Cutscenes

This post probably won't mean much to people who don't play video games, and people who do will already be all too familiar with this problem, but it's something I wanted to talk about anyway. The thing that's great about video games is that you control it. And I mean, obviously there's a pre-determined path for you to go down, with a certain order in mind, and other than speed and optional areas or side quests, every playthrough is going to look more or less the same - minus the affect of game breaking glitches. But you're still an active participant in all of it - save for the cutscenes.

During the cutscene, you're literally just watching a movie of what happens next. You have no input. You have no say. The rules of how the game is played when you are in control no longer apply so that the developer can show you the scene that they have in mind. And I mean, I'm not complaining. Most of the time, I love cutscenes. I love seeing what a badass my character is, or seeing how unbelievably powerful the foe they're up against really is. Sometimes that can be hard to portray through normal gameplay, and I completely understand, especially when you still want the game to be fair.

The problem arises in games like Final Fantasy 7, with the infamous Aeris' death scene. It's an emotionally charged scene - one of your main characters, who has thus far played a major role in pushing the story forward, has been violently murdered before your very eyes, and there is nothing you can do about it. She's gone. No save points can fix it. No potions can heal it. No reviving items can revive... wait a minute. You have items that can revive people from the dead. Hell, you probably have a lot of them. Why is she dead?

This happens a lot in rpgs in particular, which is unfortunate because they are the most story driven games. It's hard not to make fun of these things, because there's just such a disconnect between game and cutscene. Why should I be moved by her dying? She's my healer, with pathetically low hp and not very good attack or defense. She dies every other battle, and almost never gets experience from boss battles. The only thing that makes this any different is that I wasn't personally involved in. Which is problematic, because that's the whole point of playing the game in the first place.

The character deaths that really hit home are the ones that don't happen in a cutscene. The ones that you actively play a role in. To use another incredibly popular and overappreciated game, Undertale is the king of this. The only characters that die are done at your hand. If someone dies, it is entirely your fault. You could have saved them. You could have spared them. But you didn't. You cut them down in cold blood. There is only one exception to that rule, and it catches you so off guard because of the fact that the game is built in this specific way that it makes you angry at who actually was in control. Call it fanboyism all you want, that is the way that you make uncontrollable character death matter. It still happened in a cutscene. But the breaking of the game's rules was intentional - not blindly stupid.