I saw the Valkyria Chronicles entry was deleted for not being accurate, but I wander back around to this page a lot and liked it because I thought it was dead on, although the bias was clear.
Selvaria's sacrifice is tragic for SELVARIA, the commissioned soldiers she kills are mostly ignored after characterizing them as the spoiled noble children of General Damon's unit. She suicide-bombs a castle as a POW and the story is sad for her, no one cares about the soldiers... in a game that is explicitly about caring about your soldiers.
Alicia's Valkyria plotline revolves around Internalized Categorism and how a person isn't defined by their blood heritage, except her heritage defines her even before she finds out what that heritage even is (she can field several stages alone without them). The flipside of that coin is Cordelia, who is a Darcsen, and that's treated as the reveal for why she's not an asshole like the rest of the Gallian aristocracy: ohhh, she's a Darcsen, and they're good people, so that's why she's not garbage like her advisors and generals and everyone in power except her, she's literally different from them. And that's okay in this story because the Valkyrur were bad, and the Darcsens are good: people aren't defined by their race, but some races are inherently bad and all similarity to them is to be rejected, and some races are good, and can be trusted to be good on that merit alone.
Teamwork makes the dream work, with our unity and the power of friendship, we can beat these highly-individualized, uncooperative snowflakes! We don't need Alicia's magic snowflake powers, says Welkin during the unbeatable boss fight that can't progress until Alicia's powers move the plot along.
I'd have to go back and read them all to argue them point by point, but Valkyria Chronicles is bloated with Aesops to the point where they conflict each other.
On the subject of Metal Gear; if the one required kill results in fifty years of horrible war and atrocities then that would seem to support the aesop of killing is bad rather than breaking it. Especially since the game rewards the player for not killing otherwise.
MagBas
- Part of the debate on Spec Ops: The Line's ultimate You Bastard! message is the scene that the game uses to insult the player on: a sequence where white phosphorous is deployed on enemies, and it turns out the player just killed a bunch of civilians. The game gets to the point where the loading screens directly insult the player for this. Critics say that the game forces you into that path, but fans and the developers say that shutting the game off was a choice.
- That's right, people: they expect you to buy a game just so you can not play it, and if you don't, you're a monster.
Of the main Broken Aesop page: "Important Note: As tempting it may be, please do not add meta-fictional examples (which are more along the lines of a Clueless Aesop). Only add examples where the aesop is broken within the narrative itself."
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I feel like the issue with adding Meta examples is prevalent within this tropes entries for Pokémon, almost all of the examples are showing how players, not the game's narrative itself, are breaking the aesop.
MagBas
- In X and Y, after the final battle against Lysandre and Team Flare, your rival shows up to give a lecture on how you can't really say the villain was wrong or right, and that they should try to find a middle ground between their beliefs and his. His beliefs? - he wanted to exterminate all life in the Kalos region because it wasn't beautiful enough.
the example not explains why the story contradicts the moral in question. This probably will be easy to explain, however.
Yow, Valkyria Chronicles has a lot of broken aesop. Does this game really have that many broken themes, or does someone just hate the game?
Edited by MrTerrorFace Hide / Show Replies