Gameplay And Story Segregation / Action-Adventure

• Bomberman 64:
  • If Bomberman revisits a level he has already completed, if he gains or loses a heart, this carries over to the next stage he enters. This includes boss battles, most of whom do not survive the fight.
  • In the first fight with Orion, Bomberman can throw him into the lava, which should be fatal, as he canonically dies by lava at the end of the second fight, in which he is piloting Hades. Yet if Orion is defeated this way even the first time the player reaches this stage, he will still be fought piloting Hades. This can be countered by the fact that in order to get all five Gold Cards from the battle (which are necessary to lock the true ending), one must defeat him with bombs.
  • On the topic of revisiting levels, after unlocking Rainbow Palace, if Bomberman revisits the first fight with Sirius, his dialog changes from the original battle, as he is now replaced with a robot version of himself. Furthermore, revisiting giant boss battles, Sirius will not give you Remote Bombs, this powerup now being inside a bombable box, even though, again, Bomberman wouldn't canonically be able to revisit a single one of these fights after Sirius revealed his true colors.
• Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse: You start off with one character and can get one of three partners to join you, or finish the game solo. If you have a partner and sign up a new one, the old one leaves. It is also impossible to encounter all three characters during a single playthrough (without a cheat code, anyway). Yet, according to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Trevor fought Dracula with the help of all three of his allies.
• Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin: For pretty much for the entire first half of the game, you get warned about how having Jonathan or any other non-Belmont use the true power of the Vampire Killer will drain their life force and eventually kill them if they overuse it. But when you do actually unlock its power in game, you can whip it all day long with absolutely no consequences whatsoever. Justified, as it takes longer than the events of the game for the user's life force to be drained.
• Castlevania: Rondo of Blood: In pretty much any telling, it seems to imply that Richter was the main force going rather than Maria (for instance, the Action Prologue of Symphony of the Night has him fight Dracula alone and Maria only shows up to offer support if the player loses), and most treatments suggest Richter to be the stronger of the two. It makes sense, as he's an experienced monster-slayer and part of the Belmont clan and not a 12-year-old girl, but anyone to have played Rondo of Blood and used Maria can tell you that Maria is far more powerful than Richter.
• Hollow Knight: The Hiveblood charm renders the bees of the Hive non-hostile by making the Knight seem like one of their own. However, in their pacified state, they retain their normal, hostile Dream Nail dialogue.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In the majority of the games, the dungeons are usually infested with foul monsters and other creatures due to the boss inhabiting the dungeon. It's implied that beating the boss of the dungeon frees the area of its influence, but you can go back in those dungeons and still see the same monsters and creatures you fought before as if you didn't actually accomplish anything. This is especially notable with the Dodongo's Cavern: it's explained that the place had become very dangerous with the sudden resurgence of Dodongos and other monsters, and that Link was a hero for vanquishing them so the Gorons could mine the place in peace, and yet all the Dodongos and other monsters are still every bit as prevalent in the cave, even if you come back as an adult seven years later. The only one that stays dead is King Dodongo, and he hung out in the lowest basement of the cave which was accessed by a hole high up on the ceiling and was impossible to get out of.
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: The Boots allow Link to walk on water. This would seem like a handy item to have in those battle scenes where could get knocked off platforms by Ledge Bats and fall into the water, right? Too bad, there's precisely one battle area (the Heart Container near the fifth palace) where Link ever uses the boots, and falling into water on the others is just as fatal after you receive the boots as it was before.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past:
    • You can't ordinarily use the Flute in the Dark World, but after the second fight with Agahnim Link uses the Flute in a cutscene and the bird comes flying in to whisk Link away to the Golden Pyramid.
    • Zelda's sprite is always depicted with the white dress most often associated with her, though she doesn't actually wear it until the end of the game; most of the time, what she's really wearing is a more plain-looking blue dress.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: Lampshaded in the auction minigame. If you lose the auction, you may leave the room and re-enter it immediately, at which point the auction will begin afresh. The auctioneer's preamble will then begin: "Today's lot is... a treasure chart. Yes, this is exactly the same treasure chart we had last time, but for some reason, Anton, who won the auction, has decided to return it."
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: In the final dungeon, Link is rescued by his allies from an arrow to the face and about four mooks, despite the fact that by now Link has destroyed entire hordes of enemies and has been hit by more arrows than a practice dummy.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Fi's comment states that Cursed Spumes, a type of enemy, live in poisonous swamps. In-game, they're only found in the fiery crater of Eldin Volcano.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: There are several discrepancies between the Hyrule Compendium's entries and the actual entities they describe.
    • The Hyrule Compendium's entries each list two locations where their associated enemy, animal, material or equipment is common. In practice, however, the entities in question can be found in several other areas just as commonly, and in some cases — most notably the basic enemy types — have essentially universal distributions.
    • Blue-winged herons are described as living along waterfronts, while pink herons instead favor open fields and grasslands. This doesn't much match where they can actually be found, however — both types are fairly frequent in both kinds of habitat, and it's not rare for mixed flocks to spawn.
    • The Compendium describes bright-chested ducks as having high-quality, fatty meat. In-game they only drop raw drumsticks, the lowest-quality tier of bird meat.
    • According to their Compendium entry, grassland foxes are omnivores that eat smaller animals, insects, and fruits, which is fairly accurate to what real foxes are like. In practice, the foxes will eat fruit if they spot it but will not eat any meat item.
    • Lynels are described as fiercely territorial being that will kill trespassers on sight. However, unlike every other enemy in the game, this actually isn't how Lynels behave. When a Lynel notices you, it will first stand and observe you — if you move closer it will draw its weapon in warning, but won't actually attack until you either get closer still or draw your own weapons.
• LEGO Dimensions has an inversion of "a whole group is traveling together in the cutscenes, but there's just one playable character and the others disappear in the gameplay". No matter how many minifigs you load the toypad with, the storyline just has Wyldstyle, Batman and Gandalf. Particularly obvious if one of your characters is also an NPC, so for example, the Doctor explains he can't join you because he'd be crossing his timeline, and then does so anyway. (Similarly, the DLC for the Level Pack minifigs assume those characters are on their own, but you can't actually play it like that because you need the basic three's special abilities.)
• LEGO The Lord of the Rings repeats Gimli's "You'll have to toss me — don't tell the elf" line from the movie during the Battle Of Helm's Deep, which is all well and good... except for the fact that throwing Gimli is a gameplay mechanic (you even defeat a boss using it), and by that point Gimli has most likely been thrown all over the place by all manner of characters.
• No Straight Roads has Sayu start using attacks when a member of her creative team is introduced, particularly Remi's art and Sofa's editing. But on higher difficulties, those attacks are used before that member is introduced properly.
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is an interesting example. The Star Wars Legends continuity is very big, and sometimes crazy, and Starkiller (both Galen Malak and his clone) are nowhere near the most powerful in it. But Starkiller's skills with the force and the lightsaber far outshine anything Palpatine, Luke, Anakin, or Yoda (the four supposedly most powerful) have ever done in the films, causing many to label him the most powerful force-sensitive ever. The game's developers and defenders have claimed it to be an example of this trope, but the problem is, the game's narratives actually seem to support Starkiller's insane skill and raw power. Forget canonically and infamously pulling a Star Destroyer out of the sky (technically, he only redirected its fall); he defeated Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader twice, and (non-canonically, but in What If? stories) Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan Kenobi's Force Ghost (seriously), an untrained-but-embracing-the-darkside Luke Skywalker, the Ewok tribe, Chewie, Han, and a fully trained Jedi Leia. The only hint at him having some limits to his abilities are the fact that these fights required boss battles, when judging by gameplay he should have been able to force-lightning or hack them all to bits in an instant.
• Tomb Raider III: The leader of the Damned, men left horribly disfigured by resident Vain Mad Scientist Sophia Leigh, claims that he and his men are immortal. Yet Lara can lay waste to them using her weakest weapon in-game.
• Tomb Raider (2013):
  • Throughout much of the first half of the game the story implies that Lara is hanging on and only surviving the hell she's being put through by the skin of her teeth, while the first time she kills another human being is a quite traumatizing event. It's not until around the time of her escape through the shanty town after rescuing her friends that Lara decides she's had enough and actively starts taking the fight to the Solarii. Actual gameplay, however, glosses over Lara's reaction to killing, and she subsequently slaughters mooks by the hundreds after the first time she picks up a gun. The player will also blast their way without effort through encounters that Lara claims to have only barely survived.
  • Some of Lara's equipment upgrades stretch the Willing Suspension of Disbelief to its breaking point. Sure, duct taping two magazines for a machine gun together so you can reload faster is completely plausible in Lara's circumstances, but turning a WWII-era Japanese Type-100 submachine gun into a frelling AK-47 with nothing but a couple spare parts? Many of the upgrades Lara is able to cobble together at camp from random bits of scrap and parts taken from animals she hunts (bow strings or wrapping the limbs with sinew? Believable. A suppressor for a Colt Model 1911? Not so much). would require not only specialized equipment but machining skills as well. Handwaved by Rule of Fun, but still pretty egregious.

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