Examples of Luck-Based Mission in Role Playing Games.
Games with their own pages:
- Avalon Code's Judgment Link contests have a horribly-designed scoring system — when someone drops the ball, the last person to touch it before them gets a point, first to three points wins. As a result, even if you play perfectly, it's possible to still lose because of when your three computer opponents decided to screw up.
- A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: All three contests in the pig arena. Not only are the quiz bowl questions random (which makes sense), but the portions that are decoded are as well. On some runs you might get a totally decoded question, other times it might be complete gibberish. The arena is also a bad offender, since the combat system is such a Luck-Based Mission to begin with; a single miss or critical hit can change the course of the whole event.
- The browser based Billy vs. SNAKEMAN is chock full of this to the point that the game's major antagonist is literally "RNG". This may be because the majority of the game mechanics are based around dice rolls.
- Black Sigil has the main quest being the removal of a curse on the main character, which in gameplay terms results on him getting random status ailments at the beginning of battles. It's not much of an issue as you'll usually have two more party members to back him up, but if you get Cripple, Slow or Blind during one of the more difficult battles, or worse the Duel Boss, you'll enjoy restarting from the last save point.
- The Physica Absorbus spell can turn any simple fight into a hair-tearing game of chance. Contrarily to how drain attacks usually behave, it heals the user for eight times the damage caused, meaning even a weak hit can completely heal the monster who used it. Throw in the fact that all monsters have a decent chance of countering any hit with a random spell, and a whim of the Random Number God can turn any damage you cause into a free shot at you and healing back all the damage you caused, and then some.
- The Son of Sun in Chrono Trigger. If you have fire-resistant armor, this is an easy fight. If not, then prepare yourself for a wall of pain. The boss itself is immune to your attacks, and doing so results in a devastating counterattack. Around the boss rotate five flames. One of these flames will damage the boss if attacked, the other four will result in another nasty counterattack. Also, every now and then, the boss will shuffle the flames so you have to find the weak one all over again. And if you try to smartass your way around it by using a tech that hits everything, they'll destroy your whole party with counterattacks. The good news is, the boss itself has very little HP, so a few good turns without a shuffle will generally finish it. Magus's Black Hole magic can make things much easier by eliminating most of the decoys, but considering that spell is useless literally everywhere else in the game, you probably wouldn't even think to try it.
- Day of the Idea: Piizu is an entirely luck based mission, he can read your mind to predict your attacks, so what must you do to damage him? Confuse your entire party and hope you attack him instead of your own party. He has only 200 HP, so one hit should take him down rather quickly.
- Dragon Quest:
- Dragon Quest VIII:
- Almost 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: you might get hit with their best shot multiple times in a row.
- And if you should want to resurrect someone who just died, good luck: the first resurrection spell you get, Zing (usually around level 25), has a 50% chance of failing, and failure still costs MP.
- Invoked deliberately with Metal Slimes in the series. Most attacks against them either do 1 damage or nothing, and they have a chance to flee every turn. Certain abilities give you an edge against them (either attacks that always deal 1 damage to Metal Slimes, attacks that strike multiple times, or all-or-nothing abilities that can land defense-ignoring Critical Hits), but even then it boils down to whether the Metal Slime sticks around long enough to land the final blow against it. Later games (starting with Dragon Quest VII) add Metal Slash to mitigate the randomness, but also greatly reduce the benefit of Metal Slime hunting.
- Beyond battles, DQ IX has MANY quests that are completely luck based. You simply have to wait for an item to drop. Sometimes it'll happen the first battle...sometimes it'll take forever. "Kill 3 Metal Medleys with a certain Spear skill that only has about 10% chance of working"?"Kill a certain enemy with a Critical Hit, and skills that give you an automatic crit don't count"?"Kill certain monsters with the elements they're most resistant to"?
- And really, the series as a whole has LEVELING a part of this. For the most part you will not gain any reasonable experience outside of finding metal slimes and their ilk...which are both very rare and LOVE to run away.
- Dragon Quest VIII:
- Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: The extra Church areas have very random enemy formations with no consistent weaknesses, making it possible to accidentally choose a team that's ill-suited for the powerful enemies. The luck aspect is exacerbated by the fact that there is no option to flee to redo the team composition.
- The Tribunal expansion for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind includes a Match Maker side quest where you help a woman, who is too busy with work, find a husband. You can find three men to set her up on a date with. Whether the date is successful or not is up to a random chance; you can give each of the men advice which increases the odds of success, but never above 67%. If successful, one man gives you nothing as a reward, the second gives you an enchanted belt, and the third gives you the artifact weapon "the Bi-Polar Blade."
- Fallen London: While every single statcheck qualifies to a degree, there is still some influence from you. The real qualifiers are every single check that is "A matter of luck", as the tooltip helpfully informs you. They're always looked at with certain derision, making large concentrations of them quite hateable due to simple statistics: Passing all those luck rolls becomes increasingly unlikely the more you do.
- Polythreme is a serial offender: Almost everything you can do there is a matter of simple luck. The most you can do is manipulate the odds a little with your card deck, but other than that it's all coin tosses. Fortunately, for the Fascinating and Investigating progress stories, you can bribe your way through, though it gets expensive as you go. Still, the initial stages only take items you can acquire there without luck checks, helping a bit with the frustrating amount of coin-tosses.
- The Tale of the Fidgeting Writer is a repeatable storyline as infuriating as it is profitable. Mechanically, it's little more than a long game of Double or Nothing, with every step beyond the first having a small fee. Despite the decent odds in every step, the chances of getting the final prize are minimal, though it's also very, very valuable. Taking into account all the expenses and the turns taken to acquire them, it's still one of the most profitable things you can do, but it doesn't help when you wipe out at the last step. Thankfully, however, each step has a less valuable consolation prize you can snatch with no questions asked. Ideal for when you can just feel the Random Number God is about to backstab you.
- Final Fantasy Mystic Quest's first fight (which also begins the game) pits Benjamin against a Behemoth. Both characters can only attack, and their attacks naturally have a chance of missing. If you miss more often than you hit, or if the Behemoth lands lots of criticals, you're selecting "Try Again", no questions.
- Final Fantasy X-2 features the Sphere Break mini-game, necessary for acquiring the Lady Luck Dress Sphere. Aside from other issues, it is entirely impossible to progress when your core number comes up 1. (The objective of the game is to combine one of your four base numbers with one or more of the twelve other numbers on the board to create a multiple of the core number, with points being awarded for using more of the other numbers at a time; since each of your four base numbers is already a multiple of 1, the round is over before you get to use any of your scoring tiles.) If this happens even one round, out of the twenty rounds you have to win the only important match, it can ruin your combo bonus and make winning impossible, and the closer you came to winning, the greater the odds that the computer would start doing this.
- Final Fantasy XIII:
- There are enemies that use attacks with an instant death property. Fortunately, most of those attacks have a piddling 1% chance of success, so it's not too bad...until you get to the first form of the final boss, who uses an attack with a 50% chance of success, meaning that even with Death-resistance accessories there's still an ever-present chance that it will instantly cause a Game Over wthout you being able to do anything about it.
- 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 we 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.
- 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.
- Kingdom Hearts: Mushroom #VIII in Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix+. True, this is only a sidequest required for 100% Completion, but then again, the type of people who play the Final Mixes are completionists. Anyways, this sidequest, no matter what strategy you use, requires a complicated setup and can be resource-intensive—so you will be Save Scumming. The point is to keep the mushroom in the air by hitting it and never allowing it to touch the ground; what makes it luck-based is the completely random direction the mushroom will jet off to every few rounds of hits. It requires as well very fine-tuned timing and hand-eye coordination, yet if luck is not with you, you will lose. Oh, and how many times must the mushroom be hit? Eighty-five times, minimum.
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails
- Trails in the Sky: The Ramblin' Gambler achievement, which requires collecting all the Gambler Jack novels, scoring a 21 in blackjack in the casino, and getting a four of a kind in poker.
- Trails to Azure: The fishing contests in Azure can become this, particularly the final match against Lakelord. There, victory is determined by three things: Whether you have a wide selection of bait and can remember which ones attract which fish, whether you triggered the conditions necessary to have a Royal Bait EX and the Aqua Ruler needed to use it and whether the RNG decides to play nice when you use a bait that can catch more than one kind of fish.
- In the DS game Master of the Monster Lair (that's Dungeon Maker outside the US) the boss of the 5th floor is an Iron Golem who takes 1 damage from nearly all attacks. The only way to deal significant damage to him is to hope that your sword randomly triggers its one-hit KO attack. And even then, it only deals 100 of the 300-or-so HP the boss has, so you have to get really lucky 3 times before the boss's strong attacks kill you.
- Paper Mario:
- There are enough times in the battles of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door where random effects can spontaneously happen that you can never truly rely on your own skill or character's power level. Either you or your opponent can randomly be frozen or turned invisible, fog can fill the arena rendering most attacks ineffective, and you have absolutely no control over when it happens or what will happen. As the game's core mechanic relies on Action Commands, you can be steam-rolling a random encounter only to be randomly frozen, take a beating, and get a Game Over, losing all your progress, purely because the Random Number God decided to say "screw you". Calling it a Scrappy Mechanic is an understatement as, unlike every enemy attack in the game barring one from the intently difficult Superboss, you can not Superguard or even defend against some of these effects at all.
- In Paper Mario: Color Splash:
- there are Roshambo Temples where you must try to outwit three different opponents in order to win. While there are usually NPCs outside the temples who will give you hints as to what you should expect the opponents to play, the third and final opponent of every temple is the Rock Paper Wizard, who always picks his cards at random. If you lose at any point, not only will the tournament end, but the temple will close until you collect a Mini Paint Star (fortunately, it can be one you've already found), or by paying a fee to the Blue Toad who will sneak you back inside. Also, at the eighth and final Roshambo Temple, all three opponents will pick their cards randomly. Good luck.
- Subverted with one segment of Fort Cobalt. The gates, which smack you with a floor panel, zap you, drop a Washbasin thing on you, and drop you into a pit of Ninjis, respectively, if you hit the wrong one; there's no indication as to which is the right one (except for the aforementioned washbasin trap.) You're encouraged to mark them with the Paint Hammer for when they pop up after they're shuffled, and all subsequent attempts have the correct gate be dented.
- The SaGa (RPG) games all put heavy emphasis on random chance for a lot of factors - stat growth, enemies encountered, skills learned, et cetera. One prominent boss that embodies the trope is the final boss of T260G's quest in Sa Ga Frontier , Genocide Heart. Each phase you are taken to one of seven landscapes which determine his moveset. Some are relatively benign - the snowy landscape and volcano have few troublesome attacks - but heaven help you in the ocean, where Maelstrom will devastate you unless you have water-resistant gear equipped, or especially the desert, where he spams Magnetic Storm (heavy damage to everything with a bonus to Mecs, which most of your party likely is). Each time you return he'll also cast Carnage, a heavy damage dealer with a chance to instantly kill organic characters. The only thing sparing the fight from being a total nightmare is his relatively low HP.
- Unlimited Saga has another example in Armic's quest, which is centered around collecting a number of rare materials. Sure, some of these are in fixed locations and you can create a good number of them yourself if you're well-versed in the crafting mechanics, but you're still at the game's mercy for the most part, hoping rare materials and items surface in shops or random treasure chests.
- The Battle of South Roundtop in SaGa Frontier 2. Unlike every other strategy segment where you're either heavily favored or at least just slightly disadvantaged, this is brutal. Victory hinges on 1 - Killing the Dragon's unit fast. 2 - Suffering very few if any casualties. and 3 - Making a wall of Meat Shields just out of range of the Big Bad before the turn counter triggers his script to go insane. 4 - Walk straight up to the freaks on the turn the script triggers. 5 - For the love of God defend. 1 and 2 are narrow but doable odds, but doing them AND keeping your units within range of the remaining enemies and not making a mistake of crossing the line in the sand tanks the odds completely.
- Shin Megami Tensei:
- All the optional boss battles in the PS2 games (Digital Devil Saga, Persona 3, and Nocturne). Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha is exempt from this, as its optional fights are much more forgiving. Largely because DS isn't Nintendo Hard.
- Be happy, because Persona's Thanatos Tower is a luck based dungeon.
- Persona 3's PSP version has Maniac Mode. The enemies hit twice as hard, the AI is better, and the enemies are much more likely to get the advantage if a battle starts with neither side ambushing the other. This is bad, because an ambushed party, no matter what level, always has a chance of being taken out once you've gone about halfway through the game's one dungeon. Made even worse by the fact that only the player character has to be killed for a game over, and the enemies will often gang up and expose weaknesses. Making it even worse is that in order to save you have to stop what you're doing and exit the dungeon, only able to re-start at select pit-stop floors that are spaced ever 15-20 floors apart. So if you're unlucky enough to get ambushed on any floor above 70, chances are you're about to lose 1-2 hours of gameplay.
- Persona 3 Reload has encounters with Greedy Shadows. You have to chase them and guess which direction to turn three times to be able to fight it and get all the treasure — with a 50% chance of getting each turn right, that's a 12.5% chance of finding and battling the Greedy Shadow (if you fail, you at least get some treasure based on how many turns you got right). Averted once Fuuka unlocks Tartarus Search, which cuts out the luck-based aspect of this and cuts straight to the fight.
- Persona 4 features a luck-based mission that requires playing the fishing mini-game until you catch a big fish, and then trading that in so you can try and catch an even bigger fish. This mission must be finished if you want to max the Hermit Social Link. Largely fixed in Golden, which heavily expanded on the fishing mini-game and let the player fish multiple times a day.
- While the game is overall more forgiving than past SMT games, Demon Negotiations in Shin Megami Tensei IV are almost entirely luck-based as the Demons give no indication as to what the correct response is, and even if you do everything correct they may choose to leave with your items anyway. Additionally, enemy reinforcements can show up after any battle, and may automatically have priority. Given the game's Rocket-Tag Gameplay, this can be a very, very bad thing.
- Item creation in Star Ocean: The Second Story and all of its remakes. On the one hand, you can guarantee success with higher skill levels. On the other hand, guaranteed success has multiple outcomes, and you can't control which outcome you get. Finally, if you're looking to get every possible outcome, some require that you fail, which becomes harder to do as your skills increase.
- The Bunny Races in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is completely based on luck. All you can do is pick one bunny (or two "perfecta") and hope for the best. Getting at most 100 points is required to trade in for a key item needed to recruit a powerful inventor.
- The War Sequences in Suikoden are literally glamorized Rock Paper Scissors matches. Later installments expanded upon this with map-based Turn-Based Strategy combat, however much of these battles were also heavily luck-based to the point that sometimes even a supposedly winning matchup would still fail; Suikoden II in particular was an extreme offender in this regard.
- Super Mario RPG
- Look The Other Way, a luck-based minigame, 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 Bowser's Keep there are six doors, each of which has a different challenge behind it. There are two each of battle, action and puzzle challenges. For completing a challenge, you are rewarded with a special prize. Behind the battle and action doors are Mallow, Geno, Bowser and Toadstool's strongest weapons, while the puzzle challenges each reward you with a Rock Candy (a one-use item that deals a lot of damage to all enemies, but can be obtained elsewhere). You must clear four of the doors before you can proceed any further. The catch? This is the only place where you can find these ultimate weapons, and the doors are randomized with each save file, so any player who doesn't know any better has a good chance of missing out on some of these weapons altogether should they enter either of the puzzle doors. On top of all that, the game doesn't give any clues as to which prizes are behind which doors. Also, once you clear four of the doors, you can't get back into any of them. Fortunately, you can return to Bowser's Keep after clearing it and replay the doors to get anything you missed. Savvy players can just Save Scum before the doors and check to see what challenges are behind them.
- Tales Series:
- Tales of Phantasia has the Abyss of Thor, where to get to the Time Machine, the party has to find a skeleton key in one of 8 chests (which is chosen randomly) and use it on one of 8 doors (chosen randomly as well), which may lead to the destination, but will often as well lead to a room with a spell for Arche or back to the entrance (so yes, even trying to leave may become a challenge of nerves if you're unlucky). And to make matters worse, the puzzle is reset every time you enter the chamber.
- In Tales Of Link, no matter how good your team is, it is possible either the enemy you are fighting will target tiles you have no way of switching in time or attack you too quickly to whittle its health down. This is made worse in any mission with Iron Stance, which reduces all damage dealt to an enemy by five times unless you can break its stance. Whether or not you can do this relies entirely on the Random Number God.
- Undertale: Papyrus' Brick Joke tile puzzle that's later used by Mettaton that involves multiple colored panels which each color having a specific effect. It can be completed but you only have a time limit of 30 seconds and one wrong move can prevent you from reaching the finish line, but you're fully expected to fail horribly at completing it and even if you do, the end result is identical to failing it.
- In one mission of Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, the player has to save a girl from monsters. While there are abilities that can draw the attacks away from her, sometimes the monsters will all decide to ignore the taunts, gang up and kill her in one turn anyway—meaning you have to pray that she can dodge the attacks.
- We Who Are About to Die: Matches with the Luck of the Draw modifier don't let you bring your weapon or shield, and imposes the same on all other combatants. Instead, the audience starts pelting the arena with both before the match even starts, and will continue to do so throughout the fight. There's usually a few decent actual weapons and shields in the giant pile of training armaments and Improvised Weapon trash, but there's no guarantee you or anyone will start close to them, and even less guarantee that it'll be a weapon a given gladiator is skilled with. As a result, other than rushing to what looks more useful and preventing enemies from picking up the same it can be quite the tossup for everyone involved.
- In Wild AR Ms 1, the only way to get into the Bonus Dungeon "The Abyss", you had to use a teleporter and hope it malfunctioned and sent you there, which happened rarely. Since the Abyss is a Brutal Bonus Level, you'd naturally have to go back and heal outside of the Abyss at some point. Good luck getting back in!
- The 8-bit computer game tie-in to the film Willow 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 hint that the Wizardry series of RPG's are luck-based can be found in the "terminate game" battle order in Wizardry VII. Taking a step-equivalent (a single step, turning around, etc) has a percentage chance of triggering a fight-so you could theoretically finish off one group of enemies, turn ninety degrees to the left, and get attacked again. Then, once an encounter started, the computer picks from a list of different enemies for that area-each has a given percentage chance to show up. Then each enemy type has percentage chances to determine how many appear, and how many other groups are with them. So a given fight could consist of two hostile birds, or two groups of five hostile birds with a squad of bugs to help. And then, your spells' chances of working, the chance an enemy will cast a spell (and then, what kind of spell they cast), the chance of any given attack being used when they physically attack, and the chance of any given attack poisoning, paralyzing, or instantly killing a character... you guessed it. All determined by the random number generator.
- Simply put, to play the later games, you had to save, and you had to get used to the save game and Quit/No Save commands. Watching the party die because a should-have-worked spell didn't, the enemy instant-killed two party members, or you got a full screen of the nastiest enemies in the game generally falls under the heading of "shit happens".
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2:
- What rare Blades you get is largely down to chance. If you're trying to get someone specific, you're going to spend a lot of time killing monsters for core crystals to resonate with. Even if you've done everything to tip the odds in your favor, it'll take hundreds of crystals to get all of them, especially if you're going for the rarest one.
- The DLC quest Shiny New Power requires this. The quest itself is simple, but in order to advance it, you have to use specials from specific types of common Blades, which are entirely down to luck if you get one of the right weapon type and gender to have the special attack you need.
- In Xenosaga, ES Levi's special attack Blazing Judgement is an almost-guaranteed One-Hit Kill if it strikes an ES that isn't guarding. Unfortunately, it's entirely possible that the ES he is going to target will simply not get a turn between Margulis activating his Anima Awakening and unleashing the attack.
