Games that try to be meta

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Acknowledging the audience in a narrative is the next level up from "insecurity porn" or whatever that guy called it, so I'm thinking this meta narrative is going to stick for quite a while longer. I'm going to guess the next step after this is an increase in shitty VR college dropout simulators and western visual novels about horrible, horrible characters that for some reason people will relate with.

Oh I can do better than that. I've seen anons unironically claim that the gameplay isn't supposed to be enjoyable, as it's simultaneously an indictment and deconstruction of the genre.

Leave
Yes, but that fucking filename is too late to be from here.

Fuck off

Danganronpa is bad
baaaddd

in Hotline Miami, you are ostensibly killing people because you like the killing
until it turns out two fuckheads were manipulating you to start a war with the russians
but the true meaning of it all is that you are killing people because that's what you do in video games

People keep claiming that all these games are doing this "acknowledging the player" thing (which I don't have a problem with as long as they can pull it off well) but I have yet to see all these countless games that supposedly do it.

I just hope more people start calling it out more, because its starting to feel like what it is, lazy writing.

Nier Automata magnificently handles it.

Deadly Premonition. Though they twist it on you, so what you think is a fourth wall break actually isn't.

Taro just did the same thing twice.

Site is getting fucked again?

No? In the first nier there is no real 4th wall breaking, deleting your save file is gameplay mechanic that reflects his removal from people's memories, just like HP dropping to 0 reflects his death.
In automata you can sacrifice your progress to help other players, or you can not, which doesn't affect characters' stories, thus being 4th wall breaking.

sage for double post.

Yeah but the game's in-game story is much better than just the chicken head asking you if like hurting peopleplus it ties into Wrong Number's plot better than the meta shit

Pathologic's true ending is a simple take on the player identifying as the character he plays as while remaining a distinct entity. Completely free of any patronizing.

I remember trying to exit the mortar during the white phosphorous scene because I was unsure of what the last target was, and was sure that I could handle whatever it was without a mortar.

Doing the same thing twice for a different reason is still doing the same thing twice. Taro isn't a genius, he just knows his niche.

I've seen people claim the same thing about Overlord "It's supposed to be bad, it's a parody!"

It was found in like two days that you can completely ignore that by deleting a file the game puts in its appdata folder. Chances are that was the intentional since the whole point of the evil route was the game is your plaything.

I've always thought MGS handled it's 4th wall breaks fairly well within the context of the narrative. The wacky 'Hey Snake insert the second disk oh lol we don't have one now!' shit notwithstanding.

The best way to handle meta shit in your game is to have the dialogue and story double as both something that can be levied at both the player and the characters who exist within the universe.

Something like

Doubles as internal conflict for Snake, and calls the player out on their bloodlust. It's fairly effective.

Another example in the same series is how you deal with The Boss after her battle. The game forces you to press the trigger button to kill her, in that instance, you kill The Boss and the guilt players feel afterwards probably wouldn't have hit anywhere near as hard if we just watched Snake do it in a cutscene.

Taking a moment to break away from the context of the narrative to go

Is just cheap bullshit that devs need to stop doing. It's like the opening to No More Heroes 2, where Travis refers to the 'gamers' outright, shit was fucking cringe. I don't want to be reminded that I'm actually just some fag holding a controller for the sake of a cheeky gag when you could actually make me think about what it says about me as a person for doing certain things within a game's universe.

Oneshot involves you directly in the story, but that's basically the whole point so I dunno if it counts.

Hotline Miami's story pretty is pretty much stuff like that the whole way through.

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But 2B got dat ass, gnome sayin'.

I guess we gotta get rid of jumping in video games huh.

What annoyed me the most about undertale was how you were well within your rights to defend yourself from a bunch of monsters out there to blatantly kill you. But no, you gotta spare them all. just lame.

You have to talk to them to realise that they're good people, but barely any of the monsters even try to talk to you.

There's also the controller bit with Mantis, the jab with Raiden and snake with the "infinite ammo" bit, the demon in mgsv being the player, and probably lots of others i cant think of atm.

See, that's the thing. One of the most surprisingly effective ways to break the fourth wall isn't to say that "OH NO EVERYTHING IN THIS GAME HAS FEELINGS/YOU'RE A TERRIBLE PERSON FOR DOING THIS" but rather to acknowledge the player as a person.

It's a surprisingly big distinction that most fourth wall breakers don't seem to get.

This line was the thing that solidified Lambdadelta as my favorite character in Seacats.

2013 Deadpool was fun in that regard because I was at least expecting it to be completely stupid and over the top. Certainly better than the overrated to hell movie.

Muslims are only violent because of racism! If you just be nice towards them at all times and stop punishing them for their actions, you'd notice how peaceful and friendly they really are!

This scene really stuck with me. One of the coolest villains in the game takes the time to dad you directly, and it feels completely genuine. It's real life advice, and it seems like something that the developers wanted to say specifically to the kids playing. Even if they'd never met you, on some level, someone at Capcom actually cared about you.

I've got Overlord and the sequel coming up on my backlog. On a scale of 1-10, how shit are they?

That one was particularly ridiculous. I actually left it running while the little parachute camera thing was floating over them, thinking it would eventually time-out and let me bypass it, and took a shower. Came back 15 minutes later and it was still floating there, demanding I mortar the obvious non-combatants.

Still pretentious as fuck though just like all their other games.

The game or that one anime? I never heard that the Overlord games were bad.

For some time I've had the idea of a game where the protagonist acknowledges the player's presence at the very beginning and regards you as a "helpful friend" throughout the game. Then have the villain figure out that you exist and are why the main character is doing so well, so the bad guys end up trying to find ways to kill you or at least interfere with your controls, stuff like that. Just so long as you don't outright acknowledge "hello video game player" and just talk to the player as a person, I think it could serve as a neat narrative.

Has there been games before where the main character acknowledges the player in a positive way? Usually I just see things like "I'm being controlled by a mysterious force!" and other unfunny bullshit.

OFF sorta does what you mean.

You could look at some of the old FE games where the player takes the role of tactician for the armies, and the reference you, the player, as their tactician in dialogues, and they're thankful for your help. Post-game stuff mentions your skill (or lack of) as a canonical tactician.

This right here in itself justified wholesale slaughter of everybody in Undertale. The game goes out of its way to later tell you that the monsters dindu nuffin and that their intent was not to kill you, as they were unaware their actions directly harm humans, but it's all hypocritical garbage because the same logic should then apply to the monsters when dealing with humans, and they should all be held to the same standards. Fuck Toby Fox and his hamfisted holier-than-thou cuckhold message. Papyrus is too innocent and is a bro who is worth sparing, though

Speaking of meta hipster trash, when is YIIK coming out?

That happens once. Only FE 6.

nier automata is only passable thanks to platinum
yoko taro is a fucking hack
drakengard is shit

I heard nice things about the original Nier. Did Automata drop the ball?

Probably not, the game's popular right now so regardless of being shit or not it's going to go through the regular chan process of being slammed in tangential threads by (1) posters.

It only works because she is a plane of existence above the story itself. I love that, too.

That's close, but it also treats the player as a character within the game. I was thinking of, specifically, a game that acknowledges the player as a helpful "outsider" who does not actually have a presence within the world of the game, but does possess some kind of power and influence.

Now that I think about it, it's a little like what Earthbound did at the end, almost.

I have a really hard time remembering everything OFF did. It all blurs together at this point.

Papyrus is also the only one besides Toriel who doesn't try to outright kill you in a fight. Toriel can kill you but you have to go out of the way to make her do it.

Everyone else can get fucked. The only character I like from that game is Muffet. She had the least bullshit "story" elements and a fun encounter.

Higurashi is da best.

Every fucking indie game that was released in the last three to six years.

They're very copy-and-paste. I tried the first one out due to people making comparisons to pikmin, but it feels like they stuck pikmin in an incredibly generic dungeon crawler. I quit when I noticed how the levels essentially were all the same with different settings. You can just feel the assets being reused like crazy. Core gameplay feels alright, but it wasn't enough to push me through the game. Can't tell you if the sequel improved things.

Please kill yourself.

League of Legends.

Pottery

There's plenty that try it, but very few what actually succeed. Also, Spec Ops was trash, fuck you.

Only game I've seen it done well is Undertale, and that's because it rather earned it. You got that shit when things start getting weird.
Incidentally, the true pacifist route was a massive letdown, and so any of that sort of thing it tried to pull fell completely flat. So I guess at the same time it did it well, it also did it horribly.

should i? :^)

This game looks like hipster trash

Pleb opinion. The game criticizes the uselessness of decision-making in modern titles through its breaking of the fourth wall. Thinking that it's only about making you feel bad is a butthurt reaction borne out of being unable to separate your decisions (or lack thereof) from Walker's.

The correct decision is to shoot Konrad for telling you that you're in the wrong for playing a rigged game, rejecting the notion that your choices were meaningful when the outcome was fixed from the start. Thinking that you're "meant" to feel bad means you only took home superficial messages

it goes above and beyond that, it's THE ultimate hipster trash

what the fuck did I just watch

Checking these digits.
Even quints in 's ID shouldn't go unchecked.

Nah it's shit and the ultimate pleb.

Cawl of doots is bad xD is obvious to a fucking child m8

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Stay pleb ;)

MGS1 has ocelot directly addressing the player that he shouldn't use autofire during the torture sequence.
The problem with going meta and calling your players bad is that it functions the same as strawman comics. The player is limited to actions that prove the game is right, and then the game smugly assumes it's right because it says so.
It's a monologue pretending to be a dialogue.

That's an excellent question, Zack. I can't think of any off the top of my head, though.

Can we agree that meta writing in general has got to be the cheapest way for hacks to make their game seem smart?

the whole game is designed around the "look how self aware we are about our game!"

its a fucking shitty kids game, jesus fuck, just make a new IP or whatever if you want to make an adult game

Too bad that Umineko went into It's actually boy territory in the second half.

To be honest I would like o see more metashit abandoning the "HEY GUISE LOOK HOW DEEP WE ARE" shit, and just using meta stuff as a way of worldbuilding. Personally I think that they would be better if instead of trying to teach the player something, they would just focus on analyzing the genre they are in without trying to parody or give any meaning to it. Just games that use meta elements as a way of developing the universe the characters and asking the question of "Why do those mechanics work in such a way, and why do they work well?". Meta shit as window dressing is fine too as long as the game is self-aware enough to not look pretentious about it.

THAT SAID, here is a game that did mostly the opposite of what I just wrote and it worked out well.

And here is a game where it didn't work out well. The whole story is basically the creators masturbating to the fact that their concept is really original, and I'm not denying that it is, but holy shit the amount of self-jerking is fucking disgusting.

Also, you know that you did something wrong when your player is mashing escape like crazy during the "Press escape, look you're not in control anymore!" scene, just to get it over with as fast as possible. We know it's just a scripted event you niggers, no one really feels that your game world is real or that they aren't in control, you have to earn such things by careful world building and well written story. I can't believe that anyone would look at this scene and not think "You programmed a button to change functions during gameplay, aren't you fucking talented? I can just atl-f4 from the game at any time nigger."

Well at least the gameplay is fun, and the story mode is worth suffering through to get to the Endless and Challenge modes

There are many instances in Stellaris where the game either subtly, or very clearly references the fact that the events that unfold during a game have also happened before, as part of a "cycle" (basically previous matches), and Fallen Empires might sometimes even say something along the lines of "don't break the fourth wall", in case it wasn't explicit enough in other dialogs.

out of all the bad things about that game that's what bothered you most? come the fuck on

I got a boner during the "good dog" scene

But you're not you, you're your digital you. Virtually real, but controlled by real you!

Kid Icarus: Uprising was good and comical

There was an H-game where if you did one girl's path first, she'd hijack the second characters and even the game, locking you onto her route. You could 'fix' this by beating the game.

Styx Shards of Darkness did its fourth wall breaking reasonably well, since it happened at times when the player is removed from the flow of gameplay anyways (death scenes, and "you can't be detected in this mission" note delivered right to the player).

The pop culture references in it were shit, on the other hand.

Bravely Second's meta shit seemed more cheesy "anime power of friendship" bullshit than "you're a bad person". I haven't beat the first game yet, but Second's handling of some of the meta things are interesting. It's a shame all the plot and writing is terrible.

But the twist is he was never talking to the player themselves, as Zach is his own separate person.

Absolutely. Welcome to post-modernism.

Being meta was the whole point of Ar Nosurge.

every command and conquer (plus battle for dune) has you as an actual character.

well, character is a generous word, but they do refer to you as commander, strategist, general and often adress you directly.

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They're garbage.

Anything that breaks the 4th wall is garbage.

no, its just a trend

How was Ghost Trick meta?

I think that

was talking about the anemone, not the game.

The sequel definitely improves things IMO it fixes some bugs, adds more waifus, and adds some fun gimmicks. It certainly isn't perfect, the plot doesn't have as good of a hook even if *I* liked it, and the domination vs destruction (which replaced the "good" vs "ebil" of the first game) has some major flaws. If you haven't played it, I would say give it a shot.

In that fucking gif Yomiel talking to you directly is pretty meta.

This scene from Path of Neo where Wachowskis show that they know more about videogames than some professional vidya devs looking at you here Casey Hudson you fuck

I actually did just that, and didn't come back to the game at all. It was basically the maker saying. "look at me! Not only can I make good gameplay, but I'm deep too !! I'm a big deal!"

underrated post

Interesting, what game was this? For "Research" purposes of course.

So wait, DID you end up fighting a mega smith? Do you have footage of that?

Oh. I thought he was just talking to the ghosts.

I actually posted a Ghost Trick precisely because it doesn't pull this bullshit user. Is this seriously you're idea of a game having "heavy meta"?

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Shit like
is not even meta. When't you can't tell whether something is going on in or inside of the game, that's what meta is.

I'm surprised Stanley Parable hasn't been mentioned yet.

Call of Duty up until MW2 was a more realistic depiction of war than Spec Ops the Line, ironically.

(checked)
Literary the first video when you search "matrix path of neo final boss" on Jewtube.

It's the first time I've ever heard that definition.

Pretty much any applicable definition I can basically says it means "self-referential". It's true though that this sort of shit is done far better when there is an air of subtlety or ambiguity to it.

the way people use it nowadays means things that directly question reality

That one was so far up its ass I just wanted to forget it.

I didn't care much about what it was trying to "say," it was fun to explore it.

Bravely Default isn't bad with it either, though it's mostly contained to the final sections of the game. The final boss's entire motivation is that he's trying to make things entertaining for the "Celestials" (the player) and destroys Streetpass friends' worlds to heal himself.

I agree 100%. My first run was semi-pacifist, and by the end I hated every single monster. Evil fucks all of them. But after the false first ending I went back and saved them just to spite Flowey, because Flowey pissed me off more than all the others combined.

South Park: Stick of truth wasn't. Got a few chuckles over Cartman being the douchebag he is.

It's just a mindfuck all around, not just in regard to 4th wall.

At least it was self aware enough to poke fun at itself and games like it during the "Baby game" scene.

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Probably 君と彼女と彼女の恋。
Hope you like NTR

I'd actually come to this thread to mention that game. It's a shame that the game itself is a little grindy, but it's still fun as fuck.

Also, I really wish that they'd rerelease it or make a sequel or something.

That sounds like a horrible mixture of waifuing and masochism.

YE

To be specific, I'm thinking AA and UT level characters with just barely passable graphics that look nice on kickstarter trailers. On another note, I've been looking for other shitty rpgmaker games and it turns out the dude who made Actual Sunlight rereleased his 1 hour depression game on steam for 5 bucks three years back.

So haydee 2.0

Came here to say this.

ever heard about "amour sucre" ?
dont look for it, its like a weeaboo VN mixed with bad art and some sort of flashgame

Anonymous Agony is legitimately enjoyable in its own way. I don't think any cynical cash-in or SJW indoctrination product could recapture that "edgy Shenmue" magic.

Bavely Default.

Hell, the start of the game is basically you watching a girl stumble around in AR screaming for your help.

I guess that explain where we are right now.

Bravely actually does some cool meta stuff. Our world is their world's heaven/spiritual/metaphysical reality, so summoners draw shit from our world into theirs to attack, so the wind summon is a passenger jet and the fire dragon is a train.

I liked that bit

can someone make the "yeah, video games let's go" part its own webm?

Yeah mate
Different reasons
Mine is because my boner is fueled by their simplicty

Undertale does that because resets are a part of the story. You're never really in danger, so when you kill a monster it's not truly in self-defense but because they're in your way, because they stop you from progressing.
Which sort of works out but means that the game's moral doesn't map to the real world at all, which the game barely acknowledges. That's what makes the morality so weird.

I mean,it's them just stroking their own e-dicks there.

It was cheesy typical Otacon

It was,but you've got to wonder if one of the higher ups asked them to put that in as a "eh eh?"

Oneshot has the protagonist acknowledge and talk to you throughout the game while you guide him around. The villain tries some meta tricks against you, but there's no combat in the game.

I totally forgot about that dunecoon mercenary. What was his name again?

Pony Island did some wall-breaking meta with mixed results. All the 'emotional' or 'intense' parts of the game had completely zero energy, while the more humorous/'comedy' sections like with the devil at least gave me several scenes to chuckle at. though both of the story's plot twists were seen from miles away (the AI is actually and ebil QA Tester (or is it?????TOBECONTINUED)).
so the game just sucks unless you get it for a dollar and want something to sparingly laugh at.