Conversely, in these types of games, if a seemingly-unimportant character gets a face and/or a dedicated voice volume control, you know they'll play a much bigger role later on. If a voiced character is part of the 'other characters' volume setting, don't expect them to be very important either. In a similar vein, some VNs with character voices may have character-specific voice volume options. Visual Novels where character portraits are shown whenever someone is speaking may exclude certain characters from having portraits, so if you see a character speak but not get a portrait, they will likely not get much importance to the story. This, too is sometimes averted by hiding the name or showing a generic description until your character learns who the person is. In games where characters' names (or lack thereof) are revealed in the dialog box or by selecting them, the player can learn people's names before the player's character does, and the player can use this to determine which characters will be important. However, others may avert this by leaving any story-related achievements hidden until they're achieved or only giving them vague descriptions like 'Defeat the Final Boss,' or even just replacing spoiler names/locations/etc. Many ' Achievement' lists will give things away about the game to come for example, the names of certain bosses, levels, etc. Some game companies have a deliberate policy of this, so that people who have rented the game can imagine all the 'wonderful prizes' yet to be unlocked and buy the game. This is common in the tutorial and early sections, where the game is still gradually introducing new mechanics, and the player shouldn't be messing with them beforehand. You can see the Your Princess Is in Another Castle! moment coming when you've got half your equipment missing, but you still won't know exactly when or why it happens. Like many meta-expectations, this is an interesting form of Spoiler, because it generally gives something closer to hints or foreshadowing rather than actual details.

Combat obscura subtitles