Discussion Main / CuttingOffTheBranches

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Tacked on secondary definition, started by Killomatic on Mar 19th 2011 at 12:59:33 AM

• Sonic 3 & Knuckles: Curiously, Knuckles' story (which takes place after Sonic's) seems to be a continuation of Sonic's Good ending, rather than his Best ending, as the cliffhanger leading to Knuckles' story is only seen in the former. The implication seems to be that Sonic's Best ending is non-canon, or that Knuckles' story is non-canon.

Any opinion about this example?

It is noted in the entry for Star Wars The Old Republic that the Sith Inquisitor is canonically noted by the title "Darth Nox". This troper wishes to know where this source is, as they have never seen nor heard of such a source. If the source is from the recent expansion (Shadow of Revan), where a character refers to the Inquisitor by their title, then the information is false; this troper has a neutral-aligned Sorcerer who, in said scene, was referred to as "Darth Occlus". The same could be said of any in-game title usage, as this changes depending on the title the player obtained.

In the Mass Effect 2 section, listing the Udina becoming a Councilor as a worse scenario that few players choose seems to be quite contradictory and smack of personal bias.

It seems that this could be said to happen within a game, if the examples are blatant/deus ex machina enough. This often happens when all the correct actions have been made for a successful conclusion, and the developers just want to direct players to the winning finale and not have to realize and show all of the other results of these actions. This can be done with such skill and subtlety that the player hardly notices at the time, or by arbitrarily coning off vast swathes of the map.

E.g. Myst II: Riven where, having released Catherine, she breaks her cell's unlocking console, takes Gehn's prison book from you, and destroys all but one of the linking books in Gehn's tower. Oh, and the maglev cars linking the islands have stopped working. Meaning that the developers didn't have to build the rest of Catherine's cell, just so you could mooch round it, didn't have to come up with another ending if you decided to release Gehn at that point, and didn't have to create all the extremely difficult-to-compose scenes that you would have witnessed had you been there during the evacuation of the main island. Indeed, all you can do is link to the Temple Island and open the Cleft.

Another example would be Starship Titanic, where, having completed the central task of rebuilding Titania, restoring the ship's systems and robots to full sanity, you don't get to go and talk to these newly-sane droids because "The lift has mysteriously broken" and the only way out of her chamber is through the newly-unlocked door to the bridge, where you can set a course home.

I thought Road Cone was the obvious point of divergence in a game with multiple plot paths...?