Genre Deconstruction / Video Games

• Air Pressure deconstructs the "do everything you can to build/improve your relationship with a cute girl" Romance Game plot. The protagonist actually starts out disillusioned about how much he depends on his girlfriend Leigh and wondering if he should break up with her, and having him ignore his doubts in favor of appeasing Leigh results in a deliberately Esoteric Happy Ending where it's all but outright stated that Leigh is actually a metaphor for drug addiction or abusive relationships in general and that the protagonist's decision that he can't live without her is not in any way romantic or healthy. Not only that, but the game's happiest ending is actually the one in which the protagonist breaks up with Leigh and feels genuinely happy about being independent from her.
• Though not without its usage of artistic license, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag deconstructs the common pop culture portrayals of the The Golden Age of Piracy:
  • Rather than fearsome criminals, pirates are mainly ex-sailors and soldiers who turn to piracy because of poor pay, little chance of meritorious ranking and terrible treatment and poor conditions in the navies of the major nations. They are neither evil nor are they The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. Rather, they practice a form of democracy reminiscent of Union politics and the Republic of Pirates was technically the first attempt at democracy in the New World. However, because the main form of income is high seas robbery, the economy in the region falters as a result of their actions, leaving them to struggle for basic living supplies like medicine. Most pirates live in wretched slum conditions in Nassau.
  • Rather than a fearsome pirate of legend, Blackbeard is simply a desperate sailor who in his own words barely survived four decades and is trying to survive the next one. He also rarely kills people, relying on theatrical effects. Most pirates, with the exception of Charles Vane, rely more on reputation and Large Ham displays to get across the message than actual violence.
  • Furthermore, the game places pirates in a larger context of colonialism. The African slave trade is a far more profitable endeavor than piracy, and yet at the time this game is set, slavery is still legal while piracy is persecuted by the same governments who enable these laws and profit from this cruelty.
  • The game satirizes how history becomes pop culture fodder with Abstergo Entertainment Comically Missing the Point about the memories of the ancestors they seek to exploit. They are more interested in making Pirates of the Caribbean knock-offs than telling true stories.
  • The game also deconstructs some of the classic pirate character archetypes popularized by Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Errol Flynn swashbuckler movies, showing that a reckless Lovable Rogue Wild Card pirate who plays both sides, a la Jack Sparrow, would end up alienating and compromising the people around him, making him The Friend Nobody Likes at best, and The Millstone at worst. Furthermore, The Mutiny, which is treated as a great crime in nautical stories, is merely shown as democracy in action in the game, since if the sailors no longer trust their captain to give them good work and keep them from needless danger, they have every right to depose said captain and choose another. By the way, you're playing that guy for most of the game, until some Character Development. And even after Edward Kenway retires from piracy he is murdered and betrayed by Reginald Birch while his daughter Caroline is sold into slavery as a concubine of the Ottoman Empire as depicted in the follow-up novel Forsaken.
• Baldur's Gate deconstructs the well known idea that most of the world's problems tend to occur just as The Hero arrives on the scene. Due to CHARNAME's status as a Bhaalspawn, they're a literal Doom Magnet, so the fact that you seem to stumble upon a lot of trouble isn't coincidence, you are literally causing it through your own existence. Furthermore you are not the only Bhaalspawn out there causing chaos through existance. It doesn't help things that your father is the God of Murder.
• BioShock deconstructs the more cerebral, RPG Elements-gifted and Emergent Gameplay style of First-Person Shooter games (such as Deus Ex and System Shock) by showing you exactly how much choice you actually have. None. During the entire game you are essentially on the leash of Mission Control and the But Thou Must! demands it makes of you, and all the choices you can make (ammo types, plasmid loadout, etc) are (with one specific exemption) basically meaningless in terms of the game's plot. It's especially heavy on deconstructing the idea of how players blindly follow the orders they're given, even by someone they've never met, without considering the consequences. In addition, several other tropes unrelated to the genre are deconstructed as well, most famously the concept of "Galt's Gulch" from Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged.
  • Word of God is that they weren't trying to deconstruct Objectivism per se, more that they were trying to deconstruct the idea of Utopian fiction (showing that human nature always gets in the way of any so-called "perfect society") as well as the idea of the Übermensch with the antagonists Andrew Ryan and Sofia Lamb (who runs a collectivist society in Bioshock 2).
• Chrono Cross deconstructs time travel by going into detail about what happens to the people who live in erased timelines, as a result of the actions of the characters from Chrono Trigger and Serge's death/survival in parallel timelines.
• City Shrouded in Shadow by Bandai Namco Entertainment and Granzella, is a action/survival game of a citizen trying to survive a Kaiju attack on the city. Where as in Ultraman we root for the hero to beat the monster, here the game deconstructs the common genre tropes and plays them for drama as you try to not get caught in the crossfire and be accidentally killed by both him and the monster.
• This article from Cracked proposes an ultra-realistic war game. That is, you spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a nuke silo only to find out later it was an orphanage, complete with celebrities decrying the attack. Public Support rises and falls depending on entirely arbitrary factors, mission objectives change frequently and without warning, the cool superweapons kill 100 of your soldiers because the contractors cut corners, etc. The article was intended as a joke, but five years later, Spec Ops: The Line was released (see below) and included several of the suggestions.
  • Another article along the same lines from The Onion suggested that the next Call of Duty would be a hyper-realistic military sim with over 10000 hours of gameplay... whereof half an hour would be spent in combat. The rest would be spent doing vehicle maintenance, gun cleaning and guard duty, interspersed with the occasional stealth mission to sneak off to the PX to buy cigarettes and discussions about which of the Jessicas (Simpson, Biel or Alba) is hottest.
• The Visual Novel CROSS†CHANNEL can be seen as a deconstruction of the numerous character archetypes found in anime in general and eroge games in paticular. Sure we have a cast full of tsunderes, cloud cookoolanders, emotionless girls, genki girls and what not. But where to do they all go to school? A special school for young people that cannot function in society.
• Darkest Dungeon serves as a Genre Deconstruction of the dungeon crawler. Skulking through a dungeon while knowing this could be your last day on Earth would drive anybody to madness, and doing badly in combat, seeing others die, or experiencing horrifying events would definitely speed up the process. Obviously the only people who would ever risk death or insanity in this place of madness and morbidity would have a huge host of personal problems.
  • The Abomination frequently alludes to the fact that his beast form has a mind of its own.
  • The Arbalest watched her own family get killed as a child.
  • The Antiquarian murdered her own master during a ritual involving a human sacrifice.
  • The Crusader is a zealot broken by the church to be a skilled soldier that after his successful crusade he chose to abandoned his family even after he was allowed to return
  • The Hellion is The Berserker and a Blood Knight.
  • The Highwayman is haunted by guilt over the murder he committed.
  • The Jester is Laughing Mad.
  • The Leper has leprosy and is implied to spend his entire life in constant pain.
  • The Man-At-Arms is a Shell-Shocked Veteran.
  • The Occultist occasionally yells phrases in an eldritch language and is implied to channel the energies of Eldritch Abominations.
  • The Plague Doctor seemingly goes on these missions to conduct research on the effect of various toxins and plagues on the various monsters that populate the estate and was rightfully expelled for experimenting on her teacher
  • The Vestal is a healer tasked with healing others through the power of light yet denied genuine love from even her own church.
• Disco Elysium is a thorough deconstruction of the Detective Drama and Fair-Play Whodunnit genres, and many of its associated tropes, which are mocked, played with, and taken apart, especially through the Player Character, the Detective, and how the player chooses to play him. Though is clear that some it does come from the developer's love of the genre.
  • A Defective Detective, no matter how good at their job they are, is going to find it difficult to be taken seriously when their malfuctioning private life spills out in front of the public they are meant to protect. A good part of the game's sidequests involve trying to recover the Player Character's lost belongings and rebuilding a sense of trust with certain characters after a wild bender resulted in the detective trashing the local hotel and making a fool of himself across the town.
  • Regardless how you choose to play the Detective, you'll have a ton of serious flaws. The emotionally sensitive Cooper-type cop is also someone with serious emotional instability, and while your constant hallucinatory insights are sometimes scarily accurate, they can also turn out to be completely meaningless and make a laughingstock if you speak about them openly. The shoot-first-ask-questions-later Cowboy Cop is also someone who tramples over evidence and completely ignores real detective work, resulting in missing a ton of emotional and logical insight. And the analytical By-the-Book Cop will ultimately ignore context clues (causing them to misinterpret evidence) and be useless in a conflict where bending the rules matters.
• Dragon Quest Builders deconstructs tropes surrounding your typical JRPG protagonist. As the Builder, you are the Goddess-ordained Chosen One who is tasked with rebuilding Alefgard. At the same time, however, it is reinforced that "You are not a Hero". As such, you do not gain experience and grow stronger from fighting monsters like a Hero would: the only way for you to get stronger is to craft better armor and weapons. This comes to a head in the last chapter of the game, where it is revealed that your mission was essentially to set the stage for the arrival of a new Hero who will defeat the Dragonlord and save the realm. When will this new Hero arrive? "Eventually". The Player Character ultimately decides that "eventually" is too long to wait and takes matters into their own hands.
• Drakengard is a Genre Deconstruction of Action RPGs reminiscent of Evangelion. The Hero, deconstructing Level Grinding and What Measure Is a Mook?, is an Axe-Crazy psychopath who kills anything that gets in his way. His dragon partner, deconstructing A Boy and His Dragon, is a proud immortal who views humans as being little better than dirt. His sister, the local Damsel in Distress, is completely useless, but is the only thing holding an army of Eldritch Abominations from destroying the world.
• Fitting for a game inspired by EarthBound (1994), Undertale deconstructs many RPG tropes, but perhaps the most prominent and unique version of this is what they did to a simple game mechanic. It was transformed into a Cosmic Horror Story of an outside entity that can reset time at will, and is able to control a potentially all-powerful avatar — i.e. the Human Child — and operates on a different morality than the characters. Furthermore, the game discourages you from playing it like a typical RPG by deconstructing experience points and levels. EXP and LV in Undertale stands for Execution Points and LOVE; Levels of Violence. Your character doesn't get stronger when they kill. It simply becomes easier to hurt people the more you do it. Attempting to follow traditional gameplay styles anyway will lead to the characters discouraging you through speech, frustration, or sheer mundanity.
• Eternal Darkness is a highly effective deconstruction of the Survival Horror genre in the way that it goes about Breaking the Fourth Wall. The story is fairly standard for most horror titles: stop a centuries old Eldritch Abomination from completely destroying the world and wiping out humanity while also facing off against its demonic undead minions. The game, however, takes this a step further by actually demonstrating just how damaging the constant confrontations with nightmarish creatures would be on the protagonist's psyche. The game gives each playable character a sanity meter, which decreases every time they encounter a horror. If the meter is drained, then both the character and the player would be subjected to a serious Mind Screw. Examples include blood dripping from the walls, statue busts coming to life and watching you, and even the console itself pretending to break down, lower the television's volume, switch it off etc. By the end, the players themselves won't even be quite sure what's real.
• The Expanded Universe of EVE Online tends to do this to MMORPGs. It thoroughly explores the consequences of law-unto-themselves immortal demigods waging perpetual war both between themselves and with the other, less gifted denizens of the universe. The mere existence of the player capsuleers ups the average daily death rate in New Eden by many thousands, and contributes in large part to the Crapsack World New Eden now is.
• Fallout as a franchise deliberately takes the Raygun Gothic and Diesel Punk genres and rips them to pieces by showing just how awful such a world would be in reality. Set in an Alternate History where the transistor was never invented and The '50s likewise never ended, the world of Fallout gave way to technology our timeline could only dream of with laser and plasma weaponry, robots, power armor and a wide variety of Jetsons-esque technology dominating the time period... complete amid the terrifying threat among the Cold War between China and the United States, the rabid opposition to "communism" leading to the United States becoming a fascist autocracy in all but name, and a cutthroat corporate plutocracy at the top of things that'd make the average classical Cyberpunk setting look like a paradise by comparison. It all gets worse too, when the biggest problem manifests in the setting's crippling overreliance on fossil fuels leading to them depleting fossil fuels even faster than in our timeline, leading to the world tearing itself apart for the last scraps of oil, culminating in atrocities such as the United States annexing and pillaging Canada and Mexico, the United Nations disbanding and Europe and the Middle East going to war, and finally, a global nuclear exchange between the United States and China that, predictably, results in The End of the World as We Know It, and the survivors of the exchange either being put into Vaults that are designed with inhumane experiments in mind, or those lucky (or unlucky) enough to have survived the Great War now have to deal with a newly-minted Death World of mutated animals and (former) humans, killer robots, and savage Always Chaotic Evil raiders. Frankly, it should be telling that this current state of the world is noted as an improvement by virtue of the slate being wiped clean, and doubly telling that attempting to return things back to the way they were actively makes everything WORSE.
  • Speaking of deconstructing nostalgia for the past, Fallout: New Vegas features Caesar's Legion as one of the two main powers in the Mojave Wasteland. As the name suggests, they are essentially the Romans placed into a post-apocalyptic setting, and without any of the good parts. As the progenitor of modern Western civilization, the glory of Rome is often seen through an intense Nostalgia Filter. You get to see some of Roman culture up close in this game, and it is ugly. There are probably no more monsters in the Legion than most other factions, but the slavery, misogyny, and sheer brutality of the Caesar's Legion makes it the black to the NCR's grey.
• Far Cry:
  • Far Cry 3 attempts to do this for many tropes that are Strictly Formula in Wide-Open Sandbox action games. Elements meant to invoke Catharsis Factor in sandbox titles including the Escapist Character protagonist, the requisite Crapsack World setting, and the use of RPG Elements to mark your progression from Action Survivor to Action Hero, are taken to their logical conclusion here. The protagonist's transformation into a Blood Knight in an environment so uncannily tailored for him to do so is constantly discussed in the game, often to draw a disturbing parallel between his motivations and the motivations of the player.
  • Far Cry 4 takes the deconstruction of open worlds and action survivor protagonists even further. If you just behave like a normal human being and wait politely for a short time when asked, you can complete the "quest" to lay your mothers to ashes inside about 10 minutes without having to shoot a single person or endangered animal.
• Final Fantasy VII is a deconstruction of Eastern RPGs. However, because this game introduced many people into RPGs, it was lost on some people. To wit, Cloud himself (started) as a deconstruction of your typical anime RPG protagonist. When we first meet him, he seems like the typical empathy lacking badass, being a mercenary former SOLDIER who is mainly taking the mission out of obligation to his childhood friend. However, as the game goes on, it starts to become clear that what Cloud says about himself may not be entirely true, with Tifa obviously being uncomfortable with how he describes past events. It ultimately comes to a head when we learn Cloud isn't a former SOLDIER like he thinks he is. He was actually a generic Shinra mook who experienced a Trauma Conga Line that ultimately resulted in him having a psychotic breakdown after he was experimented on by a Mad Scientist for several months straight. Then his only real friend at the time, the guy Cloud thinks he is, died, and Cloud ended up taking his persona due to his inability to cope with his trauma. In other words, he is literally roleplaying someone else to escape his own shitty life. When Cloud finally manages to reconcile with himself thanks to Tifa's help, he turns out to be something of a socially inept dork.
• The first half of Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War deconstructs the main conventions of the Fire Emblem series. Like most Fire Emblem games, the main hero, Sigurd, leads a Badass Army to invade "evil" countries and kill their tyrannical kings and nobles. Unlike most Fire Emblem games though, said countries end up worse off from the invasions rather than better, as the massive power vacuum left after the removal of their rulers leads to them being royally screwed up, which Sigurd's friend Eldigan calls him out on early on. Said friend also examines the realistic consequences of My Master, Right or Wrong and Defector from Decadence that are often used in the series, as expressing his doubts to his corrupt king causes said king to immediately have him executed before he can defect to your army. In the end, Sigurd is involved in a massive political conspiracy he had no idea about, and becomes the Unwitting Pawn to his nation's corrupt nobles as a result. The game also deconstructs Heroic Lineage by showing how ensuring the continuation of such a bloodline involves a lot of incest, as was the case with real life royalty.
  • The second half of the game is a Reconstruction, however. Though the problems caused by Sigurd aren't fully fixed even in the ending, which notes that it will take a long time for countries like Verdane and Augustria to truly recover.
• Frostpunk is one of the few works that properly depicts the dystopian and punk part of Steampunk where the downtrodden and never do'well attempt to escape the coming Ice Age in arks meant for the British Elite. The survivors are not typical upper class citizens with zeppelins and monocles but gin-addled workers and children who may be forced to work as they try to face an uncertain future as social upheaval pushes them towards fanatical/nationalism/revolutionary fervor and more often than not, The Needs of the Many comes into play with few if any satisfying outcomes.
• Grand Theft Auto IV deconstructs its own series. Rather than glamourizing crime and criminals like its predecessors, it shows that most characters you meet in the game are broke, greedy and psychopathic because of falling into crime and the toll such a lifestyle takes on people is great. In addition, the end of the game where your cousin or your love interest is murdered, you get revenge but it feels hollow, and you spend the rest of the game alone and driving around.
• It is quite plausible to read Half-Life as a deconstruction of the archetypal First-Person Shooter Doom. The basic premise is essentially the same; an experiment into teleportation technology goes horribly wrong and creates a dimensional rift through which monstrosities invade our world. Additionally, there is very little plot exposition (just like the original Doom!). But whereas Doom played this incident as a wonderful way to demonstrate one's masculine virility by filling demons full of lead, Half-Life shows you exactly how frightening this kind of situation would be in the real world. You must scramble to stay alive, think and not act like a stereotypical Space Marine in order to remain breathing. Additionally, while Doom had almost no plot exposition whatsoever, Half-Life frustrates the player with its lack of explicit exposition, demonstrating just how terrifying it would be to be stuck in a life-threatening situation with absolutely no information about it.
• The Hearts of Iron IV mod The New Order Last Days Of Europe.
  • Both it and the very similar mod Thousand-Week Reich (which offers a more realistic and toned-down take on the subject) do this to the Alternate-History Nazi Victory scenario. Even in a world where the Nazis managed to achieve all of their goals in World War II and reign supreme as the master of Europe, that doesn't change the fact that national socialism was a fundamentally broken system that was completely dependent on military conquest, plunder, slavery, and the willpower of the Fuhrer to hold together. They lose the peace as decisively as they won the war, plunging into economic meltdown in The '50s that they remain mired in by the game's start in 1962 and can only truly recover from with massive economic reforms. And when Adolf Hitler dies in 1963, all the petty politicking and backstabbing that he had cultivated to thwart any challengers to his absolute authority immediately explodes, plunging the Third Reich into civil war in a matter of weeks. Events go a bit differently in Thousand-Week Reich, with Hitler dying in 1953 instead and it being possible to avoid an outright civil war, but the Broad Strokes of Germany's postwar malaise are all still there.
  • Earlier versions of the mod had Germany constructing the Atlantropa project to dam the Strait of Gibraltar, lower the sea level of the Mediterranean, and create new land in Southern Europe. Proposed but unrealized in real life, it is often featured in Axis victory scenarios as the kind of world-shaping megaproject that the Nazis had planned but were never able to build. Here, the Nazis build it, only for it to become an unmitigated economic and environmental disaster that creates only useless salt flats in the former Adriatic Sea, destroys fisheries and trade along the Med, and breaks the Rome-Berlin Axis as Italy and other nations along the Med are left extremely bitter towards Germany for what they see as an act of Hostile Terraforming. The creators of the mod, however, eventually decided that Atlantropa both stretched plausibility too far^{Specifically...}It would have required more concrete than the entire world, let alone Nazi-occupied Europe, had the capacity to make at the time, would have taken far longer than a decade to build, and would have taken longer still to cause the bottled-up Med to start evaporating. Even if it was built, the global environmental impact would have reached far beyond the Mediterranean Basin, including desertification across Southern Europe, a new ice age in Northern Europe, and global sea level rise as the water evaporating from the Med has to go somewhere. and, more importantly, created hundreds of issues with writing the various paths for Italy and the Mediterranean nations, so it was removed from the mod in the Toolbox Theory III update. They did keep the more plausible complementary dams that the Nazis build along the Congo River, creating a massive reservoir in Central Africa that provides tons of freshwater and cheap hydropower... at the expense of displacing millions of native Africans and destroying vast swaths of rainforest.
  • As explained in this Reddit post, it also does this to its base game and to the grand strategy and 4X genres in general through Hermann Göring's run as leader of Germany. Göring believes that, to restore German national pride after the death of Adolf Hitler, it needs to go back to what made Germany a global superpower: military conquest, the player's goal in any number of strategy games. Crushing the remaining independent states in Europe, then conquering the rest of Russia, and finally facing off against the world's other superpowers, the United States and Japan... and at every step of the way, you are shown the staggering human cost of what it would be like to live in, fight for, or be conquered by an empire built upon a dream of world conquest, especially when that empire is the Nazis, one of the exemplars of the tendency among real-life conquerors to engage in a pattern of Rape, Pillage, and Burn wherever their armies went. And, since the game takes place in an Alternate History 1960s during a Cold War that's kept frozen by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, going forward with the final phase of Göring's plan for world conquest can only end one way.
• Even though Half-Minute Hero's role-playing-game parts mostly ridicule many cliches found in role-playing games, it deconstructs RPG game concept as a whole. Makes you wonder why almost all other role-playing games include hours of Forced Level-Grinding and other tedious activities.
• Hatred viciously deconstructs the killing rampage popularized by Grand Theft Auto and other crime sandboxes. Not Important/The Antagonist is not some victim of society but a violent killer unleashed upon a city that isn't filled with acceptable targets and bigger fish to fry but scared civilians fleeing in vain from a sociopath killer out on a killing spree.
• Helltaker serves as a self-aware deconstruction of the Harem Genre that doesn't take itself that seriously. The plot involves the title character journeying into Hell with the goal of assembling a harem of demon girls, and he mostly only succeeds in this endeavor because he uses cheesy pickup lines that get misinterpreted as more innocuous offers (i.e., Malina thinking "I'd sure love to play with you" is an offer to play video games), he gives them Comically Small Bribes (offering Lucifer, THE top demon in Hell, chocolate pancakes), they join because they can (in the case of Zdrada and Justice), or they simply ask to come with him (like Cerberus does). By the time of the epilogue a few weeks later, Helltaker has found out the hard way something many fans of the genre have trouble internalizing; that having several beautiful women living with you doesn't mean they'll instantly be devoted to you, nor does it automatically guarantee they'll even be attracted to you in the first place. And it certainly doesn't stop them from constantly misbehaving, bossing Helltaker around, breaking his stuff, threatening and inflicting bodily harm, and (oftentimes literally) stabbing him in the back, with Cerberus having done something to get the police banging on their door in full SWAT gear. In other words, they act like the kind of troublemaking housemates you would see in a sitcom instead of the Hot as Hell Horny Devils another game might portray them as. The only ones that actually seem romantically interested in Helltaker are Beelzebub in the secret ending and possibly Modeus, given her blushing at the idea of going on a date with him and being the only one who's hugging him in the normal ending. None of the rest apparently even view him as a sexual partner, including Azazel, who's only interested in "studying" the demons and confirmed by vanripper to be a lesbian who's deeply in the closet due to being an angel. While Helltaker is visibly stressed out by the entire situation, Beelzebub's narration notes that living a life without suffering is impossible, but there's nothing wrong with enjoying yourself whenever you have the chance. The normal ending shows that Helltaker sees things this way too and is simply happy to have made friends.
• Katawa Shoujo deconstructs eroge Visual Novels, and quite a few romance tropes at the same time. In particular it deconstructs many 'girlfriend' archtypes found in this genre:
  • Lilly the Proper Lady. Nobody ever questions her decisions, so when she is forced into something she really doesn't want to do (ie emigrate, leaving everything she knows behind), no one is willing to call her out on it.
  • Hanako, the Shrinking Violet, genuinely hates being mollycoddled by Lilly and Hisao, and completely blows her top if pushed too far. She wants to expand her horizons and leave the trope behind.
  • Rin, the Cloud Cuckoo Lander, cannot make herself understood, and is genuinely frustrating to talk to as a consequence, leading to her generally being alone, as well as teetering pretty close to the Self Destruct button.
  • Emi, the Plucky Girl, cannot move on from the crash that killed her dad, though she can handle losing her legs just fine. As a result she keeps everyone at a distance. It can be argued her athletics obsessions is just a coping mechanism.
  • Shizune, the Spirited Competitor, is overbearing and often quite a pain to be with. She has no friends besides Misha as a result. She herself realises this, but can do little about it.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is a deconstruction of The Chosen One narrative, and in a meta sense, the classic Zelda formula that the previous games in the series ran on. As seen in the Opening Narration, the Hero of Time, who was an explicit Chosen One, became a Messianic Archetype to the people of the ancient kingdom of Hyrule after he saved them from the great evil, the Big Bad Ganondorf. The people then counted on the same hero spontaneously appearing to save them generations later, when the evil returned... and he didn't. The people of the kingdom, unable to defend themselves, were relegated to praying to the gods for salvation, and the gods responded by flooding Hyrule to keep Ganon from taking over, drowning any who could not make it to the safety of the kingdom's mountaintops. Then, in the present day, the main hero of the game is very much an average boy, with no Heroic Lineage to speak of, and only leaves his home island to rescue his sister when she is kidnapped at the beginning of the game. Even when he's recruited into opposing Ganondorf's plans to get at the Triforce by the King of Hyrule, disguised as a Cool Boat, he's still very much The Unchosen One, stated to have no connection to the older heroes. He has to quest to prove himself worthy of being the Hero at all, but in the end manages to permanently kill Ganondorf, having risen to the challenge of his own accord, rather than Because Destiny Said So.
  • It's also a deconstruction of post-apocalyptic After the End settings, especially those dealing with the fall of an ancient civilization. Only the vaguest memories of the ancient kingdom of Hyrule, as seen in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, remain in the present day, and rather than the usual dreary and depressing Crapsack World of the post-apocalyptic genre, for the most part, the residents of the Great Sea live normal, if isolated lives, and are content with their world. The Big Bad Ganondorf is a stubborn remnant of the ancient world, having tried and failed to conquer Hyrule and obtain the Triforce in the past, and in the present still schemes to return and claim the kingdom which is now slumbering beneath the waves, devoid of any and all life. Ganondorf's inability to let go of the past and move on eventually gets him Impaled with Extreme Prejudice, Taken for Granite and Killed Off for Real, and at the end of the game he and the last King of Hyrule remain underneath the sea as the old kingdom is swept away permanently. Meanwhile, the main hero Link and his companions Tetra and her Pirates set sail to find an entirely new land, and start a kingdom anew. The ultimate message of the game is to keep looking forward, rather than dwelling on the past.
• Life Is Strange: Both games are deconstructions of super hero stories, often hammered down by the fact that in the first game Max was compared to a hero by everyone. In both games, a young person gets supernatural powers (Max can rewind time, while Daniel has telekinesis), but as it turns out, being a hero is not easy. In the first game, Max tries to help her friends and solve a mystery in school, but that leads her through a lot of pain. In the second, Daniel getting powers causes a big accident that forces his brother, Sean, to take him off the grid to avoid the police.
• Little Inferno seems to be a deconstruction of games like FarmVille as you are, as one character puts it, burning your stuff which drops more money to buy more stuff and then the cycle just repeats itself. The dev team said in an interview the idea came from a "7 second loop of a flaming log. And [they] thought 'Man, that's like a super boring game that some awful company will totally make for the Wii or smartphones.'" Also there are constant parallels in game between the game and reality. The friend sending you letters brings up that you can't turn away from the Entertainment Fireplace, as though your character were addicted to it like a game, and she brings up how burning things is basically like burning time. They also mention how the fireplace is basically an escape from the cold harsh reality outside, among other things.
• Mafia II deconstructs Wide-Open Sandbox games such as Grand Theft Auto by showing the consequences of living the gangster life. Among these include: prison time for stealing gas stamps in early mission, causing a Mob War to erupt thanks to going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, and the relatives of the enemies you've killed attempting to get revenge themselves.
• Mass Effect 3 can be seen as doing this to the preceding games in the series and to other similar series in that the heroic character upon which everything revolves isn't invincible but is being psychologically worn down by the pressure they're under.
  • While the earlier games promised hard decisions with no easy answers, they mostly left an easy way out in the major quests. But the additional ending in the Extended version manages to deconstruct that. After fan outcry for a way to resist taking a choice from a possibly untrustworthy source that determines your ending, BioWare put just that in the ending. You can take a fourth option now. If you do, The Bad Guy Wins and kills all sapient life in the galaxy. At least everyone went down fighting and the next generation put the Reapers down for good; by (likely) taking one of the options you turned down.
  • The series also deconstructs the Anti-Hero popular in the 90s. If you choose the Renegade path, Shepard is a dick. Just a dick who uses stupid logic to justify their decisions and gets called out on it, meaning that the third game will be harder because of it.
• Mega Man X can be seen as a deconstruction of Mega Man (Classic). Like the Classic series, we have good robots and evil robots fighting each other. Unlike its predecessor though, the robots are fully sentient now. ^note Robots in the Classic series have personality but are not truly sentient as X is explicitly stated to be the first robot with true sentience. As a result, there is a major war going on between the Mavericks and Maverick Hunters with the stated goal of the Mavericks being to Kill All Humans; and many people, reploids and humans (who are mainly off-screen) alike, die. It's later revealed that many of the Mavericks, including the Big Bad, may not have been evil by choice as they were infected with a virus that drove them insane; muddying the waters in terms of how right the Hunters' actions are. X4 is probably the biggest deconstruction of the series. The war between the Maverick Hunters and the Repliforce happened not because of the virus, but because the Repliforce were mistakenly labeled as Mavericks by the Hunters and rebelled out of pride- the whole conflict could have been avoided had both sides simply been willing to talk it out. Zero, one of the main heroes, is not only revealed to have been created by Wily, the Big Bad of the previous series, but is also revealed to have been the original source of the Maverick Virus and the cause of Sigma's Start of Darkness; making Zero's existance responsible for the entire Maverick Wars. Finally, the game implies that reploids are not on an equal standing to humans despite being sentient beings and that reploids that don't obey humans are deemed Maverick (viral or not) and eliminated, a troubling implication that will be horrifically realized in the following series- further implying that Sigma may have had a point all along. ^note Though it's important to note that Sigma's goal is reploid supremacy, not equality; and his actions throughout the X series are largely responsible for creating the atmosphere of distrust towards reploids that will result in the oppression they face in the Zero series, making this more of a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
  • Then the Mega Man Zero series comes along and deconstructs the X series. None of the fighting in the X series lead to peace, as we still have reploids that protect humanity fighting against "Maverick" reploids. Only this time though, the reploids fighting for humanity are the antagonists while the "Maverick" repolids aren't dangerous psychopaths trying to overthrow humanity, but harmless civilian reploids that formed a resistance after being falsely branded as Mavericks and targeted for execution. Not only were X and Zero's efforts throughout the Maverick Wars all for nothing, this situation came about as a direct consequence of the Maverick Wars: Though the Maverick Virus was eventually destroyed, by the time the Maverick Wars ended the planet had been thoroughly devastated; resulting in humans developing a deep distrust of reploids. ^note Ironically, it was a rogue human scientist that instigated the final and most destructive conflict of the Maverick Wars; in part because he wanted the reploids to be punished for all the devastation their wars caused. This leaves the reploids in a position to be exploited as a scapegoat when an energy crisis breaks out: The government deliberately misuses the Maverick label to brand harmless reploids as Mavericks then "retires" them in what amounts to a mass genocide. Even when true peace is finally achieved, it takes another 200 years for the world to fully recover and new laws have to be passed making humans and repolids indistinguishable so they can coexist as equals.
  • The fact that Zero is the cause of both the Maverick and Elf Wars can be seen as a deconstruction of Joker Immunity and Thou Shall Not Kill. If Dr. Wily was executed when he was arrested in Mega Man 6, Zero would never exist and so much death and destruction could've been avoided. But he wasn't, and some of his leftover projects came back and screwed things up for everybody. This goes for Dr. Weil in the Zero series as well. Had Weil been executed instead of banished after the Elf Wars, he wouldn't have been able to return as a threat later in the series, a threat that Zero eventually had to sacrifice himself to stop.
  • Likewise, X's fate shows what happens when said hero finally decides to quit (for good this time). X realized his compassion had been worn away by the years of endless fighting and abandoned his position as the leader of post-apocalypse Earth to become the living seal for the Macguffin that had destroyed most the world. Unfortunately, his disappearance necessitated the creation of a Copy X that lacked the original's 100-year morality testing, resulting in this Copy X becoming a genocidal dictator that strives to protect humanity by exterminating innocent reploids (and the original plan was for X himself to become this genocidal dictator). X may have needed to quit to preserve his sanity, but because he was such an important figure, his departure wound up having dire consequences.
• For one of Gamespot's April Fool's Day jokes, they have announced that Capcom has recently announced a new game called Mega Man Deconstructed. See 7:43 of this video.
• Metal Gear:
  • While the first two games played everything relatively straight, the Metal Gear Solid sub-series is intended as a deconstruction of action movies (and, to a lesser extent, video games), twisting tropes common to them around in extremely horrible ways to establish how damaged everything and everyone would have to be for an action movie scenario to work in the real world. By the second game it's way out into the nastiest parts of the Deconstructor Fleet territory, shamelessly attacking fandom, the video game industry, the expectations of fans and even its own prequel and characters. Some would argue it goes a bit too far, to the point where it feels very painful to play a game which clearly hates you so much.
  • The setup of the first Metal Gear Solid is simple; a terrorist attack on a government nuclear warhead disposal facility occurs and a legendary mercenary is brought back to stop it. However, all the characters are unbelievably screwed up, precisely by the character traits that they'd plausibly need in order to do what they do, and the plot gets very complicated very quickly.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty deconstructed the way people related to the first game. So, you want to be just like Solid Snake, huh? You get to play as a player proxy character that, like Snake, is an emotionally crippled badass with buckets of blood on his hands and a killer instinct. Unfortunately, your girlfriend is deep-down scared of you and calls you in the middle of your mission to discuss your lack of emotional warmth, the only way you could've acquired these oh-so-badass skills is Training from Hell that you have repressed the memory of, and indeed your desire to be just like Snake is going to be granted via a mind-control experiment that the entire game's sequence of events is.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater deconstructed spy films such as James Bond and (to a lesser extent) action films like Rambo. Most of the usual tropes are there — beautiful Bond Girl who is actually a spy for the enemy, the Fake Defector, the Soviet scientist defecting to the U.S. and so on. Most are unexpected plot twists, all are horribly tragic, and all combine to make the protagonist into the biggest villain in the series.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots raises the question of what exactly happens to action heroes after the action movie ends. The choices that are presented are dying in a blaze of glory, suicide, or falling into obscurity. MGS4 also explores the concept of the Old Soldier: Snake's willingness to fight in spite of his advanced physical age isn't solely depicted as being admirable but also as being foolish and suicidal, people who idolized Snake back in the day patronize him and treat him as a burden, and in general Snake's age is the subject of cruel jokes. In fact, Snake's lifebar is changed to Old Snake to emphasize this.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain explores the revenge story, with all the major characters wanting revenge against someone in some way or form. However, it also explores the lengths that some are willing to go for it, like the antagonist wanting to wipe out language for revenge against Zero and those who subjugate others through language. The ending also critiques revenge by showing the effects of trying to get revenge on behalf of someone else - in this case, Venom Snake willing to do horrific things for Big Boss. It really doesn't end well for the former. It also subtly deconstructs tropes in modern military shooters, although not nearly as much as other games.
• The Modern Warfare trilogy, despite what the misaimed fans and detractors will tell you, is a deconstruction of jingoistic, America Saves the Day military shooters. The games are set in a more tumultuous version of the 2010s wherein Russia suffers a second civil war that ends with an "Ultranationalist" movement—founded by rogue military leaders—taking over the nation, which leads to a second Cold War between NATO and Russia. Throughout the trilogy, several tropes which one might expect from such a premise are deconstructed in a manner which paints both sides of the conflict with shades of grey, with a major theme being that 'extremism on either side is bad' (though the Ultranationalist-led Russia is still portrayed as being more in the wrong than NATO—mainly because their actions result in more civilian casualties):
  • The first game juxtaposes typical American posturing about freedom/democracy/"restoring stability to the region" with unsettling hints that the Middle Eastern country being invaded was an oil-rich U.S. puppet state, and contrasts the macho, cowboy attitude of the American grunts with a U.S. Army tank named after a famous anti-war song, "War Pig", and levels named after anti-war movies like Apocalypse Now and Dr. Strangelove (which, like the American campaign, ends with massive nuclear devastation). While you're playing, the Americans seem like good guys championing peace and stability (due to your player character being on their side), but there remains an implication that, to the other side, it's an imperialist bully who can only be fought back against with nuclear weapons. By the end, any player who doesn't already have some predisposed patriotism towards NATO countries will be left feeling like the game world is just a bunch of political structures throwing propaganda at each other to cover up the void where the truth should be. Sort of like real life.
  • The sequel goes even further. It starts with a U.S. task force performing three separate acts of unilateral action, but things quickly sour when Russia declares war on the U.S. in response to a botched CIA operation which resulted in Russian civilians dead and an American soldier's finger on the trigger. But to the American grunts fending off the invasion, it's obvious they're the victims. The two sides, inflamed by nationalism, fight to avenge their countries with Patriotic Fervor, unaware that this is exactly why a ranking American general purposefully botched the CIA op. In-game, the war is portrayed as a jingoistic power fantasy between petty nationalists looking to restore their nations' former, self-righteous glory, while the human beings on the front lines—actually fighting and dying for their countries—are treated like disposable pawns by their leaders.
  • The third and final game in the trilogy was made after Infinity Ward's founders were fired, taking on a more generic America Saves the Day tone, but still doesn't betray the anti-jingoistic, War Is Hell attitude. The United States never actually defeats the ultranationalists (they only manage to deter them), nor is Russia portrayed as monolithically evil. Moderates on both sides just get tired of conflict and quickly make plans for a truce. However, said peace talks are interrupted when the Inner Circle—an extremist organization which was forced out of the Ultranationalist party due to its criminal activities—kills most of the Russian cabinet and kidnaps the president, consequently 'hijacking' the military and launching a full-scale invasion of Europe in their bid to restore the glory days of Soviet-era dominance. Thus, the war only ends when a coalition of American, Russian and British special forces manage to locate and rescue the Russian president from his extremist captors so that he can order the military to stand down. The trilogy ends with both NATO and Russia in disarray, countless civilian lives lost and nearly every player character or fellow soldier dead, having fought and died for the sake of ending a war which—as stated above—was only ever instigated for the pettiest of reasons.
• The Mother trilogy, especially Mother 3 acts as a deconstruction of the Eastern RPG genre.
  • Mainly, it is Itoi's meditation on what games are, why they are fun, and the logistics of applying JRPG logic to the real world. For example: Who designs dungeons? And why do people instinctively know to loot them? Admittedly, the series' mythos got a little deeper with each game, though critique and analysis of the JRPG genre and heavy amounts of Surprisingly Realistic Outcomes are still in full effect.
  • Several common genre tropes are deconstructed, often in a light-hearted way but not always. For example, the "heroes going up against a massively powerful Final Boss" — in the first two games, the characters Cannot Grasp The True Form of Giygas' attack, to the point that in the second game, the player has to be called in to defeat it. While a large amount of RPGs do have powerful beings for final bosses, the second game in particular frames it like the Cosmic Horror Story it would be.
  • In the third game, the antagonists (human this time) are so powerful that the game would have a Downer Ending if it didn't have a Gainax Ending. It also deconstructs the protagonists from the first two games and the "player vs. playable character" relationship, the former by having a depressed hero weighed down and crushed by the events of the game, instead of the unfazed and cheerful Ninten and Ness, and the latter by making The Dragon a soulless puppet for the chief antagonist wrapped in knight imagery typical of JRPGs. When he finally breaks free of his control and regains the ability to think for himself, he commits suicide thanks in part to how crushing his situation was.
• NieR and NieR: Automata, the successors to Drakengard, also deconstructs the Action RPG genre and many tropes surrounding fantasy RPGs: from What Measure Is a Mook? to Protagonist-Centered Morality, everything players may take for granted is placed under a microscope and dissected.
• No More Heroes is a deconstruction of the Power Fantasy. The borderline Villain Protagonist is a psychopath who treats real life like a video game, and this might work out for him when he's killing other like-minded individuals, but in-between the intense fights he has to earn enough money to enter the next fight by doing menial jobs. In the action stages he's powerful, but in his day-to-day life he's just an otaku creep - exactly the kind of person who would be playing the game. Even his motivation for killing is initially just money to buy videogames and a half-promise of sex, and his enemies commonly have much more sympathetic backstories than he does - and when he gets attached to them, he has to live with the fact that because of the structure of the game, they must die anyway. Wide-Open Sandbox gets some jabs too, with a open-world city in which there's barely anything to do because no matter how much freedom he has, Travis can't really affect anything in his life.
• No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle relatively light on this due to not having as much input from Suda, but it's still there. Several characters in it were inspired by Travis' actions in the first game and idolize him, and the main villain is getting revenge for what seemed like minor throwaway side missions in the first game in which Travis killed CEOs of a random corporation. This time, Travis experiences Character Development as he's three years older than he was in the original, and while he doesn't exactly become a good guy, he does express disgust at it all and only reluctantly returns to the assassin job.
• No More Heroes III: Interestingly, while the game still deconstructs many tropes, genre-wise it's more of a reconstruction as it pays homage to all the things Suda likes. The game's Wide-Open Sandbox, while still far from perfect, has more meaningful content than in the first game; Travis, having outgrown his insecurities and immaturity, is a more likable Anti-Hero; and the series' Hack and Slash genre, despite its ups and downs, is preferred by Travis over the clumsier turn-based RPG gameplay (as proven in the boss battle against Sonic Juice).
• Phantom Brave viciously deconstructs All of the Other Reindeer. Marona's Chartreuse Gale is, for all intents and purposes, necromancy, and as such it is widely regarded as a dark, unholy power, with people reacting accordingly to her. This isn't simply general disdain or mocking of her but real, genuine fear and hatred. Hell, listen to that woman who scolds her son for wanting to be friends with Marona in the opening chapter- you can literally feel the pure, unbridled barely contained rage she has at the mere mention of her name.
• Planescape: Torment is a deconstruction of Role Playing Games. Characters in the gameworld comment on how adventurers are unwelcome in Sigil and how bad the main character looks and smells. It features a dungeon that deconstructs and ridicules the concept of dungeon hacking, the side-quests are... unusual to say the least. (Tired of these "Romeo and Juliet" quests that have you uniting annoying lovers? Planescape: Torment has a quest where you have to destroy a relationship.) Protagonist Without a Past is subverted because NPCs remember your character while you don't (because he has several past lives' worth of amnesia). Experience is gained by remembering and regaining skills you already had, but forgot. The main quest is mainly about people you gave quests in the past, rats are powerful enemies, there are none of the typical D&D races, and an ANGEL is one of the antagonists! Oh, and there are only two swords in the whole game. (Your character can only use one.)
  • It also scoffs at the prevalence of how lowering one's Karma Meter in Western RPGs just tends to revolve around Stupid Evil actions. In this game, wantonly killing everyone in sight will just invoke the wrath of the Lady of Pain (which you absolutely do not want.) You want to be evil? Be prepared to commit some actual, non-juvenile, cringe-worthy acts of cruelty and psychological torture, often against your own party members, and then be prepared to feel bad about it afterwards.
• Pokémon Black and White deconstructs not just many of the implications of a Crapsaccharine World in the series that are hinted at through the Pokédex entries, but also decontructs the idea that everyone in the world of Pokémon thinks that it's a good idea to send kids and teenagers out into the wild to capture Pokémon, with Bianca's father feeling immensly concerned for her. Another part of it is the idea that no one bats an eyelash at Pokémon battles or no one thinks it's too violent with Team Plasma and N. Speaking of Team Plasma, the games also viciously deconstruct the concept of Moral Guardians and the validity of their intentions, as that is what they essentially are.
• If Metal Gear Solid and later games in the series dealt with action and spy movies, then Policenauts tackled fiction that involved space travel and space colonization such as Gundam. It is shown, said, or suggested in the game that there are issues with overcrowding, assorted denizens are on medications that are of dubious legality, said denizens need to be careful when it comes to their calcium intake, and that humans born and raised on Beyond Coast are taught to act differently from earth born humans to the point there are accents for both of them. And there's even more than all of that, such as how living in a space colony affects sex working. Ultimately, the Big Bad basically says in the Motive Rant that humanity in the universe of Policenauts was not ready to leave Earth, especially seeing as how the Earth's problems still hadn't been properly dealt with, and the player might very well agree with that. As an article on Hardcore Gaming 101 puts it:
  "Of course, just as Metal Gear Solid was screaming "NUKES ARE BAD" at the top of its lungs, the prevailing theme in Policenauts is "SPACE IS BAD", which is pounded into your head on several occasions."
• Portal starts with a fairly common paper-thin puzzle game plot — make it through all nineteen Test Chambers of the Enrichment Center, and There Will Be Cake. However, as the danger level climbs, the explanations you're given for why you're facing such dangers go from slightly unusual to downright insane — then stop altogether. The entire set looks like you're a subject in a deranged Skinner Box experiment. And you start seeing evidence that previous test subjects have suffered nervous breakdowns, been driven to madness, or tried to break out of the test chambers. And then comes The Reveal at the end of Test Chamber 19. You've got an Excuse Plot played for horror. And for laughs.
  • Worth noting that it takes place in the same universe as the aforementioned Half-Life.
• Radiant Silvergun and its follow up Ikaruga deconstructs the against all odds spaceship shooter. Like most shooters, the storyline is about a great technology (The Stone-Like) that becomes a powerful threat to the human race. However, unlike most space shooters, the heroes don't destroy the threat in the end of Silvergun, but possibly die trying. And the hero at the end of Ikaruga, does finally destroy the Stone-Like, but sacrifices himself in doing so in epic fashion. The point being, that in a real against all odds situation, you're likely not going to come out of it alive, no matter how good you are. Silvergun's story mode even has a lighthearted Anime opening, but things get serious quick. The gameplay can also be seen as a deconstruction, because unlike most spaceship shooters, where you gain powerful weapons and just spam the enemies on screen, in both games you have to use tactics and strategy in order to do well. Just spamming only leads to a quick Game Over.
• Seraphim Slum is a genre deconstruction of visual novels and choice-based stories in general. On a meta-level, how can there be true free player choice when everything is scripted? The game's fail states reflect this, the "wrong" choices being struck through, railroading the player into a perfect victory state, exposing how there's no real choice at all, because everything goes back to the critical route, the events you must run through. Ironically, it's only after going through all the fail states — choosing all the "wrong" choices — that allows you to free Ezekiel. Illustrating in a meta-sense that, maybe, maybe, there is a kind of free will even if you are predestined to undergo certain events (like, in Ezekiel's case, predestined to fall)— after all.
• The Shin Megami Tensei franchise often plays around with tropes and expectations, but one of the main thrusts of the Devil Survivor title is an unrelentingly vicious deconstruction of "Mons" games in the vein of Pokémon. During the course of the game, many people obtain small handheld devices that allow them to summon various kinds of demons which essentially work like the Mons do in other games. Needless to say, it doesn't take very long before many start using them for power, or "justice", or the like, resulting in chaos and death on the streets of a locked-down Tokyo.
  • One event in particular even plays out just like a Pokémon fight — the two combatants face each other, their Mons in between them, verbal orders and all... and then one Mon is beaten, and its "Demon Tamer" is graphically murdered by the other's demon, by order of that very tamer. Yes, kids, this is how most of the situations Ash finds himself in would really end.
• Spec Ops: The Line deconstructs the modern military first-person shooter by showing the protagonist, Walker, as slowly slipping away from his sanity the further the game goes on. Walker continues to try to rationalize what he's doing by saying he intends to help whilst he's only making things much, much worse. He also says that he had no choice in a lot of situations where he very clearly did, including crossing the Moral Event Horizon by using white phosphorus to firebomb fellow American soldiers, and unknowingly killing dozens of civilians. Walker is, at best, a Nominal Hero, though he's closer to a Villain Protagonist. On top of all this, none of the possible endings are happy ones, with Walker either dead or clinically insane.
  • The game also insults the player for continuing to play it, passive-aggressively telling the player "hey, why should you care? None of this is real, so you can just kill everybody, right?" After seeing what Walker goes through as well as being mocked, many players will probably start to question what they're doing.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a massive Genre Deconstruction of post-apocalyptic shooters. The protagonist isn't interested in saving the remains of the world, but only finding and killing "Strelok" aka, himself. The world isn't a fantastic Fallout-esque wasteland filled with weird and wacky stories but a frighteningly realistic decaying urban zone - in this case, the real life Chernobyl exclusion zone. Barely anybody is willing to help you in this world, most people will shoot you on sight and you can't survive much here. Combat with humans is as intense, realistic, and often terrifying as it would be in real life. The less said about the mutants, the better. Oh, and this world wants you dead. Very dead. In fact, it's revealed that the Zone wants everyone dead thanks to the hubris of its Soviet Superscience creators, and created the post-apocalyptic setting on purpose specifically to kill the inhabitants. And everything the protagonist(s) do simply end up making things worse.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has all of the standard RPG conventions; you recruit party members who follow you forevermore, an Obi-Wan equivalent who explains everything, and you gain XP, levels and new abilities through combat. And then several important characters call you out on all of this, saying, "Have you ever stopped to think about how you get stronger by killing everything? Don't you wonder why these people follow you without question? Has it occurred to you that your Obi-Wan only knows so much about both us and the villains because she's worked for both?" It turns out that these standard RPG conventions aren't Gameplay and Story Segregation at all, but rather, things that actually happen in the plot, caused by the plot's Awful Truth. The standard aspects of the genre we as the player take for granted are seen by the people involved not because they can see through the fourth wall, but because any sane person would look at this behavior and realize that it's not the way reality should work, even the reality of Star Wars. Light or darksided, it says something about the Exile that she doesn't even notice it.
  • Not to mention the way it subverts the Karma Meter, by making what seems like the right thing to do end up being exactly the wrong thing to do, as is often the case in real life. For example giving to a beggar could lead to a worse outcome than if you had left him alone, as it makes him a target for armed robbery, and thus getting him killed. This example is the most obvious one in the game, as Kreia will bitch out the Exile regardless of the player's choice, not because she disagrees with the morality involved, but because the Exile (and very likely the player) does not consider the fact that following one's moral code does not exempt decisions from having consequences.
  • This includes deconstructing the idea of the RPG party and battle system, and at one point a companion tells you it frightens her how she follows you unthinkingly into battle, shoots when you say to shoot, kills when you say to kill etc. As in the above XP Point example, this is framed as a disturbing and unique characteristic of the main character, and treated as a plot point.
  • It also deconstructs the Jedi and the Sith — Force users in general can often be compared to deities, able to accomplish great feats that a mere mortal would declare impossible. A recurring theme in the game is that there are often times where a Muggle can do things that a Jedi would never be able to do.
  • Finally, it deconstructs Lucas's presentation of the Force, in that the Big Bad, having sampled from both the Jedi and Sith wells, ultimately rejects both because they're completely opposed yet they both work. Obviously the Force is far greater than they realized and is hoping to destroy the Force itself using the Exile to free life from its influence.
  • Obsidian Entertainment then went and did much the same thing with Neverwinter Nights 2, which deconstructs D&D and heroic fantasy in general. Only difference is, they took the Deconstructive Parody route that time.
• The Stanley Parable has been described as a Genre Deconstruction of Environmental Narrative Games, and goes out of its way to deconstruct numerous tropes about interactive fiction, Story Branching and storytelling in video games, thanks to the sometimes unstable in-universe narrator/"creator" of the game. The narrator has near omnipotence, with the ability to alter Stanley's world to the narrator's whim so Stanley is railroaded into following the story he made, since it's obviously so perfect. He even kills Stanley with a nuke in one ending when Stanley ruins his story, and gloats about how Stanley can't save himself if the narrator doesn't let him. The story the narrator made is about finding freedom from mass mind control, which you do by following his story directions to the letter.
• A lighter example of Deconstruction would belong to SWAT 4, an FPS which objective is not shooting bad guys. Just plain shooting bad guys like in another FPS, in SWAT 4, does not net you a point. This game expects you to be a police officer, not an FPS character. To earn points (which needed to advance in harder difficulties), you must deal with the bad guys with non-lethal methods, and arresting them.
• The Tales Series in general enjoys taking various RPG tropes and then brutally deconstructing them.
  • Tales of Symphonia wants to make absolutely sure you know how much It Sucks to Be the Chosen One. The two "Chosen Ones," one from each world, save their world at the expense of destroying the other. There's an enormous amount of pressure on them to not screw it up, and any other issues or problems they might have are ignored by the citizens or the Chosen One pretends they don't exist. The journey slowly strips away parts of their humanity, removing everything from the ability to taste food to their ability to speak, until they're nothing but an empty shell. Even after all of that, the whole thing is rigged against them anyway. All the Journey of Regeneration is really for is the Big Bad wanting to find a new vessel for his sister's soul, and said Big Bad couldn't give a damn what happens to the two worlds.
  • Tales of the Abyss takes a deconstructor chainsaw to every fantasy story revolving around destiny, screwing it and everything else that falls into the "Chosen One Fantasy" genre. Turns out that everyone in the world is assigned some role by a prophecy, but the "Chosen One" is actually a clone of the real one. This event threw the entire world's fate off-course, starting out with subtle alterations (like the Chosen One not dying like he was supposed to) and eventually winding up with most of the known world sunk beneath a poisonous miasma and a good portion of the world's population killed off and replicated. Even though the Big Bad says that "deviations are as nothing" in the eyes of this prophecy, we know better. Heck, towards the end of the game, the party actually winds up intentionally fulfilling part of the prophecy because they realise that there's no other way to save the world, but not long after the whole planet goes to hell. Basically, don't mess with fate.
  • It also deconstructs the Because Destiny Says So trope by showing just what a society ruled by prophecy would be like and just how many sociological problems it eventually causes, especially when the entire thing begins to break down.
• Team Fortress 2 acts as a more lighthearted and comedic deconstruction of the team-based shooter genre. Why would a group of people spend every waking hour murdering each other? Because they're all variously sadistic, psychopathic, or too insane to have any sort of moral compass. The Medic, for instance, does heal his teammates, but views this as an unintentional side effect of inflicting pain, and the Pyro is so psychotic he doesn't even realize he's burning people, as he's too absorbed in his fantasy world of candy and cherubs. This is all Played for Laughs, but it's the recognition of these tropes that lends the game its comedic quality.
• Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes can both be seen as a deconstruction of series that insist on bringing series back to life long after their cultural relevance has ended as well as the relationship between a game developer and the game they make. The former due to most of Travis not actually making any dramatic return to form with most of the game about how his past actions haunting him and how the spotlight has made him tired of the life of a celebrity, and thus resists making that 'grand return' until the end of the game when he finds meaning in his life again. The latter can also be seen if put Travis as an analogue for the series director Suda 51. He hasn't been in the director position in the games his company produced since the first No More Heroes and the game can be a metaphor for his struggling with returning to that position. It's further evidenced by the character Dr. Juvenile, whose vision for their games were twisted beyond their original ideas and the regrets that came from that, with a lot of her frustration seemingly eerily similar to Suda's own he expressed in The Art of Grashopper Manufacture released a few years earlier.
• Umineko: When They Cry is a deconstruction of literally the whole Murder Mystery genre. Despite that, it's supposed to be Fair-Play Whodunnit, though one could argue about the amount of fair.
  • The OPENING SEQUENCE of the second game states quite clearly "No Dine, no Knox, no Fair. In other words it is not mystery. But it happens, all it happens, let it happens." The author actually goes out of the way to inform us that he's not following Van Dine or Knox's rules of "fair" detective fiction and that... well, it's not a mystery that can be solved by us.
    • Then again, in said opening sequence, under said sentence, it is signed by "Witch in gold, Beatrice" herself, who is the very person trying to make you submit and accept that no, this is not a mystery. Which cast doubt upon how meta and how reliable this sentence is.
  • And then in the Chiru arcs the writer introduces first a personification of the Knox rules, and then later a personification of the Van Dine rules.
  • At the end of the series, the answer becomes clear: the mysteries that Meta-Beatrice purposely set up (the first four arcs) are quite solvable, and for the most part follow Fair Play. The reason that the author said that he didn't want to give a straight answer is because we are never told what really happened on Rokkenjima.

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