8 Awesome Video Game Plot Twists
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8 "Awesome" Video Game Plot Twists
Final Fantasy VII
The twist: The death of Aeris...
Quite frankly on my first play through I was pissed off with that "plot twist" after grinding hours in Aeris amounted to fuck all. I will take your use of your word "shocking" in a fairly negative way.
Final Fantasy VII
The twist: The death of Aeris...
Quite frankly on my first play through I was pissed off with that "plot twist" after grinding hours in Aeris amounted to fuck all. I will take your use of your word "shocking" in a fairly negative way.
Okay, no. This is not how plot "twists" go. A plot twist is "a radical change in the expected direction or outcome of the plot of a novel, film, television series, comic, video game, or other work of narrative"
Meaning the game has to lead you on for a while, then change.
KOTOR and Revan is a plot twist because the game leads you to believe you are not him. Revan is "dead" and when talking about your character's past, you reference a family and life before joining the military. So when they reveal that none of that is true, its a twist.
Likewise in SH2. You are lead to believe Mary died of natural causes. And when its revealed James killed her, thus plot twist.
Samus Aran being a chick isn't a plot twist because the game never leads you to believe she's not. You're never called he, or named as "Randy". No one says Sir or asks you how's the hammer hanging. It may have been unexpected, but neither is a jump scare and those aren't plot twists.
Likewise Aeris dying. Not a twist so much as a plot point because the game doesn't lead you to believe she can be saved or that she's immortal. She dies but seeings how the game never implied she couldn't be killed, its not really a radical change in direction. Because there was no misdirection! A plot twist would have been Aeris faked her death with Sephiroth's help and has been his wife and partner in crime this whole time.
THAT is a twist.
And GLaDOS...I'm not sure its a twist so much as an ironic quirk of fate. Because she's not on your side so much as against the other dude. Its not like had GLaDOS been a giant T-1000 instead of a potato she wouldn't have killed you. It would have been better to use Wheatley as the bad guy twist, because he's set up to be nice and GLaDOS is his enemy.
And NO mention of the Bioshock twist? Would you kindly fix that.
Meaning the game has to lead you on for a while, then change.
KOTOR and Revan is a plot twist because the game leads you to believe you are not him. Revan is "dead" and when talking about your character's past, you reference a family and life before joining the military. So when they reveal that none of that is true, its a twist.
Likewise in SH2. You are lead to believe Mary died of natural causes. And when its revealed James killed her, thus plot twist.
Samus Aran being a chick isn't a plot twist because the game never leads you to believe she's not. You're never called he, or named as "Randy". No one says Sir or asks you how's the hammer hanging. It may have been unexpected, but neither is a jump scare and those aren't plot twists.
Likewise Aeris dying. Not a twist so much as a plot point because the game doesn't lead you to believe she can be saved or that she's immortal. She dies but seeings how the game never implied she couldn't be killed, its not really a radical change in direction. Because there was no misdirection! A plot twist would have been Aeris faked her death with Sephiroth's help and has been his wife and partner in crime this whole time.
THAT is a twist.
And GLaDOS...I'm not sure its a twist so much as an ironic quirk of fate. Because she's not on your side so much as against the other dude. Its not like had GLaDOS been a giant T-1000 instead of a potato she wouldn't have killed you. It would have been better to use Wheatley as the bad guy twist, because he's set up to be nice and GLaDOS is his enemy.
And NO mention of the Bioshock twist? Would you kindly fix that.
I know everyone likes to claim they saw KOTOR's twist coming a mile away, but it caught me completely by surprise. I remember being thrilled on account of it being the first Star Wars story to totally blindside me since the time I first watched The Empire Strikes Back.
The hints are there of course (some of them rather obvious in hindsight), but I only caught them on subsequent playthroughs because I knew what to expect beforehand. Also I was a teenager at the time, so make of that what you will...
The hints are there of course (some of them rather obvious in hindsight), but I only caught them on subsequent playthroughs because I knew what to expect beforehand. Also I was a teenager at the time, so make of that what you will...
Yeah the KOTOR twist was a good one as I should of seen it coming. I found it werid how our character who is an adult is training to be a Jedi especially when it was made clear that Jedi training starts from an early age (Luke being an exception).
Professor Layton and the Lost Future. Basically the whole thing.
Future Layton is in fact mad scientist Dimitri, but the Layton he captured was his ex nemesis Don Paolo in disguise, and you didn't travel in time at all but were sent to an underground city, and the real villain was a guy named Clive all along, who wanted to destroy London with his mecha to get revenge on Bill Hawks for causing the explosion which killed his parents and Layton's lover, except she didn't die, she was sent to the future and pretended to be her sister before the time travel effect wears off and she returns to the past.
I'm pretty sure most of these aren't plot twists. Like the death of Aerith, yes it was sad, and yes no one saw it coming, but it's not a plot twist.
You critiziced Dead Space and Bioshock Infinite's twists and yet you list COD 4's as one of the better ones?, even worse, you don't even mention Bioshock's or Spec Ops' twists?... Why not put Lords of Shadow's twist in there as well?, that one is just as "shocking".
Yup, I'm not taking these seriously anymore.
To be fair though, Kotor's should be higher on the list.
Yup, I'm not taking these seriously anymore.
To be fair though, Kotor's should be higher on the list.
Actually, the NES game manual [http://gamesdbase.com/Media/SYSTEM/Nintendo_NES/manual/Formated/Metroid_-_1986_-_Nintendo.pdf] constantly referred to Samus as a "he", so the reveal literally came out of nowhere, but I'm glad Nintendo kept the character as a female.Silentpony said:
Samus is a girl, huh? I just thought rule 63 fan art was really popular in the fan base./jk
Aeris's death is overrated. We saw Sephy shish kababbing Aeris, and her spirit directly influencing the Lifestream, as soon as she left the party. What about Tella, Galuf, General Leo, or Reddas? [small]Queen Brahne, after coming to her senses and apologizing to her daughter?[/small] OK, most of them were bit characters, but they did leave an impression just as much as the flower girl.
Aeris's death is overrated. We saw Sephy shish kababbing Aeris, and her spirit directly influencing the Lifestream, as soon as she left the party. What about Tella, Galuf, General Leo, or Reddas? [small]Queen Brahne, after coming to her senses and apologizing to her daughter?[/small] OK, most of them were bit characters, but they did leave an impression just as much as the flower girl.
What made COD4's twist so shocking was at the time, FPS's(and probably most video games) didn't kill the Player Character off in the middle of the game. Maybe at the end, the main character sacrifices himself or is put in a no-win situation(the "refusal" ending of half-life) but not in the first act. I imagine that everyone pretty much expected that Jackson's helicopter would either make it out of there in just the nick of time, or Jackson would survive the crash and somehow be saved from the explosion(maybe by hiding in a fridge or something).Rad Party God said:
It's just that now, killing PC's as part of the plot is now part of the standard video game set-pieces for "shocking twists" so it's not particularly interesting anymore. Notice how MW2 and MW3 tried to milk the same thing, with less and less effectiveness each time. MW2 kind of made up for it with the betrayal, but you couldn't really see that coming because there's almost no way to see it coming beforehand. That and the series got became obsessed with shooting down almost every helicopter you got into, and pretty much every time, the PC would survive.
Which one? The one about Ryan or the one about Atlas? I know that they happen around the same time, but arguably one is brilliant and the other one is rather "meh".Silentpony said:
Far as plot twists go, I still have to nominate either or both Baten Kaitos games. Though I admit, Origins' twist is partly banking off of the player playing the first game.
The game "999" for the DS and its sequel "Zero Escape" for the 3DS are full of plot twists. I won't ruin them here not even with spoiler tags. The gist of both of the games is that you and eight other people are trapped somewhere by a mysterious person named Zero. The nine prisoners have to work together to escape and find out why these events happened at all. The twists come from the fact that none of the nine people were grabbed at random as well as the reveal of who Zero really is.
I like Drakengard 3 and Neir's twists that completely change the context of the whole game.
Zero is trying to take responsibility for herself and save the world from her clones.
The shades you fight in Neir are actually the souls of humanity trying to get back to their bodies. You end up dooming humanity on your mission.
The shades you fight in Neir are actually the souls of humanity trying to get back to their bodies. You end up dooming humanity on your mission.
That's because it made no damn sense.Johnlives said:
OT: As much as I respect Silent Hill 2 and think the twist makes perfect sense... I did see it coming a mile away. As soon as I heard Mary was dead and James was looking for her in Silent Hill of all places I was sort of already suspecting the outcome. Plus, not long before I first played it I saw Lost Highway which had a similar "videotape" style build up and reveal.