A reader explores the guilty pleasure of beating up underpowered bad guys, and why it’s one of the best things about video games.
I am very close to the end of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, playing the part of Adam Jensen. Throughout the course of the game I have developed a certain set of skills which have made me a formidable adversary, actually scratch that. I’ve become a human wrecking ball able to turn invisible and when I’m being nice I’ll only smash an opponent’s face into a packing crate so hard the guy’s nose basically becomes an internal organ; rather than pulling their heart out through their ribcage, nice being a relative term at this stage.
This got me to thinking about the overpowered endgame of most role-playing games and how our moral compass wanders a bit the more powerful you become. I once remember in Final Fantasy VII walking around the area just outside Midgar with Ultima Weapon and Knights of the Round summons, waiting for the screen to swirl and an enemy with 3 HP to appear.
I would laugh hard as I used a summon which did frankly hilarious damage. It took longer for me to complete the summon than it did for this hapless, innocent creature to challenge me to a respectful duel. In my head I can just picture them thinking to themselves, ‘Oh… bugger’(in a West Country accent for some reason) as they see the bejewelled gigantic sword hanging by my side and realise they may have bitten off more that they could chew.
Why does this give me such joy? Is it the grind it took to acquire these skills or could it be raw revenge against previously powerful enemies who tormented me so I can dish a bit of punishment back?
I can remember vividly the unbridled joy of taking a fully powered up plasma rifle (or the alien handgun thingy) and T51b power armour to a Deathclaw and cackling like Scarface as I used V.A.T.S. to blow every limb off that dumb animal. It was cathartic payback for the amount of times I had to run screaming and blubbering for my mother the other 80% of the times that I ran into Deathclaws. In the same game I also enjoyed de-limbing ghouls for the capital crime of creeping up behind me and making me jump a bit. That’ll teach them.
I think that’s probably it, you store up the small offenses from the minions as you climb the skill tree and then visit doom upon them once you’re a 10-foot armoured tank of a man. What makes me smile is empathising with the minions as if they were real players and how they might think about the whole situation.
I remember creeping slowly and carefully through dungeons in Skyrim (as people are probably doing right now) as a stealth archer with a double elemental bow (I think its name was Fearbringer). I can just imagine the internal monologue of the Draugr Deathlord who bobs in my sights shambling about in his comfy dungeon.
He’s thinking, ‘I’ve got everything they way I like it, I see that lever activated rope bridge is still safely raised. I wouldn’t want the living to stumble in. No… no, there’s no chance of that! They’ll see all the warnings I scrawled in ancient runes on the door. Okay so no one’s spoken that language for a 100 years but surely they’ll see things from my perspective. They’ll understand my instinctual and instant unceasing hatred for the living will drive me to attack them blindly and repeatedly’
Swish thunk, Archery increased to level 92.
That’s for the literally dozens of times a Draugr Deathlord appeared behind me and wrecked me in about 30 nanoseconds.
Society sets a line and the need to conform is a good thing in a lot of ways, however everyone has that part of them that wants to break the rules a bit. Games can be a release, a way to explore your darker side. Basically games make you a childish bully, petty and vindictive, and it’s a bloody great.
By reader Dieflemmy (gamertag)
The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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