Cutscene Power to the Max/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character is immensely more powerful when not playing them.

  • Straight: In gameplay, Dan is an average fighter. In cutscenes, he is the best fighter on his team.
  • Exaggerated: In gameplay, Dan is unable to squash a fly. In cutscenes, he can kill the Big Bad in one punch.
  • Justified:
    • All characters are powerful magic users, and are Nigh Invulnerable. Before the actual fight, they have to launch a wave of preemptive attacks on the enemy and take down their defenses, but he always manages to take down theirs as well.
    • Dan has to keep his rare and dangerous power of telekinesis, which would make him a target for all sorts of villains, hence he only uses it when he has no other choice, and those situations only ever come up in cutscenes.
  • Inverted: Cutscene Incompetence
  • Subverted: Dan uses telekinesis in a cutscene. Right after said cutscene, you can use that ability and upgrade it.
  • Double Subverted: But in the next cutscene, Dan demonstrates the ability to use it for flight. That one remains reserved for cutscenes.
  • Parodied: The fourth wall prevents him from using some powers in actual gameplay, but since there is No Fourth Wall in the actual cutscenes, he can do some really awesome shit when the player has no control over him.
  • Deconstructed: Dan enjoys the raw power that he can use, and begins to seek out more opportunities to wield it. After growing dependent on these bursts, he slowly loses the ability to fight normally, and is eventually taken down by a move that he knowingly parried a thousand times. After this defeat, even his bursts of power start to drop in efficiency as well.
  • Reconstructed: Dan is inspired by the outpour of power he just felt, and now trains to be as strong as that time whenever he needs to be, in order to avoid becoming dependent on a randomly-occuring force.
  • Zig Zagged: Power levels vary wildly from character to character and from cutscene to cutscene.
  • Averted: There are no things in cutscenes you can't do in gameplay.
  • Enforced: Programmers cannot be arsed to write all the code needed to implement telekinesis properly. So they limit its usage to cutscenes.
  • Lampshaded: "You just wait for when fighting stops and talking starts."
  • Invoked: Both heroes and villains know that Limit Breaking is much easier in cutscenes - and use this trope to their advantage.
  • Defied: Dan doesn't use any ability in cutscenes that he couldn't already use elsewhere.
  • Discussed: "Whoa, that was totally awesome! Do that again!" "Sorry, but i seem to be unable to."
  • Conversed: "Oh great, they're at it again. They're always omnipotent in cutscenes, but suddenly lose their god-likeness when it comes to gameplay. So damn Egregious."
  • Played For Laughs: In gameplay, Dan fights with a sword and can sense danger before it happens. In cutscenes, he fights with telekinesis and can sense the end of the cutscene before it happens.
  • Played For Drama: The cutscenes always put Bob in dangerous scenarios that he just barely gets out of.
  • Exploited: No one plays as Dan. NO ONE. But they do use him as a partner character.

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