Decon Recon Switch / Video Games

• Celeste zigzags on whether or not Madeline's stubborn determination to do something completely absurd is a good thing. In the main game it's set towards climbing Mt. Celeste, which even causes a physical manifestation of her fear and insecurity (called Badeline) to appear and start sabotaging her in an attempt to get her to see reason and stop this nonsense, but ultimately the journey leads to her personal betterment. In Chapter 9, however, Madeline's goal of somehow bringing the recently deceased Granny back to life by chasing her bird through an astral dreamscape is clearly unhealthy and self-destructive, and Badeline is actually the voice of reason this time. Ultimately, it comes down to what Madeline is stubbornly trying to accomplish, and that quality of hers can be a double-edged sword.
• Dawncaster: Depending on whether or not you take the Arch Demon Dantelion at his word, the game is one for The Chosen One and The Prophecy. The Chosen One, according to the reigning religious authority and their interpretation of a prophecy, is the Dawnbringer. However, on your way to locate the Dawnbringer, you learn that he's skeptical of his own selection, though he still wishes to go to the source of evil and fight the Arch Demon Dantelion directly. Doing so gets him killed immediately, seemingly making him The Poorly Chosen One and leading to Thread of Prophecy, Severed. The Arch Demon then states that the Chantry only thinks of themselves of The Chooser of the One, led by divine guidance, but in reality they're just led by their own wishes and desires, any god that may have been leading them having long ago abandoned them. That said, he also insinuates that it was you in fact who is the true prophesized hero and should you defeat him, you would have effectively fulfilled the prophecy as The Unchosen One.
• Ever since Fallout, the Fallout series has slowly deconstructed (on a meta level, at least) the tragedy of the Great War by showcasing it through Black Comedy and displaying that the Pre-War United States had transitioned into a jingoistic, sociopathic, and Orwellian state that practically deserved a nuclear war. However, starting with Fallout 3 and continuing through both New Vegas and Fallout 4, the games have generally reconstructed the Great War as an actual tragedy. Of course, this isn't meant to imply that all of the games have their Black Comedy moments and the first few Fallout games didn't portray the War with actual tragedy. Still, 3, New Vegas, and 4 devote noticeable amounts of effort into showing the misery the Great War caused, and how just because the world probably did need to begin again, the deaths of billions wasn't something good - like the Keller family holotapes in 3 and the "Sorry, My Darling" holotape from Broken Steel, the failure of the Sierra Madre in Dead Money and the tale of Randall Clark from Honest Hearts. This is further cemented in 4 with the Pre-War Sanctuary Hills sequence, which shows how the main player characters were Happily Married and living a idyllic life with their son Shaun before the Great War destroyed everything.
  • Fallout 3 and by extension, Fallout 4, does this to Giant Mecha. Liberty Prime was costlier and consumes much more energy and resource than merely an army of Powered Armor soldiers that it misses the Anchorage campaign as Liberty Prime was intended to be deployed. Later however, Brotherhood of Steel discovers it, and completed it underground for years before Enclave starts amassing its troops. Despite being destroyed near the end of Brotherhood's Capital Wasteland campaign, it was managed to be rebuilt in 4 with an even more effective power source.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII deconstructs a lot of the tropes of JRPGs of the time, introducing a Dysfunction Junction of plucky revolutionaries that were considered terrorists in the setting and knew it, and a hilariously over-the-top lead character who was roleplaying a hero himself and whose quest to roam the world getting stronger was portrayed as an actual mental illness. However, once this plot is revolved, the story goes into a more traditional Final Fantasy mould for the ending, even contriving a way to have Cloud save a bunch of big crystals despite the Crystals being long gone from the series by that point.
  • The Hope Bringer is deconstructed and reconstructed in Final Fantasy X. For 1000 years, the summoners acted as bringers of hope by going on pilgrimages to obtain the Final Summoning capable of defeating Sin. Each time this happens, there is a period of time with Sin absent that the people of Spira hopes will last forever called a Calm. The Church of Yevon's teachings also provide hope to Spira by claiming that if they atone for the sins of the past, Sin will never return. Except it's all a huge lie. The teachings of Yevon and the Final Summoning are total hogwash meant to give false hope. The Final Summoning is even more insidious because it is the means of Sin's rebirth, making the sacrifices of the summoners and their guardians (who become the new incarnations of Sin) utterly senseless. Each Calm was essentially nothing but a Hope Spot. The whole system has trapped Spira in what Auron describes as a "spiral of death". Hope Bringer is then reconstructed when Yuna and her companions learn of the spoilered bit above and refuse to go along with it, preferring to risk everything to find a real solution without false hope. It's at this point that the story becomes less cynical and more idealistic.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War establishes the tropes it will be using in the first half of the game, then deconstructs them in a Wham Episode at the mid-way point. However, in the second half of the game, the same tropes are played, and the reconstruction becomes reliant on what was accomplished before the deconstruction occurred, allowing the deconstruction to be overcome. The Decon Recon Switch is, in fact, a gameplay mechanic.
  • The Blue Lions route of Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a Decon-Recon Switch of the standard Fire Emblem plot of "The Wise Prince rallies an army, recaptures his homeland and defeats The Empire". The prince in this case, Dimitri, turns out to be hiding deep-seated personal trauma behind his "princely" facade, and he ends up suffering Sanity Slippage and becoming even more of a Blood Knight than the likes of Hector, Ephraim and Ike. He fights The Empire and the "evil emperor" not to end the war, but to satisfy a personal vendetta. The "evil emperor" isn't an Unwitting Pawn or brainwashed by an evil god, just someone who wants to create a better world at any cost. He outright refuses the typical FE story beat of liberating his homeland, preferring to focus only on crushing the Empire, and his unhinged behaviour alienates even the most cynical of his former allies. The Recon-shift comes after Chapter 17, where Dimitri has a Heel Realization and becomes The Atoner, letting go of his hatred and fighting to save his homeland and end the war like a more conventional Fire Emblem Lord.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas does this with the idea of the gang as one's family. The first part of the game deconstructs it by having the Grove Street Families be torn apart from the inside because of the drug trade proving too lucrative for Big Smoke and Ryder to not betray the gang to Tenpenny and the Ballas; CJ had only returned recently after five years away from Los Santos, so what is he to them? It then reconstructs it with CJ having to venture out and form actual relationships and bonds forged in common conflict against shared enemies, most of them not sharing the Black lower-income inner city hood background — most notably, his closest friendships by the end of the game are with Cesar (Hispanic) and Wu Zi (Chinese).
  • Grand Theft Auto IV is a deconstruction of the series as a whole. The main character, Niko Bellic, is a European immigrant who comes to America and sees the dark side of living the dream, thus being forced into criminal life to survive. The graphics and gameplay are more realistic than its predecessors, the people you do jobs for are portrayed as Too Dumb to Live Smug Snakes, and the story ends with Niko not much better off than how he started. The first expansion, The Lost and Damned, is the same, showing the main character Johnny Klebitz's struggle to keep The Lost MC together in the face of incompetent leadership and pressure from other gangs. He fails, and the game ends with The Lost breaking up for good. The second expansion, The Ballad of Gay Tony, reconstructs the series by bringing back features from the 3D Era GTA games, reminding us why we played these games in the first place while still keeping the game realistic, and having a far happier ending for the protagonist and his boss.
  • Grand Theft Auto V starts off similarly to its predecessor, albeit in a Lighter and Softer way. It deconstructs various aspects of the typical GTA Player Character. Michael is a criminal who "won" the game and became rich, but is bored and miserable in his retirement. Franklin and Lamar are Gangbangers who take whatever illegal work they can get to limited success. And Trevor is effectively the typical GTA player personified; a Psychopathic Man Child who revels in violence and chaos. It further hammers in why Being Evil Sucks by making all but a handful of missions actually give you money. However, by the end of the game, it reconstructs most of what people enjoy about the game, with the characters earning their happy endings despite it all and rewarding them with more money than was ever possible in previous games. And Grand Theft Auto Online takes it even further by playing all of the series' tropes straight.
• Ikaruga is THIS trope's take on a typical scrolling Shoot 'Em Up, deconstructing the entire gameplay by removing unnecessary elements such as powerups and complex weapons, and requiring good skills and tactics to progress the game. It also starts off with dysfunctional protagonists with hard backgrounds taking on the Eldritch Abomination to stop the indefinitely destructive loops once and for all. However, it also reconstructs what a typical shooter should be, like simple weapons system that's reminiscent of classic arcade shooters, and a well-deserved (but still emotional) happy ending in which even if the protagonists sacrificed themselves in successfully stopping the destructive fates of the world, they Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence and humanity is spared and flourishes after all.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep does this to the normal story formula of the series where the hero leaves to explore the Disney worlds to stop an evil threat, before fighting the Big Bad at the end. The decon comes from both Terra and Ven, who both follow the plot like normal and get stronger as the game goes on, but wind up making mistakes as a result of being the Unwitting Pawn to the games Big Bad Master Xehanort. By the end, Terra becomes Xehanort's new vessel, and Ven's heart is shattered when his Evil Twin / Enemy Without Vanitas tries to possess him. The recon comes in with Aqua, who follows after the two to protect them, and becomes a Spanner in the Works for the Big Bad, ultimately stopping his latest plans by helping fight off her possessed friends.
  • The series is well-known for its love of The Power of Friendship and an unironic use of a Wide-Eyed Idealist as a main character. In Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], however, the villains depend on both to lure the main character deeper and deeper into a dream without end, with the goal of taking over his heart and body. They are defeated once again, though, by The Power of Friendship, because friends are there for one another, and there's no way in Hell that Riku will let some sadistic monsters take over his best friend.
  • On a much smaller scale, this also plays out over the course of a single conversation between Xigbar and Sora late in the game. Xigbar points out that if Sora's power comes from his friends then he doesn't have any of his own, obviously trying to send Sora into a Heroic BSoD... which utterly fails, as Sora retorts without any hesitation that that makes him part of something bigger than himself and he's totally cool with that. This is followed by a shot of the entire cast assembled behind Sora, ready to kick ass and take names. Xigbar is completely floored by Sora being okay with it.
  • The trope comes up once again in Kingdom Hearts III, where Xigbar retorts that Sora attributes too much of his strength to his friends. During the first visit to the Keyblade Graveyard, he's proven right: when all of his friends are consumed by a Heartless swarm, Sora breaks down hard, sobbing that since all of his strength came from his friends, he's worthless on his own. That being said, the story immediately and quite effectively manages to bring things full-circle back by having Sora, through the connections he's forged for so long and deeply, quickly bounce back from his breakdown in order to rescue his friends from what seemed to be certain death, before returning back in time with everyone in order to make things right. This Reconstruction shines the most in the Final Battle where even though Master Xehanort succeeds in obtaining the χ-blade, the key to Kingdom Hearts itself, he still gets overpowered by the strength of the bonds of Sora, Donald, and Goofy.
• The 1994 Squaresoft RPG (remade for Nintendo Switch) Live A Live does this with one of its eight stories. The Middle Ages chapter appears to be the most basic RPG of the bunch, with a Chosen One story so cliche it borders on parody. But right at the end, everything goes horribly wrong. The old hero Hasshe dies of the plague, Oersted's best friend Streibough dies, Oersted himself is tricked into killing the king, his mentor Uranus dies in prison, Streibough is revealed to still be alive, as well as behind everything that happened to him, and to top it all off, Princess Alethea commits suicide due to her love for Streibough, not Oersted. The nominally-silent Oersted, now pushed beyond the Despair Event Horizon, declares himself as the Lord of Dark Odio, with the goal of destroying all of humanity throughout time and space and is revealed to have incarnated himself as the final bosses of each of the seven previous stories. If he isn't chosen for the final chapter however, the game then reconstructs many of the genre's tropes as all the protagonists of the past seven stories are brought together to not only defeat Odio in battle, but to prove his omnicidal misanthropy wrong.
• The Mass Effect series is all over the place, deconstructing some classic science fiction tropes and then reconstructing them, a good example being the asari. Initially set up as apparently the typical hot alien space babes, the series deconstructs the trope by showing that they're anything but simply sex-obsessed alien stereotypes, and then, once the player has probably forgotten that initial view of them, has asari characters complaining about too many of their people wasting their lives whoring it up all over the galaxy as well as providing a reason why the asari seem obsessed with sex outside the species, thus explaining why there's a legitimate reason for the stereotype. Even the asari character in the second game who complained about too many of her fellow asari being obsessed with sex has no problem in the third game mentioning what a fantastic rack her former asari lover had.
  • A conversation with Aria T'Loak regarding her history at Omega demonstrates the Decon-Recon Switch: her asari subordinates, skilled mercenaries and warriors, ingratiated themselves with the other mercenaries they were working with by providing sexual services, all to gain the information and access necessary for Aria to seize control. In essence, Aria weaponized the asari stereotype.
  • The Krogan are your stereotypical Proud Warrior Race. However, Mass Effect shows how such a race would function in an actual galactic civilization. Because they once threatened to conquer the galaxy, the rest of the galaxy teamed up against them and hit them with a Sterility Plague that reduced their natural explosive birth rate drastically. They could still hold a stable population if they stayed home and helped rebuild, but instead they've become a race of Death Seekers, hiring themselves out as mercenaries and dooming their race to slow extinction. However, provided you play your cards right, your Krogan teammate in the first game is inspired by Shepard to return to his home planet and assumes leadership by fighting his way to the top, essentially becoming the leader of his entire race by the time you meet up with him again in the second, and using his position, he's slowly restoring both the "Proud" part of the trope, but also the "Race" part, especially if you cure the Sterility Plague in the third game.
• The Metal Gear series, despite its heavy themes and satirical nature, is often a franchise that celebrates the best of humanity, video games, and storytelling in general.
• Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) deconstructs and reconstructs its premise in a single quest. The quest's client includes a message about how excessive monster hunting has caused wyvern populations to dwindle. The objective, as given by the client, is to deliver Wyvern Eggs, in order to help build the population back up, thus allowing hunting to exist without dramatically disrupting ecosystems.
• Persona 4, which considers the serious psychoses various archetypal characters would have using shadow archetypes, only for said characters to turn around in order to embrace and try to overcome their issues.
• The Splinter Cell series deconstructs and reconstructs America Saves the Day and The War on Terror. While the villains in the 2002 Splinter Cell are Georgian and Chinese except a leak at the CIA, Pandora Tomorrow, Chaos Theory and Double Agent contain increasingly more Americans as enemies of world peace. In Conviction (2010), the fifth title, the vice-president and the NSA are corrupt. Sam has gone rogue, and needs to save his own country from itself. In the sixth title, Blacklist (2013), Sam is back with the NSA, fighting Middle Eastern terrorists.
• Tales Series:
  • One of the hallmarks of the series is massively deconstructing a concept in the first half of the game, then putting it back together during the second half.
  • Tales of Symphonia deconstructs the idea of The Chosen One and Fantastic Racism by showing just what both would do to a person's psyche. The former brings about all kinds of Heroic Self-Deprecation and pressure to succeed, with the latter showing that mercilessly blaming a group of people for everything is only going to breed hatred that benefits no one. They're both reconstructed by having The Unchosen One save the day instead, doing so by espousing the belief that everyone has the right to live, and showing that racism towards the same group of people who made your life miserable doesn't justify it.
  • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World deconstructs the Manic Pixie Dream Girl with Marta. Emil, the object of Marta's affection, finds her constant attention and praise annoying. Not only does the journey she takes Emil on not improve his life, it actively makes it worse, and none of Marta's attempts to gain his attraction work. Emil and Ratatosk eventually both give her a "The Reason You Suck" Speech on this, with Emil telling her he's not a badass Knight in Shining Armor like she wants him to be, and Ratatosk telling her that she's nothing more than an annoying brat who keeps making everything harder than it has to be. The reconstruction comes in when Marta goes from having a petty schoolgirl crush on Emil's Superpowered Evil Side to legitimately falling in love with the real Emil.
  • Tales of Legendia does it to Big Brother Instinct and Like Brother and Sister. Toying with someone's feelings, especially if it's because you can't let go of the past, will only make that person hate you and act extremely irrationally, as shown with what happens when Senel rejects Shirley's Anguished Declaration of Love. Reconstructed in that Shirley's Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum is still portrayed as her going way too far, and in the end, Senel proves that he does deeply care about Shirley, even if it isn't romantically.
  • Tales of Graces deconstructs Took a Level in Badass. The game shows that just because a character got stronger, it doesn't make them a better person. After a Time Skip, the party members all become much stronger physically, but most of them haven't developed emotionally, resulting in a lot of animosity and bitterness over what happened during the time skip, or their Dark and Troubled Pasts. It reconstructs the concept by having the party talk a few things out, with main character Asbel coming to see that it's his actions, not his strength, that make him a badass.
  • Tales of Berseria deconstructs the Byronic Hero. Main character Velvet Crowe is driven by vengeance and presented as a brooding Anti-Hero, but it also shows that her desire to get revenge doesn't justify a lot of the awful things she does by showing the logical, long-term consequences of her actions. Velvet's emotions frequently get the better of her, resulting in her being driven by her hatred and bitterness, and she comes to be known as "the Lord of Calamity", with the world justifiably thinking she's a monster. It reconstructs the concept by showing that Velvet's emotions are still valid, she can be changed to see how she's hurting people and made to deal with it in a better way, and that surpressing one's emotions and feelings isn't any better. In the end, Velvet concludes that she doesn't need to justify the way she feels to anyone but herself, but she's also not going to just let the world rot when a real threat shows up.
• Undertale is a massive Deconstruction of the Determinator trope. It all starts with the fact that the player's determination is what allows them to SAVE their game. Determination is an actual physical force that allows things to come back to life. Most monsters have no capacity for this and their bodies will melt into abominations if it's forced into them. Flowey and the First Child could also SAVE, and have abused this previously to kill everyone — and a genocidal player will almost certainly have to do the same. Flowey also manipulates the player's Determination towards winning the game to get the power that he wants, and abuses his regained ability to SAVE throughout his boss fight. In the "true pacifist" route, it's ultimately the player's Determination to SAVE everyone (including Flowey) that allows them to survive all obstacles and achieve a happy ending.
• Witch's Wish goes over the drawbacks of using magic quite a bit, including how using it makes people's lives easier to the point where people no longer wish to work, as well as general greed and selfishness seemingly arising from the convenience magic provides and the resulting classism, with several characters trying to get rid of magic entirely. However, thanks to Vicky's helpfulness, the characters eventually realize that magic itself is not to blame, can be used for many good things and is instrumental in saving the town, and it's really humanity's selfishness and greed they need to moderate, not magic.
• The World Ends with You has Shiki, who starts out as a loud, energetic Genki Girl with a positive outlook and attempts to help Neku open up without much success. However, Shiki was incredibly jealous of her outgoing, talented best friend Eri, copying her appearance and bubbly personality after she lost her real appearance as her entry fee. Thankfully, her Character Development allows her to come to terms with her issues and learn to appreciate her true self, and it's this acknowledgement of her real self that gets Neku to open up in turn.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a decon-recon of the Eastern RPG genre. The Hero, Ichiban Kasuga, is a big Dragon Quest fanboy, and imagines the brawls he gets into as JRPG-style battles, his enemies taking on various tropes related to JRPG enemies, and the odd jobs he and his friends get from job placement services as akin to a Job System. The combination of Kasuga's overactive imagination and the uniqueness of the Yakuza setting, along with some ideas borrowed from previous games, presents a fresh take on the JRPG genre. It also decon-recons the heroes' Thou Shalt Not Kill mentality: while previous games Hand Waved otherwise fatal-looking finishing blows as Non Lethal KOs, the medium of Kasuga's imagination allows the game to present him and his party as laying into enemies with weapons that can maim or kill, such as katana, blowtorches, sledgehammers, and even a goddamn Kill Sat, while easily justifying his enemies getting off with bumps, scrapes, and wounded pride.

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