Foreshadowing/Video Games

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Examples of Foreshadowing in Video Games include:

• Banpresto must be the king of this with its Super Robot Wars multiverse, where things will be foreshadowed that usually don't even happen in the same universe. The big one of which is the Axel Almer and Kyosuke Nanbu rivalry, which was foreshadowed before either of them even appeared. "Throwaway" lines across three games where neither actually met each other (or, in one case, showed up at all) ended up being a game-long theme of Original Generation 2.
  • Another version happens in Original Generation 2. Ryusei mentions substitute names for his Humongous Mecha, and comes up with DaiRaiOh, partially naming it after one of his teammates. Another character mentions that the name may already be taken. Sure enough, in Alpha 3(an Alternate Universe), a Super Robot named RaiOh is introduced, and later gets rebuilt/upgraded to DaiRaiOh.
    • Which then comes back in Original Generation Gaiden, when the guy who ends up piloting DaiRaiOh makes an Early-Bird Cameo.
  • Axel takes this even further in Original Generation Gaiden. He mentions a predecessor of Lamia, W-07, which is said to have some exclusive devices installed in only Lamia and W-07. Surely enough, later on, Banpresto worked on a spin-off game and introduced Aschen Brodel, a somewhat regular Lamia Expy... only to later (recently) reveal that she is W-07.
    • Another far more direct version in the same game, which featured missions that made up the prologue of Super Robot Wars MX. A more humorous version when MX's female protagonist makes a cameo of her own, and remarks that she would never wear an outfit as Stripperiffic as Lamia's... of course, the outfit she wears in MX is even more so.
• The Shadow Moses Island stage in Super Smash Bros.. Brawl seems to be the usual collection of Shout Outs that the other stages in the game are, until you reach the fourth chapter of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, and realize that Hideo Kojima, who designed the stage himself, was dropping a big hint.
• In the Metal Gear series itself:
  • EVA's refusal to answer Snake's "Who are The Patriots?" codephrase in MGS3. Also the fact that Eva's gun and shooting style are Chinese.
  • Naked Snake asks the Boss why she defected. Her response? "I didn't."
  • A conversation Snake has with Mei Ling after "killing" Liquid Snake in MGS1 about the inability to store the human personality digitally.
  • "I see age hasn't slowed you down one bit."
  • Naomi Hunter's surname is a huge clue to her relationship with a certain Frank Jaeger: "Jaeger" is German for Hunter and Naomi is Frank's adoptive sister.
    • This plot twist is also used in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake when Gustava Heffner talks about her old lover "Frank Hunter". However, the manual spoils this twist by mentioning that her lover's name is "Frank Jaeger".
• Ghost Trick has no end of hints leading to the ending, when you find out the character you've been playing as is actually a cat.
  • The main one being that Sissel can't read!
  • Also, he's decidedly mean to rats and likes cramped dark places.
• The Ace Attorney games have a lot of this, particularly Trials and Tribulations and the bonus case 'Rise from the Ashes' in the first game, which was created as part of an Updated Rerelease with the writers knowing what was going to happen in later games, leading to lines foreshadowing Trials and Tribulations ("We certainly can't get a dead person to testify")and Apollo Justice (when Phoenix shows Lana his attorney's badge, her response is something along the lines of "The paint's flaking off. Give it three more years, then we'll see the real you." Three years later, between Trials and Tribulations and Apollo Justice, Phoenix is disbarred. The last one is subtle because many characters make comments on the badge aging.
  • In 1-5, you can inspect a pile of items in the evidence room. Gumshoe will point out an electronics detector, saying it might become useful someday. This gets used in Justice For All when you try and find the spy camera and mic that Matt Engarde used.
  • Also in the second case of Trials and Tribulations, when talking about Mask DeMasque Phoenix says that when you're famous there are always imitators. Pearl then says that if Phoenix works hard, someday he'll have his own imitators. The next case revolves around Furio Tigre impersonating Phoenix to cover a crime.
  • Lana's line is quite subtle, as the paint on his badge is something a quite a few NPCs mention; the time it will finish is not.
  • Investigations has an odd case of reverse-foreshadowing. Specifically case four. It's a flashback to four years before the first game and six months before Edgeworth's first trial, and contains multiple references to future events. If you hadn't played the first few games you wouldn't get the meaning behind von Karma's comments (he killed Edgeworth's father), the fire extinguisher being used in a crime (later used to bash Phoenix on the head and give him temporary amnesia), or Edgeworth mentioning his badge won't stay shiny forever (his reputation will eventually be tarnished).
    • A comment from Manfred von Karma is that case is actually both reverse-foreshadowing and genuine foreshadowing. von Karma mentions that there are some people who are above the law. Initially the reader assumes that he's referring to himself, and his crime of killing Edgeworth's father. However, in the next case, Edgeworth faces off against a criminal that has diplomatic immunity, making him "above the law".
  • In case five, the 'shadow of the Yatagarasu' is formed by more than one statue. This foreshadows the fact that the real Yatagarasu is more than one person.
  • Since we've already mentioned Rise from the Ashes, it's also worth noting a line from Gant, later in that trial, which may allude to Apollo Justice:

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Gant: Defense attorneys can forge evidence too, isn't that right, Wrighto?

• Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors: On certain routes, the team finds a bracelet with the number zero. Upon experimentation, they discover it actually represents the number six, foreshadowing the fact that Zero is actually June.
  • What looks like a "0" on the bracelet is actually the letter "O", whose digital root is 6. This is also a hint about another letter that looks a lot like a number...
  • There's foreshadowing all over the place; one particularly subtle bit is in a Panty Shot gag of all things.
  • When the group is looking for Snake, Junpei can talk to Ace, and remark that he's surprised that Clover and Snake are siblings. Ace asks why, and when Junpei replies it's because they look so different, Ace says he supposes so. Ace has prosopagnosia; he had no idea they looked different.
  • Not too important at first, but when you look at the lights in the 1st Class Cabin, Snake looks surprised until Junpei clarifies where they are. Light is Snake's real name.
  • In a bit of genius, during the safe ending you end up with the password 14383421, according to an interview with the director, he chose that number because if you multiply it by nine you get 129450789...
  • The detonators not being real,except for the one in the ninth man, and possibly the one in Ace, is hinted at in a couple of places, specifically when Junpei observes that one of the searches for the DEAD felt like a lot longer than 81 seconds.
• In Phantom Brave, Marona fantasizes Scarlet the Brave as a strong, masculine hero. Ash dismisses it with "Scarlet is a girl's name," and imagines him as effeminate. Scarlet turns out to actually be female.
• One of the unlockables in Mega Man ZX Advent is a 1-level NES-style remake of the game. Shortly thereafter, Mega Man 9 came out.
  • In the ending of Mega Man X 4, the title character is asking Zero that if he (X) goes Maverick, then Zero must "take care of him". This actually foreshadows two events, although the circumstances have been twisted by the time they occured:
    • 1) In X5, wherein their destined battle finally happens, although here it was X who thinks Zero has gone Maverick (or, in the non-Canon path, Zero actually is).
    • 2) And in the first Mega Man Zero game, it wasn't the real X that was a Maverick and who Zero must destroy, but actually a clone.
    • Another way to look at X's situation in X4 would be The reason why Copy X was created. X used his body to seal the Dark Elf following the Elf Wars. The first game hints at a nervous breakdown from the trauma of the fighting. Though never confirmed, it does explain why X never inhabited a new body since the Zero series confirms that his or Zero's body can be perfectly copied. Whatever the reason, since X abandoned his post without preparing someone to take over, humanity scrambled for a leader and put the unstable Copy X in charge. All the death and destruction that followed is partly X's fault, so he did become a Maverick.
  • Another subtle one from Megaman X5: part of the opening music and start menu theme is actually Zero's death theme from Megaman X. Guess what happens at the end of the game...
  • Mega Man Zero 4 begins with a visit to an ancient Colony Drop impact site. And ends with the protagonist sacrificing himself to prevent another Colony Drop.
  • After you get the star force in Mega Man Star Force 1, there are two separate events that foreshadow the event of Luna Platz finding out that Geo Stelar and Mega Man Geo-Omega are the same person:
    • First when the kids do the class play that Luna came up with, Pat Sprigs Gemini Spark is absent, so she asks Geo to fill in and when he puts on the suit she imagines that she is seeing him in wave form.
    • Later when they get attacked by a jammer, he puts her in a classroom and orders her to stay there, and as he is leaving to take care of it she thinks that he is talking in Mega Man's voice, and of course he is as they are the same person.
• Chop Chop's cryptic lyrics in the first song on Um Jammer Lammy ("Pick burnin' cry fly, chop choke!") actually foretell events that will happen in later stages.
• The guy Aeris famously describes as "are sick" very early on in Final Fantasy VII has a mysterious tattoo, the meaning of which (as well as the meaning of his illness) will not be revealed for quite some time. This is the only hint of its kind during the game's first half that something much bigger than the conflict with Shinra is going on.
• Final Fantasy IX, halfway through the game when the heroes meet the villain Kuja for the second time, he responds to Zidane's inquiries about his plots with the line "Oh, brother... But you're not ready yet!" On the first playthrough this just seems like uncharacterically crude choice of words from him (he speaks like he's in a Shakespearean play most of the time). After you play the game again, knowing that he and Zidane are brothers, the line seems like such an obvious hint.
• Final Fantasy X has a shot of the penultimate boss, and the stage in which you fight him, within the first twenty minutes of the game.
• Grim Fandango loves this. A lot of the dialogue, most of it optional, hints at what's going to happen as the game progresses, and the solutions to certain puzzles are foreshadowed early on.

Manny: I wonder if I'd be happier working on a ship. Then again, I'm so competitive, I wouldn't be able to relax until I was captain.

• In Disgaea, when Flonne is introduced, she mentions she wants to be like a flower. At the end she's turned into a flower, although she's revived by Lamington or Laharl in the good and not-quite-so-bad endings.
• In Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, a mid-game encounter with the Prism Rangers has them identifying Adell as a demon, which is written off as a scouter malfunction. It isn't.
• In Disgaea Infinite, the player finds out that Flonne is studying to become an Angel Trainee again. And in Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten, Angel Flonne saves the protagonists.
• In Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist, an event is foreshadowed and the narrator hangs a lampshade on it by saying "Foreshadowing alert! Foreshadowing alert!"
• Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People has lots of foreshadowing. For one, there's a Trogdor arcade cabinet sitting in Strong Bad's basement, but it doesn't work. The final episode has the machine being fixed as the first part of the plot. Also, the Videlectrix games in the first four episodes foreshadow the appearance of the characters from those games in the final episode.
• The much-maligned plot twists of Final Fantasy VIII do get some foreshadowing during the game, although for the most part it's too sparse and hidden too well to be very effective. Most notably, Ultimecia's existence is heavily foreshadowed by the New Era Speech Edea makes when she takes control of Galbadia, but neither the player nor any of the characters have any way of understanding it since she's talking about events which will take place in the future. The orphanage reveal is likewise foreshadowed, albeit not very clearly, by both Cid and Irvine.
• Psychonauts has two of these in the first level of the game, the mind of Coach Oleander. When you reach the white corridor at the end of his mind, the easiest to notice is the curtain, that hides the blueprint of the psychic tank Oleander wants to use to conquer the world, but there is another: if you look very closely, you'll find that the wall has a rabbit pattern. Oleander's Start of Darkness was the slaughter of his rabbits by his father, a butcher.
  • The Brain Tumbler Experiment has plenty of it. The passing under a bathtub labeled "Oblongata" (the name of the lake) to climb a tower covered in thorns trying to reach Loboto is obvious enough. The unique figments of a basket of milk bottles, a patch of flowers, a Napoleon hat, and a purple bull on the other hand are just figments until you make it to the real Thorney Towers.
• Silent Hill 2 with some unsettling messages in the beginning parts of the game. "There was a HOLE here, It's gone now." and "The door that wakes in darkness, opening into nightmares." The messages point to psychological plot events later in the game.
• Super Metroid foreshadows the final battle very subtly. Part of the world is the ruined Tourian from the first Metroid game, complete with Mother Brain's broken glass case. There is a secret room just beneath it with a few power ups to collect. Since there are hundreds of secret rooms in the game, the usual player won't give it a second thought, but after seeing Mother Brain's full body at the end of the game, it becomes clear that the room was there to house her huge body.
  • Metroid Prime does this much more directly with Meta Ridley's fight, not him appearing altogether - many of the scans describe what happened to Ridley, and of course, you SEE HIM right at the beginning of the game, then later on in Phendrana Drifts. Maybe it's obvious, but it worked very well as you knew eventually you would have to face off with him. Very well done indeed.
    • But then, what would a Metroid game be without a chance to kick Ridley's ass?
• Sort of odd the first time around, but very blatant on your second time through, in Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army, once you get the translation you need in Episode 11, all the NPCs start talking about...cats. Huh... (For best results, talk to the servant on the landing at the Daidouji Residence.)
• BioShock (series) starts with the main character looking at a picture of his family, and he keeps seeing shots of his family in flashbacks throughout the game. It later turns out that his family isn't real.
  • "Would you kindly?"
  • There's some more subtle hints about Atlas earlier. If you take a moment to poke around the booby-trapped submarine that Ryan blew up, you'll notice a conspicuous lack of charred corpses for a vehicle that supposedly contained Atlas' family. There are also theater posters in Fort Frolic that bear the names Moira and Patrick, who coincidentally have the same names as Atlas' wife and child.
  • There's another one that occurs in two parts; when your first enter Rapture, there are signs on the wall that state that all bathysphere travel has been shut down. However, in the fisheries you can find an audio diary that mentions that anyone in the ballpark genetically to Andrew Ryan can utilize the bathyspheres regardless of a lockout. Later it turns out that the protagonist is very much in the ballpark - he's Ryan's son.
• In Fallout 3, you meet a Megaton citizen who is obsessed with the Enclave, believing that the American government will come and clean up the wasteland and restore it to it's former glory. Guess which government is corrupt and evil, and guess which citizen gets captured by them.
  • Your dad also says "Now I know you don't like it when daddy leaves you alone" to your Toddler self. The foreshadowing doesn't last very long, but it still fits the trope.
  • Leo Stahl has an addiction which he tries to keep secret. If you ask him what he does to entertain himself, he gets very awkward.
  • Galaxy News Radio often has news stories about sidequests that you can get. It's foreshadowing until you realize that he is talking about sidequests. He also makes references to meeting the player's Dad during the quest where you meet Three-Dog for the first time.
  • In the Point Lookout expansion, the tribal religion involves getting sprayed by hallucinatory spores from a plant and having a vision quest. While they're out, someone cuts open their heads and removes a chunk of brain. When the player does this, a chunk of his brain is removed as well. Later, someone else finds out that it wasn't a part of the religious ritual, it was just a madman taking advantage of their drugged state to have some fun. It was Tobar, the ferryman who brought you to Point Lookout. When you enter his shop menu to buy a ferry ticket, you may or may not notice that there's a scalpel, surgical tubing, a bonesaw, and tweezers in there for seemingly no reason.
    • Also, the vision quest itself involves a hallucination where a bonesaw cuts a rift in the ground in front of you, and then a needle and thread comes by to sew the ground back together again.
• Knights of the Old Republic was very subtle. The Jedi masters say that normally they would not train anyone past a certain age, but you are a special case.
  • And that's only one instance. There are actually quite a few spoken lines that in retrospect aren't just coincidental foreshadowing, but in some cases actually talking about the event itself without actually spelling it out. When The Reveal is made, the cutscene flashes back to each character as they spoke these lines.
    • This is actually one of the brilliant things about Knights of the Old Republic which few people notice. The Jedi do not train past a certain age, but anyone playing this game will know about Luke Skywalker, trained when he was already a young man. The game plays on the players own expectations to make this moment less significant than it should be, meaning they don't have to try and hide the foreshadowing because the player has already hidden it themselves. They do say that they make very rare exceptions for adult recruits, but even then, the player is liable to assume this has more to do with the war thinning their numbers, the same way there would've been no more Jedi if Luke hadn't been trained.
  • A Let's Play of Knights of the Old Republic 2 provides commentary on the narrative. At the end of the game Kreia lampshades your expectations of a reveal.
• In Ever 17 it hardly seems worth pointing out the foreshadowing. If you play it, you'll look back from the final route and go OH! That's what that meant! Then if you play a second time, it's even more so because the entire story up to that route is foreshadowing. The lemur costume, the password, Tsugumi's Jerkass status being inconsistent, the door she stopped Takeshi from touching, the pendant and even stuff like arguments over how many hot dogs there were. Everything. It's almost some type of one of the different aneurysm moment tropes except it's often minor and subtle.
• Mass Effect did an excellent job with foreshadowing at the very first mission - when you talk to the insane scientist Manuel, it is very easy to dismiss what he's saying as the rant of a raving lunatic, but later on it becomes very obvious that the things he says are in fact visions of the reapers much like your own beacon-induced ones. Mass Effect 2 later did the same thing with a mad prophet, but in a more roundabout way.
  • In a much, much subtler example, it's mentioned in the Codex that turians wear facepaint to designate their clans. Those who wear no paint ("barefaced") are considered untrustworthy, as they don't make their allegiances clear. The Big Bad of the first game, a turian, is barefaced, but in the second game, the turian warden of the Purgatory has no paint, either, and soon betrays you.
  • In the beginning of the game, listen closely to the conversation you have with Doctor Chakwas and Lt. Jenkins. His comments are absolutely loaded with hints of what happens soon.
  • On your first visit to the Citadel, Ashley makes a comment about how the stairs leading up to the Council Chamber would make an excellent defensive position. During the endgame, you have to fight your way up those very steps to stop Saren from giving Sovereign control of the station.
  • You probably won't notice it when you play the game for the first time, as it's not very visible when you don't know what you are looking at, but in Mass Effect Saren has the same blue glowing eye implants as the Ilusive Man in Mass Effect 2. Combined with the fact that the later is revealed as planning to use Reaper-technology to make humankind stronger, it's a very strong hint that he is already indoctrinated by the Reapers. Though he still seems to be able to fight it, as he still wants to destroy the Reapers in the second game.
    • In the same way, the weird visions Shepard gets from the beacon in the first game make a lot more sense after the big reveal at the end of the second. Reapers harvest sentient humanoids, dissolve them to paste, and use it as a building material to create new reapers. And that's pretty much what you are watching.
• In Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time, there is a secret room where the Baby Mario Bros. can visit Fawful, and listen to one of his long, maniacal rants. However, this could possibly be a foreshadowing of his role in Bowser's Inside Story.
  • Speaking of Partners in Time, there's one segment where the gate to the Star Shrine is getting on Luigi's case, refusing to let him past, and generally being a jerk. Turns out, he was just testing the brothers, and, before he lets them past, reassures Luigi that he's perfectly worthy to enter. One of the lines he uses is "Your heart is like a gemstone: multi-faceted and beautiful." I may be stretching it, but in Super Paper Mario you were carting around the dimension, collecting crystalline Pure Hearts... and the "ideal host" for the Chaos Heart is our plumber in green
  • On a sillier note, one of the Bowser's Castle stages in Mario Kart Wii contains a billboard with a koopa and the word "Showtime!" on it—anybody who's played Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story will undoubtedly recognize this line, because the Koopa King shouts it ham-tastically every time you enter a battle using him.
• Super Mario Galaxy did this with the first two battles with Bowser. The first time you fight him, there's three small suns surrounding Bowser's arena. The second time you fight him, said arena is surrounded by dark matter that's disintegrating his castle. The third and final battle takes place inside a hollow Sun.
  • Shortly after Mario defeats Bowser for the last time by hurling him into that Sun, as he flies down to free Peach, in the background you can actually see Bowser Jr. fall into the Sun. The Sun immediately explodes and (almost) tears apart the entire universe.
• Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend. On Saturday, Postal Dude gets caught in the middle of a minor zombie invasion, which he jokingly suggests was caused by an outbreak of mad cow disease. Later, on Sunday, he gets a call from Running With Scissors head Vince Desi, saying that marketer Mike J has caught mad cow disease, and Dude has to take over marketing duties. At the end of Sunday, Dude faces the expansion's final boss: a giant zombie-cow-demon Mike J, or in his own words, "Kosher Mad Cow Zombie God of Hellfire!"
• Tales of Symphonia uses this a lot.
  • For fun times, take a drink whenever anyone says, "It's nothing." It's never nothing, it's something that if revealed would solve a lot of problems and make your life a lot easier. (Raine is so bad at this that her habit carries through to the sequel.)
  • Kratos being Lloyd's father is foreshadowed like crazy: Both of them dislike tomatoes. If you leave him controlled by the AI, he heals Lloyds at the drop of a hat. He is familiar with Lloyd's pet, Noishe. When visiting Lloyd's house, he will always be standing by his wife's grave. And so on.
• Fate/stay night has this across routes. In one bad ending in the Fate route, for instance, Shirou is thrown out a third floor window and lands hard, only to then discover he is mortally wounded; not because of falling three stories, but because swords have erupted from inside his body. (Rather confused, he then dies.) The actual explanation for this really odd event isn't given until the final route, when it is revealed that Shirou instinctively projects when his body is badly damaged in an attempt to reinforce it; unfortunately, this instinctive projection sometimes results in swords being forged inside his body.
• Yume Nikki has a very specific bloodstain on the floor at various points of the game. In the ending, the protagonist commits suicide by jumping off her balcony. We then see that bloodstain again, now knowing its cause.
• In one Vanguard arc in City of Heroes, after Vanguard rogues have attacked your Rikti allies, you tell them that they were Nemesis automatons. Then in the next arc, you discover that the Earth heroes who originally attacked the Rikti homeworld, causing the Rikti war in the first place, were, in fact, Nemesis automatons.
• Baldur's Gate I manages to do this with a total lack of subtlety by having a "Lord Foreshadowing" show up and mention the fake identity the Big Bad is using in passing.
• Many people cite the spaceship and aliens plot twists in Okami as "Unexpected" and "Came out of fucking nowhere"... Forgetting that earlier, Kaguya leaves on a Bamboo shaped spaceship, doesn't sound like much, but this foreshadows a few things about the game you don't realize untill the next playthrough.
• For all the complaining about how General Shepherd's Face Heel Turn in Modern Warfare 2 "comes out of nowhere," the article's entry on Foreshadowing consists of six bullet-points about things that hint about it earlier in the game.
• Similarly, in Call of Duty Black Ops astute players may wonder why none of your squadmates have any dialogue with Reznov, or how he can somehow beat you to the top of ladders even if you're the first to climb them. Then comes The Reveal that Reznov was your character's hallucination the entire time.
• In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the first thing you hear, even before the main menu appears, is the deep rumble of a beating heart. The rhythm continues throughout the whole piece, and, as the music plays during regular gameplay, permeates the entire island of Vvardenfell.
• In Mother 3, on Tanetane Island, the entire party hallucinates after eating mushrooms. They meet several people who spout weird and often disturbing things, but one line stands out:

Hallucination!Claus: Yes! Okay, then I'll be at the very end!

• • Also, in Chapter 1, after Hinawa dies and Flint goes berserk and has to be put in jail, Claus has this to say:

Claus: I'm going to get so strong even Dragos won't stand a chance against me!

• • The Hummingbird Egg's purpose is hinted at in Chapter 5, when Duster picks up the egg and his amnesia is suddenly cured.
• In Dragon Age: Origins, the Human Noble origin has your brother Fergus say some very innocent-sounding words to your nephew which has a chilling, portentous double meaning in retrospect.

Fergus: Don't worry, son. You'll get to see a sword up close real soon, I promise you. Could also qualify as Black Comedy or a Funny Aneurysm Moment depending on your sensibilities.

• In Dragon Age 2, offhand comments that Knight-Commander Meredith became significantly more reclusive and started becoming more fanatical right around the time you lost track of the Obviously Evil red glowy Artifact of Doom should have set off every alarm bell in the Genre Savvy player's head.
• In BlazBlue, Hakumen's Shipuu (Squall) Distortion Drive is a slower, stronger version of Jin's Touga Hyojin (Arctic Dagger) Distortion Drive.
  • Even Continuum Shift has this too. In the Arcade mode, Taokaka (the player) fought Litchi in an NOL base rather than Orient Town. And Litchi's Arcade, she knew Noel's position of Lieutenant, even if she didn't know it throughout Calamity Trigger. This was later revealed that in the Story Mode, she joined NOL thus could be spotted at the base or knows Noel's position.
• Deadly Premonition is crammed full of foreshadowing, much of which is easy to miss the first time through. Playing the game a second time, it is astonishing how many seemingly innocuous details are actually foreshadowing: The doll of a fat man in the White Room. FK in the coffee. All the comments about York's scar. The red tree growing in George's backyard. George is a passionate man. The "Love G" tattoo. The potted plant Kaysen carries around. The picture in Harry's mansion of Emily with the goddesses. The fat man among the military members in Harry's story. Leads to a ton of Fridge Brilliance when you complete the game.
• Singularity is extremely upfront about its foreshadowing, with the player finding messages scrawled on the walls everywhere that say things like "It's still not fixed" and "we've already tried" and even "What if this is supposed to happen?" That this is a time-travel story gives these messages an almost-obvious status as markers of a Stable Time Loop or Groundhog Day Loop, and to make it even more obvious, the messages are so old they've faded away...but they're scrawled in the game's Unobtanium, which means they must be meant for the player, because only the player's time-manipulation device can revert the ink back to its pristine state. It turns out the messages are actually as true as you initially assume, but this lulls you into a false sense of security, because the Stable Time Loop isn't what you think it is.
• In Episode 304 the Telltale Sam and Max Freelance Police games, Girl Stinky is making out with her secret lover Sal, a six foot tall cockroach, and the titular heroes witness this. When the lovers notice them, Girl Stinky calls Sam and Max Droopy and Stitch respectively. At the end of the episode, guess the resemblance Max has to after his transformation and Sam's resulting reaction...
• Maximillian Roivas learns some real disturbing things about his mansion at some point in his life - like, for instance, that it's built on top of a city predating humanity. Eventually, he descends into the depths of his mansion, and he gets a glimpse of a prison cell from the inside before he gets too far. After killing one of the abominations in his expedition, he goes right back to the surface to garner military aid in its further exploration. No points for guessing what happens to the poor guy.
• There is an Easter Egg in Red Faction: Guerrilla in which you can meet and talk to Parker, the protagonist from the first game, who is now an old miner. One of the things he says is "But you don't see monsters around these parts no more... Unless you look real hard." In the upcoming sequel, Armageddon, a group of explorers end up doing exactly this, uncovering an old Marauder base, and releasing a horde of monsters into the underground.
• The opening cinematic of StarCraft 2 makes it clear that Tychus Findley is a double agent working for Mengsk. What isn't so clear is the specific task Mengsk gave to Tychus. However, everything Tychus says and does throughout the campaign foreshadows his true objective: kill Kerrigan.
• In the Clannad visual novel, during Yukine's route, she tells Tomoya with one of her spells/fortunes that "Other people's happiness will become your happiness." During the game, you go into each characters route, ending off by improving some aspect of their lives or making them happy, and obtaining their "light orb." These "light orbs" are needed to get the "Good End" of the game where Nagisa and Ushio live.
• Brilliantly used in the opening cut-scene for Conker's Bad Fur Day. While the music that plays has been associated with A Clockwork Orange, it was originally written and used for a funeral procession for Britain's Queen Mary II. Considering that Berri would have likely been Conker's queen at the end had she lived, the context in which the music was used suddenly takes on an appropriately grim tone for players familiar with the piece.
• Used frequently in Kingdom Hearts. A piece of scenery in the first game foreshadows the "five betraying apprentices" that form the backbone of Organization XIII, a drawing in Kingdom Hearts II foreshadows Xion's presence in 358/2 days, Chain of Memories foreshadowed II heavily (it was almost more foreshadowing than actual plot), and in II, Xemnas' violent reaction to being called Xehanort foreshadowed a major lategame plot twist of BirthBySleep.
  • In the first game, idling on the title screen will bring up a cinematic composed of scenes from the game with sentences between each. These sentences are Kairi's letter from the end of Kingdom Hearts II.
• In Portal, if you turn subtitles on, you may notice that sometimes, GLaDOS says something where the subtitles say "[garbled]" and the other way around. However, one notable occasion is when GLaDOS says "The Enrichment Center is required to remind you, that in the end, you will be baked, and then there will be cake." The subtitles say "The Enrichment Center is required to remind you, that in the end, you will be baked [garbled] cake."
  • On one of The director's commentry tracks you can play during the game, the makers state that this above qoute was an accident. They planned for the qoute to be "You [Garbled]...baked...then there will be cake" but someone screwed up in post editing and the line was never edited so the game got released without them relising.
  • "The Enrichment Center is committed to the well being of all participants. Cake and grief counseling will be available at the conclusion of the test. Thank you for helping us help you help us all." Who will receive the 'grief counseling'?
    • "When the testing is over, you will be... missed." But not just because you're an excellent Test Subject.
  • In the trailer for the sequel, Cave Johnson was not kidding about Aperture Science selling crushers.
• The Portal 2 final battle has some very immediate foreshadowing: one of the personality spheres is obsessed with going to space. A few minutes later you portal to space.
  • Earlier than that, one of Cave Johnson's audio blurbs mentions that the white paint that allows portal placement is made out of moon dust.
  • Even earlier, a Turret that says "I'm different" can be picked up on a conveyor belt. If you save the Turret from destruction, it will actually foretell the events of the rest of the game, though not much of its hints will make sense until they happen.

"Get mad!" "Don't make lemonade!" "Prometheus was punished by the gods for giving the gift of knowledge to man. He was cast into the bowels of the Earth and pecked by birds." "It won't be enough." "The answer is beneath us." "Her name is Caroline. Remember that."

• In Trauma Team, one of Gabe's patients wears primarily black clothing with an easily-missed rose motif, foreshadowing her affliction with the Rosalia virus.
• During the prologue of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky, just right before the first scene in the game appears (it's that of the hero, now transformed from a human into a random Pokemon and being washed ashore), for a few split seconds, several diagonal lines can be seen moving extremely fast across the screen as if someone was slashing the camera, followed by someone (probably either Grovyle or the hero) screaming (it's completely blank when this happens). Later, toward the middle of the game, just right before the hero and his/her partner fights Dusknoir and his Sableye, Grovyle actually tells the hero that Dusknoir is a villain and and that he is the hero. He also tells him/her that while he and the hero are travelling to the Mystery Dungeon world, someone must have separated the two during their journey. These two scenes actually give away the existence of the game's (real) Big Bad, Darkrai, who was actually responsible for the hero's transformation into a Pokemon.
• Sonic Battle: Emerl's quote "Show me your power. Or I sh all not ob ey. I represent all things, and sha ll become Gizoid, the conquerer of all..."
• The Reconstruction has so much of it that it has its own page.
• There were several nice Continuity Nods in A Crack in Time, which was to be expected, being the third of a trilogy and all, but looking back on it, there's clear foreshadowing from Tools of Destruction to ACiT. The most obvious is set up on Planet Reepor after Qwark gives Tachyon the Dimensionator. The Dimensionator lets loose a shockwave as it's fired up and knocks Ratchet out. This leads up to a scene where the audience is shown Clank reaching for Ratchet, as the latter falls into an abyss. This is repeated, minus Dimensionator and Cragmites, in the climax of ACiT. In addition to this, the still for the pre-final boss cutscene in ToD's cutscene viewer is suspiciously similar to part of the cutscene The Last Lombax from ACiT.
  • Looking back on Tools of Destruction, there were several clues leading up to Azimuth's introduction in A Crack in Time. The most obvious is the "Court of Azimuth", which many fans caught onto, but more subtle is the optional Q&A session with Aphelion, once she's repaired. If you go through all of the information, she explains that Tachyon was granted access to the Lombaxes' technology and then used it for his own purposes-- getting rid of the lombaxes, that is. It's not terribly surprising to learn that Azimuth was responsible for this, given his motivation in ACiT
• In Folklore, an apparition of Herve from seventeen years in the past says that what he really wants for a gift is an issue of the occult magazine Unknown Realms, which he says is very hard to find because, according to his father, it doesn't sell and is on the verge of shutting down. This gets a wry reaction out of Keats, who writes for the magazine in the present. This scene is an early clue that Keats isn't what he thinks he is: he's a Halflife, a being created by the strong wish of a human (Herve, in this case). The real Unknown Realms magazine is long gone.
• Half-Life 2: Alyx stops in front of a dark corridor and says...

Alyx: That's the entrance to Ravenholm... we don't go to Ravenholm anymore.

• Kirby's Return To Dreamland has this little tidbit involving Magolor's ship.

Magolor: This baby can cut through dimensions! And it can fight... if necessary.

• Guild Wars has a fair number of these if you know where to look.
  • The Flameseeker prophecies are mentioned often in Ascalon and foretell several major events. Meerak the Shouter in specific foretells the death of Rurik; the danger of the Mursaat; the betrayal of Khilbron or Markis; and the return of the Titans.
    • Even earlier, the effigies raised by the Charr are made in the image of the end-game Titans.
  • When Togo wishes he could spend more time talking with Vizu, she promises him there will be more than enough time to do so after Shiro's defeat. Togo is killed fighting Shiro and returns as a spirit in Tahnnakai Temple, where he can speak with Vizu for eternity.
  • Miners in Joaknur Diggings had their eyes destroyed and, on her death, a servant of Abaddon declared "Abaddon will eat your eyes". Not long after, the Hunger captures Kormir and devours her eyes.

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