The best video game fights don’t always need to have player involvement. Sometimes action sequences in cutscenes are so terrifically directed that it’s more enjoyable to just sit back and watch the show. Since there’s a lot of flexibility in cutscenes, often the best moments where fist collides are within them.
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Video game series like God of War are especially known for theirs. Of course, you’d expect nothing else with a game featuring the short-tempered Kratos as the protagonist. Such games have fights that are intense, brutal, and on a massive scale. During gameplay, these things are a little hard to recreate, though. But when it’s supposed to be during cutscenes, their choreographed sequences will leave your jaw dropped.
If you’re someone who appreciates high-octane cinematics, you’re going to want to know about the most unforgettable ones. So, from an iconic duel between the strongest from two pantheons to a silent assassin eliminating her captors, these are the best cutscene fights where characters held back no punches.
5. Tomorrow’s Display – Death Stranding 2
Death Stranding 2 introduced an interesting new character named Tomorrow. She has amnesia and is from another world, so Tomorrow isn’t sure why she exists or what her purpose is at first. However, as the story continues, we learn more about Tomorrow. And then in one mission, we see exactly what type of being Tomorrow is.
Sam is searching for Tomorrow when he ends up being ambushed by a dozen Ghost Mechs. At this point, a cutscene plays, and Tomorrow arrives to save Sam. She taps into a unique type of Tar-related superpowers and goes on a killing spree. One by one, Tomorrow defeats the Ghost Mechs in close-quarters combat, and the entire encounter is nothing short of an iconic spectacle.
The fight unfolds in a single long cutscene where Tomorrow figures out how to use her powers and then wreaks havoc with them. The action is choreographed masterfully in this scenario, and the stunning visuals make the cutscene all the more memorable. So much so that Tomorrow’s display in Death Stranding 2 is easily one of the best cutscene fights in recent memory.
4. Ifrit vs. Titan – Final Fantasy 16
You’re fighting normal-sized monsters one moment, and the next, you’re fighting a boss that’s the size of a mountain. That’s the style of Final Fantasy 16. For normal storytelling, things remain on a smaller scale. But when the game wants you to get pumped up, it puts you in larger-than-life battles against powerful foes, and it’s a constant back-and-forth afterwards.
Now, Final Fantasy 16 has a dozen of these large-scale battles, but arguably its best is when Ifrit fights Titan. Since both characters have overpowered magical beings within them, things quickly go large-scale. An hour-long fight sequence then begins. For half of the fight, players are in control, while the other half is purely cutscenes. It’s a long fight but very fast-paced.
One minute you are controlling Ifrit and dodging projectiles, and then suddenly it transitions into a five-minute cutscene where Ifrit runs up to Titan and starts attacking him. The fight has many different phases and repeatedly transitions between cutscenes and gameplay. Though once you play it first-hand, you kind of realize that the gameplay is just there to keep you invested. The fight itself is actually just a long, predetermined cutscene and one of the best ones ever made at that.
3. Quiet’s Escape – Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain
Near the end of Quiet’s storyline in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, she gets captured by enemy forces. When you go to her last known location to rescue her, a surprising cutscene plays. In the cutscene, Quiet is being tortured by the armed forces. But just as the soldiers think she’s dead, Quiet strikes, biting one guy’s ear off and slamming the other two.
Then, as Snake cuts her restraints, Quiet uses her super speed and pounces on the other enemies nearby. She breaks the bones of one foe, stabs two others, and, holding a grenade, she charges into a container filled with more enemies. The entire cutscene is a giant bloodbath involving Quiet and her captors. The result is that Quiet is the only one who walks out of that container alive.
2. Wonder Woman vs. Superman – Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
In Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Brainiac has taken over the minds of Superman and the others. Superman is his ultimate weapon of destruction, and to stop him, the Suicide Squad teams up with Wonder Woman. When the Squad fights Superman, it’s all on the player. However, the segments where Wonder Woman fights Superman all occur within cutscenes.
In one of them, Superman brutally starts attacking Wonder Woman, hurling her everywhere. He fires his heat vision at her, and Wonder Woman replies by using her kryptonite-embedded shield to block them. As Superman is fully under Brainiac’s control, he is fighting to kill. The two’s scrap spans the entirety of Metropolis and levels the city in the process. Since it’s all a giant cutscene fight, the destruction and brawl are gorgeous to look at.
As they keep on punching it out, Wonder Woman stabs Superman with a Kryptonite shard. However, this has little to no effect on Superman, and he then ends Wonder Woman’s life with his lheat vision. It’s a horrific sight, but arguably makes this cutscene more memorable. This cutscene showed how strong and insane Superman was. It set a really dark tone for the remainder of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and presented who the players had to go up against towards the end. Rarely are games able to do that with cinematics, and that’s why this segment is one of the hardest going cutscene fights of all time.
1. God of War (2018) – Kratos vs. Baldur
With God of War (2018), the storytelling took a more grounded turn. The fights in previous games used to be larger than life, but in this new iteration, that changed. Now the fights were smaller in scale but just as intense as which helped the storytelling. This change was most brilliantly portrayed in the first major fight of the game, that is, the one between Kratos and Baldur.
Much of this encounter is cinematic. The cutscene starts when Baldur arrives at Kratos’ home. Kratos asks him to leave, but Baldur doesn’t. He punches Kratos instead and is whirled into the air in return. The brutal brawl continues in Kratos’ backyard with a switch to gameplay. Then, in the cutscenes that follow, Kratos kills Baldur multiple times, but Baldur keeps on resurrecting after each death.
Given the cutscene-dependent nature of this fight, each of Baldur’s executions is made to feel intense. Everyone unanimously agrees that if this scene weren’t cinematic, it wouldn’t have been so good. But since it is, Kratos versus Baldur forever remains one of the best cutscene fights in video game history.
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Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios
