Pages with their own Scrappy Mechanic pages:
- Advance Wars:
- Powers that globally drain the health of all enemies, simply because there's no way to avoid it, other than spending all the time and money for repairs (assuming you even have the bases to do so) or picking Andy with his healing power (who's only usable for a fraction of the campaign in AW2 and DS). Beating an opponent charges their power meter faster than it does yours, which can be incredibly annoying in CPU missions where the enemy starts with a very large army - those expensive units equate to huge amounts of fuel for their power. The COs who have these abilities tend to combine them with other equally annoying effects as well, such as Olaf's movement-reducing snow, Drake's fuel-halving rain, and Hawke healing his own units at the same time.
- Advance Wars: Dual Strike has, ironically, the two defining new features of the game both fall into this. It's very telling Advance Wars By Web
, which included all the COs, new units, and properties from Dual Strike, chose to simply neglect these two rather than even make them optional like other more controversial additions like Black Bombs.- The titular Dual Strike mechanic that allowed you to choose two COs for one map and, if you charged up both COs powers they could attack twice in that turn with both their Super CO Powers and extra attack power on top of the power boost if you picked COs with Tag Bonuses. It so thoroughly broke the game that it was disliked by casual and competitive players alike for just how absurdly broken and unbalanced beyond all reason it was. It's not uncommon to be dominating a match thanks to superior tactics and play, only to be crippled to the point you now can not win because your opponent just happened to get their Dual Strike at the wrong time. It's especially bad in the campaign, as often you will control three small armies against your opponent's one big army, meaning they get Dual Strikes much more often than you are. Because it so completely shifts gameplay from one of tactics to Dual Strike cat-and-mouse, your only feasible options with it are to either focus your entire strategy around it, which essentially forces you to choose the otherwise mediocre Sasha and waste her entire army as fodder to spam her Market Crash power, or to just agree not to launch two COs at once.
- The two-front battle mechanic made just about everyone cringe. It involved two battles that took place at the same time, and required you to funnel extra units to the second front for your AI-controlled partner to battle with. Not having control over the second front meant you were at the mercy of some rather thick AI and, even in spite of being improved over the preceding games, it's still not one where you could count it to be especially effective without the buttload of extra funds and units the enemy used to keep up with the player's tactics. While you could give your AI partner extra resources, they couldn't be recovered once you did even if you won on the second front, meaning it made the first front a lot harder since you were blowing expensive resources you could be putting to better use there. In the end, players wished they could just be in control of the second frontnote , if this overall pointless mechanic that only existed to make use of the second screen even had to be a thing at all.
- Advance Wars: Days Of Ruin:
- Unlike previous games that had Story Branching, allowed you to choose COs, let you play missions out-of-order, and even let you skip missions, Days Of Ruin has No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom to the Nth degree. You follow a strictly linear layout of levels, you use whichever CO the game wants you to use, and any and all extra missions are strictly non-canon "for fun" affairs.
- The way CO Powers work on the whole. Now you don't even get to use them until Mission 15: An Icy Retreat, well over half-way through the game, and they require you to "load" a CO into a unit and have units within that unit's "CO Zone" to even work. If that's not enough, they are much less powerful and impactful than they were in previous games, all being limited to very generic stat boosts save for Tabitha and Penny's, and with a few characters who don't even have CO Powers like The Beast, Forsythe, and Caulder (the last of which is still Purposely Overpowered in spite of it).
- Done In-Universe in Mission 13: Greyfield Strikes, where every so many turns Greyfield will identify whichever unit you are relying on and order it not to move next turn. It's done on purpose by Greyfield to retaliate for Brenner not following his orders, and Brenner spends the entire mission lamenting how unbelievably stupid of a combat mechanic it is.
- Code Name: S.T.E.A.M, being made by Intelligent Systems, of course brings in the "Asshole Reinforcements" who spawn at the start of the stage.
- Disgaea is infamous for having tons of wacky mechanics, some of which are fun, and some of which aren't:
- Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
- The promotion exams exposed many of the game's balance problems. To unlock more advanced Dark Assembly options, you have to defeat a group of monsters using only the unit being promoted. It requires the use of the student system to stand a chance in if you use healers. Moreover, if you wanted to utilize transmigration to any significant degree, you would be taking these exams very often, since the feature is only available to characters who have been promoted twice, and transmigration resets a character's rank. This system was wisely taken out in the second and third games, where any character with enough mana could transmigrate to a new class if they had enough mana to do so.
- The Dark Assembly in the first game was utterly broken. You had to dump massive amounts of items in the laps of the senators in order to have a chance they would vote in your favor - and there was still a chance they'd screw you over even if you pushed them all the way onto your side. It quickly became less about bribery and more about having a party strong enough to beat the entire Assembly.
- The method of reaching the Land of Carnage in Disgaea 2 wasn't much better. It sounds fair enough in theory— Go to the Item World, get ambushed by one out of 16 possible pirate crews, beat their leader to get a map, (or alternately just steal it) rinse and repeat until you have all 16 at which point the Land of Carnage is unlocked. Problem being... Every single pirate is a random encounter, and some of them (Jolly Pirates, we're looking at you) are so impossibly rare one will probably end up clearing multiple Item Worlds without even encountering a single one. Spending hours upon hours of going through random Item Worlds searching for that one last map, only to run into the Ambling Pirates over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over gets really annoying after a while.
- Walking geosymbols. Any map with them becomes a chaotic mess of constantly changing geopanel effects, which can utterly screw you in the Item World. And there is no way to tell a normal symbol from a walking one until after your first turn.
- Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
- Mobile game Dragon Quest TACT does not allow you to use Skip Tickets on event missions, even if you complete all the quests for a given mission. This makes grinding for event-mission-exclusive monsters a needless chore.
- Evasion in Front Mission 4. In Front Mission 3, the Evasion stat worked in a sensible manner, reducing the chance to be hit by any direct-fire attack aimed at a Wanzer, in direct opposition to the opponent's Accuracy. While this heavily penalized rifles, which had a chance of doing no damage at all, it meant that a multi-hitting weapon like a machine gun or shotgun would almost always score at least at least a few hits, useful for finishing off parts which had taken serious damage from single-target attacks like missiles. In Front Mission 4, Evasion was changed to be a flat chance of any direct-fire attack missing completely, completely disregarding the attacker's Accuracy (which only governed whether or the shot would miss on its own merits)- a Wanzer would fire a shotgun blast at an enemy or a spray of machine gun rounds, only for the target to smartly step out of the way of the entire shot. While this was a stealth-buff to rifles (as shotguns and machine guns lost the near-guaranteed reliability that made them the preferred weapons in the previous game), it was a frustrating change which meant you could unload a Wanzer's entire bodyweight in bullets at it and do no damage at all if its Evasion was high enough and your luck was bad enough. No matter how good your pilots are, the enemy could make their fifty-ton mech dance between your bullets like a ballerina. While admittedly your characters fought under the same rules, this severely increased the impact of the Random Number God on battles.
- Robot Warlords has possibly the worst idea for an upgrade system in all of video game history. To upgrade your units, you need to complete levels in Life Mode, which gives you money to spend on new parts. You unlock Life Mode by... beating Story Mode. You have to beat the game to improve your units. There is no New Game Plus feature.
- Various Shining Series games, especially those of the Force variety, allow you to promote your units to a Prestige Class once you reach a certain level. In later chapters of the game, some characters you recruit come promoted. Except, the problem becomes that the game promoted them at the earliest point they could, while the player has probably been doing the smart thing and continuing to level up the earlier character(s) until they reached the cap, giving them some extra stat points for when they undergo Class Change Level Reset. Needless to say, the pre-promoted characters are typically put on benchwarming duty for the entire game.
- Super Robot Wars: Depends on the game.
- L: The lack of an item system (The improved PU system makes up for it some but doesn't cover healing)
- K: The PU system; a solo unit had many more advantages compared to partnered ones.
- OGs/OGG: Parts of the twin system due to dealing with pre-paired enemies while requiring 110 morale/will for your units to do so.
- Shin: Shin SRW adds cut-ins, close up face portraits, and long cutscenes to its attack animations. This turns out to be a double edged sword because like all older SRWs up until SRW Alpha, animations are still unskippable. When running at default speed the load times and animations are atrociously long and unbearable. Much of the poor reputation of Shin stems from its slow load times and absurdly long, unskippable animations.
- F/F Final: Any units that finish the first half of two-part episodes start the next half with reduced Will. There's a way around this, but it's quite monotonous to perform.
- V and X: the final attacks of the Nu Gundam, Zeta Gundam, and ZZ Gundam are locked towards Amuro, Kamille, and Judau respectively, not letting the players use the machine for someone else to their full potential.
- Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter has feasibility studies for wasting turns without actually getting real research done and prototyping for making you spend a lot more time and money trying to get the first of a ship class out.
- Valkyria Chronicles:
- The original featured permadeath; with the exception of main characters, any member of your squad who runs out of HP, and isn't saved within three turns or before an enemy gets to them, is killed in action and no longer playable. With the amount of Save Scumming that followed, the sequel and later games would remove this mechanic. When it was brought back in the fourth game, it came with significant changesnote .
- Additionally, the mission rating system in the original game was... somewhat lacking. Your rating at the end of each mission was not concerned with how many enemies you defeated, how many casualties you took, or any other objectives. No, there was only one factor that determined your rating: how quickly you completed the mission. That's it. As a result, regardless of your preferred playstyle, if you want those S-rankings then there's literally only one strategy for every battle: blitz it. Players who prefer to take their time and be methodical need not apply.
- In Valkyria Chronicles II The class change system was based off certain items that could be gained through certain task completed in a mission. The problem was that items in question were given at random, thus a lot of time spent in the game was farming this promotion items and weapon creation items.
- XCOM: Enemy Unknown:
- You can mind-control aliens for several turns and during that time they are treated like your troops. Exactly like your troops. You cannot target them directly or cancel the mind control and it ends naturally on their turn, meaning they will immediately get a chance at revenge. It used to be even worse. Before it was patched, mind-controlled enemies were treated as allies for purposes of morale when they died. Meaning that when you deliberately get the mind-controlled enemy killed, your troops would lose morale and possibly even panic over their "teammate" dying.
- The game ditched the grid inventory of its predecessors in favor of equipment slots. Now soldiers get a slot for their armor, their main weapon, and their side weapon. So far so good, even if it means each soldier is restricted to a single weapon dictated by their class. But then there's the auxiliary equipment slot, and that's where it gets stupid. This slot is used for first aid kits, stunners and grenades, meaning no soldier can have both or have more than one of each, unless they get a special perk at promotion. Worse than that, it is also used for sniper scopes. That's right, snipers carry their scopes in their pockets and they're incompatible with grenades or medpacks (granted, it's an optional scope that only enhances their accuracy, but still)! Worse than that, it is also used for armor plates, which, logically, should be integrated into the armor and definitely shouldn't preclude the soldiers from carrying a grenade.
- On a different note, UFOs could only be taken out by an Interceptor launched from an airbase on that continent, which isn't so bad at first, just keep one or two on every base and you'll be fine. Then the game starts throwing massive battleships at you that the Interceptors cannot possibly win against because of how much damage the battleship can do, so you need to start sending UFO-based craft to fight against them, but you cannot just order them for the other bases the same way you could order the Interceptors, oh no, you needed to build them at your main base AND THEN, transfer them over to those other bases, which takes a considerable amount of time, during which you're screwed if one of those large ships shows up.
- Also, you can only have one Interceptor fight the UFO at a time, even if you have several.
- If player-controlled soldiers encounter previously unseen aliens during their turn, a brief animation of the aliens will play, then the player's turn is interrupted so the aliens can move. Thankfully, the aliens can't attack during this free-action, but they can take cover or move towards your soldiers, making ambushing aliens effectively impossible and greatly increasing the danger of sending any soldier forwards alone. The Chrysalids seem tailor-made to abuse this since it mitigates their primary weakness of being melee enemies, they often appear on ship-missions that have short hallways and blind corners, and they travel in packs, meaning they're effectively allowed to use your movements to ambush you, which often costs you a soldier.
- XCOM 2:
- Timed missions. They themselves aren't bad, but it's the sheer amount of them that annoys people.
- You cannot go on missions in a given region unless you have made contact with it, and you cannot make contact with a region unless you have already made contact with an adjacent region. Few things are more frustrating than getting notifications of several different facilities that advance the Avatar Project that are all in places you won't be able to make contact with for a while.
- Alien Rulers, of the Alien Rulers DLC, get a out-of-turn reaction for every action your soldiers take. While this does make them the sort of threat you'd expect of such boss characters, it also means that any action that isn't attacking them is suicide, drastically curtailing your viable tactics.
