What are the most pretentious games ever made?

Oilspill Battery said:
But the game is not focused around just that one moral. Most of the 20+ hours of the game is seeing how harry's schizophrenia interacts with the world and whatever conversations you skills get into.

This is why I linked the gun loop, because its a microcosm of what the game is about, which is the extremely varied comedic element of the voices in your head and how they lead to different paths and conversations. That is the main draw of the game.

Using this logic you can literally call any sidequest/worldbuild in any game ever a spiel. Whenever the game gives you an option to do anything you pull that up and call it a negative, using the same reasoning you can literally shit on every single RPG ever made by picking appart its sidequests and going "This doesn't have anything to do with the main story checkmate libtard."
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ADN_VIII said:
Potentially hot take: Destiny 2.

The plot of Destiny as a franchise is so incredibly far up it's own ass that the games need a dedicated lore book *in game* for players to reference during conversations because Bungie doesn't understand the concept of show don't tell.
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You think that's bad? Back in the times of Destiny 1 the lore wasn't even in-game, but on Bungo's website. So basically the game and the story were completely separate from eachother.

And another funny thing that their lore does is hinting at concepts and never explaining if they are even accurate information for years. The Winnower and the Gardener are the worst offenders in this regard
 
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Toji Suzuhara said:
You think that's bad? Back in the times of Destiny 1 the lore wasn't even in-game, but on Bungo's website. So basically the game and the story were completely separate from eachother.

And another funny thing that their lore does is hinting at concepts and never explaining if they are even accurate information for years. The Winnower and the Gardener are the worst offenders in this regard
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The real kicker is that 90% of the background info in D1 was basically wind because the game has been retconning itself nonstop for years. The main boss of the vanilla game, the Black Heart? The writers had no idea what it was supposed to do. It was holdover from an earlier script.
 
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The way iRacing is marketed and price I think gives it a nom to be labeled as pretentious. Let’s start with the logo:

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Immediately it’s presenting itself as some kind of professional sports league like the MLB. This is a video game. Racing sims are a pretty narrow genre. There are only a few series that can really be called racing sims, and how accurate they really are to real life is questionable. That said, iRacing is supposed to be very realistic. I have not tried it, so I couldn’t (and I’m not a race car driver anyway) because the pricing is fucking stupid.

You have to buy a subscription first to become a member, and the cheapest you’ll get that for is $5/mo. And all that gets you is a piddly handful of cars and tracks. If you want more, you have to pay for it, and I have no idea how much it is. I think it’s like $10 for a car. I couldn’t find prices on their website. So you not only have to pay each month, but you have to pay for more cars and tracks, and they are adding more so you’ll always be buying more. This is the boomer equivalent of Roblox.

The graphics model is outdated. I don’t think it’s ever been updated. Weather is not supported at all even though it’s been promised. The tyre model is comparatively unrealistic. Just two more weeks to get updates! What is the membership paying for exactly? Online play? Well that’s what people invested in it say it’s good for: it’s the best racing sim for online play. That qualification is important. iRacing bills itself as the racing sim, but it falls short. There are other racing sims out there that are way cheaper. If you’re a casual racing fan something Gran Turismo or Forza or one of the EA games will be good enough. iRacing will tell you ‘oh that’s not real sim racing’. Okay, well what about Assetto Corsa? Now there’s a more realistic simulation that you can buy for cheap on Steam with a one-time purchase. There are other games that are more niche and accomplish more than iRacing which I won’t get into. iRacing is a glorified eSports title billing itself as some sort of professional service to suck money from boomers having a mid-life crisis.
 
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More of a general trope, but any time Humans Are the Real Monsters trope comes up, especially if the recipients are objectively harmful for humans so the argument boils down to sheep saying that wolves are prosecuted unjustly.

For example, I'm playing Soul Reaver 2 and it pulls this trope with vampires despite their whole shtick is consuming massive amount of human blood, and seemingly normal humans can become vampires. I don't give a shit about your ancient vampire culture when you use human blood as fucking stairs.
 
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wtfNeedSignUp said:
More of a general trope, but any time Humans Are the Real Monsters trope comes up, especially if the recipients are objectively harmful for humans so the argument boils down to sheep saying that wolves are prosecuted unjustly.

For example, I'm playing Soul Reaver 2 and it pulls this trope with vampires despite their whole shtick is consuming massive amount of human blood, and seemingly normal humans can become vampires. I don't give a shit about your ancient vampire culture when you use human blood as fucking stairs.
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This is like the 'The universe is controlled by a computer!' plot twist that every Xeno game incorporates in some way to the point of being comical. That shit was already a tired trope by the time Star Trek did it in the 60s.
 
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-Last of Us, both of them
-Life is Strange
-Faggottale and any other shitty indie slop like it that has a "muh deep creepypasta story!!!11"
-JRPGs with dialogue the length of the old testament
-Kingdom Hearts 3 and NEO TWEWY, absolute cringeworthy dogshit presenting themselves as "muh emotional and deep heckin valid animu story!!111"
-All Quantic Dream interactive movies
-All Bethesda games from the seventh generation and above
-All Far Cry games after 1 (I would say after 2 because the gameplay is fun, but the intro takes like 30 minutes and is unskippable)
-Any and all walking sims. No exceptions
-Any and all games with unskippable cutscenes
-Any and all games with cutscenes that have several minutes runtime each
 
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Having actually beaten disco, I want to say it isn't pretentious and it isn't "not" pretentious. It's interesting it how it says things and even Ballsy at times for allowing you to get into a lengthy racial diatribe with a black man or denounce Communism.

The problem is it's a tiny fish in a big pond. There's no epic story to the epic background. If You play it conventionally you're going to get an ok but not too revolutionary crime story with some supernatural elements.

The game kinda wants you to act like a retard to open up options and get unconventional responses. But I don't want to do that and I have no interest in doing anything else but be a competent cop. It was a satisfying enough experience, but not something I would consider revolutionary unless you tried to break the mold and be a drunken spaz.

It's just ok.



LifeAlert said:
-Last of Us, both of them
-Life is Strange
-Faggottale and any other shitty indie slop like it that has a "muh deep creepypasta story!!!11"
-JRPGs with dialogue the length of the old testament
-Kingdom Hearts 3 and NEO TWEWY, absolute cringeworthy dogshit presenting themselves as "muh emotional and deep heckin valid animu story!!111"
-All Quantic Dream interactive movies
-All Bethesda games from the seventh generation and above
-All Far Cry games after 1 (I would say after 2 because the gameplay is fun, but the intro takes like 30 minutes and is unskippable)
-Any and all walking sims. No exceptions
-Any and all games with unskippable cutscenes
-Any and all games with cutscenes that have several minutes runtime each
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I take offense to kh and neo being called pretentious, but will acknowledge they are not as good as the previous games ( 3 is better with the dlc though)
 
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LifeAlert said:
-Last of Us, both of them
-Life is Strange
-Faggottale and any other shitty indie slop like it that has a "muh deep creepypasta story!!!11"
-JRPGs with dialogue the length of the old testament
-Kingdom Hearts 3 and NEO TWEWY, absolute cringeworthy dogshit presenting themselves as "muh emotional and deep heckin valid animu story!!111"
-All Quantic Dream interactive movies
-All Bethesda games from the seventh generation and above
-All Far Cry games after 1 (I would say after 2 because the gameplay is fun, but the intro takes like 30 minutes and is unskippable)
-Any and all walking sims. No exceptions
-Any and all games with unskippable cutscenes
-Any and all games with cutscenes that have several minutes runtime each
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What even is left, baby platformers? We found synthetic man's kf account
 
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wtfNeedSignUp said:
More of a general trope, but any time Humans Are the Real Monsters trope comes up, especially if the recipients are objectively harmful for humans so the argument boils down to sheep saying that wolves are prosecuted unjustly.

For example, I'm playing Soul Reaver 2 and it pulls this trope with vampires despite their whole shtick is consuming massive amount of human blood, and seemingly normal humans can become vampires. I don't give a shit about your ancient vampire culture when you use human blood as fucking stairs.
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Battlezone 2 had a nice variation of this, where it looks like it's where the story is headed, but it turns out the humans-turned-aliens just have beef with your CO because he's directly responsible for turning them into freaky hybrids, and the game even lets you stay with him after the twist is revealed. The only reason players consider it a bad end is because you help him get away with it.

Cuckmann's newest game is going to have this plot if the leaks are even halfway true, and I'm very curious what kind of shitshow it'll be.
 
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marvlouslie said:
As much as I love it, Metal Gear Solid 2 gets up it's own ass at times, but I chalk that up more to Kojima's bullshit more than the overall game itself. I wouldn't necessarily call it "pretentious". Look to Death Stranding for that.
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It's a neat idea but the speeches about how the player is a sociopath for wanting to be like Snake were just annoying to me.
 
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Gondolindrim said:
It's a neat idea but the speeches about how the player is a sociopath for wanting to be like Snake were just annoying to me.
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in a film these are the types of things that would be embedded in a movie as subtext like a kubrick film, but in a video game that's not really how you do things like that. you can't just hide things in the background, you have to consciously make the player aware of the subtext in a video game. if you want players to feel a meaningful emotion to missing out on something hidden in the background, you have to tell the player there is a thing there, AND they have to consciously make the choice to consider it unimportant to the other things - otherwise they'll just think it's sloppy craftsmanship.

a repeated subtext in mgs2 is criticizing people who aren't critical of the media they're consuming. all of the codec discussions about film and television are always about the same kind of critical lack of perception. the thing with MGS2 is that raiden is not really a separate character in a literary sense, he's really just a surrogate for the player. the game tricks you into thinking he's a separate character by giving him a backstory, but the backstory is just fake. he has your name on his dog tag. this creates a really weird schizoprehnic effect for the narrative of the game but besides that it means the game is saying things to the player aimed at a wide variety of different people to try and push their buttons in the hopes that most of what they say just gets lost on you. one of the biggest targets for the game's narrative is dumb teenagers who are playing the game directly after playing the first one

if you aren't 16 and playing mgs2 blindly after playing mgs1 then you probably understand what the game is trying to do, 20 years after the fact with hindsight it's a bit heavy handed and that can come off as kind of sloppy, especially when games like Spec Ops tried to to the exact same thing with a lot less grace and skill and just made people angry. It was aimed at a very specific audience when it came out though
 
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