Ever been playing a game and everything is moving along swimmingly: health is full, skills are maxed and victory is within your grasp, when all of a sudden, the game turns on you, like a digital Brutus. Et tu, PS3?
This has happened to me a few times and while I tend to not get too caught up in things like that, there are a few instances where the wound in my back from the knife still feels raw. And no, I’m not talking about crap where your favorite series, long exclusive to one console, suddenly becomes multi-platform. That’s not betrayal, that’s business.
One such example is Final Fantasy VII, kind of the most obvious one, so we can start with that. Aeris dies. *GASP* Well, yeah, and while it made some people cry (I call them “pussies”), it made me emotional for a whole other reason: I had spent quite a long time leveling her up earlier in the game and those hours were now wasted! I felt like the game was saying to me, “Sorry, Anthony, maybe you should have taken up another hobby, one that won’t wave its junk in your face and leave you crying in a heap on the floor, numb to all feeling except for the new rug burn on your face!” Or something like that, it got garbled in the translation.
Another time where I felt like the game was out to get me was Devil May Cry. I had spent time, blood and tears building my skills, honing my craft and kicking tons of demon ass in order to be ready for anything the final boss could possible throw at me. And what do I get? A complete change in game mechanics, where it turns into Star Fox 64! How lame is that? Developers: dance with the girl you brought, ok? Don’t change things at the very end just to be able to add another bullet to the back of the box.
But the final betrayal that still stings, that really pisses me off, that actually gets to me emotionally is Chrono Cross. See, in Chrono Trigger, which I played about a dozen times, the game has a nice happy ending. Chrono and Marle get married and become king and queen of Guardia. Until Chrono Cross.
When Chrono Cross starts ten years after Trigger and Guardia, which, if you will remember, we just left happily ever after, has been DESTROYED. That’s right and by their seemingly peaceful neighbor, Porre, too. In fact, to rub a little more salt into this gaping wound (minds back out of the gutter, please), in Trigger, you did all kinds of good deeds and even left the mayor of Porre as a kind and generous man.
You don’t find out the truth until late in Chrono Cross, but it you eventually meet the ghosts of the three main characters of Chrono Trigger. And though countless theories abound, it would appear that they decided to KILL OFF the characters before the game even starts. So much for being a sequel to Chrono Trigger.
The only pain I feel that comes close to this horrific betrayal is when I watch Alien 3 and see Newt and Hicks dead BEFORE THE MOVIE FREAKING STARTS. This is the gaming equivalent and I have to tell you, it hurts. I didn’t play Chrono Trigger over and over again in my youth just to have those characters butchered OFF-SCREEN shortly after I reach the end of the game! Bad Square Enix!
So that’s my outpouring of pain. Do you guys have any stories where a game has treated you like a doormat after you lovingly invested hours in it?
As much as I love the game, Phantasy Star II was the first time I felt really betrayed by a game (holy cow, this was 20 years ago?! I feel old). First, Nei dies, and she’s the coolest character in the game. She’s the only non-human (er, non “Palman”) character. However, the game goes on for what seems like eleventy billion more years, so I get over Nei’s death. Mostly.
Finally, after fighting my way through two planets, some insanely difficult dungeons (one of which uses only pitfalls! WTF!) and two end bosses, there’s a final, baffling plot twist involving Earthmen (again, WTF?), and then… the biggest cliffhanger ending EVER. I remember getting all the way through the end credits, so sure they’d have some answers. Then the blue Sega logo appeared and it was all over. NOOOOO!
Dunno if this would count, but when I play Dead Space every now and then on a higher difficulty.
It’s just like what you said, “health is full, skills are maxed and victory is within your grasp, when all of a sudden, the game turns on you,”
Until some necromorph jumps out at me in a spot that it previously hasn’t and brings me down to one bar of health just by SNEAZING on me. The only “good” betrayal I can think of is MGS3’s ending.
How about that sinking feeling you get after beating an arcade game only to be rewarded by a single picture and a sentence explaining something to the effect of, “Hey, you won! Game over!”?
Then you think about all the quarters you pumped into that machine all for the payoff of a crappy non-ending.
Then again, it’s probably a deserving punishment for anyone dumb enough to keep paying to play a game designed to part you from your money.
[quote comment=”10210″]How about that sinking feeling you get after beating an arcade game only to be rewarded by a single picture and a sentence explaining something to the effect of, “Hey, you won! Game over!”?
Then you think about all the quarters you pumped into that machine all for the payoff of a crappy non-ending.
Then again, it’s probably a deserving punishment for anyone dumb enough to keep paying to play a game designed to part you from your money.[/quote]
But Bad Dudes had Ronald Reagan in the ending and wasn’t that worth fifteen bucks?
Also, what about RPGs, namely Final Fantasy, where you fight a battle and you lose it b/c it’s part of the story, but you don’t know that, so you use all your good items? GRRR
In Dragon age origins, I spent a lot of time with the same pary members, and one of them was the assassin hired to kill your character. We were about level 28 when his old colleges came and he turned on me. a killed him with hessitation and then spent another few hour leveling the next best character. One manly tear was shed.
Hey Anthony! I get what you’re saying about CT & CC. I to felt for sure that after several new game +’s that my characters were invincible! And then they end up dead in CC. But remember, CC is only an alternate world after CT. Perhaps they live on in another world. I think the greatest betrayal is Square not making another Chrono game! I’d love to see them make a game where Magus/Janus is main character…that would be awesome!!
Well, Deus Ex was an amazing game that often gets over looked. Then there was Deus Ex 2…
First of all, what made Deus Ex so great was that there were decisions for you that effected the story, a LOT. An FPS/RPG like this for it’s time was incredible, like a prehistoric Fallout 3 or something.
Now DeusEx 2 came out and I just about sh*t myself… But then all my excitement left me, with the gameplay mechanics totally F’d up. Universal ammo for all your weapons? Jeeze…
So I pushed through these horrendous problems because I knew that there had to be a great story behind it all… Instead, it was an incredibly predictable story, which ASSUMED you had done certain things in the first game. Now, this is before “importing characters / save games from previous iterations” was being done, which would have made this game make more sense and way more fun.
Basically, it assumed you made one of the biggest choices in the first game (which almost no one did) by saving Paul in his hotel room. And it also assumed that you chose 1 of 3 endings. They obviously had to do this, but the ending of the 2nd game was NOT what I was expecting based on the choice they assumed from the 1st game, if that makes sense.
All in all, it was a backstab on the gameplay and on the story. Hopefully Deux Ex 3 can ressurrect the greatness of the first game.
Any “betrayals” I felt were a result of me being an English Lit geek, and because of that, otherwise great games with poor character development tick me off. This is why I completely disagree with you, Anthony, on Aeris’s death. It had everything to do with story, and forced Cloud to change. The ending in FFXII, however, disappointed me. I wouldn’t call it “betrayal” unless I wasn’t completely enchanted with the rest of the game up until the ending. It was a beautiful game with excellent story-driven moments, and a long, never-gets-old gameplay style. Then, after all that time, the characters just go back to where they were before. No development. No growth. Just exactly like it was before their epic adventure. I call BS! And I will defend that game to the death otherwise!
As a lesser example, Lost Odyssey was a fun game that was definitely over-emotional at times, but the written story pieces made up for that. The stories were excellently done, and they captured what it was like to live 1000 years and see ages come and go. The ending, though, completely ignored that sense of wonder, and gave you a 1/2 hour long (at least) melodrama with ridiculous moments (Tartan claiming his goal for peace the second after Jansen and the Queen were married, then everybody cheering) and absolutely no attention paid to what it would be like to live 1000 years. Kaim says, “I think the next 1000 years will be better,” to Sarah while they look at their grandkids. Sorry, but they’re gonna die, and their grandkids are gonna die, and you guys are gonna get bored of each other. I didn’t know what the ending should be, but they completely ignored the best part of the story!
Sorry…I’m done.