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Left: most people think Mario hits blocks with his head. Right: Mario actually hits blocks with his fist.

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  • A3 community often assumes that Homare Arisugawa is not physically fit, which snowballs into a plethora of Common Knowledge.
    • While he passes out after carrying a few boxes in his [Hotel Compass] backstage and one of the 5th anniversary live has him fail at blowing up a balloon and being called weak, Homare actually has a number of impressive physical feats and is very well-versed in ballroom dancing. To name a few, his ballroom dancing skills and experience play a major role in Dance with Butterfly, in which he coaches Winter Troupe for the play by bringing them to a gym to do core training. SK∞ the Infinity × A3! also reveals that Homare has a naturally strong core, which allows him to ride a skateboard well.
    • In the same vein, his lifestyle is also often assumed to be sedentary and indoors due to his job as a poet. However, as Moment of Winter magazine reveals, Homare is mainly driven by the desire to seek inspiration, and it shows in many of his stories. He loves going for a walk for inspiration and there are many instances in which other characters bump into him out there. An example is in Misumi's [Mankai Party] backstage, in which Homare is seen wandering outside at night to create a VLOG. He also tells Yuki that it is important for artists to get out there to get inspired, in Yuki's [Sewing Chronicle] backstage. In one of the Elegant Vacation minichats, he asks Tsuzuru to swim with him because he wants to find inspiration.
    • When Elegant Vacation teaser first came out, many outright denied the possibility of the one in the CG to be Homare for this reason, due to the person in the CG having quite a bit of pectoral muscles although the preview gave enough hint of Homare's hair, and the word "elegant" is often associated with Homare. A common assumption is that Homare is lanky with little muscles due to the aforementioned common misconceptions, but as the event art shows, he is quite built and toned, which is not as far-fetched as it seems considering his physical feats and activities.
    • Tasuku Takato is often assumed to be unable to cook. While Tasuku is rarely shown to cook, [Blazing Beachside Passion] minichat details on this: Tasuku can cook, but chooses not to because he believes there are better cooks than him. As Bridegroom Battle Royale shows, he cooks well enough to pass the cooking section of the showdown. Elegant Vacation also has him play the role of a chef.
  • Animal Crossing:
    • In many interpretations, jokes and fan artwork, Tom Nook is depicted as sleazy and greedy businessman who forces player character into mortgages, with the game itself being jokingly described as "debt simulator". While some of his sleaziness holds true in early installments, Tom underwent major character development as the series progressed, becoming one of the nicest characters in the whole ensemble (coming as far as buying free coffee for random townspeople and consciously purchasing junk items from the player at a loss). Similarly, the "debt" part of the game is often exaggerated, as loans in the game don't have actual deadlines or interest, and player can easily pay off debt at their own pace or even ignore it entirely. Even his "forcing" the character into mortgages is greatly exaggerated as the player character even in the first game clearly went there looking to buy a home but was woefully unprepared with only 1,800 bells: if anything Nook bailed out an unprepared kid who would have otherwise been homeless.
    • Many people state that the villagers used to be much more rude and cynical in the first installment of the series and became nicer as the series progressed. This is only partially true, as the villagers' visceral treatment of the player only applies to the various overseas localizations of the game, which seemingly felt the need to spice up the original Japanese script. The villagers are much more polite in the original Japanese version. Later games in the series wouldn't take as much liberties regarding the overseas localizations and thus have translations that are much more loyal to their Japanese counterparts.

  • Assassin's Creed: Unity's development director said they couldn't include female playable characters because they were too hard to do. What they actually said: they wanted to include female characters in co-op, but it was impractical to "double their workload"note . This was immediately strawmanned to the better-known version, and people are still pissed off at Ubisoft over it... though the game did still turn out to be a buggy unfinished mess. However, the actual stated reason garnered criticism from within Ubisoft's other teams, including the model rigger for Assassin's Creed III: Liberation, who stated that roughly 80 percent of Aveline's animations were Connor's and he felt like it wouldn't have been as big of a task as stated. It also didn't help that the same director stated that the multiplayer characters were all canonically the game's lead, Arno Dorian, implying that Arno somehow had multiple copies of himself in specific missions.

  • Batman: Arkham Series:

  • Battletoads: Everyone knows that the speeder bike section at the end of level 3 (Turbo Tunnel) is the hardest part of the game. Look up any article about the all-time hardest NES titles, and you can bet your last nickel that the game will be on or very near the top spot, and the infamous Turbo Tunnel will be singled out for its insanely high difficulty. Ask anybody who has beaten this section, however, and they will readily vouch that fans who believe this to be true are just the ones who never got past it and gave up early. While it is indeed a drastic increase in challenge from the previous two stages, Turbo Tunnel is only the game's first Difficulty Spike; subsequent levels like Karnath's Lair, Rat Race, and Clinger Winger totally blow it out of the water in terms of ridiculous (and often very cheap and unfair) difficulty.

  • Many BlazBlue fans would assume that Ragna's out to free the world from NOL's tyranny by declaring that he'll take them on single-handedly. So yeah, Ragna is some sort of Robin Hood for the people oppressed by the evil empire NOL, which is about as vile as Palpatine's Empire, right? The more immersed player would gladly point out that Ragna is just minding his own business that is the destruction of the Cauldrons that NOL is operating instead of "doing it for the people" and he just plows through anyone in his way. He couldn't care less about the other normal people who are fearful of his power (but he wouldn't attack them out of the blue either). Oh and the NOL? They more or less aren't just your typical evil power hungry empire, their job in regulating the Armagus was actually important to the world tethering to near-destruction; snuff them out and there'll be a high chance that some madman takes the wrong Armagus and unleashes hell for everyone else. So as 'tyrannical' they became, they were actually a Well-Intentioned Extremist police force. They just had the misfortune of not knowing that one of their enforcers, Hazama, is actually Yuuki Terumi who's manipulating the whole organization for his own gain and is on the top of Ragna's shitlist.

  • The Blazing Star "YOU FAIL IT!" screen appears when you time out a boss, yes, but most people who have not actually seen the screen first-hand think it's part of a Non-Standard Game Over. In reality, timing out a boss will simply take you to the next stage; the screen is just the game's way of telling you that you lose your end-of-stage bonuses for taking too long. Not helping this is that the most common screenshot of this text is of the Stage 3 boss, which is set during re-entry into the nearby planet's atmosphere, thus making it look as if said planet is about to be destroyed by Colony Drop.

  • Bomberman Act:Zero is thought of by some fans as Konami forcing Hudson Soft to implement a forced Darker and Edgier tone. In fact, Konami only published the game outside of Japan, with everything fans dislike about the game (up to and including the Dear Negative Reader response to the backlash) being Hudson's doing; it was in part Act:Zero's failure that caused Konami to buy out, then dissolve Hudson in the first place.

  • Bubsy:
    • Later printings of Bubsy 3D included two positive quotes on the cover, which due to the game's extremely negative reception, lead to the popular claim that both blurbs were obviously invented. While the EGM quote is a classic case of Quote Mining (it was from a preview of the game and the magazine's actual review was far more negative), the 93% score and "Gold X Award" from PS Extreme is no invention: PS Extreme is a real magazine and really did give ''Bubsy 3D'' the award and score in its October 1996 issue◊­. Furthermore, the Gold X Award is actually the PS Extreme equivelant of a B grade, with the A grade being Platinum.
    • Some people also think that Bubsy 3D's atrocious controls and camera were because it released before Super Mario 64 (which codified a lot of rules for movement and camera control in 3D platformers.) In reality, it released over a month after the game. Series creator Michael Berlyn even saw a demonstration of Mario 64 at the Consumer Electronics Show a good 10-11 months before the release of Bubsy 3D and realized how terrible their game was in comparison, but Accolade refused to allow the game to be cancelled or delayed.
    • For that matter, even the belief that Bubsy 3D was an immediate critical disaster. The game actually garnered So Okay, It's Average reviews from most of the gaming press upon release, including a mediocre-but-not-terrible 5.5/10 score from Gamespot. 3D platformers were still an unproven genre at the time, so reviewers treated the game with kid gloves. It wasn't until the genre was well established and hindsight kicked in that the game developed its current reputation as one of the worst games ever made.

  • Bungo to Alchemist: That Ozaki Kōyō hates being called old, judging by the "who are you calling granny" line. He actually hates being misgendered, as clearly shown by the latter half of that line ("I'm quite obviously a man!"); he openly acknowledges he's elderly in his other lines.

  • Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia: A number of commentators have claimed that Albus defeats Dracula at the end instead of Shanoa. This is a misinterpretation of what happens during the final battle. Shanoa uses the Dominus Glyphs to finish off Dracula, but doing so kills the user by draining their soul. Albus's spirit sacrifices himself to pay the cost instead. To sum up, Shanoa kills Dracula; Albus stops her from dying in the process.

  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night:
    • The game's game over screen contains the quote "Let us go out this evening for pleasure. The night is still young." Most people make the obvious assumption that this is a quote from Dracula, but it's not — as near as anyone can tell, it's original writing created specifically for this screen.
    • One of the most iconic lines from the game is "What is a man? A miserable pile of secrets!" Except it's not original to the game at all, nor is its strange syntax the result of a poor translation; it's actually an uncredited Andre Malraux quote. It's also a case of Beam Me Up, Scotty!, as the actual quote is "[...] A miserable little pile of secrets!"
    • And so is Alucard's quote in the ending: "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." That's not an Alucard-original quote, it's actually from Edmund Burke (though that's also a misattribution, the actual quote is "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.")

  • Chrono Trigger: Many fans believe that one of the jurors during Crono's trial will either always vote Guilty due to a bug, or can randomly decide to vote Guilty even if you did everything right. While there is a bug affecting his vote, it's possible to get him to vote Not Guilty if you return the little girl's lost cat without talking to her first. The bug is that if you talk to her, a flag gets set that tells the juror to vote Guilty (so you get penalized if you know her cat is missing but don't help her look for it), but actually finding and returning the cat doesn't unset the flag. Adding to the confusion, if you talk to the girl and then find her cat, she'll praise you for helping her find her cat at the trial instead of scolding you for ignoring her... but the juror will still vote Guilty anyway.

  • In Command & Conquer: Red Alert, it is often assumed that each of the campaign endings lead to different timelines in the franchise - the Allied ending to Red Alert 2 and the Soviet ending to Tiberian Dawn. The latter case contradicts the fact in that Nod is a faction that works with subterfuge in Tiberian Dawn (and that only gained relevance when they were pioneering several Tiberium-based technologies), when a canon Soviet ending would have Nod as a superpower that controls all of Europe. Furthermore, a pitch of the original Command & Conquer 3 involved a mission where Yuri was flung into the past thanks to a Chrono Vortex, showing that the Allied ending leads to both Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Dawn, with the timelines splitting happening some time later than Red Alert's ending, and the Soviet ending is entirely non-canon.

  • Conker's Bad Fur Day: The most well known version of the game's N64 box art, known for its comically large M rating, was never actually printed, but was leaked online. The final release of the game ultimately shipped with a regular sized M rating on its box art. Despite this, the leaked version of the box art is usually assumed to be the official box art, even to the point of becoming part of the lore surrounding the game. The original game sold so poorly that it makes sense, it's very rare to see the real box art out in the wild.
  • Due to the first game's now iconic cover art, Contra is often associated with Predator since it shows the characters mirroring the same poses Arnold Schwarzenegger makes in the movie. However, the arcade version of Contra actually predates the movie by four months.
  • Crash Bandicoot:
    • Fake Crash is said to have been created by Naughty Dog as a joke based on a low-quality bootleg Crash toy from Japan. However, the truth is that Fake Crash was actually created for a series of Japanese commercials for Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back. The toy aspect of the story comes from when Naughty Dog founders Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin were shown a prototype for a Crash Bandicoot plush doll made officially by Universal, not a bootleg. The plush was so bad and Off-Model that it reminded them more of Fake Crash, which is what spurred them to put Fake Crash in Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped as an Easter Egg.
    • It is often said that Naughty Dog sold the rights to the Crash series following the release of Crash Team Racing, except they never actually owned Crash in the first place. The actual rights to the series were always owned by Universal Interactive Studios, while Naughty Dog were the developers who were tasked with making the games. Universal Interactive later became Vivendi Games, and Vivendi was later bought by Activision-Blizzard, which is why Activision now owns the rights to both Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon. Crash Team Racing was published by Sony, but to Naughty Dog's surprise Universal allowed them to use Crash.
    • Tawna, Crash's girlfriend, was infamously dropped from the series following the first game, and didn't resurface until many years later in the franchise's history. Depending on who you ask, the blame for her disappearance either lies on a marketing director at Universal, who took offense at Tawna's sexualized design and forced them to remove her, or Sony Japan believing she was inappropriate. The truth is a bit more complicated than that. There was indeed a higher-up at Universal who didn't like Tawna, but she only succeeded in getting Naughty Dog to tone down Tawna's outfit from the concept art, a midriff-baring tank top, booty shorts and high heels, to a more modest t-shirt, regular shorts, and sneakers. Naughty Dog weren't happy with the forced redesign, and willfully dropped her after the first game, then created Coco to fill the role of Crash's female sidekick.
    • It's been said that Coco was conceived by Takamitsu Iijima, character designer for Ape Escape, based on a drawing he did of Coco wearing a more tropical themed outfit, similar to what she wears in Crash series character designer Charles Zembillas' initial sketches of her. However, this has never been documented or corroborated as actually being the first drawing of Coco, and was likely drawn after Charles Zembillas had already created her.
  • Cuphead: Although it's a common assumption that Cuphead and Mugman are children, this has never been explicitly confirmed. While the writer did refer to them as adolescents, this still doesn't preclude the possibility they're 18 or 19. The novel "Cuphead in Carnival Chaos" does portray them as elementary schoolers, but it's not confirmed canon.
  • In the wake of Cyberpunk 2077's notoriously shaky launch in 2020, with developer/executive controversies surrounding its Troubled Production emerging out of the woodwork, one common claim about the game's development was that it had begun all the way in 2012, with many using it to express bafflement at how a game with an 8-year development cycle could be so unstable. This claim is actually quite misleading — CD Projekt did publicly announce Cyberpunk 2077 in 2012, but that was merely the year when they contacted Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith and opened up preliminary discussions of an adaptation. By all accounts, the actual pre-production of the game didn't kick off until late 2016 following the studio's completion of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, effectively half the alleged length and more in line with an average production time for a triple-A game (some developers have argued that given the game's ambitions, they didn't have enough time).
  • A lot of people "know" that Daikatana has mostly robot frogs and mosquitos as enemies. In fact, said enemies only appear in the first couple levels (which make sense as it's a swamp/toxic waste dump). That said, those levels are among the worst parts of the game. As such, many players quit before they ever make it past those levels, thus adding to the misconception.
  • Danganronpa
    • It's well-known that in early drafts of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Hiyoko was planned to survive the Killing Game, while Fuyuhiko would have been a victim. Many fans, putting two and two together, assume this meant their roles were directly swapped — that Fuyuhiko was originally intended to die in Chapter 3, but that Hiyoko was killed off in his place because the creators didn't want Peko's death in the previous chapter to be a Senseless Sacrifice. However, as detailed in the game's artbook, the second victim of Chapter 3 was supposed to have been Nekomaru, while Fuyuhiko would have been transferred into a robotic body due to inoperable injuries he sustained by interfering with Peko's execution, and would have died in a later chapter. However, as the creators felt that turning Fuyuhiko into a robot would lessen the impact of Peko's death, this role was instead given to Nekomaru in the final game, and since this meant he could no longer be killed off in Chapter 3, Hiyoko was ultimately chosen to die in his place.
    • It's often claimed that The Reveal of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is that the Danganronpa franchise is entirely in-universe fiction, and all the characters are just psychotic Otaku who willingly signed up for the killing game. Except, while the game initially presents this as the truth to the player, the actual epilogue heavily implies this isn't actually true. Right before she dies, Tsumugi declares herself a "cosplaycat criminal" (or "copycat criminal" with "cosplayer" are furigana in the original Japanese), implying the imitation crimes were her real talent the whole time, which Shuichi goes on to suggest could mean that everything about the Danganronpa world is Real After All. The prologue strongly suggests these suspicions are correct, as the cast prior to being given their Fake Memories are shown as a group of Ordinary High School Students who were kidnapped as part of the killing game, talk about Ultimate talents as a real thing, and are suggested to recognize Monokuma when the Monokubs introduce themselves. Word of God confirms that Tsumugi is indeed meant to be viewed as an Unreliable Expositor, and that the ambiguity about the truth is meant to tie into the game's Central Theme of what truth and lies mean in the context of the human experience. Also, even if everything Tsumugi said were true, it would only mean that V3 was set in a separate fictional universe in which the previous games did not happen; it wouldn't invalidate the previous games' setting as its own fictional universe.
  • Dark Souls:
    • Being a game with such murky lore and encouraging speculation, there are plenty of out-there fan theories surrounding the game. One, however, which has no basis whatsoever in the game's canon is the idea that the Lord Souls consist of the Light Soul, the Life Soul, the Death Soul, and the Dark Soul. Of the Lord Souls, only the Dark Soul is ever named anything, the others are merely referred to as "Lord Souls" or "powerful Souls". A fair number of fans, however, seem to think these other Soul names are canon.
    • Seath betrayed the ancient dragons by telling Gwyn of their weakness to lightning, right? Actually, it's unclear. The game only states that Seath the Scaleless betrayed his own, not what he did to betray them.
    • A defining element of the game's world is that all of the bosses are severely weakened from their primes, right? Well, not really. This only explicitly applies to the Final Boss and Nito. The vast majority of the bosses are as strong as they've always been and are fought in their natural forms (such as all of the demon bosses, Manus, Kalameet, Havel, the Sanctuary Guardians, Priscilla, Gwyndolin, Sif, Moonlight Butterfly, and the Iron Golem). As for the rest? They're explicitly powered-up from their past selves (Pinwheel has been sapping Nito's power, the Four Kings went from regular people to superpowered abominations, Ornstein or Smough power up by consuming the other during the phase transition, and Seath gained immortality and crystal breath that he didn't have before).
      • A specific example is Artorias. It's commonly claimed that you fight him at his weakest because he's been corrupted by the Abyss and has had one of his arms broken, preventing him from using a shield along with his sword. The latter point is true, but the former is pretty clearly debunked by the game itself; his second phase is marked by him charging up a Battle Aura of Abyss energy, after which his speed, damage, and aggression all increase. It's straightforwardly making him physically stronger, just like it does to everything else it corrupts, from the Four Kings to the regular citizens of Oolacile. He also gains AOE and ranged attacks that he wouldn't have without being corrupted.
    • Some believe that Sen's Fortress is a mistranslation, and that its real name is "The Fortress of a Thousand Deaths" or something similar. This is mostly based on the Japanese word for "thousand" being "sen". In fact, "Sen's Fortress" is a direct and literal translation of the area's name, with "Sen" being written in Japanese like a name, not a number.
  • Many more people are familiar with Death Stranding's esoteric first trailer than the actual game itself. Because of that, many think that the scene where Sam wakes up naked on a beach, with a crying baby that's connected to him with an umbilical cord is an actual thing that happens in the game fully literally. In reality, it's more like a dream or a vision, and not an actual event that happens in-universe, and has to be treated more like a metaphor.
  • If you've ever had discussions on which giant robot is the strongest, you've probably heard Demonbane mentioned. It's common knowledge among people who talk about it that "Elder God Demonbane" is omnipotent and grows so large it pops the universe. The second one is partially true: a form of Demonbane in the prequels does grow so large it pops the universe. However, that was War God Demonbane. Elder God Demonbane, in its one and only appearance, does not grow beyond its base size of 55 meters. Furthermore, Elder God Demonbane is never suggested to be omnipotent in the franchise: for one thing, it may be capable of defeating Outer Gods like Nyarlathotep, but it does not possess the means to destroy them. It has to settle for sealing most of them away, and Nyarlathotep is immune to even that! The only reason it was able to seal up Azathoth was because, well, Azathoth's a sleeping mindless idiot, and if it ever woke up and actually tried to break free of Demonbane's prison, it's stated that it could do so without problems.
  • Doki Doki Literature Club!: Yuri is frequently imagined to be a Huge Schoolgirl. Her official height is listed as a mere 1.65 m, or 5 feet 4 inches, roughly average for an 18-year-old Japanese girl. Then again, when compared to Sayori (1.57 m, or 5 feet 2 inches) and Natsuki (1.49 m, or 4 feet 11 inches), she can give this impression.
  • Donkey Kong Country
    • The classic SNES trilogy was and sometimes is still lauded for demonstrating the console's 3D capabilities, when it is in truth just as 2D as Super Mario World. The game's visuals are not real-time rendered in 3D, but instead are sprites taken from digitized snapshots of prerendered models created separately on a computer, with the fluid motions simply being a matter of plentiful in-betweener frames (which didn't need to be individually drawn like most spritework) used for animation.
    • It's sometimes claimed that in the country games, the "Kaptain K. Rool" and "Baron K. Roolenstein" alter-egos of main villain King K. Rool were turned into separate characters for the Japanese translation of the games. Actually they're just disguises in the Japanese version too. K. Rool's trophy in Super Smash Bros. Brawl makes an odd statement about "his brother Kaptain K. Rool", but it's simply an error, and far from the only one in the game's trophy gallery.
    • K. Rool always hated bananas and solely stole Donkey Kong's banana hoard to starve to death in Donkey Kong Country is commonly cited as concrete canon. In actuality, the manual makes it clear that K. Rool and the Kremlings wanted to eat the bananas, which is further shown by many banana peels lying in the stage for the Final Boss with K. Rool. Similarly, other games in the series, particularly Donkey Kong 64, show the Kongs eat more than just bananas. Notably in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, Diddy doesn't answer K. Rool's banana ransom for DC, not because they'll starve, but because the banana hoard means so much to Donkey Kong. The only game where K. Rool claims he dislikes bananas is DK: Jungle Climber, which is not only by Paon instead of Rare, but also takes place long after the Donkey Kong country trilogy.
  • Doom:
    • The original game, contrary to popular belief, does not take place on Mars, but on Mars' moons of Phobos and Deimos. The third game and the reboot both do, though.
    • It's commonly claimed that the Japanese Sega Saturn version of Doom has "much better" performance than the other regional releases of the game. This is a myth: framerate analysis by Digital Foundry's John Linneman proves the Japanese version is identical to the North American release in term of performance. Likely, the rumour originates from the fact that the first person to make the claim was comparing the Japanese release to the European version, which, due to not being properly optimised for the PAL video standard as was common at the time, would run jerkier and slower than the NTSC-based Japanese release. The Japanese Doom is "better" than the other versions in that it has the multiplayer (not present in the original North American release) while retaining the NA's version slightly better framerate, although most claims of its superiority are specifically about its performance.
    • There's a common misconception that the berserk powerup (a black medikit that heals you up to 100 health if you're anywhere below that amount, and massively increases the damage your punch attack does) in the first 2 games only lasts for as long as the screen has a red tint (about 20 seconds), which is likely fueled by the fact that all the other powerups with some visible effect outside of the status bar (invisibility, invulnerability and infrared goggles) having a time limit. It actually lasts until the end of the level or until the player dies. It also increases the punch damage a lot more than most players think (you can usually kill a pinky demon with one punch).
    • The first 2 games also have a powerup called the soulsphere (a blue orb thing that increases your hp by 100, and, unlike the berserk pack, can raise your health over 100 to the maximum of 200). The message when picking it up is "Supercharge!". As such, many players think the powerup itself is named that. An understandable mistake, considering every other powerup, weapon, etc in the game says what it is in the pickup message. It certainly doesn't help that the only place that calls it the soulsphere is the manual.
    • The second half of the Final Doom expansion, "The Plutonia Experiment", has developed a reputation for being mostly "slaughter maps"—that is to say, maps with an insane number of enemies where the main challenge is just to kill them all. This isn't actually the case—in most of Plutonia's maps, the enemy count is, if anything, lower than a lot of its fellows. Only the Brutal Bonus Level Go 2 It (which features 206 monsters) fits the description. What makes Plutonia stick out is mainly that it's far more willing to throw the game's stronger enemies at you, with multiple Boss in Mook Clothing enemies like the Archvile and especially the Revenant showing up as early as the first map, often in gangs and in areas designed to play to their strengths. Part of the reason for this is that Plutonia is famously considered the hardest official set of levels in Doom, and the default assumption for a hard Doom level is one stuffed full of monsters until the player drowns in a tidal wave of lead.
    • It's commonly believed that the PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and smartphone versions of Doom and Doom II, which all launched as an infamous Porting Disaster, was actually a secret Video Game Remake that was built from scratch on Unity. In actuality, it's still based on the Doom codebase and merely uses Unity as a wrapper.
    • The hanging corpses seen in Hell levels are often assumed to be taken from real photos of hangings, namely the hangings of Benito Mussolini and his followers, due to how photorealistic they look. According to Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud made the hanged corpses using G.I. Joe figures.
  • Most online parodies of Double Dragon depict Abobo talking in Hulk Speak, despite the fact that the only time he ever talked that way was in Battletoads & Double Dragon, a non-canon crossover which got Machine Gun Willy's name wrong and had a made-up villain in the form of the "Shadow Boss" (which was actually Jimmy Lee's title in the first NES game).
  • Dragon Age II: Varric has a habit of nicknaming the people he travels with.
    • Most assume his nickname for Fenris is "broody"; however, Varric only calls Fenris "broody" once (as a modifier for "elf") and brooding only comes up in conversations between the two of them twice. Varric's actual nickname for Fenris is simply "elf" and the mistaken belief comes from fans flanderizing Fenris' character.
    • The fandom at large also mistakes Varric's nickname for Aveline as "Red". While Varric does try to address her as this, she tells him no, making her the only companion to not have a nickname.
  • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES): The belief that the citizens of London are intentionally impeding Jekyll. Only Billy Pones and the Bomb Maniac are deliberately antagonistic. The other citizens are just going about their normal lives and Jekyll either gets caught in the crossfires or the citizens push him out of the way trying to escape the Bomb Maniac.
  • Duke Nukem 3D: Seeing those poor girls trapped in cocoons throughout the game makes many players assume that the aliens' primary goal is to abduct all our women and use them for breeding purposes. It isn't. Reading the manual reveals that they are actually Planet Looters who plan to blow Earth up — by drilling a tunnel through the planet's crust (it is heavily implied that's what's happening in first episode's finale, hence all that lava and stuff) and then firing their Kill Sat into resulting hole — so it would split into many smaller pieces which would be easier to harvest minerals from. As for why the aliens are stealing Earth women? Apparently, they're just dicks.
  • Pokey's parents in EarthBound (1994) are considered abusive by many, not helped by Nintendo of America toning down what actually takes place upstairs when you return him and Picky to their house. While the Minches are the last thing from a functional family, all Aloysius actually does in Mother 2 is spank and reprimand the two boys for disobeying a simple order he and Lardna had given them (obviously for their own safety); while the former action isn't well-looked upon these days, it was a common form of corporal punishment in 1994.

  • Many Elden Ring players have cited the circle of large stone swords sticking out of the ground near the starting area as a memorial to Kentaro Miura, the creator of Berserk, who died relatively shortly before the game was released and who Hidetaka Miyazaki has noted as an influence; it's not uncommon for players to take screenshots of their characters at the circle or to leave messages near it to "pay respects." This is pure speculation, and no one on the development team has stated it to be such. Not only that, but the circle by the starting area is only one of several such monuments that appear throughout the game, none of which appear to have any particular significance. Although swords planted in the ground as gravestones do appear in Berserk, the ones in Elden Ring bear a much stronger resemblance to the sculpture Sverd i fjell in Norway, in keeping with the Norse themes seen throughout the game.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • While it's often claimed that Tamriel was based on the developers' homebrew Dungeons & Dragons setting, several former employees have stated that it was actually made specifically for Arena, though bits and pieces of it were lifted from their various D&D campaigns.
    • In Morrowind, the idea that the Sixth House would have been joinable but was not finished or was removed is a prevailing claim in the community. While there are some in-game suggestions about the idea of joining, as well as code snippets visible in the Construction Set (and utilized by modders for various "Join the Sixth House" mods), the developers have been coy when asked and have only implied that it was going to be a joinable faction. It remains a prevailing theory/claim because, in game, there are allusions to the idea that you could have joined them due your status as The Chosen One, and because Dagoth Ur has a large Draco in Leather Pants status in the fandom, but regardless the widespread acceptance of this idea usually is followed by the idea that the player could have joined him without issue.
    • There is a frequently cited quote that the famous line from Skyrim about several characters "taking an arrow to the knee" is an old-fashioned Danish/Scandinavian slang phrase for getting married. Thus the guards didn't get injured, they simply settled down. The problem is there is no evidence that such slang, Scandinavian or otherwise, has ever existed before the game's release. Even the writer of that line said that he picked "arrow to the knee" simply because it seems like the kind of injury that's debilitating enough yet survivable. And it's actually "I took an arrow IN the knee."
  • The first thing anyone brings up involving Epic Mickey is the fact that the game was going to be incredibly dark, featuring things like nightmarish Cronenberg-esque abominations of Disney characters◊, but then Disney forced the team to scale it back into something much blander and safer. This is, in fact, not true, and Warren Spector has claimed that Disney's input was surprisingly hands-off. Junction Point created a lot of art featuring dark concepts and then sent it over to Disney, but this was more or less a test to see what kinds of things Disney would allow, figuring out Disney's comfort zone with regards to dark content—basically, they had no illusions that the rotting cyborg spider with Tigger's tortured head sticking out of it would ever make it into the game, but figuring out the things Disney would allow would make for a handy reference point. There were some concepts that made it further and were toned down in the finished release, but this was the team's own decision. The problem was that the concept art leaked well ahead of the game's release, at a point where basically nothing else was known about it, and so when the actual trailers rolled out and the game's actual level of grit was shown to be Saturday morning cartoon-level at worst, it was very easy for fans to both end up disappointed and start suspecting foul play.
  • Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem has a tendency to be labeled as a third-party effort for the Nintendo GameCube. Nintendo had contracted Silicon Knights to work as a second party to create software for the console, and Eternal Darkness was the first result of that effort.note  Right on the title screen it plainly reads © 2002 Nintendo, and a look in the credits shows a screen saying, "All rights including the copyrights of Game, Scenario, Music and Program, reserved by NINTENDO." So, developed by an outside company, yes, but it was produced and published in-house.
  • E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600, a game so horrible that it was single-handedly responsible for The Great Video Game Crash of 1983... except it wasn't. While the failure of the E.T. video game was The Last Straw that made gamers lose their trust in Atari, the dominant video game company at the time, problems such as console saturation on the market, poor quality control on consoles, and fierce competition from personal computers like the Commodore 64, were bigger factors for the eventual crash and existed before the fated release of the E.T. game. Gaming historians have also concluded that Atari's Porting Disaster of Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 contributed more to the crash in the long term than E.T. did.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • One of the most common claims regarding the game is that the developers were denied royalties on the game due to falling one point short of an 85 score on Metacritic. In actuality, the 85 score condition was for a bonus, not royalties. Interviews with the developers revealed that they were aware of the fact that they wouldn't be getting any royalties when development started.
    • A minor one, but it's often assumed that Securitrons charge you 2000 caps to enter the Strip, so most players decide to take alternative routes to enter, even if they have that much money. In reality, it's a one-time credit check; you just need to have that many caps on hand and the entrance itself is free.
    • Many people assume the Courier gained amnesia after being shot in the head at the start of the game. In truth, the Courier is never stated to have amnesia. Dialogue options exist that reference potential details from their past, and amnesia is never referenced in the story as happening. The confusion seems to come from a combination of the Lonesome Road DLC stating that the Courier delivered a package that caused the destruction of the town but doesn't seem to remember doing so, and the fact that the Courier can ask questions that suggest unfamiliarity with the factions or events that took place, but the former is intentional because the Courier not knowing what happened to Hopeville as a result of delivering a package is why Ulysses is vindictive towards them, and the later is solely for the player to be able to learn about the setting. Chris Avelone himself even clarified that the Courier doesn't have amnesia, and that the ability to ask questions about the factions or information was for newcomers.
    • Because a Ranger appears on the cover, many people assume that this is the Courier's canonical appearance, to the point of using it to represent the Courier in memes and fan-comics, or even using it as "proof" that the RNC is the canon ending. In fact the character on the cover was intended to be just a random Ranger and not the courier, although eventually this interpretation gained so much popularity that in the dlcs, you can get ranger equipment that is not affiliated with any faction. This is an extension of the fact that each Fallout game has a set of power armor on the cover, and the one made for this game is the Ranger set.
  • Fallout 4 received praise from several sources for being the first Fallout game to allow you to play as a woman... despite gender choice being a feature since the very first game. The confusion likely came from the fact that a gameplay demonstration at E3 in 2015 showed the character creation screen (showing the PC and their spouse getting ready for a day out) and put emphasis on selecting their gender (chosen by choosing either the husband or wife) likely intended as a retort to rumors present at the time that the game would lack the option, added on by this being the first Fallout game where gender was a bit more obvious with a fully voiced protagonist, as opposed to the older instalments where it was close to cosmetic save a couple of interactions. This could easily give the impression that being able to pick the PC's gender was a new feature to someone not familiar with the series and was unfamiliar with the rumors.
  • Fatal Fury: A common misconception among most newcomers (whether they are introduced through the series itself or The King of Fighters) is that Joe Higashi is Thai, as his stage in Fatal Fury 2 is in Thailand and his fighting style is Muay Thai. This is understandable, but not accurate — as his name and his wearing of a hachimaki suggests, Joe is ethnically Japanese.
  • It's often claimed by people that Fate/stay night wasn't originally meant to be an Eroge, and that it was Executive Meddling that forced Nasu to include sexual content, hence the game's notoriously bad H-scenes. This is only half-true, however. While the game was indeed originally intended as All-Ages, it was Nasu himself that made the choice to go R-18 later into production, citing the increased creative freedom over what he could explore. This is why the sexual content in Heaven's Feel is much more heavily integrated into the main narrative, because it was specifically written after this decision was made.
  • Marcoh from Fear & Hunger: Termina bears such a striking resemblance to Jotaro Kujo that most players assume he's supposed to be an expy of him. While his appearance is inspired by JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, his characterization is not — Miro Haverinen, the game's creator, has never watched or read JoJo and has cited Rocky Balboa as his primary influence for Marcoh.note 
  • Final Fight:
    • It's common knowledge that Poison and Roxy were made into transgender women specifically to get around Nintendo of America's censorship policies, which wouldn't let games depict "violence against women." In actuality, that restriction led to them being cut from the US Super Nintendo version of the game entirely in favor of a pair of male characters named Billy and Sid. Poison's gender identity has been a part of her character since her conception — her original design sheet included a comment describing her as a "new-half", the Japanese term for a trans woman.
    • Despite the way she dresses and acts, and the fact that she has handcuffs and a riding crop, Poison isn't actually a prostitute. She's a wrestling manager who just happens to be rather unabashed about how sexy she is.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • Its commonly believed that Armored Knights have the worst magic resistance stats in the franchise. In actuality, whilst Magic users are great counters to Armored classes, the Armored classes have average to even great magic resistance stats. Its only in games like Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and Fire Emblem Mystery Ofthe Emblem where armored classes have low resistance, but all non magic classes, bar the Pegasus Knight and Mage Dragon, have terrible resistance in those particular games. The reason why magic users are so good at defeating armored classes is the latter's low speed stat, means an armored unit will be hit twice by a magic unit's attacks. Additionally even at its higher, the armored knight's resistance stat is always lower than their incredibly high defense stat. The classes with the most consistently low resistance stat are actually Wyvern Lord/Knight and Warrior.
    • Commentators on Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon will often tell you that Navarre inspired the Myrmidon classline because while the iconic Mercenary, Ogma, was a Jack of All Stats, Navarre had an unusual Fragile Speedster build. Those to have actually played the older games will tell you that both Navarre and Ogma fit the Fragile Speedster mold, and their stats tend to be about the same (Ogma is the faster of the two at base level, and Navarre has the better HP growth, so you could actually argue the opposite). In fact, due to the way the game calculated the stats of recruitable units, Navarre actually has generic Mercenary stats with a static all-around bonus. The first game to introduce Myrmidons had them replace Mercenaries, with them being largely identical to the older class in function. It wasn't until Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade that Mercenaries and Myrmidons were treated as two distinct classlines and developed their signature "Jack of All Stats vs. Fragile Speedster" dynamic. The remake of Shadow Dragon carried this over and adjusted Ogma and Navarre accordingly, but this was the first time in the franchise that it was the case. That said, Navarre's long hair and loose robes, though only visible in artwork, did inspire the appearance wardrobe of Myrmidon/Swordmasters such as Shanan in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War.
    • It was believed for a long time that Heimler, an enemy in Shadow Dragon who bizarrely had a name and a portrait but no dialogue, was cut content from the original NES version that was restored in the remake as a Mythology Gag. The original NES game was so obscure that it took literal years for the few who actually played it to confirm that no, Heimler was in the original game too, in exactly the same role. The misconception stemmed from the fact that Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, the way most people experienced the first game's story, replaced Heimler with a generic enemy and has cut data for him in the code.
    • Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade: Zephiel killed Hector, right? Actually no. Hector was already mortally wounded before Zephiel arrived on the scene, Zephiel merely taunted him as he lay dying, and it isn't until the chapter ends (when Zephiel has already left) that Hector finally passes. Whilst who inflicted those injuries is never stated, it's likely they came from Bern's army. Technically Zephiel killed Hector by ordering the attack on Pherae, but he never dealt the finishing blow himself.
    • One of the most widely-claimed Recurring Elements in the series is the "Est Archetype", generally held to represent a character who joins very late and underleveled but has abnormally high growths to compensate. The thing is, many characters to supposedly fit the archetype (Tailtiu, Coirpre/Charlot, Zeiss, Sophia, L'Arachel, Kurthnaga, Pelleas) actually have pretty average growth rates by the standards of a unit of their level and class in their games, and some are even below-average. Much of the reason the trope is applied to these characters is that the first game released overseas featured Nino, who was a textbook case of it and caused players to assume it was universal. There's also a degree of confirmation bias involved; the abnormally bad initial performance of these units causes players to assume they must be hiding some secret potential, and therefore pump them full of enough XP to make any unit overpowered.
    • It's often held that Roy has bad growths by detractors. In fact, Roy has some of the best growths in his game, being one of only three units to total more than 300%. He does tend to have bad stats, but this is more due to his poor base stats, his lack of a standout growth apart from Luck and his habit of getting stuck at level 20. (Bad stats also stand out a lot harder in a game with very strong enemies.)
    • It's an often-held belief among fans that in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Eirika and Ephriam get married in the Japanese version's "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue. While the game does have an awful lot of Incest Subtext, this is not true in the slightest. It's just a result of fans believing "any paired ending must be romantic, so they obviously censored it", despite there being several non-romantic paired endings, even in this very game. (Duessel and Amelia comes to mind.)
    • By extension, while it's Common Knowledge that "the Fire Emblem series is full of Brother–Sister Incest!", the only game to feature any actual explicit incest between siblings is the fourth game. And even then, it turns out to be a case of The Villain Made Them Do It. Mostly-optional instances of Kissing Cousins and Incest Subtext have cropped up a lot more frequently, though, which doesn't help.
    • It's a commonly-held belief that the Fire Emblem: Awakening Drama CDs canonize the nameless Village Maiden as Chrom's wife. This isn't true since the Drama CD has never been explicitly confirmed as canon, and it also never mentioned anything about whom Chrom married. Fans just inferred it had to be the Maiden due to Lucina being an only child in the CDs. In reality, the Drama CD was explicitly avoiding making any of Chrom's potential wives "canon" (or indeed any options in the game), so that it could be enjoyed by any player of the game regardless of their choices. Further, most fans base this "fact" off one forum post, though the original poster was joking when he claimed the Drama CD made the Maiden canon.
    • The whole deal with the "Gatekeeper's twin" in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, who is mentioned during the exploration of Chapter 13 in the Crimson Flower route. There, after being asked if he has any siblings in the church, Gatekeeper answers that he has an older twin who also was part of the Knights of Seiros, working as a grunt, and unlike Gatekeeper, the "grunt twin" is extremely devoted, and left the Monastery now under Imperial Rule at some moment during the Timeskip. Likely as a product of this conversation being unique of Crimson Flower, many people believe that the "grunt twin" is the Gatekeeper in Crimson Flower instead of the actual Gatekeeper, despite evidence of the contrary, even in this very conversation (where is mentioned that the twin was just a grunt, unlike the Gatekeeper that is very proud of his position).
    • A lot of people believe Dorothea initially hates Ferdinand in Fire Emblem: Three Houses because he once scowled at her when they were both kids. The truth is more complicated than that. Dorothea despises Ferdinand because of the marked disparity between his seemingly-hateful treatment of her when she was a dirty, penniless orphan girl and his respectful treatment of her after she became a dazzling, beloved diva. As she bitterly explains, nobles used to insult, spit on, and physically harm her out of disgust only to turn around and lavish praise, love, and gifts upon her once she became a beautiful, famous songstress. Ferdinand apparently behaving in the exact same way convinced her that he was as rotten as the nobles who once abused her.
    • In Fire Emblem Engage, the localization re-writing several of Alear's S-Supports to be less romantic led to a persistent rumor that even their supports and epilogue with their blood sibling were romantic in the Japanese script. This isn't true, Alear and Veyle's supports and ending are intended to be platonic in the Japanese version, and all the supposed romantic undertones were mistranslations or taken out of context.

  • Five Nights at Freddy's:
    • Fazbear Entertainment is commonly believed to be run by Corrupt Corporate Executives who knowingly and more or less intentionally run a death trap establishment and were willingly helping the killer in covering up the murders, but there wasn't enough information early on in the series to truly determine how much they actually knew or planned. As the series went on, their corrupt nature became double subverted. One of the founders is a Serial Killer, the Big Bad and has designed killer animatronics. However, this was neither planned nor known by the company as a whole, and he even managed to become a suspect of the murders early on, ending his involvement in the company fairly early on. The other founder of the company is actually the closest the series has to a Greater-Scope Paragon. Having been affected by the killings himself, he devotes his life to hunting down the villain, trapping him, and killing him for good (as well as releasing the souls of the victims). Although he does partially succeed in releasing the victims, the villain managed to survive.
    • For the original game, the unpredictable behavior of the AI, coupled with the game's sudden burst of popularity, has led to numerous misconceptions spreading like wildfire that contradict the game's actual coding. When YouTuber Tech Rules made a video decompiling the AI's code, he included a section specifically to debunk these rumors.
      • Many believe that Foxy will run for the office if the cameras are trained on him too many times. In truth, looking at the cameras (not just Pirate's Cove but any camera) will completely prevent Foxy from moving, and after the cameras are lowered Foxy is unable to attempt to move again for a random period from 1 to 16 seconds. Foxy will only run for the office if he succeeds at his random chance to move four times, all of which must happen when the cameras are off. This misconception probably stems from taking the hint that "he hates being watched" as meaning it aggravates him, rather than that it intimidates him.
      • Another hint that was misinterpreted was the "play dead" hint, leading to the belief that if the power goes out, not moving will give you more time before Freddy kills you and possibly letting you stall until 6:00. In reality, the game makes no checks as to whether you make any inputs at this time; how long it takes Freddy to reach the office, play his song, kill the emergency lights and finally attack are completely random. The functioning concept of playing dead is if you're caught (by Bonnie or Chica breaking the doors), don't flip up the camera to avoid triggering the jumpscare and hope Freddy or Foxy doesn't come. In fact, the whole idea of playing dead was disregarded by the guard who told you about it by realizing it won't work.
      • There's a persistent rumor that if you try to stall out the last hour of the night by keeping both doors locked, Freddy will automatically materialize in the office as punishment for a cheap tactic. In actuality, Freddy cannot enter the office if the right door is locked. The confusion seems to stem from a popular Markiplier video where he closes both doors and is killed by Freddy seconds later. What actually happened was that Freddy had already been in the office for some time; unlike Foxy instantly killing the player and Bonnie and Chica waiting for the cameras to go up before they attack, once Freddy enters the office he has a random chance of killing the player, a 25% chance every second when the cameras are down. This means that Freddy can potentially hide in the office for seconds or even minutes at a time, making it unclear when he actually got in.
    • Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach features a Daycare Attendant animatronic that transforms based on the lighting between a sun or moon-themed form. Fans quickly picked up that its names were "Sunnydrop" and "Moondrop" from posters seen in-game, which became widely accepted as its names. Officially, the Attendant's names have no inventive spin- they're just "Sun" and "Moon", as proven in subtitles and collectable item names. The "-drop" suffix seen on the posters was there as part of the names of the candies being advertised.
      • On the topic of Security Breach, it's believed by many fans that Vanny hacked the Glamrocks, however, as confirmed by the Tales From The Pizzaplex story "GGY", they were hacked long before the events of the main game by an unknown person (heavily implied to be Gregory himself).

  • Giana Sisters:
    • The character that most people think of as Giana's twin is not her sibling. Giana does have a twin sister named Maria, but many people who know the series simply as "That Mario knockoff" think that Punk Giana is her sister. It's not a case of Sibling Yin-Yang, Punk Giana is Giana's Super Mode, akin to Super Mario. Giana's sister Maria is green-haired and is usually only playable as Player 2 (ala Luigi).
    • Everyone knows The Great Giana Sisters is a blatant ripoff of Super Mario Bros.. However, that's only partially true. On the surface the games are very similar, and it's obvious that the creators wished they could have just made a Mario port, but they're not nearly as similar as people make them out to be. The first six levels are obvious ripoffs from Mario (especially the initial two) but by the end the design is vastly different from anything in the original Super Mario Bros. The power-ups also differ quite a bit from Mario's. By the DS' series revival the series completely dissociated itself from its Mario clone roots.
  • The Grand Theft Auto games don't take place in the same universe as Red Dead Redemption. While many fans have speculated that this might be the case, it's never gone beyond the level of Fanon—and, while there are Easter Eggs that seemingly imply it to be the case, there are far more clues that they take place in different continuities. Most glaringly: California and New York City are both mentioned multiple times in Red Dead Redemption, while it's been well-established for years that neither place exists in the GTA universe (just their fictional counterparts San Andreas and Liberty City). Bully taking place in the same universe is more ambiguous; Hollywood is also mentioned several times in the game, while the GTA universe's counterpart of Hollywood is called Vinewoodnote  That said, Bulworth Academy from Bully is mentioned and seen in Grand Theft Auto IV.
    • Its become a meme that police in the games will attack the player for crashing their car into a police car, even if the player is riding a bike. In reality, in most games it is perfectly possible to crash into a police car without getting a wanted level; just don't do it too often or too hard.
    • In Grand Theft Auto V, Amanda is sometimes mocked or criticized by fans for being a massive Hypocrite because she constantly chastizes Michael for being unfaithful and a bad husband, even though part of the plot kicks off because Michael catches her in bed with her tennis coach, Michael never cheats on her (unless the player chooses to sleep with prostitutes while playing as him), and Amanda's profile on a dating site can be found on the in-game internet. However, paying close attention to character's dialogue will reveal it's more complex; Amanda accuses Michael of having slept with a stripper before the game began, a charge he doesn't deny. The two have an open-relationship, but Michael got angry at Amanda's affair with the tennis coach because it was against their rule of not sleeping with people the other knew, and because it was in Michael's bed. Some of the events that occur when switching to Michael strongly imply he just got done sleeping with a prostitute, meaning he does so habitually, and outside of the player's control.
  • Given its vast and once-inaccessible lore, Guilty Gear has suffered this trope among fans thanks to the likes of Gear Project and various mistranslations, and it doesn't help that Gear Project continues to argue their canonicity.
    • A very, very popular claim among fans is that Johnny's last name is "Sfondi", as stated by Ky Kiske in a Guilty Gear X drama CD. In reality, Ky actually said "Johnny's family" in Japanese-accented but legible English. This particular bit has lasted well into the present day, though more experienced translators and lore masters have helped to dispel it, and Johnny still has yet to have a last name revealed or even given to him.
    • Another is that Slayer possesses a magical dagger that is one of the "Outrage" weapons. In reality, while he does have it and it's stated it can kill Forbidden Beasts with "the right art," it was never explicitly confirmed as an Outrage and is nowadays not considered one.
    • When Testament was brought back for the roster of Guilty Gear -STRIVE-, it was widely reported that they had been retconned to be non-binary. This is untrue, as while -STRIVE- did change them to specifically be agender, prior to this they were officially described as "ryōsei" or androgynous/bigender, meaning that they already fell under the non-binary umbrella to begin with.
    • Upon the release of Bridget and her story mode in -STRIVE-, reports spread like wildfire that a scene where Bridget decides to identify as a woman only plays in the "Bad Ending" of the game where you lose the final fight, with the "Good Ending" leading her to decide she's happy being a guy, and not transitioning. This likely stems from the fact that the ending in which Bridget makes it the clearest that they see themselves as a woman now is from completing the game on the 2nd to hardest of its difficulties, with the lines for completing the Harder Than Hard difficulty saying she wants to live as her "true self", a line which was percieved to contradict the Hard ending. This became so widespread that a developer made a note in a Developer Newsletter specifically stating that she self-identifies as a woman, there aren't "Good" and "Bad" endings, and that the variations in dialogue that DO exist are merely meant to show different aspects of the characters, and thus no variation is more or less canon to the others.
  • God Hand is remembered as a Cult Classic that was beloved within its niche for its engaging, over-the-top combat, but was despised by the press for its brutal difficulty, shoddy presentation, and barebones content. The low review scores led to the game bombing on release, and its disappointing sales caused Capcom to shut down its creator, Clover Studios, shortly afterwards. However, as Matt McMuscles found out when covering the game on his series Wha Happun?, this wasn't entirely true. For one thing, nobody at Capcom was under the impression God Hand would be a bestseller, because it didn't need to be; director Shinji Mikami made it as a quick, low-budget passion project to unwind after wrapping up development on Resident Evil 4, and while sales were fairly low, they were well within expectations.note  Likewise, the idea that critics hated the game stems from IGN's infamous 3/10 review, but that was considered an outlier even at the time; no other major publication was quite so harsh and scores typically ranged from mixed to positive. Clover's dissolution had more to do with the lackluster sales of the expensive and ambitious Ōkami earlier the same year, and God Hand releasing right before they were shuttered was just an unfortunate coincidence.
    • Another common misconception addressed in that video is the idea that the game was originally meant to have a serious tone, but was retooled to be Denser and Wackier due to the positive response to its more comedic E3 2006 trailer. However, the game was released around four months after E3 that year, which wouldn't have been enough time to make such a dramatic change in direction.

  • God of War:
    • Kratos is often thought of as having No Indoor Voice and constantly shouting all his lines. Except most of the time, when he actually does talk to someone instead of deciding to just murder them outright, he speaks in a normal tone of voice. The only times he ever seems to yell is when he's talking to Atlas and Gaia, and given that those two are Titans and therefore much larger than Kratos, it's likely that he has to yell just so they can hear him.
    • A great number of people seem to think that God of War (PS4) is the first time Kratos went through any Character Development at all, and before that all he did was just angrily murder everything nonstop for no good reason. This ignores the entire character arc Kratos went through in the old games, going from a Glory Hound, to fluctuating between a grief-stricken self-loathing wreck after the death of his family, to a living avatar of rage when the Greek pantheon just won't stop toying with him, and then finally calming down and realizing all the collateral damage he's caused throughout his multiple rampages, finally forgiving himself for his past sins and performing a Heroic Sacrifice to release the hope he absorbed from Pandora's Box to aid mankind in their recovery. There are also times where he shows genuine sympathy for people, displays an actual reluctance to kill others, eventually ends up with an actual, non-backstabbing ally in the form of Pandora, and at one point in the series he even ends up forsaking everything to rejoin his lost daughter in Elysium, only to have to abandon her to stop Persephone from destroying everything, being willing to burn the last bridge he has with her for the sake of keeping her safe in the afterlife. All years before the franchise "grew up" with the PS4 game.

  • While Goldeneye 1997 might have laid the blueprint for future console first-person shooters and showed the world how they could stand out from ones on PC, it was not the first "good" console FPS. In fact, there were quite a few highly regarded console FPSs (Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Alien Trilogy, Powerslave) released before Goldeneye.

  • Half-Life: because Gordon Freeman is the poster boy for the Heroic Mute FPS protagonist, it's often assumed that he never speaks at all, or even that he physically can't. While he's acknowledged as a "man of few words" in-universe, the series makes it fairly clear that he does sometimes talk, we just never hear it. Scientists occasionally react as if they're being asked a question in the first game, and have to be told to follow you. The second game introduces squad commands where you can order rebels to certain spots, which again, obviously requires Freeman to speak (and the rebels definitely do respond as if they're being spoken to). Opposing Force and Blue Shift, while they have Barney and Shepherd respectively as their protagonists instead of Freeman, both make this logic explicit. For instance:
    Drill Instructor: What's your name, dirtbag?
    (the player hears nothing)
    Drill Instructor: Sound off like you got a pair!
    (the player hears nothing)
    Drill Instructor: Corporal Shephard, huh? Looks more like corporal "Dog Meat" to me!
    • Part of the confusion comes from the fact that Half-Life has an Unbroken First-Person Perspective. A lot of other shooters with silent protagonists (such as Doom³ and Halo 3: ODST) have cutscenes which explicitly show them as being silent even in situations where they logically should be speaking. Half-Life never does this and leaves the reactions of the player character mostly up to the players' imagination.
  • Helldivers II is often described as "Indie devs sticking it to AAA gaming" and "setting an industry standard" thanks to its runaway success. While Arrowhead Game Studios is technically an "indie" game studio, Helldivers II is unquestionably a AAA release marketed as such — with the attendant price — at the behest of their publisher.
  • Rena from Higurashi: When They Cry is very often mistaken for a yandere. She is not. She's at most a yangire character and even then most of her most famous creepy moments are because the protagonist is delusional. Rena is overprotective about her friends and father, however, Shion is the closest thing to a yandere the series has. The misconception comes from the fact that the term yandere was relatively new when her series debuted.
  • Everybody knows that Horizon is the series about a woman who hunts robot dinosaurs. Not quite: of the 24 species of wild machines encountered in the first game, exactly four are based on dinosaurs (the Watcher, the Tallneck, the Thunderjaw, and the Bellowback), putting them squarely in the minority. The second game adds four more machines based on prehistoric animals, but only two, the Clawstrider and Slaughterspine, are based on true dinosaurs. The vast majority are just giant robotic versions of modern animals, but the marketing focused heavily on the dinosaur ones due to Cool vs. Awesome being a key part of the series' appeal.
  • I=MGCM: There're a few glaring misconceptions that are easy to make for outsiders unfamiliar with the game and operating on Small Reference Pools:
    • "This is a game labeled as an eroge and has sexy characters, so there's gotta be a lot of gratuitous sex involved." In fact, while the game isn't shy to offer helpings of Fanservice, it's relatively tame, and actual sex scenes only appear in the DX version.
    • "The DX version is stuffed full of hentai." There's only a number of scenes accessed through upgrading UR-rarity (and a number of SR-rarity) dresses, beating bond episode requirements, finishing certain limited-time event storylines and going through the main story - in other words, players mostly have to go out of their way to find them, and they're not as common as may be believed. All together, playing the DX version isn't any different from the SFW one, and those expecting lots of gratuitous hentai are only going to be disappointed.
    • "Since this is a Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction, the demons are all corrupted magical girls." This misconception is reinforced by the infamous Gut Punch scenes of certain girls' deaths and corruption into demons. However, the overwhelming majority of demons are born from what's essentially mitosis on the demon homeworld, fueled by consuming the existence of humans they hunt and kill. There's some half-and-half chance of a killed magical girl being raised as a demon, but it's not guaranteed either - and demons do not actively seek out to corrupt more magical girls to join them. According to some analysis, there are two types of demons (further differentiated by their hairstyles): Deceased Magical Girls who are corrupted into demons have hairstyles identical to heroines, while the ones who are born from Demon Realm aren't. It’s also implied that all Nymphs, Mao from some limited-time events, Demon Twins, Enbi (the Arc Villain from the light novel Magicami ~Evil of Tail Court~), etc. all originate from the Demon Realm.
    • "This is an eroge, so demons must rape the fallen girls to corrupt them." While it does appear that rape leads to guaranteed corruption, most of the time demons simply kill the girls outright; there's a 50-50 sort of chance that a slain magical girl will turn into a demon instead of dying. All together, the rape scenes are only in the DX version, while the aforementioned scenes are replaced with logical ones in the regular version. There are only 3 such scenes in the entire game, all of them concentrated in a couple chapters, with the rest of the game free of anything like that.
    • It's widely believed by the fans that Omnis' ability is to create a new universe with desired possibilities and then leave the remaining heroines from his previously failed universe alone after he screws up. This leads to another misconception in chapters 12-13 of the 2nd arc, in which Nemesis Iroha is the original Iroha from the end of Chapter 4 (where Kaori was slain and corrupted into a demon) and Nemesis Iroha wants vengeance against Omnis for ignoring them. Actually:
    • "The regular version is the DX version without the pornographic scenes. So the DX version is the original." While the regular version does have the pornographic content removed, both versions were released simultaneously. They're both equally 'the original version'. What really helps is the fact that the crossover events with The Quintessential Quintuplets and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? are only playable/available in the regular versionnote , while the DX version has its own collaboration with Elf's infamous Hentai Visual Novel Kisaku.

  • KanColle: It's often claimed, usually by detractors, that the monstrous Abyssal Fleet (portrayed as Always Chaotic Evil and hostile to everything but themselves) are dehumanizations of Allied forces, and that the series is meant to be a glorification of Imperial Japan. This is easily disproven by the presence of girls based on Allied warships, meaning it's more likely the Abyssal Fleet is a generic representation of enemy naval forces. The heavy focus on Japanese ships is due to Creator Provincialism.

  • Kid Icarus: Uprising: Eveyone knows that Viridi, being the Goddess of Nature and having a vendetta that leads her to attack humanity for their mistreatment of nature and selfishness, also has a hatred of technology typical in characters of similar motivations, right? Except not really. At no point it is stated that she has anything against machines, in fact one of her commanders even has a highly technologically advanced base in the shape of the moon intended to actually be a prison for the Chaos Kin, and there's also that the guards to the pods of the Reset Bombs she deploys are stated in the game's Idols to be robots. She's also known to play video games like most of the main cast.

  • In Killer Instinct, Riptor's ending shows a clutch of eggs that all hatch in more Riptors (and dooming humanity). The existence of these Riptor eggs has made many assume that the playable Riptor had laid them, and thus, that it was a female. However, the ending does not mention a single thing about how those eggs came out to be, and in fact the ending does not even mention Riptor at all (instead describing how Ultratech were Hoist by Their Own Petard). Thus, the original Riptor's gender is unconfirmed. The fact the Riptor seen in the reboot (which is not the same Riptor, as the original had died between the first two games) is female, and that it's stated to have the ability to lay eggs, implies that this is a case of Ascended Fanon.

  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • Several people believe that the Kingdom Hearts series is a franchise owned by Square Enix with many Disney characters thrown in as cameos. Actually, Kingdom Hearts is entirely owned by Disney. Not only that, all original properties and original characters of the series are owned by them as well. This means Sora, Riku, Kairi, Organization XIII, Xehanort, etc. are all Disney's characters. Disney just hires Square Enix to develop the games. It's all in the copyrights, which generally reads © Disney. Developed by SQUARE ENIX.note  Tellingly, when Sora was added to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the copyright at the bottom of the title screen was updated to acknowledge Disney despite already crediting Square Enix for Cloud and Sephiroth. This was acknowledged in a 2004 Official PlayStation Magazine interview with Tetsuya Nomura, the director of the Kingdom Hearts series. The Final Fantasy and The World Ends with You characters are the ones making cameos, as Disney allowed Square Enix to include them in the Kingdom Hearts games. Most of the worlds in the series are the settings of Disney movies, and the handful that aren't are original, not taken from Final Fantasy.
      • As a side note, anything Square Enix does with their own characters in Kingdom Hearts is still owned by them. This is why Cloud, Sephiroth, and Squall can have costumes based on their Kingdom Hearts appearances in Dissidia Final Fantasy.
    • Many fans also, for some reason, choose to believe that the series is also console exclusive to the PlayStation family, when that's never been the case, no matter how much they'd love to make sure newcomers and outsiders think that was true. In reality, the second game in the series was released on the Game Boy Advance. The series has had games released on Nintendo handhelds and mobile and the third entry was released on Xbox One as well as PS4. Notably, almost every main game in the series is playable on the Switch via cloud streaming. Nomura also discussed bringing 1.5, 2.5 and 2.8 to Xbox One after production on III finished.
    • Terra in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep is known for trusting the first person he meets and being a poor judge of character. Except he's skeptical of the Wicked Queen and Maleficent - he only goes along with the Wicked Queen to use her mirror but decides it's not worth it when she wants Snow White dead, while Maleficent flat out brainwashes him. Only Jumba and Captain Hook manage to gaslight Terra, and he eventually wises up to it. Xehanort is the most tragic example, but the audience tends to forget Terra doesn't know what they do, therefore Terra would have every reason to trust someone who his master holds in high regard and was being polite to them. This is also ignoring that Ventus and Aqua also trust the first person they meet in almost every world, they just don't have the luck to run into villains - who we know are villains because we saw their movies.
    • Many people believe that Kingdom Hearts III has been in Development Hell since 2007, after Kingdom Hearts II came out. That's not the case, at all. It was only announced as being in development in 2013, not long after the last new installment of the series Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance].
      • Another reason for the game being in Development Hell is the change to the Unreal Engine 4 (since the intended engine wasn't done yet, and was only used for Final Fantasy XV), as well as Pixar's Creative Differences with Square-Enix and the use of their characters, contrast to Disney whose strictness varies. (Tangled and Frozen's infamous worlds in Kingdom Hearts III are actually because Disney was even more strict than they were with say, Hercules or Big Hero 6.)
    • The idea any game released after KH2 not called KH3 is a Gaiden Game. They're full installments of the series, intended to move the plot forward towards a climax in KH3.
    • Kingdom Hearts III is also believed to feature a Relationship Upgrade between Sora and Kairi, elevating them from Implied Love Interest to Official Couple, as the result of a scene in which the two of them share two paopu fruits together, firing a Chekhov's Gun that had been set up all the way back in the first game. However nothing in Kingdom Hearts III, post-release interviews from the creators, or any games that were released later have ever confirmed this interpretation. Furthermore the DLC reveals via in-universe social media posts (all of which were designed personally by Nomura) that Sora and Kairi had conflicting ideas of what sharing the paopu signified: Kairi saw it as a guarantee that they would never be separated from each other again, while Sora viewed it as a reassurance that they’ll always be friends even when they’re apart.
    • It's also believed that, depending on who you ask, every Disney world is either the same story retold just with Sora&Co added, or an original story altogether. This isn't true - even the first game had some just retell the story of the IP it's based off of, while some were creating their own story using the characters and setting.
    • It was widely assumed that golden eyes and silver hair were a Red Right Hand of Xehanort's, given that Xehanort has them and when he possessed Terra his hair and eyes changed to those colors. Others who are also influenced by Xehanort also sport yellow eyes. This was a popular enough line of thought that when a trailer for KH3 showed Aqua with those traits she was almost universally believed to have also been possessed by Xehanort. In reality, these traits are signs of a character that is influenced by darkness. With Xehanort's heart full of darkness, anyone he placed his heart into, like Terra, would take on those features but it was also possible for someone who embraced darkness of their own volition, like Aqua did, to gain such traits. It is admittedly not very well explained in-game - it's only shown, not told.
    • Some people mistakenly believe that Master Eraqus is Terra's father. In reality, they're not related at all, as Nomura confirmed in supplementary material. This misconception is caused by people taking Terra's line "Was my master - no, my father, Eraqus, not enough for you?" far too literally - as Nomura explained, Terra simply meant that he thinks of Eraqus as a father, he wasn't actually calling Eraqus his biological father.

  • Kirby Super Star: Several fans refer to the beach area Kirby is shot to in Revenge of Meta Knight (and the music that plays there) as "Grape Garden," since that's what Meta Knight calls it. Except he never called it that. He actually said that the Halberd's next target was Grape Garden, while the player can clearly see it moving away from Kirby's general location. Also, that place looks nothing like Grape Garden. As for the music, it's actually officially called "Sea Stage."

  • It is sometimes claimed that the reason Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is such a vicious Internal Deconstructor Fleet towards the Star Wars universe is that Chris Avellone hated the series and resented having to write for it. This is not quite true; Avellone actually loves Star Wars, and in fact became a fan after the intense research he did into the canon when writing the game. What he did hate was parts of the original Expanded Universe, especially the way bad EU writers tended to use the Force as a Happy Ending Override and portray the Jedi/Sith conflict as an Eternal Recurrence without any care for the Fridge Horror inherent in those ideas. The game's Deconstruction aspects were meant as a Take That! towards those parts of the EU, not the franchise as a whole.

  • Life Is Strange:
    • A lot of players are under the impression that Chloe threatened her step-father with a knife. While there is a photo of her glaring at him while holding one (from her 18th birthday), she's clearly using it to cut her cake rather than threatening him with it.
    • People who've never played the sequel are sometimes under the impression the protagonists lived in the USA illegally (to the point even some reviews made the assumption) prior to the events of the game. The game quickly establishes them as the American-born sons of a naturalized Mexican immigrant and a white American woman.

  • Like a Dragon:
    • Since the series was originally known as Yakuza in the West, that means protagonist Kazuma Kiryu is a member of the Yakuza, right? Well yes, but only very briefly (the prologue and epilogue of Yakuza 0 and the prologue of the first Yakuza). For a vast majority of the series he's an ex-member who gets embroiled in Yakuza-related conspiracies as a private citizen. This is more intuitive in the Japanese title for the series, Ryu Ga Gotoku, where the translation of the series' Japanese title eventually became the series' title in the West come 2022.
    • "Kazuma Kiryu has never killed a person in his life" is a sentence seen in the fandom (usually accompanied by a ridiculously lethal heat action). However, this is straight up not true, with Kiryu himself dismissing the idea in Yakuza 5. He simply views murder as a last resort, and thus rarely uses it (with notable example Yakuza: Dead Souls, as Kiryu kills civilian zombies). The fact that there are no on-screen murders in Yakuza, and that people can survive anything that isn't in a cutscene, have helped perpetuate the misconception.

  • Marvel vs. Capcom:
    • Everyone knows that the Marvel vs. Capcom series prior to Infinite had a creative Marvel roster full of picks free of Executive Meddling that was based entirely on the comics themselves and it was only when Infinite came around where the series was forced to be a plug for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sort of, but not quite true. While the series did feature some adventurous picks such as Shuma-Gorath and M.O.D.O.K., in reality the real-world popularity of characters from adaptations, and indeed Executive Meddling, did influence the games heavily. The highly regarded Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for instance had X-Men characters taking up 18 of 28 characters including two Wolverines. The main reason why this doesn't get cited as much is because this was many years before the MCU existed, and the X-Men were very much at the heart of the Marvel Universe so they were the ones who were promoted instead. There's a certain hilarity in seeing a generic Sentinel, or D-listers like Marrow, Silver Samurai and Spiral getting to duke it out over today's stars like Thor and Black Panther. As for the non-X-Men characters? Mostly A-listers like Spider-Man, Hulk, Captain America, and Venom (the most popular Spidey villain back then). It only came into light when Ike Perlmutter blacklisted Capcom from using X-Men characters to spite 20th Century Fox, over not having film rights to them (at the time), and combined with a lack of polish with severe roster cuts, highlighted this much more than in the past, but with MCU characters rather than X-Men ones. Furthermore, in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Capcom had to fight for the inclusions of several characters like Storm, Sentinel and Shuma-Gorath, and had to put in Doctor Strange with very specific ideas for the move set, because there were strict guidelines to how they could make 3. The series may not have been as meddled or influenced by non-comic media in the past, but to say that it never was is incorrect.
    • Related, but the infamous quote about the X-Men not being in the game because modern fans may not be familiar with them is often attributed to Peter "Combofiend" Rosas. While Combofiend is guilty of the just as infamous "Functions" quotenote , it was actually producer Mike Evans who made the preposterous claim that players may not know who the X-Men are.
    • Some fans claimed that the reason why the X-Men and Fantastic Four villains like Doctor Doom didn't make the cut in Infinite was because Fox owned the rights to them. In reality, Fox only owned the movie rights of those characters, they had no problem appearing in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 years earlier. The reason was because Marvel (specifically Ike Perlmutter) enforced an embargo on characters Fox owned the movie rights in an attempt to sabotage their movies to get their rights back, which ended after Disney bought Fox.

  • Mass Effect:
    • There's a very common fan idea, often showing up in crossover fan fiction, that the species in the setting are stagnant technologically and only ascended to their current level because the Reapers engineered their technological path. For the former, the codex notes several advances that have taken place in recent years, such as kinetic barriers (which didn't exist in an earlier age of space warfare) or improved FTL drives that can keep a ship going forever without the need to refuel or discharge heat (upon which the whole plot of Andromeda is based), so that's outright untrue. For the latter, the confusion appears to have come with one line from Sovereign: he did say that the younger races evolved with the Reapers' technology, but he was very specifically talking about the mass relays, not anything else they use. There's also the geth, who built a Dyson Sphere, a mega-engineering project on a scale that the Reapers never managed. The backstory of the rachni was also that they had discovered eezo yet didn't have FTL warships until a salarian ship crashed in their system and was reverse-engineered, so clearly all species didn't embark on the same "tech route" just because they used eezo. The kett in Andromeda further disprove this fanon: while it has some differences, a lot of their technology is similar to what the Milky Way younger races use (railguns, kinetic barriers, Alcubierre drives, etc.) despite the Reapers not existing in their galaxy, suggesting that any intelligent species with eezo (and real-world physics otherwise being in place) would end up with those things because those are the only possible ways to accomplish the feats. Similar to how civilizations on Earth independently developed things like the printing press.
      • An additional source of confusion seems to be humanity's rapid rate of advance, having ships on par with everyone else's just a few years after discovering eezo. The codex explicitly states that it wasn't discovering eezo that let them advance so quickly, it was that the Protheans conveniently left an extensive archive of blueprints and guides on Mars. This was why the humans advanced to modern technology before first contact, and this was never stated to be the case for any other species (indeed, the rachni's backstory had them still being FTL-incapable before capturing salarian engines despite having been utilizing eezo for years). Also, though they hadn't used eezo before then, humanity already had developed things like fusion power and quantum computing by the early 22nd century, so they were already starting from a pretty high base when they found said guides.
      • An extension to this is the idea that all tech is based on eezo and that all the younger races just jumped straight from modern level to their current level after discovering it. It's specifically noted that humanity already had large deep-space stations and deuterium/helium-3 fusion power (among other things) decades before discovering eezo, and Thane implies that getting deuterium/helium-3 fusion reactors before making use of eezo is standard. A lot of their more impressive technology also doesn't use eezo at all, such as artificial intelligence (based on quantum computing) and nanofabricators.
    • Humanity's strength relative to other species. It's commonly believed among the more "Humanity, Fuck Yeah" portions of the fandom that humanity is equal to or stronger than the other great powers of the galaxy like the turians, asari, and salarians, but this is never actually stated anywhere and contradicts a lot of known lore like population figures,note  and fleet numbers.note  Supplemental material and Word of God have both clarified that humanity is actually a middle power that just happens to be more ambitious than other middle powers, and is nothing compared to the economic, industrial, scientific, and military strength of the great powers, but the myth still proliferates. note 
      Systems Alliance Office of Naval Intelligence: The elcor economy is small, only slightly larger than the [human] Alliance's, but extremely well-developed.
      Systems Alliance Office of Naval Intelligence: The salarian economy is the smallest of the three Council races, but still far larger than the Alliance. It is based on "bleeding-edge" technologies; salarian industries are leaders in most fields.
      Chris L'Etoile:note  The power vacuum at the end of Mass Effect 1 is purely at the Citadel. The Council defense fleet there gets pasted, but the overall turian, salarian, and asari fleets outnumber the humans 10:1.note  Despite rah-rah-Earth-First rhetoric from Udina, it's utterly impossible for the Alliance to militarily best the Council on anything more than a local and temporary scale. All they have to do is gather their fleets and steamroll us. Also, the Council races each have hundreds of colonies, many old enough to have populations in the billions. We can't out-produce or out-populate them, either.
    • The idea that the salarians and asari don't have real militaries, only intelligence operatives, special forces, militia, and patrol fleets. While it is shown several times that they (and Citadel Space in general) are very under-militarized compared to where they could be due to 1,500 years of peace, the former idea is a massive exaggeration that seems to have come from assuming Planet of Hats was meant to be played straight instead of subverted. The War Assets terminal in 3 specifically notes that this is an in-universe myth (held, ironically, by prejudiced humans), and that being great powers they do in fact have massive fleets that are a match for any human equivalent on a per-ship basis (more than a match, in the case of the salarians) while being more numerous. The codex additionally notes that more than 3% of asari and salarians serve in their militaries, which is both stated to be a larger proportion than humanity and indicated to lead to a military establishment of at least tens of billions of troops given the consistently-given population figure of "trillions" for Citadel Space (this is almost certainly counting reservists though). We're given no indication that these troops aren't as heavily-equipped and well-trained as what you'd expect from galactic empires. In fact, the turians have an old saying that asari are the finest warriors in the galaxy, presumably due to their long lifespans and wealth allowing them access to decades of experience and the best gear to complement their natural psychic abilities.
    • It is commonly believed (and sometimes criticised) that the entire galaxy forgot how quarians look underneath their suits. Canonically, there are movies being filmed with bare-faced quarians in them and the only mentions of quarian appearance being a secret are clear jokes. The whole thing is meant as a mystery for the player but not for any character who honestly wishes to find out.
  • Mega Man:
    • Mega Man (Classic):
      • Mega Man is sometimes referred to by critics and journalists as a Cyborg, when all official sources consistently treat the character as being purely robotic. This is only in play assuming they're using "cyborg" correctly.
      • Wily's attempts to try and Take Over the World are obviously due to jealousy against his former partner Dr. Light... except that this plot detail only exists in the English manual for the first game and nowhere else. This didn't stop every adaptation of the Mega Man (Classic) series from running with this interpretation, though, and Mega Man 11 finally did decide to make Wily's jealousy and personal resentment towards Light canon within the games themselves (though it started when they were university students instead of professional roboticists).
      • Mega Man, Roll, Bass, and all the robot characters in the series are called Robot Masters, right? Wrong; they're just called robots. Only the stage select bosses are ever called Robot Masters, and they were only ever called that from Mega Man 3 to 7. The term gets used a lot in third-party media, but as for the official lore and video games, it's just the faces you see on the stage select screens.
      • Air Man in Mega Man 2 is widely remembered as being That One Boss. In point of fact, this mostly comes from "Airman ga Taosenai" a popular fan song, which was dealing with a specific narrative that got somewhat garbled by memes; the song was not claiming that Air Man was unbeatable, but that the singer, who is meant to be a rather inept player, can't get past him. note. General opinion among most speedrunners or Challenge Gamers is that Air Man is middle-of-the-road at best in terms of difficulty; his tornadoes don't do a lot of damage and he takes extra damage from the Mega Buster, making it pretty easy to outdamage him as long as you have most of your health when you fight him, even without his weakness.note Back when the game was released, Nintendo Power even recommended fighting him first.
    • Mega Man X:
      • X is not Mega Man. He is his successor, like a "Mega Man Version 2" based on the original model. His evolutionary potential and free will - his main differences from Mega Man - are such important plot points that you'd think it'd be clear, but mistranslations (plus inaccurate journalism and promotional material) have relentlessly furthered the misconception.
      • It's a joke at this point that Zero constantly dies and is resurrected... except that Zero's only died 3 times (getting injured in X3 doesn't count). These deaths occur across 15 games in 2 different series, and the last one (depending on how you view the nature of Biometals in Mega Man ZX) actually stuck.
      • It's often mistakenly repeated that Vile's Japanese name, VAVA, is a reference to Boba Fett, and the name was changed to Vile because Capcom were afraid of being sued by Lucasfilm (B and V are interchangeable in Japanese, so the name Vava would be pronounced like Baba, which is close to Boba). In actuality, VAVA was named after the character Bubba Zanetti in Mad Max, as confirmed by character designer TOM-PON, and was only changed because VAVA may sound cool to a Japanese ear but sounds incredibly silly to an English ear.
    • Mega Man Zero
      • Zero's drastically different design (and by extension, everyone's designs in the series) is not supposed to be a literal, canonical redesign of his armor from the X series. Instead, it's merely a different depiction of the same character. The team wasn't satisfied with how Zero's usual design looked in Toru Nakayama's Zero art style, so they let him completely revamp it.
      • Aztec Falcon is often mentioned as one of the hardest first bosses in video games. While Aztec Falcon is difficult and the first Reploid you fight, he's actually the second boss of Mega Man Zero, after the Golem boss of the intro stage.
  • It's very difficult to find online humor about the Metal Gear Solid games that doesn't claim that Snake is irritated by Otacon to the point of loathing. While it is true that Snake found Otacon's naivete inconvenient and annoying when they first met, they soon begin developing a friendship which eventually matures into a Heterosexual Life Partnership that lasts the rest of their lives. They definitely bicker, but it's Like an Old Married Couple—it goes both ways.

  • Metroid:
    • Regarding the first game, it is sometimes claimed that Samus Aran originally had green hair before it was later retconned to blonde. This is likely due to how well-known the Justin Bailey code has become over the years, letting players start a game as Samus outside her Power Suit and depicting her with green hair. However, green has never been her "natural" color, even in this game. The Justin Bailey password actually starts Samus with a number of upgrades... including the Varia Suit, which was a palette swap at the time. For suitless Samus, the Varia upgrade turns her hair green; her normal color scheme (i.e. the equivalent of a Power Suit without the Varia upgrade) gives her brown hair, which is also seen in the helmetless and suitless ending screens. In addition, Captain N: The Game Master comics from the early 90s (which, unlike the TV show, are very faithful in depicting Metroid characters according to their original designs) depicted Samus with blonde hair, suggesting that the in-game brown hair might have actually been a hardware limitation that prevented a more accurate blonde color, much like Princess Peach in the NES Super Mario Bros. games.
    • It is often claimed that the Samus Is a Girl twist in the first game was more elegantly executed in the Japanese version by referring to Samus with gender-neutral pronouns in the manual. Supposedly, the English manual's use of male pronouns is an example of clumsy localization. In reality, however, the Japanese manual goes out of its way to refer to Samus with male pronouns several times.
    • "Ridley killed Samus' parents" is an oversimplification that gets thrown around a lot. In the manga (whose canonicity is debatable) Ridley did personally kill (and possibly eat) Samus' mother, but Samus' father sacrificed himself to repel the Space Pirates and never met Ridley at all. The games are even more vague, as only the Japanese version of Metroid Fusion shows a still of Ridley attacking humans while Samus' mother protects her. Either way, the relationship between Samus and Ridley in the games has never been about avenging Samus' parents, so this plot point isn't that important anyways and there's a tendency for fans to blow it out of proportion.
    • Many fans believe that Samus' infamous Heroic BSoD when facing Ridley in Metroid: Other M was a PTSD attack due to the childhood trauma of Ridley leading the attack that killed her family. This was exacerbated by the visual metaphor of her turning into a little girl. In reality, this was not the intended effect, but it was rather meant to convey how useless and powerless she felt upon seeing Ridley's return after what she thought was his final death on Zebes. This failed usage of imagery landed Nintendo the ire of Metroid fans for years.
  • Modern Warfare:
    • The original trilogy is often written off as being an American jingoistic, pro-war power fantasy where you shoot lots of Middle Easterners. In reality, you spend far more time fighting Russians than Middle Eastern troops, America is portrayed as far from perfect, even accidentally sparking World War III with a failed op and one of the major villains turns out to be an American general who helped start World War III for his own personal glory, and though the message may get lost in the increasing spectacle of the trilogy, it has a very clear War Is Hell message, with playable characters frequently having to be replaced because they died mid-campaign, and infamously horrifying scenes like the nuclear explosion in the first game and No Russian in the second. Also, the two only recurring playable characters in the series are British SAS soldiers, not Americans.
    • "No Russian" also sparked massive controversy from people under the impression that the game was glorifying the killing of innocent people and outright forced you to do it. In reality, the mission is meant to be as horrifying as Moral Guardians saw it, and the player doesn't actually need to kill anyone; as long as they don't open fire on the terrorists (which would blow their cover as an undercover agent), they're permitted to just tag along. While the case could be made that the developers intentionally played the sequence up for shock value — charitably as Serial Escalation for the previous game's nuke, cynically to get free publicity — anyone who's played the game and paid attention to the narrative will still recognize it as a very clear condemnation of mass shootings.

  • Mortal Kombat:
    • Scorpion and Sub-Zero. One of the most bitter rivalries in gaming, right? Well, not really. Scorpion got his revenge over Bi-Han, the original Sub-Zero at the end of the first game. In Mortal Kombat II, we meet Kuai Liang, the new Sub-Zero (and Bi-Han's younger brother). Scorpion actually becomes the protector of this new Sub-Zero, to atone for killing his brother. Aside from briefly attacking him during the fourth game (due to being Brainwashed and Crazy), Scorpion remains watching over him for the rest of the series (at least until the reboot, which goes in a different direction).
    • Contrary to popular belief, Sub-Zero is not a ninja. Even going by the loosest possible definition of that word, Bi-Han and his brother Kuai Liang are Chinese. The confusion is understandable, since Scorpion (who was originally just Sub-Zero with a yellow costume) is a ninja. Sub-Zero has notably lampshaded this a few times.
    • Daniel Pesina, the actor who played Johnny Cage and the ninjas in the first and the second game, was not fired from Midway because of the infamous BloodStorm ad that featured him as Cage. He was already out of the company by that point, having left it due to a lawsuit over royalties. So, the Ad, rather than being labeled as a very, very awkward moment, might have been Pesina's snarky revenge against Midway.
    • Shortly after the release of Mortal Kombat 11, a rumor started circulating that obtaining all skins within a reasonable timeframe would require over $6000 in microtransactions. This figure was obtained by taking the total amount of skins in the game and multiplying it by 5 (a skin in the shop costs 500 Time Krystals, which can be purchased with real money for $5), ignoring that only a small amount of skins are available in the store each day, that most Kosmetics cannot be bought from the store, and that both skins and Time Krystals can be earned without payingnote, but it remained common among critics of the game even after it was disproven.
    • It's a commonly passed around bit of video game trivia that Raiden destroyed the world in his ending in the first game - a far cry from his portrayal as the benevolent protector of Earthrealm and the series' Big Good which would become cemented through most of the series. However, that's a simplification of what actually happens in his ending - he merely grows bored of fighting other mortals and allows other gods to take part in the tournament, and that ends up destroying the world due to the Earth being caught in the crossfire of such powerful beings fighting one another. It's still jarringly irresponsible in light of Raiden's actions later in the series, but it isn't as malicious as it's often made out to be.

  • Many Bronies assume that the infamous shutdown of My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic by Hasbro was because the executives believed that a fighting game based off of a series targeted at young children was inappropriate and proceed to cry hypocrisy whenever official Friendship Is Magic media features violence. In reality, the C&D was no different than any usual lawsuit of the sort — it was just because the game was using Hasbro's characters unofficially, and it was getting too much publicity for Hasbro to ignore without risking potentially losing their trademarks. Trademarks themselves are something people don't know much about - it's Trademarks that have "Defend it or lose it" rules.

  • There is no such game as "Namu Amida Butsu! Rendai Utena". As evident when the title is read aloud on the screen, it's actually called Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA-.
    • Ashuku Nyorai is not a Dude Looks Like a Lady; she is out-and-out female, as stated on the game's official website.

  • NieR: Automata:
    • It's well known that 2B is an unabashed Ms. Fanservice character with her butt hanging out for half the game thanks to Clothing Damage, the camera zooming in on it whenever she climbs up a ladder, and having a realistically-modelled anus. Except that said Clothing Damage only occurs after performing and surviving a secret self-destruct move (which 9S can perform as well, blowing off his pants and leaving him in his boxer shorts) and only lasts until the player Fast Travels. The camera also doesn't actually look up 2B's skirt when she's climbing (if you want an upskirt shot you have to force the camera to do so while she's standing, upon which 2B will immediately step back and cover up,) and this "realistically-modelled anus" was never in the game, but in an unofficial porn model of 2B that was mistaken for her official model. She is a Ms. Fanservice to be sure, but the emphasis on it tends to get blown out of proportion by those unaware of the game as a whole. What may also lead to this idea is that Yoko Taro was pretty unabashed about having a Ms. Fanservice protagonist, with the famous "I like girls" comment he gave in a streamed interview when asked why 2B has Combat Stilettos.
    • On the flipside, many artists draw A2 with way more clothing than she actually wears. The only article of clothing she has is a midriff-covering scrap of cloth, performing a Full-Frontal Assault for the entire game. All those other black patches on her body are actually missing skin exposing the black material underneath (that conveniently take the shape of a backless top and hot pants) combined with Barbie Doll Anatomy due to being an older android model.
    • There's the misconception that Automata is just a fanservice game that got big thanks to horny 13-year-old boys. One may be surprised to learn that the story itself has deep philosophical messages, multiple endings, characters memorable for reasons besides fanservice, and that a great portion of the fans are women — 2B was actually the most cosplayed character of 2017.

  • Octopath Traveler is sometimes touted as "by the same team that made Bravely Default". While both games were published by Square Enix, and Octopath Traveler does take inspiration from Bravely Default for its art style and combat to the point that it can be considered a Spiritual Successor, Bravely Default was made by Silicon Studio while Octopath Traveler was made by Acquirenote .

  • Overwatch has quite a bit of this due the sparse amount of lore available and headcanons being taken as fact, but also misconceptions in general:
    • Tracer is considered to a prisoner of time if she isn't wearing her Chronal Accelerator. In reality, she only needs to be near it for it to work.
    • Overwatch is disbanded, and it's still inactive with the former members being adventurers taking sides in other conflicts? That was true when the game was first revealed, but it was established that Overwatch was indeed being reformed with the animated short Recall being about, well, the recall of Overwatch agents. Much of the plot since has been about the return of Overwatch. This makes the whole idea that Overwatch is shut down rather brief in the overall scale.
    • Bastion is often believed to have female programming, because of fanon portrayals. In reality, Bastion is considered genderless in the setting and referred to as "it" as opposed to Zenyatta (male) and Orisa (female). While an omnic obviously doesn't have a biological sex being that they're robots, they still have genders, but Bastion has none.
    • It's commonly believed that there are no real superpowers in the setting of Overwatch and it all comes from gear while every character is a Badass Normal outside of it. While this is mostly the case, there are quite a few exceptions: Soldier: 76 is an enhanced Super-Soldier; Reaper has wraith powers; Tracer can manipulate time; Winston has the Primal Rage state where his genetic modifications make him stronger; Zenyatta's orbs are quite possibly actual divine magic; Genji and Hanzo can summon spirit dragons; Reinhardt and Roadhog are so big as to be biologically impossible; Doomfist is a superhumanly strong Cyborg who punched his way out of his maximum security jail cell, punched a OR-15 in the wall, then picked up his gauntlet; Widowmaker has Improbable Aiming Skills and a resistance to the weather due to extreme genetic modification; D.va is actually manually shooting down every single bullet she hits with her defensive matrix; and Moira has a number of powers due to experimenting on herself.
    • One of the biggest examples was the idea that Mercy turned Gabriel Reyes into Reaper due to a very vague line. Then it was revealed not to be her, but rather Moira. Except, Moira didn't have total involvement in his transformation — he already had genetic issues by the time he recruited her.
    • A very confusing example was regarding D.Va specifically being a Starcraft pro. While she is definitely a professional gamer, official lorenote  never directly namedropped Starcraft, though it was extrapolated it was the case due to several factors, namely Blizzard's fondness for cross-referencing their own franchises, and D.Va being first teased with a fake Starcraft profile◊. As such, the definitive and explicit confirmation in early 2018 that this was not the case (specifying that while she plays Starcraft, she was a professional in an unnamed fictional game whose interface was more transferrable to that of her MEKA) ended up creating a pretty massive fan backlash where the writers were accused of retconning the lore and lying about it to their faces, when in reality it was more a case of unclear communication.
    • A widely-misunderstood belief is that Gabriel Reyes declassified Blackwatch's Dirty Business — in turn leading to the fall of Overwatch and Reyes' eventual transformation into Reaper — specifically because of jealousy in being unrecognized for his "heroics", especially in lieu of The Leader: Jack Morrison. However, this is not meant to be taken out-of-text at face value — in-universe, this is merely how the public interpreted the fall of the organization, not privy to the actual behind-the-scenes turmoil the characters had experienced (to the degree that Reyes and Morrison are presumed dead, rather than still operating as Reaper and Soldier: 76). It's unknown who blew the whistle on Overwatch's breach of ethics beyond increasing volumes of outside accusations, and Reyes/Reaper is particularly motivated by a desire to achieve a "greater good", presently resorting to terrorism to eliminate global systems that enforce corruption and systemic suffering.
    • In May 2023, it was widely reported that the long-anticipated PvE/story content of Overwatch 2 had been cancelled, adding fuel to the bad publicity of production woes and scandals the game and Activision Blizzard in general had become mired in. In truth, said content was actually announced to be downsized — while promised features like customizable "talent trees" and true single-player content were scrapped due to aforementioned Troubled Production, the PvE missions were by no means canned, and the first set of the campaign missions were announced and released in August 2023.

  • Pac-Man: Ms. Pac-Man is well-known as an unlicensed ROM Hack of the original Pac-Man done without Namco's knowledge or permission that fractured their working relationship with their international distributor at the time, Bally Midway, hence why the character was mostly Exiled from Continuity in later years. Except only the ROM hack part is true. Namco knew all about Ms. Pac-Man from the get-go and actually signed off on it, even giving input on character design. It was the later, lesser-known games Professor Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man that were done without Namco's approval, and which led to them terminating their licensing agreement with Bally Midway. Ms. Pac-Man's relative lack of appearances later on have more to do with legal red tape than any genuine distaste.

  • Paladins:
    • Despite the stigma, the poorly-researched clickbaity videos and articles by "professional" reviewers, and stereotypical image given to it by Overwatch fans, the game is not just "Overwatch in a Tolkien-esque fantasy setting where everyone happens to have guns". In fact, you can tell apart a Shallow Parody or a user making blind statements based on whether or not they're aware of this.
    • To begin, Paladins is actually a Dungeon Punk setting, where both technology and magic exist. Its fantasy aspect is actually a blanket term for including as many different fantasy-type characters as possible. The game also creates as many unique fantasy ideas as much as they use from established ones, and even the ones inspired by the greats have been given new interpretations. The cast is as diverse as including Asian-inspired fantasy characters, zombies wielding giant axes, rabbits riding on twin-headed lizards, shonen-inspired demon heroes, bomb-throwing robots, bipdeal foxes, walking trees, ice witches, angels, and demons, just for starters. Also, there's a good portion of the cast that don't use guns, and magic plays a heavy role in making a lot of characters unique.
    • Additionally, the idea of it being an "Overwatch clone" bares mentioning. Because it was first released in beta during the height of the Overwatch hype, Paladins is often regarded as a Captain Ersatz version because both are Hero Shooters featuring a colorful and diverse Cast of Snowflakes, and that meant Hi-Rez was "copying" Blizzard as if Blizzard was doing something that had never been done before. In reality, much of their similarities originates from the fact that both games were actually inspired by Team Fortress 2 and make use of common character archetypes found in fiction. While Paladins made some changes to attract Overwatch players to be fair, they've done far more to differentiate themselves from the game as well. Anyone who's seriously played both games, or even looked at Paladins enough, will tell you it's a completely different style of Hero Shooter with vastly different mechanics and the similarities being mainly superficial from having a similar template rooted in the genre.
    • Io's name is frequently written in all caps as "IO", which is due to files containing her character data (which were added before her official reveal) writing it this way, and confusion with the computing abbreviation for "Input/Output". However, all character files have names in all caps, yet Io is the only one who gets this treatment. As a Moon Goddess, her name is actually a reference to one of the moons of Jupiter, and, as with most names, only the first letter is capitalized in-game.

  • Palworld:
    • Due to the trailers and promotional materials hyping up the Video Game Cruelty Potential and Black Comedy, a lot of people assume that the player character is a Villain Protagonist and the intended way to play is to abuse the eponymous Pals. In actuality, abusing Pals leads to them slacking off, getting injured and just ruining productivity in general. Furthermore, many of the cruelest acts are completely optional, and you have the option to play in a more heroic way.
    • It has been claimed that the designs of the Pals and other art assets are AI generated. This is mostly due to game's Hate Dumb misinterpreting (deliberately or otherwise) some statements from the PocketPair CEO where he hints that he is okay with AI generated art and because the company developed a game where players generate art using AI.

  • Pico: The titular character is sometimes described as a sadistic school shooter, especially after he got a boost in popularity from his appearance in Friday Night Funkin'. Portraying him this way is usually an attempt at defying the Draco in Leather Pants treatment the FNF fandom gives him. In truth, Pico's first game is about him stopping a school shooting (you can shoot innocents in a bit of Video Game Cruelty Potential, but that is not the canon choice).

  • Portal:
    • Thanks to Memetic Mutation, everybody knows that in Portal, The Cake Is a Lie, which is often interpreted as said cake not existing. The Stinger reveals there really is a Black Forest cake somewhere in Aperture. The lie is that GLaDOS had no intention of giving it to Chell.
    • Fan art tends to portray everything in Aperture Science as being much smaller than it actually is, due to the fact there are no humans in the game to compare their sizes to. For instance, Wheatley is often drawn as being the size of a soccerball (or smaller), when he's actually almost as big as a human curled up into a ball.
    • Many are convinced that Portals only open on surfaces made of moon rocks. Not true. They can open on any white surface, regardless of material, as demonstrated by the unsanctioned testing areas and offices in the original game that the player can open Portals on. This misconception stems from a line said by Cave Johnson late into chapter 7 of Portal 2. What he actually said was that moon gel just happens to be a good Portal conductor; they just have a lot of it because Cave carelessly invested a lot of money into moon rocks, but got deathly ill because they're poisonous when grounded up.

  • Punch-Out!!:
    • Most non-fans will allege that the reason why Mike Tyson was cut from re-releases of the NES entry and replaced with Mr. Dream was due to Tyson's rape charge making it unfeasible for Nintendo to continue associating with him. In actuality, it was due to the license to use Tyson's likeness expiring and Nintendo, due to him no longer being the undefeated world heavyweight champion, deciding not to bother renewing it - the rape scandal happened a year later.
    • A video by Duel Screens translating the international fighters' dialogue from the Wii entry claims that "anyone who's taken even a single year of French" would know that Glass Joe's line "Je suis Glass Joe" ("I am Glass Joe") is gramatically incorrect, and should be "Je m'appelle Glass Joe" ("My name is Glass Joe"). However, "Je suis (name)" is actually a correct sentence, and has been used in France, as well as French-speaking parts of Canada (where Joe's voice actor Christian Bernard is from).

  • It is frequently stated in writeups on the history of the Shoot 'Em Up genre that Raizing was one of the offshoot companies formed following the financial struggles and bankruptcy of genre giant Toaplan alongside Gazelle, Takumi and (most famously) CAVE, an association that is at best massively overstated. While Raizing did receiving some coaching from Toaplan during the development of Sorcer Striker and developed games using the arcade hardware Toaplan used in its last-gen games, only two Raizing games (Battle Bakraid and Dimahoo) had any contributions from former Toaplan employeesSpecifically..., both of which were among the last shooting games the company would release. In reality, Raizing was founded by ex-Compile employees who worked on the Aleste series.
  • Resident Evil:
    • A common misconception among fans is that the Samurai Edge pistol used by the S.T.A.R.S. team was developed by gun shop owner Robert Kendo, the man encountered in the original Resident Evil 2 as well as its remake and the remake of 3. While Robert is a known gunsmith and has an original model Samurai Edge in his Ghost Survivors loadout, a file in the original RE3 and supplemental material establish that it was actually his unseen brother Joseph Kendo who developed the Samurai Edge (and Leon's Silver Ghost handgun) as part of a contract with the Raccoon City Police force. Robert did submit a gun for the S.T.A.R.S. gun concept trials after hearing about the contract, but it was disqualified due to not meeting any of their criteria, while Joe's Samurai Edge design passed both the criteria and the ensuing test trials. Joseph also made four further customized Samurai Edge pistols for Chris, Jill, Barry and Wesker per their specifications, the third of which is an unlockable weapon in the remake of Resident Evil.
    • While the Nintendo 64 port of Resident Evil 2 still is impressive considering the entire game is virtually intact, FMVs and all, but it's not compressing-1.4-GB-into-64-MB levels of impressive as commonly suggested. Both of the game's PS1 discs are actually a little above 350 MB, AKA half the maximum amount of data a CD can hold (and being that each disc features the same campaign but with a different Player Character, a lot of assets are obviously shared between the two).
    • As is the common misconception that Resident Evil 4 is "one big Escort Mission", and a lot is made of how either that is its greatest flaw or that it is a fine example of an escort mission done right. In fact: you only actually have to escort Ashley, and protect her from harm, for the entirety of two chapters: Chapter 3-1 and 5-2. She is with you in Chapters 2-2 and 2-3 but the levels provide dumpsters for her to hide in, meaning its less an "escort mission" and more a "hide her in absolute safety, rout all the foes, and call for her mission", and she also sits out all the boss battles. Other than that she is very briefly with you in Chapters 4-1 and 5-4, and you play as her in Chapter 3-4, and the rest of the game she is conveniently captured: even if we count every chapter where she even makes an appearance as an "escort mission" then only 7 of the 19 chapters, roughly a third of the game, is an escort mission.
      • One common criticism of RE4 says Leon was sent to rescue the President's daughter with just a handgun (plus a knife and radio). In reality, he was only there to investigate rumors of Ashley, escorted by two Spanish cops. The locals attack Leon, murder the cops and block the way out of the village. But Mission Control sends a heavily armed American gunship as backup as soon as possible. Which is still pretty impressive, considering it apparently only took a few hours to cut through the red tape and fly it to Leon's exact location in rural Spain.
  • For a long time, it was assumed that the titular protagonist of the Shantae video games was 16 years old due to a post from WayForward Technologies' Twitter account saying so when asked about the half-genie's age. This led to some discomfort in the fandom for a while due to Shantae frequently wearing revealing outfits in the games and notably having a story on her Character Blog that involved losing her clothes while skinny dipping. Eventually, James Montagna, who was in charge of the level design of several games, was asked about Shantae apparently being a sexualized underage character and he clarified that the characters of Shantae were always designed to have Vague Ages, the tweet that said Shantae was 16 was made by an intern who came to that conclusion without the staff's knowledge and should not be taken as official, and even if Shantae was 16 in her first game, enough time has passed between the series' installments that she would be legally an adult now. Creator and character designer Matt Bozon later clarified in a Discord conversation that WayForward has always considered her to be a young adult.
  • Shin Megami Tensei and Persona:
    • One misconception that's pervasive on this very wiki is the idea that whether the events of Shin Megami Tensei I or Devil Summoner and Persona happen depends on whether the events of Shin Megami Tensei if... happen. Not quite. The events of If... explicitly happen in both timelines. What makes the difference is whether they're noticed — in the Shin Megami Tensei timeline, the events are largely swept under the rug, leading to The End of the World as We Know It. In the Devil Summoner and Persona timeline, enough of the right people notice this event to realize the impending threat of demons and prevent nuclear apocalypse.
    • Alice is not, in fact, the enonymous character from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She's actually an original creation, stemming from a scenario in Shin Megami Tensei I where the player encountered a young girl seemingly living peacefully in the destroyed Tokyo, only to be revealed as a zombie resserected by her "servants" Nebiros and Belial. Future games would further lean into the Alice Allusion for her attacks, furthering the confusion.
    • Then there's the cell phone spinoff Hazama's Chapter. For the longest time, English speaking fans believed that it was a combined prequel to and remake of if... that explains how Hazama became the Demon Emperor, what Lucifer was up to during the events of if..., and features Tamaki Uchida freeing Hazama from the Demon Emperor's possession and foiling a coup against Lucifer. Then someone found footage of the game on Nicovideo and realized it didn't match up with the supposed plot summary at all. While the game is a prequel to if... and explains how Hazama became the Demon Emperor, Tamaki and Lucifer aren't in it, and Zurvan is only the ruler of the Infinite Tower (which Hazama turns into the Tower of Confinement after defeating him).
    • The song commonly known as "Fierce Battle" in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne is actually called "Forced Battle", and a later analysis revealed that the memetic "one more god rejected" lyric is more likely "war broke out in heaven."
    • Fans often treat the theory that Hijiri from Nocturne is Aleph from Shin Megami Tensei II as gospel, when in reality it is at best speculation supported by the two characters' similar appearance, "Hijiri" meaning "saint" in Japanese, and the character's cruel fate.
    • In Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, there is an entity known as the Axiom that many fans think is another name for the recurring series element known as the Great Will. This is because of a mistranslation by fans due to the two having somewhat similar names; the Great Will is always referred to as 大いなる意思 ("ooinaru ishi," meaning "Great Will") while the Axiom is called 大いなる理 ("ooinaru kotowari," meaning "Great Truth"). A sizable gap between the game's original release in Japan and the release of the localized version allowed this misconception to take root and spread.
    • It's often said that all the playable cast Persona and Persona 2 have the power of the Wild Card that the protagonists of all subsequent games have. What they actually have is the ability to change to different Personas, but they're limited by an Arcana penalty that lowers the strength of the Persona they summon the less compatible they are with it, and incompatible Personas can't be manifested at all. Contrast to actual Wild Card users, who have no limit on the Personas they can summon.
    • Tatsuya Suou, the protagonist of Persona 2, has a spell called Nova Kaiser that can stop time. With the way this information was spread around, the fandom seem to think he can effectively go around using The World. In reality, Nova Kaiser stops time for everything except Apollo, Tatsuya's Persona, including Tatsuya himself. And the only thing Apollo can do while time is stopped is use the attack portion of Nova Kaiser, meaning that the time stop is nothing more than a dramatic effect.
    • No, Adolf Hitler is not the Final Boss of Persona 2. Persona 2 is a duology, and Hitler is only the first form of the Final Boss of the first game. Even still, it's not the real Hitler - he's actually Nyarlathotep, the actual Final Boss of both games.
    • Persona 3
      • While hardly a cheery game, it can come as a surprise that the game received an M rating (the gaming equivalent of an R) from the ESRB - not only are M ratings practically unheard of for JRPGs, the game's content isn't particularly extreme, and seems like it could have easily been settled with a T rating (the equivalent of PG-13, and what it received from the UK's PEGI and Japan's CERO ratings boards). The general assumption among fans is that the existence of Mara or Yaksini pushed the game to an M rating, but this actually isn't the case - neither Mara nor Yaksini appeared in vanilla Persona 3, only showing up in the Updated Re-release FES. It's more likely the constant references to teenage suicide through the use of Evokers (mimicking shooting oneself in the head in a disturbingly realistic manner, though there's no blood or gore present) pushed the game to an M rating. While the Lighter and Softer Persona 4 and Persona Q also got saddled with M ratings, these probably were specifically because of Mara and/or Yaksini.
      • Due to widespread use of guides and the game's Social Link system being infamously more harsh than later games, it's commonly believed that a Broken Social Link is irreversible and permanently locks out access to Personas of that arcana. In reality, a Broken Social Link is reparable, it just takes longer than repairing a Reversed one.
    • Persona 4:
      • Nanako is not, as many people (even those who have actually played the game!) seem to think, the Protagonist's little sister. She is his biological cousin; her dad and the protagonist's mom were siblings. Although it's easy to get confused, given that she refers to him as "Big Bro" constantly throughout the game, and Yu (the protagonist)'s title in Persona 4: Arena is "The Sister-Complex Kingpin of Steel", referring to his Big Brother Instinct towards Nanako. The confusion arises from a translation problem; when addressing a relative like a cousin in Japanese or talking about such a relative, the words used are the same ones like those used for actual siblings. This goes even further (and thus makes it more complicated) when addressing, say, an uncle or just young man who simply isn't that much older as "Onii-san" even though there is no family relation whatsoever. In the original Japanese, Nanako addresses most of the Investigation Team with similar sibling terminology(for example, "Yukiko-onee-chan,") although she uses "-chan" on Rise and calls Teddie "Kuma-san"("Kuma" being his Japanese name).
      • It's commonly stated that Ryotaro Dojima was originally planned to have been the killer. If you select him as the killer, the game will note that he meets all the criteria (the actual killer is his fellow detective Adachi), but has been diligently working to solve the case and risked his life to save his daughter Nanako, the final kidnapping victim. While we do know the killer was someone different during development, it's never been stated exactly who it was.
      • Numerous persistent rumors surround Marie, a character introduced in the game's Updated Re-release, Persona 4 Golden. Namely, nearly the entire fandom believes that the game is filled with Ship Tease that makes her the protagonist's Implied Love Interest, and that several romantic events play out identically even if you don't romance her. In reality, there is only one scene in the game that contains explicit Ship Tease between Marie and the protagonist that goes unchanged even if the player stayed platonic with her.
    • Persona 5:
      • The English-speaking fandom tends to claim that Goro Akechi from Persona 5 is not a Phantom Thief, largely in part due to his antagonistic role in the plot, his Guest-Star Party Member status in the original game, his status amongst the western fanbase, and his lack of presence alongside them in crossover content such as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which also results in those familiar with Persona 5 through such crossovers parroting these claims. This conflicts with Akechi being listed amongst the Thieves in popularity polls officially released by Atlus, his frequent appearances in official merchandise alongside them, as well as his expanded presence in Persona 5 Royal where promotional material outright calls him a Phantom Thief.
      • Everybody "knows" that Hifumi Togo was supposed to be one of the Phantom Thieves but was Demoted to Extra in the end. What the development team actually said is that they originally had planned to have another, more radical-minded strategist in the party to act as a Foil to the strait-laced Makoto, but in the end decided to incorporate both ideas into Makoto herself. Eventually, when coming up with Confidants, the team had the idea to recycle and adapt the scrapped design sketch for a completely different character, who would be Hifumi.
      • The Yoshizawa sisters from Royal, Kasumi and Sumire, are not twins, despite looking nearly identical save for Sumire having differently shaded hair, and having been in the same year back when both were alive. This isn't helped by the two regularly being conflated both by official media and by the fandom, given how Sumire, the living sister, had been manipulated into thinking she was Kasumi.
  • Ratchet & Clank:
    • Despite the developer saying Insomniac Games on the box and before every game, for years many people assumed that the series was developed by Naughty Dog (which would have meant they were somehow pumping out two franchise entries a year in Ratchet and Jak and Daxter). If not this, then it's claimed that the PS2 games were made in the engine used for Jak and Daxter. In reality, it was only asset streaming code so that assets would dynamically morph between high/low quality versions depending on the distance).
    • It's often assumed that Ratchet & Clank (2016) was made first and the movie based on it. In actuality, the movie was in production long enough for a teaser to be included on the disc for Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus in 2013. This is rather blatant when the game's tagline is "The Game based on the Movie based on the Game".
  • Silent Hill:
    • Everyone knows that the series is all about a troubled hero who battles his own personal demons, right? Nope. From the very beginning the series has always been about a cult known as "The Order" and the main characters attempts to stop them from bringing their God out into the real world. While there have been some games that mix the cult and personal demons plots together, the cult has always played a part in the series. Even the games that seemingly don’t have anything to do with The Order, such as Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 4, make subtle references to the cult itself note . If anything only two games have nothing to do with The Order and focus strictly on the personal demons angle, and that's the non-canon Shattered Memories and Downpour.
    • The creature that chases down James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2 is named "Pyramid Head", right? Well, not quite. While the English localization and later Konami appearances do occasionally refer to it as such, its name in the original game is officially "Red Pyramid Thing".
    • The Red Pyramid Thing is exclusively a being created from the desire of James to be punished for his sins... except he's not. Despite this being the oft-cited reason why Pyramid Head's appearances in the films and other games aren't welcome, even in Silent Hill 2, it was an established icon that had roots in the Order's punishment rituals. Even across the franchise, his motivation as a punisher generally stays consistent, although who he punishes tends to vary, and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D goes the extra mile and brands him a protector.
    • It's been a common talking point in the fandom for years that the first three or so games (though this is most often used specifically in regards to 2) had Narm voice acting completely on purpose. While it could be argued that due to the heavy inspiration from David Lynch, who famously had stilted and just plain bizarre bits of dialogue in his works, Team Silent opted to use similar tactics such as long pauses in speech - there has been no clear cut answer from any of the main developers so far.
    • A common complaint with the series is that "all the American entries suck". Whether the non-Team Silent games are any good is a matter of opinion, but there's only actually ever been two American Silent Hills: Silent Hill: Homecoming by Double Helix Games and Silent Hill: Book of Memories by Wayforward Technologies. The other "American" Silent Hills were Silent Hill: Downpour by Czech developer Vatra Games, and Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories by British developer Climax Studios.
    • The town of Silent Hill is based off the real-life town of Centralia... except it isn't. Background and Creature Designer Mashahiro Ito has stated, on multiple occasions, that Silent Hill isn't based on any specific town, and series creator Keiichiro Toyama has stated that "[The game's team] deliberately did not use an actual place, since it might cause inconsistency with the real thing." However, scriptwriter Roger Avary used the town as inspiration for the script of the 2006 film, leading the game and the film's backstories to get conflated.
  • Some Sly Cooper fans refuse to believe that Bentley's line at the end of the third game regarding time travel was anything more than a humorous throwaway line as opposed to the Sequel Hook the next game treated it as, very likely due to certain reasons. In response to this, however, Kevin Miller confirmed on both his Twitter and his podcast (the 77:05 mark) that despite the fairly conclusive ending of the trilogy, Sucker Punch indeed intended for that line to be a Sequel Hook to allow the series to be revived under a new developer one day should they or Sony desire such, and for the next game to involve time-traveling and interacting with the Cooper ancestors.
    Kevin Miller: I was in a [recording] session, the very last session, where we recorded that line of dialogue, and Nate Fox, who we've had on the show, who was the writer of the first three games, said very specifically, "The only thing I know what to do with a fourth Sly game is to go back in time and meet the ancestors." He was like, "That is what the next game would be." (…) The other thing that he said in that same time was, "We are done,"— they were very clear in that recording session— "We are done with the Sly Cooper franchise." And Nate very kindly, many times— I think he said it when we had him on the show— "It is my hope that someone takes that franchise and runs with it." So what happened was exactly always what Sucker Punch very kindly set up for the IP in their relationship with Sony was, "Give the franchise a room to grow, and set someone else up for success."
  • Soul Series:
    • Seong Mi-na is often thought of as just being a female Moveset Clone of Kilik, the latter being the more iconic between them. In fact, when people argue cleaning out the roster of clones, they'll cite Mi-na as the biggest example. Thing is, Seong Mi-na predates Kilik by having appeared in the original game, Soul Blade, whereas Kilik didn't appear until Soulcalibur (the name that the rest of the series is based off of due to Sequel Displacement). While this could be considered Older Than They Think, it's so ubiquitous that it deserves mention here.
      • A new one will likely arise in the wake of Soulcalibur VI: Mi-na is a clone of Kilik at all. Considering that Divergent Character Evolution has made them play little like each other apart from their weapons, it's not even fair to call her a clone anymore, not that it'll stop people from doing it.
    • A lot of people imagine Nightmare as Siegfried and imagine him as using a One-Handed Zweihänder. Actually, this combination didn't happen until much later. Siegfried-as-Nightmare lasted all of two games (Soulcalibur and II), where afterwards the two were made separate characters on the roster due to Siegfried breaking free from Soul Edge and then Zasalamel bonding Inferno and Soul Edge's memories as Siegfried into a discarded suit of armor. It wasn't until III where this was introduced, which was done on purpose to make them stand out from each other, and was maintained in future games. Before that, Siegfried-as-Nightmare would hold Soul Edge with both of his hands (normal and monster). While having Siegfried wield Soul Edge with one hand would indeed happen, this wasn't introduced until 2018's Soulcalibur VI — a little more recently than one might think.
    • Everyone "knows" that Soul Edge is the evil sword and Soul Calibur is the "good sword", and imagine that the two are at war with each other because the former wants to reign chaos and the latter wants to prevent that from happening for the good of mankind. Those who still think that would be very surprised that this can only be true if taken at face value. In reality, both swords are evil, but in different ways, and aren't that different from each other. Hinted at throughout the series, and first made explicit in IV, it wasn't until V did the fact come to light where Soul Calibur was shown to have its own version of Inferno with Elysium, and similarly would've taken over Patroklos as its host to create its version of Nightmare. The overall theme is Both Order and Chaos are Dangerous, since humanity is screwed no matter who wins. All in all, Soul Edge might as well say to Soul Calibur "Yeah, I'm evil. But at least I admit it".
    • Many players — especially before premiere of Soulcalibur V — "knew" that Aeon Calcos a.k.a. Lizardman was just a glorified mook without actual characterization nor background, with the fact that he is a humanoid lizard being his only defining trait. In reality, like every other character in the games, Aeon Calcos does have his own (quite tragic) backstory. To make long story short: he used to be a human, he was transformed into what he is against his will when captured during his quest to destroy the Soul Edge (and effectively robbed of his life, home and family), and although he was later released from the brainwashing that made him a slave of the bad guys, he is still unable to regain his human form and is gradually losing his own humanity, sentience and sanity, slowly turning into beast. Thus, it came to a great shock for many people, when V was released and they suddenly learned that "Lizardman" does have a name and identity after all.
    • On a meta level, many think Tira was voiced by fan-favorite actress Jennifer Hale — she never was. Same is said for Talim supposedly being voiced by Hynden Walch.
  • Inklings and Octolings in Splatoon are made out of ink, so they can't swim or even drink liquids without being killed instantly... right? While they have Super Drowning Skills in-game, Inklings and Octolings can survive a bit of liquid just fine. Nintendo has offered multiple Hand Waves, ranging from the drowning actually being due to the sudden shock of falling into water breaking their thin skin and causing the ink inside to leak out like a popped balloon, to the amount of water involved being the key, to freshwater vs. seawater, to whether the water was ingested (i.e. internal vs. external contact).
  • The Floran in ''Starbound are often described as carnivores.They're actually omnivores. Eyebowls and the Hot Bone — both of which contain no meat, despite their names — are Floran dishes.
  • In Star Control, the Mmrnmhrm are a race of robots who have lost their memory and have no idea who made them or why. A lot of fans believe they were made by the Precursors. Actually, the game never gives even the slightest hint as to who made the Mmrnmhrm. And while the Precursors did create one of the game's races, it wasn't the Mmrnmhrm: it was the Mycon.
  • Many people who played the first StarCraft game instantly assumed that a demolitions operative who accompanies the squad of marines in "Battle on the Amerigo" cinematic is a Ghost, for absolutely no reason except (apparently) the fact that he doesn't wear power armor and is equipped with night vision goggles (none of which are the defining characteristics of a Ghost). That "common knowledge" was so embedded in fandom and general gaming populace that it may still be found in the internet forums, video commentaries and this very wiki. This is in spite of the fact that there is absolutely nothing about this guy that would indicate he is a Ghost, from the fact that he is a lowly auxiliary operative dealing with mundane job of blowing up things marked for demolition (while Ghosts are elite, carefully selected telepathic assassins who take part in special operations) to his equipment, which includes an ordinary personal armor and somewhat old-fashioned carbine (while Ghosts use state-of-the-art, sealed environment suits that boost their psychic abilities, allowing them to enhance their strength or even turn invisible and are primarily armed with sniper rifles of whopping 25-milimetre calibre) to the fact that when the titular battle breaks out, he is completely frozen with fear like a rookie (while Ghosts — apart from being badass commandos — are known for their absolute ruthlessness and indifference to horrors of the battlefield).
    • The Science Vessel pilot's voice actor is often assumed to be Harry Shearer, due to how much he sounds like Mr. Burns, to the point where a few of his quotes are Mr. Burns references. He was actually voiced by Tracy W. Bush, a Blizzard employee-it should be noted that all generic units in StarCraft 1note  are voiced by Blizzard employees rather than professional voice actors, and Harry Shearer isn't mentioned in the game's credits at all.
  • Story of Seasons:
    • Many players outside of Japan seems to think Natsume created the games when they are only responsible for translations and creating the English title. Natsume does currently make games under the Harvest Moon name however they're not the actual Harvest Moon titles. The Japanese games are now being translated under Story Of Seasons by XSeed.
    • Harvest Moon fans often believed that the classic blue-capped hero from the game is named "Jack". In fact, certain fans are often shocked when they find out that his official name is actually "Pete" and this was first made clear in the Game Boy Color game. "Jack" is a nickname dating from the original title having a beanstalk you could purchase.
    • Harvest Moon 64 and Harvest Moon: Back to Nature are often mistaken for the same game but fans will make it clear that they're not. The latter was meant to be a port but the porters ended up changing so much they just completely retooled the game. The two games have the same cast and Super-Deformed artstyle but otherwise play like two completely separate installments. The characters personalities, relationships, and roles were changed quite a lot. The remake Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town makes the differences clearer by redesigning the characters to fit their Back to Nature characterizations more than their 64 ones.
    • Lumina from Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is not eleven to twelve no matter what fans say. Her age on the Japanese website for the first game is given as fourteen, before she was given an Age Lift to sixteen (eighteen internationally) in Another Wonderful Life so Rock could have a crush on her.
    • It's often assumed for A Wonderful Life Special Edition that you can only get a daughter if you married Lumina. In actuality, you can have a son or daughter with any wife. A mistake that even the Wiki makes. The error probably persists because Lumina's son and the generic daughter design are extremely similar as toddlers.

  • Street Fighter:
    • The canonical ending is Ryu defeating Sagat with a Shoryuken and scarring him, right? Nope; in Alpha 3 it was retconned that Sagat beat Ryu, almost to death, in the tournament, and that he was scarred by a cheap-shot Metsu Shoryuken from Evil Ryu.
    • Akuma is not the bloodthirsty demon that most adaptations make him out to be. In actuality, he is very careful to maintain his own personal code of ethics which includes but is not limited to never fighting somebody weaker than him, and even then only fighting at his full potential against a truly worthy adversary. Akuma has only ever actually killed two people: his master Goutetsu, who accepted Akuma's challenge of a fight to the death, and Gen, who sought Akuma out because he was dying of leukemia and wanted to die in battle, not wasting away in a hospital. He didn't even kill M.Bison at the end of Street Fighter 2; Bison committed suicide to escape the Raging Demon.
    • Most people assume that Final Bison is Bison utilizing all of his power at once. This is actually pretty far from the truth; Final M.Bison is not even close to his full potential, it is simply him channeling as much of his power as possible at once without disintegrating his host body, and even that causes it to slowly degrade.
    • People looking at 90s material involving the cast of II tend to wonder why so much of it focused on Guile and Chun-Li, when Ryu is "the main character." For the most part, Capcom actually did regard Guile and Chun-Li as the main characters of II; they're definitely the most important newcomers and the ones who have the most connection to the main antagonist, while Ryu is kind of just there. In fact, almost every Street Fighter series has had a different "protagonist". For Alpha, it was originally Charlie. In III, Alex. In IV, Abel. Even V is focused more on Rashid than anyone else. While Ryu showed up first and was the protagonist of the first game, him being the protagonist for the series as a whole is very much Newer Than They Think, starting with Alpha 2 (and by extension, Alpha 3).
  • Streets of Rage:
    • A recurring meme features what appears to be a screencap of the second game with the text "ONLY TRUST YOUR FISTS - POLICE WILL NEVER HELP YOU." While it is true that the game consists of ex-cops who quit their jobs after realizing that the police of Wood Oak City as a whole were in Mr X.'s pocketbook, this text never appears in any of the games. Also, the screenshot minus the text isn't from any of the official games, but from Streets of Rage Remake, as the cop car appears as part of a special attack in that game, something that was phased out from canon after the first game.
    • On the whole, the series' anti-police themes tend to be played up heavily by fans, and as a result the games gets praised by gamers with anti-authoritarian views, even those who have never personally played the games. Only the first and fourth games actually make mentions of Corrupt Cops. In the first game, while cops being corrupt is mentioned in the opening crawl, this never actually factors into the gameplay itself, as all of the enemies you face are non-police crooks. In fact, Adam, one of the protagonists of the first game that left the police (alongside Axel and Blaze), went back to being an officer in Streets of Rage 2 and has remained in the police since. And in the US version of Streets of Rage 3, the heroes actually save the local police department, as Mr. X's scheme in that game is the replacement of cops with evil robotic duplicates. Corrupt cops are once again brought up in Streets of Rage 4, and the player does get to fight cops, but even in the 26-year gap between SoR3 and SoR4, it was not uncommon to see social media posts claiming that "SoR says ACABnote ."
  • Super Smash Bros.
    • Everyone knows that having a long and rich history with Nintendo is a prerequisite for being a Guest Fighter in Super Smash Bros., as stated by Masahiro Sakurai himself. "History with Nintendo" is a line often used either for or against the inclusion of a guest character in online discussions, depending on the character in question. Except for one thing: Sakurai never said that, not even once. He once said doesn't let "just anyone" be a guest in Smash Bros., most likely giving some that impression, but the only hard rule that Sakurai has ever publicly stated is that the series will only have fighters and other content from video games. This is even reflected in the franchise's very first guest character: Solid Snake. While his series has had several games on Nintendo platforms prior to their inclusion (an NES port of the original, Ghost Babel on the Game Boy Color, and The Twin Snakes on the Nintendo GameCube, as well as the non-canonical NES sequel Snake's Revenge), he is overall much more associated with the PlayStation brand. Despite this, there never fails to be outcry about Sakurai breaking his non-existent rule whenever a character that has little history with Nintendo ends up joining the roster; from Cloud Strife in Smash 4 to Joker in Ultimate.
    • On the same subject, the presumption that Cloud or Joker never appeared on a Nintendo system isn't true either, as while their home games hadn't released on a Nintendo system at the time of their inclusion, they've shown up as characters in other series or spin-off titles. For better or worse, this caused fans to reinterpret the non-existent "history with Nintendo" rule as really meaning that the character just needs to have had at least one prior appearance on a Nintendo console.
    • On the other hand, there are also fans who think Smash officially being declared a "celebration of gaming", rather than just Nintendo, means character choices would prioritize series, companies, and/or genres with little to no representation, playable or otherwise. One official source where Sakurai called Smash this is during Byleth's presentation, AKA the eighth playable Fire Emblem character. Ironically, while Fighters Pass 2 helped steer Smash speculation towards this belief, the only character it added who comes close to all these criteria is Steve, and even then, despite a Mojang copyright being added to the title screen alongside him, Steve still falls under the Microsoft copyright too.
    • Likely due to SmashWiki using them as the primary images for its articles on the characters' Melee incarnations, it is commonly thought that the images used in the character profiles on the game's Japanese site are the characters' sole official artwork in that game.
    • In Melee, one of the most common jokes relating to the game's famously wonky hitboxes is Marth's standing grab, which is generally thought of as being downright outlandishly long despite the grab itself looking very short. This is a very fair mistake to make, but Marth's grab hitbox actually doesn't go too far from what it looks like, at most being a few inches from his outstretched hand◊. The issue is actually with the speed of the animation, as the point where Marth's arm is furthest outstretched and where the hitbox kicks in only lasts for a single frame, and the frame right before that◊ looks a fair bit shorter—the grab goes about as far as it looks, it just doesn't look that way for long enough for many people to see it. Further messing with the issue is that some characters have wonky hurtboxes—for instance, in an infamous gif of Marth managing to outrange Yoshi's tongue grab, one thing not shown is that Yoshi has a hurtbox on his nose, meaning his overall hurtbox stretches a lot wider than Marth's does. A final layer to the problem is that the hitboxes on Marth's dashing grab are genuinely borked◊.
    • Due to competitive Melee being heavily associated with unintended Advanced Movement Techniques, L-canceling is assumed to be something that wasn't meant to be part of the game. Except not only was it intentionally programmed into the game, it's also the case for Smash 64, where the official website even had a guide on how to do it.
  • Touhou Project
    • Every single game ends with the protagonists having tea with the final boss, right? Nope. Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic Square is the only game in the series to feature a tea party ending, and it was only between Reimu and Marisa (the Player Characters). Drinking parties, however, have happened much more frequently. Tea however is Reimu's Trademark Favourite Food.
    • It's often believed that Gensokyo is a full-blown World of Jerkass, with every one of the girls being a violent Jerkass with zero actual morals. This however mostly stems from Early-Installment Weirdness, as the early games (specifically the PC-98 games and the original Windows trilogy) were much more of a Gag Series rife with Comedic Sociopathy. After the Soft Reboot and a mild case of Cerebus Syndrome, this largely dropped off, and while there are a lot of morally dubious and downright unpleasent personalities in the series, quite a few are shown to be entirely pleasent and good-natured, with Reimu being at worst a very flawed Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
    • Reimu's literal Plot Armor and, by extension, the idea that the Spell Card Rules were at least partially implemented because, if she died, then the Great Hakurei Barrier would come undone and Gensokyo would suffer a sudden existence failure are entirely ideas that the fandom made up. The fact of the matter is that, ever since Silent Sinner in Blue, it's been impressed that Reimu is frightfully expendable, entirely replacable, and the authorities of the realm, like the local judge of the dead, are more concerned with how to the spin the story in the eventuality of her death while on duty rather than her death in itself.
    • It's widely believed that Flandre's common characterization in fan works as an Ax-Crazy Creepy Child is Outdated by Canon, and Touhou Chireikiden ~ Foul Detective Satori and Touhou Gouyoku Ibun ~ Sunken Fossil World show that she's just an innocent little girl with a sarcastic streak. Except it doesn't really. Flandre is shown throughout both works to be a violently sociopathic Blood Knight with a considerable Lack of Empathy, doing things like compliment Sakuya when she thinks the latter attempted to murder Patchoulli, violently strangle Meiling while Laughing Mad, and outright declare herself a god of destruction. What the manga and game actually did change was making Flandre less innocent; while popular Fanon portrayed her as unaware of how destructive she was, Foul Detective Satori makes it clear she's fully aware of her destructive capabilities, and that the only reason she doesn't just break out of her imprisonment is because all of her needs are attended to inside.
    • It's often believed that The Shinigami's Rowing Her Boat as Usual, The Gensokyo of Humans, and other manga not written by ZUN that're serialized on Comicwalker are Doujinshi. They're actually fully official, licensed manga which have tankabon sold in stores and on official platforms like Amazon, and are fully approved by ZUN, with the aforementioned Shinigami even including the official canon epilogue of Touhou Ibarakasen ~ Wild and Horned Hermit in its volume release. They just aren't official canon due to not being written by ZUN himself, and him allowing creators creative freedom for their interpretations of the Touhou world.
    • Despite what many fans believe, Rinnosuke was not Marisa's Honorary Uncle when she was growing up. It's actually stated in the same chapter of Curiosities of Lotus Asia where their relationship is first established that he had already left the Kirisame shop and opened by Kourindou by the time Marisa was born, and the two rarely if ever spoke on the times he visited. Their being close acquaintances only started after Marisa had already run away from home.
  • In most Touken Ranbu doujin that ship or at least feature the two Kanesada swords together, Izuminokami either calls Kasen nidaime ("the second", referring to Kasen's swordsmith being the second-generation Kanesada) or by name. In game canon, he calls him Nosada.
  • The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang has a persistent rumor surrounding it that the player character in the Japanese version ate hearts to recover health, but the Bowdlerised North American replaced them with tomatoes, turning Spike into a Vegetarian Vampire. Actually, the tomatoes are also in the Japanese version; it's just that kind of a game. (The game's Japanese-only predecessor, Makai Prince Dorabocchan, even has separate meters for hearts and tomatoes.) This seems to be the result of Gossip Evolution based on typical descriptions of the game comparing and contrasting it with more typical Action-Adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, where Hearts Are Health (and Heroes Prefer Swords).
  • Twisted Wonderland:
    • Night Raven College is not a university (i.e. not the American definition of "college"); judging from the ages of the characters and the education offered, it is a high school.
    • Jade's infamous obsession with mushrooms reaches memetic status in the fandom, but that's not his Trademark Favorite Food. His real favorite dish is octopus carpaccio.
  • Ultima:
    • Everyone knows that in every Ultima game, Author Avatar Lord British can be killed using a glitch or an exploit in the rules. Actually, this is only true for some of the early games (and even then, in the first game, you didn't even need to do anything special to kill him as long as you could take on his bodyguards) - in the later games, the ability to kill Lord British is a deliberate Easter Egg. The greatest evidence against the glitch theory is in Ultima VII, where to kill him, you need to drop a specific plaque from on top of his castle walls right as he's walking under it, which is an in-joke to the real Richard Garriot being injured by a falling metal bar - all things that would be impossible to be done in the game unless the developers intended you to be able to do it. This idea seems to come from Ultima Online, in which, infamously, a troll actually did manage to kill Garriot's Lord British avatar during an event by accidentally bypassing the invulnerability he had as an admin, but it's not unplanned in any other games.
    • There's a persistent rumor that there was going to be an Ultima VIII: Part 2. This was never the case, as work on Ultima IX began almost immediately after Ultima VIII was released; there was going to be an expansion pack named The Lost Vale, but it was abandoned at a very early stage in favor of focusing on IX. (Strangely enough no one seems to remember Forge of Virtue 2, a standalone RPG which had Arcadion the daemon as either a protagonist or antagonist, which was real but ended up on indefinite hold when other projects (like Bio Forge) took priority.)
  • The Wonderful 101:
    • The ownership of the series was been a continuous source of this, both with its initial reveal and later porting to other systems; namely the latter. While the former incident was short-lived, with fans quickly realizing that that TW101 is a Nintendo IP rather than a third-party one (Nintendo owns the trademark and co-owns the copyright with developer PlatinumGames), when Platinum announced a Kickstarter year later to help them self-publish the game on not only Nintendo Switch, but also on PlayStation 4 and PC, the common assumption was that Nintendo either sold it to them or traded it for their co-ownership of the Astral Chain IP. They didn't. Platinum would later clarify that Nintendo gave them their blessing and licensed it out to them; meanwhile, while Astral Chain did change from Nintendo having co-ownership to full ownership around the same time, it was a separate business deal that had nothing to do with TW101.
    • The game was originally a Wii U exclusive, so the touchscreen is mandatory, right? No, it's just one of two available control schemes, with the game's director (Hideki Kamiya) preferring to use the right analog stick instead. When the game was remastered for other consoles, a number of the quality-of-life changes were dismissed because it was believed that the lack of a touchscreen was a downgrade, a claim pushed by Scott The Woz and frequently parroted. What was mandatory for the Wii U version was the second-screen view on the tablet controller, and YMMV on how well the ports translated that to a single-screen experience.
  • One of the things most often brought up when discussing Wonderful Everyday and its content is a scene where a girl is violently raped by a dog. Which is technically true, but it's not actually a full H-Scene. It's actually part of a brief flashback showing the past of one of the girls Zakuro forms a suicide pact with, and the game cuts way right before the rape happens.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Despite the stereotypes about its fanbase, it is not a straightforward Sword and Sorcery High Fantasy saga—it's a Fantasy Kitchen Sink featuring both fantasy and science-fiction elements, and it parodies fantasy tropes (or plays them for laughs) nearly as often as it plays them straight. Yes, it does include elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, wizards, knights, and most everything that you'd expect from a Tolkien pastiche, but it also features extraterrestrials as one of its playable races—with their own crashed spaceship, to boot— magitech robots, firearm technology ranging in complexity from the 15th to 20th centuries, and Steampunk-flavored airships and trains as a form of mass transit. In fact, while it's not focused on as much, a lot of the races are actually extraterrestrials who got to Azeroth via teleporters; orcs were presented as alien invaders from another planet right from the first game. You can usually spot a Shallow Parody of WoW by whether or not they're aware of all of this.
    • Many, many players "know" that Thrall cheated in his final Mak'gora against Garrosh because he used magic, which is expressly forbidden. In actuality, that was solely in Warcraft 2016 the Non-Serial Movie which also forbade the use of weapons. In the actual lore, the only two consistent rules of Mak'gora were that a dropped weapon could no longer be used by either combatant and that the duels were to either death or submission. Every other rule was decided upon by the participants* and there have in fact been multiple Mak'gora that involved one or both fighters using magic, including Thrall's and Garrosh's first duel back in Wrath of the Lich King.
  • It is common knowledge that at the end of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the Volunteer sacrifices him/herself to destroy the Temple Ship. However, if one were to watch the ending cutscene carefully, you can see that the Volunteer disappears in a psionic flash moments before the Temple Ship explodes. Since it happened so fast, so many people missed this detail that Jake Solomon had to clarify this on Twitter (spoiler in the link).
  • Xenoblade Chronicles:
    • Xenogears, Xenosaga and Xenoblade Chronicles are sub-series within the same franchise, right? While this is an understandable conclusion, due to all of them being developed by Monolith Soft note  and sharing the "Xeno" name, this actually isn't the case. They are three separate IPs owned by three separate companies, all with their own separate narratives and continuities; the continued use of "Xeno" by each subsequent franchise is a mix of Creator-Driven Successor (Saga) and Production Throwback (Blade), but that's about it. This misconception not helped by the fact that fans of Monolith's work like to lump them together anyway as "the Xeno games", even those who are 100% aware of this fact.
    • While each protagonist in the numbered entries certainly has a signature, red Cool Sword, none are ever called the "Xenoblade". Shulk wields the Monado, Rex carries the Aegis Sword, and Noah uses the Veiled Sword and later the Lucky Seven. Each game justifies the title in its own way; for example, spin-off game Xenoblade Chronicles X is about the conflict between the military organization BLADE and their various encounters with aliens (referred to as Xenos), with the late-game reveal that your team leader is secretly a Xeno.

    Companies and Consoles 
  • Konami had a lot of these in regards of their image thanks to the company becoming embroiled by controversy around 2015-2016.
    • Many fans believe that Hideo Kojima was an innocent auteur who was forced out of Konami by draconian upper management. In reality, while Konami definitely could have handled his departure better, Kojima wasn't exactly blameless in the situation; he was infamous within the company for valuing artistic vision over financial resources. Konami was in pretty dire straits at the time, so they had a legitimate reason to want him gone.
    • Pachislot adaptations of Konami games are often thought of as a recent cash-grab; however, their pachinko division has existed since 1992. These slot machines largely flew under the radar until the 2015-2016 scandals shone a spotlight on them. If you go on the comments for, say, Gradius: The Slot, you'll see many angry comments assuming it was made in the wake of "Kojima-gate", even though it was released in 2011, four years prior. As a matter of fact, Konami doesn't make pachislot machines anymore; the last one they released was the Silent Hill one, before the COVID-19 pandemic combined with stricter regulations on gambling in Japan forced them to turn to other ventures. This hasn't stopped a few fans from sending them hate-mail or flipping off the building for decisions they had nothing to do with, or making remarks that they still make pachinko machines instead of games (even in the face of actual new game announcements revolving the franchises they 'hurt' the most).
  • The original U.S. Nintendo Entertainment System model was known for either not running games after a while or the games displaying very messed up graphics. People attributed the problems to dirt/dust in the game cartridges or inside the NES itself, thus they would blow into them or try to clean them with rubbing alcohol or other cleaning solution. It worked for some, so many others spread the knowledge around as the solution to fix a game/system that wasn't working properly. This would actually make the problem worse since blowing on the cartridge connectors would put water vapors on them due to your breath and putting on any liquid in general is asking for trouble. In actuality, the problems came from bent pins inside the cartridges due to the constant pressing up/down on the cartridge to load it inside or remove it from the system. Nintendo addressed the design flaw by making a second model that was a top loader instead of a forward one.
  • People believed that the colors in Game Boy Advance titles, notably the early ones, were always bright and garish, which was largely the result of the early models of the Game Boy Advance not having a backlight. While it is indeed true that the original Game Body Advance had no backlight, the graphics of these games, while still brightly colored, look a lot more washed out than people think (At least with said original model and SP), with most official ports of these games on the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack using duller color palettes to imitate real Game Boy Advance screens, albeit not closely. This confusion was caused by people who either grew up with or are used to playing the Game Boy Advance titles on either most emulators (which tend to exaggerate the colors), or other Nintendo hardware (i.e. the AGS-101 model of the Game Boy Advance SP and the Nintendo DS Lite, to name a few), and this even extends to people who have only seen screenshots/videos of these games using the emulator colors.
  • The Wii:
    • It's often stated that the system was originally supposed to be called the "Nintendo Revolution", but that Nintendo was unable to trademark that name, resulting in it ending up with the name it actually got. "Revolution" was never at any stage intended as anything more than a working production name, just like the "Dolphin" (GameCube), "Nitro" (DS), or "NX" (Switch). However, due to Nintendo revealing a great deal of information about the console before it had a name, media sources were forced to use the name Revolution over and over again until the public loved it so much that when the actual, controversial name was revealed, there was a backlash.
    • With the system often joked to be "two GameCubes duct-taped together", and its being released around the time multi-core CPUs became mainstream, this has led to a belief among several gamers that the Wii uses a dual-core version of the GameCube's CPU. The Wii's CPU is still only a single-core chip, just clocked about one-and-a-half times faster than that of its predecessor. The Wii U, on the other hand, does use a triple-core (and much higher-clocked) version of the GameCube's CPU.

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