Video games that use ludonarrative dissonance to their advantage?

[JamesStone]

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Ah. So ludonarrative dissonance are merely gameplay plot holes.

Another good example is Borderlands 2. In game there are NewU, which when you die basically create a clone of you to keep going for some money. Functionally its there to keep the gameplay upbeat and fun and whatever.

In story however main characters can be and are killed permanently, even though at the end of the cutscene the place they died in has a NewU that brings the player character back to life, but not the NPCs that just died.

The story doesn't line up with the gameplay.

Never played Borderlands, but isn't it similar in concept with the BioShock capsules, and can't it be explained in the same way (IE the NPCs simply don't have access to NewU)?

 

[Asita]

Wait. What's the difference between ludonarrative dissonance and breaking the players' expectations?

Ludonarrative Dissonance stems from conflict between the story told through the narrative and that told through the gameplay.

Take for instance Final Fantasy VII. At the end of the first act, one of your party members is skewered, leaving them immediately and irrevocably killed. The narrative is saying that death is easy, terrible, and permanent. However, the gameplay itself shows your party both dealing and tanking far worse (up to and including an exploding sun engulfing the damn planet), and revival from anything being as easy as slapping a relatively cheap phoenix down on the dead party member. Where the narrative treats death as harsh, the gameplay treats it as little more than an annoyance. See also any case where there's a desperate fight for survival and you have an arbitrary headcount limit for no discernable reason.

I agree about some of the over the top attacks that just do some amount of damage... but slight correction about phoenix down.

Spoiler: as if this was necessary but spoiler for FF7

Sephiroth killed Aeris. They made that abundantly clear.

Phoenix down "cures KO status." It revives a character if they've been knocked out. In an encounter no one "dies" unless the entire party is killed and no one is left to render assistance. It isn't a D&D style resurrection, it's more like an adrenaline shot.

Yes and no. Games such as Final Fantasy tend to play it both ways regarding the status. For illustrative purposes, it's common for there to be attacks that inflict instant-death on the characters (or inflict death after a certain number of turns, like in the case of the Doom status effect (aka: Death Sentence, Condemned)). In these particular examples, the instant-death effect is often animated as the Grim Reaper itself doing in the character, thereby heavily implying death.

Similarly, the very themes evoked by a Phoenix Down (aka: Life) is based in the Phoenix's mythical ability to be reincarnate after death. This is actually somewhat elaborated on in Final Fantasy XII, via Aletap Rumors. To quote:

?The undying phoenix is said to call back souls from the heavens, but to win the attention of such fabled bird, you must give up a feather as an offering. The best are the downy feathers of the tail... hence the term phoenix down, see? Mark well that not just any feather will do. Depending on quality and size, the blessing received varies greatly. Displeased? You get what you pay for

So they really do play it both ways.

 

[an annoyed writer]

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Ah. So ludonarrative dissonance are merely gameplay plot holes.

Another good example is Borderlands 2. In game there are NewU, which when you die basically create a clone of you to keep going for some money. Functionally its there to keep the gameplay upbeat and fun and whatever.

In story however main characters can be and are killed permanently, even though at the end of the cutscene the place they died in has a NewU that brings the player character back to life, but not the NPCs that just died.

The story doesn't line up with the gameplay.

Never played Borderlands, but isn't it similar in concept with the BioShock capsules, and can't it be explained in the same way (IE the NPCs simply don't have access to NewU)?

Sort of, but the thing is this guy WAS hooked into that same system at one point. He?s a former player character (a la borderlands 1)

 

[BrawlMan]

My personal example, which also motivated me to start this thread, would be Saints Row 2. You see, in the game you are presented with all those crazy missions requiring of you to constantly kill people and destroy things, and they're all presented as pure, almost innocent fun, sprinkled with some hard satire for good measure. However, pretty much every time you complete one of those "fun" missions, the consequences are, more often than not, horrible, usually with someone ending up getting tortured or mutilated, dying an unnecessarily violent death, or parts of the city getting utterly obliterated. All of that caused by a sadistic, sociopathic protagonist, who stops at nothing to deliver a message that he should not be messed with. It all serves as means of delivering a strong message about how much the world of crime is romanticised in mass media vs what it really looks like.

First off, such an amazing idea for a thread. Kudos to you.

Secondly, allow me to build off your example. While Saints Row 2 is considered to be the best in the series, it is my least liked. I never felt like such a monster playing that game. Some of the decisions and actions felt barbaric and made me feel psychosomatically ill.

It started out harsh with what you 'have' to do to get a new Hideout after you awake. I wanted to shut the game off right there. In fact, I did. And it took me a few months if not a year to try to get past it. But it didn't stop. Revenge against the Ronin and the Brotherhood. How a member of the crew dies. That was a sore issue because I've heard stories all of my life about how people of my race were killed in such a manner if they considered lynching too lenient.

Where we diverge is that I don't think they used it to their advantage, at least to my tastes. I never felt any fun like I did with Saints Row 3 (which admittedly started off rough for me with the opening bank robbery). I never felt anything I did was justified in SR2. While the final villain was certainly villainous... Damn, did he have a point in Stillwater being better off without the gangs if those are what the gangs were capable of. Especially the Protagonist.

What made it worst is that Saints Row has always been billed as the lighter hearted alternative to GTA. I never felt so bad playing a GTA game.

Yeah, SR2 it's really hard, if even possible, to feel like you're the "Good Guy" in stillwater. Because nothing you do is remotely good. SR2 is probably one of the most straight up Villian Protagonist roles ever.

Wierdly, SR3 makes things really wacky, but you still end up doing a lot of awful things that would have you on the FBI's most wanted list for terrorism, among other things. Possibly blowing up a building? Raiding military bases to steal their weapons? Sinking an aircraft carrier? Dropping a couple large planes onto the urban areas of a major American City? This sounds like a resume ISIS would love to have. And yet when the saints do it, it's treated as lovable banditry instead of terrorism. At least SR2 doesn't try to sugarcoat their misdeeds as much.

Don't get me wrong, I like the SR series far more then the GTA series but I'll also call out that the main characters are not good people.

More or less why I dropped the series after 2. That, and the crime sandbox genre was wearing thin already to me at least.

If I had to guess Killer 7, No More Heroes, and Mad World.