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Younger Than They Look / Video Games

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Examples of Younger Than They Look in video games.
  • The 3rd Birthday: The preteen Eve is placed in the body of the 38-year-old Aya.
  • Chuck Downfield of Backyard Football looks like he's in his 20s. His age? 9. He just knows the game so well and dresses like an adult.
  • Baldur's Gate:
    • Jan Jansen in Baldur's Gate II has Perma-Stubble that's partially gray and a very calloused face, and sounds like (if he was human) he'd probably be well into his sixties. Every in-game indication of his age indicates he's barely adult by gnomish standards (which would still make him over 30-years-old, but still).
    • In Baldur's Gate III, Token Evil Teammate Lae'zel is surprisingly the youngest member of the party as she's in her early twenties and was in the middle of her Rite of Passage when the story began. Due to the way she carries herself and the fact that gith are typically The Ageless one would expect her to be much older, but when she meets with the rest of her species they immediately start regarding her as a child.
  • BioShock
    • Jack in the first BioShock is implied to be only a couple years old, yet he seems to be an adult. You find an audio diary describing the progress of an accelerated growth treatment, but you may not immediately realize who the unnamed test subject is.
    • In BioShock Infinite, Zachary Comstock is the same age as Booker DeWitt, being an alternate reality version of him, but appears to be older due to the Luteces' experiments taking a toll on his health.
  • BlazBlue: While the Murakumo units mostly lack official ages, they were activated far sooner than their appearance would suggest, and the only one with a known birth date, Mu (aka Noel Vermillion) appears as a late teen despite being only five years old. Likewise, while Nu behaves like a teenaged yandere when she isn't Machine Monotone, it's implied she went through several similar bodies with short operational lifespans, the latest literally being activated right in front of Ragna.
  • Ryu in Breath of Fire IV is a newborn...who looks to be in his late teens. Justified as he's a Literal Split Personality of a god that was split in two and temporally displaced to boot (split 600 years across time and space, at that) thanks to a botched summoning. (The other half of the god in question, Fou-lu, is not only a case of Older Than They Look but is Really 700 Years Old to boot.)
    • And for much of his life (until he went into torpor for 600 years and became the Fou Empire's King in the Mountain) Fou-lu himself would be an example of this trope — only finally "catching up" after unifying the future Fou Empire in a single generation. It's implied in the game (and overtly depicted in the Comic-Book Adaptation) that Fou-lu, much like his Literal Split Personality Ryu, ended up being summoned into the world looking like a young adult.
  • Agent York in Deadly Premonition. Due to his fascination with cheesy movies and his moments of social awkwardness, many characters comment that he must be much younger than he looks. Of course, what they see, and the audience doesn't, is a white-haired man with Exhausted Eye Bags; a far cry from the youthful-looking brown-haired York.
  • Devil May Cry
  • Disco Elysium: Your Player Character looks to be on the older side of middle age, with most characters guessing you're in your mid-fifties at youngest, late sixties at oldest. However, you can potentially internalize the thought "Day of Birth Generator" that makes you remember that you're only 44, barely a year older than your physically fit partner. Your harsh, substance-abusing lifestyle has taken a ghastly toll on your body.
  • Dragalia Lost has this happen in its comic, Dragalia Life, when Valyx, the Fourth Scion of Alberia, gives a girl who scrapes her knee his handkerchief. She thanks him and calls him an old man which cuts deep into him, with the comic pointing out he's 22 while looking like he's a grizzled army commander.
  • Downplayed example in Ensemble Stars!: most players initially assume Midori is a second or third year due to his tall height (and constant senior-itis), but he's actually a first-year; he's just kind of a beanpole. He doesn't really like this, though, as he's grown out of a lot of his old clothes already and he sometimes attracts attention due to his height.
  • ESP Ra.De.'s Big Bad, Gaara, looks like an elderly woman, easily somewhere in her 60s, if not early 70s. But according to the end credits, she's only 41. This is courtesy the utterly ridiculous amount of psionic energy she's utilized to maintain the Alice Clones and otherwise make Yaksa the avenging juggernaut it is.
  • Fallout 4:
    • Elder Arthur Maxson, head of the Brotherhood of Steel, looks like a grizzled, scarred soldier with years of experience. But, in Fallout 3, he appeared as a 10-year-old squire; with a decade passing between the two games, this makes him all of twenty. Many of his brothers note he is their youngest leader in history, and it's his thick beard that makes him look a lot older than he really is.
    • Mercenary and potential companion MacCready, who appeared as the 12-year-old Mayor of Little Lamplight in Fallout 3, also looks older than his Fallout 4 age of twenty-two, but his aging isn't as egregious as Maxson's.
    • Most ghouls have been around for hundreds of years, many since before the Great War. Hancock, on the other hand, has only been a ghoul for about ten years, following the mother of all bad drug trips. In truth, he's probably around 60 at most.
  • In Final Fantasy IV Palom and Porom look nine, maybe eight years old, but they're both five.
  • Final Fantasy VII
    • Tifa Lockhart was only 15 in the Nibelheim Flash Back and in Crisis Core, but her appearance and matured physique◊ might fool you into thinking otherwise. Even in the remake. Last Order: Final Fantasy VII fixes this a bit, making Tifa less buxom and younger-looking.
    • Similarly, Cloud in Crisis Core looks and sounds no different from what he usually does in the later games where he's in his early 20s. He's only supposed to be 15 years old.
    • The most blatant example in the game would be Cid Highwind, who is only 32 but looks and acts like he is around 20 years older than that. His appearances in the rest of the Compilation do make him appear closer to his actual age, at least visually.
  • Final Fantasy IX:
    • Steiner is 33, but looks like someone in their early 40s. It's possible that due to Steiner being a long-time knight, his line of work and experiences has physically aged him.
    • Eiko looks and acts Wise Beyond Her Years, giving the impression that she's just a very accomplished 10-year-old (possibly eleven or twelve). According to the manual, she's six.
  • Auron in Final Fantasy X is, it turns out, 35 years old. He's a grizzled, greying Rōnin who looks at least a decade older than that, even after the HD remaster adjusted his skin texture. This also sets him apart from most Unsent, who appear to the age that they died at—Auron was in his 20s when he was mortally wounded by Yunalesca. This is lampshaded in Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia where Galuf (who is 60) scolds him for acting like an old man.
  • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade:
    • Oswin's B Support with Hector summed it up:
    Hector: Grr... you ill-hearted old man!
    Oswin: Not that I'm correcting you, but I'm only in my thirties... I would say that 'Ill-hearted Gentleman' is more appropriate.
    • Hector himself also falls into this. He's only 17 but looks (and, in Fire Emblem Heroes, sounds) a lot older.
    • Wallace from the same game also counts. He's completely bald, but his supports with Renault confirm that he's only about 40.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses
    • Jeritza, first introduced as a mysterious teacher who wears a mask. One of the students even says that they expected him to be their new professor instead of the protagonist, whom most of them thought was to be a new student. When later seen without the mask, his sunken eyes and deep voice still make him seem like he's in his late thirties at youngest, but he's actually only 26, making him 21 when he was first seen pre-timeskip, roughly the same age as the protagonist. In fact, it turns out that he's the younger brother of Mercedes, who, admittedly is somewhat older than most of the other students.
    • A less noticeable case is Petra. She's the second youngest student, but since Petra is significantly taller than Lysithea (who is about 6 months younger than she is), doesn't have a complex about being treated like a child, and a handful of characters who are older than her, such as Annette and Ashe, have more youthful features, it's easier to miss that she's younger than most other characters.
    • Hubert also qualifies. He's only 20 at the start of the game (which makes him older than the rest of the students besides Mercedes), but his sunken facial features (and tendency to act sinister) make him seem several years older than that.
  • Fire Emblem Engage
    • Vander, an experienced knight, serves as the Jagen archetype of the game. Despite the fact that he has white/gray hair, he's only 45, and is only one generation older than the teenage Clanne and Framme; he's a 33rd generation steward, and they're of the 34th generation.
    • Saphir, the captain of Brodia's Royal Guard, also has white hair and looks to be in her forties or fifties, but is only 35.
  • Tweek from Fur Fighters is less then a day old, making him the youngest of the Fur Fighters.
  • In the SSI Gold Box game, Curse of the Azure Bonds, the character screen of the optional NPC Alias lists her age as "2" despite her being an experienced adult fighter. As this is not explained in-game, some players might assume it to have been a developer oversight but anyone familiar with her Forgotten Realms backstory knows that she was actually created artificially and that the listed age is accurate.
  • Amoretta the Homunculus of GrimGrimoire measures her lifespan in days (about 3 months), despite having the body of a young woman.
  • In the Guilty Gear series, the titular Gears share a common trait of maturing rapidly when they aren't created from already adult humans like Testament and Sol Badguy. This particular trait is best shown in Dizzy, a half-Gear who is only three years old in her first game despite having the appearance of a young woman in her twenties, and her son Sin, a quarter-Gear who is at most five despite looking like a late teenager.
  • Colton White, the main protagonist of GUN looks like he is at least in his late twenties or early thirties, but a flashback shows he was born around 1864 while the game takes place in 1880, making him around 15-to 16 years old. Which explains why everyone around him calls him "kid", even though he looks about the same age as them.
  • Scott Shelby from Heavy Rain is 44 years old. But his wrinkles, graying hair, body build, and general demeanor gives the impression that he's in his mid to late 50s.
  • In Hogwarts Legacy, Cool Old Lady Defense Against The Dark Arts professor Dinah Hecat is revealed to be around the same age as Dean Bitterman Professor Black despite appearing decades older. She apparently was the victim of a Freak Lab Accident that inflicted Rapid Aging on her, but refuses to give more detail due to the nature of her work for the Ministry of Magic.
  • The Biker from Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is this. It's only been a couple of years since his appearance in the first game, but in that time-span, he's apparently been through enough trauma to make him look almost twenty years older. This is likely due to the intense heat of the desert drying up his skin.
  • Idol Manager: The idol portrait generator skews towards believable post-pubescent teens and young adults. The youngest idols to show up in auditions are twelve years old and are very likely to end up with portraits that look at least a few years older.
  • Jak and Daxter:
    • Jak, from the second game on. According to his bio on the official Jak X: Combat Racing site, the 18-year-old "is a seasoned hero, with etched lines on his face that show the many challenges he's overcome, and the many adventures he's had to endure." The facial hair doesn't help.
    • Keira gets hit by this, too. She's one year younger than Jak but was even on the Fanservice Cover of a magazine despite being around fourteen at the time. She looks young but vaguely between fifteen and nineteen.
  • According to the game's Debug Room, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The 7th Stand User has Michael Walker, who despite looking like he's in his 30s is only 18. He's apparently very self-conscious of this (not that it's obvious when you meet him).
  • Dark Pit from Kid Icarus: Uprising is an interesting case. While he has the physical appearance of a 13-year-old boy, him being born from the Mirror Of Truth at the end of Chapter 5 technically makes him three years old by the end of the game. What makes this interesting is that his counterpart, Pit, is a case of Older Than They Look.
  • Fulgore, in the first Killer Instinct game, is only 1-year-old.
  • Technically, while the other Nobodies may be Older Than They Look, Roxas, due to his amnesia and lack of connection with his other, is about a week or two old at the beginning of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days.
  • Thanks to engine limitations, Mission Vao from Knights of the Old Republic looks more like a young adult than a 14n-year-old. Although her face was tweaked from initial designs◊ to look younger, all adult characters in the game have the same body type (which, for women, is curvy). Her starter outfit obscures this somewhat, but as soon as you put her in different armor, she doesn't look much younger than 21-year-old Bastila. (And the campaign guide◊ artwork doesn't even try.)
  • Kreia from Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords looks to be in her 70s. However, according to her creator, Chris Avellone, she's only around 50. The reason for her older appearance is likely due to her heavy use of Dark Side powers since the Mandalorian Wars.
  • Adult Link. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time he's actually a 9-year-old who's been asleep for seven years. Mentally, he is nine but physically he is a 16-old boy, who looks more like he's at least nineteen.
  • The main character Vayne of Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis, being an artificially-made Mana, looks like any normal 16- or 17-year-old teenager, except that he was actually around six years old.
  • Mass Effect 2 has Grunt, who is about a week old when you "recruit" him. Despite him looking like he's weathered at least a few years of life, or maybe a couple of month's worth of battling. (Still, compared to other Krogan, he's pretty "smooth-as-a-baby's-behind" material.) This is because when Shepard does "recruit" him, s/he wakes (basically births) him from a tank that he was created in as essentially a teenage (for their long lifespan) krogan.
  • Metal Gear:
  • While Mortal Kombat averts this, there's Mileena. She looks like she's in her early 20s, but due to being created in Mortal Kombat 9, she's actually one-month-old. Mortal Kombat X fixes this by making her 19 years old due to the Time Skip.
  • Swaine in Ni no Kuni. Due to his life as a wandering thief, he has an extremely run-down appearance with scraggly hair, an untrimmed beard, a bony face, and baggy eyes. He's no older than thirty. When the party travels fifteen years into the past and meets his younger self, he appears to be about the same age as Oliver, if not a little younger.
  • Kanji in Persona 4 is the youngest member of the team at 15, but because of his height and delinquent aesthetic making him seem older, the others are shocked to learn he's a grade below them.
  • Phantasy Star IV
    • The Numan◊ Rika looks to be in her late teens/early twenties, but is really only a year old.
    • Nei and Neifirst from Phantasy Star II also fit into this category only having existed for one and two years respectively.
  • Pokémon
  • In Potion Maker, when Tia sees Pio for the first time, she mistakenly assumes Pio to be a child.
  • Alex Mercer from [PROTOTYPE] looks like a regular 29-year-old guy (apart from being a cannibalistic shapeshifter) but actually he is not the real Alex Mercer, only a copy of him made by the Blacklight virus. Said virus was released (and thus infected Mercer's corpse) only 18 days before the end of the game.
  • Jack Marston from Red Dead Redemption, after the epilogue timeskip, is only nineteen, yet he's the spitting image of his late 38-year-old father, John.
  • Resident Evil:
    • Rebecca Chambers was 18 in RE0 and RE1 but she looks the same age as Jill Valentine who was 23 at the time.
    • Claire Redfield was only a 19-year-old college student in RE2 and Code Veronica, but appearance-wise Claire looks she's in her 20s (especially◊ in The Dark Side Chronicles). The RE2make fixes this up, Claire looks much younger, being modeled after Jordan McEwen who was in her late teens at the time of development. Also in Revelations 2 Claire looks older than her actual age of 34, though this can be justified given what she's been through.
    • Leon S. Kennedy gets this too, he was a 21-year-old rookie in RE2 but he looked and sounded older and more mature than he actually was. Much like Claire, RE2make changes this giving Leon a much more youthful face and demeanor, ironically the inverse of this trope tends to be more prevalent with Leon outside RE2.
    • Ramon Salazar of Resident Evil 4 has the skin of a man in his seventies, the voice of one in his late forties and the stature of a 12-year-old child, but claims to be twenty.
    • Eveline the Big Bad from RE7 is only three years old, but she makes herself look like a little girl and actually looks like an old woman thanks to Rapid Aging.
  • Ruphand: An Apothecary's Adventure: As a conversation near the storage room of Evrandel Castle Town has a kid thinking Brill's older than her 19 years. Brill thinks it's because of the hair.
  • Teira, one of the female companion choices in the Shadowlords series (fan-made expansion for Neverwinter Nights) is nineteen. Due to the side effects of a dangerous spell she was forced to use to escape a prison before the game begins, she looks like she is twenty-five or thirty.
  • The vat-grown people from Shin Megami Tensei II (that is, Aleph, Beth, Daleth, Gimmel and Zayin) were grown to adulthood in a single day. This means that the main character is only a few days old from the start.
  • Angela Orosco from Silent Hill 2 is only 19, but looks at least in her 30s. This was done intentionally by the animators, to show how her past of sexual abuse and killing her abusive father has prematurely aged her and taken a physical, as well as emotional, toll on her. It was also done to separate her from young and supposedly innocent characters, like Laura, and to emphasize that she isn't to be sexualized in any way, as much of the symbolism in the game places emphasis on sexuality. Originally, the character was conceptualized as 15 or 16, but the voice actress chosen to portray her gave her an older-sounding voice, and the design team changed her accordingly.
  • Lisa Garland from Silent Hill: Origins acts as a twenty-something woman, specially when you consider that she slept with Dr. Kauffmann, but since she was 23 in Silent Hill, she is supposed to be around 16 in this game. Considering that the Lisa in Silent Hill could have been a manifestation and not real, in Origins she could be anywhere from 16-23.
  • Common with multiple Sonic the Hedgehog characters, most of them have fairly precocious personalities and matured voices and vocabularies, but range anywhere between six and twenty one. Big the Cat for example looks, acts and sounds like a middled aged hermit, but is only 18 years old. Fanservice secret agent Rouge is in fact the same age but looks and sounds much older (especially under her second voice actress). Blaze also has a very mature and serious-minded personality, with a fairly adult like voice. She is only 14 years old.
  • Astaroth, the hulking bruiser of the Soul Series. seven years old in Soulcalibur II; not much older in more recent games (as he's one of the new mass produced Astaroths). He's a Golem created by a cult devoted to a god of murder. His counterpart, Ashlotte (Maedel), a clockwork golem, is even younger than he is as she was produced to capture him for the cult.
    • It's hard to believe, but Hilde is only 18 years old for much of the story of IV. She looks and acts like a woman in her mid-thirties, and indeed her post-Time Skip appearance in V shows she is indistinguishable as a 35 year-old from her previous teenage self.
  • Splatoon:
    • Downplayed with Marina from Splatoon 2. Her lanky build and Stripperific outfit have caused many fans to mistake her for older than her actual age of 18. In contrast, her partner Pearl is very short and childish-looking but is 21.
    • Callie and Marie are implied to be seventeen in the original game but they seem more like they're in their early twenties. After a now nineteen-year-old Marie switches to a kimono in the second game, she looks even more mature.
  • Jim Raynor in StarCraft II is 34 despite looking 20-years older than that.
  • Fox McCloud and Falco Lombardi are 18 and 19 in Star Fox 64 but look and sound more like they're over 21.
  • Super Mario Bros.: Mario and Luigi are very commonly assumed to be anywhere from 30 to 45, between the facial hair, short stature, and working-class jobs, not to mention most early adaptations portraying them as middle-aged. According to Shigeru Miyamoto and various official media, though? They're in their mid-twenties, as is the rest of the main Mario cast. Yes, that includes Bowser, despite the Koopa King looking and sounding fairly older and being the father of a child who is at least three to five years old,note  as well as Wario, who looks, acts and sounds like a stereotypical gross middle-aged man but is apparently slightly younger than Mario.
  • Tales of the Abyss:
    • Every replica, of course, the main examples being Luke, Ion and Sync. It's even pointed out that Luke is essentially only seven years old, which makes his bratty, entitled behavior before his Character Development a lot more understandable in hindsight.
    • Van comes off as a middle-aged man, at least in the English version, but according to his bio he's only 27. It doesn't help that his hair color makes it look as though his hair is graying. The skit "Brother And Sister" suggests that he invoked this trope, as Tear tells Luke that he grew a beard to seem older in response to other members of the Order being jealous of his rising so high so quickly.
  • Tales of Destiny 2: Though Reala's official (mental) age is 16, she's an Artificial Human born from a Lens during the events of the game, and thus is technically not even a 1-year-old.
  • As much as Tekken has a really bad habit of making its characters Older Than They Look, it does have an example of someone who's a tad younger than they may appear in the form of Baek Doo San. He's 48, but you might be convinced otherwise by his grey hair, among other things.
  • While many Touken Ranbu characters fall to the other end of the spectrum and all of them are Really 700 Years Old, Izuminokami Kanesada looks like he's in his early twenties, but acts like a teenager due to being the most recently created sword.
  • In Until Dawn the main cast look like they’re in their 20s to early 30s (their mocap and voice actors are all adults), but canonically they’ll all in the 18-19 age range with Josh being the eldest at 20. Given the frequency of Dawson Casting in the Slasher Movie genre, this is very fitting.
  • In Warcraft, some orcs, including Rend and Maim Blackhand are artificially aged, and thus become adults years before they would naturally grow to that point.
    • Wrathion, the uncorrupted black dragon, has the human appearance of a youngish looking man with a goatee. His true form is that of a black dragon ''whelp', a dragonling a couple feet long, making for a rare example of a dragon that stays human because he's more imposing that way. He's actually only two years old.
    • Archmage Khadgar got hit with a curse when he was seventeen, which resulted in him aging prematurely. He now has the appearance of an old man, although he still has the vigor of his age.
  • WarioWare:
    • Mona is a teenager, but until her redesign in WarioWare Gold, she could easily be mistaken for being at least a young adult.
    • Played for Laughs with 18-Volt. You'd assume his name matches his age and that he's an older teen like Mona, especially since he has the voice to match. In actuality, he's the same age as 9-Volt, being a fourth-grader in the same class as his smaller buddy. His deceptive age is lampshaded in WarioWare Gold, where after his rap battle with 13-Amp, she's shocked when he casually reveals his true age.
    13-Amp: What school you go to?
    18-Volt: Diamond City Elementary.
    13-Amp: ...Huh?
  • In NEO: The World Ends with You, Tanzo Kubo, who's frequently called "Gramps" or an "old asshole," looks like the oldest character in the main cast, and often acts condescending toward the younger cast members, is actually only 31 years old. Considering he's an Angel, he could actually be much older, though.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3:
    • Alexandria, who looks like she's 18, but she actually has the body of a 15-year-old. However, since most humans in this world are are born at 10 years old, that means she's technically only 6. Of course, in her case she's doing it deliberately to cover for the fact that people wouldn't respect such a young commander. Mention is made of her wearing cosmetics, and her clothing clearly emphasizes her bust in a way that no one else bothers with.
    • Several of the other commanders look a bit older than they are, to the point that it's easy to forget that it's impossible for anyone to be physically older than twenty. Ethel, Cammuravi and Ashera look like they're in their late twenties, while Teach and Isurd look like they could be even older. By all indications, there's no special explanation here; Ethel, Cammuravi and Ashera seemingly just grew up faster (a flashback to when Ethel was fourteen made her look more as you would expect of her age), while Teach has actual worry lines from all the stress of his life and Isurd has graying hair (which may or may not be a result of having Blade ancestry).
  • Like a Dragon franchise:
    • Yakuza 4 has Shun Akiyama, who is 32 years old, and gets asked by an innocent bystander if he has any grandkids yet. However, the game shows that Akiyama aged prematurely due to being homeless and sleeping rough for several years.
    • Yakuza 0 shows us a young Ryuji Goda in a sidequest (he would go on to become the Big Bad of Yakuza 2). Despite only being in sixth grade at this point, he has the build of a high school football player!
      • In the same game, protagonists Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima look mostly the same as they did in the 21st century, even though both men are in their 20s by this point (Kiryu is 20, while Majima is 24). Though if you started with this game, you might get the opposite trope instead.

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