Top 20 Worst Video Game Plot Twists

Top 20 Worst Video Game Plot Twists

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Top 10 Worst Video Game Plot Twists

Welcome to WatchMojo and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the top 20 worst video game plot twists. For this list, we’re looking at the most ridiculous anticlimactic wildly unexpected, or just plain stupid narrative turns in gaming. It goes without saying that there are major spoilers ahead. Let us know which one made you tear your hair out in the comments.

“L.A. Noire” (2011)

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More than halfway through “L.A. Noire'' you're treated to a baffling revelation about Cole Phelps. Although we previously believed him to be an upstanding citizen and one of the few non-corrupt cops in the LAPD, he actually spent weeks of in-game time cheating on his wife. Yes, Phelps has been having an adulterous affair with the German lounge singer Elsa Lichtmann. This news is much to the dismay of his wife, children, and all his co-workers because this is the late 40’s and World War II recently ended. Though we see Phelps talk to Elsa and visit her late at night, his cheating behavior still comes out of nowhere. It makes playing as him from that point on incredibly frustrating.

“Call of Duty: Ghosts” (2013)

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Revenge stories can make for great video game plotlines, but not when they’re executed as heavy-handedly as in “Call of Duty: Ghosts.” After being supposedly abandoned by his squadmates prior to the events of “COD: Ghosts,” Rorke was brainwashed and turned into the ultimate killing machine. Anyway, most people can’t survive being shot in the heart with a hand cannon, but add to that falling into a raging river from the inside of a crashing train? And you’re walking around like that? No chance.

It’s never good when a video game tries to get too meta, and that’s especially true when the game already suffers from shoddy writing. You have to give the writers credit for trying to make things interesting. Unfortunately, the plot twist is HORRID. Turns out that the entire world is just a video game universe created by creatures from the 4th dimension, and your party is simply AI that has become advanced enough to achieve self-awareness. It undermines everything that’s happened in the game beforehand when you realize NONE of it matters.

“Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” (2015)

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If you were playing “Metal Gear Solid V” and getting a little uncomfortable with the fact that Quiet, a professional assassin, spends basically all her time in a glorified bikini, don’t worry! Hideo Kojima is way ahead of you with a completely justified explanation. It turns out that the reason Quiet won’t put on some more layers is that she breathes through her skin, of course. This is because she sustained serious injuries at an earlier point in time and was treated with experimental parasites, which caused this strange mutation. Yes, that’s definitely the reason, it’s totally not because Kojima wanted a half-naked girl featured heavily in his game.

“Resident Evil 5” (2009)

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For the entirety of “Resident Evil 5”, one question weighed heavily on the minds of both the players and Chris Redfield: where is Jill Valentine? Both she and Wesker supposedly expired in a fall years before the game began. But if there’s one thing “Resident Evil” won’t do, it’s get rid of any of the main heroes and certainly not off-screen. So, it was absolutely no surprise when the combat-trained, back-flipping figure wearing a ridiculous mask turned out to be Jill in disguise all along. As interesting as it was to pit Chris and Sheva against the master of unlocking herself, everybody saw this “twist” coming a mile away.

As Desmond’s closest ally for the first three games, we all thought we could trust Lucy Stillman after she helped him escape from Abstergo’s lab in “Assassin’s Creed II”. But at the end of “Brotherhood” Desmond, while under the control of Juno, fatally stabs Lucy. Why did he do this? Well, in later games you’ll eventually find out that she was a triple agent and she really did work for the Templars all along. This twist is bad not only because it was so poorly executed, with players having to wait years to find out the truth, but because Lucy was one of the best characters. And taking out a character voiced by Kristen Bell is always unjustifiable.

“Fallout 4” (2015)

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After being sealed away in a cryostasis tube, you witness your spouse in the pod across from you get fatally wounded by a mysterious duo who proceeds to kidnap your infant son. You’ll spend “Fallout 4’s” first act desperately trying to find your son somewhere in the Commonwealth. But when you finally track him down to the clandestine institute itself you’re in for a shock: Shaun isn’t a young boy anymore. He’s the eighty-year-old leader of the Institute that goes by the name Father and might be the main villain if you side with any of the other three factions. Why would there ever be an option to fight the child you wanted to save? Who told Todd Howard that this was a good idea?

“Super Mario Bros. 2” (1988)

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Although it does explain the game’s bizarre mechanics and style, the ending in “Super Mario Bros. 2” is as anticlimactic as it gets. Once you defeat the last boss, you enter a room where you uncork a pot, freeing a bunch of fairies that were trapped inside for some reason. It’s then revealed that the entire game was Mario's dream. All we know is that if someone dreams about flying masks, small mushroom-headed people, and pink, dinosaur-like creatures that jump around spitting eggs at you, it's considered a nightmare, not just a dream.

“Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” (2018)

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Now that we’ve talked about a missing son, let’s cover a game that deals with a missing father. Early in “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” you discover Nikolaos, the Wolf of Sparta, is not the biological father of whichever character you chose to play as, be that Kassandra or Alexios. This sends the eagle-bearer on a journey to uncover their father’s identity. In a bizarre twist of fate, you discover the misthios’s father is the Greek mathematician Pythagoras. The scholar has been living underground near the gateway to Atlantis for centuries, kept alive by yet another Piece of Eden. It’s never clear why Ubisoft decided to make Pythagoras of triangle fame the semi-immortal father of “Odyssey’s” hero instead of literally anybody else.

“The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope” (2020)

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You’re pulled through “Little Hope” by intriguing questions. Why does everybody look identical to a family from the 1970s? Why do they in turn look identical to the residents of the town hundreds of years ago? Why are they being tormented by their zombified ancestors? In the end, it turns out that none of those questions matters at all. The main character is actually the missing bus driver, who in turn is the “Anthony” who survived the house fire. Only the 1970s characters actually exist. And Anthony has been so traumatized by the loss that he imagined the entire plot of the game. This is hugely disappointing compared to the fake story of witches, curses, and time travel we were set up to believe in.

“Indigo Prophecy” is a action adventure game filled with convoluted storytelling and ridiculous twists. It’s difficult to pick one bad twist that stands above the rest, especially when there are SO MANY head-scratchers. The most outlandish, however, is the introduction of the “Purple Clan,” a group of AI type creatures that spawned from the internet, which is actually a sentient being that can raise the dead, to unleash a plot to freeze the entire world. Also, for some reason the members of “The Purple Clan” are actually yellow.

“Metroid: Other M” (2010)

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How the heck did they manage to botch a seemingly flawless series like “Metroid” so badly? Well, for starters, they tried to imbue “Other M” with an overwhelmingly boring narrative. After being summoned to a space station overrun by aliens and space pirates by the station's director, Madeline Bergman, a boring, convoluted plot unfolds where it is finally revealed that the Madeline Bergman is actually Melissa or MB, an android created by the real Madeline Bergman, and who has developed the human-hating emotions of Mother Brain. Get it? Melissa Bergman = MB = Mother Brain? Yeah we were disappointed too.

“Dragon Age 2” (2011)

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The entire game works hard to set up the direct conflict between Kirkwall’s authoritarian Templars and the marginalized Circle of Magi. And the endgame fight against Knight-Commander Meredith is masterfully written with plenty of foreshadowing from the beginning. But the fight against First Enchanter Orsino is anything but. We can buy Meredith’s descent into madness. But we don’t buy into Orsino suddenly deciding at the end of the game that he’s going to use blood magic, becoming an abomination that you have to fight as well. It just doesn’t make sense that Orsino, who says he’s never used blood magic before and doesn’t have a good reason to start now, would ever do this.

After the critical acclaim for “Metal Gear Solid,” and the recent release of the more powerful PS2 hardware, fans were going crazy with anticipation for the second chapter in Solid Snake’s espionage saga. What followed was one of the greatest trolls in gaming: after controlling the iconic Snake for one mission, you are promptly thrust into the shoes of Raiden for the rest of the game, a somewhat whiny, weak-willed substitute who pales in comparison. “Metal Gear Solid 2” is still an awesome experience, but man were people let down.

“Mass Effect 3” (2010)

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After three incredible games, Shepard finally reached the true leader of the Reapers: the Catalyst, an AI that looks like a child. The Catalyst, living inside the Citadel all this time, makes a case for the Reapers so convincing that the story is sent in a completely different direction. The Reapers want to harvest all organic life every 50,000 years and if you suddenly decide that they actually have a point you can go along with this plan. It’s a cheap and anticlimactic way to conclude the trilogy. But the other endings aren’t much better, either. You can destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy or spontaneously merge synthetic and organic life. The latter option’s best upside is that everybody has green eyes now?

The 2009 “Bionic Commando” reboot is filled with cringe-worthy moments, from “Rad” Spencer’s questionable dreadlocked redesign down to the cheesy acting, but nothing’s worse than the reveal about the disappearance of Spencer’s wife and origins of his trademark mechanical arm. Turns out that in order for bionics like Rad’s arm to work properly, they need to sync up perfectly with the host on both an emotional and physical level. So that means that Spencer’s wife sacrificed herself to have her ‘spirit’ or whatever used to make his arm. So dumb.

“Batman: Arkham Knight” (2015)

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Who could’ve guessed that the enigmatic Arkham Knight was troubled, former Robin, Jason Todd? Well, it turns out that everybody guessed this because it was painfully obvious from the beginning. Despite Jason Todd barely being mentioned in “Arkham Asylum” or “Arkham City”, suddenly Batman is overcome by grief about the time Joker took Jason’s life. Bruce even has fear-gas-induced visions about his protege all over Gotham. It also didn’t help that Arkham Knight knew so much about Batman that he could only be a former Robin. There was never any question that the villain was Jason. So much for Rocksteady’s claim that they were introducing a new character.

“Bayonetta” (2009)

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You know that annoying kid you’ve spent the entire game looking after who’s convinced that Bayonetta is actually her mother? It turns out that she is Bayonetta. Cereza was transported through time because of an incredibly convoluted plot to restore Bayonetta’s memories. This is all because she’s forgotten most of her life before she was sealed away for five-hundred years. The revelation that Cereza is actually Bayonetta is annoying because it makes the story significantly harder to follow. Even though it’s easy to see how identical they looked to each other the whole time, it’s much more difficult to wrap your brain around how this all makes sense.

“The Last of Us: Part II” (2020)

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Seven years after the release of the first critically acclaimed game, Naughty Dog brought us back to the world of “The Last of Us”. This brand-new story looked like we'd see Joel and Ellie working together to face a new threat. Except we never got to see that happen at all because Joel loses his life around two hours into the main story. This caused outrage among players for multiple reasons. The way he went was extremely violent. And the marketing also featured extremely misleading scenes that had people believing that Joel would be alive for the whole game. While he admittedly had a lot to answer for, his demise came so quickly and unexpectedly that it upset no small number of fans. Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few Honorable Mentions:

The writers at Quantic Dream came so close to creating one of the coolest murder mysteries in the history of gaming, and yet their big plot twist, with Scott Shelby being the Origami Killer opens up an enormous plot hole in the game. In the clock shop, Scott apparently murdered Manfred, and yet, when you enter the back room of the store while controlling Scott, Manfred is already dead. It's arguably implied that Lauren, the only possible witness, was distracted by a ballerina figurine when it happened, but it happens so quickly Scott would have had to have super speed to kill Manfred in time.