Apex Legends is the latest tool of choice for Japanese spoiler trolls 

It’s a given in multiplayer games that there will always be players who ruin the fun for others. Cheating, gameplay sabotage, online harassment – there seems to be no end to the number of ways folks can ruin a game’s community. Now there is another trend that seems to be on the rise: movie spoilers. 

A Japanese Apex Legends player recently took to the game to spoil everyone’s day. But instead of cheating or griefing their teammates, this player decided to change their username to spoil the recently released Detective Conan movie that Japanese theater-goes are itching to see. The user changed their handle to “The real culprit of the new Conan movie is *name*,” spoiling the outcome for anyone who happened to come across them. 

 Detective Conan or Case Closed is a popular detective manga series that has been in serialization since 1994. The manga was popular enough to warrant an anime series in 1996 which in turn has been in production ever since. The latest movie titled Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram follows a similar format to past stories in that it has a mystery-type flow with a grand reveal at the end (think Scooby-Doo but with fewer talking dogs and more de-aged student detectives). 

Since the killers’ identities are central to Detective Conan, simply mentioning their names is enough to spoil the surprise. By switching their username to The Million-Dollar Pentagram’s killer, the Apex Legends player effectively spoils the movie for everyone who checks the kill feed. The player does not seem to be cheating either, so they cannot get banned unless several players report them to Respawn Entertainment. 

Spoilers for Detective Conan-related media are nothing new. It has been a common occurrence with each new Conan release for trolls to actively search social media for tags and posts by others mentioning that they are about to watch the movie or anime and unnecessarily divulge key plot points. This player just takes it a step further by inserting spoilers for a popular franchise into an equally popular video game.