Most infuriating "cutscene incompotence" moment?

[The Sanctifier]

I'd have to go with this one cutscene in Skyrim when your doing this quest for the thieves Guild where you enter a tomb with the questline's main badguy and get struck down by a paralyzing arrow. Firstly, my character is a total badass in full Daedric armour who should be able to take around a hundred arrows. Secondly why the hell didn't the nightingale woman just shoot the other guy instead, or even just do nothing so I could kill him instead of lying on the floor while he stabbed me. It seriously doesn't make much sense.

 

[bug_of_war]

The aforementioned, infamous "Kai Leng moment" was the first thing that came to my mind.
Great way to cut the immersion too and show that "this is no longer an RPG".

To be fair, you and your 2 (3 if you count the Virmire survivor) squadmates just can't seem to be stuffed shooting at Saren when he is walking straight at Shepard or when he's holding Shepard over a cliff with his back turned to the 2/3 survivors behind you. The Mass Effect series has always been guilty of having characters be dumb...I guess it's a Bioware thing cause I remember the same thing occuring in Dragon Age 1 and 2.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

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.?

Perfect. That was one of those moments where it fully dawned on me that this wasn't the Deus Ex I asked for. I was mashing Q that whole cutscene hoping this was some kind of cleverly disguised quicktime event.

...this wasn't the deus ex you asked for?

Really? Please tell me you did that on purpose.

Half Life.

When you're jumped by two Marines.

Two, bearing in mind you've torn through about a hundred by that point. Gah.

i replayed that part about 20 times, i was so fucking pissed off when i found out that was SUPPOSED to happen. god dammit, i rage quit the first time they killed me because i had just filled up my health/suit and they did that one hit kill on me

(later i learned obviously it wasn't a kill, but i quick save/loaded to quick to learn that, as i was pissed off.)

 

[AngloDoom]

Any time any character goes through a any transformation ever.

No matter what the game the main characters all stand there, mouths hanging open until one of two points:

1: Transformation is almost complete, time to shoot/slash/fireball the half-formed creature, just to show how ineffective your weapons now are.
2: It launches the first attack. After twenty seconds of bellowing and spazzing out.

 

[Gregory McMillan]

cool guys dont look at explosion and slowly walk away from a previously heavily enemy infested area.

That's not just horribly cliche, but did they all really walk away with different poses? Some of which don't even look comfortable?

 

[4173]

Any time Kai Leng shows up.


There's very few infuriating lists he doesn't belong on.

 

[Extra-Ordinary]

That bit in Infamous 2 where you talk to Bertrand one more time before killing him.
They're bantering and I'm thinking
"C'mon, Cole, just zap him, hit him with the stick, do something."
Maybe being a conduit, Bertrand still could've taken some punishment in his human form but, I don't know, seemed like a ripe opportunity.

 

[Feylynn]

That scene a lot of people find so depressing in FF7 just annoys me so much for that...

In FF games the status was often referred to as KO so it's pretty clear the intent was that in combat "deaths" were just being incapacitated.

Spoiler: FF7 spoilers in 2012!

Aerith purposely sacrificed herself in that scene, it was not incompetence.
If she had survived then Sephiroth would have succeeded in destroying the planet due to Aerith being unable to direct the lifestream.
The Holy Materia was a medium to contact the planet, she never intended for the spell to be enough to stop Meteor on its own.
Also, the Holy Materia was lost in the depths of that lake when she fell so killing herself later would have prooved pretty pointless.

[hr]
Every scene ever when an enemy is running away and your character manages to miss every shot.
My most hated example of cutscenes doing this is in

Spoiler: Kingdom Hearts 2.

Kingdom Hearts 2.
After a pathetically easy fight Sora exclaims that there is "too many" so Axel sacrifices himself to finish them all off in one attack.
Sora forgetting that the Slide Dash, Explosion, Negative Combo, abilities could one hit any group of enemies in the game really took a lot if not all of the emotional impact of that event out of the game.

At least in the Kai Leng example it was just infuriating and didn't compromise one of the most emotional scenes in the game.
Though I'm fairly sure ME3 did so in other scenes.

On the other side of the scale though...
Say what you will about Halo, I personally can't stand playing it and didn't care much for the story being told, but my brothers are fans.

Spoiler: Halo Reach

Halo Reach lets you keep fighting that last fight forever if you have the skill to do it. It doesn't beat you with a cutscene, it beats you as a player, with gameplay. This is the right way to do it.

 

[endnuen]

Remember in KOTOR where you first face the bad guy and you're KICKING HIS ASS...

And then that dumb cow goes 'I'LL SAVE YOU' and toss herself to him?

Yeah...

I remember everyone complaining about this at the time. Doesn't really bother me since no one has yet invented a way for the player to lose a fight and integrate that into gameplay.

Star Wars: Jedi outcast
Your first fight against the games antagonist. You haven't recovered your forcepowers and lightsaber yet and here is this guy throwing you around the arena, deflecting all your blaster shots and pushing your grenades right back in your face. I remember it as a well designed fight that really makes you feel like you're supposed to lose.

 

[PrimitiveJudge]

Any cutscene I cannot skip drives me to bat shit madness. Some times I just don't give a shit, move on already.It happens in games that require a achievement to play TWICE, and it refuses to lat me skip... GGGGRRRRRRRR

 

[Casual Shinji]

I generally hate cutscenes that force you to lose, fuck up, or get captured.

Prime example is ofcourse Mass Effect 3, where Shepard for some reason can't climb up a a stone wall... He can parkour the collapsing ruines of Tuchanka like boss while a giant thresher maw and a Reaper are duking it out right over head, but he can't clamber up a simple wall.

And ofcourse the Max Payne 3 scene mentioned by the OP.

There are exceptions though. Like the cutscene in Resident Evil 4 where Leon gets punk'd by Mendez. The guy is a powerhouse and Leon stupidly tries to roadhouse kick him, so that's what you get. It was also so that we could get introduced to the first sub villian and see what a badass he is.

 

[ExileNZ]

SNIP

Rumor has it she actually used the CASSIE on him. Which makes it less incompetent, but yes, still rather galling. And it set up a perfect comeback for when you took the hints from Pritchard and Sarif and went to not get the upgrade.

Another rather galling example would be you getting captured by the Hitler expy in Uldum only to set up a minute of glory for the Indy expy. Yes, I refuse to use their names. Seriously, Blizzard, what the fuck, I was tearing up the place and you make me all helpless in a cutscene so that you can go "Hey look, Indiana Jones, we're so awesome, huh!"

Screw that.

OK so I was trying to avoid spoilers but never mind. Using the CASSIE makes sense, but if you've ever used the thing you know it's not magic - it just reads the other person a bit better to give you an edge in convincing them - it's not some instant hypo-gadget or brainfuck device (we get to see those later, of course, or only one of them if we'r not dumb enough to replace the chip). So I was still pretty ragey when they used that damned sudden-retardation logic.

 

[Faux Furry]

The absolutely most galling moments of Cutscene Incompetence in my eyes are those that occur less frequently than some of the failings inherited from the cinema and comic books from which videogames draw a large deal of their inspiration from and as such are less glaringly obvious and easily overlooked scripting deficiencies,specifically those that involve co-op games that are scripted to only account for the actions of a single protagonist especially when team work would have solved the dilemma that they are are faced with. They never so much as say "You that thataway,I'll go thisaway!"

What exactly was 'Sparrow's' sidekick doing when s/he was being trapped then shot by Lucien near the end of Fable 2?
Did the Boss' top lieutenant(or whatever the second player is)also happen to get waylaid by a bat-wielding member of the Sons of Samedi in Saint's Row 2? What good are they if they don't have the back of their 'homies' and get similarly caught slipping?
Worse still is when The Boss doesn't just send the second player character to go help out Johnny Gat while s/he makes his/her escape near the beginning of Saint's Row the Third. Worst of all is the human resources mismanagement nightmare that already lies at the heart of the mission "Threeway" being made infinitely more puzzling by the Boss not sending off his/her doppelganger/partner off to go rescue his/her captive friends while s/he settles the score with Killbane.

No,I'll take that back. The worst case of CI comes in the form of any and every problem not instantly solved by the presence of a second Master Chief in any Halo game in which he is playable.
Master Chief is a one man army whom the Covenant can hardly keep up with when there is only one of him. It goes from a fair fight to practically being bullying on a massive scale but no one calls him out on it or points out what massive fools anyone who stands against him in two persons is for not surrendering on the spot. That's Cutscene Incompetence on a galactic scale right there.

Why doesn't this phenomenon has its own separate Trope listing yet,anyway?

 

[Cheesepower5]

Any time someone perma-dies in a cutscene where respawns are explained in-game.
Notable examples are Borderlands 2, Most Final Fantasy games.

In Final Fantasy V, when a certain party member dies, the rest of the group tries using cures, revives and pheonix downs, but they don't work because of Exdeath's magic. In Final Fantasy IV, two characters turn themselves to stone to stop a slow-closing wall. They can't be revived because their sacrifice was necessary for the rest to stay alive. In Final Fantasy VI, when a particular NPC dies, Kefka was enough of a bastard to not even leave a body (something similar occurs in Dragon Quest V.) In Final Fantasy IX, a Black Mage dies when its soul expires, leaving no oppurtunity to be revived. Mass death is also caused by summon magic, which tends to not leave much to use a pheonix down on.

FFVII's famous scene is more of an exception, really.