Troperville
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Okay class, here's a hypothetical situation for you all to chew on.
Imagine, if you will, an anonymous troper; let's call him/her Report Siht. Our new friend Report likes video games.
Report is currently playing through the timeless classic "The Legend of Alice and Bob: Hilarity Ensues". Up until the point he/she is at in the game, Alice and Bob were the sole playable characters, but suddenly, a message appears on screen:
" You have achieved One Hundred Percent Completion! That Troper has been unlocked!"
Mildly curious, Report goes to the character select screen to investigate...
What's this!? He only has three weapons! He can't even do most of the levels! WHYYYY!?
Poor Report has become a victim of this trope.
At its most basic, this is when an extra (not necessarily unlockable) feature present in a game or other medium
- Lacks functionality compared to other aspects of the game
- Does not work properly in the context of gameplay, often struggling to complete basic tasks other characters easily do (in the case of an extra character) or not meshing well with the rest of the game (in the case of bonus levels or items)
or
Note that in this case "bonus" and "extra" refer to something that may not be found in normal gameplay; if you're not sure, a good litmus test would be the question "Could I conceivably play through the entire main game from beginning to end ( One Hundred Percent Completion notwithstanding) and not once find or utilize this feature?"
This most likely occurs due to a Cosmic Deadline-induced case of They Just Didnt Care. With the Almighty Deadline looming inexorably in the near future, many sensible developers would probably do the logical thing and make sure the game as a whole works properly and the main playable characters and scenarios are as complete as possible before working on giving Awesome Mc Coolname The Unlockable Anti Hero Bringer Of Death some toys to play with.
Compare Dummied Out, where the extra stuff was axed entirely. Contrast Show Within A Show, where the extra content is a full-fledged game in and of itself. Characters afflicted with this tend to devolve into Spoony Bards. And contrast Bragging Rights Reward.
Beware! Since the vast majority of examples deal with unlockable rewards and other goodies, spoilers ahoy!
Examples:
- The unlockable Mission Mode characters in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, who each get only five or six usable weapons, compared to the normal characters who each have more than 20.
- Being able to play as Mickey Mouse makes up for this for many people.
- Your Mileage May Vary as to whether Riku's Reverse/Rebirth play mode in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories falls into this trope. While his fighting style is both different from Sora's and fully fleshed out, his deck of cards cannot be customized, and instead has a different pre-set format for each world.
- Super Mario Galaxy: the Grand Finale Galaxy. It's just a level based on the game's intro scene with all the characters present, with nothing to do other than collect purple coins.
- Sonic The Hedgehog 2 lets you play as Tails, who is identical to Sonic in every way except he can't go into super form. (He gained his signature flying ability in 3, as well as lowered jump height and running speed)
- Sonic Adventure DX has Metal Sonic as the all-emblems reward. However, he is identical to Sonic in every way, and can only be used in Trial Mode. What's worse is that he only flies at medium speed, switching back to running at maximum speed, so you don't even get that.
- Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a game with three individual characters at the start, Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, who are all fairly balanced between themselves. But, the game allows you to make your own characters, and as such everyone and their brother has their own character - most of them faster and more powerful than the regular characters. However, with the good, there is also bad, with one specific character: the "Crawla", which uses the sprites of the first enemy you encounter in the game, has a horrendous jump height, a double jump ability which almost makes up for it, is so slow the first level (which can be done in less than 20 seconds with Sonic if you know what you're doing) takes at least a minute, but at times provides an even better play experience than the original three characters!
- In Mega Man X8, the navigators Alia, Palette, and Layer are unlockable as playable characters. They are basically clones of X, Axl, and Zero, respectively; however, Alia cannot get X's capsule upgrades and Palette cannot copy enemies. You also have to purchase all of X, Axl, and Zero's purchasable upgrades a second time in order to access them on Alia, Palette, and Layer. Additionally, using even one of them when running a stage will forbid you from choosing a navigator for that stage.
- Vile's mode in Maverick Hunter X is one of the "can't do the whole game" variety. Although you get to go through the first couple of fortress levels after the eight bosses and beat Bospider and Rangda Bangda, at the end of the third fortress stage you fight X and Zero instead. After beating them, you get the ending for Vile's alternate story, so there's no D-Rex to fight, and no battle with Velgauder or Sigma. On the plus side, afterwards you can go through the game again with unlimited power to select any weapons you want.
- Proto Man is unlockable via DLC in Mega Man 9; however, his mode has no story, and he cannot unlock achievements or access the item shop.
- In an odd example, Sonic Advance 2 let you unlock the Tiny Chao Garden by meeting certain conditions in the game... Even though the first Sonic Advance had the exact same mode available from the start.
- The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time introduced crawling explosives called Bombchus, which were only used in a couple puzzles and returned in Majora's Mask, where they were needed twice to complete an optional dungeon near the end of the game. However, they only truly become this in the Oracle games, where they are only acquired as a bonus after starting a New Game Plus, are not particularly useful at any point in the game, and are not normally dropped by defeated enemies, making them difficult to stock up on.
- In Ocarina of Time there's also the final Skulltula sidequest's reward, the right to ask the person for ruppees at no cost, anytime,
anywhere. Not only is money in this game pretty useless, this is near the end of the game and you probably expected to receive a way to hold more than 500 ruppees, like other rewards you got during the sidequest.
- Old Axe Armor in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is a solo character instead of a team of two, has only two special moves (one of which is used solely for navigation) and is simply a Palette Swap of an existing enemy. However, it is very likely this was intentional.
- Almost every Metroid-ish Castlevania has an unlockable mode where you play as another character who can't do most of what the main character can (e.g. can't open the menu, can't collect items, can't level up sometimes). Sometimes, however, these come with stories of their own. Keep in mind, this is usually to balance them against their Game Breaker abilities.
- Symphony of the Night: Richter mode, Maria mode in the PSP version (she's actually easier to play as than Alucard in the Saturn one)
- Harmony of Dissonance: Maxim mode
- Aria of Sorrow: Julius mode
- Dawn of Sorrow: Julius mode (has its own cutscenes, and the characters can gain levels)
- Portrait of Ruin: Sisters mode (prequel to the main story), Richter mode, Old Axe Armor mode
- Order of Ecclesia: Albus mode
- Curse of Darkness: Trevor mode
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a two-in-one combo. It has several unlockable characters; Some of these are unique characters that cannot change classes or learn new abilities, while others are merely normal units with special sprites. One, notoriously, doesn't unlock until after you have nothing you can possibly do with him.
- The Legendary Starfy has a multiplayer mode that lets another player control Starly. This can only be used in a few specific areas of the game.
- The two bonus characters in Star Ocean: Till The End Of Time: Director's Cut may count. Adray is really just a less capable wizard (a spot already filled by Sophia) with a weapon set nearly identical to Albel's, while Mirage uses effectively the same attack set and play-style as Cliff, but is 40-50 levels lower. The player has the option to gain Adray early into the game when he would be at a similar level to the party, but if you opt to gain him at the next opportunity (much later near the end of the game), he'll still be at that level (lv 19 when the party is roughly 55-70).
- In the original, buggy version of the game sold in Japan, the four "optional" characters (Albel, Nel, Peppita, Roger) were required. Meanwhile in the North American release, only two of them can be chosen while Mirage and Adray are necessary.
- About 50% of the quest rewards in Diablo 2.
- Warriors Orochi 2... There's a HUGE roster of officers to unlock, and while several of them have suspiciously similar movesets, each of them is, at least, a BIT original. However, the hardest character to unlock, by an order of magnitude, is Orochi Z - his appearance in your roster basically signifies that you have achieved 100% Completion and then some. (You have to spend DAYS just grinding levels, well after you have finished completing every scenario on every difficulty, to unlock the last Dream Scenario - and then beat that to unlock Orochi Z.)
- Now, Orochi Z is basically the Final Boss, so that's awesome. He's not JUST a Palette Swap of Orochi either, having different hair. However... firstly, he's doesn't have his own set of weapons, like everybody else does - he just uses the same set as Orochi. Second, his moveset is less than half the size of anybody else, and he never learns new moves - though, granted, those few moves he DOES have, are pretty powerful. Finally, every other character has a series of artwork - various design-sketches, posed character-models, screenshots from cutscenes they're in and the like - that are unlocked as you use them. Orochi Z has none. So effectively, once you've taken him into combat ONCE to check out all 3 of his moves, there's literally no point in ever using him again - especially since, by that point, you've already done basically everything in the game.
- Subverted in Warlords 1, 2, and 3. The bonuses on items could vary from 1 to 3 in several different categories, but since there were more heroes than items, even 1 items were valuable.
- In Master Of Magic, the best quest rewards were: extra masteries, extra spell books, rescue of an elite hero, or an elite item. If you had the maximum number of spellbooks, heroes and masteries, the game was forced to give you some crap like an Item of Lame.
- In Mech Commander, it is quite common to kill wave after wave of elite mech's without salvaging a single one, but the single scout in the entire level does get salvaged.
- In the PS2 Shinobi, Joe Musashi can be unlocked as a playable character, his bonus being that he has unlimited shurikens and no life draining tate bar. The pro to this is that you don't have to worry about getting huge combos to keep your life and damage enemies, and you can just continually chuck shurikens at some hard to kill enemies. The downside is that there are some bosses that pretty much require you to get huge combos in order to defeat them in a timely fashion, however you can also chuck shurikens at them continually. A perfect beginner character... only you don't get him until you've beaten the entire game, gotten nearly all the hidden coins, and explored all the hidden areas.
- The Bonus Dungeon in Dragon Quest VI is just several levels from normal dungeons stuck onto each other with no rhyme or reason (but with stronger enemies), and no justification.
- By beating Backyard Skateboarding, you unlock Old School Andy. Who is a Palette Swap of Andy MacDonald, a character available from the start.
- In Final Fantasy VII, defeated Ruby Weapon gave you a golden chocobo... Except it's Nintendo Hard to defeat it without breeding one in the first place, and this new golden chocobo sucks at races.
- Star Fox Adventures had Cheat Tokens which did a few things when you dropped them into the well in the maze under the Warpstone. Two of these stand out:
- The Dino subtitle, which allowed you to see the subtitles in Dino, the game's substitution cipher. However, it doesn't replace "[Dino Talk]" with what was actually said, and the subtitles are actually significantly wrong in spots.
- The part of the sound test where you can listen to tunes. Just about every sound test I've seen in any video game has some way of identifying the tune, even if it's just a number. This one? Nothing.
- Sweet Tooth and Minion in Twisted Metal 2. You get them after you beat the game once. There's just one problem in the PSX version of the game: you get no continues. If you get stomped on level 7 out of 8 (the number is a deliberate choice), you're finished. At least Minion is intentionally overpowered. Sweet Tooth is exactly as strong as a regular character and therefore very hard to beat the game with.
- The Piranha ship in Wipeout 2097/XL. It is super fast, super agile, super this and that, only you can't use weapons. It still wins everything, but the game just got a lot more boring. They fixed this in Wipeout 64, though they still gave the Piranha the most useless superweapon.
- Imperishable Night has, as unlockables, solo versions of each team (Reimu only and Yukari only for instance, as opposed to Reimu and Yukari). However, human characters cannot go over 20% on the phantom gauge, and youkai characters can't go under -20%, which causes problems for human characters in dense bullet clouds or boss battles and for youkai characters who need to move quickly.
- Gradius V and Ikaruga have continues that increase for each hour of play, culminating in "free play" (unlimited continues) after a set number of continues obtained. But if you improve yourself at either game, by the time you unlock free play you most likely won't need it anymore. Gradius Gaiden is a similar case, save for the increasing credits; you start with 9 instead of 3, and they never go up save for when you unlock free play.
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