In the form of an old video game console, Jumanji also plays straight a lot of the common tropes of the early wave of console games and the later waves of Arcade games:
Damage that would normally kill over a longer period of time instead instantly causes disintegration, and immediate respawn.
Stilted dialogue that repeats itself.
Deliberate cheap tricks and death traps that force a trial and error playstyle (by virtue of being descended from quarter-munchers)
Extremely simple storyline
Unreasonably poor balance between player characters (Bravestone having a multitude of strengths and no weaknesses, while other characters are instantly killed by mosquitoes or cake)
Why doesn't Alex notice the passing of time the way Alan did? Well, if you get really stuck in a game, it can be weeks before you go back to try again. It's always 'just one more level'. And when you're engrossed in a game, you can totally lose track of time. And Jumanji is really engrossing...
Additionally, Alan was sucked into Jumanji physically with his real body, meaning he has a more visual means of determining time passing as his body ages. By contrast, Alex was sucked into Jumanji and given a virtual avatar, which would show no signs of age as time passes, making it harder to tell how long he has been in the game.
It might even be a deliberate decision on the part of the game. The last time it let a player grow up, his experience helped him carry the newer players. Essentially, it enforced Anti-Grinding mechanics to even things out and keep it a challenge for everyone regardless of when they joined.
How was Alex able to get so far in the game despite not having the Cartography or Zoology skills required to beat the previous levels? Because the game changed to accommodate the fact that there was one player, much like a real game.
Or Alex kind of improvised and found ways to survive and go through the levels. After all, he was stuck in Jumanji for months in-game time. He gave up and returned to Alan's former home in Jumanji after losing both of his lives at the Transportation Shack level. Jumanji's possible lesson to Alex is probably that he cannot do everything alone and teamwork is needed, whereas in real life, he kinds of needs friends, which in turn means having a family eventually or he will be alone for life and die alone, something Alex did not want.
Could be that the game had the other characters as NPCs until the new players entered. That could be why it took Alex so long, since the NPCs would have only limited moves/knowledge.
Alex remarks that while he was alone in the game, he had only ever made it as far as the "Transportation Shack" level before losing two lives trying to complete it. Why? All the levels leading up to that one didn't require multiple people to complete. Remember: the first level was escaping the hippos, the second was outrunning Van Pelt's goons, and the third was (presumably) using the booby-trapped sewer exit to escape the goons in the bazaar. The Transportation Shack level required someone to distract the guards while others stole a vehicle.
Spencer trapping the jaguars with fire is foreshadowed in the beginning of the movie when he keeps using the "wildfire" metaphor cliche in all his work, including the papers he writes for Fridge.
All other characters in the game are supposed to be NPCs. So why is Van Pelt more strategic than the rest of them? Because he's Jumanji's avatar. And Jumanji is no ordinary NPC.
It's hinted that this could be the case during the scene with the Viper pit, when Van Pelt makes the snakes rise up in a similar booby-trap-like fashion as Jumanji's "exciting consequences".
Where are the players' life bars located? On their wrists, where you can find a pulse.
The players chose the avatars least like themselves (Fridge and Bethany deliberately, the others just going along) and Jumanji capitalized on this with the jocks becoming geeky characters and the geeks becoming heroic characters so that they could walk in the others’ shoes and learn from it.
Nerdy Spencer becomes Dr. Bravestone, the Indiana Jones/Doc Savage-like explorer. He himself is easily intimidated in real life, and reveals to Fridge that he’s afraid of taking risks because it’s only one life. He even seeks to stay in Jumanji because he finds being an action hero better than being a normal kid. But he learns to appreciate his life and improve on it.
Bookworm Martha becomes Ruby Roundhouse, an action heroine. She herself is a Shrinking Violet like Spencer, who puts down people as a defense mechanism; she learns to appreciate the talents other people have and in her turn learns to take risks for others.
Not to mention she was deriding physical activity as a relevant life skill before, only to wind up as a character whose only skills are physical. Plus, she'd dismissed the notion of physical activity being remotely entertaining, yet her most valuable combat option turns out to be dance fighting of all things.
Football jock Fridge becomes Mouse Finbar, a weapons valet (the opposite of the badass he expected) and zoologist (an intellectual animal expert, in contrast to his athlete status in the real world). He learns to be more confident and reliant in his intellect, which happens when he defangs a snake and devises a diversion plan in the final stage (which comes from his football training).
In addition, when Fridge is complaining to Spencer about the fact that them getting caught cheating got him kicked off the football team, he says that it prevents him from 'doing the one thing he's actually good at'. Mouse Finbar is bad at many things and really only good at one (two if you count 'pack mule' as a skill): Zoology. Double fringe brilliance in that in a realm like Jumanji, zoology might very well be the most broken skill someone can have. All his weaknesses are to balance out how incredibly useful his one good skill actually is.
Pretty girl Bethany becomes Shelly Oberon, an overweight intellectual. This helps her to be less egoistic and self-absorbed, but it didn’t really take that much trouble; she was smart enough to work out things and brave enough to give a life to save someone. All that was really needed was to take away her phone, so that she could see more of the world around her and be more engaged.
She also worked out that she wasn’t sucked into the game the second time at the same time as the others because They needed Alex Vreeke to return to Jumanji as "Seaplane" and she needed to be outside the game in order to go and get him.
In his short scene in the prologue, Alex initially dismisses Jumanji as "just a board game", and only shows interest when it transforms into a video game. His avatar, Jefferson "Seaplane" McDonough, dresses as a pilot somewhere between the 1930's-50's, and pilots a helicopter from around the same era. This helps him learn that just because something is outdated doesn't mean it's useless (or can't still be fun).
Also in the prologue, Alex is shown to be a cooped-up-in-his-room video game addict who barely interacts with the outside world. Not only does being in the game give him a taste of the great outdoors, but he also learns, upon meeting the others, that he's been trapped in the game for twenty years instead of a few months. This (plus the fact that McDonough is essentially the youngest of the main avatars) opens Alex's eyes on how short life really is. And, as the epilogue shows, it turned into a more outgoing character.
Taking the above idea further, the descriptions on the character screen seem specifically tailored to entice the various kids to choose them. Spencer chooses the dashing adventurer/action hero Dr. Bravestone, in contrast to his own easily frightened nature as his description and name played up his archaeological expertise while trying to divert attention from his Indiana Jonesiness. Fridge picks Mouse thinking that the nickname is Moose (the font makes it look like Moose), but more importantly, Mouse's character bio says he's the weapons expert (again, action hero), when in reality he's just carrying the weapons and has no ability to use them. Sheldon Oberon's bio obscures his gender with both the use of Shelly instead of Sheldon and the description 'curvy genius'. Curvy is a word typically used to describe *ahem* well-developed women and is perfect bait for someone like Bethany, who's both intelligent and rather shallow. That leaves Ruby Roundhouse for Martha, who got last pick since all the other characters were taken.
Fridge/Mouse notes that the last level (The Defenders) is an allusion to the defense in a football game. And later, he makes the connection that his character's nickname "Mouse" isn't just a reference to how he's "short and adorable", but also because elephants are afraid of mice. It's fitting that someone named "Fridge" would get all the Fridge Brilliance.
There's a particular reason why Spencer and his friends destroy the game with a bowling ball in the end. Not just because it's too dangerous, but because it's too enticing (it almost convinced Spencer to stay in the game rather than return home). So they're making sure that nobody else will ever be killed or trapped in the game.
OTOH, the bowling ball implies that Fridge (the one who found both it and the console in the beginning) was the one ultimately responsible for the above, and for good reason, too; everyone else had the time of their lives in Jumanji — Spencer and Martha obviously enjoyed being fit and strong, but Bethany found things she enjoyed in the game as well. However, the game made Fridge weak to teach him to be more respectful of others — a lesson he took to heart — but he was the only player to exit the game without even hesitating, while everyone else was wistful that it was over. One imagines that Fridge came into the room to see the three others staring entranced at the console as the drums beat enticingly, only for the Only Sane Man to grab it and the bowling ball before heading out behind the school and smashing it without a second thought. Some might say he was making some kind of "wise statement" about video games screwing up your life, or stopping the cursed game from capturing anyone again, but one could just as easily say that the big jock football player was just getting his revenge for being turned into Kevin Hart.
During the end credits, we see the map of Jumanji completely (we were only shown pieces throughout the film as the map was blank but changed every time they reached a level) and if you look closely, the paths of land match the spaces on the original board game.
Jumanji changes its form every once in a while to remain relevant and playable, so why did it remain an old-school game cartridge until the late 2010s? Because Alex had been in the game since 1996, Jumanji couldn't change its form without affecting a game already in progress.
Indeed, that's possibly also why it hadn't already changed into something more contemporary than a board game when Peter and Judy found it: Alan and Sarah's game had never finished.
Why is Van Pelt meaner and scarier now? Because kids today just don't scare as easily as they used to!
Not so: It's teenagers who aren't as scared as children. What forced it to change its gameplay from board games to video games was that a teenager found it.
What's more, children sometimes have a black-and-white view on bad guys; they don't care about the villain having a backstory, so long as they're intimidating. But with age, they want something to give the villain more history, more depth. Van Pelt's history in particular is that he was an old colleague of the hero's, only to become a rival.
On a similar note, the original film's Van Pelt was a solo threat, because Alan got sucked into the game-jungle on his own and there probably was only one "In The Jungle You Must Wait" option available to draw. This time, the game's capture-ability can automatically reach out and nab whole multi-player teams of victims, so the new Van Pelt has minions.
In the first film, Jumanji was a board game that sucked people in only on a roll of the dice; its major draw was letting jungle hazards out for the players to deal with. This film has Jumanji take on a video game format, and suck people in as a major element.
Jumanji has more control over its players in its own world.
A board game is portable and can be easily carried around. It needs no power source, either, which all electronic devices require (power cables/batteries). When Jumanji turned into a video game, it gained a dependency on electricity as a trade-off, so it was better from its viewpoint to stay where it was and suck people in, rather than have people carrying it around looking for plugs and batteries to keep it going.
Maybe this is a sign that Jumanji (or whatever force controls the Jumanji dimension) is growing in power. Think about it; Jumanji creates a portal between worlds through games & hooks in victims with the game's appeal. Over time, games are continuously becoming more & more pervasive in our lives, as people of all ages are increasingly playing games; & they are also becoming increasingly immersive — from board games to high-tech console games to AR\VR games now. No wonder Jumanji can drag people from our dimension into its own so easily now.
Why was Van Pelt vaporized after Spencer returned the jewel? It was game over, so Van Pelt was sent back to the beginning of the game, awaiting the next round of players.
Van Pelt is meant to mirror someone in real life who "makes you feel just like a child". Why does he have a backstory as Bravestone's former friend turned rival? Because it's reminiscent of Spencer's failing friendship with Fridge, acting as a Shadow Archetype for how they could end up full-blown enemies. Also, Fridge does make Spencer "feel just like a child" because (in the real world) he's bigger, not to mention the two were Childhood Friends. Not to mention, when they returned the jewel, he dissipates into a group of mice, and Fridge's character's nickname is "mouse".
Jumanji's map slowly gets more detailed as the players go through the world, just like an open world game's map.
Bethany is parallel to Peter from the first movie: both are essentially transformation victims (Peter was gradually changed into a monkey, Bethany was changed into Shelly Oberon).
Also, Fridge may be parallel to Officer Carl Bentley: the Butt-Monkey of the story who is friends with one of the main characters (Alan/Spencer) somehow, but that friendship grew rocky somewhere along the way.
Jumanji is a pretty crappy video game, considering it's unable to adapt gameplay for both single-player and multiplayer. The characters are terribly unbalanced; they're either overpowered fighters (one of them literally has no weaknesses) or useless-until-required walking compasses and gear carriers, and the NPCs have frustratingly biased AI that prefer Bravestone instead of the character actually talking to them in what was supposed to be a multiplayer session. All of this makes sense once you remember that Jumanji the video game is actually Jumanji the board game trying to be a video game. The problem is that it took on this form when video games were still in their prepubescent years, transformed based on what it can glean from Alex's brief playthrough, and it's still operating under board game logic.
Another level of Fridge brilliance is the fact that the gaming console it turned itself into. It turned itself into a 16-bit console like the Sega Genesis and Super NES, and those consoles had games that started off as board games turned into video games, including some iconic titles such as Clue and Battleship, with just as equally questionable game play.
Shelly/Bethany's trading her life bar for Alex's may be Gameplay and Story Integration for her character/avatar's weakness of low endurance. As she used her breath to save Alex's life, her character's short breath may have affected her overall health.
A complaint about this scene is that nothing previously suggested that one player giving a life to another was ever hinted at being possible. However, many actual video games that allow a "game overed" player to use another player's life to continue (examples include Contra and Life Force) never documented this feature, either, meaning that the characters suddenly discovering it perfectly parallels the way that people learned about the ability in real video games.
This one might be a tad obvious, but why do Van Pelt's goons ride motorcycles, and why is there a level where you have to pick your ride? Jumanji realized that board games were falling out of relevance when it saw Alex ignore it in favor of playing Twisted Metal.
One of Alex's strengths is making great margaritas. It seems a bit pointless at the time, but you know what? It brings everybody together as friends!
Even better: it could've been a sneaky way for the game to allow The players who are all about on average 16 a chance to try alcohol when in there every day bodies outside the game they be underage but their avatars are all adults, Which means their avatars are old enough to drink alcohol.
In this film, the main characters are spit out back in their own time, having the memories of themselves and the game, despite the presence of an older player who was spit out decades before. In the original, Judy and Peter have no memory of Jumanji, Alan, or Sarah. However, the scene in which they appeared in the post-game timeline occurred before the point in time when they played the game in the original timeline. To match the mechanics of Welcome to the Jungle, that would indicate that, when the timelines align, Judy and Peter will be in the Parrish attic (quite reasonable given the ending of the first film) and suddenly regain the memories of their other selves, believing that they had just escaped from the game. Meaning that the two of them will remember who Alan and Sarah were after all.
One big problem. When Peter and Judy played for the first time, they already lost their parents by then. Also, the differences between the original and the 2017 film. The former acts as a Reset Button, allowing Peter and Judy to have their Happy Ending, thanks to Alan and Sarah. But not this 2017 Jumanji. Instead, it brings the players back to where they last left off in real life. Since Jumanji became a video game, it selected the chapters of their lives and puts them back there. Alex then making sure that Jumanji will find its way to the school so that the four can help rescue him.
In this film, the 2017 world into which the characters return has no memory or evidence of the timeline where Alex had disappeared as a kid, yet they remember meeting him in the game when he had been missing. This means that an older player being spit out decades before, and changing history before the newer players are spit out, doesn't erase the newer players' memories. This suggests that even though Alan and Sarah changed history by saving Judy and Peter's parents, Judy and Peter will still remember their time playing the game when they reach the point at which they had originally played it.
One might wonder why Jumanji would falsely advertise that Fridge's character Finbar was nicknamed "Moose" when really, his nickname is "Mouse". But it is apparent the line that makes up the "U's" opening was too faint, and therefore made it look like an "O". So they simply misread it. Whoops.
They're also playing on a older TV which would make it even harder to notice the difference.
Spencer and Alex are a lot more similar than first impression shows: both are video game enthusiasts who find the virtual game better than the real world (Alex thinks a board game is lame, and Spencer is more frightened of the real world). They end up in Jumanji as characters more heroic than themselves, and neither one wishes to leave to face the real world at different points in the film.
Bethany doesn’t know the difference between cake and bread, with her explaining she hasn’t had either for years. She’s been dieting to keep her body trim and fit, so obviously she won’t know how cake tastes.
Spencer/Dr. Bravestone may seem like an overpowered character, but he does have “weaknesses” of a less straightforward sort. His stats are merely best-suited for combat scenarios, but the tradeoff is that he can’t read maps, use anything other than a motorcycle for transport, or would know how to properly deal with Jumanji’s wildlife. In a game that requires the latter three to advance further, it essentially means his “weaknesses” are actually just the other players' strengths.
Alex's hideout is an open-walled house in the middle of the jungle, surrounded by citronella candles that protect him from the pervasive mosquitos. Why does this even work as a safe place for him, given that Van Pelt has all of the wildlife in Jumanji (already a notorious Death World) as his minions? Well, take the "Alan Parrish was here" sign into account, and the whole area plays like an Easter Egg hidden off the track in the game, a nod to a previous iteration of the game much as you might find in a long-separated sequel or reboot.
When Bethany respawns after losing her first life to a man-eating hippo, she describes it as "I got eaten by a rhino, and then I fell like a thousand feet from the sky." While mixing up the two species seems like a ditz moment befitting her character on the surface, it makes sense when it's really thought through. First of all, the hippo attacked Bethany from behind, so she wouldn't have gotten a good look at what got her. Secondly, after respawning, Bethany was clearly freaked out over what just happened, and rhinos and hippos are the same size, so she probably figured that it was one of those two animals and didn't care if she got it wrong.
According to canon, Jumanji tends to seek out people who have issues with their lives.
Spencer is a germaphobe Cowardly Lion who is afraid to take risks. Jumanji teaches him how to be assertive and that it’s okay to take risks.
Fridge is a Jerk Jock who sees football the only worthwhile thing he could do, which is why he got so upset when he got kicked off the team due to his plagiarism. Jumanji teaches him that he has more strengths outside of football and that he is more intelligent than he knows.
Bethany is a self-centered Phoneaholic Teenager who is obsessed with appearances. Jumanji teaches her how to live off the grid, there are more important things than how you look, and it’s good to heed the needs of others.
Martha is a Shrinking VioletStepford Snarker who is averse to being social with others. Jumanji teaches her to enjoy new experiences and be emotionally open with other people.
From what we see in the prologue, it’s implied that Alex wasn’t too close to his friends and family. Jumanji teaches him that it’s important to value those around him and never take them for granted.
Spencer has to explain everything to his fellow players, as if none of them have ever played a video game before. Actually, they have — but why would anybody from the Gen Z generation, save a complete nerd, have played anything except The Eighth Generation of Console Video Games(2011-present)? When Fridge finds Alex's console loaded with the Jumanji cartridge, he has absolutely no idea what it is, and neither do either of the girls. It's amazing that Spencer has any knowledge of The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games, let alone enough for everyone to survive Jumanji!
He's a video game nerd, and a fighting game nerd at that. It's not unusual to look at previous iterations of a title to check for old combos and glitches that may have been patched out in one title of a series, yet repeated in another later on. From there, his interest in older consoles could easily have been piqued.
Why doesn't Van Pelt just kill the players when he has them at his mercy? Consider how he acted in the first movie: He focused entirely on killing Alan because Alan had rolled the dice the turn he was summoned from the game, to the point he ignored many opportunities to kill the other players. This time, his assigned role is to recover the Jaguar's Eye and he focuses on that first even when he has every chance to kill the players.
Jumanji's Reset Buttonisn't different in this iteration than from when it was a board game. When Allan and Sarah were shunted back to their own time, they later had the chance to meet Judy and Peter before they found Jumanji and changed the events that lead them to discover Jumanji in Alan's old house. Alex didn't have a similar opportunity to interfere with the other players lives before they discovered Jumanji.
If you watch Bethany's Combat Pragmatist moment carefully, she bites Van Pelt's wrist, stomps on his foot, and elbows him in the stomach. These are all basic self-defense moves that girls are generally taught in high school or even younger to deter assault - if you take a 'rape prevention' note Yes, that sort of title isn't used anymore because it reeks of victim blaming and such, but it was common back in The '80s or The '90s, when these courses first became widespread or similarly titled course, these are the first moves you learn. The only classic move Bethany skips is the backhanded fist to the nose, but she sensibly dives out of reach instead.
When Spencer/Dr Bravestone is fighting henchmen in the marketplace, and he's throwing them around like ragdolls, no shopkeep or anyone moves to stop him even though he's busting apart stalls and overhangs like matchstick houses. It's a reference to many video games, old and new, where the player is allowed to smash environmental objects to either acquire loot or just for fun! Had any of the group thought to look at the places he had broken, they might have gotten some extra items.
I guess it's lucky that Alex's parents never took Jumanji out of his gaming console. Typically, when a cartridge is removed from a gaming system mid-game, that game loses all of its progress...
Though it's possible it wouldn't have been possible to remove it or that it wouldn't matter - after all, unplugging it would have done the same in that era of video games, but doesn't seem to have had an effect.
The cartridge probably would've stayed stuck in its slot, same as the board game's pieces stayed stuck to their places on the trail even when the game was folded up and stashed for decades.
According to canon, Jumanji’s drums call out to people who have issues with their lives. So what kind of trouble was Alex in that he was able to hear Jumanji and find it?
From what little we see of his life at the start of the movie, and as other tropers have noted in the Brilliance section above, it's possible Alex was just generally distant from his family and/or friends. He was a metal-head, which have always been generally shunned, he spent all day playing video-games, and when his father found a board-game that he thought his son might like, his son just tossed it to the side without even thinking about it. It's clear Alex wasn't close to his family, and what he learned in Jumanji was that it's good to be around others, and as noted by another troper, that's why his strength is making margaritas: it's something that brings people together.
Alex realizing that he's been in the game for years could act as a grim allegory that video games make time fly all too fast...
It's a good thing Alex remembered to donate the game system and Jumanji cartridge to the school after he got out of the game, otherwise he'd create a paradox (assuming it wasn't Jumanji itself that put itself in the school for the timeline reset).
It's also a good thing that the group found Alex when they did, and even that they had been sucked into the game in the first place. Considering Alex's weakness is mosquitoes and Jumanji is crawling with them, and he was on his last life, he would be dead if it wasn't for Bethany giving her one of his lives. Meaning Alex would never have finished the game, never would have gone home, and Alex's father would have died without ever seeing his son again.
Unless that's not how the game works. Jumanji never actually kills anyone. It's possible that, if one of them ended up losing their third life, the others all see the sky flashing "game-over" and everyone respawns in the hippo escape level. Perhaps Jumanji is a chaotic but somewhat fair trickster that teaches life-lessons through abject terror.
Consider that time flows much slower inside Jumanji and Alex has been trapped in the game for years instead of just a few months, how much time has passed in the real world while the kids were trapped? Days? Weeks? The kids probably realize they went missing and how their parents/loved ones felt like. Fortunately, returning to the real world sends them immediately to the moment after having started the game, undoing this fridge horror completely.
The more outlandish hazards that existed inside of Jumanji (man-eating plants, giant mosquitoes carrying a mystery disease, spiders the size of a small dog) don't seem to be a part of the game world anymore. This seems like an oversight... but when Alan beats the board game in the original movie, those particular things aren't shown getting sucked back in.
The mosquitoes have adapted though into smaller ones, and one of them downs Alex. While the changing body power gets more variety thanks to the video game player avatars.
In Alex's case, a smaller mosquito would be MORE dangerous for a character who can get instakilled by a mosquito. It's easy enough to see and run from a mosquito the size of an average housecat. Less so a normal sized mosquito you can only tell is approaching by hearing its buzzing IF you're lucky.
The people in Jumanji are parallel to the animals of Jumanji in being artificial 'game pieces'. The animals in the first movie can be recognized as "artificial" because of their CGI, whereas the humans in this movie are recognized as "artificial" because of their stiff acting.
Van Pelt is artificial, but as mentioned above he's evolved into a more contemporary and lethal threat.
So the journey of the game, and the end of the game, and the thing that sends them home, is putting the jewel back in the statue. So when Alex arrived, was he given the jewel? If so, at what point did the game take it off him and give it back to the NPC? And if not, what was his journey in the game?
It's possible that the jewel being taken from him and given to the apparent main character (Bravestone) was what made him go look for the new players that entered the game.
If Spencer and Fridge were once close friends, how is it that Fridge was confused to see that Spencer is afraid of squirrels (and pretty much everything else)?
Fridge's reaction was simply "What the hell, man?", which could mean many different things other than confusion. It seems they haven't been friends for quite a while, so he could've forgot Spencer's fear. It could've also never come up during their friendship (how often are you that close to a squirrel unexpectedly?) or he could've simply been stunned that Spencer is still scared of squirrels despite being in high school.
Regarding Spencer being called to the office for helping Fridge cheat; this troper has seen more than one instance in real life where the person suspected of actually doing the homework for another person is called into the office separately from the suspected cheater and asked if they were bullied or threatened into doing the homework. Sometimes they were. Sometimes they claimed they were and threw the other person under the bus. So, why would the Principal call Spencer into the office at the same time as Fridge, and then suggest or even assume automatically that it was a willing partnership?
Wouldn't be the first time a school policy left an obvious loophole that let bullies out relatively unscathed. Fridge certainly wasn't, of course, but at least in the US, it's generally assumed that if someone does something wrong, they did it of their own free choice.
Why did the game wait until Spencer, Fridge, Bethany, and Martha had all chosen their avatars before sucking them in when it took Alex immediately? When Alex started playing, he only had one controller plugged in, while there were four plugged in when the others entered.
Difference in situation. With a single player game you can usually start playing immediately. But in multi-player, you can't start the game unless all participants are ready.
Most game consoles have up to four controller sockets, so why does the game require all five characters to be in play?
As far as I know, nothing ever states all five characters are required to be in play. Alex started the game on his own and the others simply never tried to start the game prior to Martha picking Ruby Roundhouse. It could also depend on the number of controllers plugged in. Since all four were plugged in, it was expecting four players. It also doesn't transport them into the game until after Spencer presses start on the title screen.
What kind of game has a character select screen that doesn't show what your character looks like?
A game that loves to surprise whoever picked it up (after all, the hazards of the board game appear only after the dice is rolled, and the video game's show up often unannounced). And also play tricks on the player, given the wording choices that duped Bethany and Fridge.
Or one that is, or is mimicking, some cheap-ass cartridge game from the '80s that isn't going to waste limited budget or processing power on menu-screen art. If you want to know what the characters look like, look at the box the game came in.
If Ruby Roundhouse is supposed to be based on Lara Croft, why did Karen Gillan need to change her accent?
