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Cutscene Power To The Max
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Cherry: He should be pretty easy to take down with Eikre's "cut-down" technique! Eikre: Uh, I can't do that technique anymore. Cherry: What? Eikre: I could do it before, but now that I've joined, I don't feel like it anymore.
The character is powerful. Really powerful. Like, destroying-galaxies powerful. In fact, they could probably win the entire game by flexing their muscles...
...y'know, if they actually had these powers available in the gameplay. Outside cutscenes, they have less impressive powers. How powerful the character is in battle sometimes seems inversely proportional to how strong they are outside it. In negative situations, this character is Overrated And Underleveled.
Of course, there's actually a reason...Simply being able to use all the villain or hero's cutscene-granted powers of invincibility and being able to One Hit KO people would get the Unpleasable Fanbase complaining that it makes the game way too easy and cuts out any thinking required, especially if they don't bother to discourage simply spamming God Mode Sue Game Breaker powers by either making them someone who is only there for awhile, making you regret relying on their soul-sucking-pentagrams when they are suddenly removed from the party or have their powers denied, or making instant-death spells only work on clearing Trash Mobs. Simply going through the game selecting "Galaxy-destroying-punch" for every single boss battle on the highest difficulty wouldn't be very fun, now wouldn't it?
Invariably a flagrant (and particularly annoying) form of Gameplay And Story Segregation. This trope goes hand in hand with Heads I Win Tails You Lose. Compare to Cutscene Incompetence for the opposite.
Examples:
- Every Batman video game ever. Every Superman game too! If I'm Batman how come this dude in a yellow suit is kicking my ass!? (And that's just the Batman Forever game for Sega Genesis; Batman Returns for Genesis was even more painful).
- This is less of a problem in the spinoff game of Batman Begins. In this game you're not supposed to be over the top powerful and that the whole point is that you need to use stealth and fear to tip the battle in your favour.
- This is less of a problem for Batman Arkham Asylum, where Batman is essentially as competent in cutscenes as he is during gameplay, dropping his Titan gun down a Bottomless Pit aside.
- Also averted in Superman Returns where you need to protect the city from being destroyed. Getting hit merely slows you down.
- Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Lara can survive a huge fall in an early cutscene that would naturally cause instant bone-shattering death when tried in-game (proven in the remake, in which this area is playable just before the cutscene).
- On a cutscene towards the end of Anniversary Lara reaches a ledge in a cutscene by essentially grappling on nothing, despite it being very established by then that it could only work on specific points, this is made worse by the fact that the original game already provided a plausible (within Lara capabilities) ending to this sequence.
- KOS-MOS in Xenosaga is a glaring example. The original game at least attempted a nod to this, as she was the one of the few characters who did not need to ride a AGWS. Jin Uzuki is another offender, as in the second game he splits an entire giant robot mecha in half with one slash of his sword. Other characters stand in awe. But then when you get to control him he isn't that much more powerful than anyone else. Another character like this is chaos, who in a cutscene can actually kill Gnosis just by touch. Out of cutscene, he is sub-par even with Gnosis.
- chaos (sic) is at least somewhat justified. In the cutscene in question, he takes off his gloves. This is reflected in gameplay with his stronger weapons being gloves that are actually worse at covering his hands, with his ultimate weapon in the first game being the "Holey Gloves" (also sic).
- KOS-MOS is particularly horrible example because the game constantly implies that she is *significantly* stronger then her teammates. In the third game she is shown in a battle defeating hundreds of gnosis at once while her creator watches in shock, yet her creator is the same level and at least as capable of taking on a large group, possible more so due to her ability to self heal. Worse there is a certain point where KOS-MOS fights alone against a certain enemy while her 7 other teammates cower behind (with good plot based reason) and acting helpless.
- In Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, Laharl destroys an entire fleet of human battleships without much hassle during a cutscene; in the next subsequent battle you'll be facing the cannons of the one remaining ship — and you'll likely have to run away without massive Level Grinding. And during his appearance in the sequel, well, suffice it to say he takes losing to the protagonists during his Hopeless Boss Fight (which, again, can be done through massive Level Grinding) extremely badly.
- It's almost a subversion in a way, considering you can keep up with the cutscene power by Level Grinding in a game that takes Level Grinding Up To Eleven, what with having a hundred times more levels than you actually need to beat the game. And that's not even mentioning the other ways to grind. This might even be intentional, given most characters have absurd, triple or quadruple digit levels when they appear in other games, such as Laharl in the above example - and even lampshaded by Etna in the same sequel.
- Similarly, Etna kills two of the Prism Rangers while they're trying to transform with one shot from a gun each, when she's doesn't even learn with that weapon very quickly, assuming they're anywhere near as powerful as their leader they should have been able to take a lot of regular hits, and their more than half a battle-field away (guns have a range of 4 spaces in game).
- Medium Awareness + Gameplay And Story Segregation. Almost all the characters are aware that what they can do is mostly because the story says they can do it. Which is why they're constantly trying to usurp the place of protagonist from whoever's got it.
- Pretty much all of the 'Meet the Cast' videos of Team Fortress 2 except Meet the Heavy.
- Enter The Matrix had several level-ending cutscenes involving Niobe or Ghost using some fancy martial arts or dramatic rooftop-leaping. There was no pressing reason why they couldn't have let the player do that themselves.
- Exception: Final Fantasy VII's Sephiroth and Final Fantasy X's Seymour, both final or near-final bosses, are incredibly strong in battle; naturally, you only control them once.
- Subverted in Final Fantasy VIII, where Edea impales Squall on a giant spear of ice in a cutscene. Later, Edea joins the party, and this same move is her Limit Break and therefore usable in battle
- On a related note, this trope may explain why everyone in The Movie Advent Children seems a whole lot more powerful than they did in the game — most notably in the Sin Bahamut battle sequence, in which the party help Cloud reach a rapidly ascending monster by throwing him in the air one after another.
- Then again, they did kill humongous monsters like that in the game as well - they just didn't have the same kind of special effects, especially with the "stand and wait" combat system. So it could be argued that they only seem more powerful because the movie is a more flexible medium and they can be powerful in other ways than having 9999 hit points and doing as much damage while still attacking the same way as at the beginning of the game. If anything, Advent Children answers the question, if RPG characters can really reach "level 99" and this enables them to kill godlike beings, just what kind of skill does that imply? What would it look like if they fought in an environment where an attack isn't just a roll to hit and damage?
- Even worse, the pre-Advent-Children FFVII-games use this style in their cutscenes. Vincent can indulge in Roofhopping in Dirge of Cerberus. In gameplay, you're lucky to be able double jump - if you own the US-version. Crisis Core had Zack jump down from a flying helicopter about a hundred feet in the air. In the actual game you can - roll on the floor. Then there's that Sephiroth memory from the DMW where Zack takes out a monster in a Single Stroke Battle. If you haven't fought that type yet... well, you won't be doing that is all.
- Final Fantasy IX has a distinct difference between the power of summons during cutscenes (Bahamut, Atomos and Odin are all shown as capable of laying waste a city) and in-battle - where none of the above summons can do more than straight 9s in damage - the same damage cap as your characters.
- The game does make a passable attempt at explaining this phenomenon. The race of summoners are supposed to be the only ones that can summon and control the Eidolons, under the premise of using them to protect the world. But Kuja corrupted Queen Brahne with the promise of power, and she was ready to kill Garnet to gain access to the Eidolon gem inside of her. Kuja was able to corrupt the Eidolons, turning them evil and capable of far more destructive power. Alexander was an exception to all of this, but then again Alexander always was a badass summon power - and Garnet never gets to acquire him as a regular summon, either.
- The game also plays this both perfectly straight and averts it with its summoning mechanics. Summons have two versions, the full video and a shortened version of it. The summons actually do more damage when the full animation plays!
- Final Fantasy IX also averts Cutscene Incompetence while still avoiding a Game Breaker when Beatrix joins the party as a Gueststar Party Member. She still has access to the enormously powerful attacks that reduced your entire party's HP to 1, but the MP cost to perform them is so high that she can typically only perform them a few times unless the player keeps pouring ethers into her.
- Dissidia Final Fantasy is generally pretty good about averting this. Characters fighting in cutscenes tend to use the same attacks that they use in gameplay. At the same time, there are quite a few instances of this, such as Terra casting teleport, Ultimecia and Cecil using what appear to be their respective EX Bursts without hassle, and Squall blocking most of Ultimecia's aforementioned EX Burst during his final confrontation with her in his storyline.
- In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, Layle can lift tons of objects and fling them at his enemy in the blink of an eye. During cutscenes. During actual gameplay, you must target the object, wait for the lock-on gauge to fill, lift it, and throw it. One object at a time.
- In Metroid Prime, Samus is able to perform her iconic spin-jump only in cutscenes. In the sequel, she eventually gains the ability to use it in the specialized form of the screw attack under player control late in the game. In the multiplayer mode of Metroid Prime 2, however, you can see other players doing it even though they can't see it themselves. This implies that Samus really is doing the spin jump, but her visor somehow keeps the view going straight so she doesn't get dizzy. (Samus also jumps ridiculously high in cutscenes.) Also, in Metroid Prime 3 when she takes shots at the corrupted Ghor, two REGULAR shots from her default Power Beam appear to seriously harm him. Compare the boss fight against him, where he soaks up shots like a sponge.
- To be fair, he is using his Humongous Mecha in the fight. Rundas however is quite a Cutscene abuser, able to shoot down several space pirate dropships with ease, which are normally quite sturdy and only vulnerable in one spot. Also, immediately before the boss fight with him he kills several space pirates at once with a spread ice attack he never uses in normal gameplay. This may be justified in that the PED was souping him up.
- In Metroid Fusion, there is a scene where the SA-X obliterates a doorway with a super missile. If you try this outside of the cutscene, the hatch tends just to open, not to blow up spectacularly...
- There's nothing that says that Samus's new super missile is equal in strength to the old one.
- Technically, at least four characters in Guilty Gear are Gears, i.e. living weapons of mass destruction that humanity fought against for a hundred years (one of them going so far as to wipe out an entire fleet all at once in supplemental material), and the Gears almost won. That doesn't mean an adolescent crossdressing nun armed with a yo-yo and a teddy bear can't defeat them during gameplay, though.
- To be entirely fair, there are a few reasons — explained in a mixture of in-game and supplemental material — why this is the case, the most pressing being that they're much less powerful without a Commander Gear guiding them — to the point that all but the most powerful can't even retain the motivation to stay alive.
- To be even more fair, given that the cast of characters in Guilty Gear includes an 8-year old boy crossdressing as a nun, a guy who fights bent over backwards, a young girl swinging a ship's anchor around, and a totally unbalanced badass wearing a paper bag over his head... maybe we shouldn't be taking this so seriously?
- Dante of the Devil May Cry series is fairly intimidating even during normal gameplay. However, his powers become almost absurd in any cutscene sequence, and especially ridiculous in the third installment. His feats include his getting staked to the ground by his own sword and calmly pulling himself up through the blade, shrugging off horrific injuries to kill his enemies with the pieces of their own weapons embedded in his body, casually surfing on a missile. Furthermore, he kills enemies with single attacks, a feat that cannot be replicated in-game except by difficult-to-use moves. His single-shot killing of enemies is most certainly not replicable in-game (semi-joke "Heaven or Hell" mode aside). One exception is when Dante rides a fallen enemy like a skateboard while shooting other enemies, something he can also do in gameplay.
- Don't forget about running down a freaking tower in DMC 3.
- Or motorcycle riding up that same tower. Just try to guess how his bike hops away from the tower and is pulled back through gravity...sideways.
- On the other hand, this is sometimes used in reverse. Take the first boss battle against Vergil in 3. A sufficiently skilled player can defeat Vergil without taking any damage whatsoever (in fact, doing so is part of the frustrating process of getting the coveted "SS" accolade) only to watch, in the subsequent cutscene, Dante get defeated easily as if Vergil had had the upper hand all along.
- While Nero uses this straight, including the ability to surf on an enemy's body that is missing in-game, his in-gameplay grabs with the Devil Bringer also launch into a context-sensitive cool moment like with the later-mentioned God Of War and Kingdom Hearts II examples.
- Hell, in the Limited Special Collectors Ultimate Edition of Devil May Cry 3, Vergil himself is the WORST offender. Also happens to be Overrated And Underleveled when you consider the fact that despite having access to all of his weapons from the start, you STILL need to purchase his stronger moves and many of the HSQ ones from his Devil Trigger like the Judgement Cut Storm aren't available for use when you are given control. Add that to the fact that Vergil can generally own everything in his path in cutscenes, yet still needs to smack demons around a couple of times with the scabbard before making the Clean Cut during normal gameplay (barring Heaven Or Hell Mode as mentioned above) and Vergil is made even less effective (if cooler because Katanas Are Just Better) than Dante.
- Vergil's sword Yamato gets a heck of a lot of this in DMC 4. In cutscenes it's a hilariously overpowered game-breaker. It's like everything dies just by being in the same room as this sword. In game, it's not any better than the default sword, and some experts consider it to be worse...
- This editor believes that, at least in the first and third games, Dante himself is only present during the cutscenes. This would mean that in actual gameplay, you are playing as his stunt double, who takes all the punishment from the enemies (or makes all the effort to beat them down, depending on your skill) and lacks the cutscene-exclusive powers.
- Solid Snake of the Metal Gear Solid series is an even worse offender. Thanks to the game's control system, which is designed for stealthy motion rather than battle, Snake is awkward in a fight. However, he does things he could never do ingame in the game's cutscenes. This is especially true in The Twin Snakes, where, during one sequence, he actually leaps atop an incoming missile, fires off a Stinger launcher, and jumps clear before it explodes!
- Twin Snakes becomes completely ridiculous with the Rex battle, which Snake decides to preface by leaping about fifty feet to jump kick it. Which is justified...oh, wait it doesn't do a goddamned thing because he just karate kicked a giant warmech.
- In Metal Gear Solid 2, Snake is a rather accurate shot when he's in gameplay. But when Emma's been stabbed and needs to be rescued? He runs across the walkway, sniping things from a hundred yards with his assault rifle without flinching.
- However, Metal Gear Solid 3 also somewhat averts this trope, as a flashy close-quarters combat cutscene is fairly closely based on Snake's actual gameplay CQC abilities; although pulling off something on that level would be extremely difficult in gameplay it is, in theory, possible.
- The Boss in MGS3 is invincible in cutscenes. Every time Snake encounters her, his shoulder gets dislocated and his elbows get snapped. He is no match for her. Until you actually face her in a gameplay encounter. Then she is defeatable and nowhere near as badass as she is in the cutscenes.
- Actually, every time Snake faces her in a cutscene he does noticably better each time. The final Boss battle is where he finally outperforms her after improving throughout the game
- Except it was part of her mission to die. She tells you so before and during, and EVA tells you so after the fight.
- And it was a part of Snake's Character Development.
- Liquid (Ocelot) completely destroys a battle weary Snake in combat in thier first first encounter. Thier second encounter takes place after the war was over. Snake had gone through the microwave, was shocked repeatedly by Mini-Gekko, and on top of all that, his seizures were at thier worst at this point. After passing out, he finds himself on top of a ship, with Liquid. Liquid pumps him full of the stuff he uses to up his Psyche, before fighting. Considering how bad a shape Snake was beforehand, Snake was fighting through sheer power of will. A rather lengthy fight scene starts, with the two toe-to-toe with each other, even though Liquid is in great shape compared to Snake at the time. After sticking each other with syringes once again, the gameplay finally begins. Suprisingly, Liquid could actually end up being an Anti-Climax fight, as long as you keep the pressure on.
- A lot of the above is due to the Fox Die Drebin injected into Snake to kill off the rebellious Patriots - namely, EVA, Big Boss, and Revolver Ocelot. Big Boss explains this shortly before he himself dies of the Fox Die. It's also what prevents the previous Fox Die injection from mutating into a world-ending pandemic.
- Magneto in X-Men Legends is a massively powerful mutant, able to challenge your entire 4-person squad of X-Men, and throws Sentinels about like toys. In the sequel, he is no more powerful than any other character, certainly no more able to fight Sentinels than any other character, and begins, like all of them, at novice-level experience. Prior to the events of X-Men Legends II, he wiped out whole fleets of fighters with his magnetic powers, and in the opening cutscene, tosses soldiers and metal doors aside with little effort. His subsequent encounter with yet more soldiers becomes jarring, as they now provide him far more serious opposition.
- Averted in X-Men: Children of The Atom and ESPECIALLY Marvel vs Capcom 2. That game was where Mag-FUCKIN-neto ended up immortalized as one of the four god characters
- Partially subverted in the first Grandia, where Feena uses her Icarian power to destroy a room full of large hostile stone statues. The ability is then unlocked, but requires some extensive training to actually use it in battle. Then, of course, there's her ultimate ultimate ability, where, by the time she achieves the necessary levels, each and every one of the characters has the strength to practically take over the world singlehandedly.
- In the opening of Shadow Hearts, Yuri reattaches his severed arm, exhibiting a remarkable regenerative ability that is never alluded to again.
- Personally, I always just assumed that this Healing Factor was their interpretation of the HP system - the reason you can survive being repeatedly slashed, shot and punched, in-game, isn't that you're Made Of Iron, but that you've got some sort of magical healing working for you - and your HP gauge running empty just means that you've run out of healing-juice. So, considering that you can survive getting slashed by the exact same enemy, with the exact same offhanded ease (but without the graphical effects) in the actual game, this may actually be the direct OPPOSITE of Cutscene Power To The Max...
- Yuri was fused with a demonic starfish? Or they just wanted to thoroughly earn the M rating in a gory opening scene? In any case, Alice's token magical pendant, which somehow miraculously repulses the Big Bad in the opening, is also never alluded to again.
- This trope also happens in Real Time Strategy games such as Command And Conquer: The ORCA VTOL assault craft is shown dodging missiles in a cutscene, and the Mammoth Mk.II from Tiberian Sun supposedly has the power to level a base whose high-power defenses only leave small scratches in its armor.
- Similiarly, a Ion Cannon strike destroys a small base in a cutscene. Ingame, it only strikes one building, and can't even kill the larger buildings.
- In one of the early GDI cutscenes in Tiberian Sun, a single GDI light infantry blows up two cyborgs with a single shot each. In-game, light infantry are the least expensive and weakest units and a cyborg can withstand multiple shots from light infantry (and it takes a lot more than one light infantry to kill a cyborg).
- In the FPS spinoff Renegade, Havoc kills enemy soldiers with single pistol shots in cinematics. In game, even with headshots, the same soldiers take several shots. Relatedly, when he gets ambushed by cloaked Nod forces, the amount of units present in the cinematic exceed any amount of enemies you ever face at once in normal gameplay.
- In Red Alert, a cutscene shows several tanks and two helicopters being teleported by the chronosphere. In game, you can only teleport a single tank at once, and cannot teleport air units or APCs with people, with the given reason that the people in the APCs will die, which really doesn't make sense because the tanks have to have people in them (these limitations make the Chronosphere something of a Useless Useful Spell in Red Alert 1, while in Red Alert 2 the shortcomings are largely corrected).
- Star Craft similarly has a big stat difference between cuts and game. The Yamato Gun supposedly blasts with one shot and keeps going - in game, it takes 2 full shots. Even more drastic, zerglings take 2 shots of said Battlecruiser to die, whereas in cutscenes a Ghost can kill them with just one shot! The weapons of other races also are much stronger, slicing each other outright.
- Averted with Zeratul. There's a recent video in which he only takes one swipe to slay an hydralisk. In-game, it only takes one hit too.
- Cutscenes in the Mega Man franchise tend to exaggerate the power of the hero's Buster (arm cannon). In most of the games, it's relatively weak compared to the weapons you can get later — but it's his signature weapon, so when he finishes off a boss in a cutscene, he always uses the Buster. This is particularly noticeable in the Battle Network series, where even the weakest BattleChip is much more effective than your default weapon.
- In the Battle Network Gaiden Game Mega Man Network Transmission, the opening cutscene features MegaMan.EXE's charged buster gun as a GIANT LASER that destroys the first game's final boss in a single hit. Then once you start gameplay it inexplicably returns to firing small, slow pellets that do the minimum amount of damage. And even once powered up to full in the game, once charged, it only fires large bursts instead of death beams.
- In Mega Man ZX, Serpent has a One Hit Kill lightning bolt attack that he can call down whenever he feels like it... In the first cutscene that you actually encounter him in. The next two times, he doesn't seem to bother, and when you actually fight him, he doesn't actually use the attack. Though a good Handwave to explain it would be that he can't use this attack indoors. Note that the other two encounters were indoors (in a cave an in Serpent's own HQ, respectively).
- Super Robot Wars uses and reverses this trope. In the cutscene-like moments that happen before or during a battle, mecha are often shown moving or shooting much further than they can in the game. By contrast, many of the cutscenes that show the attacks made in battle are often more deadly-looking than they are in effect. To Humongous Mecha, it seems, being cut in half is only a minor inconvenience.
- Summoner uses Western-style summoning. One apparent exception is dragon summons (summoning a hundred foot long dragon), which function as Summon Magic, Eastern style. The problem comes when your party needs to get back to their home continent for the endgame. The party asks for a flotilla back, their friend then says that's not necessary, because they can simply SUMMON A DRAGON AND FLY ALL THE WAY TO ANOTHER CONTINENT. Needless to say, you still have to walk everywhere after you get there, and you still can't get the dragons to stick around and act like the other summons in battle.
- Breath of Fire 4 has a similar problem. In cutscenes, Fou-Lu can transform into a dragon to fly long distances. Whenever the player is in charge, he has to walk. Ryu shares Fou-Lu's dragon abilities, but always has to walk.
- This is constantly averted in Final Fantasy, where summons are always shown to be temporary (so no good for transport) and airships usually get cool cutscenes.
- Partially subverted in Lunar 2: Eternal Blue. Lucia can kill nearly every enemy in the game when you first get her until she loses her powers. However, later in the game her powers in cutscenes are much more powerful than her powers in battle.
- Humongous Mecha games like this one. Armored Core 2 (the original, not the expansion) had an intro sequence with ACs blasting their rocket boosters all the way, shooting perfectly at enemy mechs, and destroying an entire supply base with just four missiles. The latter one you can actually accomplish: shooting pretty much any destructible object once will blow it up. But in-game, booster-skating only works for a few seconds and makes it nigh-impossible to aim.
- It should be noted however that Armored Core subverts this trope after AC 4. The game will give you an intro movie showing you making high-speed missile dodges, boosting and boost-dodging through the air. once you start playing the game, you not only can do everything the movie does, you can do it faster.
- The most guilty offense that Armored Core offers constantly are mechs that are featured in the openings of the original games (AC, Project Phantasma and Master of Arena), as well as in Armored Core 3 and Silent Line: the featured ACs are overweight! Somewhat plausible by the existence of Human PLUS upgrade which does enable overweight loadage in the former, and the latter simply allows overweight ACs, albeit with greatly reduced performance. Not only that though, the ACs featured looked cool, but some of the designs were grossly impractical (cf. Master of Arena where the featured mech wields very powerful weapons, but very limited ammo, and very low AP body parts). Despite all that, they're all very competent in said cutscenes...
- In Front Mission 4, both opening cutscenes show robots almost skating across the ground with rocket boosters. Ironic, considering the in-game robot's slow, basic walking speed was one of the most common complaints against the game.
- However, the game developers seem to take the complaints to heart with Front Mission Online. While Front Mission has always been a turn-based RPG with Humongous Mecha, FMO throws the concept away and instead adopts an Armored Core-esque shooter, where you can actually slide on the ground, or snipe (but not both...not yet anyway).
- The third game has a robot disables another robots with a punch, while in-game is pathetically weak. That is, without factoring the random occurrence of said punch causing stun effect...
- The Sonic The Hedgehog series is a terrible offender, with characters pulling all sorts of stunts in the cutscenes that you could never do in game.
- Particularly noticeable in the "Dark" Story of Sonic Adventure 2 when Sonic makes a far higher jump than possible in gameplay to instantly KO the Egg Golem... which naturally gives you much more trouble when you actually face the boss as Sonic in the "Hero" side of the Story.
- Shadow the Hedgehog is another serious offender. If only you could fly and deflect bullets in the game as well as in the cutscenes...
- To be fair to the deflecting-bullet thing, Shadow was glowing red at the time, and if you achieve that in-game, you are, indeed, invincibile.
- In every piece of Sonic related media (and every game made past the Genesis years,) Sonic is shown as almost literally being able to fly by simply running 50 feet and jumping off something. If he has to use the spin dash on anything larger than a house he starts Roboteching, being able to stop on a dime in midair and change direction at will. And in Sonic X and cutscenes he can breathe in space, be frozen by its vacuum, AND survive re-entry without a space suit but falling off a platform in his final stages in Sonic Adventure 2 will simply turn him into a screaming fireball.
- Well, Sonic has demonstrated in two of the genesis games that he can breathe in space: Sonic 2 just after blowing the Death Egg, and Sonic and Knuckles, while FIGHTING it.
- In Sonic's opening scene from Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Knux punches Sonic hard enough to knock him out of Super Sonic mode and take his Chaos Emeralds. Many zones later, when you finally interact with Knuckles outside a cutscene, it turns out to be the easiest boss fight in the game.
- Sonic 06 takes this to ridiculous levels. Sonic's first cutscene shows him moving like a speeding bullet and being really badass. Can you do that ingame? No. Shadow's first cutscene shows him ploughing through robots and jumping over a giant gate. Can you do that ingame? No. Silver's first cutscene has him FUCKING FLYING, and speeding off into the distance. Can you do that ingame? No! Also Rouge flies (She can only glide, also does this in Adventure 2), Tails flies WAY better than he actually can, and Sonic generally moves a lot faster than you'll be able to ever move him outside of the mach speed sections.
- Lufia II had Dekar, a ludicrously over-the-top warrior who boasted of his incredible combat skills. When you first meet him (and in other subsequent cutscenes) he shows off his incredible skill by using powerful and implausible abilities such as the aptly-named "Blastmaster" that wipe out hordes of enemies at once. While he is actually in your party, he has no such abilities (though he still may be the strongest character regardless.)
- No More Heroes' protagonist Travis Touchdown is notable for being Made Of Iron in cutscenes. He survives getting blown up by grenades (which are shown to be capable of literally blowing a person's head off), electrocuted, pummeled and then blasted with a Wave Motion Gun (the lethality of which is demonstrated by a floor strewn with corpses), sawed in half (although it was supposedly part of a magic trick, the very same buzzsaw is used to finish off the opponent who used it) and punched through the heart (by a woman who is shown to be capable of killing a man by punching him through the crotch). The only thing shown to be capable of bringing down Travis is an insane girl in a frilly dress who happens to be a bit too happy with her baseball bat; that was the only fight he didn't simply walk away from, in any event. Outside of cutscenes, Travis is still sturdier than your average mook, but very much mortal (even if his body seems to be resistant to being chopped into pieces the way virtually every other foe is - including bosses!).
- Lampshaded in the first teaser of No More Heroes(viewable in the finished game), where Travis gets up after being hit by numerous MISSILES (which does seem to surprise his opponent).
- Chrono Trigger has oodles of these. The most obvious and ridiculous of all are Frog, who was able to summon such power from Masamune and himself he was able to split a mountain apart with a single sword slash (and whose in-game attack stats were usually beneath Crono's,) and Lavos itself, who disintegrated the main character (or a clone thereof) with a beam from its eye... and then never used that attack in battle, despite the deadly threat posed by the good guys.
- Interestingly enough, there is a battle where the Masamune's power carries over from the cutscenes. During the Ocean Palace Disaster, the Red Knife made to destroy the Mammon Machine becomes the Masamune after being stabbed into it, and channels its energy. Later on, you can end up fighting the Mammon Machine, and the Masamune still has the power to absorb its energy, making the boss fight a lot easier if you use Frog.
- Said boss almost impossible to lose to, even without Frog. It's quite an exaggeration to say that Frog makes it easier...more like using Frog will make the battle a minute or two shorter.
- Slightly subverted in Final Fantasy IV, where, upon gaining back his memory, Tellah remembers the ultimate Black Magic spell Meteor, and it even shows up on the menu screen. The only thing preventing him from casting it is that his Magic Points are never high enough to actually use the spell, not until the plot requires him to increase his MP in some other fashion.
- Played straight with Edge. After going through the Eblan cave and finding yourself right outside of the Tower of Babil, the heroes wonder how they're going to get in. Of course, Edge the ninja teleports all of them in. Gee, why do we even bother travelling anywhere or climbing up towers the hard way if you can teleport through walls?
- Ganondorf himself was able to give Link the old one-two in The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker and then have him at his mercy, not so much during the battle.
- Consider Pyron from the Darkstalkers series. According to his storyline, he is an immense, powerful alien who feeds on planets and stars. In his ending sequence, he treats Earth as if it was a piece of jewelry around his finger. Now, disregard all of this plot and simply play a few matches against him, and he comes across as nothing more than a fire elemental with a small degree of shapeshifting prowess. The real kicker? He's not even the most powerful character in the storyline.
- Wild ARMs 2 featured Kanon, who you battled a number of times where she lays waste to your party numerous times. Upon being recruited to battle the evil forces of doom and destruction, she continues to use the same attacks, yet they go from several thousand damage to about two hundred. She does learn some absurdly powerful attacks later on however (good thing she didn't know them when she was an enemy).
- Jade Empire is horrible about this, and combines it with Good Is Dumb. Practically all of your followers are introduced as supremely skilled and competent fighters, both in the cutscenes and when you happen to fight them, but as soon as they join you, you'd be lucky if they would take a Mook down on their own.
- Also that time a single shot from Mirabelle in an in-engine cutscene makes a guy explode.
- Of course, Star Ocean 3 is a wonderful example of this trope, the main point being where, in a cutscene, Fayt gets pissed off, vaporizing an alien spaceship with a single attack. Eventually, you can use this attack during battles, but with nowhere near the destructive power originally shown. Additionally, this attack is only available after you beat the game and delve through most of the hidden dungeons.
- Freelancer is particularly patchy with this one. There are several plot relevant cutscenes where capital ships are taken down by a single torpedo salvo from a squad of fighters, making you wonder if the various navies have decided to armour their capital ships with tissue paper. In game the battleships function effectively as space stations and needless to say you can't shoot them down. This is unless you need to take down said capital ship for plot reasons, in which case you'll generally have a fair few wingmen with you, because it takes a lot more firepower than in those cutscenes.
- The game also inverts this trope with the Order's Anubis-class fighters. When you first encounter them during the first mission, they have just taken out a massive
German Rhineland cruiser. Your first task is helping the Space Police take them out, which you are easily able to do with your worst ship and peashooters for weapons. Worse, when you are actually able to buy those, they are some of the best fighters in the game (not to mention ridiculously cheap).
- In the intro scene for Privateer, the player's ship is shown taking down a pirate fighter with three shots from one mount of the weakest gun of the game. Not even after you acquire the "wondership" and load four of the most powerful guns in the game onto it can you match that feat.
- And let's not even get into the whole thing about maneuvering around asteroids as a hostile missile avoidance/redirection technique, in a ship that not only is half as fast as the missile, but marginally less maneuverable to boot...
- Mostly averted in Wing Commander Secret Ops, whose cutscenes are all rendered by the game engine in realtime (with one or two scenes requiring special coding, due to game engine limitations).
- The intro to Omega Boost shows the player's Humongous Mecha destroying a whole fleet of space ships in one fell swoop with a massive beam weapon. Your armaments in the actual game amount to a machine gun and only slightly more powerful homing lasers. Interestingly, when you do encounter an almost identical fleet, you can take care of them with similar ease, but with an entirely different attack.
- Warhammer 40000: Dawn Of War, oh how your intro cutscenes indulge in this. The opening for the first game depicts, amongst other things, a Dreadnought effortlessly shredding a bunch of pouncing Orks with its Assault Cannon and both Space Marines and Orks killing each other in single attacks. Good luck doing that in-game without an Imbalance Mod. In fact, this applies to the source Tabletop Game itself - just replace "cutscene" with "background material".
- To be fair, the Dreadnought can fuck up quite a number of Orks in-game - this editor once used a single Dread to slaughter five squads of Ork Slugga Boys at once.
- Justified in the sequel where the Dread can perform that very trick - a wide sweep with its Autocannon decimating everything that falls into range.
- Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War: Winter Assault features one infamous cutscene amongst tabletop game players of a Chaplain, a minor Space Marine leader, beating a newly-spawned Bloodthirster, a monster capable of withstanding minutes of your best guns, in single combat, and quickly to boot. That kind of thing does not usually happen in the tabletop game. Given that the Bloodthirster's death animation used the same movements as a Captain with a Daemonhammer, the original design of a Commander killing the Bloodthirster was not nearly as far fetched, given how good Daemonhammers are at killing Daemons.
- Let no one claim Games Workshop doesn't realise it, though: a the game's magazine (White Dwarf) had an article a few years back posted the "stats" of a "movie" Space Marine, a jibe at the backstory. Each of these Space Marines was probably more powerful than any actual unit in the game.
- The cutscene we have seen of DoW 2 also features this heavily. No, that Ranger is not gonna one-shot a SM. No, that Warp Spider is not going to teleport-bounce around like frigging Bankai Ichigo. Then again, given how DoW 2 seems to be shifting towards a more "fluffy" representation of Space Marines, one only hopes that the effects of CPTTM are reduced for the other factions too.
- Those two examples actually do work: Eldar rangers really have powerful, if slow, one-shot attacks that can take a squadmate of yours (especially on the higher difficulties), and Warpspiders really are teleporting around like crazy. The one truly ridiculous thing is killing an Eldar Farseer with a single chainsword strike.
- All Justified in Warhammer. The cutscenes and the background material are all (mostly Imperial) propaganda and what happens in the games are "reality".
- Actually it all depends on who is writing. Some novels and pieces of background material have marines struggling with basic Mooks, others have a single squad annhilating entire armies of said Mooks.
- An enemy example: In Dawn Of War 2 the worst an enemy can do to your heroes is incapacitate them, and they are easily revivable after that. But when a Tyranid Warrior attacks the Force Commander Davian Thulle (a seasoned veterean, mind it), he does enough damage to him to send Thulle into a prolonged coma where he teeters on the brink of death for days and can only return to battle entombed in a Dreadnaught.
- In a short cutscene in Tales Of Symphonia that takes place in the King's castle in Meltokio, Lloyd takes out a huge, heavily armed Imperial Guard soldier who happens to be looking the other way by saying "Sorry about this!" and punching him in the back. When you encounter such guards in-game, they are worthy foes that require quite a bit of damage before going down.
- Said guards are also an example of Cutscene Incompetence.
- One boss's signature attack is to fire energy bolts at you and naturally he does this as his base attack during his fight. Soon after losing the battle, he appears in the following cut scene sneaking up on the heroes and points his blaster at one of the characters. Another character sees this and immediately dives in the way to save them. It is implied that his one shot was potentially fatal while you could easily take about a dozen of them in battle without healing. I guess while crawling up from his defeat he "Set his laser from stun... to kill."
- Two of the party members have wings and can fly... in cutscenes. During gameplay they are just as restricted by the Insurmountable Waist Height Fences as everyone else.
- Let's not forget Regal's sudden ability to shoot beams from his hands, which he uses to escape a prison cell, but can't use in battle.
- Correction : he refuses to use it in battle.
- Have we forgotten cutscenes where people like Magnius, a musclebound Desian Grand Cardinal who is first seen snapping someone's neck with his bare hand, are heavily wounded by the most basic attacks? Demon Fang and Fire Ball certainly won't do that ingame.
- The trope is also present in Tales Of The Abyss, where the main character, Luke, kills a fully-armored, heavily-trained soldier with a wooden training sword. By accident.
- In all fairness, the player is SUPPOSED to have upgraded Luke's weapon by that point. A better example is Tear, who at various points, puts an entire house to sleep, slits a man's throat with a throwing knife, and takes a hit for someone with much higher defense, among other things. In battle, the aformentioned sleep spell only affects one target, her knife based attacks are pitifuly weak, and her defensed is among the lowest in the party. She's still very good, just not at what the cutscenes would suggest.
- Ion, too. In Cheagle Woods, he uses a Daathic Fonic arte, and nearly collapses. However, in the second playthrough and further, you can summon him and he uses THE SAME arte, and only stumbles back.
- And let us not forget the awesome Back To Back Badasses scene with Yuri and Flynn in Tales Of Vesperia, wherein they take out ten mooks within seconds.
- Actually, considering the power of Yuri and Flynn once they levels up high enough, or if you have the right swords, this isn't that surprising. Or if you assume they're both in Overlimit.
- In Persona 3, The Dragon has a revolver as his main weapon. Naturally, in battle it deals a moderate amount of damage, not too much to worry about alone. However, in cutscenes he kills three people (with only a single shot each) from the same gun. Two of them are party members, but one gets revived by a Heroic Sacrifice.
- The Dragon also has a bit of a blind spot for numbers both in and out of cinematics as he frequently tries to intimidate a gang of up to eight people (and a battle-robot with machine gun arms) using only a revolver and an annoying emo kid. Quite why the protagonists don't just rush them and beat the crap out of them is never really explained.
- The battle robot could rush him. The others can't, because at least one of them would get shot if they tried.
- In Lunar: The Silver Star, the Big Bad's minions are shown to be capable of mind-controlling and turning to stone two of the Four Heroes, who saved the world prior to the events of the game. On the occasions that the other heroes join you, they're both at max level, but when you fight said minions near the end of the game, they're beatable at much lower levels.
- Zio, The Dragon in Phantasy Star IV, uses a certain spell to incapacitate one of your party members during a cutscene, forcing a hasty escape. As it turns out, nothing can heal the damage caused by this attack - not healing spells, not even a trip to the Trauma Inn. Said party member just keeps getting worse and eventually dies. Not too long after, you fight Zio again, and he uses the same attack frequently... only now it's quite easily curable. This is partially justified, as the party found a way to cure it, but were simply too late returning to save their friend.
- Subverted quite violently at the start of Lost Odyssey. The game starts off a cutscene with an evenly-matched-seeming battle between two armies zooming in on your character, who is completely invincible against the enemy soldiers, and kills dozens of them in seconds. Seems to be an obvious case of this... but when you cut to actually fighting the soldiers, you get A Taste Of Power segment where he's just as invincible and capable of killing hordes of the soldiers, and all you lose is the more flashy and cinematic (pun not intended) combat techniques you saw earlier.
- However, the game also plays the trope straight with regards to the Immortality of several of the playable characters; in the opening cutscene, Kaim survives a catastrophe which wipes out every other living thing in the area and is not so much as mildly singed, and several of the flashbacks provided by the "Thousand Years of Dreams" similarly imply that the immortals are completely indestructible. In gameplay, however, they take damage like anyone else and can be KOed, and although they get back up again after a few turns, if the whole party goes down it's still Game Over.
- In one cutscene, Sarah uses a spell that cuts a metal train carriage clean in half. You'd think something like that would be useful to get past various obstacles later in the game. It's never seen again.
- In the Prince Of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy your character is able to grabbed hold of specific ledges and bars to move around the area. In certain cutscenes, though, he is shown to be capable of much more elaborate manuevers. This style was actually moved into Assassins Creed made by the same people, where you can literally grab onto almost anything.
- Sands of Time features the worst example, where in one cutscene the Prince runs down a wall to survive what would otherwise be a fatal drop.
- In the cutscene leading up to the final battle of the Halo Trilogy, 343 Guilty Spark utterly obliterates Master Chief and the Arbiter with his superpowered beam weapon. Once actual gameplay begins, however, the ensuing fight is one of the easiest and least exciting battles in the history of FPS video games, as Spark just floats in one spot and fires (inaccurately) in your general direction.
- To be fair, shortly prior to him being unable to hit the broadside of a Spartan, he'd taken a broadside hit from what amounted to a man-portable Scorpion Tank's cannon, AND he'd finally blown more than a few circuits.
- Two problems there. Firstly, you still fight him right before he gets blasted, he's not better; secondly, it was quite amusing to actually bring that same gun to the battle and watch it do nothing until the sergeant uses it, making it a Cutscene Power To The Max anyway.
- A better example is one of the last cutscenes in Halo Wars where in three Spartans solo about fifty Elites by tossing them around like rag dolls, dual wielding SMGs like John Woo, and performing vaulting flips at least ten or fifteen feet into the air. The sad part is this is about in line with the novels, but nothing like what you're acutally allowed to do in the game when you play as one of them.
- Well, the flips aren't in the game, but in the FPSes John-117 can cut a swath through a lot of things. What's egregious is how Forge beat the Arbiter in what amounted to a fistfight (with a few cheap shots, but c'mon Forge is Badass Normal. Arby's supposed to be badass by Proud Warrior Race Guy standards).
- There's also the issue of whether or not the Master Chief can get hurt by falling. Starting in Halo 2, Master Chief can fall any distance without getting hurt—unless the developers don't want you to go into that area. This leads to bizarre situations like the Chief being able to surf a small metal plate down from a spaceship in orbit and land on Earth with nary a scratch but being unable to survive falling down a fifteen-foot deep hole.
- To be fair, he was completely paralyzed and knocked unconscious until someone revived him by that stunt.
- In Clive Barker's Undying, your character Patrick Galloway suddenly jumps like a flea through a stained glass window many feet away to escape danger. Normally he only jumps about as high as a normal man.
- In Crysis: Warhead, a cutscene has the main character getting shot multiple times by a pistol and essentially having it bounce off the nanosuit, despite the fact that on the higher diffculties in-game at the rate it was being shot it would probably take you down in 4-5 hits.
- Some of the other cutscenes in the series also apply, although you mostly can pull off what they are doing in them, even if it isn't to the same degree.
- Also doing special ability combos with cloak/maximum speed/maximum strength that would work if only you had five time the energy you have.
- Although the Pokemon games don't have cutscenes per se, if you believe the pokedex descriptions several legendaries fall victim to this. Uxie, for example, wipes out the memories of anyone who sees its eyes. Dialga and Palkia control time and space, respectively. Arceus created the universe, thus making it effectively God. You'd think that these features might translate to special abilities in game, but not really. They have generally high stats, but none of the instant-win powers that you might suspect they have. Even some average, non-legendary have out-there entries, such as the burns of a Houndoom supposedly never healing.
- In Platinum, there is some text saying that the power of Pokemon is inhibited when captured with a Pokeball, which is why Cyrus wants to capture Dialga and Palkia with Red Chains instead.
- Of course, maybe it's just lying its ass off. Alakazam is said to have an IQ of over 5000, which is a bit like saying you got 25000 on your SATs. Even extrapolating, an IQ that high is probably hitting The Singularity, which admittedly would make an absurd Fan Fic.
- Also, with an I.Q. like that, you could be damn sure that Alakazam would be ruling the humans, not the other way around.
- Trope is also used frequently in the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series after boss battles, when the defeated boss effortlessly knocks your party down and you have to be saved by a plot device.
- Dialga and Palkia at the very least have some nod to their powers, Roar of Time and Spacial Rend, very powerful unique attacks that manipulate time and space, which is in correspondence to the Pokemon's Pokedex entries. Arceus also has Judgment- an attack befitting a God.
- Don't know if it counts, but many descriptions in the Pokedex describe Pokemon eating other Pokemon, while in the actual games, all they can eat is either bait, berries, Pokeblocks, or Poffins.
- Arceus creating the universe doesn't mean it's God. It just means it's Nintendo.
- The opening animation of X-COM shows X-COM soldiers routing Mutons with your starting rifles and miniguns. Try fighting Mutons with those weapons in the actual game, and you'll get your ass kicked!
- Of course, by the time they do show up you'll generally have much better weapons to use against them.
- Don't forget that they do all that in mid-air after jumping out of the Skyranger anime-style.
- The Force Unleashed features Action Commands somewhat similar to those of Kingdom Hearts that allow Galen to finish off bosses with highly dramatic moves that would be quite impossible normally (AT-ST crushed into a cube, anyone?).
- To be fair:
- "I find your lack of faith disturbing..."
- A better example might be how he's able to use the Force to move something the size of a Star Destroyer in a cut scene, a degree of power never evidenced even in other cut scenes, let alone in play.
- In Radiant Dawn, Mia has a fairly modest figure in the ingame art and her character model. In the reintroduction of the Greil Mercenaries...
- Dark Cloud 2: In Heim Rada there was this fire machine. Which practically DESTROYED the lives of the people, until some minor past change destroyed it, which is essentially the point of the whole game, changing time. Emperor Gespard also has the power to travel 10,000 years into the past or future, and yet never seems to use it when fighting him.
- Haseo of .hack//G.U. gets this to the extreme. In a cutscene he jumps about 50ft in the air and attacks with a sword (it's even worse when you consider that you can't jump during gameplay).
- The middle part of the intro to Resident Evil Code Veronica has Claire outrunning a helicopter, dodging bullets, and reacting faster than gravity. Mind you, her abilities aren't even consistent in that one cutscene...
- Albert Wesker in Resident Evil 5. His combat prowess in cutscenes is almost god-like, whereas his behavior in actual gameplay is almost boring by comparison. In cutscenes he jumps off walls and ceilings, totally dominates the protagonists using complex martial arts moves, appears to "teleport" (ala Nightcrawler) out of the way of bullets, and even impales someone right through the chest with his bare hand. But when you face him in boss fights he's significantly less badass. Granted he's no pushover, but he isn't nearly as agile (most of the fights involve him slooowwwwllly stalking towards the player to attack them), he clearly dodges bullets rather than teleporting out of the way, and his martial arts are very easily countered by a well-timed button press. And the strategy used to defeat him in the next-to-last boss fight? You turn out the lights so he can't see you. Yeah.
- That'll teach him to wear sunglasses at night!
- In Resident Evil 0, Billy is able to jump around and shoot things in slow motion, Max Payne style. In gameplay he can only turn and shoot with Resident Evil's trademark awkward controls.
- In a cutscene in Mirrors Edge, Faith gets violently thrown a distance that's about twice what is usually fatal, and gets up about thirty seconds later like nothing happened.
- Throughout the plot of Digimon World Dusk, the Big Bad Grimmon is shown using an attack that's capable of instantly incapacitating and brainwashing whatever gets hit by it. He later gets a powered-up version he uses to make an entire union of Digimon Tamers hellbent on destroying everyone in your union. During the final boss fight against him, he uses it on a regular basis....and all it does is inflict the sleep status effect on your party. To be fair, putting your entire party to sleep is pretty dangerous as he can pound away at you for several turns without anyone waking up, but it's still nowhere near as powerful as the storyline made it out to be.
- Warcraft III trigger system allows you to create your own Cutscene Power To The Max moments by healing near-death characters or having them deal massive damage with the right "code" at the right time. Of course, that means you can remove the official moments yourself by toying with the campaign map files.
- Arthas also gets this. In cutscenes, he demonstrates the ability to drain someone's soul with his sword and turn them into a banshee he controls, raise the corpse of a giant dragon, and possibly teleport. Outside cutscenes he can temporarily raise six dead things as zombies, but it doesn't work on dragons.
- Awesome averted in God Hand; In one of the few cutscenes involving him fighting, Gene, the protagonist, proceeds to launch three enemies to the sky. While the moves are not normally "one-hit-kill" type in the game, they're pretty much available to the player, and if one takes advantage of counter hits and the tension gauge/roulette, can accomplish the same thing in-game.
- Ninja Blade uses the same Action Commands model as several of the above examples, but turns the 'Awesomeness' dial up to 11. You can pull off some nice combos and nifty acrobatic wall-runs in the actual game, sure, but in the cutscenes, all bets are off. Driving a motorcycle across the side of a bus in midair, then throwing both into the mouth of a gigantic foe while they explode? Check. Grab a gigantic fly with your grappling-hook and spin around on the spot to hammer-throw it into a nearby building which then explodes? Check. Clim the Tokyo Tower by jumping off of falling debris? Check. Throw a skyscraper at a boss? Check-checkity-check!!
- The Witcher game - Geralt handles a monster spectacularly well in the introduction video. I wish I could do that in game play... especially as you end up fighting exactly the same monster at one point - and where did all my cool moves go?
- This is a major point of the game. The cutscene happens before Geralt loses his memory and much of the skills you gain as you level up are remembering things you were once able to do.
- In the cutscene where you encounter the final boss of Dead Space, it kills someone else by grabbing them with its tentacle and crushing them against a wall. Naturally, it never does this to you when you fight it.
- Possibly justified by the fact that Kendra was wearing form-fitting clothing (and the Hive mind knocks her off a staircase, smashes her with the tentacle, and just whips her around), whilst Isaac is (by that point ingame) decked out in a heavily-reinforced mining suit.
- The tentacle in question probably weighs fifty tons. Isaac could be wearing a tank for all that would matter.
- The necromorphs don't want to destroy bodies though. They need bodies for themselves after all.
- Genjimaru. So hard. The first time we see him fighting he drives off four Av Kamiw single handed. Literally, because he's carrying his granddaughter. Then he roflstomps Karura in a duel and later manages to actually injure Diy. When you get to play as him? He's among the weakest characters you can use because his skill sets haven't been trained, so Hakuoro/Karura/Touka etc are hitting quite a bit harder on their first blows than he lands on his entire attack.
- In Battle Moon Wars, whenever a new attack is introduced, it will either kill or heavily wound the enemy it's being used on. Which is usually a boss. Which means it often does tens of thousands of points of damage in one attack. They're less effective in the actual gameplay.
- In Fire Emblem cutscene powers are abused so much that the instant gameplay leaves your hands, nearly anything can happen. In a cutscene in Radiant Dawn, Shinon is seen shooting a bow from a tree at ridiulous range and severing a rope, yet he can still only shoot three squares away from himself. In Blazing Sword, pretty much any villain worth his salt has the ability to magically teleport, although the only things in-game that offer teleportation are staves, which must be used by someone other than the person who is teleporting. This isn't even limited to magic-users. Even the assassin, Jaffar, is seen teleporting. Jaffar is also seen triggering his one hit KO ability whenever he so chooses, while he can neither teleport nor reliably trigger the kill in the level where he deserts the Black Fang for the love of Nino
- Possibly a lot of villains in the Super Mario Bros series, but most so King Boo in Luigi's Mansion. He captured freaking Mario in a painting, manages to teleport characters if they don't capture enough Boos, scares Luigi into near death when he first appears... and gets relatively easily beaten in the final battle. And then in the sequels, beaten by Mario a heck of a lot. Heck, he's beaten by Peach twice...
- Army Of Two's cutscenes think that you have an assault rifle at all times. It gets really funny when you are rapid-firing WITH A SHOTGUN.
- For a rare example of this trope being justified, see The Darkness game. While you play the game as Jackie Estacado, controlling the titular Darkness you're a force to be reckoned with. During two of the cutscenes where The Darkness controls Jackie... let's just say at one point he pulls down a helicopter with one tentacle and leave it at that. However, the game is fairly explicit in that The Darkness' powers are restrained by Jackie, or at least his limited moral scruples. Therefore, when Jackie loses control, (hence, cutscene) the Darkness is rather ridiculously powerful.
- In Tekken 3, Bryan Fury is able to take bullets to the face and chest, a shell from a tank, and then proceed to rip the turret off and throw it at the retreating soldiers. In TTT, he gets shot several times by Lei Wulong and manages to continue fighting as if nothing happened. However, in game he's just one of the slightly quicker big bruisers. Bandai-Namco managed to fix the discrepancy in Tekken 5 though.
- Touhou Project does not have cutscenes, but almost all characters canonically have terrifying powers such as "destruction of everything and anything" or simply, instant death that they will obviously never use ingame. Justified because the one they're generally facing is the guardian of Gensokyo and her death would cause the end of the world.
- Well, they are kinda following a system with rules, which might probably limit what they can or cannot do with their powers, since there's probably some clause prohibiting automatic wins. And besides, if you want to get right into it, the protagonist has an ability so powerful that if she just used it indefinitely outside of the rules, there would be nothing that anybody got do to stop her.
- In the cutscene where Alex Mercer gains his Armour power, the transformation comes with an effect that throws the Infected piling up on him away. Would it have made the game intolerably easy to let us players do that too?
- That's nothing compared to the final cutscene where, after being blown up by a nuke, his remains consume a crow and casually regenerate. Naturally, this does not occur when he dies in-game.
- Kingdom Hearts II: Several times in the game Sora and co. will one hit enemies that will normally take several strikes or combos to defeat. "I don't have time for you!". This is of course, not yet mentioning how he slices entire buildings in half in cutscene attacks, known as reaction commands.
- And in 358/2 Days, Xion has this as well. While typically when she helps in story mode she sucks compared to the player (even in the missions where your level is cut in half or you're fighting with a stick), in cutscenes she frequently slices boss heartless in half.
- Roxas, on the other hand, never does much of this trope, as the only time he really does anything awesome in a cutscene is in the last mission where you one hit kill most of the enemies anyway.
- Mana Khemia Alchemists Of Al Revis's Anna is proven to be very capable with her katana. Like wiping out her workshop deadly, who might as well be some of the strongest and most competent in the school. Naturally, some of the other characters can dealt more damage in battle.
- In Mass Effect, 2 especially, your party members are often found slicing through hordes of mooks like a hot knife through butter when you first meet them. When you get control over them they are substantially less powerful.
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