What’s the most egregious example of a difficulty spike in any video game you’ve played?

[Asian tech support]

Invoker and Meepo.

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

FTL

Smooth sailing, then final boss is a powerhouse with 6 phases that requires at least a superb build otherwise it will completely decimate you before you land a single hit.

To be fair the entire game is basically just you gearing up for the boss fight. Generally by the time you hit sector 6-7 you already have a decent idea if you have a chance at beating it or if you're fucked.

When I was a kid I had so much fucking trouble beating Yaridovich in Super Mario RPG. You fight that fucker right after Johnny, too, who also isn't the easiest and the sunken ship is full of disgustingly powerful monsters. He's one of the first bosses who can really fist your ass with his water blast spam, killing most of your party instantly if you're too low level or have bad items.

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

The end of Thomas's second chapter in Suikoden 3. Had to grind quite a bit.

 

[WULULULULU]

If you bought Darkest Dungeon, do not purchase the Crimson Court expansion on your first try. Even the first quest is ultra bullshit with a Crocodilian blocking the last quest item. And the quest is an Apprentice quest, the lowest level of the game.

 

[Big Brown Schlub]

In the first Nioh the real Tachibana Muneshige. It's true that he's a sidequest boss battle but he appears in the second area, is absolutely relentless and does tons of damage. It's a real wake up call especially after you fight the fake one in the main story and you won't face a boss as tough as him in quite a while. It took me about 20 tries to beat him the first time I played. He does teach you how to best beat human bosses though, due to his relentless attacks he often leaves himself out of ki, which allows you to ki break and then do a lethal move on him.

 

[Shining Wit]

If you know, you know

I'll end it thus!

Megaten is full of them, i'll go with Shadow Okumura in both versions of P5. In both he's a DPS check but Royal ups the ante by not letting you slog it out, you have to beat his minions in a turn or he just replaces them. A skill check that demands you're using Baton Pass right and thinking outside the box to get One More's

 

[Book Thief]

Touhou Kanjuden ~ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom. The game in general is a difficulty spike across the whole series, as ZUN took inspiration from I Wanna Be The Guy of all things. Hence why the game uses an optional "infinite lives checkpoint system" that, in the lore, is essentially just a potion that allows you to see into the future.

However, within a game that is a series-wide difficulty spike, contains yet another another difficulty spike. Say hello to "Clownpiece."

This little cunt will FUCK YOUR SHIT. And she's not even the final boss.

As for a non-Touhou example, since I've been talking about Freedom Planet 2 in another thread, it reminded me of how bullshit the final boss is. Since the new game has a "dodge" mechanic that's essentially just a "press this for I-frames" function, the devs decided to go full 2D Dark Souls crossed with Sans from Undertale for their final boss. Between a boss fight with six distinct phases that you must take from the top should you ever run out of lives, and an extensive bullet hell attack in the final one, it is downright fucking brutal.

Note that the player in this video makes this shit look easy. It is not.

 

[30+GameOvers]

This peak autism. Nigga dances with 5 ludiloco pokeymans and spams Health potions and rain to keep his team alive.

i literally had to grind the levels because i was too young and stupid for strategy.

As somebody who played GC game romhacks recently, his base game teams are laughably easy in comparison so consider yourself lucky. He gets much worse in Grand Colosseum and he has a Ho-Oh in NeXt Gen. Even in base game XD he has a shadow Dragonite once you capture every other shadow Pokemon in the game.

I think it's genius that he is the tanky boss fight of the game that will take forever since his battle music is probably the best in the entire franchise, or at the very least the most funky. It would be much worse if his music was shit or it grated on you after a loop or two.

 

[‘84 Fuckerbird Trans Man]

It's probably not the highest spike, but it's the one deeply ingrained in my memory. The jump in difficulty between the first and second level of the Lion King game is fucking ridiculous. The first level is your basic tutorial level to learn the controls and almost impossible to die unless you just run face first into enemies.and the second levels hits you with nothing but precise jumps over water(death pits) and several autorun segments that also have precise jumps with instadeath if you fuck up. It's made worse by the fact that it was purposely done to eat up the timer on rentals.

I’d argue many Disney games on the platform were artificially difficult, Mickey Mania, Quackshot and Pinocchio come to mind. Never managed to beat either of these back in the day.

 

[eDove]

The one for me was the Amygdala boss in the cursed chalice in Bloodbourne, really enjoying the game... Then a two day roadblock, had to become a god gamer to beat it. Admittedly once I did I steam rolled the rest of the game.

My character was so overleveled at that point that she didn't give me too much trouble. I imagine if I was playing in a normal range, it would've been a nightmare. The chalice dungeons' variants of bell maidens were the worst, though. The respawning spiders killed me more times than I can count.

 

[whatever I feel like]

The PS2 Grand Theft Auto games have some brutally difficult and/or buggy missions that come out of nowhere and then go right back to being relatively straight-forward again, with "Wrong Side of the Tracks" in San Andreas being a particularly infamous example.

ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS FOLLOW THE DAMN TRAIN, CJ.

Learn to fly, CJ!

Edit: My choice is Yoku's Island Express, a game which is so easy it practically plays itself right up until the snow area, where you are given multiple "swing around a pole and let go" at the right time paths that will send you falling if you mess them up. Very obnoxious and unfun portion of an otherwise braindead simple game.

 

[Kiwi & Cow]

In a game infamous for its horrendous level curves, need I say any more?

Of course, any seasoned player can deal with it. However, that first blind experience is a doozy.

It's literally the secret superboss of the game you whiny piss baby. This isn't anything new or anything worth complaining abt man.

In my gaming career nothing came close to this dude in SMT Nocturne. He is of course beatable but the spike is insane.
View attachment 5795527

Wait until this guy fights Madarame in the OG Persona 5 or Okumura in Royal.

As for a non-Touhou example, since I've been talking about Freedom Planet 2 in another thread, it reminded me of how bullshit the final boss is. Since the new game has a "dodge" mechanic that's essentially just a "press this for I-frames" function, the devs decided to go full 2D Dark Souls crossed with Sans from Undertale for their final boss. Between a boss fight with six distinct phases that you must take from the top should you ever run out of lives, and an extensive bullet hell attack in the final one, it is downright fucking brutal.

Note that the player in this video makes this shit look easy. It is not.

Freedom planet is wellknown for its dipshit hard bosses. In the first game Brevon was a huge fucking bitch.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I dunno if bosses really count as difficulty spikes, unless the game itself becomes noticeably harder afterwards. But if we're going with it then Tunic was absolutely shit in the final boss. Up until then it could be challenging, but it did give you leeway. The final boss is way too long to kill and the combat system is too janky to not fuck shit up. Unless I missed some secret that increases your damage by 200% then it's simply not fun to waste time on it.

 

[Balr0g]

The Driver tutorial

 

[Anon88]

Pathfinder Kingmaker has a mid game dungeon called Vordakai's Tomb. It's not that bad once you know what you're doing but for a first time player it's really hard out compared to everything else the game threw at you up until this point. It's filled with a ton of Zombie Cyclopes that have a high Armor Class and are just annoying to kill. It's also the only dungeon in the game to have the entrance close on you once you enter so you both have to do it in one shot and if you didn't bring a ton of rations you can't rest and are going to run out of spells very quickly. It's a huge struggle and to make matters worse your reward for beating the dungeon is that

Spoiler

your parties cleric betrays you and runs off with the item you came there to get.

 

[The Feline Solution]

In my gaming career nothing came close to this dude in SMT Nocturne. He is of course beatable but the spike is insane.
View attachment 5795527

I think this one is MILES worse than this one:

If you know, you know

SMT IV was my first mainline game and i played lots of spin-offs (DDS 1, Devil Survivor, the Persona games) before tackling Nocturne and i can't remember anything pushing in my shit as hard as the Matador fight did. Awesome game nonetheless.

The Driver tutorial

Talk about fucking bullshit and a wasted rental, i eventually got around to pirating the game and finally beating the tutorial and getting to play the real game.

 

[Asian tech support]

If you bought Darkest Dungeon, do not purchase the Crimson Court expansion on your first try. Even the first quest is ultra bullshit with a Crocodilian blocking the last quest item. And the quest is an Apprentice quest, the lowest level of the game.

Even if you bought it, just go into the modlist and deactivate it. You'll still be able to recruit the flagellant.

 

[Mike Matei's Penis]

That point in every Need for Speed campaign where the enemy just starts rubber banding, I remember it being really bad in Underground 1.

 

[30+GameOvers]

The PS2 Grand Theft Auto games have some brutally difficult and/or buggy missions that come out of nowhere and then go right back to being relatively straight-forward again, with "Wrong Side of the Tracks" in San Andreas being a particularly infamous example.

ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS FOLLOW THE DAMN TRAIN, CJ.

The RC helicopter mission in Vice City was also absolutely dogshit. That was mostly due to the controls, but fuck me did it filter me out what feels like a dozen times before.
San Andreas did so too, but that was mostly the Country chapter being absolutely boring, I wanted more Los Santos content.

 

[LOWERCASE LETTERS]

The one that always got up my ass was the mini plane mission. Fuck that one in particular.

Lol I cheesed it by just driving the plane around on the ground