Luck-Based Mission: Difference between revisions

== Video Games ==

=== Action Adventure ===

*** Try to collect all 64 rings in these games and keep your sanity intact. Probably more than half of them are gotten sheerly through blind, dumb luck—even some that are won as prizes from mini-games. Not to mention a few that are so rare you'll have a better chance of winning your local lottery than obtaining the particular ring in these two games.

** Another Oracle of Ages example. To get the Boss Key, the player has to pull the correct lever in a certain room; the wrong lever makes a bunch of snakes fall from the ceiling. Each lever pull also resets which lever is the "correct" one, such that the player could theoretically have to attempt the lever-pull indefinitely.

** While not required to get anything useful, ''[[Skyward Sword]]'' has the Thrill Digger minigame, which functions just like Minesweeper... except that with a single exception, the indicators tell you ''two'' possibilities for how many traps are around. Two blue rupees next to each other could mean they share a bomb, they share a bomb but one also has one to the side, they share two bombs...

* Laura's final quest in ''[[Castlevania]]: [[Order of Ecclesia]]'' requires you to complete one of the games super-hard bonus dungeons, at the end of which the needed item MAY spawn. If you don't get an Alexandrite from the final chest, you have to run the entire bonus dungeon again.

* The freeware game ''[[La-Mulana]]'' has one in its hidden bonus dungeon the Hell Temple, success in three of the final rooms depends on both luck and high levels of skill; it could take one try or 5 hours to complete and if you mess up on any of the three you have to restart, after you defeat a couple of annoying enemies of course. Luckily, there are a few, uh, "strategies" to get through the first room without actually doing the luck parts. You're still screwed with the second one though.

* [[Metroid Prime]] 2: Echoes has the infamous [[That One Boss|Boost Guardian]]. The thing ricochets around the tiny arena it's in like a pinball. It's completely impossible to predict where it's gonna be next, and you're constantly taking damage from being in the [[Dark World]]. In addition, the health refills for the fight are located in four pillars around the room, which can only be destroyed by the boss. Beating it requires that it not hit you excessively, and that it break open the pillars when you need health refills rather than breaking them all right away and wasting the health pickups.

* The bomb-disarming Mastermind puzzle in ''[[The Journeyman Project]]''. You have to solve three levels, with an extra color added each level. If you miss too many times, you go back to square one. If you take to long, the shield generator's radiation kills you.

* To get to the last challenge of the Big Fish hidden object game ''[[Mystery Case Files]]: Ravenhearst'', you need to collect seven keys hidden around the mansion and take them to the cellar. The keys are easy, there's one in every room, you just need to be able to find it. The difficulty is that the game will randomly select which rooms you may go into for the keys. If none of these randomly-selected rooms are in the basement, you have no way to get to the cellar. The game auto-saves as you go along, so when you reach the end of the game after hours of playing and you can't win there's nothing to do but start over from zero and play all the way through again.

 

=== Driving Game ===

* ''[[Oregon Trail]]'' is one whole luck-based game. Characters will randomly get sick, and may even die immediately, giving little time to allow for recovery. Crossing the rivers is luck-based, too; fording a river isn't, as you shouldn't really ford a river more than three feet. Floating a wagon across carries the risk of tipping over, causing the loss of your items (and some of your people!). Even the ferry carries a very small risk—it can break loose from moorings or tip/sink. In other words, as in history, ''nothing'' is guaranteed in this game.

** In ''II'', if you're unlucky enough, the wagon can tip and drown a person in as little as ''a foot and a half'' of water. You can tip even on "not too steep" hills. And hunting carries the risk of an (sometimes instantly fatal) accidental gunshot or animal attack for your leader. [[We Cannot Go on Without You|If he/she dies, it's game over]]. God help you if you get caught in a blizzard with "no progress", low/no food, few draft animals, and nothing to trade.

* ''[[Buzzy the Knowledge Bug|Let's Explore the Airport with Buzzy the Knowledge Bug]]'' got '''very''' carried away with this. It has an arcade-styled minigame called Lost Luggage, where the goal is to get each correctly colored suitcase into its matching bin. You would do this by taking control of conveyor belts and other mechanisms. The last level, Level 99, has six chutes all of the same kind, where if you put a suitcase down a chute it could come out of any of the other five in any four directions. There are several unchangeable conveyor belts that will lead it into a bin. If the wrong color lands in it, you have to restart the level. The problem is, you have no control over where it goes, and every odd is stacked against you in every possible way. Didn't think this could get worse? You have to be this lucky ''four times''. Even worse, if you do get past it somehow, your only prize is [[Bragging Rights Reward|being sent back to Level 1]].

* ''Lionel Trains Presents: Trans-Con!'' is an edutainment game dealing with the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. The player has a choice of which side to start building from: Central Pacific or Union Pacific. Central Pacific has a much shorter route, however the player is required to blast through mountainous terrain with dynamite to place the tracks. Using said dynamite has a very high chance of injuring workers in the blast, and you have to make multiple blasts to cut through. It's entirely possible the player will lose all his workers (and therefore lose the game) in the first level.

* A number of combat-oriented shooter missions - such as in ''Men of Valor'' and ''[[Call of Duty]]'' (or thereabouts) - where you have to run through an artillery barrage to a foxhole or somewhere to get to the next stage, and it's up to chance whether you go down or not while running.

* In H.P. Lovecraft-based FPS ''[[Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth]]'', the fourth mission has the player riding in the back of a pickup truck while the driver navigates the streets of Innsmouth. As firearms are extremely inaccurate (and you're shooting at things that don't take that much damage from them), there's very little point in shooting back, and if the game decides that the swarms of inhuman monsters taking potshots at you are accurate enough to overwhelm your first aid supplies, you're going to be doing the level over. And over and over and over...

* On ''[[Medal of Honor]]: Allied Assault'''s Hard (read [[Harder Than Hard]]) difficulty setting, many levels are practically impossible to pass without [[Save Scumming]], particularly where there are randomly [[Respawning Enemies]], and with [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|the computer being a cheating bastard]]. For example, Omaha Beach, where even if you flawlessly dodge the machine guns, you'll still get randomly killed by artillery shells. And Sniper Town, with its randomly-placed hitscan snipers. Earning some of the medals is also luck based, particularly the Sniper's Last Stand and Storming Fort Schmerzen levels, where a certain number of [[Red Shirt]] comrades must survive.

* The first boss of ''[[Descent]]'', between the boss's random [[Teleport Spam|teleport spams]] and [[Macross Missile Massacre|Macross missile massacres]], and the population of [[Demonic Spiders]] (Super Hulks and Class 1 Drillers) in its lair. Especially if you're trying to save the hostages on Insane skill. In fact, many of the levels are this on Insane due to the [[Roaming Enemy|random roaming nature]] of many enemies.

* The Dream World from [[Pokémon Black and White]] was intended as a successor to [[Pokémon Gold and Silver|Heart Gold and Soul Silver]]'s Pokewalker in that it's an alternative means to obtain pokemon and items for your game. While it does do that, it's prefers to send the player to random locations rather than letting the player pick the locaion to explore for themself. Add the fact that you can only take ten steps each visit before leaving and that pokemon will stop coming to you after so many visits in a day, [[Scrappy Mechanic|and it can be pretty aggravating]].

* The [[Find Mii]] minigame on the [[Nintendo 3DS]] Mii Plaza. Each Mii you find or hire with play coins has a different spell depending on what color of shirt they wear. The 12th room of the tower is completely dark and the only way to progress is to have a hero with a white shirt so he can use his spell to light the room, all other heroes just leave when they see the darkness. Meaning you'll have to wait until you come across someone with a white Mii or until the game gets generous enough to give you one when you're hiring. Oh, and all other heroes before the white one will be lost. Thankfuly, you only need to light the room once.

 

* There are several ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' raid bosses that are luck based. Kel'Thuzad in 25-man mode Naxxramas will periodically Mind Control two raid members at a time, and frequently picks healers. Other examples are bosses that require strategic movement but rather then using a timer to time their abilities, have a cooldown, and free choice whether to use an ability or not. The most annoying aspect of this is Akil'zon in Zul'aman, where you must collapse to avoid his Electric Storm, but often, he will instead use several Static Discharges, annihilating your group.

** A better example might be the Valentine's Day "Be Mine!" achievement, which required you to create eight candies from an item that generated one at random ten times. The random number generator was fickle that week.

 

=== Puzzle Game ===

* Perhaps this is not the experience all players will have, but ''[[Reset Generation]]'' feels as though the entire game is built around luck and coincidence. If the right items drop in the right place, it's easy for anyone to completely wipe out the other players. Much of the time there seems to be very little strategy required at all; if a particularly useful item drops into your territory and you're able to defend it from being destroyed by cannon shots (an easy task), your opponents won't stand much of a chance... Unless an equally useful item falls into THEIR possession.

** Plumber is actually a very [[Game Breaker|broken]] [[Character Select Forcing]] in this regard. Items are usually the difference between victory and defeat, and his power allows him to fetch nearby items without actually walking to them, basically giving him weighted dice as far as item drops go. Basically, he's the High Priest to the [[Random Number God]]. It certainly doesn't help that he can grab a full-power-charge item, taking away his opponent's chance to grab it, and then grab another one as he pleases.

* The latest version of Solitaire (Klondike, specifically) that comes ensuite with Windows Vista has the audacity to inform you that you've lost, even when it deals you a literally unwinnable game. It doesn't help that it now keeps a running tally of wins and losses.

* The item crafting and spell learning mini-games in ''[[Puzzle Quest]]: Challenge Of The Warlords''. You are almost completely at the mercy of the board's configuration when it comes go gaining the requisite number of anvils or scrolls to gain the sought item, and if you run out of legal moves, the game ends and you have to start over.

** The final battle with Lord Bane - especially if you're primarily a magic user: Bane literally gets stronger as the match goes on, thanks to his ludicrously low-cost stat buffing spells. You basically have to pray your spells don't get blocked (too much) and you don't get uber-cascaded into oblivion. If Bane gets rolling early, you're pretty much meat, not matter what class you play as.

* The underrated game ''[[Constructor]]'', upon reaching certain stages in house construction, would make certain demands of you to build X number of houses/facilities on one estate with X features. However, it also imposes varying arbitrary quotas on how many houses of each type you're permitted to build. If, upon reaching the penultimate stage in the game, it asks you to build the wrong type of house, the quota will forbid you from building enough and you'll be sacked (Read: Taken out of your headquarters in a coffin while you're sleeping and buried alive). You can't [[Save Scumming|save scum]] your way out of this one, it's determined when you start the game. If you're unlucky it will have been impossible to win regardless of what they'd have asked for, and you're screwed. Say goodbye to the last 4 hours...

* ''[[Europa Universalis]] III'' lets the player play ANY nation that is implemented into the game and existed historically during the time period. This includes historical strategy gaming mainstays like France, England and the Netherlands, but also tiny minor nations like the Irish kingdoms of Leinster and Connaught. Playing one of the Irish minor nations basically depends on little other than whether England will want to annex all of Ireland early on, and whether England gets into enough trouble with the French, Scottish and Burgundy.

* ''[[League of Legends]]''. It is similar to ''[[Defense of the Ancients|DotA]]'', which means it is a 5v5 real-time tactics game. It is not designed to have significant random elements. However, if you do not bring a full premade team of 5 people, the automatic matchmaking system will roll the dice - and god knows who you will get as your teammates. They may end up being terrible players while the enemy team may well consist of a perfect composition of the five best champions at their respective roles playing together like clockwork, pushing straight to your base and stopping only to fling a quick 'gg noobs I ***ed your mom' at your head. If this happens, there is absolutely nothing you can do no matter how skilled you are: you lose.

* [[Dark Reign]] has several:

** In mission 5, as the Imperium, you have to destroy a Freedom Guard base while preventing them from destroying the Water Extraction Compound, located in their base. They attack it when you breach their defenses, so you have to be ready to charge in and destroy everything quickly. However, you have no way of knowing what they've got in the way of units, so you have to pray they don't have half an army ready to destroy it.

 

=== Role-Playing Game ===

** ''[[Final Fantasy I]]'' had Necromancers, ''[[Final Fantasy II]]'' Cockatrices. If a group of them got to strike you first (which is completely random), and you didn't equip an item to protect your party from debuffs (which you usually get late in the game, short of [[Sequence Breaking]]) ...Poof! The whole party gets [[One-Hit Kill|killed]] or turned to stone (which is pretty much the same) without even getting the chance to fight back or attempt to escape.

** The ''[[Dragon Quest]]'' series takes this idea to a new level, especially in ''[[Dragon Quest VIII]]''. Pretty much ''every'' attack every random encounter has is remarkably powerful. On the other hand, almost all of them (even the most badass bosses) have certain moves in their repertoire that more or less boil down to staring off into space and wasting a turn. The fact that they're stupidly powerful when they hit you with their best shot but sometimes don't hit you with any shot at all is supposed to balance out in the end, but of course, this is random....

*** This is because the games give almost every legendary a catch rate of 3. This means that, at most (using the most appropriate Poke Balls for the situation, getting them to a sliver of health, and putting them to sleep), you have about an 18% chance of bagging them.

*** Or, even worse, "Will the game decided that I've caught the legendary before it Struggles itself to [[Never Say "Die"|unconsciousness]]?" Basically, if you drag out the battle with a legendary long enough, it will use up all its moves and resort to "Struggle" a technique that inflicts damage on both you and the legendary, hence meaning a half hour of tossing ultra balls (or stronger ones, like Timer or Dusk Balls) just went down the drain because the legendary just made itself faint. Beldum also falls into this category; it also has the ridiculously low catch rate, but it's trying to take itself out from the word go...its only attack is the recoil-inducing Take Down.

** And on the topic of Pokémon, Battle Revolution has a few luck-based coliseums. In the first, you have a roulette wheel to determine whether you get to use one of your own pokemon, or one of your opponent's far less useful ones. In the second, it's a 100-battle endurance match, where the roulette is used to determine if any of your pokemon get healed.

*** Not to mention that the 100 battle match has fog on most of its stages, which makes all pokemon's accuracy drop. Sure it's totally fair, as it affects both sides, but over 100 battles, the probability approaches 100% that you will eventually be horribly screwed while the computer is unaffected.

* Look The Other Way, a luck-based minigame found in the [[Minigame Zone]] of [[Super Mario RPG]], gives you exactly a 50/50 chance of winning, and the prize is randomly chosen and nearly always junk. However, you have a very small chance of winning powerful items like the party-healing Kerokerocolas, invincibility-granting Red Essences, and the game's real prize, the Star Egg, which deals 100 damage to all enemies and can be used unlimited times for no cost (fortunately, the Egg itself is always given out with the 100th win, so getting it is only as random as winning 100 times is). Playing the minigame is fortunately free, but expect to spend a very long time playing it if you want to nab that Egg.

* In ''[[The World Ends With You]]'', on the 5th day of The Game, a Reaper asks you to bring him a 'Supply Factor' pin to access a particular store. Even on Hard, with your level set low enough to let you fight the Noise that drop these pins, it is dependent on a) Letting the Noise spawn in-battle, and b) rolling a low chance of these pins dropping.

* ''[[Icewind Dale]] 2'' proper was somewhat about this, featuring some bosses who use "x% chance your party all dies" spells, but the tactics mod is absolutely brutal. The dragon in the snake/amazon level is immune to all hold spells (as in, anything that would render him immobile), all death spells, it has 300 hp, resistance to every type of damage. Oh, and he has 99 damage attacks 4 times a round while every so often hitting your party with ~100 damage AoE acid attacks. Mind you this is when your party's tank has a grand total of, at maximum, 250 hitpoints. The only way to beat him is to hope your pre-placed delayed blast fireballs and skull traps take out enough of his hitpoints to let your tank take him out in 2-3 rounds or else its all over. Did I mention his attacks also stun and he constantly casts fear? The myriad ways you can be fucked over beyond recovery each round with a single throw of the dice make it the pinnacle of luck-based mission.

* The 8-bit computer game tie-in to the film ''[[Willow]]'' was ill-conceived, badly executed and features a blatant example of this. Remember the part in the film where the eponymous Willow releases Madmartigan from his prison cage? In the game, you have two blank cages: one random cage contains Madmartigan, the other contains Death (yours). Heads you proceed, tails you lose a life.

* A scary number of battles in ''[[The Last Remnant]]'' can turn into this, due to the fact that the AI [[Random Number God|randomly]] [[AI Roulette|assigns]] what each union is allowed to do at the start of each turn. Including heal. This can result in a unit getting beaten down to critical HP and starting the turn without the sensible option of trying to heal their HP, usually resulting in them getting wiped and usually a game over.

* Getting your [[Only Mostly Dead]] [[Player Character]] resurrected in ''[[Infinite Undiscovery]]''. Since you can't give orders while dead and there is a very short time window before getting a [[Game Over]], it's entirely up to luck whether your friends' [[Artificial Stupidity]] manages to fit reviving you into their busy schedule fast enough.

* ''[[Cla Dun]]'' 's Rangeon (random dungeon) has the monster level, item drop rate and chance of items having rare titles change based on the type of gate you enter at the end of each floor. Regular Gates have little to no effect on these three variables. Angel Gates never raise the monster level by more than 1 and never lower the drop rate or rare title rate. Demon Gates and Hell Gates are guaranteed to raise the monster level, and lower the drop rate and rare title rate, with Hell Gates having more severe effects. Gamble Gates can go either way. There's always at least one gate at the end of each floor of the dungeon, but it's random which gate or gates are there, as well as whether or not there's an exit portal. All the gates' effects become greater as you reach deeper floors of the dungeon, and at the point where an Angel Gate is able to raise the drop rate and rare title rate by 40 or 50 each, a single Hell Gate can ramp up the monster level by '''hundreds'''. Even though your characters can only be level 99 at the max, enemies aren't subject to that level cap, and a Hell Gate late enough can pit you against level 300-400 monsters, leaving you no option except to run for the exit...if there is one.

* Minor example in [[Mass Effect 2]] on Insanity difficulty. At one point during Archangel, you need to close a couple of doors. However, enemies are running at the doors and if one reaches the threshold, the door reopens and you have to start again. If you do not have the right class and weapon or power combination, it is entirely possible for an enemy Krogan to run all the wall to the door without dying no matter what you throw at it. Basically, the only way you can win this mission in a lot of cases is if the Krogan AI randomly decides to stumble or doesn't spawn until it is too late to reach the door before it closes.

* ''[[Wing Commander (video game)|Wing Commander]] IV'' had this built into gameplay in the form of missiles, which 1) could ''maybe'' be distracted from you by judicious use of decoys, and 2) if they hit you, were either a whole lot of damage or a [[One-Hit Kill]]. This meant that a large part of whether you won a particular mission depended on how lucky you were with the Decoys you dropped: be lucky and you won, be unlucky and you could easily run out of Decoys and die; and both times you were piloting your fighter just as well.

* ''[[Ace Combat 5 The Unsung War]]'''s Mission 12b, "Four Horsemen," is pretty much this, the [[Scrappy Level]], ''and'' [[Fake Difficulty]] all in one little horrible, possibly insurmountable package. Even if ''you'' actually pull off your anti-radar site attack runs flawlessly, there's no sure 100% guarantee that your wingmen will—and if they don't, everyone's attack run has to be aborted and started over. (At least you're the only one who can directly cause a mission failure here.)

*** Sure, [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]] there and any player can only wish their Nosferatu performed like his, but the fight isn't luck based at all. It's quite possible to reliably evade the missile spam every time if you're good enough, even on the highest difficulty.

* ''[[Rune Factory]] 2'' has the following quest: [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Super Training Plan: Luck!]] (thank you, Cammy, for making my non-existent luck stat go up in a game of ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS)

** Another harsh example is the ''Jedi Academy''. You spend all the time covering the last three bookshelves, and, in the last minute, get overwhelmed by Jedi popping up out of nowhere, and, if you get hit once, you lose, if not, you win. The Jedi respawn in that last minute at random, too, meaning one time, you are safe in the middle of the room, the next, you get a saber through the heart from the guy spawning behind you.

* ''[[Dark Void]]'' allows you to hijack the enemy [[Flying Saucer]]s by boarding them, ripping off an access panel and then beating the pilot. This takes some time, as you have to periodically dodge turret fire and avoid getting shaken off. This would be a pretty straight-up test of skill, not even that hard, but... The luck aspect comes from the fact that if the [[Artificial Stupidity]] collides with something while you're doing this, you get hurt, and there is no way to abort the boarding sequence if you're about to die. This means you essentially have a random chance of dying without any way to stop it, especially on higher difficulties that make you easier to kill.

 

=== Turn Based Strategy ===

** Perhaps not so much luck based as [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]], but one side-mission involving the collecting of a line of dropped items became near impossible after a certain point in the game when the Mafia becomes aggressive to you. The mission takes you right through their primary neighborhood and they blow you up near instantly with their shotguns.

** Rampages in ''[[Grand Theft Auto III]]'' (and its sequel, Vice City) typically require the player to destroy a certain number of gang members/vehicles within a time limit. These are ''very luck'' based as targets appear at random. Also, since vehicles and pedestrians often only spawn in the area when the player isn't looking their way, these rampages often have players frantically maneuvering the camera around, willing more targets to appear.

* ''[[Grand Theft Auto IV]]'' features a number of missions requiring the player to evade the police. This requires the player to escape a large circle of coverage where the cops are looking, if a cop car is nearby the cops will see you and the circle will re-center. This leads to a situation where the player must escape the circle while praying that a cop car won't spawn right next to them, making all that work escaping the circle completely void. Either that, or they must escape into the Pay and Spray, hoping a cop car doesn't spawn there, as the Pay and Spray won't work if a cop sees you go in.

** Or go into the subway, where cops can never spawn, and drive away uncontested. Though missions never require you to evade very high wanted levels to begin with. By the time the scripted part of the mission is over the wanted level always drops to 2-3 stars when you need to escape, even if it was higher at first.

 

=== Tabletop [[RPG]]s ===

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Older Than Feudalism]]

[[Category:Luck-Based Mission]]