Genre Savvy/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Genre Savvy in Video Games include:

Subpages

Other Games (need to be sorted by genre)

"Princess! No need to worry. I hope you haven't forgotten my role in this little story. I'm the leading man. You know what they say about the leading man - he never dies."

  • Princess Waltz is a good H-game not just because of its elements that work, but because it gleefully lampshades its own cliches. It's really hard to hate this game for following the stock conventions of its own genres when they cleverly keep poking fun at them at the same time. In fact, the Big Bad and The Plucky Comic Relief are walking fonts of Genre Savvy hilarity.
  • Heroes of Might and Magic IV includes a sympathetic undead king who gets his underling to draw up plans for invading a neighbouring kingdom -- and them sends the plans to that kingdom, so they can fix the holes in their defenses. He explains that even though invading his neighbour would make him the most powerful ruler in the entire world, that would just mean everyone else would unite their forces to take him down.
    • He later promotes a zombie to Captain and takes the trouble to learn his name for showing the sense and initiative to find out exactly what an enemy's Artifact of Doom did (saving his life in the process), and figures out that there must be a reason why no one has ever activated each of five MacGuffins. He then takes appropriate precautions.
  • The protagonist's genre savviness is what jump-starts the plot in the FMV game Brain Dead 13. Teen computer ace Lance is sent to fix a computer at the home of Mad Scientist and brain-in-a-tank Nero Neurosis, and quickly identifies it as a typical mad scientist's lair. Dr. Neurosis flies into a rage after Lance refers to him as an "average villain", and he sics his homicidal toady Fritz on our hero.
  • Almost all the characters in the Disgaea series, particularly Etna. Mao from the third game is dangerously so, concluding that the quickest method of kicking his dad off the throne and rule with his own iron fist is to actually become the hero of the game.
    • Also from Disgaea 3, after you have defeated Super-Hero Aurum he says "Wait! In these games the final boss always has to take his final form before you can truly defeat him!", to which Mao replies "Ah! Curse you, using that convenient Game Mechanic!"
  • In the Grand Theft Auto series, a pedestrian having a conversation about a nearby dead body will occasionally mutter "Don't worry, he'll respawn!" or something similar.
  • Saints Row: "No one stays dead in Stilwater.
  • Kyle Katarn (at least in Jedi Academy) is genre savvy, lampshading tropes such as the fact that the console for opening a door is probably hidden in some room twelve floors up and that Luke Skywalker always senses a disturbance in the Force.
    • He's like this to a lesser extent in Jedi Outcast, too. Never trust a bartender with bad grammar.
      • He also finishes one of his mission objectives (disabling the Doomgiver's shields) during Galek's monologue.
    • In a lesser example, he always knows how to find keys.
  • City of Heroes has one involving the Trolls and the Tsoo: while interfering with a meeting between the two gangs, heroes will come across Mr. Ting, a Tsoo, complaining to the Troll leader, "Haven't you learned anything? When you kidnap people, capes show up."
    • Many of the NPCs in the game tend to be genre savvy: civilians will complain about they can't walk down the street without someone trying to snatch their purse, kidnap them, or try to use them in strange rituals. And some of the villains are equally savvy; at least one fragment of dialogue for a low-level gangbanger references the endless-loop purse tug-of-war animation with a "No, really! I actually got the purse!"
      • In the same vein of the low-level gang member, a cry for help on part of the NPC struggling for her purse shows some degree of Genre Savvy as well, recognizing that since crying out about getting mugged won't summon help quickly enough, she yells that there's a fire instead.
        • This is advice given to people in the real world too.
    • The pamphleteer in front of City Hall will sometimes say things like "Burn Perez Park to the ground! It's full of monsters and impossible to find your way around!"
  • In Army of Two, neither Rios nor Salem are particularly fazed by being sent in on missions to retake aircraft carriers or blast their way past the entirety of the People's Liberation Army, and at the endgame, they take on practically all of the biggest PMC in the world without blinking. When confronting Psycho for Hire Phillip Clyde, they don't even act surprised at his stream of increasingly irrational descriptions of what he's going to do to their corpses -- they assume he had a messed up childhood.
  • I Wanna Be the Guy forces the player of all people to be Genre Savvy as a requirement to progress past...well, to pretty much progress period. Unfortunately, this isn't the only thing needed to progress.
    • It also invokes Death by Genre Savviness several times -- primarily in the famous 'You jumped into a sword! You retard!' scene.
    • Meanwhile, the game itself is very Player Savvy. "OK, so I know now that these apples will fall on me, and that the third one will fall up. Ah, but there's a gaping hole between trees there. I can use it to just jump between the two trees and avoid any apples! Alright here I- A SIDEWAYS APPLE?!". Or how about sequences with one insanely hard bunch of obstacles. Once you finally pass the apples/spikepit/enemies and you think you're home free once you reach the platform on the other side... the ground falls away, or a spike lands on that exact spot that you thought was safe, and you die just so that the game can teach you not to get complacent.
  • Midna in The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess is rather genre savvy (half because she's The Imp + Deadpan Snarker; half probably to make up for how ridiculously obvious her predecessor, Navi's, hints were).

Midna: Look at that open window... this village is full of idiots.

  • Cole from The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks might just be the most Genre Savvy villian the series ever had and goes out of his way to eliminate every single trope that could probably make his master's Grand Theft Me on Princess Zelda's part go wrong, from Fighting From the Inside (he removes her spirit first) to All Your Base Are Belong to Us (He didn't attempt to take over Hyrule Castle, like every other villian in the series would have done). The one mistake he makes, pulling an You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on Byrne was finally his downfall.
  • Dawn of War 2 starts with the Blood Ravens realizing all they need to win the war is one player character.
  • The developers for Spore knew that when given artistic freedom, people will naturally deviate towards pornographic material, and put in measures so people would not be forced to run into peoples' penis-monsters when exploring the player-made content.
  • Arthas, aka the Lich King, of World of Warcraft, as of the newest expansion, has displayed some unexpected genre-savviness, going so far in one early encounter as to deliberately murder your character, simply to prove a point about his own power, knowing full well you'll get right back up shortly and keep coming after him anyway. Now that is Dangerously Genre Savvy.
    • Even moreso, when you finally do manage to face him, he reveals that he's been letting you kill all his best monsters specifically so that you will 'get stronger' -- as in, get their loot -- so that you, the player, will be a better, stronger minion when he turns you.
  • Rouge the Bat takes an abrupt turn to the Genre Savvy in Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, Lampshade Hanging everything from the convenient findability of the series' Green Rocks to the nonsensical dialects of space brigands.
    • It should also be noted that Sonic himself is also this. With the amount of times he's lampshaded tropes in the games, he fits well. Example being in Sonic Colors he knew right away that the amusement park was just a front for Eggman's evil plot.
      • A perfect example; "Experience has taught me to investigate anything that glows."
  • Henry of No More Heroes is made of this trope. He correctly identifies himself as main character Travis' mysterious foil and just goes on from there.
    • Travis picks up some of it once Desperate Struggle starts, but the king of the trope is the final boss. When Travis can't figure out his motives, the boss snaps, pointing out that You Killed My Father is a staple of every genre known to man -- "Shakespeare, for God's sake!"
  • Guillo of Baten Kaitos Origins displays genre-savviness throughout the game, questioning good guys who turn out to be villains, realizing when something has come "too easily," and knowing to run away before the inevitable "doomed to lose" boss fights.
  • A critical plot point in Metal Gear Solid 3: When you meet an American soldier in the Russian wilderness during the Cold War, who is asking about Adam and says his code name is Snake, just give it a shot and tell him you're Eva. Chances are very good this Adam guy has a partner by that name.
  • Zoey of Left 4 Dead is a prime example -- as a college student, she's seen a lot of zombie movies, and often spouts out lines relating to their current situation.
    • "I can't get over how fast they all are! It's not even fair, I'm calling zombie bullshit on that, you know? They're not... allowed to be so fast!"
    • Unfortunately she's also Wrong Genre Savvy in the comic The Sacrifice she finds out that Her father was actually a carrier so when she shot him in a mercy killing after he was bitten, it was a pointless sacrifice
  • Guybrush Threepwood occasionally points out a trope during his adventures and tries to take advantage (generally by refusing to do something stupid).
  • The title character of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard is not only savvy about every genre he's ever been in, but he's savvy about every other game genre, too. He also has Medium Awareness, and these are half of what he uses to get through his situation. The other half, of course, is lots of guns.
  • Apart from the whole "evil unkillable vampires" part and stuff of which she is by necessity very genre savvy, Arcueid of Tsukihime also surprisingly displays some genre savviness in regards to relationships. Arcueid notes that Shiki sure is acting nice to everyone else, he says that he is nice to everyone... except her. You idiot! She's thrilled (but can't quite grasp why), because she recognizes him as being a Tsundere -- and therefore making her the love interest!
  • Refreshingly, the main character in Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor can be played this way. Often, the main character can explain the plot to the other characters in the party. There's usually two dialogue options: Genre Savvy and Panicking/Has no idea what's going on. In most RPGs, the main character is prevented from being genre savvy in favor of having an Exposition Fairy explain everything for them. As a result, there's not really any scenes in the game where the main character says things like "That demonic cult member said he wanted to destroy the world with demons! I wonder what that could mean? Please explain it to me, party members."[1]
  • Sam and Max Freelance Police: Sam & Max gradually grow into this throughout the Telltale series, eventually reaching a point in Moai Better Blues where Max correctly guesses that the sea monkeys' prophecy about their messiah has three distinct requirements that the duo will have to fulfill in order to progress. The sea monkeys themselves, being Genre Blind, take his seemingly omniscient guess as evidence that he might be their messiah.
    • After a certain point, Max seems to have simply descended into being a Fourth Wall Observer. He suggests at one point switching to the Rhythm Game genre to take down the Samulacra, and instantly jumps on the opportunity to do a Fetch Quest later on.
      • Doggelgangers!!!
  • In Neverwinter Nights, besides of making more explicable efforts to stop the plague, the Big Good and his minions set up an academy to train heroes to save the city. Of course, one of them does. However, this goes beyond any reasoning that might actually make sense in the game world, and seems more like a bad excuse to set up the Protagonist Without a Past.
  • Carth's smelling a rat about the whole mission in the first Knights of the Old Republic game could be interpreted as Genre Savviness, as could a lot of Atton's behavior in the sequel. In-universe, it's mostly explained as both of them being Force sensitive.
  • In Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Nathan Drake invariably ends up in gunfights consisting of several waves of goons. Every so often, Drake will ask to himself "Where do these guys keep coming from?".
    • In the second game, Among Thieves, Drake in one level has to retrieve an ally from a broken elevator. As he does so, Drake tells himself "I swear to God, if there's a zombie around the next corner...". Mutant Spaniards, or "zombies", were a special foe from the first game, in a level where Drake again had to rescue a friend from a small compartment.
  • The girls in the Touhou Project games occasionally show that they are very aware of the tropes of Bullet Hell games. Not the least of which is the fact that they explicitly call their attacks Danmaku. One amusing example appears in Perfect Cherry Blossom, whose Stage 4 has an unusually long wait between reaching the boss's area, and the boss showing up. When she gets there, Reimu spends a few moments muttering to herself about what's going on, and when no boss shows up, she demands "Doesn't someone usually pop in with a response right about now?"
  • In Legacy of Kain: Defiance, Kain shows his level of savvy, likely stemming from several centuries of living, in the Citadel of the Ancients. He encounters a series of very well-proportioned statues with dangerous looking swords, and monologues to himself that there was no way in Hell they wouldn't attack at some point.
  • Batman: Arkham Asylum, When the player is getting close to completing all of the Riddler's Challenges, the Riddler accuses Batman of cheating, and that he is looking up the hidden locations on the internet.
  • In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in the second-to-last-mission, Soap and Price go on an assassination mission. Once the target realizes that Price is coming after him, he orders a full evacuation of his base and tells his men to simply hold off the heroes until he can escape. An entire military base vs. two men, and the guy knows it's futile to actually try to kill them.
  • In Singularity, Nikolai Demichev is smart enough to keep plans for the Singularity Reactor, and rebuilds it after the heros blow it up. He also never forgets that time travel is possible. Thus, when confronted with two American Marines in modern-day uniforms even though there hasn't been an American military for about fifty years because the timeline has been altered so the USSR conquered the world in the sixies, he knows exactly what's going on, and doesn't waste time wondering how the two men have become crazy enough to believe the things they're talking about.

Devlin: Name, rank and serial number is all you're getting from us, Ivan. Now, I want to speak to someone from our embassy.
Demichev: You will find that impossible, for a variety of reasons...

  • In Brutal Legend, Eddie shows a degree of genre savvy right off the bat when he sees a Twisted Coil Battle Nun from behind. "All right. I'm supposed to think you're a nun, but I know you're really some big ugly demon, so let's have it! (she turns and roars in his face) HAH! I knew it! Big, ugly demon."
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, if you have the human noble story and tell Arl Howe that you're going to kill his wife and daughter, he will respond, "Isn't that precious? Is this where I lament the monster I helped create? Let me show you how it's done: I made your mother kiss my feet before she died, it was the last thing your father saw. Meet my sword, and change that." Unfortunately he's not genre savvy enough to know not to mess with the Warden.
  • In King's Quest, an Adventure Game series, Graham recalls his father's sage advice, "Take anything that isn't nailed down."
  • In Command & Conquer: Renegade, after Havoc manages to board the plane and fight off Sakura just before take-off, Sakura immediately radios the crew NOT to attack him (too late, he has attacked them).
  • In Zettai Hero Project, pretty much everyone is aware of what cliches to keep track of, apparently because Henshin Hero shows are based on real life for them. But their Crowning Moment of Awesome comes when Darkdeath Evilman unleashes a series of energy blasts that land in countless cities across the world, causing mass destruction. Each and every one of those locations was evacuated, because they were all the buildings and landmarks that are always destroyed in movies. There were no casualties at all.
  • Both Ben and Dan in Ben There, Dan That! and its sequel are aware at all times that they're in a point-and-click, and specifically that it's one of the LucasArts school which doesn't punish the player with deaths or Unwinnable situations. This is frequently used to justify their more dangerous antics and their lack of any fear of death, as well as Ben's kleptomania and deliberately trying to come up with convoluted ways of doing simple things. The aliens, however, are Dangerously Genre Savvy, and reveal at the end of Ben There, Dan That! that their abduction of Ben and Dan and forcing them to go through a point-and-click adventure game was just there to keep them clicking about long enough for the aliens to enact their real evil plan.
  • Kouin in Eien no Aselia realizes that being perfectly willing to kill to save his girlfriend makes him less sympathetic than the angsty Yuuto, which means he can't be The Hero. Yuuto himself edges close on occasion.
  • Mass Effect has Legion, a mobile platform for a race of artificial intelligences who download themselves into cyborg bodies. He explains the entire metaplot of the series in a single comment when he explains how his faction of his race have chosen to create their own future rather than use the technology of others. Adopting the Eldritch Abomination's seemingly benign technology will undermine their independence and cause their society to develop along lines someone else has chosen. It may be a metaphor for cultural imperialism or a Space Whale Aesop depending on your point of view.
    • In the first game on Noveria, the Peak 15 facility has suddenly been overrun by murderous insect. Even though he has no idea what they are and where they come from, the chief of security doesn't seem very suprised. After all, "Labs like these exist to do stupid crap that gets people killed."
    • There's also the DLC Lair of the Shadow Broker, and the banter between Shepard and Liara regarding merc tactics.

Liara: The drones are disorganized. They'd be more effective if they all attacked at once.
Shepard: Please don't give the mercs ideas.
Liara: The next wave looks like a big one.
Shepard: You just had to give them tactical advice.
Liara: But now there'll be fewer left to deal with inside.
Shepard: Keep dreaming, T'Soni.

    • One of the most genre savvy moments of the series comes after Saren's death, either from combat or a self-inflicted gunshot wound. After Shepard opens the relays around the Citadel, s/he sends the squadmates down to "make sure he's dead." One of the party members will then put a round clean through his skull, although it doesn't stop him from getting up again anyway.
    • With a few slight lapses, Shepard (renegade or paragon) has shown him/herself to be consistently Genre Savvy throughout the entire series so far. A good counterpoint to the Dangerously Genre Savvy Reapers and Illusive Man.
  • Double Switch: After being attacked by a mummy who turned out to be Eddie a few times, three people hurry to Brutus's room. Why? Because they decided that they need a gun to shoot their attacker, and since they know Brutus has had dealings with the Mafia, they figure who better to come to for a gun? They didn't get a gun, but at least they tried, didn't they?
  • In one mission in Free Space, you lead a raid on a Shivan supply depot. After the first two transports grab their cargo, two more show up to snag the last two. When the first one grabs his container, it promptly explodes, killing the transport. The other transport refuses to grab the last container, knowing that it's set to explode. Command forces the transport to do it anyway. Guess what happens next.
  • Towards the end of Hunted: The Demon's Forge Caddoc notes that, "Chanting is never a good thing" And it isn't,
  • In Saints Row the Third, Loren captures Gat, Shaundi and Boss, and offers them membership in the Syndicate. They turn him down. He immediately tells his men to kill them. What's more, he doesn't stop even after the Saints jump out of the airplane they were in. As a matter of fact, he kills Johnny Gat and uses this information to enrage the Saints, possibly to get at their emotions and make them slip up. It works, especially with Shaundi.
    • Matt Miller is noticeably afraid of the Saints, and is well aware of what they're capable of, to the point where he wisely considers just paying the Saints off instead of fighting them in one mission.
    • The Saints as well, they often Lampshade and discuss tropes such as help arriving after two waves of SWAT teams and mentioning how they think Loren wouldn't be so cliche as to hide on the top floor of the tallest building of the city "like a criminal mastermind".
  • A lot of people in Super Robot Wars Z 2 especially in Sasei-Hen are quite genre savvy, especially when events from the end of Code Geass happens. When Schneitzel reveal's Zero's identity depending on your option somebody (Roger or Duo depending on player's choice) will point out why they should still trust him, not Schneizel and later, when in one route Lelouch becomes Emperor, almost entire cast knows him well enough to know he has a plan.
  • Blizzard showed themselves to be almost Dangerously Genre Savvy when it came to developing Diablo 3 - they knew that in the multiplayer option, just about every characters' stats would be the exact same as one another with little if any deviation at all. So they knew that since Munchkins would eventually force everyone to follow the "best" build, to simply make all the stats determined at level-up anyways.
  • In the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Honest Hearts, White Bird, the Sorrow tribe shaman, is player savvy enough to give you this gem with an unique weapon:

White Bird "Use well. Or sell to curio trader. Either way, says much about you."

  • In South Park: Stick of Truth, after an UFO crashes into the said town, government agents noticed a toxic waste substance was turning any organic matter, dead or alive, into Nazi Zombies. Two of the government agents felt it been done before, one proclaim "Here We Go Again" while the other calls them overused.
Back to Genre Savvy
  1. ↑ That's Yuzu's job.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Genre_Savvy/Video_Games?oldid=1979400"