Easier Than Easy

For when Easy mode is still too hard.

"If you have a bucket that holds two gallons, and another bucket that holds five gallons, how many buckets do you have?"

— Idiocracy

The Easier Than Easy mode is a Difficulty Level where, for a typical player, failure is highly unlikely, unless if you attempt to do so, but even then, failure is hard to accomplish. For the most part, such levels are there to allow younger children (ages 3 to 5, mostly), those with disabilities, your grandmother, and the rather uncoordinated to play and enjoy the game. It can also allow a casual gamer to get really casual and play just for the fun of it, since there's little risk involved.

For some gamers, the Easier Than Easy mode is a good thing, because it allows newcomers to learn the game without having to face the frustration of the higher difficulties. As the argument goes, not many people enjoy starting out on the "Absolute Futility" setting. Some narrative-heavy games will give this setting a name along the lines of "Storyteller" or "Narrative Mode" (see Story Difficulty Setting), emphasizing how it's suitable for those who want to enjoy the story without the frustrations of challenging gameplay, which also helps to ease the stigma associated with playing on this difficulty level. And others make up an original name instead.

For other gamers, making a game easy is the darkest form of video game heresy, regardless of who you are doing it for, even if they themselves never have to pay any attention to the existence of such an option, much less use it.

Just because a difficulty level like this exists in a game, however, doesn't mean that the game is guaranteed to be effortless on this difficulty. Notoriously hard games can still pose quite the challenge even on "easiest"/"very easy" difficulties. This trope is about the labeling, not the degree of difficulty.

Depending on the developers, they can pull an Easy-Mode Mockery by cutting down features on it, or add a plethora of Anti-Frustration Features to avert that trope.

Compare Mercy Mode, Sequel Difficulty Drop, Sandbox Mode.

Contrast Nintendo Hard, Harder Than Hard, Sequel Difficulty Spike, Surprise Difficulty, Rank Inflation, Brutal Bonus Level, Final Death Mode.

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Examples:

Action-Adventure

• The console version of Alien Hominid has TS ("Thumbsucker") mode, in addition to Easy, Normal, and Hard. You get infinite lives and grenades but if you beat the first three levels you're presented with a screen of your character in a diaper, admonishing you to grow up and play like an adult.
• Astral Chain has three difficulty levels: Casual, Platinum Standard, and Platinum Ultimate. Casual has an optional "Unchained" options menu that serves as an adjustable version of this trope, allowing the player to enable features such as automatic Action Commands and infinite uses of the defibrilator.
• The Sailor Moon beat-em-up Sailor Moon R has a mode where you play as Tagalong Kid Chibi-Usa. Enemy variety is way down, and she's so short that every attack just goes right over her head. Think Oddjob in GoldenEye in a beat-em-up setting.
• Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 – Enter: Electro for the PS1 both have a "kid mode", which not only makes combat easier, but also changes the level design, puzzles and controls (for example, on other difficulties, the player can web swing by pressing X and R2; On Kid Mode, all you have to do is press X twice).
• ToeJam & Earl 2 had Li'l Kids Mode, which only lasted five (out of about 17) levels, gave you invincibility, and had a different, shorter, celebration for winning.
• The easiest mode in The Wonderful 101 is Very Easy mode, where quick time events are still completed even if you fail them.

Eastern RPG

• FateExtra CCC allows the player to use Gilgamesh as their Servant. In the Fate Series works prior to the game, Gilgamesh was stated to be the most powerful Servant who could be summoned, his only defeats occuring because his arrogance was holding him back, and even then he was still almost invincible. So he is just as overpowered as you would expect. The developers stated that they considered using Gilgamesh to be cheating, to the point that using him is actually called "Cheat mode."
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III adds the "Very Easy" mode for players who just want to enjoy the story. This also allows players to just breeze through the game and almost instantly breaking the Break Meter bosses and mooks have.
• Persona 3 Portable gives us Beginner mode, which further nerfs enemy attacks and gives you thirty continues. This mode is ridiculously easy, and you'll probably only need about five of those continues.
• Persona 4 Golden takes this even further with Very Easy mode. The amount of XP you're given for enemies ensure you'll outlevel enemies throughout the game without grinding. Encounters with the rare Hand enemies in particular give absurd rewards. If you encounter two at a time and manage to kill them both, you and your party members can easily gain two to four levels at once.
• Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth has Safety mode, literally described by the game as "even easier than Easy", which besides having extremely low difficulty in general allows the party to immediately restart a battle with no penalty upon losing.
• Persona 5 has Safety mode for its easiest option, making most enemy attacks or elemental weaknesses not cause too much harm to the party members. This is also the only difficulty mode you cannot change mid-game.
• Science Girls!: After complaints that the initial release was Nintendo Hard, an update made the original difficulty, "Graduate", and added two, progressively easier difficulty levels: "Standard", which adjusted the amounts of damage done to make things a bit easier, and "Elementary", which is "Standard", but it refills your health at the end of every battle as well as adding a Gradual Regeneration-style of Regenerating Health, during combat.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse already has an established "easy" mode, Skirmish, but free DLC allows you to unlock Paradise difficulty, which is even lower than Skirmish.
• The HD Remaster of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne adds a Merciful difficulty (when the original had only Normal and Hard) which greatly tips the combat so much in the player's favor that you could blindly auto-battle some of the most infamous bosses and still win!
• Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE: At the start of the game you can only choose three difficulties, the standard Easy to Hard. Die on Easy mode and the game gives you the even easier Friendly mode, which offers you more EXP for defeating enemies, who are nerfed. It's still easy to die though, especially to Savage Enemy Encounters, due to the combat's Rocket-Tag Gameplay.
• Picnic difficulty in Untold 2: The Fafnir Knight. While other games in the series do have their own "easy" difficulty, none are as easy as this entry. The game might as well be playing itself with how much damage everything takes and how little your party receives. In this mode, the game only starts to become difficult when you reach the 6th Stratum, and by extension, the DLC 31st floor with its own challenging superboss.
• Zanki Zero: Setting the difficulty to "1" removes every enemy and traps from dungeons, prevents status aliments from ever occurring, characters don't take any damage, bosses go down in two hits, and a marker is placed on dungeon maps to show players where to go next.

Fighting Game

• Battle Arena Toshinden 3 has, below "Very Easy", the "Stress Relief" difficulty.
• One Must Fall 2097 has 'Punching Bag' below 'Rookie' on its difficulty setting. 'Veteran' is the default normal setting.
• Skullgirls has a "Sleepwalk" mode.
• Streets of Rage 2 has a "Very Easy" mode, unlockable through a code. Which, ironically, is obtained by beating the game on the Hardest difficulty.
• The first two Super Smash Bros. games have a "Very Easy" difficulty below Easy. On this mode, enemies will almost never attack you, and will die in one or two Smash attacks.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate gave a Very Easy mode to World of Light in the 4.0 update. An episode of Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games revealed this was partially due to the AI for unlocking characters becoming too hard for casual players.

First-Person Shooter

• It was possible to run Doom with a parameter that prevented monsters from spawning, allowing the player to explore the levels without having to fight. However, some levels require you to kill specific monsters, and since they won't spawn with that parameter that makes them unwinnable (the final level of the second game is interesting in that, while the thing that lets you hurt the boss won't spawn, the one that spawns other monsters still functions, making it a sort of Bolivian Army Ending).
  • The Brutal Doom Game Mod has the Power Fantasy difficulty, which increases the enemy count to the same number as vanilla Doom's two hardest difficulties, but reduces the damage the player takes by 70%, ^note By contrast, vanilla Doom's easiest difficult reduces damage taken by 50%, allowing the player to basically mow down hoards of monsters with minimal effort. The difficulty description describes it as being made for game journalists, a Take That! at the infamously awful showcase of Doom (2016) by Polygon.
• In Duke Nukem 3D, according to what appears in the saved games menu, the Easy "piece of cake" mode was numbered "1". With the DNSKILLn cheat code which set the difficulty to n−1, it was possible to set the difficulty to 0 and even -1, the latter having no enemies at all (though it also made the final level of each Episode unwinnable, since victory is triggered by killing the boss).
• In somewhat a jarring contrast compared to harder levels, the "Daydream" difficulty level in Painkiller has most if not all of the monsters deal damage of a single hitpoint.
• The Serious Sam games have the "Tourist" difficulty mode. The actual Easy mode already doubles your maximum health and armor, lets you carry more ammo, and makes you immune to your own rockets' splash damage. Tourist mode takes all that and makes your health slowly regenerate when not full.

Maze Game

• The Atari 8-Bit Computers cartridge versions of Dig Dug and Ms. Pac-Man have a "teddy bear" level, in which the action starts slower than normal. Many Atari 2600 games also had a "teddy bear" level, though whether it was Easier Than Easy or just Easy varied from game to game. Some games even had two-bear and three-bear levels for variations that were still easier than normal, but not as easy as the one-bear level.
• Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man for Atari home consoles (2600, 5200 and 7800) let you choose the number of ghosts, up to 4. Unsurprisingly, it's pretty easy with one ghost.

Platformer

• Donkey Kong Country Returns: The game continues the "Super Guide" tradition from New Super Mario Bros. Wii with a silver gorilla known as "Super Kong" optionally taking over for the player. You don't get to keep any items collected. The Super Guide is implemented to make up for the game being actually very difficult.
• Freedom Planet has a Casual difficulty that's below Easy. Not only do your characters take very little damage, your health slowly regenerates. In a platform game with almost a complete lack of Bottomless Pits, it makes the entire game a cakewalk.
  • Health also regenerates on Easy, albeit much slower. Perhaps a more notable difference is that Casual mode reduces most enemy attacks to Scratch Damage, whereas starting from Easy and above, they vary in power; particularly potent enemies or boss abilities may shave off half the life bar or more.
• Grey Area (2023): The "Relaxed" difficulty setting not only gives you three starting health points (rather than two or one like the other options), it also lets Hailey do a Double Jump, making the game's platforming much easier.
• Mega Man Zero:
  • The games have "Ultimate Mode", which starts you off with every single upgrade in the game from the beginning, making death nearly impossible. It entails a Gotta Catch Them All-style prerequisite (cyber-elves in the first two, in addition to fully upgrading and using them, secret disks in the third, and finally, enemy parts in the fourth), but by the time you've gotten all the needed parts and unlocked Ultimate Mode, you've pretty much proven that you don't need it, making it relatively pointless.
  • The Updated Re-release has "Easy Mission Mode", which is Ultimate Mode applied from the start in addition to playing each game in order, back-to-back, on one save file. And it actually unlocks one-fifth of the E-reader bonuses from Zero 3. Nice for a warmup or to get used to the new controls (and find a good setup), but otherwise is Ultimate Mode with zero initial effort.
• Mega Man 11 has Newcomer mode, the easiest of the four difficulty settings, which is identical to Casual (easy) mode but additionally provides the player with infinite extra lives, infinite Shock Guards (can't die to Spikes of Doom), and infinite Beat Calls (can't die to Bottomless Pits).
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii has the "Super Guide", which is, essentially, an optional Walk Through starring Luigi built into the game for people who have trouble playing it. The mode doesn't unlock until you die eight times in a single level and Star Coins cannot be collected in this mode. You also can't save. Worse, even seeing the block that activates it will prevent you from getting the glittering stars on your save file, permanently.
• Rabi-Ribi has Casual Mode for its Novice Mode. Novice Mode and below stops boss levels at level 49, and Normal Mode and below gives you an option for a general stat increase buff if you keep dying at a boss.
• Super Mario Galaxy 2 has the "Cosmic Guide": if you die too many times, you can talk to the Cosmic Spirit (who looks like Rosalina), who will take control of Mario and complete the level for him. You can interrupt it at any time, but you'll only get a Bronze Star at the end of the level, which doesn't count towards the crown obtained for collecting all the stars. To get the Power Star instead, you'll have to complete the entire level by yourself.
• Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is already not a difficult game (final stage excepted), but there's a semi-hidden mode that gives the player more power-ups and removes several enemies and hazards to take things from "not very hard" to "utter cakewalk".
• Yoshi's Woolly World features Mellow Mode which gives Yoshi wings, effectively giving him an endless jump as well as making enemies do less damage. The Updated Re Release for Nintendo 3DS adds Poochy pups to Mellow mode which can take out an enemy if they are thrown at one as well as automatically sniffing out all treasures.

Puzzle Games

• Kids' Tetris has a mode in which all of the pieces have only two blocks. And you don't even have to match colors.

Racing Games

• Forza has a variety of easy mode concessions, including line indication and automatic braking. Probably the most infamous, however, is the ability to rewind time, on any difficulty, without limit or penalty.
• The Nintendo Switch version of Mario Kart 8 adds optional "auto-steering" and "auto-acceleration" features that prevent you from falling off the course and moves the kart forward without having to bother with the button, respectively.
• The Japan-only Expansion Pack of SCUD Race, SCUD Race Plus, has a "Super Beginner" course that take place in a house, with your car reduced to the size of a toy car. Your opponents in this course, rather than being the usual supercars, are toys. And on the back straightaway, you get to play a little bowling Mini-Game where you crash your car into a set of 10 pins.
• The old Apogee shareware Mario Kart clone Wacky Wheels has Kid Mode. The computer handles the throttle, so all you have to do is steer!

Real-Time Strategy

• In "Easiest" mode in Age of Empires II, it's not impossible to lose, but you have to be very new to the game to lose in it, especially in non-campaign games. The AI is stupider: it advances slower, produces fewer units, and resigns after less provocation. It also never advanced in Age on its own, always waiting for the human player to do it first. This allows players to take longer getting used to the game without having to worry about the AI getting its hands on high-tech units that would crush them.

Rhythm Game

• Dance Central introduced the "Beginner" difficulty level in the third installment. While the "Easy" level difficulty normally gives players ~10 moves to perform, "Beginner" gives them three.
• DanceDanceRevolution:
  • The first three games have Easy/Soft Mode, which offers simplified stepcharts for every song, and makes it so the player cannot fail even if the dance meter runs out. In exchange, you only get to play one song, no matter how much the arcade operator sets the stage limit. The SuperNova games feature "Tutorial", which starts out with a video tutorial of the game, before allowing you to play a single song on Beginner difficulty. X2 and X3 vs 2ndMix have "Happy Mode", which offer a restricted tracklist of 35 songs, available only on Beginner and Basic, but you can play through your entire credit instead of being limited to one song.
  • Extreme introduces a proper Beginner difficulty, which can be toggled from the other difficulties instead of being relegated into a separate mode. Draining your dance meter does not end the game in Beginner difficulty until the end of the song, and if it is your first song, you still get to continue. Until the difficulty recalibration in X, Beginner stepcharts are rated by their BPM, not overall difficulty (one-foot for everything below 180 BPM, two-foot for 180-299 BPM, three-foot for 300-399 BPM, and four-foot for 400 BPM onwards). Extreme also shows a character performing the steps instead of a video in the background, albeit in a misleading form,^note Infamously, it always shows the character moving their foot back to the center after each step, which is counterintuitive and not the proper way to play the game in higher difficulties. which is why it is dropped from SuperNova onwards.
  • In later games, the higher-tiered boss songs have Beginner charts that are only easy in comparison to the rest of the song's difficulties, making them Boss in Mook Clothing. "Valkyrie dimension", for example, notoriously has a "Beginner" stepchart that, among other things, incorporates 8th streams and crossovers, and is rated 9 (meaning it's harder than some songs' Expert charts). It is definitely not to be played by actual beginners.
• DJMAX Portable Clazziquai Edition offers a two-button mode in which you only use two buttons and the analog nub, as opposed to four in the next easiest setting (four buttons).
• DJMAX Technika's Lite Mode originally had four lanes of notes. A Platinum Crew update reduces it to 3 lanes of larger notes. Ironically, those used to harder modes tend to get thrown off by 3-late Lite due to the larger notes resulting in some spatial screwiness.
• Friday Night Funkin' mods that utilize the now discontinued Mic'd Up engine, such as V.S. A.G.O.T.I., have a Noob difficulty below Easy, which despite its mocking name does indeed make the charts even simpler.
• Guitar Hero: World Tour and every game in the series subsequently released have a "Beginner Mode", where as long as you hit any button at all at the right time, you succeed. The penalties for missing notes are also reduced; you can win with an average of 13% of notes hit on Guitar. It is technically possible to fail, but only if you wait through half of the song without touching the controller.
  • The DJMAX series from DJMAX Portable Black Square onwards has this feature...in ALL modes, with no way to turn it off (allegedly in order to avoid legal troubles with Konami). You get full percentage and 80% of the points for a note for hitting the wrong button at the right time.
  • As singing works differently from the instruments, Beginner mode when singing is even easier: the pitch does not matter at all and you get full points as long as the microphone detects any sound. A favorite trick is to place the microphone in front of a fan to get an automatic 100% on any song.
  • The DJ Hero games also have the same Beginner mode, but they somehow managed to make the game even easier than Guitar Hero. It is not possible to fail in any difficulty in this game, but the Beginner mode does Guitar Hero one better and stretches the timing windows. Not only can you hit any button for any note, you can also do it way out of rhythm and still have it count.
• In the Groove has Novice mode, where not only are the charts very simple, but the arrows are also forced to a locked constant speed, so new players aren't exposed to confusing tempo changes and stops.
• pop'n music has Enjoy mode, which has specialized charts for beginners. Within Enjoy mode are its own "Normal" and "Hard" sub-modes, though the latter's charts are still nothing compared to what lies in Hyper and Expert charts. However, the game won't show your score, and you cannot use any modifiers such as Hi-Speed.
• Rock Band:
  • Rock Band 2 has No Failure Mode, in case you find Easy mode too hard. In The Beatles: Rock Band and Lego Rock Band, it's automatically activated if you play on Easy. Rock Band 3 makes No Fail Mode more convenient to turn on and allows records to be kept with it on.
  • Lego Rock Band has Super Easy. Guitarists and bassists only have to strum, drummers don't have to worry about which drum they're hitting, and singers just have to produce sound. The developers have stated this was for the little kids who want to join their older siblings in the game, but aren't much for timing yet.
• Tap Tap Revenge Kids has a Very Easy mode that most people use to just listen to the songs rather than play the game.
• Um Jammer Lammy had an Easy Mode that plays like the Guitar Hero example. As long as you do something at the right time, you're doing it right.

Roguelike Games

• DRL features the "I'm too young to die" difficulty. Way less monsters who are less aggressive, less accurate and yield more experience, randomly generated ammunition is doubled, as well healing effects and power-up duration. On the other hand, some of the tougher special levels are disabled, and you can't play any Angel challenge on this difficulty.
• Dungeon of the Endless has two difficulty modes: Easy, and Too Easy. This being a Rogue Like, "Easy" is actually Nintendo Hard, with "Too Easy" being a more normal difficulty.

Shoot 'Em Up

• DoDonPachi: Dai Ou Jou has "No Bullet" mode, in which enemies don't fire at all. Its purpose is to allow players to learn enemy placements, which is important in scoring combos, or for pure leisure, delivering a satisfying Curb-Stomp Battle after being tormented by rains of bullets over and over again.
• It's possible to set Ikaruga to give yourself infinite lives, in a game where losing a life instantly respawns you in the location you died. At that point, it's less a test of completing the game and more completing it while dying less than a hundred times.
• The Xbox 360 port of Mushihime Sama Futari brings us Novice Mode, which is an easy version of the already-easy Arrange Mode. In fact, Novice Ultra (yes, there's an easy version of the game's Harder Than Hard setting) is easier than Ver 1.5's Original mode. In an aversion of It's Easy, So It Sucks!, Novice Ultra is actually popular amongst players.
• The console ports of Radiant Silvergun have a Very Easy difficulty. It is very easy...relatively speaking. Enemy attacks are still no slouch on this difficulty, especially the ones not based on bullets.
• Raiden series:
  • Raiden Fighters Aces has Easy...then Very Easy...then Practice. None of these difficulty modes can be used in the Xbox Live mode.
  • Recent games such as Raiden III and IV has Very Easy and Practice mode, where bullets are disabled, as well as the Harder Than Harder Than Hard Ultimate difficulty which is found in latter.
• Most of the M2 ShotTriggers series of shmup ports have Super Easy mode, which not only lowers the game's difficulty DIP switch setting to the lowest, but also introduces additional features to make the game even easier, such as auto-bomb (when hit, the player fires a bomb automatically if they have any instead of dying), increasing the player's shot power, and if the game has multiple loops (including infinite loops, ending the game after the first loop. Game-specific examples:
  • Battle Garegga Rev. 2016 disables the game's rank system.
  • Dangun Feveron has auto-bomb, but only under an on-screen "safety line".
  • Ketsui gives the player six bombs per life instead of three and makes DOOM appear at the end of the first and only loop.
  • Tiger Heli makes auto-bomb apply when the player gets hit anywhere, not just when their bombs get shot (the default).
  • Kyukyoku Tiger features increased helicopter speed.
  • In Hishouzame, if the player collects enough bombs and lasts long enough to max out the rank — at which point enemy bullets become lightning fast — the player starts gaining points per frame, but this effect will wear off if the player bombs (either manually or from getting hit and then activating auto-bomb), which will flatline the rank back down to "genuinely easy" levels. 500,000 points are awarded for every remaining life at the end of the game.
  • Same! Same! Same! makes the item blimps drop more bombs, and like Hishouzame points are awarded per frame if the rank (influenced how many bombs you have in stock) has hit a certain point, and the point generation increases as the rank goes further up. 1,000,000 points are awarded for every life at the end of the game. Notably, because of how many bombs the player can easily amass, the player can hoard enough bombs to make bullets go lightning fast (as in, you blink and the bullet has already reached your ship), so for experts, the challenge lies in trying to hold onto one's bombs to reap the end-of-stage bonuses, but beginners can still enjoy a leisurely cruise to the end.
  • Hellfire doesn't have bombs, so instead it just sets the point thresholds for extra lives to be very low. Once you accrue around 9 or more lives, the bullet speeds will start to increase and after a certain point you start to gain points per frame.
• Space Invaders Extreme 2 has an Easy mode which gives the player infinite lives, but they can't use the level-select feature - they can only play the 'A' versions of the stages.
• XOP has Very Easy and Easiest difficulties below Easy.

Simulation Games

• F-15 Strike Eagle has Arcade mode, which prevents the aircraft from rolling.
• Old sandbox fighting/commercial game Hardwar used to only have three starting options, all of which were fairly hard, as you were only given the starter ship and limited weapons and gear. Presumably due to complaints, a patch introduced several more options which would give you better ships and gear. The last such option would give you the best ship in the game (normally only obtainable through complicated commerce routes), equipped with advanced gear and an experimental power cell that, in a normal game, you wouldn't get until halfway through the plot. If you died in that, you deserved it.
• Sandbox mode in Railroad Tycoon 3 has all the economics turned off, no competition, free building, and free terrain modification.
• S.W.A.T. 4 requires a certain minimum number of points to be scored to unlock the next stage. But on Easy mode, that number of points is zero, meaning you advance as long as you completed the mission. The points are awarded primarily for adhering to SWAT's procedures for preserving lives (even the lives of the bad guys). Low scores earn you titles like "renegade" and "outlaw", so Easy mode just allows you to break rules and kill hostile targets without mercy.
• Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise has Playground mode. In that mode, you don't need money, there are no Ruffians and no Professor Pester, and you don't even have to worry about predators. You can just fill your garden with whatever plants, animals, and buildings you so desire, without concern for anything else.

Sports Games

• Backyard Baseball has tee-ball mode (only for single game).

Stealth-Based Games

• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid: Integral offers a Very Easy difficulty setting, which is just the Easy mode, except Snake starts off the game with a silenced MP5 submachine gun with unlimited ammo.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the Very Easy mode results in guards being practically blind, Snake being Made of Iron and the tranquilizer gun giving Instant Sedation.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater notches this up a bit by giving the player the EZ Gun, which drastically increases your camouflage level, has infinite ammo and a laser sight (which is otherwise exclusive to one gun you find in the last thirty minutes), and the silencer doesn't wear out. The EZ Gun is available on higher difficulties as a New Game Plus bonus.

Survival Horror

• After you survive Five Nights at Freddy's (and its sequels, excepting 3 and 4), you get access to Custom Night, which allows you to alter animatronic AI between 0 and 20. It's more well known to set all A.I.s to 20 to give yourself the game's hardest challenge, but you can also set them all to zero and give yourself a night to relax. It's notable that you're still not completely safe, as the Dynamic Difficulty will raise the effective difficulty a few steps during the night and you can still trigger Golden Freddy or release the Puppet on this difficulty. It's normally used for getting a good look at rare events.
• Resident Evil:
  • The original Resident Evil comes with Hard (Chris) and Easy (Jill). Jill is still rather hard so the Director's Cut added an additional Training difficulty which doubles the amount of ammunition and ink ribbons and massively nerfs enemies.
  • Resident Evil (Remake) names standard and easy "Mountain Climbing" and "Hiking." Very easy is "Walking," with the comment "You can relax and enjoy the view." On this difficulty, healing items and ammo are practically given to you in every room, enemies won't do much damage to you and you can easily kill said enemies in just a few shots from the handgun.
  • The Dual Shock version of Resident Evil 2 for the PS1 has a "Rookie" setting in addition to the Normal and Easy settings that starts the player off with the unlimited sub-machine gun already in their character's equipment, and the two other unlimited weapons (the gatling gun and rocket launcher) in the item box. They also added an infinite ammo code. In a game like this, that's practically God Mode.
  • Resident Evil 4 originally launched with only Normal and Professional. Some international versions and subsequent re-releases added an Easy difficulty that, in addition to having weaker enemies and more ammo, outright skips a number of the more difficult levels in the game.
• Silent Hill 2 has a "Beginner" mode where all the enemies, including bosses, die in very few hits of a handgun. With the exception of the first boss's instant death attack (which you can STILL kill very easily in only A FEW handgun bullets in seconds), it is practically impossible to die in this mode.
• System Shock included 4 levels of difficulty that could be independently set for combat, puzzles, cyberspace and plot, with the lowest being 0 (indicating that aspect of the game was a non-starter, essentially). Setting all the options to 0 results in a gameplay experience where all the doors are unlocked, and the mutants and robots ignore you completely unless you actually attack them. Due to its Metroidvania level design it is possible complete the entire game in just a couple of minutes this way.

Turn-Based Strategy

• The "Settler" level in the later Civilization games (starting from IV) not only gives the player a huge advantage in build/research times, but also skews the combat probabilities so much that you'd have to try very hard to lose. Additionally, AI players are much less aggressive, and barbarians are extremely rare.
• Fire Emblem Fates introduced Phoenix Mode. Not only do units not die, incapacitated units revive every turn, making it literally impossible to lose unless any other conditions aren't met, especially in the Conquest route, or the Avatar dies in Chapter 5 (the one with their Traumatic Superpower Awakening). However, one can only play Phoenix Mode on Normal.
• The lowest difficulty mode in Galactic Civilizations isn't "Easy"; Easy is the second. The lowest is Cakewalk.

Western RPG

• The Enhanced Editions of both Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 have a "Story Mode" that grants your party numerous buffs that makes then Nigh-Invulnerable, sets everyone's strength scores to the maximum, reduces the AI toughness to Easy Mode levels, and makes it impossible for your party to die in combat, allowing you to explore the game world and finish the story risk-free.
• Divinity: Original Sin II has a Story Mode that substantially boosts the player's Hit Points, Armor Points, and damage output; substantially reduces those statistics for enemies; and gives the player the ability to resurrect nearby allies with full health.
• v2 update of Epic Battle Fantasy 4 added Zero difficulty which makes the enemies scale half as fast as on Easy. This difficulty was carried on to the fifth game and was retroactively added to the first two in the Steam release (where enemies stats are reduced by 40% instead of Easy's 20%).
• Fallout 3 and New Vegas have 'Very Easy' difficulty level that affects combat only and makes enemies much easier to deal with. Especially Feral Ghoul Reavers and Behemoth Overlords. In '3' however, it is kind of double-edged sword, since the amount of XP you get from everything depends on it, making hitting last level and best perks take much longer.
• GreedFall has the Discovery difficulty mode, which makes De Sardet almost invincible with no regard to how the player levels them, if they choose to level the character at all. De Sardet's damage is also greatly increased in this difficulty to the point they can One-Hit Kill most enemies.
• In Kingdom of Loathing, the easiest Ascension mode is Casual: You start with full access to inventory acquired in previous ascensions, but you don't get any karma for the run.^note You still get karma for freeing the king and discarding Instant Karma items, though.
• In the Mass Effect franchise, the lowest difficulty is "Casual", which ramps down not only the enemies' stats but their aggression and use of special powers. Mass Effect 3 added a difficulty below that, "Narrative", which is for people who struggle with other difficulties but still want to experience the story and/or party interactions. It also helps offset the fact that each other difficulty level is tougher than its counterpart in previous games.
• Mistmare, being ridiculously unfinished and all, lets you repeatedly respawn with decreased difficulty.
• Torchlight II has Casual mode. While Normal is intended for first time players or Veteran being for players familiar with the first Torchlight (or even Diablo II), Casual is even easier, awards 20% more gold and is labelled "for all ages".

Unsorted

• Bayonetta has a Very Easy Mode, which is basically easy mode, except your health regenerates a bit faster and enemies have even less health. Otherwise it's pretty much the same. Ironically, when you are used to Infinite Climax Mode, the ridiculous slowness of enemies in Very Easy can actually screw up your dodge timing and get you hurt.
• Castle of Illusion has one of these. It's essentially a heavily abridged version of the normal game—you meet the Final Boss after the third level, and large chunks of each level are omitted.
• Freeciv has Novice difficulty below Easy.
• Dōkyūsei was somewhat infamous for being Nintendo Hard (though it was par for the course at the time of its release in 1992), being next to impossible to beat without a guide or without learning the daily schedules of the dateable girls to heart. The 2022 remake, Dōkyūsei: Bangin' Summer, tries to remedy this a bit by adding an optional Easy Mode, which effectively makes the game this trope. Easy Mode not only lets the player know where the girls are just by checking the map, but the player can also access a "Flag list" and just have the Player Character teleport to the appropriate place and time, removing the time-management aspect of the game altogether. Not only this, but the correct and incorrect dialogue choices are now appropriately flagged as such (Though in some cases, selecting only the purportedly "correct" choices won't progress the story.)
• Freedom Fighters (2003) has the "Demonstrator" difficulty setting, in which the player character has even more health than the game's Heavy Armor Giant Mook enemies, and can survive 75 assault rifle bullets before dying (which, combined with the ability to heal at any time using inventory medkits, makes you pretty much invincible).
• Hitogata Happa, the third game in the Gundemonium Series, has "Euridice" as its easiest difficulty setting, below "Nobilimente", "Allemande", and "Doomsday". On "Euridice" mode, you're given unlimited dolls for the first mission, while the other difficulty levels start you off with 10. The only way to lose on the opening mission is to die after the timer runs out against the boss.
• Jinni Zeala has "Lollipop" mode specifically for beginners to learn the game.
• Judgement Silversword has a "Training" difficulty level. The catch? You have to unlock it by racking up points throughout playthroughs.
• In Kid Icarus: Uprising, the difficulty runs on a scale of one-tenth increments from 0 to 9. Levels 1.0 through 1.9 are Easy, levels 0.0 through 0.9 are Effortless. You have to pay hearts to play levels on these difficulties and you don't get very good rewards, but at least you'll have no trouble winning. The same system is used for Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.
• Minecraft has Peaceful mode, which removes all mobs capable of harming you (except Wolves, which will only attack you if you attack them first, and unable to inflict damage anyways unless they push you off a cliff.). You never need to eat, and your life constantly regenerates. However, with no monsters, you'll miss out on a lot of loot, including Bones, Enderpearls, Blaze Rods, Ghast Tears, and Spider Eyes. You'll also have a much harder time acquiring String, Gunpowder, Slimeballs, and Music Discs.
  • Minecraft also has Creative Mode, which entirely removes your life and hunger bars, makes you fireproof, impossible to drown, invincible to all damage, all mobs ignore you, and you're capable of spawning in any item in the game from an in game editor menu. Officially it's meant for people who create custom level maps, to save them the time and trouble of gathering up all the resources to make the sprawling dungeons you may have seen, but it can be quite therapeutic to go into a world with it and wander about, with no concern for almost any damage, even from Creepers.
    • Speaking of creative mode, some people cheat by building their house in creative, proceeding to give themselves weapons, tools, and armor, enchant said tools and armor, give themselves a huge stock of food, give themselves anything else they need to survive (brewing, anvils, a crafting table), and sometimes manually add ores to nearby caves. Afterwards, they change the game mode to Survival.
• Some Neopets games have Zen Mode, in which you'll never lose, but you'll never earn any Neopoints from it.
• Radiant Silvergun has Very Easy mode. Even on that, the game retains arcade-standard difficulty.
• River City Ransom EX, in addition to the standard Easy, Medium, and Hard, has "Wussy" and "Crazy".
• The first Tokimeki Memorial has two characters extremely easy to finish with:
  • Rei Ijuin: She simply needs the Player Character to phone her at least 75 times during the game, and not having any other girl they can finish with. How high the stats are is completely irrelevant in her case.
  • Miharu Tatebayashi: A player who wants to romance her should concentrate on building the Player Character's stats to the maximum and not go on dates with anyone. She's not affected by "bombs": she just likes high stats.
• The Uncharted series has Very Easy Mode; the biggest difference being that Nate will have auto aim. Enemies also have less health and do less damage, Nate's health will regenerate faster, and you can sustain more damage without dying.
• The Wiki Game, in which you try to do a Wiki Walk the fastest, sometimes you can get ridiculously easy pairings. One was Akon to Snoop Dogg. Snoop is the third act listed in the Akon sidebar's "associated acts". One click and you're done.

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