I think for me it has to be games that have a well thought out beginning like Sable or Children of the Light but just dont have an ending.
“Your princess is in another castle” trope. It works for Mario I guess but with other games it just feels frustrating because you’re supposed to actually have some kind of attachment to this character or thing to want to go through all this effort to rescue them but they’re just out of reach the whole time. Honestly it’s just difficult to be motivated to find a character your hardly knew in the first place.
Amnesia
“Talk to the guy about an issue I have that is literally standing one house or a few meters away from myself, then come back to me and hand him this and get a reward for, me too lazy to move or yell over.”
The knockout cutscene.
Had one in cyberpunk but it’s in other games. You can easily defeat waves of enemies, slow time or make people’s head explode, see through walls, survive gunfire and explosions, whatever. Your character is the ultimate killing machine able to win fights naked against nearly anything, short of a legendary military grade borg.
Pass a door, knocked out.
I think the one saving grace I’ll give this trope is that most RPGs don’t factor the RPG mechanics into the world. Like the power the player has is often there for the fun, not the story. So in their eyes it makes sense that someone could choke you out from behind or non-lethal you like you can do to enemies.
That being said, this trope extends to a LOT of other things. Like you can hack through a safe lock with ease, but a random apartment code lock or elevator lock is the line that stops you.
Or you have piles of meds that can basically revive you from being burnt to ash, yet someone gets stabbed once and they’re dead no matter what.
The amount of games that have a huge plot twist in act 3 which essential nullifies the entire game outside of the first mission. The assassins creed series does this a few times for example where in the final chapter of the game you find out the first good guy you met is bad and just kill him to end the game. Lazy af imo
Lung capacity and relationship level in GTA:sa
“It’s not what it looks like, I can explain!” other character runs away instead of hearing the explanation, becomes villain Seriously, does no one in stories ever stop and have a conversation? Everyone jumps to conclusions and then bases their entire life purpose on that assumption
I’m convinced Starfield was 100% written by ChatGPT.
And it did too good a job. So they ran it through bing chat to make sure it was the worst writing in the history of story telling.
Going through a series of trials to prove your worth, and it’s a combat trial, a riddle trial, and a stealth trial
Evil villian : " finally we meet face to face".
MC: tell me, why summon the elder God and destroy the world?
Evil Villian: my goals are too intelligent for you to understand.
Fuck any game that has major plot points hand waved away as I’m too smart for you to understand. It’s lazy writing
Walking through cracks in the wall
No justification for weapon technology. You go from a butter knife to a plasma sword that shoots OMG cosmic particles across the map in a world where people are still riding horses.
And if it’s justified sometimes the justification is just “Magic”. If they call it “old” or “ancient” magic, then the fans will call it lore.
I have mostly given up on trying to find good writing in games.
the main antagonist being responsible for something bad that happened to the main protagonist early in life.
“I shouldn’t go that way.”
“I probably shouldn’t do that.”
“It would be wrong to do that.”
“I’ll just put that back.”
Don’t make it a fucking option if you’re going to reverse my decision, especially in an RPG.
There’s a path in Finally Fantasy X that you come up at one point in Besaid. You can’t go back down that path ever again, with the character turning around on their own and running back the way they came. Seeing that path in Final Fantasy X-2 I headed toward it, only to hit an invisible wall. The path only exists as a usable entity for that one moment in one of the two games that feature that area. They could easily have made it a higher path that you jump down to the main area from, giving no way to go back, but they left a way to go back and refused to let you use it for the vast majority of two games.
Effective mass dispersal of aerosolized vaccines would actually be a massive advancement in medical science.