Late Arrival Spoiler / Visual Novels

• Higurashi: When They Cry:
  • Funimation and its predecessor Geneon Entertainment, as well as the original Japanese trailers (plus openings if you count the original sound novels), spare no detail when it comes to the anime adaptation of the game — from the characters' dark pasts to the not-so-secret actual plot to the ending of the main series.
  • The manga takes it even further, since it shows Hanyuu and Shion in omake before they appear, leading people who have never played the sound novels or watched the anime to wonder why Mion's hair is down (you could just think it's a fanservice omake thing, though) and who that girl with the horns is.
  • The Gaiden Game Daybreak Portable's opening theme contains a shot of Natsumi wielding a butcher knife and bearing a very lovely Slasher Smile. Sure hope you've seen all the way through either Onisarashi-hen or Someutsushi-hen.
  • The 2020 anime was marketed as a remake of the 2006 anime, so a newcomer would be excused for thinking it was a good way to get started with the series. However, in the second episode the anime turns out to be a Stealth Sequel, with a brand new arc—and the beginning of the episode outright reveals Hanyuu's existence and the fact that Rika's stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop of murders, a very major plot twist which in the original series isn't revealed until the second half of the story.
• The fandom of Umineko: When They Cry doesn't hide the fact that there is a "Groundhog Day" Loop going on (since it's revealed that there is one fairly early on), as well as the magical beings that keep appearing per arc. The PS3 version is even worse, where they blatantly show all the magical beings that appear in future arcs (until episode 4) in the opening, nonetheless. This was invoked by Ryukishi07 himself, since in an interview he admitted he didn't wanted to outright show the answer to the murders since he knew this would happen.
• The Ace Attorney franchise generally tries to avoid this whenever possible, but there are still a few examples:
  • A major subplot of the first game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, is Miles Edgeworth's gradual Heel–Face Turn. The fact that he has his own spin-off turns this into a Foregone Conclusion.
  • A major subplot of Justice For All is Phoenix (and by extension, the player) believing Edgeworth to be dead, apparently having committed suicide, only for him to turn up alive and well in the game's final chapter. Once again, the fact that he has his own spin-off game, which chronologically occurs after this one, spoils this. However, it was always more of a case of Like You Would Really Do It anyway, and he appears on the cover of the DS version, so it's not too much of a spoiler.
  • In the final episode of Phoenix Wright: Justice For All, Maya Fey gets into a truly life-threatening situation. The box art for the following game features her on the front cover, spoiling that she survives.
  • Averted in Ace Attorney Investigations. Edgeworth never actually mentions why he stopped following the path of Manfred von Karma, and someone playing the game first might assume it was due to soul-searching and personal moral decisions. They would be unaware that in the first game Edgeworth discovered that Von Karma murdered his father and raised him as a heartless prosecutor as revenge for Edgeworth's father giving him a penalty in court. In fact, most of the big spoilery events of the earlier games are either not mentioned or referred to so lightly (such as Franziska being shot) that a newbie might think they're talking about a Noodle Incident.
  • Simon Blackquill appears as a free man in the fourth case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice, spoiling the fact that he was exculpated of his murder charge in the previous game.
• Fate/stay night:
  • Gilgamesh's presence (and his class, though this is because unlike most Servants he doesn't bother to hide his identity) is usually not hidden at all by promotional materials or other sources, and Fate/Unlimited Codes has both him and Dark Sakura as playable characters from the get-go.
  • The fact that Kotomine is, in fact, the Big Bad, as well as the above mentioned Servant's Master, and not merely a Jerkass comes as a surprise late in the first route/anime to anyone who wasn't spoiled, which is practically no-one, thanks in part to Fate/Unlimited Codes and the fandom in general.
  • While many of the Servants' identities are more or less well-known these days, Saber's identity as a gender-flipped King Arthur is probably the most famous. Fate/Zero doesn't bother to hide this and establishes it early on. Much of this can owe to the fact that, with other iterations of the franchise, the term "Saber" describes a massive variety of characters. For a while, they could get away with adjectives ("Blue Saber" for the original, "Red Saber" for Nero, for instance). Fate/Grand Order quashed that by introducing dozens of Sabers, many of whom make up her supporting cast in the lore of that game, so now she's generally only called "Saber" in the context of exclusively talking about stay/Night's cast.
  • Likewise Fate/Zero also spoils the fact that Rin and Sakura are sisters early on.
  • The openings of the Realta Nua version feature several plot points that would ordinarily not be revealed into much later in the route, such as Shirou gaining Archer's arm, Saber's corruption, and Ilya during her sacrifice in the Heaven's Feel opening.
  • Grand Order does this a lot to the Fate/EXTRA games, by way of Sequel Displacement (one was a PSP game series so obscure its second entry suffered from No Export for You, the other is mobile). It had very little hope of concealing anyone's identities, so it just presented them upfront. Considering that Grand Order's first year of its story had major scenes involving Elizabeth, Tamamo, Altera, Gawain, and Robin Hood, and entire arcs centered on Nero and Drake, and entire seasonal events centered around Nero and Elizabeth, most people nowadays would get into the Extra games specifically because they want to know where Nero, Elizabeth, and Tamamo come from. Deeply ironic when one considers the entire purpose of Nero's Identical Stranger status was to misdirect people who thought she was that other Saber.
  • One of the biggest is probably Archer's identity: a possible alternate future self of Shirou. It's overall difficult to even talk about the Unlimited Blade Works route without mentioning it, and in most places it gets mentioned without spoiler tags or warnings. Part of this is due to the highly prolific status of the Unlimited Blade Works chant on the Internet... and the fact that both Archer's and Shirou's version are used make it border on It Was His Sled for those that haven't played the game yet. Fate/Grand Order doesn't even bother to hide it, as multiple Servants in-game just call him Emiya and one of his playable looks with his hair down is almost impossible to mistake for anyone other than a tanned, white-haired Shirou.
• Little Busters!: If the game's general trend towards Rousseau Was Right didn't give you the idea that Kanata isn't nearly as much of a Jerkass deep down as she acts towards Haruka, the fact that she is a well-advertised love interest in Ecstasy surely would.
• The official Steam release of the original Muv-Luv trilogy makes no effort to hide that Shirogane Takeru gets abruptly transported to a post-apocalyptic timeline in Muv-Luv Unlimited. Furthermore, promotional material for Muv-Luv Alternative clearly spells out the premise of him becoming a Groundhog Peggy Sue out to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. Lastly, once the Altered Fable epilogue was localized for the international photonmelodies release, the marketing clearly spoils the fact that it's set in Final Extra, a world that was created at the very end of Alternative.
• Danganronpa:
  • The first sentence in the second main installment, Danganronpa Zero, gives away The Reveal of the first one, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has a rather unusual example. The game's cover and store screenshots prominently show what appears to be Byakuya Togami from the first game among the character roster, thus apparently spoiling that he survives the events of the first game. However, it turns out that although Byakuya does return, the character shown on the promotional material is actually the Ultimate Imposter impersonating him.
  • By Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, the franchise is clearly expecting people to know everything about the previous installments before even trying to look up anything about the new ones. What used to be just about every single spoiler in Trigger Happy Havoc becomes a non-spoiler by this point, even in promotional material and trailers.
  • The franchise even manages to exaggerate the trope to its standards of using it in the "Ultimate Talent Development Plan" bonus mode of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony and Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp, a pair of non-canon installments where characters from all three main games are playable, including Walking Spoilers from previous canon installments such as Mukuro Ikusaba, the real Junko Enoshima (who appears as the central character on the cover of Ultimate Summer Camp), and Izuru Kamukura. It also casually spoils things such as Chihiro Fujisaki's gender, Kyoko Kirigiri being the Ultimate Detective, and Hajime Hinata being a Reserve Course student without an Ultimate talent.
  • The spin-off light novel Danganronpa Kirigiri does this to itself. The cover of the fourth volume depicts three characters who were introduced in a case in the previous book, which had four suspects, one of whom was the culprit. While no direct visual image of the characters is shown there, enough information is given that the reader can match them to the fourth volume's cover, and the identity of the culprit (Korisu Kakitsubata) becomes obvious through exclusion.
• Sunrider Liberation Day’s opening cinematic casually gives away two major twists from the previous game, Mask of Arcadius: the fact that Asaga Oakrun’s real name is Asaga di Ryuvia (and is thus related in some way to Sola di Ryuvia); and the fact that Chigara Ashada bears an uncanny resemblance to the Big Bad. For that matter, the character profiles on the game’s official website don’t even try to hide the fact that Asaga is a princess or that the Big Bad is a persona shared by a bunch of hive-minded clones called the Prototypes.
  • The same webpage also assumes that you’ve played the High School AU Dating Sim Spin-Off Sunrider Academy, as Sola’s profile casually gives away her route’s big reveal that Academy!Sola’s very existence is a by-product of the main Sunrider universe’s Sola travelling through time.
• The opening illustration for Your Turn to Die's manga adaptation not only gives away Alice's entire existence (as the cast is unaware that he's around until 1-2), but also the death of the Sacrificial Lion.
• Merely seeing the full title of the Purrfect Apawcalypse series's third game spoils the identity of the Big Bad in the first and second games, and reading the synopsis for it spoils a lot of major events that occurred in the second game's Golden Ending.
• The twist of Syrup and the Ultimate Sweet is that Pastille is secretly a witch and not a human. Pastille's later appearances in the webcomic another piece of candy and the novel Starry Flowers make no attempt to hide this fact, though his cameos in the Lonely Wolf Treat games manage to avoid the issue.
• The ending of The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog has a cameo from Sage in Doctor Eggman's base. This moment gives away some significant spoilers from Sonic Frontiers though; it shows that Sage was created by Eggman in the first place, that Eggman came to accept her as his daughter (Sage is wearing a Fun T-Shirt saying "Let's Go Dad!" in the aforementioned cameo), and most importantly that she survived the Heroic Sacrifice she made to defeat Frontiers' Big Bad.

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