I do have to agree with your sentiment, but the situation makes complete sense in context:
The people accusing him are the ones who framed him in the first place, and also anyone else would not believe him either.
It doesn't help that Corvo is a silent protagonist.
On the subject, I noticed a lot of cutscene incompetence in Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway.
I just want to point out one example of the opposite, and how it might bite you in the ass. Fallout: New Vegas. The Lonesome Road, you finally get to the end, see the final "boss" standing there, ready to amaze you with all the answers to all the questions (yeah, right, more questions, vague half-amswers, but still some of the better game dialogue written to this date, and the voice acting is droolworthy). I had a sniper rifle. An anti-material rifle actually. So I shot him, bang, there went his head. He's dead. ANd gone. Over. Dealt with. Moving on, there are enemies now.
I loved that I had the oppurtunity, but I feel sorry for anyone who used it. So much missing out. Bethesda's version of the game though, damn, I didn't even get to play through half of the important parts in that game.
Pretty much anytime that happens. It's one thing for a game to take control away and make you do stupid things for plot convenience, but it 10x worse when the game then mocks you for it.
Really game? Really?
I have a really good example of this, I usually roll out when the topic comes up, but I can't think of it off the top of my head. Will get back to you...
when jack shoots Roland, there's at least 6 other heavily armed people in the room and none of them shoot him. You cant say they were all shocked cuz they're all experienced soldiers and fighters by then and should have been strong enough to take him on at that point.
Dues ex: HR, the scene with Zhao was just painfully bad. Not just because of gameplay and story segregation where the character appears stronger in the actual game than they are story wise, I?m use to that and can accept it so long as the character doesn't stand there looking like a deer caught in headlights while this going on but because Adam got hit with stupid bat aswell. ?oh I?m really just a helpless woman, continue standing there brooding while I walk around behind you.?
Its not just this, its everything cutscene Jensen does. I hate you cutscene Jensen! I mean, I knowin a lot of games, cutscenes depict scenes of badassery that you cant do in the game, but every time Human Revolution goes to a cutscene I just know he's about to do something incredibly moronic.
Not just that. I can't be the only one thinking "Hmm, flying car, Presidium overhangs, Kai Leng on top of car. Just fly up and smack him against one!" can I?
Dues ex: HR, the scene with Zhao was just painfully bad. Not just because of gameplay and story segregation where the character appears stronger in the actual game than they are story wise, I?m use to that and can accept it so long as the character doesn't stand there looking like a deer caught in headlights while this going on but because Adam got hit with stupid bat aswell. ?oh I?m really just a helpless woman, continue standing there brooding while I walk around behind you.?
The classic example I always pick is the original Metal Gear Solid. Snake watching as Sniper Wolf's red-dot sniper sight passes over Meryl for several seconds before doing anything.
Recently? ME3 - Thane's confrontation with Kai Leng. Shepard and his/her teammates stand there looking like fools while Leng is down on the ground. Unbelievable.
I do have to agree with your sentiment, but the situation makes complete sense in context:
The people accusing him are the ones who framed him in the first place, and also anyone else would not believe him either.
It doesn't help that Corvo is a silent protagonist.
Eh. Burrows and Campbell are. Curnow and the random mook guard aren't. The main thing is he doesn't object or attempt to fight it, doing one or the other would make sense.
You might already know what this is if you read a lot of TV Tropes, but what I'm refering to is when, during a cutscene, your character does something profoundly and uncharacteristicly stupid, is threatened by something that shouldn't actually be a threat, or is hurt by an injury they could have just shrugged off in actual gameplay. I have this on my mind because I've been playing through Max Payne 3, which has a few of these. One around the middle of the game was so bad it almost gave me a brain aneurysm from rage. I can't say what it is specifically because I don't know how to make those nifty spoiler box thingies, but basically Max looks into a window and sees a group of baddies who don't know he's there, but rather than give control back to my so I can go into slow-mo and shoot them all in the face, he instead walks through the front door armed with just a pistol (one of the only cutscenes in the game where he doesn't keep the weapons he was using before it started) and asks all the guys with assault rifles to drop their weapons. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
In the gameplay segments, I tore him apart and he couldn't even touch me, yet as soon as the cutscene started, Shepard suddenly had the marksmanship ability of a graduate of the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy and completely forgot that he had biotics.
It was more than a bit infuriating, especially considering the aftermath of that particular fight (especially since no matter what you do, Shepard mopes about it).
Wrath incurred.
Kidding, I won't knock you for your tastes, though it baffles me a little.
My main problem with the PTSD argument is that it isn't justified inside the game at any point by the story. You could argue that the flashback at the point where she freezes up is said justification, but because it isn't expaneded upon or explained, all we're left with is that Samus froze up in front of an enemy she's defeated multiple times already because she turned into a little girl.
Keep in mind that the game doesn't explain that Ridley killed her parents and shows no indication that this had happened. As well, since said manga never got localized (and even if it did, how many people would have known about it exactly?), we have no reason to beleive they'd carry over such a thing into the game.
On a more personal note as well, I feel that adding the disorder actually takes away from Samus' character as opposed to adding to it, as defenders of the game like to argue. Before Other M, she was a fearless bounty hunter. She may have been a bit bland, sure, but her actions spoke louder than words and hinted at a deeper character. After, she froze up at the sight of Ridley and almost let one of her squadmates die. As your quote said, the guy can't even barbeque casually anymore, what's to keep Samus from freezing up in the face of a more dangerous enemy because it reminds her of Ridley? It shoots down her credibility as a bounty hunter, especially when all the enemeis have to do is have a hologram of Ridly fly over Samus' head to incapacitate her.
Hmmm... Moviebob actually covers this exact topic very succinctly in one of his Game Overthinker videos, this episode directly referencing Other M. I'll try and paraphrase the gist of his arguments:
Basically, modern culture has taken the term 'stoic' and almost completely removed it of context or genuine meaning. Despite Stoicism being an ancient philosophy based on the idea of truth and logic being the ideals to strive for, 'stoic' in modern parlance basically means one thing: like Batman.
To elaborate, there has been a surge in popular culture of heroes such as Batman who share the same traits: lack of fear, an iron will, moral strength, etc etc. The problem is that these are really boring traits for any fictional character. If you take any character and make their sole defining traits revolve around the idea of 'stoic' you haven't created a human character, you've created a robot. Or even worse than a robot- a Mary Sue. A character with no discernible flaws, and no characterisation other than elements that serve to show how 'badass' they are. Any character whose motivation is basically summed up as a list of reasons why they're awesome is going to be pretty badly written.
This applies to Samus because, in the vast majority of Metroid games, she has no personality. She is completely and utterly devoid of any compelling character traits. You can say that this makes her a more compelling character, but I really don't think it does. It serves only to make her an empty vessel, an automaton only programmed to show desirable 'strong' 'empowered' traits, and never any actual human flaws. While this isn't a negative thing per se, and doesn't make Samus an actively bad character, it does mean that she never displays anything that could be described as good characterisation. A character who goes from planet to planet, completing objectives and slaughtering hundreds upon hundreds of aliens without showing any sort of hint that she is being affected in any way at all... that's just bland writing. The games themselves are legendary, and you'll never hear me actively saying the likes of Metroid Prime are anything less than awesome, but as a written character, Samus has always been let down by her utter lack of any emotion, any flaws or any kind of defining character traits at all. Before Other M, you could writer a complete definition of her character simply with "strong woman in power armour who shoots aliens." That's it, because that's all the earlier games ever showed.
For all its flaws, and it does have many, Other M did at least try and move Samus from being a simple passive doll, and actually give her some semblence of depth as a character. You may not like there the developers took that character, but personally I think the fact that they even tried at all should be celebrated. Mary Sue characters are never a good thing in the long run, and we should support developers when they try and give motivations and actual psychology to their characters, even if it doesn't always turn out brilliantly.
Regarding the PTSD scene: Other M was a game designed to appeal to older fans of the Metroid series. The entire game is stuffed full of references to other games, from recurring characters to little extras like the fact that the Ridley you defeat in Other M is the one who turns up frozen in Fusion. If someone hasn't played any of the previous Metroid games, or isn't at least schooled up on the story and lore, the Ridley scene is going to be the least of their problems. And let's not forget that the live action trailer for Other M, the one that caused quite a lot of hype on release, open with Samus as a young girl seeing her planet get torced by Ridley.
If you are aware of Samus' backstory (which, let's be honest here, isn't exactly forbidden, arcane lore), and you're aware of how PTSD works (as described in the linked article) then I don't see why the Ridley scene should be such a problem. Whether or not she's defeated Ridley multiple times before is irrelevant. She's defeated him, yes, but he keeps coming back. Given the increasingly mounted pressure throughout the series that she's been under to keep defeating him, it's not surprising that one final appearance by him is enough to cause her to start having flashbacks. After all, he simply will not stay dead.
Sarah Connor managed to defeat the Terminator at the end of the first film, yet she still had nightmares about him afterwards, and still utterly freaked out at his appearance in the second film. Fans didn't have a problem then. I fail to see what is so different between the two characters that fans should have a problem with Samus going through a similar arc. Sarah Connor had a minor breakdown on seeing the Terminator up and walking about, yet she's still seen as one of the biggest badasses in all of science fiction. Why should we hold Samus to different standards?
I actually seen that episode. I'll raise you a good video anylisis on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4ww_NwjC0Q Though, I apologize, the guy is actually a little bias on the subject. He still gives good points though.
About your passive doll comment: I do understand in certain ways what you're trying to say. Yes, she lacks characterization and is nothing more than a vessel for the player to go around and shoot aliens in. However, in Other M, her characterization is just bad and carries around a lot of unfortunante implications. Her relationship with Adam progresses like an abusive relationship, she takes orders without question even when it endangers her own life, and she is treated as a child by the people she supposedly adores. She was bland before Other M, but she's just a flat out bad character in Other M. It's not that I want her to remain stoic, I just want to see her character presented better and treated with more respect. Fusion did a much better job with the same material.
Back to the PTSD issue; it wasn't adressed in the older games either. No, it isn't forbidden lore, but it is new to this game and negativly impacts her character in my opinion. It comes out of left feild, even with the trailer of Ridley scorching the planet (I got the impression she'd be obsessed with killing him), and makes her seem weak in the face of the enemy and incapable of facing them because that's what PTSD does.
However, that is just an opinion and not worth arguing. Let's discuss why she gets shit for it instead.
You used Sarah Conner as an example. While I don't know much about the Terminator series, I will assume that she had a direct part in the villian's downfall. Samus, on the other hand, has a break down in front of it, causes someone to almost die, and then doesn't face Ridley after that. She's denied the chance to face her fear by a queen metroid, who kills Ridley for her. THAT'S why she gets shit for it, she doesn't overcome her fear of Ridley, but instead has to fight the supposedly bigger bad guy that does her job for her. It just makes her seem incapable of facing her fears.
Actually I usually chock most of that up to a the necessary divergence between gameplay and story. In gameplay, dieing for one bullet makes things bad, in a story not dieing from one bullet makes things bad. Your gameplay and your story sometimes need to have different laws in order to make things work. You may be an immortal ass-kicker who punts babies in the game, but in the cutscenes the character is a kind and fragile regular old human. I think its better just to laugh at it and accept it then to get angry at something that kinds of has to exist. I guess you could try and write stories that revolve around the gameplay better too, but unless your a developer or know one, that isn't going to do much.
To be fair, there's also a lot of semi-cutscene grief during the Kai Leng/Robot fights.
Why make the scene interactive, but give them unlimited health?
During the robot chase, I kept hitting her with everything, simply because I could, but it was annoying to see nothing happen.
During the first Leng fight, you could only get him down to half shields before he went into invincible mode.
During the second Leng fight, you could only deplete sections of his shield as the conversation went on, and he smashed pieces of the floor. All other damage was prevented.
The second Leng fight I can forgive. He brought a gun ship to a gun battle after all. Maybe a skilled infiltrator would have got the job done, but I didn't bring Garrus and focus fire was on Shep.
The car chase scene is unforgivable for a biotic. Pull, Throw, Warp, hell, charge got me through walls. Leng should have been falling to his death.
The scene with the robot bothered me because it looked like my Shepard was paralyzed as the robot was gaining on Kaidan/Ashley after the shuttle crash. Once again, biotics or tech could have helped earlier so the damage to the VS wouldn't have been so bad. If it worked on geth, it should at least have an effect on the robot.
It's like all Shepards revert to soldiers during cutscenes. I didn't play a soldier since ME1 for that exact reason. They're boring!
Looking back, that game was filled with cutscene grief....
Any bit in a CoD game where a main character dies...
"I saw you take eleventybillion missiles to the face, that's one shot from a revolver! You have a knife with a blade so potent you can kill someone by gently brushing past them, how does this kill you!?"
I scream out loud every time a villain starts monologuing.
JUST FUCKING KILL HIM!!!!! HE'S RIGHT FUCKING THERE! YOU ARE A FUCKING ASS AND I'M GLAD I'LL GET TO KILL YOU AT THE END! >:O
I would say the Dragonborn DLC has an example of this, but on the badguy's side.
At one point, Miirak has you, and he could kill your right then, but instead he just says crap and then sends you back to Nirn, thus enabling you to come back and beat him later.
Badguys have cutscene incompetence a lot in game, they always have the hero in a easily killable position, but let them go.
What about the god mode boss that stops the fight whe you are down to 10% health? I think it works.
Jedi Outcast had one of those, even Kotor (kinda) had that with Calo Nord.
In fact i think i prefer those to the "if you loose it's game over, if you win... you still loose", if you are suppoused to get your ass kicked, let it get kicked for real.
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