Nintendo Hard/Role-playing Games

""Final Fantasy II will do everything in its power to beat you down. And when I write "you," I am not referring to Frioniel's party. I am referring to you, the player. Final Fantasy II is a pair of simultaneous battles on two separate planes. The first is the fictional struggle of Frioniel and the rebel forces against the might of the Paramekian Empire. The second is the very real battle between you, the player, and Final Fantasy II, in which the game attempts to foil your efforts and demoralize you from ever playing again. As you try to beat Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy II tries to beat you."
 * Digimon World 3 for PSX was released by 2003 but had several quirks one would expect to see in the first-era RPGs. The enemy set changes brutally from one area to another, and if a uncautious player take the wrong turn he may end fighting enemies that can defeat your whole team without getting damaged. Status effects are outright broken and bosses tend to abuse them, while you only get to learn such skills near the endgame. Every now and then you're forced to fight against a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere who is very powerful (woe you if you show up without full health), and some sections of the game are just impractical to figure out without a guide, to say nothing about special digivolutions that require specific stat training and digivolution levels.
 * Rogue Galaxy for the Play Station 2 is an absurdly difficult game, because enemies dish out damage like crazy and none of your party members can learn healing spells. You have to rely on items to heal and using items takes stamina, which is subtracted from the same bar you need to attack, use skills, and move about the battlefield. If your stamina gauges run out, you have to wait for it to fill up in real time while enemies thrash you. Some monsters require specific weapons to kill, too. Oh, and this is a Level5 game, so expect lots of Mimics--and in this game, Mimics automatically start you out with an empty stamina gauge and can spam a wide area of effect attack, wrecking your party before any of you can even move.
 * Phantasy Star II is unusually difficult for a console RPG. Many of the Random Encounters are strong enough to threaten a Total Party Kill. For example, in the first dungeon, most enemies are fairly weak, but once in a while, you'll encounter an enemy named "Blaster" whose attacks hit your entire party for substantial damage. If you haven't done some serious Level Grinding, you'll probably lose the battle. Additionally, despite abandoning the first-person perspective used in the first Phantasy Star game, you will get lost in the game's dungeons, because the mazes are just that complicated. You can see for yourself how confusing they get!
 * The most unbalanced game in the Final Fantasy series is clearly Final Fantasy II. Frustrating levelling system aside, every dungeon is full of rooms which may be the place you need to go, or may contain something useful, but 90% of the time they're completely empty, but for some reason teleport you to the middle of the room to walk back out, leaving you incredibly susceptible to attacks by high level monsters. This isn't rare. This is the norm. To quote Classic Gaming Review:

"If your will somehow remains unbroken at this point and the game is still turned on, Final Fantasy II will begin administering electrical shocks through the controller.""


 * On the flip side, the game isn't as hard overall as Final Fantasy 4 DS. FF2 is extremely unbalanced- While that means monsters in the first turn who can kill you with ease, it also means being able to power your team up to truly absurd levels using the poorly balanced level up system. It's more a test of endurance than it a mental challenge.
 * Adding to the frustration is that later dungeons are populated by creatures that can cast STONE and DEATH on your entire party, spells for which there's no way to defend yourself against until you get some items from the very last two dungeons. One bad roll of the dice and your entire party is wiped out, and you have to start again from the beginning.
 * Final Fantasy III was already difficult on the Famicom, thanks partially to a lack of save points, justified by hardware limits. Then it was re-released on the DS, and rather than add save points, the best jobs were nerfed, and the bosses were granted double turns. You'll have to Grind, Grind, Grind if you ever hope to finish it.
 * It gets easier in one respect in that there can be only three enemies on the screen at once, rather than eight, meaning that the splitting enemies are less of a threat and can be killed easily with the Dark Knight's Darkness move. On the other hand, the enemies that traveled alone to begin with got harder as a result. The final boss becomes more difficult, as it uses several different kinds of attacks, such as status ailments, rather than spamming FlareWave, which was powerful but possible to heal through.
 * The DS remake of Final Fantasy IV fits this to a T. While the original in the U.S. was somewhere between the Japanese release and the later Easy Type version, this is in a league of its own. To count the ways...
 * Enemies will murder your party outright when you encounter a new set. Either in sheer numbers (good luck with 6 death zombies) or because they have some powerful AOE spell that they can cast over and over, for free.
 * Encounter tend to happen every two steps, tops.
 * No amount of Level Grinding can save you... mostly because enemies give abysmally low amounts of experience points.
 * Same with Money Grinding, for the same reason. It's a good thing Square Enix decided to leave fortunes lying around though.
 * Items you need also tend to be scarce, and they're ridiculously expensive.
 * Thanks to New Game+, though, the game is only somewhat difficult the first time. It becomes laughably easy the second and third playthrough.
 * Final Fantasy V is no joke either after about the 3rd boss. It is only for hardcore players who know the wrinkles of old school Final Fantasy. You need to know what you're doing with the job system or you will get stomped by the bosses, namely due to levels not increasing any stat other than HP. Your damage / defense / etc are all based on your current job and equipped gear. Money is a big problem as well as items and equipment for multiple jobs are very expensive.
 * The first few Dragon Quest games certainly qualify although all the games in that series are harder than average. Unless you're using an Emulator, you are going to get destroyed. It doesn't matter how good you are at the game, enemies curb-stomp you. Oh, and II? Hey, let's make a dungeon that's impossible to get through unless you use Trial and Error Gameplay, or a guide! Did I mention that your spellcasters can't survive being glanced at at by anything, and you're rarely told anything? Puzzles are of the Simon's Quest type, like "use X item at Y tile on the world map to reveal a cave" or "search a random tile for a vital item". Or that the final boss can fully heal himself whenever he feels like it?
 * Baboons!
 * Gold Batboons!
 * Battles against them are not just Nintendo Hard, they're flat out Unwinnable sometimes. They will randomly use Sacrifice which instantly results in a Game Over.
 * Oh, and in III, the major bosses get invisible health regeneration that you can't see. Kind, ain't it?
 * This actually happens with some REGULAR enemies in III, and the major bosses in IV. And the further along the boss is, the more HP they restore per turn. However, this isn't always overkill, so much as a way of artificially increasing a boss's HP to a reasonable level when the game limit is 1024 HP. For example, some of the final bosses in IV have 1024 HP...but so does a boss much earlier in the game, and even one of the regular enemies very late in the game. The only way to make the final boss seem "bigger" (aside from stronger attacks and defense) is to have it automatically heal every turn. This does, however, make challenge quests much harder, as sometimes one character could do five times the total damage a boss can take, but never rack up actual gains, because it's not more than the boss's average per turn healing.
 * Ultima VIII: Pagan was infamous for its insanely frustrating jumping puzzles, which were likened to Super Mario from hell. Despite being an RPG, the developers decided to add "arcade" elements like running and jumping puzzles. The shoddy interface, poor physics, and the ridiculous save/load times didn't help one bit. The patched version fixed this by allowing targeted jumping and making the platforms stationary.
 * Odin Sphere. The game pretty much flat-out gives you infinite lives straight off the bat, and take our word when we say you'll need them. Almost every boss -- and a fair few sub bosses -- are That One Boss, and most four- and five-star levels are full of swarms of Goddamned Bats.
 * Odin Sphere is made exponentially more difficult by the sheer loving detail put into the animation - which means you'll spend a good three seconds doing anything, from simple attacks to eating health items. Meanwhile you will be swarmed by enemies. Your character is knocked back by enemy attacks. Enemy characters are not, and will continue to attack through your attacks. Several levels also require a potion to prevent an automatic ongoing status ailment. The often stuttery frame rate will also prevent your actions from registering on a regular basis. Hello, Fake Difficulty.
 * This will be most apparent in your first(chronologically, last) fight against Odette. Being a massive Mook Maker means that she causes so much lag it's virtually impossible to be near her except for a few swoop attacks or magic potions in between running to the other side of the map to heal yourself without sitting through half a minute of the heal animation being canceled by a Goddamn Bat while she charges up her next attack. This of course, gives you the disadvantage of having NO FUCKING CLUE what attack she plans on using next until you're up close to her again.
 * The PS 1 title Legend of Legaia. The "fighting game" battle system, while neat at first, quickly became extremely tedious and past the first couple dungeons, it made most NORMAL battles last close to five minutes. Worse, from the middle of the game onward if you did not spend obscene amounts of time grinding then you didn't stand much of a chance against the bosses.
 * The Nintendo RPG title Lufia and the Fortress of Doom has some of the meanest and hardest Boss Battles ever.
 * This is in large part thanks to the poorly thought-out combat system. It was like most RPG fights on the SNES, except for the targeting. You could not target individual monsters. You could target groups of monsters. If using a multi-target spell, it would hit the entire group. If using a single-target spell or physical attack, it would hit a single random monster from the group you selected. In random encounters, you'd get groups that where arranged in "1 imp, 1 lizard, 2 imps" or somesuch. In boss fights, you'd see "4 bosses". That's right, all in one group, making it impossible to focus on taking them down one at a time. Many boss fights boiled down to picking attacks and hoping the RNG picks out the right targets this time. Hoping to spam multitarget spells? Too bad, the tank doesn't have magic period, the hero's spells are especially effective, and on top of that the power of multitarget spells drops to a literal fraction when used on more than one critter: cast a multitarget on a group of 4, each one takes 1/4th the damage the spell would normally do. As multitargets are not stronger than single-target spells, this makes them nearly useless. You're actually better off with the "pick skills and pray they hit one target" method.
 * Lufia: Rise of the Sinistrals, the second game in the Lufia series, is an RPG that also happens to include several extremely difficult puzzles, most of which are not optional. A determined player may also manage to stumble upon what an NPC calls "the world's most difficult trick," which consists of a particularly difficult variation of the Klotski puzzle. Fortunately, that one is optional.
 * The Legend Returns let you have 9 members at max in a single battle toward the endgame, but the battle system allows only three from each row to attack/heal/buff per turn, you get a game over if all frontline units are defeated, and bosses are hard as hell, especially the ones with "call backup" ability and hit-all attacks which will hit EVERY characters in your team.
 * Arguably, Ever Quest. Designed to allow you to play by yourself until level 5 to 10 or so, after that, the game becomes rapidly harder to play alone until it becomes outright impossible for all but some specific character classes that can avoid direct combat. Some choice Nintendo Hard decisions:
 * Not giving you any in game map nor even a compass, combined with...
 * ... Making towns extremely large and maze like (the wood elf town and dark elf town are somewhat legendary for this), to say nothing about dungeons
 * ... Starting night blind races in incredibly dark zones (Tox Forest).
 * Making it so that if you discover you need to flee a battle, you cannot (due to the game slowing you down when you run low on health, and increasing the chance of you being stunned when attacked from behind)
 * Oh yes, and mobs never, ever stop chasing you (unlike, say, WoW). The only way to escape is if you load into another zone, or the mob dies, or you die...or you aggrodump the pack onto some other poor, unsuspecing player. The last option is a bannable offense, by the way. A panicked cry of "Train!" means something in this game.
 * Requiring players who ARE grouped together to spend literally weeks just getting keyed for certain dungeons (finding random items that allow you to finish a quest for a key, often with drop rates of less than 0.1%)
 * Making your character lose all their equipment upon death, requiring they find their way back to their corpse, without any equipment
 * Making characters lose 10% of a level upon death, undoing literally days of work for one mistake
 * Having powerful aggressive enemies in low-level zones, such as Level 30 griffins in East Commonlands, a zone where Level 12 players ventured.
 * Some levels (the infamous "hell levels") require 4 times the amount of XP to progress through, meaning the 10% of a level upon death becomes, essentially, 40%
 * The later expansions were increasingly geared towards the 1% of the player base which had finished the previous expansion (the so called "über guilds"), meaning that there are rapid plateaus of difficulty -- the idea being that you are expected to spend months "farming" bosses by killing them over and over in groups of literally dozens of players to get the equipment required to take down the next plateau's bosses.
 * Due to the game originally being envisioned as a Pay Per Hour system, as most online games were when the game began development, some of these decisions were extremely suspect.
 * Some of these decisions were later undone, notably, the modern game has a sub-par compass and map system; characters can recover their corpses using an NPC in game (although this requires a decent amount of in game resources to do); Hell levels were smoothed out; and while it is still utterly impossible to solo in the game for most classes, the addition of instanced dungeons allow quick groups to band together for an afternoon's worth of gaming.
 * And if that isn't insane enough, nearly every other MMO afterwards seemed to think that all of the timesinks, frustration and the kind of game design that would be considered horrble in a single-player game was a good thing.
 * Vagrant Story has a system called Risk points. The higher the Risk, the more damage you take (and dish out) and the worse your accuracy. At 100+ Risk you'll be missing four out of five times. And the way it raises is with successful combo attacks. This makes Vagrant Story probably the only video game in history that actually punishes you for playing the game well. Most of the random enemies encountered are even harder than bosses, because some weapons don't work on them at all due to elemental and weapon attributes. You also have invisible traps AND out-of-the-blue enemies in inescapable dungeons. Not to mention the final boss has a special attack that can kill you even if you have only 3-5 points of Risk Points and it cannot be blocked with magic buffs. And the enemies that can use an instant death spell on you... and you're only controlling one person for the whole game.
 * The supposed "first level" missions in Icewind Dale for the PC were so difficult and so prone to cause the death of the PCs that most new players to the game were told "right after you begin the game, use the cheat code to boost yourself to third level.''
 * Worse are the later Single-Character missions, especially (of course) at Hard difficulty. Just when your party is balanced enough at rock-paper-sicssors tactics to make it through the main game, you have to pick a single character to survive a long sequence of varied types of enemy.
 * Open the game's config file and notice the flag "Nightmare=0". Set it to 1 and start a new game, using your maxed out characters. Enjoy your first fight with goblins forged in hell by Satan's own hand.
 * The Immortal. It's an isometric adventure game rather than a platformer, but just like in Another World, you can and will die a lot - to the extent that you can die in the very first room if you stand on one particular spot just a few seconds too long. To put it simply: the title? It refers to - not to you.
 * There's something written on that amulet you picked up. Do you want to read it? You just blew up.
 * One of the puzzles requires you to drink poison in order to move further ahead. Better find that antidote in the next level quickly enough...
 * Did you miss the Fire Resistance spell? The Magnetic Hands spell? The Stone Form spell? Sorry, if you're missing even a single one, the dragon at the end cannot be defeated and the game becomes Unwinnable. Time to restart...
 * Electronic Arts sold a promotional T-shirt at the game's release which read "It's not when, it's how." The rest of the shirt was covered with pictures of human skulls in various states of damage with labels like "Crushed", "Fried", "Impaled", "Squid-bait"...
 * The Fushigi No Dungeon series in all its iterations--Shiren The Wanderer, Torneko: The Last Hope, Chocobo's Dungeon, and quite a few others--exemplify this entire trope to the max. The entire game is based on the premise of Roguelike dungeon exploration, with many of the same specifications, in particular that the hero has but one life. The catch: you also can't save levels, gear, items, power-ups, nothing. If you should happen to die (and you will), you are forced to restart at a checkpoint with nothing but your fists and a moderately powerful healing item and Level 1 experience, usually with a dozen hit points. A single mistake can lead to rapid death, the dungeons are randomized and often "themed" (e.g. nothing but Scrolls, traps everywhere, constant damage due to heat), you must stay fed or the hero will die and quickly, monsters spawn infinitely, traps are hidden in the worst places, and the worst of it? When you finish a dungeon, you revert to Level 1 again, and in some installments give up all your equipment, essentially starting from scratch. Some give you a leg up, like allowing you to take a few items in or store things so they don't get lost when you die, but not much else.
 * The worst of the lot is the original Shiren The Wanderer on the Super Famicom. It had one checkpoint: a hut at the very beginning of the game. If you died at any point, you went all the way back there, and needed to slog through all the dungeons again to get back where you were, minus any XP or items. It's brain-breakingly difficult and often quite unfair.
 * If you poke around U Stream you can often find Japanese players playing Jokenji Asuka Kenzan, a sequel to Shiren, only much more difficult. It's not uncommon to see it modified to insane levels, like "no weapons" or "1 HP per level".
 * In Resonance of Fate, battles can be absolutely brutal because leveling up actually increases the amount of Hero Gauge points lost when taking Scratch Damage (it goes up every 1000 HP). The Hero Gauge is basically what keeps your party alive: you can use it for super attacks or refilling HP, but if it empties, your party becomes basically useless. Considering that the Hero Gauge increases are limited by the story, and people usually think that leveling up HP in RPGs is a good thing, the pacing is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention that the customization for weapons (the real way to get stronger) is also limited by the story. Oh, and the whole party goes down if one character dies. Oh, and retrying after a Game Over costs an increasing amount of in-game currency. And this is just Normal Mode--the game has seven harder difficulties to tackle afterwards!
 * Many old first-person RPG dungeon crawlers are ridiculously difficult by today's standards, what with having to make your own maps, teleporters that drop you into identical-looking areas, pitch-black segments of the dungeon, really strong monsters, secret doors indistinguishable from walls, and just about every other cheap trick in the book.
 * Etrian Odyssey tries its hardest to recapture this, with huge dungeons you have to map yourself, enemy encounters that are either extremely strong or love status effects, expensive equipment and items, and of course the infamous F.O.E.s.
 * Atelier Lilie, the third game of the Atelier series (and one not released in America), has a reputation for being hellishly difficult compared to its contemporaries. It perhaps is not "hard" in the traditional, Battletoads sense, but getting anything other than a very "generic" ending requires that you plan out your entire approach to the game before you even start playing; you must plan what you'll do ahead of time in terms of whole game-years. And a lot of the endings require that you do a lot. The amount of planning required makes this one Nintendo Hard for a lot of folks and hurt the sales of the game.
 * MOTHER 1 is often considered the most difficult of the series. A very high encounter rate that plagues you through out the game even if you're not trying to level grind, but you will have to a lot thanks to the Difficulty Spike found in later areas in which almost everything is a demonic spider. Word of God confirms one area is highly unbalanced due to wanting to the game finished.
 * The 7th Saga for SNES is definitely up there. Monsters do grotesque amounts of damage to your paltry HP and give little experience or gold (and have unlimited MP of course), both spells and attacks fail very often. Oh, and there's a group of other adventurers roaming around trying to complete the same quest as you are, and are always a couple levels higher than you are. If you run into the wrong one at one of the forced fights with one of these guys, the game can be very nearly unwinnable.
 * "Nearly" nothing. The cleric learns a spell, Elixir, which restores all his HP and MP with every cast, totally refreshing himself. He learns it about level 40. This means that after level 40, he's fucking immortal. If he steals one of the macguffins at this point, you're boned.
 * On top of this, the game was altered to give less EXP and fewer level-up bonuses in the American version. The various other, computer-controlled adventurers do not have this disadvantage; they level up at the Japanese rate, quickly outgunning you. Since their levels scale to yours, this means you're increasingly damned as the game goes on.
 * MS Saga: A New Dawn's difficulty is okay until you lose the White Mage,, leaving you with only one effective healer with enough TP to handle the massive healing jobs. Tristan has Full Heal, sure, but he'll be busy spaming Fin Funnel before he has a chance to use his very low TP to heal the others. Upgrades are extremely expensive, and you'll be stuck with very underpowered suits by the endgame unless you do serious Level Grinding to take on numerous cloned boss machines and Burning Gundam in order to get stronger units. Bosses and crystal marked enemies hit very hard and merciless due to the fact that you must be able to handle their fixed action patterns by that time.
 * In Kingdom of Loathing, the final, form of your Nemesis will kill you, regardless of class, a lot of the time. Each one fights in a way that renders your class strengths meaningless. Are you a Pastamancer who normally ties up your enemies with pasta and throws spells at them? Your Nemesis will deal high damage even when you're using them. Are you a Disco Bandit, using your dancing skills to delevel your enemies and make them too weak to hurt you? Your Nemesis will respond by constantly buffing up his own level, slightly faster than you can lower it. Are you a Turtle Tamer who relies on high HP and defense to withstand attacks? Your Nemesis will overcome that by hitting you a dozen times PER ROUND.
 * On the other hand, if you were any other class the fights would be nigh unwinnable, as you'd have no way to play the monster's game. The thing is that the Nemeses are Bonus Bosses you can encounter before the boss they come "after", with slight Puzzle Boss elements. By the time you can fight her, you'll be able to outpace your Nemesis's defences. And with New Game+ effects - this quest wasn't actually designed with new players as its primary focus - success starts becoming consistent and faster.
 * Many of the early Wizardry games are known for their ruthless difficulty. Many of the puzzles are nearly intractable without a guide, in battles you are often hugely outnumbered and can be (very) easily incapacitated in a single turn. The worst offender is probably Wizardry IV, in which levelling was literally impossible (you had to complete the dungeon level to increase your abilities), and featured many puzzles of rather maddening difficulty. Even getting out of the first room of the first level requires a degree of off-the-wall intuition. Wizardry IV is often considered to be one of the most difficult CRPGs ever made.
 * This game was difficult by design. Wizardry IV (in which you play the orignal Wizardry's Big Bad) was unashamedly touted right on the box as "For Expert Players Only". Not only was it Nintendo Hard, but it also featured elements of Trial and Error Gameplay.
 * Both a Touhou fangame and tribute to Wizardry-style CRPGs, Labyrinth of Touhou may not have permadeath, but it does feature absolutely unforgiving enemies. It's common for bosses to tear you apart the first few times you attempt to fight them, and on later levels of the labyrinth, even normal enemies will be absolutely hellish to fight. As if that's not bad enough, the game's superbosses will rip you to shreds unless you're prepared to level grind like crazy.
 * Before they patched, the sequel to The Witcher was like this. Within minutes of teaching you the basic controls it has a swarm of enemies gang up on you. Many people could not complete the first quest.
 * Also, on highest difficulty, death is final. If Geralt dies the game automatically deletes all your save files, meaning you have to start over.
 * Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice. Oh boy. You're gonna need to level up a lot in order to get further into the game, or to even get past Chapter 2! Thank god the other Disgaea games aren't as hard as this one...
 * Baten Kaitos Origins, a vicious example of a Sequel Difficulty Spike. It got rid of the Fake Difficulty that Eternal Wings suffered from, and replaced it with real difficulty. Regular enemies can cut your health down alarmingly fast, and bosses will smash your party into a fine paste if you don't pay attention. Thought you could just grind your way past everything? No luck; all leveling up does is slightly increase your base stats. Money grinding doesn't work; money is only good for upgrading equipment, which is generally quite cheap. Monsters also seldom drop anything worthwhile; your best weapons and all your specials will come from either boss drops or treasure chests. By the second disc, most bosses will be taking out half a character's life bar in one turn, and knocking the entire party into critical status every three or four turns. This is the norm for Origins.
 * Demon's Souls. Yes, it is insanely, frustratingly, tear-inducingly hard, but it's because it's a game that DEMANDS mastery. A dedicated(and PATIENT) player will slowly inch his/her way through the game, slowly learning stages inside out and building his/her character up. With persistence, the player might even thrive. But after beating the game, it's new game plus time, which is even HARDER!
 * And after beating that, it's on to New Game++. And then New Game+++. There is no known limit. While the jump in difficulty between everything but the first plus is lower, there is no limit to the amount of pluses, and it gets harder each time.
 * The tagline for Dark Souls is "Prepare to Die". It's not kidding. Even the weakest mooks can kill you in seconds if you're careless. And many of the bosses could be considered examples of That One Boss. The environment is also trying its best to kill you, with traps and bottomless pits aplenty. Level grinding only gets you so far, the game will punish you if you don't learn from your mistakes. And just when you think you've got the hang of things, New Game+ ramps up the difficulty.
 * The story mode of Pokémon Colosseum is probably the most difficult in the series. Because of the game's focus on "Shadow Pokemon" and snagging pokemon from trainers, there is an abysmally low pool of Mons to choose from--less than fifty, in fact. The fact that you have to steal pokemon from trainers means that while trying to catch pokemon, the trainers will be assaulting you with their own. Bosses have Legendary Pokemon at their disposal, and unlike the main series utilize actual strategies beyond Poor Predictable Rock. The sequel, XD, dialed back the difficulty significantly.
 * The web game Clash Of The Dragons has horrendous enemies, some that can easily kill you in one hit. To make matters worse, there are limited cards purchasable from the shop unless you bribe your way to victory, meaning that eventually you'll be walking up a creek without a paddle. And to add insult to injury, there's an Anti-Poop socking feature and tons of enemies, meaning that you can spend weeks trying to beat a single level or even a single quest.