Serious Business/Video Games

• Pokémon battles are so important in its world that people, including kids as young as 10, are allowed to wander around, doing nothing but Pokémon matches.
  • In the Generation IV games, it is revealed that a Pokémon (Arceus) created the universe. And you can catch it!
  • The Pokémon TCG games for Game Boy take this trope to a ridiculous extent, creating an entire civilization apparently based around trading and battling with Pokémon cards.
  • The first generation Pokémon games featured many characters who didn't speak of Pokémon or the geography of their native town. One guy said something along the lines of "What? Are you expecting me to talk about Pokémon? Not everyone does that, you know."
    • "I like shorts! They're comfy and easy to wear!"
    • "I'm a pretty cool guy. I have a girlfriend!"
  • This one has at least some justification: if every sentient, living thing in the world that wasn't a human was a potentially-dangerous monster that could be domesticated through the use of careful training, don't you think that a large chunk of society would be based upon that? It'd be no more unusual than real-world biologists, zookeepers, and pet owners. Also nods in the game indicate that Pokémon are Pocket Monsters and are willing to maul anyone who steps outside of town (or presumably, gets on their master's bad side). Why use a gun when you have a giant fire breathing lizard that flies and can cause earthquakes at will?
    • The anime, various mangas, and even the games themselves to a lesser extent, also show Pokémon being used for other tasks that have nothing to do with battling. Fighting, Ground and Rock Pokémon are used in construction tasks that involve heavy lifting and/or digging into the ground, Fire Pokémon are involved in glassblowing and blacksmithing, Water Pokémon are used in firefighting, Poison Pokémon serve as living garbage disposals, Electric Pokémon are used to provide backup sources of energy when the main power in a building goes out...
    • It does seem very remarkable though that the idea of ritualized Pokémon battling is so heavily ingrained in society that it supplants inter-human violence even in criminal context.
    • Archaeological evidence in the game's universe shows that Pokemon battling is thousands of years old, predating most other forms of warfare. The bigger surprise is that they bothered inventing guns.
      • They actually didn't - the Fantasy Gun Control is invoked in Pokémon Black and White.
• Similarly, in Mega Man Battle Network series, the entire world revolves around the NetNavis, glorified sentient computer programs, and their fighting; there's classes in the public elementary school about fighting viruses with your Navi, and such oddities can be found online as coffee shops and in the sixth a fish stick vendor where you spend "real" ingame money on treats for these Navis. The series alternates between treating Navis other than Mega Man and Bass as sentient or not.
  • Though technically, in regards to the virus battling classes, the state of online networks in the Battle Network world does actually make viral infections serious business: utilities and appliances getting shut down, information getting stolen, vandalism, etc. So having Virus Battling classes there amounts to basic self-defense courses here... but the coffee and fish sticks are still pretty silly.
  • Saving the world often involved logging into a computer or surfing the Internet. Some of the games tried to amp up the danger factor by introducing a final boss whose power had a direct effect on humans, but in the end, logging in and running an anti-virus program ("virus busting") was all it took to defeat it.
• In the fan-made RPG Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, basketball is Serious Business. In the dystopian Twenty Minutes Into the Future, basketball has been outlawed after a "Chaos Dunk" destroyed New York, and almost every basketball player in the world was killed in "The Great B-Ball Purge". Hilarious if only because of how serious everyone is about it, and surprisingly fun to boot.
  • Lampshaded in-game with the opening dialogue box "Warning: this game is Canon."
  • Don't forget the author filibusters if you want to save. Remember, they're vidcons, not console videogames. And don't even get started on vid-cons.
• In the more recent Final Fantasy games, some sort of minigame, usually a collectible card game, is played worldwide. In the most blatant cases, it's possible to challenge someone to a match in the middle of a battle or other disaster.
  • Especially blatant in Final Fantasy VIII and X. In the former after time has been compressed, you can still find members of the card-gaming club from Balamb Garden in the blasted wasteland that is left, and in the latter you can use the save-crystal deep inside of the Cosmic Horror Sin to go play Blitzball.
    • The combination of blitzball being Serious Business and a growing distrust in the Church of Yevon means that you can still play Blitzball after the Church has declared your party guilty of murdering a Maester, treason, practicing witchcraft without a license, jaywalking and every other ecclesiastical crime Bevelle could find. One of the Luca Goers even comments that treason means nothing in the sphere pool.
  • You get this poem in X-2 after comleting a certain side-quest. involving monkeys.

Their world was veiled in darkness. But now, as monkey love blossoms and grows a monkey-full future surely lies ahead. This is their home. They will protect it. Now, and always.

• Custom Robo. Who'd think people fighting with robotic dolls would be big enough to have interscholastic and national tournaments and a black market dealing in illegal custom robo parts? Sometimes, you can challenge any old folk on the street with a custom robo cube in their hand, and challenge them repeatedly before going off to a big tournament or some other plot-mandated event.
  • Subverted in the Gamecube game. In the beginning it looks like the world has a Pokemon level of affection for gathering Robo parts and fighting with them (Hell, even your elderly Landlord has one and is an adept fighter) but once you go outside the city and learn about Rahu, the invisible being of mass destruction and how it nearly wiped out all of Earth's life, but was only able to be stopped since it thought a children's toy (the first robo) was a threat and fused with it, making it able to be hurt and repelled, while not destroyed fully. Those dangerous guns on tiny robots and the society's focus on learning to fight with them make perfect sense once you consider they were all secretly being prepared for battle for when Rahu showed up again so the last bastion of humanity stood a chance.
  • It gets worse than that. Custom Robos are apparently vital to police work.
    • Custom Robo's seriousness is somewhat legitimate. Bear in mind, that Custom Robos are miniature mechas armed with repeating energy blasters and highly explosive pod and missile launchers. Unsurprisingly, they are stated to be highly dangerous to their surroundings. Also, some of them are equipped with stealth camouflage, and others can transform into high-speed fighter jets. Their pilots control them remotely from up to thirty feet away, psychically, and combatants apparently see non-robos in Bullet Time. This essentially transforms average humans into very small, hard to hit, highly destructive robo warriors that no ordinary human could combat. That sounds like a recipe for disaster if their ever was one. It's no wonder therefore that the police force resort to combating renegade robos with their own.
    • And in addition, the above characteristics make Custom Robos ideal for exploring harsh environments hazardous to humans, such as the sea floor or the vacuum of space, as seen in the research facilities in Custom Robo Arena.
• Need for Speed: Underground and Underground 2 started off giving street racers enough money to buy import sports cars, but Most Wanted and Carbon finally went to over-the-top extremes showing quite a bit of street racers with enough gold to buy German supercars won from street racing alone!
• While court trials are Serious Business in real life, the Ace Attorney games elevate this to a new level with how over the top its cases get. And while being a lawyer is quite a respectable career in real life, they're practically superheroes in the gameverse.
  • Superhero lawyers? What a crazy concept.
    • Crazy indeed.
  • And let's not forget the hotbed of murder and intrigue that is the children's television industry of Phoenix Wright. Deadly serious business.
  • Spirit Mediums, too, seem to take it a little too far. But what mother wouldn't be an accomplice in a murder framing her niece just so her daughter can be the family's successor?
    • Speaking of Spirit Mediums, Phoenix's assistant/sidekick Maya considers anything she's interested in to be Serious Business. The sad part is, she usually finds at least one other person who wholeheartedly agrees with her, leaving Phoenix to wonder if he's the Only Sane Man.
  • In Apollo Justice, stage magic.
• Similarly, Trauma Center achieves this not by making serious business out of something trivial (lifesaving surgery really is serious business) but by taking its seriousness way over the top.
  • BUT ALIENS HAVE TAKEN OVER HIS BODIEEE!
  • HUUUUWHAAAAAAA??!??!?!?
  • I NEVER KNEW BEING A SURGEON WOULD BE SO COOL!
• Osu Tatakae Ouendan: Never, ever let anyone tell you that male cheerleading is not the most epically serious thing you can imagine. OSU, BITCHES.
• The rather unknown party game Poy Poy treats throwing stuff at each other like the biggest thing ever. Okay, said stuff is things like big rocks and rockets but still...
• Deus Ex Invisible War. Templars. Majestic. Illuminati. Nanites. Aliens. Nothing to bat an eye about... But competing coffee franchises? SERIOUS BUSINESS!!!
• The bonus-chapter of The World Ends With You parodies that: In this Alternate Universe, everything revolves about the game Tin Pin Slammer, which is actually just a tiny little mini-game in the main storyline. In this Alternate Universe however, Tin Pin Slammer's power is so great, it actually "managed" to make Neku become an hopeless optimist, instead of an Ineffectual Loner. (Count the times Neku's only two smiling Cut-scene-sprites are used in the main storyline. Now count how often they are used in the bonus chapter) Optimist-Neku also parodies the protagonists of shows like Yu-Gi-Oh!, by holding monologues a lá "Oh Tin Pin, how happy you make our world!" or "All these different people can only be united by one thing: TIN PIN SLAMMER!!"
  • Let's not forget that the reason an important party member was absent for Week Three is because he fled to this alternate universe and wouldn't leave because he was having too much fun playing Tin Pin Slammer. And this guy is essentially god.
• In Super Robot Wars Original Generation, the virtual reality mech sim "Burning PT" is rather popular, enough that the championship match Ryusei participates in is held in a packed stadium.
  • Never mind the fact that the whole thing was a Government Conspiracy to discover Newtypes Psychodrivers in the first place.
• Nintendogs: hundreds of people will turn up to watch dog competitions multiple times per day, every day, and are clearly paying to attend each time since how else would the generous prizes be funded?
• In Touhou Soccer, the Touhou cast will unleash their world-shattering attacks for the sake off scoring a few goals.
  • Canon material gives us Double Spoiler, where Aya and Hatate have an epic duel over... who has the better newspaper.
  • Faith is serious business.
  • Mima doesn't have legs. That totally gives her an excuse to use magic. But really, that's an indestructable soccer ball...
• Apparently the boys and girls of the Puyo Puyo franchise are very much aware that they're playing a PUZZLE GAME and it's Serious Business to them. Because apparently, if you lose, you die. Mostly. Heck, any puzzle game with a storyline can have this happen. Just finish Panel De Pon with at least one loss on your record and watch.
• In the later games of the Tony Hawk series, the ones with actual stories, this is pretty much a given, but Tony Hawk's American Wasteland takes the cake. First off, skating is a means of expression that Da Vinci himself could never fully comprehend. Second, it also gives you superhuman strength, speed, and jumping... power and allows you to slow the passage of time around you. Well, if you undergo the Training From Hell provided by Old Master Master Zen, that is. Not only do the Black Widowz, the most powerful gang in Los Angeles, rule the streets with skating, but the fearsome Skate Club domestic terrorist group uses their moves to level entire buildings.
  • Somewhat humorously, though, it's made pretty clear that BMX (which you can also do in the game) is really not that big a deal; the guy who teaches it to you is a spastic nobody who pays you to get lessons from him.
• Donkey Kong Country Bananas: SERIOUS DAMN BUSINESS!
  • Truth in Television. Just ask Guatemala.
• Inverted in Avalon Code, where the Judgment Link, a sacred ritual for purifying monsters, is played as a sport.
• Jak X gives us Combat Racing. Sound like a good thing to watch on your day off? It brings in more than its home city's entire yearly budget. Crime lords are willing to kill to ensure their bets pay off. And according to G.T. Blitz, it could become bigger. Sure, it's not as basic as a card game, but come on, a sport based around driving in circles shooting people is this big?
  • Yes.
    • Well, Twisted Metal seems to be serious business for Calypso, just because he's a Magnificent Bastard. It's serious for the competitors because Calypso's a Literal Genie who'll grant them a wish if they win. It's serious for everyone else because there's a chance they'll get gunned down by crazed clowns in ice cream trucks.
• Apparently in Artix Entertainment's Sci-fi RPG Mechquest, piloting giant robots is such serious business that your characters actually GO TO SCHOOL FOR IT. Although how important the school is doesn't seem to be explored...
  • Which means, for the most part you're just blowing up other Mecha with your mecha. The whole "university" thing seems to be more of an Excuse Plot than anything else, but DAMN if it isn't an awesome one.
  • However, if you think about it, it makes sense: There are many dangers in space that can come to the planet and destroy it, using this mecha technology, like pirates, dimensional aberrations, crazy fanatics, a giant evil organization with hundreds of years that has a armada strong enough to seize a planet in few days, and some cute bear ghost. So a school like that is actually a logical option, if you need something to backup the useless sabotaged armada of your planet.
• In Dragon Quest IX, Innkeeping is serious business. One of the sideplots involves this organization called the Syndicate of Pubs, Inns and Taverns that regulates every inn in (almost) every town to make sure they're up to scratch. Every year, they hold a competition called the Innys for the best inn in the land, with the main judge being the KING. The innkeeper who wins this award earns a massive gold trophy and earns the title of InnCredible Inntertainor. One of the main characters, Erinn, comes from a long line of Inncredible Inntertainers and is expected to continue this proud tradition. When her innkeeping friends discover this, they start bowing at her feet. If this isn't Serious Business...
  • ...then the fact that there's an Innkeeping MAFIA definitely is. I'm just as confused as you are.
    • Well it is an RPG world. The only industries that could possibly be more important are potters and blacksmiths.
• Hot drinks are an in universe serious business in Iji to the Tasen and potentially the Komato. (It's ambiguous in the later case as all of their advertisements are incredibly over the top.) Tasen logs describe it as "plasma hot" and state that you shouldn't be able to tell if you're drinking it or have been hit in the face with a plasma cannon. This is not a hyperbole: the cups have to be made out of what they use to armor their elites and the threat of running out is listed above the Komato, a genocidal race that currently doesn't know their location.
  • Psht. The drink cups aren't made out of Elite armor, they're made of the stuff that's used to plate Komato Sentinels. To elaborate, for the price of a Sentinel you could arm FOUR Annihilators. And it's still probably more efficient. Repeat, their drink cups are made of armor that halves all direct hitpoint damage and ignores armor damage ENTIRELY. Yeah, it's serious business alright.
• Similar to the Final Fantasy minigame examples, there's a minigame in Last Scenario that is extremely serious business. Of particular note is Saraswati, who shows up all over the world in the process of trying to learn how to play Hex better, and who gets increasingly creepily obsessive and insane as the quest continues. When you last talk to her, she has been possessed by the spirit of a sorcerer who used the game as a Soul Jar, and flips out and tries to kill you. But even without taking her into consideration, everyone is always willing to play Hex, no matter the situation.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, trains are Serious Business. You begin the game as a train engineer apprentice on graduation day, a ceremony that involves the princess essentially knighting engineers. It gets pretty ridiculous soon after, where part of a track disappears and the characters are at a total loss as to how to proceed, even though it turns out the place you're trying to go to is a trivially short cave away (apparently no one's heard of walking anywhere). Partly justified in-universe as the train tracks turn out to be a Cosmic Keystone that keeps the Sealed Evil in a Can imprisoned.
  • Train tracks are serious business if you hope to provide a developing kingdom large enough to require a rail system with trade and transportation. Though Princess Zelda could stand to learn how to delegate the engineer selection process.
• In The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, nearly everyone you meet — regardless of whether they're in deadly peril or even already dead — is eager to "fuse Kinstones" with Link: match up broken halves of supposedly luck-altering ceramic circles, which Link finds in bushes and under rocks. Admittedly a successfully fused Kinstone usually does place a new treasure chest somewhere or open a new path, which might justify the almost universal interest... if anyone besides Link ever went looking for the results of successful fusion.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, masks are Serious F-ing Business. The entire culture of Termina seems obsessed with masks, and they also have a huge mask-themed festival every year where everyone wears masks. In fact, a traveling salesman who sells only masks comes around for the occasion. There is even a bar in Termina that, instead of a membership card, requres all customers to wear a cow mask for service. Then there is the couple's mask, which is extremely important as it is needed for two people to get married. If something happesns to the mask, they don't get married! The most serious example of all, of course, is Majora's Mask itself, which was crafted centuries ago by a tribe of, most likely, dark wizards to be used in ancient hexing rituals by invoking the power of the sinister, melevolent, demonic god, Majora. When the skull kid wears this mask, it takes control of him and causes the moon to fall on Termina, killing everyone in sight! Yeah, that's no Halloween costume.
  • Although, technically, Termina is a mirror of Hyrule, so there might be a reason why everybody obsess over masks. But considering how many magical masks there are they might have a good reason.
• A gag reel in Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater has Snake and The Boss playing rock paper scissors. She treats it as serious business to the point where The Big Lebowski would be envious. Namely: Nuke beats everything.
• Kirby Squeak Squad: In-Universe Example: Kirby's cake was stolen. There's your story. Now go get your cake back.
• In the Professor Layton series, puzzles are serious business. I dare you to name one scenario that doesn't involve a puzzle in some way.
  • It made a bit of sense in the first game, where the citizens of the village were all robots who were programmed to be obsessed with puzzles. Why excellent puzzle-solving ability is proof that you are worthy to take care of the old mayor's daughter is another matter.
    • Even if it is somewhat justified, early on in the game, someone was just killed and someone gives you a puzzle to solve.
    • ... and none whatsoever since then.
• Mortal Kombat was one of the earliest videogame examples. Control of the multiverse depends on a kung fu tournament, one where you are allowed encouraged to kill your opponent.
  • Fighting games in general are set in this type of universe. Whether you're just looking to have some fun, insulting a girl at a bar, or one step away from taking over the world, one word will determine what happens next. FIGHT!
    • Guilty Gear had May fight Faust because she thought he was bald. He wears a bag on his head.
    • No one seems to care about the demigods fighting in the middle of their/street/factory/parade. Heck, they'll even cheer them on, sometimes.
• To at least one character in Suikoden 3, bath houses are Serious Business. He even has a rival.
• Averted in Canvas 2. Only the artists themselves and a few others take the world of painting that seriously.
• Meteos. It's a puzzle game with little colored blocks falling down, and you have to match them so they launch into the sky, and before they fill the screen. The story? Those things are meteors that are actively destroying planets, and sending them back is the only way to survive. One of the endings does a double inversion of this trope though: After meteo is destroyed, the remaining planets decide to play Meteos as a simple sport. The denizens of the planets are very serious about this sport, though.
• Played with by Inazuma Eleven - soccer is frequently treated as Serious Business, yet our protagonist Endou tends to continually insist that soccer should ideally be, above all, a fun and enjoyable sport. Even when there's an Alien Invasion trying to take over Japan using soccer to demonstrate their power. And then there's Inazuma Eleven GO, which takes place in a future where Japan has degenerated into somewhat of a dystopia precisely because everybody takes soccer way too seriously. Save for the protagonists who are trying to turn things around, of course.
• Several of the side jobs in No More Heroes. Collecting coconuts, mowing lawns, and pumping gas has never seemed so important. "Coconuts are more valuable than human life!"
• In the Dead Rising series (especially Dead Rising 2), many of the psychopaths (i.e. crazed human killers and the bosses of the game) are people who take their jobs very seriously. This ranges from a mailman who carries around a shotgun and continues to deliver mail during the zombie apocalypse to a crazed cannibalistic chef who attacks you with a frying pan and kitchen knives, to a mall security guard who hangs a man for "stealing food" during the zombie outbreak.
  • It should be noted that these aren't just average Joes who thought that the end of the world was no reason not to clock in to work. These are people who saw people eating people, which then in turn got back up and ate other people. These guys aren't just determined mailmen and hard-working mall-cops. These are normal people who witnesses the apocalypse firsthand and went batshit insane because of it.
  • Certain psychopaths avert this. The Vietnam Vet had a flashback when his granddaughter was eaten, and thought everyone was either vietcong (zombies) or civilians to be interrogated (humans). He returns to normal after you defeat him, apparently now aware of what he had done, and seems genuinely sorry for it. Those who suffer traumatic experiences in wars do tend to have flashbacks that overtake their personalities, and it can get quite serious with them.
• Lampshaded by Poppy in League of Legends:

"Fighting is Serious Business"

• In Ghost Trick, the wildly popular character Missile is a Pomeranian who gives an epic speech on how being a dog is Serious Business. [[spoiler:He then proceeds to save people's lives.
• The LBX, which are part model kits and part functioning robots, in Danball Senki. For what are supposedly kids' toys, top of the art tech is dedicated to them, completed with Ace Custom and Super Prototype. And almost everything is solved through LBX battle, including an assassination.
• Dustforce is basically Serious Business: The Game. Your main characters are ninja janitors in a world where excessive filth can turn people, animals, and random objects into monsters.
• Summon Night's Swordcraft story series treats weapon crafting like this. Apparently, it's considered dishonorable for a Craftnight to fight with a weapon made my someone else, even in life or death situations.