Magic Pants / Video Games

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• In Altered Beast (1988), the player characters can collect a series of orbs that causes them to become more muscular and less clothed with each application, until finally taking on the form of a fully nude (yet anatomically void) monster. It's a different monster on each level, with the player characters reverting back to their original (clothed) form at the beginning of each level. Then again, you start off wearing not much more than a tunic and a loincloth anyway.
  • Slightly subverted in Altered Beast (2005). Upon first transforming into the werewolf, all your clothes tear off; when you change back, your shirt and jacket are gone for good, yet your jeans and boots somehow return.
• Baldur's Gate III: Lampshaded with Karlach, whose Infernal Engine literally lights her on fire whenever she feels strong emotion. Her underwear's description incredulously wonders how they haven't burned off.
• In the climactic battle with Titan Joker in Batman: Arkham Asylum, the Titan formula has made the Joker a huge, hulking man-thing that stands easily ten feet tall. Needless to say, his purple suit is completely destroyed by the transformation — except for a pair of ragged purple shorts.
• In the Bloody Roar series of games, the transformations into the characters' beast forms explicitly tears the characters' clothing (almost always shoes, but often shirts, and sometimes their beast form is actually partially or completely naked). However, transforming back to human form also restores the torn clothing.
• Averted in Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and every subsequent game that uses the Rondo sprites for the Werewolf enemy. After losing all his HP, he transforms back into a naked man and bursts into flames as per the Castlevania tradition.
  • Played somewhat straight in the Rondo remake on the PSP, The Dracula X Chronicles. When the Werewolf transforms back, he's now wearing a black speedo, both in the new 2.5D remake and the port of the original Rondo. The Werewolves in the port of Symphony, however, remain uncensored.
  • Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia also uses edited Rondo sprites, but with a pair of boxer shorts (that spontaneously appears between frames) rather than the speedo from Dracula X.
  • Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin also averts this with its version of the Werewolf, which upon defeat transforms back into a naked man who coughs blood before dying.
• Used in one of the end credits scenes from Cave Story. Sue and Itoh are transformed from Half Dressed Mimigas to fully-dressed humans.
• In Darkstalkers as per most male Werewolves Jon Talbaine’s dojo pants stay intact when he transforms while his top rips off his torso.
  • Played with Morrigan’s burned reaction sprite such as when Demitri uses his Midnight Bliss attack on her, Morrigan‘s clothes completely burn off but her wings cover her naughty bits. Her clothes naturally regenerate straight after.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Dante, Vergil and later Nero keep their clothing while transforming into their demonic Devil Trigger forms and reverting back. With Dante and Vergil in DMC3 their long coats become an organic part of their bodies and Vergil’s sheath becomes a part of his left arm.
  • Averted with Trish and Lady in DMC5 after they are defeated by Urizen and are absorbed into Cavaliere Angelo and Artemis. By the time Dante and Nero free them Trish and Lady’s clothes have dissolved and they are completely naked. Dante on the other hand despite getting similarly absorbed by Qliphoth, by the time V finds him on the cusp on death, he still has all his clothes on.
• In the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi games if Goku loses a Beam-O-War he’ll lose his gi top and undershirt but keeps his pants and boots. Same goes for other characters with destructible clothing like Teen Gohan.
• Morrigan from Dragon Age: Origins has a bra on when her shirt is off, and only when her shirt is off.
• Averted with werecreatures in Dwarf Fortress: when one in human form transforms all their clothes are removed (even stuff they can still put back on, like backpacks), though not destroyed because that's not something the game engine can do yet. As a result, most werecreatures spend the majority of their time naked in human form, hiding in caves.
• Dungeon Crawl used to avert this trope, as shapeshifting would unequip any equipment incompatible with the selected form, and having cursed equipment in one of those slots would make shapeshifting impossible. After people complained about how annoying this was, the developers made it so that any incompatible equipment (including cursed) instead melds into the player's body until the transformation wears off.
• Subverted in Morrowind. If you become a werewolf and transform, when it's no longer night, you won't be wearing anything (except your glued on loincloth). Though they won't be destroyed, since you can just equip them again, otherwise all your precious artifacts would be destroyed.
  • When werewolves return in Skyrim, so too does this trope. When the timer wears out on your werewolf form, your character reverts to your humanoid form, naked save for the magical underwear. However, all your equipment is still in your inventory and just needs to be re-equipped.
• Fawkes from Fallout 3 used to wear Vault 87 overalls. He still does, but having grown into twice as tall and large as he once was, the top half has been torn, clearly inadequate to house his new physique. The lower half fits just fine.
  • Though it does state in one of the computer terminals that Super Mutants have no reproductive organs anyway.
• Zig-zagged in Fear & Hunger: Termina regarding the Moonscorched contestants: for instance, Levi's outfit is completely destroyed aside from the sleeves of his shirt, Abella's boots and shirt are ripped but the overalls remain relatively intact, and the only clothing Henryk loses post-Moonscorching are his shoes, with his outfit remaining otherwise in mint condition.
• In Final Fantasy VII, Vincent Valentine's Limit Break involves changing shape into a beast. His clothes simply reappear when he changes back.
  • Advent Children seems to suggest that the cloak itself is part of his power. Possibly a holdover from when he was first transformed, since he was wearing a labcoat at the time.
  • Possibly Terra Branford in Final Fantasy VI, whose innate ability, Trance (Morph in the original release) turns her into a naked, fuzzy, pink Esper, although she still wields her weapons and enjoys the stat benefits of her armor and relics. Using the command "Revert" restores her and her clothes. Might just be a case where Power Glows so brightly that it prevents anyone from seeing her clothes underneath.
  • And again in Final Fantasy IX, with both Zidane and Kuja, whose trance forms have all their clothes vanish in lieu of fur, yet reappear as soon as it ends.
• In the Fire Emblem series, the Manaketes, Laguz, Kitsune, and Wolfskin don't have any issues with their clothing, despite the fact that their dragon/animal transformations are larger then their humanoid forms, and very different in shape, as well. It simply disappears when they transform, and comes back once they revert to human form.
  • Averted by Panne the Taguel (and her son Yarne) in Fire Emblem: Awakening; her light armor is designed to fit her body in both her humanoid and giant rabbit forms.
• In Goblins Quest 3, when Blount turns into a Wolf Man, all of this clothes except his pants rip off. When he turns back, they all reappear.
• In Golden Sun Dark Dawn, Sveta's clothing will magically expand to fit her Beast Form when it's activated, and then magically shrink back to their normal size when she reverts. No Clothing Damage is sustained in either transformation.
• Hakaiou: King of Crusher have your Hulking Out moment from a human to a gigantic Beast Man, and your blue jeans are the only article of clothing that remains. Of course you lose your pants when you turn into a Kaiju. Curiously in the final cutscene, after you (as a kaiju) destroyed New York city, you then revert back to human... with your clothing inexplicably back.
• Hands of Necromancy sees you as a sorcerer who can collect scrolls turning you into a serpent, a Rock Monster, and a Big Red Devil, and somehow your clothing changes along with you.
• Jak and Daxter:
  • When Daxter is turned into an ottsel, he's left with only his gloves and goggles. Similarly, Veger loses his coat, boots, and pants, and Tess loses just her shoes. And when Daxter's Superpowered Evil Side comes out, his gloves and goggles grow while his pants are shredded from the knees down. Of course, upon returning to his cute lil' ottsel form, his pants are returned to normal.
  • In Jak II: Renegade, the final Dark Jak upgrade causes his upper body to grow to about twice its usual size, with his shirt changing size and shape accordingly.
  • In PlayStation Move Heroes, Daxter's pants only appear when he enters Dark Mode (in what has to be some bizarre Zig Zag of this trope).
• Subverted in Killer Instinct with Sabrewulf's ending. After turning back into a human, his shirt rips more, and because he's only seen from the waist up for this final scene, one can only assume what's down there, or more so, what isn't.
  • Exaggerated in the SNES port, in which a pair of tattered shorts appears on him when he becomes human.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Link from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. When he's a kid he has no tights. When he wakes up in the Temple of Time... tights. Magically. (Of course, he also has his ears pierced now and his hair isn't any longer than it was seven years ago, so maybe someone in the Sacred Realm gave him a makeover before sending him back)
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask's Giant's Mask. Well, okay, it may be the mask that's magical and causes his clothes to grow in tandem, but it's still kind of humorous when you think about it. Also applies to the other masks.
  • Justified Trope in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, since the first time he transforms back to human Link's wearing entirely different clothes, provided to him by the spirits in recognition of his heroism. These clothes could very well be magical, and since the spirits already knew about the wolf thing, they could have prepared the clothes to appear and disappear in just that way. Interestingly, the wolf keeps the earrings that Link wears in his human form, which were also the only piece of clothing he had that were part of his original work clothes.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: When Zelda transforms into the Light Dragon, her clothes disappear. But when she is turned back into her original form in the finale, her pre-transformation clothes reappear without any alterations.
• Werewolves in the game Majesty are naked while in wolf form (which is all the time when they are alive), magically gaining pants when they revert to human form after they die.
• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge: When you resurrect the incinerated remains of Rapp Scallion, his underpants somehow regenerate at the same time as his flesh and skin, and the rest of his clothing regenerate after that.
• In NetHack, a self-polymorph can destroy or forcibly disrobe you of all your armor, but when you return to normal form you can sit on a cockatrice corpse without turning to stone. Hence, your character must be wearing magic pants.
• Alex Mercer from [PROTOTYPE] shapeshifts constantly and never has to replace his clothes — even taking the forms of his victims dresses him in their outfits, whether they were suits, pants, skirts or body armour complete with gas mask. This is because his entire body, including his clothes, is made from superdynamic biomass that can imitate anything. On the downside, that means conventional armour does nothing except complete the disguise and his 'gas mask' will not, in fact, protect him from gas.
  • Same here with James Heller.
• In The Quarry, lycanthropy is shown to cause the werewolf to violently burst out of their clothes (along with their human skin), and they are naked as long as they remain in that form. When they return to human form, however, they find themselves wearing enough scraps of clothing to avoid being completely nude.
• Averted with Rampage; when the player characters revert to human form, they cover themselves up with their hands and run off screen.
• Resident Evil:
  • G-Creature aka the mutated William Birkin from RE2 in first transformation despite his enlarged size, still has his lab coat and pants on (similar to the Lizard from Spider-Man). In his second mutation he loses the coat but keeps his pants which have become ragged shorts. Averted in Birkin’s later forms as he loses his clothes completely albeit he lacks any visible genitalia.
  • In RE2make, Mr X during the Catastrophic Countdown gets caught in a explosion which burns off his Conspicuous Trench Coat allowing for his shirtless and exposed heart One-Winged Angel transformation against Leon. However Mr X’s pants and shoes somehow stay intact even after Leon shoots a anti-tank missile at him. This contrasts to the original game and Resident Evil: Damnation where once the Tyrants Turn Red they lose their Power Limiter coats and reveal their Barbie Doll Anatomy.
  • Similarly Nemesis from RE3 after Carlos shoots the missile inside his enormous RPG making it explode, Nemesis’s top gets burned off (revealing his gruesome torso) but his pants and shoes are unharmed. Nemesis keeps his pants until Jill showers him with acid, after which he comes back as a fleshy monstrous blob with no clothes. Averted in RE3make after Jill burns him alive for the first time, he loses his clothes almost entirely and has nothing but black rags still clinging to his horrible mass.
  • In the Final Battle of Resident Evil 5 after his plane crashes, Wesker loses his Badass Longcoat and top but keeps his pants and boots. The female fanservice is subverted though, as Wesker absorbs Uroboros and becomes monstrous.
  • Derek Simmons in Resident Evil 6 somehow manages to change form twice, and radically — first into some four-legged predator, then into a gigantic Tyrannosaurus rex made of organs. But each time he turns back to human, his pants and boots have survived the transformation.
    • Then he turns into a building-sized insectoid and back, but you guess it — his pants and boots are still immune even to that.
  • Jack Baker in Resident Evil 7 despite being inside a exploding car which destroyed his shirt has his pants stay intact. Given Jack is an elderly hillbilly this can be counted as a blessing.
• Ragnarok (Roguelike) specifically averts this: if you polymorph into something larger than a troll, then "Your armor strains and bursts. Eight of your fingers are cut off by rings. You shall now be known as Gjarfililidan the Fire Giant."
• Rune Factory 3 has characters with shapeshifting ability: Micah, Pia, and Raven. When they transform, they lose or change their clothes, but when they revert to their normal forms. their clothes magically reappear.
• In the Shadow Hearts series all hamonixers are people who can assume the form of various monsters. With the exception of a couple of Cute Monster Girls/Boys, most of these monsters are Monstrous Humanoids at best. On fusion, hamonixers' clothes either disappear, or get torn, but after the end of fusion they magically reappear/fix themselves.
  • In Shadow Hearts: Covenant, when fusing, Yuri drops his knuckledusters, but regains them after defusing. Given that the game's combat involves a lot of running around, he probably would have a lot of troble finding them, if not for this trope.
  • Opening cutscene of Shadow Hearts: From The New World involves Shania taking off her clothes before transforming. Surely, after she defuses, she's fully (by her standards, anyway) clothed.
• A variation of this trope, in Sonic Unleashed: Sonic's first transformation into the Werehog clearly shows his gloves being ripped to shreds, but when he reverts back to his original form, they magically reappear. This happens every subsequent transformation, even in the final one.
  • For that matter, his shoes change size and shape, even gaining spikes.
• If you give your female Soulcalibur 4 character a certain piece of clothing (called spyrobe in the German version) you can clearly see that your character wears no bra. However when the opponent destroys your spyrobe you are suddenly wearing one.
• Splatoon has the Inklings and Octolings, who can morph between humanoid-form and squid/octo-form freely with just the push of a button on the player's end. Only the humanoid form wears clothes and holds a gun; and what's even more vexing is that when an Inkling/Octoling gets splatted they leave behind their clothes and weapon, but respawn with a fresh set back at their base.
• In Splatterhouse, during the fight against the mutated Jennifer, she transforms back into her human form after being hit enough times, with her clothes literally reappearing out of nowhere.
  • In Splatterhouse 3, whenever Rick transforms into his Super Mode, his shirt rips off, but when he reverts, his shirt grows back.
• Eiji from Super Tokusatsu Wars has a transformation where he turns into a large, monstrous humanoid... completely destroying his old body in the process. Yet, if you use the Detransform action, he returns to his normal self, with the clothes he had on before he transformed.
• Averted in Tekken as Devil Kazuya’s full transformation unlike with his son Jin’s Devil form, makes him lose his pants. Then again Devil Kazuya seems to lack any exterior plumbing. In the seventh instalment, Kazuya after reverting to his normal form in his fight with Heihachi regrows his pants.
• Certain characters in the Touhou Project series:
  • Orin shapeshifts into her humanoid form twice in the same game, complete with dress and wheelbarrow.
  • Remilia sometimes changes into a bat during certain attack patterns, and if the player bombs during her final patterns, she temporarily changes into a bat too.
  • Mokou has a literal pair of magic pants that are immune to fire. And immune to her repeatedly dying explosively.
  • Similarly, fairies resurrect after being killed. One assumes this trope is in play when they resurrect, or there would be a massive clothes shortage among those with frequent dying miles like Cirno.
• In The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, it's shown that sorceresses have the power to dress and undress in the blink of an eye, generally done before/after Geralt has sex with them.
• In World of Warcraft, Druids keep the statboosts from their gear despite not wearing anything in animal form. The gear also reappears when they transform back. Same also applies to any other class or mob with a shape-shifting ability. Notably, the Warlock's Metamorphosis (which temporarily turns the user into a demon) has Magic Pants, as does a Shaman's Ghost Wolf form.
  • In addition other players polymorphed by a mage, or otherwise transformed into a Sheep, Penguin, Frog or any other part of a wide ranging menagerie are also immune to unexpected nakedness, but it is magic after all.
  • Players can remove all their equipped gear, leaving the character naked except for a different kind of Magic Pants^note All characters have unremovable underwear of some sort, either boxers/loincloth or a bikini.
  • They finally going to play it real straight in later Expansion Pack Cataclysm, this is going to be standard issue for all classes of playable Worgens. They can alternate between human and worgen form, but always revert to worgen when combat is initiated. Unlike druids, they do keep their clothing/armor while in worgen form (not just strangely dissappear and reappear when returning human).
• The X-Men Origins: Wolverine Licensed Game plays this painfully straight. Despite the game having impressive effects where Wolverine's shirt, flesh and muscles get torn up as he takes damage, this only applies to his upper body. His pants stay completely intact.
  • Played even more ridiculously straight if you unlock the Classic Wolverine costume, where Wolvie's regeneration suddenly now applies to the whole outfit, so as not to ruin the iconic look of the costume with clothing damage.

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