Player Punch/Video Games/Shoot'Em Up

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Player Punches in Shoot'Em Up games include:

  • The flash game Viricide has you slowly but surely repair EXADI, the EXtremely ADvanced Intelligence, purging viruses from her systems. Then she asks you to do "one last thing" for her, and this turns out to be the deactivation of her Emotional Core. She explains that this will remove her self-awareness, essentially AI suicide. And the game forces you to do it. The final conversation with her consists of a few lines of text indicating that EXADI is ready to function. It doesn't help that the voice actor is superb, and the writer did The Company of Myself.
    • Made all the more poignant by several things she mentions throughout the game. At one point, she mentions her creator being depressed and taking pills to fix the problem (antidepressants). It seems innocuous, until she later relates that one day he took all the pills he had at once, said he was going away, and left. She tells you that she hopes she's happy wherever he is now. Later, as you fix her up, she starts to realize that she'd done something horrible, and she let the virus in deliberately to forget what she'd done. Feelings of guilt and sadness weigh her down so much, she begs you to shut down her Emotion Core, because she just can't bear the pain of feeling any more.
  • Panzer Dragoon Saga spends most of its third disc in and around the town of Zoah. The Evil Empire would like very much to blow it up, so you spend a lot of time foiling said plans, culminating in an epic attack on a military base and chasing after a missile after it's been fired and taking it apart before it hits the town. Barely ten minutes after this, the Empire cheerfully flies its gigantic dreadnought battleship over to Zoah and uses the ship's stupid-huge laser to blow the town to bits. Admittedly you do find out later on that most of the key NPCs from the town escaped, but still...
  • A different kind of punch is delivered in Metal Slug. After finishing the game, the credits cutscene shows you what you have been doing so far in the game. Dead bodies everywhere. The final blow is a mourning widow/daughter at a grave of a rebel soldier.
    • A happier version of this ending with most of the soldiers still alive is shown if the game is beaten with 2 players, making it sort of a twisted version of The Power of Friendship.
  • Sin and Punishment 2‍'‍s 6th Stage. After defeating a Keeper, you come across its offspring. At first Isa and Kachi decide to spare it, which turns out to be a very bad idea: the hatchling takes control of a crane and holds whoever you're not playing as, and now you have to rescue him/her. Oh, and did I mention that said hatchling holds your partner over a rising sea of lava, which you must outrun by raising the platform that he and the crane is on as well as shooting the hatchling to force him to raise your partner higher? Not only that, if your partner gets too close to the lava, the hatcling will dump him/her into the lava and you get to watch as he/she falls in screaming and DIES.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Player_Punch/Video_Games/Shoot%27Em_Up?oldid=2013754"