Anti-Frustration Features: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|''"There is one feature I will happily abase myself before: mid-boss checkpoints. This is a game where a boss can be the size of the moon and have eleven health bars. Chipping the first ten away only to be killed by a casual elbow to the face is frustrating enough without having to take it from the top."''|'''Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw''', ''[[Zero Punctuation]]'', on ''[[Bayonetta]]''}}

 

 

 

 

{{examples}}

 

* ''[[Iji]]'' gives you a pre-made Resonance Reflector for your [[Playing Tennis With the Boss|tennis date with the final boss]], just in case you didn't have one yet. More acceptable than usual, since otherwise it would be impossible to win on the hardest difficulty level.

* In ''[[The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker|The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker]]'', during the third boss fight, which can only be killed by hitting it with arrows, then feeding it bombs, if you run out of either of them, the machine will "sneeze" out a few extras to compensate. Weakly [[Justified Trope|justified]] in that {{spoiler|this particular boss is merely testing your strength, which, as we all know, [[Gameplay and Story Segregation|has nothing to do with how much you can carry]].}}

** ''Among Thieves'' played this rather oddly at times. Sometimes it was inverted (arbitrarily losing your gun after a chapter transition, despite having no reason for your character to do so), sometimes it was accidental (skipping ahead to another checkpoint after death even if you hadn't quite reached it) and sometimes it was unnecessarily played straight ({{spoiler|like in the part where you have to fend off the first Yeti/Guardian and your gun has unlimited ammo for no apparent reason}}).

 

* [[Ghost in The Sheet]] has two arcade sequences; you can use a command to skip them if they're too difficult for you (the rat one you should probably be able to get on your own; good luck with the fireflies though).

 

* The Scarlet and Netherworld teams in [[Touhou]]'s ''Imperishable Night'' have special abilities that help prevent wasted bombs: Scarlet drops an extra bomb item if you die while still holding one or more, and Netherworld gives you an extra bomb if you finish the stage with fewer than the starting three. Normally, bombs held at death are just lost.

** ''Undefined Fantastic Object'' and ''Ten Desires'' from the same series do something similar for all characters: if you die with more than the starting two bombs, you keep the extras (including pieces).

 

* In the edutainment ''[[Super Solvers]]'' game ''Treasure Cove!'', you use bubbles to attack things and move around the level. To obtain bubbles, you have to shine your flashlight at the bubble station a few times to pay for them, and bubbles could in turn be used to capture starfish, who reward correct answers to questions with more flashlight energy. Since you could, if you tried very hard, waste all of your bubbles and light, the game would place electric eels on the next screen you swam to to give you a free energy boost, rather than leave you to swim around a now-[[Unwinnable]] game.

** This also applies to all Super Solver games. ''Treasure Mountain!'' and ''Treasure Math Storm!'' have the same thing, if you swap flashlight for coins, and electric eels with coins laying on the ground.

 

* In ''[[Battle Fantasia]]'''s story mode, continuing after defeat will start you with a full level on your MP bar. This continues up to level 3, after which you are given infinite MP.

* The ''[[The King of Fighters]]'' series, starting with ''KOF 98'' allowed you to continue with a slight advantage upon losing (such as reducing the enemy's health to 1/3 its normal length or starting you off with a full Super Meter).

** Though against the [[SNK Boss|final boss]], it doesn't really help much.

** In the remakes of '98 and 2002, failing any combination of the challenge games 100 times unlocks everything in the game automatically.

* ''[[Skullgirls]]'' has a feature that allows someone being stuck in an infinite combo loop to break it with a single button press.

 

* If the player loses enough times in a ''[[Brothers in Arms]]'' game, the player is given the option to replay last checkpoint with full health, instead of whatever health the player left off with. In the ''Road To Hill 30'' game, it even tells you "War isn't fair, but a game should be."

* During the boss fight against the Giant Venus Maneater in [[Bulletstorm]], you never run out of PMC ammo. If you happen to run out, you instantly spawn another full clip.

* ''[[Metroid Prime]] 2: Echoes'' has the Light, Dark, and Annihilator beams that require ammo to use. Some enemies are only vulnerable to certain beam weapons, and some doors only open with those weapons, too. Even if you run out of ammo, you can still fire the beams by charging them up, but they shoot normal shots instead.

** Also, if you happen to run out of ammo while fighting the third form of Emperor Ing, he'll gracefully summon a bunch of cannon fodder mooks that drop health and ammo when killed.

 

* The ''[[Devil May Cry]]'' series invokes this in later games. In the third game, dying a few times on normal mode unlocks easy mode; in the fourth, dying to a boss three times in a row automatically gives it a handicap in future fights.

** Which can actually feel pretty insulting to some players, especially since the fourth game doesn't tell you it's handicapping the boss until after you beat it and doesn't allow you to refuse. This can ironically frustrate some gamers even more.

* The ''[[God of War (series)|God of War]]'' games will traditionally offer you a chance to drop down in difficulty if you're consistently dying in the same area again and again...which falls apart when the difficulty levels only change ''combat'' difficulty, and you're far more likely to die repeatedly on the ''platforming'' sections. If you continue from the same checkpoint enough times in a row with low health, it also begins respawning you with slightly more health each time.

* In ''[[Diablo]] II,'' when you die, you respawn in the nearest town with no equipped items or gold. To get your items back, you need to go back to where you were killed and recover your own corpse. This is often unfeasible, especially on higher difficulties, because the enemies that killed you are still hanging around your corpse and now you have no weapons to defeat them or armor to survive them. Thankfully, you can restart your game and your corpse will appear in town with all the items intact and only the gold gone.

** In the third game, some bosses spawn weak monsters whose sole purpose seems to be to drop health orbs when killed. This is so the game is not by definition over should you [[What an Idiot!|run out of potions]] during the fight. The respawn rule is even more lenient: you just go back to the previous checkpoint. Inferno difficulty seems to be tuned with endless respawns in mind.

 

* In ''[[Bomberman]] 64'', before the big boss fights, Sirius provides you with Remote Control bombs to make the fight easier.

** That's until you {{spoiler|get all 100 Gold Cards from the first five worlds, and Sirius reveals himself as the real villain}}. From that point on, in the earlier big boss fights you'll have to bomb open a little container to grab the Remote Bombs.

* In the often maddeningly difficult Atari Lynx/computer game ''[[Chip's Challenge]]'', it's actually stated in the Windows version's Help file (not sure if it's stated anywhere else) that Melinda, the one giving Chip the titular challenge, likes persistence and will let him go to the next level if he fails enough times. Given that many of the game's levels require just the right combination of speed, skill, intelligence, and plain dumb luck, it's nice to have something to keep you from pulling out that last clump of hair.

 

* In ''[[City of Heroes]]'', the XP Debt that you accrue from dying is temporarily suspended during zone invasion events when an area of the gameworld is overrun by hordes of aliens, zombies, etc. Also deaths that occur inside the Rikti Warzone only give half as much debt as in any other zone.

** The addition of the [[Secret Identity|Patrol]] feature, where you gain a double XP bonus based on how long you are logged out, helps even more. Now when you <s> die</s> are defeated, some of that bonus is taken away. Although, if the bonus runs out it's business as usual.

* In ''[[Grand Chase]]'', even if you lose all of your lives and don't continue, you still get to keep your GP, EXP, and quest items (and complete quests).

* An extension of the Me and My Nemesis Quest in ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' has a fiendishly difficult volcano puzzle that requires a lot of patience and careful mapping to work out. Fortunately, there's an option to skip it for a loss of 10 adventures if you don't want to go through all that trouble, though you miss out on two of the quest rewards if you do that.

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' has several of these:

** In the ''Burning Crusade'' expansion, Blizzard introduced a "dynamic respawns" system which scales respawn rates to the rate that mobs/items are killed or collected. This backfired somewhat as it often caused mobs to instantly respawn on top of players, especially in the first weeks of the expansion, preventing them from resting or looting and making crowded areas an exercise in [[Attack! Attack! Retreat! Retreat!]]. Still, it beats the old days when crowding made certain quests a matter of racing other players for infrequent spawns.

** In patch 3.3.3, quest items in your bags/bank are highlighted with an orange-yellow border so you can find them among dozens of other items, some of which have the exact same icon.

** In the ''Cataclysm'' expansion, most new dungeons were given a ''teleporter'' that allowed you to skip to various points in the dungeon if you wipe and have to run back in, and this feature was also present in some raid dungeons. For example, in Grim Batol, once you defeat the second boss, the drakes near the entrance will fly you to the end of his hall, and after defeating the third boss, the drakes will take you to where you fought him.

** The total lack of any anti-frustration features is why the archaeology secondary profession is so loathed. No ability to focus on digsites you want. You only get 4 digsites a continent and what site you get after clearing one is determined purely by RNG, no relation to how many rares or commons you have completed of a race even if you have all of them it won't stop them from appearing just as frequently. The digsites you get on a continent are selected from a handful of preexisting sites so on a continent that is "balanced" toward a particular race this can be aggravating. There are only 4 continents and each continent has at least one race exclusive to them (Outland has Draenei and Orcs, Northrend has Vykrul and Nerubian digsites which exist off Northrend but are exceedingly rare, Kalimdor has Nightelves which again are exceedingly rare outside this continent and Tol'vir and Eastern Kingdoms has Dwarves) so you don't have an option to leave if you want a particular race. Also Troll digsites are common enough in Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms and Northrend that they just get in the way.

* [[Star Wars: The Old Republic]] implemented a whole list of these in patch 1.2, including being able to access vehicles in certain areas, being able to jump right past orbital stations when returning to your ship, and in general cutting down on the [[Fake Longevity]].

 

* In the first three ''[[Crash Bandicoot]]'' games, if you failed at a level a certain number of times, the game would give you a free Aku Aku mask (an extra hit point).

** Continued failures also sometimes turned some of the '?' crates into checkpoints, or made new, steel checkpoint crates (so as to not mess with the 100%-boxes rewards).

** Averted HARD in ''[[Metroid: Other M]]''. There are no [[Random Drops]] at all and the only way to restore health and ammo outside of the Concentration mechanic is to find a [[Save Point]].

* Realizing that "[[Nintendo Hard]] [[Platformer]]" is a frustrating enough formula, the developers of ''[[Mirror's Edge|Mirrors Edge]]'' added completely unnecessary and impractical (for the enemy) visible-to-naked-eye laser sights to all enemy-wielded sniper rifles, giving the player at least a vague idea where they should run without being one-hit-killed by an enemy they could neither reach, nor even see.

** It happens again in [[Super Mario 3D Land]] with the gold Super Leaf, only this time, it's if you lose five times.

* Mega Man starts with three items and Rush Search in [[Rock Man 4 Minus Infinity]]. In addition, dying three times on {{spoiler|1=the final EscapeSequence}} causes {{spoiler|1=the spikes to turn green and only do one damage, in addition to giving you more time}}.

* ''[[Sonic Heroes]]'': During some boss fights, the players can gain level 3 with one orb container.

* In the Game Gear/Sega Master System version of ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'', the labyrinth boss battle takes place completely underwater, but you cannot drown on the stage. Instead there are no air bubbles and the drowning timer has been turned off.

** Various little side-quests when you get too frustrated with the main game, like beating past levels in record time, collecting bandages to unlock new playable characters, or playing through retro-styled "warp zones".

** When you finally do beat a level, the game then shows you a replay of all your past lives doing the level simultaneously, which is good for showing you where the hardest parts of the level were. It's also kinda hilarious to see a cloud of Meat Boys get shredded to half their number by a giant saw.

** This gets inverted while in the sub-stages marked by the star-shaped portals. Throughout this game (and the series in general) a door is usually a checkpoint, but not the ones that separate the obstacle course and mini-boss areas. If you lose to the mini-boss, you get kicked out of the sub-stage entirely.

* In ''[[Epic Mickey]]'', Mickey's reserves of Paint or Thinner will slowly refill to one-third of their maximum if they ever fall below the amount.

* The ''[[Something]] [[Game Mod]] series'' bring up the save prompt after every level completion. This makes the game easier in the saving aspect in comparison to the original ''[[Super Mario World (video game)|Super Mario World]]'', which only brings up the save prompt after completing a Ghost House, Castle or Fortress level.

 

* There have been countless versions of ''[[Breakout]]'', a game in which you attempt to destroy a brick wall by bouncing a ball off your side-scrolling paddle against said wall, taking out a brick with each hit. One version will let a player try to get the ''very last'' brick on each level, but will eventually destroy the thing automatically and move on to the next level.

** One variant of ''Breakout'' is called ''Baku Baku Block''. There are many different versions of it, but the basic idea is, instead of having blocks, it has a picture, which you "destroy" to reveal a different picture behind it. (Naturally, this lends itself to [[H-Games]].) Almost all versions automatically detect when a part of the scene is unchanged and consider those parts to be pre-destroyed, to prevent it from being impossible to see where certain blocks are.

* In the ''[[Tetris the Grand Master]]'' series, the first piece of each game will never be an S, Z, or O, because an S or Z on the first piece forces an overhang, as well as an O followed by an S or Z. The games also heavily bias the randomizer against dealing a piece that has occurred in the last four pieces, so droughts of a single piece (such as the ever-crucial I) are rare. The second and third games also initialize the history to ZSZS, so that an S or Z in the first three pieces is also exceedingly rare.

 

* The rewind feature in ''[[Forza Motorsport]] 3'' takes this trope and runs with it. Are you getting to the end of a long endurance race, only to take a turn wide and crash into a wall? No problem! Just hit the back button, rewind, and take the turn again instead of restarting from scratch.

** ''Full Auto'' [[Older Than They Think|was the first to use this feature]] This was even before ''GRiD''.

* In ''[[Gran Turismo]] 3'', if you fail a License Test requirement enough times in a row (I don't know how many, but it was an ungodly number) they'll give you an unlisted prize called "Kiddie Prize" lower than Bronze that would let you technically pass that portion of the test, albeit with a horrendous score.

 

* In ''[[Star Fox (series)|Star Fox]] 64'', the boss of the planet Zoness can only be beaten with Nova Bombs. Ran out of bombs on your flight through the level? No problem-the missiles the boss shoots at you each produce a bomb when shot.

* The fourth ''[[Time Crisis]]'' game moves away from hard science fiction by including bioengineered monstrosities as opponents. The termite-like things rush at you in a line and are almost impossible to beat without using a machine gun, and the literal [[Goddamn Bats]] appear in swarms and can only be handled with a shotgun. Fortunately, your NPC ally will give you his extra ammo if you run out during those fights.

 

* In ''[[RHDE]]'', the generator that pseudorandomly selects wall pieces in the build phase is tuned to make the game more practical. A piece seen recently is less likely to be seen in the next few pieces, smaller pieces appear more often than they would in a uniform mix, and the larger and twistier pieces with 5 blocks aren't generated at all in the first building round.

 

* In the single American version of ''[[Beatmania IIDX]]'', if you are playing on <s>Hard</s> [[Woolseyism|Challenge]] mode and your [[Life Meter]] falls below 30%, the penalty for BADs and POORs will decrease.

** This has been used since 9th Style in the Japanese releases, and applies to Hard, Expert Courses, and [[Kyu and Dan Ranks|Dan'inintei Mode]]. Of course, Konami seems to have used this as an excuse to make the Dan'inintei courses use harder songs.

* In the ''[[DJMAX]]'' series, beginning with ''DJMAX Portable Black Square'', if you hit the wrong key for a note, you will still get the full percentage for it, but only get 80% of the points. The inclusion of this has proven very controversial among fans, because now you can full-combo or get 100% on a song without even hitting the right buttons at all.

** This is also true for ''Drummania'', ''Guitar Freaks'' (as of V6, at least, but probably earlier) and IIDX (at least as of Sirius, and again, probably earlier).

** In ''[[DJMAX]] Technika'', you can run out of [[Life Meter]] on the first stage of Pop Mixing and still get a second stage. On the second stage, running out of life won't end the game immediately, but you won't get a third stage. On stage 3, running out of life is an automatic [[Game Over]]. The same, however, cannot be said of ''Technika 2''.

** ''[[DJ Hero]]'', unlike the other "Hero" games, never featured a meter showing the general quality of your performance, making failing a song impossible.

 

* Despite its [[Everything Trying to Kill You|punishing difficulty]], ''[[Dungeon Crawl]]'' will stop you from executing a staggering amount of foolish actions. The game will stop you from doing certain things that would otherwise outright kill you (walking into deep water, auto-moving while starving), and will ask for confirmation on potentially risky actions (moving adjacent to deep water while confused, stepping into dangerous traps while badly injured). You're still likely to die for a thousand other reasons, but at least the game is rooting for you.

 

* ''[[Custom Robo]]'' for lets you give your opponent an HP handicap if you lost to them repeatedly. If that's not enough, losing even more lets you give them even higher handicaps, up to taking away 75% of their health from the get-go.

** In the GCN game this overlaps with [[Easy Mode Mockery]] in the epilogue, as it lowers your score ''twice'' (you get penalties for losing and having to retry ''and'' for using a handicap, and beating the high score in each area unlocks some stuff).

*** Moses offers similar help in a forest maze but getting the help loses you a title for Senel.

** Also present in ''[[Tales of the Abyss]]'', where at one point you must sneak through a forest without being spotted by enemy guards. Failing this five times, the game gives you the option of simply attacking said guards.

** In ''[[Tales of Symphonia]]'' too, you have to do an ice puzzle across a geyser. If you mess up, the character with the highest affection will save Lloyd, and then Kratos will do the puzzle for you.

* In ''[[Pokémon Colosseum]]'', if you fail to snag a Shadow Pokemon from an enemy trainer, you had to refight that trainer - in the case of bosses, with noticably improved teams. In the sequel, ''Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness'', a failure to snag resulted in said Shadow Pokemon being stolen by Miror B, a preferrable fight because a) his team was considerably weak throughout the entire game, save for what is essentially a [[Bonus Boss]] fight for [[One Hundred Percent Completion]], and b) his battle music was one of the best tracks in the series.

* In ''[[Chrono Cross]]'', you can run away from literally any fight in the game. If you're losing to a boss, you can escape, and while some of them will just [[You Will Not Evade Me|draw you back into the fight]], it'll at least reset your elements and give you a chance to heal.

* The various ''[[Shin Megami Tensei]]'' games have as a central mechanic the fact that you can fuse [[Mons|demons]] together to get new, more powerful demons. Only recently, in ''[[Devil Survivor]]'', did they add a feature to let you look up fusion combinations for certain demons instead of [[Guide Dang It|working it out with a fusion chart and a guide]]. It also finally allows you to choose inherited skills instead of leaving it up to the whims of the [[Random Number God]].

* When you're infiltrating the Shinra Headquarters in ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'', you have to try and sneak past several patrols of armed soldiers. If they see you, you're forced into a fight. However, if you botch it four times, you'll have ended up killing all the guards and you can just continue on.

 

* The Flash Game ''[[Bubble Tanks]]'' had [[Level Drain]] as a mechanic- when you killed enemies, you collected their bubbles as experience points. However, if you took any form of damage, you would ''lose'' experience points depending on how strong the attack was. Thankfully, if you get hit one too many times in an area, the next unexplored area will usually contain harmless [[Pinata Enemy|Pinata Enemies]] who cannot attack and tend to drop a lot of experience bubbles.

 

* In the original ''[[The Sims]]'', advancing up one's career ladder requires your Sim to have a certain number of friends. For example, reaching the level ten job in the politics career track, Mayor of Sim City, requires a whopping seventeen friends. This is made even more difficult by the fact that relationships degrade by a few points every day regardless of what you do, and once the relationship score falls below a certain threshold, the friendship ends and must be restored. It's very difficult for a working Sim to have enough time to form and maintain so many friendships. However, the friends requirement is actually ''household'' friends, not personal friends, meaning that the friends of all the people in the working sim's household count toward his friend total. A classic strategy is to have one Sim work and a second to do all the socializing.

* During one mission in the first ''[[Trauma Center (series)|Trauma Center]]'' that requires you to work on ''five'' Kyriaki patients, if you've got at least three of them done and run out of time, the backup team takes over and you move on. However, you still need to finish working on the current patient with the time limit at 0. If the patient dies, you don't get this relief, and [[Have a Nice Death|the Medical Board will be notified]].

* In ''[[Crimson Skies]]'', if you fail a mission repeatedly, you get the option to skip it.

 

 

* In the first ''[[Silent Hill]]'' game, if you run out of bullets at most times, you're in trouble, but if you run out of bullets in the last boss fight (or simply enter with none in the first place) the boss keels over dead straight away.

** Ditto for [[Silent Hill]] 2. Upon entering the boss without any ammo, the game then becomes a timed battle, with the boss dropping dead upon the timer running out.

 

* In ''[[Gears of War]] 2'', there are parts where you have to use your lancer's chainsaw bayonet to cut through obstacles blocking your path. No worries if you drop your lancer to pick up another gun, though, as there is always a lancer on the ground somewhere near the obstacle.

** Also found in the first ''[[Gears of War]]'' game, where any time you absolutely need a [[Kill Sat|Hammer of Dawn]] to progress, one will be found somewhere nearby. This is made even more obvious by the fact that ''two'' will be found ''side by side''. This is even more required to avoid headaches than the obstacles in the sequel. The Lancer actually has some motivation for you to keep it, but the Hammer of Dawn is a worthless piece of trash when you're out a boss fight that needed it, since the satellites always seemed to be out of alignment shortly after completion (or you had to go indoors).

** Also, he may be the only body the player doesn't have to worry about hiding.

* In ''[[Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine|Warhammer 40000 Space Marine]]'', when your game autosaves it doesn't save your health. If you die with a sliver of health left after the autosave, you revive with full health.

 

 

* In The "Destiny's Child" mission in [[Saints Row 2]] You have to use flash bangs to separate the title boss from his human shield {{spoiler|Shaundi}}. Don't have enough? Well DC was kind enough to leave some lying around.

 

 

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[[Category:Video Game Rewards]]