Scrappy Mechanic / Fighting Game

• Art of Fighting (the debut of the series) was the first fighting game with super moves and also the first to have a dedicated meter for them. However, in a case of Early-Installment Weirdness, the "spirit gauge" (as it's called in-game) actually controls your ability to perform special moves as well. It starts full and is depleted every time you perform a move that uses it or the opponent taunts you; the special moves get weaker as it goes down, and won't even come out if it becomes empty. To refill it, you must stop moving and charge it, possibly leaving yourself open to attacks^note Completing one of the bonus games makes it bigger, which means less need for charging. As its name shows, it represents the spirit energy used by the fighters in their "magical" attacks (some more realistic physical attacks, like Micky's dashing punches or Ryo and Robert's dragon punches, do not use it), but, nevertheless, it's a cumbersome mechanic that went almost unused once Super Street Fighter II Turbo introduced, two years later, what would become the first super meter standard.
• Dragon Ball Z: Budokai:
  • The Capsule system in the first two games severely limited a player's options, as moves like basic throws and ki volleys were mapped to capsules in the same manner as transformations and special moves. And this is before you get into supplemental items and effects that also required slots. Budokai 3 relaxed things somewhat by making throws a universal mechanic while incorporating the more generic techniques previously found in blue capsules into the Dragon Rush sequence of attacks. Infinite World went a step further and made it so that all transformations were mapped to a single skill, meaning players could more freely customize characters with a high number of transformations (Goku in particular) instead of defaulting to Breakthrough so as to not handicap themselves.
  • The fact that transformations drained the ki gauge, though accurate to the source material, made their use very risky and generally impractical in the first two games, especially when higher level transformations requiring 5 bars would burn through your meter in no time flat and being knocked down while below the required amount of ki would immediately cancel out the transformation. It's little wonder that, on top of giving each character their own gradually replenishing base ki level ^note which affects attack power and defense depending on how far over or under their default number of ki bars the character is, 3 removed these drawbacks entirely. Most transformations instead raise the user's base ki level, and several (like Frieza and Cell's forms) are permanent once activated. And for those who couldn't indefinitely maintain a transformation, they had to be either dangerously low on ki or in post-Hyper Mode fatigue for the powered-up state to end.
  • In order to win struggles and properly charge Ki Volley Attacks in Budokai 2, you have to spin both control sticks at the same time. Good luck trying to defend against an Ultimate while your thumbs and palms slip and slide all over the sticks!
  • For Budokai 3, Hyper Mode was pretty much very unsafe and drained all your ki in one shot if you couldn't properly use it to land big damage or perform your Ultimate Attack/initiate a Dragon Rush. ^note A commonly used work-around is to raise your ki high enough, enter Hyper Mode, transform when right next to the opponent, and then use the Guard Break caused by the transformation to either knock away your foe away with a ki attack special and enter Dragon Rush or unleash the Ultimate unimpeded, not that the game ever tells you this. Both Hyper Mode and Dragon Rushes (see directly below) were abused heavily by the A.I. as well, making some players glad that they were removed in Infinite World.
  • The Luck-Based Mission that is 3's Dragon Rush, in which you have to press a button and hope that your opponent fails to press the same button. You have a very slim chance that you'll press a different button from them every single time, and though your chances of success rise with each stage of the attack (the last choice is a 50/50 shot), you still rack up damage over time and the only way to deal any damage in return is to prematurely end the sequence by guessing right at the very beginning. For weaker opponents, this isn't so bad, but it can easily cause you to lose the fight against stronger opponents like Cell and Kid Buu.
• Ringouts (knocking your opponent out of the arena and into an auto-DQ zone), or any other means of winning a round without actually zeroing out your opponent's health bar are universally reviled. The Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur series generally include ringouts on most if not all stages. Soul Calibur also heavily features juggling and several notably claustrophobic stages where accidental self-ringout is an actual possibility. Dead or Alive, on the other hand, put a more enjoyable spin on this, transforming most ringouts into events more to the order of 'you knocked him off the building and down through the flashy neon sign and into the pavement, but then you jump down after him and keep fighting down there.' Whoever fell off the ledge does take damage, but it's at least not instantly losing the round.
• Tekken
  • For a lot of people who would otherwise play Tekken, juggling is exactly this. A large section of the fandom who thought 2 or 3 was the best in the series often find any game past 4 bordering on unplayable.
  • It gets worse with the introduction of the Rage mechanic in 6, which grants the opponent a humongous damage boost when they're low on health, making some already powerful juggles deal absurd amounts of damage.
  • One word - walls. Getting trapped by Eddy or Christie in the corner of the map has been known to break controllers.
• Eternal Champions has the Inner Strength mechanic, represented by a taijitu next to your life bar. In theory, it's supposed to balance how often you can use special moves, as each move costs a certain amount of Inner Strength to perform, and you can also taunt the opponent, which costs a little Inner Strength but drains even more of theirs. It's mostly fine in two-player mode, but when doing a single player run, the CPU patently ignores it, as shown by it taunting you into complete submission and then proceeding to use special moves on an empty gauge. Thankfully, Inner Strength can be turned off in the options of both the cartridge and CD versions.
• Fatal Fury 3, the fourth game of the franchise, introduced the Hidden Desperation Moves, whose activation method is one of the weirdest things in fighting game history. First you need to input a button combination right before the start of the round; after that, when your life bar is flashing (1/4 or less, as for the normal DMs), you must fulfill a requirement that will make your name blink, and you can only perform the move during that moment. Even worse, the requirements can be things like being hit by a strong punch or kick (which means you risk being KOed during the process if your health is too low) or the timer being at an odd number (which means you can't do the move if the time is set to infinite). No wonder this was scrapped as early as the next game, never to return.
• Guilty Gear Xrd: When two attacks clash, there's a random chance Danger Time activates. Both players get a 3-second warning, 25% Tension, then for the next 10 seconds every attack becomes a Mortal Counter which adds way more damage and hitstun to everything. Its appearance is unpredictable, it always interrupts the pace of the match, and can completely flip the match on its head if someone gets a hit in. As a result, Danger Time was completely removed in Guilty Gear -STRIVE-.
• Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: When someone ragequits in an online match, it counts as a loss for the other player, who likely would have been winning. And this happens even if the final hit was registered.
• Marvel vs. Capcom 3:
  • X-Factor is this for some. It's a power-up that can be activated by any character in the game once per fight that increases in power as more characters of your team die off. The reason some say it is this trope is that the strength and speed boost it gives your character is so big that it breaks the game. Every character gets access to easy 100% combos upon using it and can easily decimate entire teams after one mistake, completely overturning the momentum of a match. And that's not even getting into the fact that activating it cancels instantly from ANY move. Even better, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 allows you to activate X-Factor in midair.
  • The inclusion of ground/wallbounces and really common OTGs in order to make combos as long as inhumanely possible is detrimental to the overall fun level for whoever isn't the winner. MvC3 is decidedly not a game that's fun at all if you're losing, if only because you have to watch completely helplessly for upwards of 20–30 seconds of pummeling that you have absolutely no control during if you make a mistake.
  • The match-search system for online has become notorious for being utterly broken. In theory, setting "Player Rank" to "Same" should pair you against players similar in skill to you. In practice, nobody has any clue what formula the game uses, but it likes to pit Amateur (the second-lowest rank) against Lord (one of the highest) and other such blatantly-lopsided fights. Expect to get into a lot of fights you just can't win.
• Counters (or holds as they're properly known as) in the Dead or Alive series, especially in 4 where they're believed to have degenerated the game into pure guessing. In more detail, prior to 4, the defender had to hold either high, middle, or low, only countering a matching strike. This could generally be done on reaction and rewarded a successful read. 4 onward further separates mid punch and mid kicks into distinct holds, meaning reckless fast mid attacks (such as sprinting into melee range) suddenly went from an easy punish to a 50/50 mix-up any amateur could do.
• Mortal Kombat 11: Breakaway is a defensive mechanic that gives your character two hits of armor while hitstunned that costs the whole defense meter and requires you to be launched the air, allowing you to land safely and have the opponent drop their combo. While it seems like fair enough defensive option for its cost, a major issue is with how it's implemented. A big problem is how easy it is to misinput, being Down+Block to use, but a bigger problem is that you can use it to punish slow attacks with it, something not even ''MKX's Breaker could do. On top of this, Breakaways had very inconsistent punish options, requiring you to use suboptimal combos to not risk getting punished by a Breakaway. The developers added a countermeasure to it late in the game's patch cycle in the form of giving special moves Armor Breaker properties to blow through it, but not everyone has good Armor Breaker moves and some of them need to sacrifice their best moves to have access to an Armor Breaker move. What this results in is one of the most frustrating Combo Breaker mechanic to play around in a fighting game that's also available too frequently with little risk due to how the meter works in MK11.
• Deadliest Warrior:
  • The stamina bar embodied this trope to the max; even heavily armored warriors like Knights and Spartans could have their blocking ability momentarily disabled or their arm broken due to their shield being punched but not to being shot by a Blunderbuss.
  • Most characters have ranged weapons. Only some characters, however, have ranged weapons that aim for the head by default, and it's a One-Hit Kill if they connect. Worse still, there's no restrictions on when you can and can't use them, which means a round can end in a single solitary second just from someone chucking a spear into your skull at the very start of the match.
• The tests of strength in the Fire Pro Wrestling series, which become impossible for a player to win above level 5, and occur with increasing frequency in the higher difficulty levels. Generally agreed by fans to be the worst aspect of the game.
• Street Fighter:
  • Street Fighter, an otherwise-decent game at the time of its release, is infamous for its pressure-sensitive buttons: the type of attack you inflict (light, medium, or strong) depends on how hard you hit the button. Naturally, players can injure themselves over the course of normal play, and there have been reports of people drop-kicking the buttons; meanwhile, operators found these buttons costly and difficult to keep in top-notch condition. Because of this, Capcom put out a revised version that instead uses the now-standard two rows of three buttons, dropping the pressure-sensitive gimmick almost^note One of the "EO" ports of Capcom vs. SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium has a control option that uses the Nintendo GameCube's analog L and R triggers to emulate this setup entirely from subsequent Capcom fighting games.
  • Street Fighter V changed the way alternate colors are unlocked from simply playing as a character in any mode, to playing through Survival mode for each character. On paper this doesn't sound too bad, but the mode itself is a chore to go through. First, you need to play through three difficulties to unlock all the colors for one character; you can't just do hard mode and unlock them all. For the two harder modes, the enemy AI is effectively braindead, rarely blocking and only getting slightly aggressive as the mode goes on. That is, until the final stretch, where the AI takes a massive Difficulty Spike and starts doing hard-hitting combos whenever it can, after you've fighting piss-easy opponents for ten or twenty minutes straight. The higher difficulties aren't actually harder, they just have more enemies to go through, from ten, to thirty, then fifty. There's also a system where you can spend your points between fights to buy supplements to help with the next fight; these supplements are randomized, meaning you can be stuck with low healing after barely making it through the last round. To cap it all off, this all needs to be done per costume for each character. Oh, and no continues if you die, of course, or if the game suddenly loses connection to the server and boots you to the main menu. Thankfully, with the announcement of Cody in June 2018 came with numerous changes to the maligned Survival Mode, including a save feature for the higher difficulties, power-ups that don't drain your score meaning you no longer have to worry about having low health and a bad supplement for the harder fights, and the opportunity to continue at the expense of some in-game currency. Take That, Scrappy Mechanic!
• Super Smash Bros.
  • Multiple games: The Multi-Man modes in Melee and Brawl have items. While items like Poké Balls are helpful, many players view the biggest challenge of the modes is not trying to defeat all of the enemies (100-Man) or trying to survive (15-Minute), but hoping that a rogue Bob-omb or explosive doesn't spawn next to you and ruin that glorious victory. Alleviated in the fourth game, where items in the mode spawn on top of a floating platform that appears every couple seconds.
  • Super Smash Bros. Melee In the games where you can play with a Nintendo GameCube controller, mashing the C-stick is a very useful way to easily perform smash or aerial attacks, unless you're playing Melee's single-player modes, (including the training mode) where the C-stick zooms the camera in and out. Since the default camera placement already gives you the best view of everything, this feature serves no purpose but to restrict your view and to make many techniques much harder.
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl
    • The replay feature. First introduced in Brawl, replays don't record video footage of matches. What's really being recorded are the button inputs and instances of RNG^note e.g., the precise spawn spots of items, the value of Mr. G&W's Judge attack, the type of turnip Peach pulls out, etc. from start to finish and the "replay" of any given match just plays back that sequential recorded data in real time. Unfortunately, there's also a very small chance that a replay will desync and won't play back the way it's supposed to, which is usually irreversible. Also, replays in Brawl can only last up until 3 minutes. If there were any memorable matches that last 3 minutes and 1 second or more, you won't be able to record it.
    • Tripping. Whenever a player breaks into a run, they may, by completely random chance, trip over and leave themselves vulnerable. The mechanic doesn't go away in Sudden Death. Even though tripping gives you invincibility frames, you could do the same thing but better with sidestepping. It's supposed to be to limit overuse of dashing, but casual and competitive players alike agree that this mechanic has no good reason to exist. Fortunately, random tripping has been removed in the next installment.
    • Hitstun canceling, which, well, allows you to cancel hitstun by airdodging as early as ''13 frames'' after getting hit. There's really no reason not to abuse the mechanic if one knows about it. Thanks to this, any juggle situations or free-flow combos are gutted in this game, which helped to create a more defensive playstyle that didn't mesh well with many players. This mechanic was severely nerfed in the later two games, where you can't cancel hitstun until at least 40 frames, the better half of a second.
    • For the Pokémon Trainer, the stamina mechanic which punishes you for trying to rely on one of the Mons by reducing your stats when you use one specific one for too long (and to a lesser degree how the current mon automatically switches when you get KOed). You can tell when this happens when your Pokemon starts to act tired in their idle animation and move around more sluggishly. This despite the fact that Sheik/Zelda never needed any handicap on multiple forms besides lacking a Down-B move. The mechanic was completely axed when Trainer returned in Ultimate, much to the relief of fans.
    • The Pokémon Trainer's Pokemon are also affected by Type Effectiveness, meaning certain types of attacks do a bit more damage and knock a particular Pokémon further away than usual. This ends up making the Trainer's Ivysaur, a Grass-Type, susceptible to attacks from over half of Brawl's roster due to the abundance of characters that innately use fire-based attacks, making Ivysaur less durable than it should be. Squirtle and especially Charizard had an easier time with this. Both this and the stamina mechanic mentioned above were introduced to emulate the mechanics of the main Pokémon games^note Stamina was meant to bring focus to the Trainer's entire team, rather than just one Pokémon., which only sounded good on paper in the end. It should be noted that only the Pokémon Trainer's team are affected by these mechanics, so the standalone Pokémon such as Pikachu play like the other characters in Brawl's roster. Fortunately, just like the stamina mechanic, Type Effectiveness was axed for Ultimate.
    • For a large group of players (read: those who don't play in tournaments), this applies to every kind of "dashing" (except running) and "canceling" technique in Melee, the previous game. The fact that they were nearly completely removed in Brawl was seen as a breath of fresh air for some of those who didn't base their playstyles on physics exploits nor intentional advanced techniques. On the other hand, their removal was a huge cause to the very Broken Base, especially since many already-nerfed characters were nerfed even more as a result.
    • Brawl's random multiplayer. You're pitted against 1-3 anonymous opponents, and when someone quits, they're taken over by a CPU. Without notifying you. Most annoyingly, this feature was even touted on the official website. Unless you know the AI well enough, you'll never know whether your match was spent entirely with living, breathing humans or that awesome finish you pulled off in the final moments of the match was against the CPU.
    • Brawl's Final Smashes have also contributed heavily to its Broken Base. If items are in play, there's a chance of a Smash Ball appearing, and if you break it, you can unleash a super attack that will knock out enemies instantly. The main problem is that while you can dodge the super moves in some way, most of the time, you won't be able to (especially if the level is tiny and hard to maneuver around) and thus the user practically gets a free kill or two. What's also worse are "Pity" Final Smashes that occur when a player is severely lagging behind in points and respawns with a Final Smash already in standby. However, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS Nerfed the Final Smashes, heavily toning them down in damage and launch power, so that for the most part, opponents have to be heavily damaged already to be knocked out.
  • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U
    • Collecting custom attacks. It's a Luck-Based Mission, only available through single player modes or the rare chance of having a bag spawn in a Smash match. The problem lied in how custom moves are lumped in with general equipment like stat buffers or even Mii costumes, so even after getting a guaranteed five custom parts after a Classic Mode match you have no idea if any of them are going to be full moves for your main or new hats for the Mii fighters until the match is over. Even worse is that it's possible to get repeats of both custom moves and other equipment, meaning that the item pool to draw from does not lower over time.
    • There is a time limit for replays in both versions of the 4th Smash installment. It lasts for some time beyond 10 minutes and any reasonable match will end long before that. However, replays will become unplayable once you've downloaded the latest update patch, which has happened at least 9 times. All because the damage output and mechanics for several characters have been altered, which would mess up live playbacks for outdated versions of the game. To avoid this before updating, the Wii U version has an option for uploading video recorded matches to YouTube and Miiverse, but these replays can't exceed 3 minutes. As for the 3DS version, your only options are a capture device or an off-screen recording with a camera. And because that's not enough, while the Wii U version appears to save as much replays as you want depending on the console's memory, the 3DS version isn't so lucky. Did you just have an epic or hilarious match and want a replay of it? Well, if you've already reach the limit of 64 saved replays, the game almost tauntingly displays the message "You cannot save any more replays.", regardless of how much space you have in your SD card. At that point during the Results screen, there is no option to delete an old replay to save a new one.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
    • Ultimate's matchmaking lets you tweak your preferences so that the game favors giving you matches with a particular ruleset (timed battle or stock battle, 1-on-1 or multi-man, team battle or free-for-all, items on/off, etc). While it's understandable that you can't always get the exact rules you want (it would take hours to give you a match otherwise), it's entirely possible to get nothing you want. So you could put down that you want a 1-vs-1 fight with no items and no gimmick stages, and end up in a 4-player free-for-all match with every kind of item on a stage with a gimmick. There's no option to review the rules you'll be put under, and the option to subsequently back out carries a penalty.
    • Every character in Ultimate mode is playable in Classic Mode... except for the Mii Fighters. Are you a Mii Gunner, Mii Swordfighter, or Mii Brawler main who feels like playing Classic Mode? You're out of luck.
    • Despite there being boss battles as the final battles for Classic Mode and in World of Light, there is no Boss Battles mode or easy way to refight bosses. The "easiest" way is to have a World of Light file that's saved before the final battle, as there is a gauntlet of the bosses in there, but first you have to choose three separate characters, a Spirit party, and then clear a decently long platforming segment first. If your first character is KOed during the platforming section, which is very possible on higher difficulties, then you aren't using them against the bosses. And that's if you even have the near-completed save file, and didn't overwrite it with a New Game Plus as the game actively encourages.
    • The "Buffer System" in Ultimate has gained some infamy. Essentially, it makes it so that the last button you've held since the ending of the previous move or taking a hit will be executed. While not without its advantages, it's most infamously led to many "buffered air-dodge" misinputs off-stage, which is a death sentence to all but the very best of recoveries.
• WWE Video Games:
  • SmackDown! vs. Raw:
    • Since the 2010 edition, gender restrictions have been placed (no more intergender matches). To counterbalance this, 2010 also introduced the Mixed Tag match, which pits two teams of one male and one female against each other. The problem with the match is that if a man and woman are legal in the ring, the ref starts a five count and the illegal partner has to make a tag or automatically gets disqualified. Worse still- and not just in this match but in any match- the men get disqualified for hitting the women, even if it's by accident while the women, on the other hand, are allowed to attack them as much as they please (If countered, they'll win automatically by DQ).
    • The grappling system in SVR2011, which removed the modifier for strong and weak grapples. Weak grapples could only be performed on non-groggy opponents, while heavy grapples were restricted to groggy opponents.
  • The GameCube title Day of Reckoning 2 introduced a new "stamina" system that left your wrestler completely helpless and at the mercy of an opponent if they ran too much or used too many moves in succession. You could also run out of stamina if you got beat up too badly, and while that normally only happens to characters with low stats, it makes comebacks difficult if it does. In one way, it added more strategy to matches, but it also made it harder to beat opponents with higher stats.