Basic Trope: An extra feature in a game is useless, lame, or just not that good of a reward.
- Straight: Beating The Incredible Adventure on Master Mode gives you a bonus party member named Scary Mary. The thing is, her moves are incredibly weak and have a risk-vs-reward system that can lower your other members' stats to buff her, but this is hardly worth using.
- Exaggerated: Scary Mary's implementation is awful and loaded with interactions that can break and crash your game.
- Downplayed:
- Scary Mary is a decent party member in isolation, but doesn't offer anything useful that other members can't already do.
- Scary Mary's powers are kind of useful, but by the time you get her, you won't really have any more tough battles to do.
- Justified:
- Scary Mary wants to be a part of a prestigious group, so she won't join you until you've proven your might. It doesn't matter that she isn't very good.
- Scary Mary hadn't mastered her magic to a usable degree during the main quest, so you have to wait quite a while for her to join.
- Inverted: Despite being unlockable, Scary Mary is an amazing party member who brings a lot to the table, and you can use her for a substantial time.
- Subverted: You can use Scary Mary in a New Game Plus, and she proves to be a Disc-One Nuke.
- Double Subverted: But she quickly loses her power once you can use your party members that already gained levels on your past runs.
- Parodied: Scary Mary is an active liability to the team, draining their health at the worst moments and often having her magic backfire. If she's on the team, the other party members will snark at her for having such high standards for joining a party.
- Zig-Zagged: Scary Mary isn't a useful party member. But the game gets a DLC quest where she really shines. Still, though, your other party members are better. And that's assuming you even went through the trouble to unlock her in the first place.
- Averted:
- There aren't any unlockable party members.
- Scary Mary is an unlockable party member who's a fine choice, but not particularly good or bad.
- Enforced:
- There had to be some bonus content, but the game's deadline was approaching. Scary Mary was quickly thrown in, but didn't have time to be balanced.
- Scary Mary was a glitch that the developers dressed up as a feature. note
- Lampshaded: "For someone who'd only join if we did some super tough tasks, Scary Mary sure isn't that strong."
- Invoked: Someone lets Scary Mary on the team late, even though she's not that good at magic yet.
- Exploited: Now Scary Mary can get the clout of being on the toughest adventuring team in the land, despite the fact that she didn't do anything to help them.
- Defied:
- Scary Mary has a tough training regimen to make sure she'll be of use to whichever team she joins.
- Nobody wants to let Scary Mary on the team.
- Discussed: "What if we do all this to impress Scary Mary, and she's not even good?"
- Conversed: "I spent hours trying to unlock Scary Mary, but she's totally useless!"
- Played for Horror: Scary Mary lives up to her name and invokes a Fate Worse than Death on adventurers who insult her powers.
I read this entire page and all I got is a crummy old link to Bonus Feature Failure?
