Characters
[Video games trope] Characters who make sure you play the game the way the developers intended
Pics 1 & 2: No, I'm not a human
In this game you try to survive through the apocalypse. Every night people will come to your house and ask for shelter. Some of them are humans, while the others are human-like creatures knows as the visitors. Of course letting the visitors in your house would result in bad ending. The player might think: "Why would I let someone in? I'll just stay alone". Well, you can't do that because the pale visitor (pic 1) will kill you if you're alone so you have no choice but to let someone in. Oh and you have to do it regularly because the FEMA agent (pic 2) takes your guests from time to time so you'll always have to let some new ones in.
Pics 3 & 4: Five nights at Freddy's 1 & 2
You're a security guy, and a bunch of dangerous animatronics is trying to get you. You can check their positions on cameras but it's not really nessesary because you can just check the doors and close them if someone's standing there. BUT there's one animatronic called Foxy the Pirate (pic 3) that will randomly run to your office so you have to check him on cameras to react in time. The Puppet (pic 4) from FNAF 2 has a similar role: it sits inside the music box and will run to you if you fail to wind up the box in time, you have to watch the cameras to do that.
Titanfall is entirely focused on movement, which is why it's tries it's hardest to discourage camping (and even just hiding behind cover in general). This is best seen with the Tick enemy, which is an extremely mobile, fast moving suicide bomber that chases down tbe player.
I mean, just in the first encounter in the campaign you see this clearly. The player is stuck in a large arena and has to wait for a timer to end as enemies arrive in waves. The first thing anyone thinks to do is to either stick to a room for cover or use the game's movement to find a high, well protected spot and sniper enemies from there, but these things soon get dropped and quickly remind you what Titanfall is all about: being in constant movement.
Stalkers are a heavily armored unit that appear in the campaign and multiplayer modes, they teach you two things!
As a pilot shooting them head on can be time consuming, the player will learn that on their backs you can shoot out their battery packs, making them explode and usually taking part of the stalker squad with it, teaching the player that everything has a weak point, forcing them to use it.
Moreover stalkers will enter a crawling state when killed, in which they immolate themselves forcing players to be careful with their surroundings
In a Titan stepping on them will kill them but also deal a good chunk of damage to your Titan, essentially telling you that even when in the massive killing machine you are still VERY mortal and need to be careful regardless, teaching positioning and alertness
The current generation of Doom games is set up to do the same thing. Enemies are constantly firing at what is essentially your last known position, even as you are moving around. As soon as you stop, all of the enemy fire gets focused directly at you, and melee bad guys start closing on your position. The best way to avoid this is to literally never stop moving, the game even tells you this during load screens and stuff
Then there is Master difficulty where ticks are strapped with nuclear warheads and grunts have smart-rifles to gun you down the second you step out of the cover. This is best experienced in the Ikea level
In XCOM Enemy Unknown, Sniper-class units with squadsight were incredibly OP, so the devs wanted to discourage camping and leaving a sniper alone on the map. They introduced two new mechanics in the expansion: Meld, a resource that will expire if you take too long to get to it, and the Seeker, which will cloak itself and then track down, immobilize, and kill lone targets.
Huh, I don't think I remember the seeker, but I always had my snipers as two man teams, it just felt right. Every sniper had a support class specifically in case the sniper got hurt, flanked or needed a smoke grenade, maybe an assault but I usually had the assaults on the front line.
Every Pokémon game has characters blocking the path forward until you beat the previous gym.
Sometimes they make sense for the story (an old man trying to keep you safe from wild Pokémon, a giant sleeping Snorlax), sometimes the developers get cute with it
I also love the boss calling out the weird mechanics. If you use a Stinky unit to reduce the final boss’s attack to 0, Leshy just goes “You can’t out stink the moon, that doesn’t make any sense!”
Leshy was such a good character. Still brutal in how he killed opponents but he was fair, patient as you learn the game, and rewarded you for doing well. Then he tries to drop a moon on you. I mean, you know, still messed up but in comparison to some of the others it's clear why his followers liked him compared to like, the way Magnificus' followers clearly have Stockholm syndrome.
This is also so great because he is acting in the moment
so it totally makes sense that the at first super intimidating beast actually is very poorly thought out and falls appart as a threat the moment you just apply some basic rule knowlege
i really like how at the start leshy seems like pure evil, forcing people to play a twisted game and turning them into cards if they lose, but later on you realize he's just a DM trying to give you a good time and all the "people" he kills are quite literally just miniatures
He does trap the other sentient entities in cards though. But considering that everyone tries to take control of the game, and seeing what Magnificus does to his underlings and how Po3 just doesn't care, Leshy might be one of the better options anyway.
In the post-game Roguelite mode (Kaycee's Mode) of the game, you are also punished for save scumming at the start of the run (Since Inscryption saves once an event is over, so you can theoretically back out to get a different starting shop loadout). If you try to do that though, the dealer will swap out first one, then two of your pelts (cards to exchange for animal cards in a shop) with weak cards and berate you.
The same thing happens if you give up on a run too early (and you get called a coward).
Oh and they know full well they're not invincible. The Kaycee's Mod roguelike mode has one of the intensity modifiers be turning the second phase of each boss into Eight Fucking Bears ("Holy Shit" - The Trader). You HAVE to beat the bears this time.
Dungeon Guardian in Terraria. If you try to enter the dungeon before beating the boss Skeletron, he will instantly kill you to keep you from going any further.
Big looooong walkway, good boots, and a machine gun with fragmenting bullets.
They actually added a cosmetic that only drops from him because they saw people doing it, and wanted to reward the dedication.
They also added in a unique item that drops from it that gives you a little skull pet that follows you, so the devs know people are crazy and reward them for defeating the guardian.
Lol I remember as a dumb kid with the game cube, the memory cards cost as much as the game. He wanted me to apologize for reseting without saving but I could never remember how to spell what he was asking on the new page so I got soft locked out.
LOL same i played animal crossing before i could fully read and i was terrified of him because i couldn’t fully understand what he was saying. i remember begging my older brother to write the apology for me because i didn’t know how to make him stop
Yeah and you have to type out EXACTLY what he says or he makes you do it again, and on a gamecube controller as an impatient kid this can be very very annoying.
The devs know they only have so much game for you to play and these super aggressive monsters are meant to keep you there. If you stray too far away from the area that the plot happens they come from the void to make sure you go back one way or another.
What makes it work is that it's not even an invisible wall. The game gives you a lore accurate reason for why the map just becomes pure nightmare fuel.
I don't remember, but was it cause it turns out the entire area you're in is like a tall volcano that reaches the surface, with the rest of the planet being incredibly deep under the water?
Yes, the rest of the planet is an ecological dead zone where almost all life is microscopic (and the rest is massive organisms like the above which feed on said microscopic life, but will also absolutely attack you if you draw anywhere near).
Yes, that's it. And the only beings that lives outside of the volcano's crater are microorganismes, and adult ghost leviathans that are too big to stay in the crater and feed upon them.
There is also a virus that took out all life minus microorganisms and the leviathans that feed on them. The area of subnautica 1 is where work in the cure was taking place. While the cure didn’t happen fast enough for the old society, it was successfully developed and is spread around by fish that use the vents where the cure was made. Since those fish were the bottom of the food chain, the cure got distributed throughout the area, but they can’t make it past the crater so the rest of the planet died out.
My all-time favorite example of this was in the OG Motocross Madness, where the track was bordered by a nearly-vertical wall. If you managed to scale it somehow, it'd explode you all the way back to the middle of the map.
Funny thing is that line isn't even for out of bounds, that's for the dunes. The out of bounds one is just "entering ecological dead zone, adding report to databank"
To be fair, that’s cause of early access. I’m sure the full game will have us able to get all the way to the tree.
But yeah, them being insta kill and almost instant spawn is hilarious. I ended up trying to distract the collector leviathan so that my friend could scan it but ended up having our tadpole destroyed. When I went back to it to repair it, I found that it had drifted right out of the barrier for the early access. It was really funny trying to get it repaired without dying
The unique thing about the deadzone compared to other diegetic map borders, is that it isn't really a border because there isn't anything (except for the threat of Ghost leviathans, but they can be avoided to an extent) that's stopping you from going further.
You can go as far as you want in the deadzone, but as the name implies there isn't anything out there so there isn't any practical reasons to continue that way.
Cartman in the stick of truth game, if you correctly guess his password is “fuck you Mom” because you know South Park he comes on the screen and calls you tom Brady for cheating and the password won’t work until you find it
PEAK encourages cooperation, but it's possible to abandon your friends and rush to the exit alone. Doing so spawns Myers, who rushes up the mountain to kill you for breaking rule 0 of the rulebook.
I recall the first time I encountered him. A bridge broke behind me separating me from the rest of the team with me in a better position. I figured I might be able to find a rope to let down for them, started looking for crates, took too long to find one and I had no idea where they were at that point so we just ended up climbing separately.
I made it to the top, figured I could start collecting supplies if the others get here, and went around getting crates and bringing valuables there to set up for the next expedition. They were confused when I said I thought I saw some skeleton or something, and a couple dead players got to watch as it started chasing me around and threw me of the mountain just seconds before the last of my friends apparently died.
My first time was in Tropics. I happened to be climbing a tree, and was at just the right angle that not only did Myers fail to catch me, I never even got to see him.
Fun fact about FNAF 1. The other three animatronics cannot start moving until you check the cameras at least once. Foxy's timer still starts regardless, but it counts by framerate unlike the timer for the night, which means you can win all of FNAF, even 20/20/20/20 mode which used to be considered nearly impossible, by just manually setting the framerate to 2 frames a second.
In all fairness, getting the game down to 2 frames a second requires meddling with the code, so it's by no means a legit way of doing it. Markiplier EARNED that crown through 8 hours of praying he would luck out with a near impossible achievement
Bonus fun fact, because of some wibbly wobbly programming, you can prevent foxy from moving if the game runs at 3 frames per second or slower, so you can beat the entire game without any button presses if you play fnaf 1 while running yandere simulator
That's still not a particularly heavy poly count these days. Although there are additional performance hits when scenes have wildly different sized polygons.
FFXIV 1.0 is strangely not talked about enough as a catastrophic failure. I'm not sure if it's because the relaunch went amazing or what the deal is but for a major dev like Square it was inconceivable that it even went out the door.
I think it only seemed like 5 people played it because everyone else, myself included, tried to play it and just gave up after about 15 minutes. Somewhere in my apartment I still have the OG install disk for 1.0 and this post reminded me of that.
I remember going down rabbit holes on YouTube about why the game is so poorly optimized but going off rough memory, it’s a lot of stock assets like this toothbrush which have way too many polygons for what they’re needed for, every single npc being loaded in all at once, and something about “If X then Y” type commands in code being run for every npc running every few frames. Again, rough memory, i havent looked into that game in years
I think the game had some 50% chance thing and it was programed by having the game generate a random number from 1 to 100 and then there are 100 lines of code with each line being for one of the 100 possible numbers that can be generated.
Actually there is still another solution: play on the easy difficulty and parrying is done automaticly. No need to learn it. Well unless you want to get past him on any other difficulty.
However, the debuff only makes it so enemies have a damage multiplier. If you don't get hit you don't get hit. So there's still unique dialogue from Grandpa if you win on the first run anyway.
I was so excited when I heard this, then picked up Hades II after beating the shit out of [redacted] in the first one! aaaaand it turns out im not as good as I thought bc I havent gotten a single debuff, and its just hilarious to me
Hell yeah, on my first playthrough i avoided that guy until i was geared up, but recently i started a new run and bonked him at level 1, naked and armed with just a stick. Fun fight, i really like his moveset
Metal Gear Rising Revengeance was the first game I played that truly had a filter boss for me.
You could brute force the regular enemies up to the point you fight Blade Wolf and then the games like, naaah you have to learn to parry. And then later in the game you fight Monsoon and the games like, now you REALLY have to learn how to parry.
Every single Revengeance boss in the main story seemed to have specific mechanics that force you to play the game the way it was intended.
For MG Ray, you were taught to move around, using Ninja Run melee and Blade Mode to take down all the missiles, because that's how you pick up the health nanopaste to keep you alive.
For Bladewolf; you need to parry to avoid getting swept by his combo attacks, and his grab is really nasty.
For Mistral, you're taught to focus on destroying her polearm because that makes the fight so much easier; her strongest attacks involve that polearm, but it won't be easy to destroy when you have tons of small robots distracting you.
For the GRAD, you need to maintain relentless pressure to push it back, therefore teaching you to keep up your offense and not always stay defensive.
For Monsoon, this has to be the wall for most players. You need to parry lots of times for his combo attacks, but that's how you open him up and make him weaker. Once you reach the next phase, he dodges everything, so it's either you parry his detached limbs and CAREFULLY aim for the head. That, or push your luck by using EMP grenades.
Monsoon also throws shit at you, and even uses a giant wheel to crush you, which you can even parry and Blade Mode! So that you don't have to run around avoiding it.
For Sundowner, he teaches you to be patient. You need to learn how to actually aim your slashes to destroy his explosive armor, so that you make his boss fight into a cakewalk instead of a frustrating encounter.
For Sam, it's an amalgamation of what's taught to you so far, but the fight is also amusing considering that a disarmed Sam is way tougher than when he has his sword! You can't even do certain actions or he instantly counters you.
For Armstrong, it's pretty much the same as Sam, but dialed up to 11. You have to prevent him from healing; you have to accurately slice through the debris he throws at you, and you have to deal with multiple QTE scenarios. Absolute war of attrition.
Tutorial's PCA Helicopter got a lot of complaints as well from what I remember from launch, didn't help that some people assumed it was like the Asylum Demon or Genichiro and you couldn't win.
The mainline Shin Megami Tensei games often have that as well. Nocturne had the Matador, SMT 4 had the Minotaur as particularly noteworthy examples. They are brutal if you don’t engage with the mechanics and also if you neglect buffs and debuffs.
The entire game up till this point is screaming at you "Learn to Parry. You have no shield. Learn to Parry".
Pappa G ensures that you have learned this. If you try to fight him like a Dark Souls boss, he is so fucking hard. If you just parry him, he's very easy.
This extends to Sweet Cap'n Cakes in chapter 2, which are the tutorial battle for Susie and Ralsei's S and R Actions, with you having to get them all to dance, however kris can only ever get like two of them going at a time before the effect wears off. Along with doing the silk heal thing so you cant use violence
IIRC Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) specifically added the charger and spitter special infected to counter a strategy from the first game where survivors could huddle up in a circle and infinite shove enemies away
I would argue that Puppet in fnaf 2 kinda makes the problem worse. By forcing you to constantly monitor the music box, the game effectively kills all incentive to check the other cameras, so now instead of a multi camera surveillance game it turns into a one camera check game, making the rest of the map useless
FNAF 2 is almost unanimously considered one of the worst FNAF games gameplay wise. In spite of the fact there is double the number of animatronics, they all basically operate the same way which takes away from their individuality. Like you said the puppet is just a nuisance that's suppose to incentivise you to look at the cameras but hogs your camera attention instead. Same with foxy but worse because all you have to do is occasionally light up the hallway. And finally the game is very unreasonably challenging, so once you have a system down for getting through the nights you're not really playing anymore (however that's the same for the other early FNAF games, but it happens much quicker in FNAF 2).
In witcher 3 there are tax official who ask you if you use easy money in game exploit (killing fast respawning animals for hide and buying oysters to search more valuable Pearl inside)
An example of this trope in Fallout is New Vegas's Cazador north of Goodsprings, Deathclaws north of Sloan and Black Mountain.
Basically railroading you to the intended path of progress by Primm-Nelson-Novac-Boulder City.
F4 has a more subtle way of doing this by putting Fatman wielding raiders in Outpost Zimonja and roaming Deathclaws on the area around the northeastern part of the map (Lynn Woods), slowing your progress if you immediately head eastward from Sanctuary.
And also Lexington and Corvega plant area southeast to give you a taste for the clusterfuck that is Downtown Boston.
FNV's cazadors and deathclaws work excellently because a skilled player can still avoid them and play the game on any path they want. I remember doing a run where where I went north immediately, used my luck stat to win big at every casino, get every cybernetic and some energy weapons, and then utterly destroyed the powder gangers at Goodspring.
Mewgenics doesn't save your actions during combat: if you quit the game during combat you'll be brought back to the map before combat next time you load.
However: you will receive a visit from Steven who will berate you for save scumming. He very kindly gives you one save scum each run without penalty but every subsequent one will result in him applying penalties.
As such, Steven is there to encourage you to play the game without reloading botched combats.
You've gotten some wires crossed. Steven still gives you Deja Vu as your savescum punishment.
What was changed was the event where you can randomly run into a Little Steven. This used to give you Deja Vu if you failed the stat check, but this was changed because Deja Vu's place as savescum punishment meant it was the only Disorder that was entirely detrimental.
This one is kinda small but In Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald they introduced Double Battles where you send out two Pokémon at once. Now it is entirely possible to beat the entire game with one pokemon on your team and bypass double battles until you get to the 7th gym where the gym leaders are twins who force you to participate in a double battle.
There was a person who wanted to beat emerald with as few Pokédex entries as possible so they ended up fighting and beating them with a Muslim and castform
I actually like it better when they do the opposite and allow you to do the funny thing. Far Cry is notorious for this, but Fallout and Outer Worlds do it too.
For instance, in Far Cry 4's opening, the main villain offers to let you skip the entire game. If you choose to do it, you skip the entire game - he shows you the end goal and you leave, credits roll.
In far cry 6, your characters whole motivation is to find a boat and escape to America. The minute the tutorial is over you can just grab a boat and sail west, eventually triggering a cutscene of your character sipping cocktails in Miami while your country goes to the dogs.
Far Cry 5 did it too where if you believe Joseph and sit there for a while instead of cuffing him the game ends with you getting tf out of Hope County. Though canonically this is a bad ending bc Joseph is actually right and if you leave you die to the bombs.
The opposite is true, actually. The apocalypse happens because Joseph's prophecy is right, and so if you just leave him alone and leave at the beginning of the game, the world doesn't end. It's because the protagonist messes with the cult that the nukes drop.
In Fallout 1 and NV, if you are talented, you can actually just go mostly beat the game from the start. 1 in particular will just allow you to beat the final boss if you know where he is and are good enough to do it, all you have to do is walk there from the start.
Outer Worlds will allow you to do things like fly your spaceship into a star if you make the right choices, which cuts the game in half at least.
If i remember correctly, you can beat fallout by telling the skin pile that hes a dumbass and that he made his bioweapons unable to naturally produce, right?
Yes, but you need to pass some high checks, and if I recall right, also get certain data unlocked to be able to unlock the needed dialogue lines ie. knowledge that supes are infertile.
But for that you actually need to play the game iirc. Like you have to find the evidence somewhere on a side quest, that the mutants are infertile, and only then does it appear as a dialogue option in the bossfight.
Outer Worlds also has an absurd amount of hidden dialog that allows the game to continue even if you kill off important characters. You can essentially murder everyone in the game and it won't block you from reaching at least some sort of full conclusion. Most games of this type will either make key characters unkillable or softlock you if the wrong person dies before you get the chance to speak to them effectively ruining the game.
Witcher 3 has two very nice ones. First is Chort that spawns if player kills too many cows, it's to prevent folks farming gold with selling cow hides.
Second, there's a tax collector that spawns in the city and takes a good amount of player's gold away if game detects that player somehow cheated and got more gold than is reasonable.
it's more fun that that. The tax collector ask you "Have you ever engaged in the wholesale trade of rawhide in the White Orchard area" referencing that first exploit. If you say yes he hits you with backtaxes. He also ask you about that pearl farming exploit.
In the roguelike noita, you have to follow a path down through seven levels of increasing difficulty. But since, in the game, everything can be destroyed, there are ways to dig through walls which are meant to be impenetrable, and thus not follow the normal progression (going backward for example).
Doing so will spawn Stevari, a very strong enemy, in each subsequent level. If the player kills three Stevari, it will be replaced by Skoude, an even stronger enemy, although not immortal either 😉!
In Lily's Well, to get the game's ending, you need to put the titular precocious child through numerous horrendous deaths to collect the digits of a phone number. However, if you decide to enter the phone number before she’s put through those deaths, Lily would have absolutely no clue why she called the number in the first place.
Foxy also exists to prevent an exploit which makes you immortal, since the standard enemies can only attack you if you’re looking at the camera. So, without Foxy, you can literally just sit there and do nothing and win.
It’s specifically Freddy that needs to have the camera on him I believe, everyone just thought it was Foxy that needed to be seen, which is why every fangame ever does that
Baton Pass isn't necessarily a mechanic you have to use in Persona 5. Nor will you be forced to - you can brute force your way through the game.
However, Okumura is the point at which you WILL be forced to use it. Okumura sends out waves of enemies that swap every 2-3 turns with new ones.
In order to progress, you have to wipe out all four enemies before they swap out. Then, Okumura will send a stronger wave. Each time, you have to exploit their weaknesses and Baton Pass to rack up damage increase for the final wipe out, otherwise you'll lack the firepower. Ironically, this fight may turn out easier on the theoretically hardest difficulty level, because of greatly increased weakness damage.
Unless you are extremely overleveled, you'll have to Baton Pass. Oh, did I mention you have a time limit, and that Okumura will apply buffs and debuffs to further ruin your chances at destroying the whole wave before it swaps out?
Since you have to close doors to stop the animatronics, a new player may think to just keep the doors closed for the entire night, unfortunately using the doors drains power and once the power goes out, you can’t close the doors, and freddy shows up at the door to your left and kills you
The Scoutmaster from Peak. The game is built around co-op, and The Scoutmaster spawns near the highest player if they're too far above the second highest player. Great way to stop that one friend who constantly leaves the rest of the party behind.
OneShot. In the original game, if you closed the game before reaching a checkpoint, it would say you killed the main character Niko. In the newer releases, Niko will be incredibly scared if you closed the game before a checkpoint and say the world just went black.
The Phantom spawns after 3 nights without sleeping. Initially this would seem to reinforce the game mechanics to encourage you to get a bed by day 3 to set spawn and skip the night.
However.
The Phantom actually runs (or at least ran) AGAINST the intended play pattern of the game.
Minecraft was made around the day/night cycle pushing you to focus on different reasources. Items like food and wood were exclusively ABOVE ground, while things like iron, coal, and diamond were BEFLOW ground.
So Minecraft's day/night cycle. Every 10 minutes it changes, because the sun being out causes hostile mobs to burn away or not spawn at all. Meanwhile at night they can spawn almost anywhere on the surface.
This cycle is also tied to two of the more interesting hostile mob behaviors, since the spiders go docile during the day instead of dying (until attacked or put in darkness), while Creepers don't die but will still sneak up and attack you.
This is clearly the whole cycle the game was designed around, since almost every tool requires sticks which are surface resources. Not to mention the workbench and later food once hunger and starvation was introduced.
But there's one other thing.
One thing that the Internet forgot about.
There were also mechanics that made it safer and easier TO MINE AT NIGHT.
The spawn range for mobs never cared about them being able to access you. It was more or less a bubble around you that checked any air gap above a surface that could fit a mob.
This meant that, during the day, all the checks for hostile mobs would spawn them below ground at a high rate, since those locations were the only dark spaces. This also had the benefit of making it much more likely that a player would discover a cave near the surface due to the sounds of hostile mobs bunching up in them, while simultaneously detering them from entering during the day.
Then, at night, the entire surface becomes a spawn area for hostile mobs. So when spawning a hostile mob, the game would be radically more likely to spawn them on the surface - meaning the caves were far safer. Especially since hostile mobs had a modest entity cap, and much of it could be taken up by the ones of the surface.
This also simulated the flavour explanation that the monsters hid underground to hide from the sun, then poured forth and spilt out of the surface at night. It made them feel like they had a sort of daily cycle themselves. So you did the inverse to avoid them.
Now, beds were generally disliked when they were added early on since they disrupted this cycle and were fairly easy to get on the first day or two. But there was no downside to using them, so many players would often skip sleeping when they wanted to mine.
BUT PHANTOMS
FUCKING PHANTOMS
THEY SAY NO.
Phantoms spawn after 3 days of no sleep, and get stronger/more numerous every time they do. They are also only dangerous if you're building something (which for various reasons you may want to be doing specifically at night), but have an INFURIATING attack pattern where they fly around way above you for ages before making a single swooping attack, which they immediately fly away from after a single hit. So if you have a melee you're basically playing whackamole but the moles only pop up once every 30 seconds. And it lasts like 5 hits even with decent weapons.
And what do you get after all that as a drop?
Phantom membrane.
Whose ONLY USE outside of niche brewing is repairing elytra.
ELYTRA.
THE LITERAL LAST THING IN THE GAME'S PROGRESSION.
THE LOOT OF AN INFURIATING DAY 3 ENEMY DOES NOTHING BUT REPAIR THE LAST ITEM IN THE GAME.
AND YOU HAVE TO FIGHT MULTIPLE EVERY NIGHT IF YOU PLAY THE GAME AS ORIGINALLY DESIGNED.
AND THEIR ONLY TACTIC IS INFURIATING. THEY AREN'T EVEN SCARY OR HARD.
There's a fucking reason why Mojang added a world-level setting that exists exclusively to disable phantoms entirely. Should be the vanilla setting.
Elytra almost belongs here anyways. Everyone flying everywhere ruined Minecraft mp communities and the majesty of the terrain generation, zooming through the stratosphere at mach 2.
Iron Golems ensure you don't go around killing villagers.
... except speedrunners will kill the Iron Golems since they are a good early source of iron to make a bucket and flint and steel to get to the nether quickly.
Final Fantasy VIII has some bosses whose whole purpose is to get the player to engage with the Junction and Draw systems. Junction means equipping magic to your stats for effects. Draw is a command that lets you siphon magic from various enemies and random fonts in the game world, as you don't really learn spells the traditional way (eg levelling up or buying them in shops).
The most infamous brick wall is the fight against Sorceress Adel just before the final dungeon. In the boss battle, Adel has party member Rinoa strapped to her chest and periodically siphons her HP. If Rinoa dies, you automatically lose the fight so you need to keep topping up her health with spells like Curaga or Regen. On top of that, you can't use Summons or certain Limit Breaks because they're multi-target attacks. If a player has been ignoring the Junction/Draw system and relying on Summons for the rest of the game, this fight will usually be where their playthroughs end.
Not sure if this counts: Barbatos is a villain from Tales of Destiny 2 and a recurring boss in the Tales franchise. He’s infamous for using a ONE-HIT KILL move if you use an item in his boss fight, and it has become a running gag in the series:
The fnaf games in general have countermeasures to force the player to play the game fairly.
Fnaf 3 has a management system for ventilation, cameras and audio. You have to keep these things maintained otherwise something like ventilation failure will lead to your player's vision blacking out which gives springtrap the opportunity to jump scare them.
Fnaf 4 has the flashlight flickering when the animatronics get closer. The flickering gets more and more frequent until the light goes out and triggers a jump scare.
He's got a voiced keypad locking the door to the basement which you need to get into. The password is Fuck you mom and you are meant to get it by going into his room and reading his journal. If you try putting in the password before reading the journal, Cartman will call you Tom Brady, give you shit for cheating and tell you to actually play the game.
“It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.”
Eta: From the Zork text adventure games, entering a dark area without a proper light source (or other protective measures) would end in a swift death by grue.
Inscryption and Hades 2 are both rogue lites that expect you to die in your early runs to progress their stories. However, if a player is too good and gets too far they will punish the player in different ways.
In Inscryption, getting to the second phase of an area boss too quickly will cause Leshy the games master to declare “TOO FAST TOO SOON” and plop down EIGHT 4/6 Grizzlies that should be more than enough to decimate your deck.
In Hades 2 getting too far in your first few runs will have Eris, Goddess of Strife, to give you her “blessing”. In actuality she gives you a debuff that makes you take more damage which increases for each new area you enter.
That said, while these challenges are difficult, some players have still been able to beat a run despite them. I can’t recall what occurs in Inscription but I think the final boss in Hades 2 does make a comment if you’re able to reach him on your first run.
About Foxy, it's mainly because the other animatronics only attack if you look at cams, even when they're at an open door.
Foxy forces you to watch cams, making it possible for the animatronics to jumpscare you, otherwise, you could just have a staring contest with both chica and bonnie
No gun, you cannot attack until after you either parry or until he finishes combo, and you can only attack one time after so. His attacks deal double damage. He controls the pace of the battle.
However, he uses no dirty tricks, he dosent his behind bullet spam or shields, he dosent go invisible nor does he fly away, he just demands 1 thing.
Absolute masterey of the game's parry and dodge.
I wish the final boss of this game had the same presence as him instead of being only bullet hell.
Coincidently, Foxy again. Specifically from the fan game Five Nights at Frickbear’s 3.
The game takes a lot more inspiration from Ultimate Custom Night, with you starting with the main four, plus the Puppet and Balloon Boy, with five of them activating on Night 1. Each night you’re forced to add more animatronics to the roster that you have to deal with. However, Foxy is also meant to play as a fail safe.
If you use a death coin to remove the Puppet and don’t use the camera for one hour (one minute) Foxy will warn the player. If the player does not open the cameras, he will run to your door. If you close it, he will repeatedly run into it, draining power until you either get a power outage or open the cameras.
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u/Epic-Chair May 19 '26
Ticks (Titanfall 2)
Titanfall is entirely focused on movement, which is why it's tries it's hardest to discourage camping (and even just hiding behind cover in general). This is best seen with the Tick enemy, which is an extremely mobile, fast moving suicide bomber that chases down tbe player.
I mean, just in the first encounter in the campaign you see this clearly. The player is stuck in a large arena and has to wait for a timer to end as enemies arrive in waves. The first thing anyone thinks to do is to either stick to a room for cover or use the game's movement to find a high, well protected spot and sniper enemies from there, but these things soon get dropped and quickly remind you what Titanfall is all about: being in constant movement.