When it comes to ludonarrative dissonance, I usually view it from the perspective of premise.
Sure, it's a bit weird for Drake to be killing hundreds of human beings given the tone of the game, but the narrative premise is that there are bad guys who will kill you if you don't kill them, and the most logical way to tackle this problem is to kill them first.
If the premise is that you need to accomplish something, and the easiest way to do it is to be discreet and avoid violence when possible, and the gameplay is about causing a ruckus and killing lots of people... there better be some characterization that makes at least some sense out of the conflict there.
See, the thing about ludonarrative dissonance in UC games is that the dissonance isn't inherently tied to the gameplay. There are plenty of stories out there that downplay the degree of desctruction and carnage that the protagonist causes. It can be seen even in the original Star Wars trilogy, where we're not even supposed to view storm troopers as human beings. This is less problematic because it mirrors the viewpoint of the main characters. They don't view stormtroopers as humans.
That's fundamentally different from a game that uses narrative to communicate something and completely contradicts it with gameplay. It's not like UC is passing off themes of the value of life onto the audience.
IMO the worst offenders are usually games that present a narrative with a clear sense of urgency and then make the game about wandering around casually and interacting with the world in a no pressure capacity. It drove me crazy when I was playing Xenoblade 1 and the gameplay was encouraging me to fuck around and help random NPCs with the most inane shit (which was enjoyable to be clear) and then all of a sudden I'd trigger a cutscene and the narrative would be like "OH NO! This poor defenseless orphan is about to get mauled by Doctor evil robot X!" And I'd just be like "....okay, well I'm going to finish collecting this guy's dirty laundry from the swimming hole and then I'll get right on that"
A lot of it has to do with framing, and I think it's safe to say that most writers who are hired to work on video games don't understand how to make it work, or just don't care because they write the story so early on in the process without any knowledge of how the game is going to play. Yasumo Matsuno was very good about this in FFT. The game's story always has a sense of importance to what is going on, but everything is framed as though it's going to happen in the nonspecific "not too distant future" so that it usually doesn't feel inappropriate that you're not making a beeline for your next destination.
I think the worst offender in a game I played recently was probably FFXV. It failed to fit the gameplay into the narrative in a truly impressive manner. It's bad enough that the "road trip" angle didn't even get communicated by the meandering, back and forth errand nature of the gameplay, but even when you look past that, no part of the narrative made any sense whatsoever out of the aimless exploration that the gameplay encouraged. They didn't even design most of the quests with any sort of connection to the main story. You literally put your "my dad was killed in an invasion and I must defeat the empire" debacle on hold to dig for frogs in the swamp.
FFXIII was probably just as bad. The entire game is hitting you over the head with this "oh no we're being chased by the FBI and we've got ticking time bombs strapped to our arms and we don't know how to get rid of them" tone, and then you arrive on Gran Pulse and the game is like "wanna dick around exploring the wilderness?"
It's incredibly frustrating to me because it's not by any means difficult to match the narrative to the gameplay. The only reason it doesn't happen is if developers either don't care, or are just too incompetent to pull it off.
