Too cliche?

[Victor Hate]

Hear me out on this I have had an idea for sometime now and I need some fresh minds to see what am doing.


In my game the main villain is at times seen leaving or entering a hidden room.


the idea is later on when you are kidnapped and put in his castle player will be able to finally see what has been inside that room the who time.


"Whats inside?!" You ask


It's simple it's the villains dead wife.


He keeps her preserved with a spell and she is there floating in light surrounded by roses.


This is where in the story it's revealed all the **** he has been doing is to get back his wife.


He Has found away to go back in time but here the catch (it could kill everyone if he is wrong)


the idea is to show that he is 


yes insane but also show he is trying to bring back the only thing that brought his life light.


i mean too cliche? 


For me I think it works but I don't want to be that guy who "did something ****"

 

[GreyStone84]

I don't think it is too cliche. There has only been one time I can think of something like that (but that isn't to say there are more stories/games like this). It resembles the character Mr. Freeze from the Batman series. But only the part about the villain preserving his wife and doing bad to try to save her. Going back in time is a new twist. I think that if you feel it works for you, you should go for it!

 

[Wavelength]

It's fine, not too cliche.

 

[Frogboy]

The best villains are the ones who are trying to do something that can be perceived as good, at least from their perspective.

 

[trouble time]

It's a well worn trope. I'd say that it'd feel cliche if done poorly, but in sure you don't plan on doing it poorly.

 

[LaFlibuste]

Wasn't your villain supposed to be the soulmate of one of your party members, some sort of wacky love story? Or did it go down the drain?

Aside from that, is your idea novel? No. But then again, what idea really is? It really depends on the rendition, I guess.

 

[Rogue Milk]

Nah, it's ok. Sure it's a cliche but you seem to be using wisely.

 

[JessieK]

It's not an unheard of story, hell that's the story line behind "Mr Freeze" from batman right?


But I will say this, even the most cliche stories can be done if you know how to tell the story well.

 

[taarna23]

An episode of the TV show Fringe did something like this. A guy lost his wife in a car accident and he worked on improving his time travel. The catch for him was when he went back, it would pull in the electrical energy from everything around him - electronics, people, everything. He eventually got the "landing" right so that he wiped out a field full of flowers, and then ran to be with his wife when the truck hit her stationary car.


Same kind of idea, really. Just make sure that in telling your story you get the audience to empathize with the villain. In a story like this, it's important to outline that the bad guy isn't really bad, just desperate and misguided. It needs to eventually be difficult to put him in the "obviously evil" bucket.

 

[mlogan]

Same kind of idea, really. Just make sure that in telling your story you get the audience to empathize with the villain. In a story like this, it's important to outline that the bad guy isn't really bad, just desperate and misguided. It needs to eventually be difficult to put him in the "obviously evil" bucket.

This. In my opinion, stories where you can see the humanity behind villains are the most compelling. Well, humanity behind all the characters. It's one reason I love the Game of Thrones books so much - there are few clear good guys/bad guys. Mostly it's just a bunch of people trying to survive and making a lot desperate choices. Or even Snape, in Harry Potter. I mean, when you get down to it, how "tropey" is that storyline? All for true love/unrequitted love? But, it works.


So yeah, I like the idea you have and as long as you do it well, you should have no worries.

 

[Myst88]

Cliches aren't bad if done right. I mean in Fire Emblem Awakening the main character has amnesia, and that has to be one of the most used cliche's in rpg games, but who cares because that game was awesome. As long as characters are likable and the story not too dull then you can get away with a few cliches.

 

[Zabu]

Not too cliche, you can use it!

 

[jaypee]

Time traveling story is sort of not that common for me so its not cliche.

 

[kaukusaki]

I like the idea you have there. turning cliches and tropes on their heads is what I excel at. In one game I'm working on you adventure to an evil wizards castle to save your friends trapped inside who might get turned to stone. You were given the mission from an old wizard who wants the baddy and his dragon gone. Once you storm the castle rescue your friends and defeat the dragon and the baddy you find out he's in a property dispute with his neighbor (the old wizard) who didn't like his pet dragon crapping in his yard and jealous of his quality statues he's selling. You get stuck with the castles deed and the so called baddy leaves. It wasn't that he was evil, he just got sick of adventurers trespassing in his place and set traps to run them off and folks he captured he made work creating statues (they were never turned to stone anyway). Now you're the new baddy and your friends have to stop adventurers who heard the legend. and keep up with statue creating to afford fixing the castle and setting new traps.

 

[EliteZeon]

Alright alright, so... I absolutely love the idea of time travel in order to save someone or something. It's been done quite a bit now, and I'm starting to see time travel type plots pop up a lot more frequently nowadays, but I still like seeing how people manage to make things play out. Hell, even my personal project features a plot revolved around a concept similar to time travel.


The thing that makes a time travel plot work very interestingly is the cause and effect that happens when someone nudges the wheels of time. In the DC Animated film Flashpoint Paradox, the Flash runs back in time in order to save his mom from getting killed. It was a small change in history, but that effect caused a rippled in time and space, which in turn caused tidal waves of change throughout the present. Major events still happened, but in slightly different ways. Without getting too much in spoilers, Superman arrived on Earth, but not in Smallville, Bruce Wayne's parents didn't get killed, and Hal Jordon didn't exactly become a Green Lantern.


In the visual novel series and anime adapted series of Stein's; Gate, the main characters accidentally create a time machine and begin toying with it. As the past changes and present is thrown off rails and endangers the main characters, and the plot is an attempt to revitalize the original present. More recently, we have examples with Life is Strange, some newer anime adaptions from Erased and Re: Zero which all features time travel in attempts save people.


In my personal project, The Void is a place where memories and psychic imprint exist in a proto-reality parallel to the world and the present, but it also links the multiverse together. The Void also links memories of the future and past together and forms worlds and creatures based off of raw memories and emotion. (Demons and angels form based off of negative or more positive emotional memories) When characters face something devastating, they do die. However characters that die in world 1 are not the characters that died in world 2. Ever get that feeling of deja vu? Well, they remember bad events occurring for some reason, which is devastating or even good events that occurred in the other worlds. So I plan on trying to create a scene where the party is faced with a devastating foe, and they have to remember how the fight goes. I've taken a lot of inspiration from Steins; Gate and Dark Souls actually.


Time travel to solve issues, it's been done, but how you manage to play it out is what will define it as good or bad.


Like, I am running with some concepts for your plot so let me just shoot out some ideas. Why does the villain kidnap the heroes? Is it to stop them? Does he need to use their power? Is he asking for assistance? Why do people perceive him as a villain? Is it because he kidnaps mages or magically gifted people in order to research the time spectrum or is he sacrificing them for power in order to make a time gate?


Personally, I think that makes for a cool plot right there. Let's explore further, the first half of the game you are chasing after this villain and attempt to save these sages from being killed or kidnapped, or whatever. In the end you are kidnapped and you find out why the villain is doing everything. So what if he asks the hero to help him save his wife. Then the second half of the game starts, where the heroes are forced to assist the villain by traveling back in time and nudging events in such a way to prevent his wife from meeting her end. Maybe there are three or more endings that can happen in this plot.


Maybe in the end, you either devastate the villain's plans to change the past completely and destroy any way of him saving his wife in order to preserve the present.


Maybe you can save the wife, but in the end you sacrifice the villain in order to fix the hole in space in time.


Maybe you let the villain save his wife, but at the cost of what was the present. Or in the victory where damages the heroes and the villain caused can not be reversed.


Or maybe there is a feels good ending, where you find a loophole where everything can be saved.


A good friend of mine usually says this, "Yo! You do you man. I'm not you. Do what you want."

 

[Valryia]

I remember something similar from Atelier Iris 2.


Other then that, it is uncommon, so no cliche.