Something Only They Would Say / Video Games

• In ANNO: Mutationem, after Ann awakens her Super Mode and loses consciousness, Ayane quickly asks what's the Affectionate Nickname she gives Ann to assure she is still herself. Ann embarrassingly replies "darling", reassuring Ayane that Ann's 'other self' isn't there.
• In Final Fantasy VI, King Edgar takes charge of a band of thieves under the rather transparent anagram "Gerad." In the SNES translation, Celes claims it can't be anyone but Edgar when he refers to her as "My lady", though the fact that "Gerad"'s clothes are just brown versions of Edgar's royal blues didn't exactly help to keep his identity secret either. Made more obvious in Japanese, since Edgar explicitly uses the English word "lady" both normally and in disguise.
• In Final Fantasy XVI, Clive meets with his uncle, Byron, years after Clive was presumed dead. Byron assumes that Clive is lying about who he is, until Clive recites a series of lines from a game that he and Byron used to play when Clive was a boy.
• Metroid:
  • In Metroid Fusion, Samus (and the player) gets tipped off that the AI she named after her old commanding officer from her army days, Adam Malkovich, really is said officer when, after giving her an order, it asks, "Any objections, Lady?" - something her commanding officer always said after giving her a briefing.
  • That line was used again in the trailer for Metroid: Other M as a cue to the audience regarding what game Nintendo was announcing, as the scenes depicted up to that point weren't obviously from a Metroid game. As for the game itself, Samus recognizes her old friend Anthony Higgs when he calls her "Princess" near the start of the game. One of the soldiers saying this at the end of the game tips her off that he managed to survive, preventing Samus from being incarcerated by the Federation splinter group for her actions.
  • Metroid Dread makes Adam's catchphrase a subtle clue of something being wrong. Outside of the opening cutscene, Adam never addresses Samus as "Lady" and even starts addressing her by her full name. The "Adam" Samus was speaking to throughout her adventure was actually Raven Beak impersonating Adam.
• Riku identifies Roxas as Sora's Nobody this way in Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. After the two have a skirmish, he says "Come on Sora, I thought you were stronger than that." Without thinking, Roxas replies "Get real! Look which one of us is winning!", and immediately wonders why he said it, while Riku realizes that his opponent is "his Nobody".
• In Digimon World 2, at some point late in the game, a member of the Blood Knights, Commander Damien, disguises himself as a Black Sword cadet. Your character gets suspicious, and in an attempt to draw him out, calls out "Commander Damien, sir!". Damien responds, but not long before he realizes he just blew his cover.
• Quarians in Mass Effect are taught a certain phrase to use when returning to the Flotilla, as they usually arrive on a different ship than the one they left on. If they don't provide that phrase when prompted, then the Flotilla knows that they're returning under duress, and their ship is destroyed. They even have a separate phrase that sounds right if you're not in the know, but signals the Flotilla that something is wrong. It's also a strong signifier of the quarian sense of communal duty, since it also means that the ship they are on will be destroyed.
  • Another example occurs when, if you gave Tali the geth data during her personal mission in the first game, you can use it to prove it's really you when you meet her again in the second.
  • On a more light-hearted note, Shephard figures out he and Ashley had the same drill instructor in boot camp after Ashley describes her DI as using the word "gold-bricking" to describe shirking duty.
• Played with in the Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising campaign, in which one of six characters performs a Face–Heel Turn depending on their Corruption level. If Tarkus is revealed as the traitor he spends the mission giving his former Battle Brothers advice and quoting the Codex Astartes, which infuriates them, because no traitor is worthy to do such things.
• Played with in Super Paper Mario, where the player must determine who the real Merlee is in one chapter thanks to a shapeshifting villain. A game show is hosted, where the player can ask five questions, then choose afterwards. However, the actual way to figure this out is that the real Merlee has a fly buzzing around her, since she spent half the chapter hiding in a toilet in a public restroom.
• Swaine in Ni no Kuni has a habit of referring to his group of friends as "You lot"—"Stand back, you lot!" "Let's do this, you lot!" So when the party travels to the past, and the young Prince Gascon refers to them as "you lot," it immediately raises some suspicions.
• A Hat in Time:
  • Played with in an early version's mission where Hat Kid must convince a group of Mafia goons that she's really a friend of theirs named Geoffrey. Geoffrey, as it happens, is known to be a complete Jerkass. So if you do something incredibly jerkish to them, they'll accept her as Geoffrey, regardless of the fact that she's a tiny little girl and not a hulking Mafia goon.
  • In the final game, after completing Chapter 2 (supposedly), Hat Kid receives a call on her ship's phone from the same voice that kept calling the train phones in "Murder on the Owl Express". They end the call by revealing themselves as the loser of the Battle of the Birds, by referring to Hat Kid as either "lassie" (the Conductor's nickname for her) or "darling" (DJ Groove's nickname for her).
• In Dragon Quest VI, the chancellor of Somnia (who's effectively taken over the kingdom) uses this to get you thrown out - he asks the hero, who is being taken for the Prince of Somnia, the name of his late sister. None of the options you're given are correct, and he denounces you as an imposter. Subverted in that the hero is the Prince, but all his memories are tied up with his real body, which is on the other side of the continent right now.
• In Grand Theft Auto V, Michael de Santa says his signature line "You forget thousands of things every day. How bout you make sure this is one of them." This comes back to bite him in the ass when his old partner-in-crime Trevor recognizes the phrase and tracks him down.
• In the ending where Alex Mason survives the events of "Suffer With Me" in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Woods gets a visitor and tries to tell him not to enter. It turns out to be Alex, greeting him by telling Woods he looks like hammered shit.
• Used as The Reveal in Blazblue. A lot of people suspected that the real identity of Hakumen was that of psycho Jin Kisaragi through faint breadcrumbs, but the real kicker that clued in most people was in the second game, when he says a slightly less elaborate version of Hakumen's famous Badass Creed when fighting Tsubaki Yayoi and at the same time for the first time successfully resisting the effects of his Nox Nyctores through his will:
  "I am the cold steel! The blade that will restore balance to this world! Nox Nyctrories Yukianesa, activate!"
• Guilty Gear: In another example used to reveal the true identity of a character in -STRIVE-. Despite having amnesia due to the constant creation and erasure of different timelines, the one memory I-no clung onto through all of it was that of a blond-haired lover named William who used to say to her "I can't get anything out but tears!" after they had a fight. When Axl blurts out the line as he's crying for her due to her being erased from reality and she recognizes him as William, it confirms what some players had suspected: that I-no was all along Axl's long-lost girlfriend Megumi, making the two characters a pair of time-displaced Star-Crossed Lovers.
• A villainous example from Bravely Second: Anne the fairy, advisor to Kaiser Oblivion, addresses the player, reprising her lines from the opening of the first game and revealing that she is Airy's sister.

  Anne Oh, hello. I see fire in those eyes! How do I put it? They've a strong sense of duty. Like whatever you start, you'll always see through, no matter what!

• In Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1, in order to tell which of two Blancs are the real one, the heroes start asking questions supposedly only the real Blanc knows the answer to. However, they're all embarrassing questions about things such as her measurements and her novels. The fake one answers them perfectly and calmly, but everyone immediately points out the real one when she angrily snaps from all her secrets being publicly revealed because everyone knows Blanc has a Hair-Trigger Temper and swears a lot during it.
• In Cadenza 4: Fame, Theft and Murder Michael, who's a victim of Grand Theft Me, convinces Big Jim it's really him by singing a line of a song he wrote for Jim's birthday.
• In one of the climaxes of Detroit: Become Human, Connor if he becomes Deviant gets put into this situation when he fights another non-Deviant version of himself and Hank tries to guess out the false one by asking them what his son's name is. This can become problematic since it is completely possible to miss out on the options that reveal the name of Hank's son, essentially forcing players to take a guess or to already know.
• In one sidequest in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, you confront a villainous priestess and her identical, non-evil twin. You can ask them questions, but they both have all the right answers. The proper way to solve the dilemma is to notice that one of them uses a habitual phrase and call her out on it. The cheap way to solve it is to use your eagle vision.
• Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War gives us Pixy's catchphrase "yo buddy, you still alive?", which he'll ask you at several points after particularly hard missions. After he defects and disappears, your base gets bombed by a giant flying battleship and you track and shoot it down, you receive an encrypted message, which turns out to be Pixy's catchphrase, hinting that he has something to do with the attack. He turns out to be the Final Boss and the ultimate leader of A World With No Boundaries.
• String Tyrant A transformed Mary can use this to transform Lauren peacefully by talking to him, the same for Jessie but only if she declared her love
• The final memory for the "Champions' Ballad" DLC of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild features the Champions having their picture taken by an offscreen character who hasn't spoken in any of the game's other voiced cutscenes. While they're never directly identified, the fact that their final line is "Click, Snap!" makes it clear that it's Purah.
• Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity: When Urbosa saves Zelda from an impostor, she makes a point of calling her by the nickname "Little Bird", which the impostor had failed to do.
• Two of Johnny's old friends in Cyberpunk 2077, Rogue and Kerry, accept that he's back in V's body thanks to this trope:
  • For Rogue, V allows Johnny to take over their body in order to prove to her that the rockerboy is inhabiting V's head via the biochip. Somewhat interestingly, it is implied it wasn't so much what Johnny said while in V's body but how he acted; Rogue explicitly says that there is no way she would have mistook Johnny for V due to the sheer difference in behavior between the two, regardless of their appearance.
  • For Kerry, it isn't something said but something played. When Johnny shows up in V's body playing one of their old songs on a guitar, Kerry steps out of the bathroom and looks like he's seen a ghost after hearing nothing but a few beats of his old band's song, and already seems willing to accept that his best friend who's been dead for fifty years is back from the grave from Johnny's guitar work alone. Asking what their last words were to each other only confirmed his suspicions. When Johnny answers correctly, this puts him in quite a shock—followed by a pistol-whip across the face.
• Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey: Or "something only they could do", in this case. Once back on Ithaca, Wishbone approaches Telemachus, who refuses to believe this stranger is his father until Wishbone can do something only Odysseus could — solve a puzzle to retrieve Odysseus's bow from where he stored it before leaving for Troy.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon: At one point, Ichiban and the party are attacked by Mirror Face, an assassin who can replicate the looks and voice of anyone. In this case, he disguises himself as Adachi, struggling with the real Adachi. Since Adachi was a former driving school instructor, Ichiban asks them both traffic questions, with one answering perfectly and the other fumbling with the answer. Ichiban then punches out the one that answered correctly. Even Mirror Face is baffled how Adachi could be that incompetent at his former job.

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