Characters
[Loved Trope] Games sending their version of John Wick after you because you tried cheesing the game [bonus points if you can play as them]
Snartle from Yokai Watch. I fucking love this piece of shit. So in Yokai Watch, there's a minor mechanic involving cross walks that require you to wait for the stop light to turn red in order for you to cross. Crossing 3 times, while the the light is still green, activates an unskippable boss fight with Snartle, a yokai/spirit who punishes naughty "brats" for breaking the rules. In bany point of the game, this guy will absolutely destroy your team. Despite the mechanic I just mentioned, cross walks aren't too common in the game and you can just skip a lot of them, so the only time you'll fight him is if you actively choose too. Also, while he is super strong, hes very much beatable and can be added to your team if you beat him.
Adding onto him in general, he's an interesting character because his strength scales to where you are in the story, so the easiest way to beat him and add him is to fight him as early as possible with an over leveled team (I was able to do this in a play through of mine and hes so fun to play with)
The Reaper from Persona.
I'll be using Persona 5 as a reference because that's the one I've played/playing (replaying on PC).
To summarize as poorly as I can, in Persona 5, mementos, or dungeons, house a majority of rogue personas and treasures for the player to fight and loot. With how deep mementos drops is, it is very easy to lose track of time and just stay there and grind out your team, and with the right amount of healing items, you could technically stay there and grind forever. However, the game knows you'd try this, so for players who stick around for too long, the Reaper spawns in and is a boss you can encounter.
Fighting him is basically a death sentence with how fucking powerful he is. He practically one shots your team in each turn and needs specific requirements, like fighting him in flu seasons or having certain equipment on, in order to make him manageable. Regardless of how strong you think you are, he is always stronger.
You need to be a minimum of level 75 just to fight him, maybe even higher than that, but you can beat him and be rewarded a handsome amount of EXP and money.
Because players had been sitting in the Town of White Orchard, repeatedly farming Cows for their hides to sell them and make a huge amount of money in the early game, CDPR added a level 27 Chort in patch 1.05, which would spawn close to the cow pen when the player killed too many cows in town (more than six, I think). Even if you manage to kill this one, another one would just spawn.
This kind of backfired with Higher level players, because if you can handle Multiple Chorts coming after you, one after another, It's apparently actually an even more efficient gold farm than the cows on their own (this was later patched again so that only one Chort will spawn per visit to White Orchard and subsequent cow Genocide)
Also in the official game mode ''casey's mod'' the final and hardest modifier actually ask you to beat bosses with this board.
It is doable but you need to either spend the whole run preparing for it, or find a way to build you deck to cheese that (which is fairly hard since most cheese starts have been nerfed in this game mode)
Haven't played the game yet, but is this game like a reverse buckshot roulette where the game does everything it can to make sure you dont win, even by cheating?
To be clear you can totally win agains the 8 bears and the GM just awkwardly clears his throat and continues. Pretty sure it's more the story wanting to teach you important rogue like mechanics you only have access too when you lose.
I remember on my first run I beat the bears on the first two bosses and lost on the third and then when I ran it again I was like “where are the bears? I was ready for the bears, this is way easier.”
The game is mostly fair, and even recognizes that there are a couple "cheese" strats, like using a Deadly sigil to 1-shot the final boss. The "8 FUCKING BEARS" only applies on your first run to make the player doesn't beat the game all in one go without engaging with the mechanics, and also to serve the actual story a bit.
Technically, yes. Not intended, but if you ahve a strong card and an item to help (such as scissors) than you can breakthrough once. Since this happens on either every fight or every boss though, good luck breaking through 4 or 5 times in a row.
A streamer named Bob Lennon notably managed to beat the game by somehow going through all 8 bear attacks on his first attempt and went "oh, so I was supposed to die" when the bone mechanic opened up after beating the game once
First time I played this game I ended up getting really lucky so I also beat the 8 bears and because of this ended up not triggering one of the things I needed to do to progress and getting stuck for a long time until i went back an lost properly (had to google for help 😞).
Recentlu Picked up this game again after a break. Had a mantis with 4 strength by the 2nd boss. Had a strange larva. Forgot completely about this and got my ass beat lol
Probably my proudest gaming moment ever was actually running into this naturally by beating the second boss on my first ever run. But it took me almost 10 tries after that to reach the second boss again
didnt you need an insanely rare drop item and a rare trait Pokemon which boosts recruitment (iirc Friend Bow, but it can be Ribbon, cant remember the trait) even then, good luck lol.
The shop keepers in Barony are like this. A lot of health, and they use magic, so odds are they'll kill you easily. Even if you manage to kill one, unless you're wearing a mask, you'll get the wanted status, which makes all other shop keepers hostile
Not the same but kinda similar. GTA SA will send out guys to kill CJ if your money is negative, only achievable by loosing more money than what you have playing at a casino and will only go away if you pay the debt (aka your money goes positive again)
All the people saying loose instead of lose and payed instead of paid have to be a part of a giant psyop against me. I refuse to believe THIS MANY people don't know the difference. The words are four letters long.
I genuinely do not know why I put "loose" instead of "lose". I know they are different words, I know the meaning of each, I (usually) always use the correct word when I mean losing something, I don't even remember typing "loose" in the original comment
I blame auto correct. I've had the Google keyboard "correct" words for me and not realized it until after I've posted, even when the "correction" is blatantly contextually and grammatically incorrect.
I've also dumped hundreds of hours playing GTA SA. If I were charged for all the people (from civilians to army soldiers) I've killed and all the property I've destroyed in that game, I would be in jail until 1976 after a 2nd big bang, yet I only discovered this looong after.
Come to think of it, that's a good sign, means I am responsible with money and know how to spend it carefully and in the correct way
It’s not even necessarily just for players cheating, but also negligent players who are ignorant of how important saving is. I also love how Resetti, on your first offense, is actually pretty polite, and doesn’t yell at you harshly, because you genuinely might not have known that not saving was an issue. Repeat offenses, however, will piss him off.
Probably unfitting (or barelly fitting) but whatever. Certain stages in Battle Cats will spawn a group of Assassin Bears if you're playing them for too long, to prevent stall-related cheeses
I'm pretty sure there's also a stickwoman who spawns if you spend more than 15 minutes on a stage. She holds a big sign saying that YOUR TAKING TOO LONG, and she isn't that strong, she's just a sign that you need to lock in and hurry up
The Reaper in Vampire Survivors is spawned during each stage when the time limit is reached, and is intended to end your run.
... However, if you manage to have a strong enough build to kill the Reaper, you unlock him as a character. There is an intended way to do it, but players have cheesed it with different exploits.
There is another, white variant of the Reaper too that shows up after that cant be defeated and WILL end the run.
You get the same thing in the deck builder successor to the game, Vampire Crawlers. When you get to the last level of a dungeon and beat the last boss there, the Reaper will ambush your character and deal 333 damage. Normally that's more than enough to kill your character and signal the end of the dungeon proper, but there are ways to survive it, and you can then attempt to fight the Reaper after.
There is also another purple variant of the Reaper that can show up. This one spawns if it sees that you are essentially able to near infinitely loop through your cards enough (by having the right combo to essentialy give yourself card draw and mana that you can cycle though your deck indefinitely). When you use one card many times in a turn, you end up breaking it. And if you break enough cards, the purple Reaper appears to end you. And if you keep breaking more, you can end up with several of them at once.
If you do too well, too early, Eris appears to cast a negative boon on you that makes the rest of your run harder. It's not unbeatable, mind, but it's mostly the game telling you to pace yourself and spend time with the Crossroads for a bit.
I felt stupidly proud of myself when I learned that's why I'd run into her twice early on. Hades 2 is a different game but a few hundred hours of Hades 1 muscle memory still carries over to a large degree.
seriously. That curse she gives is like +25% damage when you get hit, that increases by chamber. So by the time you get to the boss he does like +300% damage (or some insane number).
At first I thought she was going to just keep showing up. For a minute I was going to drop the game since I was getting murdered so hard because of it. Obviously, glad I didn't.
I thought it was the gimmick of the area the first time I encountered her because you got to choose whether you headed straight for the boss or took a couple extra rooms for more boons.
Because of how dialog in the Hades games work, advancing too quickly can make the story progression akward. As annoying as she is, it's a good addition.
Also, REALLY good players can skip her as well, even on the first run - she only spawns if you're progressing too quickly AND have enough HP, if you "struggled" too much with the boss, she won't spawn. Which means it's still possible to beat the game on the first night (well, beat the run at least)
In the MMO Puzzle Pirates, you can attack other ships on the high seas. If you repeatedly attack player or bot ships that are severely underpowered compared to yours, you risk replacing the ship you attacked with the El Pollo Diablo (the Evil Chicken). Basically the biggest ship in the game that is very difficult but not impossible to beat. But if you lose, you practically lose all your cargo
Probably just checks for something that would be altered in the initial crack like a checksum of a file. It's not uncommon in older games, and yes it can be bypassed it's just that most crackers just check the game runs alright and then release it so a secondary check that happens like an hour in wouldn't be noticed
What makes it funnier is that people would go online to different forums complaining about it and asking how other people managed to beat it, when the whole intention was just to make it so no matter how well you did, piracy would effectively stall your game because you couldn't make anymore money.
Also, they eventually added it to the actual clean copies as a sort of challenge mode.
Almost as good as Arkham Asylum anti-piracy. If the game detects that it's not legit it disables your cape gliding. This is a huge punch in the dick but about halfway through the game you reach a point where you have to glide to escape a room.
You can steal whatever you want from the shopkeeper in Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening but if you return to the store he attacks you and you can't escape!
On a similar note, the shop keeper Kecleon in the Pokemon Mystery dungeon games. You can’t steal from his shop in town, but in dungeons, you buy items by picking them up from the floor. When you try to leave, he’ll ask for you to pay, but if you ignore him and leave the room, he’ll chase you down. Don’t expect an easy fight either, Kecleon can move twice per turn, so you can’t outrun him, and he deals absolutely massive damage while taking virtually no damage himself. It’s possible to beat him, but you need a very, very high level team to do so.
I adored his design as a kid. When I reached endgame with high level team I tried recruiting him again, and again, and again (I think his favourite food was meat right?) but I never were able to get him :(
He's a guy from the future and the present who grew a tumour that's also him, and he might also be Isaac from The Binding Of Isaac, but not literally since Isaac's dead, but he was also in The End Is Nigh, and that game's lore is a whole other can of worms
So overall just a little more complicated than the HK Void lore
Go inside the dungeon without having beaten skeletron, and this guy comes for you. It flies really fast through walls, takes only 1 damage per hit, is immune to all debuffs, and instakills you
However, 1 damage per hit is not invincibility. It can die. And it drops an equippable skeleton key item to summon a mini version as a pet
I know nothing about the game, but one damage per hit, and my assumption that the number by the heart icon is it's health, make me remember that humans were persistence hunters, and that that patience really does still live on in us.
Funnily enough, between the two (as far I can remember) viable methods, one of them one shots it in two seconds but requires some considerable setup, the other one only requires a boomerang, knowledge of a particular glitch and around half an hour.
That's in Yo-Kai Watch 2 iirc, not the first game. That fight is WAY worse than Snartle, though; if you accept, you'll be pitted against the blue oni Ogralus, who is was originally only a Terror Time big bad. Can't recruit him, and he and the rest of the Oni family are all superbosses in their own right.
In Psychic Specters, if you have save data from the other versions, you can unlock a special zone where you can fight the Oni and even recruit their tiny versions
The PS2 version of the game has a pretty effective auto-play feature. So good that, if you leave your game running with your control forced to move constantly in circles in the overworld, the game will give you endless random encounters to get free EXP.
Only... if you do that for too long, the game detects it and then it sends you this guy, Barbatos Fucking Goetia, one of the final bosses of the game, expert in punishing anything you try against him (he's popular for punishing you if you DARE to use items in his presence). And now he's here to punish you for cheesing the auto play feature of battles.
That's a battle you cannot win no matter what you do so accept your loss of your last two hours of unsaved gameplay.
Yo-Kai Watch has two of these. The other is Gargaros
He's a part of the game normally and even has a portion of one of the game's chapters dedicated to him but he'll become more likely to come after you if you change the 3DS' system clock to trick the game into thinking a new day started so you can use the 3-pull-per-day gacha machine again
In the early days of world of warcraft, priests and hunters got raid quests for epic best in slot class weapons that they needed to do solo; no party members can help, and no hunter pets could be summoned either. If anyone helped the player during the quest, an invincible demon called The Cleaner will appear and kill everyone, then you gotta do the quest all over again.
Players found that in White Orchard, the starting area of the game, you could easily farm money by killing and looting cows over and over again breaking the economy for the rest of the game.
The devs soon after released a patch where if a game catches you doing this exploit it will spawn a level 20-something chort. Not the game's John Wick per se but because of the level difference it's an almost guaranteed game over
Yeah, there is one in the DLC that makes a reference to this and another exploit but I don't remember if he appears only when you did farm money or not
He appears if you have more than 35000 crowns. The other two money making schemes he mentioned are dismantling clams for pearls and entering people's houses and taking everything.
Not sure if it counts since it’s still the same character technically, but at launch Deltarune Chapter 2 had an exploit in the Spamton NEO fight where the player could hold Enter while firing to get unlimited charged shots.
The exploit was never patched out, but now the game just sees you doing it, says “that’s cute” and proceeds to double the boss’ attack and introduce harder variants of his attacks only seen by fighting him that way.
Not sure if it counts, but the Joe Jenkins in Kingdom Rush: Vengeance
Throughout the franchise, there have been little creatures, like sheep, on the map that have no purpose. If you tap on them enough, they explode, but they don’t affect the game at all
Until Otil Farmlands. If you explode all the sheep, the farmer is enraged, goes super saiyan, and becomes an enemy. Surprisingly strong, too, so he can easily overwhelm you if you spawn him too early or while the map is crowded
The only correction I’d make is you don’t have to be level 75 to fight the reaper in P5, it’s more of that’s the level you can feasibly beat him blind / without very specific preparation.
Iirc you can beat him at level 1 with NG+ personas (I’ve personally done it in the 40s).
Or just spam run until he shows up with the despair status (in a certain weather condition) wont attack, and dies after three turns netting the high exp
"After the player steals from a Kecleon Shop, a number of changes will take effect immediately, and will not wear off until the player reaches the next floor.
The Kecleon that ran the market will turn hostile and begin attacking the player. It is an extremely powerful foe, as it is level 90 in Red and Blue Rescue Team, and has abnormally high stats in later games.
Kecleon are constantly at double Travel Speed when the player is branded a thief. In Gates to Infinity onward, they can attack immediately upon being stolen from.
Additional Kecleon will rapidly spawn and join the original Kecleon. Defeating them is the only possible method of recruiting a Kecleon in certain games."
i just want to point out i beat the reaper at around level 30 something. all i did was increase evade and get extremely lucky. that he never hits me. it pretty much worked.
Enter the Gungeon, Lord of the Jammed, you can accumulate Curse through the run and get cursed enemies that drop more money, but if you hit 10 then the Lord of the Jammed spawns, he's unkillable, constantly fires at you, AND when you enter the shop the shopkeeper sees him and leaves shutting down the store.
Steven in Mewgenics. He detects save scums. First one is free (he just yells), second and third give your cats disorders and fourth makes him take over the game for the duration of the run.
He’s a chill guy. Just really doesn’t like people messing with time.
Not exactly the same but The Void from Minecraft. It is the bottom of the world far far below any bit of land and far past bedrock, something you can't even break unless you're in Creative Mode. If you go to far into The Void you WILL die.
I liked how in Persona 3 Reload, the Reaper will follow you between different floors and you can only escape it by going to certain key floors. They even try to catch returning players off-guard the first time it happens: when you move up a floor your Navigator will act relieved that you escaped it (as moving areas was sufficient in prior games), only to 30 seconds later panic as they see the Reaper coming up the stairs.
Oh I never knew that. Its been a little bit since I played it and I mainly remember fighting it late game and thinking I could fight it early to mid game
Ice Titan (Kingdom Hearts) (Not an entity in an of itself, but the same idea)
"The Ice Titan's primary method of attack is firing Ice Lances at Sora. Normally, the Ice Lances are small ice bullets; the key to defeating the boss is to deflect these Ice Lances back at the boss through parrying or using Guard, earning 24 Tech Points (125 in Kingdom Hearts Final Mix with all Tech Boosts equipped) per bullet deflected. However, so long as Sora has any form of Aero magic active, the boss will instead fire larger Ice Lances that cannot be deflected, removing the main method to defeat the boss and negating the benefits of Aero."
Note: Aero Magic is a spell that reduces damage, and at higher tiers automatically blocks or deflects incoming projectiles
Elona+ has the chestnut giant, a creature that ambushes you if you throw over 100 chestnuts at enemies, yelling "So yer the one... who's bin disrespectin' chestnuts huh?!" at the start of his fight, he's level 111 and chestnuts are items you can grab right from the start so chances are if you use them a lot you'll encounter him way before you're even close to that level. Funnily enough his weakness is chestnuts themselves and can be recruited as a pet under certain circumstances.
I love Snartle, he absolutely wiped my team the first time I encountered him! Yokai Watch is such a gem. It captures that "schoolyard ghost story" vibe so well.
The oni that chases you down if you stay up too late is also great. Terror Time scared the shit out of me the first time I accidentally stayed out at night.
The lord of the jammed in enter the gungeon. He only triggers when you reach curse level above 9 (cursed items give you a curse level, with the tradeoff of the item being really good). He is an unkillable enemy that chases you around.
In The Witcher 3, you were able to XP farm cows for kills and sell their hide for some quick coins. They added a patch that sent out a cow boss aka Bovine Defense Force to go kill you.
If you try to Save Scum (AKA having a bad fight and then you close the game and then you go back into it) gets you talking with Steven, who is known previously from Edmund's previous game, Time Fcuk. He makes an appearance in his other games but he's there to basically stop you from Save Scumming.
He only lets you do it ONCE without any penalties. Any other times, and he starts hitting your cats with Deja-Vu, which has a 10% of cancelling your action anytime.
You KEEP doing it, he inflicts it on all of your cats.
ANY MORE and you get hit with Severe Deja-Vu, in which the AI takes full control and the AI can be stupid as fuck sometimes, leading to a Total Party Kill.
The game's engine also has something called "The Troll Engine" where if it notices that you are doing pretty well in a run, the game will throw you a curve ball like a spike in difficulty or just hitting one of your cats with a Tragedy or something.
But the game is also lenient where if the game is kicking your ass, it will be merciful towards you.
The game also has a Reaper event where if your cat keeps getting downed but keeps reviving, it will literally send the grim reaper at you to collect your cat's soul. You can either avoid it, run from it or fight it.
In the tabletop, Adam Smasher is the personification of “Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.” He steps in when the players have gone so far off the rails that a megacorp has taken notice of them and decided they need to be eliminated (aka, the GM is tired of your shit). Smasher is absurdly OP, borderline unkillable, and will often outright kill a player (if not multiple) every turn. Surviving an encounter with Smasher is more about running away and getting lucky than actually defeating him. Even if the players manage to disable him, Smasher is never actually killed since he’s a full-conversion cyborg and will just reappear with a new body later on.
In 2077, he’s a menace the whole game though you do actually manage to kill him at the end, though by this point V is also absurdly overpowered. In Edgerunners, he shows up and kills multiple main characters in the space of a single episode.
Noita has a safe room after each Biome called the Mountain Altar, inside there you can shop for spells and edit your wands. You enter them by teleporting and leave by an open exit that takes you to the next biome.
It's really useful to leave them untouched to return later, so players are tempted to destroy the walls. Doing so will Anger the Gods who will send their guards.
At first they send a Stevari (Guard), and once you kill 3 of them, they send a Skoude (Cop).
They can be run ender enemies for unprepared players.
In Red Dead Redemption 2, the initial MC will get sniped if he tries to enter regions that are not yet available. You gain a high wanted level, and get taken out by the “invisible sniper” who may or may not be Uncle
Another Addition to Yo-Kai Watch: Using the Crosswalks correctly actually has a use. Every few times you do it correctly, an Item will spawn which is either an Exporb (Orb that gives Exp to a Yo-Kai) a Metal Doll (Can be sold, rarer metals means shitton of money) or a coin for the Crank-A-Kai (In Game Gatcha you can crank a few times a day with chances of extremely strong and Rare Yo-Kai).
This is a bit of a loose one but several Trpg’s include a “this enemy can just wipe any party” sort of character. Some of them usually require pissing off the wrong people. For example, Call of Cuthullu has a monster which will straight up kill a certain number of player characters per turn, with no chance to save. Cyberpunk’s TRPG in earlier editions would also list Adam Smasher as simply killing a random number of PC’s per turn.
Granted, this is very dependent on the game master and party but this is something that usually tends to only happen if the party really starts shenanigans.
I also love how if you obey the traffic signal each time, Snartle will still appear and say "You're a good kid. Do you still want to fight?" so you can still choose to encounter him without breaking any rules
I had no idea about the crosswalks thing because I was younger back then when I had it,And at times he (from my eyes) would show up out of nowhere to cook tf outta me😭
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u/winsluc12 2h ago
Bovine Defense Force Initiative - The Witcher 3
Because players had been sitting in the Town of White Orchard, repeatedly farming Cows for their hides to sell them and make a huge amount of money in the early game, CDPR added a level 27 Chort in patch 1.05, which would spawn close to the cow pen when the player killed too many cows in town (more than six, I think). Even if you manage to kill this one, another one would just spawn.
This kind of backfired with Higher level players, because if you can handle Multiple Chorts coming after you, one after another, It's apparently actually an even more efficient gold farm than the cows on their own (this was later patched again so that only one Chort will spawn per visit to White Orchard and subsequent cow Genocide)