Introduction
Hi folks, it's Zaid Ikram. Today on Gamix, we have 10 video game plot holes that are confusing as hell. A little disclaimer here: if you really want to put some thought into it, almost anything can be explained away or justified somehow. It's fiction, after all. None of it's real. So if you come up with something fairly absurd that fits, fine. I mean, that works. None of this is real, you know?
Aliens Colonial Marines - Stasis Interrupted
This is a safe target, the infamous "Aliens Colonial Marines". People were lining up around the block to kick this thing while it was down. But in this case, it was all well-deserved because the game sucks. There's just nothing to say about it that contradicts that and makes any sense whatsoever. It's an "Aliens" game that is crappy, has a dull plot, subpar graphics, and obnoxious characters. It's a failure all around. If you like failures, it's probably great. I don't like it.
There are so many plot holes that the fandom page for the game has its own dedicated section exclusively covering plot holes. But for me, the most glaring and funniest plot hole revolves around Corporal Hicks. If you've seen the movies, you know that Hicks was unceremoniously killed off at the start of the third. But in "Colonial Marines", he's alive, and there's no real explanation as to how.
At least in the game's final DLC, "Stasis Interrupted", we finally learn the truth about how Hicks survived. And it sure is something. You'd assume his survival would've had to be explained as some kind of intentional coverup because that's the only way you could explain it, right? I mean, they show his dog tags, it came from the body in the third movie, so somebody must have intentionally pulled Hicks out of hyper-sleep and replaced him with a lookalike or some crap, which is absurd all by itself for many reasons. But if they wanna pretend that everything that happened in the movies is still canon, there really is no other explanation.
So of course that is not what goes down in the events of "Stasis Interrupted". Instead, we get this completely absurd scenario whereby a coincidence of a guy wearing the exact same bandages in the exact same places just so happens to fall in Hicks' cryosleep pod, and he just so happens to get a steel girder through the face so the body can't be identified. This all happens by accident, let me emphasize. It's the most contrived explanation possible that doesn't make any sense.
There are multiple inconsistencies with both the events of "Aliens 2" and the third. The most obvious one being Hicks wearing completely different clothes at the end of "Aliens". And it doesn't explain how the body got Hicks' dog tags. There's further inconsistencies, like the face-hugger on Ripley getting shot. You remember how the aliens have acid blood, like their signature trait? You shoot 'em and acid comes out of them? Yeah, the list of plot holes in the DLC here is a mile wide. The whole point is to explain how "Colonial Marines" respects the canon. But it's so sloppy that for every question it tries to answer, they introduce like three more things that don't make any sense.
Heavy Rain - Shelby Paradox
Another game with a whole lot of goofy nonsense going on. But if there's one standout plot hole, it's the central element that ties together the entire story, the true identity of the Origami Killer. The story of the game is a house built on a foundation of jello. Insert Bill Cosby was actually a monster the whole time joke. But it validates the entire mystery because they're not playing fair with the clues.
One of the player characters is a guy named Scott Shelby. He seems like a good guy, saves prostitutes, and gets in John Woo gunfights to stop the copycat Origami Killer. The game makes you think he's a pretty decent dude. With everything he's got going on, combined with his internal monologue, you can literally read his thoughts, which pretty much rules him out as a possible suspect. Basically zero clues this guy, a character you spend a good chunk of the game playing as, is the killer. At least up until a certain point in the plot where a big killer reveal switch gets pulled and suddenly he becomes a completely different character.
The game just doesn't play fair with the narrative here. There's parts of his story we never experience, like the murders of the shop owner. In Shelby's brain, he acts like he doesn't know what happened. But this isn't like a case of split personality or something. It's purely for the sake of the audience. There's no reason why Shelby's own thoughts would conceal motives and memories of actions. Literally, the only reason the story plays out in this way is to trick the audience. There is no in-universe explanation for the deception.
Another major part of the mystery is that Ethan's visions don't make any sense at all. This is the father who's trying to save his son while also being the prime suspect in the Origami Killer case. Early in the game, he experiences visions that only the killer would know and wakes up with origami in his hand. Seems like a pretty big clue, but nothing ever comes of it. The whole fugue state plot comes up and then gets completely forgotten at a certain point. The explanation goes like this: Ethan was originally supposed to have a psychic connection with the killer. That would've been the reason for his visions, which is stupid, so they cut the entire explanation. But for some reason, they kept in the visions. So it's something that seems important but doesn't make any sense at all.
Madison reacts when she learns about the Origami Killer like it's some big revelation that it's Shelby, which it is for the person playing the game. But for her, she never meets him ever during the events of the game, so to her, he's just some guy. If this plot made any sense, she'd be like, "I have no idea who that is. Why are we talking about him? Who is Shelby?" But she reacts like it's some big revelation. Did they forget or does it just not make sense? "Heavy Rain", folks, I'm being attacked by chickens.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League - Nuke
The sequence that directly follows the fight with Green Lantern is a highlight of the game, I'm not gonna deny that. King Shark, Green Lantern, the Superman reveal. It's one of the better moments. Only one big problem: the whole thing makes no sense. The scenario that is. I mean, you could arguably say the whole game, but yeah, let's break it down.
The squad defeats Green Lantern, then uses his ring to open a hole in the barrier around Brainiac's mothership. So far, so good. But then Amanda Waller, the squad's cruel taskmaster, gets on the line and says they're gonna launch a nuke at the ship. And tells the squad their sentences will be posthumously commuted in recognition of their efforts. The plan is for the nuke to blow up the ship and kill everyone nearby, which includes the squad. This also technically makes sense up to this point. I mean, this is a nuke we're talking about. It's not just some powerful explosive, it is a nuke. And Waller made it clear that the blast was gonna kill the squad. So then Superman appears and stops the missile. And immediately after the cut scene ends, Waller calls and says, "Our convoy has been ambushed by Brainiac's forces. 10-4. 10-4."
The convoy that according to the map was only slightly further away from Brainiac's ship than the squad was when the nuke would've detonated. Like her plan would've killed not just you but her also. And nobody ever says anything about it. But now we got ourselves a convoy. 10-4. 10-4. The whole point of her character is she's casually sacrificing these villains to achieve her goals. She is not the one making sacrifices. She's the one forcing other people to make sacrifices. There's not much point in arguing her motivations anyway 'cause they just don't come up. Why is she in a convoy just barely away from the Hall of Justice anyway? Never explained. Feels like a big chunk of the plot just got skipped over here. And I mean, that's how the rest of the game is. Spend four hours dealing with the Flash and then speed run the rest of the Justice League. The irony of the fastest hero being the slowest part.
Whole thing's a mess though. But I mean, the entire nuke situation, just absolutely ridiculous and especially because there's no reason for Waller to be out in the open in the first place. It's a completely unforced error. Just leave her in the bunker where she already was. But I guess she's a dope, so whatever.
Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth - Bryce Fairchild
What the hell is the deal with Bryce Fairchild? He's the sage of the Palekana cult, the main bad guy of the game, but nothing about it makes any sense. At first, it feels like he's part of the mystery, like everyone thinks he has mystical powers and a mysterious backstory. There's a guy who says that his appearance hasn't changed since 1993. We've got a Keanu on our hands here. So what's the big twist? Is it that he's actually more than one guy or like the modern day one as a younger dude is impersonating the real one or something? Well, no, there's actually just no explanation.
Probably the most blatant example of his supposed mystical powers is when Bryce is first introduced. A crook tries to shoot a member of the cult, but the gun jammed. Bryce appears, tells the gunman that if he tries to fire again, things will go badly for him. Like clockwork, the gun explodes in his hand. Impressive. But what's the explanation? Gotta be one, right? Well, there's none. We're basically just left to assume that Bryce was able to contrive the scenario using his underworld connections. But that's one hell of a stretch because it's not like it was some planned meeting. It's just one random happenstance where a gangster showed up with a gun.
The only other explanation is that Bryce really just does have magic powers, which sure. I mean, that's never really been a thing in the series, but why the hell not? The only problem there is that this would be the only real example of his powers. You'd think if they were more serious about having a supernatural element in this baddie, then like something else would happen. We would have something showing off his powers. But no, this is it. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. It's pretty absurd because for as melodramatic as "Yakuza" plots go, they do tend to remain sort of grounded.
Like, there's never been a guy with supposed magic powers, at least yet. You'd think they'd go out of their way to somehow justify all these moments. I mean, the games love their shocking twist reveals. Think there'd be a part where Bryce goes through everything we've seen and explains it away, but it just never happens. And it's weird. And all this despite the fact that you have like attacks like pyro breath or fulminating forecast where you can deal electric damage to multiple enemies by detecting where lightning will strike. I mean, you're literally just doing magic. It's a JRPG. It's weird. It's very weird.
Starfield - The Fall of the Magnetosphere
Bethesda games are not exactly known for stellar writing. It's not terrible most of the time. More or less, it is there to give you exposition and quest objectives and does that just fine. It's pretty good. It was all right. It wasn't great, but it was fun. The setting is supposed to be in space, and for many reasons, Bethesda didn't want to deal with, I mean, the whole thing with "Starfield" is that it creates entire planets for you to explore.
It would be kind of a challenge to make an accurate recreation of the entire planet Earth. So they had to come up with a reason why you can't go there. What they came up with was fairly weird, confusing, and doesn't make sense if you look at it critically. So in the universe of "Starfield", the development of faster-than-light technology led to a total collapse of the magnetosphere on Earth. And that is the reason why the planet is now a barren wasteland. It's one of those things where if you don't know exactly what they're talking about, it sounds like it makes some kind of sense, but it doesn't.
In the current day, we are constantly monitoring the magnetosphere, so organizations would've recognized the problem. And even with modern technology, we have the power to create an artificial magnetosphere. So there's no real reason why everyone would be forced to flee Earth. It's also ignoring that there's little reason to leave Earth in the first place. I mean, the vast majority of the population in "Starfield" seems to live on planets with no atmosphere. There's settlers everywhere you look. So what would've stopped them from just using all that colonization technology to protect people on Earth?
Even if there was no atmosphere, you could still live there, and they had 50 years to plan for it. But instead of building habitats on Earth, they just shot everybody to deep space on colony ships that had to have been orders of magnitudes more difficult to build and less efficient. Maybe if they just built some of those habitats on Earth, they would've preserved more animal species too. Maybe all dogs everywhere didn't have to die, which is another thing that doesn't make any sense. I mean, come on, people, if you're gonna preserve anything, they're gonna keep cats and dogs, right?
The Earth situation's so contrived. It's obvious they just didn't want to deal with the Earth government. I mean, who could blame them, to be completely honest? But for some reason, they had to make it so you could still go to the planet. So they had to pull all this nonsense explanation out of their ass. It's dumb.
Until Dawn - It's Just a Prank, Bro
"Until Dawn" is a fun game, but the logistics around Josh's elaborate prank do not stand up to any kind of scrutiny whatsoever. If you don't know, a big part of the story of "Until Dawn" is that this mysterious killer is stalking a group of friends in an isolated mountain lodge. He's watching them on video cameras, appearing to stalk them, and straps them into a few "Saw"-style traps. He's your all-purpose tormentor. It's eventually revealed that the killer is actually Josh pulling an extremely elaborate and sadistic prank on the people he blames for his sister's death.
He's not actually killing anybody, but he is making it look like he will. To throw off his friends, well, let's be real here, it's mostly for the audience, but he puts himself and Ashley in a saw trap where Chris has to go pull a lever to decide who lives and who dies. No matter what lever you pull, the saw always goes to Josh and appears to kill him. But it's just a ruse. A really impossibly elaborate ruse. Like, I don't get how this is supposed to work. There's no clues that Josh has rigged himself up to a fake body or something, like the whole head-through-a-hole-in-the-wall trick with a fake body full of pig guts to trick everybody or something.
If they had actually done that, I'd give the game some kudos, but they don't. Josh just looks like he's getting sawed in half. You can see his body move around naturally while tied to the wall. It's a completely BS twist. The nonsense doesn't end there. After he fakes his death, somehow this man gets back to the lodge, paints the walls in blood, and sets up balloons everywhere. And this is before Chris and Ashley get there. Like, what do they do? Stand outside the shed while their friend got brutally murdered and then set up a nightmare version of a birthday party for everybody?
The second death trap has its issues too. Chris is forced to use a gun to either kill himself or Ashley, but it turns out the gun only has blanks. The problem is, blanks can kill people, especially if you put the gun right up to your face like Chris does. These guys don't know about Brandon Lee? Like, this is maybe a bit of a pedantic complaint. I mean, "Until Dawn" is supposed to be self-aware and a little campy. But they could have made some of this make a little more sense.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - I Have Broken No Laws
This series' campaigns are total nonsense. I could pick just about any one of these games. There's plot holes aplenty. I think the "Modern Warfare 2" remake though, or redo or refresh, whatever, it sent us down a game because it somehow manages to take one of the most nonsensical plots in all of "Call of Duty" with the original "Modern Warfare 2" and somehow twist it to make less sense. That's a hell of an accomplishment.
There's so many holes to poke in this narrative, but let's just go with the most obvious and laughable one. So the early part of the game is spent hunting down Hassan, an Iranian plotting a terrorist attack in the US. It's eventually revealed he was allied with a Mexican drug cartel, and we're already diving headfirst into cuckoo crazy land because that's completely absurd. But "Modern Warfare 2" is just getting started here, okay?
So the story keeps going. They track Hassan trying to cross the border, leave the US, kills multiple police officers, manages to escape back into Mexico. So the Americans, the Mexican Special Forces, and a private military company called the Shadow Company team up to find this guy and rain down unholy hell on the country of Mexico to do so. There's a mission where you use a gunship, completely decimating an entire town. Like, there's a part where you get into an open gunfight with the Mexican army and kill dozens of guys. Obviously, at this point, acting lawfully is not part of the playbook.
So they do manage to capture the guy, but in an utterly laughable twist, suddenly they can't hold him. Like, this is a crappy cop show where the bad guy gets off on a technicality. Apparently, Hassan has broken no laws, even though you see him kill multiple American police officers, he crossed into the US illegally, he's a known terrorist ally. But he's broken no laws.
So, all right. Also, General Shepherd and the Shadow Company want him dead because him being alive might reveal their dirty secrets. But no, suddenly they care about Mexico's feelings and want to avoid an international incident with Iran. Even though we know what happens when the US extra-legally executes a high-ranking military officer from Iran, which is not really anything. Essentially nothing. And this happened in 2020, years before the game came out, so there's really no excuse here. Nothing about this dumb plot makes any sense at all. It just grinds the game to a complete halt for no reason.
There are so many other dumb things that happen in this game. Like, there's this whole betrayal that's just botched. It's hilarious even. Poorly planned. You'd think the bad guys are just making stuff up as they go. And the part where the Shadow Company takes over an entire Mexican military installation and goes on a genocidal killing spree through a city—yeah, these are the same guys who were worried about the law like an hour ago.
The motivations and the politics, they're completely incoherent, more so than your average "Call of Duty" game. And that's saying something.
Metroid Prime - Schrodinger's "Metroid"
The last one took a lot of explaining, so I'm gonna try to go with something a little dumber here, a little bit simpler of an oversight, you know. So in "Metroid Prime", the final boss is locked away in the impact crater behind 12 special locks that have never been opened. These locks were put in place by the ancient Chozo, so the thing's been sealed up for a long time. Only wait, hey, if you read the space pirate logs, they say they found the Metroid Prime in the crater, then took it back to the labs where it escaped, absorbed a bunch of their powers, then returned to the crater.
So how is it that the crater is still sealed? There's just no explanation for how they were able to get the thing out. Like, maybe if the locks were from the space pirates, it'd make more sense. But no, the lock can only be undone using Chozo technology, which Samus has and the space pirates do not. It is such a blatant hole that the Wii collection version of "Metroid" actually tries to fix it by making it so the space pirates never actually find the Prime. They just detect it in the crater, which clears things up. Only it doesn't because Metroid Prime has all these powers that it absorbed from the space pirates.
If you scan the thing, the text still says the Prime is partially made of metallic parts. So it has to have been modified from its original state, which can only be explained if the space pirates took it back to the labs. So neither explanation makes any sense. There's holes in both. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter of course, especially something like this where the data logs are completely optional. But in what is otherwise a pretty well-thought-out game, this error really stands out.
Metal Gear Rising Revengeance - Why is Armstrong There?
Time to dive back into the world of the blathering insane international politics and convoluted schemes that make no sense, and we're doing it in high order by using "Metal Gear Rising". The entire "Metal Gear Solid" saga is rife with plot holes, inconsistencies, retcons, and every other kind of storytelling sin. But who really cares? The insanity is actually part of the fun here. "Rising" is a great game. There is zero denying that. It's one of my favorite games, actually. But even compared to the convoluted stories of the main series, the plot here is scattershot at best, total nonsense at worst.
Things really start to fall apart at the end when the true nature of the bad guy's plans are revealed. The plot is ultimately your bog-standard false flag operation. Desperado, a terrorist-affiliated PMC, is secretly working for the evil Senator Armstrong, and he's gonna attack a US base in Pakistan to make it look like an assassination attempt. Why didn't they just kill the president? Good question. Honestly, I do not know because that seems like it would just help his plans, but apparently, they did all of this to make it look like Pakistan tried to kill the president. And by every possible metric, they succeeded in their plans
When Raiden gets to the base, all the US guards are dead, and Desperado is there to take the blame, so plan is over, right? Everything that needed to happen has. Only for literally no reason, Senator Armstrong reveals himself to Raiden and shows himself to be a generic 24 villain with a stock post-war on terror motivation. Then after explaining his plan for no reason other than it's the end of the game, he attacks you with a Metal Gear, which had no reason to be at the base because, like I said, the plan is over, the false flag has already been planted.
Did Hitler appear in a mech at Gleiwitz radio station after faking the attack to justify invading Poland? No, he did not. And for how much we all hate Hitler, that false flag worked. It was effective, if entirely loathsome. So what are you doing here, Senator? Oh yeah, and then for some reason, he gives you a second different villain motivation speech where he becomes a proper "Metal Gear Solid" villain, and it's the funniest thing you will ever see. But the main takeaway here is that all of this is unnecessary. The only reason he's there is that it's the end of the game. And if he had just stayed home and smoked a cigar, the plan would've just gone off without a hitch.
The 3rd Birthday - The Inexplicable SWAT Team
Square Enix sold "The 3rd Birthday" as an emotional experience. It's a game where you can be bored, frustrated, confused, and angry all in the same scene. It's like an experiment to create the most incoherent plot possible while still being tangentially related to a popular property. I mean, yes, "Parasite Eve" was already pretty nutty, but this game goes off the deep end with body swapping and multiple timelines, non-linear storytelling, lots of mysterious characters saying vaguely ominous things that don't make sense.
That's putting it mildly too. It has all the clichés and manages to surpass even the most confusing JRPG to become some kind of confusion singularity, destroying all reason in its wake. I'm saying the plot doesn't make any sense. Got it? Trying to explain it would be a total waste of time because all this stuff seems like it was specifically engineered for you to just purge all the knowledge the second it hits your memory banks.
I've played it. I've played it more than once, actually. And I still struggle to retain any information about what the hell's going on. I think it's about aliens or something. Like, I don't actually know. But at the end of the game, we see the inciting incident, the moment where the monsters breached into our world.
It starts at a wedding where Aya and a bunch of other characters you don't care about are attending. Suddenly, a SWAT team bursts in with guns and uses them on everyone. And that's when Eve swaps bodies with Aya and the endless time loop starts. They pack so much inexplicable goofiness into this one cutscene and just overload your senses with migraine-level confusion that I guess they just hope that nobody notices the big elephant in the room.
Why are the SWAT guys here? Why did they just barge into a private wedding ceremony in the middle of New York City and unload rains of bullets on it? There's a lot of speculation online. Give a nerd a chance to explain something with someone and they'll always take it no matter how pointless the question is. But in the game where it really matters, there's no explanation, no clear one anyway. And all of the explanations I mentioned a second ago make very little sense with what's been established.
If it's the shadow government guys from "Parasite Eve 2", why'd they take so long? And if Aya is on the run, why did they have a wedding in a church that's a New York landmark? Nothing about this makes sense. Where'd the SWAT guys come from? What do they want? Besides to kill. Hey, you shut up. We're the SWAT wedding unit. We don't have to have a reason. Anyway, they're just there 'cause Nomura wanted a big dramatic scene for the ending. Doesn't matter that nothing about what's going on makes even an iota of sense. It's big and dramatic and emotional, and that's all that matters.
In a way, I guess he's right because if there was an explanation, it wouldn't be nearly as funny and that's really what we're here for, right? I'll answer that for you. Yes. The answer is yes. We like it when games are inconsistent and it causes laughter.
Conclusion
So with that takeaway, that's all for today. Leave us a comment, let us know what you think. And as always, we thank you very much for reading this blog. I'm Zaid Ikram.We'll see you next time right here on Gamix.
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