Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
I think any game where the scripted loss story enemy is technically beatable but extremely difficult should at least have a special cutscene where the enemy goes 'oh shit lol' before the story finds a way to get back on track in the cutscene.
If it's a loss in the story but you still have to BEAT the battle segment (ie fucking Kai Leng) before the enemy gloats at you in the cutscene, and losing the battle segment gives you a game over instead, you should get fined. no appeal.
How did Kai Leng make it into ME3 lol, he's such obvious garbage.
He was a racist self-insert from the novels ported into the last game by the same head writer
The even worse crime is when you have to repeatedly do a challenging fight until you succeed enough to get to the defined point where the game makes you lose it.
Oh yeah that is the worst. If you have decided I should lose, then losing should just continue the story. It's two errors in one.
it would be funny if instead of a special cutscene for succeeding in an unwinnable cutscene, you get one for losing where they call you a weakass
That is literally what happens in the Kai Leng boss fight people are complaining about, you lose in a cutscene after winning gameplay wise and then Kai Leng is like "Oh I'm so much stronger than you n00b".
lol rip
Kai Leng in Mass Effect I'll hate you til I die
It is an aggravating factor and adds 2 years to your sentence if the enemy that beats you in a cutscene is an edgy asshole taunting you about the incompetence you didn't display because what you did didn't matter.
This includes Kai Leng (Mass Effect), Bloody Mary (The Wolf Among Us), and every character in Far Cry.
I tried googling Kai Leng and all I got was nightwing
Every time I ran into that guy he did some mall ninja shit, got rocked in seconds and then cutscenes interrupted me so he could smug around a little longer
If you win a fight that the story demands you lose, the game should give you an achievement and a good-end cutscene and then send you back to the menu
Chrono Trigger spoilers.
I loved when I got to Lavos at the end of the Ocean Palace during New Game+. Instead of Crono getting Thanos snapped by him I popped his shell, and it instantly shoved me into the final boss sequence. And you get the Dev Room ending!
spoiler
You get the same thing if you beat Lavos by using the secret portal at the fair at the very beginning of the game in New Game+. It's a pain in the ass to solo the fight as just Crono, though.
Believe me, I know. I have legitimately replayed the game over a hundred times. Probably in the multiple hundreds at this point. It's my all time fave.
You have perfect taste
I genuinely think that would be cool. Or like you lose the grand narrative because you never learned a crucial bit of information you only find out about after losing. Either way you winning or losing should matter in an ideal scenario
DMC5 does this, it's great! It even unlocks the next difficulty, just like if you had gotten the normal ending.
(Well, I don't know if there's an achievement, but there is a special cutscene.)
I hear what you're saying but narrative trumps ability; Dark souls (demons souls?) did it well in that if you beat the stray demon in the tutorial stage they basically give you a pat on the head (they give you a unique cinematic you couldn't see otherwise) and tell you you lost anyway
If you beat the Asylum Demon on your first encounter in DS1, you get a sword and it just dies.
I looked it up and it's the vanguard demon from demons souls Im thinking of. In the original demons souls apparently you got a cinematic, in the ps5 remake you visit a place called the unknown egress where the dragon demon kills you.
What makes a video game unique is that the narrative is created through the interaction of the player with the medium. The narrative exists through the gameplay not just the cutscenes, and if you have predecided the outcome of a narrative event and have to rewrite the manner in which people interact with the work of art to make it happen then that is clumsy storytelling.
I think you have a good point here and this substantiates many of the cases you're complaining about, but I think you're still viewing the issue a little narrowly. Letting the player interact and having that interaction be meaningful is not the same as having the player character win if they Git Gud. The point is to express things and the issue with poorly done forced losses is that they don't express very much besides "ludo-narrative dissonance" or something. Failing to achieve one's desired outcome despite doing everything as well as they could have is still a valid concept and a meaningful idea that can be used well in a story, the issue is that most games just don't do that.
Failing to achieve one's desired outcome despite doing everything as well as they could have is still a valid concept and a meaningful idea that can be used well in a story,
TNG: Peak Performance
Some games give you leeway to choose who your character will be, but there are games where the story is predecided and you're just there to fill the boots (like in the god of war games); I'm happy to be told what the story is (as it is, growing up I LOVED reading novels to see what stories are out there; some people imagined themselves in the shoes of the protagonist, but for me I always saw myself as the audience), although I do think there should be an award of sorts for those who can complete impossible tasks or fights.
That is irrelevant to the issue. The issue is not that Kratos loses, it is that they interrupt the manner in which the story is told and overwrite your input as a participant in an interactive medium to facilitate it. It is not the same as a novel having a prearranged narrative, because a novel is not interactive and you do not create the narrative through your interaction with it. The characters in your novel don't make their choices based on whether or not you pressed square or circle (The closest is those choose your own adventure novels, but the equivalent there would be you selecting to go to page 89 and the page 89 description being "No you didn't, go to page 93 instead" and the novel then mocking your choice, which would either be satirical or incredibly bad storytelling).
And kratos, for the most part, has cutscene competence. in which as soon as you press a button in a cutscene he succeeds, the only exception as far as I recall being that you sometimes have impossible to complete "Mash this button" challenges, but in that scenario You still failed and the narrative of failure is created through your failure in the interaction.
Genichiro is a cheater
So is the fucking netherbrain. I won that natural 20 fair and square, fucker!
Sheath The Scaleless can fuck off too
I was just about to praise dark souls for letting you kill the asylum demon if you're good enough, but that's true. You have to die to seath anyway.
At least Sekiro has a fake forced loss and then no real forced loss, I'm pretty sure.
Bloodborne also has sort of an interesting approach where it has elements predicated on you dying once by a certain point but you can just not die.
And even with Seath, at least the death is to set up being in jail, which I think is cool even if handled clumsily. That's something else Bloodborne improves on.
Yeah but in return you get a useless weapon
this would be good but I'm not good enough to actually experience this lol
Play some open world games with stealth at some point, like assassin's creed or something. Some of those have you doing one hit kills and major acrobatics as routine and then at some point you press a button, a cut scene activates and the main character fuck up walking or something.
