Basic Trope: A character (often a boss) drops their armour and becomes much faster.
- Straight: Alice starts the fight wearing a massive suit of armour, and has very slow, but powerful strikes. Halfway through the fight, she flexes, degenerating her armour and revealing the Chainmail Bikini underneath. She suddenly moving much faster, becoming a Fragile Speedster.
- Exaggerated: Alice starts the fight inside a mecha while wearing power armour, and is almost immobile. Halfway through the fight, she ejects from the mech, strips naked, and charges at you at lightning speed as the fastest boss in the game.
- Alice starts off as an utter Stone Wall who moves with all the speed of an old man with arthritis but has armor built like a nuclear bunker. Soon as the armor is destroyed, she becomes an utter Lightning Bruiser.
- Downplayed: Alice throws off her shield partway through the fight, and switches to more aggressive swordplay.
- Justified:
- The armour worked not to protect Alice, but as a Power Limiter. Remove the armour, and you remove the limits.
- The armour was heavy, and had been wrecked into uselessness by that point in the fight anyway. It was only hindering Alice.
- Inverted: Alice fights you unarmed and unarmoured for a while, then suddenly dons Instant Armour, trading speed for protection.
- Subverted: Alice sheds the armour... and is suddenly even slower than before, no-longer having the enhancements that boost her speed.
- Double Subverted: However, she becomes a lot more agile: before she was Too Fast to Stop, and now she can dodge your attacks with ease.
- Parodied:
- Bob is so distracted by the fact that Alice is now wearing a lot less clothing that he can’t fight properly anymore.
- It takes a few tries for Alice to get the armour off, and she asks Bob to politely wait until she’s done.
- Zig Zagged: It works for Alice, but when Bob tries it he stays at the same speed. Then he does it again later and it works.
- Averted:
- Armour is not stripped off for multiform balance.
- The armor has no effect on Alice’s speed since it’s extremely lightweight and flexible.
- Enforced: Alice losing her armour is used as an excuse for Fanservice to please the target audience.
- Lampshaded: "So... nudity makes you faster on this planet?"
- Invoked: Alice finds armor uncomfortable and heavy, and so commissions a set that can disintegrate itself on command, allowing her to fight without it whenever she feels like it.
- Exploited: Bob charges up an attack while Alice is busy transforming.
- Defied: "Drop the armour and become faster? Don’t be ridiculous. No-one could strip out of armour that quickly."
- Discussed: "She’ll probably try to remove the armour in order to become faster. Not the brightest idea, but it seems to work for her.
- Conversed: "If she’s so fast without it, why does she wear it in the first place?"
- Deconstructed: The boost in speed from not wearing armour is as minimal as you would expect, meaning Alice is swiftly defeated after this point.
- Reconstructed: The speed boost is small, but the knowledge she can now die in one hit makes Alice fight much harder due to adrenaline.
Back to Shed Armor, Gain Speed
