Fish Out Of Temporal Water / Video Games

• Meta-example: There have been a few video game consoles that have exhibited this trope, by way of lasting far longer than their contemporaries in an industry where successor hardware comes out every five-to-seven years. The most noteworthy example of this being Sega's consoles in Brazil, especially the Sega Master System. The system was introduced in 1989 by distributor Tectoy, and over three decades later, it is not only still being sold long after Sega had dropped out of the hardware race, but also continues to sell competitively against modern gaming systems.
• King Malinus from AdventureQuest returns to life after being dead for centuries only to find his once beautiful kingdom gone. He goes berserk and tries to find someone to blame for its destruction. He refuses to accept your explanation that no one is to blame; that time takes all things. He even attacks you thinking you are responsible. He calms down after you defeat him and then wonders what he should do now. Fortunately, his Moglin assistant (who survived all this time thanks to his healing magic) comforts him by telling Malinus that he has many descendants still alive and that his vanished kingdom acted as the foundation for the present civilization. You throw in your two cents by suggesting that Malinus could be a hero again since Lore will always need more heroes. Malinus takes your words to heart and offers as a reward a spell to summon him in battle.
• In Akatsuki Blitzkampf, the titular Akatsuki spends 50 years trapped in the Arctic Pole as a Human Popsicle and the action of the game is kickstarted when he wakes up from such a "sleep". He deals with this trope by restarting the mission he was given before being frozen and kicking the asses of anyone who gets in his way...
• Would you ever believe BlazBlue has this in an extreme form? Continuum Shift: Extend gives us Makoto's story mode, Slight Hope. The aforementioned Makoto Nanaya winds up falling into a dormant Cauldron in the Ikaruga ruins, and gets thrown out back at the events of Calamity Trigger — during the Wheel of Fortune timeline! Makoto has no role in NOL Intelligence or Sector Seven, her best friend Noel does not exist, and the only folks who have any idea what the hell she's going on about are Hazama, Relius, Kokonoe, and Rachel. In the bad ending Relius finds her first and... the rest is best left unsaid. In the good ending, Rachel helps her back to the active timeline.
• Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time and its sequel Bugs Bunny & Taz: Time Busters both have this trope as primary plot and game elements. In the former game, Bugs gets lost in time and has to journey through various eras of history so he can get home. The sequel ups it, though. Daffy accidentally causes Granny’s Time Regulator to go haywire and cause catastrophic damage to history, including flinging several characters from different eras across time. The "Lost in Time" characters are an optional side quest where Bugs and Taz will hit them to send them back to their proper eras. You don’t have to find them all, but the game’s true 100% ending where history is properly repaired will not take place if you don’t.
• Rather the point of Chrono Trigger. The characters of the story tend to take this in stride, with a few exceptions.
  • When Crono, Marle, and Lucca end up in 2300 A.D., they are shocked and horrified by the nature of their future.
    Marle: It's like another world...
  • The results of the Ocean Palace Disaster displaces four characters who have no way back, specifically Melchior, Gaspar and Belthasar, the three sages, in addition to the young Janus, who became Magus. Belthasar was the only one to try to make a way back, but he died of old age by the time he finished his time machine. The other three made new lives for themselves when they ended up.
  • After the party defeats Magus and screws up his summoning of Lavos, the resulting time distortions displace Magus again and he ends up in his own past, where he acts as a prophet (using his knowledge of his own time period) to try for another swing at Lavos.
• Inverted in Cyberpunk 2077. When Johnny Silverhand returns to Night City after a 50 year absence, he is disturbed by how little has changed, seeing this as further proof that the corporations have managed to stamp out human creativity and individuality.
• In Dark Fall II: Lights Out, Benjamin Parker travels into two different future eras and one period of the past. His confusion at seeing what's become of the lighthouse he'd been checking up on could fit this trope, even if he didn't get the chance to interact with people as a social Fish out of Water. Also applies to Malakai, an AI-controlled space probe from the future, that ended up in the distant past from a deep-space teleportation accident. Having gone a little insane, Malakai had since been attempting to manipulate people into helping him return home, including Parker.
• Eirena the Enchantress in Diablo III, who was placed in a 1,500 year long slumber so that she can help the hero fight the forces of Hell.
• In Digimon Survive, Barrier Maiden Miyuki was trapped in the Digital World since the 1970s as The Ageless Empty Shell. When she gets her soul back and returns to the human world with her now-elderly younger brother, she's fascinated by things like flatscreen TVs and computers.
• Dragon Age II: The Big Bad of the Legacy DLC, Corypheus, has been sealed away since the time of the first Blight. When he's finally unsealed, he's a little confused about how empty his surroundings are; weren't the Deep Roads part of the Dwarven Empire?
• Fallout:
  • In Fallout 2 you can encounter Private First Class Dobbs, who was killed in battle prior to the Great War and taken to the Sierra Army Depot to be immersed in a Healing Vat in an attempt to revive him. When the Chosen One wakes him up in the present day, he doesn't realize the world's ended and runs off in an attempt to rejoin his unit only to melt into a puddle of goo due to "post-cryogenic syndrome".
  • In the Mothership Zeta DLC in Fallout 3 you can meet people from across history who were cryogenically frozen by aliens, including a little girl from the early days after the Great War, a pre-war soldier, a cowboy, and a samurai.
  • The Sole Survivor from Fallout 4 was cryogenically frozen on the day the bombs fell, and then thawed out two hundred years After the End. They end up oscillating between this and Cold Sleep, Cold Future depending on the circumstances.
  • There's also Curie, a medical robot and later Robot Girl who spent the last two hundred years by herself running tests on mole rats until you find her. She doesn't quite grasp that civilization actually ended and has a tendency to ask if you're going to report attacking Super Mutants to the police or wonder where all the students are when you explore the burned-out ruins of MIT.
• Final Fantasy:
  • We have Tidus from Final Fantasy X, getting thrown approximately a thousand years into the future, where his home Zanarkland was destroyed by Sin. Turns out that Tidus was a dream created by the fayth and that everything that he knew wasn't real.
  • Vanille and Fang from Final Fantasy XIII were Taken for Granite for 500 years and revived just before the start of the game.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2 has a moment with Noel Kreiss, who comes from a distant future where there is no Cocoon in the sky and he's the last human left alive. He wonders at the sight of Cocoon when he goes five centuries backwards in time, and marvels at the population of New Bodhum (which apparently had more people than he'd EVER known in his lifetime). Seriously, the guy is even wowed that they're able to grow their own vegetables. Yes, his era sucked that much.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem Heroes: The Player Character is established to have been pulled from the modern day real world into the medieval-esque Fire Emblem universe against their will. Some of the other characters ask the player about their homeworld, and find the concepts of "buildings that scrape the sky" and "metallic non-horse-drawn wagons" to be amusing.
  • Fire Emblem Engage is about an ancient hero named Alear entering a coma, and then awakening 1000 years later. Although they don’t remember much about their past, the game is about Alear dealing with being hailed as this ancient legendary hero.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • The protagonist of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Tommy Vercetti, had been sent to prison in 1971 and released in 1986, shortly before the game started. One of the people he does jobs for is a sleazy porn director who's shooting a pornographic parody of Jaws. Tommy wonders to himself why anybody would go see a movie about fish. Tommy's fondness for Hawaiian shirts also leads to a few jokes that his stint in jail has left his fashion sense Two Decades Behind.
  • Likewise, Grand Theft Auto IV features a darker, less comedic application of this trope. Dwayne Forge, who had just been released from prison after several years, is shocked about how the drug business, which had once been a last-resort career track for those desperate to escape the ghetto, is now being presented by pop culture as something that black youth should aspire to making it big in.
• Axl Low from Guilty Gear has the ability to randomly, and unwillingly, travel through time, which leads to him being sent from our time to the post-apocalyptic world of the game. He takes it extremely well, holding his own against the rest of the fighters and even seeming to enjoy himself, but still devotes his time to returning to his girlfriend, Megumi.
• In Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, when Raziel is revived as a wraith and re-enters the physical world, he's shocked to see how much Nosgoth has changed since he's been gone; the vampires have all become ravenous, mutated beasts, and Kain's empire is derelict and ruined.
• Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry has the protagonist somehow time-travel from the 1980s to 2018. Much of the humor deals with him attempting to deal with modern culture and technology.
• Played with in the Like a Dragon series.
  • Yakuza has Kiryu Kazuma, who was imprisoned for 10 years in 1995. Once he's released in 2005, he notes that a lot has changed, at least in the Yakuza world.
  • In Yakuza 4, Taiga Saejima was imprisoned in 1985, and finally escapes in 2010. As he wanders around Kamurocho, where he used to live, he makes numerous comments about how everything's changed, and he doesn't even know what a CD or DVD is.
  • Ditto with Yakuza: Like a Dragon and the main protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga. He spends eighteen years in prison starting from 2001, and when he gets back to Kamurocho in 2019, he suffers from a nasty case of future shock when he sees all the modern tech around him. When he eventually gets a smartphone, he has no clue how to use it. He can't even get his old haircut back since current hairdressers no longer know how to do punch perms and got his signature Wild Hair as a result of a botched attempt.
• Mass Effect:
  • Javik from Mass Effect 3 was frozen in cryostasis for 50,000 years and as a result is the last Prothean still alive. As a result, all his memories regarding the races who now rule the galaxy are from when they were little more than cavemen, which he is constantly pointing out... even when he's praising them. His reaction to the Salarians, one of the most smartest races and major powers in the current Cycle is to first express amazement that they managed to evolve at all, before remarking that they used to eat flies and lick their own eyeballs.
  • Downplayed with Commander Shepard in Mass Effect 2, who died and subsequently spent the next two years (and twelve days) being brought back to life. Since it was only two years, it meant that aside from a few new technological advances, there was very little that actually changed in all that time, so they adapted quite quickly.
• Downplayed in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Venom Snake and the real Big Boss wakes up after a nine year coma in 1984 and is initally dazed. But thanks to Ocelot filling him in on current events, the nature of Diamond Dogs' operations and the fact that Venom doesn't really go to any major hub of pop culture, he manages to get by.
• This is the basis to the whole story in Onimusha 3: Demon Siege, as main hero Samanosuke Akechi is sent 500 years forward into modern Paris, just as Jean-Jacques, based on actor Jean Reno, is sent back into Samanosuke's time in a crazy time-travel plot to resurrect Nobunaga. Both of them act properly befuddled by their surroundings, especially Samanosuke.
• To allow new players to enter the game without knowing the theme, Otherspace uses this trope to allow players to be from any era in human history, then suddenly be sucked into the game world.
• In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Ingo from Pokémon Black and White's Battle Subway ends up in Hisui through the rift in spacetime like the player, over 100 years in the past. Since he lost his memory in the fall he doesn't have much trouble fitting in after being taken in by the Pearl clan, although he makes the occasional odd train reference. Soon afterward he recovers part of his memory and recounts the joys of being a Trainer and bonding with Pokémon through battling to the people of the past. This later happens the other way around in Pokémon Masters, where characters from Hisui end up getting timewarped to modern times.
• Dana from Shadow of Destiny is actually from the 1500s, but she doesn't know that due to Homunculus switching her with Margarette when they were babies so that Dana is moved ahead to the present time while Margarette takes her place in the distant past. They mention that they feel like something is missing from their life and they feel quite lost, which is due to them not knowing about their actual origins from the past. When they get transported to the distant past, they adapt to the time period very quickly and some endings has them staying in the past where they truly belong.
• Jean Bison from Sly 2: Band of Thieves is this way by Human Popsicle, being a frontiersman who continued his work in the present day. In his time, it was considered taming the wilderness. In the present, it's ecological warfare.
• The Soul Series takes place in the late 1500s. Most Guest Fighters fit some variant of the trope; Spawn, Heihachi, and Jin come from the modern era and are Present to Past, KOS-MOS, Yoda, Darth Vader, the Apprentice, and 2B come from futuristic worlds and are Future to Past, and Ezio, Kratos, and Haohmaru come from the early 1500s, somewhere in the 400-300 BC range, and late 1700s respectively and are Past to Past.
• Judd the cat from Splatoon is one of only two known mammals (the other being his own clone) in a setting that's otherwise primarily populated by sapient non-mammalian sea creatures. As it turns out, this is because Judd was one of the few land animals (if not the only) to survive the catastrophic flooding that wiped out humanity 12,000 years before the start of the game, thanks to his owner sealing him in cryostasis for 10,000 years.
• Star Trek Online:
  • The "The 2800" arc uses this to answer the question of what exactly happened to the 2,800 Dominion warships the Prophets made vanish in DS9: "Sacrifice of Angels". Turns out they got time-shifted 35 years into the future and reappear out of nowhere in the middle of an international summit on the Borg problem. It takes a lot of talking before they even accept that this happened, and getting them to go away still entails a big space battle.
  • The Federation temporal contact is a former Bozeman crewman (see the Live-Action TV entry for Star Trek). He is well-adjusted when met (the game takes place some forty years after Bozeman was broken out of the loop), but notes that his experiences is one reason why he works for the Department of Temporal Investigations.
• Princess Zelda as she appears in the Super Smash Bros. series. Especially in Brawl's adventure mode, when she just stands on Meta Knight's ship while getting hit by Fox's cruiser.
• Silas and Verna in The Trail Of Anguish can't say exactly where they're from, from the museum exhibit suggests they're from a lost era.
• Undertow (Chair Entertainment): Pun aside (due to the aquatic features on their feet and hands), the Atlanteans spent centuries under the ice before the Elect inadvertently unfroze them, and they are eager to reclaim their dominion over mankind.
• In Yooka-Laylee, Rextro Sixtyfourus is an N64-era character in a modern game. As this is a game where everyone knows they are in a game, much of the jokes involving him are about the characters being confused by him talking about things such as cheat codes which modern games don't have, as well as him being confused by things modern games do, such as online multiplayer. He ends up taking a class to familiarize himself with modern game design, but unfortunately for everyone else it ended up being mostly about microtransactions.

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