Never Trust a Trailer/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


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Examples of Never Trust a Trailer in Video Games include:

  • Generally speaking, many developers like to take a screenshot of the game that was generated over the course of several minutes by a supercomputer and imply that it will look just as good at home with a smooth frame-rate. Such screenshots have been dubbed Bullshots by Penny Arcade.
  • The new trailer for RuneScape. It shows a warrior, an archer, and a mage having an epic duel with a villian. Once the villian has been killed, they fight off a skeletal horde followed by an intimidating skeletal dragon eating the camera. The armor the heroes wear? Not available in the game. The evil villain? Never mentioned. The skeletal horde? Not a quest. The skeletal dragon? Not an enemy.
  • In Dragon Age II's "Destiny" trailer Hawke gets red eyes before kicking the Arishock's ass. Hawke never gets red eyes at any point in the game. The trailer also made it look like the Qunari would be the main antagonists.
  • World of Warcraft has had a few, mostly due to content being cut at the last minute.
    • "New dances" for the players were cut from Wrath, yet still played in the early advertisements.
    • Don't even mention them taking out aerial combat...
    • Catacylsm showcased the new Path of the Titans system, which would, with the help of the new Archaeology profession, help streamline the character by adding new sidequest-only glyphs. It was converted into the Medium Glyph system, at least for the moment.
  • Almost every Playstation 1 game that contained CGI cutscenes was made to look like that's what the gameplay would be like. While this wasn't exclusive to PSX1, the storage capacity of the CD compared to the relatively weak real-time rendering power led to this happening a lot.
  • The initial release trailer for Battlefield Play4Free included a scene showing combat on the Operation Road Rage map from Battlefield 2, yet the current playable map roster only includes the Karkand, Sharqi, and Oman maps (again from BF2).
  • Taken to a science by Metal Gear director Hideo Kojima, most notably in the campaign for Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3. In MGS2, the main character was going to be the new character Raiden, but the general expectation of the audience, furthered by very selective news releases, was that it would be Solid Snake. Konami released extensive gameplay information and footage, but only from the game's prologue segment, when the player really does control Snake. When video was shown from later in the story (when Raiden would be the main character), footage was edited together, using out-of-context clips and dialogue, to almost completely hide the real main character from the audience -- except for a few teasing flashes of his face behind the mask of a ninja. One scene showing Snake fighting the boss Fortune was footage from a hypothetical sequence serving as a metaphor for the Mind Screw the main character was suffering, and the real battle was fought by Raiden.
    • MGS3 parodies this in the very beginning, where when you first land in the jungle(after selecting "I liked MGS2" from the New Game menu), Naked Snake is wearing a convincing "Raiden" mask, likely causing more than a few fans' hearts to skip a beat.
    • It gets more blatant during the opening theme song! Just take a good look at Snake, and you'll realize a few scenes are basically Solid Snake with facepaint. The MGS2 Sneaking Suit is even visible briefely, though it never makes an appearance in game.
  • The MGS3 trailers do this trick again, but portray final boss The Boss as a heartless Big Bad, nearly killing Snake and shooting out his eye, causing him to wake up in a cell from a terrible nightmare. In game, the Big Bad was Volgin, who was only shown in the trailer once; the eye was not shot out by The Boss -- she merely pointed a gun at him; and the nightmare wakeup was from a near-comedy sequence resulting from a Dream Sequence minigame.
    • Hideo Kojima claims he hates making trailers, because Trailers Always Spoil. He says the only way out is to make deliberately misleading trailers - hence his embracing of this trope.
    • An American commercial listing the reviews the game got ended with the line "Snake is back", tricking people into thinking that they'd be playing as Solid Snake, when really they'd be playing as Naked Snake (Big Boss).
  • Metal Gear Solid 4 trailers showed Snake in the Middle East, quietly committing suicide. The scene in the finished game was - modified. The most hilarious example is the so-wrong-it's-awesome 'Summer Blockbuster' trailer, which cuts the gameplay footage together to make it look like a testosterone-pumping action flick. "Evil is powerful - but courage is Solid", booms the narrator, before Snake proudly proclaims to the narrator, begging for one man to save us all, "Sounds like the perfect job for me". In context, he was responding to Meryl saying that the only person who'd go on a specific mission is someone who wanted only to die. After playing the game you'll either find the trailer sick or squickily hilarious.
  • Played straight with the trailer marketing for Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, except for one instance: Pretty much a lot of the trailers have tanks and other vehicles going through areas when they weren't actually present in the game (eg, the line of Tanks and APCs crossing Los Cantos), although Miller's speech with Snake in the Tactical Espionage Operations trailer was indeed in the game itself. In addition, there was a scene where Big Boss walks by some soldiers on Mother Base's deck with Kaz looking down ashamed that, although the scene itself doesn't actually appear in the game, it was hinted at in the second Stinger ending where Snake has to make a speech to his soldiers announcing the formal creation of Outer Heaven.
  • Disgaea both lampshades and subverts this trope within the game itself. The main storyline of the game is broken up into fourteen different episodes. At the end of each episode, Etna narrates a ridiculous trailer for the "upcoming episode", where each one is for a different off-the-wall series starring her as the main character. Examples include "Hyper Dimensional Demon Gal Etna", "Space Detective Etna", and "Fire Chef Cooking Gal Etna".
    • It subverts the trope when one of the crazy trailers is, of course, an entirely accurate preview for the upcoming episode.
    • This tradition was resurrected for Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, with a different character voicing each 'Next Episode' spoof, each of which was declared to be the 'Final Episode' of the imaginary series. And, true to the tradition, the ACTUAL Final Chapter had a completely honest trailer, right down to being declared as the Final Episode...
    • Continued in Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten, with each segment (Save for the last one) having little to do with the next chapter, and always involving Valvatorez's sardine obsession in some form or fashion.
      • Another example would be the game's introduction movie, which ends with a Team Shot including Axel, which might lead you into thinking he's a part of the team. He doesn't officially join until the post-game, and mostly plays a supporting role until then.
    • And in Disgaea Infinite leave the game on at the title screen and the demo will show a trailer for... Disgaea: Hour of Darkness! Laharl and Etna are not happy with the trailer, stating some things were lost in it...
  • The trailer for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 at the end of Episode 1 implies that Alyx didn't survive the train crash at the end of Episode 1 and this would drive the plot of the second episode. This spectacularly fails to happen.
  • Press material for Iguana Entertainment's South Park game said that it would feature the boys going up against the son of Scuzzlebutt. In the actual game, you fight evil Living Toys instead. Additionally, the press mentions Cartman's mom being kidnapped by the alien visitors as part of the plot. During the actual mission against the visitors, she serves no plot importance, instead merely serving as a background character trapped in suspended animation along with other townspeople.
  • Trailers for Halo 2 implied you would be defending Earth, when in fact you spent all of two missions on Earth, and the rest on another Halo ring. And nobody was prepared for the Arbiter's introduction. The Broken Base had mixed opinions about this. Either Bungie was great for doing something different and having a generic defend the Earth storyline, or they felt incredibly betrayed by the "lies" Bungie gave.
    • You can't even trust the back of the box, in terms of the collector's edition, which also gears you up to save Earth from an alien invasion.
    • Halo 3 seemed to be going this route, but you actually did spend nearly half the game fighting the Covenant invasion on Earth and most fans knew the game would take place on the Ark in some fashion.
    • Played gloriously straight with the cutscene showing opening of the Voi portal: the first ever Halo 3 trailer showed Master chief looking at the structure from a cliff, while a huge Covenant fleet flies over his head and moves into position around it as the gateway fires up. If the actual game, the same scene is re-enacted with Master Chief looking from the cliff, while a human bomber wing flies to blast the hell out of the Prophet's ship as Lord Hood calls in an attack with several starships' MAC guns... awesome!
  • In the trailers for the video game Portal they have a scene were the player has to outrun a crushing ceiling with spikes next to a pit full of flames. This scene does not actually appear in the game. There is a third-party add in, however, that does include it as a separate game from the regular game of Portal. It's a level add-on called Portal: The Flash Game Map Pack for Portal, available from http://wecreatestuff.com
    • Please see Descending Ceiling for another fan-made pack that includes this in its entirety (with spikes).
  • Time Hollow on the DS' trailer culminates with one of the main characters falling seemingly to her death, only for the main character to dramatically grab her hand mid-air, still falling. In-game the scene is never used, and while the girl does fall, all the main character does is reach out through a portal while time is stopped and pull her through.
  • Nintendo's ads for EarthBound pushed the Toilet Humor harder than anything else with the infamous "this game stinks!" ad campaign; it memorably declared its subject to be "the first RPG with BO", which it...isn't. As anyone who played the game will tell you, the humor is much more intelligent and subtle, with only a few potty jokes here and there. Financial reports indicate that Nintendo put millions into this misguided campaign. It backfired spectacularly and the game became a financial disaster for Nintendo, to the point where they're highly reluctant to take another chance on the franchise even though it's since become one of the most beloved Cult Classic games.
  • The opening trailer for Oneechanbara Vortex shows clips from the game, including a rather cool scene of Aya saving Saki from an attacker by running into him with a motorcycle. Except that in the actual game, it's not returning Token Loli and Heel Face Turned ex-Big Bad Saki, but newcomer Anna who is saved in this manner.
  • Patrial example: the trailers and opening for Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World has Emil, Marta, Alice, and Decus all fighting, hanging around, and doing innocuous things like the main characters from the first game did in their opening, and generally giving you the false impression that the latter two are (or at some point would become) allies instead part of the game's Terrible Trio. Weirdly, they're also treated the same way in the closing animated even after they both died fighting Emil and Marta.
  • The Tekken 5 trailer. "Heihachi Mishima...is dead." No he isn't..
  • According to a former 3D Realms developer, the 2001 teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever was basically this trope embodified: Every single scene in the trailer was created from the ground-up as a non-interactive cinematic sequence, just so they would have something to show to the press. It worked like a charm.
  • In I Wanna Be the Guy, the list of items in the game fulfills this trope. The trick? Most of that shit is in the game, just not as items.
  • Parodied and lampshaded in Kagetsu Tohya with the Imogirisou trailer and sidestory. The side story is unlocked with a bizarre dreaming involving a fake Shiki, murders, Akiha's ex fiance and numerous other things, and when the game starts it has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the 'trailer' dream. Shiki gets irritated at how the story he's in now is even less interesting than the one he had a dream about. For clarification, the side story is something of a Take That to another series of games that hasn't been released outside Japan, called Otogirisou, which is made by Chun-soft, rather friendly game maker to Kinoko nasu (he made a side story to their visual novel later too).
  • Bethesda's "Radiant AI" trailer for Oblivion... an entirely scripted series of events (which they claimed were dynamic and spontaneous) that never actually appeared ingame. False advertising, hooray!
    • An unintentional example: early trailers for the game prominently showcased the player exploring the city of Sutch...which was removed from the final game due to time constraints.
  • Trailers for the second episode of Tales of Monkey Island, Siege of Spinner Cay, explicitly show a scene with Elaine commenting on Guybrush's clearly infected hand. This is only half-true: she does comment on Guybrush's hand, but she's commenting on his complete and total lack of a hand, as he instead has a hook there - the hand gets chopped off in the first two minutes of play. Presumably Telltale deliberately lied to keep this twist as a shock.
  • Trailers for World in Conflict show Pine Valley, Washington DC, and some random airbase getting nuked. Looking at the aftermath of one of said nukes a nurse states "We're seeing the same situation all over the West coast." The truth is that only one nuke is used throughout the entire game, in Cascade Falls, launched by the Americans, Pine Valley gets retaken (somewhat) intact, the Russians never nuke Washington DC and in fact never move past the Washington state border.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has a bit of this. Quite a few qoutes from the Infamy Trailer are never heard in the game(Too bad, considering how cool they are) and while Makarov is focused on the trailor, he has very little face time in the actual game("No Russian" being the most).
  • The Final Fantasy series has several examples
    • Final Fantasy VI / III: A claymation ad from the 90s had Mog as a casting director interviewing monsters auditioning and getting zapped (and implicitly rejected) by an increasingly frustrated Mog. Most of the monsters are in the game (although the ghost is actually a temporary party member), and while Mog can learn lightning spells, it's not really his signature move.
    • Final Fantasy VII: This trailer describes the Shinra Corporation as an "evil empire", and implies that the Meteor is being used by that "evil empire" to drain the planet's life energy. This trailer mentions that Aeris and Cloud's romance is doomed, however there isn't any romantic lake scene. The clip is in the game, but it's from Aeris's funeral scene.
    • Final Fantasy XIII was in development for years. What little gameplay snippets were shown in the earliest trailers made it look like a button masher action-RPG. Compare the early trailers to what the game turned out to be.
      • It also continues with the latest trailers that make a very large deal about the villain characters of Jihl Nabaat and Yaag Rosch, but together they have something like maybe half a dozen scenes in the actual game. Jihl and Yaag were given their own section in the official website before any other non-party character, making them the fanbase assume they were more important than they actually were. Jihl is also never even fought by the party.
      • Also, Dysley, one of the major antagonists, is only shown breifly in the trailers.
  • By now you must have seen the Evony/Civony ads. It's for a strategy game. Nope, no romance with busty woman. Sorry, you'll have to move on.
  • Mass Effect 1 had a scene where "Hard decisions had to be made" and the Normandy not helping out the planet Noveria that was under attack and going to a different planet instead. This...never even remotely happened.
  • Used amusingly in the advertising for Mass Effect 2 in the promo showing a geth wearing Shepard's N7 armour with text indicating Shepard's status as Killed in Action. People assumed this referred to the end of the game, since it was well advertized that the character could die, or that it was just using this trope to get attention. When in reality Shepard dies at the very start of the game and is resurrected. And the geth in the armour? Appears in the game...as one of the good guys, who found pieces of Shepard's armour when he/she had been killed and welded them on its frame as a form of tribute and honour.
    • Used less amusingly in the launch trailer for the game, in which Shepard gave his now famous "Fight For the Lost" speech. Despite this being quoted everywhere, it's not actually in the game at any point, technically making it Beam Me Up, Scotty as well.
    • The "Dirty Dozen" trailer is by far the worst not only with several inaccuracies, but several different kinds of inaccuracies:
      • It shows Miranda and the Illusive Man trying to figure out why Shepard is going to various worlds recruiting a team of hardcore specialists, and wondering what or who it is he plans on using them to put a world of hurt on. In reality, that mission is given to Shepard by the Illusive Man, who also gives him the information on the specialists so he can find and recruit them.
      • The scenes with the specialists themselves are wrong, like Grunt being on Tuchanka, whereas in-game, Grunt has never even been to Tuchanka, is recruited somewhere else entirely, and isn't even on the original list of specialists.
      • A lot of small scenes in the trailer are in the game but don't go the way they appear: Thane's debut is close but is much more cinematic in the trailer, and Grunt never kills a Thresher from inside its mouth.
      • The Illusive Man's holographic/haptic displays are extremely detailed, but in-game, none of these displays ever shows actual information and act as placeholders so the characters have computer screens to look at.
      • Finally, the trailer shows Shepard tackling Horizon with Thane and Grunt. While it originally would have been possible to do this, the final game doesn't let you recruit Thane before Horizon.
  • One of the trailers for Mass Effect 3 showed Shepard manning a turret on a Geth craft to shoot down a Reaper Destroyer. This plays out a bit differently in-game: Shepard jumps off the hovercraft, grabs a targeting laser, and goes head to head with the Reaper.
  • Haze, we were told of Shane being born in an anarchist hell where one of the highlights involve the olympics being bombed. Turns out he was living comfortably with both parents alive and was dropping out of College to join Mantel
  • The trailer for Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time showed a good-quality shot of a rip in the space-time continuum DESTROYING EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES, PLANET OR SPACESHIP. While the rip is shown in the game, it's disappointedly shown in a "flashback" video from Orvus, eons before the series. The video is also shown in a grainy quality.
    • On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, the old "What a Wonderful World" commercial for Tools of Destruction gloriously averts this trope for the most part [1] the majority of the commercial showed you exactly what you'd be doing in the first level of the game: shooting stuff, getting shot at by Tachyon/Tachyon's forces, grinding on the mag-train rail (and, by extension, avoiding running into mag-trains), lobbing fusion bombs at drophyd troopers, and freefalling. Oh, and blowing stuff up. Definitely blowing stuff up.
  • Oh, holy SHIT, did the N64 Mario Tennis abuse this one. In one ad found in the Archie Comics and in magazines, a tennis judge has a plunger shoved onto his mouth, with the words "When Plumbers Lose" overscoring that. Then little text at the bottom mentions "exploding baselines", "a couple of angry plumbers", and that "you don't play it. You survive it." This is probably a more accurate description of Mario POWER Tennis, its GameCube successor, but the N64 game is pretty tame. The "exploding baselines" bit is a reference to the Bob-Omb baseline judges that blow themselves up when you fault or go out, but they don't appear on every level. Some levels have Koopas that wave flags, similar to baseline judges in real-life tennis. The game did utilize The Power of Rock at times in its soundtrack, but that was about as extreme as the game got.
  • One of the TV commercials for The Sims 2 included a lady sim with a whip and very little clothing. Needless to say, this is not in the game.
    • In general, most of what was in this trailer was not in the game. The trailer included a lot more PG-13 content that wasn't included.
  • The debut trailer for Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm showed Konoha as a battle stage. It didn't make it in.
  • The TV ad for Lost Odyssey, primarily because of its use of the Jefferson Airplane song, "White Rabbit", but also because of the generally misty appearance of the game's FMV's, makes it appear to be a trippy, exotic experience, when in actuality it's a fairly solemn, Tear Jerker-filled story.
  • The four animated trailers of Infinite Space (including the one that is used as the opening in the game) spoil quite a number of major and minor events in the game, such as Kira's erasure from existence. However, some of these events appear differently from the game, both in the chronological order and how they happen. Some characters are also given different roles, most notably Valantin and Eremon.
  • This trailer for Legend of Dragoon is mostly accurate, except for the fight bit at the end. The game is mostly serious, without any zany humor of that sort - certainly no Losing Your Head jokes.
  • A variation in the Ace Attorney games - if the opening cinematic of a case shows a relevant conflict to you, it will usually be composed of various case-relevant events and screenshots chopped together in a way to mislead the player. Notable examples include cases 4-1 ( where we're led to believe that Phoenix was the one who freaked out and swung the juice bottle), and 5-5 ( which makes it look like Kay Faraday is responsible for setting an embassy on fire).
  • LEGO Star Wars III's first trailer, shown at E3 2010, implied the game would have had all the main six movies from the saga, instead it was only based on The Clone Wars.
    • LEGO Indiana Jones 2's trailer said the game featured the four Indy movies and a Level Editor, and that was true, but the trailer also stated the game was for PC, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS, and it didn't make clear that the Nintendo DS version didn't feature the classic adventures (Raiders, Doom and Crusade) nor the level editor.
  • The trailer for Howard Glitch, which goes out of its way to introduce all of the passengers on the ship as well as the pilot, could easily be mistaken as a trailer for the YouTube game and not the project as a whole. The game itself is actually about escaping reality in the midst of a hopeless situation, and the only character you get you interact with in any path is the pilot. Only not really. However, the characters do hint at the various endings of the game.
  • Subverted with Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour. The box art shows an American aircraft carrier being destroyed by a particle cannon. Cool? Yes. But completely implausible, as the Americans are the only ones with particle cannons in game. In fact, a GLA mission has you take control of an American particle cannon and destroy it in the game.
  • The opening cinematic in Left 4 Dead 2 probably counts, as it plays out much more like a trailer than its predecessor's, showing played-up versions of scenes from the campaign. (Oddly enough, unlike the original's, it is not available on Steam's trailers section.) It features a scene in a mall with the Survivors descending an elevator into a massive flood of zombies. That elevator is in the game, but the flood of zombies is not. They're also shown getting caught in the middle of a bridge bombing; in the game, they call it off at the beginning of the chapter.
    • The trailer also shows a piecemeal account of how the first campaign begins with the survivors on top of a hotel having missed the rescue, with the characters seeming to have already been travelling together with enough familiarity between them to make jokes, share supplies and so on. Yet in the game it's presented that the survivors just met, not even knowing eachothers' names, and the gradual trust and familiarity that gets built up over the campaigns was to be a major gameplay element.
  • While everything in the Lands of Lore 2 trailer technically was in the game, it's still deceptive. That's because everything the trailer shows is from the cutscenes, which look much better than the ingame graphics.
  • Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse: They Stole Max's Brain! was presented by all pre-release information as a Film Noir Pastiche, showing an angry, unshaven Sam charging around through Dutch Angles in the rain and the dark. It was!... for the first twenty minutes, after which it dropped all of the Film Noir tropes and turned into a straightforward comedy about a boy Pharaoh Reality Warper posessing Max's body and using Psychic Powers to brainwash Sam and turn Manhattan into Ancient Egypt. The screenshots on the official site were even rotated at Noirish angles and tinted blue, so there was no knowing about the Halfway Plot Switch.
  • The commercials for Grand Theft Auto III included a gorgeous white Banshee (a sports car based on the Dodge Viper) with a black stripe down the middle. However, the Banshees you steal in the game only have white stripes. Cue minor bitching from fans.
  • This trailer for Dead Space 2 portrays the game as an Action Shooter with mild horror elements, when we all know the [[[Nightmare Fuel]] true nature of the game.]]
  • The early trailers for Catherine implied that it was a bird's eye view horror-adventure-puzzler. Now we find out it's a Nightmare Fuel-Speed-Puzzle-Platformer. Yes, a platformer, one with vertical platforming about a guy running and climbing for his life in his underpants, all while trying to evade gluttonous demons and rack up a high score. Yes.
  • Aion was regarded as a new wave of video gaming featuring beautiful enviroments and characters flying freely...only to be shot down when you learn the game was a typical korean grindfest, most of the world is hideos past the one or two areas shot specifically in the trailers, and flight is limited to certain areas in the game, and timed to one minute base, after which they'd dissapear and send you plummeting to your doom. Granted, the character customization is one of the best out there, but that doesn't really change the fact.
  • The 1995 game Bug Too!. Compare this to the actual game and you'll see why.
  • The trailer for Super Scribblenauts shows a boy creating a huge, living skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Too bad you can't even make something remotely like that in the game, for if you type in "giant skeletal tyrannosaurus", all you get is a big normal tyrannosaurus with bones painted all over its body. Lame.
    • Try "Living Fossil".
  • Suikoden V had you thinking that Queen Arshtat was the main villain of the entire game. She gets killed a few hours in, and it is actually one of the most Tear Jerker moments of the game.
  • The CGI trailer for the first Assassin's Creed I game had Altair using a crossbow to dispatch a crusader. The crossbow would not appear in the series until two games (or 309 years) later.
    • The launch trailer for Assassin's Creed II. While none of the visual content is missing from the final game, the trailer is narrated by a much older Ezio with a rather different voice. Even after two additional games of Ezio getting older and Vocal Evolution, we've yet to hear him sound anything like that.
  • The "Blue Moon" trailer for Fallout: New Vegas featured a gorgeous view of New Vegas itself in the background of the scene. The city is completely illuminated, giving the impression that the game would include a completely intact pre-war setting which had survived any decay or damage from the apocalypse. In the actual game, however, only four buildings in the entire city are lit up, and the rest are in the same lack of repair as anything you would find in Fallout 3. It is revealed that the city, while surviving the nukes, went through hundreds of years without any maintenance until very recently when the casinos were fixed up and made pretty again.
  • Castlevaina: Dawn of Sorrow trailer could be slightly counted as this. Most notably the area that you face one boss is changed, as well as other enemies in odd areas. It does stay away from showing any area that wasn't in the game.
  • Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain: Subverted in this trailer. The trailer makes it look like Mortanius is stabbing Kain in the back when he's actually pulling the sword out of him. But it turns out he's the one who arranged for him to murdered in the first place.
  • Transformers: War for Cybertron's opening depicts Optimus Prime and Megatron facing off while two Humongous Mecha (yes even compared to Transformers they are this) Trypticon and Omega Supreme prepare to fight. In the actual game, Optimus and Megtron never meet in person, nor due Trypticon and Omega Supreme, though they do still appear as the final bosses of both campaigns.
  • The Shadow the Hedgehog game trailers all show extensive footage of Shadow riding that snazzy motorbike of his. In the game, the bike is only available in one level, is a hidden item, and has probably got the worst handling of any vehicle in the game.
  • In an unusual twist, you shouldn't trust the demo of the PC port of Wipeout 2097/XL. It supported both the newfangled Direct 3 D thing and regular ol' software emulation, although the latter was a lot slower. Still, given that this was the era when only high end gaming rigs had a "3D accelerator card", this was a good trade-off. The release version however lacked the software emulation mode despite being identical in every aspect other than having more content. The game did not sell well compared to the PSX version, but leaving people stuck with a working demo and an expensive frisbee couldn't have helped.
  • Some of the scenes in Deus Ex Human Revolution, while the riot happens you never see the Tyrants actually appearing on scene to crush the rioters who begins fighting violently with the cops and PMC as Two of the Tyrants are killed off long before the riots.
    • While on the subject, one of the trailers for the game is done up like a propaganda video for the Purity First movement, portraying the game as a straightforward fight against an evil corporation (Sarif) and it's twisted technology which has enslaved the world. In truth the game is far more ambigious with the main cast all working for Sarif (who turn out to not be so bad afterall.)
  • This trailer of Record of Agarest War makes it like the game is a naughty eroge on a home console and a turn-based strategy being its second purpose. While the game do features sim dating system and suggestive CG, the main plot of the game is a regular no-nonsense war and politic genre. There isn't even a full nudity in the game like how the triller misleaded by using pixelization.
  • Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. None of its trailer is included in the game. It's as if it was a project proposal for the unique aesthetics and graphic style of the game.
  • Trailers for Kid Icarus Uprising seemed to imply that the game's story could be compared to Zelda or other such series, featuring scenes such as Magnus and Gaol's confrontation. Instead the game is filled with Leaning on the Fourth Wall and Casual Danger Dialog. Not that that's a problem, mind you.
    • Additionally, the trailers made it look like Medusa would be the game's Big Bad. Before the game is even two-fifths finished, it's revealed that Hades is the real Big Bad.
      • This particular lie is continued by the game itself, which even rolls credits before the revelation.
  • Early trailers for The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess featured a ton of content that was either removed or heavy altered in the final game. These include enemies, locations, scenes, and even a boss nowhere to be seen in later versions. In fact if you count aesthetic changes as well, it isn't an exaggeration to say that every scene in the first two trailers contained at least one thing not in the finished product.
  • The US TV Commercial for Metroid: Other M briefly retells Samus's backstory, including a part where a younger Samus is being attacked by Ridley, implying that the game would explore the K2L incident in more detail. This doesn't show up anywhere, even scenes where it would make the most sense.
  • Early Nintendo Power ads showed Wes, the protagonist of Pokémon Colosseum to be an outright villain. He's actually an Anti-Hero.
  • The trailer for Poker Night At the Inventory has a scene in which Tycho's eyes glow red like they do in the comic he's from. This animation was made without the game engine, his eyes never glow red in-game because the game engine does not support it. (Here is a link to the trailer, skip to about 0:39 for the scene)
  • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is regarded by many fans as the best in the franchise. (You play as a pirate - what’s not to love?) The trailer, unfortunately, includes a lot of stuff that may have been minsinterpreted or Dummied Out. It starts with real-life pirate Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (referred to as “Thatch” im the game, one of his aliases) making a recruitment pitch to other would-be pirates - problem is, neither Thatch nor anyone else can recruit crew members that way in the actual game. Also, the jolly roger from Thatch’s ship is seen in the trailer, with the Assassins’ logo, but Thatch is not an Assassin by any means, his ship only flying this flag at the end of the game, where he is simply doing them a favor. The trailer also has a fight scene where he fires two muskets at once, taking an enemy down with a club, and swinging onto the deck of another ship, kicking an enemy as he lands - dramatic, yes, but all actions that cannot be performed in actual gameplay. The trailer ends with a scene that suggests Edward is a womanizer whose past is Shrouded in Myth - again, not the case in the game itself. Just the opposite in fact, he has a wife back home that he is faithful to and his motive (as he himself explains many times) is to make money to support his family and give them a better life elsewhere.
  1. ↑ (ignoring the Enforcer that got blasted within the first two seconds (while that does appear in-game (and they are present on Kerwan) you don't get to fight them before entering the Polaris galaxy) and the Alpha Cannon's presence (again, not available until later))
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