I'm saddened that Xenogears and Legaia and Shining Force made it on this list lol

Finding games with purposeful and respectful difficulty is hard these days. Ninja Gaiden tried, and fairly well succeeded. Most difficulties these days are from horrible programming. One game that I hate recently due to its wonky programming is Castlevania X Chronicles on PSP. It plays as crap-tastic as the original Castlevania on NES

NES games were mostly all hard though...