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"Players that don't read flavor text aren't too bright, sorta smell, and dress funny. But let's just keep this between us, okay? They can get kind of violent."
Double Header, Magic: The Gathering, in the Flavor Text

Flavor text is any text in a game that is completely unrelated to actual rules or gameplay, and is included merely for effect. Common in almost all Collectible Card Games, as well as Role-Playing Game rulebooks; but it is not limited to Tabletop Games, and also occurs in Video Games. For instance, the description of a Healing Potion in an RPG can include Flavor Text if it digresses beyond what the item actually does when a party member quaffs it. In RPGs, flavor text is often known as "fluff", as opposed to the "crunch" of the actual rules.

Often, flavor text includes quotes, either from real-world sources (such as in Magic: The Gathering core sets), attributed to characters in the game, or from a Fictional Document. It may also include narratives, poems, sayings, or jokes.

Flavor Text is regularly found in Lore Codexes, Pamphlet Shelves and inventory items; they sometimes take the form of an Encyclopedia Exposita. See also Expanded Universe, where the flavor text forms entire works, and Day-Old Legend, where the flavor text contradicts the fact that the item was recently made.

Compare Alt Text, a mouse-over caption that supplements an internet image, and Artificial Atmospheric Actions for the NPC behavior equivalent. Tenuously Connected Flavor Text is a sub-trope for when the name of an item and its flavor text are not clearly related, and Deliberately Different Description overlaps with these tropes when descriptions that follow a pattern, break that pattern.

Has no relation with edible text.


Examples:

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    Card Games 
  • Babylon 5: Every card in the CCG had flavour text, containing either an in-universe quote from the series, information from official guides and associated info texts, or (in some rare Alternate Universe cards) postulations on how things could have gone different.
  • Chaotic: Some cards have this, and the text can range from a simple joke to revealing lore not even found in the show. Some of the notable ones are hinting at a secret connection between Intress and Takinom and Rarran being a creation of Mommark.
  • Duel Masters: Partway through the game's English release, Wizards of the Coast began to change some of the cards' text to match the Gag Dub nature of the show.
  • Grave Robbers from Outer Space: Many cards have flavor text, often a Lampshade Hanging of the trope the card is based on ("Why does the king even trust this guy" on an Evil Vizier) or at least a Pun about it ("What's a crossbow? Like a regular bow, but angrier.").
  • Before I Kill You, Mister Spy... (formerly known as James Earnest's Totally Renamed Spy Game, formerly known as Before I Kill You Mister Bond...) features color text on every card, but the Taunt cards are particularly notable. For game purposes, only the lettered type of each card matters, but each Taunt card features a different example of Bond Villain Stupidity, such as: "Before I kill you, Mister Spy... I shall force you to draft a confession of your own incompetence using that ordinary-looking pen."
  • Magic: The Gathering has a lot, usually tied to each set's story and intended to fill in rules-light cards that would otherwise be blank. Flavor texts are also often used to link together series of cards or as part of a meta joke.
    • Deep Analysis shows two researchers observing a recumbent monster and commenting on how it appears to be broken (i.e., damaged and lifeless). The monster is a Masticore, a creature card known for having been noticeably broken (i.e., overpowered to a degree that affected game balance).
    • The flavor text on the mana-generating artifact Lotus Petal, where a characters muses about the immense greed provoked by such a little thing, is a meta reference to Black Lotus, a stronger version of the previous card known for being the highest-selling and most desired card in the game.
    • Double Header, from a joke set, has self-referential flavor text making fun of people who don't read it:
      "Players that don't read flavor text aren't too bright, sorta smell, and dress funny. But let's just keep this between us, okay? They can get kind of violent."
  • Naruto: The CCG has flavor text below the illustration for each card, oftentimes a quote from the show. Hilariously, one of Kurenai's cards has text that is talking about Sasuke being the only surviving member of the Uchiha clan, potentially misleading some to think that she's part of the clan.
  • Pokémon cards contain Pokédex text generally taken from the most recent games at the time of their release. Played with by the E-reader and EX-sets from the second and third generations — the text instead appears on your GBA when you scan the card's bottom dot code into the E-reader.
  • The fixed deck superhero card game Sentinels of the Multiverse has flavor text at the bottom of almost every card in the form of quotes from the various in-universe comics that the various characters come from. Each quote is relevant to the card it's on, the art of which usually represents a comic panel or cover.
  • Star Wars Customizable Card Game had flavor text, called "lore", on every card. Unlike most other card games, the lore often contained bolded keywords that other cards could play off of. For example, characters may be a bounty hunter or spy, and other cards would specifically target characters that were bounty hunters or spies. Some vehicles were enclosed while unmarked, others left their pilots in the open. This was done to avoid having to create new icons for every keyword, as with "warrior" or "pilot" (there were enough icons already), and unlike many card games, the flavor text and the game text were not in the same text box, but in separate text boxes of a (generally) standardized size. Placing keywords in the lore box left more room for game text.
  • Twilight Sparkle's Secret Shipfic Folder has flavor text that almost universally is derived from one of Twilight's supposed fics. The exceptions are either from her own diary, or Cheerilee desperately trying to get out of a shipping card game.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: Flavor text appears only on Normal Monster cards. Played for Laughs with a handful of Joey Wheeler's monsters when they were printed in the TCG, such as Alligator's Sword and the Normal Monsters first printed in Legendary Collection 4: Joey's World; their text is written with his Funetik Aksent. (Before they were printed in the TCG but were available to use in video games, they would use a more standard translation of their Japanese flavor text.)

    Tabletop Games 
  • BattleTech has its various sourcebooks, particularly the Technical Readouts. About half of a Technical Readout consists of the stat pages you need to play the game with a given unit, such as its armor ratings, weapons, etc. The other half is pure in-universe fluff that explains the unit's design history, famous battles and pilots, and quirks of its operation (such as the fact that the Spider BattleMech lacks any sort of emergency ejection whatsoever).
  • Cosmic Encounter: Each alien card has both crunch (what the alien's power actually does in game terms) and fluff (usually a statement about the history or philosophy of each race that attempts to explain either why or how it breaks the rules in that particular way).
  • Dominion: The rulebook of each set begins with a drily humorous description of the situation that is thematically represented in the new cards. For example, the Dominion: Dark Ages flavor text begins:
    Times have been hard. To save on money, you've moved out of your old castle, and into a luxurious ravine. You didn't like that castle anyway; it was always getting looted, and never at a reasonable hour....
  • GURPS has featured the odd bit of flavor text from early on, but Fourth Edition supplements have made a habit of it, with half-page snippets of relevant fiction at the top of most chapters.
  • Planet Mercenary positions the game's manual as an in-universe game for mercenary training, complete with footnotes of the progress of the manual's development that were ostensibly to be deleted before the manual's release.

    Video Games 
  • Afterimage: Equippable gear, collectibles and items may have additional (and color-coded) paragraphs below their name or stats that simply provide some worldbuilding and lore.
  • Age of Empires and Age of Mythology have long in-universe description of their units.
  • ANNO: Mutationem: A enlivened description is displayed for each weapon and enemy listed in the Monster Compendium. The Flavor Text for the Tunguska Missile launcher states that The Tunguska Event explosion was supposedly caused by a salvo of the prototype's missiles, which were then found by some staff from the Tithonus Group.
  • Battle for Wesnoth has a description for every unit, which shows both the unit's gamepelay stats and lore information not related to gameplay.
  • Betrayal at Krondor: Nearly every action in the game is accompanied by a prosaic description of what's happening. Even mundane actions such as opening a chestnote  or looting a bodynote  feel like they're straight out of a fantasy novel.
  • The Borderlands series, Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! and Borderlands 3, have multiple items with red flavor text, which are usually an indicator that the item is some of the game's better loot. All items with flavor text also have at least one unique effect or property, as well. 3 has Krakatoa, named after the volcano, a unique Maliwan sniper rifle that creates miniature volcanoes when it kills an enemy.
  • Brave Frontier has Flavor Text for every unit, sphere, and item in the game, and provides lore outside of the main Quest storyline for every unit (even Burny and friends).
  • Brave Hero Yuusha: For equipment, but not consumables, such as:
    • Leather Helm:
      A sturdy helm made of leather. May cause chaffing.
    • Mistral Helm:
      Shrouds you in a mysterious aura. People think it's pretentious.
  • Card City Nights: For most of the cards in the first game and all of the cards of the second. Such as:
    • First game:
      • Discussed by Green Crystal when she says:
        I like cards with flavor text better than those without.
      • Fish and Frog: Together they barely fight crime at all.
      • Mark: "YEEEAH!"
      • Old Man: Actually just strawmen with record players inside.
      • Bird (Beta) has ones that switch on each look. And the ones seen in the card selection menus at degraded quality also don't match the ones seen when looked at full size. The texts are:
        This card was rejected for faulty flavor.
        Dude check out that amazing bird!
        Everyone needs a bird.
        "Flip" this card? We can't write that!
        "See the world", they said. "Get a bird", they said.
        Demand for birds far exceeds the supply.
        "Hands off! I found it first!"
        Gotta have a bird.
        It's bird-picking season.
        They were jealous. They wanted one of their own.
      • Jenny Bird: She knows you are jealous of her bird.
      • Pancake: Also references its Extreme Omnivore nature:
        Eats anything. Kinda gross, really.
      • Plasma Hydra: Where one is cut off, two more emerge.
      • Princess Pitch DX: Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
        "Galactic! Princess! Buster!!!"
      • Characters from Healthy Weapon all use their Victory Quote as flavor text.
    • Second game:
  • Cognitive Dissonance:
    • A pair of Cool Shades: "If looking awesome was a stat it would give +10."
    • A Cosmetic Award, the "Braggart's Coin": "For those who win battles they aren't supposed to."
  • Every enemy in Cthulhu Saves the World and Cosmic Star Heroine comes with a blurb visible when targeting them. Most of them is just wit, but some drop hints regarding your foes.
  • Cube Colossus: The Armaments' descriptions. Although most are basically just functional information, there are some like:
    • DZ-X: "Deciever":
      Cube's Technology
      Produces no heat.
    • MSM-X: "Fafnir":
      Strongest of all missiles
  • All the Tomes of Eldritch Lore, vaults, characters, and items in Cultist Simulator have short descriptions detailing an aspect of the game's intricate lore. Most of them are pure fluff... but a precious few of them hold vital hints to progress through the game.
  • The Cute Knight series: Both games use it:
    • For both games, Party Dress's is:
      For dressing up and looking nice; not for fighting.
    • Ones unique to the first game, Cute Knight, are:
      • Fallen Star:
        Metal from a meteorite.
      • Night Stone:
        A shiny black stone with an oily surface.
      • Egg:
        A dried-up old egg.
    • Ones unique to the second game, Cute Knight Kingdom, are:
      • Cake:
        Sweet, sugary cake.
      • Eggs:
        Eggs, fresh from the hen.
  • This is one of the primary storytelling mechanics in Dark Souls. Every item has some sort of flavor text revealing key information about the game's world and lore.
  • In Dawn of the Dragons, all Generals, Troops, gear, craft items, etc. usually have them in the form of serious backstories and/or Black Comedy.
  • Dawn of War 2 has these for its wargear. Due to a few indicating they belonged to other chapters, the "Blood Magpies" meme was born, where the Blood Ravens are depicted as unrepentant kleptomaniacs that live only to steal weapons and vehicles from their allies and enemies.
  • In the classic Devil May Cry games, Key Items briefly mention some lore alongside their in-game effects, while weapons usually provide additional backstories pertaining to their origins or their wielders. The games also have "Library" or "File" sections compiling these texts.
  • Disgaea has humorous Flavor Text for its item and skill descriptions, which also tends to be laden with shout-outs.
  • Drakengard 3:
    • Zero's Blade:
      Effective against Intoners. It levels up as your dragon grows.
    • Sinful Scream:
      An executioner's sword that passes merciless judgement on the sinful.
  • The Elder Scrolls series's games include tons of additional information about the game world in the form of NPC dialogue, Fictional Documents, and full blown In-Game Novels. Much of it is simply background details about the history of the Constructed World of Nirn, its religions, cosmology, and peoples that have no impact on the game itself.
  • Appears throughout Eternal Darkness, with perhaps the best example being the titular Tome of Eternal Darkness: "Cradled in what appears to be a leathery hand lies a mysterious book. It is bound in human skin and intricately decorated with shrunken bones. It beckons and yearns to be possessed."
  • Etrian Odyssey and its sequels have a description for each monster and item.
  • EVE Online has a great deal of flavor text on items, organizations, and even regions of space. Very little of it is of any consequence, but there are thousands of words' worth of fluff to take in if you "Show InfO" on just about anything in the game.
  • Fable:
    • Fable: The Lost Chapters:
      • Amethyst:
      The rarest and most valuable gem in Albion.
    • Fable II:
      • Amethyst:
        An inexpensive but lovely gem. It was said to be a favourite among Old Kingdom maidens, but the recent discovery of large deposits has lowered its value.
      • Condom:
        Avoid unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases with this fetching sheath made from only the very best animal intestines.
      • The different kinds of Chocolate of Romance:
      • Gravel Chocolate:
        Less likely to melt someone's heart than to disintegrate their teeth.
      • Mudbrick Chocolate:
        Well, it's brown, but that doesn't necessarily make it chocolate. Still, at least its sweet. In an unusual and repugnant way.
      • Milk Chocolate:
        Sometimes, nothing but chocolate will do, even if it's this inexpensive and slightly chalky variety.
      • Pure Chocolate:
        Whoever you give this to is bound to love the delicate but rich chocolaty taste.
      • Superior Chocolate:
        How could anyone resist such an exquisite confection? Smooth, luxurious and seductive.
      • Deepest Dark Chocolates:
        The perfect gift for any occasion, these chocolates make it easy to woo anyone in Albion!
    • Fable III:
      • Amethyst:
        This is a common gem. You can sell it for profit at a pawnbroker or use it as a gift.
      • There is also a quest where you encounter some tabletop game players, and while the DM says writing the flavour texts are one of his favourite bits, one of the players retorts that no-one reads them.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • The Bestiary of Final Fantasy XII provides a lot of flavor text, along with a lot of backstory, for everything from the land of Ivalice to the Bazaar to the Espers.
    • Weapons in Final Fantasy XIII have this. For example, the Blazefire Saber.
      A weapon new to the Sanctum army, this gunblade is only issued to highly trained soldiers.
    • Fiend Tales in Final Fantasy X-2 International provide world-building and extra backstory to events in Spira (since most Fiends in Spira are Was Once a Man); some also serve to be Rule of Funny. Most recruitable Fiends have these Fiend Tales, usually consisting of 2-4 small boxes of text, then by releasing the Fiend at max Fiend Tale level, there's a short epilogue scene following that Fiend as he finishes his story.
  • Fire Emblem Heroes: When on the home screen, various characters that the player has randomly unlocked will be standing around and can be interacted with, whereupon they'll give a few lines about their past, their homeland, or their deep feelings about something. None of this is referenced anywhere else in-game, nor does it have an effect on gameplay; it's merely for fleshing out character personalities.
  • Gems of War: Every card has a snippet of text that appears when you click on them and then move to their picture in the Troops menu. For example: "DRACOS 1337: Draconic Robot Assistant, Courtesy Of Sparkgrinder..."
  • Gwent: The Witcher Card Game: Found on every card in the game, even tokens spawn by other units.
  • In the Halo series, the multiplayer modes from Halo 3 onward feature numerous customizable armor variants, with associated flavor text descriptions detailing their place of manufacture and intended specialized role - information that has no effect on their gameplay effectiveness. Halo 5: Guardians also has flavor text for all its REQ weapon variants, several of which provide deeper insight into the universe.
  • Most of the dialogue options in Harvester do nothing to advance the plot, but rather show how incredibly disturbed and utterly insane the people and the town are. The wrongpuarue by Retsupurae even states that the game is "ninety percent flavor".
  • Heroes of Might and Magic 3 has a small text describing the acquisition of a new artefact, and Heroes of Might and Magic V and 6 have descriptions of every unit in the game.
  • The Homeworld series has in-universe descriptions for all of its units in the manual of the game.
  • The Tomator Deluxe from Jets'n'Guns provides the trope image, with its description mentioning about how the gun was made and its significance in the universe without mentioning anything about how the gun actually works when you're firing it. Across the series, each weapon, ship, and collectible item has its own Description Porn (except the SpaceHog), with some descriptions downplaying or outright averting this trope by mentioning information that is relevant to gameplay.
  • Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls: For every object of the Chain of Deals, and every power. Some examples:
    • Golem Hand's is also a Shout-Out to the video game, God Hand.
      "Summon up the power of the Golem Hand!"
    • Chain of Deals items:
      • The Lollipop you get from Bernadette:
        "Candy for kids. You're not a kid."
      • Autograph pad from the Video-Game-Playing-Kid:
        "An Empty Autograph Pad. Get the Fairy Queen to sign it."
  • Kindergarten and its sequel have a Collection Sidequest where the player can collect Monstermon cards, all of which have their own description. For example, the flavour text for Doom Jelly:
    This is the Doom Jelly card. Goes perfectly with doom peanut butter.
  • Most Kirby games show a short blurb describing Kirby's current Copy Ability when the game is paused, often coupled with a list of the button combinations for all the different moves you can do with them. More recent entries also give a description of each boss (or playable character, in some cases) if you pause while fighting them, often providing some interesting plot details.
  • Legacy of a Thousand Suns has gear, officers, crew, Cool Starships, and engineering items that help give background lore and tell miniature stories.
  • The player character's library bookshelf in Legend of Mana includes not only their Monster Compendium, but encyclopedias discussing gameworld locations, artifacts, weapon types, and raw materials.
  • LiEat: For all the weapons and equipment. Some examples from the first game:
    • Weapons:
      • Knife:
        A little knife.
      • Small Cookie:
        A flavor you've never tasted.
      • Serrated Knife:
        It's all jagged.
      • Liar:
        Lies with every breath.
      • Small Macaron:
        Delicious!
    • Equipment:
      • Long Red Boat:
        Warm.
      • Diamond Ornaments:
        Hard.
      • Blue Dress:
        Fairly light.
      • Blue Earmuffs:
        They have a big ribbon attached.
  • Lorwolf: All items have a description containing some sort of clever blurb that can be viewed when they're moused over.
  • The Mass Effect franchise:
    • Mass Effect lets you inspect your weapons and armours for the description of their manufacturer, shedding more light on an already detailed setting.
    • Upgrades in Mass Effect 2 have a short description of their direct in-game effect, followed by a Techno Babble on how they work.
  • Metal Gear consists of flavor text for the most part. Most games can be finished in under two hours, but feature far longer mandatory and optional dialogues on real-life politics, history, science, and culture. The gameplay-sections basically do serve the purpose of connecting all the pieces of flavor text.
  • Natasha in Metal Gear Solid is flavor text in character form. You don't need to talk to her at all, but calling her will have her give you detailed information about your currently equipped weapon as as well as giving detailed information on weapons used by boss enemies and what you can do to counter them.
  • Minecraft Dungeons: All obtainable gear and artifacts have Flavor Text, which provides either a little bit of lore behind the item or explaining how the item is used.
  • Mother 3: The in-game Battle Memory has flavor text descriptions of each enemy you've met.
  • Used in the Facebook game MouseHunt for everything, ranging from mice to collectable items.
  • In NetHack, the "tell what a symbol represents" command will optionally give a quote from a real-life source.
  • The game map of Nexus Clash has hundreds of unique location descriptions that shed some light on just what happened to Laurentia in its final days. A few of them are clues to exploration bonuses, but most are just flavor.
  • The items in Panzer Dragoon Saga have surprisingly detailed descriptions which have no real effect on game play. Except the Telepathy Scope.
  • Paper Mario: Using the Tattle ability gets you the statistics of enemies, as well as some off-the-cuff remarks by the tattler (Goombario or Goombella).

    In Super Paper Mario Tippi handles this role as well, coming off as a bit snarky after giving the description. After she and Blumiere (A.K.A Count Bleck) possibly sacrifice themselves to create yet another set of Pure Hearts, you can get a replacement: Tiptron. She will make all the exact same tattles as Tippi on enemies, being a robotic counterpart. Sound a bit creepy? It's expressed in game that Tiptron is programmed to think like Tippi and even call herself that, but is smart enough to realize she isn't the real deal.
  • Parasite Eve 2 has an enormous amount of flavor text when you examine every part of the environment—multiple times! The protagonist Aya reveals quite a lot of her own inner thoughts and the backstory when you do this. Visually, the environments are hyper-detailed and gorgeous, especially for the time in which this game was made. The designer cared about the level design.
  • In Path of Exile, every single thing that's marked as a Unique (items, abilities, etc.) or Divination Card has a flavor text attributed to it. Some of the texts give insight on lore, while other accentuate the main features of the subject. Many supporter-made unique items created their own unique flavor texts, such as Notch's item referencing his own work and words dedicated to a deceased loved one.
  • In addition to descriptions of inventory items, right-clicking on certain parts of the environment in Penumbra will give brief descriptions that (excepting hints) have little to do with their use in the game.
  • Pokémon:
    • For every Pokémon a player captures in the wild, their Pokédex adds one or two sentences of in-universe description for their species. Later games add such details as the creature's footprint (if applicable), a Sound Test ability to play the creature's vocal cry, a size/weight comparison to the player character, and a comparison of form or gender differences between the species's different members (where applicable). The species's weight and height actually do have some gameplay consequences, but those are very few and far between.
    • Additionally, each Pokemon's status screen includes some text documenting where it was caught, hatched, or otherwise acquired, and a two-word description of its personality (following the format of "[adjective] nature"). Since Generation IV, this screen also says when it was caught, and an additional one-sentence remark about the individual creature's personality. The lines about personality are actually related to the Pokemon's stats, but you'd never know that without doing some research, and you'd probably never care unless you were playing competitively; nearly every possible nature boosts one stat and lowers another, though there are a few neutral ones (such as "bashful") which don't affect stats, and the additional line about personality is actually a hint regarding hidden scores which help determine how high all of that particular Pokemon's stats are.
  • Prayer of the Faithless: For some items, like:
    • Knight Sword: The standard blade for Asalan Knights. Plain, but deadly.
    • Iron Scabbard: Scabbard reinforced with iron.
    • Thanatos: A Soulfire axe that feeds off the malice from within its wielder.
  • All of the items in Recettear have humorous descriptions, in keeping with the Woolseyised script.
  • Resident Evil has lots, especially in the older main series entries.
    • One of many examples: "A lockpick. I can unlock the simple locks with this." when examining the lockpick in Resident Evil 2.
    • Resident Evil 0: The grappling hook pistol has text stating that it will be damaged if it lifts more than 80kg. Both of the protagonists weigh less than 80kg (the heaviest only weighs 73), so this has no effect on gameplay.
  • Science Girls!: For items and some skills, depending on if it's inside or outside battle:
    • Items:
      • Mandarin:
        A small, tart orange.
      • Doughnut:
        Sugary, deep-fried yumminess.
      • Incomplete Slingshot:
        Heavy, stretchy bands and plans for a slingshot. Heather wants them.
    • Skills:
      • The Defend Command, in battle:
        Hide behind your hands. Monsters will do less damage to you, and you will regenerate 2 extra SP.
      • Lightning, outside of battle:
        A powerful electrostatic discharge fries one enemy.
      • Nerve Pinch, in battle:
        Pinch a sensitive place to damage one enemy and possibly paralyze it for a round.
      • Affirmation, in battle:
        Increase self-esteem to boost attack power and defense.
  • The Shadow Hearts series thrives in providing everything with elaborate descriptions and esoteric backstories, from commonly encountered healing items to bizarre weapons the characters wield and grotesque monsters they may fight. One of the most infamous ones is the description of the Venomous Spider encountered as one of the earlier enemies in the first game, which says that "It injects a powerful, corrosive poison into the anus of its prey, and devours the meat once it has softened."
  • Shantae: Risky's Revenge: Some shop items don't have their Flavor Text displayed when selected in the Use Items menu, such as the Map's:
    Official map of Sequin Land!
  • The Silent Hill series features this, with the disturbing environments lending themselves to very terrifying or disturbing descriptions. A few of the protagonists develop a little, personality-wise, through this, but Heather from Silent Hill 3 really takes the cake. She has a snarky personality as it is, being a 17-year-old girl. The story's events further help shape the insight she provides, and she even shows this attitude in the item descriptions.
  • Nearly every item in The Sims series of games, often with recurring gags:
    • The Sims:
      • Birthday Cake:
        Talk about an instant party!!! What better way to cheer up a Sim on their birthday than a Yumko Cake Corp. birthday cake? Patented aspartame technology yields cakes 500 times sweeter than other brands! Serves 12. Candles included. Contains: Refined Flour, Milk, Saturated Fat, Corn Starch, Aspartame, Methyl Cellulose, Lecithin, Butylated Hydroxytoluene, Phosphoric Acid, Citric Acid, Limonene, natural flavoring.
      • A Sim's Guide to Cooking from Makin' Magic:
        Why waste precious time and energy trying to follow that cryptic recipe scrawled by your great-great grandmother? The Busy Baker's Association has spent years collecting the best and most popular recipes to make your life that much easier. Printed in large, clear text on plastic coated pages, there's absolutely no better resource for your cooking needs.
    • The Sims 2:
      • London's Famous Birthday Cake:
        No birthday celebration would be complete without this festive and lovingly baked confection. Make sure to invite family and friends to the party before it's all gone!
      • The Limey/Buttery/Purpley CulinaryCounter (Age++) from Celebration! Stuff:
        Your birthday, as a child, is the one day you look forward to more than any other, but as you age it acts as a reminder of just how old you really are. If it's not your friends heckling and teasing, it's that cake with one more candle squeeeeeeezed onto that little surface each year. The way we figure, if a cake is going to make you feel bad for being a year older, at least it will taste fantastic!
    • The Birthday Inferno Birthday Cake from The Sims 3:
      Usher in a new age with this white-hot pastry! Delicious, yet dangerous for the elderly and waistlines, the Birthday Inferno is a blazing flash of fun and excitement. (A Sim can throw a birthday party with this cake to transition to the next age category at any time.)
    • The Tickle My Ivories Grand Piano from The Sims 4:
      Learn to play this ebony dream, and control the mood of entire crowds at the touch of its faux-ivory keys. Gain even more attention by hiring a babe to lie across the top, or just do it yourself.
    • The Sims Medieval follows the tradition with your inventory and descriptions of food and drink you can create.
      • "Wine: There are two kinds of wine, red and white. This is neither."
      • "Weak Health Salve: Hey! Just because I'm weak doesn't mean I'm not useful!"
      • The delightful Lampshade Hanging of "Boiled Goo: Boiled residue from that attack on the Reception Hall. Eating this is a great idea!"
  • One particularly noteworthy example in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is the Armory level of your Cool Starship. Precisely one object in the room (the console where you buy upgrades) actually does anything; the rest is an excuse to show off the high-res versions of your units and give blurbs about their background.
  • In Star Ocean: The Second Story, there's a huge number of items that are raw materials for crafting and items that can be crafted. Many of them contain flavor text not related to what the object does, such as describing the texture or taste of food items.
  • In System Shock 2, you can click on a "?" icon on your HUD to get information on items in your inventory, including their in-game use and fluff.
  • Some of the Team Fortress 2 unlockable weapons and hats have flavor text in their description. Japanese-themed items have haikus. The Description Tag item also lets players write their own flavor text to apply to their weapons and headgear.
  • This Starry Midnight We Make: Some of the stars, like the Mochi stars, which reference how mochi is a type of rice cake: For example:
    • Blue Mochi Star:
      A star that further improves upon the adhesive and pliant qualities of Blue Clay.
      Looks delicious, like a molded, blue rice cake!
    • Red Mochi Star:
      A star that further improves upon the adhesive and pliant qualities of Red Clay.
      Looks delicious, like a rice cake with tomato!
  • Undertale has a lot of these, both in regards to items and monsters, including a description of practically every monster by what it smells like. The most prominent and memetic flavor text though, is the one against the final boss of the Genocide Route:
  • A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: There is some, for crafting materials and non-crafted equipment. Crafted equipment just has lists of the stats boosts that they give. For example, the Saecelium Circlet:
    "Time slows around this, giving the wearer more time to think."
  • Vindictus has flavor text for all items. Oddly, it often describes effects that ought to have an effect on the gameplay but don't, notably curses.
  • Wario: Master of Disguise and Wario Land: Shake It! have humorous flavour text for every piece of treasure you collect in the game, such as "Grizzled Prospector Candy: These lovingly handmade candies contain large pieces of real gold. Give them to your beloved and watch the teeth fly." and "Ghost Potion: One sip and you'll turn into a ghost... Wait, isn't that just poison?"
  • The Witches' Tea Party: For some items, and presented from Charlotte's point of view. For example, for a tomato: "Sweet and sour. I hate it."
  • In The World Ends with You, and NEO: The World Ends with You
    • The player, who's playing the Reaper's Game in a plane of reality called the UG, can scan the thoughts of people in the RG(i.e. real world). There are times when doing so is necessary to progress in the story, but for the most part, scanning people shows ordinary thoughts about things from relationships to work to pop culture and entertainment. That said, scanning the hoi polloi late in the game can show how drastically things have changed after Kitaniji's Assimilation Plot) in the first game and the spread of Shibuya Syndrome) in Neo, both of which cause most characters to think the exact same thoughts.
    • The Social Network in the second game is a diagram showing the connections between various characters, and each character has a short biography attached to them. Since most of the people on the Social Network are shopkeepers or other characters with no impact on the plot, most of the biographies are simply trivia about them, such as about a Love Triangle involving three NPCs, how a few of the clerks were on the student council together or various characters' hobbies.
  • In the X-Universe series, just about everything in the entire game has its own little tale to tell. Sometimes ships give you historical details, sometimes weapons tell you of their designers' money problems, and of course you get political details by looking at the races' entries in the in-game encyclopedia. Early games in the series got bonus points for having all of that spoken - thousands of lines of audio were a small price to pay for flavor.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 1 has the Collectopaedia, in which you can register items scattered throughout the game world. With how weird some of the collectible names are, this is the only hint as to what a lot of them even are in the first place. This feature returns in Xenoblade Chronicles X along with the new Enemy Index, which contains a short bio for each type of enemy, giving some insight into the life-cycle of many of Mira's indigenous species and the culture of some of the alien races.

    Other 
  • Log Horizon introduces an interesting spin to this trope. Originally, flavor text in Elder Tales items were strictly decorative with no effects on normal gameplay, but when the game became reality:
    • Raid background material became essential data to identify attacks against Eastal nations, which adventurers hadn't realized would activate while they learned how to adapt to their new reality.
    • People of the Land also took on personalities. One Lander, noted only in flavor text, is the Sage of Miral Lake, who invited Shiroe to discuss the Apocalypse, giving Shiroe vital information about magic, death and dying, and world processes. Shiroe describes his encounter by using this term, verbatim.
    • All items gradually took on attributes as described by their flavor text which creates havoc in Akihabara in volume 6 after a City Guard comes into possession of a cursed sword that's a rare drop from a raid boss. The sword's curse as mentioned in its flavor text became real, possessing the City Guard and causing him to begin a killing spree in Akihabara which can't be stopped by conventional means.
  • An Order of the Stick strip in Dragon featured a character who claimed that ignoring flavor text was the key to true peace. He didn't do anything that wasn't required by the rules; so since dirt didn't have any mechanical effect he didn't bathe, since there were no rules specifying that characters got sleepy, he only slept when hit by a magical effect (if he'd been a magic user, he'd also have done so when he wanted to recharge his spells), and he ate a revolting gruel once every two weeks, because the rules said that if he didn't he'd starve but didn't specify any other effects of not eating.
  • Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: In the first episode, Princesses Don't Do Summer School, when talking about index cards of spells to be selected:
    It had taken Uncle most of an afternoon and evening to fill out the necessary information in a way that was clear, and he'd tried to make it funny as well, with descriptions like "Makes a magic snowball that you can stuff in someone's ear, down their pants, whatever. Good for getting people to chill out." He'd hoped their giggles were for the jokes he'd actually intended.
  • In El Goonish Shive, certain cards in Magickal Gatherings (a Bland-Name Product based on Magic: The Gathering) are shown to have this.
  • In Harry Potter and the Natural 20, Milo exploits this to shrug off the Cruciatus Curse. D&D spells like symbol of pain have mechanical effects like applying penalties to a character's rolls or preventing them from taking actions. The Cruciatus Curse says no such thing, and he interprets "puts the target into horrible agony" as mere flavour text that he simply chooses not to roleplay.

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Alternative Title(s): Flavour Text

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