YMMV / MouseHunt (2008)

• Anticlimax Boss: Certain mice are easy to catch and yield enormous rewards of points and gold, but getting into position to catch them is very difficult and requires a lot of time and expensive cheese.
  • The Eclipse Mouse, if you have the right weapon. With a description stating that it is darkness and fear itself, it sure doesn't put up much of a fight if you wield forgotten traps. In fact, his difficulty rating is "Effortless" is you do so — the lowest possible. That being said, the Total Eclipse's lexicon entry mentions that the basic Eclipse Mice and the Shades of the Eclipse are merely weaker alternate universe remnants of itself.
  • The Mystic King, Technic King, and Chessmaster mice are much easier to capture than the respective Mystic/Technic Rooks or Queens, just like a real chess game.
  • The Deep Mouse is the True Final Boss of the Iceberg and is difficult to reach the Deep Lair where it resides^note requiring defeating Icewing with a specific base, and descending 200 feet in the Hidden Depths, all in fewer than 250 hunts. However, if it's the player's 250th hunt and they're in the Deep Lair, the Deep Mouse becomes a guaranteed catch regardless of power as long as it gets attracted to your trap.
• Archive Panic: There are over eight hundred different mice to catch, not counting limited edition or Special Event mice. Happy hunting!
• Demonic Spiders: A number of mice are often hard to catch and steal large amounts of points/gold/cheese or cause other detrimental abilities if you fail to catch them. Some are even meant to deter players from encountering them and have detrimental effects when caught or even when encountered, though you can arm certain charms/cheese/bases to avoid encountering them or mitigate their effects:
  • Harpy Mice in the Lagoon. Players would've most likely brought either a Physical, Tactical or Hydro trap, while their main weakness is Shadow, and their mouse power is very high. The Harpy's description even Lampshades this:
  "Hunter's lore describes these mice as a curse, bringing bad luck and fruitless hunts. Hunters lament at the eerie caw of a Harpy mouse descending from the clouds, knowing that escape is impossible. Harpy mice exist to torture Mousehunters by constantly stealing their cheese and raiding their supplies. Their swift wings bring a dark plague of frustration to any hunter unfortunate enough to encounter them"
  • Vampire mice in the Mousoleum and the Catacombs are relatively powerful and give you very little gold and points compared to the other mice there. If they happen to steal your gold, they steal a lot more than the other mice. The developers themselves stated that this was intentional to make them unappealing to catch.
  • The Fiery Warpath has the Caravan Guard and the Gargantuamouse. The Caravan Guard mouse is either resistant to or immune to all trap types, drops paltry loot, and it reinforces the wave if you fail to catch it, adding 1 mouse of each unit to prolong the battle. The Gargantuamouse shows up when you are at least at a streak of 7 to break your streak, and is vulnerable to a type that the other mice aren't weak to.
  • Mice of the Brute category in the Iceberg (Mammoth, Snow Bowler, Yeti) will push your progress back all the same regardless of catch/miss, unless you have a specific base that prevents them.
  • Mice of the Zealot category in the Iceberg (Iceblade, Water Wielder) are difficult to catch and give absolutely no Iceberg progress if caught. There's fortunately a base that decreases their encounter rate.
  • Missing any of the mice in the Labyrinth will give Dead End Clues while missing those in Zokor's districts will cause you to lose much more Stealth levels than if you caught them. Shadow Stalker mice are found in every one of these areas, and Forgotten traps which are effective against other Zokor/Labyrinth mice are less effective against them, with all other traps being ineffective. It's highly recommended to equip Glowing Gruyere, which repels Shadow Stalkers.
  • Battering Ram mice in Fort Rox will deal a heavy 15 damage to your wall if encountered, regardless of catch or miss. They're fortunately repelled by both Crescent and Moon cheese.
  • The Portal Paladin and Portal Pursuer in the Bristle Woods Rift are tough to catch can even make you lose progress when you miss them.
  • The Bulwark of Ascent in the Valour Rift can only be encountered during Ultimate Umbra runs, and can shove you back 10 steps if you miss them (and you most likely will).
  • Corrupt Mice in the Cursed City will reset all three curses if encountered at all, forcing Hunters to go through all the trouble in dispelling them again.
  • The Daydreamer and Kite Flyer mice in the Floating Islands are both innocent-looking but tough to catch, and do not drop any island loot (except Cloud Curds) to boot! Their encounters can be greatly reduced by using Cloud Cheesecake though.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Chrome Deathbot: Blingbot, as it wears "a lot o' bling".
  • Dojo Sensei: Walter^note ...A Mousehunt board moderator: "It wasn't at all meant to be an official label, but when he was first introduced, someone started a thread asking what his name should be and I said 'Walter' as a joke. Nothing to do with anything except me poking some fun at everything needing a nickname."
  • Gargantuamouse: Fluffy
  • Rhinobot: Failbot
  • Sandstorm Monstrobot: Tiny
  • Sandtail Sentinel: Stickman. It (vaguely) resembles one.
  • Sphynx Wrath/Chrome Sphynx Wrath: Kitty / C Kitty
• Fridge Horror:
  • The Warmonger mouse sends in the new recruits on the first wave before sending in the more experienced soldiers on the next two. In short, the inexperienced mice who wanted to join (or were forced to join) his army are literally being sent to an early death! Justified for the new scouts, as they are "trained" by being thrown directly into the first wave of the battle instead of spending months on the training grounds.
  • The whole concept of catching and killing thousands of sentient living beings. Some of those traps are horrifyingly cruel.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Many Limited Edition traps have respectable Power and stupidly high Luck. Luck also determines whether or not you succeed in catching a mouse, and the effectiveness of luck rises exponentially. Of note are the Partybot (Physical), Chrome Deathbot/Drillbot (Physical), Giant Speaker/2010 Blastoff/Rewer's Riposte (Tactical), and Kraken Chaos/Double Diamond Adventure (Hydro)
  • The 3 Fiery Warpath traps, the Oasis Water Node trap, the Sphynx Wrath and especially the Sandstorm Monstrobot trump all of these. However, if you want those three traps, you will have to Earn Your Fun.
  • The Phantasmic Oasis trap, Grand Arcanum trap and the Clockwork Portal trap also count.
  • The Sunken City brings the ultimate hydro trap, the School of Sharks trap at a whopping base cost of 29,000,000 gold, excluding the trap parts needed to purchase it.
  • The Labyrinth/Zokor introduces the best base in the game, the Minotaur Base. It also brings the most powerful forgotten, arcane and shadow traps; the Infinite Labyrinth trap, the Event Horizon trap and the Temporal Turbine trap. Much like the Fiery Warpath traps, you need to Earn Your Fun to obtain these.
  • Some of these top tier traps even have event-only upgrades!
  • The Dragon Slayer Cannon is by far the strongest Draconic trap. It is a huge pain to craft, requiring a variety of crafting ingredients throughout the kingdom as well as the incredibly rare Kalor'ignis Rib, which is worth around 160,000,000 gold on the marketplace.
  • The Floating Islands brings the best-in-slot traps for Law, Forgotten, Arcane and Tactical power types. All of them require many trips through the islands to acquire all the materials. They can be further upgraded at an incredible cost using Adorned Empyrean Jewels which are some of the rarest items in the game. The traditional ways of collecting them are excruciatingly slow, and they cost around 13,000,000 gold each on the marketplace. The catch? You need an absurd amount of them, for a grand total of 225 jewels if you want to collect all these endgame traps. Good luck!
  • The Prestige Base is the strongest base in the game, provided that you work hard to make it as strong as possible. As its power and luck are tied to the highest floor you've reached and number of Total Eclipse mice caught during the Valour Rift's Ultimate Umbra run, you'd need to use up all your best charms, a mountain of resources and gold to reach the highest possible floor that you can. Even then, the run is also highly dependent on luck.
  • Charms like the Ultimate charm or the cheese conserving Baitkeep charms fit this trope perfectly.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: There are MouseHunt groups dedicated to this, such as the MouseHunt Century Club, where players catch 100 of each type of mouse.
  • The Egg Master title requires you to collect all the Spring Egg Hunt eggs, which encompass all the Bosses, most of the rare breeds as well as some requiring specific area-related goals. And you can only collect these eggs during the annual Spring Egg Hunt event which lasts around 3-4 weeks. The reward for doing all this? A small bonus title you can display in the official forums along with an Egg Master-only forum.
    • As the Egg Master title is awarded regardless of which year you obtained the eggs, there are hunter-run competitions to get all the eggs within a single event in one year.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Cursed City Minigame. It requires the player to actively switch between 3 charms after each successful catch to dispel 3 curses to allow another mouse with better loot to be attracted, but Corrupt mice can waltz in at anytime and reset all the curses, even if he's caught. After successfully dispelling all 3 curses, you are given a grace period of 3 hunts where Corrupt can not be attracted, but after that, Corrupt will reset all your work when attracted. Some take days to even manage dispelling all 3 curses.
  • Made worse when you're hunting for the Dark Magi boss. He can only be attracted after dispelling all 3 curses and equipping a charm, and that charm will also cause only one other mouse to be attracted: The Corrupt.
• Tear Jerker: Greedy Al is an embittered Jerkass by the time you confront him during the Great Winter Hunt, but the letters to Santa he wrote when he was young and disappointed by empty stockings are heartbreaking.
• That One Boss: Several boss mice that aren't Anticlimax Bosses tend to fall into this thanks to having very low catch rates even with the best traps for their level, especially those that require rare cheese obtained from catching lower tier cheeses. In worst case scenarios, players might have to repeat the cycle all over again without having managed to catch them.
• That One Level:
  • Depending on whether the "Devs Hate U", each run in the Zugzwang's Tower can be a big failure, or success, or anywhere in between.
  • The Dreaded Horde in the Jungle of Dread are made to be especially hard. Even with the best traps for that location (such as the Cackle Lantern and the Clockapult of Time), you will fail to catch them over half the time. However, if you equip the Dreaded Charm, your trap receives a 300% increase in base power, making for much more favorable odds.
  • The Fiery Warpath and the Labyrinth/Zokor are this if you seek the rare trap loot the bosses drop. Many hunters are stuck in these areas hoping the next run finally brings the trap parts.
• Ugly Cute: The Itty-Bitty Burroughs mouse.