Hard Mode Mooks

Nowadays, a video game is expected to have a solid replay value to be well received. Having multiple difficulty levels is a simple way to prolong the life of the game, but then Numerical Hard is to be avoided at all costs. As such, a common way of increasing difficulty is to put the player against tough mooks earlier and more frequently in the game.

And then there are games that not only do that but create new enemies that you will meet only in difficulties above normal, thus surprising players who thought they had already fought everything. Of course, expect these enemies to be Demonic Spiders or Boss in Mook Clothing.

Some games make it so that some tough enemies don't appear in difficulties below normal, but then it's more a case of Easy-Mode Mockery. If these enemies yield rare or unique rewards, that's the product of Hard Mode Perks.

Compare Level Scaling, which has a similar effect but minus the difficulty setting angle. Also compare Replacement Mooks, a sort of narrative equivalent, and Underground Monkey. While these mooks are most often tougher than the ones they replace, in keeping with higher difficulties being harder, it isn't strictly necessary for them to be tougher to be examples of the trope, as long as their presence is the result of the game being on a higher difficulty.

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• Adventure has three levels of difficulty. On level one, there is a green and a gold dragon. Level 2 introduces a bat who will steal items, though sometimes replacing them with others. Level 3 introduces a red dragon, who is faster, more aggressive, and will pursue for greater distances.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In the original The Legend of Zelda game, Red Bubbles (which take away your sword permanently if they hit you) only appear in the Second Quest (that game's version of a Hard difficulty). Additionally, the Second Quest's Stalfos have a Sword Beam attack.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Master Mode introduces Golden-tier enemies that serve as the toughest non-boss or Guardian enemies in the game.
• Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap: The 2017 remake has a fourth color of enemies (yellow) that appear only in the postgame... unless you're playing the game in hard mode, which throws a few of them in normal stages.

Action Games

• Devil May Cry: An enemy called the Fetish will appear on any difficulty higher than Easy Automatic. They first appear in the ninth mission "New Strength" as a stronger variant of the Marionette enemy, while on higher difficulties they appear as early as the first mission, "Curse of the Bloody Puppets".
• Bayonetta: Gracious and Glorious are more powerful versions of Grace and Glory respectively that appear on higher difficulties.
• Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number: The hard mode introduce chainsaw-wielding enemies as part of any levels featuring street gang members. There's also a seldom-seen dual-gun soldier in the hard version of "Ambush".
• Lollipop Chainsaw: There are named zombies you need to slay to complete an album, and some of them only appear on harder difficulties.
• Ninja Gaiden Black, and by extension Sigma, has the Ryu clones, mini-bosses who appear unexpectedly where you fought common enemies in Normal mode. Then in Very Hard, you meet a new type of Black Spider ninjas throwing Fuuma Shurikens at you. And then in Master Ninja mode, you meet yet another type with swords that literally burn you when they hit you. Hard mode and above also put you against tougher versions of the cops and soldiers, specially immune to some of your techniques.
• Contra: In the arcade version of the first game, a Unique Enemy pair of knife-wielding frogmen appear at the beginning of the first stage when the difficulty is set to Hard or Very Hard.
• In Target Terror, knife-throwing McNinjas are extremely rare in single-player mode outside of the final mission, but are regularly encountered in two-player mode and Justice Mode.

Action RPGs

• Diablo II: In Nightmare and Hell difficulties, most of the normal enemies in Act V are replaced with "Guest Monsters". These are more powerful versions of monsters seen during all 5 acts of the game, sometimes with different names. Guest Monsters often have some palette shifts, and a few have new skills or abilities as well.
• Mega Man Battle Network:
  • Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon only permits you to fight first-tier enemies on the first go-round, and as a result, you only get first-tier chips for the duration of the run. On a New Game Plus, though, the enemies are upgraded to second tier, moving faster and hitting harder and yielding stronger chips. Some even have additional effects to their attacks. Go on yet another new game plus run after that, and the enemies will reach their third and strongest tier.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Team ProtoMan: Going through the main storyline only gets you to fight the first-tier enemies and earn first-tier chips. After you beat the Final Boss, you can open the special gate into the Bonus Dungeon (the Nebula Area) to upgrade the enemies, making them faster and stronger and yield better chips, and some enemies even get additional effects to their attacks. As you progress into the postgame, you eventually open another gate that further upgrades the enemies to earn the third and final tiers of chips.
• Phantasy Star Online: The Ultimate difficulty swaps out almost every mook in the game for an Ultimate counterpart, which are almost invariably far more frustrating to fight than their lower difficulty versions.
• Titan Quest: Dummied Out: enemies were going to be renamed on New Game Plus.
• Transistor: 3.0 versions of enemies are only seen in New Game Plus.

First Person Shooters

• Redneck Rampage: In the first episode, Hulk Guards only appear on higher difficulty levels.
• Blood (1997): A variant: the appearance of boss enemies as Degraded Bosses depends on the difficulty level. On the easier modes, the first boss, the Stone Gargoyle, reappears as a mook regularly, while the second one, Shial the giant spider, only does so once or twice and the third one, Cerberus, only appears in its boss encounter. On the harder modes, Shial becomes a regular encounter, and Cerberus makes a few appearances as a mook.
• Borderlands has many enemies that appear at higher difficulty levels that are basic mooks with advantages and name changes:
  • Borderlands: Psychos become Maniacs in Playthrough 2, then they become Lunatics in Playthrough 2.5 (after beating Playthrough 2 in the main game); Bandit Thugs become Bandit Goons become Bandit Outlaws; Bandit Raiders become Bandit Ravagers become Bandit Desperados and so on...
  • Borderlands 2: Psychos become Armored Maniacs (trading Fire element weakness for Corrosive) in True Vault Hunter Mode and Ironclad Lunatics in Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode; Marauders become Outlaw Marauders (trading their handgun for a Shotgun) become Outlaws; etc.
• Doom: Things that can appear on a map, including monsters, have flags that determine which difficulties they appear on, with three separate ones for the easier difficulties (I'm Too Young To Die and Hey, Not Too Rough), the medium one (Hurt Me Plenty), and the harder ones (Ultra-Violence and Nightmare). Going up in difficulty typically includes greater concentrations of enemies (E1M1: Hangar only has four zombies and two imps up to Hurt Me Plenty, then doubles both of those numbers and adds 16 shotgun zombies on Ultra-Violence), introducing stronger enemies sooner (the cacodemon is introduced in E2M3: Refinery on HNTR or below, and in E2M1: Deimos Anomaly on HMP or above), and/or even replacing lower-tier enemies with stronger ones (Doom II MAP06: The Crusher has five hell knights on HMP, but replaces the three of them under the eponymous crusher with the game's first Spider Mastermind on UV). The PlayStation version of Doom expands on this by allowing several Doom II-specific enemies to appear in Doom 1 levels on higher difficulties, such as E1M1 including a chaingunner and pain elemental on Ultra-Violence.
• PAYDAY 2 alters which types of cops spawn, and which types of specials can spawn, depending on the difficulty:
  • In terms of standard cops, Normal and Hard bring standard Metropolitan PD SWAT units, Very Hard and Overkill swaps them for their heavier-armed and armoered Federal Bureau of Intervention variants, Mayhem/Death Wish switches to even tougher GenSec Elites and Death Sentence swaps them out for the Department of Homeland Security's ZEAL Team.
  • In terms of specials, Normal allows only Shields and Snipers, Hard introduces Tasers, Very Hard introduces Cloakers and Green Bulldozers (wielding Reinfeld 880 pump-action shotguns), Overkill introduces Black Bulldozers (wielding IZHMA 12Gs) and Medics, Mayhem introduces Skulldozers (wielding KSP LMGs), Death Wish introduces Minigun Dozers, and Death Sentence introduces Medic Dozers.
• PAYDAY 3 introduces a Lead Guard, a security guard who patrols a large portion of the map and triggers endless pagers upon death, when the "Lead Guard" Security Modifier is activated. Said modifier is exclusively active on Very Hard or Overkill difficulty.

MMORPGs

• Star Trek Online: The PVE raid "The Breach" has a stage where you have to blow up structural integrity field nodes on the exterior of a Voth fortress-ship. In the "elite" version of the raid, the field nodes are guarded by a Bulwark-class battleship in addition to the beam and missile turrets they have on normal.

Platform Games

• Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse: On starting a New Game Plus, the medusa head enemies (themselves notorious Ledge Bats) are replaced by flying skulls. Whereas medusa heads move in a predictable wavy pattern, the flying skulls have a much more erratic wavy pattern. Every 'wave' they make can be one of four sizes, selected randomly at the end of the previous wave, making them incredibly unpredictable and difficult to either dodge or kill.
• Commander Keen: Episode 5: The Armageddon Machine has the Shikadi Master, a Boss in Mook Clothing that can teleport, shoot energy balls, and can't be stunned. It is completely absent in easy mode, but there's one of them in the final stage on medium setting and even two on hard.
• The Game Boy version of Daffy Duck: The Marvin Missions had a special series of hard levels that you can play though if you beat the first screen on a Speed Run. These levels feature a few enemies that don't appear in a normal playthrough.
• Jazz Jackrabbit allows the level author to mark any enemy as requiring a specific difficulty.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby's Dream Land: Extra Mode replaces the mooks and bosses with stronger counterparts of themselves, such as Bronto Burts being replaced by Koozers.
  • Kirby Super Star Ultra has stronger versions of enemies appear in Revenge of the King, which is the harder version of Spring Breeze (both being homages to Dream Land).
• Madness Accelerant's hard mode replaces the normal mode's Agents with ATP Engineers, who are stronger and have a more competent AI.
• Super Mario Bros. downplays this, as Buzzy Beetles show up in the regular games. However, when you play the New Game Plus, which is replaying the normal games but harder, Goombas are replaced with Buzzy Beetles.
• Super Mario Bros. Crossover: It's possible to change the settings to replace the Goombas with not only Buzzy Beetles (as in the original game's second quest) but also with Spinies and with a completely new-to-the-original-game enemy, Spike Tops (which act as both Spinies and Buzzy Beetles at once).

Real Time Strategy Games

• StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty: The Terran Dominion and Orlan's mercenaries will make use of mercenary units, variants of normal units with more powerful weapons and more health on Hard and Brutal difficulties.

Role-Playing Games

• Undertale: Parsnik, Migospel, and Moldessa are stronger variations of Vegetoid, Migosp, and Modsmal that only appear in the Ruins on Hard Mode.

Run-and-Gun

• The update for Katana ZERO introduces Kung Fu Ricky, and an MG Terry - the former are capable of launching a quick-kick, that sends the player a mile away, making them harder to get close to without quick reflexes; the latter are armed with a light machine gun and will continuously launch non-stop suppressing fire, until they stop (via going to cover) and reload. Fittingly, they only appear in Hard Mode.

Shoot-'Em-Ups

• Ace Combat:
  • Named aces, outside of those that are actually relevant to the story, only show up in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, and Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown on Normal difficulty and above in a New Game Plus run.
  • A lot of aces in Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War only appear on Hard, Expert, and Ace difficulties. This carries over to Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, which allows you to unlock the assault records for the recurring Strigon Team on any difficulty but require playing on Expert or Ace for other named enemies.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade: Chapter 11A has an extra boss (with no dialogue), a Paladin named Roberts, only appear on Hard difficulty.
  • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade:
    • Maxime is a named Elite Mook who always appears in Battle Before Dawn, but his stats are only barely above an average promoted enemy on most modes. Hector Hard Mode jacks his stats up to an insane degree, and changes his position to make it much more likely you'll have to fight him, turning him into an actual threat.
    • Hector Hard Mode makes significant changes to the enemy composition of a few maps: its version of Cog of Destiny is populated by magic users like Druids, Valkyries and Sages instead of physical classes, and its version of The Value of Life replaces nearly every enemy with a Berserker.
  • Fire Emblem Fates: The higher difficulties of the Conquest route avert Numerical Hard and instead add more enemies to maps. This commonly includes staff users with Entrap staves, which pull one of your units to a space adjacent to them. (Usually resulting in death by Zerg Rush)
• Super Robot Wars:
  • Alpha Gaiden significantly ramps up the difficulty of the Disc-One Final Boss depending on the player's performance up to that point by introducing multiple new bosses and mooks on the harder versions of the map, culminating in having to fight multiple Ghost X-9s on Hard: on the Easy version of the map, just one Ghost serves as the boss of the first chunk of the stage.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• Terraria:
  • Expert Mode and higher difficulties spawn special variants of enemies that aren't otherwise seen such as Zombies using their other arm as a club, Skeletons that throw bones and Spiked Slimes that spawn from the King Slime as he takes damage.
  • The "Celebrationmk10" secret world seed makes worlds with Gold Slimes that drop extra money, and Jungle Mimics that drop joke items and vomit blocks to clutter the inventory. The "Get fixed boi" seed has both of those enemies and includes a new boss in the form of Mechdusa, the three Mechanical Bosses joined together.

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