A Taste of Power: Difference between revisions

 

Compare [[Bag of Spilling]], where a player character's hard-won power is [[Hand Wave|somehow]] lost between the end of one game and the beginning of its sequel. If you wind up having to fight the [[Crutch Character]] later, you've been walking in [[Villain Shoes]]. May coincide with [[And Now for Someone Completely Different]]. The inversion is [[Eleventh Hour Superpower]], where you get special abilities at the ''end'' of the game. Also contrast [[Second Hour Superpower]], where the player character starts generically and gets his/her defining ability only partway through. May be [[Purposefully Overpowered]].

 

== [[Action Adventure]] ==

** Strangely, ''[[Need for Speed]]: Undercover'' completely averts the trope when it'd be ''entirely logical'' to have it in full force. You're not some out of luck wanna be racer, you're ''undercover for the FBI''. You think they'd give you more than a barely decent car...

 

** ''Metroid Prime 3'' just uses the [[Bag of Spilling]], but starts Samus off with the Space Jump Boots, Morph Ball and its bombs, and the Charge Beam. [[Word of God]] says that it was fun to make Samus lose her gear, but by the 3rd Prime game, they stopped doing it as a plot point because it wasn't fresh anymore. Also, after obtaining Phazon weapon, until you pass corruption threshold on Bryyo, you could shoot anything to death harmlessly, but walk an inch past that cutscene with the Phazon pool and even if you fly back to Norion and go to the generator, you can just overload and lose.

** ''[[Metroid Other M]]'' has Samus keep her abilities from ''Super [[Metroid]]'', but then refuses to use them until Adam gives the OK since she is working under his command. During the training session at the start, you get the chance to use the extremely powerful Power Bomb. A little bit later, you're told to not use it because its power can vaporize anyone nearby, thus you can't use the super weapon until at the end of the game.

 

== [[Platform Game]] ==

* In ''[[Captain Comic|Captain Comic 2]]'', you get unlimited fuel for your jetpack in the second to last level. The last level prevents you from using your jetpack at all.

* The new ''[[Bionic Commando (Video Game)|Bionic Commando]]'' game has a tutorial shortly after the beginning with several powers available to you. Although you get to practice them all, don't expect to use ''any'' of them until the game tells you it's okay (except zip line kicks, those you can do right away).

* The Hentai RPG ''[[Knights of Xentar]]'' starts your character at the lower-mid levels, with decent stats. However, the moment we're done with the introductory area, the plot depowers you and strips you nude.

* In ''[[Star Wars]]: [[The Force Unleashed]]'', the prologue level is played as Darth Vader. He plays like the normal player character would after being powered up to the max, with all the combos and powers available, except [[Mighty Glacier|he does not have the dash powers]].

* ''[[Star Ocean the Second Story (Video Game)|Star Ocean the Second Story]]'' has one of the two primary characters start out with a futuristic (and powerful) energy beam weapon. It doesn't take long for it to run out of energy, and the game doesn't provide a way to recharge it.

** During the battle tutorial in ''[[Star Ocean Till the End of Time]]'', the main character has a ridiculous amount of HP and MP, but has only about a tenth of that in the first real battle. This is explained in-game by the tutorial being a video game within the game's world. (This is also foreshadowing.)

* ''[[Golden Sun Dark Dawn]]'' has this when Isaac and Garet join your party for a bit and let you borrow their Djinn. They let you have enough Djinn to use at least a level 3 summon, but when combined with their Djinn, you can summon a level 4 one. After they leave the party, they take back their Djinn too, putting you back in square one.

* ''[[Agarest Senki 2]]'' has Weiss facing off against Summerill, servant of the dark god Chaos. He at this point is level 99 and equipped with Veldafard, a very powerful sword. You get to own Summerill in your first fight. After which, a cutscene happens and you get flung over to who knows where at that point. When Weiss recovers, he gets reduced to level one, and you can't equip his sword anymore for some weird reason, not to mention he now has amnesia. {{spoiler|Turns out, there's a lot more to that story later on.}}

* Inverted in ''[[Inazuma Eleven]] 3'', where the opening cutscene shows off some of the awesome power of the ''rivals'' you'll be up against, as well as foreshadowing little bits of the plot involving those characters.

** Subverted for a first few matches. Your character do have evolved skills and game breaking abilities, however, these players have horrible stemina, and get tired after a few uses of specials, usually even before the first half ends.

* Dunban in ''[[Xenoblade Chronicles]]'' provides this, with you controlling him in the opening whilst he wields the Monado, the game's titular weapon. He later temporarily rejoins the party for an early segment of the game, still wielding the weapon, and while he relinquishes it to [[The Hero|Shulk]] before the end of that segment, he's still likely to be around 10 levels higher then the rest of the group and far stronger then them even without it. He rejoins for good at a point where everyone is likely to have caught up to him in level.

 

* Super Nashwan Power (http://www.nashwan.org/), from ''[[Xenon]] 2''. Oh Oh, Oh Yeah!

* ''[[Wingnuts]] 2'' starts you out with the best plane in the game (fast, strong, a ton of missiles, etc.) as you shoot down training blimps. Then, when the action starts and the Baron busts loose of the Temporal Prison, you have to fight a boss... which steals your plane right as you defeat it. Your next selection of planes is... not as good.

* In ''[[Assassin's Creed I (Video Game)|Assassin's Creed I]]'' you start off with all equipment and a great deal of health. Sadly none of this is enough to stop you from failing the first mission (albeit by the fault of the protagonist), and being stripped of everything - including, rather confusingly, abilities that shouldn't be possible to take away, like dodging and being able to grab ledges while falling.

** ''[[Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (Video Game)|Assassin's Creed Brotherhood]]'' starts off right after the final battle of ''[[Assassin's Creed II (Video Game)|Assassin's Creed II]]'', with Ezio having all the endgame equipment of that game, only to lose most of them soon afterward when his villa is sacked, Ezio having woken up and rushed to the ramparts with only a longsword and a hidden blade vambrace -- fortunately, it was the one with both a built-in pistol (a late-game weapon in ''AC2'') and a poison injector (an ''AC2'' mid-game assassination tool).

* Justified in the ''[[Splinter Cell]]: Double Agent''. In the first mission, you're flouncing through the fjords weighed down with a plethora of high tech gadgets. In the second, you're locked up in prison and have to crawl through an air duct to snag a lockpicking kit. Ouch.

 

== [[Turn Based Strategy]] ==

* Almost every [[Fire Emblem]] game starts the party with at least one tier 2 character. This can be good for beginning players, and useful for taking out early bosses, especially the heavily armored ones. [[Crutch Character|However over using them takes valuable experience points away from all your tier 1 characters so your team can stay unbalanced for far too long]]. Experienced players tend to use them as [[Meat Shield|Meat Shields]] or just forget about them entirely.

** Another example from in the game is when Alexander tries to kill Zetta, Salome, whose level 1200, interferes and allows you to take him down easily. This is actually necessary since Alexander is level 1000 and unless you're leveling up the [[Bonus Boss|BonusBosses]], you have no chance of beating him.

* ''[[Soul Nomad and The World Eaters]]'' has moment of this in both its normal and demon paths. In the normal path, the player can get boasted to level 2000 if they [[A Deal With The Devil|accept Gig's power during]] during the [[Hopeless Boss Battle|first fight with Fienne]], allowing for an easy win, but resulting in a [[Nonstandard Game Over]] afterwords since accepting Gig's deal leads to him taking over your body. Later there's an automatic occurrence of the player getting the same level boast during the 2nd fight with Fienne for no reason apart from the fact that she, like Alexander in ''[[Makai Kingdom]]'', is far too strong for the player if they been leveling up normally. In the demon path, the player briefly [[Guest Party Member]] in the form of Blazing Ghestal/ {{spoiler|zombie Median the Conqueror}}, who is by far the most powerful unit/character in the game.