Which dificulty spikes tested your patience?

Which dificulty spikes surprised you and tested your patience?

Personally, yesterday I was really tempted to rage quit Dead Space because of the asteroid field's turret sequence. It felt much easier on the PC than on the Xbox 360. It made an otherwise easy game, exasperating.

The final level of Super Meat Boy. It's hard enough as it is, but my computer at the time was crap and essentially made the game impossible. If the level wasn't running at a perfect frame rate, Dr. Fetus would lag behind and not reach the room at the end in time. Somehow, I made it to the end....and then realized you have to play the level backwards before it's done.

I hate that asteroid sequence but it didn't make me quit the game.

I honestly can't name one in particular. I will tell you that forced turret sections are fucking awful in every single one of their implementations.

Recently, E2L2 (and later jumping puzzles) in ROTT '13. That shit got ROUGH.

The only game that comes to mind is Dragon Age: Origins.

The gang that hangs outside orzammar just always wrecked me. I ran into several fights we I got creamed, despite wiping out everybody else in that dungeon with no real problems.

I feel bad about it but I had to turn the difficulty down for the Archdemon. Too many dudes spawned in and the AoE attacks made me sad.

There definitely are games with turret/on-rails sequences that are way frustrating than it should be.

I haven't experienced this myself, but i always hear how beginners in killing floor find the leap from easy to normal a huge one. To be honest, every difficulty onwards is a leap from the last. It's amazingly fun because of it.

I was shocked when I actually finished it. I'm still like 8 dark world levels away from unlocking the last dark world level. I'll probably never finish it though, I've tried and tried.

I think it was the final area of Torchlight. I don't know what the hell was going on but enemies went from being a general cakewalk to being able to kill me in seconds. The final boss also took forever because it just did not take much damage. I don't think I was underleveled. I did all the quests and tried to clear every single floor completely so I'm not sure.

The final day of Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor is this completely unbalanced boss rush where you just have to grind a bunch because instead of gradually scaling levels like the rest of the game, suddenly each boss is like 5 or 10 levels higher than the last, and all of them have super OP attacks they can use on you, and you basically have to craft a team that has specific elemental immunities, and oh did I mention that you buy demons from a shop/auction house that has a limited quantity at any one time (or at least, it wasn't going to refresh until after I beat the boss I was stuck on) so I wasn't even sure if I could possibly fuse a bunch of new demons to have the immunities I needed for the fight.

It was just a headache that I didn't want to deal with because I ultimately wasn't even liking the game that much, so I stopped. So excuse me, princess, but I'm less than enthused to start SMT: Strange Journey (which I bought before starting Devil Survivor), and I have basically zero intention of buying SMT IV. Sorry, Atlus, your SMT games are too frustrating and draconian. It turns out Persona 3 and 4 is where you figured out how to take those concepts but instead make it A) possible to enjoy, and B) have a pretty fun story.

Can't think of a specific moment in a game but the jump between normal and classic difficulty in XCOM is ridiculous. In my opinion there's a missing hard difficulty between the two.

Edit: Actually, the ship graveyard/ocean liner sections in Uncharted 3 are made of bullshit.

The Dead Space one is just bull shit, terrible sequence.

One for me is RE4 on professional, pretty much was a cake walk for me until the Big Cheese (guy in the barn), never could beat him and gave up ever beating it on professional difficulty.

Bioshock Infinite springs to mind with that Lady Comstock ghost fight in the graveyard, was nearly impossible on hard the way i doled out the upgrades...and up to that point it wasn't really that hard.

Killzone 2 before last boss: no cover, tons of enemies which take a whole magazine to kill each, enemy snipers, rocket launchers and flanking enemies. Complete bulldick.

God of War 2 on Titan against the guy who blasts you from above while summoning minotaurs. Incredibly long, tedious fight that is exponentialy more difficult than it should because of the way mana and damage works on Titan. That's bulldick, Cory Barlog and your lazy gameplay designers.

God of War 1 before last boss agaist a million clones. Now what's more tedious than a regular protect mission? A protect mission against a million clones. Basically you have no control over what the clones hit and that's shit, David Jaffe.

I love hard games but I hate tedious difficulty spikes due to lazy developers just cranking up numbers not taking into account what effect it has on different sections of the game. So fuck you dick developers and perhaps you should spend more than the last 4 weeks of development on gameplay and less than 18 months on graphics and art design.

@bisonhero: I got stuck on the final boss in that boss rush for the longest time. I ended up only using the main character with the perfect demon counters to the boss. Once I did that I don't think I even got close to dying.

Ugh, yeah... that game is hot garbage.

Any fighting game with a cheap end boss, so... basically every fighting game, ever.

You really shouldn't judge Strange Journey or SMTIV on the difficulty spike in Devil Survivor. Neither of those games are structured in the same manner. It would be like judging expectations for Final Fantasy XII on your experience Final Fantasy Tactics.

This saddens me. You're playing the not-as-good SMT games! Why would you do that to yourself? Nocturne is downright great, IV is pretty damn good, and I can't wait to get my hands on Digital Devil Saga, all of which use battle systems somewhat similar to Persona's but with a different tone to their stories and settings.

Besides, Devil Survivor is a turn based strategy game, not a more traditional JRPG like the rest are. I haven't played it, but I haven't heard a ton of good things about it.

@believer258: The strategy part of it was really never an issue (especially in the bosses I got stuck on near the end). If anything, the implementation of grid-based movement felt kinda half-assed and pointless, because you either steamrolled everything, or you just needed to grind more. The only time positioning and tactics seemed to matter even remotely was on the handful of missions where there was some NPC asshat halfway across the map that you have to protect or else you fail the mission.

Anyway, I recognize that other SMT games will vary from that one, but whooo boy, did that game leave a sour taste in my mouth. At some point I'll give Strange Journey a shot and see if it can redeem the SMT games in my eyes, but until then I have more pressing DS backlog games to address, such as The World Ends With You and Radiant Historia.

Most recent one I can remember is Remember Me. The combat in that game is only serviceable, but late in the game they have you fight three enemies who are based off a boss you fought not that long ago. In addition to that there are infinitely spawning regular enemies and a couple special types who are immune to your special attack. The combat is very combo and timing based, which makes it frustrating for dealing with mobs. Oh and the three mini-boss guys constantly teleport behind you when you're fighting off the trash mob. So the fight is basically Punch, jump over enemy to avoid getting hit from behind, punch, jump, punch, jump, etc.

You're basically waiting for your meter to recharge to activate a special ability while getting hit. The words "fuck this game!" crossed my lips more than once. In fact, everything from that battle forward is not fun.

The only thing I can think of was near the end of the "Caravan" chapter in Uncharted 3 were you are unarmed and have to go through like 10 guys before you even have enough ammo to start fighting. Not only are you seriously outnumbered, but you can't see shit in front of you because of the sandstorm. I kept getting killed before I could even see an enemy. That was easily the hardest part in the entire game. For some reason that just kicked my ass. Everything else was pretty easy compared to that.

Oh yeah, and the Pirate level fuck the pirate level!

I'm not really one to rage because of games, but I swear I almost busted my goddamned TV doing that shit. I'm not joking when I say I must have spent a good 3 or 4 hours just going through it over and over and over again until I got it. Haven't played that game since it came out.

@bisonhero: SMT IV did the same thing to me. At one point I realized bosses kept ambushing me (which is total bullshit that they can do that) and killing me before I even had a chance to make a single move. How the fuck is that fun?

I wouldn't say it's a difficult game, but Driver San Francisco had an incredibly infuriating mission where you had to prove your worth to an underground racing boss. I was unable to progress any further in the game without completing that side mission. That stands as one of the only times I ever got mad at a game.

It's important to note I think that in Japan, most of what Atlus USA brands "Shin Megami Tensei" are not actually SMT titles. Outside of the main numbered series and a select few spin-offs, most games and spin-off franchises (Devil Survivor, Persona) do not feature the Shin Megami Tensei branding in Japan.

The game always warns you that a boss is coming, so save before going into a boss fight.

I still like playing SMT IV a whole lot but it's not the game I would recommend starting with. Parts of it, like the rough tutorial and the bosses that sometimes kill you in one turn, make it more and more of a letdown. Nocturne was way better. Apart from Matador, most of the game is hard but rarely felt unfair.

Even Matador felt more like a puzzle that had to be solved. SMT IV on the other hand, just feels like it's composed of dumb luck. *Before boss fight* "Gotta hope he doesn't get advantage!" *gets advantage, reload* *doesn't get advantage* "Alright, now I just gotta pray Jonathon doesn't make him smirk!" *He smirks, murders my party in one arrow rain*

Then I proceed to contemplate eating that fucking cartridge and being done with it forever.

I loved the game as a whole, it was just the platforming I hated.

Pokémon Red/Blue's difficulty spike between the 8th Gym and the Elite four (and continuing into the endgame).

--Edit-- Also, the final battle in Bioshock Infinite (It's the first time in the game where it seemed to penalize you for not bringing the optimum weapons) and in Final Fantasy XIII when enemies and bosses suddenly get the instant death ability and if they target your main character it is a gameover purely based on luck (since you can never be 100% immune to the death status).

There's this part in Jak 2 that made me want to choke the game to death. It was a really difficult combat sequence that involved some light platforming simultaneously. And of course there was a really simple platforming segment just after the checkpoint that I had to do every time before I could get back to the hard part. On the topic of Naughty Dog games FUCK playing as Ellie. Also that last level in super meat boy before the final boss fight.

@bisonhero: Oh huzzah, I have that to look forward to. Of course, I'll probably just chicken out and pick Yuzu's ending (also known as "the bad" ending) and deal with the rest on NG+. Assuming I don't just look them all up on youtube instead. I think that game's actually pretty alright, for the time being.

I'll say that the entire first act of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn counts as a difficulty spike, mostly because the rest of the game is significantly less frustrating when you aren't commanding an army comprised entirely of wet tissue paper. I'll also throw in Arnika Road during the early parts of Wizardry 8 where the difficulty scaling is brutal rather than just annoying, the later dungeons in Might and Magic VI (specifically Castle Darkmoor), and of course the Matador in SMT Nocturne.

I got XCOM: EU a few weeks ago but I've so far only played 4 hours worth of it. I got to a mission where you have to go through this dock or something and try to rescue the people there. But there are aliens that turn people into zombie like creatures and my team got absolutely obliterated. I tried it over again and got destroyed even quicker the second time.

I'm yet to go back to the game. I fully intend to, but that mission completely broke my spirit and so early on too.

Eh, I like the game, but I'm thirty hours in and none of the bosses feel as interesting or difficult or challenging as Nocturne's did. As I remember, almost all of the bosses in that game asked you to use your abilities in different ways that you'd never thought of before. They made you re-think how you'd been playing the game up until that point. Here, the strategy has been "find weakness, find strengths, fuse demons that reflect strengths, abuse press-turns", which formed the base of Nocturne's battle system, not its entirety.

That mission fucked me my first time through. I ended up starting the game over and dropping the difficulty down to Easy. Did a lot better the second time through, which was probably a combination of the difficulty drop and me having a better idea of what to do with the meta-game stuff.

Call of Duty 2, D-Day. Running through that open area while chucking smoke grenades, hoping for the best... that was rough. Honestly, a lot of that game on Veteran was kind of crazy. Infinite spawns certainly didn't help!

My buddy bought MGS1 on PS3 a couple of years back and I decided to play it. My patience has never before been tested so many times while playing a game. I can remember three major examples (also spoilers, I guess):

• Snake is being tortured by Ocelot in the electric chair, and you need to mash circle to keep from dying. The first few attempts are easy, but it starts to wear on you real fast. Effective in portraying what Snake is going through sure, but I was too livid to care by the end of that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5kEyo1qL-U
• Running to the top of some tower to fight Liquid Snake in the Hind-D. Having to shoot dudes and run while popping health items and navigating the geometry without proper camera controls was almost the end of my time with that game
• The very last thing in the game, the fight on the jeeps, was one of the most unfair challenges I've ever come across in a game. I mean, fuck.

Resonance of Fate is riddled with the damned things. Rather than testing my patience, I think I enjoyed the challenge, but I can see how they would turn some people off an already divisive game.

Any of the boss fights in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I just didn't like how the game was forcing me to go all action when I don't particularly enjoy the gunplay and would've much preferred to spec in hacking and stealth.

@grissefar:

Agree on Killzone 2. I think i might have tried for a week and finally just said F it. That's hard to do for someone like me that finishes every game i start and plays everything on hard difficulty.

Any Naught Dog game, but especially Jak II. All I remember was some mission where you had to escape a docks area, and it was fucking ridiculous. Also, some of the old school GTA's had missions that came out of nowhere, III and Vice City Stories, namely.

Midnight Club 2 - I understand that this game was designed to be difficult in spots, but I felt that the difficulty spikes in this game were crazy at times.

Mortal Kombat Series - The last fight (last two fights in some) in this series just feels cheap. In all my years of playing Mortal Kombat I have never felt like I beat the game, I just lucked out.

@e30bmw: I think I'll have to end up doing something similar when I get back around to the game. Though maybe I won't lower the difficult. I'll probably just keep trying over and over again until I get used and better with all the different mechanics.

@weegieanawrench: Interesting you bring this up. I played MGS1 a few months ago (through an emulator, but don't judge too much. I have no PS3 and I tried getting on PS1 many years ago but never got the chance) and got to the point where you climb the staircase in the tower. Dudes coming at you from above and below with limited ammo, explosives and rations. Plus the awkward camera and controls. That was super frustrating and I never got through it. I'd like to go back one day but I'm not sure if I can really be bothered. I had never played an MGS game before and was enjoying it up until that point. Shame.

@twisted said:

Never Finished COD2 because of that shit infinite spawning. Vet

Noone has said Ornstein and Smough ? =o

Spikey Tiger, Secret of Mana. Fuck this thing.

Same here.

@thebunnyhunter said:

Man, I remember that fight and the fight by the gate being a massive pain on Hard. What I ended up doing was hiding in a corner (by the vending machines on those encounters that had them) and sniping from afar.

For me, the only one that comes to mind is Final Fantasy IV on the DS. I had never played through the game before and was enjoying my time with it up until the (I think?) last dungeon. 45 minutes of some very rough random encounters that ended with one that instant-wiped my party. I shut the game off, promptly sold it to Gamestop, and haven't been able to get the energy to go through it all again on a version that doesn't have such fucked difficulty.

Bethesda's open world games consistently suffer from maddening difficulty spikes. Either it's so easy, it's a joke - and I got to turn up difficulty to get a satisfying experience, and then suddenly I get one-shot by something and have to turn the difficulty down. They're great games all, but damn if Bethesda isn't the worst at balancing. I get that it's a daunting task to balance such nigh boundless games, but still, I hope they'll do better next time.

Pro tip, let them come to you. Just set up your squad like a firing brigade about to execute a bunch turncoats and wait. They'll come. They'll die. Victory!

Beating the first "duel" on Ridge Racer Revolution. Cars like the "Devil 13th Racing car" were way faster than yours, meaning you had to constantly block them. Keeping faster car behind you by letting it hit you in the tail bumper for two laps in RR-game is hell.