History Main / ArtifactMook

%%* ''VideoGame/HollowKnight'': All enemies live in specific areas that they're thematically associated with, with explanations for their presence. However, the Colosseum of Fools is a series of three survival challenges where the player has to fight waves of enemies from various areas, and who don't fit alongside each other. (This is justified - it's a colosseum; bringing in exotic animals to challenge fighters is perfectly normal)

* ''VideoGame/HollowKnight'': All enemies live in specific areas that they're thematically associated with, with explanations for their presence. However, the Colosseum of Fools is a series of three survival challenges where the player has to fight waves of enemies from various areas, and who don't fit alongside each other.

* ''VideoGame/MegaManX'' has the Dig Labour/Degraver, miner mavericks who attack with pick-axes and wear hard-hats. It makes perfect sense for them to appear in the stage of Armored Armadillo who runs a mining operation, but not in Flame Mammoth's stage, which is primarily a disposal site. It also has the abovementioned Metool from the Classic series, who appears in the same situations as the Degraver, and more, making it even more of an example of this trope.

** Played straight with the Zombines during ''Episode Two''. Whereas in ''Episode One'' they were a well-fitting testament to the Combine slowly losing control of City 17, here they're mostly encountered in abandoned stretches of White Forest way outside of the Combine's jurisdiction.

* In ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'', Headcrabs (and the Zombies they create) appear to be a case of this, as at first they're found mostly in places where the Combine have specifically used them as a biological weapon, launching them via artillery shells into Resistance settlements, but after Ravenholm, they often appear in the absence of these shells, becoming more or less just goombas ready to pop out of any vaguely abandoned area. It's not out of the question, however, that these are actually leftovers of the portal storms caused by the Black Mesa incident; ''VideoGame/HalfLifeAlyx'' corroborates this by showing that entire districts of City 17 are swarming with Headcrabs and other creatures from the Xen borderworld against the Combine's wishes.
* When you add up all the bodies, the extensive bloodstains, the skeletons, the zombies and the Lost Souls you fight in ''VideoGame/{{Doom}} 3'', they seem to outnumber the human population in an area quite a bit.

* ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaPortraitOfRuin'': The Nest Of Evil has both unique enemies and enemies that appeared elsewhere in the game. They're not exactly out of place however. This trope comes into play with one of the final rooms, which contains two of The Creature, which is also known as Frankenstein's Monster. Earlier on he's a boss with an introductory cutscene of his body getting activated in a mad scientist's laboratory, now he's a DualBoss DegradedBoss with no explanation of what he's doing there and how there could possibly be two of him.

** The Olympus Coliseum from both the first and second installments allows Sora to fight almost all types of Heartless in the game, which can sometimes lead to very random opponents, like the individual pieces of the [[WarmupBoss Guard Armor]] from Traverse Town.

** The infamous Mettools. In [[VideoGame/MegaMan1 the original game]], the little hard hat guys appeared only on Guts Man's stage, which had the look of a quarry/construction site, and Guts Man himself appears to wear a hard hat. However, they broke out to MascotMook status, and now appear in every Mega Man game on multiple levels, in massive numbers, and even throughout most sequel series, to the point that they are the most common enemy encountered. That said, there are a handful of variants who conform to the theme of a boss's stage. Plus, there's usually at least one boss for whom the Mets at least make some sense (typically a construction or demoliton-based Robot Master).

** The infamous Mettools. In [[VideoGame/MegaMan1 the original game]], the little hard hat guys appeared only on Guts Man's stage, which had the look of a quarry/construction site, and Guts Man himself appears to wear a hard hat. However, they broke out to MascotMook status, and now appear in every Mega Man game on multiple levels, in massive numbers, and even throughout most sequel series, to the point that they are the most common enemy encountered. That said, there are a handful of variants who conform to the theme of a boss's stage.

* In ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'', Headcrabs appear at first mostly in places where the Combine have specifically used them as a biological weapon, and they're usually accompanied by the remains of their artillery shell cages. After the Ravenholm level, however, they become more-or-less just GoddamnedBats ready to pop out of any vaguely abandoned area. The same goes for zombies.

* Averted in ''VideoGame/{{Metro 2033}}''. Librarians remain in the Lenin Library, Demons are exclusive to open spaces, Nosalises don't leave the tunnels, Watchmen are only seen on the surface, Lurkers are always seen near their burrows, and Dark Ones aren't encountered as normal gameplay enemies at all. ''VideoGame/MetroLastLight'' mixes things up a bit, giving us Watchmen in the tunnels and Nosalises on the surface, but there's a good reason for each: the Watchmen only enter the tunnels in an area where the ceiling is breached, and the Nosalises inhabit a railway bridge that's connected to the Metro and is a largely enclosed space not unlike the tunnels. The trend continues into ''VideoGame/MetroExodus'' but is bent slightly more than in ''Last Light'', namely that you'll still encounter watchmen on the surface and spiderbugs in lightless areas, but they're far away from the Moscow Metro, making it slightly less believable that they could be there almost exactly as they were in the previous games, but Miller at least remarks on nosalises in a different metro as looking like they could be distant relatives of the familiar Muscovite ones.

* Averted in ''VideoGame/{{Metro 2033}}''. Librarians remain in the Lenin Library, Demons are exclusive to open spaces, Nosalises don't leave the tunnels, Watchmen are only seen on the surface, Lurkers are always seen near their burrows, and Dark Ones aren't encountered as normal gameplay enemies at all. ''Last Light'' mixes things up a bit, giving us Watchmen in the tunnels and Nosalises on the surface, but there's a good reason for each: the Watchmen only enter the tunnels in an area where the ceiling is breached, and the Nosalises inhabit a railway bridge that's connected to the Metro and is a largely enclosed space not unlike the tunnels. The trend continues into ''VideoGame/MetroExodus'' but is bent slightly more than in ''Last Light'', namely that you'll still encounter watchmen on the surface and spiderbugs in lightless areas, but they're far away from the Moscow Metro, making it slightly less believable that they could be there almost exactly as they were in the previous games, but Miller at least remarks on nosalises in a different metro as looking like they could be distant relatives of the familiar Muscovite ones.

BossRush and DegradedBoss are often cases of this. Very common in {{Bonus Dungeon}}s.

** The infamous Mettools. In the original Mega Man game, the little hard hat guys appeared only on Guts Man's stage, which had the look of a quarry/construction site, and Guts Man himself appears to wear a hard hat. However, they broke out to MascotMook status, and now appear in every Mega Man game on multiple levels, in massive numbers, and even throughout most sequel series, to the point that they are the most common enemy encountered. That said, there are a handful of variants who conform to the theme of a boss's stage.
** Wily's Castle in ''Mega Man 10'', in particular, brings back enemies from every previous stage, regardless of how much or how little sense they make in the context of the stage. Exploding American footballs in the [[AthleticArenaLevel sports-themed stage]]? Sure. Exploding American footballs in a castle? Not quite as logical.
** Wily's Gear Fortress from ''Mega Man 11'' reuses many enemies from the previous levels, although most are series mainstays (Sniper Joes and the aforementioned Mettools) or generic enough (the Drones from Fuse Man's stage) to not look out of place there. However, you still get to occasionally face the cooking pot tanks from Torch Man's stage and the exploding Sentai bots from Blast Man's stages, who are all goofily misplaced.