He was told to go where the business was. He went the wrong way.
"Praise be to the deity of conveniently placed inns!"
— The second Mii in your party, Miitopia
When you've faced off against many enemies and your resources are low, the most common way to get back in top shape is to sleep at a Trauma Inn. But what if you're not near a town, or perhaps deep in a dangerous cave, or the depths of a cursed forest, or within the walls of a long abandoned, haunted fortress that doesn't have anyone else around it (save dangerous things that want to kill you) for miles? Well, maybe you can use an item, usually on a save point, that does the same thing. Maybe there's a convenient magical spring or button that serves the same purpose. Depending on the game, maybe the save point itself will function as a full party restore.
Every now and then though, you'll find something in such areas that functions as the classic inn rest... because it is an actual inn.
Very obviously, numerous questions abound, beyond even the foremost one of "Why do the monsters likely infesting the area not come into the inn and kill everyone". Such as "How did the normal people get there and set this up in an area where you, an established fighter of some sort, have difficulty surviving?" "How much business does this place actually get?" "How do they even get supplies and resources that running an inn would need?" and so on. Sometimes a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation (if the whole game basically takes place in one big "danger area", then that's where the inns will be, why ask questions that aren't important?), but beyond that, such a situation makes even less sense than merchants possibly being in such locations (and beating you to them), as merchants 1) can be mobile, 2) can theoretically have guardians of some sort, and 3) might just be trying to make their way through the area themselves when you ran into them, while an inn is a stationary location.
By its nature, this is almost always a video game trope. Compare the equally oddly-placed Dungeon Shop and the equally as hard to reach Secret Shop.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Action RPG
- Brandish takes place in an ancient kingdom that was buried ages ago due to plot, which main character Varik/Ares falls into after a magic-caused mini earthquake. There are no INNS amongst the many levels he must climb to escape (the game instead makes use of the Healing Spring), but there are weapon, magic, and tool shops manned by other people who also fell into the depths and, lacking one aspect or another to use the items themselves, have resigned themselves to never escaping; it's outright said by the first that they just found their personal shop-rooms and set up there to hide away from the labyrinth's many monsters and sell to people who are bolder/stupider to try (one mentions that they need the healing springs themselves to stay alive down there). Exactly WHAT they can spend the gold they take from the main character when they're all stuck miles below ground is not answered, nor why the monsters stay out of their shops.
Eastern RPG
- Breath of Fire I has a brief period where your party is shrunk down to mouse size, and your only option to proceed is to head into a nearby mouse hole. You promptly have to help some mice defeat some cockroaches to get their cheese back. Except one of the mice allows you to stay at the 'Mouse Inn', which functions like any other inn in the game (it's free; why would a mouse need money?). What really makes it notable is that until you kill the 'boss cockroaches', you get into random encounters in the mouse hole. Which would include the inn, as there's no obvious side cave or any sort of sealed off place that you sleep. Maybe the mice stand guard? That's some good service for a "mouse inn"...
- Dragon Quest III has the Tower of Najima, which is basically the warm up location and your first quest. It has an inn on the first floor. Fittingly, in some translations the innkeeper will say it has been ages since he has had a customer.
- Double Dungeons takes place in an endless series of dungeons, so that's where you find the inns.
- EarthBound (1994) has Dungeon Man, which is a man turned into a walking dungeon. Which has a hospital. This is intentional, as Dungeon Man seems to consider his existence to be a Theme Park version of a dungeon instead of an actual dangerous location.
- Lampshaded in Golden Sun: The Lost Age regarding the backwater-among-backwaters town of Mikasala, where the innkeeper states that the main customers are the town's own residents when they feel like taking a vacation.
- Legacy of the Wizard is another Gameplay and Story Segregation examples. The entire game takes place in a massive underground cavern filled with monsters, and both Inns and Shops are located in many locations within the cavern's many rooms. While the shops sell different items, the Inn always functions solely as, well, an inn, which makes one wonder if there are many inns in these dangerous depths or if it's just one location with a variety of magic doors all leading to the same place.
- Legend of Legaia has something in this vein: in the first dungeon, an 'abandoned' castle infested with a dangerous mist that is full of monsters, you find a room where it's noted that you can use a heavy bookcase to wedge the door shut and keep it firmly closed, letting you sleep in the bed for a full heal. The fact that main character Vahn can just nap while monsters prowl and skulk just outside the room he's in likely shows he's got Nerves of Steel.
- Lufia & The Fortress of Doom:
- In the Northwest/Apprentice Tower there's no inn as such, but the plot-forwarding apprentice actually lives in said tower complete with a bednote . While he explicitly says he's there for training, you can get into random encounters in his room, so one wonders what he does when he wants to sleep.
- One is found in the Green Tower of the "Three Color Towers" part of the game, and another in the cave on Elba Island during the Alumina fetch quest. These stick out even more because Lufia ALSO has 'magic glowing floor buttons that restore your health and MP' in them as well.
- Miitopia has an inn at the end of every single area, no matter what the world's setting is. There are Inns in Nimbus, The Sky Scraper and even Otherworld! It's even lampshaded by the characters in-game.
- Paper Mario 64 has several "Toad Houses", the game's version of the Trauma Inn, within Bowser's Castle, the sprawling endgame dungeon. This is mostly portrayed as imprisoned Toads offering to keep watch while Mario rests in their prison bunk. They still describe it as a "Toad House", in game.
- Pokémon Gold and Silver, and their remakes, has Mt. Silver, an area with the highest level Pokémon in the game, where only champions who've gotten all 16 badges from both Johto and Kanto are permitted to enter. Still, there is a single Pokémon Center there. In the originals, there is another NPC in the Pokémon Center, but she is removed in the remakes, leaving only the Pokémon Center Nurse and the True Final Boss player character from Pokémon Red and Blue in the entire area.
- Secret of the Stars allows you to sleep in most beds for a full heal. You confront the first boss in what is essentially his living quarters, which includes a bed. Which you can sleep in; he'll patiently wait for you to talk to him to actually initiate combat.
- Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars takes this to its logical conclusion with the endgame Volcano level. While proceeding through it, you run into a unique character called Hinopio who not only serves as a Trauma Inn but also as an Item Shop and an Armor Shop (the latter selling the second-best armor in the game), running between the three makeshift 'counters' as you move between them to serve each role. To drive home how lacking the 'inn' is, you literally go to sleep on a pile of wood boxes. (It still works as an inn, despite this).
Western RPG
- Fable: The Darkwood Bordello is inexplicably located deep in a monster-infested forest, far away from any settlement, though villagers somehow appear there all the same. The Hero can rest and recover there, but he has to share the bed.
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has Ghostgate, a Tribunal Temple fortress situated at the only gap in the Ghostfence surrounding Red Mountain. It contains a hotel with a few merchants for pilgrims who wish to visit the holy site.
- Pathfinder: Kingmaker has the first place you're sent to being a small trading post and inn that serves as a Home Base. It's located in the middle of nowhere and has a serious problem with the local bandit population. If you question the innkeeper, he explains that he didn't like how busy cities were, or how nosy everyone in small villages is, and the seclusion's worth it.note
Non-Video Game Examples
Jokes
- There's a "Shaggy Dog" Story joke revolving around a tourist lost in a desert, and repeatedly coming across traveling bedouins who tells him they can't share their water with him, but instead offers to give him neckties for free. Said tourist turns them all down, thinking they're out of their minds... until he comes across a five-star hotel in the middle of the desert. Alas, one of the hotel's dress-codes turns out to be "No necktie, no service". (Full joke here).
Literature
- The Bone Chillers book, "Welcome to Alien Inn". The titular inn is conveniently located in the middle of a wintry wasteland, which the protagonist and his family stumbles upon while lost in the snow, and decides to bunk in. Said inn turns out to belong to a hostile extraterrestrial race intending to abduct humans and to perform a Kill and Replace on guests who checked in; in fact the entire inn - and the blizzard - is a hologram created by the aliens. Then again, considering the book's title...
- Dragonlance: In the short story "Raistlin's Daughter", the Wayward Inn is located at the edge of a magical forest few would dare enter ... unless the forest moves to leave it on barren ground no-one would farm. The innkeeper's explanation for choosing this location is that when travellers find themselves passing the Forest of Wayreth, they're really desperate for somewhere secure to spend the night.
Western Animation
- Family Guy: Played for Laughs in "Road to Europe". Brian and Stewie are stranded in a desert after their camel dies. They begin to cut the camel open and take shelter in it (not unlike in The Empire Strikes Back) until Brian suddenly spots a Comfort Inn that just happens to be nearby.
