Video games are great, you get to make believe that you’re a charming roguish adventurer like Nathan Drake from Uncharted, a badass archer/warrior Like Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn, or a powerful wizard from any number of RPGs. Playing as anyone of these badass characters makes us feel just as badass, but sometimes, video games decide that we’ve had enough of being awesome and that we need to be taught some humility by preventing us from saving someone, or having our character captured or beaten by enemies we could have easily bested. So, here are five times cutscenes screwed us over.
Fable: The Lost Chapters
I have been replaying Fable Anniversary this week and I’m having a lot of fun with it, that is until I got to the part of the game where you get captured. While on a mission to rescue your mum from prison, you fight legions of the undead, evil summoners and corrupt guards to get to her, and after all that you end up getting caught by 2 lowly enemies. What’s annoying is these particular bastards aren’t even that tough an enemy and not to mention I have a spell that would suck the soul out of their arses, in fact if this hadn’t of been a cut scene, I would’ve cast one spell and walked off with my back to an explosion.
Final Fantasy X
Regular readers, and commuters on the train who chose to sit next to the jabbering idiot with a Final Fantasy t-shirt muttering to himself about a remake, will know I adore Final Fantasy. But there are some scripted moments in cut scenes that make absolutely no sense. Now I could mention the bit in VII where cloud gets capture by one guy, despite being and ex-soldier, an elite class of warrior, or…VII again where the party get captured and Barret never thinks to use the gun grafted to his arm to escape. But I opted instead for the moment in Final Fantasy X, when Tidus and co mount an assault on Bevelle to rescue Yuna from a forced political marriage, fighting off an ancient powerful dragon, wave after wave of machine guards and armed soldiers, only to be stopped by 3 guys with guns that do 10% damage. If X had of given control back to me I would’ve energy rained them all to hell!
Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater
In Snake eater we play as badass soldier Big Boss before he has become a legend, set during the cold war Naked Snake is just your run of the mill badass soldier with mad skills and surrogate mommy issues. But despite being the greatest soldier of the 20th century he still gets dicked over in cut scenes all the time, the scene that sticks out for me however is when Snake gets ambushed by Ocelot, who pulls two revolvers on him, but rather than killing Snake he proceeds to spin his guns and perform tricks. And what does the great Big Boss do? That’s right, he stands there like a wanker, you could argue that he can’t do anything because this is a prequel and Ocelot is in later games, but come the fuck on, there are so many non-lethal ways Snake could’ve incapacitated him.
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Dragon Age: Inquisition was all about choice and consequence, about forging relationships and building an army to withstand the might of an evil dick, and obviously different people are going to have different opinions on what that entails. Will you side with the oppressed but never the less dangerous mages, or the noble but often self-righteous Templars, or in the case of this example choose political support over a friend’s life despite the fact you could literally have both…easily. In Dragon Age: Inquisition there is a mission where you must choose between an alliance with the Qunari or the lives of your soldiers who have been surrounded by the enemy. Here’s the kicker though, you have mages, archers, invisible rogues, any number of ways to save them without endangering the mission, but no, Dragon Age must have its big heartfelt moment.
Oblivion
Oblivion is the fourth(ish) game in the Elder Scrolls series, a series of awesome RPG’s that continue to get better with each instalment. But just because they’re great doesn’t exclude them from having some moments that could’ve been easily avoided, take, for example, the death of Emperor Uriel Septim, while helping you escape prison he is killed by an assassin of the Mythic Dawn cult. Uriel was aware of his impending death, and of a looming threat, and died trying to save his kingdom, but if we’d been in control we would have moved him an inch to the right and waited a good 3 seconds before killing the easily noticeable assassin.
Well, those are the 5 times cutscenes screwed us over, can you think of any that should’ve made the list or just disagree? Let us know in the comments below, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and subscribe to our YouTube channel and if you’re feeling generous feel free to donate to our Patreon, thanks for reading.
