Actually Four Mooks: Difference between revisions

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* The [[Trope Namer]] is a Flash RPG called ''[[MARDEK]]'', which [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshades]] many RPG tropes. Early in Chapter 2, you fight a bandit who, just before attacking you, says, "Now, Guards, you stand no chance against me, 'cause I'm actually four blokes!" Cue a battle with four bandits.

** And further parodied in Chapter 3 when Muriance sics his "bandits hiding in the shadows" on you.

* In ''[[The Reconstruction]]'', the [[Preexisting Encounters]] on the main map are only one sprite but usually trigger a few monsters in battle. However, all ''unavoidable'' Preexisting Encounters have you fight exactly the number of enemies as there are sprites. This includes boss battles, almost all of which have [[Flunky Boss|flunkies]] that you can see clearly on the map pre-battle. (Except for the boss of chapter 1 and chapter 2, whose flunkies come out of nowhere)

* ''[[Romance of the Three Kingdoms|Destiny of an Emperor]]'' has battles between armies of thousands, but only the generals leading each army are seen.

** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIyPMf3dQ24/ "He had another one hiding in his pants".]

* Both ''[[Lunar]]'' games for the PS1. Enemies are visible on the map as somewhat indistinct figures. Touching one of them starts a battle with up to 8 monsters.

* ''[[Persona 3]]'' and ''[[Persona 4]]'' have an... interesting version of this. Shadows always appear on the map as a single creature... but in 3, its size changes depending on how many enemies will be in the fight, and in 4, its size changes based on the enemies' level. The larger the Shadow, the more difficult the fight. (Be careful - in 3, the tiny Shadows have a tendency to be solo [[Demonic Spiders]].)

* Played straight (typically) by ''[[Avernum]]''. The largest overworld sprite graphic can only hold four people. Good enough for your party, not for the empire or wandering tribalists. Exceptions: Stationary guardsmen and triggered encounters.

* In ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]]'', any [[Mook]] with a generic appearance will, instead of fighting you, send out viruses. Deleting them often deletes the master as well. The exception to the rule is ''Battle Network 4'', in which the generic bad-guy Navis actually get to do their own fighting, and the number of them you see is the number you'll fight.

* The ''[[Ultima]]'' series, games numbered III, IV, and V, stack groups of up to ''sixteen'' into the same sized square as the player party - which itself can consist of up to (respectively) four, eight, or six members - whether it's a group of subterranean slime, food-devouring gremlins, human rogues or human-sized orcs, or freakin' ''dragons, sea-serpents, or two-headed giants'', with the odd [[Eldritch Abomination]] thrown in for good measure. Better still, a troop of up to eight or sixteen [[Elite Mooks|guards]] can stand in the same space that a ''single townsperson'' occupies; one wonders how all those ridiculously overmuscled brutes stand so close together. [[Units Not to Scale]] indeed.

* ''[[Dragon Quest Monsters]]: Joker'' shows individual monsters roaming around the areas which you touch to enter battles, but you might see two or three monsters once the battle starts.

* This occurs constantly in ''[[Star Ocean: Till the End of Time]]'' and ''[[Star Ocean: The Last Hope]]'', whereas the previous two games in the series used [[Random Encounters]]. What's worse is that the enemy that represents the encounter on the map isn't necessarily the only type of enemy you'll be fighting in that battle...

* Played perfectly straight in ''[[Dragon Quest IX]]'', the first entry in the series to show enemies on the overworld (previous entries had used [[Random Encounters]]).

** ''[[Dragon Quest VI]]'' does this during a certain sequence, where you can battle a monster sprite that turns out to be two enemies in-battle, despite the game saying it's only one beforehand. Averted by their boss, you do face only one guy there.

* Enemies in ''[[Dragon Fable]]'' are shown as single monsters on the screen during quests, but when you actually touch them to do battle, you could wind up fighting anything from one to three of them at a time.

* [[Septerra Core]]. When you pick a fight with a cluster of enemies, there are about 50% odds that there's at least one more hiding offscreen.

* ''[[Labyrinth of Touhou]]'' takes this one step further: even in battle, there are some rare enemies that literally stack their sprites on top of one another, preventing you from seeing just how many there are. Isn't it suspicious to just run into a single mook in this otherwise difficult dungeon?

* The ''[[Tales (series)]]'' takes this further by using rather abstract approximations of the enemies based on their general type.

* In the ''[[Exile]]'' series world map, enemy clusters would be represented by a single unit regardless of size. Worse, in games with multiple-tile units (say, giants, which would take up two squares vertically), these units were ineligible for display on the overmap and were ''always'' shown as whatever smaller escort they had. It wasn't uncommon for an ogre on the worldmap to turn into a squad of ogres and bears, or ogres and ursagi ([[Oh Crap|intelligent bears]]), or ogres and giants, what have you.

** Their 3D remakes, the ''Avernum'' series, work similarly: only four models will be shown on the world map, regardless of the number of individuals.

 

* In ''[[Advance Wars]]'', every unit is depicted as a single soldier or vehicle on the map, but (unless it's a particularly big unit like a bomber or megatank) is shown to contain between one and five units in battle animations, depending on how much HP the unit has left.

** This is a touch of realism: In actual military, a "unit" is usually a group of people.

** ''Heroes of Might and Magic'' actually takes this a step further as the images on the batlle screen don't represent single monsters either, but whole stacks of them. This can lead to situations where you see a picture of a single green dragon on the map decide to engage it and suddenly find yourself in battle with five pictures of green dragons that actually represent 10 dragons each at which point you probably wished you had checked the size of the enemy group before attacking it. To make matters worse armies aren't always solely composed of the enemies that are shown on the map since sometimes a small number of upgraded versions of the monster is mixed into it.

** This can get ridiculous if you find a stack that you'd ignored for (in-game) months or years, and has steadily grown in that time. If the monsters are weak enough to spawn in great numbers, you might be facing thousands of them, or more!

* In ''[[Age of Wonders]]'' a squad was composed of one to eight creatures. On the game map the current strongest creature in the squad, a Wizard (e.g., you, Merlin) or a hero unit if that was the case, was the only member visible and represented the whole.

* Utilized to save on hardware calcing time in Big Time Software's ''[[Combat Mission]]'', which due to being 3D instead of top-down like other ww2 strategy games, meaning limitations require this trope to exist. However, averted with single or dual-man units like observers and tank hunter teams. They represent from 3 to 5 soldiers each depending on setting. (as many as 8 for large conscript/fusilier groups, small groups may have a 2:1 ratio) Sometimes gets confusing with large mixed weapons columns. Also works with open-topped transport vehicles, especially double-packed transports.

* ''[[Super Robot Wars Alpha]] 2'' and ''3'' have the Platoon System, where you can make a team of up to four mecha (depending on the size of the unit). This goes double for your opponents. So, what will look like a single mook (or even boss character), will actually be up to four mooks (though, thankfully, not four bosses.)

 

* In [[Hearts of Iron]] this can be either upheld or subverted. If you play with sprites, you see only one sprite representing the most dangerous unit type (hard/soft for land, carrier/battleship/cruiser/destroyer/submarine/transport for sea, and a one-sprite-fits-all for air) in that province. Switch to counters, and that one infantry sprite turns into a 4+ divisions army of motorised infantry, backed up by half a dozen single-division units of light tanks and mechanised infantry.

** It's also affected by comparative Intelligence level. If you have advanced decryption and the enemy only has basic encryption, with a mouse-over you'll see an exact breakdown of the stack. If you've both got similar encryption/decryption levels, you'll be lucky if you're shown more than the enemy country's name.

* In ''[[Dillons Rolling Western]]'', Grocks appear as giant foes on the main stage map, but once you engage them in combat, they are smaller and often attack in groups.

* [[Ikari Warriors]]: All of the mooks die in 1 hit. When you get further in the game, the computer will send multiple mooks with identical sprites that are stacked on top of each other. Thus you have a pile of mooks that are look like a single mook. When you shoot the stack, you would see one of the sprites go into the death animation, but the rest of the stack was still coming toward you. There was no way to know exactly how many mooks were stacked like this until after you started shooting.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Video Game Characters]]

[[Category:Mooks]]

[[Category:CRPG Tropes]]