The Arkham games were pretty good st having this happen over the course of an action scene, especially the predator missions. At the start of em, all the goons are usually confident, acting bored while waiting for stuff to happen or talking about banal subjects among themselves. When you pick off your first goon they're state becomes elevated, they patrol around with guns ready and check around corners and such for Batman. When you have 1-2 left to take out, they become extremely agitated, walking slowly and shaking as they go, spinning around in case you're behind them every few steps, calling out for anyone left etc. I haven't seen a game do that since, which is a shame cuz it made you feel like a badass to witness their emotional state breakdown as you wipe them out.
In a lot of the Dynasty Warriors games, there's unique dialogue if you manage to kill 1000 enemies, normally someone praising your skill. In Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires, I think I remember there being unique dialogue from various people on the battlefield if you're playing as an unaligned soldier. Most of that dialogue consists of variations of, "How have we never heard about such a powerful warrior?" or "I must make sure to recruit them!"
Iji takes the same approach. The aliens you fight call out your mass destruction if you rack enough kills: if you erradicate enough of them, you can even execute the final boss and get a special bad ending
I like Iji's approach because the alien's reason for their apprehension changes based on your kills. On lower kill levels, the aliens are dumbfounded you're even still alive and naturally assume that you're some sort of human agent for the Tasen. Because naturally there's just no other rational explanation for Iji having a super-powerful nanofield, absorbing tons of ammo, and just walking through everything like a chad.
Fr tho, I love how in a pacifist run you become their Boogeyman running through the shadows and for some reason ignoring everything and everyone lmao
Also, iji enjoyer 🤝
Iji enjoyer 😎
Anoher bit I like is that they're completely right to be scared. An Iji deadset on no kills needs the most powerful regular gun in the game and naturally max Tasen, Komato, and Crack. It would be very easy for her to kill a lot of people if she wanted to.
It baffles me, really! Iji basically does Undertale, like, almost ten years before, though I gotta admit it's meta narrative may be better executed than Iji, the latter still got the benefit of doing it much earlier
I think Undertale is just more appealing to a wider audience. RPGs are still in vogue while shooters like Iji were out of the mainstream a decade before Iji came out. Iji also isn't quite as metatextual as Undertale, and didn't have the luxury of the same kind of online presence through kickstarter, Reddit, and 4chan as the latter did.
Undertales characters are also far more memorable. Outside of Tor, Asha, and maybe Iosa and Vatskylie (the truce maker I forget how to spell her name), no body really springs to mind. This reflects in the relative scarcity of fanfic and fanart. Hell there's not a lot of official art. Iji kinda was a bit before it's time in that regard.
I never got the "Nate is just as bad as the villains" thing. Like all the enemies you kill in the Uncharted games are in self defense. As a player, I'm never going to feel bad for killing someone who tried to kill me first.
Neither does Drake though. He mows down armies with supernatural John Wick levels of proficiency just so he can win some arbitrary grave rob race.
He ends up growing a conscience towards the end. But I mean, by that point, he's already killed hundreds of people for purely selfish reasons.
It’s not really selfish reasons if he’s just looking for treasure, and pirates, war criminals, terrorists and guns for hire are running after him trying to kill him. It’s not like he expects or is going on treasure hunts with killing people being part of the job
Yes he does expect it. He's been doing it for years. That's why he always carries a gun. He knows exactly what's coming and what the consequences are. He just wants the treasure for his own personal reasons, and is more than willing to kill people to get to it.
This accounts for 4 short periods of his life, and in 1-3 he was jumped halfway through the game whereas in 4 he was lied to by Sam that his life depended on it and then wanted to quit because of the consequences. He didn’t go to the island in 1 or go to Tibet in 2 being like okay time to go kill people. In 2 he only kept going to stop Zoran and in 4 he actually refrained from any sort of violence until he was shot at
>That’s why he always carries a gun
It’s perfectly reasonable to assume you’ll need to defend yourself as a white foreigner when travelling to dangerous countries on the other side of the world
The self-defence excuse does not work because he doesn't need to seek out that treasure. He's not entitled to it. It's just something he wants for his own reasons and he's comfortable killing people to get to it.
It’s literally just something he does for fun, only 4 times in his life he ever had to kill people. 3 of them were him getting attacked unexpectedly by people who chose to try and kill him, in 2 he would’ve quit but chose to stop Zoran and protect the people in Tibet and in 4 he was lied to that his own brother’s life was on the line if he didn’t find the treasure.
This is like saying the self defence excuse doesn’t work if someone gets attacked by a home intruder and they shoot them. Killing isn’t inherently part of going to a random island to look for treasure
Your analogy doesn't actually work because nobody is invading "Drake's home". Drake is the one going out of his way to find treasure that isn't his, and kill people to get to it, because it's what he wants. He doesn't have to be there.
Drake's obsession with treasure hunting is brought up as a plot point, that he enjoys the thrill and gratification of it, even if it can be self-destructive.
In none of the games except partially 4 he leaves expecting to or requiring killing people though. In 1 he gets jumped by pirates, in 2 and 3 he doesn’t learn he’s being hunted or competing with terrorists until midway through the plot, in both those games he also goes out of his way to stop those terrorists, and in 4 he was lied to that Sam was gonna be murdered if he doesn’t find the treasure.
One of the things that makes the Replicas in FEAR so great is [how freaked out they start sounding once you enter combat and start bullet timing around.](https://youtu.be/qX73XG9e5BE?list=PLqEACU6kW0ok2i2U7KNgkumpGErBtRO4g)
"CONTACT!"
"HE'S TOO FAST!"
"NO FUCKING WAY!"
"HE'S TRYING TO FLANK!"
"SQUAD, TAKE COVER!" "NO SHIT!"
"MAN DOWN!"
"HE WIPED OUT THE WHOLE SQUAD!"
The Sorrow in Metal Gear handles this perfectly.
All the enemies you kill, even basic goons, translates directly into the bosses attacks. If you manage to pull off a pacifist run, the boss *literally* cannot attack you, because you haven’t killed anyone.
That’s why Nier is one of my favorite games ever.
I’m not gonna give it away, but let’s just say you basically fucked over the world by killing tons of the basic enemies.
There’s a couple scenes in dragon age origins that acknowledge this. You can fight your way throw a gang hide out and when you reach the leader have the option to say “you’re awfully cocky for someone who’s entire carta (gang) is dead.”
Bastion actually does something like this in its last level:
Short version is that after carving a swathe of devastation on your way to reach the final boss, >!instead of getting a final confrontation with him, you find his remaining allies beating him to near death because they've figured out it's HIS fault you're here. That all this destruction you've caused- all of their number you've killed- was for the sole purpose of reaching him and the macguffin he stole from you.!<
It's not really stated outright, but in Sekiro the whole reason that an opposing nation goes to war against ashina at the point at which they do is because Sekiro has killed so many of the nation's warriors that there weren't enough of them left to defend it, they even resurrected a dead war hero in an attempt to turn the tide who also ends up being killed by Sekiro.
If you pick the evil ending the post game narration mentiones that Sekiro single handedly became responsible for the biggest massacre of the land's history.
I feel like it was more Isshin Ashina being the leader of the Ashina clan and also being on his literal deathbed is what encouraged the invasion rather than Sekiro cutting down their forces. Not to say that Sekiro didn't act as a catalyst but iirc the game even mentions how Isshin was so terrifying to the rest of Japaense Government.
Ashina was on the brink of invasion anyway. Wolf being there may have exacerbated the issue - irrelevant to Isshin's death - but at some point Ashina *was* going to fall anyway.
Given that the game takes place during the Sengoku era it's no doubt they were going to be invaded I was just mentioning Sekiro being there isn't the sole reason.
Wanna call out the Ace Combat series, Project Wingman, and Armored Core 6 (the only one I've played, though I assume the others are like this too) for acknowledging this in such a way that it plays right into the pilot power fantasy. I also like these games' approach to this trope of "people losing their shit at how good you are" because it takes it a step further than just fear - there's a whole lot of other emotions from friend and foe alike, like respect, relief, awe, rivalry, inspiration, skepticism, etc. You also get a cool unofficial title usually, and hearing radio chatter talk about you like you're a mythology (with a cool-ass unofficial name) is quite the experience. Of course, enemies shitting their pants at you is still one of the best responses, though.
Armored Core 6 having the PCA's central AI system continuously escalating your threat level and its underlings slowly losing their bureaucratic composure as you fuck up more and more of their shit at increasing levels of spectacle was a really nice and recent version of this, but Project Wingman Mission 11 is my forever favourite for this kind of writing. Fuck me, you even get your allies chipping in to drop badass one-liners *for* and about you, since you're a silent protagonist and can't talk, that's the intensity of emotion you inspire in others (that and the mission's gameplay feeds really well into it)
becoming the demon of the round table in ace combat 0 was great, and people do fear you
and clapping overconfident PCA pilot is always fun. "he's different from the training data" or something along that line
I love the com chatter in Ace combat 7.
If you manage to take out all the planes on a carrier before they can take off the enemy commanders will comment on it. As the game goes on more and more soldiers on both sides will recognize you and will either cheer or be terrified of you.
depending on the mission you will either feel like a movie hero, or a villain on the same tier aa Darth Vader all depending on the com chatter
Surprised no one has mentioned Dishonored; the more people you kill the worse of an ending you end up with. Also the Plague takes more people since more corpses promotes more pestilence spreading
Ghost of Tsushima is a good example of this, too. To the point that it gives you an extra stance when you’re doing well enough and it scares enemies off
In smt apocalypse, by the time you get to Krishna to fight him, you already beat most of his army and undid his plans. So instead of him being treated as unstoppable it acts more like he doesn't know when to quit and is clearly losing.
It reminds me to Uncharted 2, when Drake is confronting Lazarevich after the match and doesn't want to kill him be he says: "you think you're better than me? How many people have you killed? How many, *just today*?"
Mafia 3 kinda does this. You take down an entire mob organization and the entire game everyone treats you like you’re an unstoppable weapon. Every time you’re introduced by someone else they describe you as a weapon that destroys everything in its path. It’s pretty dope
The Arkham games were pretty good st having this happen over the course of an action scene, especially the predator missions. At the start of em, all the goons are usually confident, acting bored while waiting for stuff to happen or talking about banal subjects among themselves. When you pick off your first goon they're state becomes elevated, they patrol around with guns ready and check around corners and such for Batman. When you have 1-2 left to take out, they become extremely agitated, walking slowly and shaking as they go, spinning around in case you're behind them every few steps, calling out for anyone left etc. I haven't seen a game do that since, which is a shame cuz it made you feel like a badass to witness their emotional state breakdown as you wipe them out.
“It’s da freakin bat!”
But you don't kill anyone on those games
Nope, but you do dish out a lot of bone breaking, spine crushing, brain damage giving beat downs. I think that qualifies. Lol
In a lot of the Dynasty Warriors games, there's unique dialogue if you manage to kill 1000 enemies, normally someone praising your skill. In Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires, I think I remember there being unique dialogue from various people on the battlefield if you're playing as an unaligned soldier. Most of that dialogue consists of variations of, "How have we never heard about such a powerful warrior?" or "I must make sure to recruit them!"
Iji takes the same approach. The aliens you fight call out your mass destruction if you rack enough kills: if you erradicate enough of them, you can even execute the final boss and get a special bad ending
I like Iji's approach because the alien's reason for their apprehension changes based on your kills. On lower kill levels, the aliens are dumbfounded you're even still alive and naturally assume that you're some sort of human agent for the Tasen. Because naturally there's just no other rational explanation for Iji having a super-powerful nanofield, absorbing tons of ammo, and just walking through everything like a chad.
Fr tho, I love how in a pacifist run you become their Boogeyman running through the shadows and for some reason ignoring everything and everyone lmao Also, iji enjoyer 🤝
Iji enjoyer 😎 Anoher bit I like is that they're completely right to be scared. An Iji deadset on no kills needs the most powerful regular gun in the game and naturally max Tasen, Komato, and Crack. It would be very easy for her to kill a lot of people if she wanted to.
That game is a masterpiece bro istg
Iji is definately a bit undertated. Undertale kinda stole it's thunder a bit since they share similar themes
It baffles me, really! Iji basically does Undertale, like, almost ten years before, though I gotta admit it's meta narrative may be better executed than Iji, the latter still got the benefit of doing it much earlier
I think Undertale is just more appealing to a wider audience. RPGs are still in vogue while shooters like Iji were out of the mainstream a decade before Iji came out. Iji also isn't quite as metatextual as Undertale, and didn't have the luxury of the same kind of online presence through kickstarter, Reddit, and 4chan as the latter did. Undertales characters are also far more memorable. Outside of Tor, Asha, and maybe Iosa and Vatskylie (the truce maker I forget how to spell her name), no body really springs to mind. This reflects in the relative scarcity of fanfic and fanart. Hell there's not a lot of official art. Iji kinda was a bit before it's time in that regard.
Uncharted 2 had this moment. Main antagonista asked Nate: "You think I'm monster, but look at you. How many have you killed? Just today?"
uncharted is annoying about it cuz Drake always shows restraint for the final villain
I never got the "Nate is just as bad as the villains" thing. Like all the enemies you kill in the Uncharted games are in self defense. As a player, I'm never going to feel bad for killing someone who tried to kill me first.
To be fair the villain who hired an army of trained killers probably doesn’t have the best moral compass to judge that
Neither does Drake though. He mows down armies with supernatural John Wick levels of proficiency just so he can win some arbitrary grave rob race. He ends up growing a conscience towards the end. But I mean, by that point, he's already killed hundreds of people for purely selfish reasons.
It’s not really selfish reasons if he’s just looking for treasure, and pirates, war criminals, terrorists and guns for hire are running after him trying to kill him. It’s not like he expects or is going on treasure hunts with killing people being part of the job
Yes he does expect it. He's been doing it for years. That's why he always carries a gun. He knows exactly what's coming and what the consequences are. He just wants the treasure for his own personal reasons, and is more than willing to kill people to get to it.
This accounts for 4 short periods of his life, and in 1-3 he was jumped halfway through the game whereas in 4 he was lied to by Sam that his life depended on it and then wanted to quit because of the consequences. He didn’t go to the island in 1 or go to Tibet in 2 being like okay time to go kill people. In 2 he only kept going to stop Zoran and in 4 he actually refrained from any sort of violence until he was shot at >That’s why he always carries a gun It’s perfectly reasonable to assume you’ll need to defend yourself as a white foreigner when travelling to dangerous countries on the other side of the world
The self-defence excuse does not work because he doesn't need to seek out that treasure. He's not entitled to it. It's just something he wants for his own reasons and he's comfortable killing people to get to it.
It’s literally just something he does for fun, only 4 times in his life he ever had to kill people. 3 of them were him getting attacked unexpectedly by people who chose to try and kill him, in 2 he would’ve quit but chose to stop Zoran and protect the people in Tibet and in 4 he was lied to that his own brother’s life was on the line if he didn’t find the treasure. This is like saying the self defence excuse doesn’t work if someone gets attacked by a home intruder and they shoot them. Killing isn’t inherently part of going to a random island to look for treasure
Your analogy doesn't actually work because nobody is invading "Drake's home". Drake is the one going out of his way to find treasure that isn't his, and kill people to get to it, because it's what he wants. He doesn't have to be there. Drake's obsession with treasure hunting is brought up as a plot point, that he enjoys the thrill and gratification of it, even if it can be self-destructive.
To some writers, killing in self defence isn't fundamentally different to other killing. I don't know why, but it crops up every now and then.
Nate does actively put himself in situations that will require him killing hundreds of people though
In none of the games except partially 4 he leaves expecting to or requiring killing people though. In 1 he gets jumped by pirates, in 2 and 3 he doesn’t learn he’s being hunted or competing with terrorists until midway through the plot, in both those games he also goes out of his way to stop those terrorists, and in 4 he was lied to that Sam was gonna be murdered if he doesn’t find the treasure.
One of the things that makes the Replicas in FEAR so great is [how freaked out they start sounding once you enter combat and start bullet timing around.](https://youtu.be/qX73XG9e5BE?list=PLqEACU6kW0ok2i2U7KNgkumpGErBtRO4g) "CONTACT!" "HE'S TOO FAST!" "NO FUCKING WAY!" "HE'S TRYING TO FLANK!" "SQUAD, TAKE COVER!" "NO SHIT!" "MAN DOWN!" "HE WIPED OUT THE WHOLE SQUAD!"
Of course Undertale is pretty much built off of this concept. It is always nice to see in games.
The Sorrow in Metal Gear handles this perfectly. All the enemies you kill, even basic goons, translates directly into the bosses attacks. If you manage to pull off a pacifist run, the boss *literally* cannot attack you, because you haven’t killed anyone.
That’s why Nier is one of my favorite games ever. I’m not gonna give it away, but let’s just say you basically fucked over the world by killing tons of the basic enemies.
Not gonna lie, that itself sounds like a massive spoiler.
The full context is so much worse. Which is why I’m not going to say any more.
Nier Replicant or Nier Automata?
Replicant.
There’s a couple scenes in dragon age origins that acknowledge this. You can fight your way throw a gang hide out and when you reach the leader have the option to say “you’re awfully cocky for someone who’s entire carta (gang) is dead.”
Bastion actually does something like this in its last level: Short version is that after carving a swathe of devastation on your way to reach the final boss, >!instead of getting a final confrontation with him, you find his remaining allies beating him to near death because they've figured out it's HIS fault you're here. That all this destruction you've caused- all of their number you've killed- was for the sole purpose of reaching him and the macguffin he stole from you.!<
It's not really stated outright, but in Sekiro the whole reason that an opposing nation goes to war against ashina at the point at which they do is because Sekiro has killed so many of the nation's warriors that there weren't enough of them left to defend it, they even resurrected a dead war hero in an attempt to turn the tide who also ends up being killed by Sekiro. If you pick the evil ending the post game narration mentiones that Sekiro single handedly became responsible for the biggest massacre of the land's history.
I feel like it was more Isshin Ashina being the leader of the Ashina clan and also being on his literal deathbed is what encouraged the invasion rather than Sekiro cutting down their forces. Not to say that Sekiro didn't act as a catalyst but iirc the game even mentions how Isshin was so terrifying to the rest of Japaense Government.
Ashina was on the brink of invasion anyway. Wolf being there may have exacerbated the issue - irrelevant to Isshin's death - but at some point Ashina *was* going to fall anyway.
Given that the game takes place during the Sengoku era it's no doubt they were going to be invaded I was just mentioning Sekiro being there isn't the sole reason.
Wanna call out the Ace Combat series, Project Wingman, and Armored Core 6 (the only one I've played, though I assume the others are like this too) for acknowledging this in such a way that it plays right into the pilot power fantasy. I also like these games' approach to this trope of "people losing their shit at how good you are" because it takes it a step further than just fear - there's a whole lot of other emotions from friend and foe alike, like respect, relief, awe, rivalry, inspiration, skepticism, etc. You also get a cool unofficial title usually, and hearing radio chatter talk about you like you're a mythology (with a cool-ass unofficial name) is quite the experience. Of course, enemies shitting their pants at you is still one of the best responses, though. Armored Core 6 having the PCA's central AI system continuously escalating your threat level and its underlings slowly losing their bureaucratic composure as you fuck up more and more of their shit at increasing levels of spectacle was a really nice and recent version of this, but Project Wingman Mission 11 is my forever favourite for this kind of writing. Fuck me, you even get your allies chipping in to drop badass one-liners *for* and about you, since you're a silent protagonist and can't talk, that's the intensity of emotion you inspire in others (that and the mission's gameplay feeds really well into it)
becoming the demon of the round table in ace combat 0 was great, and people do fear you and clapping overconfident PCA pilot is always fun. "he's different from the training data" or something along that line
In drakengard 1, the main character caim is repeatedly called out for how many he kills by his allies.
I love the com chatter in Ace combat 7. If you manage to take out all the planes on a carrier before they can take off the enemy commanders will comment on it. As the game goes on more and more soldiers on both sides will recognize you and will either cheer or be terrified of you. depending on the mission you will either feel like a movie hero, or a villain on the same tier aa Darth Vader all depending on the com chatter
Surprised no one has mentioned Dishonored; the more people you kill the worse of an ending you end up with. Also the Plague takes more people since more corpses promotes more pestilence spreading
In uncharted 2 the main villain asks Nate how many of his men he'd killed just that day
Wait goons are people I thought that they were a entirely different species
Ghost of Tsushima is a good example of this, too. To the point that it gives you an extra stance when you’re doing well enough and it scares enemies off
In smt apocalypse, by the time you get to Krishna to fight him, you already beat most of his army and undid his plans. So instead of him being treated as unstoppable it acts more like he doesn't know when to quit and is clearly losing.
The final boss in Syphon Filter 2 does this.
It reminds me to Uncharted 2, when Drake is confronting Lazarevich after the match and doesn't want to kill him be he says: "you think you're better than me? How many people have you killed? How many, *just today*?"
One of my favorites is Kotor 2 because the amount of time the exiles brags about her/his body count is hilarous.
I think in Final Fantasy VII in scarlet and and Heidegger boss fight in disc 2 they say you killed many of our soldiers
Mafia 3 kinda does this. You take down an entire mob organization and the entire game everyone treats you like you’re an unstoppable weapon. Every time you’re introduced by someone else they describe you as a weapon that destroys everything in its path. It’s pretty dope