< Idiot Plot

Idiot Plot/Video Games

Video Games really can't get away with Idiot Plots, as they can cause brutal Gameplay and Story Segregation, but developers try anyway. If the player character is the idiot, see Stupidity Is the Only Option.

Plot-essential NPC stupidity includes:[1]

  • The Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series is really guilty of this. Most of the time your clients are in a pickle because they won't talk.
    • Apollo Justice:
      • There is a case where the protagonist must figure out how a magic trick is performed, not because it has any relevance to the case but simply because the judge wants to know. Despite the fact that everyone else in the courtroom has figured it out, including your client and your assistant, no-one will help because "you can't tell a magician's trick".
      • It gets better. The case of the prosecution rests on the idea that a frail, fourteen-year-old pianist with no firearms training could fire a 45-caliber pistol without injury, despite the fact that it is constantly stated that the recoil would be enough to dislocate the arm of a grown man of average build.
    • Gumshoe in Ace Attorney Investigations Case 4 gives false testimony and implicates himself because he refuses to admit that he shared a cookie with the young Kay Faraday, who broke her promise never to take anything from strangers. He only cracks when Edgeworth not only deduces the entire sequence, but also the reason he wouldn't spill.
    • The thing is, all Ace Attorney examples are either Justified Tropes, not proper examples, or are very debatable. When ever this DOES happen, if not played straight out but is rather parodied and all other times its justified in that the person generally has a reason too be an idiot.
  • The Bard's Tale:
    • The modern version had an idiot plot, that only revealed itself to be an idiot plot at the end. It turns out the Damsel in Distress is really an imprisoned demon queen and the Druids not only did not warn The Bard that he was being manipulated to unleash a great evil (not that it would be the first time the Bard did it). If anyone stopped to explain anything, then well, there goes the whole game.
    • And that the cute little dog that the Bard adopted wouldn't have been killed in the game's major Kick the Dog moment.
    • And with the kind of things he does pull while conscious of his actions, Finstown and the Nuckelavee for example, one could argue that he'd make things worse, or possibly just go through with it anyway since you'll find that the evil ending is one sweet deal for the bard, while being good gets him nothing. The bard is a self-serving liar and crook, hardly a hero in any case.
  • Much of the conflict from Sonic Adventure 2 comes from the fact that people can't tell Shadow and Sonic apart. Although the two are fast, the same height, and share similar facial features, their color patterns are vastly different (Sonic is blue, Shadow is black and red, and the two aren't mirror images of each other, such as Shadow's chest hair vs Sonic's stomach) and their spines are shaped differently, making it very easy to see the difference between the two, and Shadow is clearly seen on a news report that Robotnik is watching.
  • Similarly, Mario and Shadow Mario in Super Mario Sunshine.
    • Shadow Mario looks like he's made of dark blue water, while Mario is Caucasian with a red shirt and hat (although the overalls are blue).
    • Of course, even worse is the fact that Mario wasn't even on the island when the crimes he's accused of were committed, and there were numerous witnesses right there who could attest to that.
    • Add in to Super Mario Sunshine that the point of the game is that the inhabitants of the Isle Delfino are in a panic because of the disappearance of their Shine Sprites...and a good chunk of said Shine Sprites are in the possession of said island inhabitants. If the various people would just give Mario the damned Sprites instead of making him win the watermelon contest or bringing them a pineapple or breaking all of the crates in the room, or forking over blue coins, the game would be over a lot faster.
  • A very, very good example is the entire plot of Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. It's not an exaggeration to say that everything, every single thing in the plot is the result of rampant stupidity on the parts of the characters. The examples from Princess Elise alone would take multiple paragraphs to explain. It got so bad that SEGA was forced to fire the then-current writing staff (which has worked out pretty well for them).
  • The plot of the original Sonic Riders begins with Dr. Eggman appearing on public TV screens worldwide, announcing he's holding some races where entrants need to give him a Chaos Emerald. In what can only be explained as this, Eggman manages to get all seven of these all-powerful jewels, one of them from Sonic himself, in this manner.
  • Another really good example is Tales of the Abyss. A very large portion of the plot can be credited to most, if not everyone involved being either hypocritical, self-centered and short sighted, or astonishingly stupid.
  • Mega Man.
    • 9 Dr. Wily, the villain for the last 9 games, appears on TV to declare that Dr. Light, the man who helped put him away the last 8 times, is the true villain. He then goes on to ask for money to be transferred into his Swiss Bank Account, so that he can fight Dr. Light himself. For some reason, a planet full of idiots falls for this, and Dr. Light is arrested.
    • 7 gets special notice in that once Dr. Wily was finally arrested after the events of 6, he was imprisoned in the middle of the city. Dr. Wily, the man who's undoubtedly caused billions in property damage and has killed thousands, if not millions, because he feels slighted by the world and tried to take it over 6 times, is imprisoned in the middle of the city. As opposed to executing him immediately because he's too dangerous to be left alive. With no explanation why they did that.
    • In 10:
      • Many robots are infected by a computer virus that makes robots violent. No one is able to make a cure because humanity doesn't have the support that robots provide. No one, not even Dr. friggin' Light himself, decides to either just cut their losses, back up as much data as possible, and reset the robots to factory settings to purge the virus. Hell, this game points out how stupid humanity is since they followed Dr. Light's example and made the robots that friggin' complicated in the first place.
      • 10 also gets a special notice in that it's the third time Dr. Wily has gotten something of his to Dr. Light's lab. The first was when Dark Man kidnapped Dr. Light in 5's intro. The second time was Bass infiltrating Light's lab in 7 so he could steal Mega Man's Rush Adapter. Instead of piloting his flying saucer himself Dr. Wily could've flown it by remote with a bomb inside and turned Mega Man into a crater. Heck, just shooting Dr. Light at any point in 5 would've saved Wily so much trouble.
    • Every Mega Man game is full of idiots. In Mega Man X, humans actually thought it was a good idea to build robots with free will, and then give them a massive amount of built in weapons, and then keep producing them till they outnumber humans. And later on, they make them godlike by giving them copychips, which allow them to transform into anyone else. And they put the thoughts of the main villain Sigma, into the chips.
  • Mega Man Battle Network:
  • Many of the Story Arcs in City of Heroes, especially when Nemesis gets involved. A lot of it involves blatantly misplaced trust in blatantly villainous organizations with proven track records. None of it quite compares to the free comic books involving the Freedom Phalanx, however. They are depicted as total caricatures of their in-game selves, completely incompetent to a level that makes one wonder how they could have become the premier superhero group. They also get defeated by opponents that, in-game, would just go squish in a single attack from them. It has to be seen to be believed. It still bothers a majority of the players that these comics are, sadly, Canon.
  • The Dungeons & Dragons computer game Death Knights of Krynn featured a stunning moment of idiot plot. For most of the game, the party have been accompanied by Sir Durfey, a veteran knight and expert undead hunter. Bear the latter in mind. During the penultimate dungeon (an evil tower in this middle of undead-infested countryside), the party rescues Lenore, a (very large and muscular) serving girl who is blatantly Kitiara (minion of the Arch-boss) in disguise. Durfey immediately volunteers to leave the party and escort her home on his own. Repeat: The expert undead hunter wants to lead the thinly disguised henchwoman home through undead country. He leaves (the player can't control this; he will leave the party regardless) and is, unsurprisingly, ambushed by the undead, killed and bought back as a zombie to fight the party. Note that he's only two rooms ahead of the room that he left from. That's right, he was killed, bought back as a zombie and positioned with an army of minions to fight the players in the time it takes to cross two rooms. Imagine a Necromancer Nascar Pit Crew. Able to zombify a person in 12 seconds.
  • Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks
    • Made especially Egregious when you realize it's an action-adventure remake of Mortal Kombat 2, where our heroes aren't nearly as moronic. Whereas our heroes' foolish actions in MK2 is forgivable due to their unfamiliarity with Outworld and distractions of other important things (like taking revenge for the death of an entire shrine or rescuing a fallen comrade), Shaolin Monks everyone are so brick-stupid as to fall for a Gambit Pileup that could've only succeeded if they weren't smart or perceptive enough to realize their "friends" are not themselves. Well...Johnny Cage retained enough Genre Savvy to realize what was going on, but his keen insight unfortunately didn't rub off on anyone else.
    • In particular is the fact that "Raiden" makes a big point of the fact that Shang Tsung grows more powerful the more people die and yet sends Liu Kang and Kung Lao to go kill a bunch of powerful warriors - that should have been a huge red flag on its own when dealing with a shapeshifter, but it gets even dumber when you consider how often he got angry at the two for asking any questions whatsoever and actively worked to turn them against each other.
    • Also Deception, the plot of which basically happened because Shujinko was so gullible.
  • Code Veronica.
    • In his spectacular Let's Play, The Dark Id takes colossal fuck-up Steve Burnside to task - noting that the game is significantly longer due solely to his screwing up...
    • He refuses to hand over gold-plated guns needed to open a door unless you can give him "something fully automatic" - which sends you on a wholly unnecessary Fetch Quest.
    • Not to mention, taking those gold-plated guns triggered a death trap. When Claire did it, she was smart enough to put them back and escape. Steve is too stupid to figure this out and requires you to save him. After that, he still won't give up the guns!
    • When he has an opportunity to shoot the unarmed villain, he completely freezes up because it turns out said villain is a transvestite (at least, that's what it looks like; he has a good thirty seconds to pump the guy full of lead and doesn't). This gives him time to set the self-destruct system and force you to go to Antarctica when you do escape.
    • While trying to escape Antarctica, Steve screws up operating a crane and flooding the room you're in with poison gas. Because (ready for this?) he's too busy staring at the player character's butt.
  • Clock Tower 3. Alyssa gets a message from her which amounts to "Whatever you do, don't come home for your fifteenth birthday." Go ahead and take a guess what she does. When she arrives, an obese cadaver-looking man hints that he's killed her mother and basically threatens to rape her. Her reaction? "I have to save Mum!" Later, when the Big Bad is revealed, things get ever more idiotic, such as Alyssa's grandfather's name apparently being Dick. Not Richard. Dick. Someone actually named their son Dick Brown. And this leads him to believe in a totally ridiculous set of myths which require him murdering his granddaughter with no real hope of reward. The Dark Id has quite a lot to say about this one too. Mostly invective.
  • Valkyria Chronicles. Almost every problem in the second half of the game that isn't strictly the war itself could have been easily solved by someone, anyone, looking at Alicia's Valkyria abilities and the effects they would have on her from an objective standpoint, instead of making assumptions based on the bad example set by Selvaria and her first traumatic power eruption. Welkin only manages to come close by tying it in with his love confession, and of course this only happens at the most dramatic moment possible rather than taking her aside to reassure her when she first expressed how overwhelmed she was. By the time she decided to attempt the Suicide Attack on the Marmotah, Alicia had clearly gained control over her new abilities, and could use them as much or as little as she chose. Everyone could have avoided a lot of trouble if someone had just pointed that out early on and attended to her emotional state for five minutes, instead of Welkin waiting until the last minute while everyone else ignored her repeated cries for help.
  • In Legend of Dragoon the major town in the second act has a castle under generally heavy guard. The chapter would be SO much easier if the king in your party would just come right out and say, "I'm King Albert, here's my proof, and I can vouch for these people." But he never does. Oddly enough he even comes right out and says he will not bring up his royalty to get around, despite the rather massive stakes.
  • Suikoden I. For fuck's sake, they straight-up call it Robber's Tea! Even if the Heroic Mime main character is suspicious, the Boisterous Bruiser will still drag him along. It all wouldn't be so bad if the Boisterous Bruiser in question didn't usually seem to be so clever as to be utilizing Obfuscating Stupidity.
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. The game would be much, much shorter if everyone wasn't busy eating dangerous types of mushrooms given out by a stranger who happens to be Fawful. In games when he isn't the Big Bad (and sometimes even then) Bowser's always portrayed as a bit of a moron.

Bowser: “TOO MANY WORDS.”

  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind expansion, Tribunal. It would take too long to explain everything, but to summarise it involves taking orders from somebody who admitted to trying to kill you (multiple times), switching sides for no adequately explained reason (multiple times), and never questioning why somebody needs these immensely dangerous artifacts that you're grabbing. Oh, and terrorising an entire city, for entirely "benevolent" reasons.
  • Final Fantasy IV.
    • The Crowning Moment of Stupidity comes when one of your party members blows himself up for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
    • The above example only hints with what's really wrong with FF4: the game's tendency to make too many of its heroes commit acts of self-sacrifice, simply to shuffle new characters into the mix. With Tellah (who died trying to summon meteor to kill Golbez) and The Black/White Mage twins (who turned into stone to stop moving walls from crushing the heroes), those acts made sense. But when later characters do the same thing with increasingly arbitrary methods, players have a very hard time suspending disbelief. Exactly how does a monk with no experience with technology manage to stop an exploding computer, or how does a mechanic bombing the entrance to a world seal it away? To make the entire thing even dumber, with the exception of Tellah, all of the dead heroes came back, having survived their near-death experiences .
  • One has to wonder about the Pokémon world.
    • Very rarely does anyone find the teams suspicious, even when they're clearly stealing things (like Teams Magma and Aqua, who are so obvious that it's almost painful). It's never explained why few people other than some ten-year-old Pokémon trainer ever bother to do anything in a world that is full of people who have been using Pokémon for much longer. It's understandable that apparently said ten-year-old is apparently a prodigy (since all other Champions are at least five years older), but someone other than Lance, Cynthia, Looker, and Steven should have at least noticed.
    • That brings us to the Forbidden Land of Orre, which is a bit of a mixed bag. Sure, the police are bloody failures, but Cipher heeds the First Rule of Warfare - "don't let the enemy know what you don't want them to know". The only way the player character (a rogue Snagem goon in the first game, a prodigal agent in the second) can learn anything is to engage Cipher firsthand, and everyone else is left in the dark. As one troper said, a Plasma Grunt said that Teams Rocket and Galactic failed because they were too overt; Cipher would be a dream team for them.
  • In Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep:
    • Plot only really keeps going because the main heroes are idiots that lack common sense and social skills. Terra and Eraqus are the worst examples, Eraqus even gets taken out for his role in starting the mess but Ventus and Aqua aren't much better. (The former mostly has denial issues and the latter is a little TOO willing to call Terra out.) By the time they wise up enough to take on the Big Bad, it turns out to be too late and their stupid decisions catch up to them leading to a Downer Ending.
    • To give one a view of the tree of lack of communication that keeps the plot going: Aqua immediately believes Maleficent's claim that Terra removed Aurora's heart, even though the person telling her that is, well, Maleficent.[3] Terra, we should note, believes in just about every Disney villain he comes across (save one or two exceptions), and has his journey driven by the words of Master Xehanort. You could say he isn't guilty of trusting Xehanort, and that is true, since Eraqus didn't give him any reason to not do so... but he should have; Eraqus for whatever reason never seems to mention that Xehanort kind of tried to commit genocide for shits and giggles, instead opting for presenting him to his pupils as a righteous, good Master. The plot moves along because the good guys never, ever seem to stop and tell each other why they are doing what they're doing, or what have they found out about their particular quests, which increasingly accumulates doubt and grievances among them. Predictably, it doesn't end well for any of them.
  • Bully. At least during chapter one, Gary was giving Jimmy a couple good reasons to trust him and didn't openly stab him in the back until the end of Chapter one. However; had Jimmy simply looked for Gary to get revenge instead of trying to get the other cliques to respect him in chapter two, he could have avoided most of the game.
  • Saints Row The Third.
    • The prequels were intentionally over the top, but at least things made sense in the bizarre world where police reality shows involve chainsaws and gang conflicts are solved with radioactive waste. The third game does away with realism altogether and relies on every NPC being an idiot.
    • At one point the military get involved. They occupy the city, erecting roadblocks and conducting a large scale search of the city to find you. Where are you? Maybe at the wheel of the luxury car that is blatantly painted in Saints gang colours. Or maybe in one of the obvious strongholds with the obvious fleur de lis logo on them. The only anonymous stronghold is the one that actually gets attacked.
      • Errr, the game specifically points out that STAG is leaving the Saints for last precisely because they're the toughest gang in town by that point, and so they're going to clear out all the other gangs before concentrating on you.
  • The plot of Magna Carta 2 is driven by the fact that everyone believes everything that the villains say without question, even after it becomes bloody obvious how evil they are.
  • Heavy Rain has a whole lot of it, broken down by character plot:
    • Ethan Mars: He somehow convinces himself that he could be the Origami Killer during blackouts, even though the dates don't match and several trials involve someone remotely confirming what he is doing in real-time. He can also escape pursuits several times because the police have no idea how to corner a suspect. In the finale, he can be forced to pick an address from multiple possibilities and bemoans the lack of time, but he never considers calling the police, Madison, or his ex-wife to check any of the other possibilities for him.
    • Madison Young: She discovers an unrelated serial killer and escapes his clutches. Not only does she not call the police on this one, she doesn't make the obvious logical leap that he could himself be the Origami Killer. Upon learning the O.K.'s identity, she scoots off to his apartment without telling anyone or even bringing a gun.
    • Norman Jayden: He (in some variants) helps Ethan escape police custody after clearly implicating himself in it, but nobody so much as questions him. He is also (potentially) killed when confronting an enormous violent felon alone in his junkyard, after discovering that he had murdered another cop that the police didn't even know about.
    • Scott Shelby: His entire plotline involves going to the Origami Killer's previous victims' parents and collecting evidence that either the police never asked for, or the parents inexplicably didn't reveal. Later, he attacks a wealthy man's home, murders all his security guards (and potentially the man himself) and saunters away on foot without ever being questioned. And there is so much more.
  • Literally the entire storyline of Spec Ops: The Line would not exist if the main character had not decided, in the first mission, that his four-man team was capable of taking on an entire renegade Army battalion all by themselves and that it thus made perfect sense for him to disobey every order he'd ever been given and charge off to try and do just that. Possibly subverted in the last act, when its revealed that the main character had actually gone insane early in the game, it's just that none of the signs were visible to anyone else until it was far too late.
  • The entire storyline of Watch Dogs wouldn't have taken place had Aiden Pearce not get himself into the seedy world of organised crime and put his own family at risk. This would be averted in the sequel where the plot is more about cybercrime and mass surveillance than a generic revenge plot framed in a hacker setting.
  1. ↑ However; at the same time, doing something that's Too Dumb to Live is usually given a game-over scenario.
  2. ↑ Someone thought that maybe Lan received updates since his PET appears to have been updated and likewise the old chips probably wouldn't have been useful anymore
  3. ↑ that was only very partially true
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