Complaining: Difficulty Spike

This page is basically "levels of a game that some troper found difficult", with several of the examples being complaining about games/levels/bosses that somebody doesn't like.

First, why doesn't this have a YMMV tag? And second, how is this any different from That One Level (which does have a YMMV tag)?

The second question has an answer:

After a difficulty spike, the game doesn't really let up. That One Level is an instance where the difficulty goes back down. It may also be that That One Level is irritating, frustrating, or otherwise not entirely difficult. The way I see it, Difficulty Spike occurs whenever the game decides to suddenly get more difficult for more than a small amount of time. Breather Level might be the opposite of That One Level.

However, there does appear to be enough overlap for something to be done.

edited 30th May '12 3:58:21 PM by DarkConfidant

I don't think that works: a spike in a graph (e.g. of difficulty) is when the graph goes sharply up and then down again (such as here◊).

Looking over the examples, many of them are indeed a sudden high difficulty followed again by normal difficulty; and many others are of the last level in the game, in which case the difference is moot.

Difficulty really shouldn't be subjective. You don't get a lot of people saying, "Oh, I played Easy Mode and Hard Mode, and I thought Hard Mode was way easier." So it doesn't surprise or bother me that "The game's difficulty jumps significantly in a short span" is not marked as YMMV (and in fact I would be surprised if it were marked as YMMV).

Complaining is a potential issue, though, if there's a lot of it (I'm just taking your word for it here, since I haven't actually looked through the examples myself). Also, I notice the description says it only applies for the last level of the game, which doesn't really make sense, since difficulty spikes can occur in the middle of the game as well.

Then do we have a trope for 'Game starts off easy and jumps in difficulty partway through'?

I think that's Difficulty Spike.

I've always read this trope as when a game ups the difficulty significantly at once, and then stays at the upper level (the occasional Breather Level aside). Using it like that, it's a unique trope. If it's a single spike that goes down afterwards (like you'd possibly expect from the name), it's the difficulty version of That One Level.

While it's not a subjective trope at base, the definition of what a spike is might be, since almost all games get harder and harder further in.

edited 30th May '12 9:59:25 PM by Feather7603

For starters, I don't think you can call it a difficulty spike if you can start a game at easy, medium, and hard level, and it turns out that hard level is hard. That's not a spike, that's what hard level means.

The part about this applying only to a last level is definitely wrong.

Both of that is easy to clean up; after that we need to decide if the difficulty is supposed to go down after the 'spike', or stay at that level (or stay at that level except when it doesn't, but I'm afraid that's rather arbitrary).

I think I've heard people use it for both - it's still a spike whether or not it goes back down. But maybe the term decayed before it even got to tvtropes.

I think the term Difficulty Spike applies to the jump in difficulty. I'm not sure it needs to say anything about what comes after the jump. If we had separate tropes for Difficulty Spike That Stays Difficult and Difficulty Spike That Goes Back To Easy, they would both be subtropes of "Difficulty Spike", right? So Difficulty Spike should probably be covering both.

edited 1st Jun '12 3:07:44 PM by troacctid

Because difficulty spike isn't an opinion, it is a game design trope as much as the Sorting Algorithm of Evil is a narrative trope. You generally don't throw the hardest challenges at the player at the start of the game(unless you're Kid Icarus or Zelda2)

There is only one death pit and hardly anything is more dangerous than The Goomba in the first level of Super Mario Bros. Then the first fortress cranks up the lava, gives you Invincible Minor Minions and Boss Battles.

Whether or not the difficulty spikes too much, or not enough, is enjoyable or aggravating, those are opinions and we don't care about opinions, we're just documenting the tricks and trades of writing fiction. Tropes Are Tools, they get used or they don't.

Now, difficult spikes aren't writing tropes, maybe we shouldn't be documenting them at all. But Jump Physics, Real Is Brown, Arbitrary Gun Power, Button Mashing, Waggle, Disk One Nuke, and Save-Game Limits are not writing tropes either. At some point or another, TV Tropes decided it was going to start making pages about video game design.

Whether or not you like Check Point Starvations they happen, they can be an easy way to set up a Drought Level of Doom. Whether or not you like drought levels of doom is irrelevant, they get made all the time. If the level before the drought level had plenty of resources the player could use, then you're looking at a difficulty spike! Whether or not this is a good or bad thing to the players doesn't matter.

That One Level is about levels widely hated by a game's fandom the way The Scrappy is about characters widely hated by fandoms. One is to design, the other is to a narrative level and neither is a tool used by creators. Pure opinion and should probably be deleted, seeing how some people are apparently mistaking actual game design, with fan whining. There is no trick to making one, it could be as easy as blinking but boring, and it could be boring in any number of ways. The hardest level they set out to make might become a favorite for any number of reasons not easily predictable fans come up with.

Maybe difficulty spike really belongs on the trivia tab? I don't know but all the other non narrative game design "tropes" probably belong there too, like Welcome to Corneria and Giant Space Flea from Nowhere. I supposed work pages for games that aren't filled with cutscenes, collectible Story Breadcrumbs, Announcer Chatter, a radio or have something All There in the Manual will just have really short main pages and really long trivia tabs.

edited 12th Jun '12 9:52:38 AM by Cider

Gameplay are tropes, not trivia. Difficulty Spike has an effect on gameplay and it's visible in the game, so it's a trope.

Okay. How exactly is Difficulty Spike And The Difficulty Goes Down Afterwards different from That One Level?

That One Level is an opinion about a level's hardness. Difficulty Spike is more like Nintendo Hard, i.e objective.

That One Level = Scrappy Level

It is beyond saving

Speaking from a point of experience, Difficulty Spike is just as subjective as all of our other tropes about how difficult something might be, like That One Boss or That One Level.

There are times when it is perfectly plain to see that the difficulty has ramped up. But then you have other times where the opinion that the difficulty has spiked is purely due to an individual's play style and how they process information. I've breezed through some of the examples (I know nobody will believe me, but I didn't think level 3 of Battletoads was all that difficult... for a less controversial example, I found the Marth parts of The Subspace Emissary Super Smash Bros Brawl to be easy by abusing Marth's Counter). And I'm sure I have examples that others would find easy.

In short, sometimes there will be general agreement on it, but not always.

Also, the page is a bit spotty. A few cases are the Final Boss - wait, the final boss is supposed to be a jump in difficulty. Others are a jump to a different difficulty level... again, that's supposed to be a jump. I feel like those examples should be excised.

If it's being used for complaining, then that's a problem, and one potential solution is marking it as subjective. Another potential solution is to try and clean it up and excise any bitching. Of course, it will need cleaning up no matter what we do, since it has natter issues.

edited 12th Jun '12 10:53:04 AM by troacctid

I don't see how Nintendo Hard can be considered objective. It's one of the most common tropes on the wiki, and appears on pretty much any game that some troper had problems with - even if it's a casual game that can be completed in 15 minutes.

It's just impossible to objectively define "difficulty".

I think a good example of what I always understood Difficulty Spike to be is in Dragons Dogma. The game is relatively monster-free during the daytime, with the few large monsters usually visible from a long way off. At night, however, you can't see anything beyond your lantern's light, and whole different (and sometimes meaner) monsters come out to play.

The game also jumps in difficulty again after you complete the main quest, but I'm not sure it's this trope.

Exactly how difficult is the opinion. The fact that it spikes is not. Just like the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, games tend to get tougher as they go on. Puzzles get more complex, or perhaps there were none at all during the start. Enemies and taps require faster finger twitches/wrist flicks to keep up with. Platforms start getting further apart, pits become more common, One Ups become more scarce.

Golden Sun is hardly a hard game. But at the start, every enemy encountered can be killed with a single flare. Then you put get to the ship and the entire, hopefully much leveled up party, needs to use multiple turns worth of much stronger enemies to beat the boss(when the first boss could go down in one turn). You actually have to use your defensive buffs, healing powers or enemy nerfs if you don't want to see your party get wiped. Its still not hard, but its not as simple as before, its is possible to lose so there is your difficulty spike. Whether it is "enough" of a spike is an opinion an irrelevant opinion.

But there has already been a Wall of Text addressing it and no ones really going about how to refute it. To that we've had to repair shop threads on Nintendo hard. If you want to refute maybe you should start a third but if that's all you got don't expect it to go any better. Banner changes are for Wiki talk anyway.

So we're back to the fact that both Difficulty Spike (And The Difficulty Goes Down Afterwards) and That One Level are opinions about an arbitrary level that some troper had problems with.

Regardless of what some people think it should be, that's how it is being used in practice.

The description, if a bit whiny and apologetic, doesn't insist this is just about complaints, just a jump in difficulty, noting that with objectively harder content ahead might actually be easier for the player just because they're used to the difficulty spike than when they first hit it.

(To use its own examples, Battle Toads level three makes you dodge 13 obstacles every five seconds or so, later level six bumps it up to 15 which is harder but by then everything has been twitch or die so everyone is used to it.)

The only real problem I'm seeing with the description is that it lists That One Boss as a trope, even though it is not by the way the website defines trope. I'd change the description(the crap about wanting to throw controllers? Are you older than 10?) and maybe head to special efforts for a cleanup at most.

Difficulty Spike is no less of a trope than Difficulty Level and to prove my point...

• Ace Attorney Investigations Miles Edgeworth: Sudden jumps in difficulty
• Improbable Power Discrepancy: Context unclear
• Heretic: One case seems correct, though may be mistaken with or overlap with Brutal Bonus Level, the other case has no problems.
• Action: Ironically uses it correctly. He's the climax boss of the game, he's supposed to be harder than everything else and he is. What a surprise!
• A Game of Gods: Mooks made to be more difficult as well as an increased chance of dying(correct)
• A Game With A Kitty: Correct, game just starts getting harder after a certain point.
• Air Fortress: Larger, more maze like level after several more straight forward ones.
• Video Game/Alundra2: Gets tougher after a certain point.
• An SMWC Production: Seems correct, the sequel promises a more subdued difficulty curve.
• Armed With Wings: Possibly incorrect, the trope it is being confused with is Difficulty Level if it is, not That One Boss, That One Level or any subjective scrappy pages. Just that hard mode is harder than normal mode, whodathunk?
• Driver: Final level is harder than those before it, possible to get totaled even with the invincibility powerup(correct).
• Dynamite Headdy: Possible case. One is an Unexpected Gameplay Change and thus probably a case of missuse(but not in relation to any scrappy pages). The second case is correct though.
• Doom: Asshole game mod that jacked up a bosses's hit points and threw in a bunch of custom made monsters more powerful than the normal game's as the levels went on(correct, but could be written a little less sensationally)
• Eagle Eye Mysteries:One extreme sequence of them, another mild sequence of them. Both correct.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: No context given.
• Tower of God: Correct
• Theme Hospital: Correct
• Eragon: Correct, gets more difficult at a certain area
• Eternal Eyes: Correct
• Harder Than Hard: One case is correct, the other my overlap or be mistaken for Dynamic Difficulty
• Golden Snitch: Correct
• Forced Level-Grinding: Correct, given that it is a page about a type of difficulty spike it would be hard to get it wrong.
• Waterburned:Correct
• Harvest Moon Frantic Farming: Seems right but should have more context.
• Henry Hatsworth In The Puzzling Adventure: Correct

So five percent of the wiks are complaints and none of them overlap with any scrappy pages.

edited 13th Jun '12 7:49:22 AM by Cider

Clocking due to lack of activity.

Locking.