Wrong Genre Savvy/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


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Examples of Wrong Genre Savvy characters in Video Games include:

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Other Works, that need to be sorted by genre

Despite that, his Genre Savvyness does not fail him when he needs it most when doing stupidly dangerous and heroic at the game's climax. "You know what they say about the leading man? He never dies." When confronted with the fact that he's actually a supporting character, Balthier rejects such pessimism out of hand. He doesn't die.
    • Seifer of Final Fantasy VIII at one point declares his and Squall's roles to be, respectively, the heroic Knight and the evil mercenary. Later, having finally realized that the Big Bad has been using his aspirations toward knighthood to manipulate him, he declares himself a "young revolutionary" instead, although by that point he's less Wrong Genre Savvy and more just plain in denial.
    • It's ultimately subverted by Snow in Final Fantasy XIII: his conviction that he is The Hero in an idealistic setting where determination and a just cause will see him through any setbacks seems woefully out of place throughout the first two thirds of the game, and causes more cynical characters like Lightning and Hope no end of frustration. By the final battle, however, he proves to have been entirely right about everything except his own role in the party.
    • Zack at the start of Crisis Core displays this with a mix of Genre Blindness. He initially seems to think he's just a straight up hero and doesn't get how cynical the world he's in is. The Genre Blindness comes from not getting that Shinra is evil, or Professor Hojo is heartless sociopath despite him constantly locking you in a room with monsters For Science!.
  • We can't forget about Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth!! who appears to be entirely unaware that he's not the main character until Laharl teaches him otherwise. Hard.
    • Flonne makes the same mistake, along with other very wrong conclusions about the nature of the Netherworld inhabitants, about once a chapter in the first game. Apparently magical girl and tokusatsu shows are the only thing on in Celestia. Flonne is however right when assuming that demons aren't evil, and that her being around Laharl will cause him to turn good, it's just that she doesn't get that she is becoming his Morality Pet by just hanging around being her Love Freak self instead of the Easy Evangelism she attempted to invoke.
    • Despite how it may seem to some, Mao from Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice is right on the money. In the good ending he does win. It's just that he fails to realize that he's at the beginning of his story, and needs to go through The Hero's Journey before he can beat the Big Bad. On the other side, Aurum actually invokes the trope upon realizing that he's become the Big Bad.
    • Adell in Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories assumes that he's a hero saving the world from the Evil Overlord Zenon, since he's wasn't affected by Zenon's curse that turns everyone in his world into monsters. He's mostly right, but the real reason Zenon's curse didn't affect him is because he was born a demon.
    • Fuka in Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten believes her being the underworld is All Just a Dream, and refuses to acknowledge that she is in fact dead. This does unlock her full potential though.
    • Asagi does this throughout the franchise, as an ever escalating in-joke. She started as test character for a canceled game, and developed into an unlockable character whose shtick is to believe she's the main character and try to take over. Though at this point she appears to just be insane.
  • Ryotaro Dojima of Persona 4 is remarkably intelligent and prescient regarding a number of plot points in the game, such as discovering that Mitsuo is a copycat killer, how the victims are selected, and even the player's involvement, but his skills would be far more in tuned with a standard Police Procedural or whodunnit, not the Urban Fantasy he has the bad luck of being in, so he ends out of commission and unable to confront the actual Big Bad when he tries to get himself more involved. When he is eventually clued on what's really happening, his reaction is of utter disbelief.
  • The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion does this to the player. One of the early contracts for the Fighter's Guild has you going to a batty old woman's house to take care of a "rat problem" in her basement. However, unlike beginner rat-based missions from other RPGs, your job is to save the rats from mountain lions that have gotten into the old woman's basement. It makes sense in context, trust me.
    • This is actually an in-joke — the first FG mission in Morrowind does involve slaying rats for an identical-looking woman in Balmora, who shares her surname.
    • Which is dating back as far as Daggerfall, where the first FG mission is also a rat-killing one.
      • Which also has Fighter's Guild missions that involve killing beasts such as lions in the client's house.
    • There's a nod to it in Fallout 3, by the same developers wherein there's an optional quest to save the Vault bully's mom from Radroaches during your escape.
  • Midori of Devil Survivor convinces herself that she's some sort of hero of justice once she gets her hands on a COMP that lets her summon demons, and that the power of love always prevails over evil. How wrong is she? So wrong that she will get herself killed by an angry mob looking for a scapegoat if you don't make the right decisions.
    • What's really funny is that she gets a monster convinced it's a Magical Girl Warrior show too! And if you play your cards right, the same monster reappears as the Badass Black Frost -- doing the hero of justice shtick for the other demons
  • Bang Shishigami, HAMMER OF JUSTICE, thinks he's in a shonen anime. It shows. Seriously, one of his win quotes is "Tune in next week!"
  • Eversion manages to pull this off on the player. The game goes from a Sugar Bowl to horror surprisingly quickly. And then manages to end cute (if in a way a Nightmare Fetishist would enjoy) in the secret ending anyway.
  • In Mana Khemia, Flaya thinks he's in a Masked Superhero show instead of the Alchemy School Ontological Mystery RPG that it is. It allowed him to do some Crazy Awesome things up to convincing a Tournament Referee to replace his partner!
  • In the Professor Layton games, Inspector Chelmey acts like he's the main character and that Layton is the arrogant rival that tries to stop him from solving the crime by looking after an answer is found. In reality, Layton is the main character and Chelmey is the arrogant rival who instantly follows the first instinct he has.
  • Subterranean Animism, despite being a Shoot'Em Up, has one scenario which player character Marisa spends discussing in terms of RPG tropes, eventually getting her Mission Control Alice in on it too. Topics include whether a cave would have numbered floors (it apparently does), justification for ransacking houses (which Marisa would probably do anyway), and the necessity of talking to townspeople for hints (in a game where everything that isn't your character is an enemy), just for starters. Surprisingly, it doesn't slow them down for a second.
  • In Dragon Age Origins, King Cailan establishes himself as a great admirer of the Grey Wardens, and expresses his eagerness to fight alongside them to defeat the darkspawn like in all the stories he has read. Unfortunately for Cailan, Dragon Age is not that kind of fantasy.
    • Anybody who has read A Song of Ice and Fire and is aware that it was a great influence in this game will dub King Cailan "King Redshirt III" after hearing him speak for about 10 seconds.
  • In Dragon Age II, Cassandra Pentaghast adamantly tries between narrations to pin the blame of all the events of the game on a Big Bad. There is none. Varric even says that Meredith, corrupted by the Artifact of Doom, was irrelevant.
  • Eddie Riggs of Brutal Legend approaches the game from the perspective of a Heavy Metal roadie. This sometimes works—as he ends up in a place and time that runs on The Power of Rock—but other times, it falls squarely into this trope; for instance, he's the lead character and The Chosen One, but his immediate inclination is to assume he's supposed to play Hypercompetent Sidekick. Which is understandable, because even in a world like that, Eddie believes that he's the best roadie, and nothing more. In the end, he makes that work, because "I'm a roadie! I keep the trash off the stage!" Cue DECAPITATIOOOOOOOOOONN!
  • Strong Bad constantly hopes that Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People is an action game, instead of a point-and-clicker.
  • Zoey from Left 4 Dead. She's becomes a bit frustrated that the "zombies" aren't shamblers, but are instead violently insane people who can run, climb ladders, scale fences, etc.

"I can't get over how fast they all are, it's not even fair. I'm calling zombie bull---- on that, you know? [Giggles nervously] They're not...allowed to be so fast."

    • Worse than that, the The Sacrifice comic reveals that her wrong-genre-savvy-ness led her to mistakenly Mercy Kill her father after he was bitten. After being attacked by and having to mercy kill his infected wife, as soon he realized that he was bitten, he immediately assumed to be infected and asked Zoey to kill him before he turns because everything they knows about zombies wasin movies and that's what inevitably happens to every person infected by zombie viruses in films. She has something of a Heroic BSOD when she finds out he was actually immune to infection like her.
      • Of course, that was before Zoey knew she was immune herself. Plus, she just learned before the flashback that it was transmitted from the father's side, so... Not really her fault.
    • Most of the Survivors believe themselves to be people who are immune to the "outbreak", which they are. Unfortunatly whatever agent that causes the outbreak is still within them, making them "carriers" who would unintentionally spread the disease to everyone they came in contact with.
  • The Citadel Council in Mass Effect seem to think they're in a political thriller. They're wrong.
    • Oh, they are. It's just that they are in one that is driven along by the impending destruction of all advanced organic life by horrific mechanical creatures from the beyond.
    • They could be subverting a trope. At first glance, they do seem to fit it. On the other hand, they are the source of most of the intelligence the player needs to track Saren, most importantly Virmire, where they dispatched a Salarian espionage team specifically to track Saren.
  • Okami has a few imp merchants in some of the dungeons. They have no qualms about selling Amaterasu weapons and equipment, even though they must suspect she's going to use them to defeat their fellow Imps and their boss. Someone should tell these guys that this isn't a Gaming and Sports Anime And Manga about shopping.
    • Actually they are genre-savvy, they're taking "revenge" on her! They know that Amaterasu is going around massacring them, but what's a single cowardly imp going to do against a goddess. So they convince themselves that they're landing a few hits on her by taking her hard-earned cash in exchange for items.
  • To make a long story short, in Mega Man Legends, humanity assumed A.I. Is a Crapshoot, and prepared accordingly. Turns out, no, the AI was perfectly fine, but the preparations ended up making humanity look like Abusive Precursors.
  • Most of the cast of Tales of Symphonia initially believe themselves to be escorting Collete on her journey to revive their dying world and seal off an evil army called the Desians. Fairly soon they find a girl from a parallel world, Sheena, and that both worlds are vying for each others mana and they most likely can't save both of them, but they keep their hopes up and try anyways. Then comes the Wham! Episode moment that is tradition for the series, they find the angels that were setting up the whole thing are evil and are in league with the Desians, and they actually can save both worlds.
  • In the Elder Wars of Lusternia, Amberle was this. Being Purity Personified and reaching out to your enemies sense of kindness doesn't work so well, when you're in a Crapsack World and the foes are Cosmic Horrors. She dies pretty much instantly.
  • In Tomb Raider Anniversary, Pierre runs off with a piece of the Scion with Lara in hot pursuit. The statues outside of the tomb come to life and focus their attention on Pierre. Pierre then throws the Scion to Lara, thinking the monsters will go after her instead of him since she has the Scion. He gets attacked and killed by the monsters anyway.
  • Phoenix Wright in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 acts far more like he does in his own game than someone in a Fighting Game would. He hardly seems concerned with the fact that the "witnesses" are pummeling him with their fists and energy weapons. (Not that its the first time a witness tried to assault him, of course.) Thing is, while his method seems unorthodox it works if the player uses him right.
  • In Luigi's Mansion 3, Hellen's plan to capture Mario, Luigi, and Peach seems simple enough - nab Peach first, then wait for Mario and Luigi to charge to her rescue so she can grab them too, and this does indeed work on Mario. Just one problem - Luigi is very different than the lionhearted fearless hero his brother is. Upon seeing her Game Face and realizing she is King Boo's accomplice (and realizing he is unarmed and unprepared for a fight like this), he flees for his life, an action that ruins Hellen's initial plan and gives Luigi the chance to meet up with Professor Gadd, gain an updated version of the trusty ghost-busting Poltergust, and mount a rescue attempt his way.
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