Character Select Forcing/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A situation set up in a Video Game where certain characters are better suited to handle a given challenge than others, pressuring the player to choose them over anyone else.

  • Straight: A game lets the player regularly rotate between three members of a Power Trio: Barbara, a sword-swinging warrior; Velvet, a cold spellcaster, and Dash, an agile 'acrobat'. Each has powers connected to different elements, along with their strengths and weaknesses. However, choosing the wrong character makes the going far tougher.
  • Exaggerated:
    • It is flat-out impossible for the 'wrong' hero to advance at ALL in levels that aren't tailored to fit their strengths.
    • The player chooses one character to play the whole game through at the start, only to find that character struggles through challenges the others breeze through.
  • Justified:
    • The storyline is about how every person has different strengths and skills, and they are all important and useful in their own way.
    • The game is a puzzle game, and choosing the right character with the right strengths is the way to complete every puzzle.
  • Inverted:
    • The game chooses your player character completely at random, but none of them are any better than the others.
    • Instead of getting to choose your player character, you get to choose which of several levels to play. Some are well-suited to your character's gameplay, some aren't.
  • Subverted: ???
  • Double Subverted: ???
  • Parodied: Upon choosing the wrong character, they take one step into the level before getting exploded by a random Death Trap. Or having a cow dropped on them.
  • Deconstructed: ???
  • Reconstructed: ???
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted:
    • The level designs only slightly favor one character over another--it's quite possible to use your favorite throughout the game with only minor increases in difficulty.
    • The player can cycle through all three heroes at any time, including in the middle of a level.
  • Enforced:
    • The designers wanted players to actually use each of the heroes offered to them.
    • Each of the three represents a difficulty level: Barbara is easy to use at first, but her abilities aren't as versatile in the long run, and she only has a couple of long-ranged attacks. Velvet, on the other hand, starts out very fragile, but eventually grows into walking icy doom. Dash, for her part, starts out somewhat in-between, and develops into a swift sniper good at aiming electrical blasts and knives, but still not as physically strong as Barbara or magically adept as Velvet.
  • Lampshaded: ???
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: It is extremely hard to play the game with the second of two playable characters. However, completing the game with this character has become a sign of skill among the fandom, so much so that new players attempt to learn to play the game with this character.
  • Discussed: "The Fire People are vulnerable to ice magic. Velvet, you take the lead for now."
  • Conversed: "Dammit, another Dash level. I'm not good at her control scheme, and her voice is so annoying."

Back to Character Select Forcing, but only if you picked the Bard.

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