With This Herring / Video Games

Times where characters are given minimal supplies to accomplish their goals with in Video Games.

See below for story examples, and Early Game Hell for gameplay examples. Sometimes they overlap.

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• 7.62mm High Caliber plays this straight in the main game, sending you off to Algeria with a Tokarev TT-33, two magazines, and a box of ammo. The mercs you can hire early on often don't have much better equipment, maybe having a grenade or knife with them.
  • The Blue Sun mod both justifies this and averts it; you begin with a Beretta 92, two magazines, and a box of ammo (and only if you search a car at your starting location for it) and the mod FAQ recommends that players take a short quest in Puerto Viejo to earn a Glock 22 (which is barely more powerful than the Beretta) and some ammo, but you're told at the beginning that your guide, Paquito, has disappeared with your luggage. After running around Algeira for about a day with Paquito, you eventually find it in the police station in Sagrada and are given a longarm that matches your character class (like a SPAS-12 or a Thompson), grenades, medical supplies, and a helmet and ballistic armor.
    • If the player knows how to complete the missions already, in fact, it takes no effort or time at all: you run to Santa Maria, spend a minute on a non-violent solution to a mission that gets you Paquito (who comes with a handgun and some explosives, including a land mine) and a car to speed up your travel time, then run to Sagrada before the night is even over and talk to the police chief to get the equipment. It takes 10 minutes, tops. And most of that is loading screens.
• Ace Combat games usually (but not always; see the So Last Season article for a rundown of the Zig-Zagging Trope) start you off with a dinky outdated fighter. True, you start as a newcomer who only earns a fearsome reputation later, but surely they could stand to start you off with a 4th-gen plane. Perhaps most egregious in Zero, where Cipher is ostentatiously a mercenary, but he's clearly one with no reputation before the game starts (hired because Ustio was desperate by that point) and evidently coming from some backwater outfit that doesn't have up-to-date birds. In contrast to Cipher's humble beginnings, Pixy is tooling around in an F-15C and already has a solid reputation.
  • Double subverted in Electrosphere. Hooray, you didn't start with a puny little fighter plane, instead you start with a goddamn Eurofighter Typhoon, the coolest plane in the world as of 1999! Oh, but guess what? The year is 2040, and flying a Eurofighter by then is equivalent to flying a World War II fighter in 1999!
• Averted in ADOM: characters get whatever starting equipment is appropriate to their race and class. Monks begin the game virtually empty-handed, for instance, while paladins arrive already kitted out with weapons and armor of fairly good quality. Merchants get a sackful of items in one category, and necromancers (you guessed it) get one undead slave.
• Averted in Advent Rising; you're given a fifty-caliber handgun just minutes in, and it goes up from there. On the way to Aurelia you get the Magic and Powers, and though the BFGs are still available, you probably won't be using them anymore.
• While this would be justified in Albion, seeing how Tom and Rainer are sent to explore a reputedly lifeless planet, and they have no idea what they're getting into, so it's understandable they would have nothing other then their clotes, the trope is completely averted, seeing how one of the game's most powerful weapons can be acquired in the prologue before any action would take place. One full set of rather decent equipment is also provided to the player in a shop in the very first town, for less than 10% of it's full price.
• Justified in Alpha Protocol: the reason you have to raise money yourself to buy weapons and equipment is to preserve the organization's secrecy and not have any funding trails linked to it. The process is actually what makes the organization so successful, as each agent is encouraged to develop their own bank accounts, safehouses, and contacts. Ultimately, this turns into Mike's greatest weapon when he is forced to go rogue. It's heavily implied that one of the rival organizations you encounter started this way.
• The money you start with in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura is barely sufficient to buy armor and a weapon during character generation, largely because you just survived a blimp crash. Later on, though, the wealthiest industrialist in the world sends you on an important mission (to discover the plot of the game) and gives you jack-all for funding, beyond hiring passage for you for 500 gold. He's quite generous after you complete the mission, but even then, he won't buy you a ship to sail to Thanatos.
• The bulk of the Armored Core games start something like this: "From this day forward, you are an elite mercenary piloting equipment that gives you the firepower equal to whole squads of anything any normal force can get their hands on. You are so skilled that you are used to basically prevent the ruling corporations from destroying everything in enormous conventional wars, and there are so few of you that if you all really wanted to you'd be able to kill each other off in the course of a week or less. ...Here, take the crappiest parts we had left after everybody else bought the good ones!" Once you buy new parts, the starting parts are always next to worthless to you. Largely avoided in Armored Core 4 and For Answer, especially since you get a choice picking between a few preset designs which cater to different play styles to start with, each one very powerful on their own, though you will start looking for parts that fit your playstyle to keep your edge...just as intended.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • Slightly justified in the first game, as Altair starts with A Taste of Power, but abuses his abilities and neglects his creed; being stripped of most of his equipment is his punishment, and he will gradually have it returned as the game progresses. What plays this straight is how Al Mualim then expects him to assassinate nine powerful and well protected men under these circumstances. Guess Altair is just that badass.
  • Justified in Assassin's Creed II. At the start, Ezio is just an ordinary Italian youth and understandably does not have a reason to be packing real heat, so all he has are his fists.
  • Also justified in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, since Monteriggioni is attacked while Ezio is sleeping and he barely has time to get dressed and grab a few of his weapons before leaping into action. Hypothetically he could have grabbed his other equipment, but with the situation being what it was and his bedroom being blown up around him, escaping safely is clearly the bigger priority.
  • Also justified in Assassin's Creed: Revelations. Ezio gets captured and disarmed in a cutscene before gameplay proper starts, and even when you get some weapons back one Hidden Blade is unavailable because it was broken in said cutscene.
  • Assassin's Creed III justifies with it Connor being he's intially a teenager from a native american village who leaves to seek training from the last living colonial assasin, Achilles, who is a crippled, jaded old man living in a decaying house he can't afford or care to fix up. Less justified with Haythem not having many resources, other then the men he recruited in the colonies(though he doesn't run into much opposition either).
  • Completely justified in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, where Edward is an ordinary merchant sailor at the beginning whose ship is almost immediately sunk, leaving him only with what he can find and steal to start out with. Luckily, Edward turns out to be quite adept at stealing.
  • Assassin's Creed: Odyssey justifies this as having the Eagle Bearer starting out as a small time enforcer and mercenary for a small time crook on an island on the far edge of the greek world.
• At the beginning of Aveyond 3 (either Lord Of Twilight or Gates of Night, depending on which you got first) the King of Thais subverts this slightly by giving Edward Excalibur, but Excalibur's power depends on what stone it has equipped and the one he gives you sucks, so. Besides, he doesn't give you any armour or any gold or any equipment at all for the other team members.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • Downplayed. In the prologue you start out with nothing but a quarterstaff, but before the prologue ends you will have enough money to get decent starter gear, most of which comes from the quest-giver. You can also use exploits to give yourself items from the Candlekeep training sections that will benefit you greatly up until the first major dungeon. There's currently an "iron plague" that's making metal weapons in the region brittle and prone to breaking. Quarterstaffs, being made of wood, are not subject to this and are actually fairly good weapons for most of the first couple of chapters.
  • In the second game, your character has motivation to keep one's head down rather than go to the corrupt authorities for help, and on top of that had to break out of a magical prison at the start of the game, scrounging whatever equipment one could find. Towards the end, you can also convince various people to aid you — this makes a fair bit of sense, as during the early game, your quest is pretty much your own personal problem (well, yours and some of your companions), not a threat to the kingdom or anything.
• In Betrayal at Krondor,
  • At the beginning, Locklear is just heading down from border patrol, so he and Gorath are justifiably equipped with basic munition arms and armor that have already seen a bit of wear and tear, and Locklear has a small pouch of gold with him. Owyn, who they've picked up along the way, has just a staff and not even armor.
  • When Gorath meets Prince Arutha, Arutha agrees to send him on a mission to ferret out the Nighthawks, but doesn't trust him, and tells him that he'll have to provide for himself on the way. James, who is sent with him, is given standard-issue armor (in mint condition this time, at least) and a slightly-above-average two-handed broadsword, plus whatever Locklear had on him when the latter had to book. You'd think that the Prince's Squire could afford better personal gear when he's going on a dangerous mission...
  • Later in the game, Locklear gets a serious sword, but is still re-equipped with standard armor (which is entirely too weak by that point in the game).
• Justified in BioShock, which starts you off fresh from a plane crash in the middle of the ocean. Of course you have no equipment to speak of to defend yourself from the horrors in Rapture. What's the first thing you pick up? A wrench. You were of course kindly asked to "Find a crowbar or something." Subverted later in the game when, depending on the player's choice of tonics, the wrench can become one of the most powerful and versatile weapons in the player's arsenal.
  • In BioShock Infinite, however, Booker DeWitt is told "Bring us the girl, and wipe away the debt", and given nothing more than a 9mm pistol (which he loses mere minutes later, before he could even use it), a photograph, a postcard, a cryptic message, and a key. He didn't even know he was going to a floating city, and when he gets there, the first weapon he picks up is the Skyhook, which he uses to brutalize policemen until he gets his hands on another pistol and a Vigor.
• Played straight in the first Breath of Fire. Being the hero of your tribe sent out to rescue the village's original heroine (captured by the bad guys) and save the world from the evil Dark Dragons, you'd expect the village's shopkeepers would at least cut you some slack and let you have some useful stuff to start out with.
  • The entire village was practically destroyed at the start of the game save the building the hero was in and the shrine, they sort of need the money, to you know... REBUILD everything else.
• Played with in Bunny Invasion, where the gun salesman justifies charging you outrageous prices because if you live, he gets money, and if you die... well, he's not in any danger. He has all the guns.
• Played realistically straight in the original Call of Duty's Soviet campaign. As a freshly-conscripted infantryman, you get off the riverboat at the Stalingrad docks with nothing, and improve that condition with only a clip of 5 bullets and a cheerful suggestion of picking up a rifle if you see one of your better equipped comrades die to the German machine gun fire you're then tasked with running into.
• Neither of the two Captain Comic games give you a weapon at the start. In the first game, there's one right in front of you at the beginning, but you have to search for it in the sequel.
• Averted in Castle of the Winds. The local Jarl won't even give you the time of day until you start proving yourself as a hero. The items aren't always the most impressive (although good for some cash—and cash itself is his gift at one point). Still, the shops are more than willing to charge full price for all your needs.
• Castlevania:
  • Subverted in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Your character starts out as a level 1 character, but is wearing some of the best equipment available in the game... until Death steals it all from you and scatters it around the game map. One wonders why he doesn't bother to do so again when they re-encounter one another later in the game...
  • Alucard's starting level and general lack of abilities is explained as the result of his centuries of slumber. Much of the relics in the game are less for giving him brand new abilities but reawakening the old ones he should have by default. It would have helped if they actually explained it in-game...
  • An odd variant occurs in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. When main character Jonathan first arrives at the castle, he is wielding the legendary whip that can destroy Dracula. However, he can't use it correctly; the weapon that should be singlehandedly getting him through his quest is less useful than a short sword he finds mere moments later, and the reason for its weakness is a plot point. (This does not explain why he and Charlotte can defeat the various undead threats without ever using the legendary weapon. Death even mentions this at one point.)
  • Justified in Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, where Hector had abandoned all the implements of his previous life (including his weaponry) in order to settle down with his beloved. After the Big Bad Isaac arranges for her death, Hector chases after him in a rage, armed only with whatever was at hand. On their first encounter, Isaac taunts him for his lack of preparation and arranges for Hector to regain his lost powers, so that their final battle can be worth the effort.
  • In Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. Soma having lost the souls after the events of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is Handwaved well enough, but come on, Soma, charging into a castle full of demons with a pocket knife while leaving your Claim Solais at home?
    • Aria itself is justified as Soma is just visiting the shrine when he gets transported into Dracula's castle. Inverted in a New Game Plus of Aria, where an ordinary teenager confronted by winged skeletons may indeed whip Claimh Solais out of his back pocket to dispatch them.
  • At the beginning of the first sequence of Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, glyph expert Shanoa is preparing to receive the Dominus glyph from her master. Things go awry. At the beginning of the second sequence, she learns her first glyph from scratch, having forgotten everything she had ever learned. You later learn that ritual to receive Dominus, not the accident that happened in the midst of it, was what wiped her memories in the first place. Barlowe being corrupted by Dominus itself through his research of it didn't help matters.
  • One of the sidequests in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin demands that you kill Gergoth (a big, ugly, bipedal creature that shoots lasers from its mouth) using a Blank Book. Thankfully, all you have to do is score the killing blow with the book- using your other weapons and skills to soften it up will still let you clear the quest.
  • In a jarring case of Honor Before Reason, Leon Belmont from Castlevania: Lament of Innocence makes his way to Walter's castle completely unarmed since he had resigned from his position as a Crusader and felt he didn't have the right to wield the sword the Church granted to him. Leon tells Rinaldo that he planned to scavenge a weapon from the castle itself. Fortunately, Rinaldo gives the well-meaning idiot the Whip of Alchemy to give him a fighting chance.
• Eventually justified in Cave Story. You begin the game with no weapons, no memories, and three hit points. And then you find out that you're a war robot, and your original mission was to invade the island (bristling with killer creatures) and destroy the Demon Crown that grants its wearer insane power. Ten years ago. You were able to defeat the Crown's bearer then, but failed to destroy the Crown, and you got the everloving crap beaten out of you in the process and went into standby mode. Hence why, ten years later, you have to start from scratch to finish the job.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Pretty much the entirety of the Challenge mode can be summed up as "You'll be facing multiple enemies, they'll be sending waves of units towards you simultaneously, they can see the whole map, here's barely enough money to build a base. Oh, and you'll have to wait for enough money to get units."
• The Commandos series is very guilty of this, especially in the early episodes. You don't keep your stuff between missions, anyway.
  • Several missions require to destroy targets with explosives... that you have to steal from the German right in the area.
  • There are examples of missions in the initial episode in which the team starts with three sniper rifle bullets (less than a full magazine^note Springfield M1903, which contains five bullets of the weapon in real life) and one grenade.
  • Commandos 2: Men of Courage and Commandos 3: Destination Berlin are a bit more realist in this aspect. The sniper now starts with five bullets in his rifle instead of three. The spy's syringe is initially only loaded with three doses (you need two doses to stun an enemy).
• The Contra series. The entire world is in danger from a massive alien invasion force? What do they do? Send one or two soldiers in with minimal weapons to take care of the whole thing!
  • Metal Slug plays this out as well, but at least they gave their special soldiers 10 grenades with their pistol.
• Averted quite throughly in Crackdown: the player starts off with an assault rifle with an adjustable scope, access to the best vehicles in the game, the ability to jump ten feet straight up while standing still, and the strength to rip a car door off its hinges... and everything goes up from there.
• In the Crusader series, your Silencer was once an elite commando for the WEC, so when you defected to The Resistance, almost no one trusts you. Between that and the rebels having supply difficulties - you're only equipped with a crappy pistol and weakest force field. Everything else, you'll need to either find during a mission or else purchase from your annoying fence.
  • The first Crusader game attempts to justify it in two ways. First, the Resistance, underfunded and poorly equipped, apparently get all their equipment from the black market, and so don't have a quartermaster to requsition materials from; you have to buy direct from their supplier. Second, for most of the game, most of your cell really doesn't like you. However, if you explore the base, you can find weapons lockers with various munitions that you can get supplies from. (In the second game, they do away with the mercantile aspect entirely, forcing you to scrounge equipment, whether from dead guys or your base.)
• Crysis: Averted — the player does start with an assault rifle, a weapon accessory pack, and 200 rounds of ammunition. Despite having fallen out of an airplane. Oh, and not to mention, a friggin' super suit! Uncle Sam is not sending you in there naked, by any means. In the sequel, Alcatraz starts with a pistol that Prophet kills himself with, but gets an assault rifle about two minutes later after encountering the first CELL patrol.
  • You only have a limited supply of SCAR rounds in the early parts of Crysis though, which will leave you relying on the weaker FY-71 your enemies are using rather quickly.
• Dark Souls subverts this, as the starting gear for most classes is generally good enough to get through the early levels, or even the endgame in a few cases. However...
  • No matter your class, you start Dark Souls with a broken sword. This is later subverted when you eventually get your class' proper starting weapons later in the first level.
  • Dark Souls II starts you out unarmed and wearing possibly the worst clothing in the game, but when you pick your class, it provides proper equipment...unless you pick the Warrior, who has the only starting shield but a broken sword, or the Deprived, who starts out with precisely jack shit.
  • In all three games, picking the Deprived class starts you off with no armor, a club, and a wooden plank shield. You'll have to buy or scavenge armor on your own.
• Fresh spawns in DayZ start out with a flashlight, a bandage, a pack of painkillers, and a small (empty) backpack, with a town or city a short distance away. You are up against hordes of zombies, potentially well-armed players who may or may not have no problem with shooting you in the face for shits and giggles, and the threat of dehydration or starving to death. Not to mention broken bones, infection, shock, a complete inability to navigate outside of using the stars for finding north, or a way to see at night without revealing yourself to half the map. If you want to fix that, you need to risk all of this while scavenging for supplies.
• Dead Frontier. "Hey there player, an infection has hit the city, and the place is crawling with deadly zombies! Here's a pocketknife and a handgun."
• Deadly Towers starts you off with a short sword which doesn't do much damage and you can only have one on screen at a time. Even the manual points out how weak it is.
• Averted with Déjà Vu (1985), as you do have many possessions at the start, including money, keys, cigs, and sometimes a gun. Though in the first game, some of said possessions were planted on your person to frame you for a murder.
• Deus Ex plays with this trope:
  • The first mission of the game, which is said to take place immediately after a set of training challenges, has main character JC Denton get dropped off at the Liberty Island dock with nothing more than a pistol, a prod and a medkit. However, within a minute or so, JC is told that he's being sent in alone, as a test, against an island full of hostile troops. This causes him to exclaim that although he isn't against the task, UNATCO (the employing organization) had better issue some hardware. You are then given a choice of one of three weapons; a rocket launcher, a sniper rifle, or a small crossbow with poison tranquilizer darts. Each choice has significant advantages in the opening level, and its utility value (if it's upgraded) can last through the entirety of the game if the player is careful with inventory management.
  • At the conclusion of the first mission, based on the player's performance, Sam Carter will give JC his silent pistol, the choice between a multitool or a lockpick, and (if the player has performed in a non-violent manner) extra clips. Manderley will also issue JC extra pay if all of the additional mission objectives (rescue Gunther) were completed, even referring to how well UNATCO agents are treated.
    Manderley: We take care of our people around here.
  • Later on, when JC is escaping from the UNATCO base, Daedalus suggests raiding the MJ12 armory. If you do, you'll not only get back all your weapons and gear, but can potentially net a powerful endgame weapon (the Plasma Rifle) if you find the requisite code. If you visit Sam Carter at the UNATCO armory, he'll open the door, no questions asked, and tells you to take whatever you can carry.
  • A later incident in the game averts this hard. Once you get to Hell's Kitchen for the third and final time, Stanton Dowd asks JC to destroy a superfreighter, the Wall Cloud, with explosives or rocket ordinance. Visiting Smuggler (the arms dealer who sells you such resources) has him try to hawk a set of LAM rounds or a GEP Gun with rockets at prices that are likely far beyond the player's cash at that point. The player can point this out in dialogue, with JC asking for a deal by saying, "Give me a break - millions of lives are at stake." Smuggler rebuffs him, stating that the situation is bad everywhere and that the prices are the best he can do when supply is so restricted. Of course, there's nothing stopping the player from raiding the munitions storage building at the Brooklyn Naval Yard for the appropriate explosives.
• Deus Ex: Invisible War partially justifies this, in that you are a cadet with not much access to hardware and that your home city gets destroyed (presumably with all your stuff) just before the game starts. You also get given nanotech upgrades you would have received anyway if not for the base being invaded. There's also a black-market biomod available right from the get-go if you have the tools necessary to open a locked case.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a semi-offender:
  • As Adam Jensen is the head of security for Sarif Enterprises, he already carries a fully-modified combat rifle. It does him no good against the augmented enemies he encounters at the end of the prologue level. As such, David Sarif fits him with every augmentation they have when they rebuild him, and his choice of a revolver, stungun, combat rifle or tranquilizer rifle prior to his first combat mission as an augment. Afterwards, he never pays Adam another credit. If Adam gives Arie Van Bruggen a weapon when Belltower comes to kill him, he hangs a lampshade on this, and deposits two thousand credits in Adam's bank account.
  • Go to Jensen's apartment and you'll find a small armory, which would explain why he never griped about equipment needs to his boss. (The player only gets access to Adam's apartment midway through the campaign.) When you go to the LIMB clinics, you'll also find that Sarif made a substantial donation in Jensen's name so he could get easy access to their stuff, especially their Praxis Kits, which presumably cost much more than what you still have to pay for them.
  • In the DLC mission The Missing Link (later integrated properly into the Director's Cut), Adam loses all his augmentation functionality due to being caught and tortured by troops from Rifleman Bank. When he is aided by a source who helps him escape, said source leaves his combat suit and a number of extra Praxis Kits en-route to his first objective, thus enabling the player to have a basic build for the duration of the mission, barring any other Praxis Kits purchased or found afterwards.
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided plays with this trope:
  • In the opening level, Adam Jensen has many of the upgraded abilities still unlocked from the previous game, and intends to rely solely on them, but Task Force 29 commander Jim Miller still offers Adam the choice between a lethal and non-lethal loadout. After the mission is completed, and Adam loses access to most of his augmentations due to the Ruzicka Station bombing, he's forced to seek help from an underground source in order to restore some of his functionality, as TF29 doesn't have the capabilities to fix his internals in the same manner Koller can.
  • Having any of the DLC packs installed completely averts this trope, and makes it very clear why Adam doesn't hassle TF29 for weapons — checking his stash in his apartment reveals a boatload of weapons that boast more power than their basegame equivalents. Depending on what's installed, Adam will have a 10mm pistol, a Combat Rifle, a Diamondback revolver, a tranq rifle that's more powerful and compact, a Battle Rifle, an extra Praxis Kit and a selection of consumable items to craft tools if needed. And if you went to the trouble of buying the Deluxe Edition, Adam has an additional four Praxis Kits in his storage. Beyond that, rooting around Jensen's apartment nets some crafting parts, two Multitools, a Biocell, a few hundred credits, various packs of ammo and a "welcome package" from the Juggernaut Collective that shows a map with arrows that correspond to supply caches throughout Prague.
  • Speaking of Koller, he outright hands Adam a bunch of Praxis Kits to Adam (thus giving the player the option to create a basic build) after unlocking the TITAN augs, as Adam loses all his Praxis upgrades and Koller feels guilty over the whole situation. ("Praxis makes everything better!") Root around his office long enough, and you can find a hidden passage with an extra Praxis Kit, to boot. Conversely, TF29 has an armory with a few basic weapons (a stun gun, tranq rifle, assault rifle and grenades) that can be pilfered and utilized, though the player will still have to upgrade them.
  • If you go to the trouble of saving Arun Singh during the prologue mission, he will give you a huge boost during the final visit to Prague (which is now under martial law and filled with enemies) by filling a storage locker with several high-level weapons, which can come in extremely handy during the final missions. Notably, he's doing this as a Deep Cover Agent — he had his contacts in the Jinn fill the locker, not TF29.
• Played with in Diablo and Diablo II. In both games, you don't start out with much, but your initial equipment isn't terrible. It'll do for a bit until you can get better stuff. Justified in both games because A) you're not really all that special of an adventurer and B) the areas you're in are typically going through hard times.
• The first Dino Crisis begins with cutscenes and an introductory area featuring Regina (the player character) and her fellow soldiers. The others have large automatic rifles, Regina is carrying only a pistol. What the heck, did she forget all her gear? Some cheat codes actually allowed you to begin the game with different weapons, so you could give her a riot gun just so she'd look suitably badass in those scenes.
• Disgaea:
  • Justified in the first game; Laharl has just woken from a two year nap, was not expecting to find his father the overlord dead and a fight for his title at hand, and most of his vassals have left and stolen his money in the mean time. So it makes sense that Laharl has to start from scratch if he wants to be king.
  • Played straight in the second one. Adell is planning to have Overlord Zenon, a living god who once killed a thousand other overlords in a single day, summoned right to him to receive a beating. And he's been preparing for this day for the past fifteen years of his life. So why does he have no money, no weapons, and is level 1?
  • Justified in the third one, as Mao is the Netherworld's greatest Honor Student, and for a demon that means never attending class; he just spends all day in his room playing video games and reading comic books as "research", and so is not only unequipped, but also ignorant of how the school works. Played somewhat straighter with Almaz, who expected to waltz into the Netherworld and save a princess from the Overlord with his pathetic level and gear.
  • Justified in the fourth one, as Valvatorez has willingly given up all his once mighty powers by abstaining from human blood for centuries, and has a lowly job instructing prinnies.
  • Exaggerated to near-parody in the fifth one, as while Seraphina does create a Rebel Army to fight back against Demon Emperor Void Dark, she's not only level 1 and armed with Starter Equipment, but also has a small army of Prinnies that get wiped out in the intro cutscene (and she expects them to take on the 10-billion soldiers under Void Dark's command). While she does possess an Overload Skill that can charm foes into working for her, it's only effective against men, leaving any female enemies entirely free to stomp her. Killia, the main protagonist, is only slightly better (as in being Level 3 despite wandering and fighting off enemy forces for a number of years prior to the game's events on top of him being a former Overlord). Seraphina even goes on to admit that she has zero battle experience, having lifted nothing heavier than a cake prior, nearly leading Killia to ditch her on the spot.
• Dishonored:
  • Following the game's prologue, Corvo is forced to escape Coldrich Prison with nothing, only a key snuck into his food and the guns and sword he picks up throughout the level. Only at the end of the level, in the sewer, does he get the rest of his gear: a mask, a folding sword, and a crossbow.
  • Later in the game, Corvo is again separated from his gear in the Flooded District, and he can only use the Overseer's sword he finds outside of the pit where his body is tossed and any guns he takes from dead Overseers and Assassins in the area until he's reunited with his proper gear.
  • The two story DLCs (The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches) subvert this trope. Daud, a master assassin commanding a group of like-minded associates, starts with a generous 2,000 gold, which he can use to buy equipment, supplies or Bribes — but this is all he gets at the outset, necessitating that the player find gold during missions, and/or the funds acquired from the "jobs" he is given (one of which is contracted by the niece of a barrister who promises to pay in cash). Additionally, the player can either purchase or find supply caches brought in by their support staff (Billie or Thomas), which can provide a needed boost if you're short on certain ammo. The second DLC generally averts this, carrying over the player's gold, Bonecharms and Runes from the previous title — or just handing you 3,000 on a fresh save, enough to get a decent selection of equipment and ammo.
  • Dishonored 2 justifies the player functionally starting over from Level 1 by having Corvo/Emily besieged, arrested and placed in a secure room during The Coup, forcing you to scavenge what you can (including Corvo's mask or Emily's spyglass, plus their respective weapon[s]) on your way out of Dunwall. And while Meagan Foster gives you access to her boat, the Dreadful Wale, as a means of transportation (along with a handful of minor charms and items that can be pilfered), the player is expected to fund their own purchases with money amassed during missions.
• Doom:
  • Hand waved in the first couple of Doom games, where you initially do battle with the legions of Hell while carrying a single pistol. This is explained by the Excuse Plot saying that you were a sentry stationed outside the base while everyone else went in. Naturally, all those people with the huge guns got killed and you're the only one left. This does not come off as being particularly convincing. This is averted in Brutal Doom, in which the pistol is replaced by an assault rifle which remains useful for the whole game.
  • Doom³: Happens in the Expansion Pack, Resurrection of Evil. Aside from the unmitigated, Genre Blind stupidity required to head back to Mars after the events of Doom 3, the company still doesn't equip the marines tasked with exploring ancient ruins with anything deadlier than a pistol. At least they've taped a flashlight to the gun.
  • Played straight in Doom clone Fortress of Dr. Radiaki, in which you start as a top-notch agent sent to investigate mysterious island... with a pistol and a goddamn baseball bat. Underfinancing, indeed.
  • Justified in Doom (2016)-the pistol is the first weapon you get because Doomguy just emerged from a sarcophagus surrounded with zombies and the pistol was the closest weapon he could find. Doom Eternal averts it altogether and gives you a shotgun as your starting weapon.
• Dragon Age: Origins does this, but by the time you're a full member of the Wardens and would expect to be equipped you're already as well kitted as everyone but the officers anyway (with variation depending on origin, as you come to the Wardens only with whatever equipment and money you found during the origin story), though during the Dwarven Commoner origin, Duncan gives you a high quality mace once he recruits you as a Warden, saying that he knows that you have few possessions of your own. If you've downloaded and completed the stand alone DLC expansions of the game, it's even further averted since completing each one automatically adds Disc-One Nuke level weapons and armor that you'll start the game with.
• Dragon Quest:
  • In Dragon Quest, the player is charged with his task, and given 120 G, enough to buy a wood club and a basic set of clothes. Times may be tough and so many people have claimed to be descended from the legendary hero that the NPCs are pretty cynical by the time you show up, but when you're given this task, there are two guards in the same room wearing full body armor and carrying spears.
  • Dragon Quest II. The main character is crown prince of Midenhall, and is dispatched by his father to defeat the wizard responsible for single-handedly destroying their sister kingdom of Moonbrooke. What does the king, his father, give him to achieve this with? Fifty gold pieces and a copper sword. The other two playable characters, also a prince and a princess, aren't any better off, though one of them has the excuse that she'd been turned into a dog before the player uncursed her, and her entire kingdom's been sacked. The main characters are directly descended from the protagonist of the first game. This trope is probably a family tradition by now. Especially given that the hero of the first game is in turn descended from the hero of the third.
  • The worst example in the series comes from Dragon Quest III: you are the son of a legendary heroic figure, you are a known quantity in terms of badassitude, and the king of your country is so impressed with your decision to take up arms and face the greatest threat to the world the kingdom has ever known that he rewards you with a whopping 300 gold pieces, which wouldn't cover a full set of the (crappy) equipment for sale in the very first town.
  • In the later games in the series, this isn't so glaring; for example, one chapter in Dragon Quest IV has a soldier commissioned on a quest from a king, starting out with basic equipment — the explanation for this is that the king keeps the taxes on his people low, so there isn't enough to afford really high-quality weapons and armor for their troops.
  • Dragon Quest V goes back and forth with it - in the beginning, you're the son of a competent adventurer and incognito king, but you're his eight-year-old-or-so son. It makes perfect sense that you don't get anything more than a very simple allowance (which you get) and if anything it's odd that he doesn't comment on you picking up better gear or skills until the end of the child section. In the "second chapter" of the game, you begin as a slave, and then an escapee, and thus have only what you earn to your name. You don't even discover your royal heritage until after you get married. And then, in the third chapter, your children do start out with pretty decent equipment, because, duh, they grew up knowing who they were and with access to the royal treasury. The zig-zag comes in with that same chapter, though: it does feel a little odd that you can't ever at least borrow a bit of money from your kingdom's treasury for the party. One could argue it'd be wrong to take national money for a "personal" quest, but even in the back half of the third chapter, everyone knows it isn't personal anymore.
  • Dragon Quest VIII has as its starting main characters a guard from a destroyed kingdom and a poor bandit, thus making their lack of resources a little more sensible.
• Dragon Slayer belongs with the most egregious cases. The player starts out totally unequipped amid hostile monsters which will descend in swarms. Good luck hunting for a sword to start Level Grinding with.
• This can easily happen in Dwarf Fortress, if you fail to properly prepare your seven-dwarf expedition with the needed skills and material before setting out for the selected fortress site. Some people deliberately take it on as a challenge, trying to build a fortress with a bunch of soapmakers and animal dissectors (you normally don't get those until later) instead of miners and woodcutters. In Adventure Mode, having the highest skill in swords, maces, hammers, axes, spears, or whips gives you a shield and a bunch of leather armor, having the highest in pikes, crossbows, or bows gives you leather armor, and wrestlers are lucky to get much more than some sandals and a loincloth. Good luck killing dozens of bandits and night creatures!
  • Taking this to its peak is the minimalist build: buy nothing at embark but one anvil and one nugget of copper ore. You start your fortress with those two items, seven dwarves with no skills, two random draft animals, and one cart which can be deconstructed for three wooden logs, giving you the bare minimum you need to forge a metal axe and pick. The only step up from there is to do without the herring altogether by removing the anvil and ore, leaving you with just those three logs, animals, and whatever plants and water you can gather until the first traders arrive in autumn.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Taken to its logical extreme in the games, with the player starting every single one of them in prison for an unspecified crime. The sole exception is Daggerfall, in which the player was the victim of a shipwreck and starts out stranded in a dungeon, which basically has the same effect. In all cases, this at least explains their penniless state. To note:
    • Arena has the Emperor deposed and your only ally a ghost. Not a situation in which you'd expect much in the way of official backing.
    • In Daggerfall, you were closely trusted by the Emperor after saving his life during a past Noodle Incident. Although you choose what he rewarded you with during character creation, almost all of the options are underwhelming. (The one exception is an Ebony Dagger, though you might need a guide to ensure that you answer the questions correctly to get it.)
    • In Morrowind, you're in the employ of the Blades, the Emperor's spy network and Ancient Order of Protectors. As a covert operation they don't have much equipment lying around, though the spymaster does pay well. Morrowind parodies this somewhat, by having a mad god make you kill a giant monster with the Fork of Horripilation, which, in spite of its name, is essentially a dinner fork. In the same game, the Imperial Legion faction would give you three different sets of armour, one piece at a time, as you advanced in ranks.
    • Said spymaster also points out that you need a cover identity and more real-world experience, and setting yourself up as a "freelance problem-solver" solves both those problems along with any cash-flow problems you might have.
    • In Oblivion, you meet the Emperor just minutes before he dies. Before the assassination he does give his blessing, and this leads to some half-decent, if somewhat plain, equipment being provided later in the game.
    • Skyrim breaks the trend somewhat, as the events of the opening quickly leave you with a selection of dead guards whose gear you can freely loot—it's low tier stuff, yes, but comparable to any rank and file soldier. If you keep with the main quest line after you escape, the guy you escaped with will lead you to a relative of his in a nearby village, who in turn offers hospitality and free stuff. By the time your status as The Chosen One is revealed, you'll have a full set of gear at the least. However, that's where the trope is played straight — by this time you become famous for being the Dragonborn, the only hope to save Skyrim from the rising dragon assault, but the official support you receive is minimal, and you'll need to get equipment or favors by earning them. This is somewhat justified by a lot of people (particularly those in power) not believing you're really the Dragonborn, not believing in the Nord myths about you, and/or not believing you're as important as others claim. But on an individual basis, even people who do wholeheartedly believe you're The Chosen One are still pretty stingy about material aid.
  • Throughout the series, this is a common feature in the quests given by Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness, pretty much just for his own amusement. One of his famous implements is the Fork of Horripilation. "Horripilation" is the anatomical word for... goosebumps. It's essentially a cursed dinner fork. In Morrowind, he asks you to kill a giant bull netch with it. In Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion, it is stolen by religions heretics and must be recovered.
• Taken to somewhat absurd extremes in Elden Ring if you select the Wretch character base, which starts you off with nothing but your undies and a club to your name.
• The Enchanter series of classic Interactive Fiction games sent an apprentice wizard off to save the world from the Big Bad with nothing but a spellbook with a handful of low-powered spells (in Enchanter itself, this is purposefully done to avoid being noticed by the Big Bad). You don't even get food and water — you have to forage for that yourself. Beyond Zork (which is a fusion of the Zork and Enchanter games) plays on the series' experiences with the trope by explaining that this is Because Destiny Says So. It turns out that all the powerful archmages in the world have been secretly helping your progress, as NPCs, which does explain all the convenient shopkeepers with ridiculously powerful magic items hanging around.
  • The sequel to Enchanter does start you off with a reasonably-filled spellbook, as well as a potion to "obviate the need for food", as many players complained about having to waste time in the first quest to get a meal, rather than saving the world.
  • Justified in the third game, Spellbreaker, where magic becoming erratic has resulted in much of your spellbook being erased (and one spell added).
• Eternal Darkness tends to be fairly believable about this. Of the characters you play as, only Pious is a career soldier, and he's armed with his trusty gladius, while Karim is a traveled warrior armed with his tulwar and some chakrams. Edwin Lindsey took his kukri and a couple guns with him on his expedition to Cambodia, and the Roivases have various weapons kept throughout their home for self-defense. Nobody else expected to be in a situation where they would need to defend themselves, and they eventually find or are given weapons as circumstances develop.
• EverQuest is famous for giving new characters weapons that have the same stats as the rusty versions of said weapons. It's lampshaded in the first comic of WTF Comics. They don't even give her pants.
• Justified in the Exile/Avernum series, for the most part: your party has just been thrown in prison, or are right out of training but the only ones available, or the second group out, after the first one went missing (and had already been carrying the best equipment), etc.
• Mostly averted in the Eye of the Beholder series. You start the first game with pretty reasonable equipment for first-level characters. Even better, in EoB 2 and 3 you can import your party from previous games, turning the better part of the game into a cakewalk.
• Fallout:
  • In the first game, the character starts out with a pistol, knife, and a few medical items. It's not very much, but the Vault has limited supplies (some of which are implied to have gone with folks they sent out before you), and when you return later you can Persuade them to give you some more gear, including a shotgun. Lampshaded in the manual (which is, in universe, a standard vault-dweller's guide). There's a chapter on equipment for forays to the outside world, listing pretty decent equipment, including very good Combat Armor. However, a post-it is drawn over this section with "Yeah, right. What budget did these guys have?" scribbled on it.
  • Justified in the second game. You are The Chosen One and for your quest to save the village, you're given a Vault suit, a spear, a knife, a few bags of healing powder, and a handful of money. However, the village has entered hard times and is tribal and poor anyway, so this really is the best they can do. You can look around the huts, the only things you'll find are Shop Fodder and maybe another knife or spear. You can run a couple errands to get a few more bags of healing powder and a sharpened spear, but this isn't them holding out on you, you need to gather the materials to make them and the villagers do it for you once you have them.
  • In Fallout 3 you start out with a small gun a friend gives you, the clothes on your back and whatever you can scrounge on the way out, but this is because you're a kid who's forced to flee the Vault without time to prepare. All the same, what you can get while on the way out is in pretty good condition and is reasonable for what you fight against early on.
    • The first part of the VR simulation in Operation: Anchorage is a stealth run where you are only armed with a silenced 10mm pistol.
  • Fallout: New Vegas averts this, with Doc Mitchell giving you his old Vault Suit (for decency) and Pip Boy, plus the pistol and stimpaks you had on you, after patching you up and guiding you through character creation, and recommending you to go talk to Sunny Smiles. She will then give you a varmint rifle, a good amount of 5.56mm rounds, some survival info and recommendation to loot Goodsprings' old school house. You could also help yourself to some of the stuff around Doc Mitchell's house (it's not owned loot) where you can get a laser pistol with some energy cells, a 9mm submachinegun and a good amount of medical supplies and rations.
    • This is ridiculously averted if you have the Game of the Year Edition or other pre-order/DLC bonuses. At the start of the game you'll receive a considerable bundle of free armor, guns, rations, and medical supplies. Including but not limited to a full suit of rifle-resistant armor, a machete, a shotgun (+40 shells), a 9mm submachine gun (+60 rounds), a 10mm Auto pistol (+60 rounds), and a grenade launcher (+20 rounds). This turns the first few hours of the game into a hilarious Curb-Stomp Battle.
    • Subverted in the DLC Dead Money: Your gear is confiscated by the security system and Elijah only gives you one weapon, a jumpsuit, and an Explosive Leash, even though his success depends on your survival. However, the one weapon he leaves you is the Holorifle, which is very powerful even if you don't normally use energy weapons and almost absurdly ammo efficient (it deals damage comparable to a Gauss rifle for a fraction of the ammunition).
    • Invoked and played with for the Honest Hearts DLC. To make for light travel on the caravan route, the player is given a weight limit and told they can't come along unless they meet it. The intent is that only the bare essentials of what you need are going to be taken, and the caravan leader lampshades that if you leave your Infinity +1 Sword behind, you aren't coming back to get it, make do with what you have.
    • Invoked with gleeful abandon in the Gun Runner's Arsenal DLC. This add-on provides a raft of challenges to the player, most of which involve killing a number of a particular enemy with a weapon incredibly unsuited to the task. Two prime examples involve killing cazadores (extremely nimble, durable, dangerous, and above all flying insect enemies) using thrown dynamite and having to kill a number of deathclaws (massive mutant lizards that look and behave something like miniature T-rexes) with a lightweight pistol. This trope is played with somewhat, however: while the challenges require that the player kill the creature with the indicated weapon, it does not say that you can't soften them up with something more suitable. Thus, wise players will beat the daylights out of their target with a weapon of choice, then switch to the herring du jour to administer the killing blow.
  • The Sole Survivor in Fallout 4 wakes up in a cryo-themed vault and there is a powerful freeze ray stuffed nearby, but your character needs to gain levels in lockpicking or hacking to get it, so they're stuck with security pistols and Vault 111 jumpsuits for the moment. However, the vault was ransacked by the previous inhabitants who took what they needed and left, and it's plausible other scavengers have visited in the interim, so of course there isn't much to find. At the least, the starting pistol is decent, and when you leave the vault and return to Sanctuary Hills, you can use the crafting station to upgrade it a bit.
• Far Cry:
  • Far Cry plays with this - Jack is former Navy special forces, but has since retired to run a boat-chartering service, so when his boat is blown up he starts the game with nothing because he didn't have anything to start with. Also subverted in that he gets a decent amount of good equipment rather quickly: a few minutes after getting onto the island he gets a decently-strong pistol, some grenades and a full set of body armor, and it's not much longer until he picks up the ever-trusty M4, which will be a mainstay for several levels until better assault rifles with scopes and grenade launchers are eventually found.
  • Far Cry 2 subverts this. Depending on how you interpret the intro, you showed up for an assassination mission in a war-torn African nation with either no gear at all, or at least a single .45 pistol and a machete. Both of these weapons are left in your room by the Jackal, and you're left to use them to run from the ensuing firefight between the warring factions outside until you're inevitably knocked out. When you wake up and get hired by whoever rescues you (the actual starting point of the game), you are given an automatic rifle, a pistol and either an RPG or a flamethrower, as well as medical equipment and a car.
  • Played straight in Far Cry 3, with Dennis giving Jason nothing but a machete and the cash to buy a .45 pistol for beginning his quest to save the Rakyat from Vaas and his pirates, to the point of sending him out with just the pistol for hunting boar. This is potentially justified, as Dennis wants to build Jason into a warrior to birth the new ultimate warrior of the tribals with the leader and making it hard on him forces him to adapt quickly and learn to struggle.
    • Also justified by the fact that when Jason comes on-scene, the Rakyat aren't exactly winning (and aren't rolling in cash either) and have no real extra gear to spare for Jason's use.
  • Justified in Far Cry 5, as the Junior Deputy starts out with whatever they could grab while fleeing the Peggies, and when they hook up with the Resistance, the latter turns out to be armed about as well, with non-unique Resistance members packing mostly the same equipment that the Junior Deputy started with.
• In Faxanadu, the king would provide you 1500 gold in order to help you start your quest to save the World Tree. 1500 gold was about enough to buy some basic equipment and a potion. Amusingly, because of how the game's logic worked, if you bought the right combination of items to use up all your cash, you could go back to the king and get another 1500 gold.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy memorably starts the player's party at Lv.1 strength with no equipped weapons, armor, magic spells, or any items whatsoever, and just 400GP to buy your starting equipment with. Even the lowly Imps pose a significant threat should you choose to simply wander out and start hunting monsters unequipped. This is despite the fact the King of Cornelia readily acknowledges your group as the Warriors of Light from the prophecy and sends you on a quest to rescue his kidnapped daughter; he offers absolutely no aid otherwise.
  • Played with in Final Fantasy IV. Your starting characters have sparse supplies and a small budget with which to buy them in town, but they are high-ranking warriors of Baron, which is reflected in them being fully suited up with proper equipment and they are at Level 10. The lack of supplies is also justified with the strong implication that the King is pulling an Uriah Gambit, hoping that the two (who have started to question his orders and were removed from their posts) will get themselves killed in action, so of course he isn't going to give them much to go with.
  • Zig-Zagged in Final Fantasy VI: The game opens with your party of imperial soldiers invading a small city in Walking Tank-style Magitek Armor and effortlessly slaughtering all opposition. Then the armor is inevitably destroyed and the surviving soldier is freed of her Hypno Trinket, and she wakes up with nothing but her own meager equipment. However, she's saved by an ordinary townsperson who has to quickly usher her out his back door to avoid the guards; even if he had any supplies for you, he doesn't have much time to fork them over. At least your base equipment and magic will see you through the mines well enough.
  • Final Fantasy VII averts this trope; Cloud arrives in Midgar with little more than his Buster Sword and the clothes on his back, serving as a mercenary with the cash-strapped terrorist group AVALANCHE. His equipment, while weak compared to the weapons and armor that appear later in the game, are quite sufficient to slaughter waves of machine-gun toting guards. The Buster Sword also serves as a retroactive aversion of Bag of Spilling with the prequel Crisis Core as Cloud starts the game equipped with Zack's upgraded sword (and the materia that Zack had put in it).
  • Averted in Final Fantasy VIII where you get a regular paycheck from your employer and not one Gil from killing monsters, and you're given Guardian Forces to set up your abilities and magic before your first dungeon.
  • Played straight in Final Fantasy X, in which the party seems suspiciously ill-equipped for a pilgrimage they've been planning for years, carrying very basic weapons and armor (and Wakka and Kimahri not having any armor at all), and not bringing ANY money or supplies whatsoever beyond what Tidus (who is just a tagalong at this point, not a formal member of the pilgrimage) happens to be carrying on him. The townspeople in the village give you gifts for the journey, but it only amounts to some very basic items.
  • In Final Fantasy XI, for the quest to unlock the Dark Knight job, you are given a BFS and sent off to kill a hundred mobs with it... but it's the worst BFS in history, doing about as much damage per strike as a paper cut, and has a huge delay between strikes.
  • Final Fantasy XII justifies it as you begin the game as a street thief. Vaan has a basic dagger (a sword in the original release...that is actually just a bit weaker than a dagger) to defend himself with and a couple of low-tier armor pieces, but that's about it. However, it does make one wonder why his employer, the owner of the Item Shop, doesn't give him some Potions when he's sent to hunt a monster in the desert for him. By the time you get to said desert, you can start finding enemies to grind out Loot to sell and head back into town to buy proper supplies.
  • Final Fantasy XIII also justifies this as a result of the characters attending the Bodhum fireworks show... and then PSICOM gets involved the next day when it's discovered (by them, some characters knew beforehand) that Serah is a Pulse l'Cie. The result is that the entire show, sans military, is scheduled to be Purged, with any fancy equipment confiscated along with personal belongings.
  • Final Fantasy XV justifies the trope with Noctis and his friends initially going on their way to Galden Quey to catch a ferry boat to Altissia, and the journey is basically a few hour's drive away from their hometown, so they didn't depart expecting to have to fight anything worse than the weak monsters in the area, which their basic equipment can handle just fine. Once the actual war starts their home is inaccessible, and the one friend you have, Cid, is a crotchety old man who insists your party work for their benefits.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, you start out as members of a military academy with cadet-level gear. After the first chapter, you're a mercenary company, and after the second, you're a heretic on the run, so you're not getting any gear you don't find or buy yourself.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance subverts this in a way. As you free different areas, you will get discounts due to saving them. However, considering that the palace wants you dead, well, you can't really expect much help from them.
• Fire Emblem games tend to have the Lord and their handful of companions start out at level 1, maybe level 3 at most. While the Lord usually gets a personal weapon, albeit a fairly weak one, their troops start out the game with cheap iron weapons and very basic healing items. The obligatory Crutch Character will be actually competent and well-equipped, if underpowered for their level. Justifications for why The Wise Prince is running around with underequipped newbies varies from game to game, with the usual one being that some prior calamity has separated them from their kingdom's actual army and supply line, or that the Lord is not actually nobility and so commands a group of mercenaries or rebels instead of actual elites.
  • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War is the biggest exception to this rule. Sigurd starts the game already promoted and experienced, and wielding a Steel Sword typical for a unit of his level. Several of his cohorts are also promoted, or use steel instead of iron. He's also handed a Silver Sword at the end of the prologue, which is more than enough for him to basically solo the early phase of Genealogy. There's a reason for all this.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses is another exception. While Garreg Mach does like sending its students on live-fire missions, they're provided with basic equipment and training first. Keeping them ahead of their missions' demands is explicitly Byleth's job.
• Justified with Fredrick in Front Mission, who's wanzer starts off with no weapons at all. He's not an active combatant but a reporter not expecting to fight, but then is attacked anyways by the USN who believe him to be a spy. Note that attacking the press in real life is a war crime so he banking on not being fired at is justified. Even when he ultimately joins your unit believing it'll get him to the best stories first, he gains melee skills like First and Stun which make him better with melee attacks than weapons anyways.
• Front Mission 5 sees your character start off as a lowly wanzer pilot who gets the cash to upgrade his (and his teams') gear between missions. You can get a bit more by various means, you never really have enough to make all of your wanzers top of the line. This does make sense at the start of the game given your rank, but even when you join a "best of the best" unit later on the restriction still applies.
  • Front Mission: Gun Hazard starts you off in a wanzer intended for hard labor, and then has you trying your damnedest to protect the president from a barking mad general's coup.
• In FTL: Faster Than Light, you have to save the Federation with just one pulled-from-mothballs rustbucket. However, the only indication of that is the Flavor Text of the ship description, while in reality, the ship you start with comes with a Burst Laser Mk II, which is agreed to be overall the best weapon in the entire game.
• You start off with poor equipment in both The Godfather games and weak allies in the second. In the first it's at least justifiable that Don Vito might not think Aldo important enough to issue top-end gear, but in the second, Dominic is the Corleones' Dragon-in-Chief and thus Michael has no real reason to skimp.
• Played straight in GoldenEye (2010). The player starts each level with only Bond's trademark Walther P99 and his do-everything Smartphone, and loses everything else between levels. This might make sense for some missions (Bond wouldn't be loaded for bear when visiting an informant in a nightclub), but becomes silly in others (such as infiltrating the secret base of a terrorist out to wipe out all the computers in London).
• Roughly two-thirds of the way through Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, right after it goes From Bad to Worse, Eoleo joins the party with a Cotton Shirt and the starter axe. It's justified by his nation's Perpetual Poverty and his recent imprisonment.
• Gothic II. You, the acclaimed hero who freed the Colony, defeated the Big Bad etc... etc... materialize inside the friendly necromancer's tower. There's scarily ominous evil afoot (not to mention earthquakes if you have the extension), and you are to enter a city and get the MacGuffin that'll help defeat the new Eeeevil. There's also an army of orcs to contend with. Hmmm? Oh no, the friendly necromancer won't even give you a dagger, armor or basic training. Nor help you enter the city. Nor give you a note telling people that the MacGuffin is vaguely important. Shoo, go save the world or something! Even the former convicts who owe their lives and freedom to you won't give you the time of day — what have you done for them lately?
  • Perhaps referenced in Gothic II's pseudo-sequel. Risen - one of the drowned bodies washed up on the beach at the beginning has a herring in his pocket. He didn't make it. You did, and you have even less.
• Averted in Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned. Since your Motorcycle gang's business is gun-running, the Sergeant-at-Arms will come when you call and provide guns at a discount over the standard underground gun stores in the city. In the last mission, your character flat out tells him that he's taking all the guns for free in order to raid the prison and kill the snitch.
• In Guild Wars, new characters begin the game with weapons and armor that are pathetically weak, labeled "Starter" gear. These items are so worthless that no shopkeeper will buy them from you. The only way to get rid of them is to destroy them by discarding it from your inventory. In the Prophecies, the first game, you're a beginner adventurer embarking on the path to learn your profession. In Factions, you're a student at a monastery. While not ideal, those situations are at least somewhat believable. However, in Nightfall, the pill is a bit tougher to swallow, considering you're a member of a local militia called the Sunspears. You're still given the same worthless crappy items that monastery students and beginners get. Granted the island of Istan isn't exactly rolling in wealth, but you'd think they could cough up something better for their protectors to use, seeing as the Sunspears are the only thing standing between Istan and a horde of greedy cut-throat pirates.
• Averted with Tin Man Games's Gun Dogs by Gary Chalk. Your "Gun Dog" is a Boxed Crook who's initially surprised to be so well equipped. The government starts him off with a sword, backup dagger, a Clock Punk 3-shot repeater pistol and 30 rounds of ammo. He also has a pouch with 50 silver coins, 3 healing potions and studded leather armour overlaying padded armour. The reason he's so well-equipped is that the Gun Dogs are sent on suicidal but extremely important missions, the Emperor doesn't fear desertion as a magical dog collar will throttle you if you think of escape.
• Half-Life justifies the use of this trope, as the expendable peons (Gordon included) didn't know the experiment would not go as planned, thus most are reasonably unarmed.
  • Played straighter in Half-Life 2. The G-Man dumps Gordon off in the middle of Combine-controlled Earth with nothing and just expects him to figure it out from there. Well, that's not strictly true; G-Man dropped Gordon off next to The Mole, Barney, who in turn signaled La Résistance to come escort him to a safehouse. The plan was to teleport him to Black Mesa East, where they would've presumably armed him with their usual weapons, but this goes awry and Gordon ends up fending off armed street cops with a crowbar.
  • Mostly subverted in Episode 1, starting with the supercharged gravity gun, before being downgraded, given a shotgun, all the way down to getting a crowbar as your second to last weapon.
• Halo:
  • Halo: Combat Evolved: Granted, you are a Super-Soldier, but Keyes sends you on your mission with a pistol he claims he doesn't keep loaded. This is a strange subversion, as the pistol is very strong in this game.
  • In general, the whole series averts the trope, as you start missions with some of the best weapons in the game, like battle rifles and even specialty weapons like the sniper rifle and Spartan laser. Also, you can only ever carry two weapons at once anyways, so there's no inexplicable loss-of-arsenal between games.
• Especially ridiculous in Hinterland; the king is sending you off alone to colonize a hostile region of his kingdom, and depending on your chosen background, you might start with enough money to hire one farmer. But on the other hand, backgrounds with combat experience start with reasonably good (for the early game) combat equipment.
• The infamously bad RPG Hoshi wo Miru Hito, aka Stargazer, took this to ridiculous extremes, putting the heroes at level 0 (that's not a typo) and capable of only dealing 1 damage (if you're lucky). All this from supposedly powerful psychics that are the world's last hope of stopping the villain.
• In both Icewind Dale games, your party starts their quest in one of the most inhospitable regions of the Forgotten Realms with nothing but their clothes and quarterstaves. This is particularly ridiculous in the second game, as your party just signed up to be mercernaries.
  • Hilariously referenced in a Let's Play of the game, where the female monk repeatedly comments on how she's freezing all the time, having apparently forgotten to bring pants on her journey to the frozen hellhole that is Icewind Dale. (Admittedly, she did start with low wisdom until someone else pointed out how important it is for monks, so it is in character for her...)
• In the second Infinity Blade game, Siris starts out at level 1 but is decked out with awesome equipment and the Infinity Blade itself...and loses it all to the God King's trap at the end of the prologue. Siris then has to make do with subpar equipment at the beginning of the game proper.
  • Also, since it had to be said, in Infinity Blade II, there's an Easter Egg where you can literally get a weapon that is a herring. Good luck defeating the God King with that.
• Jagged Alliance:
  • Jagged Alliance: all the mercs come with their own kit if you're willing to pay for it, but any custom character you make gets different weapons based on their stats. For the most part however, this equipment is really low end requiring proper equipment to be purchased separately.
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, only the top (and incredibly expensive) mercs start out with halfway decent gear (that you also have to pay extra for). Since starting funds are very limited, it's more likely your revolution will get kickstarted by half a dozen affordable grunts armed with a motley assortment of pistols and maybe a shotgun or sub-machine gun. Fortunately the enemy mooks you meet in the early stages tend not to be much better off, and once you capture the first town you can start shipping stuff in from an AIM-approved Arms Dealer. It's not necessarily more powerful than what you can loot from the enemy, but it's usually better maintained and not as annoyingly random. The V1.13 mod addresses some of these complaints, and it's entirely possible - if not easy or cheap - to have everyone armed with assault rifles and wearing high-quality body armour within one in-game week.
  • In both Jagged Alliance: Back in Action and Jagged Alliance: Crossfire, you start the campaign with enough funds to hire from one to three mercenaries, and the only ones available at this price are either Joke Characters or The Load (or Magikarp Power, at best). They start with the lower tier weapons (usually pistols or small submachineguns), civilian clothes (Ice wears Jean shorts and trainers when you hire him), and a very small amount of ammunition. Worse: before capturing the first town, you're unable to buy any item (despite the fact that you may still have some money after hiring mercenaries, the online shop is down until you liberate the first town). The higher tier mercenaries (the most expensive ones) start with more serious clothes and weapons, but still carry not enough ammunition when they enter the game.
• In both Jak II: Renegade and Jak 3: Wastelander, Jak starts with no equipment whatsoever, and in the second game it's not until five missions in you get your first weapon, a slow shotgun. Justified however, since prisoners, especially people banished from city are hardly allowed to hold on their equipment.
• A commercial for the video game version of The Jungle Book lampshaded this trope. A guide tells the viewer (or an unseen listener) about the dangers of the jungle and all the things you'll need to survive in it and then says, "But you ain't getting nothing; you're just getting bananas and underwear. Ever get to level 10 in your underwear, boy?!"
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • The first game, Sora starts off his quest with just the Keyblade and a handful of items, but then he's just a normal teenager from a backwater town. By the time he meets up with Leon and his allies and has beaten his first boss, you've had time to explore and grind up some munny, and you'll return to Leon's crew for advice and aid periodically through the rest of the game.
  • Chain of Memories, Castle Oblivion utilizes a very different battle system than the past game, so even if Sora did have any items or equipment left over (which he doesn't), they'd be useless here.
  • Kingdom Hearts II averts it, after waking up Sora goes to meet with Yen Sid, Mickey's mentor, and the Three Fairies, who provides him with information and new clothes that grant the Dive Form mechanic. Not much in the way of actual supplies, but by this point you've played through the prologue and have at least a small cache of goods.
  • Played straight with Birth By Sleep, where Eraqus, the Keyblade Master in charge of training aspiring students, sends his most promising pupils on a quest to save the Princesses of Heart, and they have nothing but their Keyblades and some Level 1 commands to their name. At least Ventus has the excuse he wasn't supposed to go on the quest and snuck out, but Terra and Aqua had time to get a full briefing before leaving.
  • Dream Drop Distance justifies it with the Framing Device of the Mark of Mastery exam. Sora and Riku are expected to complete the exam from scratch with nothing but their Keyblades and a blank slate in skills and equipment.
  • Played straight again in Kingdom Hearts III. While the damage Sora's heart sustained in Dream Drop Distance is justification for why he starts at Level 1 and has none of his old skills, Yen Sid is sending him out to adventure knowing that they're fighting Master Xehanort and his Organization in a battle that will eventually decide the fate of all worlds. You'd think he'd at least toss the kid a few Potions and an armor piece.
• King's Quest:
  • King's Quest I: Graham is the last hope of Daventry, and starts with naught but the clothes on his back. Justified as the country is poor and lacks resources after years of ruin. By the end, the titular hero has collected an all-seeing mirror, chest of infinite gold, and shield of invulnerability. On none of his other dangerous journeys in the many sequels does he take this shield along, or is it even mentioned. The only treasure that is seen again is the mirror, used as a Plot Device a few times. This gets a Hand Wave in the KQ1 SCI remake, where the old king mentions that the fate of Daventry is linked to the treasures remaining in Daventry Castle. Most of the adventures of Graham and his family are in different lands.
  • The Fan-made games avert this to some extent. The AGD Interactive Fan Remake of King's Quest II actually does bother to give Graham a sword, and The Silver Lining sends Graham off with some cash. The feather hat is his good-luck charm.
  • Justified for most of the KQ games by the fact that the adventurer in question usually doesn't have time to pick up supplies, or loses them en-route. In King's Quest III, Alexander-Gwydion starts off as a slave, with the rags on his back and whatever he can steal from under his cruel master's nose. In King's Quest VI, he's been shipwrecked due to a sudden storm. Rosella is transported to Tamir in King's Quest IV and to the Troll Kingdom in King's Quest VII rather abruptly. Graham has the whole palace stolen while out on a walk in King's Quest V.
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • The first game begins with the main character waking up in bed when their ship is under surprise attack. So it's not surprising that you start the game in your underwear, with no weapons except for the standard issue junk in your footlocker. Also, the surprise attack works, so you don't have much of a chance to scrounge up heavier equipment before running to the escape pods.
  • In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the Exile begins the game waking up inside the medical bay of a now-derelict mining facility, thus explaining the lack of equipment. The Exile then goes on to wage a shadow war against the Sith, making it plausible that nobody would have heard of her mission (hence the lack of store discounts). And while the premise of the game explains your lack of starting force powers, it's still a little non-specific about why all the other abilities (combat skills, tactics, diplomacy etc). of a legendary hero of the Mandalorian Wars would have evaporated so absolutely. Hand waved a couple of times by Kreia.
  • Mostly justified in Star Wars: The Old Republic for seven of the classes, with the Jedi having training equipment and the other classes being either civilians or undercover, but the Trooper plays this weirdly straight. The character is supposedly a veteran soldier newly inducted into the most elite Republic special forces team, but for some reason goes into battle in light civilian clothes instead of the armor that serves as the unit uniform and with a gun so terrible the local militia hands you a better one almost immediately. The fact that your unit plans to defect and leave you for dead would explain their lack of concern for your equipment, they might even have counted on it making you easier to kill.
• Knights of Xentar: Cleverly subverted; the hero-out-to-save-the-world actually starts the game with a fortune worth of gems, a set of Genji Armor and the legendary Falcon Sword, along with enough heroic strength to easily defeat an entire gang of thugs barehanded. However, during the intro, he loses all his money and equipment to thieves due to being drunk off his head, and shortly afterwards, his strength is drained by a deceptive foe, reducing him back to level 1... still, at least now we know why we start out naked and powerless, right? In a brief nod to reality, just about everyone in town refuses to have a proper conversation with you until you put something on...
• La-Mulana's manual Hand Waves Lemeza's lack of starting equipment as being the result of airport security; he was only able to keep his whip and MSX by insisting that they're "souvenirs."
• Last Dream both averts and plays this straight.
  • The player character sets out to stop the Dark Lord (along with 3 of his or her companions) with nothing more than the most basic sets of armor and weapons, but once you get through one of the two long and grueling introductory challenges (going through the Forest of Despair or investigating a tower to find a relic), you can trade it in to the King of Doria for a ton of cash and enough Mythril armor and weapons (for a warrior and a mage) that will easily last you through a good chunk of the game.
  • Averted later, when you find out that the King won't give you the gear in his Treasure Room (which includes powerful Dragon armor and an Ascendant Ring) until you rescue the King of Midgard.
• This trope is rationalized in Legend of the Green Dragon. Once a player is powerful enough to slay the Dragon, they learn she's been protecting her clutch of eggs from the local dragon slayers (as hinted by the presence of a pamphlet wielding activist in the forest). The Dragon uses her last moments to erase the player's memory in an attempt to save her young, thus stripping the player of experience and skill. In their struggle to safety, the player loses their armour and weapons as they exit the cave.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In the very first game, where (according to the manual's backstory) Link is sent on his quest to reassemble the Triforce of Wisdom and rescue the princess after having saved her lady-in-waiting from monsters. Yet when he first enters the game, he's carrying nothing but a shield. He can acquire a free wooden sword◊ immediately, but given that the implication is that he's already been in at least one battle, what the heck was he using?
    • Parodied in this Dorkly video. Perhaps Link beat them to death with his "smashing board."
  • Somewhat justified in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as you are branded the one responsible for events going wrong and the people who do know are in no position to give serious help (Sahasrahla is in exile, your uncle is dead etc.) but do their best (giving you a sword or health containers or directions etc.)
  • Justified in Link's Awakening as well; his belongings were lost in the shipwreck.
  • The Faces of Evil tries to justify it, and the sentence suffers a Memetic Mutation like everything else in these games:
    Link: Great! I'll grab my stuff!
    Gwonam: There is no time, your sword is enough!
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Link is summoned by the Deku Tree, but to even see him the kid needs to have a sword and shield. You have to buy the shield at full price, even though you're about to attempt to save the Deku Tree and your only source of income is from cutting grass and smashing rocks. Partly justified in that Mido is just a douche who doesn't think you're good enough to even meet the Deku Tree and thus sends you out to blow your entire savings on a shield (which isn't justified) and find a well hidden sword guarded by a perpetually rolling boulder. What the Deku Tree expected you to do about the giant spider-thing living in his bowels when you didn't have a sword is the real use of this trope.
  • Averted in Majora's Mask, where Link has both a sword and shield at the beginning. Unfortunately he ends up getting turned into a Deku, so he can't use them for a short time, but at least he actually has them this time. As for the rest of his stuff, it was packed onto the horse that the villain stole in the opening cutscene. Link eventually gets the horse back, from a couple of shysters who probably fenced his equipment.
  • Justified in the Oracle games, though; Link's just been teleported to a new country by the Triforce, and left his equipment in Hyrule.
    • At least in the Oracle games, upon starting a new game with a password you get from beating the other game, you start with a basic sword and an extra heart. Where all the other equipment from the beaten game goes is anybody's guess.
  • Zigzagged in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess as when you need to get the equipment to save the world you're a wolf and only the animals recognize you. Also you start in a farm village in the end of nowhere so the best gear are a pair of swords (you have one and another villager the other) and a single wooden shield. Later though you get no help from the soldiers (lamp shaded when they run away from helping you) and Malo charges you through the nose for anything.
  • Also justified in Phantom Hourglass: Link was just dozing off on the deck when Tetra suddenly decided to enter the ghostship (and get Taken for Granite), so Link had absolutely no time to hurry into his cabin and get his equipment from Wind Waker when he heard her screaming. And when he wakes up on the island, Oshus and the islanders don't equip him with weapons, since they actually want him to give up and quit his quest, since he's just a Kid and they're worried about his well-being. Once he's proven himself to be pretty strong and capable of taking on the Big Bad, Oshus starts providing him with such awesome stuff such as the eponymous hourglass.
  • Minish Cap. The Big Bad shows up, turns the princess to stone, and opens a literal Pandora's Box. So, the king gives you everything he apparently thinks you need to deal with all this by yourself: a broken sword, and permission to use the not-broken low-level sword you already had. Link also has a shield by this point, but only because Zelda won it for him in a carnival game. Justified, as opening the aforementioned Pandora's box released the monsters into the world; there was no need for gear before hand.
  • Played with in Breath of the Wild, where Link awakens in the Shrine of Resurrection in nothing but his undies, and two treasure chests that offer him some mediocre, cheap trousers and a shirt as 'armor'. And weapons are things picked up off the ground, like branches or dropped weapons from enemies, which all break. Obtaining the Master Sword is its own sidequest that will take a while for the player to be able to complete. Turns out to be justified. Link was brought to rest in the shrine after being mortally wounded, and this occured in the middle of a very one-sided war on Hyrule. Princess Zelda was more concerned with ensuring Link's survival than to leave behind some good armor. And even the Master Sword had to specifically be taken to the Deku Tree, to give it a chance to regain its lost powers.
  • Tears of the Kingdom starts out the same way as Breath of the Wild, with Link starting out with old clothes and some tree branches for weapons. The game also features several shrines where Link is stripped of all his clothing and equipment and must face multiple constructs with only basic weapons and shields while using his Zonai abilities to improvise more powerful solutions.
• In Lennus II (the sequel to the game released as Paladin's Quest in the US), you start out worshipped as a god and still must pay for your equipment and items outside a few dinky little chests in the temple (of you). Later, the leader of another continent has his guards bring you into his office and asks you to save the entire world. They then take you back to where they got you. Problem: you lack citizenship papers for his empire at the time. Or travel documents, or a bus pass, all of which are very very hard for you to get (you don't get the full mobility to do what he asked you to do for quite a while), all of which are necessary for you to get about saving the world, and all of which are things that you'd expect a leader to be able to grant with a wave of his hand.
• Averted in the Medieval chapter of Live A Live. The king lets Oersted raid the entire armory if you want to. However it's wise to only take what you need since you'll be coming back in the final chapter and it would be nice to have some stuff left to loot since the gear is rather good.
• Partially averted in free MMORPG Mabinogi. The starting armour, ordinary clothing, is practically worthless; but the starting weapon is more effective than nearly any of the others you can get (particularly since it compensates for your low stats, wheras all the good weapons require considerably higher stats or skills to be more useful than the beginner version).
• Averted and subsequently parodied in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. After saving Beanbean Castle from trouble, Queen Bean falls ill and you're tasked with finding something to help save her. Rather than send you into a dangerous new area empty-handed, one of the queen's advisers rushes after you to give Mario a free badge. Luigi pokes the adviser to get something for himself. Rather than supply the other hero of the story as well, the adviser flatly replies, "Luigi, you'll just have to buy one for yourself." Cue a displeased ellipsis as Luigi sits perfectly still, his finger still pointed outward into the air.
• The Mass Effect series is inconsistent on this.
  • Mass Effect:
    • As a Council Spectre, you not only fund yourself, but are expected to do so (and you are told by the quartermaster that your starting gear is standard issue). No one bats an eye when it's revealed that Saren has a controlling interest in a major weapons manufacturer and commands his own private armies and massive research facilities, and by late-game Shepard should be swimming in cash, guns and armor, or both. Your employers did give you a spiffy spaceship at least. There are some hints that, because Spectres can get into really... questionable activities, the Council gives them minimal support in order to keep their hands clean. ("We just told them what to do, we didn't give them the stuff to do it.")
    • Parodied in Mordin's dialogue in the second game, when he compares the salarian STG to the Spectres: "Better funded, of course. Didn't have to buy our own weapons."
  • Mass Effect 2 is a glorious aversion. Cerberus, your new employers, essentially tell Shepard, "Humanity is in danger! Take this state-of-the-art ship, an armory's worth of weapons and armor (if you bought the Firepower Pack DLC), two of our best commandos to accompany you until you recruit more squadmates, and a pile of cash. We'll be in touch to give you intel and more money, and if you need something else, call us." Shepard still has to buy weapon modifications, but to tweak higher performance out of gear that's already top of the line. Other upgrades have to be researched in the ship's lab, putting the team at the very edge of weapons and armor tech in the galaxy.
  • In Mass Effect 3:
    • Depending on what pre-order bonuses or version of the game you've bought, you'll receive a boatload of messages after leaving Mars about extra gear that was secured for you. This includes additional armors for your squadmates (which have unique bonuses), a bunch of N7 weapons (including a sniper rifle, shotgun, SMG and pistol) that are among some of the best in the game, two sets of armor (N7 Defender / Reckoning) that would normally costs tens of thousands to buy at a store and (if you completed Lair of the Shadow Broker from the previous game) an Armor Modkit intel bonus that increases your health or shields. The DLC weapon packs include several guns that are flat-out better than anything from regular gameplay, to the point that some online game guides recommended against equipping them just to keep the game from being too easy.
    • The Alliance finally starts paying Shepard, perhaps out of shame at how Cerberus treated their stolen soldier better than them.
    • The DLC equipment packs award Shepard with many weapons and one suit of armor that are flat-out superior to anything in the normal game. The armor grants a total of +80% in all its bonuses to Shepard, compared to the +50% maximum for using piecemeal armor or +60% with the suits from the base game.
    • Averted with the Expanded Galaxy Mod. All the weapons you had in 2 were put in a storage chest for Shepard to pick up, thus netting you a whole suite of weapons to choose from. This also functionally turns the game into its New Game Plus mode, as the weapons you get back are all Level V (and can be upgraded to Level X immediately if you so choose).
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda: Ryder gets made the Pathfinder for the human Ark, and gets an insanely powerful biotic as their second squadmate. On arrival at the Nexus, they're given the Tempest, a cool little spaceship (in fact, the last one the Initiative has left), and another squadmate in Vetra Nyx. Guns? Top of the line armor? Nope. The Initiative didn't pack them. Or they did, but circumstances mean they're locked up somewhere and the Initiative can't get them. Heck, gorgeous though the Tempest is, it doesn't even come with a car for exploring the territory. Ryder has to find that in the first place they set down. The Herring in this situation is slightly justified since, when Ryder shows up, Herring is all they have left to give.
• Max Payne:
  • The first and second games repeatedly justify this; Max is an ordinary cop at the start of things, and standard issue for him is a simple 9mm pistol. The first game also includes a side plot where he finds himself in an Enemy Mine situation with a guns dealer who offers Max the firepower he needs to storm The Don's mansion if Max helps him, and he makes good on that promise. And the Beretta is pretty decent for Starter Equipment, being a Boring, but Practical all-rounder that stays useful even after you pick up theoretically better weapons.
  • In the third game, he's playing bodyguard to a family of socialites, where looking good is just as important as aiming good, so anything more than a handgun is probably not appropriate. Though, once the family starts being attacked in public places, you'd think they'd start giving Max at least a shotgun.
• MechWarrior: Welcome, brave mercenary! You've signed up as a member of an elite combat force and will be thrown into the thick of action, often by yourself, and expected to destroy several times your tonnage in opponents, sometimes simultaneously. We'll also regularly throw 'Mechs twice your size at you from the very first campaign. At some point, you will probably be expected to single-handedly turn the tables in some of the most dramatic battles of the Clan Invasion. Here, you get a Commando, the smallest, cheapest, most generic light 'Mech we could come up with on short notice. Also, here are some basic lasers, inaccurate rocket launchers, and mediocre armor plating that will serve as your starting gear. Go get 'em hero.
  • MechWarrior 5at least justifies it. With your base razed and your former ID abandoned, acquiring new 'Mechs and Warriors is one of your first objectives.
  • Played differently in BattleTech. While you have a full lance of mostly medium 'Mechs and even a spare light mech in the bays, you also start horribly in debt to three different loan sharks and trapped in the boonies - a pit you're in no condition to climb out of, let alone find any success. Things don't really look up until you get your Cool Ship.
• Medieval II: Total War always starts the player off with two to four small cities/towns, a handful of weak and basic units, and a paltry sum of money, no matter what faction they picked. The game starts in the mid-11th century, so this can lead to the absurd scenario where Constantinople doesn't have dirt roads, organized farming, or so much as a single chapel, when in reality 11th century Constantinople was a bustling metropolis of over half a million people and possibly the richest city in the world, at the center of an empire that stretched from Croatia to Syria. The game depicts the Byzantine Empire as a petty kingdom consisting of Constantinople itself, a chunk of northwestern Anatolia, and about half of Greece.
• Mega Man:
  • In dozens of games spanning two decades, Mega Man (Classic) blows up robots from here to eternity, absorbing their weaponry, gaining new armor, and yet at the start of each new game, you start out with the Mega Buster and your basic blue armor. However, this is explained at least in Mega Man Legends 2 when Roll tells you in the very beginning of the game, "I'm sorry Mega Man—I had to sell all your old equipment to pay for the new engine!!" including the Shining Laser, the weapon so powerful it scared the extremely short pants off of her.
  • In Bob and George it's said that he drops them all off a cliff.
  • In Mega Man Battle Network this problem shows up again, with each game taking place almost directly after the previous game, with the same characters, but the chip library and program upgrades gone again at the beginning of each game.
    • Could be hand waved in this case by saying his old chips and upgrades aren't compatible with his new PET.
    • This is Lan we're talking about here. For all we know he was transferring data to a new PET, and just lost it all in his room. He's not the neatest guy you'll meet.
    • Lan actually notes he has no idea where he put his old chips in the 6th game. And, presumably, he lost them.
  • Unusually for the series, X starts off Mega Man X5 with the full armor from the previous game. If you choose X for the initial level he keeps the armor the entire game, but if you choose Zero for the initial level, X gets his armor destroyed by Sigma at the end. (Choosing X takes away Zero's rather piddly, slow-firing ranged attack. Don't choose Zero.)
    • Mega Man X6 pretends to start you off with an armor from X5, but all its useful functions are gone.
    • The X series justifies this by having X believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely, so after each incident he disposes of the weapons and armor he acquired over the course of it. However, starting in X5, after disposing of his armor, another incident flares up again, and Alia manages to fix the armor up, though usually with the loss of some abilities. Given the fact that X is ridiculously powerful with all his weapons and armor, he's quite justified in fearing his own power.
• Metal Gear typically justifies this by the protagonists working for organizations for whom On-Site Procurement is standard procedure.
  • Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear Solid start with the hero unarmed, and carrying nothing but a radio transceiver and a pack of cigarettes (which in Solid he had to smuggle along in his stomach... addiction is a nasty thing, huh?).
  • That said, the cigarettes (or the cigar in the third installment) effectively manage be an inferior life-sapping version of pentazemin, thermal goggles, and sometimes the night vision goggles all rolled into one. They don't work nearly as well, but you start with it and it never runs out, so they'll do in a pinch if you're lacking the good stuff.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater actually had an explanation for why Snake went into battle pretty much unarmed: He's a spy during the Cold War and being issued any weapons increases the risk of having the West implicated in espionage activities - just the sight of an MC-130 gunship in Soviet airspace as it was fleeing from the failed Virtuous Mission was enough to nearly trigger nuclear war. That's why Snake was codenamed "Naked Snake", as he was essentially going into battle naked — unarmed (except for two knives and a tranquilizer pistol). He's given slightly more equipment for Operation Snake Eater (the same two knives, a tranquilizer pistol, and a second lethal pistol) because he's expected to make his presence known somewhat, to satisfy the Soviet leadership both in taking out a traitorous American and, hopefully, dealing with a faction of the Soviet leadership hoping to depose the current leader along the way.
  • Averted in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, where you get an AK-102 right after the first cutscene,^note technically Snake starts the cutscene with one, but it jams to uselessness before the cutscene is over, but he's able to pick up another one less than a minute later and meeting up with Otacon later gets you your usual pistol and tranquilizer. Also, later in the game you get several good weapons for free either in cutscene interactions (the M4 Custom from Drebin in Act 1, the DSR-1 at the end of Act 2, and the Skorpion partway through Act 3) or by beating a boss that used the same weapons against you (the MGL-140 from Raging Raven, the railgun from Crying Wolf, and the telekinetic dolls from Screaming Mantis).
  • In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, you don't suffer from this trope - you start off with an M16, a tranquilizer gun, a stun rod and you'll find some grenades near your first drop - but some of the Extra Ops side-missions require you to take over an enemy base armed with nothing but a banana. It is implied that MSF, Snake's mercenary organization, is both fairly new and thus hasn't acquired many resources yet, considering they seem to consist of a dozen or so guys and a small cabin on a beach in Columbia at the beginning.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain begins in a hospital that is thoroughly raided and butchered by an army looking to find you. Snake starts out with nothing and is unable to equip more than a single basic pistol throughout the entire mission... because he only has one hand. The first mission in Afghanistan is a search-and-rescue to save Kaz so your handler gives you low-profile non-lethal weapons (and a cyber arm) so you can get him out quietly. But once you rescue Kaz and fly back to the new Mother Base, you'll get some basic gear and even research options to build Zeerust-advanced technology.
• Justified then averted in Metro 2033: initially you can only grab a revolver when your home station comes under attack, but once everything calms down you're sent to the quartermaster and fitted out with body armour, a gas mask, flashlight, a submachine gun and generous portions of ammunition. NPCs are similarly helpful later on in the game. It's also worth noting that the equipment you're issued isn't for the long quest that makes up the game. The local leader is willing to give you that gear for a (literal) milk run to the next station down the line, but then again said leader is Artyom's well-meaning (and understandably protective) adoptive stepfather.
  • Metro: Last Light averts this at the start by having you well kitted out and with your pick of some decent, mid-level guns from the Rangers' armory for what is essentially a scouting mission. Of course, you lose said weapons immediately once you get captured by the Nazis and have to start about with a (suppressed) pistol and knives, having to scrounge up better guns from the enemies you kill if you want anything more. And this being a Scavenger World, few are going to bother giving you free stuff or discounts, what with everyone being essentially scared and trying to stay out of the rising conflict. Once you get back to D-6, however, the Rangers waste no time in sticking you in the heaviest set of armor they have and having some of the best guns (including an anti-materiel rifle and a mini-gun) out for you to use.
• Despite her reputed experience and fame, Samus Aran begins Metroid with thirty energy units and a beam weapon that only shoots a third of the way across the screen — and whatever upgrades she acquires in each game disappear in the next. Several of the later games (Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2) include an opening scene in which she has upgraded capabilities then loses them to a serious injury or whatever (though even her upgraded form lacks several of the abilities from the previous game). Metroid Fusion removes her abilities in the opening cutscene, then makes good use of them; the discarded parts of her suit become the Big Bad of the game, and she must occasionally flee in terror from the better-equipped SA-X. In a sense, Metroid Prime 3 retroactively sets up the trope for the much older game, The Return of Samus, as by the end of that game, Samus' existing suit has been severely corrupted (the Prime series is set between Metroid and Metroid 2).
  • Now in Metroid: Other M, Samus does start the game with all her abilities, but upon meeting up with Adam and his team, he has her disable most of her abilities, as they aren't sure what's happened or how many survivors there are. If she uses too much fire power, she could kill someone or blow a hole in the space station. As the game progresses, Adam authorizes your abilities as you need them. What's not explained is why purely-defensive abilities are also disabled until Adam explicitly authorizes them.
• Might and Magic 6, 7 and 8 all have the adventurers start off with substandard equipment, though only 8 lacks a justification for that: in 6, the party doesn't become the Famous Government-Backed Adventurers of Legend until later in the game, when they've very likely already had picked up nicer stuff, and 7 starts of with a treasure hunt contest run by a guy who underestimates the number of dragonflies in the area and thinks the locals' references to a dragon are just references to the dragonflies. In 8, your party starts off backed by an important trader and the local potentate for a mission important to the interests of the native culture and the trader, yet your characters still get the same rusty swords and cheap leather as in the earlier games (and the starting character is suggested to have already had those things before they got recruited for the important mission — he or she was serving as a caravan guard for the trader).
• Minecraft: The player character wakes up in the middle of the wilderness, with nothing but the clothes on their back, and an optional treasure chest full of wood. On the other hand, what else do you need?
  • Not to mention that the game lets you literally cut down a tree with a raw fish. It's about as effective as punching it.
• Subverted, sort of, in Mother 3 (the sequel to Earthbound). When the game opens, you live in a small backwoods town with no concept of currency; as a good friend when you're in need, the local shopkeeper will cheerfully give you what he has in stock for free (which isn't much, though they do replace it regularly).
  • Averted in Mother 2, a.k.a. EarthBound: since the enemies don't drop money, your primary source of income is your father, who pumps cash into your bank account. By coincidence, this happens after each battle you win.
    • Later on in EarthBound, this trope is justified when you take control of Jeff, after Ness and Paula get trapped. He starts out with just $2—but he can't get any more money since he doesn't have the ATM card!
• In Mount & Blade, you start as an immigrant to the land of Calradia. You have some rags, a rusty sword, a bent old crossbow, a tattered shield, a swaybacked old horse and some rations. You can be the greatest mercenary warlord in the land, or if you really impress a king, you can help him take it over... or throw him off the throne and take over yourself!
• In NetHack, you get a Mission from God to retrieve a talisman. You'd think the deity who sent you on the mission would, in the hopes of giving you the highest chance of success, give you the strongest equipment possible right off the bat, and would immediately come to your aid whenever you pray. Nope! Instead, you have to sacrifice corpses to them for a CHANCE that they'll decide to grant you a strong weapon, and if you ask them for help too often they punish you.
  • This can be considered a sensible approach by the gods. Literally thousands of idiots are sent on the same quest, the vast majority of them dying through sheer stupidity. There simply aren't enough fancy weapons to equip each of these lemmings.
  • Another slight aversion to the trope is that each class comes in with the tools they figure they'll need. Wizards come in with a smorgasbord of magical items; Knights arrive in full battle arms and armor with their steed; Rangers come in with a bow and enough ammo to pincushion at least 10 floors worth of creatures. Unless you're a tourist (and even they get darts), you're entering the dungeons with a pretty dependable starting kit.
• Played outrageously straight in Neverwinter Nights. The tutorial sets you up as a graduate of the Academy and suits you up with some basic gear on-par with what all the students have to make due with, and in D&D a level 1 character is considered better then an average soldier (who have weaker NPC classes). However, once the tutorial ends, you're set up as working directly for Aribeth, the Number Two to the city's lord, and she directly admits you're pretty much their only hope to save the city because most of the other Academy students are either not ready for a mission like this or were killed in the attack that ended the tutorial. Despite this, you're not given any new gear other than the Stone of Recall, which acts as a Warp Whistle mechanic to warp you back to the temple where Aribeth is. If you want some of the really good magic items sold around town, including by Aribeth herself, who offers shop services, you're going to have to pay for them.
  • The Shadows of the Undrentide expansion justifies this with you being the student for an Old Master in a backwater village, and you're sent out to track down some kobolds who stole some stuff from him. The village residents have no real incentive to give you stuff for free because this isn't a big enough deal to warrant such charity. The second expansion Hordes of the Underdark justifies it via Bag of Spilling, as a Drow assassin sneaks into your room while you're asleep and teleports away the chest you stored your gear in. Since you were at the Inn you were staying at on a dangerous job for the owner, he gives you free access to his armor so you can at least have some low-level stuff before you set out. If you imported a character from the base campaign or Shadows, you retain all your gear from them but it was locked in the chest, and later in the game you can find it and take it back.
• Used in Neverwinter Nights 2. You start basically as a peasant in a backwater village, thus explaining the lack of equipment — and when, after a long journey to Neverwinter, you're finally enlisted by authorities, they do offer you some equipment. But not much. For example, if you join the City Watch, all you get is a cloak, while the NPC Watchmen have chainmail armor and shields, but ironically, no cloaks. When Lord Nasher gives you a ruined keep to command, he's generous enough to provide you with a sum that's one tenth of what it takes to rebuild it completely — he evidently expects you to earn the rest by taxing peasants and merchants, but the income is so minuscule that it actually benefits you to avoid putting any taxes and just pay the rest of the costs by selling loot. Even at the point when the fate of the land literally depends on you and the defenses of your keep, the Neverwinter Nine don't bother to fund rebuilding the tower to use as their own base of operations, and expect you to do this instead. (Thankfully, all keep expenses are optional, and the only downside of neglecting the keep is a slightly harder battle sequence.)
  • Hand waved early in the watch quest, where the captain claims that the war at the end of the last game nearly bankrupted the city. Besides, by the time you join a faction you almost certainly have better gear than anyone in it but the leaders.
  • Expansion Pack Mask of the Betrayer has an interesting take on this trope: the villiage of Mulsantir is a-ok with throwing you against the bear god Okku with little more than the clothes on your back and a single prisoner to fight alongside you because they really don't care if you lose. The god in question threatened to destroy the town specifically so he could get to you, and the villagers (which don't like you very much anyhow) figure that he'll go away once he gets what he wants — namely, your head on a silver platter. The only reason you get any help at all is because they didn't want you complaining about it.
• NieR: Automata references this trope with the Cypress Stick, a weapon you find a fair distance into the game. According to the weapon's backstory, it was given to a young man by his mother before an important audience with the king as his starting weapon on his epic quest. The weapon is the weakest weapon in the game.
• No More Heroes: Played straight, justified and somewhat averted. Travis begins the game fairly broke money-wise. Why? To buy your trusty lightsaber beam katana Blood Berry of course. While Blood Berry is a powerful weapon, it pales in comparison to the later weapons you can get (especially The Tsubaki Mk. 3). The shops DO charge you full price on everything and Sylvia explicitly tells you you gotta do part-time jobs ("as a third-rater", so the job guy said) to pay the entry fee to the next matches, beam katana upgrades, accessories, etc., etc. You're hardly saving the world though, just killing a bunch of guys for money.
• Oddworld:
  • In Abe's Oddysee, Abe must escape from the deadly meat-packing plant and rescue 99 fellow slaves before they're used for meat. He has a loincloth and the ability to fart at will. He does learn to possess the gun-toting guards who have orders to shoot him on sight, but this only works if he can see them while standing out of range, and possessed guards aren't useful for much, so it's hardly a solution to every problem.
  • In the sequel, Abe's Exoddus, Abe travels with a group of Mudokons to help him free the slaves from Necrum mines. However, their journey takes them across a vast desert, and they've brought no food, water, or any supplies besides their loincloths. They end up blaming Abe for dragging them along on this journey, and when they reach the mines, they end up drinking a bunch of Soulstorm Brew out of desperate thirst and getting hopelessly addicted to it, completely blowing off Abe's warnings.
• Odin Sphere has a bizarre variation on the shopkeeper portion of this trope, as several shopkeepers say they'll give you a discount, but none actually do. A few greedier ones do actually charge a little extra, however.
• In Odium, you lead a team of three NATO officers sent to investigate a secret in a Polish town harbouring a former Russian secret base, in which disappeared an other NATO team. Each squadmember starts the game with a couple of medical supplies, a pistol, an assault rifle, and a knife. And only enough ammunition to fill exactly one magazine of both weapons.
• In Ōkami you play as Amaterasu, a literal goddess with all the powers of the heavens at her command. Not that you'd realize that given the state she starts the game in. Of course this is justified with Ammy's power being based on the faith and belief in the gods, and the forces of evil have done everything in their power to reduce that to nothing.
• Justified in Oni. Konoko's first mission starts off as an intelligence-gathering infiltration, so she's equipped only with a standard TCTF sidearm. She's too busy running from one crisis to another for the next few levels to visit an armory, and later she goes rogue and can't get better equipment. It still doesn't justify her losing them between levels, though.
• The cutscene before starting in Painkiller has an angel ask Daniel the protagonist point blank: "Do you need weapons?" Daniel responds angrily that he can take care of himself. Following which, the game begins and immediately turns this trope on its ass. The eponymous Painkiller is a weapon and holy freaking God what a sign of things to come. It's essentially a handheld blender that can fire off its business end which can then anchor into any surface and act as a focus point for a vicious laser beam. It's one of the most devastatingly effective and creative weapons in a game that is basically all about devastatingly effective and creative weapons, and practically a Disc-One Nuke compared to most other FPS that start you with a shitty pistol or melee weapon. It's one of the few FPS of its type in which you can go through the entire game^note sans bosses using only this starting weapon without ever coming close to Self-Imposed Challenge territory.
• In the now-defunct text-based Multi-User Dungeon game Paradox, newly-created characters began the game with laughably useless equipment. A few examples are: a rubber flail, a paper vest, a cardboard sword, and a flimsy plastic butter knife not unlike those handed out at McDonald's. Most people, logically speaking, would do more damage with their bare hands than this useless junk.
• This is justified in Parasite Eve. At the beginning of the game, Aya's on a date at the opera and has her badge and gun, which as an NYPD officer she would be required to carry even when off-duty, which is when shit first goes to hell. The next day, when Captain Baker assigns her to the case, the first thing he does is to give her a permit that authorizes her to take an M16 rifle out of the police armory which is in the words of the armorer, "the most powerful gun I can allow you to have."
• Phantasy Star II is particularly egregious about this, with every single character starting out at level 1 (there are eight party members total) with little (if any) equipment when they join up. The game starts with two characters, and one new one joins each time you reach a new town, so it's possible to get them all before the end of the game's first act. It's still somewhat irritating to have to spend about an hour grinding for each new party member just to get them to a point that they're usable.
• Phantom Brave justifies the weak starting weapons by having Marona be ostracized for her powers, but everything you can pick up and use to attack has the potential to become the Infinity +1 Sword, including, of course, fish.
• Averted in Phantom Doctrine — all of your agents start off with automatic weapons. You will find better gear as the game goes on, but the early-game weapons are entirely adequate for killing the early-game enemies.
• In Predator: Concrete Jungle, Scarface is equipped with all the standard Predator arsenal for the first level prologue, but he gets injured and loses them all, which inadvertently ends up kicking off a massive technological revolution as humanity finds the weapons and reverse-engineers them. He's exiled to a Death World for a century as punishment, and then offered a second chance to go and fix everything and redeem himself, but he's only given access to the bare essentials for an unblooded novice Predator. Scarface can gradually recover his more advanced weapons and even find upgraded versions.
• Lampshaded at the start of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, where the Prince laments early in the first level "why is it everytime disaster strikes, I find myself without a proper blade?"
• Quest for Glory IV begins with the hero being force-teleported from his last adventure to a dark cave far away, starting with literally nothing. Of course, he happens to find a money pouch on a nearby skeleton and a weapon on one in the very next screen...
• Ratchet & Clank has this to a certain degree with every game, but it's most prevalent with the original game and its remake, where Ratchet starts as a civilian with not a single bolt or weapon to his name outside of his Omniwrench and a Bomb Glove/Fusion Grenade he got/gets for free. Ratchet also recieves no formal weapons training in the original, while in the remake he recieves some but is portrayed as very inept. In later games Ratchet still starts out with zero cash and a wrench, but he also begins with two powerful weapons and very much knows how to handle them.
  • Special mention goes to Full Frontal Assault, where not only do Ratchet, Clank and Qwark have to fend off entire armies using found weapons and defences funded with cash they find on the battlefield, but the Bag of Spilling occurs before every level, inciting this trope repeatedly regarding their budget and weapons loadout.
• Resident Evil:
  • Downplayed in Resident Evil — the S.T.A.R.S. team has some pretty heavy-duty equipment for a police special unit, like grenade launchers, and a frigging M202 Rocket Launcher, but you leave the helicopter to investigate your allies' crash site without it and your own helicopter pilot wusses out and abandons you once the monsters appear, leaving you with only your handguns and combat knives at first which aren't very effective against the living dead (Chris even drops his handgun during the mad dash to the mansion). Pretty much all the good weapons you get in the game are plucked off of your dead teammates' corpses, and your pilot throws you the rocket launcher to kill the Final Boss with in the end.
  • In the original Resident Evil 2, you can find a picture of the team in which one unidentified member is packing a mortar, suggesting that S.T.A.R.S. was over-supplied, if anything. But tragically, neither he nor the mortar appears in the game, and he is deleted from the photo in remakes.
  • In Resident Evil 4, Leon Kennedy is sent to look for the president's daughter with little more than a knife and a simple (but custom-made) 9mm handgun. Contrary to popular belief, he was only investigating, and didn't actually know Ashley was nearby. After he's forced to defend himself, he comes back outside to find his transport out of town blocked, and the cops who had been driving it killed by the villagers, preventing him from leaving. His Mission Control sends him a gunship as soon as possible, though it is soon shot down.
  • In Resident Evil 5, however, this is actually justified. One of the CEOs of the companies you work for is setting you up.
  • Resident Evil 6 justifies or averts it depending on your character and campaign. Jake was just a mercenary trying to make a buck, Sherry was expecting a simple snatch and leave mission, and Leon was security detail, justifying why they have only handguns/melee weapons. Averted with Chris, Piers, Helena and Ada; they actually expected heavy combat, and come better equipped. Piers' starting loadout even includes an anti-tank sniper rifle.
  • In Resident Evil: Revelations 2, this is justified by Claire (who was kidnapped from a party and naturally wouldn't start with anything other than the clothes on her back) and averted by Barry (who arrives on the island packing an assault rifle, a sidearm, and his signature Magnum revolver).
  • Justified in the Resident Evil: Outbreak duology. The playable characters are all ordinary citizens of Raccoon City who suddenly find themselves neck deep in the viral outbreak, so only two of them — policeman Kevin Ryman and security guard/ex-military Mark Wilkins — begin with a firearm; the other six have to make do with what they can find around the environment. The various secret characters unlocked in the Collections have similar likelihoods of being equipped for danger.
• Subverted in Romancing SaGa 3: if you start off as the Shinon settlers, you don't get anything other than basic clothing and a weapon that would match the build your chose to start with. However, if you pick Mikhail or Harid...
• RuneScape's latest tutorial guides you through Fishing, combat, and Mining and Smithing, leaving you with three minnows and a bronze shortsword to your name. However, there's a series of quests called "The Path" that form an extended introduction to the combat triangle ("The Blood Pact") and puzzle-based quests ("Demon Slayer", "A Shadow Over Ashdale"), and give you a good variety of low-tier weapons. The game also has a silly shout-out to the Trope Namer if you try to cut down trees with a herring.
• The classic Konami arcade game Rush'n Attack sends you against an army with nothing but a knife. For the entire game. On the other hand, the enemy is restricted to nearly the same limitation: Only about one-tenth of the entire enemy army has guns (some which you can steal), and all those nifty tanks and rockets in the scenery do nothing but stand there. Army-on-a-budget perhaps? Then again, if they merely touch you, YOU ARE DEAD.
• Sam & Max Save the World and the games afterward play with this... you retain some key items between chapters, and the boys always have their guns with infinite ammo... it's just the game has a serious case of Solve the Soup Cans, Rule of Funny, and Rule of Fun. It gets to a ridiculous extreme when Max literally becomes the freakin' President of the United States, but his authority is so caught up in bureaucracy that he's pretty much in the same position he would be otherwise.
• Inverted in Scribblenauts and its sequel, Super Scribblenauts. You start off being able to create everything — from shotguns and TNT to dialysis machines and coffee shops — not to mention Cthulhu. The first goal in the game is cutting down a tree. You can see where this is going. To the point where sooner or later you have to stop yourself from going over the top and get out some rope. To attach to a whale.
• The Serious Sam games are justified that you start off with barely anything, but the story is that you were sent back in time to destroy the forces of evil while they're weak. And the government who send you back in time gradually sends health packs and weapons after you but not all at once, they end up scattered all over Ancient Egypt instead.
• Shadow Complex is another example, justified in that the protagonist is meant to be going on a climbing trip, not infiltrating an underground base. There is A Taste of Power section at the start, but it is with a different character who is killed off after it.
• Shadowgate: You are the last in a line of kings to stop the Warlock Lord. What do you start with? A torch and worthless armor. This was lampshaded in the manual as the story mentions "a sword would come in handy". At least the remake gives you a dirk to fight with.
• The Shin Megami Tensei games generally either avert or justify this trope. The quality of your starter equipment is rarely the point - the real deal is whether you're somehow elevated to the level of the supernatural at all to be able to fight it. In most games, high school students initiated into the magical world are able to beat demons down with golf clubs or pocket knives, while trained (but mundane) soldiers find their high-power firearms completely useless.
  • Shin Megami Tensei I justifies it as you're a regular high schooler who received the Demon Summoning Program through an anonymous email and had to grab a knife off a dead body to defend yourself against a demon, and everything went from there.
  • Shin Megami Tensei II averts it as you start as a trained, reasonably well-equipped gladiator... just that "well-equipped" is still pretty poor compared to the powers of demons and angels.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne ignores the problem completely by transforming you into the Demi-Fiend, a Half-Human Hybrid half-demon who punches everything to death with his bare goddamn hands.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV starts you as an armed and armored Samurai in the post-apocalyptic feudal Kingdom of Mikado, granted a Gauntlet that lets you deal with demons.
  • Shin Megami Tensei V starts you out as the Nahobino, a powerful entity that is said to be the Life within demons combined with the Knowledge within humans. You start out with nothing in your starting kit but a laser sword for a hand and a basic electric skill.
  • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey averts it as you are one of the best-equipped soldiers in the world, but even so human technology is not up to par with facing demons and so the support crew must scramble to develop new weapons for you and your comrades.
  • Most of the Persona games start with you completely without any kind of back-up and having to scrounge up weapons for yourselves, relying mostly on your magical powers to put you on par with the demons and shadows you fight. The sole exception is in Persona 3, where you are backed by a powerful corporation... but they have to hold back to avoid breaking The Masquerade around the shadows and persona-users by throwing their money around, and because even their most advanced toys are useless compared to a persona-user. The trope is also oddly inverted by the original Persona; while you and Kei start out with reasonable armaments (i.e. your bare hands), ex-punk Yukino could justifiably have her razors for self-defense, and everyone else joins after the demon invasion is in full swing, there is no logical reason why Masao would be carrying an axe around.
  • Lampshaded in Persona 4. Yosuke, upon being faced with the fact that they will have to fight monsters, meekly admits that the golf club he gave the protagonist is "just for show", and then later tries to get himself and the protagonist some starting weapons that at least look real... only to have those confiscated by the police and be forced to use a pair of cheap wrenches for his starting weapons instead.
  • Persona 5 starts with your sum total of equipment being nothing but a knife, a toy gun, a giant toy sword, and a giant toy slingshot. In fact, figuring out how to exploit the Your Mind Makes It Real properties of the Mental World you're traversing and getting better weapons from a military hobby shop end up being such a big issue they get their own Sidequest.
  • Devil Survivor ignores the problem as well by skipping over equipment, but also explain that the technology that lets people summon demons is also responsible for making them able to fight demons at all, as a person without such protection would get instantly pasted by the first hostile demon they met.
  • The Devil Summoner games avert the trope by making you a trained demon summoner from a lineage of demon summoners, particularly in the Raidou Kuzunoha games, equipped with the best you can manage at the time.
  • The Digital Devil Saga games start you with guns and ammunition that are perfectly fine for fighting normal humans... but those are in precious short supply now that everyone's turning into demons. Turns out the best way to kill a demon is with another demon.
• Shining in the Darkness, a SEGA game in the Shining Series tells you to save the king's daughter, your father, and... the kingdom's budget, with how much they give you.
• Shores of Hazeron dumped the player in the wilderness of an earthlike world with nothing more than a knife, and expected them to start an interstellar empire.
• A typical feature of Silent Hill games is that the protagonist will usually start the game with only a wooden plank or an iron bar to fend off the nasties with. Tends to be justified in that most people don't go to resort towns expecting to be attacked by deformed, rotting dogs or abominations wrapped in their own skin.
  • The protagonists' arsenal, or lack thereof, are entirely justified in every game, considering the circumstances. Harry accidentally crashes into Silent Hill. James was already unbalanced enough to go looking for his dead wife. Heather is having an everyday lunch at the mall, and she's already packing a knife on her. Henry is just some bloke sitting around in his apartment. Travis is a trucker minding his business. Alex is just returning from deployment ^note actually a mental hospital. Murphy is a prisoner in the middle of a transfer and has nothing on his person. Why would any of this average joes expect any of the ordeals the game has in store for them? If anything, this trope is justified.
• Slime Forest Adventure: Well, you're not actually a hero, you're a potato farmer who accidentally stumbled into the plot (such as it is). So, it's perfectly natural that you start with a hoe and the clothes on your back.
• Averted almost completely in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters. The reason none of the Hidden Village guard except Danette joins you is because there's few of them to begin with and they need to protect Layna (who is two centuries old by now and needs to sleep for days on end to live), you can't buy items from anybody for various reasons except from Gig (and it's unlikely anybody else even has the stuff you get from Gig anyway, since the Items in the game are really you just using Gig's powers through the use of "Gig Edicts"), nearly every bit of civilization you go to that isn't against you will offer you their best soldiers to join your party, and the monetary unit you use in the game are "Gig Points", rather than an actual currency, which explains why nobody funds you.
  • It's also worth noting that Danette and the main character both use Infinity+1 Swords as their default weapons. The game doesn't feature any micromanagement of individual units beyond their experience level.
• Played straight and averted in several of the Splinter Cell games:
  • Justified in Splinter Cell: Conviction, which starts out with Sam Fisher on the lam after the events of Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Most of the first few missions have Sam having to pick up weapons (which are then added to an omnipresent "Weapon Stash" that shows up in levels) or scavenge bits of tech or items to help him — for instance, the "sticky camera" from previous games is initially replaced with a rear-view mirror he takes off a car door. Despite this, the only actual benefit he gets from having Grim as his backup is one of her contacts, who gifts him with a pair of proto-tech goggles when Sam makes it into Third Echelon HQ.
  • In Splinter Cell: Blacklist, President Caldwell authorizes the creation of Fourth Echelon by gifting Sam and Grim the Paladin, a heavily-modified transport plane that boasts top-of-the-line equipment. However, you don't get any gear besides your default suit and pistol at the beginning of the game, and any upgrades you buy for the plane (including an upgraded medbay, radar and all of your additional weapons/equipment) have to be purchased with funds you acquire through the course of the campaign. The game does gift the player certain weapons or armor if you've completed certain side-mission chains, but this is intended more as a Bragging Rights Reward than an actual admission of help from the government.
• Spellforce. The clothes on your back and a sword are your main equipment. As an additional perk, it will cost you a small fortune to upgrade your weapons and/or spells every level.
• Averted in Sryth. You do have some basic equipment and as soon as you arrive in Hawklor (the starting village) you can visit Irzynn the Outfitter, who gives you quite a lot of free stuff (though all of it is low quality) before moving to Durnsig. If your character has been upgraded to AG status (i.e. if you have subscribed) you can visit him in Durnsig and get Goblindoom (which is the best weapon available to AG members for quite some time) and Adventurer's Ring (one of the best rings early in the game). Also, in some of the early adventures, such as the River Pirates and the Secret of Stoneback Hill, you are given free items you can take. Later in the game you’re on your own, but by that time you likely have better stuff than any NPC except Tallys (who is the man to go to if you have somehow managed to collect a substantial amount of Adventurer Tokens, or if you just donated a few hundred bucks and would like to buy some shiny new toys for your character).
• Played with across the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series.
  • In the first game, you're tossed out of the trader's bunker with little other than a Makarov pistol and a jacket. Justified, because you're an amnesiac who was pulled out of a car wreck in the the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and the trader has no interest in wasting good equipment on someone with no credentials, cash, or reputation who could end up dead five minutes after going outside.
  • In the second game, you were again rescued (this time by members of a small faction in a remote area of the Zone that are barely hanging on against bandits and renegades), but this becomes subverted when you find out you can recover the extremely high-end sniper rifle you were using in the intro cutscene, then subverted again when you find the damn thing and it's in the worst condition possible and empty to boot.
  • Averted in the third game, where you are an undercover military agent sent into the Zone and are given some decent gear right out of the gate, and can get your hands on several high-grade weapons and Powered Armor within a couple hours of play.
• Averted and subverted numerous times in Star Ocean: The Second Story. The backwater town you start in supplies you what little it can before you go to save one of their number, the king of the first continent will give you 'travel money' intermittently, and even the desolate, monster-ravished barely surviving colony you encounter later will reluctantly give all the equipment they own to what is essentially their last hopeless gambit (You.). Of course, shopkeepers are still greedy jerks and only give discounts if you use a powerful group-IC skill or prettyication medicines (seriously). Or if you blackmail them with forged documents. Priorities much?
  • In the first Star Ocean, two of your early party members are aliens from technologically advanced species (that is, humans) and are part of the Federation. However their decision to save Roak is technically against orders, so they can't bring any government backing. And the plan requires time travel through a blatant copy of The Guardian of Forever (Star Trek ripoffs abound in the beginning of this game), which demands that all artifacts of an advanced future has to be left behind. (Including, for some inexplicable reason, your sword.) When you arrive in the past, merely getting a weapon to fight with requires a quest.
• Super Robot Wars toys with this all the time. While it has its moments that hold true to the trope ("Sorry, all of our forces are busy elsewhere, so please take on that army with two Jegans and a ReGZ,") for the most part it gives some concrete excuse. For instance, in Original Generation, you regularly receive shipments of equipment and items, but you're just one squadron out of the entire army in the war, so you don't get special treatment aside from some nifty new toys every so often.
  • This makes less sense in Original Generation 2, where everyone and their mum hails your guys as "The heroes of the L5 Campaign". Then again, the politicians all hate you and you've collected enough superweapons by now that you could bring hell on Earth with ease, so it sort of works.
  • Pointed out between two of the rivaling faction, SRX and ATX. While SRX team's object is to develop a brand New Super Prototype equiped with T-Link system and Tronium Engine which in other words, Super Robot power and Awesomeness in a Real Robot frame. ATX tried differents style of technology (earth technology) to reach the same result, and what ATX-team do (specifically Dr.Marion do) is to MODIFY FRICKIN GESPENST/ GESPENST MK.II FRAME to reach a Super Prototype Power Levels.
  • There's actually a conversation in Original Generation about you missing out on getting the original Huckebein—you know, the one that blew off Rai's arm—your people remark that you already have the stupidly powerful R-GUN (and by extension the SRX... and the Giganscudo... and the Huckebein 009... and possibly the original-model Gespenst... and, yeah, the list goes on) and that the top brass won't trust you with another superweapon.
• Both justified and averted in Tales of Vesperia. You begin the game as a man running from the law and throughout the game very few people know of your role in saving the world so no one would actually offer you a discount. However, as your friends bundle you out of your hometown ahead of the Imperial soldiers, they press on you all they can spare including food, a map and money. The protagonist was particularly upset about the last one as they all had little money to go around in the Lower Quarter.
• Nearly every Tomb Raider game has Lara Croft start her adventure with nothing but a pair of pistols and some small health kits, despite the fact that nearly every artifact she hunts down usually has bad things happen to her from various people and animals. Averted in Tomb Raider II where Lara learns her lesson from last year's grueling adventure and she carries a shotgun as well.
• In Too Human you're a cybernetic god who can cut a swath through enemies like a hot knife through butter... and yet you start the game with weapons and armor so pathetic that you'll be replacing as soon as it's possible (Hand Waved by the notion that apparently, not long before the events of the game, you were dead). Furthermore, even as a god you'll still be paying for things in shops.
  • Potentially justified as you are buying weapons and armor from other "gods", or (in the case of blueprints) paying for the materials to construct the potentially powerful designs. The armor you got for pre-ordering the game though attempts to avert this.
• Pretty much every Scenario in Treasure of the Rudra.
• UFO Aftermath, although justified in that you start out just after aliens rain deadly spores from space and turn the planet into a mutant-encrusted wasteland. Essentially you get Uzis, grenades and shotguns, and have to loot the P90s, Super Striker grenade launchers, and extraterrestrial railguns as you go.
• Ultima series:
  • Good and noble king he may be, but Lord British never seems to have much to offer in the way of material resources when he summons you to his universe to save the day. Note that in Ultima IV, the continual poverty and starvation might be part of the Secret Test of Character necessary to become The Avatar.
  • In Ultima VI, he offers you free pick of whatever is available in his castle (which isn't all that much), but will attack and kill you if you take his dinner fork. Of course, every other NPC will attack you on sight if they see you stealing something. Including the blind NPC.
  • In Ultima VII, the Avatar has been gone from Britannia so long that some of his tools have become museum pieces, and the player must break into the museum under cover of night and steal them. Lord British, on the other hand, is happy to let you have the artifacts of yours that remain in his possession.
  • In Ultima VII Part II, you start out with all the cool equipment from the last game, only to lose it in a magical teleportation storm. Mercifully, most of your gear (and crew) will be found in the strangest locations, due to that teleportation storm.
  • Averted in Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams, in which the rescue expedition to Mars includes a set of practical, useful supplies for starting out.
  • In Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, you're summoned to rescue a baron's daughter from the eponymous Huge Underground Dungeon. So naturally he just tosses you in there with jack-all to your name and locks the door. Well, he believes that you are responsible for his daughter's disappearance and are lying about being the Avatar. He really thinks he's giving you the death penalty by throwing you in there.
    • As Spoony points out that's not very logical either: doesn't the baron want his daughter to be rescued? Regardless if you had anything to do with the kidnapping, wouldn't it be in the baron's best interests to say "OK, here are the best weapons and equipment we have. Bring my daughter back from the Abyss and we let you go, no questions asked."? I mean, that's pretty much what he does only instead of giving you the best possible chance of bringing his daughter back alive, he just chucks you in the pit with nothing.
• Urban Chaos: Riot Response had a funny aversion of this. In response to the Ax-Crazy Burners running around the city, you and the rest of your elite zero-tolerance unit are given pistols, which would suck in any other scenario, but this pistol is extremely accurate, packs a punch, has a lot of ammo and is a god when fully upgraded. Even when you're given newer toys or just loot some from the corpses of your enemies, you'll find that you'll be using the pistol a lot. And don't forget the riot shield and taser.
• Uncharted Waters: New Horizons:
  • Subverted in one scenario: the player is sent on his mission with almost nothing to his name but a broken down boat, as some sort of character-building exercise — but before he can Get on the Boat, several characters discreetly slip him some extra money to get him off to a good start. Queen mom also sneaks him a brooch he can pawn off.
  • In another New Horizons scenario, the main character is offered "all the gold he requires" by Henry VIII, but is shortchanged by a jealous court official. Also, the boat he commandeers is a Latin (not made for combat, oh so not made for combat) and the jealous court official named it "Simpleton". The king gives him a short sword and a leather armor. Your first mate (a drunken lout) is better equipped than this. It gets better quickly as Otto gets 10000 gold pieces and a Spanish Galleon very shortly after this thanks to aforementioned First Mate.
• Uninvited: You must brave the haunted mansion with NOTHING. (Of course, that was because your car crashed and exploded earlier. But that doesn't explain why you aren't carrying, say, a wallet or a license.) You don't even have purple underwear to crap in if any of the horrors catch you!
• In Vagrant Story, Ashley Riot is a Riskbreaker - an elite agent/commando that's often tasked with escorting dangerous prisoners. His equipment doesn't reflect this. In a game with a ton of different equipment he gets a bronze scimitar and his armour is even worse - he's got bandages on his hands, sandals for his legs and chaps that exposes his butt cheeks.
• Averted in a big way in Valkyria Chronicles where your entire squad has access to the best weapons R&D can design as soon as they are designed (technically you have to fund their research, but the cash comes easy especially if you do your missions well). What's more, shortly after rescuing the princess she starts giving you weapons from the Royal Armoury (for free!) which are almost always better than your R&D equivalents.
• Warcraft III: In the first mission of the expansion's Blood Elf campaign, you get access to the entire techtree, including flyers and siege guns for what is a relatively easy mission (repair three observatories that show you most of the region including incoming attacks). Come the second level, the (racist, human) Alliance commander orders all support troops and cavalry away, leaving you to face four undead bases with nothing but Blood Elf troops, which are considerably less hard-hitting.
  Kael'thas: This is preposterous! Am I to face the undead with nothing but sticks and harsh language?
• Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine does this to help establish how much of a badass Captain Titus is. Standard issue equipment for a Space Marine is a Chainsword and Bolter (basically a fully automatic rocket-propelled grenade launcher) and Space Marine Captains are very likely to carry a Power Sword or Power Axe instead of a Chainsword. You start the game using a Jump Pack (that you drop right after landing) to land on an Ork ship in mid flight with nothing more than a combat knife (which would be a broadsword to a normal human) and Bolt Pistol.
  • As more advanced weaponry is contained around the forge world the game takes place on (a world essentially designated entirely for industrial production and creating the best equipment the Imperium can offer, this one uniquely for creating Humongous Mecha) or dropped onto it with drop pods while the situation on the planet was in general implied to be very desperate and tense, and Titus' landing was made up on the spot by him completely while they were in orbit, it may be inferred their suppliers were unable to better equip them quickly enough and everyone was certain the Space Marines would be fine once they made it planet-side anyway - after all, who better to be expected to manage to equip themselves on a world teeming with weaponry than a very extensively genetically-engineered Super-Soldier that's been brutally trained for decades?
• Warhammer: Dark Omen: Averted in Shadow of the Horned Rat and its sequel Dark Omen. Your Grudgebringer mercenary band start off with well-equipped infantry and even better cavalry companies, with their only shortcoming being a lack of numbers. To top it off both companies have good heroes as leaders and start with some magic items, including an artifact-class enchanted sword. Both starting companies compare especially well to some later mercenaries you can hire like the newbie Black Avengers or the various militia that get temporarily attached to you. This goes up a notch in the 2nd game where the Grudgebringers have expanded and start with a cannon and crossbow company in addition to their original cavalry and infantry.
• Witchaven originally started the main character, big badass with Designated Hero credentials, invading the eponymous Witchaven... with a knife. After complaints with the demo, developers just gave the main character every weapon in the game at the start (weapons eventually break).
• Wolfenstein 3-D. In most ports, it would seem that you are sent by no less than President Roosevelt himself into the bowels of Castle Germansomething to defeat Master D and his Badds. For this special mission, Franky equips you with... a knife. Averted in the original version, where you were a prisoner and the knife is a shiv you used to get your first pistol.
  • Episode 1 of the original Castle Wolfenstein starts with you getting a pistol that a fellow prisoner stole from a guard.
  • The first map of Return to Castle Wolfenstein has the player starting with a pistol he got from shanking a guard.
  • Averted in the 2009 Wolfenstein. The first weapon you get is an MP40, and it just keeps getting better from there.
  • Enforced in Wolfenstein: The New Order: every time BJ returns to the The Kreisau Circle in Berlin, he loses all of his weapons and with very rare exceptions begins the next mission with only a single pistol, a knife, and his laser cutter or Laserkraftwerk. Presumably, this is done for stealth's sake; BJ's already a behemoth of a man, and making him into a Walking Arsenal in civilian areas would alert every Nazi in a 20 mile radius to his presence. Luckily, all the upgrades that BJ finds for his weapons stick around on every gun he finds in the future.
• The early X-Universe games were infamous for starting the player off with a pittance of credits and a poorly equipped/crappy ship, even when the player was needed to save millions of people in the plots. Alternate game starts starting with X3: Reunion can make it either much easier (such as starting off with a heavy fighter), or much much harder, such as the Goner Witness start. You start out in a Goner Ranger, a totally unarmed and painfully slow ship with only 350 credits, which is enough to buy about 29 Energy Cells, the cheapest ware in the game. The cheapest new ship is something like 50,000 credits.
• In X-COM: UFO Defense, the titular alien-fighting organization is painfully under-funded by the Council of Funding Nations, each of which offer usually less than a million dollars a month.
  • Though initial resources (including first base with everything inside) are paltry but not that bad. On the other hand, for some reason you have to R&D things that don't need alien input (like laser weapons) on your own and cannot even sell absurdly advanced technologies you found... other than by building ready goods in workshop.
    • UFO components and alien weapons can be easily sold in large quantities, but only after researchers have determined just what the heck they are. Your soldiers can't even throw alien artifacts before they're researched.
    • This was lampshaded in the books based on the game where you found out that anything you sold was on the black market to compensate for the lack of funding and alien technology was DNA coded and it was a case of putting 'human' on the accepted user list.
  • The worst With This Herring abuse in the XCOM series is not your equipment, which is miserable, or your funding, which is miserly, but your soldiers. Rather than give you the elite special-ops Delta/SAS/Spetznaz/GSG-9 types you would expect, you get a bunch of folks who have inhumanly bad reflexes and apparently didn't even go through basic training; some of them would almost certainly have failed the physical.
    • At least your starting weapons are pretty good by human standards... in Terror From The Deep though, they're quite pathetic. Justified in that current underwater firearms are relatively weak and little-used.
  • Averted in XCOM: Enemy Unknown: The value of "credits" isn't given, but applied economics estimates that one thousand credits is enough to buy your own third-world dictatorship. You get paid a third of this each month for a C grade war effort. Any equipment that exists before you start reverse-engineering alien tech is given to you for free. Not to mention the already-empowered state-of-the-art secret base, complete with a legion of the world's finest engineers and scientists. Now go out there and get your soldiers killed until you steal enough gear to reverse-engineer and bring out the pain.
  • Subverted in the sequel, XCOM 2 - the "resistance" as it stands barely exists at all before you show up since the fall of XCOM twenty years previously left them without leadership, and one of the biggest challenges outside the missions is simply getting in contact with distant resistance cells. However, you still get basic ballistic weapons, armor, and a handful of rookie fighters for free, recruits are moderately cheap, the resistance havens you do have contact with will give you monthly donations of supplies, and you get a swanky mobile base with internal expansion options to launch raids from that can circle the globe in hours. If you weren't facing a global alien dictatorship with a hilariously one-sided technological, numerical, and propaganda advantage, it might be seen as too easy.
• Subverted in Xenonauts. While human kinetics are still crap barely fit to kill starting aliens, unlike XCOM you will at least start with reasonably elite troops and the laughable idiots will only start showing up if you lose any of your original men.
• Xenosaga avoids this for the most part; the characters never really get more powerful (as none of the major battles are really describably and definitively "more powerful" than any of the earlier ones, and for those that are, the raw combat ability of the main characters isn't what wins it; yay for cutscenes), and moreover, the second game doesn't use shops at all! Moreover, since the first and third games predominantly use internet-based shopping, and no one really has much reason to believe that anyone's trying to save the world, expected discounts don't really come into play either.
  • Discounts in the first game come about legitimately, as a possible result of Shion's online-mutual-fund-investment savvy.

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