Interchangeable Antimatter Keys - TV Tropes

Interchangeable Antimatter Keys - TV Tropes

In Real Life, a lock is a device for making sure an unauthorized person can't get through a specific door. There's generally anywhere from one to four keys made to fit a specific lock, and these keys usually won't fit in any other lock (unless the key happens to be a master key). The lock can be opened and closed over and over again.

Not so in games with this trope! Here, pretty much any key will fit in any door. Sometimes keys will only work in the dungeon you find them in, but still, within each dungeon every key will fit every door.

Naturally, this would make opening all the Locked Doors very easy, except for one strange fact: whenever you use a key to open a door, the key, the lock, and sometimes even the entire door will disappear, right before your eyes — as if the key was made from antimatter. This makes locks almost useless for their real world purpose, which may explain why you only end up finding Locked Doors in dark forgotten dungeons beneath the earth and not on the doors to people's houses.

In a few games, the structure of dungeons may make it so that the interchangeable aspect doesn't ever come up; whenever you get a key, there's only one locked door you can ever reach, and the next key is behind that door. Still, rest assured that if you cheated up some more keys, or else got past a door without using a key, you'd find the game treats them as interchangeable.

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