Video Games / Not Allowed To Grow Up


 * World of Warcraft's Anduin Wrynn was ten for quite a while. He finally got his age up (new character model) with the release of Cataclysm.
 * Both used and averted by the Donkey Kong Country series. While the original Donkey Kong grew old to become Cranky Kong, his wife Wrinkly passed away (though she returned as a ghost) and Tiny Kong grew up from a little kid to being in her late teens, Diddy and Dixie Kong (who is Tiny's older sister) are still kids after 13 years. Since most of the Kongs note were Put on a Bus after Rareware left for Microsoft, it is possible that not as much time has passed in the Donkey Kong universe as in Real Life. Kiddy Kong, the baby character from Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!, has not yet gotten off the bus. It appears that Rare attempted to have Diddy age slightly in Diddy Kong Racing DS, in which his voice was deeper and appeared to have broken.
 * Drakengard has Seere, a six-year-old boy who made a pact with a golem creature. The price for the pact was being unable to grow up. In Drakengard 2, he is now 24 years old, but still looks like a little boy.
 * The Sims:
 * In The Sims a baby grows up to be a child... and then can never age again, meaning that eventually, they hit their peak grade and can never accomplish anything ever again. The sequels introduced aging and allowed the children to grow up.
 * In The Sims 2, only the Sims in the household you're currently playing as will age; so unless you regularly switch between households, it will likely end up with your elderly sim's old friends from elementary school still being children.
 * Averted in The Sims 3 and onwards by default. All the sims in a particular game will age and die, though you can control how long each stage of life is and even turn it off if you want.
 * In The Sims 4 you can choose a variety of options for who ages, including only the Sims you are currently playing like in The Sims 2, everyone like in The Sims 3, only Sims you've played, or only Sims you haven't played. There is also the option to turn aging off completely.
 * The Sims Freeplay originally had babies unable to age however updates added in the feature eventually.
 * Despite six years passing between the sixth and twelfth Touhou game, Reimu and Marisa remain the same age. As far as we can tell.
 * Seemingly averted with Santi from Cun-Cun & Santi. In the first game, he was 5 years old, and was tall enough to slighlty reach past Cun-Cun´s navel. In Cun-Cun & Santi 2, he appears to have got taller, now reaching Cun-Cun´s neck, and in Earthcraft All-Stars Racing, he was as tall as Cun-Cun. Played straight with everyone else, though.
 * Sonic the Hedgehog:
 * Sonic had a birthday in Sonic Generations. He's still fifteen years old. Humorously, before Sonic Adventure, his canon age was sixteen. He seems to be aging backwards! Also in Generations, he, Tails and Eggman are depicted as having aged quite a bit since their 16-bit days, not even being able to fully recall their early adventures in Chemical Plant or Green Hill Zone despite the above. His newest English voice actor as of Sonic Colors uses a noticeably deeper voice than previous ones, however, nothing points to Sonic actually aging.
 * The series has this trope in spades; none of the characters seem to grow any older than the age in which they were introduced, and some (like Charmy Bee) actually had their ages and mannerisms adjusted to be younger than what they were before.
 * Amy Rose seems to be an aversion, having aged from 8 to 12 between Sonic CD and Sonic Adventure, which seems reasonable... But is weird alongside Knuckles, who went from 15 to 16; Tails, who remained 8; and Sonic, who, as mentioned above, went from 16 to 15.
 * Infinite lampshades this in Sonic Forces. He mentions that Sonic and Tails (who are 15 and 8 respectively) have been fighting Eggman for decades.
 * Kingdom Hearts
 * Huey, Dewey, and Louie. There is no noticeable difference between their appearance in Birth by Sleep and their appearance in Kingdom Hearts II, 11 years later.
 * In 3D, Riku explains that the different worlds don't operate on the same time scale. Not many fans wanted to believe him, though the Timeless River world from II would at least add some more credence to that theory.
 * In most of the Harvest Moon games, you're allowed to get married and have a child. In several after a few months of in-game time, the kid will move from being an infant to a toddler - and then never get older than that. Also true of all the other characters, since you can play for hundreds of years in-game, and no one ever gets older or dies. This trope is subverted with Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life as everyone ages over the roughly twenty years the game goes on. Characters hair turn grey, the children grow into adults, and characters die (including the protagonist). The only exception are the farm animals as they never die of old age or even age beyond young adulthood.
 * Pokémon:
 * The franchise usually averts this trope (featuring sequels that have timeskips and cameos from characters that present them as older than before), however Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 doesn't. In the World Tournament, all the characters were given new sprites however not new designs, despite the games taking place at least a decade after some of them. So we have gym leaders like Misty or Whitney who glaringly haven't aged a day. Subverted with the Unova characters themselves. All the characters aged during the two-year timeskip between the sequels and Pokémon Black and White, though it's mainly noticeable with the child characters like Iris and Bianca.
 * Thoroughly averted in Pokémon Sun and Moon, where Red and Blue actually look like they are in their late teens if not early twenties as at least a decade has passed since FireRed and LeafGreen, where they were eleven. It also features cameos from other characters such as Grimsley, who also look noticeably older and is greying. Wally, on the other hand, plays this straight: he looks almost exactly the same as he did in OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire, despite that game taking place at the same time as FireRed and LeafGreen. This is unusual because Anabel, who was roughly the same age as Wally and debuted in the same game as him (albeit she didn't appear in the remakes) is an adult and it's noted that at least ten years have passed since then.
 * Sakura from Street Fighter is an odd example. She was introduced in the Street Fighter Alpha prequel series as a teenager, and by all rights, should be at least in her early 20's at this point. However, because her Iconic Outfit is a Japanese schoolgirl uniform, Capcom seems to want to avoid aging her up too much and has refused to really address the subject in-game. It's particularly jarring since Karin, Sakura's rival and former fellow high schooler, was finally given an adult redesign in Street Fighter V.
 * Averted when Sakura joined Street Fighter V as DLC: She's officially in college and has a part-time job working in an arcade, with her uniform being her new default costume (her iconic sailor fuku is now her nostalgia costume).
 * In Stardew Valley, you can play the game for as many in-game years as you like, but Vincent, Jas, and any children that you might have will never grow up.
 * In Ensemble Stars! it's more like 'not allowed to graduate' - the story continuously fills in a roughly one-year period of time covering a single school year, because if time moved on, a third of the characters would leave the school and not be able to participate the same way anymore.
 * Tori also references this trope off-handedly in one story, complaining about his short height and dreaming of when he'll get taller, but then remembering that since his Charm Point is his unusually youthful looks, there are definitely fans out there who would retort 'no way, you're neeever allowed to get any older!'
 * A justified example occurs in the finale of Ghost Trick. Anybody who is impaled by a shard of the Temsik Meteor no longer ages and is functionally immortal, trapped between life and death; in the original timeline, this happened to Yomiel, who was already an adult, but when Sissel goes back to undo his death, the shard instead impales Sissel himself, who was only a kitten at that point in time. Ten years later, in the present, Sissel is still a kitten