A black wind blows through your body. All weapons drop to Level 1!
In a Class and Level System, a character's new levels are generally considered permanent: A character only ever levels up, only ever increases in power.
But in many games, some enemies have the ability to take these levels away from a character to weaken them, usually attributed to draining the character's Life Energy. Due to undertones of necromancy, this ability generally only manifests in the undead, or in characters who've trained on the "evil" or "grey" ends of the Character Alignment spectrum.
While a level drain has the overall effect of universally weakening the character, side effects vary; for example, a character might lose the skills or abilities they received during the initial level-up.
If there is no way to easily gain these levels back (like, say, defeating the opponent), enemies that can do this often take on the status of Demonic Spiders, especially if they appear in groups and can drain more than one level per shot. Characters who lose all their levels this way typically die (and may come back as the same creature that killed them, or a subordinate creature under the control of their killer), particularly if the creature was undead, as undeath has a common tendency to do that.
Compare Class Change Level Reset, where changing classes makes your level drop, Level Limiter, where this happens voluntarily as an option, and Maximum HP Reduction, where this applies only to life points. Do not confuse with a Drain Level, which is about the design of a level or stage.
Examples:
- Cave Story
- This is a major game mechanic. You level up your weapons by collecting powerups that enemies drop, and getting injured by anything will lower your weapon level: this also serves as an unique weapon balance factor since different weapons have varying amounts of "spare" experience that you can lose without weakening your weapon once you reach the max level. Also, losing levels is necessary if you get the Nemesis, since it gets weaker the higher its level, and levels up from a single experience pickup.
- This mechanic is played with by the Spur, an upgrade to the Polar Star if you return to the Hermit Gunsmith later in the story by using the Booster v2.0, it's mechanically unusual in that it doesn't use experience, instead employing a charge shot which can deal up to 474 damage in a single beam.
- On the path to 100% Completion, a full reset happens twice: "You feel a black wind blow through you. All weapons dropped to Level 1!" Though you're almost guaranteed to have at least one weapon — the Spur, the Nemesis, or the Blade — that still deals out good damage at Level 1. Arguably, the de-leveling in Sacred Grounds is an equalizer, so that your chance of success isn't affected by how well you fared in the preceding boss fight.
- The original PC-88/MSX version of Valis: The Phantasm Soldier uses the same mechanic as Cave Story, where getting injured by anything will lower your weapon level.
- In Blaster Master, the human pilot loses his gun level when he gets damaged.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: While not as far as stealing levels, there are enemies who can steal your XP with each hit (as well as doing traditional damage).
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: In the playable intro under Hyrule Castle, Link has 30 heart containers, establishing this as a sequel to Breath of the Wild. When Ganondorf is awakened, and his corruption breaks the Master Sword, it infects Link's arm, and 27 of his 30 heart containers are destroyed, leaving Link with the base three heart containers from which he must rebuild his HP. Although not shown in the UI, he must also rebuild his stamina from the original base stamina ring.
- Runescape has many monsters, especially quest monsters, who do the temporary sort of draining, and there's even 'disease' from special undead, which hits a random stat for 10 to 1 levels, and there are potions to restore levels and cure disease, as well as jewelery that takes the disease for you.
- Kingdom of Loathing
- This is the "standard" debuff against monsters and thus features numerous items, equipment, player skills and familiars that can do this. On the other side, there are also items and equipment that can add levels to the enemy, in order to boost their power (and the Experience Points paid out for defeating them). A few rare items can do this to your own statistics, too.
- In July 2013 the first really powerful and regularly usable way to drain a character's stats was added as a joke punishment for doing something clearly stupid. The joke was on the developers; it turned out there was great demand for deleveling as part of an experienced adventurer's toolkit. Among other things, Level Scaling is in effect in a lot of areas, many of which contain valuable loot that isn't tied to the enemy levels.
- In the early days of EverQuest, you could fall into a "death loop" — if your spawn point was near a group of monsters, they'd keep killing you repeatedly. What made it even worse was that you'd spawn without your equipment, making you even easier to kill. You could easily lose a level or more this way.
- Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: Taking damage can lead to loss of the Experience Points of Gems, and losing gems when taking damage. Implied by how upon reaching a new Character Level threshold, the experience point count is not reset to 0 and only listing the distance to the next level, unlike other games.
- In Super Paper Mario, killing a Cragnon that's been placed under Mind Control by the Floro Sapiens will deduct 100 points from the team's total EXP. Should the EXP fall below an amount in which the team normally levels up, the team will level down.
- Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne has Arthas losing levels over the course of the campaign, though this isn't due to actions by enemies but rather just part of the plot.
- Many Roguelikes, such as NetHack, have this as just one of the many dangers that your character can face. Yes, they're Nintendo Hard.
- The original Rogue had the Wraith. It drained a level but left you at the maximum experience of the previous level, so the experience from killing the wraith would make you go up a level again (though with minimal experience for it). Too bad if you got drained twice before killing one, though.
- Angband has not only various levels of EXP drains, but also melee attacks that lower any or all of your stats.
- Ragnarok has monsters that can drain your levels, as well as reduce other stats.
- Pokémon Mystery Dungeon has Doom Seeds, which lower your level by one if you're hit by one... or eat it. Explorers of Sky also added a Lookalike Item called the Dough Seed, with a very good effect (it causes tons of cash to spawn on the next floor when eaten)... Apparently to try to lure players into accidentally eating one of the Doom Seeds.
- Chocobo's Dungeon 2 not only has level down seeds your big yellow bird can eat, but level down traps and a whole family of monsters (Vampire/Lich/Demi-Lich) that can drain levels as an attack. For some strange reason, this is partly balanced out by having level up seeds and traps.
- In Azure Dreams, there's a somewhat Grim Reaper-esque monster called Clown on the lower levels of the tower. Its special ability is a spell that drains a level from your PC or one of your familiars. Killing it brings the level back. However, this is treated as a new level-up, so all the EXP you collected mid-level are gone.
- Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja features an enemy that can drain one level from you. When you defeat it, you level up, bringing you back to your original level.
- Balatro has The Arm, a boss blind which decreases the level of any hands played against it by one.
- There were two kinds of Death monsters in Gauntlet Dark Legacy: a Red Death which drained 1000 hit points, or a Black Death that would drain one level. Thankfully, the halo accessory meant you could drain from these Deaths, and draining from the Black Death would make your character gain a level, no matter how much XP they needed. This made Level Grinding very quick.
- Final Fantasy
- Final Fantasy V had several enemies and powers that cause level drain, though thankfully it's all temporary. You can actually do it on the enemies, too. Often you can use abilities such as Darkshock (Which halves the target's level and rounds if necessary) or Level 2 old (Which gradually delevels them). This makes abilities that attack the opponents via levels (Level 5 Death, Level 3 Flare) much more feasible.
- Final Fantasy VII had this as a handicap in the arena fights in the Golden Saucer. It reduced your level by five for the remainder of the duel. This was actually one of the less nasty penalties, at least it didn't shrink you or worse, turn you into a frog.
- Final Fantasy VIII enabled one GF to learn a LV Down ability for the player to use, which could be used repeatedly to make any non-boss enemy stupidly easy. It had a LV Up ability, too, for those who think scaled leveling of enemies just isn't hardcore enough, or if you wanted to Draw a better spells, since the list of them depended on the monster's level.
- Get in the Car, Loser!: The Rust ailment causes the target to lose one rank. Since lower ranked characters are penalized when attacking or defending against higher-ranked characters, this ailment can make a world of difference.
- In Megami Tensei, some demons have a "smile and laugh" attack that reduces the level of all human party members.
- Some games in the Shin Megami Tensei series have "Energy Drain" attacks. At first, they only inflict Paralysis, but if they hit a human party member who's already paralyzed, their level is decreased by 1.
- Persona 2 has the "Prophecy" spell, which resets a Persona's rank to 1. Given that a Persona's spells and stats come mostly from gaining ranks, and going from rank 1 to rank 8 often takes several hours of Level Grinding, this can be aggravating.
- In Demon's Souls, there is the Soulsucker spell, which is used by one of the bosses in the game and can also be learned by the player. It has an incredibly slow casting time and very short range, but a hit from this will drain a player's Soul Level. Some players let themselves get hit by one for Min-Maxing purposes.
- In the .hack// series, the power of Data Drain can result in an NPC character losing character levels and distorting into a very weak monster. Player characters hit with Data Drain can have their human player be digitized, imprisoning their mind in the game and placing their body into a coma. In .hack//G.U. and .hack//ROOTS, the entity Azure Kite Tri-Edge Data Drains the characters Shino and Haseo, sending the former into a coma and transforming the latter from an artificially high level character to first level with no inventory or member address list.
- There's at least one already difficult boss in The Legend of Dragoon (The Grand Jewel) that can take away levels from your current attack, and they will stay that way for the rest of the fight (though the Grand Jewel can glitch and return levels it takes away in this fashion). In a part of the game with several boss fights in a short period of time, no less. There are also several bosses (including, again, the Grand Jewel) that make your dragoon abilities useless, which can be seen as leveling them down for the battle.
- While they don't affect the characters' levels, several endgame bosses in Golden Sun: The Lost Age and Dark Dawn have moves that shut down a character's Djinni, and a couple of them can shut down all of the Djinni in the active party. Doing so reverts the characters into their significantly weaker base classes. Fortunately, Djinni do return in battle, but only one of each character's 9 Djinni comes back each turn - especially problematic because most Revive spells and all group healing spells require classes with four or more Djinni of a particular element. Then there's the Star Magician's Ghoul Balls, which have this annoying habit of eating a character's Djinn; while they can only "shut down" one Djinni at a time, any Djinn disabled in this manner stay disabled until the offending Ghoul Ball is destroyed.
- In Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, one status ailment actually deleveled your character. It was only temporary, similar to Final Fantasy V. Then there was one late-game mission during which your level was halved and was actually tied to in-game plot.
- Games in The Elder Scrolls series will generally lower a random skill when you're put in prison. There are also various magical effects that temporarily drain the gains and means of increasing in level (health, magicka, fatigue, attributes, and skills).
- Every single one of the early Moraff RPGs for DOS had enemies that could drain your levels if they hit you. Thankfully, this was usually not so horrible due to the fact that your stats increase over time due to finding items, and level draining doesn't drain these. In fact, it is actually advantageous to let yourself be drained back to a low level so that you can get much better max HP gains when leveling back up with your newly inflated stats. The worst enemies were the ones that could drain your stats. If you happen to be a fighter, you better hope you've collected at least one or more of those Too Awesome to Use Holy Hand Grenades (which, by the way, is an extremely tedious process thanks to how the RNG manipulates the system of randomly dropped items when defeating an enemy in these games) when facing Level Draining Enemies or you're screwed. There is also a spell allowing you to drain enemy levels. Since the amount of levels drained is based on your stats, it tends to be a fast and relatively cheap way to kill these very Level Draining Enemies... provided they don't have Contractual Boss Immunity and you don't care to only get the experience for killing a level zero monster.
- Gauntlet: Dark Legacy has a version of Death that, instead of sapping health, saps a whole level instead.
- The Wizardry games had monsters that caused it on your party, which was part of what made the series so infamously difficult, as the player then had to get the characters out of the area they were now too low levelled to survive in, and then grind back up before they could return, and then pray that their levels weren't lost again. The series' fourth game played around with this trope, since the first game's Big Bad was now the Villain Protagonist, the player could summon monsters with level drain abilities to their side, and using such monsters was usually the best way to weaken up the do-gooders who were trying to put Werdna back into his tomb.
- At certain points in Miitopia, the Dark Lord will invade the inn the protagonist and his or her party are staying at. He will then remove all of the protagonist's teammates and reset the protagonist back to Level 1. He will also lock the protagonist out of his or her former job class, forcing you to pick another one. It's not as dire as it sounds, as enemies immediately after these points scale down in strength and you soon pick up new teammates.
- The Final Boss of Yo-kai Watch 2 has the ability to temporarily steal your Yo-kais levels. She can also do this in the mobile game spin-off Yo-kai Watch: Wibble Wobble.
- This is common in the H Games by 62studio, as these games have succubi as enemies. Losing levels to enemies is permanent, but not that painful since level only affects the player's Vigor and Stamina, not any of their other stats, and it's easy to level up. In Succubus in Wonderland, the player can also willingly be drained by their succubus allies to level them up, which is helpful because the player gains experience more rapidly than their allies.
- Certain enemies and traps in the dnd game for PLATO computers can take away your experience points.
- A very weird example happens in Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, as Eagun's Pikachu has somehow lost 38 levels (from Level 50 to Level 12) in the five-year gap between Colosseum and XD.
- All damage is like this in the Bubble Tanks series. Then again, the game does provide an Anti-Frustration Feature where they provide you with experience-giving Pinata Enemies should you get hit too often.
- A certain monster in Disciples II did this and also brought the target down one Evolution Level.
- Final Fantasy Tactics has a "level down" trap that you can use to abuse the leveling system for ungodly powerful stats (though most players generally don't bother). note
- In Makai Kingdom, any enemy with a hammer/mallet can steal a level with every hit. Sure it's easy to get back, but it's downright frustrating in the early levels. Also, you do not have such an ability, even if you have the best mallet in the game, putting this somewhere between My Rules Are Not Your Rules and Secret A.I. Moves.
- Disgaea Dimension 2 has an item called "Demon Buns" that take a level when consumed. They mostly come as vending machine trash and are worthless, but have a couple of uses. Since some Evilities come into effect when fighting enemies that are higher level than you, they offer a way to reduce your characters' levels on the fly. Using one on an ally also reduces your Relationship Values with that character, which can be beneficial when paired with a particular Innocent.
- The Juna Fruit (only available through live download events) in Fire Emblem Sacred Stones lowers a unit's level, which seems like a bad thing at first... but since stat increases are randomly determined whenever you level up, the Juma Fruit's real purpose is to give a unit a few more chances to gain stats before they hit the relatively low level cap of 20. The reclassing system in Awakening also works similarly, it resets a character's level to 1 and, if "demoting" from a high-tier class to a base one, will reduce their stats accordingly... but all stats they've gained through leveling up are retained internally, and repeated use of this level reset enables characters to effectively level endlessly until all their stats are maxed out. Fates changed reclassing to not reset levels.
- Possibly a bug in Super Robot Wars X, but in stage 36, if Wataru has too many levels before destroying Ersha's Ragna-Mail, then Wataru reverts to a much lower level than the players had him before.
- Dungeons & Dragons, as you might expect, is the Trope Maker and Trope Namer. Under most circumstances, the only way to defend against level drain was by making a saving throw against it, or by using magic items or spells that protected you against the drain.
- In the older games (and the retroclones based on them), if you lost a level to level drain, it was gone for good, and the only way to gain it back was the hard way, since restoration magic was out of the reach of spell casters until the highest levels. The earlier games also operated by having every gp of treasure earned count towards XP, so you didn't have to slog through tons of monsters in order to get back into tip-top shape (in addition to being a better way to survive the low levels due to the low HP that first-level characters had).
- In Advanced Dungeons and Dragons there was no save. If an undead creature hit you, you got level drained and that was that. Worse, energy-draining touch attacks ignored armor, and the only real defensive spell against such attacks, Negative Plane Protection, only shielded one character against one level of drain. In practice, the only real defense against level draining undead basically boiled down to "don't let them get near you, ever."
- A First Edition spell called "Energy Drain" had the same Level Drain effect as being touched by an undead.
- Third Edition introduced the concept of "negative levels," which was basically temporary level loss that you then had to make a Fortitude save against at the end of the fight for every level that you "lost" this way. If you made it, you got the level back, but if you failed the save, it was gone for good and you had to gain it back the hard way. While the save wasn't hard to make even at low levels, if your negative levels ever equaled your real levels, you died instantly (and usually turned into an undead for your friends to fight). Several low-level undead enemies were therefore much more dangerous than intended, as a couple attacks could instantly kill low-level characters.
- Fourth Edition did away with level drain entirely, instead having monsters that originally level-drained you (such as wights and wraiths) instead inflicting the Weakened condition on you (which simply halves the damage that you deal in combat until you make your saving throw to end it), immobilizing you (you can't move from your space unless you teleport until you make your save), taking away healing surges, and so on.
- Pathfinder finally eliminates the issue, by making almost all energy drain a temporary state. Failing the save to remove the negative level just meant you kept it for another day. There are some ways to get levels drained permanently (most notably from being rezzed by a Raise Dead spell) but even those can be removed by a (Greater) Restoration. Even then, those aren't really lost levels but more like a stacking penalty to hit points and all d20 rolls. Spell slots and class features are never lost.
- Another game by TSR, Gamma World (1st Edition), had the "De-Evolution" mutant ability. A "Sage Advice" article in Dragon Magazine confirmed that if a mutant with that ability showed up in a Dungeons And Dragons campaign, it would cause Level Drain like an undead monster.
- In Munchkin, there are various cards and monsters that cause players to lose levels, most notably the dreaded "Cursed!" card.
Anime and Manga
- In Accel World, Seiryu, one of the four guardians of the Imperial Palace, can do this to the players it fights, and considering that leveling up takes a lot of time and effort in Brain Burst, this is a very bad thing. When Nega Nebulus tried to take down the guardians, Aqua Current was assigned to deal with Seiryu, but ended up being reduced to a very low level.
- In Redo of Healer one of the ways Keyaru has managed to adapt Heal is stealing someone's EXP points and levels during sex. During his imprisonement at the palace he uses it repeatedly against the knights and servants that raped him to increase their level caps.
- In Penny Arcade, Tycho instructs Gabe on how to make his monsters more deadly.
"These hatchlings are a good start, but they should drink healing surges and eat five levels."
- The Order of the Stick being a D&D RPG Mechanics 'Verse, has several characters with life energy draining attacks represented as level draining:
- Spamming Energy Drain spells is Xykon's favorite form of attack. He's used it on multiple occasions to take down other epic spellcasters.
- Tsukiko's wights have a draining touch. It's also how she dies, being drained completely by her beloved wights on Redcloak's command before having her corpse devoured by them.
- As a Succubus, Sabine has an energy-draining Kiss of Death, but her human lover Nale buys potions that provide immunity to this in bulk for their make-out sessions.
- In 8-Bit Theater, near the end of the comic, Sarda drains the levels from the Light Warriors.
Sarda: The irony is that there's not much left for me to do to you that you haven't already done to yourselves.
[...]
Thief: Pff, what could he possibly do?
Black Mage: Oh... please don't say that out loud.
Thief: No, think about what he said. We're Light Warriors, dammit. I bet he can't hurt us any more than we hurt each other every day.
Red Mage: Thief kinda has a point. We're our own worst enemies. What can he do?!
POIT!
(The Light Warriors are reduced in levels and class)
Red Mage: (turns to Sarda) What if I said it was a rhetorical question?
