YMMV / Tokyo Jungle

• Demonic Spiders:
  • Lions. They hit like trains, they come in large quantities, they're frequently everywhere, they take a lot of effort to kill, and they can frequently call for help typically having 3 or 4 arriving at once. Only a handful of high end animals can ever hope to take them on in a stright on fight... and they're no more rewarding to kill then any other animal.
  • Dilophosaurus as well bordering on Boss in Mook Clothing. While not nearly as durable as a lion they are much faster, hit harder, and are utterly relentless in their attacks.
  • Thanks to them being Airborne Mooks, Pteranodon are difficult to run away from and even more difficult to kill, and a single hit from their attacks can easily one-shot smaller creatures. Even if you somehow managed to kill one, eating them only nets you 32 calories.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The robot dogs. One requires you to complete story mode and the other is DLC, but they're able to effortlessly stay alive for 100 years in Survival for the trophy that requires you to do so. They aren't very good at anything but surviving, however, so don't expect a normal experience with them.
  • The Tosa-only Mawashi (Dengeki) item, included in the free to download Street Wear Pack. Aside from providing decent stat boosts, it also makes smaller animals flee from you instead of attacking you, making it a great boon for survivability - and, unlike its base game cousin Mawashi (Yokozuna), it has infinite durability. Its only downsides, aside from being limited to the Tosa, are a slight reduction to hunger and an inability to wear a neck accessory with it on.
• Player Punch: During Act 3 (the Sika Deer's chapter), the deer and its sibling encounter a cheetah. You are then given a tutorial popup telling you that you should use your defensive ability. Said popup simply shows a picture of a Killer Rabbit sporting a Death Glare, so you might think that this defensive ability is going to be some totally badass maneuver that'll save you from that horrible cheetah, right? Your defensive ability is to abandon your sibling and let the cheetah have them while you make a getaway. It's either depressing or downright hilarious depending on your point of view.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Many people consider Toxicity to be this. There is a chance an area will become polluted, and if your animal is in the area when it happens, it adds an increasing Toxicity gauge which begins to lower the player's health when it reaches 100%, and also causes some animals and water pools to become toxic and add to the Gauge when consumed. There are ways to counteract it: It can be lowered by eating healthy animals, drinking healthy water, or using items, you can reset the gauge by mating or sleeping, and you also can escape by going underground, but it becomes more and more frequent the longer the game goes on, and isn't always surmountable. It comes across as a cheap way to screw over the player (especially a novice player, as more practiced players get better at managing it), and adds another needless element of luck for a successful run.
  • Herbivores. At least early on. You're usually too weak to kill anything, and it wouldn't help you survive even if you did, since you can only eat plants.
  • Most clothing items only lose durability when you're attacked, which generally isn't a problem as most of the time you'd want to avoid fights where you'd get hit many times anyway. Footwear, however, loses durability every time you attack, making avoiding durability loss much trickier, especially if you're playing as a carnivore as even Clean Kills count as attacking. Compounding this is that high-end footwear, while cheaper than other equipment, costs up to 72000 SP in the store, meaning that replacing broken ones can get very costly.
• That One Level:
  • Act 9 of the story mode. You're playing as a lion and have to defend your pride against some nomad lions and hyenas who want to take it over. What makes it frustrating is that you have to defend your lion cubs as well; if they all die, you automatically lose. The cubs will attack any enemy that gets near and won't get out of the way of enemy attacks. However, if you stray too far, you obviously leave everyone open for attack. It almost feels like the game is deciding whether you'll complete the mission at times.
  • Unlocking the lion in survival mode. The mission is a standard take over, but the area in question gets flooded with dozens upon dozens of lions each one more then a match for the tiger. Your best bet is having a full pack and simply ignoring the lions altogether, hoping to cap the points before they kill you.
  • Act 12 of the story mode. As a Tosa, you try to reclaim your territory from the hyenas. Every pack of hyenas on the map will attack you, and eventually you come up on a pack fighting an old, scarred lion, and both animals will attack you. You get to the boss, and he runs, leaving you to fight two mini-bosses. Defeat them, and you have to fight a sabertooth, which can spam it's powerful special attack if you fail to dodge it even once. Defeat it, and you finally get to face the boss...which is a overly powerful hyena, but if you don't beat him in one try, you have to fight the sabertooth again! This mission, while it still can be frustratingly difficult because of all the bosses, gets doable when you realize you can simply run past many of the hyenas and lions without fighting them, stop next to a carcass for food and let your health replenish when you've been damaged, find the hidden Pet Medicine on a balcony, and eat the sabertooth for the other hidden Pet Medicine.
  • Unlocking the cheetah in survival mode is very difficult because you have to do it with the hyena, and the cheetah has stronger attack power and is far faster than your hyena, so if you are seen by one you're pretty much screwed. The best solution that few players think about seems to be to sleep or mate to change it to night time, and hope you are stealthy enough to take over their territory without being seen.

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