Fallout 2 / YMMV - TV Tropes

Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Is Thomas Moore a charismatic speaker who uses the "crazy preacher" persona as a cover for his infiltration and subversion of Vault City, or is he actually a crazy preacher and just happens to have gotten his hands on some valuable intel? He briefly becomes more serious when talking about his plots with Bishop, but never fully drops the act, even when reporting your completion of the task later or when angrily confronted about his ties to NCR, so it could go either way.
- Is John Bishop just an upstart mafia boss who found a way to elbow into the growing NCR by meeting the right people, or is he a cunning schemer manipulating cities against each other to take over New Reno and secure his future in politics? Most dialogue concerning his dealings with NCR are vague enough in the syntax that it's unclear if he approached them with his plans for Vault City and New Reno on his own initiative, or if they approached him and he's just carrying out orders.
- What led to the Jet addict stabbing Myron in the ending in which the latter survives? Was the addict angry about Myron's role in creating the drug that so many became addicted to? Did the addict want money for Jet? Was it due to Myron's personality? Or was it a random act of violence, likely caused by the addict being high on Jet?
Broken Base:
- While the game is generally agreed to be an Even Better Sequel in regards to gameplay, design, and layout, the story and tone are another matter. 2 is Denser and Wackier than the first game and has a lot more pop-culture references. Among many other misadventures, you can: get hitched in a shotgun wedding after a one-night fling with a farmer's daughter; meet a tribe of talking deathclaws; become a Super Mutant's gimp after losing to them in arm-wrestling; meet a sapient AI named Skynet; meet a giant intelligent rat called The Brain (and his less-intelligent cousin earlier on); and encounter several characters from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The game also features more overtly supernatural elements, and while they were present in the first game, they could be written off as Early-Installment Weirdness and Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane; not so with 2, which explicitly has psychic dreams, ghosts, and aliens, and some of the (dubiously canon) random encounters involve time travel.
- On the status of the Restoration Project, a fan-made patch that turned into a fully-fledged game mod as time went on, adding cut or underdeveloped content that was still in the game files and filling up all the Dummied Out stuff. It became particularly divisive on account of adding "new" locations, which oftentimes were cut due to being replaced with something else that ended up being in the final build of the game, but still provided a bunch of badly needed fixes and quality of life changes to the game. The trope was eventually acknowledged by Killap, the author of the Project, who separated it into a bug-fixing patch, covering broken event flags and various known glitches, and the "full package" including all the modded content.
Complete Monster:
- Frank Horrigan is a Secret Service agent and Dragon-in-Chief to President Dick Richardson. A psychopath even before his mutation, Horrigan delighted in killing whenever he could. His first onscreen appearance has him gunning down a family, including their child, for refusing his demands. Later, he gleefully kills a Brotherhood of Steel agent, Matt, and wipes out the entire community of peaceful, talking deathclaws that the player had earlier befriended. Horrigan has a special hatred for "mutants", humans and creatures that have been exposed to the FEV virus or even the slightest amount of radiation. This racism leads to him aiding in the Enclave's plan to unleash a biological weapon which will wipe out all mutated life in North America, in order to make America "genetically pure." Once defeated, Horrigan tries to activate the Enclave Oil Rig's self-destruct sequence, condemning all of his remaining allies to death, just so he can take the Chosen One with him when he dies.
- Dr. Schreber is one of the Enclave's most disturbed scientists. Schreber "customizes" his test subjects in horrible experiments involving biological and cybernetic augmentation, eventually resulting in Schreber's mortified superiors in Navarro forcing him to soundproof his lab against the constant screaming of his subjects. Schreber also paralyzed his cyberdog K9 so he'd be Forced to Watch every horrific experiment that Schreber conducted. In his most abominable act, Schreber ordered the extermination of the sapient, peaceful Deathclaws in Vault 13, resulting in Frank Horrigan coming down upon them and wiping them out.
Crosses the Line Twice:
- The unused icon for the "Child Killer" reputation. Even the artist who made the icon, looking back, can't believe he did it.
- Your character can become a porn star or a "fluffer" ^note. There's also a variety of reputations and stats that count how good you are at having sex, such as "Gigolo" which is given to you after banging enough people. The sheer amount of work put into the possibility that the players may want to become virtual sex workers in a post-apocalyptic world is baffling but hilarious.
- If you stand around in green radioactive goo for too long, you'll grow a sixth toe. This toe can later be amputated and eaten.
"You just ate your own fucking toe!"
Demonic Spiders:
- Deathclaws are more numerous than ever, and just as deadly.
- The game introduces the Enclave patrols, who will absolutely end your game with their weaponry if you're at anything other than near-endgame levels.
- Wanamingos. They're tough, hit hard, leave radiation damage, and tend to come in packs. Whenever you're fighting one, the others in the area make a beeline for you, resulting in you getting swarmed.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- This is the major reason Dogmeat made a reappearance after the first game. And why his "descendant" is in Fallout 3.
- Everyone remembers and loves SERGEANT ARCH DORNAN!
- Cassidy, by virtue of being far and away the most useful party member thanks to his marksmanship abilities and his memorable one liners. Such is his popularity that the Restoration Project modification gives him a fully animated and voiced 3D head model, albeit one borrowed with permission from another fan project, Mutants Rising. The developers seem to be aware of his reputation, as his daughter appears in Fallout: New Vegas as a companion.
Even Better Sequel: The first Fallout was good. Fallout 2 took everything it established and used it as a foundation to build a game that was bigger and better in every way — a wide array of new weapon and armor types, lots of new enemy types, many more companions and a much greater degree of control over how they support you, a much larger world with more random encounters, more locations, and more quests, and a more involved storyline with morally complex factions and characters that interconnect and develop as you play. The first Fallout seems like a beta or a demo for Fallout 2 when you look at the two together.
Evil Is Cool: Frank Horrigan has his share of fans due his menacing presence and Baritone of Strength.
Fair for Its Day: Fallout 2 is the first known video game to feature a gay or lesbian marriage in the form of brother and sister Davin and Miria who can be slept with regardless of the player's character sex. Said sex leads to a literal Shotgun Wedding, which is mostly Played for Laughs, and the PC's spouses are Joke Characters with awful stats who can't be dismissed from the party outside of death unless you divorce them, sell them into slavery, force them into sexual slavery, or extract their brain. Yet the very fact that a 1998 video game featured gay marriage as a valid option that wasn't particularly unusual within the game world is extremely impressive.
Fanon: With Fallout 4 claiming that Jet was already around pre-War, contradicting Myron's claims that he created it from scratch, part of the fanbase decided that Myron simply recreated/reverse-engineered a pre-War recipe and took the credit for it; it works surprisingly well considering Myron's not as important as he pretends he is.
Franchise Original Sin:
- Many of the criticisms levied against Fallout 3 by its detractors can also be directed at this game — re-usage of story elements and ideas from the previous game, plot holes in the main story, inability to join the villain faction^note, a really long unskippable Forced Tutorial, and retcons to the lore. However, the Fallout franchise was comparatively obscure at this time and the franchise was still finding its identity with only two games to its name, so these problems aren't minded much since Fallout 2 is still a great game, while Fallout 3 dials up some of these problems and has several others that make it more contested.
- The earlier games held a Raygun Gothic aesthetic inspired by a very 1950s-style image of America, but were also a twisted satire of that ideal - pre-war America was near-universally treated as violent, imperialistic and prejudiced, having interned people of Chinese descent over fear of them being sleeper agents and so desperate for resources that among other things it was confirmed to have annexed Canada (even the intro to the first game includes a newsreel of a pair of power armor-clad US soldiers executing a Canadian citizen in the streets and then waving at the camera). As the series went on, however, especially after it fell into Bethesda's hands, the Patriotic Fervor elements gradually became less satirical, and both the continued negative portrayal of pre-war America and attempts made to hold to the original message were counterbalanced by cartoonishly-overblown nationalism and its associated imagery being either played completely straight, or treated in such a way it may as well have been. One can compare and contrast the endings to Fallout 2 and 3 both having segments revolving around a marvel of old American super-science with a cartoonishly-violent personality that embodies America's warlike nature, but there is one critical difference: Frank Horrigan of this game is the ultimate villain and Final Boss, treated dead-seriously and with his nationalism resulting in lines that simultaneously glorify America and make it clear he's going to do very bad things to you and everybody else in the wastes in its name; Liberty Prime of Fallout 3, by contrast, assists the player, and while he's similarly nationalistic, his personality is so cartoonishly overblown that it becomes endearing, so that even though he's technically used against the genocidal remnants of the American government in his debut game, not a lot of players remember him that way.
Game-Breaker: Enough to get their own folder.
Goddamned Bats:
- Wolves. You're wandering around the countryside trying to get to New Reno, when you get stopped by three random encounters in a row with wolves. They can't do any damage at all to decently-leveled players, but there's a ton of them, they have a high initiative, you can't skip their moves, and your companions will likely burn through the ammo of whatever very powerful weapon you've given them to kill things they can just kick! They also have a nasty habit of circling around you and mauling you to death at lower levels. There's also the rats, who stop you from traveling around and force combat with you until you just step on them.
- The random pickpocketeers in the Den are some of the worst. They don't do anything but steal from you, and even unless your Steal skill is obscenely high, you'll have to buy your items back from one of the Den's vendors.^note Yes, this includes quest items. If you want to avoid becoming a Childkiller, you can go with a more moderate option and hit them once. They won't ever bother you again. You can also enter combat mode whenever you are within melee range of the children. They can't steal during combat, so it's not necessary to even hit them.
- All the enemies in the Temple of Trials, unless you have a character specifically geared towards unarmed or melee combat. They are going to be obnoxiously hard to hit, forcing you to use drawn-out hit-and-run tactics to avoid burning through all their Perception-lowering healing items.
Good Bad Bugs:
- The broken computer quest in NCR. After Jack has blown himself up, you could repeatedly fix the computer, gaining 3000 XP every time. Sadly, fixed in patches.
- If you save Smiley in the Toxic Caves, he can later teach the Chosen One about geckos, increasing their Outdoorsman skill by 3%. You can ask him to teach you about geckos an infinite amount of times and increase the Outdoorsman skill up to 300% if you want.
Genius Bonus: The fictional Vertibird aircraft could be a reference to the Real Life V-22 Osprey. Both the Vertibird and Osprey are tilt-rotor VTOL aircraft. The fact that one can be found crashed may also be a reference to the V-22 Osprey's... troubled history with engine failures.
Heartwarming Moment:
- If you play as a stupid character and answer the "Why don't you have a uniform" question of one of the Enclave officers in Navarro, he loosens up a little and remarks that it's not your fault that you're slow, and adds that he has a brother just like you.
- Vic reuniting with his daughter, Valerie, in Vault city.
- Talk to Sandy, a little girl on Vault 13's lower level. She pretends she's a cat and will tell you she's become best friends with the talking Deathclaw Valdis, who gives her piggy back rides. Piggy back rides. She also says Valdis will always protect her.
  - And then Frank Horrigan comes and murders everything in the Vault.
- Despite the bleak atmosphere in the Den, one of the merchants, known as Mom, is just a genuinely nice person who likes helping people. She even gives you a small sidequest where you check in on one of her friends and give him some food.
Hilarious in Hindsight: The next exchange is hilarious with every Fallout game except 2 having a way to talk down the end-game boss into submission^note. Frank Horrigan's caustic disdain for diplomacy almost feels as if he were lampshading the whole issue.
Frank Horrigan: You've gotten a lot farther than you should have, but then you haven't met Frank Horrigan either. Your ride's over, mutie. Time to die.
The Chosen One: Can't we talk this over?
Frank Horrigan: We just did. Time for talking's over.
The Chosen One: Wait!
It Was His Sled:
- The Reveal that the Vaults were made for human experimentation has become less shocking after every subsequent game made this common knowledge.
- A lot of time is spent building up the mystery surrounding the Enclave, but the vast majority of players nowadays already know that they're what remains of the old American government.
- Online game stores have taken to using spoileriffic screenshots for promotion. A screenshot on GOG.com shows how Vault 13 has been taken over by intelligent Deathclaws.
Magnificent Bastard:
- Vegeir is the brilliant leader of the Slags, mutated humans descended from survivors seeking shelter underground following the apocalypse. As his people grew too large to sustain their food supplies, Vegeir had them build a complex irrigation system that allowed them build a farm above ground while staying hidden away from the outside world. Nearby farmers from Modoc are scared away from the farm by a complex hoax where Vegeir has the Slags cover themselves with glowing fungi to mimic ghosts and fill torn apart dummies with animals guts to serve as a grizzly warning. When the Chosen One investigates, Vegeir sets up a pitfall to trap him and force him to deliver a trade agreement to Modoc to establish peace between the two communities. Should the Chosen One refuse, Vegeir is more than willing to murder him to protect the Slags' secret existence.
- Thomas Moore is a devout abolitionist and spy working for the New California Republic to infiltrate and weaken the misleadingly idyllic Vault City from the inside. The only outsider to earn citizenship by passing the nigh impossible aptitude test, Moore plays the role of mad fanatic by zealously preaching against Vault City's slavery to appear annoying but harmless to the city's inhabitants. In truth, Moore uses his access to their vault to steal valuable technology and information that he then passes onto merchants to smuggle out of the city. He gives one such package to the Chosen One to deliver to mob boss John Bishop that allows him to send raiders to attack weak points in the Vault City defense grid and plunder their trade caravans. Should the Chosen One prove a liability by being rude or demanding payment, Moore leaves Bishop a note to silence him as a loose end.
- Louis Salvatore is one of the four crime bosses of New Reno and runs the smallest yet deadliest of the families. The elderly Salvatore slowly watched the other families grow quickly in power using either deadly new addictive drugs or outside political connections, but he kept his own family in the background as he slowly built up his forces in the shadows. Making a secret deal with the Enclave, Salvatore trades them valuable chemicals and slaves in exchange for laser weapons that allow him to launch devastating surprise attacks on the other families and take a large amount of territory. Never one to rest on his success, Salvatore engineers a mob war between the Mordinos and Wrights by poisoning a Mordino drug inhaler and using it frame them for murdering a Wright child. Salvatore then intended to wipe out the weakened rival families before finishing off the Bishops and claiming complete control over New Reno.
Memetic Badass
- Sulik, a Barbarian Hero Lightning Bruiser who can whack enemies with his sledgehammer so hard it knocks them across the room. While not as beloved as Cassidy, he's his primary competition for the most powerful and badass companion in the game.
- Frank Horrigan has a reputation massively beyond what his brief in-game appearance suggests. He's the Fallout equivalent of Chuck Norris and whenever his name comes up on battle boards it can be assured that the thread consensus will always be him stomping the opposition.
- SERGEANT ARCH DORNAN can scream loud enough to scare off deathclaws and blow out your speakers.
Low-Tier Letdown: Pretty much all possible companions that aren't Sulik, Vic and Cassidy (the first three you will get when following the main quest) have their quirks and issues, but some just stand out more than others:
- Myron is by far the weakest character in the entire game. He has an extremely limited weapon selection, low health, and will almost always run away from enemies. His only redeeming trait is the ability to make stimpaks and super-stims if you bring him the right materials, but said materials are so uncommon that it isn't worth the trouble of dragging Myron around to use them.
- Marcus. He's a super mutant and thus unable to wear armor, which really hurts his viability in the late-game when you fight enemies that can liquidate him in one shot. He's also very limited in the types of weapons he can use and most of them are burst weapons, which makes him just as dangerous to you and your other companions as to the enemy. Not to mention that they guzzle ammo like water, so he'll be quick to run out. While the fandom loves Marcus as a character, not a lot of players take him as a companion, and if they do they tend to leave him behind once they reach Vault 13 or equip him with two-handed energy weapons instead of miniguns which he favors the most. And even then, the lack of armor and any defenses will lead to him dying 4 out of 5 times when someone bursts a Big Gun in his direction, so he's best left behind. Even in the Restoration Patch which adds the ability to get him some decent armor, it'll pale in comparison to Power Armor by the endgame.
Moral Event Horizon: Being evil is still kinda OK (although at -500 Karma, you get badass Bounty Hunters after you). Being a slaver won't make you many friends, but it's a living. Killing children, though, is an irredeemable act that will get you not only bounty hunters but also stop many people from even talking to you. (An exception exists in the form of Myron; nobody will care if you kill him.)
Obvious Beta: The numbers of bugs and things left half-finished are quite high, even with the official patches installed. Luckily, there are a lot of unofficial patches as well.
One-Scene Wonder:
- Despite having next to no bearing on the actual plot and it being possible to play the game without meeting him at all, Sergeant Arch Dornan is one of the most memorable characters in the game on account of how absolutely ballistic his voice actor goes with the Drill Sergeant Nasty routine. The developers seem to have been intentionally aiming for this trope, since he has a "talking head" and full voice acting, which is otherwise only reserved for very important characters, which he is not.
- The communications officer is practically an Easter Egg and the only thing he does that could come up again was Dummied Out, but he's well-remembered for pretty much the same reason as Dornan.
Player Punch: Not only is your entire village destroyed and kidnapped after you finally get the G.E.C.K, but right after returning to Vault 13 from the desecrated Arroyo you find that the Talking Deathclaws have all been murdered by Frank Horrigan. The latter can be prevented with the Restoration Project, but doing so requires a serious Speed Run and has been confirmed to be non-canon.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- When you have Goris and enter the combat mode, Goris always takes off his robes for several seconds before you can do anything. Thankfully, Restoration Project speeds this animation up a lot.
- The game always calculates Sequence rating of all combatants. So if you initiate combat with enemies, they will often get two turns in a row between your first and second turns if they happen to have higher Sequence.
Scrappy Weapon:
- The pipe rifle, the first gun you get, is a terrible weapon even by early game standards. It does poor damage, costs 5 AP to shoot and must be reloaded after every shot, meaning that most characters can only get one shot off per round.
- Thrown weapons in general are very limited in number, which makes it not worth investing the skill points in, and not very effective in general, even the grenades. Hell, the most powerful thrown weapon of them all, the Dummied Out Holy Hand Grenade is Too Awesome to Use.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Compared to the first game, stats give you less benefit, stuff is more expensive, and supplies are more scarce. Fallout 1 started you off with a 10mm pistol and around Shady Sands and Vault 15 you can pick up a shotgun, an 10mm SMG, and a leather jacket; Fallout 2 starts you off with a knife and spear, your first gun will either be found in the rat caves or have to be purchased, and if you want a leather jacket you'll either have to take Sulik's or pay for your own. This difference in difficulty will become apparent from the moment you begin the game: while the Vault Dweller could easily massacre rats in the starting cave with just a pocket knife, the Chosen One will struggle to kill the same kinds of enemies with the same weapon, even after leveling up once. And if the game files are an indication, the game was meant to be even harder, with a higher encounter rate and a Recurring Boss that starts attacking you as soon as you leave Arroyo.
Squick: Myron's story behind the creation of Jet. Jet users are basically huffing the fumes from Brahmin shit.
That One Level:
- The Temple of Trials, a Forced Tutorial that Executive Meddling forced be included in the game, and no one likes it. Because of your limited combat options, the ants and radscorpions being the only enemy types, and the linear nature of the temple, the level is boring at best and frustrating at worst.
- The Wanamingo Mine. It's several levels of Demonic Spiders with high power and lots of HP. 'nuff stuff. If you go there too early or underequipped, it's a guaranteed Total Party Kill.
- The Sierra Army Depot is several floors of force fields that your allies will constantly stumble into and take minor damage from. And if you accidentally make the mistake of activating the robot security forces around the base, then you have the Wanamingo Mine again, but with robots.
Underused Game Mechanic:
- The game allows companions to perform tasks for you requiring Skills, if their stat in that Skill is higher than yours. However, the only characters who can actually do this are Vic (Repair) and Lenny (Doctor); there's no one who specializes in First Aid, Sneak, Lockpick, Steal, Traps, or Science. Thus this mechanic boils down to "Vic makes Repair a Dump Stat and Lenny can heal crippled limbs for you." Additionally, while Myron does excel in this Science skill, it's largely rendered moot since most Science skill checks are given to the player in dialogue -and to make use out of Myron, your own character has to have sufficient Science on their own to begin with.
- Radiation, just like in the previous game. Only Gecko's nuclear reactor and the Toxic Waste Dump random encounter will give you rads, and Gecko's nuclear reactor is entirely option to access (the quest there can be completed by a remote-controlled robot). You do get a whopping 2 rads by eating fruit, but you only start getting stat penalties at 150 rads (and die at 1000). On the plus side, this means all the Rad-X and Rad-Away you find make great selling items.
Woolseyism:
- A minor one found in the Russian pirated version of all places (which was also how most of the Russian Fallout fans got into the series, thanks to the official version not being released until 2006), where in start-up loading screens the words "loading" were replaced with something else like (note: translation accuracy not guaranteed): "Get in the line, Sons of the bitches" (where the Chosen One is captured); "Scavengers are immortal" (Guy wearing damaged Power Armor Helmet); "Leave the hope here traveler, you won't need it" (Chosen One silhouetted against car lights); "War, War never changes" and so on. There is also an image where the "Loading" was not replaced, since it kinda fitted the image. The alternate title "Vozrozhdenie" (Rebirth, Revival) may also be this for some, if only for intended irony.
- The Polish translation has an example of the translator adding something just for fun. In the character menu, if you click on the Eye Damage entry, the original description says "This means your character has been seriously hit in one or both of your eyes. This affects your Perception". The translation adds an extra sentence that says "If you can read this text, the wounds aren't critical".
- A more standard example in Polish is done with John Sullivan from Klamath. In the original, John is of Irish descent and his speech patterns represent that. This is completely untranslatable into Polish. Thus, in the translation, he's talking in Silesian instead and when asked why he sounds so different from everyone else, he replies with "Maybe it's because I'm Irish".

Srg. Dornan: "Troper, what are you doing here? I gave you a direct order to read the main page! NOW YOU MARCH YOUR ASS OVER THERE AND DO AS YOU HAVE BEEN ORDERED, AND DO NOT LET ME CATCH YOU HERE AGAIN, DO YOU UNDERSTAND MEEE?"

YMMV / Fallout 2

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