10 Earth-Shattering Video Game Plot Twists You Didn't See Coming

Hand out the award for the most despised plot twist of all time and Star Ocean 3 would have the trophy shoved into its hands and told to get the heck out.

In order to save their universe from a race known as the Executioners, the protagonists set out to reach 4D Space, a separate dimension of existence from which the command to exterminate their reality originates.

They succeed...only to find a boy sat in a house messing around with a video game. As it happens their universe is a simulation, a form of MMO, and our heroes are what amount to advanced, sentient NPCs. Their response? A resigned shrug of the shoulders.

This went down about as well as you would expect. The seemingly lazy bit of meta commentary, along with the characters’ remarkably nonplussed reaction to learning that they’re not real, left fans feeling that the ‘twist’ invalidated everything that came before and reduced a much loved setting to a tired sci-fi trope.

But infuriating as it was it worked – no one saw it coming – and fast forward to today, where the Simulation Hypothesis is being taken very seriously, and the twist ends up being less lazy, and more eerily prescient.