10 Video Game Cliches That Need To Die

5. The Father/Daughter Bond

The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, and Bioshock: Infinite are some of the best games of the past decade (yes, even that last one), partly because they all focus on the central relationship between a father figure and a daughter figure, chronicling how they both grow in the face of adversity.

The problem is, they ruined it for any other action game that wanted to tell a similar tale.

In the early 2010s there was a period where a bunch of big-name games all told this story at the same time, and did it better than anyone expected by tying the companion in the narrative to the gameplay in a dynamic and inventive way, and it's made similar efforts which followed feel a little hollow.

Even if they're not chasing trends, using this relationship as the emotional backbone of a story is no longer unique, especially when so many titles often give the companion character identical abilities in gameplay.