Excuse Plot / Video Games

"The object of Kinetic is to pilot your spaceship (bounce your ball with sticky-out bits) across the myriad screens collecting three giant letters P, X and A which have to be formed into a Latin word and presented to the Kinemator. (This is what we in the trade know as a 'make it up as you go along' plot)."

— Graham Taylor, in Sinclair User issue 62

Seeing as most games are made for the gameplay, first and foremost, expect a lot of Excuse Plots in video games.

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#-M

• 100% Orange Juice!: Most of the campaigns qualify, however, Kai's has everyone explicitly mentioning that playing a game of dice will move the plot forward.
• Most of the games in Action 52 have some kind of premise explained in the game's manual. Most of them are variants of "you're being attacked by monsters." The only game to have anything even resembling a plot is Cheetahmen, which gets an opening cutscene that explains the story to be "guy gets Trapped in TV Land, three anthropomorpic cheetah people declare that they will now fight to protect him."
• The Adventures of Lomax: An evil wizard named Evil Ed turned lemmings into monsters and Lomax has to save them. There isn't even any actual explanation about the story in the game itself (only in the manual). You just go around, defeating enemies and going through worlds that are hardly connected to each other (Lemmingland, horror world, The Wild West and Space Zone), culminating with you fighting against the game's Final Boss that you saw earlier only on the world map shown between levels.
• Agony (1992) was supposed to have an intro cutscene telling the story, but was scrapped as the intro cutscene would have taken up another floppy disk and resulted in the game costing more to manufacture. Instead, the most you get in-game is a single screen on the intro credits announcing in bold letters "ALESTES METAMORPHOSES INTO AN OWL. THE TIME TO FIGHT HAS COME." There is much more lore and context All There in the Manual yet that single in-game screen sums up all the bearing it has on the game you're about to play.
• Admittedly, the prompts are more guidelines of where you start than anything concrete in AI Dungeon 2, as things tend to frequently go Off the Rails fast unless the player is deliberately using the 'story' command to try and keep an internal logic going.
• In Akane the Kunoichi, the plot is deliberately simple (you're rescuing someone), and there's no text or speech — just a short, dialogue-free cutscene at the beginning and another at the end. The fact that Akane is in love with Goro, for example, is just communicated by a rising column of floaty heart symbols.
• Alien Hallway: There are aliens in the hallway. Aliens are bad. Shoot them. That's all the plot you need.
• Alien Swarm: You're drafted into the army to defeat a swarm of aliens and search for survivors.
• Altered Beast (1988)'s plot can be summarized as "Elmer Fudd commands you to Rise from Your Grave and rescue his daughter."
• AMID EVIL: As a Retraux shooter game based on Unreal and the like, this is to be expected. The whole story is just "evil monsters took our weapons and territory; go kill them all to prove your worth."
• Angband gives your character the following to-do list: Acquire a lantern, kill Sauron on floor 99, and kill Morgoth on floor 100.
• Angry Birds:
  • The Pigs stole the Birds' eggs to eat, and you have to recover them by flinging the Birds with a slingshot at the Pigs' buildings to defeat them.
  • Angry Birds Rio has a slightly more complex plot, the main Birds are captured by bird smugglers and taken to Brazil, and they have to save the other locked Birds and defeat Nigel and his minions.
  • Angry Birds Space has the same plot as the first one, but IN SPACE!
  • Angry Birds Go!: The pigs are having a race for cake, the birds come by and see the cake too and also want it. Thus joining in on the racetrack.
  • Angry Birds Epic: Same as the first game again, but rather than use a slingshot this time, everyone's LARPing for some reason instead.
• The The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures series, intentionally styled after an 8-bit NES game, has an equally flimsy plot for each game.
  • In the first game, the Nerd and company are sucked into a shitty game. The final boss used his magic game powers to pull them into the game. Go find him and kill him.
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd II: ASSimilation: The world got turned into a shitty video game and The Nostalgia Critic stole your stuff. Go make things right. Deluxe deepens the plot slightly by having Fred Fucks and his supercomputer be responsible for everything.
  • The Tower of Torment expansion has the Nerd outside when the titular big floating tower shows up and a figure flips him off, then says that his games suck. So the Nerd, outraged, hops into a UFO (that the narration even notes just so happened to be there for whatever reason) and flies up to the castle entrance to punish the figure, and must scale the tower to reach them.
• Ao Oni is a survival horror game, which can be boiled down to "dodge the Oni, solve puzzles, escape". While version 1 puts more into developing a reason for the characters' being there (Takuro was curious about the place, so his three friends went along with it, dragging two underclassmen along for the ride to see how they'd react), subsequent versions do away with the two underclassmen and settle on curiosity as a suitable reason (version 6.23 reveals it was Takeshi who had convinced his friends to enter the mansion instead).
• The ZX Spectrum game Arcturus has 22 in-game pages of plot involving the development and destruction of at least three intergalactic civilizations, with Earth set to be the fourth. It's quite a phenomenal backdrop and story to justify the fact that, underneath it all, the game is actually just 4x4x4 Tic-Tac-Toe.
• Arkanoid actually has a somewhat complex plot: The starship Arkanoid is destroyed by (something) and you escape in the ship Vaus, This leads to bouncing a ball off the Vaus to destroy blocks because Vaus is "TRAPPED IN SPACE WARPED BY SOMEONE" mumble mumble mumble DIMENSION-CONTROLLING FORT "DOH". Well, yes.
• Arthur's Nightmare: You're an embittered Arthur fan who dreams about having to collect Woogles^note a once-popular toy from an episode of the show in Arthur's house while avoiding its murderous residents.
• Atlantica Online has only a thin thread linking all the quests: Atlantis has disappeared, Oriharukon somehow leaked out and is now screwing up the planet's history, and it's up to you and your fellow Remnants to lead your armies and right every wrong.
• Awesomenauts: The year is 3587. Red and Blue robots are fighting each other across the galaxy for metal Solar. Go engage in wacky 80s-inspired multiplayer mayhem.
• In Bad Dudes, the premise of the game was that the US had recently been hit by a wave of ninja crime, and the White House was their latest target. (As the arcade version phrases it, "RAMPANT NINJA RELATED CRIME THESE DAYS... WHITE HOUSE IS NOT THE EXCEPTION...") This is only really referred to in the opening cutscenes, and the primary goal of the Player Character was simply to beat everyone up.
• Other than a short three-paragraph summary at the start of the game, Banana Nababa doesn't really have a complex plot. It mainly amounts to a wizard stealing six jewels and now some guy has to kill six bosses in a tower in order to get them all back.
• The Amiga Shoot 'Em Up Banshee has a very tongue-in-cheek take on the clichéd scenario of Earth facing an Alien Invasion in the year 1999. The introductory text explains that this Earth belongs to an Alternate Universe without color television and that the Styx killed our hero's father "for refusing to invent the microwave oven."
• Battlefield:
  • In the second game, it is never stated why the war is taking place, although one map hints to it being about oil, but no info as to why the USA is fighting China too.
  • Battlefield 3's attempt at a serious plot is so generic and cliched that one wonders if the game is better served without a campaign at all. To elaborate: the villain is given no backstory or even a general motivation for why he wants World War III. The CIA believe that the Russians are going to nuke America for no reason other than they're Russian. Three Russians have full knowledge of a terrorist attack on French soil and yet tell nobody and mow down wave after wave of innocent French policemen to stop the terrorist attack. They fail anyway. The sequel reveals that war happened anyway, therefore making the whole game a "Shaggy Dog" Story. This might have been a fairly unique twist- how many video games end on a full-on Downer Ending with no Multiple Endings?- if anybody actually dwelled on this, as none of the characters from the third game turn up in the fourth bar three, all of whom die in the same level they're introduced in and never mention previous events. Oh, and there's something about a coup in Iran but it's never explained beyond one line.
    • Similarly, neither of the games in the Bad Company subseries offers even the slightest explanation for why the United States is at war with the Russian Federation (yes, Russian Federation, not the Soviet Union, so communism can be ruled out), much less why the latter is projecting forces all over the Western Hemisphere in the second game.
• In Bendy in Nightmare Run, Bendy and his friends get chased because Bendy causes trouble.
• Big Nose Freaks Out: The short intro cutscene shows that Big Nose the caveman is on a quest to get back his bone after it was stolen by a dinosaur. That's it. Now go do some platforming!
• Blast Corps: A carrier is carrying defective nuclear warheads. They leaked, necessitating setting it on autopilot to head straight to its destination regardless of what's in the way when a single impact could set the nukes off and cause nuclear winter. Your job is to destroy every obstacle in its path. Even after you avert the nuclear crisis, you are then called back into action to destroy more buildings because a damaged space shuttle needs to make an emergency landing and it's in the middle of a town. After that, you are called to go to the Moon to clean up debris left there by mankind and your team know just how silly the whole thing is, but they go along with it anyway. Just more excuses to blow stuff up and no one is complaining.
• Blaster Master: Jason's pet frog got loose and jumped onto a box of radioactive waste that just happened to be sticking out of a hole in the ground in his backyard. After the box and frog fall down the hole, Jason jumps in after them, landing in a vast underground mutant-inhabited world where he immediately finds a super-advanced tank just sitting around. Now Jason has to go fight the mutants to get his frog back.
• Blood: Ax-Crazy Wild West gunslinger goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge after his god betrays him and kills his lover and best friends.
• BLOODCRUSHER II randomly generates its storyline for each playthrough, meaning the player can fight Communist Nazis on the Moon.
• Body Blows: Some fighters are battling each other in a tournament hosted by a guy named Max (who is revealed to be a robot). The sequel, Body Blows Galactic, is even more blatant in that it is about two of those fighters from the last game challenging a bunch of aliens to prove who is the strongest in the universe. Averted by the last game, Ultimate Body Blows, due to having no plot at all.
• Bomb Chicken: A bomb-laying chicken attempts to escape a fried-chicken factory. There isn't much more to the story than that, but then, not much more is needed. The true "plot" is revealed in the last couple of levels, but it's kind of a Gainax Ending that isn't clearly foreshadowed earlier in the game.
• Bomberman games' stories basically boil down to "Some Galactic Conqueror jerk is trying to take over the universe, go stop him!"
• Borderlands's plot can be best summed up as this: Something about a Vault - Cool! A revolver that shoots shotgun shells! And an SMG that lights people on fire! And - well, you get the idea. It's a common joke among the fandom that there is only a plot in the first half-hour and the last (when the Guardian Angel calls you up to remind you about that Vault thing). Word of God says that they started out wanting to do something at least somewhat serious and Fallout-like, but...
  • Most of this comes from the fact that the actual plot (yes, there is one) is told through text boxes when accepting and completing quests, which most players don't bother to read. The sequel and subsequent games avert this by having full dialogue for all missions.
• BPM: Bullets Per Minute: Monsters from Helheim are invading Asgard! Are you a bad enough valkyrie to kill them all to the beat of a rockin' soundtrack?
• The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout: Bugs Bunny's fan club is celebrating his 50th birthday, but his jealous Looney Tunes co-stars don't like this and do everything they can to obstruct his way to the party.
• Canabalt: Run and jump across the rooftops to escape... something. The background featuring Humongous Mecha stomping through a wrecked city shows that you don't want to be around here, but that's all you get.
• Candy Crush Saga: After the player clears the first set of levels, Tiffi declares to go out and explore the world, helping people along the way. The player then has to clear the levels in each episode in order to progress, but the plot remains light.
• Capcom vs.:
  • The plot for Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes goes like this: Onslaught does evil things. Use characters from the Marvel Universe and Capcom to beat him.
  • In Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Ruby Heart summons the heroes of the Marvel and Capcom universes to stop Abyss.
  • In Marvel vs. Capcom 3, it's Doctor Doom teaming up with Albert Wesker and gathering villains from both companies to take over both Worlds. That said, they are giving a little more effort than in 2.
  • Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is even worse: Characters live in TV Land. They beat up each other. The end.
  • Ultimate All-Stars elaborates a bit: Yami pulls multiple characters from both sides into a mishmash of dimensions; They beat each other up until they realize what happened, then go to settle the matter in the final boss fight.
  • Averted with Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, which is the first Capcom Vs. game to have an actual Story Mode.
• The developers of Carmageddon were forced to come up with a literal Excuse Plot to allow the game's release in the United Kingdom, where the full blood version was refused a rating by the BBFC, effectively banning it. To get around it, they swapped the pedestrian sprites for legions of the undead, tinted everyone visible in the starting FMV a bit green, and changed its voiceover to make the same scenes as in the North American release appear to be about a vehicular crusade to exterminate the zombies.
• Castle Crashers: "Four princesses have been kidnapped! You there, color-coded knights! Go rescue them!"
• Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. Castlevania has once again risen... inside a book. So the book brings the heroes to life to destroy the castle. Inside a book.
• Catacomb Abyss: "Your arch rival Nemesis has summoned the dark forces of the underworld to destroy all that is good." That's about it. There's some other background information to be found, but it's mainly about the creepy places you'll be going to, which are in themselves a large part of what this game series is all about.
• Cat Poke: You're a little girl who can't go out because it's raining. The most fun you can have at the moment is butt-poking all nine of your cats. Might as well!
• Chip's Challenge had a storyline as an excuse for its puzzles. Chip wants to join a club, and all the levels take place inside a magic clubhouse which serves as the entry test.
• Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is set in the kingdom of Agatha, where the evil (and vaguely communist) Mason Order are trying to overthrow the feudal order, and the loyal and brave Agatha Knights must fight to stop them and keep peace in the... Oh, whatever, just go chop some heads off!
• Jaleco's City Connection had one of the cutest plots ever. You're a tourist who stole a huge load of paint from a hardware store in New York, and the police have just put out an APB on you. The only way to shake them is to paint every inch of the Big Apple's single-lane, three-level highway system. Along the way you have to either avoid the cop cars or shoot cans of oil at them and ram them, as well as not hit any of the enormous cats or roadblocks that show up out of nowhere. Once you're done with New York, it's on to various other cities around the world with increasingly screwy single-lane three-level highway systems.
• Clarence's Big Chance: Averted. Though the plot isn't very deep, it doesn't just get forgotten immediately after the beginning.
• Clean Asia: Human eyes are revealed to be symbiotic aliens which turn against their masters and attack Earth. Two blind pilots must drive the invaders out of Asia. The plot has no bearing on the gameplay, but it's memorable for how bizarre it is.
• Columns: Being a puzzle game, it can't help but fall into this trope.
  • The first game has some blurb in the instruction manual about it being a game played by jewel traders in the Near East or some such.
  • Super Columns for the Game Gear had a plot about getting an amulet back from an evil merchant. You get past her minions by challenging them to the titular game.
  • Columns III had your character as an Adventurer Archaeologist attempting to find the treasure of the Pyramids. You battle bats, skeletons, scorpions, and mummies... once again by playing a Puzzle Game.
• Combat Arms: Virtually no plot is given, save for little blurbs on loading screens that mention why Team A and Team B are fighting.
• Condemned: Criminal Origins. You're an FBI agent. A serial killer just shot and killed two cops with your gun and, based on that rock-solid evidence and despite your complete lack of a motive, you're now a wanted man. Your only option is to fight through a horde of Crazy Homeless People to find the real killer.
• Congo Bongo was a 1983 Sega arcade game that had more than a little in common with Donkey Kong, but the plot, if you could call it that, was much lamer. After the mischievous ape gives the hunter a hotfoot while asleep, the hunter is willing to risk life and limb chasing down the big ape, avoiding wild animals and dangerous terrain to get even - by giving the ape a hotfoot.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day has actually been considered to be an outright parody of an Excuse Plot: Conker gets drunk at a pub, wanders off into the night, wakes up hungover in a place he doesn't recognize, and sets off on a quest to get back home. Meanwhile, the Panther King schemes to kidnap Conker because a red squirrel is the exact height needed to replace the King's broken table leg, which he uses to hold his milk. The plot later thickens as it is revealed that the King's right-hand scientist has been incubating an Alien life-form in the king's stomach, and his attempts to capture Conker are to ensure that the King won't go without his milk.
• Contra: Every single bit of plot is just an excuse to let you go and mow through enemies with your gun. Invoked in Contra: Rebirth.
• Cook, Serve, Delicious!: You have to help a dilapidated restaurant climb through the star ratings by serving enough orders and making enough money. Minigames ensue.
• Downplayed in the erotic Web Game Corruption of Champions. The sexy encounters are, of course, the main draw of the game, and the main plot thread is just slight enough to qualify for this trope - Hot as Hell demons from another dimension have opened a portal near your home town, and a champion must be sent through it each year to keep them in check on their home turf; are you a bad enough dude(ette) to end the threat once and for all? However, the background plot is very engaging, and the gameplay mechanics make it easy enough to ignore the juicy bits if you're not really in the mood for them.
• Crackdown has a plot involving gangs and genetically enhanced soldiers. It's really an excuse to tear up a city with your superheroic gunslinger. And for some reason, the creator of the genetically enhanced soldiers is not just a mad scientist, but a devil worshipper?
• In Crop Rotation, you receive CR-3000, a machine which automates farming. You only have eight weeks to earn money with it so you can pay off the year-end loan. That's it for the plot since all you have to do is to arrange your crop cards in the machine to plant and harvest them for money.
• From Crystal Crazy's instructions: "Although it might be possible to think up some contrived scenario like you're a ship raiding somebody else's crystals while some nasties try to stop you, it wouldn't really be worth it."
• Cuphead: The creators admit that the plot, which involves the eponymous Cuphead and his brother Mugman losing a bet with the Devil and having to hunt down the Devil's other debtors, is just an excuse for the game's string of boss fights.
• In the ten-second introduction to Cyber Chaser, the Giant Robot boss sticks its claw in the middle of the road and the title character crashes his car into it, apparently making him mad enough to chase after the thing.
• Dawn of War: This trope is one of the (many) reasons why Soulstorm, the third expansion, is so despised. While the previous three campaigns possessed fairly intricate stories with detailed characters (though Dark Crusade was pushing it), Soulstorm's campaign is "a Negative Space Wedgie attracts nearly every faction in the galaxy to a single system. They fight".
• DarkOrbit: It's a bunch of years into the future. Humanity has left Earth and colonized the stars, but needs resources. Three mining companies have formed. They can't get along. Here's your ship. Join one of the companies and kill everybody not in it. Where did all the aliens come from, and why aren't the corporations more worried about killing them than each other?
• The first game in the Deadly Rooms of Death series is basically, a king's dungeon is full of monsters and he's paying you to kill them so his prisoners can receive their torture in a clean and safe environment. However, the second game takes the question of why the dungeon is full of puzzles built around the monsters, and turns the quest for the answer into a Kudzu Plot spanning two more sequels, a prequel, and several DLC level sets.
• Deadly Towers uses a ridiculously long Opening Scroll to explain that the plot involves a prince about to come of age who has to defeat a devil threatening his kingdom by burning down the seven towers of the devil's castle.
• Dead or Alive:
  • Xtreme Beach Volleyball makes an attempt to justify transposing the female fighters of the Dead or Alive series into a volleyball tournament/lesbian dating-simulation. They are tricked by one of the male fighters into visiting an island. When they discover that there will be no fighting, they put aside their mortal enmities, play volleyball and other minigames, and buy each other skimpy clothing. And then they fall for it again in the sequel (although only one of them, Hitomi, fell for the same trick twice; the other females at least got there from a different trick).
  • In Xtreme Beach Volleyball, Zack (the least important character, and with no connection whatsoever to anyone else in DoA) builds an island resort with his gambling winnings. No reason given, and before you ask, he has a girlfriend now (in fact, she helped him with this project). It's eventually destroyed by a volcanic eruption. In Xtreme 2, Zack discovers "the treasure of the Pharaohs", which he uses to... hire an alien spaceship to restore his resort. Again, no explanation offered by any party as to why Zack is doing this, never attempted to search for a safer location, is only interested in women he faced in a fighting tournament in the past, etc. Aaaand, it's ultimately destroyed by a second volcanic eruption, culminating in Zack plunging several hundred feet into the flames. This isn't really spoiling a damn thing here, it's really that much more gratuitous than any softcore porn flick.
  • Never mind that, how about the actual Dead or Alive? Lessee...something about a dead rich guy, something about a big nasty corporation, something about French opera, something about a wrestling league, something about bioengineered life forms, something about constantly bickering ninjas...ah, screw it! Bring on the ass-kicking, fanservice, and counter moves!
    • The fighting games do have the overall story of DOATEC hosting a fighting tournament. The actual reason for characters fighting is unique to each, ranging from wanting revenge for family members (Kasumi), wanting money for selfish reasons (Zack) or wanting money to help a family member (Gen Fu).
• Death Road to Canada: The zombie apocalypse has broken out, no one knows why. Canada is safe, no one knows how. Florida got boring, go on a road trip.
• Demonophobia: You're a girl who wakes up to find herself in Hell. Seek a way out. And brutally die trying. Mainly the latter.
• Descent: You are a space mercenary who is hired by an unscrupulous space mining corporation. Apparently, the AI controlling their space mines has gone rogue and you need to travel to each mine, destroy the robots, destroy the reactor, and get out safely. Made even more ridiculous because the supposed "mining robots" include a "drilling" bot with an under-mounted chain gun and robots that dig with homing missiles. As the game progresses the makers lose all pretense of designing "mining" robots and explain the spike covered fusion shooting monstrosities as a "top secret military test."
• Defense of the Ancients:
  • Supposedly, the game is about a war between the Sentinel and the Scourge. Ignoring the Big Hero Little War issues, it is little more of an excuse to get a bunch of heroes into teams and beat on each other while trying to reach the Instant-Win Condition. There are some bits of Backstory in the item descriptions, but that is all we really get to know about the world's past. Dota 2 is even worse, since it drops the Warcraft tie-in pretense and leaves it with nothing but "two ancient gods don't like each other and summon warriors to fight".
  • At one point, main developer Icefrog added a third "neutral" faction to "spice things up", he went as far as making a convocation to allow players to write the backstory for the characters in the neutral faction. Sometime later, when he was running out of space for placing new heroes he simply deleted the neutral faction and relocated the heroes back into the two main factions, he didn't even brought up the issue, not like anyone cared anyway. ^note It should be mentioned that this tied into a feature that required Scourge Heroes to only play on the Scourge side, and Sentinel Heroes to only play on the Sentinel side. But since nobody cared about "lore accuracy", and most players played on a mode that removed that feature, which is part of what led to removal of both "Neutrals" and the "only play on your lore side" feature, we come right back around to Excuse Plot territory.
• In Diner Dash: Flo Through Time - The plot is as follows: A broken microwave sends Flo and Grandma through time. And apparently, a lot of their customers since we have teenagers and jerks talking on cellphones in the middle ages...
• Dodonpachi uses an Excuse Plot until the ending, and even The Reveal is something of an excuse. Still pretty awesome though. "See you in hell!" Donpachi and subsequent games are a Deconstruction of this trope.
• Doom:
  • The quote on the main page is from the lead programmer of the first game. There was originally a long and complex plot with multiple protagonists. This was cut and the plot was reduced to: "You're the last Space Marine left on Mars. Shoot anything that moves." Obviously, this didn't detract from its success. There's also a "Go To Hell and Back" part, but that's not really important outside of giving you a chance for more demon-slaying.
  • Doom II: The whole plot is "You return to Earth, only to find that the situation is even worse than it was on Mars." Never mind that the game reuses the exact same textures/graphics from the original and that absolutely nothing about it looks like "Earth."
  • Doom 64 has a bit of backstory about how Doomguy suffers from PTSD due to his past adventures, but the game is still focused on "kill demons and have fun".
  • Doom (2016) subverts this. The game plays up its primary focus on gameplay and killing demons over story, but if you look carefully, there's a great story told by the in-game lore. Direct sequel Doom Eternal takes it one step further by revealing the Doom Slayer is the exact same Doomguy from the original games, giving the series a whole mythology about his aeons-long war against Hell (there's even mention of a nameless Dark Lord manipulating everything from behind the scenes).
• Donkey Kong:
  • Donkey Kong Country: Crocodiles have stolen your bananas. Get your bananas back. Cranky Kong had to point this out.
  • Donkey Kong Land: Cranky and the Kongs argue if its predecessor sold because of graphics or gameplay, Cranky tells Donkey and Diddy to save the banana hoard again on Game Boy.
  • Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest: Donkey Kong has been kidnapped by crocodiles. Are you a bad enough monkey to rescue Donkey Kong?
  • Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!: Donkey and Diddy Kong are missing. Go find them.
  • Donkey Kong Jungle Beat: DK wants to be King of the Jungle, so he tracks down and beats up all the biggest animals he can find, claiming their territory until he eventually meets up with the Cactus King, who had brainwashed the game's bosses. Not that Donkey cares, he just beats the king up to prove he's the baddest Gorilla in all the land. The Wii Updated Re-release rectified that last bit by changing the plot from "DK (is a Jerkass and) pummels everyone to absolute pulps to prove his superiority" to "Some big, weird animals from distant lands have stolen your bananas. Get your bananas back."
  • The original Donkey Kong game - "Some big, weird animal from a distant land has stolen your girlfriend. Get your girlfriend back." The big weird animal in this case being Donkey Kong, and Mario has to do the saving, so maybe Donkey Kong as a Jerkass makes a bit more sense?
• Dragon Ball: Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans: A mad scientist is out for revenge against the Saiyans, and has started flooding the Earth with Destron Gas to weaken the planet's protectors (thus justifying the need to level up and relearn each character's signature moves) while using a supercomputer to resurrect the Saiyans' victims, which also happens to include Frieza and a slew of villains from the Non-Serial Movies.
• Dragon Master: In this South Korean-made Street Fighter II knockoff, an otherworldly demonic being named Garner has kidnapped a woman and you have to fight your way through numerous opponents to confront him and rescue the woman.
• Dual Cat: Two cats are just minding their own business when robots suddenly storm their place and haul them back to the robots' lab. One of the cats with his over-the-top Playing Possum powers must navigate the lab to rescue his friend and escape.
• Duke Nukem 3D: Aliens have invaded earth and are stealing our babes! Are you a bad enough dude to stop them?
• Dweep is a puzzle game about controlling a character with the goal of getting him to a specific place. This gameplay can, of course, accommodate many possible simplistic "plots". In the game, the character is a purple Waddling Head and his goal is to reach his children, and that's about all the story there is.
• Dynamite Dux: You're a duck (or two ducks) whose owner has been captured by a wizard. Go save her.
• Pretty much the point of the Mission Mode from Dynasty Warriors: Gundam. It had several out of character moments just for the sake of fighting. For example Zechs Merquise's mission involves destroying every mecha that fires energy just to prove melee is the way to go. Master Asia wants to beat up every under age pilot as some kind of hardcore psychologist. A girl can also invite the player to beat up her own older brother Judau Ashta as a punishment. Even couples fight for ridiculous or unexplained reasons.
• Earthworm Jim: Don't let your enemies take your super suit. Also, protect Princess What's-Her-Name, cause they're after her for some reason.
• Einhänder has an Excuse Plot of pointless neverending war right up until the Wham Level. That, at best, one player in twenty survived to reach.
• Enduro Racer was an early Sega motorcycle game where you zip through twisty, rock-strewn, jump-filled roads for no clear reason. If you reach the end (NOT an easy task), you're rewarded with this revelatory info: "'Enduro' is a symbolic journey through life via the media of a race. The results are insignificant and what really counts is competing. The lessons to be learned concerning one's self are of particular importance from the various encounters you experience along the way. There is no victor or loser in this test of endurance; the only thing that really matters is that you make a commitment to begin the long and trying trek. This game is then dedicated to all of the 'life riders' who have started out on the solitary trip to find their own individual limits. Last but not least, may we sincerely congratulate you on a perfect run." Well, at least that last line makes sense...
• Eskimo Bob Starring Alfonzo: "Hey, Bob! The seal's gone missing! Let's go find him!". The hunt involves collecting lots of fish for some reason.
• "princess is kidnapped. you must save princess." That's the entire Excuse Plot for Eversion, complete with (lack of) capitalization. This is stolen from the old MSX game Crusader.
• Evil West: You're a vampire hunter with experimental electric weapons. Go punch / shoot zombie vampires.
• Lampshaded in the very title of one of the Adventure Time games, Explore the Dungeon Because I DON'T KNOW!
• The entire plot of Factorio is "You're an engineer whose spaceship has crashed on a planet named Nauvius. You'll need to recreate the industrial revolution to build the factory you'll need to build the rocket to get off the planet. Mind the natives, they hate pollution."
• Fancy Island: Mimi the Cat Girl has gotten herself trapped in the titular Amusement Park of Doom, which is haunted by the Pieyama God and many hostile spirits. Get to the gallery to escape.
• Fancy Pants Adventures 2: "You must go in after him! For justice! For humanity! For World 2 to have a plotline!"
• Fatal Racing: The top eight car manufacturers hold Car Fu races every year. The winning company enjoys a massive boost in sales. Represent your company well.
• Final Fantasy XIV: No, not the game itself. FFXIV has an amazing story. However, the PVP battlegrounds definitely have an excuse plot. It is a major plot point that the 3 Grand Companies (factions) are allies. The PVP battleground story is basically "Yes, we're allies. But there are these ruins that each of the companies wants to get to first, so we're fighting over those. Want to come help?" Even the NPC acknowledges that it is a Hand Wave just so the game can have PVP.
• In Find Mii, the little adventure game that comes with the Nintendo 3DS's StreetPass Mii Plaza, your main Mii is the ruler of a kingdom. Monsters break into the palace and kidnap him/her. Use Streetpass to recruit heroes and go rescue them. The sequel uses the same plot, aside from adding a prince and princess to the list of royals who need saving.
• While the main story of Fire Emblem: Awakening is definitely not an Excuse Plot, most of the DLC episodes can be summed up as "Wouldn't it be cool if Ike fought Roy? Or Marth fought Sigurd?" Then there's the Golden Pack, which was made solely for easy grinding and features absurd plots like a group of zombies threatening vegetables or somehow stealing all of your units personal funds. Only Chrom seems to realize how ridiculous these situations are.
• The First Funky Fighter has a beautiful lady kidnapped as your main reason to punch suckers out of a massive bunch of wacky crocodiles and sharks!!
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • The plot of the first few games in the series have you play as a security guard trying to ward off Suck E. Cheese's style robots that are trying to kill you throughout your entire shift. Now, this premise raises several questions; firstly, why the hell would anyone keep coming back to a minimum wage job at a kid's pizza place when they have a probability of being murdered each night? Secondly, it's odd a security guard would even be needed, as you'd think the homicidal animatronics would take care of any intruders themselves. You can keep coming up with many more points... but all in all, it's irrelevant. No one is playing these games for the complex character of the Night Guard. You playing as a security guard is just an excuse to experience a strategic game of protecting yourself against killer robots, along with uncovering the deeper lore regarding the actual story of these games.
  • Freddy in Space 3: Chica in Space has an in-universe version of the series' creator acknowledge that the game exists just to be a diversion from having to release any new footage from the franchise's live-action movie... though he says he might show off said footage if the player can beat it.
• The Interactive Fiction game For A Change has quite a lot of plot, but it gets a mention for its iconic intro.
  The sun has gone. It must be brought. You have a rock.
• Forza Horizon: … Something to do with a motor racing festival? Now race some cars!
• The basic plot of Friday Night Funkin' is that you have a hot new girlfriend, but her ex-rockstar dad doesn't approve of you dating her, so you have to beat him in a rap battle to prove you're fit to date her. This plot only really applies to the game's first and (maybe) fourth weeks of the game, and only really exists to set up the game's mechanics of rap battling.
• Friction literally doesn't have a plot besides "kill bad guys and destroy their gigantic war machines".
• Fury³ does have a plot—rogue bionic warriors are rising again to take over the galaxy (or maybe universe, it's never specified)—but in general, all a player needs to know is that you go to random places on random planets and shoot everything that moves. Except for trees.
• The official plot of Galaxian is "We are the Galaxians. Mission: destroy aliens", not even explaining whether this is instructions for the player character or a threat from the enemy. Even the supplementary material doesn't explain this.
  • Galaga it is made clearer that the name refers to the enemies. One can reasonably assume the same of the earlier game.
• Tecmo's Gemini Wing had a ridiculous plot in the manual of the Western computer versions, in which all the civilized alien races decide to invade Earth because of some journalist wrote the headline "DIE MUTANT ALIEN SCUM."
• Gensou Skydrift has a rather confusing plot involving spiritual energy being stolen as part of the Big Bad's plan to escape to The Outside World, but it's really just an excuse for the girls of Touhou Project to indulge in some Wacky Racing using each other as Body Sleds.
• Glider PRO houses rarely made an effort to provide a justification for the auto-generated opening message of "get every star to win", though a few such as "SpacePods" tried to work in a flimsy premise. The game's engine doesn't really allow a different mode of play.
• Giana Sisters:
  • Giana Sisters DS: Giana's treasure chest spilled a bunch of blue diamonds into a black hole, which sends Giana into a magical world. Giana has to find the diamonds and discover the secret of her treasure chest.
  • Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams:
    • Your sister was pulled into a dream world and has been captured by a dragon. Go rescue her!
    • Dream Runners has Giana split into four after an emotional breakdown, and the perpetrator challenges the four to a race to decide which is worthy to return to the waking world. But most people are unaware of even this much of a plot.
• God Hand doesn't even bother to hide how it's mainly all about beating up thugs, demons, robots, and the occasional gorilla in a wrestling mask. The story's actually kind of neat, but it never gets in the way, serving instead to flimsily justify the next level. Even the characters joke about how ridiculous it is.
• Gotham City Impostors is about a bunch of trigger-happy vigilantes calling themselves the Bats fighting the equally trigger-happy Jokerz, all serving as an excuse for frantic multiplayer FPS action.
• Many of the Grand Theft Auto games rely on "the protagonist needs money!" as an excuse to do missions.
  • In Grand Theft Auto III it doesn't even make sense. Claude is betrayed by his girlfriend and is out for revenge. However, you will quickly get more money than you'll ever need by just doing main missions, which in the context of the story doesn't bring you any closer to Catalina. Claude could have easily just waited for the bridges to open, asked around town for info on Catalina, then hunted her down.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Tommy was attacked during a drug deal he oversaw for Sonny Forelli, costing Sonny a huge sum of money.
  • For the most part averted in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, however during Catalina's missions, Carl remarks that he "seriously needs the paper." It's not made clear exactly how money would help him.
  • Even the otherwise good character Victor Vance ends up doing criminal work to help his family in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories.
  • In Grand Theft Auto IV, Roman Bellic blows all his money on gambling or gets in debt with criminals, forcing Niko to get more.
  • Grand Theft Auto V:
    • The main storyline deconstructs what can happen to an Excuse Plot when the excuse no longer applies. Once the Villain Protagonist duo has accomplished their initial goal of settling their debt to Madrazo — which happens very early in the plot — their sole remaining motivation for their continued crime spree is pure greed and self-interest...which also solves the problem of Gameplay and Story Segregation by demonstrating just who would casually run people over and steal cars without a shred of guilt.
    • The Rampages parody the trope. The player must kill as many of a certain character group (gang members, soldiers, etc.) before the time runs out, but unlike with earlier games in the series where the Rampage just starts up, this time they're reframed as Trevor having a psychotic episode, going on killing sprees over very minor insults.
    • In general, GTA V plays with the trope almost every possible way before the end, with subversions, lampshades, straight examples, etc. The characters' motivations vary widely depending on the mission, from the comically thin (e.g. the aforementioned Rampages) to ones that are not excuses at all (e.g. a corrupt government agent forces you to do his dirty work).
• Gratuitous Space Battles: There's a war on. Go fight it. Hey, it's called Gratuitous Space Battles for a reason!
• Here's our story in Gruntz: the orange gruntz were having fun with their toys. Then one of them found some mysterious giant buttons on the ground. Pressing them opened a strange gate with a portal in it. At this moment, they were attacked by blue gruntz. In a desperate effort to save themselves, orange gruntz jumped into the portal, and blue gruntz followed them. Cue them having to go through numerous puzzles to come back home.
• In the flash game Gun Bot, the "plot" is being made up on the spot by a developer who was so busy with making the game that he forgot to add in a plot, deciding to just make it up as he goes along. This is the reason why a robot has a bug for a little sister.
• Gundam Vs. Gundam has the Devil Gundam come to life and take over arcade machines for games representing all of the franchise's 30-year history, forcing the characters to work together and save their virtual existences. No, really.
• Gunz The Duel. The actual plot is only a couple of paragraphs, and considering there are no cutscenes, it's barely noticeable in-game. Made more ridiculous by the fact that it calls itself an MMORPG. The Korean version has PVE questing and dungeons, but nobody plays this side of the game. Quest mode has you blasting up goblins and other mobs until the map is cleared, and occasionally fighting a boss along the way.
• The various sub-games in Half-Minute Hero all boil down to one of the following: "You have 30 seconds to save the world/defeat all the enemies before sunrise/get back home before the gate closes/guard the sage casting the kill-everything magic". There's an overarching plot that connects all the sub-games together, but the game is too tongue-in-cheek to take it too seriously. The sequel, on the other hand, tries to have a plot.
• A fangame series called Happy Tree Friends Adventures has most of its games' plots summed up as this: A princess bear is kidnapped by Bowser, go rescue her. The only exceptions are the spinoff games (except for the Game Boy-styled Retraux, which uses the same main plot as the main (numbered) games).
• Most games in the Harvest Moon series. The basic plot for these games boils down to this: Friend/Relative X has died and left Player Y with Farm Z. Now go farm on it and steal the village women. The Rune Factory spinoffs vary from this slightly, where the protagonists have Laser-Guided Amnesia... and therefore need to farm and kill goblins.
• Has-Been Heroes: The two remaining heroes from the Epic Band of Heroes and a rogue are recruited by the king to take his daughters to school.
• Hatred was designed with this in mind. You're an unnamed misanthropic psychopath who hates the world and everyone in it; go slaughter every innocent person you see.
• Haunted House: You are going through a mansion trying to collect pieces of a magic urn that belonged to the town and were stolen by the previous owner of the mansion. While traveling through the mansion, you have to avoid the ghost of the former owner, along with a bat and some spiders. If any of them touch you, they will scare you to death.
• Head over Heels: Jon Ritman freely admits that he "made the whole game up then added the bullshit in the last fifteen minutes".
• Heroes of the Storm, previously called "Blizzard Dota" and "Blizzard All-Stars", is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena that was originally a mini-game for Starcraft II but is now a free-to-play standalone game. It features player-controlled hero characters from various Blizzard games fighting it out in a crossover of several franchises. An early trailer mentioned some backstory involving two gods in dire need of some entertainment who kidnap the heroes from their respective universes. The announcer in the trailer then states outright that "these heroes are forced to fight to the death in an endless battle with no purpose other than ladder points!"
  Thrall: Wait, what? What do you mean there's lore in this game? You guys actually paid someone to write a story about Raynor meeting Diablo? Isn't this precisely what fan-fiction is for? I didn't approve any of this!
• Hoard. You're a dragon! Burn kingdoms! Steal treasure! Kidnap and ransom princesses! Dodge the evil knights trying to kill you!
• Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit!: Being based on a family-oriented sitcom meant they had to reach a bit to translate the premise into a playable action game, so the plot is that a mysterious thief has stolen Tim "The Toolman" Taylor's power tools, and he has to travel through several massive, improbably realistic TV show sets, filled with deadly, improbably realistic animatronics to find them. Per Arne of Encyclopedia Obscura noted that the story wouldn't have been that much more fantastical had the creators simply done what they apparently really wanted to and just sent Tim on an actual journey through time and space.
• House of the Dead has a plot that is recycled in every game with few modifications here and there. Basically, some evil geneticist/corrupt executive wants to cull the Earth of its humans and creates a bunch of zombies to ravage a mansion/city/the world, prompting a squad of sharp-dressed agents (part of an organization whose full job description is never really elaborated on) to hunt them down. Add in hilariously bad voice acting and questionable dialogue choices and you get the feeling that the creators cobbled up a premise as hors d'oeuvre to the ACTUAL meat of the series: a fun rail shooter. Then again, when the main purpose of the series is for players to pump yen/quarters into the machine for a chance at the game, there's really no reason to come up with a good story — In fact, the few times they have tried to put some extra effort into the story, writing and acting have been disliked by fans for ruining the series' goofy charm.
• The freeware shmup Hydorah has only bare hints at a plot. Apparently, there's some sort of alien empire ruled by an evil god named Hydorah that is attacking. But half of what little dialog there is (16 lines counting the post credits scene) makes no sense, and some of the missions don't even involve fighting the Hyodrans/Meropticonians/whatever at all.
• Inscryption: In-Universe, when P03 takes control in Act 3 his disdain for anything except deckbuilding and card synergies becomes clear. The plot is "You want to trigger the Great Transcendence, because it's cool. Botopia used to be cool but now it sucks because the other Scrybes sucked."
• Into Space: The plot of the first two games can be summed up as "the scientist wants the rocket to go to space because of money." The third game's plot is "recover stolen Christmas gifts" instead.
• The I of It. The intro goes as following - "Once upon a time there was an I and a t. 'Bah', said the t, and left. 'Where is t?' I was wondering, and started the quest."
• The Kid, protagonist of the freeware game I Wanna Be the Guy, wants... well, to be The Guy. Good luck, kid, you'll need it.
• The plot of Ivy the Kiwi? can be summed up in its entirety as "a baby bird has been separated from her mother."
• Young Joseph's JBA plot in Jojos Bizarre Adventure Heritage For The Future. Alessi made you young again. Have fun pounding the other heroes til you kick Alessi's arse. Justified in that he was essentially a bonus character (based on the 1930's Joseph from JBA's second story). Joseph and Alessi never meet in the manga.
• Jojo's Fashion Show: World Adventure. Before each level there's a couple of lines of an incredibly boring story about some stereotypical bitchy fashionista drama, w/e. Other than the story being about fashion designers who are going on a world tour, and the game being about you designing outfits to fit different styles from around the world, it's entirely irrelevant. The level titles are ostensibly based on the story, but they have little bearing even on that.
• Jump King: The intro text simply says "Legend has it there's a smoking hot babe at the top..." as reason for your ascent.
• Just Cause. Your theoretical goal of "overthrow [thinly-veiled parallel to a real-world dictator]" mostly exists to put you in a small nation and give you free rein to blow up basically everything with whichever new toys the game has seen fit to provide you with.
  Jane Douglas: That's the story, but to be honest, playing a Just Cause game for the story is like getting attached to anything destructible on the island of Medici - that is to say, a total waste of time.
• Kao the Kangaroo starts off with the vague excuse of Kao escaping from his cage and then going on a quest to save his kangaroo friends, and then he's thrown into a collection of levels that rarely are connected to each other.
• Karnov: "Get the map that leads to treasure" was the plot of the Arcade Game. The Famicom version, which had a different Final Boss, also had original cutscenes that had Karnov be on a Mission from God and made no mention of any treasure; these cutscenes were entirely removed from the international releases.
• Katamari Damacy: The King of All Cosmos went on a drunken bender and knocked all the stars out of the sky. You're his son and you have to fix it by gathering balls of roughly equivalent size and mass as replacements.
• The plot of Kerbal Space Program is essentially "Have a rocket and a few astronauts. Now go into space." All the Flavor Text for ship parts and mission contracts adds is "Everyone else is bad at going into space." You don't need to know why toy companies and canning factories need mineral scanners in a specific polar orbit of Moho.
• The King of Fighters XIV: A Husky Russkie Boisterous Bruiser loves fighting tournaments, so he decides to hold one. Then a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere attacks after the championship battle.
• Classic Kirby plots tended to be far more auxiliary compared to the Continuity Creep seen in games from Return to Dream Land onwards:
  • The first Kirby game's plot is: "King Dedede has stolen all the food in Dream Land, beat him up and get it back!". Kirby's Adventure subverts this by making you think it's just about Dedede causing trouble again. He's not!
  • Kirby: Squeak Squad actually plays with this quite a bit. The story starts as an Excuse Plot involving stolen cake but shifts gears after the first level. The actual plot is about a treasure chest containing an ancient being, the titular gang of mice trying to use it to gain wealth, Meta Knight's attempt to prevent anyone from opening it, and Kirby accidentally releasing it. Kirby spends most of the game in relentless pursuit of his cake, completely oblivious to the larger plot and anything else that happens.
  • The majority of the plots of the subgames in Kirby Super Star are Monster of the Week. However The Great Cave Offensive has a plot that can best be summed up as "Kirby fell down a hole, might as well look for treasure on the way out, amirite?" The Updated Re-release has a subgame giving you control of Meta Knight. Basically, he's out to kick the stuffing out of everybody; at the end, you find out it was to earn a wish, which was for him to fight the greatest warrior in the galaxy and beat the stuffing out of him.
  • The New Challenge Stages mode in Kirby's Dream Collection begins with a short cutscene where Magolor explains that he's built an amusement park for Kirby that's full of challenge stages where Kirby can test his Copy Ability prowess. There's no more cutscenes after that, and the story never goes beyond that premise.
• The plot in Knights of the Chalice serves little more purpose than to send the party out to slaughter things.
• In the H-Game Koikatsu, the player character transfers to an all-girls school because most of the girls there have never interacted with a boy their age before. His aunt, the principal, wants him to help the girls get used to boys by establishing a club that focuses on skinship between men and women and encourages him to get lovey-dovey with the girls.
• Kritika opens with an epic background story about an evil alchemist winning the trust and support of the entire population of Kirenos, before establishing a reign of tyranny under his rule. It is then followed by a brief background story for the character class that the player has picked. None of this background information is ever mentioned in the game again.
• Kuru Kuru Kururin: Yes, you see your siblings in level 3 of each stage, but all you do is pick them up, get to the end of the level and that's it; Kururin Squash would give an actual reason for this.
• League of Legends can be summed up as "disputes are settled by elites because having another full-scale magic war will destroy the world," and even then, newer champions are given less and less justified reason for joining the League in the first place. Riot eventually curbed this by rebooting the world without this concept, greatly reworking existing lore into a more free-for-all setting.
• Left 4 Dead, which has the required Zombie Apocalypse Backstory, but it's never really explained, and the developers admitted they didn't want to put in any more plot than that. It's just one big "slaughter anything that's not you or teammates before it slaughters you," with only a few hints in design and dialogue about the characters themselves (though that is slightly expanded outside the game, which mostly focuses on the survivors than the zombies). Yahtzee described the plot thus: "'Here are some zombies' pretty much sums it up." The wall graffiti found in the safehouse exists to provide some background info on the setting as well as possible hints about the infection's origins (more so in the sequel).
• In The Legend of Lumina (a free Web game) you have a reason to push various kinds of blocks around the forest and collect magical animals. But really it's about figuring out how to push the blocks so you can get to the animals.
• The Legend of Zelda usually averts this, but there are some exceptions.
  • The Legend of Zelda: "MANY YEARS AGO PRINCE DARKNESS "GANNON" STOLE ONE OF THE TRIFORCE WITH POWER. PRINCESS ZELDA HAD ONE OF THE TRIFORCE WITH WISDOM. SHE DIVIDED IT INTO 8 UNITS TO HIDE IT FROM "GANNON" BEFORE SHE WAS CAPTURED. GO FIND THE "8" UNITS "LINK" TO SAVE HER." They actually tried to justify the Dismantled MacGuffin premise by stating that the Triforce of Wisdom was required to defeat Ganon. No explanation as to why. The only indication is that if you enter Ganon's fortress without the completed Triforce, the room immediately after the entrance will have an old man who says "ONES WHO DOES NOT HAVE TRIFORCE CAN'T GO IN" and prevents you from going further. Okay, it's understandable that the NES had limitations, but it's still just a bit unsettling that the real reason you need the completed Triforce is, essentially, "Because I said so!"
  • The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords (not to be confused with Four Swords Adventures) is basically your typical Super Mario Bros. plot with The Legend of Zelda characters. Just substitute Link for Mario, Zelda for Peach, and Vaati for Bowser. And just like Bowser in later Mario games, Vaati even wants to marry Zelda!
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes plays out like a much Denser and Wackier parody of the typical Zelda plot. Beyond the opening cutscene and the finale where you resolve everything, there's barely any plot there.
• Lethal Company: You (and your crewmates) collect valuable junk in various Death Worlds populated by dangerous organisims to sell back to the company you work for.
• Let's Go Find El Dorado has a pioneer family decide at the last second to look for the fabled city of gold, instead of taking the Oregon Trail.
• It is actually surprising to learn that Linear RPG does actually have a plot. It's kind of in the background.
• Parodied by the StarCraft II minigame Lost Viking. The premise is that a Viking fighter is lost and needs to find his way back to Vikingville, but needs to watch out for the evil Terra-Tron. "HE DOES NOT LIKE YOU!"
• Lyle in Cube Sector: Your cat's been stolen. Go rescue him.
• Mad Stalker: Full Metal Force: All you need to know is that there is some evil supercomputer that was locked away in an old warship and it hacked the military network while sending out these giant mechas called Slave Gears to wreck Artemis City. Now get Hound Dog over there and kick some ass! However, the updated PC Engine CD port of this game gave the almost non-existent a much bigger narrative, aided by anime-styled cut-scenes.
• The plot of Magical Battle Arena involves how all magical worlds are connected to a single magical source that lets them exist and how said source is verging on collapse, requiring the Big Bad to force several powerful magic-users of different worlds to fight one another so she can select one to act as a Barrier Maiden and prevent the destruction of the multiverse. This plot only exists to justify why Lina Inverse, Sakura Kinimoto, Nanoha Takamachi, and several other Magical Girls and female mages are blasting the crap out of one another.
• Magical Chase's plot basically centers around a Cute Witch who accidentally set free a bunch of devils from a forbidden tome, and she must seal them back or else her teacher will turn her into a frog.
• In Magical Whip: Wizards of Phantasmal Forest, two apprentice wizards somehow end up in the eponymous forest. Time to beat up a bunch of monsters and dragons to escape!
• The Magic School Bus had a number of tie-in games where the intention was obviously to educate kids about certain themes and ideas. Most of them also had a "plot" that mainly served to motivate the field trip and give the player a sense of purpose.
• MARVEL SNAP: Dimensional rifts are opening all over the universe this game takes place in, bending locations together. So now... Bucky Barnes, Carnage, and the Enchantress have to team up to fight for Cosmic Cubes? Don't think about it too hard.
• The 1992 Windows puzzle game Maxwell's Maniac was based off a genuine physics thought experiment, known as Maxwell's Demon; the premise being that a magical being could observe individual molecules and sort them to reverse entropy. This is ubiquitous in shareware games, to the point where it seems like authors compete to come up with the silliest one.
• Meat Boy: You are a cube of meat/skinless boy. Suddenly, a fetus in a tuxedo wearing jar suit kidnaps your girlfriend (who is made of bandages). Go rescue her. There's also Buzz saws, lots of them.
• The story to Medal of Honor (2010)'s sequel, Warfighter, is basically "generic Muslim terrorist with about five seconds of actual screen time gets his hands on some vaguely defined "new explosive" which will apparently be very dangerous". The majority of the game consists of loosely connected missions of "following leads", which are pretty much just excuses to fly around the world and blow up vastly outclassed Mooks; the fact that most of these missions are all Very Loosely Based on a True Story means the whole thing will have an excuse plot by definition. For example, one mission randomly has you play as a sniper during the real-life events of Captain Phillips, but this is totally irrelevant to the plot and is never mentioned again. There's also a subplot about the main character not spending enough time with his wife and kid, but it's totally disconnected to the main narrative and ends up going nowhere.
• The NES Mega Man games. Eventually, it became clear that Capcom was having difficulty coming up with new excuses for their latest Mission-Pack Sequel. To elaborate more, starting with Mega Man 4 the plot would almost always be a new villain trying to Take Over the World would show up, until it would just turn about to be Dr. Wily again. 5 and 6 both did the same exact plot, although 7 and 8 changed it up. 9 and 10 went straight back to the old "it's something else, but then it turns out to be Wily again" formula, where it seemed to openly embrace the idea and played the "twist" for laughs. Fan games followed suit by either doing likewise, changing it up a little, reversing it outright or not having Wily present at all. The other Mega Man series, such as X, Zero, and ZX mostly avert this trope hard.
• The Mental Series has this as the premise for all of its games. You're in a mental hospital/city/the woods/a circus/a bigger city being hunted! Get out of there!
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: The story is less of a focus in contrast to the rest of the Metal Gear series, with the overarching plot of Snake building up Diamond Dogs to be strong enough to get revenge for the Ground Zeroes incident largely used as a justification for him to travel in and out of Afghanistan and Central Africa, taking on contracts and extracting soldiers and resources to supplement his private army.
• Meteos presents its 'match three' gameplay as the sake of all planets being at risk from the evil planet Meteo. While this isn't so bad, the Star Trip mode's story of 'a spaceship has been sent to sort all this out and destroy Meteo forever' is just an excuse to have a gameplay mode that isn't the regular kind.
• Metal Warriors: The United Earth good, The Dark Axis bad, go kill them. There aren't even characters outside of Stone the player character, Mission Control, Marisa and Venkar Amon; the main antagonist.
• Metroid: Sure, there's some backstory in the game, and the scope of it is greatly expanded upon in the sequels, but here, you're just a bounty hunter on a mission to blow up some space aliens.
• Misa's mission in Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae is to stop her friend Suzuka, who has gotten her hands on and become possessed by an evil weapon called the Demon Blade, which feeds on the life force of anyone who wields it until there is nothing left. Misa has to fight demons and evil cyborgs in order to get to her.
• Mole Mania: For whatever reason, a farmer with a huge island and more subordinates that outnumber the legions of hell decides to kidnap the wife and children of a mole. As the mole you then go through multiple areas of the island with some fun puzzles, complete bosses like a kangaroo, a legion of hedgehogs, and the sun itself. And in the end, the farmer somehow is an Implacable Man that gives up on his own terms when you beat his challenge.
• Monster Hunter:
  • The usual template for the stories are that there is a village. The village is under constant attack from a singular powerful monster that could threaten to end it forever. Since you are a newbie hunter yourself, you have to start with the small monsters causing minor problems for the populace. Here's your weapon of choice, go slay some beasts. The most notable users of this plotline are Monster Hunter 2 (dos), Monster Hunter Freedom 2/Freedom Unite and Monster Hunter 3 (Tri)/3 Ultimate; though the latter games employ some more plot twists to keep the story less repetitive and more engaging to a degree.
  • Interestingly, while Monster Hunter: World has a fairly intricate storyline featuring colonization, environmentalism, and quite a bit of Character Development, every conflict in said storyline is still resolved by you going out and killing assorted monsters — it's all just a justification to get the actual monster hunting right to the forefront.
  • The game that makes the most explicit effort to defy this trope is Monster Hunter 4, which features an overarching story across multiple villages where the supporting characters are in search of a monster that is spreading a dangerous virus (and followed up in the expansion 4 Ultimate with the protection of Dundorma against an Elder Dragon and a second plot point involving the virus once again).
• The plot of the original Mortal Kombat is this, before the movie and sequels tossed in all that Outworld balance between realms schtuff; An evil sorcerer is running a deadly tournament, with a four-armed monster-man as the reigning champion. Go there, compete for your own reasons, and take home the win.
• Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe: Freak accidents involving Shao Kahn and Darkseid fuse the two Big Bads into a Bigger Bad named Dark Kahn and consequently, cause the Mortal Kombat and DC universes to merge together. The inhabitants of both worlds believe those of the other to be invading their own and thus (surprise, surprise) they beat up the everloving shit out of each other, which said Bigger Bad amplifies by infecting everyone with Unstoppable Rage because, yes, he admits to loving nothing more than the kombat when you confront him at the end.
  • Speaking of both Mortal Kombat and DC, starting with Mortal Kombat 9, in multiplayer the fighters will exchange brief bantor, often establishing some reason why they are fighting. While sworn enemies need little justification, friendly/allied characters bantor will often imply the fight is for training, to ensure the character is strong enough to fight that game's villain, or (often in the case of Shao Khan) punishment for some percieved slight. This prefight bantor was used both the following Mortal Kombat games and in Nether Realm Studio's DC comics based Injustice: Gods Among Us series.
• Mosaic: Game of Gods: The God of Chaos is trying to destroy the world because a flower shattered when he touched it and you, the Goddess of Order, have to save it by putting mosaics back together.
• Mr. Shifty is about stealing mega-plutonium from an evil organization. The game never gives you more detail than that.
• Myst had several rather irrational ways of getting at the various Linking Books; the in-game explanation was that the characters in question were paranoid (quite reasonably so, as it turned out) about having their books destroyed. The sequels were, generally, more reasonable about how and why things were where they were.
  • The sequel Riven, generally considered the best of the series, is also usually considered the game with the best-integrated puzzles — although it does suffer occasionally from one of the two sides taunting each other with clues.
  • Myst III: Exile, on the other hand, forces the player through what was, according to the Backstory, originally designed as an interuniversal obstacle course meant to teach children about how different Ages come together. Several of the puzzles have been sabotaged by Saavedro, but (as Saavedro intended) in a way that leaves them solvable, though more difficult.
    • In the opening scene of Exile, Catherine lampshades this trope's usage in previous games by saying her husband is probably running late because it "takes him forever to reset all his codes".
  • In Myst IV: Revelation, the puzzles are either security against jungle creatures^note although one ground-level gate was apparently installed to obstruct creatures that can fly, manipulating creatures to perform a task, or operating machinery left behind by someone else.
  • In Myst V: End of Ages, the whole setting is a kind of testing ground put together by... someone... in order to prove your worth to obtain the MacGuffin. Interestingly, it's only possible to pass the test by taking advantage of the cheating done by previous testers who had failed for moral reasons.
  • Uru: Ages Beyond Myst has most of the puzzles set up by Yeesha as a test for the player — or at least has the Journey Cloths placed specifically so that the player needs to perform certain actions to access them. Some Ages are more soup-canny than others, though, such as Kadish Tolesa, a series of puzzle rooms leading to a vault filled with gold (and one skeleton).

N-Z

• Nazi Zombies has stories about ancient Nazi experiments, Time Travel, the Cold War, and at one point, an old-west era American town that somehow teleported into the middle of Angola following simultaneous Zombie and Nuclear Armageddons. Of course, it's just an excuse to shoot loads of zombies in whatever location the developers think is most interesting.
• NetHack: There is an amulet at the bottom of this dungeon. What it does and how it got there are irrelevant. You need to find it, then return it to your god in exchange for immortality. Go.
• NeuroVoider: The majority of the human race has been wiped out by robots that proceeded to party endlessly. Four of the only remaining human brains awaken, hijack robot bodies and proceed to hunt them all down to the Master Neurovoider. Aside from a pair of twists (the Master Neurovoider is a Brain in a Jar itself, and FAT.32 was just using you to usurp its control), it never gets complicated beyond that (and the ending is just the "Game Over" screen), so it all boils down to shooting robots for fun. Most likely invoked, since the manual even mocks this premise and considers it akin to a failed pitch to Michael Bay.
• Night Walk, an economic British game about walking through graveyard with zombies. The description must be seen to be believed.
• Nomolos: Storming the Catsle: All the story you get in the intro cutscene is that one cat jumps through a portal that appears out of nowhere and snatches his lady-friend cat, is turned into an anthro cat warrior, and goes on a quest to save her.
• Nuclear Throne: There is a vague story about a post-apocalyptic world, a mysterious throne and alternate universes, but even the game's website admits it's mostly an excuse for the Roguelike-Bullet Hell gameplay.
• Offspring Fling!'s plot is given in short storyboard cutscenes and pop-up messages, but they are entirely optional and the gameplay can be understood just as well without them.
  Offspring Fling is a game about a poor forest creature that has misplaced all of her children. She'll have to fight her way through over 100 levels of action puzzle platforming to get them all back home. There's danger around every corner, but she wont rest until her family is safe again.

  —Game description
• Although the plot for Oneechanbara is surprisingly interesting, it ultimately boils down to little more than an excuse for attractive girls to kill zombies. Not that anyone's complaining.
• Both Overcooked! games have one. In the first game, an Eldritch Abomination called the Ever Peckish has been awoken, and the only way to stop it is to feed it a ton of food. In the second game, bread zombies called the Unbread have been awoken and must be stopped in the same manner. These plots are almost never relevant to the actual levels (the second game does have some levels where you fend off the Unbread... in the DLC), and are only given superfluous mentions in the between-level "rest areas."
• Overwatch has a fairly complex plot and backstory. However, every single bit of it is superfluous to the actual gameplay, which is technically non-canon within its own setting. The backdrop just serves as an excuse to justify all the crazy powers and personalities the playable characters have. With the exception of short character blips and limited-time special events, the story is never even told to you in-game.
• Painkiller: You're in purgatory. Shoot everything until it stops moving. When it does, the exit opens up (also, Purgatory is really just every cool environment the designers had time to come up with, regardless of whether it makes any sense to have a modern military base next to an ancient Persian palace).
• Papa Louie Arcade:
  • In the platformer games, Papa Louie and the nearby citizens get sucked into portal that leads to Munchmore, a food dimension where most end up imprisoned by Anthropomorphic Food who are led by Sarge in the first game and Radley Madish in the following ones. So it's up to the remaining characters to save them.
  • Each Gameria begins with a cutscene explaining why your character is working at Papa Louie's latest restaurant. Most of the time it's them getting tricked by Papa or someone else (with Papa offering to help them in the latter case), but some games give another reason, such as:
    • Willingly applying in Donuteria because they get a free pass on the popular "Sky Ninja" rollercoaster as an employee.
    • Booking a stay at the restaurant in Pastaria due to not being able to find a hotel to stay at for the upcoming wedding between Edoardo and Olga.
    • Applying in Mocharia because the job comes with rent-free housing. After signing the paperwork, however, the character discovers that they have unwittingly signed up to be part of a documentary called "Mocharia Life".
• PAYDAY: The Heist has an extremely bare bones plot where you take part in several kinds of heists to make a lot of money. For the player, it's all about shooting cops and stealing the loot of the level. The sequel's web-series expands on it a little, with Bain explaining that everything is just "practice runs" for the ultimate heist.
• In Penguins' Journey, you need to guide a bunch of escaping penguins from a "penguin farm" in the jungle to their original home in the icy wastes by building bridges with different-shaped tiles.
• Freeware game PixelShips justifies the Pokémon meets Defender gameplay with... nanotech, or something. Jeff Minter's Andes Attack justified similar gameplay with good aliens fleeing bad aliens by landing on Earth and living with the ancient people there. One of the aliens got bored, and used a timescoop to collect "a Commodore 64 and a study Kempston joystick" from the future to play games on. Unfortunately, the bad aliens picked up the RF transmissions from this, and attacked Earth. Plot was never important to Llamasoft games.
• Persona:
  • The plot of Persona 4: Arena is explained as Teddie setting up the tournament and inviting all the characters to see who is the best Persona user. Oh, and some of the characters from Persona 3 want in on the fun too. Except not. The Teddie who set up the tournament is an impostor (as is the commentator, Rise) and the real one has gone missing. That Teddie is the shadow of a girl who was thrown into the TV, and the tournament is her dungeon. And the P3 characters are there investigating the theft of one of Aigis' sister units...
  • For that matter, Persona 4: Dancing All Night is just so players can watch their preferred waifu or husbando get their groove on. Like Arena before it, though, a legitimate plotline eventually emerges about an idol who committed suicide and an Eldritch Abomination trying to trap humanity in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
  • Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight and Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight play this the straightest. Yu's actions in Dancing All Night provoke a pissing match between Elizabeth and Caroline/Justine about whose guest would have solved the crisis more easily, leading to a dance-off that S.E.E.S. and the Phantom Thieves get dragged into.
• Pizza Tower is about a down-on-his-luck Italian stereotype, whose struggling pizzeria is threatened with destruction by death ray by a talking pizza who has built a massive, dangerous tower that you must now traverse. Use your platforming skills to get to the top, fight the evil pizza and his minions, and stop him from destroying your humble little restaurant. That's all the context you're getting.
• Plants vs. Zombies: There are zombies trying to break into your house to eat your brains. You use plants to fight them off. That's it.
• Playing with Fire: Each installment only has the same three-line synopsis on the title screen as the plot.
  You have lost your mates, your [sic] on your own.
  The local neighbourhood gang are hunting you down.
  Blast your way to them before they kill you!!
• Pokémon:
  • The point of the game is to get you to collect all the Mons, train them, and perfect your team for battling all other trainers in the land, and, eventually, other players. Having the goal of becoming the master of the Pokemon League and fighting the local evil team is just the framework for you being able to do all this.
  • The spinoff games avert this, although this is mostly for Pokémon Colosseum and XD, as well as Pokémon Ranger and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. Others like Pokémon Snap, Pokemon TCG and Pokémon Trozei!? Excuse Plot to justify it all.
  • Eventually changed in the main series with Pokémon Black and White, where the "evil team" storyline, which was usually confined to the Excuse Plot, is now the main plot of the game, advances within each and every major location visited, and its conclusion is the conclusion of the game, subverting the usual "beat the Champion and become master of the Pokemon League" ending. Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 and Pokémon X and Y revert back to using the villainous team as an Excuse Plot once more.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon is an interesting subversion; the first part of the game appears to have the usual Excuse Plot of the previous games, complete with the pseudo-villainous team being a bunch of incompetent thugs. Only the many cutscenes throughout hint at a much larger story than one would expect. This all changes during the second half of the game, which is even more plot-heavy than Black and White, though defeating the Elite Four and Champion is still the conclusion of the game.
• Portal plays this trope for horror. The plot at first seems to be a thinly disguised excuse for having you run through a bunch of rooms where you play with the portal gun. With cake as the reward. Then it becomes increasingly clear the voice guiding you through the puzzles has hostile intentions and the facility housing the puzzles has a dark past.
  • Played straight in the backstory of the sequel's Perpetual Testing Initiative DLC. It goes like this: Aperture Science is almost bankrupt, so Cave Johnson hatches a plan to run a scam spanning The Multiverse — send the plans for new test chambers to alternate versions of Aperture on other Earths, each ruled over/managed by an alternate Cave Johnson, get them to construct the test chambers and have them stolen back to Earth Prime. The player is in the role of designer and tester, designing the blueprints for new chambers and running through those that already exist.
• Postal:
  • The first game reputedly had a complex, layered story to explain why you wanted to kill everyone from ostrich farm to military base, but buried it to streamline the slaughter. The only real explanation given is that the town you live in wants you dead, and even then it's more likely that you're just crazy and need an excuse to kill.
  • In Postal 2, it's plainly obvious that the "plot" is nothing more than excuse after excuse to run around committing mayhem. Your missions each day include tasks like buying milk at the store, and returning a library book.
• Online Flash game Powerfox has a little "plot" window during the opening screen that explains the story: "Powerfox, you need to rescue the world!" "Yeah."
• The original Propagation dumps you in a Sinister Subway during a Zombie Apocalypse, and lets you kill hordes and hordes of undead left and right, because of course. The sequel, Paradise Hotel averts the trope (mostly) with a plot about you trying to rescue your sister... while fighting hundreds of zombies.
• Punch Quest: One day, Punchzerker was sleeping on a hammock between two trees, when an apple fell on his head, and he was knocked to the ground. Looking about, he saw an orc smelling flowers. "No one punches me!" said Punchzerker, racing forward determinedly. Meanwhile, Smashkyrie had been sitting atop the trees, feasting on apples. It was her apple which hit Punchzerker in the head. "Did someone say punch?!" Smashkyrie exclaimed, but it was too late. Punchzerker had breached the fortress nearby, vowing to punch everything in sight. Bravely, she stormed the fortress, following the sounds of punching.
• Puyo Puyo games really don't like to bother with a plot, using them as an excuse for the characters to battle with Puyo:
  • Puyo Puyo (1992): "Arle has new magic powers she wants to use to defeat the Dark Prince."
  • Puyo Puyo 2: "The Dark Prince tells Arle to go up a tower he's made to prove she's the best Puyo player in the world."
  • Puyo Puyo Sun: "That evil Dark Prince wants to enlarge the sun to give himself the ultimate tan! Go stop him!"
  • Puyo Puyo Fever: "Amitie's teacher has lost her flying cane and has set up a reward for the first person who can find it. Battle other students who want to find it!"
  • The MSX game, the first two Nazo Puyo games, and Champions are purely gameplay.
• Quake:
  • Quake III: Arena: You are thrown into deathmatches by some sadistic gods. As the game's manual put it: "Frag everything that isn't you."
  • Every Quake game, usually featuring some sort of Alien Invasion that must be repulsed. The first game vacillated on whether "Quake" was the enemy or the hero. Except perhaps IV, in which the plot actually has some relevance. II tried as well, but the plot was little more than very basic cinematics in between levels.
• If you want a truly ridiculous excuse plot, look no further than Quiz & Dragons, a two-player 1992 Capcom quiz game where you must save the kingdom of Capconia from the Big Bad Gordian, obviously a Satan expy, who has stolen a mystical seed and used it to enhance his mooks' wisdom on subjects including, but not limited to, science, geography, and television! The mooks then go around eating people that get their questions wrong. The sage king has no choice but to send a fighter with a Healing Factor, a wizard who can change quiz categories, an Action Girl that can take out one or two choice answers, and a ninja that deals twice the amount of damage to take back the Wisdom Seed and save Capconia. And what do you get for saving the kingdom? Your name on canned soup flavors!
• The plot to Rastan is not only practically irrelevant but inconsistent between versions. In the original Arcade Game, he's winning a bounty a princess placed on a dragon. In the Sega Master System version, he's out to rescue her. In the Commodore 64 version, he's defending his land against an Evil Sorcerer. The Non Linear Sequels don't help sort matters out.
• Rayman: Raving Rabbids and its sequel: After an opening cutscene of obscenely high quality, it's all a bunch of unconnected minigames.
• The Rosebud Condominium: "The Boss" wants you to build the tallest tower in the world. Why? Who cares when it's just an excuse to search multiple floors for hidden objects.
• Retro Game Challenge. You get sucked back in time to play 8-bit video games with a young gamer geek. Good luck, and keep on kickin'!
• Revenge of the Sunfish parodies this with the text used to justify some of the truly bizarre Unexpected Gameplay Changes:
  "YOU JUST GOT An INTENSE CRAVING FOR DIRT. YOU NEED TO EAT DIRT InORDER TO SAVE THE HUMAn race. You are our last hope. EVERY thing counts on you and your dirt eating."
• Rhythm Heaven Megamix has a story that boils down to "Some creature named Tibby fell from the sky and needs to return to Heaven World". All cutscenes after that are just characters asking you to play rhythm games (that are unrelated to the problem at hand, with few exceptions) in order to restore their flow so they can open the next door. Tibby catches on pretty quickly that all problems can be solved by restoring flow.
• River City Ransom deserves special mention: The Big Bad kidnaps Ryan's girlfriend. He makes you face all the gangs in the city, including "evil bosses" (Yes, he actually calls them "evil bosses".) But the real hero is Karma Jolt.
• The prologue to the Flash game Robot Wants Puppy in its entirety: "In Zeta Sector, Morgox the Unborn has conquered all of civilization and spread his dictatorship to every corner of the galaxy, ruling with an iron tentacle. / But on Delos IV, a rebellion is forming. Ordinary people are rising up to stand against tyranny. Meeting by cover of night, they plot to cripple Morgox's fleet from within. The attack is set in motion simultaneously by confederates working in stardocks across the sector... / Meanwhile, in a completely different galaxy, thousands of light years away, Robot wants puppy. / By the way, his tentacles are literally iron. That wasn't some kind of metaphor."
• In the RollerCoaster Tycoon series, each of the career levels gets a brief description of their history, advantages, challenges, and/or eccentricities. While this occasionally gives some kind of goal for building up/revitalizing a park, the initial blurb is never expanded upon after the game starts.
• A character's intro in Romancing SaGa 1 and Romancing SaGa 3. serves as an Excuse Plot to set the chosen protagonist off on a journey to defeat evil forces and hunt treasures that, most of the times, do not concern their stories. While some characters do have special episodes and quests, the point of the games is to let the players freely build their own teams and do multiple quests that will eventually lead to saving the world from Big Bads.
• The official plot of R-Type is "Blast off and strike the evil Bydo Empire!" Later games elaborated on what the Bydo are and why they are attacking, but the games in general still amount to this.
• Senran Kagura is basically an excuse for busty schoolgirl ninjas to fight each other, use cool "Hidden Ninpo" super-moves with a variety of elemental effect, and take Clothing Damage to showcase even more fanservice. There's a semblance of a story to the first game on 3DS, and its sequel on that system actually does have a theme of To Be Lawful or Good for the "good" ninjas, but the majority of titles in the franchise are strictly Dynasty Warriors-style gameplay with tanker-loads of fanservice. If that wasn't enough, Akane from Dead of Alive is a DLC character in the latter games.
  • This is actually lampshaded in the last two entries, Estival Versus and Peach Beach Splash. The former keeps the DW-style gameplay, but the latter is literally just an excuse to have a wet t-shirt contest with the girls and varying kinds of water guns.
  • This reaches its apex in Peach Ball; Haruka's experimental potion in the local arcade winds up infecting five of the shinobi, who proceed to act like animals, so they must be restored by an assistant striking their bodies repeatedly with vibrational force, using the titular Peach Ball (which has the right size for a pinball table).
• The Serious Sam series is very light on plot. Most of it in the first game is simply an excuse to get from point A to point B and kill everything that moves, to the point where Wikipedia has noted that the "plot" can be disregarded without consequence. There's a little more story in 2 and 3: BFE, but not enough to reach the point where you'd be missing anything by skipping it.
• The first and second Etrian Odyssey games have this until very late into the labyrinth. Subverted with the third game, where there is a deeper story, but you aren't going to get the full details without looking. Averted from the fourth game onward (barring Classic Mode for the remakes of the first and second games), where they have a full story.
• Shadow Warrior (1997) starts out with you taking down Zilla's men when they try to do a Contract on the Hitman on you for leaving Zilla Enterprises, but then has you taking them down to avenge Master Leep and save the world. The 2013 remake averts this, having a much more involved storyline.
• The Simpsons Hit & Run: The plot doesn't unfold until the end of the second hub, where it's revealed that the black vans, wasp-shaped cameras, and "new and improved" Buzz Cola are all being used by Kang and Kodos as part of a TV show where they film the antics of the people of Springfield. Then it turns out that the modified Buzz can reanimate the dead, leading to the last hub where the town faces a Zombie Apocalypse.
• The plot of The Simpsons arcade game by Konami makes no sense, especially when you consider the continuity of the show. It begins with the titular family taking a walk in Springfield. As they walk in front of a jewelry store, Smithers rushes out of said store after stealing a diamond for Mr. Burns. He bumps into Homer, which causes the diamond he stole to fly in the air, landing in Maggie's mouth in place of her pacifier. Instead of just grabbing the diamond, Smithers abducts Maggie along with it, runs off, and the remaining Simpsons give chase to rescue her. Now, anyone familiar with The Simpsons knows that Mr. Burns is the richest man in Springfield and even though he'd love to get richer, he wouldn't send his personal assistant to orchestrate a jewelry heist all over a single diamond. And Smithers isn't so lowly that he'd agree to such theft, all while kidnapping a child. That's not even getting into the strange things that happen along the way, one of which is how they share a dream, which is the setting of Stage 6. This game's weirdness would fit right in with the Treehouse of Horror episodes, minus the horror. And most importantly, there's the fact that they were taking a walk and not driving in one of their cars!
• It's really a let down for Sins of a Solar Empire that in interviews the developers talk about how the three factions come to fight against each other, and that none of them are actually evil, and there are reasons for it. But in the game, the story are just background and use as justification for technology/look of the ships, but no campaign. Fortunately, the developers promised a full campaign some time in the future. In fact, it goes ALL the way up until you start playing... they have an opening cutscene and everything that is narrated by the same TEC character that did the promos - with the set up for the three factions and their conflict... and then, it's just you vs. whoever...
• Lampshaded in Skate It, where there's a live-action video of an announcer describing the horrible devastating climate events which have wrecked the world's major cities. The slides he shows are an 'Artist's Impression' of the events, which are drawn childishly and in crayon. Then you go and skateboard around the ruined cities for no real reason.
• Sky Serpents is about a kid who wants to beat his father's record of having slain 14 sky serpents. You're told that in a brief intro, and then it's onto the battles.
• Slime Forest Adventure exists to teach the player Japanese. Everything else is subordinate to that goal.
• Smash TV's storyline about an kill-or-be-killed game show is largely an excuse to shoot things and rack up points. There are piles of cash and prizes to be won, and a grand prize (although you get that before facing the final challenge), but it's not clear how exactly these are implemented...how many "year's supply of meat-s" does one man need, anyway?
• Snowboard Kids. What little plot there is in the first game is All There in the Manual. Snowboard Kids Plus has cutscenes or the prologue and everyone's endings, though, and in Snowboard Kids 2, there are cutscenes before and after each course.
• The plot of Something is to retrieve the plot stolen by Ballser. It turns meta when Mario reads the sheet with this description.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Apparently, the in-game plot was kept to a minimum in the Genesis games so that Sega of Japan and Sega of America would be free to make up mutually contradictory backstories, tailored to their target markets. Then came the Sonic Adventure games and the addition of an actual plot to the series (and with it, the Western backstory was almost entirely rendered Canon Discontinuity).
    • Sonic the Hedgehog: An evil scientist is turning cute forest animals into robots; stop him!
    • Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Evil scientist is doing it again; stop him, with the help of a mutant fox!
    • Sonic 3 & Knuckles: Evil scientist has duped an echidna into helping him; stop both of them!
  • Sonic the Fighters: 8 characters compete against each other in a tournament for 8 Emeralds in order to power up a one-seat rocket ship to space to stop the evil scientist.
  • Sonic Labyrinth: Eggman slowed Sonic down with heavy boots. You must go through his labyrinth to remove them.
  • Sonic Heroes deliberately aimed for a much more simplistic plot with the general conflict, in order to serve as a "jump-on" point for newcomers to the series (i.e., Team Sonic's story consists of stopping Eggman from using his ultimate weapon). The only exception is Team Dark's story, due to the subplot involving Shadow.
  • The first two games of the Sonic Advance Trilogy consists of "Dr. Eggman is up to his old tricks again!"). The third game's opening cutscene is this (Eggman actually does use the emeralds, and splits the world into seven zones), but as All There in the Manual states, there's more to the plot than meets the eye.
  • Sonic Rivals series: The first game's plots consists of Eggman (later revealed to be Eggman Nega) planning to turn the world into a card and the four characters must fight each other in order to save the world. The 2nd game's plot is a little more detailed - something about Eggman capturing all the Chao to feed to an Iblis-expy called the Ifrit- but by and by the "plot" is mostly characters insulting each other for no particular reason.
  • The story in Sonic Colors is very simple: Eggman creates an amusement park powered by cute aliens, and Sonic has to stop him. There's no bigger Central Theme, no sub-plot or Character Development, and not any internal conflict for the characters. It's a pure game about Sonic fighting Eggman, with a lot of humor.
  • Sonic Generations can be summed up as this; "Time and space is being distorted by an unknown being! Sonic, go team up with your past self and save your friends as you save the world and explore areas you encountered years ago!"
• Soundtrack Attack: The plot of the game is simply "you are an escaped Homeworld Gem, team up with the Crystal Gems to outrun your superior". Anything is that is not the beginning, ending, or level 1 cutscenes are simply cute Continuity Nod flavor text.
• Space Harrier, in the manual for the Sega 32X version, describes a scenario in which Harri, last of the Sentinels of Dragonland, picks up a Jet Pack from the wreckage of a battle with the evil forces of Valna, wonders What Does This Button Do?, presses it and is suddenly flying. Almost none of this is referenced in the game itself.
• Spanky's Quest has a rather silly plot. Spanky the monkey is going on a picnic and walking through the forest when suddenly bricks start to rain down all around him. He finds himself trapped by a Wicked Witch, who also makes the fruits in Spanky's knapsack sprout arms and legs and try to kill him.
• The plot of Spelunky is so irrelevant, that the blurbs at the start of the game explaining said plot are randomly selected from a list.
• Split/Second (2010): You're on a TV show. Now go race and blow as much stuff up as you possibly can!
• In Spooky Bonus, strange things are happening in Old Town. A newspaper headline along these lines and a brief glimpse of a crypt with a green light coming from inside are all the introduction you get to a fairly standard match-three game.
• Spyro the Dragon: While the original trilogy does feature a cast of memorable, unique characters, the plots generally boil down to "Hey, look, there's a bad guy doing a bunch of bad guy things! Now go kill everything in your path while collecting gems and X type of collectible!" Averted with The Legend of Spyro reboot, which is much more story-driven.
• The freeware game Stair Dismount has a plot involving a superhero who needs to prove that he incurred physical damage in order to pay for the widespread mayhem he inadvertently caused while saving the day. This is surprisingly deep for a game about shoving a ragdoll down a flight of stairs.
• Star Control has a rich and elaborated setting. The Super Melee mode, however, boils down to "Assemble two fleets of spaceships and fight until one wins."
• Startopia: there was some kind of war that left a lot of space stations hollow and useless, yet inexplicably outfitted with perfectly intact exteriors and no serious structural damage, and you're basically bouncing between them on an administrator-for-hire basis.
• Streets of Rage can be summed up as thus: Evil crime syndicate have taken over the city. Go kick their ass. The second game is basically the same thing again, but with one of the heroes from the first game also being kidnapped. The third game gives a more detailed plot coupled with cutscenes, but overall, the main meat of the game are still straightforward "Go kick evil crime syndicate ass again." The fourth game does the same, except with a new generation of crime syndicate. Overall, it is what allows the series to thrive, since it allows the developers to pour their efforts right into developing the arcade beat'em up experience without worrying about other things and each installment's gameplay have always been squarely praised.
• SubTerra has two excuse plots. The one on Spiderweb Software's website is fairly simple: there's a mine, you want to steal the gems, and the miners set traps to prevent you from doing precisely that. The one in the game itself explains the main character as being a scientist with ultimately heroic intentions, but neglects to explain why he needs to collect gems.
• Summoners War: Sky Arena: There is a plot involving a Big Bad named Elheil trying to summon otherworldly monsters. However, the main storyline is easily and quickly completed, and most players would forget that it even exists.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Are you a bad enough plumber to save our princess in another castle? started to get averted in later games, though, when the Mario series started to make witty caricatures of themselves before being played completely straight again starting with the New Super Mario Bros. series (Though some titles like the Mario & Luigi series still make fun of the plot device every now and then.)
  • New Super Mario Bros. Wii almost has to be parodying this in its intro scene. Peach gets a birthday cake. Bowser Jr and Koopalings jump out of it, throw cake at Peach and carry Peach off into an airship while chased by Mario, Luigi, etc. And Toads fire items out of cannons across the kingdom.
  • The intro scene for the original New Super Mario Bros.. for Nintendo DS has even less storytelling. And instead of "explaining" how the items were distributed, it "explains" why Mario wasn't in Super form when the gameplay starts.
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2 is about as simple: Bowser captured Peach, became giant and took over much of the universe. Stop him. Or, from the manual, Princess Peach wanting Mario to come to the Star Festival so she can share cake with him.
  • Super Mario World: Mario, Luigi, and Peach are on vacation in a land of dinosaurs. Bowser has hidden seven dinosaurs in eggs. Even if you use the Star World to warp straight from Donut Plains to Bowser's castle, you will have saved all seven.
  • Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island: Baby Luigi gets snatched from the Stork. Yoshi and Baby Mario must rescue him.
  • Super Mario 64: Peach invites you to her castle for cake. Bowser's kidnaps Peach and imprisons everyone. Go collect the Stars and defeat Bowser.
  • Super Mario Sunshine initially averts the "Mario saves Peach" formula, but still boils down to this in a different way. The plot of Sunshine is instead kicked off by Mario being convicted of mass vandalism by the most incompetent court in the world, simply because it wouldn't have happened the same way otherwise.
  • Super Mario 3D Land: Mario is walking along happily when he's suddenly informed that Bowser has Princess Peach again. Go get her. In 3D.
  • New Super Mario Bros. 2: The same as Wii, but without the cake and about seventy-thousand times more coins than usual.
  • New Super Mario Bros. U: This time, Bowser flies directly to Peach's castle, throws Mario & Co across the world. They land in a tree full of magic acorns, spreading them across the world. And now you know.
  • Super Mario 3D World: Bowser goes into a new world and kidnaps some unnamed fairies for...some...nefarious purpose (that or they just look cute to him). Go and stop him. Oh, and you can bring Toad and Peach along to help too.
  • Paper Mario: Sticker Star: Bowser has kidnapped Peach and shattered the wish-granting comet, go make things right. Notable for being the first Paper Mario game to use this, as the rest of the series is generally known for having more involved plots, which is one of the many reasons why the fanbase dislikes it so much.
  • Mario Party games usually have a briefly-narrated premise that justifies the partying performed by the characters, with some presenting a less excuse-like idea than others:
    • The original Mario Party game doesn't even have an overarching premise that gives a thematic motivation, as it merely has all the Mario characters compete with each other to solve major problems in order to determine who is the "Super Star". And they do so by partying. It eventually ends with you unlocking a secret board and trying to recover the broken pieces of the Eternal Star, with Bowser trying to stop you at all costs with his minions. Bring out the party.
    • Mario Party 2: Spoofed in this game, as the premise is that the cast is putting on a stage production. Even Bowser's just acting.
    • Mario Party 3: You would be amazed at the cosmic significance of Super Stardom. The Millennium Star (a superpowerful cosmic being born once every thousand years) arrives in the Mushroom Kingdom to determine just who, exactly, is the best at life-size board games.
    • Mario Party 6: You must stop the sun and the moon from fighting by... uh... partying? According to this game, yes.
    • Mario Party 7: The game's premise is all about preventing Bowser from ruining the main characters' vacation, all because he wasn't invited (after all the horrible stuff he did to them over the course of the Mario franchise, what did he expect?)
    • Mario Party 9: Bowser has stolen the stars from the sky. Go explore a bunch of boards and play a bunch of minigames to get them back.
    • Mario Party: Island Tour: The characters have fun in the boards of Party Islands. Bowser wasn't invited, so he built a tower in front of them and creates evil clones of them with bubbles, so one of the good guys has to go to the tower to stop the Koopa king's plans.
    • Mario Party: Star Rush: Aside from a vague note at the beginning of each game of Toad Scramble indicating that some Stars have been stolen, the game has no plot to speak of.
    • Super Mario Party: All characters (including, with surprising sportsmanship, Bowser and his minions) compete against each other to become the Super Star and, in the process, gather the fabled Gems that reward different virtues, so they're all placed in the Party Plaza.
  • DanceDanceRevolution: Mario Mix has a simple plot for the excuse of having Mario characters having a dance off against each other. Waluigi stole the Music Keys, which can give someone the power to take over the world. He gets defeated but then Wario takes his place and after he gets defeated, Bowser steps in as the Final Boss. Yes, the villains dance off against Mario and Bowser, despite his big frame, can dance pretty damn well.
  • Super Mario Maker 2: Undodog has accidentally destroyed Peach's castle! Go play a bunch of levels to get the money to rebuild it! This is actually a step up from the first one, which is firmly in No Plot? No Problem! territory.
• Used and humorously lampshaded in the flash game Super Mario Defence:
  "This gives me a plan, a plan so devious it must have been hastily tagged onto the game after it was complete."
• Super Monkey Ball 2 fits this trope to a T, with a plot that that goes from exploding an island to making bananas tasting like curry.
• The early Super Robot Wars games suffered from this. However, by Super Robot Wars Alpha, the story and cross-over interactions hit in stride and it's never looked back since.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Super Smash Bros. 64 has this, the plot being that the characters are toys being played with by their owner (ie. Master Hand), which is just an excuse to have "your favorite Nintendo characters duke it out". Melee hints at this vaguely (with the dolls replaced with trophies), along with no plot for its Adventure Mode other than "brawl your way through Nintendo worlds and fight Bowser at the end". Brawl averted this with its own Adventure Mode, The Subspace Emissary, only for 3DS/Wii U to return to the Excuse Plot format, this time being "characters from various worlds do battle/are invited to a tournament" as told through its trailers.
  • While Ultimate does have an Adventure Mode like Brawl, it's a considerably simpler one: Big Bad destroys the video game universe and brainwashes everyone into his personal army, stop him and save your friends. The introduction of the second main villain doesn't change much, with the plot simply becoming "defeat two godlike beings before their war destroys the world".
• Super Space Invaders — the Amiga port of the arcade game Super Space Invaders '91 — adds a story wherein some old arcade machines are jettisoned into space in the year 2061, though a Space Invaders machine broke out of orbit and drifted through space until twelve years later, when an very intelligent alien race got their hands on the arcade machine. Then in 2091, the Invaders, now real and threatening, suddenly show up and proceed to attack earth colonies. After that, you play through was is essentially the same game you've played countless times before.
• Sticky Business has you starting your own online shop, with your Old Friend Julia Klein supporting your business. Other than following the storylines of the other regulars, the most that you do in the game is designing and selling your stickers.
• SYNTHETIK: The year is 1985, and the Kaida Corp supercomputer turns rogue and forms a machine army to wipe out humanity. The only way to stop them is to take control of an android prototype and shut down the Armageddon Core deep within its headquarters. Here's a bajillion guns to kill all these robots with.
  • This piece of information wasn't even present in the original release.
• Tales of Berseria is generally good about making its puzzles fit the environment. At its worst, you're eating colored fruit to give temporary Acquired Poison Immunity from matching-colored gas vents. This lasts until the endgame where the entire bonus dungeon, itself an elaborate six-zone randomly-generated harder-than-The Very Definitely Final Dungeon nightmare, is just an elaborate prank by the Katz so you can gain bath towel costumes for the party and eventually a hot springs scene. Lampshaded by Velvet, who starts off skeptical and gets in a worse and worse mood with each not-actually-in-danger Katz the party finds. On the other hand, the plot this causes the party to stumble onto completely changes the context of the game, and retroactively makes distant sequel Tales of Zestiria suffer an Esoteric Happy Ending.
• Targ: The game's plot only consists of one sentence, setting up the location (Crystal City), player character (Wummel), and enemies (Spectar Smugglers and Targs). It's only there to provide information about the necessary stuff used for gameplay.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The plot is an explanation for why two armies are at permanent war. Some other information can be found in supplementary material. For a while, this was the entirety of the game's Canon:
    "Nine mercenaries have come together for a job. It's the middle-ish part of a century a lot like the one we just had. A simpler time. There are three TV stations, one phone company, and two holding corporations that secretly control every government on the planet. Each corporation administers its half of the world with a multi-disciplined army of paper pushers. For any problem lacking an obvious bureaucratic solution, mercenaries like these are contracted to address the situation through a massive application of force."
  • The Excuse Plot for Soldier/Demoman War? Kill more of the other side so you can get the super secret extra unlockable: a pair of boots that shield you from Rocket Jump damage. (In-Universe, it's because RED Demoman and BLU Soldier became friends and the Administrator 1) didn't want to risk sensitive information being shared among her peons and 2) REALLY doesn't like friendships.)
  • With each successive major update, the absurd, tongue-in-cheek backstory of the game has become more elaborate. (The producers note that it's developed the most detailed story of any Valve franchise, even more than the plot-oriented Half-Life.) It now involves attempts at achieving Immortality through technological advancements, family feuds over inheritance, and a mineral element with fantastic properties capable of making Australia into the world's dominant power. That, however, is all on the TF2 website. Load up the game and it's just "work with your teammates, achieve your objectives, shoot everyone dressed in the other color."
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time's plot is this; Krang has stolen the Statue of Liberty. When the Turtles try to get it back, Shredder sends them into a time warp that bounces them from one point in history to another. Other than that, it plays like any other beat 'em up.
• The original Tekken had a very dull story, essentially being a tournament to find the greatest fighter in the world. This has been improved in later games, though, and Tekken 6 has a hugely developed storyline.
• Epyx's Temple of Apshai series barely has a plot and hardly needs one — go into the temple, fight the monsters, and grab their loot. What more do you need?
• Temple Run: You steal the idol. The demon monkeys start chasing you. Now run. (Good luck.)
• Teppen (2019): Welcome to the Land of Illusion, a realm that offers "truth" to those who journey through it. A lot of fights between Capcom's roster of famous characters ensues as each one looks for their own "truth".
• The point of Time Gal is that a villain named Ludo is traveling through different time periods in order to make himself ruler of the world in his own era. the heroine is a young lady named Reika who is traveling through time to stop him. None of this is mentioned in-game.
• An interesting example of a video game Excuse Plot that is not an excuse for the gameplay is the TimeSplitters series, where the time-travelling plot seems to be an excuse to make one giant super-pastiche of numerous story genres, such as western, horror, cyberpunk, and noir among many others.
• Tomb Raider:
  • Unfinished Business is four bonus levels made with the original Tomb Raider I engine. Since the designer had no resources to make cutscenes or a new artifact for Lara to find, or any means of telling a story in-game, the player just starts, plays the four levels, and then they just... end. Lara achieves nothing. It's still great fun though. The actual plot is All There in the Manual (or online, as the case is).
  • The later Gaiden Games The Golden Mask and The Lost Artifact also apply, although they do try and integrate their story a little, and Lara is rewarded with the titular item.
  • While most of the other games at least have some plot behind the locations, even if it's very small, Tomb Raider III essentially uses this trope too, as, right until the last levels the plot is so slim it essentially amounts to "there are four artifacts located in four separate parts of the world; are you a bad enough gal to find them?"
  • Why is Lara breaking into the church of All Hallows and why does she need to find a bunch of secret, completely unrelated areas first?
• Toree 3D and its sequel both have the same plot, which boils down to a reaper stealing Toree's ice cream, and them having to platform through various levels in order to get it back. This is especially the case in the first game, which doesn't even have an intro or ending cutscene.
• Tread Marks has a paragraph-long backstory about how the artificially intelligent battle tanks decided to run off to the woods and shoot each other for fun and race each other with live ammunition on the track. Aside from that, there is no plot or story.
• Twisted Metal frames its Vehicular Combat gameplay around a deadly demolition derby in which the winner is promised whatever they desire. That's really all the impact the plot has on the gameplay, though later games add more cutscenes between levels.
• Parappa's story in Um Jammer Lammy pretty much consists of him and his friend searching around the town trying to find a good guitar. There isn't even any attempt to connect the story with the gameplay, both of them having absolutely nothing to do with each other (or even any characters in common besides Parappa).
• Unpacking: On the surface, you are someone who is moving into a new home, and nothing more. A deeper narrative unfolds as every stage passes, exploring an unseen protagonist's life from childhood to adulthood.
• Unreal Tournament. You are playing a futuristic Blood Sport. Kill everything that moves, try not to die, here is your rocket launcher.
• In the opening of Urban Yeti, a silly Game Boy Advance game, we are told that Yetis surely exist and are among us, therefore they would, like us, want to have a home and family. And so the titular Yeti's journey begins. Get ready to Yeti!
• Vanish: You are a... someone, who is forcefully brought down and thrown into an underground water main to be eaten by monsters roaming the tunnels. Now you have to escape before they catch you.
• Vinyl Goddess from Mars: You're a scantily-clad babe on her way to a B-Movie convention until a meteor storm crashed your ship on a strange planet, now go find your stuff quickly before it's too late to get the to convention!
• Warcraft: Orcs and Humans: Orcs have invaded from a portal into another world. If you're the orcs, burn the human capital to the ground. If you're the humans, kill the evil wizard who summoned the orcs. Warcraft II isn't much better (outside of the manual), but this is properly averted by every subsequent game.
  • Hearthstone: A magical tavern appears in random places in Azeroth, picking up heroes and villains from across time and space. They play card games together.
• Warframe, in its early stages, was about you, a space ninja, going around and beating up an oppressive empire, a bunch of profit-worshiping merchants, and a plague of infested members from both other factions. As the game has updated and gone further into beta development, however, it has slowly started moving away from this trope and created a genuinely interesting story about the Tenno and Orokin, and the deadly consequences of both on the solar system.
• Wario:
  • Wario Land in all games in the series can be summed up as "Wario wants to get more treasure and money by beating up the enemies that get in his way while coming into world saving situations by complete accident." The latest game actually makes the intro and ending completely optional movies that can only be watched from the media room after seeing them once.
  • WarioWare is another example, in that the plot has hardly anything to do with the gameplay, with said gameplay being 3-5 second micro games, and said story being short random adventures of Wario and friends. In fact, WarioWare: Snapped! is even more excusable — all of the story can be found in the opening.
• The plot of Warriors of Might and Magic is present but extremely shady and hard to get (at least in some versions). You work your way through a series of unrelated dungeons (including a village inhabited by Orcs, a golem-infested maze, a dungeon city full of goblins and minotaurs and zombies, a temple of demon worshippers and a dark temple-prison inside a volcano) in order to remove a mask. Which happens at 3/4 of the game, leaving you with no reasons why to invade the temple.
• Warriors Orochi. The snake god Orochi has brought the warriors of Three-Kingdoms-era China and Sengoku-period Japan together in the same universe to challenge him. Sure, whatever - all we care about is getting to have the Dynasty and Samurai Warriors together at once.
• Lampshaded in Werebox 2 by the intermission cartoons which portray game company staff trying to come up with a basic plot for the game only to conclude that a "crappy physics puzzle game" doesn't need to have a storyline.
• Many games by WildTangent (which often come bundled with new computers) are nothing more than arcade games of the type such as tile matching or other arcade-type games, but come with excuse plots that fill time between level-loading, or introducing puzzles to solve.
• Witch Hunt. A witch is unleashing her terrifying undead minions on a sleepy colonial town. Are you a bad enough dude to kill the witch and save Bellville?
• In Yoshi's Story, the plot is something about collecting fruit to restore the Super Happy Tree and save the adults who have been zapped with some kind of spell.
• All your trope are belong to Zero Wing. The opening cutscene of the PC Engine version is rather different from that of the infamous Sega Genesis version.
• In Zombie Solitaire, a bad tofu burger started a Zombie Apocalypse and now you need to play solitaire in order to get away from them. Or something.

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