You are watching something like Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation and it strikes you that you have heard every single line of this somewhere else. Every trope is presented without irony or acknowledgment. All the situations and setups are clipped out of another story and pasted in as-is.
You are in a Cliché Storm. Do not worry. The pain will soon pass. A bug will soon scrag the inept Lieutenant. Security will soon come to the perimeter. The line will soon be held. It will be over, soon.
Remember, this is not always a bad thing; many a Cliché Storm is also a guilty pleasure, or even, dare we say it, exactly what the audience wants in the first place. You can see from some examples that people often intentionally create as big a Cliche storm as possible...and then start having fun with all of the Cliches. Oftentimes, they may not start around deconstructing or playing with the cliches as so much play it for laughs. It's very common in an Affectionate Parody - most of the times, they intentionally start poking fun at these Cliches.
See also A Space Marine Is You, a specific form of a Cliche Storm; see also Deconstructor Fleet, for works that tear through dozens of tropes en route from Cliche Storm to originality. Compare Medieval European Fantasy, a common setting in some Cliché Storms. Compare Strictly Formula, Reconstruction. Compare and contrast Troperiffic, which is a more fun version of this trope, although the lines between the two are blurry and kind of subjective.
An important thing to note is that, as we enter the 21st century, the sheer number of works created makes it nearly impossible to write something "original". Also, our ability to securely store books and films in libraries makes it easy to access old works. That can make the newer material appear to be cliché storms, simply because we could see the similarity to countless older stories. With all that, Cliché Storm is about to become one of the most heard of tropes in the near-future. This is why we warn you that TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.
Examples
open/close all folders
Anime/Manga
This is the point of Kujibiki Unbalance. In fact, many examples of Show Within a Show are full of clichés, possibly so that they seem "more fictional" than the show they're part of.
Strike Witches. It's still quite enjoyable though, if you just don't think too hard about what happens.
GaoGaiGar plays every single trope of the Super Robot genre as straight as an arrow. However, since this series was a deliberate Reconstruction of that genre in response to Neon Genesis Evangelion, it's purely intentional. And awesome.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is full of clichéd plots — sometimes due to a Reality Warper who loves genre fiction, or Koizumi arranging the clichéd plot before Haruhi's subconscious gets a chance. They go to an uninhabited island and someone is murdered, go skiing and get snowed in, get harassed by a student council that wants to shut the club down, and go on a treasure hunt where they actually find treasure, et cetera.
This is the whole point of Jinki Extend, at least the anime.
Dai No Dai Bouken is a shonen manga series done as though it were a Dragon Quest game. Thus it does not just use cliches, it beats them down, makes friends with them, and then watches in amazement as they come out of nowhere and tell it to go on without them. It's part of its charm.
The Guardian Hearts OVA series manages to cram in each and every cliché of anime Fanservice and the Unwanted Harem. To the seasoned viewer, viewing it for the first time feels like seeing it the second time.
Every character, visual element, and plot device in Elemental Gelade feels lifted from some other better series.
Bakugan: The first episode alone displays rather obvious parallels with Digimon, Beyblade and Yu-Gi-Oh!, among others things.
Ghost Stories demonstrates quite a few cliches from horror works.
Rob Liefeld's infamous Youngblood featured a team whose only non-powered member was also its leader, several Wolverine rip-offs including a Proud Warrior Race Guy, characters layered in pouches and shoulderpads, names like "Darcangel" and "Badrock," gun-toting anti-heroes with religious-sounding names (the hot new character when the book debuted was Marvel's gun-toting antihero Bishop — Youngblood gives us Chapel, Cross, and Prophet), and buxom women in skimpy outfits. And they had "Home" and "Away" teams.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel comics, which continue the story after both series end, reuse a good number of the best one-liners and comebacks from the TV episodes. They're meant to invoke familiarity, but the problem is that they end up doing them way too often. After the nth Meaningful Echo, you start to wonder if the writers can come up with any new witty dialogue.
Well Spoken Sonic Lightning Flash briefly notes that "they thought of everything! No cliche left unturned!" when he sees his team's new headquarters in Final Crisis Aftermath: DANCE. The series itself doesn't exemplify the trope, however, nor does the team.
Parodied in the Harry Potter fic When in Doubt, Obliviate when Snape took exception to several standard cliches during a teacher's meeting.
Snape: "I'm not going to start off irrationally hating Potter because of his parents even if he did make a pained face and cover his eyes the minute he saw me." Dumbledore: "That's certainly big of you, Severus. I feel inspired already." Snape: "After that doesn't happen, I'm not going to be forced to spend time with him in my classes and as the head of his house and start to see a new side of him. Particularly as I'm not going to find out that he was abused or neglected or had some other tragic problem growing up other than his mother's death..." Dumbledore: "...What won't happen then?" Snape: "I'm certainly not going to see a side of him that I hadn't before and see some of myself or any random relatives of his that aren't his father in him. I'm not going to be drawn to his modesty, intelligence, kindness, or any other virtue you can think of." Dumbledore: "Well, now I think you're just limiting yourself. Would it really be so bad if that did happen?" Snape: "It doesn't really matter if it would or would not be since it won't. And finally, I will most certainly not become his favorite teacher and or his mentor. I simply will not do it and this will not become an inspirational story. It will not."
Which is Hilarious in Hindsight, since as of now Rainbow Dash has been seriously injured TWICE now, Princess Celestia has been revealed to be able to use evil magic, and Twilight actually HAS become an alicorn... all in the canon of the show itself!
drconichero's Soul Chess is full of them. What's worse is that it's intentional (the only time it isn't is the character design for the expy of Jeremiah "Motherfucking Loyalty" Gottwald).
My Little Unicorn: Let's see; the villain is an Obviously Evil wizard who lives in a dark castle in the dimension of darkness. His minions are a Terrible Trio consisting out of a shallow girl, a schemer, and a brute, none of whom possess any redeeming or positive qualities. On the other hoof, we have a realm of good where the unicorns live happily without any personal conflict between each other, are ruled by a wise king and protected by a group of Super Sentai / Magical Girl-inspired good guys, whose leader has a fairy sidekick, defeats monsters with Sailor Moon-based moves and has to learn to believe in himself.
The movie Rio is a compilation of every trope common to kids movies in the 2000s, especially Dreamworks movies. See page for a list.
Self-aware in A Few Good Men, where Tom Cruise's character has a throwaway conversation with the local newsstand vendor involving each of them trying to wryly out-cliche the other.
"All right, Deep EYES, this is a bug hunt! You heard the man and you know the drill... lock'n'load, move out, and Stay Frosty!"
Dungeons & Dragons, The Movie. It's easy to imagine little "DING!" noises and a counter display ratcheting up as each cliché goes by. The film makes for an impressive drinking game.
Sommers in particular lampshades this. In his commentary for The Mummy Returns, he notes that if you have a jungle full of ruins, you have to have shrunken heads.
He also claims that movie rules require a pointed gun to make sufficient rattling noises - about the level created by a large garbage bag full of cans is a good starting point.
Deathlands: A cocktail of every sci-fi movie you've ever seen, thrown together on a budget equal to the price of a bus ticket.
Ryuhei Kitamura isn't a terrifically subtle director, to say the least. He is, however, terrifically entertaining, which might explain why he was picked to direct Godzilla Final Wars.
MST3K-featured fantasy film The Quest of the Delta Knights has the Big Bad saying things like: "I grow weary of your antics, beggar man!" Ironically, and with no explanation whatever, both the Big Bad and the old man were played by David Warner.
The movie was a thinly-veiled attempt to do Star Wars in a fantasy setting long before Eragon made it cool, and that's how they linked the Darth Vader and Obi-Wan characters. It's not much of an explanation, but it does seem slightly less random when you realize that.
Small Soldiers: Everything Hazard says is made of this, from the "roll call" when he activates his troops to his combat banter. The best bit is when he gives a hilariously cliché-ridden speech to his "soldiers."
"Soldiers, no poor sap ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by being all that he can be. Damn the torpedoes, or give me death! Eternal vigilance is the price of duty. And, to the victors go the spoils. So remember: you are the best of the best of the few and the proud. So ask not what your country can do for you, only regret that you have but one life to live!"
The 2007 hard sci-fi epic Sunshine borrows heavily from both 2001 and 2010, along with a host of other influences in the serious science fiction family of movies. The movie works though, mostly because you don't see its type very often anymore.
Sleepover. It is a preteen chick flick comedy, but this is ridiculous. It doesn't help that most of the actresses are fresh out of Barbizon and don't even realize how many Dead Horse Tropes they're playing straight.
[Mr. Jigsaw consults Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, shakes his head]
Gen. Morters: Sorry Mike, no good.
Discussed in Serenity as the setup for an action punchline:
The Operative: "Nothing here is what it seems. He's notthe plucky hero; the Alliance isn't some evil Empire; this is not the grand arena—"
Inara: "—and that's not incense."
BOOM!
Within the Movie considered on its own, The Alliance is an evil empire, Mal is the plucky (anti-)hero, and the rest of the movie goes as you would expect, albeit with enough emotional twists and turns to engage the audience. But, as Joss Whedon has pointed out, the Operative is kind of right. While the Alliance is antagonistic to the main characters, said characters are thieves, mercenaries, and smugglers. The Alliance is largely beneficial and benevolent—yes, they have done some truly despicable things, but then so have all governments ever. How much of this comes across in the film itself is debatable, since time for these subtleties is somewhat limited. As for Mal as 'the plucky hero'—even in the series, Mal is far from the hero archetype, and for the film Whedon pushed him even further towards the darker, non-heroic side so he could undergo some sort of arc of development during the film. Mal may not lack for pluck, but—for example—he shoots three unarmed men during the course of the film, one of whom appears to be surrendering.
The Operative is Genre Savvy to wear full body armor. He is not a moron.
In a So Bad, It's Good way, both Darktown Strutters and Order of the Black Eagle. These movies aren't related at all, they just fit together when run matinee style due to using exactly half of all available tropes ever created prior to the 80s. The combination effect induces what can only be described as an effect similar to a caffeine rush without the coffee.
Cheap Sylvester Stallone vehicle D-TOX. Stallone plays a cop who, after punching a Cymbal Banging Monkey, finds out his wife has been killed by his nemesis. He develops a drink problem and is sent to a remote, snowy rehab place. People get killed off one by one. And who's doing the killing? Why, the Evil Brit! As you'd expect from a film populated by alcoholics, you get an Anvilicious message:
"Booze may be a slow-burner, but it's still suicide."
Subverted in almost every possible way throughout Inglourious Basterds, a film in which almost everything you expect in a World War II action film turns out exactly the opposite of what you'd expect.
Unlike Saving Private Ryan... aside from the Normandy Beach scene, which broke some serious new ground in that genre.
Limit of Love: Umizaru. Up until the last 10 minutes, you can easily predict not only every single "unexpected twist" but every single line the characters are about to say. Even if we count that last moment where the ship sinks with the protagonist still on board, the ending is still the same. Just goes to prove it, you can only make so many movies about a sinking ship.
The Amy Adams flick Leap Year is not so much a film as it is the feeding every Rom Com and Oireland cliche imaginable into a blender and making the audience drink the result.
When Time Ran Out. Most of the Cliches used in that movie were the ones Irwin Allen himself have been credited with creating. (It's eerily similar to the 1972 film adaptation of The Poseidon Adventure, complete with an elderly woman fleeing for an escape dying of a heart attack and the majority of the people who stayed behind dying.)
In fact, it hits up more tropes than expected, particularly during the middle section, which unfortunately bores the Genre Savvy person who knows exactly what the main character's going to decide to do, and just wants him to Get On With It Already.
Battle Los Angeles is oversaturated with Alien Invasion and war movie tropes. This doesn't mean it has nothing new or exciting to offer, though.
Resident Evil Apocalypse contains so many cliches from every zombie, sci-fi and buddy action film in the past ten years before release that it is near impossible to find something original in the film.
Alpha and Omega. Entire movie in a nutshell: Male falls in love with female. Male realizes he can't be with female because their love is forbidden due to them being different. Male and female get captured, wake up in a new location, and have to find their way home. Then throw in a bunch of kiddie humor during their adventure. Male and female finally arrive home, but the female dies. Oh wait, she didn't actually die. Male and female, despite their differences, fall in love, and live happily ever after. The end.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is chock-full of every action movie cliche most people have ever seen. If you want an explanation, look no further than Christopher Orr's review of the movie, in which he decides to just let it speak for itself by providing 40 of the lines that sum up the entire plot and all of the typical one-liners and plot points it has. It's really a shame though, considering it had some great actors who did the best they could with the material they were given. Then again, for fans of the movie, this could be exactly what they liked about it.
MAD's Dirty Dancing parody spoofed not just the movie, put pointed out the cliche used in the scene they were spoofing in each panel; a display of Lampshading that would have done TV Tropes proud.
A common remark—for good or ill—seems to be that Oblivion 2013 is made up out of other SF movies in general.
Literature
Defied by Codex Alera. Yes, it is a story about a Farm Boy who becomes a sword-wielding badass, learns the magic system, gets a hot girlfriend, saves the world from an Always Chaotic Evil nonhuman menace, and is secretly the incredibly magically powerful heir to the throne. But it isn't. Perhaps this is due to the Cool Vs Awesome. Or the unique magic system. Or the fact that all the races have been replaced by completely different and awesome things. Or that the main character is the Defied Trope of the Marty Stu. Or maybe because it was written by Jim Butcher.
The Inheritance Cycle often comes across as this. One of main reasons the movie was worse was that it took anything vaguely original from the book and replaced it with Narmful clichés. For example, in the movie, Saphira goes from being a small dragon hatchling to a fully-grown dragon in a matter of moments. How? She flies up into some stormy clouds. The book actually has her physically growing, over the course of a few months, without the use of magic clouds.
The Sword of Truth series. Everything from a common man of mysterious lineage, to a wise old wizard with robes and white hair, to a character that was turned into a small, fanatical creature when deprived of the artifact that was precious to him. The live-action TV adaptation (Legend of the Seeker) is, if possible, worse.
The Fionavar Tapestry reads like a deliberate attempt on the part of Guy Gavriel Kay to see how many high fantasy clichés can possibly be strung together in 1,000 pages of text. Considering his motive for writing it was because he'd just been helping Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion and he needed to get Middle-Earth out of his system, this was probably very deliberate.
The Belgariad, intentionally, as it was an experiment in making something grand out of the most shopworn fantasy elements. Most David Eddings works have a certain familiarity about them.
Maximum Ride. So what if you've never read it? In some form, you already have.
Nicely lampshaded and then subverted in the Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series by Mercedes Lackey. Here, the "cliche storm" is almost literal: a metaphysical force called The Tradition which gathers around significant events and people, directing magical energy to flow in archetypal directions and following certain tropes that have been set down through folklore and that consequently reinforce themselves by inspiring even more folklore! Characters throughout the series find themselves guided by, opposed by, and sometimes rebelling against The Tradition — a witty metaphor for the writing process itself!
Jim Springman And The Realm Of Glory has a book within a book that purports to be about 'A unique fantasy world of hope and fear, good and evil, beauty and barbarity', where 'A teenager armed only with a magic sword and a stout heart takes up this impossible quest'. The (fictional) book is filled with cliches.
Twilight: Awkward, clumsy girl moves to new school and is instantly adored by all? Check. New girl falling in love with the hottest (cough) guy in school? Check. Hot boy falls in love with new girl? Check. Girl is so in luv she will do anything for her twu wuv? Check. And that's just the beginning...
Grahame Coats of Anansi Boys is a walking Cliché Storm; to converse with him is to be buffeted by lines you've heard so often that they're not even language anymore, just meaningless noises. For his own part, Coats revels in cliches, finding them far more valuable and expressive than original thinking ever could be; this fits somewhat with the "corporate executive" to Coats' Corrupt Corporate Executive, because in conversation as in business, he'd rather go with the tried-and-true than take a real risk.
Played with in George R R Martin's story The Hedge Knight. It begins with every possible cliched circumstance around a knight joining a tournament. Then every single element of the story is revealed to actually be something else.
Lampshaded in The Caves of Steel. Elijah Baley notes that popular culture on Earth includes many stories that follow the same basic template, none of which even vaguely accord to the reality Earthpeople face in the Robot Novels.
The popular book-film romances, to be sure, had their stock Outer World characters: the visiting tycoon, choleric and eccentric; the beautiful heiress, invariably smitten by the Earthman’s charms and drowning disdain in love; the arrogant Spacer rival, wicked and forever beaten.
Live Action TV
The characters on Stargate SG-1, as the quote below from "urgo" indicates, would occasionally indulge in volleys of cliches. O'Neill in particular had a tendency to refer to the Goa'uld as having "very clichéd" behavior, and the last scene in the series is of the characters reciting various proverbs and cliches.
"The probe indicates a sustainable atmosphere. Temperature 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Barometric pressure is normal." "No obvious signs of civilization." "P4X-884 looks like an untouched paradise, sir." "Appearances may be deceiving." "One man's ceiling is another man's floor." "A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell." "Never run with... scissors?"
Something similar happens in The X-Files episode "The Unnatural".
Scully: Mulder, this is a needle in a haystack. These poor souls have been dead for 50 years. Let them rest in peace. Let sleeping dogs lie.
Mulder: Well, I won't sit idly by as you hurl cliches at me. Preparation is the father of inspiration.
Scully: Necessity is the mother of invention.
Mulder: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Scully: Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die.
Mulder: I scream, you scream, we all scream for non-fat tofutti rice dreamsicles. (grabs Scully's dreamsicle and eats it)
In the very last episode of Stargate SG-1, at the end, the team use a large amount of cliches to describe what they've learned from their experiences. "Beggars can't be choosers. Better late than never. Look before you leap." "The best things in life are free."
Vala: Let me guess, beauty is only skin deep?
Daniel: Silence is golden.
Cam: Jack of all trades, master of none.
Sam: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Then Vala says "Life is too short", a statement repeated throughout the episode (and Daniel and Vala's time-erased relationship) but supposedly forgotten when the Reset Button was hit. Suggesting, interestingly, that somehow Vala remembers what happened.
Trapper: Welcome to the Henry Blake Cliche Festival.
Prison Break — Okay, maybe it's not quite a storm, but just too many of the characters are overly familiar — the ominous, shade-wearing government guys, the oblivious warden, the brutish guard captain, the aged Mafia guy with an Italian name, the sweet-yet-daring female leads...doesn't have to mean it's a bad show.
The Post-Modern Prometheus in The X-Files is one giant, spiral-sliced, and deliciously smoked ham.
On The West Wing, when Bartlet debated his Strawman Political opponent Robert Ritchie, we hear a snippet of one of Ritchie's responses that goes like this:
...and the partisan bickering. Now, I want people to work together in this great country. And that's what I did in Florida, I brought people together, and that's what I'll do as your president: end the logjam, end the gridlock, and bring Republicans together with Democrats, 'cause Americans are tired of partisan politics. (Applause)
The Supernatural episode "Monster Movie". Every classic horror movie cliche you can think of — because the bad guy, a shapeshifter, is deliberately invoking them.
That's because the episode was an Affectionate Parody of the old Universal monster movies, right down to the way it's shot.
Alton Brown's commentary in Iron Chef America have been this from the start. The Chairman's conversations with the challenger have turned into this.
The A-Team is an example of an effectively funCliché Storm. You know the show's basic formula after an episode or two, but the characters make the plots entertaining.
The Charmed episode "Chick Flick" parodies all the typical slasher movie cliches when a demon releases psycho killers from horror movies and sends them after the sisters. Since their powers don't work on the killers, the sisters have to follow the typical cliches. And there's a nice little shout out to Psycho.
Piper: "I'm being stalked by psycho killers and I hide in the shower?"
Perfect Disaster. A short Mockumentary-styledDocumentary series that focuses on horrible natural disasters — ice storm, fire storm, but the most notable is the cliché storm. While the narrator and various experts explain the science behind the phenomenons (sometimes in cut-away scenes), each episode tells a fictional story about how the citizens and the local government of a given town/city would react to them. The set-up of these stories borrows everything from clichéd disaster movies — mediocre (but decent enough for a TV series) effects, overused character archetypes and interactions, even the camera angles can be guessed if you are savvy enough. While this may undermine the intended realism for some viewers, others enjoy it.
In the season 3 finale of Leverage, the team writes a speech for a politician that is intentionally made up of nothing but political speech cliches. The public eats it up.
Granted, it was a small country with a one-party democracy, so the public wasn't yet disillusioned with political cliches, and the team took advantage.
TJ Hooker is very guilty of being this for cop shows. Every storyline, you've seen before. All of the character types and stereotypes are here. The villains tend to have no characterization, largely being inhumane monsters. The show is such a Cliche Storm, that you might think you're watching a parody of cop shows rather than the real deal.
Gilmore Girls has an episode when Rory is moving into her college dorm and another student has lost a bet between him and his girlfriend and must only speak in cliches. A cliche storm follows.
Every single Mexican and Brazilian soap opera is this in spades. You always have the poor girl, who gets beloved with the rich guy, who also falls in love but has a scheduled marriage with another woman (which usually is only interested in his money only), the Corrupt Corporate Executive who is the good guy's rival and wants to get his fortune (and sometimes teams up with the evil woman to do so) and so on and so on.
Music
The careers of many pop-punk bands — most notably Screeching Weasel, The Riverdales, that sort of thing — could be called this, due to their fanboyish emulation of The Ramones. This doesn't mean it's not still awesome. In some cases, pop punk bands do get really generic and cliched in a bad way.
The Beatles' song "I Will". Still a pretty song, though.
The charity single "Just Stand Up!" Justified in that the song was written so that sales could go to the cause (Just Stand Up For Cancer) and for inspirational purposes, and therefore wasn't intended to be original.
The reaction many had to Linkin Park's Meteora, mainly because the lyrics are all about the narrator and how everyone else is wrong.
Every line of Cascada's "Every Time We Touch."
The story of the Mannheim Steamroller album and TV special The Christmas Angel: A Family Story seems built from a list of Christmas fantasy cliches: living toys (including a teddy bear, a snowman, and a toy soldier); a monster who hates the holiday, wrecks the town square and steals the eponymous angel from the top of its Christmas tree to ruin everything (because it represents the spirit of the holiday); a trip by the heroine and toys to the icy north to confront him; and a happy ending wherein the villain is reformed by the power of goodness.
Celine Dion's albums are a veritable clichefest. Her first seven albums (not counting her Christmas Album) feature no fewer than 27 songs with the word love in the title. That's about 1/5th of the songs she recorded. She outdid herself on "The Colour of My Love" where half of the songs (and the title of the album) feature the word love.
Toto are pretty similar; about half their songs follow the formula of 'I love you very much <insert female name as title of song>.' It got so bad, they named one song (admittedly a good one) 99. On their second album.
Nearly anything written by Diane Warren, including Céline Dion's "Because You Loved Me". Count how many times she used the phrase "in this moment" in Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing".
Almost eveything ever released by Ronnie James Dio... although, to be honest, rocking like this when you're around 70 is still pretty damned awesome.
The entire discography of KISS... who are still kind awesome in a guilty-pleasure sort of way.
The lyrics Cosmos' (and Chaos') themes in Dissidia: Final Fantasy might as well have been a long list of cliched fantasy phrases run through a computer algorithm and edited by a non-native English Speaker. The songs are still catchy, though they owe far more to the kickass score and excellent performance than the written content.
His last large-scale video, "You Rock My World", is a rehash of elements from his Bad/Dangerous-era videos: 1930s/'40s gangster motif ("Smooth Criminal"), Jackson having to prove he's tough ("Bad" — the phrase "You ain't nothin'" appears in both), celebrity appearances ("Liberian Girl", "Remember the Time", etc.), and Jackson pursuing a sexy girl ("The Way You Make Me Feel").
It has a tearjerker reputation, but "Gone Too Soon" is really just a list of tired similes ("Like a perfect flower/That is just beyond your reach/Gone too soon").
Brad Paisley's "Then". Could there be a more cliché chorus line than "And now you're my whole life / Now you're my whole world / And I just can't believe the way I feel about you, girl"?
Thompson Square's "If I Didn't Have You" is stuffed with clichés: "Sometimes, sunshine gets lost in the rain", "I couldn't live without you, baby, I wouldn't want to", "You are my heart, every breath I breathe…" etc.
Tabletop Games
Official Dungeons & Dragons publications intentionally play to every fantasy cliche imaginable with the understanding that if a DM doesn't like the standard way of doing things, s/he can always change it for his/her campaign.
Hey, look! It's another Eurogame about farming, trading, or something set in medieval times.
Hey, look! It's another American game about fantasy, combat, or something set in fantasy medieval times.
Starcraft II, particularly its trailer. You've heard every line before, and that's a guarantee.
The Wings of Liberty campaign itself isn't much better. The characters are, at best, paper-thin stereotypes — even Raynor himself doesn't have much depth — and the plot has all the moral complexity of a fairy tale.
This is exacerbated by the fact that not only is it a cliche storm on its own, its plot is the exact same cliche storm you saw in the previous Blizzard RTS. Not that people noticed.
Grandia, a much earlier RPG, may well have beaten Skies Of Arcadia to the decision to stop trailing after Final Fantasy VII... though really, in Grandia's case it feels more like the writer just wanted to have fun rather than having a specific intention of being different. The hero's a mischievous young lad, who runs away from home chasing the legacy of his dead father to become an adventurer, carrying his Orphan's Plot Trinket (the Spirit Stone), fights the evil empire... and it is awesome in very much the same way as Skies Of Arcadia's lack of fear for the use of cliché lead it to be.
Also the whole point of the aptly-named Nostalgia.
Eternal Sonata seems to teeter between this and Troperiffic, with varying opinions as to which side it leans more heavily towards. It has many elements of the traditional JRPG, but it could be argued that this was intentional.
A fair few people argue that the first Atelier Iris game, and maybe the second one, work on this level as well — yeah, it plays a lot of common RPG adventure tropes completely straight, but they're used so well and the tone of the games is fundamentally so bright and optimistic that the audience ends up loving the product anyway.
BlazBlue. It invokes so many anime and fighting game clichés (and subverts, inverts or averts just as many), every character is a walking case of Troperifficness.
Mass Effect is this in game form, although that's the point — it's like playing a Space Opera to the hilt.
That and the writers show an awareness to all the cliches and play with them constantly. The writing is also so strong, that it never feels cliche or unoriginal. The game always feels nice and fresh.
There's also a summary (on this very wiki no doubt) of this series that points out that each of the Mass Effect games correspond to one time period in sci-fi writing- 1 is the 1980s, 2 is the late 1980s, and 3 is the 1990s. This can't be anything but intentional.
Bonus points go to the twist that the world of Star Ocean is a Video game — even the 4D beings who play it probably thought "This game really is pretty cliche isn't it?"
Grandia II, Luminous Arc, and Tales Of Symphonia are, like, the threesome of cliché storms, being built around identical framing devices and having largely the same plot twists.
Legend of Dragoon. When it first came out, many fans couldn't stop comparing it to Final Fantasy VII. There is a good reason for this. It didn't help that the few "original" elements were downplayed. One of the "big revelations" (one of the members of your group has been mass murdering anybody that comes in contact with The ReincarnatedChosen One for hundreds of years) was just flat out ignored immediately afterwards without even so much as a chiding.
The game actually played around with the usual fantasy game cliche's, deliberately invoking them before throwing in a twist that would turn them on their head.
Live A Live is like this for most of the game, with chapters made up of incredibly cliched characters and plots. Then you unlock another chapter that starts like this but turns into a deconstruction.
Just Cause 2 falls into the category, most likely as a stylistic choice. Having the good guys really wrestle between helping the average Panauan and serving the Agency? Resolving the "plot" with something more sensible than the vile oppressive evil slimy toad of a dictator pulling a nuclear threat along an international struggle over a huge oil field that was there all along? Come on now, it'd just distract you from the ridiculous car chases and the 80's stylegasoline explosions.
Halo: half the speeches by either the Master Chief or the Sergeant fall into this category. That being said, many of the Sergeant's little speeches are also played up to have humorous lines.
It's hard to take any of the Time Crisis stories seriously.
Every single thing about Rogue Galaxy, down to every line of dialogue.
Enchanted Arms plays every trope, every cliche, and every stock phrase so straight, you could lock it in a temperature-regulated room in France as the International Standard for Straightness. Okay, it does have the Pizza Golem. With pepperoni, bacon and sausage. That's fairly original.
Dead Space, which played everything so very straight that it actually included the line "As You Know" without irony or Lampshade Hanging. The designers admitted that Isaac's suit was inspired by the Power Loader, to which one imagines the world replied "Yeah, we know."
Black Sigil is every late-80s/early-90s JRPG cliche rolled into one really slow DS game. It also suffers from the "One random fight every three steps" syndrome that plagued a lot RPGs of the era.
The first 10 hours or so of nearly every single Tales game. Then it hits you that the game is supposed to end now butyou're still on Disc 1. Cue Wham Episode. And therein lies why they have a fanbase. The Tales Series series are great at deconstruction and subversion, so, for fans of the series, part of the fun is waiting to see just how many cliches they are going to utterly demolish by turning them on their heads, or exposing the downright nasty sides of them. (Sadly, most people only seem to play the first two hours and then say "The plot is a Cliché Storm." The entire series is built on a big Cliché Storm.)
Sands Of Destruction. The first 50 minutes of the game are pretty unique — the female lead doesn't want to save the world as most RPG heroes want, but rather destroy it. By the next town she's already saving people and leaning towards the cliche-ism. More clichéd characters appear and more clichéd events happened, culminating in a finale that has more or less every finale cliché in the book, including Luke, I Am Your Father, Power of Friendship, Power of Love, Evil Cannot Comprehend Good so on so forth.
Dragon Age: Origins. Granted, the game does have quite a few original things, but when one looks at the setting...with few exceptions...it's practically every Tolkienian-inspired Medieval Fantasy plus a few things, minus a few things. Forest-dwelling elves who are big on Archery and hunting? Check. Subterranean Mountain-dwelling dwarves with a fondness for alcohol and crafting? Check. Mage towers? Check. Humans who speak with British accents? Check. Obvious influence from the British Isles or Western Europe? Check. Mages wound up destroying the world and creating Darkspawn? Check. Dwarven warriors? Check. Fantastic Racism? ...eh, mark it but not fully played out. Green and brown-stained landscapes? Check. Evil dragons that are just giant animals in terms of intelligence? Check. Last in the line of kings? Check.
The game's even self-aware! The human origin story is loaded with Cliches...yet during the story, when you kill giant rats, your other party member says "Giant rats? That's like the start of every bad adventure tale my grandfather used to tell!"
Try this Quake IV drinking game. Take a shot for any Space Marines cliche lifted from Aliens, Warhammer 40,000, Vietnam War movies like Apocalypse Now, and previous Id Software shooters. Only those Made of Iron will still be conscious by the beginning of the third level. Seriously, the trope page for A Space Marine Is You reads like the design document for the game.
Guild Wars is particularly guilty of this, though it doesn't get much attention. The storyline in all four campaigns is pretty cliched itself, but if you listen to the dialog you'd think you were listening to a dictionary of cliche things to say. From the motivational speeches you quite often get ("We are the light that will shatter the coming darkness"), to the supposedly dramatic twists in the storyline ("But something tells me if they see for themselves what the White Mantle really do with the Chosen, they'll have a change of heart about their masters"). Although there are some subversions. (Varesh Ossa is actually The Dragon rather than a pawn of Abaddon, despite being Chosen, it's heavily implied any of the Chosen could have done what the player character does, the player character unintentionally screw over Elona in time for Guild Wars 2) Nightfall in particular has the most Cliché Storm story out of all of them...despite the subversions.
The Feeble Files is kinda cross between genuine cliché storm and parody of it.
The plot of Champion Mode in Fight Night Champion is essentially an amalgamation of every single boxing movie cliché in existence: brutish undefeated rival? Check. Crooked Don King-esque promoter? Check. Friendly rival brother that turns bitter only for the two to eventually reconcile? Check. Satellite Love Interest? Check...
Baten Kaitos: Eternat Wings and the Lost Ocean. You have Kalas, a teenage orphaned Anti-Hero out to avenge his family who was killed by The Empire. He meets up with Xelha, a Mysterious Waif who is trying to stop said empire from acquiring the five End Magnus. About a third the game is like that, then it turns out that nothing is as it seems.
The Fire Emblem series is split between Cliché Storm games and games which avert it: games one, two, three, six, eight, eleven and twelve fall under this (one and six being identical in how they do it!), whereas four, five, seven, nine and ten don't. (Worth noting that eleven and twelve are remakes). To be fair, Archanea wasn't as cliche in their day as they seem now - consider Archanea helped establish the genre it's a part of; compare Sword of Seals and The Sacred Stones, which were about a decade and a half after Archanea.
Path of Radiance was, backstory and setting aside, this to Fire Emblem games. However, about halfway through the game, they start playing with the Fire Emblem tropes, such as having the princess (instead of being a plot figure) don armor and become full out playable. Radiant Dawn meanwhile goes into full-on Deconstructor Fleet.
An in-universe example was done by Real Life Comics during a dimension-hopping adventure where they wound up in a world where "everything is a Sliders cliche!". Naturally, this involved their dimension-traveling device fizzling out, a doomsday scenario, joining and fighting a rag-tag resistance group led by a double of someone they knew, getting involved with and solving the world's problems and a last second escape. Well, almost all their problems.
Alt Dave: That's great, but what about the huge freaking asteroid about to hit the planet?!
Tony: Sorry, pal! You're on your own!
Catch a Mad in Narbonic not spouting off every Mad Scientist cliche ever and you will find a Mad letting the side down. If you can't rant for at least an hour about THOSE FOOLS THAT CALLED ME MAD!, then you are sane and don't belong.
It's even worse when you add in the annoying sidekick, who is just so useless until the end when he "saves" the hero, except he gets attacked by some flying frog things as a result...
Barbie movies often fall prey to this especially when they're ferociously trying to subvert it in the name of Girls Need Role Models.
Barbies and the Three Musketeers manages to fall prey to this and attempt to make them role models for girls. Unfortunately, it flops (even more) when they replace the swords (and muskets) with batons and fluffy, uniformed kittens.
Every Disney sequel that ever went straight to DVD. Although, some have thought that Cinderella III was somewhat deconstructive, and it also lampshaded several tropes played in the original fairy tale (e.g., the king asking why the prince is so in love with someone over their choice in footwear, characters seemingly being very suspicious about choice of love).
Whether intentional or not, The Fairly OddParents feels like an example of this right from the start. There are scenes after scenes and jokes after jokes that one can almost guess the outcome, or ask oneself, "why have I heard of this before?" At the worst one will emit an inner groan at the overused joke, but also at times one can find it charming.
The LEGOHero Factory mini-series, also called "Rise of the Rookies". A great cast with some big names and CGI models with over-detailed textures a good story do not make. It relied so much on recycled formulas and rolled so well on clichés, that it neglected to explain the very driving force behind its plot: Just what did Von Nebula want revenge for? Nobody has done anything to him. The first episode included a scene during which the characters tell us just how awesome the main hero is, and that he will end up saving the day. Just in case you feared that the series would have something interesting and unexpected in store for him (and surprise, surprise, his whole character development was also wrapped up in the same episode).
Arguably, its p-redecessor Bionicle started out this way, playing all the tropes very, very straight in the first few years, although still managing to be enjoyable. It's only in the later years that it became more subversive and ascended to Troperiffic. There's still a chance for HF to do the same.
Cars is this for Pixar movies. It's easy to imagine a little counter in the corner dinging whenever you see a Pixar cliche. Stranger in a community or group? Check. Brooding moment from a side character? Check. Wacky sidekick who forms a comedic duo with the main character? Check. Said group full of wacky members with their own quirks? Check. All of the development threatens to go downhill when something happens to separate or alienate the stranger? Check. They all decide they like this new stranger and want him back in the group? Check. The stranger decides that s/he really is a member of the group? Check.
Brave is often regarded as this as well, considering it stars a rebellious princess (all too common in Disney films) and struggled a bit to distinguish itself from previous movies such as Tangled and How to Train Your Dragon. To its credit, though, it did take a more subversive take on the worn formula it operated on.
The sequel to Cars likewise is a Cliche Storm for action movies. The first movie was good on its own right, just considered Strictly Formula for Pixar movies. However, the second one takes most of the Cliches Up to Eleven.
Probably because the show had a heavy emphasis on comedy; the writing made it clear that they knew it was all cliched, so at times it could come off as an Affectionate Parody of the superhero genre.
Detention - however, the characters (What little we saw of them) were memorable enough it's listed as Too Good to Last.
The first season of Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi. This was removed in the second season.
Pepper Ann was this to the Slice of Life genre, though it was written well enough to get away with it. May also count as Seinfeld Is Unfunny, as it was one of the first mainstream cartoons of that genre.
I Am Weasel had an episode which parodies almost every cartoon cliche as part of its plot of Weasel and Baboon making a new cartoon show.
Subverted so much in online text-based RP games that it's almost starting to come full-circle. Everyone seems so terrified of making their character a Mary Sue that they're going to ridiculous heights to make their characters/plots blandly average... even in genres and settings where everyone having some measure of the fantastic is not only forgivable, but preferred. These often end up producing Anti Sues that still dominate the spotlight unfairly in spite of the total lack of anything noteworthy of them.
This is especially prevalent mostly due to the misuse of the Mary Sue accusation — it has evolved from something that was reserved for genuinely annoying characters to simply complaining about characters you don't like, with several "Mary Sue tests" including stuff that really isn't Sueish...just stuff the author of the test dislikes and wants to get rid of by calling it one of the Common Mary Sue Traits.
The fourth installment of Bunny Kill is chock full of various anime cliches, including over the top violence, super modes, ninja jutsu, and the Disposable Woman. Word Of God states this was intentional.
Cirque du Soleil's KA, their only show to put its Excuse Plot front and center, is a conventional heroic journey: royal twins are separated when their kingdom is attacked and their parents killed by evil forces; they and their sidekicks (some wacky, some serious) go through a variety of adventures to be reunited and help defeat the army. Each finds romance along the way, the Twin Brother with a villain's daughter and the Twin Sister with a Tarzan-like forest hero. The pleasure of the show is watching it unfold without intelligible dialogue and with oodles of Scenery Porn and acrobatics; the familiarity of its story is kinda to its benefit.
