American McGee's Grimm
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"I wanna make the insufferable suffer! —Grimm
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Once upon a time, people told stories with dark danger lurking around every corner and important warnings. But as time passed, the stories got watered down into a pile of mushy stuff that would put Walt Disney to shame.
In this episodic platformer, your player character is Grimm, a dirty dwarf who hates how the fairy tales have turned out and decides to bring back their darker aspects... by running around the settings of said tales, his very presence causing things to become as grim and gruesome as he is.
A Comic Book adaptation by IDW Publishing has Grimm, having successfully Grimmified the fairy tale world, moving on to various Comic Book settings, starting with a Captain Ersatz-filled superhero universe in "Crisis on Earth 57",
This video game contains the following tropes:
- An Aesop - Grimm delivers one of these at the end of each darkened fairy tale, they range from normal, to Space Whale, to (unsurprisingly) Family Unfriendly.
- Bloody Hilarious - Most definitely prevalent.
- Broken Aesop - Stories like Cinderella or Rapunzel shouldn't be changed just because they have some unseemly parts to them...unless they had a happy ending to begin with, like A Christmas Carol.
- Catch Phrase - Grimm's motto is, "Happily Ever After" ends NOW!"
- He also ends each episode with "May all our stories end so well! Until next time."
- Cats Are Mean
- Christmas Episode - Grimm takes on "A Christmas Carol", then goes on to trash Santa's workshop and hijack his sleigh in order to grimmify all of Edwardian London.
- The Corrupter
- Crapsack World - Grimm's motivation is to transform the Mary Suetopia of the fairy tale world into this.
- Darker and Edgier: Tries to turn the stories into this
- Earn Your Happy Ending - This seems to be one of Grimm's beliefs. He believes that the "Happy Endings" in modern fairy tales are undeserved by the protagonists
- Evil/Mean Brit - God help you if Grimm doesn't like the way your story goes...
- Fake Brit: Roger L. Jackson is American.
- Eviler Than Thou: Grimm is this to several of the villains he encounters
- Eye Scream
- Fridge Logic: In-universe. Grimm sometimes points out some of the less logical things in the stories he visits
- Grimmification - Very literally here.
- Gorn
- Grotesque Cute - The game's visual aesthetic. Behold puppet Satan!
- Halloween Episode - Grimm turns "The Master Thief" tale into a cheesy B+ vampire movie.
- Heroic Sociopath - Grimm.
- Hide Your Children - Brutally averted. They seem to be the official Butt Monkies of the game.
- Infant Immortality - See above.
- Larynx Dissonance
- Lethal Lava Land: Grimm sometimes creates these
- Loony Fan - Grimm is a Death fanatic.
- Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Averted. Grimm is much more filthy and cynical than most dwarves
- The Pig Pen: Grimm
- Pragmatic Villainy: What Grimm thinks cats follow
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge - Grimm likes to give these to abused heroines, such as Cinderella and The Girl Without Hands.
- Spoof Aesop: The ultimate result of much of Grimm's interference is such gems like "you can't get rid of cruelty in your own generation, so why bother" and "Felines are cruel and vicious creatures who only help others out of the knowledge that they'll come off better in the long term". To show just how bad the Sugar Bowl is before Grimm comes along, these actually make more sense then the previous ones.
- Shout-Out - To many films, such as The Terminator and, more obscurely, Metropolis.
- At the end of the Golden Goose episode, Grimm plans to sail the ship the final level takes place in to Yoshi's Island.
- Even in the Puss in Boots story, after the Grimmification, he says the All Your Base Are Belong to Us meme.
- Snow Means Death - In the Godfather Death episode, Grimm's progress turns most of the areas into frozen wastelands.
- Sophisticated As Hell - Grimm is like this at times.
- Super Drowning Skills - Grimm's weakness is liquids of varying types, up to and including vomit.
- Talking to Himself - Roger L. Jackson is the only voice actor for the game.
- Larynx Dissonance - Yup, that's a guy doing Cinderella's voice.
- Too Dumb to Live: What Grimm thinks of several characters
- Villain Protagonist - Grimm himself, though he might argue differently.
- Villain Song - The Intro song.
- Walking Wasteland - Grimm brings decay and crapulence to those stories he chooses to rewrite.