Rating systems are always controversial, whether for movies, video games, or music. The Halo franchise may have been given the T rating it should have received from the start, and games like GTA 5 continue to push the boundaries of even an M rating, but somewhere in between, there is a subject even more subjective.
The line between T and M rated games is hard to draw, especially when it comes to violence. What seems suitable for younger audiences in one game might be too much in other games. However, some games have managed to sneak in some surprisingly violent moments, and tested the limits of their T ratings.
Tree Impalement, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
The Uncharted series is a stunning adventure series that lets fans live out their fantasies in a globe-trotting adventure reminiscent of today’s Indiana Jones. Also like Indiana Jones, they manage to fit in a couple of nightmare fuel scenes.
Arguably the worst of these comes towards the end of Uncharted 2, when Nathan Drake and his allies face an armed enemy on a platform sliding down a cliff. When the platform hits the bottom, Nathan rises to see the enemy impaled through the chest on a tree branch above him. Read also : 10 best cult classic video games of all time, according to Reddit. While the camera doesn’t stop, the branch is covered in blood, and has gone straight through the man’s body, leaving a huge hole.
D-Day Invasion, Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty 2 may be relatively rudimentary compared to its modern sequels, and in retrospect it’s relatively tame, but its D-Day mission remains very clear. This may interest you : The 10 best video games in all black and white. At one point in the game, players are thrust into the famous Normandy landings in WWII.
Obviously meant to invoke the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, the mission is as close to the amount of damage as the engine could do. Soldiers are shot down in their landing craft, stabbed, bludgeoned, and burned alive. It may not look so impressive now, but at the time this mission was surprisingly intense.
Killing Mission, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Knights of the Old Republic to this day remains one of the best Star Wars games ever made. It had a huge universe, a wide variety of powers to use, and a great cast of supporting characters. On the same subject : 12 new Xbox Game Pass titles have been revealed for early July 2022. Unfortunately, if players turn to the dark side, they have a chance to kill these allies.
During the game, players will be accompanied by Mission, a young Twi’lek girl, and Zaalbar, her hulking Wookie companion. Towards the end of the game, players can force Zaalbar to execute a Mission to pay his life debt. The death itself isn’t graphic, but watching Zaalbar pump round after round into his best friend as she begs him for her life is a tough watch for invested players.
The Prologue, InFamous
Sucker Punch’s InFamous is an amazing original superhero game not based on Marvel or DC properties. Following the main character Cole MacGrath, the opening of the game shows how Cole got his powers in brutal detail during a massive bombing.
Opening with a terrorist attack in a big city is already pretty heavy for a T-rated game, and the prologue doesn’t shy away from showing the destruction in full. There isn’t much blood or gore, but Cole’s face is badly damaged and the streets are littered with dead or dying civilians. InFamous is a dark game, and it wastes no time making that clear.
Grimlock’s Rampage, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
Violence in Transformers games can get away with a lot more because the characters are robots. This is good, because if the characters were humans, the amazing Fall of Cybertron would be a very hard M. The entire game is full of robots being blown off the legs and covered in a thick layer of the Transformer equivalent of blood, but when players take control of Grimlock, things get get serious
The hulking Grimlock wields a sword and can turn into a Tyrannosaurus robot, whose sole purpose is to tear apart as many enemies as possible. Players are even encouraged to use special executions, which can cripple enemies, bite them in half, or roast them alive with flame breath. The oil-soaked rampage may be a lot, but it’s also one of the best levels in the game.
Full Dismemberment, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
As the original Star Wars proved way back in 1977, fire engines are quite effective at removing limbs. Unfortunately, many games in the franchise have deviated from this to maintain a slightly more family-friendly feel. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II was not one of those games.
The game allowed players to hack apart Stormtroopers to their heart’s content, severing arms and heads. Surprisingly, the Wii version of the game took this even further, where enemies could practically be pushed down to the torso. Unfortunately, this is one of the few games to fully show the true power of the lightsaber.
Ra’s Al Ghul’s “Death”, Batman Arkham City
The Batman Arkham series has always stuck to the darker side of the character’s mythos, and one scene in Arkham City fully embraces the mature tone. Towards the end of the game, Batman and the villain Ra’s Al Ghul find themselves falling from Wonder Tower.
Batman tries to save Ra’s by grabbing him, but Ra’s refuses the help by stabbing himself through the chest with his sword in an attempt to kill Batman as well. The attempt fails, and Ra’s just hurtles to the floor, landing spine first on a massive steel “A” above a gate. Although there isn’t much blood, the moment is shown in close-up, with the point making it all the way out of Ra’s stomach. Ra’s may be immortal, but this one still had to hurt.
Decapitation Crime Scene, Snatcher
The graphic adventure Snatcher was one of Hideo Kojima’s first titles, and is still considered by some to be among Kojima’s best games. Set in a dystopian future, the game focuses on robots or “Snatchers”, who kill and replace humans in the city.
The stylized graphics let Snatcher slip by with a T rating for animated blood, but that doesn’t begin to cover some of what’s in the game. Snatcher features several gruesome crime scenes, but the worst of all is a decaying corpse that is shown in precise detail, with all the inner workings of the neck protruding. Even Kojima’s M rated games rarely go that far.
Every Death Animation, Heart of Darkness
To the surprise of anyone who’s played it, the 1998 platformer Heart of Darkness isn’t actually rated T. What’s surprising is that it’s rated E instead. The game was targeted at children, and seemed innocent with its cartoony visuals, but it has some absolutely gruesome death scenes.
During his quest to save his dog, the main character Andy can meet many horrible fates. These include everything from being crushed flat, having one’s spine broken by flying enemies, being eaten alive, and a variety of dismemberment and disembowelment at the hands of the villainous shadow creatures. Despite being rated E, Heart of Darkness is the stuff of nightmares.
Shazam’s Death, Injustice
Mortal Kombat may be famous for its ultra-violent deaths, but its DC Injustice counterpart is generally a much milder affair. Despite the focus on massively powerful shots, few people actually die. That said, those who bite the dust do so in grand fashion.
Chief among the game’s fatalities is Shazam, the first to question Superman’s increasingly oppressive rule. Superman responds to the criticism by freezing Shazam shut and burning a hole through his head with his heat vision. Shazam’s hood begins to smolder as the lasers make it all the way through his eye sockets in a moment that could be at home in a Mortal Kombat title. Also, the fact that Shazam is canonically 12 years old makes it even worse.
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Jacob Wallin
(64 Articles published)
