Refuge in Audacity/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Most video games have absurd plots, in fact. See: this article, and this All The Tropes page.

Examples of Refuge in Audacity in Video Games include:

  • Elite Beat Agents: By using an Action Replay, you can give the male agents the female agents' dance moves. Try not to laugh at the sight of any of the characters buttdancing. Like THIS.
    • If you get a high enough cumulative score, you can select Commander Khan in Versus Mode. He always dances with the Divas, and... well, he gets down.
  • Team Fortress 2 deserves a mention here, with game-play elements (rocket jumping, sentient buildings, a gun that shoots medicine) that are shadowed by the impressionistic style and cartoon shading.
  • This Touhou fancomic. Nazrin shows up and thanks a pair of (low-power) gods for the food she just stole and ate and calmly walks off. The victims are too stunned to even respond.
  • Shin Megami Tensei
    • A good example would have to be Persona 3. There, you summon your persona by shooting yourself in the head. Despite something so remarkably blatant as that, it still didn't garner much controversy, with every reviewer wondering on the possibility of it even happening.
      • Hey, it’s symbolic, okay. Given the game’s heavy Freudian/Jungian overtones (even in the name), it makes every sense you have to shoot down the Ego to summon a Persona. Besides, they look really cool doing it.
      • Still, you're bound to get some weird looks if anyone catches you playing it without understanding the symbolism behind it. "Hey, it's one of those JRPG things, I wonder how they're going to fight--wait what the hell is he doing with that gun?" Especially since you can summon the below mentioned Mara.
      • All of the above points, along with other ideas, is mentioned in ESRB's analysis on the portable version. You have to wonder if the ESRB wanted to give it an AO immediately, no questions asked.

Female creatures (female Personas) occasionally are depicted topless or with revealing costumes; male creatures have phallic-shaped heads and torsos. Story elements contain references to 'Rampant Sexuality' and characters that make 'sexual advances.'

  • It's lampshaded by Junpei (of all people) early on.

Junpei: You know, I've been thinking about the evokers. Why do they make them look like guns? I mean, I guess it's easier to use them, but you have to be a little mental to shoot yourself in the head.

  • The demon Mara deserves being mentioned. Its name is even a Japanese slang term for penis. And it's a Running Gag in the series.
  • Also in Persona 4, there's Shadow Frickin' Rise. She's a giant multicolored naked woman humping a pole that you have to fight.

Story elements also make references to alcohol, including a long scene in which the main characters hang out in a club and play 'drinking games.'

  • In the game that picture comes from, there's an outrageous boss battle, where you fight ADOLF HITLER, CARRYING THE SPEAR USED TO STAB JESUS!!! Seriously, there's nowhere further left to go... or is there?
  • Most of your party members' efforts to rescue you from Fort Drakon in Dragon Age, which include among other things Morrigan the contemptuous atheist pretending to be a pious Chantry sister, Zevran scaring the guards into letting him and Oghren in with the threat that Oghren could preform the traditional Dwarven Dance of Death ("lights his pants on fire and everything!"), and Dog pretending to be sick. The version where you break yourself out also involves this if you don't just kill everything you see; you steal a uniform, say you're a new recruit, then go out on a patrol.
  • The Wall Market location in Final Fantasy VII is part bazaar, part red-light district, and part normal town. In order to save a female friend of his', the hero must dress up like a girl with the help of another female friend (who looks like she's having way too much fun with the whole deal) and give himself over to the sexual appetite of a local crime lord, Don Corneo. It sports a gym of crossdressing men who challenge the hero to a squatting contest over a wig, several opportunities for bathroom humor, and more bashes to the hero's masculinity than seem possible. The hero can go to a place featuring girls in slutty honeybee costumes who will put make-up on him, and he can receive panties as a memento of getting felt up in a hot tub full of large hairy men. If the player gets enough items, he can even have the character be picked over the two main females of the game, and proceed on to have to deal with the Don's attentions.
    • Even if it weren't preceded by that sidequest, the scene after that one, where three party members (the hero and the other two girls) threaten to (respectively) cut off, rip off, and "smash" the Don's testicles, might qualify for the trope by itself.
    • Just for you info: All this happens more or less in the FIRST TWO HOURS OF GAMEPLAY. I'm NOT kidding...
      • Further, Cloud is not the Bishonen stereotype of Squaresoft heroes. He's quite muscular. Nobody would normally confuse him for a woman. So this is like having a giant neon sign that says "TRAP" in front of him.
    • There are also bodybuilders in G-strings at many points in the game, and a number of ethnic stereotypes. Also, attacks that Nintendo censored (such as "Inferno") are now given more accurate translations (in the case of Inferno, Hellfire).
  • The most powerful attacks of the Banpresto Originals from Super Robot Wars use this trope. The most extreme has to be Keisar Ephes' The end of the Galaxy which has demons escaping, visions of horror appearing on the screen and ends with an image of the Earth blowing up. If the character uses a certain seishin beforehand this attack will do a whopping 10 points of damage.
    • This has recently been topped by the final attack of Dark Brain, who warps his target to another dimension before growing to a ridiculous size, then proceeds to destroy at least two dozen planets in the ensuing chaos. And unlike the previous example, none of this is justified as simply being Mind Rape.
  • No More Heroes: An otaku buys a beam katana off the internet, takes the advice of a hot stranger and becomes a Badass who slices his way up an assassins' leaderboard. Almost all of said assassins are flamboyant and highly distinctive personalities. When a Mook gets killed blood geysers and coin showers occur. To recharge his weapon, the protagonist... shakes it in a rather suggestive manner.
  • Metal Wolf Chaos. The President of the United States has been deposed in a military coup by his running mate. He responds by blowing everything up in his Humongous Mecha armed with machine guns, rocket launchers, and a shark gun while delivering ludicrously awesome one-liners one after another. And the completely over-the-top BURNING AMERICAN JUSTICE.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The entire Russian plot hinges on the idea that nobody would believe that they'd actually launch a large-scale suicide attack against Washington, DC.
  • In Betrayal at Krondor, most of the story involves a dark elf running around in the Kingdom, which has been warring with his nation since forever. While he does make an effort to keep his telltale pointed ears hidden, as often as not, not being recognised relies on the common folk assuming that anyone with pointed ears walking around openly this deep in their territory must be a light elf and not a dark elf. This is helped by the fact that there are only subtle (read: clothing, complexion, attitude) differences between dark and light elves and most common people couldn't tell one from the other.
  • BLACK has a lousy plot; it's actually pretty well known for it. It takes refuge in completely pointless Cluster F Bombs, hands you ammo like candy, doubles the real-life magazine size of all weapons and makes a good 50% of things in the game that aren't walls explode.
  • Recently, a group of companies announced an RTS whose title says it all: Stalin vs. Martians. Official site here.
    • And then they went one step further and released a Game of the Year Edition, even though the game had been critically panned.
  • Red Alert 3. Armored bear paratroopers. Psychic schoolgirl commandos. Giant walking battle mechs. Crowd-control spiderbots. APCs whose primary method of transporting troops is to shoot them out of a giant cannon. When the faction that uses freeze ray satellites is the one deemed to have the most practical technology, you've hit the truly ridiculous.
    • And this is the faction that has battle dolphins, literal land battleships, and attack helicopters with shrink rays.
    • Red Alert 2 gave us the weather control machine to begin with, along with mind controlled squid, ludicrously tough bomb-dropping zeppelins (re-used in RA3), dolphins with sonar guns attached to their heads (also re-used in RA3), soldiers equipped with guns that erase their targets from time and space...and this is before we get onto Yuri's Revenge.
    • The Expansion Pack Uprising is trying for the insanity again. Giant Japanese Battleships that are also Giant Heads? Automated Tanks that respond to 'jump' with 'I regret I cannot'? It got to the point where their April Fool's Joke, the Mammoth Tank (a literal prehistoric Mammoth with two giant cannons strapped to its back) seemed like a completely viable unit.
  • The Force Unleashed. Every method of disposing of an enemy more complex than stabbing them with the lightsabre counts as this. Say what negative things you will about this game, but this was the first game that ever allowed one to lift up a TIE Fighter using the Force, charge it with Force Lightning and throw it at a room full of people, essentially creating a bomb about the size of a small room.
  • If a game features one point where you can be killed by something you couldn't possibly have seen coming, it is massively irritating. If it features many such points, the game is completely ruined. I Wanna Be the Guy averages about three of these per screen, and it is awesome.
  • In City of Heroes, there is a viable strategy known as "tank stealth" which is the physical embodiment of this. Tanker class PCs in the higher levels can become almost utterly unkillable if they don't stick around to take damage. While stealth porter strategies commonly require that the porter in question not be noticed, a tank can essentially run an entire map full of dangerous enemies, shrug off their fire as he passes them, and teleport the entire team to the objective point. Due to aggro rules, the enemies will most likely not chase the tank as he has yet to lock their aggro on him. Apparently the image of an 8 foot tall block of granite running through your secret underground lair is clearly a hallucination and not a catastrophic breach of security.
    • With the advent of the custom mission creator, a number of people have chosen to go this way in creation. By filling their missions to the brim with either extremely strong custom enemies, or individual spawns of everything they can fit into whatever level range they're aiming for, perhaps people will ignore the entire event not making sense. Does it work?
  • Everything in Painkiller. Weapons include a weed whacker with a tractor beam attachment, a stake launcher that shoots * logs* at your enemies to impale them against walls, a machine gun rocket launcher combo, and a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning. And one moment you'll be using these weapons to fight Hell's Angels in a prison, and the next moment you'll be fighting ninjas at the Sydney Opera House. The game doesn't bother to explain why you're fighting ninjas at the Sydney Opera House, and by the time you get to that point, you won't care either.
  • MadWorld is Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 in Real Life. And is in black and white. On the Wii.
  • In Knights of the Old Republic, after discovering you're really Darth Revan, you can rub this in the face of the universe. Sure, nobody will believe you, but...
    • And then you come to Lehon, where the Rakata actually recognize you and are upset because last time you were there you told them you needed to get into the Temple of the Ancients so you could destroy the Star Forge. While last time you were lying and took over the Temple and the Star Forge and set out to conquer the galaxy, this time it's (possibly) a reasonably accurate description of your quest. Which you can tell them. ...yeah. They're not inclined to believe you.
    • For minor dialogue hilarity, name your character Darth Revan to begin with.
    • When you're trying to get into the Sith academy on Korriban, one of the things you can try is to Jedi Mind Trick the headmaster's apprentice into letting you in. It fails, but it still impresses her that you'd actually dare to try it.
  • Majora's Mask features a game run by Zoras with the premise of destroying a large number of pots standing in a pattern with a single attack. This can indeed be done in Zora form. Alternatively, you can take Goron form and use a Powder Barrel to simply blow them all up. The Zoras will take it in stride and accept it as a legitimate victory.
  • And then there's Mad Karate Man, who doesn't just beat up salarymen, with enough training he can take them off the face of the earth!
  • Bayonetta has Devil May Cry-style action taken Up to Eleven, featuring a Hot Witch protagonist who embodies no fewer than at least ten different fetishes, is (in the words of one reviewer) so confident in her overstated sexuality that she's intimidating more than attractive, starts a motorcycle by jamming her middle finger into the ignition, suplexes a dragon, uses buses as projectile weapons and finally punches God into the sun.
  • Power Instinct is probably the fighting game example of this. The plot revolves around a clan dominated by a pair of superhumanly strong, 80-year-old twin sisters who have the ability to transform into younger versions of themselves if they kiss their opponent. The series cast features typical fare with a Shotoclone, the all-around American guy, and The Chick, but other than that, we get a Magical Girl, a perverted old man who farts on his opponents, a young boy who is almost naked and can transform into a dog superhero based on his late dog, a giant muscular woman who wields a whip, a robot policewoman loaded with Fan Service, a burly S&M-looking man in his 40s who wields iron balls and has a homosexual relationship with a 17-year-old White-Haired Pretty Boy, a cameo of Bobby Strong as a boss, and much more. Atlus introduced yet another pair of elderly twin sisters in the latest series entry in 2009, and they haven't lost their touch.
  • Ar tonelico. Dear God, Ar Tonelico. The sheer amount of the crap that gets past the radar is just astounding...
  • Total Overdose: Even before prime character example Ram shows up, his father bases his DEA career off of this. The game itself features endless opportunities for violent mayhem without consequence against civilians and police, explosives up to the eyebrows, and Mexican caricatures and ethnic gags.
  • MDickie, justifying making his The You Testament sequel about Islam, and in the process, violating the taboo against depicting Mohammad. In summary: "Breaking the taboo is not actually blasphemy, because I don't want it to be and as a non-Muslim I know better than Muslims, and also the taboo is the real blasphemy because that way I'm actually a religious hero for breaking it."
  • Much of the entertainment in Grand Theft Auto comes from trope. Blowing up a cop car with a rocket launcher in broad daylight, picking up a hooker and killing her before taking a different hooker to same spot where you killed the first one, firing a shotgun into a dense crowd of businessmen, and in general doing awful, awful things for shits n' giggles, all of which you can do while wearing doctor scrubs.
    • Whilst GTA IV and it's first expansion stay at least remotely realistic, the same cannot be said for the last expansion, The Ballad of Gay Tony. The conclusion involves Luis receiving a You Are Too Late speech (as the villain is fleeing the country in a private jet to an unknown location), at which point, he proceeds to partake in a shootout/car-chase (involving a golden helicopter with miniguns and rocket launchers), chase a taking off jet on a motorbike, before jumping aboard and shooting the grenade-wielding Big Bad, only to finally sky-dive out of the exploding plane at terminal velocity to safety.
    • In many ways the modern 3d GTA games are toned down compared to the original, GTA 1&2 memorably included bonuses for such acts as: Destroying an ambulance and fire engine in quick succession (Medical Emergency), killing a large enough group of Hare Krishna (GOURANGA) and committing genocide. These bonuses would be highlighted in bright yellow letters, in the second title they would also be cheerfully announced game show style.
  • Rare realized that its game featuring context-sensitive commands, based in a lush woodland environment populated with cute woodland creatures, would look a lot like many of the other games it had come up with lately. What did they do? Transformed it into Conker's Bad Fur Day.
  • Mass Effect 2, when Shepard has the option of punching a female reporter mid-interview. The implications would be especially unfortunate for a Male Shepard under most circumstances, but considering said reporter is an intentional Scrappy who has a reputation for attempting to vilify you (indeed, the interrupt is triggered while she's trying to set you up for a fall), most see it as a well-deserved Take That. It's so popular that Shepard's dialogue has reached the levels of Memetic Mutation.

Shepard: I've had enough of your disingenuous assertions! *SHEPARD PAWNCH*

    • And FemShep has the option to do the same too, so it's not really a sexist double standard.
  • Duke Nukem's bread and butter.
The Secret to Duke's Humor is that he and his universe actually are serious. In his world, it makes perfect sense for families to be visiting the Fellatio hotel (i.e., the Bellagio) in Las Vegas. Everything in his world is real for them, authentic. It's only when we look at it through the lens of our world that we get the joke.
—Randy Pitchford, April 2011 US Xbox 360 Magazine on why the game's humor is so effective.
  • Operation Darkness has Nazi Vampires, Werewolves punching out tanks, then Jack the Ripper shows up, (as a protagonist, no less!) and just when you think it couldn't get anymore weird Adolf Hitler show up and starts summoning dragons!
  • Kingdom Hearts II has a quick time event in the final battle that lets you cut that skyscraper the boss just threw at you in half. With a key.
    • And then launch the broken pieces of said skyscraper back at said boss with said key. While floating in space.
  • Postal 2 goes for this Refuge in Audacity in numerous ways both subtle and overt. The more obvious means, in the original game, of causing havoc besides using firearms include, diseased cow heads that cause lethal vomiting of blood, setting people on fire, firing a disease-carrying "Weapon of Mass Destruction" bazooka to cause panicked people to spread a disease that induces vomiting and crawling on the ground, urinating on people's faces with a chance of inducing vomiting, and tasering people until they collapse onto the ground and urinate in a fetal position. Depending on who you ask, it's so ludicrous that it is hard to take this game seriously.
  • The Rance Series. Let's see, the protagonist is a Crazy Awesome Heroic Comedic Sociopath mass serial rapist who generally gets away with it since he is technically a hero(of sorts), the said protagonist's Leitmotif is a remix of East Germany's national anthem, an innumerable number of fetishes are played to, there are Deus Sex Machinas everywhere, Dead Baby Comedy is rampant, an insane amount of women are raped per game, Jerkass Gods play with humanity For the Evulz, and so on. Bonus points for being longer than anything else on this list and still on-going!!
  • The Saints Row series has this trope as its main gameplay feature. Saints Row the Third starts with a massive shootout while skydiving out of a plane. If thats not enough, when said plane comes right at you, you drop the girl you just saved, lose your parachute, fly THROUGH the plane, guns blazing, grabbing a new chute, coming out the other end and diving after the girl to save her AGAIN.
    • The best example is the evolution of the Japanese gangs in each game. The first game has your average street racing gang involved in shady crime deals. In the second game you get bikers with katanas. The third game has teleporting commandos on hover skates with shockwave hammers.
  • In-Universe in Assassin's Creed. When Thieves steal from people, they openly run up to them and do the deed visibly. No one protests. But when Ezio does it sneakily, the victim can somehow recognise him and try to fight back.
    • Fridge Brilliance. At no point in the series have you ever played as anyone except Desmond. The entire game world is built from your ancestor's memories. They don't remember what happens to anyone that they weren't directly involved in. So you never see a thief get caught, unless you catch him yourself, which you remember doing through the Animus because your ancestor caught him.
  • Sin and Punishment was an amazing on-rails shooter for the N64. Essentially Star Fox on foot, it featured hordes of enemies, tricky obstacle courses, huge bosses and A CITY BEING FLOODED BY A TSUNAMI OF BLOOD. It was rated T by the ESRB.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 Has this gem from the ESRB summary: "While the litany of somewhat 'gruesome' depictions attests to the Mature rating, the over-the-top onslaught is, in some ways, mitigated by the exaggerated menacing evil (camp?) of the drone-like zombie horde;"
  • The entire character of Alicetroemeria from Monster Girl Quest Paradox runs on this. To begin with, she's actually Black Alice, a tyrannical Monster Lord infamous for her cruelty. According to history, she was killed by the hero Heinrich 500 years before the game's events. Yet when you go back to that time period, you discover that she has disguised herself as a human and is travelling around the world with that very same Heinrich. Her "disguise" consists entirely of putting on different clothes, with her face completely unchanged, yet she somehow manages to fool almost everyone. The main characters immediately realize her true identity upon meeting her, yet are too terrified to reveal the truth.
  • Meta-example with Taiwanese developer-slash-bootlegging outfit NTDEC, whose full name was "Nintendo Electronic Co." Unsurprisingly, Nintendo filed a trademark lawsuit and brought the whole operation down for widespread bootlegging of NES games, but while most pirates sought to weasel themselves out of a trademark case by mincing if not outright removing Nintendo's trademarks, (an example of which are those pirate Game Boy multicarts with the wordmark "Nintendo GAME BOY" replaced with just "GAME") NTDEC simply didn't care if they appropriated Nintendo's name and the Pac-Man logo while they were at it. Surprisingly enough, they're still apparently operating to this day, albeit under the name Asder whose modus operandi is now in the production of children's educational electronic toys.
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