When I was young and had a super nintendo I loved playing Super Mario RPG.
I’m playing the remake and I’m at the scene after defeating Valentina. Mallow goes into the castle and Mario was left standing outside.
Back then I didn’t know why Mario pulled out an umbrella and it rained. I just realised after 20 years of playing the original that Mario knew it was going to rain because whenever Mallow cries it rains; Mario knew that Mallow would get all emotional when meeting his parents for the first time.
Blew my mind.
Diablo in Diablo games can never be killed permanently
When I first played Diablo 3 I was shocked when Diablo was summoned. My friend I was playing with who played thousands of hours on D2 just chuckled and said “well the game is called Diablo”
More or less the entirety of Sanitarium. I had to play it a second time to know that it was talking about the mental recovery of the main character. Before that, to me it was just someone travelling between strange worlds.
The scene in Silent Hill 2 where you’re in a room with Angela and it’s basically a construct of the sexual trauma she endured from her brother and father.
When I first played SH2, I kinda innocently didn’t realize all the huge implications in front of your face.
The boss character (aptly named “Abstract Daddy”) is quite literally designed to look like a huge hulking man, on a bed, underneath bed sheets, doing…something.
The worst was realizing that the fleshy pistons pumping in and out in the room were meant to be seen as “foreign objects” entering…Nah, I’ll stop there.
Abstract Daddy is the most blatant. But there is a lot of psychosexual implications in SH2. That early scene with Pyramid Head. All the Nurse enemies can be interpreted as James fantasizing about nurses while his wife was in the hospital. Maria appearing as a ‘sexy’ version of Mary to tempt him, etc.
It didn’t take long (pmuch immediately), but I giggled like a kid once I realized that the subtitle for the first South Park RPG sounds just like Fractured Butthole.
Two playthroughs ago, I realized that the entire honeybee brothel sequence in original ff7 used a combination of writing/camera work/blocking/framing/mini games to foreshadow that Cloud is a big fat fraud and a scared little boy (imo he’s a satire of gamers). The level of sophistication in that games design is just nuts.
It makes me sad how Cloud’s character growth (especially after late in the game when you go through his memories as Tifa) is sorta thrown out in his other appearances as he often is reduced back to the brooding tough guy attitude he fakes at the start of the game.