There Are No Bedsheets

A video game trope, usually seen in Role Playing Games.

Back in the 2D era, it was fairly easy to show characters getting into bed. One sprite for the back of the bed, one for the sheets or blanket, slot the character sprite between them. In fact, in countless such games the player can "lie down in bed" simply by walking his character into it from the side, at which point they look just like they're tucked in safely.

However, when games went 3D, players expect to see realistic bedsheets. This is nowhere near an easy task, as bedsheets need to curve realistically and be able to be sloughed off the bed when the character arises, something that's very difficult to do with polygons. This gave the developers three choices:

• Show a bedsheet as a single polygon slab (or at best several polygons). This is almost never done, because it looks awful.
• Go whole hog and program realistic bedsheets. For most games this is simply too much work for too little gain.
• Do what most RPGs do, which is simply remove the bedsheets entirely, or make them welded to the bed so the character sleeps on top of the blanket.

For many games, your hero will be lying in bed, but there will inevitably be no sheets or blanket on it; the hero may as well be lying on a slab of rock. The only exception may be when showing someone who is ill and not actually expected to get out of bed at all during the course of the game.

Examples of There Are No Bedsheets include:

• Final Fantasy X: Whenever Tidus is shown on a bed, there is no blanket.
  • Similarly with Yuna in Final Fantasy X 2.
• Kingdom Hearts: This trope happens in every game in the series, with the exception of Chain of Memories, where there are no beds.
• Fallout 3: Many beds are like this.
• In The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, Link during his Good Morning, Crono.
• Grandia II: While all the beds in the game have sheets, the characters will only be shown lying on top of them, except for one scene with a bed-ridden character.
• Aversion conveniently enabled in Paper Mario. Since all the characters are 2D in a 3D world they can just slip under the sheets without anything needing to be changed.
• Animal Crossing beds may or may not have bedsheets in their models, but characters will universally ignore them and just lie on top of them, using the same animation for a normal bed as they would for a hammock or a bench-press.
• Shenmue on the Dreamcast. Ryo was a lazy bugger, he never changed his clothes for bed or even took his jacket and boots off!
• Oblivion boasted a day life cycle for each NPC, meaning that at night, they would go home and sleep in their beds. On top of their bedsheets. Fully clothed.
• Gothic
• Back to The Future - Marty wakes up in episode 4 on top of his blankets, fully dressed.