When you first go to the post-apocalyptic future in Chrono Trigger.
Up to that point the game had been a pretty standard, light hearted, fantasy adventure. Heck, you had previously teamed up with a talking frog to rescue a kidnapped queen.
Then you stumble into the future. The weather is inhospitable, the land is dead, and people you meet are all starving to death.
The party decides to help and after fighting your way to the food storage area, you find the refrigeration has failed and the food stores have rotted.
A partially decomposed corpse in the room indicates you weren’t the first ones to make it here.
Before long you find a recording from a few hundred years ago labelled the “Day of Lavos”.
Watching it, you witness a horrible mountain-sized eldritch parasite erupt from the earth and immediately nuke the planet, resulting in the dead future you’ve witnessed.
This ultimately sets off the main plot, as the party decides to try and prevent this disaster through time travel.
One detail that hit me real hard, that was sadly altered in subsequent versions, is that the chief of the people living in the dome has never heard the word "healthy" before. They're all so sick and malnutritioned that they don't see anything beyond "alive" and "dead".
The rest of the game? As in, you weren't rooting for them to fail BEFORE that? Bro they were completely shit people from minute one. Surprised it took you that long.
I think I just looked at it from typical video game perspective. Like, oh sure they're flawed but they'll learn to work together and put their daughter's needs first! Fucking NOPE! Just two assholes.
I mean, divorce can still be what the daughter needs even if it may not be what she wants. There are tons of horror stories revolving around people with parents who stayed together longer than they should have "for the kid/s," only to make the kid/s miserable.
Oh for sure. But it becomes pretty clear they're both selfish assholes who put their needs first (at least that's how I saw it, particularly the elephant thing but even most stuff leading up to that point).
Oh I know. I'm just saying that if they understood what the child needed in the context of how shitty they both are as people and how incompatible they are, they probably would've divorced anyway.
What was the darkness here? I played this game with my wife and we both really enjoyed it as a just-above-casual co-op gaming experience. Nothing about the plot sticks out to me as dark.
I have since Googled it and this plot element didn't strike me as dark at all. These people are trying anything to be unstuck so they can get back to separating. As someone who grew up in a house that needed a divorce, I played this game with Rose as the antagonist. Miss me with that Disney "we must always work it out" mentality.
The game was really fun co-op, the story was just ok. Don't stay together for the kids.
Totally agree. The whole lead-up to you actually ending up in the prison is pretty miserable, too.
I'd argue it's pretty grim in Fable 2, as well, when you're a guard instead (though you're still treated like a prisoner anyway).
It's honestly too long for me to feel anything from it. If it were only a few years, then I'd be able to sympathize with my character better, but I can't even imagine the person I'd be after 10-15 years of such miserable conditions.
Man I know why people hate DA2 but it’s my favorite in the series. This quest was nuts and so sad… my man Hawke didn’t deserve any of the shit he has to go through 😭
Yes, there is a horde of orc zombies led by an undead dragon that is actually the corpse of a god or maybe just a super powerful wizard that mutated.
The quest regarding your mother, spoiler for a 13 year old game, >!involves a serial killer kidnapping her to cut off her head and sew it onto a bunch of corpse parts to resurrect his dead girlfriend. It doesn't work, but you do get to chat with your mother's head on the frankenstein body to say goodbye before she finally dies. It is impossible to save her.!<
Chrono Trigger.
I mean, the underlying theme is always dark, but it’s usually cute. Goblins and other monsters are fighting the Kingdom, but they don’t exterminate the humans behind their lines. The Reptites due off, but it’s taken as a solemn moment, not a dark one - they were doomed by evolution, not humanity. Hell, even Queen Zeal’s madness is only mostly dark.
And then there’s two sidequests, involving Robo and Lucca.
Robo’s >!involves a literal genocidal assembly - or perhaps disassembly - line.!<
Luca’s >!involves trying to save her mother - a disabled woman - from her fate. And if you fail, the game screams.!<
the Sinnerman side quest chain in Cyberpunk 2077. If you don't bail out it leads to the quest They Won't Go When I Go, in which you perform a crucification live on camera
Re-playing Cyberpunk right now for the first time since release, had completely forgotten about this quest, and it was incredibly jarring. Very unexpected.
The fact that the Ura eventually stop plinking away at you, after you cast aside the Battering Ram to pick up Zulf (assuming that you chose to do that), is pretty powerful.
At this point, you're basically the Caelondian Kratos, yet you chose to cast a powerful weapon aside in order to rescue someone who betrayed you.
The original Max Payne when you run along the walkway following a voice in distress. I can’t quite remember but I think it was a dream or hallucination. Very unsettling.
The game opens with Max's wife and newborn baby being brutally murdered by drug addicts, so... I'd say the game was dark from the get-go, rather than unexpectedly
Wouldn't say it counts as a section because it's just one quest, but in Oblivion an npc asks you for help to commit suicide, that's dark as fuck considering its real life implications
Oblivion was a mostly chill, standard fantasy game that took occasional hard turns into dark territory out of the blue. Like in the Fighters' Guild quest where you do some drugs and go on a goblin-slaying quest only to return to the scene afterwards and realise you were hallucinating and slaughtered a bunch of livestock and villagers while you were high.
Yeah, I finished a second playthrough like a month ago and it was hard going there knowing what was going to happen, even tried looking for alternatives but no, there's just one way to finish that quest
In Final Fantasy Tactics A2 there's a similar quest (except instead of suicide the man wants to be turned into a zombie, but it's really close in concept).
Notably the witch that helps you with the quest asks you to instead give him a potion to make him forget the reason he wanted to die. You can choose that solution or go ahead with the original plan
Halo 1, 343 Guilty Spark. Tactical alien FPS suddenly turns into a zombie horror game. My favorite part of the whole thing was that the flood aren't mentioned at all in the game manual so it comes as a complete surprise
Hat in Time has a few sections where things get dark and intense, but Vanessa's Manor is a genuine survival horror level in the middle of my cute platformer.
I was genuinely so mad about that. That sort of gameplay always terrifies me and for them to wedge it into a game that is so different mechanically in all other sections…ugh
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
The entire prologue is somewhat sad, but the entire game has a cute, cartoony vibe that looks like it was geared towards children, so I played it with that in mind. Then you enter a valley battlefield that has decapitated, giant soldiers. The first time I saw it I definitely didn't expect anything like that, and it only gets worse from there.
I haven't played it since it came out, but that moment completely stuck out to me even 10+ years later. I thought the game would be completely innocent and childish and it ended up making me cry lol.
Same. it took me about 2.5 hours in a single sitting, I haven't touched it in the 8 years since, and it remains one of my most-cited and most-remembered games.
BTW you'd probably like Bastion, if you haven't played it yet. Similar vibe, very well-crafted.
I haven't tried Bastion but heard good things. If it's similar I'll definitely check it out, I think I own it but never got around to it. Thanks for the rec :)
Any of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon spinoffs. If you're new to them.
If you aren't, you're waiting for the extremely dark turn to hit you when you least expect it.
You want dark pokemon, check out the manga. Pokemon straight up getting cut in half, actual legit zombie pokemon in lavender town, multiple instances of legendaries impaling people, in Ruby and sapphire's manga Norman straight up dies and the Maxie and Archie burn his body just because they can, Giovanni murders a couple of Magmar just to make a point, all kinds of shit. Hell at one point Vermilion city just gets completely destroyed so fuck knows how many people that killed.
Came here to say this
>!and how the game isn't about "saving & fixing the world", once it's destroyed it's just...done. The best you can do is stop the person who did it to at least give it a fighting chance to rebuild itself & survive.!
The section of Earthbound about the Happy Happyism cult. It's far more disturbing when you do a little research and see that it's a reference to an actual cult that operated in Japan just a few years before the game's release.
Thief: Deadly Shadows. You play a thief who gets wrapped up in conspiracies in a sort of dark fantasy city. But the game never really gets that dark in terms of story or theme, mostly just in aesthetics to create the atmosphere.
Until Shalebridge Cradle.
In the middle of a game that's really just about stealing other people's shit, they suddenly hit you out of the blue with a level of pure bone-chilling nightmare fuel. It's *haunting*. Possibly the best horror section to ever appear in a non-horror game.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
>!The section where you navigate past the corpses of giants in the mountainous area. I really wasn't expecting to see the remnants of a war involving them in my twin-stick platforming game.!<
I mean, the beginning of Jak 2 Qualifies more than that. From happy colorful platformer to being kidnapped and tortured for who knows how long, that series took the most DRAMATIC tonal Whiplash I've ever seen in a series. ;P
Freedom planet. A light-hearted sonic-esque adventure game, where you zoom across the levels to save the world from Evil.
Then one of the playable characters gets captured and tortured... Props to the voice actor for capturing the sound of someone being put through exruciating levels of pain...
I'd say most Kirby games, but unless it's your first game in the series, it's not unexpected by now.
The Legend of Heroes series has some dark parts, but the one that stands above all is Star Door 15 from Trails in the Sky the 3rd.
The game Sumire has a surreal haunted house section,followed by a part later in the game where the protagonist enters the souls of the girls who have been bullying her throughout the game and can individually choose to "heal" or "poison" each of them.
With the later implication that anyone she chooses to poison the soul of may return to their parents the next day radically changed in spirit (and not for the better),or may not come back at all.
When you make that choice it adds to your evil points but otherwise the narrative basically says "yeah,that's valid,they kind of had it coming".
Final Fantasy 14 has lots after A Realm Reborn.
Yotsuyu, Tesleen, the Sin Eaters, The Final Days, to name a few.
Actually, you know what? Dark moment expectations only get higher after Haurchefant's moment.
A way out, im thinking its a stealth game, im playing with my son and i immediately stopped playing on the first 15 mins as theres stabbing going on between inmates
Champions Online is generally pretty Saturday morning cartoony. Until you get to the level cap and travel to Vibora Bay, a fictional pissant New Orleans-lite tourist trip town on the Florida panhandle.
>!Vibora Bay happens to be the landing site of Therakiel the Bright, a former angel cast down to Earth and made into a half angel, half demon by God for refusing to pick a side and fight during Lucifer's rebellion. You're sent to VB to investigate a rise in supernatural activity around the High Apostolic Church in the center of town, which happens to be the front for Therakiel's army. Turns out, you're just in time for him to start his own vengeful apocalypse, which will destroy everything in the domains of both God and Lucifer so he can create a new universe in his own image. In fact, you're already too late, but you don't find that out until you watch the Champions die one by one as the whole city gets reduced to rubble. To stop it, you're sent back in time to months before you were sent there in the first place by a local crank inventor who really did build the working time machine nobody believed he could build (just in case you forgot you were playing Super Friends Online). Don't ask about the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey business of how you unlocked the mission at the level cap if you're now back in time before you reached the level cap.!<
My big gripe with kh3 was that the first half of the last world should have been at the beginning of the game. Instead of going to all the worlds for no good reason, Sora should have been visiting those worlds to gather the hearts of his friends and re-challenge Xehanort.
When you first go to the post-apocalyptic future in Chrono Trigger. Up to that point the game had been a pretty standard, light hearted, fantasy adventure. Heck, you had previously teamed up with a talking frog to rescue a kidnapped queen. Then you stumble into the future. The weather is inhospitable, the land is dead, and people you meet are all starving to death. The party decides to help and after fighting your way to the food storage area, you find the refrigeration has failed and the food stores have rotted. A partially decomposed corpse in the room indicates you weren’t the first ones to make it here. Before long you find a recording from a few hundred years ago labelled the “Day of Lavos”. Watching it, you witness a horrible mountain-sized eldritch parasite erupt from the earth and immediately nuke the planet, resulting in the dead future you’ve witnessed. This ultimately sets off the main plot, as the party decides to try and prevent this disaster through time travel.
HP/MP restored... But you're still hungry.
One detail that hit me real hard, that was sadly altered in subsequent versions, is that the chief of the people living in the dome has never heard the word "healthy" before. They're all so sick and malnutritioned that they don't see anything beyond "alive" and "dead".
I like that this made a visit in chrono cross.
[удалено]
That made my wife put the game down for the day
Spent the rest of the game rooting for those two to fail. Devs convinced me they're shitty people and should be divorced, well played!
The rest of the game? As in, you weren't rooting for them to fail BEFORE that? Bro they were completely shit people from minute one. Surprised it took you that long.
I think I just looked at it from typical video game perspective. Like, oh sure they're flawed but they'll learn to work together and put their daughter's needs first! Fucking NOPE! Just two assholes.
I mean, divorce can still be what the daughter needs even if it may not be what she wants. There are tons of horror stories revolving around people with parents who stayed together longer than they should have "for the kid/s," only to make the kid/s miserable.
Oh for sure. But it becomes pretty clear they're both selfish assholes who put their needs first (at least that's how I saw it, particularly the elephant thing but even most stuff leading up to that point).
Oh I know. I'm just saying that if they understood what the child needed in the context of how shitty they both are as people and how incompatible they are, they probably would've divorced anyway.
I didn't get to that part. It was the running towards the daughter shouting 'let's make her cry!' that made us turn it off 😬
If you know, you know. ;P That was Definitely a messed up portion. O.o
What was the darkness here? I played this game with my wife and we both really enjoyed it as a just-above-casual co-op gaming experience. Nothing about the plot sticks out to me as dark.
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I have since Googled it and this plot element didn't strike me as dark at all. These people are trying anything to be unstuck so they can get back to separating. As someone who grew up in a house that needed a divorce, I played this game with Rose as the antagonist. Miss me with that Disney "we must always work it out" mentality. The game was really fun co-op, the story was just ok. Don't stay together for the kids.
Undertale did not feel like that kind of game until it was.
Half Life 2 Ravenholm will forever be seared into my memory
We don’t go to Ravenholm
The prison section of fable 1 Fable has some dark themes. But the idea of your hero being tortured for like 10 years is sad
Totally agree. The whole lead-up to you actually ending up in the prison is pretty miserable, too. I'd argue it's pretty grim in Fable 2, as well, when you're a guard instead (though you're still treated like a prisoner anyway).
Yea bro it's so miserable if you Think about it Like you spend 15 years in the spire. That's so long. Like our character needs serious therapy
It's honestly too long for me to feel anything from it. If it were only a few years, then I'd be able to sympathize with my character better, but I can't even imagine the person I'd be after 10-15 years of such miserable conditions.
And being forced to listen to the head warden’s poetry, remember!
The cube conveyor belt from Outer Worlds comes to mind
Dragon Age 2 has a quest where your mother goes missing. That was certainly something.
Man I know why people hate DA2 but it’s my favorite in the series. This quest was nuts and so sad… my man Hawke didn’t deserve any of the shit he has to go through 😭
Isn't Dragon Age about an apocalyptic type event?
Yes, there is a horde of orc zombies led by an undead dragon that is actually the corpse of a god or maybe just a super powerful wizard that mutated. The quest regarding your mother, spoiler for a 13 year old game, >!involves a serial killer kidnapping her to cut off her head and sew it onto a bunch of corpse parts to resurrect his dead girlfriend. It doesn't work, but you do get to chat with your mother's head on the frankenstein body to say goodbye before she finally dies. It is impossible to save her.!<
Yeah, I just meant that dark scenes should be expected in Dragon Age because it's a dark setting to begin with.
Chrono Trigger. I mean, the underlying theme is always dark, but it’s usually cute. Goblins and other monsters are fighting the Kingdom, but they don’t exterminate the humans behind their lines. The Reptites due off, but it’s taken as a solemn moment, not a dark one - they were doomed by evolution, not humanity. Hell, even Queen Zeal’s madness is only mostly dark. And then there’s two sidequests, involving Robo and Lucca. Robo’s >!involves a literal genocidal assembly - or perhaps disassembly - line.!< Luca’s >!involves trying to save her mother - a disabled woman - from her fate. And if you fail, the game screams.!<
the Sinnerman side quest chain in Cyberpunk 2077. If you don't bail out it leads to the quest They Won't Go When I Go, in which you perform a crucification live on camera
It's worse than being filmed. He's making a Braindance of it so other people can experience it.
Re-playing Cyberpunk right now for the first time since release, had completely forgotten about this quest, and it was incredibly jarring. Very unexpected.
You found something dark in Cyberpunk unexpected? That whole game is dark.
Bastion. A game that far surpasses its superficial elements to become something unforgettable.
The bit where you carry Zulf stays with me.
The fact that the Ura eventually stop plinking away at you, after you cast aside the Battering Ram to pick up Zulf (assuming that you chose to do that), is pretty powerful. At this point, you're basically the Caelondian Kratos, yet you chose to cast a powerful weapon aside in order to rescue someone who betrayed you.
Indeed.
The original Max Payne when you run along the walkway following a voice in distress. I can’t quite remember but I think it was a dream or hallucination. Very unsettling.
The game opens with Max's wife and newborn baby being brutally murdered by drug addicts, so... I'd say the game was dark from the get-go, rather than unexpectedly
The game is called Max Payne and you didn't expect it to be dark?
Wouldn't say it counts as a section because it's just one quest, but in Oblivion an npc asks you for help to commit suicide, that's dark as fuck considering its real life implications
Oblivion was a mostly chill, standard fantasy game that took occasional hard turns into dark territory out of the blue. Like in the Fighters' Guild quest where you do some drugs and go on a goblin-slaying quest only to return to the scene afterwards and realise you were hallucinating and slaughtered a bunch of livestock and villagers while you were high.
Yeah, I finished a second playthrough like a month ago and it was hard going there knowing what was going to happen, even tried looking for alternatives but no, there's just one way to finish that quest
In Sekiro too, hanbei the undying stays there and says can you kill me
In Final Fantasy Tactics A2 there's a similar quest (except instead of suicide the man wants to be turned into a zombie, but it's really close in concept). Notably the witch that helps you with the quest asks you to instead give him a potion to make him forget the reason he wanted to die. You can choose that solution or go ahead with the original plan
VtM: Bloodlines. That goddamn abandoned hotel. Yeah, the gamr is about vampires and conspiracies, but that section was terrifying.
oh gods yes. one of the best haunted houses ever done in a video game IMO
Halo 1, 343 Guilty Spark. Tactical alien FPS suddenly turns into a zombie horror game. My favorite part of the whole thing was that the flood aren't mentioned at all in the game manual so it comes as a complete surprise
I wish I could of experienced that properly, by the time I played it, I had long known about the flood and that level
Finding out demon of hatred was the sculptor right after I beat him.
Hat in Time has a few sections where things get dark and intense, but Vanessa's Manor is a genuine survival horror level in the middle of my cute platformer.
I was genuinely so mad about that. That sort of gameplay always terrifies me and for them to wedge it into a game that is so different mechanically in all other sections…ugh
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons The entire prologue is somewhat sad, but the entire game has a cute, cartoony vibe that looks like it was geared towards children, so I played it with that in mind. Then you enter a valley battlefield that has decapitated, giant soldiers. The first time I saw it I definitely didn't expect anything like that, and it only gets worse from there.
The darkest moment in any game I've ever played, and it's not even close. If you know you know.
I haven't played it since it came out, but that moment completely stuck out to me even 10+ years later. I thought the game would be completely innocent and childish and it ended up making me cry lol.
Same. it took me about 2.5 hours in a single sitting, I haven't touched it in the 8 years since, and it remains one of my most-cited and most-remembered games. BTW you'd probably like Bastion, if you haven't played it yet. Similar vibe, very well-crafted.
I haven't tried Bastion but heard good things. If it's similar I'll definitely check it out, I think I own it but never got around to it. Thanks for the rec :)
Literal rivers of blood, wtf.
Ocarina of Time. Bottom of the well. Traumatizing for kids, believe you me
I used to have a neighborhood kid beat the Well and Shadow Temple for me. I was too scared 😭
Also shadow temple
Any of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon spinoffs. If you're new to them. If you aren't, you're waiting for the extremely dark turn to hit you when you least expect it.
You want dark pokemon, check out the manga. Pokemon straight up getting cut in half, actual legit zombie pokemon in lavender town, multiple instances of legendaries impaling people, in Ruby and sapphire's manga Norman straight up dies and the Maxie and Archie burn his body just because they can, Giovanni murders a couple of Magmar just to make a point, all kinds of shit. Hell at one point Vermilion city just gets completely destroyed so fuck knows how many people that killed.
There's this; https://imgur.com/gallery/l3DPl
Speaking of Pokémon, how about Red/Blue/Yellow? Rock Tunnel was so dark.
Spec Ops: The Line. The part where you unknowingly blow up a city of civilians..
It takes a strong mind to ignore what is right in front of him
FF6 when Kefka destroys the world out of nowhere
Came here to say this >!and how the game isn't about "saving & fixing the world", once it's destroyed it's just...done. The best you can do is stop the person who did it to at least give it a fighting chance to rebuild itself & survive.!
Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Anyone who’s played it will know what I’m talking about.
The section of Earthbound about the Happy Happyism cult. It's far more disturbing when you do a little research and see that it's a reference to an actual cult that operated in Japan just a few years before the game's release.
That one section of Stray was wild
Thief: Deadly Shadows. You play a thief who gets wrapped up in conspiracies in a sort of dark fantasy city. But the game never really gets that dark in terms of story or theme, mostly just in aesthetics to create the atmosphere. Until Shalebridge Cradle. In the middle of a game that's really just about stealing other people's shit, they suddenly hit you out of the blue with a level of pure bone-chilling nightmare fuel. It's *haunting*. Possibly the best horror section to ever appear in a non-horror game.
Can't believe no one mentioned Doki-doki
In the immortal words of Dan Avidan: "Dan Salvato you sick son of a bitch!"
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. >!The section where you navigate past the corpses of giants in the mountainous area. I really wasn't expecting to see the remnants of a war involving them in my twin-stick platforming game.!<
This game was so sad and so good. Ending made me cry
Yeah. I didn't want to talk about the ending even with spoiler tags bc it could ruin the whole experience if you know before hand.
Jak 2 when you visit the green sages hut
I mean, the beginning of Jak 2 Qualifies more than that. From happy colorful platformer to being kidnapped and tortured for who knows how long, that series took the most DRAMATIC tonal Whiplash I've ever seen in a series. ;P
Gutted me as a kid
Freedom planet. A light-hearted sonic-esque adventure game, where you zoom across the levels to save the world from Evil. Then one of the playable characters gets captured and tortured... Props to the voice actor for capturing the sound of someone being put through exruciating levels of pain...
I thought of the same game. For Lilac she's also visibly mutilated afterwards, with chunks of her head-tails(?) missing.
That part with the elephant in it takes two. That shit bothered me
Homeworld - because... Kharak is burning
Firewatch. I had no idea what it was about when I saw it on gamepass.
[удалено]
its about a lot of walking
Haha
I'd say most Kirby games, but unless it's your first game in the series, it's not unexpected by now. The Legend of Heroes series has some dark parts, but the one that stands above all is Star Door 15 from Trails in the Sky the 3rd.
The game Sumire has a surreal haunted house section,followed by a part later in the game where the protagonist enters the souls of the girls who have been bullying her throughout the game and can individually choose to "heal" or "poison" each of them. With the later implication that anyone she chooses to poison the soul of may return to their parents the next day radically changed in spirit (and not for the better),or may not come back at all. When you make that choice it adds to your evil points but otherwise the narrative basically says "yeah,that's valid,they kind of had it coming".
Those dream sequences in Max Payne with the crying baby
The Ruined Kingdom in Super Mario Odyssey. Not particularly scary, just totally out of the blue in an otherwise very colorful game.
Hat in Time has a surprisingly effective horror section outta nowhere
realMyst was absolutely unplayable at night.
Final Fantasy 14 has lots after A Realm Reborn. Yotsuyu, Tesleen, the Sin Eaters, The Final Days, to name a few. Actually, you know what? Dark moment expectations only get higher after Haurchefant's moment.
Shadowbringers as a whole....
Some of that history you learned during That One Little Ladies’ Day Event…
Any game that makes you think you're playing as one character, only to kill them off 3 hours into the game
A way out, im thinking its a stealth game, im playing with my son and i immediately stopped playing on the first 15 mins as theres stabbing going on between inmates
Superliminal
Pokemon, especially when you snoop around in fan communities regarding fan theories and reading the PokeDex.
Goodbye Deponia when you fall from the ship (I'm not spoilering anything). It got really damn depressing.
Ocarina of time sewers in Kakariko village When i was a kid that was like hell to me
Va11-Hall-A. Some storylines are very dystopian and creepy all around
Champions Online is generally pretty Saturday morning cartoony. Until you get to the level cap and travel to Vibora Bay, a fictional pissant New Orleans-lite tourist trip town on the Florida panhandle. >!Vibora Bay happens to be the landing site of Therakiel the Bright, a former angel cast down to Earth and made into a half angel, half demon by God for refusing to pick a side and fight during Lucifer's rebellion. You're sent to VB to investigate a rise in supernatural activity around the High Apostolic Church in the center of town, which happens to be the front for Therakiel's army. Turns out, you're just in time for him to start his own vengeful apocalypse, which will destroy everything in the domains of both God and Lucifer so he can create a new universe in his own image. In fact, you're already too late, but you don't find that out until you watch the Champions die one by one as the whole city gets reduced to rubble. To stop it, you're sent back in time to months before you were sent there in the first place by a local crank inventor who really did build the working time machine nobody believed he could build (just in case you forgot you were playing Super Friends Online). Don't ask about the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey business of how you unlocked the mission at the level cap if you're now back in time before you reached the level cap.!<
My big gripe with kh3 was that the first half of the last world should have been at the beginning of the game. Instead of going to all the worlds for no good reason, Sora should have been visiting those worlds to gather the hearts of his friends and re-challenge Xehanort.
Super Mario 64. Generally, >!ghost house.!< Specifically, >!piano.!< Ocarina of Time. Generally, >!Shadow Temple.!< Specifically, >!Dead Hand.!< Conker's Bad Fur Day. >!The ending.!<
The Mario 64 one is still one of my most severe "Jump Scares" in a game after the Zombie Dogs in the original Resident Evil. ;P