A YouTuber recently posted a video hilariously pointing out how absurd Red Dead Redemption 2, merchants can be literally robbed and murdered before returning to their shops a few days later with no memory of the event and perhaps nothing more than a bandage wrapped around their wounds.
For these reasons, video game merchants work best when the game is not meant to be grounded in reality. While Cuphead, circumvent this inconsistency by simply having one merchant who remains in the same place for the entire game and has a set number of items to sell.
In hear more about a wooden club, he is instead immediately sold the club for 100 gold. When he tries to return it, the club is purchased back by the merchant for a measly three gold pieces.
The rest of the video depicts something that goes for virtually every NPC in Skyrim, not only the merchants. When the player gives up on purchasing anything and instead picks up an apple, the merchant immediately becomes hostile, accusing the player of being a thief and killing him. Once the player dies, the merchant muses that the thief “must have gone” and reverts back to his original voice lines. In a real-world setting, this level of short-term memory loss and violent tendencies would be cause for alarm; however, when playing Skyrim, it’s just par for the course.
Of course, none of this means that Skyrim is a bad game. In fact, as the game’s tenth anniversary approaches, it remains one of the most beloved open-world RPGs ever made. The fact that the game is riddled with hilarious bugs and exploitable glitches only adds further to the game’s charm. Skyrim has been the source of hundreds, if not thousands, of videos and memes over the years, and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future.
Source: Alasdair Beckett-King
