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The protagonist is amazing. He can defeat hordes of monsters, perform feats of superhuman strength, solve complex puzzles no one else can, answer the most baffling riddles, and is always Just In Time for the action... that is, as long as he's being controlled by the player.

Once the cutscene starts or the player loses even the tiniest bit of control, things tend to go south quick. The hero is far more prone to do rather boneheaded things, such as take on too many enemies at once (or just declare there are too many and give up even if it's obvious the enemy would be quite defeatable in a normal battle), get captured, get someone killed, or stand around navel gazing while the bad guy escapes. Often, such things can only be resolved once the player takes command again. It's as if the main character would be Too Dumb To Live without the player's wise and guiding hand.

Particularly jarring when the character has been in the conflict for a while and doing an awful job, but immediately improves once the opening scene is done and the interface pops up.

The best way to gauge how bad the effect of the trope is in a given game is to ponder the question: What would have happened if the player had control throughout the whole game? (He'd probably attack the Gazebo.)

Cutscene Power to the Max in reverse. Subtrope of Gameplay And Story Segregation. See Stupidity is the Only Option for the "interactive" version.

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Examples:

• Nearly universal scene: Heroes defeat badguy. Badguy declares he will crawl his way over to something bad then he slowly yet surely heads over to the Self Destruct Mechanism, Sealed Evil In A Can, or escape hatch. The heroes will often just stand there. Sometimes they will yell "Oh no, he's going to free Dracula!" But will otherwise not budge an inch or even attack their helpless foe.
• In the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the entire plot is set in motion as a result of the emperor's assassination. There's just one problem: you are there when it happens. In a rare moment of the game taking control away from you, an assassin emerges from a secret passage and kills the emperor. On your first play through, you have a good chance of not seeing this coming. However, if you happen to be standing in the alcove with the secret passage when you lose control of your character, the assassin pushes you out of the way to get to the emperor and you can do nothing about it. To make things worse, the assassin is no different than the other enemies you had been easily defeating so far, so when you regain control of your character you can kill the assassin immediately.
• The grand champion of Only Idiots May Pass, EarthBound, features this in the sequence before meeting Jeff - Ness and Paula are suckered into a trap in which they're attacked by a band of zombies and KOed instantly - never mind that you can pretty easily destroy that many in one or two hits at this stage of the game. Yeah.
• Far Cry 2 takes this to ridiculous lengths. In game, your character is an unstoppable murder machine that routinely wipes out entire mercenary camps without any difficulty. Even without armor, you can shrug off hits from grenades, machetes, rockets and rifle fire. You're basically Brock Samson with guns. But this doesn't stop the game engine from dictating that you be surprised and defeated by a guy armed only with a single machete. Never mind that the room you're heading into screams "obvious trap" and unless you were under the control of the game engine, would probably have lobbed a few grenades into the room first. Generally speaking, the plot of the game is wildly inconsistent with what actually takes place in the game itself.
• Goldeneye had a particularly egregious example as Bond, on finishing a level, is captured by two soldiers holding him up with rifles. As if he hadn't waltzed through several dozen of their comrades in the level before, as their machine gun fire repeatedly missed at short range and barely scratched his body armour.
• A similar scene takes place in Live-A-Live, Oersted's chapter. A bunch of soldiers run away from you in cut-scenes, and you slaughter any of their ilk that you encounter as random encounters. But venture back into town, and two of the very same soldiers will capture you without any resistance, making a Heroic Sacrifice by your Mentor necessary.
  • Even more annoyingly, the protagonist displays the "indifference to a comrade's fate during cutscenes" attitude when said mentor is initially captured.
• In Tales Of Symphonia, the party has to hide in Mizuho because they are being tracked by a few armored knights... about the same number and kind that they had to fight upon entering the forest.
  • Also in Symphonia, whenever Genis casts a spell in a cutscene, it's always his weakest, most basic spell, the beginner spell Fire Ball. (This is because it's the only spell Genis is guaranteed to have at all points in the game, but it's still weird when Genis is attacking Physical Gods with it when he's got Indignation or Prism Sword up his sleeve.)
    • But the fireball is also always effective.
  • Perhaps most absurdly, at one point you fight three dragons in a miniboss fight. After you defeat them, there's a cut scene where three dragons, the exact number you just defeated, appear. Lloyd's response? "There's too many!"
    • This may have been referring to there being three more to fight, with, presumably, even more waiting in reserve.
  • Similarly, the very first boss in the game is perhaps easier than the first wild monsters you encounter - if you spent any time at ALL leveling up, that is - and yet after you "defeat" it, your characters are completely exhausted despite the fact that any decent player will have full health, and Kratos will have to come and rescue your sorry ass.
  • There's a cutscene a few hours into the game of our hero being hit by a basic Mook's whip, and being severely injured by it. These are the same enemies you've felled countless times before, you've probably been hit by this attack before, and considering factors like your defense and armor at the time, it shouldn't be able to fell you like that.
• Early in Tales Of Phantasia, Cless and Mint fight their way through a dungeon full of Giant Slugs and Bugbears, ending in a battle with a gargoyle thing and three Giant Slugs. Immediately afterward, he's incapacitated in a cutscene and has to be dragged to a nearby house by Mint. What laid our hero out so helplessly? Why, a Giant Slug from the sky.
  • Arguably that one simply caught him by surprise (dropping, as it did, from the sky) whereas all the random encounters up until then were seen coming a mile away.
    • A similar situation happens in Chrono Trigger in the cathedral in 600 AD; after defeating a large group of Naga-ettes, one will leap out and cheapshot Chrono, providing an opportunity for Frog to make a dramatic appearance and rescue.
• Half Life: In a scripted scene, Gordon gets knocked out by a single melee attack from ambushing Marines, despite wearing power armor that can withstand point-blank shotgun blasts and psychic alien lightning bolts during gameplay. They accomplish this by attacking under cover of total darkness, using a magic light switch that can turn off not only the room light, but also Gordon's suit flashlight.
• Link from The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker. In one of the first few cutscenes, he goes from being a competent fighter to running off a cliff to chase a bird. A bit later, that same bird picks him up with his beak and carries him away, even though the player can easily make him dodge such attacks, as we find out later.
  • He was running after his sister, not some random bird. He was completely driven by concern for his sister, which fighting ability has nothing to do with.
  • Again in Wind Waker, Link is almost crushed by Ganondorf in a cutscene twice, while he was fairly easy to beat once you took control again. Well, probably Tetra/Zelda keeping to shoot him with Light-arrows in this battle had something to do with it, but, still our Hero of Winds was pretty patethic in these two cutscenes.
  • In Twilight Princess. Close to the end of the game, Link is getting the final key to get into the Hyrule castle tower. Said key is guarded by all of two lizard men and two archers. The player could just kill them and be on his merry way, but the game takes over and has Link stand perfectly still so that his "friends" can "save" him.
• The Smug Snake Saemon Haevarian of the Baldurs Gate series only appears in cutscenes. This is a way of enforcing Stupidity Is The Only Option and make sure that the player doesn't get a chance to kill him for his constant (supposedly) Lovable Traitor ways.
  • You can kill him, actually, on the scene during the githyanki attack. You only have a few seconds, though.
  • Also in Baldurs Gate 2, the cutscenes often do things like ensure the capture or death of a character as necessary to advance the storyline, which has the side effect of making 12th level characters temporarily helpless against a single guy with a dagger. Sometimes, as with the introduction to Spellhold, a plot justification is supplied. Other times, it's just silly.
• Metal Gear Solid: During a cutscene, Snake is spotted by a security camera and is quickly captured by the guards. Had the player been in control at that point, Snake could have easily defeated the guards, or even snuck around the camera altogether. Heck, he could have even just ran out the nearby door, which usually cancels the alert status during gameplay, causing the guards to forget all about him. Another instance of this is that there's a camera that's completely unavoidable even with generous usage of Chaff Grenades that forces Snake to be chased by a group of guards up an annoying set of stairs. However, later on, in an odd subversion of the trope, Snake is knocked flat on his back by Wolf's sniper fire during a cutscene (and even flashes with Mercy Invincibility), but isn't harmed at all.
  • The first instance was completely subverted in the Gamecube remake, The Twin Snakes. That game replaced the original with an alternate cutscene which showed Snake ambushed more sneakily, then reacting deftly to turn the ambush into a four-man Mexican Standoff where Snake is the only person without a gun pointed directly at him. The only reason for his inevitable capture is the appearance of Sniper Wolf taking a bead directly on his heart while he is busy with the guards; the clear implication is that without the presence of a legitimate boss character on the opposing side, Snake would have very easily taken down the Mooks and proceeded unhindered, cutscene or no.
    • And in the second instance, it replaced the camera with a laser sensor, which made more sense.
  • There's a particularly irritating cutscene in Metal Gear Solid 2 where the player character fights a number of flimsy, mass-production Metal Gears. On the highest skill setting, you demolish four-fifths of the enemy's available forces... then the cutscenes begin, and the protagonist promptly gives up and is reduced to little more than a ragdoll until the next boss battle.
  • In "Metal Gear Solid 3" in the Virtuous Mission pert of the game, while the game relies on sneaking and catching the enemy by surprise, in the cutscenes, Snake seems to prefer the method of running around waving his gun everywhere, which often leads to him getting ambushed.
  • The Twin Snakes has a ridiculous scene where Meryl and Snake seem to watch a strange red dot trace slowly across Meryl's body. Of course, it's a laser sight for Sniper Wolf's sniper rifle, and Meryl's soon shot through both arms and legs while she and Snake basically watch. ''Didn't you guys ever WATCH the show?''
• Sora of the Kingdom Hearts series is a particularly bad offender. In battle his abilities are superhuman, but in cutscenes he will often be found whining or crying for help after a few waves of minor, easily defeatable enemies. This does not stop him from later, under the player's control, defeating an army of 1000 Heartless by himself.
  • There is an instance toward the end of the game in which Sora is being assaulted by waves upon waves of Dusks. Instead of anything challenging, though, they're all the weakest brand of monster in the game and are easily destroyed in about two hits. However, after killing a certain number of them a cutscene occurs in which an ally must sacrifice himself to save Sora from the scary grunt monsters.
    • As in a previous example, the implication here is that the enemies simply don't stop coming, so no matter how many Sora kills there'd always be more, if not for the herioic sacrifice bit.
• The player characters in Skies Of Arcadia are forced to surrender to a bunch of easily-beaten guards at one point for no good reason.
  • Though you are given the option to fight Ramirez in a Hopeless Boss Fight.
• In Knights Of The Old Republic, Darth Malak appears as a Duel Boss about two-thirds of the way through the game. He's easy enough to beat... until the game takes your controls away from you and cuts away to show your character being defeated.
  • What makes it all the more jarring is that KOTOR is very deliberately paced with regard to level gaining. A reasonable guess can be made as to what level the player would be at that point, and thus the developers could have made Malak sufficiently powerful to defeat the player fairly.
    • Though the experienced difficulty varies widely with the character level up choices made by the player. To the extent that the final boss can range from a virtual one turn kill to being completely Unwinnable.
  • This trope is Lampshaded when you are confronted outside your latest butchering ground by a police contingent which says you must surrender and stand trial. If you refuse, a But Thou Must statement repeatedly appears saying (in bolded text) that there is no way you could possibly fight your way to the spaceport and off-planet against the entire military. This is a reasonable conclusion, but still… It makes you wonder.
  • No matter if you have a piece of equipment that would render you immune to poison, if a cutscene says you're going to get poisoned, you're going to get poisoned. This is especially egregious in the sequel, where your character gets poisoned twice in cutscenes in rapid succession, then can, with the proper equipment, proceed to fight through a bar with a toxic atmosphere with no trouble whatsoever.
  • Likewise, the fights against dark-side Bastila. Even when your comrades get stunned, you can probably win in one or two strikes, but she will push you back and restore health fully, all while talking all kinds of smack. Hello! You're LOSING!
• While Devil May Cry titles usually play Cutscene Power Beyond The Max, this can crop up if a particularly good player is at the reins. For example, part of getting one of the games' Bragging Rights Rewards involves pulling off a No Damage Run - and yes, it is harder to do than it looks. Immediately after a flawless battle against the first Vergil encounter in Devil May Cry 3, Dante gets beaten up as if Vergil had been holding the upper hand at along. Dante also seems to take other hits unnecessarily in cutscenes, given that the games can be completed without taking damage at all and that he has a parry-style move that briefly grants Nigh Invulnerability. An attempt to Justify (or Handwave) this is made after the first run-in with him as a boss fight in Devil May Cry 4, where he claims that he might have underestimated Nero's abilities.
• Xenosaga has a slightly bizarre variant where the cutscenes are awarded Fake Difficulty by making 90% of the characters totally indifferent to their comrade getting wasted right in front of them. The most egregious case comes in the first game when the whole party stands around looking bored as Jr gets himself throttled from behind by a robot girl, about twenty inches from where they’re standing at the time.
  • The third game certainly gives it a run for it's money though. Early on, the party comes across T-Elos, an Evil Counterpart of KOS-MOS. After the obligatory boss fight, the cutscene commences. KOS-MOS states that T-Elos is too powerful, and offers to hold her off, knowing she'll be beaten, in order for the party to escape an otherwise certain doom. Kosy charges in, and as promised, begins losing spectacularly. The party just STANDS THERE as KOS-MOS is treated like a rag doll. One would think that if they decided to stay, they would at least help out. Yet all they do is sit there and watch everyone's favorite robot girl is torn apart, with Shion occasionally shouting her name whenever a nasty blow is dealt. The result is KOS-MOS almost dying. Strangely enough, later on in the game, after KOS-MOS has been rebuilt more uber than before, T-Elos shows up again and the party DOES try. Granted, they failed miserably, but one has to wonder where that team spirit was when KOS-MOS was being mutilated.
• This happens a lot in Super Robot Wars. Look at the time when Ingram captures Kusuha. It's like he'd still capture her with just four Mooks surrounding her, probably because if the player is in control of Kusuha, she'd whip out the Guard/Iron Wall Spirit Command and lay smack down on those mooks. It would get even worse if the player upgraded Kusuha's Grungust Mk.II to maximum beforehand.
• A scene in Jedi Academy in which six soldiers drop out of stealth mode and have the player surrounded. Never mind the fact that the player has a personal shield, allowing them to take several hits without dying and the fact that they're standing at point blank range and are therefore at perfect range for some lightsaber induced stab wounds and the fact that they're surrounding you so realistically you could duck the moment they fired, which would result in them hitting each other, instead Jaden just gives up like a puss.
• In XIII, despite having wiped out legions of thugs, security guards, bodyguards, and professional soldiers, at the end of the game, you're suddenly attacked by two bodyguards — one with a crossbow, hardly a good close up weapon — and the big bad, which turns out to be a senator. Despite this less than impressive show of force, the games ends, implying that they've captured you.
• Fable has another egregious example of this: For the whole game you have been battling and destroying hordes of countless enemies without problems (at least if you have leveled up enough), but then, suddenly, a cutscene kicks in and you are easily captured and imprisoned by just four enemies without any resistance whatsoever.
  • It's because the four enemies are accompanied by The Big Bad, who at that point would kill you fairly easy.
    • Not really. Slow Time is very, very powerful. In fact at that point the character, while weaker, is of the same order of power as at the end of the game, if you've invested effort into developing him. Especially as a will user.
• The Witcher has your monster-slaughtering, projectile-parrying character ambushed and apparently subdued by a handful of mooks with crossbows.
  • This happens more than once in the gam. Act II opens with a cutscene that has our anti-hero, who's just slain dozens of men and monsters alive, willing surrendering to three incompetent guards, leading to a short Prison Sequence.
• In the game of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, an entire level is made of Shelob's cave and the things that live in it. This is all well and good with smaller spiders, generic orcs and the like. A typical hack and slash game. But after you beat Shelob (a gigantic spider)... The scene where Frodo is knocked out and believed dead makes perfect sense in the movie or book. But in the cutscene of this part, Sam hides from just TWO Orcs. After he just slaughtered at least 40 of them in the previous levels and a huge number of spiders in the cave by his wits and swordsmanship alone. And they're just regular orcs too - no appearance from the awesome guy at the top of Cirith Ungol who can kangaroo kick people. He appears as a boss in the NEXT level, where it's a requirement to kill (no lie) at least 80 orcs by yourself, including miniboss varieties. You'd think that he'd defend Frodo's body a bit better. I don't remember him intentionally giving his body over to start a civil war.
• At one point in Tales Of The Abyss, the party is confronted by a member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad and a couple of Oracle Knights, who demand they surrender. My response: "Big deal, we've already kicked your hiney halfway cross Auldrant when we were twenty levels lower and we kill mooks like these by the dozen, bring it.". The party's response: "We surrender.". And it's hardly the most outrageous of the game's examples of this trope, either.
• Despite generally being armed with a blistering array of weapons and capable of defeating every single villain foolish enough to cross him for 5 games now Ratchet of Ratchet And Clank is routinely ambushed and either robbed, captured or allows his friends to be kidnapped while he looks helplessly on, often DIRECTLY after defeating a boss the other badguys were avoiding...
• Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII does this backwards and forwards. Zack is nearly unstoppable in gameplay, and one of his side missions has him fighting his way through 1000 Shinra soldiers without breaking a sweat. The opening cutscene and others have him performing similar feats (and more over the top stuff). Then Zack is hurled out of a small base if he's caught during a mandatory stealth mission.
• In a memorable cutscene in Final Fantasy X, Tidus and the gang are forced to surrender when they are stopped and held up by guards as they attempt to break up Seymour and Yuna's wedding. However, in-game, such guards are relatively harmless enemies that are incapable of causing significant damage and can be disposed of in one or two attacks. It makes no sense as to why the party would view them as such a threat. A similar event also occurs in the beginning of Final Fantasy VII, in which Cloud is forced to flee from guards that are pathetically easy to defeat in battle. Interestingly, crowds are always invincible, as pathetic as the enemies in them may be.
• A minor case shows up in the ending cinematic of Final Fantasy XII. The party has just beaten the crud out of a god, which of course comes with weathering the usual "destroy the battlefield" cinematic attacks. Then, during the ending movie, Fran is knocked unconscious by a few pieces of falling debris.
• A plot point in Jade Empire: You only lose one fight throughout the game, and that's to the man who taught you to fight, and deliberately taught you wrong so that when the time came he could kill you easily.
• The Halo novels, particularly the ones by Eric Nylund, give Master Chief insanely superhuman attributes, describing him as being able to flip armored vehicles barehanded, run as fast as a speeding car, and perceive the world in bullet-time. This is never shown in the actual cutscenes, where he moves and reacts at normal human speeds. Also, the only cutscene that shows him actually fighting another character is the final battle of the trilogy against 343 Guilty Spark, where he promptly gets knocked on his ass and has to be saved by Sgt. Johnson. In the actual game, he's also not significantly more powerful than human NPCs (other than his regenerating energy shields), also making this a case of Gameplay And Story Segregation.
  • He can flip tanks over with his bare (well, power armored) hands in-game. Unfortunately, he can only do it to upside-down tanks so he can man them, as opposed to tossing around tanks that are attacking him.
• In Persona 3, one character who regularly faces terrible monsters in battle proves totally unable to take a punch when a cutscene rolls around.
  • Plus two characters who easily withstand fireballs, lightning bolts, sword slashes, grenades, gunshots, punches from monsters ten times their height and much, much more, but can't even survive a single gunshot from the exact same gun that barely hurt them in combat while under the awesome power of the cutscene.
• Terminator: Future Shock ended with a cutscene in the Skynet Core (think of the tractor beam controls in Star Wars.) Three Terminators enter the only door out. With nowhere else to go, you hang off the walkway and just as they take aim at you, time changes and you're saved. But by that stage of the game, you're so well-armed that three Terminators aren't that much of a problem.
• Adventure Mode in Super Smash Bros Brawl (Subspace Emmisary) has enemies that can't be destroyed in cutscenes even if they are relatively weak lesser minions in combat. Also as nod to their own games, without any effort an enemy manages to capture BOTH Princess Peach and Princess Zelda like they have no fighting ability. Later on without much fanfare BOTH are kidnapped. Because having Mario or Link kidnapped wouldn't work at all.
• Among its other annoyances, the game Daikatana, once you finally capture the titular weapon, has the Big Bad appear in a cutscene and announce that you can't fight him, because it's the same sword in different parts of time, and it would destroy the universe...totally ignoring that not only does the PC have enough weapons to level a small country, he has two SIDEKICKS with similar amounts of weaponry. "Will someone shoot him, please? He's pissing me off."
• Tron 2.0 does the "captured by mooks in a cutscene" thing.
• The original Ogre Battle. In one of the bad endings, which you get if your Karma Meter is too far toward evil, your main character takes over the country instead of handing it off the the rightful ruler. The game then says that your main character was soundly and easily defeated within days. This occurs despite you having an army full of high level paladins, liches, and dragons at your command.
• Tomb Raider 2 has Lara being knocked out by a guy with a spanner in a cutscene despite you killing (and shrugging off the blows of) many near-identical enemies over the previous few levels.
  • Tomb Raider 3 has an example that's hard to classify as either playing straight or an aversion; a level ends with you doing a daring ramp jump over a high fence on a quadbike, then the level ends as you are about to pass over and the subsequent cutscene shows Lara failing the jump miserably, knocking herself out and getting captured. This makes it Cutscene Incompetence initiated by the player.
• In Valkyria Chronicles, whenever a player character's HP reaches 0, the player can, if there's a nearby ally, always call for the medic. In a cutscene around halfway through the game, Isara gets shot, and ultimately dies... Even though all the rest of the main cast surrounding her never think to call Fina over. Granted, this scene was necessary for good tragedy, but...
  • What makes it worse is that, in a later cutscene this time, Alicia gets shot, the characters were quick to call for the medic.
• In Crysis your character gets knocked out in a cutscene in a similar way to the Tomb Raider 2 cutscene above (albeit by being punched in the face rather than with a spanner). Both Crysis and Crysis: Warhead have certain cutscenes with situations that are treated as being very dangerous, despite the fact your character could resolve them in all of ten seconds with the abilities and weapons they have available in-game.
• Parodied in this strip of Adventurers!
• The World Ends With You gives you the option to play the Tin Pin Slammer minigame about a third of the way into the game. One of your most frequent opponents is Shuto, a young boy who claims to be the local champion of the game. While not the easiest opponent, he poses only a minor threat to a seasoned player. However, the one time that your battle with him is relevant to the plot, you almost immediately lose to him in the cutscene. The minigame never even starts.
• Towards the end of Fallout 3, you find your father being held hostage by Colonel Autumn and 2 Enclave troopers. By this point in the game, you're almost certainly a Powered Armor wearing murder machine easily capable of slaughtering dozens of Enclave troopers. But, instead of simply letting you into the room so you can murderize Autumn and his two goons, your father sacrifices himself by flooding the room with radiation, killing the Enclave troopers and knocking Autumn unconscious. To top it off, this indirectly results in your death at the very end of the game, when you're forced to walk into the irradiated room to "face your destiny". Gee, thanks Dad.
  • The Pitt DLC forces you to follow its script by confronting the player character with three typical Mad Max-wannabe Raiders just inside the city gate. It doesn't matter if the character is incredibly stealthy (or using a Stealth Boy) or has the combat skills and weapons to take down these mooks with one or two hits each - they still beat the PC up and take all of his/her stuff. You do get it back later.
• Planescape:Torment has a particularly infuriating example - when entering the Lower Ward for the first time, an in-game cutscene will play where two were-rats will grab Morte without him saying a word. Why didn't the Nameless One stop this? Why, because he was talking to a clothes merchant!
  • Not to mention the end, when your party gets shredded one by one by a creature they could at least heavily damage, or in Dak'kon's case probably destroy. Oh, for a challenging end boss.
• The Prince Of Persia: Sands of Time series relies on this concept in a roundabout way. Through the series, the Prince is forced into levels or boss battles by collapsing floors, unstable masonry, or sucker punches. Here's the thing - the entire concept of the series revolves around the fact that the Prince has the power to rewind time! Thus, each of these inconveniences could be easily avoided...were it not for the fact that they're presented in cutscenes.
  • Don't the dagger and amulet only have a ten-second rewind limit and a limited number of slots? And why waste his Sand on something he can find is way around the hard way? Isn't there also the possibility that he can be surprised by something and not react until it was too late? And doesn't the first game end by him using the Hourglass to rewind ''the entire game?
• Doom 3 subverts this with a number of "cutscenes" that allow the gameplay to keep continuing while an animation plays in the background, such as when Swann and Campbell try to warn Betruger over a phone to shut his project down, or when Swann and Campbell pass through the Vagary's lair on the other side of a glass barrier, and when you see Bravo Team pass you by down a corridor on another side of a glass barrier. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to get to a certain point. Even if you take your sweet time, the cutscene won't trigger until you run over some invisible tripwire.
  • To be honest, that's pretty much how it works in ALL games with the exception of timed missions.
• Cate Archer of No One Lives Forever is an elite government spy, stealthy and quite handy with a gun. And yet, during cutscenes, her idea of sneaking is carelessly clomping around, like Elmer Fudd trying to get the jump on the "wabbit." Inevitably, this leads to her capture. TWICE. And by the same person both times.
• This troper had been greatly enjoying the opportunities for unbridled mayhem in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Then she got to the end. How the hell could Palpy kill the protagonist when Starkiller had just thrown Darth Vader through a wall and kicked Palpatine's ass all over the place?
  • This is even lampshaded. Starkiller calls Palpatine's "defeat" "some Sith trick", but still falls for it.
  • He didn't fall for it, he knew if he didn't stay and try to kill Palpatine he would simply smash the shuttle the others escaped in.
• The_Mess remembers examples of this phenomenon from the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. One of them featured you and a cast of characters trapped on a space station. One member of the crew was a traitor, a robot working for the evil robots! If only you could figure out who it was! Could it be Mr. Tobor?! No, not a chance... oh, wait, IT WAS! This frustrating turn of events is made worse when "you", or the narrator speaking in your place, says, "OF COURSE! It's robot spelled backwards! I should have known!" Well, you nitwit author, I did know, AT AGE FIVE! If you're going to give us an obvious clue, at least let us USE IT! But, no, it could only be discovered in the literary equivalent of the cut scene.
• "Dio"/Odie of Soul Nomad And The World Eaters is presented as a bumbling, inept joke of a sorcerer. In actual gameplay, he's fairly powerful and a valuable addition to the team.
• Most fans complain about .hack//GU: Volume One—in which an overpowered Haseo takes on an underpowered Alkaid in the arena, but before you land the finishing blow, a cutscene is triggered in which your character whines about how powerful his opponent is and summons his avatar for help. Ugh.
  • The game tries to justify this by having Alkaid during the gameplay part of the fight activate a hyper-mode, allowing her to wail on you while you sit there frozen in time. However, this troper was grossly overleveled and had equipment on that reduced any physical damage by 25, causing our hero Haseo to be beaten by a flurry of attacks that each do 1-2 damage.
• Saints Row 2 to the worst degree. The player character can absorb dozens of rifle bullets and grenades even while high and drunk at the same time, kill a hundred enforcers with body armor and rifles so advanced that the U.S. military doesn't even have them, and literally ignore explosions several feet away that send cars flipping through the air. And in one mission, he is captured by the Sons of Samedi after he's so busy shooting one of his unconscious attackers to finish him off, he doesn't notice the guy running up at him and whacking him in the chin with a baseball bat.
• Can happen in any sports game that alows you to simulate parts of a game or season. You can be the God of Football, with a team made up of nigh-immortals, and lose to a series of scrubs because of the number generator. Of course, the opposite can happen as well, when your team of scrubs pulls off an impossible upset that you (the player) could not have done had you actually played.
• In Chrono Trigger, a scene in the early part of the game shows six mini bosses trashing one of your characters. You technically can act during this time and try to stop them, but they'll just smack you away and replay the sequence until you let it play out. The party member in question offers no resistance either, which is especially odd when the remaining two fight the six mini bosses, and can almost OHKO three of them at a time if at a normal level at this point. The party member in question? He gets better.
  • In the New Game+ mode, the characters start out at unweildy levels of strength and with massively powerful weapons, to the point where they can two-hit a dragon tank and take on Lavos unassisted, yet Crono will still get knocked out by a single hit from a security guard in an early cutscene.
• Not a video game, but in the old school book-based adventure "Deathtrap Equalizer" for the tabletop RPG Tunnels & Trolls a scenario exists where the player is faced with a sorceress wearing a stripperific outfit and accompanied by two polar bears. If the player attempts to use offensive magic, the book tells the player that the magic doesn't work and the sorceress has noticed the attempt and she has ordered her bears to attack you. The player dies because "you have no magic to help you". However, if you attack the bears with weapons they prove tough, but not completely impossible for a competent character to defeat without magic.
• In Samurai Warriors 1, during Yukimura Sanada's story mode, his lord Shingen Takeda will be assassinated in a cutscene by Ninja Hanzo Hattori no matter what until Shingen is unlocked; then it's possible to intercept Hanzo before the assassination takes place, unlocking Yukimura's Alternate Universe path.
• In Saint's Row, just before you get to save Lyn, you get knocked out by a single hit from a baseball bat. Never mind that in game you would have just turned around and instantly shot him with your One Hit Kill .44 Shepherd.
• Happens in the Teleporter Room in Cave Story.
  • And when Sue gets curbstomped and dragged off by Igor in the Egg Corridor, the hero just stands there and watches. Admittedly she did say she could handle him and don't need any help, but the hero can't be that spiteful, right?
• An early plot point in Phantasy Star 2 is that you need to stop Darum, a criminal, from causing trouble by rescuing his daughter Teim. So you rescue her and offer to bring her to Darum to defuse the whole situation. But since he's got enemies who might be gunning for her too, she dons a veil so they won't recognize her. Okay, fine, let's go have a loving reunion. But when you find Darum, she just walks up to him, veil STILL ON, and since he doesn't recognize her, he demands money. She refuses INSTEAD OF TAKING OFF THE VEIL. So he gets pissed and kills her. THEN he takes off her veil, realizes he's killed his own daughter, and commits suicide by explosives. In other words, two people just killed themselves over a tragic mistake while your party just STOOD there, not saying or doing anything that might've cleared the confusion.
• At one point in Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of Underdark, you have the option to take out a large number of drow holding a formian hive in slavery, or just sneak by. If you agree to save the formians, you're treated to a cutscene of your character storming through the gates and shouting to call the enemies' attention to themselves. Not very fun if you're playing say a rogue or some other charcter who was hoping to rely on stealth, tactics, and maybe not taking on every enemy in the area at once.
• After completing the Mystech tunnels early in Anachronox, you are assaulted by a cutscene with the gangster boss Detta and a couple of thugs, who proceed to demand you hand over your primary find. Your boss Grumpos insist on fighting since he really, REALLY wants to keep the rare find, but our hero Sly folds like a wet blanket, even knocking Grumpos down on his own. This of course comes back to bite everyone in the end.
• Dragon Quest III has a fairly egregious example. The Hero comes across his long-lost father Ortega in the depths of Zoma's Castle. Ortega is fighting a battle against a powerful monster, and seems to be holding his own, but finally runs out of MP for healing and dies. Neither the Hero nor his party considers joining the battle, providing the needed healing, or using one of their spells or items to bring Ortega back to life after he dies.
• In Final Fantasy IV, Cecil & Co. defend the first of the Dark Crystals, held behind King Giott's throne room. With help, they defeat Golbez and his summoned monsters. In fact, they trounce him so badly he's reduced to a hand. After they congratulate each other for the victory, the hand comes to life and crawls towards the Crystal, and steals it. We say again: a Paladin, a Dragoon, a Master Monk, a White Mage, and a Black Mage/Summoner stand and watch as an animated hand steals the Mc Guffin and do nothing to stop it.
  • The DS remake handles this scene a little bit more gracefully; Golbez waits until your team is at the door, THEN announces that he's still alive, gets up (instead of doing the creepy-as-hell hand thing), dashes for the crystal and warps off with it, all in the space of 2 or 3 seconds.
• Geist, the guards are easily killed by the imps in cutscenes. No, these imps are not Immune To Bullets, no, they aren't remotely strong. They're by far the weakest enemies in the game, and have about as much HP as your typical Damned Bats, except without the numerical superiority. They are killed by one bullet from any gun. They can be killed with a fucking fire extinguisher for crying out loud! And yet, in the cutscenes, when guards are confronted by them, you'd think they were minibosses Immune To Bullets.
• This video of a Lets Play for Quake IV points out that the big spider-tank takes out your fellow marines' tanks effortlessly - but you, of course, can take it out. ...Of course, the element of surprise probably had something to do with it.
• Soldier of Fortune: Payback does this in the most obnoxious way possible. Right after defeating two bosses in a row and getting the mission critical briefcase, the lights suddenly go dim and a woman runs straight up to you with a fire extinguisher and hits you, taking you down. She thanks you for doing her dirty work and strolls off with the case. All your character does is to utter "Bitch" in contempt. The game then ends on a cliffhanger. Screw you, Activision.
• Jedi Knight:Jedi Academy: At some point in the game there is a mission where your character has to explore a planet and find some evil dudes.However when you land there one fat guy and four twats declare that there is no chance of you winning and apparently even if killing thousands of stormtroopers is possible if not easy then killing five people is impossible so the cutscene shows your idiot hero being captured and having his gear confiscated.
• Dragon Quest VIII. Your team is captured by guards that you could probably kill with a single attack each when they're accused of killing an important religious figure. Naturally, they don't attempt to explain the actual situation at all, and let the guards throw them in a supposedly inescapable jail for the better part of a month, because... well, just go see Wall Banger for more info.
• Age Of Mythology. At the beginning of "Isis, Hear My Plea", two of the main heroes are taken prisoner by 6 axemen, which could have easily been taken down during gameplay. This troper got revenge on the game engine by completely conquering the large enemy fortress they were held in, rather than sneaking into it, and still got treated to a cutscene where the Big Bad talks about how mighty his fortress is, while standing knee-deep in rubble.
• In Impossible Creatures, enemies become completely immune to damage during cutscenes. Very frustrating in mission 8, when La Pette hovers near your anti-aircraft towers for about a minute and then you spend the rest of the mission trying to kill her.
• In Mass Effect, your first fight with The Dragon ends with him giving you a beatdown until Nuke Ex Machina distracts him and lets you get away while he runs for his life. While the fight is designed to be hard enough to have that cutscene be reasonable, the player can have access to powers specifically designed to turn one on one fights into "point gun at helpless, immobile target. Pull Trigger. 30 goto 10."
• Disgaea is a fun case because it can't make up its mind. In one cutscene Laharl destroys a 2 millions spaceships fleet in a few attacks... to then saying that "even he can't beat this many demons" against an easily defeated threat, allowing Kurtis to play the Big Damn Heroes role.

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