>>1622143 >final boss murders literally millions >catastrophic death count, the world is forever changed >every single time they were spared prior, they went back to the same shit >you get the bad route ending if you kill them and stop the cycle I swear some of these ending must be written by the villains themselves

>>1676775 >>1676785 I'm unfamiliar with these tropes, sounds like you're talking about a specific game.

>If you kill them.. You're as bad as them.. Whenever a hack writer pulls this shit, ask them their opinion on Nuremberg, you'll quickly find they do not authentically believe that shit at all. This trope is near exclusively used to cuck their characters.

>>1677942 Same kind of people who live in gated communities but then push for open borders.

Why is it that almost every mainstream JRPG makes the most boring character their main protagonist most of the time, in many cases being a literal mute?

>>1622143 Were all 2 thousand of those enemies in a state of being unable to fight when you killed them?

>>1677981 Self insertion

>>1676775 It seems like its just a lazy way for writers to try and make the player feel accomplished or powerful because someone that was once an enemy wants to join your group instead. It would make a lot more sense for the character to be outright rejected, like you say. And it would actually be more satisfying to see that character try and change himself, maybe help the main group from the shadows, do the exact opposite of what he did up to that point to prove that he has changed. Then, and only then, does everyone consider offering him a position on the team. The only thing stopping writers from doing this is laziness, or maybe incompetence in some cases. >>1677981 Another anon beat me to it, but yeah, it is a way for players to self-insert. The character usually has just enough detail and concrete backstory to make his/her presence in the story reasonable, but beyond that, most is left to the player's imagination. And to make that easier, they don't want the character to speak for the player. Literally. Do players actually find this helpful for self-inserting? Do players even like it? I'd want to see a study or survey if there has ever been one.

>>1677747 MMOs where antagonists are reintroduced as allies in later xpacs (WoW being the biggest offender I know), Any series with a recurring antagonist that the protagonist is too much of a pussy to kill (does not count antagonists who revive after death ala Ganondorf or Sigma), others I'm probably forgetting. >>1677997 If the game would give me the chance to disarm, persuade, or avoid enemies, this wouldn't be an issue.

>>1677981 >>1678006 >>1678024 Even in that aspect fails 80% of the time, for the early times it worked because you can actually customize your party for your liking, i.e Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and these stories are so primitive yet open-ended for the sake of your imagination. At the time where people's standards were low until the Playstation bought to stores. But after those games, the genre as a whole just looked at it's bones and just stick to it, instead of learning why it was so effective in the first place. Hell, you can keep your protagonist to be actual character while being a self-insert as long as you add the ability to actually change the character more than just names and/or stats. It's how fucking FPS games are so popular in the first place. Now, back in the day, it was excusable because at the time where everyone was trying something new, it's how some games aged poorly, because we, as gamers, didn't thought about the insane random encounter spam that was Battle Network 2, or R-E in general. It's now a excuse by hack writers to not put the effort to make it interesting, there are a lot of silent characters who are far more cool than most of RPGs, yes, even western ones are guilty for this.

>>1678100 >If the game would give me the chance to disarm, persuade, or avoid enemies It’s harder to non-lethally incapacitate or avoid 50 men going out of their way to kill you than it is to do so for one guy.

>>1605941 I get his point but I'm peeved because Half Life changed shooters forever in a way I didn't really like compared to UT or Doom

>>1677942 This is used to pacify white people

I know 8chan threads won't get archived any time soon but still a bump.

>The very end of your completion grinding is a broken powerup/item/upgrade that you will never use because there is nothing else for you to do. >Reused art assets of characters/objects for different games in the series. >The "point of no return" save block where the rest of the game is inaccessible up to a certain point. >The pity system letting you through a challenge because how dare you try to git gud at the game. >Have the ability to inflict status aliments to anything other than the most important enemies in the game. >Progress paths/items blocked by multiple progression triggers/upgrades back to back.

>>1677981 >>1678117 Western games used do this, too, and not just RPGs. Remember, until I think the first Black Ops, virtually all of the Call of Duty games had faceless mutes for protagonists, and Mason was the gimmick for that trend changing. Games like Half-Life and Halo were strange semi-exceptions, where Gordon Freeman has a face, but no voice or personality aside from comments made by other characters, and the Master Chief talks in cutscenes but has no face. At least when RPGs use voiced dialogue, it's an excuse to save money on a voice actor (or two) saying all the potential lines. Fallout 4 and the Mass Effect series have less overall dialogue options due to that. Part of the reason why it's weirder for JRPGs to do it is because the ones I've played have scenes where the protagonist could easily fucking talk like everyone else does (and there's no voiced dialogue), but then their character model will just gesture or their sprite will run in place, and then another character react and say, "What? You're saying...?"

>>1711155 >The very end of your completion grinding is a broken powerup/item/upgrade that you will never use because there is nothing else for you to do. I HATE THIS WHAT'S THE FUCKING POINT?

>>1711609 >WHAT'S THE FUCKING POINT? NG+(++++)

>>1597650 nah

>>1711716 Shit for brain retards can't handle this

>>1711609 >>1711696 That only works when there's a NG+ option or a secret superboss. On a similar note, I hate how JSRF just ends after you beat the final boss. You can unlock all the characters, finding all the graffiti souls and clearing all the challenges in the process, tag everything in the open world, and then there's FUCKING NOTHING. The game is dead once you 100% it. Jet Grind Radio meanwhile has an arcade style NG+ loop, so you can experience any part of the game with any character, with a scoring system to give you something to work towards even after 100%ing it. Why did they fuck that up in the sequel?

>>1712007 Because it was rushed out the ass and SEGA wasn't sure if it would sell well (it didn't).

>>1605938 >You couldn't post something more reddit if you tried. You're welcome to go back there since you brought it up you dumb nigger

>>1587249 Usually from low iq basement dwellers who don't engage with anything beyond their 3 doujins. And their opinions on anything reflect the same quality of intellect that you expect as a result

>>1605938 Man, you need to appreciate the small things in life more

>>1676785 Same reason why I dropped undertale. Fuck that game and its cryptic moral system

>>1712527 Undertale is worse, it's entirely written as a gotcha moment and it intentionally baits you into being "evil" the first time around like it's clever. It's just a stupid moral system in the first place. It came out at just the right time when it was in fashion to criticize morals in video-games, then you throw a kid inside a monster filled cave where the first thing the majority of them do is literally attack you (as in, if you do nothing you literally die), then the game chastises you at the end for killing the sad sad monsters that often tried to murder you first. God, I fucking hate tumblr and reactionary leftists, it's really hard to find a dumber breed.

>>1677942 Well there's a way to go about that trope when it's not about letting the villain off the hook but rather about the hero himself not becoming corrupted. See Lord of the Rings for the non retarded version: <'What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!' >'Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.' <‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’ >‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in. <‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’ >'Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many – yours not least.' In fact a running theme in LotR is the struggle between doing the good moral thing and the pragmatic thing for the cause of good at least initially. It makes total pragmatic sense to give a powerful weapon like the Ring to Gandalf or Galadriel or to some High Man like Aragorn or Denethor and have them break and throw down Sauron forever. And that's how it would begin.

>>1622312 They probably didn't want to overwhelm people with a ton of new mons, and wanted to ease them into it. Plus, Gold and Silver were technically marvels since they were experimenting with shoving all of Kanto into the post-game. A flex by the late Satoru Iwata to show off some new tech that allows faster decompression of data.

>>1713472 I don't think that critique works, when the game also offers you the Mercy option, and tells you how you don't have to actually kill your enemies to win the battle. If there was no Mercy option, and you, as a player, were forced to kill the enemies then you would have a point. That's the problem I had with Spec Ops The Line's white phosphorous scene, in that they chastise you a lot for doing it, but the game also forced you into doing it. There were no branching paths, or ways to avoid it, yet the game constantly calls you out for killing those poor, innocent NPCs civilians.

>>1713472 >the game chastises you at the end for killing the sad sad monsters that often tried to murder you first Toby got kinda assblasted by this critique, as evidenced by one of the bosses in Deltarune trying to kill you after you spare them, and calling you an idiot. In any cast, most “messages” in stories are immensely retarded when viewed through the in-universe lens <you don’t need superpowers to be a superhero >no, actually, you do need superpowers to wrestle a living tornado. No amount of kung fu or gadgets will mitigate this. >advanced sci-fi tech that doesn’t and probably can never exist is functionally indistinguishable from superpowers

>>1596490 If it's to force backtracking for no reason, it's boring. It didn't belong in Souls and I'm glad they got rid of it from Demon's to Dark Souls. But if it's to create challenge by having the player deal with limited resources before they can resupply, it's good.

>>1712496 If anything those actually have some imagination, it's the drones that consune nothing but the trendy thing in a pathetic attempt to fit in with the masses that state that kind of shit, and unfortunately there's shittons of them working in vidya companies nowadays.

>>1713745 >the game also offers you the Mercy option Yes, but the entire point is how the entire thing is built with the tone of the creator being a smartass and making fun out of you for playing games normally as if that makes him this intellectual genius, when basically everything in the game points you towards just killing things that try to kill you first. It's was a boring meta commentary back then, it's still a boring meta commentary nowadays, especially when you consider that the monsters openly attack you and tumblr sucked this game off to the point of exhaustion as if they're brilliant and toby fox is the second coming of jesus christ. Fucking bioshock had a more sensible approach to give you an open option to either be evil or be good, and it still fell into the most classic blunder of all morality dichotomies in video-games which is >being good actually reaps you the most rewards which is blatantly false in real life and entirely defeats the purpose of pretty much all moral/ethical dilemmas presented in video-games. Being good is meant to be annoying, a pain in the ass, and basically unrewarding in the short-term that games happen, if at all. Evil should be the default path, the easy and simple way out of shit is just to shoot them, and it should also be the most rewarding in pure resources, only then that would be an actual moral dilemma. In most video-games with choices, being the "good guy" when you have the option to be evil is the most rewarding path in pretty much all ways which is absurdly unrealistic and utterly annoying.

>>1714758 I don't like Undertale at all, but I think you're being a little biased on it's moral system. The game doesn't exactly "Reward" or "Punish" you for pursuing any of the available routes, none of them are presented as a narrative gotcha, specially when the game makes itself clear on the fact you have a choice between fighting and acting and you have to go out of your way to pursuit both Pacifist and Genocide; No Mercy ends up being pretty lukewarm instead, which is kinda the point since Undertale goes for the moral conundrum. Also, I have a couple issues with you painting good will on a bad light as far as gaming AND real life is concerned. 1. While I agree Good choices being favored over Evil choices is bad design by principle, I don't think favoring Evil choices is any better. What a designer/writer should strive for is a balance between the Good and the Evil, where you pick one side or the other based on which you agree with the most, with moral challenges that attempt to turn you into the opposite path and rewards that fit your gameplay style the best. Deltarune actually manages the latter pretty nicely, where playing offensive gives you rewards that will help you being more offensive, while playing pacifist gives you rewards that will help you on non-offensive ways; either way you are presented with the dilema of "which one do you prefer as a player the most?" which I think it's neat. 2. In real life, being a good or bad person is both rewarding and punishing depending on the circumstances. Sometimes you wont get your way unless you are either nice or awful to people, your actions will always have consequences and you will be rewarded accordingly in most situations. Like gaining someone's trust for being chill will make this person help you big time, or fighting your way out of a situation will make it so you don't become a target in the future... or it could be the other way around and you can be taken advantage of for being nice and get into more troubles for being awful... Point is that the world isn't as black and white to say good = lame / bad = cool. ...also, it might be just me, but when you say something like >Evil should be the default path, the easy and simple way out of shit is just to shoot them your rant kind of sounds like you don't like the moral dilema in games to begin with, whether is made poorly or not, which is fair, but... in that case, what are you even complaining about anymore?

>>1715970 Sorry, I won't go into too much detail as I'm a bit tired at the moment, but I appreciate the long post >none of them are presented as a narrative gotcha At the very end of the game flowey explains what LV stands for and very clearly makes fun of you for really thinking it meant anything else. At the very least I find that to be a "gotcha moment" even though you do have the option to be merciful the entire game. In particular, the game only really shoves in your face that you can be merciful in 2 ways, with Toriel bashing your face in that you should do that, and at each boss when you get the opportunity to be merciful, but with the generic enemies, it's not as obvious and it's very likely you'll kill at least one enemy through your first playthrough which leads flowey to be a smartass. That's what I mean by a gotcha and it's what 99% of normal playthroughs will face in the game. It's pretty much designed to do that. Delta rune did at least improve on the moral thing by making it more obvious what's the main purpose of the game, there's no gotcha anywhere from what I can see. >on evil I do like moral dilemmas, and I understand about balancing things, but most games that people suck off for being "intellectual" and "thought-provoking" aren't anywhere near as that because it's pretty obvious that they implemented things biased for good. Call it cultural, or maybe call it the fact that games are meant to be fun and make you feel good in the first place, but I find this kind of "deflection on the weight of morality" that most games do just to bias good annoying. If a game that presented choices on morality was truly to be "thought-provoking", at the very least it would lead you into a zone of discomfort where you truly have to gauge between good and evil and your own individuality as a player, not just have play pretend roleplaying and still reap a ton of rewards in whatever route you go to, just because that's kind of what games are for. >real life We're already teetering on the edge of turning this into not-videogames, but, just to leave my point of view clear: It is clear to me that being an evil person is much more individually rewarding throughout your entire life than being the goody two shoes games want you to be, but it's important to note that it's not about just being an asshole in general and just pushing people away but being strategically evil. Doing away with morals has a lot of benefits which is why we can notice a trend of certain (((individuals))) reaching positions of power, along with the correlation in sociopathy and money/power. As in, assume a smart independent being that acts in intelligent ways, as much as you could consider my own view on society as a huge commie in the sense that I just wish things were good and people were decent to each other, I have no doubts that in a society with mixed morals as our own, being an individualist bastard is the only real way to rise to the top, because the more "optimal" long-term abnegation that leads to the whole tide rising takes a lot of fucking work, whereas just being evil and reaping the rewards is quick and easy.