Dungeon Bypass: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

 

 

 

Heroes that find another way to get past a maze may also count. Basically, the Dungeon Bypass is where the hero takes a shortcut instead of whatever the intended path was (possibly exploiting [[Myopic Architecture]] in the process). If used in combat, this can be in some contexts a case of [[Fighting Dirty]]. This is a [[Sub-Trope]] of [[Fake Skill]].

 

 

Compare [[Take a Third Option]] (any generic option of going along an unintended route), [[Cutting the Knot]] (for ''making'' the shortcut), and [[Easy Level Trick]] (pulling this stunt on any sort of level in a video game).

 

== Advertising ==

* An advert for jeans saw a man and a woman running through a series of walls, and by extension, rooms. Parodied in the title sequence of early series of ''Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway''.

 

* In ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS]]'', when Quattro learns that the heroine has found out where she is, she tries to console herself on the fact she's in the core of the ship while Nanoha's in the Throne Room, two places separated by many doors, swarms of drones, and a huge maze of corridors. She then notices Nanoha pointing [[BFG|her staff]] at the floor and powering up for a ''Blaster 3'' [[Wave Motion Gun|Divine Buster]], and promptly realizes that she is ''screwed''. Made even more impressive by the fact the ENTIRE ship is covered by an anti-magic field... So the beam had to be also powerful enough to resist the anti-magic effect.

{{quote|'''Quattro:''' She's going to just blast through the walls? [[Oh Crap|Oh dear mother of God...!]]}}

** This is [[Foreshadowing|foreshadowed]] in the very first episode of Strikers, where Nanoha uses Divine Buster to break through the walls when rescuing Subaru from a fire.

*** Teana repeats the feat in ''[[Sound Stage X]]'', {{spoiler|having learned Starlight Breaker from Nanoha}}.

** Gon also did this in a later story arc. He and his friend had been manipulated into a mansion by a tough enemy talented in anticipating their movements (and who knew where the doors were). The heroic duo started kicking through the walls...

* In ''[[Fate/Zero]]'', the [http://imageshack.us/f/338/0000000000000.jpg/ famed mage Kayneth el-Melloi finds the hotel he rented out and filled with traps and summoned monsters] according to accepted form for a conflict between Association mages to be a [http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/8726/kaynethtrolled.jpg waste of effort] when the [[Trying to Catch Me Fighting Dirty|highly pragmatic]] (and collateral damage-insensitive) mage-assassin [[Combat Pragmatist|Emiya Kiritsugu]] {{spoiler|simply brings down the entire building with explosives}}.

** See the scene from the animated adaption [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdNN81bioHc here].

* Both subverted and played straight with the Maze Card in ''[[Cardcaptor Sakura]]''; trying to fly over the walls causes them to grow (or turns the maze into an Escher masterpiece), but the Moon Bell knocks down the walls in a straight line.

* In a short story of ''[[Suzumiya Haruhi]]'', the SOS Brigade are stuck acting out a typical Medieval RPG in simulated space. Not only do they bypass a lot of dungeons and battles (by threatening an NPC, no less), but the biggest use of this trope is found when they reach the final dungeon, still at level one and probably lacking all the key items and skills they need to beat the last boss. The solution? Mikuru accidentally casts two doomsday level spells at once, completely demolishing the entire castle and the [[Big Bad]] with it. [[Fission Mailed|And the hostages they were supposed to rescue.]]

* In ''[[Yu Yu Hakusho]]'', Hiei, Kurama and Kuwabara give Yusuke a boost to help him reach a window in Suzaku's tower on top of Maze Castle, enabling him to fight Suzaku while they work their way up to him.

* In ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh! R]]'', Seto Kaiba does this twice. First, he lands on the roof of the building in his Blue-Eyes Jet rather than Duel his way through the lower floors. As he Duels the first card professor, Mokuba hacks into the security system as unlocks the door, making the Duel for the keycard superfluous. Kaiba announces he simply needed a warm-up before Dueling Yako.

* The only way anyone gets around in ''[[Bleach]]''.

 

* In ''[[Superman|Superman: Ending Battle]]'', Superman gets trapped inside ''[[Living Ship|Bunny: The Living Ship]]'' by Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman. Trying to bust out is nearly impossible, because the inside is an ever-shifting dimension. Supes fires his heat vision at the wall and keeps pouring it on. Since metal conducts heat, the heat travels everywhere and the ship overheats and shuts down.

{{quote|'''Cyborg:''' You're already twenty miles deeper into the ship than when you started... Make that forty. I can fold ''Bunny'' back in on herself indefinitely, a technorganic Moebius Strip. We're going to be at this for a very, very long time.}}

 

== Fan Works ==

* In ''[[With Strings Attached]]'', Jeft pits the four and the Hunter against the essentially impregnable Twisted Temple and the [[Touch of Death|death-touch-wielding]] [[Doomy Dooms of Doom|Brothers of Doom]]. The Brothers have left two small windows open to lure stupid invaders into the temple. Unfortunately for them (and Jeft), this is a golden opportunity for Ringo to prove once and for all that no, he is not useless. He [[Mind Over Matter|telekinetically]] removes each Brother one by one and drops them in a large box that John made out of ice.

 

* When [[WALL-E]] wants to power up, he rolls outside and opens his solar panels. When EVE is in a hurry and wants to power WALL-E up, she blows a hole in the ceiling with her plasma cannon. Note that the door was open and not five feet away.

** It's also worth noting that "blow something up with my plasma cannon" is EVE's [[When All You Have Is a Hammer|default problem-solving technique]].

{{quote|'''Kuzco''': No! It can't be! How did you get back here before us?

'''Yzma''': Ah...uh... how did we, Kronk?

'''Kronk''': ''(pulls down a map of the dotted lines)'' Well ya got me. By all accounts it doesn't make sense. }}

* The Xenomorphs pull this one on the heroes in ''[[Alien (franchise)|Aliens]]''. After the humans supposedly barricade all the doors and air ducts, the Aliens just climb above the dropped ceiling.

* Subverted in ''[[Labyrinth]]''. Shortly after Sarah enters the labyrinth, she asks directions from a small sentient caterpillar. "Don't go that way. ''Never'' go that way," he tells her, at which she thanks him and heads off in the opposite direction. When she's gone: "If she'd gone that way, she'd'a gone straight to that castle."

* In ''[[Casino Royale]]'', while the mook is going through a building under construction with [[Le Parkour]], [[James Bond (film)|James Bond]] just goes through walls, shoots down an elevated platform for it to fall...

** One of the published books shows what happened during his test. According to it, he reprogrammed the test so it was possible to talk his way out of the fight, so it is a little of both.

** Of course, [[Alternate Continuity|both could be correct.]]

** Interestingly, ''Starfleet Academy'' (which was released about 10 years before ''[[Star Trek (film)|Star Trek]]'') presents both options to the player, when they stumble upon Kirk's original hack when taking the Kobayashi Maru themselves.

* Averted in [[The Lord of the Rings (film)|The Lord of the Rings]]. The Fellowship tries to go around Moria via a mountain pass, but Saruman awakens the mountain of Caradhras, causing an avalanche of rocks and snow that blocks their way, causing our heroes to have to backtrack and go through Moria anyway.

* [[Played for Laughs]] in [[Robin Hood: Men in Tights]]. Little John stands on a bridge and demands Robin fight him to pass. Achoo points out that the river beneath "ain't exactly the Mississippi". Or even a ''river'', for that matter; "stream" would be generous.

 

== Literature ==

** [[Fridge Logic|Why couldn't he just do a repeat of the first task, again?]]

* In ''[[Emberverse|Dies the Fire]]'' by [[S.M. Stirling]], some outside force suddenly causes electricity to stop working all over the Earth. In Oregon, the main (human) villain begins establishing a brutal fiefdom, and orders the construction of a well-defended fort blocking an important pass. Fortunately for the heroes, ''hang-gliders'' still work just fine, and they land a strike-force on the fort's roof and breach the defenses from the rear.

* From [[Loophole Abuse]]: In one of the ''[[Dinotopia]]'' spin-off novels, the protagonists find themselves in a Lost City inhabited by Troodon samurai ([[Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot|just go with it]]). The Troodon challenge the humans to different contests to win citizenship, one of which is a race through an obstacle course. The [[Most Writers Are Human|human]], Andrew, wins by bypassing the course and just running down the strip of land between his course and his opponent's, because there [[Loophole Abuse|isn't a rule]] against it. This becomes very popular, and although the rules are immediately changed, "Pulling an Andrew" begins to occur in other activities around the city as well.

* In one of the ''[[Star Wars]]'' [[Expanded Universe]] novels, Han Solo remarks that he "never saw a maze that couldn't be greatly simplified with a good blaster".

** This was probably inspired by Leia's way of getting herself and her rescuers out of a very tight situation in ''A New Hope''. Granted, it landed them in a garbage masher, but it still counts for something.

* In ''[[Posleen War Series|When The Devil Dances]]'' and ''Hell's Faire'', the "Screaming Meemie" units accompanying the 7000 ton "Bun Bun", tend to take full advantage of the passage of the SheVa smashing everything in its path flat. The resultant path is still impassable for wheeled vehicles, but for the tanks<ref>* the MetalStorm turrets replace the regular turrets on [[Yanks With Tanks|M-1 Abrams tanks]], whose hulls are left unchanged save for the turret interface</ref> traveling through the impressions that each section of SheVa tread leaves isn't a problem.

* In [[Codex Alera]] the Vord bypass an impenetrable Canim fortification by tunneling underneath it to attack them from behind. It took the Canim completely off guard because the Vord had enough [[We Have Reserves|reserves]] to continuously attack the front while tunneling behind.

* In [[Esther Friesner]]'s ''Elf Defense'', our heroes are stuck in a [[Mobile Maze|magical semi-sentient hedgemaze]], which has just separated the college professor being pursued by a dragon from the elven prince who actually knows how to ''fight'' a dragon. No problem: the Welsh au pair calmly picks up a sword and proceeds to chop her way through the first hedge in the way. The maze, not being stupid, immediately opens a clear path for her.

* In Robert Asprin's ''[[Phule's Company]]'' series, the Omega Mob tends towards solutions like this. The key example comes in the first book, where Phule's troops (a gang of misfits that were already considered too irregular for the Space Legion, which is already an irregular military force) are going up against one of the finest military units in the galaxy in a series of competitions. The second event is the challenge course, which is to be run "under combat conditions" with full military gear. The regular Army unit runs the course perfectly, setting a spectacular time as they do so. Phule's company literally ''destroys'' the course, blowing down walls, cutting away barbed wire, and in general ''using'' their full military gear to wreck everything that gets in their way, and get away with it through [[Loophole Abuse]] and because the rival commander was too damned impressed to push the point.

* Brandon Sanderson's ''[[Warbreaker]]'' Vasher uses Nightblood to demolish walls in the royal palace in order to reach his target Denth. It's not a straight example because it's not a dungeon but the effect is the same.

* In ''[[Who Moved My Cheese?]]'', Hem and Haw chisel holes in the wall of Cheese Station C to see if more cheese is behind the wall.

 

{{quote|'''Bra'tac:''' The shield generators are far below, there -- in the very bowels of the ship. We must climb down several decks, through the length of the ship. Then, taking our weapons, we must--

'''O'Neill:''' ''(shrugs and tosses grenades down the shaft; the generators explode; he looks back at Bra'tac)'' Grenades. }}

'''Kryten:''' Or we could use the teleporter. }}

** Again from ''Duct Soup''. The crew crawl through the ventilation shafts of ''Starbug'' after the ship apparently goes offline. {{spoiler|Kryten made sure the doors were functional but didn't explain this until they got back}}.

* In ''[[Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger vs. Space Sheriff Gavan: The Movie|Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger vs. Space Sheriff Gavan the Movie]]'', the Gokaiger have to climb all the way to the top of the [[Big Bad]]'s tower to rescue Gavan, but once he's free they simply blow a hole in each of the successive floors to get them back to the ground level. Then, adding injury to insult, they pull out their [[BFG]] and fire it upwards, taking out a large section of the castle and killing all the bad guys they bypassed.

 

== Music ==

No passage below the dungeon }}

 

* In [[Greek Mythology]], Theseus tied his string to the end of the maze, dropped it, and it rolled down, where he just followed it until it eventually led to the minotaur. While not technically a bypass, he did circumvent the whole dead ends thing that a maze is supposed to have.

** Except the Labyrinth is not a maze. It's a pair of interwoven paths, with one junction, so that one has no choice but to go toward the center, where the minotaur would presumably be. The idea of Theseus using string to find the way is probably apocryphal.

*** Aren't all myths apocryphal? Anyway, the unicursal (single path) Labyrinth is a design to simply represent the vastly more complex maze-like Labyrinth. Nothing in any of the myths depict it as anything other than a branching maze. [[That Other Wiki]] talks about this as well.

* [[Older Than Feudalism]]: In ''[[The Bible]]'', rather than attempt to get through the heavily defended and fortified walls of the city of Jericho, Joshua and the Israelites paraded around the city for days before blowing their trumpets. This caused the walls to crumble completely.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

** The spell Passwall creates a temporary hole in a wall of your choice. A portable hole does much the same and a few other tricks. Another all-time utility spell is Dig. And wizards learn Disintegrate not only because it's save-or-die.

** A feared (by DMs) tactic is the "scry and die", in which the player characters use divination spells to locate the [[Big Bad]], then cast a teleport spell to ambush him wherever he happens to be, bypassing any and all elaborately prepared defenses he has set up. Such is the fate of those who don't use counter-measures adequate of the level of troubles they ask for, but it's a game balance problem - if defenses against magical ambushes are too easy to implement, you eventually lose the ability to spring those plot-convenient ambushes on your ''players''... Still, most countermeasures cover only specific effects and aren't convenient enough to be foolproof: for long-range divinations there are Non-detection and Mislead, items with nondetection effect and mundane means like lead sheets (for scrying) or running water (for Locate Creature), and Detect Scrying as early warning. There are a few protections against mind reading, too, though not in core rules.

*** Obdurium appears in some supplemental materials and has a hardness of 30, which is really just obscene.

*** However, in fourth edition D&D, items and walls no longer have a hardness rating, which means that a weak but determined character can ''punch through them''.

*** So much that the remake of ''[[Tomb of Horrors]]'' has replaced all of its Adamantine Doors with "Spell-Hardened Steel as Hard as Adamant, but loses its magic if you dismantled them."

** In [[Tomb of Horrors]] At least one group of adventurers has made it through without a single casualty by having a team of dwarves dig around the traps and obstacles with non-magical mining equipment over the course of several weeks. The writers planned for ethereal travel, melding into stone, magical defenses, teleportation, etc. but never expected an ordinary pickaxe and a group of patient, careful adventurers.

* Many RPGs have so many ways of doing this that it may be futile to try to list them all. There appear to be two main reasons for this: first, many games include countless different spells whose implications are often poorly thought out (though some of this is intentional). The second reason is many games try to write rules for every conceivable situation, including tunneling through a wall with a battle axe.

* ''[[Exalted]]'': Solars with the correct Charm can bypass locked doors by ''walking through them'', and more veteran ones can remove the walls by punching people through them. Meanwhile, those with dematerialization effects can just stroll through walls, and experienced Infernals can just load up Pellegrina's Fury and ''erode away everything in their path''. Of course, the point of ''Exalted'' isn't about whether the heroes ''can'' make it through the dungeon, it's about whether they ''should'', and how they intend to solve the long-term problems that led to the dungeon attack in the first place.

 

* Several games have [[Sequence Breaking|shortcuts that lets you cut through large sections of the dungeon]]. In World 1-2 of the original ''[[Super Mario Brothers]]'', for example, you could smash through the ceiling and run over the entire level all the way to the end... and then keep going and skip half of the ''game''.

** And world 4-2 has another warp zone (better hidden, but still accessible) to let you skip to the last world, cutting out roughly 80% of the whole game.

** Playing as Luigi or Toadstool in ''Super Mario Bros. 2'' allowed you to easily bypass large chunks of several stages.

*** Then there's the P-Wing, which can make almost any level a breeze (and unlike the cloud, they stay beaten if you die). Shame they are [[Too Awesome to Use]] (until you beat the game and get an [[Bragging Rights Reward|inventory loaded with them]]).

** In other levels in the game, there's a massive wall between the start and finish line, with the majority of the level in a cave underneath it. Which means anyone with the P Wing can just fly straight up, right over the wall and down to the finish block.

** Same with the Feather, Flying Yoshi, or Lakitu's Cloud (again) in ''Super Mario World'', on levels with no ceiling.

*** Another ''SMW'' example: once you gain access to the Star Road, you can skip the rest of the game straight to Bowser's Castle by keyhole-clearing each of its levels. Especially glaring if you get there through the Donut Secret House.

** In the [[Super Mario Galaxy 2|Rightside Down Galaxy]], halfway through, you can backflip above the maze and walk around the top. Exploring the area nets you 4 1-Ups and the ability to re-enter right on top of the Star.

* ''Mario'' has nothing on ''[[Kirby]]''. In ''Kirby's Dream Land'' you can literally float over whole levels. In pretty much [[Game Breaker|every single level]]. Subsequent games put more of a limit on his flying ability.

** Admittedly, most levels in Kirby games have low ceilings and many of the enemies can fly, shoot, or otherwise hit Kirby while he's in mid-air, so this isn't really so much of a [[Game Breaker]] as it might sound. They took away his floating powers in ''[[Kirby's Epic Yarn|Kirbys Epic Yarn]]'', though.

** In ''[[Sonic Unleashed]]'', [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H9Dw9CgYqA there's one stage that can be won in under five seconds by Sonic turning around and railjumping to the exit.]

*** ''Sonic Unleashed'' itself has gained a bit of a following for people who know level layouts and special tricks, allowing speedruns of certain levels. The Air Boost in this game alone can turn a platforming segment/puzzle into a two-second solution of [[Cutting the Knot|"Just jump and boost over it,"]] among a ton of other small tricks to speed up levels. Specifically, a couple levels in particular with the description of "Complete X Laps!" can be sequence broke by turning around at specific points, tricking the game into thinking you've reached a certain lap early.

* In ''[[Nethack]]'', a game which very much prides itself on its flexibility, you can begin the game with a pickaxe or acquire one very early on. A pickaxe can break down every wall, including the ones that separate one level from another. By diligent digging, you can literally bypass the entire dungeon, stopping only to bushwhack a few mandatory bosses before ascending to ultimate victory. This means playing with a very [[Low-Level Run|underlevelled character]], but is quite exciting. The technique is known as [http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Digging_for_victory digging for victory].

** And also has the nickname "Die for Victory" as the tactic generally kills characters very quickly. The benefit is largely that you'll go through so many characters that eventually you'll get lucky and end up with a somewhat stable setup.

** "Every wall" is a bit of an exaggeration; there are a few special levels where the walls and/or floors are undiggable.

* The old ''Ragnarok'' RPG had potions of phasing, which allowed you to walk through walls (except in the shop level) and even between planes, letting you skip the tedious process of looking for portals. If you walked off the map, however, you'd fall to Niflheim and take a lot of damage, usually dying.

* The RTS game ''Dungeon Keeper 2'' has a campaign level that has racing against the clock while your mission is the destroy the enemy Dungeon Heart where the Macguffin is stored in the far North, having to go through another enemy camp in the middle to get there and having overwhelming numbers against you with few resources while you're stuck in the far South. The obvious solution hinted by the mission briefing is to find the bypass. This can be done by building a bridge on the west side over the water and then tunneling past both bases straight to the enemy's Dungeon Heart. Another level gives you the choice of a frontal assault to be able to assassinate the enemy leader or to tunnel east and attack him in his own headquarters bypassing all his defenses.

* In the ''[[Disgaea]]'' series, units with flight like the Mothman and Masked Hero can move through enemy units, and disregard the height of terrain, making them extremely useful for any map where you need to get a certain point to complete it, as both of those things will frequently pose problems for normal units.

* In ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' one can bypass much of the Shinra Building and its guards by simply taking the stairs as opposed to fighting your way floor by floor. This is, however, incredibly boring, time consuming, ''and'' you have to put up with your characters complaining the entire way. There are a few bits of nice loot on the stairs, however.

** It is also possible to go past most of the Undercity plot by simply bribing the guards at the entrance (exit) and most other dungeons can be severely shortened through use of the transformation-teleport bug.

** And unofficially, one of the most popular [[Game Mod|mods]] for ''Shadows of Amn'' is an NPC that justs teleports you and your party to the end of the opening dungeon with any worthwhile items, quest hooks, and the equivalent gold roughly equal to the market value of all the [[Vendor Trash|junk that you could have picked off each damned corpse]] as well as a bunch of experience points. Because in a game with very high replay value, after a few times through, [[Scrappy Level|that dungeon really is that boring.]]

* In ''[[Neverwinter Nights 2]]'', the supposed [[Door to Before]] in the Temple of Seasons can be opened from the "wrong" side by any decent rogue, skipping the entire dungeon.

** It is possible to do this in the Golem Dungeon in ''[[Neverwinter Nights]]'', as there is a door right at the entrance that leads straight to the final room of the dungeon. It takes a ''lot'' of lockpicking skill to open it, however.

* Possible in many ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' dungeons if you use an all-stealth group. Having all druids is most effective, as they can occupy any slot in a group (tank, healer, DPS). Though Blizzard got a bit crafty recently and allowed some of the enemies to detect stealth.

** Rogues (and anyone with the Engineering or Blacksmithing professions) can pick the locks of some doors that ordinarily require keys found on bosses in that dungeon. Others can't be picked, however, and there's no way to tell except by trying.

** Some dungeons however are designed in a way that lets player skip some bosses. The Botanica being the most notable since you can skip ''every'' boss, but given the ease of most of them, its pretty pointless to do so. They are the ones that give the nice loot, after all. In addition, crafty players have found ways to bypass several normal enemies with various tricks, although the usefulness of some are debatable.

*** And one of these, the infamous wall-walking <s>feature</s>bug, was almost entirely patched out of the game after a number of rather blatant exploits.

** There's another anti-stealth technique used by some encounters, in which a boss will summon all the monsters you haven't yet defeated in the nearby area to assist it, with [[Hilarity Ensues|hilarious]] [[Party Wipe|consequences]].

*** Made even funnier when you have a group with enough gear/levels/skill to simply mow these extra enemies down as they arrive and still beat the boss.

** An interesting example happened in the past, when one of the players (called Angwe) set camp in a narrow passage (that had to be passed through to reach an important location) and killed every character he could. Other players had to be very creative to pass this place.

* In [[Dawn of War]] Dark Crusade, during the Space Marine stronghold mission an early optional objective allows you to direct [[Earthshattering Kaboom|orbital bombardments]] from the ''Litany of Fury'' by co-opting the Blood Ravens' communications. The Imperial Guard stronghold has a scanner that gives you line of sight to one point anywhere on the map temporarily. Orbital bombardment can one-shot an enemy stronghold building.

* Can be done on any mission in ''[[City of Heroes]]'' that does not require every foe on the map to be defeated as long as the players have Stealth or at least one has Stealth and the ability to teleport their teammates to their location. Stealth can be taken by any character by level 6, and the Stalker archetype has it as a required power at level 1. However, some enemies later in the game have + perception powers that allow them to see through stealth as well as some maps featuring obstacles that will suppress stealth if the player gets too close to them.

** The most impressive example of this is the final mission of the Katie Hannon task force. Players are expected to beat their way through hordes of [[The Fair Folk|Red Caps]], find a captured witch, and get her out through wave after wave of ambushes. This happens on an outdoor map, though, and the witch is capable of flying. As a result, it's become standard practice to fly to the witch, blow away her captors, and fly her out.

** Metroid: Zero Mission on the GBA let you use a morph-ball shinespark to acquire super missiles early, bypassing a few minibosses. It was a tricky technique, and probably more time-consuming than just killing the boss. Worryingly, the skipped bosses register as dead if you come back later, down to scenery-alterations caused by their death throes. If you didn't kill it, then what did...

* In the original ''[[X-COM]]'', most walls can be shot through with a powerful enough weapon. Eventually, units can be outfitted with flying armour and weapons powerful enough to punch through the hull of a U.F.O - making it possible to simply blast your way into the bridge.

** There's another spot where a door is meant to close before you can get to it. The intention is that you are entering on foot - with a warthog, you won't be slowed down by the enemies between you and the door, and with good timing and driving skills, you can wedge the warthog in the doorway, forcing the door to stay open. If you're also lucky, it's far enough through for you to hop out on the other side, bypassing having to fight your way to and through the back door.

** There are in fact many more examples which can be found throughout the game, like hugging the wall down a huge valley, allowing you to take a ride in the Pelican dropship, straight to the Scorpion tank in the 5th level.

* Some games with randomly generated dungeons, such as ''[[Persona 3]]'' and ''[[Baroque (video game)|Baroque]]'', will occasionally end up generating a floor's exit right next to its entrance. You can't bypass the entire dungeon this way, but you pretty much end up bypassing that floor.

** [[Pokémon Mystery Dungeon]] has the Pure Seed item, which teleports you to the stairs down instantly. [[Awesome but Impractical]] in that, while not very expensive, you'd have to bring one for each of the up to 50-70 floors of the dungeon, can only find them as random drops or in the randomly restocked shops, and they would take up a lot of space in your bag...

** Several dungeons (the one that comes to mind the most is the Antagonizer's Lair) have a hidden back door that you can use to skip all the monsters and traps and go straight to the boss/Macguffin item/mission objective.

* ''[[Avernum]]'' sets these up intentionally in the first three games. Learn the Priest spell "Move Mountains" and look for cracked walls, and you can sometimes get around the baddies (or at least find sealed-off rooms.) Sadly, as of the fourth this is no longer possible.

***** "Two-Faced Tanner", from GTA III, involves over-taking and killing an undercover cop. As soon as you attack his car, you get the cops on your case, coming at you with just about everything they have. You can't disable his vehicle beforehand. What you can do is get ahead of him, jump out of your car, and then destroy his car with an M-16. It takes about half a magazine, and when he dies the cops automatically desist.

***** The street races in GTA Vice City can be made much easier by simply killing all of your opponents in the opening seconds with a tank cannon shell.

** ''[[Grand Theft Auto IV]]'' has one in the mission Pest Control, where you have to kill {{spoiler|Ray Boccino}}. Before the mission starts, you can see his car sitting outside the building the mission starts at, so you can simply slap a car bomb on it and set it off when he gets in. You still have to clean up his guards, but you skip the entire pursuit section of the mission.

* In ''[[Pokémon Red and Blue]]'', you can, after acquiring the usage of Surf and Fly, bypass the extremely annoying Seafoam Islands dungeon by surfing south from Pallet Town, landing in Cinnabar Island. It means skipping Articuno, but it's easy to pick it up later.

* ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'' is usually linear and when hordes arrive, most players hole up in small rooms or something similar, especially in the finales. However, the infected will sometimes make their own shortcuts by smashing down walls, catching the survivors off guard.

* In ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass]]'' Link must return periodically to the Temple of the Ocean King, a multi-segmented dungeon that is FAR too long for its own good. Fortunately, they give you the ability to skip many many floors after certain points in the game. They did not go far enough though. Even in the end game getting to the bottom is [[Fake Difficulty|very annoying.]]

** A beautiful and brutal example from ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess]]'' that utterly makes up for the [[Soup Cans]] puzzle- in the Temple of Time, you gain the Dominion Rod and thereby gain control of a monolithic, mobile, hammer-wielding statue, which you have to return to the first room. The hammer-wielding statue can break past all of the fiddly little gates and things that you had to work your way past on the way up. And kill all enemies in one hit. You do not know what fun is until you see an entire puzzle-room destroyed 'neath the mighty tread of the Hammer Golem!

** In ''[[Ocarina of Time]]'', the game only checks if you got the [[Plot Coupons]] from the last two dungeons, instead of the last five as it should. Normally, the game prevents access to the Shadow Temple until you complete both the Fire and Water temples by putting the entrance up high and only giving you the [[Warp Whistle|warp song]] after you complete them. And, normally, you cannot complete the Spirit Temple until you learn how to go back in time, which you can't do until you complete the Forest Temple. But [[Good Bad Bugs]] exist to get into the Shadow Temple and complete the Spirit Temple without having to fully complete the other three, making at least half-dungeon bypasses possible. Additionally, the Kakariko Well is not technically required, though it takes a lot of memorization to get through certain areas without the Lens of Truth it provides.

* ''The Adventures of Rad Gravity'''s [[Very Definitely Final Dungeon|very definitely final planet]] has a nerve-wracking maze of [[Magical Mystery Doors|Magical Mystery Teleporters]], but it can by bypassed by glitching through the walls with the Teleport Beacon.

* ''[[Planescape: Torment]]'' differs from many RPGs in that instead of having to assemble the whole party in the transition zone in order to move to the next location, you just need bring one character there. If you have an experienced thief with well developed stealth ability in your party, you can bypass most of the heavily infested locations. Of course, sometimes the exit is behind a locked door but guess what? The experienced thief can steal the key!

* In ''[[King's Quest: Mask of Eternity|King's Quest Mask of Eternity]]'' it is possible to take a shortcut through the [[The Underworld|Dimension of Death]].

* In ''[[Little Busters!|Little Busters]]'', one of the routes in Ecstasy feature a dungeon. You have to pass through it three times during the story, but you only have to navigate through it twice, because on your third pass you are given a heavy machine gun which is used to simply blast a hole on the ground on every floor as a shortcut to the next one.

* The Ratchet & Clank series have had a couple of these, thanks to many platforms that the player should probably never reach still being made solid.

** The most well-known, however, is the Razor-Claws glitch. (A weapon that, while cool, did not make it into [[Ratchet and Clank Future A Crack In Time|A Crack In Time]], for obvious reasons.) The weapon allows one to climb walls, which can turn platform heavy levels into a case of "Climb a wall, walk/glide over the level, land at the end/in the boss' area" followed by "Fly to next level. Rinse and repeat."

* The first ''[[Elder Scrolls]]'' game, ''Arena'', included the spell "Passwall". It allowed players to permanently destroy dungeon walls, letting them bypass tough enemies and other obstacles. They didn't include it in the next game, ''Daggerfall'', but enterprising players can make use of the wonky level geometry to move through the walls into a black space known as [[Fan Nickname|The Void]], allowing you to run along on top of the dungeon paths. Be aware, though, that while it's relatively easy to pass into the Void, it's rather more complex to get back out of it. These "features" live on in later Bethesda games, with the "tcl" (toggle clipping) console command.

* The [[Jet Pack]] item from ''[[Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg]]'' allows you to float indefinitely, but only at the initial hight you start floating from. Naturally, this means that if you can jump off from a high enough point, you can go over just about anything and go to pretty much anywhere in a level. At least one level in [[Slippy-Slidey Ice World|Blizzard Castle]] seems to encourage this to get around a particularly vicious slide.

** The 7th mission can be completed in about thirty seconds by simply casting "Defense Matrix" on the SCV with the Psi Emitter and sending him directly to the beacon in the enemy's base. The right route there results in very few defenders in your way, and with the Defense Matrix they can't kill the SCV in time before he gets to the beacon.

** A Protoss mission expects you to wait until another general arrives with enough reinforcements to destroy the heavily guarded enemy base. Though it is very difficult, you can potentially destroy the base on your own without him before he arrives.

** The 7th Protoss mission is a terrible pain, pitching you against three strategically positioned enemy bases, but you only have to destroy a single building to win. Instead of building up your base and taking out theirs as is expected, you can simply utilize their invisibility and go kill the objective in about five minutes, as long as you take the right way in that lets you bypass most of their defenses.

** In the expansion pack, a mission has you escorting a leader unit to a beacon in the middle of the enemy base. If you take along an escort unit or two to clear the anti-air turrets on the way, you can use a Shuttle to fly her to the beacon, bypassing the enemy base entirely.

* In ''[[Ragnarok Online]]'' the teleport skill and flywings would make bypassing dungeons possible if you got lucky enough. One dungeon in particular made this NECESSARY to access as it was in the middle of a lake on an island. Some quests, such as the fox quest in Amatsu which is necessary to access the dungeon are nearly impossible without getting around the hordes of hydras guarding the shrine. Seeing as how this dungeon was the best way to gain levels for a new acolyte becoming a priest it made poor acolytes spend half an afternoon trying to get lucky enough with their teleport skill to bypass the hydras.

* In the PC version of ''[[Far Cry]]'', in the second level, a lifeboat is hanging from the top of a beached carrier. A lucky shot from the lower deck of the carrier can break the chains, dropping the lifeboat into the water and skipping the section on top of the carrier altogether.

* Acknowledged in ''[[Gaia Online|zOMG!]]'', which has guards stationed at the west and north entrances of Barton Town to try and prevent low-level players from leaving town in those directions (into Zen Gardens and Bassken Lake areas respectively). This doesn't work as well as you'd think, because the early-game areas don't have monsters that automatically attack players, so a surprising number of newbs ignore the quest chains, walk through the low-level areas without fighting anything and gaining experience, and [[Too Dumb to Live|then wonder why all the enemies in the higher-level areas suddenly aggro and oneshot them]].

* In the first level of Unit 3 in ''[[Quake II]]'', you can skip the [[Laser Hallway]] jumping puzzle by detouring through the moat and an underground passage that drops you out at the exit. Don't forget the secrets on the main path, though.

* In ''[[Resident Evil 4]]'', if you fight off the ganados in the village before entering the house containing the shotgun, Dr. Salvador won't spawn here. Don't go into the path leading to the next area, since he guards the door there. Also, fighting the second El Gigante is optional.

 

== Web Comics ==

* The titular order in ''[[The Order of the Stick]]'' skips two levels of a dungeon by taking the service stairwell.

* Duv in ''[[Goblins]]: Life Through Their Eyes'' attempts this (using slave labour to dig a hole into the [[Dungeon Crawl]]) in order to gain an [[Artifact of Doom]] which will restore her lost power. However, she only manages to bypass the hundred-foot-high gates, rather than the whole dungeon.

** [[Invoked Trope|Invoked]] [[Averted Trope|unsuccessfully]] much later in the comic. Upon arrival at the [[The Very Definitely Final Dungeon|Temple of Fiends]], Black Mage suggests that the Light Warriors land their airship at the top of the temple, crushing a few floors in the process and "killing their way" downwards, as he put it. Red Mage disagrees, mainly because the airship's autopilot (designed by omnipotent [[Jerkass]] elder Mage Sarda) had been pre-programmed to land them at the entrance and their previous attempts to manually control the airships given them were [[Hilarity Ensues|uniformly disastrous]].

* ''[[Bob and George]]'' has this happen with the Wily Castle in almost every game retelling. Some of the Robot Master stages, too.

* Right at the beginning of the rpg-story in ''[[Absurd Notions]]''. Starts [http://www.absurdnotions.org/page9.html here], solution [http://www.absurdnotions.org/page11.html here].

* ''[[Homestuck]]'': Why go in a dungeon when you can [http://mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004628 pull it apart]?

* In ''[[Kevin and Kell]]'', Danielle, a [[Defector From Decadence]] who left Rabbit's Revenge, thinks she's safe in the Dewclaw house basement because Kell, a skilled predator, lives there and Rabbit's Revenge wouldn't risk facing her to reach her. Two members then tunnel into her room.

 

== Web Original ==

* The RinkWorks game Maze Maker generates a random printable maze. The same website allows visitors to submit altered screenshots from the site as "RinkWorks Graffiti" ([http://www.rinkworks.com/graffiti/ see here]). Needless to say, it's quite popular to use this in Maze Maker graffiti.

** More specifically, one of the early "Graffiti" images was a maze with an extra wall drawn in, rendering the maze impossible to complete in the normal sense. A significant number of later Graffiti images are Graffitis of ''the original altered Graffiti maze''.

}}

* In ''[[Journey Quest]]'' Perf and Nara accomplish this {{spoiler|on the Temple of All Dooms, by accident!}}

 

== Western Animation ==

* Faced with a deathtrap maze of The Riddler's design and time running out, Batman commandeers one of the maze's flying robots (the Hand of Fate) to bring him to the Riddler's would-be victim in ''[[Batman: The Animated Series|Batman the Animated Series]]''. Needless to say, The Riddler calls him out for "grand scale cheating."

** Another episode had Batman clear Mad Hatter's maze made of giant cards by climbing up and [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|running along the top]].

{{quote|'''Bart:''' Hey, I found a shortcut through your maze.}}

** Barely in the scope of this trope, but in another episode Mr. Burns and Smithers use their security clearance to advance through thick steel doors and other obstacles that can only be opened through retinal scanners and the like, only to see a stray dog at the destination who entered through the back door. The back SCREEN DOOR.

** And in another episode, when Marge was doing the tests to join to the Springfield Police Force, in one of them, she tried to climb a wall, but she has problems with it. Chief Wiggum notices that all the women had the same problem, that they don't use the door to cross the wall.

* Done by Wildwing in an episode of ''[[The Mighty Ducks (animation)|The Mighty Ducks]]'' when the Ducks find themselves trapped an an alternate universe based on fantasy tropes. Faced with a huge stone maze, Wildwing simply uses his grenade launcher to blast their way though.

* The opening scene of the ''[[Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy|Ed, Edd n Eddy]]'' episode "They Call Him Mister Ed" had Edd setting up a massive cardboard maze and placing Chunky Puffs (Ed's favorite cereal) at the exit. It was supposed to be an experiment of sorts, with Ed being the guinea pig (Edd even timed it), but Ed, simple-minded oaf that he is, simply runs through all the walls in a straight line to get to the cereal. Edd even complains "That ''isn't'' how you go "through" a maze!"

* In ''[[Superman: Doomsday]]'', when Lex Luthor's clone of Superman turns on him, Luthor retreats to an armored panic room that is lit by red lights (Superman needs yellow sunlight to retain his powers) and holds a pair of kryptonite encrusted gauntlets. Luthor attempts to lure the clone Superman in, but he merely locks the door, ''rips the entire panic room out of the building'', and casually drops it to the ground a hundred stories below.

* In an episode of the 1967 version of ''[[Fantastic Four (animation)|Fantastic Four]]'', Diablo learns the hard way that a panic room is no match for The Thing:

* Subverted in an episode of ''[[Popeye]]''; Popeye and Bluto are charting a course. Bluto wants to go around all the perilous obstacles, but Popeye scoffingly draws a straight line through them.

* In the second episode of ''[[Xiaolin Showdown]]'', Omi, the enthusiastic combat monk, sets a record for the obstacle course, leaping through and beating down the obstacles to reach the target. But next to go is Clay, the stalwart [[Dishing Out Dirt|Earth]] monk, who notices that the course is arranged in a circle. When the clock starts, he beats Omi's time by turning and walking all of ten feet from the starting line to the target.

* ''[[Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures|The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest]]'': The title character is stuck in a death maze within Quest-World, his dad's enormous virtual reality. He quickly comes across some snakes who turn things they bite into stone, and wastes little time into goading them to transform one of his hands and one of his feet; he uses these to [[Willing Suspension of Disbelief|tear down the maze's imposing grey walls for an easy exit.]]

 

== Real Life ==

* The Israeli army has developed tactics for urban warfare that probably count as an example of this trope. Instead of going through booby-trapped streets and narrow alleys in which troops may be exposed to sniper fire, Israeli soldiers literally ''walk through walls'', using explosives to create passageways through houses and other buildings.

** This sounds not dissimilar to an event on the Green Line in Nicosia (the divided capital of Cyprus). Reputedly, the local Turkish contingent were suspected of discreetly expanding a blockhouse so it extended into the UN secure zone. The local UN commander responded by going on patrol one morning... driving a bulldozer.

*** Notably this happened during the Siege of Petersburg during the [[American Civil War]]. Union troops dug a mineshaft underneath the Confederate lines and set off a sizable stash of explosives. Death From Below, pretty much. The resulting fight was dubbed the [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Battle of the Crater]].

** Taken to an extreme in the 2009 Israel/Gaza conflict. According to the accounts of some Israeli soldiers, Hamas gunmen and suicide bombers attempted to lure them into houses most likely rigged with booby traps. Instead of taking the bait, Israeli soldiers simply just knocked down the houses with bulldozers.

** Also, American troops in Iraq often face insurgents who, when charged, run and hide inside a building they hope to defend, at which point the Americans promptly call in an airstrike. The situation's so common it's earned its own unofficial acronym. (AWR, for Allah's Waiting Room.)

* In [[World War I]], the Germans executed the [[wikipedia:Schlieffen Plan|Schlieffen Plan]]: the indirect invasion of France via Belgium, and nearly reached Paris. Some French generals had proposed to do the same thing in case of a war with Germany, but the French never adopted it.

* Another [[WW 2]] example: When the Allies were pushing into Germany near the end of the war, the depleted German army were trying to drag it out into city fighting in each town along the way, and were trying to coerce the populace to fight to the last man. Upon taking fire from the town, the Allied troops backed off to a safe distance and called in artillery strikes to reduce the entire town to rubble. When they reached the next town in line, they were usually greeted by the Mayor waving a white flag and the few remaining German troops having either fled the area or been haphazardly captured by the civilians as a sort of bribe for the Allied army.

* Averted by the Market-Garden operation. It would've been a bypass if it had succeeded, as it would allow going around the Zygfrid line. However, the operation failed. Out of 41000 airborne troops deployed, 17000 died. Oh, and the Nazis punished the Dutch who supported this operation, letting thousands of them starve to death the following winter.

* Happened (again) on a larger scale (much, MUCH MUCH larger scale) during WWII when the Americans dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than fight their way across Japan.

** Of course, when they needed to clear out an island for whatever reason (Iwo Jima, for example), the result was a dungeon adventure akin to the ''[[Tomb of Horrors]]''.

* Police SWAT teams discovered that getting past a door with many locks on it was a problem, so they just use a shotgun to blast out the hinges.

* The Berlin Airlift. The [[Soviet Union]] decided to control Berlin by cutting off all supplies coming into the city from the West by road and train. Instead of trying to recapture a corridor of land between West Germany and West Berlin, allied nations decided to just ''fly'' over.

* A similar tactic got the Crusaders, and later the Turks, into Constantinople. It's a heavily walled city, but if the emperor needs an army and you happen to have a horde of barbarian mercenaries for hire...

* While the [[wikipedia:Siege of Kazan|Siege of Kazan]] in 1552 was your typical siege involving thousands of troops (with the Russians outnumbering the defending Tatars) and hundreds of cannons, the city was only taken when the attackers secretly dug a tunnel under a defensive wall and planted charges, blowing a huge hole in it. Later, [[Ivan the Terrible]], who commanded the Russian forces, decided to safeguard Moscow from the same tactics by ordering basements to be built under each defense tower with copper plates mounted on walls. During sieges, people with good hearing would be sent into these rooms to listen for sounds of digging that would be amplified by the plates.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Narrative Devices]]

[[Category:Action Adventure Tropes]]

[[Category:Example as a Thesis]]