Every God of War game I ever played. Kratos makes for one huge jerk - he can only relate through killing. This guy killed his wife, his daughter, his brother, his mother, his father, his mentor, his friend - not to mention the whole of mankind, quite literally by GoW III. And don't get me started about his "enemies".
Was Kratos ever really meant to be heroic? The OP says that say , spec ops wouldn't count because the protagonist's actions were supposed to be depressing, well isn't Kratos supposed to be an asshole? If he's not than I fear to think what designers think an actual asshole is. I think this is supposed to only be for things that are supposed to be seen as heroic that actually are not.
I can't think of anything besides fable 3's fucking retarded emperor mode :build an orphanage, or build a brothel, and if you build a brothel and keep it up for a year you'll save hundreds of thousands of lives, and the brothel is apparently the evil option. YOU CAN'T FUCKING ACT LIKE THE MONEY GRUBBING ROUTE IS ALWAYS EVIL IF YOUR MONEY GRUBBING WILL SAVE COUNTLESS LIVES/THE WHOLE WORLD. Dear lord that game was ass
Most JRPGs making me kow-tow to jerks so I can get a key that I need to stop some villain from destroying the world. Like, I get you're a nice person, but damn, seriously? That nice?
Failing to kill Carth at the end of KotoR. I consider it "heroic" in the sense that I have a heroically huge hatred for Carth.
Persona 3 and 4 social links. I think they're fun, but in P3 especially, I got the sense that he secretly hated those people. There's a moment where you hang out with a friend, and he asks you what he should buy his nephew, who is suffering from an injury that prevents him from walking. One of the potential responses is "running shoes." Damn, what an asshole.
SMT: Nocturne's True Demon Ending. That shit gave me nightmares.
I'm not really defining heroic as in "a person/action to look up to that's altruistic," I'm thinking in terms of proportions. If it's good guy stuff that actually made me sad or mad, other than the JRPG thing, it's helping Samesh Bhatia get his wife's corpse as a Renegade. Like damn man, did you really have to threaten that kid like that?
Every God of War game I ever played. Kratos makes for one huge jerk - he can only relate through killing. This guy killed his wife, his daughter, his brother, his mother, his father, his mentor, his friend - not to mention the whole of mankind, quite literally by GoW III. And don't get me started about his "enemies".
Was Kratos ever really meant to be heroic? The OP says that say , spec ops wouldn't count because the protagonist's actions were supposed to be depressing, well isn't Kratos supposed to be an asshole? If he's not than I fear to think what designers think an actual asshole is. I think this is supposed to only be for things that are supposed to be seen as heroic that actually are not.
The problem is that the developers always make a saving throw trying to humanize Kratos, trying to explain his anger and make us empathize with the guy. The whole plethora of dead relatives, for one thing. The devs kill a member of his family for every new game! And when they run out they just make up new relatives to kill! And on they milk their revenge story. Clearly they're trying to make the gamers feel torn between the ends and means of Kratos's plight. Why else would they come up with that sequence in the first game where you're forced to defend - to no use - the memory of you wife and child against murderous copies of yourself? Mercy-kill your mother? Commit patricide, twice? Accidentally murder your friend? Recover your brother only to lose him again? The devs keep coming up with deeply emotional *excuses* for Kratos's rage. And precisely because we bear witness to these "original sins" we're meant to take Kratos not as a hero or a villain but as a tragic hero.
Except it gets a little repetitive after a while, and all we're left with is the indiscriminate slaughter.
A hero, in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion. A demigod is the son or daughter from one immortal and one mortal parent, an example would be Heracles, son of the mortal queen Alcmene and the god Zeus.
How else do you explain everything the Boss is able to do. Wouldnt be surprised if he (or she) was actually the son/daughter of Zues himself... though probably disowned because all they did was smoke pot and drop out of college...
In just Cause 2, your character is supposed to be a hero. In reality, despite what the game tells you he's an unabashed terrorist and murderous revolutionary with no morals who blindly follows orders. In fact so much of a villain that I actually found it to be hilarious in that so-bad-it's-good kind of way.
Jason from Far Cry 3 has to be the worst kind seeing as he eventually grows more insane and liking in what he's doing while slowly letting murder get the better of him and leaning more towards Citra even though he actually has a girlfriend who still cares about him and that to me just leaves quite the bad taste in my mouth compared to what Vaas was like he seemed more tame and passed off as a genuine psycho character.
Yep, in every Elder Scrolls game you plunder dozens of tombs, and no one seems to mind. It was especially strange in Morrowind, with all the ancestor and Tribunal worship. The Nine Divines have nothing against graverobbing, though.
In my favorite, sorta-roleplaying playthrough of Skyrim thus far, I played my Khajiit as being mentally disturbed after events prior to the start of the game proper culminating in surviving the Helgen attack, and the result PTSD drives her to be absolutely ruthless with her enemies and their resultant corpses.
"Tabby" (spelled with the quotation marks,) was already somewhat, ah, "psychologically delicate" to begin with. But the rapid succession of being robbed of all her worldly possessions, being slashed across the face by a sabrecat while trying to ask directions, having said wound get infected and permanently scarred, being thrown out of a hospital for no reason other than trying to pay with a "shouty axe necklace" that she had found on a dead guy, being strung along by Ulfric with promises of becoming his "housecat", nearly being executed and then nearly being burned alive by a fuckmothering dragon, drove her to the brink of madness. And after all that, being abandoned by Ulfric during the subsequent escape snapped her mind cleanly in two. Wary of appearing "soft" in front of the Imperial who would've overseen her execution, she grabbed the largest and most intimidating armor and weapon she could find. Later, to compensate for her unfamiliarity with two-handed weaponry, she adopted pseudo-necromantic practices to turn her slain enemies against their former allies, culminating in her ascension to vampire lord.
She had no trouble looting dead bodies, new or old- served them right for trying to kill her. Though a moment that caught me off-guard was when I was cleaning up after a fight, and found my zombified servant suddenly superfluous. I did the humane thing, and bashed its moaning skull in.
"Thank... You..."
I gotta admit, that creeped me out.
Another thing that sorta sucked was taking that odd-job for the kid in Whiterun to get the girl to leave him alone. Turns out she was just picking on him because she loved him and didn't know how to show it, but now she wouldn't have anything to do with him. Not exactly world-shattering stuff here, but there wasn't even an option to tell the kid what he'd just screwed himself out of. And before switching games, one last thing that bothered me intensely when I noticed it. You can marry a wide variety men and women, and even adopt a kid or two, regardless of who you play as. All very progressive, I'm sure. But no matter who they are, you can't tell them you love them, or even refer to them affectionately in any way. You just sorta bark orders at your spouse for them to give you money and pies and move somewhere else, and that's it. I'd heard the word "soulless" used to describe Skyrim, and after seeing the purest expression of familial love reduced to little more than a fucking stat bonus, I believe it.
*sigh* Moving on.
I know the original post said not to mention Spec Ops but FUCK IT I'm gonna anyway. During the big firefight in The Hive, there comes a moment where you are required to flank a turret nest. While making your way around, a civilian runs into the line of fire. The color of her clothes is roughly the same as the 33rd's desert camo, and they've by now introduced you to the CQC experts that run at you with a knife and threaten to one-hit-kill you if they get too close. So if you're like me your first reaction upon seeing someone run at you, with someone shooting at you from behind them, was to gun everyone down first and ask questions later. However, unlike the other "you are a bastard" moments in this game, the encounter was very understated and was over in a heartbeat and they never mention it again, but that nagging realization of "I just shot an unarmed woman" stuck with me for a while afterward.
The Exile in KOTOR 2 and his/her relationship with Kreia, you start the game out having had the Force removed from you then getting it back, Kreia is more or less a tutor for you regardless of your morality, if she likes you she teaches you all kinds of neat Force stuff, but she only likes you if you shit on the less fortunate, basically all the things that that make her like you more are evil things, which is even worse because she's supposed to be this Grey Area super Jedi, she was once a Jedi Master and a Sith Lord, but she wants you to do all kinds of shitty dark side things.
There were plenty of times I killed an innocent or did some other sadistic thing and Kreia scolded me for it. Shes fine with cruelty to your own advantage but senseless cruelty is wrong
Yeah but there isn't anything to do light side wise that gives you favor with her. At least not that I know, but I play KOTOR almost exclusively light side.
Considering who she ends up being revealed as at the end of the game, why exactly are you expecting her to give your brownie points for being Light Side? That goes against everything she believes in.
She knows the Exile has to defeat the main baddies, the ones that betrayed her, but she refuses to like you if you do light side stuff, which means she also refuses to teach you the neat force tricks, I only got to learn them by using a conversation glitch where I make the same astounding realization over and over until she liked me enough to teach me force stuff despite my good nature.
That doesn't make him exempt from criticism. It's still grating when you hear him saying the exact same thing at the end. He learned nothing from the events of the story. He's as hard-headed at the end as he is at the start. For god's sake, Hope has a better character arc than him.
I'm surprised I'm not seeing this more often. I definitely nominate Uncharted's Nathan Drake. He has the most punchable face in gaming. Bonus Douche Points for constantly becoming a Chosen-One-esque "hero" simply by the virtue of being the handsomest douche in the room.
I'd hardly say he's ever even close to be the chosen one in the slightest respect. However he is almost always a hero by accident, with his original plots being closer to "Treasure = gold = riches", the fact he ends up saving the world is often because someone else intends to misuse whatever treasure/wealth/secret power that the game is centered around. Through that almost all of his heroics leave a bad taste in my mouth because you can tell he's getting fed up of it.
Character development, character development, the scene where Hope has a go at him on that rooftop...yeah Snow realizes he was being an idiot and starts to change his ways.
Having to work with Cerberus in Mass Effect 2. To me they felt like that era's Nazi Party in the way they frequently achieved their goals. As Miranda tells you; Cerberus teams are given the resources they need and are told to do whatever they want with it. That code of ethics lead to the Sole Survivor character arc and realated missions, Jack's nightmarish childhood, David's torment in the Overlord DLC, etc. Read up on Cerberus' activities for more information. The Illusive Man tries to paint himself as protector of humanity; after Jack's Loyalty mission he claims to have shut down the experiments once he learned of them, but the fact is Cerberus policy allows for these experiments to happen and don't really care so long as they get results.
To quote; "If you throw something into the air you have to worry about where it lands." The Illusive Man believes history will justify his actions? Ask Hitler how that turned out. Lost lots of repect for Joker when he willing joined Cerberus since he must know what they've done through Shepard's missions against them. I'm not going to list Cerberus' actions in ME3 however; since I feel that as the Illusive Man was the Reaper's puppet any chance of true retribution against him was lost.
If you return to the Undead Asylum, you are attacked, and therefore required to kill, the guy who broke you out and gave you his Estus Flask. His last words were "Go now, I would hate to harm you in death."
Do you have the Old Witch's Ring, by the way? It allows you to talk to the Quelaag's Sister, the Firekeeper; if you don't have the ring equipped, she appears mute. She is only capable of communicating with her sister, and because you are able to communicate with her, she mistakes you for Quelaag. Oh, she's blind, too, which is why she can't tell 5he difference. Blind and effectively mute, and incredibly sick and pained; despite this, she asks you not to worry, and to take care of yourself. The only way to help her is to give her Humanity, which is, as some people speculate, the only reason Quelaag attacks you on sight: To take your Humanity to help her sister.
Also, the pyromancer right before you fight (fight?) the Bed of Chaos (which absorbed her mother) is also speculated to be yet another Daughter of Chaos that, more likely than not, you kill. So here we have perhaps the most pitiable character in the game, blind, sickly, pained, but kind and gentle and selfless. And you kill her family.
There are lots of instances like that in the game. Let us not forget Crossbreed Priscilla, the boss who only asks you to leave, or Gwyndolin, who attacks you only because you have trespassed on his father's tomb.
Four pages and no one's mentioned "Shadow of the Colossus" yet?! Sure, bringing your love back and all, but those gentle, peaceful creatures were just minding their own business until you decide to crawl up their bodies and go all stabby on them!
Also, "B-17: Flying Fortress". I love the game, but dropping tons of bombs on civilian targets to the whoops and cheers of the crew just feels kinda... weird.
Finally, the entire "Killzone" series. Once you familiarize yourself with the universe, it's quite clear that the Helghast were being bullied by the ISA for a VERY long time, and in the first game were in fact merely trying to take back their one habitable planet, from which the ISA had exiled them to go live in a barren hell hole.
While I Agree with all the rest of your points, this one I feel can be argued.
First off, Shepard doesn't kill the Council, she merely tells the Alliance fleet not to save them.
Secondly, the way the choice is presented in the game, the options are for the Arcturus Fleet to move in to help the Destiny Ascension, or stay out of the fight until Shepard opens the Citadel's arms and concentrate all fire on Sovereign.
I almost always choose the latter option. Defeating Sovereign is the most important thing at that point. I can't justify potentially losing ships (and thereby firepower) saving the council when we might need every ship and every ounce of firepower to defeat Sovereign. Saving the council means nothing if Sovereign wins.
Now, I know this is a game, and therefore you'll still be able to win if you save the Ascension, but in-game, Shepard has no way of knowing this. It makes sense (to me at least) to let the Council die rather than risk losing everything.
OT: Ezio. Just Ezio. Guy goes all Assassin to avenge his family, then proceeds to kill more people than his enemies ever did.
Assassin's Creed III had a few of these moments for me, specifically when you're looking for Captain Kidd's letters. In one Connor chases after a looter who'd found the letter he was looking for, shouting the whole time that it belongs to him (how do you figure that, Connor?) and ultimately murdering him over it. Later he destroys an entire fort for the measly scrap of paper he has no claim to, condemning who knows how many people to fiery, agonizing deaths for the sake of his own wealth.
Frankly, Connor comes across as a pretty massive asshole in general, and the game's attempts to paint him as heroic (if naive) just make him that much more irritating.
To be fair, those were pirates, in a pirate fort. Hardly innocent guys.
And isn't that an issue with all Assassins Creed games? I remember 2 being particularly anal about me killing any civilian, but it had no problem in me decimating the entire population of policemen in renascent Venice because they, justifiably, suspect of the guy climbing the side of the palace with a greatsword on his side.
Assassin's Creed III had a few of these moments for me, specifically when you're looking for Captain Kidd's letters. In one Connor chases after a looter who'd found the letter he was looking for, shouting the whole time that it belongs to him (how do you figure that, Connor?) and ultimately murdering him over it. Later he destroys an entire fort for the measly scrap of paper he has no claim to, condemning who knows how many people to fiery, agonizing deaths for the sake of his own wealth.
Frankly, Connor comes across as a pretty massive asshole in general, and the game's attempts to paint him as heroic (if naive) just make him that much more irritating.
To be fair, those were pirates, in a pirate fort. Hardly innocent guys.
And isn't that an issue with all Assassins Creed games? I remember 2 being particularly anal about me killing any civilian, but it had no problem in me decimating the entire population of policemen in renascent Venice because they, justifiably, suspect of the guy climbing the side of the palace with a greatsword on his side.
A) Huh, I thought I remembered them being British troops. In any case it's still pretty fucked up, and a really dumb plan to begin with considering he could just as easily been killed by the cannons as everyone else in the fort.
B) I'm referring more to stuff characters do in the context of the story than in gameplay, though Ezio is still a pretty huge douche even then. Connor's just more recent, I guess, plus his personality is more outwardly dickish.
Well i couldnt stand roche.. he was way to fucked up.. i chose Iorveth instead but gotta start my 2nd playthrough soon.. or 3rd.. and prob a 4th xD love it
Ezio murders his way through countless guards and yet refuses to kill the game's antagonist because he doesn't think it'll make him feel better about his dead family anymore, despite the fact that it's blindingly obvious that this guy will continue to cause trouble.
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but gotta start my 2nd playthrough soon.. or 3rd.. and prob a 4th xD love it 
