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Leon whips out his Broken Butterfly and blasts the little bastard across the room, thus ending the chapter. Or at least he would, were he not inflicted with the Cutscene Stupidity Bug ®
I love this series’ tradition of having the main protagonists completely forget about their firearms during cutscenes. Really, I do.
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.) Because of this, many a player has likely fantasized about how they'd have handily won that Final Boss Preview if they'd been in charge during the encounter.
Cutscene Power to the Max in reverse. Subtrope of Gameplay And Story Segregation. See Stupidity is the Only Option for the "interactive" version.
Examples:
- 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. 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.)
- Worse, a few hours in the game, arriving in a city, Genis runs ahead of the others while Raine (his older sister) tells him he'll trip. He does trip, and Raine rushes to see if he's hurt, despite the fact that he participates in almost every battle up to that point (battles in which he'll probably get very hurt, as he's a mage).
- 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!"
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 pathetic 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.
- Wait... what? All three of you guys really need to pay more attention. In the first case, Link was running off that cliff because said bird was holding his sister in its claws. When Link is picked up, note he was too happy having found his sister again to really focus on dodging. Second, in those cutscenes Link wasn't the Hero of Winds yet. He was just a normal kid without the Triforce or a fully powered Master Sword to help him. Finally, in the mention cutscene in Twilight Princess, Link is actually about to fight when his friends pop up and do the battle for him.
- In Marvel Ultimate Alliance, there is a cutscene where you get to watch Nightcrawler teleport past a door and into a room, hacking robots to tiny bits with ninja swords to the sound of many "BAMF"s and "shhhiinnng!"s and robotic death noises. You're all pumped up and looking forward to playing such an awesome character when he suddenly decides to open a booby-trapped door with his hands. He gets electrocuted and passes out, never to be played for the rest of the game, and you wonder why he even takes the trouble to walk at all with a teleportation power like that. No one controlling him would take the time to open these silly "door" contraptions... At least this troper never did during X-Men Legends II.
- 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?''
- Metal Gear Solid 4 has, of particular note, the elite, all-female FROGS. In-game, on the higher difficulty settings, they are wholly capable of being tough opponents. Their competence in cutscenes, however, seems to drop to bewilderingly low levels, as they are promptly massacred in almost any cutscene they're in. Two outstanding examples are practically their introductory scene, wherein two of three FROGS that attempt to get the drop on the Rat Patrol, complete with stylish entrance, are casually killed instantly, with the third being mercilessly shot to pieces by an aggravated Jonathan, and the second is Meryl and Johnny's proposal scene, where the two soldiers, one of them not even 'super' in any way imaginable, effortlessly slaughter countless FROGS, who are apparently capable of only blindly rushing the pair and entirely incapable of hitting them, without even trying.
- 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.
- And there is also the factor that Sora was stuck in a place that erodes the heart over time.
- 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.
- 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.
- Malak himself suffers from a reverse version of this trope in that first battle. It would be more logical for him to be vastly more powerful in game terms, but then he'd just kill you.
- 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.
- In all fairness, Jr does fire off a couple rounds at T-Elos eventually, for all the good it does.
- This happens constantly 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.
- In Jedi Outcast, Kyle is forced to sneak around an Imperial base and will be arrested if a Stormtrooper manages to sound the alarm. At the start of the level, he somehow sees that "there are too many of them." At that point in the game, with his lightsaber and almost full Jedi powers, he could probably kill fifty Stormtroopers with ease (and probably won't even need the blasters, repeater gun, sniper rifle, various explosives and rocket launcher he's also lugging around). But if anyone sees him and gets to a button, you get an instant cut to his being imprisoned and a Game Over.
- By contrast, in Jedi Academy when the player character is taken prisoner at the start of a level, (s)he surrenders when surrounded by several Elite Mooks pointing weapons at him/her that are not blockable with a lightsaber and are fast firing; in other words, the situation is actually life-threatening even in game terms. (If Jaden had third-tier core Force powers at that point, (s)he could still kill them with ease with the right moves - but (s)he doesn't.)
- 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.
- 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 game. 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.
- At least the first case makes sense since the hero is a professional monster-slayer and does not want to get into trouble with the law. As such, killing the guards on sight was not an option, especially since he had a lot of business in the city they guarded.
- 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.
- For obvious reasons, the game's Sam became a Memetic Badass among this troper's group of friends. "Samwise Khan" could totally set up that kind of Xanatos Gambit.
- At one point in Tales Of The Abyss, the party is confronted by a member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad and a couple of mooks, who demand they surrender. Despite the party having defeated said boss when they were 15-20 levels lower and having butchered their way through umpteen Random Encounters with the exact same mooks to get to that point, the party surrenders.
- 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.
- Adding insult to injury on the FFX example above is that your group had just plowed through several waves of Mooks to get to the spot where they are held up by the smaller group of Mooks.
- 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.
- Doesn't quite fit the trope, because this is full-on incompetence unrelated to whether or not the player is in control. The only real advantages to the cutscene are dramatic directing and player's full attention. It could have been done as an in-game fight with exactly the same results.
- 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 Halo 3 at least, the Chief can latch on to Covenant wraiths and wreck them by punching through their frontal armor and leaving a grenade in the hole.
- The Grenade is actually extraneous. It's completely possible to kill the tank just by hitting it non stop. It'll blow up after about 4-5 seconds of doing this.
- 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.
- At another point in the game, the heroes face Aegis, who's been brainwashed and turned against them. Despite the fact that there's a 7 to 1 advantage for the heroes (4 to 1 even if we assume that in-game battle mechanics apply), and that each side's respective stats would suggest this is going to be a pretty quick and effortless (if somewhat regrettable) beatdown for the good guys, the scene suddenly fades to black as they're attacked, and one scene transition later, they're all bound and ready to hear the villain's brilliant evil plan.
- 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.
- That's assuming they STAYED at your command, rather than joining the next rebellion.
- The main character is often so powerful by the end of the game he could kill everyone else at once, making this one a particular wall banger for most players.
- 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.
- Actually, he was holding back drastically against you, as you were new. When the time came, he broke out his secret weapon of doom, and was not holding back. He would have beaten everyone else too, had your partner not telekinetically jammed his launcher.
- Towards the middle of Fallout 3's main quest, 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 heavily armed and armored murder machine who are 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.
- This one is especially annoying because, in the Enclave example, you might be intimidated or afraid of endangering ol' Dad. With the Pitt Raiders, these are criminals who you literally kill all the time. By that point in the game, you would have more trouble with some animals. And to top it off, they should be diseased and cancer-stricken anyway! What's worse, to trigger this particular cutscene, you would have just killed four guards outside the damn gate who tried the same thing!
- 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.
- Just what kind of levels did you have for your characters to make that statement? And note that that's levels without the something like a million (no exaggeration) experience points you get for Nameless One after that for "finding out" his name, whatever the heck it is. Even with those extra levels, this editor found said creature quite challenging. (It could have been scaled up, of course.)
- 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 a certain 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.
- Are we playing the same game? Guys can and do run out of nowhere with melee weapons all the time- and the baseball bat, in a touch of Fridge Brilliance, is a stun weapon that subjects you to the game's moon physics for over two seconds. Try playing the bodyguard sidequests barehanded and you'll see just how broken the baseball bat is. So, perhaps play-wise it doesn't fit, but it definitely fits the mechanics of the game world.
- 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.
- The reason said party member didn't resist was that he considers the ones thrashing him his family and even begged you to not hurt them as he was beaten up. That being said, once he is knocked out of comission...
- 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.
- In the Teleporter Room in Cave Story, you get curbstomped by a Giant Mook that could have been defeatable if it wasn't an NPC.
- 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.
- It may have been her plan all along to commit suicide by proxy out of the shame she felt for his actions. That doesn't excuse the party for standing there and letting her, though.
- 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.
- 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.
- The heroes were not fighting back because the guards were innocent... but they probably could have just ran out onto the balcony and activated their portable Global Airship. You know, the one they needed to gain access to the area they currently are in.
- 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.
- Also during the campaign, you have to stop the Big Bad from opening up a gate in the Norse lands that will set free an even bigger bad. After destroying the enemies defending the battering ram, a cut scene begins and about 10 fire giants appear, chase you away, and kill one of the heroes. In game however, 3-4 heroes could easily take them down, and that isn't even counting all the soldiers you used to destroy the ram in the first place.
- 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."
- There's also the fact that pretty much every cutscene that involves you drawing a weapon shows you drawing a pistol, even if you've got max skill in the assault rifle or shotgun.
- Some of that particular feat of incompetence even bleeds off into gameplay, as it tends to switch your active weapon to the pistol and then you have to switch back when the fight starts.
- Disgaea is a fun case because it can't make up its mind. In one cutscene Laharl destroys a 2 million spaceship 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.
- Done really obnoxiously in Princess Waltz. Whenever you don't win a fight, it's game over. But half the time you do win, the story immediately resumes with your character messing up, getting sucker-punched, the enemy being Made Of Iron, a bunch more enemies showing up, or whatever, forcing either the use of the Dangerous Forbidden Technique or a Big Damn Heroes moment to win the day. The most frustrating example is when you beat Liessel. Having bested her after a difficult battle, she gets up and kicks your ass anyway, forcing the game's resident Lolicon girl to step in and beat Liessel. At least the aforementioned Lolicon girl turns out to be a Cute Bruiser, which lessens the humiliation factor a bit.
- To be fair, that fight against Liessel was a one on one confrontation. As soon as she realises you have the upper hand she proceeds to cheat blatently, not allowing you a chance to pin her down again. The real Wallbanger is why she faced you that way in the first place, instead of flat out using her ‘win now’ abilities to begin with.
- Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines. During gameplay, your character can take shotgun blasts at point blank and not even be slowed down, particularly if you've been investing heavily in Stamina and Fortitude. In a cutscene, one cheap shot with a baseball bat is enough to knock you unconscious, and presumably would have left you incapacitated while three Sabbat vampires tortured you to death were it not for the intervention of another character.
- Well, given the effectiveness Back Stabs have in-game when you're doing it...
- Still it is profoundly embarrassing if you play as a Tremere. Even being pinned to the ground there nothing preventing you from casting Blood Purge - an area spell that harms and incapacitates all the enemies around you and that you most certainly would have by that moment. You are clearly concsious when they are about to torture you and you are perfectly able to cast the spell immidiately after you "rescue".
- An even worse example is the Kuei-Jin ending. If the player should decide to join those guys, in the end, Ming-Xiao will come in with two standard Kuei-Jin guards armed with rifles and a katana, kill the prince and tell you that she'll have to get rid of you next since you're a Cainite. So you're bound onto the sarcophagus and thrown into the ocean. However, why exactly would the player, after having probably taken and survived hundreds of bullets and killed dozens of both humans and vampires, be imtimidated by two rifles and basically let the Kuei-Jin give him A Fate Worse Than Death? He didn't know of Ming-Xiaos powers to turn into a giant tentacle monster, of course, but the guards would've been easy to take out and fighting Xiao would at least have been worth a try...
- In Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2, if you play on easy mode you can easily defeat bosses that, according to the cut scene, your character was unable to defeat. This leads to interesting complications. You easily defeat a villain with one character, only to find the villain is unscratched and the character you controlled who won is dead.
- The Bouncer features a kidnapping in the opening cutscene that the three playable characters try to stop. All three of them get completely raped by the kidnappers, who they later easily beat.
- Rebecca Chambers in the original Resident Evil and Resident Evil Zero, who seems to be capable of taking care of herself when the player controls her, but is reduced to a Damsel Scrappy who needs to be saved by Chris or Billy whenever the plot requires it. This is even more glaring in Zero, which takes place a day before the first Resident Evil, where she is more competent than she was in the original game.
- Silent Hill:
- If you don't do the right thing/have the right item at certain points, it's instant death for you!
- This is how Harry suffers Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome in Silent Hill 3—we don't even see how this could have happened, just Heather coming upon his corpse and her horrified reaction.
- Depending on which ending you get in Silent Hill 4, Henry is seen not to have come away from the battle unscathed after all; he's broken his arm or murdered off screen by Walter in the ensuing cutscene.
- Lose a Quick Time Event in Silent Hill Origins or Silent Hill Homecoming and see what happens. (Hint: It's not pretty.)
- Also in Silent Hill Homecoming, Alex stoically endures what would be game-breaking injuries during the fight against Judge Halloway, but he doesn't even begin limping until the very end.
- The second Pokemon Mystery Dungeon set (Darkness/Time/Sky) has a couple of these scenes. The first occurs when the ((Goldfish Poop Gang)) Team Skull spends approximately 5 minutes describing their super-secret attack and calling it...While your team stands there and waits for the attack...Granted, the characters didn't know how strong the team's leader was, but his minions were the boss of the first dungeon, and could be killed within two or three turns! Then, it happens again after fighting Grovyle, where after finally beating him down, he turns around and knocks you out so that a supporting character can save the day. It should be noted in both cutscenes, and non-plot party members just stand there and watch, but that falls more into ((lazy backup)).
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