Video Game Tropes and Design Choices that you hate.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

''WHY DOES A DOOR NEED SUN POWER TO OPEN?! I JUST WANT TO PLAY THE GAME!''

We all have them. Those certain mechanics, tropes, and design choices in games that just piss you off, and make you hate the choices found in that game. This thread is all about discussing those idiotic design choices in video games. 

To start with...

Grinding. 

Words really don't begin to describe how much I fucking hate grinding in games and RPGs. I hate having to keep doing a boring task or wasting an hour or two stuck in the same place fighting the same repetitive enemies over and over again, just so I can gain a few levels and then proceed to fight a overpowered boss for that point in the game.

One big example for me is in Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance. There was a boss in the Fantasia world that was a complete and utter pain in the ass to fight. Not only did Sora's attacks barely do anything, but his attacks were extremely strong. Forcing me to grind levels outside the Mysterious Tower for a few hours before I could proceed. No one wants to waste their time doing a repetitive task over and over again. They want to proceed in the story, not going through the same enemies over and over again.

 

 

[Polkadi~☆]

Let's run through the list...

 

Enemies hiding behind explosive barrels

Seriously, are you for real? Who says "Hide behind the explosive barrels, they'll protect us"? It does not in ANY WAY provide safety from your enemies. Enough said.

 

Taking the long path

Short path is destroyed/unreachable? Take the long path that takes a fucking QUARTER OF THE GAME to get through. This is ridiculous and only cheats how long the game is. The game could take 20 hours to complete, but it's because of a long path you had to take when the short path makes the game shorter. One great example is Half-Life 2. Teleporter doesn't work? Take the path that takes TWO LONG AND TEDIOUS CHAPTERS to take. It is boring and really stupid.

 

Main character is the Chosen One

Because everyone wants to feel important! No, it spoils the player. You have to earn that rank. One of my favourite games, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, treats you like a whelp and you have to earn the rank of Hero. But in it's later games, especially Skyrim, you get a hero rank not even that far in the game. It's stupid.

[Nepenthe]

Timers.

Fucking timers.

What I mean by timers are those highly arbitrary waiting periods you have to deal with in freemium games wherein too many failed attempts at a level means you're going to have wait 16 goddamn hours to get another round of chances, unless of course you want to pay a fee to skip.

Since naturally the developers want as much money as possible, a game with timers tends to skew towards being unnecessarily difficult after a certain point even for the gameplay and tasks at hand. It is inevitable for the majority of the population to hit that wall. And a game that's significantly rigged against you unless you buy your way through is just crap.

One can argue that this is merely like the arcade model of gaming, and I can argue that it's ridiculous to compare them. Arcades were brick and mortar stores relying on a continuous stream of folks coming in, so creating games limited by difficulty and a fee makes sense. That, and even in arcades the game wasn't free to simply start anyway. You had to drop some coins, meaning there wasn't any of the sly trickery inherent in advertising the product as "free." 

One can also argue how in the world are poor devs supposed to make money if they can't squeeze you for all you're worth? Put up a fucking asking price, like almost every other fucking game ever. I would much rather drop $5 for an Angry Birds 2 that I can beat with my skill than the one that's completely befuddled with paywalls (and it's a shame too because AB2 actually updates the formula in excellent ways. Too bad it was fucked over with timers!)

Seriously, there's nothing good about timers. All they do is limit the enjoyability of the game. I hope whoever invented timers can never find a matching pair of socks for the rest of their goddamned life.

[Cobalt_Bolt]

If you really want to get me fired up about game design choices that I absolutely hate here are mine that have continuously cropped up in the games that I have played over the years.

RUBBER BAND A.I. IN RACING GAMES:

I know that when I play any arcade type racing games I expect there to be some rubber-banding but more serious minded racing sims like Project CARS and Assetto Corsa Rubber Band A.I. can FUCK RIGHT OFF! I am at the head of the pack setting some fairly consistent lap-times but when these assholes suddenly decide to increase their speed to max right at the last lap of a long endurance race and ram right into me leaving me no chance to recover from the impact. All that work gone forcing me to restart from practice and qualifying because some idiot programmer thought it would be a good idea for an A.I. opponent to suddenly get a heroic second wind as the player closes in on the final laps of the race.

A.I. THAT DON'T GET PENALIZED IN RACING GAMES

This also crops up in both Assetto Corsa and Project CARS where the A.I. drivers cut the corners but get off with no loss in traction/speed or major penalty where if I get bumped off the track I end up with a cut track warning, major loss of traction, and invalid laptime for my troubles. FOR FUCKS SAKE MAKE THE PENALTIES APPLY FOR BOTH THE PLAYER AND A.I. WHEN MAKING A RACING SIM! I swear with all the time and effort put into these sims the devs always seem to forget about making proper penalty systems.

[Diogenes]

The majority of what you could call "traditional" (J)RPG mechanics.

The whole EXP/leveling setup, especially.

It's all so sloppy. Skip a few too many fights and now it's mathematically implausible for you to beat the next boss. Grind for too long and now you're breaking the game over your knee, no need to use any kind of actual strategy to win. Why not actually balance the game to provide an interesting challenge, rather than letting the difficulty swing wildly depending on how much fodder you've chewed through? It's not like "earn EXP from battling to level up" is the only way to make a game where the characters get stronger as you progress. They could have you "level up" only by beating a boss, so you still get stronger, get bigger numbers, and can go back and curbstomp those puny slimes outside the first town if you want, but keep your party's stats and abilities within reasonable ranges that each stretch of the game can be designed around.

And remember when we found out that Sticker Star wouldn't have exp/leveling? And people complained that there was no reason to even fight because of that? Well, that's kind of true, but I feel like it exposes a really terrible truth about most RPGs: most of the gameplay isn't actually fun. It's just busywork, to keep your party ahead of the difficulty curve. You spend most of the game's length fighting mechanically irrelevant trash mobs, doing little more than spamming basic attacks and maybe throwing in a few spells, not because it's any fun but because it's required to stay competitive in the few fights that actually matter.

Equipment falls into the same sort of mindless treadmill. Get to a new town, check the shop, buy the new sword/chestplate/helmet, repeat. Not because they actually expand your options in any way, but just so you get a few more points of atk/def/whatever to survive the slightly-more-powerful monsters on the way to the next town. Tone down the enemies' stats a few notches and you wouldn't even need to have 90% of the equipment the average RPG has, losing nothing but the psychological wank of getting new shit. And if you do ever find equipment with some unique effect, don't be surprised when it becomes statistically inferior and thus practically unusable within an hour.

There's just so much lazy design hiding itself under its own bloated scale. I want to like RPGs, but so many of the basic assumptions are so bad, you'd basically have to reinvent the genre from scratch to make anything good of it.

...oh, and please stop sneaking "RPG mechanics" like these into other genres. Keep that toxic shit out of games that are actually good and fun.

[Agie]

When the controls are awful. Wanna make a hard game? Go right ahead, but please don't make the controls the player's worst enemy!

No difficulty modes. I know there are people out there who don't like an easy game, and those who don't like a hard game...but would it have killed you to give us options?!

 

And while not necessarily a game mechanic...I also hate region locking. I don't see the benefit. Most players probably wouldn't even care to import, and it infuriates those who do. At best, it leads to people trying to disable the region lock, and at worst, it encourages piracy.

[Shoboni]

Unskippable cut-scenes are a big one, especially when the designers chose to put the checkpoints on things such as boss fights BEFORE the usually long introduction instead of after it.

Fake difficultly achieved via giving enemies really cheap abilities and attacks are another one. "Remember Me" was extremely guilty of doing this to artificially lengthen fights.     

[Solly]

Basic Player Actions Not Working Under Specific Circumstances.

I can't talk about things I hate in games without talking about the stairs in Casltevania. For several reasons. What's that? You're slow as molasses and want to jump to avoid incoming enemies? Sorry. The Belmonts may be agile enough to jump on teetering platforms, spinning gears and crumbling footholds, but in the earlier games, you can't jump in any direction from the staircase. Similarly, you can't land on a staircase either. You will fall through them if you don't approach them from the ground, and hold up or down. Trevor will presumably just walk past the staircase even though what you're trying to do is incredibly obvious.

Holding up and hitting a button also happens to be how you access your subweapons. So you can't prep for an attack without moving slightly. This is not helped by the fact that your character will not actually perform an action unless he's on acceptable footing. In other words, you cant be "between" steps on the stairs when performing an action, you are actually moving in increments. It's also impossible to turn around and use one because you'll face the direction the stairs move in.

So to review

• Jumping from the stairs doesn't work.
• Jumping onto the stairs doesn't work.
• Throwing subweapons while standing still doesn't work.
• Throwing subweapons behind you doesn't work.
• Throwing subweapons or even whipping when you're not at an acceptable place on the staircase itself doesn't work.
• Your character doesn't instantly crouch.

Some of these make sense, but this is just a recipe for disaster, and easily the most frustrating things about old Castlevania games. Thankfully, not all Belmonts have this curse.

This kind of thing happens a lot in games, although it's usually not as frustrating. In the case of Castlevania, it's in part because there are few suitable buttons on the controller. But even then, the game wrestles basic functions away from you to make something very simple a complete nightmare. Some might say this is less of a design trope and more of an oversight, but I feel like it's a bit of both. 

Edited August 2, 2015 by Solly

[KHCast]

I understand where people come from with the whole "rpg/exp/etc." complaints, but I never found it a issue in certain RPGs like Kingdom Hearts. Not to mention the gameplay for that series is legitimately entertaining. You're not gonna spend hours leveling up just to fight one boss, the games are pretty generous in that regard, and grinding really doesn't rear its ugly head until you decide to wanna max out your level, or fight secret bosses like data matches. But yeah, just wanted to say that lol

 

Thw topic in question now. 

 

"One shots"

 

what I mean by that is bonus items or things that you're only given one chance to get. This is especially noticeable in the Sonic series. Whether it's red rings, or those damn emblems in 06, I hate when you're a completionist and you miss said item, requiring you to quit the level, restart, or die just to try another attempt to get the item in question.

[Kaze no Klonoa]

Let's talk about shoehorned RPG mechanics in a game that doesn't need it.

In recent Triple AAA games, they usually contain useless upgrading or leveling systems. But in these games, your character already has the tools to do well and the leveling and upgrades in these games don't make enough significance if it is so easily tacked on like Watch_Dogs or Assassin's Creed. In Assassin's Creed IV, the only upgrades I found worthwhile was the additional pistols and ships, since the combat itself is easy and boring, and the ship battles are completely unbalanced and favors whoever has the more upgrades.

The point is, these games need to have meaningful upgrades and well-implemented RPG-related mechanics in order to work. Maybe one where upgrades affect your play-style, or ones that goes towards unlocking more significant abilities/weapons.

[Vertekins]

Collectathon quests

Gathering things from certain locations and returning to the NPC who's requested them is not original and never will be. It's easily the most unimaginative idea for a mission and shows a distinct lack of inventiveness on part of the game designer.

Cut-and-paste environments

When I play through a game, I like to see changes in the visuals so I'm not looking at the same thing again and again. Repetitive environments are boring and do nothing for the graphical vaiety of a game.

Save Token/Point

I want to be able to save my game at convenient points if I have to go out, not have to find something first in order to do so. This is very assholish game design.

Password saving

There's no excuse for this in this day and age.

HM slave required

Uh, Game Freak? I don't really want to have to dedicated one slot on my 6 slot team of Pokemon for a HM slave because you won't allow me to traverse multiple areas of the game world without very specific abilities.

Cutscene incompetence

Character's abilities and competence in cutscenes should be believable and consistent with their power and/or established intelligence. I often find my sense of voluntary disbelief broken when characters are hardcore badasses in gameplay but complete numpties and weaklings in the story.

Tank controls

When a game forces you to move forward and backward separately from left and right, it is almost all of the time an extremely unintuitive control scheme and therefore very annoying.

Lost forever

A collectable being permanently missable because of shit game design that doesn't allow you to return to the location where it was is a huge game design sin to me. Golden Sun Dark Dawn is a terrible offender with many of it's Djinn being permanently missable as is Skies of Arcadia with it's permanently missable items in the Grand Fortress and Valua.

 

 

 

[Agie]

To add to cutscene incompetence...I played Blade Kitten, and yeesh, are cutscenes our heroine's big weakness. Seriously, at least some of the problems wouldn't have happened if she had simply used an ability that gameplay shows she's quite capable of pulling off.

[KHCast]

Is talking about mobile gaming design choices and its effect bleeding into full retail titles okay, or is that a whole other can of worms for a different topic lol?

 

 

[Kaze no Klonoa]

To add to cutscene incompetence...I played Blade Kitten, and yeesh, are cutscenes our heroine's big weakness. Seriously, at least some of the problems wouldn't have happened if she had simply used an ability that gameplay shows she's quite capable of pulling off.

It's more of poor writing and possibly a disconnect between the writers and game designers. With that disconnection the gameplay doesn't feel like it has much to do with the story.

[Wraith]

Morality 

Morality systems are becoming more and more irritating the more they continue to be used poorly. I like the idea of having more control of the character's actions in the story, but far too often it starts to feel like a decision between paragon of justice and unreasonable asshole with no real middle ground. I have a choice between making Cole a boring hero or an insanely unlikable villain? Uh, alright.   I'd just like to see this concept tried with a little more thought put into it more often is all. 

 

Padding

AKA, when a game's progression is brought to a hault and the main gameplay is stopped and the player is forced to do repetitive side stuff that's mostly just there to keep you playing longer. Lots of developers are guilty of this, from Nintendo in the past few 3D Zeldas to Ubisoft's tendency to smother a solid gameplay system under hundreds of repetitive side missions you have to complete. I don't understand why they keep doing  this. Why pad out the time of the game if the time isn't spent engaging the player or doing boring or repetitive things? Does extending the game time mean that much to people? 

 

 

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Is talking about mobile gaming design choices and its effect bleeding into full retail titles okay, or is that a whole other can of worms for a different topic lol?

 

 

It's fine to discuss Mobile game design choices here as well.

[Johnny Boy]

Get Back Here Boss

Oh GOD this trope pisses me off so much. Basically this is a boss that is constantly moving throughout the battle, thus requiring the player to chase it down in addition to dealing damage to it.

Now in some cases I find this kind of a boss to be fun (the sonic games being a good example). But most of the time this shit irritates me to no end because of how tedious it gets chasing the boss down. But the worst offender of this trope by far is the Pokemon series. Why? I have two words for you: roaming legendaries.

Every time you encounter these fuckers, the very first thing that they'll do is run away, and so you have to go on a wild goose chase throughout the region to track them down and slowly whittle their health down so that you can track them down. Oh and I sure hope you didn't use the master ball on the mascot legendary because you won't have to go on said goose chase if you didn't. And if you did, well fuck you because now you have to put a dugtrio or wobbuffet at the front of your party to make sure these things don't run away. Or at the very least have a Pokemon that can put the legendary to sleep, but even then they can still run off with a status condition on them!

And it's at it's worst in X and Y. Here the birds are once again roaming but the twist is that now they can run away before you even have to option to attack. Seriously who thought this was a good idea?!

[Semi-colon e]

I hate grinding, whether it's in Pokemon levelling up (which they've wised up to a lot thank GOD, it's nowhere near as horrible as it used to be) or trying to get a specific random drop (Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow has this as the one big major flaw of an otherwise amazing game), I just hate it. It's so tedious and repetitive.

I also dislike the marathon boss trope sometimes, because often you can't save and if you die you lose an assload of progress. Limited saves are a bastard too, Metroid Prime 3's endgame requires you to beat an entire 20 minute area, then fight three final bosses which take half an hour. Sure, if you die at the bosses, you can start at the bosses, but turn the system off and you have to do the final dungeon again. Just let me save god damn it!

Unskippable cutscenes are horrible too. Metroid: Other M is terrible about this, I mean after watching them once you can skip them, but just let us skip them in the first place if they're not gonna be integrated into the gameplay properly.

[LoseR]

Yo I got something for you: Unnecessary Text

 

Tutorial Text: Some developers completely neglect the idea of explaining mechanics or other game elements through gameplay. When this happens the go to way to explain something to the player is to use text--and let me tell you--not only does this suck, but it can break up the pace of the game, make a game unfun, actually insult the players intelligence, or have several other negative effects on the game experience. The worst of these occurrences is when a game explains something in text in a redundant manner, when it doesn't even need to, because it also teaches through gameplay. You've played a game where it goes "Hey this is what you do." right before you have to do it, sometimes even forcibly, right? Of course you have. Now devs, STOP.

Story / Conversation Text: When a game uses text to explain a story, either through dialogue, flat text, or other means in a manner that is way to extensive. Now this is a case of rectangles and squares. This can be tutorial text, but also something different, or much more. Ever play a game where the story is explained through text in a boring, drawn-out, or other-wise unnecessary manner? Me too. Ever play a game where characters talk about events, occurrences, make jokes, or just explain things for so long that it becomes tedious and un-fun? Me too. These problems are in so many games, simply because the writers are flat out bad at writing. The pace of writing is important, depending on the mood that's trying to be set, but the writing also has to be concise, even when it's detailed. It can't ramble or repeat in any non-strictly-purposeful way. As a game designer who cares about story, and has taken a measly one college-level creative writing class, I can't stand so many games' "stories" and find myself generally uninterested in story-based games because of problems like these... It's sad really.

 

Whelp, there I go again, spewing out a game design discussion. I could say a lot more about these topics or others, but I'm lazy and I'll leave it to someone else.

[Mega]

One-hit KO attacks. :|

It's one thing if it's a forced-loss scenario for story progression, but when a boss has an automatic kill move that they spam relentlessly, that's just cheap enemy design. Powerful moves are one thing, but in RPGs in particular, I really don't wanna deal with insta-death attacks. Even Doom status is incredibly grating in my opinion. =_=

[Briraka]

I don't care for games where you have to explore without any kind of instructions or something that helps guide you along. I need to have some kind of structure when I'm exploring in a video game, and wandering around an area looking for some kind of way forward gets really tiring. That's why I like exploring in Elder Scrolls games as opposed to Zelda or latter Castlevanias. Even in Morrowind, there's some kind of instructions to get you where you could need to go for certain quests.

[Salamander]

I would have to agree with all comments about grinding - both experience grinding and item grinding.  I would do anything I could to kill these concepts stone dead; the problem is, what to replace them with?  They exist for the useful purpose of putting progression in the player's hands and for making certain items actually special and rare, and I'm not really convinced by many of the suggested replacements.  To a certain extent you can replace experience grinding with other sorts of grinding, though - there's not really any good reason to have both experience levels and job levels / equipment upgrades, and I suppose for rare items, they could just make them harder to get, or have complicated ways of boosting drop levels to stratospheric highs, or make items craftable and throw mountains of craftable scraps at you but not give you any clear recipes...

Lost forever

A collectable being permanently missable because of shit game design that doesn't allow you to return to the location where it was is a huge game design sin to me. Golden Sun Dark Dawn is a terrible offender with many of it's Djinn being permanently missable as is Skies of Arcadia with it's permanently missable items in the Grand Fortress and Valua.

Dark Dawn's missables were particularly inexcusable because the original pair of Golden Sun games had nothing that was missable or lost forever, nothing whatsoever.  With the exception of a couple of tiny areas from the very start of each game, you could always backtrack and nothing was ever lost forever.  But for some reason, the whole plot of Dark Dawn is built around multiple points of no return...  Just emphasises the fact that it clearly wasn't overseen by the same people as the originals.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

I would have to agree with all comments about grinding - both experience grinding and item grinding.  I would do anything I could to kill these concepts stone dead; the problem is, what to replace them with?  They exist for the useful purpose of putting progression in the player's hands and for making certain items actually special and rare, and I'm not really convinced by many of the suggested replacements.  To a certain extent you can replace experience grinding with other sorts of grinding, though - there's not really any good reason to have both experience levels and job levels / equipment upgrades, and I suppose for rare items, they could just make them harder to get, or have complicated ways of boosting drop levels to stratospheric highs, or make items craftable and throw mountains of craftable scraps at you but not give you any clear recipes...

My suggestion is making bosses a little easier to beat at lower levels (Generally in RPGs, the places where grinding is the biggest problem is because despite progressing through normally and destroying enemies, the boss is usually somehow still a good higher level above you, leaving your character too underpowered to take him on.

[Radiant Hero Ike]

Grinding can be annoying but I never had to do it in KH3D, 'cept for Julius. I didn't have any trouble with the Fantasia boss.

Anyway one thing that really annoys me and always will annoy me is water levels. Especially in Sonic. I'm trying to move quickly through a stage and then they put water everywhere, and you move extremely slowly underwater. That's partially why I don't like the Classic Sonic games. Zelda has Lakebed Temple as well. But that might just be bad design in general and not have anything to do with the water theme. It's just, everything is limited underwater. Oh, it's also annoying when you can drown, too. Rayman Legends is the only game I can think of with likeable water stages.

Also I don't like backtracking. I haven't beaten Shantae and the Pirates Curse because I have to go find those Cackle Bat things or whatever. I don't wanna do that ughhh.

Also I'm not completely fond of games where the main character dies. It doesn't always bother me, but if it's someone I really really like, THEN it bothers me. Two examples:

Ludger in Tales of Xillia 2 and Serah in Final Fantasy XIII-2

Just, ugh.

Oh, I don't like synthesis either, especially for really good weapons. I personally prefer being able to unlock the weapons through other means, like beating an extra boss or going through a secret dungeon. That's a lot more fun than fighting a million of the same enemy hoping that you eventually get one of the 50 materials you need for it.

I'm also starting to get bored of silent protagonists.

And while not directly linked to gameplay tropes, I hate it when people get angry with me because I named a character in a game. I mean, they gave me the option to do so, so why shouldn't I use it? I generally name the main character after myself if it's a (ugh) silent protagonist. Ness, Isaac, Link, etc.

[gala]

Unskippable Tutorials/Cutscenes

Sure, if you're playing something for the first time, you might want to go through a tutorial and watch cutscenes to get the full experience, right? But if you're playing through it again, you're probably just wanting to play the game, seeing as you've seen all of this before.

Cutscenes that are too long and too many

A game is a game, you most likely want to play it for the actual game rather than watch a not-movie. If you're cutscenes are so long that they're more of the game than the actual gameplay does (a la The Order 1886), you may as well just made a movie script rather than a game.

No way of finding out what to do next

So imagine you've started playing a game. You've just watched a cutscene where someone tells you to go to a certain place to continue the game, but things have got busy in your life and you have to take a break. A few months later, you pick up where you left off, and you have no clue what your next task is. You go around talking to NPCs, but they just say the same old stuff they always say. It doesn't let you re-watch the cutscene. Your only hope is to either start a new save file, or look up a walkthrough and hope that something on there rings a bell. It's really not fun, and they should always give you SOME way to check up on what you've got to do.

Trial & Error

In small doses, it's fine (something that just causes a minor setback), but if a lot of your game is based on random shit jumping out at you and killing you before you have any chance to move or block it and remembering where these points are by pissing away your lives, then you really need to reconsider your game design choices and learn the difference between real difficulty and fake difficulty.

Too many Quick Time Events (QTEs)

QTEs can be cool, when done right. For example, if you've just depleted a boss' health bar, a QTE that'd involve quickly tapping a button until a bar was full to tear it's head off or something would be a good idea: It's immersive , it's simple, and it leaves the player feeling even better about defeating the boss than they would have before. On the other hand, QTEs can be straight-up B to the S. You're fighting a boss. You're running in for an attack. Suddenly, the boss swings it's arm right at you, and you get a QTE prompt telling you that you gotta press A, B, X, Y, L, R, wiggle the Left Stick left and right 50 times and shove the controller up your arse in that order in the span of a second. You fail, and the boss OHKOs you. Now you have to start the whole thing over because apparently it's YOUR fault.

Forced Multiplayer aspects

Games that make something intentionally hard to do on your own and essentially force you to get another player to join you. What if you got the game years after it came out and nobody plays it anymore? Tough shit, you ain't going to be defeating that boss. You want that last item you needed via Streetpass, but no one near you has the game? Oh well, guess you're not getting that item. If it's an optional second player thing then fair enough, but if you're locking out content just because you don't have the opportunity to get another player who has the game, that's just cruel.

Money buys you progress

Can't be bothered to play the game and level up like everyone else? No worries, you can buy a DLC pack which grants you all the weapons and skills that'll put you ahead of the other players without working for it at all!

Counterintuitive camera controls

You're wandering around in the game, when suddenly some big-ass thing jumps out at you. It's a higher level than you, and will tear you to shreds if you try and fight it, so you've got to get your ass out of there. But on the way out, the camera fucking spins around and shit so you've got no idea where you're facing. Your character can't seem to walk in a straight line. You're running into everything your getting frustrated and the enemy draws closer. You go to jump across a huge crack in the ground to get away from it, but your camera decides to swing around as you hold the stick in the direction you were jumping, causing your character's jump arc to go directly into the crack, and you die. Cameras really shouldn't be the main cause of death in a game, and if they are, fix that.