Good Day good people.
I am looking for some more examples of Video Games where there is a plot, but for one reason or another, the result of the plot is that nothing happens. My criteria for this is fairly lax on the “how” but in some sense, by some definition by the end of the game, absolutely nothing has happened. I’m hoping some of you fine people may be able to identify some instances of such a thing.
Examples (I've chosen to spoiler tag everything as just being listed gives away certain plot elements. All examples given here are niche titles from over 15 years ago).:
- Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere (specifically the Japanese release): Huge inter-corporate conflict with several different factions and paths you can follow. One you go through all the different endings, the game reveals that it’s just a simulation made by one guy to make sure no matter what happens in an upcoming conflict; your character, an AI, will kill the dude who cucked him.
- Persona 2: Innocent Sin: You spend the whole game fighting Nyarlathotep to prevent him and the Nazis from destroying the world. At the end of the game, you fail and choose to abort the timeline and erase everyone else’s memories, leaving the main character stranded in the doomed timeline.
- Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter: This is the most boring way for this to play out IMO as it’s just a straight coma twist
So please. Let me know any and all games you can think of where the end result of the plot is that nothing happens. The more ridiculous, the better!
(Sorry, for repost. I didn’t know about the crosspost feature)
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The stanley parable, in a way.
the end is never the end is never the end is never
the end is never the end is never the end is never
I did LSD and played through the Deluxe Edition - holy fuck, I had fun!!!
oh, nice. I like getting high and playing surprising games, it usually makes the experience even more pleasant. But I never did LSD, and I’m not sure I could handle it. How does it affect playing something like Stanley Parable ?
Well, it was just funny. It kind of fucked with my brain, but i think i managed to get through the entire game in about 6 hours. I would not play Last if Us, Resident Evil etc, but I also once had a blast in RDR2 on LSD! It was after I had completed the game.
Would love to try something similar to Stanley Parable - I’m looking at Don’t Press The Button! for my next trip in October.
I can understand having a good time in RDR2, that game can be lovely and atmospheric
Seems like a recipe for an existential crisis
Stanley walked through the red. door.
Every Zelda game is a sisyphean adventure where you never really defeat the evil or restore Hyrule, you just reset the board for the next evil apocalypse.
Except there are consequences for failure. See the timeline split stuff.
The Last Of Us.
The entire plot is about getting this girl to a location, only to get there, kill everyone and leave again. They could have stayed at home and the result would have been the same.
Same with The Mandalorian, the ending in Boba Fett completely invalidated the entire show. But that isn’t a video game.
I mean you’re right, but it makes sense in context in both cases because the plot, or maybe better to say the driving motivation for action by the characters, isn’t the real story.
TLOU isn’t the story of two survivors trying to reach a goal- thats set dressing. It’s the story of a man who lost his daughter being given a chance to confront his grief and grow close with another young woman who would be the same age. The relationship growing, their mutual guilt and relief and joy in finding that familial connection in a dying world IS the story. And the climax isn’t Joel shooting 50 more people, it’s when he chooses her over the whole world. Even when thats obviously the wrong choice.
From a plot view, nothing has changed. What actually “happened” was entirely between Ellie and Joel. But lots of stories are like that. If you released a movie where a grieving man connected with his adopted, formerly abused or neglected, daughter- that could be a good movie and you wouldn’t say “nothing happened” because it would be honest and upfront with its stakes. But fewer people would play that as a game so they have to obfuscate their actual story with apocalypse and zombie trappings.
The Last of Us was more about Joel and Ellie’s relationship growing during their travels.
Had the hospital scene occurred within the first like ten hours of the game, Joel would have had no problem sacrificing her for a potential cure.
I think this highlights the big problem with Op’s question: it’s not all about plot, character development can be as satisfying and as important even if the world objectively doesn’t change.
Edit: by this i mean your point on The last of us
Didn’t play TLoU, but if you didn’t catch it from the start, the point of The Mandalorian was clearly always about Grogu becoming ‘the Mandalorian’. Just cause it didn’t go the way you expected doesn’t mean nothing happened.
Arguably Mass Effect 1.
You spend the game warning about the reaper threat and you are constantly brushed off. Then the bbg attacks the citadel and you fight them off.
Second game: oh that plot from game 1? Yea, that was an isolated incident by different species and not the enemy you were warning is about.
Game three: HELP!!! The friends of bbg from game 1 are attacking you have to save us.
Mass Effect 2 kind of pisses me off, ngl. The characters are so good, but the plot is really kind of bad. Forcing Shepard to work with Cerberus makes zero sense, especially since my Shepard went out of their way to murder Cerberus employees for what they did to their squad.
BioShock 3. Game establishes that it is a multiverse. There are many worlds/universes, but there is always a girl, and always a light house. You did something bad and it caused suffering. At the end of the game, you go back and change something, and create a bright happy future. Everyone sings Kumbaya (literally they play a song called break the cycle). The idea is that there was a single event and everything bad happened because of that. Going back and stopping it prevents all the bad stuff. The problem is, that only works with “Back to the Future” style time travel. The game already established it is a multiverse. So yes, you did create 1 future where everything didn’t go to shit. But because it’s a multiverse there are still an infinite number of universes where things are still very bad, and there is suffering. For whatever reason the writers just didn’t think about that I guess? It seemed really asinine at the time I played it.
spoiler
I clocked its ending as you became a coalescence of all Bookers, and since all the Elizabeths kill you it stops you in every timeline in which you exist.
coalescence, I think
One moment going to research that.
Update; you are correct and I changed my original comment. Thanks for the correction.
If it means the same as in french, convalescence is the period of time after an illness during which one recovers. Coalescence would be the action of joining/merging things
btw I never really got the ending of Bioshock Infinite, so your explanation is welcome. It felt a bit masturbatory to me at the time. It doesn’t help that I didn’t really enjoy the game itself, contrary to the previous two
It does. My just having woken up brain mixed the two up.
Also, I was actually a huge(ba-dum-tiss) fan of it. It’s one of my favorites. It’s flawed and you can tell that it had to drop some things to make it out the door but I liked it. My wife and I actually have matching tattoos based on the series.
All the Elizabeths come together to kill their Bookers. It’s not just one universe. It’s every universe. You only get to see your universe’s Booker die.
Gone Home
Good story, tho
Was going to comment this as well! I enjoyed the story quite a bit too. Despite nothing really “happening” per se I remember the ending feeling emotional regardless.
Came here to say this. I enjoyed the game till the ending which I thought was terrible.
Stanley Parable
I hadn’t considered it like that but yeah, if there was ever a game about nothing, the Stanley Parable is it.
Dead Rising.
Everything happens with our without your input. You can just chill out, do nothing, and the game ends.
Driver San Francisco kinda. You spend most of the game in a coma, but you do wake up and do some real stuff for the ending.
Depending on your definition of nothing happens, Mad Max too. At the start of the game Max loses his car, meets this car fanatic and for the entire game he helps you build the “Magnum Opus”, the most badass car the wasteland has seen. At the end, you lose your Magnum Opus, he gets killed, and you get your original car back. You have a big impact on other people throughout the story, but as far as the protagonist is concerned, he is pretty much exactly where he started.
That is pretty much Max in every movie bar the first one though. Wanders about, reluctantly helps some people, wanders off on his own again.
I hated the Mad Max ending, so disappointing
The thing driver san francisco was weird, but I enjoyed it.
Damn near every time travel game I’ve played has ended where you basically stop yourself from starting the whole plot so that none of it ever happens.
In the sense that everything you did was pointless: BlastCorps. It’s a “puzzle” game about destroying everything in the way of an out of control truck carrying a world-ending nuke on it, with the goal of having it safely crash into the ocean… But it still blows up and destroys the world at the end. 😩
Damn near every time travel game I’ve played has ended where you basically stop yourself from starting the whole plot so that none of it ever happens.
This ruined Life Is Strange 1 for me. Great game, but in the end she somehow knows that undoing all time travel stuff, including letting your best friend die, means that there won’t be a giant storm and not undoing anything will lead to said storm destroying the entire town.
In the end you only have 1 choice, where your choices throughout the game don’t matter because you undid everything, or your choices don’t matter because everyone is dead.
Very anti climactic imo
In Sonic 2006, the entire game plot happens, but the solution to the core conflict is to do some time travel shit and cancel the entire timeline
Most people wish that game could be erased from the timeline IRL too
Dear Esther
Arguably, dark souls 1 (either ending)
The other games leave room for long term consequences but the 1st game is entirely pointless in the broader scope of the story.
If you don’t link the fire, you just did all of that adventuring for nothing. You may as well have just stayed in the asylum and let Gwyn slowly burn away.
If you do link the fire then you just reset the clock for the age of fire to fade again later while you wait for the next guy to come kill you just like Gwyn.
I agree with the point, but would argue that choosing not to link the fire is distinct from never adventuring at all. Letting the dark gradually take over with no wielder/ruler would make events like Oolacile much more likely than if a Lord of Dark was there to control and direct that power, imo.
Minecraft ? Other sandbox games ?
2017 Prey, sadly.
I get why the ending to 2017 Prey might have been annoying, but I honestly thought it was very in line with the themes present in the rest of the game. The more time has passed, the more I’m satisfied with the ending. That being said, IMO the only right ending is
Spoiler
to murder everyone
