Basic Trope: The first part of a game is the most difficult.
- Straight:
- For the first few levels of Legends of Troperia, your party members have few skills or items to use, making progress both tedious and challenging. A few areas later, you gain access to more options, opening up more possibilities for overcoming challenges and making things much smoother and more fun.
- For the opening arc of Legends of Troperia, Bob, The Hero, is the only available party member. Most of the Random Encounters in this part of the game still pits Bob against multiple adversaries at once, forcing him to perform all the roles of the party, including tanking damage, dishing out damage, and heal his own wounds, which is quite challenging for the player to juggle as Bob still only has one move per turn, and as soon as he runs out of health, it is Game Over. It is first at the end of the opening arc, when Alice, The Lancer, and Charles, the White Mage, formally joins the party, that the player has any real chance at assigning specialized party roles, allowing for more meaningful strategic choices in combat.
- Exaggerated: The first part of the game is loaded with Kaizo Traps and Demonic Spiders. Everything afterwards is completely effortless.
- Downplayed:
- While the first part of the game is more difficult, the later parts are still fairly challenging.
- The first part of Legends of Troperia II suffers from Tutorial Failure, making it harder than it has to be for new players. Players returning from the first Legends of Troperia, who've developed an intuition for some of the more esoteric mechanics of the series, don't have any trouble.
- Justified:
- The game puts you as an Action Survivor, with emphasis on survivor at the start.
- The Big Bad thought to defy the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, and sent their strongest and most cunning troops first.
- Inverted: The first portion of the game is staggeringly easy, then there's an immediate and unforgiving Difficulty Spike.
- Subverted: The first battle is very brutal, but afterwards, the rest of the first dungeon is a breeze.
- Double Subverted: But the boss of the first dungeon is an absolutely murderous opponent.
- Parodied: The game is coated in Stylistic Suck after the halfway point.Evulz: Don't look at me like that! No-one was supposed to survive past the first three levels!
- Zig Zagged: Schizophrenic Difficulty
- Averted: The difficulty is fairly reasonable given the length of time the game has progressed, with some areas being more and less difficult than others.
- Enforced:
- "Don't forget to jack up the difficulty of the first dungeon, and really show 'em what they're in for."
- The game uses Permadeath but is long and has an ending that players are meant to reach: making the late game difficult would be unfun due to forcing the player to repeatedly play through the early game to try again, so the early game is the only fair place to put the game's difficulty.
- The developers made the start of the game more difficult so players would feel a satisfying sense of progression and growth when their characters become strong enough to easily overcome things that were previously challenging.
- Lampshaded: "After that first dungeon, I feel like I can take on anything they throw at me."
- Invoked: The designers wanted to make progression feel more rewarding, so they made the early sections of the game difficult.
- Every single character is an example of Magikarp Power so that the player could get catharsis from their power after the hard early stages.
- Exploited: The player is able to garner massive amounts of Experience Points from killing the Demonic Spiders in the first dungeon, making the rest of the game a breeze.
- Defied: The quest-giver realizes that the first dungeon will be too difficult for the heroes at the start of the game, so they let you bring a Crutch Character along for a while.
- Discussed: "Aren't the beginning sections of most adventures usually the easiest?"
- Conversed: "Many people die just trying to escape the forest, let alone fight the monster elk that resides there. Are you sure you can take it?" "Nope"
- Deconstructed: The characters come out of the opening dungeon with PTSD. Later portions of the game revolve around the heroes having to overcome the trauma and fear they learned from this brutally difficult dungeon, which hinders them even though they've since become strong enough to fulfill much bigger tasks.
Back to Early Game Hell. Typing those first two letters were brutal, but afterwards everything was easy.
