Top Ten Harshest Difficulty Curves in Video Games 

Thesaurus Rex and go right

Yes, they are. As a somewhat serious defense, once you beat Death mountain you are ready for the rest of the game and also, it makes sense as a progression of the story from the original game. Like, you go through Death Mountain in the original and are like...wow, that was hard. Then, you have to go back again and deal with it all over again.

I just did.

Dare anyone to try defend death mountain he said

that is genius sir

Way underrated comment, LOL.

That really makes sense.

Oh hell yeah!

That's so interesting! Is it a confirmed part of game history or just a super-smart theory?

@@gerudokupo2225 I kind of doubt it since this kind of technique was more commonly seen in the following generation of games. Further, the Famicom version is just as hard while Japan's rental service industry was quite small and of little concern. It was just more common for developers to make challenging games, notably Nintendo was much less afraid of giving in to the lowest common denominator compared to now.

And still the world record holder beat the hoverbike part blindfolded on a live stage in Sweden this year, it's impressive as fuck lol - Guy's called TMR, or The Mexican Runner

Jan I actually did this before RU-vid was a thing and my grandma could even make it to the snake level. When a friend and I beat Battletoads in college, the Internet didn’t even have accurate information on how it ends.

Jan TMR is great, and his commentary is hilarious. His run of Cuphead at AGDQ was great. And, as a Mexican myself, (although I'm sure it applies to anyone) I find his Spanish exclaimations when he's upset with something entertaining. No mames.

It’s not though. lol

The Great Majora I imagine that replacing 06 with Boom is going to be more accurate

Seems that way.

Pretty much nailed in the nail of unfairness pass the limits of the frustration board

I realise that I probably sound like a bit of a twat but I never really had an issue with Death Mountain, my issue with the adventure of Link was the 2nd continent.

Adam Aus87 Nah, there's always one.

Adam Aus87 me either

Hells yes. That level is hard as fuck.

bob Says You're crazy. To this day, the Genesis version of the level still gives me trouble.

It's not hard, just really, really long and annoying. If you know what you're doing you can rush through the level no problem.

That was a memory challenge.

I finally beat the game after years and years of practice and trouble... On easy mode. Fucking hell

The worst part wasn't finishing it, but finishing it TWICE to get the coin, and the second time was even harder than the first, and you only had one life.

+Think Before You Type I see what you did there

Think Before You Type badum tsss

+Great Great Note, quiet a few of levels are optional.

+Great Great At the same time, that's the reason they're not higher on the list. I imagine Aztec Complex could even surpass Death Mountain if it were the final level rather than a bonus one.

If your not going 100% you are doing it wrong.

@@cult_of_odin Unless you're just playing for the fun of it and don't care about the annoying or unfun side content. Or just playing for the story, if the game has one. Or you don't have the time to do everything and want to just get through the main content to say you did.

+Amelia Bee I'm convinced they didn't even bother programming a level after the octopus, knowing no one would ever make it there.

+leadergld LOL! Fair enough. I beat it but I admit I had to use the invincibility cheat. And even then I died like crazy on those stupid sky levels and The Machine.

Maybe the dude didn't play it yet

it's a difficulty SPIKE. Echo was just difficult.

Ecco only got real hard at the machine. Granted, many on this list are towards the ends as well. Otherwise the game is just tedious and taxing on your patience.

I still have PTSD from that section in Rilgar...

Ratchet and Clank in general had some _really_ big difficulty spikes.

Like the fucking Pier from Jak 2 *turns away to cry for a minute* The game was difficult, but it was about a 7 on a scale of 1-10, but the pier is a fucking 11!!!!!!!!!! WHERE IS THIS SHIT ON THIS LIST!!!!!

Mickspad Really? I found Jak 2 pathetically easy except for the very end of the game. I cant remember what this pier is tho, as I havn't played the game for like 4-5 years.

The pier is that level with the endless hoards of guards trying to get you while you have to make your way back into the city after picking up some device. I don't remember it too well, but I remember is being where I rage quit for the final time.

Rainbow Dashtruction I remember crash bandicoot and the road to nowhere level. go from 28 lives to 0 in no time.

What about paranormal chaos from luigis mansion 2, the rest of the game is relatively easy if you know what you're doing, but paranormal chaos is extremely difficult, especially if its your first time and you don't know whats happening

For me that was trying to trap that damn blue bear. I try to place a trap or heal, and it charges me during the animation and wrecks everything.

Now I'm gonna be honest here. If you are saying that capturing Arzuros was a difficulty spike... Well good luck

Eelektreigon To be fair here , if its your first MH then yes , arzuros would be a spike. =D

Just when I feel like I'm getting into the game, it throws that behemoth at me and tells me to take it alive. Not a chance.

Green Plesioth or Blue Kut Ku, pick your poison.

Same. We rented it back in the day and never got through to the end of this level.

My people, there is a webcomic I read which features a running gag of the protagonist and her childhood friend trying (and failing, a lot) to beat a Bland Name Version of BattleToads. It's 100% right in that regard.

You and I were much alike at 10 then. Only at 10 years old I had so much more time to practice and build my skills, to memorize the paths and to restart over and over after countless game overs. I don't have those privelages anymore, and since most gamers you associate with today are probably working class people like me and you, we don't have the time to build game specific skills anymore on top of games simply getting made easier. That's what happened to us. I can still do this, but it takes time. Time is something you have alot less of when you not 10 years old.

Torturing children is frowned upon nowadays. :p

I overcame Death Mountain as 10 year old as well. It prepared me for games today like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Why can't so many today handle it? Well, they didn't go through the old-school NES boot camp some of us did, haha!

I am a huge souls fan. But I think it's safe to say now that dark souls at least is a wildly popular game. It just sat in the shadows and didn't catch on straight away so people didn't quite come to realize just how huge the game has become. March 11th I booked 3 days off work to crack into my DS2 Collectors edition. I'm expecting the servers to be swamped.

Well, 'this generation' is very used to having... what are they called.. oh yeah, checkpoints, so having to reset the entire game is kind of a turn off. Besides that, 'this generation's' hardest games are Super Meat Boy, Dark Souls, Binding of Isaac... actually Rogue-likes in general, VVVVVV, etc. Check these games out, and you'll find some similarities and some differences, the differences being... well, the entire game engine. Rogue-likes are played on a 2D plane, either top-down or facing the character, the later being the 'old school' perspective, like Mario and Zelda 2. These types of games, however, don't have checkpoints, if you die, you start back from square 1, the difference being is that you can buy upgrades for your character each time you die, and become more powerful as you go on. Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 has a 3rd person perspective, and is played like an RPG. You start out incredibly weak, meaning just a few hits will kill you. It doesn't help that your starting weapons are weaker than the first sword and shield you find. Afterwards, as you get stronger, so do the enemies, the difference being they get moves like curse, which will almost always kill you. The bosses have an insane amount of HP, as well as cheap moves (the scaleless dragon, for instance). However,, there are frequent checkpoints that restore all of your HP and allows you to level up. After using one, enemies respawn, meaning you can grind and level almost indefinitely... if you have no life, that is. VVVVVV is a 'classic' platformer; 2D sidescrolling, with amazing music, might I add. You die in one hit, no matter what, but there are frequent checkpoints. Then look at Zelda 2's Death Mountain. No checkpoints anywhere. The enemies are extremely high leveled in comparison to you. Lava pits that instantly kill you. Enemies respawn if you leave, and considering dead ends are everywhere, you'll have to face them over and over and over. Just as well, you don't have any great items or magic during this part, and are relatively low level. Add that to what other people on this comment chain say, about the people playing them now having more important things to do than sitting in front of the screen for hours on end and having to work, people don't have the time or patience to play a game over from the start because of one level. After all, you completely reset from one death, unlike Rogue-likes. No saved weapons, no saved levels, nothing. This would have been annoying when it was first released, but now, where games have checkpoints and upgrades, people will get fairly annoyed of having wasted a few hours of their time. Add this to what RL said, and you see why your 'generation' has been able to do that, because, at 10, you had the time and patience to replay the game as many times as needed to beat that one level. Besides, if people get annoyed by a game, they could just play another from the mountains available, unlike the days of the NES.

I used a pen and paper, but yeah roght when possible is the trick. The trick for the lizard axe throwers is just to duck jump over the thrown axe and hit them in the face. You get enough level ups and magic bottles to not have to die.

Exactly lol. Like only 3 or 4 zones and you're there

Wii remote? Excuse me, young 'un, I think you meant your SNES controller. I would have even accepted 64 controller. Ahh, to be young again.

blackbirdlore Dude, Mario Kart Wii. Da fuq, why did you think i meant SNES?

Because Rainbow Road on the Wii isn't shit. The original Rainbow Road is the one everyone talked about, the original is the one the you got carpal tunnel trying to beat.

I didn't THINK you meant anything. I'm TELLING you Rainbow Road on Wii ain't shit. AceofJays knows what's up.

Somebody clearly never played the Banshee Boardwalk and Yoshi's Canyon on the N64 version. I would take Rainbow Road over those any day of the week.

He said the list is "difficulty thrust upon a new player". Not difficulty for a seasoned Pokemon veteran.

I know!!! Miltank is so easy, it took me one try and I figured out how to kill it.

:P i just used sand attack on it until my pidgeoto fainted and turned it into a battle of attrition

I'd guess it's a noob bitch slap thing. It got me tons of times, but I actually can get past it regularly now. The big problem comes if you have issues getting a decent sp. attacker or a really good attacker.

DeadpoolPlayz Dumb luck is dumb luck I suppose.

Why can't more people like you exist???

*tips fedora* Nice meme, m'gentlesir

...How trite of you to use something so incredibly rude in the presence of something that was once decent. Shame on you, Rodger.

Dante Martin I concur. That was incredibly rude of him. Oh, pardon me, IT.

Dante Martin Mr. Phoenix Trite. XD

Yeah, it took me like 2 days and then I figured out that other would've worked on the internet..

xD, yeah cause even playing it safe and what not, it's hardly possible!

Yes.. Actually the class races are quite easy if you use the shortcuts, there are other bullshit missions later in the game (at about 70%)

Yeah, I have to agree. Most of the times even a little fail could cost the victory, which can get annoying quite easily...

nicksurvives/NickSharpx I LOVE the Jak and Daxter games. I've played and beaten the first three. I've beaten the first and third more times than I can remember. Do you know how many times I've beaten the second one? Once. Fucking. Once. I've played it numerous times, but I've only beaten it one fucking time because it's just so damn hard. Good story, though, Naughty Dog is good at that kind of thing.

Lol

Dark Souls isn't hard, you just suck. Get Good

UGH Get good makes you sound like an ass. Use it when you get raged at in PvP, not in RU-vid...

LOL dude dark souls isnt a recent game its been around since 2011

Wonderful Death And the games in the list are from the 90s and early 00s. It's pretty fucking recent in comparison.

John Smith recent doesent mean 3 years and "recent" usually isnt used in comparison

Spider guardian

Much easier on wii

The barrel is not a difficulty curve. Its a lack of instructions about how to play the game.

The Reverse 180 gets me every time

Could never get past a burnout. I actually had to have someone do that for me when I was younger.

fuck that tutorial

I hear that!

Dafawfulizer how...?

Wyatt James He's way harder than all of the other bosses in the game. The only one that came close was deminx

Dafawfulizer ohhhhhhh I thought you were talking about one of the bosses that Roxas faced when you played as him, not Final Roxas XD sorry for the mishap I guess, I personally haven't completed KH2FM/FM+ yet. Back when I was really into KH, I beat the normal game (without dying) the first time I ever played it, which was on Normal, so I didn't remember him as a boss fight. But then I was replaying the game in FM+, but I kinda got burnt out of KH and never finished it. Also my controller got a bit messed up part of the way into FM+, so lost the urge to play it pretty quickly.

Wyatt James From what I understand, he was only a boss in final mix. In the original the fight was just a cutscene

Don't remind me

The Milk Drink burden...... UUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGG!

Ukiby3000 You have not seen the true Hax God crap that she does in the Drayano ROM hack of HeartGold and SoulSilver, but even then Misty is more of a threat than her from what I hear in that ROM hack.

Ukiby3000 Claire was worse in my opinion. She has a Kindra, which only weakness is dragon, a type that you do not have

I had no trouble with SS Whitney. Sure, it took a while, but I did it first try. Using Metronome.

Ukiby3000 my starter was a female XD

He fixed that recently.

Every RU-vidr nowadays has like their intro some god fucking epic song which is loud also the screen flashes and their name spins rapidly on screen. I'm gonna use my own intro as some calm song and the name simply showing up at some part of the screen.

It does remind me of the first time I visited Grunty Industries in the second game. Vivid memories of getting every jiggy in every stage but only having one in GI because I had no idea how to enter the stage in the first place. You wanna talk difficulty curves? at LEAST RBB is at the end, GI is world 6 of 8, and you have to know you can call the train and need the train to get in there. And forget navigating that maze of a stage with the Washing machine. (though in fariness, RBB is significantly harder than Mad Monster Mansion, and funnily enough, you CAN at least do the engine room first and only have to do it once (a bit more for the few notes in there). Click Clock wood though...You die, just brutal of a punishment. XD (Always have 10 notes to go, just to fall off the top of the tree in Fall or Winter). Oh and also, Mr. Patch Boss fight. Not hard "damage" wise, but for the third boss in the game, he's a HUGE pain.

Mario Mastar I've gotten pretty good at RBB over the years so I can at least take a deep breath before I torture myself. GI though...ugh. Yes there were the days spent trying to figure out how to even get in but even inside it's just not fun at all. I've only every 100%'ed Banjo Tooie once and this level is one of the reasons why. *sigh*

The memories... They will never fade away :(

Skeith804 Am I the only person who went through rusty bucket bay without a second glance at difficulty? I mean, I wasn't able to play it until it came out on xbox arcade, so they might have changed something.

Maybe so. Now it's no problem, but now I know to do the engine room first and I have way better motor controls than when I was 6-7 years old.

What self respecting adult female animal would drink the juices that came out of their own friends and families' tits?

now i think the main difference here is that it's a cow

Zachary Carlini Well you can buy human breast milk ice cream...

speedyblupi WHERE?!

More than likely Japan.

Because people don't really choose a fighting type pokemon untill later on when machoke appears, that and not alot of people really cared for grinding unless your stuck on a part of the game thats throws you to the ground and tells you to prepare your anus

Gamer1999ad In general, a difficulty spike is only as bad as you allow it to in pokemon.

was hoping he would say borderlands, but atleast someone agrees.

That part was easy and I'm 13

12 at the time

Actually I was 11

Actually, Zelda didn't start out as a JRPG, the first few games like with Sonic were made in the U.S. and then migrated over to Japan where they got a whole lot lamer. And yeah, Death mountain on Link wasn't all that hard. Then again none of the stuff on this list is hard I can name a game that is almost identical to all of these whose difficulty curve is much much steeper.

IT IS WAY WORSE THAN WHITNEY. Whitney, if you had gotten an Onix or traded for the Machop that girl in the Department Store offers, was pretty easy. Those two had advantages over Miltank(Better tanking/Type Advantage). Death Mountain had a maze, enemies that don't give two shits about your only line of defense, and FUCKING LAVA PITS, MAN. Whitney was ranked low on the list because you had ways to bypass her being a pain in the ass. You get no such respect from Death Mountain. Death Mountain in the first one made sense, being the last dungeon. This hellhole was the SECOND. It buried an axe in your head, burned the body, pissed on the ashes, and told you your mother never loved you.

dayolpoi You mean you didn't map it? And Death Mountain in the first game made no sense at all with entire areas that has direction maps puzzles, and you had to visit it three different times before you could even do the dungeon there not to mention monsters that made no sense. In Link it was just a single puzzle and if you had the right gear an easy one as well, you needed nothing more than a candle, a sword, a piece of paper and a pen and you were done. Simple, easy, clean, only challenge I had in that game was in the one dungeon that had the hole too small for you to fit down into where you needed to go.

thats not a difficulty curve... thats difficulty right off the bat. a difficulty curve is a sudden spike in difficulty with little warning

technically its a hard game so it doesnt really count

phantasmic1000 thats literally what i said....

zach livernois i was responding to him

phantasmic1000 yea, by saying what i literally said to him

Idk, maybe is because it is HARDER. is harder to level up, at least for me.

***** The reason is because if you catch a pokemon there, it is harder to level up and If you are level grinding it will take very long

you still have 8 extra gyms and red's battle anyways

j9794 That's what I think the diffuculty curve was, since they throw INSANE lvs at you but the wild pokemon are insanly low lvs

Arthur Moebius I actually don't remember having difficulties first time I played it (like many years ago), but I got stuck at the E4 playing in an emulator in my phone because the mystery road pokes didn't help me grind exp :P

I thought the same thing. Is he rambling, or is he RabbidLuigi? Or, is he both?

She is a fat cow who sucks on her pokemons udders

Haha I didn't mind her all that much. pokemon gen 1 had starmie as the fuck you over pokemon with its high critical % chance with bubble beam...

@golum pawelec an udder is those hanging pink things on cows where milk comes out.@TheAnimeGamer O god i hated Misty! Especially if you start out with charmander!

as Liu Kang or Raiden?

shelby4369 Lui Kang. Lui Kang's X-ray move does barely any damage to Shao Kahn but Shao Kahn does butt loads of damage with 3 regular attacks.

took me a few tries the learning curve on most fighting games is steep

Joseph Zammit The only thing that taunted me was the restart screen. God, Shao Kahn was annoying.

The original trilogy when you get to Shao Kahn! Holy fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck! I was only young when I played those games but I remember that was the first time I legit raged out at a game.

Not quite the same thing. The initial challenge is to understand the mechanics of the game and how to actually control it. The gameplay isn't actually that difficult... well... depending on how much death spawned in the area where you settled down.

Denamic I always set all danger to maximum because i am a masochistic, suicidal maniac.

Goddammit, That last fucking statue...

That level took me two fucking months of dying and being sent back to the start of that last area. It is the worst part of the Spongebob Movie game.

That took me about 11 1/2 MONTHS TO BEAT

not so much a difficulty curve as a difficulty cliff.

I agree completely with all the points here, it's stupidly hard and need a lot of effort to even know what's going on

oh my gawd yes so much depth

*HHHHHHHHHHNNNNNNNNGGGGGHHHHH*

You mean Through the Fire and The Fames?

That was at the very end, where at least the songs before raining blood were passable, raining blood just to a very harsh turn

***** That was the song that made it take a week longer to get El Jefe than I thought it would.

***** Raining Blood was also near the end. It was still however a huge jump from what you were used to

Satch Boogey from GH On Tour Decades was even worse. It was hard on easy