Animal Restaurant: With the other troublesome customers (the thief and the skunk), you only need to tap on them until they go away, and the game in general is non-violent. So it can be quite shocking the first time you tap Mr. Roach to get rid of him and he ends up splatted.
If you assume Aviary Attorney is going to be anything like the Ace Attorney series, you're going to be in for a heck of a shock at the end of the first case when you defend your client by finding an alternate culprit, present evidence of such, said culprit has a satisfying Villainous Breakdown... and then your client confesses (in private) that she was guilty, and you just sent an innocent man to the gallows while helping a murderer escape justice.
Cytus II had one of its most shocking plot twists upon levelling Crystal PuNK to 25: Cherry had been wounded in a drone attack and is recovering in the Kyuu Hou Kai's intensive care unit. However, a second attack causes the power to fail, and her life support system shuts off, leading to her dying in front of her ex-boyfriend Xenon.
Dota 2: Icefrog is known for his bold approach to game balance: not afraid to make players cry They Changed It, Now It Sucks!, patches often massively shake up the foundation of the game, often leaving the player base in shock (whether it be positive or negative) as they read through the patch notes. But some patches have a bigger effect than others, leaving players feeling like they're looking at a whole new game:
Patch 7.00 blew away the playerbase with its massive changes. The UI was completely revamped, and the Talent system had huge repercussions on every single hero in the game. That's on top of many alterations to the map and the addition of the Monkey King as a new hero (the first to not be a port of a Defense of the Ancients hero).
Patch 7.23 elicited a similar reaction. The two new heroes, Void Spirit and Snapfire, weren't too shocking since they'd been announced months ago, but no one was prepared for the addition of 62 new and extremely powerful items which are dropped by neutral creeps. On top of that, the courier system also got completely changed, with each player having their own courier who levels up with them, gaining new abilities (such as being able to use items), the Level Cap got increased to 30 (granting heroes all of their talents at the same time at max level), new map objectives were added in the form of Outposts, and many heroes got their skills reworked.
Final Fantasy VI has the mother of all 16-bit shocking moments when Kefka kills Emperor Gestahl and moves the Statues out of alingnment, causing the end of the world and the death of Shadow. Even if you know it's coming, it's still can stun even hardened JRPG fans who are used to the world always being saved.
Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War: So you managed to kill Duke Reptor of Friege, and Arvis has invited you to Belhalla- Wait, why did he and his army turn from green units to red units? Oh no...
Fire Emblem: Three Houses: The Reveal that the Flame Emperor, Part 1's Arc Villain, is in fact Edelgard, one of the game's three protagonists. Especially on the Blue Lions route, where it's done in a full animated cutscene, and also features Dimitri's memorably terrifying reaction.
God of War (PS4) is, at first glance, a Soft Reboot of the franchise: a new setting, a new Kratos wielding a new weapon, and a new storyline seemly disconnected from Kratos's misadventures in Greece. But then when Kratos's son Atreus falls deathly ill, and Kratos learns that the only cure is in a place his Leviathan Axe will be useless, Kratos returns home to retrieve something he had buried and hoped to forget about. The symbol of his dark past, of his slavery to the wicked War God Ares: his signature Blades of Chaos.
Guilty Gear -STRIVE-: When Bridget was added as a DLC character, audiences expected them to be played similar to their previous appearances as an effeminate man. What no one saw coming was Bridget getting an emotional Coming-Out Story as a transgender woman, completely upending all of the Unsettling Gender-Reveal jokes and memes that defined her character in the fandom for decades.
Live A Live: After playing through seven different scenarios, the average player would expect the eighth, set in the medieval era, to follow the same formula — except at around the halfway point, the whole thing starts to fall apart. Oersted sees the Lord of Dark in the throne room and cuts it down — but it was an illusion, and he struck down the king instead. Then the guards appear, assume he did it, and that he's the true Lord of Dark. He flees, only to eventually get captured, and set free by the last of his friends using the last of his strength to open his cell door. He goes to rescue the princess...and is confronted by his best friend, whom he thought dead, revealing he was responsible for Oersted's fall from grace. They fight and Oersted wins, and he finally finds the princess... but she chews him out for not caring about her, lamenting his friend's death, and stabs herself in the chest with a dagger. This all causes him to snap and become the evil the kingdom thought him to be, claiming the title of Lord of Dark. Thus the eighth chapter plays a MASSIVE subversion of the formula set by the previous seven and serves as the origin story of the Big Bad.
The beginning of Paper Mario has Bowser using the Star Rod to boost his strength and make himself completely invincible against Mario's attacks. Bowser manages to defeat Mario and kicks his lifeless body out of Peach's floating castle, sending him plummeting to the ground. Of course it's only the start of the game and Mario isn't going to be out of commission, but it was a very shocking moment for fans who were used to seeing Mario always beating Bowser.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has Grodus kidnap Princess Peach for his plans related to the treasure everyone is scrambling over and she eventually learns what the treasure is and what Grodus is planning to do to her. Said "treasure'' is actually a powerful demon named the Shadow Queen and she was sealed away a thousand years ago. Grodus plans to use Peach's body as a vessel to revive the Shadow Queen so that he can control her and rule the world. This leads up to the shocking moment of seeing Peach being controlled by the Shadow Queen, leaving Mario no choice but to fight her in order to stop the demon.
When R-Type Final 2 was first teased during 2019 April Fools' Day, many fans were shocked by it, and some even dismissed it as an April Fools' joke. However, Granzella actually made it a real thing and eventually released it in 2021.
Sol Cresta: Nobody expected not only a new Cresta game in 2022, but one by PlatinumGames of all teams, and with Hideki Kamiya as the director no less! Granted, Kamiya is a big fan of shmups, including the original Cresta duology, but given that all of his prior projects are big-budget three-dimensional games, very few expected him to actually make a shmup. Even more extra shock is that the game is released in the same timeframe as the critically and commercially panned Babylon's Fall by the same developer.
Super Mario Maker 2: After the first game introducing Mystery Mushrooms and them being removed in the second, fans thought there was no way they could top that. Following the update 2.0 announcement, and not only does an alternate costume appear in the form of Link, he also is his own playable character with his own playstyle using his sword, bombs, and arrows.
Vanilla Level Design Contest 9 has a secret 7th submap, something that before this hack's release in 2016 was thought to be completely impossible for a ROM Hack of Super Mario World to have.
A T-Rex being in the game, that was already well-advertising long before the game was out. It's pretty powerful... and sleeping in the Cascade Kingdom. You are not expecting one to suddenly roar at you and charge while wandering the dark forest far below the Wooded Kingdom; even with the in-game description warning about "giant creatures." And you definitely aren't expecting one to to wear goggles while it chases you through New Donk City.
One regarding an out-of-place character design: after you take off from the Luncheon Kingdom, Bowser appears riding atop an enormous, realistically detailed dragon that looks like it belongs in a serious fantasy game, not the goofy, cartoony world of Mario.
The Broodals try one last resort to keep Mario from interfering with the wedding. A giant robot as big as their ship, working nothing like their usual boss fights.
The final part of the game where you capture Bowser and use his sheer might to escape the moon's crumbling interior, especially the last area where "Break Free (Lead the Way)" plays.
Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin: The end of the Trials of the Dragon King DLC. After fighting the Warrior of Light at the start of the DLC and dealing him a Curbstomp Battle, you'd expect the rematch now to be the time the Warrior won and defeated Jack, as per Final Fantasy. And it seems to be going that way, as Jack goes to deal the final blow only for the Warrior to knock him back and dive at him — and then Jack stops him in midair and impales him on a spear of dark energy and crystallizes and shatters him. Seeing Jack deliver the same kind of brutal execution to the face of Final Fantasy in the same manner as he has so many other monsters is bound to make your jaw drop from the sheer audacity of it.
The reveal of Snake in the first trailer completely shook the series, which had up to this point been specifically about Nintendo characters. Having a third party character from a series very tonally different from usual Smash Bros. fare meant that nobody would know what to expect from the series from here on out.
Likewise, the announcement that Sonic would be in the game brought the hype to unprecedented levels; while Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games came first, the fact that players would finally be able to have an Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny with Mario and other Nintendo icons drew more attention to Brawl.
The Reveal that the Ancient Minister is a R.O.B. the entire time.
The explosive clash between the Halberd, the fighters, and Ganondorf and Bowser's gunship.
Just like the reveal trailer for Brawl, Nintendo follows up with the announcement of a new 3rd-Party character; Mega Man. Cpacom's Super Fighting Robot makes his way into a crossover with Nintendo's greatest.
The fact that the Wii Fit Trainer's inclusion is shocking because not a single person had even imagine them as a fighter. Heck, that was Sakurai's intention during the reveal.
The DLC lineup has managed to outshine the base roster's biggest reveals. First up, we have Ryu. Not only does he have actual command inputs but the fact that he has two Final Smashes is quite big. Next, we have Cloud Strife. While Final Fantasy has a presence on Nintendo consoles, Cloud specifically barely has history with Nintendo. And for our final fighter is the winner of the Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot; Bayonetta, a character from a game series with a M-Rating that's beyond what the Metal Gear series has featured.
The line "EVERYONE IS HERE!" from one of the first trailers was surprising since it confirmed that all fighters from previous games would be in this game, including characters nobody thought had a chance of returning - most reaction trailers show the hype ratcheting up from the moment the Ice Climbers, who were absent from the previous game, show up (and that's before the tagline appears on screen). The trailer specifically shows Pichu and Young Linknote who is a separate character from Toon Link, Moveset Clones who were thought to have been cut for being redundant, and Snake, whose absence from the fourth game was thought to be because of licensing issues.
The reaction to Steve being confirmed for Smash caused Twitter's servers to crash for a few minutes.
The biggest surprise for a newcomer, however, is by far Sora, a character who had been one of the most requested characters worldwide but believed to be too tied down by copyright laws by nearly everyone. Even the devs knew what a feat it was, saying "Sora is finally here!" in the tagline.
Galeem's role in the opening would leave such a large impact on players that seeing the Eldritch Abomination get sliced in halfin the opening of a new fighter trailer stunned everyone watching. It was only compounded when the one responsible turned out to be none other than Sephiroth. The same trailer later followed this when it appeared that Sephiroth had stabbed Mario like he had done to Cloud in the Nibelheim reactor — and the reveal that he had just caught Mario's overall strap.
Lampshaded in both the trailers for King K. Rool (with Dedede) and Banjo-Kazooie (with Duck Hunt). It's treated as a massive reveal for both... and then their first "introduction" is revealed to be another character in disguise, right before they show up for real.
A new mechanic called Special/Finish Zoom is introduced to facilitate shocking blows in a match when there are only two fighters on screen. When a certain move (like Captain Falcon's Falcon Punch) or an attack strong enough to likely KO an opponent connects, time slows down and the camera zooms in on the impact.
The Player Punch of killing Toriel, the kindly mother figure that stands in your way trying to protect you from the dangers of the outside world. The usual peaceful strategies that you have been practicing up to that point are ineffective against her. Players that think they need to weaken Toriel are in for quite the gut punch as she will suddenly take lethal damage well before the player can expect it. The game will also surprisingly call you out on resetting and trying the battle again.
The end of Asgore's fight in the Neutral route can be this, with Flowey barging in to finish off Asgore and destroy his SOUL before you can absorb it to cross the barrier. And then he absorbs the six human SOULs himself before crashing the game!
Watch Dogs: Legion's advertised ability for the player to play as every character in the game awed many a gamer when it was first revealed.
Wild ARMs: Million Memories opens with the destruction of Filgaia. Then it turns out this is because Rudy, a character known for being kind hearted to a fault, betrayed everyone.
