Games that devolved into absurdity.

[Dfskelleton]

F.E.A.R.2: Project Origin, to bring up one that (probably) hasn't been mentioned yet.
I had always preferred Fettel to Alma as far as the series went, but hey, the second one started off alright.
And then, around the school...
Yeah yeah, I know she made herself look like that because she wants to seduce Beckett (I guess the whole 'styrofoam block' personality is a turn-on for undead psychics), but the fact that she looked like that and we were still supposed to be afraid of her was almost insulting.

 

[Therumancer]

To be honest I don't mind absurdist transitions when they happen to be entertaining and wrap things up. To be honest I felt that Condemned had a nice pace and did it's genere transition from horror to superhumans fighting monsters fairly well, though I guess I'm in a minority.

I don't think I can think of many games that haven't already been mentioned here though. Purely bizzare ones yes, but I can't think of many that had a radical transition, of course I'll probably remember something as soon as I finish writing this message.

 

[WanderingFool]

The Saint's Row series. I haven't played the first, but the second game was a little absurd and wacky, but still retained some sense of reality. The third game goes beyond absurdity, into Charlie Sheen territory and never looks back.

Having played and beaten all three, SR1 was basically a GTA knock-off that focused on GTA:SA's gang warfare element. SR2 was less serious in attitude, and overall the better game for it. SR3... shit was whack... But various decisions made for the game made it, in my own opinion, worse than SR2.

Another for me was BF: Bad Company 2. No, not a part of the game, the whole fucking game! How did we go from:
1)A small group of soldiers who went AWOL looking for evil merc gold[footnote] Tiss better than boring old Nazi gold, thats for sure[/footnote]
2)Who drive off into the sunset
3)While the head merc (who, mind you, was just blown the fuck up) manages to rise out of the wreckage of his chopper, terminater style, without a freaking scratch

...to a game where Russia takes over the whole world save the US, and those same four soldiers are now the US's, naw, the worlds, hope against Russian domination!?

Suffice to say, I wasnt thrilled with BF:BC2... but the multiplayer was fun.

 

[excalipoor]

Star Ocean 3: Till the End of Time

Spoiler

At about 90% through the game you find out that you live in the matrix. The previous 90% does absolutely nothing to build up to the big reveal, however. Basically your world is ending because the in-game rules are being broken (by you; it's all very Gurren Lagann), and there's some furious debugging going on by the creators.

 

[triggrhappy94]

Assassin's Creed. I just finished AssCreed Rev. tonight and whenever Desmond was on screen I had no idea what was going on. The whole ending with the past-future people was ridiculous.

To continue a discussion that's already going on in this thread, I like AC2. At least what I remember of it, it's been years. What I really hate it Brotherhood and Rev. The two things I despice the most are the Apprentice micro-management bullshit and the multiplayer.
To be fair, I tortured myself with both of those to get achievements, but really: If I wanted dude-bro multiplayer, I'd play CoD; if I wanted a management sim, I'd play Evil Genious.

 

[triggrhappy94]

The Saint's Row series. I haven't played the first, but the second game was a little absurd and wacky, but still retained some sense of reality. The third game goes beyond absurdity, into Charlie Sheen territory and never looks back.

SR3 has you beating all the things to death with a giant dildo. Yeah batshit insane and I love it.

I actually read somewhere that THQ got mad at them for having a giant purple dildo baseball bat, so SR4 might be toned down abit, relatively.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

Anyone remember True Crime: Streets of L.A.?

Going from cop learning to cuff people on the street to fighting zombies and fiery dragons?

Don't for get the flaming skulls, I remember flaming skulls before fighting the dragon.

That game isn't hard to forget. It was definitely an absurd game, but I loved it and played it to death.

The reason being that that generation I had only a Gamecube, so I was missing out on the GTA stuff, so the True Crime games filled in that place in my gaming needs.

Though the True Crime games were buggy as hell. The glitches brought a different layer of absurdity. TC:New York I think was the buggiest of the two games. There were a lot of side missions I would fail because the evidence items I needed to retrieve wouldn't drop, or just play disappear.

Then there was on time I decided to go in a store to get food items, the game apparently glitched when loading because when it came back form the loading screen, I wasn't inside the store or outside. I was trapped in a rectangular person sized purgatory that was like a middle space that showed a door to the inside in front of me and a door to the outside behind me. I had to restart the system, because the doors wouldn't activate and I was stuck.

Now, my favorite glitch in NY involved one of the run of the mill street crimes. I arrived at the scene and found no criminal with the red marker over him in sight, even though the map showed that the criminal should be standing practically right on top of me. I just decided to pull out my gun and fire to see what happened. Then the red dot on the mini map started moving away from the direction I was facing, but I saw nobody. I angrily slid my thumb that was near the camera controls and accidentally made my guy look up. That's when I saw the criminal. He was running away, but he was the equivalent of being five stories up in the air. I did my best to try and chase him and get him down, but he was too high up for my bullets to hit him. So he air ran into the "sunset" and got away.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

I actually read somewhere that THQ got mad at them for having a giant purple dildo baseball bat, so SR4 might be toned down abit, relatively.

Actually I think it was the company that they were using to distribute the game to Asian countries.

The censors made them smooth the thing out and edit out the floppy physics of the thing, so it just looked like a purple baseball bat.

 

[crazyrabbits]

OP, are you talking about a tonal shift that changes the story completely, or a series of missions in a game where the plot devolves into nonsense? It seems half the responses in this thread are examples of the former. MW2 got a bit ridiculous, but no moreso than the previous game.

You guys need to go way back for better examples. For sheer WTF-ery, there's:

Earthworm Jim 2: I still distinctly remember this one. You beat the final level, defeat the Queen...and then it's revealed that you, the Princess and the Queen are all cows wearing suits of the main characters. The end.

MGS2: Raiden throwing the dogtags with the player's name on them away, then Snake giving a speech about the advancement of society over stock footage of NYC.

Monkey Island 2: Lechuck's Revenge: The boss fight with Lechuck, which turns into a reveal and flashback where both of you are brothers, who once visited an amusement park together. It was completely retconned out of the third game, and never mentioned again because the development team couldn't figure out what Ron Gilbert was thinking when he wrote it.

Silent Hill 2: The Dog ending. Words just can't...


By the way, the dog's name is Mira.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Monkey Island 2: Lechuck's Revenge: The boss fight with Lechuck, which turns into a reveal and flashback where both of you are brothers, who once visited an amusement park together. It was completely retconned out of the third game, and never mentioned again because the development team couldn't figure out what Ron Gilbert was thinking when he wrote it.

Spoiler: Remember what Elaine says after the credits, though?

"I hope he's not under some sort of SPELL..." (emphasis originally there) Implying (or making it rather obvious actually) that the whole thing is just an illusion that LeChuck created to confuse Guybrush, and in the process also confuse the player.

 

[Lieju]

http://twinbeardstudios.com/frog-fractions

Pretty sure i win.

That is the first thing that came to mind when I saw "absurdity" in the title, but it doesn't exactly devolve into it. It starts there and then progresses further into it and invents entirely new levels of it as it goes along.

I'm pretty sure it's a "devolution" when it ends with erotic pictures of bug porn. Just saying.

(Don't worry, mods, it's censored.)

Bog porn, as in with actual invertebrates?
Why would there be any need to censor something like that?

 

[Ninjat_126]

While it was generally crazy over the top 99% of the time, Bayonetta sure went bat-poop insane near the end. I mean, the way you take out the end boss is just all kinds of super over the top awesome.

It opens with graveyard-desecrating angel shooting, and proceeds into PUNCHING GOD INTO THE SUN.


That game was utterly batshit from the start.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

http://twinbeardstudios.com/frog-fractions

Pretty sure i win.

Oh, wow... that's basically what Yahtzee described in his first Duke Nukem Forever review.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

The Saint's Row series. I haven't played the first, but the second game was a little absurd and wacky, but still retained some sense of reality. The third game goes beyond absurdity, into Charlie Sheen territory and never looks back.

Saints Row 1 was like Grand Theft Auto...between Vice City and San Andreas (you can swim but you can't aim unless you have a sniper). It was pretty grounded in reality from what I remember and ended in a way that suggested a sequel wasn't really in the works: They knew they were making a shameless GTA clone after all.

Saint's Row 2 escalated into absurdity but in a passive aggressive way. The leader of the Saint's main missions could have taken place against movie villains and the set pieces for certain missions were freaking huge (like setting a neighborhood on fire). The side quests though seemed to have come out of really messed up cartoons. Then Saint's Row the Third forgot what subtlety was entirely...at least SR2 built up to its madness after all!

 

[Groxnax]

The Saint's Row series. I haven't played the first, but the second game was a little absurd and wacky, but still retained some sense of reality. The third game goes beyond absurdity, into Charlie Sheen territory and never looks back.

Thanks for ninjaing my entire post. But yeah how roes a game series go from the story of a gang rising from its ashes to a game where your common day involves beating cloned brutes and furries with a giant purple dildo.

Don't forget how that day starts off.

With a plane ride.

And don't forget the crazy reality game show.

 

[Alhazred]

Drakengard haas already been mentioned in the thread. It's a game where the big bad is a little girl whose voice occasionally switches to a bored 40-year old's. The protagonist, Caim is a mute, angry sociopath, accurately reflecting the personality of anyone playing this game.
His sister has the hots for him.

Later on, the world is invaded by a legion of giant babies; thankfully the heroes are well-equipped to deal with them considering they include a child-killer, a child molester and a child eater.

But all this pales in comparison to the final ending of Drakengard, in which Caim and his dragon charge the mother of the evil babies so hard they break the fabric of space-time and end up in modern-day tokyo. Caim kills the mother, but is promptly shot down by the Japanese air force. The End.

 

[Angie7F]

If we can use whole franchises, Resident Evil is at the top of my list.

Bad voice acting is one thing, zombies and monsters are even ok. But now we're at the 6th game and the zombies have machine guns and everyone looks and acts like the most generic action heros and explosion, explosion, explosion. Just... NO.

RE came to mind immediately after seeing the thread.
I mean, what happened to creepy awkward moving zombies and solation in a creepy house.
Where the hell did those zombies get machine guns from??

 

[Nekron_X]

Drakengard haas already been mentioned in the thread. It's a game where the big bad is a little girl whose voice occasionally switches to a bored 40-year old's. The protagonist, Caim is a mute, angry sociopath, accurately reflecting the personality of anyone playing this game.
His sister has the hots for him.

Later on, the world is invaded by a legion of giant babies; thankfully the heroes are well-equipped to deal with them considering they include a child-killer, a child molester and a child eater.

But all this pales in comparison to the final ending of Drakengard, in which Caim and his dragon charge the mother of the evil babies so hard they break the fabric of space-time and end up in modern-day tokyo. Caim kills the mother, but is promptly shot down by the Japanese air force. The End.

This, although i'm thankful for that last ending since it's what starts off Neir later.

OT: even though the game was absurd from the start(though i still love it),Asura's wrath gets absolutely ridiculous towards it's end. That's saying something since it already starts off with you flying through the atmosphere, fighting giant creatures including one which takes up most of one side of the planet, and ends with Asura becoming planet-sized and flying and shooting at a God who hurls comets, planets, and Suns at you, with a final battle switiching between the event horizon and a pocket space said god created.

 

[lacktheknack]

http://twinbeardstudios.com/frog-fractions

Pretty sure i win.

That is the first thing that came to mind when I saw "absurdity" in the title, but it doesn't exactly devolve into it. It starts there and then progresses further into it and invents entirely new levels of it as it goes along.

I'm pretty sure it's a "devolution" when it ends with erotic pictures of bug porn. Just saying.

(Don't worry, mods, it's censored.)

Bog porn, as in with actual invertebrates?
Why would there be any need to censor something like that?

Because the game is absurd.

You should play it.

 

[Warachia]

If we can use whole franchises, Resident Evil is at the top of my list.

Bad voice acting is one thing, zombies and monsters are even ok. But now we're at the 6th game and the zombies have machine guns and everyone looks and acts like the most generic action heros and explosion, explosion, explosion. Just... NO.

But the zombies don't have machine guns, the zombies can only lumber around and bite you.
Incidentally I'm guessing you only played Chris's campaign because the other ones aren't like that, they are still ridiculous, just for different reasons, that drill vs drill QTE comes to mind.