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Turn and Face the Chain (Ch-Ch-Chainses)

Like all middle-class white males, I'm afraid of chains. So when I see gigantic ones in my video games, it's definitely pause for thought. The first of which invariably is, "What the hell, why did someone make this? How did they make this?"

It's perhaps an odd bit of fantasy architecture to focus on considering how truly alien some games choose to make their visions of other worlds, but there's something oddly breathtaking about a massive chain you can run along that stretches out for yards and miles. I mean, we as a species are probably capable of making chains like that, but what reason would we have to ever need to? And that's really where the true insanity comes in: Not with the colossal chains themselves, but what equally colossal thing they've been built to chain down.

Anyway, here's a brief smattering of links to games with unusually large chains. Yep. Getting the "links" joke out of the way with early.

List items

  • Infinite Undiscovery has a doofy name, but its boundless imagination is better served elsewhere. Namely, how they've built the ol' "save the world" plot around the destruction of a series of enormous chains that are keeping the moon bound to the Earth. It's as absurd as it sounds, and as Capell is the only guy who is able to break them, he's sort of reluctantly roped into this whole hero gig. Or... chained into... this whole... I don't-

  • There's chains everywhere in Pandora's Tower. You could make the case about the figurative chains of love keeping the two besotted main characters together despite one of them having a disfiguring curse and the other's apparent lack of vocal chords, which are represented by the physical Oraclos Chain that Aeron wields and the many giant ones that stretch across the foreboding chasm named the Scar and hold an entire ecosystem of elemental-themed towers together. Turns out all these elements linked after all. Oh dammit, I promised I wouldn't make any more link jokes. Last one, honest.

  • When the party of time-travellers reaches Zeal, the magical floating Utopian continent of dreamers, scientists and anti-muggle racists, they find themselves immediately at odds with the cartoonishly evil ruler Queen Zeal. Eventually, they're required to rescue Melchior, back when he was still the Guru of Life rather than some blacksmith schmuck with a cool basement. He's trapped on a giant floating mountain held down with a chain, because that's the sort of absurdly elaborate prison Zeal deals in.

  • Ultimecia's Castle is an ominous final dungeon (aren't they all) that is apparently so packed with magical energies that someone built enormous chains to stop it floating off. Maybe Ultimecia did it so she wouldn't have to pay property tax on it. I mean, Diabolos only knows how much it would've cost per annum for something that massive in the future. What with rising inflation and all. On floating castles. Move on? Yeah, I hear you.

  • When Kratos once again finds himself in the underworld, he has to fight his way back out in a manner to which he must surely at that point have become accustomed. Only this time the big boss man Hades isn't too keen to let him just stroll out now that Growly's murdered his missus in one of those spin-off PSP games no-one cares about, and since Kratos is on a "kill all Gods" bent and would have to come back eventually anyway, he decides to overkill two birds with one QTE. Before then, though, he's scaling the vast expanses of the land of the dead via all the many ginormous chains it contains.

  • A real-life example, sort of, the large chain that historically kept Constantinople's harbor safe from invaders makes an appearance in Revelations when Ezio decides to use it to destroy a Templar outpost. He then goes on to burn a whole bunch of sailors alive with an anachronistic Greek flamethrower. "When in Constantinople", I suppose. (At least it led to a pretty sweet recreation in the second Game of Thrones book? Written years before this game?)

  • There's enormous chains underneath the castle of Walter Bernhard, the vampire currently keeping Dracula's ornate seat warm, but they're there for a reason. They're holding the equally enormous and fairly gross The Forgotten One, sealed to protect the world from its devastating power. What's odd is that the game refers to him has a man-made creation: Like the underworld isn't proficient enough at spawning these horrors that we have to make our own drippy demons?

  • Apparently, because this is the one Zelda game I haven't got around to playing yet, the many railway systems across the world of the game are actually chains built to keep some titanic evil God imprisoned for eternity? Gee, I wonder what happens at the end of that game? No, no, don't spoil it, I haven't played it yet.

  • I have been reliably informed that one of the DLC areas, Crown of the Old Iron King, has a bunch of chains you can run across while exploring a new region of Dranglaic. I mean, it also has lots of fire demons and traps and death around every corner too, but that's Dark Souls for you. Watch out for ash holes.
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