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.
Baten Kaitos: Eternal 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.
Most people remember recent BioWare games for the characters, less so than the plots, due to the actual villain being obviously Black-and-White Morality.
Black Sigil is every late-80s/early-90s JRPG cliché 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.
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.
Body Blows: Naturally, as a series that was created as an Alternate Company Equivalent to Street Fighter (the first Body Blows game following the basic formula of several people from random countries fighting in an international fighting tournament) after the Amiga port of Street Fighter II was panned by many owners of that brand of computers having similarities with that Capcom owned franchise was to be expected. The sequels especially became rife with cliches when it started copying elements of Mortal Kombat (particularly Body Blows Galactic with the whole premise of humans fighting otherworldly fighters, though doing it in a Sci-Fi manner rather than through mystical means), and to some extent SNK's Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting series (Of which the first game already demonstrated this in the form of the brothers Danny and Nik introduced in the first game were plainly based to an extent on the Bogard brothers from the former). You can probably have a drinking game spotting the character archetypes and other elements of this series that were inspired by those other games.
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger leans into this on purpose, almost to the point of being a mild parody of the Spaghetti Western. Cowboys and Indians, decisive quick-draw duels at high noon, thrilling wagon chases and jailbreaks, it's all there, but the more fanciful and unlikely aspects are treated as creative embellishments for drammatic effect by the Unreliable Narrator telling the story or, less commonly, gross misunderstandings by the slightly naive fanboy in the audience.
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."
Deltarune appears to be deliberately invoking a ton of Very Special Episode plots in the character of Noelle Holiday, already a Christmas-themed reindeer. To summarize, she's going through a Coming-Out Story while trying not to upset her Workaholic mom and help her hospitalized dad, while her sister is missing, or dead; it's not yet clear.
Destroy All Humans! does this deliberately, invoking almost every well-known trope in the alien invasion genre. The locations Crypto visits represent Cliche Storm parodies of various countries.
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, subterranean Mountain-dwelling dwarves with a fondness for alcohol and crafting, mage towers, humans who speak with British accents, obvious influence from the British Isles or Western Europe, mages wound up destroying the world and creating Darkspawn, Dwarven warriors,note One of the few aversions is that the dwarves don't have a Scandinavian accent—remarkably, they have American accents too!Fantastic Racism, green and brown-stained landscapes, evil dragons that are just giant animals in terms of intelligence, and last in the line of kings. The game's even self-aware! During the human origin 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!"
Dual Blades: While the Power Combing System is unique and praiseworthy and what little plot there is is set up in a very different manner to most fighting games, the designs and characterizations of the fighters on the roster is quite it guilty of this. To quote one critic who reviewed this game "These fighters are rather uninspired in their character designs, lacking any real memorable flair. You've got Efe, a robed swordsman; Kanae a Japanese swordswoman; Brandon, a shirtless swordsman...okay, you get the picture. Each of these characters have their own crazy attacks and text after winning a bout, but it's obvious that these fighting guys and gals won't ever get their own fanclub, spinoff, or even a future sequel." Though amusingly enough, a sequel, titled Slashers: The Power Battle, has since been made and the developers of that title have fleshed out at least some of the character backstories.
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.
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's intentional.
Evil Genius pulls this off intentionally, putting the player in the shoes of a supervillain striving for world domination. A James Bondexpy even shows up trying to stop you. Your player avatar choices are a stout Austrian, sexy socialite]or ex-triad, and the game takes place in an Elaborate Underground Base of the player's design. And it doesn't stop there.
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, Shadow Dragon and its immediate successors weren't as cliche in their day as they seem now—consider Archanea helped establish the genre it's a part of; compare The Binding Blade 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.
The Verdant Wind route, with the occasional bout of Narm Charm, is this. You end up aiding the Alliance to fight against the evil Empire. You fight the Emperor as a Climax Boss, but once they're defeated, they reveal that there is a man behind the man who has been trying to pull the strings and lead the land into war — those who slither in the dark. Despite defeating their boss, a powerful monster from antiquity (Nemesis) appears, with implications that he's with them as his army is made up of The Remnant of Those Who Slither in the Dark. What's more, he's even defeated with a power of friendship speech. If it is your first playthrough, it definitely feels like a rehash of all things Fire Emblem, though this is arguably to the route's strength. Fortunately, when viewed as a whole, plenty of the tropes are played with more than it appears.
The plot of Azure Moon is rather typical for a Fire Emblem game, as the plot focuses around a young noble saving his homeland from an invading power hellbent on overthrowing it. However, what sets it apart from other stories in the series is its protagonist, Dimitri, and his ratherlargecharacterflaws and arc. The Blue Lions are also tied very intimately with the plot, making for a character-driven story that exemplifies why Tropes Are Tools. Due to this, Blue Lions is regarded as the best route in the game by many, though especially by veteran Fire Emblem players.
If you play as the Black Eagles, the Silver Snow route arguably comes off as similar to the Verdant Wind route, due to having a mostly identical plot, whereas in the Crimson Flower Route, you side with Edelgard and The Empire to conquer Fodlan, making it the least typical route.
Engage cranks the cliche storm up to eleven, moreso than Awakening even. Not only does it rely heavily on stock Fire Emblem plot elements, such as the protagonist's sole parent dying and the heroes fighting against an evil dragon, but also adds common cliches used in Shounen anime to the mix, such as the main theme of The Power of Friendship, summoning other characters through a phrase, and the protagonist getting revived with an 11th-Hour Superpower with the help of spirits. Several fans, especially those of Three Houses don't enjoy the story for this reason, but others do otherwise thanks to how these cliches result in a very Narmy plot.
The plot of Champion Mode in Fight Night Champion is essentially an amalgamation of every single boxing movie cliché in existence: brutish undefeated rival, crooked Don King-esque promoter, friendly rival brother that turns bitter only for the two to eventually reconcile, and Satellite Love Interest.
Gone Home is a standard lesbian teenage love story, combined with a standard "parents' marriage is falling apart" plot.
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.
Halo: Half of the Master Chief's quips or Sergeant Johnson's speeches fall into this category. That being said, Johnson's cliche "badass black hardass drill sergeant" tendencies are often Played for Laughs, and he actually gets some pretty clever lines too.
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.
The 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 cliches, deliberately invoking them before throwing in a twist that would turn them on their head.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is what you'd get if you drew up a list of every Eastern RPG trope in the book, then built a detailed world to explain and justify said tropes. We've got a spunky, outgoing heroine with a staff, a reserved boy who keeps to himself with a mysterious past, a princess that lives a normal life until she's called to take up her family responsibilities, a loner swordsman with a sour disposition who comes to protect a much younger girl who acts as his anchor, and so on. But the scale is downsized from saving the world to traveling the local kingdom, the dialogue is full of incidental chatter about daily lives and the people in towns with their own subplots and personalities, making Liberl feel like a living, breathing place that didn't just spring to life when the protagonists were born to be saved. It also helps that Estelle and Joshua flip the usual roles of who's the viewpoint character. Joshua has all the trademarks of a angsty male lead, but the game's story is largely seen through Estelle's innocent outlook who subverts the idealized image of a heroine. Sure she's a Genki Girl who believes the best in people, but she's also a slob, prefers physical activity and wearing practical clothes but is fully comfortable with girly things from time to time, can be utterly clueless, and isn't aware of the darker implications of her world. Putting all this together creates an experience that grounds cliches so thoroughly that a player can become invested in things they know are bound to happen.
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 where it plays exactly like a Save the Princess RPG plot where the Knight in Shining Armor Oersted goes to rescue his bride Princess Alethea from the Lord of Dark...only for the entire storyline to go dark extremely fast where his jealous best friend Streibough orchestrates a plan at the last moment to steal the glory for himself and results in everyone Oersted cared about being dead and the rest of his kingdom branding him a villain for (accidentally) killing their king. He then decides that he'll be just that and crowns himself the Lord of Dark Odio.
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 1990's, and 3 is the 2000's. This can't be anything but intentional.
The Metal Gear series, while highly innovative in terms of gameplay, is a long Cliche Storm as far as the writing goes. It thoroughly mixes cliches from some Manga/Anime series together with established Hollywood cliches, and barely ever lets up for more than a cutscene. Some fans enjoy the series expressly for that reason.
In Persona 5 Strikers, Ango Natsume's novels are apparently Cliche Storms when they aren't flat-out plagiarizing other works. His Jail, modeled after his novel, features such things as a Quirky Miniboss Squad whose members face the heroes in ascending order of strength, several MacGuffins to collect, and a demon lord from another world who calls the protagonists out on how many enemies they've killed to get to him. Futaba, who's rather familiar with the genre, ends up snarking at Natsume's lack of talent or originality.
Punch Club is a storm of 80's martial arts and sports movie cliches: avenge your murdered father, recover a magic medallion, train under an old guy named Mick, re-enact the plot of Rocky IV, win a prison fight ring, become a vigilante and fight mutants and robots, make your own Training Montage, attend a fighting tournament on a private island, and your father is actually alive and a bad guy.
Try this Quake IV drinking game. Take a shot for any Space Marines cliche lifted from Aliens, Warhammer 40000, 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.
Red Dead Redemption is also full of this. This is most likely because EVERYTHING that happens in the game is a tribute to old Spaghetti Western movies.
Sands of Destruction. It actually manages to invert the trend seen in the Tales Series! The first 50 minutes of the game are pretty unique and very promising—the female lead doesn't want to save the world as most RPG heroes want, but rather destroy it. Unfortunately, by the next town she's already saving people and leaning towards the cliche-ism. More clichéd characters appear and more clichéd events happen, 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, and Evil Cannot Comprehend Good. A common complaint towards the game is that They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot.
Zap Dramatic's Sir Basil Pike Public School contains quite a few elements of the standard school drama (the Big Game, the school dance, disguising yourself as another person to humiliate someone, etc.).
Grandia, 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.
Sonic Adventure; The entire story is a mashup of many standard fantasy, anime and video game cliches. Band of heroes out searching for magical trinkets to save the world, versus an evil mad scientist trying to get the trinkets himself to take over the world while putting up with them, and an evil monster is also giving them trouble along the way, eventually becoming the main villain and having a One-Winged Angel showdown with the main hero at the end. The hero defeats the villain by literally using The Power of Love. Many of the following games in the series would follow a similar story structure and formula.
E-102 Gamma's own story was deliberately left unfinished in favor of a different character in the Archie Comic adaptation of Sonic Adventure, specifically because the writers quipped that his story was "something you've seen a hundred times if you're a devotee to samurai movies".
Subverted and played straight with Spec Ops: The Line. The plot is a brutally critical Deconstruction of military tactical shooters but a common criticism of the gameplay is it is unapologetically generic and bland. However, given how the entire point is for Do Not Do This Cool Thing, making the gameplay feel tedious and unfufilling was likely an intentional choice to reinforce the point.
Some games in the Super Mario Bros. series are this, mostly in regards to the franchise's own cliches.
A prime example of which is the New Super Mario Bros. series, where all four (five with Luigi U) games are Super Mario Bros. 3 copies with mostly similar world and level themes (grass, desert, water, forest, ice, mountain, sky and lava), the same bosses (the Koopalings, Boom Boom and Bowser), the same general soundtrack and bosses mostly from Super Mario Bros 3 and Super Mario World. They also tend to have the same final boss concept (giant Bowser), certain recycled level themes (like one with tons of Skewers the player has to carefully avoid), and a secret world with a sky/space theme. Super Mario 3D Land is basically a 3D version of this formula, albeit with less boss variety and a different style of final boss.
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.)
It's hard to take any of the Time Crisis stories seriously, since most of them are standard action-movie fare. They usually involve rescuing a hostage, stopping a weapon of mass destruction or recovering a MacGuffin, among other cliches that serve as excuses for large-scale shootouts.
And likewise, Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico did this for the Mexican action movies.
Likewise, True Crime: Streets of LA intentionally reproduced the 1980s action flick in video game form.
Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta is already The Mockbuster to the Uncharted series, but it's also an hilariously bad cliche storm in just about every other sense too. You've got a guy who acts suspiciously like a mixture of Nathan Drake, Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. A Temple of Doom in an ominous middle eastern desert location that's never named, complete with boulders to dodge, swinging blades crossing the room in predictable patterns, and a bunch of collectathon gameplay of the simplest order. There's a generic bald tough guy acting as the villain with a horde of identical henchman mercenaries, a driving sequence in town involving dodging the police and awful controls, a level set on the rooftops, a 'To Be Continued' screen, and even an extra mode involving your characters fighting off a zombie horde like something out of Left 4 Dead or Nazi Zombies. It's literally as standard as an action game gets, to the point even the characters lampshade some of the similarities and cliches..
Until Dawn was marketed as a campy mix of every B-grade teen horror movie known to man, with a plot revolving around a group of attractive young people spending the weekend at an isolated mountain cabin in the snowbound Rockies and finding themselves stalked by a masked killer. Turns out it's by design, a cruel prank staged by Josh to avenge the deaths of his sisters Hannah and Beth by throwing his friends (who pulled the prank on Hannah that accidentally got her and Beth killed) into a real-life horror movie and scare the living hell out of them, using '80s slashers and modern Torture Porn as his reference points. Unfortunately for everybody involved, Josh's plan goes Off the Rails once the actual, malevolent supernatural forces haunting the mountain make their presence known.
The Wonderful 101 takes this trope and runs with it, using and exaggerating the majority of tropes found in a Saturday-Morning Cartoon, being unapologetically ridiculous and silly the entire time. Despite this, the story does manage to pull off legitimate twists here and there.
Deliberately invoked and played with by Yandere Simulator. The protagonist attends an Elaborate University High filled with cherry blossoms, larger-than-life characters, romantic angst, and 'mythical' creatures who are somehow able to hide in plain sight. About a tenth of its students are all in love with the same boy – not that he notices – and more than half have unnaturally colored hair that no one comments on. In all these ways and more, Akademi is a distillation of every anime school that has ever existed.
◊ since Baldur's Gate.
