Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Difference between revisions

*** Even worse is the Tower of Babel. A large, tall, ''completely hollow'' tower that your characters have to ascend in their Gears, which, of course, are capable of ''flight''...and yet they make the entire ascent ''on foot''. It is official: the cast of ''Xenogears'' is [[Too Dumb to Live]].

* With [[Lampshade Hanging]], when you encounter a certain unopenable door in ''[[The Journeyman Project]] 2: Buried in Time'', your [[Exposition Fairy|AI Sidekick]] comments, "I've got a feeling that the room behind this door has neither been modeled nor rendered." Similarly, the original ''Journeyman Project'' makes you take the lift straight from your 4th floor apartment to the ground floor transporter booth that takes you to work. Pressing floors 2 or 3 receives a reply of "Access denied; this floor was never modeled nor rendered."

* The Sims in ''[[The Sims]]'' and its sequel cannot pass between squares separated by walls or fences, which led to the ridiculous experience of surrounding a Sim with an ankle-high white picket fence and watching him starve to death, unable to cross it. As a means of a "fix", ''[[The Sims]] 2'' includes higher-than-waist fences only.

** ''Sims 2'' sims cannot climb out of a pool without a ladder. They would sooner drown than simply climb up the ledge that's only inches above the water line.

** Later in the game, the entrance to the waterways is initially blocked by a grate which can't be opened even with an [[NPC]]'s help. If it could, a difficult [[Boss Battle]] and a major plot twist could have been avoided.

* The 2-D ''Zelda'' games provide many obvious examples of this, with a plethora of simple obstacles that nevertheless require you to find a powerup first. Move past a bush? Not without your sword. Step over a small rock? Forget it unless you got your power glove. A small tree? Nope, only if you got the fire wand. One of the most ridiculous is in ''[[The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games]]'', where you can walk past trees in winter, but in any other month their ''hanging leaves'' form an impassable barrier.

** Both ''[[The Legend of Zelda a Link To T He Past (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda a Link To T He Past]]'' and ''[[The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening]]'' also feature important books sitting on top of a bookshelf. To get it down, Link has to go all the way to a dungeon on the other side of Hyrule/the island, defeat countless monsters, and get the [[Sprint Shoes]] so he can ram the bookcase and the book will fall off. Instead of, you know...going to someone else's house and [[Kleptomaniac Hero|stealing a footstool or something like he probably already did with every other useful object in said house]].

** In ''[[The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker (Video Game)|The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker]]'', every time you try to sail to areas your map doesn't cover, your boat says something along the lines of "In that direction is sea to dangerous for you to travel now." and refuses to sail through.

*** Kingy does this if you try to go anywhere but the row of three map tiles between Windfall and Dragonroost Island, and the column from Dragonroost to Tree Haven before you clear the dungeon on Tree Haven. So if you want to get back to Windfall Island from Tree Haven, you have to go north and then west, rather than just cutting through diagonally...

** There's even an ''Impassable Head High Hole'' in a hallway in the East Central Sewers by "Sweet" Jill's corpse. There's a ''knee-high pile of rubble'' in the way, that you can't climb over, because the ceiling is about 6 inches too low. [[Invisible Wall|You still can't climb over it even if you're crouching]]. Made worse by the fact that the giant sewer rats can get over it no problem.

** The earlier Fallout games play the trope much more directly. Because of how the game deals with shop inventories many of the merchants in the game have their items stashed in containers on the map just beyond the player's vision and, thanks to various waist-high obstacles, beyond their reach as well. At least one of these inventories in Fallout 2 can be accessed with patient skirting of a waist-high fence, not that it really breaks the game at all.

** See also Sigmateam's ''[[Alien Shooter]]'', an isometric shooter where the final weapon is some sort of [[BFG|shoulder-fired nuclear-powered gatling gun]]...which still cannot seem to destroy basic office equipment. Perhaps the aliens should have made their armour out of cheap Chinese plastic instead.

* ''[[Eternal Sonata]]'' features some insurmountable sticks on the ground, especially in [[Stealth Pun|Mt. Rock]]. Oddly enough, standing behind one of these sticks will cause an enemy on the other side of the stick to be seemingly unable to see you.

** Actually, Bowser can jump when he gains the Shell Slam ability, but only straight up into the air, and several times higher than the ankle high ledges.

* ''[[Rogue Galaxy]]'' is basically ''based'' on this. If there's a huge, open door in front of you but the room within it isn't displated on the map. You CAN'T get in. There's even a part where, after crossing a very long maze-like path across a mine you come to a point where the short way can connect directly to the elevator leading to the next level, but you have to turn around and take the longest possible way 'cause there's a ''rock'' on the way.

* ''[[Syphon Filter]]'': Grate blocking subway ramp? You can't use grenades on it, only C4 will take it down, from the other side. Hedge maze in Washington Park? No, you can't climb over the hedges. Cars blocking the road? Forget about climbing over them. And outside of cutscenes, falling more than about 10 feet kills you instantly (no falling damage in between).

* In ''[[Vette (Video Game)|Vette]]'', large sections of San Francisco are blocked off by insurmountable fences, some waist height (No, you can't jump over them with low gravity, either). [[Handwaved]] in the manual as being due to "earthquake damage". And if you try to jump over Lombard Street, you hit an [[Invisible Wall]].

* In [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zJv0gssH2s this example], a little dog is seemingly not able to escape a cage made out of empty Pepsi cans.

** Similarly, horses and other large animals are sometimes kept in non-electric, unbarbed fence enclosures; they could knock down a fence section without even trying...so, naturally, they only ever break fences by mistake, because ''trying'' to knock a fence down doesn't occur to them.

* Many insects get trapped behind the window even if some of the window squares are open, trying desperately to fly against the glass. Of course this is due to their inability to see the difference between air and transparent glass.

** Insects also tend to move up when they can't move horizontally, to the extent that an upside-down, uncovered cup will usually keep them trapped for quite a while until they fall out by mistake.

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[[Category:Insurmountable Waist Height Fence]]