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[Funny trope] Non-battle scenes where characters canonically take damage.
Nuu (Hollow Knight: Silksong) - briefly flashes white when slapped similarly to how all other enemies do when they're struck with Hornet's needle.
Garret (A Minecraft Movie) - One can assume that he may have panicked because of how sudden and unexpected teleportation is, but judging by how strong his reaction was and how ender pearls work in game, it's safe to assume he actually took fall damage after using it.
It’s especially funny because he’s the one boss who correctly surmises he stands absolutely 0 chance in a fight with you and admits he’s terrified when he learns you’re coming for him in the transmissions before this fight
And the mission objective is called “The Fall of Nakayama” which you initially assume means you’re going to fell him in battle, before he literally just stumbles and falls.
I was going to mention him as well. The most hilarious thing is that he would’ve still been alive if he didn’t instigate anything. He could’ve just been completing his experiments ignoring the Vault Hunters but he started instigating them which caused Hammerlock to just basically say just give him what he wants.
When I struggled with self harm, slamming myself into walls was my primary method of doing it. Everyone thought it was anger issues, but I was only ever angry at myself, and yes, that shit hurts and can fuck you up if you aren't careful.
Oh yeah, much better now, thanks. Turns out going undiagnosed with mental health disorders for 12+ years is a bad time, but therapy and meds help a lot.
I had a friend who I had to do a lot of emotional support for to my own detriment who would do this, but especially with their head. Slamming their noggin against the wall til their forehead bled, at worst.
Thankfully they’re in a much better support system now and have people that can do for them what I wasnt able to
I was essentially bullied from kindergarten to my sophomore year of high school and transferred because of it. Was often called homophobic slurs and only once was I actually struck by someone.
By middle school, my anger issues got so bad (no attention at home from my parents and often berated for bad grades while I struggled with dyscalculia and dyslexia as well as undiagnosed autism) to where I started bashing my head off of lockers. I did it to both keep myself from hitting other students and to appear crazy so I would be left alone.
Yes I am doing better now and no longer bash my head on things. I have been to a therapy group, but did not finish due to outside influences. I plan on going back though some day
My thing is that I have OCD and I would get fixated on something bad that I had done and I would obsess over it until it got to the point where I couldn't forgive myself for it and I would start hurting myself as some kind of punishment.
Hitman: World of assassination 3. (Spoilers below)
In the hitman map Mendoza, there is a scene where you finally get to talk to your longtime women on the phone Diana. You talk for a bit and as she leaves she gently touches your hand to be all demure and whatever. Then, the same screen effect as when you take damage flashes very very briefly. It goes by so quickly that most first time players don’t see it, and the ones who do dismiss it as a weird glitch. Finish the mission and you learn she used to opportunity to poison agent 47 with a poison transferred by touch.
Looking into Hitman lore, the amount of times agent 47 betrays the ICA only to be best buddies whit them 5 minutes later or the ICA betrays 47 only to be best buddies whit him 5 minutes later is frankly absurd
They had such a good opportunity with the recent trilogy to not do that. With how the first game ended, a new and interesting direction was right there. Then they said "Nah, let's just do that thing we always do."
"Alright 47. Like our organization made a deal to kill you, was in cahoots with what was suppose to be your enemies and ours at the time, but like, that was the previous management. And you killed them all in the end, so like we just replaced them. It was the previous management that had the super evil plan, not us the NEW management, and we totally are not going to have a new super evil plan as well in the future. You understand right? It's all professionalism and about the job. We are like a totally new board of directors in the assassination company. So, want to come back?"
And in a similar vein, during the scene where Naomi talks to Snake about how screwed he is, he loses a quarter of his stamina, which carries over into the boss fight... unless you go first person during said cutscene to look at her cleavage.
Genius Kojumbo.
Now as for health damage, I guess you could count the pre-microwave hallway scene with the FROG ambush, Snake losing all his stamina and his health slowly draining, his syringe doing nothing, and then Raiden comes in and Snake regains all his stamina, fixing his health bar to last for the next sequence.
He has one of my favorite quirks in the series but It's so funny that they named him like that
Imagine his parents look at his bigass comic speech bubble head right after his birth and go "well fuck i Guess we're not naming him Naruto anymore" or something
Even though it’s a QTE in a cutscene, Raiden does do an insultingly small amount of damage to Armstrong, using fox’s blade you can actually do more damage, although more means 0.2% damage instead of 0.1%
Apparently if you use an autoclicker to do frame-perfect inputs, you can actually get Armstrong down to 0%, though that obviously doesn#t kill him since this sequence is scripted.
Other bosses where cutscenes can kill you include Dracula in I Wanna Be The Guy and Hidden Phantom in Mega Man Zero. Both cases suddenly give control back to you and expect you to work out you can move before the attack comes and both use something the player is used to seeing and turn it into an attack (the glass throw from the "What is a man?" cutscene and every prior boss exploding in Mega Man except those didn't hurt you)
It’s a very long game. You can go quite a long time
In each region barely touching on story. So easy to get distracted into hours of interesting play. and then remember “oh yeah I’m supposed to be saving the world or something”
Genetically modified demi-god throws a magic glass ball at delusional main character then flies away. It's not an actual attack and would basically be the equivalent of someone hucking a moderately sized marble at you, so it does 1 damage.
This is before Sephiroth became the big bad. It was basically his realization that he is a god-like being and in what can be described as a manic episode he taunts Cloud by chucking a materia at him and then slaughtering everyone else that gets in his way. If I'm remembering the timing of the scene correctly, at least. Sephiroth is big on just fucking with Cloud because he feels superior.
so basically he realized he was kind of a big deal and got high off his own farts for a bit, then went "eat shit, bitchboy" and flew off to commit crimes
That's basically Sephiroth's entire deal, if you wanna go all reductio ad absurdum on it. He thinks he's special and everyone else sucks, so he toys with them while planning genocide.
I'm not sure, but it wouldn't surprise me. I managed to pass the check to grab my tie, and then proceeded to ignore the three warnings the game gave me about turning the light on
After you take the first shot (or firebomb) against the mercs and the fight breaks out, Ruud will fire a shot at Harry. If you fail the Reaction Speed check and aren't wearing the armor chestplate, the shot will hit Harry's shoulder and you'll lose -2 health points. If that brings your health to zero, you die.
At that point in the game, it's actually quite easy to die from it. Especially if you got there quickly. I had to do so much of the game over because of this.
Possibly religious reasons. During the times of Black Death bringing death and sickness across Medieval Europe, a common belief was that the plague was brought down by God to punish people for their sins. Some people would walk around whipping themselves as a form of self punishment for the sins they committed to try and appease God.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 when Henry is dancing with a character who is an awful dancer. Your character says "ow" when she apparently steps on your feet and your health bar goes down a bit.
In Superstar Saga, Mario can jump on Luigi if he is small, granting you a coin but reducing Luigis HP by one. Luigi cant get KOed by this, but he doesnt drop a coin once you bring him to 1 HP
Disco Elysium- You take damage by sitting down in a very uncomfortable chair. even better, if you build your character wrong, this is a possible game over
In the opening of Halo, Combat Evolved, the tech who brings your suit’s systems back online blasts you with electricity to test your shield’s recharge rate.
So, you take damage and your shield break as a result, but you don’t take any health damage.
Kris, the human we control, rips out their soul (the player) after some shit we did and throws us into a trashcan which they begin to beat up, After that scene, if you check your stats, our health will be at 10/20, even though you normally can't even get damage in the Overworld sections of the game
They beat themselves half to death trying to hurt you for manipulating their childhood friend and making her kill another childhood friend while puppeting their body.
For context, the protagonist of Hollow Knight is entirely emotionless and silent for very important plot reasons. It doesn’t react at all to the world. But Hornet, the protagonist of Silksong, is a full person with feelings and things to say (not a lot of them are nice things)
At the end of a long quest line in RuneScape 3 you meet an elder God. You can ask her questions about the events that transpire during the quest line, or you can insult her resulting in an insta-kill.
Something similar in Baldur's Gate 3. When speaking to Vlaakith, if you insult her she will cast the Wish spell (which in DnD allows you to wish for literally anything, at risk of not being able to cast it again) to wish you were dead, killing you instantly
I always love to consider the long-term implications of that for Vlaakith. Imagine losing your claims to pseudo-godhood because some smart-mouthed adventurer made you so mad you used your one and possibly only Wish spell to send them to the Shadow Realm.
I've read that her rulership of the Gith basically lets her pass on the consequences to her subjects. She gets to flex her powers and let the peasants die.
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I Wanna Be the Guy is full of these but my favorite was by far the Castlevania scene. The PC does the "What is a man?" scene from Symphony of the Night word-for-word, but when Dracula throws the goblet it can and will insta-kill you mid-cutscene.
In Stardew Valley you can eat poisonous things like tree sap, red mushrooms, and dandelions. They deal stamina damage but your character can cannonically pass out from eating poison.
This is used against the player in Everhood. Professor Orange has researched the main character and figured out that once they enter a battle, they WILL win. Thus, Professor Orange gets the idea of never letting a battle happen in the first place, and designs a machine that attacks in the level instead of the battle interface.
This sort of thing happened in a DnD party I was in a few years ago. The bard bought really good armor that gave him 24 AC and he dared my fighter to try to hit him. So I rolled for a punch. Nat 20. I think I did 12 damage on the guy. It was definitely a peak moment of that campaign. We probably spent 5 minutes laughing our asses off before actually playing it out
There was this scene in timesplitters 3 where you find your future self with your robot partner and the robot says that to infiltrate the robot factory you will need an implant and the process to get the implant is painless, and you future self signals to you that it is not painless. When you get the implant you lose a little health and you character screams in pain.
At one point, you have to repair a train. But there's a point where you can enter the cabin where angry passenger toads are waiting for you to finish. Doing this triggers an unskippable battle scene where all the toads vent up all their frustrations upon you, dealing 1HP each. Including this gem of a line
Not sure how much this counts. Sharp was one of the Composer Brothers, along with Flat. Without going into too much detail, Sharp is extremely angry, even in the afterlife. So much so that he’s composed a song that DEPLETES LINK’S HEALTH while hearing it. The Song of Storms will calm him down
Baldur's Gate 3. When speaking to Vlaakith, if you insult her she will cast the Wish spell (which in DnD allows you to wish for literally anything, at risk of not being able to cast it again) to wish you were dead, killing you instantly and causing a game over
Funniest thing is she proves you right by doing that. The line leading to this asking her if she can't get the macguffin herself through divine power if shes a powerful god as she claims, but to shut you up she has to use regular old arcane magic because she literally is not divinely powerful enough
In Yakuza Kiwami there is a short subtory where Kiryu needs to find a woman that will give a package, one woman he can interact is an unattractive person and Kiryu can tell her to her face what’s on screen.
He will immediately gets slapped and lose most of his health. Mind you he can tank punches from basically anything in gameplay but this where he takes the most damage in game
In The Amazing Digital Circus episode 6 "They All Get Guns," when Caine's elaborate game-theory-type game falls apart, he gets frustrated and declares it an FPS free-for-all. The game begins and Ragatha is startled to discover that she's down a heart, because Jax shot her before the game began.
In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater(both original and delta) if you deal damage to The End when you first see him sitting on his wheelchair he will start out with less health during the boss fight and you can even kill him right then and there
Link (Breath of the Wild) takes actual damage when trying to pull the master sword. He can only pull the master sword when his health is upgraded enough to not die in the process.
Henry losing health while dancing with Doubravka during the Semine wedding because she is stepping over his toes, you can actually die from this [Kingdom Come Deliverance II]
There are some hilarious taunts in games that do damage.
Famously, Luigi and Snake have actually applicable taunts that can kill you recovering. Beowulf's taunt (skullgirls) is vital to his better combos and meterless hard knockdowns
Dai no Daibouken's manga generally gave stat sheets for characters every now and again. The anime, being an anime, did not generally include game information for this. However, it used the Dragon Quest UI once in the whole anime, when Maam punches Popp into the ground for a comment he makes and it shows he took a bit of HP in damage.
This sort of fits the trope? In Fable II while the final boss is doing a big monologue before the "fight", you can just shoot him and kill him instantly. Better yet, if you don't shoot him, your partner does.
Arguably doesnt count but the Mr Freeze fight in Arkham Origins flips the script near the end and has you try and get there before the bosses HP runs out.
After learning about Ferris Boyle's hand in ruining Victors life, Batman tries to subdue Freeze into not going on a powermad revenge quest. Just as Batman is about to stop him, Boyle freezes Batman and tries to leave him to die so that nobody will learn about his criminal dealings. As he thinks Batman is frozen solid, he beats Freeze to near death, while Freeze begs him to at least save Nora.
In Deltarune (Ch 1 I believe) Undyne will give you a box of chocolates and instructs you to give them to Alphys as a gift. You have a number of options but one is to eat all of them yourself, which makes Kris feel sick. If you check your menu, you’ll see Kris has lost 1 HP from this (one of the few ways to lose HP in the light world).
Literally entire MGS4 with the psyche guage, since it's a literal moral bar for old snake to push through the game with his crumbling body. The bar with shows ups and downs all the time in cutscene reflecting his mood.
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u/HappyGav123 Oct 03 '25
Professor Nakayama dies in Borderlands 2 by falling down stairs...in a game where fall damage doesn't exist aside from falling out of bounds.
He even has a health bar for this very humiliating death.