- Advance Wars: Advance Wars 2 has Sturm and his 4 subordinates, each of which is in charge of invading one of the countries. Naturally, the continent facing the most incompetent (story-wise) one of them gets liberated first and it gets more difficult from there. This is even noticeable in the enemy AI: Flak doesn't take advantage of his factory and produces cheap units. Adder, on the other hand, deploys a Battleship against you. On day 1.
- Actually subverted in the end of Arc the Lad 2. After a long and grueling path to kill the four demon Generals trying to free the Big Bad, the final person you encounter is a lowly human monarch with no combat abilities or experience what-so-ever, who is rightly terrified of your party. The demon Generals used him too because The Sealed Evil in a Can can only be released by a human. Later played straight when you have to fight the Big Bad anyway.
- Baldur's Gate manages to play-straight, avert, subvert, and then justify this trope. Confused? Just keep reading.
- Played Straight: Your character is targeted by assassins practically from the get-go. It starts with some mooks who pose no threat to even a 1st level character, then a moderately powerful spellcaster note And so on, until you finally meet the godlike Big Bad himself and easily dispatch him with all the loot and experience you\'ve taken from his minions.
- Averted: Being an early version of an Open World RPG, you don't have to go wherever the story directs you; at least not right away. There are a lot of areas in the world that you're free to explore with their own side quests and rewards. Of course, the further out you go, the more dangerous critters/enemies you run into. If you know what you\'re doingnote it's possible to get access to loot/experience faster than the game expects you to steamroll your way through later encounters.
- Subverted: The Big Bad was aware that this might happen and ambushes you right after you leave the starting area. It\'s only because your Foster Father Gorion pulls a You Shall Not Pass!! Heroic Sacrifice to give you the chance to escape.
- Justified: All of this makes sense once you learn who the Big Bad is and his place in the whole scheme of things. Slight spoiler, he turns out to be a Dragon with an Agenda; there were bosses he had to answer to, thus he couldn't devote too much time and resources to tracking you down, least he tip them off to his schemes. The assassins he sends after you early in the game had to be paid for discreetly (most likely out of his own pocket, too), but as you become more of a thorn in their side his superiors kick more money his way to deal with you. The attack outside of Candlekeep had been a one-off thing; his "duties" kept him pretty busy and that was the only bit of free time he had to make the attempt. It was also the only time he knew for certain where and when he be able to find the PC. After that, your character is constantly on the move and he has to make calculated guess as to where you'll show up nextnote , hence the reason your assailants wait for you in one place instead of chasing you down.
- Averted in Borderlands, where you can easily get your arse handed to you by wandering into the wrong area and finding some high-leveled bandits.
- Averted in the MMORPG City of Heroes, Paragon City is divided in many different zones, each of which has its own difficulty level. But except for a few limited-access areas, characters can go (and possibly die) anywhere they want in the city. Most MMORPGs are structured like this; the only thing stopping a low-level character from reaching high-level areas are the powerful monsters. The sorting algorithm is there, just pointed out as how you should do things, not enforced. Typically, the very high-level areas are an inordinately long walk from the low-level areas, or behind a locked door for which the key is easily acquired on the high-level side, in order to at least suggest the intended progression. However, not always: the Forsaken starting area in World of Warcraft contains a mid-level dungeon in one corner, and is directly adjacent to one of the max-level areas, with some helpful NPCs hanging around to tell new players not to go past; and the Blood Elf and Night Elf starting regions aren't much better.
- In Dark Souls the early part of your quest is you trying to ring a couple bells while overcoming the monsters in your way. When that's done, your next objective is to earn the right to carry the Lordvessel, which means fighting through even more powerful monsters and a pair of warrior demigods. Actually filling the Lordvessel sets you off on what is basically a god hunt. The Final Boss is a fallen God-Emperor who is still fully capable of skewering you on his giant flaming sword.
- Demonbane starts off with the heroes fighting a Mad Scientist and his Humongous Mecha of Doom with which he terrorizes the city. After a few rounds of this, the ante is upped when the Sorcerors of Anticross get involved, each of them thousands of times more deadly than said Doom Robots and aiming for global domination. After that, the protagonists start doing battle with Great Old Ones (Cthulhu included), and finally with the bastard child of an Outer God, in which the whole of the timeline hinges on the outcome of the battle. In one ending, the heroes ascend to become Elder Gods themselves, and declare war on Nyarlathotep, one of the single most powerful entities in the entire Cthulhu Mythos, across all of time and space in every universe that has ever and will ever exist.
- Double subverted in Devil Survivor. In most routes you have to defeat the remaining three heavenly kings (events in the story have already removed the 4th). Atsuro notes that it is not the normal order to go after the strongest first (see quotes page). When you go to tackle the second, it turns out the third is with him as well (wisely deciding to fight the people who defeated the strongest of the four at the same time) and the map is full of Demonic Spiders.
- Drakengard follows this formula for The Evil Army that Caim is fighting across the vast breadth of the land. By the end of the game, he's fighting the gods themselves, and then the Mother of the Gods, but you don't know that at the time. According to series canon he never actually fought the gods, as they went with the one ending of the five that was bittersweet and not a downer.
- While present in most (if not all) Roguelikes, it's also downplayed in some, such as Dungeon Crawl where there's a chance some of the most powerful enemies in the game will spawn on the first couple of levels of the dungeon, and Sigfried who kills more PCs than any other named enemy in the game; or ADOM which can spawn horrifyingly out-of-depth monsters (especially in the Dwarven Halls early in the main dungeon, where the PC can encounter Balors, Ancient dragons, etc.)
- Parodied in EarthBound (1994). During one part of the game, you will need to defeat five moles, each of whom claims to be the third strongest of the moles.
- The otherwise-excellent The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion shows us why this trope is useful because it lacks it and by doing so is less enjoyable. Monsters power is scaled to yours: you never have to run in terror from an overwhelming threat or carefully plan the takedown of a challenging monsters. All monsters are similar at all times. There is little sense of accomplishment in levelling up and one can complete the game's main quest while remaining at level 1. Worse, some patterns of "leveling up" make you weaker: you must pick the right skills to advance to stay still. In the end, the difficulty slider lets you change your level more than leveling up. The benefit of this system is that as a Wide-Open Sandbox the player can go anywhere and do anything without fear of getting smooshed.
- Justified in Evolve. Each monster that appears isn't necessarily stronger then the previous one, but does have advantages compared to the previous one in order to overcome an obstacle. Kraken is smarter than Goliath, Wraith is more stealthy than both of them, Behemoth is more durable than all of them, etc.
- Played straight and subverted in Fable II: where the Crucible has a strict progression from Beetles to a huge rock troll, but the Big Bad has a serious glass jaw and can be killed by One friggin' crossbow bolt to the face — or groin, if you prefer.
- Fallout:
- Largely averted in Fallout 1. The game doesn't stop you from wandering anywhere you like right from the beginning, meaning that you could end up encountering enemies that are far too powerful for you to handle. Once the XP and the ammo start rolling in, however, you can tear the world up at your leisure.
- Fallout 2 benefits from the trope. The enemy progression is: giant ants and scorpions at first then rats and geckos. The Den will probably see your first human vs. human battle with nearly everyone in leather armor, pistols or SMGs. Vault City will have metal armors and assault rifles. Redding is fairly light but piss off the Salvatores in New Reno and your ass will get lasered — the Sierra Army Depot nearby has various battle robots. If you are evil, Broken Hills will see your first human vs. supermutant battle. The New California Republic has policemen armed with gauss rifles. In gameplay terms, that means ouch. Both the raider hideout and Vault 15 is full of raiders in leather armor and boasting pistols and hunting rifles but three of them has combat armor and assault rifles. Mariposa is a deathtrap full of super mutants armed with laser rifles, flamethrowers, miniguns, you name it. San Francisco is light but Navarro and the Oil Rig are both utterly deadly with every single combatant clad in power armor and boasting energy weapons. Oh, and the Big Bad has 999 HP, a really powerful plasma cannon, a big-ass knife and about a dozen minigun turrets for backup. note
- Present in Fallout: New Vegas as well, depending on who you might consider evil. Listing only those who will attack no matter your faction, your first enemies consist of the geckos and giant ants wandering around, wild animals easily disposed of. The first human antagonists are very likely to be Powder Gangers. All are petty thugs and criminals armed only with what they could pillage from the prison they broke out of (pistols, dynamite, batons, the occasional break action shotgun), and any of them can be easily handled by a fast trigger finger or bashing them with a piece of old pipe. The Viper and Jackal gangs are often next and have at least basic armor and better firearms, especially since they are the first Always Chaotic Evil faction to use automatics in the form of submachine guns. Moving up brings in the Fiends, a pack of drugged up, aggressively homicidal beings with highly damaging energy weapons and mid-level kinetic weapons (e.g. the hunting rifle and service rifle), but no armor and not much in the way of tactics. The game averts the scale and takes a very large step down the moment you reach Freeside, however, as you're engaged by Freeside thugs—little more than desperate civilians acting as muggers, and easily dispatched by even low-level players. The aversion continues when dealing with the Three Families of the Strip, as their guards are quite weakly armed and their missions mostly revolve around subterfuge. For most players, Caesar's Legion will be up next; you may have started fighting them after the Powder Gangers and before the Vipers and Jackals, but the only Legion units you were likely to encounter then were the lowest-level ones equipped only slightly better than the Powder Gangers (but with more training). The bulk of their soldiers you'll be fighting now are armed similarly to the Fiends, bar the energy weapons, but they come in larger groups and are smarter, and at least some of them have real armor. Finally, after building up enough Infamy with the Legion by fighting them, they will start sending assassination squads after you, all of whom consist of elite teams with very high combat skill stats and high-tier weapons such as anti-materiel rifles, brush guns, marksman carbines, and plasma grenades. Similarly tough and well-armed troops compose the entirety of the Legion's forces during the Final Battle at Hoover Dam (but then, the friendly NCR forces are just as tough, so it's not that big of a deal).
- New Vegas DLC is definitely sorting its enemies, considering the main enemies in each new zone. Dead Money has the Ghost People, which are melee fighters with only highly telegraphed spear or bomb throws for a ranged attack (though the Sierra Madre's holograms are less enemies and more obstacles, and not evil so much as just securing the premises via Beam Spam). Honest Hearts has the well armed but unarmored and comparatively lightly trained White Legs of differing varieties. Old World Blues has the equally violent Lobotomites, who appear in large numbers, are naturally resistant to pain and injury, are backed by robots, and have both strong conventional weapons (like the White Legs) and various energy weapons. Finally, Lonesome Road has the ghoulish Marked Men (who used to be special forces of the NCR and Legion), who uniformly have absurdly high health, the best possible weapons, and respectable armor, no matter their level.
- In Fallout 4, the game introduces you to combat by pitting you against Radroaches, Bloatflies, Mole Rats, and Bloodbugs, all of which can be killed with a few shots or a whack from your melee. Upon reaching Concord you'll face a gang of Raiders with homemade pipe weaponry, made even easier by the Power Armor and Minigun given to you, culminating with a Boss Battle against an angry but basic Deathclaw. Once this is done, you travel to Diamond City, encountering basic Feral Ghouls, Super Mutants, and scattered Raider gangs en route. Moving from Diamond City to Vault 114 introduces the player to the Triggermen — a mobster-like gang who favor fighting in the tightly packed hallways of the Vault with submachine guns and baseball bats, and the first gang that will use real weapons against the player. Moving from the Vault to Kellogg's Hideout, the player encounters various predatory animals such as the Yao Guai and Stingwings, who are scripted to appear on the path to the place, and the hideout itself will be filled with Generations 1 and 2 Institute Synths (the robotic yet outdated infantry of The Institute who use relatively weak but fast firing laser rifles). One boss battle against Kellogg and a cinematic later and the player has the objective of traversing down south towards the Glowing Sea, where the meanest of monsters, mutants, and gangs reside.
- Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy II uses this trope. If you go directly from town A to town B, you'll have the right level of enemies to face. Unfortunately, they forgot to tell you how to get there without wandering, and lined both sides of the path with high-level enemies, leading to slight missteps to be fatal.
- Final Fantasy XII has a few major exceptions to the trope. Many of the early stages have extremely powerful enemies wandering around that eclipse the normal small fry. A normally leveled party at this point has absolutely no chance against them. note
- Invoked in Final Fantasy XIII. Barthandalus and the other Sanctum fal'Cie want the heroes to get strong enough to kill Orphan and destroy Cocoon, so they carefully controlled what Sanctum military forces went up against them, making sure the protagonists never fought anything that would outright destroy them, instead giving them just enough of a threat to strengthen them.
- Final Fantasy XIV rarely states exactly how power any given opponent is but it still fulfills this trope in both visual design and the scale of what is at risk. But really, it's hard to deny some level of power scaling is in place when the Final Boss of Endwalker is fought while riding on the back of the Final Boss of Stormblood.
- In The Final Fantasy Legend each of the four fiends is not only stronger than the last, but more active in their evil. Genbu stays in the shadows, only ambushing the party after they've found the MacGuffin to unseal the tower. Seiryu has his monster-filled castle on the sea floor, but mostly keeps to himself and ignores the people living on the surface. Byakko is a despot who tyrannizes his world with an army. Suzaku terrorizes his world personally, attacking you constantly on the overworld and outright destroying a town full of NPCs while you're off getting the MacGuffin needed to bypass his invincible force field. The Big Bad, Archfiend Ashura, is a subversion: a Designated Villain who offers you a half-hearted We Can Rule Together before fighting the party because... well, there's a door behind him and he's in the party's way. But then it turns out he's not the Big Bad after all and the real Final Boss has been manipulating you from the start, disguised as a lowly NPC.
- Strangely included in Final Liberation: even if the game allows the player to get stronger units and a better army as he wins battles, the opposing forces will always have the same overall level as the player's army.
- Fire Emblem:
- Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 features a subversion of this early on, where the main antagonist of most of the game, Raydrik, decides to throw his most skilled warrior at you the moment said warrior is available to fight. This creates a pseudo-Timed Mission mechanic in Chapter 5 and 6 where delaying too long or killing too many enemies results in a foe with stats on par with endgame bosses showing up and hunting you down.
- In one of the earliest chapters of The Binding Blade, you have the Big Bad, King Zephielnote , and feared Dragon Rider Narcian in Araphen just as Roy's plucky and low-level band of heroes arrive. Zephiel immediately dismisses a suggestion to unleash war dragons on them and delegates the matter to Narcian, who immediately delegates it to his underling: a level 7 knight. If Zephiel had just stuck around for five minutes, he probably would have won.
- Early in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, your group is not seen as a big threat. You start in independent countries that the bad guys have less control in. After you make it to enemy territory, a knight questions why Ashnard is spreading his force so thin near the end of the game. Ashnard's response is that he's fascinated by the strength of the group and it's implied he wants to personally fight the strongest force possible. Also, he's just plain vanilla crazy.
- In the endgame of the sequel, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, you fight a politician who was blessed by a goddess. Then you fight the Black Knight, who has also been blessed. Next, you fight an army of dragons led by their king, Dheginsea, who in addition to being blessed is also an ancient being who helped defeat the goddess of chaos. Next comes another ancient being who is also blessed by the goddess. Finally, you reach the damn goddess who blessed the bastards from before.
- Awakening begins with the Theocracy of Plegia, which is only really a threat because its king is a monster and the heroes are working with such a small army. Next up is Valm, an empire from across the seas that is notable for coming close to conquering the entire continent. Finally, we come to the Grimleal cult that is in the final stages of awakening their dark god and annihilating all life on the planet.
- F-Zero GX plays this straight, as Captain Falcon has to deal with various antagonists during the game's Story Mode, each one eviler than the last:
- Chapter 2: "Goroh, The Vengeful Samurai". Samurai Goroh, bandit leader and Falcon's longtime Unknown Rival, ambushes and challenges him to a race around his turf, the Red Canyon, for Falcon's machine.
- Chapter 4: "Challenge of the Bloody Chain". Michael Chain and his subordinate Gangbangers surround and attack Falcon for the hell of it.
- Chapter 6 and 7: "Black Shadow's Trap" and "The F-Zero Grand Prix". Captain Falcon's Arch-Enemy, Black Shadow, manages to immobilize and send Falcon into a high-speed trap, summoning Blood Falcon (Falcon's Evil Knockoff) to assist him. Later, Falcon has to beat both Black Shadow and Blood Falcon during the Grand Prix.
- Chapter 8: "Secrets of the Champion Belt". Big Bad Deathborn challenges Falcon to a race in the underworld for the fate of the universe.
- Chapter 9: "Enter the Creators". The Creators reveal themselves and their role in creating Deathborn, and now they want to steal Falcon's soul.
- The Godfather: The Game tries to encourage you to take on the Tattaglias first, followed by the Straccis and Cuneos, leaving the Barzinis for last. However, due to the Wide-Open Sandbox nature and lack of Broken Bridge, it's perfectly okay to take them on in any order if you're skilled enough.
- Intelligence: 314th Clash: Maw the Icelord appears to be the Big Bad of the game and easily defeats the party in their first encounter. He is actually the weakest of his kind, the Ancient Ones, and he travels back to his home planet in order to free his stronger brethren. The party has to fight progressively stronger Ancient Ones, and their allies in Corporation XVI constantly challenge them to battle in order to make sure they gain enough EXP between each Ancient One fight.
- The King of Fighters: the later end bosses tend to be stronger, but there's no consensus on which is the hardest.
- Kingdom Hearts has an interesting example. The first game has what appears to be the creator of all Heartless, the embodiment of emotion corrupted. In Chain of Memories we see a preview of much more powerful beings called Nobodies who are the body and mind that's left over after a Heartless is created; then we find out that the main villain of the first game is only 1/3rd of the evil assistant of the real creator of the Heartless and the villain of this game is the other 2/3rds. All of this seems to imply that the true villain is reassembling himself. Then we get Birth by Sleep in which it turns out again the main villain is more than he appears to be; in this case it turns out he used to be a very old powerful keyblade Master who then possesses a much younger keyblade wielder who is then split into the main villains of the first and second game. This all leads into Kingdom Hearts III in which all the previous main antagonists, minus all the side games (unless you count Birth By Sleep a side game) combined into one holy terror of a villain.
- The first game also features this with the Disney villains, but it's played with: The first of the villains introduced to the player character, Hades, is actually the most powerful and is fought last — and he's not at the top of their totem pole, either. (He seems to be quick to cut ties with them completely.)
- The final boss fight in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Ganondorf goes from gargantuan teleporting boar, to a demon head made of pure energy to a man on horseback who can summon ghost horsemen at will, to a final fight between you and him on foot with swords. But the overall difficulty ramps up: in each successive fight you lose abilities — the ability to turn into a wolf and use Midna's magic, then Zelda's magic, and eventually it's down to you and your sword. And then your fishing rod.
- Lufia series. You beat Gades, a dark god of destruction, only for you notice there are three more powerful villains out there. In the Sinistrals Boss Rush, it's quite clear Gades is the least powerful mainly because he can't cast powerful spells.
- Done in all the Mario & Luigi games. What's strange here though is that there are many cases of late game areas and early game areas located right next to one another. As in, part of say, the desert is explored at the beginning and part is explored at the end of the game. Given that the enemies are scaled to match this, it means that sometimes you've literally only got a four foot wall between an area with weak enemies and one with strong ones, and no real reason why the latter never seem to cross it.
- It's also done interestingly in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, in that the big enemies Bowser fights are actually weaker than the small ones he usually just crushes underfoot. What this means is that when Mario and Luigi revisit the area later, they find that the small enemies are the ones actually scaled to their current level...
- Played relatively straight in Mass Effect games. In the first game, the initial antagonists are the mechanical Geth and rogue Spectre Saren, whom is eventually revealed to be working for Sovereign, a Reaper, who are Abusive Precursors intent on destroying the galaxy's organic life.
- In Mass Effect 2, the Collectors, who are abducting human colonies to build a human-based reaper become the main antagonists. They are controlled by Harbinger, another Reaper, though most early-game enemies are just mercenaries unrelated to the Collectors. At the end of the game, Harbinger mobilizes hundreds of Reapers, all with a personal vendetta against Shepard, which will presumably need to be dealt with in Mass Effect 3.
- Unsurprisingly, the Reapers need to be dealt with in Mass Effect 3. Again, with increasingly strong minions, who are also called Reapers, but are basically reanimated corpses.
- Medal of Honor: Airborne: Each subsequent enemy type faced will overall be tougher to fight than the last, with the lowest classified as "Trained", then "Proven", then "Veteran", with the last few classified as "Special". Italian Blackshirts, the first enemies encountered, have a Combat Rating of 1, Heer units have Combat Ratings of around 2 and 3, Waffen-SS have around 4, 5, and 6, Fallschirmjager have 7 and 8, Panzergrenadiers have 9, and finally, The Dreaded Nazi Storm Elites are 10.
- Metroid II drops Samus onto the title creatures' home planet with the goal of exterminating all of them. Despite the fact that in plot terms she's poking around the place more or less at random, she encounters strictly young, weak Metroids at first, and only runs into the older and powerful Zeta, Omega, larval and Queen Metroid enemies (yes, the larval form is one of the most dangerous) after she's had time to collect a bunch of upgrades. The remake goes a step further, where Samus goes from defeating the Queen Metroid and then suddenly being ambushed by her Nigh-Invulnerable Arch-Enemy and the franchise's traditional That One Boss, Ridley.
- Might and Magic series:
- Most games starting with #3 follow the trope. You start the game in the easiest town and the more you move away from this town the harder the game becomes. Some games subwert it on occasion though. Might and Magic III had a very tough dungeon, the aptly-named Maze From Hell not too far from the start point but it was locked and could only be entered much later in the game. The trope is completely subverted in Might and Magic VI though. In this game, the starting area has 3 dungeons: Goblin Watch, the starter dungeon; the Abandoned Temple, a slightly harder and longer dungeon meant to be completed next; and Gharik's Forge, one of the most difficult areas in the entire game (possibly the series) and meant for the second half of the game. The Forge is unlocked and the only way to tell it's best left for later is to enter it and watch the entire party get slaughtered within seconds. VIII also has the access to the Plane of Earth (place of penultimate quest) on starting map, but at least that is inaccessible without Water Walk or Fly.
- Following the main quest lines averts this trope for the most part and consequently can throw some really nasty surprises. VI for example expects you to slay an army of monsters that occupy The Very Definitely Final Dungeon in the first half of the game. VII, meanwhile, has an early quest that takes place in a tough dungeon full of enemies immune to physical damage, while the slew of quests following after is not only taking place in dungeons with easier enemies, but said quests have an easy (if less rewarding) solution without getting yourself exposed to danger, or you can ignore them altogether because they are time-limited and the story will progress automatically without consequence (other than losing associated rewards) when they expire.
- NetHack generates enemies of level equal to the average of your level and the current dungeon depth. This avoids Oblivion's "every level is just as tough as you are" while still providing the same progression.
- Not just played straight, but formalized in No More Heroes, in which you fight your way up the ranks of the official top ten assassins.
- Another formalized example in No Straight Roads, which involves Bunk Bed Junction fighting through NSR's top chart for the best musical artists.
- Played with in Opoona. The game has an abundance of both Bosses in Mook Clothing who are far stronger than anything else in their respective area, and enemies who simply have things like a great deal more health than other nearby enemies, so there are often much stronger enemies in an area than their appears. However, the game also likes to pull on enemies from earlier areas, leading to weak and early game enemies suddenly making a reappearance later in the game, no stronger than they were before. (However, they do have a tendency to appear in larger groups.)
- Ōkami: Orochi's flunkies, the Spider Queen and Crimson Helm, pose very little trouble, and the Orochi himself is severely weakened after awakening from a 100-year imprisonment. The other major villains are already active presences in the world, but they are likewise diminished and can't regain their power, or even cause harm beyond their immediate area of influence, until they absorb the malevolent Life Energy of their slain brethren... culminating with Yami, Lord of Eternal Darkness, who takes all their evil power unto itself.
- Ōkamiden likewise follows the same trope, the first three villains are relatively small time and haven't caused much trouble outside of the areas they're directly related to... then comes King Fury, a specter who intends to revive a massive superweapon with the full intention of using it to take revenge on the world. And the true Big Bad, Akuro, who's the God of Evil over even Yami, and who's so omnipotently strong killing him for good requires a heartbreaking Heroic Sacrifice from one of the characters.
- Subverted in Painkiller. While the first boss is a skyscraper-sized undead giant that requires massive amounts of punishment to bring down, the following bosses get successively smaller. Difficulty, however, is still scaled normally until the last boss; the 4th boss is only about King Kong sized, but is the hardest to beat, while the final boss is bigger but turns out to be a pathetically easy Puzzle Boss who can be killed in seconds.
- In Pokémon the strength of the trainers and the wild Pokémon are directly proportional to how long it is until you get there. There are some aversions: Both the Viridian and Petalburg Gyms have leaders much stronger than you likely will be when you first get there, but you can't actually battle until you're at the appropriate point in the game (with the Petalburg Gym it's because the leader knows he would just kick your ass entirely otherwise). While the Kanto trainers in GSC/HGSS play this straight in that they're all leveled to be near those of someone who beat the Elite Four (which is handwaved by someone stating Kanto has started attracting a bunch of really strong trainers), the wild Pokémon avert it in that they are the same levels as they were in the first generation of games. Interestingly, the trainers still have Pokémon typical of trainers in those locations in the first game, which means they must have held off on evolving them for dozens of levels.
- It's particularly hilarious in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2: in the original Pokémon Black and White, routes 1 and 2 were basically the game's Noob Cave, full of low-level trainers like children and schoolteachers. In the sequel, this area is locked off until the post-game and you can't access it until you beat the champion. Visiting the area after leads to the amusing phenomenon of running to the bunches of little kids with Com Mons... that are so high-level that they could easily curbstomp most of the bosses in the game. It's quite surreal being named Champion, and then promptly getting beaten by a kindergartner with a level 65 Rattata.
- Pokémon Sword and Shield actually justifies this with its Gyms; rather than a casual event like previous generations, the Gym Challenge is a cultural event, meaning that specific protocol must be followed to ensure both protection of tradition and an effective means of weeding out the defeated for optimal entertainment. The order which the player visits the Gyms is explicitly defined (they even have an in-universe ranking system based on performance, so one can actually move up or down depending on how they match up to the other Leaders over time), meaning that the Gym Leader's Pokemon levels are preset to maintain a reasonable escalation of challenge. On the other hand, however, there is the Wild Area, a Wide-Open Sandbox where Pokémon of widely varying levels live. By the time you arrive in the Wild Area, your party likely be around level 10, but you can run into Pokémon several levels higher. The game even cautions you to be mindful of the Pokémon you run into and, when in doubt, run away.
- The original Prince of Persia does this.
- [PROTOTYPE]: the weapons and gear the Blackwatch are deploying to Manhattan become more and more sophisticated as the infection worsens and they begin to understand and counter both Mercer and the progressing infection's capabilities. Similarly, the infected armies begin to grow in effectiveness as they develop and evolve.
- Justified, as Blackwatch is supposed to be low-key, operating behind the scenes with the Marines as the public face of the operation. However, as you play through the game, you'll see fewer and fewer Marines being torn to shreds by you and the Infected and more and more Blackwatch troopers. Which is nice, because the Marines are Punch Clock Villains and giddily skipping over the Moral Event Horizon is practically a requirement to join Blackwatch.
- Quest for Glory — not so much within episodes but present in the larger arc. For instance, if you attempt to venture into the forest when you first begin Quest For Glory 1, you will almost certainly not escape alive without prior knowledge of its layout. As you acquire skills, equipment, items, and experience, you are soon able to survive the forest during the day — but you still had better stay out of there at night. Even as a top-level player, a nighttime venture in the forest is nigh-suicidal, thereby really giving it a sense of menace. However, as you progress from game to game, enemies as a whole become globally stronger so as to keep up the challenge. A Quest For Glory 1 character imported into Quest For Glory 4, for instance, would probably be killed from the suspense alone. note
- In Robopon, this is zigzagged. At first it's played straight: going from a schoolyard bully and his gang to a brainwashing TV idol, then to an actual gang terrorizing a town, then to a would-be-dictator. It's then averted with Dr. Disc and Prince Tail, neither of whom are evil, but played straight againwith Dr. Zero, Mad Scientist and the final boss of the game
- Sam and Max Episodes: each episode's villain was secretly The Man Behind the Man of the previous episode's villain, and would increase in important from local criminals all the way up to President Abraham Lincoln, the Internet itself, and finally the Big Bad himself. Mildly subverted in the end, as the Big Bad was revealed to have been, all along, an annoying recurring secondary character that had appeared throughout the season. Though the first episode villain was acting alone.
- Shadow Hearts: Covenant takes this to an extreme. Every time the heroes defeat the apparent Big Bad threatening to destroy the world, a new one appears to, yes, threaten to destroy the world. Somehow it gets softer each time; starting with the threat of demonic global annihilation, and ending with the threat of having the war-torn recent history rewritten into a more peaceful one by the unusually benevolent final Big Bad.
- Skies of Arcadia has a variation: while Lord Galcian is the Big Bad, he isn't the Final Boss. That honor goes to Ramirez, his Dragon. While Ramirez is fanatically devoted to his boss, he's the most powerful of the game's villains.
- The peak bosses in SSX 3 follow this pattern; The boss of Peak One is arrogant upstart Mac Frasier, followed by the gargantuan, destructive human wrecking ball Nate Logan on Peak Two, and finally Psymon Stark, an unstable musclehead who might be violating his parole by competing, on Peak Three. If you're playing as any of these guys, the peak boss is changed to 11-year old Griff Simmons on Peak One, riot grrrrrrrl Zoe Payne on Peak Two, and megalomaniac egotist Elise Riggs on Peak Three.
- Somewhat justified in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. You start out at the fringe of the Zone with basic weapons and armor (usually because you've had a Bag of Spilling moment when you almost got killed somehow, or you've just come to the Zone), but you won't be facing anything more dangerous than small pockets of bandits and small-fry mutant wildlife for a while. Granted, those are nothing to sneeze at, but later on they're more of a nuisance (and a chance of getting pistol and shotgun ammo) than a threat, and will only get you killed if you get careless. Moving closer to the center of the Zone, you'll be facing heavily armed and armored troops in large numbers as well as the Zone's most powerful and frightening mutants. At least you can adapt your gear accordingly, thanks in no small part to those heavily armed troops you kill off or find dead, and their map-marked stashes.
- Star Ocean: The Second Story: Invoked by Lucifer (or Cyril) of God's Ten Wise Men. Instead of having all ten fight you at once, he splits them up among the Very Definitely Final Dungeon in order to increase the party's chance of success. The reason for this is that he, true to his namesake, wants to backstab his way into ruling the Universe by himself.
- Star Wars games:
- In the first Knights of the Old Republic, you can go through the four planets after Dantooine in any order, so the difficulty actually gets easier. However, after you find the map on the first one, you get to fight a group of bounty hunters (the leader you already vanquished to get that far), after the third you get to fight Malak's apprentice, immediately after that you get to fight a toned-down version of Malak himself, and then you get to fight Malak on full difficulty in the ending sequence.
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order plays this relatively straight with the enemies that Cal actually defeats, though he faces The Second Sister four times throughout the game and has an easier time each battle. The first forced boss after his intial clash with the Second Sister is an AT-ST that is relatively straightforward for him to deal with, the second is a K2-series security droid that blindsides him and can prove troublesome. Afterwards, he battles the Ninth Sister, an Inquistor over twice his size, then he is forced to fight Gorgara, a massive bat-like apex predator in a two-stage fight both in its lair and in the skies above Dathomir. The next boss is Fallen Jedi Talin Malicos, who wields both Jedi abilities and some Nighsister magick, and who Cal explicitly would have been killed by were it not for Merrin's intervention. Finally, he battles the Second Sister twice more and eventually prevails over her. And then immediately afterwards he ends up in a confrontation with Darth Vader himself, and can only run for his life while trying to slow Vader down to the point that the game's tactical guide outright tells you to run and Vader doesn't even have a health bar, unlike previous Hopeless Boss Fight against the Second Sister.
- Super Smash Bros.:
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The Subspace Emissary begins against the robotic Ancient Minister, then onto the Nintendo villains, led by Ganondorf and Bowser, then the series' perennial antagonist Master Hand and finally Tabuu, ruler of Subspace. And in-between, the characters have to face increasingly sinister major bosses, ranging from Petey Piranha to Meta Ridley.
- Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: World of Light starts with Kirby having to save the defeated playable cast and hundreds of spirits from Galeem. They fight spirits that range from Novice to Advanced to Ace to finally Legend, then fight the bosses like Rathalos and Giga Bowser, then finally Galleom (of Brawl fame). When Galeem is defeated, Dharkon takes his place, and the new world map is littered with even stronger Ace and Legend-level spirits and harder bosses like Ganon, Marx and Dracula. Then when he's defeated, the player is taken to a final map populated almost exclusively with Legend spirits, and if the player is on the path to the Golden Ending, they fight a Boss Rush of all six standard bosses, and finally Galeem and Dharkon at the same time.
- In Sword of the Stars the Von Neumanns follow this. At first all they send are probe motherships that send out lesser drones; deadly to individual destroyers and almost untouchable by missiles, but otherwise lightly armed and not much trouble when you get better weapons. That's when you see Berserkers, which are much more powerful and resilient, able to sweep aside cruisers. If you still manage to prevail against multiple Berserker attacks, they deploy the Construct, which is stronger than even dreadnoughts and can cause an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
- Appears in the all of the Tales Series games. You encounter stronger enemies and bosses later in the game, though scripted fights with major villains do occur. There are some accessions, such as in Symphonia and Vesperia, where you would encounter a villain that you wouldn't fight until much later in the game. Another partial-departure with it occurs in Tales of the Abyss, where you will end up repeatedly fighting these bosses called the Six-God-Generals throughout the game, and they get stronger each time.
- Generally played straight in any given Touhou Project game, ignoring some oddness with midbosses and Optional Bosses. Averted for the series as a whole, where there's no particular scaling of villain power or threat. As characters are reused, their power relative to the point in the game you encounter them is usually relative to the amount of effort they want to exert to try and stop you.
- Subverted in Tsukihime and its sequels. The power and abilities jump all over the place. Nero Chaos is easily the strongest adversary, much tougher than Roa or any of his opponents so far have been. Satsuki presumably comes after this at some point and doesn't amount to much yet. Then we have Kagetsu Tohya with Nanaya, someone Shiki can't beat, then Kishima Kouma who mainly has the advantage of being Made of Iron. Not much good against Shiki's eyes, though. Wallachia really only seems to be a problem because even Shiki's eyes can't kill him normally. In direct combat he appears to be rather weak.
- Averted in Undertale: While the basic enemies are generally fought in ascending order of difficulty, the bosses actually get progressively weaker (going purely by their stats) until the Final Boss. The game makes a distinction between a monster having raw power and having the skill to use their power effectively. Indeed, the so-called "weakest enemy", with stats that are mere 1's across the board, delivers what is unquestionably the toughest fight in the game (but you have to go pretty far out of your way to piss said character off enough to fight you).
- The sorting algorithm seems to be based off the bosses' threat toward you rather than raw power level. The first boss, Toriel, is only trying to protect you from the other monsters, and attempts to avoid killing you outright. Papyrus is a Punch-Clock Villain who's only trying to capture the human. Undyne is the first boss monster that's actually trying to kill you, but she has altruistic reasons for doing so. Mettaton is a vain glory hound who is trying to kill you for his own selfish reasons. Asgore is very powerful and is out to kill you, albeit very reluctantly. Only the final monster, Flowey, is actually malevolent.
- The PC game Vivisector: Beast Inside has this in abundance: the animalistic enemies are faced based on their level of feralness and anthropomorphism. The Human enemies also get stronger as the game goes on. In a subversion, though, the final leg of the game contains "unfinished" versions of the animal enemies that are pathetically weak and easy to take out..
- Inverted in Wild ARMs 4. The game seems to follow this trope until you face an ancient demon with total control of space whose lover you just killed. When the enraged demon goes after you, you're only able to kill her because she expends too much energy creating and supporting Another Dimension designed to kill your party and she goes after you again despite her wounds to ensure she takes you out while collapsing the dimension. Her death causes Lambda's strategist to propose a plan to have the remaining Brionac Lieutenants attack the heroes all at once, which gets rejected because The Omniscient Council of Vagueness had other ideas. From that point on, it seems like you fight the Quirky Miniboss Squad in descending levels of power, culminating in a battle against a scientist who just stands there while you wail on him. This is exactly what The Omniscient Council of Vagueness had in mind all along, as they wanted to cull Brionac's numbers so that the surviving members would be easier to keep under their control.
- Wizard101 follows this trope in broad strokes. Individual bosses can vary in difficulty depending on your school of magic, but the level cap and, by extension, the power of the bosses increase with each world. The game also introduces "cheating" bosses with game-breaking special rules partway through the game. Compare the recommended level for confronting the first main villain (50) with the current level cap of the game (140+).
- The major story arcs follow this trope for the first three arcs then avert it for the next two:
- The first arc gave us Malistaire Drake, who as a former Ravenwood professor is no slouch in power and is empowered by the Krokonomicon and the Dragon Titan but ultimately is still merely a mortal wizard using the same Death school players can slot into;
- The second arc gives us Queen Morganthe Malory, Merle Ambrose's first apprentice and Queen of the Shadow-Web who's attained incredible Shadow Magic and has tapped into the Song of Creation to try and change the Spiral to her image;
- Then third arc's villains take a massive leap in power: first, Grandfather Spider, one of the three Primordials who created the Spiral, acts as the central antagonist. Then, Grandmother Raven turns it into a Big Bad Duumvirate with her own agenda fueled by hatred of Grandfather Spider. Finally, the end of Empyrea sees The Aethyr Titan, who is so powerful that it can overpower Raven and Spider combined, usurping the role at the very end.
- The fourth arc initially seemed to continue the trend- The Cabal is a group of powerful wizards seeking to unmake the Spiral and return the First World which matches Grandfather Spider in motives, and The Nothing is an insanely powerful force of nonexistence from beyond the spiral who one-ups any of the Primordials. However, once The Nothing subsumes The Cabal's leader, The Old One, and becomes a new entity known as Dasein, the arc subverts this and really has no true main villain anymore; while Dasein is the central figure of the arc, it now centers around teaching him about his newfound existence as Something rather than Nothing and becoming his friend, essentially preventing what would be an all-powerful arc villain from ever being a villain in the first place through empathy and guidance, and The Cabal while still an active threat takes a hit now with both its top leaders gone.
- The fifth arc is a double subversion- the central villain seems to be Miranda Briar, a human from Earth like you who made it to The Spiral and became a Wizard, making her seem like even less of a threat than Malistaire due to being new to magic. However, it seems that assumption is very wrong- her scientific prowess and understanding of energy make her adapt insanely well to The Spiral's systems, her plans involve siphoning The Spiral's power to save Earth making her goals yet another catastrophic doomsday motive, and- well- given the only other canon wizard from Earth (you) have blitzed your way past archmagi, primordials, and eldritch abominations quite handily up until now, it paints a kind of powerful image about Earth wizards... Not to mention Miranda fuses herself with The Dreaming introduced in Wallaru, imbuing her with the power of possibility and making her a threat that even Bartleby can't see.
- The major story arcs follow this trope for the first three arcs then avert it for the next two:
- Inverted in the Japanese version of Wolf Fang, where picking the harder routes will give you an easier final stage, which reflects how much of the enemy forces remain. The final bosses are still very hard.
- X-COM:
- Played straight in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The aliens spearhead their invasion not with their mighty battleships, but small scout UFOs manned by Sectoids, their puniest, least effective soldiers, carrying out low-profile abduction missions. It's only after humanity begins shooting down alien spacecraft that the invaders step up their game with terror strikes at heavily-populated areas, and larger UFOs crewed by alien shock troopers or mechanical war machines. It takes several months more for the aliens to send in their battleships, and for their psionically-powerful leader caste to actually appear in the field directing their forces, by which point XCOM will have reverse-engineered alien plasma weapons and started deploying their own psionic soldiers. This is revealed to have been invoked by the Ethereals, who started the invasion as a test of humanity's physical and psychic prowess - with every successful mission and psionic operative XCOM trains, we're only proving our worthiness in their eyes.
- Played straight and justified in XCOM 2. In this Alternate Timeline, the aliens averted this trope and steamrolled XCOM during the initial invasion, and have spent twenty years ruling Earth as the ADVENT Administration. To keep the humans in their shining city centers pacified, the aliens use Half-Human Hybrid peacekeeper soldiers and robotic units more than their exotic, inhuman forces. It's only after months of XCOM victories that ADVENT starts deploying their most horrifying and destructive units, like Chryssalids, Andromedons and Sectopods.
- Justified once again in XCOM: Chimera Squad. There are three villainous organizations to contend with, each pursuing its own agenda, and Chimera Squad can only focus on one at a time. So the first group will go down comparatively easily, the second that Chimera Squad pursues will be better-equipped and -established, and the third will be on the cusp of achieving its goals by the time Chimera Squad goes after it.
- Xenoblade Chronicles:
- The franchise has a tradition of a giant simian enemy hanging around in one the starting areas which is close to the Level Cap, teaching the player that they will be forced to avoid powerful enemies rather than kill everything in sight.
- Downplayed in Xenoblade Chronicles 1. The Mechon mostly follow this, but the enemies found in the overworld can be many levels higher than you, for example, level 35 enemies that can be found in the starting area and will all join in to kill you if you try to attack one.
- Completely averted in Xenoblade Chronicles X: there's a near max-level monster wandering around the very first area (Luciel the Eternal, who is 32 levels above the Level Cap). And you'll find extremely low-level creatures in end-game areas as well. Much of the early to mid game will have you carefully avoiding enemies that are way too powerful for you to take on (which makes it all the more satisfying when you finally are able to fight them).
- Story wise, the main trilogy of games usually play this straight with you working through progressively stronger members of an organization (The Faced Mechon, Torna and Moebius), but subverts this when you first meet them where they deploy members that the party have no hope against (Metal Face, Malos and Moebius D/J
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