Misused: Easy Mode Mockery

The actual trope: A game radically changes on easy mode, either by cutting substantial parts out or actually making fun of the player in-game.

Common misuses:

• The easy difficulty names have mocking names like "I'm too young to die" (the description says these belong on Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels)
• This game has an easy mode
• Easy mode is easy

I'm posting this here because (1) is common enough and understandable enough that it might merit a redefinition. It's even possible that "game makes fun of you for picking easy mode" and "game witholds stuff on easy mode" should be two different things, with the latter possibly being foldable into Hard Mode Perks as "Harder Game Equals More Game" or something.

The other two are probably the sort of thing that will have to be periodically deleted as long as there are people who will post anything that vaguely resembles the page title.

I haven't gone trawling the wiki at large. Instead I just picked through everything up to "First Person Shooters" (or around one-third of the page) and here are the specific examples I already have:

Properly Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels, or otherwise makes fun of you for picking Easy but doesn't technically fit the trope:

While these don't fit as currently defined, it seems to me that this indicates a problem with the definition.

• In Lollipop Chainsaw, the image for the easiest difficulty setting is... a chicken.
• If you select Easy on God Hand, Gene will mock you by saying, "What, you want me to hold your hand?" In the game itself, Easy mode restricts the in-game difficulty meter to the two lowest levels, so players will only earn low rewards on the enemies they kill.
• Also [in some Mortal Kombat game], selecting tournament difficulty would have Shao Khan laughing evilly. Selecting the easiest/shortest tournament would have him say "You make me laugh" in a condescending tone.
• There is a Game Boy Color Shrek game called Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown, in which selecting the difficulty uses Donkey's head as a cursor. If you select easy mode, he will stick his tongue out at you and even on medium, he will not look impressed.
• In a related phenomenon, the tutorial for the easier control scheme in BlazBlue: Continuum Shift EXTEND is less the usual tutorial interspersed with insults from Rachel, and more insults from Rachel interspersed with a tutorial.
• Wolfenstein 3-D and its sequel showed the protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz's face next to the difficulty selector, with increasingly fierce expressions as the difficulties got harder. The easiest mode, "Can I play, Daddy?", shows him wearing a baby's bonnet and sucking a pacifier.
  • The second easiest mode isn't much kinder: "Please don't hurt me." It shows him looking scared.
  • This mocking naming of difficulty levels would continue through the Doom series ("I'm Too Young To Die" and "Hey, Not Too Rough") and Heretic ("Thou Needest a Wet Nurse" and "Yellowbellies-R-Us").
  • The PS 1 version of Doom just states it outright. 'I'm Too Young to Die' is now named 'I am a Wimp'.
• Mortal Kombat 3's difficulty selection on the PC included "Wuss" in place of the easy option.
• Rise Of The Triad insults you for the two lowest difficulty settings. One of the possible names for the lowest one is "I am a chew toy" with a picture of a doll in a dog's mouth, while the second-lowest is "Will of iron, knees of jello," with a picture depicting a dollop of smelted iron on a cube of jello.

Easy Mode Exists:

• The Onimusha series also offered Easy Mode after three deaths.

Easy Mode is Different From Other Game Modes:

• Spider Man on the Playstation has a Kid Mode (or the "Easy mode that's so easy it's no fun" mode). The Official New Zealand Playstation Magazine issue #40 page 102 gives this lovely gem:

—>Fight like a Baby — Kid Mode is a quick way to ruin the game. Avoid it. It bypasses several of the puzzles and trickier bits and it will even complete parts of the game for you.
Honest to god in the beginning of the game when you foil a bank robbery, the bank robbers set a bomb. After you take them out you have to solve the problem of how to keep the bomb from destroying the bank. On Easy, Spider-Man says "I need to put this bomb in a safe place". He really emphasized "safe". Guess where you're supposed to put the bomb.

• In Orcs Must Die, if you decide to play on the easiest difficulty, you will only be able to earn two skulls, the thing you use to upgrade your traps, for finishing a level, instead of a maximum of five on the harder difficulties.
• Some Lucas Arts adventure games such as the Monkey Island series offered a Lite mode which had fewer puzzles and shorter length. It's really not worth playing these no matter how bad you are at adventure games because you aren't getting the full experience: in this case, playing the Easy mode is its own punishment.
  • Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge labeled the two modes and gave each a subtitle; Easy mode was "I've never played an adventure game before, I'm scared", and if you chose this mode, most of the puzzles were solved for you, making for a very unsatisfying experience (In addition, the Lite mode was advertised on the back of the game box as being geared towards video game reviewers). The Curse of Monkey Island, by contrast, had regular (Being a Swashbuckling Pirate Adventure) and Mega Monkey (Being a Swashbuckling Pirate Adventure, But with More Puzzles) modes. Regular was a complete and satisfying game experience; Mega Monkey added puzzles to the normal mode for people looking for a greater challenge.
• In Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 console games and Trilogy, your reward for winning was determined by your level.

Other Questionable Things Many of Which I've Already Deleted:

Not a game mode

• King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow has two possible routes to the endgame, a long one and a short one. Taking the short one locks you out of several sidequests and has a much more bittersweet denouement. Cassima even wistfully laments all the things Alexander didn't do because he took the short path.

Properly No Fair Cheating:

• The NES Battle Toads, if you actually managed to beat it, would call you out for taking the easy way out if you used the level select cheat.

—> Dark Queen: We might be evil, but at least we don't cheat!

Not a game mode:

• In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Stairway to the Destined Duel, if you lose 5 times in a row, you unlock Mokuba as a duelist, and he's laughably easy. Note that your starter deck is usually pretty bad, so unless you buy the real life cards or look the codes up on the internet and enter them, you will lose. A lot.
  • Which was probably the point.

Easy Mode is Secretly Hard Mode?

• The number of laps on a race in Fatal Racing is difficulty dependent. Girlie mode has this below 5 laps for all of the first two cups. Two problems come from this: first, the AI is NOT restricted by the acceleration and braking stats of the car they drive (which means the slowest car can pass you from 16th place on the first lap), and second, the 8th course of the first two cups is nigh-unwinnable on Girlie mode, and most of the other tracks are difficult to get decent placement on, requiring a near-perfect performance on all 8 tracks in championship mode to win. The final slap in the face? The third cup is only unlockable on Impossible or DEATH difficulties - by clearing BOTH cups before it on that difficulty!

Somehow an example about Easy Mode not existing:

• Payday The Heist: You can only select easy mode on the first two levels.

edited 13th Feb '14 9:13:11 PM by ChadM

I'm seeing two possible issues here:

1. Easy-Mode Mockery, despite the name, doesn't actually cover all forms of the game mocking you for playing Easy Mode.

2. There's no opposite trope (that I know of) for Hard Mode Perks.

Regarding the second point, the reason I bring it up is that while you can look at the gameplay changes from the "rewards" point of view, sometimes it's not really "Hard Mode Perks" so much as it is "Normal Mode Perks" (that is, you lose something for playing on Easy Mode, but the standard difficulty and the ones above it are more or less the same in that aspect). In these cases, it's more a "non-penalty" than an actual perk.

I would suggest changing the definition of Easy-Mode Mockery to include all forms of mockery, regardless of whether or not they affect gameplay (including Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels) and making a separate Easy Mode Penalties trope as a counterpart to Hard Mode Perks to cover the gameplay side.

edited 13th Feb '14 11:08:27 PM by MrL1193

I don't see why Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels wouldn't count. I think whoever wrote the description wasn't sure of their exact relationship or how much they overlap, and just went with the generic "related to" instead.

Hard Mode Perks doesn't need an easy counterpart; Tropes Are Flexible. Mark it as inverted and you're good to go.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Hard Mode Perks isn't specifically about "Hard Mode". It's about harder modes. So if Normal offers more than Easy, it's still the trope. Whether it's called "Hard" or "Normal" doesn't really matter, as one game's Hard Mode may easily be easier than another game's Normal Mode. Or even Easy Mode.

Easy-Mode Mockery should (in my opinion) be about the game discouraging you from playing a low difficulty through mockery. If that means you get less gameplay, it's also Hard Mode Perks. If it's just a locked true final level, with no mocking about it, it's not Easy-Mode Mockery.

I don't see a problem with overlapping those two, or with Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels. An easy mode called "Wuss" would be both.

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"Hard Mode Perks doesn't need an easy counterpart; Tropes Are Flexible. Mark it as inverted and you're good to go. "

That's not an inversion. An inversion would be if there are bonuses or unlockables that you can only get by playing in Easy Mode at least once, which I'm sure actually happens sometimes even if I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.

I'm willing to agree that the actual names of the difficulties aren't the key thing about the trope, but the name and definition of Hard Mode Perks leads me to believe that it's about actual rewards, not simply avoiding punishment. I find it hard to consider a change a "perk" or "bonus" when it simply amounts to "Your score doesn't get cut in half" or "Your game doesn't get cut short before you reach the final stage."

Also, Chad M summed up what I was thinking about inversions of Hard Mode Perks.

edited 14th Feb '14 11:49:50 AM by MrL1193

Getting twice the score or a longer game certainly seems like perks to me.

edited 14th Feb '14 2:14:06 PM by AnotherDuck

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The game can specifically present the differences in the opposite light, though, and since most games don't use Easy Mode as their baseline, they usually will. The negative connotations are especially pronounced when Easy Mode is the only difficulty that's different in some aspect or the game gets cut short with no story ending whatsoever on Easy Mode.

Well, as others have stated, Tropes Are Flexible is still a thing. I believe it applies here.

Whether this trope applies would to me depend on if the game says, "You don't get to play the last level because you played on easy," or, "You don't get to play the last level because you're a wuss who plays on easy."

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"Whether this trope applies would to me depend on if the game says, 'You don't get to play the last level because you played on easy,' or, 'You don't get to play the last level because you're a wuss who plays on easy.'"

And therein lies the problem; people are mistakenly placing the former type of example under Easy-Mode Mockery because it's natural to reach for some trope about Easy Mode rather than Hard Mode, and Easy-Mode Mockery is the only such trope at the moment. Hard Mode Perks is not a very intuitive receptacle for such examples, since it requires one to reverse the game's perspective on the differences. I just think that if we made a separate trope for Easy Mode Penalties, it would do more to prevent future Easy-Mode Mockery misuse.

edited 14th Feb '14 4:58:47 PM by MrL1193

It may be that we're looking at a Missing Supertrope to Hard Mode Perks. I agree that the idea in question and Hard Mode Perks could be the same trope; I just think Hard Mode Perks is a bad name for whatever that trope is.

edited 14th Feb '14 6:29:33 PM by ChadM

Actually looking back at the definition of Hard Mode Perks it actually is something distinctly different from giving extra levels or whatnot. Hard Mode Perks is about the game giving you a mechanical bonus for picking hard mode; that is, it counterbalances the harder difficulty by helping you out. Something like "giving an extra just for fun bonus level or extended ending for picking hard mode" actually doesn't fit Hard Mode Perks as currently defined.

No, that just means that it gives you better rewards, and sometimes those rewards end up making the game easier as a side effect—e.g. if beating hard mode gets you an extra-powerful sword, suddenly you have a superweapon to help you in the next mission. The laconic is correct here.

Dollars to donuts whoever wrote that description had a specific example in mind.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

The intent reads crystal clear to me:

"Some video games may reward their players for choosing harder difficulties. However, merely getting Cosmetic Awards may often seem unfair, so gamers may receive some actually gameplay-affecting bonuses to keep up with the challenge."

Whether it was intentional or changed after the fact, I think the examples we're talking about moving fit just as badly with the things currently under Hard Mode Perks as they fit under Easy-Mode Mockery now. Consider:

• The player chooses Easy, so the game makes fun of them
• The player chooses Hard, so the game gives XP bonuses or extra weapons as a difficulty balancing mechanic

I'm not convinced that:

• The player chooses Easy, so they can't get the best ending

fits with either of those. I mean, the whole reason Easy-Mode Mockery got to its current state is that people assumed "bad stuff happens because you picked Easy" was all one trope. The more I think about it I don't think "good stuff happens because you picked Hard/didn't pick Easy" is all one trope either.

To be concrete about it, here's an example that I think could easily fit Hard Mode Perks, possibly after rewriting that page description:

• In Planescape: Torment, choosing Easy mode gives an XP penalty.

Here's one I think wouldn't without redefining the trope, probably to its detriment:

• In Double Dragon II, the True Final Boss only appears on the hardest difficulty. The other difficulties end prematurely with a narrated ending instead.

I wonder where Touhou would fit here, since at least two games have bosses where one of their attack patterns will be intentionally much harder than they "should" be when playing on Easy. One of these is actually the final boss of her game (and beating her on Easy always gives you the bad ending, no matter what) while the other has "surprises" as her theme. These don't quite seem to fit the trope as currently defined, but I'm not sure where else they go.

To me that sounds like it already fits Hard Mode Perks; in fact, from a certain point of view, it's really "harder modes have easier patterns to make up for being harder in general".

By that interpretation, every instance of Non-Indicative Difficulty would fall under Hard Mode Perks. Is that really what the trope is about? I thought that it was meant to pertain to intentional rewards given out on higher difficulties, not instances of poor (or trollish) difficulty balancing.

Also, the more I look at it, the less I like the name "Hard Mode Perks." If the trope is really supposed to cover any instance of getting better or worse rewards according to difficulty, there's no reason it has to name Hard Mode in particular and apply those connotations. As it is, the name makes it look like a counterpart to Easy-Mode Mockery (since there aren't any other "Easy Mode" or "Hard Mode" tropes out there that I know of), which is probably why Easy-Mode Mockery is being misused.

edited 18th Feb '14 11:09:24 PM by MrL1193

"By that interpretation, every instance of Non-Indicative Difficulty would fall under Hard Mode Perks"

It's only Non-Indicative Difficulty if taken to the extreme that a mode is harder or easier than it should logically be compared to other modes. Playing Planescape Torment or the early Fallout games on Easy penalizes your XP, but it doesn't make the overall game harder.

I don't think either Hard Mode Perks or Non-Indicative Difficulty are appropriate for when an otherwise fairly-balanced difficulty level starts acting like a much harder difficulty for a short period, especially when the fandom generally agrees that the creator is being a troll.

When it comes to Touhou it's also frequently said that ZUN (the creator) is rather bad at balancing the easy difficulty due to being so experienced with the genre himself, and out of touch with newbies. It sort of fits on Non-Indicative Difficulty, but it still depends on the strengths of the player (better at micrododging or speed dodging?)

edited 19th Feb '14 10:16:08 PM by AnotherDuck

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That sounds more like Schizophrenic Difficulty than rewarding or penalizing the player for selected difficulty.

Clock is set.

@Chad M: "The player chooses Easy, so they can't get the best ending" does overlap with "the player chooses Easy, so the game makes fun of them" in cases where the Easy ending makes fun of the difficulty selection.

Re-clocking; this is going away if something doesn't come of it.