In-game rewards instead of in-game punishment - I can ditch the Mary Sue and not be penalized? Cool!

Oddly enough, been thinking about this recently in a different context, where games give you a story decision with a counter intuitive result.

Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis has a particularly stupid one. At a certain point in a game, you have to make a choice whether to hunt down and capture an innocent creature. Agreeing gets you the "good" ending, while refusing gets you the "bad" ending.

Really hate it when games do that crap.
 
  • Feels
  • Informative
Reactions: IAmNotAlpharius, cunt bucket, Y2K Baby and 1 other person
Not sure if this counts either, but you can ditch battles inside palaces in Persona 5 without consequence (while letting enemies escape has consequences).
 
  • Informative
Reactions: IAmNotAlpharius
Metal Gear Solid gives you the stealth suit if you fail to save Meryl. Considering that's the easier option and the stealth is arguably more useful in the game than infinite ammo is...
 
Lord of the Large Pants said:
make a choice whether to hunt down and capture an innocent creature.
Click to expand...
Explain. You mean an animal? What's the problem then?
Ms. Cegination said:
Hollow Knight has an NPC that has a crush on you that you can date and an NPC that constantly gets trapped in webs. If you leave him stuck in the webs, he dies, but if you save him, he steals your girl.
Click to expand...
Holy shit really? NTR Knight :story:
 
  • Like
Reactions: IAmNotAlpharius
Ms. Cegination said:
Hollow Knight has an NPC that has a crush on you that you can date and an NPC that constantly gets trapped in webs. If you leave him stuck in the webs, he dies, but if you save him, he steals your girl.
Click to expand...
Remembered that if you also beat the one dream battle you get from saving said NPC enough times, she ends up leaving anyways.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: IAmNotAlpharius
Played Disgaea and didn't know you could make your characters lift each other into a 10-character tower... then hurt somebody as a tower. Twas fun.
 
Super Robot Wars, which I've Let's Sperged here, has some goofy examples of atypical game rewards/punishments.

Whenever they cover Gundam SEED/SEED Destiny's plot, they tend to mess with your head.

In SRW Alpha 3, the character Mu La Flaga, unlike canon, doesn't have to die. Simply don't deploy him in the unit he died in, and he lives to the end of the game, with cutscenes and everything taking into account his survival. The game follows canon fairly loyally otherwise, so most players either deploy him or expect the game to force deploy him and kill him off if they don't but it doesn't happen.

SRW J flips this around and kills him off automatically despite no real reason why he should have to die, even though they actually let more people live than in SRW Alpha 3's retread of the SEED plot.

SRW Z has some weird requirements for a true canon route that require doing strange things when covering Gundam SEED Destiny.

In one level, to qualify for this bonus route, you have to shoot down Kira Yamato from that show, but he's an ally (and was NOT shot down during the part of the show that stage retreads), so the game shouldn't let you kill him by default. You have to spam MAP weapons, which hit friends and foes indiscriminately, until they kill him off, and the game ordinarily encourages NOT doing this to allies, you just kill them off for no good reason doing this.

It's counter-intuitive especially because the true canon route pretty much rewrites GSD to be way less stupid in terms of plot, but you have to do strange things like mentioned above to throw the usual plot off the rails to get it.


SRW MX is also kinda goofy when covering the anime of RahXephon. Ordinarily, SRW let's you save people who should otherwise die in some horrible fashion and subvert their deaths, and through most of the game, most the crappier parts of that show are avoided or toned down, but then one level forces the PLAYER to reenact a death scene from the show, even forcing you to pull the trigger for a character's death, things SRW usually averts in one way or another.
 
Last edited:
  • Informative
Reactions: American Lollinator Mace
In Red Orchestra 2, teamkilling still counts towards weapon leveling stats the same as killing enemies, so some lazy people will go to empty servers and farm teamkills on bots until their weapons are fully leveled. Of course, teamkilling is still punished by negative team points and server autokicking past a certain threshold.
 
  • Thunk-Provoking
  • Winner
  • Informative
Reactions: DeadwastePrime, The Shadow, IAmNotAlpharius and 1 other person
I'm pretty sure everyone knows this, but Far Cry 3 if you dick around and don't leave the room, eventually the main bad guy will return and then the game ends.
 
  • Winner
Reactions: IAmNotAlpharius
I just remembered an interesting bit of backhanded reward that seems like punishment from Super Mario RPG.

In the town of Marrymore, they have a luxury suite room you can sleep in repeatedly and register a massive tab you have to pay off by working as a bellhop. It's technically punishment because you can't leave until you pay the bill off, but it can be a system of rewards if you are willing to be patient.

While working as a bellhop, the customers will hand out tips for good service, and some of the tips are stupidly valuable items, and the frequency they hand these out is good enough it can be worth it to game this for awhile, you can debt slavery yourself in getting enough Flower items (which increase Party MP) to get to max cap barely halfway through the game.
 
Bloodborne.

Gascoigne's Daughter. Complete her quest she dies and so does her sister

Ignore a crying little girl? Probably make it until morning

The DLC has a bit of this too

Kill the innocent fetal child of a god? It stops torturing the end boss in his dreams!
 
Not sure about punishment, but..

In Secret of Evermore on SNES, if you leave the upstairs bedroom of a house WITHOUT opening the chest, the owner of the house comes up and gives you a special magic spell that you can only get from him in that cutscene.

This one always stuck out to me.. in games you go in people's homes, opening their chests, taking potions, smashing pots, etc. but if you don't in this one instance = kickass spell.
 
Valkyrie Profile awards you the best ending if you misbehave on purpose otherwise you'll often get the bland ending.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back