Sandbox / Cliche Storm Wick Check

A wick check to see how Cliché Storm is being used. Concerns include it being a dupe of Troperiffic, it being complaint-bait, and it being ZCE-bait.

Wicks checked: 50/50

Quick Results:

• Positive/Neutral: 14/50, or 28%
• Negative: 21/50, or 42%
• Only about part of the work: 3/50, or 6%
• Intentional: 2/50, or 4%
• ZCE/Other: 10/50, or 20%

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Used as "Work has a lot of tropes", positive/neutral

• VideoGame.Romancing Walker: Despite a surfeit of standard RPG motifs, and a less than optimal translation, Romancing Walker still manages to be fun and entertaining, mostly because of its characters, and because it doesn't take itself too seriously.
• YMMV.Binary Domain: The setting and story are what you would expect if you put a bunch of cyberpunk anime into a blender and filtered it through competent writers. Still, it is very much enjoyable.
• YMMV.Bokura No Hentai: Although the manga deconstructs many tropes from Otokonoko Genre and Boys' Love, it still has a noticeable number of them, like the natural femininity of crossdressers or Incompatible Orientation to make the "non-standard" characters' feelings more dramatic. It also follows similar beats to other pieces of transgender fiction.
• YMMV.Buddy Complex: The first episode has been called out for having a lot of this including an invasion, a high school student going to school, the apparent death of a love interest, etc. It doesn't help that viewers keep comparing with Valvrave the Liberator. On the other hand, the use of time travel has made the series stand out a bit.
• YMMV.Doom And Destiny: This game is chock full of cliches pertaining to anime, video games (mainly JRPGs), and so much more. Most of the people who played the game enjoyed it because of its parodic nature and charm.
• YMMV.Final Space: Everything, from the plots to the characters to the dialogue. Naturally, it's all an Affectionate Parody, or at the very least Tropes Are Tools and/or Narm Charm.
• YMMV.Harvey Street Kids: Most of the episodes are simple retreads of plots done by other shows. Not that it makes them any less entertaining.
• YMMV.Lady Bird: Like many other great teen comedy-dramas before it, the movie doesn’t exactly change up the formula or break new ground, but it presents itself with plenty of heart, charm, and substance.
• YMMV.Ninth Company: First half of the film (the boot camp) fully embraces all possible cliches about conscription story. That doesn't mean it's bad. Then there is the second half, which gradually twists and inverts every single war movie trope into a bloody mess of War Is Hell. And it's awesome to watch.
• YMMV.Ouija: It seems like there was a checklist of basic horror movie tropes that needed to be fulfilled in order to make the movie work.
• YMMV.Overwatch Story And Lore: The story is full of classic sci-fi and superhero cliches, such as a Robot War, a hyper-intelligent gorilla, a supervillain whose powers are the results of medical procedure gone horribly wrong, two ninja brothers (one of whom is now a cyborg) who oppose each other's ideals, and so on. A lot of this adds to its charm, however, as the familiar tropes make the characters very easy to understand and the story easy to get into. What also helps is that, despite the familiar premises, each character possesses well-written and sympathetic backstories that make them easy to identify with. Up to and including several villains. The story, despite not being in the game itself, is very detailed and well thought-out and has people wanting more.
• YMMV.Skies Of Arcadia: If you had to look at the game on paper, it'd be hard to see what all the fuss is about. It's an extremely standard turn-based RPG that follows the One True Sequence (or at least appears to) one hundred percent, it has your typical "race with the bad guys to collect the magic crystals in the world" plot, only a handful of the characters really undergo any substantial Character Development, and the villains are an Evil Empire staffed mostly by some of the hammiest, most straight-forward and one-dimensional Card Carrying Villains ever. But it pulls off each and every single one of these cliches and tropes so well that the game is far more than the sum of its parts, especially considering it came out in the wake of a whole slew of overly dark and edgy Final Fantasy VII imitators, where these old cliches felt like a breath of fresh air after being smothered by the new ones so pervasively.
• YMMV.The Faraway Paladin: The story uses all of the stock fantasy tropes, such as an invading Demon King, the Standard Fantasy Races, patron gods and goddesses, the separation of magic and benedictions, as well as the protagonist being a reincarnation of a Japanese person from Earth. But Tropes Are Tools is in full effect, and the setting, while familiar, remains distinct through its examination and usage of these tropes.
• YMMV.Zap Dramatic: Sir Basil Pike Public School uses many subplots and tropes common to fiction involving school (the Big Game, school dance, disguising yourself as another person to humiliate someone).

Used to bash the work / Troperiffic "but bad" / Negative Slant

• YMMV.Black Desert Online: It would be cruel to say that BDO's story is incompetent in everything from its writing and presentation to its translation. It would also, unfortunately, be accurate. It's a disjointed Cliché Storm filled with paper-thin characters where the "Blind Idiot" Translation and inept cutscene direction make it difficult to follow or grasp the importance of basic plot points, and the voice-actors audibly struggle with the messy script and lack of direction. The good news, though, is that the game itself is a satisfyingly busy Wide-Open Sandbox with an appealingly flashy Hack and Slash combat system with just enough depth to be interesting, so you'll be spending most of your time building your own trade empire, exploring a huge and gorgeous world, or juggling orcs with magical kung fu and murderous Chinese ribbon dancing rather than pretending to care about the main plot.
• YMMV.Bring It On: Most of the sequels do retreads of the first film's plot, usually with an anti-racism Aesop tacked on.
• YMMV.Call Of Duty: Ghosts is generally considered to be a sub-par Call of Duty sequel due to its weak original setting story and characters, over-reliance on Rare Guns as the second attempt to futurize the franchise, stupid hype ("Fish AI" that wasn't as unique as advertised and didn't work anyway, and an "improved graphics engine" that was only a noticeable improvement in the system requirements), and a Cliché Storm plot with no likeable characters on either side that ends in a blatant Sequel Hook.
• YMMV.Cinderella II Dreams Come True: This movie is considered a strong contender for being one of the worst, if not the absolute worst, of the Disney direct-to-video sequels, for the jarring drop in animation and overall unoriginality, and had a huge hand in crystallizing the already notorious reputation of the sequels. The third film on the other hand....
• YMMV.Cop Craft: The series as a whole seems to be attempting to set a record for how many Buddy Cop Show and Cowboy Cop cliches it can cram into twenty minutes. All played very, very straight.
• YMMV.Gundam Build Divers: A major sticking point for some viewers is how it doesn't break much ground as far as MMORPG anime go. A Stock Shōnen Hero, his Mysterious Waif ally, his glasses-wearing nerdy Lancer best friend, the Plucky Girl in a cute Gunpla and two Aloof Allies. The breaking point for these viewers was Episode 12, where the day is saved by a combination of Power Gives You Wings, The Power of Friendship and Deus ex Machina.
• YMMV.Memphis Belle: One of the primary complaints about the film is that while it's competently made, it doesn't really hit any notable dramatic heights, and could have easily been mistaken for a typical drama filmed during the actual war, nearly to the point of being a Cliché Storm.
• YMMV.New York Minute: Part of the reason the film bombed; many felt that the film didn't justify its theatrical release because, despite having a higher budget, it had the same kind of plot and character types as their direct-to-video movies.
• YMMV.Radiant: The most common criticism of the series is its use of many of the common tropes present in many other anime fighting series, such as a generic Stock Shōnen Hero as the main character with a Dark and Troubled Past and a Superpowered Evil Side he needs to control, leading to inevitable comparisons with Naruto and Fairy Tail. The main premise, involving the search of a MacGuffin Location, also lead to comparisons with One Piece.
• YMMV.Rainbow Rangers: The show follows a basic Nick Jr. formula. The girls fit standard character archetypes and have a cute, clumsy pet, there's a fairly harmless villain with a daughter who isn't so bad, and while Kalia is said to have depth to her character she mainly fills the generic mentor archetype as well as Mission Control.
• YMMV.Ravensword Shadowlands: One of the many criticisms aimed at the game is that it's one of the most generic RPGs out there.
• YMMV.The Rugrats Theory: Let's see. The entire series was all in one of the protagonist's heads? Check. The world is 'actually' ridiculously dark to the point of bordering on Narm? Check. Multiple inconsistencies that the writer Handwaves as the protagonist being crazy? Check. Yep, it's your fairly standard Delusion Conclusion. The supposed Based on a True Story implications from it were also a recurring element from many creepypastas made at the time.
• YMMV.Space Sweepers: While entertaining, the film does suffer from a variety of cliches, at least to a Western audience. Namely, the utopian CEO of a MegaCorp being the Big Bad of the film would be obvious to anybody with experience in the Cyberpunk genre, many a Disney Death make the characters' sacrifices and efforts lose their sense of risk, their schemes near the end of the film seem like the characters are donning their Plot Armor, Tiger Park's axe is an obvious Chekhov's Gun, and The Cavalry arriving to save the day at the end of the film are easily predictable or overdone going into the film. Claims the film his entertaining, but has a very negative slant.
• YMMV.Surviving The Game: Feels like checking boxes on the list of all possible plot devices, archetypes and cliches to make the Hunting the Most Dangerous Game scenario. Doesn't mean it's bad per se, but still schematic.
• YMMV.The Accidental Animagus: Some Fandom-Specific Plot(s) like "Ancient and Noble Houses", wards, super!Harry^note although Harry and Hermione have only mastered first year wandless spells and it took them more than a year to get the hover and repairing charms to work are present. Also the fact that Hermione's parents are called Daniel and Emma. Ironically, the author's FFN bio calls out super!Harry as one of his Pet Peeve Tropes.
• YMMV.The Chase My Little Pony: Some FIMFiction critics consider 'The Chase' this. It becomes excessive as the story goes on. With just more and more cliches being piled on.
• YMMV.The Hard Times Of RJ Berger: Seriously. This show is like if Clone High took itself seriously, minus the creative premise to boot.
• YMMV.The Last Legion: Definitely right up there, what with the Action Girl pairing off with the deliberately mentioned single lead, the boy they'd adopted turning out to be King Arthur's ancestor, among other things.
• YMMV.Titanic The Legend Goes On: The film has an insane list of clichés found in kids' movies (especially Disney ones). Talking animal characters, an antagonist with incompetent henchmen, a girl with an evil stepfamily, Love at First Sight, Disneyfication gone mad, and more clichés are there to show its notoriety.
• YMMV.The Idhuns Memories: The trilogy crams up a ton of staples of teen fantasy fiction: improbably young characters saving the world, a lot of focus being put solely on their relationships, girls repeatedly falling for (very) bad boys, a rather neuter female protagonist with two love interests antagonistic to each other, stock European fantasy creatures like dragons, forbidden loves that reach cosmic levels... Interestingly enough, some of those traits weren't actually that popular yet back when the books were published, at least compared to how huge they would become later, meaning Idhún managed to predict an entire segment of literature many years before it happened.
• YMMV.Uglydolls: Despite its message about embracing differences and standing out being anything but subtle, the film has been savaged by critics for its generic plot, unmemorable characters and for not standing out at all from any other cookie-cutter children's animated film in the last decade.

Used to describe a part of the work

• YMMV.A Good Day To Die Hard: Alik is your typical America-hating Russian villain. The portrayal of Russia in the movie as a whole is a hailstorm of The New Russia clichés that were already dated 20 years before.
• YMMV.Orange: The original plot settings, but not the story itself, are full of this in the context of the shoujo manga, for we have a love triangle with the naive main character, angsty Tsundere and Nice Guy.
• YMMV.Raw: Jojo and Anthony. Let's see, girl marries a guy she doesn't know that well - he immediately turns into a controlling Jerkass and borderline abuser. Oh and he's foreign too.

Intentional examples / In-Universe examples

• Literature.Wearing The Cape: Jacky in Bite Me: Big Easy Nights intentionally invokes as many vampire tropes as she can, sleeping in a coffin on native soil, wearing lots of black and goth-like clothes, even studying to become a private detective, so that she go undercover in the local "vampire" culture. Jacky finds it all stupid, but since Vampire-type breakthroughs get their powers by being incredibly obsessed with vampires, it's otherwise universal.
• VideoGame.Blue Dragon: Blue Dragon started out as a 2006 Role-Playing Game for the Xbox 360, developed by several of the people behind the Final Fantasy series and the artwork of the Dragon Quest franchise. It's basically Akira Toriyama, Hironobu Sakaguchi, and Nobuo Uematsu's^note called the Square Dream Team by fans, as they previously collaborated on Chrono Trigger attempt at a Cliché Storm, after seeing how cliche RPGs had become.

ZCE, partial-context, misc

• Manga.Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga: The book itself, and the manga you would produce if you followed its advice. Why?
• YMMV.Arby N The Chief: The entirety of "Endgame"
• YMMV.Dungeons And Randomness: Some of the more dramatic characters qualify, especially Malchus.
• YMMV.Fast Girls: It ticks most of the typical tropes you'd find in a sports movie.
• YMMV.Independence Day: Certainly enough from every other alien invasion movie to go around.
• YMMV.Its Not The Raptor DNA: Everything about Bridges.
• YMMV.Mitadake Saga: The comic tends to invoke common anime clichés wherever possible.
• YMMV.Stargate: Roger Ebert's review (he put this movie on his most hated list) boiled every element of the movie to this, right down to the snare-drum "military" music as Daniel arrives at headquarters. Doesn't describe why it's cliche.
• YMMV.The Pearl Fishers: There are lots of clichés and coincidences in this opera.
• YMMV.Waist Deep: This was a major criticism of the film. Why?