This Blog is for Tragic Hero’s contest, contains MAJOR SPOILERS to the plot and ending of Fallout, you have been warned.






What can’t I say about Fallout that hasn’t been said before, it’s my personal favorite game, and in my option, the greatest RPG ever created. In Fallout you create the character from scratch, this in stark contrast to many Japanese RPGs where a character has a predefined role and character development cycle.

One might think that those predefined characters you become more attached to, but to the contrary, as you groom your character in Fallout you become very attached to them and the NPCs that you get to accompany you. And in the end, no matter how hard you work, no matter what character you develop, you cannot escape the inevitable.

Illusion of a Simple Task

Introduction Speech by the Overseer



You are given a seemingly simple task, leave the vault, walk across the wasteland to nearby Vault 15 and get a replacement water chip. On the way you get a taste of life in the wasteland at the community of Shady Sands and its problems with giant scorpions and raiders, and upon reaching your destination, find it already opened and ransacked long ago.

So, you report back, and look for clues as to where to go next. With the only lead dead, the rest of the wasteland is spread out before you. Your visit to shady sands reveals the existence of more settlements to the south. Exploration will eventually bring you to Necropolis, a city full of seemly undead mutants and another kind of mutant that seems to be in charge of the city. Here you can recover a working water chip and return it to your vault and escape the horror of the wastes.





The Inevitable Second Task

Well now that you saved the vault it’s time to settle back down into a quiet secluded life and ignore the problems of the outside world right? Well, no, the Overseer asks you to perform one more task, find the source of the large mutants you saw in Necropolis and destroy it. You’ve just gone through hell and back to secure the vault’s future against a very real threat (thirst) to be asked to do something that is neigh impossible to a veiled threat (the mutants) that may never materialize.

So you trudge back out into the wastes to do it all over again, to fight an evil you know nothing about for someone who cares about everyone else but you. As you uncover more and more the reality and severity of the threat slowly becomes apparent until you finally do battle with the mutant hordes, ones not mutated by radiation, but forcibly by a pre-war virus and one man’s sick twisted vision of the future. Which you chose to strike at first, the master or his military base makes no difference, you have to fight or sneak your way through an army of guards and set off a bomb to destroy the base, and fight the mutated megalomaniac himself (or convince him to commit suicide) while he lashes out at you psychically.

A Thankless End Game

The 'Good' Ending, you still 'kill' the overseer with the bloodymess trait (I couldn't find a better video), contains IMO one of the saddest moments in video gaming



So, you think that after not only returning the water chip and saving the vault from dying of thirst, and destroyed a mutant army and saved the entire region, if not the world, you would be well deserving of a rest and some relaxation. Sorry to burst your bubble, but in the end you get absolutely nothing.

Upon returning to the vault you are confronted by the overseer, and he thanks you for all that you’ve accomplished. However, he cannot allow you to even re-enter the vault. With all the good that you’ve done, the people of the vault see you are a hero, they will want to hear your tales of the wastes, the struggles you faced, and eventually they too will want to leave the vault. You’ve become too dangerous to let back in and are exiled, to wander the wasteland and never return to the only home you’ve known. Even if you have accumulated enough bad karma (or have the bloody mess trait) and kill the overseer, the steel door won’t open, and you will never be allowed back inside.

After all that you have done, and all that you have fought for, you will only know betrayal and the cold harsh reality of life in the wasteland. While they may not be a well defined JRPG like character, I feel players become more attached when they create and guide a character through the world, and very few game endings have ever come close to being as tragic or saddening as the one penned in Fallout.




If you have enough negative Karma, you can exact your Revenge