— Yoda, Star Wars: Shatterpoint

• The Legend of Zelda:
  • A Link to the Past:
    • There's a buried Heart Piece that costs 80 rupees for 30 seconds of digging in a vast field. Thankfully there is a good source of income in the Light World version of the nearby village, and it's not uncommon to find more than your 80 rupees back. And if you're not above glitching, you can speed up the process with your boomerang.
    • There's a Heart Piece in a treasure chest game: open 2 of 16 chests for 30 rupees a try.
  • Ocarina of Time:
    • There's one Heart Piece where the player must pay a slowly moving grave digger 10 rupees to dig in certain areas he walks across. What the grave digger finds when he digs is completely random, from a few rupees, to the valuable Heart Piece, and even nothing at all. Due to the nature of this, getting this Heart Piece can be a quick and painless walk to the graveyard at night or an extremely long and arduous affair that wastes all of your rupees.
    • One treasure chest game. You must progress through a series of five rooms, each of which contain two treasure chests. One chest contains a key to the next room, while the other contains a rupee (the value of which is dependent on how far you've progressed), which will end the game if found. If you can successfully find five keys in a row, you'll reach the sixth and final room, which contains a Heart Piece. Fortunately, you can come back once you've obtained the Lens of Truth and use it to see inside the chests without having to open them.
  • Majora's Mask:
    • There is a minigame where you must make your way through a randomly-generated maze within a set amount of time. The walls of the maze will only rise once you're close to them, which can make things a bit disorienting if you're not careful. Of note is that if you initiate the game while wearing the Goron Mask, you can play for a Heart Piece. Fortunately, the maze itself isn't all that big, and most players tend to succeed within their first few attempts. However, there is no surefire path through the maze that can be exploited, meaning that it technically boils down to luck.
    • There's also the Doggy Racing mini-game, in which you must bet rupees on which of the fourteen dogs you think will win the race. Picking the first place dog will yield you triple your bet, while second place will give you double. Placing third through fifth gives will return your bet, while anything lower is a loss. If you can win a total of rupees (either from a single race or across a streak), you will be awarded with a bonus Heart Piece. While it's possible to use the Mask of Truth to hear the dogs' thoughts to give you an idea of how well they'll perform, there's still a chance that even the most enthusiastic-sounding dog will place between third and fifth. Good luck to anyone who doesn't know about the Mask of Truth and its use in this mini-game.
  • Oracle Games:
    • There's two particularily annoying Heart Pieces. One of them drops randomly when you run into Maple the witch; the other comes from a Gasha Tree. There are rings that can be worn to increase the chances of these random drops, but they're still rare. Try to collect all 64 rings in these games and keep your sanity intact. Probably more than half of them are gotten sheerly through blind, dumb luck—even some that are won as prizes from mini-games. Not to mention a few that are so rare you'll have a better chance of winning your local lottery than obtaining the particular ring in these two games.
    • To get the Boss Key in the Mermaid's Cave, the player has to pull the correct lever in a certain room; the wrong lever makes a bunch of snakes fall from the ceiling. Each lever pull also resets which lever is the "correct" one, such that the player could theoretically have to attempt the lever-pull indefinitely.
    • In Oracle of Seasons, to get to the 4th floor of Ancient Ruin, you have the same puzzle as Oracle of Ages above but with a pair of floor switches instead of levers.
    • and shortly after that, you have Manhandla, whose body moves in random directions, and whose only vulnerable spots are the mouths that randomly open to shoot at you and are only vulnerable to the boomerang the slowest weapon in the game.
  • If you're a completionist, The Wind Waker can drive you insane with the battleship-esque minigame. It's bad enough that you have to win it once to get a heart piece, then a second time to get a treasure map. But if you want to get a second treasure map, you have to beat the game in less than 20 moves. Be prepared to run out of rupees very quickly.
  • Nearly all the puzzles in Four Swords Adventures boil down to being presented with several items, only one of which you can hold at a time, and taking a blind shot-in-the-dark guess about which one you'll need to solve a puzzle found later in the level with absolutely zero hints whatsoever. Expect to do a lot of Backtracking which gets old pretty quick. Granted you can can just use a walkthrough, but since this mechanic was intended to be a guessing game it still counts, especially for players who prefer to not use walkthroughs or strategy guides.
  • While not required to get anything useful, Skyward Sword has the Thrill Digger minigame, which functions just like Minesweeper except that with a single exception, the indicators tell you two possibilities for how many traps are around. Two blue rupees next to each other could mean they share a bomb, they share a bomb but one also has one to the side, they share two bombs
  • In Hyrule Warriors, some Adventure Mode missions have an event where two cuccos appear in a random base and start fighting. If you try to stop them, you'll get locked in the base with them and risk taking tons of damage until they calm down. If you ignore them, they'll take over the base and head out to steamroll other bases. The mission to get Ruto's third level weapon has this event happen three times, and the mission's difficulty changes significantly depending on how nice the game decides to be with where the events happen. If they're all on the north end of the map where the enemy bases are (or even better, an event occurs in a base that was already lost to the cuccos), the mission will go fairly easily; if they all spawn on your side of the map good luck getting A-rank.
  • The "Under a Red Moon" shrine quest for Breath of the Wild requires you to perform an action on the shrine pedestal during a Blood Moon. Simple enough, right? Only one problem: Blood Moons occur completely at random and the player has no direct way to trigger one.^note Some players have luck by killing a large number of enemies, since one purpose of the Blood Moon is to respawn slain monsters. However others see no difference whatsoever. The player's only recourse is to either go on to other things and warp to the nearest fast travel point the moment they finally see one, or to camp out at the pedestal and wait doing nothing until it finally triggers. Although, there's one moon-obsessed NPC at the Dueling Peaks Stable who will tell you if a Blood Moon will occur that night.
• Laura's final quest in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia requires you to complete one of the games super-hard bonus dungeons, at the end of which the needed item MAY spawn. If you don't get an Alexandrite from the final chest, you have to run the entire bonus dungeon againunless you exploit a ludicrous glitch to get to the chest which is mere inches from the entrance, but tantalizingly out of reach.
• The freeware game La-Mulana has one in its hidden bonus dungeon the Hell Temple, success in three of the final rooms depends on both luck and high levels of skill; it could take one try or 5 hours to complete and if you mess up on any of the three you have to restart, after you defeat a couple of annoying enemies of course. Luckily, there are a few, uh, "strategies" to get through the first room without actually doing the luck parts. You're still screwed with the second one though.
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has the Boost Guardian. The thing ricochets around the tiny arena it's in like a pinball. It's completely impossible to predict where it's gonna be next, and you're constantly taking damage from being in the Dark World. In addition, the health refills for the fight are located in four pillars around the room, which can only be destroyed by the boss. Beating it requires that it not hit you excessively, and that it break open the pillars when you need health refills rather than breaking them all right away and wasting the health pickups.
• In Shounen Kininden Tsumuji, the dartboard wheel mini-game has a Heart Container as the top prize, getting it requires to hit three red marks on the wheel, which are given a small hit box and on very rapidly spinning wheels.
• In order to get one of the life containers in Alundra, you need to guess the correct color in a roulette game five times in a row. To get one of the gilded falcons, you need to do this three more times. Even understanding the algorithm that the game uses to select the color (The opposite location to where the light ended up last round, plus or minus up to 2), you still only have a 40% chance of guessing right on a typical round. Fortunately, once you pull it off once, you'll have all the money you need for the trial and error needed on the later attempts.

• Pandemic 2 plays like a luck-based mission most of the time. You can play more or less perfectly, but whether you can win or not will come down to whether one or two isolated regions seal themselves off before they get infected. They usually do, and apart from trying again (and hoping you start in one of these areas) there's nothing you can do about it. The most isolated area, Madagascar, has achieved Memetic Mutation status. The Kongregate-hosted version of this game acknowledges the fact with a President of Madagascar Badge.
  • Averted with the Spiritual SequelPlague Inc. where, while Madagascar would still close their everything if a dog so much as sneezed, you still had options to get in. One such way was with the parasite: one such evolvable trait turned it into a Puppeteer Parasite that could slam an infected plane into Madagasgar regardless of their border status. Even if your disease lacked an ability to get into a country, there was also always the chance you'd get lucky and get a popup reading "the disease has somehow infected [a country]!" — basically the game's way of saying you have no way of getting into this country now so we gave you a freebie.
• The Top-down shooter stage from Gunstar Heroes on the Game Boy Advance can be placed in this category. The damage you take is high already, but even if you make it to the attack helicopter at the end of the section in that stage, it all boils down to whether or not the missiles, laser, and submarines fire anti-air shots hit you, and if you get hit once, the entire screen will be flooded with bullets and you'll die as your helicopter is such a large target. This makes the only possible strategy for this boss be spray and pray, hoping that you will have a little energy left for the last section of the stage.
• The Russian indie game Hammerfight features the unfortunate addition of "siege bombs", which are an instant kill if they touch a character (including you), and even if they miss, they have an insanely huge blast radius and can easily take off half the players health from a half screen away. Their power is balanced out by their high price (making it Too Awesome to Use). The NPCs, however, have no such qualms about throwing one at you, especially when you are an inch from their face and cannot possibly dodge it in time. It is especially infuriating in Arena, where at higher levels you must fight a constant stream of enemies, any one of which could end your game immediately through a single suicidal siege bomb toss.
• Cave Story has a corridor in the Bonus Level of Hell where blocks, both large and small, rain down upon you dealing ten damage each completely randomly, and you have to kill or avoid small angels flying around too. It's probably safer to take five damage from the angels and use the Booster to blast across the area while you still have Mercy Invincibility. Taken Up to Eleven for those playing on Hard in the Nicalis ports (or a 3-life run in the original version); while the entire Bonus Level of Hell becomes Harder Than Hard, the aforementioned corridor's Luck-Based Nature is fleshed out in full. All it takes is a bad combination of blocks that the player could not possibly have forseen, and boom goes the protagonist.
• Broforce has a particular game mechanic where you are given a random series of characters to play a mission. Given that the characters have vastly different mobility and firepower, spawning with the wrong series can make an otherwise normal level all but unbeatable, and conversely spawning with the right one can make it possible to end the level without losing a single life. Compare Cherry Broling to Snake Broskin: Cherry moves at a hobble and has the best upwards mobility at the cost of having the worst horizontal mobility while Snake moves as fast as a regular armed bro but has a hang glider that, when figured out, acts as the cape in Super Mario World granting Snake the ability to breeze through levels if used well. In the final levels specifically against Satan's Deathfield form, Snake can easily leave it in the dust while Cherry it's best to keep dying until you get a better bro.
• The missions in the two Lost Episodes in Asura's Wrath. It starts off simple, but in one mission, you have to beat them under 40 seconds (which is a very strict limit), and in another, you have to beat them without taking a single hit! Also, the last mission against Akuma is to beat 10 consecutive matches against him, slightly recharging your health with each victory.

• Leisure Suit Larry:
• One of many, many examples in a long line of evidence that Sierra personally hates you, the original EGA version of the original Space Quest has one segment where you need to turn $30 into about $, and the only way to do it is to be really lucky with the slot machine in the bar. Aside from you being just as likely to lose money as to win, there's one special configuration which, when hit, makes the machine shoot a laser and kill you. You have to save scum to get past this part.
• Because the behavior of NPCs in Addison-Wesley's The Hobbit PC game (in the 's) was randomly determined, the whole game could be considered a Luck-Based Mission. There's a possibility the roaming vicious warg could be captured by the wood elf long before you get to the wood elf's dungeon. And if said warg kills the only person capable of unlocking the jail door and you end up on the wrong side of that door, the game's unwinnable. Even worse, NPCs will sometimes randomly refuse to obey your orders for no good reason. Bard the bowman is the only one who can kill the dragon, but if you order him to do it and he says 'No', the dragon will kill you right away.
• The lava pit in Broderbund's Mask of the Sun. At a certain point in what had previously been more or less an illustrated text adventure, the player is confronted with a pool of lava, with a stepping stone that rises and sinks into the lava rapidly. You're given a choice between jumping to the stone, and then to the other side of the pit or retreating back to the poison gas room you just escaped and die. But even if you choose to jump, there's still a VERY good chance you'll end up with "splash and burn" and die. The stepping stone moves so rapidly (much like rapid eye-blinking) that timing doesn't even enter into it it's dependent on luck. Furthermore, it became clear that it was the only way to proceed.
• King's Quest V. Just look what happened to this guy! Mordack randomly shows up in his castle to kill you, and if he appears you're dead, no matter what.
• Similar to the King's Quest V example, Infocom (a designer which otherwise knew better) had the Crown Jewels puzzle in Zork III. In order to steal what you need from the museum, you have to wait until the guards leave. But there's a chance that a guard will randomly walk in and kill you. There's no way to hide, and there's no warning that it's going to happen. And if he kills you during this sequence, it's 'Game Over', since at this point the player is out of the Dungeon Master's reach (the Dungeon Master usually gives the player another chance when dying).
  • In the game's predecessor, Zork II, the game's antagonist, the Wizard of Frobozz, often randomly shows up to cast spells on the player. These spells are annoying, but harmless usually. The exceptions to 'usually' are what turn this into a luck-based mission, as it's possible for the Wizard to cast 'Fall' (causing you to fall) or 'Float' (causing you to float) while you're in the hot-air balloon. If he shows up at the wrong moment and casts these spells, the player will lose the hot-air balloon forever and be unable to complete the game.
    • Not to mention that some spells in some situations are just plain instant death, like 'Fear' when you're on a cliff or 'Fierce' when you're in the same room with the dragon, and that no matter what if the Wizard happens to cast enough spells that hold you in place for too long ('Float', 'Freeze', etc.) your lantern will run out of batteries before you have time to complete the game.
  • The first Zork had two Downplayed examples - fighting the troll and fighting the thief. Fighting the troll is so early in the game that a restart if you fail is a relatively minor annoyance. The thief is a Nintendo Hard brutal boss fight, but the game is designed so that you have a better chance of confronting him and winning at the end of the game.
• Gold Rush!, one of the lesser-known Sierra adventures, has a few places where you can randomly catch a lethal disease, or get swept away while crossing a bridge. The death message even informs you, "there was nothing you can do; sometimes terrible things happen." And indeed, there is no way to prevent this other than to restore. Thankfully the chances of it happening are rather low.
  • When it does happen, though, the only recourse - as EVERY guide out there will point out - is to load a game from BEFORE you made the action that results in you leaving Brooklyn and leaving town on a different frame. Restoring from before the last action that you were healthy won't cut it [unless you catch the disease right after leaving Brooklyn].
• The bomb-disarming Mastermind puzzle in The Journeyman Project. You have to solve three levels, with an extra color added each level. If you miss too many times, you go back to square one. If you take too long, the shield generator's radiation kills you.
• To get to the last challenge of the Big Fish hidden object game Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst, you need to collect seven keys hidden around the mansion and take them to the cellar. The keys are easy, there's one in every room, you just need to be able to find it. The difficulty is that the game will randomly select which rooms you may go into for the keys. If none of these randomly-selected rooms are in the basement, you have no way to get to the cellar. The game auto-saves as you go along, so when you reach the end of the game after hours of playing and you can't win there's nothing to do but start over from zero and play all the way through again.
• The poker section from the original Police Quest. You do badly, it's game over. Fortunately, the VGA remake makes it skippable.
• In The Feeble Files, when Feeble tries to escape from a max security prison, he has to go back and forth a few times between several floors, and each of those floors has a guardian android periodically show up to check for any escapees. He visits the different floors completely at random, so it's down to pure luck as to whether he just so happens to show up on a given floor while you're still on it.
• A lot of things in Chulip are up to Lady Luck. The items you get from digging in the trash are random, there's a chance that the Underground Resident you're trying to kiss just won't Viva, and even the act of using the Fast-Forward Mechanic may cause the Poor Boy to lose hearts.

• The beginning of the last level in the original Double Dragon has you walk along the side of the brick wall. Some of the bricks pop out and hit you for massive damage. There's no pattern, thus, no way to tell which brick is going to pop out next. And once they do pop out, they do it so quickly you cannot dodge. Your best bet is pretty much just continuously jumping and trying to get past the wall as quickly as possible except you also have to time it so that you don't get hit by the spear the statue standing right next to the wall thrusts at you.

• The final mission leading to the best ending of the original Driver videogame involves driving The President across New York City while dozens of hitmen and corrupt cops in nigh-indestructible uber-fast cars try to ram your car off the road and reduce it to a wreck. Since the hitmen cars are so much faster and tougher than yours, the only way to complete the mission is if you're lucky enough that the AI cars wreck themselves as you scream across town. The mission is nearly impossible without an invincibility cheat (and you can still die by flipping over with invincibility on).
  • Every time-based mission requiring you to evade the cops while reaching your destination (Read: The majority) was luck-based. If a cop spawns too close to your destination, you have to detour and will run out of time.
• Almost any street racing game where traffic motion is random. Particularly noticeable in the Burnout series, where a long vehicle like a bus pulls out in front of you, there's nothing you can do to prevent a crash. On time trials, this can make a track Unwinnable.
  • As of Burnout 3: Takedown, however, all traffic in hotlap-based races is completely scripted every time, in career at least. You can still get pretty boned in other modes, though.
    • Sometimes the Signature Takedowns that appeared in Takedown and Revenge are still an example of this, though. Some of the ones involving crashing opponents into static bits of the environment are easy enough: you find your landmark, you happen upon your hapless victim, you push said victim into the landmark. Bingo, the game gives you credit for the Signature Takedown. Your weapon is timing-which you don't have when you're tasked with Signatures involving crashing opponents into, say, trams or buses. Both are moving, neither are alone in traffic, and both are interspersed in obstacles. Even if you and your opponent are in the right position for a takedown, should another car or a lamp post or something get in the way and the car crashes into THAT? Regular takedown, back to square one. In Revenge, particularly, there was one involving crashing an opponent into a tram-a tram that liked moving into a little chute in between two narrow walls a lot. Finally, because their appearance isn't scripted (they're just coded so that they appear down certain roads on certain tracks, not precisely where or when) they might not show up with the main pack of cars at all.
  • And while on the subject of street racing games this can be also irritating in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, particularly the sequel's Black Box Games version, where some championship events may have traffic that could crash into you if you were leading. This is also the case in the remake, which can make certain events in the career a huge bone-shaking pain.
• This is a common criticism of the Mario Kart series. The Rubber-Band A.I. keeps you from gaining too much of a lead in the higher difficulties, so it's all-too-common to get nailed by a bunch of non-dodgeable attacks like Lightning Bolts and Blue Shells RIGHT before the finish line and go from first to the rear of the pack out of sheer dumb luck. This is because the game is designed so that anyone can win if they can race decently, but means that players are rewarded for lucky item handouts rather than skill.
  • In addition to the above, Mario Kart Tour features weekly and bi-weekly challenges for stars, and getting enough stars grants the player extra rewards (like coins and tickets to level up your karts, drivers, or gliders). Some of these challenges fall into this - for example, if Use a Lightning pops up, best of luck triggering it, because it's the rarest item to get, has a very low probability of turning up, all of the gliders that boost its appearance are Ultra Rare, and the game has an internal timer that prevents the item from even appearing at the beginning of the race as well as making it impossible to appear if someone got one (even if not yet used) within the last 60 seconds.
• One of Kirby Air Ride's objectives involves getting all 3 pieces both the Hydra AND the Dragoon in a single City Trial session. The session can only last 7 minutes max, so good luck finding a SINGLE piece of EITHER machine.
  • City Trial in general can consist of this since power ups and vehicles pop up randomly, so there's no guarantee that you'll find a decent assortment of power ups or one of your preferred rides.
• Rad Racer, a cross country racing game on the NES, falls under this due to when and where other cars spawn and if they swerve into your lane. Touching them from the side will send your car flying sideways and into an obstacle off road, costing you time.
• In Wipeout Fusion, there is an elimination challenge where you have to destroy a large number of enemy ships on the racetrack. The tools given to every ship to fight this battle: grenades (weak), rockets (beyond weak), quakes (massive damage to EVERYONE in front of you). Weapon pads rarely provide a quake, but there are 15 ships rolling the dice so quakes will go off every few seconds, obliterating your opponents. After half a lap, the pack of 15 ships will have been reduced to about 2 or 3. Which would be nice, if you didn't have to kill 5 enemies to win this challenge. Your only chance is to get a quake from pretty much the first or second weapon pad, and happen to use it at the right moment so it finishes off 5 ships. You get no second chance.
• A lot of the faster races in Ridge Racer 3D took advantage of fixing the much-maligned ancient collision mechanics of previous Ridge Racer titles, then took advantage of itway too much. Since everyone now loses very little speed when colliding with each other or not scraping walls for a very long time, even mid-game races can turn into outrageous three-or-four-machine melees wherein cars are overtaking one another, going far, far faster than they should-which you can't do in kind. This means you may keep some nitrous for yourself to break away from the pack and win a raceonly to have the rubber-banding kick in and have a truck twice as tall as you zip past at what must be MPH.
• An interesting example in Gran Turismo. In some restricted events there can be a car far superior to the rest of the grid and your own. For example, in the World Classic Car Series (where most cars have HP) you could be driving a respectable GT knowing you'll certainly win, but if you're unlucky you could find an AC S/C has arrived to ruin your day.
  • In Gran Turismo 5, a lot of the seasonal challenges feature a single lap to a difficult track (Nurburgring Nordschleife or Suzuka are the regulars) in which you start last and have to finish first. This can become, either Unwinnable if the car starting first is a fast one or Easier Than Easy if it's a turtle, helding back all the others.

• The Oregon Trail is one whole luck-based game. Characters will randomly get sick, and may even die immediately, giving little time to allow for recovery. Crossing the rivers is luck-based, too; fording a river isn't, as you shouldn't really ford a river more than three feet. Floating a wagon across carries the risk of tipping over, causing the loss of your items (and some of your people!). Even the ferry carries a very small risk — it can break loose from moorings or tip/sink. In other words, as in history, nothing is guaranteed in this game.
  • In Oregon Trail II, if you're unlucky enough, the wagon can tip and drown a person in as little as a foot and a half of water. You can tip even on "not too steep" hills. And hunting carries the risk of an (sometimes instantly fatal) accidental gunshot or animal attack for your leader. If he/she dies, it's game over. God help you if you get caught in a blizzard with "no progress", low/no food, few draft animals, and nothing to trade.
    • While frustrating, this is very much Truth In Video Gaming. A number of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were drowned when Humvees flipped into shallow water. If you are underneath something extremely heavy like a wagon when it flips, you really will drown in 1 foot of water before they can get it off you.
• In The ClueFinders Search and Solve Adventures, one mini-game you find early on involves Trial-and-Error Gameplay, since that is after all, the entire point of the minigame. You have to guess the rows and columns, represented by colors and shapes. (The points on the grid are colored shapes) And you have to get certain points so you can get past the game and get a reward to continue on. Problem? All it's randomizedall the spaces on the grid you have to hit could be all clustered in one corner, and the first choice you pick happens to be right on the other side, in a row and column that won't help you. You'd also be surprised how hard the 9-guess levels can be.
• Buzzy the Knowledge Bug: Let's Explore the Airport got very carried away with this. It has an arcade-styled minigame called Lost Luggage, where the goal is to get each correctly colored suitcase into its matching bin. You would do this by taking control of conveyor belts and other mechanisms. The game's 99th and final level, being a developer-induced Kill Screen, plays this trope straight. It has six chutes all of the same kind, where if you put a suitcase down a chute it could come out of any of the other five in any four directions. There are several unchangeable conveyor belts that will lead it into a bin. If the wrong color lands in it, you have to restart the level. The problem is, you have no control over where it goes, and every odd is stacked against you in every possible way. Didn't think this could get worse? You have to be this lucky four times. Even worse, if you do get past it somehow, you won't get a victory screenor anything new and exciting to celebrate beating the whole thing. Instead, you'll be sent back to Level 1, while being able to play any level you want since beating the penultimate level.
• Lionel Trains Presents: Trans-Con! is an Edutainment Game dealing with the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. The player has a choice of which side to start building from: Central Pacific or Union Pacific. Central Pacific has a much shorter route, however the player is required to blast through mountainous terrain with dynamite to place the tracks. Using said dynamite has a very high chance of injuring workers in the blast, and you have to make multiple blasts to cut through even one bit of terrain. It's entirely possible the player will lose all his workers (and therefore lose the game) in the first level, before even finishing one tunnel.
• Odell Lake has the insects and insect larvae and the chub, if you can eat that. There is always a small chance that one of those items will conceal a hook. Fillet of mackinaw trout, anyone?
• On rare occasions in some of the early Carmen Sandiego games, despite your best effort, you may simply not be provided with enough evidence to narrow down which crook you're going after, especially since a few crooks happen to share multiple traits. The best you can do at this point is to request a warrant for one of the possible suspects and hope that you guessed correctly upon apprehending them. If not, back to square one. Thankfully, later entries in the series fixed this issue.
  • On that note, if you haven't solved too many cases, and one of your possible suspects happens to be Carmen herself, you can cross her off your list, since she doesn't ever commit a crime until you have a lot of experience under your belt. Just be sure you know when exactly Carmen has a chance of showing up before you dismiss her.

• In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, getting all the trophies requires you to use trophy stands on every kind of enemy in Adventure Mode, including bosses. Of course, these stands are rare, and (just like Pokémon) you have to weaken the enemy in order to catch it, so it doesn't always work. Raising the difficulty level and using certain stickers will raise the chance of getting a stand, but it's still annoying when you hit a boss too hard, kill it, and you have to go through the whole level again for another chance, not to mention if the stupid bastards hit a conveniently-spawning Koopa Shell or a Blast Box with a stray attack of their own and thus end up dying without you being able to do a Goddamn thing about it. Playing with a friend can greatly help: one keeps the trophy stand and keeps distractions away, while the other whittles down the boss's health.
  • You know what's even more luck-based though? The Trophy Lottery, in which you spend coins to possibly obtain a new trophy. Brawl does away with that annoying feature in favor of a shooter game that's just as addictive in order to get trophies and stickers. However, it is still random whether or not new trophies even show up. The Mew Trophy is an especially bad case. It's bad enough you have to fight multiple characters at once while getting worn down, but the combinations are random and can range anywhere from easy peasy to downright lethal.
  • And then there's the stickers in Brawl. At least with the trophies you can aim for specific ones when using the stands or in the shooting mode; with stickers, apart from a few that you get for completing challenges, you have no way of knowing which sticker you'll get each time you grab one. Thus, the only way to get them all is massive amounts of sticker grinding, and once you're near the end you could spend hours doing it and not get anything new.
  • Items in general make some tasks this. If a bomb spawns in front of your attack that's another multi-minute attempt at the man-melee down the drain. For this reason, competitive players and tournaments often shut off items.
  • Gameplay itself devolves into this, with people needing to exploit the map hazards, map terrain, or item spawns in order to gain an advantage against their opponents.
  • Super Smash Bros. Melee has a minor one that can make That One Sidequest much easier to deal with. Adventure Mode features one level patterned after The Legend of Zelda, where the player needs to find the Triforce in order to clear it. There are five potential places for it to spawn, and a Dark Link fight is positioned at the four places where it didn't spawn. Two of the locations are at places where the player can check them without triggering a possible fight (which is shown by a Master Sword in a pedestal rather than the Triforce hovering over it), with the other three situated beyond one of the first two (thus, if the Triforce is in one of those, you have to go through at least one Dark Link to get to it). The fights aren't necessarily hard, but if the Triforce is in one of the first two positions, and the player avoids the very slow Mooks in the area, they can get the Switzerland bonus, otherwise known as one of the hardest stage clear bonuses to get (all of which must be earned to get a trophy for % Completion). Some players will quit and restart Adventure Mode multiple times just for the chance at that bonus.
• Clearing the tutorial in Soulcalibur III requires the player to guard impact (counter) the instructors moves while he randomly switches between high and low attacks 5 times in a row (getting hit makes you start over). The problem is that the medium attacks he uses are too quick to guard after it starts (so you need to guard before he starts) and all but a handful of characters are too slow to get out of that block and counter in time when he DOES execute a low attack, meaning the mission requires the player to be lucky enough to make a correct "prediction". To add insult to injury, the characters that ARE quick enough have this mission stupidly easy. (note:Completing the tutorial with a character unlocks their Ancient weapon. The only other way to unlock the weapon involves reaching and beating Olcadan with that character. Which means you'll fight Night Terror.)
• Mortal Kombat 9 has a mode called "Test Your Luck", where a slot machine determines what additional stipulations are added to a match. These extra rules range from inconsequential (rainbow blood, Zombie Kombat) to game-changing (no arms, poisoned health, disabled super meters). These missions appear at regular intervals in the Challenge Tower, where they also determine your opponent.
  • Additionally, fighting Reptile in the original Mortal Kombat (and the reboot as well) not only requires a double flawless victory followed by a fatality, but the player must "Look to la Luna"; there's a random chance of seeing objects fly across the moon. The player can only challenge Reptile if this occurs.
  • Although luck isn't strictly required to win the fights against Shao Kahn or Kintaro it certainly helps. Both have tremendously powerful and versatile movesets that can allow them to hit you for massive damage from all the way across the arena with very limited ability to dodge or block. They both also have a tendency to stop and taunt in the middle of combat. If you're lucky they'll stand around taunting like idiots the whole battle, allowing you to slowly chip away at their health bar with ranged attacks. If you're unlucky they'll charge in immediately and spam their most powerful moves at lightning speed until you die.
• Dissidia Final Fantasy has some of these, mostly relating to the Battlegen system. Crash course: Battlegen produces unique items for synthing weapons/armor/accessories based on what the player does in battle, the "standard" set of 'gens are five items made in four ways: inflicting Bravery Break, landing an HP attack, using an Exburst, and damaging the stage/slamming the opponent into the wall, ground, or ceiling. However, battlegen is never guaranteed—you only ever have a chance of generating the item when performing the above actions. That's the luck-based, here's the mission: In campaign mode, there are enemies who demand, if the player wants the highest score possible, that the player cause battlegen to occur within ten seconds of starting the match. Not even factoring in the Spiteful A.I. who seems to know the player's motivations and will run away instead of fight and give you a chance—the player can still do everything "right" and just be out of luck. If you're going for % Completion, time to restart that board!
  • Much like the above example, there's an achievement for battlegen-ing five items in one match—and you can only ever generate one of each individual item per match. Thank God for the Stiltzkin opponents and their unusually long list of possible battlegen items, as they turn this achievement from "nigh impossible" to merely "hugely aggravating."
    • The sequel makes battlegening a lot less frustrating: getting generic opponent-based items is a lot easier and there's only 3 of them per character, you don't need to battlegen the more common items first to be able to get the rarer ones and there's no DP anymore, meaning nothing requires you to succeed in a battlegen within a time limit.
  • If the player is deep in the Lunar Whale or Blackjack course, that is to say, running gauntlets of random enemies 20 to 50 levels above the level cap, the player's survival can quickly wind up luck-based: Did the computer give the opponent the best equipment in the game, or merely a motley assortment? Do they have accessories that complement their strengths, or worthless ones? Is their summon godly, or horrible? Is their CPU-behavior set to a playstyle the player can counter reliably? There's no way of knowing unless you fully commit yourself to fighting the opponent. Start praying.
• The fight with Jinpachi in Tekken 5 comes down to this. Jinpachi has an attack that comes out almost too fast to block, interrupts any attack you perform, stuns you, and forces you to stand. He also has a fireball that takes off massive amounts of your health and which he can use multiple times in a row. The only way the player can win the fight, short of spamming Forward-Forward+Square, is if Jinpachi's AI decides not to use the "stun palm" - if it does, it will always chain the stun into waves of fireballs and wipe the player out.
• Some of the Parallel Quests in Dragon Ball Xenoverse are like this, mostly the ones where you fight Super Saiyans. Super Saiyans have unlimited Ki so they can spam Ultimate Attacks, during which they're mostly invincible; for players this is balanced by making Super Saiyan a temporary transformation, but computer opponents often have it as a permanent status, so the fight becomes a question of "will the computer decide to let me damage it, or will it stunlock me with nonstop Kamehamehas?"
  • Not to mention that attempting to get a specific clothing item or skill causes the randomness to stick out extra hard. For the best chance at items and skills dropping, you must complete optional tasks in order to get an Ultimate Finish. Trouble is, in addition to the item/skill drops being random once the quest is finished, it's totally random whether the optional tasks will even present themselves to you in order to get an Ultimate Finish! For example: In order to unlock the ability to turn Super Saiyan, you have to fight Piccollo, then Gohan, then Vegeta, and then Krillin and Goku will show up. If you defeat Krillin first, Goku has a CHANCE to turn Super Saiyan, and then if you defeat Super Saiyan Goku, you have a CHANCE of the Super Saiyan skill dropping. If you defeat Krillin first and Goku doesn't change, tough luck! Start the mission over and fight through everyone again.
• Obtaining all the skill cards in Sonic Battle is this. Emerl the customizable robot gets a random skill after each fight, which may be a duplicate of one you already had since skill cards can be traded between players. Early on, this does give you enough new skills to replace some of the near-useless default skills, but later on you'll mostly get duplicates. The skills usually are copied from whoever was just fought, but if he gets a "rare" skill, it may have nothing to do with who you were fighting, and may have nothing to do with fighting at all. It's possible to fight against Amy and Cream only to unlock parts of Shadow's color scheme, which you will likely never use unless you like spending your skill points on turning a fighting robot into a color-basedVirtual Paper Doll.

• Many first-person shooters task you with defeating a certain number of enemies in a given amount of time (such as TimeSplitters), and this often comes down to how often and near enemies spawn.
• Team modes (i.e. Team Deathmatch or Capture The Flag) in online multiplayer can become this. You can be a pro at the game, but if you're unlucky enough to be paired up with bad teammates, you can still lose the match.
• In GoldenEye () for the N
  • Unlocking the Invincible cheat requires finishing the second level, Facility, within seconds. Being able to do this is largely dependent on where Dr. Doak (with whom you must speak in order to finish the level) randomly spawns. This is not a question of looking in the right place. Only one specific place renders it possible to finish the level in time.
  • Not to mention the Statue level. While nowhere near as difficult as the above, if the player looked in the wrong place for the randomly generated flight recorder, he would run out of time to unlock the cheat.
• In Perfect Dark, obtaining the dual CMP's on the second level requires you to reach the weapons cache computer without being detected, which heavily depends on the positioning and behavior of the guards. On Perfect Agent, this is close to impossible due to the AI's keen senses.
• Left 4 Dead:
  • Witches are randomly placed (if at all) each time a level begins (which means two times per map in Versus Mode). There is an achievement for successfully clearing an entire campaign without disturbing ANY witches. Guess how frequently witches are placed on choke points where hugging the wall (or worse, ledge) still gets you too close to the witch to avoid alerting her?
  • Even worse if you are playing single player mode. You can go through the entire game avoiding witches. If a witch spawns in a finale, an NPC team member WILL disturb the witch without fail.
  • Sometimes a witch will be placed at the top of a ladder that you must go up in order to continue the game, and she is placed in a spot where it is pretty much impossible to shoot or see her until you get to the top of that ladder, then it only takes half a second for her to get angry and rip your face off. This is especially horrible in one player mode when you are basically forced to sacrifice yourself just to continue.
  • And then there's the items like first aid kits or special ammo. Usually, if the team is doing well, you will usually just find molotovs or pipe bombs off the beaten path, but if the survivors are crippled and have nothing to heal with, the AI Director MAY spawn more health kits or other healing items, which can sometimes make or break the game.
  • The entire game itself can be a luck based mission at times no matter how careful your team is. Sometimes you can go an entire game without any incaps/deaths/restarts and other times you may have to restart several times due to being overwhelmed by the infected. Especially evident if you're playing with bots on any difficulty above Normal. Bots will always heal to 80% hp before leaving the saferoom. However this means by the last saferoom, you could be walking out with one or no extra medkits at all. Good luck surviving the Finale, as the bots will almost always get incapped or killed before the second tank, leaving you alone hoping that a smoker or hunter doesn't come out and ruin your day.
  • The bots themselves can also make or break the game. Either they will quickly save you if you get in trouble or they will watch you die before deciding to do anything. Especially fun when the player is grabbed by a Smoker or Hunter, and the bot is melee hitting the normal zombies around them instead of the actual threat.
  • The Sacrifice campaign for the first game is like this during the finale where you have to jump off the bridge and kick start the generator. If a Smoker grabs you while he is on a rooftop, the bots won't shoot the tongue or bother to snipe the Smoker, so you'll die and have to restart, thus you have to hope a Smoker doesn't spawn when it's time to do the sacrifice act. This is somewhat avoided in the sequel in the same campaign due to having more weapons and items to defend yourself with and having more special infected types so your chances of a Smoker grabbing you is lower.
• Many levels in the Halo series on Legendary difficulty are luck based missions due to the randomization of enemy spawns and random unavoidable death situations. Well, that's why you've got plenty of save points.
  • In Halo 2 Legendary, the odds are dramatically stacked against you, and even if you play very well, you're still fairly likely to die. So you just do any given hard segment over and over again, doing pretty much the exact same thing each time, until the one time when all the chips fall just so, and you make it through. It's certainly not skill-based: if you use an optimal strategy and execute it flawlessly each time, you'll still die ten times and succeed once.
  • Jackal Snipers, with their one hit kills and near-perfect accuracy on Legendary, often create luck based situations, particularly where they spawn randomly.
  • Something even more sinister can happen if your luck is really bad. All of the Halo games after the first will try to detect if your last checkpoint landed you in an Unwinnable situation. If it detects this (say, you die two seconds after spawning several times in a row), it will send you back a checkpoint. However, it isn't unusual to be insta-killed very easily due to reasons listed above, and if it happens enough times, you'll actually lose some of your progress.
  • Halo 5: Guardians has the Warzone Firefight gametype, in which player success is largely determined by whether or not the bosses spawned are unreachable or Nigh-Invulnerablebullet sponges, or whether or not your objective is defense of an objective across the map or protection of a highly-exposed relic.
• The final battle in Killzone 2 has elements of this; the final boss has a teleporting ability that lets him constantly Flash Step all around you. It does make a lot of noise and give off an easy-to-detect blue light, but he moves very fast when he decides to attack and absolutely LOVES to teleport BEHIND you or directly in your path if you try to run. There's simply no telling if he'll suddenly materialize three inches from your back or if you'll run smack into him and (in either case) end up being gutted by his knife of doom.
  • Heck, just put in the whole of the battle leading up to that fight; the player is attacked by what amounts to a battalion of elite soldiers, numbering up to at least 40 vs 2. Your partner is stupid. And the Helghast have the smarts to flank you from almost every direction with not only machine guns, but also flamethrowers and rocket launchersjust try to survive all that in one go on Elite difficulty, if at all.
• A number of combat-oriented shooter missions - such as in Men of Valor and Call of Duty (or thereabouts) - where you have to run through an artillery barrage to a foxhole or somewhere to get to the next stage, and it's up to chance whether you go down or not while running. Such as the second half of "Heat" in Modern Warfare, where you go from holding the line to running back through it.
• In H.P. Lovecraft-based FPS Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, the fourth mission has the player riding in the back of a pickup truck while the driver navigates the streets of Innsmouth. As firearms are extremely inaccurate (and you're shooting at things that don't take that much damage from them), there's very little point in shooting back, and if the game decides that the swarms of inhuman monsters taking potshots at you are accurate enough to overwhelm your first aid supplies, you're going to be doing the level over. And over and over and over
• The first three PC Rainbow Six games can be a crapshoot with the semi-random positioning and movement of the tangoes, espcially on Elite difficulty, where they often headshot you as soon as you poke your head around a corner (sometimes even on the "normal" difficulty setting), and during stealth based missions where you have to avoid being detected. Cases in point: in Rogue Spear's Arctic Flare mission, if the two tangos outside the control room are facing towards the stairs as you come up them, they WILL alert the bridge guards, resulting in the ship being blown up or hostages being killed. Often, they seem to already know you're coming. On "Perfect Sword", sometimes the tangos will come downstairs after the sniper fires, sometimes they won't. If they stay holed up upstairs, you're more or less fucked, as its nearly impossible to clear the room without a hostage being killed.
• On Medal of Honor: Allied Assault's Hard (read Harder Than Hard) difficulty setting, many levels are practically impossible to pass without Save Scumming, particularly where there are randomly Respawning Enemies, and with the computer being a cheating bastard. For example, Omaha Beach, where even if you flawlessly dodge the machine guns, you'll still get randomly killed by artillery shells. And Sniper Town, with its randomly-placed hitscan snipers. Earning some of the medals is also luck based, particularly the Sniper's Last Stand and Storming Fort Schmerzen levels, where a certain number of Red Shirt comrades must survive.
  • The exact same applies to the missions in Call of Duty where you have to outrun artillery.
  • Same for most COD games on Veteran difficulty, with the random enemy spawning, near-instant death shots with pinpoint accuracy, and grenade spamming. Especially the original, which lacked regenerating health, and removed all medkits on Veteran.
• The first boss of Descent, between the boss's random teleport spams and Macross missile massacres, and the population of enemies (Super Hulks and Class 1 Drillers) in its lair. Especially if you're trying to save the hostages on Insane skill. In fact, many of the levels are this on Insane due to the random roaming nature of many enemies.
• Sniper: Ghost Warrior features an escape sequence in which you must swim across a lake while being shot at by at least 3 enemies with near-perfect accuracy and no way to fire back at them. Surviving the segment boils down to winning enough of their accuracy coin-flips to reach the other side. Did we mention you can't dive under the water? This is one of many escape scenes you WILL be shot repeatedly during but it stands out for offering absolutely no way to retaliate.
• Receiver has two sources of this: the level is generated randomly, and your starting loadout is generated randomly. Given that there is no Emergency Weapon, therefore, starting with exactly one bullet is a major handicap.
• PAYDAY: The Heist can be either smooth sailing or a nightmare to trudge through thanks to the special units of the SWAT teams. Tasers will use said weapon to shock you to death, which freezes you in place and makes you fire your gun uncontrollably. Shields will use said shield to flank you and require to be hit from behind. Cloakers can instantly down you. Bulldozers have high firepower and can only be shot in the face. There has been many cases where a single cloaker wiped out all four players and bulldozers plowed through even the most hardened players. And you can get multiples of the same special units coming after you.
  • Any level that requires you to use a saw, drill, or hacking device. The items will jam or stall at some point, but how many times they stall is random.
  • Several levels are mostly or purely luck based:
    • Diamond Heist forces stealth upon you if you want to get to the diamonds without trouble. If a guard spots you before then, you're forced to install the hacking devices on the alarm boxes and make sure they don't jam as the SWAT team come rushing in. Even if you get to the vault without being discovered, it's randomized on whether or not the codes work. If the codes work, great. If not, you're then forced to find the CFO (and your cover is blown by then), take him to the roof and have Bain pick him up for some negotiations. The CFO himself is also luck based on whether or not he gives up the code. If he does, then you can get to the vault. If he refuses to give up the codes, then Bain kicks him out of the helicopter to his death and you will have to find another person who can give the code. You will get the diamonds no matter what, but how you get them depends on whether or not the game wants you to succeed.
    • No Mercy also has a ton of randomization in nearly all of its objectives. In the first part, you have to destroy several cameras, but they are in random locations and the more players there are in the game, the more cameras you will have to destroy and you only have 7 seconds to destroy them either way. Once you do, you then have to keep the civilians down and make sure they don't run off to trigger the alarm and yes, where some of them are located are also randomized. When you are going through the computer and then searching for a specific file, you may get some events where someone may come up to the hot zone, to which you will have to yell at them to stay down, or if they are a guard, kill them.
    • Should the alarm go off in the No Mercy level, the ICU gets sealed and you have to hack it away with a saw, and then use the saw again on one of the 3 isolation booths and hope the first one you picked has the patient you are looking for. On top of this, even when you get the blood samples, you have to get them validated and it's randomized on whether or not they will be successfully validated. Even worse, when you call the elevator, how many times the cops cut the power is random.
• PAYDAY 2 reduces some of the random elements, but also adds additional randomness in. For example, drills are guaranteed to jam at least once when they are used, no exception, but will not jam more than thrice, and there's a number of skills that can mitigate the jam (smack the drill for a chance to restart it, random chance to restart it, faster jam fixing, etc). However, the layout of the levels is now much more random, and can absolutely ruin attempted runs. Shadow Raid, for example, requires an entirely stealth-based approach, as if you're spotted, you have 1 minute to get out, and if you haven't gotten enough loot, you fail. But camera, ladder and guard placement can ruin some attempts before they even start by placing too many guards on the dockside, taking up valuable pager uses before you get inside the warehouse, and severely reducing your options once inside.
• Many of events in Modern Warfare on Veteran depend on luck to some extent to overcome, but Mile High Club is above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak, with the combination of a one-minute time limit, cramped quarters combined with swarms of tangoes, unpredictable enemy behavior, Artificial Stupidity by your teammates, and the tendency for enemies to No-Sell your flashbangs half the time.
  • Even on Regular difficulty, there are still a few sections of the games where your survival depends more on how accurate the enemy's shots are rather than any skill on your part - "Bag and Drag" from the third game in particular, where you're in a car chase and as such have no option to hide from the barrage of enemy bullets being fired at you. Dying seconds after moving to the back of the van for the first half without being able to do a thing about it is extremely common.
    • The Car Ride stage in the first Call of Duty had similar fake difficulty.
• RAGE gives the achievement "JACKPOT!" for rolling four kills on your first roll in the Tombstones Mini-Game. Yeah, an achievement for getting a particular result on a dice roll. The odds are against on the face of it, and that's assuming id Software didn't weight particular rolls. Likewise the achievements for completing the other minigames (e.g. an in-universe trading card game).
• Weapon generation in the Borderlands series can also fall into this territory. After a long enough time just about any weapon will fall behind in terms of damage and if there's something unique about a gun that you really like, ammo regen or a special effect, then you better hope that you find a similar gun with enough power to make it viable.
  • Several Borderlands 2 Badass Rank Challenges and achievements depend on luck. For instance, the "Jackpot!" challenge requires playing the slot machines in Sanctuary until you win either a big pile of Eridium bars or an ultra-rare weapon. Statistically, you have a roughly % (about one in ) chance of either of these spins coming up. Another achievement requires a natural 20 or a natural 1 during looting in Tiny Tina's RPG session, but at least that one's less frustrating than the slot machine challenge, in that you're not obligated to spend anything.
• In Doom mod Reelism, a slot machine in the HUD decides everything in gameplay, like weapons, enemies, or conditions of the level. Sometimes, you can get tons of overpowered weapons. Sometimes, the game decides to spawn a lightning-fast invincible enemy dangerously close to you. Sometimes, you become an invincible and deadly dog

• GHOST Squad's third mission has a prompt where you must pick from one of three cottages in hopes of finding McCoy, who has been kidnapped by the terrorists. One cottage holds him and will end the segment without further resistance, one cottage has a few enemies to shoot and a hostage that you shouldn't shoot, and one cottage has a Hand-to-Hand Combat scene worth a substantial amount of points. Which cottage holds which is randomized on every playthrough and the only hint you get is that the cottage with white smoke holds McCoy; if you want the most points out of this segment you still have only a 50% chance of getting that chance.

• Action 52 is notorious for its enemies spawning in random places and shooting at random times.
  • Especially Micro Mike where sometimes a screen will be flooded with so much enemies that slowdown and death is unavoidable. There's also a small round bullet type of enemy which spawns randomly at random part of the screen, sometimes appearing behind you, making a hit unavoidable. It's even worse, given the Action 52 collision detection. Chances of even completing the first level is about 1/50 while the rest is up to skill.
  • Bad enemy combination can result an almost instant game over in Hambo.
  • As The Angry Video Game Nerd demonstrated in his review, in some games the bosses sometimes won't show up at all, forcing you to reset. Not to mention the games that simply crash at some random point.
• The fan remake of Streets of Rage has this for the final level if you defeat Robo X. You have 3 minutes to disarm a bomb in the building or ignore it and try to escape and beat Shiva before the bomb explodes. To disarm the bomb, you have to find a room with a computer console which you can destroy to disarm the bomb. To get to the bottom floor, which is your escape route, you have to find a key card. The 3rd and 2nd floors each have 3 rooms. 4 of them are trap rooms filled with mooks and electrical traps. The other 2 contain the computer console and a treasure room filled with money, health items, and the key card. However, don't be fooled into thinking that once you know where the rooms are that you can go to them every time you play this level. The game randomizes what rooms will have the key card and computer every time you play this level. Oh, and don't forget you only have 3 minutes to actually figure this out before you're blown to bits and get the Bad Ending.
• The iOS game Lego Minifigures is a game where you need to match up a minifigure's head, legs, and torso. The problem? All of it is luck-based. It plays exactly like a slot machine, and the only way to add a minifigure to your collection is to hope that it will somehow get it right. If not, you have to keep spinning.
• Plants vs. Zombies: Heroes literally has their final Plant and Zombie missions being completely luck-based. Professor Brainstorm on the plant missions has absolutely nothing but Eureka^note His signature superpower that gains 3 random cards from the entire game. in his deck. Depending on his draws, you can win very easily with him getting stuck with nothing but underwhelming zombies and tricks to even losing just because he conjures a card with Dino-Roar. Citron on the zombie mission, though, is much worse than Professor Brainstorm. Not only does he runs a powerful bean deck, the rule of gaining one card from the entire game each turn and gaining 2 sun/brains each turn allows Citron to play whatever card he conjures easily. If you try to circumvent his beans by using rushing, he can conjure a Kernel Corn or any legendary that can change the game in his favor. What's worse is that if you do manage to beat these final luck based missions, you win absolutely nothing, and you are then doomed to repeat the same mission over and over again.
• The Find Mii minigame on the StreetPass Mii Plaza. Each Mii you find or hire with play coins has a different spell depending on what color of shirt they wear. The 12th room of the tower is completely dark and the only way to progress is to have a hero with a white shirt so he can use his spell to light the room, all other heroes just leave when they see the darkness. Meaning you'll have to wait until you come across someone with a white Mii or until the game gets generous enough to give you one when you're hiring. Oh, and all other heroes before the white one will be lost. Thankfully, you only need to light the room once.
  • This has been somewhat averted in Find Mii II, since now you can re-hire people you've tagged with Street Pass. You still need to have found Miis of the color required in order to do it, but once you have at least one, it becomes a lot easier (especially since the new obstacle rooms may now require 2 Miis instead of one).
• The web-browser game PokéHeroes has the Game Corner, and the game unlocked at Level 7 is the Concentration Game. However, besides Game Chips, there is a particular kind of prize to get: the Retro Eggs consisting of Chikorita, Cyndaquil, Totodile, Hoothoot and Sentret. Simple enough, but there is a catch: the chances of even obtaining a Retro Egg is very low, with the chances increasing if you make less wrong flips. However, since the game is random, you better hope that after you are done matching all of the pairs that you get the Retro Egg. But, another catch is that if you do not have a empty space, then it is back to the matching pairs in hopes of getting the Retro Egg.
  • There is also the Lugia Egg Voucher and the Lake Trio Egg Vouchers. Getting the Lugia Egg Voucher is hard enough, considering that getting 4 Pokémon to match the result gets you the voucher (or a shiny one, for all 5) but the Lake Trio Egg Vouchers are just extremely hard. You need to waste Gold Game Chips on the Legend mode and hope that you will get three 7's, or you will be back to interacting with Pokémon and Pokémon Eggs to try again.
• Racing missions in Lego Marvel Superheroes. You're racing in New York City with randomly generated NPC vehicles of varying sizes and speeds. You can lose, even if your vehicle is fast and you don't go off-course, if there's a giant bus in front of you.
  • This behavior, though, can work in your favor, as you can simply find a bus on your own before starting the race and place it in front of your opponent, and he won't be able to move at all (it doesn't even have to be a bus, you can use much any other vehicle if you set it on its side, so its wheels can't be used to push it forward), as the AI is not capable of reverse maneuvers.
• Many Hugo the TV Troll games have a final stage where Hugo has to choose the correct key to open a treasure chest or pull the correct rope to lift a cage which his family is trapped in. There's no indication of which is the correct one and if you choose the wrong one it's game over.
• Any arcade game with a prize at stake, no matter how much the designer claims it to be a game of skill. The cabinets come with hidden mechanics that the arcade operator can tweak to rig the odds of winning regardless of how perfect someone plays, because they would not be able to profit if too many people kept winning. A classic example is Stacker, a game where you line up rows of blocks on a tower by pressing a button to stop it from moving left and right. The minor prize row is easy to reach for any experienced player, at which they could either keep going or accept the prize, but the last row before the major prize is rigged to jump ahead of the tower no matter how precisely one times the button press unless the Random Number Generator decides to let the player win (common advice is to never play after watching someone win the major prize).
• VGA Miner: Hazards can pop up anywhere in the mine. Hope a cave-in or a spring doesn&#;t park itself in the way of the elevator shaft or directly underneath the outhouse, since you have to dynamite directly under there to get the diamond ring.
• Progressbar 95: Hardcore mode (or any higher difficulty in Progressbar NOT) can occasionally rely on luck, as you better hope that the red segments don't drop in a way that makes it impossible for the progressbar to avoid them or pop-ups don't trap the bar without any time to close them.
• Epic Coaster: Trying to get a good perfect jump combo relies on luck to a certain extent, for example if a platform spawns right under another one, it will be impossible to continue the streak as you'll fall in the middle.

• See also: "20 Bear Asses"
• There are several World of Warcraft raid bosses that are luck based. Kel'Thuzad in man mode Naxxramas will periodically Mind Control two raid members at a time, and frequently picks healers. Other examples are bosses that require strategic movement but rather then using a timer to time their abilities, have a cooldown, and free choice whether to use an ability or not. The most annoying aspect of this is Akil'zon in Zul'aman, where you must collapse to avoid his Electric Storm, but often, he will instead use several Static Discharges, annihilating your group.
  • A better example might be the Valentine's Day "Be Mine!" achievement, which required you to create eight candies from an item that generated one at random ten times. The random number generator was fickle that week.
  • Holiday achievements in general can be these sometimes, especially the infamously aggravating Hallow's End holiday, which requires no less than three achievements that are completely reliant on the RNG to gain progress towards (Getting toothpicks, getting enough tricky treats to eat yourself sick, and getting an impossibly rare drop of both a pumpkin vine companion pet and a jack-o-lantern helmet.)
  • The "How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies" quest in the Death Knight area requires the player to extract information from Scarlet Crusaders. This is done by equipping a pair of pokers and attacking the mobs, with a chance on a hit that they'll talk. The enemy talking is so completely random that the quest can take anywhere from a few seconds to over an hour.
  • WoW's end-game consists of your raid doing one dungeon or group of dungeons until you gear up enough to do the next higher difficulty. Early on, the gear was class-specific and dropped completely randomly from bosses, meaning you could have Molten Core on farm but still not be able to move on because you keep getting hunter gear and your tank just can't get that helmet he needs. This has been improved since then, with gear/class homogenization making you more likely to be able to use a drop and tier sets being bought with looted tokens that can be used by multiple classes.
  • One of the best and still most relevant examples of luck in WoW are mount drops. Certain raid or dungeon bosses have a very small chance to drop a rare mount, the odds of you winning the mount are even less than that due to there usually being anywhere between 4 - 24 other people who can all lay claim to it. The most (in?)famous example being the Rivendare Deathcharger, it used to have a % chance of dropping (now has a 1% chance) and guilds were known to have split up over who got to have it. Right now it is solo-farmable, but people still often kill him several hundred times and get nothing. Honorable mention being the Ashes of Al'ar, which still has a % drop from a boss that can only be defeated once per week (and still requiring at least some teammates) as opposed to Rivendare who could be fought several times per hour.
  • Some of the daily quests are based on random drops, particularly the fishing dailies in which players must catch a certain type of fish that can only be caught on the quest. In the Icecrown daily Slaves of Saronite, the player must talk to and free slaves, who will either 1)run to freedom, 2)commit suicide or 3)attack you. Only the first counts toward your total.
  • Halfus Wyrmbreaker was this in the early stages of Cataclysm, depending on your raid configuration. He would have a random set of three out of five drakes each week, which would influence what abilities he would use, and would have to be released and killed to weaken his abilities and put a damage increasing debuff on him. General consensus is that the Slate Dragon (who gives him the abilty to inflict a healing debuff) and the Storm Rider (which gives him the ability to launch a powerful AOE that is cast too quickly to be interrupted until the Storm Rider is released) gave him the most deadly abilites out of the five, and the presence of either would make winning nearly impossible for a group just starting Cataclysm raiding.
  • Lord Rhyolith cranks this Up to Eleven. Success on this boss is entirely dependant on where he chooses to spawn and then ignite volcanos that he must then be guided to break by stepping on. These volcanos apply a constantly stacking debuff that increases the raid's fire damage taken. Basically, he can spawn and activate a volcano right in front of him and then step on it causing minimal damage or he will spawn it on the other side of the map which he won't get to any time soon as he moves very slowly. This sheer luck based fight earned the ire of many players who considered him harder than Ragnaros (the final boss of this raid) depending on how lucky they were. It also earned him the nickname Lord Random. Since his release he was toned down various times and is now more managable, but can still wipe a raid with an ill-placed volcano or two.
  • The sandstone drake alchemy mount had three levels of RNG smeared on it. First, you had to get an archaeology dig site in Uldum. Then you had to get the Canopic Jar as your item to solve. If you didn't get that, you waste a bunch of fragments and start over. And then, if you do get the canopic jar, it has a tiny chance of containing the alchemy recipe. Some people got it the first day of the expansion it was added in and some still haven't gotten it, years later.
  • The achievement "Dropping Some Eaves." Just before the last boss of the Court of Stars dungeon, you will overhear part of a conversation between Grand Magistrix Elisande and Advisor Melandrus. In most cases, Elisande is just about to leave, but under certain circumstances, you may hear her reprimand Melandrus for failing to kill Thalyssra, before noticing your party. Unfortunately, no one is certain what those circumstances are, as while some have theorized that you have to identify the Legion spy at the party quickly and/or without being caught, among other things, general consensus is that the conversation is entirely random.
  • Torgash(Twisted Corridor wings, in particular) takes it Up to Eleven. The entire layers(which equals to 18 floors each, and you have to clear 8 to get all the rewards) are MASSIVE luck-based trips. Each layer of 18 floors takes around 2+ hours to clear if done right. Problem is that you need to obtain power-ups along the way to go forward, and its entirely possible to be Unwinnable by Design because you got screwed in terms of anima powers. The final bosses of floor 18 and even regular mobs from the floors before that hits for over twice the base health anyone actually has at point of release(as of this writting), meaning you need AT LEAST enough power-ups to have triple your base health AND traits that allows you to constantly self heal in order to finish. As if that wasn't enough of a pain, any argument about Torgash being "skill-based" is completely thrown out of the window because floors are not even in terms of difficult. Floors and bosses varies entirely per each run, and some bosses are nigh-impossible to kill because of massive scaling, borderline on Unintentionally Unwinnable, while others are a complete cakewalk by comparison. Losing the run is especially possible, and completely rage-inducing to lose 2 hours or more of your time with nothing to show for it, which earned the feature a extremely negative reception, even more since you need to complete a entire layer of Twisted Corridors as part of the story questline.
• MUD II, descendant of the very first MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon) requires the player to touch the touchstone in order to obtain the ability to use spells. Failure means instant death, with the chance of success being a function of the player's level. Since the use of magic becomes almost essential in later levels, most players touch it with an approximately one-in-six chance of dying, having spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time grinding to that level.
• EVE Online: Apocrypha introduces reverse-engineering which is doubly luck-based. You have approximately 30% chance of a successful job, then a 25% chance of that job producing the desired result. That's right, a net % chance of getting the desired result.
• Granblue Fantasy introduces this mechanic with the release of the Arcarum Expeditions, as you'll never know what kind of gimmicks do the stages have in store for you, nor the elements of the enemies and their drop lists. This takes in full effect if you are aiming for a specific Arcarum Summon and are planning to farm the element-specific materials related to it. The final bosses you encounter at the third, sixth, and ninth stage of every expedition is random, and may or may not change on the next day. However, there is an item that allows the players to freely select the Arcarum boss that they want to fight on the ninth stage.
• Kingdom of Loathing is full of Fetch Quests that require you to obtain randomly-dropping items. Sometimes you can plan things so you're levelling up decently while searching for that elusive item, but sometimes you'll find yourself looking for it in an area several levels below where you "should" be.
  • Also parodied with one subquest which consists entirely of "press a button until you roll an 11 on 2d6. If you roll anything else, you take damage". Of course, a leaf clover, which has already been introduced by that point as an item granting the player luck for an adventure, will make you always roll an (Except in one mode where clovers aren't available - so loaded dice are substituted.)
    • However, if you're in Hardcore and want to go to Bad Moon, you must not use leaf clovers. Including the above. What used to be harmless is now not so harmless.
  • There have been multiple incarnations of delay features implemented; completely divorced from the whims of the RNG, you won't find the thing you're looking for for a certain number of adventures in the appropriate area after you've been told to find it. Of course, once you've expended those adventures, you still have the RNG to contend with, and it is a fickle beast indeed. The delay system has met with varying levels of outrage, so the devs rigged the formula for determining the delay so that it's always "5" until they can come up with a better solution.
  • The RNG got so famous/infamous that it became a character. It sometimes applies "blessings" or "curses" to players for being polite or rude to it, though these effects don't actually do anything. Probably.
  • To get the Brass Bowling Trophy Trophy, all you have to do is pick it up during the Strange Leaflet Quest. Problem is, it isn't always there. There's 4 other items that can appear in its place, all of which are useless ^note Well, they provide a clue to a hidden sidequest within said Quest, one which is unavailable if the Brass Bowling Trophy Trophy is there. If the trophy isn't there, you have to play through the entire game again, which takes a few days at the very least, for another 1-in-5 shot at getting it.
• Back around Christmas a Steam promotion for Champions Online involved a gathering mission. The basic idea was that players had to get through the tutorial mission and then go around the main HUB finding Christmas gifts in typical packaging, and take the items from said packages after taking 5 seconds to open them. The main problem was that straying too far from the hub would probably get you killed instantly by mooks at a higher level than you. Most of the gifts appeared in areas right next to combat zones, so coming down in an area with a gift and waiting for it to be picked up would probably get you slaughtered before you could retrieve the quest items. Add to the fact that gifts may not contain the required item % of the time, and also add to the fact that other players would be going around looking for the gifts too, and ALSO add that you might be attacked from one of these crates as well, made this a slog that could take well over 3 hours to finish.
• In one high level RuneScape quest, you confront The Dragon with a companion, who enrages said Dragon and gets attacked. The luck comes in when you realize your companion has fairly low HP, and can easily get trashed by the boss in a few good hits. Since you can't give your companion food, it all comes down to whether or not you'll whittle the boss' health down before he kills your companion.
  • Dungeoneering achievement "And I Want It Now" requires you to finish a Complexity 6 dungeon (that is, find and defeat the boss) alone in 6 minutes. Dungeons are randomly generated, so you literally have to cross your fingers and hope for a simple floorplan.
• The crafting in Final Fantasy XI is entirely based on equations depending on your level in a particular craft, the level of the recipe you're trying to make, and luck. And there is a cap on your success rate below %. So your level +3 Cook could catastrophically fail to boil a carrot, though the chance is very slim. Whether or not you "HQ'ed" a synth was also dependent on certain factors plugged and a random number generator.
• Final Fantasy XIV crafting is slightly different. You essentially have a progress bar and an quality bar. When the progress bar is filled, the synthesis is successfully completed, and if the quality bar is filled, it's a % high quality chance. If the quality bar is less than full, you get a certain percentage chance for an HQ result based on how full the bar is. However, the abilities you use to fill these bars, particularly the ones used to fill the quality bar, have a chance of failing. Gear and actually ability has no effect on the failure rate of these abilities. So it's still mathematically possible (though if you're smart with your abilities, it's less than %) for a capped crafter to botch a level 2 synth. It doesn't help that players swear that 98% chance of HQ synths result in NQs more often than 2% chance of HQs actually HQ.
  • Worse in FFXIV is Atma Farming. You need 12 Atma as to upgrade a relic weapon past a certain point. These Atma drop from completing Full Active Time Events (FAT Es), which are little scenario battles that pop up in the overworld. The Atma dropping is entirely luck based, and your luck is going to absolutely suck. It's entirely common to spend 5 hours FATE grinding to not get a damn thing. Not helping the "I'm Not Having Fun" factor is the fact that FATE grinding is widely believed to be the most sole crushingly tedious thing in the game. Also, you have to do this for every relic weapon you want upgraded, and every job has their own relic weapon.
  • While Atma farming is still entirely RNG based, SE has patched it so the drop rate is much higher, turning potentially many weeks of farming into a few days of it. Bad news is that they added a step to the relic weapon upgrade process that was even worse than the original Atma grind. To upgrade one's relic to a Zodiac Weapon, one must collect an item from each of 16 dungeons, among a pile of other crap that is just bought with some form of in-game currency or another. The items that drop from dungeons are charitably assumed to have a drop rate of 15%, and it takes at least 10 minutes to do even the fastest dungeon involved, at least 30 minutes for Aurum Vale and Dzemael Darkhold. The math ends painfully. Naturally, you have to do this for 'every' Zodiac Weapon you want.
  • Thankfully, finishing the first expansion, Heavensward, gives you an NPC that lets you skip all that tedious grinding and bring any Relic weapon to its maximum level pre-Heavensward, allowing you to catch up quickly on any Relic by completing the initial quest to get it, and then skipping all the in-between quests quickly.
• Guild Wars has a particularly frustrating example. During the Divinity Coast mission, the bonus objective is to find five villagers throughout the countryside and take them with you. If all five reach the end safely, you're rewarded. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. Sometimes, one (or several) of the villagers will spawn in the middle of a group enemies, typically dying long before you can get anywhere near them. It's entirely possible to fail the bonus objective and have to restart the entire mission, simply because the game didn't feel like playing fair. A luck-based mission, indeed.
• Star Trek Online: The raid "Azure Nebula Rescue" requires the players to free Romulan ships captured by Tholians: a T'liss-class warbird is worth 1 point, a Dhelan is worth 2, a Ha'apax is worth 3, and a Falchion is worth 5. The ships spawn randomly, so it's entirely possible to miss optional objectives by simple bad luck, which has a significant effect on the payout.

• Mario Party is one, big Luck-Based Game, justified since it's a digital board game and most of the physical of them have a luck factor, and the game is designed to be mindless fun with your friends and not something competitive.
  • Pictured in this page is an example of a cut minigame that was very honest about its luck-based nature, going by Toad's description.
  • Beginning with Mario Party 2, there are several minigames that are mechanically identical to Russian Roulette with four players, just with family-friendly themes like "Stacked Deck" (twelve cards on the table, four are hiding Bowser symbols) or "Pier Pressure" (ten fishing rods, three have hooked sea urchins).
  • Two LPers of the game - in their third round - came up with a hidden block on the first turn. Containing a star. It went downhill from there.
  • Get a Rope from Mario Party 5 is the literal version of luck-based mission. Pull a rope, hope you get the better result than the opponent. Completely luck-based; you don't even have to press a button.
  • And, of course, there's the board games themselves. Then again, board games in real life are oftentimes Luck-Based Missions.
  • At the end of Mario Party 9's solo mode, it's you, an AI partner that hates you, and two smarter than your partner A.I.s that, if they win, make you start the level ALL over. The kicker, the Boss minigames (the ones with the most mini-star value) are pure dice rolling. Expect Shyguy and Magikoopa to have improbable luck and win both of these while your "partner" ruins your chances of winning by getting you fourth and then getting third themselves.
  • It's debatable if skill can be used, but the first six games' and Superstars' Chance Times and equivalents can change who wins in one turn because one of the outcomes is swapping stars.
  • Special mention goes to the Bowser's Big Blast minigame in the second game which is pretty much the Mario Party equivalent of Russian Roulette.
  • Buried Treasure from Mario Party 1 is heavily luck-based, despite looking like a skill game on the surface. Players need to dig through the earth, racing to find a randomly-located treasure chest. If a player starts close to where the chest happened to spawn, there's a pretty good chance they'll win unless they're an idiotic AI. God help you if the chest spawned far from your character's starting point.
• Every round in Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is focused on skill and luck. However, there are certain aspects where luck plays a much larger role in obtaining the crown.
• Family Game Night 3 featured video game versions of various Hasbro games, one of which was Mouse Trap. ANY achievement related to Mouse Trap was innately luck-based as Mouse Trap is simply rolling dice until someone wins.
  • In addition, the game featured a Yahtzee-like card game which is basically making poker hands until someone wins. While this game allowed for SOME strategy, the achievement for making 6 hands in a single game is essentially luck based as all you can do is HOPE you are dealt better cards than your opponents.
  • The achievements for winning Spin-To-Win (in the Game of Life) and pulling over another player for speeding (rolling a 10) are innately luck-based as well.
  • One of the Wii games has a minigame that quite literally amounts to "Russian Roulette with catapults".
• Sonic Shuffle:
  • Some of the mini-games can only be won by pressing the right button. These include "Sonicola", where you must choose one of five cans of soda from a vending machine, hoping not to get the one shaken up by Dr. Eggman, and "Egg in Space", where Eggman is imprisoned in a rocket jail cell and you have to find the right switch to launch it.
  • Certain mini-events can only be won by certain characters. One of the most notable is the mini-event where Eggman plays a tune that makes your character fall asleep on the next turn. Only E Gamma is immune from this effect, due to being a robot, and he even fights back by locking onto Eggman, firing at him and chasing him away.
• In Tweety and the Magic Gems, some mini-games are this, such as "Big and Small", where you have to guess whether the next card drawn will be bigger or smaller than the last one, and "Next Color", where you have to guess whether the next card drawn will be a red, blue, green, or black one.

• The last encore level of BattleBlock Theater is made almost entirely of exploding platforms. There are tons of cannons firing down at you at all times & their shots move fast enough to come on screen during a jump & kill you during that same jump. Dodging a projectile usually requires you to stop or jump at which point you usually either get hit by a line of projectiles from out of nowhere or fall in acid because the platform under you exploded. The timing of the shots is randomized to some degree too.
• Donkey Kong Country: Fishing minigames, such as that in the GBA remake of Donkey Kong Country, often have a luck component to some degree. The worst ones are almost entirely luck-based.
• The game Alex Kidd and the Enchanted Castle for Sega Genesis takes place on Planet Paperrock. Accordingly, the player has to play Rock, Paper, Scissors to gamble for power up items, at a highly increasing cost over the course of the game. Each boss fight is a series of Rock, Paper, Scissors matches.
  • Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom also revolves boss fights with Rock, Paper, Scissors, but goes a step beyond. If you win a round, your opponent's head starts spinning and for the round to count you have to guess which way they'll be looking when you press the D-pad. They had to do the same thing if they won a round, but still
    • There was at least one case where they dropped you a hint: a character tells you that another character in the game "hates scissors," meaning that he'll always choose Paper in the first part. Though you still have to randomly guess which direction he'll look in the second part.
• In Mega Man X5, there are two ways to prevent the space colony Eurasia from crashing into the Earth, but their odds of success can only be manipulated to a point. The laser will almost never succeed no matter what you do, and the space shuttle will sometimes fail even if you gathered all its parts. You can also affect it with who you've been playing as for most of the game, someone who uses Zero a lot has a better chance of him not succumbing to the virus, as the game won't remove him due to how frequently he's used.
• An already Nintendo Hard freeware game by the name of Dungeon (download link) is this taken to its logical extreme. Depending on your computer's name, your username, your RAM, and your hard drive (and maybe even your Operating System), the game picks a bug to inflict on you. This can range from merely changing level names around to making the game completely unwinnable due to fast enemies or spikes being one pixel taller. "Bugless" version is here
• The first special stage of Kaizo Mario World requires the player to perform a leap of faith over (essentially) a Bottomless Pit and hope that a fish jumps up at the right place for them to bounce off and continue. There is no set pattern to how the fish appear at all, meaning the jump comes down to pure luck. As Wugga said during his Let's Play of the level:

  "How is this good gaming design?"

• The emerald/key hunting missions in both games of the Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 can come down to this, especially in the latter title. The worst case is Security Hall. In any other hunting levels, if you take too long, you just don't get as good a rank, at least on the first mission. Here, if you take too long, you lose a life. The fourth mission imposes a time limit with the same penalty on all stages, making the hunting stages a definite example of this. At least the fourth missions are optional with regard to finishing the stories, but you still have to beat at least one hunting stage with a time limit in order to progress.
  • Ironically this is averted for the 5th Hard Mode missions which makes them cake walks. In line with being harder, the emeralds are kept in very hard to find and difficult to reach locations however said locations are always the same, so you could easily take a huge amount of time to complete with an abysmal rank your first time, then retry and get a fast 'A' now that you know where to go.
  • The final battle against the Finalhazard can turn into this, depending on where the red welt appears on the boss's body. It could be near the head or the tail, which are easier to reach, or in the middle of the body, where you're more liable to get knocked back by the pink eggs or lasers.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Area 5, the boss of the Area (the Technodrome) can be at the end of one of three caves. You have no way of knowing which one it'll be in short of trying each one and hoping it's there. Making this even worse is the fact that it's most likely (a one-in-two chance) to be at the end of the furthest, most difficult cave.
• The boss of the Asteroid Coaster in Sonic Colors. Beating him isn't hard, but you have only a ridiculously small chance of netting a high enough score for an S-Rank. To maximize your score, you have to use the Rocket Wisp every time the boss warps away (and the Rocket Wisp randomly appears from crates the boss throws at you and sometimes doesn't show up at all). And destroy all of the component parts of the boss before destroying his core (using the finicky homing attack). And collect lots of rings (and keep them to the end of the fight, which means you can't get hit at all). And rack up the quick step bonus as much as possible (constantly jerking Sonic back and forth whenever he isn't attacking). And, of course, be quick about it (take longer than 2 minutes and you may as well start over). The odds of all that coming together is astronomical, and has next to nothing to do with your skill.
• I Wanna Be the Guy has Dracula. He's the only completely randomized boss, and can be an incredibly difficult fight, even by IWBTG standards.
• Impossible Mission 2 had an infamous ending sequence: in the final room of the game are 3 identical computers. Using one of them will win you the game. The other two will instantly end the entire game regardless of remaining time or lives. Which computer is correct is randomised each game and there are no clues, in the game or in the manual, to tell you which is the correct computer. And you can't restore, so you'll have to start again from the beginning. This was likely done to hide the fact that, as with many Commodore 64 games, the ending was awful.
• The mobile app game Subway Surfers gives you various missions to increase your ability to get a high score in the game. Most of them are fine, but every so often you'll get a mission stating "Collect 3 Magnets in a Single Run" or similar. These missions are entirely reliant on the item appearing during the course of your run. Fortunately if the Random Number God is not with you, you're able to spend coins to skip that particular mission.
• Zombie Tsunami has this mechanic as well, thankfully, since a good chunk of its missions are at least partially luck-based (like amassing 30 zombies, partially down to the layout of hazards and powerups, or making a certain background appear, completely random).
• At the end of Kid Klown In Crazy Chase, you're presented with ten locks. You've collected five keys over the course of the game. One of the locks works. There's no indication as to which one it is. Basically, it's a shot and if you get it wrong, the game gives you the worst possible ending and calls you an idiot. Now consider that getting the good ending requires a No Death Run where you also collect all the extremely missable cards, all of which you have to accomplish before this point and which failing at this moment turns into the worst ending anyway, and you have a lot of SNES controllers getting snapped in half.
• In Super Mario Sunshine, one mission involves visiting a casino and getting a triple 7 on two slot machines. One of them is not too bad because you can use F.L.U.D.D. on the individual reels until they land on a 7, but for the other machine all three reels will spin at the same time so you have to spin the triple 7 by chance. In the process you might also roll a triple Boo, which will cause a Boo to spawn into the level.
• New Super Mario Bros. has a minigame where you collect 1-Up cards hidden in blocks. Getting the multiplier card too early can be bad, as it doubles your current total upon finding it. Also, finding the Bowser card will end your game.
• In Cuphead, the reason Dr. Kahl's Robot and Cala Maria are so difficult is they both share annoyingly random tactics that tend to turn winning their battles into a matter of luck rather than skill. The nature of their attacks can, at pure random, put you in a scenario where taking a hit is unavoidable, meaning whether or not you win depends on how many times this happens to happen. Cala Maria isn't so bad since it's only her final phase where this happens, but Dr. Kahl's Robot hits you with this every step of the way.
• The Simpsons: Bart vs. the World: The "Find the bat in the coffins" minigame. Just three coffins and you have to pick the right one.

• In Minesweeper, since the boards are psuedo-randomly generated, you can easily end up with situations where there's no way to logically determine where the remaining mines are, and whichever square you click has an equal chance of containing a mine. Since the board is fixed after the first click of the mouse, you don't even get the mercy of Schrödinger's Gun. On top of that, some bootleg versions of the game are luck-based right from the very beginning — as the field is entirely obscured at first, it's perfectly possible to step on a mine in your first move.
  • In the standard Windows version of Minesweeper, the game is configured so that you cannot possibly hit a mine on your first move (i.e. the playing field is generated based on your first move to avoid generating a mine there). This is easy to see when the number of mines greatly exceeds 50% of the playing area when custom fields are generated, yet you still can never lose until the second click. Other renditions, however, are not always so fortunate. Regardless, any moves other than the first can easily be luck based.
  • Some incarnations of Minesweeper go the other way and avert this trope entirely: they generate the board based on your first click and ensure that there is a logical solution.
• Catherine is overall a puzzle game that is lacking in requiring luck, since stacking blocks to form a staircase is overall more a logical activity. That is until Stage 9 of the game, where Mystery Blocks are added. These blocks have red curtains around the sides and will randomly transform into any of the block types when you step on them, so they could do no harm by turning into regular or heavy blocks, help the player advance faster by turning into a springboard block or utterly ruin everything because they turned into spike blocks or black hole blocks which spell insta-Death and Game Over for the player.
  • The final boss and its stage is worse! Not only does the final stage feature several Mystery Blocks, but one of the boss' form of attacking is causing randomly chosen blocks in the vicinity to randomly change their type repeatedly. So there's an even higher chance that your lovely progress is ruined because he changed the block you were on and you could not dodge what it turned into fast enough.
• Perhaps this is not the experience all players will have, but Reset Generation feels as though the entire game is built around luck and coincidence. If the right items drop in the right place, it's easy for anyone to completely wipe out the other players. Much of the time there seems to be very little strategy required at all; if a particularly useful item drops into your territory and you're able to defend it from being destroyed by cannon shots (an easy task), your opponents won't stand much of a chance Unless an equally useful item falls into THEIR possession.
  • Plumber is actually a very brokencharacter in this regard. Items are usually the difference between victory and defeat, and his power allows him to fetch nearby items without actually walking to them, basically giving him weighted dice as far as item drops go. Basically, he's the High Priest to the Random Number God. It certainly doesn't help that he can grab a full-power-charge item, taking away his opponent's chance to grab it, and then grab another one as he pleases.
• The latest version of Solitaire (Klondike, specifically) that comes ensuite with Windows Vista has the audacity to inform you that you've lost, even when it deals you a literally unwinnable game. It doesn't help that it now keeps a running tally of wins and losses.
  • Free Cell, in contrast, has only one Unwinnable game out of the ~ it will randomly deal.
• The item crafting and spell learning mini-games in Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords. You are almost completely at the mercy of the board's configuration when it comes go gaining the requisite number of anvils or scrolls to gain the sought item, and if you run out of legal moves, the game ends and you have to start over.
  • The final battle with Lord Bane - especially if you're primarily a magic user: Bane literally gets stronger as the match goes on, thanks to his ludicrously low-cost stat buffing spells. You basically have to pray your spells don't get blocked (too much) and you don't get uber-cascaded into oblivion. If Bane gets rolling early, you're pretty much meat, not matter what class you play as.
  • The sequel, Galatrix, runs with this: adding time limits to the Gate Hack mini-games (and the cascades that would help you in battle work against you, since the clock keeps running and you can't make a move until they stop) and junk blocks to the rest or the mini-games.
• The entire game of Trash Panic on PSN is luck based. It is a physics based Tetris style game, but the objects do not have uniform dimensions like the blocks of tetris, but consist of things like guitars and toilet bowls, making this game very very difficult.
• The independent game Osmos is built entirely out of this trope. While the developers claim that the eat-blobs smaller than you and avoid bigger ones that eat you gameplay has a strategy to it, in reality (especially in the later levels) the only strategy involved is to reload the game constantly until you get a starting position that has blobs you can actually eat.
• Puyo Puyo can be this at times, especially with higher levels where the pieces drop almost instantaneously and the AI is ruthless. But the most egregious example is the Endless Fever battle mode. Due to the offset mechanics, nuisance Puyo will not drop if you can clear just one group of four, making it easy to survive a very long time. Due to the margin time mechanics, surviving a very long time will eventually lead to a scenario where clearing just one group is enough to wipe out a full tray of warning Puyo and completely fill your opponent's tray. At this point, it is literally a matter of "whoever gets a piece that can't clear anything first, loses".
• Immortal Souls is a sort of cross between Puzzle Quest and Bejeweled, where you have to match up colored tiles to take down matching color armor on your enemies. Meanwhile, using the wrong color on the wrong armor is much less effective. As a result, getting the right tile/armor matchup can make a battle a breeze, while getting the wrong one can make a battle drag out over multiple turns. And unlike you, your enemies never miss and always deal the same amount of damage. Then add on some enemies which have two or more different armor colors (usually bosses or the Templars), and it can take either grinding your attack stats or repeated attempts at getting good luck to win. Argh.
• Candy Crush Saga, a game that is also similar to Bejeweled, has some levels which can be incredibly frustrating, but later levels introduce Candy Bombs that will go off after a set amount of moves. However, some levels have them so tightly set up that it is almost impossible to take out the bomb in the set amount of moves unless if the candies are there.
• Many a run of Tetris has ended because the game denied a piece crucial to recovering out of an otherwise-unmanagable stack, something that could've been avoided with a different roll of the RNG. This is why newer games, such as Tetris: The Grand Master and official Tetris games falling under the "Tetris Guideline" use randomizers tailored to curbing piece droughts. Professional Tetris matches attempt to mitigate this by playing a version that ensures both players have the exact same piece order. They can still get killed by RNG, but they won't lose because their opponent got better RNG.
• The Impossible Quiz is virtually unwinnable on a first playthrough for even the cleverest thanks to its Insane Troll Logic questions. And then some of the questions have a different answer every time, making it a luck based mission even if you memorized the answers.
• In Elemental Story, getting 5 star monsters in normal roll or evolution slabs as random quest clear drops requires an absurdly large amount luck.
• There are times where the only way to move forward in a Sudoku game is to guess. Fortunately, there is no losing in Sudoku, just having to backtrack to undo the incorrect guess.
• Some of the levels in Lemmings fall into this. There's a stage in which the Lemmings fall into a 1-pixel wide gap between two pillars. Due to the AI of Lemmings walking forward until they hit a wall and then turning around, this causes the Lemmings trapped in this gap to change their direction every single frame. In order to beat the level you need to get the Lemming to bash through the right pillar, one of which will create a path to the goal once destroyed while bashing the other one will result in your Lemmings falling into lava. Due to the fact that the Lemmings will bash whatever they are currently facing it's impossible to time this since they're changing directions far too rapidly to read.

• Pikmin 2's Challenge Mode has a luck-based level called Concrete Maze. It has 3 floors. You have a strict time limit on each floor. The first floor is a maze with randomly placed destructible walls blocking most of the dead ends, a key behind one of the randomly placed walls, & a buried exit behind another one of the randomly placed walls. The buried exit will only emerge after you get your pikmin to take the key to the ship (which takes a really long time if the key is really far from the ship). The second floor is like the first floor but it's bigger, it has way more paths, & bomb carrying spiders randomly fall from above to suicide attack you & your pikmin. All you have to do on the third floor is throw your pikmin into flowers to get more pikmin & have your pikmin get some treasure for you that's laid out for you. That floor is really easy if you don't assume you need to be careful about which colors of pikmin you get from the 3 flowers (which change colors every few seconds so going for specific colors takes a while).
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun: There is a Nod mission where you have to send a small force through GDI infested territory to recapture a Scrin ship, then storm Vega's base to retrieve the Tacitus. Getting the Tacitus is a matter of sending your two Attack Buggies in, praying all the forces attack them, then sending a Scout Cycle in to destroy the train car and finish the level. If any of the enemy units opened fire on the Cycle, you were screwed.
• Certain missions in Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars depend heavily on chance.
  • One of the most painful ones is Operation Stiletto, a Nod mission where you have to capture the Construction Yards/Drone Platforms of four separate bases, all intact. If any of the Yards/Platforms are destroyed, you automatically lose. The problem is that the GDI and Scrin forces are fighting each other, and will gladly destroy their opponents' bases, including the buildings you need to protect, forcing you to simply hope they don't break through each others' lines until you can build up your forces enough to stop them.
  • The 6th Nod mission. You had to do a suicidal run into the middle of an enemy base in order to pick up a package with a small, fragile strike team with no reinforcements, and then reach an evac helicopter on the other side of the map - all while being harassed by enemy patrols. It basically came down to praying that the enemy would ignore at least one of your units while you make the escape to the helicopter, or else it'd be gunned down helplessly.
• The underrated game Constructor, upon reaching certain stages in house construction, would make certain demands of you to build X number of houses/facilities on one estate with X features. However, it also imposes varying arbitrary quotas on how many houses of each type you're permitted to build. If, upon reaching the penultimate stage in the game, it asks you to build the wrong type of house, the quota will forbid you from building enough and you'll be sacked (Read: Taken out of your headquarters in a coffin while you're sleeping and buried alive).
• Europa Universalis III lets the player play ANY nation that is implemented into the game and existed historically during the time period. This includes historical strategy gaming mainstays like France, England and the Netherlands, but also tiny minor nations like the Irish kingdoms of Leinster and Connaught. Playing one of the Irish minor nations basically depends on little other than whether England will want to annex all of Ireland early on, and whether England gets into enough trouble with the French, Scottish and Burgundy.
  • This is valid for any country in any given game made by Paradox team. There are almost no certain things here, even for mainstays. From the moment you start the game, it's alternative history of humankind. Random events can make or destroy continent-spanning empires in few years (or weeks in Hearts of Iron). Random Number God is one of most important factors in battles, sometimes more powerful than technological, numerical and tactical advantages and God help you if you don't have those advantages. Later add-ons for EU3 take it to extremes in terms of succession. It's entirely possible to inherit half of the continent via sheer luck and a single, long-forgotten pact or to see a powerful empire being balkanized into a bunch of laughably weak states after a succession mess or revolt created by a sighted comet.
  • Playing as a weak or very minor country tends to be a Self-Imposed Challenge not because of the skill needed to succeed, but because it's usually sheer luck that allows you to stay afloat for the first century or two.
• UFO Aftermath base defense missions, which randomly scatter your men. How does trying to take on whole squads of laser-toting aliens with your weakest member because the rest of the team is in a different room sound?
• Age of Empires has an example: In the Babylonian mission Lost, you start on an island with several archers and a priest. You have to go to the north of the island, use the archers to kill all but one archer on a second island, use the priest to convert a priest on the other island, immediately use that priest to convert the remaining archer that opens fire the moment the priest is converted, hope the priest can convert the archer before the archer kills him, and then use the archer to attack a transport at the northern end of the second island to send it towards the first so the two priests can work together to convert it.
  • Or, just use your own priest to directly convert the Transport Ship. It might only work on the expansion, though.
• Dark Reign has several:
  • In mission 5, as the Imperium, you have to destroy a Freedom Guard base while preventing them from destroying the Water Extraction Compound, located in their base. They attack it when you breach their defenses, so you have to be ready to charge in and destroy everything quickly. However, you have no way of knowing what they've got in the way of units, so you have to pray they don't have half an army ready to destroy it.
  • In mission 8, once again as the Imperium, you have to flee your base, which is hopelessly overrun, and take a MacGuffin to an extraction point to receive reinforcements. However, the only way to do this is to hide out on the lake west of the base, wait for the Freedom Guard to finish destroying the base and leave, then move back through the wreckage. However, if the Freedom Guard army catches a glimpse of the transport or any other units heading out onto the lake, the army won't leave the area. Considering the MacGuffin is both sluggish and armored with tinfoil, it's almost impossible to get through. And god help you if you run into a marauding Spider Bike.
  • In the final level, the Tograns' survival is dependent entirely on what the Imperium does. If they attack your base too early, you'll be obliterated. If they attack the Freedom Guard too aggressively, they'll punch through and destroy the Orbital Defense Matrix, which is the only thing preventing the activation of an Imperium Kill Sat (read: Non Standard Game Over). If they don't attack the Freedom Guard enough, the Guard will attack you. And if the Guard and Imperium attack at the same time
• Atom Zombie Smasher is a grand example of this. The game randomly places zombie infestations, spawn points, and even what mercenaries are at your disposal during a given battle. The game could be over before it even started.
• In Pyramid Rising every level has a goal called "gold time" that gives your city some new building or enhancement. In some levels, meeting this goal is only possible if the correct purchases show up at the right times at the port.
• In the primitive strategy game Bokosuka Wars, combat wins and losses are based on what is essentially a dice roll.
• In the Police Quest: SWAT 2
  • Terrorist campaign, one mission requires you to give food to a newspaper editor before she'll cooperate with your primary objective. SWAT is the only source of food, but they might randomly refuse to give you any before ending negotiations and storming the building, guaranteeing a failed campaign and mandatory mission restart.
  • Getting the Golden Ending in the SWAT campaign requires collecting all the right evidence throughout the game. Since each mission has certain elements that are randomised, it is very difficult to get all of the required evidence and more often than not, most players will find the Chief of police being forced to resign in the ending.

• Pump It Up NX2 and NXA have a World Max mission with the song Deja Vu. At specific parts of the song, the chart can change into one of multiple patterns. Unlike most instances of this trope, this chart is actually a popular one.
• In Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock, there are a few segments called "Guitar Battle" in which you face off against a computer (or player) opponent and play for power-ups to use on one another. These power-ups, ideally, are used to make the other person fail the song or at least prevent them from obtaining power-ups of their own. The luck-based success is against the final boss on the Expert difficulty - if one is lucky enough to both have a non-fatal power-up used against them at first and then acquire a 'whammy attack' power-up of their own, the boss can be promptly defeated much, much more easily than via any other power-up combination.
• DanceDanceRevolution:
  • DanceDanceRevolution SuperNOVA's Stellar Master mission mode often has mission requirements that are entirely luck-based—i.e., playing multiple songs in a row with a (randomly-selected) onscreen character of the same gender.
  • The end of the song "Tohoku EVOLVED" has a jump that comes at the end of the song, preceded by a sudden spike in scroll BPM to , and is always randomized to be one of four "corner" jumps^note L+U, U+R, R+D, or D+L. Because the chart is scrolling so fast, hitting it boils down to hitting one corner jump and praying that it's the correct jump. For those who played the song as an Encore Extra Stage in DanceDanceRevolution X3, with a one-point lifebar, this means that no matter how well one played up to this point, you had a 75% chance of failing the song.
• Sound Shapes has Death Mode, in which you must collect notes spawned one by one randomly over a map, within a ludicrously tight time limit, to go along with the instant-death enemies, projectiles and inability to touch most surfaces. One attempt can see three or four notes spawn right next to one another, others having notes appear on the other side of the map. Even a perfect run of certain spawning patterns cannot possibly be done within the timer.
• The whole point of the Vegas character in Audiosurf, whose powers are the ability to shuffle the board and generate random powerups.

• ADOM
  • Some examples will merely require a lot of grinding if you're unlucky. For example, the dwarven elder asks you to kill a random creature, which may be disgustingly rare or far more powerful than you can handle until much later in the game — this locks out most of the rest of his quests as well. The road to the Ultra Endings and the Trident of the Red Rooster is especially infuriating: Gaab'Baay wants a boar skull which first requires a rare wilderness encounter with a boar and then a random corpse drop, and then she wants a scroll of danger which is also quite rare. Saving Khelavaster requires an Amulet of Life Saving, which is so rare that it's better obtained with a Wish, and Wishes are so rare there may be no practical way of obtaining one before this part of the game, particularly if you get unlucky with the pools in Darkforge. This last one can become practically unbeatable, though never in principle since you could always get an extremely rare drop.
  • Especially near the beginning, some quests and objectives are genuinely uncompletable with bad luck because they have failure conditions or are almost guaranteed to kill a character who gets unlucky in a specific way, usually both. (And no Save Scumming in the original mode of this game; dead is dead.) Trying to reach all possible objectives right at the beginning requires a very unlikely string of lucky breaks: Find the Goblin Camp in a random wilderness encounter before reaching level 3. (And by the way, moving around the wilderness consumes game time very fast, affecting the last item on this list.) Go to the Small Cave and find the stairs down and the waterproof blanket before reaching a too high level and/or dying — the difficulty rises all the time with each level. Kill Kranach the raider lord in a random wilderness encounter before reaching level 6. Rescue the cute dog in the Puppy Cave before four days have passed.
    • You can't complete the raider quest if you don't get the encounter before level 6. You might starve or unwillingly level up from other encounters before that happens. You might also be too weak to survive against the raiders when you encounter them, regardless of tactics.
    • Exaggerated Trope: The puppy quest is, just by itself, a string of challenges dependent on luck. Most characters will not be able to complete it other than by retrieving the puppy's corpse. On the second level, you have to get past a nest of giant ants. You might just be able to stroll to the next level without running into them (or find a huge rock to block their nest), or they might be right between you and the objective. Low-level characters might be completely unable to kill giant ants, or have to take so long the puppy dies. There used to be an underground river in the cave as well, meaning you'd have to be really lucky to get past without taking a lot of drowning damage and getting your items rusty, but that was thankfully removed. Then there's the cavernous level near the bottom, where the monsters just keep coming at you and can be quite tough. An ogre mage generated at this point will kill most player characters, although at least that's rare. (That is, ogre mages are rare, not being killed.) Again, you might just be able to walk into the next cavern and go right down, or you might search the whole area before finding the stairs down at the opposite end. If you get to the next level before four days have passed, the puppy will be generated alive in a level with hostile monsters. It seems to have at least 50% chance of being killed before you find it, even if a river isn't randomly generated on this level, which it might. (It's presumably possible to enter the level at this point to generate the puppy alive and then quickly leave and come back later at a high level when you can just teleport straight to it.) Also, you might instead run into the vault full of monsters in the level first, which usually means either dozens of weak opponents you have to deal with — or a random vault with dozens of sometimes powerful opponents. Anyway, if you do manage to find the puppy, then you just have to do an Escort Mission back across all the dangerous places just mentioned, to get it back to town.
• Dwarf Fortress, on the whole, is a strange fusion of luck and skill, with luck most noticeably determining just how stupid your dwarves will act (EG: dodging by leaping off a cliff). However, the truly luck-based missions enter when either noblemen make demands or someone has a strange mood; will you be lucky enough to have the requisite materials on hand? Will you be lucky enough for them to exist within the world? It is quite possible to generate a world with next-to-no iron in it and have someone demand steel furnishings. And if none of your neighbours have iron, you can forget about trading for it
• While most roguelikes (like say NetHack) have a fair bit of luck involved in winning, Dungeon Crawl

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