Build, battle and brawl your way out of trouble!
There are two LEGO Adaptation Games based on the Indiana Jones franchise.
LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures has a storyline based on Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, and The Last Crusade.
LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues has a storyline based on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and includes new levels based on the other three movies.
These games contain examples of:
- Actor Allusion:
- Han Solo appears as a Guest Fighter in Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures.
- The German mechanic who fights Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark is played by the same guy who plays the guy who operates the gong in Temple of Doom (the late Pat Roach). In the LEGO version, the German mechanic is the guy who operates the gong.
- In LEGO Indy 2, the title character is distracted while driving through the warehouse by the sight of you-know-who frozen in carbonite.
- Adaptational Badass: Many characters that never fought in their source material become capable of kicking some major plastic butt. Even the Grail Knight takes more than a single swing at Indy and Sallah.
- Adaptation Distillation: The Adventure Continues had six whole Hub Levels to create, with five levels each. While they had very innovative gameplay, because there's only one hub each for the first three movies, each of their overall plots were heavily condensed and simplified. For example, the Hovitos Temple doesn't even get a proper story level like in the first game, only a small bonus one.
- Adaptation Dye-Job: In the first game, Marion has brown eyes instead of blue (in the DS version, her hair is also brown instead of black). Corrected in the sequel.
- Adaptation Deviation: Many of the adaptational changes, especially in The Adventure Continues, really deviate from the films.
- Adaptation Expansion:
- The Original Adventures: When Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood escape the burning bar, they have to go across some other areas in Nepal, get rid of an enemy truck full of Respawning Enemies and drive off in one of their cars.
- The Adventure Continues: Along with the Assassin actually becoming competent enough to block Indy's bullets, every movie now ends with the villain becoming a giant boss running on the Rule of Cool: Belloq becoming a lightning monster with power from the ark, Mola Ram commanding an living Kali statue, Donovan turning into a wind monster when he drinks from the wrong cup, and Spalko surrounded by a lethal force field.
- Automatic New Game: Unlike the first two LEGO Star Wars games released at that point, the first game skips the first visit to the college hub world and goes directly into "South America, 1936" for the first Raiders level, just like the movie.
- Badass Adorable: It's LEGO Indiana Jones, being based on a franchise where most characters are badass and applying the general cuteness of LEGO mini-figs to most of them.
- Bottomless Magazines: Everyone that fights with a gun as their default weapon follows this. Averted with the dropped guns, which typically fire six times before being discarded.
- Bowdlerise:
- The Nazis get turned into a group of "Enemies". Really though, it's a very sensitive topic.
- The sacrifice scene in "Temple of Doom" removes the heart-stealing attack, and has the lava give its caged victim a tan and merely burn off all his clothes instead of incinerating him outright.
- Damsel out of Distress: Willie becomes this in the second game's adaptation of Temple of Doom, which omits her capture and near-sacrifice by the Thuggee and instead has her join Indy and Short Round in raiding the temple to retrieve the Sankara stones.
- Death by Adaptation:
- The porters were scared off originally. Here, one is shot by the Hovitos with a poison dart and another accidentally walks off a cliff during the opening cutscene.
- Temple of Doom: While he died in a deleted scene, in the game, Chattar Lal dies when his body explodes after his boss fight.
- Defeat Means Playable: In the second game, the hubs contain swarms of mooks that after defeated, leads to a single one that can be recruited after being punched enough. Also, after each hubs' final levels, the torn apart Climax Bosses can be reassembled, defeated and purchased.
- Degraded Boss:
- Disproportionate Retribution: In the first game, if you try to use a guard post with the wrong outfit, the guy in the window responds by throwing a grenade at you.
- Dope Slap: Henry Jones Sr. delivers one to Indiana after he turns out to not have died in the tank crash.
- Duel Boss: In the handheld version of the sequel, you play the siafu level as Indy and Oxley, but when it's time to battle Dovchenko, only Indy is playable (granted, Oxley isn't able to attack to start with).
- Framing Device: In the DS version of The Adventure Continues, the levels are presented as entries on Indy's journal. Outside this, the story is about Indy and Marion exploring an island in their honeymoon.
- Game-Breaking Bug: It is nearly impossible to 100% the PC version of LEGO Indiana Jones. In "Escape the Mine", one of the enemies on the left never comes within reach of your shovel. Since you need to hit him to get the artifact, you are barred from getting it and thus barred from the bonus levels unless you can somehow pull off three hits with very specific timing.
- Giant Spider: Alongside the commonplace tarantula-sized spiders, some levels feature spiders bigger than a mini-fig, mainly wilderness areas.
- Gratuitous Disco Sequence:
- In the first game, there's a hidden area based on the Cantina in Star Wars that plays a disco remix of the Raiders March.
- In the second game, Belloq's opening the ark has this effect on everyone present. At least until he becomes a giant lightning monster.
- Groin Attack: Occasionally, an attack will cause an enemy to grab their crotch in pain before dying.
- Hub Level:
- The first game is based around Barnett College.
- The second game features six fully explorable hubs, with the original trilogy of Raiders, Temple, and Crusade having one each, while the story of Kingdom is divided into three.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Averted somewhat in the first game, as characters can only carry their default weapon and one pick-up weapon, played straight in the sequel, as you can carry all of the different weapons at once if the level has them together, a banana, Your character's default item if they have one and then an important item such as a torch.
- Hypocritical Humor: In the DS version of the second game, when Mutt is first introduced, Indy’s narration comments “Who names themself after a dog?”
- Lighter and Softer: Owing to being aimed towards children, the games are far sillier than the movies they are based on. In addition to No Swastikas and the Nazis being dumbed down to a generic bad guy army, several of the cutscenes feature silly slapstick moments, there are many references to a certain other George Lucas-created franchise and the most horrifying moments in the films are drastically toned down;
- At climax of the Raiders playthrough, the deaths of Belloq, Major Toht, and Colonel Dietrich are reduced from their nightmare-inducing gory fates to the trio simply reacting in horror once the Ark spirits turn hostile and having vanished entirely once the Ark has shut itself again.
- For Temple of Doom, the fate of Wu Han is reduced from a gunshot to simply dropping dead from poison, complete with X's over his eyes, the infamous Thuggee sacrifice scene where a man is burned alive while screaming in agony which was responsible for the creation of the PG-13 rating is reduced to a simple Naked People Are Funny gag. Also, Indy is never put under the Thuggee cult's control and Mola Ram's grisly fate as gator food simply has Mola Ram falling into the water and the next time we see the gators, one of them burps while wearing his hat!
- Mind Screw: In the second game's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Part 1 hub, if you put out a fire after the A-Bomb level, the mannequins in the area come to life, and act like zombies. Oh, and they're playable characters, as well.
- Mobile Shrubbery: There are bushes that virtually anyone can pick up and hide in, although it's never really necessary.
- Mythology Gag:
- LEGO Star Wars characters and the Mos Eisley Cantina can be found. Finding them all unlocks Han Solo as a Guest Fighter.
- One of Raiders levels in the first game includes a hidden gag concerning the movie's production: the movie had the locals take down their TV antennas so they could get an outdoor shot, so in the Cairo game level, you can find a room filled with the removed satellite dishes. (in the second game, the hub has ten dishes that when destroyed unlock one of the cheats)
- In the first main-game cutscene to The Last Crusade, some people from Raiders and Temple are briefly seen in the background.
- Destroying Indy with Professor Jones earns you the "That's for blasphemy!" achievement, in reference to the scene from the Last Crusade movie.
- Naked People Are Funny: The caged victim in Temple of Doom suffers from this in the "sacrifice scene" thanks to some Lego bowdlerization.
- No Swastikas: The Nazis are called "Enemies", and a few parts (particularly in the second game, where the Berlin scene from Last Crusade is a level) at most have a German eagle. The "Enemy" soldiers do noticeably all have blond eyebrows and blue eyes contrasted with every other character's plain black ones.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: All you have to do is grab an enemy character's hat to pose as from that faction.
- Percussive Maintenance: One of the random animations when using a wrench to fix something is hitting it with the wrench.
- Power-Up Magnet: The unlockable "Stud Magnet" extra is known as "Treasure Magnet" in LEGO Indiana Jones.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: Several adjustments are made to suit the requirement that there be at least two playable characters at all times.
- Satipo survives his death scene and instead gets the pleasure of being chased by the giant boulder alongside Indy during the first Raiders level.
- Sallah aids Indy during the truck chase for the ark, as opposed to the film where Indy was on his own.
- Following Mac's reveal as a Double Agent, a janitor for the artifacts warehouse finds himself caught up in Indy's predicament, acting as the second playable character until Mutt enters the picture.
- Product Placement: The second game was released to tie in with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
- Raiders of the Lost Parody: Naturally, due to the Affectionate Parody nature of the Lego games, it makes plenty of gags relating to iconic scenes from the movies like the Indy Hat Roll and Indy Escape.
- Rent-a-Zilla: LEGO Indiana Jones 2 has several bosses that are various ways of making giant monsters.
- Rule of Cool: The new boss fights in LEGO Indiana Jones 2 have the characters gaining various superpowers or turning into monsters entirely because the general normalness of the franchise resulted in the first game's bosses being rather underwhelming both visually and mechanically, and the developers couldn't figure out how to fix that outside "embellishing" the story with extra cool powers.
- Rummage Fail: Indy has been known to do this.
- Secret Character: There are 5 well-hidden Star Wars characters in various levels, and finding them all results in Han Solo becoming unlockable for playing.
- Shovel Strike: Any character who has a shovel (it's standard equipment for Satipo and Sallah, but anyone can pick one up in some levels) and hasn't picked up a weapon will just use the shovel to attack Enemies. So if there's a level with a lot of digging, you'll probably end up doing this a lot too.
- Spared by the Adaptation:
- Barranca isn't killed by the Hovitos. Instead he is scared off by the bats coming out of the demonic idol.
- Satipo survives longer than in the movie, due to the requirement for a second playable character during the giant boulder run.
- The first game's adaptation of The Last Crusade averted this by killing Elsa off like in the film, but the one in the sequel played it straight: not only does she live, but also pulls a Heel–Face Turn and is seen driving off with Indy and the others in its final cutscene.
- Taken to extremes in the second game's handheld version: the game opens with every single villain that Indy has faced aboard a plane with him, all teaming up to steal his journal. This includes Dovchenko, Spalko and Mac, whose fates are left ambiguous in the story mode campaign.
- Stepping-Stone Sword: These games have a spear variant, where special wall holes can have spears thrown into them to allow jumping up to higher areas when railings are absent.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Both games have certain objects held up by weighted ropes, which specifically require a sword to throw at them to cut down. In the first game you can find a sword to use in most of the levels, but some of the levels and all of the second game require you to unlock and buy a swordsman, such as a Thuggee mook, the Grail Knight, and Agent Spalko
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can beat Short Round and Mutt Williams to death, repeatedly, with a shovel or wrench.
- Visual Pun:
- A closet in "Pankot Secrets" contains two skeletons.
- You can throw bananas to monkeys to get an item you need to complete a puzzle. The first item you get this way is a wrench. A monkey wrench.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Indy's well-known fear of snakes is used as a game mechanic; if there are snakes, he'll refuse to go anywhere and just stand there shuddering, meaning you'll have to solve a puzzle with your other character to get rid of the snakes and get Indy where he needs to be. This also happens to Willie and Mutt, who are afraid of bugs, and Henry Jones and Elsa, who are afraid of rats.
