In games, main characters, villains, and superheroes are just mirages, a poorly conceived illusion, lazily written and terribly designed, an outright scam.
You know what I’m talking about. You start a game, doesn’t matter if it’s fantasy, superheroes, or realism, the cutscene shows the main character as a godlike force of nature, obliterating everything in their path. They annihilate enemies with a flick of the wrist, level entire terrains with the arch of an eyebrow. Then the cutscene ends. You finally take control of this “unstoppable” character, only to find that none of what you just witnessed is remotely possible in gameplay. Your character’s punches barely chip away a quarter of a random minion’s HP. This is lazy writing, lazy game design, and it’s infuriating on so many levels.
I’m starting with video games because this bait-and-switch scam is most prevalent in this type of media. Nearly every game where you control a supposedly “powerful” character wreaking havoc on hordes of enemies suffers from this problem. But it doesn’t stop there. This absurd inconsistency is everywhere, in all kinds of media!
Take Wolverine, for example. His adamantium claws are described as being able to cut through the toughest steel. In one scene, he slices through a 30-centimeter-thick steel door as if it were Tofu. Then, moments later, those same claws merely scratch the skin of some nameless enemy, barely scuffing their cheap, generic military clothing. You can’t sell me on the idea of the sharpest, strongest, rarest metal on Earth and then have it rendered useless against random plastic-like armor. It’s dumb, lazy, and outright insulting to the audience.
Staying on the superhero theme, I’m currently playing a superhero game, I won’t give names, but let’s just say it really “marvels” at raising expectations sky-high during cutscenes, only to bring them crashing down the moment gameplay starts. It happens with all playable characters, but I’d like to highlight Storm, in the cutscene before a match, she’s a goddess of destruction, effortlessly disintegrating enemies with lightning, summoning apocalyptic thunderstorms, and striking fear into anyone nearby. Then you start controlling her. Suddenly, her “thunderous” attacks barely push enemies around, doing any meaningful damage only if you’re lucky enough to have them backed into a wall otherwise your attack is just a strong wind that deals no damage. Everything about this feels terrible.
If you’re creating something, stick to it. Don’t cheap out. Either show me from the start something achievable in gameplay, or put more effort into scaling the challenges. Give me more cannon fodder to obliterate, scale up the bosses, create barriers that counteract the character’s powers, even creating in-story blockages are acceptable, lazy but acceptable. Don’t sell me an all-powerful being and then turn them into an average earthling the moment I take the controls. It’s frustrating. It’s disappointing.
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