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Schizophrenic Difficulty: Difference between revisions
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** ''Sonic 2'' for the [[Game Gear]] and [[Master System]] is horrible about this. Underground Zone, the game's first, is modestly challenging up until the boss, and even that is beatable with some practice. The next zone, Sky High, is more difficult than anything up until Scrambled Egg and Crystal Egg, the final two levels, due to unintuitive hang glider controls. Aqua Lake is back to being relatively easy, then bounces back to being [[Nintendo Hard]] with the second act. Green Hills (note the "s") isn't very hard at all until the third act. The game seems to make up its mind about its difficulty level starting with Gimmick Mountain.
** ''[[Sonic Rush Series]]'' also does this. Especially as Blaze, since her level order is different to Sonic's.
** ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (2006
** ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog 4]]'' starts off easy enough, before becoming quite hard from the second level onwards, mainly due to the broken level design.
* ''[[Mickey Mania]]'' has 6 levels. The first, Steamboat Willy, is very easy. #2, The Mad Doctor, is likely the second most difficult level in the game (the difficulty jump between the first two levels is ridiculous). #3, Moose Hunters, is medium-hard, but quite short. #4, Lonesome Ghosts, is pretty hard. #5, Mickey & The Beanstalk, is about medium. And the final stage, The Prince & The Pauper, is quite merciless. It has five incredibly difficult segments to it (though the first isn't too bad), plus the final boss (who takes forever to kill and can mess you up if not careful).
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* The online [[Tower Defense]] game ''Easter Island TD'' goes beyond this to chaotic difficulty. The same layout on the same level in different games can give wildly varying results. So much for keeping notes.
* The levels in the original ''[[Populous]]'' were generated with an algorithm. A side effect was that there were some hard levels quite early in the game, a bunch of easy levels near the end, and the hardest level in the game was around the middle
* ''[[UFO:
* The first [[Age of Empires
* Flash TD game ''Cursed Treasure - Don't Touch My Gems'' has a fairly balanced difficulty ramp. That is, until ninjas appear. With their first hit, they turn invisible, being unable to be targeted and making mid-air shots heading to them disappear. Then the ninja champions come out to play: More health (enough that the direct damage spell won't save you), twice as fast and still turning invisible, so by the time they become targetable again, they're often inside your base and [[Luck-Based Mission|you can only hope that your towers will activate the chance to cause fear]]. It's not uncommon for the last boss of the wave to be killed in seconds, but the entire level leading up to that to be laid out solely to deal with the ninja waves.
* ''[[Command & Conquer: Red Alert]] 3: Uprising'''s Commander's Challenge mode has this in spades. Many levels -- though not all of them -- have one or more "gimmicks" associated with them: one mission is [[Tank Goodness|Tanks Only]], one features enemies that attack only with [[Instant Awesome, Just Add Ninja|ninja]], one gives you a set of [[Stone Wall|powerful but immobile]] towers, etc. Depending on how well a given player's favored, practiced tactics work on a particular level, they can go from trivial to maddening and back again. Worse, the game unlocks new units with each mission, and the missions are largely nonlinear; two runs of the ''same mission'' can be wildly different in difficulty if you unlocked a [[Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors|particularly effective unit]] in the meantime.
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=== Role Playing Game ===
* This seems to happen a lot in both traditional RPGs and MMORPGs, in general. Earlier levels can actually be harder because your characters don't yet have many items or skills. Then, middle content can become a breeze once you've got your hands on some decent equipment and spells, only to find yourself butting heads with a [[That One Boss|enemy]] [["Wake
* Several reviews that describe ''[[The Last Remnant]]'' as painfully erratic in its difficulty, which leads to a lot of [[Anticlimax Boss|disappointing boss fights]] and cheap deaths. There's nothing quite like walking into an area and starting a normal fight with really high morale (suggesting you're a lot stronger than them and should have visited 'properly' when you were weaker) and then getting whipped by the boss.
* The first ''[[Pokémon Mystery Dungeon]]'' games begin quite easy, then you face the three legendary birds when you aren't even Lv. 20, and Articuno is [[That One Boss]]. Afterwards, it becomes absurdly easy until you finish the story. Then you meet a [[Difficulty Spike]] in the next three dungeons (first one with much tougher enemies, the second goes heavy on traps and the thirs have pokémon that seem random, but have all kinds of [[Game Breaker]] properties). Then the difficulty plummets down for a while until you get to the ultimate dungeons.
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* ''[[Might and Magic]] IX'' had this, mainly because it was only [[Obvious Beta|half-finished]] as shipped and the resulting gameplay had some rather noticeable flaws. The first part of the game seemed more neglected than anything else, resulting in a "tutorial" stage that was punishingly difficult due mostly to a lack of any sort of preparation. Trying to follow the "main path" of the game past that point led through a somewhat stable difficulty curve, but any sort of deviation from where the game automatically expected you to go quickly led to the discovery of numerous side quests which could be completed without placing your team in any form of danger whatsoever, making the rest of the first half of the game ludicrously easy. The difficulty eventually spikes back up out of nowhere before bottoming out again, and varies depending largely on which promotion quests you decide to do.
* From Jahara to Giruvegan storywise, ''[[Final Fantasy XII]]'' is all over the place.
* ''[[Persona 4]]'' starts with 2 extremely easy dungeons, then a [["Wake
* ''[[Devil Survivor]]'' has this a little bit as well. Day 1 has a tutorial, followed by a nasty [["Wake
* ''[[The World Ends With You]]'' can be like this, thanks to its very complicated battle system. A hard boss battle might force you to learn how to use a gameplay mechanic you had been ignoring beforehand, and suddenly the rest of the game becomes easy until you run into another [[Difficulty Spike]]. Repeat until you get to the post-storyline content, which requires jumping back and forth between a bunch of [[Bonus Boss]]es while constantly switching your difficulty setting and HP around.
* ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'' for the DS had this in its dungeons. You expect, as you go through the levels of a dungeon, that as you progress the monsters will get harder the farther you get from the entrance. In many dungeons, though, this is reversed. The nastiest monster in the Tower of Zot, the Frostbeast, likes to hang around the entrance—and its [[Palette Swap]] upgrade, the Flamehound, is only found in the lowest levels of the Tower of Babil despite being a right nightmare. In the Sealed Cave, while the {{spoiler|doors}} are everywhere, the Chimera Brain with its awful Blaze attack is most often found in the first half of the dungeon. [[The Very Definitely Final Dungeon]] appears to have a more standard difficulty curve, with [[Demonic Spiders]] of increasing levels of meanness populating the first several floors, then floors with ''only'' [[Boss in Mook Clothing]] (or [[Degraded Boss]], depending on your perspective) encounters, and then, right before the [[Final Boss]]...ridiculously weak enemies. What the hell?
* ''[[MOTHER 1]]'' has a bad case of this, mostly due to the high random encounter rate. At least, until Mt. Itoi, where it spikes to an insane level and stays there. The creator admitted that they didn't playtest it or try for any sort of balance; they just wanted to finish making the game.
** ''[[
* ''[[Dragon Quest VI]]'' has a pretty strange difficulty curve. The game's difficulty increases steadily until it gets [[Nintendo Hard]] at the [[Disc One Final Dungeon]], after which you get access to the game's [[Character Class System]]. The game's difficulty then drops a bit after that, and once you start mastering the classes and then some secondary classes, the game becomes really easy. Then, all of a sudden, the enemies and bosses get all sorts of cheap attacks, and the game becomes even more [[Nintendo Hard]] than it was before.
** ''[[Dragon Quest VII]]'' also does this with its own Dharma Temple event. The mini-dungeon and encounters surrounding the area are stupidly hard. This, however is a trick: If you are (and most likely will be) low level for this area, you can use the area for a [[Peninsula of Power Leveling]] once you actually get your Job Classes. But if you decide to grind out your levels before going to the temple, then you can't use the encounters there to gain job points.
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