< Tales (series)

Tales (series)/Narm

Feel free to make your own Tales of Silliness jokes now. Namco made it easy with a few of these scenes:

  • In Tales of Legendia, the main character, Senel, sees his long-lost girlfriend, Stella, fly into the sky and sacrifice her life to stop the beam of the Nerifes Cannon from reaching its target. The cutscene ends with Stella's limp body falling to the floor, a short pause, and then Senel leaning down and yelling "STELLAAAAAAAA!". Due in large part to the apparent reference to Marlon Brando's famous line in A Streetcar Named Desire, many fans reported bursting out laughing at the end of this otherwise tragic scene.
    • Not helping is the fact that, as she dodges in front of the beam, it looks like she explodes like a rather spectacular firework.
  • In a similar case from Tales of Symphonia, Zelos's death on Kratos's ending is hilarious.
    • This scene is made even more hilarious when Zelos is wearing his "Pickup Artist" beach outfit. If you choose to let him live and he wears that outfit, he rescues the party from Mithos in the Hall of the Great Seed in the same outfit.
      • Abusing the outfits in New Game Plus can be funny in general. For instance, near the start of the game, Lloyd is taken into custody, breaks out, sneaks around the base a little, and ducks into a room when some guards are about to see him, eliciting a "And just who the hell are you?" from the villian who was standing just inside the doorway. This is all fine in-context, but if Lloyd is wearing nothing but a speedo and flippers the whole time...
    • When Colette loses her soul you get this famous scene-killer:

Colette learned Judgment

    • After Presea regains her true self and discovers what has become of her father, you can't help but laugh at the scream.
    • Also from Tales of Symphonia, the Bonus Boss's line, said in a very overly dramatic deep voice: "I will show you my true power!" The actual battle aside, that only just increased the ridiculousness of the laughably cliched villain storyline-wise.
    • "What is this ominous light that threatens to ENGULF US?"
    • Why have the (weirdly executed) attempts to avoid gendered pronouns and names after Mithos possesses and kidnaps any one party member apart from Lloyd or Kratos not turned up? It was hilarious that the missing party member would only be referred vaguely and strangely to as "Our Friend" instead of he/she/him/her/it/insert name here while Heimdall gets rained on by fragments of the Tower of Salvation. Even more so that Genis says it unless he got kidnapped, though he was so irritating it has yet to happen for me.
      • Around that same time, when the party realizes that Derris Kharlan is about to leave, dooming the world to die from mana deprivation, Genis will say "This is a much bigger problem then reuniting the worlds." and then immediately after, respond with "Who cares?! Our friend just got kidnapped!" Genis, we're already worried about your mental health. Arguing with yourself doesn't help your case.
        • He only says the latter if Zelos isn't there. Likewise, I think Zelos does the same exact thing if Genis isn't there, although his original line is the latter.
      • In the final area, reuniting the party requires Lloyd and his friend of choice to remind the other party members of what they have learned during the journey. They're divided into thematic pairs of Genis and Raine, Zelos and Sheena, and Presea and Regal. If one of the six is your friend of choice, Colette replaces them. Thus, if Regal is your chosen party member, you get to see a dramatic scene in which Presea tries to stop Colette from killing Alicia. Really?
    • Regal obtained the title, "El Presidente"!
      • Averted in the Spanish translation, for obvious reasons.
    • The scene after the first dungeon, when Lloyd manages to figure out that Colette has lost her sense of touch...by giving her possibly hot possibly cold coffee. Even if you could stand that, the fact that Collette dramatically drops the coffee cup at the end of the scene just pushes it into Narm.
    • And the sound the cup makes when it hits the ground makes it seem as if it was actually empty.
    • The scene where Magnius's forces attack Palmacosta. There's one part where a Desian mage does an interperative dance around his staff for aobout five seconds in order to produce one fireball; one-third of the game's weakest black magic spell. Then Genis just blocks it with Force Field, so it was completely useless.

"Amateur."

    • "It's Magnius from the eastern ranch!" "That's LORD Magnius, vermin!"
      • If you look at Magnius as he says it, he finishes the line by making an extremely goofy face.
      • Seen here at about 3:56.
      • Magnius is just narm on legs.
    • When starting the boss fight against Magnius, he has the scripted line, "You really think you're gonna live through this?!" which is bad enough on its own. However, each character has their own individual sound bite reacting to a number of events, one of which is 'enemy spellcaster is charging an attack' - every time this trigger happens, one of the party members the player isn't controlling will shout their alert phrase. Lloyd's alert phrase for that trigger happens to be "Not a chance!" Magnius begins casting immediately after saying that opening line, so if the player isn't controlling Lloyd at the time, he sounds awfully pessimistic for an Idiot Hero.
    • The scene where Lloyd finds out that Kratos is his biological father. It goes along pretty smoothly until Colette comes out. Lloyd is in complete shock upon learning that Kratos is his dad and Colette, just finding out and seemingly not shocked at all, proceeds to give him a heartfelt speech about how it doesn't matter who his (Lloyd's) parents are or what his background is and that he's him no matter what. There are also two Renegade mooks right in front of her ready to kill on command while this is going on (but then again they're such pitiful enemies, I can't say I'd feel too threatened either). Lloyd then approaches Kratos and gives him a speech about how "no life should be born for the purpose of dying" and how he disapproves of what Cruxis does. Did I mention the guy's lying on the ground in pain after taking one of Yuan's...electricity ball things to the back? Thank God Mithos comes out and points out how corny it was.

"Wow, that was an amazingly corny speech. Congratulations."

      • That entire scene was funny, just for the little things: The scene starts with Lloyd waking up to find Yuan just standing next to him, saying "Do you want to meet your father?" No context, no warning, he's just there. Gets better when, instead of asking why the hell he's there/how he got in/what it is he wants, he just asks "What have you done with my dad?!", as if that's the most bizarre/worrying thing about the situation. When he leaves the house, and he finds out that Kratos is his father, he says in his anguish "No...Kratos can't be my dad. I c...I can't believe that! I won't believe that", which would be great and all if the guy wasn't still there, hearing everything he was saying. Even if you didn't like Kratos, that's still a little harsh. Then you get Yuan ruining whatever menace he'd accumulated with the line "You changed once you got a family!", as if he was just complaining that Kratos had just stopped going to the pub or something. And then, to top it all off, there's Mithos' hilariously over-the-top evil laugh when he's kicking the shit out of Yuan. Combine it with his incredibly bored expression, and overall, what should be a sad and heartfelt scene turns into comedy GOLD.
      • It gets worse when Mithos shoots at Presea and Altessa takes the shot for her. He jumps about three feet into the air for no apparent reason upon getting hit, and the animation makes it look more like he's slipping on a banana peel than being shot.
      • Right after that, Tabatha responds to her master getting shot by saying that Mithos saved her once. His response? "Shut up." He then shoots her with magic, knocking her down while she says her line again. It's supposed to be a dramatic moment, and it is, but Tabatha's voice and tone makes that particular part more funny than serious.
    • Right after some of Zelos's best character development in his Flanoir scene, we get this gem:

Zelos: Did I piss you off?
Lloyd: Hell yes! Of course! It'd be a huge problem for me if everything were destroyed!

Thanks, Captain Obvious.

    • After dodging a punch from Dirk, Lloyd gives us this:

Lloyd: Ugh...! You don't have to hit me!

    • It's totally possible I'm the only one who thought this was narmish, but Lloyd's exclamation "Don't even start spewing the word, "justice"! I hate that word!" was more than a little mood-ruining.
    • One of the lines Zelos can say at finishing a battle is, "Man, I rule! I'm soooo cool!" You can also choose to have someone cook at the end of a battle. So having Zelos say this, and then getting the message "Zelos failed to make a sandwich!" is incredibly funny.
    • In the final battle of Tales of Symphonia, the boss will teleport next to you and then yell "get away from me!" Geez, if you don't want me near you, why'd you teleport next to me?
    • Tales of Symphonia has a scene where there are a bunch of guards holding their spears up who are then ordered not to attack. In the English language version, the order is, "lower your weapons!" Lowering a weapon is actually an **aggressive** stance when the weapon in question is a spear.
    • Right after you defeat the monster in Iselia at the beginning of Symphonia, you find out that said monster used to be Marble. It's just as disturbing as it sounds, but the effect is quickly lost because of how Genis chooses to handle the situation: He says Marble's name twice, looks toward the sky and spreads his arms out, then screams "NOOOO!" from his place on the ground. All while the camera dramatically zooms out from him. All these details combined made the scene come across as so cliched that it was hard for me not to laugh at him.
  • Veigue's "CLAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRE!" in Tales of Rebirth was so bad that even Namco frequently makes fun of it. It's even undergone a small degree of Memetic Mutation.
    • From the same game, there is Eugene's "GUOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRGHHHH!!!!!!!". Wouldn't be so bad, except that he does it A LOT. Not as much as Veigue's "CLAAAAAAAAAIREEEEE", but close.
  • Indignation. * ahem* sorry, IN-dig-NAY-shun!
  • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World also has its moment in the form of Emil's Mystic Arte, particularly the Ain Soph Aur extension. After the main execution, he laughs maniacally in an over-the-top fashion, then yells "Darkness Devours! Ain Soph AUR!!" while using a Light spell.
  • In Tales of Eternia, after you counter the Final Boss's instant death attack she/it utters the line "This cannot be..." in the flattest voice possible. You have to hear it to believe it.
    • Pretty much everything in the English Tales of Eternia is entirely free of drama. Meredy's enraged declaration that Shizel is dead at the end of the game, after dubbing, mostly sounds like she's about to gag.
  • In a more obscure example, Karell's death in Tales of Destiny 2. You see, his sister, Harold (yes, it's a long story), already knew from the time-traveling main characters that he was going to die; her response was something among the lines of "Well, I can't do anything to change the future, so I'll focus on our goal right now". However, when Karell dies, she goes on to dramatically cry about it like a helpless little girl. Sure, some could say that even though she knew it she wasn't prepared to face it, but it's still pretty hard to feel sad by the scene.
  • And then there's Tales of the Tempest, which is a long, endless streak of Narm. For an example, the game's introduction has an evil villain killing Rubia's father while Caius is secretly watching, inside of a church. Then Rubia's mother shows up in front of Caius; the kid warns her that the villain just killed her husband. She then decides to enter the church for no reason and gets killed after two lines of dialogue (yes, exactly two lines of dialogue). Not easy to feel sorry for her...
  • Tales of the Abyss has a very dramatic and mostly well voice-acted cutscene near the end. And then, at the very end...

Asch: (in a deadly calm voice) Well said. I will make those words your last, replicaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

    • The scene with the Malkuth and Kimlascan forces going to battle may count, considering that they're charging fiercely into battle armed with tubas.
      • And the Off-Model soldiers. My god, the Off-Model soldiers!
      • That, and the sheer savagery of the battle propels the scene into Nightmare Fuel. Your Mileage May Vary.
  • Tales of the Abyss deserves some kind of award for attempting to use really complicated terminology for otherwise simple concepts like atoms ("fonons"). Even though the script is well-written and acted, the constant usage of these terms confuses and tends to make one review what the characters were trying to say a few times over before advancing to the next line of dialog. This artificial wordiness is more than deserving of an Hiimdaisy style grilling: FONONSFONONSFONONS
  • Tales of Graces has the famous "Tomodachi NANDA!? TOMODACHIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!! HUAAAARGH"
    • In case you were wondering, the English version is just as if not more full of narm than either of the Japanese versions.
    • The only purpose of the Attachments you can find throughout the game is to turn scenes into this.
  • Going back to Tales of Legendia watch ANY of the characters walking animations. Just... just watch. Moses, Shirley and Norma are the biggest offenders.
    • The skits in Legendia. Whenever someone walks or runs, the picture of the character is simply bobbed up and down, like a paper cutout stuck to a popsicle stick.
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