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"Lacking in survival skills" indeed. Seriously, twelve seconds of dialogue, and she can't dodge?
"When your martial arts skills are developed to the Chuck Norris level, you can spit out gigantic chunks of expository dialog in mere seconds without breaking a sweat."
— Mister Kitty on Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos
"Apparently 'strongest' here are thoes who can talk tediously for the longest amount of time"
— Ishida Bleach Episode 28
"And besides, comic book stories exist in their own reality, the kind of place where a character can bash out a 200 word monologue in the time it takes to leap across a room."
Time in comics is flexible. Each panel shows a single event, which is usually accompanied by a length of dialog, which must take some time to say. This disparity is usually accepted if it isn't taken to extremes.
But often, characters will exposit when it's most needed: at the story's climax, when both the intricacies of the plot and the intensity of action hit their highest.
While the Heroes Outrun The Fireball, Mr Exposition might explain why the Evil Overlord's death caused the explosion. The Action Girl can deliver impressive lectures on why the monster's Achilles Heel will work, while still engaging in Waif Fu. The Super Hero can quip to his heart's content and explain his abilities while dueling one insignificant mobster, or deliver a Kirk Summation during the course of a single Finishing Move. Sometimes even apparent mere mortals can give a lecture on what is happening when it would be a much better idea to simply run like hell.
Without stopping to breathe, apparently.
This has become less common in the era of Decompressed Comics, possibly because it was taken to silly degrees at times, but has never really gone away.
This is mostly found in comics and Web Comics, as it compares time to talk with time to do. If a comic is translated to a medium where time is a factor, then this can become obvious.
Anime versions of Manga, for example, sometimes end up having Midstrike Monologues, where it almost seems like Time Stands Still for the purpose of attacks, but not for the hero to deliver an In the Name of the Moon speech.
Another variant can occur in roleplaying Video games, where battle can stop for dialogue scenes, either for Character Development or rules description. Sometimes this is with enemies present, but refusing to attack. Maybe they're caught up in the romance or wonder of the moment. Or maybe they realise they're doomed cannon fodder and think it best to savour their last moments of life.
The Trope Namer is Dungeons And Dragons, in which certain actions (most notably talking) are designated "free actions" and can be taken in addition to any other actions within the normal limit of a turn. Talking does not distract the player from any other actions and there is no word count limit on how much the player can say.
Compare Inaction Sequence, Comic Book Time, Webcomic Time, Expolabel, Wall Of Text. Compare Changing Clothes Is A Free Action for the apparel equivalent. Talk To The Fist is this trope's feared enemy, and Killed Mid Sentence is the biggest subversion/aversion. Contrast Distracting Disambiguation, where there is some amount of cooperation on the enemies' part that enables this. See also Exposition Beam, which bypasses this. And see Magic Countdown, which can be an example of this if the characters are talking during an artificially slow countdown.
See also Year Inside Hour Outside and Plot Time.
Examples
General
- As a rule, this trope will usually apply in any situation where a protagonist's close friend, relative, or lover falls in battle. A character will essentially never be at a disadvantage for taking a moment (or several) to mourn or exchange a few touching last words, even if surrounded by angry Mooks. In cases where this trope isn't used, the bad guys' miraculously poor aim will usually fill the role.
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- Abused in Transformers Super God Masterforce when Ranger is introduced — Ginrai is able to give him a tutorial on transformation while Ranger is falling from a cliff.
- Frequent in Naruto. The worst offender is Lee, who can kick his opponent into the air, jump after him and deliver a 30 seconds exposition before performing a finisher.
- Naruto is a rather bad offender of this as well. He'll somehow manage to spout of a speech while dodging/delivering attacks. When he finishes his speech, he'll usually use clones or Rasengan to finish off his opponent (or both).
- Then there is the wonderful fight between Sakura and Sasori, where the former injects herself with an antidote that will protect her from poison for the next three minutes. The characters then proceed to spend five minutes talking before they resume fighting(another half hour), all before the three minutes manages to expire.
- While fighting Kisame, Killer Bee and Sabu manage to easily talk to each other even when they are underwater.
- In volume 7 of the the Hellsing manga, a Vampire manages to explain how he can tell the difference between bloodtypes by taste all the while a shell from Harkonen II floats onimously over his shoulder before impact in the next pannel.
- The final volume of the Death Note manga features an entire chapter of infodumping which supposedly takes less than 30 seconds. Even more blatant in the anime, in which the monologuing takes a good nine minutes of screentime to deliver but still is portrayed to be confined to a less than 30 second timeframe. In one case, time even appears to stop while said infodumping takes place.
- To be fair, a good part of it happens while Light is thinking about all the plans he made over the past few months, which would take no in-universe time.
- Happens all the time in Kinnikuman and Ultimate Muscle. One of the most blatant examples is the match between the newly-returned Ramenman and Motorman in the Throne arc. Although one of the shorter fights in the arc, it still goes on for a solid 9 or so minutes during the anime... even though they clearly state in the next episode that the fight only last 37 seconds.
- Taken to ridiculous extremes in Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure. The lengthy situational analyses in the manga (often spoken out loud, often in the time it takes a bullet to travel less than a dozen feet) are egregious enough, but the anime managed to extend nine seconds (the canonical duration of Dio's time-freezing ability, as explicitly stated in both manga and anime) into nearly a minute of gloating.
- This is also evident in the PS2 game Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Whirlwhind. Here we see Bucciarati, who has no time-slowing powers, thinking really, really fast.
- That is actually fully appropriate, if the incident depicted match their train fight in the manga. If Gold Experience's main power is used on a living being, they perceive themselves as having been sped up, but the body cannot keep up with the hastened mind, and loses control as a result. It doesn't come up any time afterwards as this is a pretty lame power, all in all, but Bruno gets to analyse it in detail when it happens to him.
- The video example is because Bucciarati has just been hit with Giorno's power which normally is to give life to nonliving things. When it is used on someone living in causes an overflow of life meaning it really does speed up the brains thinking powers greatly. As a side note the reason it becomes Giorno's advantage is because the brain cannot handle the sudden speedup and causes the affected person in real life to not function correctly
- Mobile Suit Gundam saga just loves doing this, especially during epic battles.
- To be exact, it varies by series. Gundam0083 had a reasonable balance between this and "Talking Will Get Your Ass Shot Off". Chars Counterattack, however, is a SHAMELESS follower of this trope.
- Inui of Prince Of Tennis defeats his opponents by memorizing the percent chances of any particular action occuring during a game. This can end in him rattling off a list of percentages in the middle of his through-swing.
- Heck, in almost every game in the series and certainly during every training exercise, someone will either manage to shout the name of a move about to be used, describe exactly how a certain move works, point out a forgotten fact, or generally manage to get in a good three minutes of talking, all before the ball manages to get to the other side of the net.
- Somewhat lampshaded when just as much(or less) talking can cover up to five games being won/lost.
- Gantz. To excess. Then again, everything in Gantz is a free action, and nothing happens unless directly caused by such a free action, in what can only be described as the anime equivalent of event-driven programming. This is vitally necessary, as the show's protagonists are perhaps the single most hesitant gaggle of mooks in all of anime.
- It's probably the only show where even *sex* is a free action.
- The aliens OR ARE THEY? seem to be getting about as tired of this as us, with Inaba being stomped to paste after his triumphant return and the Hiroshima team member having and arm and part of his head taken off mid-conversation.
- The Law Of Ueki does this quite often, both with the standard talking and occasionally with flashbacks. Apparently it takes less time to revisit all your motivations for becoming a fighter (taking five minutes of screen time) than it does for a fist to cross a foot or two. At one point Ueki pole vaults onto someone, and they manage a four line dialogue explaining his move before he even gets close to landing.
- Hunter X Hunter has fun with this trope. In one of the more recent chapters, one of the character thinks several paragraphs worth of stuff, then realizes that he's thought entirely too much in so short a timeframe. He then realizes that the reason this is happening is because one's perception of time slows greatly in the seconds before one is about to die. Zoom out to reveal the guy he's fighting, all set to beat the shit outta the first guy.
- Mocked in Real Bout High School. After Ryoko effortlessly takes out a powerful hood, his friends get angry. The leader is calmed by his Dragon, who wishes to test his sword skills against hers. Well, that's the sentiment he was trying to express. He got as far as "She's good. I'll g-" before she smashed his face in with her wooden sword.
- Happens all the time in Eyeshield 21. Football players and spectators can have entire conversations in the middle of plays that last five seconds.
- Poked fun at in manga Kotaro Makari Tooru, where in a martial arts tournament one of the contenders launches a mid air attack, whereupon the surprised announcer proceeds to exclaim his shock, admiration, expectations, exposition of the move, and prediction in the same panel. A little pop-up head in the corner of the panel quips, "How much time does he have to say this much anyway?"
- Subverted in the final episode Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, where Tsubaki's Pre-Ass Kicking
One Liner Speech is long enough for Sousuke to calmly find his bag, take out his gun, load it with rubber bullets, carefully aim for his head, and shoot him.
- To Aru Majutsu No Index. Probably a side effect of having been adapted from light novels, but that does nothing to excuse the fact that several minutes of conversation happen while a character is running across a room no more than twenty feet wide. To it's credit, this sort of thing becomes less common as it goes along, though.
- In Ichigo's second fight with Grimmjow in Bleach, his hollow mask stays active for around 11 seconds, but the fight lasts for five minutes in the anime. Even if you do assume that the characters are moving at superhuman speed and can take more actions in 11 seconds than most people can, the dialogue that both characters say would easily take longer than 11 seconds combined.
- Subversions are fairly common in Bleach- near the end of the Soul Society arc, the just-revealed Big Bad is attacked in the middle of the twenty-minute explanation of his Xanatos Roulette. Being a Bad Ass, he just shrugs it off, sends his attacker reeling, and goes on talking. In a later episode, D-Roy attacks Rukia in the middle of some exposition, and then again in the middle of her introductory speech. Given the result, maybe D-Roy should have just let her talk...
- D-Roy's case is rather odd, in that he interrupts Rukia by attacking (and this is commented upon), but only after letting her talk for nearly 5 minutes straight.
- But the original and by far the most widespread example is Kido. The incantations for these spells are so wordy, one is left wondering how they could ever realistically be used in a combat situation. Here's an example of one of the more basic bindings:
"Ye lord! Mask of blood and flesh, all creation, flutter of wings, ye who bears the name of Man! Inferno and pandemonium, the sea barrier surges, march on to the south!"
- And that's the incantation for what is basically a basic fireball spell. Is it any wonder the more powerful Soul Reapers have taken to learning how to cast without the incantations?
- Like the Bleach example above, in the climax of One Piece's Arabasta arc, the Straw Hats are able to call out to each other while executing an improvised plan over the course of less than a minute, which lasts three minutes in the anime, and their dialogue also would have taken up the entire alloted time.
- Parasyte! uses this to highlight an increase in the main character's reaction time. We see a punch fly at his head, he pauses to muse on the source of his newfound strength for a couple of paragraphs, and then parries the attack without difficulty.
- Dragon Ball of course, where every villain has the urgent need to talk a lot. It usually is necessary to talk about evil plans or the like.
- Taken to insanity during Goku's fight with Freeza. Freeza destroys the core and gives the planet five minutes until implosion. Twenty episodes (approximately three hours of screentime for each of the scenes that are playing out simultaneously), and over three hundred lines of dialog for the two fighters later the planet finally collapses.
- Lampshaded snarkily in the dub. With ten episodes to go, Frieza has a line to the effect that the planet s "a tough one... it'll probably last another two minutes."
- Not exactly talking but, in Pokemon anime, flashing your Pokedex at an unknown pokemon causes all other activities to cease. Even if said pokemon is hellbent on the protagonist's destruction, it will politely wait until said protagonists know exactly what they're facing up against.
- The Team Rocket motto is usually a free action. For some reason, Ash & co will wait for them to finish before defeating them, and they drop anything else to introduce themselves. However, on occasion people will interrupt Team Rocket, especially Barry (who has never actually heard the entire motto for this reason).
- Parodied in a later chapter of Hayate the Combat Butler. During a Flashback chapter that explained the first meeting between Nagi and Tama (in the African jungle, by the way), Nagi had to save the then-baby Tama from a group of wild animals ready to pounce on and eat it... and also Nagi and Jenny, as well. Her resolution to protect Tama, complete with her saying as much, was interrupted by said animals closing the distance with them. Jenny even pointed out that they caught up while she was talking.
- Code Geass often abuses this, especially with pilots talking during supposedly-fast-paced Knightmare battles (taken to a ridiculous extreme with Urabe's sacrifice in R2 episode 2), and with Lelouch making his dramatic fauxlosophic speeches as his opponents just stand there pointing guns at him.
- Current state of the plot in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. They've been in the middle of the final battle with the Big Bad for a dozen chapters now, each of which seems to cover about two seconds and eight pages of exposition.
- Especially evident in the Rain Guardian battle in Katekyo Hitman Reborn, where the fight stops every minute for Combat Commentator Reborn to explain what Yamamoto just did.
- Claymore has one instance where two Claymores jump up into the air for an attack and have a minute long conversation about how they wish they had a slightly different job before landing.
- Lampshaded early in Elemental Gelade. The Eden Raids (living weapons) transform and can be commanded to perform various actions only after singing short songs. Coud begins going into an extended piece to unlock Ren's power against a foe, when the enemy moves to attack him in mid-song. Cisqa keeps the enemy back with a warning shot, saying, "When someone sings, listening until the end is good manners."
- Happens twice in Great Teacher Onizuka when Onizuka accidentally knocks people off ledges on top of high buildings. Somehow there's enough time in midair for several paragraphs of internal monologue, lots of screaming from astonished bystanders, and for him to finally reach a decision and run down the side of the wall to catch them.
- Used fairly frequently in Genesis Of Aquarion. Basically, any time the focus is in the Vector cockpit, you can rest assured that the Monster Of The Week will wait patiently for the pilots to finish whatever strategic discussion, Character Development, or general exposition may be going on.
- At the climax of the film Point Break, Keanu Reeves's and Patrick Swayze's characters fall out of an airplane at four-thousand feet and have a ninety-second shouting match which, as Myth Busters demonstrated, is about three times as long as it would take to actually fall that distance. And that's not getting into the problems with being able to hear someone in free fall.
- Crank takes the above shouting match and cubes it by having a character fall out of a helicopter (at what looked like a relatively low altitude), have a fight to the death, and still have time to pull out his phone, connect to an answering machine, wait through the message, leave one of his own, and hang up.
- Quentin Tarantino's speech in the final act of Four Rooms was to be one minute. He even has a buddy time it. It's actually one minute and twenty-eight seconds of talking.
- In Ferris Buellers Day Off, narrating is a free action for Ferris.
- Subverted in The Incredibles. During the initial encounter between Mr. Incredible and Syndrome, Mr. Incredible attempts to catch Syndrome off guard by attacking him while he's explaining the source of his powers.
- Subverted in The Good The Bad And The Ugly, when the bounty hunter who tried unsuccessfully to kill Tuco right at the beginning of the movie locates him again, three quarters of the way through the movie, in the bath, naked. He's clearly got the jump on him, but can't resist going into a speech about how glad he is to have finally cornered him. Tuco immediately whips out the revolver around his neck and kills him, saying to the corpse, "If you have to shoot, shoot! Don't talk!" Most fans consider it Tuco's Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
- Both parodied and played straight in the third Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, when Will and Elizabeth ask Barbossa to marry them during the final battle. Barbossa tries to deliver the "Do you (insert name here) wish to" -speech, but has to constantly stop to fight Davy Jones's crew. Played straight in that when he finally gets enough and yells: "Just kiss!", Will and Elizabeth kiss for several seconds and not a single pesky enemy tries to kill them during that.
- Completely straight in 2012. John Cusack's character is given an pretty short Exact Time To Failure before going to unjam some machinery, but the time he takes to speak to speak to his family doesn't count.
- Also done straight in Armageddon. Bruce Willis knows that he has only a few seconds to press the detonator that will destroy the giant asteroid and kill him in the process. So naturally he finds a camera and spends what feels like several minutes giving a tearful goodbye to his daughter, still managing to press the button at the last second.
- The Eye Of Argon:
"All that you hear is less than I hear! I heard footsteps coming towards us. Silence yourself that we may find out whom we are being brought into contact with. I doubt that any would have thought as yet of searching this passage for us. The advantage of surprize will be upon our side." Grignr warned.
- In Orson Scott Card's novel Empire, the main characters, while fighting for their lives during surprise-attacks-in-peacetime with never-before-seen giant mecha, basically have a full conversation, complete with sarcastic political commentary.
- Terry Pratchett's {{Maskerade (sic) parodies the use of Singing is a Free Action common in opera, when the villain with a stage sword between his arm and chest takes five minutes to die, while repeatedly jumping up and delivering yet another Info Dump each time.
- Harry Potter, with his wand in his hand, failed to stop Lockhart from using the Memory Charm, despite Lockhart gloating for four lines before activating that Memory Charm. Luckily for that Deus Ex Machina then.
- even though he had just used Expelliarmus on Lockhart in Myrtle's bathroom. Somebody isn't Genre Savvy enough.
- Actually, he used Expelliarmus in Lockhart's office. Lockhart learned from his mistakes and raised his wand before threatening. Think of it like he was drawing his gun in his office when Harry drew his faster and shot him. This time, he's got his gun trained already, meaning he beat the quick draw.
- Lampshaded in, of all places, The Iliad. Played straight in that Patroclos stopped to give the lampshade in the middle of battle.
Patroclos: My good man, why do you bandy words like this? You are wasting time. Taunts and jibes will not drive the Trojans away from that dead body. Many a man will fall before that! Words are potent in debate, deeds in war decide your fate. Then don't go on piling up the words, but fight!
- Hilariously subverted in Confessor, when Snakeface tries to make a Heroic speech when facing down the main character. Five words in, he loses his head. Apparently, he forgot he was in an objectivist series.
- The Doctor from Doctor Who often lapses into long mocking speeches that get his enemies stunned by his sheer audacity. Subverted in "The Idiot's Lantern", when he starts: "Hold on a minute! There are three important, brilliant, and complicated reasons why you should listen to me. One of them is—" and is promptly KO'd with a punch to the face.
- In a similar vein, Power Rangers and Super Sentai all have lengthy morphing, zord summoning and weapon invocation scenes. The giant-sized monsters never seem able to step on the Rangers in the minute or so it takes them to summon and assemble their Megazord.
- Double subverted in an episode of Mahou Sentai Magiranger, where an enemy monster attempts to fire on the heroic mecha as it's going through the motions invoking its final attack. We discover that the graphics superimposed over the motions actually function as an energy shield, and divert the attack.
- Subverted in the first Power Rangers movie, where the Rangers finish morphing only to discover their opponents have vanished, and then have to track them back down.
- And again in Power Rangers Dino Thunder, when the Red Ranger is attacked by the MOTW while he's doing all the action poses that normally accompany transformation.
- And in Lord Zedd's first appearance, when his monster used that time to attack and take control of the Zords before the Rangers could get into them and actually start foiling him, something my 10 year old self had been yelling at the bad guys to do since the 2nd episode.
- This isn't just limited to the good guys; Tenaya 7 of Power Rangers RPM had an early gag where people would interrupt her monologues with attacks or quips.
- In Charmed whenever using the Power of Three the demons always remain motionless or nearly so, awaiting their destruction for no obvious reason, during sometimes-long rhymes.
- Though if you notice, a lot of the time the Demons are kind of vibrating/shuddering while the spell is being recited, which indicates that a Power of Three spell is not one that instantly blows the demon up once it has finished being said, but proceeds to destory the Demon throughout the duration of the spell being spoken, climaxing at the end.
- But not when they first defeated The Source, where the destruction chant was so ridiculously long that they did have to find a way to bind it while they spoke.
- In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Ami invokes her first transformation into Sailor Mercury during a 20-foot-fall — and she does it by reciting a trigger phrase that takes about three or four times longer to say than she should have taken to fall.
- Inverted in the Season 7 opener of NCIS, where Tony babbles on for several minutes to the terrorist villain, even stopping him from shooting McGee so he could explain his plan for escaping (borrowed from the movie True Lies). The point of his monologue was actually to spend as much time as possible talking to give Gibbs enough time to set up a sniper's nest and shoot the terrorist through the window.
- In the Motorcycle Song, Arlo Guthrie accidentally goes off the road on his motorcycle, 500 feet up a mountain. As he starts falling has a great idea for a song, so he gets out paper and a pen to write it down. Still falling, he finds out the pen is dry, so he replaces the ink cartridge.
Tabletop Games
- The trope name comes from Dungeons And Dragons, in which most talking requires neither time nor effort, so requests to "stop talking and get fighting" weren't necessary...in the game world. In the real world...
- To be fair, Dungeons And Dragons actually does place guidelines and limitations on just how much talking you can do without time or effort... but these are usually ignored by players and DMs in all but the most drastic cases, and sometimes even then; it's generally more fun that way.
- Among the other things listed as "free actions" in D&D is "touching yourself"...
- To clarify, spells, scrolls and the like use an action to prepare/wave hands/say magic words. Designating a target and actually using the power on them is a free action. Some spells (in fact, most of a cleric's healing spells) are 'touch attack/actions', meaning you must be physically in contact with the person you want to use it on. Some times touching a person may require a move action or minor action (They are in a heated sword fight, five feet away, etc.) This simply states that you do not have to devote such an action to using a spell on oneself. (On a related note, it's unlikely that the cleric actually physically touches themselves.)
- The Super Hero roleplaying game Villains And Vigilantes, first published in the early 1980s, explicitly defines speech as a "free action" and allows characters unlimited dialogue in combat because it is appropriate to the genre.
- The better-known Champions game that followed it, and its generic outgrowth HERO System after that, followed suit and is the most explicit example of encouraging people to use this trope for genre reasons in the present day.
- Mutants and Masterminds has a mechanic called "Monologuing" in which you trick the villain into talking on and on for several rounds, thereby giving your characters a chance to escape. Beyond using this trick however, the villain can monologue as much as he wants as talking is a free action, and Monologuing is a full round action.
- Talking is technically not a free action in GURPS, but Basic Set points out that unless you're going for hyper-realism it's usually best to use this trope.
- The Mayfair Exponential Game System allows one or two free Bond One Liners per phase of combat; however, if the dialog takes more than four or five seconds to deliver, it costs the player an Action.
- Occurs in Rogue Trader. You can even play an Astropath and have "mindtalk" as a free action.
Video Games
- Advanced Wars plays this straight, although given that its a turn-based strategy game the player has as much time as they need.
- Excuse me, does anyone remember Metal Gear Solid 2?! The codec conversations, even if they are purely an act of thought on the part of Raiden, are pretty unbelievable. Particularly infamous is the three-minute argument over weapon naming conventions with the AI construct the Patriots built to rule the world that occurs during the final boss battle. And this is just after a twelve-minute long Infodump from the same guys, while Solidus Snake just stands there, waiting to deliver his shocking revelation.
- Considering the fact that Solidus had established a well-known proclivity for every person that he faces knowing exactly what's going on...hmm. Actually, still pretty ridiculous.
- Used again in MGS4 (naturally) when, during the final cutscene after the credits have already started to roll, Snake meets up with the supposedly deceased Big Boss, who isn't quite dead yet. About five or so minutes into the cutscene, Big Boss reveals that Snake has just infected him with a new variant of FOXDIE, which, it has been established, kills people in about five minutes or so as they suffer a fatal heart attack. Big Boss then explains everything, while suffering a heart attack, for about 20 or 30 minutes. Granted, he's super-tough, considering he's Big freaking Boss, but still...
- Don't forget the original Metal Gear Solid (or MGS as a whole), wherein several codec conversations are allowed to take place right in the middle of combat. Mostly forgiveable, except for when Snake is fighting Psycho Mantis, The codec call being made to tell Snake to use controller slot 2 takes well beyond enough time for Psycho Mantis to slaughter Snake mercilessly...though this IS fourth-wall breaking anyway, so...
- Subverted in SSB Brawl, where Snake's codec transmissions on Shadow Moses Island have absolutely no effect on the fight...quite the opposite, in fact: If he's killed mid-convo, the character on the other line notices immediately. "SNAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!!"
- But overall, let' just say that the MGS series has an implicit MST 3 K Mantra.
- In many, many Fighting Games with "super" special attacks, when a character executes one the battle will freeze for a split-second while they give a battle cry.
- Fire Emblem sometimes has dialogue or monologue delivered before attacking particularly important characters.
- It also has Support conversations, in which two compatible characters can start gabbing in the middle of battle to raise their stats using The Power Of Friendship... but this eats a turn, at least in some of the games.
- In No More Heroes, in the rank 10 fight against Death Metal, Travis begins to monologue on what it would be like to live in his opponent's mansion, talking about what his servants would do and how he would spend his days in leasure. Clearly for Travis, swinging a Beam Katana around for close to five minutes straight doesn't even make him breathe that hard.
- It's unclear if this is internal monologue or even fourth wall breaking expository monologue, like the opening "You there with the Wii remote" speech.
- For the sake of flavour, virtually all of the Super Robot Wars games have the characters, whether hero or villain, delivering a couple of lines of dialogue (well, actually monologue) with every attack. This is especially amusing in the case of unmanned drone enemies, who actually go "beep beep beep" in place of their dialogue. Sometimes the characters will chat before they attack, and then they get the "combat chatter" on top of that.
- Using the actual Talk command, however, uses that units' turn.
- And in the case of important dialogue, the villain really is stopping to chat with the protagonist. Throwaway chatter is along the lines of "Villain X! What you've done can't be forgiven! Let's go!", and as for attack animations... it wouldn't be Super Robot without liberal Calling Your Attacks and Invocation.
- Sakura Taisen displays a similar behavior to Super Robot Wars. In Sakura Taisen 4, there are even occasions where several minute long cut scenes occur between turns.
- In Final Fantasy Tactics, story fights are often interrupted with dialogue — sometimes including extraordinarily long and detailed monologues.
- In fact, several Final Fantasy games have dialogue scenes for character development or rules description during battle screens, with enemies present, but refusing to attack.
- And in another Square product, Chrono Cross, the enemies are refusing to attack since they're the ones giving the rules and game information; apparently the heroes just stand there and listen.
- Because it's ''helpful''!
- Sometimes averted Final Fantasy X: some battles have "Special Commands" available, including "Talk" — which use up a turn.
- But you DO get a nice battle-specific stat boost when you use the "TALK" commands, so it's usually worth it.
- Both averted — in the same way as above — and played straight in Final Fantasy Tactics A 2; Sometimes main characters go into lengthy monologues mid-battle, and other times you have to use your turn to talk. It seems mostly dependent on if you're talking to yourself or not.
- Perhaps played most notably straight in Final Fantasy VI, in which the first time you have Terra use magic in battle with Locke and Edgar in the party, the Active Time Battle(!) system will pause for a looooooong conversation in which they freak out, break off to the side to whisper among themselves, FAINT, recover, and finally get back to fighting. Naturally, the enemies (usually a pair of Magitek Armours) wait patiently throughout this entire exchange.
- In the same vein, Disgaea 2 has a truly remarkable example of this; the party bursts into the middle of a fight, where the brother of one of the main characters is in the middle of a suicidal assault on the Big Bad's bodyguard. Apparently, however, Mook Chivalry prevents them from attacking while brother and sister share a lengthy retrospect, debate the value of life, make plans for the future, and learn new super-moves from their combined powers. Of course, it IS a turn-based game, and the characters are almost universally Genre Savvy, so maybe they were just aware that the enemy couldn't move until someone hit the "End Turn" button...
- Then again, the trope is subverted in the first Disgaea, in which Etna takes out two out of three Power Ranger knockoffs in the middle of their intro speech, before all their colors combine. This does earn her a stern lecture, though. Later, Laharl gets a scolding from Flonne too when he suggests that they should attack while The Rival is busy monologuing
- It's also subverted by the prinnies at the beginning of Disgaea 2, where they're A-OK with scoring a cheap critical hit while Rozalin is busy with an Internal Monologue
- It's also lampshaded in the tutorial, where Etna notices that the monsters apparently have the courtesy to wait for their asses to be beat.
- Assassination targets in Assassins Creed have the uncanny ability to freeze gameplay in order to deliver cryptic, rambling speeches. This despite their having invariably been stabbed through the neck by a two-foot spike immediately prior. On the other hand, this clearly takes place outside normal time, as the scenes are invariably set in the white "memory-space", and the implication via the glitches is that Altair may have actually cornered and spoken with his victims before killing them.
- Body Harvest actually says that when you get blurbs from the girl in your lander, your receiver injects a drug into you that speeds up your perception hundredsfold for a fraction of a second, gives you the transmission, and then dispenses another drug to bring you back down to normal speed.
- In Achaea, talking is one of the few actions that doesn't require balance (which is lost when most actions are used, and takes a few seconds to come back). Even emoting requires balance, which can result in the rather odd circumstance of the character apparently having the composure to recite entire paragraphs, but not being able to blink. Talking is also instant, although this effect is limited by the time the player spends typing it out.
- In Call Of Juarez, characters you've just duelled with get last words, despite having just been shot in the head at extremely short range.
- Gawn, from Wild ARMs 4, having already defied physics to shoot down 11 missiles in mid-air and punching the last one with his bare hands, decides to twist up the flow of time too. In the one second or less it takes for the last missile that he had just punched to explode, Gawn manages to give the protagonists an entire speech on reaching for the future. Of course, everyone else has to move in slow motion while it happens. You don't believe me, do you? There is proof.
- Spoofed in Days Of Ruin, despite the rapidly dropping altitude of the plane the scene is set on no one except an unnamed IDS agent (who is panicking at her oncoming doom, and even asks if anyone else cares) cares, every other character is casually talking to the Big Bads Tyke Bomb convincing her to Heel Face Turn and allow them to make it out alive
- Played straight in the separately translated EU version Dark Conflict, where the IDS agent does nothing but read the altitude.
- The Tales Series of RPGs loves this; typically there will be cutscene exposition before a plot-important fight and then the characters will banter during it, apparently not even needing to breathe.
- Tales Of Vesperia takes a jab at this trope when Yuri and Flynn work together to defend a village of refugees from monsters. Yuri can't concentrate if he isn't talking and Flynn can't concentrate when someone is talking.
- And then they fight each other and trash-talk each other while they're kicking each other's ass.
- In Dragon Quest VII, you can talk to your party members before each round of combat by just choosing 'Talk' instead of picking everyone's next actions. However, if you try talking three times, the enemy stops waiting and gets a free round of hits. (Surprisingly, Maribel does not chew you out if you choose to start the next round by 'Talk'ing again...)
- In Fallout 3, if you manage to Mezmerize an enemy during combat, you can run right up and talk to them, rifle their pockets, take their weapons, and slap a slave collar on, all while their allies patiently wait for your conversation to end.
- All The Elder Scrolls games will pause indefinitely whenever the Player Character enters dialogue, even in combat (though to be fair, very few non-scripted NP Cs will engage in dialog while fighting). This leads to such oddities as a soldier filling you in on the next stage of an attack plan while a fireball sent from the walls is patiently hovering mid-air not far from his head.
- Not to mention the spot where they lampshade it in Oblivion: when you return to Weynon Priory and find it under attack, you are informed by an NPC after a reasonably long conversation that he's fairly sure a Mythic Dawn agent is right behind him. Sure enough, when you finish the dialogue, there he is.
- Averted rather annoyingly in the Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, where opening dialogue with an NPC leaves you open to attack from any nearby enemies.
- Diablo II: In the cinematic between Act II and Act III, Tyrael somehow finds the time to deliver a ten-second monologue to Marius while ostensibly in battle with two Prime Evils.
- The background clearly shows that time has stopped while he does this. Also, he's an angel. And furthermore, the moment his time-stop ends, Baal catches him off-guard and disarms him. Triple justified.
- Averted in River City Ransom: The player can attack bosses while they're still talking.
- Deus Ex features some intricate dialogue with friendly characters -that can thankfully be fastforwarded- while enemies are either advancing on the player or waiting to attack. Notable instances: Paul blabbing away to JC in his room at the 'Ton Hotel while a gaggle of men in black and UNATCO troopers are converging on their location, and Illuminati contact Stanton Dowd briefing JC on his next assignment in the middle of a street patrolled by mooks and bots, while a thug visibly hovers behind his back.
- Shown in this Achewood comic.
- And again here, where Ray demonstrates Writing Is A Free Action, by writing 19+ words (we don't see the other side) on a board during a pause in a conversation.
- In Darths And Droids the players have a long, complex discussion, while insisting their characters are holding their breath.
- Subverted in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures.
- Demonstrated greatly in this 8-Bit Theater, where Fighter has a full flashback, gets an idea, and draws both swords before hitting opponents Black Mage threw him at that were apparently at most fifteen feet away. In the flash version it's even more obvious, and even funnier.
- The comic for 11/11/08 is literally titled "Talking Is A Free Action".
- Girl Genius doesn't seem to be immune to this either
- VG Cats subverted the trope with this comic parodying frequent offender Metal Gear Solid 2.
- Lampshaded here in Nowhere University
- Although Dr. McNinja was busy running away from a horde of killer robots that were almost literally breathing at his neck, he still found enough time to read a note he discovered.
- Seen shortly after Ellen's creation in El Goonish Shive. Sure, she may not have said that much and got interupted at the end, but it was still a lot more then should have been possible during the time it takes to fall from a second story window.
- Suicide For Hire does this a lot. Lampshaded in the sidenote here.
- Parodied once in Stick Man Stick Man: strip 892.
- In Sluggy Freelance this seems to hold true for Blacksoul but not for Bun-Bun.
- Obviously, being a D&D comic, Order Of The Stick not plays it straight after Haley makes a speech to Roy and then proceeds to say "Relax, talking is a free action".
- Not to mention that they talk a lot while fighting, even though they don't mention this trope explicitly.
- How about this Irregular Webcomic? The characters have taken several strips talking about elven philosophy and gods.
Web Original
Western Animation
- In Danny Phantom, in the midst of heated battle, foes often seem to just stop and let Danny finish his superheroic, corny jokes.
- A subversion of this appears as well. Danny apparently has no qualms about attacking Technus during his usual lengthy monologues.
- In The Simpsons, this occurs whenever the family is watching a Coincidental Broadcast: They all briefly stop to have a conversation regarding the report, spew pop culture reference jokes, bring up past adventures related to it, etc. then when they finally get back to watching, the report is exactly where they left off, almost as if the world stopped just for their conversation. Naturally, its been lampshaded a few times.
- The Spectacular Spider Man, though a very talky series by nature, has a notable subversion. When a net is launched at Spider-Man from behind, he takes the time to say "Woah! My Spider Sense is tingli—!" only to be caught in the net before he can finish. Afterwards, his sense is shown, but never announced again.
- The all-time winner of this trope is the So Bad Its Good Marvel Superheroes cartoon from 1966. These barely-animated six-minute gems were often directly adapted from '60s Marvel Comics scripts — in their full-blown long-winded Stan Lee glory. It often included such moments as Captain America giving an inspiring speech as he leaps across the screen — with the leap dragged out to fill the full length of the speech. Watch a few of these, and you'll see just how damned silly this trope can get in a medium where time actually, you know, happens.
- On and off in Kim Possible, but the episode "The Twin Factor" has plenty of examples of characters visibly hanging about waiting for others to finish their lines instead of taking advantage of the moment.
Real Life
- John Moschitta. OtherwiseknownasthatfasttalkingMicroMachinesguywho'sintheGuinessBookOfWorldRecords.
- Floyd Mayweather answered a football question during a match. Not exactly on the level of Spiderman, but still pretty amusing.
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