Suspicious Video-Game Generosity

You're gonna need 'em.

"Well, what have we got here? A pile o' bones, and a pile o' guns. Subtle they ain't."

— Let's Play Trespasser: Level 8

In a well-paced game, health packs and ammo cartridges can feel like gifts from the Heavens. They're granted with care, and by the time you come across a little box with a red cross painted on its side, you are likely to make good use of it.

So why does an experienced gamer start sweating when they come across a room full of medical supplies, armor, ammo and weapons? Why are they suspicious of this bounty? Because the gamer knows what this generosity entails. In the next room, they're going to need all of this, as they're about to get their ass kicked by a horrific Eldritch Abomination with twenty thousand hit points and whose very existence will cause the player's optic nerves to shrivel and die. Have fun!

The game designers are being nice and giving you a chance to gear up and heal up before The Unpronounceable One eviscerates you and sticks your head over its mantle. Also prevents the player from having to backtrack through the dungeon to heal themselves up to full. Bonus Dungeons tend not to feature these before the Superboss, as they're intended to be extra-challenging. It's not necessarily limited to Boss Battles; Suspicious Videogame Generosity may occur before the Death Course or any other noticeably difficult segment. If a free, re-spawning extra life appears right after a checkpoint, chances are the next segment isn't going to be pretty.

Sometimes referred to as a "boss fountain" when directly preceding a boss fight.

An Acceptable Break From Reality and Anti-Frustration Feature. Compare After Boss Recovery, where the stash is found after the fight's over, and Foreboding Architecture, where you can predict the extra difficuly based on the level design. Often overlaps with Healing Checkpoint when a Save Point is included; these same genre savvy gamers treat such a Save Point as an Ominous Save Prompt.

Subtrope of Blatant Item Placement. See also Intrepid Merchant, where a merchant or store in a video game is in an unlikely location, but one where you'd need it.

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• 007 Racing does this in the third mission. It starts with Bond driving into a wide open area filled with spare missiles, shields, med-kits, and various power-ups to stock up in his vehicle... because the immediate following area is an army camp full of enemy soldiers, turrets, and two hard-to-destroy excavators which can deal massive damage to Bond.
• ANNO: Mutationem: The Corn brothers of Corn & Corn, cyborgs with corn cobbs for heads, pop up all over the place in sewers and secret labs they have no business being in, to sell Health Potion drinks and sometimes serve as a workbench, to make sure the player doesn't run out of supplies.
• The surprisingly decent game Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds has the run up to a boss level when playing as Faith in an abandoned mine guiding the player through an area with a suspicious amount of pickups.
• God of Thunder occasionally has angels on the map who will replenish your health (red angels) or magic (green angels) every time you touch them. If you find both in one place, chances are that the boss is in the next room.^note This game feature actually wasn't very well thought out, though; early in the first episode, you get the Magic Apple that converts magic into health, so a green angel is all you ever need.
• Played absolutely straight in C-12: Final Resistance, right in the second-to-last area. You're now in an armoury brimming with weapons, ammunition, health boosts, shields, and guarded by two alien soldiers, which, considering by this point you would've killed hundreds of similar enemies, should be no big deal. So you gleefully help yourself to the sheer mountain of supplies, make your way to the exit - and reach the final area, the penultimate boss battle with the Alien leader, who is a Damage Sponge boss that spams you repeatedly with missiles and beam attacks, flies all over the damn place, and can unleash devastating attacks whittling your health to a fraction in seconds. Fridge Brilliance states that the supplies in the armoury belonged to the Alien Leader - you're just lucky to have raided it first before facing him.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In various games, there are generally small chambers full to the brim of pots containing healing/revival items or even fairies located right next to boss rooms. Other than healing items, the pots might also hold something useful for defeating the boss—if you see Bombchus, you're gonna have to use 'em. Since boss rooms are marked on the map (and have huge, ominous doors), this isn't so much "suspicious" as "getting you ready for a fair fight"—however, mini-bosses aren't so marked, so if you find a fairy next to an otherwise nondescript door, get ready for a tussle.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword contains a particularly egregious example: In the Shipyard, an area with just 2 enemies, after going through what basically amounts to a minigame, you suddenly find a Save Point in front of seemingly nondescript room. So naturally, you get suspicious. So you go through the door and surprise! Moldarach's back!
  • Later 3D Zelda games gave you a fairy just before the Boss Room. In Twilight Princess, this is the only place where you can find fairies until you've completed a Side Quest. Fortunately, the Water Temple's boss room is relatively easy to access once you've beat the dungeon.
  • The weather vanes (save points) in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds are like this, they're always conveniently placed right before a dungeon entrance or a particularly tough section of the game. So every time you see one, expect the worst.
  • With the ability to save anywhere in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the game does not lock you in a boss arena and requires that you manually activate a Divine Beast's main console before fighting it. This is for the best, as the bosses do not play around and Link's weapons are not durable.
  • Inverted in the first The Legend of Zelda: the tougher the room is, the likelier it is that an item (or a plain secret passage) is in there.
• The Onimusha games have a tendency to throw herbs and medicine at you just before pitting you up against a boss.
• Castlevania:
  • In the 2D games, the map is very blatant about this — a dead end with a Save Room on one side, and... a giant glowing boss door on the other.
  • The older games did this, too: you'd usually find a pot roast along with a subweapon useful for the upcoming encounter. The most extreme example is before the final boss fight in Super Castlevania IV: if you jump off into space before ascending the steps to Dracula's room, you'll find an invisible platform that gives you two whip upgrades, 99 hearts, the cross (the best subweapon, bar none), and the two items that let you throw more than one item in a row. Considering how difficult Drac is, you'll need it.
• Luigi's Mansion will often have a powerful healing item before the boss of each chapter.
• In Cave Story, a secret room right above the entrance is available right before fighting the final bosses. They also had the healing machines and save points before some bosses.
• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is pretty generous with ammo placement and cover to hide behind throughout the game, but uses this trope a few times:
  • In Chapter 17 (the chapter where you first fight the zombie Spaniards), you're standing in a large, empty room that is stuffed to the gills with guns and ammo...because you're really gonna need it.
  • The same thing happens in Chapter 20 in the Nazi base.
  • A minor case in the sequel: at one point you're trapped in an ice chamber and find a WWII-era Nazi pistol on a long dead corpse during a mission where the game told the player they had no combat to worry about. Ostensibly, it's to shoot out some icicles blocking your way. However, as anyone who's played the first game would know, you're about to deal with something nasty.
• Alundra and its sequel also make very heavy use of this trope. Save point, magic recharge and health recharge all in one place? Oh boy, you better get ready for some nightmare-spawned horror from out of this world. (Quite literally too, more often than not!)
• In the final arc of Ecco the Dolphin, the eponymous player character receives a major power-up: his sonar is now a lethal weapon, and in auto-scrolling areas (the majority of the arc), his health regenerates on its own rather quickly (and that's in a game renowned for being Nintendo Hard!). In any previous level, this would be a massive overkill. Not in these ones.
• After killing what you assume to be the boss of the final dungeon in StarTropics 2, you're thrown into a series of rooms filled with health powerups and medicine. Directly following is a marathon fight against every single boss in the game, directly followed by the final boss, who has two forms to boot. Ow.
• Severance: Blade of Darkness does this in the final area of the game. One of the countless Dark Knights you'll be slaughtering will drop a key to the castle's armory. The armory contains the best weapons and armor for all four characters. However, all of these items can be found in earlier levels with the exception of the Barbarian who can ONLY find his ultimate weapon in the final stage.
• The 2013 Tomb Raider reboot likes this. You'll be carefully exploring a new area, then: "Oooh, an ammo box! Ooh, another ammo box! ...and a quiver of arrows... in fact this whole room seems to be full of ammo boxes carefully stacked next to all those crates and low walls that are scattered around the floor and look suspiciously convenient for taking cover behind.... Oh, Crap!." "There she is! Get her!!" Cue siege event in which a couple of dozen enemies assault your position.
  • Happens in the original. Near the end of the level 'Sanctuary of the Scion', you ascend a massively long staircase littered with ammo and pickups, and at the top you open a gate to expose yourself to attacks from four Atlanteans. Most will probably stay in the corridor and just fire at the ones that come near, but if they come down the corridor then there's really little room to maneuver. Going out means taking on all four at once.
• Right in front of the sauna in River City Ransom, early Dual Boss Bennie and Clyde show up again, looking for revenge. However, they are the exact same strength they were at the beginning of the game, while you've had multiple opportunities to get much stronger. Plus, they use basic and easy-to-handle strategies still, while still giving out decent cash upon defeat. The fight against them essentially combines Degraded Boss with Piñata Enemy. Not surprisingly, what's immediately after them? River City High, the final area of the game.
• The God of War series has chests which replenish your life, your magic, or alternate between them. If you see two of those boxes alongside a save point, the gods are going to put you through hell real soon, if they're not trying to kill you outright.
• Dark Devotion has special "Crusader's Heaven" rooms which contain a teleportation altar, a healing statue, a disease-purging statue, a chest containing three random consumables, and a shaft of light that fully restores your Faith. These rooms always come before a major boss.
• No Straight Roads actually has an inversion of this in the final encounter with DK West; when you get closer to his final verse, his projectile patterns are much easier to dodge, and the final one gives Zuke's side a whole pile of health-recovering hamburgers. It's a pretty welcome sight, all things considered.
• Shantae and the Seven Sirens: The final Save Point's Rewarding Vandalism pots give a full Mana restoration and a full Hit Point restoration, right before the final boss.

Action Game

• Metroid examples:
  • It's fairly easy to pinpoint the locations of the bosses in any Metroid Prime game by just looking on the map and finding save stations (which in some games also recharge your health) that are next to unusually large rooms. The 2D games (the ones with maps, anyway) get to the point and just label where bosses are on the map.
  • In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, you are forced to pick up two Energy Tanks during the Pirate attack on the Olympus and Norion. The Berserker Lord isn't too hard, but you have to fight Meta Ridley on a time limit not long after the second tank. Even then, you need to inject a whole tank to use Hypermode, which completing the game without is impossible. Even then, good luck getting through Phaaze with just those two.
  • Metroid: Other M features one hell of an example in the room immediately preceding the Ridley battle. This room gives you an Energy Tank and an Accel Charge. It's the only room during the main run of the game where you can find multiple power ups, and it's a small room and both power ups are very easy to find. Not suspicious at all...
  • From this Let's Play thread for the hack Super Metroid Redesign: "Plus, if you take the bottom route, you find the most obvious missile expansion in the history of gaming, which gives you +10 missiles for some inexplicable reason. I feel like I'm being fattened up before the slaughter." Naturally, Kraid is a few rooms away. The same hack will mysteriously give you two Energy Tanks in an elevator room if you missed them earlier; this is because the next section ("Hell's Run", a trip through Norfair without the Varia Suit) is outright impossible without them.
  • Metroid: Samus Returns:
    • The game offers a Save Station beneath the room where you would find the Space Jump. Go beneath that and the Diggernaut will try to drill you.
    • After you defeat the Metroid Queen (the final boss of the original game), the tunnel to take you to the surface provides you energy/weapon expansions, enemies to still fight, save/recharge stations and a teleporter (never mind that the Metroid hatchling is required to get some expansions in the earlier areas). It turns out you're not done yet, because one more boss awaits at the end.
• In the Ninja Gaiden remake on the Xbox, if there is a crate of infinite arrows, there is at best a situation that requires you to use them, and at worst, a boss that can only be defeated by them. Interestingly, one of the reasons this game is Nintendo Hard is that they don't leave save points or items lying around right outside the boss room. True, the path to the fight is typically fairly easy, and you'll come to know it well, but count how many times you actually expect it when a boss fight to happen on your first playthrough.
• In Crazy Flasher 2, you enter a small room with ammo all over the ground and several boxes containing health packs... and in the next room, you enter a pitched battle with a LOT of tough enemies.
• [PROTOTYPE] has this in a mission where you have to hold off waves of infected mobs for a few minutes while Dr. Ragland does his work in a room protected only by reinforced glass and Alex lacks most of his powers. A rocket launcher, grenade launcher, machine gun, and assault rifle are conveniently laid in front of you once you resume control of Alex.
  • There are also a couple of missions in which you have to escort special plot-related military hardware in order to, well, advance the plot. Abandoned military vehicles, which are in tip-top operating status, are conveniently placed within reach so as to offer you a chance of less grief throughout the mission.
• Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc's final Tower of Leptys stage is literally nothing but a long, long spiral staircase full of health and score pickups, all punctuated by the occasional monstrous groan from the top of the tower.
• Alien Soldier stages usually give you a time limit of 2-4 minutes. Stage 20 features a time limit of a little under ten minutes. That entire time will be spent fighting Seven Force, a multiform boss that feels like five separate bosses in a row.
• Skylanders Spyro's Adventure: Right before the final boss, Eon will tell you that all of the Skylanders you used in the level preceding the boss have been healed up to their max health, including those who were defeated. No other game in the series replenished your Skylanders' health before the final boss, as the developers likely expected you to have enough Skylanders by this point that you can lose some of them in the final level.

Adventure Game

• The final Rite in Quest for Glory V culminates in a battle right in the villain's storeroom, and wouldn't you know it, he succeeds in lifting the seal on the Dragon of Doom before you can stop him. Played with in that everything is locked behind a row of booby-trapped doors, requiring the player to work for it.
• After needing to complete difficult puzzles in Another Code to get anywhere, one of the last rooms is full of goodies, and only two very simple puzzles. Enough to tense this player up for a Genre Shift.

Beat 'Em Up

• The Legend of Tian-ding generates tea stations which restores your health to maximum, and they appear usually near boss areas. Taken to the extreme in the Jiangyue-lou Restaurant level, where said station appears five seconds before you fight Kawashima Kaguya (the game's Wake-Up Call Boss).
• The Fan Sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rescue Palooza typically offers pizza to recover your characters' health after tough areas, or before some boss encounters. The very last one in the entire game? It's found in the battle arena for Krang and Shredder. Not only to recover from fighting War beforehand, it's also a sign that they actually have more than one phase to go through...
• Most levels in the Streets of Rage series have breakable objects that hold turkeys to restore you to full health, either in the boss arena or just before it. The room before the Final Boss battle in Streets of Rage 4 throws enough food items and cash pick-ups at you to restore your health and give you enough points for an extra life.

First-Person Shooter

• BioShock:
  • Right before the last boss, you find a room with one of every kind of vending machine/powerup station in the game. It's almost like the city planners knew there would someday be an epic confrontation one room over.
  • At one point in the Medical Pavilion, you'll come across a room in which you find your first shotgun. And, oh look, the game was generous enough to sprinkle some ammo around it. That was nice. So, of course, you pick up your new-found weapon with enough ammo to last a frugal player a while. Then the lights go out...
  • It's also amusingly subverted when you confront Andrew Ryan—the rooms leading up to him are filled with ammo, health kits, and EVE, but he ends up ordering you to beat him to death without a fight.
  • And in the sequel, if there's a corpse for your Little Sister to harvest from, you can bet it will have at least one handy security or environmental measure in the area to help you fend off the Splicer hordes.
  • In BioShock Infinite, look around for tears that change the scenery. If you can count more than three and at least one contains some sort of weapon, be prepared for a showdown.
• Corridor 7: Alien Invasion tends to give you blue alien orbs - the Invincibility Power-Up items - right before areas where you'll be swarmed by hordes of alien mooks, including difficult, heavily armored Mechanical Warriors.
• Anytime you enter an area in Borderlands, there's an ammo, health, and possibly a gun vending machine. The other times you usually see them is right before dead-ends on the map where a boss is waiting.
• Serious Sam plays it straight, and exaggerates it with a single health pill creating a swarm of monsters. There is also the occasional Lampshade Hanging, such as Sam expecting an immediate ambush upon reaching a dead end full of good items. Serious Sam 3: BFE makes this even more blatant by adding Half-Life 2-style infinite-ammo crates for rockets or C4 packs; whenever the player encounters one of these crates, it's usually a sign there will be Khnum nearby, as they only take damage from high explosives.
• Halo follows this trope throughout the series.
  • Right before the final conflict in the Autumn's engine room in Halo: Combat Evolved, Cortana reminds you that there's a huge, well-stocked armory station right down the hallway. What she doesn't mention is the active camouflaged Flood Warriors lurking inside beyond the locked back door.
  • Finding a rocket launcher or a fuel rod gun generally indicates an encounter with either enemy vehicles or Hunters up ahead.
  • Halo 2 has a level in which you are confronted by Wraiths on both sides. Immediately after that you have a run with: One Fuel Rod Gun, one Rocket Launcher, four Brute Shots, about twenty grenades, two super-powered Plasma Rifles, two super-powered Beam Rifles, two Shotguns, and those Carbine things... in one room. With all the damn generosity, you'd think you're taking on Death. Or a god. Or a death god. Logically, all of these should be utilized against the Wraiths in the area before it. Thanks for that, Bungie.
  • Same for Halo: Reach in some levels. Right before you encounter your first Wraiths in the second mission, you are given a Target Locator. At the beginning of the level, there's a sniper rifle that you will definitely need on Legendary, and the comms array building has a rocket launcher that can be used to take out the nearby Revenant. In "Tip of the Spear", otherwise a Drought Level of Doom, you get a Revenant and a Plasma Launcher shortly before facing a pair of Hunters and a pair of Wraiths. On "The Package", you are given a large stockpile of ammo and heavy weapons, including a BFG, for the lengthy Hold the Line episode at the end.
• Subverted in Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. One level later in the game begins with four rooms filled with rocket launchers, EMP guns and various other heavy-duty weapons, as well as grenades and proximity mines (and a shield recharger and some Bacta tanks), making you expect an army of AT-ST:s or something. Instead, it's a lightsaber battle against a couple of Elite Mooks, rendering all other weapons more or less useless (you do need the bacta tanks and shields though), followed by a stealth section.
• Another Bungie example is Marathon, which will do this often with health upgrades and ammo. A new gun, lots of refills, AND a triple boost to your health? SWEET! Thanks so much, man! ...why are the doors locked?^note You hear a Pfhor's screech, followed by another, and another, and another...
• The Half-Life chapter "Surface Tension" takes you past an armory with enough ammo to refill all your weapons, shortly before dropping you into a huge arena where you have to shoot down a helicopter while dodging gunfire from both marines and alien grunts. Even better, you can open a Door to Before to return to the armory to restock afterward, if you didn't clean it out the first time. Later, you're given access to another stockpile before going into the Xen teleporter. You don't need it for Xen; you need it for the fight that ensues while they're warming it up.
• The first fight with the Gonarch in Black Mesa features a lengthy buildup clearly aimed at scaring Genre Savvy players out of their minds before they even see the boss. You have to travel the circumference of the arena to activate the three crystals that power up the portal in the middle that spawns the Gonarch in. Each one is close to a stash of supplies, but also pops up messages reminding you how to long-jump, and then informing you that you can also long-jump backwards and sideways. You know, just in case you need to know that. Also, the stashes of supplies? They're not for stocking up on now; they're for restocking during the fight. The game is making you power up all those crystals so you know where you can recover health and ammo as you rush around trying to put some distance between you and the boss.
• Half-Life 2:
  • If you see rockets, there will be a gunship (or worse, a strider). Lampshaded in Concerned. This may be linked to the fact that you physically can't destroy the gunship if there are no rockets around: They need at least three direct hits on easy, five on normal and seven(!) on hard, and you can only carry three.
  • Similarly, if you are ever given auto-turrets to set up, it means you are about to be swarmed by Combine or antlions.
  • After you defeat the hunter-chopper, you encounter a Combine base manned by a few metrocops, but packed to the brim with grenades, ammo, and health. Of course, after this the next combat situation you encounter is Ravenholm, where ammo is scarce and zombies are everywhere. There's generosity of a different kind at work there, too: between the hunter-chopper battle and Ravenholm you get the Gravity Gun. Not only is it possible to complete Ravenholm using nothing but the Gravity Gun, you get an achievement for doing so. Two achievements, if you count being able to go without sleep for the next few days.
  • Your protective suit has 100 points of armour when fully charged, and the wall chargers can give you 75 points (on easy). When you make it into the Citadel at the end of the game, the wall chargers not only charge the HEV suit up to 200 points, they also refill your health, and they have a big charge reserve as well. Uh-oh.
  • During the Strider assault sequence at the end of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the buildings in the valley not only have respawners for the Magnusson Devices, but the shelves are loaded with health, batteries, and ammo, all of which restock periodically.
• Doom:
  • Doom:
    • E2M8 givesyou four Soul Spheres and a massive amount of every ammo type you're certain to have at that point. Not so much "generous", though, since the doors to them close behind you, and the Cyberdemon is waiting in one of the far corners of the map beyond, so you can only safely grab everything from one or two of the four rooms (depending on which one you pick first).
    • Cyberdemon battles are almost always preceded by you finding a massive supply of rockets and a rocket launcher. Ironically, this is actually not a very good way to handle them; Cyberdemons and Spider Masterminds only take damage from the direct hit of a rocket, not any splash damage from the explosion. The Plasma Rifle and BFG are usually recommended instead.
  • Doom II: In the last level, you start in a room filled with a Mega Sphere, a backpack, several ammo pickups, and every single weapon available in the game. You will need it all against the Icon of Sin, though most of it will be put to use in dealing with the hordes of enemies it'll send your way, and only the Rocket Launcher will be useful in putting the boss itself down.
  • Also played straight in TNT: Evilution, where the final map does the same thing. The Brutal Bonus Level Go 2 It opens similarly, in a small corridor with a substantial amount of ammo and every weapon. Good luck.
  • Doom 64: The final level gives you all of the weapons in the game, backpack, lots of ammo, megasphere, and an invincibility powerup. Depending on how many Demon Keys you retrieved, the less keys you obtained to shut down the monster teleporter doors, the much more ammo you are forced to use against the horde. Hope you have enough ammo for the final fight afterwards.
  • Doom³:
    • Every time you spot ammo or health just laying somewhere, you can bet that somewhere behind you a door will slide open and something horrifying will shamble out and make you waste that newly-acquired health or ammo. Often, the monsters are scripted to show up if and only if you get the goods, so more often than not the best strategy for saving ammo is not picking it up in the first place.
    • The last level of the game starts you off in a room with more gear than you could possibly carry! Unfortunately, it's mostly useless, because the only enemies these things will work on in the level are Maggots and Imps, handled easily enough with either the Shotgun or Chainsaw, and which you need to kill in order to charge up the Soul Cube, the only weapon that will work against the final boss.
    • In the final room of Resurrection of Evil, before the final boss, you are treated with a lot of items and powerups. Randomly throughout the game you can use the souls of corpses to give yourself invulnerability/damage buff/speed increase, and you find these corpses littering most of the stages, however you find almost six in one place, which is three more than you could possibly hold.
• Heretic's Shadow of the Serpent Riders ends with E5M8, Field of Judgement, where you're given all the weapons (other than the Firemace), a good load of ammo, one of every item in the game and a full load of big Phoenix Rod spheres at the center of the arena. Now why would they give you this generous loadout? You're going to need it all against the eight fucking Maulotaurs that the game throws at you for the final battle.
• Whenever you see large amounts of ammo, healthpacks, armor and treasure in Will Rock, prepare for a fierce battle.
• Medal of Honor has a rather laughable variant. If you see a mounted machine gun, you would expect a horde of enemies to come pouring out and attack when you use it. They do. But they're scripted to only come out when you use the gun... so if you walk past it, nothing.
• Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy: There are blaster turrets set up twice on Hoth and once on Vjun. If you take control of them, the game spawns, respectively, a horde of snowtroopers, an AT-ST, or 8 Hazard Troopers. If you ignore them (especially likely on Vjun, given the only enemies in that area were trying to use that turret on you a second before), nothing happens.
• Blood 2 The first Invisibility talisman is set down a short hallway and spawns an enemy at the entrance to that hallway once you pick it up for the sole purpose of demonstrating that it makes you invisible - ignore it and nothing spawns. Interestingly, most other talismans are placed more intelligently, such as the first Willpower (which cuts incoming damage by 95%) being set before the player drops through a skylight and then rushes through an area with tons of enemies armed with machine pistols.
• Modern Warfare 2 does this twice, once in "The Gulag" and once in "Loose Ends", where you storm, respectively, the armory of the gulag you're infiltrating and an enemy safehouse, and you find massive piles of various weapons, the house in particular being stocked with claymores, C4, and about forty different kinds of guns. You can guess what happens both times.
• Most of the bosses in Wolfenstein 3-D had a nearby room or rooms (usually secret, but not always) packed to the gills with health and ammo. And some of the individual levels. This caused most fun when the rooms were too packed, because the game's engine could only render so many objects at a time - and if there were too many in view, some would disappear. Including, potentially, the boss. E4M10 and E6M9 are the best places to go to see this in action.
• In Far Cry Jack gets access to an armory right after he defeats the supposed "final" boss and is heading to kill his actual target. Right after you visit this armory you get locked into an arena with several armor-plated mutated creatures who all wield rocket and grenade launchers. Notably, the game trolls you pretty hard: the enemies you find are very tough and more than enough to exhaust even your newly-replenished resources - and you can't go back to the armory because the doors are locked. There's a reason this area is seen as a notable example of Fake Difficulty; in fact, the best way to beat it without enormous amounts of frustration is widely acknowledged to be pre-emptively glitching the doors open with a dropped object, so you can go back to the armory when your weapons start clicking empty.
• Left 4 Dead:
  • Hold the Line sequences feature health, ammo, and sometimes a minigun. Justified in that the areas you hold off at are previously barricaded up by other survivors trying to hold out, or used as military extraction points, and thus were intentionally fortified and stocked with supplies at some point before you got there.
    • The miniguns are of limited use, though: they are fixed in place with limited field of view that often doesn't cover more than half the entry points, and are in highly exposed places. Usually takes the cooperation and cover of the entire team to give the minigun any tactical significance. It's often a more sound idea for the team to just back into a corner together.
  • The game does, however, manage to avert this trope for the most part. Since everything in the game (hordes, tanks, other specials, weapons, health items, explosives, even the "inbetween hordes" regular infected) is somewhat randomized and somewhat based on how well the player is doing (e.g., if you're doing good, you get less items, and have a greater chance of encountering Tanks and other Special Infected), large caches of weapons or items can just as often be indicative of a boss as they can an empty room. Even the "preset" Hold the Line hordes have extreme variability from one play to the next, making gauging the pacing of the game based on item handout all but impossible.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 plays this trope a bit more straight for the finale in "The Parish." Instead of the usual 4 med kits and 3 tier 2 weapons, you get 8 med kits and every possible tier 2 weapon, along with (randomized) pain pills, adrenaline shots, pipe bombs, molotovs, and sometimes even more first aid—in addition to several spots along the way with pills, new guns, and so on. The survivors need this because the finale involves dashing across a half-destroyed bridge jammed by abandoned cars. And infinite zombies.
    • One of the reasons the "Cold Stream" finale is hard is because it doesn't provide generous amounts of gear before its finale, which is an even harder uphill dash.
    • And let's not even talk about user-made campaigns. The first time most players walk into the supply room in the finale of "Questionable Ethics," you can hear the thunk over VoIP of their jaws hitting their desks: they've just seen a room that has four of everything, from pills to chainsaws. Then you hear the gears start spinning in their heads: "I've just survived Malevolent Architecture and Everything Trying To Kill Me, with infected literally falling from the ceiling. So far they've been doling out items—we're lucky to get a third of the health items we need, and we've found maybe five Tier 2 weapons total. But if they're giving us this room, what the hell's in the finale...?" Then you hear them scream.
• Team Fortress 2: In the Mann Vs. Machine mission "Caliginous Caper", you and your teammates start out with 5000 credits to spend on upgrades (as opposed to the 400-1200 you normally start off with). You're gonna need them, because what follows is one of the longest waves in the game, which is also a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Quake IV plays this trope dead straight. In the final level there is a long walkway going from the elevator where you start to the chamber with the boss and it is laden with health, armour and ammo for every gun you have.
  • Towards the end of the Nexus Hub level, there is a large room with a ridiculously large amount of ammo and health pick-ups in one corner. Enough to fully replenish your health and weapons, in fact. Shortly after, you discover some more pickups, including armour. In the very next room, you have to fight not just one, but two Stream Protectors (aka giant cybernetic spider-like monsters of doom) who not only pack flamethrowers, but homing rocket launchers as well. It gets worse when, upon their defeat, the Makron suddenly bursts through the door and kicks your ass.
  • One of the later stages also feature a big room with health, armour, and ammo scattered all over it. Right when you lick your lips and charge forth to loot the place, the doors lock and hard-to-kill monsters (Stream Protectors are only the first wave in this room) start spawning in waves. Lots of them.
• Vivisector: Beast Within: Found a large cache of health and ammo out in the middle of a clearing where you can't possibly not see the enemy coming a mile away? Expect to not only be ambushed by a bunch of Mooks teleporting in from nowhere, but also to be sealed up in the clearing by a convenient cage the moment you step near the bounty.
• Turok and Turok 2 push this trope to its logical extreme: both the final boss in the first game and the penultimate boss in the second game are heralded by a long, narrow hallway containing a laundry-list of every weapon in the game and full ammo for each (in ascending order of power; the final piece of the Macguffin weapon, the Chronoscepter, is in the first game's final corridor), plus an increased ammo backpack and armor for game 1 and the rare "more-than-maximum health" health pickup for game 2. The kicker? You literally cannot avoid these items.
• Borderlands is usually pretty good about not doing this, but in one case it was made so obvious as to border on a lampshade. Directly before a large, perfectly circular room according to your map (in an area that has up until then been entirely cave), they give you two red chests (filled with ammo, grenades, and new weapons), and put an ammo vendor right there as well. Guess what's in the next room.
  • The closest New-U station to a boss will nearly always have an ammo vendor, and slightly less often a health vendor alongside it. However, that's more because you don't get ammo back when you die, and trying to beat a boss to death with melee attacks is generally a very bad idea.
  • Then Subverted in the Pre-Sequel, where a (slightly anticlimactic) boss fight is followed by a room with boxes and boxes of ammunition, suggesting that it has another phase to it. It doesn't.
• Alpha Prime has a room stocked full of ammunition and supplies in a mine right before the Final Boss. It's especially jarring here not only because the game had never done it before, but because you had been to an armory, and it wasn't anywhere near as well stocked (granted, much of the stuff in the armory was behind locked cabinets, though it still didn't have as much variety).
• In Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, right before you face the final boss there is a terminal that not only maxes out both kinds of ammunition, but raises them to 999 each, as opposed to the usual maximum of 200.
• In the Descent games, what awaits you is often telegraphed using the supply powerups you find in the rooms leading up to it. An abundance of shield orbs, energy stars, and ammo refills will usually be found before an intense dogfight. An Energy Center surrounded by energy refills means you'll be using up a lot of ammo in that fight, which typically happens if there are Mook Makers and/or Incredibly Durable Enemies involved. An Invincibility Power-Up means there's a room full of Demonic Spiders and Bosses In Mook Clothing coming up. An Invisibility Cloak means they'll have homing weapons. A 1-Up orb together with the Invincibility Power-Up or Invisibility Cloak means a high chance you might lose at least one life even with those items.
• In the final level of SiN, the player (who was tricked into a trap in the previous level) begins in a meat cart riding out into what looks like an empty cavern. You are then dropped into a pool of water, which leads to a massive cache of ammo, all the weapons in the game and a generous supply of health packs. Great, you say!...then you walk outside and see that the several-foot tall mutated father of the main antagonist is walking towards you with a tri-projectile rocket launcher. And the door to the supply room just closed behind you.
• Medal of Honor: Frontline grants you a Gewehr, BAR and Bazooka, along with generous ammo, at the beginning of Clipping Their Wings. You're going to need it for the rest of the level.
• In F.E.A.R., you find a rocket launcher shortly before encountering the deadly Sentry Guns for the first time. Said level also marks the debut of the REV 6 Powered Armor.
• Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: Any time you find a whole load of health and ammunition in a single room, be afraid of what's coming next.
• Deep Rock Galactic: Point Extraction missions give you a relatively justifiable fixed encampment with both automatic turrets and floodlights, to bring anything you find. Less explicably, the caverns they happen in also have a lot more Nitra and Red Sugar than usual, for both Supply Drop calls and healing. You will need all of this, since the local wildlife in Point Extraction missions is much more aggressive, with sudden and constant attacks by the bugs and active swarms coming in with literally no warning.
• Zombie Massacre: The game can be pretty hectic with undead everywhere, so when you're in a new area seemingly devoid of enemies, with power-ups and weapon upgrades everywhere, be wary. Once you're done collecting all the good stuff, you open the door to the next area only to meet a Zerg Rush made of several dozen zombies, and you'll finish off your new supplies as quickly as you accumulate them.
• Vermintide II: The distribution of pickups is semi-random and based on the difficulty level, but each map usually has ammunition, at least some healing items, and sometimes a potion or bomb on the approach to the final Boss Battle or equivalent challenge.

Hack and Slash

• No More Heroes: A health pack, toilet, and sword-energy refill are awaiting Travis before every Boss Battle. Another tell is that Travis' informant, Sylvia, will always call him on his phone (with her voice even heard on the mic if you're playing the Wii version), telling him to get ready (like going to the bathroom, which is game's save point) for upcoming boss. The trope is also justified, since the boss fights are pre-arranged duels.
• Witch Trials in Bayonetta 2 usually give you only one health item after completing a room. The last Witch Trial V gives you FOUR health items after each encounter (enough to go from zero to full health even with fully upgraded two healthbars). Why? Most of the verses in Witch Trial V is you against two bosses that in regular game are only fought by themselves.
• In both games of the Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara duo, you're warned several times about going into caverns where red dragons are known to reside, with the option to turn back being presented each time. This is especially generous coming from arcade games, which would reasonably be expected to want to devour your quarters.

MMORPGs

• Variant show up in World of Warcraft occasionally.
  • When an ally shows up to help you in boss battles, it's usually because you're really going to need them. For example, a chunk of the Blue Dragonflight shows up to help you against Kil'jaeden. Their main use is blocking Kil'jaeden's Darkness of a Thousand Souls ability, and they can only do it three times before everyone dies.
  • In the Heroic re-release of Zul'Gurub, there are often cauldrons lying around that give their users buffs. One type makes you mostly immune to nature damage, and it's used to go through a field of poison gas and fight two enemies with deadly poison breath (although they can also remove your immunity). Another type enables you to freeze enemies and take off most of their health, and it's used in areas with enemies that are stronger than most trash. Both types and a third, which causes players to cause AOE damage to enemies near them, are used in the fight against Zanzil; if he uses gas, you have to take the cauldron that makes you immune to it, if he summons a berserker, you have to freeze it, and if he summons zombies, you have to use the AOE damage cauldron against them.
  • Shortly before the end of the Warlock's Fel-fire questline, you are prompted to spend a bit of time ransacking the Black Temple's pleasure palace for everything it's worth, after which point you can redeem the items you stole for hard cash. You can easily make two or three hundred gold doing this. But don't think the game is just giving you that gold for no reason. That gold will help offset the enormous repair bills you are likely to incur from the questline's brutal final boss.
  • During the fight against Kael'thas in Tempest Keep, players gain access to a series of legendary weapons with effects that are ludicrously powerful such as reducing fire and shadow damage taken by 50% or absorbing massive amounts of damage. There's a reason for that.
• You do not normally see a lot of this in Runescape; however, there is one glorious exception inside the God Wars Dungeon. Namely, right before Nex, one of the tougher bosses in the game, there's a bank that allows you to restock on items. The boss beyond has a combat level of 1,001, or 7,000 if you dare to challenge her in hard mode. In perspective, the highest combat level you, as a player, can get is 138. It really does speak for itself.
  • Another example is Vorago, whose lair is located directly outside one of the major respawn hubs, making it easy to get back to your grave if you die. His combat level? 10,000.
  • In the "Death of Chivalry" quest, after infiltrating the Black Knights' fortress, there is a bank chest right next to a deactivated portal. When you activate the portal, your ally for that quest plainly tells you to use the bank chest and get your best combat equipment before continuing.
• In Dungeons & Dragons Online, one of the first quests (possibly a Justified Tutorial) has you investigating disturbances in Heyton's Rest, the family tomb of Lars Heyton. At the beginning, you need to deal with cultists of the Devourer, who are busy disinterring corpses from the tomb, and are easily dispatchable with any weapon. About a third of the way into the tomb, you encounter a chest with a longsword and mace. Why? Because you'll soon encounter zombies and skeletons which take reduced damage from attacks except from slashing and bludgeoning ones respectively.
  • When you complete the intro quest earlier in the game, Celimas rewards you with a selection of Ember weapons; enough that there's bound to be at least one that your character is proficient in. Ice Spiders and Ice Mephits start to ambush you after the first leg of the Korthos story arc, both of whom are weak to the Fire damage dealt by those weapons.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, part of the difficulty of Ultimate raids is that there are no checkpoints. If you suffer a Total Party Kill at any point, then you must start from the very begining of the multi-stage battle. However, the "Dragonsong's Reprise" ultimate trial puts a checkpoint immediately after the first stage, allowing raids to start from the second stage if they wipe. This is because the raid goes back to the last part of the first stage halfway through, only this time you must also save Haurchefant from his canonical death, which means having to save a level 3 Limit Break for the tank so that Haurchefant can withstand the hit, healing so that he can survive long enough, all on top of dealing with the boss's Desperation Attack. Failing to do so just loops back to the second stage, at which point it's better for the party to just wipe to reset cooldowns for a fresh start.

Party Game

• Mario Party 10: Right before the Homestretch of Chaos Castle in Mario Party mode, Blue Toad will give all players a chance to roll a roulette for a free Special Dice Block, something he doesn't do on any of the other boards. The Homestretch that follows is the most dangerous board segment in the entire game, with over half the spaces costing players that land on them to lose half their Mini-Stars.

Platform Game

• Halo Zero loves this trope. Here's a rocket launcher. Here's a Hunter or Sword Elite to use all of those rockets on. Here's a shotgun. Here's a clusterfuck.
• Eggmanland in Sonic Unleashed has extra lives everywhere.^note At least for PS3 and 360 players. Wii players have a fixed number of lives. This is because the level itself is a sprawling monstrosity of an amusement park that will kill you again and again and again until you're ready to break the controller. It also has all power-ups in one place at the end of the level, just in time for the fun you will have with two Dark Titans.
• Kirby:
  • Certain games (Super Star, Amazing Mirror, Squeak Squad, Return to Dream Land'') have a habit of placing three or four "Copy Essences" in the room before a boss encounter — though only occasionally are health power-ups included. One game features a room with nothing but a Sword Copy Essence — and sure enough, the very next room contains Meta Knight, ready to duel you.
  • Kirby Star Allies:
    • There's a Reset Platform, a pedestal lined with four empty Copy Essence stands, upon which you can stand and revert your current abilities and Friends into Copy Essences. There are also a few abilities from enemies just beyond as well. You might as well just write the words "BOSS AHEAD" in 300-foot tall neon green letters if you're going to go that far.
    • The Ultimate Choice's Soul Melter EX difficulty level gives the player more health and better healing items than the "normal" Soul Melter difficulty does. That along with final boss or end-game music playing in the rest areas should tell you everything about the fun party up ahead.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, when you find a Super Star, often times, you don't want to take it. Either it will prevent you from getting 1-ups by using a Koopa shell on enemies, or you won't be able to complete the level at all, like in World 8-2 (although in World 8-2, there is a pipe that takes you back to an earlier spot so the level won't be Unwinnable).
  • Super Mario Bros. 2, in Level 7-2, there is the final room before the showdown with Wart, you find nothing but the crystal ball with the Mask Gate, and two throwable Mushroom Blocks placed on pedestals, even though there is no boss. Players will quickly find out why they're there: grabbing the crystal ball causes the Mask Gate door to detach from the wall and attack you.
  • Super Mario Bros. 3, Level 5-5 has a ton of bumpy blocks with raccoon power-ups. Too bad they are placed conveniently after the pipe with the superior Tanooki Suit, making it very difficult to leave the level with it.
  • In Super Mario Galaxy, there is almost always a Life Mushroom shortly before the boss arena, either lying around or from a nearby shop.
• The Kid Chameleon level "Frosty Doom" is extremely generous with extra lives, including a guaranteed one for beating the level, knowing that a certain That One Level immediately follows: Bloody Swamp.
• Iji:
  • The last three bosses are preceded by large piles of weapons and ammo (and in one case health - in the other two your health is refilled automatically). In Iosa's case it merely confirms your suspicions, in Asha's case it's not at all surprising seeing as there's a logbook from him telling you he's waiting to kill you right before you enter the goodie room, and in Tor's case, it completely spoils the surprise that he is actually going to fight you, given that all the instructions up to that point are along the lines of "hopefully he'll be reasonable, if not you're screwed".
  • The room before fighting Yukabacera contains enough red nano to refill you from near-dead to full health about five times over. He drops even more when you kill him.
  • There's also plenty of powerups right before the elevator that leads to a Komato ship.
• Beware Power Up potions in the game Hocus Pocus, the Monster is just about to show up (out of thin air)
• The level Tree Tops in Spyro the Dragon features a suspicious amount of extra lives... probably because after that area you have to engage in tons of huge leaps across death-inducing falls, all while charging through rooms full of enemies that can gang up on you and kill you easily. Hence the Scrappy Level status.
• For the entire Ratchet & Clank series, before every Boss Battle/difficult section, there'll be a weapons vendor, for you to replenish ammo (and in some games, regenerate health, for some reason). Sometimes, they'll even pop out of thin air.
• The Bonus Dungeon in Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, Balue's Tower, hands you nine extra lives right at the beginning. While not a "boss," per se, consider that fair warning for what you're getting yourself into. 9-packs of lives occur at regular intervals throughout the level as well, usually just before long sections of horrible jumping puzzles.
• Jett Rocket is usually quite stingy with its health-restoring items... except right before bosses. Then, you'll usually get a full top-up right before you fight them.
• Mega Man:
  • If you're playing a game and you see an extra life and/or an E-Tank without a bottomless pit or a horde of instant death spikes around, you can know for sure that you'll find an insane platforming segment right in the following screen. Or a boss that will kill you in less than 30 seconds. Or both.
  • Subverted in Mega Man 3 with the final stage, which is just a one-screen wide room before the boss filled to the brim with power-ups. Other than enough energy to land one solid hit on the boss's final form with Top Spin, you aren't going to need them.
  • The Mega Man 4 Game Mod Rockman 4 Minus ∞ has somewhat fair, if hard levels. In Wily Stage 3, following a huge labyrinth, you're given an ''amazing'' amount of 1-Ups, E-Tanks, health, and ammo◊. Then you fight the Wily Machine 4. Which has 28 health bars. And a second form. Trust us when we say that you will need it all.
  • At the end of the second Wily (Shadaloo?) stage of Street Fighter X Mega Man, you are given a 1-up, some health, and weapon energy right before the boss door. You'll be needing it for Vega.
  • In Mega Man X4 Sigma has four different forms in the 3-phase final boss battle. That isn't bad math, 'cause in the last phase Sigma will alternate between two of those forms (and each comes with a separate health bar). The game warns you just how difficult this battle is going to be when it provides a free health pickup just as the player drops down to the final room.
  • Rockman 7 EP starts you off with maximum E/W-tanks, and replenishing them is very easy. You will need them. Gets taken to ridiculous extents in Wily Stage 5. Just before the final boss fight with Bass, you get upgrades that give you infinite lives and infinite, auto-refilling E-tanks.
• Bleach: Soul Carnival 2 has health packs and SP items before boss fights or hard areas. Later stages also refill your BP.
• In Yoshi's Island, the midway rings are always very conveniently placed before difficult sections or boss fights to act as a checkpoint. Some examples where this is apparent include the rings placed just before the skiing sections in the ice levels, the ring placed just before the killer drop past instant kill spikes in the Brutal Bonus Level Endless World of Yoshis, and the ones placed in every single room of the borderline Platform Hell Yoshis Island Easter Eggs level in the DS games.
• A shutter rains down rings just before the final boss of Sonic Erazor.
• In Banjo-Kazooie, the top of Gruntilda's Lair contains music note doors leading to items that completely refill your red and gold feathers, eggs and, if you have enough Jiggies, an upgrade that doubles your total hit points. This is a warning that Gruntilda herself will not be an easy final boss.
• In Freedom Planet, extra lives are usually only found in hidden areas, but right before one of the boss fights in Final Dreadnought, you're presented with four extra lives in plain sight, giving a not-so-subtle hint of things to come. Also, the game only debases itself to providing mid-boss checkpoints when Brevon comes out to play.
• Prince of Persia 2 requires you to max out your HP meter in order to activate the Flame and defeat the Big Bad. To prevent an Unwinnable situation, the final stage has a screen with Respawning Enemies that drop Heart Container potions.

Rail Shooters

• The House of the Dead games grant you access to a bonus room if you've fulfilled certain conditions: rescuing all civilians in 1 and 2, rescuing your partner at every chance in III, and averaging a B or higher in prior chapters in 4. All of these rooms are right before their respective games' Final Bosses.
• In Rez, when you reach the final Area's boss section, you get upgraded to Final (sixth) Form, and between each of the minibosses preceding the Final Boss, you get several items to pick up. You will very likely need all of these, as the final boss itself throws out missiles like nobody's business.

Real-Time Strategy

• In the Homeworld single-player campaign, several missions, especially missions 7 and 8, feature very large amounts of resources. Coincidentally, each of those missions also features large enemy fleets which will likely do large amounts of damage to your fleet, requiring you to replace or rebuild much of it. The sequels don't have this so much, due to having much larger amounts of resources in general.
• Any army command game in general whenever you start a new mission and your opening lineup consists of a sizable army, a handful of new toys and a unique hero unit. Odds are, you'll need them and by the end of the map, you'll be lucky if any of them made it into the final stretch if the unit is not required to survive.
  • An example of this would be the human escort mission from Warcraft II where you have to deliver Uther to a location on the opposite side of the map with a number of units that should have been a sizable army. Then you start to see the rest of the map...
• Any mission in a Real-Time Strategy game where you start with large amounts of resources. Even (especially) if there is no enemy in the immediate vicinity, you will need those resources.
  • Related, if the mission begins with only basic structures, or with you having to build your first base by hand, expect the enemies to go easy on you for a while, not rushing your base or using the time to get a head start on an unstoppably huge army. If it begins with a full base or, even worse, an army, expect to use it immediately.
  • A common way of doing early in-game cutscenes would be to give you a vast amount of units and structures, then promptly nuke (sometimes literally) everything. Frequently happens in no-base scenarios where your powerful base is destroyed and you have to use a ragtag "escapee" force to finish the mission. Other ones involve spawning just enough units to kill the "heavy defended border" then give you your starting credits and base construction needs.
• An incredibly painful example of this occurs in one Soviet mission during Red Alert 3. You're given 100,000 credits for you and your ally to build an army - enough to build five in fact - but just as the full extent of the enemy becomes clear, those credits are "shared" with a third general who shows up who you then have to fight shortly afterwards. So you have one enemy to deal with, then two, then three, then four... with no credits whatsoever. Ouch.
• Pikmin:
  • Pikmin 2: Most of the later caves have a sublevel just before the cave's boss (or at least a very difficult section) with no enemies, lots of nectar, and lots of Candypop Buds.
  • Pikmin 3: The arena for the Final Boss happens to be placed right next to the Onion. If you don't know what you're up against, you'll likely make plenty of trips to the Onion, as the boss can very quickly wipe out your army.
• Awfully nice of MechCommander to leave all these repair gantries around for you to repair your BattleMechs with, isn't it? Normally you have to blow some resource points to bring a repair truck with you, costing you a deployment slot...and that's an incoming swarm of heavy Clan OmniMechs isn't it. Hope you have enough 'Mechs for those gantries to put back together between waves, Commander.
• Once your empire in Stellaris completes the process of psionic ascension, you can access other dimension known as Shroud, and try to strike a bargain with its dwellers. One of them, calling itself The End of the Cycle, offers to double your empire's production, research output, and fleet capacity for fifty years - "if only we bring forth The End". Under any other circumstances this would be a complete Game-Breaker, but the red text saying "DO NOT DO THIS" is there for a good reason. Long story short, once these fifty years pass, you'll lose everything you've done in this game, effectively having to start anew - all while a gigantic fleet made of souls of your people roams the galaxy and annihilates every living thing in its path. And even if remaining empires somehow stop it, they'll come for you soon after.

Roguelike

• While not a true Boss Battle, in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, the presence of many loose items in a room usually (but not always) signals a "monster house" (a horde of enemies that teleport into the room, which you must kill or be killed).
• The Binding of Isaac:
  • The first room of The Chest has four items/upgrades in it. For context, beating a boss or reaching the treasure room got you one.
  • Entering the Blue Womb in Afterbirth treats you to two double item rooms, a shop, and four golden chests. Unless your build is already overpowered, you will need these goods to stand a chance against the Superboss found there.
• NetHack has the castle. Packed with various types of equipment including the almost game breaking wand of wishes. Unfortunately it's directly above the entrance to Gehennom and the monsters are about to get much tougher.
• FTL: Faster Than Light's final sector begins with your Federation comrades refilling 1/3 of your Hull meter and giving you 10 fuel cells, and throughout the sector there are repair stations that will give you hull repairs, resources, and scrap at no charge. Given that the Final Boss is a massive flagship with four powerful weapons and some unholy Limit Break attacks, you'll likely need all of this generosity from the Federation to win.
• In DRL, the start of the Phobos Anomaly area has several suits of armor, a handful of medkits, and some rocket launcher ammo. You're going to need it — even on the easier difficulties where you don't have to face off against Lost Souls, Cacodemons and Pinky Demons in the room beyond, you still have to fight the boss of the area, the Bruiser Brothers, a pair of elite Barons of Hell.
• The Arena of Blood, a special scenario in Dungeon Crawl, gives you the Axe of Woe at the start. It is a literal Infinity +1 Sword: it gives the player +∞ accuracy and damage, and attacks everything around the player, turning every enemy into a One-Hit-Point Wonder. And the Arena of Blood is still one of the most brutal challenges in the game.
• For the King: The last room in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon before the Final Boss fight is a chest containing only one piece of firesilk, the game's Emergency Energy Tank, per player character.

Role-Playing Game

• Most RPGs often only provide save points right before major boss fights, so if you see one, be prepared to use it.
• In an RPG that involves a management system of sorts for any "land" you gain control of and you accrue a ridiculous amount of ingame currency easily without the usual Cheat Code input, it usually means that it's going to ruthlessly demonstrate whether or not your "management" skills are enough to endure whatever "catch" said generous amount of ingame currency inflicts, so be prepared and save often (and in different slots, so you don't screw yourself over if you use only one save slot) for that eventuality.
• The Paper Mario games do this a lot. If you ever see a Health Block and a Save Block right next to each other in a Paper Mario game, you can bet there's a boss in the next room — even if you're not actually supposed to fight him. Case in point: in the first game, there's a Health Block and a Save Block in Tubba Blubba's bedroom. (He'll enter after you're behind (from his perspective, not yours) his bed.) However, it's still handy; what follows is a chase back down into the Gulch, which is still littered with Hyper Clefts and Hyper Goombas. (Thankfully, the literal ghost town before your destination also has a Health Block and a Save Block...)
  • In The Thousand-Year Door, the room before the final boss not only comes with the aforementioned Save Block and Health Block, but also 1 of each of the best healing items in the game. Both of which you probably might need.
  • Origami King has benches which serve the same purpose as heal blocks in previous games, one of which is placed right outside of the final boss room. This one gets discussed by the characters, with Olivia musing that King Olly intentionally put it there for her, indicating that even if he's ruthless and genocidal there must still be some good left in his heart. This musing is shown to be correct in the ending, where it's revealed that he only became evil because he was written on, a major taboo in origami.
• Final Fantasy kinda has this, since you can use tents at save points, and there is usually a save point right before each boss. This practice started with Final Fantasy IV, however. Programming limitations kept save points from being used in the NES games, and to this day, Final Fantasy III is the only game whose remakes still don't let you save right before a boss. Screw up or find an unwinnable battle in the Dark World? Enjoy climbing the Syrcus Tower from the ground floor again!
  • The beginning of the first Temple of Doom in Final Fantasy XII. When you first enter the area, you have the option to save (in a menu prompt, not a normal Save Point) and are fully healed automatically before having to fight a flying Mini-Boss that can be difficult without the proper equipment.
  • Save points in Final Fantasy games X through XII also heal and regenerate MP. It gets to the point where you start dreading the image of a save point deep within a dungeon.
  • Especially in Final Fantasy XII when you encounter Crystalbugs, which look like save points...
  • There is one part of Final Fantasy X (Bevelle) where you run down a fairly short linear corridor with save points at both ends, which features random encounters that give tons of AP and good items. Especially notable given that Yuna has been missing for a while, and is consequently missing a lot of levels relative to the rest of the party. A hint, perhaps. There is, of course, a That One Boss at the other end. (On the other hand, the game is pretty clear that you're looking at a boss battle; it's just the difficulty that's the surprise.)
    • And then we have the Omega Dungeon, who lacks the generosity. A Save Sphere at the start, have fun fighting yourself through powerful fiends, including the horrible Great Malboro who always starts with a ambush and then goes to inflict a variety of Status effects on your party.
    • Generally, Final Fantasy X gives the player several save points with not-so-large space in between. Not only the case in Bevelle, though that one is by far the worst offender. On the Thunder Plains, in one version, there's even a Save Sphere right outside the Travel Agency and one right inside it. And "right outside" and "right inside" means what it sounds like. You only need to walk 5 steps at most from you enter, until you reach the sphere. The outdoor one is right adjacent to the door, so it almost even blocks it.
    • When you arrive in Sanubia Desert, your party is split up. As you collect each member again, you may notice that the game is giving out a lot of healing items (of note are Al Bhed Potions, which heal statuses and restore 1000 HP to everyone; you'll reach the maximum 99 very fast if you do any sort of exploring). You may also notice that your only dedicated healer, Yuna, is the last person you need to find (after the only person who can actually use the Al Bhed Potions, Rikku). Guess who you won't be seeing for a long time...
  • One interesting example in Final Fantasy VII involves a point immediately after leaving Nibelheim. Traveling through an eerie passage, you get a savepoint at the very beginning of a largish room with a snakelike pathway, very innocuous, as many winding paths are common in areas throughout the game. In fact, there's a T-shaped intersection immediately after the save point. Head right, a chest and dead end. Head left, what some players consider That One Boss, Materia Keeper.
    • Another interesting example (in fact, a subversion) in this opus is the infamous "Yuffie savepoint". Upon defeat Yuffie (a random encounter in a forest), you will be brought to a screen with her, and taking the right choices in the dialog tree when you speak with her will make her join you. Since it's very easy to get answers wrong in the dialog tree, a savepoint is generously offered on the screen before talking to her. The subversion? Taking the save point requires you to turn your back on her, which let her assault you, steal your money and flee. Damn ninja!
    • After Yuffie steals the party's materia, the player would expect all the random encounters to be a nightmare since everyone is now crippled with stat changes and no abilities other than items and attack. However, the random encounters drop powerful items like X-Potions (full healing), Phoenix Downs (revive), and powerful attack items as compensation for a severely disadvantaged party.
    • In addition, Wutai side quest is supposed to be done just after Temple of the Ancients. Incidentally, weapons you find as treasures in aforementioned temple all lack materia slots but compensate with almost double attack power than their contemporaries. They will come useful soon enough.
  • In Final Fantasy IX, first had a healing spring before the first boss battle in the Evil Forest. Later, right before the first Black Waltz, there's a split path. On the left is a Moogle, which can save and heal you, and on the right is the cutscene for the boss. The problem is this: you need Vivi to free the Moogle from the block of Ice it's trapped in, but if you went right and then went back, Zidane's alone and Vivi can't help him. It doesn't help that the boss has to be fought with just Zidane, so if you went right first, Good Luck!
  • Final Fantasy XV: The game's Fire, Ice, Lightning magic, Elemancy, is obtained by gathering energy from elemental deposits scattered around the world; outdoors, these take the form of odd spikes surrounded by their corresponding element, while indoors they're more like gas canisters filled with magic. Elemancy is an expendable, highly damaging tool, so elemental deposits are generally found only near havens (one of each deposit). Thus, finding an elemental deposit elsewhere tends to be this trope.
    • At the Disc of Cauthess, you'll find a surprising number of Fire deposits. Besides being thematic (the place is hot enough to avert Convection Shmonvection), the last maneuver for the boss at the end involves dealing a large amount of damage in a brief time; it's perfectly possible to meet the requirement with Noctis' weapons (and technically the finisher happens nevertheless), but if you're doing a Low-Level Run the provided Elemancy makes it much easier.
    • Most large dungeons have at least one of each deposit scattered around the dungeon. Not all of the optional dungeons have bosses; if you find them all close to each other, prepare for a difficult boss fight.^*Fodina Caestino has two of each, but one set is around the haven and the others have very little energy; it's mostly Foreshadowing for the new Technique that Ignis gets at the end.
    • While hunting Deadeye the Behemoth, a single, isolated Fire deposit is found after an Optional Stealth segment. There are also a bunch of explosive barrels scattered around the boss fight down the next drop; hit one with a Fire spell while Deadeye is near for massive damage and bonus AP.^*This is also a Development Gag; Deadeye was the boss of the Episode Duscae demo, where you got a proper tactical takedown and Prompto shot a gas canister for similar effect.
    • During Chapter 13, in Zegnautus Keep, you'll find a room with four of each type deposit, all gathered together. There are also two vending machines, one for weapons and one for healing items. Down the elevator at the end of the following hallway, enter That One Boss Ravus daemonified, who cuts your allies down easily, crosses the battlefield in an instant if you try to get distance, and has a ridiculous amount of HP for a mandatory boss.
  • Final Fantasy Type-0: the second playthrough introduces Code Crimson missions, which are a prime example of Checkpoint Starvation. There is only one relic terminal accessible during Code Crimson; the rest of the mission leading up to it is a Stealth-Based Mission, and the area after it is a boss fight during which you are under sniper fire.
• Baten Kaitos always has a save point before every boss battle... of course, since those are the only places in the game with the red save flowers (as opposed to blue), the game isn't particularly trying to hide the fact.
• Monster Hunter:
  • Monster Hunter 4: Before leaving Harth on the Arluq, you're warned to prepare thoroughly in case something goes wrong. Sure enough, that "something goes wrong" is "Gore Magala attacks the ship and you have to repel it." Note that in subsequent voyages, you don't get the same warning, and nothing bad happens on the way.
  • Monster Hunter: World:
    • After a full year of free gameplay updates, Iceborne finally ends with the arrival of Fatalis. When you get the special assignment to fight it, you are given five carts instead of the standard three. It's extremely suspicious because even previous dreaded monsters like Extreme Behemoth, Alatreon, and Safi'Jiva didn't warrant this. Turns out this is just so players can get used to the fact that Fatalis is by far the most difficult monster in the entire game. It has at roughly a dozen one-shot kill moves, is insanely hard-hitting and unforgivingly fast in it's attack combos. And if you've managed to get to half-health and haven't managed to break its horns at least once, it will enter a super-charged mode, where every single fire attack can be an instant cart, regardless of whatever resistance you have. It should also be mentioned that the typical hunt time of 50 minutes is cut down to half an hour, giving you no breathing room and forcing you to plan how you fight it very carefully. And what's worse is that, after you (eventually) beat it in the special assignment (which only requires you to get it to 75% HP, and that's still extremely difficult solo), the event quest that comes after does not give you the mercy of five carts, taking away the generosity altogether.
    • There's an event quest that pits you against a Tempered Furious Rajang, which also gives you five carts. It has considerably less health than Fatalis. Unlike Fatalis, the arena you fight it in has nothing you can use against it, it's far more agile, and all of its attacks can still smack you flat in two hits, even with Fatalis gear.
• The Tales Series:
  • Tales of Vesperia has two kinds of save points: red ones, which are just normal save points, and blue ones, which restore your entire party's HP and TP. Take a wild guess as to where most of the blue ones are.
  • Tales of the Abyss did it too (first?), with yellow save points, and green save points that made a different sound effect. The item version is played with a bit during a specific portion of the game. The mineshaft in Akzeriuth is absolutely full of loot, with Inexplicable Treasure Chests at the end of every one of the numerous sidepaths, and since there are no puzzles or particularly difficult enemies it's a bit unnerving. The fact that there's a save point at the bottom that looks red because of the thick miasma does not help. There isn't a boss fight. What's there is one of the biggest Wham Episodes in JRPG history, which renders the entire area inaccessible afterward.
  • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World did the same, only with yellow and green save points instead of red and blue, respectively.
  • Tales of Legendia was actually sort of the first (of the games released outside of Japan anyway). While save points were always the same, sometimes there'd be little circles next to them that, when checked, fully healed your party. They aren't usually as generously-placed as those in Abyss and Vesperia.
  • A more specific example happens in Tales of Xillia. While save points are usually at the ends of areas, right next to entrances to cities and dungeons, you come across one in the middle of the Lakutam Highroad. What follows is obvious to any player.
• In Star Ocean: The Last Hope, purple spheres are save points and green spheres fully restore your HP/MP. If you see a green sphere, you can bet a tough fight is waiting for you ahead.
• Parasite Eve and its sequel does this towards the end of the game where Aya meets up with the military and they give her all the items, weapons, and ammo she can hold.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Shin Megami Tensei I completely averts this. You're lucky if you get so much as a warning of the boss' location, much less anything to heal with.
  • Shin Megami Tensei II is nicer in this regard. After you've defeated three of the Elders/Archangels, the fourth one shows up, heals your party, and warns that there's still one enemy left. Cue fight with (false) Yahweh. Also, in the endgame, Steven will help you teleport to shops, healing garages and fusion temples to suit your needs, although you'll be sent back to the endgame area each time.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne:
    • During the grueling Labyrinth of Amala, there are two ghosts who offer to let you rest for a diminutive fee, and invite you to tea. The tea is drugged, you will lose a lot more money than you first paid, and you will be kicked to the entrance of the Kalpa. On the other hand, it is a good way to easily escape to the entrance of the Kalpa should the player be running low on healing items or MP before they have Mana Drain/Meditation, so it's not a total loss if they already raided the Kalpa for its loot and want out or just wants to save the game to prevent level progress loss.
    • It's somewhat generous with the Mystic Chests although you have to figure out their gimmick to get all the good stuff they contain since unlike the Cache Cubes, the mystic chests don't sometimes contain enemy encounters.
  • An utterly sadistic version was seen in Shin Megami Tensei if..., in the World of Greed. You will enter a room filled with valuable treasure, sixteen chests total. The next room, the local boss demon's power is directly linked to your greed. Forfeit the treasure and you will find a diminutive fox that can be easily destroyed. Take all of the treasure and face a titanic, Eldritch Abomination-level Kitsune of pure fog... To add that little extra edge of humiliation, every single chest will be empty after you destroy the boss, making it a dangerous game of picking what you want and what you're willing to trade for it.
  • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey typically has a heal spot and a save/teleport station together before the boss fight. You'll need it.
  • Digital Devil Saga has two instances of this. The game provides Large Karma Terminals (checkpoints, healing and teleportation) right before a) Cerberus and b) Superboss Beelzebub Fly.
  • Persona 3 removed Anti Poop-Socking before major boss fight so that you could grind yourself strong enough to survive, mind you that was before FES.
    • Every floor on Tartarus has a teleporter on it, acting as an emergency exit to the first floor if you're getting battered too much, but forcing you to redo that chunk of the tower if you take it. There are two-way teleporters that let you return to that floor afterwards, but there's always a boss fight on the same floor. The Answer, however, not only subverts this by forcing you to fight the boss to get to the teleporter, but adds some extra asshole points by putting the teleporter directly behind said boss, in clear sight.
    • There's also a variation on this, where the player can randomly stumble onto a floor crawling with nothing but Golden Shadows. However, this also means that The Reaper will be arriving much faster than usual.
  • Persona 4's idea of generosity is a warning before a mini-boss and a save point/Door to Before just before a dungeon's main boss. Given this lets you come back again another day fully refreshed (or, if you've befriended the fox, to get your Mana Meter refilled in the dungeon at great expense), and you can skip right back to the end of the dungeon, this is (like Persona 3) pretty generous for an Atlus game.
  • Persona 5 has Safe Rooms which function as checkpoints that facilitate saving and quick travel. They're usually distributed before/after major room puzzles or mini-bosses, and there's often one right next to the Treasure room, so after sending out your calling card, you can warp right next to the Treasure Room and start the boss fight with few interruptions.
• Right next to the boss's door in any Shadow Hearts game, you'll find a very convenient save point. There is one major inversion: in the first Shadow Hearts, The Very Definitely Final Dungeon will force you to fight bosses to reach its save points.
• A form of this shows up in Mega Man Battle Network 6, where the spot in which the pre-boss cutscene kicks in is noted by a big skull on the floor. Considering how previous games left this up to "best guess" or "chronic paranoid saving", it's pretty generous. For that matter, so is the fact that most of the chips in the game can be acquired with "*" codes, preventing the "alphabet soup" problem that plagues many players while they're working through the main story mode.
• All storyline Bosses in Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis are preceded by a save point that restores HP and SP.
• Lufia loves this trope. Just a Save Point? Might just be a mid-point for the dungeon. Just a Health recharge? Okay, good fortune. Health and Magic recharge? Uh-oh. Health, Magic, and a Save Point? Alright, time to go fill my IP bar so this god-damned boss gets whacked a couple of times before he hurts me.
• In Pokémon, guess what's in the Pokemon League Building? A combination Pokemon Center and Mart.
  • Defused a bit in Pokémon Black and White, where there's a Mart inside every Center (not just the one in the league building).
  • Throughout the series, you are often given access to Pokemon effective against the next Gym's type immediately before said Gym. Examples include the Machop trade before Whitney, the Elemental Monkeys before the Striaton Triplets and having to go through a route full of Ground-types before Clemont. Sometimes you'll even be given a TM effective against against them too, such as getting Rock Smash right before Lenora.
    • Pokémon Sun and Moon often does with trials and kahunas, as with previous games before gyms. The biggest example is in Vast Poni Canyon, where you can, without much hassle, find the TM for Dazzling Gleam (a strong Fairy-type move) and you're handed a Fairium-Z right before the totem's den, letting you upgrade that Dazzling Gleam into the powerful Twinkle Tackle. Additionally, the den itself contains the TM for Dragon Claw. Sure enough, the resident totem Kommo-o is weak to both (being extremely weak to Fairy in particular), and will probably be a very hard fight without them.
    • Also from Pokémon Sun and Moon is the very first trial which features the TM for Brick Break (a reasonably strong physical Fighting-type move) before you face the Normal Type totem pokemon, which has boosted defense. Though while it's a reasonable boost for Sun where players face an overpowered Gumshoos, because the Moon totem pokemon (Alola-Raticate) takes quadruple damage from fighting moves, it makes the first trial into an Anti-Climax boss.
• At one point in Eternal Sonata, you rescue a boy, more from his mother finding out that he was missing than from the dangers of the cliffs, and are rewarded with a free stay at the inn. If you're thinking this is leading up to Inn Security, you'd be wrong; the night goes smoothly. Once you're done resting, however, go hit the Save Block near the entrance to Forte City; there's a boss battle ahead.
• Fable: Just in case you manage to make it all the way through the game without finding a bow, there happens to be one sitting right outside the door on your way to the final showdown, where the Big Bad stays outside melee range.
• A variation on this occurs in Dungeon Siege, which has an auto-save feature. Whenever it says 'auto-saving', a big fight or a hard dungeon is coming up.
• If the Kingdom Hearts series does this, it's at least more subtle than other games, as all save points regenerate health and magic, no matter where they are. The more obvious clue is your characters all walking around independently and talking to you. The practice is spoofed in the Chain of Memories manga where, right before the fight with Marluxia, Sora and Co. come across a vending machine full of health and mana potions. And they get several for free.
• Dragon Age: Origins:
  • The game often averts this, being quite unforgiving at certain points of the game, if the player didn't think to stock up enough healing poultices, but plays it straight in a couple of points, as well, like just before the final battle with the Archdemon, where you encounter a storage room full of useful items - in locked chests. Hopefully you remembered to take your rogue along.
  • Injury Kits are generally a good indicator of an ambush ahead. Except when they come one fight too late.
  • Played straight in the quest A Paragon of Her Kind, where a large supply of potions is stored just around the corner from the boss fight.
• Dragon Age II, on the other hand, auto saves before huge battles. When walking along a path and you see the save icon appear, you become suspicious that a dragon is about to attack you... Single corpses and skeletons also tend to drop multiple potions and droughts before big boss battles, like the Ancient Rock Wraith.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition plays this trope straight. Once you've seen a crate with potions, brace for a boss fight.
• As you can save almost anywhere in Sands of Destruction, the game is fairly generous in providing healing points before boss battles.
• In Dragon Quest VIII, there's a spring deep inside one dungeon that fully restores all your hit points and magic points when you step into it. Sure enough, just past the spring is Dhoulmagus, one of the hardest boss fights in the game.
• In Earthbound Beginnings, The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, Mt. Itoi, is more difficult when compared to the rest of the game. Thankfully, at the base there's a house owned by a healer who can fully heal Ninten and his party for free, as well as give him as many of the best healing item in the game he can carry for free. In addition to that, in the plateau area there's a house owned by another healer who can fully heal Ninten and his party for free, including reviving unconscious party members, and even provides a Save Point. Given the living nightmare that reaching the plateau of Mt. Itoi already is, the healer and his house are a huge lifesaver.
• Mother 3 lampshades this, to an extent, towards the end of New Pork City. As you're told every time you clear a floor that the next room up is supposedly the 100th floor with the final boss chamber, there's always a save frog before the door to keep the player on their toes.
• In Golden Sun: The Lost Age, the item store in Prox sells Mist Potions as a regular item. Prox is the last town before Mars Lighthouse, the Final Boss of which is the appropriately-named Doom Dragon. You will need those Mist Potions.
  • In the last dungeon of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, Tuaparang soldiers attack which bestow 5-digit numbers of EXP and Water of Life after every battle. The final boss is much tougher than everything else in the game, and the post-game Bonus Dungeon is of the brutal kind.
• When Mass Effect 2 gives you the opportunity to switch weapons in the middle of a level, odds are there's a big fight waiting for you a few rooms away.
  • Somewhat inverted in Mass Effect games. Generally, the medi-gels and the spare ammo (in 2) are actually in the room where the gigantic climactic battle of the level is. However, you rarely actually run out of medi-gel in the middle of a battle, so it's more for replenishing your depleted stores after the battle is done. Ammo, on the other hand, is a different matter.
  • In full effect in Mass Effect 2 on the Collector ship, where you get access to advanced weapons training about 5-10 minutes before one of the hardest battles in the game. There's also a lot of unusually high-value salvage and some research to unlock before the fighting starts, which only adds to the sense that something big is about to happen, but you can't use any of your new goodies besides the weapons training until the mission is over.
  • All those flamethrowers you find laying around in the rachni hive in Mass Effect 3 are bound to make you nervous. Naturally, they come in very handy against the webs, pods/sacs, and various creepy enemies.
  • At several points in Mass Effect 3 you'll find a Heavy Weapon that you can pick up, either the Hydra Missile Launcher, Blackstar, or Geth Spitfire. These will always be placed in conjunction with a particularly tough battle, though in a bit of a subversion they're frequently in the battle area and aren't always placed somewhere that's convenient or safe to get to, making it a bit risky to go for them.
• In Deus Ex: Human Revolution ammo is extremely scarce, so this trope is played straight for every boss battle, Especially for the fight against Yelena Fedorova, before which you are given a bloody light machine gun and about 150 ammo for it.
  • Inside Isaiah Sandoval's apartment you find a conspicuous Praxis Point on top of a corpse. Sounds legit, right? Taking it triggers an EMP mine and causes any nearby mooks to gun for you.
  • The first phase of the final dungeon is full of rare weapons and ammo, but has no enemies at all. You just know something bad's on its way.
• Zig zags in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords where the game tells you very early on that Atton has a special ability to guess when things about to get bad. The idea is that whenever he quotes the iconic line; "I have a bad feeling about this", you are advised to save the game. The problem? Like every other non-combat-oriented special ability the player's companions get, this only happens once in the entire game.
  • Also, starting from around the Ravager level and the Battle of Telos, Life Support Packs and Verpine Prototype Shields start dropping in increasingly higher quantities.
• Fallout 3: In the Calvert Mansion from the Point Lookout DLC, there is an abundance of stimpacks and ammo throughout. You'll use nearly all of it when fending off the Tribal attacks.
  • In Fallout 4, you're given a full suit of power armour and a minigun with a thousand rounds of ammo within the first hour of the game seemingly just to demolish a group of low level raiders. Then, a huge Deathclaw emerges from the sewer, acting as the game's first boss battle. During "Taking Independence", you find a Missile Launcher in The Castle, and you will definitely need it for the Mirelurk Queen if you aren't already carrying it or a Fat Man.
• Done in all the Mario & Luigi games. If there's a handy save point nearby (along with a few blocks containing useful healing items), you almost certainly know there's a difficult section or Boss Battle nearby.
  • Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time has no less than three save points close by each other and separated only by cutscenes just before the final boss, in addition to giving you three of every special item and multiple amounts of every healing item in the game.
  • The save point placement is most notable in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team though, since you don't have the Save-Game Limits of only being able to save at save points any more, hence any you do see are placed just right to act as a "save here reminder" for anyone new to the game. Along with the inevitable healing items in blocks, shops, etc.
• In Shadowrun Returns Dragonfall in the last stretch of the game, you enter a medical room with top-level medkits for everyone, a couple of BuMoNa Trauma Kits (revive items), and a medical station that fully heals all your party's wounds. It's harder to miss what's waiting in the next room than to realise what you're facing.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky:
  • Sometimes averted. While most Healing Checkpoints are in front of a boss, sometimes they're just the midpoint in a long dungeon.
  • The penultimate Superboss drops a nice piece of armor that grants both dark resistance and instant death immunity. (This is very useful, since otherwise the only way to protect against instant death is through accessories, and the accessory that protects against all other status effects doesn't protect against death.) Guess what spells the ultimate Superboss loves to use?
• In South Park: The Stick of Truth, right before the final boss you encounter a shopkeeper that you can sell your junk to as well as buy some healing items. He even lampshades how in every videogame gives you a chance to resupply just before a major encounter and he's that guy for you.
• 7th Dragon III: code VFD:
  • The game often has a green Save Point (the kind that fully restores all parties' Life, Mana, and statuses) and a teleport gem right before major bosses, along with a one-time cutscene of your allies or Mission Control informing you that you should prepare yourself first if you attempt to proceed further.
  • Chapter 5.1 seems to end, but then you get another day to do basically anything you want, and the day only ends once you go to bed, with Nagamimi asking you if you're really sure if you want to do so. This is because the following chapter is a Wham Episode that not only has some major plot twists, but also closes off a lot of things (such as sidequests, intra-party and NPC dating, and the cat cafe) until the next chapter.
• Downplayed in Undertale. After running away from Undyne for the second time, she destroys the bridge you are standing on, sending you falling down into the dump. While there, you find a save point, followed by a room with various items scattered around, including a container with 2 "Astronaut food" bars. Unsurprisingly, there's a mini-boss waiting for you.
  • As for the main boss fights, they usually have a save point shortly before, and also give you the chance to backtrack and get any potentially helpful items before initiating the fight. In some cases there are shortcuts that make backtracking less time-consuming. The room just before Mettaton's boss fight also has a save point and an elevator which takes you back to the Core's entrance, which is useful since the Core can be hard to navigate around.
• LISA: The Painful RPG:
  • When completing Area 1, the game hands two party members to Brad for free. Said party members are a depressed Joke Character with low accuracy and a Master of None. They come right before Buzzo's Sadistic Choice and the Russian Roulette warehouse, where it is possible to permanently lose party members.
  • Rando Land is full of diesel engines to make powerful Diesel Firebombs, and sacks containing Rando Rations (completely heals a player's HP and MP) littered about in plain sight. By this point in the game, you're alone and likely missing an arm or two. Shortly after this, Brad fights against twenty-four members of Rando's army (although near the end, most of them are too scared of Brad's rampage to attack) and finally Rando himself, a man strong enough to shrug off a motorcycle rammed in his back.
• OFF has color-coded save points: yellow boxes simply save and heal you, while red boxes do that and send the player back to the Hub World. Yellow boxes are scattered about evenly, but red boxes are typically only at the beginning of the Zone and right before the boss. So red boxes can be used to head back to an earlier point in the game and to indicate that a boss fight is coming up.
• In Octopath Traveler: In addition to a Save Point at the end of a dungeon to signal a boss battle ahead, dungeons in the first chapters also have a merchant next to them to sell you items that you can stock up on in preparation.
• In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, if you see a Save Statue and an RP refill chest in the same place, it means that a boss battle is just up ahead. If there’s also a nearby cache of healing items, well… that tells you just what kind of boss it’ll be.
• In Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide, in the Catacomb of al-Rashid around the halfway point of the Interlude between the two chapters, solving a puzzle rewards you with Desert's Fury, an enchanted weapon — the exact type of weapon is determined by your class — engulfed in flames and with bonuses against undead. Undead become extremely common in the dungeon to follow.
• OMORI: See a picnic basket and a health restoration point, but no Mari? A boss is likely ahead.

Shoot 'em Up

• Right before the Final Boss of RayForce, the game pits your ship(s) against lots of harmless pods for you to lock on and destroy with your homing laser. All of which contain powerups. Destroying most of of them will give you enough powerups to max out both players multiple times... You're so going to need them.
  • Raystorm also does this in Extra Mode of Home Editions of the game. Just before the Stage 7 boss. Then Stage 8 is a boss fight itself.
• After you finish the Level 3 Final Boss of Hellsinker, all of the on-screen enemy Mistletoes turn into Life icons, allowing you to trivially boost your life counter to maximum...right as the True Final Boss begins.
• The final stage of any given Touhou Project game is likely to be short, easy, and a good way to regain any lost power and probably nab an extend. Exceptions exist, but this is the rule.
• In most Gradius games, if a bunch of teleporting orange enemies show up dropping oodles of powerups when killed, it means a Boss Rush or Boss Bonanza is up ahead.
• Summer Carnival '92 Recca's Zanki Attack starts you off with 50 lives. And you will need those fifty lives, because every enemy shoots revenge bullets upon death. Additionally, the game ranks you based on how many lives you have left when/if you complete the mode, rather than using score, so if you have to make use of every last life to reach the end then it means you did poorly (but still better than a Game Over).^note zanki (残機) is Japanese for Video-Game Lives. Thus, the mode can be translated as "Lives Attack".
• It seems rather generous of Bangai-O Spirits to outright explain how to turn on the cheat menu at the end of the tutorial stage set. This is to warn you that the rest of the game is DS-snappingly difficult.
• Darius Gaiden's Zone M takes all of 30 seconds or so before sending you into a boss fight. That boss fight is against Titanic Lance, the largest boss in the game that takes as long as the Final Bosses to defeat, despite only being encountered about halfway through the game.

Simulation Game

• During some of the Final Bosses in the Trauma Center series, the game will automatically deploy the Healing Touch for you, even if you've already manually used it earlier in the operation. This does not mean "Just in case you used your once-per-operation Healing Touch already, here's another one." At this point, you will need to manually use your Healing Touch, usually to take the Healing Touch's "slow down time" property and turn it into a full-on time stop because the GUILT/Neo-GUILT is still doing something too fast for you to be able to safely perform a Finishing Move on it. If you've already used it previously in the operation, the operation is Unwinnable by Design.
• In Spore, fields in the creature stage where Epic creatures reside tend to be littered with many high-level skeletons.

Stealth-Based Game

• Metal Gear Solid: You are suddenly advised to save your progress by an ally that never suggested so before. What happens afterwards? You enter a torture scene where dying is permanent (meaning you can't press continue on the "Game Over" screen) which happens more than once if you don't submit to Ocelot.
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater:
  • If you try and save during a certain boss fight, your ally will claim she has a bad feeling about it and advises against it. If you happen to go a week after saving here, the boss will die of old age and you lose your chance to beat him properly and snag his camo and weapon. But if you load the save before waiting a week, you get knocked out cold via a cutscene where the boss snipes Naked Snake in the head with his tranquilizer Mosin Nagant as soon as you load the save!
  • In the Krasnogorje Mountaintop area, you'll come across a lot of ointment and bandages laying around. This will be useful in treating the burns you'll undoubtedly get during your fight with The Fury shortly after.
• In early levels of Velvet Assassin, a shotgun always precedes a race against time throwing stealth to the wind.

Survival Horror

• Alien: Isolation:
  • Played straight before going to investigate the reactor core area, since you find all packed togehter your revolver and your shotgun, just a couple of minutes after finding the bolt gun. This because you are going to use them against a lot of working joes.
  • Then when you enter the reactor itself, there is a flamethrower conveniently on the left with a lot of fuel, hinting that you are going to fend off xenomorphs.
  • Inverted in Mission 12: you find a room full of ammo and grenades, but after you activate the pack of working joes chasing you.
• ANNIE: Last Hope plays this straight in areas where you find Frank, an Intrepid Merchant, waiting to sell you weapons and backup - expect a boss or a zombie swarm coming up. In fact, right at the start your first automatic weapon pickup (a MP-5 Machine Gun) is followed immediately by two streams of zombies swarming from your left and right!
• There's a reason Silent Hill players start thinking Oh, Crap! when, in a town where Everything Is Trying to Kill You, it suddenly gets very "generous" with weapons, ammunition, and/or health drinks:
  • Silent Hill 2 has no fewer than nine savepoints in the room immediately before the final boss battle, arranged in a square on the wall. This is more of a really heavy hint than generosity as such (since it's not actually any more effective than a single savepoint), but still. Silent Hill: Origins does something similar in a Shout-Out.
  • In Silent Hill: Homecoming, unless you use your guns incredibly sparingly, you will be low on ammo for most of the game. In the sewer level, you are given several boxes of ammo for both the pistol and shotgun. Guess what? Eventually you come to a small room where you have to fight three needlers, who block most of your attacks, and a siam, who takes three shotgun blasts form close range to the head to kill. Have fun.
  • Silent Hill 3 spawns additional ammo and health items when you're low on supplies. Specifically, it provides more medical supplies when you are low on ammo and more ammo when you are low on medicine. It even lampshades it in a cutscene.
  • In Silent Hill: Downpour, you have to rely on melee weapons and pistols until the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, where you finally get a shotgun. You will need this shotgun.
• Alan Wake does this at least a few times. Your usual pickups come from the occasional red emergency box lying around, which will have batteries for your flashlight and a little bit of ammo. So when you find multiple boxes of ammo, flares, batteries, etc. lying around an area, you know that you're about to walk into a massive assault by The Taken. It also manages to invert the trope: any section where Alan has lost his light and/or weapons will usually have few or no enemies, simply because he'll have no way to fight them.
  • At one point Alan himself comments on how suspicious it is finding flashbang grenades amongst supplies left by the power company. Of course, Alan himself probably wrote them there.
• In every The House of the Dead game, you can unlock a special bonus room full of bonus-point items and life-ups just before the Final Boss by fulfilling a hard-to-meet requirement—in the first 3 titles, this requirement is rescuing every hostage or rescuing your partner at every chance. In The House of the Dead 4, you have to one-credit the game up to that point. If you're looking to clear the entire game without any continues or going for a high score, this will really help.
• Take note whenever you find a computer console overflowing with med-kits in The Persistence. Such kindness generally means the room next to it has a chest that you'll have to risk suffocation or murder to open.
• In the 2002 Remake of Resident Evil, the Residence throws an entire shelf of blue herbs at you right at the start and has more green herbs in the first couple rooms than you've seen in the entire mansion. Nice, right? Oh, are those giant spiders and bees...? And a giant shark? And a giant plant monster? Oh...
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. generally averts this, as you usually can only get at caches and supplies after you've already killed the previous owners. When you find the resources first, you know you're in for a bad time.
  • In Shadow of Chernobyl, while cutting your way through Pripyat on your way to the CNPP you can find a relatively large Monolith armory, as well as numerous randomized stashes around the city that you'll likely have unlocked before ever entering Pripyat. The raid itself on the CNPP that follows is a long, painful, highly irradiated slog where you'll need every round and every bandage you can scrounge, and that's even when the game occasionally leaves a fresh suit of body armor for you to find. Likewise, in the CNPP itself, you can drop down a ladder into an extremely irradiated zone and find another cache of equipment.
  • In Call of Pripyat, you can acquire an armored suit from the military tech in Pripyat, and before each military-assigned mission can requisition a goodly amount of other equipment. As the only other source of supplies is looting corpses for a handful of rounds at a time, you'll need the gear.
• The Last of Us:
  • There are periods within each chapter where Joel will find a workbench where he can upgrade and improve his weapons using tools and parts he found along the way. Why are these workbenches there? Because in the next few minutes, he's about to find himself in a gigantic firefight with waves upon waves of raiders or Infected.
  • After getting to the hydroelectric power plant, it should come as no surprise that the building eventually comes under attack with all those random bricks lying all over next to convenient places of cover.
• Resident Evil 4:
  • The game lets on that a major encounter such as a Boss Battle is ahead when you find The Merchant (and his armory) and a typewriter in the most implausible of locations.
  • The Regenerador (the Implacable Man of mooks) initially appears indestructible, but using a heat scope with a rifle can help hit its normally invisible weakspots. The only opportunity to get the said scope requires the player to thaw a meat freezer and walk past a semi-frozen Regenerator into a cramped dead end to claim it. Also done through the chapters containing the Regeneradors via means of ammo - rifle ammo not only becomes increasingly scarce, but finding any rifle ammo (which is always 3-4 bullets) becomes a sign there's a nigh-invulnerable monster that requires ~4 bullets to kill ahead.
• Players of Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6 will quickly learn that once you leave the normally linear-like areas and find a wide open space with crates or red exploding barrels, that at best you're in for an attack by a swarm of Majini or J'avo, and at worst in for a visit from a Chainsaw-wielder or Ustanak.
• In Dead Space, there are two points where you find save points: in the "safe room" where you can restock equipment and items, and right before something big is going to happen. Finding a Store or Save Point on its own isn't that bad, but finding both in the same place? You're about to have your ass firmly handed to you.
  • It gets even more ridiculous when you see an oxygen recharge station placed randomly in an area. When you see one you know eventually the air will be let out of an area.
    • On the other hand, since certain levels are reused, that means the air may be let out five minutes from now, or five chapters from now.
• In Ghost Hunter there's a major ammunition cache in the final level. It's useless because shortly after that Lazarus loses all his weapons. The final battle uses a new weapon with infinite ammo.
• Eternal Darkness subverts and plays it straight. Played straight in that the one time the game asks if you want to save, it's just before teleporting you to the final boss. Subverted in that several actions (such as diverting gas or opening a door) give you the choice of whether to go through with it or not, regardless of the fact that you need to do it to proceed and that nothing happens on most occasions. A major exception to this is at the end of Paul Luther's chapter, where you get a warning of sorts when you reach the Black Guardian's lair, and instantly die upon crossing it.
  • This is also one of the game's Sanity effects: you find mountains of ammo in a room, but before you can even collect all of it you appear in the previous room... without all the ammo you just picked up.
  • The game also does this to play on the paranoia of the player, as several times through the game when controlling Alex you find weapons and ammo in her house, which is completely safe until the very end of the game. But as the game goes on the feeling that the next time you enter a room it's going to have zombies in it builds.
• Cryostasis is forced into this by the game mechanics—rather than having health in the proper sense, you have body heat, which is slowly depleted by your environment and rapidly depleted by monsters. If you get to warm your hands by a fire, it means you're about to get very, very cold.
• Rule of Rose has several cruel instances of this, when coming across hordes of mooks, no less! Needless to say, if you see a trail of candy, be very skeptical about following it unless you have a death wish.
• With Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, there are plenty of beds scattered around Neverending Nightmares which serve as checkpoints. But if you see a room with a bed inside of it, always expect some deadly obstacle right nearby.
• Subverted towards the very end of The Final Station: after leaving the train once it finally breaks down for good, you come across a corpse with a briefcase containing $100,000. Up to this point, money pickups were lucky to hit double digits. All it does is make pretty clear that you're no longer going to have any use for money.
• After the No-Gear Level towards the end of ObsCure II, you find a duffel bag containing all of the weapons that the villains previously took from you, plus extra ammo for all of them, just before facing the True Final Boss. As if that wasn't a big enough clue, this is followed by you setting foot into a gigantic football stadium with the sun coming up over the horizon.
• In GTFO, C1 is an entire level of this trope as it hands out a lot of resources and some very easy to kill enemies, compared to the previous stages. Once they reach the end of the stage, players then find out that it's a Hold the Line mission and that they must survive eight rounds of waves of enemies while inputting a code to progress every round.

Third-Person Shooter

• Jet Force Gemini normally has no-enemy rooms with enough Five Unit Gemini's to fully heal you just about all of the time; it also has plenty of ammunition; this is a very good thing, since most of the bosses are incredibly difficult.
• Terminator Salvation lets your character see the green outline of any weapons in the area, even through walls, so when you see a big pile of green, or just green in the shape of a rocket launcher, you know a whole bunch of big machines are gonna be coming at you.
• In Freedom Fighters (2003), Rocket Launchers will only appear when you have a helicopter or a heavily fortified encampment to deal with up ahead, and Sniper Rifles are usually placed in locations where you can expect to use every single bullet before running out of enemies.
• In Mega Man Legends Data who refilled your special weapon, restored your health, and saved your game had a weird habit of popping up JUST before a boss fight..
• In Kid Icarus: Uprising, if you stumble across a Drink of the Gods (fully restores your health), chances are you're going to meet the boss of the level just after. It isn't always the case, tough, but they still tend to pop-up where you're going to need a fully refilled health bar. The only exception is the sudden miniboss between Dark Pit and the Base's core in chapter twelve; you don't get a drink of the gods until after you've beaten them.
• Usually averted in the original Max Payne, until you get to Aesir Plaza and suddenly discover you're starting the level with maxed out ammunition for every weapon including the borderline Too Awesome to Use ones and the maximum number of painkillers, where previously your stock of both would carry over between levels unless there was an in-story reason not to. (And this game is not especially stingy with ammo pickups, either.) You'll need every bullet you can get!
• Everything or Nothing has an armory that you need to have unlocked two missions earlier with a Bond Moment full of batteries, body armor, and weapons in the final mission. Chances are you are going to need them all unless you like starting the mission over.
• Splatoon 2:
  • Mr. Grizz always prefaces Cohock waves in Salmon Run mode by unlocking cannons to shoot them with. This is not an act of generosity, as special weapon charges are limited and the only non-special weapons capable of one-shotting a Cohock happen to be the Dynamo Roller and a fully-charged E-Liter. If even one player disconnects at this time, you will need the turrets to meet your quota.
  • In Octo Expansion:
    • If a test gives you five lives instead of the usual three, that does not mean it is an easy test to pass. Most of the time, 5-life tests will be harder than usual, often in the form of having many ways to fail instantly.
    • Most stations give you three choices of weapon loadouts, but Girl Power Station lets you freely pick from three different subweapons and nine different main weapons, giving you 27 possible options. It's also one of the hardest levels in the game, requiring you to defend an orb from an onslaught of Octoling soldiers. All this on top of being a 5-life station.

Tower Defense

• Bloons Tower Defense: Some rounds send many weaker bloons for you to get some cash to prepare for later hard rounds.
  BTD5 Round 18 Pre-round Comment: Have some free money with 80 greens coming up next.
• Infinitode: Hardcore mode starts you off with 5000 gold. While it turns the first few waves into a cakewalk, it quickly becomes clear that the souped-up enemies and many disabled global upgrades make the mode live up to its name.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Cruelly subverted in Final Fantasy Tactics. There are certain parts of the game where battles occur one after the other, and the game kindly lets you save in the intermission between each part. Unfortunately, what the game doesn't tell you is that once you've passed the first part of these multi-battle sequences you cannot leave to level up or buy items. There's one area in particular that drops two nasty boss fights on you right after a relatively easy battle. You might need to fall back to your secondary save file to raise your team up a few levels. Unless you didn't make one...
• In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, there is a chapter where literally all there is is shopping for weapons, staves, and healing items. It comes right before the penultimate chapter, which has a huge number of enemies, including a dangerous boss, and then the final chapter where you have to fight about ten reincarnations of previous bosses, and then the "final" boss, and then the real final boss all without saving in the middle, so if you die, you have to fight every single one of them over again.
  • The ROM Hack The Last Promise also features a chapter similar to this, with the inclusion of an Arena to help your unit grind for levels if they were underlevelled. There's even a secret conversation with Chief Haas and Storm that allows Storm to get the Emblem Bow, an infinite use bow that compensates for its low might for easy accessibility. It comes right before the secret chapter if Shon's army obtained all 4 Emblem Weapons and the 24th chapter, in which both maps are in darkness, and the latter chapter has one of the game's most climatic moments in which Lahar kills Siegfried, and that is before the 25th chapter in which it features a massive map akin to Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War.
  • The final chapter of Path of Radiance features two: the shop sells Physic staves for the first time (unless you're on the Japan-only Maniac Mode), which are incredibly useful for the following boss fight. Secondly, the Hard Mode version of the chapter actually has less enemies than Easy/Normal. There's a very good reason for this... the final boss actually moves now, and gets a new One-Winged Angel form when he goes down the first time.
  • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn has several actually:
    • In Chapter 3-6, (in non-Japanese versions anyway), Edward, Leonardo and Nolan all get a personal Game-Breaker weapon. And you're going to need them. The following chapters you play with the Dawn Brigade can all be considered on various degrees a That One Level.
    • In Chapter 3-13, you get for the first and only time the Sleep staff in a base conversation. The chapter itself is considered the hardest "Defend" level of the game. And the boss? It's Ike himself, who's automatically equipped with the Ragnell and will start moving on turn 11. Now you see why you need that staff?
    • Ena is a mandatory unit for the Tower of Guidance, which while she's not a good unit per se, she has the Dragon Laguz unique skill Boon, which automatically removes any status ailment to any adjacent unit. Pretty good considering that status ailments in this game lasts for five turns, right? If you wonder why that's good... Know that in the next chapter there are two enemies with Sleep, while the boss can cast Silence on ALL characters.
    • If you can play as one of the Purposely Overpowered Royal Laguz, know that the chapter is going to suck. Hard.
• In Hunted: The Demon's Forge any time you see a useable Sleg pedestal/container there will be a hugely difficult fight, often harder than the boss battles. So why not just drink it and use the power it gives?

Wide-Open Sandbox

• In the third level of The Simpsons Hit & Run, you get to start with the Malibu Stacy Car. It's the first genuinely good vehicle in the game, having very impressive stats (2.5 speed, 3 acceleration, 1.5 toughness, and a whopping 4.5 handling) and being a vehicle you'll likely use for the remainder of the game. However this level is also the one that decides to stop screwing around, so you're going to need it.
• In Star Control II, you'll spend much of the game gathering resources to upgrade and customize your flagship, buy additional support ships, and replace spent fuel and crew. Both of the major ways to do this, mining planets and combat, can be risky, with greater risk providing greater reward, and the best modules and ships are expensive. Right before the final act of the game you'll ally with a race called the Chmmr, who will not only give you the design to their Avatar class ship (the most powerful in the game), but also infinite resources to spend. Kit out your ship however you please and buy your own fleet of awesomeness, but the Final Boss is still a challenge.

Non-Video Game Examples

Anime and Manga

• Parodied in one Pop Team Epic comic - Popuko finds a save point and immediately checks around a corner to see if a Boss Battle is after it. (She's right on the money.)

Fanfiction

• During a forced Dungeon Crawl in Sekirei? Is that some new species of little sister?, everyone still alive is notably alarmed when all enemies despawn after Minaka rolls a 1 on a Die of Power (rolls below ten spawn enemies, rolls above ten spawn weapons to use). They realize that whatever was summoned by the die is so dangerous that the other enemies are unnecessary. Given that said boss No Sells blasts from plasma rifles (from getting a 16 on a Die of Power), they were right.
• Lampshaded in Concerned with regards to Half-Life 2:
  Rebel NPC: Just having this damn thing [chest of infinite rockets] up here guarantees us a massive aerial attack.
  Gordon Frohman: How do you figure?
  Rebel NPC: Let me put it this way. If you come across a room full of wooden crates, what always happens?
  Gordon Frohman: I have to do a jumping puzzle?
  Rebel NPC: And if you come across a huge cache of ammo, weapons, health packs, and armor chargers, what does that mean?
  Gordon Frohman: That I'm about to get my ass kicked?
  Rebel NPC: Bingo. Same basic premise.
• Lampshaded in The Secret Return of Alex Mack: While searching the Spencer Mansion, Alex notes that she's finding bazooka ammo in odd places, and wonders why it is there.
  [Alex] couldn’t figure out what all the bazooka ammo was for, unless Wesker knew she had that guy’s bazooka and was playing some sort of creepy game with her, or leading her into a trap.

Film — Live-Action

• In a cross with this and Lured into a Trap, Terminator Genisys opens with the events described in The Terminator: John Connor's Resistance attacks the Skynet headquarters, and the shut the evil Master Computer down. Raiding the place, they discover a time machine, which had already been used to send a Terminator to 1984, and assigns Kyle Reese to follow him... and then one of the soldiers turns out to be an undercover Terminator who attacks John, while lampshading how things seemed too peachy ("Did you think it would be that easy?").

Game Shows

• During the clock format of the U.S. version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, contestants are given categories before each of their questions, likely to compensate for the strict time limits they are given for each.

Live-Action TV

• Episodes of the docudrama series A Haunting usually start with people finding their Big Fancy Dream House for sale at a very low price. Obviously, as the name of the series suggests, these houses are haunted with all kinds of nasty spirits.

Play-by-Post Games

• An omake in Embers in the Dusk written during the Gilded Skies has a person reviewing the invasion as a video game campaign. Upon seeing the forces and tech available, the reviewer can't understand how one fails it... until the final enemy arrives; TWO First Circle Angyls. Mind you, even one is basically a Level 5-6 Apocalypse that shrugs off all weapon damage.

Tabletop Games

• The tabletop roleplaying game Shadowrun in the adventure "Queen Euphoria" has a situation where the player characters agree to assault a stronghold for a company. The company offers to outfit them. Players will doubtlessly ask for the most expensive and destructive weapons in the equipment list. They do get it. The adventure explicitly says that this should surprise the players and make them realize what type of resistance they can expect to meet.

Webcomics

• In Eddsworld comic #114, a secretary informs Edd that the boss will see him now, and offers him ammo and health. Edd is visibly terrified.

Web Video

• Referenced in Krillin Plays Alien: Isolation, where on getting the shotgun, Krillin mentions that while he's really glad to have a better weapon, he's also very worried that the game just gave it to him out in the open, because he's sure that means he's in for a rough level.
• Also referenced by the Game Grumps when playing Resident Evil 3 (Remake) when they're in the final area of the game, have presumably killed Nemesis and escaped an exploding area, and made their way to apparent safety: a safe room with an item chest and tons of ammo:
  Arin: Alright!
  Danny: Hey hey!
  Arin: Safe spot, giving me lots of explosive ammo so definitely nothing big coming.
  Danny: Typewriter! Typewriter!
  Arin: I'm safe, bro!

Real Life

• Open-book/open-note exams. In principle, they sound like a breather since you don't have to memorize the material. In reality, it's often a carte blanche for the professors to make you wish you had memorized the material.
  • These are more for "did you understand the material?" checks. The real world forgives you if you have to open a book, notebook, etc. What the real world doesn't forgive is if you don't understand the material well enough to create a quality product even with those aids (and especially if that product involves human lives).
  • In advanced Engineering classes, these are sometimes "Open Note", "Open Book", and "Open Prior Exams that are posted on the internet with solutions". In the Professional Engineer Licensing exam, it is common to bring a suitcase full of reference materials. The rationale is that as an engineer, you will have access to your notes, your texts, and your past work. Note, these tests still have a high fail rate.
  • A common justification given by teachers is that the process of writing notes and cribsheets right before an exam is an excellent form of review; and in many cases, once the notes have been written, they are not necessary (assuming the students are taking the time to write their own notes).
  • Next time you have a math/calculus/physics/statistics exam, if you see the professor stand up, go to the whiteboard and write down formulas before starting, do not rejoice. You'll need them.
  • Subverted with electricians and carpenters when they have to do Code Tests in school where they are asked a question and made to go throught the (at least) phone book thick codebook to find not only an answer, but a code reference as well. True the codebook has all the answers, but the test is meant to gauge your ability to find and interpret the code itself, not your knowledge of the subject. Most apprentices claim code tests are harder than normal tests. And no, just knowing the answer is not enough so you can forget about Cutting the Knot and answering questions based on personal knowledge and experience: even a correct answer is worth no points without the correct code reference (though a correct code reference yet a wrong answer is typically worth partial credit as you proved you can at least use the code book).
• If an exam is open book and has a long time period to complete (as in several hours), but has few questions, be afraid. These exams tend to be notorious for having high failure rates despite these benefits.

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