Developers Foresight / Role-Playing Games

Developer's Foresight for Role-Playing Games.

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Subpages:

• Baldur's Gate
• Undertale

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• Alpha Protocol's story progression runs on this. At first, it just seems like little things, like characters calling you out on wearing ridiculous sunglasses or if you're wearing cammies in a public place where it would be better to wear civvies and blend in. Your character sheet even comes into play. The simplest example being an instance where Mike decrypts some encoded files he's swiped on a mission, unless you haven't put any points into the tech skill. In that case Mike is computer-illiterate and his handler handles the files instead. Multiple playthroughs will reveal just how far-reaching your little decisions are; every choice has a consequence, even dialog options that seemingly do nothing but influence whether or not someone likes you, because different reputations with different NPCs always have different, tangible results. Many players assume that the game is somehow unfinished or that, at least, the writing is sloppy because they lost track of a character and never saw them again. In fact, the choices they made allowed the character in question to become a Karma Houdini, but different choices would've ended in that character being more important and getting an on-screen resolution (of which there are many possibilities, ranging from friendship to backup to Heel–Face Turn to execution.) The drawback to this complexity is that if you want to rig the game for a certain, preferred outcome, you're probably going to have to consult a FAQ.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura
  • The game has custom dialogue and journal entries for characters with low Intelligence. However, characters with low Intelligence can't get some quests, and some potential party members won't join them. In at least one case, they won't ever join you if you talk to them with low Intelligence, so you would have to know in advance or Save Scum to bump the character's Intelligence before talking to them. However, if you do manage to recruit them like that and then let the Intelligence booster wear off, the character won't talk to you regularly, but for quest-mandated conversations, you'll have the usual custom dialogue.
  • Every quest and significant development in Arcanum are recorded in your journal. Low intelligence characters record their impressions in broken Hulk Speak. There are low intelligence journal entries for quests you can't undertake as a stupid character, just in case you boosted your intelligence with a potion specifically to access them.
• Astra Hunter Zosma: Zosma initially calls his blob companion "Blobbo," but later gets the option to give the latter a proper name. However, the player can input "Blobbo" anyways, causing Zosma to say, "Actually, Blobbo is fine after all."
• Baldur's Gate III is infamous for the sheer amount of this it has:
  • There are a lot of race-specific dialogue changes, especially for drow and githyanki, as the former are only just losing some of their hated reputation and the latter are outsiders with a history of combat against the mind flayers central to the plot, which is shown as early as your first encounter with the tieflings holding Lae'zel where they'll react with hostility and force you to either fight them or intimidate them to make them back off. There's also a huge amount of custom dialogue for a tiefling in the druids' grove due to the refugees. There's also a lot for a druid. And if you're both of these things, there's specific lines for that.
  • If Gale dies through methods unconnected to the story, a magical projection of himself will give you instructions on how to resurrect him the first time this happens. However, if you yourself kill Gale and then revive him, Gale will tell you how he would normally thank you, but you killing him to begin with leads to him having mixed feelings about you.
  • There are multiple ways of dealing with the Druid Grove and the goblins in Act I. While it's possible to simply stick with one side or the other, it's also possible to be a Double Agent by telling the goblins you'll help them, running back to the grove, telling the druids the goblins are coming, and catching the goblins in an ambush.
  • If you use the tadpole, then after your second dream involving it, Shadowheart will suggest that you stop using its powers as it seems to be gaining stronger influence on you. If you agree, then use an illithid power anyway, your companions will call you out on it after the next dream. But if someone besides the protagonist used their illithid power instead, they'll be the one called out. Shadowheart in particular will get put on blast for being a hypocrite if she's the one who does it.
  • After Astarion is revealed as a vampire spawn, you can tell him not to feed on "anything we can have a conversation with" — if you have the speak with animals spell, Astarion will point out how this brings his options down to rocks and trees. If you're a druid and therefore can also talk to plants, he'll unhappily note that this means he's down to just rocks.
  • Speaking of Astarion's reveal: if you approach the story in a way that skips the camp cutscene in which he tries to bite you, he'll just tell you the truth about his true nature in a regular camp conversation a bit later.
  • If you take either Volo or Auntie Ethel up on their offers of assistance in trying to remove the tadpole, the other one will refuse, as by that point you'll only have one working eye left. You also can't accept either offer if your player character is Wyll, since one of his eyes has already been replaced by a sending stone.
  • During the tutorial level on the nautiloid, it's possible to shove Lae'zel off the edge of the ship and to her death. If you do, her body spawns on the beach at the start of Act 1, allowing you to bring her back to life with the aid of Withers. This does run into some serious Gameplay and Story Segregation though, seeing how you shove her off in Avernus but find her body in Toril, a completely different plane of existence (maybe her body got caught on the side of the ship and shaken loose as you crash?).
  • In several dialogues with Astarion, you can choose to Leave wordlessly, which will actually prompt parting comments from him.
  • If you somehow meet Gandrel with only Astarion in your party, but not as the main character, it triggers a scenario where Astarion automatically attacks him.
  • A similar scene occurs in Act 3 if you have Karlach speak to Gortash alone (after agreeing to an alliance during the coronation) without having her as the main character. She and Gortash will exchange a few barbs before automatically trying to kill each other.
  • There are some camp events and cutscene aftermaths where all of your companions have something to say. The game will actually track who you talk to, so speaking with someone first yields a slightly longer conversation than if you'd spoken to the second, while your latter picks may comment about apparently being lower on the priority list.
  • Astarion has been a vampire for 200 years, which seems like it was chosen specifically to give a reason why you can't use the game's only Scroll of True Resurrection on him to cure his vampirism — it only restores life to undead creatures who died under 200 years ago. (Your ability to bring him back other ways is simply a gameplay mechanic.)
  • If Astarion for some reason tries to bite Karlach (eg, mind-controlled by an enemy into attacking party members), there's specific dialogue for him burning his mouth on her. If Karlach is your player character, then there's also a unique version of the scene in which Astarion tries to feed on you in your sleep. Both of these also apply to Gale; thanks to the orb, his blood poisons Astarion.
  • The Vicious Mockery spell has an impressive number of variations, and every party member has fully voiced lines for them to account for cross-classing.
  • The game has caps on party size (4) and spell level (6), but is ready to accommodate more than that if forced to via a Game Mod.
  • If you don't meet Raphael in Act 1 by avoiding all of his spawn locations, then he'll eventually show up at your camp.
  • When you meet Philomeen, you immediately enter a conversation where she threatens to detonate a barrel of explosives if you move. If you swap to another party member mid conversation and sneak around her to move or remove the barrel without her noticing, then return to your conversing character and refuse to talk down Philomeen, she'll fire a firebolt where the barrel was, then upon no explosion occurring, realize you moved it and the conversation will continue accordingly with her feeling like you cornered her.
    • Alternatively, having access to Smokepowder Bombs yourself means you don't have to go find Philomeen in the first place and can clear up the rubble on your own. Finding and talking to her after freeing the gnomes will result in a situation that's much easier to defuse.
  • If you pick the lock on the crypt at the beginning, and go through it backwards, there are special reactions for dealing with the bandits out front, including pretending you're some sort of undead come to attack.
  • A rather dark one for Dark Urge players: thought you could be clever by knocking Alfira out before she shows up at your camp and suffers her unavoidable Cruel and Unusual Death at your hands? Meet Quill Grootslang, an incredibly innocent and excitable Dragonborn Bard showing up in her place looking for a safe shelter. Cue the exact same outcome. Not even leaving your character dead overnight will save Alfira or Quill; Sceleritas Fel will commit the murder on your behalf.
    • Related to the above, however: if you do spare Alfira's life in this way, Alfira will write you a letter in the epilogue recognizing the effort you made, sincerely thanking you and assuring you that she is safe and happy.
    • There's an additional scene included if you have a companion kill Alfira instead; Sceleritas Fel will refer to the whole matter as an "embarrassment" that he's willing to look past.
  • Similar to the above, killing Zevlor before killing the Goblin leaders causes Asharak to take over as leader of the tieflings for the victory party. If you killed Asharak and Zevlor however, a new tiefling, Cerys, takes over the role so the story can proceed. The game even has a reason for the player never having had the chance to meet (or kill) Cerys prior to this moment - she was out scouting. Similarly, almost all the tieflings have a replacement NPC to take their place at the party if they died prior to the events. Some of these backup NPCs even have unique dialogue. Zae for example will ask the player character for a dance.
  • If you kill the goblin leaders while having one of your party member remain at the grove, an NPC called Gherson the Bent will engage them in conversation, telling that companion that the goblin leaders have been killed and everyone is preparing to celebrate, prompting a loading screen to hide how the grove NPCs are relocated once the goblin leaders are killed.
  • Before meeting Ketheric Thorm, numerous characters will flat-out tell you that he's functionally immortal and can't be defeated by conventional means, making it a terrible idea to take him head-on. If you decide to do so anyway, Ketheric will be completely unfazed, call you a fool, and order his guards to kill you. He even has unique dialogue if the Dark Urge attacks him, as he'll be considerably more shocked and outraged at the turn of events and tell them they never should have come.
  • Pressure plates are generally armed when they are compressed, but most are built to only unleash the rest of their mechanism once the compression is later removed. This means the player can accidentally compress a pressure plate but then disarm the trap by weighing it back down with another object.
  • If you try to shove a flying or hovering creature into a chasm, they poof back onto the ledge. The animation is a bit strange, but it's conveying that creatures with these capabilities would use them instead of falling to their death.
  • You need all three Netherstones to defeat the Absolute, and to make sure you don't go throwing one off a cliff, they can only be dropped, rather than thrown. However, as player BOB_BestOfBugs discovered, there's nothing to stop you putting one inside a container and throwing that off a cliff... but doing so triggers a Non-Standard Game Over where the Emperor points out what a stupid thing you just did, followed by a cutscene of the elder brain transforming your party into mind flayers.
  • Your Camp will change depending on the general location you are in when you go to it, such as it being outdoor and forest like if done in an area that is more woods like, or it will be in a cave section if you were in an underground location.
  • Doing the brief Selûne chest puzzle in the Owlbear Cave with Shadowheart in your party naturally has her make unique comments due to being a cleric of Shar, including a conversation where she urges you to destroy the chest. However, if you attempt to get her to be the one who opens the chest by reading the note in front of it, the game accounts for this by not opening the chest, as it would be out of character for Shadowheart to follow the instructions. Instead she'll make a comment about the note, but not actually do as it suggests, requiring someone else to try.
  • On the nautiloid, if all the enemies around the mind flayer are dead, it immediately switches from ally to enemy.
  • In the Shattered Sanctum, you can meet Abdirak, a priest of Loviatar, the Maiden of Pain, who offers you Her blessing by ritualistic flagellation. If you embrace the pain and take off all your armour before being flagellated, you gain the "Ardent Apostle" buff when you enter the shrine, which gives you +4 to Performance and Intimidation rolls, improving your chances of receiving Her blessing.
  • In the endgame, if you don't have the Orphic Hammer or any other way of dealing with the Netherbrain, and you also reject the Emperor, then Raphael shows up to spell out exactly how badly you've messed up... and to offer you one last deal so that you can still complete the final battle.
  • The Sharess' Caress brothel in Rivington has a unique sex scene wherein the player character is propositioned by a two drow sex workers. While they offer a threesome, they also offer to pull in one of your companions to make it a foursome. Both of these sex workers are siblings, which provides a layer of Squick for your companions and causes many of them to retreat from the encounter. Astarion is one of the very few who will go through with it... unless the player character is in a relationship with him, wherein he rejects it due to his Character Development and being more open with his demons.
  • If Lae'zel is your Player Character, the two tieflings who would normally have captured her will instead be found already dead when you arrive at the area you would have normally encountered them. Presumably they were killed by the goblin war party chasing the Beno Boys.
  • Despite Act 1 being inaccessible by the time you recruit them, Halsin and Minthara have their own dialog when the eagles on the roof of the Creche are calling for help.
  • If you manage to make it to Act 3 without killing anyone in either the Goblin Camp or Moonrise Towers, the Steel Watch that scans you at Wyrm's Crossing will let you through without a fight, since your record is completely clean as far as they're concerned.
  • If you figure who Orin is impersonating and try to kill her before when you're supposed to fight her, i.e. the Bhaal Temple, you'll find that you can't kill her. Her HP will not drop below a certain point, and if you do somehow manage to deplete her HP, she'll be knocked out instead of dead. In the latter scenario, she also has no items on her person, not even her Netherstone.
  • There's a holy sword of Eilistraee that can be found in the Underdark in a rock that normally requires a difficult strength check to pull out or an equally difficult religion check to know the ritual to release it. If, however, you're playing a cleric of Eilistraee you just automatically know the correct ritual and can take the sword for free.
  • There's a unique dialog tree between Astarion and Cazador, that's only accessible if you kill one of Astarion's fellow spawn before the fight ends, preventing him from even attempting the ritual.
• If you glitch yourself into the room to speak to Kamroh in Baten Kaitos Origins, he'll tell you that you shouldn't be able to do it in a fairly passive-aggressive way. This is particularly odd as other characters just give generic "no dialogue available" messages:
  Kamroh: Is there a time when you can talk to me here? I feel like there isn't...
• Bloodborne: Performing gestures in front of the Plain Doll causes her to react in various ways: she applauds, bows, and tilts her head curiously depending on the gesture used. This carried over to Dark Souls III.
• Castle Chase: Interacting with Hyde's location, in the Blackout Basement without the assistance of the Lantern will get a response from Monica saying that she thinks something's there but she doesn't have enough light.
• Chest: If the party doesn't have enough money to stay at the Snow Village Inn as part of the story, Capulet will use his Star Coin, which is the setting's equivalent of a credit card.
• Chrono Trigger was one of the first big RPGs to engage in this, and there's a surprising amount of unusual actions and details the developers accounted for:
  • Items which exist over multiple time periods obey causality, relative to themselves. If you take an item from the past, it will be absent from all subsequent time periods, but you can also acquire two versions of that item by taking it from the future first, effectively creating a Temporal Paradox. The Black Omen functions identically; it disappears after you complete it, but only in periods further ahead, making it possible to explore the Omen three separate times and score three times the Charmed loot off Queen Zeal.
  • Speaking of the Black Omen, the only time period where you can't take it on is the Bad Future; if you try, you get a special cutscene where Queen Zeal comes out to make fun of you, pointing out that the apocalypse has already happened by then and attacking the Omen in that period is pointless.
  • It's entirely possible to skip huge portions of the plot and go straight to Lavos with the bare minimum of party members or equipment, long before you're ready and before the characters even know said Boss exists (New Game Plus even lets you do it right at the Millennial Fair, when you don't have anyone in the party at all except Crono). Not only do you get a lot of unique dialogue from doing this, but if you actually manage to defeat Lavos that way, you'll get a secret ending explicitly lampshading what you've done. It's nearly impossible to do if you're playing normally, but they still acknowledged the possibility of people pulling it off through cheating, Min-Maxing, or sheer dumb luck.
  • On a similar note, winning against the various Hopeless Boss Fights will cause slight changes to the plot and earn you unique dialogue you won't see otherwise. One of the secret endings is earned by beating Lavos in the first battle with him (and only in that specific battle; you get a separate for beating him at other times, as noted above), where he's at his most powerful and expressly designed to wipe out your party with ease.
  • Famously, the quest to revive Crono is optional; there's absolutely no sane reason to not do it, but you're still free to play the rest of the game with your Player Character dead, and the plot and cutscenes all change to account for his death. Yet again, you get a unique ending for completing the game this way.
  • Frog has a tech called Slurp Slash where he grabs enemies with his tongue, pulls them to himself, and slashes them. If you use it on stationary targets, Frog will instead pull himself towards them, with the ensuing damage being from him crashing into his enemy.
  • In the Blackbird, your party is stripped of their gear after being taken prisoner. Until you get it back, you have to rely on magic and stealth to get through... unless you have Ayla in the party; she's been ripping stuff apart with her bare hands the whole game, so naturally all her "weapons" still work perfectly.
• Coromon: Merrin has dialogue acknowledging the Bookworm hat as a sign of knowledge if it's acquired before talking to him for his part in Perrin's quest, even if it's only acquired instead of worn:
  ...Although judging from that Bookworm hat you already know quite a bit. You have my respect.
  Uhm, well, here you go!
• In Dark Souls, if you try to fight Kalameet immediately, he'll continuously swoop around breathing fire around the arena while safety out of your reach. What you're supposed to do is find Hawkeye Gough at his tower and have him shoot down Kalameet with his bow, forcing him to fight mainly on ground. However, you can still damage and kill Kalameet without Gough's assistance using some specific strategies. If you manage to accomplish this, Gough will congratulate you for doing that when you speak to him.
• Devil Survivor: The second battle against Kudlak requires NPC Mari to deal the finishing blow, if the player wants her to become a recruitable member. If the player managed to do the right events and get Kaido to appear in the battle, too, his A.I. is programmed so that he will always leave Kudlak with 1 HP left. This makes it much easier for Mari to defeat Kudlak.
• Devil Survivor 2: When fighting the Team Tokyo leaders on Day 7, Io Nitta will eventually boost the entire team and use their special power. If the player managed to defeat this character before this event plays, Io Nitta will get up and the event will occur regardless. This is done to prevent the player from accidentally losing out on a chance to unlock Lugh in the Demon Compendium.
• In the PSP adaptation of Digimon Adventure, during the labyrinth sequence in the Episode "Centarumon, The Guardian!", if you manage to clear the first puzzle without falling (by walking on the wrong tiles) even once, the first time Koushirou/Izzy is able to establish contact with you he will give you a hint as usual, only to be surprised that you managed to clear it on your own.
• Disco Elysium has a central mystery that can be approached in basically any order, with attendant dialogue changes to match.
  • The Jam Mystery (a quest you can obtain almost as soon as starting the game) will change significantly depending on if the cops think Ruby is the murderer (which requires you to leave it right up until the latest point you can possibly do it), and whether or not they have seen the 'Odd-sole' footprints leading to the body.
  • It's possible to force yourself into the Whirling-in-Rags secret passages with a very lucky roll before having spoken to Klaasje. Kim will still refer to Klaasje as a rape victim in his dialogue until you've found out the truth.
  • You can check for fingerprints after having found the bullet and spoken to the Hardie Boys — the scene is rewritten so that the cops are aware that they are being tricked.
  • The game will make fun of you if you somehow get a lucky roll to pry open certain containers without having a prybar equipped.
  • If you dance in the church after the military tribunal, Kim will have an extra line of dialogue in which he asks you how the hell you are dancing on your broken leg. Similarly, if you try to dance between confronting Ruby and the tribunal, the option to dance is replaced with Kim telling you that there's no time for dancing at the moment.
• In Dokapon Kingdom, one of the random map events is that your character will be abducted by aliens. This causes them to disappear off the map until the start of their next turn, when they are returned with a change to their stats. If this happens to sync up with an end-of-week hairstyle contest (itself a very rare event), the game will comment that your character 'was not around'. This can lead to one person winning by default.
• Dragon Age: Origins:
  • During the late-game "Rescue the Queen" quest, you set out to rescue Loghain's daughter, Anora, from a fortified estate. As you escape, you're besieged by Loghain's lieutenant, Ser Cauthrien, and a large posse of knights at the front door to the estate. The situation is presented as a Hopeless Boss Fight, as your only apparent options are to either surrender (which sends you and your party to Fort Drakon, and requires another companion to help bust you out) or attempt to take on the massive number of enemies (which usually results in you being overwhelmed and knocked out). However, it is possible (though very, very difficult) to win this fight. Doing so nets you a powerful greatsword (the Summer Sword) early and skips the later confrontation with Cauthrien at the Landsmeet. Anora even gets a unique line later on where she mourns Ser Cauthrien, who she knew.
  • When you return to Ostagar, a site of a great (and lost) battle against the Darkspawn, you pursue the enemy warlock to a place where, in an early cutscene, an Ogre was slain by one of the heroes. Its corpse is still lying there, and the warlock animates it for you to fight as a very tough boss. Except that if you have a mage in your party, who specialises in Necromancy, you'll know that animated corpses are put to rest when the mage controlling them is killed. Hint: it works here. Kill the warlock, and the Ogre will crumble to dust.
  • If you're creating a character with the Dwarven Commoner origin story and try to remove the facial brand that signifies that your character is casteless, the game will ask you to reconsider having one for roleplaying purposes. You don't have to have one, but in the game's universe, you do. Same goes for the Dalish Elf origin story, as their facial tattoos are given to them as a Rite of Passage into adulthood.
  • Every single NPC that refer to you as a group, such as saying "what can I help you people with" or "I heard there were travelers on the road", have alternate lines if you have no party members with you. In these instances they instead refer to you as alone and sometimes even comment on your race. For example, after being warmly greeted by the Dalish, a Dalish player will then be asked why they are traveling without their clan.
  • The Redcliffe questline has a few different options for how you deal with the possessed Connor, some of which can become closed off depending on how you play. If you sided with the templars earlier the option to bring circle mages becomes closed off. If you killed Jowan he can't bring up the plan to confront the demon in the fade, but you can still get the idea from another mage in your party or bring it up yourself if you are a mage. If you somehow closed off all of the above options (sided with templars, drove off Morrigan, killed Wynne and Jowan, are not a mage yourself) confronting the demon will never be brought up and Teagan will point out that there simply are no other options but to kill Connor.
  • The questline "The Trial of Crows" has the Antivan Crows giving you a list of targets to assassinate. It is entirely possible for you to have killed the first one before beginning the quest. If that is the case, you have dialogue along the lines of angrily calling them out on asking you to kill a dead person. Your "handler" is visibly surprised, but recovers and then moves on.
  • After the Redcliffe arc, Teagan will send you on a quest to find the Urn of Sacred Ashes, a legendary artifact that can cure Arl Eamon. However, it's also possible to complete this quest by yourself by following leads/stumbling onto the right NPCs despite having no motivation to do so. If so, then the moment you're sent on the quest you can tell Teagan that you've already found the urn. He'll understandably be baffled that you've somehow already located the fantasy equivalent of The Ark of the Covenant in your spare time. Some of the dialogue in the questline will also be slightly different, as you and your party members will not bring up why they need the urn since they don't know that Arl Eamon is sick.
• In Dragon Age II, one of Aveline's gifts is the Shield of the Knight Herself. You get different dialogue when you give it to her depending on what you did with her starting shield, which belonged to her husband right up until he died ten minutes in. If you put it in storage she'll complain about you passing it around, and if you sold it she'll mournfully comment about "utility over sentiment". If she for some reason still has the shield equipped — which by now should be outclassed by every other piece of equipment in the game — she'll note that she already has a shield and doesn't need a new one.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest:
    • In the remakes, if you are carrying the princess with you to Charlock Castle and talk to the Dragonlord, he actually thanks you for saving him the trouble of having her transported there.
    • The game will take the time to rib you if you decide to not rescue the Princess at all.
  • Dragon Quest III: In the event Ortega defeats King Hydra due to cheating, he still dies from wounds suffered before the battle, and the hero fights a resurrected King Hydra.
  • Dragon Quest IV: In Chapter 3, did you sell all your equipment for enough gold to open up your shop, but you don't have enough gold after to buy any new equipment or items? If so, the enemies around Endor will likely kill you, and you seemingly don't have a way to get back to the chapter's starting area with easier monsters. Well, it's okay - There's a reason your wife gives you a sandwich every morning. You can slowly use that, and the shop's surcharge, to build your gold back up.
  • Dragon Quest VII: Once the casino becomes available, it's remarkably easy to use Save Scumming to reload your way into an incredible gambling winning streak, with the tokens then traded in for gear that will outclass anything that will be found for several dungeons. Good thing that the casino first appears right before all of your skills and spells get locked away.
  • In Dragon Quest VIII, after you meet Red, she'll send the party to retrieve a tear-shaped gem in order to get Princess Medea back. However, it's possible to go to the dungeon, clear it and obtain the tear before talking to Red (with no in-game indication that this is an option). If you do, a cutscene will play after you leave Red's shack where Yangus admits to Trode that he played up his response. Knowing Red as well as he does, Yangus knows if she found out that the party already got the tear, she'd just send them after something else.
  • Dragon Quest XI:
    • The Hero and Erik encounter a Black Dragon in the sewers of Heliodor Castle. At this point, the player is around level 6 and their attacks are likely to do no damage apart from critical hits so the player is expected to flee. In the unlikely scenario that a player either cheats or grinds long enough to actually beat the dragon this early, they'll get a slightly different cutscene where Erik is mildly impressed at their strength.
    • If you equip the Luminary with a costume that would cover his hands, the Mark will still appear and glow in certain cutscenes.
    • It's possible to do a few events out of order, such as getting Sylvando back before re-recruiting Rab. He will appear in the Angri-La cutscenes and will react to events, but will have no spoken dialogue. He does have some things to say if you talk/Party Talk with him.
    • The post-game essentially drops the player back to a save-state made around the midpoint of the game, which means that the game not only remembers the equipment state of your characters but also whether or not you consumed any seeds or had any hard-to-obtain items equipped at the time.
    • This save-state is created once, and only once — When speaking to Benedictus with 6 orbs. It is entirely possible to duplicate items this way, by equipping them right before this on everyone that's not your main character, talking to the person that triggers the save-state, and then unequipping them. When the save-state comes into play much later in the game, the items are duplicated. This is not terribly useful outside of a few accessories that are one shot otherwise, but it's good for farming ability seeds in preparation for the postgame's Difficulty Spike.
    • This can be gamed in interesting ways via 11 S's chapter select system — you can take endgame gear back to before the save-state, put it on other characters, and then rush through the act to duplicate it. This is the easiest way to get multiple versions of the Infinity +1 Sword crafted weapons, such as the Hypernova Sword.
• EarthBound:
  • The game gives you a bike early on in the game, which is only usable when Ness is the only member of your party. In the Playable Epilogue, if you get the bike out of storage (because, guaranteed, that's where you put it), and go riding around in the swamp, a unique sound will play when you pedal through the marshes that can't be heard anywhere else in the game.
  • The Deep Darkness swamp lacks any light source, making the whole area pitch black. You need the Hawk's Eye in order to see, but a persistent player or those who have a map guide can feel their way around in the dark. The way to the Tenda Village is blocked by an invisible wall that you can't get around, but it disappears once you use the Hawk's Eye.
  • Similarly, there are eels in Deep Darkness that are found swimming around in the deep water. There's a couple of places where they can be coaxed out of the water and onto dry land, an act which is so difficult and time-consuming you need to be deliberately doing it for it to happen. If you do it, they actually do have fully-rendered eel sprites not seen anywhere else in the game.
  • The game also has several NPCs that say things based on who is in your party. For example, Paula's friends and father react with relief and joy once they see that you have rescued her. If Paula is unconscious, the NPCs will instead wonder where she is and Paula's father will react with disappointment when he thinks he sensed Paula's presence and sees that she's not there.
  • Speaking of NPCs there are two unique-looking characters, Jackie and Poo's Master, who can never be talked to from behind. If you manage to do this, either by hacking or by glitching through the wall, they actually have properly drawn sprites that can't otherwise be seen: Poo's Master turns around completely and you see his back, while Jackie looks over his shoulder at you.
  • Normally you can't encounter the Clumsy Robot at all without having first freed the Runaway Five from their debt, and normally the battle ends once you've done enough damage and the band rushes in and help you defeat it. If, however, you face the Clumsy Robot without helping the Runaway Five, which barring a cheat code to walk through walls is impossible, the game actually has an alternate event where doing enough damage to it makes it spew black smoke instead, blinding the players and making them pass out. After being overcome by the smoke they wake up outside the building, leaving them with no option to go and help the Runaway Five if they want to get past it.
• Elden Ring:
  • The Church of Vows has a Stake of Marika outside, which initially seems redundant when a Site of Grace is visible from the respawn point. This is to prevent one specific scenario: there's a portal in the Academy of Raya Lucaria that leads to the inside of the Church. If this happens at night, going forward will spawn a Bell-Bearing Hunter before a player finds the Grace.
  • All NPCs have fully rendered faces, even the ones who you never see without masks or full helmets. Sellen even has two- one for her original body and one for her doll body- despite never taking off her Glintstone Mask.
  • Unlike previous Soulsborne games, rolling in filth and poison swamps will coat your character with gunk, causing you to take poison buildup. You can clean the mess off you with soap, or you could start rolling around in rain or clear water, which will also wash the poison away.
  • Lightning attacks do extra damage to foes who are wet (either because it's raining or they're standing in a pool of water) and/or made out of metal, like the Abductor Virgins and Golems.
  • If, for some crazy reason, you want to fight the Climax Boss Morgott, the Omen King, before killing the Warmup Boss Margit, the Fell Omen, you will not have to fight the latter. This is because they are the same person; Margit is a projection of Margott's, being his attempt at foiling you near the start of your journey despite having to stay in the late-game area Leyndell. Killing Morgott means he's unable to keep projecting Margit.
• Epic Battle Fantasy 5:
  • Summoning Jotun against Sól and Skadi will trigger extra dialog:
    “B-BROTHER?? YOU BETRAY OUR FAMILY AND WORK WITH APES?! BIG BEATING YOU WILL GET!!”
  • Capturing Poseidon instead of killing him will trigger additional dialog when starting battle against Vulcan:
    Vulcan: I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU - THE MURDERERS OF MY BROTHER, POSEIDON!! WHILE HE MAY REST NOW, I, VULCAN, STILL AGONISE FOR REVENGE!!
    Matt/Lance: Hey, we didn't murder Poseidon - we captured him! Does no good deed go unpunished in your world?
  • Similarly, he will react if you summon Poseidon against him:
    "POSEIDON?? WHAT IS THIS?! WHY DO YOU TORMENT ME SO, BROTHER?! YOUR GHOST CANNOT CALM MY BURNING LUST FOR REVENGE!!"
  • When using attacks that would typically show Earth (e.g. Ion Cannon or Genesis) after the Final Boss uses Delete Earth, the attack will instead show a black circle with a red outline and the text "ERROR 404 NOT FOUND" where it would have been.
• Etrian Odyssey Nexus: The script in certain events can vary differently depending on your party's composition (even if it's a one-man party). For example, in the "Guardian of the Lake" quest, while attempting to catch the guardian, certain party members have a different script when they're taking action to weaken the guardian, such as a Survivalist firing their bow, a Gunner aims their gun and fire at the guardian, or a Highlander throwing their spear at the fish. Imperials will pull out their drive blade and fire them at the lake, paying no attention to other party members (if there are any), which causes everyone else to instinctively squeeze their eye shut as the sound of explosion rocks the lake, and a Zodiac will cast Volt Star upon the lake in order to stun the fish, but this will cause 1 HP damage (which is reflected in the party status) on another party member if they're pulling the rod. Naturally, this doesn't apply if the Zodiac is the only active party member (since they stabilize the rod before casting).
• Fable: The Lost Chapters has a Demon Door which will only open if you trade it all of your Silver Keys, but if you somehow reach it without any Silver Keys (something so unlikely it has to be done deliberately), the Demon Door will open anyway, though it will ask how you managed to get so far without finding any.
• Girlfriend Rescue: Drinking a Red Toro, a.k.a Rare Candy that gives Experience Points, right at the edge of a Character Level threshold, applies its restoring effect of 3 SP after the level increase, so the recovery is not wasted as the new level brings an increase in SP limits.
• Golden Sun:
  • In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, after lighting the Mars Lighthouse, the player controls Felix only, which means that the psynergy 'Mind Read' shouldn't be usable. With the help of ROMs and cheat codes, it can be given to Felix. Using Felix's newfound ability in Prox results in new information in the mind reading dialogue boxes the developers put Mind Read text in normally non-mindreadable characters. Not just text, which would just be there to prevent the game crashing over an impossible action, but plot hooks.
  • Atop Jupiter Lighthouse prior to its lighting, Agatio and Karst also have Mind Read text, though Sheba isn't in the party at that time, either. Both are thinking that Felix has outlived his usefulness, foreshadowing the upcoming boss battle. Agatio's thought bubble contains a typo.
  • It does this quite a bit. In Golden Sun, if you enter Altin Mines without the Force Psynergy needed to cause a path-opening rockslide, Garet will get frustrated and kick a wall, causing the rockslide. In fact, the Force Orb's absence in The Lost Age if a file from the first game is not imported implies that this is either the default scenario, or the developers knew that otherwise people would be asking how Isaac's team completed the first game in a non-import file.
  • It's possible to go to Imil before Kolima in the first game, which gives you Mia in your party. When you go to Kolima afterward, the cutscenes there will have extra dialogue added just for her.
  • If you set Flint to Ivan while he's briefly in your party at Vault, he will apologize and give Flint back when he leaves. This just happens to keep him from being in another class in a later cutscene when he rejoins and uses a power exclusive to his base class.
  • It's been discovered that you can glitch-exploit Retreat to skip the part of the game where Mia joins the party. In doing so, you also skip the only part of the game where Mia's unique Ply power is required for puzzles. Bosses later in the game provide artifacts that lets other characters use Douse and Frost, so you can solve puzzles requiring them without her, keeping the game from becoming Unintentionally Unwinnable.
  • In The Lost Age, if you give the Lash Pebble to Piers and you go to Lemuria, when Piers will leave the party you will need to Lash once to enter the house of Lunpa. However, if you can't use Lash, Lunpa will insult you and throw down a rope instead, preventing you from getting stuck. This is the only use of the "rope throwing" animation in the game.
  • In The Lost Age, replying "No" to everything eventually results in Kraden throwing a tantrum and accusing Felix of thinking this is all just a game.
  • When in speaking roles, Djinn tend to have increasingly-amusing responses to being continually denied, and a character in the first game will complain if you change your mind repeatedly in one cutscene and cause the conversation to loop.
  • In Dark Dawn, you can use Slap Psynergy to ring the emergency gong in Tonfon, sending the city into a panic, then blame the nearby guard for the false alarm.
  • In Dark Dawn, you cannot name your character any name that belongs to another player character or plot-relevant NPC (including Alex). This has not been confirmed for the other two games.
• GreedFall: Due to the many different solutions the developers will usually offer for any given quest, main or otherwise, there are a number of events and additional lines of dialog that can occur if you did not follow the intended, guided sequence of events. A great example of this is rescuing Constantin from the morning-after of his celebratory night on the town, and the various events that may happen:
  • If you rescue Constantin before saying your goodbyes to the other ambassadors in Serene, Constantin will be sitting down at the table with De Sardet, or is otherwise clearly present in the room.
  • You can learn Constantin's location in three ways: following the tip from the poorly written ransom notes all around town, making recompense for the unfortunate innkeeper who's business was wrecked by Constantin's antics, or simply walk by the warehouse where he's being kept, whereupon De Sardet and Kurt will over hear his yelling.
  • Related to the above, if you save Constantin and meet the innkeeper for the first time, they will have additional dialog where he recognizes Constantin and yells at him for the broken table, upon which Constantin compensates him out of his own pocket, than De Sardet's.
  • If you rescue Constantin stealthily from his predicament, he will ask to murder the bandits who kidnapped him for revenge. Should De Sardet have taken the direct approach or done that anyway, Kurt will make mention of it.
  • Constantin will have additional dialog during sidequests and scripted events, such as meeting Vasco for the first time at the docks. He will, for example, hope that his father is implicated in the disappearance of Vasco's cabin boy, allegedly by a noble family in the city.
  • Bringing along certain companions will elicit unique interactions with NPCs and can often be used to complete quests differently. They would even have dialogue about who should be in the party for certain objectives.
• The Inazuma Eleven series shows plenty of signs of this:
  • Inazuma Eleven 3, and possibly previous games in the series, have a special shoot animation which is only played if the defending team has no available players (not even the goalkeeper) anywhere near the path from the ball/kicker to the goal. Odds are you can complete the entire game without this situation ever coming up, because the goalkeepers' A.I. isn't stupid.
  • Inazuma Eleven GO adds two more animations that only occur in highly improbable situations, where a player with an Avatar active either (a) fails to steal the ball from or (b) gets the ball stolen from them, by a player without an active avatar without using a hissatsu technique. Both of these are nearly (but not completely) impossible to pull off.
  • The Wii version also possesses animations for scoring an own goal (basically almost impossible to do by accident).
  • Every player who's about to use a hissatsu technique will use an individual grant to signal their intentions. Some even have alternate ones for very specific situations, such as Hiroto using a shoot hissatsu when Endou is the opposite team's goalkeeper. Not only does every character has their own voice lines for scoring (even those who will most likely never play offense, like the keepers), but also voice lines for shooting, goalkeeping, defending AND dribbling, even if they don't possess any hissatsu in that particular skill. Too bad the same can't be said for the announcer...
• Indivisible: During the game's third act Ajna returns to Ashwat village. You are meant to go through the level again up until the area Dhar's soldiers captured her. You discover a Chakra gate and are supposed to use it to backtrack to the previous areas. But if you decide to go forward you discover you can actually walk to Tai Krung and enter the lower levels in reverse. The game acts as though you went to Tai Krung first. Ajna questions if she's going the right way once you run into Tai Krung's last roadblock before Naga Rider sneaks up on and joins her. You unlock the Maha Haruka dash, and can clear Tai Krung's objective from that point.
• Kingdom Hearts: Multiple:
  • If you complete Hollow Bastion before completing Monstro, Riku only says one thing in any of the cutscenes and does not help you during the first Parasite Cage fight. Riku only speaks one line before the second Parasite Cage fight, mocking Sora for not remembering his best friend. Sora calls him a liar, saying he's not the real Riku.
  • Similarly, it is possible to actually leave a few worlds before beating the bosses there - if you return, they get stronger (presumably because they've absorbed more power from the world), and any scenes with Maleficent will not play (since she's long since left for the next world on her list).
  • If one goes to Wonderland, leaves, then completes Deep Jungle first, the scene that normally shows Alice wandering into Hollow Bastion will instead show Snow White.
• Kingdom Hearts II:
  • The Cavern of Remembrance in Final Mix is split up into several platforming areas that require maxed out Growth abilities to proceed, with the last of these areas necessitating Glide (obtained from leveling up Final Form). If the player cheats to get Glide before beating Roxas (the trigger that allows access to Final Form) and goes to the end of the Glide room, they will find an invisible wall that prevents passage into the last part of the Cavern until Roxas is defeated.
  • Final Form, which is normally unobtainable until the last world of the game, has a unique ability that changes how several spells work. Despite the fact it is normally impossible to have low level forms of various spells (such as the first level of Blizzard or Fire), these are still coded to have unique animations and altered functions if Final Form is cheated or glitched in earlier in the game.
• Kingdom Hearts III did this in a meta way. The game was set to be released on January 29, 2019, but a few copies were stolen from a shipment of games a month early, and spoilers were posted through a Content Leak. However, the leakers couldn't tell anyone what happened after the credits, because it wasn't on the disk; the epilogue and secret ending were added in a day-one patch, so even if the game got released early, they couldn't be spoiled.
  • The game over screen for most bosses will simply show Sora hovering lifelessly above the ground. However, if defeated by Ansem, his heart is also seen floating above him. Since he is the only Heartless among the Organization, this is consistent with other instances of Heartless enemies causing a game over.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has one part wherein you must have a female party member wear a Stripperiffic outfit to dance for a Hutt. If the PC is female, then you have to do it, but if the PC is male, the Handmaiden will do it. If you are visibly Dark Sided and female, the PC will brainwash the Hutt to let her do it anyway. It's also possible to have recruited Visas Marr by this point, so naturally, a curious player may think to try bringing her (since the game will dismiss Kreia). Visas will outright refuse. Additionally, if you've recruited Mira by doing the planet's main quest first, you can dare her into doing it.
• In Last Dream, if you enter the Absurdly Spacious Sewer under the starting town, people will make comments about the stench and/or filth until you clean up in the pond, at which point they start giving you their stock responses again.
• The Last Sovereign: Sierra Lee apparently knew, or guessed, that people would unencrypt the game to data-mine potential spoilers; as such, in place of Ivala's portrait, she put the Dramatic Chipmunk clip.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky can change dialogue in the main story depending on whether or not you've done certain sidequests. For example, in Second Chapter, there is a sidequest where your characters spar with some members of the military at a fortress for training. When you go to the same fortress for story-related reasons, if you did that sidequest first, the characters acknowledge that you assisted with training the soldiers at the fortress. This is even done between games, because the later games can read your saves and carry over progress accordingly, so for example, if you did a sidequest for a lighthouse keeper in First Chapter, you can go back to the same lighthouse in Second Chapter and get another sidequest there, and he'll acknowledge that you helped him out before too.
• The Logomancer:
  • The steps of many quests can be done out of "normal" order, such as solving a problem before finding the quest giver, but everything will work out fine and you'll just get some Easter Egg dialogue for your trouble.
  • Trying to investigate the rooms in the inn without talking to the clerk and finding out which room is yours will result in an Easter Egg where Ardus points out it's rude of him to go barging into a room he doesn't know is his.
• In Lufia & The Fortress of Doom, at one point in the storyline, you learn that an unknown villain has stolen the key to the exit of the "Tower of Light", which you need to progress. It's possible to reach the Tower of Light as soon as you get the ship, long before the game requires you to and hence before the key is stolen. Should you reach the top of the Tower before the plot requires you to, the boss will not be present and the chest that the key is normally stored in will give you a Might Helm, the game's strongest headgear normally only obtainable as a Rare Random Drop.
• Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals:
  • The Tanbel Abandoned Mine serves as an introduction to Tia's Hook Shot ability. One section has her explain how to grab items from across crevices; it's possible to snag the key without approaching close enough to trigger the tutorial scene, which leads to Tia commenting on how Maxim already knew how her Hook Shot works. A later scene requires Tia to grab a box you passed by earlier in order to reach a higher ledge. If you threw the box away from its initial position, Tia will tell Maxim to look, the camera will zoom in on its original place... and Maxim will comment that nothing is there. The game even acknowledges whether it was Maxim or Tia who moved the box.
  • When you obtain the Legendary Sword from Soma Temple as a request from Parcelyte's president, you can choose to sell the sword. The obvious choice is Rochy since he pays the most, but there is unique dialogue for selling the sword in the Parcelyte guild shop or even in Tia's shop in Elcid.
  • The first time you encounter Gades you are not supposed to win. It is possible though with a bit of grinding and full-heal items from the local Casino. If you beat him, you get his sword that has an 8-hit special move and the cutscene after the battle starts with Gades defeating your party with a lightning bolt.
  • At one point, Guy uses his field move to destroy a missile in a cutscene. If you glance at the bottom screen, you can see his TP actually drop, like if you used the move in gameplay yourself.
• Manafinder: Normally, Sol and Mars accuse Lambda of cheating whenever she wins one of their minigames, but if Lambda wears the Stone Helmet to trivialize Sol and Mar's final challenge, they'll specifically call out Lambda for doing so.
• In MARDEK, at the very end of chapter 2, if you have Aqualung on ^note by having Emela cast it in Moric's battleship after defeating the final boss and not touching any Save Crystals and attempt to jump off the pier of Lake Qur, the game will give you a message: "Oh, there's no reason you need to go down there. Yes, I know you set up Aqualung all cleverly specifically for this, but I assure you, there are no temples worth exploring down there. Really." ^note  You can only start exploring the Water Temple in Chapter 3.
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance and X-Men Legends have a ton of unique dialogue branches accounting for your party makeup, often reflecting relationships from the comics (e.g., Spider-Man and Mysterio bickering because they're old enemies). Others account for more unusual picks; for instance, bringing Deadpool to the boss fight with Deadpool causes them to start bickering with one another about who the real Deadpool is.
• In the Monster Hunter series, players can use the BBQ Spit item to cook steaks while out in the field. But what happens if a player stands at the edge of a cliff and tries to deploy it in midair? The models for both the cooking fire and the stool the hunter sits on contain wooden scaffolding underneath. Normally this scaffolding clips into and is obscured by the ground if the BBQ Spit is deployed on a level surface, but it becomes visible if the item is used on rough terrain.
• Mother 3:
  • An amnesic Duster is dubbed Lucky at a point in the game. If you named him Lucky, the nickname will be changed to Gorgeous. Likewise, Kumatora goes undercover and briefly takes up the name Violet. If you named her Violet, the name will be changed to Kumatora.
  • The Saltwater Gun deals high damage to mechanical enemies but has no effect on any other kind of enemy. Cheeky players who decide to use it on slugs instead will find that it does high damage to them as well.
• Neverwinter Nights 2:
  • Depending on certain choices you make in game (along with relationship values with your party) a large number of your companions can betray you during the final confrontation with Black Garius. At least one will always do so, no matter what. Sneaky players would save scum the boss, learn who was going to betray them, reload and preemptively remove their gear, rendering them a lot less dangerous. If you do, then Black Garius will conjure them high powered gear as replacements and taunts the player for seeming to "expect" their betrayal.
  • If your character is a Priest, your patron god can be Kelemvor, the god of death in Forgotten Realms. Kelemvor himself plays a major role in the Mask Of The Betrayer DLC. If you're playing as a Kelemvor Priest during said DLC, you get tons of unique dialogue, and we mean tons. It almost completely changes your role in the story.
• Nocturne: Rebirth has a Brave Clear system that gives a random rare item for beating the boss below a certain level. However, the developer made it so that the reward is determined long before fighting the boss, preventing players from Save Scumming their way to a better reward.
• In Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis, you're expected to kill The Dragon in order to acquire the key to the upper levels of the final dungeon. However, he doesn't drop the key when killed. Instead, it's found in a trunk in his bedroom, meaning that it's possible to get it without killing him. If you do so, then the Big Bad's dialogue will change to acknowledge this.
• OMORI:
  • If the player misses the T key inside Humphrey, it'll pop out with the W key once they leave the dungeon.
  • At one point, Hero will request the party buy flowers as a gift. If the player already bought some, he insists they go to the store and get a fresh bouquet.
  • The Slime Girls will tell the party that they have to clear off Sweetheart's 1,000,000 clam debt. Normally Aubrey will tell them that they don't have enough money, but if the player actually manages to accumulate 1,000,000 clams before the cutscene, instead she tells them that they can't just give away all their money.
  • Sweetheart's castle has an Abbi tentacle in it. If the player erases Sweetheart's castle and goes to fight her (only possible on the Omori route), she will be short one tentacle. (Though she still says she has eight tentacles regardless if the castle is erased or not, so not a completely flawless foresight.)
• The Outer Worlds:
  • There's an early side quest in Emerald Vale where you either destroy or repair a malfunctioning robot. One possible ending is to have Parvati repair, after which she'll joke about renaming the robot Jeremy as she fixed it. Do this, and way later into the game you'll encounter that robot again... and it has indeed been renamed Jeremy. This only happens if you let Parvati fix him.
  • Doing certain things or taking damage from specific sources repeatedly can cause the game to offer you a Flaw (a sort of anti-Perk) based on that in exchange for a Perk point. For example, if you catch on fire a lot the game will offer to make you even more vulnerable to fire, or if you encounter a certain creature multiple times it offers to weaken you against that creature to reflect your character being afraid of it.
    • Linked to this, one Flaw you can take is Robophobia, which makes you fear robots. One of your potential companions is a robot. The Flaw applies to him as much as it does to other robot NPCs; you take a stat penalty when he's in your party, and have special dialogue options that make clear that you're terrified by him.
  • Characters sometimes remark on the clothing and armor you're wearing. For example, wearing the Spacer's Choice mascot costume around Martin Callahan (who also wears that costume), gives you a unique dialogue tree discussing how you two are wearing the same outfit.
  • Similar to Fallout (which was created by the same people), your Perks and stats can heavily affect your character's dialogue and the overall plot. An extremely low intelligence character talks in borderline Hulk Speak, a Sadistic Choice at the end of the game can be entirely avoided with a sufficiently high Science/Engineering skill, your selected Perks or background give you unique dialogue options, and so on.
  • The game has a downright insane number of redundancies. Breaking the main quest by, for example, rendering yourself unable to get the Stellar Bay navkey from Gladys (nearly impossible to do on accident), just makes the game let you land on Monarch anyway through a back-path. You can kill practically every named NPC in the game, and there are dozens of back-up characters designed to fill in for them to keep quests intact, to the point that doing a Pacifist Run will actually make you can miss a good chunk of the cast. No character build is unviable, and nearly every quest has multiple solutions in case you botch the most obvious ones.
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous:
  • Not based on reactivity to the plot, but in addition to having multiple recordings of companions' various quotes for acknowledging player orders, spotting hidden objects, unlocking doors, and disarming traps, characters also have another set of those quotes which has them whispering while they're in stealth.
  • The random background NPCs have unique lines in Wintersun if you take Arueshalae with you due to how Jerribeth altered their perceptions. This is also true of a Demon-path Commander. If the party is just a Demon Commander and Arueshalae, they get a unique scene.
  • If you're playing as a Lich and recruit Kestoglyr, then bring him with you to the Ineluctable Prison, you'll get a different scene when you encounter his wife's ghost.
  • Pass a high Trickery check in the slums of Alushinyrra to get into the Rotten Guttery before a quest sends you there and you can clean the place out. Once you get the quest to go there and fight the mercenaries, the mercenary leader gets an extra line mentioning they needed the gold because someone broke in and stole all their stuff.
  • Most religions and many player races get unique responses and scenes where it would be appropriate (the lack of which was criticized in Kingmaker).
    • Sosiel and a Shelynite PC can commiserate over people questioning what role the followers of the goddess of beauty could play in a Crusade.
    • Worshippers of Cayden Cailean, god of partying, get a buff early on in the game during the siege on Defender's Heart because you're protecting an alehouse.
    • Followers of Calistria, goddess of lust and revenge, can declare and enact sacred vengeance where appropriate and will see swarms of wasps as an expression of the favor of the goddess, granting them a buff.
    • Followers of War God Gorum can occasionally dedicate a duel or battle with a particularly powerful foe to him, again granting a buff.
    • While tracking down the three Desna followers for Ramien in Act 1, you'll get unique dialogue with the Inquisitors if you chose Desna as your deity.
    • You get specific dialogue with Ember, Nurah and a few other characters as an Atheist.
    • Lich Commanders who worshiped Pharasma, goddess of the cycle of birth and death, get a unique event chain dedicated to Pharasma's reaction.
    • On the other hand, a character worshiping Urgathoa, goddess of disease and undeath, gets several explicit signs of divine approval when going towards the path of a Lich.
    • Commanders who worship Pharasma and aren't becoming a Lich receive signs of divine favor - including a powerful buff before one infamous fight - when fighting major encounters with undead.
  • When becoming a Lich you have to sacrifice your romantic interest. If it's Daeran and you haven't completed his companion quest, the Other, the Eldritch Abomination using him as a gateway to enter the world, will attack you.
  • Tiefling PCs get a lot of unique options given the proximity to the Worldwound and their fiendish ancestry. You can bond with Woljif over shared experience of Fantastic Racism, succubi might make suggestive comments about things you can do with your tail, and some story events reference fighting against the pull of the lower planes.
  • Sometimes the player's class is explicitly referenced. For example, before the battle for the Defender's Heart, if the player is a druid, ranger, or hunter, Irabeth will comment that the Commander is likely more accustomed to fighting in the wilderness.
• Persona 3: The protagonist has Calling Your Attacks voice clips for all the party members' Personas, even though he can only use them through hacking. The two navigators even have voiced dialogue reacting to the player using a cheating device.
  • It's possible, though difficult on a first playthrough, to reach the second barrier in Tartarus before Fuuka is recruited. If you do this, Mitsuru's dialogue will have her complaining about how she can't see very well that high up, and worrying that her Persona isn't good enough for the job.
  • Just like with the sequel, Social Link events with party members change depending on when in the story you do them, and scenes where Social Link characters show up will change depending on whom you have a Social Link with and what level your Social Links are at. For example, Bebe leaves Japan and returns to France when you max out his Social Link; if you do this before the school trip to Kyoto, he won't be there.
  • In the remake, after completing Elizabeth's request for 3 Jack Frost Dolls, she mentions that she originally considered tasking the protagonist with raising one to Level 99, before deciding against it. If you actually do raise a Jack Frost to Lv 99 and show it to her, she has special dialogue.
• In Persona 4, certain Social Links with party members change slightly depending on when you do them in the story. For example, each party member's Social Link has at least one scene where Nanako shows up. If you do these events after Nanako is kidnapped, the scenes will play out differently.
  • Also, certain mandatory scenes in the game where Social Link characters show up change depending on both whom you have a Social Link with and what level those Social Links are at.
  • In one early Social Link conversation, Yosuke will ask if the killer will be found guilty. If it's done after a certain point, he'll refer to the current suspect by name.
  • In Golden, some of Marie's events will have her acknowledge the fog covering Inaba if they're done between late November and Christmas.
  • If you fail your summer exams, which only happens if you deliberately refuse to raise your Knowledge stat, you'll have to attend summer school.
• In Phantasy Star III, if you buy as escapipe at the start of the game (which requires selling your starting gear) and use it when the king throws you in jail, it breaks the game's sequence, making it Unwinnable. If you talk to the king after this, he commends you on using the item, but tells you to reset.
• Pillars of Eternity:
  • Unlike many RPGs, your character's race and backstory actually has an impact on the plot and how other characters interact with you. For example, a Watcher from Old Valia can get angry with people badmouthing the region or display knowledge about it when it's brought up in conversation.
  • The Modular Epilogue takes a staggeringly large amount of details into account; what people you helped, what quests you did, whether you kept promises to the gods, what you said in random conversations, and so on. Most notably, if you leave the main quest in the "White March" expansion unfinished, than the Eyeless swarm your keep and kill you.
  • During the climax, Thaos will try to give a Breaking Speech to your party. The game takes into account how you've handled them and their character arcs, and their responses to his speech change accordingly. For instance, Hiravias can either give a snappy comeback or be left a shaken mess depending on whether you've completed his quest or not.
  • Your stats, class, and reputation frequently have a big impact on the plot; a Cipher Watcher can bypass some battles and puzzles by simply reading minds, people will be actively afraid of you if you've picked up an evil reputation, having high Lore lets you figure out some plot twists early, and so on.
  • In the climax of the White March expansion, a member of the party has to stay behind and sacrifice themselves in order to stop the Eyeless... unless you cheat by wearing a diving helmet you probably got earlier, releasing the Pargrunen souls, or picking the Devil of Caroc as (she's a construct, which means that she can't drown). Do any of these and the narration lampshades that you Took A Third Option.
  • In the climax of Deadfire, the final encounter is a battle against the leader of the strongest remaining faction not allied with the Watcher. The identity of the final enemy will vary depending on the choices made during the game, but one of those choices could involve the player prematurely killing whoever was supposed to face them. To compensate for this, several candidates have second-in-commands who will take their place at the end. The Vailian Trading Company are an exception, because their leader, the Canta Nicese, is only ever encountered in cutscenes before the end, so the Watcher can't kill them. The Huana would normally be led by Queen Onekaza, but if she dies, her brother Prince Aruihi disappears from the map and will take her place at Ukaizo. The Royal Deadfire Company's Hazanui Karu will be replaced by her second, Grand Secretary Atsura. The Principi pirates really take the cake, though. Their default leader is Captain Furrante, but if he's dead, possibly because the Watcher sided with his second Captain Aeldys in their power struggle, then she will go to Ukaizo instead. But if she's also been killed, then Captain Two-Eyed Pim will take her place (and Pim disappears in a cutscene shortly before Furrante and Aeldys come to blows, reducing the likelihood of his death). If the Watcher has killed Two-Eyed Pim as well, he'll be replaced...by One-Eyed Pim, Two-Eyed Pim's eyepatch-sporting identical twin.
• In Rune Factory 4, your player character's child has special dialogue for going through Yokmir Forest—the Noob Cave—for the first time. The only way to see this is by playing as Frey and romancing Vishnal before ever entering the first dungeon, as he's the only character you can romance without needing certain locations opened up later in the story.
• Red of SaGa Frontier is gifted with superheroic powers, but part of the deal involves it being a Secret Identity for him; humans and monsters can't witness him becoming his alter ego, Alkaiser. If his teammates are KO'ed or asleep in battle, transforming is fair game. By the same token, you have a single optional chance to recruit a monster called Cotton in a segment prior to when he joins a fighting tournament under his Alkaiser form (the game never suggests getting a new party member is possible at this point); if you did so, Red will ask Cotton to wait to the side before stepping out to transform, and talking to it has it wonder what's taking Red so long coming back.
• In Secret of Mana, there is a boss fight that is essentially a Zero-Effort Boss. However, if the player is wiped out in this fight (you do have to try to lose), the party is just kicked out of the area with Randi being revived.
• Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne: One of the first appearances of Dante in the "Maniax" rerelease has him leaping from the top of the Mantra HQ skyscraper to land on the ground in front of you, since falling damage doesn't exist in Devil May Cry, before challenging you to a battle. You yourself can make the same drop, but it will bring you and your party's HP to 1 - come back and do it after you've recruited Dante, however, and he won't take damage from the fall.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV:
  • The Terminal Guardian, a recurring enemy that you encounter guarding each one of Tokyo's Terminals, as well as the Terminals in the final dungeons. His disguise depends on where you fight him, and the demon(s) he summons depends on how many times you've encountered him so far. His dialogue will always match his current disguise-demon combination, even unlikely combinations, such as encountering him for the first time in his "Intuitive Man" disguise (which he wears in the final dungeons). What's more, every single one of his lines in these 81 possible combinations is fully-voiced. A comprehensive dump of his dialogue can be found here.
  • The skill Estoma Sword normally stops all encounters on the World Map and also banishes enemies that you strike with your weapon in a dungeon if their level is lower than the player character's level. It does not work on Challenge Quest enemies, ensuring that you have to fight them even if you have the level advantage.
• South Park: The Fractured but Whole: Henrietta, a Goth Kid, has one of the strongest Ultimate Abilities of any character in the game, "Black Mass". That said, it will not work on the Woodland Critters, a group of devil-worshipping animals.
• In Suikoden, you first meet Vincent when he's in an inn in one town. After he runs off, you have to pay his bill at the inn. However, if you don't have enough (200 bits) ^note  if you wish to see this in action, try spending all your money upgrading your equipment until you have less than that , you're treated to an additional cut scene with your party washing dishes.
• Tales Series:
  • Tales of the Abyss takes an Important Haircut into account for Luke in New Game Plus:
    • Luke's unlockable costumes all have him with his newly cut short hairstyle. If the player starts a New Game Plus, inherits Titles, and puts Luke in one of his costumes, Guy and Tear will point out his different hairstyle in certain cutscenes, with Luke telling them that "it's an expensive wig." Tear even points out that Luke "took off his wig to cut his hair" if he's still wearing an alternate costume when the scene of Luke cutting his hair comes up.
    • A New Game Plus will also enable Luke to use his mystic arte before he cuts his hair — this skill only becomes available to Luke after he cuts his hair, and his cut-in depicts him with his short hair. If you use his mystic artes in a New Game Plus before that, Luke will have different cut-ins with long hair.
  • Tales of Graces:
    • Most characters have certain moves and such that they only get later on and have quotes for in the Future arc, but have different phrases for when they're used in the game's main storyline. For example, Asbel's Super Mode and its resultant Limit Break move are only available in the game's future arc and he mentions teaming up with Lambda during said Limit Break. If the player, on New Game Plus, carries the titles that unlock said super mode and Limit break to the game's main arc, Asbel's phrase will be different.
    • Not only does Asbel get a new Mystic Arte cut-in in the Future arc, but his skit portraits and status screen image now reflect his heterochromia.
    • Richard can also carry over his stronger Mystic Artes over to the brief part of the main arc where he's playable. All of his Mystic Artes have completely different dialog in the main story than they do in the Playable Epilogue, reflecting his dramatic change in demeanor before and after being freed from Lambda's influence and whether he's been crowned King of Windor yet or not.
    • If Malik uses his Eternal Serenade Mystic Arte on the main arc's final boss, he declares it the last time he'll use said move. Yet, the player can still use Eternal Serenade in the Future Arc. If this happens, Sophie will call Malik out on his lie, forcing him to lie again to get Sophie off his back.
  • Tales of Xillia 2:
    • If you start a New Game Plus glitch, the alternate Milla has access to the Special skill and a Mystic Arte. However, while she has the same cut-in picture as the real Milla, her incantation during the mystic arte is different. Same goes for her linked mystic artes with Ludger and Jude.
    • Early on, the party gets settled with a huge debt and they are restricted in their travelling. The first time this occurs, the player may think they can just walk to the next city because it's so close. Impossible, as two NPCs are spawned at the entrance to the next city, blocking the player's way. The first steps of paying off the debt and earning the right to use the train to the next city again has to be done.
  • Tales of Symphonia:
    • The PS3 rerelease has two different Mystic Arte cut-ins for Kratos, depending on what costume he's wearing when he performs it.
    • When Genis takes the test at the Palmacosta Academy, the rest of the party takes it with him. Since you go to Palmacosta early in the game, "the rest of the party" would ordinarily be Lloyd, Colette, Raine and Kratos (and possibly Sheena), but if you do this sidequest after returning from Tethe'alla, Presea, Zelos and Regal will also take the test, and the proctor will tell you their scores.
    • Normally, Kratos and Zelos are Mutually Exclusive Party Members, but at the literal Disc-One Final Dungeon, the player is given the opportunity to use both. Despite it being for literally a single dungeon, despite the fact that the player could elect not to use one or either, and despite the fact that the player is almost certainly using a stronger unison attack finisher by this point in the game, Kratos and Zelos do have a single compound unison, Cross Thrust.
  • Tales of Zestiria
    • In areas with miasma, your party is virtually crippled, and you also may encounter the last boss long before you're supposed to. If you somehow managed to win under these conditions, you unlock the game's worst ending since Maotelus will be revived without the party being strong enough to stop him.
    • Normally, Edna has to be talked into fighting her brother Eizen because she has to accept that there's no way to save him, and the party needs to perform a Mercy Kill. If you do some Sequence Breaking and try to fight Eizen before talking Edna into it, she'll get angry at Sorey, and won't fight.
  • Tales of Arise:
    • A few of the game's sidequests require you to defeat an Optional Boss. If you had already done so, the game will acknowledge this, provide different dialogue, and automatically list the quest as "completed" and give you the rewards right there.
  • Spinoff Platform Fighter Tales of VS features items that you can pick up and use at any moment to gain an advantage...unless you're playing as Barbatos Goetia, whose hatred of items is so memetic that in this game, he's hard-coded to not be able to pick up items at all.
• TaskMaker has two examples:
  • The optional tutorial level features no enemies, and the only NPCs whatsoever are shopkeepers who cannot come out from behind their counters even if provoked. Therefore, the only ways to die in the tutorial are by repeatedly running into walls or floor traps, summoning a monster (via a hidden spell that a new player might not even know about, and which has a very low success rate), or using a potion or cheat to go behind the shop counters. Should the player still find a way to drop their health to 0 in the tutorial level, the game will instead reset the health meter and display the message "Normally, you would have just DIED, dropped your pouch, and gone to hell."
  • Another hidden spell immediately summons a boat if the player is facing water... except in Castle Hall, where a message of "We do not tolerate that here!" appears instead. This is because, in prior versions of the game, players were using it to access a very powerful weapon hidden within the Castle Hall fountain.
• Titan Quest:
  • If the first Inventory Bag is not picked up from "Timon - Oligarch of Megara" before some point later in the plot, presumably talking to the Oracle of Delphi, when talking to him and picking up the bag, he says:
    What are you doing back here, warrior?
    Forget something?
  • Even if there are items in the game that lower your hit points and/or health regeneration rate, your character will always have keep one hit point, to prevent being stuck in an endless Cycle of Hurting.
  • Out on the Wild Heathlands, the player can encounter the Kornwyf, a demon with a scythe it drops as a quest item. The quest is to find someone who would find the scythe useful. Magoine in Glauberg Outskirts complains about life day-in, day-out, farming, and with all of the hubbub with the cultists farther out. If the player shows her the scythe, she says that she's too old to work with that.
  • The easy way to deal with escort missions is to clear the whole area of monsters before undertaking the quest. However, in the "Giesel" quest, new wolves will always spawn and attack during the mission no matter what.
  • Corinthian merchants sell Egyptian and Asian outfits so that players who skip the first four acts can complete the Celtic Plaid side quest.
• The Tomb of the TaskMaker:
  • Some events require the player to sail a boat out of Castle Hall by buying one from the dock's owner, which will then lead to him opening the drawbridge and letting the boat through. Not even killing the owner will bypass the fee; he even tells the player "Even so, you're not getting a ship from my docks for free!" when injured. However, it is possible to bypass the fee by throwing a projectile weapon at the switch that opens the drawbridge.
  • Certain doors are adjacent to walls with shapes on them (spades, polygon, heart, etc.), and cannot be opened without the appropriately shaped key. While doors can normally be phased through with an Ethereal Potion or knocked down with a Falling Wall scroll, neither will work on "shaped" doors. Instead, the game will tell the player that he or she still needs the key even when ethereal, or the Falling Wall scroll will be used up and fail to knock the door down.
• Torment: Tides of Numenera:
  • There are two characters in the Bloom who are eventually revealed to be the same person from different points in his timeline. If you, for whatever reason, murder the younger one at any time, the elder one and his shop are immediately erased from existence, with a bit of narration saying you now have no idea why you just killed the young man.
    • Adding to this, there's a sidequest where you help a former slave find a job, which can be completed by getting him hired by that shop. If you do that, then kill the young version as described above, the slave's quest switches from "Completed" to "Active"; you erased that guy's job from the timeline and have to do his quest all over again.
  • A semi-major mechanic is the Merecasters, which allow for Mental Time Travel that lets you alter the past. There a staggeringly large number of ways to completely alter the story this way, such as dealing with a cult by changing history so that its leader dies before he can found it. You can even undo the entire game by letting your past self get killed by the Sorrow when you watch the events leading to the start of the game.
  • The game starts with your character falling from the sky, and you must take action to ensure you survive... or you can do nothing and splatter against the ground, ending the game in ten seconds. You get an achievement for doing this.
• Trials of Mana: Multiple:
  • Very early in the game, every playable character except Charlotte is stuck in a town. While there, Angela can be seen asleep in the inn if she is not the main character. Since Angela is implied to be naked in bed, she will get angry at you and call your character a pervert if you wake her up. However, if the main character is Riesz — the only other female main character that could speak to Angela at that time — Angela will only express annoyance at being woken up. This extends to the remake where a cutscene plays out if a male character approaches Angela, but she sleeps through any attempt by Riesz to converse with her.
  • The third party member is usually recruited via jailbreak. However, if the player selected Charlotte as the third party member, she joins in a predetermined location much earlier. Should this happen, one of the three possible party members not chosen by the player will be in the jail cell instead of Charlotte. The foresight comes from an extra scene where this character gets left behind when the heroes flee the town; if Duran is the character left behind in this manner, he'll berate the heroes for abandoning him when they meet Duran in the Molebear Moors much later.
  • There is a hierarchy for certain cutscene reactions. For instance, when facing the Altenish mages in the Stoneslip Gap, they prioritize Angela first (the runaway princess who has a price on her head), then Duran (the Valsenan loyalist the Crimson Wizard encountered); if neither are present, they declare the party to be Valsenan spies and try to kill them anyway.
  • When the party stays at an inn, they all shift into their respective "sleeping" animations. In normal gameplay, the only thing the player sees of these are the characters' heads peeking out from under the sheets of the beds. However, not only are the rest of the characters' bodies there, they're wearing underwear that changes color depending on the character's class. However, this is averted in the 2020 remake, as everyone sleeps with his/her clothes on in the cutscene.
  • Should you have enough money, you can simply agree to the outrageous price quoted by Watts and buy the Nitromyte. If you do, the king will tell you about a shortcut to the boss room via a strange statue, which does nothing if you went through the dungeon in the normal way. You still get the Mana Spirit, but you'll skip the rest of the dungeon. (In the 2020 remake, you get an achievement called "Throw Money at It" and the "Blacksmith" ability if you just buy the nitromyte, but you still have to chase after Watts, as you can't progress very far without Gnome.)
  • In the original SNES release, the battle with Karl in Kevin's opening is a Hopeless Boss Fight that Kevin has to lose before transforming into a werewolf. In the 2020 remake, this could have potentially taken hours to clear, since Kevin's level carries over from previous playthroughs on New Game Plus. So the battle is just changed to Kevin's tutorial fight, and he now has to win.
  • Riesz has a Tragic Keepsake in the form of her mother's green ribbon. Before class changes, it's the bow in Riesz's hair. After class changes, the ribbon is tied on Riesz's left wrist, showing she's still wearing it.
• Most Soul Voice lines in Xenoblade Chronicles X are completely standardized but fit together pretty well anyway. The exception is calls for support moves, where the responder has three different spoken lines depending on the move used — one for supporting the member who called out, one for targeting themselves, and a third for targeting a party member not part of the exchange.
• One of Finch's Heart-to-Hearts in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has her wanting to visit a snow-covered place. If you view this after visiting Tantal, the conversation will change.
  • Another Heart-to-heart that changes depending on story progress is "Legendary Lands". If viewed before reaching Elysium, Rex, Zeke, and Morag will debate on whether or not Elysium actually exists. If viewed after reaching Elysium, they discuss if that barren wasteland was really Elysium.
  • The DLC expansion Torna: The Golden Country has fireside chats where the party comment on current story events. A few unique ones cover very specific circumstances a player would have to go out of their way to see, such as making camp just after the story has given you a free stay at a local inn, or losing to story bosses and backtracking to a campsite instead of trying again. (One of which involves abandoning Torna's capital to go camping while it's under attack by Malos)

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