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[Servant Corps]

Oh the Sith receptionist in Mannan. I thought you were talking about the Czerka recepoinist in Tattionee. Whoops.

Hm. I do remember (altough my memory is faulty) that there was a way to get her to shut up. Somehow. Ignore me though, since I don't remember how.

[Jude]

Pretty much every CRPG ever, but Bioware are particularly bad about this.  They love giving you apparent choices that all lead to the exact same reaction.  KoTOR was what really lead me to lose interest in Bioware games.  There's this one scene I remember in particular where you come into the Sith HQ on Manaan and the receptionist asks you what you're doing there.  You get like five options like attack, Make a bad excuse, use your bluff skill, use your diplomacy skill, or use force persuation to convince her nothing is the matter.  None of these work no matter what.  You can cheat your skills to max and she always reacts the exact same way by calling the security and then charging you suicidally with a stun baton or something similarly weak, while you have lightsabers.  There're several other instances of this that aren't quite as clear in my memory, but I think there's stuff like this on Taris and Korriban as well.

The sith have a receptionist? I'm picturing a middle aged woman with long, painted nails sitting at a desk surround by plastic plants and a water cooler with two hideously deformed evil guys in black chatting about last night's game.

She just used a generic sith female model.  Grey imperial officer ripoff uniform and all.

I was thinking more like, "I'm sorry, the Dark Lord is in a meeting, can I take a message? Hmm? You'd like to slay him...I'm sorry but he's all booked with Jedi for this week, maybe...yes, I can pencil you in next Tuesday 10 o clock, how about that?"

[Neonivek]

If you want more false choices what about the ones of Winning and Losing?

I recently played Tekken 6 and became annoyed at the OVERWHELMING number of scenes, after I just beat a character in game, where the fight simply didn't take place!

I HATE it when I beat an enemy only for the cutscene to contradict the fight. No I don't mean the enemy suddenly drawing upon more power... That is alright, that just means he was taking it easy on me during the battle. No I mean when the entire battle is circumvented into nothingness.

[Nivim]

 I remember something like that I randomly played at a store some time, a long time, ago. There was a restaurant fight of some sort, and by the end I had piled all the bodies at the entrances to inhibit incoming fighters, and had even managed to kill the one person in a suit that tried to run away at the beginning of the fight. When the cutscene started, all the bodies were scattered everywhere, and the one that tried to run had come back to life and was saying something. But that sort of thing is less a case of lieing and more a case of programmer communication errors and lack of prediction.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

Suikoden Tierkreis has a really bad issue with fake battles.  They're just like normal battles except that you inexplicably do almost no damage to the enemy while they conversely do huge damage to you, and after a certain number of rounds if you haven't been wiped out the battle ends and it cuts to you complaining about getting your ass kicked.  It'd be fine if this happened just a few times, but it seems to happen almost every time you meet a new enemy, and even worse, you often meet them again not too soon after and find that they're significantly weaker and actually beatable.

[Leafsnail]

There was a fake battle with Lu Bu in Dynasty Warriors 2 (I think).  Me and my friend noticed he was doing massive damage and we were hardly making a scratch on him.  Before long, all our henchmen were dead.  The idea was that you were supposed to walk away and have him killed in a cutscene... or something.

And you know what?  We put two fingers up to the game and kept fighting.  It was arduous, but he did EVENTUALLY die.  And we got no reward for it.

Ah well, it was worth it to screw the game.

Hmm... and as for FF... it seems to be a law that all turn based combat games have to have a fake fight or two.  Heck, even Pokemon has the occasional "fight which you can't possibly win".

[3]

Suikoden Tierkreis has a really bad issue with fake battles.

I've seen this sort of thing in far too many games (funnily enough, many of them JRPGs). I'm really opposed to the concept - artifically beefing up an opponent to ridiculous levels and then pitting them in a faux-battle with the player as a means of demonstrating that the player "isn't ready yet" strikes me as just plain lazy.

It'd be fine if the developers bothered to make an AI effective enough to beat the player early on (when the player was fairly inexperienced), and then make the player fight the enemy pertaining to said AI later in the game (when they've learned far more effective tactics and such). This would appear far less artificial than simply making an enemy utterly invinicble to ensure the player losing. However, it's likely not to work for a few reasons:
1. It'd take a hell of a lot more testing;
2. It'd reduce replay value;
3. Most importantly, it'd force developers to take the emphasis off random rolls (such is which still beloved by so many RPGs) to ensure that the player couldn't just one-shot the opponent they weren't supposed to beat.

Still, it's something that might bear thinking about.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

There was a fake battle with Lu Bu in Dynasty Warriors 2 (I think).  Me and my friend noticed he was doing massive damage and we were hardly making a scratch on him.  Before long, all our henchmen were dead.  The idea was that you were supposed to walk away and have him killed in a cutscene... or something.

And you know what?  We put two fingers up to the game and kept fighting.  It was arduous, but he did EVENTUALLY die.  And we got no reward for it.

Ah well, it was worth it to screw the game.

Hmm... and as for FF... it seems to be a law that all turn based combat games have to have a fake fight or two.  Heck, even Pokemon has the occasional "fight which you can't possibly win".

It's not a fake battle.  Lu Bu is just insanely powerful.  That's the point.  He also just retreats after the cutscene if it's the one I'm thinking of.  You still can fight him.

[Leafsnail]

We did fight him.  It took a full ten minutes to kill him.  We fought him again in a later battle and he went down in about 20 seconds.  Hence why I regarded it as fake .

[Neonivek]

Kind of sad that for some battles the ONLY one capable of dying is you.

And yes even worse then the "Battle didn't happen" is the "The enemy actually beat you" after you win a battle.

[Onlyhestands]

How about Chrono Trigger when

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You see the video of Lavos in the future age and you are given the choice [Yes] or [No] to dedicate yourself to try and stop him.

Also another Morrowind one: While many of the games directions are relatively unclear, or overly brief, occasionally you are told directions that are just pain incorrect. Still, I prefer it to the horrible compass in Oblivion

[LegoLord]

In morrowind, that's really more like an editing error.  And most of the lack of clarity is from not being able to check your map for the name of the local river or foyoda.

[Keiseth]

Summary: "But ye must!"

[qwertyuiopas]

Most of the arguments about morrowind seem to end in "but they gave you the tools to fix it if you don't like it".

From that, you can take the view that, although it lies to you, it is better than many other games, where it lies to you and THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

By including a decent editor, many "lies" can be corrected with a mod. Few games allow this though, unfortunately.

[Cthulhu]

Suikoden Tierkreis has a really bad issue with fake battles.  They're just like normal battles except that you inexplicably do almost no damage to the enemy while they conversely do huge damage to you, and after a certain number of rounds if you haven't been wiped out the battle ends and it cuts to you complaining about getting your ass kicked.  It'd be fine if this happened just a few times, but it seems to happen almost every time you meet a new enemy, and even worse, you often meet them again not too soon after and find that they're significantly weaker and actually beatable.

They did this in Legend of Dragoon when you fought, uh, ugh, I don't even remember his name anymore.  The guy with the Dragon Buster who killed Lavitz (FFFFFFF- HE WAS THE COOLEST GUY IN THE GAME).  You did an arena tournament and if you lost any of the fights it would turn out your opponent was cheating or something, and then when you got to him he dodged every swing and did huge amounts of damage.

This constant railroading stuff is why I hate JRPGs.  They're not as much roleplaying games as linear action games with some non-story-affecting character customization.