Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Didnt Think This Through / Video Games

Go To

People not thinking things through in video games.

  • The Big Bad of AI: The Somnium Files, Saito Sejima, spends the game trying to undo something they brought upon themselves. When interrogating Rohan Kumakura (actually Falco in his body), they learn about the Psync machine and how it can induce a body swap. So they decide to try it out for the heck of it. The swap worked, but the prototype Psync machine didn't complete it, leaving both men with amnesia. Worse, the machine sedated the Psyncer's body while injecting a stimulant into the subject's body, so once it was disconnected, Falco-in-Saito's-body ran off, while Saito-in-Rohan's-body was left helpless in the machine. The main problem? Saito no longer had his original brain that was wired to feel pleasure from killing — which he liked. Saito, once he regained his memories, was not happy about this outcome and set out to try and fix the consequences while blaming the other party for the whole thing, even though the only reason this happened in the first place was their own curiosity.
  • Andrew Ryan of BioShock built the Underwater City of Rapture as an Objectivist utopia, but there were several holes in his plan that eventually led to the city's downfall.
    • Ryan's ambition was to create a city where the greatest minds in the world could live and work free from big government, religion, and people he deemed "parasites" telling any of them what to do. Of course, as Frank Fontaine pointed out, somebody's gotta do grunt work, even in such a city. And none of the geniuses who would want to move to Rapture would be happy with being forced into being an Almighty Janitor. This oversight regarding the working class ultimately led to Rapture's destruction.
    • Ryan's devotion to Objectivism blinds him to the role that charity and empathy play in human society; he genuinely thinks that everyone in Rapture will think like an Objectivist checklist and will always take actions that most benefit themselves at all times- something any real economist will tell you is far from true. He's utterly blindsided when his primary competitor, Fontaine, upstages him by appealing to Rapture's working class and fostering genuine loyalty in the disaffected losers of the game, because Ryan thought that everyone (except him) would accept losing at the game and would show no loyalty to someone who didn't pay them.
    • Ryan bought into the Original Position Fallacy in a big way; despite his objectivist ideals, he never considered that he himself might end up a victim of capitalism. When Fontaine Futuristics starts outcompeting him, he ends up having Fontaine killed and stealing his company. II also reveals that this happened with the fast travel railroad; Ryan invested a whole lot of money in it, then somebody invented bathyspheres and made it basically obsolete. Ryan was unable to handle the idea of losing a lot of money to both his own failure and simple bad luck and forced a bank bailout of the railroad, which helped ruin Rapture's already faltering economy.
    • For all his love of unfettered capitalism, Ryan forgot a basic rule about supply and demand: if you have a demand but no supply, the demand won't cease, people will just make the supply. In this case, forbidding all contact with the surface only allowed smugglers and organized criminals like Frank Fontaine to make a fortune bringing contraband into Rapture, such as beef, tobacco, movies, and bibles.
    • Ryan also failed to realize that getting rid of the government (and religion, to an extent) means getting rid of most of the social constructs that exist to counteract criminals, leaving Ryan with no real way to stop Fontaine's operations nor prevent people from overusing plasmids once they hit the market.
    • Ryan is openly dismissive about the field of psychology, but eventually brings Sofia Lamb into Rapture simply to fulfill a market demand. The Rapture novel reveals he didn't read any of her papers or research and simply hired the first big-name psychologist who could be trusted to keep their mouth shut about Rapture. If he'd vetted her at all he would've immediately noticed that her personal philosophy and background ran entirely opposed to his own, and could potentially become a problem down the line. As it was, he basically assumed that she was just another supply to provide, instead of a potential political rival in her own right.
  • BioShock Infinite:
    • About midway through, Booker makes a deal to get an airship out of Columbia, which, in fairness, was done right after he woke up from being bashed unconscious.
      Elizabeth: [incredulous] You can get us out of here?
      Booker: Yes! I just need to... [audible wince] supply enough weapons to arm an entire uprising.
    • After Booker and Elizabeth risk life and limb to get to gunmaker Chen Lin's impounded tools, they realize that the "tools" are more like machines — way too big and numerous to be transported anywhere, let alone all the way back the way they came from the shop.
      Booker: Well, we sure as hell aren't gonna be able to carry all this back to the shop. God, we didn't think this all the way through...
    • They end up solving it by shifting to a reality where the rebels already have the guns. Roaring success! Too bad in this reality nobody has any idea what the hell they're talking about when they say there was a deal.
    • At one point Elizabeth mentions that the revolution reminds her of Les Misérables and how romantic it all is. She might have forgotten the part where everyone dies in that story, or that her father would not be above doctoring all of her media, along with the rest of her life, to keep her naïve and controllable.
  • A frequent experience in Bomberman: Place a bomb, walk into an alley, realize alley is a dead end because of said bomb...
  • In the Borderlands 2 expansion Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage!, one side mission you get from Mr. Torgue involves a contaminated batch of beer being served at the tournament (a diseased midget fell in the vat). Mr. Torgue hires you to do a "product recall", and by "product recall" we mean "storm the bar the beer went to, kill everyone inside, and get the beer back so nobody gets hurt by the contaminated beer". Only when you've completed the mission does Mr. Torgue realize that what he just asked you to do "MADE NO SENSE G*D DAMNIT!"
    • He later hires you to go kill people with Torgue guns so he can use footage of it in an advert for Torgue guns. A radio advert. This time, he doesn't realize it.
    • He lives this trope in general as in his pursuit of the Rule of Cool, he ends up doing many short-sighted things, like trying to blow up a planet that he was currently on.
  • Castlevania:
  • Cave Story has a funny moment after the Player Character busts Kazuma Sakamoto out of the building he was trapped in in Grasstownnote /Bushlandsnote . Kazuma and Professor Booster notice a motorcycle nearby that Kazuma deduces still works. They get on board, Kazuma starts the ignition... and realizes too late that he has no idea how to control the motorcycle. He loses control and crashes, damaging the motorcycle beyond repair.
  • In the post-game of Chicory: A Colorful Tale, Zucchini finally finishes writing their book...but dreads that now they'll have to deal with editing, publishing, and marketing it.
  • In Chrono Trigger, Ozzie tries imprisoning Crono, Frog and co. in a cell within the Fiendlord's Keep by digging several pit-traps, but it quickly becomes obvious that he really did not put much thought into his plan. The "prison cell" he sends Crono and co. into via pit-trap contains harmless enemies that yield high amounts of EXP. and money, chests with helpful items, and one of the four fake Save Points is actually a teleport to freedom. Long story short: Ozzie, check that the selected cell has no easy escape route before digging your pit-traps!
  • Deathloop has a potential one at the end. When Colt finally manages to break and exit the time loop, he realises he forgot to consider why so many people would have chosen to enter a time loop in the first place....
  • Die Hard Trilogy 2's big plot twist is that Kenny, the old buddy of John's who invited him out to Las Vegas in the first place, was actually a Big Bad Friend who was in on the terrorists' scheme from the get-go. To review: Kenny —a guy secretly masterminding an evil terrorist plot— voluntarily invited his friend John McClane —who he can't possibly be unaware is a guy that has already foiled three evil terrorist plots almost singlehandedly, while killing nearly everyone who participated in them— to come and visit the city where he's planning to carry out his own evil terrorist plot. Naturally, hilarity of a decidedly "John foils the evil plot and kills all the bad guys" nature ensues.
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, Loghain's whole plan falls into this. Due to his delusions, he thinks that Orlais wants to reconquer Ferelden with the help of the Grey Wardens, and that the Blight is just propaganda. He fails to consider that a) the Wardens don't really care about politics, b) Orlais is not going to want the wasteland Ferelden will become once the Darkspawn are done and, oh yes, c) he's not doing anything against the whole Darkspawn horde that's ravaging the very country he wants to protect.
  • Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 plays with this in the Infinite History missions. If you bring in Gotenks to the first mission, he's in awe when his components' fathers become Super Saiyan 4, but decides to mock them by claiming that Fusion is so much cooler, prompting Goku and Vegeta to fuse into Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta. He's then reminded that now he has to defeat him, which the fusion warrior sheepishly realizes he never thought of.
  • Much of the Fun in Dwarf Fortress comes from the player neglecting to think things through, such as forgetting to make a proper drainage system for your water (or magma!) devices, cooking all the fort's seeds so there's nothing to plant for crops, building a prosperous fort without regard for thieves, knocking the last support out from under your megaproject...
  • Pops up all over the place in the Fallout universe.
    • Big Bad of the original game, The Master, plans to save the irradiated remains of humanity by turning everyone into Super Mutants. As a sufficiently smart Vault Dweller can inform him, his plan has a tiny hiccup: Super Mutants are sterile. Meaning if he succeeded, his Master Race would go extinct in a generation cause they can't reproduce. He does not take the news well.
    • Brian Virgil of Fallout 4 falls victim to this twice. First there's his plan to escape The Institute, which involves hiding out in the extremely irradiated Glowing Sea. He survives there by turning himself into a Super Mutant, not thinking that it would eventually start robbing him of his scientific intelligence. The second comes when you give him the cure, which he takes before leaving the Glowing Sea. Meaning he's basically trapped there forever.
  • In The Feeble Files, after Feeble returns to the city of Metro Prime from Cygnus Alpha, a prison colony that he escaped from, he's able to go to the automated Confession Booth and then "confess" that he is a rebel and that he will do what he can to overthrow OmniBrain and his totalitarian Omni Corporation. Later on we can hear an announcement saying that he's become this cycle's top confessor, and that he should go to the nearest Confession Booth to receive his "reward". Feeble remarks that what he just did was probably a really bad idea.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • In Final Fantasy VI, Sabin dives off a raft to fight Ultros, only to be swept away from the rest of the party by the strong current.
    • In Final Fantasy VIII, Rinoa, despite her good intentions, doesn't fully grasp the seriousness of the situations she's involved in, or the consequences her actions will have for others. She's fond of coming up with big plans but doesn't consider what will happen if they fail or if they succeed — they hijack the train car but she clearly doesn't have any idea what to do with "Deling" once they do. Part of her Character Development is outgrowing this.
      • Later, Squall gets into a space suit and leaves the Escape Pod to rescue Rinoa, who's floating out in space. Even though he succeeds, they're both stuck out in the middle of space, low on oxygen, and with no way to get back to the Planet. Fortunately, Deus ex Machina saves the day.
    • In Final Fantasy XIV, everything that happens in the game can be traced back to one particular plan: over 12,000 years ago, an Ancient named Hermes tasked his creations, Meteion and her sisters, to explore the cosmos and learn The Meaning of Life. However, all the worlds they've visited are dead or dying. The main Meteion learns this and quickly grows horrified and despondent. As Emet-Selch points out, such a purpose is flawed if there's no one around to ask such a question, or if the people questioned don't value life. This leads to Hermes pushing the main Meteion to escape into the cosmos and have the memories of these events erased from Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus and prompts Venat to create the Primal Hydaelyn to find a way to save the world and the people on it.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War:
    • In Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake, Echoes: Shadows of Valentia:
      • Jesse decides that it's a marvelous idea to chase after Grieth's thugs on his own to save Est. He realizes that going up against a gang of thieves and slavers alone was a bad idea when they just toss him in a dungeon, too.
      • In Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Rudolf's grand plan for the continent has a major oversight. He has no contingency plans to deal with the inevitable fallout when his "Well Done, Son" Guy ward and apparent heir presumptive Berkut realizes that his life's goal to become emperor was never possible and that everything he's ever worked for in his life was All for Nothing. The result is that Berkut concludes everyone in his life was just stringing him along for their own twisted amusement, crosses the Despair Event Horizon, makes a Deal with the Devil, murders his fiancée and his right-hand man, and throws his life away in a final mad attempt to kill Alm and take the throne for himself.
    • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the prologue mission involves defending three lords from a group of bandits out to kill them. It's later revealed that the Flame Emperor who ordered the assassination was in fact one of those very three lords. The one who came closest to getting killed, in fact. While it was necessary to be vague in order to prevent any of it from being traced back to them (and it's in fact hinted here and in Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes the bandits were supposed to fail anyways since they also fulfilled the goal of scaring off the teacher the Emperor's own inside-man would replace once the debacle became clear to the Church), the Emperor clearly didn't consider what might happen if one of the targets just decided to run off and throw the whole thing into disarray.
  • In the canon ending of Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location, Ennard successfully enters the protagonist's body. The hidden cutscenes for completing the Custom Nights show why choosing a corpse for a hiding spot isn't exactly the best of ideas.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach: seeing the player character Gregory racing along in a go-kart, Roxanne Wolf decides it's a great time to jump down in front of him, and let the kart bring him right to her. When he sees her, Gregory bails out of the cart, and Roxanne realises she actually just placed herself in the path of a heavy metal cart tumbling straight towards her at high speed. Just to rub it in, the game replays her Oh, Crap! expression in slow-mo, twice, and it's considered an amazing Funny Moment in what is generally a mild horror game. As a result, Gregory is able to remove Roxanne’s eyes- though this makes Roxanne more of a threat as she now relies on hearing to find out where he is.
  • Genshin Impact: Zhongli has a constant habit of forgetting to bring any money with him while working with you on the incredibly expensive Rite of Parting. It turns out, this is because he's Rex Lapis, the God of Contracts, and could always create money on the spot. This becomes a problem when he decides to give up his Gnosis, the source of his godly powers, to retire and live a normal life; Not only did he forget to set aside any kind of savings for himself while he could, he also didn't consider that the only mint on the continent was powered by said Gnosis, putting the global economy in jeopardy.
  • In Grand Theft Auto V, while he's not an idiot Trevor's schemes tend to not land the endgame due to the fact that he tends not to account for details or deliberately tries to squeeze out the crew's intel guy Lester (whom he doesn't see as immediately useful because he doesn't do field work). This leads to things such as a heist on a PMC cargo that results in them stealing nuclear weapons that they are forced to return or else become terrorists or a drug deal where the buyer is an undercover cop.
  • In GreedFall, during the Coin Guard's attempted coup against all three colonies, there's a dialog option to have the party member who's in that faction talk a group of conspirators into surrendering by pointing out that the entire plan was insanely stupid because in the extremely unlikely event that they actually succeeded, all they'd have accomplished would be to strand themselves on an island full of hostile natives because they'd have made enemies of every single country on the continent.
  • Guilty Gear XX: In her Arcade Mode story, Bridget is starting out as a bounty hunter and attempts to capture I-No. But I-No gives Bridget a bulletin full of fake bounties instead. Desperate to prove herself, Bridget accepts the list and sets off, never bothering to check if they're current or legitimate. As such, she causes Ky lots of grief when she arrives to turn in the bounties.
  • Quite a few times in the Henry Stickmin Series.
    • In Diamond, Henry ditches his motorcycle to escape the cops and succeeds, only to realize that he left the diamond behind on the motorcycle.
    • In Airship, Henry may try to blow up the exterior door with a bomb, and tries to take cover only to realize he has nowhere to go and blows himself up.
    • In Complex, Henry and Ellie get in a truck full of prisoners to escape... except nobody's driving the truck.
    • In the Completing the Mission path "Free Man", Henry can use a bomb to try to blow the door open, only to realize there is no space in his cell and blows himself up. In the same mission, he can try to use a grenade launcher to defend himself but ends up blowing a hole in the ship and getting sucked into space. The FAIL text even questions why the Toppats even have a rocket launcher on their space station, given the obvious results of its use.
    • In the mission "Valiant Hero", he can tell Charles to beam him aboard the Toppat Orbital Station... only to beam right in front of the leader and have a gun drawn on him. He can also ask Charles to use a Super Accurate Laser Shot to punch a hole through the ship, but the Toppats perceive this as an attack and activates the blast shields, splitting Henry in half.
  • Horizon Zero Dawn:
    • We find out that almost everything wrong with the world today goes back to one man: Ted Faro. His company created war robots that were unhackable, could hack enemy forces, could consume biomass for fuel, and could self-replicate out on the field. As expected by anyone with common sense, all of Earth was doomed when one swarm of these went rogue thanks to a glitch. A secret project (Project Zero Dawn) was dedicated to creating a super A.I for cracking codes to stop the plague and terraforming the Earth after the plague ate everything. Being a supreme narcissist, he deleted knowledge of the old world (part of the A.I) and killed everyone else on the project to cover up his role in humanity's extinction. This, even though plenty of records exist outside of the A.I which link him to the "Faro Plague". He deluded himself into thinking the deletion was to protect new humanity from the mistakes of old, but even then, lack of history guarantees the same mistakes would be made.
    • In one side quest, a young noble hires you to clear out the aggressive machines that attacked his family estate and killed everyone but his sister. It soon turns out that the noble deliberately lured the machines there to kill his family so he could inherit the property and associated fortune. You learn this when the noble arrives to gloat about his successful plan, only to be immediately snatched up and torn apart by machines because he invented a lure that would attract them, but never bothered inventing a way to actually control them once they were summoned.
  • At one point in Insanity, Keisuke discovers Yuuki stuck in a locker, having hidden in there from the Big Bad. Upon hearing him returning, they both jump into the locker to hide. It's only after the villain has gone that Keisuke points out that Yuuki got trapped in the same locker they just shut themselves in.
  • Done twice in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle. If you have a stand that keeps you locked within a single timeframe (or dimension), who's going to stop you but a Stand that can rewind time? Even worse, against a Hamon user?
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Larxene is trying to cheer Namine up about the plan. Namine replies that they want part of Kairi to replace Kairi in Sora's memories so that he'll forget Kairi. Spot the flaw in this plan.
    • King Mickey has a bit of an impulsive streak that causes him to leap headfirst into half developed plans. Case in point: in Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-, he confesses to Aqua that he spent so much time trying to figure out how to get into the Realm of Darkness that he never actually considered how he was going to get out.
    • In Kingdom Hearts III, this occurs at least twice.
      • The first time, everyone's going after a box in the Caribbean that's said to contain someone's heart. It doesn't seem to occur to any non-natives that it might contain an actual heart rather than a metaphysical one, as per the norm for the series.
      • The second time, Sora uses his Power of Waking to save his friends from the Lich after getting it handed to them by Xehanort and an insane number of Heartless. Unfortunately, turns out using something for a purpose other than its intended one will lead to a problem or two somewhere down the line. Case in point, Sora uses the Power of Waking so muchnote , he winds up disappearing after rescuing Kairi.
  • Kings Quest (2015): In Episode 3 Graham runs off on a well, guess, with naught but an engagement ring to a tower to find his future wife/one true love, because a magic mirror told him so. Once he gets to the top (and after getting rejected by both of them) the princesses imprisoned therein ask if he's got any rope. He was actually hoping for long hair.
    Princess Vee: You're a bit of a ropeless romantic, aren't you?
  • Mass Effect:
    • In Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC, Shepard is targeted by someone who wants to be them. No, not Conrad Verner; it turns out to be a plan to Kill and Replace Shepard by a Shepard clone. Clone Shepard, however, has absolutely no idea what the real Shepard is like; they're a narrow-minded Bad Boss and xenophobe worse than the purest of Renegade Shepards (who are the embodiment of pragmatism who want results by all means necessary, even if that means to cooperate with aliens to ensure humanity's standing to the galaxy), and even when they are on the Normandy, they make no effort to resemble the real deal aside from jacking their fingerprints. They even fire Samantha Traynor for "conduct unbecoming"/"fraternization" and try to dispose of Shepard's space hamster. Shepard even points out that fingerprints and Spectre status aren't going to fool anyone who actually knew Shepard for long. They would be found out within five minutes of meeting Fleet Admiral Steven Hackett, and even if they did replace Shepard, what was their plan for dealing with the Reapers? This also can be applied to Maya Brooks, the real mastermind of the mess, with all of her smarts that she managed to fool Shepard and the crew, it seems that both her xenophobia and arrogance also lead her to think that she doesn't have limits on manipulating Shepard's clone on longer term especially with a war going on.
    • In general, this is the Fatal Flaw of the salarians. Their short lifespans seem to make it hard for them to think out their actions on a long-term scale. What's worse is this applies to their entire culture, failing to remember the same mistakes they made long ago despite the rest of the galaxy being able to remember and tell them. For example, uplifting the krogans: First they use the krogan to wipe out the rachni. Then the krogan revolt because their Blood Knight nature combined with their extreme healing abilities and high birth rates (which is why they were chosen to fight the war in first place) forces them to start pushing onto other inhabited planets for living space. Seeing that their one-time soldiers can't be stopped by force they use the Genophage to drop birthrates to controllable levels.note  Eventually the salarians find an even more smartest, violent and strong species called the yahg, who killed the parties first sent to meet them, and think they will be a great idea to uplift.
    • The turians also show this tendency at times, most notably in the First Contact War. Due to the Rachni Wars 2000 years before, it is extremely illegal to unlock a mass relay without knowing what's on the other side, so a turian patrol fired on a human merchant flotilla that was opening relays left and right, then chased the one survivor back to a colony world and occupied it. During this whole debacle, the turians never considered that they were dealing with an uncontacted species with no way of knowing about the laws of Citadel Space and completely unknown capabilities, which left the turians with a nasty surprise when one of the human fleets showed up to liberate their colony world. The asari and salarians were NOT happy with the turians when they found out about the situation, knowing that everything about the First Contact War could have been prevented had someone from the turians established contact with the humans and gave them a proper welcome to the Citadel space.
    • The leviathans in their plan to create an AI that would stop conflict between organic and synthetic life and preserve that at any cost. Given such a command, the AI naturally came to accept that creating the Reapers, which exterminate all technologically advanced organic life every 50,000 years clearly fits the bill. So no wonder the existence of the leviathans is akin to believing in the Loch Ness Monster with all of their stellar empire wrecked and forgotten by the galaxy.
    • Mass Effect: Andromeda:
      • Liam's personal mission is one giant mess of this. He lends critical intel to some Angaran friends of his without considering what would happen to it if they were ever captured. He gets Ryder's help to launch a rescue mission, but fails to plan any further than "sneak aboard the raider's ship inside a storage crate" and has no idea what to do once they're there.
      • Peebee's Loyalty Mission wouldn't happen without this. There's a doohickey on a planet Peebee's found, but the problem is the Tempest can't land because it's a volcanic planet and there is nowhere to land. So she tricks Ryder and the other squadmate into the ship's escape pod and fires it at the surface. Once there, she has to admit she's got no plan for getting off-planet again. If her ex hadn't followed them with her own shuttle, they'd never have been able to.
      • Proving some salarians just don't learn, the fate of the Paarchero, the salarian ark, is rife with this. The salarians wake up in Andromeda, off-course but aware of the kett. Salarian military doctrine is to learn everything about the enemy before fighting, then turn the enemy's strengths against them. So some of the ark's leadership decide they need to learn about exaltation. Their solution? Sell the Paarchero out to the kett, resulting in dozens, if not hundreds, of salarians being horrifically experimented on and / or killed. One of the conspirators, when caught, insists it had to be done, apparently not knowing that anyone exalted has their memories either removed, or no longer has any emotional connection to their past life, so even if they had the knowledge, there'd have been no way to utilise it. Ryder points out the sheer stupidity of this approach.
        Ryder: "Hey, I know how to not get us all exalted: Get us all exalted!" You idiot!
      • Ultimately, this is Zig-Zagged for the Andromeda Initiative overall. While they had the foresight to plot out potential habitable planets for each of their species, they didn't take into consideration the fact that they had little to no intel as to who or what could be inhabiting the new galaxy, and as such they went in armed with little more than small arms and a few light combat ships...which turned out to be a problem when they arrived and the main bad guys were flying fully armed capital ships around. Granted, the entire expedition knew how blind they were going in, and they were also faced down with a massive Outside-Context Problem in the form of the Scourgenote  but it still doesn't excuse the fact that they walked into Andromeda with no heavy firepower nor the means to manufacture that firepower to back them up in case things went pear-shaped, although there turns out to be a reason for that. The Initiative left earlier than intended because they found out about the impending Reaper invasion.
  • In Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, the Big Bad sends Master Detectives to investigate Kanai Ward so they can serve as their pawns while conducting their plan to oust Yomi Hellsmile, the Peacekeepers' director, from power over Amaterasu Corporation and usurp management, seeing as him an obstacle in his protection of the defective homunculi in the city. Said Big Bad is Makoto Kagutsuchi, Amaterasu Corporation's CEO, who fails to properly protect them from the Peacekeepers he knows are dangerous, giving Yomi the opening to kill dozens of them on their journey to Kanai Ward. Not that Makoto cares, that is.
  • In the Flash game Mastermind: World Conqueror, you play as the evil mastermind with a goal to destroy the world. When you finally succeed, you see the world explode from your space pod...and are then offered a small menu of cheesy lines you can say with no one to hear you and your oxygen running out.
  • Mega Man 11: According to Torch Man's bio, he once tried a type of training where he stands under a raging waterfall. The result was that he needed heavy repairs that took three months.
  • In Mother 3, In order to protect himself from the main party, Porky, without thinking, locks himself into the Absolutely Safe Capsule. However, it really is absolutely safe, meaning that once someone enters it, there’s no way in or out. In other words, Porky is stuck in it for the rest of eternity. Oddly enough, he seems perfectly fine with this.
  • Octopath Traveler:
    • In Cyrus' Chapter 1, his student Therese, who has a one-sided crush on him, starts an untrue rumor that Cyrus has entered into an illicit relationship with Princess Mary out of jealously at his eagerness to answer her relative's questions in class. She did not think of the possibility that the rumor would be taken seriously enough to get Cyrus placed on sabbatical, and does not take it well when she realizes the result.
    • At the start of Primrose's route, we get a flashback where three mysterious assassins dressed in black robes and bearing tattoos of a crow break into her home and murder her father for finding out information about their organization that is strictly forbidden to outsiders. This incident happened when Primrose was still a little girl, and it traumatized her and formed her desire for revenge. It apparently did not occur to the three Crow Men that having their Obviously Evil criminal tattoos exposed for all to see when breaking into a noble House where many people would either be living or working there, or leaving Primrose alive when she was hiding right there in the room to witness the murder and let out a cry of horror, might not be a good idea. Sure enough, ten years later, their neglect comes back to bite them when a now-adult Primrose picks up on their trail, using their crow tattoos to identify them as her father's murderers.
    • Three NPCs are convinced by a Manipulative Bastard that they can bring someone they love Back from the Dead if they ally themselves with them, either presently or in their backstory: Ophilia's adoptive sister Lianna believes The Savior when he tells her that he can resurrect her recently-deceased father if she steals the ember from Ophilia, and both Graham and Kit Crossford believe Lyblac when she tells them that passing through the Gate of Finis will help them bring back their wife and father, respectively. In their grief, it doesn't occur to any of them that they might be being lied to until it's too late.
  • The scientists on the Anti-Shadow Weapon project from Persona 4: Arena clearly never considered how a robot with emotions and a personality might react if she was made to kill her friends once they'd outlived their usefulness to the project. Predictably, she turns against her masters and uses her newly developed Persona to make them pay.
  • In Path of Exile while using time travel shenanigans to influence the future of the Vaal temple, Adventurer Archaeologist Alva will comment on the player's choices. If you decide to encourage the architect who's obsessed with filling the temple you plan to later raid with traps, she'll comment she's not sure you thought this through.
  • In Persona 5, when the group's working on identifying some burglars threatening Shibuya, Yusuke proposes luring them to Leblanc, like they did in The Daybreakers OVA. Unfortunately, not only would such a plan result in the protagonist getting kicked out, but Yusuke forgot that he left his mother's painting, the Sayuri, in there. Luckily, cooler heads prevail and the Thieves go with another plan.
  • In Pikmin 3, the entirety of Koppai seems to be like this. One of the main reasons that the planet is suffering such a major food shortage is that there was “a basic lack of planning.”
  • Antagonists in the Pokémon series have a tendency to suffer from lack of forethought.
    • Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 has a fabulous example from Ghetsis, surprisingly. He orders Kyurem to attack the player character directly, rightly expecting this to force N into action to stop the attack, so he can steal N's legendary dragon and fuse it with Kyurem, which he controls. The thing he didn't take into account? N's actions did save the player character, who beats the daylights out of him and Kyurem in defense of their rescuer.
    • In Pokémon Sun and Moon, as you invade Aether Foundation's headquarters, you encounter Faba, who has the key to president Lusamine's office. He had allowed you to defeat him so he can gather more Aether employees to defeat you, Hau and Gladion. When Hau asks if he had the key and Faba responds in the affirmative, Hau pointed out that if he had just stayed hidden, they would have been stuck forever. Faba is gobsmacked at being outsmarted.
    • And now Galarian villains get in on the action in Pokémon Sword and Shield, during the post-game. A pair of pompous "celebrities" claiming to be descended from the ancient kings of Galar are upset by the player's discovery during the main game that the real heroes of long ago were the legendary Zacian and Zamazenta, feeling it undermines their lineage. They proceed to lure the opposing version's mascot to the middle of the region and bombard it with Galar particles with intent to drive it into a wild frenzy, causing the people to see them as 'false kings'. The flaw in this plan? Every child who wants to be a Pokémon Trainer knows that you don't go where wild Pokémon roam, because they'll attack you. The descendants drive the legendary wild on the top of a building when they're the only people there, and expect it to go into town and attack people instead of attacking the people right in front of it. The player character and their version's mascot have to pull a couple Big Damn Heroes moments to get them to realize how idiotic and selfish they're being.
    • In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Commander Kamado turns into a Hero Antagonist after things get worse with the spacetime rift and you, the player, are the prime suspect. He decides that if you can unmake the rift, he'll accept your innocence on the matter... but while you're running around preparing to do just that, an Olympus Mon is sighted inside the rift, and Kamado intends to fight and kill it. Adaman and Irida are baffled by this display of thoughtless impulsiveness.
    • Many Gym Leaders and Elite Four members suffer from this as despite all their preparations, they can still be easily taken down via ways they did not plan for. For instance, most Grass-type Gym Leaders (except for Cilan, Ramos and Brassius) in their rematches will teach their Pokémon Sunny Day to activate the various benefits like one-turn use Solar Beams. However, it also powers up your Fire-types allowing you to cook their team easily. Likewise, in Flint's initial match in BDSP, his Drifblim knows four status moves, so if you nail Drifblim with a Taunt (the opponent's Pokémon can only use attacking moves for three turns), the Blimp Pokémon can only use Struggle until being switched out.
  • This is more or less the defining trait of Wheatley in Portal 2. As a particular example, in one scene after Chell escapes from a deathtrap, Wheatley calls to her to come back. If you actually go back, Wheatley realizes that he cannot reset the trap and he has no other trap prepared, and apologetically resorts to asking you to throw yourself down an obvious pit.
  • In the bonus route of Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable, Homura spends all her efforts to save everyone individually from their despair and/or death, and prevent Madoka from making a contract. Great! Then Walpurgisnacht shows up, and they're not ready to fight her as a team. Homura gives up and bails before the battle even starts.
  • In Ratchet & Clank (2002), Captain Qwark is especially guilty of this. To wit, Qwark, who is initially made out to be a courageous and noble superhero who will help the titular duo stop Chairman Drek's, is revealed to be a shameless, self-promoting fraud who is on Drek's payroll as part of a PR comeback deal in which he will be named the spokesperson of Drek's new planet in exchange for killing Ratchet and Clank. Even if he had succeeded in killing them, he'd have to contend with the fact that he knowingly took sides with a genocidal warmonger who rendered billions homeless by destroying planets for the new blarg homeworld and possibly even killed countless people when everyone was expecting Qwark to defeat Drek, meaning that he'd be just as reviled as Drek himself once it'd inevitably come to light that he was in league with him. On top of that, it becomes clear that Qwark is completely in over his head, what with his dimwitted personality and being too washed up to even try fighting Ratchet on foot and being forced to cowtow to Drek in order to get sponsorship for his comeback, and the failure of his first attempt at killing Ratchet blows up in his face when it causes Drek to ream him out for not following his orders to the letter and causes a vengeful Ratchet to gun for him and eventually hand him his ass during the games second act, resulting in his comeback and reputation going down in flames.
  • Red Dead Redemption 2, Dutch Van der Linde prides himself on always having a plan... it's just too bad that most of 'em are terrible plans, he absolutely refuses to change them until whatever he's doing has already blown up in his face (often resulting in the unnecessary death of someone in the gang), and he never learns that maybe it's better to account for probable consequences in the first place rather than make new bad plans to deal with the results of the previous bad plans.
  • River City Girls: After beating the final boss, Misako and Kyoko decide to dropkick them out the window. Unfortunately, they dropkick the boss so hard that they wind up flying out the window as well. And they're on the top floor of a skyscraper. They admit that they really should have thought about this beforehand.
  • Skies of Arcadia: During a boss battle with a giant sky-squid, Vyse has the opportunity to flank from the back or the front of the squid. Normally, you'd want to flank from the back, since most ships don't have strong rear weapons while your battleship has high-powered frontal cannons... except that's when Aika asks Vyse which side the normal-sized sky-squids shoot their ink from. Whoops.
  • Something you can do in Smackdown vs Raw 2011 ladder matches: have you and your partner both climb up a ladder. The opponents get up and realize they could just tip the ladder over. Cue doing just that.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Spider-Man: Miles Morales: Both of the main villains suffer from this.
    • Simon Krieger is a sociopath who likes to resort to skullduggery to get the immediate job done... in a way that leaves him with even worse problems down the line that he'd have avoided if he'd played fair. For example, he killed the lead scientist on the Nuform project when he wanted out, but the guy was the only one who could actually make nuform so now he's screwed if he can't reverse-engineer it fast. He breaks his deals with both the Prowler and the Rhino, and expects them to not go after him because of it (Rhino gets defeated by Spider-Man and imprisoned first, but Prowler testifies against him in court, resulting in him going to jail), and the Nuform project itself (extremely toxic fuel, reactor housed in a crowded city) is basically asking to end in some sort of disaster that results in Roxxon being investigated. And he paid extra to have the reactor housed in Roxxon Square (NYC real estate ain't cheap) instead of installing it out of town like normal power plants.
    • The Tinkerer has the excuse of not being in the best state of mind, but even their own minions (who are in it for the tech the Tinkerer provides) realize that blowing up the nuform reactor is an extremely stupid move that won't do what they want; Phin will be blamed for the terrorist attack, Roxxon will get off scot-free since the plaza is insured and she still has no evidence that Krieger killed her brother Rick, and most of Harlem will be dead. Though, to be fair, the stupid plan was Plan B, and Plan A was 'gather legitimate evidence and turn it over to the police', but Miles' mistakes kept destroying it before they could do anything.
  • In Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, Amazing Spider-Man finds one of the pieces of the Tablet in a construction zone, only to get caught up in a battle between the Juggernaut and Silver Sable and the Wild Pack. Juggernaut accidentally stepped on the Tablet piece and has it wedged in his foot, but Sable is bearing down on him with firepower. Spidey spots and tosses away the tracker Sable planted on Juggernaut, leading her and her men to chase after it, leaving Spidey alone with the Juggernaut, a decision he regrets a split-second later.
  • In Star Fox 64, after defeating Andross, the Star Fox team is offered a position to work for the Cornerian Army, pretty much guaranteeing a life of luxury and the chance to pay off the 80-year loan James took to build the Great Fox. Fox said no as that would mean not doing things their own way anymore. Because it so happens that mercenary work isn't as lucrative as it looked, cue the team turning into space hobos multiple times and the team itself having internal conflicts with each other.
  • In Star Wars: The Old Republic:
    • The Republic has a top-secret prison on the planet Belsavis, where they send people who will never be allowed back into the galaxy again. Unfortunately, they never thought about what would happen when a closed population inevitably started having children, none of whom had ever been convicted of a crime, yet were still considered prisoners. Eventually, these descendants started a movement to gain their freedom, which left them open to the Empire's offers...
    • On the other side of the coin, when the Sith invade Belsavis they start opening every vault they come across, unleashing the prisoners inside to cause problems for the Republic. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Belsavis is an artificial planet custom-built as a prison by the Rakata; sure enough, eventually the Sith unleash a race of Omnicidal Maniacs with technology far beyond the Empire or Republic, who in turn try to free the world-eating god imprisoned in the planet's core.
    • Towards the end of the Imperial Agent's storyline the Dark Council grows displeased with Imperial Intelligence and disbands the organization. However, they don't consider how vulnerable the Empire will be without a spy network to provide information and guard against foreign and domestic threats. To make matters worse, Intelligence was the Only Sane Employee and kept everything running smoothly throughout the Empire. Without them the Empire's situation quickly goes from bad to dire.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
  • Lord Harkon in the Dawnguard expansion of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, plans to black out the sun permanently so vampires can hunt all they want. However, not only would this likely motivate the Empire of Cyrodiil, the Stormcloaks (both of which are currently locked in a Civil War) and maybe even the Aldmeri Dominion to drop what they're doing to fight the vampires, but the dragons currently threatening Skyrim would certainly start hunting down the vampires as a result of messing with the sun, which they'd view as defiance against Akatosh. For added stupidity, the return of dragons is part of the prophecy he's trying to fulfill, yet at no point does he attempt to develop a counter to the dragons. And as another character points out, blacking out the sun would inevitably cause all life to die out, leaving vampires without a food source even if they somehow managed to escape everything else. His own wife is working against him because she realized that all of the above factors would lead to their victory being a very short one, and she'd rather stick with the relatively nice deal they have now.
  • Tales of Symphonia: In the Temple of Earth, one of the Gnomelettes offers to help Lloyd and his party reach the Summon Spirit with the brilliant plan of causing an earthquake to break a bridge while they are standing on top of it. After the bridge gives way and drops them some thirty feet into the valley below, Lloyd points out that the plan almost got them killed, and the Gnomelette admits that he "didn't think about what would happen after it fell".
  • This is very much the modus operandi of Nate in Uncharted, his most famous quote being "I didn't think that far ahead". On a small scale he often carries out solutions to problems without thinking about the consequences of the aftermath; one moment in the second game has him quoting the trope verbatim as he uses a train car to bust out of a repair shed, alerting all the enemies in the area. On a larger scale this is his overall theme throughout the series; other characters often point out that he's often going up against incredibly dangerous people for the treasures he seeks, which always lands him in their bad blood and frequently sends him to jail. The third and fourth games even have the backstories themselves construed to warn him of the danger, yet he doesn't think anything of it and plows ahead on the adventure, putting him and his loved ones in constant peril and biting him in the ass later.
  • One of Flowey's ultimate goals throughout Undertale is to goad the protagonist into becoming a killer, because he thinks they're his best friend from the time when he had a soul, and he wants them to become like him so they can be together again. If you go for the Genocide Route, he'll become much nicer to the protagonist before realizing somewhere around New Home that "kill everyone" means him too. On the other hand, if you play the Pacifist Run, Flowey devours all the other monsters to regain his soul... and with it, his conscience.
  • During a bonus chapter of Valkyria Chronicles 4 Riley charges out of a hot spring to confront the guys when she hears them making misogynistic comments... forgetting that she doesn't have anything on.
  • At the end of Wario Land: Shake It!, After Wario beats the Shake King and nabs the Bottomless Coin Sack, Captain Syrup steals the bag and the coins and drives off. The Merfle then nervously reveals that he went to Captain Syrup first and cut a deal with her to give her the Bottomless Coin Sack in exchange for a "Consultant's Fee". Wario, angry at having been screwed over, chases the Merfle around Wario's garage, the latter having not thought about not telling Wario about his deal with Captain Syrup right away.
  • The MacGuffin in Yakuza 6 is revealed to be a "Yamato"-class battleship built under the oversight of the the yakuza and paid for with embezzled funds. Where it drifts into this trope is that by the time construction started the battleship as a ship class was already obsolete and aircraft carriers were the kings of naval warfare, and the "Yamato"-class was Awesome, but Impractical to begin with. By the time construction ended, World War Two was already over, and the ship had no function whatsoever other than supplying the Onomichi yakuza with excellent blackmail material. Apparently, Minoru Daidoji just really loved him some battleships.
  • In the tutorial for Zoo Tycoon Dinosaur Digs, when you learn about how to build a Dinosaur enclosure (for a T rex) you are eventually prompted to go ahead and remove a wall piece, which of course releases the T Rex and it starts to kill your guests. The tutorial then blames you for not thinking ahead.

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top