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)
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.