5 Clichés & Tropes Only Gamers Will Understand

The gaming world is nothing short of massive. There are new games coming out just about every day, especially in the indie world. Major titles release all the time, and announcements are plentiful. Even with all the variety in gaming, though, you do still see a lot of cliches raising their head. While some of these are expected, others have gotten pretty annoying in recent years. Worst of all, your non-gaming friends probably don't understand the pain that comes with a gaming cliche. Sure, everyone knows the save the damsel in distress trope is annoying, but what about the other ones that seem to be in every game you play. The list below contains gaming cliches that are sure to invoke plenty of memories.

5. The Evil Friend

Gaming has a huge love for making someone close to you the villain. This gaming cliche even showed up in Genshin Impact, a game that has only been out for two years. Another recent but famous example of this is Goro Akechi from Persona 5. The trope works like this, someone close to you that could never do any wrong turns into the villain. In these scenarios, they have either gone missing, and you find them as they reveal their true colors, or they pretended to be your friend all along.

In some cases, they will even offer you to join them. As most games go, the protagonist declines, and then the two vow to kill each other for their ideals. In many cases, another twist happens where it's revealed that this friend wasn't really evil after all. Everything was simply for the greater good or to protect the main protagonist from harm's way. Sometimes, it even turns out that the protagnist was the one in the wrong the whole time.

4. Bad Foreshadowing

While foreshadowing is an ever-present plot device, especially in classic media, games don't always do it well. Sometimes the foreshadowing is so bad that it completely ruins the would-be surprise altogether. There's even a joke about how obviously evil characters have evil eyes in JRPGs. While there are plenty of good examples of foreshadowing, like in the amazingly woven story of The Witcher 3, there are tons of bad examples out there.

One of the worst ones you will encounter is the, your friends are obviously going to die foreshadowing. Usually, the character says something about seeing their family again or talks about future plans with you before a fight. They, of course, never make it back, and you will likely avenge them at some point. This trope can be especially bad in the FPS genre, as it is an easy-to-use motivator for FPS protagonists.

3. Story Tutorials

Tutorials in games are great the first time if they are well put together. After that, though, they become an annoying hindrance that slows down your replay. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a good example of this problem. The game forces you to go through a sequence where you create your character and then have to run away from a dragon attack every single time you make a new character. This is simply not fun to deal with and keeps many players from wanting to start a new save.

Other games will directly tie their tutorials or opening sequences in with story quests as well. Many of the popular games that do this become meme fuel as players become frustrated from hearing the same lines over and over again. It's become such a problem that many games with skippable tutorials are praised by the gaming community. The gaming cliche of story tutorials should probably stop, especially in the case of games that are meant to be replayed.

2. The Chosen One

If you have played any video game set in a fantasy world, then you know that you are the chosen one. The prophecies have foretold of your coming, and you will surely save the world from destruction. Despite being so famous, though, many of the people around you have no respect. You have to do asinine requests to get anywhere in the world and pay high prices for items you need. Even when someone knows who you are, they will stop you from saving the village to do a task like wrangling chickens.

It's kind of strange that the savior of the world has to do petty labor just to speak with someone. Even worse is when you're the hero, so you get random power-ups that you can't actually use in-game. These powerups just appear during a cutscene, and then you may never see them again. Why can't Link use the power of the Tri-force like Ganon? It'd be a pretty cool endgame feature to throw in Zelda.

1. This Isn't Even My Final Form.

This gaming cliche has been around for decades at this point. How many times have you played a game, got to the final fight, and then they had multiple forms. The cliche of having three really hard boss fights with the final boss back-to-back is nothing new. Most times, you will find these fights the most difficult in RPGs where your MP and items have been heavily worn down by the boss's previous forms. These fights can either be really challenging or fall into the unfair category if they are badly balanced.

In some cases, you may even need to be completely over-leveled if you want to pull through. Some games, like the Tales series, even come with the expectation of a multiple forms of the final boss. Players have learned to fill up on healing items before the fight in order to survive it more easily. While this may have once been a cool trick, many gamers now prefer having one solid battle to a chopped-up boss. It'd be nice just to have a really hard but satisfying final boss fight in many of these titles.

So, what’s your take? Do you agree with our top five? Are there any games we should know about? Let us know over on our socials here or down in the comments below.