Just For Fun / Console RPG Cliches: The TV Tropes Version

This is the TV Tropes version of The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés. Sanity optional.

---

Index | 1-24 | 25-48 | 49-72 | 73-96 | 97-120 | 121-144 | 145-168 | 169-192 | TV Tropes Version

---

1. Screw Politeness, We Have Plot: If a villain, usually a Designated Villain, wants to talk with the hero, the hero will refuse and be too much in a mood to fight, even when the hero was calm-minded just before that.
2. Law of Plot-Based Charisma: Regardless of how OBVIOUSLY EVIL a villain is, they will be a trusted and upstanding ruler to the lemmings that are their subjects.
   • Yakra's Corollary: If the villain is an Evil Chancellor instead of a ruler in their own right, this will instead apply to the official ruler, who really should realize that their subordinate iz no goud and do something about it.
3. One Degree of Plot Coupons Rule: There will always be a connection between one of the heroes and one of the villains. They might be related, have had a failed relationship, or something of the sort.
4. When All You Have Is a Hammer… Principle: Fighting an opponent in the underground wastes of Mytheria and fighting an opponent in the air kingdom of Kingdomia and fighting an opponent in the mechanized paradise of Mechanolai are interchangeable. There are no tactics besides "hit him with what hurts him," and environments are strangely useless during combat. On certain rare occasions, the tactics might reach the rareified heights of "stun him using a special trick, then hit him with what hurts him". On those occasions, the special trick invariably involves some skill or tool the hero just learned/acquired.
5. Garrett's Observation: Stealth is as simple as staying out of the guards' line of sight.
6. City Watch Equal Opportunity Employment Act: Speaking of stealth, sight and hearing ranges tend to be much, much, much shorter in RPGs than in real life. Your team can be 15 feet away with a guard looking right at them with your characters not even bothering to whisper when they talk, and the guard will have absolutely no idea that you're there.
7. City Watch Equal Opportunity Discrimination Act: All guards are required to have the exact same detection range. No new guard will be hired if they can detect intruders any better or worse than any other guard.
8. Front Door Corollary: Regardless of how easy stealth is, you may as well just fight your way through.
9. That Which We Don't Kill Doesn't Make Us Stronger: No one ever gets Experience Points for avoiding enemies or having them run away. In the rare event that it actually does, the reward is rarely equal to what you'd get from just fighting them. Might as well just kill everything.
10. The Cutscene Director has a Magic Fetish: Magic is always cooler in the intro movie for the game or for the (admittedly rare) cutscene where someone casts a spell, unless there are 'ultimate' spells. (Includes summoning.)
11. Rule of One-Hit KO: Bullets, arrows, swords, and other common weapons will always kill during a cut scene, even if they don't anywhere else.
12. Fair Play for Suckers Rule: If you see the villain standing before you, you have to go up and talk to him, no matter how obviously it is a trap. Bombarding him with spells and melee weapons from out of range of whatever he had planned is never an option.
    • Yoshi's Corollary: Finding creative ways to cheat your way around running up to the villains in plain sight and having a noble duel to the death will be rewarded by the developers.
13. Yosuke's Lament: Your character will never need to use a bathroom, and sleep and eating are completely optional.
14. Astroturf Clause: No matter what you do in battle while in a forest you'll never set the forest on fire. You can cast massive fireballs, pull meteorites from the heavens, or summon a planet-sized dragon to assault your enemy with a Wave-Motion Gun from space, but those trees just aren't going up.
15. Revenge of the Architects: A 10-foot high cliff is a more impassable barrier than an adamantine door engraved with runes of power. Apparently in the excitement of mastering apocalyptic magics, no one bothered to invent the stepladder.
16. Level 1 Hero, Level 50 Rock Climber: Similarly, the only mountain-climbing allowed involves no gear whatever. Mountains are essentially big staircases, and you just need to pull yourself from ledge to ledge.
17. Beelzebombed: Summoning dark forces (demons, devils, eldritch abominations, etc.) never works. Despite this, the evil wizards keep trying, lured by promises of fame, wealth and power, and generally wind up dead instead.
18. Rules of Romance (Bianca's Lament): If the game has a romantic subplot, the protagonist will end up with his blonde childhood friend. If the game lets you choose between various characters, one of them will be your blonde childhood friend. The other options will be the Black Magician Girl and maybe a Lady of War. But there will always be three, and very seldom a Gay Option.
19. Organ-Filled Punching Bag: At least one female character will see it as her duty to slap male characters when they do something she deems silly or stupid. No one thinks any less of her for it.
20. Back to Prohibition: Hardened pirates, city guardsmen, and dastardly thieves all have one thing in common: they drink nothing stronger than fruit juice.
21. Know Your Audience: Shy ingenues, independent warrior women, and brilliant sorceresses all have one thing in common: out-of-character though it may seem, they all dress like hookers.
22. HOUSE Magazine - Villain's Edition: The bad guy's castle will be really ominous-looking, and located in the middle of a wasteland. Why he chooses to live here, we'll never know.
    • If you're rich enough, you can build any kind of madhouse to live in.
23. Reality Is A Shonen Series Theorem: The protagonist will always be a clean-shaven, brown-haired or blond lad who spends most of his time looking determinedly ahead and smiling a big stupid grin. All of his reactions will be bizarrely exaggerated.
24. Yuan's Surprise: If it is a JRPG, At least one major character (usually a protagonist, if not the main character, but sometimes applies to villains as well) will have blue hair.
25. Cataplexy: The revelation of unexpected news will cause a character (or, for a bigger reveal, your entire party) to fall over.
26. Politeness Is For Troublemakers: Whenever anyone blames your party for something, they will barely apologize once you've cleared your name, and certainly won't offer any kind of restitution for the punishment you've endured.
27. My Little Allies: Every party member, except the main character, is about the size of a grape for the entire game, except for cutscenes and battles. While grape-sized, they will ride around in your pocket.
28. Natural Selection: Local flora and fauna may completely detach themselves from the laws of nature should it mean the deaths of the protagonists. For example, while taking a stroll on the beach, fish and squid will attack the party by levitating across the sand and flailing at them with their now remarkably useless appendages.
29. A Victory Well Stolen: If someone offers to give you something, then usually it will have been stolen and the person who owns the object will go and get reinforcements to go and get the object back, but they only turn up when you regain the object.
30. The Deskjob From Hell: Storekeepers and other members of the working society are on duty, 24 hours a day.
    • A Change In Scenery: Any NPCs you encounter will walk the same little route over and over again.
31. Psychic Magic Points: Even if you are Psychic, you'll always use Magic Points, even if it isn't Functional Magic.
    • Magic Everything: All techniques beyond 'Basic attack' require mana to use, and are therefore powered by magic. Even things like a straightforward lunging sword slash.
    • The Problem With Power Points (We Are Using Struggle Together): If any technique (other than the Infinity +1 Sword) has a cap on how many times it can be used, every technique will have a cap on how many times it can be used no matter how basic or undemanding. This cap will not change with experience - your mage can cast Scorch exactly thirty times before recharging whether they are Lv. 20 or Lv. 100.
32. It's A Weird, Weird, Weird, Weird World: Throughout your travels, you are likely to end up in a city full of toys, Heaven, inside a big sewer, inside somebody, a town that feels nostalgic, a city that doesn't look right, a train, IN SPACE, an elevator, a seemingly endless staircase, a seemingly endless battlefield, a city made of food or a place where the laws of physics and gravity don't apply..
33. Friends of My Friends Are My Enemies: If early in the game you encounter a general and/or an elite group of soldiers (usually with a neutral-to-evil name that includes the words "Crimson", "Vermillion" or "Wolves") who appear on your side for one fight, one-hit-killing all enemies, they will be either mind-controlled or be out-and-out traitors, and you will be fighting them once you've levelled to the degree where you are able to think about taking them on.
34. Revenge Of The Fashion Designers Principle: Elaborate clothes improve combat prowess. This rule operates on a curve, however, as the more elaborately dressed characters there are, the less effect the clothing has on their abilities.
35. The Three Pieces of Dental Floss Equality: Likewise, the amount of material in the clothing worn by a character equally (but inversely) affects combat prowess, especially if said character is young, female, attractive, or animalistic. The inverse of this rule is ignored — bulky outfits are seldom encumbering. This particular effect is most seen with agility, evasion, and magic — an easy way to handwave the results. The fact that these are also the typical domain of female characters is also a consideration. It has been suggested that a 18-year-old nudist white haired Cat Girl ninja-mage wearing 3 band-aids and a ribbon could break the speed of light, but obviously none have been observed.
36. Summoner's Tough Love Maxim: If an RPG includes a class or character that summons powerful magical creatures to attack, you will have to subdue at least some of them in combat before using them. However, once the summoner learns how to summon a creature, it will never turn on the heroes no matter how many times it is forced to do the party's bidding.
37. The Runs: The main character in an RPG never walks anywhere. He will always run and has infinite stamina to do so. No matter if he's going to another continent or moving two feet from the weapon merchant to the armor merchant, the protagonist will run the whole way instead of walking. This behavior doesn't appear out of the ordinary in the game to anyone.
38. "Why Don't We Just Call The Cops?" (Red's Law): Police Are Useless. Your party of prepubescents and wanted convicts are expected to deal with any and all crime in the world, even if it completely stops you from completing your quest. May or may not extend to all adults.
39. Inverse Law of Rewards: The reward for succeeding at something in an RPG is inversely proportional to how trivial the task was. Defeating the vampire that was holding the village hostage might get you some gold, if you're lucky, whereas the path the Infinity +1 Sword will be a reward for tasks like racing with children and finding lost chickens.
    • Inverse Corollary of Accessibility: However, the hard, non-trivial, non-rewarding quests can easily be seen and stick out like a sore thumb, whereas the easy, trivial, very much rewarding quests will require a lot of investigation to even find out. The secret cabal of vampires that gives you nothing can be seen from your house. The location of the chicken race (and its existence) that has no reason to be kept secret is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
40. Law of Military Research: A weapon will always do more damage the more primitive it is. Player characters wielding guns will be completely useless with them, and will likely fill magical support roles, while characters wielding swords, axes, hammers, clubs, or even their bare fists will always hugely outclass supposedly superior weapons, up to and including galaxy-destroying super lasers.
41. Law Of Conservation Of Diligence: Although sneaking past guards requires nothing more than avoiding a few obvious spots or staying out of their line of sight, if you break these simple rules, you will always be caught. It doesn't matter if you are invisible, polymorphed into a rat, a legendary hero who has already saved the world, or wearing the exact same outfit as the guards themselves - unless it's a cutscene or an NPC specifically told you that this time those tactics would work, the guards will not only see through your disguise, but address you just as if you had taken no measures to hide yourself at all.
42. The Valor Of The Defeated: Except for the rare boss who changes sides or escapes at the last minute, all fights will be to the death. A single mugger, standing over the bodies of seven of his felled colleagues, will still fight against a team of god-slaying juggernauts until his last breath. Surrender can never be offered, and would presumably be rejected out of hand, anyway.
43. Spiraling Vortex of Terror: Either the final battle, location, or next-to-last cutscene of the battle you just took place in will be in a location that is either completely destroyed, a kind of space-time vortex, or the mid-between of a portal that connects the human world with the generic-evil "other world" that the villain is drawing his/her power. Note: No matter what the location, those inside of "location x" will still be able to breathe, walk, and function normally unless specified otherwise.
44. The World For My Friends First Law: At some point in the game, if the main character's love interest is captured by the villain, or otherwise evil character, the captor will allow for a trade for her life. The only thing he'll/she'll accept is the "four mystic gems" or "eight magical items" that you have either acquired, or are in the process of acquiring.
    • Have Your MacGuffin and Eat It Too Addendum: Before trading the items for the main character's love interest, the captor will inevitably be a boss battle, but will still escape with the items you've collected for the trade, and may even leave you with a trap, or self-destruction device that you must escape from.
45. The World For My Friends Second Law: Even if it means handing free reign of reality over to the villain, the hero will still do so for twu wuv.
46. Money Is The Root Of All Devious Minor Characters: There is a good chance, that a NPC with a mansion, and many butlers doing things for him, will be evil, and will attempt to kill you after he/she has invited you inside their home to rest for the night.
47. Screw the Money, I Have Destiny (Mitsuru's Lament): Opposite of the above, but rare and applies mostly to the hero. Should the hero (or a party member) be rich, the player will never have access to their income, supplies, or other items they have, for being as rich as they are. Addendum: At least one cutscene will involve this character's parents/family/butlers sacrificing themselves to protect the character.
48. Makin' Use of Instinct: If the main character is any part Fantastic Race and any part human, expect them to fall victim to any and every one of the "natural instincts" of that non-human at least twice in the story, more if they don't know about their mixed heritage.
49. Anger Leads To Asskicking: If the main character has skills with either a weapon or combat magics, and anger issues, expect a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, Foe-Tossing Charge, or Curb-Stomp Battle/No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Shouts of "This Is Unforgivable!" are optional.
50. Emotional Stability is For Wimps (Cloud and Squall Rule): The emotional baggage a character has contributes directly to the badassery they possess.
51. The Shopkeeper's Holding Out On Them: Regardless of how destitute a town is the shopkeepers can still afford to buy your insanely valuable equipment from you for the same price as the shopkeeper in the richest city in the world.
52. Infinity Plus One Child: That child who wandered deep into the dungeon and got lost had no problem avoiding the same monsters that just killed two of your friends and left you crippled with no healing items.
53. Link's Law: Should the protagonists be able to wield a weapon other than their preferred, they will invariably have a masterly level of skill. This is true even and especially if this does not make sense given the character's backstory. (e.g. street rat, farmer, businessman, etc.)
54. Bought Your Halo: The hero and villain's public image directly corresponds to the amount of money in the villain's savings account.
55. The First Rule of Red: There will be at least one nominally important person with red hair. This is usually the case for the hero, but can also be true for the love interest, the fiery Lancer, or really any Hot-Blooded person with a name.
56. The Second Rule of Red: Redheads in RPGs come in two temperaments: Brash and Hot-Blooded, or shy and soft-spoken. The former is especially true if said redhead wields a sword.
57. The Third Rule of Red: Fire is always associated with deep red colors, even though real flames are often orange-red, and can also be yellow, blue, or white.
58. Maturity Is Breast Size: In the event that one of your female party members is considered mature by virtue of being a few (like, three) years older than the hero, she will invariably have large breasts — which the other female members will consistently express envy over.
    • Maturity Equals Nymphomania: Said "mature woman" often prefers nothing more than to continually flirt with the male lead.
    • Maturity Equals Sluttyness or Naivete: Said "mature woman" will either be the sort that will flirt and try to sleep with every guy that they see or so innocent, airheaded, and naive that they will completely fail to recognize when any guy is trying to flirt and sleep with them, and that's if they even notice.
59. The Single-Disc Game-Breaker: A certain piece of equipment (usually body armor or an accessory) that, once acquired, makes an upcoming stretch of the game significantly easier.
    • Top-Shelf Stuff Clause: Single-Disc Game Breakers are most commonly sold in shops for a lot more than the other things the shop sells.
      • The Top-Shell Stuff Corollary (a.k.a. The Knight Armor Addendum): Said armor usually serves as that character's strongest armor for most of the remaining game anyway, thereby saving you much more money than what you spent on it.
60. The Hall of Gigas: A variant of the Peninsula of Power Leveling that displays the following:
    A significantly-heightened encounter rate compared to other areas.
    Sandbag Enemies appropriate to your location and level, that you still wouldn't want to have to deal with for a whole dungeon
    Said hallway itself neither contains anything else of interest or must be traversed to proceed with game.
61. Rewarding Munchkinism (a.k.a. The Melmond Effect): If a shop sells Single-Disc Game Breakers, expect the next storyline-related dungeon to have a Hall of Gigas.
62. The Back-Attack Principle: Preemptive strikes on the enemy are as simple as sneaking up on them from behind. Likewise, all the enemies have to do to ambush you is touch you from behind, on the sides, or where your view of your map character is obscured by the scenery.
63. You Can Go Home Again: If a character in your party was banished from his homeland, you'll almost definitely have to go there to get some plot-important item. Half the time, he'll end up redeeming himself in the eyes of his people. The other half, he'll spout off An Aesop about how it's important not to let others' opinions of you dictate your life.
64. The Law Of Guide-Based Frustration: All sidequests, including the path to the Infinity +1 Sword, will be, at most, obliquely alluded to in-game.
65. News Travels Fast, But Names Don't: Everyone knows that the town was saved from the Evil Dragon of Evil; nobody knows that your team did it. Perhaps this is why Adam Smith Hates Your Guts.
66. DIY Weaponry: Being more powerful isn't simply a matter of leveling up and equipping better weapons - you need to make the weapons better. Not upgrading means not being as powerful as you could be, but upgrade too much and you've wasted all your components on your first weapon, making the "better" weapons later in the game much less useful unless you're prepared to gather all those components again.
67. Law Of Global Airship Limitation: It's really easy to tell the first place you should go with your shiny new Global Airship - it's the one town you haven't visited.
    • Corollary of Global Airship Limitation: You won't be able to walk right in to the last new town - you'll have to park the airship a ways away and traverse inhospitable land.
68. Law of Economic Efficiency: Prices never fluctuate on the open market. A Potion of Healing will always retail for 50 gold and sell for 25, no matter how wealthy or depressed the town is.
    • Corollary of Economic Efficiency: A non-special item's selling price is always either one-half, one-fourth, one-fifth, one-tenth, or in some rare cases two-thirds or one-twentieth of its purchase price.
    • Second Corollary of Economic Efficiency: Every town, regardless of size, amount of money, or necessity, has exactly one item shop, inn, weapon shop, and accessory or armor shop (if the other shops don't handle that).
      • Addendum: Each shop will nearly always carry exactly one new model for each variety of weapon/armor. Occasionally you will be offered two, one of which trades damage/damage reduction for stats buffing or special attributes.
    • Third Corollary of Economic Efficiency: No one ever accuses the sole item shop or inn of having a monopoly.
69. Innkeeper's Law of Price Gravitation: The price of a stay for one at an inn is inversely proportional to the square of its distance to the final boss.
70. Medina Law: A city where the people hate you will invariably sell goods for exorbitant prices, fair trade be damned. However, even if you are the one ruler of a city you will still have to pay for everything with your money.
71. Rimzan's Maxim: The Guest-Star Party Member loses a lot of usefulness when he formally joins your party.
72. The Calculator Theorem: By the time you get the necessary pieces in place to get a Game-Breaker setup for your team, you've either a) almost reached the end of the game or b) deliberately ignored about twenty other, easier methods for domination.
73. Rule of "Not It": Your party will be blamed for something, at some point. If not your party, you. If not you, a single person or pair from the party, possibly the/a love interest. If nobody from your party is blamed, look for a person on your side with a MacGuffin, and wait for them to be blamed. No matter what, blaming on your side will happen. Do note that the enemy will never be blamed, only captured, if that.
74. Law of Summon Magic Utility: If you have a summoner/the ability to summon there is a good chance that at least one summon is good for nothing at all aside from one plot event, repeatable as needed, and you will not feel like the summon saved you, you will feel annoyed because it was necessary. If all summons for the plot actually do have usefulness in combat at any point, then at least one summon will actually be worse than a common spell.
75. The Rule of Rightful RNG Paranoia: (Or the Fire Emblem Rule) No matter how hard you pray, the Random Number Generator will find a way to screw you over. When using skills or spells that rely on random chance, the odds of success decrease dramatically (95% means 50%, 50% means 1%, and 1% means either 5% or 100%). Conversely, when such skills are used against you, the odds of success dramatically increase (50% means 99%, 1% means 50%, and 100% means 100%).
    • The Desire Sensor Addendum: Once you want something to happen, the RNG will bend itself in such a way that the odds will become phenomenally low. Conversely, when you aren't thinking about something happening, the odds of it happening will skyrocket. You also cannot cheat the system with reverse psychology or denying it. It knows.
76. Evil Comes with Age: Your average band of heroes will range from 13 to 35, and even then it's very rare. Your average villain is usually several times the age of the ages of your party combined, ranging from 5 to 17 times. Even so, they always appear to be younger than the resident old-but-not-really hero.
77. Mages are Weak: No mage, in any game whatsoever, can equip any armor aside from hats and robes and can't use any weapons aside from staffs, especially white mages. As a result, they are always the first to die in any fight and couldn't kill something with physical attacks to save their lives, but they must be used due to the usefulness of their spells.
78. Women are Weak: Related to the above, unless a female party member is a Warrior Girl, they are always weak compared to the male members of their party, sometimes being the...
79. Mandatory Useless Party Member: In any game where party members are selectable, there will always be at least one party member too weak to ever use, thus most of the time you will not, and yet the game will force you to use them.
    • Peco's Addendum: There's always one character who really seems like they'd be useless, but train them up and they'll solo the game for you.
    • Quina's Corollary: In the absence of (or, heaven forbid, in addition to) the above characters, you will have a character who will have exceptional skills and be incredibly dangerous in good hands, but is incredibly awkward or out of place for the setting. You'll be forced to use them too.
80. Warrior Girls are Bachelorettes: No Warrior Girl will have a romantic relationship with anyone in a game unless they are the main character, and even then the odds are slim.
81. No Body = No Death: No character, hero or villain, that falls off a cliff, gets caught in a death trap, is at the center of a big explosion, etc., but does not leave a body behind is actually dead, no matter how unlikely their survival.
82. Can't Save the World Until...: If the player ever gets to fight the Big Bad at any time before the final battle, they can't kill them, and no matter how obvious it is that a scheming Big Bad is going to conquer/destroy the world, you can't attack them or have the local authorities arrest them, only when their plans are moments away from succeeding can you stop them.
83. Emo and Hot-headed Heroes Must Die: No matter how out of character, how little sense it might make, or if it would actually be better for it to not happen, no hero that is moody, brooding, hotheaded, reckless, or is otherwise flawed will ever stay that way by the end of the game. This also applies to any party members less frequently.
84. Heroes Attract (The Marth Effect): Heroes will recruit numerous people to their cause like flies to honey, often as party members, including people that are nothing like them and that wouldn't make sense for them to get together.
85. All Swords Are the Same: All weapons of a specific type will perform and look exactly the same.
86. Viridian City's Hex: Regardless of how many times you have played games in a franchise, no matter how little the system has changed over the years, in completely indifference to the 5 plus signs on the file, you will still be required to watch the tutorials at the beginning.
87. Gotta Buy 'em All: Owning an older game in the series will be required for 100% Completion, due to that one item given as an Old Save Bonus. ^note The most infamous offender is Pokémon, hence the name, but Game Freak isn't the only company doing this.
88. Heroic Presence=Everybody's incompetence: Despite all indications to the contrary prior to this, a empire/kingdom/organization/some guy on the street/etc.'s competence is inversely proportional to the amount of heroes in the given area at any given time. As a result, the now incompetent people will get the hero to do a bunch of tasks they should be more than capable of doing themselves.
89. Good Guys=Good Guns Bad Guys=Bad Guns: If guns are used by both sides, the hero's guns will be far more effective and they will be far more skilled in their use than trained and (one would think) far better funded and equipped soldiers of the villain's side, even if the hero has never picked up a gun at any time in their lives before the beginning of the story.
90. Scooby's Axiom: Any problem in the known world, from a missing apple to quarreling lovers to the impending apocalypse, can and most likely will be solved by a bunch of meddling kids.
    • Addendum: No matter how many times said kids prove themselves to be far more capable and competent than adults, said adults will go out of their way to belittle them as "just kids" and/or put themselves unnecessarily in harm's way and hide things from them to "protect" said kids, frequently getting themselves killed.
91. The Odd Inhuman Out: At least one member of your party will be some sort of monster race, whether they be a Cat Person with Horns or a Robot, there is usually at least one. They are either stoic and never speak, or completely awkward and often Comic Relief.
92. Useless Useful Armor Effect: No matter how many effects armor has in the game (defense, other attributes, status resistance, elemental defense, etc.), only one of them (usually but not necessarily defense) will be the one to watch for, except for That One Boss, where suddenly a before useless side-effect is the key to winning.
93. God of Getting His Ass Kicked (Law of Final Fantasy): If your game features a Physical God, expect to have to fight (and beat) him at least once during the game, however contrived the reasons may seem.
    • Summoning Dissonance Corollary: In the event that the villainous plot is to summon such a Physical God, it is considerably easier to defeat the god than to stop the summoners.
94. What if God Was One of Us: If you encounter someone on the road - especially if said person is an old, bearded man, though they may be an adult woman or a small child - and you have the opportunity to do a quest for them, bear the possibility in mind that there is every prospect that they may be an aspect of the Maker, some kind of minor deity in their own right, an otherwise very powerful or important person in disguise, or the spirit of someone who is already dead. Help them and they will unlock something very important for you later on in the game, like a summon or final weapon.
95. Non-Optional Sidequest: There will always be one sidequest that is not required to do to complete the game; but the rewards and loot are so good that you feel like an utter idiot for skipping in the first place.
    • Sidequest For Nothing: There will also always be at least one sidequest which is ridiculously hard and/or abstract and that gives as a reward either something useless or something that's now useless as the only thing difficult enough to be worth using the reward on is the sidequest needed to get the reward.
96. Altair's Law: Sneak attacks are more effective then frontal assaults.
97. Altair's Corollary: Sneak attacks will not help you win, if they're even possible
98. Dante's Axiom: Nothing is impossible if it's fueled by Rule of Cool. Most often applies in cutscenes.
99. Schrodinger's Pyrrhic Victory (Rule of Trish): No matter what choice you made, it will be the wrong choice, no exceptions.
100. Experts Enigma: There are only two types of experts in the world. Those who are completely wrong and are blinded by their passion for the subject, and those who are good and know the subject well and are impartial. Those who are wrong will end up working for the villain by choice or by accident, and the good ones will always help the heroes when needed. There is no middle ground for these people.
101. The Granasaber Postulate: Any monster, no matter how terrifying, can be reduced to a minor nuisance by the simple expedient of finding a cooler sword.
102. Blitzball Rule: If there's a sport of any kind in the universe, you'll have to play it at some point, after which it'll become a sidequest.
103. Standardized Magic: Magic is heavily standardized and tiered. You can't pour more MP into your Fire spell for more damage, and vice versa.
104. It's Watching Birds Race Or Nothing: There is one and only one fun thing to do in an RPG universe. Visiting it is usually optional, and it's usually either some sort of sport or a casino.
105. Evil Power is Good For the Good Guys (Riku Rule): No matter how much ancient lore says it will, how many Wise Men warn against using it, a Dark and/or Evil power will not corrupt the heroes if they use it, especially if they're the main character. At most a brief Face–Heel Turn and a dip into Angst will occur.
106. The Bumbler (Gilligan Rule): Whether a member of the party or a NPC frequently encountered by the party, there will always be at least one person who, either due to arrogance or incompetence screws up, gets captured and the heroes have to save them, and/or frees ancient powerful evils constantly throughout the game, which as a result makes the heroes' adventure much longer and much more difficult than it would have been if the heroes had just left them to die the first chance they got.
107. Good Or Evil Incarnate (Open Palm Closed Fist Rule): If the game has a morality system, there will not be any nuances or grey areas involved in any choice the player makes, nor any benefits for trying to do so, despite claims to the contrary. One's choices must either be one only someone more pure than a dozen angels would make or so evil than The Devil himself would consider it wrong.
     • Stupid Good/Stupid Evil Rule: Aforementioned saintly or devilish choices will often make no logical sense whatsoever, often providing little to no direct benefit to the player character, but the player will do them anyway for the pursuit of the benefits of being purely good/evil.
108. Heroes Are Just Better: Whether the hero is a battle hardened veteran that have been fighting The Empire for their entire lives, some kid from the middle of nowhere who's never even seen a weapon before in their life and just learned of the bad guys 5 minutes ago, or something in between, or if they're The Chosen One or just another face in the crowd, will be far more effective and competent at stopping the Big Bad than entire armies of resistance movements and even entire countries that have been trying to stop said Big Bad for years, decades, even centuries.
     • Heroes Get Things Done: The heroes will also accomplish more in a mere few short weeks (if that long) than said resistance has ever accomplished during the entire time they've been fighting put together.
109. True Evil Awaits a True Hero (Baal's Rule): Any endgame Optional Boss is invariably stronger than the Big Bad or Man Behind the Man you fight at the end who's very obviously trying to Take Over the World and failing at it, reasons be damned. May be a Physical God, Eldritch Abomination, Forgotten Superweapon, Person of Mass Destruction, or something similarly superpowered that will most likely make you flip a table for being That One Boss, unless you were savvy enough to read a Strategy Guide. Rarely, can also be a Marathon Boss. Degree of evil optional.
     • Limiter Collary: Through specific conditions on the journey will the Big Bad be fought at his or her full strength.
110. Baal's Corollary: Anything more powerful than the great evil trying to conquer/destroy/etc. the city/world/universe/etc. has an equal chance to be completely unrelated to cast, the scheme, or even the entire plot, up to and including the possibility of being a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere who picks a fight purely for shits and giggles.
111. Weapons for MacGuffins Rule: Getting the almighty Infinity +1 Sword for someone involves collecting a bunch of random artifacts to hand in for your shiny new Game-Breaker. Collecting said artifacts could be as simple as traveling to a location so far off the map you couldn't possibly find it yourself and killing an Optional Boss, to doing something as inane as dodging lightning bolts for ten minutes.
112. Hero Of Another Story If They're Cool Enough (Zack's Rule): Every character has their own story arc, most of which are completed as part of the main story. If a character is cooler than the hero, expect him to have more time in the spotlight in the next adventure, if not be the focus of the next adventure altogether (even if it's in the past).
113. Something To Not Aim For (Nisan Rule): If you see a shop sell an item, you can't possibly afford at this point of the game, better instantly forget about it. By the time you have enough cash on hand to buy it, you'll either have equipment that's better anyway, or it won't be available anymore.
114. Babysitter's Nightmare: Any character that looks like a little girl will behave like an annoying brat, no matter how old she actually is.
115. Impartial Dreaming: Whenever your character is dreaming, it's either a 100% accurate memory of his (or another person's) past, or a 100% accurate prediction of the future.
116. Rule of Selective Environmentalism: It's wrong to destroy nature and ruin the natural balance of all creatures within. Except for the ones that are attacking you in random encounters. Those jerks can go straight to hell.
117. Rule of Dissonant Hardships: Random encounters rarely, if at all, exist in the greater scope of a journey of our plucky young heroes. Instead the greatest trials will will always be mundane in nature and be the only recognizable impact on the growth of a character. Learning to kill a dragon in one swift move will pale in comparison to the horrors of getting in a one vs. one duel against a man who shouldn't rightly be able to hold a candle to someone who can cut a dragon down in one stroke, and yet he will end up being much more threatening somehow because his goals oppose the heroes' own goals.
     • Zoology Corollary: Random encounters not only nearly fail to exist in the "real world" but the creatures who mock the very laws of nature will also fail to show up in any sort of study that could help humanity, while only rare and obscure creatures that never get fought will have any sort of benefit for mankind in general.
118. New Kids On The Block Rule (Paine Rule): In any spinoff material, all the new characters introduced will either know each other personally or be related in some way or another, even if there's little reason for them to know each other.
119. Origin Of Magic (Mana Rule): If the setting heavily relies on Magic or magical entities, chances are that the protagonist will find the source of it to either protect or destroy it to prevent its abuse.
120. Chefs Are Useless: There's no such actual thing as cooking. You just put the ingredients into the pot in roughly correct proportions, mix it up and out comes the Rare Steak Dinner.
     • Krakpot's Corollary: Alchemy is exactly the same, just that some of the ingredients have a supernatural theme.
121. Don't Need No Education: The player is capable of acquiring all the information they need for the game through the manual and/or tutorials, and so their character does not require formal schooling to know how to do various things. Therefore, there will be no schools in the setting.
     • Addendum: If there are schools, expect them to be delivering lessons either so boring the protagonist completely fails to absorb anything from them, or that are still tangentially related to the heroic quest somehow. They will also have a very repetitive syllabus.
     • The Trainer School Isn't For Trainers: In-universe institutions established to teach adventurers will actually tell the player very little about how to adventure. Certainly less than trial and error (or, indeed, checking out the enclosed instruction book) will do.
122. Fresh As A Daisy: Entering the castle via. the sewers will not impede your ability to sneak past the guards once inside. Either they can't smell a thing (see City Watch Equal Employment Act), or the sewer was really just a diverted stream.
     • Addendum: Entering via. the moat will not cause problems either, because moats are always beautiful deep blue and algae doesn't actually exist.
123. Boring Metropolis: The largest city in the game is really just the one with the most doors that don't open. They will tend to have a large number of plot events, but once you're done with those all you find to do there is the odd sidequest or two.
     • Inifinity-1 Town: There will be another, slightly smaller city that will host a unique shopping venue, many many sidequests, the local bird-racing contest or a combination of the above. This will become a central hub of your gameplay activities.
     • Addendum: The Infinity-1 Town may turn out to be an Infinity-1 Outpost In The Frozen North. You'll still spend all your time there.
124. The Goof Behind The Man: There are only 2 kinds of comedic characters, those who are The Load and spend the entire game doing silly stuff that greatly inconvenience the party, or those who are The Load and spend the entire game doing silly stuff that greatly inconvenience the party... and is one of the villains if not the Big Bad. Either way, if it is possible to leave these people to die or kill them yourself, you'll get a Game Over for indulging anyway despite how this would solve quite a bit if not the whole plot.
125. The Innkeeper's Lament: Eventually, you will gain the ability to restore your party's HP and MP for free, be it by visiting a spring and drinking the water, bunking down in your Global Airship, or simply going home and sleeping in your own bed. Despite this, if there are towns you've yet to visit, the inns in those towns will still charge you more than the inn in the previous town for a night's stay.
126. The True Power Of Humanity: Humans have some special trait that will allow them to gain the ability to stand against the villain, no matter how utterly hopeless such an action that might appear to be to any objective observer. The script usually claims that this is either the The Power of Friendship or The Power of Love. Most of the time, it's actually bloody-minded stubbornness.
127. No Need To Call The Locksmith: No villain has ever accidentally locked himself out of his own base or had protocols where the incoming shift of guards has to be let in by the outgoing shift. If your objective is behind locked door X, you can be certain that a copy of key X or some other means of unlocking door X is in an area behind locked door X-1, and the means to open that door is in an area behind locked door X-2, and so on until the key for opening locked door 1 is found in an unlocked room that anybody could walk into starting from the front door.
128. The Law of Prescient Architectural Decay: In the rare cases when a certain area cannot be accessed by conventional means, a wall adjacent to said area or the floor of the room above will have fallen apart to the point where the hero can either travel through the resultant hole, or create said hole with explosives so it can be travelled through.
129. You Can't Get There From Here, At Least Not Yet: If there is more than one way to go from point A to point B in a dungeon, you can take it for granted that the shortcut won't be available to you until you've taken the long way around at least once.
130. Competitive Balance Is For Chumps (Orlandu’s Maxim) : Some games don’t care about competitive balance and will just sorta drop a Game-Breaker into your lap, free of charge.
131. Amnesia equals importance (Neptunia’s Rule): Whenever the main character has amnesia, chances are they’ll turn out to have been someone extremely important, whether it be an Amnesiac God, someone destined to save the world, a former villain, A Living MacGuffin, etc...Of course, this doesn’t just apply if it’s the main character who has amnesia. If it’s the hero’s best friend or love interest who has memory problems or who at least can’t remember parts of his/her past instead of the main character, then the chances of this rule applying to them skyrockets.
132. Obligatory Mascot Character (Morgana, Teddie and Koromaru's Rule): The game will often have a marketable cute mascot character, especially if it’s a JRPG. Sometimes, it may be a Mascot Mook, but other times, it may actually be a party member. If so, they’re usually male and almost never female (which is ironic, since cute characters are often made with the younger female demographic in mind). They usually come in two flavors. One, they will usually turn out to useful in some way (both in-battle and to the plot), yet also often quite annoying due to having an immature or pervy personality or whatever other character flaw. Two, the exact opposite: They won’t be annoying at all (and may in fact be beloved by the other characters and the player), but they won’t be as useful or powerful as the other party members for whatever reason. Regardless of which flavor the mascot character is, they’re often paired together with the main character as pretty close friends. Otherwise, they’re usually paired with another party member as they may get up to weird antics and have weird adventures together.
133. Herring! My Only Weakness!: If the hero starts out his journey as an ordinary man working an ordinary job, then the tools of his trade, no matter how unsuited they might seem to adventuring, will turn out to be essential for completing quests, defeating monsters and/or thwarting the villain.

---