Sandbox / Schizophrenic Difficulty Wick Check

Here a wick check will be performed for Schizophrenic Difficulty.

Why?: While the name has been deemed possibly offensive in the Trope names with outdated and/or offensive language thread, that alone has been determined to not be enough for TRS, so this wick check will see if there is also a misuse problem.

Wicks checked: 0/50

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Correct use (0/50)

Misuse (0/50)

ZCEs, unclear, and other (3/50)

1. DarthWiki.Eversion: World 4, 6, and 8 are harder than 5 and 7.
2. VideoGame.Eversion: World 4, 6, and 8 are harder than 5 and 7.
3. VideoGame.Harvest Moon Frantic Farming: See Artificial Stupidity commented out ZCE

Unclassifiable (0/50)

Wicks that have not yet been checked (47/50)

1. PlayingWith.Early Game Hell: Zig Zagged: Schizophrenic Difficulty
2. VideoGame.The World Ends With You: The partners are this - Shiki's the tougher partner to attack with, while Beat is usually considered the easiest. Joshua is considered the best partner though.
3. VideoGame.Zombi U: Some areas have their zombie numbers influenced by how many players have died there - no, not just you, players from around the world. This results in some areas having some free goodies curtesy of an unfortunate soul, or constant empty zombies in the same place every time you visit there.
4. VideoGame.Cannon Fodder: After the Mission Eight difficulty spike, the first game stays at about the same level of average difficulty with isolated fearsomely-hard phases dropped in at random. [[spoiler:12:6, 14:2, 19:1, and 22:2-4.]]
5. YMMV.Soulcalibur VI: That One Achievement: "The Hunters Become the Hunted", which requires you to complete 30 Astral Fissure Sealing missions. The problem is that the difficulty of the enemies of these missions varies wildly, from ridiculously easy to full-blown SNK Boss status that make even Kilik in the "Pounding Heart" mission and the Ancients to look like pushovers by comparison... even with a Level 99 fighter. You'll have to fight several cases of the latter to get this achievement.
6. VideoGame.Super Mario Maker: Courses that have been uploaded but not played can appear in the Easy difficulty of the 100 Mario Challenge. An unlucky player can run into difficult unrated levels; good thing they can be skipped. Also, the Expert and Super Expert difficulty have this feel as they allow for courses with a clear rate up to around 15%; levels near that mark are miles easier than the average Expert or Super Expert level. And then there's the issue with impatient players rage-quitting after a couple three attempts, pushing courses that aren't very hard into Expert/Super Expert territory.
7. OneWingedAngel.Video Games: * Touhou Project:
   • The same game (which happens to be Touhou Fuumaroku ~ the Story of Eastern Wonderland) has a similar concept with the final boss, Mima, but only if you beat the game without using any continues. She says she wasn't trying before and now she's serious. Oddly enough, she dies a lot faster in this form than in her normal form.
   • In the very first game, Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers, the final boss of the Makai route gets that kind of second form. It has a surprisingly low number of hit points compared to the first form, though.
8. VideoGame.Alien Rage: The first 3/4ths of the game are insane. Once you unlock the tier 3 perks that increase your health, health regeneration, and resistance to explosions, the game becomes much more balanced.
9. DiabloIII.Tropes P To T: The game has this to a lesser extent, though in a rather strange way. Act 2 is more difficult than the first act, with multiple ranged enemies doing nasty things to you, but the start of act 3 is laughably easy, with masses of easy-to-kill enemies trying to swarm you (and failing) while dropping lots of gear. Midway through act 3 you start fighting enemies with an obnoxious ranged attack, but then after that point they go away and the act goes back to being easy again. This repeats itself as you go through the difficulty tiers. Eventually you reach Inferno mode, the most difficult mode when you are at level 60 and the enemies are very powerful, and the elite and unique mobs (the most dangerous - and valuable to kill - enemies in the game) get FOUR random buffs per group. The game is EXTREMELY difficult at this point (particularly before the patches repeatedly made Inferno mode easier), but it doesn't get any WORSE, either - once you get the gear you need (which is quite hard to do, and likely to cost you piles of money in repair costs due to dying constantly) it becomes progressively easier to kill the inferno mode enemies. As you get more and more gear your damage goes up and the damage you take goes down, and the enemies don't really get significantly deadlier. This eventually culminates in reaching Act 3, when the enemies drop the best loot in the game at the highest rate that they ever are going to (act 4 enemies, though tougher, don't drop better loot), the enemies are easy to mow down, there aren't as dangerous of enemies to have to fight elite versions of (for most of it anyway), and you are powerful enough you can beat them. The net effect is that the game becomes EASIER after that point, as you continue to get better gear but the enemies fail to increase in difficulty alongside you.
10. YMMV.Roller Coaster Tycoon: In all scenario lists (especially those of the first game), the parks are roughly arranged in order of difficulty. However, we want to emphasize "roughly"; every level pack has at least a few scenarios that seem unusually easy or difficult for their position in the list. (Also see the entries for That One Level and Breather Level.) The same goes for Classic, where even the second-to-last group, the Silver Group, has a surprisingly amount of Breather Level category scenarios, especially after dealing with the hell known as Fiasco Forest and Pickle Park.
11. VideoGame.Outriders: The mutated fauna of Enoch are generally much, much easier to manage than the various gun-toting factions you contend with, on account of being largely melee-only attackers in a shooter, compared to countless soldiers capable of using cover and sniping from across the map with extreme accuracy. Killing them is the easy part. The game constantly switches between which type you'll face over the course of the campaign.
12. Video Games: Other: Fantasy Night of TouHou Project by PoQoP is described as "based on Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night", which is an understatement. It's so full of plagiarism ^note (the sprites, music, characters, story, and sound effects are taken from the original and used without permission; on top of that, there's fanart used without permission) that it's essentially an unauthorized port, and it still fails to capture what made the original enjoyable. For some reason, it does change many of the original (good) bullet patterns... for the worse. The new ones tend to be bizarre, not fit the characters using them, be much easier or harder than you'd expect from the stage they appear in, have poor design that leads to cheap deaths, be plain boring, or some combination of the above.
13. VideoGame.Crush Crush: The girls are generally unlocked in order of difficulty but some girls' level requirements can be surprisingly easier or harder to meet than others'.
    • Ayano's requirements start out in line with her unlocking position between Bonnibel and Fumi's but hit a big difficulty increase after she becomes Friendzoned and her Lover requirements are much more difficult to complete than any girl's before Pamu.
    • Eva is unlocked at almost the same time as Luna but many players get her to Lover status long before Luna because of Luna's absurdly expensive gift requirements.
    • Karma and Sutra both require multiple hobbies at the maximum level of 75 to complete, which will take days to do even if you have the highest bonus multiplier possible (pity the poor players who don't have enough diamonds to buy speed boosts from the store...). Once you've finally reached Lover level with them, however, your maxed-out hobbies and jobs make completing the final two girls after them a walk in the park in comparison.
14. VideoGame.Command And Conquer Red Alert 3:
    • Evil Is Easy: Present in the campaign selection, but nowhere near as blatant as in Red Alert 1. The Soviet campaign is the most straightforward and easiest of the campaigns (and is designed to be the one played first), with no notably difficult levels and a linear difficulty curve. The Allied campaign, on the other hand, ramps up the difficulty steeply starting at the end of the second act, with many instances of a Non-Standard Game Over. The Imperial campaign straddles the line with Schizophrenic Difficulty, with a sudden difficulty increase in the second act, and remaining reasonably, but not suddenly difficult in its third (and having a relatively mild final mission).
    • The Imperial campaign has some of the easiest and hardest campaign missions in the entire game.
15. YMMV.Candy Crush Saga: Difficulty Spike: You may be meandering along the levels, having completed four or five levels in a row quite easily. You might even be passing the 'Hard' levels in one or two turns. And suddenly along comes a level that has an obscene time limit or a crippling number of moves, and it's not even called Hard. And then, for no reason, it gets easy again.
16. VideoGame.Mega Man 3: Obvious Beta: The game is plagued with Schizophrenic Difficulty. In particular, the Doc Robot stages are considered to be the hardest in the game, whereas the Wily Castle stages that immediately follow are actually among the easiest thanks to an overabundance of extra lives and E-Tanks.
17. VideoGame.Mega Man 8: Depending on what point of the game you are, it can feel like almost as much of a breeze as the Game Boy Mega Man II, or one of the most brutally hard entries in the series. One minute you can be playing a very simple and straightforward level, the next you'll be playing what seems like the Spiritual Successor of the notorious speeder bike segments from Battletoads.
18. Breather Level:
    • Sometimes in a video game you'll notice that the learning curve is more of a learning zigzag: you may find yourself in a level harder than you were expecting, followed by a level that is significantly easier. A logical application of the Sorting Algorithm of Evil would say that the two levels should appear the other way around. A cynical explanation would be that the levels are out of order due to poor testing or time constraints in production.
    • When there are quite a few Breather Levels between harder ones, you'll get Schizophrenic Difficulty.
19. NintendoHard.Beat Em Ups: Double Dragon: Double Dragon Advance. Too little continues for the spiked up challenge ahead, enemies that can easily hit stun the player every time usually leading into a combo, Mission 4, and being considered so difficult that the later released Japanese version is much easier than the American version.
20. Horrible.Video Game Generations Fifth To Sixth: Mortal Kombat Advance is one of the worst adaptations of a Mortal Kombat game on a handheld system known to man - it's a cheap bastardization of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. As the two ports of Deadly Alliance proved, Mortal Kombat can work on the Game Boy Advance. But Mortal Kombat Advance fails - tinny music, primitive-looking sprites, AI that's either too easy or too diabolical depending on the opponent (which sometimes results in getting an SNK Boss as your first opponent), collision detection that can't tell if you're next to the opponent or on the other side of the arena... you get the drill.
21. YMMV.Battle For Wesnoth: Some campaigns are notorious for having a particular scenario that gives you far fewer resources or a much harder objective out of nowhere, followed by a much more straightforward objective in the next. Northern Rebirth campaign is notorious for this.
22. VideoGame.Action 52:
    • Level 3 of Sharks is much harder than the rest of the game, due to the sharks being replaced with jellyfish which are hard to hit.
    • In Billy Bob, it's extremely noticeable where the game gets easier with each level.
23. VideoGame.Lemmings:
    • The difficulty generally rises from the start to the finish, but with a lot of wobbles on the way. As it's a puzzle game, it's hard for designers to predict how easily players will reach certain insights, and levels that are simple for one player can leave others completely stuck. And there are several levels that are widely agreed to be out of place, such as "Postcard from Lemmingland" and "Triple Trouble" (too hard for their place) and "Take a running jump" and "How do I dig up the way?" (too easy).
    • For the Genesis version, the Present difficulty sits between Mayhem and SUNSOFT, and is much easier than either of them — more on par with Taxing.
24. VideoGame.Dragon Quest VIII: The early game isn't a cakewalk, since it's not too afraid to throw 5-6 enemies at you at once who can take out over half your health if they attack the same character at once, and enemies who can use breath attacks to take out half your health at once. Once you get Jessica and later Angelo, it gets far easier. But then you get a difficulty leap when you fight Dhoulmagus, and until you beat Evil Jessica, the game will start ramping up the difficulty. But once that's done, the rest of it becomes far easier to beat.
25. VideoGame.Road Redemption: The Campaign+ mode outright randomizes the order of most of the missions.
26. VideoGame.Yu Gi Oh Legacy Of The Duelist: In Campaign Mode, the game features fixed decks containing the cards only shown in the duel it's featured in. As a result? Some levels wind up much harder because you're stuck with a crappy deck. This is painfully common for the original series, GX, and VRAINS, as Yugi, Jaden, and Playmaker all have bad decks that are rarely better than what they're up against.
27. VideoGame.Somari: Unlike the original game, this one generally gets easier as the game progresses:
    • Green Hill Zone is a lot harder than the original, and features many inescapable pits. These were fixed in some hacked versions, but those that do skip this zone entirely.
    • Marble Zone is especially bad with the enemy placement and seems to have been designed to be as inconvenient as possible. Acts 2 and 3 are also noticeably longer than most of the other levels.
    • Spring Yard Zone act 1 has a tunnel which is nearly impossible to get through without getting hit due to the poor controls but is relatively easy aside from that. ("Relatively" being the important word, as the bad controls make it harder than necessary)
    • Labyrinth Zone takes a ridiculously long time to beat (expect to spend about half of the game here) but the time over rule seems to have been thrown out of the window in this zone. Also, the lack of oxygen is pretty much the only real threat this level has.
    • Star Light Zone, like its 16-bit counterpart, is noticeably easier than the previous zones and is probably the only time you can run for more than 3 seconds at a decent speed. However, it does also have some of the most schizophrenic level design and one of the hardest bosses in the game. (It's also the only original boss as the seesaws aren't in this version)
    • Final Zone is about as accurate to the source material as it gets, being slightly more difficult than the original due to the controls.
28. VideoGame.Syukusho Gakuen: While the game's always Nintendo Hard, some parts are harder than others; generally speaking, once you've adapted to an existing difficulty, the game changes the rules on you, resulting in the difficulty varying.
29. VideoGame.Columns Crown: Flash Columns can range from hellishly difficult to ridiculously easy, just by going from a normal stage to a Challenging Stage. For evidence, the very first Challenging Stage can be cleared without the player even pressing any buttons.
30. VideoGame.Doctor Lautrec And The Forgotten Knights: The difficulty curve rises very gently until you visit the Bastille. Therein, it jumps through the roof on the whole shebang - the puzzles, the stealth levels AND the spirit-taming. Once you clear it, it returns to where it was before, making this a whole-chapter-shaped Wake-Up Call Boss moment, with the Treasure Animatus at the end serving as an actual Wake-Up Call Boss.
31. WebVideo.Twitch Plays Pokemon Alpha Sapphire:
    • The battles with Brendan (except the last one) and Wally have been more difficult than the rest of the game until the first Elite 4. Even then, Steven was defeated in two attempts.
    • Due to randomized typings, the gyms' difficulties can be rather all over the place. After speeding through the first three gyms quicker than ever before, they hit their first wall with the fourth gym being Dragon-type (though they had enough of a head start and the combination of the Gen VI Exp. Share and a route with wild Audino that they were still quicker to 4 badges than any previous run). Then they swept Rock-type Norman with a single Pokémon. Wallace, the final gym leader, also managed to be easier than the previous two gym leaders despite having a Lugia.
32. TabletopGame.Freecell: While nearly every Freecell game is winnable, that doesn't mean it's going to be straightforward to do so. Games of Freecell tend to land all over the difficulty spectrum with equal probability - one deal could be easy and the next could be brutally hard. It generally depends on how unlucky you are with getting low cards buried under high ones, or how deeply buried the Aces are. Some versions of Freecell can control the difficulty somewhat by stacking the deck (eg. by burying the Aces deeper on purpose).
33. VideoGame.Lobotomy Corporation: The game is all over the place in terms of difficulty. The first twenty days are fairly easy, with occasional roadblocks such as an unexpected HE or WAW throwing a wrench in things. By the time day 21 hits, all bets are suddenly off- your chance of getting WAW and ALEPH abnormalities skyrockets, the tough as nails [[spoiler: Core Suppressions]] become unlocked, and the second layer really begins to get filled out. If you haven't sufficently trained your Agents, completed several [[spoiler: Core Suppressions]], finished enough missions and worked out a way to contain all the abnormalities you own successfully, it can be extremely difficult to complete day 21 and on. Once that hurdle has been cleared though, the rest of the game is pretty smooth sailing outside of [[spoiler: Gebura and Binah's suppressions]]... Only to then shoot back through the roof again with days 47-49, each of which are fiendishly difficult and require extensive planning and preparation to deal with. Day 50, mercifully, is a Post-Final Boss epilogue.
34. Persona5.Tropes S To Z:
    • Madarame, the second boss, is maybe the hardest in the game — not because of outrageous stats or an unbalanced movepool, but simply because the party's abilities haven't significantly improved since the battle with Kamoshida and Madarame actually poses a threat. After beating him, the player's strategic repertoire expands so much that there are few challenges remaining other than the Reaper.
    • In Royal this applies to Okumura instead, as Madarame is significantly easier there. While his robot mooks are no different from before, if the party does not beat them within two turns, he will instantly remove them and replace them with a fresh wave of four, and he will repeat this indefinitely until the whole wave is defeated, which can easily stall the party until they time out. To complicate things, he can even cast Rakukaja on the robots to make sure he gets his way and he can still inflict Famine as before, making the robots extremely hard to kill. If the player has not prepared for this fight, they will get stuck. Mixed with Guide Dang It!, there is no warning before this happens and there is also no indication that the robots are very vulnerable to a big list of conditions that can hit them with Technical and they don't resist Gun Damage, and the player may not find it out unless by accident or trial-and-error. And don't forget that Okumura is a Time-Limit Boss.
35. VideoGame.Final Fantasy VI: This game has a number of factors (i.e. mostly bugs) which can easily combine into a "it was easy then hard then stupidly simple then WTF I CAN'T WIN NO MATTER WHAT" cocktail of confusion.
    • The number of gameplay bugs (most notably the "evade doesn't count for dick" bug) ensure that newbie players will be horribly confused when the relic they paid good money for doesn't seem to work.
    • The battle speed bug, which makes the battle speed as selected in the config menu only apply to ENEMIES. Those who know of this can turn this "bug" into a difficulty adjuster, but those who don't may wonder why they're getting curbstomped now just because they wanted battles to go a bit faster.
    • Even without the aforementioned bugs, there are still several difficulty spikes that can make the player wonder how much time the dev team really bothered to put into gameplay balance. The game is in fact quite easy... until you reach Zozo, when the Veil Dancers can kill off your party with a single high-level Ice spell and the huge guys can also do so with a high-level earth spell (Magnitude 8) if you don't run as fast as you can. Then you beat that town (mostly by running like a little girl), and go along quite nicely until you have to airdrop onto the Floating Continent, at which point the bosses liquidate your party into a fine soup-like consistency... after you have spent 20 non-saveable minutes fighting their grunts, of course.
36. Recap.Battle For Wesnoth Northern Rebirth: The first four or so chapters are absurdly hard even on the easiest difficulty level, while the latter half of the campaign is pretty easy, just extremely annoying, because every single chapter throws a seemingly endless wave of orcs and trolls at you that take virtually forever to kill off.
37. VideoGame.Puzzle Quest: The Runekeepers' levels are relative to the strength of the Rune they protect. The problem is that the power of the run is not relative to when you can find it - most notably, the Rune with a basic effect of granting Water mana is located in one of the final locations you unlock. This leads to a fight with a Runekeeper who is likely not even half your level.
38. VideoGame.Harry Potter Puzzles And Spells: While some levels are labeled Hard, there's no real rhyme or reason as to whether or not any given stage is going to be easy or difficult to complete.
39. DarthWiki.The Silker Family Saga: Enemies near the village are moderately difficult. Populated areas are surrounded by easier foes, but setting off across a waste means serious danger. Nothing is consistent with any of the maps.
40. Pre-Final Boss: The difficulty of said boss fight tends to vary from game to game: though they're usually a rank down from the final boss, games with cases of Schizophrenic Difficulty could have these types of bosses be anywhere from laughably easy to a That One Boss that's significantly harder than the actual final boss of the game.
41. Bloodborne.Tropes J To Z: Mainly with the bosses. Father Gasciogne, at the end of the first area, is one of the hardest bosses in the game, and one of the few you cannot summon NPC help for. After him, the next few are relatively little trouble until you meet Vicar Amelia (and even she isn't bad if you summon the NPC helper). You may also go down into Old Yharnam to fight the Blood Starved Beast, who is at least as hard as Amelia with its poison abilities.
42. VideoGame.Crash Team Racing: The tracks in Adventure Mode aren't placed in ascending difficulty. Many times, the courses are chosen because it fits into the theme of the world rather than difficulty. This is why, for example, the second world has both Coco Park and Papu's Pyramid, a simple track and a pretty hard track respectively. The Arcade Mode cups fix this and the tracks are in ascending difficulty.
43. YMMV.The Chase Game Show: Designated Villain: Some feel that the contestants who take lower or even minus offers can be unfairly demonized by the viewers due to the sheer difficulty of the gameshow where the questions can range between reasonably challenging to ludicrous and abstract regardless of whichever offer they take (this is particularly prevalent on Twitter, as some Chasers have pointed out). The fact that the show itself is the one that decides to place a minus offer on the board, which is not guaranteed to appear for every contestant, doesn't help. This has gotten less stigma over time, especially when either the player(s) or even the chaser suggests the low/minus offer just because of how valuable that one extra head start can be.
44. VideoGame.Turrican: A successful playthrough of Turrican 1 consists of stocking up as many extra lives as possible before reaching World 4, then finishing the significantly more merciful final world with however many you have left. There's even 3 extra lives and enough laser power-ups to max out your weapon hidden in plain view to the right of World 5's starting point, as if the developers knew how badly beaten the player would be at that point.
45. VideoGame.Puyo Puyo Tetris: The way chapter bosses work is that they tend to be significantly more difficult than anything that comes either before or after it. Especially Ecolo.
46. VideoGame.Dead Cells: Downplayed. While the levels progressively get harder overall, the random nature of them may cause this to an extent, depending on what the game decides to generate and where.
47. VideoGame.Death Rally 2011: The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: On Medium difficulty and higher, even the player's three fastest cars, the Wraith, Deliverator and Interceptor, with maximum speed upgrades, are not as fast as the other opponents; they somehow have speed stats that are higher than the maximum top speed of the player's Wraith, Deliverator and Interceptor. This makes it a good case of both Rubber-Band A.I. and Schizophrenic Difficulty.