Whole Plot Reference / Video Games

• The Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown DLC campaign is basically the plot of The Hunt for Red October with an enemy captain who commands a nuclear submarine going rogue and necessitating a massive search for him. Count even jokes that it would be easier to find the sub if the whole crew started singing.
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent has a DLC titled Justine that was released as part of the Potato Sack bundle. As a result, the plot of the DLC, a woman being put through hellish 'tests' by another for her amusement, is a subdued reference to Portal, of all things.
• The Armored Core series has had this happen a few times to itself of its own plots and stories, most notably with 3 being a reboot and expanded retread of the very first game in almost every way, and Silent Line having elements of Master of Arena, right down to a mysterious support character being an antagonistic and manipulative AI the entire time.
• The first game of the Detectives United series, Origins, has what seems to be a WPR to Avengers: Infinity War. The Big Bad intends to unravel reality as we know it with a snap of his fingers, once he's assembled the necessary Plot Coupons.
• The Clan War missions of Borderlands 2, in which you instigate a clan war between the redneck Hodunks and the Irish Zafords and play both sides against one another are a reference to Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing. The only difference is that you are forced to side with one family in the final encounter rather than wiping all of them out.
• Chapter 3 of Bully is basically the plot of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, some of the Greaser voice lines even quote it.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 pretty much lifts the entire plot of The Rock for one mission.
• Chaser closely follows the plotline of Total Recall (1990), right down to the Twist Ending.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: The first level in Yuriko's campaign is about a severely traumatised Japanese schoolgirl who rips out of her restraints at a secret research facility and rampages around the place, messily killing the guards with her psychic powers.
• Corruption of Laetitia: The credits and collectable books make no secret that the setting is based on various Vocaloid songs, such as "Daughter of Evil" and "Boss Death". Some of the dialogue quotes the songs word for word.
• DEFCON - Everybody Dies is based on the climax scenes of WarGames, where civilization is imploding in a global thermonuclear war. However, unlike the movie where it's just a computer simulation, it's actually happening in DEFCON and your goal is to ensure the communists/capitalists die in a nuclear fire. Introversion's previous game, Uplink, featured a Shout-Out to Wargames in an Easter Egg.
• Discworld Noir: To The Maltese Falcon, Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep. All happening at the same time, and with one character playing the roles of all three Femme Fatales. And then part way through, where it turns out to also be a Discworld version of the investigation plot of Illuminatus!, with Eris and the Apple of Discord copies, conspiracies within conspiracies, an Eldritch Abomination trapped in a polygon-shaped building, and Malaclypse ranting.
• The EarthBound ROM Hack EquestriaBound is this to the original game. The main thing that makes it this instead of a simple texture swap like Pony Fantasy VI is the fact that doesn't follow the EarthBound plot to an exact letter. In addition to the characters remaining faithful to the FiM roots, the plot is similar, but not exact. Some minor differences and such do pop up, in addition to the new areas added to the game, as well as a ton of new bosses and features.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The quest "A Night to Remember" is this to The Hangover; the Dragonborn wakes up after a drunken stupor and has to find their missing drinking buddy, all while cleaning up the mess they left behind throughout Skyrim. They even got married in all the drunkenness - to a Hagraven, no less.
  • The whole Civil War plot borrows a lot from the main conflict of Fallout: New Vegas. The Empire is a well-intentioned but corrupt and ineffectual government that's hated by a good number of the locals, much like the NCR. Ulfric Stormcloak acts as a stand-in for Mr. House - an ambitious and cunning leader who wants to kick out the government and forge an independent nation under their own rule. On the horizon is the Aldmeri Dominion, a nation of barbaric Nazi elves who once warred with the Empire and plan to do so again, eradicating both sides and claiming the province as their own for a further conquest of the Imperial homeland, exactly the same as the Legion. In the middle of this huge mess is the player, who is in a position to play the sides off against each other for their own personal agenda, or join up with a faction and bring them a decisive victory.
• Enemy Zero is essentially Alien if the protagonist was Ash instead of Ripley.
• Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a remake of Journey to the West.
• Fallout 4: Virtually the entire setup of the game's story is lifted from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - It's a future where humanity has been devastated by a nuclear apocalypse, a group of people simply decided to leave the radioactive wasteland (though these guys live underground), and those scientifically-inclined survivors make Artificial Human slaves that are almost perfect "replicants" of humans to where you can't even tell their identity unless you kill them. Furthermore, many of the aforementioned androids attempt to escape and gain freedom (often having their memories replaced to do so), only to be hunted down by other androids and hired bounty hunters.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy II is, for all intents and purposes, Star Wars in a fantasy setting (mostly A New Hope). You've got an evil conquering empire led by a Big Bad Emperor who has just built a giant superweapon, a black-armored right hand to the Emperor who turns out to be related to one of the heroes and ultimately betrays the Emperor, the heroes being pursued by the Empire in the opening and losing badly to them, a princess leading the rebels, a wise, cloaked mentor who helps out early on and then sacrifices himself, a gruff pilot of a fast transport that the heroes hire help from in a bar who ultimately joins the rebels, and even a scene where the heroes meet a bunch of short furry creatures who help them out after one of the protagonists reveals he can speak their language.
  • The plotline in Final Fantasy VII concerning Cloud's rivalry with Sephiroth is based on Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro.
  • The plot of Final Fantasy XV was largely inspired by Hamlet, though the more explicit plot points from it somewhat dissolved during the director changeover. It was also influenced by William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, though retains little from this other than some aesthetics.
  • Dirge of Cerberus references Metal Gear Solid extensively, and its sequel slightly. Vincent's a retired war hero who is sent to stop a terrorist group made up of genetically-enhanced military personnel. He fights a ranting shirtless rival dead set on surpassing him in a helicopter. He meets a sexy lady scientist whose sibling has been turned into a cybernetic ninja that thinks of nothing but war, but who also contains the memories of Vincent's lost friend. He fights a psychic in bondage gear. Vincent turns out to have a biological superweapon implanted into him, intended to kill all of the terrorists. Like in Metal Gear Solid 2, it turns out the real villain is an AI preserving itself through the Internet. This is just the beginning of the similarities.
• Gekitotsu Dangan Jidousha Kessen: Battle Mobile, an obscure Super Famicom game by System Sacom, has the story where a violent gang trying to kill a couple. The male survives, and come back for a Roaring Rampage of Revenge using a Weaponized Car. Sounds familiar?.
• Frackin' Universe, a Game Mod for Starbound has the Delta Freya II mission as a Whole-Plot Reference to At the Mountains of Madness with the protagonists stumbling upon an abandoned Eerie Arctic Research Station and end up encountering a Shoggoth.
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is very similar to the 1980s, Al Pacino-starring remake of Scarface. A criminal, exiled from his old stomping grounds in The '80s, winds up in (a) Miami(-like city) and builds up a criminal empire, including an opulent mansion, but gets betrayed by a partner who ends up seeking his death, culminating in a Last Stand at said mansion. The way the protagonists end up is different, though.
• The first third of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is basically Juice mashed together with Boyz n the Hood. The last two thirds of the game are basically the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo with a brief interlude to reenact Ocean's Eleven
• Half-Life
  • It takes place in a secret base where teleportation experiments are being carried out. Despite initial successes, horrifying creatures from a different dimension soon come streaming out of the portals, overrun the facility, and turn the humans into mindless monsters. A lone man fights through the chaos, enters the alien dimension through a teleporter, and kills their leader by shooting it in its exposed brain. Sound familiar?
  • Large sections of the overarching plot of the first game and various names are lifted from The Mist, for you are taking part of the interdimensional experiment that brought the mist itself.
• Haunting Starring Polterguy is a WPR to Poltergeist. Comes with a lot of Shout Outs.
• A mission in H.A.W.X., "Operation Whitehorse" has the player defend a space shuttle launch pad and the shuttle itself, carrying a super weapon to even the playing field in the war against enemy attack. First, the enemy sends wave after wave of airborne-dropped tanks, dropped from cargo planes. Then they begin sending jets to try and kill it. When all else fails, they start firing cruise missiles at it. A near-identical mission appears in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, "White Bird Part I".
• The plot of Hylics could be considered a loose parallel to Final Fantasy IV. It involves sages, crystals, a lab of secret experiments, a giant tower level, progression from overworld to a boat to an airship to a spaceship, a knight in spiky armor who switches sides and a final battle on the moon.
• Kung Fu Master is the story of a martial artist who has to climb a five-level pagoda full of enemies in order to ensure his loved one's safety. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
• The "Mechanical Heart" chapter of Live A Live is one giant retelling of Alien. As you progress through, elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey are also introduced.
• Marco & the Galaxy Dragon is about a human, who was kidnapped by aliens as a child and raised to become a thief, stealing a cosmic stone which grants tremendous power to whomever wields it. The thief narrowly avoids the agents of an evil alien overlord, who sends his daughter—a skilled assassin who secretly hates him—to hunt the thief down and retrieve the stone. Both the thief and the daughter are eventually thrown in prison, where they team up with the last surviving member of a race that the overlord exterminated in order to bust out, and end up working together to keep the stone out of the overlord’s hands. Sounds an awful lot like Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), doesn’t it?
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect 2, Thane's loyalty mission, where he tries to make his son go down a different path than the one he took, and to make up for not being a part of his son's life is basically a whole plot reference to Harry Chapin's song "Cat's In The Cradle," to the point where the achievement for completing the quest is named after the song.
  • While it has more than enough original elements to keep it fresh, the story of Tali's loyalty mission is overall very similar to the episode "Sins of the Father" in Star Trek: The Next Generation. See the shout-out page for more detail on that.
  • The Mass Effect 3 mission "Rannoch: Geth Fighter Squadrons" has Shepard get Brain Uploaded into a very TRON-like computer world, where Shep has to fight bad code.
• Metal Gear:
  • Large chunks of the plot of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake are taken from the J.C. Pollock novel Crossfire.
  • Metal Gear Solid:
    • The main plot is a total retread of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake but with a dark conspiracy subplot as well. All of the setpieces are the same - finding a female soldier in the women's bathroom, Gray Fox warning you about mines using an anonymous radio frequency, a key that's a 'shape memory alloy' that changes with heat, punching the Evil Counterpart to death after losing your inventory, a cyborg ninja turns out to be a character from the previous game, a mysterious woman is revealed through dramatic irony to have a tragic part in Gray Fox's life, there's a battle with a helicopter using missiles, and many, many more. Unlike the retread in 2, none of the characters remark on this, as this was intended as a Soft Reboot of the franchise, allowing it to serve as a Video Game Remake of its previous entry as well.
    • An outrageously cool Anti-Hero named "Snake" is captured against his will and ordered on a mission to retrieve a nuclear device and rescue the daughter of a shifty authority figure in return for having his criminal past forgotten. He's also infected with a genetically engineered virus on his way. This is very similar to Escape from L.A..
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
    • The basic plot is The Rock with the serial numbers filed off (New York instead of San Francisco, nukes rather than bioweapons) down to the occasional Homage Shot and Harry Gregson-Williams doing the music in the same style - but also incorporating bits of pomo novel The New York Trilogy.
    • A major plot point revealed near the end of the game is that it's also an intentional, in-universe retread of the first Metal Gear Solid - an isolated island facility that's actually the testing ground for Metal Gear taken over by ex-special forces, having taken hostages and demanding a ransom, threatening the US government with a nuke if the demands aren't met, a lone FOXHOUND soldier sent in to stop them, both main hostages dying not long after they're located, the presence of a cyborg ninja who assists via radio, the lone soldier getting his gear (and clothes) taken away near the end - though, ironically, right around when this reveal happens is when things have started going off the rails into... well, something different.
    • While Escape from New York elements are prominent in the aesthetics of the game, the Carpenter movie referenced in the plot is Big Trouble in Little China, particularly towards the game's second half where a character named Jack (Raiden) is rescuing a woman by leading her through flooded green tunnels and fighting long-haired, knife-throwing enemies with magic-based powers drawn from Chinese martial arts. The game also borrows Big Trouble's themes of focusing on a protagonist who thinks he's the main character and isn't, with both Snake (who borrows his name from a different Kurt Russell character and is redesigned to resemble Kurt Russell) and Raiden (whose real name is Jack, like Russell's character in Big Trouble) both being marginalised as protagonists (Snake is Demoted to Extra after the prologue, and Raiden is a Pinball Protagonist forced to watch as Snake takes care of the story without him).
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain:
    • Snake's first mission is to rescue his old war buddy who is being tortured by the Russians for providing arms to the Mujahadeen - Rambo III.
    • Eli's plotline, about a privileged English schoolboy who ends up the leader of an insane tribal society of warring children until a military man comes and gets him, is clearly a reference to Lord of the Flies.
    • The game contains a subplot that is a Whole Plot Reference to Neon Genesis Evangelion of all things. Huey and Strangelove have built Metal Gear Sahelanthropus, a world-ending giant robot that can only be piloted by children. The three pilot candidates are a clone (Eli), a European Child Soldier (Tretij Rebenok, Russian for "Third Child"), and the child of the creators (Hal Emmerich). Later events wind up with Strangelove dying inside Sahelanthropus's AI Pod, and so it literally contains Hal's dead mother. Just like one of his Japanese animes indeed.
  • Metal Gear Ac!d 2 also references Neon Genesis Evangelion. Dr. Kopplethorn has cloned his dead wife Lucinda into a child, planning to use her mind as an OS for Metal Gear. However, due to being its OS, Lucy now feels Metal Gear to be her true body. Upon activating Lucy's consciousness, she becomes enormously powerful and kills Kopplethorn before synchronising fully with Metal Gear and attempting to kill Snake.
• In The Outer Worlds, you play as the charismatic captain of a rustbucket star freighter crewed by a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits including a cute mechanic girl, a snarky good-looking doctor and a Badass Preacher with a mysterious past, travelling from job to job between frontier towns in a lost star system ruled by corrupt corporate authorities. This is the closest we'll ever get ot a Firefly video game.
  • Later on you find out the people of the future are gormless buffoons who endlessly parrot corporate slogans and are causing a famine through their own gross incompetence and mismanagement, and it's up to you, the unfrozen everyman, to maybe save these people from themselves. Your Firefly game just became an Idiocracy video game.
• Red Dead Revolver, as a game where the Showdown at High Noon is a frequent occurrence, has a quickdraw tournament in the vein of The Quick and the Dead.
  • Earlier in the game, there is a stage where the player must blow up a bridge on a battlefield by wading into the water and placing explosives on the pillars, much like in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
• Red Dead Redemption 2: The latter part of Arthur Morgan's story follows the plot of The Seventh Seal, albeit in a less spiritual/metaphorical way. After years as a good soldier in Dutch van der Linde's libertarian crusade, Arthur learns he's dying of a disease, and after a lot of soul searching he tries to help his fellow outlaws find better lives rather than stay and be killed by the encroaching forces of law and order. Arthur eventually sacrifices himself to ensure that a family can escape and start a new life.
• Rengoku II: The Stairway to H.E.A.V.E.N.: The game is heavily inspired by The Divine Comedy, with the hero going through the "seven circles of hell" before reaching "Heaven", and with Beatrice and Virgil as important characters. The strongest sword in the game is called Dante.
• Resident Evil 2 has two parallel plots. Claire's story has a lot in common with Aliens. Last time around, a small group of people stumbled onto something horrible. Now, thanks to the greed of an evil MegaCorp, that same horror has overtaken an entire community in part because everyone failed to heed the warnings of the survivors. A tough young woman stumbles into the mess and befriends a little girl who's been surviving on her own by crawling through places too small for anyone or anything else, and who initially tries to run away. Incidentally, the little girl's father is kinda sorta responsible for the whole mess. The little girl falls into a sewer and almost gets used to breed a baby monster, but she's rescued by the tough young woman at considerable personal risk, just as the helpful Computer Voice warns her that everything is about to explode. Our heroes escape an exploding facility in the nick of time, but the biggest, baddest monster of them all is Not Quite Dead and has hitched a ride on the escape vehicle. The "references" to Aliens even go into meta territory: Resident Evil 2 was a sequel that managed to be even more successful than its predecessor.
• Resident Evil 3: Nemesis has an Action Girl Badass fending off an unstoppable beast using an ATM Hardballer, grenade launcher, minigun and Western 1887, which she cocks one handed. Hmmm...where have we seen this before?
• Both RosenkreuzStilette games have plots resembling two Mega Man titles (which the series takes heavy inspiration from):
  • The original game's plot heavily resembles Mega Man X4. A military organization (Repliforce/RKS) working for the government (Maverick Hunters/Holy Empire) suddenly turns against the government, feeling that they are being persecuted and desiring independence, but are willing to resort to violence to achieve their goals. The two protagonists (X/Spiritia and Zero/Grolla) beg the rebels to reconsider, knowing that the government will come after them and they most likely won't survive, but are forced to fight their friends when they refuse. The rebellion is led by a noble man (General and Colonel/Count Michael Zeppelin) who desires to protect a sweet, innocent girl named Iris whom he is related to (sister/daughter). Eventually, after defeating the leader, it is revealed that the war was deliberately set up by a third party (Sigma/Iris Zeppelin) in order to destroy the rebels and enable them to take control of the world- said party becomes the final enemy faced by the protagonists.
  • Freudenstachel's plot resembles that of Mega Man Zero, specifically Zero 3. After the original conflict between the rebels and government has stopped, the government (Neo Arcadia/Orthodox Church) begins persecuting the demographic associated with the rebels (Reploids/Magi), and appoints a group of four (Four Guardians/Schwarzkreuz) to carry out the capturing of enemies of the state. The man supposedly in charge of the government is revealed to be a copy of the real person (Copy-X/The homunculus Pope) controlled by an evil genius (Dr. Weil/Iris Zeppelin) who seeks revenge for their prior defeat and to regain control over the whole world, and eventually tries to destroy it.
• In the children's story "Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back" by Shel Silverstein, a hunter shoots at the titular character only to find that his rifle is not loaded, and then Lafcadio eats the hunter. This is very similar to the tutorial section of The Sexy Brutale where a hunting rifle is used to kill Sixpence, who kills the staff member if Lafcadio Boone puts a blank in the rifle. Moreover, Lafcadio-the-lion forgets that he's a lion until he returns to Africa and another lion reminds him of his true identity. The lions and the hunters try to convince him to join their respective sides, but Lafcadio-the-lion rejects both of them and walks off into the distance never to be heard from again. The story of Lafcadio Boone, forgetting his identity as Lucas and being forced to choose the side of either the hunters or the hunted, follows this basic plot.
• Silent Ops, a low-budget Gameloft output, recycles the plot of GoldenEye almost wholesale. The hero, John, works for a peacekeeping organization called the Ubiquity based in Britain, and his best friend Hans was seemingly killed in the opening mission only for a later stage (set eight years later) to reveal Hans had faked his death and was working for the villains the whole time. Hans also has a ruthless henchwoman, Natalia Petrovich, a blatant Xenia Onatopp expy who spends most of the game on a killing spree, though Natalia pulled a Dragon Ascendant unlike her counterpart.
• While SINoALICE is on the surface level a morbid crossover of several classic fairy tales such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Gecko Ending made for its Taiwanese and Global servers before they shut down reveals the game's overall plot to be extremely similar to OMORI; both games are about a dark-haired Troubled Teen struggling with suicidal tendencies and trauma relating to someone they looked up to in life, who is revealed to have dreamed up a disturbing fantasy world in which a blade-swinging morose version of themselves engages in violence, even towards their real life self, to cope, and only being able to find closure and move on towards the future through waking up and facing reality.
• Take the classic literary tale of Beowulf, and change the presentation of the story from an epic tale to Professional Wrestling. You just described the entire concept of the character Beowulf from Skullgirls.
• Shadow Ops: Red Mercury has a level set in Kazakhstan based on the Kazakhstan level of fellow FPS, The World Is Not Enough. Not only are both locations the same, but the player is introduced to Frank's on-off lover, Galena, in an identical way to how Bond meets Christmas in the other game. There's also a shootout against mooks in a circular room with enemies swarming from left and right, while the Love Interest character is running between control panels where Frank / Bond needs to provide cover for, the heroes making an escape down a shaft, and an Outrun the Fireball cutscene where the whole facility explodes behind Frank and Galena / Bond and Christmas followed by Frank / Bond being chewed out by his superiors over his recklessness in the prior mission. Not to mention both games having a Hidden Villain, Kate Daniels and Electra King.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Right from the first game, to the original Devilman; the story opens just before the end, and ends up the Hero's family killed by the demons they were hunting for the first third of the game. The world ending in nuclear hellfire, and then ultimately being destroyed by God. Fusing with demons makes you inherently more wild and feral, and demons have an innate connection to the natural world. God seeks to destroy the world to create a perfect paradise free of sin, and the equivalent of Satan is caught in an endless battle against God. Eventually, it ends with your Bishōnen Ideal Hero going full Knight Templar and seeking to recreate the world in God's vision, and your Hunk Anti-Hero fusing with a demon as a last-ditch effort to stop them, while Satan and God meet one last time for a final battle.
  • Devil Survivor 2 has a series of Eldritch Abominations, utterly immune to conventional weaponry, attacking Japan, which only a handful of special people have the potential to stop, is a Crapsack World, has major break and Kill the Cutie, Order Versus Chaos themes, a white haired Bishōnen who loves humans (and happens to secretly be one of said abominations) and viciously deconstructs all tropes related to its genre. This sounds awfully familiar...
    • Persona 3 also fits this nicely for very similar reasons, also by having 12 major enemies followed by a 13th one who has a human appearance (and has an affinity towards humans). It can be safely assumed that somebody at Atlus is a huge fan of Evangelion.
  • Persona 4 stars a group of Ordinary High School Students gifted with the power of Summon Magic of their own Fighting Spirits, who are put to use that power to stop a Serial Killer with the same power run rampant on the small, rustic town they inhabit. Alongside the Amateur Sleuth murder mystery, a great emphasis is put on a Slice of Life Coming of Age Story that features said teenagers grow up and confront themselves while tracking down said serial killer, who's later revealed to be an outright misogynist of some kind, in the way he's treated the murders (attempted or successful) of his (mostly) female victims. Hmmm, where have we heard of this one before...?
• Soul Sacrifice revolves around horrific creatures that were once men (and animals) born from profane magic, which is spread by a shining, innocent-looking entity. The only way to kill said monsters is to use said magic, which will end up transforming YOU into a monster eventually for others to kill in an endless cycle. Souls, despair, and hope are all central to the story, as despair is what triggers the transformation from man to beast. The main storyline also involves a Ho Yay -filled relationship between two sorcerers, one of which locks himself into an endless loop in order to save his 'dear friend'. Yeah, it's that kind of game.
• Spec Ops: The Line very shamelessly lifts its plot from Heart of Darkness and its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now. Much like the latter, it features a special forces soldier and his squad venturing into unknown territory to take down a U.S. Army colonel gone rogue, with their sanity slowly withering the further they venture.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Employee of the Month is one, big narrative reference to National Lampoon's Vacation. SpongeBob plans on going to Neptune's Paradise, much like how the Griswolds plan on going to Walley World, but ends up either getting sidetracked or facing frustrating roadblocks in his path. The ending is also almost one-to-one, with Neptune's Paradise and Walley World being closed, and SpongeBob and the Griswolds only being let in due to special circumstances.
• The Spore mission It Came From The Sky is this to The Thing (1982).
• Stellaris:
  • The War in Heaven event chain in the Leviathans expansion pack is a plot reference to Babylon 5. Two hyper-advanced and scarily dogmatic Precursors clash in a titanic war across the galaxy, leaving the more primitive races to take sides or stay the hell out of the way.
  • In Utopia, making a Covenant with the End of the Cycle will lead to you reenacting the Fall of the Eldar from Warhammer 40,000. You use your advanced technology and psychic powers to become the undisputed masters of the galaxy, only to unwittingly give rise to an Eldritch Abomination which obliterates your empire and your race, leaving only a small handful on a far-flung world, despised by all.
  • In Nemesis, the founding of the Galactic Imperium mirrors the rise of the Galactic Empire in the Star Wars prequel trilogy: Taking advantage of a crisis and being named Custodian of the Galactic Community, you then proceed to refuse to give up your emergency powers, first extending your term indefinitely and then reforming the Community into a Galactic Imperium with yourself as its Emperor.
• The Talos Principle: The plot of the game is basically the Garden of Eden story with AIs.
• Umineko: When They Cry: The relationship between Battler and Beatrice is this towards The Divine Comedy with Beatrice waiting for Battler to find the truth referencing the eternal lady waiting for Dante at the top of Mount Purgatory. Several other names in the series also references this and fulfill the same roles.
  • First of all we have Virgilia, who guides Battler towards the truth, taking the role of Vergilius who guided Dante.
  • In Ep 7 we also have Clair vauxof Bernard, the reader of that Episode who reveals the truth to Will, Lion and the players. Clair takes the role of Bernard of Clairvaux as both are the final guides of the stories after Beatrice has gone to her eternal rest.
  • Then finally we have the name of the metaworld where Battler is trapped, Purgatorio. Here Beatrice wants Battler to remember his sin of six years ago just as Dante had to recognize and acknowledge his sins before ascending to Heaven.
  • The book and the similarities are references in Ep 5 just when Battler does reach the truth:
    ''Vergilius guided Dante to Mount Purgatory, ... and brought him below the feet of the eternal lady who waited at the top, Beatrice. Therefore, ... the innermost depths lay not at the bottom. ... but at the peak of Mount Purgatory. The eternal lady... had been waiting there for Dante... the whole time... And then... I... knew.
• The Wonderful 101 features Platinum Robo, a Humongous Mecha that secretly contains the soul of the pilot's mother, a brilliant scientist thought to be long dead.
• World of Warcraft was always big on the Shout Outs, from single NPCs to entire quest lines, but two zones in the Cataclysm expansion brings it to a new level. The Redrige Mountains are all about Rambo, while around half of Uldum consists of Harrison Jones fighting for an ancient relic against Nazi goblins.
• The plot of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 seems to be heavily inspired by Granblue Fantasy. Both play in a World in the Sky and feature a Mysterious Waif as the secondary protagonist who links her life force with The Hero to safe him, and in both games the aim is to reach a legendary destination (Elysium in Xenoblade, Estalucia in GBF) that is unreachable by normal means. Both games feature an antagonistic empire, which is fairly standard for a JRPG ... But both games also feature an inseparable duo of goofballs (Zeke & Pandy / Sturm & Drang) who get in the way of the party at various points and an enigmatic enforcer (Morag / The Black Knight) interested in capturing the Mysterious Waif, all of whom aren't really evil and end up joining the party at some point.
• Yumina the Ethereal starts off as a light-hearted school romance game with significant foreshadowing and a few serious moments and later becomes a serious sci-fi story about fighting aliens with mechs where people can and will die. Sounds a lot like Muv-Luv, doesn't it?

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