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alt title(s): Its Easy So It Sucks 
Remember when it was difficult to find Waldo?
Nintendo Hard games were damn near impossible, right? We all have fond memories of those games back then, but the main thing we all remember is that such titles were impossible to beat.
Nowadays, with better technology and more designers thinking about how to make a fair challenge, games get less and less hectic and more and more accessible.
To some fans, this shall not stand.
Gamers sometimes believe that a company making an easier game means that they think that the players aren't capable of beating difficult games and that mainstream gamers are to blame for making gaming "too casual". Beating a challenging game makes the gamer feel triumphant, victorious, unbeatable. The act of "dumbing down" the difficulty seems like a direct insult to the gamer's own skill level, and the result is that gamers rage about how Save Points just destroyed the challenge factor of whatever video game series they hold close to their heart. And the utter Wall Banger of this is? People complain about auto mode, game guides, Save points, difficulty toggles, in-game hint features on and on...and yet most if not all of these things are completely optional. Of course, it stands to reason that, if playing for bragging rights, there will be much less bragging to be done if the possibility is there that a player completed the game with the use of auto mode, game guides, Save points, difficulty toggles, in-game hints features, etc. Unless there's a good way to differentiate between the "casual gamers" and those who have played through properly, this is at least reasonable ground for complaint.
A lot of people reason that when buying the games they don't buy say, 700 MB of fun. They buy seventy hours of fun, and therefore, if the game is easy, you spend less time with it, thus having less fun.
Many times, gamers will complain about how easy today's games are compared to the games of yore. Obviously the Nostalgia Filter at work...playing some hard games nowadays will make people point out all sorts of reasons why the game was hard...and many times it wasn't intended. This is where the trope overlaps with Did Not Do The Research, amongst many other tropes. Many people complain about the occasional Game Breaking Bug and other bug, but back then, there were all sorts of bugs that would make the game harder, or just plain Unintelligent design. The Angry Video Game Nerd states that several of the So Bad Its Horrible games he plays are extremely hard...for all the wrong reasons. The Wizard of Oz for the SNES, for example, is considered one of the hardest games by him, for the sole reason that a bug had the effect of often making you fall through platforms. Many games of the past are also full of Fake Difficulty that are obscured by the Nostalgia Filter.
Compare Stop Having Fun Guys.
Not to be confused with My Girl Is A Slut.
Examples:
- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night angered many fans of the series' incredible challenge factor. The Metroidvania installments of the series tend towards easier difficulty in general.
- Despite this, though, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is still widely considered the best game in the entire series.
- That was reversed in the last Metroidvania, Order of Ecclesia, where the considerably shorter dungeons are populated by VERY angry and powerful enemies; careless players will never be able to reach the now scarcer checkpoints. Even Igarashi's detractors agreed that the game, while not perfect, is much more challenging and closer to the older Castlevanias than any of the games since Symphony Of The Night.
- Evidentally, they haven't played Circle of the Moon. This troper could rank that game as the second-hardest metroidvania, partly because of the lack of a shop and healing items are both hard to come by and not very useful. That, and at a certain point relatively early on, enemies start burning through your health at an alarming rate, and some enemies hit like a freight train.
- Ar Tonelico was panned by fans on both sides of the pond for being way, way too easy. It still proved popular enough to spawn a sequel, which upped the difficulty slightly, but not so much as to alienate those who liked the fact that it was easy.
- Many gamers accused Super Smash Bros. Brawl of "scrubbing down" the series. Never mind that, if you wanted to beat all the challenges, you were forced to play through the boss battles on each difficulty.
- The Mega Man franchise to an extent. Despite its still-present challenge, people don't like the new abilities that give a better chance of beating bosses. The X series gets more flak because of the dash jump and other such abilities.
- Subversively Mega Man 9 is a throwback to the Nintendo Hard era. It's short, but very difficult.
- The Zero series calls players' bluff. The stages are fairly easy, but the ranking system is aggressively demanding. In a bit of a Wall Banger, you have to get at least an A rank to receive EX Techs. Zero 4 toned this down, refreshing for a lot of the Zero fanbase. (However, try the Self Imposed Challenges in the ZX subseries.)
- This troper is confused. Admittedly, he's only played 7, X, X-2, and X-3, but they were all really easy. 7 was not at all harder than X.
- For a more recent example, Super Mario Galaxy is often bashed for being too easy, people saying how getting 60 stars to fight Bowser in the finale is cakewalk compared to how Super Mario 64 did it. They tend to ignore that the the extra stars (like the green star challenges or the purple coin ones) were borderline hair pulling.
- The Mario And Luigi games compensate for this by having the attacks being considerably more damaging than most ordinary attacks in RPGs; you can't afford to get hit on a regular basis. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the second stage of the final battle in Superstar Saga, both Mario and Luigi start with one HP each, and Cackletta might do her very hard to avoid "arm swinging" attack first", and near the end of Partners in Time you can only defeat the Shroob-powered Bowser by dodging his attacks so dodging is even more crucial in those instances.
- Yoshi's Story traded in large, imaginative, dangerous levels for short, boring, easy ones. The Final Boss even has infinite numbers of invincibility powerups in the same room as him.
- Mario Kart Wii is also accused of being dumbed down. Not just because snaking is useless now, but the fact that in order to gain mini turbos, you have to drift on corners and maintain it, which is easier than wiggling the analog stick left to right and get many turbos in a row while drifting.
- Of course, those same players that liked snaking were able to find any number of exploits in Mario Kart Wii in a few weeks.
- The Super Mario Advance series is often accused of this, what with things such as your number of lives being saved. To Super Mario Advance 4's credit, it had an e-Reader card that replaces the enemies with harder versions, but that never made it out of Japan.
- This ultimately came to a climax with the new "Demo Mode" being added into New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which will, whenever you're stuck and ask it to, take over for you and show you how to finish a level. You can complete the entire game, allegedly, through this mode, never bothering once to ever actually play. Needless to say, there's been a lot of backlash from this one.
- ...later on, Nintendo revealed said feature to be a Mercy Mode (and thus, not available at the start), which, according to them, also allowed them to bump up the game's difficulty compared to its predecessor. Cue Cullen.
- Hopefully, the unexpected shift to Nintendo Hard doesn't result in "It's Difficult, So It Sucks."
- The only two things most criers of Its Easy So It Sucks (/v/, for example) like in a video game are nostalgia and difficulty. If anything you might still get a few people saying it's too easy.
- A lot of people complained about Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword being easier than the previous games. The Sacred Stones was even easier than its predecessor. Then came Radiant Dawn, which brought back the difficulty in full force. (Of course, the gamers complained about that, too.)
- A lot of people hated Metroid Fusion for giving you the location of your next destination and closing off alternate routes, claiming that it destroyed the series's emphasis on exploration. Gamespot famously deducted points from Metroid Prime 3 because the controls were too good and thus the game was "too easy".
- People complained about Super Metroid back in the day, saying the inclusion of an automap feature was a travesty against everything Metroid was about.
- Most of said people forget that the reason Metroid was so hard was because there were no landmarks or maps. Combine that with the copy & pasted backgrounds it could take you forever to find Ridley's Lair (which is what happened to this Troper).
- The Legend Of Zelda franchise has never been the same in terms of difficulty since its transition to 3-D. The series added more and more interesting puzzles but included easier combat, fewer traps, and less dangerous Boss Battles as part of the deal.
- The Legend of Zelda: a Link to the Past started the trend by actually showing you where the dungeons are instead of leaving you to go find them yourself. Also, one of the more difficult challenges in doing a 000 game is that you cannot Save and Quit (this requirement was removed in the GBA port), but even without that requirement it takes a whole lot more skill to do that in the two NES games. Once the 3D installments rolled around it got even easier to do a 000 game.
- Most notably, The Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass are accused of this by the fans of the more realistic graphic style. In reality, however, those two games are not that much more easy than Ocarina Of Time or Twilight Princess, they just have less dungeons.
- Bioshock gets criticised a lot for the Vita-Chambers. Whenever you die, you respawn nearby without penalty, so even a tough enemy like a Big Daddy can be worn down over several "lives", removing almost all challenge and a lot of scariness from the game. A patch added the option to disable the chambers, making it much harder.
- While System Shock 2, which Bioshock is the spiritual sequel of, had resurrection chambers the difference was that there was only one on each level and you had to find and activate it first.
- And unless you were specifically playing on "easy" mode, you had to pay to use them.
- When Halo 3 isn't being bashed for gameplay modifications or whatever, it's being bashed because it's too easy. The developers have freely admitted that Easy difficulty is purposely developed so that "my grandma can complete the game if she wants". However, try it on Legendary.
- While still being a challenge, Legendary in Halo 3 in itself is still toned down compared to Legendary in Halo 2. There are only, at best, a handful of Sniper Jackals in the entire game of Halo 3 and, while the Brutes are significantly improved from 2 to 3, the Brutes are not even close to being a replacement for how fierce and challenging the Elites could be.
- IMO, Halo 2's Legendary was hard for the wrong reasons, ie Fake Difficulty. H3's legendary is still quite Nintendo Hard.
- It is not recommended to play Dead Space on any difficulty lower than Hard.
- After several games which gradually raised the difficulty and complexity, culminating with the Nintendo Hard Sim City 4, Sim City Societies toned down the difficulty, removed the zoning system, and instead replaced it with a social influence system that would determine whether your city will be made of slums or crystal spires. Here's a hint: Sim City 4 was the highest ranked game of the entire series. Now figure out the rest.
- Though the Baldurs Gate and Neverwinter Nights series weren't ever really seen as presenting killer difficulty compared to other companies' RPGs, recent Bioware franchises like Knights Of The Old Republic, Jade Empire and Mass Effect have vastly "streamlined" combat and shorter, much more linear (and repetitive) campaigns that older fans complain are a cash-in on the genre and give less bang for the buck.
- Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was specifically designed for newcomers to the roleplaying-game genre. Cue hardcore Final Fantasy fans lynching it for being too easy and short.
- In the same vein, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was bashed for, among other things, ease of play, which contrasted directly the much-hyped difficulty of use. It's not a hard game by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not supposed to be.
- Amusingly enough, starting with Final Fantasy 6, the regular entires in the series are about as hard as Mystic Quest was, yet you don't see a lot of people complaining about their difficulty.
- Kingdom Hearts 2 got this type of criticism because of its simple reaction commands and the addition of Drive forms, and the almost total removal of any platforming or puzzles whatsoever.
- One third of the complaints about Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes were that the addition of the tranquilizer gun and first-person aiming made the game too easy. The other two-thirds were about the voice acting and cutscene changes.
- In the MMORPG genre, a vocal minority loathe World Of Warcraft because, compared to other MMORPGs of the time, it was too easy to grind to level 70, the penalties for dying were a pittance, it was too easy to gain gear (via PVP), etc.
- The death penalties for City Of Heroes are considered to be even easier, except that their players liked it that way. Lately there have been complaints that the game is getting too easy as the already weak penalties have been reduced to near irrelevance; however, with the introduction of the mission editor in issue 14, players who like a challenge will be able to play (and create) missions as difficult as they like, to the point of creating new enemy groups which make Malta and Knives of Artemis look like wimps.
- And now with issue 16 players have more options for setting the difficulty. Ranging from normal spawn number to spawns ussualy set for 8 people and same level enemies to over four levels higher.
- In the latest WoW expansion, the complaining has reached new heights because Blizzard intentionally made the starting raids much easier than was the norm in the original game and first expansion. This was a design philosophy change intended to improve accessibility after the statistics showed them that only about 2% of players actually got to do the original level 60 version of Naxxramas, and they decided that they wanted people to enjoy their work. In response to the expected hardcore backlash, Blizzard added hard modes that provide more and better gear along with achievements, and require a great deal more skill. The devs have promised more difficult raids in future content patches.
- Of course, now 3.1 is out, and a week later guilds have cleared all new content, and even scored a few "hard-mode" kills. There is no way for Blizzard to please their fanbase.
- Every time a boss is nerfed in World Of Warcraft...a hardcore raider who feels their intelligence insulted somehow cries. Loud. And hard. Even if the "nerf" is a Game Breaking Bug fix that practically required the 25 people who downed the boss beforehand to exploit in order to beat the encounter.
- Nevermind that some of these "Nerfed bosses" were in fact actually programmed to be initially unwinnable. Of course they complained about how they were made unwinnable and removed the intentional "bugs" that's make people struggle with the boss until they release a "Fixing" patch. Cue the whining of people clearing the bosses within weeks.
- And now there is whining about making the stats more streamlined so "now an utter moron can find out what their class needs" ..Wait a sec. Figuring out stats and what you need to focus on for pretty much every RPG out there should be a no brainer to anyone who's ever played one before. (Tabletop or not) It seems to imply there were people who actually had trouble figuring out what they needed beyond the small "Oh does my death knight need spell damage?"-confusion that even then was easily answered. Determining what stats you needed to focus on was already as easy as opening your character profile and examining the stats' descriptions since day one, and if anything, it's even easier now since you can inspect a random player and observe their talent build and equipment. (Or just look them up on the Armoury) And yet people still complain, even when there were mods that showed you what stats you needed to focus on. Blizzard seriously needs a hug considering how many people are whining about such a trivial thing that shouldn't affect them anymore than switching one thing around.
- Also you can just look up a strategy guide. It takes a total of five minutes. Yet somehow nobody complained about the existence of those?
- Even the game's user interface isn't exempt from this! Regarding the Stat stuff since this is related, people have whined and whined...and whined and whined about how "Blizzard hates mods" despite the fact that many staff members encourage people to mod the UI and it was through modding that they made the UI and other stuff better in the first place! And one of the main reason for this was because after every update from a minor bug fix to a large patch, the mods would be outdated and wouldn't load and the third-party who made the mods would have to release updates. So naturally, Blizzard & Vivendi decided to leave most of the interface-changing stuff alone and add the basics. Most people who whine about "Blizzard hating mods" have either not played long enough or just joined and thought it was always like this. Stuff like additional ability bars, being able to see other players' and enemies' health & mana (Or even what percent they're at), Damage-over-time timers, quest levels, Raid warnings, seeing how much additional spell damage you had, seeing other groups in the raid without targeting individual members on the field, being able to see how much threat you had and if you pulled aggro, seeing what your stat changes would be by equipping something - stuff that is now built into the game - required mods for each. Yet when Blizzard builds them into the game it's making it easy even when you can turn quite a bit of that stuff off or just ignore it. (Although why anybody would want to ignore some of those would be surprising.)
- But to give some of the "Blizzard Hates Modders" some credit, yes, Blizzard has cracked down on a few mods. Some of which weren't even that bad, yeah. Except that some of the mods Blizzard has cracked down on were pretty much exploits or borderline bots. The most notorious example would be "Decursive". Decursive was considered a "Required mod" for anyone with a debuff removing ability in their arsenal. It automatically found the nearest person with a debuff the player could remove, and cast the deubff-removing spell. And you had to just press a button. This was considered an exploit so Blizzard told the decursive programmers they could be banned for that, so decursive mods were later changed to just show the player with the mod who they can decurse, meaning they still had to select the spell.
- And there were other mods that were even worse...A "Required" rogue mod for awhile had the player set up a combo, press a button during an encounter and it automatically did all the abilities in the combo the second energy was available, and the player didn't need to do anything. Even people who made third-party mods disliked this, as well as an attempt for a Death Knight mod to make the character use abilities in an energy-efficient rotation.
- There's a vocal part of the zOMG! fanbase that insists any nerfing of any quest or enemy is ruining the game by making it easy. This includes the parts of the game that were honestly too difficult for the CL it was meant for. And the game is still in beta.
- Hype Backlash aside, a common complaint against Fable was that it was extremely easy. This was largely due to you being able to carry an infinite number of health potions (which instantly restore your health to full), and health potions being really cheap to buy, resulting in it being virtually impossible for anything (even the major bosses) to kill you as long as you just kept mashing that "drink potion" key.
- This was extended even further with Fable II. It is completely impossible to die. Losing all of your health merely results in scarring. And of course, you can carry an infinite number of health potions and resurrection phials (still very cheap).
- Many longtime fans of the Rainbow Six series complain about the series' shift from hardcore "one-shot kill" tactical shooters to standard First Person Shooter action games, starting with Rainbow Six: Lockdown and solidified in Rainbow Six: Vegas.
- R6V was purposely "stream-lined" to reduce the annoyance of being killed with one well-placed shot, but keep the same penalties for poor tactics, requiring the player to advance cautiously rather than run and gun (which still results in death in about two to three seconds.)
- Devil May Cry 2 was criticized for a lot of design choices, the too-easy fights being just one of many.
- Devil May Cry 4 is being criticised by long-time fans of the series due its significantly lower difficulty compared to the third game, not exactly helped by Nero's Devil Bringer, who without it is almost completely useless.
- La Mulana is a Take That against newer generations of games; the manual calls anyone used to playing newer games a wuss.
- When Guitar Hero: World Tour's track list was announced, fans complained that there was no song on par with "Through The Fire and The Flames". Fan backlash and flame wars are expected as those fans realize that "Satch Boogie" is not on that level, and that's the only really hard song in the game.
- The Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune series had its Story Mode toned down in difficulty for its third installment. The more hardcore players complained that getting undefeated status in Story Mode is too easy now.
- The remakes of Final Fantasy I had purists complaining about hits being redirected to live enemies if they targeted enemies that had just died; in the original, they would have automatically missed.
- Later remakes were stuck in "easy mode" (the PSX version had to option for "old-school" difficulty or easy mode). In addition to making level ups easier to achieve (level 2 takes 12 XP instead of 40, for example), it replaced the "x spells per level" mechanic with a straight MP mechanic. This ended up seriously unbalancing the game towards the player, who could now cast NUKE (Flare) many, many times per dungeon, as opposed to two or three times. However, the developers DID realize how devastatingly powerful this is: all enemies have increased magic resistance, and bosses are almost entirely immune to attack magic (except Lich with Dia. Go. Fucking. Nuts).
- The PSP remake leans closer to the PS1 versions' Normal difficulty.
- Gungrave and Nightshade got this, as their challenge was mainly based around getting a high score or equivalent, and they were fairly easy if you wanted to just charge through to the end. Oddly, the more traditionally difficult Gungrave: Overdose and Shinobi instead get complaints about being too hard.
- Old fans in particular often blame Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider games of being too easy and straight-forward in comparison to the often expansive and difficult Core Design games.
- Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney gets complaints for its dumbed-down difficulty, with some players being able to beat the entire game while only being penalized once or twice. Then there's the new prosecutor, Klavier Gavin, who gets shit because he isn't hard enough on Apollo. He's Not A Jerk Ass, So He Sucks.
- That said, the "difficulty" present in the previous Ace Attorney games was more or less the game not being clear enough on what you have to do, and having the almost pointless option of presenting profiles. Apollo Justice simplifies it by simply telling the player when to present evidence or profiles instead of having you randomly guess.
- The latest Prince Of Persia game has also been criticized for being very easy, as the companion saves you from any death while platforming or fighting, though you're brought back at the beginning of whatever platforming, or after the enemy regains a good chunk of health. For all intents and purposes, this means that the game establishes checkpoints at every safe platform, rather than forcing you to go back to some arbitrary checkpoint and waste time redoing five minutes or so of platforming just to get back to where you were before.
- Or, as the developers said, requiring you to rewind to just before the point of mistake, which allowed them to make much longer chains of platforming action instead of being restricted to the ten seconds from the Sands of Time trilogy.
- To clarify, the game isn't easier than the Sands Of Time trilogy, it simply has a faster checkpointing system.
- Meaning players can run into an area without forethought on the basis that there's no risk, and once they clear a given gap - through skill or plain luck - it's cleared forever. That is to say, it's easier.
- Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories has been criticized for being somewhat easy, as on many boss fights against enemies with decks (for example, the Organization members), the player can repeatedly dodge the boss's sleights (which remove one card from the deck) to drain the boss' card reserves. Eventually, the boss will be unable to make more than a few attacks without reloading, will hardly ever use any of the sleights, and most likely will have used up its Enemy Cards, so it will be relatively easy pickings.
- Not to mention the fact that your deck was never shuffled. Why is this noteworthy? Because you can stack it so that you only have to mash the buttons to pull out sleight after sleight, during some of which you are invincible, then once your deck is badly depleted via sleight depletion, reload it with an Elixir (which reloads used cards as well). Ouch.
- Uh, people have complained about Chain of Memories being hard.
- Part of the backlash for newer Tetris games comes from infinite spin, then there's the purists of older versions of Tetris that denounce the piece generator in newer versions, saying that surviving a wave of S and Z pieces and going 50 pieces without an I piece is what Tetris is all about.
- Tetris: The Grand Master 3 implements floor kicks, which allow an I block on a flat surface to rotate upright, allowing it to more easily slip into holes one block wide. This feature was not in TGM3's predecessors, which has led some players to believe that this ruins the challenge of the TGM series.
- This was a major complaint levelled at Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does A Little Undercover Work: The designer's intention was to make the game play more like an interactive cartoon rather than a complicated adventure game, and make sure as many people as possible finish the game, therefore removing old Sierra adventure game standards such as death or Unwinnable situations. Despite Larry 5 being, for these reasons alone, significantly better than the games that preceded it in this troper's opinion, adventure game fans cried foul as their beloved genre was being dumbed down for the masses.
- Do Tamagotchis count? No, seriously. The old ones from the mid-90s were fairly brutal if you wanted to get the best characters. The gen.1 would give you the "average" character if you made a single mistake over the course of the first 7 days, including waiting longer than one minute to turn out the lights when it went to sleep, or allowing the hunger/happiness meters to get any lower than 3/4. Then came the Angelgotch, which was nearly impossible to not get the best character on, unless you literally ignored it for two days at a time. The new Tamagotchi connections are better than angelgotch, but they still place almost no emphasis on good care - the manual no longer even classifies characters as being well or poorly taken care of. All the emphasis is on gimmicks, new features, and interaction with the website. Boo hoo.
- According to TheGameOverthinker, Nintendo had just recently patented a new technology
 that would give hints to players who are apparently stuck in a game and allow gamers to bypass difficult sections altogether, playing them as semi-cutscenes instead. Cue the whining.
- The most depressing thing is that it's completely and entirely 100% optional. Why is such a fuss being made over something people won't even use? No one complained about Game FA Qs....
- Of course mentioning this or You Tube won't make them listen. Their main argument is that if the option is there, everyone will be tempted to use it and never attempt to beat the game on their own, which, once again, was not any different in the days of strategy guides, word of mouth, and of course Game FA Qs. Their main fear being that if more games become easy or have in game help, then no game will ever be challenging, though they ignore the fact that most Nintendo Hard games were difficult for all the wrong reasons.
- Magic The Gathering started a practice of printing italicized rules text on cards when space permitted, making it slightly easier to actually play the game without having a rulebook handy. Of course, hardcores who already know all the rules hate it. Wizards of the Coast even poked fun at its fanbase in a joke set: Duh
- Some programmers look down on Visual Basic because it's easier to create working programs in compared to the likes of C, C++, and Java.
- This is nothing compared to the waves of contempt that HyperCard inspired in its day.
- I'm going to quickly point out programmers can find a way to look down on ANY languange. Visual Basic = Too easy + Microsoft, Java = Horrifying, Perl = Write-only, Python = Whitespace? etc. etc..
- It's not so much because it's easier to create working programs, as because it's easier to create working programs that are an utter nightmare to maintain/upgrade, as opposed to more "difficult" languages, which tend to take more work to get your program running properly, but are much easier to keep running over the long term. Maintaining Visual Basic 6.0 Programs on Windows 7...*shudder* That said, the above comment is totally correct.
- Oddly enough, people haven't yelled at modern-day P Cs which were designed to be more accessible, easy-to-use, and user-friendly than the compters of old. Why's that? Well either because they don't know P Cs weren't "Personal" and took up entire room or they are just too used to fancy schmancy interfaces like Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. They used to require specific training to use, you needed to enter punch cards in in the exact order, you had no keyboards, you had little GUI if at all, and let's not forget the big Guide Dang It that stuff like DOS was. And yet the irony? PC gamers whine about how it's "Dumbed down" for the masses...on a format that was ALREADY dumbed down for the masses...but don't tell them this. They'll just tell you "But it's more available!", which is true regarding how big old computers were, but that doesn't excuse how modern stuff like GU Is, keyboards, computer mice, trackballs, input devices, and simplified programs pretty much dumbed down computers massively.
- Wario Land and Wario Ware games often fall into this gap as well as Its Short So It Sucks, due to being generally short games that reward 100% completion more than a main mode. In the case of Wario Ware, this is likely because the gameplay is deliberately kept simple as part of the series premise, and due to the fact the first run through only requires you to play through the first micro game set difficulty level to move on to another. For Wario Land, it's probably because of the health set up being extremely generous towards the player (aka about ten heart points to complete invincibility). Which completely ignores that both series have some quite difficult bonus challenges and secrets.
- Nintendo Power's only complaint about Klonoa was that it was a bit easier... because Klonoa had one more heart than in the original version. They gave it a 9.0 anyway.
- Final Fantasy XI sometimes has its veteran players complain that recent expansions have made the game too easy. Of course, the recent expansions have only brought the game somewhat into line with modern MMO standards for ease of play and soloability, and the game is still an epic time sink for grinding and camping Notorious Monsters, among other things. And these kinds of things are what people consider difficulty in an MMOG....
- The Beatles: Rock Band is earning its fair share of this before it's even out yet; players who cut their teeth on Guitar Hero III's "Through the Fire and Flames" are decrying TB:RB as "just a bunch of tier 1 songs."
- This Troper muses that perhaps those fans are missing the point of having a Beatles game...
- While The Beatles: Rock Band is much easier than Rock Band 1 and 2, however does offer a few hard songs, and also has much harder first and second tier songs, since song tiers are chronogically sorted, instead of by difficulty.
- Pokemon Gold and Silver had become the target of harsh criticism from fans for being incredibly easy due to gym leaders (aside from Whitney) were to simple or levels early on were severely low, and an Elite Four that provided almost no challenge compared to the other 3 regional elite fours in other games.
- This troper found that when you start out with Chikorita the game becomes REALLY HARD! This troper (same guy) fondly remembers spending hours trying to beat the 1st two gym leaders because he chose, and still chooses Chikorita on the sole fact she is adorable ^-^!
- Technically Pokemon can be both genders and Chikorita only has a 12% chance of being female anyway. Moving on, the remakes Heart Gold and Soul Silver copped flak for not really bumping up the initial difficulty all that much, and because Whitney's Pokemon dropped one level. Never mind that everything after the Elite 4 got a boost, rematch battles against gym leaders and Elite 4 reach into the 70's, Red's team almost hits 90's, ghost Pokemon no longer work against Whitney and the AI in general has greatly been improved from the original games.
- This happened quite a bit with Guild Wars...Even Factions received this complaint when it was new! Nevermind the amounts of missions declared as "Newbie Traps" that happen very early in the game compared to even Prophecies's annoying levels.
- And a lot of things in the game catch hell for precisely this reason. Heroes, PVE Skills, inscriptions for weapons (never mind that the previous system sucked ass), specific weapons becoming more common, etc etc...
- Hardcore Sierra Enthusiasts and Lucas Arts adventure gamers whined and whined about how games after Zak Mc Kraken were programmed so that it would be impossible to lose (Unless you were absolutely trying) or make the game unwinnable, therefore "Dumbing it down for the masses". Nevermind that people to this day whine about how Sierra Adventure games ruined them by having the realistic scenarios of characters using the wrong item and dying.
- And even when another Sierra adventure game called Torins Passage came around and featured an in-game hint feature at the cost of points, people whined about how that hint feature was too easy. But wait a sec...You didn't have to use the In-game hint feature, did you? Then what is the problem?!?
- Some players of DJMAX Portable don't like the new Fever system in DJMAX Portable Clazziquai Edition and Black Square, because they lack the distracting tinting of the playfield when you get a x3 Fever or more going, x5 Fever in both games doesn't cause your speed multiplier to increase, and x7 Fever only causes it to do so when you hit x7. Some even go as far as to wish that the x7 Fever feature had two increases in speed multiplier. It Doesn't Have Fake Difficulty, So It Sucks.
- Subverted with Gradius Gaiden; despite being one of the easiest games in the series, many Gradius fans still regard it as the best Gradius game around.
- The Backyard Sports series, to IGN at least. The scores just get lower and lower because the games get easier and easier (and cheesier).
- In Donkey Kong Country, visits to Cranky's Cabin are accompanied by Cranky ranting about how newer games have been dumbed down for new players.
- No mention of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance? A widespread criticism from fans of the Playstation FF Tactics was that the game felt so toned down by comparison. In the original Tactics, no matter what map you were on, if a unit died, there was the risk of their spirit turning into a crystal/chest and being lost forever. In Tactics Advance, that was only possible on one or two specifics areas. The Playstation Tactics had quite a share of ball-buster encounters. Tactics Advance? Not so much.
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