5 Video Game Character Deaths That Don't Make Any Sense (WARNING: MASSIVE SPOILERS!)

     We've all probably experienced a beloved character dying before: Obi-Wan at the hands of Darth Vader in Star Wars, Mufasa in The Lion King, Wash's untimely demise in Serenity, the red shirts at the hands of pretty much everything in Star Trek, the many enjoyable characters of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, and Sean Bean in almost every film he's ever been in.

     Some of these characters were well built up and their deaths meaningful to the fellow characters and the audiences who have watched their films, time and time again. This practice can also be found in many video games, but there are a few video game character deaths that made absolutely no sense within the context of the games. In this article, we'll be taking a look at five video game character deaths that just failed to make sense. Just in case you, the dear reader, are an idiot didn't see the MASSIVE SPOILERS warning at the top of this article, this is your final warning: there will be spoilers. It is inherent to the nature of this article, so you've been threatened warned.

1) Kat

     The first character on this list is Kat a.k.a. Noble 2 from the Xbox360 video game Halo: Reach. Kat is a genetically-enhanced super-soldier, a brilliant military strategist, remarkably good at making babies hacking computers, but terrible at making sandwiches driving (don't let her get in the driver's seat EVER).

In fairness to Kat, the UNSC marines surrounding her aren't much better at driving... or anything, really.

 
    Kat is the spartan that players probably spend the most time with, and typically end up liking the least. Putting questionably annoying features of her character aside, she is still a fictional walking tank made of bad-ass. Beyond her genetically enhanced body (notice she's taller than all of those marines in the picture above) she is also wearing a state of the art, half-ton suit of spartan armor with a personal energy-shield generator and a robotic left arm designed for the ultimate hand job to do everything a genetically-enhanced spartan arm can do. Or she can punch through tanks if it's that time of the month.  She's also part of an elite team of other spartan badasses (Noble Team), so she's rarely without support.

     Over the course of the game, players watch as their team is slowly whittled down to the last man, each character trying to die in a more heroic way than the last one. Noble team is fighting back a massive Covenant (those are the bad guys) invasion of the planet Reach. It's basically outlined at the beginning that everyone is going to die and we, the players, are going to find out.

    Right before Kat's death, she's busy having a conversation whilst Noble team evacuates from a building but is shot in the head and dies mid-sentence. Sad music plays and the team recovers her body, but the whole time I was watching this I couldn't help but scream bullshit. To further elaborate, she was in her spartan armor and there was absolutely no reason for her shields not to be working, AT ALL. The gun used to kill her was a Covenant, standard-issue needle rifle. Normally, this weapon takes several shots to even pierce someone's shields. But here, the rifle merely fires one shot (video evidence below).

     Why, for any reason, were her shields not working? Did Kat suddenly decide to go green for the environment and power down her shields while not in combat? (They were still running away from a combat situation, mind you.) Or were the developers and writers just being lazy? All evidence points to the latter. Either that, or the rifle had an epiphany and became the most powerful gun in the universe. She couldn't have taken a few shots or a grenade to the face perhaps (hint: an additional part to the level)? It changes the story in no way other than adding plausibility and consistency.

2) Roland

     Similar circumstances occur in our next video game character: Roland from Borderlands 2. This suave military commando knows what the ladies like (wait, are we done with Halo yet?) and what the bad guys don't: bullets to the face. It is important to note that this character was also one of four playable characters from the first Borderlands game, so he already has some lead-up. In the first game Roland fought overwhelming amounts of enemies, all armed to the teeth and packing quite a variety of heat. (The game is notorious and lauded for having "bazillions of guns!")

He keeps the biggest gun in his pants.

     During the story mode (which is really the only mode) of Borderlands 2, the player must infiltrate and kill someone very important to the game's main antagonist: Handsome Jack. Partway through the fight, the player receives backup in the form of Roland personally showing up to help the player. After the fight, everything seems good. The day is won, the objective is complete, and Roland gets to look forward to sexy times with his girlfriend (also a playable character from the first game) Lilith. Then Handsome Jack literally teleports into the room, kills Roland, and kidnaps Lilith. "Oh my, what a plot twist!" screamed some players, we merely gasped at the levels of bullsh*t inconsistency the developers displayed in this cut-scene. Like our previous entry Kat (she's always getting shown up but at least she has plenty of experience) Roland, who during the fight was shown to have active shields and a full health bar, was shot once in the back. WITH A PISTOL.

Either that's the most powerful gun in the universe or it's just a
bullsh*t plot device epic case of Diabolus ex Machina.

     Unlike Kat, the player has actually played as Roland, and therefore understands just how powerful Roland is. This would basically be the equivalent of Batman taking precisely one punch to the face from Bane in the Dark Knight Rises and dying instantly.  On top of this magically instant-kill pistol nonsense, the game is flooded with a series of specialized respawning stations known as New-U stations. These magical devices respawn players at the cost of some money. Roland was hooked up to these during Borderlands and presumably during Borderlands 2 as the developers make no attempt to tell us otherwise. These stations certainly work during Borderlands 2 as the new characters can use these magical devices to cheat death over and over and over again.

     Even if we just blindly accept the premise that Roland isn't hooked up to the New-U stations, the developers couldn't have at least killed him in a way befitting of such a great and powerful character? Like a missile from space to the face, death by giant robot fight, sexing to death, or some sort of noble sacrifice for the greater good? All of these would've made much more sense than that pistol nonsense and would've served to display the unlimited resources and power of the antagonist, and if you're wondering how a massive orgy that inevitably kills Roland would display power on the part of the bad guy, you probably haven't tried to organize an orgy played this game before. The Borderlands series is well-known for its hilarious and otherwise nonsensical humor.

3) Adams

     Our next character comes from the game Spec Ops: The Line. This game was looking to be yet another generic Call of Duty clone but then slapped everyone in the face with its amazing story mode that looked at war and heroism in a light rarely seen in any sort of media. We'd certainly recommend a play-through of this game if you've become tired of run-of-the-mill shooters with terribly generic single-player campaigns. The character that we'll be discussing the death of is none other than Lieutenant Alphonse Adams. (We'll just refer to him as Adams.)

     The entire story revolves around a Delta Force team that is sent into a ruined Dubai to scout for survivors from a military force sent to evacuate the city. It soon becomes clear that nothing is what it seems and throughout the story, the player's squad (which includes Adams) must fight and kill US soldiers for several reasons that we shan't spoil. The only real question that bothered us was the undisclosed amount of soldiers sent to Dubai, because your spec ops team kills what feels like several hundred soldiers to get to the ending. The game, after all, has to have gameplay, and what kind of game wouldn't pit the player against seemingly overwhelming odds on an almost continuous basis? The answer is no game, because there wouldn't be any intensity or sense of urgency.

     Now to the point. Near the end of the game, the two remaining members of your spec ops team, Adams and the player, shoot their way into the main enemy encampment to reach the game's main villain. After killing what feels like hundred or so guys in less than an hour, our heroes find themselves surrounded by the enemy who is requesting their surrender. At this point, I would like you to guess just how surrounded they were. If you guessed anything over like seven dudes, you've guessed too high. The cutscene in question shows a humvee pull up and roughly five guys hop out (still standing near the humvee) and one helicopter hovering overhead. Now in a realistic setting, one could consider this to be surrounded, but when your main characters stage a two-man assault on the front door of an armed military complex and win, it kind of shatters any sense of belief in the premise that they could ever actually be surrounded, especially after they've just got through killing a bunch of trained military personnel armed to the teeth with grenade launchers, RPGs, LMGs, automatic shotguns, and various other powerful weapons. And it's not like these guns just disappeared either. There was nothing stopping either of our characters from offing the helicopter within a matter of seconds with a nearby grenade launcher/RPG and then tossing like a billion grenades at the humvee. Let us remind you that this is pretty much the exact kind of balls-to-the-wall scenario that the game loves to throw at you on a continuous basis.

If only we had access to something that could solve this situation.

     With our characters pausing to tally up their kill counts surrounded , the player's character decides that if they want to get inside the central building, this is the only way because f*ck logic taking on seven guys is suddenly too hard to do. Adams, being the more logical of the two, decides that plan is total bullsh*t, and proceeds to push the player over a wall to safety whilst "going out guns a-blazing." After your character runs away, you discover that Adams killed all of them and dies off-screen. If the player had just stayed and helped instead giving up like a little b*tch, they would both easily have walked away from that scenario alive. Perhaps it could have been more believable if these guys hadn't just killed hundreds of soldiers to get to this point in the game, or if the developers actually added a second helicopter two dozen extra guys to surround them, this scenario would be somewhat believable. This would be the equivalent of Obi-wan being surrounded by like five stormtroopers and dying. If you'd like to see the level and cutscene in question, click this link, if you just want to see the cutscene, just jump ahead to about the 16-minute mark.

4) Dom

     The fourth character on our list is Dominic Santiago (Dom) from the Gears of War series. This hardened killing machine serves as the second player throughout the majority of the series and is the secret butt-buddy best friend of the main character Marcus Fenix. These soldiers have been through several hells together and it has scarred their anuses them deeply. Like our last character, Adams, Dom sacrifices himself to save his mates from severely underwhelming odds but this time, not only was his death avoidable, his sacrifice was also pointless.

It can get awfully lonely in the closet underground.

     Without spoiling too much, Marcus and Dom find themselves in the aftermath of a war against the Locust army (basically a bunch of worm dudes that live underground and one day wondered just what all this fuss about sun-tans was about and had to invade the surface to escape the lambent, because if you're having some trouble waging a war on one front, the logical thing to do is to start a second war on another front.) and are currently fighting the Lambent pandemic (they're like zombie parasites, only they know how to shoot guns, mutate, and explode when killed.) The main objective of their mission and only means of saving the world is to find a secret military outpost called Azura and help Marcus's father activate a weapon that will simultaneously destroy both the lambent and locust. To do so, they must find a usable submarine and fuel to power said submarine.

     To find enough fuel, Dom suggests going to the hometown of his dead wife (whom he killed, but that's an entirely different can of worms.) to acquire fuel. Upon arriving at the town's fuel depot (which is conveniently at the town entrance) they discover that the town has been seemingly abandoned, and then find out that it is full of lambent humans. They reactivate a fuel pump and return to the entrance only to be caught in a massive orgy with Roland three-way firefight with the Locust and Lambent. At some point Dom gets separated from the group and finds the perfect chance to kill himself by driving the giant fuel truck into the fuel depot, subsequently blowing up everyone that isn't a good guy because friendly fire was turned off only the good guys remembered to use the magical chest-high walls that their universe seemingly consists only of.  See the cutscene below and on a side note, why would anyone ever toss aside a gun with a built-in chainsaw?

     Like the death of Adams from Spec Ops: The Line, Dom dies saving everyone from odds that they should be very used to, this is the third game after all, the main characters have certainly proved that the only thing they can't kill is their feelings toward each other. They killed a giant miles-long worm capable of sinking entire cities in the second game, and earlier in gears of war 3 they've taken on several hundred enemies with pretty much no problem whatsoever. That level was pretty much a shooting gallery for the good guys and there was no reason they couldn't handle the situation or lack thereof.

Just a typical day in the Gears of War universe.

     Everyone is sad and they move on to a pointless filler arc a different city to find fuel, but Dom's death was not in vain! Or it wasn't until they reached the shipyard containing a submarine and magically find fuel there. (It is literally a mission objective that you can complete in about 20 minutes.) The game just sort of expects the players to not notice that they spent roughly 40% of the story mode finding something they didn't even need because no one bothered to check if the shipyard contained fuel for the very ships it contains. This only serves to make Dom's death feel less like a noble sacrifice and more like a crappy plot device that the story writers desperately tossed in to make the players cry.

5) Paxton Fettel

     The final entry on our list today is Paxton Fettel, the ghost-child of F.E.A.R. series antagonist/psychic ghost child Alma and brother of the game's interestingly unnamed central protagonist Pointman. This unlucky evil bastard has been killed twice, and by his own brother both times! In the F.E.A.R. series, Paxton Fettel is a very powerful psychic person and master of the paranormal. He tried to do a bunch of evil stuff in the first game, came back in a DLC for the second game, and became one of two playable characters in the third game.

The developers decided reusing dead characters was a better design choice than creating new ones.

     Throughout the third game, Paxton Fettel demonstrates his ghost abilities and otherwise flaunts his immortality several times. It's pretty clear that he is a ghost and cannot be killed by conventional means, but at the end of the game he and Pointman have a disagreement over who gets the last macguffin bagel in the fridge (we're pretty sure that's what the game was about) and one of two endings can happen: Either Fettel possesses Pointman and kills him, or Pointman whips out a pistol and shoots a motherf**king ghost in the face.

     This defies all physics and reality in the game, especially since Pointman tried to kill him at the beginning of this game too, albeit to no avail. We're pretty sure that everyone can agree that the premise of a ghost being killed by a bullet is a complete and utter farce. This essentially the equivalent of stabbing a ghost Yoda with a lightsaber and expecting results. While there were several dozen other problems with this game (which will be addressed in an article later) this is the most pertinent issue. The game specifically goes out of its way to demonstrate Paxton Fettel's immortality and then pretends like that didn't happen. You don't just establish rules and then break them whenever you want, otherwise the entire premise and story begins to unwind and feel pointless. If we throw continuity out the window, then everything is pointless. The actions and plights of our characters become meaningless in this way.

     This concludes the article. If you enjoyed it, why not give it a share or a like? If you didn't like it, leave a comment telling us why you agreed or disagreed with any of the information or arguments henceforth presented in this article. If you have ideas for other articles that you'd like us to cover, or perhaps a character or two to tack onto this one, message us or leave a comment. We thank you for perusing this article and blog!

Written and edited by Joey with super duper extra special editing assistance from Alex.