Outside Context Problem / Video Games

Outside Context Problems in Video Games.

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• In the backstory of 1917 - The Alien Invasion DX, it's the middle of World War I as Europe is busy fighting among each other when an Alien Invasion unexpectedly occurs, and the invaders effortlessly overwhelms humanity. It's up to the hero, a German scientist-turned-pilot developing a prototype Cool Plane, to take on the aliens.
• The Z.O.E. from Ace Combat 2 and its Updated Re-release Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy is an enemy that shows up every now and then just to fight the player — it's so aggressive (being the only enemy in the entire game to chase down the player from the start of a mission) that many players are even unaware the game has a different ending for not shooting it down at every opportunity. Assault Horizon Legacy gives more context and dialogue to the story, which leads the rebel Cocoon Squadron to wonder if it'd be possible to recruit such a formidable ally, and your own Commander Olsen wondering out loud just what the heck this thing is. He states that there's no way the rebels would've developed such advanced technology during the final encounter, and there are ultimately no answers. "Z.O.E" is only revealed to stand for "Zone Of Endless" for the player's sake. Even knowledge of outside material doesn't reveal much more, other than that the plane it's using for the final encounter is Belkan technology; what it's doing halfway across the world goes unexplained, not even the typical "Belkan infiltrators are fanning the flames of war" every game in the series since 5 has boiled down to.
• Almost all races in Age of Wonders: Planetfall were a former part of the Star Union prior to its collapse. Even the insectoid Kir'ko were a part of it (an enslaved part, but still) and the newly-arrived Psi-Fish are passive and low in number. So the arrival of the Shakarn, a race of genuinely alien Lizard Folk who favour the Reptilian Conspiracy, catches everyone completely off-guard.
• Chakravartin in Asura's Wrath is a classic example. Absolutely no-one in the story had any inkling what his plans were, or that he even existed, until he straight-up manifested in the world and told the main characters. As the Supreme Being, his powers are infinitely greater than anybody else's, but Asura beats him anyway.
• You start Baldur's Gate II captured by a mysterious wizard whose motives and identity are unknown. The intro sequence only shows that somehow he was already aiming at you since time, waiting for the right time to strike.
• The Joker comes across as this in Batman: Arkham Origins. He arrives in town with no explanation, no origin, no identity, no real motives, just wanton and senseless destruction. Batman himself is completely taken aback by the sheer brutality and sadism in the crime scene where he first sees his name and later mentions that while he's put away psychopaths before, The Joker is something completely different.
  • To an extent, Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight's militia in Batman: Arkham Knight. The police are completely unprepared for an actual army bristling with high-tech equipment to march right in and seize control of Gotham, and even Batman's Crazy Preparedness is put to the test, especially when the Arkham Knight seems to know everything about Batman's tactics because he's actually Jason Todd, who Batman thought was long dead.
• The BlazBlue series has Yuuki Terumi, Relius Clover, and Izanami playing a game of destiny against Rachel Alucard, Kokonoe and the Origin/Amaterasu, and yet even with chessmaster-on-chessmaster action in full play, a few of these are introduced in the story, each further out of context than the last.
  • Makoto Nanaya downplays this trope in a manner of speaking, as she makes sense in context for the most part: she's someone who has legitimate connections with the known cast and well-established relationships along those lines. However, in the Slight Hope story of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, this instance of Makoto is out of context with this particular timeline, having been displaced from her own thanks to the Cauldron in Ibukido. Terumi's plans fell apart thanks to Makoto throwing his game off with knowledge her native self had no business knowing, and she comes closer than Rachel herself to destroying his plans in the continuum shift, only failing due to bad luck; even then, she blows holes in his long game that never got patched over.
  • Celica Ayatsuki Mercury takes over in BlazBlue: Chronophantasma. While the Celica of the present day was murdered by Terumi, this one was evoked by Kokonoe for her rather distinct qualities: as a chronophantasma, she is technically not supposed to exist, meaning temporal Observers cannot track her movements, and anyone in proximity to her is equally obscured; while her healing magic and seithr-negation abilities can treat corruption in individuals and shut down Azure Grimoires in range of her. These last quantities made her ideal as the warhead for Kushinada's Lynchpin, which was the big reason Kokonoe evoked her in the first place. Not only did she blind Takamagahara and Izanami to various developments, but said obfuscations were used to further the damage to the villains' game of destiny, which led to Terumi's death; he had to self-observe to stave off his finality. Izanami was a villainous instance, as the heroes lacked knowledge to the nature of her existence before she revealed herself, let alone the full extent of the abilities at her command. The apocalypse the heroes sought to avert had gone in full swing despite their efforts due to her own hand in affairs.
  • BlazBlue: Central Fiction gives us Naoto Kurogane and Susano'o. The latter, like Makoto, makes some sense in context, but his true nature had been obscured and thus only makes sense in hindsight: the Susano'o unit which Hakumen inhabits had fragments of Terumi inside of it, due to the sloppy nature that Terumi extracted himself from within, and he becomes the single most dangerous threat when he takes it back because it was his original shell in the first place. As for Naoto, he was cast into the plot, and the dimensional pocket known as the Embryo in which the final events of the story take place, from a potential timeline by the third party known as Raquel Alucard. Only Relius knew he existed at all, and absolutely nobody knew anything about his motives or prowess, let alone anything of value except the fact that Naoto's presence interferes with Ragna's. Naoto's biggest benefactor in this world, strangely enough, is the aforementioned Makoto, who staged a last stand so he could escape to Ragna and the others, and he in turn staged a last stand so Ragna could rein himself in when his Azure Grimoire went berserk. While Terumi's plans almost succeeded as they were, the ultimate cause of his downfall was due to events so far beyond his control that he didn't even know they were happening in the first place, and at least one element of which was directly due to his own lack of due diligence loosening the guillotine enough for Ragna to drop on his neck.
• Chrono Trigger:
  • Lavos is an extraterrestrial planetary parasite and the overarching threat of the story. Its existence is known to various people at various times — in prehistory it ended the war between cavemen and the Reptites by making planetfall and triggering an ice age, and in antiquity the Kingdom of Zeal tried to use it as an energy source, which wasn't that smart a move — but nobody knew its purpose until 1999, when it woke up.
  • The heroes use this to great effect when they jump around to other time periods. Robo is an android from the distant future, so naturally people in the Middle Ages aren't sure what to make of him. Crono, Marle and Lucca all learn magic over the course of their adventure, which catches both the Reptites of the prehistoric era and the Fiends of the Middle Ages by surprise, since in those time periods humans haven't learned magic yet or have forgotten it, respectively. The party's only big defeat comes when they visit the ancient Kingdom of Zeal, where they aren't out of context — Zeal is a nation of human mages with access to advanced technology that rivals the stuff from Robo's time, and the Prophet arrives beforehand to warn the natives about the meddlesome heroes.
• Creepy Castle:
  • The original scenario has you dealing with Darking. The next problem you have to deal with a few moments afterward is a mysterious powerful entity that suddenly awakened without any warning, possessed Darking and intend to destroy the world. There are actually a few sources that tell of said thing but they are rare due to said entity having ended entire civilizations several times in the past.
• An old security alert you can find in Destiny calls the Darkness an Outside Context Problem by name. Fitting with the Iain Banks quote above, its arrival heralded the near-destruction of human civilization^note total destruction only being averted by the intervention of our resident Outside Context Altruist. High technology means nothing to a malevolent Sentient Cosmic Force.
• Digimon Survive starts off as a darker take on Digimon Adventure until the Cosmic Horror Reveal halfway through the story. In the last chapters of the game the group stops fighting Digimon almost entirely and instead have to face off against the Eldritch Abomination's shadowy minions called the Kenzoku.
• Dragon Age:
  • In Dragon Age: Origins the Darkspawn are this to everyone except the Grey Wardens and the Dwarves. Since it's been hundreds of years since the last Blight, the people of the surface believed that the Darkspawn had been eradicated. When the Fifth Blight strikes, the people of Ferelden are left scrambling to prepare their defenses and it doesn't help that Ferelden has so few Grey Wardens to help. Things get worse after the Battle of Ostagar — everyone is too preoccupied with serious internal problems including a civil war and underestimate the true threat level of the Blight. Nobody in Ferelden is really prepared to fight monsters that a) vastly outnumber them b) carry a lethal and corrupting magical plague and c) are controlled by an insane dragon god that is unkillable unless a Grey Warden strikes the final blow.
  • In Dragon Age II, Cassandra and the Seekers are desperately trying to figure out who out of all the key players in Kirkwall, was the Big Bad responsible for the outbreak of the Mage/Templar War. Varric tells her that none of them are responsible, but the Red Lyrium Idol recovered from the Primeval Thaig certainly was a key factor in what happened.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition brings us the Breach: essentially a giant hole in the sky connected to the Fade that constantly spews out demons and other nasty horrors, and is essentially ripping the world apart at the seams when it is first encountered.
• The Drakengard franchise:
  • Drakengard has the Grotesqueries. The only foreshadowing they get is a hint about the "Watchers" that Manah serves, but they don't show up until the player unlocks Ending D, which reveals them to be huge, man-eating babies with adult teeth and lightning wings, accompanied by a colossal, extremely pregnant Queen whose mere presence causes time and space to come apart. Needless to say, the cast is completely blindsided and has no idea how to deal with them.
    • Ending E drops Caim, Angelus, and the Grotesquerie Queen into modern-day Tokyo, where they abandon the hack-and-slash and dragonback combat used for the rest of the game to engage in a fiendishly difficult rhythm battle, which Caim and Angelus come out on top of mere seconds before the JASDF blows them out of the sky. Which kicks off the NieR series by introducing White Chlorination Syndrome to that world from humans coming in contact with the remains.
  • NieR is a post-apocalyptic fantasy game with a mix of magic and robots, so about the last thing anyone expected to happen in its supplementary material was an alien invasion.
  • NieR: Automata concerns the struggle between an army of alien-built Machines warring against hyper-advanced Androids serving the remnants of mankind. And then there's Emil, a former party member from the previous game who is the only explicitly magical being left on the planet. He was definitely an Outside Context Problem to the aforementioned alien invaders, however, and is the same to the player when fought as an Optional Boss.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • In the series' backstory during the 2nd Era, the Kamal (an Akaviri race of "Snow Demons") showed up one day out of the blue along the coast of Skyrim and immediately laid siege to the Nord city of Windhelm. Normally, the Kamal are part of an Akaviri Vicious Cycle where they freeze every winter and thaw out in the spring to attack the Tang Mo "Monkey Folk". For unknown reasons, they broke this cycle to invade Tamriel instead. According to captives taken, they were searching for someone or something called the "Ordained Receptacle." It took an alliance of ancient enemies — the Nords, the Dunmer (Dark Elves), and the Argonians — to finally defeat the Kamal invaders.
  • In Skyrim, nearly everyone is blindsided by the return of the dragons. Supposedly rendered extinct following a concerted hunting effort thousands of years ago, they are now suddenly returning in vast numbers. Naturally, all of the parties involved in the Skyrim Civil War blame one another for the sudden reappearance of the dragons. The only group to have any idea where they came from are the Greybeards, and that's only because their mentor is a dragon.
  • The dragons see one in the form of the Dragonborn, a being who can end their eternal existence by devouring their souls. For a dragon, physical death is only a brief respite until another remakes their flesh, but there's no return from soul-death. And Dragonrend is in some ways even worse; it causes them to experience a finite existence, something that is so unnatural and unimaginable to them as to border on perverse.
• The monsters in Evolve appear across dozens of worlds without any sign of how they got there, murder and demolish their way through every human settlement they can find, and then terraform the planet into a Death World. Attempts to study and understand them just seem to raise more questions, like why their genetic structure seems artificial, how they interact with and manipulate reality warping forces, and why their "eggs" don't contain fetal monsters when broken open and give off signals similar to those produced by FTL engines. Eventually, it's discovered that they're extradimensional beings whose dimension also connects to the one the humans use for FTL. Using that dimension as a stepping stone, they pass through and form physical bodies out of materials they know how to replicate and produce. As to why they're exterminating humans, the futuristic power sources the humans use for FTL, energy shields, weather control, and other such technologies have the side effect of manifesting in a constant storm of destruction in the monster's world, something they'd very much like to stop.
• Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water has this as part of the Tall Woman's Nothing Is Scarier package: Unlike all other ghosts in the game, you cannot interact with her to find out stuff like her name, how she died, why she is so inhumanly tall, why she seems absolutely delighted getting to hunt you down, or anything else. She has a couple of spoken lines, but they just serve to establish that this trope is at play: Unlike all other ghosts in the game, who were dragged into the Big Bad's grudge or are just reacting to your presence, the Tall Woman is a malevolent entity in her own right, and she's actively hunting you down.
• The Lostbelts in Fate/Grand Order are alternate histories that diverged too far from the main timeline to continue, and are thus filled with outside context problems by their very nature. It works both ways, however, as even simple devices such as portable long-distance communication can be non-existent in an otherwise technologically advanced Lostbelt.
• Fate/Samurai Remnant: The game is set in 1651 Japan during its isolationist period, so most of the characters have never even heard of concepts like Christanity or the mythologies of other countries and have no context for Servants from outside of Japan like Jeanne d'Arc, Arjuna, Cu Chulainn, Circe, Samson, and Gilgamesh. If the heroes did not have the Westerner Dorothea Coyett on their side, who knew of Samson's story and his weakness of getting his hair cut, they would have never defeated him. Li Shuwen is this for everybody since he's from the future, so no one knows who he is or how he fights.
• Final Fantasy games are fond of this, with the villain often being something utterly alien to the protagonists:
  • The Cloud of Darkness from Final Fantasy III is familiar to the World of Darkness, but wholly unknown to the World of Light.
  • The Lunarians (specifically, Zemus, Golbez, and the Lunarian Lost Technology) in Final Fantasy IV, which include the hero, on his father's side anyway. He was raised as a human, so he's just as baffled by the powers of his father's people and the artifacts they left behind. There's supposedly mostly good Lunarians, but we only see one and a Face–Heel Turn.
  • Exdeath of Final Fantasy V is known to the inhabitants of the world he comes from, but utterly unknown in the other. Fortunately, people from his world follow to help the defenseless natives of the protagonists' world fight him.
  • Jenova in Final Fantasy VII, an invading planet- and life-eating parasite from space. The main villain Sephiroth also gets some of this quality partly from Jenova. While both Shinra and members of Avalanche (the eco-terrorist group opposing Shinra) knew him from before, they didn't really know him — especially what his connection to Jenova meant since they didn't know what it was. As he makes his return, he derails the plot from the fight between Avalanche and Shinra into both trying to stop him without really knowing what he even wants.
  • Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Gilgamesh and his lost Genji Armor, aka the Protorelics, are from another dimension. The Protorelics have strange effects on the environment and creatures, and Chadley says they and Gilgamesh are hard to analyze since they are made of substances not found in this dimension. Even Sephiroth gets confused when he meets Gilgamesh and pulls a Screw This, I'm Outta Here rather than deal with him.
  • The Terrans of Final Fantasy IX, which, like IV, include the hero, who, like IV, has gone native. Unlike IV, all the other aliens are of the "invade and help their planet devour the souls of those that live on ours" variety.
    • And Necron, the enigmatic Giant Space Flea from Nowhere True Final Boss of the game. Wild Mass Guessing abound about just what the hell he's supposed to be.
  • Ifrit's sudden appearance in Final Fantasy XVI throws all known logic of a single Eikon representing one of the eight elements out the window. The Phoenix is supposed to be the Eikon of fire.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • Stormblood has many of the bosses that appear as part of the Omega raids: several of them, such as Exdeath and Kefka, are stated to be characters from tales told by other civilizations made manifest by Omega's reality bending abilities. Omega, itself, is also revealed to not be an Allagan creation as was originally suspected, but rather, a machine that was not native to Hydaelyn at all.
    • Shadowbringers has the machine lifeforms from NieR: Automata, as well as the androids 2P 9S, and 2B, appear in the world of The First as part of the YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse raid questline. Technology in The First, as well as in Hydaelyn, are nowhere near the level of sophistication needed to create machines that appear as human and lifelike as 2P, and the idea that machines can even be considered a form of life is completely alien to them. And then it turns out that these events are being caused by a Seed of Destruction from Drakenguard, which is an Outside-Context Problem even for allied the NieR characters.
    • A crossover event with Final Fantasy XV introduces this on both sides. Starting in XV, Noctis and the gang encounter a miqo'te woman who can use arcanima, a form of magic completely alien to the world of Eos. The Ixali beatmen that wound up on Eos along with the miqo'te also use a form of summoning completely unlike what Noctis can do, using energy from meteorshards in lieu of aetheryte to summon Garuda, a simulacrum of their patron goddess. In XIV, the MT armors that wind up on Hydaelyn are of a level of technological sophistication that dwarfs Garlean magitek, as well as with Noctic's Cool Car. The Ixali's attempt to summon Garuda also goes awry as, due to Noctis's presence on Hydaelyn, they inadvertedly summon an actual divine being in the "Messenger" allied with Noctis that took Garuda's name for her own.
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles builds up an entire plot about memories, with side characters such as Leon Esla and the Black Knight providing a glimpse into the true conflict of the plot. Then you get to the final level and fight... an alien parasite worm from outer space equipped with laser turrets, and who's been the source of the miasma for eras ever since he crashed. After the lengthy bossfight you fight the more expected villain the game was building up as the final boss, but that doesn't make it any less jarring.
  • Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin has this happen twice over in its DLC continuations. The first time is when Jack and his party run into the series's resident dimension-hopping rapscalian Gilgamesh, while the second has the game's Greater-Scope Villain call in an unexpected enemy for Jack to square off against: the Emperor from Final Fantasy II.
• The Shivans from Freespace. In the middle of a galactic war between humans and an alien race called the Vasudans, suddenly a second, obscenely powerful and advanced alien race arrives and effortlessly crushes everything in sight, forcing a truce between humans and Vasudans just to protect themselves. Their shields even render them completely impervious to all weapons until R&D introduces some shield-busting weaponry.
• In God of War (PS4), Kratos ends up being one due to being a Greek god in the Norse-Pantheon controlled Scandinavia. While the fact that he fathers Loki and the giants refer to him as Fárbauti suggests the universe tried to balance him into the role, this doesn't stop him from doing things that shouldn't be possible and actually defying several prophecies. In Norse mythos You Can't Fight Fate is a recurring theme and proven to be an unbreakable truth, but somehow Kratos manages to kill Thor's son Magni and later on Atreus kills his other son Modi — two gods who were supposed to survive Ragnarok and at the end of the game his killing of Baldur and starting Ragnarok 100 years before it was prophecized suggests he's completely thrown off the script. God of War Ragnarök justifies this by revealing that fate doesn't actually exist. Prophecies are just predictions of the future based on the foreseeable consequences of the Norse pantheon's actions which, obviously, Kratos couldn't have been factored into.
• As seen on the page image for Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, the Big Bad of Growl, a game revolving around rescuing African animals from poachers, turns out to be aliens.
• GTA Online: The Doomsday Heist presents one in the form of Cliffford and Avon Hertz. While most villains in the franchise are relatively grounded in their goals — whether it be controlling local territory, gaining lots of money or reputation, or rigging the economy or politics — these two take it a giant step further with their plans for creating a worldwide dystopia where they will murder billions of people by triggering a thermonuclear war and rule over the remains and the clone society they will create. Grand Theft Auto has taken many turns throughout the years, but never before has it produced such a pair of highly ambitious and blatantly sci-fi villains.
• Guild Wars has a few examples:
  • First, in Nightfall, was the return of Abaddon, the fallen sixth god, and his Margonite followers. The other gods had gone to great lengths to render him an Un-Deity, so much of the players' knowledge of Abaddon is learned while on the run from his various armies.
  • Second, in Eye of the North, was the appearance of the Destroyers. While foreshadowed in an obscure Dwarven prophecy, nobody really knew about them until they were already halfway through slaughtering the Asurans. Even by the end of the campaign and their destruction very little was actually known about the Destroyers beyond that they were an enemy.
  • Third, in the sequel, Guild Wars 2, is the appearance of the Elder Dragons. While they have been present since long before man or god walked the land, they were largely dormant and only hints of their power were seen.
• The Hex: Waste World is an unfinished Fallout-esque game taking place After the End in a post-apocalyptic city filled with raiders and mutated animals. Over time, numerous mods are added to the game as the segment goes on, including one that adds alien invaders into the game. Rust and Rocky do not understand what is happening because they are not aware of where the aliens came from or the fact that they are inside a video game. It all slowly devolves into Existential Horror from there.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising is largely a magical fantasy adventure loosely based on ancient Greek mythology, twinged with magitek and only minor bits of cosmic theming and for flavor. This makes it really bizarre when a third-act Arc Villain appears in the form of the Aurum: a horde of robotic alien invaders bent on destroying or assimilating all reality. Nobody on any side expected that, forcing all of them into a drastic Enemy Mine situation.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Throughout Kingdom Hearts, Sora has fought both Heartless and Disney villains who used the power of darkness, and Sora managed to defeat them. But once Sora successfully seals the Keyhole in Hollow Bastion, he suddenly receives a notification from the Princesses that a mysterious man has appeared in the Chapel where Sora defeated Maleficent's Dragon Form where according to them, this man is neither a Heartless nor a human, but "something else", and he is stated to use a power not from the darkness or light. So Sora decides to enter the portal to investigate, and suddenly a hooded man in Black Cloak shows up and makes vague proclamations how Sora looks like "him", and how he is familiar with Ansem. Sora is understandably confused about all this, the hooded man decides to test his skills, and proves to be stronger than any of Sora's adversaries up to that point, including Ansem. At the end, when it seems that the Sora has beaten the hooded man, he just shrugs it off and finds the Keyblade wielder amusing and promises Sora that they will meet again soon and he departs, but not before vaguely telling Sora that he is just a "mere shell" when Sora asks who he is. This whole incident left everyone and the audience confused with so many questions asked as to who the man in the Black Cloak is and what he wants with Sora. Apparently, according to Ansem's reports that is obtained after beating him, that when a heart leaves its body, that body itself becomes a Nobody and it is stated to be a form that doesn't actually exist. Said mysterious figure is revealed in II to be Xemnas, leader of Organization XIII.
  • On a smaller scale, Sora, or rather Sora's Keyblade, gets to be this in Kingdom Hearts II in the world based on Pirates of the Caribbean. Since it's not from that world, it's not subject to that world's rules — which means it can permanently kill the cursed pirates. This is also why magic works well on them too.
• In most Kirby games, Kirby blames his problems on Friendly Enemy King Dedede or Noble Demon Meta Knight, and fights a fairly static cast of Dreamland inhabitants that are more dangerous than evil. The Final Boss, though, is some kind of Lovecraftian Eldritch Abomination like Dark Matter or 0 ...
• The Conqueror in The Last Remnant shows up out of nowhere with an army and starts capturing Remnants until the current world order recognizes him as a ruler. As it turns out, this is a Humanity on Trial thing to see how humans are using the power of the Remnants. They fail.
• Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain: Aside from a brief bit of Foreshadowing from the Oracle of Nosgoth earlier on, the Nemesis' impending invasion of Nosgoth overtakes Kain's quest to slay the Circle of Nine. It sends him on what seems to be a wild goose chase, where he heads to the city of Willendorf in order to amass an army to defeat the Nemesis, kills an Ephebophile doll-maker in order restore the soul of the king of Willendorf's daughter, and a trip back in time to fifty years before the events of Blood Omen in order to kill the Nemesis when he was a young man. As it turns out, all of these events were orchestrated by the Oracle of Nosgoth, who is actually Moebius the Timestreamer, the Guardian of Time in the Circle of Nine, thus connecting it back to Kain's quest to kill each member of the Circle.
• This is a major plot-point, along with Rogues' Gallery Transplant, in LEGO Dimensions — thanks to Lord Vortech's attempt to conquer the multiverse and subsequent rift abuse, villains are scattered all over the place where they logically shouldn't be. For instance, Sauron lands his tower right into the middle of Metropolis. The heroes themselves — Wyldstyle, Batman, and Gandalf, along with any other figure you've got — in turn serve as this to the various villains.
• In the original Mass Effect trilogy, the Reapers intentionally invoke and weaponize this. Every time they destroy galactic civilization and wipe out the most advanced species, they go to a great deal of effort to also wipe out any trace of themselves, but leave enough behind of their victims to give the next wave of civilizations an assumption that the mass relays and Citadel were the products of the previous civilization, as well as some technology to ensure that the next wave's technology develops along the same paths. Thus when the Reapers come out of Dark Space and attack, they know they're unlikely to face any independently developed novel technology that threatens them and no one is prepared to face mind-controlling technorganic Eldritch Abominations with superior technology who can instantly seize control over galactic government and travel.
  • This is one of the reasons why the Reapers still manage to wreck much of the galaxy even without their normal advantages. The current Citadel's method of warfare depends on a degree of synergy between the three biggest members: the turians, asari, and salarians. The turians provide a conventional military force of disciplined soldiers and powerful navy and ground army, while the asari function as highly elite light infantry and commandos who conduct guerilla operations, raids, and other behind-the-lines operations, and the salarians gather massive amounts of intelligence on the enemy, disrupt their intelligence, logistics, and command structure, and conduct cyberwarfare to cripple the enemy before a war even starts. Because the Reapers came out of nowhere, and have a much more advanced computer technology and virtually no logistics or society or communications to exploit, the salarians' cyberwarfare and intelligence arms are utterly useless against them, and their overwhelming numbers and power mean that they can easily brush aside the lighter asari military forces with ease once they defeat the asari fleets. Only the turians are able to fight the Reapers head-on, and even then they need the help of the krogan to have a chance of holding the line, and even this is universally acknowledged as an unsustainable long-term solution in an unwinnable war, only being used to give the other species more time. Meanwhile, the asari are forced to fight guerrilla battles on their occupied planets and the salarians are just outright ignored in favor of bigger targets first.
  • The first game even has the asari councillor give this as the exact reason they can't and won't help Shepard: Their best agent going rogue and getting an army of killer robots on his side, they can handle. Their best agent working for an angry giant robo-cuttlefish to exterminate galactic civilization as it has done for aeons, they cannot. So their solution is to ignore the idea, and Shepard's warnings, completely.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda kicks it up a notch; while they had the foresight and the technology to map out habitable planets before departing, it turns out that in the 600 years that they took to arrive, a pheonomenon known as the Scourge appeared, and basically destabilized (or outright destroyed) the planets the Andromeda Initiative intended to inhabit. The Scourge, being a nasty mix of radiation, dark matter, and Element Zero, seemingly came out of nowhere and, on top of poisoning the very planets they intended to live on, also damaged the Initative's ships and their main hub, leaving 100,000 people marooned in an alien galaxy. On top of that, the first signs of intelligent life they encounter are the sociopathic, dogmatic Kett who seem more intent on shooting and kidnapping for unethical experiments than making peace. Compounding both of these issues is the fact that the Initiative is a mostly civilian organization rather than military, and as such their defenses are limited to small arms, some ground vehicles, and light fighters while their opponents are fielding fully-armed capital ships. Needless to say, the Initiative is way out of its league, and it's left up to the Pathfinder to keep it all from going to hell.
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is mainly about the conflict between the Luminoth and Ing for control of the planet Aether, with Samus and the Space Pirates showing up to the planet to take sides, Samus by aiding the Luminoth and the Space Pirates by falling under Ing possession to aid the Ing against their will. And then there is Dark Samus, who shows up to the planet for the sole purpose of feeding off of the Phazon there and attacking everything that gets in her way, Samus and Space Pirates alike. Despite having nothing to do with the Ing and their conquest of the planet, Dark Samus still manages to prove herself as a major hindrance to Samus, and by extension the Luminoth, by taking away all of her power-ups, fighting her directly on multiple occasions, destroying the easiest routes for Samus to take, and finally becoming the Final Boss, attacking Samus one last time after she has defeated the Emperor Ing. With her Phazon powers and stolen abilities from Samus, she manages to bring a whole new challenge to Samus beyond what the Ing can do.
• Mindustry has the Frozen Forest, where enemy waves consist only of ground units, and the map has a lot of coal, encouraging you to build anti-ground Hail turrets. However the boss of that stage is a flying unit, and will wreck your base if you neglected to build anti-air defenses. It's also one of the first stages, meaning that you likely haven't yet survived long enough to know that a boss would eventually spawn.
• This isn't normally a big issue in the world of Monster Hunter, as even the strangest of beasts (from golden mantises that wield Humongous Mecha to crystalline dragons from outer space) can still be bested by hunters with enough time, effort, and preparation. Then Monster Hunter: World came along, and new issues popped up.
  • Behemoth is a monster from an entirely different universe, and this shows in how it fights. While it is classified as an Elder Dragon, it is unique in that, unlike all of the other fantastical beasts in the Monster Hunter universe, it is a truly magical creature, and makes ample usage of them in the hunt against it.
  • Taken even further with Leshen — just like Behemoth, Leshen hails from another universe, but while Behemoth is just a really tough, magically enhanced animal, Leshen is a vaguely humanoid nature spirit that can teleport and use magical abilities that not even Behemoth has access to. Fortunately, whatever sent Leshen into the Ancient Forest also sent Geralt over, so he offers to help take it down. Also, Leshen is classified as a Relict, its designation in the Witcher universe, showing that it is unlike anything ever seen in the Monster Hunter universe even in comparion to Elder Dragons (which Behemoth was at least classified as).
• In Nefarious, YOU are the outside context problem. In a world of superheroes that are each paired with their designated Card-Carrying Villain, Crow breaking away from his designated opponent Mack (due to Mack getting bored with fighting him all the time and letting him win) results in him moving on to the other kingdoms of the world, the heroes of which have no idea how they're supposed to fight an opponent they've never seen before. While Crow couldn't legitimately beat Mack on his own turf, Crow can come out victorious against all the various heroes whose princesses he goes after, purely due to exploiting the surprise factor of his arrival.
• Outer Wilds's backstory has the Interloper serve this role for the Nomai. They were obsessed with something they called the Eye of the Universe, a spatial anomaly that drove them to come to your home star system in the first place, and inspired them to come up with a hugely complex plan to locate the Eye's exact location. When that plan hit a dead end, the Nomai decided to distract themselves by checking out a comet entering the local star system... and the survey team found that the Interloper was full of an exotic, enormously volatile, positively lethal substance packed in a frozen core that was weakening with every second the Interloper traveled closer to the sun. The Nomai surveyors had just enough time to realize the danger they were in before the Interloper erupted, wiping out all non-aquatic life in the system in the blink of an eye.
• Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth: The Labyrinths themselves and what's behind them are completely unknown even to the Velvet Room Attendants. All they know is that the Velvet Room itself was hijacked halfway between the stories of Persona 3 and Persona 4, with their casts trapped inside with no way out but to explore an alternate Yasogami High for answers.
• In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, the Bittercold is this for the entirety of the Pokémon franchise, being the first boss besides Dark Rust in Pokémon Rumble Blast that isn't a Pokémon or a Pokémon trainer. Instead, it's a crystalline embodiment of despair and hopelessness, given form because how much negativity has been going around in the Pokémon world as of late. Simply being near it causes Pokémon to suffocate and, if left unchecked, it has the potential to destroy the entire world. It takes the intervention of a similarly-outside-context entity (a Nature Spirit in the form of a Pokémon) to destroy it, as, knowing no Pokémon can do the job, they decide to summon humans who can resist its debilitating effects.
  • Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon follows it with Dark Matter, another eldritch force that is not a Pokémon and which can turn even the legendaries into stone. It's also hinted to be the Bittercold once again, with a new slew of powers and even sentience.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon has the Ultra Beasts: strange creatures that appear to be neither human nor Pokémon, but are causing problems in Alola. It turns out that they are Pokémon that hail from Another Dimension referred to as Ultra Space, and apart from Nihilego, who may not even be sentient, they aren't out to purposely destroy anything but are more like scared animals dumped into an alien and unfamiliar environment.
  • Similarly, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet has the Paradox Pokémon, which are supposedly past/future versions of contemporary mons brought to the current day by The Professor's Time Machine. Several aspects of their existence don't add up, and it's heavily implied that they're actually tulpas brought to life by the Applied Phlebotinum used to make the machine. Like in Sun & Moon, the Player Character has to stop them from causing an Introduced Species Calamity that could destroy the region.
  • Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon has a different kind of Out-of-Context problem: Team Rainbow Rocket. Made up of the villains from the previous main series games, they hail from Alternate Universes where they succeeded in their goals. They unexpectedly take over Aether Paradise in order to take over all dimensions.
• In the Game Mod Rise of the Reds for Command & Conquer: Generals, the European Continental Army proved to be one of these for the Global Liberation Army. The GLA had previously overrun large parts of Germany and destroyed or looted large parts of central Europe with little response from the armies of the EU, leaving them to believe that the Europeans were weak and helpless and had to rely on the Americans and Chinese to protect them. A decade later, the various European countries (with Chinese help) had rebuilt and re-armed and create a new, powerful, technologically-advanced allied army. The GLA, mostly focused on internal squabbling and fighting the Chinese, were unprepared when the ECA came looking for revenge, and their advanced technology utterly ruined the GLA forces in Africa with weapons and vehicles they had never seen before.
  • The ECA tended to use these routinely on the Russians when they invaded Europe. While the Russians mostly relied on powerful but conventional weapons and firepower supplemented by Tesla weapons, the Europeans resorted to highly-advanced prototype weapons that completely blindsided the Russians, like the massive AI-driven Manticore tank with nanomachine repair tech, the Solaris fusion satellite arrays, and the Valkyrie armor system. In fact, the ECA even has a specific technology, the Venom Protocol, which causes their army to switch from conventional weapons to extremely advanced prototype weaponry.
  • The GLA proved to be one for the Russians and every other power operating in Africa, despite the fact that they knew the GLA still existed. After going underground (literally in many places) the GLA re-armed and re-equipped their army and then launched a sudden, unexpected attack on their numerous enemies with wholly new and unexpected weapons and equipment, including actual aircraft (which they couldn't field in the base game). They hit the Russians with such ferocity that they annihilated their main army in North Africa overnight.
• By Saints Row IV, the Saints have taken down plenty of street gangs (including gangs of Voodoo practitioners, Yakuza samurai bikers, cyberpunk hackers and heavily armed masked wrestlers) a MegaCorp, an extremely hi-tech private army, terrorists and zombies, and have used that sheer force of will to propel themselves to the White House, making it clear that no force on Earth can best them. Then aliens invade, abduct humanity's best and brightest and destroy Earth and the Saints are taken completely by surprise.
  • Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell goes one step further when the Boss is abducted by Satan, forcing Gat and Kinzie to chase after him into Hell, where they're both cut off from the rest of the Saints. The only reason this isn't more of a shock is because it came out right after IV.
  • Before that, in Saints Row 2, the majority of the game is spent fighting other street gangs, who while more powerful than the Saints initially, aren't all that different outside of what vehicles they drive and some slight variation what weapons they use. When all three of the street gangs are eliminated, the Boss is out celebrating their victory, when out of nowhere heavily armed commandos with armored personnel carriers storm the building and simultaneously attack the Saint's headquarters. These guys belong to ULTOR, the aforementioned MegaCorp. And while we the players have been privy to their attempts to manipulate things behind the scenes, to the Saints, the corporation's sudden attack comes as a completely unexpected surprise.
  • Saints Row: The Third had been spending most of its storyline pitting the Saints against the Syndicate, a multi-faction criminal organization in control of Steelport. They are too occupied with battling each other to notice Senator Monica Hughes, nursing a grudge against the Saints, authorizing the STAG Initiative, a highly-armed military force equipped with futuristic weaponry and vehicles... until a meeting of the Boss and Oleg with Viola DeWynter (who was preparing to do a Heel–Face Turn to get revenge on Killbane for killing her sister Kiki) gets disrupted by STAG's arrival, and all of the Saints are completely blindsided. For that point on, the Saints must battle both the Syndicate and STAG.
• In Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse the main character is this to the events of Shin Megami Tensei IV. The inciting incident of the game is the main character dying and being given the chance to come back to life as a servant of the Celtic God Dagda. In accepting his offer, you completely change the destiny of the world. If the main character had chosen to stay dead, the events of IV would play out as normal.
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has a downplayed example. Wolf, the protagonist, is a shinobi, and is trained and armed to fight lightly armored human soldiers of the sort you'd see in Sengoku-era Japan, as well as monsters and apparitions. However, when faced with the Armored Warrior miniboss, a European explorer in full plate mail, his small katana and shinobi tools are completely incapable of penetrating the armor, forcing Wolf to improvise.
  • Your first encounter with a Headless will likely be this. You stumble across a place where there's a warning that whatever is ahead cannot be killed. You venture into a subterranean graveyard and spot something strange ahead. You approach and a dark and haunting score begins to play as a headless... thing approached, using strange and difficult to dodge, block, or parry attacks, teleports at will, and will cause a status effect you've never encountered and have to treatment for which is instantly fatal. In fact, without Divine Confetti, which you will only have a tiny amount of at this point, you cannot even hurt this creature. Until now, your only supernatural encounters are your character's ability to resurrect and an immortal trainer, so you genuinely have not encountered something this unearthly, dangerous, and hostile. This will likely be your first truly supernatural encounter in the game, and it is made devastatingly clear that you are completely unprepared for it. All you can do is run, and even that is supremely difficult to accomplish, given that this thing can teleport, and has a nearly impossible to avoid ranged attack, plus a grab that involves ripping your soul out through your ass.
  • The Interior Ministry runs into one of these after they begin their invasion. Their arms and other equipment are designed for dealing with human threats. Nothing in their training is even close to dealing with a gigantic, fire-throwing monstrosity. When you encounter the Demon of Hatred, it is utterly surrounded by dead Interior Ministry soldiers.
• The 3D Sonic the Hedgehog games generally use this as their source of villainy, as usual Big Bad Dr. Eggman's role is often demoted in these titles, either trying to benefit from the fact the villain is outside the typical context of the series or only rising to the level of being an instigator of the events and then losing his grip on them after some of the plot has passed. Examples include Chaos (a water monster from ancient times Eggman has been trying to harness but only ends up aiding its vengeful rampage),Biolizard (a last-ditch experiment by a mad scientist aboard a space colony as his final parting gift for a world he believes betrayed him), Metal Sonic (the selfsame Robot Me of Sonic, now rebelling against Eggman in an effort to assert its own dominance), the Black Arms (an army of alien invaders whom Eggman opposes because he can't conquer the world if they destroy it), Solaris (a time-bending Eldritch Abomination), Dark Gaia (an ancient monster resting within the Earth), the Time Eater (a time-eating Eldritch Abomination) that as it turns out, was roboticized by the present and past versions of Dr. Eggman, the Deadly Six (a group of wicked Zeti that Eggman lost control over when Sonic pulled a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero), and The End (An Eldritch Abomination that destroys civilizations for fun and was sealed away in Cyberspace until Eggman woke it up and Sonic accidentally busted it loose.
• Spyro the Dragon:
  • In Spyro Orange and Crash Purple, the protagonists suddenly find themselves the victims of a villain switcheroo, and have to take on each other's archnemeses.
  • Spyro: Shadow Legacy: The Shadow Minions. Even Spyro can't damage these things until he starts learning Dragon Kata.
  • The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning: The dragons were winning in their long battle with the apes, until Dark Cynder showed up and singlehandedly turned the tide of the war. In addition to her being just that powerful, they didn't anticipate another dragon would show up to lead the apes.
• StarCraft:
  • The Zerg, who are a Horde of Alien Locusts from another part of the galaxy. The Zerg are out-of-context for the Protoss more than anything, since they were running the galaxy as part of their "Great Stewardship". They never imagined a Horde of Alien Locusts coming out of nowhere with the explicit purpose of assimilating them, and destroying their ancestral homeworld.
  • The Protoss were pretty out-of-context for the Terrans as well, the Terrans discovered they were not alone when a massive fleet showed up out of nowhere and sterilized one of their colonies.
  • The United Earth Directorate from Brood War is another example. The Zerg are at least comprehensible to the Protoss as they are also a creation of the Xel'Naga, and part of their power comes from absorbing Xel'Naga knowledge. Terrans, as far as most of the Protoss are concerned, are a bit of background noise in their fight with the Zerg. But then a fleet from Earth shows up and (for a time at least) controls the Zerg and becomes the top power.
  • The Dark Voice and his Hybrids also seems to be this in StarCraft II, especially in the Bad Future: the Zerg were the main threat that everybody recognized, and then, just as Kerrigan was killed to defeat the Zerg, the Fallen One came in, took over the Zerg, and used them to bring everlasting darkness to the Universe.
• Played with in Star Wars: The Old Republic: Sure, the Republic and Jedi have been in cyclical wars with the Sith Empire. Thing is, actual Sith haven't been seen by the Republic for centuries. They thought that the Sith had all been wiped out by a combination of infighting and war. Thing is, they had merely retreated to a part of space not on Republic maps and spent the next few years rebuilding. The Sith they had fought in the centuries since, like Exar Kun, were all fallen Jedi who had unilaterally adopted the name or were backed by ancient Sith ghosts. Revan stumbled on them, got put under a mind-whammy from the Sith Emperor, and sent out to conquer, but the events of the games wiped Revan's memory of the actual Sith, so the Republic thought Revan's followers were all there were. Of course, Revan eventually remembered, recruited the Exile, and they promptly grabbed the Idiot Ball, blundering into an incredibly obvious trap, and they made no attempt to warn the Republic. 300 years later, the Empire invades, the Republic is caught with its pants down, and we get the opening situation with the Republic on the verge of destruction.
  • The Eternal Empire of Zakuul is this even more so. Republic–Empire conflict has been going on for decades at this point, alternating between open hostilities, uneasy truce, a Space Cold War, renewed conflict, and another truce set up by a Reasonable Authority Figure on both sides. With no setup or foreshadowing, either in this game or the larger Expanded Universe, an entire new Empire emerges from Unknown Regions, secretly built by the Sith Emperor over past centuries. Their technology is superior to anything Republic and Empire have to offer, so they Curb-Stomp both sides, subjugating an entire galaxy within a year and leaving both the Empire and the Republic with no further means or resources for open hostilities.
• Stellaris:
  • The finale of any game hits you with an Endgame Crisis unlike anything you've dealt with before that point: the Praethoryn Scourge, an extragalactic invasion of world-consuming biological monsters; the Unbidden, a horde of Emotion Eater extradimensional invaders who wipe entire worlds clean of populations; or the Contingency, an AI tasked with sterilizing the entire galaxy of life.
  • You may encounter the War in Heaven, in which two rival Fallen Empires wake up and drag the entire galaxy into a massive war, or a particularly foolish empire can theoretically unleash the End of the Cycle, which will abruptly annihilate whatever empire summoned it and proceed to try to purge the galaxy with a nigh unbeatable super-fleet.
  • You can be one yourself to pre-FTL races if you set your "Native Interference" policy to Unrestricted, and can even earn the "Outside Context" achievement if you invade a pre-space flight Earth in the middle of a world war.
  • In the Nemesis DLC, you can become the biggest Outside-Context Problem in the game by becoming the eponymous Crisis for everyone else, especially after they have just fought off other galactic threats. Imagine that your species had just expended vast amounts of resources and personnel to drive off gibbering horrors from beyond the galaxy, only for one of your neighbors to suddenly start blowing up stars to feed a strange weapon that will destroy reality itself.
  • If that weren't enough, when the Machine Age DLC drops there's gonna be an additional Rogue Servitor On Steroids AI Crisis and ANOTHER path to becoming a Player Crisis that basically lets you become the robots from The Matrix , according to what we've seen from the promotional material thus far.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The Smithy Gang from Super Mario RPG, an enemy so outside normal context that it caused an Enemy Mine between Mario, Peach, and Bowser!
    • Taken to its furthest extreme with Culex, the game's Optional Boss. The joke is that Culex is a villain from Final Fantasy that somehow wound up in Mario's universe, right down to a Non-Standard Character Design that boasts sprites in the games' style, music that plays in all of his scenes being franchise standards, and fighting with four elemental crystals. When defeated he departs back to his own universe, lamenting "In another time, another game, we might have been mortal enemies." The joke is even more clear in the Japanese version where he's a two-dimensional being astounded by the 3D forms of Mario's party, challenges them to a fight because of this and after the fight, after respecting the party's strength and positive energy and disappears until one day he can gain the solidity of Mario's third dimension. The English version completely rewrites his backstory to him being a "Dark Knight of Vanda" who's been sent as a scout by the Dark Mage to conquer Mario's world...only for those plans to come to a screeching halt due to Mario's dimension not being inhabitable to Culex's kind. As such, before he departs, he wishes for the "strongest knight" to come challenge him before he leaves.
  • In Super Paper Mario, Bowser ends up working with Mario, Luigi, and Peach to take down Count Bleck. Then, after Count Bleck goes down, Dimentio shows up, banishes Count Bleck and a heavily wounded Nastasia (who took the bullet for Bleck) and fuses with a brainwashed Luigi to form Super Dimentio. Luckily, Mimi and O'Chunks's loyalty and love for the Count reignites the Pure Hearts and allows Mario and the gang to stomp Super Dimentio. After Super Dimentio is split up, Dimentio dies and tries to pull a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum which is thwarted when Bleck and Tippi get married and the duo are transported to another world, restored to Blumiere and Timpani, their original selves.
  • Bowser's Inside Story features the Dark Star, initially portrayed as a simple Artifact of Doom. No one knows what it really is or where it originally came from, but it clearly has an agenda of its own, and it easily replaces Fawful as the villain when he tries to use its power.
• In Sunrider, the people of the galaxy have enough on their plate already between pirates, slavers, the escalating war between two galactic superpowers, and occasional run-ins with ancient but still-functional (and hostile) Lost Technology left behind by the Ancient Ryuvians. Nobody is expecting a time-travelling Ryuvian fleet led by a man who wants to rebuild his people's galaxy-spanning empire in the present day to suddenly show up, which is just what happens in The Stinger for Sunrider Liberation Day.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl: Tabuu in The Subspace Emissary comes out of nowhere and effortlessly beats absolutely every character. Then Dedede's badges activate...
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: There's Galeem (and later, Dharkon) from World of Light. Shows up from out of nowhere with an army of Master Hands, and proceeds to obliterate everyone and everything in sight, sans Kirby who manages to escape on his Warp Star. The rest of the mode consists of Kirby rescuing and rounding up the other fighters to take the fight to it.
• In Tadpole Treble, by the time Baton makes her way back to her home Tadpole Pond, she finds it to be polluted with oil. She learns from Coda (the pelican that attempted to eat her on multiple occasions) that the source was a passenger airliner that had crashed nearby, and he takes her there to try and solve their mutual issue. It turns out that, independently of Baton's quest, the experimental AI aboard the plane, ELE-94, had malfunctioned, and now just tries to attack the local wildlife. Up until that point, the majority of Baton's obstacles had been natural and non-malicious in nature; even the predators that tried to eat her were only doing so out of their own survival instincts.
• Tekken 7 introduces the man who promised Kazumi Mishima that he would kill Heihachi and Kazuya for her: Akuma. He fights like his Street Fighter IV incarnation, bringing jump-in combos, the Focus Attack, and his array of projectiles to the game's grounded three-dimensional combat engine.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe: There are many warlords vying to reforge the fragmented territory that was once Russia in the image of their own ideals, ranging from the sane, the guards both old and new, to the utterly bizarre and even insane, for good or ill. But they are all figures that had a part in the Russia of old, or in the wastelands... except one. The pragmatically fascist folks in the Free State of Magadan can hire Mitchell WerBell III's band of mercenaries to help in taking over the Eastern Siberian wastes... and the guy in charge of actually paying them dies before he can, leaving the mercenaries with no other resource than an attempted coup. And this coup can succeed, spiralling off into the insanity that is the Republic of West Alaska path, which has a genuine shot at reunifying the East, and then the entirety of Russia, under a mercenary banner, utterly baffling every country on Earth (with USA desperately trying to explain they had no part in this). As a result, the nations from an alternate history where the Reich won can find themselves contending with what is basically Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker's Outer Heaven, except unfathomably bigger in terms of controlled territory and openly declaring nuclear weapon development as a full United States of Russia. While the deluded madmen who can form the Holy Russian Empire if they win causes Russia to collapse again after various atrocities and the Black League are the most likely to kick off a nuclear war if they win are the worst options for Russia and the entire world respectively, WerBell's mercenary horde is definitely the most stupefying possible victor.
• The protagonists of Until Dawn spend most of the game dealing with a masked psycho out to kill them in an isolated cabin in the woods. Except he isn't. He's a deranged but ultimately harmless former friend who wanted to pull a massive prank on them. Except something is killing people. And that something turns out to be a pack of supernatural wendigos that just happen to call the area around the cabin home.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The Void, while originating at the dawn of time and inadvertently helping to create the universe, is this for life in the universe. Even the titans, god-like beings who travel the universe creating life, were surprised to learn of the Void's existence. Sargeras in particular was so horrified by the existence and nature of the Void, he formed a demonic army with the purpose of wiping out all life in the universe, as he saw a lifeless universe preferable to one dominated by the Void.
  • The Orcs were this to the Humans. While the humans of Azeroth are no strangers to non-human enemies, having fought a few wars with the trolls, the Orcs suddenly appeared out of nowhere as they came from another world, hell bent on waging war and dominating Azeroth.

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