Nintendo Hard/Video Games/Role-Playing Game: Difference between revisions

* [[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 [[Trial and Error Gameplay|impractical]] to figure out without a guide, to say nothing about special digivolutions that require [[Guide Dang It|specific stat training and digivolution levels]].

* 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 [http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/finalfantasy/ff2/ff2-1.htm Classic Gaming Review]:

{{quote|"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."

** 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.

** 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 [[Guide Dang It|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.

** Baboons!

** Gold Batboons!

** ''[[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 Bats|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 Nintendo RPG title [[Lufia|Lufia and the Fortress of Doom]] has some of the meanest and hardest [[Boss Battle|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 [[Block Puzzle|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.

** 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

** 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

** 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.

* ''[[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.''

** 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. [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|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 {{spoiler|the [[Big Bad]]}} - ''not to you''.

* 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.

* ''[[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 ''[[Game Breaker|fucking immortal]]''. If he steals one of the macguffins at this point, you're boned.

* 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.

* ''[[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, [[New Game+|it's new game plus time]], which is even HARDER!

* 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.