Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

Got the idea for this thread from the thread about games and skill. What are some games you know of with some serious plot holes, or something else that just seems…off, during the game?

Have to start with the same thing I mentioned in the skill thread, because as much as I love the game…yeah. I hadn't even thought about it until seeing the Angry Joe review. In The Last of Us, there's a crafting system, and one of the items you can craft is a shiv (a makeshift blade). Shivs have two primary uses…to unlock certain doors, and also being the most reliable way of stealth killing clickers, should you feel comfy enough to get close to them. They also protect you from the clickers' instant death grab if you have one on you, and the shiv master skill. The only thing is, from the beginning, Ellie carries a pocket knife, which she uses plenty during a section of the game where you take control of her.

Why, in the world, in all that stress, all those wasted blades and binding, does Ellie, not once, not even ONCE, offer to let Joel use her pocket knife?

What are your favorite plot holes or things that are just off, in games you know/love?

Most first-person shooters these days, when you reload a weapon, actually shows your character going through the motion of removing the old magazine (as needed) and replacing it with a fresh magazine (or in the case of shotguns, hand-loading individual shells then pumping the pump-action for that classic shotgun *KACHUK* sound.)

Unless you're playing GoldenEye 64, where every single weapon is reloaded in less than a second by James Bond holstering the gun then redrawing it.

When I say "every single weapon," that includes: The shotgun, the semi-auto shotgun, the RCP-90 assault rifle, shoulder-fired rocket launcher,and the dual-wielded versions of all of those guns. Yes, 007 can fully reload and cycle two shotguns in under a second just by holstering them. He's that good.

More FPS offness: I hate Halo. Hate the first game, hate the second game, hate the third game, hate the spinoff sidestory where you're Some Guy in the background from the first game, hate the RTS spinoff along with everybody else, hate the overpretentious ship names humans use in the series, hate the energy sword from the third game in its one-hit instadeathitude, hate the very concept of Halo Reach's existence for reasons explained in the spoiler block below, hate the remake of the first game touting itself as if anything in the series actually innovated first person shooters (It didn't. Red Faction II had regenerating health before Halo: Combat Evolved ever did, and that was on my good old PlayStation 2; Shadow Warrior had vehicles back in the late 90s; Rise of the Triad was the first FPS to limit you to carrying two guns and not only was that back in 1993, it was on the Wolfenstein 3D engine), hate the fourth game, but love the extremely crappy line read of Master Chief reacting in disbelief to Cortana saying she has to sacrifice herself with "No, that's not we're leaving together." (THIS IS ACTUAL DIALOGUE FROM HALO 4.)

Why do I hate Halo so much? There is no sense of balance. Halo: Combat Evolved had a pistol that you could go through the entire game with, without once changing weapons. Bungie responded in Halo 2 by making the pistol worse than the Klobb from GoldenEye, so, yeah, apparently that IS humanly possible. (At least you can [eventually] kill someone with the Klobb in GoldenEye.)

But Halo multiplayer is why I hate the series. There is no balance in multiplayer. If I empty an entire assault rifle magazine into your chest and all it does is barely slow your charge, that's terrible. If I sidestep slightly and my arm grazes the pistol bullet you fired, the end result should not be Snorb's Brutal Death. (This happened to me in Halo 3. Constantly.)

I will first start by saying that I agree with everything, and I mean everything Snorb just said about Halo. I also hate Halo, passionately. Richly developed sci-fi games are so [expletive] rare, the spaceship and laser guns genre is so, so starved for games, it hurts to see it represented by such garbage.

Yeah, Halo multiplayer... the last LAN I went to, it was only Halo multiplayer. Now, I am NOT a FPS god but I can handle myself, I used to be very skilled at UT back in the days. Halo? I was cannon fodder for one of my buddy's 13 years old son. It was systematic, as SOON as I saw his name on screen, I was dead.

Halo sucks.


Now, plot holes. Allow me to grab the shovel and dig up a horse that was beaten to death a gazillion times, just because I can. I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy 7.

I really, really loved Aerith Gainsborough. Yes, I had a gamer crush on her. Yes, my wife uncannily looks like her and yes, she was (my wife, not Aerith) involved in a bad car accident the DAY I first played through the Aerith death sequence. Yeah, I freaked. So in a game where characters are routinely crushed to death by falling PLANETS and then immediately revived by a tickle of a phoenix's feather, why did the pretty girl perma-die of a stab to the solar plexus?

Oh, right, because reasons.

[expletive] you, Squaresoft.