Archived Discussion Main / FakeDifficulty

"Looks like a fish. Moves like a fish. Steers like a cow."

—Ford Prefect, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Most gamers have a notion that there is a difference between "real" challenge in a game and "stuff they just threw in to make the game harder". What constitutes "Fake Difficulty" is, of course, highly subjective, but while we can't agree on the details, just about everyone agrees it exists.

Real Difficulty should evolve organically from the nature of the game's story or premise. When this doesn't prove challenging enough, the game is "too easy". Developers try to "fix" this by, well, pulling dirty tricks.

Real Difficulty works on an in-universe basis. The Final Boss is Real Difficulty because he's the biggest, baddest, nastiest critter in the whole game. Fake Difficulty tends to be an aspect of the interface or game design. If a simple action is complicated because it is the nature of the game's universe, it's real difficulty; if it's not part of the game's universe, but it's still complicated, it's fake difficulty. In other words: Real Difficulty is a Dostoevsky. Fake Difficultly is "Dick and Jane"... in Klingon.

Compare Nintendo Hard, Surprise Difficulty, Luck-Based Mission. Escort Mission usually is a form of this.

Contrast Guide Dang It!, Revive Kills Zombie, when the situation is tough until you figure out the key to making it easy (like how in the picture, the boss goes down fast with the fire wand. Alternatively, certain items like the magic cape or the staff of Bryna can help avoid damage from the boss's attacks and spikes).

When you make your own Fake Difficulty, it's a Self-Imposed Challenge.

Generic Examples

Some generic examples may help convey the concept.

(Note #1: The following list of examples is as subjective as the definition of 'fake difficulty'; many items listed herein could be considered a side-effect of shoddy programming, bad graphic design, or simply "real challenge" to someone else.)

(Note #2: These generic examples. They give subtropes of the larger Fake Difficulty trope, not how they manifest in specific games. See the "Specific Examples" section further down for case studies.)

• Making the UI/controls inconsistent/unresponsive for no good reason
• Making key objects indistinguishable from the background
• Making the AI significantly more competent when the player is winning
• Inexplicably exempting the enemy from rules the player must follow
• Arbitrary time-limits with flimsy (or no) justification
• Denying players vital knowledge that their player character should have
• Severely punishing any mistake the player makes
• Disguising safe progress as instant death
• Disguising instant death as safe progress
• Disguising dangerous items as beneficial items
• Arbitrarily disallowing the player from collecting items from fallen enemies
• Randomly disallowing the player from collecting ''vital'' items from fallen enemies
• Arbitrary restrictions on save games
• Arbitrary limits on the stuff you can carry
• An "Easy" Difficultly Mode which makes the game harder
• Giving the player hopelessly obscure challenges
• Saddling the Player Character with a sidekick controlled by comically poor AI
• Punishing players for gaining levels by giving the opposition more power than the player gained.
• Positioning the camera to make it hard to see what's going on
  • In the middle of a precision maneuver, this becomes an Interface Screw as well
• Losing all weapons the player has acquired.
  • Better instances let you reclaim your inventory somehow. With worse ones, you have to gather everything from scratch.
  • This troper personally doesn't believe that Warring Without Weapons is fake difficulty, unless no good reason is given for having your weapons taken. Breaking out of a prison with nothing but an iron bar is a real challenge for a soldier.
• Randomly changing the Edge Gravity
• Dropping several Invincible Minor Minions into what would otherwise be a simple challenge
• Pitting the player against endless waves of enemies with no way of stopping them
• Making things depend so much on luck, you might as well just flip a coin
• When a puzzle segment breaks the fourth wall and requires some sort of real-world object or documentation
  • Making a puzzle segment dependent on a clue found much earlier in the game with no way short of Save Scumming to look at it again
• Requiring the player to repeat an action multiple times, while providing absolutely no indication that repeated attempts will yield (different) results
• Making the AI inclined to attack the player over any mutual enemy, even if it is downright suicidal for the AI
• Unexpected Genre Change — Throwing a puzzle into an all-action game, or vice versa.
  • Even worse if the puzzle-segment is ostentatiously obtuse.
• Enemies which hover on top of the player during Mercy Invincibility, so the player takes damage repeatedly
• Giving an enemy invulnerability to all but one type of player attack, and the ability to randomize that weakness during battle, but only when giving no indication that it has been so randomized, or in games that offer no ability to tell an enemy's weakness.
• Making the game physics/logic inaccurate, "muddying up the controls"
• Presenting a variety of beginning-of-the-game choices (especially character classes) as equal in power — even when they're not.
• Limiting the directions in which your character can attack and then placing enemies where they cannot be hit (Example: Right above you or on the floor below your hit zone).
• Game Breaking Bugs which require infuriatingly specific workarounds to prevent Unwinnable scenarios
• Allowing health, ammo, and other important items to be destroyed by a stray shot

Specific Examples

• In the little-known SNES action RPG Brain Lord, there are three rooms in the final dungeon that fall into this territory. They're mazes... but the walls are invisible. The first isn't so bad as it's rather small, but the the last two take up half a floor of the dungeon each- in these rooms, all you can see are yourself, the monsters, and the exits from the room. The only way you can get even a general sense of where you are in these two huge rooms is to bring up the map screen (which naturally doesn't show the invisible walls either.)
• In Castlevania X, you encounter pikemen whom you cannot whip because they are positioned above/below you and you can only whip left or right. They, however have their own unique attack designed specifically to exploit these limitations, forcing you to ignore them while they poke at you with their pikes.
• In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, if the partner dies, you die. You need to spend around 32000P on colour-coded gummis to increase the IQ of your partner, whereas giving them to the hero grants special abilities.
• Silent Hill 2. On harder "action levels", the player character, James Sunderland, became a lot more clumsy, and would run into walls and be utterly debilitated by falling off a ledge less than a foot high. Notably, a level which required you to row a boat blind in fog is no longer controlled with basic up-down-left-right controls, instead requiring constant and tricky rotations of the analog sticks.
  • In Silent Hill 3 the situation is similar. You can even die by falling into bottomless pits (on normal difficulty Heather always backs away the edge).
• In a similar vein, Clock Tower 3 is a shining example of what happens when adventure game writers try their hand at action. Though combat is only possible at the end of each level, the player is saddled with a clumsy, slow-moving action girl, who stumbles and falls down, who can not change her aim while charging a shot, and who will not respond to a pressed button unless the player first releases all the controls. In fact, if you try to, say, duck while running, she will simply grind to a halt and refuse to do either. Given that every time she is attacked, she is knocked to the ground and incapacitated long enough to allow her attacker at least one additional blow, the fact that they don't simply make everything a one-hit-kill seems almost cruel.
• Weird apocalyptic RTS Krush Kill and Destroy had a clear advantage for one entire race. In single player campaigns this made the levels more challenging, of course. But they were not toned down for multiplayer, making it nigh-impossible for a Great or better player to beat a Good player or casual Great.
• City Of Heroes: Often, you'll see several members of one bad guy faction menacing one or two members of another faction. If you interrupt them by attacking, both factions will gang up on you. This may be more true to life than one would intuitively imagine.
  • Also in City Of Heroes, or rather Villains, ambush groups somehow know where a hidden Stalker is, no matter where he runs or how many times he placates them. Since the whole combat style of a Stalker involves using Hide to become invisible to enemies, enemies who arbitrarily see through it when they shouldn't be able to are a pain.
  • The current version of the Hamidon raid probably counts. As currently set up, Hamidon sits in the middle of a cloud of eighteen Mitochondria, which need to be attacked in a specific, coordinated pattern by 40-50 players. That's fine. The problem is that, if you do it right, you can get through the Mitos in less than ten minutes, leaving just Hamidon to kill, and he's not particularly complicated when alone. So, to prolong the raid, he will RESPAWN his Mitochondria at 75%, 50%, and 25% HP. To win the raid, you have to fight the exact same fight four times in a row.
    • Hamidon has since been changed from a public area raid to a private area instance. This, naturally, means that there are fewer players available to fight him, but also that the battle is significantly less cheap, and there are no worries about dreaded Yellow Dawns (when a majority of the respawning mitochondria were yellow, it was pretty much a raid-wipe luck-based-event).
• In the WWE Day of Reckoning series, all the opponents in 3-way and 4-way matches tend to gang up on your character, even though they are supposed to be fighting each other as well. Particularly egregious in one particular Story Mode match in the original Day of Reckoning, where either John Cena or Shawn Michaels (depending on which story mode you're playing through) approaches you and offers to "have your back" in the coming match. Naturally, the first thing he does in the match is to come after you... and yet, when he turns on you in the following cutscene, it's supposed to be shocking.
  • Day of Reckoning 2 does nothing to fix the above problem, and actually includes a new "stamina" system that will leave your wrestler totally helpless for a good 30 seconds if they run too much or use too many moves in succession. Oh yeah, guess who it doesn't affect...
    • This Troper remembers Day of Reckoning 2 also changing tag team matches to where you always control the person in the ring - a pain in the rear for someone who liked to ensure his AI partner got the win by preventing the illegal opponent from breaking up a pin.
• The original Prince Of Persia had a unique and annoying example in its poison potions. Located at various points in the game, these looked almost exactly like the regular potions (they had blue bubbles instead of red — a detail that could be difficult to make out in the console versions if you had a small TV, and easy to miss in general) but hurt you instead of restoring or increasing health. They served no apparent purpose except making the already hard game even harder in a painfully artificial way.
  • The SNES version had instant death potions, as well as innocent looking sparkly things that instantly vaporized you if you touched them.
• Metal Gear Acid was already complicated enough without the gameplay rules being drip-fed to you over the course of the game (and you only received each rule by the time you had probably figured it out yourself anyway). This, combined with the needlessly complex, roundabout way the characters explained it all, meant many people found the game too confusing to play, and sold it back to the shop. Thankfully, the sequel rectified this by providing a very neat and concise in-game manual that could be accessed at any time, as well as a much simpler "go-here-do-this"-type tutorial level — although even that suffered, as it took place on a psychedelic background which made it hard to see your character or work out where you were supposed to be going, which scared off yet more gamers.
• Available for 8-bit and 16-bit computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga 500, Rick Dangerous is a classic example of Fake Difficulty. Effectively a pastiche of Indiana Jones, Rick could be felled by spike traps (that looked identical to ordinary floor tiles), falling boulders (released without warning) and any number of other dangerous items.
• The Dizzy games for the 8-bit computers often featured sections where players would have to pick up and move items to locate gems and fruit hidden behind them. Sadly the items were disguised as ordinary background sprites, making it impossible to complete the game without a magazine guide or hint book.
• In Deep Space Nine Third-Person Shooter The Fallen, it is bizarrely difficult to climb down a ladder. Instead of the common videogame convention of immediately grabbing on when you approach the top of a ladder, the only apparent way to get on a ladder from the top is to back off the ledge and hold down the forward button in the hopes of catching hold. Naturally most ladders are of sufficient height that failing to catch on means death or very near to it.
  • Return to Castle Wolfenstein had a similar problem, made easier on some ladders by the presence of cages. They lampshaded it with a memo about how cages reduced ladder deaths drastically, but they COULD have just put cages on all ladders.
• Several commentators have noted how Resident Evil 4 is made easier on the Wii due to the Point-and-Shoot interface being more intuitive than controller-based.
  • However, the quick time events become harder, turning "Press X to Not Die" into "waggle the controller furiously to not die."
• Testers of Hitman: Codename 47 complained that the game was too short, many of them completing it in under four hours. The solution? Remove all ability to save mid-mission. It took longer, all right...thanks to endless repetition.
• Doom 3 allowed the player to hold either a flashlight or a weapon in its extremely dark environments, but not both at the same time. As a result, the player is forever spotting targets with the flashlight, only to switch to a gun and fire blindly, for purposes of "atmosphere". (Perhaps the hero has only one hand?) The extremely popular "duct tape" mod allowed the player to use both at once, as in every other FPS in existence.
  • Doom 3 also dropped players in Hell towards the end of the game and removed all previously acquired weapons.
• Interesting case in the original Metal Gear Solid - Solid Snake is unable to fire from first-person view and is thus awkward in any fight. Sequels added this ability while cranking up the difficulty of the rest of the game's world, but the Gamecube remake gave Snake this ability and, at least according to one reviewer, created a Game-Breaker.
  • In order to stop it being a complete Game-Breaker, if you use your first-person perspective while fighting Psycho Mantis, it allows him to reassert his mindreading and you have to change controller slots again.
• Shining Force 2 had Taros, a large suit of armor guarding a story-important vehicle. He could only be damaged by one character, the hero, because his only weakness is a sword that only the hero can wield.
  • What's more, that detail can make the game Unwinnable, since it's possible to throw the sword in question away and never be able to get it back.
  • In the interest of fairness, the Shining Force games did allow you to recover rare or unique items that were sold or discarded, and this includes the Achilles Sword. If you were to go to any store and ask for "Deals" the shopkeeper would give you a list of all these items, so if you accidentally threw away the Achilles Sword, you could buy it back for 1350 GP. For items that were absolutely essential to finishing the game, such as the Chaos Breaker, the game flat out refused to allow you to sell or discard them, giving you a message, "No! Keep it!" if you tried.
• The first level of Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures isn't too tricky, but the difficulty suddenly spikes in the most unfair way possible. It is the iconic boulder-chase scene, but instead of doing what most chase scenes in video games do and give you room to breathe or visual cues for obstacles, this game gives you no such luxury; 3/4s of the screen is taken up by the huge Mode7 boulder, leaving a very meager section of the screen that is often just enough for Indy to fit in. Traps spring up along the way with very little warning and even littler time to react, and just one knocking you in the right (or rather wrong) direction leads to instant death against the giant boulder. Why did they think this was fair or challenging to make it the only way to complete a level is to have the reflexes of a cat or to completely memorize where the hazards are (a feat in itself)?
• Advance Wars: Dual Strike on the Nintendo DS borderline forces the player to use particular commanding officers or Forces (commanding officer boosters) on various maps in the single player modes. One example of this is the War Room map Megapolis, where the AI has very high income to the point of being able to make many strong units, all made even stronger by the computer's officer; the only way to shake off the stronger units is to have an officer with defense boosts him/herself. However, if a certain officer is used, the map becomes absurdly easy.
• Another example in a handheld: Golden Sun gave only two of the enemies (the Final Boss and the Bonus Boss) a party-wrecking, unblockable spell: Djinn Storm. Such spell can incapacitate the entire party's Djinns at once, thus making the heroes look like they lost 10-15 levels-ups worth of stats. Your only hope is to pray that they never use them. Or not: coughbattlepatterncough.

• Believe it or not, even Kirby games are subject to this, though very subtly... When you use Kirby's copy abilities, you often have to either get in close range to use them or have to attack the enemy several times in order to defeat it (or both), but if you stick to inhaling things and spitting them at enemies, not only is this much safer, as you can fire from a distance, but the spat stars hit far harder than any of the copy abilities can. That's right, a boss that might take 16 to 24 hits from the Sword or Cutter abilities would drop in only four to eight hits from stars. This was implemented by the Kirby staff to provide a challenge to experienced players, newbies to gaming could stick to using stars, while the better players would use the more flashy, yet impractical copy abilities.
  • I'd hardly call copy abilities impractical- while certain abilities (like the aforementioned cutter) are fairly useless, a lot of them provide useful side benefits, like Plasma's damaging shield or Hammer and Sword's underwater attack. You also have a much larger attack window against bosses, since you don't have to wait for them to do a particular attack that gives you star fodder.
• Neopets has been accused of Fake Difficulty many times, particularly in the Battledome area where formerly excellent weapons are often downgraded without warning, making them next to useless. The information about the weapons in the "Battlepedia" provided on the site is incorrect, so users turn to In-Depth Battlepedia instead. http://idb.finalhit.org/?searchtype=alpha
  • The retired game Pterattack (a vertical shoot-em-up) had a nasty habit of randomly generating a un-dodgeable obstacle the width of the whole playing screen during the start of the first level. It also had glitchy collision detection at higher levels. Thankfully, the sequel fixed these.
• Phantasy Star Universe has a couple particularly annoying examples in the online mode.
  • One stage has you running around rescuing people trapped under piles of debris, with a very strict time limit. Every time you rescue someone, it goes into a loading screen, then a small scene where the person says a few lines and runs off, and then back to loading before giving you control. These scenes are unskippable; you can only mash A to speed through the dialogue. Of course, the timer will keep ticking down to your doom during these little scenes.
  • Another stage has you chasing a small child around a maze. He may or may not be infected by the SEED virus and could turn into a monster if you don't get him medical help...but despite this, will run from you no matter what. You have two perfectly capable party members that could logically help you corner him; instead, they say "Why don't you handle this?" and proceed to follow behind you dumbly. The kid wouldn't be too hard to catch, if every time you closed in on him, the game didn't take control away from you as he leisurely walks off to another room. Once you finally figure out the one specific path that lets you corner him without him teleporting or running straight through a locked door, the kid becomes a monster anyways and you have to kill him. Yes, you could have held the goddamn kid down and blew his brains out right from the start, as many gamers no doubt wanted to do after about 5 minutes of this mission, and it wouldn't have mattered. Oddly, your party's dialogue implies that this would have been favorable, as the kid wouldn't have had to suffer that way, even though there was no indication that he actually WAS infected until he was already a monstrosity.
• Sega seems as committed to the idea of "fake difficulty" in Universe as they were in the predecessor Phantasy Star Online, including, but not limited to:
  • Instant death attacks that can come out in succession and with little warning and that there is absolutely no way to be immune to at time of writing.
  • A status effect which renders your controls useless.
  • No less than three crippling Standard Status Effects, two of which make it impossible to do anything other than sit there and wait for either death by beatdown from enemies that kill you in three hits or hope someone notices your predicament and has the ability to assist.
  • Enemies which, without effort, can cripple your stats. (see Goshin; the Svaltus falls into this category AND the previous one)
  • NPCs with AI ranging from "pants-on-head retarded" to what can charitably be described as "suicidal" and, in certain story missions, penalising you should they die—or, more likely, get themselves killed.
  • Making certain enemies even stronger, seemingly at random, and often when these enemies are already among the strongest non-boss enemies in the game.
  • Random drops taken to extremes; Some items (the least useful ones) drop often at random from just about everything and do so with vexing frequency, while others drop once every century from enemies which may only have two instances in only one mission in the entire game, and still more which drop VERY, VERY RARELY from some boss monsters. (Anyone who's tried to acquire the rare rifle Rattlesnake knows this type of pain)
  • Allowing the player to apply status effects to monsters but having the actual effect on those monsters being inconsistent, or not affecting monsters the same way it affects players:
    • Applying Silence to the Bal Soza enemy prevents it from using the TECHNICs Zonde and Gizonde, but applying the same to the Deljaban enemy does not prevent it from spamming the instant-death TECHNIC Megid - In order to prevent Deljabans from using Megid, you must apply the Shock status effect which prevents them from using physical attacks and Megid even though it shouldn't block the latter.
    • The above is due to the game representing natural abilities (as opposed to photon-manipulation) with TECHNI Cs that are vulnerbale to physical inhibitors (Stun) rather than photon ones (Silence). In the case of Del Jaban, Megid is a natural ability being as they're pure dark/megi SEED forms. A more obvious example is the dragon-like enemies' ability to use Damfoie - or do you think silencing a dragon's magic should take away its ability to breathe non-magical fire from its gut? A general rule of thumb is to be ready for monsters to have at least one ability of their home alignment as a natural one.
    • Similarly, if the Stun status effect is applied to you, you will remain rooted to the spot no matter what hits you, even if you would be thrown away were you not stunned. If you stun an enemy, they will be thrown around by your attacks as if they weren't stunned at all.
  • Making certain enemies resistant to - i.e., taking 50% damage from - one or more of the three major types of damage, (Melee, bullets or TECHNICs) and not giving the player any indication of these resistances. Net result, your damage values will take a massive hit against certain enemies for absolutely no apparent reason.
• Phantasy Star Universe's predecessor, Phantasy Star Online, has its own examples.
  • In the second Dreamcast version, Ultimate difficulty was added. In lower difficulties, a common enemy of Caves was the Poison Lily. The Poison Lily was largely a non-threat except for extremely low-levelled characters. Its only attacks consisted of poison and paralysis effects, and a weak pecking attack if a player was very close. Lilies would try to peck at players outside the actual range of the attack, however, something this troper found rather amusing. Androids found them even more laughable, possessing racial immunity to both poison and paralysis. Ultimate Caves replaced these with Ob Lilies. Ob Lilies still possessed the pecking attack and paralysing wave, but their poison attack was replaced by Megid - a penetrating linear ball possessing a very high chance of an instant kill on any player it hit. Though not Fake Difficulty themselves, Ob Lilies were often found in large packs, with one Megid having three or four more hot on its tail giving players little opening for attack, and often with Crimson Assassins who possessed the ability to freeze unwary players.
  • Additionally, in the followup Episode 1 & 2 on Gamecube and Xbox, Ob Lilies were present in the VR Temple stage on Ultimate difficulty. The rooms in VR Temple were much smaller than in Caves, making evasion of the Megid harder, and were often accompanied by large enemies which would often hem players in such that they could not move, (even if those enemies did no damage) and making Megid evasion even more difficult.
  • Ultimate Episode 2 is a huge example of Fake Difficulty all by itself. Every area in the episode, without exception, had enemies with very high ATP, meaning they would inflict large amounts of damage even with debuffs in effect, or outright one-hit KO attacks that would kill you irrespective of HP or defences. Some particularly bad areas had both.
    • VR Spaceship, the second area, had the Gran Sorceror, who fired Megid at a high level, and consequently a high chance of killing you, as well as the Baranz, whose missiles, only ever fired in ever-increasing clusters, could wear down a player's HP very quickly.
    • Central Control Area (which spanned Jungle Area, Mountain Area, Seaside Area and Central Control Area) had the Zol Gibbons who fired Megid, (albeit very low-level Megid) and the sub-boss Mericarol and its siblings Merikle and Mericus. Prior to Ultimate, these enemies would do damage and inflict status effects using medium-speed projectiles with a very long range, but were not tremendously dangerous. On Ultimate, their projectiles were accelerated and instead of causing status effects, would instantly inflict over 32,000 points of damage if they connected. (By contrast, no player could ever have HP above approximately 2,500 through any legitimate means)
    • Seabed had the Delbiter, whose charging attack was very fast and did a high amount of fixed damage. The Delbiter also had what this troper referred to as "Megid aura", whereby it could suddenly one-hit kill players who normally had enough HP to survive all of the Delbiter's attacks even in a worst-case scenario. Seabed also had Sinow Zoas and Zeles, who had high ATP. a high critical hit rate and near-total invisibility for upwards of 50% of their lifespan, and Deldepths, which were only vulnerable to physical attack for short periods, could not be hit by more than one attack before they became invulnerable again, and could spam high-level Megid at a disturbingly frequent pace.
    • Control Tower would actually combine the cheesiest of the above enemies into fairly small rooms. A single room could see you attacked by any combination of Mericarol, Merikle, Mericus, Gibbles, (a gorilla-like thing which had very hard punches) Gi Gue, (which would spam purple balls which would drain your HP rapidly AND confuse you) and Delbiter, as well as two exclusive enemies. The first of these is the Del Lily, a D-cell infected Ob Lily on steroids, and Ill Gill. Ill Gill's abilities included the ability to inflict any status effect with its scythe, instant-kill with its scythe, and freeze the player to the spot such that they couldn't evade or escape the scythe strikes. The most frequent offensive tactic used by the Ill Gill would be to root you to the spot and then use an unavoidable death strike on you.
  • The sequel to Episode 1 & 2, Blue Burst on PC, was even worse, where not only could you be killed instantly by any of the above attacks, but you would be penalised by lost experience for every death, including the unfair ones. Not only that, but Blue Burst removed all recovery period between hits on Ultimate difficulty, with the result that attacks which were survivable in the earlier games could add up and kill even a player of level Awesome in under a second. (The Recon is a particularly egregious example of this, despite only being a significant threat in swarms in the earlier games; This editor had his level 200 character killed in about a second by a single Recon on at least one occasion)
    • Episode 4 doesn't escape this, either. The most painful example is the Dorphon. Dorphons are the most powerful monsters in the Crater area, which is not a good thing for you when they have a Dynamic Entry. A Dynamic Entry that more often then not spawns right on top of someone. And then there's the (extremely small) chance that it will be a Dorphon Eclair capable of that much more damage. While the fact that they're rare means this doesn't happen too often, it does mean that you may not know when it's coming until you're suddenly in need of healing/revival.
• Final Fantasy X's Chocobo racing game is fake difficult. Your character is trying to collect balloons (which appear around the track randomly) that decrease your time while avoiding birds that attack you that increase your time. However, the Chocobo at times will randomly turn to miss balloons and hit birds, making completion of this sidequest a Luck-Based Mission. Of course, this is the only way to get the main character's best weapon.
  • Although that's the most egregious, there are several others. Lulu's "avoid 200 lightning bolts in a row" and Kimahri's butterfly romp (where you have to avoid the red butterflies but pick up the blue ones - where the camera and lighting make it very difficult to judge distance, and the two sorts of butterflies look almost identical - come to mind.
    • Lulu's lightning avoidance was particularly bad because Mercy Invincibility that usually applies to Random Encounters didn't apply to lightning. You could be struck during the fade-in from combat. Good luck trying to get that final weapon without an item that eliminated random encounters..
  • Final Fantasy in general is pretty good about avoiding this, but Final Fantasy XII is unforgivable in this regard. It's like the game designers couldn't figure out how to make the game fair, so they instead made your characters weak, the enemies strong, and the swarms frequent and huge.
    • It gets worse late in the game, in the way the programming handles command priority. Command priority determines which moves, by either the player or the AI enemies, will execute in what order, especially if they are all initiated around the same time. The trouble is, late in the game, you tend to be fighting sizable swarms that move fast...and almost all their moves take priority over the party's moves.
    • Not only that, but also in the last half of the game, most enemies and bosses will have numerous passive abilities that kick in when near death (and for enemies with tons of HP, near death status can kick in while they still have a few thousand HP), such as zero charge time for attacks or higher stats. While you can have some of those abilities for yourself, you usually won't live for long to take advantage of it.
• The Warlords series is particularly gruesome in the luck respect, even in the RTS-type Battlecry ones. It made it a genuinely jarring attempt to make an "Ironman" hero that dies for real. Since in the battlecry one any unit can just do a random supercritical that ignores armor, the Hero could easily die, not to mention assassins that could randomly kill the Hero with an attack. In the TBS ones, that is even more jarring. You can test it by arranging a battle of two identical units. 5 times out of 7, the AI will win. Just as simple as that. Also the AI seems to have an uncannily higher chance of triggering special abilities. Finally, if you're using a highly inferior unit in combat you can expect them to miss (and do only 1 damage) about 90% of the time, and criticals are downright miracles, while the AI seems to only miss half his attacks and criticals half the attacks it hits.
• World of Warcraft somewhat arbitrarily assigns 'elite' status to certain mobs, whenever the designers wanted to encourage player cooperation, or to artificially increase the challenge of areas where Player groups are expected, such as instanced dungeons. These mobs look and act normal, but possess the hit points and damage output of a character several levels higher, to the point where a lone PC of comparable level has virtually no chance of defeating it without help. While this sort of thing makes some sense for bosses, it comes off as unrealistic when faced with an army of elite kobolds, or towns filled with 'commoners' who are all inexplicably level 50, and can easily take down trained warriors while armed only with a shovel and wearing a linen shirt for armor. One wonders why these supermen aren't cleaning up the dragons, pirates, and neighborhood villains on their own.
  • Compare Everquest with its Giant Rats which seem to exist at every known level of power, from newbie to epic. It would be a shame to let a good character model go to waste.
• The Night Elf Campaign in general in Warcraft III has this in heaps. The Orc campaign was legitimately challenging for the most part, but the game designers screwed up with the Night Elves. The first level restricts you to flimsy Archers with no way to upgrade them at all, no melee or short range units, a level 2 hero (Making it even worse, Priestesses of the Moon downright suck until they get much higher up, unlike most other heroes which have redeeming qualities at low level), and you have to kill a level 6 (!) Paladin to win, who already has a few potions and isn't afraid to spam Divine Shield. The third level restricts you to a time limit, which is measured in the number of trees left protecting Furion. Even weirder still is that an earlier level did the same thing, but instead gave you a proper time limit rather than forcing you to estimate your progess. The next level after makes you crawl on the ground under massive three-way air battles as you dodge between one 5000 content gold mine to the next. Need this troper continue?
  • The archers were pretty cheap, though. This troper had a lot of fun growing the archer army to the food cap and flooding the screen. However, the orc campaign Slash and Burn just came to mind. Limited access to gold, a race that was expensive enough as it was, limited air defense, and your main concern was flying units, whom could only be brought down temporarily with a skill that had to cool down. And your objective is to amass 15,000 lumber. Perhaps more of a tedious example, than difficult, but it wound up being unnecessary anyway.
• In many platformers, being hit causes the player character to momentarily recoil and be unable to move. Unfortunately, in some games, being hit in this way makes it impossible to avoid the next attack, and so on, leaving the character "stunlocked" until dead or at least far more damaged than the original attack should have left him. Odin Sphere is a primary example, but is far from unique in this.
  • The Belmont family are classic victims of juggled-to-death gameplay.
  • Another common side-effect of taking damage in a platformer is for all of your inertia to suddenly vanish if you're hit in mid-air, causing you to immediately fall into any Bottomless Pit you might've been trying to jump.
  • This happens after a fashion in fighting games, as well. Often when being hit, for a moment you'll be completely vulnerable, unable to block, counterattack, or do much of anything. Of course, the computer is sometimes programmed to perfectly act on this. Tecmo is particularly bad about this in its Dead Or Alive series, seeming to view fighting games as programmer-versus-the-player; on some opponents, such as Hayate, the first time you get hit is likely to result in you losing more than half your life bar, as he uses precision computer timing to strike while you're constantly reeling, giving you no opportunity to block or combo break.
  • River City Ransom has an issue with this. On one map enemies will attack the player as soon as he enters, lock him in this, and cause massive damage to him.
  • In the Beat 'em Up Burning Fight, this basically ruins the game. When the character is knocked down, he goes through a stunned animation as he gets up. The computer always starts their next attack as the animation plays, so that it hits the instant the character gets up. Your health bar is meaningless; the character is essentially a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
  • The boss fight in Kingdom Hearts II against Xaldin at Beast Castle: He had enough fake difficulty that the programmers gave you one free continue. As he becomes more damaged, he acquires a spear attack at a range of about half the field. If you get hit, well, prepare to take it a few more times, as the timing of the spear swing around just beat out any hope of the game acknowledging you had pressed a button. Not to mention the vortex attack that required at least 10 hours of grinding before you had an ability that allowed you to maybe avoid it.
  • Reflect can easily let you survive.
• In the Gradius series, the player's ship is painfully slow until you use the speed-up power twice. Not coincidentally, in this editor's opinion, there always seems to be at least two enemies that drop power-ups just after every checkpoint - but god help you if one of them randomly turns into the blue "kill all enemies on the screen but don't give you a powerup" item. This comes on top of that fact that Gradius is a SHMUP.
  • Subverted in Gradius V, in which the player respawns where he/she dies a la Life Force, though purists have the option to play the game the old-fashioned way through the "Revival Start" setting in the options menu.
• The Gamespot review of Metroid Prime 3 seems to be lamenting the lack of Fake Difficulty: apparently the controls are too good.
• In Star Trek Encounters, the camera angles make determining the "height" of the rings in a Pass Through the Rings game nearly impossible (even though the game is merciful enough to keep a consistent "up" and "down" despite being in space.)
• Tomb Raider: Anniversary had a particular scene where Lara must kill two difficult flying enemies with an area-effect ranged attack, while standing on a small platform. Oh, did we mention the almost unavoidable ranged attack throws you ten feet and knocks you off your feet? And since there's two of these guys, if the first shot doesn't throw you off the platform to your death, the second one will get you before you recover. If you manage to kill the enemies, there is a nigh-impossible acrobatic sequence which is timed. If you don't make every leap perfectly (see Camera Screw for why that will never happen), the grapple point for your rope disappears, sending Lara falling to her death. Guess where the respawn point is? Before the fight with the two obnoxious flying enemies. This troper gave up after 2 days and at least 20 failures.
  • Almost every game in the series has a section where you lose your weapons, Tomb Raider 3 ramps up the Fake Difficulty involved in this by making you lose everything; unlike the other instances where you only lose your guns and keep everything else (although this does lead to the amusing inconsistency that you actually get a medikit added to your inventory if you have run out). This combines with the fact you can choose which order to do the middle locations, which means that if you do Nevada last you have to build your inventory and weapons (some of which are hidden in secret areas towards the end and therefore possible to miss) back in the final, most difficult, area.
• Soul Reaver 2 has inexplicable barriers appear compelling you to fight powerful enemies you could otherwise easily evade. Defeating these enemies provides no benefit and often leaves you at the edge of death yourself.
• The Crusader games' hardest difficulty features enemies who carry much heavier weapons than they're described as carrying in the manual...and they still drop their pissy little ammo.
• The infamous blue shells from Mario Kart target the person in first-place, so even if you are at the top of your game, you won't be completely safe.
  • The Wii game takes this to a whole new level. Thanks to the number of players allowed in a match being boosted from 8 to 12 there's much greater potential for several CPU players to acquire powerful items at once. If you're playing on 150cc difficulty against the CPU the worst-case scenario is to be comboed by a Blue shell followed by a Red Shell and then get blown away by a Bullet Bill-transformed racer and ran over by another that has become gigantic with the Mega Mushroom right before being pushed aside by the entire rest of the pack before the person in last, still in last up to this point, hits a Thunderbolt, shrinking you. Oh, and all of this happens right before you hit the finish line, guaranteeing you dead last. And this entry in the series is supposed to be more non-gamer/casual-friendly.
    • Note, however, that the Wii game actually contains dynamic difficulty on a per-game level, so if this happens and you lose, when it says "Better luck next time!" it means it literally. (In other words, it's better to finish a bad Grand Prix and get the computer to ease back than to get frustrated and restart just because you got screwed in the third of four races.)
    • Which does not help if you need a star rank in order to get unlockables because finishing slower equals lower ranks.
    • Don't forget the POW Blocks that seem to pop up at every lap to shake loose your items, or the Thunder Cloud which only serves to hurt you unless you can bump it off to someone else, which is nigh-impossible if you're at the front of the pack. Oh, and the casual-friendly appeal for Mario Kart Wii is it gives players who stink a chance to catch up, which spells doom and hurled controllers for the skilled players.
  • Not to mention the "Mirror" courses which are just the regular courses with the directions reversed, made fake-difficult by how your twitch reflexes are primed against it, but it offers no actual new challenges.
    • Made even worse on the N64 version with Toad's Turnpike. In the Extra class, the cars drive the opposite way!
    • The whole point of mirrored tracks is to discourage relying on reflexes too much. Though if you play mirror mode all the time you get used to it just the same. The only Fake Difficulty about it is the AI cheats even more. And This Troper missed driving against the traffic in the Double Dash equivalent, that was the best part of mirror mode in Mario Kart 64.

• In Super Smash Bros Brawl, when fighting against multiple AI opponents in a free-for-all, they tend to forget they're supposed to be against each other and just gang up on you. It's more noticeable whenever the computer gets a Final Smash or the Dragoon; They will target you twice as much as the other computer controlled players. This can also happen when you are on the same team. AI teammates in Smash Brothers games tend to be pretty bad in general.
  • Speaking of the Dragoon - it's a three-part item, and you have to pick up all three parts to use it. Theoretically, if you get hit before you have all three, you might drop the parts you already have. Human players tend to get the parts knocked out of them much more often than AI players, even if the human is hitting harder and more often.
  • The final boss's one-hit-kill-on-any-difficulty-other-than-easy, only avoidable in a single (and by some players, unused) way, that requires perfect timing attack.
  • Even worse, there are several items and stage effects which alter either your controls or your ability to see what's going on, with some of the latter obscuring between half and the entire screen. This is bad enough when you can't see what you're doing, but even worse when the computer-controlled opponents aren't affected by this in any way.
  • Let's not even forget the cheapness of Classic Mode in harder difficulties. Instead of simply improving the AI, the game simply increases the knockback of the AI's attacks and decreases the knockback of the player's attacks.
  • The same tactic of Statistical Difficulty increase as mentioned above is also in play in the Subspace Emissary mode, except the difference is that on Intense Mode, normal enemies literally do smash attack damage by even the weakest attacks as well as increased knockback of their attacks.
• PCs in Odin Sphere and Rogue Galaxy are saddled with a stamina system that serves no point except to randomly render them helpless mid-battle. Guess what enemies aren't subject to. The first PC you get to control in the former game is widely thought to be the suckiest due to her slow combo, low priority and low range. Her only saving grace is that she can glide, and from gliding, she can use a dive-bomb attack that does moderate damage.
• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn's Hard difficulty hides the enemy's movement range for no reason other than to force the player to manually count squares and remember the movement cost of thick grass to mounted units. Thanks for that.
  • Also; map support/the weapon triangle (two almost fundamental Fire Emblem features) no longer have an effect, turning the Fragile Speedster team from Part 1 into almost entirely useless weaklings, since they start at low levels.
• Armored Core: Early iterations of this game featured some problems dealing with computer opponents in the arenas, since looking up or down was arduous at best with the games limited controls, and every truly hard enemy in the game was a master of highly controlled air combat. As an added bonus, Armored Core 2 featured an arena opponent named Metheus(I think) who was capable of doing an attack combination involving the most powerful sword and gun in the game ad infinitum, reducing you to 0 AP in a matter of seconds if you were nice enough to stand in front of him at all. All attempts by this troper to mimic that combo have failed horribly, meaning that the computer may be cheating beyond simply having PLOW mecha that the player actually can replicate.
  • Last Raven, one of the sequels, combines Fake Difficulty with a game that is Nintendo Hard to begin with: the mechs will just zip around the battleground faster than the camera will move, combine this with weapons that don't work at all, weapons that are horribly inaccurate, weapons that only fire if you lock on to your enemy (and you can only stay locked on to your enemies if you are actively keeping them dead center of the screen with the slow-ass camera). On top of the controls screwing you over, one of the FIRST MISSIONS has an enemy that can kill you with pretty much one hit and moves faster than the camera, one of the third missions has two enemy mecha that fire lots of missiles after the mission briefing tells you they use lasers, and guess how fast those bastards move? Oh, yeah, there's no tutorial either.
  • Armored Core 4 lulls you into a false sense of security by giving you AP in the 5 digits, only to make sure every 60 second skirmish...erm...mission either has twenty things shooting at you to shave it away or a couple enemies that do well over a two thousand damage per shot.
    • To be fair, though, upon acquiring a certain weapon, the above situation is quite handily reversed - suddenly you gain the ability to mow your opponents down with startling ease - even up to the final boss (if you can make him stand still long enough...)
• The point-n-click adventure game Simon the Sorceror 2 was chock-full of puzzles that defied logic and sent the player screaming into the arms of the nearest walkthrough. One particularly egregious example involved sneaking past a demon with acute hearing by using your magic wizard's hat to turn a dog into a pair of hush puppies. Bear in mind that using your hat on other objects had completely unpredictable results, if indeed it had results at all, which was rarely.
• If it's confusing puzzles you want, try the first two Discworld games. Although the puzzles are indeed quite funny, it's absolutely impossible to use intuition or knowledge to figure them out. So either you click on absolutely everything in your inventory and try using it with every object in the game world, or you read an FAQ.
  • Likewise in the first game, where you acquire some necessary money by using a rope to lower a magnet into a dragon's den and pull up some gold from its hoard. Simon even lampshades this as he does so, only to be utterly surprised moments later when he finds out that the non-magnetic gold does stick to the magnet after all...
• The Myst MMORPG Uru had a particularly maddening example in which a puzzle can only be solved by using a fish trap as a weight on a trigger plate. This is reasonable enough, but the character has no way of picking objects up, instead you have to try to push it with your feet through a river that will wash your fish trap away, requiring you to start over. This is the only place in the game that works this way and there is no clue to indicate this course of action. This task would take fifteen seconds in real life but thanks to the cruddy controls, count on wasting at least a couple of hours.
• 2D games often have items or enemies "hidden" against the background, despite the fact that from your character's perspective, they should be clearly visible.
• Dark Cloud 2 is evil, not only having chest monsters, but also chests with nothing in them.
• Ghosts N Goblins. The game wouldn't be that bad were it not for a single enemy; the Red Arremer. These devil-like creatures fly out of reach of your projectiles, then swoop down at a random angle. Very rarely, they'll miss you entirely, but most of the time they'll get you in such a place where it's impossible to jump or duck under them. Unless you're fast enough to kill them before they collide with you, a hit is guaranteed. This isn't so bad in the first level, where you might get lucky or can risk the hit and negotiate the rest of the level with one hit-point left, but the third level suddenly tosses several of them at you in its second half.
  • In every title in the GnG line, you have to play the entire game through twice before you can face the final boss. This is always due to some specious plot device or "surprise" item that was unobtainable the first time around.
• This is pretty much the point of I Wanna Be The Guy.
  • As compensation, the regular difficulty level has fairly frequent save points and there is no time lag between dying and letting you respawn. And you have infinite lives. Of course, the game is still punishingly, unforgivingly hard - but at least it's not randomly hard. Everything has specific triggers.
• Kingdom Hearts 2, Demyx. An easy battle overall, until you get to the point where the game declares you must defeat 10 of his water clones in 10 seconds or you get a game over. It's a lot harder than it sounds. It seems that no matter how powerful you are or what tactics you use the only way to do this is using reaction commands, and even then a substantial amount of luck is involved. More so, it's never explained why you get a game over if you can't do this. The clones don't use any sort of special attack, Demyx doesn't escape, you just...lose. Just like that.
• Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 has some measures of Fake Difficulty on its own.
  • Some enemies can use abilities that they clearly cannot learn at all. A LV 44 Red Mage having Counter as a support ability? Vieras don't learn counter!
  • Some of the laws make you tear your hair out. No missing (when anything short of healing, status-removers, and buffs have a chance to miss)? No knockback (when crits make you knock the enemy back unless they can't move in that direction)? What the crap?!
  • Don't forget laws like "No damage above X amount" or "Do not end turn next to a unit". While Final Fantasy Tactics Advance had annoying laws that mostly banned certain move sets, the laws in this game are pure bullcrap. At least you don't get punished too heavily for breaking them.
  • Upon further review, "Time To Act" certifiably qualifies as fake difficult in the same manner that Riovanes Rooftop qualifies. You get to pick one guy out of your lot of twenty-four to support five NPC moogles against a number of other characters; the original guard, as you will. If even one guy on your team bites it, the mission fails. Oh, did I forget to mention that one of your allies is a Tinker, a class that is debated as one of the worst because his field buff/debuff abilities can affect either your group or theirs, and he always starts with Red Spring, which induces Haste on the designated side? If the devil moogle pops out of that box... well, bombs away is putting it lightly.
    • One sidequest has you climbing a tower while fighting monsters in the levels of the 40s. This seems simple enough until at one point, you encounter 4 monsters, two of them are level 50 and the other two are level 90! First, you have this extremely fast and hard to hit bunny who will spam the ability to cast Regen, Haste, and Protect on its allies. Second, there is a brutal werewolf monster who will spam Dark Elixir, which reduces your HP and MP to 1 and it will also use Roar to remove any buffs your party has. While it also removes buffs on its allies, they will just recast the buffs. Lastly, you have a pair of highly evolved Malboros who will spam Love Song on their allies, which restores great chunks of HP, casts Regen, and casts Defense Up. Combine all this together and the battle is pretty much near Unwinnable unless you do some massive level grinding and coax luck to help you. This troper literally stepped out to make some hot chocolate because it took several minutes before a single unit in his clan could act after all the hasted enemies were finished.
    • Pretty much all the battles in the bonus mission "The Final Quest", but battle 4 is borderline Unwinnable; you'll fight two Masterberries who will just spam Karma on you for an unblockable 999 damage, a Juggler who will spam Hastega and Quicken on his allies, a Ranger who will either spend the battle hiding or use Mirror Elixir on you to reduce your HP and MP to 1, and a Seer who will use Magick Frenzy with Illusionist skills. Oh, and they all get extra turns when the battle starts and they regain those turns again when affected by Haste. This troper refuses to believe that this battle can be won.
• Done to annoyance in No More Heroes for the Nintendo Wii, where the bosses' basic attack patterns get easier after the third boss battle (3rd of 10, that is). The difficulty is ramped up in the later boss battles by giving the bosses one-hit kills (on you), combo attacks of which the last one is unblockable (even if all earlier attacks in the combo are), and lastly by playing psych games on the player (one boss resembles a high-school girl - one of her attacks is to drop to the ground crying; if the player approaches her in this state with her weapon in her hand, it's a one-shot kill. On the player).
• Pretty much the entirety of Final Fantasy III DS. You are forced to trek through sometimes long dungeons, without Save Points. Quicksaving doesn't help, as quicksave erases itself as soon as you continue from it. Meaning if you die from the dungeon boss (and you will), you have to slog through the dungeon again. And again. Most, if not all, enemies and bosses are either Goddamned Bats or Demonic Spiders. Also, when you change jobs, you must fight X number of battles in order to return your character's stats to normal. It seems to serve no purpose other than making you want to snap the DS in two.
  • To top it all off, the final dungeon has six Nintendo Hard bosses, and you can't save between them. Sound like fun? Didn't think so.
  • The Job Adjustment Phase at least replaces the clumsy Change Point system from the NES version that required grinding before job changes. Less welcome changes included nerfing the top-tier jobs and granting the bosses double turns.
  • And then there's the fact that it's impossible to get the best equipment, the best job class, or fight the Bonus Boss without getting an arbitrary number of friends on the otherwise useless and tacked-on online mail-system-. That's right, it's meta fake difficulty.
  • The most bizarre part may be that the lack of save points is self-imposed - Square Enix took a poll of Japanese fans on whether they should include save points or not (the original NES game didn't have them), and the majority said no. Sane fans also said NOOOOOOOOO!
• In Pokemon Diamond/Pearl, there's a sudden jump in difficulty between the eighth gym and the Elite Four. The trainers you face go from having level 45-50 Pokemon to level 55-60 Pokemon.
  • Pokemon Stadium has one if you want to teach Pikachu Surf without using a cheating device. First, you must play the Prime Cup, a place where all trainers have LV100 Pokemon. Second, you need to have a Pikachu in your party and it can't be a rental. Third, that Pikachu has to be one of the 3 Pokemon you use for each battle for all 8 battles (And the final trainer has a Mew by the way). What makes this a Fake Difficulty is that you're swapping out a Pokemon that could even things up in a battle for a Pikachu who probably has bad stats compared to your other Pokemon. In other words, in order to get the prize, you have to handicap yourself.
• Maple Story has ludicrous STR requirements for Warrior equipment, which forces Warriors to waste all their Ability points on buffing up thier STR stat, instead of on the DEX stat, where it's NEEDED, as nearly all enemies over level 20 have an insane Avoidability rate.
  • Not to mention a ludicrous level curve. Leveling is quick and easy until level twenty, and then becomes ridiculously steep, with the needed EXP going up by several thousand each level and even the most profitable enemies giving out unbelievably tiny fractions of the necessary amounts. A surprisingly high number of players quit in disgust in the 30s.
• Assassin's Creed, at least on the PC version, can do this near the end of the game, with improbable amounts of mooks that suddenly learn moves that are impossible to counter, and assassination targets that become invincible if they aren't standing up.
• In Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, the final battle against Lou on the Expert difficulty includes many of the examples from above, at various times, including Making the controls unresponsive, Changing the UI conventions for no reason, Endowing enemies with unblockable or unavoidable attacks, Making things depend far too much on luck, often to the point of removing skill as a factor, and enemies that are grossly imbalanced.
  • Most of the fake difficulty comes from adding notes that aren't really there either by including other parts in addition to the main guitar part, actively adding notes for where mutes would be, changing from chords to single notes in place of palm mutes (justifiable since there is a big difference in the sound and a rather limited control scheme), and when covers were being recorded, actually adding parts because no guitar was actually playing (I Love Rock 'N' Roll has a fairly long part where the guitarist doesn't play at all).
  • There is absolutely no correlation between how difficult a song is to play in real life and how difficult it is to play in guitar hero. Many very simple songs rank pretty highly in difficulty level because of this (aka why Sex Pistols songs tend to be about mid-level in difficulty, but much more difficult slow songs that would rely more on technical ability tend to be very easy).
• Winning the final battle in Gears of War against General RAAM seems to be based more on random luck rather than actual skill (i.e. whether or not RAAM suffers an A.I. brain fart, or whether the reavers or wild (non-shield) Kryll randomly kill you or not). What's that you say? You can beat RAAM on Insane difficulty in less than a minute? Fine. Do it 2 or 3 times in a row, reliably, without exploiting the A.I. block glitch. Didn't think so.
  • This troper hasn't gotten to him on Insane... but on the standard difficulty, there's a gun emplacement just behind him that switches the battle from absurdly hard to laughably easy... if you can manage to get past him without dying, which is harder than it sounds. Without it, though... the first poster also forgot to mention that he can take an absurd amount of punishment, and is usually cloaked by a shield of Kryll that absorbs any damage you try to deal to him, and counters by trying to shred you, killing you instantly.
  • You can actually dispel his "cloak" of Kryll with a grenade or a bolt from the Torque Bow. Yes, there is a good reason why the very first Torque Bow had its own "HEY, LOOK HERE" button attached if you moved like you were going to skip it, and it ain't just for the fun of one shotting everything in the game without being in melee range (yeah, you can nuke boomers and therons in single hits of it regardless of difficulty). However, it became a little Fake Difficult when on Hardcore and Insane, said torque bolts became One Shot Wonders, as did lambent wretches and near misses from Boomshot blasts. Honorable Goddamn Bats mention to Kryll, except for the fact you can actually use them in places to kill off groups of Locust without spending more than a single bullet (hint: kryll munch on locust too, and there's lots of fragile fluorescent bulbs all around in Nightfall).
• The Gamecube port of Resident Evil. The controls for walking are as natural and intuitive as operating a forklift; you can't jump, strafe, dodge or otherwise move like a human being. You can only shoot directly ahead, which usually means you'll miss unless you fight at point-blank range. The fixed camera deliberately hides things that would be obvious from your character's point of view. Your inventory is small, but it won't stay full for long because there is a finite number of bullets in the game and all "defensive" items break after one use. You die after three hits from the weakest enemies. All locked doors are Soup Cans. And just to annoy you on every level, you can't quicksave! Surviving an actual Zombie Apocalypse would be easier than this game.
• Most R-Type games have you restart at a checkpoint if you die in mid-stage. Super R-Type, the SNES port of R-Type II, however, has no such checkpoints; if you die anywhere in the stage, you are booted back to the very beginning of it.
  • The R-Type series has always been known for outstanding gameplay, but then it went SUPER and got AWESOME!

• Deadly Towers on the NES takes the cake for Fake Difficulty. Right at the start of the game, it's very easy to get lost in a labyrinthine area because there is an invisible door right next to the one you're supposedly supposed to enter. If you get trapped in this maze, it becomes an extreme chore to find your way out, because all of the corridors look the same, save differences in wall coloring. Throw in the fact that some of the basic enemies can thrash you about with ease (because Prince Myer doesn't get Mercy Invincibility when he's hit) and knock you off the ledges into the instant-death Bottomless Pits, and that opportunities to upgrade your basic weapon are very limited (shops are hard to find, and the things they sell are restrictively expensive), and you've got the makings of a really frustrating experience. Your game is bad, Lenar, and you should feel bad.
• Paper-and-pencil example: numerous books of sudoku variants exist, for those who become bored with standard sudoku. While most of the variants are Real Difficult (16x16 sudoku; sudoku with fewer initial numbers than normal but additional restrictions), one variant that exists is "we've replaced the digits 1-9 with nine typographical symbols." From a logical standpoint, it changes the puzzle not one bit, but just adds Fake Difficulty for sudoku enthusiasts who have learned to recognize subsets of the digits 1-9 quickly. Also in "Wordoku" or similar puzzles where letters replace the numbers, although that may have the inverse effect for people with good word-puzzle skills. (This only applies if nine distinct letters are used; some puzzles use the letters from a nine-letter word in which some letters are repeated, which is a legitimately different puzzle.)
• Star Tropics punishs death so harshly, leaveing you with 3 hearts in a game with minimal health powerups AND your attack power degrades with lowered health, combined with limited checkpoints, means your best off restarting if you die (because you are stuck with these penalty if you continue after losing all your files as well)
• Ghost In The Sheet is a point-and-click adventure game with an interesting premise: You're a ghost, and while you have a number of powers as a ghost, you have to learn them all yourself. One power is the ability to create a flash of light, which you can only learn by completing an action sequence. You have to drive all the fireflies in a certain area together by clicking on them, but if you're too slow they drift off again. They are very fast about drifting off again.
  • It's also one of those games where the manual encourages you to find items by "sweeping" the mouse over the screen and seeing where it changed into the "interact" cursor, in lieu of using anything to actually differentiate items you can muck with from items you can't. This led to a Guide Dang It! moment for this troper when the action he couldn't find to do turned out to be to pick up a bit of loose rebar-it's "hitbox", so to speak, conformed exactly to it's shape, making it easy to miss in a sweep.
• Darkened Skye had Fake Difficulty out the wazoo. For starters, the heroine's hitbox was fairly large, while the hitbox of her staff and the enemies appeared to conform to the shape of the bastard, and any extraneous outlying bits like wings didn't technically exist-making it easy to get killed because you're too busy flailing at something you aren't aiming at with tenth-of-a-micron precision. Next let's move on to iffy jumps. Also, several enemies with projectile attacks had homing attacks, while yours moved in obstinate straight lines. These last two put this troper off the game entirely (and I hadn't been so keen on continuing at the time to begin with): I ended up on a small floating platform, getting shot at by not one but two extremely powerful enemies with homing shots that do not disappear or otherwise stop until they hit their target-ie me. Damn near Unwinnable situation, that was.
• In Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception, there is a mission where the player must neutralize a chemical gas attack on the city of Santa Elva. The player must use special bombs to disperse the gas and save the city. The Fake Difficulty comes from the small matter that the canisters attached to your plane are structurally fragile and are prone to exploding violently when put under strong gravitational forces, taking the player's plane along for the ride if they accelerate too quickly or attempt to turn more than a few degrees. Worse yet, the player must perform this operation while being tailed by several missile-happy enemy fighters.
  • To make matters worse, another mission has you defending helicopters from surface-to-air missile infantry that are hiding in the woods. Worse yet, each helicopter dies in one hit if you miss your target, who only pops up mere seconds before they fire. If you happen to be in the wrong place when one shows up, you can count on losing a helicopter. To top it all off, to S-Rank the mission, you must keep all the helicopters alive until they reach their target several minutes into the mission.
• Some cars in Project Gotham Racing 4 are practically undrivable if you used the helmet view. What makes it worse is that they were drivable in any view in PGR3. Here are some reasons why.
  • In PGR 4, you must rely on the car's instrumentation whenever you're in helmet view, since the game no longer provides you with simple digital tachometer, speedometer, and gear indicator. This makes it difficult for players that do not have an HDTV or a decent monitor to read the gauges.
  • Not only that, the seating position was altered for some cars, meaning that gauges and readouts that were readable in PGR 3 were sometimes no longer readable in PGR 4. A glaring example of this would be the Aston Martin DBR 9. In 3, you would have full view of the LED tach and gear indicator, but due to the change in point of view, YOU COULDN'T SEE THEM AT ALL in 4.
• Almost any Super Mario World Rom Hacks that are LP'd by people on You Tube. One of the major complaints from LPers are people who abuse invisible blocks and black chompers by placing them everywhere in the levels and providing a minimal way of getting by them.
  • One sadistic Rom Hack that deserves special mention is Brutal Mario. In one level, the player's left/right directional controls are switched, turning a merely aggravating level into Platform Hell.
  • this in Super Kusottare World. The water maze with the Munchers (black piranha plants) is bad enough, actually making the water completely opaque is just ridiculous. Although to be fair, everything else stated in the main example and trope is also in that level.
• This troper is disgusted by the lack of Ocarina of Time's Water Temple. Anyone who's played the temple will know the exact part of the temple I'm talking about.
  • All of it?
• In the Civilization series, AI-controlled civilizations will act a lot more aggressively toward the player than they will against each other. Harder difficulties are distinguished not by more intelligent AI, but by artificial income bonuses for them, as is often the case with strategy games.
• In fact, pretty much every strategy game has this on higher difficulty levels. This troper has rather unfond memories of Age Of Mythology FFA games where the AI players were very indifferent toward an AI player building a wonder (which wins the game if it stands for 10 minutes) but swarmed him to death once he build his own. Also, using certain god powers like Fimbulwinter (which attacks 4 random enemy town centers with packs of wolves) pretty much has the same effect (but not if an AI player uses it, of course).
  • And of course, AI teammates are completely indifferent to you getting torn apart.
• The Game Mod Portal: Prelude is full of this. Lots of jumps that you have to make in exactly the right way or you fail. This troper would give more specific examples, but he's stuck on the second chamber. To make things worse, whenever people complain on the forums about the difficulty, the mod creators will defend it, basically saying "You aren't good enough at Portal to play this game". Never mind that some people might want to know the story they've created... since it's, you know, a prequel and not just more maps...
• Less egregious and possibly the result of technical limitations, this troper still found the "Little Rocket Man" achievement in Half Life 2: Episode 2 to be quite infuriating. Attempts to transport the lawn gnome by car are hindered by the collision box for the cabin of the car being a simple open-ended rectangular cut-out, instead of being able to put it behind the seat, or give it to your passenger to hold on to. This makes it very easy for the gnome to fall out of the car, even moreso when you're trying to avoid getting killed by a helicopter gunship.
  • Optional things, too, should never ever be hard.
• Alone in the Dark gives you 7 minutes (not counting any cutscenes you trigger) from the moment you get a cut that bleeds to bandage the cut before instantly killing you. It is supposed to display this timer on the HUD until you do. Completing an episode while bleeding will allow you to save, and start the next episode WITH the bleeding cut but WITHOUT the timer on the screen, which really sucks if the next episode has no bandages (which you'd be looking for if you ended up finishing the episode while bleeding in the first place). Guess why this troper died in a chapter with no enemies and no environmental damage.
• In Beatmania IIDX, some songs seem to have wider (or narrower) timing windows than other songs. on IIDX 12 Happy Sky, Gambol's Light chart had relatively loose timing windows, while the very same song's Normal chart had the same exact note placement but tighter timing windows. The console version of RED added an ANOTHER chart to Gambol, which pushed this to the point where a full combo is effectively impossible: approximately 3/59ths of a second for a "Just Great", 1/59th beyond that for a Great, and anything else a "BAD". at least they labeled the chart's difficulty appropriately enough (an "8+"). (for reference, the game runs at 59FPS) What makes this worse is that a secret code in DJ TROOPERS allows the player to use this timing window on any chart, including the Black Anothers. Ouch.
  • Also, some of the requirements for certain extra stages in the newer IIDX console games might also qualify (although figuring them out before KONAMI releases the info is more Guide Dang It! than Fake Difficulty). Take IIDX GOLD: it has two separate (but not mutually exclusive) Special Extra Stage systems in place. one requires three AA's and extra stage qualification (which is simple: FC a 5 or 6, finish with 100% Groove Guage on a 7, or clear an 8 or above), and even then, if the difficulty's sum wasn't high enough, it would restrict you to an easy chart (which prevents you from getting the One More Extra Stage). Another requires you to get a total difficulty (sum) above a certain number in SINGLE PLAYER MODE (which includes DOUBLES - the number's lower there) and extra stage qualification. getting both to trigger on the same run (required for one gallery picture) teeters right on the edge of this.
  • For that matter, the whole series lives off of Fake Difficulty. Instead of the traditional life meter round in other Rhythm Games, you have a "Groove Gauge" that doesn't fail you out if it empties. Instead, you need the gauge to be at 80% or more when you finish the song; many notecharts abuse this mechanic by having the difficulty spike at the very end of the song, which means you could have 100% one second and somewhere in the 70-78% range in the next.
  • Some Rhythm Games also do this via tempo changes, by repeatedly doubling or halving the BPM for sections of the song when the music is still at the same tempo. Fascination MAXX, Fascination -eternal love mix-, Pluto, and Pluto Relinquish from DDR and IIDX, I'm looking at you.
    • It should be noted that IIDX players get screwed over more on Pluto than DDR players because of two "stops" (where the song drops to 50BPM on IIDX) that have notes in them, and the first BPM change WILL catch you off-guard, even if you've full-combo'd the DDR chart on Challenge. God forbid if Pluto Relinquish ever shows up...
    • To be fair, if you were to use the kick drum (or whatever percussion's going on) as the rhythm, some of those BPM changes could be justified. On a side note, if the song were to be played at its original BPM, the note density would increase. Experienced players like to increase the scroll rate to decrease note density to see them better. So either way we have fake difficulty.
  • When it comes to rhythm gakes with fake difficulty, O 2 Jam is king. Firstly, there are hold notes, which require you to start and end them accurately; cue clusterfucks of hold notes, giving instruments holds of arbitrary length with no melodic significance purely to make something difficult to read and hit. Additionally, the timing windows are proportional to the BPM: The faster it gets, the less leeway you're given. So, naturally, one of the hardest charts in the game Terminal Strike has a section which speeds up until it's scrolling faster than you can possibly read, filled with unpredictable placement of notes in painful patterns (hitting the same keys at 1/10th second intervals for extended periods) and every single note is a hold. Even the computer player breaks combo on this monstrosity!
• Castlevania: Circle of the Moon 's Bonus Dungeon saps all of your MP upon entry (and keeps it drained if you attempt to use any MP-restoring items). Most likely you've been relying on DSS cards (which consume MP) to tear through the castle, so...enjoy! It wouldn't be so bad if it was just a bonus dungeon, as it's also the only place to get the last 2 DSS cards.
  • Not to mention potions can only be attained when dropped, since there is no store, but potion drops are rare.
• Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies' enemy Yellow Squadron has Story-Driven Invulnerability up until Stonehenge, which nerfs the XMAA and XLAA special weapons in the titular mission, since you can't control which targets they simultaneously lock onto and can be fired at.
• Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal faces the problem of how to turns the hordes of rather conventional Mooks they're throwing at you into something dangerous when you're a level 20+ whirlwind of death. Answer? Give each and every soldier in the enemy army, no matter how lowly, his own Long Sword +3 and Shield +3! Not that it matters much; they still go down by the hundreds and are largely there to remind you that, by this point, your character is more or less the embodiment of pain.
  • Not quite fitting the trope, since they go down as easily and you get tons of (admittedly fairly useless but expensive) loot. And it matches the pen and paper RPG, since high-level NP Cs with class levels are supposed to have proper equipment for their level. More appropriate would be the end fights, where the villain throws several groups of increasingly more powerful foes at you... and you're unable to rest and recover spells, even though there are no hostiles nearby. Laughably easy for a tanky fighter, not so much for a caster.
• Another timer related example is in both Yoshis Island DS and Wario Land The Shake Dimension, where the timer WILL NOT stop during cut scenes or text reading sequences. In the former, that's pretty bad in time trial mode, where Kamek's transformation scenes and the end boss cut scenes all count towards the time (and the message blocks actually flat out tell you this fact and laugh at you at the same time). The latter game actually has the timer keep going in the cut scenes in the FINAL BOSS BATTLE. Doesn't seem too bad, until you consider that to get a certain few unlockables, you have to actually beat every level and boss in the game under the certain time specified, and the fact The Shake King has two life bars about the length of the screen, and said One-Winged Angel final form restores his health, makes the quick battle under a certain time rather unfair. Not to even mention the missions which are, in almost all levels and all boss battles 'Don't lose any health'...
  • So, if the game mocks you on this, that means that the game knows it's not stopping the timer. So, if they were to make the clock not move, they'd just lower the time you have. Fake difficulty or the above troper just wanting to bitch and moan?
• In the game "Grand Chase" some bosses are easy enough to deal with, but some have Orc Warriors to help them...like up to 3 or five. And considering how difficult they are to kill along with the amount of damage the boss himself packs, it's not really a fair fight unless you have a party...and even then it's not enough.
  • In some of the harder difficulties in the normal mode, some enemies will also have statuses like freezing (the enemy's attack freezes you), petrification, arrow defense, recover and some others and since each enemy can have a total of three... In Challenge mode, every single enemy has three statuses, including the boss.
• Many Nintendo Hard games like Zelda 2, Ninja Gaiden, etc. have enemies that will chase the player on sight and will continue to do so unless the player kills the enemy or escapes fast enough to scroll the enemy off screen. Naturally, the chasing enemies will cause knock back to the player, but will still continue to follow the player, even to the point where they will overlap their sprite on the player's sprite and hover over the player! This can be extremely hair pulling when you combine this with pits, death traps, or other enemies and have very little room to escape. Mercy Invinciblity may kick in, but it won't stop enemy chasers from parking themselves on the player.
• The final battle in Omicron The Nomad Soul for the PC requires 3 hands. And you may not change the controls. You need a joystick to move, a keyboard to strafe, AND a mouse to aim. -_-

• The first 2 Metal Gear Solid games greatly exaggerate scope sway on sniper rifles. During the first duel with Sniper Wolf. Snake is firing an H&K PSG1 from a prone position. This is a purpose built sniper rifle designed to be as stable as hell being wielded by a trained spec ops agent yet Snake can't keep the sights on target to literally save his life. While diazepam is available, the effect of the drug is minimized to a ridiculous extent, having an influence lasting seconds while the real world drug has an effect measured in hours. For the second duel with Sniper Wolf I dropped her with Nikitas because I was so frustrated. Expect a similar experience in Metal Gear Solid 2's sniping Escort Mission.
  • It slowly drains health, but smoking a cigarette will steady Snake's aim for much longer than diazepam.
  • Later games thankfully tie it to Snake's stamina gauge, so you can snipe properly as long as you're at full stamina.
• An interesting inverted example is the Updated Re-release of the original Final Fantasy. As interface upgrades made the game easier (thus removing what we would now call Fake Difficulty in the original), the makers had to add some "real" difficulty (read: make enemies tougher) to compensate.
• A recent and widespread complaint about Star Wars The Force Unleashed involves a scene hyped up fully by the game's trailer video. The main character pulls down a Star Destroyer and crashes it into a planet with the awesome power of the Force. Sounds cool right? Not since the controls are represented by on-screen keypress prompts, and most of these on-screen prompts are dead wrong. The game simply won't tell you how to use the controls properly to continue. And to boot, there are timed waves of TIE fighters that continuously (and infinitely) respawn to attack you, despite the entire Expanded Universe, in-game literature, and the laws of reality themselves telling you that Star Destroyers would only have a limited compliment of TIEs. Many players have reported being entirely unable to complete this. (This specific troper returned his game to the rental store because of an inability to get past the controls for this stage in three hours.)
  • Oh, that's simple. Basically, you can pull the Destroyer any which way, and it'll crash eventually. (Kind of like the inverse for getting out of a forest you're lost in: go in any one direction long enough and you'll escape.) Almost like it has an invisible healthbar that depletes slowly while you are gripping it. And the TI Es are easy too - hide behind the pillar, jump up and zap them.
• Even with as much real difficulty as Final Fantasy XI can have, it still sometimes resorts to this:
  • The Stalking Mission quest "All By Myself" would be hard enough if you weren't arbitrarily restricted to level 10 for the duration. It's worth noting that this is lower than the lowest boss fight level caps.
  • The infamous Pandemonium Warden had enough real difficulty to cause a media backlash. To even attempt to fight it, you must defeat three other monsters, each of which are at the top of pyramids of other boss fights. So far, so good. Then they decided that to help further "set apart" PW, they would make the drop rates of the items you need from these monsters very low, on the order of less than 20%. That's less than a 1% chance of getting all three on the first try. As if that weren't bad enough, when the media outcry against the original PW being so unbeatable that it was fought for 18 hours straight after which the players gave up for health reasons, they decided to go in entirely the other direction by making PW slightly less difficult, but arbitrarily vanish after a mere two hours... in a game where two hours tends to be the minimum time investment for most activities to begin with, thus elevating the move beyond the realm of reasonable Anti Poop-Socking.
• The simple fact that Super Mario World won't let you bring Yoshi into the castles, fortresses or ghost houses... The hardest levels of the game, made arbitrarily harder by refusing to admit your dinosaur companion. Though players of ROM Hacks (if not necessarily the creators) can discover the hard way another reason why Yoshi isn't allowed in these levels: to avoid gruesome sprite glitches (which probably wouldn't happen if the programmers had planned for that eventuality, but never mind...).
• By far the most barbaric use of fake difficulty I have seen in a game is the Canary Mary Race in Banjo Tooie. On the final stage, you encounter a character you raced earlier in the game, who was relatively easy to beat simply by tapping the A button. However, in this race, you only have the slimmest chance of winning if you stay right behind her during the entire race and then mash buttons on the home stretch, defying everything you've ever known about racing. The official player's guide doesn't even reveal the true way to win, so this isn't so kind as to be considered a Guide Dang It! moment.
• Golden Eye 007, although ahead of its time, had its share of Fake Difficulty gripes, most evident on 00 agent difficulty. Examples: the Interface Screw where you are knocked backwards and your aim is disrupted by enemy bullets, and Trial-and-Error Gameplay moments where "jack in the box" enemies spawn behind your back while you're taking on a group of enemies in front of you, one of this troper's pet peeves. The worst example is in the Control level, where you have to protect Natalya from the infinitely respawning enemies breaking through the glass walls.
  • In the programming, it's made so the enemys forget what a door does (stops them) when you have your back to them. If you close a door and they aren't allow (due to the game's programming) to open it, if you face away from them, they slide through it.
• Mega Man examples:
  • The classic series and all the later 2D platformers are replete with spikes, bottomless pits, and other one-hit-kills. Even in such company, there's a special place in Hell for Mega Man 8's jetboard sequence at the start of Wily's fortress.
  • Rescuable Reploids in Mega Man X6 and X7. The moment one of them is loaded, it's vulnerable to enemy attacks, even if you're way too far off to help. A dead Reploid is Lost Forever; you have to reset to try again. Capcom loves to put them next to time bombs, giant enemies, and such. And all the good powerups come from saving these bastards. The only real way to guarantee success is to go into a stage, rescue one Reploid, kill yourself off, and save... then repeat 127 times.
  • In fact, Mega Man X6 in general. If you don't have the patience for Reploids, you can still get through X7 easily enough. But almost every stage in X6 has something unavoidable that's equally obnoxious, like autoscrolling sections, near-impossible jumps, crushing hazards, blind platforming....
  • Any time you're forced to use an Extra folder in the Mega Man Battle Network games, because these unmodifable folders are absolutely 100% suck (on purpose).
  • Mega Man Battle Network 5. The challenge of 100 warriors. Unavoidable minigame with awkward controls and zero margin for error. This is not what I signed up for, Capcom.
  • In Mega Man 2, the Turret boss in Wily's Fortress has five Turrets to destroy, three destructible walls you need to destroy (they block a Turret,) and two walls you can ignore. Each takes one Crash Bomb to destroy. Doesn't sound too bad, right? But you only have seven Crash Bombs. So you have to do some crazy jumps and land your bombs very carefully, and hit multiple targets with one bomb at least once.
    • Supposedly, if you die on the Turret boss, whatever you killed or blew up stays that way. So you can expend your seven, die and respawn, farm until you refill your Crash Bomb meter (groan), and re-enter and finish the job. (Source: my friend, who had done it this way for years, until I showed him a speedrun that featured the two-walls-with-one-bomb trick.) Furthermore, there was an exploit where, if you hammered the Start button, the Turrets' shots would just pass through you. (Crazy subversions going on here: even the fake difficulty was fake!)
• F Zero GX is an extremely difficult but scrupulously fair game. Except for Story Mode, which feels like the developers filled it to the brim with as much Fake Difficulty as possible. You're required to drive the Blue Falcon (hope you're good with its playstyle!), the courses come loaded with unpredictable hazards, and the AI vehicle statistics are boosted beyond the bounds of all reason. The confluence of all of these tendencies occurs in Story Mode Chapter Seven, which is famously very, very hard, and not for good reasons.
  • Not to mention the AI drivers focus on you and damned be all else. As this troper's brother once said, "The other racers are crashing into me on purpose! Why would any sane driver do that?!"
    • Justified, as Captain Falcon IS on everyone's death list for winning the last Grand Prix (as Samurai Goroh points out) and possibly because everyone wants to be on Smash Bros. and he took the winning spot once again.
• Jak II is a great example of this trope. This game introduced guns to the series which aim automatically, but they only do this when you're a certain distance from the enemy, which is somewhat less than the distance the enemy has to be to accurately fire at you. You can't directly control the guns besides moving towards the enemy, and you can't aim in first person, in addition to the fact that this game is filled TO THE BRIM with Goddamn Bats and Demonic Spiders. And don't get me started on the missions that require you to drive a hover vehicle (which is most of them).
  • The Jak X race in which someone sabotages your car's weapons systems is equally annoying. As an additional perk, if you pick up a missile launcher, you'll spend the entire race being distracted by the distinct sound of the rockets locking on, even though they can't be fired.
• Mirror's Edge decides midway through the game, that instead of giving the player legitimately hard puzzles, and full-of-action situations, they just stick you in a room with a bunch of SWAT guys. This would be fine, unless you remember that Faith is not a fighter, and combat is frustrating.
  • Assassin's Creed does the same thing.
• Resistance 2 Has certain enemies programmed to specifically go after you, while this makes some sense when with Redshirts, as the main character is infected by the Chimera and probably very high and their hit-list after his actions in the first game. When with other Chimeran-infected allies this starts to fall apart as enemies ignore the Super-Soldier mowing them down with a minigun and go straight after you.
• One of this troper's major pet peeves in First-Person Shooter games is "jack in the box" enemy spawns, where enemies are scripted to "teleport" in out of sight, sometimes behind and in front of you at the same time, after crossing a certain line, or via a timer(often used with infinite Respawning Enemies, as in Call Of Duty). Leads to many "learn by dying" situations. In some games like Halo, enemy types and ranks(ie blue or red Elites) will be randomly grouped, adding a Luck-Based Mission element.
• Devil May Cry 4's Hell or Hell mode. It's basically Heaven or Hell mode (in which everything dies in one hit, including you), except it doesn't count enemies or bosses (leaving just you) to be susceptible to a one hit kill.
  • Adding in a totally optional mode that's difficult? Man, that's just the devs being DICKS. Oh, wait.
• In Dragon Quest VII, Maribel is the obvious choice to set up as healer, as she naturally learns a few offensive spells, so it rounds out her spell list. She, of course, leaves the party without warning before one of the hardest bosses in the game, just to screw you over if you didn't make absolutely sure to have more than one healer.
• In Digital Devil Saga, once again, it provides you with an obvious choice for healer... then forcibly removes her from the party during a difficult segment.
• In the campaign mode of StarCraft, you follow a logical progression of being limited to basic units in early missions and gradually accessing higher-end units in later missions. (This makes sense in both the game world and the meta level, as it allows a player to gradually find the strengths and weaknesses of a growing number of units, while yo uas a commander would become more trusted by your superiors with the expensive stuff.) However, some missions in the Brood War expansion pack undermine this progression by randomly denying you the use of units (usually offensive air units) you were able to use in previous levels. Some of these instances are bearable or even understandable, like one Protoss mission that could be considered a subversion of the game's ordinarily Easy Logistics, and a later Protoss mission that disallows certain units for plotline reasons. But aside from "the pylon clusters are generating an electromagnetic field that's preventing our fliers from maneuvering," there's no excuse but Fake Difficulty for a Zerg mission that denies you the use of offensive air units and makes the mission far harder than it would be under normal circumstances. This would be justifiable under the hand-wave, except that your non-attacking air units (Queens and Overlords) are completely unaffected.
  • Unaffected with one notable exception. For completely arbitrary reasons, you can't develop the Overlord transportation ability that would allow you to ferry ground units to an enemy base on an impregnable plateau. The premise of the scenario involves attacking five smaller bases surrounding the unassailable central base; since they couldn't make a base "invincible" under normal game mechanics, they resorted to cheap and arbitrary limitations.
    • To damn it further, it is possible to make a base invincible using the game mechanics. In the Campaign editor, any placed unit or building can be given an "invincible" flag that makes them untargetable and immune to all damage. Curse you, Blizzard!!!
    • For this troper, this limitation wasn't annoying at all; in his opinion, it's much more efficient - for Zerg - to swarm the enemy with land units, and it also appeals in the multiplayer games (for every race). The only thing that is only mildly troubling is that sometimes your units don't have a lot of room to maneuver in.
    • Used depressingly well in the final Terran mission for Brood War, in which you have to bring Medics to beacons near the new Overmind. Unfortunately for you, you have to take out Zerg Cerebrates that are making all the sunken colony turrets invincible. Just for fun, they let you start out with several hapless Marines in bunkers...which are then disassembled by sunken colonies that you can't even hurt. Oh, and a Torrasque [[Warhammer40000 Carnifexes]] Ultralisk with twice the health of normal Ultralisks is rampaging around stomping your units...and reincarnating every time it's killed.
• In the calculator game SQRXZ, there are tiles called 'spike traps' that look ordinary up until you step on them. Then, the tiles reveal themselves as spike traps, trigger, and cost you a life. This isn't normally Fake Difficulty, but for some levels (usually where the level authors have overused them) it is.
• In Deus Ex the Sniper Rifle has a wobble imposed on your controls, which can't be controlled or compensated for. The wobble deceases with skill level, so in that sense, it is in accord with the game's reality. The patternless jiggle, however, feels fake.
• Space Puzzle Bobble, a previously Japan-only Nintendo DS installment of the series, makes changes that weren't done in Puzzle Bobble DS (a Japan-only game). These changes make gameplay, especially near the end of the story mode, worse:
  • Bowling balls don't rebound off the sides anymore. They pop.
  • Filler blocks imprinted with Chackn Pop on them make you lose if they go over the bottom line. They used to fall off.
  • The nodes (on which the bubbles are held onto) will make you lose if they go over the line alone.
  • When you continue, instead of restarting the stage where you lost like in older games in the Puzzle Bobble series, you have to start from the first of the group of five levels per stage all over again. Now can you say Ruined FOREVER?
• Disgaea has the Dark Assembly, a group of demons who for some reason has utter control over everything you do. Their support is pretty much determined randomly (high rank/level can influcence it), but so is their vote. In other words, anyone short of "Total support" can still vote no. This can lead to absolutely ridiculous situations where the entire assembly "Strongly supports" your proposal, but they vote no anyway.
  • Though as an example of fake easiness, the assembly are also programmed to randomly love random bribe items, meaning you can keep stocking up on incredibly cheap healing items, and simply cycle through the senators until you find one who "must have" your ABC Gum. Consequentially, it's time-consuming but easy to bribe the entire Dark Assembly into falling head over heels for you.

• Yggdra Union keeps track of long-term unit health in the form of Morale. Morale is only ever recovered by sacrificing the same items you'd usually use for stat boosts. Fair enough so far. Another gameplay mechanic is cannons - if you entered a certain area, you'd take a percentage of morale damage at the start of each turn until you completed the objective that took out the cannon operator. Still a fair tactical challenge. Except at later stages of the game, where every one of your precious few remaining items count, at which point one battlefield traps you completely in range of an enemy cannon that will reduce your entire army's morale to about 25% of its starting value of five turns, AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The enemies are invincible, map design renders it impossible to reach the cannon operator, and you loose a tactically valuable ally in the story event that allows you to move on. The entire level is quite blatantly put there to rob you of valuable resources.
• In Empire Earth, the computer doesn't actually have to gather resources, and it seems to build one of the most difficult enemies (crossbows) in the game in a fourth of the time that it takes for the player to.
• Ants in the later levels of Bugdom return from the dead as invulnerable ghosts.
• When it was realized by the developers of Monster Hunter that some monsters like Plesioth and Gravios are simply too enormous for a few of their attacks to even hit the player, they extended those attacks' hitboxes all the way to the ground with no visual change. It doesn't help that these attacks can take off more than half the player's health.
• C&C Renegade has an enemy Apache helicopter attack you. When you look up, it quickly moves behind you; and when you turn, it quickly moves behind you again, while still maintaining perfect accuracy.
• Arguably, PC Roguelikes, due to their often insane and unintuitive control schemes (Net Hack has four keys to deal with equipment instead of a single nested menu, for example), and your character's complete lack of knowledge regarding, well, anything (you'd expect a wizard to identify at least some of the potions without using a scroll or drinking them, and a cleric should be able to detect curses/blessings).
  • The Priest class does have the ability to detect curses and blessings. However, item identification is a major part of the game, so Priests are severely limited in their choice of weapons and attack spells.
  • The Final Fantasy Fables/Chocobo's Dungeon series, like many "mystery dungeon" games, is a Roguelike Lite game that eschews much of the arbitrary difficulty which some Roguelike purists consider a major part of the genre. However, it makes up for it with some of its optional side dungeons, dungeons that not only bar you from bringing any items inside but also impose special restrictions, such as a dungeon where everything is so dark that at best can barely see anything that's not adjacent to you or one where any attack is an automatic One-Hit Kill. Then there is one side dungeon that does both, and includes monsters that are twice as fast as you, so you can be automatically killed by a completely undetectable enemy running in from outside your view area and attacking before you have a chance to react. Fun!
• The 7th Saga. A bug in the US and EU versions results in smaller stat bonuses upon level up. The enemies, including bosses that scale to your level, were not rebalanced accordingly.
  • Additionally, if your main character is Esuna or Lux, you'll have to take a ferry to the northern continent, where monsters are 7-8 levels above where you're supposed to be. Running is nigh impossible against enemies with higher speed than yours.
• In Captain Comic 2, be very careful with how you use your jetpack. Fuel is limited, you can accidentally waste fuel switching between your items, and you're not reimbursed any when you die. You need the jetpack to beat the game, of course.
• The Dark Id recently did a Let's Play of Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus. He grilled the game on pretty much everything: its clunky control that practically requires an auto-aim that seems to work against you; arbitrary cutoff distance for firearms; crack-shot snipers that show up by the score and hide in the background (he actually calls it a Pixel Hunt to find them); hidden items for 100% Completion that you don't know about until you run across the third of four, and you can't backtrack for the other two; "Stage Missions" to do things like babysit suicidal NPCs that will usually die before you can act; random invisible walls and arbitrary Insurmountable Waist High Fences that Vincent has no problem with in the interminably long-winded cutscenes; and the recurring "Bulls**t shield" that makes enemies (usually with identical character models to generic mooks) immune to Vincent's only halfway-decent attack, forcing you to weather a hail of gunfire to get close enough to slap them. And that's just for game design; he curses the name Tetsuya Nomura for his ridiculous character designs and the game developers in general for disrespecting Final Fantasy VII's plot and writing a narrative for this one with plot holes big enough to drop in Meteor.