Truly difficult games

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Final Fantasy Tactics (PS1): simply because there's so many times after a fight that the game asks you to save. You do so not knowing you will be automatically tossed into the next fight. You can menu but that's it. Can't buy anything or go anywhere to prepare. And if you aren't prepared to beat part 2 of the fight, well you get to start back at the beginning of the game.
That and the ludicrous difficulty spikes in a handful of fights make the game absolutely infuriating. I abuse the shit out of save states when emulating FFT or Tactics Ogre with no shame.
 
Super Castlevanía 4 is really hard not because your jumps need to be pixel perfect but because every enemy can knock your ass off stairs and ledges. The boss rush before Dracula is also pretty difficult, unless you cheat with save states of course (I picked that one specifically because I never really played much of the NES ones).
Never beat it as a kid despite beating 1-3 on NES, tried it decades later as an adult and wondered what my problem was as a kid, it's definitely one of the easier titles in the series, the easiest next to the Igavanias (apart from Order of Ecchlesia, which i find to be unreasonably difficult and have never beat). Perfectly beatable without save states. Graphically it still blows me away, it's crazy what the SNES was capable of and that game showcased that perfectly. Came out early in the consoles life cycle and still looks better than the majority of games towards the end of the consoles life span. Not to mention the soundtrack.
Final Fantasy Tactics (PS1): simply because there's so many times after a fight that the game asks you to save. You do so not knowing you will be automatically tossed into the next fight. You can menu but that's it. Can't buy anything or go anywhere to prepare. And if you aren't prepared to beat part 2 of the fight, well you get to start back at the beginning of the game.
Cliche at this point but if you didn't get assfucked via saving before the Wiegraf fight you haven't played video games :story: The game already pushed my shit in in Dorter and that's what, the third main quest fight? I heard they changed the save game trap before Wiegraf in the remake, for shame.

Edit: There's not only the Wiegraf fight where you can get trapped hopelessly if you only have a single save file, later on there's the part in Mustadio's city where a fight starts if you leave with no indication whatsoever beforehand, i remember i sent my key party members on errands before that and had no chance of winning that fight, having to start the game over yet again.
Mega Man & Bass. It's really hard but it's not broken.
Only ever played it on emu a million years back but i remember it being ridiculously difficult right of the bat. While i love Mega Man and owned the majority of the NES and SNES titles i used to struggle even with the easier titles, 2 on NES took kid-me forever to beat. I even struggled with Sigma in X1 back then.
 
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Well, that's officially made the list of the most retarded things I've ever read on this website.
i actually agree with his take, but with a caveat: enemies in video games should never, ever have iframes. it's only okay for the player to have them otherwise it's retarded bullshit.

and fir me, a generally challenging to hard game of note, or series rather, is Ys.
 
i actually agree with his take, but with a caveat: enemies in video games should never, ever have iframes.
It's embarrassing how little some of you seem to know about the most basic functioning of the medium. You're like "movie buffs" who know nothing about writing, direction, lighting, acting, or cinematography, but speak authoritatively on filmmaking anyway.
 
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The most exciting, difficult, and challenging game I ever played was AI War: Fleet Command and there's no contest. Hands down best AI I've ever played against. I recommend the original, not the sequel, (which is visually too busy for my eyes.)

Aside from the excellent AI scripting. There's a few things that make it truly difficult without being a cheat.

Autistic variety: There's about 300 unit types but only ~50 are selected for each playthrough. Both for you and the opponent. So both sides deploy a 'work with what you got' strategy that you can't repeat between sessions. You'll have to use your brain because your advantages change with each playthrough.

Escalation: Your opponent has better things to do with its time and ignores you at first; but every action you take increases its perception of you as a threat and it will devote more of its infinite power to your destruction. You have to weigh the pros and cons of each asset you capture. You will never, at any point, be more powerful than the opponent.

Two Foes: On top of this there are two AIs, with 46 personalities, which strongly alters their behaviour.

I only beat this once, on 7.5 & 8 difficulties, though that's partly because it's a timesink. I captured some enemy technologies which raised the threat level too aggressively. Was able to destroy some data centers to lower that threat and put together a force to destroy one AI's core. That sent the other one into a fury that began collapsing everything I had. So I cobbled together a fleet of shield ships, nested an enormous nuclear warhead under their umbrella, and blitzed it to the second AI's core planet.
 
Silksong? Havn't even played it but all the complaints and negative reviews seem to be from difficulty.
Imagine an army of IGN reviewers walking up to the first skeleton in Dark Souls and dying repeatedly without trying anything differently until finally ragequitting and posting about it online. That's what's going on there with a couple tutorial bosses designed to make sure you aren't playing like a spaz.

It's tougher than Hollow Knight, but that's not saying much.
 
Games like EU4 where you need to play 1000 hours to learn the game and its mechanics and the AI will still pull some bullshit on you and fuck you over.
 
I think I had to watch a YouTube video of someone doing the last dungeon so I can beat that game. Of course I did the cheap way to beat the shadow Link in case I lost and had to restart the game.

Try beating it without the Candle. Some sick fucks have done it.
 
Imagine an army of IGN reviewers walking up to the first skeleton in Dark Souls and dying repeatedly without trying anything differently until finally ragequitting and posting about it online.
This is what I see every time I ragescroll through Steam user reviews
 
I can't imagine it being more technically difficult than one of those spreadsheet simulator games
 
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20 (REAL IRL TIME) minutes to survive. Evade two hard-as-balls CPUs that are smart enough to know where you're located even if they are one floor above/below you. You can only pick up 3 items at a time. Said items you pick up have a shelf-life after repeat usage AND each item has a different stun timer with the more powerful ones hidden in the basement... the same basement where you need to go down stairs with finicky controls that may or may-not cooperate with you half the time. There are hiding spots like inside the christmas tree or behind a random shelf in the attic but they too have a shelf life meaning the CPUs WILL find you and kill you.
You’re making this sound kind of like Clock Tower which has me intrigued.
 
You’re making this sound kind of like Clock Tower which has me intrigued.
Yes, but unlike Clock Tower, there is no dialogue, so as soon as you press start, you're off to the races.

There is a map that you can check during the game (pause or select, I forget which button it is) to show where the CPUs are, where the dropped items are, and how much time you have left. But I never really found it helpful.
 
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If that’s not the most important thing in life, what is?
Like Janny Jersh says:

what's the meaning of life oh to get pussy you gotta smash box chat you gotta smash box like you're working at fucking walmart in the back room just smashing box all day that's the meaning of life here ask me ask me your chat ask me your questions i'll come i'll come to uh i'm not talking okay i'll get to that i know what people are gonna think they're gonna they're gonna complain i already see it coming i'm a box smasher smash box why are we here to smash box
 
Chicago 1932: Don Capone. A gangster RTS where you need to build your empire and fight rival mobsters for 22 missions. The hard part stems from you cannot save during the mission and if one thing fucks up and everything falls apart, you'll need to start from scratch (also some maps can randomize with the starting location), furthermore the AI will always outpace you in terms of getting better units and money (by the time you get your 1st sniper or enforcer, the AI will already have assassins and guys with Tommyguns heading for your base)
 
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View attachment 8006346
20 (REAL IRL TIME) minutes to survive. Evade two hard-as-balls CPUs that are smart enough to know where you're located even if they are one floor above/below you. You can only pick up 3 items at a time. Said items you pick up have a shelf-life after repeat usage AND each item has a different stun timer with the more powerful ones hidden in the basement... the same basement where you need to go down stairs with finicky controls that may or may-not cooperate with you half the time. There are hiding spots like inside the christmas tree or behind a random shelf in the attic but they too have a shelf life meaning the CPUs WILL find you and kill you.
Wait what game? That doesn't sound like the SNES game.
 
I'm amused no one went truly back. There's a lot of "historical" (oldass games from the 90ies or the 80ies) that are hard as balls because the developers were incompetent, but there's the occasional game that was kind of insane by design. Have you ever heard of Wizardry? Today it ain't a name well-known bar in psychotic online communities or japanese derivative games, but back then it was a huge deal.

Let's talk about Wizardry 4: The Return of Werdna.

Wizardry
is a blobber, you have your group of adventurers and wander around a labyrinth to kill stuff and reach an objective. All fine and dandy. Wizardry 4 was designed from the ground up to be an expert level blobber and it was built in 1987. No FAQs, no walkthrough (bar the tidbits the manual gave you).

So what makes Wizardry 4 difficult? You control the resurrected Bad Guy of the first game Werdna and play in a sort of anti-blobber:
- You don't create a party. You control a party of monsters that act independently from your character. Better pray they do something adequate.
- You level up at pre-defined points, and fighting gives you nothing.
- There's loot. It's almost all plot-items or useless chaff. There's no good way to understand beforehand what's chaff and what's not.
- Enemy adventurers are capable of killing you in one or two hits.
- It's an old-style RPG. You are expected to take extensive record keeping, and the floors are essentially puzzles: teleports and tricks are commonplace.
- A enemy ghost follows you in real time (the game is turn based) and if it catches you, it's game over. You have a limited amount of key-strokes to properly finish the game.
- The final boss(es) are between the devilish and insane. To kill Lord Hawkwind, for example, you need to get a (useless) monster from the first level and the only hint is that the walls of some levels form the letters of the name of the aforementioned monster . No automaps.
- The True ending is esoteric. I hope you had your Qabbalah ready, because the game won't explain it to you.

It's a fascinating example of "difficulty" in another era entirely. The point was to make a sequel that would truly challenge for weeks experts in the first three games, and it's an interesting design for such an objective.
 
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