6 Retconned Plot Points That Ruined Beloved Video Game Characters

6. Big Boss' Legacy Came From A Clone - Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

What you think you know: Big Boss is the 'greatest soldier in the world' who formed multiple mercenary factions that allowed soldiers and skilled workers sick of being bound by regional patriotism, to act as one. In both MGS: Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain especially, you play as Boss, spreading his reputation by word of mouth, recruitment and goodwill (... by way of punching people in the face until they sign up, anyway).

What you must accept: Come the close of MGS V, we find out all this work, all this reputation-building wasn't done by the man himself.

Instead, you were playing a fake, cloned Snake - Venom Snake - staying almost entirely mute after a bout of psychotherapy, only to die to the hands of Solid Snake in the first 1987 Metal Gear, pretending to once again embody the real Big Boss.

None of the weight behind your 60-80+ hours of gameplay and base-building mattered, and even the villain Skull Face - who was so annoyed about also helping build Big Boss's legend and getting none of the credit that he tried to kill you - was also wiped away, the game noting that "the real Big Boss" went off to establish Outer Heaven somewhere else entirely.

All that marketing around The Phantom Pain being the essential 'missing link' behind Big Boss's downfall and how he became a nuclear weapon-possessing terrorist with concrete motivations? That happened 'somewhere else'. Somewhere we'll never see, yet somewhere that chronologically framed all the other games from this point forward.

How 'essential'.