This is the first part of my Top 10 video game surprises. This is very personal, based on my experiences in particular. I found some of these funny, shocking, pleasant or simply weird. Let’s get started, shall we?
Number Ten: The princess is where!?
Super Mario Bros was the very first video game I played… or that I remember playing, since my parents owned an Atari (Gamer blood IS in my veins!) Me and my brothers were pretty bad players, but we were also discovering a whole new world on the process; travelling through the mushroom kingdom, going underground, and then the heights, to reach for the first time to King Koopa’s castle. It was exciting enough for us having to avoid the flames and find a way to get to the axe, but the most exciting part for me was when we realized that the game was far from over, since the princess was on another castle.
Number Nine: Camelia’s outer beauty
Meet Camellia, a 200 years old sneaky and deceptive deimos that was trapped an experimente don for a while. When she joins the party, and probably before that, she keeps mentioning how beautiful she was before she was drained during the experiments.
At best, I could imagine her as a cute little plant thing with a giant head without the wrinkles, at worst, I imagined her as a delusional little wrinkly liar.
Mirror, mirror on the wall
Anyway, at one point, pretty late on the game, she is finally powered up by the Earth Stone and she recovers her “beauty.” It turns out, she wasn’t lying.
Camellia’s true form
Number Eight: Return of the dead
Rewind a couple of year: Mortal Kombat Deception was released, and the intro of the game showed Liu Kang getting killed. Honestly, I didn’t care much for him anyway, but seeing Him get killed was surprising enough. When the game came out, I was too busy playing Konquest Mode and finding krypt keys and stuff, while checking GameFAQs message boards frequently for new discoveries.
Then something unexpected happened. A user whose name I don’t remember claimed he unlocked Liu Kang.
He was zombie like and rotting and had chains on his wrists.
No, really. To unlock him, you need to be at a specific place and waitfor a specific day of the week (in game) and a chest with the key will appear for around 1 or 2 in game hours. You had to be quick.
This guy was flamed, called troll, and humiliated by the overall GF population for making up so much garbage and insisting it was true. Of course, that only lasted until they realized…
It was true.
To me the best part of it all was imagining the faces of the collective community. XD
Number Seven: Speed is his game!
Fast Forward from MK: Deception to Super Smash Bros Brawl. A new trailer was shown. Holy smokes! Solid Snake will be in Brawl!? His inclusion to the game opened the doors to speculate which other non Nintendo characters would appear on the game. Sonic the hedgehog was one of the most popular ones. Long discussions and flame wars were caused by however that gave reasons why he will or won’t be in it. It was just not possible, many people claimed. It will never happen.
But it did happen
I was neutral over the inclusion of Sonic. I mean, I was probably on the “He won’t make it” side, but I didn’t care enough about it to actually argue. Still, seeing his inclusion and explosion on the boards was priceless.
Number Six: Breaking the transformation rules
Disgaia is a pretty fun game, with its wacky characters. One of my favorite parts was also one of my most surprising ones. Laharl decides that anybody who manages to take the Deed off his hands as he travels to the Heart of Evil shall become the new Overlord. That way he would know who his enemies are. Or something like that. He can’t have that many enemies, can he?
Er… this chapter is pretty awesome so far, but the part I want to get is this.
The Prism Rangers came to challenge the Overlord! They feel lonely, and figured that if they become the Overlords, they’ll have enough friends to have a ranger of ever color. And they’re so serious, that they will transform right away.
Until Etna shoots two of them. Red ranger can’t transform by himself. When questioned why didn’t he transformed before coming into battle, Flonne, gave a very logical explanation
A true defender of justice transforms in front of the enemy!
But seriously, do you know how different some series like Dragon Ball would be if people were like Etna? That was definitely one of my favorite Disgaea moments.
Number Five: There’s something about Tuta
Meet Tuta
The Suikoden series is a game where you can recruit a lot of characters, and some are way more useful than others. Tuta is a pretty weakcharacter that fights by throwing pebbles, but also used medicines automatically to heal the wounded party members. To be honest, I put her a few times on my party for the sake of variety. And she was such a cute little girl! (can be upgraded to rocks)
The world of Suikoden is full with betrayals and surprises, but my biggest surprise for me finding out that Tuta was a boy. It’s not like he was pretending to be a girl or something, but going by his looks, and considering his name ended with a (and Tuta is a girl name in Spanish, boys would be called Tuto instead.) Taking him to the bath tubs would confirm his gender since he got in with the boys. And if that wasn’t proof enough for the unbelievers, Suikoden 3 happened.
And Tuta became a fine young doctor who no longer looked like a girl or threw rocks at monsters.
Number Four: Killed by curiosity
Back when I got Final Fantasy 7, I played it with pretty much no guides or anything. But that didn’t stopped me from checking them whenever I went to a store. I just browsed the pages out of curiosity, and guess what I found. Yep. THAT
And I wasn’t even that far into the first CD. And I happened to like her on my team. That was the first time I was spoiled of a major event by a guide, but not the last. It took me a while to be wary even of reading character bios in FAQs.
I’m not dragging her corpse all the way out! Down you go to the drain!
Number Three: Shoplifting is bad
Legen of Zelda: Link’s Awekaning was my very first Zelda game. Me and my brother got a copy along with a Game Boy each, so we were playing it pretty much at the same time. At one time, one of us lent the game to a neighbor. This is a conversation we had a few days later
Neighbor: Dude, I was playing Link’s Awekaning and we stole from the Tool Shop!
Neighbor: Really! And when I came back, the shop keeper killed me with a beam!
Neighbor: And when I came back, everybody called me THIEF!
If it’s still not obvious, we didn’t believe him. At all. But my sister was intrigued by it, and she was willing to try anything if it meant not having to cut grass like crazy to buy the bow. And for the first time ever…
Our friend was telling the truth. Who would have known?
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Die!
Number Two: Did I miss something?
SaGa Frontier is game that I believe receive a lot of criticism, but I happened to like, a lot! You had 7 different main characters, each with their own stories. Some of them were very story oriented, other were my open ended (Lute’s story allowed you to go right to the final dungeon at the very start.) One of these character was named Blue: a mage mage that had to master every type of magic available and battle his rival twin brother. Or something like that. Anyway, of all the seven characters, Blue’s was the one that left you startled. Seriously. Let’s go through an epic pic journey to see the ending.
Maybe I didn’t beat it fast enough? Let’s try it again.
WHAT THE HELL! HOW DARE THEY! WERE THEY TO BUSY MAKINGEIGHT OTHER ENDINGS TO REMEMBER THERE WAS A SEVENTH CHARACTER!? And why is that Asellus has 3 DIFFERENT ENDINGS! That ending whore should given a slot for Blue! I traveled all the way through HELL, literally, because the last dungeon was in hell, even if it looked like what we typically associate with paradise, but I digress
I TRAVELED ALL THE WAY THROUGH HELL and this is what I get?THIS!? This is the only ending in an RPG that really has pissed me off because.. it doesn’t even have an ending! Seriously Squaresoft, WHAT WAS UP WITH THAT!?
Sorry, I’ve been bottling that up for maybe a decade. Moving on.
Number One: The death of a legend
It was pretty exciting and nostalgic to get to the first boss in the New Super Mario Bros; The classic fight of Bowser against Mario on a bridge over a lava pool. Getting to that axe at the end of the bridge felt as good as the first time, all those years ago.
But then something, unexpected happened. Bowser sunk slowly, he popped out briefly before sinking again.
I watched horrified as Bowser suffered slowly and horribly and his skin burned away.
I’ll be honest, this is the most surprising thing I’ve seen ever. I mean: How many times have Bowser fall into lava pits, knocked out of fortress? Sure, he came back as Dry Bowser, and later revived by his youngest son, but the damage have already been done, since for the first time, Mario managed to kill his long time rival, the King of Koopas.
Conclusion
So these are my Top 10 surprising video game experiences, starting and ending with Mario, how odd. I hope you didn’t mind the image heavy blog, but I felt like I couldn’t do it any other way. Hope you enjoyed it!
Tyrian Defenders 