History Main / EarlyGameHell

** Only to be followed by the first few chapters of New Mystery. In the Original Mystery, the first few chapters of the game are already notable for being surprisingly hard hitting. Dracoknights, classically a mid-game enemies shows up as early as chapter 2. This is compensated by having Palla and Catria, two extremely powerful characters joining on the second and third chapter. In the higher difficulty levels of New Mystery, while Palla and Catria are still extremely powerful, theyre nowhere near the powerful juggernaut they were in the original games and lower difficulty of New Mystery. This culminates on the fourth chapter of New Mystery, a rescue mission where you have to rescue 2 helpless children, protected by Ogma and Sirius as a recruitable neutral character. In the original you can simply recruit Sirius and simply have him destroy everything on that side of the map. Doing that in higher difficulty of New Mystery is effectively suicide. Leaving them to die would mean losing out on 2 fairly strong character the only Rescue Staff for most of the game. Lunatic Difficulty version of Chapter 4 is considered by many as some of the most brutal chapter in the entire series, with strong enemies, mean reinforcement placed close to both the starting position of the map, and desert move penalty, often forcing you to use the valuable Rescue Staff to achieve the objectives of the map. Theres a good reason why you can promote your character in New Mystery as early as chapter 2.

** Several games in the series, [[NintendoHard already hellish as a whole]], make the early exploration hard even by their own sick standards. Patching up party members and replacing your [[EscapeRope Warp Wires]] [[PerpetualPoverty takes up all the money you earned getting the injuries]], giving you no cash for even basic equipment. Running into [=FOEs=] means an instant game over. Skill-heavy characters like mages and healers run out of TP after only a few battles, reducing them to plinking with daggers for ScratchDamage. It's not until you can level up a few times and get some decent skills that you can start saving for better gear. Even worse, [[VideoGame/EtrianOdysseyI the first game]] in the series does not let you reset your skills until halfway through the game, meaning if you made bad decisions assigning skill points before the first boss, you may have to either train an entire second team almost from scratch or just restart your playthrough. The fourth and sixth games aim to mitigate this by introducing a NoobCave (Old Forest Mine and Eastern Shrine respectively; the latter is still officially a major dungeon in ''Nexus'' but only has one floor), but unprepared players are still likely to have a hard time during the prologue.
** Ironically, said Eastern Shrine is an example itself, having some dangerous ecounters expected from an Etrian Odyssey dungeons, a boss fight and a critical lack of gathering spot. This is notable since Gathering is a relatively stress free way to gather resources, and gather materials sells for multiples the value of individual random ecounter drops.

* ''VideoGame/{{Civilization}}'' games can be this, if you have an early warmonger civ as a neighbour. Bonus points if you're Venice from the Fifth Game's Expansion, Brave New World. If you manage to survive his attack or somehow he doesn't declare war on you, you can try to take him down since his advantage is gone after going up to a certain era (Medieval or even Classical).

* Minecraft [=YouTuber=] LetsPlay/{{Dream}} and his Minecraft Manhunt series. The beginning of a Manhunt is almost always one of the most frantic parts, since all the Hunters are nearby and Dream doesn't have any of the tools he'd normally use to fight them off, leading to some dud games where they simply corner Dream and punch him to death in minutes. Once he manages to get some breathing room he can gather resources and equipment, giving him a lot more options to level the playing field.