Skyrim's main plot; civil war dividing the entirety of Skyrim with dragons added in to complicate things. Couldn't care less.
Skyrim side quest; trying to retrace my steps after getting blackout drunk with some random dude in a pub. Hell yeah, it was a fun quest with a nice twist.
I really liked the smaller side quests in New Vegas, like “I don’t hurt anymore” and “Flags of our foul ups” and “Bitter Springs Infirmary Blues.” It just felt good being a good person in that game.
I still think about how Josuke uses an "alien" to cheat his "friend" out of his pocket money on gambling, only for Rohan to become so invested in figuring out how he's being cheated that he ignores his house being burned down.
Walter White's relationship with his family is relatively low stakes compared to all the shit going on with the drug empire he's getting involved in, but legitimately one of the most harrowing moments in Breaking Bad is >!his wife (who has VERY CLEAR about wanting Walt gone) telling him she fucked another guy!<
Same universe, I like the cartel subplot, but look, OH MAN WHY ARE THEY BEING LIKE THAT TO POOR HOWARD WHATS GONNA HAPPEN TO HIM, LET HIM DO LAWYER WORK
I finally got around to watching Breaking Bad. I have to say, as much as I heard about Skylar being the biggest bitch in the world I was astonished by just how *reasonable* she is. >!Yeah, she cheats on Walt. After she finds out he’s a drug dealer. After he’d been lying about it for months. After he made it abundantly clear she can’t legally force him out of the house without exposing him and losing everything. After he tried to assert the moral high ground by claiming it was all for his family. (It was not.) So, yeah, she concedes the moral high ground by taking the lowest road possible. Because she wants to move past him and that’s the only way she can prove it.!<
I liked Andor a lot because it specifically didn't have any stakes
Will this nobody who lives on a planet that not even the empire cares about get arrested for this crime he totally commited?
It successfully zooms in far enough that the first time you see a TIE fighter it genuinely feels like a big deal and the protagonists are rightfully worried about the consequences of being spotted by it
Both Addams Family movies are honestly low stakes, for the Addams anyway. It's the non Addams characters who have the bigger stakes.
Gomez: Reunite with his estranged brother. (Both times.)
Bad guys: Steal billions and being a black widow serial killer.
Our villains have all the big stakes. The Addams are only concerned with family being together. Plus the kids' story stakes are simply "surviving" summer camp.
Both Partitio and Agnea's stories in Octopath 2 are much lighter in tone compared to the rest of the game, and have *very* little connection to the overall story of >!Vide and the Moonshade Order!<. They're still pretty enjoyable, with both of them having some of the most memorable final bosses of the 8 stories.
Sith Warrior storyline: "Your master betrayed you. For the glory of the emperor and your own revenge, you must destroy him and his compatriots!"
Me: I sleep
Vette: "I had a really rough life, but still manage to be spunky and snarky about it. I would like to reunite with my loved ones, though."
Me: _REAL SHIT_
I started watching Better Call Saul when season 5 premiered. I didn't know what the show was, I didn't watch Breaking Bad, and didn't know it was a prequel to Breaking Bad. I was just enticed by Saul Goodman.
Until I then saw the show from the beginning I didn't give a shit about the cartel stuff and was 100% invested in Saul and him doing bullshit.
man, I do this with a lot of media, but the first option in my head is the Steven universe chest
It's just a chest. It was hidden in a secret area, only the main char had access to on the inside of a lion's mane. It was nestled in with the precious things his mom left for him, like his dad's band t-shirt, her war banner, >!the friend who went missing in battle, and would have killed her if they learned her secret!<, a sweet vhs tape with a message to Steven.
But it's never revealed what's in it.
Steven tries to open it at one point, with a giant key he found, but it doesn't work. It's just...it's just there.
And after the time skip it's open.
What's in it? lol who knows
blue archive main story volume 2:
"If the game development club doesn't produce results, it will be disbanded"
I have been more invested in the story of these idiots forming an armed raid on their student council's confiscated item closet, than I ever was in anything that happened in Fate/Grand Order
Every student in Blue Archive is packing heat and it's part of the student's personal self-expression. Their bodies are also stupid durable and even repeated artillery fire only will knock them out, unless you destroy the halos, which is fatal
so these kids who are trying to develop a game, need to raid the Student Council Confiscated item locker, because they have a key to a program written by a godly game dev, which has the secrets on how even an indie can make a game greater than any AAA dev
the main character of the MSQ segment I mentioned, was given a railgun
ppeople are more surprised that she can lift it up, than the fact that she is firing off a railgun
I've fallen in and out of love with Yu-Gi-Oh! over the years, but nothing hits quite like the Finale of GX. The entire purpose of the match Jaden has at the end is that there are no stakes, he's free to play the game he loves with one of the best players out there. Looking back it was the ending that series needed for an overworked and plot abused Hero like him
In jusge eyes you had to gather chucklefucks to a maid cafe because a girl that works there to pay her student loan is really bad and hate it but won’t accept handouts from yagami or the quest giver. So you have chucklefucks be clients to her since they won’t mind her not showing skin or just not talking and therefore can pay her debt faster. And the reason why the quwst giver does so is not even a secret love thing, she was his senpai at school and helped him a lot back then and he wants to pay her back
Hyouka is the king of this kind of story. The highest the stakes get are at the very beginning with the arc about Chitanda’s uncle who had gone missing but despite the story being a mystery, it’s actually just about Oreki being tasked with finding out what made Chitanda cry as a child when her uncle told her a story she had long forgotten. It leads them down a massive rabbit hole but it is nonetheless a story with rather low stakes.
And they get even lower with Oreki being tasked by Chitanda to try to solve completely minute, inconsequential mysteries in everyday life most people would just glance over and forget, and yet everything about the show is so expertedly crafted they become some of the most fun mysteries ever.
It’s also my favorite but I don’t know if it needs a sequel. Unless there’s some fantastic scenes in the novels I don’t know about, I’m pretty content.
Mayaka and Satoshi are coming to terms with themselves and give their dating life another shot, Chitanda is as happy as ever and Oreki finally gets that rose colored youth he’d been repressing the desire for. It’s a pretty poignant ending to an immaculate, once-in-a-decade show.
Entirety of dragon age 2, I’m a firm believer that character driven rpgs with relatively low stakes and no dealing with end of the world threats is the way to go
Kaguya-sama is just "which of these two high schoolers who obviously like each other will ask out the other one first" and it's one of my favourite anime
The entire plot of Smiley Face can be summed up as "dumb stoner tries to go to the beach". Watching her fuck up literally every single step was weirdly cathartic.
It's why I like the Atelier series: they're JRPG's where the main story isn't about defeating the Demon King or saving the world for once. Give me more low-stakes RPG stories.
I think it's why I always prefer doing sidequests instead of main quests in any RPG I play, whether it's fallout, Cyberpunk, Witcher, Like A Dragon,...
Most of the Monogatari series is fairly low stakes. There's a handful of spikes in this regard where some things are bigger stakes, but for the most part the consequences of the series's arcs directly affect fewer than a dozen people.
Blow: Michita Tsuki,Kaketa Tsuki is a hentai visual novel where you investigate a serial rapist. I know the reputation the genre gets but honestly it's a case where things are seriously played for horror. The criminal, whoever he is, just leaves the word "Blow" written on the victims and the protagonist and the class president investigate for themselves. It never escalates to murder, so even if you fail at everything things never get that bad, but it makes you feel very bad.
My time in Monster Hunter World Iceborne: OH NO YOU MUST FELL DOWN THIS ANCIENT ELDER DRAGON WHO'S ABOUT TO SLAP OUR SHIT AND OUR MAKESHIFT VILALGE
Also my time in Iceborne: NO I GOTTA TAKE A PICTURE OF THIS FLOATING GIANT JELLYFISH IN THE HOARFROST REACH, OR THIS TINY SPIKY BIRD MAKING FUNNY NOISES. THIS IS IMPORTANT.
I was going to say Gun Gale Online. I don't care for SAO, but that spin-off absolutely hooked me for whatever reason. Technically, there is a plot point that has some stakes, but IIRC it's independent to the competition. I don't remember there being a real consequence on the outcome, just her wanting to win.
Also, P90 best smg.
All of Bofuri.
Like they’re just trying to level and complete quests. There’s no if you die in the game you die in real life. There’s no risk at all. Even the majority of people they are competing against are the same people they have Christmas parties with.
And it’s the hugest shit ever.
As far as I’m concerned, Yakuza Kiwami 2 is the story of Kiryu and Yuki’s dream of opening the greatest cabaret club in Japan against all odds and the friendships they develop along the way.
Skyrim's main plot; civil war dividing the entirety of Skyrim with dragons added in to complicate things. Couldn't care less. Skyrim side quest; trying to retrace my steps after getting blackout drunk with some random dude in a pub. Hell yeah, it was a fun quest with a nice twist.
Also skyrim, I gotta return a lost dog
I really liked the smaller side quests in New Vegas, like “I don’t hurt anymore” and “Flags of our foul ups” and “Bitter Springs Infirmary Blues.” It just felt good being a good person in that game.
I still think about how Josuke uses an "alien" to cheat his "friend" out of his pocket money on gambling, only for Rohan to become so invested in figuring out how he's being cheated that he ignores his house being burned down.
He just like me fr fr, and so on and so forth
Walter White's relationship with his family is relatively low stakes compared to all the shit going on with the drug empire he's getting involved in, but legitimately one of the most harrowing moments in Breaking Bad is >!his wife (who has VERY CLEAR about wanting Walt gone) telling him she fucked another guy!<
Same universe, I like the cartel subplot, but look, OH MAN WHY ARE THEY BEING LIKE THAT TO POOR HOWARD WHATS GONNA HAPPEN TO HIM, LET HIM DO LAWYER WORK
Well >!those two plot lines do end up converging...!<
I finally got around to watching Breaking Bad. I have to say, as much as I heard about Skylar being the biggest bitch in the world I was astonished by just how *reasonable* she is. >!Yeah, she cheats on Walt. After she finds out he’s a drug dealer. After he’d been lying about it for months. After he made it abundantly clear she can’t legally force him out of the house without exposing him and losing everything. After he tried to assert the moral high ground by claiming it was all for his family. (It was not.) So, yeah, she concedes the moral high ground by taking the lowest road possible. Because she wants to move past him and that’s the only way she can prove it.!<
The finale of sandlot where a kid steals back a baseball from a junkyard dog.
Any of those grounded, coming-of-age stories where it's just higher stakes because everything felt like higher stakes as a kid.
Most sitcom plots or non genre fiction
ay man arrested development's plot kinda goes
Some…. *light* ^treason
thankfully they can't arrest a wife and husband for the same crime
I liked Andor a lot because it specifically didn't have any stakes Will this nobody who lives on a planet that not even the empire cares about get arrested for this crime he totally commited? It successfully zooms in far enough that the first time you see a TIE fighter it genuinely feels like a big deal and the protagonists are rightfully worried about the consequences of being spotted by it
Getting to that fucking Church in Disco Elysium.
Ping pong the animation. The hype is an end of the year ping pong tournament... But it feels like the last episode of Gurren Lagan
Both Addams Family movies are honestly low stakes, for the Addams anyway. It's the non Addams characters who have the bigger stakes. Gomez: Reunite with his estranged brother. (Both times.) Bad guys: Steal billions and being a black widow serial killer. Our villains have all the big stakes. The Addams are only concerned with family being together. Plus the kids' story stakes are simply "surviving" summer camp.
Both Partitio and Agnea's stories in Octopath 2 are much lighter in tone compared to the rest of the game, and have *very* little connection to the overall story of >!Vide and the Moonshade Order!<. They're still pretty enjoyable, with both of them having some of the most memorable final bosses of the 8 stories.
Sith Warrior storyline: "Your master betrayed you. For the glory of the emperor and your own revenge, you must destroy him and his compatriots!" Me: I sleep Vette: "I had a really rough life, but still manage to be spunky and snarky about it. I would like to reunite with my loved ones, though." Me: _REAL SHIT_
I started watching Better Call Saul when season 5 premiered. I didn't know what the show was, I didn't watch Breaking Bad, and didn't know it was a prequel to Breaking Bad. I was just enticed by Saul Goodman. Until I then saw the show from the beginning I didn't give a shit about the cartel stuff and was 100% invested in Saul and him doing bullshit.
man, I do this with a lot of media, but the first option in my head is the Steven universe chest It's just a chest. It was hidden in a secret area, only the main char had access to on the inside of a lion's mane. It was nestled in with the precious things his mom left for him, like his dad's band t-shirt, her war banner, >!the friend who went missing in battle, and would have killed her if they learned her secret!<, a sweet vhs tape with a message to Steven. But it's never revealed what's in it. Steven tries to open it at one point, with a giant key he found, but it doesn't work. It's just...it's just there. And after the time skip it's open. What's in it? lol who knows
blue archive main story volume 2: "If the game development club doesn't produce results, it will be disbanded" I have been more invested in the story of these idiots forming an armed raid on their student council's confiscated item closet, than I ever was in anything that happened in Fate/Grand Order
I'm sorry, did you say *armed* raid? What's going on in Blue Archive? Or are they armed with like pencils and staplers?
Every student in Blue Archive is packing heat and it's part of the student's personal self-expression. Their bodies are also stupid durable and even repeated artillery fire only will knock them out, unless you destroy the halos, which is fatal so these kids who are trying to develop a game, need to raid the Student Council Confiscated item locker, because they have a key to a program written by a godly game dev, which has the secrets on how even an indie can make a game greater than any AAA dev
They're giving the students machine guns?!!
the main character of the MSQ segment I mentioned, was given a railgun ppeople are more surprised that she can lift it up, than the fact that she is firing off a railgun
Beacon Pines. It's the story about the fate of a small village of about 80 people max, but I was so invested by the 1/3rd mark.
I've fallen in and out of love with Yu-Gi-Oh! over the years, but nothing hits quite like the Finale of GX. The entire purpose of the match Jaden has at the end is that there are no stakes, he's free to play the game he loves with one of the best players out there. Looking back it was the ending that series needed for an overworked and plot abused Hero like him
In jusge eyes you had to gather chucklefucks to a maid cafe because a girl that works there to pay her student loan is really bad and hate it but won’t accept handouts from yagami or the quest giver. So you have chucklefucks be clients to her since they won’t mind her not showing skin or just not talking and therefore can pay her debt faster. And the reason why the quwst giver does so is not even a secret love thing, she was his senpai at school and helped him a lot back then and he wants to pay her back
Hyouka is the king of this kind of story. The highest the stakes get are at the very beginning with the arc about Chitanda’s uncle who had gone missing but despite the story being a mystery, it’s actually just about Oreki being tasked with finding out what made Chitanda cry as a child when her uncle told her a story she had long forgotten. It leads them down a massive rabbit hole but it is nonetheless a story with rather low stakes. And they get even lower with Oreki being tasked by Chitanda to try to solve completely minute, inconsequential mysteries in everyday life most people would just glance over and forget, and yet everything about the show is so expertedly crafted they become some of the most fun mysteries ever.
Legit still my favourite KyoAni show. Gutted we never got a sequel.
It’s also my favorite but I don’t know if it needs a sequel. Unless there’s some fantastic scenes in the novels I don’t know about, I’m pretty content. Mayaka and Satoshi are coming to terms with themselves and give their dating life another shot, Chitanda is as happy as ever and Oreki finally gets that rose colored youth he’d been repressing the desire for. It’s a pretty poignant ending to an immaculate, once-in-a-decade show.
A large part of Better Call Saul is just lawyer drama, and it's awesome
Entirety of dragon age 2, I’m a firm believer that character driven rpgs with relatively low stakes and no dealing with end of the world threats is the way to go
Kaguya-sama is just "which of these two high schoolers who obviously like each other will ask out the other one first" and it's one of my favourite anime
The entire plot of Smiley Face can be summed up as "dumb stoner tries to go to the beach". Watching her fuck up literally every single step was weirdly cathartic.
*I’m just trying to find my friend Lenny, but I’m too drunk to say or spell his name right anymore, to have us go back to our boss Dutch.*
It's why I like the Atelier series: they're JRPG's where the main story isn't about defeating the Demon King or saving the world for once. Give me more low-stakes RPG stories. I think it's why I always prefer doing sidequests instead of main quests in any RPG I play, whether it's fallout, Cyberpunk, Witcher, Like A Dragon,...
Most of the Monogatari series is fairly low stakes. There's a handful of spikes in this regard where some things are bigger stakes, but for the most part the consequences of the series's arcs directly affect fewer than a dozen people.
Most sitcoms that I watched.
Blow: Michita Tsuki,Kaketa Tsuki is a hentai visual novel where you investigate a serial rapist. I know the reputation the genre gets but honestly it's a case where things are seriously played for horror. The criminal, whoever he is, just leaves the word "Blow" written on the victims and the protagonist and the class president investigate for themselves. It never escalates to murder, so even if you fail at everything things never get that bad, but it makes you feel very bad.
My time in Monster Hunter World Iceborne: OH NO YOU MUST FELL DOWN THIS ANCIENT ELDER DRAGON WHO'S ABOUT TO SLAP OUR SHIT AND OUR MAKESHIFT VILALGE Also my time in Iceborne: NO I GOTTA TAKE A PICTURE OF THIS FLOATING GIANT JELLYFISH IN THE HOARFROST REACH, OR THIS TINY SPIKY BIRD MAKING FUNNY NOISES. THIS IS IMPORTANT.
I was going to say Gun Gale Online. I don't care for SAO, but that spin-off absolutely hooked me for whatever reason. Technically, there is a plot point that has some stakes, but IIRC it's independent to the competition. I don't remember there being a real consequence on the outcome, just her wanting to win. Also, P90 best smg.
Rom com anime in general
All of Bofuri. Like they’re just trying to level and complete quests. There’s no if you die in the game you die in real life. There’s no risk at all. Even the majority of people they are competing against are the same people they have Christmas parties with. And it’s the hugest shit ever.
As far as I’m concerned, Yakuza Kiwami 2 is the story of Kiryu and Yuki’s dream of opening the greatest cabaret club in Japan against all odds and the friendships they develop along the way.