InFAMOUS (series)/YMMV

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• Acceptable Targets: The second game apparently considers street performers who pose as statues this trope. You get a trophy for beating one up, and one mission has you fight a whole crowd of Militia members disguised as them.
  • And in the first game, the Dust Men are riddled with Unfortunate Implications. Making an entire city's homeless population a group of faceless mooks who murder and destroy For the Evulz feels more than a little uncomfortable. That, and their standard uniforms are garbage bags. While still having access to turrets, riot shields, and RPGS by the truckload. At least The Reapers get the Freudian Excuse of being manipulated by Sasha. The Dust Men are just...bad?
    • The cinematics actually do a good job of explaining this: Empire City wasn't treating its homeless well before the blast, and Alden, with his lifelong rage, tapped into something. There's still a lot of bad implications, though, especially since that basically makes Alden Hitler.
• Anticlimax Boss: Both Kessler and the Beast are surprisingly easy to take down, especially compared to the minibosses the game throws at you.
  • Kessler is arguably the hardest single boss in the first game. The Beast is a reasonable case--while he gets a lot of build up, and he's not exactly extremely easy to take down, all of the several fights with him involve Cole wrecking his shit to some degree. Compare him to Kessler from the first game, whose boss fight includes several brief cutscenes where he overpowers Cole, and he comes off as much less threatening than we're led to believe.
    • Once you know Kessler's attack patterns, it's mostly a matter of keeping your distance, dodge, and wait for your opening. Compare to Alden, who throws massive amounts of fire and spider golems at you while you're trapped in a small space, or Sasha, which requires you to hop from platform to platform over mind-controlling tar while she slams you repeatedly with psychic attacks and hallucinations that can somehow shoot you.
    • From a gameplay standpoint, that's probably true. Kessler's fight, however, is an effective narrative climax--a drawn out, out and out duel between two conduits with similar powers where the events of the game all started, under a foreboding sky. Kessler has the upper hand for much of the duel. The Beast, however, is tired and weary, totally unlike the build up of a psychotic monster that Kessler gave him. The fights with him tend to be very short, and he hides behind a partner after you make him your bitch. The location of the fights are also rather underwhelming. The Beast isn't even the focus of the story at that point, being just another faction in your way. At the end, dealing with him is literally an afterthought which Cole only goes through because he wants to get his jollies before he sacrifices his life.
• Complete Monster: Bertrand as he deliberately rounded up "undesirables to sacrifice for his own superpowers, and, once he found they were loathsome, plans on committing Conduit Genocide.
  • Blood Mary is a very obvious Fully Embraced Fiend, as you can find from her memories, almost all of which have her gleefully talk about the people she killed, turning families against one another, and forcefully converting cleregymen.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: By Amon Tobin, the whole soundtrack gives a distinct avant-garde urban jungle feel, but Rabble Rouser stands out amongst them all.
  • "Silent Melody" by Working For A Nuclear Free City certainly counts too.
  • "Fade Away", the end credits theme of the sequel, especially if you got the good ending.
• Demonic Spiders: First Sons hunter conduits. They tend to go invisible and hit you with shotguns while laying mines all over the place.
  • Turrets in general. Better be quick with those grenades...
• Ensemble Darkhorse: The Reapers seem to be the most popular gang from the first game. Cole even gets a Reaper based costume in inFamous 2.
• Even Better Sequel
• Evil Is Sexy: Sasha qualifies for this, given her mode of dress, her facination with Cole, her rather overt language when talking to him, and her primary grappling attack resembling a twisted form of kiss.
  • Nix as well, especially in contrast to Kuo's complete awkwardness. A Male villain example, John's human form as the beast.
  • In Festival of Blood, the Big Bad Bloody Mary counts as well.
• Evil Pays Better: Subverted, if you're paying attention. Evil Cole's powers seem the better deal on the surface, but the way the bonuses stack, they're actually fairly balanced. Evil Cole gets more splash damage, but Good Cole doesn't need to worry about charging up. Taken to ridiculous extremes in the sequel, when you get Bolt Stream, which combines with your Karmic bonuses to give you a machine gun with a bottomless ammo magazine and no reload time.
• Hell Is That Noise: The first encounter with a Ravager, a Devourer, the Behemoth, the exploding Corrupted you first see after Kuo is kidnapped, and random fights that break out in the streets.
  • Also during the mission where you are traveling through the swamp with Nix, there comes a point where you hear a loud stomping and growling sound in the distance, but Nix tells you to ignore it. You hear the exact same sound later when you fight Bertrand
• Goddamn Bats: God damn snipers! You'll often find yourself peppered with gunfire from above when you're exploring an area on the ground (yet another reason to take to the rooftops) and their attacks can whittle away your health while you're trying to focus on guys with rocket launchers or Conduits.
  • They're extremely annoying when you're doing something else, too - walking around, minding your own business, then BAM! A bullet to your back. The gunfire often draws in nearby mooks, too, and with Dust Men or First Sons, they'll call squads of six or more flying at you like some sort of annoyance squad.
  • If you're playing Evil Cole, the rock-throwing civilian mobs can be like this, since it's difficult to tell where the rocks are coming from, the throwers don't show up on your radar as hostiles and apparently the city is stocked with dozens of people who could've made a career in the Major Leagues, hitting Cole from the better part of a block away. And to make it worse, in what seems to be a kind of glitch, if you get too close to the mob, some of the members will attack you with their fists, which has the same effect as being attacked by the civilians infected by Sasha's tar, meaning that you can't fight back or do anything other than run for several seconds.
    • It is this reason that I just summon repeated storms in all directions at even one stone.
  • Shotgunners in the second game, who will use their powers to get right up in your face and hit you point blank with a shotgun blast.
    • Don't forget the Spikers, which are quick, numerous, and have long range attacks on a par with any mook running around with an automatic. On the other hand, this does make Cole's melee animation for killing them, a punt, incredibly satisfying.
  • Festival of Blood being about vampires contains these by default but special mention goes to the Harpies who bounce around just out of reach hanging from improbable locations shooting you with dual Uzis also the zombie civilians who swarm you during certain missions and can deal more damage with a single melee swing than the minibosses can.
• Good Bad Bug: You can fry any conductive item in the game with your standard bolt a couple dozen times, then drain it for way more juice than you'd receive from a power box or light post. Since the bolt doesn't drain any energy, you're basically creating your own electricity. Very useful in tunnels or Alden's tower.
  • Sometimes easier to come by, you can also do that with corpses. Or enemies.
  • For the most part, this cannot be done if you haven't restored power to that area of the city. Only a couple of certain structures will let you recycle electricity.
  • In the sequel its possible to use User Generated Content to bypass a Broken Bridge to enter the second half of the city before you're supposed to. Depending on the content there can be no enemies whatsoever, and with the power out only the blast shards will show up on the radar. Makes it very easy to find them in that area.Just remember to die before aborting the mission, or you might get stuck.
  • Ladies and gentlemen, Schizo-tin-foil man.
  • Large bosses such as Devourers can sometimes actually get stuck inside scenery, forcing you to restart the mission, but skipping the boss.
• Gray and Grey Morality: The second game. In short, the good ending relies upon an assumption of No Ontological Inertia, which in-game is stated to not be a sure thing. If Cole and company were wrong about said assumption, and they didn't have any way of knowing for sure, the evil path would have been significantly less disastrous--saving a small portion of the population vs. almost complete extinction of sentient life. The evil path was also assured to work. However, the way Cole goes about the evil ending is really damn ruthless.
• Moral Event Horizon: If you choose to activate the Ray Sphere a second time when given the chance, you become more powerful. However, you kill a lot of people in the process, and your Karma Meter is set to "Infamous" permanently.
  • No matter your Karma rank in iF2, at one point you are given a choice that will end the pseudo-teamwork you have going on between two other Conduits. If you pick say, the Evil person, because you want their power, and you have maxed the Hero side, the game considers it equivalent to denouncing law and order and choosing to revel in chaos. You are instantly ranked as a Thug(lowest evil), lose all Good benefits, all Good powers, and now have hard to get rid of bad Karma. The opposite holds true if you pick the Good person. Note that this happens long into the game, and this fact is never made clear. If you don't like their element, there is no option to mix. Luckily, if you knew about this and hard saved through the menu beforehand or at the choice, it will only take a replay of the mission you just did in order to get the choice again. If you didn't, hope you enjoyed your first playthrough of inFamous 2 because you get to replay from the last time you made a hard save, and if you didn't do that...new game.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In the Festival of Blood DLC, The only reason Cole wins at all is that Bloody Mary for some reason tries to lure him out with the Cross of Ignatius, the only weapon that can kill her. Had she just hid it somewhere and bided her time until sunrise, Cole would have been SOL.
• Player Punch: Zeke's Moral Event Horizon, when he tries to claim the Ray Sphere.
  • Kessler's Sadistic Choice for Cole: should he save Trish, or six doctors?
  • In the sequel, the Evil Ending requires Cole to personally kill Zeke. He takes multiple hits, and just keeps raising his gun.
• The Scrappy: Trish, Moya, the Voice of Survival, and Zeke (At least before the sequel). In fact, most of the characters in this game seem to have taken lessons on being NPCs from Slippy and done postgraduate work with Otis, since they'll all whine at you about how you're not doing something while you're in the middle of a firefight, or demand you perform some task that turns out to be extremely difficult and then offer precisely zero gratitude for it. Trish stands out in particular with one mission where Evil Cole protects her medical supplies, saves her from a hostage situation, and gets rewarded with being dumped.
• Selfish Evil: Evil choices on the karmic path are typically framed in terms of "let/make others suffer for your personal benefit" rather than "let/make others suffer for fun," e.g. forcing a bystander to expose himself to dangerous chemicals so you don't have to deal with those chemicals yourself. Of course, the game won't stop you if you choose to electrocute random civilians.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Alden, to some degree. One has to wonder what exactly Kessler did to turn a scared little orphan into this.
  • Nix: she watched her mother get vaporized right in front of her eyes when Bertrand used her as fuel for the raysphere, and befriended a corrupted only to have it die protecting her escape from the bayou. It's a little understandable she's a Pyromaniac Blood Knight when it comes to the militia.
• Xanatos Roulette: Kessler's plan is . . . convoluted to say the least.
  • Also Bertrand's plan to convince the world to hate and fear conduits by mass-producing them and selling them to various countries and military powers as weapons is up there in complexity as well