No-Gear Level: Difference between revisions

See also [[A Taste of Power]] (an inversion of this which gives you late-game equipment in the very beginning of the game), [[Second-Hour Superpower]] (when the first level is played without gear), [[Bag of Spilling]] (loss of equipment between games), [[So Long and Thanks For All the Gear]] and [[No Item Use for You]]. A variant of [[Unexpected Gameplay Change]].

{{examples}}

* This happens every couple of books in the series ''[[Lone Wolf]]''. Of course, you're still a [[Psychic Powers|psionic]] [[Badass]]. Notably: in Book 2, after you get shipwrecked; in Book 5 and Book 9, if Lone Wolf has to get out of jail; and unavoidably in Book 7, ''Castle Death'', when thrown into [[The Maze]].

* The whole book 4 of the ''[[Grail Quest]]'' series, ''Voyage of Terror'', is this trope. The hero Pip is accidentally sent to ancient Greece instead of Avalon, and starts out with none of the usual equipment, nor the numerous magical items that could have been gathered during the 3 precedent books, including [[Talking Weapon|Excalibur Junior]]. Sure, you can find some new weapons, armors and magic along the way, but none of the usual fare until the next book.

* ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' adventures A3 and A4. At the end of A3 "Aerie of the Slave Lords", the characters are captured by the title opponents: they have no chance to avoid it. At the beginning of A4 "In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords", they wake up in the title location with no weapons, though they can improvise some from their belongings.

* One ''[[Pathfinder]]'' module has the party trying to retrieve an item from a shop in a section of a marketplace where weapons aren't allowed (except for the shops' guards) and magic is suppressed, and the shopkeeper doesn't want to sell it. (Judging by the Dungeon Master notes, the expected method of obtaining it is to use items in the shop as improvised weapons.)

* ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]'' series:

** In ''[[The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games|Oracle of Ages]]'', your equipment is stolen about halfway through the game when you are stranded on an island.

* ''[[Star Fox (series)|Star Fox Adventure]]'' has Fox get imprisoned and his magic staff (the only piece of equipment he has) taken off him in one stage. The stage thus revolves around sneaking around the prison and getting it back-then administering some much-deserved violence towards the jailers.

* The SNES version of the movie ''[[Judge Dredd]]'' has you stripped of all weapons before stage 3, save for the pistol.

* ''[[Alien vs. Predator]] 2'' has two of those (disarming an alien is somewhat... difficult). For the marine, it happens pretty early in the game and is a rather standard scenario. You are helped by the fact that a fellow prisoner hands you a knife (well, you grab it off his barely-cold body...) and the first enemy soldier posthumously donates you a pistol about six seconds after the mission starts. The predator is trapped, shot unconscious and shipped off to the human base for research. For obvious reasons, the scientists try to disarm their prisoners, but hesitate when taking off the arm blades of the first one induces cardiac arrest in the specimen. The predators ''do not like'' being without a weapon...

* The final boss in ''Viewtiful Joe 2'' strips Joe and Silvia of their movie superhero powers. All the abilities you've bought and learned are gone. However, {{spoiler|after a short pre-fight using their weaker forms, the spectators use [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe]] to revitalize the duo.}}

* ''KOTOR 2'' has this happen fairly early on, and you only have two fights sans-equipment before you get it back.

* ''[[Deus Ex]]'', which makes the Warren Spector quote ironic as he was lead developer on the game. However, unlike many other games, you are immediately re-armed with a lot of good weapons and tools the moment you escape, making this much less of a pain, unless you rely too much on Assault Rifles or Shotguns.

* ''[[Rune]]'' was billed as a game where [[Proud Warrior Race Guy|manly vikings]], [[Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti|yetis]], [[Steampunk|dwarves]], and [[Zombie Apocalypse|giant zombies]] chop each other to pieces with swords so huge they don't even fit on the screen. While most of the game easily lives up to this, your character is [[Plotline Death|killed in a cutscene]] right after the [[Justified Tutorial|tutorial]], and then brought back to life in a dank underwater cavern with no weapons. You only get to do anything interesting after working your way through [[Underwater Ruins]] full of goblins, crabs, jellyfish and ''malignant sea anemones''.

* In the last act of ''[[Police Quest]]: Open Season'', the [[Big Bad]] strips you of your possessions in a [[Matchlight Danger Revelation|Flashlight Danger Revelation]] moment, forcing you to improvise an [[Aerosol Flamethrower]] to take him out.

** In the first one, at least, you have the option of leaving Natalya in her cell until you've cleared out the rest of the base.

* In ''James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire'', you can actually prevent this from happening, if you find a keycard before you enter the submarine in the Poseidon level.

* ''[[Soldier of Fortune]] II'' has Mullins stripped of his weapons and imprisoned in Hong Kong.

* This is essentially the entire purpose of the Exemplar/Malefactor (Cross-level team) and Flashback (repeating a quest) features in ''[[City of Heroes]]'' and ''City of Villains''. The game doesn't make extensive use of in-game items, but you receive an effective level reduction, losing access to any abilities and enhancements you achieved after the level you've been reduced to.

* The idea behind the Kung Fu Hustler skill in [[Kingdom of Loathing]] is to turn the character with it into a monk: if you have it and don't have any weapons equipped, you get four intrinsic effects that boost your power by a considerable amount.If you equip weapons, you lose the effects in a turn.

* Salvage in ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]'' strips players of the ability to use all gear upon entering (the excuse is something about psychowaves in the ruins). Special cells dropped by enemies can be used to lift the equipment restrictions, slot by slot.

* In ''[[Zone of the Enders]]'' you have to play a mission as a damaged mook Raptor with 1 hp.

* The parts in ''[[Super Mario Sunshine]]'' where you lose FLUDD.

* Happens twice in ''[[Heart of Darkness (video game)|Heart of Darkness]]'' (an adventure game somehow similar to the first ''Oddworld''): when you start the game you have [[Rule of Cool|the electric equivalent of a flamethrower]] with which you zap hordes (literally) of [[Living Shadow|shadowy monsters]]. But of course, you lose that weapon before the end of the first level, so, since you're playing a twelve years old with no other means of defense, you have to run helplessly for the rest of the level. However, later in the game, you find a [[Green Rocks|magical rock]] that grant you powers, and you can start zapping monsters again... until later on when the rock is destroyed and you lose your power... only to find back your electric weapon a moment later.

* Level 4-1 in the Wii ''[[A Boy and His Blob]]'' begins with Blob, the source of all your abilities, getting [[Distress Ball|suddenly kidnapped.]] You have to make your way through the whole level without him.

* In [[Kirby's Return to Dream Land]], when Kirby enters the other dimension through the openings unlocked from using the Ultra Copy Abilities, he loses his ability and must make his way through an obstacle course with only his normal moves.

* In a rare unscripted version, ''[[Nethack]]'' has nymphs, who seduce your character, steal your equipment and then teleport away. More than a few players have died because they were suddenly left weaponless after running into a nymph. (Of course, this is ''NetHack''. More than a few players have died falling down stairs. [[Everything Trying to Kill You]] is a bit of an understatement.)

* ''[[Ancient Domains of Mystery|ADOM]]'' twists this by making the player voluntarily give up his equipment. Just hanging inside the Tower of Eternal Flames, fire immunity or no, will randomly and permanently destroy things from your inventory (with fireproof blankets/rings of ice as a partial countermeasure). Falling down the Rift breaks a good portion of your currently carried inventory and the only way to diminish the effect is to have the few [[Cursed with Awesome|good/not too awful]] corruption effects among an array of nasty ones. On both occasions the smart player is forced to stash most of their rarer belongings somewhere and having to get by with only the bare essentials. Using artifact weapons/armor is an option due to their indestructible nature, but they also accelerate the player's food consumption, making starvation a real possibility.

* In ''[[Chocobo's Dungeon|Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon]]'', all of the special dungeons prevent you from bringing in items including gear from outside; upon entering, your inventory is put into your storage (if there isn't enough room in storage, you can't enter). Upon leaving the dungeon you get to keep everything you found inside and can go to storage to retrieve your former gear as well.

* In ''[[Final Fantasy XII]]'', you're thrown in jail at one point and stripped of your equipment, but still get to keep all the spells and techniques you've acquired so far.

** Averted strangely in ''[[Final Fantasy V]]'', where your party is sent to jail, but allowed to keep all their weapons and items. Going even further, they're in a cell right next to Cid, who was apparently allowed to keep enough explosives to blow a hole through the wall. The game contains a later instance where this trope is played straight.

* At one point in the first ''[[Xenosaga]]'' game your party is captured and locked in a room without your weapons. But don't worry, you have [[Good Old Fisticuffs|chaos]] in your party and he gets to fight the guards on his own.

* In ''[[Black and White]]'' you lose your creature for a level. The creature is ''most of the gameplay''.

* All the ''[[Metal Gear]]'' games have this in some form.

** ''Portable Ops'' puts a good twist on it. As in the other games, Big Boss/Snake is captured, and stripped of his equipment...but this time, the [[Redshirt Army]] he's spent the whole game recruiting has to search for him and break him out.

* You start the last two levels of ''[[Hitman]] 2: Silent Assassin'' equipped with nothing but your trusty non-metallic strangulation wire.

* In ''[[Dead Rising]]'', you get captured by cultists, stripped to your underwear and put in a box. You have to break out the box and fight your way through hordes of cultists, armed with only a step-ladder (until you find the katana on a shelf). Notably, you can avoid this by defeating them at distance and thus avoiding their gas attack. This is rather difficult in most cases, although the [[Infinity+1 Sword|Infinity Plus One]] [[Mega Man (video game)|Mega Buster]] renders it laughably easy. And when {{spoiler|the Army shows up near the end}}, they will capture you if you "die." They strip you to your boxers and tie you up. Oddly though, even though they are there {{spoiler|to cover up the incident}}, they take your pants ''but not your camera.''

* In ''[[Condemned]]'', the final level strips the air taser that the player has had the entire game. The ''[[Disc One Nuke|extremely efficient]]'' air taser that it was easy to rely on as the primary weapon through the entire game.

* In ''[[Dead Space 2]]'', the first level consists of running past necromorphs in a straitjacket. Oh, and to make matters worse, Isaac's health bar is alarmingly low. Have fun.

* Also happens several times to [[James Bond]] in ''Everything Or Nothing''. Quite frankly, you end up wondering why they even bother to take his weapons at all, when there are so many unlocked armouries for Bond to take his pick from. In general, Bond is infamous for this, because the enemies never take away his gadgets.

* ''[[Destroy All Humans!]]'', when Crypto's craft gets shot down in Union Town and he gets caught by Majestic.

** In ''Max Payne 2'', he has to evade assassins at the hospital until he can obtain a weapon from a fallen security guard and turn the tables. He also loses everything at the start of the second chapter... then the police station gets attacked.

* At the end of the Life Missions in ''[[Heroes of Might and Magic|Heroes of Might and Magic IV]]'', you get to keep your items but are stripped of your entire army, to fight the final end boss with just the story's main character. The enemy however, is also a lone general, who's probably lower level and has no ranks in Combat, so you can generally trounce him.

* At the end of the third chapter of ''[[Fire Emblem Jugdral|Fire Emblem: Thracia 776]]'', Leaf and Lifis are thrown into jail along with Karin and Fergus ; all of them have had their equipment stripped away from them and put into chests scattered around the prison. You have to use your three new recruits with weapons (Brighton, Machyua and Lara) to get them out of their cells and to help them recover their equipment quickly, since the game mechanics allow any disarmed unit to be captured instantly.

* Subverted (fortunately) in ''[[Fallout|Fallout 3]]'', where {{spoiler|despite losing all your inventory (including your pip-boy) when captured after getting a key plot item, you recover all your items ''from a locker conveniently placed in the room you are held in''. you're even instructed by one of your captors (President Eden) to get your stuff from it.}} The sequence following this event, had it NOT be subverted, would've been a subversion of another fake difficulty trope (before briefly subverting/correcting itself.) Played arrow-straight, however, in "The Pitt" expansion. In order to get into Pittsburgh, you must (willingly or unwillingly) give up all your equipment {{spoiler|except, optionally, for a hidden switchblade or the least powerful gun in the game -- both are only marginally better than your bare hands}} despite the fact that by this point, you may be kitted out in full Power Armor with a Gatling Laser and the guards are about as strong as the other [[Random Mook|RandomMooks]] you've been killing for days.

** Same deal for the "Mothership Zeta" expansion. Although you find some really swanky stun sticks almost immediately, and then start finding alien zap guns. It's almost enough to make you not want to bother retrieving the rest of your stuff.

* ''[[Scarface the World Is Yours]]'' does this in the mission where Tony returns to Freedomtown, confiscating his weapons and springing an ambush on him. It also does... something like this at the start of the assault on the [[Very Definitely Final Dungeon]], dropping all the stuff in Tony's [[Hyperspace Arsenal]] for a Desert Eagle and rather limited ammo. You have to collect guns off fallen enemies to keep fighting.

* In the story mode of ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's|Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's Stardust Accelerator]]'', the player gets sent to jail after breaking into Neo Domino City, duel runner and cards confiscated in the process. While you use borrowed cards to win your freedom, it takes a little [[Stealth-Based Mission]] to get your stuff back.

* While your weapons are bolted onto the ship and cannot be removed, ''[[Naval Ops|Warship Gunner 2]]'' has one mission where your ship has expended all of its ammunition and needs to resupply by taking over an enemy depot (presumably with a contingent of marines). Fortunately, the only opposition comes from coastal defense guns that are more annoying than anything else.