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Video Game / LEGO Adaptation Game

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So a Jedi, an archaeologist, a superhero, a rockstar, a wizard, and a pirate walk into a toy store...note 

"LEGO Adaptation Game" is a catch-all term for a loosely-connected series of Multi-Platform Video Games made by Traveller's Tales, based on combining the license for LEGO with that of another work, generally a film, as tie-ins to licensed toy lines based on the same films LEGO is producing and selling around the same time. With few exceptions, the games are action platforming games with the characters and stages all consisting of LEGO interpretations of the licensed work in question, with tongue-in-cheek, often parodical Cutscenes poking fun at both those works and the fact that they are made out of LEGO bricks. They generally follow the original work's story, but with a Denser and Wackier tone.

In these games, death is just the character falling apart and, if it's a Player Character, reforming with just the loss of a few small round LEGO bricks referred to as studs, which are the currency in these games.

The real meat of the games is the quest to 100% Completion; while simply completing the levels are typically a stroll in the park, many collectibles and rooms in every stage are initially inaccessible until the player acquires a character with a specific ability (like super strength or the ability to destroy Silver LEGO Objects). Replaying stages and exploring overworlds with these new characters reward players with more collectibles and playable characters (often numbering in the triple digits per game) until players hit the magical 100%.

Games in the series:

(In the order each subseries debuted)Related Traveller's Tales-produced LEGO games include LEGO Rock Band, LEGO City Undercover, and LEGO Dimensions. Many of this series' crossovers have also made the jump to animation - LEGO Batman: The Movie - DC Superheroes Unite is even a straight-up adaptation of the LEGO Batman 2 game.

The games are rife with numerous shout outs, much as you'd expect from a franchise affectionately parodying popular films.

The remaining LEGO Adaptation Games provide examples of the following tropes:

    open/close all folders 

    #-M 
  • 100% Completion: The main story modes are usually quite short, but the meat of them is collecting every item and character to fill out the completion meter. Unintentionally Unwinnable in some of the DS versions because apparently, some minikits are missing.
  • Ability Required to Proceed: While story progression is based around the abilities possessed by your current character roster, most of the various extra collectables and side-quests require abilities you don't have at the time, necessitating replaying levels in Free-Play or waiting to unlock World Free-Play so that you can use characters with those abilities.
  • Adaptational Badass: Most characters that never fought in their source material become capable of kicking some major plastic butt.
  • Adaptation Deviation: An example in The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame: Lucy doesn't get kidnapped by Mayhem unlike in the movie. This may be because she and Emmet are unlocked as player skins at this point.
  • Adapted Out: Many of the games usually have some characters or scenes missing, despite being in the original source material.
  • Adorable Evil Minions: Pretty much anything evil automatically becomes quite cuddly, or at least Laughably Evil, when turned Lego.
  • Affectionate Parody: The games constantly play around with their adapted franchises, ranging from adding gags to originally serious moments to employing Biting-the-Hand Humor over the various faults and errors in the original plots, but each and every one of them are created out of a definite love for their adapted source materials, utilizing plenty of Mythology Gags and other obscure references that make it clear they know and enjoy what they're joking about.
  • Always Check Behind the Chair: All of the games frequently have purple studs, Minikit pieces, Red Bricks, and other valuable items hidden in a location the camera can't normally see unless you know where to stand, meaning walking behind or into every camera-obscured location is a common method for finding goodies.
  • And Your Reward Is Clothes: There are many "characters" in the games that aren't really anything but alternate outfits for the characters. Some, however, do have slightly different properties. Later games, including Marvel Super Heroes and Jurassic World, give each distinct character only one slot in the selection grid, which rotates through the available outfits for that character, so that the overall size of the grid gives a more accurate idea of how many actual characters there are.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • If you come across a Two-Keyed Lock when playing by yourself, activating it will cause the AI-controlled character (or the nearest or most appropriate if there's more than two) to activate the other one of their own accord.
    • Related to the above: In Free Play, if you enter an area that requires a specific character, the AI will automatically cycle through the roster until it finds one with the same ability.
    • If you're in cursor mode, you don't have to worry about any enemies harming you due to being unable to take damage there, so you can continue your task unimpeded.
    • Starting in The Hobbit, going through free play now lists the individual segments of each level, as well as which collectibles still need to be found in each segment.
    • Starting in Jurassic World, the Free Play character select menu includes a list of what abilities each character has to make it easier to figure out who can solve what puzzles.
    • In the earlier games, enemies would often attack and interrupt you while you're building something. At some point, Traveller's Tales made it so that you're invulnerable to damage while building, which was a godsend.
    • In the bonus levels that involve collecting every stud in the level (such as Wayne Manor/Arkham Asylum in LEGO Batman), death will not cause you to lose studs as it would in normal gameplay, as to avoid an Unintentionally Unwinnable situation. Studs received from breakable objects will also be added to your total immediately instead of dropping onto the ground, so there's no rush to collect them all before they fade away.
  • Art Evolution: As the series goes on, several of the series' visual elements have been updated or refined:
    • The mini-figures themselves have noticeably more detailed designs, and their Black Bead Eyes now have a white dot to make them more expressive.
    • Almost every character has unique animations for actions such as standing and running, while in earlier games most characters shared similar animations.
    • The UI has been updated in multiple ways: character portraits now feature the character doing their idle animation rather than a static picture, the portrait border went from a static circle to varying depending on the game, and multiple characters now have unique crosshair designs.
  • Artificial Brilliance: Most of the time AI partners can hold their own in a fight, and if multiple levers need to be flipped or multiple buttons need to be stepped on, they'll automatically head to those levers and buttons. That said, there's still plenty of Artificial Stupidity here and there, especially when it comes to pathfinding errors.
  • Autosave: These games have consistently had it where most game-state saving comes from automatic triggering by entering new sections, finishing levels, and collecting hub items.
  • Block Puzzle: One common form of puzzle is objects on checkered floors that need to be pushed around, whether to create platforms or activate pressure pads.
  • Bloodless Carnage: Whilst characters are dismembered, the characters are still plastic Lego pieces, and as such they just bloodlessly experience Literally Shattered Lives.
  • Bottomless Pit Rescue Service: Several of the games have a "Fall Rescue" Red Brick that makes it where instead of breaking apart and losing studs when falling into a death pit, you jump out of it no worse for wear, Additionally, most of the Super Heroes games have flying characters that will instantly start flying if you fall into a pit as them.
  • Bottomless Magazines: Everyone that fights with a gun can shoot non-stop without ever needing to reload and never running out, with the sole exception of non-default weapons in Indiana Jones.
  • Bragging Rights Reward:
    • The Studs X8 and X10 Red Bricks in all games are rather superfluous, as their expensiveness means it's hard to unlock them before finishing the story, while the stacking nature of multipliers means getting the cheaper X2 and X4 bricks provides a X8 multiplier that lets you breeze through acquiring True status and buying all the other unlockables, so the last two mostly exist for achievements involving reaching an absurdly high number of studs.
    • All of the games have either a super-expensive character or a 100% Completion reward that exists mostly to represent that you have truly completed the game. Most of the time these are characters or vehicles that play just like a more easily gotten and cheaper character/vehicle, so you have little reason to use them since everything they could do, you've already done in the process of unlocking them.
  • Built with LEGO: The name of the game(s) is taking various franchises and recreating them with varying amounts of LEGO, particularly making it where if it's made of LEGO, it can most likely be interacted with in some way.
  • Butt-Monkey: Each series of games tends to have one, who will fall victim to most of the comic injuries and pratfalls.
  • The Cameo: Surprisingly, Doctor Who has been briefly represented in three of the games: LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (The TARDIS), Lego Batman III: Beyond Gotham (Weeping Angels), and the series got a level pack in LEGO Dimensions, with occasional cameos in the main campaign. Also, Doctor List reused the Twelfth Doctor's hair and face in LEGO Marvel's Avengers, which was released two months after Lego Dimensions.
  • Cap: In the earliest games, the stud counter capped at 4 billion, and there was usually an achievement for reaching this cap. This cap was removed in later games.
  • Character Customization: Beginning in LEGO Star Wars II, you can mix-and-match pieces from any unlocked character to make your own creation.
  • Character Exaggeration: Pretty much the point of the games is emphasizing and exaggerating character traits for comedy.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The games use visual shorthand so you know what you can do. Silver objects have to be blown up with explosives, red and black ones can only be manipulated by evil characters, and so on.
  • Comedic Sociopathy: Half the fun is going around beating up NPCs and destroying random objects.
  • Compact Infiltrator:
    • Across the series, there are special characters known as "Shorties" who are able to crawl through small ducts or paths to reach otherwise inaccessible areas, such as an Ewok sneaking through a vent to pull a switch on the opposite side of a forcefield barrier, or using Short Round to reach a high ledge to pull on a rope that raises a platform for you.
    • All of the "superhero" games starting from LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, including the LEGO DC games starting from LEGO Batman 3, feature a "Vent Travel" mechanic where there are vents with grate gaps too small for most characters to pass through, necessitating characters with Sizeshifting powers like Ant-Man or The Atom, Rubber Man powers like Mr Fantastic or Plastic Man, Elemental Shapeshifter powers like Sandman, or Energy Beings like Livewire, in order to pass through them for solving puzzles or finding hidden collectibles.
    • The "superhero" games with Sizeshifter supers, in addition to Vent Travel access, also have a special interaction where they can shrink down super-tiny for entering and traveling through paths that are too small for normal-sized characters.
  • Conspicuously Light Patch: Being made of LEGO bricks is a sign that it can be destroyed or interacted with. Most games have exceptions in the form of bonus levels that are completely Built with LEGO, meaning the patches are a bit less conspicuous in those instances.
  • Critical Existence Failure: This is present for everything in these games. The player and enemies can keep fighting at full strength and vehicles can ride around at full power even when only a sliver of health away from death/destruction, only finally breaking down into pieces once that final bit of health is gone. The most that happens is exhibiting cases of Shows Damage, which is quite common for vehicles, but even when you're effectively driving an exposed engine on wheels it acts like all the visually missing necessary parts are still there.
  • Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Dying just makes you lose LEGO studs followed by an instant respawn on stable ground. These aren't meant to be Nintendo Hard games unless you're trying to get 100% Completion, which sometimes demands a No Death Run.invoked
  • Developer's Foresight:
    • When distance-tagging (the ability to tag to another character without standing next to them) was introduced, you may have thought about using this to tag yourself out of falling to your death. However, if the death has already been registered by the game, you'll lose your studs anyway and you will be left at 25% health (12.5% in LEGO Batman) as a punishment.
    • No matter who you select as your starting character for a Free Play stage, the game will make sure to hand you a character from every required unlocked ability you have for your stage roster. This way, you are always able to grab every collectible that you can in a stage playthrough, provided you have at least one unlocked character for a class.
  • Die, Chair, Die!: Destroying all (and we mean all) the level furniture is not only possible and enjoyable and but also distinctly necessary, and generally one of the game series' trademarks.
  • Double Unlock: How you get virtually everything extra. You have to do something to make the character (or the Red Brick) available to you (in Lord of the Rings you unlock characters by completing levels; in Harry Potter you find characters scattered within levels and in Hogwarts) and then you have to use studs to buy them. You have to actually look for the character on the map in Lord of the Rings, as if to make up for the ease of the first unlock. Saruman nearly qualifies as a case of Guide Dang It!.
  • Downloadable Content: Starting with LEGO Harry Potter Years 5-7, the games have had extra characters available as DLC. New copies of the games sometimes include codes to download these characters for free.
  • Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: Every game has it where a second character will always be present not just for teamwork puzzles but also so a second player can easily join in whenever they want and also easily leave when they want.
  • Dungeon Bypass: In some levels of the comic games, using a flying character can get you to a puzzle near the end and bypassing a lot of gameplay.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: The first few entries in the series did not feature dialogue in the cutscenes (aside from the occasional simlish), and were pantomimed instead. This was dropped from LEGO Batman 2 onwards, and the games now use a mix of lines from the source material and original voice acting.
  • Escort Mission: One common type of sidequest following the introduction of explorable hubs involves escorting an NPC somewhere while protecting them from enemies. However, unlike most escort missions in video games, the escortee follows the same Death Is a Slap on the Wrist status as the player, so no matter how many times they die you'll never fail it, which is helpful because quest NPCs are highly prone to Artificial Stupidity and are not Friendly Fireproof, meaning most of their deaths will come from them being in the way of your auto-targeted attacks.
  • Every Car Is a Pinto: In every game featuring some form of rideable vehicles, whenever any of them receive enough damage to experience Critical Existence Failure, ranging from futuristic spacecraft to machinery-free horse-drawn wagons, they will proceed to go up in an impressive explosion of fire and thousands of bricks.
  • Every 10,000 Points: Every game has a "True" status bar that's filled by collecting studs in a level, each level having a different amount needed, which is required as part of getting 100% Completion.
  • Everything Fades: Dismantled LEGO pieces and opponents eventually flash for a moment and disappear.
  • Fixed Camera: Most of the gameplay areas have the camera locked to specific angles that only shift when moving past designated spots, with the introduction of camera controls only allowing looking slightly further before snapping back. The only time you can properly move the camera at will to different angles is when in the open-world sandboxes starting from LEGO Batman 2, and even then there are some mini-puzzles (particularly mazes with overhead views) that lock the camera during them.
  • Flash of Pain: Being hit causes a character to flash red.
  • Follow the Money: In games with large hubs/world maps, the game gives you a trail of ghostly or holographic studs to guide you to your destination. Of course, since they're not real, they're not actually worth any money - unless you activate a cheat. The normal version with real studs is also used.
  • Foregone Victory: In these games, normal gameplay has no level fail state, you can fail a puzzle and/or die as many times as necessary until you break through and complete the level. There are exceptions, though, all of which are bonus levels, such as the occasional Timed Mission or levels that require collecting a minimum number of studs before it ends automatically.
  • Funny Background Event: The games are chock full of scenes where half the comedy is stuff happening off to the side or in second-long moments from the peripheral of the main stuff in the forefront.
  • Global Currency: LEGO studs are used to buy anything and everything, no matter what world or era the stories are based on.
  • Gratuitous Disco Sequence: A Running Gag in the earlier games; each game contained at least one disco gag in it. Unfortunately, this wore off over time (meaning LEGO Marvel 2 passed up its chance to use "Guardians Inferno").
  • Ground Pound:
    • Any character with a melee weapon can perform a Shockwave Stomp by jump-attacking.
    • It's required by bigfigs or super-strong characters to perform a Ground Punch to break floor-mounted cracked walls.
  • Guide Dang It!: While the levels themselves are pretty easy to beat, finding all of the minikits and hidden bricks can get to the point of frustratingly obtuse, reaching Trial-and-Error Gameplay levels that make it much easier to just use a guide.
  • Hammerspace: Characters have weapons that grow into its size when taken out and shrink when put away. When walking while pressing either button for that, the weapon grows to size or shrinks away in the character's hand.
  • Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: While bosses usually possess various gimmicks to provide decent challenges, the fact Death Is a Slap on the Wrist means you just need a bit of patience to figure them out and beat them. But the levels leading up to those bosses include things like herds of swarming enemies that are sometimes enhanced with Respawning Enemies or puzzles that can get so difficult they enter Guide Dang It! territory, meaning reaching the bosses provides most of the real challenge.
  • Hub Level: Each series has its own. In later games that expand to a Wide-Open Sandbox, there's usually a section of the world that holds most of the Hub functions like shops and character customization.
  • Idle Animation: Everyone has their own animations for when left standing a few seconds, and there's actually quite a bit of variation. Characters will scratch their head, point their weapon, or twirl around.
  • Kill Screen: In the unlikely event that a player keeps one of these games up running for over 24 hours, one will find the game engines for them were not built to handle such long continuous playing, as animations and light effects will break, the framerate will often lag horribly, and scripted elements like in boss fights will fail to trigger. All that's needed to fix this is just a normal restart, after which everything will go back to normal.
  • Lighter and Softer: Even when the games enter somewhat dark territory, they're always much lighter and more kid-friendly than their source material
  • Literally Shattered Lives: This being LEGO, every character falls to pieces upon defeat. Also, when a character or enemy is frozen into a block of ice (across several games), they can be killed in one hit when the ice is broken.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading:
    • Any of the PSP versions of the games can fall into this.
    • Oddly enough, the 3DS versions of the games fall into this as well. Considering that 3DS games are cartridge-based, unlike the Wii or PSP, the fact that these games have loading times nearly as long as those of LEGO Island 2 is rather perplexing, especially when compared to other games on the system such as Ocarina of Time 3D or Super Mario 3D Land, which have very short loading times. Worse, not only are these loading times long, but they are also very frequent.
    • In general, the open worlds in games such as The LEGO Ninjago Movie or LEGO The Incredibles suffer from incredibly long load times.
  • Mind Screw: The Rule of Funny means quite a few scenes get rather strange visually, but adding the visual cheats like "Disguises" and "Boss Disguises" can turn them outright bizarre.
  • Mission Control: Introduced at the same time as the minifigs' ability to talk, from LEGO Batman 2 onward, is a designated character that directs you where you need to go and what you need to do, including acting as the hint system.
  • Mission-Pack Sequel: One of the major complaints is the similarity of the games aside from the license. TT Games has tried to diversify, especially with abilities and the addition of the Wide-Open Sandbox hub worlds.
  • Money Multiplier: Almost every one of these games, since the introduction of Red/Power Bricks in LEGO Star Wars II, has provided cheats for boosting stud gain (usually X2, X4, X6, X8, and X10), and in every game with more than one, activating all of them at once stacks, so on average you'll get X3840 studs for each you collect.
  • Money Spider: Normally studs are gotten through Rewarding Vandalism, but several of the games have a "Character Studs" Extra that provides a small amount of studs with every kill (making Respawning Enemies a good source of money) and the introduction of combos also introduced Finishing Moves that provide more studs based on how high the score is.
  • Moveset Clone: Inevitably, considering the amount of characters within each game, there will be a lot of them that have familiar, identical, or otherwise the exact same attacks or body language.
  • Multi-Platform: The games have been released on several Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft consoles and some portables.
  • Multi-Slot Character: In almost every game, a good chunk of the roster is made up of variants of major characters, so you'd have young, mature, and old versions of Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars and multiple versions of Indiana Jones. Some get really bad about this, though, such as around 14 different versions of Emmet from The LEGO Movie or the 6 main ninja from The LEGO Ninjago Movie having 5 versions each.
  • Mythology Gag: In LEGO Rock Band, the only characters with normal skin tones are those based on the pre-made characters from RB 2. The rest (the human ones, anyway) all are built with yellow skin, including your road crew.

    N-Z 
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: "LEGO video-game adaptation of popular media like Star Wars" was such a bizarre combination when first announced that many thought it was a joke.
  • No Campaign for the Wicked: While all the games let you unlock and play as villains, averting this gameplay-wise, it's zigzagged on a game-by-game basis when it comes to the story. Given most of them adapt stories revolving around "heroes beating villains", it's usually played straight. However, every so often they give you special bonus missions where you play as villains wreaking havoc, LEGO Batman: The Video Game had Another Side, Another Story about how the villains set up their plans before Batman caught up to them, and LEGO DC Super-Villains finally averts this entirely by being the first game to feature Villain Protagonists as the main focus, with it this time having the heroes get lesser focus.
  • No Fair Cheating: If you attempt to use a code to unlock any characters or red bricks, the game will lock you out of saving until the next time you play. Averted with the cheats provided by the various Red Bricks.
  • Nerf: In the earliest games Stud Multipliers costed the multipliers themselves times five hundred thousand, being 1,000,000 for x2, 2,000,000 for x4, etc. This means each multiplier after the first two was technically cheaper, as the compounding multipliers were much faster than the cost scaling. As the games went on these costs were constantly revised in an effort to make getting each multiplier as hard as the last, until eventually in The Skywalker Saga they finally scaled it so the combined multiplier of all previous multipliers makes them each effectively cost a million studs, being priced at 1,000,000, 2,000,000, 8,000,000, 48,000,000 and 364,000,000 for the x2, x4, x6, x8 and x10 multipliers respectively. That game's case is especially justified by the revised extras system allowing you to buy any extra so long as you have a datacard, so that players still have to get the multipliers in order.
  • Once an Episode: A disco that plays a dance remix of the theme song appeared in every game that used Speaking Simlish. Starting from when they were Suddenly Voiced, the disco sequences became less frequent.
  • Painfully Slow Projectile: All forms of projectiles, including bullets, lasers, arrows, spell blasts, and more move at a slow enough speed to be visible to the naked eye, allowing the player to dodge or deflect them.
  • Party in My Pocket: In contrast to the consoles' and PSP versions, the DS ports only have two active player characters onscreen at any time. As a result, characters must tag in and out this way, similar to Free Play mode.
  • Percussive Maintenance: In several games, one of the random animations when using a wrench to fix something is hitting it with the wrench.
  • Person of Mass Construction: Every character, with the exception of Joke Characters, can rapidly create complex structures, assuming a pile of interactive LEGO Bricks are around. This especially goes for characters with Telekinesis (ex: the Jedi, Wizards, Green Lanterns), who can manipulate LEGO Bricks from a distance.
  • Pickup Hierarchy:
    • Primary: None (the games can be completed by just beating every level without actually collecting anything)
    • Secondary: Lego canisters to build minikits, Blue Challenge Mode canisters, Gold Bricks, Power Bricks, extra characters, game modifiers (the latter two are a Double Unlock and have to be bought with studs after they're found or unlocked with Power Bricks and then bought.)
    • Tertiary: Studs
    • Extra: Various bonus content unlocked by collecting a certain number of gold bricks
  • Playable Epilogue: Starting with the introduction of fully explorable hubs, there also came the introduction of numerous collectibles that are normally locked out from you getting during story mode. This is where "world Free Play" comes in, where after completing the whole story, you become able to switch between characters on the fly through bringing up the character grid just like during level Free Play. Even later games started making it where you can access Free Play character selection by using a "character purchase" panel before getting total free changing by completing the story, until eventually by The Incredibles they just let you switch on the fly in the hub no matter when you are currently in the story.
  • Plot Tailored to the Party: In every game, normal level progression is designed around the abilities possessed by the current character selection, no matter how contrived or convoluted the presence of those obstacles is. While there are some sections where you only need the basic punch, interact, and team-up actions, the majority of the time you'll face obstacles to progression specific to each character.
  • Power-Up Magnet: The "Stud Magnet" cheat lets you collect studs from a slightly boosted distance without needing to directly walk over them.
  • Pragmatic Adaptation: Parts are sometimes changed from the original material to allow two players in what were originally one-man scenes.
  • Product Placement: All the games have been based on pre-existing building sets, naturally. More than that, most games are timed to tie in with a related movie release, such as The Lego Movie and The Lego Movie 2.
  • Puzzle Boss: Due to the fact that combat in the games involves just hitting things until they die, along with how only enemies experience Cycle of Hurting, in order for bosses to be challenging they will be invulnerable to damage until the player performs an action that renders them hurtable, in some cases only being damageable at all through using the environment for attacking.
  • Puzzle Pan: Some games may point the camera toward required puzzle elements.
  • Recurring Element: Puzzles often use a push lever that's green on one side and red on the other.
  • Red and Black and Evil All Over: Red and black objects can't be manipulated by most characters and are reserved only for either those with evil powers or those with evil-hurting good-imbued properties.
  • Respawning Enemies: A common mechanism in all of the games is having a constantly restocking supply of Mooks, to pad things out a bit while the player is solving puzzles. Every fifteen seconds, like clockwork.
  • Rewarding Vandalism: Smashing anything plastic-y and/or in LEGO form provides Lego studs to collect.
  • Rule of Funny: The cutscenes in general, no matter the game, are all about taking their source material and making appropriate gags out of them.
  • Running Gag:
    • In nearly every LEGO game, there's a room which has a disco, and the disco theme in question is a remix of a piece of the soundtrack.
    • In many of the games, there's at least one scene where a character is seen sleeping with a teddy bear, regardless of the setting.
  • Sequel Escalation: The first LEGO Star Wars game was rather small in scope, with a very limited Hub Level, around 50-60 playable characters, and the levels were decently short. As the games went on, all of these aspects were expanded on, with hubs getting bigger and more expansive until they became a case of Wide Open Sandboxes, character rosters averaging around 100 characters at minimum, and individual levels nearly tripling in content, alongside increasing amounts of collectibles and sidequests needed for 100% Completion.
  • Sequence Breaking: Generally in Free Play mode, where you can choose any character needed to traverse the level, which means you can skip a number of puzzles to proceed through the level. Sometimes you can this outside of Free Play mode as well.
  • Silliness Switch: The games are silly enough already, but some of the unlockable options, particularly the common "Disguise" cheat, deliberately take it farther.
  • Solve the Soup Cans:
    • The puzzles to find the hidden minikit canisters, Red/Power Bricks, and various other collectibles. You won't know something in the area will make those items appear until you've already done it. Finding these items without a guide (or the Minikit/Power Brick detector cheat) can be difficult.
    • Several parts of levels are confusing since the typical Color-Coded for Your Convenience mechanics are difficult to identify due to lighting. Other puzzles are easily overlooked, since they involve repeating an action which granted you something important to the level and give you a minikit the next time, or recreating a condition of the level which goes against the player's instincts to move on (since the games are normally very linear).
  • Spared by the Adaptation: Downplayed. Some characters occasionally live longer than they did in canon in order to give player 2 someone to control during a boss fight (most notably Cedric Diggory and Darth Vader).
  • Speaking Simlish: The earliest games used a small voice cast speaking gibberish in the cutscenes, and relied on the players to have seen the movies and know how the story goes already. Later games used dialogue samples from the movie being adapted, voice actors performing new dialogue, or a combination.
  • Stripperriffic: Averted, obviously. The designs of notably sexy outfits like Storm are considerably more modest, and the minifigure body certainly diminishes the effect as well.
  • Stock Footage: In the adaptation games with voice acting based on movies, it is generally the stock voice clips from said movie.
  • Stylistic Suck: Everything is kept pretty simple and even sloppy as if to drive the point home that the game is a toy first and foremost and things aren't meant to be taken particularly seriously. Probably less "stylistic" at first as Traveller's Tales were a shovelware dev at first making licensed platformers and kart racers, then played straight from that point on due to the first LEGO Star Wars' success.
  • Suddenly Voiced: After eight years of muteness, characters finally started speak come LEGO Batman 2.
  • Teamwork Puzzle Game: Two or more characters onscreen help pull levers or stand on buttons at the same time, for example.
  • Technicolor Magic: Special powers such as magic and telekinesis glow purple when they're used. Some bricks are purple to begin with, meaning those powers are required to manipulate them.
  • This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Each playable character has their own gimmick, and in story mode, every character you are given will have their gimmicks be mandatory to use in order to progress. The only exceptions are times when a second character is included just for the sake of multiplayer mode.
  • Title: The Adaptation: LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game, LEGO Batman: The Video Game, The LEGO Movie Videogame, The LEGO Ninjago Movie Video Game, and The LEGO Movie 2 Videogame.
  • Toyless Toyline Character: The roster is large, so this trope is inevitable. Some characters did eventually get physical figures, though it is usually sometime after the game, sometimes with major differences.
  • Trap Door: There is one in Rock Band, at the theater where auditions are being held. Your character uses it to dispose of a tuba player during the auditions for bassists.
  • Two-Keyed Lock: Two levers are often next to each other and must be pulled at the same time by two characters. Similarly, multiple floor buttons in an area must be stood on by multiple characters.
  • Utility Weapon: Plenty of the games have weapons be necessary for puzzle-solving alongside combat, such as shooting targets or cutting through hard objects.
  • World of Pun: Ever since spoken dialogue was introduced, a great deal of what the characters say involves making puns relating to either their character or the current situation, sometimes even basing the puns off a Mythology Gag that wouldn't make sense playing the game without prior knowledge of the adapted franchise. Heck, even the early games involving Speaking Simlish had characters engage in plenty of Visual Pun scenarios, both for gags and as references to the spoken dialogue from the source material, and outside of the dialogue, there's plenty of punny imagery that pops up here and there, especially as a Funny Background Event.

 
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Video Example(s):

Hold Circle, move stick

(LEGO Ninjago Movie Videogame) Four of the unskippable Spinjitzu tutorials using the same controls. Over and over.

Example of:
Forced Tutorial

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Hold Circle, move stick

(LEGO Ninjago Movie Videogame) Four of the unskippable Spinjitzu tutorials using the same controls. Over and over.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (7 votes)

Example of:

Main / ForcedTutorial

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