Anti-Frustration Features: Difference between revisions

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Anti-Frustration Features are instances in a game where the established rules of the game are suspended/modified under certain circumstances, or a particular effect that happens when the game deliberately helps you out during a specific situation.

 

== Action Adventure ==

*** This is true for most post-NES Zelda games; if you need a particular weapon (such as bombs or arrows) to beat a boss battle, you can count on them being available during the boss fight in case you run out.

**** Such as King Dogongo in ''Ocarina'' (Bomb flowers) or Odolwa (Arrows) - in fact, Odolwa has plants that drop arrows and hearts, and they regrow.

**** Trinexx, the boss of Turtle Rock in ''[[A Link to The Past]]'', can initially only be hurt by attacking his fire-and-ice-spewing heads with their opposite elements. If you run out of magic power to use the Fire and Ice Rods, however, his elemental breath attacks will have a chance of leaving a small magic container behind.

**** Also in ''[[Twilight Princess]]''. While escorting Telma and Ilia to Kakariko you fight King Bulbin for the second time. You will need bomb-arrows and everytime you run out of them (or didn't have any to begin with) Telma will give you some.

*** Similarly to the Rug Ride thing, losing all your lives to the inexplicable buzz-saws and acid pits (and the floor itself, if you fall off the trolley) in one of the early levels of [[Mickey Mania]] will not earn you a [[Game Over]], as the game will [[Hand Wave]] you to the next area with a message to the effect of "Mickey has broken all the trolleys so he walked instead". [[Fridge Logic|Why didn't he just walk to begin with?]] It had the apple thing too, but with marbles.

* Another Zelda example, ''[[Spirit Tracks]]'' will have your train magically flip in the direction you want to go when exiting a station or a portal.

* ''[[Uncharted]]'' makes liberal use of checkpoints, especially in platforming sequences and gunfights. Typically if you do a "milestone" of sorts, the game will mark it as a checkpoint. Unfortunately, gunfights are likely to kill you more often than the platforming sequences.

 

== Bullet Hell Games ==

** ''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).

 

== Fighting Games & Beat 'Em Ups ==

* 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.

** 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.

 

== First Person Shooters ==

* 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."

** Also in ''Half-Life 2'', [[The Very Definitely Final Dungeon]] upgrades your suit to allow it to heal much faster and more energy (as well as HP) from the wall-mounted recharge stations.

** In the one battle that doesn't have an infinite crate for the one type of ammo you need, infinitely-respawning allies will provide you with the ammo you need.

* ''[[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.

*** It does this twice, actually. The second time is with the most awesome portal ever. You know the one.

**** It does it in The Part Where He Kills You too.

 

== Hack and Slashers ==

** 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.

* Any time you die in ''[[Drakengard]]'' 2, you're allowed to keep whatever experience points and gold you acquired before dying -- the [[Game Over]] screen outright tells you "Select 'Yes' to retain your experience points."

* 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.

** This was a consequence of not having this option in the first ''[[Diablo]]'' in multiplayer mode. Imagine your prized gear on the floor surrounded by monsters right at the entrance of the level waiting to chomp down on you.

 

== Maze Games ==

** 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 first three Bomberman Land games if you lose in a minigame too many times the employee will eventually ask you if you want to skip the minigame and get your price instead.

 

 

** Many bosses in various dungeons have a mechanic to reset them. Normally, hostile [[NPC|NPCs]] in dungeons will pursue fleeing players until the players are dead or have left the dungeon. If a group gets wiped out to the last man by a tough boss, regrouping can be a slow, annoying process. Fortunately, some bosses will not pursue fleeing players to the ends of the earth. Instead, they'll despawn when pulled out of their throne room and reappear in their starting point a few minutes later, so any surviving players may have a few minutes to resurrect their fallen teammates in peace, saving a lot of time and aggravation. Note that some bosses don't do this, and some bosses trap players in with them when the encounter starts, meaning that there's ''no'' middle ground between victory or death, so this may be a [[Good Bad Bug]].

** 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.

 

 

* 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).

* ''[[Metroid]]'' games in general tend to bias [[Random Drops]] items in favor of items that you need: If you're low on health, you'll see more health pickups.

** 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}}.

* Fail a mission in the first ''[[Sly Cooper]]'' game enough, and you'll start it with a 'lucky horseshoe', moving you from a [[One HP Wonder]] to a Two HP Wonder. Later games used a [[Life Meter]], making it unneeded, although at times if you died in a mission with a 'Do Something X Times' theme, it would let you keep the ones you did already. Sometimes.

* 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.

** One such feature is that respawn after death literally take less than a second and is automatic. No more "PRESS R TO TRY AGAIN", yay!

** The levels themselves are short, from 15 seconds to 90 seconds, so in the quite likely event you die, you don't have to go through too much again.

 

== Rail Shooters ==

* 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.

 

 

== Real Time Strategy ==

 

 

** 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''.

* More recent [[Guitar Hero]] and [[Rock Band]] games have a "no fail" feature, so you can finish the song no matter how badly you screw it up.

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

 

== [[RP Gs]] ==

** 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).

* ''[[Dragon Age]]: Origins'' has a lot of these. An early example would be in Lothering, when you can pick up Sten, a powerful warrior who joins you without any equipment for plot reasons. This early in the game, you can hardly afford to buy any armor for him, so he looks pretty useless... right up to the point when you loot an entire set of decent heavy armor during an unrelated side quest.

** A more prominent example is in Orzammar, which is widely seen as one of the toughest sections of the game. Since you can and will be attacked in the street, even in what would be a safe area in any other of the game's cities, the game autosaves every time you come out a doorway, so on the off chance you get wiped, you won't lose too much progress.

** Hell Wyrm works the same way, just has less HP.

* In ''[[Lufia Curse of the Sinistrals]]'', the DS remake of Lufia II, whenever you get game over, you have the option to either continue with the levels you had when you died, or to continue with the levels of your entire party raised by five.

*** However those stat point increases from Espers? ''You don't keep those.'' Enjoy having permanently lower stats.

* ''[[Riviera the Promised Land]]'' allowed you to retry a boss again and again, cutting out some of their HP until they reached 25% of their original life. A family of [[Palette Swap]] Bosses also blow you away if you anger them in the battle... And you can go back and engage them again after walking back to their screen, with the HP you whittled away from them never regenerating, and only your rank and reward suffering.

* Fail a (fairly simple) multiple-lights puzzle enough times in ''[[Shadow Hearts]]: From The New World'', and Johnny will simply kick in the doors it was locking.

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

*** There is also the short "re-draw the fonic glyph" minigame, where Tear will do it for you if you fail. Unlike the above example, however, you rob yourself of [[Hundred-Percent Completion]] this way (at least unless you do it right [[New Game+|the next time]]).

* In the ''[[Baten Kaitos]]'' games, dying to a boss will allow you to modify your decks and start the boss fight over from the beginning, as opposed to kicking you to the title screen like normal deaths do. You'll be thankful for it; bosses in these games are ''hard'' and tend to have long-winded [[Exposition Break|Exposition Breaks]] before the fight.

* 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 ''[[The Elder Scrolls]] Skyrim'' you have a limited inventory--it is loosely based on the amount of stuff your character could feasibly carry, divided into units--so your character starts with a capacity of 300 units, and gold ingots "weigh" one unit, a heavy armor helmet weighs maybe five units, so on and so forth. Every item in the game you can put into your inventory has a weight--including bees, flowers, and ''butterfly wings'' (thus making Skyrim a place where steel ingots and five butterflies weigh the same). There are only three exceptions to the weight rule: Lockpicks, of which you'll burn five or more per high-level lock, easy. Arrows are also weightless, so being a bad shot isn't so painful. And lastly, the game's currency is also weightless. Thank Divines.

** Quest items also weigh nothing despite having a weight value (particularly helpful as quest items cannot be dropped), although this can actually lead to problems. If you pick up a common item that's also used in a current quest you can't drop any of them until the quest item is removed by the game (for example, returning the item to it's owner).

== Simulation Games ==

* 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.

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

 

** 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).

** On the other hand, when you ''do'' get the chance to use the Hammer on ordinary Mooks (for example, when a Seeder is protected by a Mook Rush), ''[[Death From Above|it is awesome]]''.

** In the third game, your health will reset to full if you die and need to go back to a checkpoint, even if you were on the verge of death when you trigger it.

* In the tanker chapter of ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 2'', if you have 4 out of the 5 photos Otacon needs, but the timer is nearly expired, Otacon tells you to forget about the last photo and get out.

* In the first ''[[Splinter Cell]]'' game, the final step of the final level requires you to snipe the Big Bad with a head shot. Fortunately, there is a magazine of rifle ammunition conveniently placed on the railing of the balcony from where you need to take that sniper shot.

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

 

 

 

== Non-[[Video Game]] examples ==

 

{{reflist}}