w-orst Moments in Gaming Plots
Have you ever had a moment in a game where something occurs in the story or events that you simply cannot accept? Something which, like midichlorians, you simply decide to wipe from the story. It didn't happen, and official canon be damned. I was going through a few of these in my head yesterday, and I wanted to share. Spoilers will ensue, though for most games I mention, it's beyond the statute of limitations for spoilers, so they're unmarked.
-Chrono Cross: The fall of the kingdom of Guardia. Chrono Cross has a lot of problems (most of which can be summed up "it's a sequel to Chrono Trigger when it should have been a new IP"), but few worse to me than the initial setup for the plot. In 1005, the Kingdom of Guardia is invaded and destroyed by the Kingdom of Porre. Wait, what?
By the end of Chrono Trigger, Chrono, Lucca, and Marle all return to Guardia. Each one is essentially a combat god capable of wiping entire armies out with a single spell, and together they get even more powerful. You're expecting me to believe that an army from a dinky little po-dunk town in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to its name except a beret and a generous mayor somehow defeated the only three magic users on the planet?
Oh, but it gets better. Yeah, the reason it was able to do this? Dalton. You know, the joke boss? The one who commands the army of the weakest minions in the game? The army that a single character can tear through without even breaking a sweat? And this guy, this pathetic frelling joke, somehow manages to defeat a guy who is capable of soloing the devourer of worlds?
No chance. No way. It just doesn't happen. How anyone can be expected to take the story seriously when the entire setup is dependant on Dalton being a credible threat is beyond me. It'd be like Ultros showing up at the end of VI and killing Terra, Edgar, and Celes to become the new king of Figaro. It'd be like the Antarans returning after Master of Orion 2 to wipe out your empire. Oh, wait...
-Master of Orion 3: The fall of the Empire. One would think that the atrocious gameplay would be reason enough for this game to suck, but the developers decided to destroy the plot as well. The setup for MoO3 is that the Antarans, the bogeyman race from MoO2 that harass you throughout the entire game until you finally kill them, turned out to not really be dead. Instead of destroying their home planet in another dimension, which is what MoO2's plot states, you actually just wipe out an outpost, and they return later to eliminate you. The problem? By the end of the game, they're a bigger joke than Dalton.
See, you can't investigate the Antaran homeworld without committing your forces there. You don't want to send a minor fleet, because you know these guys are nasty. They've been harassing you the entire game, and by this point you likely know that their armor, engines, computers, and shields are all better than yours. If you lose the fight, you'll probably lose your biggest fleet along with it. So, what is the result? In nearly every game I've played, what rolls into Antares is a fleet of about 300 ships equipped with multiple planet destroying Stellar Converters apiece, each of which is capable of destroying any Antaran warship (of the 9 or 10 they have guarding the planet) in a single shot. Even if you haven't reverse engineered their technology, you can wipe out the entire defense fleet with a single bloody ship.
And these guys somehow get uppity again and manage to wipe out my empire? Doesn't happen. My fleets literally destroy planets because its more efficient to build them from scratch than to deal with their low resources or toxic environments. My empire builds warships by the hundreds because its the only way to prevent economic collapse because the government has too much money. We have an entire galaxy or resources, and an immortal emperor guiding us. And that little race manages to wipe us out and destroy the entire series while they're at it. No thank you. It's not like 4x games need direct sequel plots anyway. I mean, are we supposed to believe that Civilization V takes place after the death of your spacefaring race from Civ IV?
-Final Fantasy Tactics: King Delita and the death of the Princess. This is a good game, and I've never tried to say otherwise. But I do have a lot of problems with it. Perhaps the worst, however, is the ending. Pretty much from his first appearance, I'd been convinced that Delita was a villain. At the end of the game, he becomes king. And he then proceeds to kill his new wife, a princess who was a character I was quite a fan of. And all of this happens because Ramza is too much of a wimp to do what needs to be done and slit the jerk's throat any of the dozens of times you see him. The guy can stroll through the entire Church of Glabedos without breaking a sweat, eliminating the Rukavi and anything else that looks at him funny in a heartbeat, yet he never even attempts to wipe out this sociopath whom he could have killed at any time, and the princess dies because of it. And this is your reward for beating the game. A view of the world now being led by a self obsessed meglomaniac who kills anyone who gets in my way, while Ramza goes running off into the night. Worst hero in any Final Fantasy ever.
Discuss your own, or mine. I'll certainly have more incoming.
