No, I can't. How can it fit with the world and the narrative and not fit with the tone, which is a direct function of the world and the narrative? Your example doesn't help. How does an "intricate tactical war" plot even look in a rhythm game? How do these mesh? How do concepts in general mesh? This is a much more important issue than just juxtaposing those concepts, be they "CnC", or "linearity", or "tonal gameplay", etc. Putting these next to each other in a sentence means nothing unless you tease out their components and interconnections.
Tone is more a function of presentation than world and narrative. Some movie parodies work on this pretty well, and change the world not at all and the narrative very little if at all, but make it much more amusing by this. Make a character a bit more clumsly, give them an eccentric body language, whatever. You can even mock a narrative just with the presentation bye tweaking how lines are said, not the writing, and the camerawork. Dramatic close ups for things that aren't that dramatic, like "Sorry, we're out of Coke" *EPIC ZOOM IN*. You're either limiting your imagination in some way or are oblivious to an understanding of the meaning behind gameplay choices if you can't imagine that such a scenario exits, I assume the former based on the language you use. You're thinking like a competent game designer, that's the problem.
And you're missing the point. You're saying: "How does an intricate war plot even look in a rhythm game? How do these concepts mesh?". I'm going to explain how to mesh them such that every component has a narrative justification in it's elements, but do not fit the tone of the story. First of all, any time a unit on the battlefield moves, you need to press a specific button combination in time. This a: doesn't evoke anything that does exist in the narrative, there is a tactical battle, the units are moving, and the battle itself is even fitting within the serious complex narrative, and all of the things used in the battle exist in the narrative, and b: the 'concept' is justified, not tonally but the gameplay mechanic itself, by saying that certain battles are decided by understanding the rhythm (so, guerrilla warfare has a totally different pace than like marching into each other, sometimes you strike quickly and frequently, sometimes you take an exhaustive approach, and this is how the society views battles). So, it's all justified, and the game goes: cutscenes, battles, cutscenes, battles, ect. Now nothing narratively is incorrect about the moves and such used in the battle, and the battle system is even justified by in game lore to some extent. However, instead of being the commander making decisions in this battle and getting to feel like you're part of the intricate narrative, you're pushing buttons in a rhythmic time. The system might be fun, in the lazy reflex challenging way, but it won't fit with the tone of the story. Therefore, it will be a complete misfire. Now, if you say that's not well designed, you're right if you mean it doesn't fit, but the only way it doesn't fit is tonally, it does fit narratively and in the world, it just doesn't have the right tone. It's like a director who doesn't know about the visual language of movies, and is filming a romantic comedy in all dutch angles or something stupid. Take out the narrative, put the game on iPhone with a reskin that makes the armies with some liscensed characters or something and you'd probably still have a good time waster on your hands.
Also, I can define tonal gameplay, CnC, and linearity pretty well, and I am teasing out these concepts in relation to each other, so that seems like an evasion from considering the points brought up. I just don't believe that non-tonal gameplay is by definition bad gameplay. I mean arguably many jRPGs have way too complex gameplay for the nature of their narratives, even if the gameplay's enjoyable,, so there's probably a real world example of non-tonal gameplay that is fun.
I will do no such thing
It's quite enough for anyone here to come across this and then try and think of a single challenging gameplay experience that retained its aesthetic atmosphere and immersion after even 5 repeated, frustrated attempts (with no save-points close by), and that didn't turn into a tactical minmaxing challenge or into a boring slog that made them quit the game. I'm quite confident the statistics are on my side, no matter how much you cry "'Tis a fallacy!" at me.
You're appealing to the reader so you always win in someone's mind, which is just an evasion from the discussion. Seriously, that's just hack tactic to do, and it makes
you look silly, and I doubt you're really that silly, so I don't know why you feel the need to do that. It's as simple as rewording "I'm sure many people know of and have had experience with this and felt the same way, even if I don't have a statistic". It looks a lot better than just saying "I'm confident the statistics are on my side" without actually bothering to check, so if it's about how others who read this will perceive you I'd think you'd be better off not using the term "statistics" at all, but whatever.
Anyways the point of Survival Horror isn't the actual challenge but the possibility of death, that's more the point from my experience. It's a reverse tinkerbell effect that works in the games favor: I know if I die it's bad, therefore I act more carefully, therefore my chance of dying goes down. They make it much easier though, such that if saving wasn't limited, you might find it a bit too easy, but the save system helps make the monsters more terrifying. Just like the limited availability of healing items isn't the hugest problem normally because you don't get hurt very badly often, and mixing healing items helps further. There's a key balance of actually delivering once or twice on your fears but actually not most the time so the game is still fun. And, from my experience, it works. And it makes sense from a gameplay perspective, that's why I've explores the Survival Horror genre enough to own games like Overblood (not that that was a great game or anything, but it was interesting).
The fact of the matter is your whole argument falls apart when you make sure a game is easy enough that you probably won't die 5 times in a row. And regardless of whether the
majority of people who played those game dies 5 times,
many people didn't, and they continued to by Survival Horror games, and it created a genre. There's a reason it existed, and I'm sure it's not because people thought the games were shit.
