Unexpected Quests In Video Games

Highlights

• Some video games offer unexpected quests that change genre or alter gameplay, providing players with a unique experience.
• In Pokemon Red and Blue, players can encounter a trade that results in the unexpected evolution of Raichu, a fan-favorite Pokemon.
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 features a side quest involving pigeons that takes an emotional turn when the player discovers the quest giver’s fate.

In every video game, players get to know what to expect from the story once they have played the tutorial. Very few modern games deviate from their genre, and most modern stories in video games will play out without any huge twists or turns regarding their format.

However, there are a few games out there that deliberately try to offer the player something different. As such, gamers can sometimes encounter unexpected quests that change genre, alter how the game plays, or offer something that they never would have guessed when starting the game.

6 Pokemon Red and Blue

Pokemon Made A Small Mistake On Its First Entry

Choosing to perform an in-game trade isn’t really a side quest, but there is one trade in Pokemon Red and Blue that has left fans of the franchise scratching their heads. If players wish to complete all trades in these games, their journey will take them to Cinnabar Island, where a man in the Pokemon lab wants to trade his Electrode for a Raichu. This transaction seems normal enough. However, if the player talks to the man after the trade, he will proclaim that his Raichu has evolved.

Raichu is a fan-favorite Pokemon, being the evolved form of the franchise’s mascot, Pikachu. As such, all players know that Raichu cannot evolve, despite there being some initial alpha designs of an evolved form of the rodent existing among some of the original games’ scrapped ideas. Therefore, this trade will result in something quite unexpected for the player.

5 Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

Moving Pigeons Turns Out To Be Incredibly Emotional

In the first Marvel’s Spider-Man, players will be asked to find pigeons for a man named Howard. The pair become fast friends, and fans will be happy to learn that Howard makes an appearance in another side quest in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. This time, Howard asks Spider-Man if he would be willing to find a new home for his flock of pigeons without giving a reason. After learning a few bird calls and gliding through some objectives, the quest becomes simple enough. Using Spider-Man’s new web wings in a quest is nothing out of the ordinary for this game.

However, when the player returns to speak with Howard to complete the quest, they will find that an ambulance is there and that Howard has passed away. The reason why Howard wanted his birds re-homed suddenly makes sense, and the player receives an emotional, yet unexpected, gut punch as a reward for the quest’s completion.

4 Fable 2

Being Tricked By Reaver

The story in Fable 2 has the player grouping three heroes together to fight the main threat of the game. The first two heroes are compliant to fight evil as expected, but things change when it is time to recruit the third hero. Not only is Reaver an egotistical coward unwilling to help, but his first act upon meeting the player sees him tricking them on a quest where he knows they will be cursed with old age.

Returning Reaver’s seal to The Shadow Court will age the player or force them to pass the curse on to an innocent civilian. It is certainly surprising to meet a supposed hero in Albion who acts so dastardly.

3 Dishonored

Poisoning A Distillery Doesn’t Count As A Kill

In the first Dishonored game, players can choose to complete the game by using stealth and as a pacifist or by killing as many enemies as possible. However, if players run into Granny Rags in the open world, she will ask them to sneak in a poison supply at a nearby whiskey distillery.

Such an act will surely cause anyone who drinks the whiskey from this company to die, but completing the side quest will not affect the player’s kill tally. The next level will have more Weepers in it as a consequence, but there is a way to unexpectedly perform a no-kill run in this game, even by completing this quest.

2 Batman: Arkham Asylum

Fighting Scarecrow

As soon as players begin Batman: Arkham Asylum, they will quickly learn that playing the game successfully involves performing well in some fast-paced combat encounters or avoiding being spotted in some stealth sections. Even most of the game’s boss fights involve a version of this formula. But that all changes when players first meet Scarecrow.

While investigating the morgue as Batman, players will find that the corpses in the body bag on a table are Bruce Wayne’s parents come to life. A brief jump scare will then transport the player to a distorted realm with a towering version of the Scarecrow, who has poisoned the hero with his special nerve gas. The player then has to navigate around this new world to reach Scarecrow and take the boss down. Although changing the gameplay like this is natural in modern games, it was a new idea and quite unexpected back in 2009.

Not Killing In A Dark Brotherhood Quest

The Dark Brotherhood guild in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is essentially a group of assassins who have one job: They perform assassination contracts for people willing to pay the price, as players soon learn after completing the first few quests of this story arc. However, the fourth mission that players have to pursue as an initiate in the guild asks them to do the opposite.

‘The Assassinated Man’ quest requires the player to meet a man named Motiere in Chorrol. He has paid the Dark Brotherhood to pretend to assassinate him in an attempt to escape his gambling debts. Players must use a magic blade to paralyze Motierre in front of his loan sharks and then revive him later by giving him an antidote while he is resting in his family crypt. While players do have to fight a few spirits when escaping the crypt, this quest has an unexpectedly low level of bloodshed, which is something that made the Dark Brotherhood quest line so refreshing and fun to begin with.

MORE: The Best Hidden Side Quests Of All Time, Ranked