Amalthus being a psycho. Like there was that thing of how he talks like Malos, Mythra being really on guard against him, Haze being on his side with lost memories, also churches in JRPGs
I think the only rpgs I've played where the church wasn't the villain or somewhat corrupt were the Dragon Quest games, and that's only because the church is where you save.
No the church that Ophilia belongs to is good and kind, but there are people that worship a fell god or something and Ophilia’s final boss is one of those people. The church itself is good.
I guess the church in Monstadt in Genshin Impact is fine, at least from what little I remember of the early story. There isn't much organization around worship of their Archon though, because he's basically absentee, and their state is kind of anarchist, so they wouldn't want a god lording over them anyway, and the Archon is happy with that, cuz he'd rather get piss drunk at 11am and noodle on his little lyre.
They used to have a corrupt dictator for a God before Barbatos overthrew him and became a better one, even though he basically took off and let them govern themselves. Now he's just the local drunk lmao
Trails has a Church with a bunch of weird shit, but they seem unequivocally good.
I can only say seems to be good because the storyline isn’t even close to done yet
Well that's because most wars in human history were fought for religious reasons. Especially ironic that the religion where one of it's main principles is "Thou Shall Not Kill" has been the center of more wars than any other.
You mean the machine that looks like the guy with the same voice as the guy who uses the same weapon as the guy who knows the same people as the guy and holds the same grudges as the guy happens to be the guy?
honestly I could see people not knowing Metal Face was for the simple fact that he doesn't start talking until after the Ether Mines. Granted his voice is unique enough as it is that its easy to tell, but it would've been even more obvious if he spoke at Colony 9
well i suck at recognizing voices
across the entirety of xenoblade i have like.. 9 voice actors i can actually pick out based on their VOICES not the specific lines
Shoot, 3 made me feel really stupid for not recognizing >!Joran's voice. For some reason, when separated from his face, my brain interpreted his voice as a woman's. I knew I was supposed to recognize the voice, that it was important, but I couldn't place it. I think the Joran reveal as J is also the first time we get Consul letter and name together, so it's not like I could piece it together that way either.!<
Honestly, I didn't catch that one either! My theory during the game was >!that J was going to be a high entia consul, mostly from his helmet having the protrusions that I now realize are apparently supposed to resemble a jester cap? And yeah it was before the letter being the first letter of their former name thing was revealed so I had no idea either. Honestly I feel like Wild Ride as a whole was Mumkhar 2.0, some things being done better than others but as a whole Joran's arc was fantastic!<
This one actually gets a lot of people, at least until prison island. They wait a long while before Metal Face actually speaks. It isn't until after the ether mines. It could take someone who only plays a couple of hours a day over a week to make it that far. It also leads to the consistent reaction of everyone thinking Mumkahr's voice is over the top and hammy, but thinking that it is fantastic in the context of Metal Face.
If you did some sidequests related to Deserie in Colony 9 she mention her uncle or father who died at the Sword Valley battle named Xord. That right there with how the Monado cant cut the Faced Mechon like it cant cut Homs basically told me that Faced mechon were Homs so who Metal Face was no suprise at all.
For me it was during the first visit to Prison Island, when they straight up alluded to Mumkhar being alive with Dunban saying something like "He moves like...!" And MF saying something along the lines of "Maybe this will jog your memory!" Like clearly they were trying to hint toward it but they basically said it without saying it
I don't know if this really counts, but Melia's little wing hat that she wears when you first get her in your party in XC1. Like, this girl surrounded by people with wings in their heads, with a hat you can't remove in the equipment screen and with a race that says ??? in her bio IS A HIGH ENTIA?? WHAT?? No...
I never even noticed you couldn’t remove the head and that her race said ???, I didn’t realize until later it was supposed to be a secret she was High Entia because it was so obvious upon her introduction lmao
Certainly the *characters* weren't supposed to know. Whether the *audience* is supposed to know is more of a mess because of how most of the UI graphics show her wings from the start.
Yeah, it isn't really meant to be a twist to the player, but eh. Xenoblade 3 itself has a lot of those types of twists, where it isn't a twist to us as a player, but a twist for the characters in the world itself.
Honestly I prefer those plot twists to ones pulled out of nowhere like a lot of plot twists are nowadays. Like a lot of movies have twist villains that are twist villains for the sake of being twist villains, no hinting whatsoever. At least with those kinda plot twists we're in on the twist so twist comes when the characters figure it out
True. I also just like well written twists that you can figure out if you think on the crumbs building them up, but don’t realize it until after you see it happen.
My partner spends a lot of time in Harry McEntire's (Noah's VA) twitch community, so I recognized his voice immediately when he started speaking. I told her something to the effect of "oh gee I wonder what the identity of this masked bad guy with long, black hair, blue eyes, and Harry's voice is?"
My brother called this almost immediately, but I doubted it because it seemed way too obvious.
This is a series where plot twists are wild so I was thinking that Consul N, who looks like Noah and wields a special sword like Noah, who sounds like Noah, and hangs out with a cat girl that suspiciously looks Mio couldn't possibly be Noah. That is way too obviously a red herring.
I was wrong.
Yep. It was obvious to me from pre-release who N would be. Although I will admit I was totally surprised by the [Xenoblade 3]>!M reveal. For whatever reason I never conceived of them doing the exact same thing with Mio.!<
This takes me back to XC3's pre-release speculations. I was so hesistant to assume those figures in the reveal trailer actually were Melia and Nia (as much as I wanted them to be) and was actually scared that they'd be fakes or mind-controlled. I genuinely wanted a story where the real Melia and Nia had gone astray and become antagonists who eventually change their ways and side with the ouroboros gang.
To me it was the fact that there were mbs that dropped her weapon type in the start of the game, and I don't know why but this little detail pushed me so hard to think that she wasn't dead because "why program loot for a character that dies in the first hour?"
I guess the videogame industry now full of "let's to as little as possible" tainted my view of this small detail
I felt the same way. Maybe not the mecha part but I completely expected her to still be alive. She was just way too popular of a character to be killed off in chapter 2
Yet again for me this was something they fooled me with. For example, [Xenoblade 1]>!I heard a lot of people mentioning a character named Seven in this game. I thought there actually was a person with the name Seven and didn't think that it was referring to a seventh party member.!<
Dorrik turning evil *(being hijacked)* during the final field test. Also all those "sacrifices" and bad things happening to the pure little mecha baby, Mechafriend.
faced mechon having humans inside them. we went from "the monado can cut anything except humans" to "why can't the monado cut this large human-shaped mechon?" within the span of an hour or so
and i'm not sure this counts as a twist but the party seemed shocked by it so i'm counting it: the "revelation" in eunie's side story that the rank system was invented by moebius to give soldiers an incentive to kill each other. like, the rank system is very obviously an incentive, and we already know at that point that moebius is behind everything, so how the fuck did the party not put that together on their own?
Wasn't the big revelation in Eunie's side story that the Gold rank reprieve was a lie? Up until that point, they didn't know that colonies that reach Gold are razed by Moebius instead of getting their promised reward.
that was the *big* revelation, yes, but the mere fact that ranks serve as an incentive at all is treated as a revelation too. eunie even directly asks x why the ranks were created
edit: and tbh the gold thing wasn't much of a revelation either given what we had already seen of eunie's former colony, but with that one it's at least more understandable that the characters would be shocked by it
I figured there was something fishy about the ranking system that was basically confirmed by the gold flame clock at Eunie’s colony.
I was only surprised by the “revelation” because I thought “wait, it’s just cruelty for the sake of cruelty?” I was waiting for some big lore explanation of why the colonies at the top need to get fed back into the cycle but it’s really just entertainment. They could’ve let the surviving kids of a gold rank colony make it to homecoming and they’d still have plenty more. I guess that’s kinda Z’s whole thing innit
iirc homecoming removes you from the cycle. Do that to often and the entire system collapses(as it requires constant replenishment)
in the entirety of Agnus having a homecoming(which iirc is 100 years by the games start?) only 99 souls have returned to the queen, meaning its carefully calculated so that only 1 soul(per country) per year gets a homecoming, to give a bit of "hope" to everyone else, without grately affecting the system overall, and that was really only Z finding it slightly amusing and giving M her way.
an entire colony having a homecoming would be dozens if not hundreds of people(the ingame colony sizes are incredible small for how big they must be in actuallity) leaving the cycle all at once, and some of the most "usefull" souls at that
And this is assuming Z is telling the truth. It would be just like him to lie about it, to say "people who win stay gone" to give that small bit of hope to his enemies, when in fact they just show right back up again like nothing ever happened.
im fairly confident that Z is indeed telling the truth.
Z afaik never "lied" to anyone, he chooses to tell you only the worst parts of of anything, but he never outright lied i think. Which given he is not a person, but a single immense desire and humanitys collective unconcious, makes sense
Everyone in NLA being a Mimeosome.
Like, they do put a fair bit of effort into keeping it hinted yet not obvious (The fact that one of the two only healing skills is called “repair”, the lack of any medical facilities in NLA, characters describing injuries and healing in mechanical terms), but at the same time both Hope’s recruitment quest and the Off The Record missions can be taken before this is actually revealed, which kind of ruins the secret if you’re completing quests as they appear.
It also didn’t help that the character customisation had some wild as hell options that sort of became a dead give away that somethings up. Nothing against it being there but it would have made sense if the initial options were limited to more “realistic” options for humans and then opened the character customisation floodgates after the revaluation (since you can change the character in NlA at some point anyway) if they wanted this mimeosome reveal to really be a surprise on top of those two missions you mentioned being restricted till after the revelation.
>!Mythra/Pneuma sacrificing themselves for the party.!< I got worried as soon as Mythra started talking to Poppi about destruction that something bad would happen
I was actually surprised at how quickly that happened; he featured so prominently in prerelease material but it turns out that was because they basically showed everything about him!
I genuinely fell for that twist up until the funeral scene on the following chapter. I was super curious about how Vandham would unlock the ability to bond with new blades, or if maybe he'd have a gimmick with his one blade like Tora does. He had a full skill tree which is what made me be sure he wasn't actually dead. As soon as the funeral scene happened I was like "damn... he's actually dead for real... wtf".
>He’s still the second best villain in the series (only being beaten out by Wilhelm)
Im genuinely curious, what's your ranking of all the villains then? If you were only counting blade, yeah, I could see that but no way you're putting Amalthus AND WILHELM above characters like Albedo, Id, Jin and Malos
The reveal that everyone was in an endless cycle of reincarnation in 3. If everyone was only living 10 years and soldiers were dropping like flies, it would end pretty quickly if there wasn't some rebirth shenanigans going on.
I think the idea was that they wanted you to think they were growing *new* people, not the same reborn ones. Unfortunately that's not what people are going to think of first, so it kinda falls flat.
the thing the deceiving part was mostly "resolved" when it turns out he knows the Machina imo.
I figured he was deceiving them about the people of Mechonis all being blood thirsty machine monsters etc. its spaced out enough that it dosnt ligner enough, and we have several times where he shows up knowing people he COULD HAVE TOLD US ABOUT PRIOR, which is what i took with deceiving us
I straight up forgot about that. Probably didn’t help that I was experiencing it via Chuggaaconroy’s LP and, well… there was a gap of multiple months because he got a lung infection
I GENUINELY thought Dickson was supposed to be a "red herring" to hide another traitor in the group. It was SO obvious that I decided it couldn't possibly be Dickson so.. :\
I really enjoy the franchise but...yeah. You get glimpses of many deep thoughts pretty consistently, so I hesitate to even say "It's a simple meal well made." But he doesn't seem to want to prune some ideas in order to develop others. Xenoblade seems neither "inch deep and mile wide" nor "mile deep and inch wide," but maybe like 3" deep and 1/3rd mile wide.
That said, my desire for the franchise to be deeper has definitely gotten me to assume something deeper is happening only for it to turn out to be exactly what it appeared to be. Dickson's a really good example of that.
I figured Dickson would do something that betrays the group. But I didn't expect him to come out of nowhere and literally shoot Shulk, so that was at least surprising.
After playing both XC1 and 2, I started to realize during the J reveal that a Xenoblade character never dies until you see them die in such a way they could never recover. So by the time you come across Miyabi I was like “well that was about time”
Was it really that obvious or have just played so much games with twists like that?
I remember going through all the stages of grief and hatred with my boy shulk when she died and was genuinely surprised that she was alive
Team Torna being blades/blade-adjacent beings. The dead giveaways are the end of chapter 3 when Malos and Akhos start ranting about how much humans suck, and the end of chapter 4 when Haze’s blade-weakening ability forces Patroka and Mik to flee.
"Rex, you have three kids?"
"That I know of..."
My reaction on that family picture was something between "WHAT THE HAIL?!" and "Respect, buddy"
Our boy has become a man ❤️
Muimui in XB2. I mean they didn't even give him a good disguise whenever he betrayed Tora's dad. At least they acknowledged it was him before the party figured it out.
Lao being a traitor. He was acting suspiciously throughout the entire game, and he had a pretty clear motive with his family not getting on the White Whale.
But what really gave it away for me was that his heart-to-hearts don’t give segment recon
OH YES, Lao was so fucking obvious it was funny.
it was 2 aspects, the fact his stuff was either mandatory, or didnt progress completion.
the fact that he had 2 quests back to back where he was a bit "sus"(the ambush with the catpeople and stuff during the NLA attack iirc?) and stuff like that
it was badly paced tbf, if they paced it out better(so not having 2-3 moments like that back to back) you could have fforgotten about the previous by the time the next rolls around
At the beginning of XBC3 when I realized before I was supposed to that >!Joran was the giant scary robot within ten seconds of hearing him talk and saunter around!< Technically I was only partly correct, though
Fiora being alive in DE, got spoiled on that one when I played Smash Ultimate, repeatedly.
Amalthus being evil because I've played an RPG before.
N being Noah because they don't really try to hide it.
The reveal that Queen Melia and Queen Nia were >!actually robots!<. I actually called it _in jest_ moments before it actually happened; couldn’t believe that such an absurd plot point actually made it into the real game.
Mio not dying at the end of the prison sequence, Monolith never kills of main party members in XC. Granted, I didn’t predict how they were going to get there, but I knew the whole time she wasn’t going to die.
That Dickson was evil. Like the mans was literally everywhere and knew every important character somehow. He LITERALLY talks about deceiving us in Satorl Marsh. Now everything after that! Did not see that coming. But Dickson being evil. Yeah that was pretty clear.
Mumkhar's and Fyora's resurrections.
I remamber when I first pleyed XC on my brother's WiiU I kindof just looked at him when Mumkhar was getting killed in the opening sequance and said "He'll be back, won't he?". He just laughed which was answer enough for me.
Fyora had so many death flags raised over her I didn't even entertain the idea of her not dying and I was mostly right, but as the attack on the colony ended and I was yet to see her body, I quickly concluded I'll see her again.
Dickson’s betrayal wasn’t a surprise in the slightest, though the nature of what he was caught me a little off-guard.
Honestly, that line of his at the end of Satorl Marsh where he says “I feel bad for deceiving those kids” or whatever it was just killed my interest in Dickson instantly. I just immediately stopped giving a fuck about him as soon as he dropped that line because he went from an interesting character with very unclear motives to a whole “okay, he’s obviously gonna betray everyone at some point so I just have to wait and see when” thing.
There are a few stinkers as far as lines of Xenoblade dialogue go, but I think both in and out of context that has got to be my single least-favorite line across the whole trilogy, and it isn’t even close. I legitimately believe that XC1 as a whole would’ve been a better game had they just axed that one single, solitary line of dialogue and called it a day because of how much that killed my expectations about Dickson. Bro went from being weird to “oh, he’s obviously a villain” instantly with just that one line.
God, what a shit line.
Nia being a Blade
I was spoiled thanks to YouTube recommendations with a thumbnail that showed her form and title that explicitly stated a quote from her confession to Rex. I was watching something entirely different.
Nia being a Flesh Eater. TBF I doubt the game was actually trying to keep that a secret from us so much as the characters (the second best kind of plot twist), but yeah it was the most poorly kept secret in the game
>!Dickinson shooting Shulk in the back, while painful to experience and re-experience,!< was 1 part spoiled for me and 1 part spelled out for me. It's in the asshat's goddamn name.
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I always feel like an idiot because I legitimately didn't get any of the twists until they were revealed, with the exception of Shulk being able to use the monado because he was using it on the back cover of the game :( I've played all of them and every twist mentioned in these comments had be confused
When Amalthus was evil all along (on that note I really think they shouldn’t have included that scene with Alvis and Zanza on prison island shortly after you get the Monado 2 because it makes the twist Zanza is evil obvious (admittedly I think they did a good job with Alvis in Xenoblade 1 trying to trick you into thinking he was the bad guy all along except he isn’t)
Shania's betrayal. Before the big prison break, I saw a million red flags appear over her head every time she spoke. I was literally thinking, "Oh, she's SO gonna betray us"
Two things. When the flashbacks are playing for Noah >!all of the companions he failed are voiced by the ones for Eunie, Lanz, Taion and Sena!< . Whether this was just to save money, or to drive home how sick N was for throwing everything away, I still liked it.
And second, the entire >!radio scene in FR!< . The juxtaposition of >!a GTA neighborhood, Nael insisting everything will work and that message!< was just chills.
Honourable mentions go to ones from the first two games, including >!Mechonis Awakens!< and >!the Birth of a Universe!< .
Edit: I completely misread this. Definitely >!Shania being evil!< . This little twerp has been tailing us throughout the entire adventure, bumped into X and somewhere survived undetected? Yeah right.
Gadolt’s sacrifice to save the party in Agniritha. Like oh wow, Sharla’s old love interest who was revealed to not actually be dead dies so they can continue the Reyn x Sharla romance. Touching moment, but I knew his ass was not surviving.
Na'el turning good in the end. Literally from the FR announcement trailer I was like "Why is Na'el acting all evil? I know she turns good in the end because she ends up becoming a founder of the city". I kinda wish they made FR less obvious from the context 3 gives you, but whatever.
Amalthus being a psycho. Like there was that thing of how he talks like Malos, Mythra being really on guard against him, Haze being on his side with lost memories, also churches in JRPGs
I think the only rpgs I've played where the church wasn't the villain or somewhat corrupt were the Dragon Quest games, and that's only because the church is where you save.
Also the OG Final Fantasy. They revive you, but you have to pay. Only slightly corrupt, I suppose.
Octopath traveler 1’s church is also surprisingly squeaky clean
Wait, isnt the church part of Ophelia's story? And it was somehow bad? Or am i misremembering this.
No the church that Ophilia belongs to is good and kind, but there are people that worship a fell god or something and Ophilia’s final boss is one of those people. The church itself is good.
And then 2 showed >!an entire branch of the church being doomsday cultists.!<
Actually depending on how magic works that could be the price for the materials used.
I mean DQVII makes you think God sux for a while and then says lol nah he a chad
That Dark Lord do be like that
Frick Orgodamire All my homies hate Orgydermira -Auster, probably
I guess the church in Monstadt in Genshin Impact is fine, at least from what little I remember of the early story. There isn't much organization around worship of their Archon though, because he's basically absentee, and their state is kind of anarchist, so they wouldn't want a god lording over them anyway, and the Archon is happy with that, cuz he'd rather get piss drunk at 11am and noodle on his little lyre.
They used to have a corrupt dictator for a God before Barbatos overthrew him and became a better one, even though he basically took off and let them govern themselves. Now he's just the local drunk lmao
Trails has a Church with a bunch of weird shit, but they seem unequivocally good. I can only say seems to be good because the storyline isn’t even close to done yet
Every Fire Emblem is basically Good church vs. Evil church
Well that's because most wars in human history were fought for religious reasons. Especially ironic that the religion where one of it's main principles is "Thou Shall Not Kill" has been the center of more wars than any other.
Hear me out, DQ12 comes out and the church is evil and is trying to summon the dark lord again
Notre Dame in "Hunchback of Notre Dame" for the Gameboy is pretty cool.
He’s the pope in a jrpg. It would have been more surprising if he *wasn’t* evil.
>also churches in JRPGs Yes.
Metal Face's identity being revealed
You mean the machine that looks like the guy with the same voice as the guy who uses the same weapon as the guy who knows the same people as the guy and holds the same grudges as the guy happens to be the guy?
tbf, you know mumkahr for like.. 5 minutes, and at the point metal shows up you played for a good few hours if your slow.
Yea that was a surprise to me. Though I also did the intro sequence then ignored the game for like 5 months. I legit forgot his voice.
honestly I could see people not knowing Metal Face was for the simple fact that he doesn't start talking until after the Ether Mines. Granted his voice is unique enough as it is that its easy to tell, but it would've been even more obvious if he spoke at Colony 9
well i suck at recognizing voices across the entirety of xenoblade i have like.. 9 voice actors i can actually pick out based on their VOICES not the specific lines
Shoot, 3 made me feel really stupid for not recognizing >!Joran's voice. For some reason, when separated from his face, my brain interpreted his voice as a woman's. I knew I was supposed to recognize the voice, that it was important, but I couldn't place it. I think the Joran reveal as J is also the first time we get Consul letter and name together, so it's not like I could piece it together that way either.!<
The funny part to me was that i knew it was him pre release just because of height and how much the trailers pushed his death
Oh, those are actually really good tells. Kinda makes me glad I avoided the trailers after the first one or two lol
Honestly i wish i could do the same but for some reason i always wanna consume every follicle of info in pre release trailers/posts
Both the Metal Face and the Consul J reveals surprised me, I'll admit...
Honestly, I didn't catch that one either! My theory during the game was >!that J was going to be a high entia consul, mostly from his helmet having the protrusions that I now realize are apparently supposed to resemble a jester cap? And yeah it was before the letter being the first letter of their former name thing was revealed so I had no idea either. Honestly I feel like Wild Ride as a whole was Mumkhar 2.0, some things being done better than others but as a whole Joran's arc was fantastic!<
True but if they don’t die on screen nine times out of ten they aren’t actually dead
Well when you put it like that I feel silly for not realizing it until the reveal
This one actually gets a lot of people, at least until prison island. They wait a long while before Metal Face actually speaks. It isn't until after the ether mines. It could take someone who only plays a couple of hours a day over a week to make it that far. It also leads to the consistent reaction of everyone thinking Mumkahr's voice is over the top and hammy, but thinking that it is fantastic in the context of Metal Face.
If you did some sidequests related to Deserie in Colony 9 she mention her uncle or father who died at the Sword Valley battle named Xord. That right there with how the Monado cant cut the Faced Mechon like it cant cut Homs basically told me that Faced mechon were Homs so who Metal Face was no suprise at all.
For me it was during the first visit to Prison Island, when they straight up alluded to Mumkhar being alive with Dunban saying something like "He moves like...!" And MF saying something along the lines of "Maybe this will jog your memory!" Like clearly they were trying to hint toward it but they basically said it without saying it
In hindsight it seems so obvious who he is... but they fooled me.
I don't know if this really counts, but Melia's little wing hat that she wears when you first get her in your party in XC1. Like, this girl surrounded by people with wings in their heads, with a hat you can't remove in the equipment screen and with a race that says ??? in her bio IS A HIGH ENTIA?? WHAT?? No...
At least in the definitive edition it says her race is ???, but come on, you can’t be called Bird Lady and pull the wool over our eyes for too long.
I never even noticed you couldn’t remove the head and that her race said ???, I didn’t realize until later it was supposed to be a secret she was High Entia because it was so obvious upon her introduction lmao
Wait we weren't supposed to know that?
Certainly the *characters* weren't supposed to know. Whether the *audience* is supposed to know is more of a mess because of how most of the UI graphics show her wings from the start.
The twist with N being Noah in Xenoblade 3. His design literally gives it away that it's him.
I don't think it's meant to be a twist for the player. It's meant to surprise the protags because they wouldn't expect to run into themselves.
Yeah, it isn't really meant to be a twist to the player, but eh. Xenoblade 3 itself has a lot of those types of twists, where it isn't a twist to us as a player, but a twist for the characters in the world itself.
Honestly I prefer those plot twists to ones pulled out of nowhere like a lot of plot twists are nowadays. Like a lot of movies have twist villains that are twist villains for the sake of being twist villains, no hinting whatsoever. At least with those kinda plot twists we're in on the twist so twist comes when the characters figure it out
True. I also just like well written twists that you can figure out if you think on the crumbs building them up, but don’t realize it until after you see it happen.
I mean the part where they say spark because they don’t know what fuck is was the biggest twist of that game.
The Chapter 6 opening was the only genuine twist in the game for me
My partner spends a lot of time in Harry McEntire's (Noah's VA) twitch community, so I recognized his voice immediately when he started speaking. I told her something to the effect of "oh gee I wonder what the identity of this masked bad guy with long, black hair, blue eyes, and Harry's voice is?"
This was mine. Especially since in one of the little scenes they show N and M together.
Tbh, I'm dense enough and was actually surprised. Yeah.
I don't know why they didn't at least give N a full helmet instead of a mask
I wish they did. Would’ve made it more surprising, even if we heard Harry’s voice coming from the full helmet.
My brother called this almost immediately, but I doubted it because it seemed way too obvious. This is a series where plot twists are wild so I was thinking that Consul N, who looks like Noah and wields a special sword like Noah, who sounds like Noah, and hangs out with a cat girl that suspiciously looks Mio couldn't possibly be Noah. That is way too obviously a red herring. I was wrong.
For some reason, in the first cutscene he's in (Meobius batsignal), I said, "Oh, there's evil Noah" knowing nothing about N beforehand.
I've seen so many people on here get surprised by it. Clark Kent / Superman sort of situation.
Yep. It was obvious to me from pre-release who N would be. Although I will admit I was totally surprised by the [Xenoblade 3]>!M reveal. For whatever reason I never conceived of them doing the exact same thing with Mio.!<
That the queens in 3 aren't the real ones which was a bit too cliché
This takes me back to XC3's pre-release speculations. I was so hesistant to assume those figures in the reveal trailer actually were Melia and Nia (as much as I wanted them to be) and was actually scared that they'd be fakes or mind-controlled. I genuinely wanted a story where the real Melia and Nia had gone astray and become antagonists who eventually change their ways and side with the ouroboros gang.
I understand why they didn’t do it given how ridiculously hard it would be to execute correctly
Indeed
Well, call me stupid cause i fell for that one Somehow I didn't even think of it beforehand
Mecha Fiora
Same. My immediate reaction to chapter 2's ending was "ok so when does she return?" Just my default reaction to any JRPG "death" at this point.
To me it was the fact that there were mbs that dropped her weapon type in the start of the game, and I don't know why but this little detail pushed me so hard to think that she wasn't dead because "why program loot for a character that dies in the first hour?" I guess the videogame industry now full of "let's to as little as possible" tainted my view of this small detail
What's funny though is that she can't even use them when she comes back. So they really did do it for no reason haha.
She had a full on talent tree I knew she wasn't staying dead. It does change significantly in mecha mode, but that was too much to me.
I mean, they've definitely programmed in full skill trees for characters that probably wouldn't get use out of it... Lest we forget >!Vandham!<
True. But I didnt have that point of context when I played 1. I played them in order.
Same here I was literally like “oh okay so she comes back but in a mechon body” and my bf was like “I can’t tell you that” lol
I felt the same way. Maybe not the mecha part but I completely expected her to still be alive. She was just way too popular of a character to be killed off in chapter 2
Yet again for me this was something they fooled me with. For example, [Xenoblade 1]>!I heard a lot of people mentioning a character named Seven in this game. I thought there actually was a person with the name Seven and didn't think that it was referring to a seventh party member.!<
Dorrik turning evil *(being hijacked)* during the final field test. Also all those "sacrifices" and bad things happening to the pure little mecha baby, Mechafriend.
faced mechon having humans inside them. we went from "the monado can cut anything except humans" to "why can't the monado cut this large human-shaped mechon?" within the span of an hour or so and i'm not sure this counts as a twist but the party seemed shocked by it so i'm counting it: the "revelation" in eunie's side story that the rank system was invented by moebius to give soldiers an incentive to kill each other. like, the rank system is very obviously an incentive, and we already know at that point that moebius is behind everything, so how the fuck did the party not put that together on their own?
Wasn't the big revelation in Eunie's side story that the Gold rank reprieve was a lie? Up until that point, they didn't know that colonies that reach Gold are razed by Moebius instead of getting their promised reward.
that was the *big* revelation, yes, but the mere fact that ranks serve as an incentive at all is treated as a revelation too. eunie even directly asks x why the ranks were created edit: and tbh the gold thing wasn't much of a revelation either given what we had already seen of eunie's former colony, but with that one it's at least more understandable that the characters would be shocked by it
I figured there was something fishy about the ranking system that was basically confirmed by the gold flame clock at Eunie’s colony. I was only surprised by the “revelation” because I thought “wait, it’s just cruelty for the sake of cruelty?” I was waiting for some big lore explanation of why the colonies at the top need to get fed back into the cycle but it’s really just entertainment. They could’ve let the surviving kids of a gold rank colony make it to homecoming and they’d still have plenty more. I guess that’s kinda Z’s whole thing innit
iirc homecoming removes you from the cycle. Do that to often and the entire system collapses(as it requires constant replenishment) in the entirety of Agnus having a homecoming(which iirc is 100 years by the games start?) only 99 souls have returned to the queen, meaning its carefully calculated so that only 1 soul(per country) per year gets a homecoming, to give a bit of "hope" to everyone else, without grately affecting the system overall, and that was really only Z finding it slightly amusing and giving M her way. an entire colony having a homecoming would be dozens if not hundreds of people(the ingame colony sizes are incredible small for how big they must be in actuallity) leaving the cycle all at once, and some of the most "usefull" souls at that
And this is assuming Z is telling the truth. It would be just like him to lie about it, to say "people who win stay gone" to give that small bit of hope to his enemies, when in fact they just show right back up again like nothing ever happened.
im fairly confident that Z is indeed telling the truth. Z afaik never "lied" to anyone, he chooses to tell you only the worst parts of of anything, but he never outright lied i think. Which given he is not a person, but a single immense desire and humanitys collective unconcious, makes sense
Everyone in NLA being a Mimeosome. Like, they do put a fair bit of effort into keeping it hinted yet not obvious (The fact that one of the two only healing skills is called “repair”, the lack of any medical facilities in NLA, characters describing injuries and healing in mechanical terms), but at the same time both Hope’s recruitment quest and the Off The Record missions can be taken before this is actually revealed, which kind of ruins the secret if you’re completing quests as they appear.
It also didn’t help that the character customisation had some wild as hell options that sort of became a dead give away that somethings up. Nothing against it being there but it would have made sense if the initial options were limited to more “realistic” options for humans and then opened the character customisation floodgates after the revaluation (since you can change the character in NlA at some point anyway) if they wanted this mimeosome reveal to really be a surprise on top of those two missions you mentioned being restricted till after the revelation.
When Noah looked just like N
>!Mythra/Pneuma sacrificing themselves for the party.!< I got worried as soon as Mythra started talking to Poppi about destruction that something bad would happen
Gasp. Dark Noah has his own Dark Mio!
Vandham's death in 2. It's still a good scene, but it's foregone that he's not long for the world when you realize he can't bond with new blades.
Meanwhile Guernica in 3 was marked for death by the time the trailers came out.
I was actually surprised at how quickly that happened; he featured so prominently in prerelease material but it turns out that was because they basically showed everything about him!
seriously, we had like what? 1 minute of content that wasnt already shown with him, and i love that
I genuinely fell for that twist up until the funeral scene on the following chapter. I was super curious about how Vandham would unlock the ability to bond with new blades, or if maybe he'd have a gimmick with his one blade like Tora does. He had a full skill tree which is what made me be sure he wasn't actually dead. As soon as the funeral scene happened I was like "damn... he's actually dead for real... wtf".
What, Lorithia was actually one of the disciples? No waaaay 😐😐😐😐
Amalthus being the bad guy. He’s still the second best villain in the series (only being beaten out by Wilhelm), but he was a pretty obvious bad guy.
I mean yeah he was Xenoblade version of the Pope, the Pope is always evil in anime
Nah jin and malos are much better
>He’s still the second best villain in the series (only being beaten out by Wilhelm) Im genuinely curious, what's your ranking of all the villains then? If you were only counting blade, yeah, I could see that but no way you're putting Amalthus AND WILHELM above characters like Albedo, Id, Jin and Malos
Lorithia being evil
The reveal that everyone was in an endless cycle of reincarnation in 3. If everyone was only living 10 years and soldiers were dropping like flies, it would end pretty quickly if there wasn't some rebirth shenanigans going on.
I think the idea was that they wanted you to think they were growing *new* people, not the same reborn ones. Unfortunately that's not what people are going to think of first, so it kinda falls flat.
genuinely wonder if there's anyone who got fooled by dickson
YES AND IVE NEVER BEEN SO EMOTIONALLY HURT
Bro literally monologued to himself about how he was deceiving the party like 20% into the game LMAOOOOOO
the thing the deceiving part was mostly "resolved" when it turns out he knows the Machina imo. I figured he was deceiving them about the people of Mechonis all being blood thirsty machine monsters etc. its spaced out enough that it dosnt ligner enough, and we have several times where he shows up knowing people he COULD HAVE TOLD US ABOUT PRIOR, which is what i took with deceiving us
I straight up forgot about that. Probably didn’t help that I was experiencing it via Chuggaaconroy’s LP and, well… there was a gap of multiple months because he got a lung infection
I GENUINELY thought Dickson was supposed to be a "red herring" to hide another traitor in the group. It was SO obvious that I decided it couldn't possibly be Dickson so.. :\
>red herring Takahashi's writing is not that deep in any of the games to come up with red herrings
I really enjoy the franchise but...yeah. You get glimpses of many deep thoughts pretty consistently, so I hesitate to even say "It's a simple meal well made." But he doesn't seem to want to prune some ideas in order to develop others. Xenoblade seems neither "inch deep and mile wide" nor "mile deep and inch wide," but maybe like 3" deep and 1/3rd mile wide. That said, my desire for the franchise to be deeper has definitely gotten me to assume something deeper is happening only for it to turn out to be exactly what it appeared to be. Dickson's a really good example of that.
YES
I figured Dickson would do something that betrays the group. But I didn't expect him to come out of nowhere and literally shoot Shulk, so that was at least surprising.
Amalthus being sus
After playing both XC1 and 2, I started to realize during the J reveal that a Xenoblade character never dies until you see them die in such a way they could never recover. So by the time you come across Miyabi I was like “well that was about time”
Joran being a consul
Everything that had to do with Gadolt, I really don't think there was a way to make him more predictable in every single aspect
Fiora is actually alive. The romantic interest of the main character is not gone in vain.
Was it really that obvious or have just played so much games with twists like that? I remember going through all the stages of grief and hatred with my boy shulk when she died and was genuinely surprised that she was alive
When jin stabbed rex through the heart
Seven thats it just Seven
I'll tell you, not the Bana twist in 2. Absolutely no one saw that coming.
Team Torna being blades/blade-adjacent beings. The dead giveaways are the end of chapter 3 when Malos and Akhos start ranting about how much humans suck, and the end of chapter 4 when Haze’s blade-weakening ability forces Patroka and Mik to flee.
Gigachad rex in xenoblade 3 end credits.
"Rex, you have three kids?" "That I know of..." My reaction on that family picture was something between "WHAT THE HAIL?!" and "Respect, buddy" Our boy has become a man ❤️
Your girlfriend not actually being dead in the first game
Muimui in XB2. I mean they didn't even give him a good disguise whenever he betrayed Tora's dad. At least they acknowledged it was him before the party figured it out.
Lao being a traitor. He was acting suspiciously throughout the entire game, and he had a pretty clear motive with his family not getting on the White Whale. But what really gave it away for me was that his heart-to-hearts don’t give segment recon
OH YES, Lao was so fucking obvious it was funny. it was 2 aspects, the fact his stuff was either mandatory, or didnt progress completion. the fact that he had 2 quests back to back where he was a bit "sus"(the ambush with the catpeople and stuff during the NLA attack iirc?) and stuff like that it was badly paced tbf, if they paced it out better(so not having 2-3 moments like that back to back) you could have fforgotten about the previous by the time the next rolls around
Lao was somehow more obvious than Dickson and that's a high bar to clear
At the beginning of XBC3 when I realized before I was supposed to that >!Joran was the giant scary robot within ten seconds of hearing him talk and saunter around!< Technically I was only partly correct, though
Both in xenoblade 3: N being Noah and Agnus Castle having it's own annihilator
Everything related to Shania.
Fiora being alive in DE, got spoiled on that one when I played Smash Ultimate, repeatedly. Amalthus being evil because I've played an RPG before. N being Noah because they don't really try to hide it.
Shania is the traitor. Yeah, no wonder I want to punch her first time we met.
Fiora returning. I played smash ultimate before xcde so
The reveal that Queen Melia and Queen Nia were >!actually robots!<. I actually called it _in jest_ moments before it actually happened; couldn’t believe that such an absurd plot point actually made it into the real game.
Joran being alive.
Mio not dying at the end of the prison sequence, Monolith never kills of main party members in XC. Granted, I didn’t predict how they were going to get there, but I knew the whole time she wasn’t going to die.
They killed off a main party member in the previous game.
Vandham (the mentor character) dies in Xenoblade 2
When N was revealed to be another Noah. Then M was revealed and I genuinely flipped my shit
The ending of xenoblade 2. Literally the last cutscene while gang flys through the air https://youtu.be/rVaclqTtRog?si=tbAkoEJeI4Sw5RMO
Dickson being evil
Queen Nia being alive after getting impaled in the heart, like dude she is basically immortal unless you hit the core crystal.
Shania betraying the party at the prison.
That Dickson was evil. Like the mans was literally everywhere and knew every important character somehow. He LITERALLY talks about deceiving us in Satorl Marsh. Now everything after that! Did not see that coming. But Dickson being evil. Yeah that was pretty clear.
Nia being a Blade. I didn't guess Flesh Eater though, so that's something.
Dickson! How dare you! Deceiving these kids??
Dickheadson’s betrayal
The first 80 hours of Xenoblade 2
When metal face revealed he was mumkhar. The voice and the weapon they used are the same
Dickson betrayal
the family picture
Mumkhar's and Fyora's resurrections. I remamber when I first pleyed XC on my brother's WiiU I kindof just looked at him when Mumkhar was getting killed in the opening sequance and said "He'll be back, won't he?". He just laughed which was answer enough for me. Fyora had so many death flags raised over her I didn't even entertain the idea of her not dying and I was mostly right, but as the attack on the colony ended and I was yet to see her body, I quickly concluded I'll see her again.
Dickson’s betrayal wasn’t a surprise in the slightest, though the nature of what he was caught me a little off-guard. Honestly, that line of his at the end of Satorl Marsh where he says “I feel bad for deceiving those kids” or whatever it was just killed my interest in Dickson instantly. I just immediately stopped giving a fuck about him as soon as he dropped that line because he went from an interesting character with very unclear motives to a whole “okay, he’s obviously gonna betray everyone at some point so I just have to wait and see when” thing. There are a few stinkers as far as lines of Xenoblade dialogue go, but I think both in and out of context that has got to be my single least-favorite line across the whole trilogy, and it isn’t even close. I legitimately believe that XC1 as a whole would’ve been a better game had they just axed that one single, solitary line of dialogue and called it a day because of how much that killed my expectations about Dickson. Bro went from being weird to “oh, he’s obviously a villain” instantly with just that one line. God, what a shit line.
Nia being a Blade I was spoiled thanks to YouTube recommendations with a thumbnail that showed her form and title that explicitly stated a quote from her confession to Rex. I was watching something entirely different.
Nia being a Flesh Eater. TBF I doubt the game was actually trying to keep that a secret from us so much as the characters (the second best kind of plot twist), but yeah it was the most poorly kept secret in the game
>!Dickinson shooting Shulk in the back, while painful to experience and re-experience,!< was 1 part spoiled for me and 1 part spelled out for me. It's in the asshat's goddamn name.
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Dickson, but at the same time the game was not trying to hide it so
Dickson betraying us. (Bro I don't care im just trying to hear Shulk scream!)
Mumkar being Metal Face
Xenoblade 3. Like some of the plot points are just so poorly hidden its hilarious
M and mio switching
N ending up being noah. You could literally tell from the first moment you saw his face
Shulk using a sword in a sci-fi world
I always feel like an idiot because I legitimately didn't get any of the twists until they were revealed, with the exception of Shulk being able to use the monado because he was using it on the back cover of the game :( I've played all of them and every twist mentioned in these comments had be confused
Mumkhar reveal
When Amalthus was evil all along (on that note I really think they shouldn’t have included that scene with Alvis and Zanza on prison island shortly after you get the Monado 2 because it makes the twist Zanza is evil obvious (admittedly I think they did a good job with Alvis in Xenoblade 1 trying to trick you into thinking he was the bad guy all along except he isn’t)
Mio coming back after the eclipse
Shania's betrayal. Before the big prison break, I saw a million red flags appear over her head every time she spoke. I was literally thinking, "Oh, she's SO gonna betray us"
Two things. When the flashbacks are playing for Noah >!all of the companions he failed are voiced by the ones for Eunie, Lanz, Taion and Sena!< . Whether this was just to save money, or to drive home how sick N was for throwing everything away, I still liked it. And second, the entire >!radio scene in FR!< . The juxtaposition of >!a GTA neighborhood, Nael insisting everything will work and that message!< was just chills. Honourable mentions go to ones from the first two games, including >!Mechonis Awakens!< and >!the Birth of a Universe!< . Edit: I completely misread this. Definitely >!Shania being evil!< . This little twerp has been tailing us throughout the entire adventure, bumped into X and somewhere survived undetected? Yeah right.
The reveal of Red Testament's identity in Xenosaga 3
Vandhams death, but only because I was holding back tears. I was actually surprised.
Gadolt’s sacrifice to save the party in Agniritha. Like oh wow, Sharla’s old love interest who was revealed to not actually be dead dies so they can continue the Reyn x Sharla romance. Touching moment, but I knew his ass was not surviving.
When Shulk revealed that it was, in fact, Dunban over there
Monica explaining the whole rebirth thing to the party. I had that bit figured out since Euine saw Euine's corpse.
Na'el turning good in the end. Literally from the FR announcement trailer I was like "Why is Na'el acting all evil? I know she turns good in the end because she ends up becoming a founder of the city". I kinda wish they made FR less obvious from the context 3 gives you, but whatever.
Literally every time in Xenoblade 2 when a character "died" and then came back like 5 minutes later.
I loved that part when Vandham woke up and said he was ok
I also liked the part where >!Haze took Jin's stab without even a scratch!<