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Tuesday’s Trope: Chekhov’s Skill

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

This week's trope is Chekhov's Skill, the defining trait of all Metroidvania games and most adventure games. Chekhov's Skill is a skill that you know you'll have to use eventually to proceed in the game. It's best embodied in the Metroid games, where every new weapon lets you get through a door you couldn't open, and every new skill helps you reach a ledge you couldn't jump up to. Most recently it's popped up in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, where you'll pass a ton of locked doors and hidden passages you simply can't access until later. Conversely, as soon as you pick up the skill necessary to open those doors, you know that the only way to move forward is to go back to every one of those locks and see what's behind them. Many video games love this trope, because if you can't actually use the neat crap you pick up to continue, what's the point in looking for it?

• The Legend Of Zelda series typically has the boss of each dungeon's weakness based around whatever piece equipment Link finds in (and sometimes before) it. For example, if you find the Bow expect to be shooting arrows at a weak spot, if you find a hammer then expect to smash some armour and so on.
• In Tales Of Eternia, Rid gets the Kyokku skills (Aurora Artes) in three parts. The first two form his two-stage "Hi-Ougi", the high-powered low-HP sort of move most Tales leads get at some point. The last one is completely useless (and unusable) except as a requirement for the final Puzzle Boss.
• In Trauma Center: New Blood, Valerie drags the operating team to a demonstration held by her friend. Unfortunately, she doesn't realize that her friend became a veterinarian. Any attempts to salvage the situation as having learned something useful are shot down by Markus as being highly unlikely, since human doctors would never have to operate on a dog. Much later in the game, a dog that had been given to them is shot, and they decide to use the skills they learned earlier to operate on it.
• Parodied in Final Fantasy IX - early in the game, Vivi, being too naive to understand how to escape a captor, is easily kidnapped from the party. With Garnet standing right next to him, Zidane explains how to successfully resist capture. Later in the game, when Garnet is about to be captured, she only remembers to yell "Let go of me, you scumbag!", to the perplexity of the villains who then proceed to grab her anyway.
• Chekhov's Gun are the order of the day in any Point and Click Adventure, since most objects you can pick up will undoubtedly become useful later. The Monkey Island series also includes the occasional skill. The most famous example is Insult Swordfighting, but a neater example comes at the end of Monkey Island 2: at the beginning of the game, you were taught how to make a voodoo doll to defeat Largo La Grande. At the end of the game, you must recall this skill to defeat Le Chuck. Guybrush states early on in the first game that he can hold his breath for 10 minutes, which is fortunate because people keep trying to drown him.