Difficult but Awesome/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A video game character is hard to master, but nearly unstoppable.

  • Straight: Alice, from "Super Beat'Em Up 9000: The Prequel to The Movie: The Game", has combos that are hard to both set up and use, but once you learn both when to start a combo and how to keep them going Alice is hard to take down.
  • Exaggerated: Alice is incredibly difficult to use, but once mastered you've mastered her techniques, she becomes literally impossible to defeat, turning into an all powerful invincible monster.
  • Justified:
    • Alice has a demon trapped inside her, only with near perfect control and mastery can one harness its power and through her use it on their enemies.
    • The fighting style of Alice is hard to use randomly, meant for strikes at the right time or place, making it harder to use her as you cannot use attacks loosely.
  • Inverted:
  • Subverted: Alice uses nothing but a high arching projectile weapon, making her completely unable to defend herself from close range attacks. She can shoot rapidly and aim it in any direction, but her attack does 1 damage each and fling her backwards in the opposite direction of shooting. She has no special combos or other moves, or any other noteworthy quality. . .
  • Double Subverted: . . . Until skilled players realized that by with perfect precision and skill, the gun can be used by experienced players to fly over other players heads and shoot enemies below. However, the arch makes getting the correct projection nearly impossible to fly and hit players on the ground, making her Difficult but Awesome.
  • Parodied: Alice can take one hit and explodes if you move your character from her starting position. To attack, you have to enter a 30 button combo. Once you enter this combo, you attack once. The attack instantly kills the other player. But without extreme practice and skill, good luck pulling it off.
  • Deconstructed: Every single one of Alice's moves is powerful, but each move must be a combo to even be used, she has such an insanely difficult difficulty curve to work with that no one is willing to play her . . .
  • Reconstructed: . . . Until players decide to man up and play her. Eventually, they master even her impossibly difficult play style, and her powerful rapid combos make her nearly unbeatable.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: Alice is in a children's education game. There are no characters to master.
  • Enforced: "Some characters will be harder to use than others, to balance them, let's make them extremely powerful if mastered."
  • Lampshaded: "If you can time her usage correctly, she becomes a beast."
  • Invoked: "Alice? She's a Bitch to use, but if you can master her, she's Difficult but Awesome."
  • Exploited: In the Metagame, knowing her high potential, skillful players use no other character except Alice.
  • Defied: No characters in Super Beat'Em Up are Difficult but Awesome. All characters are about average.
  • Discussed: "Alice usually sucks, but right now she's killing me! How is she pulling off those impossible to use combos?"
  • Conversed: "Alice is the best character once you've mastered her."

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