Harsher In Hindsight / Video Games

Games/franchises with their own pages:

• Five Nights at Freddy's
• Lonely Wolf Treat
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica
• Star Wars Legends

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Individual examples:

September 11 Attacks-related

• During the Fragile Cargo mission from Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, you have to prevent an airplane packed with anthrax by a bunch of terrorists from crashing against some huge chimneys that look a bit too much like the World Trade Center. In order for that blimp to safely land on water and not crush the chimneys, the player must shoot the chimneys in the way.
• Aero Fighters 2 features New York as the backdrop for level 2. While the Statue of Liberty can be shot for a powerup, there is no physical damage, though this is not the case with both of the World Trade Center's towers. Not only that, but there's money inside each! Paid to destroy the Twin Towers. Golly.
• Aleste 2 begins with the Vegant empire invading Earth, and New York was the first major city destroyed.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2:
  • The original packaging had artwork of the Soviet attack on New York, with the burning Twin Towers prominently displayed. Needless to say, said packaging was pulled off the shelves after 9/11.
  • The first Soviet mission sends you to destroy the Pentagon, which was attacked the very next day IRL. The third has you guarding a superweapon built right next to the Twin Towers. Yes, you can destroy the towers with your tanks (they are better utilized as garrisons for your conscripts). To make matters worse, the game rewards you for this by dropping boxes of cash for you to pick up once the towers are destroyed. Later patches would change the names of these buildings (and other famous monuments) to generic ones. And then fan mods reverted the names because as we all know, people don't like censorship.
• In the opening to The Combatribes on the SNES, the center of all evil in New York is run by a group called Ground Zero. They became "Guilty Zero" in the Virtual Console version.
• In the opening levels of Deus Ex, set in NYC, the WTC towers cannot be seen in the distance due to an engine limitation^note basically, the skybox for any given level, rather than showing the full 360 degrees of art, only show 180 degrees of it and then mirror that for the other half; the half that is shown for the NYC levels just so happens to be the half that doesn't include the towers. The in-game explanation? They were destroyed in a terrorist attack.
  • The fact that one of the main plots portrays a government orchestrating terrorists acts to get pretense for freedoms-curbing legislation doesn't help either.
  • Then there's the Statue of Liberty being C4'ed by terrorists, which makes the absence of the WTC even more disturbing. On the other hand, Statue of Liberty has been decapitated by French freedom activists who have deliberately chosen such act to perform a symbolic action without any human casualties. Although it is strongly implied that the main villains framed them for it, which makes it possibly more disturbing.
  • One older character is a veteran of a war that involved him against Afghans. The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan would start just about a year after the game was released...
• The cover◊ and start screen for the NES Die Hard game is "kinda disturbing, maybe offensive" as The Angry Video Game Nerd put it. It's not actually meant to be the World Trade Center however, but Nakatomi Plaza from the film, which was filmed at Fox Plaza in Los Angeles.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy V, there is a forked tower (meaning it is one building on the bottom, but splits into two) that two party members must take each side.^note Half of its magic, half physical. Any deviation will kill you. It turns out the bosses are load-bearing.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, the guy who founded the corrupt church of Glabados, Ajora Glabados, who was also implied to be the Antichrist or at least under Demonic Possession of the Lucavi Ultima, was born on September 11. His actions in the game alone are bad enough as it is. It gets worse approximately three to four years later, with the real-life 9/11.
• In a parody/homage to King Kong, Fur Fighters had a plane crash into the radio antenna of the New Quack World Trade Center. Funny in 2000 when the game was released, not so much a year later.
• Hydro Thunder, a game released in 1999, features the New York Disaster course, which is set in a flooded, apocalyptic version of New York.
• The first level of King of the Monsters 2 has the Twin Towers, which can be thrown or destroyed for giggles.
• The third stage of Lethal Enforcers 1 involves a group of terrorists attempting a hijack at an airport. This also applies to the second stage of Locked N Loaded.
• The obscure Taito shmup Master of Weapon not only states in the opening crawl that it is set on "September 11, 199X", but, more eerily, features several couples of skyscrapers that can be shot and will crumble in a cloud of dust.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
  • A rare example of it happening before the game is released, so the moment really only happened to the developers: The game had a scene showing Arsenal Gear crashing into New York, including a detailed scene where the towers were destroyed. It was supposedly going to be one of the best scenes in the game — but just before the game was set for release, 9/11 happened, causing them to hastily edit the scene and leave it rather disjointed. More specifically, the landfall of Arsenal Gear purportedly destroyed all of New York City's financial district. The prow made it so far inland as to toss the protagonist and his nemesis onto the roof of Federal Hall, which, as anyone who has been to Wall Street knows, is quite removed from the coastline. Early concept art shows the devastation, with the south end of Manhattan reduced to smoldering rubble. The final version cuts away to black as Arsenal Gear approaches the Brooklyn Bridge, then shows the mobile base already at rest at Federal Hall.
  • The game also introduces the main villains of the series with the Nebulous Evil Organization of the Patriots, which has been in full control of American politics apparently for well over a hundred years with the ultimate goal of stripping the population of its civil liberties and turning them into mindless slaves that are completely oblivious of their being controlled. Given that the game was released in November 2001, any similarities to the PATRIOT Act and its aftermath are probably completely coincidental.
• One of the editions of Microsoft Flight Simulator released in the late 1990s had an announcer in one mission suggest it would be cool if you flew into the World Trade Center. Needless to say, that dialogue got stripped out in a later version.
• Some of the switches in Panic! detonate bombs randomly placed in famous locations around the world. This was played for laughs back in 1993, especially considering that some of the "landmarks" include an igloo and a dog house. After certain events eight years later, the idea of blowing up monuments became less humorous. While there is no World Trade Center, some of the monuments include downtown Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. In the Playstation 2 port, the explosions were changed to diarrhea.
• Pilotwings 64: One choice of destination for the Nintendo Power August 1996 Player's Poll Contest grand prize winner was Washington, D.C., where Nintendo Power invited the winner to "hob-nob at the Capitol". 24½ years later, the term took on a sinister new meaning when the most devastating attack on U.S. soil this side of 9/11 took place at the Capitol, with some classifying the attack as domestic terrorism and right-wing people generally describing the attackers as all but hob-nobbing at the Capitol.
• In Pokémon Gold and Silver it is said that 700 years before the game, two skyscrapers were built in Ecruteak City, but one was later destroyed in a massive fire that raged for three days. The remaining tower is referred to in-game as the Tin Tower. It was changed to the Bell Tower in later generations, though for translation reasons rather than avoiding a reference to the WTC.
• In Police Quest 2: The Vengeance when you hit pause you get a screen saying that every cop needs a break now and then. The unpause option on the screen? The words: "Let's roll!" It doesn't seem like much until you happen to pause the game as you try to defeat the terrorists on the airplane.
• Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear: Black Thorn originally had the eighth mission set in a airport terminal. After 9/11 it was changed to a bus depot, but the developers actually sent the level designs to modders who wanted to restore the original level. Rogue Spear itself also had Perfect Sword, where terrorists hold an airliner hostage.
• Rampage, where the object of the game is to destroy skyscrapers as a Captain Ersatz of Godzilla or King Kong, among other monsters, in a city has become this since 9/11. It took them 7 years to produce a new game because of it. Worse still, you can actually target some real-world landmarks in a few of the games.
• The long-forgotten Old Shame Maxis edutainment game Read-A-Rama has a cutscene in which two humanoid flies crash into each other. The background just happens to be of the Twin Towers. skip to 6:41 to witness the horror.
• In Shadow Warrior (1997) there is a level where you find that Zilla has caused a jet airliner to crash, presumably killing everyone aboard.
• The third mission in Silent Scope 2, which came out less than a year before 9/11, has a cargo plane being hijacked, and it crashes at the end of the mission. Worse, the PS2 version was released on 9/11.
• In SimCity 2000, if you build your airport too close to your big cities, your planes can and will crash into your skyscrapers, sparking fires and the collapse of said skyscrapers. Yeah. Plane crashes were removed from future installments for obvious reasons.
• One of the possible things that could happen in SimTower was for terrorists to plant bombs inside your tower, which you then have to stop. Ouch.
• A setpiece of the Corneria mission from Star Fox is when Fox flies between rows and rows of twin towers collapsing above him.
• The 1990 Neo Geo game The Super Spy ends with a warning on the increase in power of terrorism, complete with an image of the Twin Towers in the background. Come 9/11...
• In the first level of the forgotten NES game Tetra Star: The Fighter, aliens destroy the Statue of Liberty and then go for the World Trade Center, whose destruction the player can prevent.
• In the Tex Murphy game The Pandora Directive, set in the 2040s, Tex meets an NSA agent who reminds him of the Graham Act, a law that was passed "40 years ago" in response to increased terrorist threats to the US, giving the NSA carte blanche when dealing with internal security matters. The game was made a full 5 years before 9/11 and the resulting Patriot Act.
• The Electronic Arts game Urban Strike was set in the year 2001, according to the intro. A cutscene in which Malone's laser fires and blows up part of the World Trade Center is shown right before the seventh campaign, which takes place in New York City. When you reach your destination in the mission to rescue the survivors, there is a huge smouldering hole in the side of one of the towers. If you fail the mission by incorrectly defusing the bombs that have been set in the towers, the whole thing comes crashing down. The fact that some crackpots do believe that placed explosives brought down the Twin Towers makes this even harsher. It originally came out in 1994, after the 1993 car bomb attack.

Harsher because of other real world events

• In some ways, case three of the third Ace Attorney game became a little bit harsher, or maybe just weird to play through, for those who live in Chicago. The case features a sudden "out of nowhere" lottery winner dying from cyanide poisoning. A real life case occurred in early 2013 when a Chicagoan died in the exact same circumstances.
• The ending of Affordable Space Adventures has the player send a final desperate message to Uexplore informing them of their situation. It turns out nobody is currently in the Uexplore building, and the message is left unread alongside numerous others, all sent by other players. Unfortunately, the act of sending the message (and retaining those of other players) employed the Wii U's Miiverse functionality, so once the service shut down in November 2017, the act of sending a final plea for help became equally futile and unacknowledged in reality.
• The first Advance Wars game already failed to see a Japanese release because of 9/11, but then a remake of the game set for April, 2022 was delayed worldwide for a year because the first mission of the first game involved a fictitious version of Russia attempting to launch a world invasion, similar to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022.
• The Amazon Trail has one scenario in which you are expected to listen to both sides of an argument, both between the Indigenous peoples, and the oil companies who legally purchased nearby land from Ecuadorian government. However, given the environmental damage that happened in South America, it can be hard to take it seriously.
• In Anachronox, there is a segment where you have to vote on a battery of silly Propositions affecting a planet's society. Even though you just arrived on the planet 10 minutes prior. Your goal is to vote in the same way the ruling High Council does in order to gain their trust. One measure attempts to legalize marriage between the Planet-dwellers and Ring-dwellers (lower and upper caste), which the Council has voted against. The measure? Proposition 8.
• The 2014 invasion of Crimea and civil war-like situation in Eastern Ukraine is uncannily similar to the scenario and plot of the 2008 tactical shooter ArmA II (which in return was very loosely based on The Yugoslav Wars); A radical Russian minority with a Communist bent in a post-Soviet Central-Eastern Ruritania bordering on Russia wages war against weak government forces (after the latter declare to distance themselves from their Cold War sphere of influence) and occupy government buildings. Then Russia personally intervenes, marching over the border in a semi-black-op manner. Then the government forces team up with radical nationalist militants. The only part that has yet to happen in Real Life is a US-European military intervention. Or the zombies.
• A.S.P. Air Strike Patrol was unashamedly centered on the Gulf War, despite changing the name to Zarak. It is possible to beat the game, but no matter what you do you get one of the bad endings because of casualties, money or politics, despite being told you were doing well. Compared to the current Iraq war, this is rather uncomfortable.
• In the Backyard Baseball series, Barry Bonds gets fatter every game, with his stats getting better, and is removed from the series after 2003. Then the exact same things happened in real life. Poor Barry.
• Balloon Kid featured a girl trying to rescue her little brother as he gets blown away while riding on balloons. Almost 20 years later...
• In Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, L.O.G. (the game's medium-aware narrator of sorts) constantly jokes that the game will be poorly-received due to its Unexpected Gameplay Change from 3D platformer to vehicle builder and racer. Turns out, he was exactly right. Furthermore, he "promises" that if the game doesn't sell well, the next Banjo-Kazooie game will return to a 3D platforming style... but, as it turns out, Nuts & Bolts was a Franchise Killer and Rare's old team disbanded before they could attempt another game.
• Famed Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy voiced the titular character throughout the Batman: Arkham Series, only for Batman to suffer Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. With this believed to be Conroy's final performance before his passing (until the announcement that he recorded lines for Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths) along with the unceremonious death of such a beloved character that he lent his voice to, many DC fans felt that it was in poor taste.
• EA and Dice developed a map for the Battlefield 4 DLC Naval Strike that takes place on a South Pacific island, with the central feature of the map a crashed commercial jet liner. They announced it about two weeks after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
• The BEMANI song "GOLD RUSH", produced for the 2007 game beatmania IIDX 14 GOLD, features the line "Make it! Make money!" repeated throughout the song. Come 2015 and Konami shutters two of its other Cash Cow Franchises, Silent Hill and Metal Gear.
• The Bill Cosby Fun Game was meant to be a work of Black Comedy referencing the sexual assault lawsuit Bill Cosby faced in 2005, with the premise of Cosby going broke after the rape trial and ending up being a Serial Killer for money while evading the police. Much harder to stomach after the massive wave of 2014 sexual assault allegations and Cosby being convicted of sexual assault, especially with the dedication at the ending:
  This game is dedicated to Bill Cosby. Here's hoping you conquer your demons and deliver more decades of laughs!
• For Brütal Legend fans and non-fans alike, the members of the Second Wave of American Tween Melodic Rap Metalcore band Kabbage Boy getting killed at the start of the game is a little harder to accept as a Take That! to Linkin Park (the band that Kabbage Boy is obviously spoofing) and other bands similar to them thanks to the suicide of Linkin Park's lead singer Chester Bennington, and especially since quite a few of Linkin Park's songs actually might have told Chester's feelings on life and were not the whole "emo" thing the band's hatedom had thought it to be.
• Bungo to Alchemist: Ozaki Kōyō speaks in slightly archaic structures to give the impression that he's an old man, and he outright claims to be an old man in one of his lines. The actual author this character's based on died in his 30s.
• Through controversial already since it was based on the film, Death Race 2000, Carmageddon had two drivers, one of them called Die Anna, played on to the name Diana. Keep in mind, the PC version, which came first, was released on June 30, 1997. It was altered to a zombie game in order to release in the United Kingdom, since the censors felt that a video game where players can run down human pedestrians was glamorizing vehicular homicide. Two months later, Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car accident, though at least this likely wasn't a homicide.
• Modern Warfare: Russia's invasion of the west in a conventional land war became more disturbing after the Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. On a more specific note, the infamous No Russian scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which depicts terrorists massacring Russian civilians, became more disturbing in 2024 following a mass shooting and bombing in a Moscow shopping center.
• Much like the original Modern Warfare series, quite a few plot elements in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) became disturbingly prophetic recently:
  • The plot point where the Urzikstan rebels are declared as a terrorist organization and have their support cut off, allowing an ascendant Al-Qatala to seize power in the resulting vacuum, comes off this way as the game was released soon after the US government withdrew support to the Syrian Democratic Forces, causing a surge in the conflict that led to ISIS cells re-establishing themselves in the chaos.
  • Likewise, the U.S Embassy raid chapter became pretty relevant after the U.S Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq was raided in December 2019 by Iranian-backed militiamen.
  • Everything surrounding the Russian invasion and occupation of Urzikstan suddenly became much more harsher when Russia invades Ukraine in 2022.
• When Combat Mission switched from simulating World War II campaigns to hypothetical "near-future" wars, it got an uncanny knack for predicting real-life wars.
  • In 2007, Combat Mission: Shock Force modeled a hypothetical NATO invasion of Syria in response to terrorist attacks on European cities, with mutinous Syrian army units fighting alongside NATO forces, militias and insurgent groups entering the fight, and the conflict eventually spilling across the border into Lebanon. Almost the exact same events happened in real-life, albeit in a different order: in 2011, the Syrian Civil War broke out. In 2014, ISIS launched a short-lived invasion of Lebanon, and a US-led coalition intervened in Syria against ISIS. In 2015, ISIS launched a devastating string of terrorist attacks in Europe. And in 2017, the Western coalition entered direct conflict with the Syrian regime.
  • In 2009, the devs began working on Combat Mission: Black Sea, which would depict a Russian invasion of Ukraine with the USA intervening on Ukraine's side. In 2014, shortly before the planned release date, Russia annexed Crimea and the Donbas war broke out. The developers released the game in late 2014, with a rewritten plot in which Russian launches a full-scale invasion to remove a pro-NATO government in Kiev. Then, in 2022...
• The entire plot of Command & Conquer: Generals turned out to be horrifyingly prophetic.
  • The game, released in 2003, is about a massive terrorist army, the Global Liberation Army (GLA) rampaging across the Middle East and Central Asia, toppling national governments, and obtaining WMDs, with joint American and Chinese efforts required to combat them. At the time, this was considered over-the-top and really exaggerated. Then in 2014, 11 years later, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was established, and is a terrorist army hundreds of thousands of men strong rampaging across the Middle East and using the same tactics the GLA did, such as murdering civilians indiscriminately, routing the Iraqi army, nearly destroying a dam, and looting hundreds of millions of dollars from banks in conquered cities. Furthermore, their leader is calling for recruits from areas as far away as Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. America's military has gotten sucked back into the Middle East just when it thought its business in Iraq was done, and there are calls for China to send military forces to Iraq to help combat ISIS.
  • The Expansion Pack then prophesized that the GLA would defeat the USA and drive them away into isolationism, then invade Europe and terrorize the continent with both sleeper cells awakening and open shipments of hardware, until finally China would come in and defeat them at the cost of having to use nuclear weapons on European soil. While an actual invasion did not happen in reality since the combined efforts of American, Russian, Syrian, and Kurdish forces managed to drive ISIS into a corner, sleeper cells and terrorists pretending to be refugees did manage to slip into Europe and cause horrible crimes.
  • In yet another example of this game being prophetic, the second mission of the Chinese campaign, "Hong Kong Crisis," deals with the PLA being deployed into Hong Kong to deal with a huge GLA presence there that ends up destroying the HK Convention Center. In June 2019, enormous protests (of over a million people) took to the streets of Hong Kong to protest an extradition bill that would de facto give Beijing unprecedented and near total control of Hong Kong. In August 2019, Chinese government media outlets such as CCTV and the Global Times newspaper officially labeled the protests as "terrorist acts." Hong Kong International Airport was shut down on two separate incidents on August 12 and 13, 2019 before reopening. The protests started to peter off in 2020 due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus as well as harsher anti-protest management, and eventually ended in July 2020 after Beijing passed its national security law that essentially brings Hong Kong under total mainland control.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 was released in 2009, with the main tank of the Empire of the Rising Sun, which is Japan, called the Tsunami tank. Two years later, Japan gets hit with an enormous earthquake/tsunami causing the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown and killing 40,000 people, becoming the country's biggest crisis since World War II.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Modern Warfare 3, and Battlefield 3, amongst other games, all featured terrorist attacks in Paris. In 2015, Paris was hit by two horrible terrorist attacks, one at the Charlie Hebdo offices in January and another city-wide attack in November, and was hit again in 2017. Following these three tragedies, especially the November 2015 attack, the games become very dark to watch. And the date of the attacks in Battlefield 3 was November 13, 2014 — exactly one year before the city-wide attacks.
• The Asian-themed level "Tsunami" in Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex in which you evade a small tsunami and then explored around the flooded remains. Granted the game's levels were themed around natural disasters, though at this point in time, it's hard not to view it in a rather grim fashion.
• In Dead or Alive 2, Bass Armstrong attacks Zack for the latter's interest in his daughter, Tina, shouting, "Rargh! I'll never let you near Tina!". Bear in mind that Bass is an expy of American wrestler Hulk Hogan, while Zack is an expy of (black) basketball player Dennis Rodman. In July 2015, Hogan was fired by the WWE after racist remarks he said years prior became public. One of the remarks was concerning his daughter having sex with a black man.
• Deus Ex:
  • One mission takes place at a gas station whose signage lists prices in the lines of $4.50 a gallon in 2030.^note (The game takes place in 2052, but that station was abandoned since the "Big One" devastated southern California.) When the game was released in 2000, gas was still under $2/gallon. As of 2022, it has surpassed $5.
  • Dialogue from the NSF and their supporters regarding income disparities and the power corporations have wouldn't be unheard of in Occupy Wall Street circles. Dialogue from the resistance forces involving governmental power wouldn't be unheard of in Tea Party circles.
  • The major plotline of the world suffering from a plague known as the Gray Death is this on multiple levels. First, and most obviously, it comes off as eerily similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, the virus disproportionately affects the poor, while the wealthy are able to live it up in their isolated communities. Third, the vaccine for the Gray Death, Ambrosia, was doled out to priority groups first, not unlike how certain groups are given priority for the COVID-19 vaccines, leaving people to fear that poorer nations will be left behind. Lastly, the fact that the Gray Death was created by the antagonists parallels conspiracy theories that COVID-19 was created in a lab.
• In 2007, the creators of Deus Ex: Human Revolution thought up a story of having the city of Detroit suffer from an automotive industry collapse, but would then become one of the most economically thriving cities in North America by the time of 2027 thanks to the Bio-Technology industry that it built up. In 2008, Detroit suffered an automotive industry collapse. The game was released in 2011, and in 2013, the entire city declared official bankruptcy. Ouch.
• The Division:
  • The game is set in New York City, after a pandemic has wiped out a large percentage of the human population. At the time of development, a massive pandemic happened in West Africa that wiped out a lot of the population there.
  • In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic hit. While nowhere near as lethal as the game's "Dollar Flu", lockdowns still resulted in streets becoming a lot more vacant. This meant that the game predicted a pandemic almost exactly four years after its release ^note Covid-19 was characterized as a pandemic by the WHO on March 11th of 2020, The Division was released March 8th of 2016..
• In the early 1990s, Doom enjoyed massive popularity which can be credited to a vast community of fans making game mods. One of which, "UAC Labs," featured modified enhanced gore, and levels where you are supposed to kill swarms of demons. The description of the WAD ends with "Good Luck Marine, and don't forget, KILL EEM AALLLL!" The copyright notice says "You may NOT change a damn thing with this WAD, if you do, i will blow you up." This mod was one of a handful made by Columbine shooter Eric Harris (one of which included an on-screen gametesting credit for accomplice Dylan Klebold). Fortunately, the consistent rumors that he also made a mod set in Columbine that allowed the player to shoot students are all false.
• In 1998, the makers of Doonesbury released Doonesbury Flashbacks: 25 Years of Serious Fun, which contained an archive of every strip published up until that point, as well as numerous extras. Each menu on the disc featured "fun" little animations. The menu for the archive itself was an exterior shot of the White House. One of the many "wacky" things that goes on if the viewer leaves the menu on long enough: an airplane crashing on the White House lawn.
• Anders blowing up the Chantry in Dragon Age II is rather uncomfortable in the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks, especially since the perpetrator happens to share the same name with him and even look surprisingly similar.
• Seeing the name of one of Drive Club's (possibly) final DLC expansion tours, "Finish Line", stings quite a bit harder knowing that it was released the very same day Evolution Studios was shut down.
• Duke Nukem 3D:
  • The majority of the first level ("Hollywood Holocaust") takes place in a movie theater. After the Aurora theater tragedy, a shootout in a movie theater isn't as entertaining.
  • The end text crawl says look for a Duke Nukem 3D sequel soon. That sequel took fifteen years to come out, and got mixed critical reviews when it finally did.
• The pre-War issues in the Fallout franchise have a lot in common with real-world issues in the early 2020's:
  • A New Plague is caused by Chinese saboteurs, like the COVID-19 pandemic which originated in China;
  • Out-of-control inflation;
  • Food and fuel shortages caused by war;
  • Over-consumption of scarce resources;
• Another case that involved the death of Liam Neeson's wife: the character he voiced for the game Fallout 3 loses his wife in the intro sequence.
• Caesar's Legion from Fallout: New Vegas is disturbingly similar to the Islamic State of the Levant for being a well-organized guerilla militia / rogue state based on generally-regarded-as obsolete manuscripts and way of life.
• Final Fantasy VII has environmentalism as one of its themes due to Shinra polluting Midgar with its mako reactors and sucking up the Planet's energy to power the city. The company's meddling with nature has lots of plants and animals dying and vanishing entirely. While the real world did have the same issues, it grew so out of hand that in the late 2010s, scientists report that nearly a million species on the planet will face extinction due to human interference.
• In Ghost Recon, released in 2002 and set in 2008, a war between NATO and an Ultranationalist Russia starts off with the Russians backing Georgian separatists in an invasion of Georgia. Fast forward to 2008 and...
• In Groove on Fight, the Distant Finale title of Power Instinct series, the plot is for first time in the series, Goketsuji sisters has to open the tournament to the public because of the lack of family members in their family to join after 20 years of the tournaments of the first games. Today in Japan, this country has to open their doors to foreign citizens because of the lack of local workforce and to uprise the birth rate. Also 20 years after the release of this game (1997).
• Taking advantage of the 2008 presidential election, a game was released featuring animals competing for the throne to the animal kingdom. It was called Hail to the Chimp. A bit less funny when a black man was elected.
• In the "House of Cards" mission of Hitman: Blood Money, Agent 47, who by this point in the game has a sizable bank account, checks into a Las Vegas hotel while carrying several concealed guns, including, if the player chooses, a sniper rifle. A fun mission to play, but still rather cringeworthy since the 2017 Las Vegas massacre. Even more cringeworthy when one of the methods to get the highest rating for the completing the mission is to lure the target out onto the open, and use the sniper rifle to take him out from an upper floor of the hotel.
• Homefront has become chillingly prophetic thanks to several real-life events in the coming years happening very similarly to the backstory.
  • Old newspaper articles in the game talk about the GKR deliberately destroying a Japanese nuclear power plant. Homefront had the unfortunate timing of being released right in the middle of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan — in Japan, it was released during the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accidents that resulted from the tsunami.
  • Kaos Studios was shut down the day before the first (and apparently only) Homefront DLC was released. The name of that DLC? "Fire Sale Map Pack"
  • In the storyline, Kim Jong Il dies in 2012. He actually died on December 17, 2011. Sounds creepy enough…
  • The Arab Spring, picking up when the game was released, has resulted with Iranians and Saudis trying to exert influence on key countries (Bahrain being one). Wikileaks reveals of Saudis pushing for a war with Iran, and the worsening relations between Iran and the West also took place around the same period.
  • The plot of the story has North Korea becoming more aggressive after Kim Jong-Un takes power. Given that the North Koreans stepped up their aggressive rhetoric, going so far as to release (laughably) bad propaganda movies…
  • The Interview has North Korea beating the war drums and threatening terrorist attacks even on foreign film festivals that dared mention the movie. Whether or not they would be a legitimate threat it's enough for experts to be concerned.
  • There's a variant of the bird flu that is claiming a large number of lives. Come 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Hopper mentions that anyone who looked even slightly Asian had been getting lynched when he left Oakland, and he was "lucky" to only have his home burnt down. Nearly a decade later, there has been an uptick in xenophobia and racism towards East Asian and Southeast Asian individuals (including people of East Asian or Southeast Asian descent) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including a spike in hate crimes against them, one of the most notable of which being a mass shooting in the Atlanta area in March 2021 (which came out a decade after the game's launch) that left 6 Asian women dead out of a total of 8 victims (and 4 of whom were of Korean ethnicity no less).
  • The United States in the game is depicted as a broken-down shell of its former self with riots and civil unrest as well as an economic crisis and a widespread pandemic of the bird flu. Nearly ten years after its release, eerily similar events have occurred in real life such as the attempted insurrection at the White House on January 6th and a recession caused by the coronavirus.
• Hyperdimension Neptunia, a game where you play as several goddesses of Console anthromorphisms out to fight an Anthropomorphic Personification of Flashcarts and Custom Firmware, was launched on the PlayStation 3 in February of 2011 (in North America at least). Just two months later, hackers broke into the PlayStation Network, forcing the service to shut down for months.
• In 2022, Iron Lung was released, a game by David Szymanski where the basic premise is that a convict is trapped deep underwater inside a submarine, and communications are cut off, and said convict has to find a way to escape to the surface. Fast-forward a year later to June 2023, and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and four other rich people went down in a submersible in an attempt to see the wreck of the Titanic, only for navigation and comms to be lost an hour and 45 minutes into the dive. It turned out the sub imploded due to the immense pressure at the depth it had managed to get down to, killing all five onboard.
• James Bond:
  • 007 Racing has among the lines said by John Cleese's R "Oh, please, you call that driving? Q could drive better than that, and he's dead!" It seems tasteless considering the original Q, Desmond Llewelyn, died in a car crash. Almost a year prior to the game's release, no less, and the developers never thought of the association!
  • The 2004 James Bond video game Everything or Nothing has a sequence of Bond trying to stop the villains from destroying the levees around New Orleans, M saying that without those, the city will be flooded. Less than a year later, Hurricane Katrina hit.
• The Jane's Combat Simulations series had one campaign in Crimea set in April 1997 where Russia was trying to reclaim the Black Sea Fleet. They were roughly 17 years early, plus the stakes have changed from ships to land and people, but it is spooky that one of the scenarios they made up looks to be setting up even when you account for them trying to be as realistic as possible.^note Its parent company is a publicly available (for a fee) catalogue of military information. Doubly so for the Baltic Republics, especially Estonia which is the battlefield for another scenario. On the other hand, it also predicted the overthrow of the Pro-Western Egyptian Government, albeit in 1998 and it didn't get quite as hot as a full fledged air campaign; they probably didn't count on the simultaneous rebellion against the anti-Western Gaddafi regime.
• A joke about Kerbal Space Program is that rocket instabilities are caused by not enough struts. On June 28, 2015, a SpaceX Falcon 9 disintegrated because of a failure of a strut. That being said, many landings in SpaceX Failure Video are all too familiar to players who tried to do SpaceX builds themselves.
• 2003's Kinder contains 2 scenes in which characters attempt to kill themselves through jumping off buildings. In 2011, the game's developer Parun killed himself via jumping off the 9th floor of his apartment building.
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep has a Darker and Edgier retelling of Cinderella, in which the evil stepfamily becomes The Family That Slays Together who, in one scenario, summons the Unversed to murder everyone in the ball because Prince Charming did not pick either daughter, and in another scenario, attack Cinderella out of hatred before being blown up. Eight years after the release of the game, the Surabaya terrorist attacks would strike, with three of the perpetrators being a mother and her two daughters, who blew themselves up in a church with hatred as a motivation. Although witnesses report that the daughters, unlike Drizella and Anastasia, were forced against their will by their parents to carry out the suicide bombings.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The sinister "Happy Mask Salesman" who appears in Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Oracle of Ages is eerily reminiscent of 4chan's anti-Semitic "Happy Merchant" meme, down to the Cheshire Cat Grin, Hand Rubbing, and hunched posture.
  • This quote from Carlov in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, referring in-game to the loss of members in the Nintendo Gallery, but retroactively becoming meaningful for the controversial (even to this day) transition between the Nintendo GameCube and the Wii, as well as between the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS:
    Carlov: Ah, well, no worries one way or the other. We've been losing members due to our lack of "gimmicky attractions"...but we don't worry. True fans know we're the coolest.
• The age verification quiz for the 1987 game Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards asks who O.J. Simpson was, with one of the answers being "under indictment". While "Nobody to fool with," is the right answer, in 1994, O.J. Simpson was indicted for the murder of his wife.
• In Lula3D: There's a chapter where you end up on a western movie set and one of the actors accidentally shoots a bird in the opening cutscene, it's mentioned by others that the gun safety on the set isn't great (with Lula joking that she hopes the actors have good insurance) with there being confusion if there are live rounds being used or just blanks and the director insists the prop guns are "under lock and key" and at one point the actress that fired the guns mentions how the director wanted her to shoot directly at the camera. All of this stuff became downright eerie in light of the tragedy on the set of the western movie "Rust" in October 2021 where Alec Baldwin was using a gun during filming and it accidentally went off and hit and killed a crew member and there was a lot of controversy and questioning over the handling of the prop guns on the set with questions of how live ammo got into the gun to begin with, and the scene in which the crew member was shot had Baldwin scripted to shoot his gun directly at the camera.
• In Mass Effect 3, Diana Allers says "Have you ever seen how fast an e-democracy can turn on its allies?". After the game came out, a lot of people online were upset at Bioware for the controversial ending. And for bonus points, several gaming press articles turned on the critcs as "entitled" and the like.
• In Max Payne 3, Max gets caught up in the political corruption in Brazil. The main antagonist, Victor Branco, is a fascist who promises to fight the corruption while secretly benefitting from the scandals. In 2018, the country's population elected Jair Bolsonaro as their new president; a politician who openly praises the former military dictatorship of Brazil while promising a brutal crackdown on corruption and crime. Fans were quick to find similarities between Branco and Bolsonaro.
• The tagline of the planned-but-cancelled Mega Man Legends 3 was supposed to be "Legends Never Die", made doubly ironic as a bad case of Executive Meddling is blamed for the death of the project (and the Legends sub-series) and is believed to be one of the reasons why one of its chief producers left Capcom.
• As the years go by and more interesting, amusing, and worrying news about real cybercrimes mount up (Bitcoin activity of questionable nature, hacking of embedded systems in everything from smart lighting systems/toilets to Baby Monitoring IP Cameras and possibly even hospital ECG systems with network connectivity, Stuxnet, Flame, and suchlike), Mega Man Battle Network has slowly become more worryingly realistic with each new iteration of malware rising from the depths the Internet each and every year.
• Way back in 2008, Pandemic Studios releases a game called Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, set in Venezuela. Part of the background events is a new regime moving to nationalize the oil rigs and refineries of an American company. In 2010, Hugo Chavez prepares to nationalize the oil rigs of an American company.
• The long pre-final boss cutscene in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty discusses the antagonist's plot of using A.I.s to control and censor information in the digital age in order to manipulate events of the populace. Presumably for the greater good. Cue 15 years later after the game's release and machine learning has been the hot tech topic of the year. And while some of the results are promising, it has led to issues like social media using algorithms to effectively tailor content so news feeds show selective information. While not exactly censoring and controlling it like in MGS2, it has had similar impact of manipulating people.
• A hidden audio file in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (accessible by entering Samus' gunship and putting a code inconspicuously provided in the hidden area of planet Norion) has then-Nintendo President Satoru Iwata lament that no one seems to believe he's taking his role as head of the company seriously, as he doesn't appear to be physically affected by the stress of the job. Fast-forward to 2015, where Iwata died due to surgical complications with a bile duct growth. In the months prior to his death, fans could see him physically deteriorating in each new Nintendo Direct as a result of his tumor and the stress of running Nintendo during a financially rough period.
• The arcade game Michael Jackson's Moonwalker might be weird enough, but it just gets creepier (or sillier) each year: You touch kids to gain points and powerups, or touch Bubbles the Chimp to get a super cyborg transformation. One of the attacks is Michael grabbing his crotch. And then there's the dance attack: Jackson does his moonwalker gig, and it wipes out all the enemies on the screen. The Angry Video Game Nerd lampshaded it during in his review of the game.
• Minesweeper has an option to change from defusing mines to avoiding flowers, in case one of its players also happens to be a victim of a landmine.
• Modern Warfare:
  • The first Modern Warfare was made in 2007, but took place in 2011. Now that the actual year 2011 has rolled around, the events of the Arab Spring, especially the stuff going on in Libya, make the depictions of civil unrest, a violent coup, and subsequent Western intervention across the course of Al-Asad's rise to power seem chillingly prophetic.
  • The second game was highly controversial at its release for including a level in which the player is part of a terrorist attack on a Moscow airport as an undercover agent. In January 2011, actual terrorists also decided that the airport would make an excellent target. However, they used explosives instead of machine guns (which had been used in a terrorist attack on an airport in India earlier).
  • The very depiction of a President Evil named Al-Asad is itself Harsher in Hindsight when you consider the ongoing Syrian uprising and civil war against a government led by a president named — you guessed it — Bashar Al-Assad.
  • Shepherd's speech at the beginning of Modern Warfare 2 about the Afghan soldiers trained by US forces takes a harsher meaning in the wake of 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
• MotorStorm Apocalypse is a racing game involving a group of adrenaline junkies that hold a racing festival in a ruined city during an earthquake (and other disasters). The early videos featured buildings collapsing around your ears during aftershocks, explosions and tsunamis. During release week... This happened... Because of it, the game was pulled from shelves in New Zealand and Japan.
• Persona 2 Innocent Sin's remake and international release had to make some changes from the original version, as the base game featured the supposed resurrection of Hitler as a plot point, and even features the party fighting him on a floor littered with the Nazi flag and swastikas. In 2011, the "changes" were giving Hitler a pair of shades, calling him "The Fuhrer", and replacing the swastikas with Iron Crosses. At the time, people thought this was such a clumsy attempt at censorship that people thought Atlus was flat out Trolling the censors. Ten years later, the idea of neo-nazis using the Iron Cross instead of a swastika is not nearly so farfetched as it was at the time.
• The plot of Persona 4 is kicked off by two women being found hanging from telephone poles within a few days of each other, and a copycat murder is committed a few months later in-universe. This news story involved a young man's body being found under strikingly similar circumstances.
• In a typical Plague Inc. game, expect borders to close, flights being cancelled, quarantines, mass burning of bodies to stop the disease from spreading. Then COVID-19 happened, and we got to live through a similar government response as the one shown in Plague Inc. This was sufficiently eerie that it got the game banned in China.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, the player is charged with fighting water- or fire-themed villains. The villains want to use the games' legendary Pokémon to their various ends, but the legendary Pokémon turn out to be too powerful, and end up causing torrential downpours threatening to flood the entire world (in the case of the water Pokémon) or causing massive worldwide droughts, threatening people with starvation (in the case of the fire Pokémon). It all looks like a standard case of Gone Horribly Right, but takes on a new meaning if you consider that some of these things are happening (or threatening to happen) nowadays as a result of global climate change. These effects are further canonized in Pokémon Sword and Shield, where Galarian Corsola and its evolved form Cursola are born from bleached coral brought on by climate change.
  • Take a look inside the Pewter City Museum in the first-gen Pokémon Red and Blue (and Yellow). Among the displays is a space shuttle, labelled Space Shuttle Columbia. The name is removed in the remakes.
  • The Kanto region also features an abandoned and ruined power plant, which is located in approximately the same location as Japan's Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant, which was one of the nuclear power plants impacted by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
  • Pokémon Black 2 and White 2: About half of the Unova region (based on the New York City area and part of New Jersey) is frozen over by a tremendous snowstorm, forcing many characters to relocate and leaving the fates of others uncertain. In 2012, a good chunk of New York City and part of New Jersey was flooded and/or otherwise damaged by Hurricane Sandy, forcing many people to relocate and leaving the fates of others uncertain. It gets even more accurate with the Polar Vortex in 2013.
  • In Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, one of the new areas is the Ultra Ruin, an alternate universe in which Hau'oli City, the Fantasy Counterpart Culture to Honolulu, is reduced to rubble, rendered uninhabitable for human life, and survivors have to live underground in radiation suits. Averted now, but for 38 terrifying minutes on January 13th, 2018, it seemed as though this was going to become the fate of the real Hawaii as a false positive was identified as a nuke traveling from North Korea aimed at the islands.
• In Police Quest: SWAT 2, an easy source of money early in the game is to sell off the sidearms for those officers you don't intend to immediately send off on call. Funny then... less so when the LAPD's SWAT team was investigated for doing essentially the same thing.
• In Postal 2, Gary Coleman is killed during a book signing at Paradise Mall in a way that disturbingly parallels the murder of Christina Grimmie during an autograph signing in June 2016, which brings us to a store in said mall with a sign reading, "Closed For Renovation. Reopening June 2016."
• Red Dead Redemption II shows how dangerous tuberculosis was back in the day and how it affects the patient... about 13-15 months before the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak/pandemic. Both diseases share certain symptoms, such as respiratory issues. That said, at least modern healthcare means catching it isn't a death sentence like TB was in the 1800s.
• In Saints Row IV, one of the signs in simulation Steelport said "Reboot is death". This ended up being awfully prophetic, given how the mixed-to-negative reception towards the 2022 reboot resulted in Volition, the longtime developer of the Saints Row series, folding a year after its release.
• In Shadowrun Returns Hong Kong Extended Cut, the Runners are involved in ensuring HKPF Maintains their contract to Hong Kong against Ares Marcotechnology and the other Megas. By the end of the campaign, Hong Kong's policing is under the control of Ares Marcotechnology, in July 2020, China passes the National Security Act in Hong Kong, ending Hong Kong's autonomy in exchange for a brutal dictatorship's police enforcement.
• SimCity Societies is notable for promoting BP's "green" agenda by stamping its logo on windmills and solar power plants. Three years later, the same company is responsible for one of the worst oil spills in U.S. history.
• Part of the plot of Sly 2: Band of Thieves is how the villains are distributing illegal spices that, when eaten, drive the eater into horrible rages in order to manufacture a Hate Plague to fuel the parts of Clockwerk. The use of literal spices was done in order to mask the usage of drugs in the game. Unfortunately, about a decade after the game's original release people have been selling "legal highs" of synthetic cannabis which has become a serious issue is several countries, with a popular brand of these legal highs being called Spice.
• The promotional iPad game for The Smiler roller coaster at Alton Towers has you tilt the device in order to stabilize the train, or else the train derails. After seven accidents, the most serious causing two riders to be amputated, the app was taken down from the App Store.
• Sonic the Hedgehog
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Oil ocean zone. Note that the video uploader's username has "bp" in it.) The comic also has Sonic and Bunnie in said zone. Ian Flynn has stated that he planned the storyline before the Oil Spill.
  • Sonic Adventure: Water-god Perfect Chaos laying waste to Station Square in his fury is much harsher after the flooding of New Orleans and the tsunami at Tokyo. It gets harsher with every such tidal disaster that happens.
  • One of the missions in Shadow the Hedgehog requires the player to complement a(n alien) terrorist attack by detonating five large bombs planted around a city centre. The game was actually released after the attacks on London, but the mission would have been completed well before.
  • Madonna (a scrapped human character, probably based on the singer by the same name) was planned on being Sonic's girlfriend early on, but the idea was dropped because of fear that American viewers would be disgusted with the human-anthro relationships. Come Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), and it turns out that they were right, as the Elise and Sonic romance scenes was one of the most criticized aspects, especially with Elise kissing Sonic to resurrect him after getting killed by Mephiles through the power of the Chaos Emeralds.
  • Infinite's theme from Sonic Forces is incredibly reminiscent of Linkin Park's music, and the singer has stated that the song is heavily inspired by them. Sadly, the song was publicly released on July 20th 2017, the same day that Linkin Park's singer Chester Bennington committed suicide by hanging.
• At E3 1995, Sony Computer Entertainment America's "brief presentation" about the PlayStation consisted of one word: "299," a Take That! against the Sega Saturn launch price of 399 USD. 11 years later, again at E3, the PlayStation 3 presentation touted it as costing FIVE HUNDRED NINETY-NINE U.S. DOLLARS,^note For the 60 GB model; the 20 GB model would cost 499 USD significantly more expensive than other consoles of its generation at their respective launch dates.
• In Star Fox Adventures, you can buy and later deliver Cheat Tokens to unlock cheats or special messages. The very last Token (buyable in the Ocean Force Point Temple once Fox is on the way to put into place the final Spellstone and then proceed to the last part of the game) unlocks the following message upon being delivered in the Warpstone's maze in Thorntail Hollow: "There is sorrow ahead. A close friend does not have much time left. It will be hard to accept but you will grow". In-game, this message is foreshadowing the farewell between Fox and Tricky, but becomes doubly somber when you remember that this game, released in September 2002, was the final game released by Rareware before their departure from Nintendo after they were bought by Microsoft, finishing a successful partnership that released many popular video games in the past. The only consolation is that, as far as the Star Fox universe goes, Fox and Tricky met again in Star Fox: Assault.
• In the Star Trek Online mission "Mirrors and Smoke", players arrive on Kentari Prime, a polluted planet struggling to survive under two different sides with one who seeks to stop the damage to the environment and compliments those who help others and another who ignore the damage done and seeks to fill their coffers with money. It was already harsh with beating the viewers with the comparisons between the Democrats and Republicans circa the 2016 Presidential Elections, what with the two leaders being blatant expies of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald Trump, but in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, the violent xenophobia and monetization of masks make it even worse.
• Two in Mario Super Sluggers, both relating to the "close play" feature. At third base and home plate, if a fielder receives the ball just as a baserunner approaches, the runner can attack the fielder thereby jarring the ball loose. Since the game was released, Major League Baseball instituted two rule changes, both unpopular with fans. In the 2014 season, MLB brought in the Posey rule which prevents catchers from blocking the plate unless they have the ball. Two seasons later, a rule was added prohibiting takeout slides unless the baserunner makes contact with the bag.
• For Team Fortress 2, after the voice actor for Soldier died in 2020, one of Spy's domination lines became this.
  Spy: Oh, Soldier, Who will they ever find to replace you? Anyone! (laugh)

  There have been many memorial videos using modified versions of this line since, such as this.

• Tekken 5 claims at the end of the arcade intro that "Heihachi Mishima is dead.", which comes across as a major contradiction seeing as Heihachi is on the roster. Then Daisuke Gōri, Heihachi's voice actor, died. Then Unshō Ishizuka, his replacement, also died a few years later.
• Utsuho Reiuji, a character from the Touhou series, is a nuclear raven girl inspired by Chernobyl. Now that Japan had a nuclear crisis itself, let's just say don't be surprised if she is claimed by Chuck Cunningham Syndrome. It doesn't help that one of Tenshi's victory quotes against her in the fighting games is, "Say, you're not related to the earthquake on the surface, right? Right?" For that matter, Tenshi herself has come under fire for this, as she had stated she wanted to set off a massive earthquake on the surface world.
• Yuko Kaida voicing Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (2013) voiced Marida Cruz in Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn. Look up Marida to know what kind of trauma she goes through...
• In Tony Hawk's Underground 2, there is a level that take place in New Orleans. The player can trigger an event that, through some voodoo magic, changes the city to be full of death and destruction (wrecked buildings, zombies walking around, etc.). This would seem much harsher after Hurricane Katrina, which occurred less than a year after this game was released.
• In Total Carnage, you blow your way through an insane landscape of chaos which is clearly inspired in several ways by the 1991 Iraq conflict (it's in a desert) mixed with a much higher dosage of constantly escalating madness (the mad general is called "General Ackboob", you battle hordes of mutant monsters). In 1992 the way your PC tears his way through all this chaos without any trouble save a quarter shortage is amusing in its insanity. Viewed today against the many complications of the second Iraq war...not as much.
• In 1994, there was a Troy Aikman NFL Football for Sega Genesis with a commercial that touted "They stole Troy Aikman's brain!" After the NFL concussion controversy, considering Aikman was concussed many times during his career (multiple times in his final season, 2000), him saying "homina homina homina" doesn't seem so funny anymore.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has a throw away line regarding the collapse of the European Union as a sign of Gehenna, the Classic WOD Vampire version of the Apocalypse. With Brexit and threats of other nations leaving, some reports suggestthe collapse may become a reality.
• Vampyr takes place in London during the Spanish Flu outbreak. Much of the plot is given to citizens coping with the pandemic, and the main character is a doctor who is investigating the disease. The game came out two years before the COVID-19 outbreak, the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu 100 years earlier. The game was released free to PS Plus members in October, 2020, in the midst of the new pandemic. This harshness is only double underlined by the late game reveal the cause of the more aggressive variants of the virus that seem to plaguing London and twisting the citizenship into monsters are actually the work of a vampire goddess, who comes out every few centuries or so to "play" against her son, to stop her disease. Meaning in the timeline the world was potentially expected to have an outbreak in the exact time frame of the Covid pandemic.
• In Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, one of the items that can be stolen by Carmen Sandiego and her crew is James Bond's Aston Martin. In 1997, one of the Astons was stolen for real. No word on whether Carmen Sandiego is on the list of suspects.
• Part of what drives the main conflict in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is the fact that white Americans rather than fight against the Nazis, when the United States was taken over, hesitantly accepted the occupation and even tried to make the best of a bad situation by cooperating with the new regime, so long as it was only ethnic minorities who got the worst treatment under the new government. One memorable scene shows uniformed Nazis having a friendly chat with hooded Klansmen. Considering the events of summer 2017 in Virginia, when this game was released in Fall of 2017, it was deemed oddly timely and relevant.
• The WonderSwan in 1999 does not have a headphone jack unlike many other portable entertainment devices of its time, instead requiring the user to use an adapter to use headphones. A little over 15 years later, Apple began dropping the headphone jack from its iOS devices, most notably the iPhone 7, a design decision with high enough publicity to warrant worldwide controversy.
• WWE games:
  • The WWF Raw video game for the SNES and Sega Genesis (among others) allows wrestlers to perform over-the-top "mega moves" in order to finish a match. The video game guide demonstrates Diesel's mega move, in which he tosses his opponent fifty feet in the air and lets them crash back down onto the mat, by having him do it to Owen Hart, who would wind up dying at the WWF's Over the Edge event five years later by falling fifty feet and crashing onto the mat due to a malfunctioned harness.
  • The Undertaker's SmackDown vs. Raw curse:
    • A storyline of the story mode in WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw 2006 ends with Eddie Guerrero landing in a casket during a feud with The Undertaker; soon after the release of the game, Guerrero died.
    • In SmackDown vs. Raw 2007, a storyline has dialogue where The Undertaker tells Chris Benoit, who he's feuding with, that his grieving family will have no one to blame but himself; months later, the real Benoit kills his wife, his son, and himself.
  • In WWE '13, if you are having a match with Eve Torres, you'll occasionally hear Jerry Lawler make a comment about needing an EMT at ringside because his "heart skipped a beat." It's fairly cringeworthy when you remember that Lawler had a major heart attack on live TV in September 2012 that nearly killed him.^note In THQ's defense, the audio commentary had been done for awhile at that point and Lawler himself has already made these kinds of jokes following his return.
• Yandere Simulator contains a lot of sexual content, with several of these instances (e.g. Mida Rana attempting to seduce male students) being played for Black Comedy. Needless to say, after allegations of long-term predatory behavior towards minors against both the game's developer YandereDev and composer CameronF305 began to be made in The New '20s, the sexual jokes have become a lot more controversial.
• Meta-example from Yo-kai Watch: When promoting Yo-kai Watch 2 at E3 2016, Akihiro Hino suggested that the games would follow the same pattern as they did in Japan, and that the series would "bloom like a flower" in a year's time. Fast-forward a year, and the sequels not only wound up selling significantly less than they did in Japan; but the series also experienced a decline in popularity there that has caused Hino to reconsider the future of the series.

Harsher because of in-universe events

• The front cover of the 24 video game has a shot of Tony and Michelle diving for cover from an explosion. Michelle is killed by a car bomb at the start of Season 5.
• The Ace Attorney series has quite a few:
  • Players of the Phoenix Wright Trilogy would know the fate of Phoenix Wright did not end as happily as it has been heavily implied in the final game once another new protagonist has been introduced, including Wright's fall from grace as a major plotline. Ema Skye unfortunately suffers from this fate also, with a bright light of hope coming to her at the final case of the first game to become a forensic scientist. This was only to be shattered upon discovery that she failed in doing so, causing her to grow angry and bitter at everything and everyone, and to an extent becoming like her big sister Lana.
  • Related to this, many characters, including Maya Fey, Ema and Lana Skye and Detective Gumshoe have joked about Phoenix giving up or even losing his badge. It was funny during the first three games, since the players reaction was guaranteed to be "Yeah, like that'd ever happen!"... Then, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney came along and the jokes turned into nightmarish Foreshadowing instead, with the only ray of hope resting in Apollo and his new law firm.
  • It is worth nothing though, that both examples above have since been reverted by the time of the sixth game (Phoenix was reinstated as a lawyer who is considered legendary among people, and Ema became a successful forensic investigator who also got to keep her detective job), effectively subverting this trope.
  • The above-mentioned "fall from grace" also impacts the Rise from the Ashes case in the first game. Phoenix being accused of illegally withholding a piece of crucial evidence and having Gant say his badge will be taken away becomes a lot more apparent and foreshadowed when Phoenix is disbarred in the fourth game after he unknowingly presents forged evidence during a murder trial. This could however be a deliberate foreshadowing since Rise from the Ashes was made and released in the DS port for the first time while the fourth game was probably already in development.
  • Edgeworth's phobia of earthquakes is hilarious when triggered for the first time, with Maya finding him curling on the floor of all things and definitely not coming to his senses anytime soon. It gets kind of sad and creepy when you find out about the circumstances that caused the phobia in the first place, as lampshaded by Phoenix.
  • Trials and Tribulations:
    • In Case 2, Pearl jokes that Phoenix will one day grow famous enough to have imitators. In Case 3, Tigre gets Maggey thrown in jail by impersonating Phoenix and doing a deliberately awful defense at her trial.
    • One of the most gut-wrenching is this quote from Diego Armando/Godot when he is describing Maggey Byrde's supposed guilt: "Using the dark, aromatic depths of coffee to conceal the poison...classy lady!" It really hits home when you find out Armando himself was poisoned by the murderous Dahlia Hathorne and fell into a five-year coma, during which time Mia Fey, the love of his life, was murdered. Poor guy really had in rough...
    • Mia's reaction to Phoenix eating the pendant bottle in Case 1 is mildly amusing at the time, but if you consider the events of Case 4 it's no longer funny: it was not her first time seeing her client swallow poison in court to cover for his lover.
    • Godot's line, "by the way, I've tried salt in my coffee. It tastes terrible," Take a look at the end of Flashback case 3-4, Mia is crying that Terry Fawles commits suicide, Dahlia got away with that murder and Diego says "relax, kitten, your tears are getting my coffee salty." This ultimately implies how Godot is still alive and why he is addicted to coffee.
    • There's a power outage during the earlier cases where the only visible objects on screen are Phoenix's eyes and Godot's visor, a moment clearly played for laughs given the visuals. Fast forward to the final case, and one of the logical conclusions Phoenix points out is why Maya is so certain of Godot being there, and he demands the court turn out the lights... and guess what lights up the darkness in a much more serious shot than before.
  • Dual Destinies:
    • The first case features a bombing of a courtroom, where the courtroom was cleared in time before the explosion. This was thanks to Ted Tonate alerting everyone to the bomb. Later on, Ted Tonate is fingered by Phoenix as being the real bomber, and that he detonated the bomb to hide a murder, leading the player to conclude that Tonate must have tried to clear the courtroom out on purpose. The fact he killed someone, blew a courtroom up, and risked killing innocent people is bad enough for this to a dark case. But it gets a whole lot worse much later on in the game when the player learns that the actual bomber wasn't Ted Tonate, but someone else who stole the remote switch and then detonated the bomb with it. In other words, the actual bomber did mean for everyone to still be in the courtroom when the bomb went off. It was simply by luck that Tonate noticed the bomb was activated and alerted everyone, making the bombing of the courtroom a whole lot harsher and darker in hindsight.
    • Watching the astronaut Solomon Starbuck act as if he's in a malfunctioning spacecraft madly pushing buttons in episode 4 whenever he's stressed, is hilarious. It can also come off as hilariously ironic that he has a fear of space. That is, until you find out that he's suffering from extreme post-traumatic stress disorder due to almost dying in the depths of space when a terrorist sabotaged his spacecraft. He almost didn't make it back alive, and from that day forward he developed an intense fear of space and, presumably, a habit to flashback and act like he's in that situation. Although he still looks over the top while he thinks he's in space, it does make it less of a laughing moment and more of a "... you OK, dude?" moment.
    • There's a Running Gag throughout the game of the convict prosecutor Simon Blackquil being tasered by his detective handler Bobby Fullbright to keep him in line. Come The Reveal in Case 5 that Bobby Fullbright is said terrorist mentioned above, and Simon was falsely convicted for a murder he committed, and this becomes a lot less funny on replays. In fact almost every comedic moment involving Bobby Fullbright comes off as deeply disturbing after The Reveal, such as Jinxie calling him a ghost in Case 2, as the real Bobby Fullbright has been dead for a long time.
  • Investigations 2 introduces Sebastian Debeste, a rather incompetent prosecutor who gets made fun of by everybody for being an idiot, including Larry, the resident dumbass. The last two cases of the game explain that Sebastian's abusive father likes to berate him for being an idiot, and that he paid Sebastian's teachers to give him good grades without telling him. When Sebastian finds out about this in Case 4, he starts to think that he really is an idiot, running out of the room crying, and in Case 5 he almost has a mental and emotional breakdown over it.
  • One shows up in the final case(s) from Spirit of Justice, where Dhurke shows up as a client at the Wright Anything Agency, and Apollo, his adoptive son, considers the whole thing as an Awkward Father-Son Bonding Activity, and tries to push him off as an Amazingly Embarrassing Parent. It becomes this when we learn that Dhurke is dead, knows that he's dead, and is being channeled by Maya. He was legitimately trying to reunite and bond with his adoptive son knowing that he'll never have another chance. Apollo, upon realizing this, promptly kicks himself for his rude and dismissive behavior.
  • The Great Ace Attorney
    • In the fourth case of Part 2: Resolve, Ryunosuke and Susato take a picture with the newly arrived in England Yujin Mikotoba and Judge Seishiro Jigoku as a commemorative photo. It's a sweet moment, even if Ryunosuke's pose is a bit stiff and Seishiro's suitcase kind of sticks out. Fast forward to next chapter, and it's revealed that Seishiro's suitcase has Gregson's dead body inside. Yup, they're taking a picture with a dead body, and yup they let a criminal carry a dead body in and out of a hotel just like that. Not exactly a commemorative photo anyone wants to keep anymore, isn't it?
    • Baron Van Zieks is a competent prosecutor if not intimidating and discriminative toward Japanese like Ryunosuke, and some of Ryunosuke's reaction toward that particular antics can be seen as funny. He's also called "Reaper of the Bailey" because those proven innocent in a trial where he's the prosecutor end up dead under mysterious sircumstances to add the air of mystery and intimidation on him. Fast forward through both of the games, it's revealed the reason why he has prejudice toward Japanese; His older brother is the last victim of a serial murder committed by a Japanese exchange student ten years prior. What's worse, said Japanese student is actually not the culprit. VAN ZIEKS' BROTHER is. Even worse, This and the added accusation of him being the Reaper cracks him mentally he decided to withdraw from court hoping that the murder would stop, only reappearing when Ryunosuke enters his first trial in England. Leaving the racism, the dude has had it rough for the past ten years.
• In-universe example of this trope is the premise of Alan Wake, as the eponymous writer gets caught up in scenarios eerily reminiscent of the books he wrote.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • An in story example for Assassin's Creed: Revelations. On the final mission Ezio goes into the library in Masyaf, there are absolutely no books or anything at all, save a ring of chairs with only one occupant: the skeleton of Altair. You then have an Altair Memory, of him dousing all of the torches in the hall to the library (mirroring Ezio relighting them as he goes into it) and then hiding the Apple of Eden behind a wall. The final mission statement? Take a seat and rest for a bit.
  • Comes again in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, when you realize that he had lost another loved one in the city he lived in and watched helplessly as his father and brothers were executed. He had every reason to brutally execute Savonarola for the death of Cristina. It took a lot of self control to not give him the same fate he had given Vieri and Uberto.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • Batman: Arkham Asylum has quite a few elements that fall into this with later games in the Batman: Arkham Series:
    • Just before the final boss fight, Joker turns his TITAN gun on himself while talking like he'd been Driven to Suicide: "I have nothing left to live for." Fast-forward to Batman: Arkham City, and his death by TITAN poisoning.
    • Though successful, this isn't the first time he tried to turn the gun on himself.
    • In addition, there's Batman briefly getting infected by the TITAN formula himself near the end of Asylum, but is able to successfully overcome the effects. He wouldn't be as lucky the second time around, this time getting infected with the tainted batch of it mixed with Joker's blood, leading to far more devastating effects on his body.
  • Batman: Arkham Origins:
    • A key part of the plot Bruce is learning that he can't do everything alone and he has to trust other people to help him. Not only did he seem to forget this lesson even by City, but Batman: Arkham Knight sees that the lesson not sinking in is ultimately what does Bruce, his career as Batman, and the Wayne legacy in.
    • The "Cold, Cold Heart" DLC involves Mr. Freeze trying to cure Nora. Knight's "Season of Infamy" DLC reveals he failed, meaning everything he's done was for nothing.
    • During the events of Origins, Bane nearly kills Alfred, but Bruce is able to revive him. During Tom King's run on the main title, Bane successfully kills Alfred.
  • Batman: Arkham Knight features a subplot where Batman, infected by the Joker's blood during the events of City is slowly becoming like the Joker because of it. While in Knight, he was able to fight off the infection, the Batman Who Laughs wasn't so lucky.
  • One of the tie-in comics for the series, Arkham Knight: Genesis, confirms that Jason Todd only escaped his capture by the Joker (where he was being held in an abandoned wing of Arkham) at the end of the first game. He's on the island with you the entire time. In fact, one fan went further, and actually managed to figure out the room he was being held in.
• BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger:
  • Taokaka's joke ending involves having been trained with Bang until an unknown enemy attacks, forcing Bang to make a Heroic Sacrifice, while Tao is left to fend off against the antagonist: Jin and Litchi, played out like an upcoming movie, which turns out to be Taokaka's lies. Cue the sequel, Litchi herself ends up reluctantly making a Face–Heel Turn, going from neutral to antagonist because her beloved's life is in danger and she has no choice if she wants to save him. Way to go in your imagination, Tao... Let's hope that Bang doesn't end up biting it in Continuum Shift's sequel.
  • Previously in CT, during Bang's story, when he met Litchi trying to converse with Arakune, he immediately thinks she's a Damsel in Distress that Arakune is trying to brainwash. This scene is Played for Laughs. Then in CS, per with the first aneurysm moment above, Litchi became a Deconstruction of Damsel in Distress, a damsel pleading for help to those that can help her (Kokonoe) and flat out refused, thus forcing her to take the offer to join NOL because she's the only one who can save herself when everyone else turned her pleas down. Even more tragically, she's the type of not wanting to burden her friends with her problem, while this is noble, this made Bang, whom you can bet your ass will try to help if he knew the problem, become unaware of her distress to make a save. Damn.
• In The Book of Unwritten Tales 1, a character named Death lampshades that no one dies in point and click adventure games. Then comes the Darker and Edgier sequel The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 where Archmage Alistair sacrifices his own life.
• Once you've completed Bugsnax, it can be hard to bring yourself to replay it once you've seen The Reveal of the Bugsnax' true nature, and know that most of the game's quests consist of feeding your friends parasites that are slowly destroying their mind and body.
• Every single joke made in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow about how Soma and Mina are obviously an item at their expense come across far more darker in the wake of the bad ending. Let's just say that a Soma without Mina is not a happy Soma...
• In Chrono Trigger, as you head off to the Millennial Fair at the beginning, one NPC you can talk to says "You're going to have to wait a thousand years for another Millennial Fair!" Unbeknownst to you, Lavos will destroy the world in 1999.
• The first game of The Coma series ends with Yaesol telling her superior about Youngho, her new friend, explicitly suggesting that he could become an asset to the Ghost Vigilantes. In the sequel, it's revealed that said superior is evil, and tries to murder Youngho so that Vicious Sister can possess his body. Yaesol is horrified when she finds this out, not least because it was her reports that brought Youngho to the Ghost Vigilantes' attention to begin with.
• Try playing the other Contra games after finding out in Contra: Shattered Soldier that the aliens invaded Earth because the Triumvirate had secretly stolen a sacred relic from them, and that Lance Bean became a Well-Intentioned Extremist himself by trying to overthrow the Triumvirate. And try playing Shattered Soldier after seeing Lucia become one of the members of the Quirky Miniboss Squad that must be defeated. And try playing Hard Corps: Uprising after Shattered Soldier if you interpret Bahamut and Leviathan as Bill and Lance.
• Moe's constant sleeping in Da Capo when you get to the end of her route. Suddenly the Cloud Cuckoolander thing and all her sleeping are a bit less charming, aren't they? And the vitamins... She's trying to sleep as much as possible so she can see the childhood friend who died saving her. She stopped taking the vitamins - read: sleeping pills - when she started dating Junichi but started taking more and more after the cherry tree died and she couldn't dream anymore. Eventually, she tries to overdose on sleeping pills where she met her friend right as Junichi convinces her to move on with her life. She gets better but... For extra fun, remember that the tree dies in lots of routes and she doesn't have the hero around to help her.... Yay...
• Diablo III
  • During Act 3, Leah's journal mentions how the spirits she's trying to keep trapped within the black soulstone are starting to wear on her, but comforts herself by remembering that once Asmodan is dead and captured, and the black soulstone is destroyed, she'll be herself again. At the end of the act, before the soulstone can be destroyed, Diablo's spirit is freed from the stone and placed into Leah's body, turning her into the Prime Evil and the end boss of the game, whom the player must then destroy to save the day.
  • Also during Act III, a Westmarch messenger tells Tyrael that he will not send men to fight "imaginary" demon lords, which is rebuked by Tyrael coldly stating "Perhaps he'll believe when his kingdom burns to ashes around him!" Come Act V, angels are burning Westmarch and King Justinian is dead.
• In Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, when Flonne is introduced she says she wants to be like the flowers. In most of the endings, Flonne is turned into a flower by Seraph Lamington as her punishment, before the final battle. In the Good ending (the canon ending), she is revived as a Fallen Angel, in the Neutral ending, Laharl sacrifices himself to resurrect her, and in one of the bad endings, he picks the flower and wanders the Netherworld for eternity.
• Dragon Age: Origins:
  • If you choose the Human Noble origin, your young nephew asks his father (who is about to ship off for war) to bring him back a sword as a present. His father replies something along the lines of "Don't worry, you'll be able to see one up close soon". Your nephew and the rest of your family are brutally murdered shortly thereafter by the armies of a rival nobleman.
  • If you play a City Elf, when you talk to your cousin Soris, he'll say that his bride-to-be sounds like a dying mouse, to which you can respond (paraphrased) 'maybe I should get you a cage for your wedding gift'. Considerably less funny later on when she and a few other female wedding guests are imprisoned in a human noble's mansion so that he can rape and kill them one at a time.
  • There's banter between Alistair and Oghren where Alistair asks how Oghren is so drunk all the time - "Do we even have that much alcohol with us? I wish I could be drunk all the time!" If you recruit Loghain into your party and you either don't make Alistair king or haven't hardened him, Alistair ends up becoming a drunken vagrant out of despair.
• Many lines in Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening became harsher due to the plot twists involving Anders in Dragon Age II. Among these are Justice's discussions with Anders and Nathaniel about possession, Anders accusing Velanna having a "chip on her shoulder that replaced her head" and Anders joking that he's fond of "iconoclasm" since in Dragon Age II he blows up the Chantry in Kirkwall to incite a war.
• Dragon Age II:
  • One comes at the beginning of Act II. The Viscount of Kirkwall is becoming exasperated over the growing problems with the Qunari, and humorously grumbles, "I really should spend more time with my son. This life is just too short." They're both dead by the end of the Act. Too short indeed.
  • The "glistening elves" potential Party Banter between Isabela and Fenris. The former, true to her typical sense of humor, asks the latter what sort of bent his slavery had, and Fenris responds with flat audible exasperation that he was a bodyguard. It seems innocuous enough with the exasperation pinned to Fenris's usual attitude as The Comically Serious. And then you meet Fenris's former master, and hear a few comments that Word of God has since confirmed the implications of.
  • Varric likes to write stories where the hero dies at the end, something he mentions a few times in banter. One banter in Act 1 is with Anders to whom he explains that he's "working on an epic poem about a hopelessly romantic apostate waging an epic struggle against forces he can't possibly defeat." At the end of the game, Anders can potentially be executed after having blown up the Chantry.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition:
  • Varric gets annoyed with Hawke for Tempting Fate while in the Fade. A funny little exchange between two extremely close friends that comes about five minutes before a situation where Hawke (potentially) pulls a Heroic Sacrifice to allow the others to escape.
  • Varric also has a few banters with Cassandra where they talk about his books. In one such banters, he explains how he likes to make his characters suffer, and even "throw in a heroic death".
  • Later in the game, if female Lavellan is in a romantic relationship with Solas, Sera will snark about Levallan and Solas "rebuilding the Elvhen empire" in the bedroom. Later, it turns out that Solas is indeed trying to rebuild the ancient empire of the Elves...just in a more apocalyptic fashion.
  • Solas being trapped in the castle in the Bad Future and poisoned by red lyrium is bad enough on its own, but it gets worse when you realize that he inadvertently caused it by giving Corypheus the MacGuffin (he thought it'd kill him, but was underestimating Corypheus), and now he's had years to just sit and stew in his own guilt and the knowledge that he completely ruined the world, all while slowly dying a rather horrible death.
• Dragon Quest:
  • As seen in the Dragon Quest II distant sequel Caravan Hearts (which takes place 200 years later), Moonbrooke lies in ruins. This either means that the Princess was unable to restore her castle; or she restored the castle and it was destroyed again. Though, oddly, Dragon Quest Builders 2 directly contradicts this, stating that the reconstruction of Moonbrooke is, as far as the Builder and Lulu knows, proceeding apace, which comes up concerning certain story beats in that game.
  • Dragon Quest VIII:
    • Many people in places Dhoulmagus attacks end up repeating his Character Catchphrase, "Such a pity". It turns out this is something much more sinister than just Got Me Doing It...
    • Eight and his allies manage to save the Lord of Dragovians from himself after he took on a full dragon appearance at the expense of his people, with the leader thanking him for it. 2 games later, the God of the Dragon Race, Nadraga, wanted to have the Dragons rule over the other races, but would later try to destroy Astolia as well as his own race after being revived and never thanked the Hero and their allies for defeating him.
• Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter was made for the DS and Wii by two completely different teams. In the DS version, the character Mike, a random human who is inexplicably stuck in the game world, mentions in random dialogue that the world is very odd and "like a dream." At the end of the DS version, the world is destroyed in a Dream Apocalypse, and it was all created by Mike when he enters a coma.
• EarthBound (1994):
  • Ness can randomly get Homesickness, a crippling condition which causes him to waste turns in battle thinking about home. The only way to cure it is by calling Mom. Good thing this doesn't happen to Lucas in Mother 3!
  • There is a character who, when you speak to them, says "I wonder if Earthbound 2 has been released yet?" There's a lot of us in Europe (and America) who would sadly say "No, and it may never be".
  • Here's◊ the Fry's Electronics mascot. Looks pretty cheerful, kinda reminds some people of Sponge Bob Squarepants. Now try looking at him again after seeing Mother 3's Negative Man.
• Ever17:
  • Tsugumi and Takeshi's scene in the flooding elevator while talking about the Archimedes Principle becomes a lot less amusing when the mini sub they're in starts to sink and they need to lose about 100lbs in order to start rising again. Takeshi distracts her with by asking her about it again the leaps into the airlock and moments later out into the ocean which is ice cold and in a setting that does not ignore the effects of water pressure or the human swimming ability.
  • At the beginning of Coco's route, there's a moment where Takeshi, You, and Coco are looking at a photo album of You's. When they see a picture of a baby Takeshi humorously asks You if it's her baby, which she reacts with a brief "no". Later in the route, we find out it actually IS her baby/clone, which she only had because she's dying of a lethal heart disease and made her to carry on her legacy. Ouch...
• On the way to meet with Page to sneak into Reaver's masquerade in Fable III, at the entrance of her base, you pass by Captain Swift, who's off to stir up further support for the uprising among the soldiers at Castle Bowerstone - before leaving, when Page refuses to let him come with the two of you, Ben half-jokingly whines that he should've just gone with Swift (who is for the record essentially the Walter to Ben's "you"). The next and last time he sees him is at his public execution. It's also a little of a downer on a replay that one of the promises you make to your supporters for when you're on the throne is to put Swift in charge of your army.
• A possible moment can happen in Fallout: New Vegas. In Old World Blues, the toaster says that "Soon the world will burn in nuclear fire, again!" You can't help but laugh as the Toaster is Ax-Crazy yet harmless (because he is a toaster). Then, Lonesome Road comes along, and the Big Bad try to launch nuclear missiles at the NCR/Legion/general Mojave depending on your relations with all the factions in the Mojave, and you get to pick if and where they're launched.
• In F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, Stokes asks Snake Fist who Alma is. Snake Fist replies "She's the mother of the apocalypse!" This amusingly unhelpful description becomes somewhat less amusing in light of the game's ending - Alma rapes the player character and becomes pregnant with his child who is, due to the nature of her parents, possibly the Antichrist.
• Tidus in Final Fantasy X keeps telling Yuna about how much he's looking forward to going back to Zanarkand with her, and about how great things will be once they get there and all the stuff he'd like to do with her once the pilgrimage is over. He says this a lot. Much later in the game, he finds out that Zanarkand is the ultimate destination of the pilgrimage, where Yuna will acquire the Final Aeon, but in defeating Sin will die. Upon realizing how boneheaded this makes him seem and how much pain it must have caused Yuna to hear him talk about it all so cheerfully, Tidus experiences a brief Heroic BSoD before freaking out over why nobody told him this. Some players felt this way too.
• Grand Theft Auto franchise:
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: During the ending, Tommy Vercetti comments to Ken Rosenberg that this could be "the beginning of a beautiful relationship." By San Andreas, about six years later chronologically, it's revealed that Rosenberg's friendship with Tommy is permanently damaged and he is disbarred as a lawyer.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:
    • Salvatore Leone has his casino robbed in the game, where he goes into a paranoid fit, threatening to kill Carl Johnson for betraying him. Nine years later, in Grand Theft Auto III, he has become so paranoid that it ends up getting him killed.
    • Big Smoke's actions and quotes are cast in a far different light when he and Ryder are revealed to be moles for Frank Tenpenny and the Ballas.
    • One of the random (female) pedestrian lines is "Where's the Russian mafia when you need them?". Definitely a lot funnier before the Darker and Edgier Grand Theft Auto IV happened.
  • In Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, Johnny Klebitz, Clay Simon and Terry Thorpe may have dialogue commenting they are alive and Johnny asks how long it will last. Clay comments "I hope forever." Come Grand Theft Auto V and the Lost M.C. is killed in a mission for Trevor, including Johnny.
• Guild Wars: Eye of the North introduces Gadd, a vitriolic and insufferable genius who is unrelentingly hard on his son, Vekk. Vekk declares he'd sooner push Gadd off a bridge if they didn't need Gadd's help. Not long after, Gadd is killed during battle and a grieving Vekk scatters his ashes from a bridge.
• Guilty Gear:
  • Guilty Gear XX introduces Bridget, a character who, due to cultural superstitions surrounding identical twins, is raised as a girl, leading her to try to prove her masculinity despite still presenting in a feminine manner. This led to a lot of jokes and memes surrounding the fact that she is apparently male, including the use of a certain transphobic term centered around the punchline of "this character looks like a girl but he's actually a boy, oh no!". Come Guilty Gear -STRIVE-, 20 real-world years later, Bridget makes a return and her Character Development arc has her transition to being a woman, effectively putting an end to all of the gender-as-punchline jokes that have been the core of her fandom status for years.
  • In-universe example in Guilty Gear Xrd. During a flashback sequence, Sol and Aria are sitting together and Aria talks about wanting to be like a bird, flying through the sky carefree, to which Sol responds that he imagines being like a roach, having no natural predators, no concern for socio-political bullshit and being very hard to kill. Of course, this also sums up his future life as an unwilling Gear.
• Halo:
  • The first game seems like just a well-made, fun, alien shoot 'em up. It's got little monkey enemies that like to panic at the first sign of you and marines shouting lots of funny things like, "Get up—SO I CAN KILL YOU AGAIN!" Then your AI guide sends you alone into an eerie containment facility where the mutated corpses of slain soldiers really do get up for you to kill again... and again....
  • Hilarious Outtakes feature Sgt. Johnson saying "Halo 4, I get a woman", part of the joke being that they weren't expecting the series to go on for four main games. A Halo 4 did come out, eleven years later... but Johnson got KIA at the tail end of Halo 3. The closest thing to Sgt. Johnson in Halo 4 is Commander Sarah Palmer. It could also be interpreted now as referring to all the Ship Tease between John and Cortana in 4, just before the latter ends up sacrificing herself.
  • In Halo 4 Cortana saying "I'm not doing this for mankind" revealed how much she cared for Master Chief. In Halo 5 this takes on a much darker light when it's revealed how callous she can be to humans who aren't John.
  • In Halo: Combat Evolved, Cortana prevents 343 Guilty Spark from destroying the universe at the beginning of the eighth mission and calls John out for allying with Spark. Now, her actions are seen in a completely different light after Halo 5: Guardians, when she makes a Face–Heel Turn, and becomes not so different from 343 Guilty Spark and betrays John in the process.
  • Another in-story example from Halo: Reach: Noble Six is notified to be a soldier with a hyper-lethal skill set and a lone wolf personality. Carter, Noble Team's leader and Noble Six's new commander, upon meeting Noble Six tells them that he is happy to have a soldier with Noble Six's skill set on the team but that those lone wolf tendencies should stay behind now that he/she is part of a team. Near the end of the game Noble Team is assigned to defend the Pillar of Autumn and all of Noble Team dies in the process except for Noble Six (and Jun who escaped with Dr. Halsey according to Word of God) who stays behind on Reach to make sure the Pillar can escape Reach. Carter's statements become sadly ironic as Noble Six is left alone as the only Spartan, or UNSC soldier period, on Reach and all he/she can do is watch as Reach is glassed by the Covenant. Forced to become a lone wolf once again Noble Six's final actions are to fight against unrelenting waves of Covenant forces in a Last Stand that lasts for several hours until he/she is finally subdued and killed. Decades later, the only reminder on Reach that any sort of conflict had ever occurred is the shattered remains of Noble Six's helmet, a lone wolf but a noble and courageous one indeed.
• In Heavy Rain, all of Scott Shelby's interactions with the parents of the Origami Killer's victims, which seem genuinely kind and caring at the time, become this when it's revealed that Shelby is the killer, and is just using them to get his hands on any evidence that might implicate him.
• An in-story example occurs in Hatoful Boyfriend. At one point during Nageki's route, Hiyoko tells him (in a non-malicious way) that he's like a friendly ghost that hangs around the library. Then later on it's revealed that Nageki really is a ghost (having committed suicide 5 years ago), and is unable to leave the library.
• An in-universe example in Hyperdimension Neptunia V. Plutia mistaking a CPU Memory for candy? Amusing. Blanc, Peashy, and Rei all making similar mistakes? One tragedy after the next. The world sucking outside of Lowee until Planeptune and Lastation came along? Interesting take on how things played out in real life. That's not the only thing taken from real life.
• Infinite Crisis sees Atomic Wonder Woman blame herself for the state of her world being a nuclear wasteland when it wasn't her fault. The concept of Wonder Woman: Dead Earth involves Diana in a similar post-apocalyptic world — and unlike her Atomic counterpart, she is to blame.
• Yuuichi and Ayu's pinky swears in Kanon suddenly become a lot less childishly innocent at the end than they were to start. Or rather, they remain the same childish innocent gesture but...
• Katawa Shoujo:
  • During the years between the release of the demo and the full game coming out, an enormous amount of the Hanako-centered fanfics followed the formula of "[character] comforts Hanako, protecting her, cuddling her and tells her she's beautiful, and Hanako falls in love with them forever." Cue Hanako's route from the game, which revolves around an absolute deconstruction of that very same idea, showing that this type of behavior would cause terrible emotional damage to both parties involved.
  • Emi asks in Act 3 of her route why Misha would hang around with someone as bossy as Shizune, in a somewhat lighthearted moment. If you've played Shizune's route, you know why.
  • Late in Act 1, one of the scenes leading up to Lilly's route has her joking with Akira about how bad Akira is at cooking. Later on, it's revealed that Akira was essentially forced to raise Lilly by herself when they were 19 and 12, respectively, after their parents left for Scotland. Akira believes that she was a failure as a substitute parent, and couldn't do as much for Lilly as she should have.
• At the start of Kindred Spirits on the Roof, Yuna, who's having lunch on her school's roof, leans against the railing. She acknowledges that it's against the rules, but notes that if the school wants to prevent accidents, it should build a taller fence. It later turns out that Sachi, one of the two kindred spirits, died when she fell from the roof after saving the classmate she loved and admired.
• Kingdom Hearts series: Whenever he is in Space Paranoids, Sora will wear armor with Tron Lines that'll change color depending on what Drive Form he enters. Seeing him in Master Form in that world, which results in the lines turning yellow, looked cool until late 2010, when Tron: Legacy was released, in which its Big Bad, Clu, also has yellow lines. Considering how cruel he is, especially what he did to the ISOs, Tron and to his own creator, this really brings a bitter aftertaste to players. What tops this off is that Sora gets Master Form DURING the first trip to Space Paranoids; not only that, using the form consumes both party members (temporary, fortunately), and Tron is a party member in Space Paranoids...
• Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]:
  • The game makes the original Organization XIII arc much harsher as it reveals that the members were actually growing new hearts. It makes you feel sad for Demyx, "Oh, we do too have hearts!".
  • Demyx's infamous sudden competence as a boss fight along with the very uncharacteristic "silence, traitor" line before said fight is a lot harsher now that we know Xehanort was using Organization XIII as vessels in a Grand Theft Me plan. It's likely Demyx, who was later confirmed to be a Dandelion, was mostly assimilated by Xehanort by then. Though by Kingdom Hearts III, Xehanort opted to "bench" Demyx for his incompetence, triggering Demyx to defect and help Vexen rescue Ansem the Wise.
  • Every time Ansem, Seeker of Darkness is fought, he's accompanied by his Guardian, a Heartless-like bodyguard creature. Kingdom Hearts III reveals that Terra's heart was trapped inside it the whole time, which makes every fight infinitely worse on replays of the earlier games. Terra was forced to be a living shield for the man who stole his body and ruined his life for years. Ansem's "Submit!" attack call suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.
  • Sora's heart shattering from darkness due to his inexperience with it and causing his Disney Death (and, ultimately, his disappearance in Kingdom Hearts III. It's hard to take after recalling this line: "The closer you get to the light, the greater your shadow becomes."
• Knights of the Old Republic has a bucketful if you've played Star Wars: The Old Republic. That Hope Spot (and lightside boost) on Taris with those Outcasts? Yeah, instead of a quick death by orbital bombardment, you instead condemned the lot to be picked off by disease, rakghouls, starvation, and finished off with toxic waste. Playing the "canonical" option as a Light Side Male with a Bastila romance? Well, your character knocks Bastila up, has a Force vision about the Humanoid Abomination Sith Emperor, and runs off to try and stop it, leaving their friends and loved ones behind without so much as a holocron warning them about the threat or telling them why you had to leave. They spend the rest of their lives waiting and you never return. Even worse is if you go canon with the sequel, which is already running on this Trope. Exile hooks up with Revan, they try to take on the Emperor. Lord Scourge literally stabs Exile In the Back, Revan ends up with the same fate Malak put all those Jedi in, then goes insane and tries to commit genocide of anyone with a trace of Sith blood before the Imperials save the galaxy by putting him out of his misery. Canderous's people become vassals of the Sith again (with those who followed his teachings hunted down by the Imperials), and the Sith charge in and lay waste to half the Republic anyway — so everything in both games turned out to be near-completely pointless. And Revan's final fate is to become a crazed cult leader trying to resurrect the aforementioned Emperor, and is finally put down like a rabid mutt by an Enemy Mine coalition of characters from both factions — including, for irony's sake, two of his descendants.
• In one of the early traffic cases in L.A. Noire, Bekowsky jokes about how Phelps was a One-Man Army during his time in World War II, greatly exaggerating his accomplishments while Phelps dismisses them since he doesn't like to brag about what he did when he served. It becomes a lot harsher when you learn that Phelps was a terrible marine whose orders and Glory Hound tendencies gotten all of his men killed as well as a group of Japanese civilians and children all being burned alive. It's no wonder that Phelps refuses to talk about his past in the war.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
  • At the entrance of Kakariko village, a solder introducing the village says that they're a small community and that he hopes they'll one day be as lively as the Castle Town market. Years later, when the market is overrun by ReDeads, the village ends up holding the escaped population of Hyrule's humans, making it the liveliest area in Hyrule.
  • There is the guard posted at the gate of Hyrule Castle Town, who complains about how boring things are, and that he wishes things would become more interesting. The player also learns about the guard's fascination with ghosts. Fast forward seven years, after Ganondorf had overtaken the castle, in the place where the guard was stationed sits a mysterious individual who buys and sells ghosts, who somehow earned Ganondorf's favor.
• Spider-Man's ending in Marvel Super Heroes has Mary Jane ask "So does Spider-Man have room in his universe for a wife and child?" Spider-Man and MJ's unborn child would later die in The Clone Saga, and their marriage would subsequently be Retconed out of existence years later during One More Day.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect, Ashley writes an e-mail to her sister warning her not to fraternize, as she doesn't want to have romantic feelings come into play when deciding which of her subordinates lives or who dies. On Virmire, where you must choose between saving Kaidan and Ashley, both of whom can be romanced, it's possible to sacrifice Ashley to save a romanced Kaidan or save a romanced Ashley at the cost of Kaidan's life, making Ashley a potential victim or reluctant beneficiary of this kind of thought.
  • In Mass Effect 3, if you choose to allow the quarians to destroy the geth, EDI will criticize the logic behind your decision, suggesting that if given the choice, Shepard would save Joker over her. This gets even harsher if, at the end of the game, you take the Destroy ending, which not only destroys the Reapers, but all synthetic life in the galaxy, EDI included.
  • In an elevator conversation, Wrex can ask Kaidan whether he would win if he fought Shepard, and Kaidan replies that as Shepard is his superior officer, he can't imagine them fighting; this also implies that Wrex believes that Shepard would win against him. In the third game, Shepard can (and potentially must, depending on how many mistakes you've made) kill Kaidan during the standoff with Udina. To make this a two-fer, Shepard can also be forced to kill Wrex at one of two points in the game- if you fail to talk him down on Virmire or if you sabotage the genophage cure.
  • Do a playthrough with the Citadel DLC where you save Miranda from Kai Leng, and Jack will make fun of her for having trouble with a "guy with a sword". Then do a playthrough where you fail to warn Miranda about Kai Leng, leading to her death. That particular bit of banter suddenly stops being funny.
  • During the Collector attack, Joker imagines what people will say after everyone becomes 'organic batteries'. "This is all Joker's fault! What a tool he was! I have to spend all day computing pi because he plugged in the Overlord!" Cue the Overlord DLC where David, who's been forcibly plugged into a VI and kept alive with machines, spends all day computing Pi as part of an experiment conducted by his own brother. And to just add cruelty, he's autistic and has to communicate with hundreds of geth at the same time, which is torture to him. Until Shepard rolled along, he had no way of freeing himself and the "MAKE IT STOP!" screams were both Tear Jerker and Nightmare Fuel at the same time. Also a case of Fridge Horror as of all of the things Shepard had experience, this was one of the few that made even Paragon Shepard angry enough to strike Gavin Archer and threaten to kill him if he comes near David. It comes back in Mass Effect 3 when after Thessia falls and Joker makes a joke about it in front of Shepard, he could risk antagonizing Shepard enough to break platonic ties with him.
  • Also, in Mass Effect 2, if you bring up his past hobby as an actor, Mordin will sing a modified version of the Major General Song to the amusement of both the players and Shepard. The moment becomes really depressing in Mass Effect 3, if Mordin sacrifices his life in order to cure the Genophage, as he quietly sings it (if he sang it in the second game) as the building collapses and explodes around him in one of the biggest tear jerkers in the whole series.
  Mordin: I..am..the very..model of - (BOOM)
  • The Noodle Incident involving farming equipment is much less funny when you realized He was forced to savagely kill a Krogan sentry in cold blood, not only brutally injuring himself but also that all of the defenders at the camp were female Krogan makes the incident less funny.
  • In the original game, a Tali/Liara elevator conversation has Tali mentioning that most of the technology she wanted to send back to the flotilla tried to kill her. In the second game, she is accused of sending active geth parts back to the flotilla, which proceeded to kill everyone aboard the Alarei, but it was actually her father who was responsible.
• Shooting down the Gesselschaft, the Bonne's flagship in Mega Man Legends is pretty satisfying because it's easily the most difficult battle in the game... unless you play the prequel game The Misadventures Of Tron Bonne where you learn not only did Tiesel almost die for them to acquire the ship, but the family inadvertently saved the entire world from Lex Loathe in their efforts to save him.
• Mega Man Zero:
  • The antagonists of the first three games in all have the Greek letter Omega as their symbol. Sure most of them are Knight Templars, but they still mean well, fighting for the sake of humanity. But later we're introduced to an actual character named Omega, who is everything that the antagonists ever stood against.
  • Back in Mega Man X2, Zero, freshly Back from the Dead, very easily destroys a weak clone of himself that the Big Bad made. Cue Zero 3, where Omega (the same one mentioned above) is the original body of Zero, while The Hero is the clone. But it was subverted, the clone Zero didn't mind the irony of the situation he was in, and goes on to defeat Omega Zero easily. Also, The Hero may be using a duplicate body, but the mind is real; he is still the real Zero. Omega Zero is now just a mindless puppet.
• Metal Gear:
  • Way back in the first game, released in the late Eighties, Snake must reach Metal Gear by crossing an electric floor. All the other electric floors in the game have had panels which can be shot with missiles in order to prevent Snake getting zapped; this one had no such thing. In order to reach Metal Gear, Snake has to eat Rations to regain his draining health meter while he blinks in eight-bit damage. If you have played Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, this simple gameplay puzzle will likely bring you to tears, for its similarity to the microwave tunnel scene. Only there, Snake can't restore his health with rations. This becomes even closer to Book Ends if you've played the NES Reformulated Game which replaced Metal Gear with 'the supercomputer' — in which case both Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid 4 end with a forced walk through a corridor that causes pain and Snake destroying a computer.
  • Also, wince at a line where the Colonel informs Snake that if he refuses to co-operate, he'll be 'in the stockade until [he is] a very old man'. Considering Snake's accelerated aging as a clone and how he looks as of 4, he wouldn't have to be there very long.
  • The fewer details given, the better, but one of Meryl's lines, ("Women have more hiding places than men") becomes a lot harsher with Ground Zeroes. In this case, the woman in question had one of her "hiding places" used against her will to hide a bomb meant to blow up Big Boss.
  • In the original Metal Gear Solid, there's a funny sequence where Naomi Hunter lectures Solid Snake about what happens to the body when someone smokes, and informs him that if he carries on doing it he will get cancer and die. In Metal Gear Solid 4, Naomi dies, of cancer. Suddenly the conversation isn't funny, and it gets worse when Snake learns something much worse; the old FOXDIE virus implanted in him back in the first Solid, originally designed to only target and kill specific people, will soon become an uncontrollable bio-weapon that will kill people indiscriminately - unless he offs himself first.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
    • In an optional Codec call, Otacon will reprimand Snake for throwing away a lit cigarette into the harbor from the George Washington Bridge. Shortly after the release of the game, it was shown that Otacon wasn't the only person upset with Snake's actions, as quite a few people were in an uproar over this fact, enough to have Kojima have Naked Snake actually stamp out his cigar just before doing his HALO jump at Tselinoyarsk in the next game.
    • The intended joke is probably this too, as Otacon is basically chiding Snake for polluting the Hudson. Flash Forward to the Plant Chapter, and it turns out the Tanker Snake scuttled led to a lot worse pollution than that. Or rather, so The Patriots would have us believe.
    • There's a famous scene where a corrupted AI character rants about purple stuffed worms and scissors, among other things which lighten the mood of the otherwise dark section of the game. It's not so funny in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker when the AI Boss starts doing the same thing, even quoting some lines, while she's being essentially murdered.
    • The original script had a scene where the Arsenal is rampaging through the streets of New York, destroying multiple buildings. This was completely cut following the 9/11 attacks.
  • There is a movie on Metal Gear Solid 3's Secret Theater where Snake and Para-Medic argue about whether Snake should kill and eat The Boss's horse, with The Boss becoming incensed enough to storm away quickly and send GRU soldiers over to their location. It's not so funny in Peace Walker when Big Boss is forced to euthanize The Boss's horse with his gun in a manner similar to his killing The Boss, after the horse was critically and mortally wounded from falling off the Costa Rican/Nicaraguan border while in pursuit of Peace Walker.
  • In Portable Ops Plus, Old Snake is a bonus playable character. As a bonus detail, all the girly magazines in Portable Ops Plus use pictures of EVA. Being a man, Snake is not immune to the irresistible lure of pictures of his beloved naked, smoldering - mother. Lampshaded by CMP Studios, a Metal Gear Machinima group, in a one-shot special - "I apologize for what I used your pictures for".
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots managed to do this to a lot of Metal Gear Solid 3: bad enough that Naked Snake ends up becoming Big Boss, the villain of the first two Metal Gear games, but MGS4 reveals that the rest of your team - Sigint, Para-Medic and the all-important Major Zero - went on with EVA and Ocelot to found the Patriots, the organization which eventually became the shadow government of the United States, and that Big Boss - originally one of the group - set off the Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land incidents in order to throw off their control. Furthermore, it's revealed that both Sigint and Para-Medic, a.k.a. DARPA Chief Donald Anderson, who probably indirectly created the AIs, and Dr. Clark, the creator of the Les Enfants Terribles project and the person who turned Frank Jaeger into the Cyborg Ninja, were both killed; Dr. Clark shortly before the events of the original Metal Gear Solid, and Sigint/Ocelot were aware of their true allegiances when Ocelot killed Sigint; by the end of MGS4, none of the original members are left, though it's a surprise as to which one is really the last to die. It's actually Big Boss, who survived Metal Gear 2 and was in a coma until saved by Ocelot and EVA.
• Any and every time Samus's narration mentions Adam in Metroid Fusion, after Metroid: Other M was released. A more specific instance is when an AI asks Samus, "Did this Adam care for you? Would he sit in a safe Command Room and order you to die?" Years later, you have Adam seeming to barely care about Samus, sitting in a safe command room, and ordering Samus to not use weapons or protective gear while being chased by monsters through boiling lava. So... yes, then.
• In the first Ni no Kuni, the main character does a mission for the Cat King and you have to beat the Mouse King for it. It's cartoony. It's really early on and afterwards it never comes up again. Then in the sequel Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom, centuries later, the Mouse species have launched a coup that kills the current Cat King and a good number of his loyal catperson troops. Later in the game, this is revisited. While it's not seen as justified; it's considered in-game as understandable and forgivable. Such to the point of letting the Micepeople continue being in charge.
• Overwatch: If two players on the same team are respectively playing as Sombra and Cassidy, it's possible for the former to grill the latter on his name, to which he replies with "Don't know what you heard, but my name's not Joel." Funny Development Gag then. Not so much after New Blood revealed that Cassidy had been dealing with a massive identity crisis stemming from having used a fake name for years.
• In Persona 3, many characters will talk about future plans they want the main character to be a part of, and how their lives have changed for the better ...and then the main character dies at the end of the game.
• Pokémon Black 2 and White 2: There's a mild in-game example of this: Before you get your first Pokémon, your rival's little sister tells you to make sure you take good care of it. When you reach Nimbasa City, you learn that her Pokémon was stolen five years ago by Team Plasma, and your rival is hell-bent on getting it back and taking revenge on them.
• Project × Zone:
  • Natsu was much more better received and characterized in Project × Zone 2 than her home game. Unfortunately, while the Project × Zone series ended there, it was later announced that Natsu's home franchise would receive a new game which was a Continuity Reboot that all but placed her game into Canon Discontinuity (later reveals in Soulcalibur VI indicate that the events of V are set in a Bad Future that certain characters in the new timeline are privy to and trying to avoid) with no indication if she'll be a part of the reboot timeline, rendering most of the improvements for Natsu here almost for nothing.
  • Metal Face/Mumkhar describing Bionis and Mechonis being fused and then destroyed via Ouma's 101 Embryo Project would accurately describe the Intersection, which fused the new Xenoblade 1 world Shulk created after Zanza's defeat and Alrest from its sequel into Xenoblade Chronicles 3's Aionios, only for Origin, an ark created in a joint venture by Melia and Nia in order to preserve their peoples' lives and knowledge, to be infected by Z, a living computer virus created by the people's fears of not wanting the worlds to defuse.
• Psychonauts:
  • In the theater level, it's a bit hard to find the over-the-top, sickly-sweet "happy" play put on by kids in flower costumes to be amusing once they start talking about Gloria's mom, if you've played before and already know what happened to her...
  • Milla's Dance Party is pretty much impossible to look at the same way once you find out her backstory. She wasn't kidding when she called it a "party killer".
• Record of Agarest War 2 has it, of all the events that you can find in the game, in the third generation Hot Springs Episode. Normally a Hot Springs Episode is pretty funny in this series until Jude just had to say (in a joking manner at that point) that his father Jainus who's in heaven be at peace while Jainus tells him that he heard that and point out that he's not dead. This is just before Jainus' Heroic Sacrifice when they get surrounded by monsters who were attracted to Chaos' power leaking out from Grey. You can even watch it again at the Event Gallery and it just feels uncomfortable watching that entire scene again and knowing what's about to happen.
• Red Dead Redemption II:
  • Every time you hear Arthur wheezing a bit here and there since Chapter 2? It becomes a lot grimmer once you realize that those were probably early symptoms of tuberculosis.
  • In Red Dead Redemption, Dutch van der Linde is finally cornered at the top of a mountain with John pointing a gun at him. Jokingly, he states that they "have got to stop meeting like this". The last time the two saw each other, they were at the top of a mountain, with John once again pointing a gun at him.
  • Remember how in I Jack kept angsting over John's constant absence from his life? We get a bit of backstory on this. Supposedly he abandoned Abigail and Jack for an entire year, and once the Marstons settle down in West Elizabeth, the player no doubt participates in John's disappearings by simply playing the game.
  • A new player may see the "Sicknesses" section of the Player menu and think "Neat, Arthur can get sick? That's a nice realistic touch." He indeed does. But instead of a randomly occurring temporary disease that goes away on its own, it's something much, much worse.
• In Rumu, at one point Rumu has to clean up the house's lab, with the main mess being a chemical spill. This is made all the more tragic later on, when it's revealed that that same spill was the cause of both David and Cecily's deaths.
• Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair:
  • During Chapter 1, you can look around the dining room and talk to the guests, as a sort of tutorial for the investigation sequences. One decoration is a tombstone that has the names of all the guests besides Rie (the party host, who made it) and Taiko (the guy Rie likes). The characters don't think too much about the tombstone, although Taiko doesn't get why he isn't on it, but it gets less funny by the end, after Momoko, Hiro and possibly Kotoba die.
  • Also from Chapter 1, Raiko can talk to some of the guests. If Raiko talks to Momoko, Raiko will remark that she'd rather kill herself than wear the cat costume her mother bought her. The otherwise cheerful Momoko becomes upset and calls Raiko out on making light of suicide. Momoko kills Hiro and leaves Kotoba to die before hanging herself, so the fact that she was planning suicide explains why she reacted the way she did. In fact, it's also implied that Raiko's older sister Reiko may have committed suicide, since she died suddenly and Raiko blames herself for her death.
• Everything involving Penelope in Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves becomes really painful after knowing she does a Face–Heel Turn in Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time.
• The "Mario throwing Yoshi into a pit" jokes in Something after Brawl in the Family released "Plumber's Best Friend". Yoshi intentionally throws Mario off his back to give him the extra air, leaving him to fall to his death.
• In Sonic Chronicles, E-123 Omega wants to destroy Eggman but Tails states that Eggman is an ally and Omega only backed down on his closest friends, Shadow and Rouge's behalf. Then Sonic Forces has Shadow allying himself with Eggman to spread panic and disorder throughout the world. ^Really?Not really; the Shadow siding with Eggman is a copy created by the Phantom Ruby, while the real Shadow still opposes him.
  E-123 Omega: "ORANGE FOREST CREATURE GONE MAD. RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE DESTRUCTION."
• Spider-Man: Edge of Time:
  • Part of the game's plot involves Peter dying and coming back from the dead — something he'd experience a couple of years later with the events of Superior Spider Man
  • Likewise, part of the plot of the game is Alchemax being founded years before it should've been. Part of the finale for Superior Spider Man features Alchemax being formed earlier than it was before.
  • Miguel telling Mary Jane that her and Peter would stay together in light of the game being released years after One More Day.
• Subverted in Spider-Man: Web of Shadows. During the battle with Black Cat, Spidey takes a metareferencial jab at his movies when encountering a Kingpin Tech Flyer for the first time: "Green Goblin is so 7 years ago! The kids are into guys like Venom and Sandman now!" The kids probably aren't liking Venom some time later in the game after he resurfaced with his symbiote army that turned New York into a deserted city, almost devoid of human activity (which is far more than what he did in Spider-Man 3). The catch? The player was well aware of that, for this would have been a straight example if the game didn't start In Medias Res.
• One of the first pieces of promotional material for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate reveals that "EVERYONE IS HERE!", i.e. in addition to adding new characters, it brought back every single character from past Super Smash Bros. games, including characters who appeared in Super Smash Bros. Melee and Super Smash Bros. Brawl but disappeared in subsequent games. Many hailed Ultimate as topping Avengers: Infinity War as "the most ambitious crossover in history." Then came the trailer for the World of Light adventure mode and Ultimate topped Infinity War on this claim in a way that was not happy. Thanos destroying half of the universe's life with a fingersnap at the end of Infinity War? Try Galeem killing everyone except for Kirby in one fell swoop, and as part of the game's intro no less!
• Tales of the Abyss, has a particularly nasty example, Guy's fear of women. Most of the fellow characters, and even the players snicker at seeing him freak out whenever women get too close to him. Some characters even make fun of it, and the female members may occasionally touch him deliberately in spite of that (like when Tear grabs his hand after he jokes about her having Luke "whipped"). Then you find out his fear stems from being hidden under the dead bodies of his sister and the maids who sacrificed themselves to save him when Kimlascan soldiers massacred his family. When he was around FIVE. Cue the three female party members feeling like jerkasses.
• An in-game example comes from Tales of Symphonia. Close to the beginning, there is a cutscene about Lloyd's Exsphere in with Genis says something about his mother protecting him through it. It feels way heavier the second time you play it since you then know that the Desians imprisoned his mother's probably still conscious soul in the stone, which gives it its power.
• These are everywhere in Tales of Graces because of its prologue structure. Playing the game again and seeing how much everyone changes is one thing, but there's also lots of awful Foreshadowing around. Probably the worst one is when Asbel tells Hubert that he's pretending Richard is his older brother, and Hubert asks "What about me? Am I still your brother?" Pathetic on its own, but even worse once you know that Hubert's about to be adopted by the Oswell family, and he makes it very clear in the beginning of the adult arc that because of the adoption, he doesn't consider Asbel his brother anymore.
• Invoked between Tales of Zestiria and distant prequel Tales of Berseria. In Zestiria, the party venerates Shepherd Artorias, discussing his heroic efforts against the first Lord of Calamity. Berseria reveals Artorias to be utterly ruthless, murdering his child brother-in-law for the sake of a ritual, maiming his sister-in-law and leaving her to die, and instead imprisoning her for three years when she gets a useful mutation; meanwhile, his Abbey proceeds to effectively take over world politics thanks to controlling the royal family and having good PR. (None of this is a spoiler, by the way — this is Berseria's prologue. It gets worse from there.) The Lord of Calamity Velvet, natch might have selfish motivations but she's at least aware of her own hypocrisy. It makes Sorey's party chatter cringe-inducing in hindsight.
• The Turtles In Time level Neon Night Riders sends you just over a decade beyond the game's present. That game was released years before Lord Dregg invaded the earth in the then-ongoing cartoon series, creating a much worse future that the turtles visit at one point than is depicted in that game.
• Try playing Time Crisis II after finding out about the plot twist in the fifth game that Robert Baxter, the second player, is now the VSSE traitor and the Big Bad of the game.
• Touhou Project: Let's just say that Running Gag about Youmu Konpaku idolizing Sakuya Izayoi as her Onee-sama to ridiculous proportions gets less meaning or could be unfunny as Youmu gets included in Touhou 13 without Sakuya, who's more probably jealous like hell. Then again, Sakuya did say that she was just a maid and that the role was for... something. It was in the dialogue for one of the games.
• Tron-based video games are loaded with these:
  • In the Intellivision version of Tron Deadly Discs, Mattel incorrectly made Tron an orange (evil-aligned) figure cutting down blue-colored (User-believer) Mooks. Simple color goof in 1982 - oddly prescient come 2010.
  • Another of the Intellivision games was Maze-a-Tron where you're controlling Flynn, who is navigating a circuitboard maze, friendless and alone. It's an Endless Game where you just keep going until a Recognizer or other hazard does you in. Again, consider the sequel.
  • In TRON 2.0, one of the story arcs is finding a "Tron Legacy" code. Unfortunately, the code is buggy and causes Ma3a to go Ax-Crazy and declare all Users must be destroyed. TRON 2.0 also has the Sequencer, which allows Jet to split his discs into multiple copies and fight with them. Guess who does that in the sequel? Topping it off is the troubled relationship between Alan and Jet, which is a lot more creepy after you've seen TRON: Uprising and watched the equally rocky relationship between Tron and Beck.
  • Tron 2.0 and its sequel comic Ghost in the Machine came out in 2003, well before TRON: Legacy was even written. 2.0 is even considered Canon Discontinuity or Alternate Continuity. Still, about half the game's plot straddle the line between this and Hilarious in Hindsight when it comes to light that in both timelines, Kevin Flynn and Tron vanished under mysterious circumstances. There was also a plot element with a Tron upgrade code (which is called the Tron Legacy code...) with an unfortunate bug in it that turns the Program it's installed into Ax-Crazy.
  • Even one of the weapons counts. The Sequencer disc allows Jet to split his disc into multiple parts and fight with them. Remember who fights with multiple discs in the canon sequel?
  • The Energy Claw resembles a Sith Force-Choke. Appropriately enough, it's a Datawraith (digitized User) weapon.
  • The Rod Primitive is an improvised melee weapon using a lightcycle rod. Sam Flynn had the right idea, but the wrong execution.
  • One of the story drivers is Alan and Jet's rocky father-son relationship; lots of love, but very little understanding. Queue TRON: Uprising where Tron and his apprentice Beck have a creepily similar relationship. ^note Given that, in the first film, Programs strongly resembled the humans who created them, this has led to some speculation that Beck might actually be Jet's Program
  • And for more unfortunate moments in TRON games, check out the Intellivision games. In TRON Deadly Discs Mattel got an early, incorrect draft of the script. They screwed up and made Tron an orange (bad guy colored) sprite, cutting through hordes of blue (good guy colored) enemies. A simple mix-up in 1982 gets much nastier when you factor in "Rinzler." The other one is from Maze-A-Tron. You're playing Flynn, trapped on a circuit board and trying to navigate the maze — alone, with no way to win...
  • Tron himself is a party member in Kingdom Hearts II, and develops a strong friendship with Sora, though he is often prone to be in distress (especially in the manga adaptation), and requires the teenager to save him. Now try and see him captured and fighting for his life in the game grid after seeing the sequel. Or worse, after playing Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], where he serves as a boss for Sora!
• Umineko: When They Cry:
  • Maria constantly adds the words 'uu uu' to her sentences, infuriating her mother, Rosa, who scolds her for her childishness. Taking this to be a comment on cute characters and their catchphrases, the reader finds this therapeutic. Then Episode 4 rolls by. Rosa is shown to be both severely abusive and neglectful of her child in private. It also turns out that the catchphrase is a spell Maria invented which she believes will make her mother happy. This is based on a moment in the past where Maria forgot the words to a song she was singing and merely went 'uu uu', which made her mother smile. It now has the opposite effect, but that only makes Maria think that she has to say it more, which causes her to suffer further abuse.
  • In the third arc, we learn that Battler made a silly childhood promise 6 years prior to his then crush, Shannon. The promise involved him coming to get her while riding a white horse, adorn with his usual Engrish. Looking back he finds this extremely embarrassing since he had already forgotten and moved on from such childishness. Later we find out what the recipient of that promise thought of it. Shannon took it extremely to heart, and waited anxiously for his return. But he didn't. He forgot both the promise and pretty much Shannon for the whole 6 years he was away. Waiting for him and self-consciously berating herself for expecting something of the first person who respected her intellectually breaks her.
• Valkyria Chronicles already prompted some Values Dissonance with its Valkyria Alicia, who pitches a hysterical fit and ultimately disavows her war-changing superpowers essentially because they make her stand out too much, which made her Unintentionally Unsympathetic, particularly to western audiences. Valkyria Chronicles 4 features Valkyria half Alicia's age who are turned into the living cores of warships ultimately expected to painfully sacrifice themselves, including one who learns all this and refuses a chance to walk away if it would mean leaving her friends in the lurch when she has a chance to end the war, and a contrasting retread of Alicia's situation with another Valkyria who had such a shitty life the player is probably pleased they got a happy ending, if they can read through their tears. In hindsight, it makes Alicia look like a whiny coward.
• In Virtue's Last Reward:
  • Quark gives Sigma a letter about how he met his adoptive grandfather and how he gushed about getting a chance to have root beer float which none of his friends ever had. This is actually a hint that the world has gone post-apocalypse.
  • There's a moment when Sigma's monologuing about how he can't see a reason for his kidnapping. The first first two of examples he gives, he goes on to do during the game. Considering his special ability, this might not have been a coincidence. The characters' dismissal that they're in quarantine facility due to none of them obviously not having radical-6 becomes harsh when you learn that some of them do have radical-6. And even harsher when you learn that EVERYONE has radical-6, but didn't notice due to the fact they're all on the moon, so the effects it has [slowing your brain's processing speed down by a root of root-one-sixth] got cancelled out. There's also the bad ending in which all of the cast, including the protagonist, kills themselves in quite gruesome fashion due to the effects of radical-6.
    Sigma: Had I started a fight with a new and powerful religion? No... Had I hacked into a terrorist group's server? No...
• In World of Warcraft up to the end of Wrath of the Lich King, Horde players were given quests during the holiday of Hallow's End (the equivalent of Hallowe'en) to bomb the little town of Southshore with stinkbombs. Then the Cataclysm expansion came out... and the Forsaken have since bombed the town with something far less harmless, the Blight, killing everyone who lived there and polluting the earth itself. The place is now inhabited only by sentient slimes.
• X-Men Legends featured a trivia game that would ask questions about the X-Men in exchange for experience. One of them gave you a list of 5 characters and asked which one of them was not a mutant. The correct answer to the question is Juggernaut, although Jubilee is one of the choices. Jubilee (along with many other characters) lost her powers at the end of House of M. Thanks, Scarlet Witch, thanks a bunch!
• In universe. In Yakuza 4 Saejima uses woodworking for his Revelations in a humorous manner. In Yakuza 5 Kugihara, an inmate and enemy of Saejima uses a woodcutting to wound one of the inmate and accuse Saejima with it. Sparking him off into a rage and attacking Kugihara.

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