One of my favorite game tropes is a sequence that’s just chasing someone. This seems to most often be a shorter sequence that’s not usually too dramatically tense, and often about getting something back that was stolen from you. Really any thin excuse to go chase a guy for a while works.
I was reminded of this when I remembered the excellent music in Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Intergrade’s chase section, titled “The Runaround”, which comes in five separate parts! That’s a lot of custom music for a chase!
Love a chase sequence. To get the thread started a bit here’s a basic but foundational chase scene for me, and one that serves as a bit of a tech/movement flex on Nintendo’s part. Chasing this dang rabbit in Mario 64.
Shenmue has a couple really good chase sequences. The QTE isn’t my favorite mechanic, but they’re well-shot, and they often offer a new perspective on spaces (and their denizens) that have been navigated more slowly and more deliberatively before, like this one in Dobuita.
Celeste really nailed its chase sequences, they force you to speed up your game and prove your mettle. Thematically it works really well in the context of the game, as it forces you to backtrack and lose progress up the mountain or escape from the diversions to re-focus afterward.
Sounds like a great thread for bringing up some Driver 2 !
This is not the best chase sequence in Driver 2, but it’s certainly the most memorable. This mission resulted in innumerable fails and so much frustration, I had to borrow a memory card and transfer a save from this dude at school who was able to beat it. We had nothing in common other than our love for this game.
So I’ll always remember this mission being fun until it wasn’t, and also serves as a reminder of personal gaming shame because I had to let someone else beat it for me.
The one where you chase the kid in Shenmue 2 is the single best use of a QTE in video game history.
I get that the question is framed around being the chaser, but there’s also some good ones about getting chased. The early sequence in the motel of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a pretty intense one, and there’s a few neat ones in A Plague Tale (even though both cases are “make one mistake and you’re dead” for the most part)
being chased I think is the modern iteration of this segment a la Uncharted 2 getting chased by the huge truck. It puts the focus more on the set piece than on the actual mechanics of chasing, which is why it seems a little more prolific in the AAAA space
