Close, but not close enough. Green graze particles -> blue bar being filled.
This is about a specific radius where the game gives you some benefits like points/filling a certain gauge if you can keep lethal things near your hitbox but not quite where they hit you. It's most commonly seen in Shoot 'Em Up and especially Bullet Hell games, where it's called grazing or scraping. This can be a use of Hitbox Dissonance, but it doesn't have to involve it. This trope tends to become a necessity for Arbitrary Weapon Range and Spread Shot weapons, with it being a disadvantage for the former and the effective way to maximise damage on one foe for the latter. The game frequently adds a visual effect or a sound to indicate that you're successfully pulling this risky maneuver off. Naturally, one of the Hard Mode Perks involving this mechanic means that more bullets also means more grazing and more opportunities to reap this trope's benefits.
Compare Deadly Dodging and High-Speed Missile Dodge. For similar game mechanics see Action Commands, Counter-Attack and Critical Status Buff.
Examples:
- Dino Run awards you points for "surfing the doomwall" (staying inside the Advancing Wall of Doom while it's onscreen).
- Skylanders: During some of Kaos's boss fights, he will fire Doomsharks at the player. Narrowly dodging them will heal the player.
- Need for Speed
- In Need for Speed: Underground 2, one of the stunts to refill your nitrous consists of driving in the opposite lane of traffic and nearly hitting oncoming cars. Also, in drifting contests, drifting closer to walls awards more points, at the risk of colliding and losing your points altogether.
- In Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, Need for Speed: The Run and Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2012), while nitrous gets refilled automatically, driving in the opposite lane of traffic and nearly hitting oncoming cars recharges your nitrous faster.
- Need for Speed Unbound, there are two different nitro boosts. A normal nitrous (indicated in blue) which is filled up over time and three bars of Burst Nitrous (indicated in yellow) that are filled up by doing stunts like near misses, drifts, and jumps.
- In Burnout Paradise, Near Misses award extra points/multipliers.
- The drift events of Grid awards you extra points for drifting close to flags/cones without touching it.
- In Forza you can perform Near Misses to gain Skill Score, with more score for getting closer to the traffic.
- Deltarune: When the SOUL comes close to bullets, you gain Tension Points for your magic, and many attacks also end faster.
- Bullet Audyssey has you touch bullets with the ship's Absorb Aura that surrounds it to fill the attack meter before you lash out at the enemies.
- Bullet Heaven 2 adds 20 points every time you graze a bullet, which the game signifies by making it temporarily bigger (obviously not enough to hit you) and playing a quiet sound.
- Castle of Shikigami has the Tension Bullet System. When you get close to a bullet, the player character has a red outline. Doing so makes attacks more powerful and gives additional points.
- Frantic lets you scrape bullets and fill the Tension Gauge with it. Once its full, your point multiplier goes up.
- Graze Counter, as indicated by the title, makes grazing a core mechanic by filling a bar when you're doing it, which is indicated by the bullets turning red. Once it's full, you can unleash a highly damaging counterattack that also gets rid of enemy bullets and makes enemies drop stars when they're hit.
- In Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony, you get bonus points for letting enemy bullets graze your conveyance without hitting its weak point.
- In Mecha Ritz Steel Rondo, the purple mecha's unique gimmick is that by grazing enemy bullets, a meter at the bottom of the screen will fill up. When it's completely filled, all bullets on-screen are cancelled (or become revenge bullets, if Rank is 150 or more) and all on-screen enemies take some damage (enough to destroy most smaller enemies).
- Psyvariar actually encourages grazing as a game mechanic, as grazing builds up an experience meter that, when filled, levels up your ship, temporarily making you invincible and powering up your ship at certain level milestones.
- Raiden series:
- Raiden DX has the graze bonus, despite being a non-Bullet Hell shooter with a ship-sized hitbox released in 1994.
- Raiden IV downsizes the hitbox to accomodate the denser enemy fire, and also has a grazing bonus.
- Raiden Fighters brings the hitboxes closer to Bullet Hell-size, with the Slave having the smallest. However, if you're using the Judge Spear version of the Slave (which has the Judge Spear's game-breaking bomb), your movement speed becomes so fast that grazing becomes dangerous and impractical.
- Reactance 2 fills the focus meter and multiplier slightly every time you graze.
- rRootage:
- In normal mode: as your ship grazes a bullet, the graze meter in the bottom-right corner fills up. When it's full, the ship becomes invincible for a while.
- The IKA, PSY, and GW modes imitate the mechanics of Ikaruga, Pysvariar, and Giga Wing respectively; IKA allows you to graze opposite-polarity bullets while absorbing the same-polarity ones and shooting them back at the boss as lasers, PSY lets you spin your ship and graze bullets to charge a power bar that gives you a boost whenever it fills, and GW lets you charge up a barrier to cancel out bullets.
- Seihou games let you "Evade" the bullets or lasers by letting them come close to your hitbox. Each time a bullet is evaded adds points to your score and adds to the clear bonus.
- Sisters Royale: Each sister's regular shot can be temporarily strengthened via grazing bullets. Same goes for their familiars which can grant them bonus points once they graze past enough bullets while used.
- Most Touhou Project games starting from Touhou Gensokyo ~ Lotus Land Story have a graze mechanic accompanied by a sharp pop/crackle sound and small white particles flying off from the hitbox area.
- Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil increases the value of bullet cancels instead, as well as giving a raw score bonus at the end of every stage. Later games would increase the value of point items.
- Touhou Chireiden ~ Subterranean Animism rewards grazing by filling a "signal strength" meter which slowly drops over time while you're not dodging. Maxing out the meter causes you to collect all pickup items on the screen from anywhere, and all Point Items you collect this way will be at their maximum possible value.
- Witch Thief keeps track of the number of Grazes you have. Grazes add to your score and thereby your grade.
- Dead by Daylight's survivor Vittorio has the unique perk Quick Gambit. Due to the game's multiplayer focus, a character equipped with Quick Gambit is providing the benefit to the other survivors; when said character is being chased by the Killer, anyone repairing a generator near the chase gets a bonus applied to their repair speed, which also means that the Killer won't be far from a new target if they decide to disengage.
- Kid Icarus: Uprising: During flight sections, Pit will enter a gliding stance if the player stops shooting, which improves his mobility and makes it easier to avoid projectiles. In this state, bullets that get really close to Pit's hitbox produce a special sound effect that, if triggered a certain number of times, will unlock rewards for the player.
- In the Saints Row series, one way to gain Respect (Which depending on the game, either serves as street cred needed to unlock story missions or a form of Experience Points to unlock new abilities and weapons) is to cause almost-collisions while driving at high speeds (i.e. barely missing another car or a building), as well as near-crashes while flying a plane. The closer you come to an obstacle before missing it, the more rep points you get.
