RPG Elements

(Not that it matters.)

You're not playing an RPG. However, your character gains experience and levels as if you were. Instead of being a mere test of skill, in which the only thing that makes the game easier or harder is your ability as a player, your control over the Player Character is abstracted so that you must build a unique path for them. Often their talents improve the more you practice or train, maybe there's a class system, or some sort of system that allows for tweakable abilities.

Well-implemented, this will give a game added depth and customizability, or allow players who might not be as good to spend a little time leveling up to make the game easier, creating a roundabout way of introducing Difficulty Levels to the game. Badly implemented, it seems like tacked-on attempt to appeal to a broader demographic, or be seen (critically) as a better game.

These have been around almost as long as console and computer RPGs have, and became more common durring the mid 90's which time a HUGE number of developers seemed to want the added more complexity to their games(and they hoped increased sales thanks to the prestige that came from having "RPG Elements" printed on the back of the box), even if the elements in question weren't anything more than Hit Points. Generally ignored is the fact that these "RPG Elements" are not even universal to actual RPGs.

Seems to occur most often in FPSes, strategy games (usually Veteran Unit), sports sims, and the occasional Fighting Game, especially those that allow you to build your own character from the ground up.

Examples of RPG Elements include:

Video game examples

Action Adventure

• One of the earliest examples is Zelda II the Adventure of Link, which swapped out a lot of the Adventure Game elements for a blend of platforming, supplemented by RPG Elements like Level Grinding and a magic system.
• Even earlier than Zelda II was an Infocom text adventure, Beyond Zork. Your character had various stats, could use potions and herbs, and even attack monsters, yet it had all of the trademarks of the previous Zork games (including the mindbending puzzles). Surprisingly, it worked.
• Castlevania has firmly entrenched RPG Elements into its gameplay ever since Symphony of the Night came out, about the same time it adapted the free-roaming environs popularized by the Metroid series.
  • It tried free-roaming gameplay with RPG elements before in Simon's Quest, but the results were broken and nigh-unplayable.
• Arguably, the Ys series, though some would declare them straight Action RPGs. The gameplay, mostly in the style of Zelda II, is too far afield to accept as a true RPG for many, though.
• In Okami, when you do a good deed (from making trees blossom to helping cook the ultimate dish) you are rewarded with so-called "praise spheres" which more or less function as experience points, allowing you to increase your ink, your solar energy or your number of stomachs. The health is also partly increased with hidden solar fragments.
• Swim Ikachan has experience points earned by either killing enemies or eating a limited supply of fishes that increase player's maximum hit-points when enough is collected.
• O.D.T. - Escape...Or Die Trying by Psygnosis had a filling up experience bar. At first, it could be distributed into armor (hit points), weapons (allowing to learn upgrades), or magic (allowed learning spells). Once these were topped, each filled up experience bar gave you an extra life.
• The Breach has a level up mechanic, each level increases Sergei's Rate of Fire and damage by 8%, and his health bar and shield regeneration by 5%.

Action Game

• Strangely, Square's World of Mana series started out as a straight action-RPG, but every game since the Japanese-only Seiken Densetsu 3 has had fewer RPG elements than the previous title. Dawn Of Mana manages to be a straight-out third-person action game with fewer RPG elements than Ratchet and Clank.
• Scurge: Hive is an isometric Action Game-slash-Platformer with experience points, character levels, and Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors. Oh, and Expys of the Metroid Fusion cast.
• In Evolva, you must absorb the DNA from your enemies to mutate again and improve your weapons, making DNA something like Experience Points. Besides, you're allowed to customize your characters and choose which attacks and skills you want to improve.

Adventure Game

• Sierra's Quest for Glory series, though officially a graphical adventure, allowed you to improve various stats (both physical and skill) by taking related actions. Some tasks could not be completed (at least, not in a particular way) until your character reached a certain skill level.
  • Though the fifth and final game is more of an inversion (an RPG with adventure game elements).
• Used very loosely in The Spellcasting Series. Ernie gains XP and levels by solving puzzles and learning new spells, but since it's a text adventure game without a smidge of combat, the process is mostly for show. Some spells DO require a certain level to be cast, but progressing through the game normally will take care of that problem on its own.

Beat'Em Up

• In Capcom's Knights of the Round, your character will get stronger once your score reaches certain milestones. Does this remind you of anything?
• Capcom's Dungeons & Dragons-based beat 'em ups Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara are loosely based on the tabletop RPG itself. Strangely though, even though your character has Experience Points, they function as just a score if anything, as your characters simply level up once per chapter.
• Surprisingly averted in Asura's Wrath, which in spite of being published by Capcom (Of which It's Own Devil May Cry did have RPG Elements) this game intentionally avoids this.

Card Battle Game

• Unusually, the Yu-Gi-Oh!! video game franchise has RPG Elements in them, to some degree, possibly as a way to gauge the player's growing skill at the game. Unfortunately, some games take this concept too far, and actually prevent you from using cards above your current level, placing unneeded—and unwanted—restrictions on one of the most appealing parts to the card game: building and customizing your deck(s).

Driving Game

• Midnight Club: Los Angeles is a racing game that uses levels, albeit three different leveling scales. One is raised by driving certain types of cars, which unlocks parts; the second is for using special abilities, which unlocks more storage for special abilities, and the third and most important one is for racing in general, which unlocks more missions.
• Blur has you earn fans for finishing in a given place, pulling off stunts, wrecking other cars, etc. Get enough fans, your Fan Level increases, unlocking new cars and, in multiplayer, new car mods.

First-Person Shooter

• Borderlands is a First-Person Shooter with separate classes with a specific action ability and passive skill trees, as well as CharacterLevels - unlike other examples of An Adventurer Is You, weapons are not by any means restricted by class though, specific classes just have ways to make certain weapons better.
• Daikatana was (infamously) supposed to be an innovative blend of RPG Elements and the Quake FPS system. Delays, developer infighting, and just plain bad design resulted in the final release being... schizophrenic, to say the least.
• A pair of games known as the Crime Crackers duology were released by Media Vision as Japan Only titles for the Playstation [one of them in fact being one of the first ten games ever released for it]. These games used anime-style art for the characters and environments made by Kokomai of "Akaijutsu Club" and used an engine that was more of a middle ground between Wolfenstein 3D/Blake Stone and Doom's engines, but also allowed things like transporting elevators to give the illusion of multiple floors in the same map (like Duke Nukem 3D which included elevators that teleported you as one of it's mapping effects), a specialized guarding system for blocking attacks from enemies, the ability to level up via Experience Points [for the second game only], and probably one of the least used RPG elements in First Person Shooters, a multiple-characters-in-the-same-party set up [3 in the first game, 4 in the second game with the option to switch characters at the start of most levels]. Some environments could even damage all of your characters simultaneously, and of course if all of them died, it was game over. The targetting system is also a bit out of place compared to other first person shooters, stopping you in place while you aim a crosshair at anything on screen and your shots will shoot towards the crosshair instead of straight ahead]. It was probably not the biggest thing since sliced bread, but it's existance was the inspiration for another FPS modification for Duke Nukem 3D with far more build up on the RPG Elements (among other things) so far.
• Warren Spector's 1st-person games (Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Deus Ex) had so many RPG Elements, it's hard to tell whether they were FPSs with an RPG's level system, or an RPG in the style of a shooter.
  • Ultima Underworld is as far from being an FPS is you can get. The only element it shares with FPS games is the first person point of view. There was no such thing as an FPS when it was released anyway.
  • It's a similar situation to Magic Versus Science. Word of God (or at least the advertising material) is that they're RPGs with first-person shooter interfaces.
  • BioShock (series), 2K's spiritual successor to System Shock 2, however, had its RPG mechanics scaled back somewhat to simplify gameplay (although the actual world itself contains a touch more complexity (in terms of systems that players and NPCs can interact with) than System Shock 2): Players were invited to enhance themselves by using ADAM to buy genetic upgrades, divided into plasmids (active superhuman attacks that let you fling items around and shoot bees out of your hand among other things) and gene tonics (passive upgrades that enforce the player's ability to deal with enemies, the environment and machinery), which were all swappable at will.
  • The Deus Ex series is arguably an actual RPG. The repercussions of a lot of your actions in the first game are extremely subtle changes down the line. Many characters do react differently to you depending on how you handle yourself during missions. They aren't open world games, but they also aren't far off from how many table top RPGs conduct themselves (you can't really wander away or completely ignore the overall mission, but how you handle yourself and act does impact the mission further down).
• Hello, Call of Duty 4. See this comic. For clarification: as with an RPG, every kill you make rewards you with experience. Gain enough, you rank up and get access to more equipment. As it's Call of Duty, this has become very popular in multiplayer shooters since then.
• An Older Than the NES example: Dungeons of Daggorath for the Tandy Color Computer 2- ostensibly an early first-person dungeon-crawler, but deeper. Killing creatures increased your strength, and therefore both your health and damage; your strength was also the factor in "revealing" magical items that were more powerful than mundane ones once revealed. You were free to roam through the first three levels of the Dungeon at will, but as the second level's creatures would splatter you in one hit, and the third level had magical creatures that you couldn't even see without a magical torch, you were far better off hunting down every last creature before moving on.
• Done surprisingly well in Hexen 2, which had a fair number of stats and leveling up did have an impact on the game. Leveling up was properly paced so that if you went with the standard combat tactics (kill anything that moves and some things that don't), you would never have to grind, making the RPG elements almost invisible.
• The Battlecry series embodies this trope, as a large part of the game consists of leveling up your "hero" unit.
• Parodied in Team Fortress 2 - some weapons level up on the loadout screen as you play, but it has no effect at all on gameplay.
  • More specifically, some items are asigned static "levels" on acquisition, (e.g., Sandvich is a level 10 lunchbox) leading to some players collecting multiple levels of the same item to no additional benefit. Then you have the "strange" items that have killcounts that persist throughout your career and bestow different prefixes to the name (like "Mildly Threatening Flaregun"). This also has no effect on gameplay outside of showing off how many kills you've racked up with a given weapon.
• Star Wars: Dark Forces II and later. The player gets to pick force powers as the game progresses and can drift towards an evil / good character.

4X

• In Civilization IV, a "Unit Promotions" game mechanic was introduced, allowing you to use experience gained by your units in battle to buy them special traits that improved their combat values or added new abilities.
  • While picking specific bonuses as you level up is new, units getting better with experience has been part of the series since the original game. It started with a simple binary distinction (veteran vs normal) in Civ I and Civ II and slowly became more elaborate.
  • A somewhat more diverse experience setup was provided in the Spin-Off game Colonization (the original, at least). Through constant use, a Free Colonist could eventually and randomly level up to become an Expert <Profession> (civilian) or Veteran Soldier, and Petty Criminals and Indentured Servants could both become Free Colonists. Likewise, once your colonies declare independence, your Veteran Soldiers could level up even further to Continental status.
    • The revised version based on the Civ IV engine keeps the "Unit Promotions" mechanic from Civ IV', which has the side-effect of forcing your troops to level via combat so they are ready to fight off the Europeans once you declare independence. The "befriend & arm the natives" and "coexist peacefully" strategies from the old game aren't really workable if you want an effective militia in the new version.
• In Sins of a Solar Empire, capital ships gain experience points, increasing their fighter cap, and granting the use of special abilities, which could be upgraded by throwing a skill point into them.

Hack and Slash

• Drakengard is Hack and Slash meets Flight Sim meets RPG Elements. You level up your HP, you level up your weapons, and you level up your dragon.

Platform Game

• Speaking of Ratchet and Clank, your BFGs level up with use, and your health bar levels up as you score kills.
• Parodied in Kirby Super Star, as pictured at the top of the page. In the "Great Cave Offensive" sub-game, you fight a supposedly "RPG-style" boss known as the Computer Virus, which takes the form of generic Medieval European Fantasy enemies like knights and dragons (as opposed to the Kirby series's more bizarre fare), complete with a little text box at the top of the screen that announces the player's or boss's blocks or attacks and a tinny, 8-bit style rendition of the main boss theme. The player, though, continues to control Kirby in the normal Platformer style throughout the battle, so it isn't actually an Unexpected Gameplay Change (it just looks like one.) When you win, the menu awards you various (spurious) spoils, including Experience Points, "hunger points," "happy smile points," "exam score points," and so on.
  • In Super Star Ultra, you are told at the end, "You gain X experience points! (Not that it matters.)". If you're playing as Meta Knight, different stats go up at the end.
• Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness saw a lot of derision for its random RPG elements that added nothing to the game, other than a ludicrous way to bar progress until you did something to make Lara arbitrarily gain the ability she needed to progress.

Lara: My legs feel stronger!\\

—Lara: My boobs feel bigger!

• • There was also money on the ground at various points that would respawn if you left the area and come back to it.
  • Lara Croft And The Guardian Of Light does this subtly with powerups that grant permanent health and ammo capacity upgrades, along with collectible artifacts and weapons that provide bonuses, with superior ones provided as progress is made.
• Sonic and The Secret Rings and Sonic Unleashed implemented a level-up system and experience points that enhances their overall gameplay.
  • Sonic Battle did this first, to an extent. The skill points system is even discussed in-game.
• Platform-shooter Iji uses RPG Elements to level up various skills like hacking or strength (for kicking). They're necessary and change how the player proceeds - concentrating on hacking enemies or destroy them with the most powerful guns? There's a huge amount of choices. It works in-game because the character, Iji, is part-cyborg.

Real Time Strategy

• Similar to both the above, MechCommander features pilots that gain experience as you progress through the game. Additionally, said pilots can be injured during missions and, although they do recuperate over the course of multiple missions, they can receive sufficient injury to kill them.
• Dawn of War: Dark Crusade's campaign mode allows the player to equip their chosen faction's commander with various pieces of Wargear, which offer various stat boosts, as well as other bonuses, while also looking cool to boot. This carried over into the next expansion, Soulstorm. This carries over to DOW 2, with the "standard" campaign troops gaining experience and wargear choices.
• Warcraft III has Hero units (not a very uncommon concept in RTS) that act like a RPG character. They level, learn spells, have 3 different attributes and can carry up to six different items. They can also be revived for a fee unlike the replaceable masses of other units. The expansion allowed certain normal units to carry some items as well, but only as a carrier for the hero. The maps also had neutral monsters ("Creeps") to fight for items and experience, and doing so is an integral part of the game. Put together with the bundled map editor, has obviously led to many custom maps focusing on the RPG aspects - so much so that the official Orc campaign for the expansion was RPG-style.
  • Also note that early press releases for Warcraft III had an even stronger RPG element, to the extent that the game was referred to as "Role Playing Strategy" and the whole process of base-building was intended to be scaled down and redesigned. Fortunately for RTS fans, this was watered down to the eventual release.
    • And then a custom map came out that removed base building and redshirt unit micro anyway and let you focus entirely on controlling your hero unit in a team-based multiplayer environment. It was quite popular. Meanwhile the official ladder wasn't very successful online for a Blizzard RTS because its RPG elements included a heavy luck factor and lack of macro-level strategy. Blizzard learned from this mistake and decided to play it extremely safe with StarCraft 2.
• Some RTSs like Command & Conquer allow normal units to gain experience and 3 ranks of veterancy that makes them stronger and more durable. The highest ranks sometimes get special abilities such as slow self-healing. In most cases however, the game does not allow the player to carry their most experienced troops over to the next mission.
  • Beyond that, in Command & Conquer: Generals, the player can level up by killing enemy units and demolishing enemy structures. Then the player can spend the skill points for special units and superweapons.
  • Taken to its extremes in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Twilight, where players have to gain experience from playing within their profiles, which is necessary to unlock new units for use in both campaign and multi-player mode. This has resulted in a need for grinding to unlock the powerful units and superweapons; Your Mileage May Vary on whether it has added depth to the gameplay or skews the multiplayer arena in favour of veteran players.
• The Warlords Battlecry games not only allow basic troupes to gain about ten levels of experience, but also allowed the player take a few choice units with them from battle to battle. Of course, these games also featured a hero which had a full RPG leveling system, classifying the games entirely as an RTS-RPG.
• In the Total War strategy series, units can gain experience, making them more effective in combat. Furthermore, you can also upgrade their weapons and armor by retraining them in settlements containing Blacksmiths and Armories (or whatever the game-specific / faction-specific equivalent is). Finally, since the first Medieval incarnation, your faction's commanders all have stats that can be leveled up (or even leveled down) by gaining certain traits in the course of the campaign.
  • This aspect of the game is significantly more prominent in the franchise's next installment, Shogun II. In previous games, the abilities of characters were listed in a handful of basic skills, as well as traits that gave them advantages or disadvantages in certain situations. In the newest game, however, generals and agents have special abilities, skills and talent trees made available to them when they gain enough experience, which allow for the player to specialize them in certain ways.
• Probably one of the first RTS to have levels for units was Seven Kingdoms. Every unit had a Combat Skill and a Leadership Skill (which only mattered when they were Generals) and spies additionally had a Spionage Skill. Each of these rose over time either when training in a Fort or in Combat (except for Spionage). Some items or special events could also affect these scores. The first game in the series also had another skill for workers, but that was dropped in the sequel.
• Often overlooked RTS Dragonshard, being based on the Eberron campaign setting of D&D, has RPG elements out the wazoo. In addition to requiring gold and crystal shards for building, killing enemies also gives you experience points, which lets you make certain unit types stronger. Not to mention the levelling up of hero characters and the meticulous inventory management aspect. In fact, it can get so complicated that micromanaging becomes a requirement, and failure to do so results in a quick death from the computer AI.
• Quest 64 is often accused of this, instead of being considered a true RPG.
• Spellforce walks the fine line between being an RTS with RPG elements and being an RPG with RTS elements, depending on whether one is playing Free-Roam or Story mode. (Story mode focuses mainly on the RPG angle; in the "Breath of Winter" expansion, this leads to a massive difficulty spike when the encounters suddenly become ten levels too high for your hero to effectively deal with).
• In Age of Empires III, your CITY gains experience. And can buy lots of cool upgrades.
• In Wiggles (also known as Diggles), the eponymous dwarfs learn abilities similar to RPG characters, but for a change by actually doing stuff related to the ability, e.g. gaining one point in "wood" by building something.
• In Warhammer Dark Omen the regiments improve via veterancy, upgradable armor and equipable magical swords / shields / banners, and are carried over from one mission to the next.

Rhythm Game

• The third Taiko no Tatsujin game for the DS, Dororon! Yokai Daikessen, includes an RPG mode. From what's normally a rhythm game series. You travel a world map, get into random battles, gain level ups, visit towns, buy equipment, and fight bosses, just like a regular RPG. The main change is that battles is presented like songs are in the games. Every correct note you hit causes damage to your opponent, but enemies will sometimes use tricks to try and obscure your vision or generally make it harder to hit notes.

Roguelike

• Dwarf Fortress has two modes of play. One is a Roguelike, and the other is similar to The Sims or Dungeon Keeper. Naturally, they both allow the dwarfs to gain skills and whatnot.

Shoot'Em Up

• In Mars Matrix, collecting golden cubes will give you Experience Points and levels. Leveling up increases the power of your main shot.
• Like the above example, in the flash game Epic Battle Fantasy 3.3: Bullet Heaven, you can collect coins from killed enemies and buy upgrades like more lives, stronger and faster shots, etc. Of course, these stats cap at a certain point; it seems to be more of a way to let newcomers to the Bullet Hell genre start out slow and work their way up. Any non-hardcore player will need max upgrades to survive the later levels and bonus levels.
• The Playstation port of Point Blank is a collection of minigames in which you use a gun controller (like Duck Hunt). It has a one-player RPG mode that replaces regular RPG battles with the minigames. The stats don't affect the actual minigames, but determine which ones you play, how many losses you can take before Game Over, etc.

Sports Game

• Any Sports Game with a "Career Mode" will usually contain some RPG Elements.
  • NBA Street from EA Sports Big made it so getting 5/5 in stat made a silver crown appear for that stat, but then you could upgrade to gold crown (essentially 6/5). The catch is only one stat can get a gold crown; through lots of play, you can get 6/5 on one stat and 5/5 on all others.
• The Game Boy Color version of Mario Golf. You'll gain Experience Points from completing events and winning tournaments in-game, which you can use to level up your character and increase stats like distance and straightness of your shot.
  • In fact, any portable version of a Mario Sports game made by Camelot (Mario Golf and Mario Tennis series) so far has had RPG Elements and a Story Mode in them where your goal is to become the greatest player ever by defeating Mario. It remains to see if the 3DS Mario Tennis game will follow in their footsteps.
    • Sadly, it won't.

Stealth Based Game

• Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops allowed you to collect new 'party members', gave them all unique stats and abilities, and even let you 'level up' their health and stamina with enough play. It felt less Final Fantasy and more Pokémon, though, since there was an element of collecting for the sake of collecting, only one party member was on the field at a time and most of them ended up filling up your Spy Unit (essentially a dump unit).

Turn-Based Strategy

• Likewise, the Dark Wizard game for Sega CD used units that leveled up, could be equipped with exchangable gear (if they weren't monster types), and even evolved or got class changes, despite being fundamentally a strategy game.
• Many small-scope strategy games like Close Combat and Battle for Wesnoth allow you to equip, promote, and transfer troops throughout a campaign.
• Silent Storm and its sequels has characters with unchangeable stats and skills that improve or worsen based on the successful use of these skills. For example, a sniper's accuracy skill improves based on successful hits and worsens based on misses. This means that each successful hit improves the likelihood of the next shot hitting the target. On the other hand, each miss reduces that likelihood. Additionaly, characters gain XP and level up, at which point the player can select a perk (such as reduced time cost for turning or less bleeding from wounds). These perks are class-specific. Unfortunately, there is an entire branch of perks for the Engineer class that are spoilers for the eventual appearance of Panzerkleins.
• The characters in Odium actually gain experience immediately after doing damage to an enemy, and level up during combats. It's a simple Point Buy system. They have stats governing their health, their likelihood of counterattacking, their likelihood of making a critical hit, and how many hits they can take before becoming Enraged.
• Apart from individual units gaining stat points when they kill two or six units units of their own level, the leaders and heroes in Age of Wonders gain 10 skill points every level they gained. They can be spent freely on any of the stats, or on abilities such as spellcasting and combat perks, and it doesn't take many levels to reach the point where they can take down entire armies single-handedly. Especially using items "retrieved" from monsters' lairs.
• Heroes of Might and Magic had heroes commanding armies and gaining levels when enough enemy creatures had been defeated from the beginning, with each game up to IV adding more and more RPG elements to them (II added skills, III modified the inventory system to use an abstract sort of paperdoll system, and IV made the heroes actually fight in battles, and not just cast spells).

Wide Open Sandbox

• Many fans of Grand Theft Auto were surprised by the number and variety of RPG Elements in the San Andreas entry, specifically the idea that using an ability allowed one to improve it. In fact, one could say that the main character CJ in GTA: SA had a more realistic advancement than many true RPG heroes, as CJ doesn't improve in discrete levels, but almost continuously over time. Most of the titles in the series have some kind of character advancement, but usually in the form of bonuses for completing special missions.
  • To get into specifics, some of CJ's stats include strength, stamina, muscle build, fat build, driving skills, cycling skills, flying skills, and yes, even sex appeal. The skill stats for various vehicles improve your handling of them as the skill set builds up, so if CJ rides a bike for the first time, he will pretty much suck at it and fall a lot from even gentle bumps!
• In The Godfather: The Game, you can put points from Respect levels into five categories: Fighting, Shooting, Health, Speed and Street Smarts. With 50 Respect levels and 10 levels for each category, you'll max them all by the time you're done; no specialising here.
• Dead Rising and its sequels have "prestige points" that level the character up eventually, increasing your walking speed, your inventory space, making you learn new attack moves, giving you more health, and in Dead Rising 2 onward, unlocking new Combo Cards for Item Crafting. Note that going on a zombie killing spree is actually the least efficient way to earn Prestige Points; you gain much more for helping survivors back to the safe room.
• Minecraft has this in the form of experience points, potions, and enchantments. Experience points are used to enchant tools and armor pieces for various effects, such as a sword multiplying the number of drops from a mob or a pair of boots that reduces fall damage. Brewing potions can get you various results, depending on what is used, and they can be made into a "splash" form that act like hand grenades. The fanbase is divided as to whether this constitutes Growing the Beard or Jumping the Shark.

Non-video game examples

Anime and Manga

• Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu, where IQ means rank, examination means Serious Business and academic performance means Experience Points.

Fan Works

• In The Games We Play by Ryuugi, a RWBY/The Gamer Crossover Fic, a pre-Beacon Jaune Arc suddenly gains an RPG interface to his life -- including the ability to gain XP, learn skills, raise his stats through grinding, and store an outrageous number of possessions in his Inventory. Unfortunately, there's a reason he's gained the ability to become very powerful, very fast... and it's not good.

Manhwa

• The Gamer is about a fellow who gains an RPG interface to his real life -- including the ability to level up and get more powerful. Unfortunately, he's not the only one...

Web Original

• The web serial Memetic Narration (found here ^{[dead link]} ) features a group of teenagers who fight turn-based rpg battles against evil embodiments of internet memes within a computer. Their abilities in said battles are determined by "leveling up" their personal relationships.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time

Ice King: Cast Detect Secret Door! (door appears) SUCCESS!