Witch Hunt's Ending is Horrible

You know, I’ve been playing video games, predominantly RPGs, for a good, long time.  Like, almost the entirety of my life.  In the years and years since that fateful day that I hamfistedly shoved a Crystalis cartridge into my NES and turned it on, I have seen the good and the bad of almost 400 different RPGs, and become intimately familiar with the genre’s ins and outs.  I have seen the good of RPGs, and I have seen the bad of RPGs, and though the nuances of each may change from game to game, it’s difficult, these days, for a game to truly just take me aback, completely boggle my mind.

But it does still happen occasionally.

Let me paint you a picture.  Let’s say you’re playing an RPG.  It’s a game whose premise is that a young woman, both a princess and a talented witch, has suffered the unfortunate indignity of having her boyfriend transformed, via another, more evil witch’s magical curse, into a chicken.  This princess, Cybel, thereby embarks upon a quest to lift the spell from her boytoy, renaming him Double 0 for her own amusement and bringing him along for the ride, assisted in her quest by her best friend and a small assortment of allies met along the way.  The plot is pretty straightforward, but enjoyable enough for what it is, as they travel through various settings on their way to confront the evil witch who’s been terrorizing the kingdom.  Fairly average, but pleasantly lighthearted overall, with a slight Halloween-ish vibe with its zombies and graveyards and creepy mansions and skeletons and whatnot.  Appropriate for a game about witches.  It’s even got a between-areas transition map that pulls up as you go from 1 part of the game to the next, very much like the transitions between stages in the Ghosts ’n Goblins, and Ghouls ‘n Ghosts series.  Neat!

Anyway.  The adventure proceeds well enough to its conclusion, with its adventurers determined and in good spirits throughout (well, most of them; 1 guy’s kind of the Shaggy of the party, but an appealing coward is good for levity, anyway).  The heroes confront the evil witch, clean her clock (somewhat literally; part of her deal is throwing a bunch of animated furniture and other household items at her foes), and the big twist is revealed of who she really is (another Scooby Doo-esque element, now that I think about it).  After her defeat and the reveal, the party as a whole gathers in a hallway, and the protagonist goes into the evil witch’s study to demand some answers, and a less avian look for her beau.  Some dialogue is exchanged that better explains why the evil witch was doing her evil thang, and then, at long last, the spell is lifted from Double 0.

And it turns out that it’s the wrong goddamn chicken.

Amusingly enough, seems that somewhere along the way, the party inadvertently switched their own cursed brother-in-wings with another similarly cursed guy.  The evil witch had a fondness for polymorphed KFC menu items, you see, and there was a whole monastery a little ways back filled with literal dumb clucks that the party had passed through, at which point the exchange was unwittingly made.  This ain’t Spirited Away; 1 Chick-Fil-A victim looks about the same as the next to Cybel.  They even have the same profile picture.

Anyway, the blacksmith who has now been uncursed runs around the room, amusingly swearing violent revenge upon the evil witch and, for that matter, all witches everywhere, which I found rather unfair given that 2/3 of the witches he’s encountered in the last few days have been trying to save him from his curse (if admittedly by accident).  The evil witch and Cybel shout at each other a bit about the mix-up and who’s to blame for it, and then...

Oh, wait.  There is no “and then.”  That’s it.  Fade to black, with a vague message questioning whether Cybel would ever see her boyfriend again, the end.  Over.  Done.

I thought I’d done something wrong.  Honest to Irori, I figured this was a feature.  I mean, the game’s treatment of legs of the journey like stages from Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts had me convinced that there was more to this.  See, in SGnG, when you beat the game the first time, the princess tells you, essentially, “Yeah, thanks for stopping by, Arthur, it’s all great about the saving-me-quest and everything--but I can’t help but notice that you’ve come here without my bracelet on your person, and I am not going back to my castle looking anything less than a perfect 10.  Get your ass back out there and bring me my bling; the next time you show up here, you better be putting a bangle on it.”  And then you have to replay the entire game from the start, beating it with the inferior weapon that is Little Miss High-and-Mighty’s enchanted slap-bracelet, before you can see the real ending.

So when I beat Witch Hunt, and saw that ending, my first impression was that Aldorlea Games must’ve taken a page out of Capcom’s book.  No doubt I just had to play through the game a second time, perhaps at a higher difficulty or using the New Game+ carry-over items to enter a secret area inaccessible the first time around, or something like that, and then I could see the real ending to the game.  The idea that this could be the 1 and only ending to this game was so unreal a possibility to me that I had actually booted the game up again to go through it all a second time before I decided, just to play it needlessly safe, that I should probably post on the developer’s forums and get a confirmation that what I knew must be the case was, in fact, true.

It was not.

Indinera Falls himself (who, from what I can tell, basically IS Aldorlea Games all on his own) responded, and was good enough to save me another 10-ish hours on the game by letting me know that this is, indeed, the 1 and only ending.

Witch Hunt is a game which is, start to finish, about saving one’s boyfriend from being cursed to be a chicken.  Saving the kingdom from the evil witch that did the deed is an admirable side benefit, but ultimately, the entire purpose of the game is an NES-era-esque video game quest to save a dude and live happily ever after with him.  And then, after 10+ hours of pursuing that goal, that doesn’t happen.  Witch Hunt is about taking on a classic quest, and then completely failing it.

Except that even saying that isn’t accurate.  Witch Hunt is not “about” that failure.  There’s nothing about the game that prepares one for, that narratively or aesthetically lines up with the idea of, a game where the good guys don’t win.  Witch Hunt doesn’t carry itself like something with a message, or a point to prove, about the unfortunate realities of life, and how one lives with them.  It ain’t Rakuen.  Witch Hunt doesn’t comport itself with the gravity of a game to which a happy ending is questionable, or even unlikely.  It ain’t Shadow Hearts 2.  Sure, it’s got plenty of spooky stuff in it like undead-overrun graveyards and evil hell baby demon things and whatnot, but I can’t emphasize enough how much closer it is to the all-in-good-fun Halloween kind of spooky than it is to something actually frightening or disturbing.  Witch Hunt doesn’t conduct itself like, A, some study of humanity being gray rather than black-and-white, or B, some treatise about the possibility that one can’t change fate, or C, some argument that there are such things as lost causes which we have to accept.  It ain’t, A, Fallout: New Vegas, or B, Fallout 4, or C, someone extensively playing Fallout 76 in an attempt to induce a strong enough case of Stockholm Syndrome that he no longer regrets his purchase.  Witch Hunt just acts like a basic, straightforward RPG about a quest to cure a magically cursed chicken, throughout its entire course.  I won’t go so far as to say that the ending is as self-contradicting as Mass Effect 3’s was (because what possibly could be?), but there is absolutely no part of Witch Hunt with which this abrupt, You Failed ending has even the slightest shred of narrative symmetry.

THIS is the only ending to Witch Hunt.  This.  An ending which gives the player absolutely no closure whatsoever regarding the entire core quest around which the game is built.  An ending which leaves its protagonist’s happiness completely ambiguous.  An ending which won’t commit to whether some poor, innocent kid will or won’t live out the rest of his substantially shortened days watching over his shoulder for Popeyes workers.  An ending which leaves the entire rest of the party, all the other important actors to this play, just sitting patiently in a fucking hallway.  After an entire quest’s worth of trials together, interactions, and cooperation, these major characters are just stuffed into a hallway and written out of the story!

Here’s a freebie to any aspiring writers out there: if you’re not a pretentious foreign film director with ambitions of premiering in the basement of a family-owned antique shop to an audience of 3½, then the process of sitting in your dentist’s office as you wait to get called in for a root canal shouldn’t be an indistinguishable experience from the final moments for 90% of your cast!

Imagine if you went through all the trouble of fighting off an alien invasion in Startropics 1, only to find out that Mike’s uncle was actually kidnapped by an entirely different bunch of aliens and he’d missed his chance to save him.  Imagine if, instead of making a long ending montage of each party member summarizing who they were and as major components to the game’s story, Final Fantasy 6 did that only for Terra and everyone else just hung out in the airship’s lounge offscreen, unacknowledged, forgotten.   Imagine if you got to the end of Chrono Trigger, and beat Lavos, but it turned out that a giant meteor hit the planet 5 minutes later and the future was destroyed anyways, and before Marle, Lucca, Robo, Frog, Ayla, or Magus could even say anything about it, a big ol’ “BUT THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE” got slapped up on the screen and the credits began to roll.

Imagine if Toad said “But our princess is in another castle!” and it was actually just the end of the game.

Now, in the interest of giving the full story, I should note that Indinera Falls has explained his motivations for this ending as being rooted in an enjoyment of open-ended conclusions, a greater appreciation for unhappy endings than the alternative, and a wish to emulate the kinds of endings one may find within a horror movie.  I have...many thoughts on that, most of them strong, and very few of them complimentary.  But I try to go a little easier on Indie creators, and I already said my piece to him directly on his forums anyway, so I’ll just point out a few brief rebuttals:


A: As mentioned before, Witch Hunt is a far cry away from having the kind of dark, twisted style and sensibilities that could make a horror movie’s kind of ending work for it.  It’s a damn game about saving a guy from being a chicken with generally positive and determined, even plucky, party members, a good-natured and well-intentioned protagonist, a comical profile portrait of the chicken in question, a mildly Shaggy-esque complaining coward character, and so on.  Not a cynical, twisted tale by any means.*  I mean for heaven’s sake, the cause of this unfortunate ending is that someone grabbed the wrong chicken at some point--that’s the kind of setup you see for a gimmick in a sitcom.

B: Different media have different narrative conventions that do and don’t work for them.  Different media have different avenues of telling their stories, different levels of engagement in an audience.  What works well in 1 format doesn’t necessarily work well in another--just look at Cats’s transition from Broadway to film.  An empty, meaningless conclusion of doubt, despair, and loose ends may very well work for a horror movie, but a movie occupies its audience’s attention for roughly 2 hours and has to be, as a result, focused very strongly on the events that move it forward, in most cases.  Witch Hunt is a game that took me over 10 hours to beat, with lots of interactions between party members who established themselves and their personalities well, and a strong focus on its (many times) stated goal of saving a guy from being the prop to a Game of Thrones meme.  Completely abandoning these characters and this cause to deliver an “open interpretation” unhappy ending like this is a completely different thing for an audience who’s only given 2 hours to simply watching a bunch of events transpire around some lightly-defined characters than it is for an audience who’s invested over 10 hours into actively assisting a party of personalities that they’ve gotten to know with some relative intimacy!  Even if Witch Hunt HAD been a game akin to a horror movie in its tone, it’d still feel insultingly careless and stingy for its reward of its player’s hours of efforts and for its payoff for its developed, familiar cast’s involvement to be so ambiguous, empty, and curt!

C: Making something open-ended is not the same as just suddenly dropping it altogether.  Witch Hunt’s conclusion feels like a discourse that ends because your phone died, not because you intentionally ended a conversation to keep it short.

D: Unhappy endings can be truly great ways to conclude a work, to bring forth its message.  The sadness of Rakuen’s ending gives us inspiration in seeing that it’s possible to weather such tragedy and be all the greater for the memory of that which has been lost, and that a short existence can still be one that had great meaning.  The tragedy of Shadow Hearts 2’s ending is a testament to the character of Yuri, to the love between him and Alice, and to the idea of being able to die as oneself rather than lose what makes one the person one is.  Severed, Eternal Senia 1, Grimm’s Hollow, Children of Zodiarcs, each has an ending with at least a hearty dose of unhappiness to it, and each unhappy ending fulfills a powerful purpose of emotion and/or philosophy.  But Witch Hunt has an unhappy ending that’s only there for its own sake; there’s nothing it does, no narrative quality or idea put forth, nor emotional poignancy created.  An unhappy ending doesn’t have value just because it happens to be less common than the alternative; it still needs to do something useful to the work as a whole, like any other part of a story.


You may recall that while I found the overall finale to Millennium 5 to be pretty good, the ending itself was surprisingly, even shockingly, brief and meager, leaving the player starved for details of the outcome to a quest they’d invested 5 separate games’ worth of effort and time into.  I’ve always just assumed that this was an isolated case of tripping at the finish line...but now, after my second foray into the creations of Master Indinera Falls has found a similarly but more even more harshly flawed ending, I worry that this may be a signature flaw to the developer.  I’ll give the Aldorlea Games catalogue a few more tries, of course--heaven knows I’ve extended many more chances to less deserving developers in the past, so it’s only fair--and hopefully I’ll be proven wrong and bad endings aren’t a trend with Aldorlea Games.  But even if that does, hopefully, come to pass, the ending to Witch Hunt will remain a noticeably black mark on this developer’s record.














* And I think it’s probably worth pointing out here that Aldorlea Games DOES know how to create an RPG that’s got a level of darkness to it.  I’m almost done playing Laxius Force 1 as I write this rant, and although it is mostly of a fairly average fantasy atmosphere, there are a good number of moments in this game where some serious, shockingly gruesome shit goes down.  That’s not to say that an ending as awful as Witch Hunt’s would work at all as the ending of Laxius Force (and here’s hoping it won’t be), but at the very least it would have a more understandable thematic connection to a game that at 1 point has a surprise gunman start blowing heroes’ heads into gory chunks than to Witch Hunt, a game whose darkest characteristic is that its set design looks like something inspired by the shelves of a Spirit Halloween store.  Had Indinera Falls wanted to design a game whose story and approach could adequately accommodate his preoccupation with lazy horror movie endings, it seems reasonable to believe that he could have, making the disparity between Witch Hunt and its conclusion all the more baffling and inept.

Deus Ex 4's Downloadable Content

Well, I beat an RPG with DLC again recently, so y’all know what comes next: The RPGenius talks about years-old add-ons as though what he says could possibly influence your buying decisions or really anything else, ever.  Because damn it all, DLCs make for easy rants to write when I’ve got nothing better to offer, and after over 10 years of running this blog, my general lack of ideas has happily transitioned from a character flaw to an understandable result of having done this for so long.*  So let’s take a look at the 3 DLC packs for Deus Ex 4.  I found DE3’s single add-on to be quite good, if you recall...let’s see if the next title in the franchise managed to equal its predecessor.



Desperate Measures: Desperate Measures was, from what I can gather, 1 of those sneaky little free DLCs that companies will sometimes use to soften you up to the idea of acquiring the ones that come later, which will cost money.  It’s not a terribly honest business practice, but I guess I can’t fault it too strongly when so much else connected to microtransactions is so much worse.

Anyway, Desperate Measures is kinda blah.  There’s nothing especially wrong with it, or anything, but it just feels totally unimportant, and you don’t get anything from it.  The premise of this side-story seems to be based on answering the question of who the train station bomber was...which would be quite significant, of course, if not for the fact that the main game already provides you the opportunity to discover the bomber’s identity on a computer during Adam’s visit to Golem City.  And Desperate Measures really just doesn’t go much further than said computer’s emails did in rounding out the bomber’s character and answering players’ questions about him, either; what you learn about him is more peripheral (some light information about his family) than relevant.

So the stated purpose of this DLC is totally superfluous.  The biggest service it provides narratively, in that case, is that Desperate Measures explains why the police’s recording of the bombing incident (which Adam has to retrieve and have his coworkers analyze early in the game) was corrupted.  Which is, honestly, such a tiny lore detail that it didn’t even occur to me to ask or care during the main game’s course why that might be the case.  I dare to presume that most other players paid it as little mind as I did.  Beyond that, there’s really nothing story-wise...there are a few tiny ambient stories going on in emails and texts you can find, I suppose, but the DLC’s specific central character is pretty basic, Chang is no more than a plot device, and after delivering just enough decent lines to make for good trailer material, Adam is just there to get the quasi-plot done and move on with his life.

Bottom line, Desperate Measures is a fine enough extra level to sneak or run-and-gun through, I suppose, but only really worth the time if you’re very fond of Deus Ex’s gameplay.  Which I am, I guess, but still, I would’ve hoped for a lot better.  Still, it’s free, so I guess I can’t judge it too harshly.


System Rift: This add-on has some decent little perks to it.  It’s good to see Deus Ex 3’s Francis again, and the grudgingly respectful antagonism that he and Adam mutually share for one another is fun enough to see in action once more.  As someone who enjoyed the little side game Deus Ex: Breach more than he probably should have, I also thought it was neat to involve ShadowChild; I wasn’t expecting DEB to get a tie-in to the main series, and I liked the surprise.  And it’s neat that Stanton Dowd makes an appearance (well, a line of dialogue, anyway) here; concrete ties to the overall series lore is appreciated when one finds them.

With that said, this DLC is almost as pointless as the first.  It’s really not so much a side-story as it is a side-transition (which does, I suppose, make it fairly authentic to DE4 as a whole, as this game ultimately feels more like a transition between the series’s really important events than it does a story in its own right).  The premise of System Rift is that Adam’s old “friend” Francis wants to have him investigate Santeau, so Adam has to break into the infamous Palisade information bank to grab any of Santeau’s dirty little secrets off the servers.  But you get basically no payoff to that premise!  We’re given no substantive peek at the data Adam gets ahold of, and even secondary aspects of interest inevitably fizzle up similarly--Stanton Dowd really is nothing but a tiny cameo and we’re left with no understanding of what he’s up to with Palisade, and Adam and Frances are all too happy to refer to the mysterious period of Adam’s life between Deus Ex 3 and 4, without going into any actual goddamn detail about it.  It’s almost as bad as the cliched vague villain meetings you get in JRPGs where everyone talks in the most stiff, ridiculously inefficient manner possible about “that guy” performing “these actions” to accomplish “those goals” and so on.  Hell, the game even seems to know what a frustrating tease it is on this matter and revels in it, having Adam actually fucking hang up on Francis at the DLC’s end just as the latter was about to mention a single specific detail that the audience would find interesting about Adam’s recent past.

There’s really only 1 thing that System Rift tells us that’s of any consequence whatsoever, in that it is, unexpectedly, basically the story of how Deus Ex: Breach exists.  Yeah, thanks to System Rift, now we know the story of where the titular breach in Palisade’s network came from, which is, “1 time Adam Jenson did some stuff.”  I guess it’s nice to know that detail, but it’s also thoroughly unnecessary.  I guarantee you that no one, no matter how huge a fan of Deus Ex, was asking to know the Breach’s origins.  In fact, much like Desperate Measures revealing to us why the police evidence was corrupted, I don’t think it ever would have even occurred to me to wonder about something that small.

But unlike Desperate Measures, you have to actually pay for System Rift.  In fact, you have to pay a fucking lot for it; this add-on is sold at a whopping $12!  Considering that there isn’t anywhere even close to 12 hours of content to this thing, that would be a hell of a steep price even for a really good DLC, and this sure as hell ain’t that.  I would struggle mightily to call System Rift even minimally adequate, frankly.  I, thank Palutena, bought Deus Ex 4 a few years ago during some kind of Steam ultra-sale on SquareEnix products, paying only $4.50 for its DLC Season Pass (so essentially, $2.25 for System Rift and A Criminal Past each), or I’d really be kicking myself right now.  But even a measly 2 bucks is still overpaying for System Rift, a story that doesn’t want to actually tell you its story.


A Criminal Past: At this point, SquareEnix stopped even pretending that it had the slightest interest in using Deus Ex’s add-ons for anything relevant to Deus Ex.  I mean, Desperate Measures may have had very little to say about nothing, but at least it was connected to DE4’s plot and made the pretense of having some significance to it.  System Rift may have performed no greater storytelling task than to give the origin story of a goddamn mobile tie-in game, but at least it pretended to have substance to the series by leading you on with promises of extracting corporate secrets and finding new, interesting information about major players in DE4’s story.

A Criminal Past?  This is just a DLC that uses the backdrop of Deus Ex to tell a surface-level cop-goes-undercover-in-prison story that has nothing, and doesn’t even pretend to have anything, to do with the events, themes, values, or characters of the DE franchise.

Don’t get me wrong, if this had been, say, a movie belonging to some other franchise, or its own venture altogether, A Criminal Past would be okay, I guess.  Not good, mind you--not enough exploration into Mejia’s character and motivations, too much left open-ended about Fixer’s significance, and lacking a personal connection to the protagonist.  But it would be okay.  I guess.

But A Criminal Past isn’t it’s own thing, it’s a side story in the Deus Ex franchise.  A side story that has nothing to do with conspiracy theory fundamentals, examining the movements of human beings within their society, the question of where the line is between being a human being and being something more, or the grievously flawed foundations of a world in which the greedy and selfish few are overlords to the incalculably many.  A side story in Deus Ex that has none of that.

It’s not like it couldn’t have been an adequate representation of the series.  The undercover-in-a-prison schtick isn’t an especially on-brand move, but A Criminal Past could have used its setting as a way to show a hard, inside look at the prison system’s workings when used by corrupt social overlords as a tool for getting rich off of what effectively amounts to slave labor.  That ain’t even conspiracy theory; that’s just the current, factual corporate-run prison system of the USA right there.  But it can also tie very neatly into the theories of methods by which humankind is suppressed by its elite ringmasters, so with some decent talent and really not even all that much effort, A Criminal Past could have been a compelling part of its series.  But nope, rather than any of that thinky-thinky stuff, the bad guys in this DLC are the tired old cop-story mainstays of organized crime and officers going bad in favor of said organized crime.

At the absolute most, you can read significance into the final little summary scene with Adam and Delara, in which it is maybe implied that Adam is beginning to suspect that Delara is untrustworthy.**  But an entire DLC adventure is a hell of a lot of rigamarole to go through for such a tiny snippet of overall series plot advancement, and other DLC stories could have accomplished the same, such as ones perhaps crafted to in any goddamn way have an actual involvement of or connection to Delara.

A Criminal Past is highly pointless, plain and simple, and I’m honestly baffled by its existence.  How did such a completely irrelevant, tone-deaf thing come to be?  The best I can figure is that someone in SquareEnix had it in their head that it’s the basic, surface-level work that Adam does for TF-29 that fans of DE are interested in, and nothing more.  Of course, that would require SquareEnix to have misunderstood their franchise to a similar bungling extreme as Bethesda misunderstood (or intentionally ignored) the point of Fallout when they made Fallout 76, which seems impossible--surely no one is as stupid as Fallout 76-era Bethesda?  But then, SquareEnix is the company that gave a major narrative spotlight to Organization 13, refused to let Bravely Default bear the Final Fantasy name, and made Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals.  So I guess no level of incompetence is truly beyond them.

With some work, A Criminal Past could have been great.  Because Deus Ex 3’s DLC, The Missing Link, was great, and that, too, was a side story in which Adam was stripped of all his augmentation advantages, imprisoned in a detention facility, and forced to bear witness to gross violations of ethics as human beings were viewed as hardware to be used and destroyed.  But A Criminal Past can’t duplicate the significance or quality of the DLC it’s plagiarizing, not even remotely, so it’s not worth the asking price of $12.  It’s not worth the effective price I paid for it of $2.25.  In fact, it’s not even worth the time it takes to play it, not unless you’re just a huge fan of the undercover-agent-in-prison schtick and don’t especially give a damn about whether it’s Deus Ex or not.  If that’s your thing, then by all means, go for A Criminal Past if you can somehow possibly get it for free, but for everyone else, I’d advise not even wasting your time on it.



And that’s it!  So how does Deus Ex 4’s add-ons compare to its predecessor?  Well, if you’ve read this far, you probably have gleaned this already, but for the heck of it, let’s go ahead and just say it for posterity: it’s crap.  None of these 3 stories are particularly exciting, interesting, or otherwise gripping, they don’t offer a proper ratio of content-per-dollar-spent, and all 3 of them weirdly share the unfortunate trait of being UTTERLY POINTLESS.  We already got about the same level of insight into the identity of the bomber and we never thought twice about the corruption of the footage.  We didn’t get to learn anything from the data we busted our hump to steal and we never felt the slightest need to know where the breach in Palisade’s firewall came from.  And we got exactly what significance to the series out of Adam’s little stint as a clank in the clink we were offered: none.  If Deus Ex 3’s downloadable content was a refreshing sample of high-caliber work sadly uncommon to the DLC landscape, then Deus Ex 4’s add-ons are a souring specimen of bilge, equally uncommon for how inconsequential they are.












* Hey, cut me some credit.  My content’s still fresher after 10+ years than the Simpsons and Family Guy were by Season 10, right?  For that matter, it’s better than Family Guy was by Season 1.


** This is inexplicably linked to his experiences with Mejia, somehow, as Adam wonders what else (besides the fact that the supposed terror attacks used as a story element in this DLC were bogus) Mejia might have been right about.  What the hell else did Mejia even really talk about that he could be right about?  At least, in connection to Delara, or the nature of Interpol, or whatever?

General RPGs' Puzzling Use of the Term "Goddess"

Thanks to Ecclesiastes for letting me bounce the banter that became the backbone of this bunch of blathering off him.  As always, you’re a damned fine (and patient) fellow, Ecc.



You know what’s weird about certain RPG worlds?  The word “Goddess.”

Now, the existence of the word “goddess” makes sense, in our own world.  The fundamental, earliest hierarchies of our historically and developmentally dominant societies, here on Earth, were largely male-centric to varying degrees, as were the systems of faith they by and large believed in, and the evolution of language depicts that.  Most of the religions of the human race’s foundational societies have either been A, centered around a single deity who is male, or B, had a pantheon of deities of both genders, but the most important and/or foundational deity or deities in that pantheon were male.

It follows that the default gender of the term “god” is regarded as male.  “God” is the root term for this concept of a deity, and generally speaking, the first, primary gender of deities in our species’ religious history, particularly the religions which have had the greatest influence on our society as a whole, is male.  So it makes sense that if you want to, in this world, refer to a specifically female deity, the term “goddess” is employed, because when you want to denote something as the gender opposite of what the thing is typically seen as, you either make a new word altogether, or add an addendum to the word to differentiate it from its original, base concept.  If the base state is male, then a suffix like -ess or -ette is common to tack on to denote that it’s a female version you’re talking about (a female “baron” becomes “baroness,” while a female Mario series NPC goes from “Toad” to “Toadette”), while (less commonly) if the base state is female, then a suffix like -er is added to denote that it’s a male version (such as a male “widow” being a “widower”).  Obviously some terms encompass both genders without need for differentiation (a “dancer” can be male or female, as can a “doctor”), but if you do have multiple versions of the same word, the simple, baseline word also inevitably corresponds with the gender most traditionally, originally associated with it.  As a result, the term “goddess” has been created to distinctly denote a female version of a god, because the history and nature of our society and our religions have by and large focused on male deities first and foremost.

But that means that it’s really weird that the people of Hyrule, for example, use the term “goddess” at all.

Because female deities are the only kind that Hyrule has.  To my knowledge of The Legend of Zelda series, all the deities of the land’s tales of creation and forms of worship are female.  Din, Farore, and Nayru are the 3 deities who created Hyrule and the Triforce, and then there was also Hylia at some point, who made the land’s people, if I recall.  And she was (and is) also a chick.  While there are male sages, and male spirits of the land, and stuff like that, the entirety of Hyrule’s religious pantheon has always been strictly female.  So by basic rules of thumb, the nomenclature in Hyrule should refer to Hylia, Din, Farore, and Nayru as “gods”, and the term “goddess” shouldn’t even exist.  Either they should only have the single term, or, at most, they should have the term “god,” to denote female deities, and a term such as “godder” to denote the theory of a male deity.

You see this sort of thing fairly frequently, and it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.  The titular land of Ys was created by 2 female deities and, to my knowledge (I’ve so far only played the first game), had no male equivalent of them running around anywhere, so they should refer to that pair as “gods,” not “goddesses.”  Fodlan of Fire Emblem 16, meanwhile, is a land with a single, all-powerful organized religion devoted to Sothis, a female deity.  Granted, other lands in the world of FE16 have different belief systems (Brigid, for example, believes in multiple divine beings), so the concept of male and female deities isn’t as unknown as it would be for Ys and Hyrule, but given Fodlan’s near xenophobia and aggressive belief in Sothis as the only true deity, you’d think that the only acknowledgement of the outside world’s beliefs in their language would be to invent a term like “godder” for foreign male gods, rather than adjust how they refer to their own single, female deity from the base “god” to “goddess.”  

Now, I can occasionally see an exception to what the rule should be.  The Lunar series, for example, has only a single deity within it, Althena, but I actually think that the term “goddess” makes sense for her.  Because, see, Lunar takes place in the far, far distant future of our world, at a time when humanity has fled to the moon, and forgotten its Earthly heritage.  So ultimately, you can make the logical argument that the conventions of language used in Lunar are directly related to the history of our own language conventions.  Just because the people of Lunar don’t actually have the slightest recollection or record of the time in the distant, distant past when the default term “god” was created in association with the, at that time, more standard idea that deities were male, that doesn’t mean that the term “goddess” wouldn’t have survived far past the point at which its denotation of gender has any value.  So in some rare cases, the strictly-female-deity society using the term “goddess” can still make some sense.

But in most cases, it’s something like Hyrule/Ys, where the default term of “god” would undeniably have implied a female, and/or Fodlan, where keeping that default term’s gender association would have been a matter of pride.  And yet, there’s a ton of RPGs out there with exclusively female, or at least clearly predominantly female, deities and pantheons, and they all throw the term “goddess” around willy-nilly.  Doesn’t make sense.