this annoys me a lot

30 March 2026

recently i tried to play Dawn of Mana, the 8th game in a series that's explicitly about the sanctity of nature.

fig.1: the protagonists remembering a time a decade ago when they carved their initials into a tree, and cringing at how terrible it was to pointlessly harm nature like that.

fig.2: a combat tutorial. you get damage bonuses and extra items proportional to how stressed-out you make each enemy before you kill them.

how come everyone is blind to this? it feels like every video game has you kill animals for no reason, but this one is probably the most obvious contradiction i've ever seen. at least the animals just poof into a cartoon dust cloud, instead of exploding into a fountain of bones like the first few Mana games.

4 comments

LAWatson

The Kirby games are my personal go-to example for this kind of dissonance a lot of the time... Dreamland 3 has you helping out random cute little creatures and using their love to expunge the corrupting force of Dark Matter, but then also every *other* creature is just an enemy for you to explode... and as far as I see it, there's nothing that truly distinguishes the things you help from the enemies other than the game specifying as such. I think Star Allies was the only other game to really try for such a thing, you can actually make friends with all the enemies and they'll help you! But from a gameplay standpoint you're still very much wreaking havoc on everything...

Dang, though! I'd be hard-pressed to find a more genuinely baffling case than what I'm seeing here.

Bathead

I’m trying to think of a point of view where this mechanic isn’t totally bizarre. Even if the messaging wasn’t laughably contradictory, why would random excess cruelty fundamentally give me better rewards? And why would I want to be so vicious if the point isn’t to play an evil role?

Ocxin

Nah see it's fine to hurt emotions instead of bodies since we all know those are just imagined, nooothing wrong here no.

Ocxin

At least Kirby games have the decency to imply that enemies you strike down are not really destroyed.