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Late to the Party: Difference between revisions
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Typically, often as a direct result of the player's investigation, he will find himself needing to learn from what he can piece together of the past to stop this bad something from happening again -- to him. In games with a supernatural angle, there will often be some component of "freeing the ghosts" of those involved in the past tragedy by resolving the situation.
Expect to find at least [[Apocalyptic Log|one diary]] (Scavenger hunts for journal pages are very common), a video tape or two, psychic visions of the past, and, very likely, notes on the wall in human blood.
This setup is not uncommon outside of video games, but the focus on discovering these fragments of the past is typically much stronger in the game -- the interactive medium is particularly well-suited to this kind of storytelling, as it lets the player control the pace and order at which the story is told, but the story itself needs not account for the player's pesky free will getting in the way.
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* ''[[The Seventh Guest]]'' and its sequels. The main character in ''The Seventh Guest'' is late for a literal party ? so late that all the guests are ghosts! {{spoiler|It later turns out that he is, in fact, the eponymous Seventh Guest, and was on time, as he, too, is a ghost.}}
* ''[[Myst]]''. You, the player, find yourself on an abandoned island. After exploring a bit, you build up a picture of something dire that happened there before you arrived.
* In ''[[Uru]]'', the party you're late for just happens to be first four Myst games. [[Completely Missing the Point|And you'd just preordered them, too...]] * sniff*
* ''Amber: Journeys Beyond'' is built on this trope. Your paranormal research partner has bought an allegedly haunted house and rigged it up with all kinds of barely-tested equipment. You find her unconscious with some of that equipment strapped to her head, the whole house dark, and all manner of creepy stuff going down.
* ''Echo Night Beyond''
** The ''[[Echo Night]]'' series uses this in each installment. First one has Richard ending up on the Orpheus, a ship long lost at sea; [[No Export for You|second]] has his search for his missing girlfriend lead to a [[Haunted House|haunted mansion]]; ''Beyond'' takes the series into space and strands him on a lunar colony.
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** Averted, however, in the first game, in that the player character causes the resonance cascade, and all the expansions except ''Opposing Force'' put the player as other Black Mesa employees present as everything goes to <s>hell</s> Xen.
* Very common in [[Interactive Fiction]], where it forms a subset of the situations described by "Adam Cadre's Theorem" (i.e. That in games, mysteriously abandoned places are common since they inherently have mystery and lack any difficult to program Non Player Characters). Examples include ''[[Planetfall]]'', ''Babel'', ''Glowgrass'', ''Theatre'', etc.
* ''[[The Neverhood]]'', a claymation game that starts off with the protagonist sleeping on the floor of a locked room with no explanation as to who he is or how he got there. The story is told bit-by-bit through little discs recorded by another character.
* Partially subverted in the ''[[Silent Hill]]'' series -- although fitting most of the criteria, right down to the scattered journal pages and the notes written in human blood, you never ''really'' find out what's going on. The most you can hope for is some personal closure, a rescued survivor, or maybe a long-lost wife brought back from the dead. (!)
** The games do drop hints as to why the town is the way it is, and the nature of Silent Hill is explored in detailed in the expanded book "The Book of Lost Memories".
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* ''[[Star Control|Star Control 2]]''. The protagonist is sent to aid Earth and its allies in a war against hostile aliens, only to find that Earth was conquered twenty years earlier.
** Done again later, when you go looking for the Androsynth homeworld only to find out that the Androsynth were researching something they shouldn't have, and were seen by something when they really didn't want to be seen. [[Eldritch Abomination|There are no more Andryosynth, only Orz.]]
* ''[[System Shock]]'' and its sequel, both of which have the hero waking from cryogenic suspension and slowly discovering the ship/station he's on has been through some interesting developments while he was out.
** Interesting to note is that System Shock's development actually necessitated a Late To The Party story, as then-current computers simply couldn't render believable character interactions.
* ''[[Bioshock]]'' (from the makers of the ''[[System Shock]]'' games) takes place in an abandoned undersea utopia-gone-wrong, which the player character stumbles across, discovering more about what went wrong as they explore.
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* [http://armorgames.com/play/751/shift Shift], a game which evokes much of the spirit of Portal, uses this trope in [http://armorgames.com/play/1846/shift-3 Shift 3].
* ''Uncharted: Drake's Fortune'' does it a few times over - not only the hero and the villainous enemy mercs but also Nazis and Sir Francis Drake were [[Late to the Party]] of a group of Spanish explorers who found El Dorado - and grew to wish they hadn't. In the present, the hero finds himself trawling through the wreckage of these multiple doomed expeditions.
* ''[[Blaster Series|Reading Blaster: Ages 9 - 12]]'' does this, frequently incorporating the information about what happened into its [[Alphabet Soup Cans|language arts activities]].
* ''Bonesaw: The Game'' has one of these to help form its premise. The player character took a bit too long gathering some pulled pork sandwiches, and just happened to miss ''Ref M sucking the rest of his team into an interdimensional penalty box!''
* ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]] II'' Starts with the player being Late to the Party aboard the Peragus Mining Facility. After finding the culprit, the player promptly has his own party which makes the first party almost completely irrelevant.
** The first game and the Hrakert Rift station. You know ''something'' happened, but then you and yours walk right into a survival horror mess with a bunch of crazed Selkath, chewed-up bodies, and if you're really unlucky, Darth Malak's excuse for an apprentice.
* The general theme in [[Mass Effect]]: it's galactic civilization that's late to the party, to the point of the last party being held for the Precursors.
** The Protheans being close to stopping said party and being as smart as the.... hosts... If the full party had happened on the current civilisation's watch... well one of the ships was battling the ''entire combined force of the galaxy's sentient beings on it's own''... Imagine millions of the things. Or at least, you probably won't have to in [[Mass Effect 3]].
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** ''[[Dead Space 2]]'' on the other hand has you present as the 'party' is starting, although things have been building up for weeks or months beforehand.
* In [[Super Smash Bros Brawl]]: The Subspace Emissary, this occurs right before the final boss fight, when {{spoiler|Sonic}}, the ''fastest playable character in the game,'' {{spoiler|shows up out of nowhere with [[Deus Ex Machina|no notice whatsoever]] and damages [[Big Bad|Tabuu's]] butterfly wings, weakening his [[Fantastic Nuke|'Off Waves']] ability and allowing a battle with him ''without'' [[Hopeless Boss Fight|dying by default.]]}}
* In ''Starflight'' (So old the Sega Genesis version was a re-release) you find yourself centuries [[Late to the Party]]. {{spoiler|You're from Planet Arth, whose star is about to collapse, on a mission to find a hospitable planet to which the populace can relocate. Along the way, adrift in deep space, you find a sleeper ship from Planet Earth...rendered inhospitable [[Apocalypse How|(see Apocalypse How, Class 5)]] long ago. So long ago, in fact, that your culture lost all knowledge that your civilization originally came from Earth. Eventually you find Earth itself, and on its surface locate 'artifacts' in the form of [[Apocalyptic Log|newspapers]] vaguely describing its downfall. Eventually you have to use three [[Power Crystal|artifacts]] together to stop a [[Desolation Shot|crystalline entity]] that was the cause of both Earth's downfall and the near destruction of your solar system.}}
** ... How? {{spoiler|Smack its nose with the rolled up artifacts}}?
* The entire world of ''[[Fallout]]'' is based around this trope, having been destroyed by a nuclear war a few hundred years before the game begins.
* [[Heretic]] 2 has you arrive at you home town some time after a magical plague has been unleashed.
* [[Doom]] 3 has you both early and late to the party, you're there when everything goes to hell (or hell come to it) but it's clear a lot has been going on before your arrival.
* In ''[[Alpha Prime]]'', your original goal is to simply travel to a sealed off mining station to rescue a friend. {{spoiler|Once you meet him, however, you learn that the asteroid was sealed off in the first place due to the Company who owned it's failure to acquire the [[MacGuffin]] they sought. By the end, you learn that not only was the villain only there to make another attempt at collecting Glomar's heart while eliminating any witnesses, but it was the real reason [[Big Bad Friend|you were sent there.]]}}
* Jonathan Boakes's [[Dark Fall]] is another good example: "you" get a telephone [[Distress Call]] from your architect brother: "I know what you're thinking: you're thinking, 'He only ever phones when there's something wrong.' Well, something is wrong. Very wrong." You hurry to help him with whatever it is, and find yourself alone in a railway station fifty years abandoned. You get to explore and find out what the strange sounds are, and why the lights turn themselves on and off, and just who it is you hear singing in the restaurant kitchen, and why the star-map you find shows constellations unlike any we know, and what those strange symbols and words are in the bathroom, and what's in the basement ...
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** Perhaps in the novel - in the film version, he actually saves the fourth cardinal.
* ''[[Power Rangers Ninja Storm]]'' begins with our heroes-to-be late for training yet again... thus missing the [[Big Bad]]'s initial sacking of their training hall.
* In ''[[At the Mountains of Madness]]'', all of the dying happens before the viewpoint characters arrive.
* [[John Carpenter]]'s ''[[The Thing (film)|The Thing]]'' got dug up by, and slaughtered, a <s>Scandinavian</s> Norwegian expedition team before it found its way into the American outpost in Antarctica.
* Taken to a ridiculous degree in ''[[8-Bit Theater
* Jay in ''[[Marble Hornets]]'' begins his investigation nearly three years after the events recorded in the tapes. Most of the cast has scattered or disappeared and several locations trashed by the time Jay looks for them.
** Averted at the same time though: As Jay starts going through the tapes, it becomes apparent that {{spoiler|he had much more to do with the party [[Laser-Guided Amnesia|than he remembered]]}}
* ''[[Empire From the Ashes]]'' includes this in each book. First book: "What happened to Dahak's crew?" Second book: "What happened to the Fourth Imperium?" Third book: "What happened to Pardal's techbase?"
* In the pilot episode of ''[[Crusade]]'', [[The Captain|Gideon]] arrives to Earth days after the battle with the Drakh (see ''[[Babylon 5]]: [[A Call To Arms]]''). All the crew see are ship wreckage and infected Earth. Matheson comments that they were late for the party even before they jumped. Then again, there's not much they could've done with a research vessel with enough weapons to scare off an occasional [[Space Pirates|raider]] or two.
* In ''Hero's Chains'', Derek arrives several centuries late to a world gone from a sci-fi utopia to a fantasy hellhole.
* ''[[Star Wars]]: [[Shatterpoint]]'' has ''the Clone Wars and the Republic at large'' be late to the "party" known as [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Summertime_War the Summertime Wars]. Basically, conflict between offworlders and natives led to a war that starts when the winter snows melt and end when the autumn rains began. Each year. For thirty years as of the start of the book. The natives only support the Republic because the offworlders are supported by the Separatists. Mace Windu, the narrator, notes that his young native companions do not speak of [[Retirony|what they will do " after the war]]". Because it's all they've ever known. {{spoiler|Which makes it kind of heartbreaking when Nick admits his feelings about what he wanted to do with Chalk ''if'' the war ever ended, while holding her corpse.}}
* ''[[With Strings Attached]]'': The four are sent to C'hou, specifically the continent of Baravada, when its entire (dysfunctional anarchistic dystopian/utopian) way of life is dying out. There are hints of a much more orderly past to the planet, especially the magnificent [[Ghost City]] of Ehndris and the implied behavior of the [[Jerkass Gods]] some centuries in the past.
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