CRINGE MOMENTS IN RPGS

I came in this thread to slack off a bit. I watched that first video and now I just want to work again. So..thank you???

Could be just my opinion, but there's a lot of those moments in the first Disgaea game and other early Nippon Ichi titles. I thought the Horse Wiener scene was really cringey in particular, and there were a few moments in La Pucelle that seemed really "off".

More recent games from the company have been better-written, but I genuinely do not know if that can be attributed to the scripts being better, or if the localization teams have gotten more proficient in handling Japanese humor.

That part in FF7 when Cloud get's "overwelmed" by all the dudes in the hot tub in Wallmarket.

I think Welch counts in every scene of every Star Ocean


For less creepy but still cringy, I'd like to submit about... half of FF4? One of my favorites garbage scenes is the Dwarf Castle Crystal cutscene. From the dolls, to Golbez's sudden appearance with his dragon, to Rydia's sudden appearance, to Golben exploding into a lone severed hand that floats around then grabs the crystal and disappears while Cecil and Crew picks their nose. It's like the whole scene was devised using a dart board and an unhealthy number of empty beer cans.

Hey now, you can't deny that the scene where Cecil falls through a trap door and Golbez goes "HAHAHA YOU JUST FELL THROUGH MY TRAP DOOR" is a wonderfully endearing Skeletor moment.

That time in ff4 when Cecil is like "well extremely qualified medic and summoner of the arcane, get off the airship so me and my buddies with pointed sticks can go take care of this interplanetary horror. You can't come because you're women."

like i was a kid who was still sipping the internalized sexism coolaid when i first saw that and i still cringed. AHHHH THE 90s....

author=SgtMettool
Hey now, you can't deny that the scene where Cecil falls through a trap door and Golbez goes "HAHAHA YOU JUST FELL THROUGH MY TRAP DOOR" is a wonderfully endearing Skeletor moment.

Man Golbez isn't even there, it's just the game going "whoa you thought you were going to score a victory? lol no". If Skeletor was there he'd at least laugh at your or something. What happened in FF4 is more a Beastman move than Skeletor, Skeletor would never do such a low-class jerk act!

Exdeath is way better at the Skeletor thing than Golbez could ever dream to be.

author=emmych
That time in ff4 when Cecil is like "well extremely qualified medic and summoner of the arcane, get off the airship so me and my buddies with pointed sticks can go take care of this interplanetary horror. You can't come because you're women."

like i was a kid who was still sipping the internalized sexism coolaid when i first saw that and i still cringed. AHHHH THE 90s....

Oh yeah, this is bulshit too. You've already done all the shit in the game with them including going to the very place that Cecil's trying to forbid them to go. They even beat up the giant robot that was going to destroy the planet! It doesn't help when Rydia talks about what she brings to the party and it's basically "I have bahamut's number!". Or they pretend to step off, wait for Cecil to fly to the moon, then confront him about it instead of telling him where to stick it right away.

author=GreatRedSpirit
Oh yeah, this is bulshit too. You've already done all the shit in the game with them including going to the very place that Cecil's trying to forbid them to go. They even beat up the giant robot that was going to destroy the planet! It doesn't help when Rydia talks about what she brings to the party and it's basically "I have bahamut's number!". Or they pretend to step off, wait for Cecil to fly to the moon, then confront him about it instead of telling him where to stick it right away.

I always took this as a "women and children first" moment. When men of a species go off and die, the species can come back. But when women die, that's it, the population can't rebound. I've read in National Geographic that this is what happened to Neanderthals: the species was not as sexually bimorphic as ours, with women having the same build as men. Because of this, women would go on dangeous hunts with men and die in equal numbers.

At that point in history, Final Fantasy's medieval-high-tech hybrid period, they would mostly be out of that woods... but it's still something to consider. Perhaps our population has become so overblown here on Earth that we forget what it's like to only have a population of, like... what would it be in Final Fantasy... 5 million?? With monsters attacking and who knows what else.

But I DO remember, like, 20 years ago, thinking during that scene, "Rosa's not coming?? How am I going to survive??"

The thing about that scene in FF4 is that every player had the same reaction to Cecil and Edge being dumbasses, and that reaction was Rosa and Rydia's reaction. The game made it very clear that the men were wrong. It wasn't good writing, but it was predicting a cringey sexist point of view that some members of the audience might have, giving that view to a character so it could be addressed, and trying its best to show why that viewpoint was wrong, and why Rosa and Rydia should be part of the team and didn't need protecting.

Then Lufia 2 had Maxim do the same thing, except for real, no one stopped him, and you actually had to beat the climactic dungeon and main villain of Act 1 with Dekar replacing the two women. Now that was stupid.