Refuge In Audacity / Video Games

In-Universe Examples Only:

Video Games taking Refuge in Audacity.

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By Company:

• Meta-example with Taiwanese developer-slash-bootlegging outfit NTDEC, whose full name was "Nintendo Electronic Co." Unsurprisingly, Nintendo filed a trademark lawsuit and brought the whole operation down for widespread bootlegging of NES games, but while most pirates sought to weasel themselves out of a trademark case by mincing if not outright removing Nintendo's trademarks, (an example of which are those pirate Game Boy multicarts with the wordmark "Nintendo GAME BOY" replaced with just "GAME") NTDEC simply didn't care if they appropriated Nintendo's name and the Pac-Man logo whilst they were at it. Surprisingly enough, they're still apparently operating to this day, albeit under the name Asder whose modus operandi is now in the production of children's educational electronic toys.

By Title:

• In Assassin's Creed, when Thieves steal from people, they openly run up to them and do the deed visibly. No one protests. Then when Ezio does it sneakily, the victim can somehow recognise him and try to fight back. Not that they can do anything about it, though.
  • This is actually an invoked trope in-universe, albeit discredited. Prior to Altaïr becoming Mentor of the Levantine Assassins, the Assassins would create highly public spectacles for their assassinations to use as psychological warfare and to create a reputation among the Holy Land, until Altaïr realized the folly of this and reorganized the Brotherhood into a more stealth-based organization. This is Truth in Television, as the real Hashashin tended to use this method.
• The RPG Maker game Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer revolves around a community of people named "Dungeoneers" who befriend people, then capture them, drag them to a Torture Cellar, film the person being tortured for fun, and upload the video to the internet for the public to see. The game states that they haven't been caught because nobody can believe that somebody would torture innocent victims and be completely open about it.
• Ben Jordan attempts this in Case 7 of Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator. He attempts to enter Genovese's apartment by saying "It's a me, the Pope." Case 8 then features him saying "God dammit" in the church and in front of a priest.
  • Use the hand icon on a priest and it will say "Shouldn't that be the other way around?"
• In Betrayal at Krondor, most of the story involves a dark elf running around in the Kingdom, which has been warring with his nation for a long time. While he makes an effort to keep his telltale pointed ears hidden, as often as not, avoiding recognition relies on the common folk assuming that anyone with pointed ears walking around openly this deep in their territory must be a light elf and not a dark elf. This is helped by the fact that there are only subtle (read: clothing, complexion, attitude) differences between dark and light elves and most common people couldn't tell one from the other.
• In the Blade Runner video game, one comedian goes so far as to publicly mock the protagonist. While he is on stage with him.
• The character endings for Bust a Groove 2 all take place on a show called "Dancing Heroes" where a man named James Suneoka will come out, tell a joke (which would always lead to the audience booing and throwing a random object at him), deliver some backstory on whichever character you played as, interact with the character briefly, and then let them dance to the credits music. The jokes told by James range from corny (What do you say to someone who keeps asking the same question? "Where were you when they were handing out the brains?") to downright insensitive (What do you need to get The Beatles back together again? Three more bullets!), and the interactions between him and the character usually resulted in violent Amusing Injuries, such as having a hole blown through him by a bazooka, or getting an axe lodged in his head with blood squirting out. It was likely for these reasons that James Suneoka was cut entirely from the American version of the game, despite his dialogue already being in English.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: The Russian plot hinges on the idea that nobody would believe that they'd launch a large-scale suicide attack against Washington, DC.
• Choice of the Vampire: An ancient vampire governor asks the fledgling player character's opinion on who should be the next lord of the city. They can name themselves, in which case the governor astonishes the appalled crowd by laughing in admiration of their sheer pluck. However, if the fledgling is a total nobody in vampire society at the time, she'll coldly snub them, so the trope only stretches so far.
• In City of Heroes, there is a viable strategy known as "tank stealth". Tanker class PCs in the higher levels can become unkillable if they don't stick around to take damage. While stealth porter strategies commonly require that the porter in question avoid being noticed, a tank can run a map full of dangerous enemies, shrug off their fire as he passes them, and teleport the entire team to the objective point. Due to aggro rules, the enemies will most likely not chase the tank, as he has yet to lock their aggro on him. The image of an 8-foot tall block of granite running through your secret underground lair is clearly a hallucination and not a catastrophic breach of security.
• Counter-Strike has a thing called the "ninja defuse", where a single counter-terrorist (usually the only one left) will jump directly into a bombsite with no guns (usually guarded by the entire enemy team armed with the best guns the game can buy), hide themselves with a smoke grenade that does absolutely nothing but loudly announce "I'm over here defusing the bomb" and defuse the bomb while the enemy team is in denial that someone would try something so obviously suicidal. It doesn't show up in competitive matches often but it's very successful.
  • Bonus points go to the players who are brazen enough to do it the moment the terrorist plants the bomb and is right in front of you.
• In Cultist Simulator, one of the ways the Villain Protagonist can prevent the Suppression Bureau from turning Notoriety into evidence against them is to "lock down" that Notoriety by using it to publicize their next painting. They're publically proclaiming themselves a Mad Artist who meddles with eldritch and occult powers for art world cred, which temporarily prevents the Suppression Bureau from actually arresting them for their deeds.
• In Deceit, two Infected players must kill four Innocent players. To do that, they need to drink blood bags while the lights are on to transform into monsters when the lights go out. The Innocents have the options of shooting people and then attacking them while they are down to vote them out and kill them, which is one of the two ways to kill Infected (the other being a lethal injection). Particularly brazen players are known for drinking blood in full view of an Innocent player before screaming in voice chat that said Innocent player was the one that did it.
• Digimon Survive: Part 8 has Takuma return to the real world with Miyuki. One of the people he can talk to is an old woman who tells him about the mass disappearances of children 50 years ago, which includes a daughter of the famous Minase family. The old woman then looks at Miyuki and tells Takuma that the girl who vanished was around the same age as Miyuki and looked like her. Miyuki was that girl and at several points even outright admits that she doesn't know anything about computers or modern television in front of people, although it doesn't ring any red alarms at all.
• Dishonored has this as an option during the Lady Boyle mission: you can enter the party, dressed as the assassin who has murdered or ruined several key political figures (by which we mean yourself) over the last few days. You can walk right up to your target, and tell her that you need to get her to the basement, since there is an assassin after her (by which we mean yourself) who is now in the building. And she will believe you, and follow you down there, because no one could ever be so brazenly obvious about being the assassin! You can even sign the guest list under the name of a wanted criminal (by which we mean yourself), and you'll find out later that it's believed to have been a prank.
  • Corvo and Jessamine are secretly lovers, but given the fact that the latter is the Empress, and the former is her bodyguard that she trusts above all else, it's... not really a secret. How they managed to avoid any scandals was by continuing to act like their affair was still secret. It worked so well, that even after they had a child out of wedlock, those who could've incriminated them merely ended up keeping their (awkward) silence, unsure of how to proceed with this information.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins: Most of your party members' efforts to rescue you from Fort Drakon, which include, among other things, Morrigan the contemptuous atheist pretending to be a pious Chantry sister, Zevran scaring the guards into letting him and Oghren in with the threat that Oghren could perform the traditional Dwarven Dance of Death ("lights his pants on fire and everything!"), and Dog pretending to be sick. The version where you break yourself out also involves this if you don't just kill everything you see; you steal a uniform, say you're a new recruit, then go out on a patrol.
  • In Dragon Age II:
    • In the core game, any Hawke can fall into this but especially Mage Hawke. See, in the Dragon Age setting, mages who aren't members of a Circle of Magi are dubbed "apostate" and hunted by dedicated Anti-Magic soldiers known as Templars. Mage Hawke is an apostate and can swan around everywhere with a clearly magical staff on their back, up to three other apostate mages in their party, and a broad smirk as much as they please, presumably because Templars expect apostate mages to hide and skulk rather than buy their way into high society. You can even engage in spellcasting directly in front of Templars, give one of their Knight-Captains a lengthy speech about your mage friends, and otherwise go out of your way to rub in their faces that you're a mage, and none of them will be able to do anything about it, especially in Act 3 when you have a heroic reputation and a statue looking right at their HQ.
    • The Mark of the Assassin DLC has Hawke and Tallis attempt to infiltrate Chateau-Haine whilst coming up with increasingly ludicrous stories to get past the guards, involving acting the part of a sterotypical foppish noble and Chewing the Scenery. Sadly, due to the guards being jaded from years of exposure to nobility (and Orlesians, and Orlesian nobility), it doesn't work. Tallis is doing one that isn't immediately obvious; the outfit she's wearing has the Qunari emblem hidden in its pattern and the name she's going by loosely translates as "assassin". Unfortunately for the party, this backfires and their host spots both immediately, giving him plenty of time to set up a trap.
    • Varric, being a lover of embellishment in his stories, will occasionally tell unbelievably exaggerated versions of the events that happened in the game. He immediately cops to it when Cassandra calls him out, but it's likely the reason that she never catches on to the fact that he knows exactly where Hawke is currently, the biggest lie he tells and the one that she never calls out.
• Duke Nukem's bread and butter. This is a man who wrote a book titled "Why I'm So Great", a man who throws money at the feet of strippers when anyone else would be evacuating them from an active warzone, and a man who once threatened a giant alien monster with "I'll rip your head off and shit down your neck!" And then followed through with the threat once it was dead.
• Fallout:
  • If you ask Arcade Gannon from Fallout: New Vegas why he never talks about his past, he will answer that it's to hide his association with a "fascist paramilitary organization." He will then add "just kidding". Turns out, he is one of the Enclave Remnants.
  • An NPC conversation in Fallout 4 is made of this. While idly chit-chatting, a Raider tells the story of a guy he led into an ambush. When they jumped him, he started tossing grenades... that turned out to be painted rocks, with explosion sounds supplied by him. He then moved on to machine gun sounds, and finally motorcycle noises as he made his escape. The Raiders were so flummoxed, they let him leave. Another overheard conversation reveals the loony used the same trick on a group of Super Mutants. Successfully.
    • On the player character's side, there is a perk that turns your character into an idiotic savant. It shows a giggling (and yes, you hear it), boggle-eyed vaultboy every time its effect (3-5 times EXP gains at random, with a higher rate the dumber your character is) activates.
• Halo 2: Master Chief on Cairo Station, otherwise known as Return to Sender, where Chief launches a bomb out of an airlock, rides it Major Kong style into an enemy capital ship, arms it and jumps off it to land on a friendly ship all the while riding the explosion. While the smartest being in the universe eggs him on because she’s a fan of his absurd methods.
• In one route of the Henry Stickmin Series' Completing the Mission, Henry gets it into his head to charge headfirst into enemy territory on a scooter just to steal the Toppats' space station before it's able to launch. Reginald can't believe what he's seeing, and he's scandalized when the attempt actually succeeds. Special mention to the first quick-time event of the route: Seeing a manned and armed checkpoint in his path, Henry simply stops, asks the armed guard to raise the barrier, and continues past when the guard does that. All the guard can do after that is sheepishly report to Reginald that there's an intruder on the grounds who was 'too fast' for him to stop.
• The King of Fighters: This is basically the crux of Ash Crimson as a character. To keep it short, he steals the powers of Chizuru Kagura and Iori Yagami, pits his own teammates against each other, works with the Big Bad of his saga (seemingly), and is an all-around huge troll to everyone he meets. The end goal of which was his sacrifice by way of resetting the timeline so that he never even existed - which also meant that everyone would effectively forget about his actions in the first place, at least In-Universe.
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • After discovering you're really Darth Revan, you can rub this in the face of the universe. Then you come to Lehon, where the Rakata recognize you and are upset because the last time you were there, you told them you needed to get into the Temple of the Ancients so you could destroy the Star Forge. While last time, you were lying and took over the Temple and the Star Forge and set out to conquer the galaxy, this time it's (possibly) a reasonably accurate description of your quest. Which you can tell them. They're not inclined to believe you.
  • For minor dialogue hilarity (and confusion), name your character Darth Revan to begin with.
    • Similar dialogue hilarity occurs in any game where you give a disguised or undercover character their real name as a cover. Final Fantasy IX comes to mind with Garnet.
  • When you're trying to get into the Sith academy on Korriban, one of the things you can try is to Jedi Mind Trick the headmaster's apprentice into letting you in. It fails, but it still impresses her that you'd dare to try it.
• In The Last Express, if you want the game to continue beyond Vienna, the correct way to obtain the briefcase full of gold is to drop into Kronos's cabin from the skylight during the concert, steal the briefcase, then walk out holding the briefcase in plain view of everyone. The audience is too focused on Kronos and Miss Wolff to realize what's going on besides a few awkward glances. Kronos and Kahina know exactly what's going on, but are powerless to do anything about it at that time, since their concert is part of The Masquerade and they must keep it going.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask features a game run by Zoras with the premise of destroying a large number of pots standing in a pattern with a single attack. This can indeed be done in Zora form. Alternatively, you can take Goron form and use a Powder Barrel to blow them all up. The Zoras will take it in stride and accept it as a legitimate victory.
• In Mass Effect 2:
  • In Thane's Loyalty mission, a stock boy accosts you when you're trying to sneak through an area. Shepard, in a Paragon option, claims s/he's with Citadel Health and Safety about an infestation in the area. While in full combat armor, covered in weapons. The stock boy, though initially not believing him/her, ultimately decides it's not his problem and leaves.
  • Renegade Shepard can pull off some amazing acts of intimidation by simply threatening to kill people in broad daylight. At one point, a threatened asari will screech about how there's a dozen witnesses and security cameras everywhere, and Shepard will reply, "Do I look like I care about witnesses?"
  • The reason you can walk around with Legion on the Citadel two years after the geth attacked and killed countless people. No one thinks you're actually bringing an active geth platform onto the station; they just assume it's a fancy "personal assistance mech." Everyone is assuming the geth would rather try to infiltrate with platforms that resemble organics. When Legion points out that "Geth do not infiltrate," the security guards blow it off, and Legion then admits that "Geth do not intentionally infiltrate."
• In the final DLC for Mass Effect 3, the player needs to infiltrate a casino, with a select party member coming along to serve as a distraction. Hilarity Ensues:
  • Javik flat-out refuses to get dressed up, so he comes to the casino in full armor with his weapons still equipped. At one point he will outright tell a guard as a distraction, "I am a Prothean. What do you think of that?" He'll also claim that the casino's customers would have been executed in his cycle and that he met a guard's ancestors while they were living in caves, throwing rocks at wildlife. Somehow, the guards end up thinking he's in a very accurate costume, needs a place to park, or drank something with a hallucinogenic ingredient.
  • Kaidan, of all people, comes in second place by convincing one guard he was going to cry, outright threatening another by pretending to mistake him for someone who owes him money, and loudly informing a third one that he is a member of the Varren Anti-Cruelty Association and not happy about what he's seeing.
  • Ashley comes in third by acting extremely drunk, loudly crying about a breakup, and outright propositioning a guard. Both she and Kaidan also claim they want to recruit a guard as a Spectre.
  • Lastly there's Wrex, who distracts a guard by claiming to be a food inspector, and eventually just berating the guards for being terrible at guarding. Special mention here in that, as leader of the krogan, Wrex could, if he wanted to, legitimately declare himself a food inspector.
• In the 15th Nancy Drew game, The Creature of Kapu Cave, the culprits commit a crime so bizarre and specific that it takes the police a while to find out what to charge them with. (Nancy herself seems a little confused just explaining what it was they did.)
• In Nethack, if you pray to your patron god while they are sufficiently angry at you, they'll hit you with a One-Hit Kill Bolt of Divine Retribution. If you have shock resistance or reflection, you'll survive, but not to be deterred, your god will follow it up with a wide-angle disintegration beam, which is also a One-Hit Kill. It's possible to survive that as well, to which your god can only respond, "I believe it not!" and, one imagines, back away slowly and try to forget the whole thing ever happened. If you're on the Astral Plane, this won't work, as the god summons three minions to kill you the old-fashioned way.
• Partitio from Octopath Traveler II is often able to pull things off through sheer audacity. For example, he actually accepts Roque's completely ridiculous offer to by the rights to the steam engine for 80 billion leaves, and then manages to acquire said money by impressing a famous nobleman enough to take out a loan. Castti even acknowledges the latter point and teases Partitio about how bold it is to just barge into Alrond's estate and ask for 80 billion leaves.
• PAYDAY 2: Sydney first introduced herself to the crew by joining them mid-heist, shooting at the cops with them, and then swiping some cash before she left. They weren't even mad, they were just impressed.
• Persona 5 presents the question of how to deliver the final Calling Card, which can't be a real card for logistical reasons. Futaba decides that the best course of action is to hijack every Japanese television network at once and broadcast a video that declares that Joker is still alive, that the Phantom Thieves have been framed, that Masayoshi Shido is responsible for the shutdown and breakdown incidents, and that they are going to steal his heart and make him pay for everything he's done. The police and The Conspiracy are horrified and can't get their act together in time to stop their leader's heart from being stolen.
• Pokémon Sword and Shield: You're able to use the Pokémon Camp feature in nearly any open area...which means yes, you can set up camp in the center of a town and no one will bat an eye at it. Note that most indoors areas also count as open areas for Pokémon Camp, meaning that you can set up camp in someone's house and put a pot of curry on and they'll be surprisingly okay with it.
• Rhythm Heaven Fever has the Cheer Readers, an entire cheerleading squad who perform in a school library, get away with it, and actually manage to help people study better.
• Saints Row: The Third: The Boss can randomly murder civilians on the street by killing them with such an overblown, comedic wrestling move that everyone doesn't take it seriously. The intro mission features the Saints robbing a bank while wearing giant Johnny Gat-shaped helmets, including Gat. Then the SWAT team tries to neutralize you while asking for your autograph. The Morningstar have human pony rides that they use to chase the Boss (who's also riding on the guy he busted out), shooting back and forth on half-naked slaves with ball gags and blindfolds, and at no point does any news media comment on this. The Deckers are British teenagers who dress in neon signs and somehow manage to steal a Black-Ops supercomputer without the governments of the world noticing. The Luchadores host a snuff kickboxing contest every year with ganging-up and chainsaws allowed, and all they get is the occasional questions from a few confused reporters on why this hasn't been banned yet. STAG manages to turn a metropolis into a police state, tries to rig a false-flag terrorist attack on the Magmarock Statue, and if they succeed at that, try to carpet bomb the city just to kill one gang. Also, Professor Genki is a genetically-spliced Cat Boy who thinks killing people in funny suits is ethical while shooting cardboard cutouts of endangered animals isn't, hosts a live blood sport about it, and will sometimes go out on the street shooting random people, without alerting the police, after gloating about it on live radio, until he is killed by the Boss.
• Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong:
  • Picking Racter and Gaichû as party members when infiltrating the Ares facility will lead to Racter socially bullrushing your party past the facility's reception (who are notably upset by an obvious Ghoul dressed in Renraku equipment being present in the facility) by proclaiming himself a world-renowned roboticist here to demonstrate his latest product: A ghoul-drone hybrid that will revolutionize warfare. The receptionist is so domineered by Racter's certainty he lets the party pass without incident.
  • Another mission involves trying to infiltrate a fancy party for a successful evening soap. Again, bringing Gaichû (who suffers not so much from 'Fantastic Racism' as 'kill-on-sight orders' in polite company) will allow you to get into the party by insisting to the bouncer that he's not a 'Ghoul' but 'a person with HMHVV'^note Which is basically Expospeak Gag for 'he's a Ghoul' and also a personal friend of the female lead. Gaichû will be somewhat perplexed that it worked.
• Sonic 3 (especially without lock-on) contains a few physics glitches, some of which can get Sonic and Tails stuck under certain walls and curves, sometimes forcing the player to reset or wait out the time limit; clearly an accidental function of the game's code. Instead of trying to ignore or downplay this, the American manual describes these bugs as Robotnik's "diabolical traps".
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: During the Republic's Makeb missions, you have to seize a giant starship from the corrupt foreman who's been embezzling from the construction funds, setting the project behind by weeks. After soundly beating him, he tries to get out of it by offering to sell you the very starship you came to take! For a 20% discount. Right after he says that, part of it falls off and crashes to the ground. "30 percent?"
  • Often invoked by the Smuggler, whose usual tactics typically include outrageous lies, pulling a Bavarian Fire Drill, over the top Trolling (like hacking a computer to inflate their enemy's criminal record and mark him as a carrier of a virulent STD), or claiming they are Most Definitely Not a Villain when discovered in the middle of an enemy base, all of which are surprisingly successful.
    • Even better is if you play one during the Ziost arc in the Shadow of Revan expansion. Eldritch Abomination ex-Emperor possessing an entire planet? The rest of the classes get dialogue that amounts to declarations of professional intent to destroy him or Badass Boasts to get attention focused on them and not the people of Ziost. The Smuggler? Nah, they can flirt with said abomination, and then follow it up with a dick joke.
    Corso Riggs: Unbelievable! One of these days you have to teach me how you do that?!
• Sunless Skies includes choosing an ambition as part of its opening character creation. Among them is simply "Murder a Sun".
• The official Game Genie codebook has an invincibility cheat for Super Mario Bros. 3 that worked by locking Mario into a specific form which almost worked without flaw... save for how the code also overwrote part of the door opening animation which happened when you beat Bowser, causing a Game-Breaking Bug that would freeze the game if you didn't get through the door before the animation finished. Rather than fixing this, Galoob acted as if it was a deliberate case of No Fair Cheating:
  If you use any of the next five codes to defeat Bowser, stand in front of the door and hold "Up". as soon as the door opens, you will pass through into the chamber where the Princess is held. If you don't do this, you may get caught in Bowser's time trap and the game will pause forever!
• Undertale: In the Pacifist route, after you have completed the game, Gerson (the elderly explorer turtle shopkeeper) tells of a story that, when Asgore and Toriel were Happily Married as King and Queen of the Underground:
  Gerson: It was the monthly address at the castle,
  and the queen was giving her part on current events.
  After finishing her update, she moved to pass the microphone to the king.
  However, she didn't realize the microphone was still
  in her hand when she said: "Your turn, Fluffybuns."
  The audience burst into laughter.
  Realizing what she had said, she started laughing too.
  After a few moments, the king held up his arms. The crowd grew silent.
  He leaned towards the microphone. Expression... Stern.
  "Dear citizens." "Thank you for coming here today."
  "I... King Fluffybuns..."
  And the rest is history.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Flynn Fairwind advises the Champion that the best way to get into a place you're not supposed to be is to just walk in like you own it.
  • Ve'nari's fifth rule for surviving in the Maw is "Be audacious, when the situation demands it." The Mawsworn are so accustomed to being the dominant power in the Maw that sometimes you can catch them off guard with a bold enough attack on their own seats of power.
• Happens a couple of times in the Yakuza series.
  • In Yakuza Kiwami, after being marked for death by the Tojo Clan, Kazuma Kiryu has to meet up with his mentor Kazama. Kazama is otherwise occupied attending chairman Sera's funeral, which is being held at the Tojo Clan's headquarters. When asked to sign his name at the door the player can choose to sign using Kiryu's real name. When the receptionist recognizes him, Kiryu can tell him "that was a different Kiryu". The receptionist believes him because "there's no way the real Kiryu could be THAT stupid".
  • In Yakuza 2, Majima is tasked with defusing a bomb and points out to his subordinate which wire to cut based on nothing but raw instinct.

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