Take Your Time

"Nothing happens unless something causes it to happen and that something is, ninety percent of the time, me."

—Karn, Adventurers!

A near-ubiquitous RPG trope: no matter how urgent the hero's quest is, he can almost always take time before confronting the Big Bad to finish every Sidequest, collect every item, repeatedly stay overnight at the Trauma Inn, and unlock the hidden superpowers of his teammates, including any useless ones. Usually, this is because, in pretty much every RPG, in order to progress the story or the quest at hand, you have to trigger an event somehow.

On a smaller scale, even the most pressing, immediate tasks, such as, say, rescuing a fellow character who is dangling off a ledge at five hundred feet in the air, can be done at one's leisure, provided there isn't a number countdown ticking away on screen. Of course, the accompanying cutscene will always depict you arriving just barely in time, and you can expect NPCs to nag you constantly to establish a false sense of urgency.

From a gameplay perspective, suddenly railroading you into the final dungeon or an urgent quest seems a little unfair, doesn't it? Traditionally, quite a few sidequests like the quest for the Infinity+1 Sword only open up when the final dungeon is in the sky, or in a part where you aren't powerful enough, even with the Peninsula of Power Leveling...if you have a very small window before it's Lost Forever due to you getting stuck in a Point of No Return, how will a player who doesn't have a strategy guide know they had a small window of opportunity to do the sidequests? Or that it was possible to recruit a Guest Star Party Member permanently before the final boss?

Contrast In-Universe Game Clock, Timed Mission, Continue Your Mission, Dammit!, Always Close. Compare with Offstage Waiting Room. May overlap with Traveling At the Speed of Plot or Magic Countdown.

Please only list notable examples, subversions, or aversions, as this trope is very common.

Examples of Take Your Time include:

Video game examples

Action Adventure

• In Okami, a later sequence in the game tells you about the coming Day of Darkness, when the sun will be swallowed and there's nothing you can do about it. Since you're the Goddess of the Sun, this would be a Very Bad Thing but of course, no matter how much you dawdle, the sun is only swallowed the moment the final boss stares you down, leaving you powerless.
  • That's also a case of Stupidity Is the Only Option: the smart thing is to wait until the dreaded day of weakness darkness passes before fighting the Big Bad.
  • However, in an earlier chapter, if you dawdle too long, Oni Island WILL disappear.
• In Little Big Adventure II (aka Twinsen's Odyssey) a certain event partway through the game puts your home planet in danger of being smashed into pieces by its own moon, which is being pushed towards it by a huge reactor. Since the game doesn't have any time limit, you can wander around the planet you get stuck on as long as you want. Certain events will trigger a short video of the moon moving, but the collision never happens—unless you get killed during the final fight with the Big Bad, in which case you will get the "end of the world" game-over Cutscene.
• At one point in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Link has to get somewhere before the pirates do. Tetra gives Link a head start, and tells him that she'll stall the pirates until morning. Fortunately, that particular night doesn't end until Link does what he has to do (but because there was a curse that made night eternal).
  • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass lets you wander off halfway through the final boss battle if you get a Game Over. While the Big Bad is holding Tetra hostage. Lampshaded when Linebeck calls Link on it after you return to the ship after playing a minigame.
  • Lampshade hung (along with quite a few other things) by Midna in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Of course, it doesn't matter to her if you delay, because she just wants the MacGuffins, and would actually be happy enough to see your world end (at first).
    • It might have been subverted later on, after Midna gets hit with Lanayru's light. I say 'might have been' because I have not heard of anyone taking the time to find out.
  • Both played straight and subverted in The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. Before the final fight, Vaati states that when a bell chimes three times it will be too late to save Zelda. The first two always happen at the same time no matter what, but it's subverted when you're fighting three Darknuts one room away from Vaati. If you take too long, the third chime rings.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has a justification in the form of time travel being involved.
    • Though there are still cases like when the Imprisoned starts acting up, and everyone is shouting at you to hurry and go beat it up. You can technically do as much sidequesting and stocking up you want, because the monstrosity will just wait for you to arrive before trying to escape.
  • Majoras Mask is the only Zelda game where this trope is not in heavy application, and shows what a difference it makes. The player is under constant pressure, knowing that the moon is literally hanging over his head, ready to drop and destroy the world when time runs out, and if he doesn't manage his time wisely, everything he's accomplished in that cycle will be erased.
  • College Humor digs at the idea of Link not having this trope in effect here. (NSFW)
• You may sleep as much as you want in Cave Story, but the Doctor will not prepare Mimigas for experiment until your final sleep in Plantation.
• As you enter the last quarter of Shadow of the Colossus, it's revealed in a cutscene that Emon and his entourage are chasing you, and are just over the horizon from the forbidden lands. However, the last four Colossi all require lengthy voyages through the land to reach and protracted battles to defeat. Dormin announces before you fight the last one that you need to get a shift on, but you can still go sightseeing or food hunting, and the inevitable won't take place until just after you've killed the last Colossus.
• The final submarine level in Tombraider Chronicles has the sub Lara is in sinking to the bottom of the ocean. She even urges the NPC to hurry up and help her find a way to escape, but you can take as long as you want finding the key items and secrets.

Action Game

• In Batman: Arkham Asylum, there are hostages that are supposed to be gassed, and you supposedly have 2 minutes to save them (Complete with the Joker counting down). In reality, you can take as long as you need to find a way to save them
  • Subverted in another point of the game where Zsasz has Dr. Young hostage and even though there's no time limit given or shown anywhere, if you don't save her before he's done ranting, he gets bored of waiting and just kills her, complete with a mocking speech from Joker afterwards.
• In God of War, an oracle is dangling from a rope at one point. You need to solve a puzzle to be able to climb up to the room's high platform, which sets off an Event Flag for a Timed Mission in which you must navigate an obstacle course to reach her in time. However, you can take as long as you want in solving the puzzle that allows you to reach that platform, despite her cries.
• Subverted in Mirror's Edge. A number of levels have the voice in your ear tell you that SWAT teams are on their way, but if you dawdle too long or spend a long time trying to make a jump, they bust into the room and, ah, speed you along.

Adventure Game

• An inversion occurs in Grim Fandango. No matter how long it takes you to figure out how to unlock the lighthouse during Year 2, Manny will get there just a moment too late to save the girl. He will, however get there in time to hear her last words and receive a clue, before she turns into flowers and blows away.
• The Journeyman Project series lets you take your take your San Dimas Time, as long as you're not in the present. If you're in the present in the first game, you can become un-made by the incoming history-altering "distortion wave" if you dally.
  • And in the first game, you have an energy meter that slowly drains while you're in the past.
• In Riven: the sequel to Myst, during your quest you learn that the world is coming to an end. But no matter how long you explore, it'll always be a peaceful sunny day with nary an earthquake in sight (at least until you strike the death blow to end the world). There is one timed interaction in the game, but you get a long window and three chances (with clear warnings) to make the "right" choice.
• Averted in the endgame of Timelapse. Once you steal the robot's power crystal in Atlantis, he will chase you for the remainder of the game, and if you stand still too long, you'll be caught.
• In The Pandora Directive, at one point, you have to light a stick of dynamite and throw it at a door. You can light the dynamite while in another building, go outside, over to the other building where you have to throw it, throw the dynamite, then just as lazily walk to a safe distance. The dynamite won't blow until you're out of reach anyway.

Beat'Em Up

• Oni: In level five you're chasing the Big Bad, who is fleeing towards an airplane, across the airport's cargo hangars. You can, however, Take Your Time and explore every single room in the hangars, and when you reach the plane the Big Bad is just boarding it.

Edutainment Game

• Just about every Clue Finder game has this. Of course, considering they're all educational games, what exactly would be the fairness in putting a time limit on long division problems? Kids struggle enough in school!
  • 3rd grade: No matter how long you take building the Mathra trap, Joni and Santiago never get caught.
  • 4th Grade: Justified, but then played straight considering something the Big Bad wants is in possession of the kids and his minions were ordered to spy on them for the first half of the game. Then, no matter how long you spend wandering around the Nile Kingdom helping the mice or admiring the scenery in the Pyramid, nothing really bad happens.
  • 5th Grade: No matter how long you spend looking at the computer, The Aliens never walk in and bust Owen and Leslie, despite banging on the door. They also do not bother to stop you when you're spelling catwalks. Owen and Leslie are also in absolutely no danger despite that they hear something early in the game walking to them.
  • 6th grade: It's implied that you have a notable time limit, but no matter how long you spend completing the challenges (Which actually can take awhile given that two out of the three you have to complete are reading comprehension, and one of which requires you to cycle through information), Joni never turns into a plant beyond the cutscene where she begins to change. Owen even says "We can't just stand around here while Joni turns into a salad!"
  • Math 9-12: Well, okay this isn't as much...the treasures are never gathered.
  • The Incredible Toy Store Adventure: When Leslie and Santiago are caught by the Big Bad and trapped in a gumball machine, they don't seem to be in any danger when they're stuck inside the gumball machine. If you also don't have enough items to complete the unshrinker and have to go back to get them, Leslie and Santiago wait, as does the antagonist.
  • Search And Solve Adventures: Only during the last part, in which the Big Bad never actually does get away. Granted, he does get stuck in a flume ride, but no matter how long you take unscrambling the code, he never gets himself unstuck.
  • Unusually, Reading 9-12 actually justifies it. The Big Bad had Joni and Owen complete the Amulet of Life for her in a Xanatos Gambit, meaning she was wiling to wait for however long it took for Joni and Owen to decode all the reading challenges and create the amulet for her, all the while holding Leslie and Santiago hostage to keep them going. When it was actually completed, Malicia accidentally grabbed a fake amulet that Joni bought from a gift shop, so she had to keep Leslie & Santiago alive still so Joni and Owen would bring the Amulet to her.

Fighting Game

• Super Smash Bros.. Brawl's Subspace Emissary mode is really bad at this. There are several instances where you fight while a bomb has been set, but with the exception of one Boss Battle, the timer shown on the bomb never makes it into actual gameplay. And said boss battle is after two segments that aren't timed, and you still have two out of the three total minutes shown on the bomb.
• Mortal Kombat Deception is extremely bad about this. Not only can you take your time in Real Time, but you can take your time in Game Time. For example, one sidequest features a woman who is lost and needs you to get her a map. You can then enter a hut, and train for five years, only to come out and see her still lost and asking for a map.

First-Person Shooter

• In Far Cry 2, many missions revolve around destroying a vehicle (the arms dealer missions) assassinating a person coming in by car, etc. However, you can take as many hours/days you want to get there, and the vehicle will always be driving in circles in the same part of the game world.
• In Halo: Combat Evolved , the missions are all supposed to be time-critical, and there are several points in the game where Cortana (or in some cases, Guilty Spark 343) urges you to hurry, yet only the final escape scene is actually timed.
  • This happens in Halo 2 as well. The first major level in the game requires you to defuse a live bomb, set on the Cairo by the Covenant. However, you can muck about the level for as long as you want, despite Cortana constantly nagging you about the bomb over the radio. When you finally succeed, you're told how close you were.
    • Also happens in the second part of the Arbiter's first mission, where you cut the cable to the gas mine, causing it to plunge towards the planet core, then pursue the Heretic Leader back to the hangar for a rather long Boss Battle.
• At one point in Deus Ex, the main character's killswitch is activated. The player is told at several points that J.C. has X hours left to live, but these points are specifically scripted, and the player can take as long as they want to get to Tracer Tong and deactivate the switch.
  • Just as you get to Tong and deactivate it, JC comments that it's been some time but he still feels fine. Paul seemed to show adverse symptoms relatively rapidly (not that this stops him from running about shooting lots of MJ12 troops). Meanwhile JC's flown from New York to Hong Kong in a helicopter in 11 hours (24 hour timer has 23 hours just before the start, and 12 hours have passed after activating a bit after landing) and is still in tip-top condition.
  • When you destroy the welding points on the superfreighter, you can chill on the boat until the sun burns out, but it will never sink with you on it.
• This is averted hard in the first mission of the prequel, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You are sent to handle a hostage situation, but if you dick around the Sarif Offices too long, the hostages will be executed, and you'll arrive only to have to fight Purists. It's played straight for the rest of the game, though.
• In Metroid Prime 3, the Galactic Federation is certainly nice to wait on Samus when it comes to her doing the critically essential tasks they assign her in one or two places. It's realistic if you take your time doing it, but they seem perfectly content to let you wander off to entire other planets, collecting missile launcher expansions instead of doing your damn job.
  • Averted, though, in the more immediate sense. In the game, you have several ostensibly "timed" missions, but you never see an actual timer on screen. The only indication seems to be the voice over telling you to hurry, but time actually will run out if you take too long.
• Also happens near the end of BioShock. At one point your heart will start to stop beating, which slowly reduces your maximum health until it is dealt with (the explanation for why this takes time is that "The heart's a stubborn muscle"). However, rather than being a continuous Standard Status Effect, it only happens in intervals at scripted points in the level and will not actually kill you outright, even if you never took the power-ups that augment your maximum health.
  • At the end of BioShock 2, the player character and his ally are running around Rapture, trying to escape before several timed charges go off and sink the city. The ally repeatedly shouts things like "We must hurry!", but you don't have to.
• Most challenges in the Half-Life series allow you to take as long as you need, provided you can keep certain key allies alive. However, the jump to Xen includes a time-critical moment between when the gate opens and when it malfunctions; miss it and get a Nonstandard Game Over.
  • Similarly, the last battle in Half-Life 2 gives you a limited amount of time to defeat the Big Bad before he wins by default.
  • Perhaps the most obvious examples of this trope are when Combine soldiers were coming and you have to set up a perimeter with turrets. You can take as much time as you want doing this, and in fact the first time around you can even pile up junk in front of entrances to keep the Combine out completely, but the Combine only start coming once the last turret has been placed.
  • Episode 1 does this for the entire game. The citadel's core is on the verge of causing an explosion that will completely wipe out City 17. In the start of the game, Alyx keeps reminding you about the crisis, but you can go as slow as you want and the core will still be intact. Plot wise, Gordon and Alyx can take a bit more time on escaping after they delayed the core from going off, but when their plan stops working, Alyx once again urges Gordon to keep moving, but you can still go at a leisurely pace. The Citadel never explodes until after Gordon and Alyx board the train and leave City 17.
    • Similarly, Episode Two does this on several occasions. You are reminded several times that the Combine are hunting down Alyx and Gordon because they stole data from the Citadel that can be used against them. Even though you are urged to hurry to White Forest, you can practically hold down the walk button and the rebels' reaction to your arrival would still be the same. Likewise, after Alyx gets impaled by a Hunter, you are urged to be swift and retrieve an antlion larva extract to prevent Alyx from dying. No matter how fast or slow you go, by the time you come back with the MacGuffin, you'll always hear how Alyx's pulse has stopped and you're always in the nick of time to save her.
  • At the beginning of Half-Life 2, there are several instances where the dialogue makes you believe you need to leave quickly to avoid the Combine. One is the first meeting with Barney, another is in the apartments. You can stay as long as you want watching the citizen hold that door against the Combine. It'll never open.
• Left 4 Dead 2 has this for the finale in "The Parish". After contacting the army, the soldier tells you that the escape chopper will leave in 10 minutes, but you can take as long as you want since it will still wait for you. The zombies, however, are not so polite, and will happily take the extra chances to continue trying to kill you.
  • Technically, all the rescue vehicles that come to rescue you like to take their time in both games. They say they will be there in ten minutes, but really only appear after you kill the second (or in "Swamp Fever", third) Tank.
  • Due to some bugs in the game, the trope gets subverted where the Tanks die off before you can fight them, speeding up the rescue.
• In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, your superiors will constantly be telling you to hurry, your ride will be telling you they only have enough fuel for 30 seconds, etc. Unless there's an actual timer on the screen, you can safely ignore the former.
  • In Modern Warfare 2, there are no more rooms of infinite-respawning enemies, so in a lot of places it is to your advantage to take it slow even though your commander is yelling in your ear to "Hurry! Hurry! We're Oscar Mike!" The only notable aversion occurs in "Whiskey Hotel". If you take too long to get to the roof of the White House, the bombers WILL destroy it.
• Starting midway through the second act, Portal 2 sets a vague time limit on the player by stating that the Enrichment Center is going to explode in "a few hours". You can take as much time as you want getting to the third act, after which it's implied that a minimum of twelve hours of game time have elapsed since the start of the second. Again you can take your time getting to the Final Boss encounter. When you get there, you're explicitly given six minutes until the nuclear meltdown, and there is a time limit to the battle, even if it expands somewhat in actual execution. However, between the resolution of the battle and the action that triggers the final cutscene, you can literally wait forever, with explosions going off, debris falling around you, and the AI characters screaming at you to Continue Your Mission, Dammit!.
• Not only does Red Faction use this trope, it actually has an NPC pull a weird inversion on you. When Capek's base is on a one-minute self-destruct timer, Eos insists that you escape while she finds some crucial data. She won't move a muscle until you're gone—but even if you leave her only one second on the timer, she'll somehow turn up later having accomplished her mission. Apparently other characters can Take Their Time as long as you're not around!

Hack and Slash

• If you Take Your Time rescuing the seals in Drakengard, visiting other places, perhaps grinding away if you feel like it, The Empire will take its time in destroying them.
  • Though it should be said that the trope is averted somewhat in the game; every single level is on a time limit. Thankfully, unless the level has a significant plot reason to be especially urgent, the time given is either 30 minutes or a full hour depending on the size of the area, which is generally more than enough.

MMORPGs

• In City of Heroes, unless your contact specifically says that you have X amount of time before the bomb goes off/they escape with the hostages/initiate their plan you can take all the time you need. But if there is a set time, you have exactly that much time; even if you exit the game and get back in, the timer is still ticking.
  • This is then subverted in the bank missions. You have only so long to stop the villains before they escape with the bank's money (or, in villain missions, for you to fight off incoming heroes and escape), but once they are taken care of, you have fifteen minutes to run around beating up bad guys. This is then Double Subverted, since the timer can be extended by stopping a jailbreak or stopping groups of vandals.
• This is the case nine times out of ten in World of Warcraft, where events are often done by the player in Anachronic Order; a Quest Giver might tell you that time is of the essence, but nothing bad happens if you stop for side quests and leveling.

Platform Game

• Averted in De Blob: you have a time limit on each level. It is explained that the time limit is in place because if you don't get the mission done soon enough the enemy will learn about your presence there and mobilize. This makes sense... until the last level where you fight the leader of the Inkies. OF COURSE they know you're there! The time limit is pointless!
• Recommended before the final mission of Psychonauts: leveling up by collecting all the pickups will make the boss battles much easier. It doesn't matter that Oleander's evil plan is about to begin; Raz can run around collecting figments indefinitely.
• In Donkey Kong 64, the whole game is technically played while K. Rool is charging a laser that he plans use to destroy DK Isle. However, only the final level has a timer, and you can extend that.
  • Unless you quit the game. Oh God, don't quit the game.
• Banjo-Kazooie (also made by Rare) takes place while the evil witch Gruntilda prepares to use a machine that will swap her ugly looks with those of Banjo's sister, Tooty. Even though, as you trek through her lair, she regularly taunts you about this, Banjo and Kazooie will have more than enough time to collect the Jiggies necessary to reach Grunty before she can get the machine to work, and it only ever does in the Game Over sequence.
  • And in Banjo-Tooie, Grunty's sisters build a life-sucking machine to restore Grunty's flesh, as she was reduced to a skeleton in the time between the two games. However, they only ever use it once on King Jingaling, after which it needs to recharge. Like in the first game, the heroes have all the time in the world to collect the required Jiggies before the machine is done charging.
• In the new Prince of Persia game released in late 2008, there is a part of the story where your trusty female sidekick is dying and you must rush to save her. You can actually get an achievement by sitting in place and doing nothing at all (you can't input anything on the controller during this period) for a long enough period of time during this segment.
  • She wasn't dying. She was already dead.
• In the first Ratchet & Clank and Up Your Arsenal, the final two levels are part of a plot in which you have to confront the Big Bad before he can use his superweapon. Both games not only let you return to other planets, but encourage it by introducing side-quests which require you to go elsewhere.
  • Towards the end of the third game, the Phoenix comes under attack in a last-ditch attempt by the Big Bad to destroy the Q-Force. The survivors are huddled under a walkway on the bridge, only meters from the battle. In the plot, this is made out to be a matter of urgency and the ship explicitly goes above normal speed to get there. However, once you're there, you can leave, fly around the galaxy, return and be in time to save the day.
• At the end of Sly 2 the Big Bad's flying fortress is blown up over Paris. You then have to navigate the debris, make you way to the villain, beat him up and rescue you friends all before hitting the ground. There's no rush. You're apparently falling from orbit because you have plenty of time to precisely plan you jumps.
• Sonic Adventure 2 actually averts this in a few cases, where the plot mandates more urgency (notably when the military base is about to explode); it imposes a time limit on the relevant stages (such as Green Forest, Security Hall and White Jungle).
  • Likewise, the final fight of each story is timed, although no countdown is present on the HUD to draw attention to this fact:
    • In the fight against Shadow or Sonic (depending on the story), both of you run down an endless path which is collapsing behind you. Waste too much time, and it turns out to be not so endless, as it starts collapsing ahead of you as well, dooming you both to fall to your deaths.
    • With the Finalhazard, your teammates bark at you (somehow) about how you only have five minutes to kill the overgrown lizard, and they're not lying - hit five minutes, and you die instantly. It's not even a special cutscene; you get the same sort of death for running out of rings.
  • Which is funny when you realize that the song ends when the five minutes is up. "Hurry Sonic and Shadow, the music is what makes you breathe in space!"
  • However, it's played straight with the ending stages of both Hero and Dark stories - whether you're rushing to stop Eggman from firing the ARK on the Earth, or rushing to stop the heroes from stopping Eggman from firing the ARK on the Earth, this trope is in full effect.

Real Time Strategy

• The campaign of the original Dawn of War is effectively nothing but this trope. By the last few missions, Ork hordes are rampaging everywhere, Imperial Guard forces are getting slaughtered or falling to Chaos, Chaos themselves are preparing to unleash a daemonic Sealed Evil in a Can, and a Negative Space Wedgie literally from hell is about to swallow the system, warping the very planet, and there is absolutely no in-game reason to care.
  • Zig-zagged in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2. Some missions have expiration date, while others don't. All the plot missions, however, don't. Say you have to close the gates leading to the industrial city district, or else the endless implacable hordes of Tyranids will storm in, destroy the crucial installation and extinguish the very last hope of defeating the terrible Tyranid Hive-Fleet...Yep, they will storm...Any minute now...Already storming...Almost there...You waste another day on sidequests and all will be lost...Well, you waste another two days...you get the idea. The funniest thing? You can lose the mission, i.e. get all your units incapacitated and withdrawn back to the base...and then you'll simply get another try to start the mission from the very beginning.
• Mission choice option makes Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty VERY guilty of this. Even when offered a mission that you'd think you have to complete ASAP before something terrible completely out of your control and independent from your actions happens, like Big Bad finding some vital information she's searching for, Protoss fleet obliterating a Zerg-infected planet, or a nearby star going nova, you can still take your time completing a whole side arc, before attending to those pesky nuisances.

Roguelike

• In the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, there are some story based missions that try to give you a sense of urgency. But in reality, you can do whatever missions you please (or no mission at all), getting around to the story based one when you're ready to advance the story.
  • Although Chatot will give you heck if you don't do the Perfect Apples mission immediately after he asks you to.
• No matter how quickly or slowly you progress through the quests in Diablo II, you're always just a step behind the Dark Wanderer. No matter how long it takes to get through the expansion chapter, you can never beat Baal to the Worldstone, but he doesn't have time to finish corrupting it and leave.

Role-Playing Game

• In the Neverwinter Nights games, this trope is handily illustrated by their various attempts to bring resting from the Dungeons & Dragons rules into the games, allowing players to interrupt any crisis with a representation of what is supposed to be an 8-hour nap, including sometimes in short breaks in the midst of battle.
  • Averted somewhat in the expansion Storm of Zehir, where resting is restricted to actual beds and outdoor camping (somewhat at the price of the complexity of dungeons, all of which needed to be surmountable without the benefit of resting). Still, the possibility remains of going into a dungeon, fleeing from the horrors inside out the front door, setting up camp literally on their doorstep, and charging back in with a full night's rest - said horrors, of course, politely refraining from trying to escape or pursue you.
• With a few exceptions (such as events that happen in x days or when a quest giver asks you to do something within a specific timeframe), what's considered the "main story" in every Elder Scrolls game is pretty much encouraging you to take your time to continue the illusion of non-linearity.
  • Somewhat funnily, the game that has the most Main Quest missions with a time-limit is Daggerfall... which, given that it lacks an oncoming disaster, or even a Big Bad, is also the one to have the most justification for taking one's time - after all, doing stuff entirely unrelated to the royal families of the Iliac Bay would make people less inclined to thing you are just a spy for the Emperor...
• Final Fantasy IV. Multiple times. Especially Zemus, since two of your allies go off to confront him inside the moon. No matter how long it takes you to get to the center of the moon, they are always just beginning their fight.
• Final Fantasy V lets you rest as much as you want while your ship is being attacked by monsters. You can't leave, but the boss just waits by the bow of the ship for you to come fight him, however long it takes.
• You can take your time getting to the Floating Continent in Final Fantasy VI. But instead of always making it in the nick of time, you arrive just in time to watch The End of the World as We Know It. It's implied that the villains were, in fact, waiting for your party (specifically Celes) to show up.
• No matter how long you take going about your business in Final Fantasy VII, the Meteor just hangs in the sky and never comes down. Try to think about this from the perspective of the characters:

Red XIII: Cloud! Meteor's going to fall in less than a week!
Cloud: Let's race Chocobos!

• • Also, after Diamond Weapon emerges from the ocean to attack Midgar, you get to actually see it wade and waddle its way towards its target, and you can't attack it until it lands. The kicker? If you just sit there and watch it go forward, it will eventually just stop right in front of Midgar and politely wait for you to kick its ass.
  • Crisis Core also has some points like this. Director Lazard waiting to speak with you? Whatever, let's go on some missions!
    • Some points? With missions available at any save point, you can run off to hunt treasure while Nibleheim is burning to the ground!
    • Lampshaded heavily in this Fanfic.
• A classic example is in Final Fantasy VIII, where the hero's main Love Interest, Rinoa, is shown dangling from a rock over a tremendous fall. You must hurry there and rescue her! However, there's no timer counting down... so, sure enough, you can Take Your Time. No matter what you do, you'll always arrive in time to grab her hand and save her from falling. In all, she ends up holding on for a solid thirty minutes, while the two Gardens keep crashing into each other.
  • And yet Averted Trope while Rinoa is dangling, as the fistfight between Squall and the flying Mook will end after a certain point of time if you haven't finished him off yet.
  • Even more egregiously, at a later point in the game, Squall happens to be on a space station about to be swallowed by a cosmic catastrophe, and to gain a particular card in the game's card game sidequest, you are required to play a secondary character, an opportunity that comes only in this instance. To its credit, the game does some Lampshade Hanging on this by having the character state, "You wanna to play cards now!?"
• Although not a very notable example, there is a scene in Final Fantasy IX where the main party has to chase Beatrix, which is, long story short, an enemy. She leaves the room and you have to go after her... but, not only you can take as long as you want talking to everybody, you can actually talk to the Moogle in the room to spend the night in a Tent. And when you leave the room, you'll still catch up with her right in front of the building. It's like a video game version of The Tortoise and the Hare.
• Justified somewhat with Final Fantasy X's Very Definitely Final Dungeon, since Jecht, being inside Sin, is somewhat able to mitigate his murderous impulses.
  • Final Fantasy X is not immune, however: "Yuna's been kidnapped, and they're getting away! What do you want to do?" "Play Blitzball!"
    • However, there is a short portion of the game where you are not allowed to play Blitzball (when you are running/hiding from the law).
• In Final Fantasy X-2 Shuyin is just starting to activate Vegnagun when your party arrives there. After spending hours digging in the desert, defeating Angra Mainyu and following a moogle's ghost around.
  • There is an exception listed further below, though.
• At the end of Final Fantasy XII, a battle between The Empire and La Résistance is in full swing over your home city, and you need to get there and defeat the main villain before the whole place gets wrecked. But no matter how long you spend doing hunts and dungeon crawls, the city will still be miraculously unwrecked and the battle will still be going on.
• A very strange use in Final Fantasy XIII: The world is going to end, and your characters have maybe a couple of weeks, if not days to live before the phlebotinum they're carrying in their bodies turns them into mindless monsters...but they have enough time to hunt monsters for sport and fix a toy robot.
• The Mega Man Battle Network series does this a lot. Often, there will be something bad going on, like your house's kitchen being set on fire, the ventilation system for the basement you are trapped in having been shut down, the plane you are in being about to crash, or a powerful Navi is wreaking havoc on the Net. However, you can fool around all you want and when you DO start your mission, you'll arrive just in time to put an end to the problem.
  • In Mega Man Battle Network 3, Wily's evil plan can go off at any time, yet you can go back and forth between ACDC Town and Wily's fortress as many times as you want, a process that takes half an hour according to the game, and Wily still hasn't set off his plans yet.
  • Even better, in Mega Man Battle Network 2 and 4, you can take an airplane to different parts of the world every time there's something urgent.
• Near the end of Shadow Hearts, the villain proclaims that an alien of godlike power will lay waste to the world in seven days. Given that the game is set before World War I, and that you're moving between different locations in Europe, you can spend about a year's worth of time on the different subquests without the week running out.
  • The sequel, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, does the same damn thing: The Big Bad explicitly mentioned that The Very Definitely Final Dungeon will ring a 108 times before unleashing its powers. Yet, most players would leave the dungeon to do sidequests.
• In Baldur's Gate: Shadows of Amn, you can run all over the countryside, Level Grinding and building Infinity Plus One Swords—and when you finally get around to rescuing Imoen from the prison she was sent to at the beginning of the game, she'll still be fine. And when you leave the prison, you can dawdle all you want in the Underdark and then complete all the quests you missed, despite the fact that your soul has been stolen from you and her, and both of you are supposed to be wasting away and dying without them.
• In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the barriers keeping the demonic realms of Oblivion apart from your world are sundered. But nothing happens, no Daedra invade, no gates open until you carry out the second mission on the main storyline, or stumble upon a certain city, whether you do so immediately or never do. Similarly, you are told that time is of the essence in recovering the main quest item, entirely in keeping with this trope.
  • What makes it even worse is that the game is a Wide Open Sandbox. You are actually encouraged to join various guilds, explore hundreds of caves/ruins/graves/whatever and do side quests for NPCs, all the while being told that the fate of Tamriel hinges on a Plot Device you happen to carry around (and which can't be dropped except by following the main quest).
  • Worse than that, nobody seems to care about impending doom, still continuing their petty crimes and rivalries. You'd think a thousand wild theories would flourish, but no, everyone agrees it was the magical cult wot did it. Where's the "Last Seed 27 Truth Movement"?
  • One mission has a doom weapon about to enter the world through a magic portal, and if you take 15 minutes+ to finish, said weapon does enter the portal, and you die soon after. Fortunately you can easily complete the mission in well under the required time limit.
  • Probably unintentional, but Oblivion is notorious for the main quest becoming harder and harder to complete the higher level the player is, due to all enemies level and gear scaling with the player. Once you've reached a sufficiently high level, the game becomes almost impossible to beat without cheating, thus encouraging (in a roundabout way) the player to complete the main quest as quickly as possible before wondering around.
    • The enemies scale with your level. The NPCs do not.
• In Dragon Quest IV, you enter a village to learn that a girl has been kidnapped and the kidnappers demand a magic bracelet be brought by midnight. Now, the map world has day and night, and you can run around all you like, or take a few nights at the inn, or the like, before continuing. And you almost certainly must do so (since by the time you get to this point, it's too early to attempt the cave where the bracelet is). But when you finally get around to moseying into the graveyard at night, there they are, waiting for you...
• Early in Dragon Quest V, you must free the nearby haunted castle of evil spirits to...keep some kids from teasing a cat. If you die, you'll just be dragged back to the inn and will have to try again the next night. Fortunately, your dad has a cold, and won't get over it until you finish the quest.
• In Spiderweb Software's Exile (later remade as Avernum), you can take whatever time you need to get your quests done... but there's a certain city that gets destroyed by a demon only after you complete a certain semi-related activity.
  • In Exile/Avernum 3, though, things get destroyed if you don't hurry.
• Not quite a time limit, but in Jade Empire the hero needs to infiltrate a sinister assassin and spy Cult. That doesn't stop you from running around rescuing orphans, laying ghosts to rest and otherwise being a selfless noble meddling do-gooder.
  • Or, for that matter, a heartless, selfish prick who could make Ayn Rand blush.
  • Not really an example, yes the hero does need to infiltrate the cult but from a storyline perspective there's not urgent need to do so, the situation would likely still be the same in a few days as it is now.
• Towards the end of Xenosaga Episode 1, an orbital superweapon is being aimed at a planet, and you are told it will be ready to fire in 5–10 minutes. Even if you do rush through the next portion of the game, it will take at least 45 minutes to an hour or so to stop the weapon, without it ever firing. Of course, you can also go the usual route and spend hours or days leveling and working on sidequests/minigames, too.
  • However, Albedo is implied to have deliberately delayed the firing sequence to allow Jr. (and the rest of the party, but mostly Jr.) to make it in time for a suitably dramatic final showdown. The first words out of his mouth when you reach him are, after all, "You're late, Rubedo!"
  • Justified Trope when used in Episode III, since the Big Bad literally can't restart time to the beginning without two of your party members present.
• Tales (series):
  • At the very end of Tales of Symphonia, Mithos is about to leave the planet with Derris-Kharlan and the Great Seed. This removal of mana will cause both worlds to perish. Despite this apparently imminent threat, there are several bonus levels and sidequests that only open up after you open the door to the final boss fight. This one is justified by the story, however: the Cruxis Crystal containing his soul is still carried by one of your party members so he has to wait for you to reach him.
  • In the end of Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World Richter is attempting to force the door between the world of the living and Niflheim, the demon world, open to allow the demons to invade the world. After finding this out the gang splits up to prepare for the final fight (and you can visit them). After the team regroups, you can take care of all the things you forgot, including Gladsheim (a bonus level that can take an upwards of 3 hours to complete). When you finally do get to the final boss he's JUST about to complete his goal.
    • Only a couple of aversions. In the Temples of Fire and Lightning, certain delays, if taken too much, can in fact lead to the heroes being too late to grab two of the Mac Guffins, which will then be lost to them for an extended period of time. But only if time is lost in those specific ways. Other than that, you can take all the time you want.
  • At the end of Tales of Vesperia, Duke has raised Tarqaron for the sole purpose of absorbing the life of everyone on the planet in order to defeat the Adephagos. In fact, many people in the world are already feeling its effects, meaning he's already absorbing their life! Of course, you can take as long as you want to go there, and the game actively encourages you to do just that, as a huge chunk of the available sidequests only become available after this happens.
  • Tales of the Abyss has some sidequests that are only made available after seeing the last scene before the final boss fight. Even after they've trekked all the way through the final dungeon and had a pep talk about how they're going to finish this once and for all, none of the party finds it strange to then wander off to get some new clothes.
    • What makes this more amusing is that the writing feels like it was trying particularly hard to create a sense of urgency in the player. But since a lot of the sidequests have odd cut-offs for no apparent reason and a lot of them are the only way to learn about the world, its history, and most of the backstory of one of the characters, by all means run around bothering random NPCs while the land threatens to collapse, it'll wait for you.
  • In Tales of Graces, there are moments of urgency in the game where you obviously have to go somewhere...however you cannot doof around doing whatever, as the game may tell you "No that's not the right way" because the characters will know they can't just run around. However, you can take all you want in some dungeons when you attempt to stop something. The Valkines Cryas in Fendel is about to explode? Let's just run around doing requests. And you don't need to worry about Richard beating you to the Valkines Cryas - no matter what, Richard always seems to arrive a few minutes after you got there
• During the Olympus Coliseum segment of the first Kingdom Hearts, the enormous boss Cerberus can loom over Hercules's head indefinitely, inches from defeating him, until Sora gets done puttering around the other worlds and finally comes back to help out.
  • Xemnas never tries to open up the door to Kingdom Hearts until you confront him. He never does anything else inside Kingdom Hearts until you enter the door.
  • Birth by Sleep does this a few times as well, such as when Terra's escorting Cinderella to the ball - at one point, you see her surrounded by Unversed ahead of you, but since it's not part of the actual escort mini-game you can take as much time as you want getting to her.
• Eye of the Beholder and its sequels even informed the player about the amount of time that had passed while the party was resting, but no matter how many days you spent sleeping, the Big Bad never quite got around to completing his nefarious plans.
• Square-Enix is apparently very generous with time, as in the action RPG, The World Ends With You (or It's a Wonderful World), the plot involves placing missions with time limits on players; if the mission is not cleared within the time limit, then any players in the mission will be erased. However, you can deviate from the mission as long as you want. Even if the game recognizes that a full week has passed, you can take your time leveling up as much as you want, and spend time shopping as long as you want; the time limit is only plot sensitive. Funny enough, each Reaper Game is seven days as well, and the game explicitly gives you XP for your pins for up to a week of not playing your DS after saving.
• Parasite Eve has one. After beating the boss on the hospital rooftop, the dying boss gets a lesser minion to jump onto the lift where Aya is, knocks out the brakes, and the lift starts to plummet to the ground. You're forced to battle the smaller monster, which is no different from the ones in the NYPD building, only it has more HP. You could take 2 minutes or 20 minutes, it won't matter since there is no time limit and when the battle ends, Aya will always stop the lift several feet up from the ground no matter how far the lift has gone down (about to the height of a street light).
  • But right before that, the Big Bad causes a jet fighter to go on a crash course to the roof where said lift is. If you take too long to get to the lift, game over.
• Very well done in Chrono Trigger: In a game that revolves around discovering and mastering time travel, the party receives forewarning of the Big Bad's attack and has all the time in the world to prepare, as long as they eventually travel to that moment. It's possible to skip straight to the final confrontation (and get instantly splattered) for most of the game.
  • However, no matter how many times you sleep in an inn or Crono's house (or a jail cell), the Millennial Festival will not end until after you defeat the final boss.
• In Fallout 3, there comes a point in the main questline when the Enclave are about to take control of a vital piece of technology. You can of course, just say you need a while longer, and nothing will happen (apart from some new random encounters). Finally, you can pop back into the Brotherhood of Steel's Citadel, say you are ready, and emerge again to see the Enclave have set up turrets, mortars and troops everywhere during the two minutes you were inside.
  • Also, at the end when you are following Liberty Prime and the other Brotherhood of Steel troops through DC, if you are with them they will run off ahead at their own pace, with you just appearing to be little more than another rank and file trooper. However, you can wander off and explore the world for weeks and the entire Brotherhood army will just stand about and wait up for you.
  • Enterprising players have discovered that some Quest NPCs will follow you until you reach a certain destination. If you never actually go to that destination, the NPCs will simply tag along as free backup indefinitely (provided they don't die). If you do this in a specific order, you can have as many as 7 characters following you (though this prevents you from entering some quest hubs.)
• Fallout: New Vegas continues the Fallout tradition of this. The second battle of Hoover Dam is about to happen. Every major faction in the game will be participating. And yet, the battle can be delayed as long as it takes for you to do whatever else you want.
• Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door does this. You can go all the way through the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, get right up to the save point outside the Final Boss's lair... and then turn right back around, leave the dungeon, level grind, and complete all the sidequests in the game. When you return and walk through that door, it will always be just in time to stop The End of the World as We Know It. At least this isn't mandatory to complete everything, thanks to the Playable Epilogue.
  • You can do this again in the sequel Super Paper Mario.
• In Star Ocean: The Second Story, there are several instances where characters keep telling you that you need to be somewhere, to save the world and all that, but you can still wander from town to town, level grind, and make rotten shashimi to your heart's content.
• Golden Sun. In the final dungeon, you get the Teleport Lapis, finally allowing your party to warp to any town you've already visited as well as to use certain teleport circles to advance further into the optional dungeons. So, halfway through the final dungeon, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, your party can just pop on off to complete sidequests and then come back to Mars Lighthouse when they're good and ready.
  • While not mobility-based, in Dark Dawn, you get the Sol Blade right at the end of the final dungeon, which, like the Teleport Lapis, allows access into certain areas. You can piss off right then for some sidequests and come back, when a number of cities are relying on you to fire the cannon to dispel the shadows currently running amok.
• Dark Cloud 2 is an interesting example because not only does the game feature a day and night cycle, it keeps track of how many in-game days have passed since you started playing. Griffon's army is closing in on the Gundorada Workshop in the future? No problem! (Even though it appears that the game uses San Dimas Time). Monica is stuck in a volcano with Gaspard? I think I'll go catch some fish and then maybe race them! Griffon brought his flying castle through time to terrorize the present? Let's go to an old dungeon and see what prizes we can get from Spheda!
• In a sense, all of Eternal Sonata falls under this trope. You're exploring the dreamworld of a man who has less than four hours left to live, yet no matter how long you spend in any area, he doesn't get any closer to death until the story gods say he is.
  • You might be able to explain this away under the fact that time passes rather inconsistently in dreams as compared to the outside world. Who hasn't heard of a five year dream or something like that?
• Played straight in Dragon Age: Origins. The Blight never gets past Lothering until the plot advances far enough. Indeed, every location in the game seems to be frozen in one point in time, until the player does something to advance the plot.
  • You can wander around the Mage Tower all you like and you never have to worry about the demons taking it over or the Templars storming it and killing all the mages, assuming you failed. The same happens in The Fade.
  • In Awakening, the attack on Amaranthine and Vigil's Keep do not go off until you arrive to stop it.
  • Early on, when you have to light the beacon, you can look around the tower for as much loot as possible and take your time doing it even though every character up to that point has been saying how quickly this task must be done.
  • Arguably most gratuitous in the Take a Third Option quest at the end of the Redcliffe arc. You can elect to go to the mages tower instead of making a decision of whether or not to kill a possessed child or his mother... said child is possessed by a demon capable of making the dead rise. There are no consequences for this decision, you can faff around as much as you like on the trip to the mages tower and back without consequences, despite there being the very real danger of the abomination going berserk and killing everyone in the castle. And if you haven't already completed the Mage Tower main quest at this point, you have enough time to do that (including the lengthly Fade sequence) and get back to Redcliffe with no consequences.
  • What's worse is that if you do the mage origin, Wynne will ask you how long you've been away from the Tower, and your answer? One Year. Which means that it takes roughly one year just to go to Ostagar, witness a battle, pass through Lothering, spend one day at Redcliffe, and fight your way to the top of a tower. (Assuming the player proceeds in the intended order, anyway.) Given that this is about a quarter of the game, it's theoretically possible to leave elves in pain and shapeshifting into werewolves, let the dwarves continue fighting over succession, watch Arl Eamon die slowly of poison, and even keep a demon-possessed child in his room, for up to four years. The only exception is Redcliff - Take Your Time around the village, but if you leave to go anywhere else, it's completely destroyed.
• Played both straight and averted in Dragon Age II. Secondary, Side and Companion quests generally disappear when you go to from act to act. However, within a single year? The looming threat of a poisoned district, dangerous blood mages on the loose, or an insane serial killer kidnapping your mother? It's fine, feel free to wander the Dalish camp or take that random item back to that random NPC. The safety of hundreds can wait.
• Similar to the above, in Knights of the Old Republic, Darth Malak only seems to attack Dantooine after the third piece of the star forge is found. He also doesn't enter the Star Forge no matter how much you doof around playing Pazaak.
  • Taris also never gets destroyed, but it's justifiable considering that usually, the sith are looking for Bastila and won't glass the planet just yet.
  • Justified in the sequel, in which there's no real "Time limit". Sion never manages to catch up to you because he's not looking in the right places, and you alone are not enough to lure Nihilus over.
• Pokémon Diamond and Pearl games. You could start playing one now and keep hanging around breeding for movesets and Level Grinding until you've worn the DS buttons down so far you have to press them with a pencil, and Cyrus's attempt to remake the world will hover forever at the brink of success.
  • Team Galactic's attacks on the three sacred lakes also counts. In Platinum, at least, Lake Acuity can only be accessed by noncombat use of Rock Climb, which forces you to detour to Snowpoint City and defeat the Gym so that you can use Rock Climb outside of battle. Your rival will just stall Commander Jupiter at the Lake until you get there.
  • You'll also just walk in in time when Giovanni is discussing "grown-up things" with the boss of Silph Co. in the first generation games (and their remakes).
  • Being an RPG, Pokémon does this several times. In Pokémon Gold and Silver/Crystal and their remakes, you may not really be able to go on to Blackthorn while Team Rocket has taken over Goldenrod, but you most definitely can run around all you like and Giovanni never comes out of hiding. The Kimono Girls also wait for you in the remakes to perform their ritual. (Seemingly justified, though, since they specifically wanted you to battle Ho-Oh or Lugia.)
  • Technically, there is a reason you can take forever and never worry about Giovanni turning up, at least in the remakes. It's because after obtaining a Celebi, you travel back in time, beat Giovanni, and get told by him that even though he's been training since another kid beat him three years ago, he fact that you beat him means he still isn't ready to come back and take charge of Team Rocket again. Admittedly this just means you have to take your time getting a Celebi, but since it's time travel, you have all the time in the world.
  • And in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, Archie and Maxie always wait for you to arrive before sending a crazy Pokémon on the world. But seemingly justified in that your presence is requested specifically in Sootopolis by Wallace and Stephen. However, you don't need to worry about the world getting flooded or the oceans evaporating in the process, oddly enough.
• In Pokémon Black and White, the plot moves along with you, but no matter how long you spend after reaching the Pokemon League, N will never beat the Champion until the second you arrive. After that, you can dink around in the castle all you want. However, justified because N is specifically requesting you.
• Another RPG example, in Ultima VII the planetary alignment of course does not actually occur until you reach the chamber of the Black Gate.
• In Ultima Underworld II, everyone has been trapped in Castle British by the Guardian's spell, and problems like running out of food and water are explicitly alluded to. Despite this, the plot only progresses when you make it. This is particularly odd given that the game does have a time system, you can sleep to pass time and check the time on your pocket watch, but still nothing significant happens without the player character triggering it.
• In the old SSI Dungeons & Dragons RPG Secret of the Silver Blades, your party can rest for up to 99 days at a time, as often as you like, and the Black Circle will be no closer to freeing the Dreadlord from his icy prison until just before the PCs get there.
• Used liberally in Rune Factory 3: There's a giant skeleton lizard monster attacking the univir village? You don't have to actually fight it for days. No one can cook anything for fear of attracting a lion-like beast? Eh, do whatever you want. Your fiance has been kidnapped by a dragon? It can wait.
• One of the main quests in Mass Effect 1 is actually called "Race Against Time", in which you have to find the Conduit before Saren does. This quest kicks in relatively early in the storyline, and you can Take Your Time for as long as you like - no matter how much time you spend cruising the galaxy prospecting for mineral deposits between advancing plot points, an actual time limit only kicks in when you are actually within sight of your objective (at which point there's nowhere else to go anyway).
  • Furthermore, once you've stolen the Normandy and become a fugitive from the Citadel, you can complete all of the side quests you want that don't involve going back to the Citadel, even though the trip to Ilos (the aforementioned Race Against Time) is supposed to be of the utmost importance. If you do any of the sidequests that involve the Alliance, you'll be contacted by Alliance leaders as normally, even though you've stolen a prototype Alliance warship and committed mutiny.
  • Mass Effect 2 generally plays this trope straight, but it's very averted near the end of the game. After the Collectors invade the Normandy and kidnap the crew following the penultimate mission, you're given the option of starting the final mission immediately and entering the Point of No Return or choosing to wait. You can choose to wait, but you can only do one mission. More than one, and half your crew will die in a most horrific fashion by the time you get to them. Do more than two sidequests and only Doctor Chakwas survives. Considering that the aforementioned penultimate mission involves the recruitment of a character (thus restricting your time spent with them if you want the Golden Ending), this is a clear example of why so many consider this trope an Acceptable Break From Reality.
  • Also averted in The Arrival DLC. When Shepard recovers, s/he only has about an hour to destroy the mass relay before the Reapers arrive. If you let the timer run down, you get a Nonstandard Game Over.
  • Mass Effect 3 has a strange relationship with this trope: Earth and quite a few other of the most important and influential planets of the galaxy are under attack by the Reapers from literally the first few minutes of the game, and the majority of the game's atmospheric background NPC chatter and flavor text emphasises how every minute you spend running around the galaxy, people are dying in droves; the main plot-advancing missions are identified by the label "Priority." In general, Priority missions are the only ones not on a time limit - these will wait as long as the player likes, whereas optional sidequests left undone will often expire after the main storyline has progressed passed a certain point, often with tragic consequences.
• At one point in Radiant Historia, you can stay in an inn that is on fire, while the entire city is being burned down around you and the citizens are being murdered by soldiers... who are actively hunting you specifically. The innkeeper lampshades this, saying that he can't leave because another (oblivious) NPC is still there.
• In the Neopets game, The Darkest Faerie, they justify this in the last act, set in a city trapped in slowed time, meaning that you CAN Take Your Time and return in time to defeat the Big Bad
• Very blatantly used in Grandia II. The dark god has been resurrected by the Big Bad, millions of people are being slaughtered left and right, including Mareg, but not Millenia, the world is burning and the dead are rising to become his minions who are looking for the final MacGuffin held by Ryudo, the only thing keeping him from total invincibility and The End of the World as We Know It. Of course, now's the perfect time to go and insert a Bonus Dungeon that can only be accessed now! There's even a DISCLAIMER telling you not to woory about the story when you enter!
• Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has this in full force. That woman who got knifed and is lying on the street groaning? Yeah, she can wait a week or two for that first aid you're supposed to be providing.
• Persona 2: Innocent Sin plays this dead straight over the course of the game, though averts it for a handful of locations where you're on a timer (specifically, a bomb's timer). You can even take a break from the Very Definitely Final Dungeon where you're supposed to be chasing Nazis intent on bringing about The End of the World as We Know It, and go visit the final section of the optional dungeon (which only opens after you've been through the first part of the VDFD!), grind your way to the level cap, gather up everyone's ultimate weapons, waste time in the casino, and play as many magazine sweepstakes as you feel like.

Stealth Based Game

• Despite having only an "18-hour time limit", Solid Snake can run aimlessly around Shadow Moses for days in Metal Gear Solid without the terrorists making good on their threats. It's later revealed that the nuclear threat was a ruse, but you can still play way past the eighteen-hour mark with no one saying anything.
  • Snake does gets complimented about his fitness or teased about his age depending on how long the player takes to get out of the underground dock.
  • Portable Ops has this trope as well, in an interesting form. The game has a date system, it keeps track of the day, month, year and time of day because part of the gameplay aspect involves passing time to create items or using night as a sneaking tactic. But, because of the series' established continuity, and the fact that Portable Ops is a prequel, in theory Big Boss can only spend so long on this mission before the continuity calls for him to be elsewhere doing other stuff. This doesn't happen, if you take too long, the date system will merely say: "Time Paradox".
  • Subverted in Metal Gear Solid 3 a certain boss is said to be very old, only willing himself to remain alive to face his ultimate battle. If you take more then 2 weeks of real time to reach the boss after he gets in position... he'll have died of old age, forcing you to fight mooks instead.
    • However, this is also played straight, as you allegedly have one week to complete your mission, or there will be a nuclear war. However, the fact that you can wait two weeks for the aforementioned boss to die should be a clear indication that this does not happen.

Survival Horror

• In Resident Evil Zero, there is a scene where Rebecca is attacked by T-virus infected apes, and falls through the floor into a Bottomless Pit, where she hangs by one hand and calls on the radio for Billy's help. While the dramatic music plays and the radio occasionally squawks, "Billy, help!" Billy (controlled by the player) can take as much time as he needs to collect ammo and health, kill zombies and apes, and get to where she dangles over certain doom. Upon arriving, he will grab her wrist just as the strength in her fingers gives out and she falls.
  • Actually, if you take too long to get to Rebecca, she will eventually fall and die. But the time limit before that happens is fairly generous.
  • Similarly, at the beginning of the game Billy and Rebecca are on a train which abruptly starts speeding down the tracks. You can let the train run for hours with no ill effects, until you trigger the sudden, urgent need to engage the brakes.
• Deadly Premonition. Play darts, go fishing, stare into coffee, and do whatever. Just remember to get back to the investigation at some point.

Third-Person Shooter

• The lengthier half of Jet Force Gemini has the player gallivanting about the galaxy to collect pieces of a ship required to catch up with an asteroid that's on a collision course with Earth.
• Dead Space: No matter how dire the situation, Isaac Clarke can sure take his sweet time.
  • For example, there is one section of the game in which the ship drifts through a debris field with its asteroid defenses offline. Isaac can take all the time he wants, because an asteroid will only smash through the bridge once he gets there. And then, when he boots up all but one of the auto targeting asteroid guns, the asteroids will only start coming once he gets behind the manual controls of the one malfunctioning gun.

Turn-Based Strategy

• The weirdest example of Final Fantasy series goes to Final Fantasy Tactics. The game actually has date count. Year by year, the heroes get older and older. Despite this, starting his hunt for the Corrupt Church, which kidnaps his sister and tries to waken a goddess to destroy the world, at the age of 18, Ramza and his army can spend their time Level Grinding, completing subquests, getting a Secret Character, ultimate equipments, and hidden spells then finally go save his sister and the world by the time he's older than 30. Yet no one has actually aged and the situation never changes.
  • The same strange mechanic is in play for Ogre Battle 64. Your character has birthdays, complete with a party and presents. You can age Magnus to 100 years old, but the characters appear no older, his dad will still be alive, and the bad guys' plans don't advance. Except that if you do, each birthday party results in increasingly grumpy comments by all of the guests about how long this is taking.
• Fire Emblem. Unless it's a Timed Mission or there's some other time-sensitive event, chances are anyone who doesn't care about their Tactics score will stand around for hours building supports, beating up the boss for experience, arena-whoring, etc.
• At at least one point in Shining Force II, a whole castle is allegedly falling apart while the screen shakes. You can take all the time you want to leave; the screen will just keep shaking.
• Trying to leave the final dungeon in Final Fantasy Tactics A2 will start a short skit where Luso asks if it's really okay to leave...and then Cid responds that nobody really cares about the Big Bad at all, and doesn't care how long it takes to come back and fight her.
  • Which is pretty funny because when you do reach the final boss, she tells you that you're late, even if you immediately go confront her after being warped to the final area.
  • It's also Justified Trope: Illua can't complete the ritual to open the Rift and unleash Neukhia without your eponymous Grimoire, which you carry. So basically, she can't unleash The End of the World as We Know It without you showing up and letting her. Of course, Luso can't return to his own world until this happens, either, plus Neukhia has HP just like everyone else and can be defeated, so you do have some reason to do something that would otherwise be fantastically stupid.
• You can take your time before entering the final dungeon in the Luminous Arc series, even when the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
• In all of the Nippon Ichi RPGs, plot progresses at the speed which you fight the story battles, meaning that you can grind to the Absurdly High Level Cap of 9999, reincarnate, and do it again as many times as you want in the random dungeons and whatever "dire" situation is still there waiting for you to resolve it. (This gets particularly silly in Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, where Almaz is supposedly cursed to become a demon after so many hours, a time limit that you can eventually pass once you take long enough to grind.)

Wide Open Sandbox

• Pretty much the definition of this game style.
• Although John Marston of Red Dead Redemption implies that he has only a small window of time to collect his former outlaw mates before his family dies a horrible death, you are free to take as long as you need to complete his quest.
• The Grand Theft Auto series largely averts this, as it's rife with Timed Missions, but there are a few classic Take Your Time moments. In particular, throughout all the recent installments, random gang leaders instruct you to "get to the payphone in [district]," implying that they're calling right now. You, of course, can wait on it for in-game weeks, and the phone will always be ringing.
  • Humorously averted in IV. At one point early on, you can go on a date or help out your cousin from getting beaten up. If you choose the former, your cousin calls you afterwards, complaining that you didn't help him out. The mission still happens regardless, though.
    • The same thing happens at the end with Roman's wedding. It's scheduled for 10:30 AM, but if you miss it, Roman will call and complain but will allow you to come the next day. You can miss it as many times as you want.
  • If you do exceptionally poorly in a gunfight, it is possible to escape and grab some lunch (restoring your health), and buy more armor and guns before returning to the fight.
• In The Godfather: The Game, there are some missions that imply time pressure, such as going to the hospital after Don Vito gets shot, but if there's no explicit timer you can spend your time extorting businesses, taking hit contracts and generally ambling around aimlessly as long as you like.
• In Batman: Arkham City, despite Hugo Strange stating the countdown till Protocol 10 throughout the game and the fact you are rapidly dying from blood poisoning, you can pretty much do whatever you want between the main mission from completing side missions, finding Riddler Trophies, or just beat up random mooks for fun.
• In Subnautica you are infected with an alien disease which allegedly is going to kill you Real Soon Now. Oddly, though, you never show any effects other than glowing green spots on your hands, and you can spend literally months in-game poking around every nook and cranny on the sea bed without feeling the least bit inclined to, you know, keel over and die.

Non-video game examples

Film

• In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the duo keep saying how they need to get from New Jersey to Los Angeles in three days (by driving/hitch-hiking, a 2800-mile jaunt which would be murderously hard) in order to stop a movie from being made. About halfway through the real movie they stop mentioning that plot point and it never becomes relevant.
  • Averted: They don't make it in time. The first day of filming has already started when they reach the studio. Instead, Silent Bob has to quick-talk Banky into paying them likeness rights for the film in order to avoid a lawsuit the duo would probably win. They then use the money to fly all over the country and beat up the GIFTed people who had inspired them to try stopping the movie in the first place.
• A semi-example: In Spaceballs, doors are very slowly being closed on the heroes. After they jump though, the doors close quickly.
• Happens twice in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl:
  • The Black Pearl is the fastest ship in the Caribbean, and its crew is suffering horribly from a dreaded curse. Upon capturing Elizabeth Swan during a nighttime raid and thinking her the solution to their problem, they set sail for Isla de Muerta to break the curse. One would think that with the fastest ship in the Caribbean that they would be in a hurry to end their suffering, yet hero Will Turner has enough time to awake in the morning after the raid, break Jack Sparrow out of prison, help him steal the Interceptor, sail to Tortuga, pick up a crew and sail through a storm to get to the island before the start of the curse-breaking ceremony.
  • Later in the same film, Will Turner is found to be the one the pirates need to break the curse, and they maroon Jack and Elizabeth on an island. Once again Jack and Elizabeth have enough time to play on the beach, sleep through the night, get rescued by the Royal Navy and sail to the island, and still arrive in time to save Will.
    • Keep in mind, however, that "Fastest ship in the Caribbean" isn't exactly like comparing an SR-71 to a DC-3. Even the fastest sailing vessels of the era needed hours, if not days to lose a pursuer.

Literature

• You can Take Your Time in any puzzle book whose story supposedly involves a Race Against the Clock.
• In Terry Pratchett's Moving Pictures, the protagonist is aware that his universe is currently running on movie tropes and that he'd probably arrive just in time no matter what he does. He seriously considers stopping for a rest instead of running towards the climactic scene, but decides that would be "cheating".

Live-Action TV

• Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? is MADE of this trope. Jefferson will beg you to quickly find parchment so he can write a draft and run to Philly (b/c there are people there who needs it like...NOW!!) or Yuri Gagarian will plead for you to get the Chronoskimmer and get the frong out of his ship, yet you can simply leave the computer, eat lunch, watch a movie, and come back to a still patiently waiting Jefferson/Yuri.
  • Fridge Brilliance in the final mission where you're trying to find out where and when Carmen is. You catch her just in time..because guess what? You have the Chronoskimmer...you can theoretically pinpoint the exact moment Carmen appears in the present and ambush her. (Whereas before, you could only follow through wormholes)

Web Comics

• Parodied more than once in the RPG-inspired webcomic Adventurers!
• Red Mage tried (with little sucess and humorous results) to invoke this trope in the final arc of 8-Bit Theater when attempting to convince Chaos to wait a for them to level up a bit before the upcoming final battle. He actually intended for the gang to then ignore Chaos and have him wait for their return until the heat death of the universe, at which point he wouldn't be their problem anyway, but...

Red Mage: ...which I figure is fine since time is meaningless to you.
Chaos: Yes, you may do this thing.
Red Mage: Score.
Chaos: And take as long as you like. As long as it takes no more than 24 of your Earth hours.
Red Mage: But you said--
Chaos: I'M CHAOS!

Western Animation

• Not a video game, but a similar concept in Danny Phantom: Phantom Planet. Upon learning of an meteor poised to hit the earth in a week, Earth has sufficient time to panic in the streets, launch ICBMs at it, build a state-of-the-art spaceship, fly it to the meteor and back, negotiate with an Evil Overlord, fly the ship to the meteor and back again, build a phase-shift-the-Earth machine at the South Pole, and lay foot-thick cables from there to the North Pole. What did you get done this week?

Real Life

• Sir Francis Drake insisting on finishing his game of bowls before going off to confront the Spanish Armada.

"There is plenty of time to win this game and thrash the Spaniards too."

• • Note that Drake was a master seaman and navigator. He could see the English Channel from where he was standing, and knew how fast the Armada would be travelling. Even figuring in the game of bowls and the ride to the docks, he would have had plenty of time to ready the fleet and set sail.
  • There's also the minor detail that he couldn't leave immediately since the tide was against him. It's very easy to play it cool when your choices amount to 'Finish the game, or run down to the ship...then twiddle your thumbs for four hours while the tide turns.'

Exceptions

Action Adventure

• In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Link only has three days to do his stuff before the moon crashes into Termina, resulting in a Nonstandard Game Over. Although time can be slowed, fast-forwarded, and reset for his benefit, it adamantly refuses to stand still -- except during conversations, of course. Oddly, also played and justified in your ability to reset time as many times as you want, while it is unclear what effect this has on Link, the people he helps, the masks and the gods, the Mask Salesman and the outside world.
• In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, you rescue Zelda and hide her in a sanctuary, then set out to acquire the necessary Plot Coupons to get the Master Sword. No matter how fast you are completing the next three dungeons, you are informed that she was re-kidnapped just before you return. Later when are trying to re-rescue her from Aghanim, he will always have her with him and seemingly sacrifice her, no matter how fast you are to complete the dungeon.
• In the final dungeon of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, you have to rush to the roof of the castle before the bell chimes three times, or Princess Zelda will be turned to stone forever. If you take too long to get there, the bell really chimes three times, resulting in Game Over.
  • Actually, only the third bell has a time limit. The first two ones ring once you go through two of the doors in the hallway. So, technically, this is played straight AND subverted within one hallway.

Action Game

• In the Spider-Man games, if you take too long to rescue a person about to fall they will drop. However, once you've grabbed them it's treated as completely reasonable to walk all around New York with them.
  • This can lead to some pretty funny results if you're investigating a random crime, in which case you're not ever punished for failing, taking too long, or going outside the event area. As a result, you carry around things like muggers, balloons, or even a purse, which doesn't impede your abilities at all, and you can carry it back to its owner for a free health refill.

Adventure Game

• The Adventure Game Full Throttle double subverts this trope in its endgame; if you take too long during any section, the vehicle you're currently in either falls into a canyon or explodes. However, after fading to black, the protagonist, Ben, says "Let me try that again," and the game automatically restarts in the last stage of the endgame you reached. This is because the entire game is told in flashback.
• Speaking of adventure games, some of the older text-only games had time limits in spades, particularly Spellcasting 101 and its sequels, in which you had to complete certain tasks in a certain number of actions or else the entirety of the game would be impossible.
• In the shockwave-based puzzle/adventure game Lenny Loosejocks in Space, the player has four real-time hours to complete the game before the entire galaxy is nuked to oblivion.
  • You only think that will happen, but it ends up being delayed by the Y 3 K bug.
• The Last Express is an Adventure Game by Jordan Mechner that takes place entirely in a kind of real time, sped up by a factor of five. The game spans three days, though there are a couple of time skips when you are knocked out or fall asleep. You often have to be at the right place at the right time to witness a plot event. Good news is that the game has Multiple Endings. Bad news is that only four out of 34 of them don't see you dead. Luckily, the game has an absolutely ingenious retry mechanic. Fail at a task, the clock simply rewinds to a point where it is possible to complete it. You can also do this manually.
• Sierra's Quest for Glory series. Time Keeps On Slipping, but you actually get all the time you want to beat the game, with a few exceptions:
  • Quest for Glory I has no day-specific events. There is, however, the errand Baba Yaga gives you in exchange for not having you for dinner—she asks for a mandrake root from the local graveyard, and if she doesn't have it before the very next morning, "her curse turns you into a frog on the spot, and you are forced to live out your years dodging Sauruses (Saurii?) with large feet."
  • Only Quest for Glory II is on a strict timetable - you get sixteen days in Shapeir to freely do as you wish (just remember to deal with the Elementals within three days after they appear, or they'll destroy the city), followed by three completely linear days in Raseir, and the endgame takes place in one night.
  • Quest for Glory III has the character go to a meeting with Rakeesh and Rajah at day 3, after which you join Rakeesh to go to the Simbani village. After that, you can take your time doing as you wish.
  • Quest for Glory IV has Igor falling into a grave at day 5. If he's not rescued in three days, he'll die, and so will the unjustly convicted gypsy (and so will you and the townspeople, because of the gypsy's dying curse). Also, you need to speak with the Domovoi at day 5 to get the doll to give to Tanya, or the game becomes Unwinnable By Mistake. Other than that, you can waste as such time as you wish.
  • In Quest for Glory V, the storyline doesn't start until you're ready to enter the Rites of Rulership. This is explicitely told to you and your old friends advise you to take some time to relax and enjoy yourself before the Rites (and hopefully, build up skills and look for better weapons and armor). Once the fun starts, certain quests allow you to Take Your Time because only you can complete them, with others if you wait long enough, someone will beat you to them. Also, the Arena fights are set for the first 25 days of the game regardless of anything else.
• King's Quest II+ VGA mostly plays this trope straight; although most of the game is set over the course of a day, time only passes to the next stage when you get a Gem of Destiny. One exception, however, is when you must get Caldaur's tiara. If you take too long, Caldaur will appear and kill you.
  • King's Quest III averts this. There is a clock at the top of the screen at all times, and the evil wizard who imprisons Gwydion has a set schedule, which he keeps to regardless of how fast or slow you figure things out. Even if you ready all the ingredients for his demise or rather, transformation into a cat, you still have to wait until he gets home to do anything. Also, after you complete a certain event, a ship sails into the harbor and stays there for no more than twenty minutes. If you don't get on it, it leaves and the game becomes Unwinnable. Not that the game tells you this.

First-Person Shooter

• In Metroid Prime 3, during the opening sequence, a meteor begins falling toward the Federation base on Norion, and you have a limited amount of time to stop it. While at first, you can mess around, after a certain point, it turns into a Timed Mission. While there's no timer on-screen, if you disobey the words of the Female Computer Voice, you will be a very sorry Bounty Hunter indeed.
  • Most Metroid games have at least one timed mission - usually escaping the area before it blows up at the end of the game.
    • The cardinal Metroid rule is that if the game ever mentions an explicit amount of time - "Meteor impact in four minutes", for example - you better fucking heed the warning whether the clock's onscreen or not.
• Used, Averted, and Semi-Averted in Republic Commando. During a few missions you're told to rush but there is no timer and events won't happen until you trigger them. Other parts, have 'time limits' in the form of more enemies being in the area depending on how long you take to get there. And then there's the last mission of the first chapter where you're trying to get off a ship that you've sabotaged. When the mission starts you hear a voice saying '5 minutes to self destruct'. You have 5 minutes to complete the entire level, no timer is shown but every once in a while you'll hear 'x minutes till self destruct'. To make it harder you need at least 1:30 in the last room to complete it, and generally more like 3 minutes. The instant the 5m are up the ship explodes and you're squad is killed (unless you've triggered the end sequence, where the ship explodes around you but you win anyway).
• Crysis 2 has at least one aversion: In the "Power Out" level after the Ceph spear appears you must complete the objective that follows within a certain timeframe or die.

Genre Busting

• Averted hard in Pathologic. The restrictive In-Universe Game Clock is ticking constantly unless you pause the game, and it will make you hard-pressed to finish everything in time thanks to the fact that your Player Character can only walk at a leisurely pace. If you spend all day looking through garbage bins, going shopping, and sleeping, the plot will progress without you, usually locking you into an Unwinnable state (or giving yourself a Game Over).

Light Gun Game

• The Time Crisis games. You have to clear each screen of terrorists or whatever they are before a timer goes to zero - doing so causes the timer to reset. This prevents the slow and safe technique, where you hide to prevent wasted ammo and getting hit while shooting everyone. This, if you do run out of time, will take one of your lives away, and kill you if that was your last life. It also doesn't help in Time Crisis 2-4, when a supporting character will go into your range and you aren't supposed to hit him.
  • The first Time Crisis was much more stubborn with regards to time. Instead of the timer resetting after clearing a wave of bad guys, time would get added to the timer. Trouble is, the timer runs even while the player is (non-controllably) running to the next wave of bad guys - and running out of time ends the game (unless you insert another coin or two.)
    • The Silent Scope series works this way as well. Later games melded time and life into one entity (you can only receive bonus time, getting hit by an enemy costs you time, etc.)

Miscellaneous Games

• Viciously averted in Half Minute Hero. As the title suggests, you have exactly thirty seconds to grind up, buy equipment, perform sidequests, and kill the Demon Lord. You can buy extra time, but the cost goes up every time. Unlockables include a five minute mode and a brutal 3-second mode.

MMORPGs

• Played completely straight in World of Warcraft nine times out of ten. One quest in particular that springs to mind involves a competition with a dwarf as to who can kill 60 animals first. This quest is specifically designed to overlap with other "Kill X many Y" quests which have a far smaller amount of animals to kill - at certain points when you have killed a specific number of animals, the dwarf will appear, laugh at you about how many more animals he has killed, and disappear. Around the 40 point he'll take a nap, at 55 or so he'll wake up, and at 60 he'll be 2 or so kills behind you.
  • An example pointed out a few times on fansites involves Sentinel Hill, a military base and the only place in the entire Westfall region that isn't full of homeless people, burning to the ground by the Defias Brotherhood. The leader, Gryan Stoutmantle, yells at you to hurry to Stormwind and tell King Varian, telling you to take a gryphon and not waste any time. You can go anywhere on that gryphon, maybe spend a few hours in a dungeon, heck, level all the way up to the level cap if you'd like.
• Justified in RuneScape by Recipe For Disaster: the events of the quest are in a time-bubble.

Platform Game

• According to the plot of the classic Prince of Persia, the protagonist has only one hour to save the sultan's daughter. This carries over to the real world, as the player is only given one real-life hour to finish the game.
  • More specifically, the player has 60 minutes of "alive time" to defeat Jaffar. The timer doesn't count down when the player is dead (a separate, hidden timer starts upon death, and if that timer finishes, the game restarts), and since the threat to the sultan's daughter is Jaffar, defeating him stops the timer.
• Averted in Impossible Mission. Despite the main character respawning upon death, you have only eight hours to complete the game (and each death penalizes you by a few minutes). You loiter, you lose.

Real Time Strategy

• World in Conflict generally plays this realistically, rewarding you for accomplishing some tasks within a certain time-frame, and many primary objectives are timed on their own (the timer isn't always visible). However, there is one exception: the two missions before the finale are supposedly under time pressure as you need to liberate Seattle before the president is forced to nuke it to prevent Chinese landfall, but only one objective is time-based (and it has nothing to do with the primary threat).
• Pikmin is divided into thirty game days of about twenty minutes each. If anybody's not in their respective aircraft by nightfall, they're eaten. If you're not done with the game within the thirty days, your life-support system runs out and you get killed by the oxygen. C'mon, hustle! The sense of haste induced by this deadline so clashed with the rest of the game that Nintendo removed it for the sequel.
  • Although the sequel does keep the "Pikmin left outside at night will be eaten" rule.
• While your superiors in Supreme Commander will continuously badger you that it would be really smashing if you could just finish your objective, like, now (and use the new cover sheet on the TPS reports), at least the first phase of a mission will leave you enough time to you build up your defenses, construct the infinite resource generator, arm ten nuclear silos ... all while the enemy will send about ten units at a time to let you know he's still there. Occasionally, the difficulty is in not accidentally finish your objective (by, for example, building several long range artillery pieces that destroy the enemy base).

(your ACU is capturing Black Sun in the last Cybran mission)
"I would suggest you check your objectives, commander. Ops out."

• In Warhammer Dark Omen you can swerve from the main course and take on side missions, but the enemy bulk will be on their way, so when you finally arive to the site of the next grand event, you'll find the enemy force much stronger then you could've otherwise or even that the castle you were to defend was taken and now you have to take it back. You also get chewed on by your mentor for your lack of determination.

Role-Playing Game

• Some sidequests in some RPGs, such as, for example, a couple Elder Scrolls games and MMORPGs have time sensitive sidequests.
  • Exactly one quest in Oblivion has a time limit, the one to join the thieves guild, where you have to compete against someone else. The time is in fact exceptionally short - if you take too long talking to people to figure out where to go, you'll fail. Fortunately if you fail the mission, you are given a second chance.
• Subverted in Final Fantasy X-2. Waiting around too long at the final level of the game will result in the cannon being fired, causing Spira to be obliterated.
• The above-mentioned Baldur's Gate II also contains a quest chain in the Underdark wherein a series of tasks must be completed within a certain number of hours game time, or the quest chain is broken. As a result, you have to do a disproportionate amount of killing and maiming to complete the game.
  • Even earlier (though less drastic) examples include several NPCs that join for quests of their own (Minsc, Korgan and Nalia). But they will either leave the party or attack the party if you take more than ten game days to fulfill your part of the bargain.
  • In the first game, your first party members outside of Candlekeep besides Imoen- Xzar and Montaron, and Khalid and Jaheira- will tell you to go south, pestering you if you take too long and leaving if you don't listen. In the eponymous city, you will get poisoned and must find an antidote in time.
• In Betrayal at Krondor, the plot revolves around preventing an invasion of the dark elves into the human kingdom. The very first chapter has the goal of escorting a messenger who is bringing a warning about this invasion. Even though trooops are constantly amassing and preparations are being made, there is no drawback at all to taking your sweet time and exploring the Wide Open Sandbox world the game has to offer right from the beginning.
• In Fallout, the player must find a replacement water chip for his shelter's computer systems within a set period otherwise his people will die of thirst. He can, however, pay to have water taken by caravan at certain times of the month, thus extending the clock. This would, however, reduce the clock of the second time limit...
  • The game used to contain an invisible second time limit; if you waited too long, an army of supermutants would overrun the world - having water delivered to the vault would cause the mutants to be able to locate it faster, ending the game. However, fan complaints led the developers to remove this second time limit extend it to a ridiculous level (the 500 day limit became about 17 years) with a patch.
• In contrast with most RPGs, including those in its own saga, Exile III from Spiderweb Software did actually move the plot forward without you so that, if you did nothing, the cities would slowly be attacked and destroyed and its inhabitants killed (of course, crucial NPCs would survive—sometimes hidden in the same city, sometimes moving to others).
• Averted in Shadowrun for the SNES. At one point in the game, a Cortex Bomb that's been implanted in Jake's head is activated, and he finds out that he has 30 hours before it detonates. If the player does not find a way to deactivate the bomb in 30 real-world minutes, Jake dies.
  • Staying at a hotel takes just a few seconds of real-world time, whereas adventuring is in 1:1 time; thus the bomb actually takes between 30 minutes and about a half-year of game-time to actually go off. Of course, apart from the bomb, you can spend years and years at a hotel to no effect whatsoever.
• In Fountain of Dreams, the sequel to the acclaimed Wasteland RPG, the player characters must deal with the constant threat of mutation caused by post-nuclear holocaust radiation. Since mutation increases your attributes, but decreases your ability to heal from damage, if the player takes too long (especially if they wander carelessly into highly radioactive areas), the game essentially becomes unbeatable as you are no longer able to heal when hurt by enemies.
• While mostly subject to the trope, Lost Odyssey does include one sequence in which the party must prevent four giant monsters from ravaging the country of Numara. Not only must the characters chase each monster down in their Cool Boat, but while they're busy fighting one, the others keep heading for the coast, and if any of them reach land, it's game over.
• The first Valkyrie Profile has a set number of Chapters, with a set number of Periods within them. Going into a dungeon or to recruit an Einherjar takes up one or two Periods, so you've got a rather limited amount of time to adventure before the Very Definitely Final Dungeon triggers.
• Persona 3 and Persona 4 mess around with this as well. The games are run by a date system and you can only complete so many actions per day. For instance, while simple item exchange sidequests typically take up no time, social links and spending time in places advance the clock. There are only so many days in the game, ergo, you do not have infinite time to complete everything, hence necessitating more than one play through. You can, in theory, spend an infinite amount of time in Tartarus/The TV World, but this is not recommended, since you would run out of items or money and would need to progress to the next day to heal. However, this trope is in effect with respects to Tartarus in Persona 3, because Tartarus appears during the dark hour, a magical one hour block between midnight and 12:01, but you can remain in there for over an hour of game time.
  • Provided, of course, that your party doesn't get worn out from the constant battling, thereby necessitating your retreat within a reasonable amount of time. However, this is only an issue in the very early parts of the game when your characters are still at low levels, and is especially not so during the final climb to the very top where you are not allowed to leave Tartarus until the final boss has been defeated, and can take as long as you need in order to do so.
    • And (at least in FES) on the day before a boss fight, you're allowed as much time as you want in Tartarus without your party ever getting tired.
• In Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army, there's a case of this the first time Raidou travels to the Dark World, as he discovers he has to save a schoolgirl from being devoured by a tsuchigumo, but can do whatever he feels like without her getting eaten. This turns out to be justified, as the whole thing was a trap, and it wouldn't exactly work if he ate the bait.
• Egregious in Rudra no Hiho, where having only 15 days before the end of the human race is the whole plot, yet days only pass if you advance the story, not when staying the night in an inn.
• Might and Magic: World of XEEN attempted to use the availability of cash as a sort of level cap. Combine the ability to create new characters at any time, a bank with compound interest, and a job that made time pass quickly as well as netting some cash. Wait a century. Congratulations! A truly epic Take Your Time, as you recruit a brand new party to actually save the world, since the guys you started with are so old that if you let them sleep they'll never wake up.
• In Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI, there are several instances in both games where the party is forced to escape a structure or to rescue another character. Running out of time in either case will result in a Nonstandard Game Over, and you cannot save during these situations for obvious gameplay reasons. It gets worse when you realize that the timer will keep counting down even while you're fighting monsters and even Mini Bosses, and it gets even worse when you notice that the timer even counts down while you're accessing the menu/status screen or reading dialogue conversations. Better set the Battle and Message speeds to the fastest settings!
  • Final Fantasy VI even has a sequence where you want to cut it as close as possible while escaping the Floating Continent, if you jump down to the airship before the clock counts down to 5 seconds, Shadow won't be able to catch up and dies for good.
• The Suikoden series doesn't do this too often, but Suikoden II has an somewhat infamous example in Clive's sidequest to track down Elza. It requires talking to certain people across the game world within an extremely short amount of time (short for an RPG, anyway), and being late by even a second means the trail goes cold and the quest can't be completed.
  • In Suikoden I, after you win Kwada's army everybody shouts "yay! let's go and kill the bastard!", the game picks your party for the mission and your party starts to run to the castle gates. People are waiting outside to see the results of the battle. And then you can go, rest, do whatever you like and come back to attack the castle. Everyone is still waiting outside.
  • Another example from Suikoden I, you are rushing back to your castle which is under attack. Before the enemy's invasion begins, you can go anywhere you want to grind. Which is good, because when the invasion begins you have a defeat a level 40 with a single character which may have stayed at level 8 since the beggining of the game. Failing to win the duel means the good ending is gone. So good thing they give you time to grind.
• Partially averted in Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. You do have a time limit, but it's more related to how long you walk, use dragon powers, and explore around rather than how much time you take. Ryu could stand in one place and the D-counter never increases, but if he wanders around, then it increases.
• Even though Paper Mario 2 is already listed on this page with a straight example, there is an actual timed mission earlier on, at the end of the second chapter. You have to chase down The Dragon and defeat him in a certain amount of time, or you and a tree full of Ridiculously Cute Critters goes kablooie.
  • Although, the battle against him itself is not timed. He'll stop the timer after a brief cutscene where he's yelled at by the elder, then you fight him.
• In the first Wild ARMs game, there's a timed mission where you have three minutes to escape a collapsing dungeon. However, the timer doesn't count down during battles—a very important caveat, because there's a Guide Dang It bonus boss that is only available during those three minutes, who you can spend as long as you need to actually fighting.
• In Dragon Quest VIII, this is very noticeable in two places. The first is the duel with Dhoulmagus, who briefly talks to you when you open the door and makes it sound like he's gonna attack right away, but you can outright flee the room and go training. Also, Rhapthorne the dog heads into Savella Cathedral after you follow him. If you don't open the gate and head into the High Priest's room, though, you can go to Neos and train for hours on Liquid Metal Slimes, following it up with some gambling at Baccarat.
• In Kingdom Hearts, you can at the very least head over to a save point in most of the boss battles. There are some areas that won't let you go back to town, but you can still take a breather, even when facing Jafar where he's supposed to be attacking you immediately.

Shoot'Em Up

• In Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters, the Lost Technology superweapon of the Big Bad will (unless you put a stop to it) eventually begin exterminating every other race in the game before reaching Earth. Also, the rogue Slylandro Probes will become progressively more numerous if left unchecked, to the point that there are so many running around, completing the game becomes nearly impossible. Players who specialize in battling the Probes will often deliberately not do the quest because salvaging destroyed Probes can be a more efficient resource-gathering technique than mining.

Survival Horror

• The ending of Call of Cthulhu involves your escape from a collapsing undersea temple while an American sub is attempting to destroy it. At first it seems like the standard "take your time" scenario, no clock or anything and the 'collapsing fortress' we've seen in so many games. The reality however is that if you take too long the ceiling falls in on you and you die, its an extremely hard time to make actually and there are programs/cheats out there to make it easier.
• Averted in Pathologic and Dead Rising, where the games' events play out over a number of days, and it's up to the player to complete his quests on time and be present for important events.
  • Dead Rising actually plays this somewhat straight, as some of the events will be going on for an absurdly long time if you let them. The first gunfight between Brad and Carlito in the Food Court will rage for over two days unless you intervene.
• This sort of happens in Obscure: The Aftermath. When you go to rescue Jun, there's a health bar (read: timer of the non-showing you just how long you have left variety). If it runs out, it seems like nothing happens. Although it technically has an effect- depending on how much of it dwindles down. If you make it with time to spare and kill the fat thing menacing her, she falls down a hole to the Scrappy Level and subsequently dies. If she has a little health left, you see her die. If she has none left, you see the enemy and her body.
• Though the games try to imply that zombies are kicking in the doors, often you are free to take as long as you need in Resident Evil games, with one *huge* exception. If you screw around too long in the gamecube remake of Resident Evil 1, all the normal zombies you killed without destroying their heads will eventually return as much faster, much stronger Crimson Heads. You can burn the bodies to prevent this, but there isn't enough fuel to do it to all of them.
  • A second exception is the Outbreak series, where every character is infected with the T Virus (represented by a % counter) that ticks up and acts as the time limit. It ticks up much faster if wounded, so it also acts as the health bar.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Heroes of Might and Magic V usually lets you take your time, but quite a few missions have time limits of one kind or another. In some cases you are running from an enemy or need to be at a place first, or the enemy forces a decisive battle at a certain time. The Dwarf campaign in Hammers of Fate is filled to the brim with time limits.

Wide Open Sandbox

• In Starflight, the goal is to discover the cause of stellar instability moving through the sector. If you take too much gametime to stop it, your home system's sun will flare and destroy your base. (You can still "win" after that point, but you'll have nowhere to resupply your ship or make repairs in the meantime, and it makes for a somewhat bittersweet victory.) Also, depending on when you're in a given system, you may be warned of the star's instability; if you don't leave in time, the resulting activity will destroy your ship.
• Shenmue, as lampooned in this Penny Arcade comic. "I am Ryo Hazuki. I will avenge my father's death... Right after I play with this kitten! And drink this soda! And play with these toys!"
  • It is an exception because if you spend too long doing these things, the guy you're up against DOES, in fact, come back for the other mirror and kill you, resulting in the bad ending.
• Way of the Samurai has a somewhat persistent timing mechanic going that can be sped up sometimes and ignored at others, but generally speaking if you screw around you'll probably get roped into one of the crappy endings, most of which involve everyone kicking the bucket. Unless you quit early, the game ends on day 3.
• Mason can take his time in the Wide Open Sandbox game Red Faction: Guerrilla: The commander thinks Sam might be walking into an ambush—get over there right now! Or later! When you feel like it!
• Most missions in STALKER have a time limit of a day, this can get fairly annoying when you have to cross several miles on foot to complete said mission while avoiding get shot, eaten or ripped apart.
• In russian game Space Rangers nobody gonna wait until you arrive. Military forces and fellow rangers will launch assaults by they own, so will do your enemies. Not only that, but, depending on the game difficulty settings, one of the warring factions can actually win if you linger long enough.