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)
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. 😩
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