History NintendoHard / RolePlayingGames

* ''MapleStory'' becomes this after the unlimited patch along with a lot of fake difficulty. Mid tier bosses and above such as Von Leon and Chaos Zakum have their HP jacked up to absurd levels (Von Leon already had 500m hp and can summon mobs to heal a hefty portion of its HP, and Czak's 8 arms alone currently have around 200-300m a piece AND the bodies total over 2b hp before the buffs. The former casts damage reflect seemingly randomly and can use it with a short cooldown (about 2 times in one minute if you're unlucky and can't crash/bind him) he also can cancel you're potential and make you weaker all while having you on a potion cool down (averted with a potion pot...) but you can die as much as you want fortunately. The latter has a deadlier combo of seduce (forces your character to move and or jump in one direction and disables potion use and cannot be dispelled by a bishop but only with hero's will which has a 360-600 second cooldown) get hit and not have any MP, and you're dead to even scratch damage. To make matters worse after the update, all bosses deal %hp damage rather than a static number effectively making warrior's defense and hp useless at the release of this update, they decided to release a class that solely uses HP as its mainstat...They also made Cygnus nigh unbeatable, instead of being able to go in with 10-18 of you're buddies, you can only go in with a normal party of 6. She has the above mentioned buffs along with a near map clearing OHKO attack, she can summon tons of boss minions whom also got buffed and she remains active unlike before, she has 64billion HP and you have 30 minutes to take her out. Good luck, oh and as a high tier boss she's got tons of defense. They reworked that system to become multiplicative rather than additive meaning your defense ignore becomes less significant as you can never ignore all defense. The only help you've got? You're now outdated gear and hyper skills. Though the damage cap was raised to 50m these bosses were designed around you already having most of the new gear options such as additional options. These bosses are this hard even for the hardcore spenders let alone the middle class and god forbid the poor...As if the bosses weren't enough, they also buffed up normal mobs used for grinding AND the weak boss summons which become auto aggro afterward.

** On the flip side, the game isn't as hard overall as Final Fantasy 4 DS. [=FF2=] is extremely unbalanced- While that means monsters in the first turn who can kill you with ease, it also means being able to power your team up to truly absurd levels using the poorly balanced level up system. It's more a test of endurance than it a mental challenge.

* ''MapleStory'' becomes this after the unlimited patch along with a lot of fake difficulty. Mid tier bosses and above such as Von Leon and Chaos Zakum have their HP jacked up to absurd levels (Von Leon already had 500m hp and can summon mobs to heal a hefty portion of its HP, and Czak's 8 arms alone currently have around 200-300m a piece AND the bodies total over 2b hp before the buffs. The former casts damage reflect seemingly randomly and can use it with a short cooldown (about 2 times in one minute if you're unlucky and can't crash/bind him) he also can cancel you're potential and make you weaker all while having you on a pot cool down (averted with a potion pot...) but you can die as much as you want fortunately. The latter has a deadlier combo of seduce (forces your character to move and or jump in one direction and disables pots and cannot be dispelled with a bishop but only with hero's will which has a 360-600 second cooldown) get hit and not have any MP, and you're dead to even scratch damage. To make matters worse after the update, all bosses deal %hp damage rather than a static number effectively making warrior's defense and hp useless at the release of this update, they decided to release a class that solely uses HP as its mainstat...They also made Cygnus nigh unbeatable, instead of being able to go in with 10-18 of you're buddies, you can only go in with a normal party of 6. She has the above mentioned buffs along with a near map clearing OHKO attack, can summon tons of boss minions whom also got buffed and remain active unlike before, she has 64billion HP and you have 30 minutes to take her out. Good luck, oh and as a high tier boss she's got tons of defense they reworked that to become multiplicative meaning your defense ignore becomes less significant. The only help you've got? You're now outdated gear and hyper skills. Though the damage cap was raised to 50m these bosses were designed around you already having most of the new gear. These bosses are this hard even for the hardcore spenders let alone the middle class and god forbid the poor...As if the bosses weren't enough, they also buffed up normal mobs used for grinding AND the weak boss summons which become auto aggro afterward.

* ''MapleStory'' becomes this after the unlimited patch along with a lot of fake difficulty. Mid tier bosses and above such as Von Leon and Chaos Zakum have their HP jacked up to absurd levels (Von Leon already had 500m hp and can summon mobs to heal a hefty portion of its HP, and Czak's 8 arms alone currently have around 200-300m a piece AND the bodies total over 2b hp before the buffs. The former casts damage reflect seemingly randomly and can use it with a short cooldown (about 2 times in one minute if you're unlucky and can't crash/bind him) he also can cancel you're potential and make you weaker all while having you on a pot cool down (averted with a potion pot...) but you can die as much as you want fortunately. The latter has a deadlier combo of seduce (forces your character to move and or jump in one direction and disables pots and cannot be dispelled with a bishop but only with hero's will which has a 360-600 second cooldown) get hit and not have any MP, and you're dead to even scratch damage. To make matters worse after the update, all bosses deal %hp damage rather than a static number effectively making warrior's defense and hp useless at the release of this update, they decided to release a class that solely uses HP as its mainstat...They also made Cygnus nigh unbeatable, instead of being able to go in with 10-18 of you're buddies, you can only go in with a normal party of 6. She has the above mentioned buffs along with a near map clearing OHKO attack, can summon tons of boss minions whom also got buffed and remain active unlike before, she has 64billion HP and you have 30 minutes to take her out. Good luck, oh and as a high tier boss she's got tons of defense they reworked that to become multiplicative meaning your defense ignore becomes less significant. The only help you've got? You're now outdated gear and hyper skills. Though the damage cap was raised to 50m these bosses were designed around you already having most of the new gear. These bosses are this hard even for the hardcore spenders let alone the middle class and god forbid the poor...Even one of the easiest bosses Hilla got buffed up to become hard.

* ''VideoGame/EarthboundZero'' is often considered the most difficult of the series. A very high encounter rate that plagues you through out the game even if you're not trying to level grind, but you will have to a lot thanks to the [[DifficultySpike difficulty spike]] found in later areas in which almost everything is a [[DemonicSpider demonic spider.]] WordOfGod confirms that the final area is highly unbalanced due to wanting the game finished soon.

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIII'' was already difficult on the Famicom, thanks partially to a lack of save points, justified by hardware limits. Then it was re-released on the DS, and rather than add save points, the best jobs were nerfed, and the bosses were granted double turns. You'll have to [[ForcedLevelGrinding Grind, Grind, Grind]] if you ever hope to finish it.forced to beat the dungeon and its five bosses in one go, with death meaning having to do it all over again from beginning), and [[ThatOneBoss Garuda]].

** Both a Touhou fangame and tribute to Wizardry-style [=CRPGs=], '''TouhouLabyrinth'' may not have permadeath, but it does feature absolutely unforgiving enemies. It's common for bosses to tear you apart the first few times you attempt to fight them, and on later levels of the labyrinth, even normal enemies will be absolutely hellish to fight. As if that's not bad enough, the game's superbosses will rip you to shreds unless you're prepared to level grind like crazy.

* MassEffect3 has just had the Platinum difficulty added to multiplayer. The good news. No more GrenadeSpam. The bad news is they don't need it. Multiple [[ThatOneBoss Banshee]]\Brute Atlas\[[DemonicSpiders Phantom]] Prime\[[EliteMooks Hunter Pyro]] combos in the first round, of eleven.

* ''TheImmortal''. It's an isometric adventure game rather than a platformer, but just like in ''Another World'', you can and ''will'' die a lot - to the extent that you can die in ''the very first room'' if you stand on one particular spot just a few seconds too long. To put it simply: the title? It refers to [[spoiler:the BigBad]] - ''not to you''.
** There's something written on that amulet you picked up. Do you want to read it? ''You just blew up.''
** One of the puzzles ''requires'' you to drink poison in order to move further ahead. Better find that antidote in the next level quickly enough...
** Did you miss the Fire Resistance spell? The Magnetic Hands spell? The Stone Form spell? Sorry, if you're missing even a ''single'' one, the dragon at the end cannot be defeated and the game becomes {{Unwinnable}}. Time to restart...
** ElectronicArts sold a promotional T-shirt at the game's release which read "It's not when, it's how." The rest of the shirt was covered with pictures of human skulls in various states of damage with labels like "Crushed", "Fried", "Impaled", "Squid-bait"...

** Adding to the frustration is that later dungeons are populated by creatures that can cast STONE and DEATH on your entire party, spells for which there's no way to defend yourself against until you get some items from the very last two dungeons. One bad roll of the dice and your entire party is wiped out, and you have to start again from the beginning.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIII'' was already difficult on the Famicom, thanks partially to a lack of save points, justified by hardware limits. Then it was re-released on the DS, and rather than add save points, the best jobs were nerfed, and the bosses were granted double turns. You'll have to [[ForcedLevelGrinding Grind, Grind, Grind]] if you ever hope to finish it.
** It gets easier in one respect in that there can be only three enemies on the screen at once, rather than eight, meaning that the splitting enemies are less of a threat and can be killed easily with the Dark Knight's Darkness move. On the other hand, the enemies that traveled alone to begin with got harder as a result. The final boss becomes more difficult, as it uses several different kinds of attacks, such as status ailments, rather than spamming [[KamehameHadoken FlareWave]], which was powerful but possible to heal through.
** Actually a lot of things make Final Fantasy III probably the hardest in the series, such as dungeons where you are forced to use Mini on your entire party (thus dropping your attack and defense to zero), Phoenix Downs being unpurchaseable and undroppable, useless jobs that you are forced to use to progress through certain parts of the game, the splitting enemies, black magic becoming obsolete near the end of the game, the final dungeon being a point of no return (once you face the BigBad you cannot return to save and restock, you are forced to beat the dungeon and its five bosses in one go, with death meaning having to do it all over again from beginning), and [[ThatOneBoss Garuda]].

* The first few DragonQuest games certainly qualify although all the games in that series are harder than average. Unless you're using an Emulator, you are going to get destroyed. It doesn't matter how good you are at the game, enemies curb-stomp you. Oh, and II? Hey, let's make a dungeon that's impossible to get through unless you use {{trial and error gameplay}}, or a guide! Did I mention that your spellcasters can't survive being glanced at at by anything, and you're rarely told anything? Puzzles are of the Simon's Quest type, like "use X item at Y tile on the world map to reveal a cave" or "search a random tile for a vital item". Or that the final boss can fully heal himself whenever he feels like it?
** Baboons!
** Gold Batboons!
*** Battles against them are not just Nintendo Hard, they're flat out Unwinnable sometimes. They will randomly use Sacrifice which ''instantly results in a GameOver''.
** Oh, and in III, the major bosses get invisible health regeneration that you can't see. Kind, ain't it?
*** This actually happens with some REGULAR enemies in III, and the major bosses in IV. And the further along the boss is, the more HP they restore per turn. However, this isn't always overkill, so much as a way of artificially increasing a boss's HP to a reasonable level when the game limit is 1024 HP. For example, some of the final bosses in IV have 1024 HP...but so does a boss much earlier in the game, and even one of the regular enemies very late in the game. The only way to make the final boss seem "bigger" (aside from stronger attacks and defense) is to have it automatically heal every turn. This does, however, make challenge quests much harder, as sometimes one character could do five times the total damage a boss can take, but never rack up actual gains, because it's not more than the boss's average per turn healing.

** "Nearly" nothing. The cleric learns a spell, Elixir, which restores all his HP and MP with every cast, totally refreshing himself. He learns it about level 40. This means that after level 40, he's ''[[GameBreaker fucking immortal]]''. If he steals one of the macguffins at this point, you're boned.

** Oh, no. The grenade spam returned in full force with the release of the Retaliation DLC. Now the Geth have a drone whose sole purpose is to drop multiple grenades repeatedly to fish you out of cover. If that was not enough, the new Collector species has Abominations. If those unaware, think zombies lit on fire that haul ass and explode in your face.

-->"Final Fantasy II will do everything in its power to beat you down. It is a pair of simultaneous battles on two separate planes. The first is the fictional struggle of Frioniel and the rebel forces against the might of the Paramekian Empire. The second is the very real battle between you, the player, and Final Fantasy II, in which the game attempts to foil your efforts and demoralize you from ever playing again. As you try to beat Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy II tries to beat you."
-->"If your will somehow remains unbroken at this point and the game is still turned on, Final Fantasy II will begin administering electrical shocks through the controller."

* ''[[Disgaea3AbsenceOfJustice Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice]]''. Oh boy. You're gonna need to level up '''a lot''' in order to get further into the game, or to even get past Chapter 2! Thank god the other Disgaea games aren't as hard as this one...

** Actually a lot of things make Final Fantasy III probably the hardest in the series, such as dungeons where you are forced to use Mini on your entire party (thus dropping your defense to zero), PhoenixDowns being unpurchaseable and undroppable, useless jobs that you are forced to use to progress through certain parts of the game, the splitting enemies, black magic becoming obsolete near the end of the game, the final dungeon being a point of no return (once you face the BigBad you cannot return to save and restock, you are forced to beat the dungeon and its five bosses in one go, with death meaning having to do it all over again from beginning), and [[ThatOneBoss Garuda]].

* Arguably, ''EverQuest''. Designed to allow you to play by yourself until level 5 to 10 or so, after that, the game becomes rapidly harder to play alone until it becomes outright impossible for all but some specific character classes that can avoid direct combat. Some choice Nintendo Hard decisions:

** This is misleading; despite the increase in monster health, resistance and damage, it arguably gets easier after the second playthrough until the character's level plateaus out due to insane soul requirements to level up. This is because a competent player knows every enemy monster to a t, has every spell and useful weapon maxed out, and thus rarely ever gets hit, while quickly and efficiently destroying the opposition. The hardest playthrough is arguably the second, until that 40th+ playthough where, even with maxed endurance, heavy armor, and a shield spell, every meaningful adversary one shots you.

* DigimonWorld3 for PSX was released by 2003 but had several quirks one would expect to see in the first-era [=RPGs=]. The enemy set changes brutally from one area to another, and if an incautious player take the wrong turn he may end fighting enemies that can defeat your whole team without getting damaged. Status effects are outright broken and bosses tend to abuse them, while you only get to learn such skills near the endgame. Every now and then you're forced to fight against a GiantSpaceFleaFromNowhere who is very powerful (woe you if you show up without full health), and some sections of the game are just [[TrialAndErrorGameplay impractical]] to figure out without a guide, to say nothing about special digivolutions that require [[GuideDangIt specific stat training and digivolution levels]].

** Both a Touhou fangame and tribute to Wizardry-style [=CRPGs=], [[http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Labyrinth_of_Touhou Labyrinth of Touhou]] may not have permadeath, but it does feature absolutely unforgiving enemies. It's common for bosses to tear you apart the first few times you attempt to fight them, and on later levels of the labyrinth, even normal enemies will be absolutely hellish to fight. As if that's not bad enough, the game's superbosses will rip you to shreds unless you're prepared to level grind like crazy.

* ''OdinSphere''. The game pretty much flat-out gives you infinite lives straight off the bat, and take our word when we say you'll ''need'' them. Almost every boss -- and a fair few {{sub boss}}es -- are ThatOneBoss, and most four- and five-star levels are full of swarms of GoddamnedBats.
** ''OdinSphere'' is made exponentially more difficult by the sheer loving detail put into the animation - which means you'll spend a good three seconds doing ''anything'', from simple attacks to eating health items. Meanwhile you ''will'' be swarmed by enemies. Your character is knocked back by enemy attacks. Enemy characters are not, and will continue to attack ''through'' your attacks. Several levels also require a potion to prevent an ''automatic'' ongoing status ailment. The often stuttery frame rate will also prevent your actions from registering on a regular basis. Hello, FakeDifficulty.
*** This will be most apparent in your first(chronologically, last) fight against Odette. Being a massive MookMaker means that she causes so much lag it's virtually impossible to be near her except for a few swoop attacks or magic potions in between running to the other side of the map to heal yourself without sitting through half a minute of the heal animation being canceled by a [[GoddamnBats Goddamn Bat]] while she charges up her next attack. This of course, gives you the disadvantage of having NO FUCKING CLUE what attack she plans on using next until you're up close to her again.

* MassEffect3 has just had the Platinum difficulty added to multiplayer. The good news. No more GrenadeSpam. The bad news is they don't need it. Multiple [[ThatOneBoss Banshee]]\Brute Atlas\[[DemonicSpiders Banshee]] Prime\[[EliteMooks Hunter]] combos in the first round, of eleven.

* MassEffect3 has just had the Platinum difficulty added to multiplayer. The good news. No more GrenadeSpam. Multiple [[ThatOneEnemy Banshee]]\Brute Atlas\[[DemonicSpiders Banshee]] Prime\EliteMooks Hunter]] combos in the first round, of eleven.

* NintendoHard is the default difficulty for any ShinMegamiTensei game. Rampant abuse of OneHitKill spells in games where [[WeCannotGoOnWithoutYou you only need to use your main character to game over]], a spell naming system that practically requires the player to learn a second language to know what everything does (fortunately, the naming's fairly consistent, so once you learn the language in one game you won't have as much trouble in other games,) and the frequent use of a "characters get extra turns for exploiting weakness" mechanic which can frequently lead to the player either mopping the floor with a tough encounter or the easiest encounter annihilating an entire party before they even get a chance to move.

* NintendoHard is the default difficulty for any ShinMegamiTensei game.

* In ''ResonanceOfFate'', battles can be absolutely brutal because leveling up actually increases the amount of Hero Gauge points lost when taking Scratch Damage (it goes up every 1000 HP). The Hero Gauge is basically what keeps your party alive: you can use it for super attacks or refilling HP, but if it empties, your party becomes basically useless. Considering that the Hero Gauge increases are limited by the story, and people usually think that leveling up HP in [=RPG=]s is a good thing, the pacing is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention that the customization for weapons (the real way to get stronger) is also limited by the story. Oh, and the whole party goes down if one character dies. Oh, and retrying after a Game Over costs an increasing amount of in-game currency. And this is just Normal Mode--the game has seven harder difficulties to tackle afterwards!