Hyperspace Arsenal/Video Games

• Heavily averted in 7.62mm High Caliber. The grid inventory system is divided between two quick-access pockets on your fatigues, belts (two of which include holsters), tactical vests, and backpacks, with the different carrying items divided into smaller pockets that can only accept items of a particular size or smaller. All of the belts, vests, and backpacks appear on the character model and backpacks even prevent soldiers from rolling while prone. On the other hand, the grid is very strict and doesn't allow for items to be rotated, which greatly limits what can be carried in certain pockets.
• Ace Combat wouldn't work without this trope. On top of the ludicrously high number of missiles and special weapons (as parodied here), if you use 3rd-person view (as in "behind the plane") and move the camera underneath the plane, you can even see weapons magically reappear once they're available for firing again!
  • There is a fanfic where a writer rewrote Ace Combat 5 if it and Ace Combat 04 had to adhere to real-life limits; for example it's the F/A-18 Hornet fighters from the aircraft carrier OFS Kestrel that attack an enemy naval blockade early on while Wardog Squadron merely flies air cover, and Mobius One didn't destroy Stonehenge by himself, despite newspaper claims to the contrary.
  • Operation Katina from 5 has much stricter limits than the normal games - you start with just 20 missiles and 4 of its special weapon. There are certain enemies you can destroy which replenish one of the two (10 missiles or 4 special weapons), but that's something entirely different.
• The player's inventory in Achaea, as in most MUDs, is effectively infinite, and can hold (among other things) mounts. A character suddenly producing a full-size winged horse from his backpack is not regarded as odd. Herbs have to be kept in the Rift, however, which can only hold a few thousand units of each type.
• The After Burner series has your Cool Plane start out with 50 missiles, way more than a real-life fighter plane can carry. And in After Burner Climax, they regenerate.
• Similar to the Ace Combat example above, the MMORPG Air Rivals features one-man fighters that can potentially carry several hundred thousand missiles each. Of course, those same inventory slots could be used for 60 sets of armor plating that are each as big as the craft itself.
• Averted in the 2008 version of Alone in the Dark, where everything Edward carries (except for his currently equipped weapon) is explicitly shown to fit within the confines of his jacket.
• Another Century's Episode uses this one. Most hand-carried weapons simply appear out of thin air when used (often replacing the weapon your unit is already carrying), then are gone just as quickly. When using melee attacks, the primary weapons simply disappear... Only to reappear if needed as part of an Evolving Attack.
• Like a good adventure game protagonist, Ashley of the Another Code: Two Memories series has no problem carrying around loads of random junk she finds. It does make for at least one odd instance in the second game when she goes to return a briefcase and pulls out from behind her back. Unless you can buy that she had a regular-sized briefcase in that little fanny pack of hers.
• ARMA II and its Operation Arrowhead expansion have a form of this: most weapons that can load multiple types of magazines only have one actual model for those magazines. Hence, you can load a 100-round Beta C-mag into the XM8, only for it to magically look like a normal 30-round magazine.
• In the even more bizarre adventure game Armed And Delirious, the main character is a crazy old woman who stores items she finds in her support bra.
• Assassin's Creed averts this quite handily; all of Altair's weapons are carried visibly on his body. However, this raises another problem, regarding how the guards mistake a man with two swords, gauntlets, a dozen knives, and heavy-duty boots for a monk.
  • Taken to an extreme in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. By the end of that game, Ezio (in addition to his four pieces of armor) can carry all of the following on him at once: two hidden blades, a hidden gun (with extra ammunition if you unlocked the online UPlay achievement), 15 vials of poison, at least one dagger or small weapon, one large sword, 15 parachutes, 15 vials of medicine, 25 throwing knives, several smoke bombs and a crossbow. Later on, you'll also carry The Apple Of Eden in one hand in addition to the aforementioned equipment (although you won't be able to equip weapons during this time). Strangely, none of this extra weight appears to affect Ezio's swimming ability or parkour skills in the slightest.
• Banjo-Kazooie: Banjo can carry 100 eggs, 50 red feathers, and 10 gold feathers, but can double that with secret codes. There's also the Mumbo Tokens, Jiggies, notes, and the Stop 'n' Swop items. These are all stored in Banjo's backpack, which is also occupied by Kazooie! Even worse is Banjo-Tooie, where there's even more items, like the Fire, Ice, Grenade, and Clockwork Kazooie Eggs. There's also the Cheato Pages, the Glowbos, and the many quest items... And finally, when Kazooie does leave the backpack, Banjo can even store other characters when needed, such as an obese polar bear child, a pterodactyl child who's too large to fly, a sick dinosaur child, live batteries, and floating creatures to allow Banjo to float without Kazooie!
• The Battlefield} series normally lets the player only carry two weapons at a time, plus extra equipment depending on class. However, there are supply crates in Bad Company 2's campaign that play this straight, in that you can grab any weapon you've ever picked up before from any such crate anywhere.
• Battlestar Galactica Online: Even a tiny strikecraft can carry thousands of rounds of ammo, to say nothing of other pieces of equipment.
• In Beyond Good and Evil, Jade & friends have a device called a "S.A.C.", which literally snorts up and reproduces unlimited numbers of items just like the imager in Tron.
  • Fun fact : sac is the French word for bag.
• BioShock (series). Your character is physically enhanced to some unspecified above-human level, but seriously -- a radio, a camera, a wrench, a pistol, a machine gun, a shotgun, a grenade launcher, a chemical thrower and a crossbow. And these are all 1960-level technology, so these things are pretty big and clunky -- the radio is as big as a dictionary, the camera the size of a human head. And for each weapon you carry three types of ammunition, and that too is big and clunky, the frag grenades look like cans of peaches, the chemical thrower ammo is carried aroun in giant tanks (of which there are three types), and the machine gun takes drums for crying out loud. You can also carry nine first aid kits, which are metal and brick-sized, and nine syringes of EVE, each of which seems to contain about a quart of the stuff. And you can pick up more than a hundred audio tapes; even assuming that you just took the tape each time and discarded the playback device, once again it's 1960, so we're talking cans of reel-to-reel tape. More than a hundred. And thanks to the item inventing system, you can be carrying dozens of all manner of non-weapons like steel screws, rubber hoses, samples of bee enzyme, bottles of distilled water, bottles of pure alcohol, cans of kerosene, containers of glue, empty syringes, shell casings and batteries. Then on top of all that, some missions require you to temporarily carry something else around, like say, an EMP bomb the size of a nuclear warhead.
  • Don't forget the wallet, which can carry $500 of single notes before being full.
  • Well, does this picture justify anything?
• Taokaka from BlazBlue, despite wearing a none-too-baggy hoodie, can fit a seemingly unlimited number of baseballs, bowling balls and even the occasional Kaka kitten.
• Blood II slightly averts this in a sense: weapons correspond to number keys in the order that you find them rather than a predetermined order. Since there are about twenty weapons but only ten number keys, if a player comes across a new gun they want, they'd have to drop one they're already holding to make room for it. Of course, as noted, you're still toting around 10 weapons at one time (a knife and nine guns, some of which can be dual-wielded without taking up extra space).
• Bloodline Champions has it all over the place - some characters have all their weapons shown on them, other less so, though all will make you wonder about ammo.
• BloodRayne is very strict with how many weapons you can carry, but none of them are seen on Rayne's person. A cheat code makes the weapons visible on Rayne, and it becomes obvious why they're invisible by default; it looks ridiculous and not to mention extremely cumbersome.
• In Borderlands the character uses "Storage Deck", a literal Hyperspace Arsenal, to lug all your stuff around, which is vaguely implied to work similar to the transporter buffer for the Elite Force games, or the nanotransers from Phantasy Star Universe. Like nanotransers, Storage Decks have limited carrying capacity to start with: 12 inventory items, a rather low amount of each type of ammo, and two "active" guns to start with. As you progress through the game these limits increase, via the use of "Storage Deck Upgrades", or SDUs, to 42 inventory items (obtained by rescuing Claptraps), 4 active weapons (obtained by default in the main quest), and a ton of ammo for each weapon (obtained by buying Ammo SDUs at Ammo Vendors).
• Exaggerated to a hilarious degree in Brain Dead 13, where Fritz has a ridiculous amount of weapons in his cloak. This is played to its fullest extent in the final battle, where he falls down a ridiculously high set of a stairs, and on every bounce four or five items fall out of his pockets, from knifes, to saws, to an anvil and a vampire Playboy.
• The videogame version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer obviously doesn't wear such a thing as a jacket or a trenchcoat. She instead keeps all her items in her hip pocket. Including her crossbow.
• Averted in Call of Duty. Since the beginning, the player has only been able to carry two weapons plus grenades (though in the first game pistols got their own third slot, and the number of total grenades has been toned down a bit since then). Multiplayer, starting with Call of Duty 4, requires the Overkill perk, using up one of your three perk slots, to spawn with a second non-pistol; while you cannot see yourself, allies and enemies wear their secondary weapon slung over their back, along with an RPG, Claymores or C4 if they are carrying those. Arguably played straight with total ammo and shared calibers; it's one thing to assume that Sgt. MacTavish is constantly refilling emptied magazine pouches with spare magazines, it's another to realize that your 9mm pistol is getting refilled when you run over 9mm submachine guns, and that so much ammo (the user's total ammo for the weapon) is being carried on the weapon itself.
  • Averted further in singleplayer and the later games, where the above-mentioned RPG is counted as a secondary weapon rather than as equipment, and the Overkill perk didn't reappear for Modern Warfare 2 or Black Ops (though MW2 counted shotguns and explosive launchers as secondary weapons, so you could spawn with one of them along with an assault rifle or SMG whenever you wanted).
• In Chibi-Robo!, the eponymous four-inch-high robot is capable of stuffing items it comes across into its head. Lampshaded twice: the first time it uses this ability, the family is noticeably impressed. Later on, Chibi stuffs a toy ship some twenty times its size into its inventory.
• Averted in Chrome, which takes a different approach: you get a limited inventory in which you can only keep one large weapon and one small, or two medium ones. Ammo also has to fit in there. This is supposedly for realism, but the rest of the game features no such similarities to real life. The damage system follows the traditional "survive as many bullet wounds as the enemy can fire off as long as you have medkits" approach, driving a vehicle off a cliff doesn't cause it to become unusable and firing a rifle round in an enemy's head at point blank range doesn't cause a huge gaping hole in it. The frustration caused by the hacked-on and completely unnecessary inventory system just serves as a demonstration as to why every other non-realistic FPS game doesn't bother.
• Averted in Combat Arms: You can only carry a primary and secondary weapon plus grenades unless you're using the backpack, in which case you can equip as many extra weapons as you have slots. However, ammunition and modifications do not carry over between instances of weapons... so you can be carrying an unmodified but fully loaded M16A3 and swap it with a scoped M16A3, only to find that it's down to the last magazine or even empty. Plays it straight with the "the player's total ammo for the weapon is included with the weapon" though.
• In Command & Conquer: Renegade, by the end of the game, Havoc can carry about a dozen different weapons plus ammo. However, the in-game animation only shows what weapon he's carrying, and one other weapon on his back.
  • Appeared to be averted in the trailer for Command & Conquer: Tiberium, where it appears that rather than many different weapons, the main character has a single Swiss Army Weapon.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day: The throwing knives!
• In Crusader: No Remorse, the Silencer is limited to carrying five guns (though he can still carry a metric buttload--ten percent larger than an Imperial buttload, ya know--of explosives, medikits, and so on). In No Regret, even this restriction is waived, and you can carry one of every gun in the game. The games also seem to feature hyperspace magazines in some of the guns, as the grenade launcher mounts magazines of nine grenades at once.
• Dark Forces Saga's Kyle Katarn's Jedi utility belt can carry several rifles, a rocket launcher, anti-personnel mines and the ammunition for all of them. Even more in the Jedi knight games.
  • A trading card featuring scenes from the movies and EU shows a scene from the original Dark Forces, showing Kyle actually loaded with weaponry.
• Dark Souls, unlike Demon's Souls, allows you to carry as many items as you want, as long as you're willing to deal with scrolling through all of it. If that gets tedious but you don't want to throw items away permanently, you can also get a "bottomless box" to put your items into.
• The Darkness's video game. Jackie does not replace the magazines of his pistols or submachine guns, but discards them for new ones that are kept, presumably, in his coat. Preserve ammo in the game long enough and you'll see Jackie has no problem keeping upwards of 20+ separate guns in his coat.
• Dawn of War falls into this trope while averting Crippling Overspecialisation. Almost every infantry unit possesses a ranged weapon and a melee weapon (with the exception of all Necron and Imperial Guard units whose weapons are dual-purpose), switching between the two as appropriate, however most of them are only seen carrying their ranged weapon when idle or when firing, pulling their melee weapon from nowhere while their ranged weapon disappears. Dawn of War 2 averts both, only the melee specialists possessing a dedicated melee weapon while other infantry use their weapon as a club or merely Good Old Fisticuffs.
  • Averted for most units carrying other weapons. Close Combat troops are shown carrying both their ranged and melee weapons at all times, and the Heavy Bolter marines don't drop their gun to pick up a knife. Their weapon is so cumbersome, they're reduced to hitting you with it.
• The playable characters of Devil May Cry revel in this. In the first two games, Dante can hold his pistols, a shotgun and an explosive launcher, as well as other not-so-easily-classified weapons on his person. The third game, where one is limited to two melee and two ranged weapons, would appear to be more realistic... until one realises that Dante can hold two back-covering scimitars, a full-sized electric guitar, a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher. The fourth game goes to three melee weapons and three ranged weapons, with the Pandora's Box literally reshaping itself via demonic tech into the desired mode. Even a Macross Missile Massacre-capable flying battle station that Dante can sit in.
  • Then again, considering that all of them have some manner of demonic blood, it could be possible that some magic enables this. Indeed, Vergil does literally summon a set of gauntlets and greaves out of thin air in a cutscene.
  • Also note that in DMC 3, if you equip Beowulf (gauntlets and boots for martial arts moves) then you can see both Beowulf and the weapon he stores on his back (which is not held up by anything, btw...). This is further helped that if you equip Artemis (a gun which more or less covers his whole hand) this will stay visible when using a melee weapon. Of course, the gloves will mysteriously disapear the second you pull out the other weapon. Ditto with Artemis, though this is more understandable, the gloves still seem to have fully articulate fingers and should still be able to hold and use a sword.
• Deus Ex also uses a 6x5 tile Grid Inventory system that allows you to carry, say, six assault rifles and six pistols under your trenchcoat (it should be noted that DX's actual item models are more compact than those in most games). The sequel, Invisible War, dumped the grid system for a simpler one where every item, from a rocket launcher to a pack of smokes, took up the same amount of room (note that neither title considers ammo and other items to be competing for the same space).
  • Annoyingly, the Dragon's Tooth Sword takes up more room in your inventory than it does in-game, considering that the blade only appears as it's switched on when JC equips it, and yet it's permanently on in your inventory, thereby requiring that much more space to store.
  • On the other hand the GEP gun slows you to a crawl when you equip it (reasonable as it is a huge rocket firing cannon) but causes no such problem when you tuck it under your coat.
  • And ammunition doesn't seem to be counted in this; even when you're imprisoned by the Ancient Conspiracy, they leave you with your ammo.
• Similarly, the Diablo games have different inventory areas, each with a different amount of limited space, that represent easily-accessed belt pouches, holding space in a backpack, a treasure chest in town, etc. You still never see this backpack, and it can comfortably hold multiple suits of full plate armor.
  • In Diablo II, the player acquires literal (in-universe) hyperspace called the Horadric Cube. This item takes up four squares in the player's inventory, but opens up to reveal twelve squares of internal storage.
• The MMORPG Dofus has a theoretical limit of weight: each item has a size, measured in "pods", which vary from 1 (most common components) to 100 (some very rare items). You can only transport 1000 pods of materials, which is huge by itself, since it means 200 pieces of wood. But... You gain 5 pods from every point you spend in strength (which can top several hundred with the good equipment). You gain 5 pods for every job level. When you reach lvl 100 in a job, you gain an additional 1000 pods. And you can have three jobs. There's a pet who can give you an additionnal 1000 pods. And also numerous items, who give you more pods: a low-level belt offers you 500 pods, and the best backpack in the game can go up to 1200 pods. And, if with all of that, you still didn't have any space left, you can store items in your house's chest, or even at the bank, where you have unlimited storage (with a cost, of course). And even with that, the lack of space is still an issue to tons of players! You can literally walk with an entire forest chopped down into bits in your backpack, but it's still not enough for some players!
• Doom 3 is probably the most blatant perpetrator of this trope. By the end of the game you're carrying a handgun, a shotgun, a machine gun, a chaingun, a bunch of grenades, a plasma rifle, a rocket launcher, a chainsaw, a PDA, a flashlight, a BFG bigger than a microwave oven and a big metal cube, not to mention all the attendant ammunition, which can include fifty or so rockets and several BFG fuel cells the size of your head. Then in the cutscenes the character is seen carrying naught but a dinky shotgun.
• Taken to extreme levels in Dragon Age Origins. Every different item type takes up the same space in your inventory. That is to say 99 Health Poultices takes up the same space as 1 Health Poultice. Each weapon and armor piece also takes up an inventory space on its own. By the way, you start out with an inventory limit of 70 and it can go up to 125 with backpacks. So in theory you could lug around hundreds of potions and dozens of weapons and pieces of armor. Plot-relevant items don't take up any space either. Of course the only things you see on your characters are equipped items.
  • And all items in the inventory are shared between all currently active party members (or all party members, if you're in camp).
• Caim can carry eight weapons in Drakengard. "Only eight?" you might ask, but given some of the odd dimensions of some of them, and the fact that no one of human stature could comfortably carry three axes and four staffs whilst fending off entire armies of baddies...
• In Dubloon, your inventory can hold up to 4 pages of items. It doesn't count how many of each item you have however, so you can end up with 99 Shake-Bombs and still have space for a jerky.
• Dungeon Siege sort of plays and averts this one. Although your inventory is grid-based, your speed is never affected by how much you're carrying, and the only thing you can see in your character, just like in Morrowind and Oblivion, is your armor and your currently equipped weapon. However, as you keep stashing your items into your packmules, you can see how the stack of bags and crates they're carrying starts growing.
• EarthBound acknowledges the problem by using a courier service to drop off and pick up items that the characters don't have room to carry -- but then again, a packet of salt seems to occupy the same space in the characters' pocket as a bazooka, or even a bicycle.
• In The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall you can't pass a row of shrubbery while on a horse. So you get off the horse, jump over it, and get on again. At this point, Fridge Logic suggests horses are kept in the Hyperspace Arsenal too, thus making Tamriel horses infinitely more awesome than Earth horses. It's also possible to climb up a city walls from the outside, climb down on the inside, and get on your horse.
  • It goes even further by allowing you to carry a cart which has a ludicrous weight limit which you could take anywhere (including the wall climbing trick mentioned above) except inside dungeons.
  • But then how do you get the horse through the shrubbery? Ahh, I see. You mean the player can literally put the horse in their inventory.
• The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and Oblivion limit what you carry based on weight. With magic spells and items to enchance your weight limit, walking around with hundreds of pounds of weapons, armor, and assorted detrius is fine. All that is visible, however, is your equipped weapon, armor, and/or worn clothes.
• In EverQuest 2, your character is limited to what he can carry by their strength. But, after gaining no more than thirty levels or so, assuming you're not a Squishy Wizard type, you'll be easily able to carry six solid steel, 100lb strongboxes full of junk.
  • Harvestables in the game also have a negligible weight and can stack in to groups of 100, so you can carry tens of thousands of units of rocks, precious minerals, gemstones and lumber without any decrease in movement speed.
  • Also, you are able to craft and carry around furniture, even going so far as being able to fit two dozen full-sized four post beds inside one of the aforementioned strong boxes.
• In Fable the character cannot properly carry around a weapon if it is too heavy, but can carry around an apparently unlimited amount of weaponry, food, augments, etc. In Fable II you can carry around freakin' furniture.
• Fallout lampshaded this with the perk Pack Rat (which increases your carrying capacity); the picture for it showed Vault Boy stuffing a grandfather clock into his backpack. The second game was particularly odd in that the trunk of the car could carry any amount of items as long as its very high weight capacity wasn't exceeded, but if an item would exceed it, the game told you that there was no more space in the trunk
  • To be exact, the trunk counts size, not weight. Weightless items like chems DO take up space so those are better off in your inventory. On the other hand, you can happily stash all the ammo you get your hands on into the trunk and the game won't object (even though ammo does have weight).
  • This leads to some of the best animations ever, such as when the Vault Dweller pulls a Bozar out of his/her pants with a distinct heaving motion.
  • The player's inventory itself in Fallout 3 is limited by weight, but ammunition and chems doesn't weigh anything. Thus, you can be carrying so much that a single knife slows you down, but you can still pick up 500 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition (or 500 rockets, for that matter) no problem.
    • Much worse even, though there is a carrying limit, it is usually so ridiculously high. A character with a decent strength score has no problem carrying four different handguns, two different assault rifles, two shotguns, a hunting rifle, a minigun, a rocket launcher, a miniature nuke catapult, an oversized flamethrower, a sniper rifle, a small assortment of chosen melee weapons and can still pick up an entire wardrobe of combat armor and several backpacks full of loot, and all you can see of it is what the character is currently wearing and armed with.
      • This has the added charm of being able to stuff a rocket launcher inside a first aid kit.
    • Fallout 3 has a rather gruesome 'exploit' in that if you were deep in a vault, for instance, and weighed down with stuff you plan on selling or craft materials, you could use a stray leg, arm, or even eyeball as a Hyperspace Arsenal. Since all of the dismembered pieces from cinematic kills can be 'looted', you could open the part's inventory, transfer whatever was weighing you down to said arm/leg/eyeball and then 'carry it' (with the cursor, not in your backpack) to the door of the area for quick retrieval later. (It's not a true exploit because you can't bring objects you're carrying via physics manipulation with you between zones, but you can put it neatly by the entrance so when you fast-travel back it's readily accessible.)
  • Since weapons not being used are invisible, enemies will sometimes pull off strange tricks like firing a pistol at you while you approach then suddenly pulling out a hidden flamethrower the size of their torso the moment you're in range.
  • The second game also had an exploit: stealing from hired teammates is coded to always succeed. However, reverse-pickpocketing also works, meaning that by using your Steal skill, you can pack tens of thousands of pounds onto them and the only drawback is that they can't run.
• F.E.A.R. only lets you carry 3 weapons at a time, but places no limit on how big those weapons can be. Your character can thus carry the 3 biggest guns in the game, the rocket launcher, repeating cannon and energy beam weapon, all at the same time. It's notable that the first 2 weapons on that list are almost as big as the character himself.
• The NES version of the original Final Fantasy does it both ways, giving players a bottomless joint inventory for consumable items, but providing a extremely small inventory for equippable items, which each character must carry separately. Some dungeons have so many equippable items that multiple trips are necessary to loot the dungeon without having to throw some of the equipment away!
  • Further sequels have a giant chocobo acting as storage for your extra units, but you can still carry a ridiculous amount of stuff with you. After Final Fantasy V, your party can be lugging 99 of everything (potions, swords, various things you can throw at the enemy, and armor) and enough money to ruin the world economy several times over.
  • Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light tries to limit things by limiting the player to 15 items per character, but there's nothing theoretically stopping you for, for instance, carrying around 15 axes. And then there are the hundreds of gems you end up lugging around by the end of the game.
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics, enemy units have infinite stores of consumable items and throwable weapons, so you can exploit that to get otherwise rare items.
  • In Final Fantasy XII, Larsa has an infinite supply of potions (unless you're playing the International Version, in which case he uses yours).
  • Many of the characters in the Dissidia Final Fantasy games seem to be able to summon their weapons at will. The notable exception is Firion, who is seen to carry the seven weapons around with him at all times. Conversely, Vaan is a particular offender, being able to wield even more weapons than Firion, but he summons them as he needs them (in fitting with his gimmick of switching between weapons for better attacks). Bartz at least has possible excuse that the weapons that he summons are but imitations of those of his teammates, and so may not be useable by anyone else for any other purpose.
• Ignoring the fact that most players routinely carry copious amounts of clothing, weapons, armor, animals, and on occasion children in their inventory as costume items, many attacks in Gaia Online zOMG involve pulling a weapon from nowhere, using it, and then having it disappear almost instantly. This is explained away as G'hi energy being manipulated by your rings to form the weapon. But in a game that has you killing plungers and lawn gnomes, a Hyperspace Arsenal only adds to the charm. (Plus the ring that lets you fire 4 guns at once is really cool.)
• Averted in the unremarkable PlayStation 2 survival horror, Ghost Hunter. The main character picks up five or six weapons over the course of the game, and carries them in various holsters and slings on his body. It never affects his aim, of course.
• The main character in the videogame version of The Godfather keeps a massive arsenal -- a shotgun, 2 handguns, a Tommy gun, garrote wire, 1 stick of dynamite, 4 Molotovs, 1 bomb, and a burning two by four in some versions, along with all the attendant ammo -- inside of his shirt. Plus you can upgrade your Street Smarts to increase the carry limit on your throwables, and upgrading your weapons increases the max ammo capacity.
• A small source of comedy on this subject can be found in Golden Eye 1997 for the Nintendo 64. There's one level where you, as James Bond, have to make it to an elevator in a set time limit. This level limits you to only one handgun to dispatch enemies. If you make it to the end in time, there is a short cut-scene of Bond walking into the elevator, tucking his gun behind his pants, and leaving. However, if you use some cheating peripheral like a Gameshark to access more weapons, or simply the game's built-in cheats, you're treated to a ludicrous scene of Bond, say, stuffing a rocket launcher down his pants and having it magically disappear before he leaves.
• Arthur from Ghosts N Goblins can produce an infinite number of lances from nowhere, to which they quickly return.
  • And judging that he can still hang onto them when he loses his armor, the only logical explanation is that he keeps them in his boxers.
• The hero in the Gothic series can carry an infinte amount of anything he finds. It is not unusual to be carrying large quantities of weapons, a dozen suits of armour, and enough various foodstuffs to feed an army for a year. In the first game, there's a finite amount of money in the world since vendor inventory never refreshes so you can't even sell it all. This is even more noticable in Gothic 3 where some of the carryable items include large crates full of (presumably) heavy goods, barrels full of fish, and unbelievably large plants which have somehow never even been flattened when the hero takes them back out to eat them.
• The "heroes" of the Grand Theft Auto games find room for a very large arsenal in their pants.
  • In fact, since C.J. (the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas) is capable of changing his clothes, he could conceivably be carrying around a rocket launcher, a shotgun, and an assortment of other weapons in his boxers.
  • Niko Bellic, of GTA IV, for example, is capable of carrying a pistol, shotgun, submachine gun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, an RPG (the weapon, not the video game genre), 25 grenades and a baseball bat, along with enough ammunition for each to take out a small army.
    • Lampshaded/spoofed in this portrayal.
    • And many fans still complain about the ammunition supplies being too limited.
• In Grim Fandango, Manny Calavera tucks all manner of bulky items, from fire extinguishers to metal detectors, inside his jacket. Then again, he does have a hollow torso... One notable item is a scythe, taller than he is, which he carefully folds up first.
• The Half-Life series demonstrates this trope particularly well. The player character, Gordon Freeman, typically starts off with a crowbar, then expands his inventory to include a pistol, a revolver, at least two types of machine guns, hand grenades, a rocket launcher, and many more. The first game in the series is the worst perpetrator, as there are more weapons to collect as well as a much higher limit on how much ammunition can be carried, including but not limited to what is essentially a nuclear cannon (with boxes of depleted uranium for ammunition) attached to a backpack-sized generator. The Powered Armor cleverly masquerading as a hazard suit makes the weight issue more believable, but not where he puts all of it.
  • The Specialists mod for Half-Life, based on The Matrix, allows you to carry an absurd amount of weapons, though they do reduce your walking speed and too much weight will prevent you from doing some stunts. Due to the proliferation of players bunny hopping around the map kicking people in the face at 200 miles per hour (Kicking or punching players will disarm them), the Hyperspace Arsenal provides a hilarious way to kill these bunny hoppers - they zip in, punch you - your gun goes flying, then you pull out four more guns and shoot them in the face.
• Another exception is Halo, which allows you to carry just two weapons and eight grenades, although you can also carry as many as four steamer trunk-sized boxes of rockets along with your 4 foot long rocket launcher.
  • He's a genetically-engineered Super Soldier in Powered Armour strong enough to flip over tanks. The only issue is where the ammo goes.
  • Halo 3 further averts this, with both player weapons being visible, unless you pick up a turret. They still have no ammo pouches.
    • A Bungie employee explained this due to Master Chief's armor being magnetized in some way. On the ammo and grenade supply: "Who knows? It's magic."
  • This example is conspicuous because a large fraction of the serious-shooter gaming-industry has followed Bungie's lead with Halo, so this trope is on its way to dying out in that genre.
• Subverted in Hard Reset. You have two basic weapons-a ballistic weapon and an energy weapon-that can morph into different guns.
• An exception is the videogame version of Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy. Arthur Dent can only carry a limited number of items and will start dropping other items if this limit is reached. The Hyperspace Arsenal is then Handwaved once the purpose of the Thing Your Aunt Gave You Which You Don't Know What It Is is discovered. It is basically something in which every item, with the exception of the spare improbability drive, can be placed. If the item is dropped it will magically return to your inventory a few turns later.
• In the first Hitman game, the eponymous character can put certain small items away inside his jacket. When he switches to swimming trunks in order to infiltrate a sauna, the same animation of him putting things away into his jacket is used, making it look like he reaches inside his own chest.
  • The sequel, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, takes the middle road. You can only carry a single "large" weapon, be it a Katana, an AK-47, or an anti-materiel rifle -- but you can still stuff a lot of small arms inside your shirt: 3 different knives, 8 pistols, a revolver, a small SMG, a sawed-off shotgun, a bottle of anaesthetic and his trademark piano-wire. Also noteable is that he can apparently transfer this entire arsenal to the jacket of another disguise in a matter of seconds.
  • Hitman: Blood Money went marginally more reasonable by only allowing 47 to start out a mission with one handgun, one SMG, and one unconcealable weapon alongside his non-gun equipment. Any collected handguns and SMGs can still be concealed on 47's person, but the inclusion of an ICA weapons storage crate could allow the player to feign realism.
• The Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and so on) are bad for this. Each character is given a carry weight and twenty inventory slots. It doesn't matter if it's the shell of an ankheg (bug so large the exoskeleton alone of weighs 50 pounds) or a single, tightly-rolled scroll (effectively weightless). The weight limit believably penalizes weaker characters, who end up carrying a lot of gems and scrolls if you spend a lot of time away from settlements with stores. The space penalty was less believable on stronger characters, who could carry as many gems and scrolls as the weaker characters--and nothing more except the equipment on their person.
  • Further playing with the trope are quick item and quick weapon slots, where an item can be put in a position to be used immediately if necessary without having to resort to the inventory screen (which added an interesting tactical dimension to the first game, as the game unpaused and could not be paused again while you were looking at your inventory). It doesn't matter if it's a dagger or a sword-and-shield combination (which only became possible in Icewind Dale II -- you could, if you wanted, have four bastard sword and tower shield combinations in quick weapon slots and they would take up no place in your inventory), it can be placed in a single quick weapon slot.
• Reconstructed in Iji, as the title character only carries one gun, but that gun can rearrange its insides to make different weapons, whether Iji picks them up or combines two other guns; switching to another gun requires brief cooldown period. By the end of the game, it's possible to have sixteen weapons, ranging from shotguns and machine guns to triple rocket launchers and automatic shotguns to plasma cannons and explosive lasers to weapons normally reserved for space combat.
• Jet Force Gemini. You can cary a standard pistol, frag grenades, flares, machine gun, sniper rifle, homing rocket launcher, tri-rocket launcher, shuriken, fish food...
• Appears in The Journeyman Project, where Gage can carry a rather impressive number of items, including a hand-sized key, some huge wire cutters, and a stun gun, all while wearing a skin-tight Biosuit. The remake gives him larger items, and turns the stun gun from a pistol into a rifle, but no new pockets to carry the stuff. Buried in Time features a diagram of the Jumpsuit in the manual, with one thing labeled "Null-Time Pocket Generator," likely an interdimensional pocket as a better excuse for carrying all this junk than most point-and-click adventure games have.
• Just Cause 2 averts this with weapons; Rico can only carry three at a time, with a reasonable amount of ammo for each one. But he can summon up a parachute from his backpack, throw it away, and create another one an unlimited number of times.
• Kingdom Hearts does this a lot. Almost every character is able to bring out their weapon out of nowhere at a moment's notice and then make it disappear again just as quickly. Granted, Sora and the other Keybearers can summon Keyblades via magic, likewise with the Organization and their weapons.
• The King's Quest PC game series from the 1980s always had the main character carrying dozens of possessions by game's end. The official hint books gamers could purchase for the games actually included the question "Where does my hero keep all that stuff he's carrying?" with the answer being "The same place Superman keeps his street clothes when he flies." .
• Knights of the Old Republic. You can carry around three times the weight of your starship in thermal detonators, datapads, blaster pistols and medical supplies without breaking a sweat.
• Left 4 Dead and its sequel mostly avert this. Each survivor can carry one primary weapon as well as a pair of pistols or a melee weapon, a medkit, defibrillator or explosive/incendiary ammo pack for four people, a grenade and a bottle of painkillers or adrenaline injector. All of a character's equipment is shown on the model, but the ammo seems to be stored in hyperspace.
  • It should be noted that "ammo" in the game is only picked up in an ammo pile. The only other way to get more ammo is to pick up a different weapon. Once you do, you'll drop your old weapon with the ammo "left in it". You definitely drop the gun but the ammo that's associated with it is nowhere to be seen. This could mean that the weapons themselves are Hyperspace Arsenals...
• In Legend of Mana, you can not only carry a truly impressive amount of items and equipement (including magical instruments bigger than you are), your inventory also contains entire worlds (in the form of magical artifacts).
• Link, from the The Legend of Zelda series, has a huge carrying capacity. This is explicitly expanded, with regards to bombs, arrows, and Rupees, by several fairies and items in later titles. The cartoon adaptation from the 1980s explicitly gives him a magic pouch, like a Dungeons & Dragons "Bag of Holding" (his hat!). Perhaps even stranger, Link has kept iron boots and a huge ball and chain, both of which slow the character down immensely... when they're equipped. As soon as he puts them away, their weight disappears. They're still made of iron.
  • It's kind of amusing to watch Link stand on a giant button, which doesn't shift under his weight... then change into his heavy metal boots, causing the button to sink. As soon as he takes the boots off the button moves up again, despite the fact that they should weigh the same even if they're not on his feet.
    • Also the fact that in OoT, Link sinks when he's wearing the iron boots, but floats when he puts them back in his bag.
  • This picture shows what it be like if the first Link was carrying everything without a Hyperspace Arsenal. For those of you playing at home, that's a sword, a shield, a bow, a wand, a bracelet, a boomerang, a flute, a jar, a bomb, a key, a book, a ladder, a raft, and two different types of arrows. By all the laws of nature he should be over encumbered. And that's nothing compared to the more recent titles.
  • And yet, in many of the games, the amount of ammunition or money Link can carry is very narrowly limited by which level of the relevant container he's got. Given that a red rupee (worth 20 green rupies) is exactly the same size as a green rupee, it's a bit odd that he can carry around iron boots and thirty silly masks, but needs to buy an upgraded wallet before he can hang on to a few extra bucks. In Twilight Princess, he can't even take larger rupees from treasure chests if they would exceed his rupee limit.
    • They seem to fix this problem in Wind Waker, where the Rupees that were worth more money were physically bigger than the other ones. They seem to have continued this pattern, with Silver Rupees going up to his waist.
    • In OoT you could find orange rupees (worth 200) which were as tall as old Link.
  • Don't forget about Majora's Mask where you not only carry more masks than you weigh and tons of other equipment (including a sword as tall as your human form), but you ALSO carry a princess in your pocket (in a bottle). You can even carry a Goron-sized barrel full of gunpowder as if it was a keychain. The mask salesman, oddly, needs a comically oversized backpack for his collection, even though Link carries dozens of masks apparently between the fibers of his tunic.
  • In the anime it shows that Link carries all of these items by shrinking them down before placing them in his bag. It does not, however, explain how he does this (Magic?).
  • Skyward Sword manages to slightly avert this by limiting some of his items to a pouch with 4 to 8 slots, which includes the classic bottles, shields, medals and items to expand the ammo capacity of some of his weapons. Some items are also too big to be carried by Link himself.
• Leisure Suit Larry 2 does pretty much the same thing, only with a vending machine. Unrelated circumstances mean that you can't actually leave the room with it alive, however.
  • The exact circumstances are that Larry decides to get a Big Gulp drink. Which is about 32 gallons. The cup is as tall as he is. It takes two minutes of real time to fill it up. After filling it up, the second person narration idly wonders how you're going to carry that beast, before remembering "Oh wait, adventure game", at which point Larry stuffs the whole thing into his inside jacket pocket. Oh, without a lid, but no one mentions that...
  • Leisure Suit Larry 5 contains a section where Passionate Patti has to ride down a glass elevator naked, carrying a full inventory of items. Suffice to say, it might be best not to ask where she was keeping it all.
• The Lord of the Rings Online inventory consists of five bags with 15 slots each, and each slot can hold either a piece of jewlery, a weapon, a piece of armor, 10 pieces of Vendor Trash, 50 Healing Potions or servings of food, or 100 pieces of crafting material, such as ingots of iron. Assuming each ingot masses one kilogram, a character (even a Hobbit) could potentially carry seven and a half metric tons of metal with no effect on their speed, fighting ability or appearance. On top of this, most quest items don't take up any of this inventory space, such as 30 crates of confiscated goods, and you can be on at least 40 quests at a time.
  • Lampshaded with one quest arc in Buckland: three NPCs send you out on Fetch Quests for goods their employer's inn needs. After completing these quests, they have so much stuff that they need a wagon to get it to the inn. One in particular states that "adventurers must be resourceful folk", since he can't figure out how you were able to carry ten bear hides, three pristine bear carcasses, three pristine wolf carcasses and three boar heads all at the same time.
• Lost in Blue presents an odd example. Your characters' bags have enough capacity to hold exactly twenty items. It doesn't matter what they are. Just twenty items. One has to wonder how Jack and Amy can only manage to hold twenty leaves at one time, yet somehow manage to shove twenty logs down their asses.
• Mostly averted in Lunar Silver Star Story Complete, as each of your characters can only hold 6 items, not counting their equipped items (hell, Alex can only hold 5, as one of his items slots is permanently taken up by his ocarina until the very end of the game). Played straight, however, by Nall, who can, despite being about 1/10 the size of everyone else, hold up to 96 items. Where he keeps them all is anyone's guess.
• The brilliantly violent horror game Manhunt avoided much of this trope entirely. The main character could carry one weapon or item in each of three slots, and all of them were visible on his person. He was still clad in the prison outfit he was wearing for his mock execution, and thus had nowhere else to put them.
• The characters in Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle carried everything in their pockets, and had no problem either removing absurdly large items, or putting them there in the first place.
  • Even better: The characters can also swap almost every single one of these items through the Chron-O-John, a trans-dimensional port-a-potty, with the exception of living beings such as hamsters.
• Marathon (by Bungie) paid no attention to weapon or ammunition bulk/capacity, allowing all possible weapons (including rocket launcher, assault machine gun, and flamethrower) to be carried simultaneously. When set to Total Carnage difficulty, the game also allows you to carry unlimited ammo.
  • And in Marathon: Evil, instead of a rifle, you have a freaking GATLING GUN.
• Mass Effect both averts and falls victim to this trope.
  • All weapons in the game are capable of collapsing to roughly half their normal size. Those you have equipped on your person simply clip onto several hardpoints of your body armor and switching between them takes a few moments, requiring the player to think strategically. Ammunition is a non-issue since all guns work on a sophisticated system that simply shaves chunks off an inserted cube of metal and propels them via a miniature mass accelerator.
  • On the other hand, you can also carry up to 150 other items on your person at all times, including guns, upgrades, and even entire suits of body armor.
  • Averted in Mass Effect 2. You select your loadout for the missions and do not pick up extra weapons. The way you get extra weapons is by scanning weapons laying around, which sends the blueprints to your ship so you can get those weapons manufactured for the next mission or have it immediately modded onto the weapon you have via tech stuff in the Codex. The two cases where you are outright given a physical weapon is when you meet Mordin to get the Carnifex Hand Cannon, and on the Collector ship where you switch out one of your weapons for the one you pick up. You don't carry spare weapons or armor on you anymore.
• Max Payne tucks his Berettas, Desert Eagles, shotguns, Ingrams, Kalashnikov, Jackhammer, grenades, Molotov cocktails etc, into his trenchcoat when he's not using them. The game attempts to make it more realistic in the cut scenes (untraditionally so), where Max is shown tugging around a huge black bag roughly since the time he acquires the "heavy duty persuaders" like M-16 and the Sniper Rifle.
• There is a noteworthy scene in Mean Streets where Tex Murphy, who had been carrying a large, ornate birdcage in his pocket, pulls it out.
  • In one of the cutscenes in Pandora Directive, Tex pulls a ten-foot pole out of his trenchcoat, very slowly and deliberately.
• In Mercenaries Playground of Destruction, you can only carry two weapons and grenades, and the weapons are always visible, though you still carry an improbable amount of ammunition.
  • Not to mention the various smoke grenades, radio beacons, laser designators, satellite uplinks, and multifarious support items you can carry. In the sequel, your character picks up briefcases full of money and car gas tanks both of which just magically transport themselves into your stockpile.
• Metal Gear Solid starts its main character out carrying nothing but a pack of cigarettes... but Solid Snake quickly winds up carrying a pistol, an assault rifle, two rocket launchers, a metal detector, a cache of Claymore mines, enough rations for a week's march, and three cardboard boxes big enough to hide under. Metal Gear Solid 3 adds caged animals, medical supplies, changes of camouflage clothes, and a collection of dead carcasses up to the size of an alligator or mountain goat. The series concept artist once had a shot at drawing the hero wearing his equipment, but forgot about the boxes.
  • This is rather hysterically lampshaded in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
  • In MGS4, Snake gains the Metal Gear Mk 2, a little robot the size of a small cat that holds his extra inventory, including automatically selling any spare weapons he picks up to Drebin. However, it still doesn't explain Snake carrying two assault rifles, a pistol, an anti-materiel rifle, a drum can, various bits of random inventory pieces (camera, the aforementioned cigarettes, syringes, etc.), and a twenty-kilo railgun capable of destroying APCs in one hit. At least.
    • In one late-game cutscene, he is lying on the floor and hears something. Cut to Metal Gear Mk 2, cut to Snake's face, then back to the original angle, and his trusty M4 suddenly has appeared at his elbow.
  • Raiden of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has similarly large amounts of equipment. By the end of the game he has two pistols, four rifles, two rocket launchers, a grenade launcher, multiple frag and stun grenades, caches of both Claymores and C4, a high-frequency blade, coolant spray, multiple rations, five boxes big enough to hide under, body armor, an enemy uniform, two pairs of goggles, multiple bandages and Pentazemin pills, multiple magazines (of both empty "gun" and "pornographic" varieties), binoculars, a camera, four sensors, and a cell phone. All that is ever physically on his person are one of the pistols, the high-frequency blade, and either the uniform or body armor if either are equipped.
  • Naked Snake also carries a ton of equipment without it being visible on his person when not equipped, but there is one exception - the knife he uses for CQC with a pistol is normally in a sheath near his left shoulder. Said knife is actually removed from the sheath and placed in his left hand when the player equips the Mk 22 or M1911.
• Metroid might not be such an extreme example at first, but one wonders where the power suit stores all those energy tanks, missile tanks and power bomb tanks, the later of which in turn store a surprising amount of said items. And some of the games also have Fetch Quest items to account for, some of which are quite large.
  • At least the powerups function aren't an issue here (in the Prime series, you can actually see most upgrades on the suit).
    • Then there's the issue of how she kept all the upgrades when left in the Zero Suit. Maybe the second Power Suit came with all the upgrades. But that brings up the issue of how it always has the same exact number of missiles/energy tanks/what have you.
  • For a while at least, the explanation for the ammunition was that it came from energy. You get suit power and missiles from killing stuff and refill stations. The Chozo made Samus's suit just like they made the energy-siphoning Metroids so all of those upgrades are essentially just batteries to store the energy before it gets turned into something else and released again.
    • Alternatively: She keeps it all the shoulders of the Varia/Barrier Suit. Where she keeps her stuff in the Fusion Suit is anyone's guess.
    • The shoulders may be the temperature control systems the Varia Suit features. This does though, make one wonder how the Chozo could figure out squeezing 255 missiles into a suit, but not make an air conditioner fit into a smaller space.
• In Might and Magic VI and successors, you have a finite but large inventory - enough for, say, four suits of plate armour, or twelve or more spears, or about fifty potions. None of this space is occupied by food, gold or ammunition (arrows and crossbow bolts don't exist as items in the game, but the weapon's efficacy is unhindered). Dead party members are not only still ambulatory but retain their full inventory capacity, even if reduced to their component molecules (eradicated).
• In Minecraft, the volume of material that can be carried around is about the size of a decent swimming pool (50 x 20 x 2 meters and more than 300 cubic meters to spare).
  • Lampshaded in this picture.
• Completely averted in Mirror's Edge; Faith can only carry one weapon at a time, and anything larger than a handgun or an small SMG will make her slower and unable to do her crazy Le Parkour moves.
• Guybrush Threepwood in the Monkey Island series of Adventure Games stuffs the various items he finds in his pants. This is simultaneously lampshaded and handwaved by explaining that Guybrush's pants are "baggy fit".
  • The ridiculousness of this is acknowledged when he pulls a twelve-foot ladder out of his pocket. Not a euphemism, ladies.
  • The more cartoony feel of the third game, The Curse of Monkey Island, enables the animators to make a joke out of this, having him shooting a knowing glance at the camera as he pulls a bargepole out of his pocket, or animating him holding out the waistband, dropping the item in and his trouser leg billowing.
  • Don't forget about the giant tofu block even bigger than his head. Guybrush stuffs it in his pants almost... nonchalantly. It makes an interesting squishing sound.
  • One scene in The Secret of Monkey Island plays with this. When incarcerated by the cannibals, Guybrush can fit a banana picker as long as he is tall in his pants with nary a bulge, but can't escape with it through a hole in the floor because it's too large.
  • It's lampshaded even more blatantly earlier in the game, where in one puzzle Guybrush has to get rid of the heavy weight holding him underwater by... picking it up. Whereupon it enters the Hyperspace Arsenal and ceases to weigh him down.
  • In one memorable scene during Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, Guybrush picks up a dog, stuffs it into his coat, and smiles at the screen. Not to mention that he can pick up a petrified monkey too, and hold BOTH in his pockets at the same time.
  • There is also a scene in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge where Guybrush goes diving to recover the figurehead from a sunken ship. After struggling to move the obviously extremely heavy thing for a few moments, he puts it under his coat, and then has no trouble moving around with it in his Hyperspace Arsenal.
  • In The Curse of Monkey Island this is subverted with a bottomless cup, which literally has no bottom. The lemonade simply falls through it.
  • There's also a part very early in The Curse of Monkey Island where Guybrush finds a cutlass, and if you're watching closely you can see a terrified expression cross his face very briefly when he drops it down his trousers.
    • There are apparently things even Guybrush wouldn't put down his pants - like a two-prong catcus.
  • In the second game, he can keep a very large Q-tip in his pants, and very carefully pulls it out when needed.
• Monster Hunter both uses and averts this. It's averted in that you can only carry one weapon at a time, there are limits on carrying capacity, and certain bulky items such as monster eggs require you to carry them with both hands - they won't fit in your inventory. On the other hand, many of the armour sets in the game don't appear to include any storage space at all, and your inventory can hold all the materials necessary to construct more than 10 four-foot-high exploding barrels...
• Mount & Blade: You have a limited amount of spaces in your inventory, but even on the most basic level, you can hold dozens of swords, spears, crossbows, bows, food, books, clothing, armor, even dozens of horses in your inventory. And just like in The Elder Scrolls, the only parts which show on you is what you have equipped.
  • The inventory is somewhat symbolic. You use the horses as pack animals to increase your speed on the world map (while item weight decreases it). If you look behind you right after starting a battle, you'll see a small cart which you can use to swap your equipped items if needed. Those extra horses aren't visible though.
• Annoyingly averted in Myst - You can pick things up to use and/or inspect them, but you can't take anything with you except one measly red or blue page. (The pages probably do have magic involved, though.)
• In Nethack, the player's inventory is limited both by number of items (52, although items such as same-color potions or gems can stack) and net weight of all the items. Increasing the strength stat allows the player to carry heavier loads, while tools such as sacks can be used to increase numerical capacity. There are in particular Bags of Holding, which reduce the weight of items stored therein.
• Neverwinter Nights also uses a grid system to "limit" what you can carry. Never mind that you have room for at least a dozen sets of full plate armor. There are also magical bags (and their more powerful cousins, Bags of Holding) which reduce or eliminate the weight of items along with making them take up only as much space as the bag itself. The weight limit for strong characters can easily be a couple hundred pounds (prior to any magic items which boost strength), without limiting movement speed or ability to fight; it can be much, much more if one is willing to walk at a speed of a foot a minute. Of course, aside from clothing and worn armor, no equipment is visible on the character.
  • Not even all the clothing. Robes and cloaks didn't show up when worn.
    • Cloaks show with a patch that came around the same time as Neverwinter Nights 2. And Robes were always visible.
  • There are also spells that improve strength. Dragon/golem/demon shapeshift are very good.
• Ryu Hayabusa in the remake of Ninja Gaiden carries an arsenal in a skintight, pocket-less leather outfit that would be humourously over-the-top were he not a murderous out-for-revenge Ninja. It includes four different katana, two different types of nunchaku, a warhammer (no, not the game), two BFS, a large wooden oar, a spear gun and a variety of other items.
• In Okami, Ammy can carry bags of feed, damaging items, jugs of sake, technique scrolls, and all of her weapons despite being a wolf with no pockets. (Then again, she is a Goddess, so magic is most likely involved.)
• Oni, an earlier game from the creators of Halo, only allows you to carry one weapon at a time, as well as a limited number of ammo magazines and health recovery items. The game was focused on martial arts, so this limit kept the focus off shooting. The main character can still make her weapon disappear by holstering it, though, and even the moderate supply limit is invisible on her Latex Space Suit uniform.
• The Painkiller hero holds five large weapons, yet is never seen with anything but the shotgun on his person in cutscenes.
• Phantasy Star shows this trope, particularly in Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe. The latter however explains it with 'nanotranser' technology, a sort of Clarke's Third Law Bag of Holding that's worn somewhere on a character's body, and projects stored objects into realspace as needed. Not only is this trope played with a bit in the game's Offline Story Mode, when Tonnio steals the protagonist Ethan Waber's nanotranser, and thus his weapons, money... and clothes ('gave me a certain vindictive satisfaction, let me tell you), but the Hyperspace Arsenal was also the climax of the first story arc. The enemy at large was dealt with by shoving it into a Hammerspace induced by a giant, Lost Technology nanotranser called the Confinement System.
  • Phantasy Star IV may actually be the most extreme example of this trope - In addition to the usual items and old weapons, your party casually carries around two tanks and a hydrofoil, each of which can comfortably fit the entire party in its cockpit. One can only assume hyperspace technology is involved, since the game itself offers no explanation as to why each vehicle inhabits the same amount of space as, say, a chocolate bar.
• The Court Record in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney can hold a surprising number of things... but this may not count, as most of what is in it are notes or facts describing the items in question, neither of which would actually take up much space. Still, it's hinted at least once that Phoenix has a large air tank in his pockets.
  • Additionally, it's made explicit at one point that he's carrying around a large metal detector in his pants. Make of that what you will.
  • Also Adrian Andrews who always carries extra pairs of glasses in case she shatters them out of shock.
  • In the sequel, Apollo Justice travels around with Trucy Wright, so it may be assumed that the evidence is kept in her Magic Panties, which can hold a lot of stuff (a car tire, being one object among many) apparently without changing the shape or weight of the panties.
    • She can even fit Apollo in them too.
• The Perils of Akumos: The narration breaks the fourth wall when you pick up a large potted plant, dismissing your ability to carry it as inherent to adventure games.
• Pokémon is another ridiculous example, especially in Diamond and Pearl, where the item Cap was completely removed, along with item storage on the computer. By the end of the game you're carrying a Coin Case, a Fashion Case, an Explorer Kit, a bunch of keys, a bicycle (which would be too large unless it were a folding bike as stated in Red/Blue), various notepads, a Poffin Case, a Seal Case, a Secret Potion, a Town Map, and a Vs. Seeker, all in the Key Items pocket of your backpack! Add on top of that, the various medicines for your Pokémon, as well as the Poké Balls, CD-shaped TMs and HMs, Berries, Mail, and the Pokédex and Pokétch that you carry outside of your bag! The player character sure knows how to pack.
  • On the other hand, there's already an in-universe explanation for being able to carry around creatures the size of a whale in a little Poké Ball, and it may have been hinted in the anime that similar technology can be used for more mundane items (if they can store items in a computer...)
  • As an example of the bottomlessness of the player's backpack, at least 990 Poké Balls (plus the normally unique Master Ball) of mixed variety can be stored in the Poké Ball pouch, 6336 berries (note: berries include plants the size of watermelons) in the Berry pouch, and at least 594 bottles of vitamins, 396 beverages, 1188 medicinal sprays, and 99 cookies in the Medicine pouch, to say nothing of the hundreds of held items, fossils, elemental evolution stones, and jars of sweet honey in the main pocket of their backpack. Looks like Silph Co. is manufacturing Bags of Holding now.
• Postal 2 is a particularly big offender: not only will The Postal Dude be carrying multiple melee weapons, a pistol, a shotgun, an automatic rifle, grenades, gasoline cans, a hunting rifle, and two types of launchers all at once, but he's also got another inventory for carrying other goods, like cash, milk, lunch bags, weed pipes, books, and cats. Multiple cats. Naturally, he doesn't seem burdened by it one bit.
  • The addon Apocalypse Weekend pokes fun at this (while taking it to huge extremes) by having him acquire a nuclear warhead bigger than himself and stuffing it within his trenchcoat. When he gets to Bullfish Interactive headquarters, he grunts with effort from pulling the warhead out of his coat and setting it down with an earth-rattling THOOOM.
  • The base game also manages to lampshade this when you die. NPCs, at most, have one or two inventory items and one or two weapons on-hand, which are all immediately dropped when they die. This applies to the player, as well, so if you manage to die, dozens of weapons and inventory objects will suddenly scatter all about. In Apocalypse Weekend and the A Week in Paradise mod, this could include "dervish cats" which proceed to go Tazmanian Devil and immediately start mauling anybody near you to death.
• In Prototype, the guns and vehicles you pick up from the Marines and Blackwatch troopers have an intriguingly high amount of ammo, and still increases with each mastery level. 4-7 rounds for the missile launcher, 500-800 rounds for the machine gun, 8-20 rockets on the APC...
• Averted in Punisher. One can only carry enough weapons that is convenient to carry. Fortunately Frank has a lot of straps. Need to get more ammo? Just go back to the pile of dead guys you left in the other room.
• Puzzle Pirates: Your ships have a definite volume and weight in the hold, but your player character can carry a truly ridiculous amount of items (including furniture) in your inventory and as much money as you can earn.
• In the Ratchet and Clank series, the eponymous Ratchet is a small, furry, semi-feline alien who seems to be able to carry more than two dozen weapons, some much larger than himself! When walking around unarmed, these weapons are completely invisible, and seem to just fold out into his arms when needed. A lampshade is hung on this in the third game, in the death course/death arena show "Annihilation Nation", when the announcer asks the all-important question, "Where's he keepin' all these guns? I mean, come on!"
  • Handwaved by the character literally wearing two weapon rings, meaning they can rebuild themselves into any weapon, then compact back into his hands.
  • Could also just be artistic license. We know that Clank can keep objects larger than himself in his inventory compartment, so maybe weapons too? Of course, it doesn't explain where they are when Clank's gone.
    • You can actually see the weapons fold out when he equips them.
• Averted in Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45, in which players can only carry one primary weapon, a pistol, and a few other items besides.
• The Resident Evil games are relatively realistic; each item has to fit in a grid of space inside a backpack, suitcase, or whatnot. That said container (up to an "attaché case" large enough to contain the hero himself) is never seen is an exercise for the interested reader. Still, characters often find a way of stuffing a rocket launcher or an M4A1 assault rifle inside their pockets.
  • On a related note, most of the games counterbalance this limited-capacity personal inventory with infinitely-large storage boxes in the environment, for excess baggage. Mysteriously, you can put things in one box, and fetch them out of an identical box some miles away. The simplest conjecture is that there's just one box, a benign alien following the player around through a network of tame wormholes. Capcom have sadly omitted its origins from the series canon.
    • The same thing happens in the Square Enix PlayStation RPG Vagrant Story. Put an item in one container, take it out of any other container.
    • The remake of the original Resident Evil has an unlockable mode which ups the game's difficulty in several ways... but the primary way? The storage boxes are no longer interconnected -- whatever you put in one is only in that box.
    • The Resident Evil-like Parasite Eve 2 also uses non-interconnected boxes.
  • Similarly, the game annoyingly considers a key to be the same size as a handgun. And the game has a lot of keys. This makes a keyring one of the most important items in the game, because it allows you to store many of them on one square.
  • In Resident Evil 3, Jill Valentine is wearing a tube top and miniskirt (and later does get an equipment harness), but manages to carry much more than the temporarily playable Carlos, who's wearing combat gear with plenty of pockets, and is demonstrably stronger than her (he can shove objects she can't).
  • Resident Evil 5 takes this trope and creates a bizarre sub-branch. Any weapons larger than a handgun are visible on your body when they aren't equipped (i.e. if you're running around with an unequipped rocket launcher you can see it attached to the character's back, though how it stays magically stuck there without any visible straps is anyone's guess). However, if you have more than two weapons in your inventory one of them will disappear into thin air when you switch weapons, depending on what order you switch. Additionally, RE5 brings back the infinite (well, semi-infinite) storage box in the form of an inter-chapter super-inventory. One wonders where Chris and Sheva are keeping all this stuff. Are they running back to town to rifle through their safety deposit box in between story chapters?
    • In an aggravating subversion, obtainable armor does not increase your available inventory space, but rather takes up a space of its own. You're wearing your armor in a pocket of your armor!
  • The Merchant in Resident Evil 4 is a huge example of this. He has, at one point, several handguns, 3 shotguns, 2 rifles, the minethrower, the TMP, all the attache cases, the RPG, the Chicago Typewriter, the Infinite RPG, and various other more believeable items.
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein: By the end of this game if you collect everything you have a grand total of twelve guns, a rocket launcher, a flame thrower, a Tesla gun and two types of grenades plus all your ammunition
• Exception: In Rise of the Triad', you can carry just two pistols, a machine gun and a single "heavy weapon" (usually a rocket launcher).
  • That still leaves the question of where the player character manages to store ten rockets and an infinite supply of bullets while wearing a T-shirt and black uniform trousers.
• In Rune, one of each class of stowed weapon (big sword on back, small sword on leg, axe on other leg, etc...) is always visible. However, the player can carry about 3 of each class simultaneously, and the really humongous weapons shrink when stowed.
• In RuneScape, each player has a 28-space inventory. However, even some of the largest items only take up one space. This means that it's possible to, among many other things, carry 28 cooked sharks with you at a time!
• In Saints Row 2 you can only carry one weapon of each category at a time unless dual-wielding pistols or machine pistols (in which case they have to be of the same model), but that still theoretically allows for multiple long guns. Still less unrealistic than how nobody gives a hoot when he's visibly carrying around weapons, or how rivals (such as the Ronins) can be strolling down the sidewalk with katanas over their shoulders.
• In the Sam and Max series, Sam wears a giant trenchcoat and generally only carries small items. Feasible. But Max wears no clothing at all, and not only carries a gun, but in The Devil's Playhouse, he carries multiple toys of power. When various villains take Sam's items, they're unable to take Max's (except in one case, where Max was actively using the item taken when captured), as they don't know where Max keeps them. And in Reality 2.0, during a "text adventure" sequence, Sam is surprised when he's able to carry an entire (unseen) building.
• Tony Montana in Scarface the World Is Yours can only hold three weapons, four if upgraded, and only one of each "type" (pistols, SMGs, assault rifles). However, they are nowhere to be seen on his business-attired person. Furthermore, the "restriction" doesn't prevent him from carrying a missile launcher, SAW, shotgun and sniper rifle, along with the attendant ammo. Add to that the fact that Tony can swap his arsenal from outfit to outfit.
  • Somewhat more amusingly used with leaders of enemy gangs, who cough up on death a large box of cash they could not possibly have fit into their clothing.
  • Similarly, the arms street dealers somehow pack an inventory limited only by Tony's considerable finances.
• In the Adventure Game Scratches, at one point the player free-rappels out an upstairs window and climbs into a lower one while carrying a magnifying glass, four keys, a large knife, a kerosene lantern, a grinding tool, a stethoscope, a newspaper, an oilcan, and a hammer -- in a driving rain (which has served as a sort of meteorological Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence, keeping him inside the house). Inexplicably, on climbing back out the lower window, rather than dropping to the ground and walking in the front door the character climbs back up the rope and in the attic window.
• Seiken Densetsu 3 allows you to carry up to 9 of any item in your ring menu, but outside of battle you have access a bottomless inventory of everything you've picked up.
• Serious Sam has the eponymous main character toting around an impossible arsenal that includes things like a minigun that's longer than he is tall, an only slightly smaller chainsaw, and a ridiculously huge cannon, unaffected by their weight. For comical effect, the weapon switch animations (when using the 3rd person view) show the character tucking all of these in the back pocket of his jeans.
  • However, there is a part during The First Encounter where you give up all your weapons except the knife and revolvers because you traveled through the desert and could not carry all your items. Somewhat strange, considering the above fact.
• At first glance averted in Shining Force, particularly Shining Force II in which you have a full sized caravan to carry everything - only at first glance though, because the same caravan carries the entire rest of your army...
• Silent Hill series are guilty of this: an especially ridiculous example is a "Great Knife" from Silent Hill 2, which is huge and extremely heavy and hard to use... but you can still stuff it into your clothes, at which point it seems to lose all weight.
  • Travis from Silent Hill Origins deserves a special mention as he manages to stuff up to 20 portable TVs in his jacket. Also: enough bottles of alcohol to start a distillery; more sledgehammers than Triple-H's closet; more tire irons and wrenches than a hardware store; and a couple of katanas to make every aspiring Samurai or Bruce Willis happy. All. At. Once.
  • They tried to avert it in Silent Hill 4. They really did. Your inventory is limited... however, you now have the hyperspace box in your apartment. Further, you are limited to slots, not space. So a pickaxe takes up the same amount of space on your person as some coins. And I'm just not sure I want to know where Henry keeps that 9 Iron...
  • While the player character in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is an Actual Pacifist (and thus doesn't carry weapons), the inventory still consists of an astonishing number of flares and momentos.
  • Considering most if not all of the items the player characters find are not even real (the aforementioned Great Knife in particular) and the town operates on an especially twisted version of Clap Your Hands If You Believe, it could simply be that the items disappear then reappear when the character thinks of them. It wouldn't be the weirdest thing to happen in that town.
• Simon the Sorcerer has an animation of Simon stuffing a ladder into his hat. Granted, it is a magical hat.
• The Sims pull everything out of their pockets(even when they're wearing swimsuits). While weapons aren't involved, it deserves mentioning here due to the sheer variety of impossible things Sims can carry in their pockets, including a whole crop of vegetables, cars and helicopters. A pirate shipwreck? Why not?
• The Space Quest series of adventure games makes fun of this trope at least once. In Space Quest 6, hero Roger Wilco picks up a large 2x4 board, and the game's narrator says, "Bet you can't fit that in your pants!" Roger does, and the narrator is genuinely surprised.
  • Also in Space Quest 2 upon picking up a wastebasket the narrator responds "Aren't you amazed by how much stuff an adventure game hero can carry? You've just got to know how to pack."
  • And in Space Quest 3, Roger must stuff a ladder as long as himself into his pants. The narrator comments on how much empty space he must have down there.
• Averted by S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which has a very strict weight-based inventory system. Considering that almost every character is at least hefting a backpack and combat harness, it is at least conceivable that all the medkits, canned food, ammo, artifacts and such are somewhere on your body. You can carry a RPG and three rifles, but supply issues aside, good luck with even jogging at a steady pace.
  • The same system is found in an earlier game, the little-known Hidden & Dangerous (and its sequel), a Third-Person Shooter set in World War Two. Every soldier is limited to two weapons excluding pistols, and equipment is either stuffed in clothing or in a backpack (if you have one equipped). Whatever that is in the immediate inventory (ie. not in the backpack) can be seen on the soldier, including the gun slung over the shoulder. Technically, you can carry three primary weapons, but you can only put away two; the third must be dropped to empty your hands before any equipment can be used.
• In Star Fox Adventures the only limits on what you can carry are on scarabs and bafomdads, both of which can be upgrade by buying bigger bags for them. Krystal isn't playable long enough to accumulate much of an inventory, but you still have to wonder where she carried that large brass key when she's wearing nothing more than a loincloth and a bikini top.
  • In Assault, the only other game in the series with "on-foot" segments, characters are capable of carrying multiple heavy weapons at once (including sniper rifles, miniguns, and rocket launchers) but the only one visible is the one they are currently using.
• Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force offered an in-game explanation of this phenomenon; characters carried a "transporter buffer" which could store bulky weapons using some variant of Star Trek's familiar transporter technology. Like the Xenosaga games mentioned above, visual effects showed weapons and items being transported in and out of the character's hands.
• The Hammer bros. from Super Mario Bros.. Oh man, we all have memories of them recklessly throwing mass quantities of large hammers into the air while we wondered where they kept them all. This is briefly lampshaded by Goombella in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door when she asks the exact same question.
• Super Robot Wars uses this trope with reckless abandon, ironically enough, with its Real Robot units. Super Robots are generally not allowed to carry extra equipment, but their more "realistic" counterparts can be toting around Laser Swords, Attack Drones, lots and lots of missles, and all manner of BFG imaginable, as long as it falls under an unusually high carrying capacity. No explanation as to how this is even remotely possible is ever given.
• SWAT 4 averts this - your inventory is limited to one long gun, one pistol, about five magazines each, and various other small bits of equipment SWAT officers would be expected to take on missions, all of which are either one infinitely-usable item or five of one-time use items. SWAT 3 was a bit more blatant: while gas grenades and breaching charges were still heavily limited, you were carrying upwards of 12 magazines for both your guns (mix of hollow point and full metal jacket bullets, depending on whether hostiles are armored) plus an infinite number of handcuffs.
• A Syndicate agent is capable of packing eight miniguns without spoiling the line of their coat. Syndicate Wars changed this, so your agent would take one weapon and generate the energy-ammo from a internal generator, but it still meant they could be a walking war, carrying a minigun, laser, plasma lance, four nuclear grenades, gas grenades, medikits, auto-guard sentinel...
• The Syphon Filter series:
  • Earlier Syphon Filter games had Agent Logan carry multiple pistols, shotguns, submachineguns, assault rifles (yes, they're all plural), a sniper rifle, a taser, a flashlight, explosives, MacGuffins and Plot Coupons all in his pants. Literally - in the first game, an animation shows Logan reaching into and picking the item from his pocket, producing anything from a plausible 9mm to an absolutely absurd sniper rifle (the animation was removed in Syphon Filter 2 and later installments in favor of an instantaneous switch of weapons).
  • The later games averted the trope. You're only allowed to carry one type of weapon per "hardpoint", and unused weapons are clearly shown being worn by the agent on his back. However, it's still not clear where Logan is able to carry five spare magazines for each projectile weapon he's carrying.
• In Tales of Symphonia, when the characters receive a boat they shrink it into a little box so they can conveniently carry it around. One might think this must be the way they are carrying all of their considerable arsenal of items, but most of the characters are surprised to learn about the shrinking boat in a box.
• In Terranigma the main character Ark has a literal hyperspace arsenal he can walk around in. This is actually somewhat annoying, as traditional equipment screen are much faster and easier to navigate.
  • He only walks around in specific plot points. For most of the game, it's a traditional inventory navigation scheme.
• In Thief, Garrett can apparently carry his tools, weapons, ammunition and all the wealth of a richly appointed mansion or an entire freaking museum inside his cloak, since he's never depicted with any bags. Presumably Keeper training includes instructions on how to access an inter-dimensional pocket. One mission even has him carrying around a gramophone, and another four stone tablets the size of his head!
• Parodied in the Tomba series of action RPGs. Tomba, the main character, is a pink haired caveboy wearing nothing more than a grass skirt. Early on, he reveals to an NPC that he keeps everything in the inventory in his stomach and vomits it up as necessary. Yes, even living livestock needed for sidequests, as demonstrated when he rescues some baby chicks, swallows them, and throws them up later -- alive and perfectly fine. A lampshade is hung by the same NPC he reveals it to, who asks what else he keeps in there, only to add, "No, don't tell me..."
• Lara Croft from Tomb Raider has her infamous tiny backpack. Her twin pistols rest in holsters, and in later games she wears one long gun on her back, but switching weapons makes it magically swap to a different one. (A cynical observer may remark that the backpack exists to counterbalance her implausibly giant chest.)
  • The backpack is also played with in the Tomb Raider movie. In the TR games, if Lara puts an object close to her backpack, it magically teleports into it. If she needs something from it, she puts her hand close, and voila! In the movies, she is never actually shown to put anything in her backpack; instead, she simply puts it close, the camera cuts away to another scene, and no one mentions it again.
• In the decidedly bizarre game called Total Distortion, the player character carries a guitar case which functions as an interdimensional portal to their own personal dimension. This guitar-case dimension's only purpose is to provide you with storage space for indeterminate amounts of items that you can find or make in your kitchen.
  • In-universe, this is the primary use for the alternate dimensions - to greatly expedite shipping by teleporting items into another dimension and then teleport them back out at the point of delivery. The only limitation is that the larger the object, the more energy it takes to transport it.
• Thanks to her mastery of dimensional boundaries, Yukari Yakumo from Touhou has this as an explicit power - she just opens a gate to wherever what she needs is stored and grabs it. Thanks to this, she's been seen making use of such weapons as falling tombstones, flying signposts, and even a train.
  • She used an ICBM in a particular Doujin against Yuka Kazami.
  • Sakuya has an effectively infinite supply of knives due to her manipulation of space-time, both literally pulling them from a hyperspace storage place and the knives returning to said storage after they're used. In game this manifests as the player being on the receiving end of a solid wall of knives.
  • It should be noted that this can apply to anyone that uses a non-magical gimmick, such as Reimu and Sanae's exorcism seals, Alice's dolls, and Komachi's coins.
• Lampshaded in The Trail of Anguish as well, where you question your ability to carry your many items on a formal dinner. Your date, as it turns out, has a hyperspace arsenal or his own.
• The (Current) King of Hyperspace Arsenal is Turok 2. Turok carries 23 different weapons with him: A Flare Gun, both the Talon and the War Blade, two bows, two pistols (regular and bulky burst-mode versions), a tranquilizer gun, a tazer dart rifle, two shotguns (a regular one and the bulkier Shredder), a plasma-based Sniper Rifle (considerably bigger than Doom's), the Firestorm Cannon, the Cerebral Bore, six bulky flashbang grenades, a gun that shoots proximity mines, a grenade launcher, a flamethrower, a serrated Battle Boomerang, a Harpoon Gun, a tri-shot rocket launcher, a torpedo launcher (it doubles as an underwater jet, and is very bulky), and, finally, a Nuke that makes the original BFG look like a pea-shooter. Not to mention ammo and some artifacts you carried on occasion.
  • Granted this is all carried in his Light Burden, a Bag of Holding.
• Unreal has your character carrying an arsenal of bulky, unwieldy weapons, then, when (s)he dies, the camera pulls back to see that not only is (s)he not visibly carrying anything, his/her clothes are skimpy and skin-tight to the point that (s)he couldn't be concealing so much as a pocketknife.
  • There's a mod for Unreal Tournament that lampshades this by making every weapon a killed character was holding scatter about near the body. In the same game, the animation for switching weapons consisted entirely of the gun a character was holding instantly transforming into the weapon the character wanted to use; later games did the same, but also had the characters reach for the back of their hip and bring the new weapon up.
  • Subtly averted in the Infiltration realism mod for Unreal Tournament: Before starting a game you choose your equipment loadout, and up to a point you can freely pick any number of weapons and as much ammo as you like. However, the more equipment you're carrying, the slower you run, the less high you can jump, and the faster your stamina runs out. Novices tend to load up with everything and become very easy targets.
• Partly averted in A Vampyre Story. If it's small enough that it could logically be placed in a purse or small satchel, Mona will take it with her, regardless of the danger of spilling, anything else she's carrying, or even the fact that she doesn't actually have a purse or small satchel. Anything that's too large or cumbersome (or that involve Froderick interacting with something else), she leaves where it is, but says she'll make a note of it and gains a ghostly blue icon of the item or combination. When the icon is used with it's requisite puzzle, it first shows Mona retrieving the item in question.
• Interestingly subverted in Vanquish. You have the new prototype BLADE(Battlefield Logic ADaptable Electronic) weapon, an expandable carbon nanotube device which can re-arrange itself into any weapon stored in its memory, including weapons bigger than your torso. The catch is, the data needed to make up a whole gun-sized object, down to the molecular level, is so much that the gun's hard drive can only store three configurations at a time. These can be swapped by scanning different guns, which also provide more ammo.
• Mostly averted in Vega Strike. Sure, if you can physically fit that million-ton mining equipment in your ship's hold, you can transport it--but your ship is suddenly a million tons more massive, and extra inertia makes it much less maneuverable (provided it doesn't mass much more than a million tons in the first place, of course). Still, hardpoints for weapons are not depicted, and it sometimes is hard to see how all the equipment you've outfitted your fighter with fits in there. It's no wonder to have 10,000 Ion Burster ammo per slot when they're but 5 grams each, but with mass drivers...
• In the game Wild 9, one of your friends who you have to rescue is called Pokkit. He is 3'4", wears a jacket covered with pockets, and can literally produce anything from within these.
• In Warhawk (1995 video game) on the Play Station 3 you can carry an entire arsenal including a machine gun, missile launcher, sniper rifle, binoculars, two types of land mines, a knife, a wrench, a flame thrower, a pistol, grenades, and ammo for everything. Additionally, if a player is killed they drop it all in a huge backpack about as big as a person which can be absorbed by anyone who gets near it.
• The RPG Wasteland limited each party member to 30 slots. An apple was the same as a (variably-sized) box of 7.62mm ammo, a rake, a chainsaw, an assault rifle, and a meson cannon. One popular trick is to load your party down at generation with 30 pistols each, then drag yourselves to the nearest gun shop and get rifles.
• In The Witcher, the player can hold 1 silver sword 2 iron swords/axes/maces/big weapon and a dagger/smallflail/torch, fair enough, as the protagonist is a Witcher who is meant to be inhumanly strong (and real weapons don't weigh as much as fiction makes them out to). The rest of the inventory gets confuseing though, as you can hold the brains of 50 of the roughly human sized Drowner monsters or 1-50 teath in a single slot of your alchemy pouch, same for 10 bottles of alcohol or a small gemstone in the main inventory. (Note:The game does not have a weight system on top of it)
• Wolf Team plays this one in spades. While you can only carry a big gun, a pistol, and some nades, your encumberence is affected by the really big weapons, such as the portable mounted machine guns, which are the size of three men and have to be deployed to fire. However, if you switch to yout pistol or knife, the giant gun goes away and you can now walk or run at full speed. Oftentimes you will see hordes of players running with knives during the beginning of Capture the Flag mode just to run faster.
• World of Warcraft explains this (somewhat) by giving the player a magical knapsack which can carry 16 items, which they can never remove or lose. They can also find or buy up to four 'pouches' of sizes ranging from 4 to 22 items (or 32 for specialty bags). Items always take up only one slot (seriously), and for most unequippable items each slot can hold several of the same type at once for possibly ridiculous results. You never have trouble fitting them into the mouth of the bag. Money, keys, companions and mounts are also stored outside your bags.
  • The nature of the item stacking rules can create some rather unexplainable situations. A most commonly found 16 slot bag can contain 320 watermelons intact but Hemet Nesingwary's 16 missing pages barely fit because they are differently numbered. It's a good thing Cataclysm removed the two notorious page-collecting quests.
  • Keys, pets and companions used to be items taking up your bank and character storage as long as one ever wanted to recall them, but that's just ridiculous with over 180 pets and 150 mounts obtainable.
  • As for ammunition, a good-sized quiver in Wrath of the Lich King (before ammunition as a mechanic was cut in Cataclysm) could holds tens of thousands of arrows. Even the starting player's quiver in classic WoW, back when ammo only stacked to 200, could hold over a thousand rounds.
• X-COM: UFO Defense uses a grid inventory in which each unit has a certain number of cells, in different shapes, on his belt, limbs, in his hands, and in his backpack. However, the backpack and items carried are never actually shown, except for the gun they hold. It still qualifies as a Hyperspace Arsenal as most player-controlled units are perfectly capable of stowing a human body (unconscious or dead) or most alien corpses. In both cases, the mass is not visible, though it has a seriously detrimental effect on how quickly the unit can move per turn.
• In the Xenosaga series most of the weapons in the games, as well as the mecha in the third installment, are in fact pulled from a literal hyperspace arsenal, with visual effects showing them "warping in" when a character needs to use them.
  • Jr. and Jin, however, prefer to carry their weapons the old-fashioned way. Jr. has, at least in the third game, a pair of holsters and Jin carries the sheath strapped to his waist.
    • In the first game, KOS-MOS pulls the gun out of the pouch on her right leg.
• Lampshaded in Zork: Grand Inquisitor when the player puts a large vacuum on a vending machine and Delboz comments "Just where were you keeping that?"
• Justified in Doraemon: Giga Zombie no Gyakushuu, where unequipped items are stored in Doraemon's signature fourth dimensional pocket.