Some of the best detective stories of all time tend to hide things in plain sight, only for readers to be ashamed they didn’t see it right away. Anime openings tend to do this as well, spoiling things that will come later in the season that manga fans may catch, but new viewers could miss. Even the best RPGs that have touched PlayStation consoles have had obvious story bits spoiled upfront if players were paying attention.
Some players like playing the sleuth and guessing twists. Not all of these will be exactly riveting, but they are worth thinking about. Were they set up to wink at players, or were they oversights by the developers? It may be a secret they take to their graves. Either way, these plot points are complicated to discuss in length, but here are some good summaries.
Warning
There will be spoilers for the following examples.
Final Fantasy 8
The Guardian Forces
Final Fantasy 8’s version of Summons is called Guardian Forces, or GFs. Players can equip them to characters, Draw magic from monsters, and then equip the spells onto their GFs to raise stats instead of relying on equipment. It’s a beneficial system for warrior cadets like Squall, the protagonist, but there is a problem. If players spend time in the beginning talking to everyone at Balamb Garden and reading emails, they will learn about the downside involving memory loss as these GFs take up brain space. This helps set up the whole playable cast sharing collective amnesia over knowing each other as kids, which also involved a spell, but the GFs could be blamed just as much.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Gone Too Soon
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has a lot of wild revelations, and players could hypothetically predict the big one involving the entire world existing in a painting. That would take some heavy guessing upon the player, but one twist they could predict easily is the fate of Gustave, who begins as the protagonist. Each character has a skill tree, and his is pretty small compared to everyone else, meaning he could gain a boost later to expand it, or that he was gonna die. This small detail could have been enough to clue players into his death in the first act.
Dragon Quest 11: Echoes Of An Elusive Age
Talking About Tockles
Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age is a long game, and it takes the usual amount of time to get to the supposed final boss, which is about sixty hours. The strange thing is, there are little ghost-like creatures that players can see as they travel around, which they later learn are called Tockles. Players can’t talk to them, and no one acknowledges their existence, as only the player can see them. By the time players get to the final fight, and they aren’t addressed, or even long before that, players could have guessed they were tied into a big revelation, which they were. After this boss fight ends poorly, players can talk to the head Tockle to go back in time, to set things right, easily adding another twenty to thirty hours to the experience.
Fallout 4
Where Is My Baby?
Fallout 4 lets players create a female and a male character in the beginning, which is set before the bombs drop, and then players can choose which one to main. This happy couple also has a son, Shaun, and when all heck breaks loose, players jump into a cryochamber, and their spouse jumps into one with Shaun.
During cryosleep, players will wake up, see two people open their spouse’s pod, kill them, and then take Shaun. After passing out, players wake up and embark on a quest to find their baby in their newly discovered post-apocalyptic predicament. But, given that cryosleep can last years, players probably figured out their child was going to be an old codger by the time they saw him again.
Final Fantasy 10
Dreams Of The Faith
Final Fantasy 10 opens with Tidus playing Blitzball in his home of Zanarkand, which is then attacked by a giant tidal wave and monsters. After fighting for his life, Tidus wakes up away from his home, and when he finds civilization again, Yuna and her Guardians explain that it’s impossible he was from Zanarkand because it was destroyed a thousand years ago. It’s a mystery, and some players may think there is a multi-dimensional or time travel situation going on, but it’s even darker than some fans may guess. Because it’s established early that humans, who are dead, can still take on a corporeal form as a Dream of the Faith, they may figure out that Tidus is essentially a ghost.
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This article originally appeared on GameRant and is republished here with permission.
