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Perfect Dark
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Perfect Dark (Video Game)
The future of shooters is Dark.

It's dark.
It's very dark.
She's perfect.
PERFECT DARK
— Opening sequence of Perfect Dark on Game Boy Color.

Perfect Dark is a series of First-Person Shooter video games developed by Rare, initially created as a Creator-Driven Successor to Rare's previous FPS classic GoldenEye. Taking place in a MegaCorp dystopian future and starring Joanna Dark, an agent for the Carrington Institute fighting against the rival dataDyne Corporation.

The first game, Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64, released in 2000. Shortly after Joanna has graduated the training program, she is sent on a mission to meet an insider from the dataDyne Corporation. The events that unfold quickly reveal a plot against the US President involving dataDyne, the NSA, and a mysterious third faction, which soon escalate even further as Joanna finds herself in the middle of a war between two alien races who have allied themselves with different factions on Earth. While published by Rare, the game is notable for being the first M-rated game ever to be distributed by Nintendo creating some light controversy among consumers and industry analysts due to this clashing with the company's family-friendly image.

Released the same year was an all-but-forgotten Game Boy Color game of the same name that was actually a prequel showing Jo's training and first mission with the Institute. Rather than being an FPS title like its home console counterpart, is played mostly from an overhead view with Metal Gear-inspired gameplay, along with a mix of stages involving flying/driving vehicles from a similar top-down perspective, arcade-style first/third-person shooting, and even Simon Says-esque memory puzzles. It also has full-motion cutscenes and digitized voice-acting provided by much of the same cast as the N64 game.

The third game in the series, Perfect Dark Zero, was a launch title for the Xbox 360 in 2005. Serving as yet another prequel, Zero is set three years before the original game and has Joanna working as a bounty hunter with her dad, setting out on a mission to rescue a defecting dataDyne scientist, before getting mixed up with the Carrington Institute. While well-reviewed, fans deemed it an underwhelming follow-up to its predecessor. The time period in between the two games is covered in a pair of novels, Initial Vector and Second Front, as well as the comic series Janus Tears.

In March of 2010, the original game was rereleased for Xbox Live Arcade, with new features such as updated graphics with 1080p resolution and eight-player online multiplayer. Both console games were later re-released again for Xbox One on 4 August 2015 as part of the Rare Replay compilation. The original game was also added to the Nintendo 64 suite of video games within the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack, requiring the download of a separate Mature app to play it due to its age rating.

After being dormant for fifteen years, a new installment in the series, simply titled Perfect Dark, was announced at the 2020 Game Awards for the Xbox Series X|S. Rather than being developed by Rare, it was planned to be the first project of Microsoft's then-new first party studio The Initiative, and was described as a "AAAA" game. However, the project would enter Development Hell shortly after its reveal, releasing only a single trailer in June 2024 before being cancelled in July 2025 and The Initiative was shut down.

Games with individual pages:

Includes examples of:

    open/close all folders 

    A - C 
  • 11th-Hour Superpower:
    • The RC-P120 comes at just the right time in one of the game's hardest level.
    • In Mission 1-3: datadyne Extraction, you can destroy the hovercopter with normal gunfire, but why risk losing most of your life and ammo when you can use the rocket launcher that was just conveniently assembled on the top floor?
  • Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The Sewers map from multiplayer. Chicago's also got some, but they're not quite as big.
  • Action Dress Rip: When fighting to defend the Carrington Institute from the joint Skedar/dataDyne forces, Joanna is wearing a long dress (because she was to attend a three-way meeting between the President, Carrington Institute and the Maians), which she rips towards the end of the intro cutscene.
  • Action Girl: Joanna, obviously. She has an A++ rating making her The Ace among all other Carrington Institute operatives. Her credentials even extend into cutscene territory at the end of the first mission when she runs, jumps into the Institute dropship and spins around to effortlessly kill two of Cassandra's bodyguards with one shot each. Cassandra's Amazon Brigade also qualify.
  • Adaptation Dye-Job: Jo has longer red hair in Zero, despite having short brown hair in the original.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Inverted. dataDyne developed a super-advanced codebreaker A.I. to figure out the programming on the Cetan ship. It unintentionally (and unwantedly) developed sapience and a conscience, making it rebel against its creators while taking the name of Dr. Caroll. Zero all but outright states this is in part because they decided to base the A.I. after the personality of an actual Dr. Caroll, one of their top scientists who had tried to defect but was killed before Joanna or the Carrington Institute could extract him.
  • Air-Vent Passageway: Several levels have them, including Area 51, and some of the multiplayer levels.
  • A.K.A.-47:
    • A selection of weapons from GoldenEye are unlockable, and not only are their names different from their Real Life counterparts — they're also different from its own made-up names. The Klobb in particular becomes the "KLO-1313" in Perfect Dark, despite already having had a fictional name.
    • The game also features a few straighter examples: the Falcon 2 is a Colt Double Eagle, the CMP150 is a barely-disguised Steyr TMP, the AR-34 is clearly the French FAMAS assault rifle painted in sci-fi colours, and the DY357 Magnum resembles a Colt Anaconda.
    • Also the RC-P90 in Zero, which also has a few more straight examples of this (its version of the SuperDragon, for instance, is clearly a G36K, while its plasma rifle is another, more direct copy of the FAMAS), as well as one aversion (the M60 retains its name).
  • Alas, Poor Villain: Both Trent and Cassandra get this treatment: two Smug Snakes who serve as main antagonists and die before the story's conclusion. Trent was a willing pawn in the Skedar's schemes, but overestimated his own usefulness to them, and dies in a "You Have Failed Me For The Last Time" moment establishing The Reveal of the Skedar being aliens. Cassandra serves as the primary early antagonist and the catalyst for much of the plot, only to be betrayed by the Skedar as soon as You Have Outlived Your Usefulness; she promptly pulls a Heel–Face Door-Slam Heroic Sacrifice, but explicitly makes it clear she's doing it for revenge, NOT redemption.
  • Alien Abduction: Joanna and Cassandra are taken prisoner by the Skedar near the end of the game; Cassandra gets herself killed in an ill-thought-out attempt at revenge to give Jo a chance to take the Skedar down.
  • Alien Autopsy: The Area 51 stage of the original game has a level which involves rescuing an alien from vivisection, and a bonus level involves that alien sabotaging the autopsy of his already dead kin.
  • Alien Blood:
    • Maians have green blood.
    • Averted by the Skedar, who have red blood, albeit of a slightly different tint than human blood. This also applies to Mr. Blonde, acting as the first confirmation that he's actually one of that species rather than a real human.
    • Paintball Mode (once a cheat in GoldenEye) takes this to a whole new level of absurdity with everyone bleeding multicolored rainbow blood. The same effect happens to bullet holes on surfaces, walls, etc.
  • Alien Sky: The Skedar homeworld has a blue sky tinged with pink and three suns.
  • Aliens Speaking English: The Skedar subvert it; they speak English just fine in their Mr. Blonde disguises, but speak Black Speech in their normal alien forms. The Maians, however, play it straight.
  • Aliens Steal Cattle: The Skedar are implied to be behind the "cattle mutilation" phenomenon.
  • All There in the Manual: The game has an unlockable feature which provides more background information on the game's plot and setting.
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us: One of the later levels of the original takes place in the Carrington Institute as dataDyne troops and Skedar soldiers make one last spiteful attack. Notably, it almost succeeds; while most of the Institute's personnel are able to escape, dataDyne captured their star agent who spent the last 3/4ths of the game wrecking their plans, and if not for Cassandra bailing her out, would have had Earth dead-to-rights.
  • Always Chaotic Evil: The Skedar in the first Perfect Dark game are an alien entity that are hostile to the other factions in that game. Trent Easton gets "introduced" to one after Mr. Blonde reveals his true form as a Skedar after Easton outlived his usefulness.
  • Amazon Brigade:
    • In Zero, Zhang Li's last line of defense is a platoon of about 20 elite female troopers armed with cloaking devices and plasma rifles in the penultimate mission. They're super annoying, since getting killed by them kicks you all the way back to about halfway through the level.
    • Cassandra de Vries' bodyguards are similar. They're all female, and they all have shotguns. They're also more likely to pull out Falcon 2s when disarming them.
  • Ambiguously Jewish: Jonathan's last name is apparently Steinberg and he has curly hair. Judging by his accent, he's American, so he very well could be Jewish.
  • Amusing Alien: Elvis, Joanna's Non-Human Sidekick, who introduces himself with an appropriate Elvis pose, tosses out Bond One-Liners, and who is also Intrigued by Humanity.
  • Ancient Astronauts: Both the Cetans and the Maians have visited Earth in the past.
  • Annoying Arrows:
    • Enemies will keep fighting even if they've been turned into a pincushion by crossbow bolts or thrown knives... but since the former are laced with a tranquilizer (which takes them down instantly with just one bolt) and the latter are poisoned, they won't be fighting for long.
    • The Crossbow has an instant kill function, which kinda averts the trope.
  • Arbitrary Weapon Range: Easily seen in the first Area 51 mission, where there's a clearing in front of the base covered by a guard tower. If you hang back in the tunnel and shoot at the guards in that tower with something like the Falcon 2, they will get out of the tower to rush at you before opening fire. If, however, you zoom in on them with the MagSec 4, then they'll just hang back and shoot you from the tower.
  • Armor Is Useless:
    • In the first game, body armor and helmets seem to be fashion accessories instead of protective equipment, as the easily killed dataDyne Troopers and G5 SWAT Guards can attest.
    • Averted in Zero. Enemy armor provides some extra protection for them, though it usually only takes a few bullets to break it. Helmets do prevent you from killing enemies with a single headshot from anything short of a high-powered rifle.
  • Armor of Invincibility: The Super Shield cheat. In Multiplayer, Turtle Sims spawn with one, but...well, see the name.
  • Arrow Cam:
    • The Slayer rocket launcher's secondary function is a fly-by-wire missile you steer while looking through a camera on it. Sadly, it can only be used in a few levels and weapon training, even with the All Weapons cheat. And in MP, but using it there means people can look at your screen and gauge when you're standing when you fired it, so you should really only use the secondary function when you're playing against bots.
    • In Zero, since there's only the one (non-alien) rocket launcher, its targeted rocket secondary was replaced with another fly-by-wire missile. It's not as ridiculous since it flies at a set speed rather than slowing down whenever you turn.
  • Artificial Brilliance:
    • Elvis is a particularly good shot with the Farsight. On "Deep Sea", he can take care of the enemies in the first section all by himself if you let him.
    • Perfect Sims and Dark Sims seem to know exactly where all the good weapons and shields are on multiplayer and always have perfect aim. It's not really so much brilliant, though, than The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard cranked up to eleven.
    • Dark Sims turn the cheating to an art form; they move faster than a human player, fire their weapons faster, have frame-perfect reactions (to the point it's not unheard of to take hits before they even visibly round a corner) have full, real-time knowledge of both all players' locations as well as weapon spawns and timers, reload faster than humans and, most damningly of all, can full-on teleport when out of all humans' lines of sight. It's worth noting, the Sim description explicitly describes them as having superhuman capabilities that break the rules of the game, and warns that fighting them is only for the most capable of players.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • Meat Sims are the easiest AI enemies you can play against in multiplayer. They wander around drunkenly, ignoring weapons (and oftentimes you), and can barely hit the room they're standing in.
    • Try putting a Meat Sim adversary in a match with automatic weapons... and watch them trace a perfect outline of you on the wall behind you in bullet holes.
    • In an accidental example, none of the AI can detonate Remote Mines. They can throw a Dragon in secondary, but only if it's empty; amusingly, they treat the Laptop Gun the same way, meaning you might sometimes encounter sentry guns that don't fire. They also can't see any form of trap and will walk straight into a Proximity Mine left in the middle of a corridor. Nor are they able to use these traps, themselves. Because they will merrily blow themselves up on mines you set, even Dark Sims become pathetically easy in this case.
    • Generally your single-player buddies (Jonathan and Elvis) are very handy shots, but they will occasionally wander right into your line of fire or otherwise act like idiots just so you can fail the mission. The bot ally in co-op behaves the same way.
    • Dr. Caroll in dataDyne Central: Extraction. Not only will he randomly hover right in the line of fire, but he also lacks the combat support given to you by Elvis or Jonathan. Many players simply leave him in the foyer while tackling the rest of the mission.
    • The President also has a tendency to run into areas where he is vulnerable in Air Force One: Antiterrorism.
    • The inability to avoid explosions has carried over from GoldenEye. Case in point: This video.
    • Similarly, if a Simulant is given an explosive weapon, such as a Devastator, they will not factor in splash damage when using one. They'll often die from the explosion and any allies, with the scores potentially going into the negatives.
  • Artificial Gravity: Described as such onboard the Skedar ship, though obviously due to game limitations, there's no turning it off or sabotaging it. This tech (provided to the Institute and dataDyne by their respective allied extraterrestrial factions) also powers the various devices through the game, such as the hovercrate, hoverbike and hovercopter.
  • Ascended Meme: One of the possible name for multiplayer bots in Zero is "Wallguy", referencing a meme spawned from an infamous pre-release screenshot of the game◊ and the arguing it caused on several video game forums.
  • Attack Drone: The police robot from "Chicago Stealth"; it deals horrendous damage and is almost invincible. Thankfully, it has a predictable (and easy-to-avoid) patrol route, and one of the objectives on higher difficulties is implementing Car Fu to destroy it. They also show up in Alaska in Degraded Boss form; they deal much less damage, are easy to kill, and slowly move towards you rather than following a path. Although annoying, they aren't very dangerous.
  • Autobots, Rock Out!: The game has different music for each level, but is perhaps unique for having an amped-up version for most, if not all of these themes that kicks on most missions once the action really revs up (i.e. when Joanna's cover is blown, when a bomb is about to go off, and so on).
  • Auto-Doc: The Alien Medpack that you use to revive Elvis in Area 51. It's very convenient as you can just leave it to work and focus on defending against the waves of guards rather than having to focus on waking him up yourself.
  • Awesome, yet Impractical: The Skedar Reaper, being an alien chaingun-drill combo, at least in the hands of a player. Even with two hands, your bullets will spread wildly across the entire screen. Justified in that it's supposed to be used by the much stronger Skedar. When they wield it with one hand, they have almost perfect accuracy, even on the lower difficulties; additionally, the Grinder mode is useful for stunlocking enemies at close range.
  • Badass in Distress: Joanna gets abducted by the Skedar after the attack on the Carrington Institute.
  • Bag of Spilling:
    • Played straight in Perfect Dark. For some reason, the weapons that you get will never carry over to the next mission. For instance, Joanna can pick up a CMP150 in Mission 1-1, but will no longer have it at the start of Mission 1-2, despite nothing having happened between the two other than an elevator ride.
    • Zig-zagged in Perfect Dark Zero. At the beginning of each mission, you can choose which weapons you start with. The only requirement to be able to pick a weapon is to have carried it to the end of a previous mission.
  • Bait-and-Switch Gunshot: Joanna meets Jonathan this way when he shoots an Area 51 guard for her.
  • Beam Spam: Several alien weapons are good for this. Some have special secondary properties, such as explosive shots for the Phoenix, high-penetration rounds for the Castillo NTG and the deadly charge shot for the Mauler.
  • Beating a Dead Player: Just like in GoldenEye, except that you don't get a third-person replay from three different angles.
  • Benevolent Alien Invasion: The Maians planned to do this eventually, but left the humans to develop on their own for a few millennia. The end of the main plot revolves around the Maian ambassadors finally coming down to meet with the authorities in the White House and establish peaceful connections. Then the game plays the evil Alien Invasion straight when the Skedar come rolling along.
  • Benevolent Architecture: Most levels have plenty of pillars and walls to hide behind.
  • Benevolent Boss: Carrington. He takes Joanna's operational concerns seriously (even though he knew it was more important for them to help the Maians before the President) and shows true concern for her in his capacity as Mission Control.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: Just because the Maians are cute and fond of humans doesn't mean they're pacifists. The deadly FarSight XR-20 alone proves they know how to use their weapons. They fought a space-faring race who relish war into a stalemate. Once the sacred Skedar shrine is uncovered, they unleash their unbridled fury upon the extremists, perform regicide, and flatten the place to cripple their enemy's morale forever-after.
  • Big Bad: dataDyne in the series, and the Skedar in Perfect Dark.
  • Big Damn Fire Exit: The Cetan ship has a sequence like this.
  • Big "NO!": The guards will sometimes let loose with one of these when they are killed.
  • Big "YES!": Joanna gives one when she kills the Skedar leader. Which leads to a Little "No" when the bombardment starts immediately after.
  • Bioluminescence Is Cool: The Cetan ship. Most of the lighting inside it appears to be due to this effect.
  • Bizarrchitecture:
    • "Skedar Ruins". There are collapsed archways and off-kilter floors all over the place, as well as random chasms and dead ends.
    • The Skedar live on an earthquake-prone planet with very hostile conditions according to supplementary material. The mess makes sense once you take that into account.
  • Blackout Basement:
    • "dataDyne Central: Extraction" begins with a section in pitch blackness which requires the use of night vision. de Vries' bodyguards will Invoke it on purpose when they ambush you at the rooftop access, using night-vision goggles to see where you are. "Area 51: Rescue", "Deep Sea: Nullify Threat" and "Skedar Ruins" have sections where the lighting flickers on and off.
    • The "Perfect Darkness" cheat takes this up to eleven — every single level will be pitch black (with flickering lighting if indoors). It's nearly impossible to get around without using Night-Vision Goggles.
  • Blasting It Out of Their Hands: If you're skilled or lucky enough, you can shoot firearms right out of enemies' hands, which will leave them vulnerable as they run over and pick it up. Getting it first is often enough to get them to surrender. Sadly, this feature seems like it is too "complicated" to include in most modern games. Same thing with the ability to make the guards limp when you shoot them in the arm or the leg.
  • Bling-Bling-BANG!: Like GoldenEye's Golden Gun, Trent has a gold-plated magnum revolver with a leopard skin grip. It's not just for show either, as it's made to fire special rounds — not only are they armor-piercing, but they're designed to shatter into shrapnel on impact, ensuring every bullet is lethal.
  • Bloodier and Gorier: The blood is ramped up quite a bit from GoldenEye, where enemies bled if shot, but it just stained their clothing. In Perfect Dark, they often leave bloodstains on various surfaces; if you shoot an enemy in the head, blood will spray all over the wall opposite the direction from which you shot them. Enemies dealt lethally by the player often have a puddle of blood form under their corpses. This is partly why it was rated M when GoldenEye was only rated T.
  • Blown Across the Room: The inevitable reaction by NPCs to your deadly arsenal of explosive weapons.
  • Body Armor as Hit Points: A shield generator will completely protect you. Even from explosions. Armor in the second game averts this, as most damage taken while wearing it also chips away at your health and melee hits bypass it entirely.
  • Bond One-Liner:
    "Sorry, gotta shoot!"
    "Lights out!"
    "Accidents will happen ..."
  • Boom, Headshot!:
    • In the original game's campaign, a headshot is an instant kill—all enemies, friends, and NPCs alike.
    • A headshot resulting from the DY-357 Magnum and Callisto NTG will score a One-Hit Kill in the Combat Simulator.
    • The equivalent for this on the Skedar is to knife-slash (from behind) or carefully shoot the tentacle/tail at their backs for a One-Hit Kill (rarely, an extremely accurate player can get it from a front-facing angle and using, say, a sniper rifle). Justified, because they are actually wearing biomechanical suits and the tail is the only part of the true form of the Skedar which the suit doesn't conceal and protect. Accordingly, every other part of their body including their nominal "heads" can ordinarily tank quite a few shots including from assault rifles.
  • Boring Yet Practical: The Falcon 2, your default weapon, is fairly accurate, has a good rate of fire, and is easy to get headshots due to little sway. There's plenty of ammo for it, too. The CMP150 is a bit weak for an automatic weapon, but every dataDyne goon carries it, so there's plenty of ammo. You can dual wield both of these weapons, too.
  • Boss in Mook Clothing:
    • The dataDyne captain in "Mr. Blonde's Revenge".
    • In "Maian SOS", there is a guard who is armed with dual golden magnums. Having him become alert to your presence may quickly result in you getting killed. note 
  • Boss Remix:
    • The final battle's music features the game's main theme.
    • In Perfect Dark Zero, the music for the second and last fight against Mai Hem is a combination of the game's main theme and Mai Hem's theme. The music for the final showdown begins with a remix of the original Perfect Dark theme.
  • Bowdlerise: In the Japanese release of the original game, several elements in the game were censored or removed.
  • Boyish Short Hair: Joanna has a pixie cut in the original. Though in the prequel, she has longer hair that goes down to her shoulders.
  • Brick Joke: "Not forgetting the President, of course."
  • Brutal Bonus Level: All of them on Perfect Agent, especially "Maian SOS" (playing as Elvis, beginning with half of your health missing) and "The Duel" (where Joanna is a One-Hit-Point Wonder, regardless of the difficulty setting).
  • Bug War: The war against the Skedar is like this, despite their not actually being bugs.
  • Bullet Proof Human Shield: All NPCs will act as this unless using a weapon with very high penetration, such as the DY357 revolver or the FarSight. This can be handy when one needs to be used as a meat shield.
  • The Can Kicked Him: A guard can be found unconscious and face-down in Carrington's bathroom in the Villa level.
  • Can't Kill You, Still Need You:
    • The first mission requires you to break into Cassandra's office to knock her out and steal her necklace. What's stopping you from just blowing her brains out so that she can't cause any further trouble for the Carrington Institute? Her necklace has a code key to access the basement laboratories, and it will only operate while she's still alive.
    • On Perfect Agent in "Carrington Villa: Hostage One", one of your objectives is to knock at least one guard unconscious instead of killing him so that he can be captured/interrogated later.
  • Cap: You can plant a large number of Remote Mines but the program and hardware limitations won't allow all of them to detonate at once (otherwise it would've froze or crashed the game). Instead, the remote mines will detonate in sequence going from the first mine that was planted to the last one.
  • Captain Obvious:
    • Joanna, according to her inner monologue.
      "They'll be unable to conduct operations without any power."
    • There's also:
      Elvis: I'm alive! I thought I'd be chopped up like the others by now. [notices Jonathan] You're from the Institute, aren't you? I recognize you from before. You helped me. Thank you.
      Joanna: You... you speak our language?
      Jonathan: Watch her, she's sharp.
  • Captain's Log: A few levels begin with Joanna recording one.
  • Casual Danger Dialogue: Many things Joanna and Elvis say to each other.
    Elvis: Look out, Joanna! I think they may be angry...
  • Casual Interstellar Travel: The Skedar Assault ship ends up near a triple-stellar system (that is somehow habitable to Joanna) likely a few hours after the Institute attack. The Skedar obviously have super FTL travel down pat.
  • The Cavalry: The Maian troops that show up to assist Joanna in "Attack Ship: Covert Assault".
  • Ceiling Cling: In the opening cutscene of "dataDyne: Extraction", Joanna hides above the elevator door to ambush the guard that waits at the bottom. He walks into the seemingly Empty Elevator, baffled, and she pistol whips him from above.
  • Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: Joanna seems to be able to switch outfits between levels effortlessly.
  • Charged Attack: The Skedar Mauler's Secondary Fire. Unusual in that the charge happens automatically when not firing: the gun consumes a few extra bullets (up to five) and starts glowing red.
  • Chasing Your Tail: The final boss fight contains some of this, since he will occasionally cloak and chase you around the room. The only way to avoid it is to run around in circles.
  • Checkpoint Starvation:
    • In the original game, being built on GoldenEye 007's engine, there are NO continues; die, and you restart the whole mission. On higher difficulties and longer missions (like Deep Sea or Skedar Ruins), this can mean losing a lot of time and work.
    • In the Game Boy Color game, checkpoints only occur after you reach a very specific part of a mission, such as a boss battle or when you pass through certain doorways. Good luck getting far enough to reach those points without dying.
    • Perfect Dark Zero has only two checkpoints per mission; one at the very beginning, and one about 3/4ths through or before the end level boss fight. This is fine for the shorter missions, but very noticeable on the longer ones.
  • Chekhov's Gun: Several:
    • The backup of Dr. Caroll.
    • The recording of the meeting in the G5 Building.
    • The shield tech item from the second level that dataDyne is working on. Guess what the troops that storm the CI later in the game have?
    • The K7 Avenger is also first seen on that level as a prototype, and is later used as the primary assault weapon for the rogue NSA troopers as well as dataDyne's forces.
  • Cherry Tapping:
    • Tranquilizer weapons in the first game. The sedation feature, which causes the screen to blur and darken each time you're punched or hit by a tranq weapon, is one of the quirkier features of the game, largely because your sedation level doesn't drop to zero when you're killed. You'll respawn as trippy as you were before your buddy finished you off. Better hope it wears off before he finds you again!
    • The N-Bomb (Neutron Bomb) is a special grenade that explodes with a very persistent, light-absorbing sphere of energy that can completely mess up your vision and kill you (albeit very, very slowly). It is also the only weapon in the game that bypasses shields.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The Skedar. They fully intended to test the Weak Nuclear Force Decoupler weapon from the Cetan Ship on Earth, taking out dataDyne and the NSA along with it, before using it on the Maian homeworld. While that plan didn't work out due to intervention by their enemies, they still murdered Trent for failing the presidential cloning gambit and abducted then eventually executed Cassandra for failing to have dataDyne successfully raid the Cetan Ship.
  • City Noir: The Chicago level, due to the evocative soundtrack, sense of griminess and rain among other things.
  • Code Name:
    • Joanna gets Agent Dark for the most part in the first game, with one or two occurrences of a Title Drop instead.
    • Elvis is Protector-1.
    • In the first few levels of Zero, Joanna and Jack both get codenames, respectively "Dark Zero" and "Point Forward".
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: dataDyne troops wear dark blue or black while CI agents wear light blues and greys. Even your crosshairs are colored to reflect this (red for enemies; blue for civilians/friendlies).
  • Combat Stilettos:
    • Cassandra's bodyguards wear high-heeled boots for some reason.
    • Joanna wears heels herself in a few of her outfits — not that it seems to slow her down, though.
  • Comm Links: How you receive your orders from Carrington. Several missions will have your signal jammed, with a secondary objective to destroy the interference so you can communicate with your boss again.
  • Compensating for Something: Joanna doesn't like the fact Jonathan uses a magnum for covert work and secretly accuses him of this.
  • Competitive Multiplayer: The game has a "combat simulator" in which players can set up many different combat scenarios, involving up to four human players and eight "simulants" (computer-controlled bots). The available game modes are:
    • Combat: The standard Deathmatch mode
    • Hold the Briefcase: Players try to find and hold a briefcase, scoring points based on the amount of time the briefcase is held. Other players/teams try to kill the briefcase holder to pick up the case and score points of their own.
    • Hacker Central: Players must find a "data uplink" and use it to interact with a "terminal" to score points, while preventing the other player/team from doing scoring points the same way.
    • Pop a Cap: One player at random is randomly assigned as the victim; the victim scores points by staying alive, while other players score points by killing the victim.
    • King of the Hill: A random section of the map is designated as the hill; players/teams score points by occupying the hill for a certain amount of time with no enemies present.
    • Capture the Case: A capture the flag game in which players must go to the enemy base, retrieve the suitcase there, and return it to their own base to score points (while preventing the enemy from scoring points the same way).
  • Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: Dr. Caroll is infamous for this.
    "Do you actually know what you are doing?"
    "We're going to the helipad, I assume?"
  • Computer Equals Monitor: In Area 51, apparently all records are kept on the monitor of a single computer note . As well, destroying the monitor of a mission-critical computer will result in a failure.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
    • The toughest of the AI opponents you can fight against in multiplayer are Dark Sims, who move faster than you, always get headshots with hitscan weaponry even if they don't actually have a line of sight to your head, spawn armed with the best weapon in the current setup, and teleport when you aren't looking.
    • The computers. Even the super-easy MeatSims can fire semi-automatic weapons faster than you (that includes magnums), reload every weapon at the same speed, use lock-on weapons while moving, and have perfect aim with non-hitscan weapons. PerfectSims also act as if they can see the radar even when it's off.
    • One former Rare developer has said that enemies were even harder in pre-release builds of the game: in one version, DarkSims had the ability to strafe out from behind cover, fire, and move back behind cover — all within the space of three frames!
    • In missions that have respawning enemies, it's important to complete your objectives as soon as possible or prevent an alarm from being raised as the spawned enemies will always know where you are. This can be averted with cloaking but only if you use cheats to get cloaking outside of Mission 7. Disguises will also work as long as you weren't seen during changing and your cover isn't blown.
  • Conspicuous Trenchcoat: Joanna wears a trench coat in "Chicago: Stealth", as well as all of the CIA and FBI personnel, which ironically makes them stand out even more.
  • Conspiracy Kitchen Sink: Apparently Area 51, The Greys, Ancient Astronauts, Reptilian Conspiracy and a Secret War are all true and related to the Roswell Incident.
  • Container Maze: "Area 51: Rescue" begins with a section in a warehouse.
  • Contemplate Our Navels: Right at the end of Zero, Jo and the final boss all of a sudden get philosophical about the nature of death and decay.
  • Continuing Is Painful: In the Game Boy Color game, even if you die after reaching a checkpoint, your health will remain exactly as it was when you first reached the checkpoint instead of completely refilling (for instance, if your health was at 45%, then it will still be at 45% when you retry). Also, your ammunition won't be refilled, but at least you won't lose weapons you've already collected until the mission is complete and you've moved on to the next one. Also, there are health pick-ups in the game, and your health will be restored at the start of the next mission
  • Continuity Nod: Zero has two scientists in a Mayan shrine, arguing over whether the Mayans were visited by Gods or Aliens, and who exactly gifted them with the MacGuffin Zhang Li wants so badly. It's clear they are talking about the aliens.
  • Continuity Snarl:
    • The Game Boy Color prequel takes place in 2022, one year before the N64 game, and contradicts the main game's story that Joanna's rescue of Dr. Carroll was her first mission since she gets sent on a mission in the GBC game to destroy a cyborg manufacturing plant in South America. She also meets Elvis in that game when he rescues her from dataDyne capturing her on the Pelagic I ship (though he doesn't give her a name), and she also learns the name of the Skedar alien race's name, both of which don't match well with the N64 game as the existence of aliens was a surprise to her there. Finally, the GBC game ends with Joanna stopping a dataDyne attack on the Carrington Institute, which if canon would make Carrington the most careless fool that he took no measures to secure the Institute afterward since dataDyne also launches a major attack against it late in the N64 game as well.
    • Perfect Dark Zero, another prequel set two years earlier than even the GBC game, manages to contradict both previous games by turning her into a bounty hunter who's done the type of missions seen in the original N64 game before she even joined the Institute... which she did in 2020 — the year the game takes place in. So, the whole angle of her being an inexperienced, yet extremely skilled agent is entirely cut off at the knee at this point.
    • The books that were written to promote PDZ don't mesh very well with the games, either. Just as with the 2005 prequel, the books would indicate that she had done several missions for them, despite the original game clearly highlighting that Joanna was a recent graduate from the Institute's training program. The books also indicate that Carrington was practically in love with Cassandra and portray him as blindly idealistic, which don't match with his game portrayal. Unless the books' events caused him to lose both. Finally, Jonathan in the game is the institute's top infiltrator, while the books portray him as the institute's security chief with no sense of subtlety. Though those could be different Jonathans.
  • Cool Bike: The hoverbike from Area 51 is surprisingly useful. It's fast, indestructible and you can fire weapons while sitting on it. It can even be used in later levels!
  • Cool, but Inefficient:
    • The Laptop Gun's secondary turret tends to be this. It will usually expend much more bullets killing mooks than a decently accurate player would. However, it remains useful for difficult room clearing situations which would otherwise expose the player to a ton of fire.
    • The K7 Avenger, suffers from having a 25-round magazine which can be depleted within seconds due to the weapon's very fast 950RPM rate of fire. The reloading of his assault rifle is a slow and frequent annoyance that can be potentially fatal in a heavy firefight.
  • Co-Op Multiplayer: In addition to the various competitive multi-player modes, the main campaign can be played cooperatively by two players; the second plays as Joanna's sister, Velvet Dark. The Combat Simulator also has a series of co-op challenges, various combat scenarios of increasing difficulty.
  • Corporate Warfare: dataDyne is not a company that plays well with others. It's taken most literally in the penultimate level of Zero, which is an actual battle between them and the Carrington Institute.
  • Corridor Cubbyhole Run: "dataDyne: Extraction" has a sequence in which you must evade the helicopter outside the building by taking using the walls of the offices as cover.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Cassandra de Vries serves as the CEO of dataDyne. She is willing to risk Earth's existence in her allegiance with the Skedar, all in the name of profit. Her characterisation in the prequel novels adds more context to this.
  • Corrupt Politician: Trent Easton. An advisor to the president who demands the usage of the Pelagic II underwater research vehicle purely so he and his allies can profit from their alliance with the Skedar.
  • Coup de Grâce Cutscene: After defeating the final boss in the original game, the cutscene shows Joanna shooting off a shard from an altar which impales the boss.
  • Covers Always Lie: The Japanese box art◊ makes the game look more like a Silent Hill-esque psychological horror game than the James Bond-inspired action game it is. It's mostly a holdover from when Nintendo was pushing to rename the Japanese version to "Red & Black", since they thought a direct translation wouldn't sound quite as good in Japanese.
  • Critical Existence Failure: For gameplay reasons, being pistol-whipped or punched will cause you to stumble and your vision to blur, but not being shot multiple times to the point of near death.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Elvis. He botches the decoupling of the Skedar invasion craft from the Air Force One with his own ship, forcing the crash landing of all three vehicles, and generally jokes and laughs like a goofball. But he is absolutely lethal with his weapons of choice when it comes to ground combat.
  • Cryptically Unhelpful Answer: Many things Carrington says for the first half of the game.
  • Cutscene Incompetence: The ending of "Carrington Institute: Defense". Apparently Joanna can defeat dozens of enemies per level, but can be captured by a single unarmed Skedar which knocks a pile of crates onto her.
  • Cyberpunk Is Techno: The soundtrack in several levels. Exhibit A:
  • Cyanide Pill: An actual item for the game's Counter Operative mode — one player is Agent Dark as normal, while the other takes control of one mook at a time, switching if their host is killed. If they take control of someone far away from the action, they can take the "suicide express" to try to get closer.

    D - H 
  • Damage Discrimination: Averted in the original game. Enemy guards can injure and kill other enemy guards. Likewise, Joanna is capable of injuring and killing mission-critical characters with wayward fire.
  • Damsel in Distress: Believe it or not, Joanna, when she wakes up in a cell aboard a Skedar ship.
  • Darkened Building Shootout: In "dataDyne Central: Extraction", the level begins with the lights turned off, forcing Joanna to use night vision. At the end, Cassandra's bodyguards do the same thing and must be fought in the dark. Since they're wearing night vision goggles as well, turning the lights back on temporarily blinds them, making them easy to kill.
  • Darker and Edgier: Compared to its predecessor GoldenEye (1997), this game has much more blood, as well as swearing. Perfect Dark was rated M, while GoldenEye was rated T (or 18+ and 15+, both BBFC, in the UK).
  • Dark Reprise: The "Carrington Institute: Defense" theme is a remixed version of the BGM played when you exit the Main Menu and venture around the Institute, which also serves as the main theme of the series.
  • Deadly Doctor: The scientists and biotechnicians in Area 51 will attempt to attack you by firing Tranquilizer Darts, although these are more annoying than anything. Of course, then there's also what they plan to do to Elvis...
  • Deadly Euphemism: "Retire presidential clone." Due to concerns of security implications to the USA to have two identical people both claiming to be the President.
  • Deadly Gas: Joanna Dark infiltrates Area 51 to rescue an alien survivor. When she reaches the Operating Room where he is located, one of the scientists floods the entire area leading up to the OR. Of course, he miscalculated where the gas would spread.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Joanna, but also Jonathan. Forcing them to work together results in a lot of snarking. Even the President gets a few snarks in himself. He randomlly make a sarcastic coment, "Are you sure this is the way to the escape pod?"
  • Deal with the Devil: The alliance between dataDyne and the Skedar doesn't work out so well for them in the end.
  • Death World: The Skedar homeworld/battle shrine planet orbits three stars, and as such, experiences a lot of tidal forces. Earthquakes ravage the desert world's surface, to the point where the natives can't keep repairing all the accumulating damage to buildings and doorways.
  • Deflector Shields: The personal variety. Makes thrown weapons like the Combat Knives bounce off. Also averts One-Hit Kill on the weapons that would normally play it straight, but at the cost of the entire shield's energy. The shields also take the same amount of damage no matter what portion of the shield is hit, making head shots not immediately fatal until the shield is dropped.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: Elvis' description of the Skedar homeworld.
    Elvis: This is the Skedar fanatics' most holy place. They believe this planet is sacred ground. The Battle Shrine is located at the most holy part of this holy planet.
    Joanna: So let me get this straight: it's holy.
  • Description Porn: All of the weapons and items in the game have detailed descriptions in the menu, and even more descriptions at the firing range. The sheer number of weapons is bordering on Gun Porn, too.
  • Developer's Foresight: Impressive detail is one of the good reasons why Perfect Dark remains acclaimed:
    • Shoot someone in the leg and they'll limp around unable to run anymore. Shoot them in the arm and they'll hold it while moving. They will even trickle blood to show that they're wounded.
    • When you kill someone while their back is against the wall or a solid object, there's a chance they'll fall against it.
    • When you kill someone who is sitting on a chair, they'll remain slumped over in their seat.
    • When you kill someone who is on the second floor behind a handrail with explosives, their body will fly over the railing and down to the first floor. You can't do that in GoldenEye.
    • The Carrington Villa Mission features rooftop snipers and soldiers that go prone to shoot you. The snipers will roll down off the roof and the prone soldiers will simply spazz out with their face in the ground when you kill them.
    • When someone falls down from lethal force, they cry out and a pool of blood appears to indicate that they are dead. If they fall down from non-lethal force (punch, pistol whip, sedatives), then they are simply unconscious but will continue to react to non-lethal blows with cries of pain.
    • Completing levels results in a green colored "mission stats" menu. The Mission Status is listed as completed, and Agent Status as active. At the end of "Carrington Institute: Defense", Joanna is knocked out and the menu is instead grey with Mission Status: Unknown and Agent Status: Missing. Taking it a step further, it even changes in regards to failing, aborting, and using cheat codes.note 
    • In Area 51: Infiltration, if you knock out the tech carrying the lift keycard instead of killing him, he shows up in the next mission behind a locked door. Take the elevator in the hangar he was in and you'll find a Phoenix.
    • When escaping from Area 51, you can choose to have Jonathan escape with Elvis, or have him stay and escape on his own. If you choose the former, Jonathan will appear on the mission where when the Carrington Institute is attacked and cover you. If you choose the latter, he does not.
    • In Area 51: Rescue, you have to escort a crate of explosives to a hole in the wall. If the box explodes prematurely, you will fail the mission. However, enemy soldiers in the mission carry Dragons, which have a Proximity Mine as their secondary effect, and will explode when shot in that mode. If you use this mode to destroy the hole in the wall, you will UNFAIL the mission and can continue as normal! You can also use the explosive setting on the Phoenix for this purpose if you went to the trouble of keeping that tech guy alive in the last level.
    • Enemies in GoldenEye react to the noise of loud weapons and near-misses (bullets that hit or pass by close to them) but not nearby explosions. In Perfect Dark, they now react to nearby explosions and will also check unconscious and deceased people that they come across.
    • When you are ambushed by Cassandra's Bodyguards in Mission 1-3, they'll turn off the lights to make you vulnerable in the shootout. You can turn the lights back on which will overload their Nightvision Goggles and temporarily stun them as they grab at their faces in a pained reaction to the blinding light.
    • Not including Dr. Caroll in Combat Simulator. Rare got a lot of flak from gamers for featuring Oddjob in GoldenEye 007's multiplayer, due to his short height making him harder to hit. Game Shark codes reveal how easily accessible Dr. Caroll is. Thankfully averted in the game proper, as the fast-moving floating sapient with a very small hit-box would have been the stuff of nightmares.
    • In the G5 building mission, the objective to shut down the damping field generator is quite challenging since it's guarded by several enemies and gunfire aimed uncarefully will destroy the machines near it, causing an explosive chain reaction to in turn destroy the console which is critical to the objective. There also aren't any scoped weapons available for precision aiming in this mission. So how does Rare throw gamers a bone? Well, if they take the care to knock out the two guards in the first room instead of killing them (a difficult task, granted, given they both have cloaking devices) then the last one drops a secret crossbow. With this weapon an instant sedation or lethal shot (depending on preference) can be used on any part of the body, making it easier to take some careful potshots on the security in the damping field generator room.
  • Diagonal Speed Boost: Like GoldenEye, it's essential for getting most of the cheats through strafing, so as to achieve the tight completion times required.
  • Didn't Think This Through: Daniel takes Dr. Caroll to his lightly-defended villa rather than the heavily secured Carrington Institute, sells dataDyne the sniper rifles and handguns the force storming the building used, and repeatedly ignores the recommendations of his top agent and pointlessly endangering the life of the President of America.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Did you just assassinate the Skedar leader?
  • Die, Chair, Die!: Not as much as GoldenEye, but most computers and panes of glass can be destroyed, as well as the obligatory Exploding Barrel.
  • Diegetic Interface: The game's menu is contained in the headset that Joanna wears. It can also be accessed from the computers at the Carrington Institute.
  • Dilating Door: All over the place. Coupled with Slow Doors, this can be very annoying.
  • Dirty Cop: The FBI agents you encounter in Chicago are most likely on dataDyne's payroll.
  • Disc-One Final Dungeon: The Cetan warship in the original game.
  • Disintegrator Ray: Two, in the Game Boy Color game. Late in the Jungle/dataDyne level, Joanna obtains a Mayan raygun that completely eradicates anyone she hits in a single shot (she sadly loses it soon after.) Additionally, the game has a rocket launcher weapon, which arbitrarily causes bodies to fade away shortly after death (rather than leave behind a body for Joanna to collect items from). While the rocket launcher effect is most likely a family-friendly version of the Chunky Salsa Rule, it's still jarring since the effect isn't present in the far more violent N64 game.
  • Disposable Pilot: Air Force One's pilots are killed while Trent is executing his coup, forcing Joanna to reach the cockpit and activate the auto pilot. With some Sequence Breaking, Joanna can kill the assassins before they reach the pilots, and they will stabilize the plane when things go awry.
  • Distaff Counterpart:
    • Joanna is basically a female James Bond, only with a more serious personality instead of a hedonist.
    • In-game, Joanna and Jonathan are counterparts.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: Mentioned by a guard in the intro to an early mission:
    "... it's like she had nothing on! Mai Hem's giving orders, but I don't know where to look!"
  • Distress Call:
    • The distress beacon Joanna has to activate in "Crash Site: Confrontation".
    • In "Maian SOS", Elvis must sneak through Area 51's underground base to send one to Mr. Carrington.
  • Do Not Drop Your Weapon: Averted, unlike in GoldenEye. Shoot an enemy in the hand/gun or use disarm them with a punch and they'll drop the weapon, but aren't dead yet. If you grab their weapon in the process, they may surrender, but not all the time. In fact, they may still try to punch you out.
  • Do Not Run with a Gun: Inverted. The enemies actually seem to be more accurate when they're walking towards you and spraying bullets, though most attack animations in the latter still have the enemy standing otherwise still.
  • Doomsday Device: The Cetan ship's Weak Nuclear Force Decoupler.
  • Doppelgänger Attack: Halfway through the deathmatch with Mai Hem in Zero, she starts summoning clones of herself. Unlike her, they don't "derez" (in the words of TRON) when defeated, and you can pick up their weapons and ammo.
  • Double Agent: Chandra. This could also be considered a Face–Heel Turn, considering she used to be a good guy, until she sold herself to dataDyne.
  • Dramatic Gun Cock: Frequently in cutscenes, e.g. when Cassandra warns Joanna "One last chance!" to return the sapient, her bodyguards pump their shotguns.
  • Dramatic Unmask: Mr. Blonde drops his hologram disguise as a Nordic heavy to reveal himself as a Skedar and slash Trent dead with his claws.
  • Dressing as the Enemy: In "Area 51: Rescue" and "Air Base: Espionage", Joanna has to acquire and wear uniforms to wear in order to fool security.
  • Drop Ship: The Skedar shuttles. Joanna and Elvis commandeer one to get to the last level.
  • Drugs Causing Slow-Motion: Some levels give you a dose of Combat Boost. When used, time slows down for the player for a short period. While you don't actually move any quicker, with your character's movement slowed down as well during this time (doesn't happen on XBLA), it still becomes a lot easier to react to enemy actions, and to quickly line up headshots.
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?:
    • Some of the workers at the Carrington Institute are less than polite towards Joanna; it's even worse that they still treat her this way even after she saves their asses in one level.
    • Jo herself comes across as being cranky, particularly in the novels. Going by this, she withdraws into herself after failed attempts to socialize by the time of the first game's events.
    • Dr. Caroll is less than polite to Joanna when they first meet, considering she's trying to rescue him.
  • Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The Skedar intend to test-fire the Cetan warship's superweapon on Earth before wiping out the Maians.
  • Easter Egg: Quite a few, including the infamous cheese pieces in every level. Also, hidden weapon caches, Cassandra's necklace with mysterios username and password and a large keyhole you can only see with X-Ray vision in Area 51, among other things.
  • Easy Level Trick: In Extra Mission 2, there are four guards hidden in certain areas of the level that serve as placeholders for the guards that will be infinitely spawned to hunt you down after the alarm is triggered. By killing them, you can completely prevent them from spawning and attacking you altogether.
  • Elaborate Underground Base:
    • The dataDyne basement labs, as well as Area 51, the Alaskan air base and the Carrington Institute itself.
    • Carrington's private villa also has an extensive network of tunnels in the basement.
  • Elevator Action Sequence:
    • "Mr. Blonde's Revenge" has a fight with a guard on the elevators.
    • In the second level, Joanna pistol-whips a guard in the elevator (possibly a Mythology Gag since GoldenEye can allow Bond to gun down a KGB soldier in a bathroom stall while exiting out of a vent in Facility).
  • Elite Mooks: The masked dataDyne guards, and also the black-clad dD soldiers.
  • Empty Elevator: In the opening cutscene of "dataDyne: Extraction", the guard in the basement is baffled when the elevator comes down seemingly sans passenger. The player knows full well that Joanna is in there, having entered at the end of the previous level — turns out she's hiding above the door ready to pistol whip him.
  • Enemy Chatter: The original game gives the guards a few lines. Some of the more amusing ones include "I bet this is another drill" (said by a guard who has heard/seen you, but can't find you now), and "Ah, I never liked him, anyway" (said by a guard who found one of his comrades dead). Other guards scream out the Big "NO!" when finding an ally dead. It's possible to shoot someone in the middle of a line.
  • Enemy Civil War: An VERY interesting (and hilarious!) example (which, for some reason, only occurs in Co-Op mode) is the mission on board the Pelagic II. Apparently, there are two separate camps inside the ship that you're dealing with.
    1. Datadyne soldiers disguised as Pelagic II Guards.
    2. Pelagic II Guards who are loyal to the government but are unaware that Datadyne has taken over the ship.
  • Enemy-Detecting Radar: Like GoldenEye, the game has one, explained as the function of one of Joanna's gadgets. Oddly enough, you have to unlock a cheat code to turn the radar off. The most common reason for bothering unlocking this cheat is when you have a friend who is so good at the game in multiplayer you have to do something to make things harder for them to hunt everyone down.
  • Enemy Mine: Joanna and Cassandra after being imprisoned aboard the Skedar ship. It doesn't last long, as Cassandra sacrifices herself to distract the Skedar.
  • Enemy Summoner: In the Chicago mission, the FBI agents will summon Elite Mooks with .357 magnums if you don't quickly dispatch them.
  • The Enemy Weapons Are Better: In some cases. The K7 Avenger and Mauler are generally more useful than the AR-34 and Phoenix, for example.
  • Energy Weapon: The Mauler and the Phoenix are quite weak on their primary setting, but can be fired rapidly for plenty of Beam Spam.
  • Episode on a Plane: Joanna gets onboard Air Force One to warn the President that he will be killed and replaced with a clone.
  • Episode Zero: The Beginning: Perfect Dark Zero, which takes place chronologically before the original game.
  • Epunymous Title: The game's title refers to the protagonist (Joanna Dark), her in-game rank ("Perfect Dark", which in turn is above the rank "Perfect Agent"), and the somber themes and situations dealt with in the adventure.
  • Escape Pod: One vaguely resembling the command module of a spacecraft like the Apollo series is one of the many additions to the new craft used as Air Force One. When the main craft goes down, one of your objectives in the next mission is to locate the escape pod and activate a distress beacon built into it.
  • Escort Mission: Both console games have their fair share of these, some much more annoying than others. Especially with the President, who just loves to run in front of you while you're firing at enemies.
  • E.T. Gave Us Wi-Fi:
    • Antigravity technology and other advances are due to help that dataDyne and the CI received from the alien races. In the second level of Perfect Dark, you must steal some technology from dataDyne that is heavily hinted to be reverse-engineered from the Skedar, specifically the prototype shield and the K7 Avenger and its threat detector. The night vision visor, though... we already have that in real life.
    • Two of the special assignments spell this out in their objectives. "Mr. Blonde's Revenge" has an objective to plant a bomb in the elevator of dataDyne's headquarters, outright stating that the scientists of dataDyne should no longer be allowed to research the Skedar's technology. "Maian SOS" likewise has an objective to destroy the ship Elvis got shot down in before the Area 51 personnel can examine it, the objective noting that the Carrington Institute will be put in danger if anyone realizes the similarity between their "inventions" and the technology on the UFO.
  • Every Bullet Is a Tracer: A trope inherited from GoldenEye. For many weapons, every bullet fired from a weapon is a visible tracer round.
  • Everything Fades: Played with. The game will try to preserve framerate performance by removing deceased or unconscious entities and destroyed objects while still allowing a few to persist. There is even a limit to the amount of bullet holes, explosion marks, and bloodstains allowed in-play.
  • Evil Is Hammy: All of the villains, but especially Trent.
  • Evil Sounds Deep: Mr. Blonde, possibly the deepest voice in the game (barring the monstrous Skedar roars) and definitely the most ruthless villain.
  • Exact Eavesdropping: The meeting in the G5 Building.
  • Executive Suite Fight: In dataDyne headquarters.
  • Expanded Universe: The novels Initial Vector and Second Front by Greg Rucka, and the Comic Janus Tears by Eric Trautmann.
  • Expecting Someone Taller: The first thing Joanna says when she sees Air Force One is that it's smaller than she thought, although it's actually pretty damned big.
  • Expendable Clone: Of the President. The Skedar King has several clones of his own.
  • Exploring the Evil Lair: Many levels such as "dataDyne Research: Investigation", "Area 51: Rescue" and "Deep Sea: Nullify Threat" have elements of this.
  • Explosive Instrumentation: As in GoldenEye, nearly any kind of computer, console, or keypad you can shoot at blew up in a spectacular fireball. In fact, some already exploded objects would explode again if shot a few more times.
  • Exposed Extraterrestrials: The Maians. They're mostly fully nude (with Barbie Doll Anatomy in full effect) but the soldier types wear some kind of caps (they're not helmets because headshots are still instantly fatal if one were to shoot these) and Elvis wears both shoes and also at times a [USA flag smock
  • Exposed to the Elements:
    • In Perfect Dark Zero, Joanna Dark's outfit in a freezing cold snow covered mountain is torn jeans, a half jacket, and a half sweater that exposes her midriff.
    • In the original game, she wears her standard spysuit in cold climates, which one can assume is well-insulated.
  • Expy: An in-game example is Cassandra de Vries' obvious jealousy of the Carrington Institute, to the point where the dataDyne logo is almost exactly the same as the Carrington Institute logo.
  • Extranormal Institute: The Carrington Institute's other role besides being a Spy School. It was founded for the goal of benevolent contact between humanity and Maians, and employs some of their donated advanced technology such as anti-grav.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: Subverted twice. You cannot get "Mission Completed" on the Carrington Institute: Defense level; you'll always get "Missing In Action". You can also unfail Area 51: Rescue.
  • Fake Defector: Subverted in Second Front, as Joanna approaches Portia De Carcareas, who believes Jo is defecting Carrington, but Joanna clears the misunderstanding quickly.
  • Fast-Killing Radiation: Joanna Dark was infiltrating a lab only for her superior Daniel Carrington to stop her as she was about to enter a room full of high-level radiation and orders her to use the cam spy. Should she disregard the order, she will die from exposure to it.
  • Fast-Roping: A couple of levels begin with Joanna rappelling from a Drop Ship.
  • Firing One-Handed: Joanna does it in a few cutscenes, with an assault rifle, no less.
  • First Contact: Between humans and Maians, setting up the rest of the story.
  • Flying Car: By the time of this alternate 2023, most wheeled cars appear to have been replaced by airworthy variants, including taxis. Several can be seen flying around the background of missions set in the dataDyne Lucerne Tower.
  • Flying Saucer: The Maians use them as their primary craft, presumably with interstellar capabilities.
  • Foreshadowing: The first time you can fight and shoot the Mr Blondes (without using exploits to attack the guy in earlier missions when he's usually just confined to cutscenes, anyway) is in Air Force One and then in Crash Site immediately after. Shooting him and looking up close reveals he actually has slightly off-colour blood which reveals slightly before the true reveal in the latter mission that he's a Skedar in disguise that there's something not quite right about him. Earlier, his dialogue was pretty unnnerving, but it didn't explicitly hint that he's an alien and not just a ruthless human who's dedicated to the success of the dataDyne/NSA mission at any cost.
  • Friendly Sniper: Elvis, who cracks lame jokes while shooting down guards with the FarSight.
  • Gangsta Style: For some reason, Joanna will fire her pistol sideways at close targets. The grenade launcher on the SuperDragon also requires the gun to be held sideways, probably for the same reason, but more likely because it's easier to use that way, instead of holding diagonally, like other rifles with grenade attachments in other games, or in real life.
  • Gatling Good: The Reaper is a chaingun with three barrels and an impressive rate of fire. It takes a while to spin up, though. But at least you can use the bladed fans of the weapon as a melee attack in a pinch while it spins up.
  • Gentleman Snarker: Dr. Caroll. He comes out with lines like "Do you actually know what you’re doing?" and "My dear, you're taking your time!" while you're running an Escort Mission to take him into Carrington Institute protection.
  • The Ghost: The Cetans are never seen in the game. "The making of Perfect Dark" shows them to be a strange insectoid/cyborg race, depicting they were once possibly Mechanical Lifeforms, millions of years ago became Living Ships. Jump ahead to today, and they're most likely now Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
  • Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: "The Brothers" in Zero. Their appearance has no build-up, they're not mentioned after their battle, and it's never elaborated what their deal is.
  • Give Me Your Inventory Item: It's necessary to sacrifice one of your weapons to enter the boss chamber in the Skedar battle shrine.
  • Goggles Do Something Unusual:
    • The IR scanner, which can detect enemies using cloaking devices, and even find weak spots in walls. (Needless to say, Real Life infrared technology does not work that way.)
    • The X-Ray Scanner can detect hidden switches and items required to complete objectives. It's also fun to see through walls and spy on unsuspecting characters.
  • Gondor Calls for Aid: Carrington sends a message to the Maians asking for help in foiling the conspiracy between dataDyne and the Skedar.
  • Gotta Catch Them All: The game has a large number of weapons to collect... and the countless Easter eggs, such as the cheese wedges.
  • Government Agency of Fiction: In the game, the NSA is practically Trent Easton's private army and joins the dataDyne corporation and the Skedar in an attempt to lead a coup against the President. In Real Life, the NSA is the United States government's signals intelligence branch and deals with cryptography and other fairly boring stuff like that. Amusingly, everyone but the CIA is part of the Government Conspiracy Easton has going.
  • Grenade Spam: The SuperDragon, definitely. Repeating grenade launcher with a magazine of six and a reserve of 40? Yes, please.
  • Grenade Tag: Mines can be thrown on enemies and then detonated.
  • The Greys: The Maian race is a textbook example. They're even referred to as such in-game.
  • Groin Attack:
    • A "critical hit" will make the enemy clutch his bereaved area for a few seconds, giving you ample time to put him out of his misery. It even works on female enemies. And just like in GoldenEye, there are death animations for killing someone with a groin shot.
    • Shooting unaware enemies in the ass often results in a hilarious butthurt animation!
  • Grow Beyond Their Programming: To retrieve the Cetan warship from the Pacific Ocean, the Skedar employ dataDyne to create an AI capable of cracking alien codes and advanced languages. As it did so though, the AI unlike its makers developed morals, realizing restarting such a dangerous weapon was not only ethically wrong, but incredibly stupid, as they risked being double-crossed by the Skedar.
  • The Guards Must Be Crazy: Enemy AI is variable in this regard. Some enemies will go immediately for the alarm if you attack, while others you can shoot from behind and make them ask in an astonished voice, "Was that a bullet?" It's also sometimes possible to eliminate almost an entire floor's worth of guards if you're careful, as long as you get rid of each one out of the others' line of sight.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • It can be very confusing to find out what the level objectives are when there are no hints besides a few paragraphs of briefing in a first-time playthrough. (Ironically, whenever Joanna's in close proximity to an objective, someone will speak up and bring it to her attention.)
    • The "Crowning Glory" achievement in the XBLA remaster for earning all the Leaderboard Crowns. Each Crown requires you to do a specific thing on a specific level on a specific difficulty, and there's no description of what these might be in the game, other than a crown's name and icon. Some are almost impossible to complete in Solo because they require the player to be in two places at once.
    • The Area 51: Escape level actually has two endings. While both endings lead to the same conclusion at the beginning of the next mission, the less immediate takes much less time to complete and is almost mandatory if you want to beat the timer needed for one of the cheat codes.
  • Guns Akimbo:
    • Only certain small weapons — primarily pistols and submachine guns (and not even all the SMGs in Zero) can be dual-wielded.
    • Elvis frequently wields dual Phoenixes and the Skedar sometimes carry dual Maulers.
    • Taken to ridiculous extremes with Dual Cyclones on Magazine Discharge.
  • Guns Do Not Work That Way: The Tranquilizer is a dermal spray injector that uses liquid sedatives contained in capsules to operate. This makes sense when your using the weapon in Secondary Mode, but when you're using it in Primary Mode... well, let's just say that Hollywood Science somehow allows the Tranquilizer to shoot the sedative drugs as liquid bullets without the need for darts as a delivery system.
  • Gunship Rescue: The helicopter that appears to rescue Joanna when she's trapped on the roof of the dataDyne building. Downplayed in that it's not actually armed, so you have to find some way to take care of dataDyne's own gunship first.
  • Hacking Minigame: In multiplayer, one of the competitive match types revolves around hacking the enemy team's computers. In the campaign, the same thing goes, and Joanna can sometimes be vulnerable to enemy guards as she's required to hold the gadget seperately from any firearms.
  • Halfway Plot Switch: You thought this was a futuristic Cyberpunk thriller about rival Mega Corps? Nope. It's a Sci-Fi thriller involving aliens.
  • Hand Cannon: The DY357 Magnum, which like the equivalent in GoldenEye is powerful and can penetrate multiple layers of level architecture and people alike. Its upgraded, custom variant, the DY357-LX, combines that penetrative attribute with instant-kill bullets (which also can deplete nearly any type of shield with only one hit, unless it's scripted to be functionally permanent like with the final boss).
  • Handicapped Badass: Jo was born with a broken spine and spent her first several years paralyzed. Once past that, she kills gods and stops alien invasions.
  • Harder Than Hard: Perfect Dark Zero has an official Dark Agent mode that you unlock for completing Perfect Agent.
  • Heroic BSoD: Joanna Dark blames herself for the death of her father. In Initial Vector, she considers herself a killer and responsible for the death of Benjamin Able. In Second Front, she also comes to the conclusion she's a failure, who disappointed her father and Carrington.
  • Heroic Sacrifice:
    • Dr. Caroll destroys the Cetan ship and himself along with it.
    • Cassandra of all people makes one to save Joanna's life. Though Cassandra claimed it was so Joanna could kill the Skedar, giving Cassandra posthumous revenge, the woman might have seen it as her chance of redeeming herself. In Second Front, she tries to do it when she realizes how rude she's become, yet she ultimately becomes what she is in Perfect Dark.
    • Jack Dark pulls one in Zero, and he actually takes out a fair deal of the mooks and saves Jo, but Mai Hem ducks his bullets, and shoots him in the gut, bringing him down. She then aims her Magsec at his head and kills Jack.
  • Hero Insurance: Joanna kills a lot of government agents in the first game with no consequence.
  • Higher-Tech Species: The Maians. Just look at their weapons!
  • High-Heel–Face Turn: Cassandra sacrifices herself to allow Joanna to escape the Skedar ship.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • One of the doctors attempt to use Area 51's nerve gas system on Joanna... which includes the OR he and his mate are both in. Joanna makes it out, of course.
    • The Skedar Leader, with the statue that he worships right above his head.
  • Hollywood Hacking: The Data Uplink can access any computer and bypass any security measures in a matter of seconds.
  • Hollywood Science:
    • The RC-P120 somehow converts bullets into energy to power the prototype cloaking device it has.
    • The Tranquilizer is a dermal spray injector that uses liquid sedatives contained in capsules to operate. It can dispense the sedatives with a direct injection or as liquid bullets.
    • The IR scanner detects weak points in walls.
  • Hollywood Silencer: Roughly the same as GoldenEye, though the 'first shot from any weapon is silent' rule seems to have been taken out.
  • Holographic Terminal: In the Skedar mothership, for things like the bridge and weapons systems.
  • Homing Projectile: The Rocket Launcher has a lock-on feature, although it's not perfect and its use greatly slows the velocity of the rocket, and it's also possible to shoot the rocket down.
  • Hotter and Sexier: Here is Joanna in the N64 version.◊ Here is Joanna in ''Perfect Dark Zero''◊, showing tons of cleavage. (She was on the cover of FHM magazine◊ (!)) For the Xbox Live remaster, they went back to her conservative way of dressing, but still couldn't resist dolling her up a bit.◊ Maybe playing a sexpot just appeals to the female (and woman-loving) audiences more?
  • Humanoid Aliens: The Maians. Bipedal Grays, who have translation technology and even pick up bits of human culture for them to admire. Much more so than the reptilian/insectoid Skedar.
  • Humans Are Bastards: The mission briefing to "Maian SOS" implies this.
    Emergency capture protocols activated. Ship XD-310372 suffered hostile planetfall. Maian Protector One (Aelphaeis Mangarae) sole survivor. Planet designated pre-contact status: paranoia grade 'B+', intolerance grade 'B', xenophobia grade 'A'.
  • Humanity Is Insane: What the Maians regard humans as. They've watched man for thousands of years and experienced disappointment after disappointment, remaining hopeful mankind will eventually start to tap into its potential after it matures.
  • Hurl It into the Sun: Averted. Millions of years ago the advanced Cetans, as part of a disarmament program, agreed to scuttle their nuclear force de-coupler (a superweapon that screws up one of the fundamental forces of the universe). They decided to dump it in the depths of Earth's Pacific Ocean. To their credit, it's not easy to salvage something that big and that deep, but it's still a possible feat, nonetheless.
  • Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Elvis, at times. He is very capable with each type of Maian firearm (from dual Phoenixes to a Farsight-XR), but he's very vulnerable to attack (particularly the devastating melee slashes by the Skedar) and doesn't alwas prioritise his own well-being as one that physically fragile should.
  • Hyper-Destructive Bouncing Ball: The always entertaining "Proximity Pinball" secondary function for a grenade, which causes the explosive to ricochet around before detonating next to someone-possibly even yourself if you're unlucky.
  • Hyperspace Arsenal:
    • Though the "quick select" menu only shows up to ten items (weapons and gadgets), they all are still in there somewhere; the rest have to be accessed through the Pause menu. Expect to do so very often if using the "All Guns in Solo" cheat, especially given the very, very diverse arsenal.
    • Some guards pull guns out of nowhere, even large ones like the Cyclone. And where the heck was Grimshaw hiding that grenade launcher when he was taken hostage?
    • Averted in Zero, where you can hold four slots. Pistols and grenades take one; plasma rifles, rocket launchers, M60s and sniper rifles take three. Gadgets get their own set of slots, but each option takes two, so you're stuck with one gadget determined on a per-mission basis like the CamSpy and one optional, more universal gadget like the Data Thief.

    I - R 
  • I Can't Reach It: A very lame example when Joanna complains that she can't throw a bug onto the antenna in Area 51 without lowering it first. Any fit person should be able to do it. In fact, she can throw it that high — it's just much easier to lower the antenna first.
  • Impairment Shot: The screen blurs and darkens if you're hit with a weapon like the N-Grenade, Tranquilizer, Crossbow (primary function). Also happens when you're punched.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The Skedar Leader's fate, when Joanna destroys the central statue of worship which leads to shards of it falling through his nearly-impenetrable shield and finally killing him.
  • Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: All of the guards are fairly bad shots on Agent, but the revolver-wielding guards from the G5 Building really stand out. They're unable to hit you at point-blank range and yet, they keep swarming in and getting killed.
  • Implacable Man: Mr. Blonde, apparently. He doesn't even flinch when Trent points a revolver in his face. A golden revolver that can kill in just a single shot.
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: Elvis, to some extent. Jonathan also counts since he's equally deadly with a revolver as enemies are with scoped rifles.
  • Improvised Weapon: The SpyCam is a tiny, floating camera that can be used to go into hostile territories. Once its part of the mission is over, you can find some bad guys. Float in front of a guard's head and his partner will recognzie the Spycam and SHOOT IT. The explosion kills the first guard.
  • Incredibly Obvious Bug:
    • In Mission 1-1, you must plant an ECM Mine on the Internal Comms Hub and External Comms Hub. The only clear place to put it is directly on the monitor.
    • In Mission 3-1 Chicago: Stealth, you must place a Tracer bug on a Datadyne limo. You'll actually fail if you put the bug if one of the civilians standing next to it sees placing one on the limo.
    • In Mission 4-1, you must plant a Comms Rider bug in the dish of the communications antenna. How can you expect a routine patrol to look at the antenna and NOT notice that?
  • The Infiltration: Numerous levels, including "dataDyne Central: Defection", "G5 Building: Reconnaissance", "Air Base: Espionage", etc. There's even one called: "Area 51: Infiltration".
  • Infinity +1 Sword: The FarSight from Perfect Dark: an Imported Alien Phlebotinum sniper rifle that's massively overpowering and features tremendous penetration to the point of being able to shoot through almost any wall and barrier, coupled with an Infrared X-Ray Camera scope that tracks other players for you. Yes, that's right — it can see through walls. The only disadvantages to it were a slight Sniper Scope Sway and a slow firing rate, but the rest of its attributes more than made up for it.
  • Infinity -1 Sword: The RCP-120, although the K7 Avenger might be a better candidate since it appears in more than one single mission.
  • Innocent Aliens: Elvis, as with most Maians, is on the good guys' side, and in fact will need Jo's help to defeat the malevolent Skedar race of aliens.
  • Insane Equals Violent: The Psychosis Gun. At least the game got the definition of the word right, though. note 
  • Insecurity Camera: An element inherited from GoldenEye. They're highly explosive, as well. Be careful while blasting them on the run, as they can and will damage you. They have a small advantage over the previous game: the lens is equally as strong as anywhere else on the camera body (but that's still quite weak to gunfire though), rather than using vulnerable glass. Strangely, the cameras can be oddly finicky; sometimes, the alarm may sound the instant you set foot in their range, while other times, they'll stare at you for several seconds before it happens. It's partially connected to you shooting in the camera's line of sight — it will auto-notice you if you shoot and it sees it.
  • Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Dr. Caroll, who was created to decipher codes and languages but became sentient and turned against dataDyne.
  • Instant Death Bullet: Although guards usually die instantly when shot in the head, this is averted at times when they die slowly and make horrible choking sounds as they expire.
    • Trent's DY-357 LX magnum has special bullets that will kill any foe in one hit.
    • The FarSight XR-20 has orbs that will vaporize the target in one shot (two if they're shielded).
    • The secondary functions of both the Tranquilizer and the Crossbow are a One-Hit Kill. The former can only be used within melee range.
    • Of course, if the One-Hit Kill rule is active in multiplayer, then all attacks are instantaneously fatal — even the fire from an explosion.
  • Instant Sedation: With tranquilizers, it only takes a few hits to become completely disoriented. This is particularly egregious in the cutscene where Elvis is hit by one dart and keels over unconscious.
  • Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: Super spy Joanna Dark lacks any kind of jumping abilities, so her path can be blocked by such trivial things as a handrail, a couch, or a potted plant.
  • Inter-Service Rivalry: Apparently, the Secret Service is completely loyal to the President while the NSA isn't.
  • Interface Screw:
    • Melee attacks apply a heavy after image filter to your screen for a while to reflect stunning. Tranquilizer darts apply an even stronger version of this effect. Get hit by two or three darts guarantees you are not seeing your own weapon for the next minute. In multiplayer, it sticks around even after getting killed and respawning.
    • Poison gas, poison-tipped knives (when thrown), tranquilizer darts, and the dreaded N-Bombs all blur their victims' vision which makes it very hard to shoot straight, much less walk in a straight line. Taking more than a few punches from an unarmed foe can result in a similar effect.
  • Interface Spoiler: Carefully averted — upon clearing the Disc-One Final Dungeon, Deep Sea: Nullify Threat, instead of the briefing for the next level, you get a simple "Replay Last Level/Continue" dialog.
  • In the Future, We Still Have Roombas: In one level, Joanna must follow a little cleaning robot to get through three laser barriers.
  • Invisibility Cloak: Of the technological sort. The RC-P120 has an ammunition-powered cloaking device as its secondary function. The game also features stand-alone versions.
  • Invisibility Flicker: Aside from an actual faint flicker that can be caught with a sharp eye by human players, the game's cloaking devices make the wearer become fully visible for a brief moment when firing a weapon.
  • Irrelevant Importance: Inverted. One level requires you to carry a crate of bullet-sensitive explosives for a while to blow a hole in a wall. If they blow up while still relevant, you'll get the "Mission Failed" message, but it turns out they were never really relevant to begin with; there are other ways to blow the hole in the wall, and doing so will give you a "Mission Incomplete" message as the game realizes you still had a chance.
  • I Should Have Been Better: Joanna says "I should have been quicker" when she rescues Mr. Carrington from being held hostage. Of course, he tells her it's not her fault.
  • It Has Been an Honor: One of the last things Dr. Caroll says to Joanna before his death.
  • "It" Is Dehumanizing: dataDyne always refers to Dr. Caroll this way, since they believe he's Just a Machine.
  • It May Help You on Your Quest: Elvis seems fond of giving you items which become extremely handy later on the level.
    Good to see you, Joanna! Take this — you should find it useful...
  • Jeanne d'Archétype: Loosely. The game's creators seem to have taken Joan of Arc as a template for Action Girls.
  • Just Following Orders: One of the pleas by a surrendered enemy, should the player character disarm him (and he opts not to draw out a Falcon-2 backup weapon).
  • Kaizo Trap: In Zero, after defeating Killian's gunship, it will try to kamikaze into you as a Last Ditch Move, but the real Kaizo trap is his reinforcements, which can still kill you after you beat him.
  • Keystone Army: The Skedar seem to have a Hive Mind dependent on their leader. Interestingly, they do actually have a backup plan for what happens if the leader bites it — clones of the leader that activate as soon as he dies. Three of them, in fact, in one of the bonus missions.
  • Killed Mid-Sentence: Plenty of enemies if you time your shots right through their lines of dialogue.
  • Klingons Love Shakespeare: All Maians have an affinity for humans and their culture, and Protector One makes no effort to hide his passion, insisting Carrington Institute operatives call him "Elvis" and even later dons the stars and stripes of the USA.
  • Laser Hallway: A few levels have laser barriers which must be bypassed. There's one in an early level that can only be circumvented by waiting for a maintenance robot to pass though and temporarily deactivate it. A later level has a huge laser grid surrounding Air Force One that required you to find a way around it.
  • Laser Sight: The Falcon 2 comes with one by default.
  • Law Enforcement, Inc.: The Carrington Institute is a supposed R&D center that secretly conducts espionage and paramilitary operations in league with aliens while killing U.S. government personnel and the security guards of a private corporation. They're the good guys.
  • Leet Lingo: Perfect Dark includes an unlockable version of the Klobb gun from GoldenEye, renamed the "KL01313". Also, in the Attack Ship level, the information screen for Cassandra de Vries' necklace displays the message "Password: I8MOZYM8NDI8S".
  • Level in Reverse: Datadyne Central: Defection and Datadyne Central: Extraction. The former is a standard espionage mission, descending the skyscraper, while the latter is an Escort Mission back up to the rooftop, with tons more enemies, including a Future Copter and Cassandra's Amazon Brigade, and the player's path restricted by barricades and locked doors. Later, there's the Area 51 Rescue and Escape levels. Perfect Dark Zero has Laboratory Rescue/River Extraction and Trinity Infiltration/Trinity Escape.
  • Limited Loadout: Zero implements this via a form of Grid Inventory. Both weapons and gadgets have four slots, with weapons taking up either one (handguns, explosives, and the Hawk boomerang and viblade), two (submachine guns, assault rifles, the Shotgun and the Combat Shield) or three (Sniper Rifle, M60, Rocket Launcher and Plasma Rifle) slots, requiring you to drop enough weapons to make room for a new one. Inventory items have the same limit, but every option takes two slots, and two of the four are restricted to mission-specific gadgets like the audioscope or CamSpy (even for missions where you don't have them), leaving you your choice of either the Locktopus, Data Thief or Demo Kit, all of which can be used in every mission but are never required.
  • Little Green Men: The Skedar, in contrast to the Maians (who themselves only reach past half an adult human's height by way of their enlarged heads). The "little" part is especially emphasized by the fact that they're actually tiny, snake-like creatures piloting mid-sized mechas.
  • Lock-and-Load Montage: Before the last level. Check out this delightfully cheesy commercial for the game as well.
  • Lost Superweapon: The Cetan megaweapon is a planet killer that has been resting on the floor of the Pacific Ocean for millennia. The plot revolves around a conspiracy to retrieve the weapon and use it on Earth.
  • Low Culture, High Tech: The Skedar, who have spaceships and cloning technology, but no culture to speak of besides warfare and violence.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Obtaining the dual CMP-150s on the second level requires you to reach the weapons cache computer without being detected, which heavily depends on the positioning, behavior of the guards (depending on difficulty), and when you skip the opening cutscene if you're also trying to speedrun.
  • Made of Explodium: While not as common as in GoldenEye, things like computers and television monitors will explode when shot. In the very first level, the flying cars seen outside a tower can be picked off with good enough accuracy, and will go up in a fireball regardless of what type of gun you shoot them with. Any car that blows up after one shot from a handgun at a distance must be very volatile.
  • Made of Iron:
    • Just like in GoldenEye, graphics limitations (or perhaps certain guidelines) include no dismemberment and disintegration. Invoked heavily when you set Enemy Health at 1,000%.
    • When you're roaming around the Carrington Institute, nobody, yourself included, can die — no matter how many times they are shot at or blown up.
  • Magnetic Weapons: The Farsight XR-20, which is a One-Hit Kill sniper rifle that can track and shoot enemies through walls. It doesn't track particularly quickly, and its low rate of fire makes it awkward at close range, but it's still very powerful in multiplayer.
  • Major Injury Underreaction: If you shoot any enemy in anywhere but the head, they'll stagger for a moment, then recover and start shooting back at you.
  • Marathon Level: The Cetan Ship is huge, features a difficult Escort Mission, and has enemies with cloaking devices or very tiny ankle-biting aliens who attack you in dark places. Worse yet, the level is actually longer on the higher difficulty settings, both extending the time spent there and decreasing the odds of success.
  • Martyrdom Culture: The vicious Skedar believe that death on the battlefield is the highest honor attainable.
  • The Masquerade: Nobody but the CI, dataDyne, and certain parts of the US government knows that aliens have visited Earth before and are supplying us with advanced technology.
  • Matrix Raining Code: The computers tend to show this.
  • Meaningful Name: Joanna, of course. Elvis also counts, since it suits his fascination with American culture. Cassandra ... that's a bit more dubious.
  • Mega City: Also the City with No Name and a Skyscraper City.
  • MegaCorp: The dataDyne corporation, along with others in the novels.
  • Mega Manning: In the first game, you can't dual-wield weapons without taking them from an enemy carrying two of them.
  • Miniature Senior Citizens: Zhang Li stands at half the height of any other character in the game. Ironically, Joanna's father and Daniel Carrington, each with more reasonable heights, are actually older than he is.
  • Missile Lock-On: The Slayer can be manually directed by using the Fly-By-Wire secondary mode, though a player can slow its speed to help whenever they must turn around corners.
  • Mission Control: The Carrington Institute. Lead by Carrington for general mission objective advice, and backed up by Grimshaw and the vehicular expert for techy stuff.
  • Missing Mission Control: Carrington is unavailable in the last two levels. Elvis takes over the mission briefing at this point. He's also unavailable in the Villa, for obvious reasons since the level centers on rescuing him from being held hostage.
  • Mix-and-Match Weapon: As each weapon in the game has a secondary fire mode, a few of them invoke this trope:
    • The Dragon is an assault rifle that just happens to have a proximity mine built in.
    • The Super Dragon combines an assault rifle and a grenade launcher.
    • The RC-P120 gives the user the option of turning on a cloaking device, though this feature eats up ammo like crazy.
    • The Phoenix has the option of turning regular pistol ammo into miniature rockets that explode on contact.
    • The most (in)famous weapon, the alien FarSight XR-20, combines a One-Hit Kill sniper rifle with a target-seeking X-ray scanner.
  • Money, Dear Boy: invoked dataDyne's motives for cooperating with the Skedar.
  • Mook Chivalry: Sometimes the guards will do defensive actions (like combat rolls or running off to find their comrades) which nevertheless can make them an easier target. Or, they can also be tricked into melee attacks at close range (instead of shooting), which can also be quickly dodged and allow openings for the player to take them down with weapons or their bare hands.
  • Modular Difficulty: Like GoldenEye (1997), there is an unlockable Perfect Dark difficulty setting which allows you to adjust enemy health, damage, and accuracy. (Though it lacks the ability to adjust reaction times.) Similar to GoldenEye, fans have established License To Kill (Maximum damage and accuracy, minimum health) and Dark License To Kill (Maximum health, damage, and accuracy) fan challenge difficulties.
  • Mook–Face Turn: The infamous "Janus guard" glitch in the first game, which randomly causes a guard to side with the player and attack other guards, as if he/she were under the effects of the Psychosis Gun.
  • Moral Guardians:
    • Nintendo might have geared things back enough to allow blood and mild swearing, but there were still demands made; Nintendo forbade any depictions of alcohol or drug use. The "Combat Boosts" were originally "Adrenaline Pills," and the abandoned, useless basement bar in Chicago (which has a stripper pole, no less) was probably a casualty of the same policy that forbade there being a bar in one of the N64 Duke Nukem games.
    • Then there was the story of using the Game Boy camera to put faces of anybody in the game. Rare at first said this was due to technical limitations; however, they later said it was taken out due to the Columbine massacre and video games being blamed for the shootings.
  • More Dakka:
    • The Cyclone is a fairly average machine gun with the extraordinary ability to empty its entire clip in a second or two. The Skedar Reaper is horribly inaccurate, but has an incredibly high firing rate best used to clear corridors (plus the highest-capacity magazine in the game — it can hold 200 bullets!). Then there's the RC-P120, which can hold 120 rounds per magazine.
    • The Magazine Discharge on the Cyclone spews so many bullets that you're guaranteed to kill and destroy anything, even though it looks like you're missing it. You can also dual-wield the Cyclone for twice the destruction.
  • Mugged for Disguise: Which involves taking out the owner.
  • Musical Spoiler: At the end of Carrington Institute: Defense, Joanna is overwhelmed and knocked out by the Skedar. Instead of playing the normal 'Mission Complete' music, a slow, ominous tune plays over the level statistics (in addition to the screen going monochrome instead of green with dark-blue background). You knew something bad was going to happen next.
  • Mutual Kill: dataDyne and CI soldiers will occasionally do this against each other in conveniently (ill-) timed shots.
  • My Friends... and Zoidberg: It becomes something of a Running Gag that nearly every time the President is mentioned by other characters, it's almost like he's an afterthought.
  • Named After Somebody Famous: Elvis. In a slight twist, it appears he chose the name himself.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Played straight with the Devastator grenade launcher and Slayer, which really are deadly; averted with the wildly inaccurate Reaper, which might well be the single most useless weapon in the game. Unless it's a Skedar warrior wielding it, as the weapon was designed for Skedar physiology and not humans.
  • Nerf: The waves of Skedar in the Attack Ship hangar battle are notably very low on health, accuracy and reaction times. This is probably done so that Joanna and her three Maian comrades can make it through without too much trouble; if they had stats like they do otherwise, they might just overwhelm and maul the puny Maians and make the mission unwinnable. It makes for a breather in what is otherwise one of the most difficult missions in the game.
    • Also, the cryogenic vaults in this mission and the following Skedar Ruins mission actually allow easy kills for the warriors they store. Both of the missions grant the Callisto NTG Maian submachine gun (the former if you choose to knock out the Maian soldiers who carry them) and the penetrating secondary fire of the weapon can pierce the armoured vault glass and for some reason kill any of them in one shot. However, should the vaults open before the player can do so, then the Skedar will be at their usual level of health instead.
  • Neuro-Vault: In Perfect Dark Zero, atter rescuing Nathan Zeigler and his important classified data, Zeigler downloads that data into Jack Dark's brain for safekeeping, then promptly dies.
  • Neutron Bomb: The aptly named N-Bomb, which is essentially a grenade that knocks out everyone in a radius of several meters.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: Absolutely pissed the Cetan superweapon gets destroyed, the Skedar abduct both Cassandra and Joanna to ritualistically slaughter them on their holiest of holy shrines to satisfy their blood-lust. By doing so, they gave away its concealed location to their enemies, the Maians.
  • Night-Vision Goggles: The game has night-vision goggles in some levels which are somewhat realistic, eg. if the lights come on or you walk out into sunlight, you'll be blinded until they're taken off. Human targets still appear a bright, glowing green, though, making them much easier to spot. There is also one place in the game where you fight enemies who wear night vision goggles. If you turn on the lights, they won't be able to shoot you for a few seconds while they take them off.
  • No Biochemical Barriers: Of the All Atmospheres Are Equal type. At least with the Skedar, they have the excuse that their biomechanical suits could be processing the atmosphere, but not so much for the Maians. Of course though, as Joanna is likewise able to breathe on the Skedar homeworld, it seems that All Planets Are Earth-Like.
  • No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: During most ending cutscenes, the player character will use whatever one-handed firearm they were using when the cutscene is triggered. However, if you were using a two-handed weapon, she will revert to a Falcon 2.
  • No Fair Cheating:
    • You can use the cheat codes on any level you have access to, but you can't unlock any other cheats or any further missions while any of them are active. Similarly, any Combat Simulator Challenges won't be passed if you have cheats on, nor will you gain ranks.
    • Trying to use the Invincibility cheat on missions that involve the place blowing up will have the mission abruptly end, due to the game expecting you to be taken out by the explosions.
  • No-Gear Level: "Attack Ship" begins with Joanna armed with nothing but a knife.
  • Noisy Guns: There are clicking sounds every single time you pick up ammo or reload, often followed by a Dramatic Gun Cock.
  • No OSHA Compliance: Very few in the Perfect Dark universe has ever heard of railings.
  • No Name Given: Or maybe his name is "Theodore President" and they're just shortening it. Who knows?
  • No Scope: Possible with any of the guns, even with the FarSight (although it's quite difficult).
  • Nostalgia Level:
    • The original game has a couple of GoldenEye's multiplayer maps, including the classic Facility. Although in Perfect Dark, the name of the map is changed to Felicity, which is a clever nod to Perfect Dark being starred by a woman.
    • Zero has DLC of a few GoldenEye and Perfect Dark maps, including Facility.
  • Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Joanna is supposed to be American, yet she speaks like an authentic Brit in the first game. We know the lads from Rare are Brits, but it's not like any part of the game is set in the UK.
  • Obvious Rule Patch: In Counter-Op mode, the counter-operative can't deal damage to the subject of an Escort Mission or specific targets. No exploiting Artificial Stupidity for you!
  • Offscreen Teleportation: Your buddies can do this. DarkSims can also teleport around the map, but only if the radar option is disabled, enforcing the "offscreen" part.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    "Help! Help! She's got a gun!"
  • One Bullet Clips: Averted in Perfect Dark on Game Boy Color, where a gun cannot be reloaded until it is emptied or another clip is "equipped" on the inventory screen. However, doing so disposes of all remaining ammo from the replaced clip, so you won't have any left over once you've emptied your last clip.
  • One-Hit Kill: The DY357-LX. The alt-fire modes of the Tranquilizer (a melee attack) and Crossbow as well, and especially irritatingly, the FarSight XR-20, which can shoot through walls. Got a shield? Good, now it's just a Two-Hit Kill (draining the shield first with no health damage).
  • One-Hit-Point Wonder: In "The Duel", both you and your opponent will die in one hit. It doesn't matter if it's a bullet or melee attack.
  • One-Hit Polykill: The DY357, Callisto NTG and particularly the FarSight are capable of this.
  • One-Man Army: While stealth is generally encouraged (and at times forced), Joanna is such a good fighter and so much more durable than her opponents that it's equally possible to simply blast the enemies and still win the missions, so long as said mission doesn't actively require you to avoid alerting or shooting guards.
  • Only a Flesh Wound:
    • Shooting someone in the head with a Crossbow bolt won't kill them, just as long as the weapon is not set on Instant Kill.
    • Any NPCs that are specially coded to be invincible (aka. Plot Armor) can be shot up with every weapon and show nothing for it but some bloodstains and a few bolts and knives sticking on their skin.
  • Only Six Faces: The same enemies keep showing up in single-player, but this is averted in the Combat Simulator where you have a wide variety of skins to choose from.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: The amount of voice acting in the first game was very impressive for its time, but Rare made the mistake of using British actors for a game primarily set in America. This is most apparent with the President, who comes off like a Sean Connery Expy when it happens.
    "You can't make accusations like that without evidence! I a-shume that you have some?"
  • Optional Stealth: Perfect Dark Zero, but only on the lowest difficulty setting.
  • Our Presidents Are Different: Of the "President Target" variety. Also "President Minority", which hadn't happened yet at the time the game was made.
  • Outrun the Fireball: When alien ships are destroyed, some unknown phlebotinum causes them to erupt into massive explosions. This isn't a problem if you run away fast enough.
  • Outside-the-Box Tactic: In Zero, the two bosses go down really easily if you know what to pack Pack a Plasma Rifle for Mai Hem, and a Viblade for Zhang Li.
  • Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Perfect Dark can be modified to have more blood.
  • Palette Swap: The second player's primary character Velvet, in the N64 game, during most of the co-op missions (before the missions where Jonathan or Elvis become the second-player character). Velvet even resembles Ken to Joanna's Ryu.
  • Parking Garage:
    • In the G5 Building.
    • There is a multiplayer level called the Car Park.
  • People Jars:
    • The bodies of the Maians being kept in cryogenic storage at Area 51.
    • The Skedar have cloning tanks which hold warriors in suspended animation.
  • Percussive Maintenance: In one cutscene, Elvis fixes his spaceship by banging on it with a hammer.
  • Personality Chip: Dr. Caroll's backup disk, which (fortunately for the population of Earth) is also his Morality Chip.
  • Pint-Sized Powerhouse: The Maians. Despite being three feet tall, they're still able to punch out Skedar over twice their size.
  • Pistol-Whipping: The secondary fire mode of the Falcon 2 and DY357 is a melee smack. And in Zero, any gun can do this with the press of a button.
  • Planet of Hats: The Martial Pacifist Maians against the Always Chaotic Evil Skedar.
  • Player Mooks: One of the multiplayer modes has Player 1 try to complete a single-player mission while Player 2 controls the mooks. The mook usually has only two weapons. If the mook gets stuck (or Player 2 needs to get to a closer mook) he can use a Cyanide Pill to effectively Body Surf to another mook.
  • Player Versus Player: The Counter-Operative mode, where one player tries to complete missions as normal but their opponent gets to play as randomly-assigned enemy guards. They can even "body surf" by intentionally committing suicide (via pill) and trying to spawn as a guard closer to the main player's current location.
  • Playful Hacker: Elvis, who appears to be perfectly familiar with both the Cetans' and the Skedars' computers.
    It looks like this would benefit from a little bit of sabotage...
  • Plot Armor: On some levels, certain characters will have an indestructible protective shield around them to make sure they aren't killed. One particular instance is in the Chicago level, where a police robot patrolling the streets is made completely immune to all weapons and explosives, so that it can only be destroyed by reprogramming a taxi to crash into it for one of your objectives. This is made particularly egregious by the fact that robots of the exact same model turn up in a later level, but can be gunned down with just a few rounds from your gun.
  • Plug 'n' Play Technology: Your Data Uplink is compatible with anything the game requires it to be.
  • Poisoned Weapons: The Combat Knife has a poison tip which will slowly kill enemies if thrown accurately.
  • Poison Mushroom: The Secondary Fire mode for the Dragon assault rifle turned it into a proximity mine you plopped on the floor. Unless they have one of the game's hazard-detecting items, an opponent in multiplayer is going to be very surprised when they try to pick up their free gun. Ditto for the UGL Liberator SMG in Zero.
  • Police Are Useless: The CIA agents in the Chicago level of the first Perfect Dark. Despite being a major law enforcement agency in Real Life, the agents featured in PD might as well be ordinary civilians, and don't even attempt to maintain law and order. They carry no weapons, show no indication of any experience in combat whatsoever, flee at the sight of Joanna carrying a weapon in front of them, and seem to only exist as an excuse for you to fail your objectives. The FBI agents, the SWAT guards they call in if they see you, and the police robot on the same level, on the other hand, are indistinguishable from the dataDyne thugs that are patrolling the streets outside the G5 Building.
  • Power Glows: The charged-up Mauler glows bright red.
  • Press X to Die: This was in the Counter-Operative mode. One player plays through the mission, while the other plays as a Mook, trying to impede Player 1. When changing weapons, the mook player could select "Suicide Pill" which would instantly kill you. However, this actually served a purpose; you would respawn at a different point on the level, so it was helpful for letting you catch up to the player.
  • Private Military Contractors: There's has an excessively large security division of the dataDyne hyper-corporation, which is contracted to an alien race (albeit somewhat unwillingly), as well as the protagonist's workplace, Carrington Institute. Zero and extended universe adds the contractable security sectors of another two hypercorps; Zentek and Core-Mantis Omniglobal.
  • Punch-Clock Villain: Some of the guards say things like "I'm only doing my job!" when they surrender.
  • Punch-Packing Pistol: The Phoenix pistol, like every other weapon in the game, has an alternate-fire mode. In this case, the rate of fire drops considerably but each round explodes, and can one-shot almost any enemy in the game. Even a near-miss will still cause damage.
  • Punny Name:
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: It makes no difference whether you're playing as the skinny Joanna or the hulking Mr. Blonde; everything about the gameplay is exactly the same. However, when the player character shifts over to Elvis, this does cause his perspective to be around as short as Joanna at fully-crouched height.
  • Purposely Overpowered: The FarSight, and also the DY357-LX.
  • Race Lift: In the Japanese release, Jo was given Asian features, despite looking Caucasian in every other release.
  • Railing Kill: Quite a few, especially in the Villa level.
  • Ramming Always Works: Elvis' way of dealing with the Skedar UFO attached to Air Force One.
  • Rank Inflation: In-universe. Joanna is the first agent to achieve an A++ score in training, hence the call sign "Perfect Dark".
  • Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: The "Hurricane Fists" cheat boosts your melee rate of attack to Dragon Ball Z levels.
  • Ray Gun: All of the Maian weapons, plus the Skedar's Mauler and the Institute's inhouse laser pulse weapon.
  • Really 700 Years Old: The Maians are a long-lived species. Elvis' age is given as 320.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: The President. Although he's sick and tired of Trent begging him for the Pelagic II to be loaned out, he quite politely insists that Joanna furnish him with evidence of Trent's betrayal before he is willing to consider him as a traitor.
  • Recurring Riff: The main theme of Perfect Dark Zero is played (at different tempos and in different arrangements) in nearly every piece of music in the single-player campaign.
  • Red Filter of Doom: Whenever the player dies in either single-player or multiplayer, the screen is tinted red.
  • Regenerating Health:
    • Perfect Dark Zero has a unique version where most damage you take being "shock damage" that will go away if you aren't hit again after a short period, with a small amount being lost forever every time you get shot. Combined with a complete absence of health kits or other healing items, and you can eventually end up stuck with only a sliver of health towards the end of a level if you get shot a lot. Furthermore, each weapon has different levels of shock damage. Viblade? Say goodbye to your health permanently. Fell a long way or getting poisoned? All Shock Damage. On the hardest difficulty, all damage is permanent.
    • In the original game, this is how you recover from poison/punching/N-Bomb effects. In fact, you have to actually walk it off; the effects don't fade if you just stand still.
  • Reliably Unreliable Guns: The enemies' guns will sometimes randomly jam for no reason at all, which is quite convenient for you.
  • Renegade Splinter Faction: The Trent Easton-controlled NSA attacks the President's security detail and kidnaps him.
  • Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The Skedar are weird dinosaur-like aliens, whose offspring resemble small lizards (that can jump and bite you).
  • Reptilian Conspiracy: The Skedar race appear to be inspired by the Reptilian myth, being aliens that disguise themselves as Scandinavian men. Though, they are more open about allying with human governments.
  • Respawning Enemies: Most levels have a finite number of enemies, but if they sound an alarm or call for backup, wave after wave of baddies will appear.
  • Restricted Expanded Universe: The series leaves a large gap between the original and the prequel game, leaving the Greg Rucka novels (and comics) to expand and improve the characters and conspiracies of the universe. Those also change the backstories of Daniel Carrington and Cassandra Devries by placing them into a relationship.
  • The Reveal: Mr. Blonde is a Skedar with a holographic disguise.
  • Reverse the Polarity: Confusingly, the firing range says this is how the Devastator's Sticky Bomb function works. The game's menu just says the grenade is coated in some kind of adhesive.
  • Rich Bitch: Cassandra. She's very condescending to Joanna but also offers her a job as a way of tempting her to return Dr. Caroll which is summarily rejected.
  • Robo-Cam: The BombSpy, CamSpy and DrugSpy appear this way when you're piloting them remotely.
  • Robotic Reveal: When Joanna discovers that Dr. Caroll is an AI.
  • Rooftop Confrontation: At the end of "dataDyne: Extraction", as Joanna is attempting to escape from the top of the dataDyne building but Cassandra and her bodyguards try to stop her.

    S - Z 
  • Sapient Ship: The Cetans are implied to be this, although gameplay-wise, the Cetan ship you explore doesn't really do anything special. It's in some kind of Convenient Coma. It's not completely docile considering the first sight you see when you enter the ship is a Skedar corpse as well as the mutually hostile ship defense turrets.
  • Say My Name: Joanna and Elvis seem to do this a lot, particularly in cutscenes.
  • Scare Chord: When Trent is killed by Mr. Blonde, the score surges just as he transforms back into a Skedar and lands the killing blow.
  • Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Skedar, who are depicted as aggressive religious fanatics, as opposed to the peaceful Maians.
  • Schizo Tech: Flying cars and police drones coexist alongside computers that look like they're from 1985 and a "smartphone" of sorts (the Data Uplink) which looks like an old satellite phone.
  • Schmuck Bait: That Dragon lying on the ground there looks awfully tempting... better hope its' explosive booby trap alt-fire isn't engaged!
  • Schrödinger's Gun: Whether you or Jonathan stays behind in Area 51 is determined by whether you bring the hoverbike with you into the hangar or not. If you stay behind, he appears in "Carrington Institute: Defense" and helps you out a bit.
  • Scream Discretion Shot: The camera cuts away right before Mr. Blonde kills Trent. Also, Cassandra's death happens offscreen. However, you see Trent's death in his POV, so it's a subversion.
  • Secondary Fire:
    • Save for the GoldenEye weapons, every weapon has a secondary firing mode. Some are basic, like the Falcon 2 and DY357's Pistol-Whipping, the Reaper's Grinder mode, the Combat Knife's throw instead of a melee slash, the AR34's scope zoom in non-aim mode, and the Sniper Rifle's crouchnote ; to burst-fire modes like the MagSec 4, Cyclone, and Shotgun; to explosives like the Phoenix's small explosive rounds, the SuperDragon's underslung grenade launcher, and the Dragon's proximity mine booby-trap; to the downright exotic like the "Proximity Pinball" function on the grenade, the Laptop Gun's sentry mode, the CMP150's aimbot and FarSight XR-20's auto-tracking, the K7 Avenger and explosive mines' threat detector (picks up armed mines and booby-trapped Dragons), the Devastator's sticky grenades, and the RC-P120's cloaking device.
    • Then there's the Laser (Short Range Burst), the Crossbow (Instant Kill), the Mauler (Charged Shot), the Callisto NTG (High-Impact Shells), the Tranquilizer (Lethal Injection), the Rocket Launcher (Homing Rocket), and the Slayer (Fly-By-Wire Missiles). Also, the N-Bomb has a proximity option.
    • Even when unarmed, you can choose between "Punch" and "Disarm."
  • Secret Government Warehouse: Area 51, filled with secret alien technology and specimens.
  • Secret Level: Four.
    • Three of these are are retreads of previous levels from a different point of view, which reveal different parts of the story.
      • The first one shows how the CEO of dataDyne ended up in the Skedar ship's prison cell with you: an alien Mook went in, kidnapped her, and set a bomb to implode the dataDyne building, effectively destroying the company.
      • The other two missions let you play as the Maians: the first is where Elvis alerts the Institute of being captured at Area 51, and you play through the entire level with diminished health. The other has you play as a random soldier among a platoon who landed on the Skedar homeworld after Joanna dropped the shields. The last mission, despite being short, is arguably the hardest out of the three.
      • The last mission is training simulation in which Jo has to be three combatants.
  • Secret War: The novels indicate this has been going on between the Carrington Institute and dataDyne, out of the public eye. Zero shows it, with the last set of missions being an all-out battle between the two.
  • Sequence Breaking: Many levels can be completed in more than one way. In fact, the game often encourages it and even has HUD messages for when you find alternative means to complete an objective.
    • Finding the Bombspy allows you to use it to blow up the guards blocking the entrance to the G5 Building. With no one to lock the door down, if you're spotted, the game immediately completes the final objective before getting to the entrance because you don't need to make a distraction now that the people you'd need to distract are dead. If for whatever reason you decided to destroy the taxi you're supposed to reprogram for the objective, which normally fails it, the game will undo this and congratulate you on finding an alternate means of distraction.
    • The game (and Jonathan) explicitly go out of their way to drill into your head to not blow up the crate in the second Area 51 mission. Obviously doing so immediately causes the first objective to fail as you're intended to use it to get into the labs. However, the game gives you the Dragon — and, with some setup in the previous mission, the Phoenix in this mission, and their secondary features are explosives. By detonating the Dragon or firing the Phoenix's explosive shells at the wall, the objective will change from failed to completed and alert you that it's been rescinded due to alternative means of access being found.
    • Opening the safe door in the G5 Building takes 90 seconds while you deal with Demonic Spiders. Or you can trigger the As You Know cutscene within three seconds after you begin unlocking the safe, as the door will actually finish opening during the cutscene but the enemies will not spawn and attack you.
    • The Pelagic II has a hidden entrance to the submersible, simply by finding the switch for the big doors with the x-ray goggles and triggering it through the wall, which allows you to beat the level much more quickly than taking the conventional route.
    • The sensitive information in Carrington's office can be destroyed with a grenade instead of having to go downstairs, then go back up to open the safe with the Laser.
    • By putting the BombSpy in the other elevator, you can kill the dataDyne captain much more easily in "Mr. Blonde's Revenge".
  • Set a Mook to Kill a Mook:
    • The Psychosis Gun, which makes enemies Brainwashed and Crazy so they attack each other. Works best with torso or head shots; a limb shot will cause them to cradle the limb in pain just as a gunshot to the same area would, and hence reducing their efficacy as a lethal ally.
    • It's possible to get enemies to fire at each other just by dodging out of the way fast enough.
  • Shoe Phone: The Laptop Gun, which unfolds out of — you guessed it — a laptop. It even has a kickass Secondary Mode where you attach it to a surface and it serves as a Sentry Gun, which you can pick up again and take with you. It also Averts Bottomless Magazines in this mode, as it'll only have whatever was left in the magazine when you throw it.
  • Shoot the Hostage Taker: In "Carrington Institute: Defense". This is much easier if you take the Combat Boost first.
  • Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Rescuing Dr. Caroll ends up being this. Joanna succeeds in rescuing him (and Carrington learns plenty about dataDyne's plans, including about Dr. Caroll's backup), but he's ultimately recaptured and forced to resume his work on the Cetan megaweapon, eventually dying as a result. The one good thing is that Joanna was able to restore his backup, allowing him to pull a Heroic Sacrifice to stop the megaweapon's activation.
  • Shooting Gallery: The firing range, where you can try out any weapon you want.
  • Short-Range Long-Range Weapon:
    • Guards will not fire at you past a certain distance, even assault rifles (except snipers). When you get close enough, they try to punch you out instead of shooting you.
    • The accuracy of the AR34 is so bad, it might as well be a "close-range only" assault rifle. You have to crouch in order to hit anything at a distance.
  • Shout-Out: Numerous ones to other sci-fi and Cyberpunk works. Has its own page.
  • Sigil Spam:
    • The weapons-manufacturing MegaCorp dataDyne likes plastering their "dD" logo on all their architecture (admittedly, it is quite a cool logo). Not to mention the fact that the Carrington Institute's logo appears on Joanna Dark's Spy Catsuit. DataDyne troops also have the same logo on their uniforms, and it even appears prominently on the dataDyne-designed Shotgun.
    • The Skedar also seem to like etching their symbol into every available surface and sculptures of it appear all over the place in the Battle Shrine.
    • For a top-secret government installation, Area 51 makes it pretty clear what the name of the facility you're in is.
  • Showdown at High Noon: The bonus mission "The Duel", complete with back to back stance and scripted steps. Higher difficulties demand you to best more duelists in a row.
  • Silliness Switch: The Paintball Cheat replaces bullet holes with paintball splotches and blood with multicolored puddles.
  • Simple Rescue Mechanic: The negotiator that you have to save at the beginning of "Carrington Institute: Hostage One" (unless you choose Perfect Agent difficulty, where you are the negotiator) inexplicably disappears from the level when she runs away after you save her from the guards.
  • Simple, yet Awesome:
    • The Falcon 2 is a surprisingly decent handgun, considering it's the first weapon you get in the game. It's fast, accurate and even comes with a handy little scope on certain missions, plus doubles for Pistol-Whipping. The CMP-150 also qualifies, as it's the most common gun in the single-player mode, but it has a high firing rate, plentiful ammo and a nifty auto-targeting system. It can also be dual-wielded.
    • There's always the option of disarming an enemy, which works wonders in multiplayer.
  • Single-Biome Planet: The Skedar homeworld is implied to be one big battle-scarred wasteland, due to a combination of earthquakes, scorching heat from the star system's three suns, and thousands of years of constant warfare on the Skedar's behalf.
  • Sinister Geometry: The weird polyhedral structures that are scattered all over the Skedar planet. (Overlaps with Spikes of Doom.)
  • Slow Doors: Some, such as the large cargo elevator (albeit this one does not provide cover so the guards and player character can shoot eachother like for like) in Area 51 open and close very slowly. On the Skedar planet, some of them open only part-way due to poor maintenance and the failing power system of the area.
  • Small Name, Big Ego: Trent Easton is head of the NSA (National Security Agency), a high-but-not-that-high position in the US intelligence hierarchy that would make him report to the Director of National Intelligence. He acts like he is the NSA (National Security Advisor), which is a far more influential position.
  • Smug Snake: Trent. He almost succeeds in his plan to capture the President, but ends up failing thanks to Joanna and getting mauled to death by the Skedar for it.
  • Snark-to-Snark Combat: Joanna and Jonathan engage in this in every interaction between them.
  • Sniper Pistol: Joanna's trusty Falcon 2 pistol can be fitted with a scope to make a surprisingly accurate medium-ranged sniper weapon. Note that the scope attachment, much like the silencer, cannot be applied or removed at will; they're treated as separate weapons, and getting the scoped, silenced, or basic version of it is decided by the game on a per-mission basis. Zero has the similar P9P pistol, which always has a scope attached and can also attach or remove a silencer at the player's discretion, which in fact makes the gun more accurate in return for lesser damage.
  • Sniper Scope Sway: The game has this feature for all scoped guns, but it's especially bad on the Sniper Rifle. To compensate, you can crouch while firing for greater stability. Also, unlike in GoldenEye, you can just turn the "Head Roll" feature off through the menu if you like.
  • Sniping Mission: The first part of the Villa. Averted on the Perfect Agent difficulty; instead of sniping the guards to save the diplomat, you are the diplomat and have to use the laptop gun.
  • Soft Glass: You can even punch through it.
  • Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb: Twice — in Area 51, and the Carrington Institute.
  • Songs in the Key of Panic: Most levels has a faster variant of its music, which plays during critical junctures. Exaggerated with Carrington Institute: Defense; the normal level music is already more frantic than the Institute's usual theme, and still has an even faster variant.
  • Sound Test: The game allows players to choose the combat music for multiplayer and listen to it (and any other track available) prior to starting the match. It comes with both music from the single-player campaign and its own multiplayer-only music.
  • Space Cold War: The real conflict in this series is not between the Carrington Institute and dataDyne, but rather the Maians and the Skedar. Earth itself is not that important; the only reason the Skedar have even bothered to take an interest in Earth is because they're losing the war against the Maians but have learned about the existence of a lost superweapon under the ocean that was left behind by a third alien race, the Cetans. In the end, humanity isn't considered a major player in this war; the Skedar plan to activate the weapon on Earth just to test it, and if successful, then they'll deploy it against the Maians.
  • Spiteful A.I.: In Defense when hostages are taken, the hostage takers have no self preservation whatsoever, eagerly gunning down their captives regardless of how many times they're shot just to make you fail to save them.
  • Spoiler Cover: Look closely at the box art for the game◊. You can see a reflection of Elvis in Joanna's left eye.
  • Spread Shot: The Shotgun, obviously, but the Cyclone has a ridiculous spread as well, as does the Reaper.
  • Spy Catsuit: One that has has armored surfaces and is a mixture of blue and gray material rather than black leather. She does wear a literal spy catsuit in the G5 Building level. The Carrington Institute uniform she wears in the second half of PDZ counts too.
  • Starfish Aliens: Opposite of the benevolent Maians, aka The Greys, there are the evil Skedar, which are squid-like Starfish Aliens who literally worship war, although equipped with anthropomorphic Powered Armor.
  • State Sec: The NSA headed by Trent Easton. Unlike the real world agency, the video game counterpart has its own troops and controls Area 51. Somewhat justified since Easton is part of a conspiracy, using the NSA to accomplish his agenda.
  • Stealth-Based Mission: Numerous examples, but being stealthy is rewarded in almost every level.
  • Stealth Pun: Joanna Dark.
  • Sticky Bomb: The Devastator's grenades have this option: they will stick for a couple of seconds then forcefully eject and detonate on contact with the next surface (floors, walls, etc). Mines also qualify, much like in GoldenEye.
  • Strapped to an Operating Table: This happens to Elvis, and he nearly gets dissected before Joanna intervenes.
  • Stripperiffic:
    • Mai-Hem's outfits have to be seen to be believed◊.
    • Joanna's Qipao in the Xbox Live version is considerably more revealing.
  • Stuff Blowing Up: The ending cutscene for "Deep Sea" contains plenty of Scenery Porn.
  • Super-Persistent Missile: When you fire a Homing Rocket at a stationary enemy. It tracks them down (but occasionally glitches up and simply hovers at them, if they're standing still). It will do the same to the hovercopter sent to attack Joanna in the first mission of the game.
  • Super-Soldier: Joanna is the closest character to this, not just because of her training, but because of her accomplishments as well.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Max Danger from the Game Boy Color game for Jonathan Dark/Steinberg from the other games. He's an undercover agent for the Carrington Institute who provides Joanna with objectives/intel, and he even has the same voice actor as Jonathan from the N64 game.
  • Suspiciously Small Army: Joanna believes that seven Skedar constitutes an 'army'.
    "OH NO!!! A Skedar army in suspended animation!"
  • Swiss-Army Weapon: The Laptop Gun has three functions (laptop, SMG, and Sentry Gun). Note however that it's not actually possible to carry the weapon out as a laptop e.g. to enhance any disguise you may be wearing.
  • Tap on the Head: Punching out civilians is easy and painless. Occasionally, there will be one who puts up a lot more resistance than others, though.
  • A Taste of Power: You can get the K7 Avenger as early as the second level, which doesn't appear again until halfway through the game. It's also possible to get the Phoenix in Area 51, which makes the level much easier. It doesn't appear again until the third last level.
  • Technicolor Toxin: The bright green nerve gas in Area 51.
  • Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Joanna and Jonathan snark at each other a lot in Area 51, but appear to have gotten over that by the time they need to defend the Carrington Institute (Jonathan's presecne is an optional feature if you fulfill a certain condition in the Area 51 Escape sub-mission).
  • Teleporters and Transporters: "Deep Sea" has warp portals.
  • Ten Paces and Turn: The bonus mission "The Duel," in which Joanna is pitted against simulated opponents of increasing difficulty in the Carrington Institute's training center. Each round Jo and her enemy will start back-to-back and take several scripted steps away from each other before turning to fight. The second opponent, Agent Jonathan, will actually cheat and duck behind a wall while your back is turned.
  • Theme Music Power-Up: The "CI Operative" theme plays during some cutscenes, usually after Joanna does something awesome.
  • They Look Like Us Now: Mr. Blondes can use impressive hologram technology to pass as Nordic humans when they are really Skedar.
  • Throw-Away Guns: The Dragon and Laptop Gun on their secondary mode, which turns it into a disguised proximity bomb, or sentry gun respectively. The UGL Liberator in Zero gets the Dragon's secondary mode. Also, there is one point in the last level of the original which requires you to leave one of your guns behind before progressing. Unfortunately, the completely worthless Reaper can't be used for it.
    Make your sacrifice to the god of war.
  • This Is the Final Battle:
    Joanna: This is it. Cut off the head, and the body will perish.
  • Timed Mission: Several levels have segments which must be completed in a certain time limit (these are usually Always Close). In particular, "Mr. Blonde's Revenge" must be completed in about four minutes before the bomb you've planted in the basement of dataDyne headquarters goes off. It's possible to do it the long way and kill everyone in the building before planting it, but very difficult and time-consuming, and the doors can be locked — failing the mission.
  • Title Drop: Perfect Dark is Joanna's agent title at Carrington Institute. So sometimes she'll be called that (Carrington also uses the codename to call her over the radio after Air Force One crashes in the Alaskan wilderness).
    Carrington: Good luck, Perfect Dark.
  • Took a Level in Badass: There's one animation all the guards can potentially do — usually (mercifully) don't, but when they do, it strikes fear into most gamers. It's unofficially called the "Terminator Walk". Guards in the game generally either go prone, crouch or stand still, all while adjusting their aim. In the Terminator Walk, they start advancing towards you with no regard for their own safety like a badass, and unload their entire magazine at you. Actually, they don't stop until the animation ends, rather than magazine being empty (which is even more ridiculous with weapons like the K7 Avenger, with its insane RoF and small clip, making for a The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard example). If this happens on a harder difficulty, take cover quickly, or prepared to get shredded.
  • Tranquillizer Dart: The Tranquillizer, but instead of knocking targets out, it blurs their vision, lowering their accuracy. The alternate fire gives the darts a lethal overdose.
  • Translation Convention: The mission briefing for the bonus levels which let you play as a member of an alien race is written to reflect the style that the alien races might be expected to use.
  • Trapped in Containment: The surgeons at Area 51 who kill themselves with nerve gas.
  • Trial-and-Error Gameplay: The original game's lack of mid-level saving of any kind means that if you get killed in ambush, use an expendable gadget in the wrong place, or allow your braindead AI companions to get themselves killed, it's back to the start of the level. More evident on the two higher difficulty settings.
  • Troperiffic: Rare more or less attempted to cram as many action movie and sci-fi tropes as possible into a single game. It worked pretty well.
  • Try Not to Die:
    Jonathan: That crate... [...] It really doesn't like being shot.
  • 20 Minutes into the Future: Apart from the flying cars and alien technology, this could almost be a modern shooter. Canonically, the game is set in 2023. The prequel is only set three years earlier and completely drops both of these, leaving the only real hints that it's the future as some of the odder weapons (Plasma Rifle, a sword with an energy shield, etc.), the fact that the only flying vehicles all seem to be Osprey-inspired, jet-powered VTOL craft, and the in-universe existence of Deathmatch.
  • Unexpected Genre Change: From normal, if futuristic, spies versus evil conglomerates to epic sci-fi action ending with the main characters storming an alien planet.
  • The Unfought: None of the main villains (Cassandra DeVries, Trent Easton, Mr. Blonde) get boss fights, and Joanna never even meets the specific Mr. Blonde who's leading the conspiracy. Cassandra at least gets an Enemy Mine Dying Moment of Awesome.
  • Unguided Lab Tour: Joanna's missions sometimes require her to sneak into and investigate several high-tech, top-secret labs such as dataDyne Central (her institution's rival), Area 51 (Government facility, hints about the existence of aliens), and the Pelagic II (Government ship overtaken by dataDyne). Justified because she's a secret agent —it's literally her job to go unnoticed.
  • Uniqueness Rule: In the Combat Simulator, each player is only allowed to deploy one Laptop Gun as a sentry weapon at any time. Attempting to deploy a second Laptop Gun as a sentry gun will result in the first deployed gun destroying itself.
  • Universal Ammunition: The game uses the same ammo setup as GoldenEye, with a few weapons having unique ammo types and the rest drawing from shared pools, differing only in that a third "generic" pool is added for submachine guns. A fairly ridiculous example, not only in that (at least going by the One Bullet Clips rules) it already made sense for submachine guns to use pistol rounds, but that the alien weapons also draw from these pools.
  • Unlockable Content: Perfect Dark inherits this structure from GoldenEye (1997), in that, if you want to have the full experience, to explore everywhere, and complete various objectives, you are required to play the missions in the harder difficulties. This however, is no cake-walk.
  • Unnecessary Combat Roll:
    • It seems like the first day of security guard school is spent teaching cadets how to perform this. Averted in that it's as woefully ineffective as it should be (it leaves guards open to attack for several seconds) but played straight in that Joanna herself performs a few shoulder rolls during cutscenes.
    • One of the changes made from GoldenEye (1997) involved making the rolling animation interruptible - that is, a guard no longer finishes his roll, stands up and then dies if shot mid-roll.
    • Zero lets Joanna do this as a command. It breaks enemy lock-ons, forcing them to get their bearing. They are also substantially quicker.
  • Unorthodox Reload:
    • The Cyclone's bizarre reload animation where the magazine is fed into the side of the gun and passes out the other side.
    • Maian weapons have a magazine which looks like a greenish ball and is absorbed into the side of the gun like a liquid.
    • The DY357 has a cool-looking but pointless reloading move where you insert the moon clip into the chamber and then flick it sideways one-handed.
    • When you're dual-wielding. How the heck can you even reload two guns at the same time so quickly if you're holding them in each hand?
  • Unusable Enemy Equipment: Taken to absurd levels in the GBC title. Most enemies will be armed with assault rifles, yet only a few guards will have usable weapons, or even ammo, on them when they are killed.
  • Unusual User Interface: Joanna's headset, which is essentially a wearable computer that deploys over her field of vision when you access the menu. Strangely, this detail is nowhere to be seen in her in-game model, or her renders for the XBLA version.
  • Unwinnable by Design:
    • You can actually (and on higher difficulties, have to) encounter the Disc-One Final Boss in the very first mission. You can freely gun her down, but it will fail the mission and prevent you from progressing. (The In-Universe justification is that she has a key you need to get into the secret lab, but it will stop working if she dies - and the mission's intro cutscene even tells you as much!)
    • Rarely, mission objectives will have (non-obvious) timers; two big examples in the same mission are the taxi and the limo on the Chicago stage. You need to bug the limo and hack the taxi, but the taxi will leave permanently only a short time into the mission, and the limo will depart a short time after (they'll also both leave if you make too much of a ruckus.) Didn't handle them before they depart? Mission failed, abort and try again. However, there's a hidden BombSpy which does allow the objective involving the taxi to be completed in a different fashion, however this itself can be lost if the player doesn't take care to explode the dumpster it's hidden in with adjacent oil drums.
    • Also in the Chicago mission, you need to create an opening to sneak into the secret base. If you just casually waltz into the guards' line of sight, they'll permanently lock the door; mission failed.
    • Obviously, any mission where you need to keep plot-critical NPCs alive will fail if they die.
    • You need a disguise to infiltrate Area 51 in the second self-named mission. If you get the disguise, but then botch it by raising the alarm anyway, you can't get into the room you need to to complete the mission. Time to restart!
    • In the start of that same mission, you need to escort a hovercrate to a weakened wall to blast an opening into the base itself. You have to move it through a warehouse full of enemies. The crate is fragile, and there is only one. You do the math. However, you can still pull it off if you lose the crate, by throwing the assault rifle in proximity mine mode next to the marked wall, then shooting it with another gun to detonate it.
    • In the Airbase missions, raise the alarm in the airbase before you've infiltrated it, or on Air Force One before you've proven the conspiracy to the President (or don't have the evidence when you do, or leave before you present it, etc.) will turn the level hostile and prevent you from finishing.
  • Updated Re-release: Re-released for the Xbox Live Arcade on March 17th 2010 with bright, shiny new high-def visuals and online play! Feast your eyes.
  • Vader Breath: Mr. Blonde has it, notably in his own mission, Mr Blonde's Revenge. It highlights his alien origins because it sounds unnatural.
  • Video Game Caring Potential: If you disarm or surprise some foes, they'll surrender and cause you no further trouble note . But...
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: Are you evil enough to shoot an enemy in the groin or head after they've been disarmed and surrendered? Yes.
    • In the original, foes who have been knocked out can then be killed rather easily, especially if you like headshots.
    • In the first mission, you can shoot down flying cars that go by, obviously killing whoever was inside.
      • In the same mission, you can kill the Executive after he logs into the terminal that you have to use the Data Link on.
    • Nothing says "guilty, sadistic pleasure" more than shooting a dead body curled up in the fetal position.
    • The non-combatants in Area 51 will either surrender, run away to hide or alert security, or yell at you. You can kill them all without failing the mission... if you want to, that is.
      Scientist: "Leave this area now!" [gets shot in the head]
    • If you wasted time and ammo in breaking all of the bottles in the Wine Cellar of Carrington Villa, Daniel will call you out for destroying at least a million dollars worth of vintage alcohol.
      Carrington: Act your age, Joanna.
  • Video Game Cruelty Punishment: In some levels, there are civilians wandering around. You are not allowed to shoot them; doing so instantly fails the mission.
  • Villain Shoes: "Mr. Blonde's Revenge" is played from his perspective.
  • Violence Is the Only Option: Against the Skedar. As they are so warlike and have been threatening to break a fragile truce with the Maians, and given their willingness to destroy planets in the pursuit of their goals, the only option is to bring the fight to their homeworld and take out their leadership.
  • Virtual Ghost: Dr. Carroll is the mind of a dead scientist programmed into a floating laptop computer. He appears in human form in Perfect Dark Zero.
  • Virtual Paper Doll: In multiplayer, you can combine any costume with any character's head (some of which wear helmets).
  • Virtual Training Simulation: The Combat Simulator room.
  • Visible Invisibility: The Cloaking Device leaves a faint trace of the user's outline. As well, users have to decloak to attack.
  • Voice with an Internet Connection: Usually Mr. Carrington, although other CI staff sometimes fill this role. Zero gives you Chandra for half the game, though she defects to dataDyne very shortly after Jack is killed.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifting: The Skedar can shift between their true forms and their Mr. Blonde disguises.
  • Vulnerable Civilians: To complicate matters, some missions have many non-combatants and innocents wandering around. If you kill too many of them, (or just one or two on harder difficulties) you will fail the mission.
  • Wall of Weapons: The guns in the glass cases at the firing range.
  • Weak Turret Gun: The Laptop Gun in its Secondary Fire mode. Most drone guns in the game can be destroyed without much effort, although the ones in Area 51 can be pretty tough.
  • Wearing a Flag on Your Head: Elvis' stars and stripes vest. The Maians really like America.
  • We Can Rule Together: Cassandra invokes this when Joanna encounters her at the end of the dataDyne mission.
  • We Need a Distraction:
    • Reprogramming the taxi on Chicago to crash into the police robot.
    • Cassandra gives her life to make one in "Attack Ship".
  • We Will Not Use Photoshop in the Future: Joanna's evidence of the conspiracy is a recording which the President proclaims "overwhelming" after seeing roughly three seconds of it.
  • We Will Use WikiWords in the Future: dataDyne, SuperDragon, FarSight, MagSec (what is that short for, anyway?), the BombSpy, CamSpy and DrugSpy. The N-Bomb may count too, since the "n" is short for "neutron", though it's nothing like a real neutron bomb.
  • Wham Shot: Again, several.
    • Dr. Caroll being revealed as an AI at the end of the second level.
    • The Greys being real, at the start of the seventh level.
    • Trent being killed by Mr. Blonde, who is revealed to be a hostile alien, at the end of the twelfth level.
    • Mission 7's ending, which sees Joanna captured.
    • Finally, Mission 8's opening, which shows Cassandra a prisoner aboard the Skedar ship same as Jo.
  • What a Piece of Junk: Elvis says this about his own ship.
    Elvis: Oh no, we have a problem. It's a single-seater. Two can get in, but no more.
    Joanna: It's the only way out of here.
    Elvis: Plus, it's got no style, you know what I'm saying?
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: After being rescued in the Crash Site mission, the President is never heard from again, although a meeting with him is a plot point later on.
  • What Measure Is a Mook?:
    • Until you run up against the aliens directly, you're mostly mowing down security guards or government employees. Admittedly, they're working for a corrupt corporation and a treacherous NSA respectively. Even if they're under orders to kill you, your "viable targets" are still people doing their jobs. You can just knock out human enemies if you so desire in most levels. It's just that this is usually only practical if you can surprise lone guards.
    • In the levels where you have to board or are actually on Air Force One, you will fail the mission if you kill guards, as they are not involved in the conspiracy to kidnap the President. You can, however, kill NSA troops, since they are.
    • A particularly sad example is in Mission 4-2 where you must take a spare uniform from a scientist named Harry. On Agent difficulty, you can't avoid killing Harry as he is "conveniently" next to the crack that you must demolish.
  • What the Hell, Player?: Running around, ducking, and doing other wacky stuff in front of people will elicit a response. "Please don't do that, Joanna — it worries me." If you destroy all the wine bottles in your boss's wine cellar, he will tell you to act your age. Which is odd, as story-wise, your boss is tied up in the other room bruised and beaten.
  • Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The game is rather vague about the location of most of its settings, aside from Chicago, Alaska and Nevada. Most of the CI staff are British, but the city where dataDyne's headquarters are located isn't named, and Carrington's villa seems to be in Gibraltar or somewhere on the Mediterranean.
  • Why Isn't It Attacking?: When Joanna and Elvis enter the Cetan ship, they comment on how unusual it is that there are no guards around. The reason is that several of them have cloaking devices.
  • A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Two instances where there is a group of scientists or personnel that you're not allowed to kill, one of them will invariably try to screw you over by sounding the alarm or pulling a gun.
  • Word Salad Title: Aside from being the codename of the main character, the name "Perfect Dark" doesn't mean anything in particular besides that it sounds really cool. Because of the difficulty in localizing the title, the game was going to be renamed Red and Black in Japan for the same reason until they decided to just transliterate the English title.
  • Would Hit a Girl: You are playing as a woman, and your enemies are perfectly willing to shoot or punch you. This is only fair, given you're trying to kill them as well. It would also be a pretty boring game if they didn't.
  • Writing Around Trademarks: In the XBLA remaster, the Big Head Mode was renamed from "DK Mode" to "Monkey Mode".
  • X-Ray Vision: There is an item called the X-Ray Scanner that can see through walls. One of the weapons (the infamously overpowered FarSight) is a railgun with one of these scanners built into it.
  • You All Look Familiar: All of the Skedar and Maians (except Elvis) look the same.
  • You Are Too Late:
    • Joanna rescues Daniel from being held hostage at the villa, but not before dataDyne recovers Dr. Caroll from him.
    • Trent invokes this when he has the President hostage at gunpoint. Jo has about a half second to disarm him before failing the mission.
  • You Fool!: Trent says this about the President. Cassandra also says "You won't shoot me, foolish child". You can't shoot her without failing the mission, but you can knock her out.
  • You Have Failed Me:
  • You Killed My Father: In the sixth mission of Zero, Mai Hem kills Joanna's father, Jack Dark. Jo retaliates by burning Mai Hem with her dropship's engine exhaust, although she's Not Quite Dead yet.
  • Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Happens after you've blown up the undersea superweapon and saved the world. Time to put on your best dress and meet the President! Whoops! Change of plans... time to defend your headquarters against a surprise invasion, get kidnapped, and single-handedly defeat a warlike alien race on its own planet.
  • You Shall Not Pass!:
    • Joanna attempts this during the evacuation of the Carrington Institute. While the ship she was defending manages to escape, she gets knocked out and captured.
    • During the evacuation of Area 51, either you or Jonathan covers the escape. If you do it, you find a way out on your own, and Jonathan shows up again at Mission 7. If Jonathan does it, the mission ends for you immediately and you don't see him again.
  • You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Cassandra rightly claims this. You can still knock her out though.
  • Zerg Rush:
    • The tiny Skedar in "Deep Sea" are particularly annoying as they just keep spawning and there's nothing to do but shoot them all as they regenerate.
    • On "War!", the enemies never stop coming; your only hope is to kill as many as you can and run like hell to avoid the rest. Luckily, they're terrible shots. The good news is that your army also respawns. Keeping them alive is essential.
  • Zero-Effort Boss: The Duel mission, which is ordinarily difficult almost to Luck-Based Mission levels... unless you're facing Jonathan Steinberg. The guy is actually fairly competent when he's helping you, but when he's in the Duel, he's apparently taken correspondence courses at the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, and misses every single shot even at point-blank range. You can be standing perfectly still right in front of him, and he'll still merrily fire every single shot into the wall behind you. This is because he's still coded as an ally, and therefore to avoid committing friendly fire. The only way to get killed is to either get into extreme close range, at which he uses a melee attack, or use cheats to give him a rocket launcher, at which he can kill you by splash damage.

 
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Perfect Dark

Perfect Dark is a 2000 first-person shooter game developed by Rare for the Nintendo 64. It follows Joanna Dark, a spy for a research institute attempting to stop a rival company from conspiring with aliens to take over the world. As a spiritual successor to GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark retains the controls and general FPS gameplay of the former, albeit in an entirely new setting and with some of the best graphics on the N64.

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First-Person Shooter

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Perfect Dark

Perfect Dark is a 2000 first-person shooter game developed by Rare for the Nintendo 64. It follows Joanna Dark, a spy for a research institute attempting to stop a rival company from conspiring with aliens to take over the world. As a spiritual successor to GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark retains the controls and general FPS gameplay of the former, albeit in an entirely new setting and with some of the best graphics on the N64.

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