History Main / MercyInvincibility

** In ''Videogame/TheLegendOfZelda'', both Link and his foes have mercy invincibility, but Link's lasts longer.

As a small mercy, most games that work according to these rules grant the player a small span of invulnerability whenever damage is taken, giving him time to extricate himself before another hit can be taken. This is visually indicated in most games by partial transparency or flashing of the player sprite. The momentary invulnerability may be substituted for (or coupled with) the player character being physically [[{{Knockback}} thrown backward]] from the point of impact.

* ''VideoGame/GoldenEye1997'' for the N64 played this straight, providing about half a second of invulnerability to the player after being damaged to make it easier to survive and escape a fierce gunfight.

** ''RaymanOrigins'' again makes damage knock you back and you're only invulnerable for about half a second, which is a major factor contributing to the game's NintendoHard status.

* ''Manga/DragonBall Advanced Adventure'' gives you a moment of safety if you get hit a strong attack or multiple small ones in a row, but the bosses also get a form of it. After you hit them enough times in a combo, once you stop juggling them they'll flash blue for a few seconds. While they're flashing, your attacks will connect for no damage at all, indicated by a dull "thunk" with each hit.

* Played straight and averted in ''ShinMegamiTenseiNocturne''. While a new fight won't start the moment you finish your last fight, it's still entirely possible for a new team of demons to show up as reinforcements in the first fight after you beat the first team. With the skill riberama to make the odds of battle increase you can occasionally fight up to four or five teams in a row.

** In ''MegaMan10'', the reason the Triple Blade is so powerful at point blank range is that each blade counts for a separate hit, thus letting you hit an enemy for 3 hits before MercyInvincibility kicks in.

* Both played straight and averted in the Mega Man ''BattleNetwork'' series in the case of both the player and bosses. Some attacks triggered mercy invincibility, while others didn't (Usually multi-hitting ones). The latter were initially favored over the former for obvious reasons (Or for those fighting bosses with them, hated), but later games in the series added attacks that ''ignore and remove mercy invincibility'', which made the former more practical to use.

* MassEffect3 multiplayer has this in the form of the [[http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/343/index/14478691 Health and Shield "Gates"]], when reaching 0% shield or 5% health a short invincibility is activated of a length depending on the difficulty level. To prevent too much abuse it can only be triggered every few seconds.

->''"But I suddenly scream "Shit!"''
->''Because my guy has just been hit''
->''With my hits points indicator less than full''
->
->''But it's quite inconsequential''
->''And my wrath will be torrential''
->''For the following one second''
->''I am in-vin-ci-a-ble"''

* A clear mark of a skilled ''{{Metal Slug}}'' player, is watching them jump in and out of a vehicle repeatedly to abuse the few seconds of MercyInvincibility it grants.

* A clear mark of a skilled ''{{Metal Slug}}'' player, is watching them jump in and out of a vehicle repeatedly to abuse the few seconds of MercyInvincibility it grants.

[[AC:ThirdPersonShooter]]
* In MegaManLegends, Mega Man gets a second or two of mercy invincibility each time he gets knocked down. What makes this game notable in this regard is that there is an item (the trademark Mega Man helmet) that makes him much harder to knock down. The game plays this off as a good thing, but if you can't be knocked down, that means many enemies can just keep you in stunlock (i.e. flinching so many times you can't move at all) with machine gun fire until you are dead. Being knocked down causes you no extra damage, and allows you enough time after you get up to move out of the way.

** Cruelly inverted in ''VideoGame/MegaManAndBass'', where bosses get LONGER mercy invincibility than the player character. The real kicker? Bass's primary weapon is a weak rapid-fire shot. However, only the first hit will count for anything, meaning any boss fought with Bass' default weapon takes much, much, much longer to kill than it should.

** You actually could get mercy invincibility in one case: getting flattened by an giant hamster ball, or the ice cream man.

* In ''StarControl 2: The Ur'quan Masters'', an encounter would normally be triggered whenever the player's flagship touched another spaceship on the map screen, but for a short period following an encounter the player was able to pass by any number of ships without another encounter resulting. This prevented an immediate re-encounter with the same ship, but was also useful when the player was being swarmed by dozens of hostile fighters. The encounter-free period was signaled by the ''non-player'' ship flickering.

* ''VideoGame/CaveStory'' - In areas past the Plantation, it is probably the main reason you die at a NintendoHard pace instead an PlatformHell pace.

* The ''StreetsOfRage'' series has a unique take on this. Like all other beat em ups, your character cannot be hurt while they get up after being knocked down. However, when you lose a life and respawn by falling from the sky, all enemies, including bosses, on the screen are knocked down in order to prevent the enemies from ganging up on the player that just spawned.

** Although ''NeedForSpeed'' games feature this ability, ''Most Wanted'', ''Carbon'', and ''Undercover'' have actually made it ''less'' useful. Considering the fact that there are two situations where resetting would be useful (flipped over car and tires shredded from a police spike strip), the first instance has the car reset automatically, and late in the game, such a situation means you've probably lost the race anyway. The second situation, where the player's tires have been shredded (preventing a getaway as the car simply ''will not move''), seems like it would be useful, but the reset inevitably places the car in the middle of the pursuing police with no velocity, resulting in an arrest before the player can do anything.

* Like a lot of fighters, ''VideoGame/DissidiaFinalFantasy'' uses this to let characters who have been PunchedAcrossTheRoom or knocked over recover and get back in the fight. However, ''unlike'' a lot of fighters, this is averted in the sequel, ''Duodecim''. Yeah, ''you'' can't whale on your opponent further after you've nailed them to the wall--but your ''[[AssistCharacter assist]]'' can. And if your assist was the one to do the wall-nailing, then you can gladly continue the damage. This is the main way players unleash combos in that game.

* ''VideoGame/{{BioShock 2}}'' added this to the LastChanceHitPoint mechanic already present in the first game.

* In ''PhantasyStarOnline'', players would be knocked down and receive a short mercy invincibility period as they stood up again if they took more than a certain percentage of their max HP in damage in a single blow. This led to an absurd situation in which certain characters with more HP and higher levels were in fact, less survivable than low level characters with less HP, and many players simply minimized their HP and defense stats on purpose to make use of this.

* In ''CityOfHeroes'', self-revive powers have a brief period of complete invulnerability for a moment or two after pulling yourself off the floor. Also, a character revived by any means will be protected from XP Debt (the game's penalty for being defeated) for a short period of time, to allow a character to be revived without risk of being penalized twice if they get defeated immediately after rezzing.

* Pretty much every incarnation of the ''Mega Man'' games has had this ability. Some of them actually had items that would extend the length of time it was active. The invincibility actually made it ''advantageous'' to be hit in certain spots. In most ''Mega Man'' games, touching spikes means instant death, but hitting an enemy right before hitting spikes would allow you to escape with your life (provided, of course, you had time to extricate yourself from the spikes before the invincibility wore off). However, this doesn't apply at all to ''VideoGame/MegaMan1''. Touch spikes at any time, even after getting hit? BOOM!
** By the way, almost every single boss in the ''Mega Man'' series has MercyInvincibility as well.

** In ''1'' the invincibility expires even when the game is "paused" with the Select button (different from the weapon select screen, and only present in that incarnation of the game); hitting Select immediately after hitting a boss allows a subsequent hit to strike the boss straightaway. This is what enables the Elec Beam/pause rapidly [[GoodBadBugs glitch]] that can kill a boss with one or two shots.
** In ''10'', the reason the Triple Blade is so powerful at point blank range is that each blade counts for a separate hit, thus letting you hit an enemy for 3 hits before MercyInvincibility kicks in.

* In the case of ''SuperMarioBros'', this can happen to powered-up Mario or Luigi, resulting in the loss of any special ability he had.

** Particularly difficult VideoGame/SuperMarioWorld [[ROMHack romhacks]] will sometimes have sections of their levels that are impossible to get through unless you're invincible, so the designer will throw in a powerup just so you can lose it and use the Mercy Invincibility to race through these sections. If you don't make it in time, you die.

* ''{{La-Mulana}}'' has a ROM combo that increases the amount of Mercy Invincibility you get. Of course, it's [[GuideDangIt never alluded to]].

* ''{{Vectorman}}'' had an interesting form of this. When you get hit, you keep your invincibility longer if you continue getting hit (by an enemy, lava, etc.), and further, if you keep ramming the minor enemies, THEY get destroyed. Sweet.
* The ''{{Metroid}}'' series always has mercy invincibility. However, it lasts much shorter than it does in some other platformers, to ramp up the difficulty. A glitch in ''Super Metroid'' allowed you to have a permanent Speed Booster effect (which combines SuperSpeed and InvincibilityPowerUp in one convenient package), but it had the unusual side effect of eliminating MercyInvincibility - making spiked floors, normally an inconvenience at best, your worst nightmare.

* The first three ''{{Rayman}}'' games all use mercy invincibility. However, it can be ''incredibly'' unhelpful in the first game, since the automatic knockback coupled with it commonly tends to either push you into [[SuperDrowningSkills water]] or [[ConvectionSchmonvection lava]], [[BottomlessPit off a ledge]], [[CollisionDamage into another enemy]], into the edge of the screen in an AutoScrollingLevel, or onto a [[SpikesOfDoom floor of spikes]] [[OneHitKill that instantly kills you regardless of how much health you have left]].

* ''{{Purple}}'' makes you invulnerable for a short while when hurt. [[CaptainObvious That's probably a good thing.]]
* In ''TheSmurfs'' for the SNES, you had mercy invincibility, but so did the only non-boss[[hottip:* :bosses have [[BossVulnerability their own trope]] enemy that could take several hits: Azrael, who was hard to avoid and naturally, could [[CollisionDamage hurt you]] while invincible.

* ''SoulBlazer'' had this, as well as one armor that extended its length.

* In keeping with its NintendoHard reputation, ''{{Gradius}}'' on the NES had a power-up that gave the Vic Viper shields. When the shields took a sufficient amount of damage, they turned red, then another point of damage would make them disappear; however, since the disappearance often came during a flurry of shots and since there was no Mercy Invincibility on the SHIELDS, you could lose the shields with one shot then die the next moment.
* ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}''. You have a few seconds of invulnerability after dying and respawning, at least in the Windows games. Also, after you finish off one section of a boss's health bar, they often get a couple seconds of invulnerability before you can start draining the next section.

* In ''SecretOfMana'' most enemies in the game, after being hit with a physical attack, would enter a stunned state where further attacks apparently did not affect them. Unfortunately for weaker enemies (and, annoyingly, your characters) attacks that hit while the target was stunned ''would'' do damage the moment the stun period ended, immediately leading to another stun period and so on.

* ''CastlevaniaSymphonyOfTheNight'' has split-second MercyInvincibility, making it very possible to be ravaged to death should you fall into a morass of monsters or [[SpikesOfDoom a large spike trap]], usually requiring you turn into mist to escape.

* [[InvertedTrope Inverted]] in the SNES port of ''VideoGame/CaptainAmericaAndTheAvengers'' where enemies can pummel you down to nothing in a quick succession of blows, but get mercy invincibility as the player hits them, preventing them the chance to do more than small increments of damage at once while staying wide open and vulnerable. Combine this with the fact that the first level took over a minute to start on a black screen (what the hell? A cartridge game with LOAD TIME?) and you begin to understand why nobody ever talks of this game.

* Spikes in the first version of the original ''[[SonicTheHedgehog Sonic]]'' would not trigger MercyInvincibility at all, leading to situations where a player could land on a large area of spikes and lose their shield, rings, then life in one go as Sonic bounced uncontrollably from spike to spike.

* Similar to the above example, some of the ''DragonQuest'' games have an item, the Golden Claw, which guarantees a fight with a monster at every step.
* Absent in ''EVOSearchForEden''.

* The ''{{Pokemon}}'' games just don't have it at all. Say you are facing north and you want to take a step east. It's entirely possible to get one wild encounter when you turn to face east and another one when you move to the tile east of you.

* Painfully absent in the indie shooting game ''[[http://www.2demotion.com/sapharica.html Sapharica]]''. It has some pretty dense bullet hell. You never get invincibility in the game. Not even when bombing. Then again, this IS from the same person that made a ''Touhou''-themed VideoGame/IWannaBeTheGuy clone that pretty much required memorization of the level (and some [[GuideDangIt really obtuse puzzle-solving]]) to get to the first boss.

* The total absence of this in the NES version of ''VideoGame/MetalGear1987'' is one of the many reasons why that [[PortingDisaster version]] is reviled by Kojima. Both [=MSX2=] games and even the non-canon NES sequel ''VideoGame/SnakesRevenge'' gave players temporary invincibility every time Snake gets hit. This is actually a necessity in ''VideoGame/MetalGear2SolidSnake'', since it makes it very easy to defeat [[spoiler: Dr. Pettrovich]], who sneaks up behind Snake and tries to strangle him. Because the player constantly receives damage from the choke-hold, Snake is constantly in MercyInvincibility, meaning it's possible to kill the boss just by firing remote-controlled missiles at [[ViolationOfCommonSense his own back]]. He also had MercyInvincibility in ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid'', but it was excised from the sequels and the remake in the name of realism.