"Count Nefarious Vile, who has recently conquered the world with his army of monsters, demons, and those flying things that always knock you into pits when you're trying to jump."
An infamous class of enemies in
Platform Games, that use
Knockback to ruin your jumps, even when they are otherwise not that dangerous.
Every veteran gamer knows what it's like: You're jumping across a series of platforms ... and then you spot that little bird roosted on solid ground on the other side. There's a pretty good chance that the bird will completely spook and defend its terrain the moment you try to cross the last gap. Although your HP would be
hardly worse off for what damage it can inflict, the main threat is that the aforementioned
knockback. If you are
really lucky, you may land back on the platform and get another chance to try again. But far more likely, you'll get knocked off these ledges entirely, usually leading to:
- You fall into a Bottomless Pit, Spikes of Doom, or anything else that costs you a life.
- You fall down a Non-lethal Bottomless Pit, or down to the bottom of the area and must climb all the way back up to try again.
These guys can also come in the form of an
Airborne Mook, flying right into you and knocking you backwards into the pit when you jump over it.
Of course, if you have some kind of ranged attack at your disposal you may be able to dispatch the creature and make this jump in safety. Otherwise, you'll have to settle for striking it down in midair, and carefully time your attack to hit it before it can inflict its
Collision Damage.
Very common in the arcade and 8 bit era. In the former it was justified in that the machines were there to eat your quarters so levels would be designed
with a degree of cheating in mind forcing gamers to pay to play on in a bid to get past them. While
Nintendo sold itself on offering challenge seeing these on home console was more
Egregious. 16 bit games began to phase them out and offered a fairer challenge.
A
Sub Trope of
Goddamned Bats. One of the
Classic Video Game Screw Yous.
Examples:
- Named for the bats in Castlevania, which are prone to this.
- The Medusa Heads are also like this. The Angry Video Game Nerd had actually developed a pathological hatred of such enemies and had developed a mental phobia to wavy lines.
- And the crows.
- The fission Metroids in Metroid Prime end up like this, as the area you find them in requires a lot of platform climbing. Plus they are quite powerful and difficult to kill without Power Bombs (which you must stand still to use), and if you do kill them they respawn.
- Fortunately, Fission Metroids stay still for several seconds to divide. Unfortunately, they're invulnerable for that time, and afterwards there are twice as many Metroids chasing you. Whether stunning them and running is worth it is a personal decision.
- Xenogears manages to introduce the trope to the role-playing genre. When a random battle is triggered, there is about a one second lag between the trigger and the actual transition to the battle. During this time, you can still move around, but thanks to a bug, you lose the ability to jump, which frequently leads to you falling down several levels and forcing you to backtrack, thus making Ledge Bats out of invisible random encounters. A large reason why Babel Tower is That One Level.
- The birds in the NES Ninja Gaiden games, and just about every other enemy in the heavy platforming areas.
- Starting with Zelda II The Adventure Of Link and then with the 3D games, have a few enemies like this.
- Zelda II was horrible with this, where dragon heads, floating skulls, slime blobs and other enemies were created and specifically designed and placed to knock you into pits.
- Moldorm (the boss of the Mountain Tower dungeon) in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past had the additional challenge of knocking you back to a lower floor if it hit you or you hit it in the wrong spot in addition to the damage it would do you normally (you'd have to climb a lot of stairs to get back to the fight, and the boss would of course heal during this).
- This boss reappears in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, on a smaller platform. The Evil Eagle in the seventh dungeon also works like this, flapping its wings to blow you off the tower.
- Oracle Of Seasons had one like this, too.
- Throughout the Mega Man series are enemies who will jump out of Bottomless Pits, stall, and fall back in. If you are moving at top speed you will jump into one and recoil into the pit. Go play Mega Man 10 and start Commando Man's stage. They're all over the place.
- This perfectly describes the behaviour of Banjo-Kazooie's 'Big Cluckers', birds which pop out of holes in the wall to hit you with their peckers and knock you off ledges in the final level. The designers even included a progressively more difficult gauntlet of ledges guarded by these. Earlier levels have eels (and in one level, skeletal eels) popping out of grates, but not with the same frustrating skill level as those cluckers.
- In the second game, there are clamp monsters that snap out of the wall when you pass near their hole. They usually only appear when you're grip-climbing across a crack, and getting hit guarantees falling.
- Many La-Mulana enemies, from bats to birds to Surprise Fish to Invisible Monsters, can and will push you off platforms, make you fall down ladders and ruin your jumps. Perhaps the worst single example is a certain Mini-Boss/Unique Enemy in the Confusion Gate which is called a bird but moves and looks like a giant bat and whose room is almost entirely made of narrow ledges.
- A secret mission in Devil May Cry 4. You have to traverse disappearing platforms without falling, while under attack from several flying enemies at once who are exceptionally difficult to finish off quickly. And yes, practically ANY hit will knock you off.
- The pink Koindozers from Donkey Kong Country 3, mooks who all carry large shields with which to ram you off cliffs. The good news is, they only appear in one level in the game. The bad news is, they're all over That One Level. You can't kill them, just avoid them — and it gets pretty difficult to time your jumps properly so that you land safely on top of their shield rather than right in front of it at perfect bulldozering range — suggest that the good people at Rare do something physically and anatomically impossible with their mothers, and never play the level again.
- I Wanna Be The Guy has the Medusa heads from Castlevania (which temporarily turn you to stone and knock you backwards), as well as the Cheep Cheeps in the graveyard (which push you around randomly, usually off the cart and to your eventual death). It's worth noting that these are the only enemies in the game that don't kill you with one hit.
- Several mooks in the Metropolis Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 function as this.
- Almost every long stretch of running and boosting or blind jumps in Dimps-developed Sonic games ends in you running into a badnik.
- Bug! features a few of these, especially one area in Splot where you had to jump from small platforms platforms with enemies on them.
- The Oddworld 2D platforming series makes a habit of placing insta-kill bats near ledges, either to tell you to find another path or to take a leap of faith. And the game doesn't even tell you that these bats are deadly. Then again, everything kills Abe in 1 hit anyway.
- Airborne enemies in Journey To Silius typically appear in areas with bottomless pits.
- Terraria: Nearly every enemy in the underworld can act like this if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
- Unless you gained any of the game's innumerable ways to fly and chucked an Obsidian Skin potion, in which case you're all right.
- Every jump quest in MapleStory is chock full of these. Oh god.
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - The Game features hordes of flying bats and Medusa Heads which fill the exact same niche.
- They Bleed Pixels has the flying octopodes. They attack by dashing a third of the way across the screen; they usually hover far out of reach while they get ready to attack you.
