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Overly Long Gag / Video Games

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Overly Long Gags in video games.


  • Mr. Resetti of Animal Crossing fame can get into this, with his rambling reprimands for trying to outwit the auto-save system. Or it can just be a huge annoyance. They were aiming for the second one. He also rambles on and on if he appears as an assist trophy in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Considering that most assist trophies last a few seconds, and he seems to last over 2 minutes, it's just hilarious.
  • Noober, the annoying villager in the first Baldur's Gate who follows you around asking endless questions. And Neeber, the one in the second. Who incidentally the game allowed you to kill without penalty, even if you were a paladin.
  • Borderlands 2 has several, generally involving Claptrap:
    • After defeating Boom-Bewm, you have to use a giant cannon to blow up a gate. Claptrap will ramble on for about a full minute how you can't shoot the gate until he moves out of the way. He never actually moves.
    • At the end of the game as you're going to face the final boss, he finally gets the giant door to Hero's Pass open, only to realize that there's a stairway behind it. He begins to lament that Handsome Jack knew his greatest weakness... and then proceeds to list all of his other weaknesses, which include things like "being looked at funny" and "being turned down by women".
    • A random psycho in Thousand Cuts will scream at you to shoot him in the face. His name is Face McShooty. Three guesses what the associated quest, achievement, description of both, and task is, and the first two don't count.
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm has a sidequest where you get a part-time job working laundry duty at the Battle Arena. Naturally, this involves waiting for six minutes in real time while a load of underwear finishes its cycle. Let's hope you brought something to read... or some actual laundry to do.
  • Chimps On A Blimp: The game ends with an extremely long ramble from Amelia Earhart as the blimp threatens to crash and burn overhead. It never does.
  • When Conker's Bad Fur Day was remade as Conker: Live & Reloaded, two scenes were extended to turn them into these (the electric chair scene and Berri's shooting).
  • After you crash on Genosha in Deadpool (2013), you can spend a good chunk of your time just trying to wake up Wolverine by slapping him, with Deadpool saying something different every time.
  • The Doom mod "Mock 2: The Speed of Stupid" has a level named "Mining Fecality". It consists of a long, U-turn corridor with a button visible right next to where you start, blocked by a grate. You travel down it and hit the button. Only for another button to appear where you just were. You go back to press THAT button...and another one opens up right at the end. You make it to the turning point in the hallway to find out it's gotten even longer. You press the button finally, only for yet another goddamn button to appear back at the start. Luckily, this one ends the level. Watch it here at its full length, regular speed glory
  • The factory password from EarthBound (1994) is to wait... for three minutes. While mildly amusing when you first hear of it, it's rather annoying if you don't take the time to make a sandwich. Thankfully, you don't have to do anything at the three minute mark.
  • Dasher Inoba's ending in Ehrgeiz consists of Inoba ordering and eating bowls of noodles. Repeatedly. The video goes on forever — the only time it stops is if the player gets bored and skips it.
  • Fallout 3: While escorting Sticky, his rambling, implausible yet not particularly inventive story will repeat over and over, with little variation. You can always skip through by fast traveling if you'd been to the destination before; otherwise, you don't have to imagine what your character is going through for the trip, you get to experience it yourself.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy IV does this when Tellah attacks Edward. Tellah simply whacks Edward with his staff. And misses. A lot. At least the battle stop after a few turns.
    • Kefka in Final Fantasy VI seems to think one his jokes are much funnier than they really are. Case in point: when he flees from you three times in a row, every time you ask him to wait. He responds each time by saying, "Wait he says. Do I look like a waiter?" By the third time the comment is nothing but enraging. But then, he IS clinically insane, so maybe it makes sense.
    • Final Fantasy VII:
      • When Cloud's group infiltrates Shinra HQ, the player is given the option of either barging in via the main entrance, or climbing the emergency stairs all the way up to the 67th floor. All the way! Hilarious dialogue ensues during the stair-climbing, such as:
      • An NPC in Shinra HQ, if you talk to them, gives you somewhere around 6 pages of ellipses.
  • In Full Throttle, you can access a hidden mini-game by simply telling the person playing it in-game "Let me show you how to do that" enough times that he agrees "Only if it'll shut you up".
  • Year 2 of Grim Fandango has Carla's rambling story about her terrible childhood, which will go on for several minutes until she finally breaks down crying if you don't have Manny interrupt to ask for the metal detector he's trying to get.
  • Hollow Knight has Zote's 57 precepts, ranging from practical, everyday advice to most things people know to outright nonsense. Once he's listed all 57 precepts, he starts over again.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 has Ellis and his rambling anecdotes about "me and my buddy Keith", which always seem to end with Keith suffering Amusing Injuries (like being covered in third-degree burns after trying to make home-made fireworks).
    Rochelle: Ellis, honey, is now really the best time?
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, King Zora takes 30 seconds to move out of the way—lurching himself sideways an inch at a time, apparently because he's too fat to stand up—so Link can reach Jabu-Jabu.
  • Loom's unending temple corridor in the very beginning.
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has one in the back surgery scene. You drill into Bowser's back, and wait. Really wait. At least the game is nice enough to let you know it will take a while, more specifically, it tells you to go take a tea break. It won't do anything for about five minutes. Though if you spoke to some NPCs beforehand, they tell you a method to speed up the process.
  • Mass Effect 3:
    • In the final piece of story DLC, upping the tempo at Shepard's party will lead to EDI asking Joker to dance with her. When Shepard offers to dance with her instead, Joker stands up and laughs for thirty seconds straight.
    • In the same DLC, you can invite James to hang out solo at Shepard's apartment, where he'll notice his/her exercise equipment. He'll challenge you to beat his pull-up record of 182 pull-ups. Each one is an individual Quick Time Event, and it takes about 15 minutes real-time to do them all.
  • Metal Gear:
    • At one point in Metal Gear Solid 3, Naked Snake has to climb a ladder. A very, very tall ladder. Partway up, the game's theme song starts playing, and at maximum climbing speed, it has time to finish before you reach the top.
    • At the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, fighting through seemingly-endless corridors of Scarabs, and then suffering from early-onset-RSI destroying your Triangle button as Snake slooooowly crawls through the many, many microwave-emitting Corridors of DOOM.
    • Metal Gear Solid 2 pits Raiden against a whole squad of knock-off Metal Gear RAYs for the penultimate boss battle. As part of the game's infamous ending, it's no surprise that there's no indication as to how many you have to fight (apart from an estimate by Snake). The following scene is a real "overly long gag" (a minute-long chokehold) on European Extreme.
    • Metal Gear 2 makes you climb 30 floors of stairs. Fun!
  • Monkey Island:
    • Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge:
      • You have to get a bucket from three pirates. One way to get it is to say "please", which doesn't work right away. It will eventually.
      • Trying to answer Herman Toothrot's Ice-Cream Koan, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, what color is the tree?" I bet you didn't know Pink Floyd was a color.
    • The Curse of Monkey Island has the ship crew burst into song at the beginning of the third part. Guybrush's pleadings for them to stop singing and start working just leads to them inventing new verses on the spot that rhymes with what Guybrush said. They can't rhyme orange.
  • The Neverhood:
    • Klaymen can pick a fruit from a tree and eat it, and will consequently burp. Eating a second fruit will cause Klaymen to burp a little longer. After eating a third fruit, Klaymen will burp again... for a full minute.
    • Something like 45-screens worth of walls covered with dense text. It's actually readable if you click on it — the history of the game's universe starting with its creation.
  • In OneShot, Niko only needs one photo to attach to the library card, but there's nothing stopping you from taking another. And another. Each photo has a unique description and response from Niko, until the camera finally runs out of film after the tenth photo.
  • Paper Mario:
    • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door:
      • In one scene, an NPC loses his fiancee's engagement ring. After an "insensitive" comment, she insists that he apologize by saying "I love you" 100 times. Yes, you have to click through every single one of them. (The speech bubbles are even numbered starting with the 11th one.)
      • The method of finding a certain Bob-omb general, which you have to do once to continue through the game, and have to do AGAIN for a sidequest. And that doesn't include that you have to go to almost every town to find out that he was headed for where you started during both the story and the side quest.
      • The 'quest' that Luigi goes on, which includes some of his partners loathing him, sending Mario and his partner to sleep when he tells them about it, and being so popular that it gets made into a book.
    • Super Paper Mario:
      • First one involves breaking a priceless vase and being forced to pay for it, all 1,000,000 rubees of it. The initial way of earning them involves jumping up and down under a block while avoiding the "motivation spark" till you are able to pay another prisoner (100 rubees) enough for the code to unlock the running in a wheel like a hamster (which though faster still takes a while), earning rubees depending how long you run. There IS a series of sidequests to earn the million in one go, but you need about 10,000 rubees to buy the initial clue. Which still involves holding down the right button for 5 minutes while you watch Mario run on a wheel. And there's no indication on how much you've earned until you stop, so if you didn't make enough... back on you go. P.S., it's 41262816.
      • Second involves getting a password to pass some guardian in the desert. The person giving you the password warns you to get a pen and paper, because it's going to be long. About 30 words long. Hope you don't mess up. You have to spell out "please", and that is after fighting your way to a dead end and having to turn around and fight you way back then use the first password. Then, just to increase the level's length, after you get past several very large and powerful monsters with a lot of health to reach...the place that a second password is needed used. So once you reach the village again you have to spell out "please" three times.
      • Third involves the Sammer Guy world. In order to get the world's MacGuffin, they tell you you'll need to fight all 100 Sammer guys (which is required for 100% Completion) first. Most players by now will assume that they'll pull the rug under you and not make you fight all 100. They just choose to wait until the 20th fight to do it...
      • "Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...Um...A girl fell from the sky!"
  • In Path of Exile, the long-dead Karui chieftain Kahuturoa asks what happened to the neighboring empire from when he was alive, the Vaal, and discovers they all died. Then he asks about their other neighbors the Azmeri and learns they became a great empire and then also all died. What about that banished island cult he remembers? Also became a conquering empire and was destroyed. This keeps going, until he finally gives up when he asks about the Caaltu and learns the Exile (and the player) have never even heard of them, concluding that Wraeclast is just a cursed wasteland.
  • The leaked unreleased game Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors was supposed to accomplish this with the "Desert Bus" sequence. It is a real time drive between Tucson and Las Vegas, with the idea being that someone would eventually wonder when it's supposed to end (and at the end...you do it again in the opposite direction...forever; screw up and crash and you get towed back to Tucson...also in real time). The dull-yet-unending nature of this 'game' eventually lead to a charity effort conducted online called Desert Bus for Hopenote .
  • One of Elizabeth's requests in Persona 3 FES (and Reload) has you bring her a Sengoku-era helm from Mr. Ono. The first time you talk to him, he tells you he'll see if he has any he can part with at home, and to come back another day. The next day, Mr. Ono won't be there, and you'll instead get an impromptu lecture from another teacher. This happens five times until you finally run into Mr. Ono again on your seventh visit to the faculty office.
  • The timing of Dialogue Trees in Persona 4 result in some scenes getting prolonged as the player wants it to. This includes Kanji chasing Yosuke in the park in a circle, and the boys getting pelted by an unlimited number of buckets when they step into the inn's hotsprings, and the girls are there.
  • Pokémon:
    • To get the Bike Voucher in Pokémon Red and Blue and its remakes, you have to listen to the Pokémon Fan Club Chairman gush at length about his favorite Pokémon, Rapidash and Fearow.
    • Hoenn games:
      • A random trainer hints that the reason the bike shop gave you a freebie is because the bike is plastered with the bike shop's name.
        Cyclist: It says 'RYDEL RYDEL RYDEL RYDEL RYDEL RYDEL RYDEL RYDEL RYDEL...(etc., etc., for about six boxes)...RYDEL RYDEL RYDEL'... The name's everywhere! You should ride it all over the place- it's good advertising!
      • In order to get into Regice's room, you have to wait. The length of time is just enough time to completely translate the message.
    • Sinnoh games:
      • Approaching this is Flint's dialog after defeat, he uses about 8 boxes of Ellipsis. This was removed in Platinum.
      • West of Celestic Town, there is an Ace Trainer who, if you talk to him, says "I'm strong!" a bunch of times to himself before noticing you, then gives you the TM77, which contains Psych Up.
    • The medal guy in Black 2 and White 2 who appears in most Pokémon Centers. If you talk to him for the first time in a while after doing things to qualify for a lot of different Medals since the last visit, he'll give you medal after medal after medal, and you wonder just how many medals you're going to get. It is varies between area, but it's arduous.
  • Act III of Portal 2 manages to squeeze one into just a few seconds as you enter Wheatley's death trap at the very end of Chapter 8.
    GLaDOS: Well, this is the part where he kills us.
    Wheatley: Hello! This is the part where I kill you!
    On-screen text: Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You
    [First-time players receive the achievement for completing Chapter 8, which is called... "The Part Where He Kills You"]
    • The track that plays during this sequence is listed in the OST as (you guessed it) The Part Where He Kills You.
    • Ironically enough, the method of escaping the trap is so easy and the time window you get is so large, it rarely actually kills you (unless you're getting yourself killed on purpose).
  • Psychonauts:
    • Vernon Tripe's rambling stories.
    • Boyd and his theories...
    • This interview with Tim Schafer, the game's creative designer. Specifically, his response to the first question.
  • The demo for The Stanley Parable gives you an opportunity to make your own with the button that makes a voice say "Eight."
  • The flash game, Steamshovel Harry. Watch out for that gravity.
  • One of the power moons in Super Mario Odyssey needs you to capture a coin coffer so you can feed a specific plant coins. 500 coins, to be exact, so you'd better prepare to stand there and shoot coins at the plant for a few minutes while it slowly grows.
  • Several popular Team Fortress 2 custom joke maps involve taking an official map and stretching one element to ludicrous extremes. Examples include 2fooooooooooooooooortExplanation and HighertowerExplanation.
  • In Tekken 3, one of the secret unlockable characters is Gon (the little dinosaur from the manga of the same name by Masashi Tanaka). If you beat arcade mode with Gon, you get an ending cinematic in which he runs through a jungle, eats some fish in mid-air, and jumps on whales. The FMV repeats over and over again until you skip it.
  • Ultimate Custom Night: Getting killed by the Mr. Hippo animatronic will be followed by Hippo going into a unskippable, ridiculously-long, rambling monologue.
  • Undertale:
    • If you try to use the Instant Noodles healing item in battle, it'll actually take you through all the steps needed to prepare instant noodles in reality. The end result is that it's a full minute between when you select the noodles and when you actually heal from them. And they only heal 4hp. Averted during certain boss fights, where using the Instant Noodles produces the message "They're better dry" and heals you for 90hp.
    • Every time you pet the Lesser Dog, its neck stretches out slightly. You can make it stretch to absurd lengths. If you pet it until its head goes above the top of the screen, then returns down and goes entirely below the bottom of the screen, it stops giving new flavor texts and only responds with "Really?"
    • One of the lines of Arc Words is said frequently if you do certain things enough times. Like in the epilogue wandering of the underground in the True Pacifist ending, if you talk to Asriel enough:
      Asriel: Frisk… Don't you have anything better to do?

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