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Gameplay And Story Segregation
This trope occurs whenever there is inconsistency in how things work or behave between the gameplay and storyline sections of the game, the latter of which consists of cutscenes and dialogue. While this trope is generally forgivable due to technological limitations, especially egregious instances can result in the shattering of the player's Willing Suspension Of Disbelief.

Since large-scale cutscenes and extensive dialogue have only been present in games the last ten years or so, Gameplay And Story Segregation is far more prevalent in modern games, especially ones in which the storyline is a focal point of the game.

Forms of Gameplay And Story Segregation include:

See also RPG Anime, Gameplay And Gameplay Segregation and Screw The Rules I Have Plot. Plot Coupon That Does Something is a form of aversion of this, but most notable aversions should be listed in this article.

Examples:

  • The special moves "Hadouken" (Surging Fist), "Shoryuken" (Rising Dragon Punch) and "Tatsumaki Senpuu Kyaku" (Hurricane Kick) in Street Fighter II are moves that, storyline-wise, severely injure opponents. Those, in and of itself, are toned-down versions of the original murderous techniques (which Gouki/Akuma uses and Gouken knows of) that can actually kill an opponent (the "Gou Hadoken", "Gou Shoryuken", and the "Tatsumaki Zanku Kyaku"). Since this would obviously result in unfair gameplay, this is heavily toned down in the game itself. Meanwhile, the various anime versions wander the spectrum between "uncommon occurrence" and "final strike of destiny".
  • This also occurs in the RTS Warcraft III. Fallen heroes can be resurrected at a special building, so enemy heroes will make repeated suicide attacks - until they are killed in a cutscene, when it turns out to be permanently fatal.
    • One of the cutscenes in War Craft II depicts a human footman commandeering an orcish catapult and using it to destroy a goblin zeppelin. In gameplay, catapults can't even attack zeppelins, let alone strike them down in one hit.
  • In Phantasy Star II; Rolf is unable to use the teleport station in Paseo to go directly to other cities at the start of the game. It's required to visit a city once before you can teleport there from other cities. This creates an odd paradox since he's unable to go directly to Piata. A city he had travelled to in the past, right before a rather important story-related event unfolded.
  • None of the protagonists in the Grand Theft Auto series can technically be killed. If one's health bar runs out, he is said to be "Wasted!", and will return to the gameworld outside the nearest hospital. The implication being that the player character can always recover swiftly from any injury, including being trapped inside an exploding vehicle. Furthermore, when pedestrians are killed, they can always be revived by paramedics. Of course, when the plot calls for it, any character can be Killed Off For Real.
    • Pedestrians can't be revived if you kill 'em right. A high-caliber headshot or katana decapitation is just one of several ways of preempting the unquiet dead.
    • The plot of San Andreas is pretexted on the idea that the protagonist can be threatened with a long prison sentence for the murder of a cop, and hence forced to do the bidding of a corrupt cop. The same game later has the protagonist shoot his way into a top-secret military base to steal a jetpack, rob a military train, shoot down a helicopter, steal a Harrier jet from a warship and shoot down at least one other, blow up the turbines of a local dam...And these are just the things you have to do in missions.
      • How about the bit where the rival gang is chasing you in their car, and you're on a bicycle. The gameplay should let you jack any vehicle you like, and go anywhere, or run the rival gang off the road, right? Well, you can if you like, but the storyline won't advance, and the gang bangers' car will still be after you, indestructible and unstoppable, until you pick that bike up off the road and slog your way to the checkpoint on it.
      • Actually, the gang's car CAN be destroyed. it takes like 10 missles, but its possible. of course, everyone are still cycling for their lives.
      • Not to mention the fact that the player can willingly murder hundreds of cops (and get away without even being killed/arrested), yet all cutscenes still portray the player character as innocent. In fact, as the plot goes on CJ is shown in a more and more positive light and seems to be trying to "get away from" all of the illegal activity in order to start a good, honest life...And as soon as these cutscenes finish, the player can get back to throwing hand grenades off a highway overpass to see how far cars can drive before they explode.
      • It's also strange in most of the other games, seeing as how Victor Vance from Vice City Stories, and Niko Bellic and Johnny Klebitz in IV are shown having the same goals and have calm personalities, but sound like ravenous maniacs if you decide to go after NP Cs full-force. And this same bloodlust disappears when you start the next mission cutscene.
      • Often, the game ignores the resources CJ could potentially posess, in classic examples of Cutscene Incompetence; for example, in an early mission, a character called B Dup threatens to hit CJ if he doesn't leave. Despite that CJ could potentially be carrying an assault rifle at this point, he will always get spooked and leave.
      • Late in the game, an even bigger example is seen; at this point, CJ has just robbed a casino, has contacts with a powerful criminal organisation, owns his own airfield with a Harrier jet and possibly also an attack helicopter, and just gained use of a mansion. Then his brother is released from jail and demands CJ help him take back the 'hood. Rather than just having his underlings handle what at this point is a ridiculously trivial task, he ends up more or less right back where he was when he started, with all of his power and connections totally forgotten about.
      • And the ultimate kicker to all of that is if Sweet had actually used his brain when CJ told him of these accomplishments, he could have realized that his little brother has effectively and inadvertently allowed the Grove Street Families to control the entire state, if not the entire country. But no, he bitches CJ out about not "being true to the hood." Buh?
      • In the final mission, the protagonist hands a Selective Condemnation to his opponent for wearing body armour. It is unlikely the player character will not also be wearing body armour at this point, or indeed at many points during the game. Obviously, nobody ever berates him for wearing it, since he doesn't visibly do so.
    • Saint's Row 2 has the same segregation with the Killed Off For Real as NPC allies can be revived by the player and non-allies can be revived by paramedics. The way that you and other characters act is a lot less segregated as shown by Johnny Gat's trial for over 300 counts of murder though that's probably a little low too.
  • This trope is pretty much universal and constantly active in MMORPGs - typically in the "infinite-lives bosses", the "what do you mean, resurrect spell?", and the "we desperately need level 1 fighters even though we have level 70 shopkeepers" varieties.
    • Well, a level 70 shopkeeper is one who has put 61 points in the Shortchange talent tree...
    • Eve Online makes an effort to avert it, with the status of players as capsuleers justifying and deconstructing many of your average MMORPG tropes, from player immortality to the sociopathic need to slaughter everything in sight for fun or marginal profit.
  • THE argument on Mitadake High. If you play normally, you will be called a terrible rper and shunned. If you play well and properly in the character of an Ordinary High School Student then you WILL be killed off fast and laughed at as a noob. The two sides of this argument are rabid.
  • Ace Combat 6 had this at the end of Mission 12, where I'd spent the second half of the mission running for my life, having taken 97% damage with no return line (crossing it leads to the landing sequence, which leads to your plane being fully repaired except on Ace difficulty) and then after reinforcement squadrons arrived I just kept calling in Allied Attacks or Allied Cover against all the other planes except for two unarmed electronic jamming planes that I took out. And yet one of those reinforcement pilots claimed that it was all me...
    • In that case, the guy's probably just impressed that you're still in the fight at all, given that your plane is being held together more by the power of prayer than anything else.
  • The amateur game Sensible Erection RPG features quite a bit of lampshading and parody of the cliches of Japanese RPGs. Before the final confrontation, a party member that had been killed in a cutscene returns as if nothing had happened, and his companion declares, "I used a 1up on him. What's the big deal?" To which the boss responds, "See? I told you, [we live in a] videogame."
    • The Simpsons Game has a very similar joke. Homer starts to give a speech about how he clearly isn't a videogame character but rather a real person; however this is cut short when he falls down a Bottomless Pit to his death. After immediately resurrecting he just says, "OK fine, I'm a videogame guy."
  • In the Dungeons And Dragons pencil-and-paper RPG, the character class known as the "Paladin" is granted divine powers by his patron god and will lose them if he commits acts contrary to his god's nature. Some mechanism to represent this rule is usually present in computer games based on D&D. Even so, one isn't necessarily allowed to bring it up in circumstances in which it would be useful to do so. To whit: In the computer RPG Neverwinter Nights 2 (in which paladins can only be lawful good), there is a sequence in which the player stands falsely accused of slaughtering an entire village and must prove his innocence at a trial. Illogically enough, if the class of the player character is a paladin, one is not allowed to point out that if that if the player character had actually committed this heinous act, he would have lost his divine powers, but since he retains them, he must be innocent.
    • Order Of The Stick uses this idea in a trial: the prosecution argues that the arresting officer didn't lose her powers, so the defendants must be guilty.
  • This is particularly obvious in older games, due to technical limits. For instance, in the 1990 Dungeons And Dragons computer game Secret of the Silver Blades, most of the story takes place in a gigantic frozen cave. The game wasn't advanced enough to let the heroes use fighting magic outside the combat menu. So you kill hundreds of monsters with fire magic, but can't melt a single frozen door with it. (Instead, you have to wait for the villains to melt the doors for you - using the exact same fire magic you have.)
    • Capcom's Dungeons And Dragons arcade game Shadow Over Mystara introduces two new characters to the playable party, and the plot acts as if they've always been adventuring with them from the start. One of them even pulls out a Plot Coupon from the first game that they "stole" to allow the party to access the final leg of stages.
  • Ridiculously silly in the Nippon Ichi game Phantom Brave is how the sweet, kind and innocent Marona who is The Messiah, gains powers for herself and her equipment. She does this by "fusing" her party members into herself and her equipment. This results in them having Final Death as far as the game is concerned. The plot completely ignores this.
    • Well, to be fair, said party members are all phantoms. They're already dead. But still.
  • In the early areas of Rule of Rose. there's a pair of scissors you have to get that are dangling just out of your reach. Even though there's dozens of ways that the character should be able to get them, ranging from using the chairs in the room to slightly stretching or standing on her toes, the actual solution is massively convoluted and involves doing something the plot of the game explicitly forbids you from doing.
  • In Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, almost all locked doors can be "bashed" open by force... except when they're suddenly not, requiring the player to bypass them through monster-infested areas so they can run into mandatory party members and recruit them. The sequel at least Handwaves this by saying that the "locked for real" plot-relevant doors are "magnetically sealed", immune even to lightsabers, which can be used to quickly open nearly any other door in the game.
    • This kind of...kind of...makes sense in terms of canon. In the original first movie, and I believe some of the EU, "magnetically sealed" implies it has some kind of forcefield erected around it. This makes it immune to energy weapons, I.E. lightsabers. If memory serves, in A New Hope, Luke has a lightsaber right there with him and when he sees they're trapped in a trash compactor with magnetically sealed doors, and they stop trying to brute force their way out after Han nearly kills them shooting the door, causing the bolt to ricochet around the enclosed area. So while it sounds retarded, it's entirely likely that whatever forcefield "sealed" those doors may in fact be able to outlast a lighsaber. Still a Handwave though but, apparently, one that is backed up by canon.
    • So why not just hack the wall right next to it apart?
    • One particularly annoying example of the trope occurs when items that give you immunity to poison don't always work outside of combat. At one point this may lead to a Nonstandard Game Over, if you make the wrong decision based on your supposed complete immunity.
  • In the original Super Mario Bros, fireballs and thrown shells wouldn't affect enemies that had just walked offscreen, due to technical limits. The manual suggested this was because they were doing something sneaky where you couldn't see.
    • In the manual for Sonic The Hedgehog 3, a gameplay hint suggested that Robotnik had outfitted the environments themselves with inescapable traps that would require you to reset your MegaDrive/Genesis. It then suggested that, to avoid these flaws in the collision engine traps, to not run too fast when under the effect of Mercy Invincibility.
  • God Of War 2 has an example at the ending: Athena gets impaled in the ending by Kratos with the god-killing BFS and dies, this would be fine in itself... Except you just spent the last twenty minutes or so stabbing and impaling Zeus with it, INCLUDING in cutscenes, yet he seems to shrug it off within a few seconds , even your final cutscene impalement just before Athena interrupts (and is subsequently killed). Not even some sort of godly Charles Atlas Superpower can explain why Zeus can do this, as the manual states that Athena herself is a highly skilled warrior, so, apparently, the only real explanation is that Zeus is a rare case of a villain being strong as he needs to be to survive for an epic final showdown in the next game.
    • There's another example. When Kratos beats the Colossus near the start of the game, he normally has a full health bar because this section is fairly easy. However, once he is in a cutscene one hit from the Colossus lands him near death and his armour breaks off his body. What makes it worse is that Kratos routinely survives being hit by huge monsters like the colossus with little loss of health.
  • Modern WWE games with career modes fall victim to this. Your status as a face or heel is solely dependent on the choices you make during storyline cutscenes, meaning your actual behavior in the ring is entirely irrelevant. For example, you may play your matches dirty, doing things such as using weapons, removing turnbuckle pads, delivering low bows, and taking advantage of the Easily Distracted Referee, but as long as you make the corresponding decisions during cutscenes, the game will act as if you're a straight-up face. Some games will penalize you by taking away momentum (the stuff that lets you perform special moves) for using tactics that don't match your alignment. However, you can still do them at any time, and the storyline will never acknowledge it.
    • This may actually reflect a lot of developments from the Attitude Era and subsequent years, and the popularity of superstars such as Eddie Guerrero, who would "Lie, Cheat, and Steal" but still be a fan-favorite because he was amazing in the ring and could convince the crowd to eat out of the palm of his hand.
  • Many RPGs have summons or other spells with extensive animations that never affect reality in the RPG world. The earthquake spell never takes out any buildings, Bahamut Zero can fly out of space and zap your enemies even when you're underground, and the most infamous offender, Final Fantasy VII's Supernova, destroys Earth's whole solar system, doing some damage to the characters but leaving them and the planet (which is not even Earth) intact. Moreover, the villain can cast it multiple times. On the other hand, Little Girl Rydia summons Titan in a battle-cutscene and creates an entire mountain range (long before she learns how to summon Titan, at that). Likewise, in Final Fantasy IX summons are pivotal to the plot as the beasts enact massive actions in cutscenes; apparently, their attacks are much more surgically precise during gameplay.
    • In a bizarre exception that vindicates the rule, Final Fantasy VI has a cutscene where character uses a smoke bomb to escape from a fire.
  • Final Fantasy IV, if one uses Level Grinding, Rydia can learn the spells Fire2 (Fira) and Fire3 (Firaga). But you still cannot get past the Ice Wall until the plot grants Rydia the spell "Fire"...the weakest of the fire spells. This is arguably due to the fact that grinding that much is effectively Sequence Breaking.
  • In the Saturn RPG Shining the Holy Ark, the wooden barrier blocking entrance to the final dungeon can be burned down with Inferno, the game's strongest fire magic. This might be a subversion of the trope if it weren't for the fact that all the other fire magic you've learned has no effect at all.
  • Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII has an emotionally powerful but very odd example in the final battle. Zack faces an Unwinnable fight against a whole army of Shinra Mooks, but how fast he falls depends on the fading memories of friends and enemies in his slot-machine-like Limit Break function, not on his HP. I was killed... at full HP. Also, the final trio of Mooks that finish him off are unkillable for no discernable reason, as you're still dealing 9999 damage to them per swing. Many who've actually played the game (so far) have found the ending's storyline use of its "DMW system" game mechanic brilliant and emotionally moving, so it's probably an Acceptable Break from Reality.
    • Of course, at the end of the game, not only are the Mooks unkillable, but so is Zack: his HP can't go below 1 no matter how much damage he takes. The battle isn't a measure of Zack's ability to kick ass anymore, since no matter how much ass he kicks he has to die. Instead, the battle is a measure of how long he can hold on to the things that bind him to life despite taking absolutely murderous amounts of damage. As he is killed, his memories also slip away, until finally he has nothing left keeping him alive, and he dies.
    • Another Crisis Core example, similar to the FF 8 one above. Much of the Level Grinding in this game takes place through a menu-based 'SOLDIER Mission' system, where you undertake various missions for Shinra Inc at any save point. However, you're still able to use this system during the latter leg of the game, where Zack is on the run with Shinra Company hunting him down and gunning for his blood. That's a whole barrel of WTF right there.
  • Final Fantasy X features a scenario where you make your way through waves of mooks to stop Seymour's forced wedding to Yuna, when suddenly you are shown a cutscene wherein your characters are held up by more of the same mooks with guns, and for some reason your party just gives up (hint: it's so the story can progress to the next cutscene). This is maddening for any player who has been doing decent leveling up beforehand, as the party should be in fine shape to take out the rest of the bad guys. But the game doesn't care if you're still at 80% of your max HP when it interrupts your impending victory to tell you that you have no chance of winning against a few more mooks.
  • Final Fantasy X-2 contains a bizarre example in which the party chases down villain-wannabe LeBlanc, who has stolen Yuna's garment grid and impersonates her appearance exactly... despite the fact that every other example of using the grid system, including the exact dressphere she's using, copies the outfit, not the user's appearance. On the flipside, the Dressphere skill/class system is frequently mentioned in cutscenes. And not just in "here's how the game works" exposition either, one of them is actually a Mc Guffin in the main storyline.
  • The Super Mario series has an odd case of this. From the very beginning, Princess Peach has been the Distressed Damsel... but on almost every occasion she's been playable, she's been quite capable, whether as a fighter, athlete, or go-kart driver, and largely a match for Mario... which raises the question of how she continues to be kidnapped and require Mario to save her when she's as good as him and more than capable of defeating swarms of angry Koopas or even Samus Aran when she needs to. At this point, Nintendo seems to simply have fun with its artifacts.
    • C'mon, it's 'cause she likes it. Considering Bowser has expressed more than "passing interest" in her, she's probably not in all that much danger anyway.
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, the player's character gets a regular paycheck from his organization, Seed (based in Balamb Garden), based on his Seed rank. This works fine, until about halfway through disc 2, the player is made the commander of Balamb Garden. You would think that this would give you a pay raise. But no, your rank doesn't so much as rise a single level when you are promoted, and in fact, it is still possible to be demoted and receive a pay cut. Never mind the fact that, story-wise, you're the highest ranking person in the Garden. Even more confusing, after time starts compressing at the end of the game and you are thrown out of time into the future and can no longer interact with towns and most NPCs, you still are paid at regular intervals. That's a pretty impressive banking system.
    • You can even be demoted in the few areas where you only control Rinoa, the only member of the party who isn't working with SeeD, near the end of Disc 1.
  • Crushingly subverted in Final Fantasy V, where the party members attempt to use healing items (including an Ether, for some reason) and spells on a character who has been Killed Off For Real.
  • Dirge Of Cerberus has three degrees of separation: Gameplay Vincent, Cutscene Vincent, and FMV Vincent, each ramping up how improbably capable he is in a fight. For elaboration, Let's Play ''Dirge of Cerberus'' (first distinction made near the end of Episode II).
  • Some games, such as the Wario Ware series, take this to such a blatant extreme that it starts making sense again by having the gameplay and the story literally have nothing to do with each other.
  • In the ending to Fallout 3 Project Purity must be activated but the person who does so will receive a lethal dose of radiation. This completely ignores the fact that players, at this point in the game, have enough items/perks to render themselves nearly completely resistant to radiation. Oh and your super mutant and robotic party members (who are completely immune to radiation) and your ghoul party member (who is healed by radiation) won't step in to save the day either.
    • To accommodate the Broken Steel DLC's extended main quest, this was changed such that the radiation only puts you in a coma from which you wake up two weeks later. You can also ask your radiation-immune followers to step in for you, though for whatever reason this still gives you the "selfish" ending cutscene.
      • Needless to say however, both you and Sarah gets incapacitated while the human buddies don't feel a thing.
  • If the plot of the Resident Evil games actually mattered where the gameplay was concerned, the playable characters would very quickly run into a big problem the first time they took damage - since one zombie bite is all it should take to turn one into the walking dead. Amusingly, in Resident Evil 3, one of Nemesis's attacks finds its mark on Jill during a cutscene, which naturally does infect her.
    • Not to mention the fact that in almost every game in the series, other characters can explore areas that are closed off to you, usually because of moving walls, secret passages, and doors that require specialized keys hidden in obscure and inconvenient places. How Wesker/Barry, for example, got into the crypt in the R Emake before you unlocked the door is a question with no apparent answer. Ditto the Chained Creature, who can apparently navigate the entire mansion grounds despite the fact that it's in shackles that constricts it movement considerably and most of the important places in the game are sealed off with locked doors the player inevitably gets the keys to. Ditto Steve in Code Veronica, who gets ahead of you without the items needed to open the pathways. One wonders why the characters don't just kick the doors in or shoot the locks.
      • Satisfyingly, Leon does this all the time in Resident Evil 4, shooting or cutting with his knife simple locks or simply kicking the door open. Note that he still requires a key to get past a padlock later in the game, despite the door being so rickety that it collapses as soon as you unlock it.
      • The R Emake has an even more obnoxious example: One of the doors is so rickety that after you use it a few times, the knob falls off. Both of the characters are wearing combat boots but can't just kick in the door.
  • In games with condensed time systems, characters will often describe the amount of time events have taken in real time, even though in the game world, it is actually much longer. This is especially jarring in the 'Grand Theft Auto games, in which one second equals one minute, when missions can take several "hours," sometimes lasting from morning to night, with no one noticing.
  • The game Heart Of Darkness for the Playstation 1 notably averts this trope: What seems like a simple powerup/magic attack skill for a good part of the game becomes an important plot point later on. The skill stays your most important weapon in gameplay combat, but during cutscenes, the hero and his friends find numerous ways to use it creatively as well.
  • In Super Mario Sunshine, the entire goal of the game is to retrieve magical Shine Sprites which have scattered all over a tropical island. The Sprites are the source of the good weather that gives the island prosperity, and therefore vitally important to everyone on the island. However, most of the Sprites you'll find are being held by random inhabitants of the island who give them to you as rewards for trivial tasks like winning a squid race. One merchant in town happens to possess a full 20% of them. Not a single inhabitant seems to realize that it might be a good idea to return the sprites themselves.
    • It could be considered integrated, if you take an alternative look at Delfino Island: The inhabitants throw you in jail because you have a blindfolded resemblance to a vandal, they demand that you clean up their island and never actually clean anything themselves, and their island is in utter jeapoardy because of the lack of shine sprites that some people have in their back pockets, their island has portals to worlds of absolute mindfuckery, they allow incredibly dangerous creatures to run rampant and then yell at you if they happen to get wet while you're fighting them off... And they still advertise themselves as serene, peaceful, beautiful Delfino Island. Those bastards.
  • In Drakengard, you're only allowed to take one party member with you into battle, and he doesn't follow along with you on the battlefield, no; you transform into him for a predetermined amount of time. Contrast this to the cutscenes, which show all the party members present in the battles when applicable. Dragonfire kills anything human in a single blow, but not so for some higher-end Mooks in-game. Caim wields a relatively smallish BFS as his default weapon in the cutscenes, but his default weapon in-game is realistically proportioned to be used by a human being. Manah can obliterate armies in cutscenes, but never displays this sort of power when fighting you in-game. And so on in that order.
  • In Syndicate Wars you control your agents from an airship. The last levels are in a space station and on the Moon, but don't mention how you see them.
  • Streets of Rage starts with a cutscene when the five characters decide to shake up the mooks for information. After a few levels of assaulting mooks by yourself, everyone else appears for another cutscene and says "This is useless. No-one told us anything." How could they? I just kicked the crap out of anyone who came close. And where the hell have you been, anyway?
  • While Advance Wars in general can be bothersome about it, Dual Strike has one case that takes the cake. SEVEN Aircraft Carriers, each loaded with a Stealth, and near a somehow important Black Hole fortress no less. Bear in mind that Aircraft Carriers and Stealths are among the most expensive units in the game AND the Aircraft Carriers are support units, not to mention that (because the units were top secret before) Black Hole does not recognize the ordinance in the first place, so it's a wonder how they got trapped. Then again, because of this suggestion that the Allied Nations is absurdly rich to the point that these units could even be around, let alone top secret, when they have been lucky to have had only ONE Megatank (a unit that isn't as expensive as any of the Aircraft Carriers) in the next mission, never mind that they have been having troubles with having reasonable forces, it's a wonder how the Bolt Guard trashes most of the Allied Nations' facilities in a massive ambush before they could even respond. Most likely they had to contend with the fact that Black Hole was drunk on ridiculous story power. Oh, and guess what? The mission in question is ridiculously easy for the point it is at.
  • In Castlevania III, you start off with one character and can get one of three partners to join you, or finish the game solo. If you have a partner and sign up a new one, the old one leaves. It is also impossible to encounter all three characters during a single playthrough. Yet, according to canon, all four people were involved.
  • In Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, players can siege and conquer any town of the map, which allows them to collect income once per month when passing them and using them as a base, but this is completely separate from the story. If they rebel, however, you can't continue with the story if the town in question has the next storyline quest.
    • Since the cities count as mechanical creatures, you can even get the dwarf Kalkus to aid you in besieging his own homeland.
  • A minor but decidedly odd instance occurs in Quest For Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness, where the hero takes part in a Gypsy celebration, wherein among other things, the narrator goes into about a paragraph's worth of detail about the yummy local food there... but somehow, the hero always wakes up hungry the next morning.
  • The 1998 PC game SiN has this in spades. A number of bizarre gameplay elements include: the main character (John Blade) being turned into a half-naked mutant late in the game, then being changed back to his original human self, weapons, armor and all; not being able to walk into a testing facility early on because you have police attire on, but the moment you switch into a work uniform, the few employees at the building won't recognize who you are; the opening two levels revolve around an unsuccessful heist to retrieve a document, but if the player finds the item wanted by the terrorist, it is simply an empty envelope that doesn't factor into the rest of the story; walking into a building and being captured, even if you have full health and enough ammunition to waste its entire group of occupants; falling into a trap door in a random room at a secret base that only serves to dump you into a meat cart for the final boss battle, and many other minor infractions.
  • EA's skate suffers from this trope. At the beginning of the game, your skater gets hit by a bus after skating out into the street, and needs surgery in order to skate again. Later on in the game, however, there is a mission for Thrasher Magazine which requires you to break four bones in order to proceed. This, along with any other time in the game where you break bones is briefly commented on, but your character can get right back up and keep skating right away.
  • In Dragon Quest VIII, your horse (actually a cursed princess) is stolen. You find her in a barn, securely locked up with a chain around one leg. At this time, your party is carrying a key that opens most locked treasure chests, and one party member is a big burly guy who often uses an axe. Yet there is no indication that anyone even attempts to pick the lock or break the chain. No, instead you're sent on a Fetch Quest by the crook who bought her on the black market.
  • During one cutscene of Atelier Iris, The Stoic swordsman asks to talk with the main character while the cook is making dinner. They go out to the woods where the swordsman "tests" the main's progress by beating him within an inch of his life. They then return to have dinner, and the other characters calmly ask what the two were up to. They accept the response that they were "taking a walk", and no one seems to notice any distress or injury from the character. Given the various common ways one can heal in the game, and the fact that the main character is an alchemist who can produce healing potions, one might generously think that perhaps he healed himself to avoid worrying his friends... except that after the cutscene, he's still at 1 HP. Apparently in this world, no one bleeds when they get hit by swords.
  • Tales Of Phantasia averts it multiple times and plays it straight twice: Averted near the start of the game, where Cless is betrayed and captured by a group of soldiers; you are quite weak and have low-powered equipment at the time, so it's very reasonable that you can't fight back as you probably would get slaughtered. Played straight when Cless is poisoned (and knocked unconscious) by an attack from a creature that you killed tons of as fodder just five minutes ago, and they were incapable of poisoning you then. Later, you get captured again, except this time you are much more powerful, as well as having a party, and could probably take them just fine (although they are actually the good guys, so you could assume that the characters just didn't want to cause a fuss). Averted by your encounters with the Big Bad; when you first meet him he is shown literally vaporising people in cutscenes with some sort of laser beam attack and a shockwave explosion, and you are sent away to become more powerful so you can beat him. When you finally do get around to fighting him and are much MUCH more powerful than you were before, he casually throws these attacks around in battle and you can shrug them off just fine (and the storyline gives them no further prominence), although they are still his most powerful attacks and kill you in a few hits. Also averted in various small instances where characters use things like healing spells outside of battle.
  • In Metroid Prime 3, Samus must ultimately find at least 7 Galactic Federation energy batteries in order to activate enough doors on a wrecked cruiser to get a code that unlocks the last area of the game. However, she's working for the Galactic Federation. And at the end of the game, they're waiting on her to do this. Surely, she could just let them know that she needs a few batteries. No, she must scour the landscape of four worlds for batteries from Federation installations, crashed ships, and the like.
  • Generally, lots of things that the Pokedex says directly contradict gameplay:
    • Drowzee/Hypno are said to live off dreams; it's their defining trait. Yet they can only learn the attack Dream Eater by TM (or, in later games, via breeding). You'd think they'd be able to learn it by leveling up, but...
    • Also, even though Dugtrio is treated as three Diglett in the anime, in the game series, a single Diglett evolves into a Dugtrio.
      • Ditto for Weezing (two Koffing), Magneton (three Magnemite), and Metagross (two Metang that consist of two Beldum each).
      • According to the anime, Slowpoke can't evolve into Slowbro unless a Shellder latches onto its tail. In the game, it's just a matter of leveling up.
    • Voltorb and Electrode are both said to be (and actually are in-game) often mistaken for Poké Balls. Voltorb is 1′08″ and Electrode is 3′11″. Much larger than the baseball sized Poké Balls.
      • Some have come up with explanations based on the animations used in the 3D console games - Voltorb and Electrode can compress themselves (usually to use something like Explosion), which might allow them to compress that much.
      • Actually even simpler in Pokemon Colosseum where it shows that items are really kept in pokeball shaped containers rather than actual pokeballs. It's more reasonable to think that they just look like these larger containers rather than the size of a baseball.
    • Abra is said to sleep through most of the day, teleporting away from danger in its sleep, yet the Sleep status affects it just like everything else.
      • If This Troper remembers correctly, that was fixed in the Gen IV games, but prior to that, well... consult the MST 3 K Mantra...
    • Evolving Nincada into Ninjask also earns you a Shedinja, but only if you have a slot free in your party. For some reason you can't just ship the thing off to your PC like everything else you catch.
    • Ironically, some examples were done correctly. One example is the aforementioned Shedinja actually "shedding" from a Nincada, others could include a Mantyke requiring a Remoraid to evolve. If they were all Hand Waved, one could just assume they kept the games simple...but when half of it is correct, it turns weird. For example, Illumise and Volbeat (or female and male Nidoran) are considered male and female versions of the same Pokémon, and can breed and produce either Pokémon. However, Tauros and Miltank are considered male and female versions of the same Pokémon...yet can't breed in that fashion (a Miltank always produces more Miltank, and the only way to get a baby Tauros is to mate a Tauros with a Ditto). No explanation is given, and the canon just ignores this and insists they're the same.
      • In all honesty Miltank and Tauros being opposite gender equivalents is Fanon.
  • In Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath you play a bounty hunter saving up for a life saving operation. The surgery bid given to you by Doc in the first town says the price is roughly 20,000 moolah (the games currency). You collect this money by exchanging outlaws at the bounty store. However, gameplay wise Moolah is only used to purchase ammo and upgrades. You can collect hundreds of thousands of moolah, or use cheatcodes for infinte moolah, yet Stranger won't be able to afford his operation until he finishes the New Yolk City missions and take the ferry to Doc's Retreat. Of course, you find out the Big Bad's mooks have killed Doc, and you are overtaken by previously easily defeated outlaws. Your equipment is stolen, all of your moolah is taken away, you're hit with a Tomato Surprise, and then Moolah isn't used or mentioned for the rest of the game.
  • In the Halo series, all the weapons are much more lethal in the books. The plasma pistol melts huge holes in flesh and can kill anything in one hit, and the needler does exactly what one would expect a weapon that fires exploding glass to do. In the actual game though, they're the two weakest weapons; the plasma pistol is only good against shields and the needler only becomes a real threat if you shoot out half a clip. Gameplay wise, even a standard marine or grunt can take plasma pistol and needler shots to the face and not be all that harmed by it.
    • Master Chief can dive from the stratosphere in cutscenes, but the game kills him instantly if he falls too far in-game, which acts as a barrier against Sequence Breaking and Unwinnable situations.
      • Chief, and pretty much all the SPARTAN-I Is are a lot faster, stronger, and more durable in the books than ingame, where the Chief (regenerating shields notwithstanding), is only marginally superior to the basic soldiers surrounding him.
  • The entire plot of Tales Of Symphonia occurs because Mithos wants to revive his dead sister Martel in a very complex way that takes about 4,000 years to get right (and is actually criticized by Martel for doing horrible things to revive her) when they could've easily just bought a Life Bottle for a couple hundred gald. Every merchant in the world sells them anyway.
    • Well, said events did take place thousands of years ago. Maybe (even though they had powerful Magitek) Life Bottles weren't invented until long enough after Martel's death that she couldn't be brought back that way. Then again, when you see her hooked up to the Kharlan Tree in the middle of the game, her body seems pretty complete...
    • Averted once where there is a button out of reach and the winged character simply flies up and activates it for you. This will never happen again no how similar the situation.
  • The aforementioned The World Ends With You. Although the characters in-game have time limits, you can stay in a particularly day longer than the time limit and nothing will happen. Likewise, in Another Day, the game takes place in an alternate timeline where Neku, Shiki, and Beat are not part of the Reapers' Game, and do not know each other, yet you can battle like it's any other day. Also, when you unlock the chapter select feature, you can use ANY character on ANY day, even if, in the chapter you select, the character has not met Neku yet or has vanished.
  • In Dead Rising, during the second boss fight an NPC ally can withstand dozens of hits from a rifle that, in real life, is known to be able to tear a man in half with one shot, without dying. In the cutscene immediately after said fight he is shot in the leg with a pistol and unable to walk, and the very next task set for the player is to acquire a first aid kit to treat him - for a fever. Which becomes lethal if you don't find the first aid kit in time.''
    • That said, Dead Rising does subvert this trope handily if you go off the rails of the main story. If someone critical to the story gets killed or Frank doesn't perform actions fast enough, a screen comes up saying "The truth has fallen into darkness" and gives you the option to start the story over or keep playing until your chopper comes back. And due to Brad, Jessie, and chopper pilot Ed succumbing to Plotline Death if you follow the story all the way through, this is actually the best way to rescue the most survivors and get the "Saint" achivement.
  • In Tales of the Abyss, Guy, one of the protagonists, has a crippling fear of women (to the point that being glomped by one early in the game is sufficient to give him a momentary Heroic BSOD.) This doesn't seem to pop up when in battle, even against female enemies.
  • Okami, in which Ammy can swim for as long as she wishes during cutscenes (Carrying a woman through the sea on her back, no less), yet spend more than a set amount of time in in body of water whatsoever during gameplay and she drowns.
  • MMORPG City Of Heroes has a rather glaring example of this in the Freedom Phalanx. The premier superheroes of the setting, akin to Superman, Batman, Captain America, and other A-listers....sit around waiting to give you quests, and generally do absolutely nothing else, with poor excuses for why they never fight at your side. In the few times you DO team up with them, they're generally as bad as any of the other NPC allies, and die in short order, while their villainous counterparts will kick your butt all over the surrounding environs, generally being some of the most dangerous bosses in the game. Even more confusingly, when you face the same heroes in City of Villains, you can face the same heroes in single combat, and they're now, like their counterparts, the hardest bosses in the game. Apparently the only time the game can give these people the powers they're storyline-wise credited with is when they're beating on you instead of random mooks.
    • This was mocked/played with on the games forums, when a player asked the developer that plays Positron why he never helps players during Rikti Invasions and they gather at that characters feet in Steel Canyon. He responded that the Rikti 'con grey, so I wouldn't get XP.'
    • For those who don't play City of Heroes, when your character is 10 or more levels higher than an enemy, its name turns grey and you don't get any experience for kiling it.
  • In Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, for pretty much for the entire first half of the game, you get warned about how having Johnathan or any other non-Belmont use the true power of the Vampire Killer will drain their life force and eventually kill them if they overuse it. But when you do actually unlock its power in game, you can whip it all day long with absolutely no consequences whatsoever.
  • Don't bother looking for Taki's Din's Fire-esque explosion or attempt to get Ivy's sword to separate and fly at the oppoent separately in Soul Calibur 2, they only exist in the opening cut-screen.
    • The attack that Taki uses is certainly in Soul Cailbur 3: Ninja Cannon.
    • Ivy has a move named summon suffering with a riddiculously complex input that makes her sword disconected and fly around the screen.
  • Lost Magic has a field day with this; Bosses use special Runes they aren't supposed to have ''at all' as they're their respective Sage's secret power, [1]s work better for the bosses then for you, and then comes the Cutscene Power To The Max. Or not.
  • Vampire Bloodlines is based on the tabletop RPG Vampire The Masquerade. Of course, for gameplay reasons, disciplines work differently in the game than in the RPG... except in cutscenes. For example, in one scene, Beckett uses his Protean discipline to change into a wolf, which is a perfectly valid usage in the tabletop RPG but something you can't do even with maxed Protean in-game. Later on, a vampire uses Presence to seduce a mortal: Again, perfectly valid in the RPG, but in the game Presence is entirely useless to you outside of combat.
  • You'd think Retro Game Challenge averts this, because the story IS gameplay. However...
    • The in-game game magazines have only a few screens of text that would occupy less than a printed page, and would make no sense as game magazines that your character actually has.
    • The in-game games have some in-game cheats that don't work in free play mode, even though it's supposedly the same game both times. Most likely this is because the cheats imbalance the game but are necessary for game balance purposes (players shouldn't find the whole thing Unwinnable just for not being able to pass a single in-game game).
    • The games may be shorter than actual games would be. Guadia Quest has two towns and two dungeons (each divided into two parts). Not only do we not see characters complaining that the game wasn't worth the money, the in-game magazines said that the game was delayed because it was too big to fit into a standard cartridge's memory.
  • Big one in Valkyria Chronicles after having taken Marberry Shore During this and all other missions your troops can take an anti-tank round to the face at point blank range and be rescued by a medic, but in the cutscene Isara takes a shot in the back and neither the medic nor ragnaid is a benefit. It's all very FF 7
  • During the only blitzball game you're forced to play in Final Fantasy X, the crowd call for Wakka and Tidus fakes injury so he can come back. When you play blitzball at any other time, there is no option to make substitutions during play - you have to wait for halftime.
    • Of course, no one else gets injuried during regular play. At least, not enough to take them off the team for the rest of the half. Ostensibly, there's a provision in the rules that says each side must have X amount of players at all times or something.
  • In ''zOMG!'', your appearance is purely cosmetic. No matter which race you choose to make your avatar (And there are a lot), you'll still be treated as a normal human. The most blatant instance of this is if you choose to make yourself a vampire. Gaia Vampires are weakened by sunlight (though not killed), do require blood (though mostly drink a soy based substitute), and are weak against most of the traditional vampire weaknesses.) And yet you can run around in broad daylight killing animated cloves of garlic with no side effects.
  • Kingdom Hearts II - Whenever Sora transforms into a drive form, one or both party members disappear as long as it's active. The cutscene where he firsts gains this ability shows that this is not the case in the story.
  • In Bioshock, ADAM is described by NPCs as a substance you need to have injected into you to make plasmids and gene tonics work, and after that regular injections are required to prevent physical and psychological damage. In the game itself, it is simply treated like a currency you use to buy said plasmids and tonics, which cost no actual money besides. The game also features the corresponding EVE, which acts as fuel for the plasmids, and is never touched on in the narrative.
    • One of the Public Service Announcements might even be lampshading this: "A Rapture reminder: We all have bills to pay, and the temptation to break curfew to make a little extra ADAM is forgivable..." So, wait, you can pay your bills in ADAM instead of dollars?
    • Bioshock also makes the game's inherent linearity and lack of open-endedness a plot point: as it turns out, you were under mind control the whole time, triggered by Atlas saying "would you kindly".
  • Dragon Quest IV: During the fourth chapter, you have to search for some gunpowder in order to make a loud noise and scare the Chancellor of Palais de Leon. Never mind that Maya already knows a spell called "Bang" that creates a big explosion...
  • Early on in Beyond The Beyond, the party is attacked by Ramue (one of the Big Bads of the game), who throws a cursed shawl at Samson, draining his strength. Normally, characters that have curses can simply go to a priest and have the curse removed for a fee (even though you don't start finding cursed items until later in the game, but the priests note that the curse put on Samson is too powerful for them to remove, and that they actually have to go meet God (or an analog thereof) Himself to undo it.
  • Amusingly averted in the intro of Shadow Hearts. Yuri, the main character, fights his way through a dozen or so Imps, shrugging off their scythe-attacks like the minor annoyance they are (they only do something like 10 HP damage). Then he enters a cutscene where the Big Bad sics an imp on him. Who cuts off his right arm. At which point Yuri regrows his arm in a split second, and crushes the imp with his left hand like the annoyance it is, at the same time.
    • . . .Of course, this is also playing it straight, as that regeneration power of Yuri's never shows up in gameplay.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, dying enemies either turn into crystals or drop an equipment box if they've been dead long enough. In cutscenes, bodies will hang around long after they should have changed into the aforementioned items.
    • Some battles will end when you defeat the boss. If you do this, Ramza will usually tell the other enemies to lay down their swords and surrender. He still says this even if you have already killed every other enemy and had their corpses turn into crystals.
  • In the animated prequel to Dead Space, the zombies cannot go near the Artifact Of Doom that was dug up. But when it comes to be your turn to escort the thing, all manner of baddies can come right up to the thing with no issue. And by extension, you.
    • Another Dead Space example, the Valour. Sure, Pulse Rifles are weak against Necromorphs, and maybe the soldiers needed a while to grab their guns, but seriously. One slasher - the weakest type of Necromorph - manages to kill and infect an entire ship stocked to the brim with trained soldiers wielding Pulse Rifles and wearing advanced body armour that is as good or better than Isaac's Level 5 suit. Let me repeat that. One. Slasher. An. Entire. Freaking. SHIP.
  • The entire plot of The Simpsons Game revolves around the family coming to realise that they are living inside a game. As such there is very little Gameplay And Story Segregation, with all the characters' abilities (and even basic gameplay mechanics such as respawning after being killed) being used in the story.
  • Elite Beat Agents averts this in that the gameplay IS the story. How well the Agents perform determines how each story's protagonist behaves in the screen above, and how the plot twists until the end of the song. More specifically, music and dance are the only effective weapon against the alien invaders in the last mission.
  • In Planescape Torment, your Wisdom, Intelligence and Charisma scores are useful for far more things than just getting cool spells. A high intelligence directly affects your ability to solve problems and outsmart other characters, for example.
  • In Lost Odyssey: Your casters cast in cutscenes, and the fact that you're immortal is also a plot point. Immortals recover from being 'dead' after a few turns!
  • In Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon 3, the villains pull off many of their plans only because they have the main characters' transforming powers. The game being a Massive Multiplayer Crossover, being able to transform into various Tales characters and bosses and play as them is pretty much the only reason the game exists, and is simply also worked into the Excuse Plot.
  • The influence system in Knights Of The Old Republic II is the gameplay manifestation of an ability that the main character is revealed to have. That is, the main character has the ability to subtly manipulate people that they're close to. As a consequence, the more influence you have with a party member, the more their alignment mirrors your own. And vice-versa.
    • Similarly, the XP system, where you grow more powerful by killing enemies, is revealed to be the result of The main character's "rift in the force" growing more powerful by feeding on the destruction she causes. Pretty rough revelation, for a light-sider.
    • Furthermore, some of your party member's characterization traits turn up as actual abilities in battle. Atton has improved saving throws the closer he gets to knocked out from half health and below, and he can get back up in battle from being knocked out, provided somebody else is still standing, Kreia provides EXP bonuses to the party, Mandalore is immune to mind-affecting powers, and that's just the start.
  • Michiah in Fire Emblem 10 (Radiant Dawn) has "Sacrifice", which is a miraculous healing ability in the storyline, and can also be used in-game, though in-game it doesn't have any abilities beyond a simple heal staff, and as the name implies it hurts to use it. It's seen as a miracle because she can heal without being a member of the clergy.
  • In Wild Arms 2, one of the powers the main hero gains during the last battle is powered by the prayers of all the people of his world, allowing him to defeat the game's final Big Bad.
  • Assassin's Creed takes place in a video simulation, created by mad scientists to allow the protagonist to re-live his ancestor's memories. As such, all the artifice of the video game interface were specifically programmed by the villains to make the simulation intuitive.
  • Final Fantasy IX opens with a play: the fight scenes are done using the battle system, and the characters have the battle command "SFX" with the help menu description of "uses powerful, deadly magic", a damage output of zero and no mana point cost. Of course the party leader gets to cause the biggest blast.
  • In Disgaea 2, Adell and Rozalin start out having a 0% combo rate on their attacks (which is more or less impossible to get with any other combination of characters), being at this point enemies and utterly unwilling to directly help each other. Their combo rate starts rising as the game goes on and the two grow closer, eventually capping at 99% near the end.
  • In Lunar 2, Lucia's development of human emotions happens concurrently with her deveoping new tactics in battle. For example, after a plot point wherein she returns to Hiro because she misses him (though she doesn't understand that), she begins casting healing and protective spells on other characters, favoring Hiro, in fact. Prior to this plot point, she would only cast these spells on herself.
  • In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Dagoth Ur's rising power doubles as Anti Grinding, with stronger ash creatures and blighted fauna appearing more and more as you keep leveling up.
  • A rare turn-based strategy game example: In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, it is possible in gameplay to completely wipe out the native flora and fauna. But when the story calls for it, suddenly the fungus stands poised to wipe out your massively powerful post-singularity civilization and only a dose of [[Applied Phlebotinum]] can save it.
    • The flora and fauna is said to also live deep underground. It is effectively unkillable, except for the Applied Phlebotinum version and the fact that it is so massive it cannot energitically sustain itself, just like it already happened several times before. And yeah, it also is a Hive Mind .
  • A rather funny, though subtle aversion occurs in Persona 4. Yosuke is incredibly unlucky, with him getting kicked in the nads within minutes of the game starting for breaking his friend's CD. He ends up falling off of and crashing whilst on, his bike,BEFORE he's even named, and to top it all off, his girlfriend gets killed very early on. If you check his stat profile, you'll notice that he has the lowest Luck stat of any of your party members.
  • The opening scene of Phantom Dust has a team of espers scorch scores of monsters with single attacks when two of said monsters would be challenging to the player. This may be justified by the fact that some of the monsters look a little more sickly they do in the game proper. Another example is characters performing feats like telekinetically hurling what appears to be half a sky scraper at you when the player, who is easily the most powerful esper in the game, has no such abilities.
  • In Captain Planet, Gaia states that heart is the strongest power of them all. In the video game, heart does nothing. Not that this should be a surprise to anyone.
  • in Dragonball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 2, it'll often happen that you beat the crap out of an opponent, losing no health whatsoever, and the following cutscene shows you collapsing while the voice-over tells you how you were no match...
  • Aversion: Brutal Legend. Everything gets an in-universe explanation, from why Eddie is an expert with a battle axe despite never touching one before, why he is able to fly around the battlefield issuing orders, why he is able to build a functioning car from parts dug up out of the ground, to why said car has a radio in it.
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