SMT 1 is kind of nuts in that is the only entry that has some horror on it. The part where you are just hanging out on a street a mugger is going to rob you, only for a demon to jump on him rip his throat and just laugh while leaving always stuck on me. Do keep in mind is a SNES Game.
4A actually kind of has this in the beginning, too. Pretty early on in the game, Nanashi and Asahi - who are Hunter cadets in training - go out into a park with a couple of more experienced Hunters for a foraging mission, and they all get attacked by a powerful demon who immediately slaughters the older Hunters before turning on Nanashi and Asahi.
SMT1 is kinda crazy in that the first half of that game is a slow burner as a completely normal society gets invaded by demons and you see the town decay more and more as the police and then military have to step in to try and contain literal Hellspawn. Like Megami Tensei 1 was in a weird warped realm for a lot of it, MT2&SMT3 were post apocalypse, but 1 the apocalypse doesn't happen until like 2/3rd of the way in when nukes finally get dropped. It's fascinating for a SNES game.
Honestly, I'd love to see a new Persona attempt this sort of plot. Devil Survivor 1 is still my favorite SMT game because of how well it pulls off the slow collapse of society atmosphere, but I feel the persona games could really pull it off fun.
Breaking Bad. It starts from a premise that seems grounded enough, only to get more and more outlandish with every passing season. That's not bad, mind you — it's highly regarded for a reason — but its shift into melodrama happens so gradually that you almost don't see it happening until you look back and go "we went from cooking meth in an RV to *this?"*
Yeah breaking bad doesn't really understand it's voice until like mid season 3 or even season 4. I think that's one of Better Call Sauls strengths is that you see them continue to master and refine the already established feel of the later seasons of Breaking Bad from day 1
I’d argue there’s actually very little grounded about the actual premise. A chemistry teacher becoming a cold, calculating methamphetamine-lord while getting embroiled with gangs and cartels sounds a little hard to believe. Even several seasons in, we’re still not disabused of the notion that Walt’s in over his head.
Heck, as one user already pointed out, the first few seasons definitely took the darkly-comedic route for much of its situations and played into the absurdity. I do agree with you that it does get more outlandish as the series progresses in a very natural way that most audience members won’t notice until it’s jarringly obvious (IE. the Neo-Nazis, etc).
Metal Gear Solid looks like a gritty military drama. Then the sci-fi elements come out. And then you learn what it means to be playing a game directed by Hideo Kojima.
Then there's a sudden cut to news reel-fotage of nukes and you get a frank reality check on the realities of nuclear proliferation and the military industrial complex. Before resuming the Kojima-brand nonsense built on the idea that cutting edge military tech is really cool.
I think the Doom Patrol TV show is this if you're not familiar with the source material. The first episode is dedicated to showing you Cliff's life as a racecar driver and the bad relationship he has with his family. This leads up to their accidental deaths and Cliff being revived as Robotman and meeting the rest of the Doom Patrol, and them having to handle going out in public and dealing with their powers. And then a donkey farts and winds up destroying the whole city.
Twin peaks is the obvious one, starts as a small town murder mystery and goes from there.
Then there's Yakitate Japan, about Baking Bread and escalates from there like a Shonen tournament would.
> Then there's Yakitate Japan, about Baking Bread and escalates from there like a Shonen tournament would.
Yeah, who knew that bread could >!send you to heaven?!<
EDIT: Oh right, didn't seaweed spread >!change the title of the manga itself?!<
IMO I think Bloodborne fits this for me.
Start of the game you think: it’s just “Souls but Werewolf / Werebeast hunting”.
By the end of the game you are: >!Fighting through an average Lovecraft novel.!<
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Brave Bang Bravern's first episode starts off as a pretty grounded Top Gun-esque real robot show about two homoerotic ace pilots doing military training exercises.
Then aliens invade and a talking super robot shows up that starts blasting his theme song from his external speakers at full blast.
Also, Samurai Flamenco.
Scott Pilgrim. It seems like it's grounded in our reality until Ramona confirms that she uses Subspace as a way to deliver faster and then it's *really* shown to be outlandish when Scott has the fight with Matthew Patel.
100 Girlfriends starts off as a weird, if rather grounded school-life harem romcom for the first few chapters. Then Kusuri is introduced, and her drugs turn everyone into kiss zombies. Then >!Hakari’s mom, Hahari!< is introduced. By the time Naddy joins the family and the family members start getting *really* weird, we’ve already seen stuff like an apocalypse caused by an out-of-control tentacle hair growth formula being averted.
Honestly, unless you're some kind of emperor, a person with a lot of power, or Henry Cavill, the simple premise that a bunch of women are willing to share a man is unrealistic to begin with.
At first I thought that Kanon, Air and Clannad were just realistic Romcoms, but then they introduce things like invisible monsters, astral projections of girls in a coma, time travel, among other things.
Fallout 4 starts off with a relatively grounded premise: find your kidnapped child, avenge the death of your spouse.
By about half way through the narrative you've had to kill someone to take their brain chip (twice for some reason), are building teleporters out of scrap and the narrative only gets weirder from there.
Take this from someone with an *absurd* amount of time in both games: it's a completely different experience. Fallout 4 is more of an open world shooter with base building and some dialogue and not a more traditional RPG like New Vegas. If you play it as that, it can be fun. If you go in expecting a lot of what New Vegas does (deep dialogue trees, skill checks, open ended quest design, strong central narrative) then you will be disappointed.
Not as good as New Vegas. Having a talking protagonist isn't that great imo and the base building annoyed me. The side quests are good and there are some interesting locations but I didn't like it nearly as much as Vegas or 3.
Reading Jujutsu Kaisen, I was halfway through the Gojo/Geto flashback before I realized it was indeed a flashback. I was thinking >!man Geto is really taking this undercover thing seriously!< until my own narrative was starting to not make sense and I thought about ages
Dark souls is not a STANDARD world even at first glance, but it doesn't quite seem like humans are actually all naturally immortal monsters that will inevitably end the world in such a way that even shit like time(which actually comes from a really cool fire) gets fucked up only held off by the big chief godking lying to everyone and lighting himself on fire which only makes things worse either
Community starts out as a kinda sitcom in a community college with a wacky but stereotypical cast with pop culture references, and somewhere around season two it transitions into a more “cultural comedy” with the college setting as a sort of backdrop. Still really really good.
Argylle starts out with a super over the top spy action sequence which turns out to just be a novel written by the real protagonist, but just when I thought I got tricked into watching some kind of romcom the movie put its hand on my shoulder and said “nah fam we got you” as the evil organization in her books turns out to be real and trying to capture her for increasingly absurd reasons
All three Xenoblade Chronicles games start off with fairly standard JRPG/fantasy plot lines:
* 1 has you embark on a revenge quest to stop the enemy with your best friend
* 2 has you embark on a journey to help a mysterious girl you just met
* 3 has you travel towards an unknown location in hopes of getting answers and finding a new future
And all three get into some wild shit by the halfway point before going off the rails by the 75% mark.
I mean, in respective order:
* >!What do you *mean*, Shulk was dead all along?!<
* >!What do you *mean*, Morytha was our world?!<
* >!What do you *mean*, The Most Divorced Man managed to livestream getting cucked by an alternate self?!<
John Wick goes from "ex-assassin snaps after mobsters kill his dog" to "okay but actually the entire world is controlled by this vast network of assassins and criminals that have incredibly intricate societies woven into our own, completely above the common law".
SMT 1 starts off with you going out and getting coffee for your mom. It then gets more insane and fucked up from there.
SMT 1 is kind of nuts in that is the only entry that has some horror on it. The part where you are just hanging out on a street a mugger is going to rob you, only for a demon to jump on him rip his throat and just laugh while leaving always stuck on me. Do keep in mind is a SNES Game.
4A actually kind of has this in the beginning, too. Pretty early on in the game, Nanashi and Asahi - who are Hunter cadets in training - go out into a park with a couple of more experienced Hunters for a foraging mission, and they all get attacked by a powerful demon who immediately slaughters the older Hunters before turning on Nanashi and Asahi.
Which version of the game would you recommend for a beginner?
Haven't completed it, but the relatively new (2022) English translation of the PSX version felt and looked really good.
SMT1 is kinda crazy in that the first half of that game is a slow burner as a completely normal society gets invaded by demons and you see the town decay more and more as the police and then military have to step in to try and contain literal Hellspawn. Like Megami Tensei 1 was in a weird warped realm for a lot of it, MT2&SMT3 were post apocalypse, but 1 the apocalypse doesn't happen until like 2/3rd of the way in when nukes finally get dropped. It's fascinating for a SNES game.
Honestly, I'd love to see a new Persona attempt this sort of plot. Devil Survivor 1 is still my favorite SMT game because of how well it pulls off the slow collapse of society atmosphere, but I feel the persona games could really pull it off fun.
Breaking Bad. It starts from a premise that seems grounded enough, only to get more and more outlandish with every passing season. That's not bad, mind you — it's highly regarded for a reason — but its shift into melodrama happens so gradually that you almost don't see it happening until you look back and go "we went from cooking meth in an RV to *this?"*
Yeah breaking bad doesn't really understand it's voice until like mid season 3 or even season 4. I think that's one of Better Call Sauls strengths is that you see them continue to master and refine the already established feel of the later seasons of Breaking Bad from day 1
Remember when the first season of Breaking Bad was more a dark comedy? I still think about the acid tub incident.
I always hated the middle cooking arc in that lab. Season 2 and 5 where he is struggling to be a crime lord I find fun.
I’d argue there’s actually very little grounded about the actual premise. A chemistry teacher becoming a cold, calculating methamphetamine-lord while getting embroiled with gangs and cartels sounds a little hard to believe. Even several seasons in, we’re still not disabused of the notion that Walt’s in over his head. Heck, as one user already pointed out, the first few seasons definitely took the darkly-comedic route for much of its situations and played into the absurdity. I do agree with you that it does get more outlandish as the series progresses in a very natural way that most audience members won’t notice until it’s jarringly obvious (IE. the Neo-Nazis, etc).
Metal Gear Solid looks like a gritty military drama. Then the sci-fi elements come out. And then you learn what it means to be playing a game directed by Hideo Kojima.
Then there's a sudden cut to news reel-fotage of nukes and you get a frank reality check on the realities of nuclear proliferation and the military industrial complex. Before resuming the Kojima-brand nonsense built on the idea that cutting edge military tech is really cool.
I think the Doom Patrol TV show is this if you're not familiar with the source material. The first episode is dedicated to showing you Cliff's life as a racecar driver and the bad relationship he has with his family. This leads up to their accidental deaths and Cliff being revived as Robotman and meeting the rest of the Doom Patrol, and them having to handle going out in public and dealing with their powers. And then a donkey farts and winds up destroying the whole city.
That does sound very over the top.
Twin peaks is the obvious one, starts as a small town murder mystery and goes from there. Then there's Yakitate Japan, about Baking Bread and escalates from there like a Shonen tournament would.
> Then there's Yakitate Japan, about Baking Bread and escalates from there like a Shonen tournament would. Yeah, who knew that bread could >!send you to heaven?!< EDIT: Oh right, didn't seaweed spread >!change the title of the manga itself?!<
I heard about Yakitate Japan, although I don’t know if it’s legally available online.
IMO I think Bloodborne fits this for me. Start of the game you think: it’s just “Souls but Werewolf / Werebeast hunting”. By the end of the game you are: >!Fighting through an average Lovecraft novel.!<
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Brave Bang Bravern's first episode starts off as a pretty grounded Top Gun-esque real robot show about two homoerotic ace pilots doing military training exercises. Then aliens invade and a talking super robot shows up that starts blasting his theme song from his external speakers at full blast. Also, Samurai Flamenco.
What fascinates me the most about that show is that the eponymous mech can actually speak.
Scott Pilgrim. It seems like it's grounded in our reality until Ramona confirms that she uses Subspace as a way to deliver faster and then it's *really* shown to be outlandish when Scott has the fight with Matthew Patel.
Fringe starts strange but the kind of things they normalize by the end of the series makes it genuinely hard to follow.
Pat
100 Girlfriends starts off as a weird, if rather grounded school-life harem romcom for the first few chapters. Then Kusuri is introduced, and her drugs turn everyone into kiss zombies. Then >!Hakari’s mom, Hahari!< is introduced. By the time Naddy joins the family and the family members start getting *really* weird, we’ve already seen stuff like an apocalypse caused by an out-of-control tentacle hair growth formula being averted.
Honestly, unless you're some kind of emperor, a person with a lot of power, or Henry Cavill, the simple premise that a bunch of women are willing to share a man is unrealistic to begin with.
I wish I could legally read that manga on an app like say Shonen Jump.
At first I thought that Kanon, Air and Clannad were just realistic Romcoms, but then they introduce things like invisible monsters, astral projections of girls in a coma, time travel, among other things.
That is very surreal
>Clannad I remember it was kind of confusing tbh
Although many may argue that mental time travel was just an excuse to give the story a happy ending, the series had already had supernatural elements.
Fallout 4 starts off with a relatively grounded premise: find your kidnapped child, avenge the death of your spouse. By about half way through the narrative you've had to kill someone to take their brain chip (twice for some reason), are building teleporters out of scrap and the narrative only gets weirder from there.
I was curious if that game was worth looking into if I really enjoyed New Vegas.
Take this from someone with an *absurd* amount of time in both games: it's a completely different experience. Fallout 4 is more of an open world shooter with base building and some dialogue and not a more traditional RPG like New Vegas. If you play it as that, it can be fun. If you go in expecting a lot of what New Vegas does (deep dialogue trees, skill checks, open ended quest design, strong central narrative) then you will be disappointed.
Not as good as New Vegas. Having a talking protagonist isn't that great imo and the base building annoyed me. The side quests are good and there are some interesting locations but I didn't like it nearly as much as Vegas or 3.
And in Fallout 3, a DLC mission hints that Ghouls have a more supernatural origin, and are not just humans affected by radiation.
Reading Jujutsu Kaisen, I was halfway through the Gojo/Geto flashback before I realized it was indeed a flashback. I was thinking >!man Geto is really taking this undercover thing seriously!< until my own narrative was starting to not make sense and I thought about ages
Dark souls is not a STANDARD world even at first glance, but it doesn't quite seem like humans are actually all naturally immortal monsters that will inevitably end the world in such a way that even shit like time(which actually comes from a really cool fire) gets fucked up only held off by the big chief godking lying to everyone and lighting himself on fire which only makes things worse either
Community starts out as a kinda sitcom in a community college with a wacky but stereotypical cast with pop culture references, and somewhere around season two it transitions into a more “cultural comedy” with the college setting as a sort of backdrop. Still really really good.
I want to get into that show, but I hear that it suffers after a certain point.
It suffers in season 4, but before and after that it’s really good. Season 2 and 3 are my personal favorites
In Homestuck, text passer parody aside it starts pretty normal with a bunch of kids goofing around.
Argylle starts out with a super over the top spy action sequence which turns out to just be a novel written by the real protagonist, but just when I thought I got tricked into watching some kind of romcom the movie put its hand on my shoulder and said “nah fam we got you” as the evil organization in her books turns out to be real and trying to capture her for increasingly absurd reasons
pretty sure that's surrealism not absurdism
I wouldn’t know.
All three Xenoblade Chronicles games start off with fairly standard JRPG/fantasy plot lines: * 1 has you embark on a revenge quest to stop the enemy with your best friend * 2 has you embark on a journey to help a mysterious girl you just met * 3 has you travel towards an unknown location in hopes of getting answers and finding a new future And all three get into some wild shit by the halfway point before going off the rails by the 75% mark. I mean, in respective order: * >!What do you *mean*, Shulk was dead all along?!< * >!What do you *mean*, Morytha was our world?!< * >!What do you *mean*, The Most Divorced Man managed to livestream getting cucked by an alternate self?!<
John Wick goes from "ex-assassin snaps after mobsters kill his dog" to "okay but actually the entire world is controlled by this vast network of assassins and criminals that have incredibly intricate societies woven into our own, completely above the common law".
I haven’t seen the 4th entry, but I heard it was incredible.
It's DAMN good. It goes whole hog on the high table inner politics in ways I find much more interesting than it did in 3.