History Main / LuckbasedMission

** Breeding in any game, if you aren't an RNGer. You can control inherited moves easily as long as your breeders don't level up too much in the daycare and getting the right ability is easy with one parent holding an everstone, but good luck getting the right nature. Even two parents with the desired mature may not up your luck. And good stat parents help your IV chances but do not guarantee good stat offspring. Even worse is trying for shiny Pokemon. The Masuda method of using one parent from a foreign language game helps, as does Gen V's shiny charm,but the chance is still low. Arceus help you if you're breeding for shiny, good stats and correct nature all at once.

** And on the topic of Pokémon, Battle Revolution has a few luck-based coliseums. In the first, you have a roulette wheel to determine whether you get to use one of your own Pokemon, or one of your opponent's far less useful ones. In the second, it's a 100-battle endurance match, where the roulette is used to determine if any of your Pokemon get healed.
*** Not to mention that the 100 battle match has fog on most of its stages, which makes all pokemon's accuracy drop. Sure it's totally fair, as it affects both sides, but over 100 battles, the probability approaches 100% that you will eventually be horribly screwed while the computer is unaffected.

** In ''[[VideoGame/PokemonColosseum Pokémon XD]]'', there is the "Metronome Cup." You fight two Pokémon with two of your own. All of the Pokémon have only one move - metronome, a move that summons any other move at random. Winning or losing is literally and entirely based on luck. There is no strategy involved in the least.

*** Like RealLife Casinos, Game Corners in general are a LuckBasedMission. Compared to the outrageously rigged slots in the other generations, Voltorb Flip is downright forgiving.

** The very battle system itself is luck based to an extent. You can plan and strategize as much as you possibly can, but if the game decides it doesn't want a move/item/ability/side effect with a less than 100% chance of working to succeed, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Then there are critical hits, which are possible for almost every move but are also almost always random. Some moves choose targets at random in double and triple battles and others (and a hold item) force the opponent's to switch out at random. There are still some other luck based factors not yet mentioned here.

* Completing all objectives in par time on the second Belarus mission in ''SyphonFilter: The Omega Strain'' is a coin toss, since Ivankov's papers are in one of three randomly chosen locations.

* In ''VideoGame/HarvestMoon:The Tale of Two Towns,'' triggering date events (called "flower events" here) reaches this level. Whereas in previous games, triggering date events could come down to being [[GuideDangIt in the right place, at the right time, under the right conditions]], ''Two Towns'' adds the modifier of having a choice of locations for your "dates." There's a chance the proper option to trigger the flower event, rather than a regular date, won't come up.

* ''VideoGame/{{RAGE}}'' gives the achievement [[ThatOneAchievement "JACKPOT!"]] for rolling four kills on your first roll in the Tombstones MiniGame. Yeah, an achievement for getting a particular result on a dice roll. The odds are 16:1 against.

A subtrope of FakeDifficulty. Sister trope to TimedMission and EscortMission. Cousin trope of TrialAndErrorGameplay. Has a very high chance of being ThatOneSidequest.

* The Dream World from VideoGame/PokemonBlackAndWhite was intended as a successor to [[VideoGame/PokemonGoldAndSilver Heart Gold and Soul Silver's]] Pokewalker in that it's an alternative means to obtain Pokémon and items for your game. While it does do that, it prefers to send players to random locations rather than letting the player pick the location to explore for themselves. Add the fact that you can only take ten steps each visit before leaving and that Pokémon will stop coming to you after so many visits in a day, [[ScrappyMechanic and it can be pretty aggravating]].

[[quoteright:170:[[VideoGame/{{Minesweeper}} http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/minesweeper.jpg]]]]

* In ''ClueFinders: Search and Solve'' Adventures, one mini-game you find early on involves TrialAndErrorGameplay, since that is after all, the entire ''point'' of the minigame. You have to guess the rows and columns, represented by colours and shapes. (The points on the grid are coloured shapes) And you have to get certain points so you can get past the game and get a reward to continue on. Problem? All it's randomized...all the spaces on the grid you have to hit could be all clustered in one corner, and the first choice you pick happens to be right on the other side, in a row and column that won't help you. You'd also be surprised how ''hard'' the 9-guess levels can be.

* The Dream World from VideoGame/PokemonBlackAndWhite was intended as a successor to [[VideoGame/PokemonGoldAndSilver Heart Gold and Soul Silver's]] Pokewalker in that it's an alternative means to obtain Pokémon and items for your game. While it does do that, it prefers to send players to random locations rather than letting the player pick the location to explore for themselves. Add the fact that you can only take ten steps each visit before leaving and that Pokémon will stop coming to you after so many visits in a day, [[ScrappyMechanic and it can be pretty aggravating]].

*** Even navigating a map or a dungeon without losing much HP is a chore per se. EncounterRepellants like Holy Water or certain abilities are highly unreliable, monsters always have a chance of doing the first attack and devastate you before you can act, and what's worse, failing to run away (which is entirely luck-based, and harder to do against stronger monsters, which '''are''' the ones you want to run away from) gives the whole enemy party a free turn, leaving your party in an worse shape that's even less likely to win a battle, forcing you to keep trying to run away until you either succeed or die.And because of the above-mentioned flaw in resurrecting spells, your healers will burn through their MP like nothing after few such encounters, barring succeeding at every resurrection at the first or second attempt.

*** You think 8 is bad? Try ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIX'. Oh, the main game doesn't invoke this trope. And neither does most of the post game. But high level Legacy bosses get 3 turns. Even with a maxed out party if they attack the same person twice or critically hit them once they will die. One character can use an item that will protect against the latter, but the other three have no recourse except to rely on an evade rate that caps around 20-25%. Most of them also have an [=AoE=] move that will do about 300-350 to you. Your max HP is in the 810-900 range if you don't farm 1/256 drops repeatedly and 999 if you do. Either way if they do that move three times in a round, instant Game Over. They also have the dreaded Disruptive Wave. However there is another side to them being luck based fights. The easier Legacy bosses can be soloed with sufficient farming, provided they don't Disruptive Wave too often.

** While we're at it, catching pretty much any legendary. Sure, you can give it status effects, whittle its health down to a sliver, etc., but ultimately it boils down to "Will the game decide that I've caught the legendary before I run out of Ultra Balls?" (it helps that the catch rate is subject to [[http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Catch_rate a lot of variants]]; [[http://veekun.com/dex/gadgets/pokeballs calculating them is possible]], but not guaranteed to suceed)
*** This is because the games give almost every legendary a catch rate of 3. This means that, at most (using the most appropriate Poke Balls for the situation, getting them to a sliver of health, and putting them to sleep), you have about an 18% chance of bagging them.
*** Or, even worse, "Will the game decided that I've caught the legendary before it Struggles itself to [[NeverSayDie unconsciousness]]?" Basically, if you drag out the battle with a legendary long enough, it will use up all its moves and resort to "Struggle" a technique that inflicts damage on both you and the legendary, hence meaning a half hour of tossing ultra balls (or stronger ones, like Timer or Dusk Balls) just went down the drain because the legendary just made itself faint. Beldum also falls into this category; it also has the ridiculously low catch rate, but it's trying to take itself out from the word go...its only attack is the recoil-inducing Take Down.
**** Beldum may possibly be even worse to catch than the [[OlympusMons Legendaries]], at least in Platinum. As if the incredibly low catch rate AND [[CastFromHitPoints Take Down]] weren't bad enough, you have to wait for a swarm of them to appear, which could take days, possibly even weeks, so you'd have to be patient to even get the opportunity to confront one. This also means that if you miss out on the swarm day, or simply fail to catch one in time, you're boned and have to wait ''again''. That aside, they only appear in the one route that's always plagued by a sand storm. While this ''thankfully'' doesn't hurt Beldum due to its type, your own Pokémon will be worn down, so you'll have to waste parts of the battle constantly healing. And there's little you can do about Take Down, either; even if its PP runs out, there's still [[LastStand Struggle]] to worry about. Unless you can exploit ElementalRockPaperScissors and render yourself immune to Take Down (0 damage dealt means 0 recoil received), the best option you have is to delay Beldum by inflicting [[StandardStatusEffects Sleep or Paralysis]] long enough for your god-sent [[ChargedAttack Timer Balls]] to reach full effect. If you ''do'' have a Ghost-type handy and can keep it alive against the sandstorm, you still need to worry about Take Down running out of PP - unlike recoil moves, Struggle really is CastFromHitPoints and type immunities won't help in the slightest.

** A good chunk of the dungeons in the Mystery Dungeon games qualify as well. Purity Forest and Zero Isle South, for example. Not only did they have 99 floors, but you could not take any items, money or teammates with you, you could not recruit anything inside, your level was reduced to one and you were forced to save before going in, meaning that essentially whether you made it through or not depended on how quickly you could locate the stairs and what items you could find.
** Although Pokèmon retain their IQ skills and have their basic moveset when they start these dungeons.Get a Pokèmon with IQ abilities to avoid traps and Monster Houses and locate the general direction of stairs, other than a satisfying moveset, and you have an eligible candidate for a still hard, but not frustratingly impossible run.

*** Painted over Great Balls actually. Still not what you'd call reliable if you toss them at an unstatused full-health Pokemon.

** Voltorb Flip in the HeartGold/SoulSilver games is basically Minesweeper with much more random guessing. The higher levels especially so.

** The Vermilion City Gym could also count. In order to deactivate the electric gates blocking your path to Lt. Surge, you need to flip a pair of switches. Said switches are randomly located in two of the 15 trash cans in the room, but they would always be next to each other; if you pick the wrong can after hitting the first switch, they would reset. The problem with this is that guessing incorrectly would, for whatever reason, ''change which trash cans the switches were in''. You could spend hours trying to get to Surge, since the absolute "best" you can do is a 50/50 chance of finding the second switch.
*** Technically, there are 3 trash cans which are surrounded by 4 trash cans, giving 1 in 4. 8 which are surrounded by 3 other, giving 1 in 3 And 4 with 2 surrounding, ie. 1 in 2. That would give a total of (54/15)/12*100%=(3.6/0.12)%=30%; yes, about 30% of success.
** The very battle system itself is luck based to an extent. You can plan and strategize as much as you possibly can, but if the game decides it doesn't want a move/item/ability/side effect with a less than 100% chance of working to succeed, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Then there are critical hits, which are possible for almost every move but are also almost always random. Some moves choose targets at random in double and triple battles and others (and a hold item) force the opponent's to switch out at random. There are still some other luck based factors not yet mentioned here.

*** This is mitigated slightly by the PSP version, allowing you to jump back into the dungeon at the highest floor you've reached by going to the door instead of the teleporter. If, however, you're looking for a specific [[RandomlyDrops drop]] from a [[MetalSlime specific]] [[DemonicSpiders Shadow]], trying to rescue someone, or [[FetchQuest looking for some other inane item that Elizabeth/Theodore has sent you after]], then the pit-stop mechanic returns in full force.

** And long before having a chance of fighting Ozma, you had to go thought a looong treasure chase all around the world. It wasn't so bad per se BUT to get hints on where to search you had to endure the "Chocobo Digging" minigame.
** Let's face it, most of ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIX'' falls into this trope. Just about every enemy has at least one overpowered attack that they use "randomly" (ie. [[FinaglesLaw any time it's least convenient for you]]), random encounters can happen anywhere from every step to not one battle during an entire trek of a 10-screen dungeon, and of course there's the CardBattleGame and its any-card-can-win nonsense...

*** [[FromBadToWorse And then there's the fact that there's a Camera magnus hidden in there.]] And you need to at least take one picture for OneHundredPercentCompletion. It's ''entirely'' possible to easiy win the battle but ''not'' take the picture, which is just as, if not more, frustrating for people seeking to achieve perfection in this game (which is a very hard task, given this game doesn't have a NewGamePlus and there's ''plenty'' of items that can be LostForever, including Boss pictures). [[OhCrap And then it repeats all over again for the Wizard Shadow battle...]]

* Some bosses in ''DarkSouls'' such as the Hellkite Dragon can be this, your survival dependent on whether or not they choose to use their large, damaging nuke attacks.
** The Hellkite Dragon's actually pretty straightforward: it uses its fire attack any chance it gets. A better example would be the Capra Demon, which you fight in extremely close quarters. It can (and will) rush you the second you enter the boss arena, and proceed to stunlock you with machete strikes while its two skinless dog {{Mooks}} block any chance of escape.

* In ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros. Brawl'', getting all the trophies requires you to use trophy stands on every kind of enemy in the adventure mode, including bosses. Of course, these stands are rare, and (just like Pokémon) you have to weaken the enemy in order to catch it, so it doesn't always work. Raising the difficulty level and using certain stickers will raise the chance of getting a stand, but it's still annoying when you hit a boss too hard, kill it, and you have to go through the whole level again for another chance, not to mention if the stupid bastards hit a conveniently-spawning Koopa Shell or a Blast Box with a stray attack of their own and thus end up suiciding without you being able to do a goddamn thing about it. Playing with a friend can greatly help: one keeps the trophy stand and keeps distractions away, while the other whittles down the boss's health.

* Gambling in ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'', obviously. While there is some skill in Caravan and blackjack, roulette and slots are completely hit or miss, although the LuckStat can increase your odds of winning. Furthermore, as an "anti cheating measure", you have to wait a minute after reloading a save to gamble again.

* Getting the best outcome of ''FalloutTactics''' Springfield mission usually boils down to the AI failing to kill its unarmed hostages or you succeeding at a lucky hit that knocks down one of the units responsible for arming the bomb on the power plant. Stealth and picking the right troops to cover each objective helps to some degree, but once the bullets start flying it's really just down to the dice.