Basic Trope: A video game character is hard to master, but nearly unstoppable once you manage it.
- Straight: Alice, from "Super Beat 'em Up 9000: The Prequel to The Movie: The Game", has combos that are hard to both set up and use, but once you learn both when to start a combo and how to keep them going Alice is hard to take down.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is so incredibly difficult to use that most players dismissed her as Awesome, but Impractical, but once you've mastered her techniques, she becomes literally impossible to defeat, turning into an all powerful invincible monster.
- Lethal Joke Character
- Downplayed: Alice's combos focus on taking advantage of "states", such after attacks or mid jump, in order to the most damage with her attacks, her moves can be learned easy enough, once you learn what move to use with what state she can deal the most damage in the game.
- Justified:
- Alice has a demon trapped inside her, only with near perfect control and mastery can one harness its power and through her use it on their enemies.
- The fighting style of Alice is hard to use randomly, meant for strikes at the right time or place, making it harder to use her as you cannot use attacks loosely.
- Inverted:
- Alice is grossly overpowered, and requires absolutely no skill to use.
- Alice is Awesome, but Impractical, she's awesome, but very easy to defeat.
- Skill Gate Characters
- Subverted:
- Alice uses nothing but a high arching projectile weapon, making her completely unable to defend herself from close range attacks. She can shoot rapidly and aim it in any direction, but her attack does 1 damage each and fling her backwards in the opposite direction of shooting. She has no special combos or other moves, or any other noteworthy quality. .
- Alice seems like she's worth the trouble it takes to master her, but time reveals serious core issues that limit her effectiveness even when mastered. In short, she requires a whole lot of work without really being worth it.
- Double Subverted:
- ...Until skilled players realized that by with perfect precision and skill, the gun can be used by experienced players to fly over other players heads and shoot enemies below. However, the arch makes getting the correct projection nearly impossible to fly and hit players on the ground, making her Difficult, but Awesome.
- The few dedicated users eventually discover some other techniques with her that make up for the issues that were believed to limit her. In short, she's back to being awesome as well as difficult, but for different reasons.
- Parodied: Alice can take one hit and explodes if you move your character from her starting position. To attack, you have to enter a 30 button combo. Once you enter this combo, you attack once. The attack instantly kills the other player. But without extreme practice and skill, good luck pulling it off.
- Zig Zagged: Alice is useless, but with proper training... she's still useless. Until you activate her special skill. Which makes her the second worst character in the game. For inexperienced players. And experienced players too.
- Alice is difficult but the strongest character overall. Except for her two hard counters Bob and Carol. Bob has some of the worst match ups except against Alice which can allow even a novice to beat a champion with some effort. Meanwhile Carol is a Jack of All Stats who is generally mediocre but lacks any hard counters or bad match ups past a skill floor.
- Averted: Alice is in a children's education game. There are no characters to master.
- Enforced: "Some characters will be harder to use than others, to balance them, let's make them extremely powerful if mastered."
- Lampshaded: "If you can time her usage correctly, she becomes a beast."
- Invoked: "Alice? She's a Bitch to use, but if you can master her, she's Difficult, but Awesome."
- Exploited: In the Metagame, knowing her high potential, skillful players use no other character except Alice.
- Defied: No characters in Super Beat 'em Up are Difficult, but Awesome. All characters are about average.
- Discussed: "Alice usually sucks, but right now she's killing me! How is she pulling off those impossible to use combos?"
- Conversed: "Alice is the best character once you've mastered her."
- Deconstructed:
- Every single one of Alice's moves is powerful, but each move must be a combo to even be used, she has such an insanely difficult difficulty curve to work with that no one is willing to play her . . .
- New players keep abandoning the game because more experienced players invariably slaughter them with Alice and other characters like her who take months of practice to play with any degree of competency.
- Reconstructed: . . . Until players decide to man up and play her. Eventually, they master even her impossibly difficult play style, and her powerful rapid combos make her nearly unbeateable.
Back to Difficult, but Awesome, it's phenomenal once you can pull it off.
