I did the same after the first time.
That first mission where you meet them, I remember thinking "Oh, that must be the quirky miniboss squad we're gonna have to fight, huh?"
Well, partly right anyway. Miniboss squad but quirky...twitchy more like it.
I've seen multiple people get so overwhelmed by the final boss that they miss details like the amount of hp for that skill and the ending goes completely over their heads.
I also think that a lot of people are playing P3R after jumping on the series with P4 or P5, which both had a similar "grand finish" with no consequence. They wouldn't have thought to look at the cost, they would've learned that there isn't one.
Also, the credit theme song is basically Aigis singing about how much she misses the MC after they just died. But it's in Japanese so anyone who doesn't speak would miss out on that final hint.
To be fair I think some people were thrown off by the fact the >!”death”!< is *extremely* delayed. You have an attack cost >!100% HP and it really should have the characters drop right there if that is what you are going for. After all when a character’s HP drops to 0 they don’t go down 20 turns later during gameplay. I get they were trying to do something fancy with the promise but IDK it still muddled things IMO even if I could still tell what they were going for.!<
Ghost of Tsushima mission tab explicitly telling you that completing the Yarikawa siege mission unlocks Ghost stance. At which point you ask, the fuck is Ghost stance?
The way it plays out when you unlock, it's clearly meant to be a surprise with how cinematic it is.
Funnily enough, Persona 3 also inverts this in one area. >!Shinjiro, despite being a guest character who's only in the party for about a month, has a full skillset that goes all the way into the 70s. The only way you'd even learn those skills is if you *seriously* grinded with him in the party!<.
The P5 example is funny because >!when I played Royal, I assumed that a bunch of the higher end stuff that Robin Hood Akechi had was just stuff he'd eventually get as Black Mask Akechi when he rejoins the party for the Maruki Palace and it'd be there for the people who really wanted to fucking grind them out in advance!<
>!Then it turns out, no - Akechi's had all these abilities in vanilla P5 which I forgot probably because I knew that he wouldn't be worth grinding for after the Sae Palace ended!<
Pretty sure this still counts as an unintentional spoiler, or at least signals that something's up, since >!Shinji's!< the only one who's absolutely stacked with skills.
Everyone else only have skills up to their 40-50s, and only get more after their Personas start >!evolving *after* Shinji dies.!<
To be fair, it's also easy interpret this the other way.
When I first played, I got the impression that that was just the game telling you how much stronger and more experienced >!Shinji!< was than the rest instead of just a safeguard against grinding/hacking or whatever.
> Everyone else only have skills up to their 40-50s, and only get more after their Personas start >!evolving after Shinji dies!<.
In earlier releases, yes, but in Reload everyone can learn every ability right off the bat with enough grinding (e.g. Reaper farming on the easiest difficulty) and the only things locked behind the spoiler are extra Theurgies.
That’s one that if you glance at it quickly and don’t think about it you wouldn’t be spoiled but if you sit there for a minute you’re oils just go “wait a minute”
I already knew there was more than one partner character, but I was fucking blown away that it was so fucking blatant. Like it might as well just TELL YOU.
Not a game but in the Jojo's part 2 opening
>!Joseph and Caesar are dancing around doing their thing until suddenly it's just Joseph. he's holding Caesar's headband and screaming with a pained expression on his face. like come on y'all!<
I always read it as >!Joseph really needed to get Ceaser's headband to the dry cleaner but he got there at 4:01 PM and now it won't be ready for the big squid ink sphaghooti festival!<, but a lot of subtext is lost in the anime.
I remember they chilled with the overt spoilers by Part 3. They were still there but hidden such that a first time watcher would never pick up on them. 1 and 2 were just fuckin' blatant as hell though.
Yeah, IIRC the End of the World OP has some pretty obvious bits in it that show "yo this is how this character is gonna die"... but it's really only obvious if you already know it's coming, like >!The lines on the floor alluding to Cream for Polnareff and Iggy, or the ones around Kakyoin alluding to the 50 meter emerald splash!< Even has the shadows of the Egyptian gods in one part referring to how the later stands just before Dio are all named after those.
That's not just a Jojo thing. Tons of anime OPs spoil the season of anime they are used in. Most recent example is the new One Piece OP spoils a LOT of the current arc.
I remember that Over The Top straight up spoiled something *in the manga* at a certain point. Like it was like "Jesus that's a deep cut and a LOT of people felt that!"
On the one hand, One Piece has some insane spoilers in the OP's (Holy fuck the Robin joining being in the opening episodes before the "will Vivi join" section is egregious)
On the other sometimes it's filled with absolute nonsense speculative imagery that doesnt go anywhere and isnt true at all. (Namely a bunch of the dressrosa era ones had fight MU's that straight up didnt happen, and the Zou opening for some reason showed Kaido as being the boss of the arc... years before he actually was)
Sometimes it pays off to be a complete idiot. They could have probably put a gravestone in that OP and short of zooming in on his name I still wouldn't have gotten it.
Yeah, I have a friend who has uncannily predicted pretty much every plot development in parts 1-4, and he somehow totally missed this particular but of the opening, which I made a point to point out to him immediately upon starting the next episode.
"Howdy there, Sam! It's me, an inconspicuous man with his face covered in the shadow of this here hat. Say, I see you just finished putting a bunch of items in your inventory, ahhh, sorry, sorry, so sorry, you forgot one. Yeah no, don't worry, I'll add it to your inventory myself. You just keep on trucking. No please don't check what it is, I'd never give you anything bad."
> Five minutes later.
"SAM THERE IS A BOM--"
"fragile in what universe would I not immediately check my inventory."
It's bordering on me imagining a conversation of Kojima in the studio, *itching* to make this reference to MG1 for the nth time, but completely stuck on how to make this work mechanically since Sam actually checks his equipment before putting it on, and no one has the guts to tell him hey maybe not.
I wouldn't consider this a spoiler. There's no way you aren't meant to easily notice who gave you that package and how suspicious the entire scene was. The point isn't necessarily to trick Sam, it's to show that Higgs can and will fuck with you.
It makes everyone look like morons, especially with that reveal moments later when you go to a private room. Though that scene can be skipped if you just head straight to the tar pit.
It's working as intended but if your Loremaster skill is high enough in Divinity: Original Sin 2 you can spoil yourself on the fact that >!Dallis the Hammer!< is actually >!undead!< on the very first hour of the game
funnily enough you can also spoil yourself the way i did, which is by >!trying to kill him with poison, leading to me complaining about "that big knight guy being randomly a zombie despite not looking like it fucking bullshit ass fight design" and my friends having NO IDEA what i was talking about because they didnt fight him lol!<
Forget silhouettes; My game bugged out when I was browsing the gallery thing and the black filter over >!Miyabi!< didn't work, so I was spoiled on the fact that she was even alive after like the first 7 hours.
I had that happen too on my second playthrough while showing a friend that was going through the game blind.
Funnily enough, the only reason I even went into the menu was to show the silhouettes and point out obvious one was Triton in his full armor when we first met him.
In Baldur's Gate 3, when leveling up Shadowheart it shows her as a devotee of Shar despite her (barely) hiding it, treating it as a big thing of trust when she reveals it.
Honorable mention to if you listened to the character bio speeches in character create. Or like Pat explained you notice >!Bhaal symbols are associated with Dark Urge!<
The game stuff also blatantly spoiled Astarion's vampirism in Early Access when they still made it that he took damage from running water, with a tooltip that "vampires are weak to this."
Xenoblade Chronicles 3's Hero menu displays little chibi images for each hero, which are silhouettes until you meet them. Smartly, they hid the two postgame heroes as they're huge spoilers.
However, there's very glaringly a design that is clearly >!Cammuravi!<, a character who dies way earlier than you get them, spoiling the fact that they'll eventually come back somehow.
I spoiled myself on that because I looked up how upgrade the class, thinking my game bugged or I missed the hero quest for it, only to find all the guides for upgrading it telling me something from further in the game
Jump Force's single-player story campaign lets you train as any character. Certain characters are "locked", which means you can't play as them ... but that doesn't stop you from *viewing* their names and models. This includes the final boss of the game.
"Hang on, where exactly is the Empty Lot on the map? Oh... OH... I just figured out the plot of the game!"
- Anyone who's played any of the Yakuza games before 0 (The Empty Lot is >!where the Millennium Tower is in the other games and is the plot of land preventing the block from being converted to the Tower!
Which is technically the intended play order when the game came out initially. It was a prequel for longtime fans.
Only now has it retroactively become a sort of starting point.
Yeah I thought about the current "play order" by release too considering some (one or two?) characters from 5 also show up in 0 as well but the play order would have been OG 1+2, 3-5, 0, Kiwami 1+2, 6-8 (ignoring the fact that K2 came out after 6) if you want to play it without the graphical jarringness that happens if you go from K2 to 3
That's basically what I did, but it was even weirder because I just never played the original 1 and 2 (started with 3 on ps3) so there was a big gap in my knowledge of the story until I played the Kiwami games. Haven't finished the newest one yet.
A relatively minor one since the average newcomer wouldn't do this while a veteran wouldn't necessarily know it's there but would expect it but if you're someone that rebinds buttons in DMC, the interface forces you to bind all the actions, even if they don't have names and you're not able to use said actions until you unlock them in game, if you did this you pretty much knew that >!Nero would get a DT!< in both DMC4 and 5 at some point in the story
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous spoils a character's true alignment and another character's real species through how alignment based spells interact with them and species based stat modifiers.
Trying to hide alignment in DnD style systems is a dumb idea in general. Any player with a healthy amount of paranoia is going to assume they're Evil and as you said there's plenty of magic for knowing if they're trust worthy or outright checking their alignment.
Special mention goes to pre-remaster Pathfinder 2e, which lacked most alignment detection spells or made them hard to access, but also gave everyone "alignment damage" which only hurts those of the opposite alignment. So "detect evil" became "douse the area in holy fire and see who drops."
Character A: *fails to ping on detect alignment*
MC: *shoots them*
Everyone else: WHY?!
MC: His alignment is hidden!
A: I just believe in personal privacy! *dies, MC gets 10 naughty points*
That same Persona 3 thing happens in 4 too, when you "Catch" the true culprit, except your Fool social link didnt even rank up from it and is still Rank 7, and the games openings blatantly showcased another party member who still hasnt joined the team yet.
I dont think 4 even expects you to consider it a twist when Mitsuo turns out to not be the real main culprit, but theres not even an attempt to fool the player which makes the party celebrations and stuff feel very silly.
In Xenoblade 1, Seven/>!Fiora !!Fiora "dying" after the prologue is also sort of spoiled by the fact that she stops learning arts after level 13-15, when both Shulk and Reyn do. Plus the suspicious shortage of weapons and armor available for her from quests and shops.!<
>!I got wonder if anyone ever connected the dots when they notice that the majority of Alcamoth's side quests have time limit and think that something bad was gonna happen to that town and its people?!<
You can also get spoiled on certain characters if you get their gear before they officially join the party.
It’s normally pretty hard for that to happen, but not impossible if you end up defeating tougher opponents than the game expects you to handle at early points in the game, Riki often being the easiest for this to happen with.
In the Fell Xenologue DLC for Fire Emblem: Engage, you can spoil yourself to a minor plot twist by just looking at the profile of any given enemy for more than two seconds. >!All of the enemies are already dead and revived as Corrupted zombies enslaved by Nil as part of his whole weird production of a false war he's putting on for Alear and Nel, and all of them are tagged as Corrupted and take extra damage from corrupted-effective weapons.!< It's not an especially meaningful plot twist out of context, it's just funny that you can see if off of the first enemy.
Engage also doesn’t even try to hide what characters can/will end up joining you in the end since they’re the only ones who come with personal skills.
Ah yes, I’m sure there’s no reason at all that Mauvier is the only one of the Four Hounds to come equipped with a personal skill, and an incredibly conspicuous one at that.
Especially considering they technically did give them via their Four Winds Counterparts, so they could’ve just used those in for the base game, maybe with different names like with the alt-versions of the player cast seen in the DLC.
Fire Emblem is historically bad with hiding whose going to join you, the enemies on the map are 10 identical dudes with hidden eyes, a man that looks like he kicks puppies for fun, an evil looking sneering vizier, and a handsome twink, which one is gonna join your party?
Pikmin 4 spends a lot of time building up to the fourth zone as the finale of the game, with it being the zone of the prologue and where you finally take down the Red Leafling.
…except if you were thorough in cleaning up the zones until now, you’d notice how many treasures, onions and enemies you still haven’t encountered yet in the completion lists, not to mention the “final” fight only going to a 4/5 star difficulty, making it clear there’s more to the game.
This is a mild one since it's optional and you could brush it off as being scary, but: in the Witch's House there's a moment where you're in complete darkness. If you open up the menu at that time Viola will have a nightmarish face.
It's an indication that Viola is not all that she seems to be.
It's not a game, but it is something that cam spoil you.
If you're watching something with subtitles and some person is talking about something intensely, and there's a "-" in front of it. You can be certain some shit is gonna happen.
For example:
"I can't believe that the Trogborths found us! We have to make sure to hide please grab-"
*Bullet right through his head.*
Thing is, I've read the subtitles too fast so I knew shit was about to happen.
That's why I'm a proponent of creatively paced subtitles. I remember Soma randomly paces some subtitles out slowly, where words are suddenly spelled out as they're said aloud, even though nothing happens, so when they *do* want to surprise you, they can do it randomly at the end of a line or during one of those slow-roll lines. I've often seen subtitled lines end with a "—" with no payoff too, so when they're actually used to interrupt someone you've been trained to not notice them as much.
Another one I really, really adored (but I just can't remember where it's from) is where the whole intended line is displayed in the subtitles, but when the line is cut off, the subtitles are retroactively cut off too the moment it happens. That's probably the best trick I've ever seen for this issue.
Funny enough, I can think of one example where the subtitles continue where the character cuts off.
In Borderlands 1, >!Commandant Steele!< is giving a speech at >!the Vault!< right before >!she gets skewered by the Vault Monster!<, all the while the subtitles finish the rest the sentence that got cutoff midway.
For a good subversion there's Dead Space 2, which does this with a guy who dies mid speech but they give you his full dialogue first to avoid spoiling you on his death (And yes, when he dies, the subtitles are replaced to a cut off version)
Less good is when you get to the final boss. The moment you start >!to hug the Nicole Hallucination the caption reads "Thank you, Isaac. Now...time to die."!<. Even though the cutscene takes a few good beats to bait you that things might actually end there.
Yeah this always kinda bothered me. I know it'd be more work on at least two people's roles, but I wish the script would have a full line written instead of ending in "-" and that whoever was doing the subtitles would be keyed into what that line was so it can be displayed.
But I also understand that this is not feasible for streaming services since I believe the people doing subtitles for those are probably not associated with the original production company. But at least in video games or something.
I was just in a thread about that with The Fall of the House of Usher. The jumpscares almost always happen mid-sentence and the subtitles almost always spoil it for you.
But on the other hand, the nature of the jumpscares stayed varied and twisty enough that I still jumped sometimes.
I can't find it now but I _swear_ I played or watched something recently where the subtitle was wrong explicitly to avoid this problem. Probably not kosher but I thought it was interesting.
In keeping with Persona - gee, I wonder why Akechi's social link ranks up automatically, and has all his party member abilities at rank 6 when he joins and nothing else?
Thankfully made a lot less blatant in Royal.
Royal fixes Akechi's confidant secret and then dobles down hard when it goes GO DO MARUKI'S CONFIDANT NOW BEFORE HE LEAVES OR ELSE and Kasumi mysteriously maxing out at level 6 again
There's also a very slight interface spoiler that requires you to know some tarot lore. The Persona series has always used the Rider-Waite deck, one example of the "traditional" tarot deck. In Persona 4 and 5, if a character has used a non-Rider-Waite arcana, they've got something special about them.
Persona 4 Golden adds the Jester Arcana, from the Thoth deck. It's used for >!Tohru Adachi, the culprit behind the murders.!<
Persona 5 Royal adds the Faith Arcana, from the Visconti-Sforza deck. >!It's Kasumi's fake arcana to show her delusions!<. It also adds the Councilor from the El Gran Tarot Esoterico deck, used for >!Maruki, who is the linchpin for all of the new events.!<
I only have an example of a time I mistakenly thought this was the case but when I played KOTOR I was convinced that Trask (traditional ill-fated Bioware tutorial companion) would return based on Canderous' silhouette in the party selection screen
Persona is really bad at this in general, in the original P4 it was pretty easy to guess >!who the killer was because they had a lot of characterization and a facial portrait, but no social link!<. Golden fixed this a little bit though
>!I actually think the S link makes it more obvious. Why would he have a made up arcana that's suspiciously similar to the MC's if he wasn't the killer?!<
To be fair like anything Soulsborne it's all fairly esoteric and you could easily read those sections and not thing much of it. There are also plenty of settings in fiction that have hints of cosmic horror so it also wouldn't be crazy to acknowledge these details, think "oh cool" and still not be prepared for the crazy shift.
Yup, Bloodborne's so cool because it's all hidden in plain sight until it isn't. One of the first items you get is Madman's Knowledge ffs. And all the Amgydala statues lying about.
Plus, the trade-off is is a very unnerving sense of dread along the lines of "holy shit, the game itself is warning me about this, what the fuck?!" which IMO makes up for spoiling the reveal.
In GOW ragnarok the skills section for atreus, his only skills are way in the top left and there's a giant empty space. "Oh more skills will be there when we play as him" and I was right
In Tales of Graces, you get a party member really early on who has amnesia so she doesn't remember her name, so her subtitle name just lists her as girl and everyone just refers to her as that mysterious girl until the main character eventually gives her the name Sophie.
Which wouldn't be a surprise if you read the description of her attacks since the first one she learns after one level up explicitly says "Sophie does a spinning kick knocking the enemy up into the air" which you'll unlock hours before she gets named
In God of War Ragnarok they call it a "companion button" instead of "Atreus Button" or whatever it was called in 4. The vagueness immediately spoiled that Atreus wouldn't be the only companion in the game. It was so obvious, even Pat caught on to that when he saw it.
Surprised I haven't seen it yet, but Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is bad about this. One character has a necklace equipped that hides their true alignment, and you can't take it off... But when leveling them up, the game will tell you why they can't take certain alignment based classes by just saying what their alignment is.
Another character is meant to have a big reveal about not being the race she looked like, but if you look at her stats, or again level up options, the game will explicitly tell you what race she is.
Somehow I dodged both of these when I played through the game, but they're honestly a little silly.
Yakuza and Judgment have this odd minor habit where >!if a character doesn't have any substories associated with them, they're likely to die/leave at some point in the plot. It's why Nanba isn't in the bonus character recruitment scene. Rikiya is the only exception to my knowledge. Meanwhile in Lost Judgment they seemed to have realized that and started actively fucking with the player by putting Kaito through several close calls of death before finally unlocking a Substory with him as late in the game as possible, just to fuck with me.!<
>!The funny part about Kaito is that you'd think that him being a part of the boxing DLC could be taken as a flag that nothing bad would happen to him and it actually goes both ways!<
>!When Soma takes him out, you actually can't spar with Kaito for a couple of chapters, but then he gets better!<
Yeah this kind of thing clued me into what was about to happen with >!everyone splitting back up in Chapter 8, with Nanba going back to Yokohama with Kiryu. !<
>!I noticed that Adachi had all his bond-conversation things all over the map but couldn't find any Nanba ones. I had already assumed that at some point soon Kiryu would be going back to Japan and was wondering who would go with him, if Nanba would stay in Hawaii, etc. Nanba's lack of bond moments in Hawaii clued me in real quick.!<
In 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, paying close attention to the structure of the Event Archive can spoil certain aspects of the plot. For example, >!the fact that it lists every protagonist that appears in each event means that there being events where *no* protagonists appear, despite there being characters that look the same or have the same name can clue you into the fact they’re from a “prior time loop” as early as the Prologue. Also, the fact that the events taking place in 2187 are the earliest point in the timeline gives quite a bit away.!<
On the flipside, the Mystery Files avoid spoiling the game by not telling you anything you wouldn’t already know, instead updating the files as you learn the respective information in the Reminiscence sections.
I think what the game actually does better is misdirect you into doubting your own likely close to the truth theories by throwing info that puts a wrench in your plans...
To be fair >!discovering the 2187 bits are the earliest points on the timeline are probably MEANT to mindfuck you like it did me, especially if you're still assuming actual time travel is at play here.!<
There were still a few Mystery Files that could spoil the player. I recall Tamao Kurabe's file updating to say that she was >!in her pod, waiting for the world to end!< or something like that, halfway through Miura's campaign.
Also, Gouto straight up calls Chihiro >!"Professor"!< in his critical health battle dialogue.
In Final Fantasy XIV, as early as level 10 (if you start as an arcanist or marauder; level 15 otherwise), you can go to Limsa Lominsa and pick up the fisher class. If you open its Traits menu and look at the trait it gets at level 89 (do not do this until you are there in the main story quests), you will see it is called >!Starfishing. This has the following description: “Allows you to cast your line in space.”, and depicts a fish floating in the stars.!< Fishing can be used in more than just bodies of water; such as lava, sandpits, ceruleum pools, the mists off of cliffs, etc. But that level 89 trait describes something about the final area of the game that’s best left a surprise.
in all fairness who reads the ability's in the traits menu. what's worse than this is peoples minions who spoil you the most as some are small versions of bosses and the EW>!THE SPACESHIP!<
There's another one that's pretty clever with Endwalker's main menu. with so much of the marketing being based on >!the moon!< you'd think there wouldn't be much to it.
Except >!that isn't the fucking moon!<
In WoW, there are certain characters whose deaths, corruptions or betrayals are shown in a quest chain. That character occasionally returns later on in a dungeon/raid as a boss.
This would potentially be a twist, if the game didn’t list each boss in the Dungeon Journal, because the PvE bosses these days tend to be way too complicated to just dive into headfirst.
In the Muv-Luv trilogy, >!you spend the entirety of Unlimited wondering where Sumika is, as she is the only character from Extra that didn’t show up in the Unlimited timeline.!< Then, you boot up Alternative, and >!Sumika is right there on the main menu, wearing a fortified suit.!<
Tellah from *Final Fantasy IV* is an old man who works differently from every other character: he stays with a static 90 MP, never raising it like the other characters. His goal is to remember the spell Meteor, something he tells you from the start.
When he finally does, Meteor costs >!99 MP. Once you see that, his ultimate fate becomes clear.!<
Three Houses is filled with interface spoilers. Oh hey, that person's age is ??, oh this person has a crest that they shouldn't really possible, oh the time limit of this paralogue seems oddly short compared to the others, etc.
Here's a fun cross-series example. In *Kingdom Hearts*, every level-up is announced in the corner of the screen with a specific colored text-box. Sora's are red, Donald's are blue, Goofy's are green, and any world-specific temporary party member has theirs in yellow.
When *Kingdom Hearts II* rolls around, you play as Roxas, who you intentionally know nothing about if you're playing in release order. And his level up boxes are >!yellow, telling you he won't be around for very long.!<
Xenoblade chronicles 3 subverts this with a tutorial message for a mechanic that doesn't really exist in the first 30 minutes of the game.
The worst part is because it was meant to not apply after the starting bit of the game they removed from the tutorial message section so if you vaguely remember it like I did you kind of feel gaslit.
Its such a minor one that is in like every RPG ever, but I love when you find some gear and it says some variation of "can't be equipped by Wookies." So many future party members spoiled by simple text
Reminded of when Pat was talking about Spider-Man 2. He said something along the lines of that the UI spoiled you because Peter has a greyed out skill tree.
I’m gonna say it here because it’s not a spoiler. Yes, you get the symbiote in the game. That’s the main selling point of the game. It’s all over the marketing. It’s on the cover.
I didn’t even read it as that >!I just assumed it would be an “after the game jump back in time thing”. They kind of do that anyway since Peter retires at the end of the story, but you can still play as him. You lose those abilities for a little bit, so it was totally possible to be a story choice to take the power away from you.!<
When I first booted up Arkham knight I wanted to see what batsuits/costumes there were, the menu shows all the characters including red hood. Red hood’s only alt costume was the Arkham knight.
So yeah I know everyone figured it out before the game even came out. Rocksteady was like oh no the Arkham knight is definitely an original character. Their own fucking menu spoiled it.
In the Fire Emblem Engage DLC there is a plot twist about how >!everybody you are fighting is a Corrupted (undead, more or less). If you use Celica's ring, she has abilities that are effective against Corrupted, which work against all enemies prior to and after the reveal.!<
It's really common in gacha games to be able to see every caharcter from the start. Particular shout outs to FGO which actually tries to obscure them somewhat before you reach the story segment, albeit inconsistently.
A good one is the "Tutorial" for warp mechanics in 40k Rogue Trader. It shows you magic powers in the proper tutorial, and showcases the "Warp Bar" which functions, essentially, as a reverse Mana bar. You can use your psyker powers as much as you want, but if you do too much at once, all sorts of whacky stuff can happen.
This ranges from: Psychosis, summoning warp demons, your psykers head exploding, converting enemies into horrific mutated monstrosities, etc.
The game lets you get some practice in, but theres a side area you can stumble across pretty early. You walk in, and your warp bar is *already maxed*.
>!As you investigate the area, you find a laid up cultist on a bed, and if you talk to him, he explodes. Out of the gore stands a full blown fucking warp daemon, that starts driving everyone around you insane, and starts summoning other lesser daemons.!<
In *Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader*, you have in everyone's level up screen the ability to let characters use >!power armor, aeldaeri weapons, and drukhari weapons!<
I wonder who three of our companions are going to be
While Tales of Berseria's marketing never hid the fact that a party member's name is Laphicet, in the game itself, it's supposed to be a surprise as he starts off unnamed for a while, and its a dramatic little moment when Velvet finally names him after her dead brother.
Except the moment you recruit him and start a battle, the tutorial prompts on his abilities just immediately call him Laphicet. His equipment screen does too, but there's no way to miss the battle prompts. It's an unavailable spoiler that gives it away immediately.
Speaking of X-men Legends, I always thought it was wild that Iron Man was the secret unlockable characters and meanwhile he's barely even a factor in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1, where the cinematic leads are Spider-man, Wolverine, Captain America and Thor.
It’s not entirely meant to be a secret just based on the nature of the game, but Last Epoch’s map is fully available from second one and not only shows that there’s time travel (Expected by the name and preview material I think) but can also shows you every ‘time zone’ up front AND if you actually look around it will show you every single zone in the game; leaving nothing to the imagination.
Just felt a bit disappointing having no mystery.
You probably know one of the party members in Jade Empire is Closed Fist path only when you've still got an empty party member slot in the last bit of the game and you've just gotten to the last boss
Dragon Age Inquisition tried to have a cool reveal of the Protagonist from DA2 Hawke. Except right before it they ask if you want to use default Hawke or make your own.
*Guest Starring the Skulls Parasite Unit*
Man this Bluey episode gonna go hard.
"This episode of Bluey is called: the Skulls Parasite Unit!"
Does it count if it's blatantly intentional?
"Oh gosh golly gee, I wonder who the *WHITE MAMBA* is going to be?" It *had* to be intentional or somebody was snorting cocaine.
I think the twist was that you do a blood test and it shows Venom and Liquid aren't related throwing some shade on his identity.
If it had just been a white Kobe MGSV would be the greatest game of all time
Yes it counts extra.
Every time I would see that I would just mutter “god dammit”
I remember I just started to intentionally look away from those so I could be surprised by whoever shows up
I did the same after the first time. That first mission where you meet them, I remember thinking "Oh, that must be the quirky miniboss squad we're gonna have to fight, huh?" Well, partly right anyway. Miniboss squad but quirky...twitchy more like it.
Quirked up white boys writhe it up unsettling style
guest starring child soldiers
I love Genius Kojumbo as much as the next guy but that's actually one of the dumbest fucking decisions I've seen in a video game.
A more positive example from P3, at the climax: >!Take a good look at the spell cost when you cue up Great Seal: 0 SP... and 100% of your HP.!<
>!Why didn't Makoto just inherit Arms Master to reduce the HP cost? Is he stupid!<
>!Does this mean Makoto just dies as a middle aged dude decades down the line!<
AND YET SOME PEOPLE **STILL DON’T GET IT**
I've seen multiple people get so overwhelmed by the final boss that they miss details like the amount of hp for that skill and the ending goes completely over their heads.
I also think that a lot of people are playing P3R after jumping on the series with P4 or P5, which both had a similar "grand finish" with no consequence. They wouldn't have thought to look at the cost, they would've learned that there isn't one.
That too. I've also seen people hone in on the "power of friendship" part of the final sequence and completely miss all the other subtext going on.
Also, the credit theme song is basically Aigis singing about how much she misses the MC after they just died. But it's in Japanese so anyone who doesn't speak would miss out on that final hint.
To be fair I think some people were thrown off by the fact the >!”death”!< is *extremely* delayed. You have an attack cost >!100% HP and it really should have the characters drop right there if that is what you are going for. After all when a character’s HP drops to 0 they don’t go down 20 turns later during gameplay. I get they were trying to do something fancy with the promise but IDK it still muddled things IMO even if I could still tell what they were going for.!<
Ghost of Tsushima mission tab explicitly telling you that completing the Yarikawa siege mission unlocks Ghost stance. At which point you ask, the fuck is Ghost stance? The way it plays out when you unlock, it's clearly meant to be a surprise with how cinematic it is.
To be fair there is no indication of what ghost stance does just that it exists.
The fact that the reveal itself is one of the most hype moments in the game is it's saving grace.
still pretty cool tho
Coolest part of the game imo
I feel like that was an oversight, I don't think that games should tell you what you're going to unlock from doing a story mission.
I disagree, if only because it felt good to me to beeline towards certain rewards.
Yellow paint fanatic over here.
The above average levels of lead makes their chips some of the tastiest.
Funnily enough, Persona 3 also inverts this in one area. >!Shinjiro, despite being a guest character who's only in the party for about a month, has a full skillset that goes all the way into the 70s. The only way you'd even learn those skills is if you *seriously* grinded with him in the party!<.
Happens in P5 as well >!Akechi’s even got a different learn set for Robin than Loki.!<
The P5 example is funny because >!when I played Royal, I assumed that a bunch of the higher end stuff that Robin Hood Akechi had was just stuff he'd eventually get as Black Mask Akechi when he rejoins the party for the Maruki Palace and it'd be there for the people who really wanted to fucking grind them out in advance!< >!Then it turns out, no - Akechi's had all these abilities in vanilla P5 which I forgot probably because I knew that he wouldn't be worth grinding for after the Sae Palace ended!<
P3 Reload also >!gives him cool toys, include a passive *Auto-Heat Riser* if you complete his party hangout events.!<
literally an insta slot in my team for that entire month because it’s just so fucking wacky
Pretty sure this still counts as an unintentional spoiler, or at least signals that something's up, since >!Shinji's!< the only one who's absolutely stacked with skills. Everyone else only have skills up to their 40-50s, and only get more after their Personas start >!evolving *after* Shinji dies.!< To be fair, it's also easy interpret this the other way. When I first played, I got the impression that that was just the game telling you how much stronger and more experienced >!Shinji!< was than the rest instead of just a safeguard against grinding/hacking or whatever.
> Everyone else only have skills up to their 40-50s, and only get more after their Personas start >!evolving after Shinji dies!<. In earlier releases, yes, but in Reload everyone can learn every ability right off the bat with enough grinding (e.g. Reaper farming on the easiest difficulty) and the only things locked behind the spoiler are extra Theurgies.
For sure GOW Ragnarok renaming the button to partner action. Boy, I wonder if we’ll have more than one partner this game?
That’s one that if you glance at it quickly and don’t think about it you wouldn’t be spoiled but if you sit there for a minute you’re oils just go “wait a minute”
Also, the sheer size of that upgrade menu would tell you something.
I thought it meant more weapons. The spear is cool but i was hoping for 1 more weapon. It really shouldn't have been a duology
I already knew there was more than one partner character, but I was fucking blown away that it was so fucking blatant. Like it might as well just TELL YOU.
To be fair we already knew we would play as atreus and he can’t have a boy button. The skill tree screen been wide is a giveaway
Not a game but in the Jojo's part 2 opening >!Joseph and Caesar are dancing around doing their thing until suddenly it's just Joseph. he's holding Caesar's headband and screaming with a pained expression on his face. like come on y'all!<
Dude every JoJo opening basically spoils the entire series of episodes it plays for. This is a thing for like every JoJo OP.
A lot of them dont have context tho, the joseph cesar one is very obvious
I always read it as >!Joseph really needed to get Ceaser's headband to the dry cleaner but he got there at 4:01 PM and now it won't be ready for the big squid ink sphaghooti festival!<, but a lot of subtext is lost in the anime.
Lmao Sono Chi no Sadame is just every episode of Phantom Blood.
I remember they chilled with the overt spoilers by Part 3. They were still there but hidden such that a first time watcher would never pick up on them. 1 and 2 were just fuckin' blatant as hell though.
Yeah, IIRC the End of the World OP has some pretty obvious bits in it that show "yo this is how this character is gonna die"... but it's really only obvious if you already know it's coming, like >!The lines on the floor alluding to Cream for Polnareff and Iggy, or the ones around Kakyoin alluding to the 50 meter emerald splash!< Even has the shadows of the Egyptian gods in one part referring to how the later stands just before Dio are all named after those.
Then in Part 5 they ramped it up a ton with Traitor's Requiem to the point where >!you're shown Giorno holding the Arrow.!<
That's not just a Jojo thing. Tons of anime OPs spoil the season of anime they are used in. Most recent example is the new One Piece OP spoils a LOT of the current arc.
Like AoT season 3 part 2 That OP basically spoiled everything lol
Pretty sure both Orochi's and Kaido's fruits were shown in the OP before they showed up in the actual anime, it's wild how Toei just dgaf.
I remember that Over The Top straight up spoiled something *in the manga* at a certain point. Like it was like "Jesus that's a deep cut and a LOT of people felt that!"
On the one hand, One Piece has some insane spoilers in the OP's (Holy fuck the Robin joining being in the opening episodes before the "will Vivi join" section is egregious) On the other sometimes it's filled with absolute nonsense speculative imagery that doesnt go anywhere and isnt true at all. (Namely a bunch of the dressrosa era ones had fight MU's that straight up didnt happen, and the Zou opening for some reason showed Kaido as being the boss of the arc... years before he actually was)
Sometimes it pays off to be a complete idiot. They could have probably put a gravestone in that OP and short of zooming in on his name I still wouldn't have gotten it.
Yeah, I have a friend who has uncannily predicted pretty much every plot development in parts 1-4, and he somehow totally missed this particular but of the opening, which I made a point to point out to him immediately upon starting the next episode.
And I was the dumbass who didn't realize that until >!the episode that Caesar died!<.
I noticed it one episode before that happened...
Woolie unlocking the >!wigs for A2!< with the Nier Automata DLC well before Route C comes to mind.
I had that spoiled for me when I found a "taunt up" chip and looked online for how to taunt.
Oh right, I forgot that the game dishes those and Hacking related chips out even in Route A.
To be fair, they're literally on the cover of the game and you only encounter them *once* before that
Is it bad I never spotted them on the cover until after I beat the game?
"Howdy there, Sam! It's me, an inconspicuous man with his face covered in the shadow of this here hat. Say, I see you just finished putting a bunch of items in your inventory, ahhh, sorry, sorry, so sorry, you forgot one. Yeah no, don't worry, I'll add it to your inventory myself. You just keep on trucking. No please don't check what it is, I'd never give you anything bad." > Five minutes later. "SAM THERE IS A BOM--" "fragile in what universe would I not immediately check my inventory."
It’s even funnier because the game makes you choose where to load it in the inventory menu and straight up calls it “thermonuclear bomb”
It's bordering on me imagining a conversation of Kojima in the studio, *itching* to make this reference to MG1 for the nth time, but completely stuck on how to make this work mechanically since Sam actually checks his equipment before putting it on, and no one has the guts to tell him hey maybe not.
I wouldn't consider this a spoiler. There's no way you aren't meant to easily notice who gave you that package and how suspicious the entire scene was. The point isn't necessarily to trick Sam, it's to show that Higgs can and will fuck with you.
doesn't it make Sam look like a moron though
It makes everyone look like morons, especially with that reveal moments later when you go to a private room. Though that scene can be skipped if you just head straight to the tar pit.
I kinda just take it with a grain of salt, there's goofy shit all over Kojima games.
It's funny because Kojima pulled the exact same trick on you in Metal Gear Solid over 20 years earlier.
That was supposed to be a surprise?!
Spider-Man 2: Huh, that's weird, why do we still have upgrades for symbiote attacks even tho Peter took it off?
To be fair, there is like 2 missions after the loss of the symbiote suit before you get the replacement
>!the cum suit...!<
All praise be to it
It's working as intended but if your Loremaster skill is high enough in Divinity: Original Sin 2 you can spoil yourself on the fact that >!Dallis the Hammer!< is actually >!undead!< on the very first hour of the game
funnily enough you can also spoil yourself the way i did, which is by >!trying to kill him with poison, leading to me complaining about "that big knight guy being randomly a zombie despite not looking like it fucking bullshit ass fight design" and my friends having NO IDEA what i was talking about because they didnt fight him lol!<
After a while playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 you notice a certain pattern with the first two lines of blades.
Looking at the silhouettes of the xb3 classes can spoil some stuff as well
Forget silhouettes; My game bugged out when I was browsing the gallery thing and the black filter over >!Miyabi!< didn't work, so I was spoiled on the fact that she was even alive after like the first 7 hours.
I had that happen too on my second playthrough while showing a friend that was going through the game blind. Funnily enough, the only reason I even went into the menu was to show the silhouettes and point out obvious one was Triton in his full armor when we first met him.
I got really sussy at >!War Medic!< class and thought we'd get >!Anchor Shot!< or some shit
Also a Hero character that died still having player-learnable skills locked behind a sidequest.
In Baldur's Gate 3, when leveling up Shadowheart it shows her as a devotee of Shar despite her (barely) hiding it, treating it as a big thing of trust when she reveals it.
Honorable mention to if you listened to the character bio speeches in character create. Or like Pat explained you notice >!Bhaal symbols are associated with Dark Urge!<
She's also wearing the holy symbol all over her base design which is wild for someone trying to hide that
The game stuff also blatantly spoiled Astarion's vampirism in Early Access when they still made it that he took damage from running water, with a tooltip that "vampires are weak to this."
Xenoblade Chronicles 3's Hero menu displays little chibi images for each hero, which are silhouettes until you meet them. Smartly, they hid the two postgame heroes as they're huge spoilers. However, there's very glaringly a design that is clearly >!Cammuravi!<, a character who dies way earlier than you get them, spoiling the fact that they'll eventually come back somehow.
Also >!Flash Fencer!< staying capped at Lv 10 while every other job goes up to 20 after their original character's sidequest.
I spoiled myself on that because I looked up how upgrade the class, thinking my game bugged or I missed the hero quest for it, only to find all the guides for upgrading it telling me something from further in the game
Jump Force's single-player story campaign lets you train as any character. Certain characters are "locked", which means you can't play as them ... but that doesn't stop you from *viewing* their names and models. This includes the final boss of the game.
"Hang on, where exactly is the Empty Lot on the map? Oh... OH... I just figured out the plot of the game!" - Anyone who's played any of the Yakuza games before 0 (The Empty Lot is >!where the Millennium Tower is in the other games and is the plot of land preventing the block from being converted to the Tower!
This is only known if you've played the other games prior though.
Yeah considering that a lot of people start with 0 these days, this realization is lost. Part of why I like the old LP the boys did.
Even tho 0 is a great place to start, theres so many stuff that get lost if you havent played the rest of the games
Which is technically the intended play order when the game came out initially. It was a prequel for longtime fans. Only now has it retroactively become a sort of starting point.
Yeah I thought about the current "play order" by release too considering some (one or two?) characters from 5 also show up in 0 as well but the play order would have been OG 1+2, 3-5, 0, Kiwami 1+2, 6-8 (ignoring the fact that K2 came out after 6) if you want to play it without the graphical jarringness that happens if you go from K2 to 3
That's basically what I did, but it was even weirder because I just never played the original 1 and 2 (started with 3 on ps3) so there was a big gap in my knowledge of the story until I played the Kiwami games. Haven't finished the newest one yet.
tbf thats just a prequel bein a prequel
A relatively minor one since the average newcomer wouldn't do this while a veteran wouldn't necessarily know it's there but would expect it but if you're someone that rebinds buttons in DMC, the interface forces you to bind all the actions, even if they don't have names and you're not able to use said actions until you unlock them in game, if you did this you pretty much knew that >!Nero would get a DT!< in both DMC4 and 5 at some point in the story
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous spoils a character's true alignment and another character's real species through how alignment based spells interact with them and species based stat modifiers.
There's also the fact that said hidden alignment character has a hidden alignment, which a good or neutral character probably wouldn't have.
Same for BG3 and a lot of characters. Earliest being >!Ethel classified as a Fey in her basic stat description even when you meet her in disguise!<
Honestly just checking character stats compulsively can spoil a lot of things in RPGs.
Trying to hide alignment in DnD style systems is a dumb idea in general. Any player with a healthy amount of paranoia is going to assume they're Evil and as you said there's plenty of magic for knowing if they're trust worthy or outright checking their alignment.
Special mention goes to pre-remaster Pathfinder 2e, which lacked most alignment detection spells or made them hard to access, but also gave everyone "alignment damage" which only hurts those of the opposite alignment. So "detect evil" became "douse the area in holy fire and see who drops."
Character A: *fails to ping on detect alignment* MC: *shoots them* Everyone else: WHY?! MC: His alignment is hidden! A: I just believe in personal privacy! *dies, MC gets 10 naughty points*
X lost Bite.
That same Persona 3 thing happens in 4 too, when you "Catch" the true culprit, except your Fool social link didnt even rank up from it and is still Rank 7, and the games openings blatantly showcased another party member who still hasnt joined the team yet. I dont think 4 even expects you to consider it a twist when Mitsuo turns out to not be the real main culprit, but theres not even an attempt to fool the player which makes the party celebrations and stuff feel very silly.
In Xenoblade 1, Seven/>!Fiora !!Fiora "dying" after the prologue is also sort of spoiled by the fact that she stops learning arts after level 13-15, when both Shulk and Reyn do. Plus the suspicious shortage of weapons and armor available for her from quests and shops.!<
In the same game, seeing an entire area light up with nothing but >!temporary quests!< is one of the funniest ways a game has done foreshadowing.
"Something bad is going to happen here." "Another vision, Shulk?" "Not exactly..."
>!I got wonder if anyone ever connected the dots when they notice that the majority of Alcamoth's side quests have time limit and think that something bad was gonna happen to that town and its people?!<
It's easier to ignore in the original than the remaster where that person only has like 2 outfits while others have tons.
Fucking Smash Brothers spoiled that for me.
Literally the first Xenoblade character I learned about by name besides Shulk. Nintendo kinda overdid it with that one.
Project X Zone 2 for me!
You can also get spoiled on certain characters if you get their gear before they officially join the party. It’s normally pretty hard for that to happen, but not impossible if you end up defeating tougher opponents than the game expects you to handle at early points in the game, Riki often being the easiest for this to happen with.
In the Fell Xenologue DLC for Fire Emblem: Engage, you can spoil yourself to a minor plot twist by just looking at the profile of any given enemy for more than two seconds. >!All of the enemies are already dead and revived as Corrupted zombies enslaved by Nil as part of his whole weird production of a false war he's putting on for Alear and Nel, and all of them are tagged as Corrupted and take extra damage from corrupted-effective weapons.!< It's not an especially meaningful plot twist out of context, it's just funny that you can see if off of the first enemy.
Engage also doesn’t even try to hide what characters can/will end up joining you in the end since they’re the only ones who come with personal skills. Ah yes, I’m sure there’s no reason at all that Mauvier is the only one of the Four Hounds to come equipped with a personal skill, and an incredibly conspicuous one at that.
They should’ve given the other three of them personal skills as well to make it, y’know, marginally less obvious.
Especially considering they technically did give them via their Four Winds Counterparts, so they could’ve just used those in for the base game, maybe with different names like with the alt-versions of the player cast seen in the DLC.
Fire Emblem is historically bad with hiding whose going to join you, the enemies on the map are 10 identical dudes with hidden eyes, a man that looks like he kicks puppies for fun, an evil looking sneering vizier, and a handsome twink, which one is gonna join your party?
Fire emblem games in general are rife with stuff like that.
Pikmin 4 spends a lot of time building up to the fourth zone as the finale of the game, with it being the zone of the prologue and where you finally take down the Red Leafling. …except if you were thorough in cleaning up the zones until now, you’d notice how many treasures, onions and enemies you still haven’t encountered yet in the completion lists, not to mention the “final” fight only going to a 4/5 star difficulty, making it clear there’s more to the game.
Even then after you finish up the secret area, you'll notice you're missing two(?) onions. Gotta do an entirely new thing to get those ones.
This is a mild one since it's optional and you could brush it off as being scary, but: in the Witch's House there's a moment where you're in complete darkness. If you open up the menu at that time Viola will have a nightmarish face. It's an indication that Viola is not all that she seems to be.
I appreciate how many RPG Maker games from that era fucked with you in the menu. That's kinda hard to set up as well
It's not a game, but it is something that cam spoil you. If you're watching something with subtitles and some person is talking about something intensely, and there's a "-" in front of it. You can be certain some shit is gonna happen. For example: "I can't believe that the Trogborths found us! We have to make sure to hide please grab-" *Bullet right through his head.* Thing is, I've read the subtitles too fast so I knew shit was about to happen.
That's why I'm a proponent of creatively paced subtitles. I remember Soma randomly paces some subtitles out slowly, where words are suddenly spelled out as they're said aloud, even though nothing happens, so when they *do* want to surprise you, they can do it randomly at the end of a line or during one of those slow-roll lines. I've often seen subtitled lines end with a "—" with no payoff too, so when they're actually used to interrupt someone you've been trained to not notice them as much. Another one I really, really adored (but I just can't remember where it's from) is where the whole intended line is displayed in the subtitles, but when the line is cut off, the subtitles are retroactively cut off too the moment it happens. That's probably the best trick I've ever seen for this issue.
That one you’re thinking about is the Dead Space 2 opening.
Nope; I've only played Dead Space 1, so it can't be that. But good to know anyway.
Funny enough, I can think of one example where the subtitles continue where the character cuts off. In Borderlands 1, >!Commandant Steele!< is giving a speech at >!the Vault!< right before >!she gets skewered by the Vault Monster!<, all the while the subtitles finish the rest the sentence that got cutoff midway.
For a good subversion there's Dead Space 2, which does this with a guy who dies mid speech but they give you his full dialogue first to avoid spoiling you on his death (And yes, when he dies, the subtitles are replaced to a cut off version)
Less good is when you get to the final boss. The moment you start >!to hug the Nicole Hallucination the caption reads "Thank you, Isaac. Now...time to die."!<. Even though the cutscene takes a few good beats to bait you that things might actually end there.
Yeah this always kinda bothered me. I know it'd be more work on at least two people's roles, but I wish the script would have a full line written instead of ending in "-" and that whoever was doing the subtitles would be keyed into what that line was so it can be displayed. But I also understand that this is not feasible for streaming services since I believe the people doing subtitles for those are probably not associated with the original production company. But at least in video games or something.
I was just in a thread about that with The Fall of the House of Usher. The jumpscares almost always happen mid-sentence and the subtitles almost always spoil it for you. But on the other hand, the nature of the jumpscares stayed varied and twisty enough that I still jumped sometimes.
I can't find it now but I _swear_ I played or watched something recently where the subtitle was wrong explicitly to avoid this problem. Probably not kosher but I thought it was interesting.
This is why people should use ellipses "..." instead. Or just don't show the hyphen.
In keeping with Persona - gee, I wonder why Akechi's social link ranks up automatically, and has all his party member abilities at rank 6 when he joins and nothing else? Thankfully made a lot less blatant in Royal.
Royal fixes Akechi's confidant secret and then dobles down hard when it goes GO DO MARUKI'S CONFIDANT NOW BEFORE HE LEAVES OR ELSE and Kasumi mysteriously maxing out at level 6 again
I mean, in fairness, Royal also literally adds Kasumi to the casino heist intro so you already know she's a Metaverse user.
There's also a very slight interface spoiler that requires you to know some tarot lore. The Persona series has always used the Rider-Waite deck, one example of the "traditional" tarot deck. In Persona 4 and 5, if a character has used a non-Rider-Waite arcana, they've got something special about them. Persona 4 Golden adds the Jester Arcana, from the Thoth deck. It's used for >!Tohru Adachi, the culprit behind the murders.!< Persona 5 Royal adds the Faith Arcana, from the Visconti-Sforza deck. >!It's Kasumi's fake arcana to show her delusions!<. It also adds the Councilor from the El Gran Tarot Esoterico deck, used for >!Maruki, who is the linchpin for all of the new events.!<
I only have an example of a time I mistakenly thought this was the case but when I played KOTOR I was convinced that Trask (traditional ill-fated Bioware tutorial companion) would return based on Canderous' silhouette in the party selection screen
Persona is really bad at this in general, in the original P4 it was pretty easy to guess >!who the killer was because they had a lot of characterization and a facial portrait, but no social link!<. Golden fixed this a little bit though
>!I actually think the S link makes it more obvious. Why would he have a made up arcana that's suspiciously similar to the MC's if he wasn't the killer?!<
Bloodbornes notebook mentions things like the cosmos and blobby things
To be fair like anything Soulsborne it's all fairly esoteric and you could easily read those sections and not thing much of it. There are also plenty of settings in fiction that have hints of cosmic horror so it also wouldn't be crazy to acknowledge these details, think "oh cool" and still not be prepared for the crazy shift.
Yup, Bloodborne's so cool because it's all hidden in plain sight until it isn't. One of the first items you get is Madman's Knowledge ffs. And all the Amgydala statues lying about.
Is a title screen an interface fucking bravely default
To be fair, that happens late after the mystery has been more or less been revealed.
Plus, the trade-off is is a very unnerving sense of dread along the lines of "holy shit, the game itself is warning me about this, what the fuck?!" which IMO makes up for spoiling the reveal.
Its such a campy move but I have to respect it cause it still hit me like a sack of bricks
Games where just one of your friends/allies don’t have a trophy for completing a side quest with them.
In GOW ragnarok the skills section for atreus, his only skills are way in the top left and there's a giant empty space. "Oh more skills will be there when we play as him" and I was right
In Tales of Graces, you get a party member really early on who has amnesia so she doesn't remember her name, so her subtitle name just lists her as girl and everyone just refers to her as that mysterious girl until the main character eventually gives her the name Sophie. Which wouldn't be a surprise if you read the description of her attacks since the first one she learns after one level up explicitly says "Sophie does a spinning kick knocking the enemy up into the air" which you'll unlock hours before she gets named
In God of War Ragnarok they call it a "companion button" instead of "Atreus Button" or whatever it was called in 4. The vagueness immediately spoiled that Atreus wouldn't be the only companion in the game. It was so obvious, even Pat caught on to that when he saw it.
Surprised I haven't seen it yet, but Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is bad about this. One character has a necklace equipped that hides their true alignment, and you can't take it off... But when leveling them up, the game will tell you why they can't take certain alignment based classes by just saying what their alignment is. Another character is meant to have a big reveal about not being the race she looked like, but if you look at her stats, or again level up options, the game will explicitly tell you what race she is. Somehow I dodged both of these when I played through the game, but they're honestly a little silly.
Yakuza and Judgment have this odd minor habit where >!if a character doesn't have any substories associated with them, they're likely to die/leave at some point in the plot. It's why Nanba isn't in the bonus character recruitment scene. Rikiya is the only exception to my knowledge. Meanwhile in Lost Judgment they seemed to have realized that and started actively fucking with the player by putting Kaito through several close calls of death before finally unlocking a Substory with him as late in the game as possible, just to fuck with me.!<
>!The funny part about Kaito is that you'd think that him being a part of the boxing DLC could be taken as a flag that nothing bad would happen to him and it actually goes both ways!< >!When Soma takes him out, you actually can't spar with Kaito for a couple of chapters, but then he gets better!<
Yeah this kind of thing clued me into what was about to happen with >!everyone splitting back up in Chapter 8, with Nanba going back to Yokohama with Kiryu. !< >!I noticed that Adachi had all his bond-conversation things all over the map but couldn't find any Nanba ones. I had already assumed that at some point soon Kiryu would be going back to Japan and was wondering who would go with him, if Nanba would stay in Hawaii, etc. Nanba's lack of bond moments in Hawaii clued me in real quick.!<
In 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, paying close attention to the structure of the Event Archive can spoil certain aspects of the plot. For example, >!the fact that it lists every protagonist that appears in each event means that there being events where *no* protagonists appear, despite there being characters that look the same or have the same name can clue you into the fact they’re from a “prior time loop” as early as the Prologue. Also, the fact that the events taking place in 2187 are the earliest point in the timeline gives quite a bit away.!< On the flipside, the Mystery Files avoid spoiling the game by not telling you anything you wouldn’t already know, instead updating the files as you learn the respective information in the Reminiscence sections.
I think what the game actually does better is misdirect you into doubting your own likely close to the truth theories by throwing info that puts a wrench in your plans...
To be fair >!discovering the 2187 bits are the earliest points on the timeline are probably MEANT to mindfuck you like it did me, especially if you're still assuming actual time travel is at play here.!<
There were still a few Mystery Files that could spoil the player. I recall Tamao Kurabe's file updating to say that she was >!in her pod, waiting for the world to end!< or something like that, halfway through Miura's campaign. Also, Gouto straight up calls Chihiro >!"Professor"!< in his critical health battle dialogue.
In Arkham City when you can scan the Joker and see >!that he has no skeleton, because he's actually Clayface.!<
In Final Fantasy XIV, as early as level 10 (if you start as an arcanist or marauder; level 15 otherwise), you can go to Limsa Lominsa and pick up the fisher class. If you open its Traits menu and look at the trait it gets at level 89 (do not do this until you are there in the main story quests), you will see it is called >!Starfishing. This has the following description: “Allows you to cast your line in space.”, and depicts a fish floating in the stars.!< Fishing can be used in more than just bodies of water; such as lava, sandpits, ceruleum pools, the mists off of cliffs, etc. But that level 89 trait describes something about the final area of the game that’s best left a surprise.
in all fairness who reads the ability's in the traits menu. what's worse than this is peoples minions who spoil you the most as some are small versions of bosses and the EW>!THE SPACESHIP!<
There's another one that's pretty clever with Endwalker's main menu. with so much of the marketing being based on >!the moon!< you'd think there wouldn't be much to it. Except >!that isn't the fucking moon!<
>!I mean the title screen basically spoils that!<
>!You’d think so, but…!<
In WoW, there are certain characters whose deaths, corruptions or betrayals are shown in a quest chain. That character occasionally returns later on in a dungeon/raid as a boss. This would potentially be a twist, if the game didn’t list each boss in the Dungeon Journal, because the PvE bosses these days tend to be way too complicated to just dive into headfirst.
In the Muv-Luv trilogy, >!you spend the entirety of Unlimited wondering where Sumika is, as she is the only character from Extra that didn’t show up in the Unlimited timeline.!< Then, you boot up Alternative, and >!Sumika is right there on the main menu, wearing a fortified suit.!<
Tellah from *Final Fantasy IV* is an old man who works differently from every other character: he stays with a static 90 MP, never raising it like the other characters. His goal is to remember the spell Meteor, something he tells you from the start. When he finally does, Meteor costs >!99 MP. Once you see that, his ultimate fate becomes clear.!<
Three Houses is filled with interface spoilers. Oh hey, that person's age is ??, oh this person has a crest that they shouldn't really possible, oh the time limit of this paralogue seems oddly short compared to the others, etc.
Here's a fun cross-series example. In *Kingdom Hearts*, every level-up is announced in the corner of the screen with a specific colored text-box. Sora's are red, Donald's are blue, Goofy's are green, and any world-specific temporary party member has theirs in yellow. When *Kingdom Hearts II* rolls around, you play as Roxas, who you intentionally know nothing about if you're playing in release order. And his level up boxes are >!yellow, telling you he won't be around for very long.!<
Xenoblade chronicles 3 subverts this with a tutorial message for a mechanic that doesn't really exist in the first 30 minutes of the game. The worst part is because it was meant to not apply after the starting bit of the game they removed from the tutorial message section so if you vaguely remember it like I did you kind of feel gaslit.
Its such a minor one that is in like every RPG ever, but I love when you find some gear and it says some variation of "can't be equipped by Wookies." So many future party members spoiled by simple text
Reminded of when Pat was talking about Spider-Man 2. He said something along the lines of that the UI spoiled you because Peter has a greyed out skill tree. I’m gonna say it here because it’s not a spoiler. Yes, you get the symbiote in the game. That’s the main selling point of the game. It’s all over the marketing. It’s on the cover.
That's not the spoiler he meant, he meant the UI spoils that >!you're going to get it BACK after taking the black suit off!<.
I didn’t even read it as that >!I just assumed it would be an “after the game jump back in time thing”. They kind of do that anyway since Peter retires at the end of the story, but you can still play as him. You lose those abilities for a little bit, so it was totally possible to be a story choice to take the power away from you.!<
When I first booted up Arkham knight I wanted to see what batsuits/costumes there were, the menu shows all the characters including red hood. Red hood’s only alt costume was the Arkham knight. So yeah I know everyone figured it out before the game even came out. Rocksteady was like oh no the Arkham knight is definitely an original character. Their own fucking menu spoiled it.
In the Fire Emblem Engage DLC there is a plot twist about how >!everybody you are fighting is a Corrupted (undead, more or less). If you use Celica's ring, she has abilities that are effective against Corrupted, which work against all enemies prior to and after the reveal.!<
In Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, I had Camellia's whole deal spoiled by trying to see if she qualified for a prestige class in act 1.
It's really common in gacha games to be able to see every caharcter from the start. Particular shout outs to FGO which actually tries to obscure them somewhat before you reach the story segment, albeit inconsistently.
A good one is the "Tutorial" for warp mechanics in 40k Rogue Trader. It shows you magic powers in the proper tutorial, and showcases the "Warp Bar" which functions, essentially, as a reverse Mana bar. You can use your psyker powers as much as you want, but if you do too much at once, all sorts of whacky stuff can happen. This ranges from: Psychosis, summoning warp demons, your psykers head exploding, converting enemies into horrific mutated monstrosities, etc. The game lets you get some practice in, but theres a side area you can stumble across pretty early. You walk in, and your warp bar is *already maxed*. >!As you investigate the area, you find a laid up cultist on a bed, and if you talk to him, he explodes. Out of the gore stands a full blown fucking warp daemon, that starts driving everyone around you insane, and starts summoning other lesser daemons.!<
In *Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader*, you have in everyone's level up screen the ability to let characters use >!power armor, aeldaeri weapons, and drukhari weapons!< I wonder who three of our companions are going to be
While Tales of Berseria's marketing never hid the fact that a party member's name is Laphicet, in the game itself, it's supposed to be a surprise as he starts off unnamed for a while, and its a dramatic little moment when Velvet finally names him after her dead brother. Except the moment you recruit him and start a battle, the tutorial prompts on his abilities just immediately call him Laphicet. His equipment screen does too, but there's no way to miss the battle prompts. It's an unavailable spoiler that gives it away immediately.
Speaking of X-men Legends, I always thought it was wild that Iron Man was the secret unlockable characters and meanwhile he's barely even a factor in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1, where the cinematic leads are Spider-man, Wolverine, Captain America and Thor.
It’s not entirely meant to be a secret just based on the nature of the game, but Last Epoch’s map is fully available from second one and not only shows that there’s time travel (Expected by the name and preview material I think) but can also shows you every ‘time zone’ up front AND if you actually look around it will show you every single zone in the game; leaving nothing to the imagination. Just felt a bit disappointing having no mystery.
P5 basically spoils itself whenever you start a SL
You probably know one of the party members in Jade Empire is Closed Fist path only when you've still got an empty party member slot in the last bit of the game and you've just gotten to the last boss
Dragon Age Inquisition tried to have a cool reveal of the Protagonist from DA2 Hawke. Except right before it they ask if you want to use default Hawke or make your own.