Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
alt title(s): Temple O Traps 
"I think the past is trying to kill me."
"That thing is bound to be full of treasure we can steal! ...And booby traps we can steal ideas from!"
An ancient temple or city, usually buried deep within the jungle or in the middle of the desert. The temple is often full of ancient yet sophisticated machines and traps that still work to lethal effect even after thousands of years without maintenance.
The Temple Of Doom is almost always inhabited, often by the same Mooks and monsters found in the surrounding environment — oddly, they know how to avoid every single trap — but you can also expect things like ghosts, skeletons, living statues and other ancient guardians. And naturally, whatever treasure you go in there to find will be found in the very spot the Giant Space Flea From Nowhere has decided to make its home.
Occasionally, the Temple Of Doom will be co-opted by the Big Bad to use as his base, which would explain why the traps still work. In which case, you can also expect his Mooks and a few high-tech surprises as well.
Named for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which serves as an obvious inspiration for these levels.
Compare Ruins For Ruins Sake and Landmark Of Lore.
Examples:
- Not only does Indiana Jones have the trope namer, but it also has the ancient idol resting place from the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the temple of the Grail in The Last Crusade, and the eponymous Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...
- His knockoffs have them too. The Hidden temple in The Rundown, the buried treasure chamber buried under Manhattan in National Treasure, and the City of Gold from National Treasure 2.
- Nearly every Moon Crystal in Skies Of Arcadia is found in one of these.
- It'd be quicker to name the games in the Sonic The Hedgehog series that don't have one of these.
- Sonic Heroes... wait, no, Ocean Palace. Damn. Er, Knuckles Chaotix?
- Anyway, for completeness' sake: Marble Zone from Sonic 1 (merged with Lethal Lava Land), Labyrinth Zone from Sonic 1 (merged with Down The Drain), Aquatic Ruins Zone from Sonic 2 (merged with Under The Sea), Marble Garden Zone from Sonic 3, Sandopolis from Sonic And Knuckles (merged with Shifting Sand Land), Rusty Ruins from Sonic 3D, Lost World from Sonic Adventure (merged with Down The Drain)... you get the picture.
- Donkey Kong Country has a "Millstone Mayhem" stage as the last non-boss stage in Monkey Mines, as well as a "Temple Tempest" level near the end of Vine Valley.
- Said level served as inspiration for "Angry Aztecs" world in Donkey Kong 64.
- A large number of levels in the Crash Bandicoot franchise.
- A very large number of levels in the Zelda franchise. There's the occasional level inside a suitably enormous creature, and occasionally a level still inhabited by its original builders (the Gerudo Fortress in Ocarina of Time, the Hyrule Castle Tower in A Link to the Past), but most dungeons are of the Temple Of Doom variety. In The Adventure of Link, not only are all eight dungeons Temple Of Doom-type, the monsters within them are ostensibly not on the same side as the ones on the World Map.
- If it wasn't for this trope, everyone's favorite Tomb Raider would have enormously less to do for a living.
- Oddly, sealed-up tombs, with no apparent exits to the outside world apart from the door Lara Croft has just opened, still contain live animals, burning fires, infinite supplies of poison darts for the traps, and structures made from wood which should have rotted hundreds of years before Lara arrives.
- To be fair, if you look close, any time a poison dart is fired, if it doesn't hit you, it will disappear in another hole in the wall. The darts just get recycled, there is a finite supply that gets fired over and over again.
- Odder still are the vast amounts of supplies scattered around the tombs, but no bodies of other explorers. Did they just drop them as they wandered about?
-
Tomb Raider Anniversary's final level is set in an ancient tomb which by some stroke of luck for Lara, is chock full of ammo and health, which is exactly like all other levels and already stated as such above.
- Final Fantasy VII's Temple of the Ancients, built by, yeah, Ancients.
- Final Fantasy X has three lost temples, each with a sidequest that unlocks an Aeon.
- While conspicuously light on the booby-traps, Final Fantasy XII has the Tomb of King Wraithwall, complete with a That One Boss, a Bonus Boss, and lots and LOTS of undead things crawling around. And it has the Stillshrine of Miriam. And Giruvegan. And Ridorina. And the Sochen Cave Palace. It makes you wonder why modern civilization bothered to build anything, since there's probably enough hidden temples and lost cities to house a nation.
- Mayahem Temple from Banjo-Tooie.
- TheElderScrolls III: Morrowind has several dozen "Daedric ruins" scattered around the country. Each comes complete with a Giant Statue of Doom, Gems of Doom that summon Demons of Doom to attack you when you try to snatch them, and plenty of Cultists of Doom.
- The Ceras Lake Ruins in Suikoden V. Ask not, "why give a sluice control for a dam a complex three-layered lock that can only be unlocked by three buttons on the far sides of a labyrinth, a door controlled by a one-of-a-kind magic rune and fill it with magitek robot guardians?", because the game certainly isn't going to tell you.
- La Mulana has a single Temple Of Doom, the titular ruins, contain all the levels in the entire game.
- Levels 10-13 of Prince Of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame are set in a literal temple, which actually contains most of the Mooks in the game. Levels 6-9 are in a the ruins of a palace, now inhabited by snakes and flying heads.
- Diablo II has lots of them, naturally. Working from memory, there's the various Tombs of Tal Rasha; the temples under the Flayer Jungle, large parts of Kurast...
- The original Diablo was a series of Basements of Doom.
- The "Temple of Bù" in Little Big Adventure — traps, skeletons and stuff, not to mention it is located underground in the middle of the desert. In the second game, it got turned into a Theme Park and the aliens' secret base.
- Western Animation example: The temple of the Avatar The Last Airbender episode, "The Firebending Masters," with killer spikes, a secretly-cached Mac Guffin, a room that fills full of killer glue, and a justification for the fact that everything's still working: the ancient extinct civilization that built it is not actually extinct. How everyone missed this, who knows.
- The third Quest For Glory game features such a temple as the base of the demons looking to do a divide and conquer on the different peoples of Tarna.
- Oddworld: Abe's Oddyssey has the Paramonia and Scrabania temples.
- Arguably, nearly every dungeon crawl in any Dungeons And Dragons campaign fits (and possibly made) the trope.
- Metroid has some, though the temples are mostly futuristic (the biggest being "Temple Of Doom meets Eternal Engine" Sanctuary Fortress from Metroid Prime 2), and the most dangerous aren't contraptions, but post-abandonment inhabitants (or in the case of the Sanctuary Fortress, old inhabitants, the haywire-security robots).
- Super Metroid: Ridley and company inhabit what appear to be ruins of Chozo civilization, deep within Zebes.
- Tales Of Symphonia has eight Temples Of Doom, one for each element, where you find the summom spirits.
- Mother3 has Chupichupyoi Temple. Not a dungeon, but a key location.
- The Wild ARMs games are full of these, often just lying around inexplicably, often with fiendish traps that just happen to be able to be bypassed using one of the tools the party has picked up along the way.
- Valkyrie Profile and its sequel also have about half a dozen of them.
- Warhammer 40000 has some of these. In general, they tend to contain Things Man Was Not Meant To Find.
- World Of Warcraft has one or two dungeons that fit, but the best example is probably the Sunken Temple. A large temple to the serpent god Hakkar, sunk beneath the waters of a lake, hence the name. Infested with dragons and zombie trolls.
- Also the Black temple. Filled with demons, crazy orcs, a big bad and even an eldritch abomination.
- Most of the troll temples/ruins qualify (Zul'Gurub, Zul'Aman...)
- All of the temples in Secret of Mana
- And it's spiritual successor Secret of Evermore had one as well.
- Super Smash Bros Brawl has a classically annoying Ruins level in the Subspace Emissary.
- Deconstructed in Reaper Man. The temple of doom is staffed by a pair of VERY bored priests. There's even a little thermometer fundraising poster on the wall for the Temple Of Doom Roof Repair Fund.
- Fall Out 2 begins with a Temple Of Doom. There's no justification for it in game or real world history, but it's so Dooomy that surviving instantly makes you The Chosen One, even though one of your tribesmen are waiting for you inside.
- Temple. An ancient South American temple buried in a giant pillar of rock, full of demonic cat monsters. And treasure, obviously.
|
|
