- [Falcon] Single-player games
have a ton of flexibility to try a lot of different things both narratively and mechanically that defy the shorthand
of multi-player gaming. While familiarity is good
in a single-player game it's not nearly as necessary as say the control scheme
in a multi-player game, but sometimes it can go a
little bit off the rails. Hi folks, it's Falcon
and today on Gameranx 10 single player game
concepts that make no sense and we're talking stuff that just doesn't add
up logically speaking like in the universe of the game rather than stuff that
makes games less good. In some cases it makes games better. It's just weird to see. So without further ado,
starting off with number 10 it's the unbreakable, easily
breakable doors/walls. So let's talk Kratos. He is an unstoppable force at least when the game wants him to be. Sure he can bring down entire buildings, smash through barriers,
cause massive destruction, fight a godlike 300 times his size. But what happens when
this unstoppable force meets an immovable object
and by immovable object I of course mean a flimsy wall or a door. Well, there's just nothing
that can be done, right? And this pops up so much in recent games. Take any soul style game with
an abundance of shortcuts. Usually shortcuts amount to
a basic locked door, right? Yeah, you're swinging around
a gigantic hunk of metal in the shape of a sword,
something so impractical and ridiculous that it's pretty
generous to call it a sword, but this little wooden door, hmm, can't do anything about that. Nope but nope. And the thing that really bugs
me is so many of these worlds are run down and dilapidated
like everything's rotting and falling apart, but man
that door is in great shape. It's in such good shape that it can withstand a
beating that a boulder can't. Like why can't we
destroy that crappy door? It just doesn't make any sense. But it's another one of those
things you have to accept as a gameplay contrivance. The devs want shortcuts that
you have to unlock later. So no matter how little sense it makes, they're still there and
they are not passable, but Kratos man, you can turn
giant, destroy cities at will. Why is this door giving you guff? And number nine, when you
kill an enemy in battle, but then the cutscene
starts up and they're fine. I was just thinking
about this the other day. I was literally playing Chrono Trigger and they added cutscenes after the fact and they actually put a cutscene in where a character beats
up a bunch of dinosaurs and and scares them away and
then it cuts back to the game and that character does it again. The same action, but as a sprite. It's kinda the reverse of this problem, but it's also kind of
the exact same thing. A recent and particularly
infuriating example happens in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty where the incredibly difficult Lu Bu Boss somehow ends in a draw, like, dude, your health bar is zero my health bar isn't zero, therefore I win. But the game doesn't want
you to beat Lu Bu yet. So I guess you didn't. There's a lot of other examples out there. It's pretty common in JRPGs and Metal Gear Solid 3
is a pretty funny example where you just riddle Volgin with bullets in his boss encounter and he shows up a few minutes
later completely fine. It's a trick mostly done to
show how badass the enemy is, but sometimes it feels like a cheat. Like you killed them, they're
dead, their health is zero, but the game's not done
with their character arc. So none of that. Like it kinda feels, like one of those
shootouts with a punk kid on the playground where
they come up with excuses for why the shots don't
count or something. Like that kid was annoying then and this is, it feels the same. And number eight, speaking of cutscenes, Cutscene Dante versus in-Game Dante. I don't need to say anything else if you've played the Devil May Cry series. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Now if not, there's a lot of games where your characters total
unstoppable badass and cutscenes and then a flailing dork when you're actually playing as them. I mean, in theory you could
get better at the game and get to the point of the cutscene. But let's say you just started and you don't know how to play the game. How is that guy you like any
cutscene a Devil May Cry 3, Dante can just shrug off dozens of enemies like that are trying to
stab him at one time. He's literally a human pin cushion, destroys all of them with ease. It's nothing. But then the gameplay starts and those enemies suddenly
become actually dangerous. Bayonetta probably one of
my favorite game series of all time is one that
takes this to an extreme too. Cereza can perform
completely ludicrous feats and destroy everything in her own special way
without breaking a sweat. And then it switches to actual gameplay and things get dicier. Tons of games do this, not just over the top
character action games. There's plenty of games where
the cutscene your character is way more badass and
it's just not possible to even do it in the game. The most absurd example I
can think of by a wide margin is a pre- Dark Souls action game from From called Ninja Blade. It's almost like a parody of action games. It's so ridiculous. Every cutscene is totally nuts. Your guy can fly, he runs
on walls, he's super mobile, but that's the cutscene. Once you're in control, ooh, it's a game made by FromSoftware. So it ain't like that. Like you can barely move. His attacks are pretty crappy and there's invisible walls everywhere. So it's pretty limited in
comparison to the cutscenes. Like I get it game devs want
there to be cool cutscenes no matter how much they
contradict the game play. And most of the time it's
actually kind of funny, but sometimes it's a little disappointing. I don't wanna just watch crazy stuff that looks totally badass. I also want to do it like that's
what separates a video game from a movie or a TV show. At number seven when
in the next game Batman just leaves all his gadgets at home. You know what I mean? Like one of those things
you just had to accept when a sequel happens, the
main character's always just gonna forget a bunch of
stuff, gonna be lower level, gonna lose their equipment. And there may be a reason for
it narratively, there may not. A lot of the time the excuses
are pretty flimsy too, but most players go through with it because it's kinda how the game works. With Batman, he's a good example 'cause he's kinda tougher to
justify than a lot of them. Like the whole thing is that
Batman is a super detective. He's prepared for everything and he knows the drill so to speak. But in every Arkham game without fail he's entering these super
villain infested situations with the bare minimum of his equipment and then he has to like gather it. I get it, it's a video game. You wanna progress, you
wanna reason to continue and introduce new mechanics
throughout the whole thing. And it's important even in
sequel because it's a video game, but even though they
try to justify it a bit by having Batman say all the
equipment would slow him down if he carried it all the time. I don't feel slower by the end of the game when I'm carrying all that equipment. And no matter what game it is, whether it's Batman or Zelda or Metroid or pretty much anything else with a sequel they have to come up with an excuse why the hero doesn't just start out with all the stuff they
had from the last game. And I bring in Zelda, even
though like most Zeldas take place in different eras. This upcoming one Tears
of the Kingdom doesn't, and you know this is going
to happen in that game. I don't expect the reasons to make sense because that's kind of just what we expect with sequels at this point. This happens so much. The rare time the hero
actually does keep everything from the last game. It's kinda shocking. And then like the games villain hits them and they lose all of it. Like it falls into the sewer or something and you're like, "oh, oh
yeah, yeah, right, right. I don't have all of my stuff." Now we're back to normal. And number six is the
abundance of indicators like climbable walls that are color coded for your convenience. This is something that I
think is probably helpful, but it's also just really
strange when you come upon it. Like it sure is nice. Someone came out and painted
all the climbable walls white so Lara Croft knows where to jump. I mean, like which one of
the henchmen in the crew is the white knight? Like who takes the time to
paint out all this stuff? Like ideally you would want the hero not to get anywhere near you. Mirror's Edge did it right by giving you kind of
a random flash of color that's not actually part of the game world and you can turn it off and
sometimes it can be subtle. Like there's times when
lighting directs people towards something or the
angles of certain things are arranged in a certain
way that points your eyes in the right direction. And yet whoever wrote cut off their limbs in blood on that wall in Dead Space. That makes sense, I get it. But let's say you're a
bad guy setting traps. Oh, we got a trip wire over here why the hero won't know what's coming. But you know what, it
might be kinda hard to tell that you can climb up this thing. So it would be courteous
if we like painted it in a way that sort of
indicated that you can. Can we get somebody on that? Well sure, Dr. Robot. I'll even put some signs up that indicates there's
a bottomless pit here just so that Sonic knows to jump there. Like what is that? Yeah, I get that it's to
make it so the player feels like they know what
you can and can't climb or where you can't go or what have you. But it's super weird. Like who went around and
painted all the crates in the Resident Evil 4
Remake with the yellow? What is that? That being said, it is helpful and like back in the day stuff that you could interact
with just looked different because it was a polygon on
a pre-rendered background or it was more or less
detailed than it's surroundings or has a different color
palette or something. It's not like that anymore. Everything's super detailed. So it's not something I dislike it's just something that
doesn't make any sense at all. And number five, when
you have to learn to run I mean, I don't think I
have to explain this one, but let's say you're a video game hero, you're an over the top badass
sorta comes with a territory. You're an expert fighter,
expert sword handler, expert with guns, et cetera. But I guess basic cardio
is elusive to you. Skill tree is kind of a
basic fact of life in gaming. Almost every game has
some RPG element to them and that's not a bad thing by itself, but there's some ridiculous situations like in No More Heroes where Travis has to learn
the fine art of running. Yep. You have to learn to run like you couldn't do it
until somebody taught him. And Travis is an adult, he
got to that point in his life never having run before. Another particularly silly
example is in Just Cause 3 where this highly skilled special agent can't aim until he learns how
to do it at a shooting range or even from a more general
level, like look at Deus Ex. You place this highly
trained special agent you can barely hold a gun
at the start of the game. You gotta level up all your stats before you're even halfway decent. It's the contrast between how
you're presented in the game versus how worthless your
character is at the start. Because again, there is
a need for progression. So it makes sense to some extent, but the point of including those mechanics is to have it be meaningful and there should be a certain
baseline of competency that makes sense. But certain video game
protagonists just don't have it. At number four everything being a puzzle for whatever reason. Now this is pretty low hanging fruit, so low it's probably rotting, but if you wanna talk about something that doesn't make sense
in single player games it's all the puzzles. Like in a normal logical world people lock up their
belongings using like locks. Not in video games though, you have to align the shadow
puppets to swap the shotgun with the replica shotgun,
solve the tile puzzle, or insert three emblems into the Tower of Hanoi to open the lock. Resident Evil is the king
of the nonsensical puzzle, but almost every single player game is guilty of this to some degree. Puzzles are an easy way
to break up the gameplay and they add some variety
to the experience. So of course devs are gonna
shove them into their games and certain puzzles have
a little more natural of a feeling to them. But there's always at least
a little bit of fakeness when puzzles come up. And I'm not saying it's bad. Obviously it's a video game
and I love a good puzzle, but in the logic of the game world, that random match three segment that I have to do to get
past that unbreakable door that I can't do anything about, yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense. And number three when
video game protagonists refuse to pick up guns like
I don't know about you, but I'm always annoyed
whenever I play a game and for some reason your main character just adamantly refuses to pick things up usually for no reason. Like take the Metal Gear Solid games. Every one of them starts
with Snake entering a place with the order to procure
onsite as in get guns and tools on your own. But without fail, Snake refuses to pick up the guns enemies drop. It took until Metal Gear Solid 5 which is not the fifth Metal
Gear Solid might I add. And also takes place in the past that Snake was finally
able to pick things up. I mean his Solid Snake
really that inferior genetically speaking to Big Boss that he doesn't think enough to realize that all those guys have
guns that he can take. Nah, he's gotta go in the
hangar and go down that elevator and get past the eight
or nine guards with guns to get the gun. I know I'm exaggerating a little, but really it's particularly absurd when it comes to boss weapons. Like, hey, you can take a
boss's soul after beating them. But they kinda dropped a
weapon when I killed them. Why can't I picked the damn thing off? At number two, bullets being weaker when your allies shoot them. Like in so many games, your allies operate under completely different rules than you. In reality, and I feel
like an idiot saying this, but bullets cause a lot of damage. A shot can kill a person and it doesn't matter
who's holding the gun. I mean, other than like
in terms of aiming skill. In the world of video games though, if you got a companion
who's supposedly better at aiming than you, they're gonna hit that enemy
right in the heart repeatedly. And for some reason that heart can take it because it's your companion and not you. The bad guys like that
tickles, what you got player? So I aim and shoot them
and I can kill them in one or two shots in
the shoulder or knee. My NPC buddy shot him in
the head like three times. Didn't matter though. Thanks for warming them
up, but I got this one. I know how to kill. It's with a good hand shot. Get them right in the palm, he's done. (gun shot) And number one, when like a
bunny is stronger than God. Levels can lead to some pretty
bizarre situations in games especially ones that have
pretty robust post-game content or a lot of expansions or something. A perfect example of what I mean here comes to us courtesy
of Xenoblade Chronicles where the nonsensical power
discrepancy you can find between a literal God that
created the game's universe and this bunny with a club
that shows up in the end game, but the Despotic Arsene,
the bunny with the club, has a base level of 108, dwarfing the God of the
Universe's level 82. And it's just a rabbit, like
a randomly super tough rabbit. Makes no sense in the
logic of the game world. But hey, that's what happens when you're playing an
RPG with fixed levels. There's plenty of other examples of this kind of thing out there, but this one really takes
it to the logical extreme. - I can't go on. - [Falcon] And that's all for today. Leave us a comment, let
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