A couple of my favorite blogs are Cracked Magazine because of their awesome lists, and Angry Video Game Nerd because it's awesome to see someone get pissed off at videogames. So in an homage to those I am going to put together this blog. I have a feeling that there is a special place in hell for game developers who have a normal difficulty slope, then with no warning at all the crank the difficulty up to 11. In most of the cases below, you're just playing with a hard part here and a hard part there, then all of a sudden there is this part that makes you want to scream and throw the controller at the nearest expensive breakable object. Sad thing is that once you past most of these parts you realize the rest of the game is ridiculously easy.
#10 New Super Mario Bros.: World 3
Ice levels suck no matter which Nintendo game you are playing, that's one of the few things I'm glad died off with the regular NES. But then they came out with the Wii and put a whole world of stupid ice levels; which are the only things worse than underwater levels in the gaming hierarchy. Now I've watched most people play this level and I wondered why it was such a challenge; but it wasn't until I started watching their hands that I realized what actually makes these things challenging. Nearly everyone playing on an ice level jerks the controller when their character skids where they don't want them to go. This becomes an even bigger problem when you use a controller that responds to your movement. Nintendo did try to level the playing field with a "penguin suit" which is great if you can't wait the necessary 30 seconds it takes to die on these levels. I'm not sure what they were going for with it but the purpose it serves is to make you slide on your belly into the nearest pit completely effortlessly.
#9 Diablo II
: DurielLikely Diablo fans will disagree with me, but just think back to the very first time you played against this guy. He's got a million gagillion health, you can't leave, he hits like a truck, and on top of all this he damages your with freeze and slows your attacks down. If you use a melee weapon you get maybe 2 hits on him before you die; if you use a pet he's dead somehow before you even go into Duriel's room. He's the end boss of the second act, so if it's your first play-through you probably don't have anything amazing to take him down with. If you ask me, he's the hardest boss aside from Diablo, but he's the end boss so you kind of expect that.
#8 Marvel vs. Capcom: Onslaught
You're tired, you have fought your way through the masses of Marvel and Capcom characters. Finally took that cheap bitch War Machine down a peg. Now just have to beat Onslaught and then you can see the ending and go to bed. For those of you less nerdy than me, Onslaught is Magneto and Professor X from the X-Men combined (I forgot how it happened). His first form, really hard but sill in human form. In this picture you can see his second form; no that's not the background that's the guy you're fighting. His second form is not quite as hard really but whoever gets the last hit on this guy, is the one you get to see the ending for. So what if you want to see it with, let's say Venom, who doesn't have any great attacks that go to the very top corner of the screen. So you have to jump-punch, jump-punch, jump-punch until you finally kill him.#7 Monster Hunter Freedom 2: Tigrex
I wrote a whole blog on this game earlier so of course I had to include him on this. The main problem with that game is that it's sofa king hard it's difficult to nail down a specific hard part. This guy was the biggest bottleneck in gameplay for me. As I estimated before, I'm thinking 60 hours just devoted to training to beat this monster. He isn't supposed to be the hardest, in fact he's just kind of the midway checkpoint guy. He is, however the "flagship monster" of the game so they want him to be tough but I think they went a tad overboard. See the "Hardest.Game.Ever" post for more details.
#6 Record of Lodoss War: WagnardYou remember on the Dreamcast... What, you don't remember the Dreamcast? Okay well remember that show called Record of Lodoss War? Oh okay so you aren't as huge of a nerd as me. Well back in the olden days there wasn't a Lord of The Rings trilogy; if you wanted something that was basically the same and yet totally different you would watch Record of Lodoss War. Well there was even a game out for Dreamcast, but it was kind of strange. Basica
lly it was a rip-off of Diablo but as with RoLW and LotR there were almost more things different than things in common. You couldn't just play Diablo and then assume you knew how to play RoLW. There was this really strange armor system that made it so you melt down all equipment in the field for mythril to improve your early game equipment. It's one of the few RPG's where you get the lion's share of the equipment at the very beginning. So already strange you think the main character, Wart, would be giving you legit advice. But he says not to stray from the path, in the beginning you will see how bad you get owned wandering off it and just kind of assume you aren't supposed to do it. But if you don't venture off you won't be able to do any subquests and there are like 50 of them. The worst part is, you really don't need to do them up until the 2nd to the last boss of the the game. Even the room before this guy is easy and then BAM! you walk in the room, hear him say "Cardis" and you're dead. Then you realize you need to do 50 some-odd dungeons to get the equipment to kill him.#5 Final Fantasy X: Dodge 200 Lightning Bolts
This is the first one that you technically don't have to ever do to progress to the end of the game. But since it's Final Fantasy you practically won't be satisfied to fight the end boss until you have all the best equipment and bend the end boss over like in Deliverance. So I consider this required... Anyway, in the FF universe there are so many bogus secrets that people make up (like the silver chocobo that sinks in the marsh in FFVII) I at first thought this was a joke. Dodge 200 lightning bolts... that come from the sky... that you don't know when they are going to happen... These lightning bolts come out on the Thunder Plains, you see a brief flash of light, and then you need to press a button to dodge them. You can't see anywhere how many you
have dodged, you just keep doing it until whatever happens (I don't know what happens honestly, my record is in the 6 range). They come down once every 3-7 seconds so it takes a long time as well. Seriously; do you even have the patience to count to 200? I don't, another thing is that your eyes almost start to bleed waiting for a flash every couple seconds... so the best internet advice is to just sit there like a tweaker with the lights off staring at the screen for 30 minutes. Also of course this is 200 in a row... so getting in the 180 range and slightly fucking up... I don't even want to think about it.#4 Mega Man 9: Tornado Man
Wow, trying to find an image of Tornado Man's level is hard; but if I was trying to find a fan pic of Splash Woman giving Mega Man a BJ I would be able to make a whole gallery of them. Since I can't find a pic of the level you just have to take my word for it. You start off at this part where you have these little platforms that spin around while spinning you around at the same time; jump at the wrong time and you are jumping down at the pit. Well there are things like this scattered through the Mega Man (Rock Man in Japan) franchise. But this one goes on ridiculously long, so if you're like me you scrape by with maybe one life left if you even pass it. But the rest of the level is just as hard, there is some sweet fucking ice block parts, yeah you know like the sweet ones in the New Mario Bros... yeah they brought it back for this one, and then there is the one where the rain makes you jump too far and then the rain makes it so you can't jump far enough and then the fucking umbrellas come down slow as shit so you have to wait for them because you already died like 20 fucking times from thinking you can pass them just a little before but you jump so fucking high now that you run right into them, and then you're finally at Tornado Man with like two dots of health and so you throw the fucking kitchen sink at him because you're so stressed out and you don't want to have to go all the way back to the stupid platforms again... ARRRGGHHH! Then it's Hornet Man and he has a bullshit hard level too. Insult to injury; take a look at the achievements for this game. They are like, "Beat the game without dieing", "Beat all bosses with M Buster", "Beat a level without firing a single shot", "Beat the game in 5 minutes," "Beat the game while drawing pornographic pictures of Splash Woman"; who the fuck can beat this game with enough style and flair that they need these challenges. It took me weeks to beat Tornado Man...
#3 Final Fantasy XIII: Barthandelus
"Alright so I can finally pick my own team? After 60 hours or so into this, I finally get to do my own thing... that's awesome! And here is the first boss... Oh shit I died after duking it out with him for a half hour. Well at least now I know the strategy kill all the little faces and then fight the big one... Oh I made it 40 minutes before he killed me. The big face is really strong when I kill the little faces how about I leave one face up and hack away at the big face... well this is going to take 2 years this way. I think I'll play a little Bioshock now." This guy is a pain in the ass; he increases his power exponentially the longer you fight him. If you fight recklessly he has too much health and hits too hard to do a fight that way. If you fight cautiously he will just keep increasing his power and will flatten your tanks long before you kill him. I can see a 30 minute boss that you need to use strategy for; but no strategies work... and I mean not even close.
#2 Sega GT
This game was free with my XBox at the time I got it but it is the king of bad difficulty spikes. Either the license tests are too hard, or more likely, once you've passed the license test you have harder races but no easy races to try again ever... Unless you were the extremely savvy consumer you won't have the greatest cars ever but that's just tough shit, because if you don't, you'll never be able to get them. This could have all been fixed if you could just race lower ranked tracks but for less money. But if you're like me, you didn't know there is only one car that could ever win against the slightly higher ranked cars. Granted you can get money for losing races but that would be like saving for a Maserati with your paper route.
#1 Final Fantasy Tactics: Wiegraf and Velius/Belias
This has to be my favorite game of all time, Final Fantasy Tactics, it has gotten to the point that I literally have memorized the approximate odds of each attack connecting etc. And even knowing mathematically the odds for everything in this game, there is one challenge that every time I play it, I'm convinced, that victories are pure luck. There are hard levels in this for sure; Dorter Slums and Golerand Execution Site but these pale in comparison to the battle with Wiegraf at the middle of the game. Now typically in this game you have 5 characters to play with and maybe an extra "guest" (uncontrollable character). But for this level you have only the main character, Ramza, to control. Now I've tried this in nearly every combination of actually feasible characters and I'm rarely even able to beat him in this stage. Fact is, Wiegraf hits for about 112 and even more when he crits. Every possible combination of armor lends me in the high 200's at best. So if you are lucky you can survive 3 hits (as I said if he doesn't ever crit). You, on the other hand, hit for about 60-90 and he has in the low 300's of health and on top of that, he's a knight with a shield so 60-70% chance of hitting him is actually good... oh yeah and he can also "Counter" so hit or miss he gets a free chance to hit you again. So he has a 100% chance of killing you in 3 turns; while you have a 65% chance of killing him in 5 turns unless you somehow crit the fuck out of him... Did anyone even bother to run the numbers on that fight before they released it? So what is even worse is, you're stuck inside a castle and so you can't leave and level up to get a skill that might be helpful. You just have to make do or reset the whole damn game. There are really 2 or 3 strategies that work against him; both involve doing some borderline cheating moves like using "yell" (tailwind in the new version of the game for PSP). Then you beat him, big whoop... the next half of the fight is even harder. That's right, a mathematically impossible fight is still the easy part of this fight. Well once you get his health down low enough you can bring 4 of your friends. But then he gets to bring in 3 of his friends called "Archaic Demons" basically some of the baddest monster in the whole fucking game. All but 1 of the cheater strategies will have Ramza on the verge of death; but Wiegraf turns into Velius (Belias in the new version) and is cured fully and gets over 6x his normal health. And then let's look at his attacks, Clops (Cyclops) has massive range and will kill anyone who isn't wearing the best armor (Knights or Holy Knights) so basically heals and casters are dead first turn. Ramza is dead if there is a chill to the air. So you 9/10 times have one character (Agrias) in charge of doing 1600 damage... but she's going to die in the next turn because the Archaic Demons do "Dark Holy" which will kill most anyone especially if they just got hit by Clops. Top that off with Velius who can do 100% confuse (that character is out) and the Archaic Demons can also do "Giga Flare" and do 70 damage or so without charging which is a nice follow up to any of these other attacks that didn't quite kill you to begin with. But if you do end up beating him, you will cry tears of anger when you see how easy the rest of the game is.
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