What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord?, formerly known as Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This? is a dungeon defense sim/puzzle game by Acquire (Published by Nippon Ichi America in the US) for the PlayStation Portable.
What's an Evil Overlord to do? You just want to be left alone with your schemes to take over the world, but those pesky heroes keep attacking! There's only one answer: Spawn an army of bad guys to defend your home!
The game differs from other "defense" type games, in that it's more of an ecology sim: You dig through nutrient-filled ground to create "slimemosses", which then distribute more nutrients throughout your dungeon, allowing you to create omnoms (which eat slimemosses) and lizardmen (which eat omnoms and lay eggs), etc.etc. etc.
The game is also notable for its sense of humour, with plenty of Lampshade Hanging, ridiculousness and funny profiles.
A sequel was released for download and UMD in spring 2010. There's a third one, for $10.00 on PSN, under the title No Heroes Allowed! And then there is No Heroes Allowed: No Puzzles Either! for the PlayStation Vita, which is a puzzle game variant that is free to play, though small payments are required to increase inventory room and play more frequently per day. There is also No Heroes Allowed! VR, released in 2017 for Playstation VR.
In 2022, No Heroes Allowed! would be rereleased for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 as part of the Premium tier of PS Plus. As with other retro games in the tier, anybody who already owned the game digitally can access the game on said systems without a subscription.
This series provides examples of:
- Adaptive Ability: Starting in the second game onward, monsters can also mutate in response to stress in their environment depending on what conditions are fulfilled. These are generally as follows:
- Basic: Monsters that die to the threat of heroes can simply evolve into their next tiered upgrade
- Gigantism: Monsters that die due to starvation will often evolve into large versions of themselves that are much bulkier and harder to kill while being more efficient in expending energy.
- Abnormal: Monsters that die as a result of predation will evolve defensive measures to protect themselves, being weaker overall, but specialize in dealing status effects to whatever they're fighting.
- Rare: Monsters that fulfill arbitrary conditions will evolve into these weird variants at high stress which are different for each species. Slimemosses can evolve into Amoebas for example if the population of Lizardmen exceeds the mosses.
- Pure: Monsters attempting to evolve have a chance of instead becoming these albino monsters that are weak and serve no real purpose. These can also be created when splashed with Holy Water by a hero.
- Acrofatic/Kevlard: This is the Giant-class monsters' gimmick — They're big, they're fat, and they've got lots of extra HP.
- Anti Poop-Socking: No Puzzles Either! gives you Pickaxes, which are consumed upon entering a level. The first five are free (plus the three daily), but after that, Pickaxes have an eight-hour cooldown before you can get one, up to three per day. Of course, this can be remedied with cold hard cash.
- Apocalypse Wow: The ending of No Heroes Allowed! shows Badman's magic doing its work after the heroes are defeated, uprooting and burying human civilization and overwhelming heroes and mankind with monsters, all with great spectacle.
- Artificial Insolence: Downplayed example, you can hit monsters with your pickaxe to destroy them, and some monsters like the Golems can cause buffs when hit with the pickaxe, but otherwise, monsters will eat, reproduce, and fight heroes all on their own with no player input, and their behavior cannot be directly manipulated aside from the mentioned exceptions.
- A Winner Is You: Normal mode in the first game ends with Badman gloating over your victory, followed by him taking over the castle in the credits. This is downplayed in Hard mode, which ends with a significantly longer speech from him, followed by the credits which, as he acknowledges, are exactly the same as in Normal mode.
- Blob Monster: Slimemosses, but like real-life slime molds, they can turn into blossoms to reproduce.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: No Puzzles Either!. It's possible to beat the whole game without paying a dime,
though considering how gloriously hard the game gets, you might be wishing you had more Pickaxes. - Cannibalism Superpower: Giant, fat monsters are able to slurp each other up to feed themselves if necessary.
- Checkpoint Starvation: In the games' stages, getting Badman captured by a hero will force you to repeat all previous sets of dungeon prepping and hero waves in the stage all over again.
- Classic Cheat Code: L R L R L R L R L R features in every single installment of the series, generally used to unlock more levels.
- Daddy's Little Villain: Badmella is Badman's daughter, who first appears in a DLC story in the second game, and begins to take a major role in the third stage of No Heroes Allowed!, when Badman is temporarily put out of commission, being the Distaff Counterpart to Badman gameplay-wise.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: Every Boss Hero in No Puzzles Either!'s Hard Mode. They're still the exact same levels and have the exact same HP as in the normal scenario, except the damage your monsters deal to them is reduced to only a fraction of what they would normally take, which leads to a lot of losses.
- Defeat Means Enslavement/Eaten: In No Puzzles Either!, Heroes your monsters defeat in a dungeon may be captured and subsequently worked to death in your Mines or consumed by your monsters for levels.
- Disaster Dominoes: Fail to keep populations in check of any monster higher up the food chain and you'll end up with them entirely devastating the population of their prey, which will result in said monsters starving to death, leading to the starvation of what preys on them, and so on and so forth.
- Disc-One Nuke: If you can manage to create a Dragon very early into one stage, and feed it enough, it'll be strong enough to destroy a hero on its own. The nutrients it gets will cause it to give birth to a stronger Black Dragon, and when it kills the next hero or group of heroes, it can keep upgrading to stronger and stronger versions of the dragon, right up to the deadly Shin Dragon, which is practically indestructible.
- Distressed Dude: Badman is helpless from kidnapping heroes without his god actively creating creatures to save his arse. Justified since Badman used up just about all of his power to summon the God of Destruction in the first place, which forces him to become a Non-Action Guy. However, Badman does prevent the hero capturing him from using their abilities. For the third game, the same applies to Badmella if she is active in the dungeon.
- A Dungeon Is You: As the God of Destruction, it's your job to make Badman's dungeon for housing his monsters, putting Badman in the safest spot possible, and making sure heroes don't leave your territory alive. You rely on your monsters to do all of the dirty work since you and the heroes can't interact with each other directly.
- Elaborate Underground Base: The entirety of the gameplay is digging this out. Where you dig is what matters.
- Embedded Precursor: The disc version of the second game allows you to unlock the first game by entering a code. (The same code used to unlock Hard Mode in the first game, no less) On the digital version or
any European version of the game, entering the code just gets you a humorous rant from Badman. - Encyclopedia Exposita: Contains humorous descriptions of many of the monsters and heroes.Her life hasn't exactly been all peaches and cream. Just days before she left her poverty-stricken town, her house burned down, her horse ran away, her cat died, she lost her favorite pair of shoes, and she stepped in a cow pie with her second favorite pair of shoes. But you know what Brad says, "Be content with the cards you're dealt. *awkward stare* *nod* *lazy turn*"
- Evil Overlord: Badman, aka "Overlord". Is named "Maou" in the original Japanese version.
- Evil Minions: Your only defense for protecting Badman from the heroes, all of whom you build your dungeon for.
- Evolutionary Levels: Present in most iterations of the game, though it resembles proper evolution better than other examples. Monsters will upgrade themselves in response to being killed, either by heroes, predation or starvation. The surviving members of a race, when under pressure, will adapt into forms that are better protected against however they died.
- The puzzle game simplifies this system into evolving a match of three or more monster tiles into a single tile of the next tier of monster. Monsters with stars on their tiles may also evolve into higher ranked monsters of the same class by feeding them a certain kind of Hero. The kind of Hero you need depends on the monster, but the game never really tells you anyway.
- Food Chain of Evil: Managing this is one of the big challenges of the game. Slimes roll around redistributing nutrients and occasionally blossom into flowers to reproduce. Omnoms (caterpillar things) eat the slimes, go into cocoons, turn into deadly killer moths and hunt more slimes to plop out omnoms. Lizardmen eat omnoms and lay eggs in a nest. Demons and dragons can eat Lizardmen (or heroes).
- Hold the Line: The objective. You're not able to take offensive action of any kind...which means if those dumb heroes didn't invade your netherworld, you'd never be able to take over the surface.
- I Know Mortal Kombat: The second hero, Chimli's profile says they know all their moves from "mangas and animes" and his weapon is a "video game replica".
- Law of Chromatic Superiority: The red skeletons are more powerful because they are red. Also the speed holes.
- Lizard Folk: Among the strongest of your troops.
- Luck-Based Mission: You're not going to be able to control much more than the shape of the tunnels you dig out. Everything else is up to the monsters.
- Man-Eating Plant: One of the late-game evolutions for slimes turns them into rampaging Rafflesia, flowers that can hold their own against heroes by eating them.
- Mook Commander: Demons like the Wookiemon are summoned through Runes (breaking a Level 3 block) with space all around it), and while they're tough, their main appeal is in buffing all other present monsters' stats. Monsters in the Golem family do the same, but require being poked with a pickaxe for them to roar and give their buffs.
- Nintendo Hard: This game can be surprisingly hard for first time players. The tutorials help, but you still find yourself trying to figure out a good enough path in order to create some of the higher-level magical monsters.
- No Puzzles Either!'s Hard Mode. If you somehow managed to scrape by the final Hero and jump into Hard Mode straight away, you will see Badman get dragged off a lot as the game continuously humiliates you by kicking your maxed out monsters' butts with low level Heroes.
- Old Save Bonus:
- Uploading clear data from the first game into the second allows some of the heroes to make return appearances.
- The third game unlocks special picks with their own unique powers if you load up a save file from a completed version of the first and second game. These are, however, unavailable in the PS Plus Premium home console release due to the third game being the only installment of the trilogy on the service.
- Precision F-Strike: While mostly avoiding swearwords, the almanac entry for Rafflesias mentions the phrase, "That which we call a Rafflesia, by any other name, would still smell like shit." (And they do!)
- Pure Is Not Good: Well, Pure is Good, actually, but it's no good for you. Monsters that are under a lot of stress (but not quite enough to force evolution) will often give birth to "Pure" versions of themselves. Pure monsters are weak because they're too nice, and they don't reproduce—they're just a big waste of your time. The third game also introduces holy water which can turn your monsters pure.
- Reference Overdosed: The hero descriptions in the almanac are a hurricane of references to other media, though sometimes veiled properly enough you won't immediately recognize them.
- Retraux: The game has a distinctive 8-bit-to-early-16-bit style.
- RPG Elements: No Puzzles Allowed! throws these in via a monster fusion system where you feed your minions other monsters, Loot, or Heroes to level them up and boost their Attack. How your monsters are leveled affects your winning chances in the game itself.
- Save Point: The heroes are able to create their own save points as they travel around in your dungeon, but you can easily hit them to delete them.
- Shout-Out: The (original) title sounds like a very familar phrase, but we just can't think why...
- And from there it's almost relentless. The English version of the game makes shout-outs to everything from Jurassic Park to Half-Life.
- As an example, one of the monsters at your disposal is named an “Omnom”, referencing the “Om nom nom” meme.
- The use of “My Lord” in the revised title could be a Shout-Out to the infamous use of the phrase in advertising for Evony from around the time of the game’s release.
- Simulation Game: Not as wide or long as some, but the game is based on sim elements more than strategy or RPG elements.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: The hero known as "***",note who parodies the trope and is the Final Boss of No Heroes Allowed!, being a "Level ** Swordsman" and has the title of "Foul-Mouthed Failure". His introductory dialogue is full of asterisk-censored words.
- Stylistic Suck: Everything's all blocky, in the vein of Half-Minute Hero or 3D Dot Game Heroes.
- Truly Single Parent: Monsters do not need to copulate to produce more of themselves. Even Lizardmen are able to lay eggs; the almanac for the second game even calls them "The single fathers of the Netherworld."
- Underground Monkey: Parodied with the Palette Swap upgraded units: You can upgrade from Slimemoss to "American Slimemoss", Lizardman to "Lizard Mage" and "Lizard Geisha", etc.
- Unstable Equilibrium: The work you've done on your dungeon carries over after each wave of heroes within a stage. If you've poorly managed or built your dungeon such that it struggles to take down the heroes early or cause a blunder that devastates your monster population in the earlier sections of a stage, it will reflect in the later sections and their tougher heroes. Likewise, if you've built an efficient dungeon that takes out heroes with minimal losses, you'll get more room for growth later on, and spend less time recovering from losses.
- Villain Protagonist: You're a God of Destruction helping an Evil Overlord named "Badman" Take Over the World.
- Weak, but Skilled: The other main mutation monsters can undergo besides Acrofatic is this. "Abnormal" monsters have low HP and very low defense, so they die easily, but they inflict status ailments on heroes which work wonders against armored ones, and reproduce rapidly.
- White Mage: A type of Hero that can enter your dungeon, to heal up other invading heroes significantly when they're injured. Since the heroes will likely have already captured Badman by the time you've exhausted said hero's Mana, your dungeon set-up generally needs to be able to either take them out early or cripple them as soon as possible.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Badman 2 apparently ends this way after clearing Area 5. After an incredibly long stage, you've finally managed to take out the single most powerful hero in the game. There's a credit sequence and everything, and Badman walks the earth in a parade...then you may find yourself realizing there was still a lot of room left on the Almanac for heroes, and right during the credit sequence, Badman's castle gets bombed and the credits glitch out. Cue a devastated and exhausted Badman saying that now you have to re-conquer his own castle in three more stages.
