Basic Trope: Repeatedly pausing the ongoing game to gain an advantage in a video game.
- Straight: In Tales of Troperia XVII, negative status effects have a real time duration which continues to run even while the game is paused. If your party is afflicted by one of these effects, you can pause (which will otherwise freeze the battle) until the effect wears off.
- Exaggerated: All status effects instantly resolve if the game is paused due to a glitch.
- Downplayed: The game only allows you to pause once per battle, so this only works the first time.
- Justified: "Pausing" is actually the deity who brought the party together freezing time to help the party.
- Inverted: Pausing actually causes the negative status effects to become worse and last for the rest of the battle, so players avoid pausing at all costs.
- Subverted: Pausing causes the negative status effects to resolve instantly, even if this would be a negative result. For example, poisoned characters die instantly while if the game were not paused, you'd have time to cure them as the poison slowly drained their health.
- Double Subverted ...but poison is a rare status effect and pausing remains useful to deal with those that do not drain health.
- Parodied:
- Zig-Zagged: Pausing is the in-universe act of the supporting deity freezing time to help the party. However, influencing the mortal world directly like that weakens him, so every time you pause, he is less able to help the party in other ways later in the story.
- Averted: Pausing the game confers no advantage whatsoever.
- Enforced: The game is a remake to another where pausing had this effect due to technical limitations. However, it proved to be popular with players, so it was implemented as an actual feature for this game.
- Lampshaded:
- Exploited:
- Defied: A balance patch Nerfs this strategy, also pausing those effects when the game is paused.
- Discussed:
- Conversed:
- Deconstructed:
- Reconstructed:
- Played for Laughs:
- Played for Drama:
