Games that ramped up difficulty and dang near destroyed the experience

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

The Last Remnant. If you fail to notice a flanking maneuver coming up, and you get Raid locked. Set the controller down and walk away. Its got a solid story, but screw the random difficulty spikes.

I don't know about the 360 version (which is supposed to be fairly broken in general by comparison), but on the PC it felt fairly balanced and even got to be kind of too easy after I was about halfway through and had everyone set up in proper unions and learning useful abilities, and no group was without good healers/revivers. New Game+/hard mode is another story entirely, though, especially trying to stay low BR until you get all the good characters. It's fun, but some bosses are just ridiculous.

One game that I gave up on that's stuck with me for a long time is Diddy Kong Racing. It seems like a perfectly innocent Mario Kart clone for quite a while, and then it suddenly gets massively harder toward the end. Thanks to the Internet, I have since discovered that it's common knowledge that there are plenty of ways to get a lot more mileage out of speed boosts, which makes the game actually possible to beat, but the messages that tell you how in-game are displayed randomly, and it's very easy to miss them or never see the relevant ones at all and just think you somehow have to magically cut 20+ seconds off your time through sheer willpower.

 

[Saltyk]

I seem to recall Zone of the Enders having a pretty steep learning curve. As I recall, the enemies would learn your play style and adapt to you. That's right, they could learn how you fought and adapt to it. So if you relied on one technique to beat every enemy, you weren't going to make it far. Also, there were the occasional squads with a commander. Those squads could be deadly. I remember in the sequel three Mummy Heads (pretty weak standard units that specialized in ranged attacks) in a squad with a commander would put on a deadly light show. Die to the enemies you consider the weakest in the game once and you will never take them lightly again.

The games were still quite beatable on normal and even, hard, though.
But not so much on extreme.

Uncharted 3, mainly because I was thrown off by past experiences and previous Uncharted games.

I've played Uncharted 2 on Crushing, and while fucking annoying, it was still beatable. I turn on Uncharted 3 on Normal and holy shit, I wasn't expecting Drake to be that much of a knockover. In Uncharted 2 Normal, it played like an action movie -- find cover, jump on this, shoot this dude, run to cover, beat this guy up, throw a grenade. And playing co-op on Normal, it's regular Uncharted Normal, Drake surviving massive amounts of shots at once while easily punching out a thug. In Uncharted 3 Normal, it goes -- find cover, jump on this, get shot twice by some guy with a machine pistol from eighty feet away, die.

It's pissing me off, playing half of the game from cover instead of running around like Drake has ants in his shoes while shooting everyone with a shotgun.

Biggest problem I found is that snipers could literally one shot you. Now, it takes them a little while to get a bead on you, but it can be really annoying when you're trying to deal with an armored shotgun wielding goon and a Sniper is slowly tracing you. Or worse yet, you do start a fist fight and suddenly you can't get away all the while knowing the sniper is about 2 seconds from shoo-DAMMIT! That's the tenth time!

Grenade launchers were bad, too. Was it just me or did every other room seem to require the presence of at least one sniper and one guy with a grenade launcher?

 

[Leyvin]

Final Fantasy XII. But to me, it DID destroy the Experience. I loved the game up until I got to a point to where I was getting face-rolled by a boss. You might say "Oh, well duh you're going to get stuck on bosses eventually in RPGs and have to level up a bit!" Well, I Spent the majority of TWO days grinding up to where it was just taking too long to level in my area and the next. I decide to fight the boss again, utterly DESTROYED it, then move on. Next boss: I get smashed. Basically three 'screens' past the last boss and I'd have to spend almost the same amount of time grinding as I did before. I'll get back to it eventually but after like five tries I stopped. Haven't touched it since.

Personally I didn't find Final Fantasy XII that difficult, make sure you use the right team against each boss; keep updating your macros... for the most part the battles would play themselves out until you could use the specials, which if you were quick enough could be chained to do ridiculous amounts of elemental damage.

I would echo that there is a Final Fantasy that is just ridiculous difficult wise; namely being Final Fantasy XIII. The issue I have is directly against the Bosses, as well as the stupid paradigm system... In effect the Paradigm system is much like the Job-Swap system in FFX-2 which made that game imo too difficult.

In FF XIII the ATB is only one aspect that makes it difficult to simply "pick-up-and-play" despite the auto-battle option, but when you take a break and go back to playing you realise that your difficulty with the bosses wasn't due to lacking understanding or skill with the paradigm system ... but that they were just ridiculously over-powered, with no way to level your character up as you played given the set number of enemies and linear paths you had to follow.

There are many games that share this example, I'm not talking about games like the Halo-Series where you can set the difficulty levels; but games where the difficulty just suddenly hits a wall for no apparent reason.

Hell Ninja Gaiden is the best example in the world of a game, just being too difficult for the sake of being too difficult!

 

[Nyaoku]

All I have to say is New Londo Ruins ...
And not a single bonfire was found.

NOOOOO! You can't be serious?! I just started that part! So they expect you to beat the Troll Ghosts (lol i'm in the wall, LOL i'm in the floor! Nah jk i'm actually in the ceiling Trolololololol) with no checkpoints... FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUU(walkthrough tiemz)

I'm not even sure what's worst about that part, the room that gets filled with ghosts (woman screams, shit gets dark, Ghost Army Assemble!) or the fact that you can't block for shit when they're coming out of the bloody scenery!

OT: Speaking of Dark Souls...

Fucking Bell Gargoyles... Flame breath spamming pieces of shit. I swear the one of them just covers the other with his flames. It's like playing UMVC3 against someone who actually cares about tactical team composition but more nightmarish... If that's even possible

The ghosts are the easy part. There is a shortcut after you drain the water but it involves going through 5 drakes that respawn each time. Just make sure to equip that ring from Sif before you drop down to the boss or you may end up needing to buy a new controller.

 

[ACman]

XCom2 Terror from the Deep was an absolute bastard.

Witcher 2? But I think that just the result from having impenetrable mechanics and no tutorial.

 

[Extragorey]

The Witcher 2 tutorial took me a few goes to get through (until I changed it to Easy) but the rest of the game was pretty good.

And Batman has a time limit? It sounds like you're doing one of the challenges; they're supposed to be hard.

 

[Yureina]

I really enjoyed a flight sim game called Wings of Prey for a while. Then I ran into this mission where I had to shoot down an absurd number of enemy transport ships before they flew to their objective. Try as I might, it was fucking impossible for me. x_x

Ended up having to delete the game. A very rare occurance of me not being able to beat a game.

 

[Tigurus]

Warhammer:Battle March

Now I'll admit I'm no great shakes at RTS games but I managed to work my way through the Empire campaign on normal difficulty and was enjoying it until the final battle.Suddenly the game just ramped up the difficulty to ridiculous levels and I repeatedly got my ass handed to me.Annoyingly too there's no checkpoints which means you have to restart from the start every time and considering you can easily be 25+ mins into a battle before defeat it's a pain in the ass having to go back to the beginning.Hell I even tried dropping the difficulty to easy and still couldn't beat the damn thing.It remains on my shelf unbeaten to this day

I have yet to beat this game and I am an RTS kind of person. In the Empire Campaign I got to the last map I think, damn that was hard.

Even worse...I can't even finish the FIRST mission of the expansion pack! T_T
Edit: Sorry, I didn't saw Battle March so I thought just the base game. Still hard though!

 

[Dansen]

I have a better shortcut. After you drain the water go to the New Londo entrance from fire link shrine and run strait down the wooden bridge. Sprint past the ghosts, hug the the wall and go right You will see a body and a platform bellow you. Jump down, you only lose like 30 health. Congratulations, you have now skipped more than half the enemies in the area.

All I have to say is New Londo Ruins ...
And not a single bonfire was found.

NOOOOO! You can't be serious?! I just started that part! So they expect you to beat the Troll Ghosts (lol i'm in the wall, LOL i'm in the floor! Nah jk i'm actually in the ceiling Trolololololol) with no checkpoints... FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUU(walkthrough tiemz)

I'm not even sure what's worst about that part, the room that gets filled with ghosts (woman screams, shit gets dark, Ghost Army Assemble!) or the fact that you can't block for shit when they're coming out of the bloody scenery!

OT: Speaking of Dark Souls...

Fucking Bell Gargoyles... Flame breath spamming pieces of shit. I swear the one of them just covers the other with his flames. It's like playing UMVC3 against someone who actually cares about tactical team composition but more nightmarish... If that's even possible

The ghosts are the easy part. There is a shortcut after you drain the water but it involves going through 5 drakes that respawn each time. Just make sure to equip that ring from Sif before you drop down to the boss or you may end up needing to buy a new controller.

I have a better shortcut. After you drain the water go to the New Londo entrance from fire link shrine and run strait down the wooden bridge. Sprint past the ghosts, hug the the wall and go right You will see a body and a platform bellow you. Jump down, you only lose like 30 health. Congratulations, you have now skipped more than half the enemies in the area.

 

[Vykrel]

F-Zero GX. i could never beat it.

 

[Aidinthel]

I have actually never finished Psychonauts because of the "Meat Circus" level. It's a shame too, because I was really enjoying it prior to that.

Didn't they release a patch to make it easier at the same time they ported it to mac?

OT: Psychonauts is my choice, too. Though I did still finish it (twice) because the game is awesome.

 

[Redryhno]

Warhammer:Battle March

Now I'll admit I'm no great shakes at RTS games but I managed to work my way through the Empire campaign on normal difficulty and was enjoying it until the final battle.Suddenly the game just ramped up the difficulty to ridiculous levels and I repeatedly got my ass handed to me.Annoyingly too there's no checkpoints which means you have to restart from the start every time and considering you can easily be 25+ mins into a battle before defeat it's a pain in the ass having to go back to the beginning.Hell I even tried dropping the difficulty to easy and still couldn't beat the damn thing.It remains on my shelf unbeaten to this day

Were you on the last battle, the one with the city and all?

 

[darkcalling]

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard was an awesome game but got stupid hard at times. The Tentacle Beast of Traam was the moment that made me stop playing for like a month.

 

[Sarge034]

RE4 on Pro mode, and I do have the suit of armor for Ashley.

There is one part in the Castle where you have to activate a turn crank and then crank the thing. It is pretty awesome. There is an infina-spawn, and crossbow snipers, and riot shield enemies, and the crank takes 30 seconds of cranking to activate the bridge, and if Ashley does the cranking she will not continue after she is dropped by a zombie caring her. I got past that on the PS2 because there was NO INFINA-SPAWNS! Krauser kicked my ass on the PS2 because I had sold my magnum. That was my fault.

 

[xitel]

I think I have to agree with the folks saying Dark Souls. I mean, yeah, it's already really really hard, but also really really fair. If you're patient and able to learn patterns, you can get through most of the areas pretty easily. But then Anor Londo. First the fucking archers that shoot spears at you that knock you off the tiiiiiny little pathway you're on, and then ORNSTEIN AND FUCKING SMOUGH. Seriously, that's just... nrgh. Nearly broke my controller by twisting it out of sheer rage.

 

[newdarkcloud]

I have actually never finished Psychonauts because of the "Meat Circus" level. It's a shame too, because I was really enjoying it prior to that.

Didn't they release a patch to make it easier at the same time they ported it to mac?

OT: Psychonauts is my choice, too. Though I did still finish it (twice) because the game is awesome.

This was the time where patches were irrelevant to console gamers.

 

[Kapri]

Final Fantasy XII. But to me, it DID destroy the Experience. I loved the game up until I got to a point to where I was getting face-rolled by a boss. You might say "Oh, well duh you're going to get stuck on bosses eventually in RPGs and have to level up a bit!" Well, I Spent the majority of TWO days grinding up to where it was just taking too long to level in my area and the next. I decide to fight the boss again, utterly DESTROYED it, then move on. Next boss: I get smashed. Basically three 'screens' past the last boss and I'd have to spend almost the same amount of time grinding as I did before. I'll get back to it eventually but after like five tries I stopped. Haven't touched it since.

Just curious what boss was giving you trouble? I remember fighting Zodiark and dying hundreds of time to the point I stopped playing for a year but other than that I managed to get through the bosses eventually.

 

[Kapri]

OT: Devil May Cry 3... chess board... oh god...

Chess board on Dante Must Die mode. Hell, that entire game on Dante Must Die mode. :|

 

[ImBigBob]

There's a sharp difficulty spike in Radiant Historia that requires you to spend two hours grinding before you have any chance of continuing. A blemish on an otherwise great game.