There’s a Japanese console RPG called “Persona 3”. Basically, the plot is that these evil demons called “shadows” are coming out of this mysterious tower and stealing people’s souls. You play a high school student who, along with your friends, are the only ones who can see the tower and the shadows. So, you and your friends explore the tower to try to find out why the shadows are there and how to stop them.
In order to fight the shadows, you and your friends summon beings called Personas. You summon your Persona by shooting yourself in the head. See, your character has this thing called an evoker gun, and when your character wants to summon his Personal, he puts it up to his temple and pulls the trigger.
Now you have to think that at some point in the development of this game, somebody must have brought up the question, “Do we really want to make a game about teenagers shooting themselves in the head?” The fact that the game exists means that someone answered that question, “Yes!”
So, does anyone else have any examples of wtf moments in games? Moments that just make you stop and ask yourself what the hell the designer was thinking?
Well, I don’t know if you have played Persona 4, but you basically go through the minds of characters, dealing with their individual mental hangups.
When you go through one character who is struggling with homosexuality, you end up fighting a boss that uses two male symbols as weapons and has two “sexy” dudes as his sidekicks.
See it here. It’s odd.
Then, there is Psychonauts, where you enter a mentally disturbed man and spend itme dealing with G-men in suburbia who are imitating various common suburban roles. It’s odd.
Liquid Snake, who is your clone twin (well technically you are two of a set of triplets) and who you defeated at the end of the previous game is dead…sort of. See, his body is dead, and you don’t really fight him in this one, but Revolver Ocelot, who had his arm cut off in the previous game has had Liquid Snake’s arm attached where his own arm used to be. And then at certain points in the game, Liquid Snake takes over Ocelot’s mind, via his arm.
The first time this happens is probably the most egregious WTF moment out of all the WTF moments in that game.
Japanese games generally have more, on account of the whole culture shock thing.
In Shadow Hearts 2 for instance, you can find yourself desperately searching everywhere for gay porn cards, which you can hand out to a pair of camp French tailor brothers in exchange for doll dresses. It’s not even the weirdest thing in the game. You also get to fight 100 Indian catch wrestlers, all with Indian food themes.
Two games that come to mind immediately are Killer 7 (which is almost nothing but WTF moments) and Eternal Darkenss: Sanity’s Requiem. I don’t want to spoil anything about the games, though.
Yeah, came in here to post this. For those who never expect to play the game and don’t mind being spoiled:
Your character slowly goes insane causing the game to basically fuck with you doing things like lowering the volume while putting a fake tv volume indicator on the screen, making the walls bleed or entering a room upside down, sometimes the camera will tilt a few degrees only making things seem a bit “off” but not obvious enough that you realize whats happening. Bugs will crawl across the screen, this is a fairly common effect around the internet now but back then it was freaky as hell. The biggest WTF moments though are one when the game suddenly stops and throws up a “To be continued” screen implying the game abruptly ended and you need to buy the sequel to finish and a fake blue screen of death.
It was originally put out on the Gamecube, and at one point, it would start the GC startup screen - as if the game had reset and the console was restarting. Of course, it was WELL past the last time you’d saved…
One that comes to mind for me was The Dig - at one point in order to open a door to progress in the game, you are presented with a room full of a handful of junk objects.
Unless it happens to occur to you to build a MOUSETRAP (!) out of these random items, in exactly the right sequence, you will never get through that door.
Basically, if you failed to buy the $25 strategy guide, you’ll never beat this game.
THANK YOU! A former co-worker of mine told me about this game and I thought it sounded awesome, but I forgot what the name of it was and had no way to get in touch with him again.
Also from the maker of Killer 7, No More Heroes. The gameplay is relatively straightforward, but the trappings generate a constant stream of W…T…F. Some examples include the liberal use of 4-bit graphics and sound, the nature of the bosses you fight, the creepy and cryptic monologues by the game’s hostess before each boss, and the fact that you save by taking a bathroom break. It’s a constant stream of mindbending weirdness, and the weirdness changes so much throughout the game that you just can’t ever get used to it. It stays weird all the way through.