Deconstructor Fleet / Video Games

• Alan Wake is basically the House of Leaves of video games. It takes as many meta tropes as it can, such as Through the Eyes of Madness, All Just a Dream, Dead All Along, and Transfictionality and takes them apart with every plot twist, so that the player is left guessing which is true until the very end of the game.
• It may be more of a deconstruction unit than fleet, but Anarchy Reigns does deconstruct a few tropes, though not as many as MadWorld below. It deconstructs Lawful Neutral / lawful by Nikolai, one of the more "lawful" people in the game, a horrid Knight Templar who believes that anything that isn't his view of "law" has to go. You have Anti-Hero, where as Jack is simply doing his job, but his past as a killer and his anger at his adopted daughter's death nearly drive him him to the murder of the person he's trying to track down until he is forcibly prevented from committing said murder at the last second. Then Leo, who disobeys his orders and attacks Nikolai before his true colors are shown, also gets in on that a bit. The backstory plays with a few tropes in a more negative light, showing characters who are acting for the greater good, but don't necessarily come off as doing the right thing until the very end of the game. Again, not as many as before, but it does put some focus on a few.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura:
  • Science Fantasy: The game explores what were to happen if technology and magic existed in the some setting by highlighting how the two are effectively at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of explaining how the world works. Magic is essentially a form of reality warping while science grounds the world to things like physics and logic. These two forces result in a world where a single spell or invention can have dire repercussions rather than coexist, and as such society has been shaped by these two facts. For instance, magic users cannot use public transport in some cases, while inventors are treated with hostility by the more magically inclined groups. This is reinforced in gameplay as well, such as a mage being unable to use equipment, and a more tech focused build being unable to use magic weapons.
  • Steampunk: The game very accurately points out the nastier sides of the Victorian era. All of society is underpinned by racism, sexism and misogyny (try playing as a half-orc). Factories are hideously unsafe places to work, and the workers toil away in poverty and drudgery with no rights; it's very common for striking workers to be shot in the streets too. Eugenics is a very popular science — there's a really uncomfortable book that suggests solving the Orcish Question by removing a "malignant gland", and this has nothing on the horror of the half-ogre breeding program, which also has parallels with antisemitic conspiracy theories common at the time.
  • Standard Fantasy Setting: Elves are not always better than other races, they certainly aren't always wiser, and they're often jerkasses about it to boot. Good men can wreck the world with the best of intentions while someone who is unquestionably evil can still be right once in a while. The traditionalist kingdom with armies of Magic Knights loses badly in a war with the industrialized kingdom which uses rifle-toting peasant levies. Wandering adventurers raiding old ruins for treasure are basically treated as a joke (and get abuse heaped on them by archaeologists, who hate it when they mess up potential dig sites), and old heroes who travelled the world righting wrongs eventually started a war because they disagreed about what was the right and wrong thing to do and turned on each other.
  • Big Bad: Arronax has everything that makes him an obvious Big Bad; being the Satanic Archetype of a major religion, being a Sealed Evil in a Can, and having a Elf supremacist agenda. The entire game is about the typical build up to confronting him, since he's still sealed but could one day return. When you eventually confront him, he's far from the evil evil Big Bad you've been told; having been sealed away for thousands of years, he's had plenty of time to reflect on his life and views, and has sense come to realize he was wrong and renounced his past. He isn't the Big Bad at all, and none of the events of the game were done by him. Instead it's Kerghan, who has actively worked to manipulate events so Arronax is treated as the Big Bad by the outside world, who is final boss and the true villain. You can even work with Arronax to defeat Kerghan.
• Antichamber goes far out of its way to defy common sense and never behaves like you would expect. That is, until you get used to all the bizarre twists and it decides to throw a perfectly normal puzzle in front of you. Unless it isn't.
• The Assassin's Creed series as a whole is filled with several conceits that poke holes into traditional genre elements.
  • Unlike most conspiracy-based fiction, which posits a hitherto unknown secret as the real explanation, the game takes a Like Reality, Unless Noted approach that aligns 80% of the time with the actual historical record, with the facts altered for gameplay reasons. Indeed, the battle between the Assassins and the Templars as seen in the game largely shows how difficult or impossible "behind-the-scenes" control over history would actually be, with the Assassins and the Templars wavering in the level of control and influence they have on world affairs and never in a position to truly change things as they would like it.
  • By and large, the game tackles pop-culture perceptions of a given period, showing a more accurate vision of historical figures than most popular fiction (for the most part). The first game for example shows Richard the Lionheart as a Noble Demon rather than the Big Good for England, a warrior for God who invades the Holy Land and regards his enemies as heathens but pragmatic enough to listen to the nominally Muslim Assassin, Altaïr.
  • The second game and its sequel likewise shows The Renaissance not only as an intellectual and artistic revolution but a time of great political turmoil and uncertainty, with city-states relying on mercenaries and backdoor assassinations to assert their hold over a region, with a special focus on the corruption of the Church. Niccolò Machiavelli likewise is shown as a Reasonable Authority Figure devoted to public welfare and service rather than the stereotype people hold over him. The game director Patrice Desilets was especially proud to show Leonardo da Vinci not by the popular image of a bearded old man, but the young handsome man that he was famous for being at the peak of his creativity.
  • Assassin's Creed III and Liberation likewise gives a Warts and All depiction of The American Revolution, showing what happened to people who didn't profit from the movement. Likewise, the fourth game Black Flag shows The Golden Age of Piracy as no Golden Age but a fruitless struggle for sailors and men of ambition oppressed by their country's navy to make a living that a restrictive society would not allow them, showing a fuller depiction of the reality of pirate life than adventure movies generally allow.
  • The third game in particular, both the present and modern story, deconstructs the Assassins vs. Templars conflict. The historical portion shows the Assassins and Templars briefly united by a common purpose as well as familial bonds while at the end of the contemporary storyline, Minerva tells the contemporary Assassins that they wasted the whole of history fighting the Templars instead of working to the common good.
  • The conceit of the game itself deconstructs Video Game Tropes itself: the Animus is specifically modified on the metaphor of gameplay with progression, items, quests geared to achieving "synchronization," an aspect defined as "organic design" by Patrice Desilets, the game director on the first two games. The fourth game, likewise, is set in a modern day game company that essentially seeks to do in the gameworld what Ubisoft is doing with the series: use ancestor memories to create pop-culture products.
• The Baldur's Gate-games gleefully rip apart most fantasy clichés. To wit:
  • In the first game, you can meet a ranger who asks if you've come to hunt ankhegs. Typical monster eradication quest, like in every RPG ever? Wrong. The ranger gives your party a bag limit of five total. Ankhegs are an important apex predator as well as an integral part of maintaining the integrity of the local topsoil, and the ranger wants a cull, not an extermination, in order to keep the ecosystem in balance.
  • When confronting Sarevok in Baldur's Gate for the first time, it ends with your party being thrown in jail. Because of course it does. You called out one of the city's leading figures, a respected merchant prince well on the way to becoming one of the four Grand Dukes, and accused him of orchestrating a continent-spanning trade war, with no concrete evidence beyond a few crumpled letters that may not even have been written by the man. What did you think was going to happen?
• The Bard's Tale takes cheery jabs at fantasy games and RPGs, especially the idea of The Chosen One. It turns out there are multiple "Chosen Ones" — because when you tell a young farm boy he's destined to defeat evil and hand him a crappy sword, he tends to rush into the fray and die instantly.
• BioShock, using Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as a jumping off point, explores its various concepts while deconstructing Rand's philosophy, First Person Shooters, and the tropes common to early 20th century fiction.
  • The antagonist of the first game, Andrew Ryan, deconstructs the idea of the Übermensch, showing how such a person would be, at best, a Well-Intentioned Extremist, and at worst hypocritical and dogmatic. Ryan is himself a composite of John Galt (the hero of Atlas Shrugged), the industrial plutocrats of the time, and Ayn Rand herself. At the same time, Frank Fontaine, the real Big Bad of the first game, takes the archetypal Randian villain — a man who leeches off of others to get ahead and in turn supports those who leech off of others — and turns him around into the embodiment of the criticisms of Objectivism. He's out purely for his own rational self-interest, and if that means destroying the life's work of the man who tried to destroy his, all the better.
  • Rapture was supposed to be built as a place for only the "Best and the brightest". Unfortunately for Ryan and everyone else? This also includes the best and the brightest criminal minds.
  • ADAM is a deconstruction of both superpowers and Mundane Utility. The frivolous uses of the substance for plastic surgery, sports, and other mundane purposes left people hopelessly addicted, repulsively disfigured by genetic disorders, and irrevocably insane, thus creating the Splicers that function as the main enemies of the game. The only characters in the game who haven't ended up this way are people who didn't splice (Ryan, Lamb, Tenenbaum, and Holloway), spliced in moderation (Atlas, Sinclair, Poole, Langford, and Fontaine prior to the final boss battle), possessed a natural immunity (The Big Sisters, Eleanor, and apparently the protagonists), or are dead. ADAM is based on the real-life radium craze of the 20s, when radium was seen as a cure for cancer and a magical element with "life-giving" properties, which caused many people to die from radiation poisoning .
  • The twist of the first game deconstructs Mission Control, showing how FPS = But Thou Must! in most cases.
  • The first game also deconstructs the plot of Atlas Shrugged, which ends with the iconoclastic society of Objectivist outcasts thriving while the 'mundane' mainstream society completely falls apart. In Bioshock, the self-interested and ruthless nature of the Objectivist outcasts eventually leads to them all tearing their society apart, while mainstream society continues on apparently without even noticing that they've gone.
  • Andrew Ryan also wanted the "Best and the brightest" people to populate Rapture. Except an audio log laughs at this philosophy - because not only is there only room for only a few "Captains of industry", but in the end somebody needs to clean the floors, scrub the toilets, maintain the infrastructure, and actually build the place. The sorts of jobs objectivsts like Ryan deemed "leeches". It's deconstructed even further when the game's Big Bad is able to use the disenfranchised people as their own personal army.
  • Meanwhile, Sofia Lamb, the antagonist of the second game, deconstructs the notion that "the needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few" and what happens when a single individual starts claiming to speak on the behalf of everyone else. Unlike Andrew Ryan, who prized individualism above anything else, Sofia is an extreme collectivist who believed that the notion of free will itself is something evil that needs to be destroyed or contained at all costs, and that this is the only way to save humanity from itself. She is willing to sacrifice everything and everyone at her disposal (including her own daughter) in order to save humanity from the "evils" of free will and self-awareness.
  • Bioshock Infinite deconstructs the nature of linear video games upon its ending, stating that there are constants and variables in the narrative, alluding to the gameplay (and programming) itself).
• Cannon Fodder frequently takes the Military and Warfare Tropes page and systematically tears it to pieces.
• Darkest Dungeon demonstrates the sheer, psychosis-inducing stress and terror that regular shmucks fresh off of the carriage would feel going down into nightmarish ruins for the sake of glory and treasure. Just because you go in with a full party doesn't mean they'll come back out in sound body or mind. Or that you'll finish it with a clear conscience.
• The storyline of the DonPachi series as a deconstruction of many typical shoot-em-up plots.
  • DonPachi How do we create a One-Man Army capable of destroying ememy fleets? Make our recruits destroy our own fleets.
  • Daifukkatsu could also be this for the whole concept of a fanservice Robot Girl.
  • SaiDaiOuJou: Robot Girls? Let's try to make them out of the population of an entire city and see what happens! Meanwhile, the Pilot himself is a deconstruction of the Excuse Plot and a Take That, Audience!—not caring about the damage he causes so long as he carries out his orders.
• Dragon Age: Origins is a gleeful deconstruction of just about every trope listed on the Standard Fantasy Setting page. Dragon Age II, meanwhile, is ultimately an unintentional deconstruction of Western RPGs as a whole. There is no single Big Bad to pin the central conflict on, nor is there a third option when the time comes to pick a side. In fact the conflict is sparked by the instigator specifically eliminating all chance of a third option. Hawke is less interested in saving the world than simply trying to keep his or her family safe and together, possibly making Hawke one of the most relatable protagonists in video game because of the need to deal with real person problems, but unfortunately the plot has other ideas.
• Fallout: New Vegas deconstructs a lot of its own franchise (which already deconstructs quite many post-apocalyptic tropes).
  • Elite Army: The Brotherhood of Steel and Enclave, who relied so much on small groups of troops with Energy Weapons, Powered Armor and superior training, are The Remnant after their wars with the NCR, who could afford to replace casualties and material losses, and the BOS and Enclave couldn't. As a result the BOS is cowering in a bunker under lockdown while the Enclave's presence in the Mojave is a grand total of 5 old geezers who have long since moved on and tried to rebuild their lives.
  • The Empire: Caesar's Legion has its supporters because while they're certainly harsh, sexist, cruel slavers, they keep roads and communities safe for trade, a big improvement in a Crapsack World. "Civilised" communities are mostly left alone while the Legion focuses its oppression on "tribal" communities. A lot of people are perfectly fine letting them screw over another group as long as it doesn't affect them personally.
  • Final Battle: The unseen First Battle of Hoover Dam was not the end of the Legion, they just retreated to lick their wounds and recover their strength and attack again 4 years later. General Lee Oliver is banking on a major decisive final battle at the Hoover Dam, which in itself is reasonable, since the dam is a major strategic resource, but he is neglecting pretty much everything else as a result, such as logistics and raiding the enemy's positions. As a result a lot of NCR positions are badly undersupplied, demoralized and undermanned.
  • Gaia's Lament: Life on Earth is one tough son of a bitch, and can recover. As a result, 204 years after the war, the ecosystem of the Mojave Wasteland and Zion Valley is effectively stable and thriving (although to be fair they were much less hit by the nuclear bombs).
  • Golden Ending: There are multiple factions vying for control over the Mojave Wasteland, who have irreconcible ideology and goals. Any ending will require Kicking The Dog and betraying certain factions and screwing them over.
  • Hidden Elf Village: The xenophobic and isolationist Boomer tribe is starting to realize they're going to run out of artillery shells one day (their only real defense from the outside world) and then the expansionist factions fighting over the Mojave will inevitably Zerg Rush them, so their Wasteland Elder is seeking to open up peaceful negotiations with the outside world to set up trade routes.
  • One-Man Army: While The Courier is an enormous badass in their own right, most of the game's 2nd act is spent forging alliances, eliminating potential rivals or trying to reactivate a dormant robotic army and factory. Did you stupidly decide to destroy said robot cache and factory even though they're you're only chance to gain and hold on to power? You have no choice but to sabotage Hoover Dam's power plant, meaning the region loses its major strategic resource and foreign powers no longer have any reason to invade. In the game's mechanics and engine limitations you can easily triumph against the limited forces present at the battle of Hoover Dam, lore wise it's an enormous battle and both factions fighting over it need all the help they can get.
  • Powered Armor: It's useful, but doesn't make you invincible. You can find the corpses of overconfident Brotherhood of Steel Paladins who were overwhelmed by Centaurs and Super Mutants, shelled by heavy artillery, or had a roof collapse on them and they got trapped.
  • Scavenger World: It's been 204 years since the bombs dropped, which means generations of scavengers (or "prospectors", the more polite term) have picked most ruins clean. The rare time you find unambiguously pre-war technology it's usually Boring, but Practical items like low-tier guns or drugs. The higher-end gear in the game is very rarely just found in pre-war ruins, it's usually bought from stores, looted from dead bodies or just stolen. The rare times you find untouched pre-war caches of technology is usually in very remote or incredibly dangerous areas like the Sierra Madre, Big Empty or The Divide. There's a reason those objects haven't been looted yet.
• Final Fantasy, starting from roughly VI on, has been subtly doing this, poking holes in the concepts of The Chosen One, the characters' dependency on Green Rocks or phlebotinum to solve their problems, cheerful heroes, sullen heroes, Heroic Sacrifices, and so on, all while diving deeply into Genre-Busting waters. Final Fantasy VII is perhaps the most extreme example.
  • Final Fantasy XIII's entire plot and world seems to be a deconstruction of Final Fantasy itself, particularly how much it would suck to be taken out of your life and given a quest and magical abilities by powerful entities. Indeed, the characters themselves seem to be deconstructions of typical FF characters. For instance, the sullen loner isn't depressed, just quiet, ditches people who become burdensome and shirks leadership. The charismatic and headstrong leader has no idea what he's doing and gets people killed with his idealism. The cheerful ditzy girl is really just hiding how suicidal depressed she is, and so on.
  • Final Fantasy XIV deconstructs The Chosen One trope in almost every expansion in some way. The Warrior of Light has a rare ability that makes them important to the safety of the land. However, this means the Warrior of Light is also pushed into conflicts because nobody else can do what they can, meaning that they become something of a Crutch Character even if they don't like it. The Dark Knight quest line shows that the Warrior of Light, for all the good they do, doesn't exactly like always being relied on by people, and shows how difficult being basically the only hope for the world. Also, the concept of The Psycho Rangers? They were also Warriors of Light, but they did everything right in their world, and caused a flood of light to ruin their world, and their only hope lies in killing you to bring balance across the various worlds.
• In the Fire Emblem series:
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War and Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 deconstruct common character tropes of the series.
    • Lord Sigurd mobilizes a campaign to rescue his friend Edain, who was abducted by the prince of a neighboring country. With the king and all but one prince dead, the neighboring country is unstable, and promptly annexed by Sigurd's country, causing a lot of political unrest throughout the continent.
    • Prince Leif, the Lord of Thracia 776, leads a rebellion to liberate his country from an oppressive empire. He also starts out with no money, and has to resort to underhanded tactics like stealing from enemies. When he gets arrested, his army practically disbands and he has to find them again. While he succeeds in taking back his capital, the rest of the empire has more than enough troops to throw at him, and he is bailed out by unexpected reinforcements from his cousin's larger and better-funded army.
    • Lifis is a deconstruction of the Julian archetype. His introduction is meant to parallel Julian and Lena's romance, where Julian rescues Lena and guides her to Marth's army, except he tells his minions that he's lying to get into her pants. He is only in Leif's army because he'd be hanged otherwise, and is an all-around scumbag who is kept because he's useful.
  • The Tellius duology does this to Fire Emblem. Setting and Backstory aside, Path of Radiance pretty much starts off as a Cliché Storm for Fire Emblem games, then starts to deconstruct them. Even during Path of Radiance, some of these tropes are played with:
    • Elincia is the brought up as the rightful heir to the Crimean throne - but as she was raised in secret, people don't rally behind her at first. This results in some Apathetic Citizens basically selling her out to the invading force who seeks her demise.
    • Ashnard is very very Obviously Evil - much like other Tin Tyrant figures in the series. However, he does have supporters in Daein - specifically because his positions were often awarded based off of merit and personal skill, rather than familial connections. In a setting mirroring a Medieval European Fantasy where peasants were largely expected to keep in their own lanes and do as their betters tell them, it explains why someone as Obviously Evil as Ashnard would actually have a following.
    • Radiant Dawn's first act is a deconstruction that asks what would happen to a country that lost the war. In this case? It's shown that the Beignon senators now rule Daein without an actual ruler and face little to no accountability. A sudden shift in governance's beliefs caused some of Daein's citizens to actually long for the days of Ashnard, and happily support someone who has a legitimate claim to the throne.
    • The second act of Radiant Dawn features a perspective flip to Crimea. In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, the Mad King's war went like a fairy tale for them: The invading force was defeated and the rightful heir restored. But once there was no single threat, nobles begun to turn on each other seeking power. Others raised some genuine questions over whether or not Elincia was the right person for the throne. As put by a Let's Play, Part 2 serves as a very nice deconstruction to the series, showing the realistic consequences of the rightful heir to the throne being kept unknown from the public and emerging to help guide the country during its time of need.
    • Both games also examine the implications of a Universally Beloved Leader, specifically what happens when such a ruler is suddenly removed. The moment the people of Begnion had someone to blame for their beloved Empress' death, it ended with the genocide of a race of entirely innocent pacifists.
• Kreia from Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords lambasts many facets of the Star Wars universe, especially its Black-and-White Morality and deferring to the Force. She tells the player character that altruism can cheapen the efforts of others, that the Jedi Order is not infallible, and that the Force manipulates its users for constant conflict.
  • On top of bringing moral nuances into Star Wars, the game also darkly subverts many tropes of role-playing games, such as when leveling up from helping or killing people along the way is acknowledged diegetically.
• Last Scenario could practically be considered a western Tales game (including the turning of the entire story on its head at the halfway point). The Chosen One isn't chosen at all, other than in the sense that the villains found him to be easy to manipulate because of his overly-idealistic nature. The great hero from ancient times who saved the world from demons is all propaganda; in reality, the demons were a race of elf-like people the hero was supposed to exterminate, but ended up siding with. There's an evil kingdom and a good empire (at least, once the corrupt elements are cleaned out), and battles against both are done with a combination of political intrigue and massive military operations instead of just a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits taking care of everything (though they're still at the forefront of most of the battles).
• Legacy of Kain is full of deconstructions:
  • The Chosen One: Kain is destined to be the being whom the fate of Nosgoth is bound to, and the end of the first game, Blood Omen, reveals that in order to fully preserve Nosgoth, Kain has to perform a Heroic Sacrifice. Thing is, Kain is a Nominal Hero of the highest degree, only being considered a hero because the people he is up against are far worse than he is. Because of this, Kain ends up refusing the sacrifice and lets Nosgoth burn, though in future installments he shows regret over his decision to damn Nosgoth, but as fate it would have it, it turned out to be the Lesser of Two Evils.
  • Heroic Second Wind: In Blood Omen, Kain manages to rally King Ottmar of Willendorf to take his army and defeat the legions of the Nemesis, after returning the soul of Ottmar's daughter to his. But they are too late, and the Nemesis' army demolishes Ottmar's army regardless, forcing Kain to use Time Travel in order to prevent the Nemesis from ever existing.
  • Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Kain travels back in time to kill the Nemesis, in order to prevent Nosgoth from being conquered. As it turns out, Kain is instead forced to fight the beloved William the Just, The Good King who eventually became Nemesis in the first place. This results in Kain creating an even worse future for himself, as Kain being a vampire and killing William gives the vampire hunters of Nosgoth reason to start a new crusade and genocide against the vampire race.
  • Screw Destiny: In Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance, Kain's whole plan leans on Raziel defying his destiny and changing the future so that the two of them would be able to oppose the Elder God and Moebius the Timestreamer. However, this is a series where You Can't Fight Fate, so all of their attempts at doing so usually create alternate futures that do not benefit them (such as the one seen in Blood Omen 2), or their actions have already changed the past and have been accounted for).
  • Take a Third Option: Kain is looking for a way to both save Nosgoth, while also preventing the vampire race from being driven to extinction, as the Pillars need vampire guardians in order to fulfill their purpose. But in a series where everyone's plans are subject to a Xanatos Gambit Roulette Pileup, this means Kain has to wait centuries until being presented with the right opportunity to take the third option.
  • Eldritch Abomination: The Elder God is one who revives Raziel and proclaims itself as being the center of their world, who spins the Wheel of Fate and is responsible for the cycle of death and rebirth. But as the series goes on, it turns the Elder God is Not So Omniscient After All, and is less of the all-powerful God or Nosgoth, instead being more akin to a parasite who feeds on the souls of mortals, meaning that the immortal vampires are more or less the bane of its existence.
  • Fisher King: The Pillars of Nosgoth maintain the physical and spiritual well-being of the realm, with each Pillar having a guardian to whom it is tied to, with each guardian being a member of the Circle of Nine. However, when one member of the Circle of Nine goes mad and curses the rest of them with insanity, it effectively damns Nosgoth until all of them have died and have been replaced by new guardians. And when the last guardian standing isn't inclined to kill himself, Nosgoth is doomed to an eternity of decay and ruin.
• MadWorld. While the game itself encourages and makes a mechanic of killing people in horrific and creative ways, this is all under the pretense that you're being filmed for a TV show for the rich and corrupt. Actual cutscenes that move the story are much darker and usually revolve around the cast talking about just how horrible the events of the Death Watch games actually are. You could even see the end of the game as Jack's killing of Leo as the writer killing the player for enjoying such a perverse game.
• Metal Gear as a whole is known for this:
  • Metal Gear deconstructs action games by placing a greater emphasis on avoiding combat. A One-Man Army, Snake is not: against several armed opponents with only what weapons and supplies he can scrounge, his odds of winning a straight fight are not favorable.
  • Metal Gear Solid deconstructs the original games as well as the "Die Hard" on an X formula.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty practically deconstructs the entire concept of video gaming itself (See here for more details), and continues the tradition of subverting earlier games in the series by twisting the Nurture over Nature Aesop of the previous game into a sinister Ancient Conspiracy that reshapes people's whole personalities through social engineering. Really puts a dark spin on Naomi's "people can choose how they live" speech, no?
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater does it for spy thrillers and Bond movies. Hell, the theme music, Snake Eater, sounds like it came straight out of a Bond film.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots deconstructs the concept of sequels and grand finales in general.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain deconstructs revenge stories with Big Boss' Protagonist Journey to Villain, and also deconstructs Fanservice tropes with the character of Quiet.
• No More Heroes rips into To Be a Master and Gotta Kill 'Em All plots, showing just what kind of sick, twisted world an equally sick protagonist would actually want to participate in.
• Planescape: Torment takes aspects of Dungeons and Dragons, such as character alignment, and drags them out to their logical extremes (a trend already started in Planescape sourcebooks). The characters and plot are deliberate aversions of clichés found in most typical fantasy games.
  • Respawning is turned into the crux of the plot: the player character cannot die and the quest is to find out why.
  • There's even an optional dungeon that's the bare essence of RPG dungeon crawling, complete with enemies that explicitly attack you for no reason.
• Shin Megami Tensei — Long before Shadow Star did, they had already deconstructed the sheer horror of a world populated by Mons while also being the Trope Maker.
  • With Devil Survivor targeting the Mons tropes put forth by Pokémon the most. How bad does it get? It's frequently considered to be the darkest game in the entire franchise. Keep in mind that this is a franchise that revels in post-apocalyptic settings, God being kind of an asshole and Lucifer being a fairly alright guy (if a bit manipulative), and having to pick between either fascist religious zealots, murderous Social Darwinists, or just beating the hell out of both of them.
  • Persona 4 deconstructs common personality archetypes in fiction and the difficulty that occurs from trying to live up to them.
  • Persona 5 loves demonstrating what happens when Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs, for better or worse for our heroes.
• Runescape often has a few parodies in its many quests, but special mention goes to ANY quest written by Mod Ash. Love Story, for example, is a quest where the Big Bad is a lady who hates adventurers who go around doing quests. It turns out she's the deranged ex girlfriend of the guy who's helping you with the quest. A recent quest by Mod Ash has you creating a Cliché Storm quest for a spoiled rich kid, because his dad thinks it will build character. Phillipe rolls his eyes the whole time. This particular quest turns into a Reconstruction at one point: to create final enemies for Phillipe, you disguise some cave wolf pups as dragons. As he easily kills them, the mother attacks, and Phillipe gets a chance to really earn some self respect. Then it turns out the lady who had helped train you back when you started the game had planted the wolf there for that very purpose, saying that you would have saved Phillipe if it got too out of hand.
• Spec Ops: The Line. It sets itself up as a generic Modern Warfare clone, starting with you being part of the search team, but starting in the second act, it shows its true colors as a deconstruction of more than just modern shooters, but of moral choices systems, But Thou Must!, One-Man Army, and ultimately, escapist power-fantasy video games.
  John Konrad: You're here because you wanted to feel like something you're not: a hero.
  • While it's at it, it reserves some pretty harsh criticism for American interventionist foreign policy, though the developers argue that people tend to overstate this aspect. Mostly, they wanted to deconstruct the military shooter genre.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. deconstructs dozens of common FPS tropes. Remember those other FPSes where you had limitless supplies of ammo which took up no room in your magic bottomless bag? No. Remember those games where the people not shooting you spoke the same language as you? Нет. Remember those games where there'd be some guy who would helpfully fill you in on the boss' weak point before you fought him? Nein. Remember those games where you didn't have to eat, where being injured was just a reason to be slightly more cautious, and you could heal by simply walking away and waiting for a bit? Non. Remember those games where you could take thousands of bullets without a sweat? Ні. This is what the end of the world really looks like, and this game wants you dead.
  • It also deconstructs post-apocalyptic video games (and many After the End stories/literature in the process). The Zone doesn't take up the entire world; the rest of the world outside the Zone goes on, and are actually exploiting the Zone for resources and major scienticic breakthroughs. Weapons are unashamedly realistic and all of them are given an explanation as to why they can be found in the game world. The game world — much like the real Chernobyl Zone of Alienation that it was directly based on — is not ruined, but simply deserted and slowly crumbling. The story also ends up averting the more "fantastical" elements of games like Fallout or the Metro series, as the anomalies aren't really magical as much as they're just... scientifically strange.
  • Stalkers aren't glamorous special forces badasses, but simply average people desperate to make a living at best, and dangerous criminals at worst. Reselling artefacts to merchants nets you pennies - you're essentially the zone equivalent of a Banana Republic farmer who gets exploited to farm cash crops like cocoa or bananas for middlemen who actually get rich. Most Stalkers either die a horrible undignified death (or not) to the many hazards in the Zone or eke out a pathetic life even by Stalker standards by staying in the "safer" outside areas of the Zone to pick the low-end artefacts.
• The Stanley Parable is a deconstruction of several videogame tropes, but it also gets in meaningful analysis of the nature of choice and freedom itself.
• The biggest appeal of games in the Tales Series is the fact that they glue as many cliches together in the first few hours and then deconstruct them so much that on many occasions sections of the fanbase think that the Big Bad is the real hero. Some specific examples:
  • Tales of Phantasia started the trend. While tame now, back in the day the revelation that the main villain was after a completely understandable, totally reasonable goal—which unfortunately could only be achieved through rather amoral means—was a huge twist.
  • Tales of Symphonia grew famous for being a Deconstructor Fleet; it savagely tears into the concept of The Chosen One as well as the Idiot Hero; Fantastic Racism, while not necessarily "deconstructed", receives a lot of examination. The concept of a Determinator also gets deconstructed, as it's the Big Bad's primary flaw. A lot of effort is put into examining sacrifices and what it means for a person to be a sacrifice. The Chosen One Colette can also be seen as a deconstruction of Purity Sues. She's the daughter of the angel (actually not; everyone just assumed she was, and the angel guiding her just decided to latch onto that to better control her), loved by everyone (until she decides she wants to live instead of sacrificing herself for the sake of the world, causing all of Sylvarant to turn on her) and is kind and selfless to a fault (her attempts at hiding the horrible things her Cruxis Crystal is doing to her body for fear of making everyone worry just makes things worse for herself, and makes the party (especially Lloyd) suffer even more when they do find out.)
  • The sequel, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, deconstructs Protagonist-Centered Morality and the concept of Hero of Another Story by showing how the protagonists of the first game's actions resulted in drastic changes to the world, and the consequences that come from deciding to change the world on their own terms. For example, the heroes merged the two worlds together to save them, but making such a drastic change caused two worlds to collide that were barely aware of each other's existence, resulting in a new feud between the people of both worlds. Another example occurs early on when Martha meets Colette, and proceeds to rip into her about letting her hometown be destroyed back in the first game since it was Colette's job to help people. The game shows on a whole how just because you're the protagonist of your game, the world is still going to react to the things you do, and making changes that affect the entire world will have ramifications.
  • Tales of the Abyss so totally shatters the notion of prophecy, and the implications future-telling could have on people, both on a societal and individual level. It examines a lot of cloning tropes as well. Also, while neither are explicitly the good guys or the bad guys, the kingdom is more warlike and causes a lot more trouble than The Empire does, and has much more blood on its hands in the backstory. The game also deconstructs the concept of the Amnesiac Hero. Luke isn't actually an amnesiac. He's a clone. The reason he can't remember anything before his seventh birthday is because he didn't exist yet.
  • Tales of Vesperia takes aim at Protagonist-Centered Morality, especially through the concepts of the Anti-Hero and Vigilante Man. Is a hero who makes decisions without considering the opinions of those whose lives he changes — whether it be ten people or ten million — really a hero? Furthermore, what gives the right for a person to use the concept of justice as a justification for their actions, and when does it become a case of Motive Decay or Knight Templar? The aforementioned Vigilante Man is also heavily implied to be motivated by a martyrdom complex, willing to damn themselves to keep their Wide-Eyed Idealist friends clean.
  • Tales of Graces takes aim at the I Will Wait for You trope, showing the realistic consequences of the trope where Cheria waited seven years for Asbel to return. It also takes what can only be described as a Take That! to Final Fantasy's Omnicidal Maniacs, by featuring a Big Bad who is a rather blatant Expy of Jenova and Seymour (that is, said villain wants to destroy the world through global warming because it's full of pain and suffering) by showing how utterly pointless destruction of all living things is, since nobody — not even the instigator of the said apocalypse — can benefit from it.
  • Tales of Xillia took the Undying Loyalty trope and deconstructed it, showing how wrong one can appear by focusing so much and turning a blind eye to one's actions. There's also Muzét, whose undying loyalty towards the Lord of Spirits, is presented as a huge flaw. When her loyalty is repayed with nothing but scorn, she goes against Maxwell, her creator, and decides to follow Gaius now. Milla could also be seen as a deconstruction of the Determinator trope. Milla is always focused on her mission and barely cares about anything else, except to get closer to her goal. Her determination is so strong, that she still decides to keep going when her legs become paralyzed and eventually decides to commit a Heroic Sacrifice, simply because it would serve her goal and fulfill the idealized view of her as the Lord of Spirits.
  • Tales of Xillia 2 takes aim at the Expendable Alternate Universe trope. At first it seems pretty standard, with the player righting what went wrong and restoring the real universe. Then an alternate version of Milla, the previous game's heroine, is accidentally brought to the prime dimension. The entire point of her character arc is that she is just as real as the Milla the player and the rest of the returning cast knows from Tales of Xillia, something even the original cast has varying degrees of difficulty with. In the end, she sacrifices herself or is sacrificed to bring back the Prime Milla. While the rest of the cast is celebrating Prime Milla's return, Elle is heartbroken over Alternate Milla's death and lashes out, because from her perspective, Alternate Milla was the real one and Prime Milla is the fake. All of this is used to set up The Reveal, that Elle herself is from an alternate dimension, and ends up resigned to dying so her "real" self can be born later.
  • Tales of Zestiria takes on the Messianic Archetype and the Incorruptible Pure Pureness tropes and demonstrates just how hard keeping such a purity would be, and how it is practically impossible to save everybody. The game is littered with examples of would-be Messiahs and religious fanatics who, while acting entirely with good intentions (at least, at first), end up causing way more harm than good. The game also confronts Take a Third Option at multiple points, as there may not be a magic third option that solves everything neatly, and the search for the third option may instead simply be an attempt to escape from having to make a difficult decision. Not to mention its rather meta take on Broken Bridge. You CAN go right up and face the Big Bad much, much earlier than you're supposed to story-wise, but doing so grants you the Bad Ending since you aren't aware yet that he isn't the real source of the problem.
  • Tales of Berseria is the prequel to Zestiria. Naturally, this is one of those games wherein your villain is actually a Villain with Good Publicity and the player character goes down in history as the Lord of Calamity — which was the title given to Heldalf in Zestiria. It also acts as an Internal Deconstruction of many of Zestiria's features. After Zestiria left a feeling of how great it would be to get rid of Malevolance, Berseria shows exactly what that would look like, and the results are not pretty. Armatization, the holy ability that marks the Shepherd, was developed by the villains for the purpose of enslaving the spiritual beings the world worships.
  • Tales of Arise takes aim at dystopian and rebellion stories that were very popular in The New '10s. Among pointing out that not all rebellions are as clear cut as they may seem, it also deconstructs Fascist, but Inefficient and Might Makes Right tropes that are also common to these types of stories. In addition, it also deconstructs tropes such as the Token Heroic Orc, Benevolent Boss, Feel No Pain, and Cast from Hit Points.
• The premise and plot of Penumbra and Amnesia: The Dark Descent sound like complete Cliche Storms of various horror story tropes, but they actually make mincemeat of them by toying with the player on every occasion and subverting the hell out of every horror trope known to man.
• Thief cheerfully tears apart every stereotypical "thieves' guild"-related trope remembered from Dungeons & Dragons and also likes to play around with the various factions and creatures inhabiting its Low Fantasy setting. Consider, for instance, that a thieves' guild would be made up exclusively of criminals. Criminals do not obey rules. Of course they're all going to be trying to rip off their fellow thieves! There's a reason Garrett works independent.
• Would you believe if someone told you that some installments of Touhou Project are Deconstructor Fleet? Let us observe...
  • Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night: Deconstructs Immortality and associated tropes. The immortals have nothing to do, and keep sane, relatively speaking, by tearing each other to shreds (sometimes literally).
  • The fighting game Scarlet Weather Rhapsody also deconstructs Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence and Fluffy Cloud Heaven this way, as the main villain is a Celestial who ascended together with her parents. She's so bored with all the happiness up there, she decided to descend and cause trouble on Earth.
  • Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View (sic): Touhou deconstructs itself. Eiki explicitly warns the other characters that they are so going to Hell if they don't change their atrocious behavior. Eiki is a Judge of The Dead.
  • Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object: Touhou deconstructs itself yet again; Humans Are Bastards and the playable characters are Knight Templars.
  • By applying some Fridge Horror to Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic Square, one way to interpret the plot is to think of it as; "What if Alice actually went to hell?"
  • Touhou Shinpiroku ~ Urban Legend in Limbo deconstructs the series' audience, particularly the Fandom-Specific Plot of someone from the Outside World (read: the author's obvious self-insert) ending up in Gensokyo, gaining ridiculous powers, becoming instantly adored by every canon character, and so on. Sumireko Usami is this character archetype (except she already has powers instead of gaining them in Gensokyo, and she makes her own way instead of using the usual plot point of getting "gapped" by Yukari). She is also kind of an uppity jerk (a common trait of "Gappies", but one for which they are almost never called out). Far from being loved by all, her appearance in Gensokyo ends up infuriating most of the major power players (primarily because her means of arrival disrupts the Hakurei Barrier) and she gets beaten up so badly by the residents that she almost destroys Gensokyo along with herself in desperation. It's probably the closest we'll get to a canon version of Diamond in the Rough (Touhou) (see Web Original), though it's nowhere near as vicious.
• Undertale is a gigantic deconstruction of RPGs in general, as well as Moral Choice systems, and the game really, really lets you know it.
  • Anyone who approaches it with the same sort of mentality of your average RPG will result in the game utterly berating you for your actions, calling you a monster, especially if you kill the final boss in the demo conventionally. Most people will do a second run / a save reload after they see what they have done, and try to put right what they did wrong. The game knows you did this, and will mock you accordingly, talking about your use of save points to rewrite reality. Even if you take the completely pacifist approach, the demo ends with a certain character asking you how long you will keep up the much-trickier act of peacefulness, wondering when your frustration will overcome you.
  • The full-game also delves into the concept of the Determinator, presenting the player with a character so filled with raw determination that they can come back from the dead via save points, and eventually just get right back up where they stand if killed. It also shows how utterly terrifying someone with overwhelming determination and little else can be, especially when combined with a complete lack of compassion and love (i.e., a player murdering everyone and everything in the game, just to see what happens). It also shows the consequences of seeking 100% Completion in a game that's as meta as Undertale is. Either you get the True Pacifist ending and everyone lives happily ever after, only for the player to cruelly reset everything to start killing everything that moves for the Genocide ending (even the Big Bad calls you out for doing the exact same thing he was doing by jumping in to constantly deny you your happy ending), or they murder everyone first, and then reset everything to go for the True Pacifist ending...only to realize that, by achieving the Genocide ending, they gave the First Child everything they wanted, including the player's soul, irreparably tainting the entire game and ensuring that the player will never be able to save everyone, because the First Child will kill them all every time the game ends.
• Yggdra Union pretends to be nice, cutesy, and safely within the range of standard medieval fantasy plots for a little while. Then it rips its mask off and awesomefaces whilst tearing many common plot devices—along with the tried-and-true methods of the Turn-Based Strategy genre—into tiny little bits as it goes. It's been four years since the franchise was launched, and we're still not a hundred percent sure about who the main character is supposed to be.
• Yoko Taro is known for this in his games, savagely parodying, lampshading, subverting, and mocking tons of familiar JRPG and anime conventions.
  • Drakengard deconstructs action Role Playing Games, Multiple Endings, and Dark Fantasy in general. In particular, it's infamous for its multiple endings which became progressively more difficult to unlock while simultaneously becoming more bizarre, depressing and surreal, culminating in an elaborate Gainax Joke Ending, with no happy ending at all. It also does this to the Hack and Slash genre by highlighting the One-Man Army usage of the genre; a person who can slaughter an entire army by himself is obviously not someone right in the head, and Caim is shown to be a deranged Blood Knight who barely counts as a "hero", if not for the fact that what he is fighting against is far worse than him.
  • NieR heavily deconstructs the concepts of heroism through Protagonist-Centered Morality. No matter how much Nier thinks he's a hero and is doing the right thing, the situation is never as simple as "kill the bad guys and save your sister/daughter". The concept of New Game Plus is also hit with it, which is used as a medium to expand the narrative as the player gains the ability to see more of the game's story that they couldn't originally, turning what looked like a clear good vs evil story into a muddy case of two groups being right and wrong at the same time. The game even takes shots at The Power of Friendship which is so common to the media with Nier using the perceived moral superiority of the trope as a shield to defend his actions.
  • NieR: Automata does much the same thing as the original game, and adds one of the most comprehensive deconstructions of Do Androids Dream? in fiction to the mix. It also takes aim at the concept of a Forever War and shows how futile and silly a never ending war would be, leading to a number of characters getting fed up with battle and critizing both the machines and androids.
• Earlier games in the Ys franchise was often accused of being a Cliché Storm, but since the Action RPG genre was still relatively new and in its infancy, most people agreed it slowly became less predictable following Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand and Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim. Ys SEVEN seemingly set up another cliche experience, only to turn player expectations completely on their heads on just about every narrative front, such as The Reveal that Non Player Characters who were previously deemed allies are actually in cahoots with the Big Bad and Evil All Along, while simultaneously deconstructing tropes regarding The Chosen One and how much it sucks to be that, the latter of which is also reused in Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana.

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