Player Punch/Video Games/Stealth Based Game

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Player Punches in Stealth Based Games include:

  • In the Final Battle of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater Snake has to fight his best friend and mentor in a duel to the death. She gives a long final speech about her motives and why she is willing to sacrifice everything to fulfill her duty, and tells Snake that he has to fulfill his own. Like in most fights of the series, she's not immediately dead after being defeated and with her last words demands that Snake shoot her with her own gun. But you don't get to simply watch Snake shoot her. You have to press the fire button yourself. Which directly leads to the birth of Big Boss.
    • A cutscene in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops has the villain indirectly kill off the first soldier you collected in the game, who gets a little bit of screen-time, but has almost all of his emotional connection to the player being the fact that he'd been there since the beginning.
    • The original MGS has the death of the horribly mentally and physically twisted Grey Fox, crushed under the foot of Metal Gear REX. As an added bonus, you then get to repeatedly fire missiles into the face of the bastard that killed him.
      • Go ahead, call Revoler Ocelot's bluff about him killing Meryl if you give into the torture.
    • How often do you keep a dying villain company for his last minutes, and especially villains who repeatedly shot at your friend with a sniper rifle to lure you out of your hiding place? For Sniper Wolf you do, and it's unbelievably sad.
    • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has multiple Player Punches. So many, in fact, that it's possible the game will seriously injure your psyche if you're not careful. Almost everyone comes out okay in the end, but man.
    • Even more incredibly hard hitting is the "The Reason You Suck" Speech given to Raiden, by GW near the end of the game. Even though it doesn't actually involve anyone dying, it makes a huge emotional impact by practically chewing out the player more so than the character.
    • Another Player Punch from MGS3 was the torture sequence. By the time it was over, I wanted to kill Volgin like no other video game character I have yet seen.
      • A slight one, also from Snake Eater, is if you let The End die of old age in your duel. All he wanted is a Final Battle against a Worthy Opponent and you couldn't or wouldn't give it to him. Even Snake was saddened by that.
  • More or less completely inverted in Manhunt. The villain in the game is a disturbing sadist who compels the player character to acts of excessive, wanton violence for his own entertainment and watches the proceedings through a series of disembodied cameras. Not many games end with the player killing the personification of the part of themself that enjoys the game.
    • A non meta example involves Cash saving different members of his family from a group of crazed hunters, only to be told at the end of the level that their deaths would be necessary, and are killed shortly after.
  • In Assassin's Creed II, the first hour of the game introduces Ezio's family, and aside from the initial fight with the Pazzi, all the missions show you that the Auditore household is solid and full of love. You hang out with affable big brother Fredrico, beat up sister Claudia's cheating boyfriend, collect feathers for sickly little brother Pettruccio, and do jobs for his Reasonable Authority Figure parents Giovanni and Maria. They look like they're going to be part of the story for a while, especially considering the detailed profiles regarding them in the database. Then his father and brothers - yes, including the twelve-year-old Pettruccio - are hanged at Rodrigo Borgia's order, and his mother goes mute from shock when the guards who came for them tried to rape her. Oh, it is on now. Those Templar fuckers are going down.
    • Made even worse when Ezio finally confronts Rodrigo, who says he only had Ezio's brothers hung to show the Templar do not offer mercy to their enemies.
    • Brotherhood has Rodrigo Borgia's son Cesare kill Ezio's uncle Mario to conclude the siege of Monteriggioni. Oh, it's really fucking on now. We're not gonna spare you this time, Borgia, you had your chance, and you blew it.
      • The siege of Monteriggioni also laid waste to your hard work synchronizing (outside of the story) with Ezio in the second game. All the renovations, all the money spent, all the collectibles... gone in a single morning. For the split-second that it's visible, apparently not even the Armor of Altair survived (intact).
      • Juno forcing Desmond to stab Lucy while Desmond can do nothing but struggle and watch is possibly the worst, the fact that it comes without warning doesn't help at all.
        • Even worse? The player is forced to do it, as well. The cutscene cannot continue until you move the control stick. One. Step. At. A. Time. And then, you must deliver the attack with the familiar "press any button" input.
      • Caterina's admittance that their only night together was all politics for her definitely feels like this. The novelization actually has Ezio angsting about this for quite a bit, even contemplating abandoning it all and running away with Caterina, only for her to reiterate that she doesn't love him. Then, just to hammer it home, Desmond in the present asks what happened to her, and it's revealed that she never got her city back, then got sick and died. While this is pretty much Caterina's fate in Real Life, it still sucks.
  • Assassin's Creed introduces you to each of the targets by showing them commit an atrocity. The first brutally stabs a man to death for talking back to him, the second has a man's legs broken because he tried to flee the hospital of horrors, one throws a scholar onto a pile of burning books because the man argued (peaceably and politely) that books are treasures to be preserved, not destroyed, and another murders an innocent priest because he thinks the man might be you...the list goes on. The player is always completely unable to intervene and has to watch these terrible things happen, even though some of them would be so easy to prevent because you're literally a few yards away from the target.
    • Then the game punches you a second time by having a long conversation with each target in which he justifies his actions, or makes the player pity him, or etc. In short, the game takes away the first punch and in doing so makes the second death another punch.
      • All of them except for Majd Addin, who turns out to be a psychopath who killed people for fun.
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