What are the five most challenging games you've ever played and why?
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What are the five most challenging games you've ever played and why?
Having a hard time pinning down the one game that was the hardest to me. FFIII was definitely torture the first time through but on subsequent playthroughs it was much more manageable. Diablo II is the only game I ever ragequit, since the final battle was incredibly cheap and even though I did everything to build my character right, the gear you can get through online play is apparently the only way to get good enough. I think the absolute toughest though was Zelda II. Even abusing save states to high heaven it was pretty insane.
Touhou 11: Subterranean Animism, Touhou 15: Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, Ys: The Oath in Felghana, Battletoads, N. All games that require a good deal of precision and pattern learning that you kinda have to learn your way through by failing repeatedly. Enjoyed all of them a great deal though.
Well, way I see it, there are two types of challenging games: Those that make you restart the entire game after a certain amount of deaths (see: Battletoads, the NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, Ninja Gaiden. Basically any challenging game from before the SNES era), and those that don't.
Since I personally find it hard and unfair to compare the two in terms of actual difficulty (and not just tedium or the time it takes to beat them), I'll just focus on the latter category, where you can die as many times as you want without having to play the first 10 levels of the game for the umpteenth time :p
I don't generally play that many really hard games, but from the top of my head:
I Wanna Be the Boshy, Super Meat Boy, Wings of Vi, Celeste - these four 2D platformer games all require precision and quick reflexes to varying degrees (Celeste being the easiest of them) but put you back in the action immediately after you die. I racked up thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of deaths in these games.
F-Zero GX - hardest racing game I've ever played. Ridiculously fast with damage from bumps and falls that can blow your vehicle up, ending the race instantly. Memorization and precision are required for the tracks, and then add reflexes on top of that to stop you from bumping into the 29 other vehicles on the track.
The two games that come to mind are NES Battleotads and NES Ghosts n Goblins.
I shall mention one game, and one game only: Koudelka.
Kid Icarus definitely has to be up there. I rented it as a kid and couldn't figure out how to get past the beginning. Are we talking games we've played or games we've beaten? If it's played, then it's pretty much gonna be a bunch of NES games for me. If it's beaten, then it's probably not all that hard. One game that stands out (though I'm not certain it's the hardest I've ever beaten) is Brave Fencer Musashi, which mostly isn't that hard, but I found the button mashing on the second form of the final boss difficult. Combine that with the fact that if you die you have to go through a whole bunch of stuff again including another boss before the final boss, story sequences, two platforming sequences of getting chased by the final boss before fighting it, and the first form of the final boss, and it was incredibly frustrating. Ended up putting it down for years before finally completing that game.
Anyway, that's one for toughest played and one for toughest beaten. That's all, because it's hard enough to come up with one.
For the sake of argument, I'm going to avoid filling this list with some unplayable nonsense from the NES era. Especially since I feel like a few of them are really only difficult because you're often given terrible directions on what to do, but having a guide can often remedy this issue. Just a shout out for some worthy additions that didn't make it: Castlevania III, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Gradius, R-Type, and Shin Megami Tensei. So here we go!
Zelda II: One of the major issues with Zelda II is its terrible translation and direction, which made figuring out where to go and what to do nearly impossible. A guide easily remedies this and at that point, you learn the gameplay itself is pretty brutal as well since its way more action based than you think, and you have to deal with highly omniscient enemies who can mostly counter whatever you throw at them. Making matters worse is that anytime you lose all your lives, the game kicks you all the way back to Hyrule Castle, forcing you to backtrack to the place that kicked your ass to begin with. I still feel like I finished the game through more luck than skill.
Mega Man X6: In a lot of ways, this game is here for the wrong reasons. X6, in comparison to the rest of the franchise, is a broken game. The level design is brutal and requires some Gold medal worthy zen platforming to complete, as well as serious trial and error to counter some of the malicious enemy placements. Just when you think you have it down pat, the game throws in the Nightmare system to add penalties to the worlds that make them even harder. If you're a completionist, this game will probably give you ulcers as some of the item placements are just unfair with one armor piece being on a platform across a massive bottomless pit that requires a pixel perfect grab of the wall to reach, while some of the Reploids you need to rescue, regularly spawn next powerful enemies or death traps that will force you to redo the level over and over again. I wouldn't be surprised if this game served as inspiration for "I Wanna be the Guy".
Devil May Cry 3: I still consider this to be the toughest DMC game on its normal setting, let alone the more ridiculous difficulty settings. Tough enemies that can shave off huge chunks of health fought as regular fodder. Bosses that can two-shot you if you're not careful, and a myriad of styles and weapons you need to have a strong grasp of to survive gives this game a pretty steep learning curve. I remember finally beating Cerberus for the first time with my friends watching and we were all screaming for joy because none of us had taken him down yet a few weeks after the game had already been out. While I'm sure there are tougher action games out there, at the time DMC3 was herald as one of the toughest challenges. Course I still need to get around to playing Seikiro...
Demon's Souls: Ah yes, the game that launched the franchise. I find it amusing that having conquered all the other games, this is the game I still consider to be the toughest. What's surprising is that while the Souls series is more well known for its brutal bosses, Demon only has three that are truly challenging and all three can be easily cheesed with the right tools. I feel where Demon beats out Souls is for its brutal level design, nastier regular enemies, and more limited inventory. Not to mention the game's general clunkiness can lead to a few more deaths that would have likely never happened if the game played as smoothly as Souls did. I still stand by the fact that Blighttown and most other "poison peasant villages" are all smurfing apologies compared to the sheer horror that was the Valley of Defilement from Demon. The other issue here is that I feel like the Souls game are designed in a way to make any build optimal as long as you have the skill to back it up, whereas Demons feels designed to have at least one area that is going to punish you for your build and another that will be a breeze with it. This game also just doesn't give you as many good equipment options as later installments do. Boss Soul weapons are kind of garbage in this game with too many weaknesses. I find a lot of players often just stick to their starting gear and only use the crafting system to upgrade a few standard weapons to deal with real threats. I'm pretty sure I died more times in this game that the rest of the Souls series combined.
Ghouls and Goblins: Probably the king of old school difficult games. Two lousy HP, enemy design that keeps pressure on you, and level layouts designed to wrack your nerves; this game was designed to never give you a moment to rest. Of all the game's on this list, this is the only one I have never beaten. Hell, I've never even gotten far enough to get the BS plot twist of not getting a real ending because the game expects you to beat it all over again.
Recently Hades.
I'm slow to get use to games that you can't tackle face-first, and also don't like Rogue-lites/likes.
Oh gosh it's so good tho.