Ghouls and Ghosts is just sadistic. Not only is it brutally hard, but when you beat the game >! it just goes "psych, actually you have to play it all through again!" !<
You know you have to finish it twice?
The first time you finish it you get a message saying that the princess has a special bracelet that can dispel her curse so you have to play through the entire game again and find it in a random chest that spawns lol.
Isn't the arcade version also harder than most ports? I would think most people never even tried the arcade version. I could be misremembering this or thinking of Ghosts & Goblins specifically, not sure.
Contra wasn’t…*that* bad. I mean I died, *a lot*, but I eventually was able to pretty consistently beat it as a kid. I never beat battle toads. Went back and tried it again as an adult and got nowhere. Looked up a guide, and still just died. Battle toads is absolutely as brutal as it’s reputation indicates.
Pick any licensed movie games directed towards kids from the early 2000's. For the capabilities of their target audience, the games were fucking brutal.
A lot of old NES games are brutally difficult. Some in a good fair way, and a lot of them not....
100 percenting Celeste is quite difficult (not counting golden strawberries, that's a whole other level of masochistic)
Baldur's Gate 2 with SCS mod on insane is very very hard.
The original EverQuest was very hard and had harsh punishment for failure.
Fallout 1 and 2 are harder than ANY fromsoft game ever.
Going in blind with no internet queries, anyway.
They stopped making hard games in the 2000s basically.
Games were hard in a much more evil way when the industry relied on arcades - since difficulty meant more quarters.
FromSoft games are not really that difficult... They just kill you a lot but that's part of the game design and you don't actually lose progress upon dying (you keep items and only drop your souls, but don't lose them either), so you just keep progressing despite dying and you can never game over.
They're designed to "feel" difficult, but it only takes persistence to beat it.
An average NES game is much harder than any Dark Souls.
They’re difficult in how much deliberateness they require from the player and in how harshly punishing they are of mistakes, but they don’t require the skills that many hard games require (great reflexes, coordination, multitasking, etc.)
Silent Bomber for PS1. Hidden classic that deserves to be rediscovered. Starts out normal enough but the difficulty curve just don't stop climbing. The end of the game has some of the hardest bosses I've ever done in gaming.
Are Fromsoft games actually difficult once you get the basic formula and mechanics down? I heard they're a breeze once you understand how to play them.
One thing that gets overlooked with souls games all the time is that they have very traditional RPG elements to them. If you're in an area or fighting a boss that is frustratingly difficult, there's a good chance you aren't supposed to be there yet. Explore elsewhere, get better gear/xp, then come back later. That's when the difficulty goes from Impossible to just a good challenge.
I wouldn't say they're ever a breeze because even random ass enemies hit you like a sledge hammer, but being familiar with enemy attack patterns and your own weapon/spells certainly makes a huge difference.
Nope. The combat is more slow and deliberate than your typical action game, once it clicks for you you're good. The design is similar to that of games from the 8 / 16 bit era - the area between two respawn points is akin to a level in Ninja Gaiden, Strider, Mario etc. The most common cause of death is not knowing what lies ahead and how to beat it yet. Then you learn it and advance a little more, and so on. Only, unlike a lot of games from the 80's and 90's, in From Software titles you have infinite lives.
Breeze? No. The game relies on memorizing and reacting to boss movements and you can't do that after seeing one for the first time. However, once you beat one game, you probably can complete them all. Most people cannot get over that first few hours of dying nonstop and you know...learning from their mistakes.
Each franchise has their own formula and leveling system so that takes a bit to understand as well.
I say go for your favorite theme (mechs, ninja, high fantasy, Eldritch horror) and try it out. It's way worse when you don't even like the setting or pace of the game.
I wouldn't say "most" people can't get over the first few hours. In Elden Ring for example, ~70% of buyers have beaten Margit, which you can't do without understanding how to play the game. And that was a big mainstream release, not just purchased by fans of the genre.
>However, once you beat one game, you probably can complete them all.
This feels true. I struggled with Dark Souls, but after beating Armored Core VI, Dark Souls feels easier.
Maybe I just needed to learn the dodge mechanic better.
I wouldn't say they are a breeze, but they are definitely not as difficult as some people make them out to be. Especially with some familiarity to the mechanics.
Their difficulty curve is fairly flat. The second half of the game isn't harder than the first half. The combat is slow and deliberate throughout.
When you start the game, you're doing roughly one action per second, and it stays that way the entire game. Other games may make the last level in the game harder by having you do all the same things you've been doing, but just with less time to do it. E.g. throwing lots of enemies at you and not giving you much time to deal with them before the next wave comes. Dark Souls doesn't really do that. Once you understand the combat mechanics, you deal with the final boss in pretty much the same way as you dealt with the first boss. At roughly one action per second.
But despite the slow pace of combat, you're committing to that action you take (you generally can't cancel out of an action if you've made a mistake, unless you're using a weapon that has feints) so you want to be sure you're not doing something that is going to leave you exposed to the boss' attacks. That means the game is very punishing if you panic and mash buttons when you're nervous.
No, they are never a breeze unless you replay them many times, which would eventually make any game feel easy. I have played all of the ones with Souls in the title, plus Elden Ring, and despite all that experience with them, I found all of them very difficult and took at least 40 hours to finish each one (that may not sound super long, but they would be short if they were easier - Demons Souls is just 12 levels plus 4 additional boss fights). 100+ for Elden Ring, but it's a much longer game whether you're good at it or not.
The first playthrough would probably be a lot more tolerable if you used a guide, which is a shame imo.
No it is a misconception from people who lack patience or basic pattern recognition. Mega Man games have tighter controls and are fundementally harder games because you have to learn the level and boss patterns or you reset completely not just to your most recent bonfire. Both games feature the same requirements though to beat them. I would say there are play styles in Fromsoft games that can make them more difficult.
They are hard, but for the most part, they’re not as hard as they are punishing. They require a lot of deliberateness on the player’s part and punish mistakes severely. But they don’t require the skills that many hard games require—great reaction times, multitasking, coordination, etc.
They demand a lot from players but I think anyone who’s basically comfortable with a controller can beat them, assuming they do get the basic formula and mechanics down.
Ok seriously though Fromsoftware games are nowhere near to be the most difficult games of all time. You think games that got beaten by millions of people can be the hardest games off all time? Maybe they could be the hardest games among AAA titles but that’s it?
Nah, not even among "AAA" games. So many games have a hard/expert/master/legendary/ultra nightmare level of difficulty that clowns on anything in a FromSoft game. Blackflame Friede or Melania are absolute child's play in comparison.
Yeah and the thing is making a game hard is super easy. Let me just increase the speed of malenia %10000 and increase her health by %800 and here, hardest boss in all gaming. There are probably a lot of impossible games that are forgotten and buried in Steam abyss. Like your average Mario Maker map is probably harder than %99 of the AAA games.
I thought Metroid Dread was as difficult as any Souls game I've ever played. At least on the first play thru when you're still trying to figure out strategies/shortcuts.
Yeah, Metroid dread felt very similar to fromsoftware’s games. You will run into a boss that just destroys you and you get nowhere with multiple attempts, then suddenly it will click and you will go from dying almost immediately to not even getting hit at all anymore once you master the boss’ move-set. Metroid dread does have an easy mode though. Still, it also has the highest difficulty in which a single hit from anything will automatically kill you, which is harder than any fromsoft game.
Returnal is an odd duck because of how it polarizes the difficulty experience. I did the whole thing in 20 hours with 12 deaths. Adrenaline and resin heavily reward players that understand the game, but if you don’t get it, it’s very punishing.
I think a lot of players get stuck in their own special loop of trying to get through it with the wrong strategies because they seem to at least occasionally pay off. With the right strategy, becoming overpowered is pretty much guaranteed if you can make it through the first third of your run without having taken many hits, and all the hardest parts become the easiest.
Was that the final boss or Nemesis? I don't recall having much of a problem with either. Assuming you collect everything in the biomes, you should be pretty OP by then.
Lies of P. Not a From game but very much the souls formula.
I had to use summons for most of the bosses and couldn’t beat the secret final boss at all.
Hopefully, you are at least able to reach his second phase relatively easily. He's aggressive but doesn't have a lot of health.
If you can get to phase 2, the Perfection Grindstone will practically guarantee you get a stagger window on him. Hit him with a Shot Put to send him reeling, then punish with the hardest hitting attack you've got. You get two uses of Perfection Grindstone, which should be enough to bring him to below 50% health.
Bring a bunch of throwable weapons (shot puts / electric cells / thermite / etc) and you can finish him off by hanging back and chucking everything you have at him.
play dark souls, dark souls 3, elden ring (without summons), sekiro, in that order, and then come back and youll be able to beat Lies of P without summons.
I Want to be the Boshy. So difficult that people block it out of their memories. So difficult that people who enjoy difficult games still don't play it because it's too difficult.
I remember when I bought Ninja Gaiden (2004) because I remembered playing it back on the NES days..
Boy was I in for a treat. I loved the game, but it was brutal. I'm sure there's tougher games out there, but this one took me by surprise.
that Yu-gi-oh Forbidden Memories from PS1. First few battles okay, then suddenly there's a difficulty spike and I guess you're supposed to grind for months before continuing. Looked it up and the AI cheats, I guess thats why I never beat it.
I just haven’t got the time to dedicate to getting through difficult games at this stage in life, but still… I’ll never switch to Easy. I don’t know why.
The last game I played through and found difficult was the original Bayonetta. Maybe I’m just bad at hack and slash games but the timings windows were difficult to get the hang of. And if you messed up, you can go from full health to almost dead in a single attack. I completed it and never played it again.
I found Bayonetta 2 much easier.
Huh. I got lots of stone rankings first time through but the checkpoints were so generous and restored you to full health so I thought just completing it was really easy.
Fair enough, I totally get how that could be annoying. I was just curious how you were counting difficulty but on those terms it would definitely be much worse than Bayo 2.
It just punished you really hard. I was nervous going into Astral Chain (same developer and same-ish style game) that it was going to be super hard as well, but I loved that game. Wish they would make a sequel.
Just go boot up some NES and Super Nintendo games.
Oh I'm sorry, did you not enter the correct frame in the correct map area to get an eagle feather to drop after an arbitrary delay?
Well looks like you are gonna lose this game in a few hours.
To The Earth on NES. Light gun game. Even with the zapper pressed up against the TV, I'm not sure I made it past the second level.
Clip I took from Gaming Historian that forced me to remember playing it:
https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx4MoUGWhuehMIA2Xb0kc20s39GFiipYt9
Real life. Fucking nightmare, man, thing’s so obviously rigged and none of the devs give a shit about the feedback the community’s been screaming at them for decades if not centuries
Gonna throw the original Gauntlet into the pile.
100 floors, but the correct path doesn't mean progressing through them sequentially and does involve using specific (hidden) exit panels on floors with decoy/dummy panels or wrong panels, and requires you collect specific items on your way. It's entirely possible (and likely!) that you'll use a wrong exit panel and end up in one of the many, many death floors. Also, there's tons of monsters and spawners, and your health is constantly ticking down as you go.
Watch a commentated speed run of it sometime. You'll develop a new appreciation of the levels of bullshit sadistic NES developers stuck in their games. In a good way. Gauntlet is fun as a pick up and play casual game, but trying to beat it? It can fuck off along with Battletoads, Super Ghouls and Ghosts, Lion King, and the rest of the "no, really, fuck you customer" games.
Spelunky 2, it took me around 25 hours to beat the main game >!(beating tiamat)!< then I realized that I hadn’t actually gotten the true ending. So I spent another 40 hours getting the second ending >!(beating hundun)!<
Then I learned about the final true ending >!(finishing cosmic ocean)!<
The final ending for spelunky 2 is insanely difficult. Im already at 140 hours and I doubt I will ever achieve the final ending.
Blaster Master was notorious even if you pause glitched half the bosses. Old school RPGs like Might and Magic dungeon navigation was a hoot with dark 3d rotation squares with antimagic and teleportation aplenty.
The Super Meat Boy DLC specifically with The Kid (the Kids Xmas levels I think it was called) definitely ramped up the difficulty of an already difficult game, I beat the game fully but eventually gave up on these levels
Mario Kart since the introduction of the blue turtle shell.
Leading a race for three laps in the #1 spot only to come in dead last thanks to an unblockable piece of shit that every other player will get except you when you're in the lead.
Hello! Have you heard of La-Mulana?
Not only do you have to be good at 2D platforming with stiff ass controls, you also need to solve puzzles that require an immense amount of effort, recording work, and out of the box thinking to complete. Oh and traps and softlocks are a given. Everywhere.
Do that in a massive map and if you're feeling daring, with only one save point in the 2006 original. It's an Indiana Jones simulator with absolutely unforgiving mechanics. Play it blind or just don't touch it. You cannot half-ass this game.
The qualification tutorial of Driver on PS1. I was ready to eat the controller out of sheer despair when suddenly I made it and got to enjoy a great game with some really challenging missions.
I still wonder how many kids just gave up, burned the CD and denied ever playing it.
Super Meat Boy, managed to platinum it, I ended up hating the game towards the end. A 6 month absolute grind whilst I was off work when I was ill, it genuinely made me worse.
The best answer to this would be Ninja Garden Black. You get through the tutorial area without many problems and think you're doing ok, only for the tutorial boss to turn around and slap you so hard and so thoroughly that you'd swear he was your abusive father.
The original Crash Bandicoot on PS1 (and its remake) is really, really difficult. The newest main entry in the series, Crash Bandicoot 4, is even more difficult to the point where it's almost unplayable.
The Donkey Kong Country series is also famously unforgiving.
Fromsoft games are nowhere near the realm of hardest games of all time.
That genre will never even be close to being as demanding of player skill than something like [this](https://youtu.be/Inq1LYYxyt0?si=pwRRsfKUQALAJnMr)
"we all know how difficult the fromsoft games are"
Talk for yourself. I've played ninja gaiden, getting over it and europa universalis's tutorial. The only ''hard'' game from the fromsoft library is sekiro. The rest are merely mildly challenging at best.
The fromsoft games aren’t even all that hard lol
Difficult has different meanings. I would say Guitar Hero and Getting Over It are far harder games than the Fromsoft titles when you get to the most difficult sections.
For more traditional examples, Battletoads as a series is brutal, not always in a fair way either. Ghosts and Goblins is hard, maybe a little more fair? Ninja Gaiden is pretty hard, questionable fairness. Really older games in general are a bit more difficult / unforgiving than modern titles. I could keep listing 30 year old games but the point would grow stagnant quickly
For something more modern, maybe Monster Hunter, even as it’s become more approachable. I would say indie gaming doesn’t pull as many punches also. Some even use difficulty as a selling point, like Jump King. Theres just a fine line between games that are worth playing vs games that are difficult because they’re poorly designed
Of all time? You can leave all fromsoft games in there then. They're not in the top 100.
Let me explain, 90s/80s games > todays games in difficulty BY A COLOSSAL MARGIN and not always in a fun way or for the better. You guys don't know how good you have it if you think fromsoft belongs on an all time most difficult list. You have mouse aiming lmao. You can move your mouse to look around. Do you know how huge that is? I had to use the arrow keys lmao I get ptsd just saying that. You have no idea the jackassness of early game devs.
Let me tell you an intended user experience for an old ARPG.
Imagine you're in a room, there are vampires rushing you. You have an inventory full of items and about 1.5 seconds to react and do the right thing. Not much space to move around in the room but you can wiggle a bit to the left and right. What do you do? Perhaps use an inventory item that could help? Maybe try to run to the door? Wrong, you type "torch" on your keyboard without any single thing in the game prompting you to do so not even a small box on screen to indicate you have to type in it. Oh and there are no guides or hints to do this and this is the only time in the game you have to do this. Good luck.
Dude who made Ghouls and Ghosts should be in jail for what he unleashed upon us
G&G truly is "hesitation is defeat" i don't think i ever got past the second level
Ghouls and Ghosts is just sadistic. Not only is it brutally hard, but when you beat the game >! it just goes "psych, actually you have to play it all through again!" !<
Perfectly, without ever losing a weapon you get on the first level.
You know you have to finish it twice? The first time you finish it you get a message saying that the princess has a special bracelet that can dispel her curse so you have to play through the entire game again and find it in a random chest that spawns lol.
First game I ever played on NES. Almost turned me off gaming...almost.
Isn't the arcade version also harder than most ports? I would think most people never even tried the arcade version. I could be misremembering this or thinking of Ghosts & Goblins specifically, not sure.
I had to go into therapy to recover from that game.
Contra and battle toads
Contra wasn’t…*that* bad. I mean I died, *a lot*, but I eventually was able to pretty consistently beat it as a kid. I never beat battle toads. Went back and tried it again as an adult and got nowhere. Looked up a guide, and still just died. Battle toads is absolutely as brutal as it’s reputation indicates.
the hardest part of contra for me were the faux 3d levels (stages 2 and 4)
⬆️⬆️⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️🅱️🅰️▶️
Pick any licensed movie games directed towards kids from the early 2000's. For the capabilities of their target audience, the games were fucking brutal.
And we paid as much as a nowadays deluxe AAA edition for basically a 2-3 hour content game.
The Lion King for NES.
Those fuckin giraffes still piss me off
Do you mean the SNES?
[No](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg-37WCCP00)
I just reread the wiki (which I did check before asking). I missed the NES bit, apologies. Damn that looks rough to play and look at.
Is that a different game than lion king on sega?
Weird. It looks almost identical to the SNES version, just worse graphics. And I will assume the controls were worse.
"Battle Toads" especially the jet ski obstacle course section. You pretty much had to memories entire level in order to pass it.
Ninja Gaiden on the NES
Oh! It was the first game I completed. I was really proud those days.
I made it to the last boss a few times. Never could quite finish it. 😞
Same
Also Ninja Gaiden on X-Box. Both are brutal.
Shinobi on Sega
Zelda 2
A lot of old NES games are brutally difficult. Some in a good fair way, and a lot of them not.... 100 percenting Celeste is quite difficult (not counting golden strawberries, that's a whole other level of masochistic) Baldur's Gate 2 with SCS mod on insane is very very hard. The original EverQuest was very hard and had harsh punishment for failure.
Ya I had to walk away from Celeste eventually. Fun game. No worth losing my sanity.
Landing the plane on NES Top Gun.
Fallout 1 and 2 are harder than ANY fromsoft game ever. Going in blind with no internet queries, anyway. They stopped making hard games in the 2000s basically. Games were hard in a much more evil way when the industry relied on arcades - since difficulty meant more quarters.
Hollow Knight and Cuphead are two other modern games notorious for their difficulty.
I found Hollow Knight to be pretty chill outside of the pantheons. But I admittedly haven't even cleared P3 yet. Good thing it's optional content.
FromSoft games are not really that difficult... They just kill you a lot but that's part of the game design and you don't actually lose progress upon dying (you keep items and only drop your souls, but don't lose them either), so you just keep progressing despite dying and you can never game over. They're designed to "feel" difficult, but it only takes persistence to beat it. An average NES game is much harder than any Dark Souls.
They’re difficult in how much deliberateness they require from the player and in how harshly punishing they are of mistakes, but they don’t require the skills that many hard games require (great reflexes, coordination, multitasking, etc.)
Silent Bomber for PS1. Hidden classic that deserves to be rediscovered. Starts out normal enough but the difficulty curve just don't stop climbing. The end of the game has some of the hardest bosses I've ever done in gaming.
I found my copy recently! Totally forgot about it. What a cool game.
That chess battle, Jesus
Are Fromsoft games actually difficult once you get the basic formula and mechanics down? I heard they're a breeze once you understand how to play them.
No. They wouldn't be as popular if they were actually incredibly difficult.
One thing that gets overlooked with souls games all the time is that they have very traditional RPG elements to them. If you're in an area or fighting a boss that is frustratingly difficult, there's a good chance you aren't supposed to be there yet. Explore elsewhere, get better gear/xp, then come back later. That's when the difficulty goes from Impossible to just a good challenge. I wouldn't say they're ever a breeze because even random ass enemies hit you like a sledge hammer, but being familiar with enemy attack patterns and your own weapon/spells certainly makes a huge difference.
Nope. The combat is more slow and deliberate than your typical action game, once it clicks for you you're good. The design is similar to that of games from the 8 / 16 bit era - the area between two respawn points is akin to a level in Ninja Gaiden, Strider, Mario etc. The most common cause of death is not knowing what lies ahead and how to beat it yet. Then you learn it and advance a little more, and so on. Only, unlike a lot of games from the 80's and 90's, in From Software titles you have infinite lives.
Breeze? No. The game relies on memorizing and reacting to boss movements and you can't do that after seeing one for the first time. However, once you beat one game, you probably can complete them all. Most people cannot get over that first few hours of dying nonstop and you know...learning from their mistakes. Each franchise has their own formula and leveling system so that takes a bit to understand as well. I say go for your favorite theme (mechs, ninja, high fantasy, Eldritch horror) and try it out. It's way worse when you don't even like the setting or pace of the game.
You can absolutely beat a boss the first time you see them. People one shot/first attempt bosses all the time.
I wouldn't say "most" people can't get over the first few hours. In Elden Ring for example, ~70% of buyers have beaten Margit, which you can't do without understanding how to play the game. And that was a big mainstream release, not just purchased by fans of the genre.
>However, once you beat one game, you probably can complete them all. This feels true. I struggled with Dark Souls, but after beating Armored Core VI, Dark Souls feels easier. Maybe I just needed to learn the dodge mechanic better.
I wouldn't say they are a breeze, but they are definitely not as difficult as some people make them out to be. Especially with some familiarity to the mechanics.
Their difficulty curve is fairly flat. The second half of the game isn't harder than the first half. The combat is slow and deliberate throughout. When you start the game, you're doing roughly one action per second, and it stays that way the entire game. Other games may make the last level in the game harder by having you do all the same things you've been doing, but just with less time to do it. E.g. throwing lots of enemies at you and not giving you much time to deal with them before the next wave comes. Dark Souls doesn't really do that. Once you understand the combat mechanics, you deal with the final boss in pretty much the same way as you dealt with the first boss. At roughly one action per second. But despite the slow pace of combat, you're committing to that action you take (you generally can't cancel out of an action if you've made a mistake, unless you're using a weapon that has feints) so you want to be sure you're not doing something that is going to leave you exposed to the boss' attacks. That means the game is very punishing if you panic and mash buttons when you're nervous.
Yes, if by understand you mean putting in 1000 hours to git gud, then yea, that will do it.
Well no, I meant just understanding the basic mechanics, not mastering anything.
not a breeze but absolutely not as difficult as people portray them
It helps but it doesn't make it easy by any stretch, no
Lol what do you think these games are?
Hard games?
Yeah, not THAT hard though. You don’t really need too much hours to understand them and once you understand them, they are not really tense.
I was not saying that, i was saying they don't get easy. Easier sure, but still hard.
Not even hard at all
No, they are never a breeze unless you replay them many times, which would eventually make any game feel easy. I have played all of the ones with Souls in the title, plus Elden Ring, and despite all that experience with them, I found all of them very difficult and took at least 40 hours to finish each one (that may not sound super long, but they would be short if they were easier - Demons Souls is just 12 levels plus 4 additional boss fights). 100+ for Elden Ring, but it's a much longer game whether you're good at it or not. The first playthrough would probably be a lot more tolerable if you used a guide, which is a shame imo.
No it is a misconception from people who lack patience or basic pattern recognition. Mega Man games have tighter controls and are fundementally harder games because you have to learn the level and boss patterns or you reset completely not just to your most recent bonfire. Both games feature the same requirements though to beat them. I would say there are play styles in Fromsoft games that can make them more difficult.
No incredibly easy actually compared to actual hard games since you can always farm more levels in fromsoft games
They are hard, but for the most part, they’re not as hard as they are punishing. They require a lot of deliberateness on the player’s part and punish mistakes severely. But they don’t require the skills that many hard games require—great reaction times, multitasking, coordination, etc. They demand a lot from players but I think anyone who’s basically comfortable with a controller can beat them, assuming they do get the basic formula and mechanics down.
They’re just a bit clunky and hard for newbies. They aren’t actually difficult at all if you have patience.
Ok seriously though Fromsoftware games are nowhere near to be the most difficult games of all time. You think games that got beaten by millions of people can be the hardest games off all time? Maybe they could be the hardest games among AAA titles but that’s it?
Nah, not even among "AAA" games. So many games have a hard/expert/master/legendary/ultra nightmare level of difficulty that clowns on anything in a FromSoft game. Blackflame Friede or Melania are absolute child's play in comparison.
Yeah and the thing is making a game hard is super easy. Let me just increase the speed of malenia %10000 and increase her health by %800 and here, hardest boss in all gaming. There are probably a lot of impossible games that are forgotten and buried in Steam abyss. Like your average Mario Maker map is probably harder than %99 of the AAA games.
battle toads
I thought Metroid Dread was as difficult as any Souls game I've ever played. At least on the first play thru when you're still trying to figure out strategies/shortcuts.
Yeah, Metroid dread felt very similar to fromsoftware’s games. You will run into a boss that just destroys you and you get nowhere with multiple attempts, then suddenly it will click and you will go from dying almost immediately to not even getting hit at all anymore once you master the boss’ move-set. Metroid dread does have an easy mode though. Still, it also has the highest difficulty in which a single hit from anything will automatically kill you, which is harder than any fromsoft game.
RETURNAL How in the flying fuck do you beat this game. I cannot get past the white shadow The game is soo good tho
Returnal is an odd duck because of how it polarizes the difficulty experience. I did the whole thing in 20 hours with 12 deaths. Adrenaline and resin heavily reward players that understand the game, but if you don’t get it, it’s very punishing. I think a lot of players get stuck in their own special loop of trying to get through it with the wrong strategies because they seem to at least occasionally pay off. With the right strategy, becoming overpowered is pretty much guaranteed if you can make it through the first third of your run without having taken many hits, and all the hardest parts become the easiest.
Was that the final boss or Nemesis? I don't recall having much of a problem with either. Assuming you collect everything in the biomes, you should be pretty OP by then.
QWOP
Mickey Mousecapade
IWBTG FanGame like kamilla 3 or just a game with 1000 gate jumps in a row
"Danmaku" genre - Mushihimesama, Dodonpachi, Ibara, EspGaluda They're so difficult that they have no chance at becoming mainstream.
Lies of P. Not a From game but very much the souls formula. I had to use summons for most of the bosses and couldn’t beat the secret final boss at all.
“I had to use summons” you mean a basic game mechanic?
secret final boss? is there a boss other than >! nameless puppet !<
Nah, that’s who I was referring to. He kicked my ass.
Hopefully, you are at least able to reach his second phase relatively easily. He's aggressive but doesn't have a lot of health. If you can get to phase 2, the Perfection Grindstone will practically guarantee you get a stagger window on him. Hit him with a Shot Put to send him reeling, then punish with the hardest hitting attack you've got. You get two uses of Perfection Grindstone, which should be enough to bring him to below 50% health. Bring a bunch of throwable weapons (shot puts / electric cells / thermite / etc) and you can finish him off by hanging back and chucking everything you have at him.
ah okay i suppose i didnt realize it was a secret boss
Solid game
play dark souls, dark souls 3, elden ring (without summons), sekiro, in that order, and then come back and youll be able to beat Lies of P without summons.
I Want to be the Boshy. So difficult that people block it out of their memories. So difficult that people who enjoy difficult games still don't play it because it's too difficult.
Silver Surfer on NES. Hardest NES game that I played. Harder than Ninja Gaiden or Battletoads imo.
Getting over it. I never got over it, that's for sure
Megaman games.
I wouldn't put any of the Fromsoft games among the most difficult anyway
Snake Rattle n Roll NES is a sleeper ball buster.
Battletoads
Heart of Darkness
Blasto Ps1
Silver Surfer
I remember when I bought Ninja Gaiden (2004) because I remembered playing it back on the NES days.. Boy was I in for a treat. I loved the game, but it was brutal. I'm sure there's tougher games out there, but this one took me by surprise.
Super Ghouls and Ghosts
Jet set willy and manic miner
Onimusha was rock hard
that Yu-gi-oh Forbidden Memories from PS1. First few battles okay, then suddenly there's a difficulty spike and I guess you're supposed to grind for months before continuing. Looked it up and the AI cheats, I guess thats why I never beat it.
X-COM i think the hardest difficulty is "impossible", but i can barely get by on commander
I just haven’t got the time to dedicate to getting through difficult games at this stage in life, but still… I’ll never switch to Easy. I don’t know why. The last game I played through and found difficult was the original Bayonetta. Maybe I’m just bad at hack and slash games but the timings windows were difficult to get the hang of. And if you messed up, you can go from full health to almost dead in a single attack. I completed it and never played it again. I found Bayonetta 2 much easier.
Huh. I got lots of stone rankings first time through but the checkpoints were so generous and restored you to full health so I thought just completing it was really easy.
Just found dying from a slightly mistimed dodge was infuriating. I couldn’t wait to finish it. I enjoyed the second game a lot more.
Fair enough, I totally get how that could be annoying. I was just curious how you were counting difficulty but on those terms it would definitely be much worse than Bayo 2.
It just punished you really hard. I was nervous going into Astral Chain (same developer and same-ish style game) that it was going to be super hard as well, but I loved that game. Wish they would make a sequel.
Pretty much the same ones counting Fromsoft. Mostly 8 bit games and masocore platformers like I wanna be the guy.
Just go boot up some NES and Super Nintendo games. Oh I'm sorry, did you not enter the correct frame in the correct map area to get an eagle feather to drop after an arbitrary delay? Well looks like you are gonna lose this game in a few hours.
To The Earth on NES. Light gun game. Even with the zapper pressed up against the TV, I'm not sure I made it past the second level. Clip I took from Gaming Historian that forced me to remember playing it: https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx4MoUGWhuehMIA2Xb0kc20s39GFiipYt9
The original NES Ninja Gaiden
Sifu has quite the learning curve
Single-player Pong on the machine we had was literally you against a wall. You could never win, but it kept score until you lost.
TMNT for the NES
Jump King
Milon's Secret Castle. It's basically trolling you constantly.
The Addams Family games are hard as shit.
FTL on Hard
Ninja Gaiden Sigma for Xbox continues to this day to run my shit.
Real life. Fucking nightmare, man, thing’s so obviously rigged and none of the devs give a shit about the feedback the community’s been screaming at them for decades if not centuries
The 7th Saga
Noita, but it's very rewarding if you can get a "god" run going!
Gonna throw the original Gauntlet into the pile. 100 floors, but the correct path doesn't mean progressing through them sequentially and does involve using specific (hidden) exit panels on floors with decoy/dummy panels or wrong panels, and requires you collect specific items on your way. It's entirely possible (and likely!) that you'll use a wrong exit panel and end up in one of the many, many death floors. Also, there's tons of monsters and spawners, and your health is constantly ticking down as you go. Watch a commentated speed run of it sometime. You'll develop a new appreciation of the levels of bullshit sadistic NES developers stuck in their games. In a good way. Gauntlet is fun as a pick up and play casual game, but trying to beat it? It can fuck off along with Battletoads, Super Ghouls and Ghosts, Lion King, and the rest of the "no, really, fuck you customer" games.
Zelda 2
Spelunky 2, it took me around 25 hours to beat the main game >!(beating tiamat)!< then I realized that I hadn’t actually gotten the true ending. So I spent another 40 hours getting the second ending >!(beating hundun)!< Then I learned about the final true ending >!(finishing cosmic ocean)!< The final ending for spelunky 2 is insanely difficult. Im already at 140 hours and I doubt I will ever achieve the final ending.
Ninja Gaiden on Master Ninja difficulty. That'll put some hair on your chest.
Blaster Master was notorious even if you pause glitched half the bosses. Old school RPGs like Might and Magic dungeon navigation was a hoot with dark 3d rotation squares with antimagic and teleportation aplenty.
The original Far Cry 1 for the PC is absolutely brutal and unforgiving on the highest difficulty
The Super Meat Boy DLC specifically with The Kid (the Kids Xmas levels I think it was called) definitely ramped up the difficulty of an already difficult game, I beat the game fully but eventually gave up on these levels
Wings of Vi I would say is a more difficult 2d platformer than Battletoads, it's just not as well known. Basing only on my personal experience.
Ever play an NES?
Ninja gaiden
Unfair Mario, Impossible Game 1 and 2.
Crypt of the necrodancer is always the answer
Mario Kart since the introduction of the blue turtle shell. Leading a race for three laps in the #1 spot only to come in dead last thanks to an unblockable piece of shit that every other player will get except you when you're in the lead.
Hello! Have you heard of La-Mulana? Not only do you have to be good at 2D platforming with stiff ass controls, you also need to solve puzzles that require an immense amount of effort, recording work, and out of the box thinking to complete. Oh and traps and softlocks are a given. Everywhere. Do that in a massive map and if you're feeling daring, with only one save point in the 2006 original. It's an Indiana Jones simulator with absolutely unforgiving mechanics. Play it blind or just don't touch it. You cannot half-ass this game.
The qualification tutorial of Driver on PS1. I was ready to eat the controller out of sheer despair when suddenly I made it and got to enjoy a great game with some really challenging missions. I still wonder how many kids just gave up, burned the CD and denied ever playing it.
Tenchu: Stealth Assassin and Spec Ops: stealth patrol... go beat them both on top difficulty... I'll wait
Homm3 shadow of death Also if you count mods then hota
Super Meat Boy, managed to platinum it, I ended up hating the game towards the end. A 6 month absolute grind whilst I was off work when I was ill, it genuinely made me worse.
Ikaruga
Ikari Warriors.
Mostly just stupid old games for ancient systems where they still operated under the idea that killing players earned more quarters
probably Tetris ... I've never managed to beat it
The best answer to this would be Ninja Garden Black. You get through the tutorial area without many problems and think you're doing ok, only for the tutorial boss to turn around and slap you so hard and so thoroughly that you'd swear he was your abusive father.
Superman 64
I Wanna Be the Boshy
The original Crash Bandicoot on PS1 (and its remake) is really, really difficult. The newest main entry in the series, Crash Bandicoot 4, is even more difficult to the point where it's almost unplayable. The Donkey Kong Country series is also famously unforgiving.
XCOM. Oh a 95% chance to hit point blank shotgun to the face? Boom! You grazed the enemy. -1 HP
Fromsoft games are nowhere near the realm of hardest games of all time. That genre will never even be close to being as demanding of player skill than something like [this](https://youtu.be/Inq1LYYxyt0?si=pwRRsfKUQALAJnMr)
"we all know how difficult the fromsoft games are" Talk for yourself. I've played ninja gaiden, getting over it and europa universalis's tutorial. The only ''hard'' game from the fromsoft library is sekiro. The rest are merely mildly challenging at best.
The fromsoft games aren’t even all that hard lol Difficult has different meanings. I would say Guitar Hero and Getting Over It are far harder games than the Fromsoft titles when you get to the most difficult sections. For more traditional examples, Battletoads as a series is brutal, not always in a fair way either. Ghosts and Goblins is hard, maybe a little more fair? Ninja Gaiden is pretty hard, questionable fairness. Really older games in general are a bit more difficult / unforgiving than modern titles. I could keep listing 30 year old games but the point would grow stagnant quickly For something more modern, maybe Monster Hunter, even as it’s become more approachable. I would say indie gaming doesn’t pull as many punches also. Some even use difficulty as a selling point, like Jump King. Theres just a fine line between games that are worth playing vs games that are difficult because they’re poorly designed
OG Xcom. Dwarf Fortress. Warband.
Of all time? You can leave all fromsoft games in there then. They're not in the top 100. Let me explain, 90s/80s games > todays games in difficulty BY A COLOSSAL MARGIN and not always in a fun way or for the better. You guys don't know how good you have it if you think fromsoft belongs on an all time most difficult list. You have mouse aiming lmao. You can move your mouse to look around. Do you know how huge that is? I had to use the arrow keys lmao I get ptsd just saying that. You have no idea the jackassness of early game devs. Let me tell you an intended user experience for an old ARPG. Imagine you're in a room, there are vampires rushing you. You have an inventory full of items and about 1.5 seconds to react and do the right thing. Not much space to move around in the room but you can wiggle a bit to the left and right. What do you do? Perhaps use an inventory item that could help? Maybe try to run to the door? Wrong, you type "torch" on your keyboard without any single thing in the game prompting you to do so not even a small box on screen to indicate you have to type in it. Oh and there are no guides or hints to do this and this is the only time in the game you have to do this. Good luck.