Basic Trope: A character who's easy to use for a newbie, but also easily defeated by a more experienced player.
- Straight: In a Fighting Game, Alice is a strong, slow character. Her attacks cause a lot of damage and are easy to hit with, making her a good choice for new players, but experienced players can exploit her slow speed and attacks to defeat her easily.
- Exaggerated: Alice feels like a Game-Breaker at low skill levels, but is a worse pick than the game's intentional Joke Character in tournament play, due to how exploitable her strong, slow attacks are.
- Downplayed: Alice dominates low-level play with powerful, sweeping, but highly telegraphed heavy attacks. At higher levels, she's still viable, but high-level Alice players regard her heavy attacks as situationally useful at best.
- Justified:
- Alice is a bully who enjoys picking on the weak, and isn't able to properly defend herself from more skilled opponents.
- Alice is explicitly a Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond who was the best fighter in her small town. When dealing with outsiders, though, she's solidly outclassed.
- Inverted: Difficult, but Awesome: Bob is a fast, fragile character. His attacks cause little to no damage and have awkward hitboxes, making him a bad choice for new players, but experienced players could easily exploit his insane movement and attack speed to clean house easily.
- Subverted: Alice has several advanced techniques that can make up for her slow speed, but require skillful play.
- Double Subverted: However, these techniques also have flaws that can be exploited by an even better player.
- Zig Zagged: Alice's effectiveness varies wildly depending on the level of skill of both players.
- Averted: All characters maintain roughly the same level of strength at all levels of play.
- Enforced: To make the game more beginner-friendly, the game's creators add Alice, a character that new players can use and get strong results with. However, to avoid upsetting the game's balance at higher levels, they build weaknesses into her moveset that will render her a non-issue against a skilled player.
- Lampshaded:
- "Alice used to destroy me whenever we got into a fight. Now that I've learned how to dodge her attacks, she's the one losing."
- If you try to choose Alice in later levels, she says, "Hey, we had a lot of fun back in the Noob Cave, but it's too dangerous for me out here!"
- Invoked: Alice is a Threshold Guardian, and the flaws in her battle strategy are intentional. She's aiming to teach her weaker opponents how to analyze their opponent's strategy and counter it.
- Defied:
- A patch to the game gives Alice a Balance Buff in the form of faster attacks, letting her compete at higher levels just as well as any other character.
- Alice was intended as a skill gate character, but her abilities and attributes have unintended side effects that allow clever players to use her as a Difficult, but Awesome Lethal Joke Character at high levels of play.
- If you play as Alice in later levels, she initially gets outclassed, but then she undergoes a special Training from Hell sidequest that makes her powerful again.
- Discussed: "If Alice doesn't learn to compensate for her slow speed, then she could be in a real fix later on. Her classmates don't know how to exploit her just yet, but her future opponents will..."
- Conversed: "What's wrong with this game?! I used to beat my friends whenever I picked Alice, but now I always lose!"
Return to Skill Gate Characters.
