10 Video Games Where You Unexpectedly Swap Characters

It goes without saying that most video games cast players in the role of a single defined protagonist who remains as such for the entirety of the game.

After all, taking on the persona of one character tends to make for a more immersive gaming experience, and what are video games if not wish fulfillment?

But there are those few games which have instead opted to toy with video game conventions, by unexpectedly placing players in the shoes of other, totally left-field characters.

Sometimes these surprise shifts happened for just a level or two, but in extreme cases we played as other characters for massive chunks of the game, with some developers even being sneaky enough to keep the new character out of their game's whole marketing campaign.

Needless to say, several of these character swaps left fans irate, while in some cases the swap was at least modest and minimal enough to provide a controversy-free compliment to the story.

But for better or worse, nobody saw these perspective-shifting character swaps coming...

Perhaps the most infamous example of a protagonist switcharoo occurs in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

The highly anticipated sequel was largely marketed on the presence of a returning Solid Snake, though in typically subversive fashion, Hideo Kojima had other plans.

Though Snake does serve as the protagonist of the hour-long Tanker prologue sequence, he's left presumed dead in the fallout of that botched mission, at which point players are handed control of rookie operative Raiden for the rest of the game.

Despite Metal Gear Solid 2 being an incredible game from a pure gameplay perspective, the protagonist bait-and-switch remains hugely divisive to this day, with many complaining that Raiden was an off-putting void of charisma compared to the previous game's beloved hero.

It also didn't help matters at all that players never actually regain control of Snake, not even when he resurfaces near the end of the game.

To rub salt in the wound, Metal Gear Solid 3 also ditched Solid Snake in favour of a prequel story focused on Big Boss, and it wasn't until 2008's fourth game that players were finally reunited with the series' beloved hero - "old" and haggard though he was.