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Meta Twist / Video Games

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Twists based on viewers expecting a behavior and subverting it for Video Games.

  • Brave Fencer Musashi had action figures of enemies and bosses you could purchase, often before actually facing them, which had actions and sometimes even voices that displayed their attacks. Of course there's an action figure of Colonel Capricciola with all of his attacks which never get seen in-game since he's The Unfought and actually helping you.
  • Uncharted:
    • The first two games had definite supernatural elements. The first game has zombies created by a cursed coffin. The second game had the lost city of Shambala, which at it's heart has a magical sap that gives those who drink it eternal life, super-human strength, and a seriously bad temper, as you find out defending yourself against the city's long lived and purple skinned residents. The third game initially seems to have Djinni, spirits of fire, trying to kill you in it's lost city, but it turns out that they were merely hallucinations caused by smoke coming out of a giant container in the city's heart. As for what is in the container, the game is ambiguous (whether it's truly a djinn or just some sort of ancient chemical weapon), but it is lost forever at the end of the game. For the fourth and final installment, there is...absolutely nothing. The lost pirate city you find was clearly destroyed centuries earlier, but it turns out the cause of it's destruction was plain and simple greed; the pirates who came together to create a pirate utopia eventually turned on each other.
    • The villains of the first two games are big, scary bald men with foreign accents, so the player is lead to believe that Charlie Cutter, scary bald British man is the antagonist of the third game, but it turns out that's only to fool the real villain, and Cutter is actually an ally.
  • Mega Man:
    • It's well known that Dr. Wily is the Big Bad and Final Boss of every Mega Man (Classic) game. Mega Man V, Super Adventure Rockman, and Rockman & Forte: Mirai Kara no Chousensha, however, go for a half-twist, as while Wily is partially responsible for the latest batch of enemies Mega Man has to face (in that he uncovered and repaired them), Sunstar, Ra Moon, and Rockman Shadow all refuse to be controlled by Wily and give him the Dr. Eggman treatment before facing Mega Man themselves as the Final Boss.
    • Mega Man X:
    • After spending an entire franchise as the Big Bad (and serving as the not-quite-posthumous Greater-Scope Villain of another), Mega Man Legends threw players for a loop by making Wily a completely benign boathouse owner who even helps Mega Man on his quest. Granted, given the long gap between Legends and its predecessors (and Legends itself at first giving off the appearances of being a standalone series, complete with the original games being a Show Within a Show), it is very unlikely this is the same Wily.
    • The Mega Man ZX series revolves around Biometals, artifacts containing the souls of past characters from the Mega Man X and Mega Man Zero series, including Model X, Model Z(ero) and the Four Guardians, Models H(arpuia), L(eviathan), F(efnir) and P(hantom). Advent then introduces Model A, who's fighting style is based on guns and his unique "A-Trans" ability, which allows him to transform into defeated bosses. At the end of the game, it's revealed that the A doesn't stand for Axl (a character in the X series), but Albert, the Big Bad of Advent and the ZX series as a whole, who possesses an A-Trans ability of his own.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog's Dr. Eggman picked up a bad habit of getting upstaged by the game's real Big Bad around the Sonic Adventure-era games. It initially looks like this is going to be the case in Sonic Generations, until it's revealed that Eggman is the real Big Bad and Final Boss after all. Not just Eggman, in fact, but Eggman teaming up with himself from the Genesis-era games. Sonic Colors also completely lacks the upstaging part altogether by having Eggman be the Big Bad from beginning to end, and then when he's upstaged for real in Sonic Lost World he wrestles his Big Bad status back from the game's villains at the very end for one more Final Boss fight. Sonic Frontiers, meanwhile, has Eggman out of commission throughout most of the story on account of being trapped in Cyber Space while THE END takes center stage as the main villain throughout via manipulating Sonic into opening the Sealed Evil in a Can. By the time Eggman is free from Cyber Space, his AI adjutant/surrogate daughter, Sage, has undergone a Heel–Face Turn (insofar as helping Sonic also helps her "father") and she convinces him to dispense with hostilities and help Sonic defeat THE END (albeit reluctantly).
  • Fire Emblem:
    • If you are the father or main parental figure of the protagonist, you are going to end up in the ground by the halfway-point of the game, at best. However, there are two major subversions in the series.
      • In Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, Eliwood is introduced at the beginning as Roy's sickly father. After the first chapter, he loses practically all of his plot importance. The real Sacrificial Lion is Hector, the Love Interest's father and Eliwood's old friend.
      • In Fire Emblem Warriors, Yelena is introduced at the beginning as the queen of Aytolis and the mother of protagonists Rowan and Lianna. She is captured by enemy forces at the end of the prologue and later appears as their hostage, planned to be used in a ritual sacrifice. Rowan and Lianna manage to rescue her, and she ends the game none the worse for wear.
    • Normally, the Tin Tyrant leader of The Empire is rarely the actual Big Bad and is usually an Unwitting Pawn to an Evil Sorceror who is the real Big Bad and wants to bring about the revival of an evil dragon or god. In Path of Radiance, King Ashnard actually is the Big Bad and Final Boss (though when the sequel is taken into account, the Unwitting Pawn part is still played straight).
    • Zephiel in The Binding Blade has a similar thing going on. It's common for the villain to have once been a decent man, who was then corrupted by an evil force (Julius in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Hardin in Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem). Zephiel has characters explaining he used to be good but became twisted and malevolent, and he's usually shown alongside Idunn, a creepy woman in a dark cloak that apparently showed up when he changed. Then we learn that Idunn is an demon dragon from the distant past. So she was the one who corrupted him and he's just her pawn, right? Nope! Zephiel became the way he was through a good old-fashioned Despair Event Horizon, and when he did so, he released Idunn from her prison so she could help him. Idunn is the one who's a magically-corrupted pawn, and though she's the Final Boss, she's mindless for most of the game and is only carrying out Zephiel's final wish alongside his surviving servants by the time you fight her.
    • Fire Emblem usually plays Dark Is Evil straight for its final bosses. Both The Heavy and the Final Boss of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn fall into Light Is Not Good instead.
    • Fire Emblem Fates:
      • Iago fits every item on a Fire Emblem Big Bad checklist. While he is a major threat and one of the most prominent of the villains, he is surprisingly not either the Man Behind the Man or The Starscream to King Garon, but a perfectly loyal Dragon.
      • King Garon is the Big Bad and the evil dragon Final Boss, via One-Winged Angel, of the Birthright route; the only hint to the Greater-Scope Villain in Birthright is a throwaway line. On Conquest, he is still the Big Bad, though the route is more upfront about someone else working in the background.
    • Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
      • Events of The Great Offscreen War in a Fire Emblem game's past were often Written by the Winners, with those painted as the villains then either being a lot more complicated that expected (Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade) or outright good (Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn). So when Three Houses makes a big deal out of Nemesis, the previous wielder of the Sword of the Creator, turning to villainy in the past and needing to be stopped, it's easy to guess he'll later be revealed to have been Good All Along. While it's true that Fodlan's history was distorted, Nemesis nonetheless turns out to be more evil than the legends portray him (said legends portraying him as a hero who was corrupted by the power of his legendary sword. Really he was just a power hungry bandit who killed the setting's god in her sleep and made said sword from her corpse).
      • Fire Emblem games typically have an unambiguously happy ending, with character epilogues mentioning post-war reconstruction goes well. Three Houses has no Golden Endingnote ; there are too many ideological schisms at work, someone (who is heroic in their own right) is going to die over it, and the continent's values are often shaken to the foundations by revolution.
    • It's extremely common to have a "Camus"-type character, a basically goodhearted and noble Anti-Villain who still can't be recruited because they chose the wrong side and believe in My Country, Right or Wrong. In The Binding Blade, we have Perceval, a character who looks almost identical to the original Camus and even shares the same class, and looks to be fulfilling a similar role... and he is recruitable. (There are a few other characters in the game who fit the archetype and can't be recruited, but Perceval is by far the most blatant.)
    • Played with in multiple ways in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, to the point of becoming something of a Deconstruction (and, later, reconstruction) for the entire franchise (which is pretty impressive given that it had barely even begun yet). Firstly, the way Sigurd happily sends his armies out into other kingdoms for the sake of saving the life of a single person is portrayed with oversimplified idealism, as is common to the franchise, until it suddenly isn't: the culmination of Chapter 2 is that Sigurd's incursions into Agustria have been incredibly disruptive because he can't just arbitrarily decide that politics don't apply to him and Grannvale aren't automatically the good guys just because they're his home kingdom. (And in part two, we find that even Sigurd's early invasion into Verdane actually had devastating long-term consequences.) But the biggest twist of all, out of the entire franchise, comes at the end of part one. Genealogy isn't really a subversion of the 'the lord's dad always dies' trope, because Sigurd's dad does indeed die. But what players won't think about is that the boy on the cover, Seliph, is also a lord, and Sigurd is his dad. Which is to say: halfway through the game, it's revealed that players have not been controlling the plucky young lord who saves the world. They've been playing his dad, who fails to stop the encroaching darkness and then dies.
  • There is a Flash version of Portal, naturally known as Portal: The Flash Version. The final level is simply an open room, with a cake on a pedestal. When you move over to the cake... you pick it up, and can leave the room safely, completing the game, in complete defiance of expectation from anyone who's ever played Portal itself. In this case, however, it's unintentional- the Flash game was made before the release of the actual game, so the creators weren't aware of the twist.
  • Metroid:
  • Final Fantasy:
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • It's frequent to have to explore three dungeons to gather an initial set of Plot Coupon items before something unexpected occurs and the Master Sword has to be collected (or, conversely, the Master Sword is collected and then the twist occurs). So it was very shocking for gamers to discover that the location of the third quest item from The Wind Waker is utterly destroyed and the holder of the item went elsewhere for safety (this was most likely due to time constraints during development). The item is gotten after a series of events in the overworld, rather than the completion of a dungeon. The real third dungeon, Tower of the Gods, is found after making use of the three quest items and is completed to find the Master Sword. And the traditional unexpected twist occurs after completion of the fourth dungeon (Forsaken Fortress).
    • Every Zelda game ever that has featured a boss with a giant glowing eyeball has had the exact same weakness: strike the eye and they'll either be stuned and vulnerable or just take damage. Gohma from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker sets himself up as such, but can No-Sell any attacks to his eye just by blinking. You need to remember the clue from Medli, that "a monster is doing horrible things to Valoo's tail", to know that you actually have to swing from said tail with the Grappling Hook to drop the ceiling on Gohma several times. Then you are free to attack the now-vulnerable eye once Gohma's armored shell is smashed off.
    • Another twist on the Plot Coupon gathering formula happens in The Minish Cap, when Link finishes the third dungeon just to discover that the MacGuffin he was searching for isn't there anymore.
    • Since The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the dungeon boss is usually fought with the dungeon item, so when Ghirahim shows up in the first dungeon of Skyward Sword, and is fought in a pure sword fight, it comes as a shock. It comes as an even bigger shock when you fight him again. A double shock because Zelda villains usually loom in the background, never encountering you until the finale. Lastly, bosses are never fought in the overworld prior to this game, yet Skyward Sword has a whopping four outside of dungeons (including the Final Boss).
    • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds:
      • In the Thieves' Hideout in Lorule, you'll find a girl locked in a cell asking for help, who promises to give Link the Sage Painting after her rescue. Players familiar with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past would know that in the Thieves' Town dungeon in the Dark World, the maiden there was in fact the boss in disguise. An experienced player is thus fully prepared for a betrayal at any time. The game teases you by making it an Escort Mission and having Link work together with her to go through the dungeon. Upon finally reaching the boss door, the game reveals that the girl is in fact, not actually the boss that the player had been expecting (though they do fight Blind's Suspiciously Similar Substitute, Stalblind). That's not even the end of the teasing. After the battle, Link has to cross a narrow bridge with the girl behind him, teasing that she might push him off. In the end, she keeps her word, and gives Link the painting as promised.
      • Despite Zelda correctly guessing that Yuga is kidnapping the Sages to free Ganon, the plot is not Hijacked by Ganon; Yuga merges with Ganon but remains the one in control, able to use the Triforce of Power for his scheme.
  • Pokémon:
    • In Pokémon Black and White, many aspects of the series' standard plot formula are subverted: the villainous team plot is not solved prior to the eighth badge and the usual Champion Final Boss is actually defeated by the evil team's (supposed) leader before you reach him. Said decoy leader becomes the (next-to) Final Boss, relegating the Champion to the post-game Optional Boss. On the other hand, the Gym Leaders are not resting on their laurels either and take on several of the Evil Team's admins, allowing you to bypass them.note 
    • Pokémon Sun and Moon also subverts many standard Pokémon gameplay and story tropes. Pokémon Gyms are absent entirely, with Island Trials taking their place instead; the Pokémon League itself is only recently introduced to Alola. While there is the usual Team X as recurring antagonists, they're not the primary Big Bad. There isn't even a Champion as the Final Boss; rather, the player becomes the region's very first one after a final battle against (of all people) the region's Professor, and subsequent playthroughs of the League have the player defend their title from various important Trainers.
    • Ever since Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, the main antagonists have used the Mascot Legendary in their plans. In both Black and White and Sun and Moon it is you, the player character, who uses the Mascot Legendary to stop the villains.
    • Pokémon Sword and Shield further plays with the expectations set by Sun and Moon: Team Yell isn't even a threat so much as a bunch of Loony Fans, the guy you expect to be a villain in their place wasn't actively trying to cause the Mascot Legendary problem, and the few people who are truly antagonistic only appear in the postgame. On top of this, the third main Legendary actually appears during the endgame rather than the postgame and is caught before the Mascot Legendary.
    • In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, a very important character to the overall story is revealed to be one that appears in every Pokemon game and the player outright expects to see, but is usually of no plot significance whatsoever: the region's resident Pokemon Professor.
    • At the end of every Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game, the Player Character has to leave for whatever reason, but inevitably ends up doing no such thing before the credits sequence ends. Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon looks like it's going to go the same way, until it suddenly turns out that the partner is the one who has to return — and what's more, they don't come back until you advance the post-credits plot a bit.
  • Castlevania:
    • When you get to the end of a game, you can expect to fight Dracula as the final boss and for him to alternate between teleporting around and firing bursts of fireballs at you. Midway through the battle he'll usually transform into some grotesque creature, so the twist here are those few times he doesn't. For example, in Super Castlevania IV he merely loses the flesh on his head. Then there's Order of Ecclesia, where instead of transforming, Dracula simply strolls menacingly around much like the recurring golem and armor bosses.
    • On a more minor note, in most of the Metroidvania games in the series Dracula has 6666 HP. In Ecclesia once again, he instead has 9999 HP (as a bonus, it's simply "6666" upside down).
    • Aria of Sorrow pulled one, though it is widely known now. If Dracula has been reincarnated, you expect his new incarnation to be the final boss, not the player character.
  • Live A Live pulls the same trick as Final Fantasy IV where, if you face a boss and he has an animated sprite instead of a drawn portrait, you will recruit him at some point, thus spoiling who will and won't be a playable character. Except this isn't the case at all and you can and will play as not only a Humongous Mecha in the Near Future chapter, but will also control all the bosses if you play Oersted's final chapter.
  • Persona 5:
    • Futaba's dungeon is set up exactly like one from Persona 4, a mental world created by the inner thoughts and insecurities of a future party member, controlled by their Shadow. It's all flipped on its head once you reach the end: Due to Futaba's outward self-loathing, Shadow Futaba is a Hero Antagonist who represents Futaba's repressed positive side, and only fought the Thieves because she thought they were trying to harm Futaba. She's not the boss of the dungeon, the real boss is a monster born from the feelings that caused Futaba's depression: the belief that she's responsible for her mother's death. Shadow Futaba pulls a Big Damn Heroes to help the party defeat the boss, by convincing Futaba of the truth and becoming her Persona.
    • One fact obvious to players of previous titles is that Igor has a completely different voice actor in both English and Japanese. Given the passing of his original Japanese VA and said new VA makes no effort to mimic his work, it's likely to pay respect to him. Turns out this "Igor" is actually the Big Bad posing as the real one, and the voice change is never suspicious to Joker simply because he'd never met the real Igor and so would have nothing to compare it to. Sure enough, when the real Igor shows up, he sounds much more like his original self, to the point of being voiced by archived audio in the Japanese version.
  • Persona 5 Tactica: Normally, in Japanese-made works, whenever someone is struck or run over by a car, truck, train or other transport, they're guaranteed to die instantly (often to set up an Isekai plot); this includes Wakaba, and Principal Kobayakawa in the original Persona 5, the real Kasumi Yoshizawa in the Royal Updated Re-release, and Aoi Hasegawa in the backstory of Persona 5 Strikers. So it's a twist when Eri Natsuhara, the girl whom Erina is based off of, is shown to be pushed into the path of a train in a flashback, only for the next scene to have her recovering from her injuries in the hospital. While it at first seems she still eventually succumbed to her injuries, The Stinger reveals she recovered, although she is crippled to the point of needing a cane to walk around, and it's heavily implied that she lost her right eye as well.
  • Shin Megami Tensei V: As usual for the series, the Lawful angels and Chaotic forces of Lucifer are at war. An organization called Bethel, consisting of Top God figures from various mythologies, backed by the angels (whose leader is a Knight Templar obsessed with "God's law"), is responsible for fighting demons and protecting peace and stability. Of your classmates who are Bethel members, one is a perpetually calm, glasses-wearing honour student who fights to protect people, and the other is a girl known as "the saint". Your other classmate is an indecisive but ultimately well-meaning delinquent desperate to prove himself, who jumps at the chance to be a hero. In the demon world, you meet a violent ancient goddess, Nuwa, and her human follower, who are introduced slaughtering a legion of angels. Guess which of these factions are the game's Law, Chaos and Neutral representatives? Bethel is Chaos, the delinquent classmate is Law, and Nuwa is Neutral.
  • EarthBound (1994) lets you name the four main party members right at the beginning even before any of them have been introduced by the narrative, so when you name Lucas, Claus, Flint, and Hinawa at the beginning of Mother 3 you know that's your party, right? Oh ho ho NO. You play as Flint until Hinawa dies and Claus disappears very early on, driving the poor guy out of your party and into near-suicidal depression, and Claus returns as a Hollywood Cyborg as well as the Brainwashed and Crazy Dragon to the Big Bad who offs himself in the final battle so Lucas won't have to do it. Yeah, it's that kind of game.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's:
    • The series heavily implies (and eventually confirms) that the killer animatronics are Haunted Technology. Five Nights at Freddy's 4 and Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location, however, eschew the ghost story entirely; in the former, they're nightmares experienced by a traumatized mind, and in the latter, they really are sentient robots. Ultimately subverted in the case of the latter group, as the next game reveals that the Funtime Animatronics actually were haunted, just...in a different way than the others.
    • The Purple Guy is also established in each game to be responsible in some way for the killer animatronics each protagonist faces. In the fourth game, however, he's only an easily-missed cameo and has nothing to do with the game's story.
    • Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach has Freddy actually be an ally for the first time in the series thus far, while all the other animatronics are crazed and out for your blood. The game repeatedly teases the prospect that he may actually be evil or may eventually become villainous like the other animatronics, but it never happens. While he can attack you if he runs out of power or if you flub an upgrade segment, it's made clear this happens against his will like a reflex rather than being deliberate, and while the Big Bad tries to take control of him like the other animatronics, Freddy manages to fight it off. He remains your steadfast ally from start to finish no matter what ending you get. In addition, the game only has one night.
    • Security Breach - Ruin continues this with another good animatronic, this time Roxanne Wolf who is revealed to be, at least when she's not been reprogrammed into a maniacle killer, actually pretty sweet toward guests despite her massive ego and insecurity. This game's Glamrock Freddy... not so much this time. Furthermore, this game's antagonistic glitch creature is actually revealed to be a force of good trying to prevent The Mimic from escaping.
  • For its time, Bowser joining Mario's Team in Super Mario RPG was a massive twist. Until then Bowser had just been the series Big Bad, no more no less. Then Smithy's Gang rolled up to the party, booted him out of his own castle, and caught everyone off guard when he "let Mario join the Koopa Troop" to help take down Smithy and served as The Lancer for the remainder of the game. It was also a very big revelation that Bowser's honestly not such a bad guy at heart and is even A Father to His Men.
  • In the Mario RPGs, Bowser is normally demoted to Big Bad Wannabe and only acts as Big Bad when there is not an original villain to serve as the actual main antagonist. Mario & Luigi: Dream Team is the exception, where it is the original villain who plays second fiddle to Bowser.
  • Batman: The Telltale Series manages to pull a doozy when the Children of Arkham begin spreading the story that Thomas Wayne was actually one of Gotham's worst criminals ever and made his fortune through theft, murder, and sending innocent people to Arkham to rot. No way in hell any of this is anything other than a fabricated story to drag Bruce through the mud, right? It's all true. Every word of it. This time around the franchise's Paragon is actually a Greater-Scope Villain the entire time, and the only reason The Penguin and Lady Arkham's Roaring Rampage of Revenge isn't entirely justified is they're targeting Bruce and the innocent lives of Gotham to get it.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Tetsuya Takahashi is rather infamous for his tendency to include evil Demiurge Archetype gods in his games. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to discover that the Architect is a genuinely benevolent figure who ultimately wants the best for his creations- though he is the good half of Klaus, while Zanza, the traditional evil Demiurge and true Big Bad of the first game, is his evil half.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The villainous organization Mobius is led by a being going by "Z", hinting a connection to Zanza and another Rage Against the Heavens plotline. It turns out Z is not a god, but the negative emotions of humanity (superficially, their fear of the future) made manifest.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed: The Xenoblade series has a history of mysterious mentor characters who turn out to secretly be godlike beings, interdimensional AIs or some other Mind Screw. It was long speculated that the Nopon Ultimate Blacksmith Riku, from the main game, was one of these, due to his knowledge of Noah's Sword of Plot Advancement, vague references to his "Masterpon" and him repeatedly insisting he's a "common variety Nopon". Come the DLC, Riku's origin turns out to be shockingly mundane: his Masterpon was Melia, and his father was a travelling companion of hers, making him the child of either Riku from Xenoblade Chronicles 1 or Kino from its expansion Future Connected.
  • Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth: The Etrian Odyssey series has a well established pattern of fellow adventurers who are helpful and friendly early on, only to become antagonists after some major plot twist. So in the fifth game, when Lili and Solor show up for the first time, experienced players were already planning for the inevitable betrayal and battle. It never happens. While they become a major part of the plot around the third stratum, it leads to them fighting the boss alongside you. Another twist is that, whereas previous games introduced a civilization in the fourth stratum (and almost always a hostile one), in this game's fourth stratum the only character found is a friendly, mysterious girl whose race remains unknown until the sixth stratum, where she shows her true form as an alien from another world, the Arken. And her civilization was tragically slaughtered by the Star Devourer, making her the Last of Her Kind.
  • In the Splatoon series, a lot of weapons are re-purposed everyday items such as hairdryers, washing machines, and giant paintbrushes. In addition, levels in the main campaigns are accessed via tea kettles. So come Splatoon 2's "Octo Expansion" DLC campaign , some players may be forgiven for thinking that this could extend to other pieces of machinery and that the "thangs" they're collecting which look suspiciously like blender parts will form a teleporter or something. That is until Mission Control takes a glance at their video feed and realizes that, no, you've all been fooled into building a giant blender that's going to puree you into fish paste.
  • Resident Evil:
    • When The Nemesis from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis popped up most people were inclined to think he was just this game's big mindless final boss monster and nothing more, as was the trend in the first two games. Then he kills your friend, looks you in the eye, and says "STARS..." Then he ambushes you and follows you from room to room, something no monster has done yet in the series. Then he starts shooting missiles at you. Then you learn he can actually appear at random, meaning you're never truly safe. Then you realize he's after you specifically, no one else, and won't stop hunting you all across town until he gets you: for the first time in the series you're not dealing with a random mutation lashing out at life, but an intently created weapon made for the specific purpose of killing STARS members, the last of which you are.
    • The remake of the original Resident Evil on Game Cube added some new mechanics to surprise the crap out of veterans of the series. Most infamously is the Crimson Head mechanic that was set up to look like the new game was averting Everything Fades: so you've killed a zombie and left its body slumped in a hallway. Give it enough time and it'll get right back up, faster and deadlier than before, so now you have to either waste your very limited supply of kerosene to dispose of bodies or not be so eager to kill zombies. In every Resident Evil game thus far a killed zombie stays killed, not even respawning enemies unless there's a reason for more to show up, so imagine everyone's shock when, on their fifth or so time passing the same dead zombie they killed almost an hour ago, it suddenly gets back up and starts running.
    • Similarly, the Resident Evil 2 (Remake) pulled a sneaky on veterans of the original with Mr. X. Between the memes, the trailer, and common knowledge, everyone going into this game knew he was coming. However, in the original he was introduced with a flashy cutscene and only appeared in Scenario B. In the remake however he pops up in your first playthrough of the game, without any fanfare whatsoever, by casually lifting the helicoper out of the way, in a hallway you've already safely transversed at least once no less, and hauling ass toward you. This time too, rather than encountering him in Pre-existing Encounters, he's now a fully Roaming Enemy who's always somewhere in the police station looking and listening for you, adding the extra risk of firing your gun and attracting his attention.
    • Resident Evil 4 (Remake) pulls a sneaky as well with the dog in the beartrap. Around the time and place you'd meet the dog in the original, you instead find the brutalized corpse of a dog in a beartrap. Since the remake takes itself a lot more seriously and has more a focus on horror than the camp of the original, everyone fell for this one as it appears to send a very clear message. It later turns out it was a Red Herring when you then meet the dog in a beartrap much later, and yes, he still helps you when you fight El Gigante.
  • Deltarune: In Undertale, every single major monster the player battles turns out to have hidden positive aspects and are either Obliviously Evil or have genuinely good intentions yet simply went down the wrong path, and are reasoned with and pull a Heel–Face Turn. In the Golden Ending, this even extends to Flowey/Asriel. Cue King in the successor/sequel/Elseworld, who has a similar Boss Banter with the party as several of Undertale's bosses and seems to be setting up a sort of Freudian Excuse for himself... and it turns out he was just lying, trying to trick Ralsei into healing him back to his full strength so he could finish the team off, having not learned a single thing from the fight no matter what the player does. When he tries to throw Lancer, his own son, off the roof of his castle, it becomes clear that this guy is just a genuine jerk inside and out. Instead of befriending the player, King is either overthrown by his own people and locked up or he's put to sleep by Ralsei. That said, Chapter 2 does imply that King genuinely does love Lancer, that his threat to throw Lancer from the roof was a bluff (as Lancer would "just bounce"), and even has him show concern for his son's well-being — though whether these are just more tricks and lies to manipulate the player or the truth are left ambiguous.
  • The first Nier features two characters Devola and Popola who are introduced as helpful allies, but eventually turn out to be major villains within the story. In NieR: Automata they suddenly make a reappearance, again being portrayed as helpful allies. Not only are they Good All Along this time, but they're not even the same Devola and Popula, but two other androids of the same model as them, who've been facing persecution their entire lives because of the actions of the Devola and Popula from the first game. Yoko Taro is also known to make games with Multiple Endings, with each new ending more horrifying, tragic and/or confusing than the last. Ending E of Nier: Automata, while certainly confusing and bizarrely meta, is also the single most optimistic ending he's ever written, with the 14th Machine War finally coming to an end and all three main characters being brought Back from the Dead for a second chance at life.
  • The titular King of Fighters tournament has a long history of being hosted by people with ulterior, often sinister motives, or just someone with connections to the current Arc Villain. (Even in the Art of Fighting/Fatal Fury continuity, every iteration of the tournament was hosted either by Geese Howard or one of his relatives.) So it's quite a surprise when the tournament's host for XIV, Antonov, is neither of these. He's just a completely unrelated, actually pretty nice rich guy who wants to fight strong opponents, and Final Boss Verse has nothing to do with either him or the current tournament. (Though Verse does have a connection of sorts with the Jin Scrolls from Fatal Fury 3 that Geese sought out.)
  • Due to Values Dissonance, JRPGs don't show monotheistic religion in a good light; the setting's "church" (and there's always only one) is always evil or a cover for an evil conspiracy, and Final Bosses are usually tyrannical gods who the party shows their unity and virtue by killing. So when it was announced that Octopath Traveler would have a religious protagonist who serves a church, a la Yuna, fans got ready for her to experience a shocking Broken Pedestal moment. Except she doesn't — the Church of the Sacred Flame really is on the up-and-up. (A few priests in Stillsnow are corrupt, but they're not especially significant to the Church's hierarchy or the plot.)
  • Mass Effect 3:
    • The game throws you a cruel one during the Quarian/Geth War arc. In the past, "Paragon/Renegade" button prompts allowed Shepard to interrupt an ongoing sequence and prevent an event from otherwise happening. So, should you choose to allow the Quarian fleet to get destroyed by the Geth, a distraught Tali attempts suicide, but Shepard is given a Paragon button prompt to stop her—only for Tali to kill herself anyways. It's a shockingly deep punch given that Tali has been with the crew for the whole trilogy and helps drive home that you essentially destroyed her entire race and family for an alliance with the geth.
    • Over the course of the three games, responses can essentially be divided into three categories: Paragon, where Shepard responds with diplomacy or righteousness, Renegade, where Shepard uses violence or aggressiveness (or sometimes just being downright rude) to get their way, or Neutral, which essentially cuts the difference with a...neutral or snarky remark. Come the end of the Thessia mission, where Shepard is in their Darkest Hour following their utter failure to obtain the final component needed in their fight against the Reapers and is Forced to Watch and listen as the Asari lose the battle and the planet along with it. Back on the Normandy, Joker tries to break the tension and misery with humor, but, no matter how which option you choose, even if you choose the diplomatic answer, Shepard essentially reams Joker a new one. This prompts Joker, of all people, to call Shepard out and essentially hangs a lampshade on Shepard's behavior, noting that their stress levels are higher than they've ever been and even sharing his own concerns and fears for his sister and father. The whole sequence essentially helps underline how hard Shepard is taking this fall and how they're essentially barely holding it together.
  • The first four fifths of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine have a pretty standard Indiana Jones plot, other than replacing Those Wacky Nazis with Dirty Commies. Indy learns of a powerful and dangerous artifact that could be used to conquer the world, and embarks on a race with the tyrannical regime to acquire it before they can use it to conquer the world. Then it's revealed that the apparent Big Bad was perfectly aware of the dangers and never intended to use the Infernal Machine; Indy's American ally Turner is the one who wants to use it to wipe the Soviets off the face of the map.
  • BlazBlue: Central Fiction: The third act of each character's Arcade Mode ends with a different final opponent for each character, relating to that person's role in the story. For the protagonist Ragna, there are plenty of people who could serve as his final enemy: Jin, Terumi, Nu, possibly even Rachel or Hakumen. Ragna's final opponent is, in fact, Amane Nishiki — a randomer with whom Ragna has barely shared a single scene. However, it sets him up for his course of action over the remainder of the act, as told in Story Mode.
  • Superliminal: The first two areas are meant to be an introduction to the game's mechanics, such as resizing objects and turning images into real things. In contrast, the third area is themed entirely around a single object (dice), but changes their properties with every single puzzle. A whole die may actually be two halves put closely together, or the end of a huge column you can only slide around instead of pick up, or a bunch of very tiny boxes that only break apart when you first attempt to use it as a platform...
  • Call Of Duty Infinite Warfare has a Central Theme of "sacrifice". It also features Robot Buddy Ethan. He's charming, funny, helpful, and competent, and anyone with any knowledge of storytelling tropes knows he will have to make a dramatic Heroic Sacrifice at some point to save the day. And he does! At roughly the same time as almost everyone else on the player's ship. Over 750 people, four survivors. Not including the player character.
  • Across the Dark Souls franchise, it's common for the bosses you face to start out as legendary heroes, only to degrade into monsters due to the ongoing decay of the world. The Final Boss of The Ringed City DLC for Dark Souls III, Slave Knight Gael, does succumb to Hollowing midway through your fight... but instead of turning into a twisted creature, the previously savage Gael stands upright and grips his sword, and goes out fighting you as a man.
  • Bloodborne: does something similar for a triple meta twist. Bloodborne has a genre known for heroes falling into madness, is something of a spiritual sequel to Dark Souls above, and in-game most of the enemies you face are the result of normal people being corrupted by unnatural bloodlust and turning into monsters- and in the case of two, Father Gascoigne and Vicar Amelia, you get to see the process happen. In the DLC, the first boss you face initially follows the trend; Ludwig the Accursed was once the first Church Hunter and is now a horrible chimera-centaur-thing monster lost to blood-madness... but after you lower his health enough, the light of his Holy Moonlight sword shines upon him and he manages to take at least some of his sanity back, changing the entire mood of the boss fight, turning the music downright bombastic and triumphant as Ludwig, The Holy Blade fights you as a Magic Knight. Even after you've defeated him, he remains lucid and you can talk to him if you're wearing Healing Church garb.
  • Grand Theft Auto V: Most GTA games, including the previous game, give an option to only save one character by letting the other die. Similarly, V also has Devin Weston order Franklin to kill Michael in retaliation for the loss of his secretary, as well as Haines and Dave ordering Franklin to kill Trevor due to him being a serious liability. The twist is that there's a third option to save both Michael and Trevor and instead killing all the other antagonists, which experienced players may miss in a first playthrough.
  • Master Detective Archives: Rain Code was made by the same creators as Danganronpa below, so when it uses the same neon pink blood for its murder victims throughout the game, players think nothing of it. Then comes the final chapter, which reveals that the pink blood is actually pink this time around and not merely a stylistic choice, because homunculi have pink blood. When protagonist Yuma cuts his finger in Chapter 0, as well as every time he gets his throat slashed open in Mystery Labyrinths to make questions appear, the blood is red, because he's human. Players likely excused the former as the small amount of blood having already dried by the time they found it since Danganronpa used red for dried blood, and excused the latter as Mystery Labyrinths being Eldritch Locations where "normal" rules don't apply. Needless to say, this reveal made for one of the most memorable moments in the entire game, and promptly gets lampshaded by Shinigami, who says out loud what every player is likely thinking at that moment.
    Shinigami: Hey, you're right! Everyone did have pink blood! Huh. I guess I got used to it.
  • Dead Space uses the Survival Horror standard of save rooms and Dynamic Loading areas where the monsters can't enter and the player is safe. At one point around halfway through the game, this gets violated and a monster suddenly bursts into a save room to attack when your guard is down, seemingly signaling a Difficulty Spike in which even the safe areas aren't really safe. The real twist is that this never happens again; that one instance of a monster entering a save room is a scripted event, and for the rest of the game, such rooms and elevators are perfectly safe as usual. It's all just a way of fucking with the player's head and keeping them off-balance by toying with their expectations.
  • My House riffs heavily on amateur Doom mapping habits, an aspect that will probably be lost on people not familiar with Doom or its map-making community:
    • The map's entire concept is a Deconstructive Parody on the many custom levels (for Doom and other games) that are just a recreation of the author's house, many of which are also named "MyHouse.wad".
    • The game's use of "D_RUNNIN" (a.k.a. "Running from Evil"), the music track for the first map of vanilla Doom II, is a reference to countless amateur maps that replace MAP01 without bothering to change the music. The map messes with players familiar with this by replacing "D_RUNNIN" with a modified 11-minute version as soon as you enter the second house; the modified version starts out like normal, but slowly becomes weirder and weirder, with skipped beats, repeated choruses, instruments swapped out with other instruments, and a guitar line from a completely different music track. Then it gets suddenly and quietly replaced with "memory=entryrrrr/////", which is initially similar but slowly degrades into a nightmarish Drone of Dread that homages Everywhere at the End of Time by Leyland Kirby, an album designed to emulate the effects of dementia. Essentially, the musical score of the game starts as generic before gradually changing tone to reflect the player's own realization that this is not a typical Doom map, as well as to symbolize the nature of the map itself as a Disguised Horror Story that starts very simple only to go wildly off the rails in mind-bending ways as you play.
    • Going to Underhalls (vanilla MAP02) after you exit the map is also a staple of amateur mapping. This mod turns it into part of the experience. Rather than continuing on to MAP03 as expected, beating Underhalls just takes you right back to My House, and you're intended to do at least one playthrough of Underhalls since it's the only way to get your hands on the Super Shotgun (you'll need it). The joke is taken even further by making the exit tile in the Mirror World House functional, which takes you instead to 20PAM - Sllahrednu, a Mirror World version of Underhalls. Beating Sllahrednu also sends you back to My House, except you start in the Mirror World. Underhalls as a map also features a building that represents the original level designer's house (specifically the brown building where the Mega Armor secret is concealed), making it an example of My House-ness in itself and furthering the in-joke.
    • Monsters in the burnt house are all custom, making it into a Wham Episode that hammers down the shift in tone if that's the first "hidden" area you encounter (which is likely to happen in a blind playthrough).
    • The community practically never plays Nightmare! difficulty because it's seen as unfair in many maps; amateur map-builders all too often fail to account for Nightmare!'s faster and relentlessly respawning monsters. This mod twists this around as a cruel joke, making Nightmare! the easy mode and the usual easy mode — I'm Too Young To Die — a hard mode. Instead of the typical way it goes, the latter now gives the monsters new abilities that make them harder than usual, while the former removes the new powers but keeps the doubled ammo pickups usually included with hard modes.
    • The early parts of the map feature a lot of purposefully bad level design tricks to sell the idea that it's an amateur creation, such as deliberately making the silent teleport trick on the basement stairway — used to create the impression of a room-over-room layout — jarring and poorly implemented so that the player will notice what really happened. All of this lulls players familiar with poorly made first-timer maps into a false sense of security by making them think the map is a Cliché Storm. The game then pulls the rug by phasing out the bad effects and tricks with much more sophisticated and elaborate ones.
  • The Communitree: Unlike the original Candy box!, trying to throw 10 candies on the ground in the Candy tab just makes the game decline the action.

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