Metaphorically True / Video Games

• In Touhou Project canon, Cute Witch Marisa Kirisame notoriously steals books from the Scarlet Devil Mansion's library. She claims it's not stealing because all the inhabitants of the Scarlet Devil Mansion are youkai, who will live many times longer than her, and they can simply take the books back when she dies. She calls it "borrowing without permission". Luckily, the Youkai don't mind; or at least; don't mind beyond mind-boggling Bullet Hell duels, but that's the standard operating procedure. It's also worth pointing out that while Marisa claims the youkai can have their books back when her human life ends, in some games' backstories it's mentioned that she's working on an Elixer of Life, to prolong her life without losing her humanity. Trust Marisa to pair a Metaphorically True with Loophole Abuse.
• In the Rogue Like game Ragnarok, an Amulet of Eternal Life turns you to stone. That makes a certain kind of mythic sense, but it's not "life" as we'd recognize it.
• Ancient Domains of Mystery, another Rogue Like, has the gauntlets of peace — and their artifact counterpart, the Gauntlets of Eternal Peace —, which make it almost impossible to hit anything while you're wearing them. The "peace" either means you can't kill anything, or you will die quickly and be at peace since (duh) Everything Is Trying To Kill You and you won't be able to fight back. Even better, the gauntlets are autocursing. At least they give you a moderate defense and armor boost while you search desperately for that scroll of uncursing.
• If you haven't played Knights of the Old Republic it wouldn't be much of a spoiler to say that you shouldn't fully trust anything that any Jedi has to say to you. Indeed, their self-serving tendencies of filtering truth through "certain points of view" is significantly responsible for their eventual downfall.
  • In the first game, on the other hand, the only real example of this trope is Jolee's claim that "the Jedi left me" (and he doesn't consider himself a Jedi any more at this point). The other Jedi certainly do tell some outright lies, but don't continue to defend them as 'true' once they're exposed as lies. There is also at least one case of Exact Words where a Jedi who knows about the biggest coming plot twist talks to you about something else in a way that passingly refers to the secret by necessity but sounds innocuous and avoids revealing it.
  • While this an important plot point in the first game, the second game takes it to the point of deconstruction with Kreia and the rest of the Council; almost everything a player may think they know about the background of this game has to pass the litmus test of "but did I hear that from Kreia?". Similarly, Atton is often used as the writer's mouthpiece on any particular topic, but his word shouldn't be taken too seriously either, as he used to be a Sith torturer who willingly and enjoyed torturing Jedi into turning to the Dark Side.
  • HK-47 gets in on it too, if you ask him about how many Jedi he's killed during the Jedi Civil War:
    HK-47: I have found many Jedi to be arrogant practitioners of pacifism when it is convenient for them. Also, their tendency to never directly answer a question is rather annoying.
  • Further twisted with Kreia, in that she only claims to always speak the truth. You can call her out on the fact that she could be lying about not lying, and she is proud that you noticed without really discussing the point further. Most fan interpretations are built on which parts of Kreia's speeches are true, half-true, and outright false.
• The World Ends with You:
  • Uzuki offers Neku a way out of the game if he kills his partner Shiki. However, before Neku can deliver the killing blow, he's stopped by Mr. H, who says that since his life is tied to his partner's, he'll die too...
    Neku: All that about letting me out of the game — that was all a lie!
    Uzuki: Like, that is so rude! I do not lie. If I erased you, that's still letting you out of the Game!
  • Unfortunately, there's no similar way to weasel out of her claim that Shiki was a spy for the Reapers. No-one calls her on this.
  • At one point, Game Master Konishi tells Neku and Beat that she's going to hide in the same place for seven days, while they try to find her. However, she's able to move all over the city, because the "one place" she chose was Beat's shadow.
• A rare positive version courtesy of Another Century's Episode: When it was announced that the PlayStation 3 installment would be limited to three mecha per series, fans were upset - until the game's director posted on his blog, revealing that Mid-Season Upgrades and Mecha Expansion Packs would fall under the heading of their base machine and therefore only count as one, meaning they can fit in more playable while still maintaining the whole "three per series" idea.
• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia has Death's Ring, which massively increases your stats and whose description is "One hit kills instantly." It is indeed true. Take one hit and you will instantly die.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Long ago, the continent of Akavir had its own race of Men a little different from those in Tamriel. However, it is said that these men were "devoured" by the Tsaesci, an Akaviri race of "snake vampires". One theory states that this means the men were literally eaten by the Tsaesci. However, another source regarding the Tsaesci uses "devour" and "enslave" interchangeably when it comes to what the Tsaesci did to the red dragons of Akavir. "Devour" is likely just a colorful metaphor for enslavement and/or cultural absorption.
  • In Morrowind, one of Vivec's stories of his involvement in the death of Nerevar indicates that the official Temple stance of it not being his fault is a literal half-truth: Vehk the God was not to blame, but Vehk the Mortal is. Since Vivec ("V'vehk") is both of those...
• In Skies of Arcadia, Belleza befriends the protagonists, who take her with them to Temple of Pyrynn to find the Red Moon Crystal. She gains their trust by telling them a sad story about herself: that her father was a sailor who was killed in the Valua-Nasr war, and she was left orphaned and with a hatred of war. This much is true. What she did not mention at that point is that her father was a Valuan sailor, not Nasrean, and she is in fact an admiral of the Valuan Armada. Her hatred of war was also not a lie; she believes that Valuan hegemony will bring stability and end the war.
• In The Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush is told that Blood Island is the place where he will die. After drinking alcohol mixed with medicine, he goes into a coma-like state for a few hours. It doesn't actually kill him, but it is enough for the island to document him as legally dead (at least twice). The official explanation is that he does die, but because it's a family-friendly LucasArts adventure game, he recovers.
• Angels in Might and Magic: Heroes VI are incapable of lying, but they are capable of deception by not telling you all of the truth. Kiril learns this the hard way when he agrees to accompany the angel Sarah on her pilgrimage through hell as her protector, and ends up imprisoned in hell as a result; Sarah decided that the best way for Kiril to protect her is by her selling his soul, without his consent, to the demon sovereign Kha-Beleth in exchange for safe passage through his realm.
  Sarah: I never lied to you, but certain truths had to be ignored to set Elrath's will in motion. Forgive me.
  • Hilariously subverted in Might and Magic X, which takes place in the aftermath of Heroes VI: the intro highlights this aspect (as well as certain related tropes) of angels, and then at the end of the expansion (which acts as an additional chapter to the game) you meet a scheming angel responsible for a fair chunk of your troubles... who turns out to be quite bad at this, flubbing her attempts and making it obvious to everyone around her what's really going on. Her schemes only worked because she was working with a human who, being human, could straight-up lie.
• The bulk of Niko's phony resume for Goldberg, Ligner, and Shyster in Grand Theft Auto IV — although there are several outright lies to puff up his credentials, most of it is composed of statements that are technically true, but either worded so vaguely that they're meaningless or deliberately framed in a misleading matter.
• Fallout: New Vegas:
  • Fantastic convinced the NCR to give him a job fixing an advanced power plant through this trope:
    Fantastic: They were going door to door asking if anyone knew any scientists. I said look no further. They asked me if I knew anything about power plants. I said as much as anyone I'd ever met. They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard.
  • Dr. Borous in Old World Blues claims his genetically engineered Nightstalkers and Cazadores are as "docile as they are sterile". This is entirely true, though not in the context he intended (Borous believed the answer was "completely", whereas the Player Character at this point knows the answer to be "not at all").
  • The King, who believes the School of Elvis Impersonation was in fact a temple. The reasoning behind it is... surprisingly coherent.
    The King: Near as I can tell, [this building] was some sort of religious institution. Oh, I know it says "school" out front, but everything in here seems to be related to the worship of some guy from back in the day. People used to come here to learn about him, to dress like him, to move like him. To BE him. If that's not worship, I don't know what is.
• Coming up to the reveal, Capcom had said that the 5th character for Ultra Street Fighter IV had never appeared in a Street Fighter game before. Decapre had actually appeared in a cutscene for Street Fighter Alpha 3, and looks and plays similarly to Cammy, but otherwise she's never been playable before, meaning that Capcom wasn't lying for the most part.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Fi tells you that the environment in which the final boss is faced disables your Skyward Strike. This is correct; a different, lightning-charged projectile attack that can be performed in that environment, though activated and utilized in much the same manner, is distinct from a Skyward Strike.
• Mass Effect 3: The developer claims that its conclusion "has provoked a bigger fan reaction than any other video games' conclusion in history." It's true. They fail to mention, however, that it was a hugely negative reaction.
• At the beginning of Jurassic Park: The Game, when Nima Cruz and Miles Chadwick need to trek further into Isla Nublar to make contact with Denis Nedry and suddenly come across a huge electric fence, Nima, unaware of what InGen has been doing lately, expresses surprise at such a structure having been built on the island. Miles tells Nima that the place is "kind of like a zoo" with "all sorts of animals". Of course, if they had just looked a few meters to the right, they would have seen that the zoo pen they have just come across belongs to Dilophosaurus.
• At the end of Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, when Sly defeats the Big Bad, Clockwerk, his Last Words to Sly,"Cooper! You will never be rid of me! Clockwerk is... Superior!!!", are mainly just that, until the sequel. Clockwerk, (or rather, his lifeless body frame piloted by a hate-filled Neyla) ends up collapsing on Bentley and as a result, paralyzes him. In the end, his final words become true as now Sly has to be reminded of him every time he looks at his friend who's now confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Mephiles tells Silver that Sonic is the Iblis trigger, and therefore the cause of Silver's current Bad Future. After being warped back in time by Mephiles, Silver tries to kill Sonic to prevent his Bad Future from ever occurring. However, it is Sonic's death that is the event that causes Iblis' awakening in the first place.
• Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy has Sphinx be given a magic Gem of Invisibility. He's then immediately warned by his mentor that the gem is a trap. It will technically turn him invisible...and then kill him right afterward. Fortunately, the Mummy is already dead and can get around this little problem.
• In Sonic Chronicles, the role of Emerl the Gizoid in the destruction of the Nocturnus Clan (as the person who was previously accepted to have caused the event in question) is called into question with the revelation that the Nocturnus Clan was pulled into the Twilight Cage. Nestor the Wise theorizes in-game that it was with the creation of Gizoids as powerful as Emerl that the Nocturnus Clan became sufficiently dangerous to justify what was done to them - so Emerl inadvertently caused the Clan's destruction, rather than the conventional meaning.
• In RuneScape quest "Death to the Dorgeshuun", Zanik initially earns the sympathy of the Human Against Monsters group by telling them that the city she's from is full of goblins. Zanik is a cave goblin in disguise, and the city she's referring to is Dorgesh-Kaan.
  • The quest "Temple at Senntisten" begins with Azzanadra trying to gain permission from the Digsite administrators to restore a long-abandoned temple of Zaros. You have to convince the administrators that Azzanadra's human disguise is a respectable archaeologist and worth entrusting with the project, by recommending his expertise in ancient magicks and pyramid interiors, and omitting the part where he's actually a Mahjarrat who was sealed in said pyramid untold centuries ago for practicing said ancient magicks.
• The Check text for the final boss of the Genocide run in Undertale, Sans, describes him as "the easiest enemy" who can only deal 1 point of damage and has 1 HP. While this is literally true, it greatly understates the problems his boss fight entails. For the former, Sans' attacks hit every frame, thereby bypassing Mercy Invincibility, meaning that he hits for 1 damage thirty times per second and also applies a stacking Damage Over Time effect with every hit. For the latter, Sans is the only foe in the game who dodges your attacks. All things combined, he is the single hardest boss in the game by a wide margin. The statements that he can't dodge forever, and to keep attacking are both true, but quite misleading.
• Nintendo did this with their trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which showed Zelda crying into Link's arms in the middle of a rainstorm. Many fans believed that they were going to witness why Zelda was crying over how everything she did was a failure and some fans hoped Link would do something to comfort her. In actuality, it's a flashback showing Link and Zelda fleeing from the Guardians corrupted by Calamity Ganon, followed by Zelda breaking down over how she couldn't awaken her powers in time to save the champions, her father, and the entire Hyrule kingdom. By the time Link holds Zelda in his arms, the flashback ends and the player doesn't get to see what happens after. While Nintendo wasn't exactly lying in the trailer, the scene was just presented out of context for the sake of hype.
• In Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Master Xehanort warns Terra that his mentor Master Eraqus plans to kill his friend Ventus, sending Terra off on a rescue mission. And it's true, Master Eraqus was about to murder the young man before Terra intervened. What Xehanort left out was the motive. Master Xehanort planned to use Ventus in a ritual of sorts to obtain the X-Blade and Kingdom Hearts. Master Eraqus, grief-stricken, felt he had to kill Ven to thwart Xehanort's plans. Terra's battle with Eraqus due to their mutual refusal to explain themselves in the heat of the moment weakened the master enough for Xehanort to finish him off.
• Golden Sun have you go on a quest to save the world by preventing the seal on alchemy from being broken, less the world be destroyed by its sheer power. When a priest asks you if you will accept the responsibility of saving the world, choosing no has the game state that the world slowly drifted towards its fated destruction. The sequel reveals that not saving the world would destroy it, but it would be from the world crumbling into nothingness because alchemy was sealed. In other words, alchemy is the world's life force and without it, the world starts to wither and break apart piece by piece. You're also told that releasing alchemy could destroy the world as well, which leaves the party with a big catch-22; do nothing and let the world wither away or release alchemy and risk destroying the world anyway. Thankfully, the sequel after shows that everything worked out once alchemy came back, though The Lost Age's ending shows it required divine intervention.
  • Near the end of the first game, Saturos offers to exchange captive Sheba's safety for Ivan's Shaman Rod. When your party gives up the Rod, Saturos turns around and orders Felix to bodyguard Sheba with his life— he never said anything about setting her free, just that he would ensure her safety. ^note since Sheba starts the next game enthusiastic about continuing Saturos's mission, it's also possible that if she'd been set free she would have joined him willingly
• For the teaser of patch 4.3 in Final Fantasy XIV, the developers were insistent that they would not show the patch's new trial because it contains massive spoilers. The trailer shows the player character fighting a pair of elderly civilians, a familiar antagonistic person, and then it's followed by a supporting character appearing to fend off a major villain. All the above is a part of the new trial, but the spoiler itself is still hidden since the trailer never shows who you would be actually fighting. The trial is against Yotsuyu who has transformed into a primal. The second phase of the fight has her memories of people that antagonized her materializing and attacking her, which is what the trailer showed while keeping her off-screen.
• Most of the villains in the Shin Megami Tensei series aren't wrong in what they say at all. They just derail their morals into insane, radical variants that would inevitably bring forth suffering to others.
• In Persona 5, The Corrupt Politician Big Bad Masayoshi Shido claims that he's not that different from the Phantom Thieves that they wanted to reform society and asks him to join them. While it's obviously a ruse, he's actually trying to reform society by getting himself elected... but if he gets elected, he will turn Japan into a dictatorship and there will be hell to pay for it alongside the world.
• Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth uses this as its entire premise.
  • All of the movies in the game are not inherently wrong in their settings; they follow the tropes of their genres strictly. It's just that they are derailed and twisted into perverse versions of what they actually are.
    • Kamoshidaman is a superhero movie about a superhero punishing evil in the city and fighting villains...except that the "superhero" decides who is evil and who isn't, and anyone who opposes or disagrees with him are the evil villains threatening his city. To make things worse, he bullies his citizens into absolute submission by silencing all critique.
    • Junessic Land features a group of herbivorous dinosaurs trying to gather The Power of Friendship in order to fight against the stronger carnivores... except The Power of Friendship, in this case, is actually being used against any herbivores who disagree with their plan.
    • A.I.G.I.S features a robot resisting against an A.I. god... who is the "Hero" of the movie, and the robot is the "Villain." This is always the other way around in these movies.
    • The fourth movie mixes elements of a biopic and a musical, and it surely appears as cheery as a standard musical. It's just that all of its lyrics are about a Loss of Identity and it depicts a biopic of someone getting their life ruined instead of a success story.
  • Then there's the Big Bad Nagi/Enlil. Much like Zen in the prequel, she genuinely wishes for the happiness of the people that she protects from pain and suffering; she just does it by having them watch movies of pure negativity with absolutely no encouraging morals and positivity, with all of the people they depict being portrayed as failures in an unsympathetic fashion.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses has plenty of exposition that is technically true, but framed very differently, in large part because which house's story route you're on can drastically change what information is available to the characters.
  • In most routes, Seteth will claim Edelgard took the Imperial throne in a bloodless coup. This isn't wrong, but playing that character's route will reveal Edelgard politely asked her terminally ill father to hand over power, which he did willingly; Edelgard then promptly arrested any dissidents because she's acutely aware how little she could trust her own court, hence the "coup" rumor.
  • This crops up with respect to historical events as well, largely because Seiros has been massaging the truth of the War Of Heroes and Crests to protect the last few Children of the Goddess. To make matters worse, the only other source of information on events back then, those who slither in the dark, do the same, but they're intentionally deceptive. For example, on the secret route, the Flame Emperor tells the player that the Heroes' Relics are not gifts from the Goddess and were made by human hands. This is true, but it leaves out one very big detail that is only revealed on the Golden Deer route: the Relics were made from the bones of the Children of the Goddess, who were massacred entirely for this purpose, and the humans who created them were backed by those who slither in the dark.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel I, when Machias asks as to whether Rean, Gaius, or Elliot were nobles whatsoever, the latter two denied it fully but Rean's response is that "he doesn't have any noble blood on him" which Machias does buy (since Machias was introduced in the story as hating all nobles) but Elliot notices the dodge. Rean does feel bad about it later and does come clean (he's adopted by nobles but as far as Rean knows at the time, he was a commoner) but to Machias, he felt that he was lied to. Notably, under the rules of Erebeonia's class system, an adoptive noble has all the rights and privileges of somebody born into the nobility, so Rean is for all intents and purposes a noble.
• Dark Souls pulls this with Kingseeker Frampt and Darkstalker Kaathe. Frampt says your destiny is to succeed Gwyn while Kaathe says it's to replace him. While either option at the end is technically true, succeeding Gwyn requires burning yourself alive as fuel for the Kiln of the First Flame and replacing him means taking up the mantle of the Dark Lord for the Age of Dark, despite the fact that Kaathe's guidance is what led to the destruction of New Londo (and, implicitly, Oolacile) to begin with. As a result, you can't honestly trust what either of the serpents is telling you to be true, yet you have to make a choice between which version of your "destiny" you're willing to believe in.
• Fallen London may require your character to partake in this, with enough frequency that it even has its own stat, which handily provides a name for the capacity to "mislead the listener without a single false word": Mithridacy. The skill also covers spotting these misdirections when they're thrown at you.
  Descriptor for high Mithridacy: You are an artist of implication, allowing people to think what you are not able to say.
• Pokémon Sword and Shield: In the Isle of Armor expansion, you have to earn the "secret armor of the Master Dojo," which turns out to be the legendary Pokémon Kubfu. Not a suit of armor in any sense, but it's meant to stand by you and protect you like a suit of armor.
• In Final Fantasy VII Remake, as the party is touring Shin-Ra Headquarters, they come across holographic presentations from the Shin-Ra executives. One of them belongs to Professor Hojo, who very bluntly tells the tourists that his research is beyond their comprehension. Given that his research involves creating bioweapons using the DNA of an Eldritch Abomination, he’s not completely wrong.
• Return Of The Obra Dinn: You can get the hidden achievement "Captain Did It" by blaming Captain Witterel for all the deaths aboard the Obra Dinn. This is, according to the achievement description, "Loosely true, in the eyes of Company and Crown". As the captain of the ship, the safety of his crew and passengers was legally his responsibility, so in the eyes of the Crown their deaths are on his hands.
• In Horizon Zero Dawn, the Nora tribe believe that their goddess, the All-Mother, had created humanity, and saved them from the metal devils. They’re right in a sense. It's revealed that humanity was wiped out by the metal devils, when the robots went out of control in an event called the Faro Plague, and Gaia was created to create a virus that would shut down them down, and would rebuild the destroyed world with machines, and repopulate it with cloned humans. One of the cloning facilities, in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, was eventually named the All-Mother by the Nora.
• In Hades, Theseus refers to Zagreus as a demon spawned from the lowest depths of hell, which Zagreus comments is not untrue. Zagreus is the son of Hades and was born in the House of Hades, located in Tartarus.
• In the leadup to Batman: Arkham Knight, Rocksteady claimed the titular Knight was designed "from the ground up" as a brand new villain who Batman has never fought before, which is true, because the Knight usually goes by Red Hood.

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