Basic Trope: The first hard boss early in the game, often signaling a Difficulty Spike and/or forcing novice players to reconsider their play-style.
- Straight: Hardball uses grappling moves that are effective against players who have used Button Mashing to get through the game.
- Exaggerated:
- Hardball uses a One-Hit KO move if players so much as get in his range. It can be parried, but not a single enemy before him has had a parry-only attack.
- The player is required to master several recently-introduced mechanics to defeat Hardball. This is in addition to Hardball using attacks unlike any previous boss with awkward hitboxes that need trial-and-error to properly figure out.
- Downplayed:
- Hardball is tricky enough to surprise players, but not tough enough to force them to replay the battle over and over.
- Hardball can be defeated with button mashing, but the player will need to be particularly lucky or burn through several healing items to survive Hardball's grapples.
- Justified:
- Hardball is a particularly early Climax Boss.
- Hardball is explicitly stated to be the best fighter of his kind.
- Hardball is a Stealth Mentor specifically trying to get the heroes ready to face tougher foes.
- Inverted: Hardball is easier than the other bosses at that point in the game.
- Subverted: Once the player learns Hardball's weakness, he goes down without a fight.
- Double Subverted: ...until he reveals his demonic second form that's much harder than his first, and truly can't be beaten unless you're good at the game.
- Parodied: The stretch leading up to Hardball is littered with the corpses of the playable character's past lives.
- Averted: Hardball is no harder than the other bosses at that point in the game.
- Enforced: The developer thinks the game's difficulty curve isn't steep enough, so he puts Hardball in to throw players through a loop.
- Lampshaded: "Don't think I'm going to go easy on you just because you're new meat!"
- Invoked: Hardball's trained harder than his fellow henchmen to serve as more of a match to the heroes.
- Exploited: The Big Bad recognizes Hardball's dangerousness and uses him as a Hero Killer.
- Defied: Hardball is a Technical Pacifist who beats the heroes within an inch of their lives, but lets them continue with their adventure.
- Discussed: "Careful, now. That guy Hardball doesn't look like he'll be as easy as anything we've already encountered, so prepare for a real fight."
- Conversed: "Damn, this guy's tough. Should have paid more attention to the tutorial."
- Deconstructed: Hardball is disproportionately difficult in comparison to the rest of the game. Less experienced players give up trying to beat him, while those who do treat him with revulsion. The developer admits this was all because of poor play testing, and publicly apologizes for this moment.
- Reconstructed: The game was never meant to be easy to begin with, and Hardball is simply intended to mark the beginning of its Difficulty Spike. The battle with Hardball becomes one of the game's most memorable moments, and the character himself becomes an Ensemble Dark Horse.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Not only is Hardball a ridiculously tough first boss, he's also the hardest boss in a game filled with them. As the player progress through the game, it becomes apparent that the evil forces are more and more disorganised and disheveled, with infighting and panic being common. When the player finally reaches the end and defeats Emperor Evulz, Evulz is revealed as a puppet ruler, and it turns out the true power behind the throne WAS Hardball. The Boss fight with him at the start on was an attempt at defying the Sorting Algorithm of Evil that had Gone Horribly Wrong.
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