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In some racing games, no matter how much punishment a car takes, it comes out unscathed, no matter what. Is there a trope for that? Don't say Critical Existence Failure because the car doesn't explode no matter what. Bombs, rockets, multi-car crash, and other weapons only stun it.
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Do we have a trope for RPGs where you control a party, but can only directly control or give commands to one character at the time. With the rest using AI and it typically being possible to switch the character you're controlling directly and control the general behaviour of the rest by setting them as defensive/aggressive/healing/etc?
Games I can think of which use such a system include Final Fantasy XIII and Fortune Summoners.
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Is there a trope for the situation when, typically in adventure games, you have to do something mundane like break a window, but the game insists you use one particular item to do it, when either a) you've already seen several identical/suitable items which you weren't able to pick up, or b) your inventory already contains items which would more than suffice?
Variation a) comes up a lot in casual games which feature both "hidden object" and adventure elements, where there can be any number of hammers/iron bars/misc. weighty things appearing in HO scenes, but none of which can be picked up for use elsewhere.
Variation b) generally appears in traditional adventure games. You may already be carrying such items as: a crowbar, a hammer, a rock, a cannonball, a particularly weighty projector, and sundry Objects of Prodigious Weight, but no, it simply HAS to be that one baseball bat which you need to break that window (and which you inevitably have to go to great lengths to acquire), with attempts to use other items eliciting a "that won't work" or the like.
Expecting Net Hack standards of item interaction is clearly unreasonable, but the suspension of disbelief is sorely tried when this goes too far :)
Possibly comes under Gameplay and Story Segregation or Acceptable Breaks from Reality, but I couldn't find anything about this particular phenomenon.
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So if there's a game whose only difficulty levels are "Hard", "Harder", and "Hardest" - but the names are totally non-indicative of the game itself since "Hard" has the questions "add 1"/"subtract 1" and "Hardest" has the questions "add 1000"/"subtract 1000", what page would it fit on? Harder Than Hard fits the level names but not the game. Would it just go on Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels?
Edited by DawnwingopenNo Title Videogame
When a character acquires a weapon or other item, it does a prominent gesture with it. It mostly happens in video games. For example, Gordon Freeman in Half Life 2 looks at his (now armored) hands when he takes on the HEV suit. The character in Prince Of Persia holds the sword up in the air when he gets it. It's not restrictive to video games; I've just seen Grindhouse / Planet Terror, in which El Wray prominently spins the guns when he is finally given some. This also happens in many western movies. Basically, it's a pretty common trope in video games, movies and other motion pictures.
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I've been trying to find a trope to fit a particular issue in "Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7", but either there isn't one or I don't know what it's called. I'm also not sure if it's prevalent enough to count as a trope, as I'm not a huge player of games (other than the Lego ones) with this sort of mechanic (where characters have a selection of abilities assigned to them, so that a complete party is needed to do everything in a level).
Sorry for the following long-winded explanation; I thought it better to give too much detail than too little.
The issue: Harry might as well not be in the Free Play part of "Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7"; if he wasn't stuck in your party by default, I'd never use him.
In Years 1-4, he had four rare or unique abilities: Expecto Patronem, perfect broomstick control, Invisibility Cloak, and Parseltongue. The first wasn't used very often except as an in-character replacement for Riddikulus, but the other three were used in a lot of puzzles.
By the later parts of Years 5-7, anyone can use a broomstick perfectly (in the only two places you get to use them as such), most everyone has Expecto Patronem, and cauldrons with Invisibility Potion litter the place (and there's only one puzzle that uses invisibility anyway). Ron and Hermione have been gifted with one truly unique ability each, which are used in practically every room, and (due to the requirement to follow some spectacularly bad concept degradation on the author's part) Ron now has the ability to crack any Parseltongue code (rather than just the one required by the plot).
So I was looking for a trope to cover situations where (probably in a sequel) a character is reduced to space-filling eye-candy (at best) by gifting everything that made them unique to other characters.
(I looked for names like "Story-Induced Redundancy" or "No Need For X", but the former really only works for book/film-to-game adaptions.)
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If you can trade something from a sequel of the game to the first game, and it says that the item/character whatever was obtained in distant land or something similar, despite the area being accessible in the first game...
(To make this clear, I will use an example - Trading a Pokémon from Pokémon XD to Colosseum. A Pokémon in Colosseum that was traded from XD will say it was met in distant land, despite both games taking a place in Orre)
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A game where character models are better than the later games on better platforms and with graphics better overall (aside from the aforementioned models). For example, Pokémon Ranger series or Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series versus main series. Some of the Ranger sprites seem actually more detailed than Generation V's sprites (like Arbok's or Charizard's). Not to mention that Red Rescue Team was on GBA, yet Pokémon sprites still were pretty neat (at least in my opinion).
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There's a comedic video game I've been troping off and on, where part of the plot is that you're a cop whose partner is being held hostage by the bad guy. Every so often he'll send you a message begging you to, well, hurry up and rescue him, and every single time you'll have a flashback about he somehow rescued your life, or your mom's life, or made some other big sacrifice to help you. There ends up being at least 10 or so different flashbacks, and they even fight over how often it happened and what should "count", at one point.
...it's clearly parodying some trope, but which one I don't know. Player Punch is the closest, but this isn't YMMV; the game is pretty clearly doing on purpose as a running gag.
Edited by ArkadyDarellopenNo Title Videogame
Whats the trope where the heroes enter an ancient ruined city or just any place that is completely deserted and everyone is pretty unnerved. Also typically it's a place that was about stopping or caused the end of the world. And it really is empty and devoid of like, it's dangerous and nothing attacks them thats from the ancient city (But maybe the Big Bad's goons do) but they're just uneasy.
Think Ilos from Mass Effect and Chernobyl from STALKER.
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I saw it a long time ago, but there's a trope about when a player character is as lacks as much detail as possible - generic, gender-less, nameless, etc. I believe it's so that the player can put themselves in the character's position, but I'm not -positive- that was actually the point of the trope.
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Looking for a trope: In video games, it's common for the player to assign a name to their character. However, names are tricky things that can be pronounced all sorts of ways. To fix this, a lot of games assign a nickname or title to the hero, and simply call him/her by that name. For instance, Fable II calls the hero "Sparrow", male or female, during the tutorial.
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Is there a trope for when a Big Red Button is set up like Schmuck Bait, with a series of increasingly-hysterical warnings not to touch it, but when you actually touch it, nothing happens? I've seen this one a couple of times in video games.
Is it just the subverted trope version of Schmuck Bait?
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Not sure if we have this one but may as well ask before making a YKTTW just to make sure.
Is there a trope for where a cowardly character has no courage whatsoever, but if they're with a certain person, be it their best friend or person they love very much, they feel more courageous and can push on?
I put video game because an example of this would be in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2, where your partner is a complete coward, but being around you, The Hero, makes them feel much braver.
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2 similar questions
Is there a trope where a person's weapon or armor is shown having a feature which is seemingly new but the story tells you that it has always been able to do that and this is just the first time you have been put in a situation where it could be useful?
Or
Is there a trope where you ask "If such and such could do that, then why did it not do that during that one event a long time ago when it would have been useful?"
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Tinky bosses.
I was watching this youtube let's play of Megaman 7 ny Egoraptor and Jontronshow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXW11B4dEqU&feature=context-shows&list=SL)and
at around 6:36 after dying to a boss one of the commentators, I think egoraptor, exclaims "He's tinky!"
All of the bullets he had fired bounced off of the boss doing no damage and making little tink noises when they did so (6:00-6:36). The commentators then point how there are many other bosses that share this trait, and I remembered seeing quite a few of those myself playing old school games, but I can't recall any specific examples.
Is this common enough to be a trope, or could it be considered part of "Contractual boss immunity" or "attack it's weak point"? Hitting the bosses eyes did do damage without making the tinking noise.

Is there is a trope for something that isn't frequently seen in previous games, but later games make it more prominent? (like tag battles in Pokémon. I mean, I had like 6 tag battles in White 2 - I tagged 4 times with rival, once with Cheren and once with Bianca; and there is supposed to be another with Cheren, giving a total of 7. The only one in Generation III was with Steven in Emerald, Gen IV and BW had some but not as much as these games.)
Edited by PinkCelebi