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5th Feb: Echo Chamber Season 1 blooper reel on Youtube here
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Reminds me of this one group I ran with. The barbarian in our group found, and I quote: "a pink frilly tu-tu of Strength +6", and he wore it with pride for the rest of the campaign.
What happens when players in a game where Informed Equipment is averted equip their characters with gear solely based on stat bonuses without consideration to how it will look on them. The end results tend to be... colorful... to say the least. David Sirlin has an article on this phenomenon, appropriately entitled Football Helmet Clown Shoes Guy.
Many games try to circumvent the phenomenon by letting the equipment to be dyed, or allowing cosmetic alteration of equipment so it would look like another item.
Compare Rummage Sale Reject, Impossibly Tacky Clothes. Not to be confused with Pimp Duds.
Contrast Virtual Paper Doll, where the items usually look better, even though they are superficial. Also contrast Full Set Bonus, where the items are meant to be used together and this is encouraged by giving a full set bonus.
Examples
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Action Adventure
Adventure Game
- Quest For Glory V was an early example. It was the first game in the series to show your armour and weapon as you walked around around town. It was a nice idea - except that magic items were primary colours and glowed, pulsing weirdly.
Driving Game
- Pretty much the point of Lego Racer, a racing game where you build your car out of lego bricks and various lego-related extras, and most unlockables are extra gadgets that don't do anything but look funny. This can get quite ridiculous, which is part of the fun.
Fighting Game
- Soul Calibur 4: The Character Creation mode suffers heavily from this. While you can always play "Standard" mode, where clothing and weapon effects don't count, if you want to do well in other modes, you're pretty much forced to play with either the bastard child of Lady Gaga and a Silver Age superhero or a generic heavily-armored knight. The Random Character Generator in Soul Calibur 3 also produced pretty much exclusively this kind of character.
- Your character's good/evil and cheerful/gloomy stats in Soul Calibur III were assigned via clothing options, meaning you'd often need to hide extra garments underneath your chosen costume to get the alignment you wanted or just shrug and settle for looking stupid.
- Tekken 6 can end up like this in its Scenario Campaign, due to various clothes you can find giving you special boosts. Though, this does vary character to character, as one characters clothing sets can end up mixing a lot better than anothers.
First Person Shooter
- Team Fortress 2: Most of the Nice Hats in that game are just for show, but you can buy paint to color them any hue you want, result in a lot of this.
Hack And Slash
- Basically everything in Diablo looks great... Until you start socketing in gems, at which point all of your equipment turns ridiculous colors. In Diablo 2, the best helm was usually a certain astroturf green hood. Some fighter characters preferred the neon purple skull mask, though.
MMORPG
- World of Warcraft is particularly guilty of this due its pseudo-cartoony style and initial poor itemization of gear, meaning it was very easy to build an efficient but stupid clownsuit. This was particularly prevalent in the first expansion, leading to "Outland Clown Syndrome"◊. This is usually only avoided in druids (whose shapeshifted forms mostly hide gear) and arguably trolls (who are stylistically gaudy).
- The page picture is Penny Arcade's invocation of this trope. Tycho gives Gabe a coupon for a free 3D-model printing of his World of Warcraft character, which Gabe treats as a chore rather than a gift because he doesn't want to use it while his character looks like...
- Blizzard designed gear in the Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack specifically to avoid this, with numerous items sharing models so as to mesh well with other items when equipped. Sadly, they went much too far in the other direction, with very few new item models and most of those hard to distinguish from each other, in a variety of shades that include very very dark purple, brown, very very dark blue, brown, very very dark green and brown.
- Even worse, some of the sets look pretty bad. And it's not like you got much of a choice when it comes to those. At least you can turn off helmets and cloaks, but those shoulders... Developers insist part of the issue is for players to be able to identify other players by a quick visual, with many players falling between the camps of Burning Crusade's armor sets (extremely colorful and science fiction) versus Northrend armor (nordic, down-to-earth, and more realistic) A major complaint of the latest expansion is that Blizzard went too far the other way around — there are only 2 or 3 armor models for each "tier" of armor; there aren't even color differences in most of the armor. Oh, and everything has spikes.
- Blizzard has taken steps to avert this in Patch 4.3 with the Transmogrification feature. This allows players to (for a fee) take two items and combine them into one, with one item forming the stats and the other item forming the appearance. In this way, a player who likes the stats of one item but dislikes the look, and likes the look of one item but dislikes the stats, can now have their cake and eat it too.
- Rainbow Pimp Gear in World of Warcraft was parodied in the Machinima The Grind. This is what happens when, faced with an imminent horde ambush, one of the main characters switches to his "Damage Gear".
- EverQuest and EverQuest 2 originally filled this trope. However, EQ1 introduced armor dye. EQ2 includes a feature where you can equip a piece of armor to appearance, and hide cloaks and hats.
- The now-closed Tabula Rasa MMORPG seemed to generally avert this, as armor colors were generally of a duller shade, and dyes could be made to change the color of most armor, and so, were usually tolerable in terms of color coordination.
- Averted in City of Heroes as your appearance has no effect on your powers. Instead your powers may have an effect on your appearance. This means that you can keep the same look throughout the entire game if you wish as stat bonuses are handled by a totally separate mechanic. Furthermore, starting with Issue 16, players can even customize their powers in case they don't like how their power sets make their characters look.
- It happens in Final Fantasy XI, though not as often or as glaringly as in some MMORPGs. This is an example of a paladin in good enmity gear for the time◊ — not pretty — but it irks the most when the red and semi-revealing Scorpion Harness body piece is worn as part of an outfit with the blue and concealing Dragoon or Blue Mage artifact armor. What an eyesore. On the other hand, it's quite nicely averted with top-level White Mage gear, which is pretty consistently blue and white with the occasional small red highlight. Warriors also get a dark
blue purple ultramarine blurple hauberk and nearly matching purple gloves and black shorts... along with bright gold bananas boots.
With the introduction of a bright piiiink gear set for Monks, Thieves, Rangers, etc, there's now a true rainbow bottle of Pepto-Bismol to be worn, too.
- Averted in Anarchy Online. The game has a "social" equipment tab, which allows you to wear things over your normal gear, and also allows you to make your social or normal gear, shoulders, and helmets invisible in the options menu.
- Runescape is so, so guilty of this. Not only can you make your default clothes any color you want, you can also equip any combination of armors in the game, leading to combinations like a fishbowl helmet, a body that makes your torso transparent, a orange and yellow-striped cape, a pink miniskirt, and an anchor for your weapon. Thankfully, most equipment sets look decent (with the exception of the Infinity mage set, which is a set of robes that looks like it was designed by a chameleon on LSD). It's mostly magenta.◊ Luckily, it's recolourable to make it more palatable.◊
- The example above was designed to be laughable. On the other hand, "hybrid" or "tribrid" gear for players who wish to use and/or defend against multiple styles of combat (melee, projectile, and magical) without changing armour will almost always look absurd. Wearing a robe skirt, leather body armor, metal boots and gauntlets, a visored helmet and a backpack with a chicken in it - while wielding a salamander - is optimized gear for certain activities.
- Even worse, the developers try to give the player some control over the look, by having dyes... that only work when trying to dye armor that basically amounts to Vendor Trash. And basic capes. On the other side, dye wouldn't stick to metal or leather...
- Abyssal Whips can be dyed (Though all of the colors are bright and most of them don't go with armor colors), and are one of the best melee weapons. Though, weapons are a bit harder to see than armor...
- The Helm of Neitiznot, one of the best helmets in the game, is white with gold trim and wings. It tends to go badly with one's (probably brown) armor.
- Averted in Warhammer Online, where you can dye almost all your equipment to a matching colour.
- Only partially averted and in some ways, playing mockingly straight. The vendor dyes (besides having their prices raised since release to a cost unaffordable to new players) only cover such colors as a few shades of purple, pink, green, and brown. If you want your Chaos Chosen to have black armor as they are commonly portrayed wearing, or your Archmage to wear white (their starting gear is pure white!) you'll have to pay hundreds of gold on the auction house or hope you get lucky on super rare drops from endgame bosses. Problem has been partially pushed aside as set gear is now much easier to obtain, and usually has a thematic appearance. At release set gear was often very hard to obtain and many players wore a pastiche of quest and influence gear, unsurprisingly often dyed purple. Then again, you still occasionally see people intentionally go for the clownsuit look, such as a bright orange witch hunter.
- In The Lord of the Rings Online you can make things like hats, cloaks, and even boots invisible, you can dye all of your equipment in a wide variety of colors, and you can even equip to alternative sets of equipment that replace the visuals of your actual equipment without having any effect on the stats. So nobody has to look like a clown. Except those people who want to.
- MapleStory has this, especially once you get to a level where armour is no longer purchasable, and you have to take whatever colour armour you can get. Luckily, you can fix this with cash shop equipment, which masks over whatever you're actually wearing. (Its rather expensive, however.) If you don't want to be wearing something in a specific equipment slot at all, there's even invisible item masks, which just hides specific equipped items.
Like-colored equipments for classes tend to have like stat boosts. Translation? People who want the most out of a stat will tend to wear only one color — and if they're obsessive enough they'll just hunt down the gear . . . which, given the fact that the resident search engine for the Free Market, known as the Owl of Minerva, costs about 600 NX as opposed to the thousands that any given shirt or pair of pants in the Cash Shop would cost, a high-level player who bothers with NX (and getting all the different sets of equipment) could just bother with saving up their money (both kinds), buying a few, and jumping into the infamous sea of spam to find their armor or spending hours looking for it in the overpriced player stores. This was not actually too bad until Nexon constantly began to release special equipment which outshined standard equipment in stats so much that wearing standard equipment will automatically brand you as someone who isn't playing the game correctly. At least their outfits will match.
Many players have the weird habit of mixing cash items, which has no benefit whatsoever since almost all are purely cosmetic. Particular standouts are the clown faces, animal heads (heads, not hats) and multicolored hair. From left to right,◊ the first player of Maple Story wears standard equipment (worst statistics), a player who wears special equipment (mindlessly overpowered in statistics), a player who has a sensible sense of fashion from using cash items to cover their somewhat not-so-great appearance while at the same time reasonably using their money, and the last one is someone who you can't even tell what they are because they drown themselves in absurd combinations which they believe is stylish.
Then you run into people who practice in Min-Maxing. Let's just say that in any other game, you would not normally be allowed to run around wearing a glowing stone relic for a helmet, a paintbrush as their weapon, green shoes... and your only real armor consisting of nothing but a Modesty Towel.
At as low a level as 18 (out of 200), a fairly simple quest gives out a terribly tacky full-head hat with defense and stat bonuses leagues ahead of any other hat. This, however, renders your head completely invisible, and the only way you can see your face again is to a) wear a less powerful hat or b) buy a NX hat. Ahhh Freemium.
- Another Nexon game, Mabinogi makes it possible to completely avert this. There are many different styles of equipment with identical stats, grouped into three categories — clothing, light armour, heavy armour — with weapons and shields being a bit more varied. Combine this with cash shop dyes (which can be used to dye pretty much anything, including weapons), and it's fairly easy to customize colour and style combinations to create any look you want. However, since all gear, whether dropped, crafted, or purchased from NPCs, comes in completely random colour combinations (some of them fairly hideous on their own), and there are many items which exist solely to look silly (such as the "bald wig" and "tree costume") it is also possible to play this trope straight to truly epic levels.
- Since shop items change colours randomly, it's also possible to create stylish and coordinated ensembles simply by waiting until the desired colours are available. However, this can take a very long time and a lot of shop-watching; and some colour combinations are only available via boss drops, special event rewards, or cash shop versions (such as pink and white shields, or bright purple longbows).
- Vindictus, prequel to Mabinogi, plays this trope very straight. All equips drop or are crafted, and come in fairly random colours. Mix-and-match outfits are discouraged by the bonuses provided when wearing a complete set; but matching colours is a lot more challenging. Unlike most other MMORPGs, especially other Nexon games, there is no provision for choosing colours. There is a function to "dye" all equips, including weapons, but it is purely random; and costs a considerable amount of in-game currency for higher-level gear. Fortunately, the colour palette for each type of armour or weapon is very small, so there are limits on how clownish you can end up looking.
- With later updates, cash shop dyes were released that allow for more control over colour; and create much brighter colours. This means that along with players creating some very coordinated and flashy sets of gear, others deliberately go for the insanely clownish look.
- Along with that, there are some armour sets, especially at high levels, that look pretty clownish all on their own.
- Star Wars Galaxies was unique in that nearly all equipment was fully customizable (since it ran largely on a player-run economy); but it was very difficult to find full sets of armor that were customized in the same way without buying it all at once from an individual, or even to wear every piece of a given armor set at once. (Since there was no armor certification system; the armor itself simply drained some of your other stats while equipped. It was very easy to simply be unable to equip a helmet depending on your class, which would not give you enough points for the armor to drain in order to equip it.) Many players never wore armor at all, opting for the robust clothing options instead. The game has... changed a bit over the years, to say the least.
- In The Matrix Online clothing drops were randomly colored, sometimes leaving articles in colors that should never be viewed together, much less in entire ensembles of visual offensiveness. Any player dressed like a complete clown was assured to be kicking ass in their ubergear. Some kept more fashionable but less adventure-worthy gear for clubbing and socializing, and others amped their absurdity to 11. This was somewhat mitigated by players able to weave their own clothing from the Matrix, but it involved a very expensive skillset and time-consuming farming to gather the raw materials.
- Completely averted in Guild Wars, where you get to choose the stats on your armour with runes, thus letting you use whatever armour skin you want. Note that this hasn't stopped the hideously ugly Chaos Gloves from being used with armour sets that clash garishly with them, but that's more an issue of mindless epeen. Note also that in older times, stats were tied to skins, but the creation of insignias stopped this.
Before the implementation of insignias, by far the most common armor set for necromancers was scar pattern armor since it increased your energy (mana) pool. So you had a bunch of hunchbacked emo looking characters running around in briefs with their skin covered in scars.◊
- Granado Espada mostly averts this. The characters appearance from the neck down is entirely determined by body armor or costumes. The important part here is "from the neck down", since it is entirely possible to give a female elementalist a truly gorgeous Pimped Out Dress with bows, ribbons and lace all over and a metal helmet.
- Earth Eternal can suffer from this if one doesn't take advantage of the Armor Refashioners, who can take an existing piece of gear that may be ugly or garish but have good stats, and make it look like another piece of gear that may be from ten levels ago, but looks really nice. This may result in grinding random mobs to see if they drop anything that looks interesting.
- Aion averts this, unless (as with City of Heroes, which was made by the same company) you WANT Rainbow Pimp Gear. Not only can you dye any part of your armor, you can actually change the appearance of the various parts to that of any other piece of the same armor type in your inventory.
- With a couple of exceptions:
- Abyss gear (earned via PvP) can be remodeled but for some inexplicable reason it cannot be dyed.
- The level 50 Daevonian armor, one of the best sets in the game for every class, cannot be remodeled. Each version has a very distinctive look, and the set can be attained by anyone willing to Earn Your Fun via a long and irritating quest chain.
- Gunbound. Each avatar item has different stats and not all of them mesh well together appearance wise. Player that often disregards the appearance of the equipment in favor of the stats were called Stat whores.
- Mobsters 2: Most high-level players wear what amounts to a uniform of Combat Pants (puffy camouflage trousers) and a Window-pane Overcoat (a long grey coat over a waistcoat, shirt, and tie). Their bottom half is in the army and their top half is attending a business meeting.
- La Tale doubly averts this. The normal armor always comes in a complete set, so if there are Boots of Take No Damage, you can bet there will be an upper body, lower body, gloves, and helm of Take No Damage as well, with the only reason you wouldn't have them all is simply not going through the trouble of collecting them all. And if for some reason that doesn't work, you can buy fashion shop items to cover your normal armor, with special sets that can boost your stats.
- And again averted with Champions Online—coincidentally created by the same people as City of Heroes, as well. With a similar but arguably more powerful character creator, you can be a smooth tailored fancypants, or an eye-blinding garish nightmare at your discretion. More tailors in the game also means it's easier (especially for low levels) to change their look.
- Can occasionally happen in The Old Republic, although class gear is generally colored similarly, and has a similar style to the rest.
- Kingdom of Loathing technically averts this, since the only things that affect the appearance of your avatar are complete outfits and a couple of miscellaneous items like the insane tophat, but its gear would take this trope Up to Eleven if you could actually see how it looked because of how ridiculous it generally is. For instance, you could be wearing a ninja mask, a bra, and spangly mariachi pants, while wielding a giant spoon and accessorizing with a cape made out of a towel, some combat boots made of blackberries, and a stuffed shoulder parrot.
- Not to mention the fact that without a certain skill, your character is not wearing a shirt, or even a bra if female. This is because they are not aware that they have a torso.
- A common effect in Monster Hunter with new players, who forge whatever they can afford to increase defense without them knowing about skill points. More experienced players equip full sets of armor from a certain monster (which doesn't look tacky) to get the skill points that the monster set gives. Even more experienced players know that, with the right combinations of armor sets, a unique combination of skills can be attained instead of having to go with a pre-made set... at the cost of looking like a rainbow pimp again.
To provide a mild example, a commonly seen set in Tri is to have mostly advanced magical white armor from a certain Elder Dragon, replace the waist with a lower rank form of the same armor (which looks the same but gives different skill points)... and then replace the helmet with the head of a dinosaur which boosts rewards.
- Dungeons & Dragons Online mostly averts this because A) the only items that actually change your appearance are armor and hats/helmets, B) many players opt to turn their hat/helmet invisible because it does weird things to hair and C) there really aren't that many items that look out of place. The only real exception to this is the odd set of pink armor, which appears most frequently on warforged, and a customizable sky-blue toga◊.
- This very trope was mentioned on the Tibia forums. The game itself suffers from this kind of gear as well, just take a look at the so-called blocking set.
- It should be mentioned that the equipped items have no bearing on a character's appearance and outfits are instead chosen in a menu. That being said, some player's tastes can be questionable.
- Averted in Adventure Quest Worlds, as items do not affect your stats until you enhance them by visiting the trainers.
- Dofus only has three visible pieces of equipment (with the weapon also showing, but only when it's used). Hat, cloak, and pet / mount. A character is also allowed to customize their own colors (but only at character creation or for a small real money fee). These colors, combined with armor that stands out very starkly and tends to be rather absurd (A popular early hat is basically a severed sheeps head with the tongue still hanging out), means that the odds of your character looking not stupid is very low. Of course, anyone going into Dofus intending to look badass is playing the wrong game.
- Rift, like Aion, averts this with armor dyes and a "wardrobe" tab.
- Eden Eternal seems to be trying to avert the trope by adding clothing dyes but results are ... weird. Random color dyes are sometimes quest rewards and some are for sale to characters under level 15. But, want your wizard to wear red robes and a matching hat? Good luck. You could end up with clashing colors that look horrific together. Made worse in that you can only choose what clothing part you want to dye with each attempt, such as main colors or trim. While you COULD simply leave all your clothes alone and they will match, at least according to the developer's designs, giving you clothes dye as rewards for quests makes it too hard to resist. The real purpose is probably to get players to spend real cash on clothing dye but results will STILL be random.
Role Playing Game
- Dragon Age tends to avert it, encouraging you to wear full sets of armour of the a specific type as that would give stat bonuses, and armour of the same class tends to be more or less similarly coloured. However, in the Feastday Gifts and Pranks DLC, there is the Butterfly Sword and Ugly Boots (Both are more or less Exactly What It Says on the Tin), which will massively clash with pretty much everything else in the game, but are decent items on their own. (Sten and Leliana will also take a big -50 approval. Because they clearly pretty much agree those items fall under this trope)
- Fallout 3 and its expansions contain a lot of gear that can be just plain goofy looking all by itself, like the tribal power armor with its green color and attached skulls and such, powdered wigs, Abraham Lincoln's tophat, samurai armor, cowboy hats, civil war caps, motorcycle helmets, tinted sunglasses and assorted raider bondage gear. Late game you tend to move toward a handful of proper looking unique armor sets but low level lone wanderers are very likely to look like total jackasses.
- Which seems to have become a post-apoc splatterpunk staple. Just check out anything from Mad Max all the way to Doomsday! Dystopian futures are also in the midst of perpetual fashion emergencies, as any reject-from-the-80s Shadowrun poster will tell you. Granted, in the movies it doesn't grant them any special abilities, but based upon how African warlords dress, it's easy to guess they probably believe it does.
- Shadow Hearts From The New World has a Ninja who actually tells you that no matter how ridiculous something looks, if it raises your stats, wear it.
- Too Human: Every piece of armor is a different color and design (meaning that you could end up with super-bulky armor for your chest and arms but slim and sleek armor for your legs and feet). You can buy special runes to change the color of your armor.
- Knights of the Old Republic suffered from this as well.
- The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
- The strongest armour sets (Daedric and Glass) in both categories (heavy and light respectively) look incredibly ugly. Daedric armour basically looks like a suit welded together from mismatched pieces of metal in various states of rust, with no concern for fitting together, and with added spikes, while Glass has a radioactive green glow. Tragic since the last game, Morrowind had both of these sets look presentable, if not incredibly badass.
- And, while not as garish as most examples, both games have the Bloodworm Helm and the Helm of Oreyn Bearclaw. Both helmets resemble giant dinosaur skulls, which would be rather neat, had the jaws not been open and your character's face peeking out. The fact that they make your head look too big for your body doesn't help.
- The amber and madness armors as well as the golden saint and dark seducer armors from the Shivering Isle expansion are not much of an improvement either. You can avoid this by using the mage guild enchantment laboratory to give your armor a combined chameleon rating of slightly over 100%, so you do not have to look at it (not to mention the rather amusing reactions enemies seem to have when they are hit. Hooray for infinite sneak attacks.)
- On completion of a major quest, the city of Bruma will erect a statue of you in your honor. Your statue will wear the "best" armor and gear that you had in your inventory at that moment, not necessarily what you're wearing. The results can be interesting. In fact "Interesting" doesn't even begin to describe the weird things that can go on with this statue. On one hand, sometimes it equips magical equipment you no longer possess, due in part to a glitch that sometimes gives you magical bonuses for items forcibly taken from your character; on the other hand, if you carry out the insane task of completing the mission while carrying one-thousand torches, a one-handed weapon, and no shield, you're rewarded with the sight of your statue wielding a flaming weapon. So if you know how to manipulate the results of the statue, you can make it look like a big-headed dinosaur with a fiery sword. No matter what, though, the NPCs will comment, "You look just like your statue!" Why yes, I do have a dirty great staff implanted right through my arm, thank you for noticing. A particularly odd result can have the statue wearing the hood of the Grey Fox, leader of the Theives Guild and the most recognisable criminal in the entire province. And people still don't connect you with the Fox. Another effect is with a certain dagger you get from the brotherhood. The most powerful weapons in the game, but it's pretty small, and a statue heroically lifting a dagger to the sky does not have the intended effects.
- Morrowind gets in on the act as well, as all enchanted items look as if they've been covered in plastic wrap and placed under tinted lights.
- Morrowind takes this to new extremes with separate item slots for the glove on either hand, either pauldron, a cuirass, trousers, either boot, helm, and skirts or robes that can be worn over regular armor. Combine this with the Enchanting System and...
- Many of the heavier armor suits in Baldurs Gate 2 suffered from this, particularly given that they couldn't seem to figure out how to do the color red, so it was not uncommon to end up with someone wearing bright green armor, a pink helmet, and a glowing pink halberd.
- Hellgate: London had a mechanic to color shift all your gear to match. Unfortunately this translated into a lot of brown (because Real Is Brown!) and similarly dingy colors.
- Neverwinter Nights and its sequel both have "Rainbow Armor", which according to the item description was made by a colorblind mage. The item itself has decent stats, but isn't particularly exceptional. You can also do some awesome things with custom modules and armour dyes. Also: Prismatic Dragon Boots. They give you great bonuses to DEX and AC, but they are so painful to the eye that they drain your CHA.
- The best equipment in a 3D Might and Magic game tends to look extremely gaudy and ridiculous. The in-game descriptions of said items tended to lampshade this.
- Even though there is no visual representation, it still felt weird making most of your characters in Final Fantasy VI wear earrings to boost their damage output.
- Mostly averted in Phantasy Star Universe, where armor consists of personal force fields. Characters tend to wear casual clothes, which you can buy in shops and have no effect whatsoever on gameplay. Not quite averted in that the elemental affinity of your armor will affect the color of some glowy lines on your clothes.
- For the humans this is played straight. Many of the rare outfits that are out there are required to be dropped and they all have 10 different color settings. While they are not particularly bad looking, it does create the situation where players will continuously frequent an area over and over again to get the clothes that they have multiple copies of in the same color.
- By extension the Casts have this in a much more lenient system. While they do have preset colors, a majority of the parts that they obtain are relative to the Cast in question. This means that you can quite literally just go to the appearance shop and use the options to recolor your Cast to match your armor for a trivial fee. This means that everything your Cast is wearing is simply a case of mixing and matching for your desired color.
- Averted in the Fable games, where you can purchase dyes to color-coordinate your outfits.
- Of course, the player can deliberately invoke this trope too (It's an achievement no less). With the exception of the original, clothing stats are almost entirely NPC reaction modifiers. If the player wishes to stroll through Bowerstone looking like a clownish pimp reject For the Lulz, they may do so, and the NPCs will point and laugh accordingly.
- Armour can end up looking pretty ridiculous in Mass Effect, particularly the pink-and-white Phoenix armour. Fortunately, this was changed in the sequel, where you can choose exactly how Shepard dresses.
- Of course, this means that you can create your own brands of eye-hurtingly-bad color schemes. Purple and yellow camouflage with bright blue trim? Hell yes.
- Played straight with the "Death Mask", unfortunately. Faceless, looks like an elephant head, and somehow makes your paragon/renegade speech scores higher.
- Dragon Quest IX hits this badly due to widely varying equipment styles and occasionally counterintuitive bonuses. For instance, a leather kilt is better than cotton pants as warrior gear despite covering less, but iron armor is predictably more effective than a shirt, so a warrior may have substantial upper-body coverage and bare lower legs.
- Almost every player runs into this problem because it's really easy to obtain the "Gooey Gear" early in the game, which has great defensive stats at that point, but looks completely ridiculous. It's literally a stack of brightly colored slimes that's worn by the character. Parodied in this fan art◊.
- The Baldur's Gate series. My! This blue magic cape fits your pale yellow armor wonderfully, doesn't it? The designers apparently also couldn't figure out how to do red properly, judging by the abundance of glowy pink items.
- Averted in Mount & Blade. Since all of the various bits of armour are based on fairly mundane historical stuff rather than outlandish fantasy they all mesh together pretty well, and certain bits of armour (as well as shields) will display your coat of arms and thus be color co-ordinated.
- The Sonny series is pretty bad about this. Game two has perhaps two or three sets of equal-level equipment meant to be used together. For the rest of the game you are stuck with pick-and-mix gear in widely varying styles trying to maximize the attributes your skills depend on.
- Opoona's equipment is solely for the floating things above its main characters' heads (the Energy Bonbon), but it affects the appearance of said bonbon quite a bit. Some very silly combinations are possible, like a glittering tentacled cybernetic mace with a UFO orbiting it.
Wide Open Sandbox
- Saints Row has a variant - you can pick colors on just about anything, but really, the most bang from your buck will come from purple gear - which happens to be the Saints' flag.
- Spore can get quite silly in the tribal stage, with a wide variety of items available in different categories. Getting the best stats for a creature requires some unusual combinations of clothing, but the game's built-in colour-coordination and ability to move and size the items generally averts total ugliness. Still, it's tricky when you find that your Bad Ass warlike tribespeople absolutely need cowboy hats. One method for dealing with that is to make it as small as possible, and try to hide under something else.
- In the Creature phase, it can happen with body parts, particularly for a "social" species. It doesn't help that they're acquired randomly.
- Averted in Dead Rising wherein if you so choose, you can deck dear old Frank West out in a dress and ServBot mascot head while wielding a sledgehammer. It has no effect on anything, but it carries on into the cutscenes.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: You can make some pretty outlandish things to CJ with the various clothing accessories. A chainsaw-wielding loony with a hockey mask, wearing what could only be considered a "diaper", and cowboy boots. Where's my respect, man?
Non-video game examples:
Live-Action TV
- MythBusters: For the most part, the protective gear shown all goes together, even if it looks awkward and uncomfortable. And then there are the occasions when Tory ends up in a chain mail shirt and a football helmet...
Tabletop Games
- Forgotten Realms: Jarlaxle is this trope exactly, possibly due to living in a world that is also a Dungeons And Dragons setting. Everything he wears is highly magical and very, very... unique. He almost fits this trope literally, as he wears a color-changing rainbow cloak (it also cycles through ultraviolet!) and a large be-plumed hat that could best be described as pimptastic. Of course, he's probably doing this on purpose, as he's quite flamboyant and is happy with his look. It also makes him quite memorable, which is what he's going for. Jarlaxle's reputation is "He dresses like a goofball, but don't screw with him." It also helps that everything he wears has a perfectly practical use. Even the ridiculous plume on his hat can be used to summon a monster in a pinch.
- Inverted by Slaaneshi cultists in Warhammer 40000: their clothing (what little of it there is) tends towards hideous clashing colors which produce a stronger reaction than any sort of protection. The Emperor's Children are a Slaneeshi Legion whose armor is painted pink and black because it's one of the few combinations that still attracts their attention.
Web Original
- This image from a Cracked slideshow titled "If Real Life Worked Like A Role-Playing Game".
Web Comics
- In an early The Order of the Stick strip, Haley describes finding a pair of boots that would have been great, except that they were lime green. Later on, you see her wearing them in a flashback, and her Nemesis's first words to her are sarcastically noting the "nice boots". It turns out she's not only been carrying them around, but she also had them dyed to go with her new armour.
Haley: ... so the Boots of Speed were totally powerful, but they were, like, lime green.
Vaarsuvius: Indeed. A most grave conundrum you faced.
- Sir Bob in The Noob is an example of this.
- Parodied by Stolen Pixels in regards to Dragon Age: Origins. Dragon Age actually tends to avert this by giving stat bonuses to characters who wear a full set of armor (e.g. chainmail breastplate + gloves + boots.) At that point in the game, though... yeah, most characters fit the trope.
- Homestuck
- Lord English owns a very literal piece of Rainbow Pimp Gear, the massive lime green CAIRO OVERCOAT. The cuffs, collar, and patches all shift to any and every color of the rainbow to reflect the current state of the timeline.
- Most of the kids have alchemized a wide variety of clothing, weapons and other equipment, most of which doesn't really gel as an overall appearance. Most spectacularly is what Jade alchemized herself and generally wore for quite a while — her blue and black knee-length Dress of Eclectica, accompanied by her bright-red-and-white (with Squiddle-print) Squiddlejacket, Squiddlesneaks and Lunchmuffs, and her dark-red Junior Compu-sooth Spectagoggles. And that's not even considering her veritable rainbow of weapons - her bright-neon-green Green Sun Streetsweeper comes to mind. The end result, well... On the other hand, Dave does a good job of maintaining some consistency with his wardrobe and weapon array, vocally showing distate for the one (neon-green) suit which didn't mesh.
- In 8-Bit Theater, while this is averted, Red Mage states he would wear his underwear over his armour if it granted +3 Endurance. An obvious jab at this trope and super hero suits that really look like they wear briefs on top of spandex.
- While not as colorful as the example above, this Penny Arcade also makes fun of the trope.
- Peganone's adventuring outfit in Our Little Adventure. Randi even makes the comment that her outfit makes her look like one of the Holograms. She explains that her outfit gives her a lot of combat and stat bonuses.
- In Goblins, Minmax finds a suit of armor in the Maze of Many while in dire need of it (having lost most of his clothes). To his great dismay, however, the whole armor is pink. Although it might be more pracical than he thought, subverting the trope.
Real life
- Warlords, but for some odd reason African warlords especially, seem to treat war like a sport, even keeping with them at all times lucky articles of clothing (or in the case of one no clothing at all. The most common garb is to mix and match womens' clothing as they terrorize small villages, adding upon their layers. There is actually a belief behind this that doing such a thing causes bullets to "miss" more often.
- Some customized medieval armour, especially from Renaissance Italy, can fall into this category, from animal-head helmets to ever more impressive codpieces. Although these are typically made more for aesthetics than defense, they still provided more defense than going without, or the standard linemen's armour, simply due to being commissioned to use better materials. These were the halfway point between usable-in-battle and pure parade. Typically, those owned by poorer lords would invoke this effect more, as they would spread the cost among multiple armourers.
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