Tuesday’s Trope: Giant Space Flea From Nowhere
[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.]
Boss fights don't have to make sense. Sure, sometimes you'll fight a crime lord, an alien overlord, or an evil wizard that fits in with the narrative of the game you're playing, but just as often you're probably going to run across a mutant cake, a robot dinosaur, or a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere.
What is the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere? It's supposed to be the embodiment of all evil in the world. Some say its father was the main character's long-lost friend. Nobody believed it was real. Nobody ever saw it or knew anybody that ever worked directly for it, but to hear the cutscene tell it, anybody could have worked for it. You never knew. That was its power. The greatest trick the GSFN ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist. And like that, poof. It's gone.
The GSFN is any boss that just doesn't make sense. It appears out of nowhere, forces you to fight it, and then vanishes without a word. In some games, it turns out to be the final boss, just because the guy you were chasing the entire game didn't seem big or interesting enough. It just shows up, looking for a fight.
Examples of Giant Space Fleas from Nowhere include:
Tuesday’s Trope: Lethal Joke Character
[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.]
Almost every fighting game has a character nobody wants to play because he's too weak, too strange, or too useless. That same character inevitably turns out to be completely unstoppable in the right hands. They might be extremely difficult to master, but once you figure out how to take advantage of their unique abilities they're absolute monsters in the ring. They are Lethal Joke Characters.
Tournament fighters aren't the only games to have lethal joke characters. Many RPGs feature seldom-used characters that can be grinded or equipped properly to turn them into invincible killing machines. Blue mages in Final Fantasy games are often lethal joke characters, because it's so difficult to get their best abilities. If you can expose them to just the right magics, though, they easily become the most powerful members of your party.
Examples of lethal joke characters include:
Tuesday’s Trope: New Game Plus
[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.]
Just because you've finished a game doesn't mean you're done with it. Sometimes it helps to start all over again, with all the experience and equipment you built up or a few extra items you can't even find in your first playthrough. This ability to start again while carrying over things from your previous game is called New Game Plus, and it's become a popular feature in many games. Chrono Trigger wasn't necessarily the first game to do this, but it pioneered the concept and gave it its name. This is actually one of the few video game tropes with its own Wikipedia page!
Examples of New Game Plus include:
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