Ambiguously Human in Video Games.
- Absinthia: Lilith ia an angel-turned-human, but she still states that she will never die, making it ambiguous if she can be considered a mortal. Not helping matters is that the Halonian Knights capture her alive and never try to kill her.
- Alex Kidd usually looks like a young boy with a mean case of '80s Hair, but sometimes he has monkey-like features. This isn't so surprising since he's partially based on the Monkey King.
- ANNO: Mutationem: After Ann defeats Absalom in their first encounter, he disappears in shades of energy and is later shown speaking to C in the form of a large octahedron. Absalom's character bio mentions that he's from the Middle East, but the extent of his other form isn't elaborated enough to explain on just what he is.
- Mumbo Jumbo the shaman and Gruntilda the witch in the Banjo-Kazooie series. Both of them have human forms, albeit with very strange skin color (bright pink and green, respectively), and Mumbo's face has been magically transformed into a skull-like mask, so there's no telling what he may have originally looked like. The manual says they used to be magic partners, so they could be members of the same species; a Mage Species, perhaps? This trend is continued in the first sequel with Humba-Wumba, who appears to be a normal Native woman, but she has a magic pool and appears to be much taller than Banjo. Some people speculated that Mumbo may have been a Jinjo, but when asked about this on his Character Blog, Mumbo simply said, "Mumbo never been so insulted in whole life".
- Bendy and the Ink Machine: Henry Stein seems human at first, however he has an outright cartoonish level of durability, is immune to the corruptive effects of the ink, seemingly doesn't have a shadow, and can respawn in front of Bendy statues after death by travelling through an inky wormhole. Bendy and the Dark Revival confirms that he isn't human, instead being a cartoon clone of the real Henry Stein.
- Songbird from BioShock Infinite is a giant mechanical bird, but sketches of its designs from Burial at Sea — Episode 2 indicate it may actually be a human in a suit.
- BlazBlue: Azrael's appearance is that of a really, really muscular dude. However, his punches leave visible shockwaves, he can tear chunks of earth out of the ground and Punched Across the Room is his main gameplay gimmick. He needed a specially-designed prison where he was frozen for over a decade in cryogenic stasis, and on release shook it off like he'd had a long nap. In Act 1 of Centralfiction he can sense the presence of Phantom, only achieved by other characters by the useful of powerful magic devices or Observance, and in Act 2 he punches his way out of a Pocket Dimension. And then feels so good about it he immediately challenges the Imperator to a fight. And all of this is performed through four layers of Power Limiter, which he only uses to stop victims dying too quickly. Many characters find it hard to believe that Azrael is even human at all.
- Borderlands:
- Zer0 from Borderlands 2 is actually speculated in game to not be human. Prevailing theories seem to be on alien (he's only got four fingers on each hand), a robot (what with being utterly emotionless), or just a garden variety psycho. A DLC head seemingly reveals that there's a robotic eye under that visor... except that the name of the head is "N0t C4n0n".
- Borderlands 3 doesn't resolve the issue, but it does feature a Zer0 imposter which is revealed to be a human in a suit. This may or may not indicate that the same is true for the real deal.
- The P.E.K.K.A from Clash of Clans wears heavy armor that covers every inch of its body, which also leaves its gender unknown, if it has one. In fact, one of the hints at the game's loading screen wonders if the P.E.K.K.A is a knight, a samurai, or a robot. Its TV commercials gives it a robotic voice, though.
- Some of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of the Dead in Darksiders II are Ambiguously Post-Human. One, Draven, is said to have once been a human warrior, but he doesn't look any different from the other residents.
- Dark Souls:
- The gods are really just pygmies who attained power through the Lord souls pulled from the first flame. However the literal definition of humans in this universe is "Person with a piece of the Dark Soul inside them" add to that inconsistent references to Gwyn and his ilk being called giants (they are generally ~20 ft. tall), despite giants being an explicitly inhuman race, and it becomes unclear what precisely anyone is.
- In Dark Souls II, we're introduced to the Shards of Manus. Aspects and pieces of Primeval Man's soul who gain sapience and take the form of beautiful women who go off to seek other powerful souls to suck on. We only see the true shapes of Nashandra and Elana, both of which look very inhuman but again we run into the problem of definition. Manus was a human who was twisted and mutated by his own Dark Soul, so does that make him and his children any more or less human than the protagonist? Abyss spawn are generally counted as monsters but exactly it is that makes the Abyss different from the Dark within humans is hard to define as well.
- Darkstalkers: Baby Bonnie Hood, or B.B. Hood for short, was created to be the Token Human of the cast as well as depicting her as more dangerous, evil and Ax-Crazy than any monster. That said, she shows rather inhuman levels of strength and durability, while also possessing no sort of monster lineage like Donovan Bane. Her eyes are also said to glow white, especially when she's at her most sinister. A very common belief is that her soul being so evil somehow allows her to fight Darkstalkers, which raises questions since even a succubus has shown more humanity than her.
- Deep Rock Galactic: It's unclear if Mission Control is a human or a dwarf; with his physique and face, it could go either way, and even his lack of a beard says little seeing the miners themselves (who are very clearly dwarves) can and do go without beards depending on the class and cosmetics. The company employs both species at leisure, and neither he nor the miners ever say anything clarifying about his species (the dwarves only call him "that guy in Mission Control").
- In Doom (2016), the Doom Slayer can do things like absorb normally-fatal demonic energy without suffering any ill effects. A data log in Doom Eternal confirms him to be genetically human, but goes on to note that he's been enhanced to become something beyond human, and Khan Makyr states that he is no longer mortal.
- Dragon Quest IV: Elisa's official art indicates that she's a simple human girl, in the game she uses the same elf sprite as Rose.
- Elden Ring: Just about everyone. There are explicit Half-Human Hybrid and Rubber-Forehead Alien races in the Lands Between like the giantkin, Draconians, Onyx/Alabaster Lords, and Numen, as well as various types of mutants and godly-influenced beings thanks to the various Outer Gods and magical experiments. Some characters appear entirely human or are clearly nonhuman, but with others it's hard to tell whether some aspects like great size, odd proportions, or off-putting skin textures are evidence of them being weird humans, mutants, divinities, or bearing nonhuman ancestry.
- To give just one example, the Commoners are all seven feet tall and have gangly limbs and chalk-white skin, looking quite different from the player and other NPCs with similar proportions (like Foot Soldiers, Nobles, and other Tarnished). Are they a nonhuman underclass like the Misbegotten? Humans with scant nonhuman ancestry? Normal exceptionally-tall humans who have had their bodies warped by the Cosmic Keystone being broken? Who knows.
- A lot of the generic boss-level enemies like Black Knives (who are called Numen, but it's never made quite clear if Numen are a Human Subspecies or another race entirely), Cleanrot Knights (who also seem to have been mutated to an extent by the Scarlet Rot), Night's Cavalry, Crucible Knights, and Tree Sentinels are 8-9 feet tall and never take off their armor. This is not merely a gameplay abstraction, as other bosses who are simply supposed to be exceptionally powerful humans (like Vyke, Adan, or Sir Gideon Ofnir) are your size. Since each of aforementioned boss types are elite troops associated with a particular divinity, it's possible their sizes are results of Super-Empowering (we see that this can increase someone's size, most notably by Godfrey being 13 feet tall due to being an Elden Lord, despite being a confirmed human), but that's never stated and other explanations exist. The ambiguity extends to named bosses in a similar size range like Loretta, Ordovis, and Alecto.
- With Loretta in particular the possibility is raised that she is an Albinauric. On one hand, she is said to have searched for the Haligtree as a 'promised land' for the Albinaurics, and she's always mounted so the player never sees her walking (first-generation Albinaurics can't use their legs, and some get around this by riding mounts). On the other, she could just be a sympathetic human, she bleeds red when struck (though this could be her horse's blood, since they're a single NPC), item descriptions dismiss it as merely a rumor, and she's never seen unarmored so it's hard to tell for sure.
- The Nox are called a "cold-blooded race" and are have the internal names of MarikaLineageWoman (the Nightmaidens and Swordstresses) and MarikaLineageMan (the Monks), but it's unclear how metaphorical this is meant to be.
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: At the end of the Shivering Isles DLC, nobody is quite sure if you're a mortal, daedra, or something in-between or entirely different after you become the new Sheogorath.
- Epic Battle Fantasy series: Anna looks human and the player even sees her parents, but on death a wooden idol falls out of her instead of a ghost. This is never commented on in-game, it's not clear if the idol holds her soul or is her soul. This wooden idol also appears when she guards. Complicating matters is in the premium version of Epic Battle Fantasy 5: her Evil Player counterpart, Annabelle, is a demon that has a spider appear in a similar vein as Anna's idol when she casts something. Annabelle's death sequence has her body turning in to black spirits until the spider remains, which poofs away shortly after. This implies the spider is the "real" Annabelle, but that doesn't answer much since the other playable characters have their own counterparts that clearly are not normal humans/not a normal cat either.
- The Four Tribes from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. All four are considered human and distinct from animals, monsters, and other sentient races like Moogles or Carbuncles, though the Lilty and Yuke tribes are clearly not human in our sense of the word given that they are Plant People and bird people who later evolve into purely spirits possessing suits of armor down the timeline respectively, while the Clavat and Selkie races are more ambiguous.
- Final Fantasy VII:
- Sephiroth (who is not a reliable source) states that humans are descended from Cetra who abandoned their nomadic urge to 'settle the Planet, then move on', instead choosing to settle down. It is unclear whether he means that humans abandoned a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to focus on establishing settlements, as happened in the history of the human race in reality, or whether he means that the Cetra were nomadic spacefarers and the humans those who decided to stay on one planet. The fact that an excavated spaceship is visible in an archaeology site reinforces this idea, but on the other hand, Aeris tells us that the Cetra 'were created by the Planet'.
- The Canon Welding with Final Fantasy X-2 tells us that space travellers from Spira reached the Planet at some point. At least, this means President Shinra and Rufus Shinra are Human Aliens; at most, it means every character in the game (besides Ifalna, a full-blooded Cetra) is an alien. Which raises questions about how it is that they can 'return to the Planet' when they die...
- Final Fantasy XIV:
- During the conclusion of the 3.0 Heavensward plot, a number of your opponents begin to legitimately question whether or not you are actually another mere heroic "Spoken", as you've gone from "doing heroic things" to "performing feats that, by the laws of the metaphysics of this world, should be properly, literally impossible".
- Shadowbringers finally reveals the "Echo" is in fact the same ability that gives the Ascians their power, and the Warrior of Light in a past life was one of the greatest of all the Ascians: Azem, the fourteenth seat of the Convocation of Fourteen, the ruling body of the ancient precursors of Amaurot, and colleague of the likes of Emet-Selch. Further, your abilities are getting so close to that of an unbroken Ascian, when the protagonist reclaims the eighth of fourteen pieces of their previous unbroken soul from Ardbert's sacrifice, Emet-Selch even temporarily sees the protagonist as Azem in full.
- Byleth in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. The exact nature is never made clear, but in the Silver Snow route, Rhea reveals to them that their mother was an Artificial Human that she hoped would serve as the vessel for her mother’s soul, Sothis. Jeralt, their father, was given a transfusion of Nabatean blood when he saved Rhea’s life. Adding to the mystery, is that Byleth has a crest stone implanted onto their heart that saved them from being stillborn. All this leaves it up in the air of just how human Byleth really is.
- Genshin Impact:
- The Celestial Twins Aether and Lumine look completely human, but seem to have something that separates them from the regular human, such as being Dimensional Travelers. This is explored in Albedo's story quest, in which he experiments on the Traveler to find out how different they are from normal humans, since they can wield elements without a Vision and they can withstand corruptive influences. In the end, after the experiments, Albedo concludes that the Traveler isn't much different from regular humans; they and Paimon lampshade it, but he then points out that this result shouldn't be taken for granted, as it means Teyvat's world laws aren't hostile to them. However... after the Traveler leaves him, he muses to himself that he made a point to tell them how "ordinary" the results are, but then he notes about the strange sediment left in the potion vial from which the Traveler drank, which normally shouldn't appear. He indirectly implies that he himself has a similar result from said potion, while also noting that they are both "composed of a substance that has yet to be fully defined".
- Speaking of Albedo, he claims that he is born of "chalk", in contrast to the other humans of Teyvat who are born of "soil", and professes a kinship to the Traveler who is from another world. He also claims to have no memories of any blood relatives. One of his talents is also "Homuncular Nature". His character story mentions that while his old master wasn't his mother, he felt that his life stemmed from her. The epilogue of the "Chalk Prince and the Dragon" event has him claiming that the life force he extracted from the Festering Desire sword, which was born from a dragon cursed by an alchemist, resonates with him due to his fundamental nature.
- Klee's species is left completely ambiguous. While she has a short stature, pointed ears, and ages at a much slower rate than other inhabitants of Celestia, she is not clearly stated to not be human. Her lifespan was likely inherited from her mother, Alice, who is also Ambiguously Human and is heavily implied to have come from another world, but the reveal that Pucinella and Nahida (natives of Teyvat) also have a short stature and elf ears naturally makes which parent Klee inherited her ambiguously human traits from even more of a mystery.
- In a case of Ambiguously Half-Human Hybrid, there is the issue of Sigewinne. So far, she's only been stated to be a a Melusine with "a special body that looks more human" (regular Melusines
are a One-Gender Race of short faun-like creatures with pastel-colored fur, horn-like structures similar to the eye stalks of slugs, mitten-like hands, and stubby feet, who look inhuman enough that they can run around half-naked without anyone reacting, while Sigewinne just looks like a normal human girl with Little Bit Beastly traits), what exactly this actually means has not yet been elaborated on. If she is a Half-Human Hybrid, she would arguably need to be the result of Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action, considering melusines are only about three feet tall. And considering what has been revealed regarding the origins of the Melusine race so far, it's entirely possible that Melusines don't even procreate the biological way to begin with.
- The titular Greendog in the Genesis platformer Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude is rendered in an extremely cartoony style, while every other human that appears looks more realistic.
- Squeezed inbetween his looks, behavior, speech patterns and powers, it's quite obvious that the G-Man from the Half-Life series is not a normal human. No-one really knows what exactly he is but Word of God has it that he was designed to invoke the image of something that has assumed A Form You Are Comfortable With but doesn't care if you remain comfortable with its form.
- In Halo, many new players mistake the Master Chief, an seven-foot-tall Super-Soldier who is constantly clad in Powered Armor and never shows his face, to be a robot instead of an augmented human. This was lampshaded in Halo Legends's "Odd One Out", where everyone calls Spartan-1337 "Big Robot Man".
- It's unknown what species the humanoid characters from Jak and Daxter are, Jak himself included. They have incredibly long ears and odd hair colors but are never specified as anything other than probably human.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- In Majora's Mask the Happy Mask Salesman looks like a Hylian, but is also the Uncanny Valley incarnate. Similarly, there are the children on the moon.
- A Link Between Worlds has Rosso the miner, who looks like a Goron even though, going by A Link to the Past, his ancestors were apparently human. Though if Medli can be a direct descendant of Laruto in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, it's at least safe to assume he's genuine human as it's pretty clear evolution basically does whatever it feels like in the land of Hyrule.
- In A Link to the Past itself, the apparently human maidens were said to be descended from a group of sages who sealed Ganon away long ago. These are generally believed to be the same sages who appeared in Ocarina of Time, and some of them were definitely not human. While it's true that the sages were said to be all male and five of the ones to appear in Ocarina were female, it's still possible that the details got garbled over the intervening years.
- In Little Nightmares, the protagonist Six is absolutely tiny compared to her surroundings and adversaries, but she is the most human-looking person we see. Though we never see her face properly, she appears sickeningly malnourished and pale. The hunger pains she suffers from are abnormally painful, and she becomes so desperate that she will eat just about anything — tearing into and devouring a live rat, and even consuming other sentient beings with little trouble.
- In Little Nightmares II, the protagonist Mono appears to be human but has various unexplained abilities, including being able to absorb the glitching remains, tuning in transmissions just by touching a television screen, travel through televisions and Reality Warper abilities, banishing the Thin Man through sheer willpower and moving the TV-station closer to his location and straightening the bending buildings around him..
- In Littlewood, there's Willow. She has several traits stereotypically associated with elves: She's associated with nature, she has a forest-themed name, and she uses a bow. However, she lacks the pointy ears of an elf, which the other confirmed elf in the game (Iris) has. But she's never stated to be an elf.
- The Final Boss of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a cross between Ambiguously Human and Ambiguous Robots. Is he a human with augmentations, or, as Doktor speculates, is he an android? Eventually it's made clear that both are the wrong questions to ask.
- Zigzagged with Samus Aran of the Metroid series. the game clearly states that Samus, who was born human, has been infused with Chozo (and later Metroid) DNA, but the exact ratio of human to alien DNA is never clarified. Considering that Samus has DNA from birdlike and jellyfishlike aliens in her, it's astounding that she still looks human.
- Minecraft:
- Villagers look human, but have big noses and make weird noises, and are distinct from the more human-like player.
- Illagers look like villagers, but with grey skin. Unlike villagers, they're naturally hostile and will attack anyone.
- Witches look more human than villagers, are always evil, and happen when a villager gets struck by lightning, so it's unknown if they're human.
- Neopets: At first, the creators, known as The Neopets Team (TNT), were actual characters, certain species looked like humans, and Edna the witch was a human. Then, they rewrote it so that humans didn't exist in Neopia, but there's still the guy who runs the Tombola on Mystery Island. He looks like a human, but his face is always covered. He also cannot be a Faerie as he has neither wings nor a tail and there are no male faeries.
- From the Neptunia series: Arfoire, Linda, and to a lesser extent CFW Magic, all of whom share the otherwise unique trait of having pale grayish-purple skin and pointy ears, which is never commented on.
- In the first game, it was eventually revealed that Arfoire was once the True Goddess and eventually performed a Face–Heel Turn. However, flashbacks to when she was still a Goddess show her looking exactly the same with no explanation. In the remake of said game, the reveal is instead Arfoire was once a human hero with Power Copying abilities, which she used to copy the powers of the insane True Goddess after she was defeated by the other four heroes, and then created the four CPUs before raising them with Histoire. However, she inherited the insanity of the True Goddess as well and eventually did her Face–Heel Turn. In the True Ending, she's purified of her madness and it's shown she did an Evil Costume Switch as her true form is much different - having a normal human skin color, for starters - yet still beautiful. In the second game, which takes place in an alternate continuity, Arfoire (who in this continuity is a borderline Eldritch Abomination) is mentioned to have once been a normal human. However, once we see an artificial copy of her "human" form two games later, she looks exactly the same as she always does, complete with grey skin and pointy ears. And finally, in the third game, which takes place in yet another alternate continuity, she is never implied to be anything other than a weird looking human, and yet she is still able to transform into her One-Winged Angel forms from the previous game. All we know for certain is that this version of Arfoire isn't a goddess (which, in this dimension, are humans who gain divine power rather than being born from the peoples' faith).
- Linda's unique appearance is never commented upon, and she is for all intents and purposes just a weird looking human.
- CFW Magic is one of the aforementioned Eldritch Abomination's four Co-Dragons. However, the other three are two Humongous Mechas and what is essentially a fat cyborg dinosaur while Magic is the Token Human (?). When they die, all four apparently just vanish into thin air and return to their creator, with it being implied that they are some kind of vessel meant to contain a portion of her power, but this doesn't explain why Magic looks the way she does or what her origin is, if she was once human or if she's an artificial creation...
- From Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart, there's Resta and Moru.
- Like Arfoire, Linda, and CFW Magic, Resta has elf-like pointy ears, but they are never commented on and there is no evidence to indicate that she is anything other than human.
- Moru has cat-like ears and a tail, but it's never made clear whether they are fake or real.
- Like Moru, Brocccoli also has cat-like ears and a tail that may or may not be real. Not helping matters is the fact that unlike most other makers in the series who are simply Affectionate Parodies of characters from games that they are Anthropomorphic Personifications of the makers of, Broccoli for all intents and purposes is Puchiko from Di Gi Charat.
- Nobody Saves the World: The titular Nobody looks distinctly off compared to normal humans. Their skin is chalk-white and their eyes are black voids. They're also bald, despite several characters (themselves included) calling them a child. It's revealed later that they used to be human, but the Calamity stole their face and memories.
- In No Man's Sky, the "Anomaly" race option for player characters resembles a humanoid being in a space suit. They cannot take off their helmets, however, and their visors are completely opaque from the outside, leaving whether they are actually human a mystery. The father of the Atlas, and thus, the creator of the Lotus-Eater Machine that the entire game takes place in, is suggested to be an Anomaly, giving credence to the possibility that Anomalies are, indeed, humans.
- No Straight Roads:
- While the majority of the cast is made up of humans (with some robots, a cyborg, and a virtual mermaid thrown in for good measure), DJ Subatomic Supernova stands out as an exception. He's able to shapeshift his form by changing his size and making his arms long and spaghetti-like, his voice has an echo to it, and the small galaxy that makes up his head explodes into an Unrealistic Black Hole when the glass helmet that contains it breaks open during his boss fight. The only part about him that might suggest that he's human are his legs, which are short, hairy, and mostly hidden behind his DJ booth.
- Yinu's mother is another example. She spends most of Yinu's boss fight in the form of a towering wraith with hair that looks like dead tree branches stuck to the back of her head. She speaks in a Voice of the Legion, makes wooden creaking sounds when she moves, and only gets bigger and more monstrous looking when she gets angrier during the fight. Even when the fight is over and she's reverted to a much smaller, calmer form, she still doesn't look completely human, especially compared to her daughter.
- OFF:
- The common NPCs (nicknamed "Elsen") are all male, look alike, act strangely paranoid, can possibly transform in to beings called "Burnts" that commonly have some sort of smoke or liquid shooting from their heads, and they're addicted to sugar, which in this world is made from burning their corpses. This on top of the already-weird world they and the whole game takes place in, where "air" is smoke and all the "ground" is made out of colorful metal. Word of God is that they are still human, while the Batter and the Queen are not, which raises more questions than it answers.
- A specific character confirmed to be human by Mortis Ghost is Enoch, the boss of Zone 3, who is even weirder than the regular workers. He first just looks like a really fat Elsen with black dots on his cheeks, until he starts Size Shifting and talks with his head cut off. His powers might be from whatever made him a guardian in the first place, given how a flashback shows him getting stuck in a hole and needing the help of several birds to pull him out.
- Hugo himself seems to be a normal human baby, yet he possesses the powers of a Physical God without any explanation as to how or why.
- In Pinball Quest, the King, the player, and the other citizens of the pinball realm resemble round metal balls. However, Princess Ball looks like a human female. Whether she actually is a human or not is never specified.
- Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon has the Ultra Recon Squad, a group of "people" who come from a world beyond an Ultra Wormhole. The most notable feature about them is the fact that their skin is so pale that it's almost blue. This is due to having their natural light stolen by Necrozma in the distant past and need to rely on artificial light. It isn't confirmed if they're humans or Human Aliens.
- Chloe from Psychonauts insists she's an Alien Among Us stranded on Earth but it's never confirmed if she is or not.
- The Punch-Out!! series gives us King Hippo. All of the other boxers in the game are recognizably human, but King Hippo goes so completely against the established art style that it seems impossible for him to simply be an enormously obese Polynesian man. He has a semi-spheroid shape to his head, tiny sunken pig-like eyes, a flattened snout in the place of a nose, an enormously underslung jaw with a mouth that can open unnaturally wide, and two protruding flattened teeth that resemble tusks. The Wii version goes one step farther by giving him a series of animalistic roars and growls instead of spoken dialogue. Notably, while King Hippo reportedly hails from "Hippo Island", no other natives of that island have ever been seen in-game.
- Puyo Puyo: Risukuma was at one point stated to look like a squirrel-bear hybrid due to a freak accident, which was already strange enough given Suzuran, Ringo's world, is otherwise fairly ordinary and non-magical compared to Arle's world and Primp Town. However, this has since been retconned to Risukuma wearing a fursuit at all times with a removable head. However, no one apart from Ally knows what's under the head, and the truth is apparently "shocking".
- The Ratchet & Clank series has a few human-looking characters (notably Captain Qwark and Ace Hardlight), the most notable physical difference being they have three fingers on each hand.
- Hugh Bliss from Sam & Max: Freelance Police is described as an "albino thing that's struggling to look human". He's eventually revealed to not be human in the slightest: he's a large colony of sentient bacteria that is, in fact, struggling to look human.
- Shattered Pixel Dungeon: There are two wands (Transfusion and Prismatic Light) that operate differently when used on, to quote the latter's description, "demonic and undead" enemies. Apparently that description matches the mad prisoners and guards of the second stage, and the not-explicitly-undead Dwarves of the fourth.
- Shin Megami Tensei:
- Stephen is a disabled genius who somehow manages to show up in three of the five main games despite them taking place with large gaps in between and possibly in multiple universes, in addition to all of them featuring many disasters such as nukes and floods. In Shin Megami Tensei IV, there's also a weird distortion in his voice.
- The Velvet Room residents in Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5 are of unclear origin and are only referred to as residents of the Velvet Room. The siblings Elizabeth, Margaret, Theodore, Justine, and Caroline all appear to have the golden eyes of Shadows, yet wield personas at a far greater level than your own group. The latter two are revealed to both be halves of the same being. After overcoming their Identity Amnesia, they merge back into their original personality, Lavenza. And according to Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, she can both divide into them and merge at will while retaining all her memories.
- Shovel Knight: Due to the world being dominated by humans and other such sentient creatures, it's unclear if the knights, with few exceptions, are even humans themselves. Mole Knight has a very inhuman shape, Tinker Knight is short but doesn't have the same stature as a child, Polar Knight is large and muscular even compared to non-humans, and the titular Shovel Knight himself is guilty of this since no part of his body isn't covered in armor and you can run into an NPC that looks otherwise identical to Shovel Knight but they're not wearing a helmet, showing they have a fish head.
- Skylanders: Out of all the characters in the series, Master Eon, Kaos, and Kaossandra are the most human-looking. The most humanoid playable characters other than Kaos are Déjà Vu, who looks like she could be a human but has her face completely obscured by her mask, and Aurora, who is Eon's niece.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: For a long time, Dr. Robotnik/Eggman has been seen this way. This was especially true in early western classic continuities where he was given lots of inhuman features like red eyes with black sclera and (sometimes) a mechanical arm and he had the distinction of being the only human like creature on Mobius, a planet full of Funny Animals, making it unclear whether he was a human, a human-like alien or a cyborg. Even when the humans are all just as cartoony as he is, or when he is made more realistic-looking to fit the setting, he has caused many a raised eyebrow. While Sonic Team eventually stated that Robotnik is human and even has human relatives, some people still can't help but wonder otherwise. Especially since, in the games, he seems to have superhuman durability and he's repeatedly survived things that would have killed an ordinary human 10 times over, like falling from hundreds of feet from the sky or having his mechs covered in lava. It doesn't seem to be a case of toon logic/cartoon physics either, as unambiguous humans in the franchise have died from much less damage, including his cousin Maria who died from a mere gunshot wound. He's also shown some instances of superhuman physical strength too, given that he once destroyed a wall of ice with a single punch. All in all, his physical attributes and abilities seem to put him more in line with the anthro characters than the humans, given that humans generally don't seem to have powers (unlike the anthros).
- Soul Series:
- Voldo is seemingly incapable of speech, able to fight trained warriors using only smell and hearing and contort himself in ways that just don't seem possible, and has Vader Breath and an Undeathly Pallor. Apparently he is just a blind and insane man, but given Vercci was a Collector of the Strange in life, who knows if something that lies down in the Money Pit transformed Voldo in the years he spent down there.
- Yoshimitsu could be a man, but he claims in his story in VI that his "hatred has turned him into a demon". Whether he simply meant figuratively, or it's just a Badass Boast he uses to strike fear into his enemies' hearts, or he really believes that he has become something inhuman is left unclear. But he has several strange powers with no obvious source including Functional Magic, Soul Stealing, Flight, Teleportation, bizarre movement and Energy Absorption. And he never reveals his face.
- Spyro the Dragon: Handel and Greta, the Kid Hero secret agents in the original trilogy, look human, but display glowing red eyes in one cutscene, and both display bizarre and powerful magical abilities (for example, Greta invokes Bullet Time in one of the third game's cutscenes). The fact that the setting doesn't really have humans makes them even more suspect.
- The Star Wars Legends contains a number of species that look identical to humans but aren't. Biologists in the GFFA term these "near-humans"; one good example is the Echani who appear in the Knights of the Old Republic games.
- Street Fighter:
- It's hard to tell just who or what Q from Street Fighter III really is, or even if Q is a single person. On one hand, he's clearly humanoid, has a very noticeable case of Vader Breath, and the back of his head can be seen in character artwork underneath his mask, where he has blond hair. On the other hand, his movements are very strange and unnatural, electrocuting him reveals some very weird, indistinct things underneath that mask and trenchcoat, and if he's defeated via Cherry Tapping then he's knocked out while still standing, almost like a robot shutting down.
- Dhalsim is a balding, emaciated Indian man covered in facial tattoos and a necklace of tiny skulls and sporting blank white Prophet Eyes. He has the ability to stretch his limbs until they're as long as he is tall, breathe fire, levitate and teleport, all of which are Hand Waved with "Yoga". His portraits usually have him in bizarre, sometimes anatomically-impossible poses, and many of his alternate color schemes turn his skin tone into unnatural colors. Street Fighter IV acknowledges how weird he looks, with Dhalsim getting offended when Rufus asks if he's an alien.
- If "yoga" isn't a strange enough excuse for weird powers, Blanka was Raised by Wolves in the jungle. Somehow this turned his skin green and gave him the ability to generate electricity (which he apparently learned from electric eels.)
- Introduced in Street Fighter V, we have the wild and crazed Necalli. It isn't entirely known where he came from, but the closest we get is Aztec. Apparently he used to be a statue who comes to life and consumes the souls of strong warriors. Even other characters are confused as to what exactly he's supposed to be. Just like Q, electrocuting him doesn't reveal a human skeleton but a black silhouette.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- The Shy Guys are a sort of "tribe" of little guys so shy that they never expose anything of their bodies to anyone. They wear long cloaks, shoes, belts, masks and gloves, and when they lose their masks the first thing they do is run away while covering their faces. It's unlikely, given the Mushroom Kingdom's populace, that they actually are human, but their basic shape indicates that they might well be. In one of the Mario Power Tennis endings a Shy Guy's mask falls off, and while he's turned away from the screen poor Luigi can see it perfectly. He immediately falls over, looking like he saw a ghost, trembling in fear as the Shy Guy walks past him, seeming to imply that the Shy Guys are anything but human. The closest we get to seeing a Shy Guy's face is in Luigi's Mansion, where there are Shy Guy-like ghosts whose masks have to be removed before they can be sucked up. Behind their masks are a pair of glowing yellow eyes a la Jawas.
- Wario and Waluigi, with their Pointy Ears, pink noses, and elf shoes, look more like goblins than regular people.
- Dr. Snoozemore in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. Is he human? A relative of the local Pi'illo people? Some unknown human-like species? It's extremely hard to know, and it's never even hinted at in the game itself.
- The residents of New Donk City, from Super Mario Odyssey, look like regular, realistically proportioned humans. However, they are never referred to as human by the in game brochure; they're just referred to as "New Donkers", in the same manner that the seal-people of the Snow Kingdom are called "Shiverians", and the living fork-people of the Luncheon Kingdom are called "Volbonans". That, coupled with their Non-Standard Character Design makes them a bit suspect when compared to (probable) humans like Mario, Peach, and Pauline.
- According to an internal document from the 1990s, Mario himself isn't a homo sapiens, but a "homo nintendonus"; however, it was likely intended as a joke, and the document itself contains a lot of outdated information. Per Word of God, circa 2017, Mario is human, though this hasn't stopped some real-life people from speculating otherwise.
- Back when the Brooklyn backstory for the Mario Bros. was still recognized enough to be mentioned in Mario 64's Player's Guide, Peach and presumably Daisy had the oddity of being human by all indications and yet ruling over short mushroom men. Stranger yet, if Toadette (one of the decidedly not-human Toads) grabs a Super Crown, she'll turn into a being that looks near-identical to Peach. What little has been told of Rosalina's backstory combined with her shown abilities makes what she is open to question too.
- While we're on the subject of short mushroom men, there's no indication in the original Super Mario Bros. that the "Mushroom Retainers" who serve Princess Toadstool/Peach are anything but humans in mushroom-shaped hats; Toads didn't become a race unto themselves until later in the development of the canon. With the 8-bit graphics, it's impossible to say, but if Peach's court was originally composed of humans, it would at least make her less of an oddity (although it would raise just as many questions about the Mushroom Kingdom itself).
- Pyro from Team Fortress 2, who is always hidden behind a gas mask and fireproof suit, and only speaks in muffled mumblings.
- Terraria:
- The Lunatic Cultist appears to have a humanoid shape and size, but he has a Voice of the Legion effect and can pull off things that even an endgame-tier player character is incapable of doing. He is also completely covered head-to-toe and his face is masked, so the player does not get a glimpse at what he looks like. It is not known if he is a human that is simply well-versed with eldritch magic, a once-human that turned in to something else, or if a different entity that happens to be the same size as the human characters.
- Monster Clowns may spawn in Hardmode Blood Moons, and it is not clear if they are humans in clown makeup or their own sort of species. They do not appear to be undead or have any kind of "inhuman" traits that cannot be explained by clown makeup, and humans enemies do exist in the game in the form of the Pirate Invasions. They are also simply called "Clowns," a profession instead of a species, and not something like "Clown Zombies." But they only appear in Blood Moons, and Blood Moon-exclusive enemies otherwise have a blood and/or zombie theme, with Clowns appearing to have neither. The Blood Moons also cause monsters to become more aggressive and there is very little explanation as to why a human would bomb people in clown makeup. The Bestiary says that where they come from is unknown.
- Kanna and Anderson from Three the Hard Way appear just as human-like as the rest of the party, but the former is a hundred year old alchemist belonging to a mythical ancient order, while the latter seem to have a close tie with the ageless Kaibutsu, and is very much implied to be Really 700 Years Old as well. Other cast members describe them as "weird" and "intense", and Vance frequently remarks that he wouldn't be surprised if those two are actually not human.
- Touhou Project usually distinguishes youkai from humans in some way, physically and/or mentally, but it's also made clear that the line between human and youkai is a lot more blurry than most realise, especially in Gensokyo where humans and youkai have existed in unusually close proximity for centuries.
- Magicians have a natural affinity with complicated magics but humans can use them with sufficient training, aside from not needing to eat they're quite similar to humans, and some Magicians were human (Alice, Byakuren) before they performed some alluded-to ritual.
- Marisa is noted to be more like a youkai than a human, and much of her behavior (isolating herself from humans, collecting magical artifacts, intense studying) are implied to be part of the ritual for human Magicians to transform into youkai Magicians. She insists she's human and is immensely proud of being able to hold her own in a land where Everyone Is a Super despite this, but it verges into Suspiciously Specific Denial territory; for example in Forbidden Scrollery (which is all about how the enforced separation and antagonism between humans and youkai is precisely because it takes the slightest nudge to go from one to the other) her title is "Extremely Ordinary Magician". Reimu seems to consider her human, but it's also established that Reimu is far more friendly with youkai than someone of her position should be.
- Sakuya is classified as human, yet her time and spatial manipulation abilities are far beyond the capabilities of any other human (as well as being very similar to the abilities of a Lunarian character), and characters have noted her to be far more mature and worldly than her apparent age would indicate.
- Not even ZUN knows whether Mononobe no Futo is human, with her profile listing her species as "Human? (a taoist who self-identifies as a shikaisen)". More broadly, this applies to Miko and Seiga, fellow shikaisen who essentially faked their death in such a way that the Celestial Bureaucracy fell for it, gaining immortality in the process.
- Related to the above are hermits. Most are humans who get super-powers out of a strict training regimen. But there do seem to be some physiological changes, given that they act as Rare Candy to youkai. And they might not all have started out as human. The first hermit character introduced, Kasen Ibaraki, is very strongly implied to be an oni who's only pretending to be a hermit and this is eventually confirmed to be the case.
- ZUN's also unsure whether Satono and Mai are human, as they get a similar "Human (?)" species entry to Futo. They were human when they were children, but are becoming less and less so thanks to Okina's magic energy. What exactly's happening to them is anyone's guess, but they still retain their human personalities. In The Grimoire of Usami, Yukari explains them as being stuck in the space between human and youkai.
- Lunarians. They're humans that moved to the moon to avoid kegare, so they no longer die of natural causes, but the profiles always list their species as "lunarian". All of the known ones are based on Shinto gods, which just makes things more confusing.
- Undertale
- Sans the skeleton is a case of ambiguously monster. Like his name suggests, he is a living skeleton, making him stand out from the others, but while the underground counts many wacky monsters, he still is far different from them: he teleports constantly, seems to be able to stop time and breaks all the game's rules during his battle. Sans' death is as ambiguous as he is: when hit, an unexplained red liquid spills out (it may be blood, ketchup, or something else) and while every other character disappears in front of the player, he dies offscreen.
- His brother Papyrus is another example: while he doesn't share his brother's powers, he is more aware of them than he lets on. Also, while all main monsters (even Flowey) have an explained origin, both of them apparently came from nowhere and settled themselves in Snowdin, making them stand out from the rest of the cast even more.
- The Fallen Child/Chara fits too: Physically, they're identical to the player character, but seems to inhabit some sort of void in the game itself and has the ability to harness a human SOUL by bargaining for it.note As one goes further and further into a Genocide Run, they seemingly take more and more agency away from Frisk (the player character) and the player themselves, leaving it up in the air exactly what they are if they have that sort of power over the game.
- Vampyr: Usher Talltree physically resembles an normal Indian man in a turban, but possess an uncanny sense of knowledge about Jonathan and other Londoners and can actually No-Sell any Mesmerize attempts. These sort of abilities are unheard of in this established setting and Jonathan suspects that Usher might belong to some unique and exotic vampire subspecies. With that said, Usher can still be drained like any other civilian in the game.
- Warframe: It takes a long time before we have any real idea of what the Tenno are. The warframes they use look like Powered Armor, Vor claims they are Energy Beings, Infested call them "our flesh", and there are hints in Codex entries of a strange Void accident. Turns out it's all of them. The original warframes were humans intentionally mutated by the Technocyte Plague into powerful forms, but went violently insane in the process. Separately, a ship was lost in the Void, and the children who survived gained strange powers, including existing in a state between matter and energy. Using a process known as Transference, the children controlled the warframes, becoming the Tenno.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: This is... complicated. First off, the definition of "human" has expanded to include all the races from the first and the second games, except for the Nopon. This means that all the Machina, High Entia, and Blades are now considered "human," even though in previous games they were explicitly different. The problem is that it's not clear if these people we see actually are Machina, High Entia, and Blades. Lanz has Machina metal skin and Eunie has High Entia head-wings, but they both grow at normal human rates instead of being Long-Lived, and Lanz clearly needs food instead of just subsisting on water and ether. Likewise on the other side, Mio has a Flesh Eater Blade's core crystal and a Gormotti's ears, but she grew up like a normal human, and is very strongly implied to be Rex's daughter with Nia, which was supposed to be impossible in the previous game. Sena is clearly a Blade, complete with a normal core crystal and ether lines, but she grows up normally even though she should have been Born as an Adult immortal. The only "normal" humans are Noah and Taion, and while Noah can easily be a Homs (who are just humans with different ether affinities), it turns out Taion has a core crystal hidden under his clothes, so he's a Blade Eater. The most common fan theory is that the races have interbred enough that everyone has normal human lifespans now, but the games never say outright. Future Redeemed makes it clear that Aionios started only one generation after the events of the first two games, making it less likely that crossbreeding is the answer—while still providing no alternative explanation.
