Biggest spoilers PlayStation fans missed at the beginning of RPG gaming

Some of the best detective stories of all time tend to hide things in plain sight, only to shame readers into not seeing it right away. Anime openings tend to do this as well, spoiling things coming later in the season that manga fans might catch, but new viewers might miss. Even the best RPGs to hit PlayStation consoles have had obvious stories spoiled ahead of time if players were paying attention.

Some players like to play the trick and guess turns. Not all of these will be exactly captivating, but they are worth considering. Were they set up to flash at players, or were they oversights by the developers? It may be a secret they take to their graves. Anyway, these plot points are complicated to discuss at length, but here are some good summaries.

There will be spoilers for the following examples.

Final Fantasy 8

Guardian Forces

Final Fantasy 8's version of Summons are called Guardian Forces, or GFs. Players can equip them to characters, draw magic from monsters, and then equip the spells on their GFs to raise stats instead of relying on equipment. It's a beneficial system for warrior cadets like Squall, the protagonist, but there's a problem. If players spend time in the beginning talking to everyone at Balamb Garden and reading emails, they will learn about the downside of amnesia as these GFs take up brain space. This helps create the entire playable cast who share collective amnesia about knowing each other as children, which also involved a spell, but the GFs can be blamed just as much.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Gone too soon

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has many wild revelations, and players can hypothetically predict the big one involving the entire world contained in one painting. It would require some heavy guessing for the player, but one twist they could easily predict is the fate of Gustave, who starts out as the main character. Each character has a skill tree, and his is pretty small compared to everyone else's, meaning he could get a boost later to expand it, or he'd die. This small detail could have been enough to track players to his death in the first act.

Dragon Quest 11: Echoes Of An Elusive Age

Speaking of Tockles

Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age is a long game, and it takes the usual long time to get to the supposed final boss, which is about sixty hours. The weird thing is that there are little ghost-like creatures that players can see as they travel around, which they later learn are called Tockles. Players cannot talk to them, and no one acknowledges their existence, as only the player can see them. By the time the players get to the final fight, and they aren't addressed, or even long before then, the players could have guessed that they were bound for a big reveal, which they were. After this boss fight ends badly, players can talk to the head Tockle to go back in time, to set things right, and easily add another twenty to thirty hours to the experience.

Fallout 4

where is my baby

Fallout 4 allows players to create a female and a male character at the beginning, which is set before the bombs drop, and then players can choose which one to play. This happy couple also has a son, Shaun, and when everything breaks loose, the players jump into a cryochamber and their spouse jumps into one with Shaun.

During the 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 newfound post-apocalyptic situation. But given that cryosleep can last for years, the players probably figured out that their kid would be an old cod when they saw him again.

Final Fantasy 10

Dreams of faith

Final Fantasy 10 is opened with Tidus plays Blitzball in his home 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 is impossible that he was from Zanarkand since it was destroyed a thousand years ago. It's a mystery, and some players might think there's a multi-dimensional or time-traveling situation going on, but it's even darker than some fans might realize. Since it's established early on that people who are dead can still take on a corporeal form as a dream of the faith, they can figure out that Tidus is basically a ghost.

NieR: Automata

Humanity's last hope

NieR: Automata begins in a space station, humanity's last bastion, where two battle androids, 9s and 2b, are tasked with descending to Earth and helping get rid of the robots that took it over eons ago. Their mission is given to them by human decree, but no humans are ever seen. Players will first play as 9s, then 2b, and finally someone named A2. After three campaigns, players will learn that humanity died out eons ago, and the AIs controlling the space station continue their legacy as if they were still human. Since players never see a real human in space, they can predict this twist from the start, or at least assume that something is fishy.

Kingdom Hearts 2

RPG anagram

For players engaged in interquel, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memorieswhich Roxas was at the beginning of Kingdom Hearts 2 was a no-brainer. In the GBA spinoff, Sora meets Organization 13 for the first time, and every character has an X in their name, such as Axel, Marluxia, and Larxene. Although the players do not learn that they are anagrams in the game, and their real names are not revealed until later sequels, it becomes clear that Roxas must be an anagram of Sora with an X added. The two characters look so similar, and the name is an easy puzzle to solve before it's revealed at the end of Roxas' opening act.

Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom

The missing link

Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom opens with Roland, who is assumed to be the president of some country, seeing an explosion before waking up in a fantasy world where he meets Prince Evan. Players who got involved with the first game know that there is usually an equivalent person in each world, as they are like mirrors.

Roland doesn't meet his two hours into the game, which is suspect, on top of a masked villain introduced somewhat early on, named Doloran. In the end, he is revealed to be the world's version of Roland, which was very obvious considering this was another anagram situation where Doloran only had an extra O.

Human nature

Metaphor: ReFantazio takes place in a fantasy world where there are monstrous giants, called humans, who mostly act as bosses in the game, and they are as menacing as the humanoid titans in Attack on Titan. Turns out it wasn't a design choice to scare players with something familiar. Instead, these people were actually mutated and transformed people from eons ago, before the post-apocalypse, because this fantasy world used to be Earth. It might be a stretch, but some players could have figured this out, especially if they quit Attack on Titanwhich is eerily similar.

Final Fantasy 16

Knowing Summoner Lore

In the opening to Final Fantasy 16two Eikons, the summons of this game, fight. Ifrit takes over Phoenix and destroys the Grand Duchy of Rosaria, the home of the main character, Clive. Joshua, Clive's brother, who appeared as the Phoenix, was also killed in the battle. Clive swore revenge on Ifrit, although it seemed pretty obvious, given his absence, that Clive was Ifrit and was just suffering from amnesia. Also, everyone who knows Final Fantasy lore, or just basic fantasy lore, knows that a phoenix's big trick is being able to revive itself. Lo and behold, Joshua is later revealed to be alive and well.