A good story doesn't need a twist or a surprise to be considered good. Sometimes surprises or twists can make stories better, or at least they can help make a game more memorable. To mention a few '90s game twists would spoil things, but let's just say Final Fantasy 7 and Super Metroid are good examples.
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In the 2010s, it was seemingly a race for developers to add twists that would help define their experience over others. While these are all memorable, that doesn't mean they're all good. Some twists are a little more ghostly than most players wanted from their endings. That said, let's recap the biggest surprises and discuss their effectiveness.
There will be full spoilers ahead.
A lot of rain
A solid attempt at a twist
A lot of rain is an interactive thriller in which players try to catch a murderer and kidnapper called the Origami Killer. Players alternate between four characters, Ethan, Madison, and Norman, with Scott secretly being the killer.
When Ethan gets to the finale, when Ethan reaches Scott, who is holding his son captive, it's one of the wildest reveals on PS3. When you think about it, the plot doesn't make a lot of sense, which is why it ranks a little lower, but on first review, it couldn't have been a cooler twist.
Final Fantasy 15
The most depressing post yet
Final Fantasy 15 also has a somewhat muddled story that is somewhat happy for about half the game, or maybe even two-thirds of it. The last bit is full of misery and death, with a big revelation where the protagonist Noctis has to travel into the future, where he has aged and the whole world has been overrun by monsters.
He joins up with his three amigos, and together they take on the final boss, who kills them, but in turn saves the day. It is one of the darkest endings in the whole Final Fantasy.
Spec Ops: The Line
Main game
It is obvious that something is not right Spec Ops: The Lineas the group leader, Captain Walker, seems to keep having episodes. Players can chalk it up to exhaustion in the heat of battle, but eventually it will happen that the man they're trying to hunt down has been dead all along.
He was just a figment of Walker's imagination trying to cope with the atrocities he had committed before the game began. It's one of those gaming stories that is better the second time around when players get to experience it from a different angle.
NieR: Automata
All a lie
NieR: Automata is divided into three major campaigns starting with 2b, going to 9s and then to A2. The concept of the game is about how the Earth was taken over by robots in a war from the past, so humans had to escape into space.
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In humanity's last refuge, a space station, they developed battle androids like 2b and 9s to try to take back Earth one mission at a time. By completing these campaigns, players will gain more insight into the conflict and eventually learn that humanity was completely killed off eons ago. The people on the space station are not human at all and are instead driven by a mandate that humanity must endure no matter what.
The last of us
What would a father do?
The last of us is a journey across America from Boston to Seattle. Joel and Ellie must get to the last remnants of the Fireflies, who may be able to use Ellie as a cure for the plague that turns people into parasitic zombies.
It's a long road, and once they get there, Joel finds out that they have to kill Ellie just to even attempt a cure, which isn't even a guarantee. Displeased with this news, Joel kills everyone, saves Ellie, and then later lies about it, saying they couldn't use Ellie for a cure after all. Although a dark deed, Joel did what he thought was right as a father figure.
Bravely Default: Flying Fairy
Fairy Troubles
Bravely Default: Flying Fairy was a return to the classic Final Fantasy formula, although it was not an official one Final Fantasy game. Four chosen warriors embarked on a journey, battling monsters and enemies with various jobs, reviving the power of elemental crystals along the way.
When it seems the journey is coming to an end and the last crystal is lit, the group finds themselves back at the beginning in a time loop. Not only that, but after a whole loop, they eventually find out that their fellow elf, Airy, who has been nothing but helpful and sweet, was actually the mastermind behind it all. No one could have seen it coming.
BioShock Infinite
Salvation by drowning
BioShock Infinite set in Columbia, a flying utopia in the sky, where a detective, Booker, was tasked with rescuing a girl, Elizabeth, from the city's ruler, Comstock. It is revealed that this story is also a time loop, all of which are connected to Booker and Comstock because they are one and the same.
At some point in the story, Booker, after losing his daughter, is baptized as Comstock, which changes his personality and leads to a cult and the building of Columbia. To break the cycle, Elizabeth and her other multidimensional versions drown Booker with his blessing, and to call it a dark ending would be an understatement.
Face/Off
This saga begins with Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroeswhere the ending sees Big Boss go down in a helicopter explosion. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain opens with Big Boss in a hospital, having lost his arm, before finally being rescued and taken to a newly formed Mother Base courtesy of Master Miller and Revolver Ocelot.
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These open world games had story developments that many players really didn't see coming.
The trick is that to fool his enemies, Big Boss actually had memories implanted into one of his soldiers to become him through plastic surgery, while the real Big Boss was out there laying low gathering other intelligence. In other words, the so-called “Venom Snake” in this game was not the real Big Boss.
Red Dead Redemption
A change in heroes
Red Dead Redemption is about an old gangster, John Marston, who went straight a long time ago to start a family. When his old gang wanders into town, he decides to seek revenge alongside the government, who pressure him into the role.
Eventually, John is betrayed and shot in his own home, which feels like a bittersweet ending for the cowboy, but it's not the last twist. The game then flashes forward a few years later with Jack, John's son, now the playable character, going after the lawmen who gunned down his father, and once Jack gets it, it's one of the most satisfying kills in all of gaming.
Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow
Reinvent the franchise
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow has the biggest twist of the 2010s era of gaming simply because there's a lot of baggage attached to the reveal. Castlevaniaas a series, began in 1986 in Japan, and most games feature one of the Belmont family searching for Dracula or his minions throughout the centuries.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is essentially a reboot where Gabriel Belmont is tasked with taking down an evil group known as the Lords of Shadow, and at the end he becomes Dracula thanks to a curse. This means that the Belmonts cause their own cursed enemy through time, which was an interesting way to find out.
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