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7->''"Remember [[VideoGame/BanjoTooie Canary Mary]]? Did you have fun racing her? How I laughed when I was setting up those levels. I'm still laughing!"''
8-->-- '''The Lord of Games''', ''VideoGame/BanjoKazooieNutsAndBolts''
9
10An optional, nonessential, usually out-of-the-way part of a video game that is extremely difficult and/or time consuming to complete, yet is nonetheless required for [[HundredPercentCompletion 100% completion]]. These are generally far more difficult than anything else in the game and, in extreme cases, may be classified as nigh impossible.
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12Casual players do not even bother with this. Most serious players of the game attempt to do this, fail miserably, give up and move on. Only the truly dedicated [[HundredPercentCompletion 100% completionists]] remain, but even many of them fail and inevitably accept defeat. In the end, many players wind up hopelessly stuck at 99%, and give up before ever reaching the coveted 100% completion. Why? They've been derailed by that one sidequest.
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14Usually considered infamous within the game's fanbase, the game's message boards are filled with posters either asking for help on how to beat it, or, more likely, angrily ranting about it.
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16Note that, despite the name, this isn't necessarily a sidequest in the [[RolePlayingGame RPG]] vein. This commonly shows up in other genres, including {{first person shooter}}s and {{sports game}}s, as that one challenge. Or it could be a BrutalBonusLevel in of itself.
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18This is sometimes an {{unexpected gameplay change}} [[MiniGame minigame]], {{luck based mission}}, or {{timed mission}}, and may be all three. Particularly brutal games may contain two or three of these kind of sidequests. If the sidequest cannot be solved legitimately without referring to a third-party source, see GuideDangIt.
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20See also ThatOneLevel, ThatOneBoss, ThatOneAchievement, LastLousyPoint.
21
22''Note that {{self imposed challenge}}s do not count as examples. This is a part of the actual game that is required for 100% completion''. Also keep in mind that TV Tropes is ''not'' WebSite/{{Game FAQs}}. Please refrain from going into Administrivia/WalkthroughMode if possible.
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24----
25!!Examples:
26[[index]]
27* ''ThatOneSidequest/AnimalCrossingNewHorizons''
28* ''ThatOneSidequest/Borderlands2''
29* ''ThatOneSidequest/TheBindingOfIsaac''
30* ''ThatOneSidequest/TheElderScrolls''
31* ''ThatOneSidequest/EntryPointRoblox''
32* ''ThatOneSidequest/FinalFantasy''
33** ''ThatOneSidequest/FinalFantasyXIV''
34* ''ThatOneSidequest/FireEmblemHeroes''
35* ''ThatOneSidequest/GenshinImpact''
36* ''ThatOneSidequest/KirbyAndTheForgottenLand''
37* ''ThatOneSidequest/TheLegendOfZelda''
38* ''ThatOneSidequest/{{Paladins}}''
39* ''ThatOneSidequest/TalesSeries''
40* ''ThatOneSidequest/{{Warframe}}''
41* ''ThatOneSidequest/XenobladeChronicles2''
42[[/index]]
43
44[[foldercontrol]]
45
46[[folder:Action Adventure]]
47* In ''VideoGame/{{Alundra}}'', there's the Gilded Falcons quest. You have to find all 50 of them throughout the game, and most of them are {{permanently missable|Content}} if you're not careful, especially since there's one in each dungeon and most dungeons are one time visits. One of them even has a ''time limit'' before it self-destructs -- if you don't beat all the enemies quickly, you'll be tossed from the dungeon before you can pick it up (FYI, it's the wounded miner dream).
48* The Looter's Caverns in ''VideoGame/BeyondGoodAndEvil'' have caused more than one player to attack their TV screens in a fit of rage. They require you to maneuver the not-very-manueverable hovercraft through a maze of twisty passages lined with mines, [[LaserHallway lasers]], and obstacles, all the while "racing" against the doors, which close on a timer -- and some of which are almost impossible to get through in time without using [[NitroBoost speed boosts]]. If steering into a bomb-lined wall twenty times doesn't drive you to madness, hearing your sidekick [[AnnoyingVideoGameHelper shout the same things over and over again]] will.
49* The Infinite Battery quest in ''VideoGame/{{Boktai}}'' is so prohibitively difficult that odds are not a single gamer has ever earned it via legitimate means. To get it you must first beat the game and earn the Dark Emblem, then fully restore the Solar Tree to earn the Sol Emblem (this requires ''hours'' of grinding sunlight to earn 1500 sol). Then they must enter the Azure Sky Tower to earn an elemental emblem (you get one of four at random), then earn the other three through "Emblem Resonance", a process which involves [[SocializationBonus other players and a link cable who also happen to be taking on this sidequest]]. Once you have all six of these emblems you earn the Luna Emblem and can finally take on the Azure Sky Tower, which you must complete over and over and over again, each time adding a few extra floors to the tower (At first it's only 12 floors), until you've built it up to 99 floors -- this will take hours upon hours, you can't save during a run (not even to take a break), each floor is a randomly-generated affair riddled with traps and enemies that are much more powerful than enemies found elsewhere. ''Then'' you must face and defeat the Silvery White Knight, a savagely difficult {{Superboss}}, to finally earn the battery. As one final kick in the rump, by the time you're even able to attempt this sidequest, let alone strong and skilled enough to beat it, there is [[BraggingRightsReward absolutely nothing left to do in the game]].
50* ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaOrderOfEcclesia'':
51** "Mandrake Is The Best Medicine" wherein you have to get Mandrake Root. Doesn't sound so hard, but it's dropped by Mandragoras, which only appear in one level, and only in the areas of that level that take the longest time to reach from the starting points, and which explode without dropping anything if you don't kill them quickly enough? Not only that, but the enemies in this particular level are extremely annoying. So, yeah.
52** A late-game mission that requires you to collect an Alexandrite. The only place it's found is as a 1/5 drop chance at the end of a fairly difficult bonus dungeon, and if you get one of the other 4 drops instead, you have to do the whole dungeon over again.
53** Or the one sidequest Abram hands out that requires you to get some Merman Meat? There's just one little catch: Mermen don't drop Merman Meat -- Loreleis do. And they don't do it very often. This can be blamed on a translation error -- the original Japanese version had a gender-neutral name for the item instead, although who knows why they didn't simply translate it as "Mermaid Meat"...
54* ''VideoGame/EpicMickey'' has a fair share of these, but the one that stands out the most is the quest to rescue ''all'' of the gremlins in the game, considering that some of them can be [[PermanentlyMissableContent easily missed and lost]] since you can only visit most places once, and there's an autosave feature and no SaveScumming in this game (as the developers didn't want you to go back on your choices) to help you out, if you make a mistake and don't realize it until it's too late.
55* ''VideoGame/HandOfFate'': Arm Wrestling. Roll 3d6 to determine your strength, you can reroll any dice once, and you can even cheat with the right items. Sounds simple, right? Well, try winning ''five times in a row'', with the challenge modifier going all the way to ''18''. You also have to find the card individually during each adventure, so you could slog through a quest and get all the gambling items just in time to reach the fifth round of the contest, only to screw up at the end and get bumped back to the beginning of the sidequest!
56* ''VideoGame/HollowKnight'':
57** The quest for delivering the Delicate Flower to the grave of the Grey Mourner's lover requires you to travel from the Resting Grounds to the Queen's Garden ''on foot'' (taking the tram is acceptable, but no using the Stagway or the Dream Gate). And if you take ''any'' damage, you have to start all over again (and put up with the Mourner scolding you for damaging their precious gift). And you have to do this quest to get one of the Mask Shards and achieve OneHundredPercentCompletion.
58** The path to one Vessel Fragment in Deepnest involves going all the way down one very long room whose traversal requires {{Wall Jump}}ing around SpikesOfDoom while also {{Goomba Springboard}}ing off the spiked back of a [[InvincibleMinorMinion Garpede]] with only more spikes below it, which means each mistake is likely to cost two hits. Some players have struggled long and hard with this jumping puzzle before realizing it's merely a side passage, since Deepnest is such a dark and confusing maze.
59* Anyone who's played ''VideoGame/IllusionOfGaia'' remembers gathering Red Gems. They range from easy to GuideDangIt, but that ''one''. The third red gem occurs only in your home town, so once you leave it's lost, but that's not the annoying part. To get it, you have to wait for the fisherman on the docks to have caught a bucket, which you examine to get the gem. You can only change how he is by running inside and then back outside to check on him. ''And, on top of all that'', [[RandomlyDrops there's a one-in-God only knows chance of him actually having got the bucket.]] Step One: Eject cartridge. Step Two: Ball-peen hammer.
60* ''VideoGame/LaMulana'' has the [[HeartContainer life jewel]] in the Dimensional Corridor. If you don't know what you're doing, you'll easily [[PermanentlyMissableContent miss it for the rest of the game]]. If you know what you're doing but have trouble getting it right, you'll hate waiting to recharge a certain item that needs to be used at an exact moment to make a tricky jumping puzzle possible. Damage boosting can prevent it from being lost, but messing up still makes it even more frustrating to get than it already is.
61* ''Franchise/{{Metroid}}'' games have quite a bit of these on their paths to HundredPercentCompletion.
62** ''VideoGame/MetroidZeroMission'' and ''VideoGame/MetroidFusion'' in particular have rather well-hidden items that can be a pain to get to. The one [[EmergencyEnergyTank Energy Tank]] in ''Zero Mission'', just outside Robot Ridley's lair, will have you ripping your hair out. Guaranteed.
63*** ''Zero Mission'' may well be the most annoying game to attain OneHundredPercentCompletion in. Aside from some items only being attainable after getting the fully powered suit (which you get when you're five minutes away from the final boss, thus [[LastLousyPoint killing the pace as you backtrack across the entire map just to get them]]), a noticeable amount of them make you use the Shinespark (and building one up is annoying and tedious thanks to having to run uninterrupted for around five seconds, with nary a run button to speed things up), often requiring you to memorize multiple rooms down to the last pixel so you can maintain a Shinespark between one place and another far removed from it. More often than not, one slip-up means you have to start the whole room again.
64*** ''Fusion'' by contrast is a lot more forgiving, ''and'' its EndgamePlus helpfully tells you which sectors still have uncollected items. It nonetheless has some items that require a chain of Shinesparks, their difficulty ''almost'' reaching ''Zero Mission''[='s=] level, notably the missile accessible from Zazabi's room.
65*** ''VideoGame/MetroidDread'' sees the return of the Shinespark and thus the return of the Shinespark puzzles. While not as nasty as ''Zero Mission''[='s=], the puzzles in ''Dread'' still demand a lot of precision and reaction time
66** ''VideoGame/SuperMetroid'' also has its fair share. '''The items are in the walls'''. And who would have thought that one pipe in Brinstar, that looked like every single [[MookMaker enemy spawn tube]], would lead you right to that Missile Tank? ''Super'' at least gives you the X-Ray Scope, which can see hidden passages and breakable blocks in the walls. You still have to scan everywhere, but it's much easier than bombing every inch of the game to reveal the blocks.
67** The only game in the series that relents is ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime3Corruption'', thanks to a hidden secret that unveils the location of all powerups and expansions. ''Getting'' some of those items (like the infamous second Energy Cell in Bryyo) is still a problem, as is getting some of the credits and vouchers (i.e. not being touched by Ridley while crossing a section of Norion in Morph Ball form, or helping all 12 GF troopers survive during the Federation assault in Pirate Homeworld).
68** ''VideoGame/MetroidSamusReturns'' has some of its power-ups hidden behind the use of the "Spiderspark" move, which has you using a power bomb while in Spider Ball mode to blast you in a straight line away from the surface you're attached to. [[GuideDangIt The game never even hints that this is something you're capable of doing]], though it does provide a place where you ''might'' accidentally learn it.
69* ''VideoGame/{{Okami}}'':
70** In order to get all the stray beads, you have to defeat the final blockhead by painting on his weak spots. They only appear for less than a second, you have to remember the exact order. If you fail, boulders drop from the ceiling, and you have to run away from it before you can do it again. It's worth noting that this particular blockhead has ''eight'' weak points. The average human being can retain ''seven'' items in short-term memory at a time.
71** The Black Devil Gates: Fighting ten very long and difficult battles in a row, without saving or leaving the cave in between fights. It doesn't help that the enemies are powered up, many of the hard enemies such as Red and Blue Ogres and Bull Chargers appear three at a time, and the one in Kamui requires you to go through six extremely long battles with about 50 enemies per battle, which takes about an hour.
72** There's also the races for the Gimmick Gear and the fishing minigame to get the Marlin.
73** The race with Kai which requires you to memorize all of the shortcuts on a fairly long track and utilizes RubberBandAI.
74** That beehive. only worth 20 praise, it requires you to roll one round object from in water from at least the middle of Agata Forest to the bear at the top beginning. Unlike the acorn and cabbage that are also part of the sidequest, the beehive is so jittery that it will slide backwards at even the slightest incline, even if you try to brace it by a rock. It also seems to be magnetically drawn to the cliff that takes up the last half of the challenge, and if it falls off, you have to start all over again.
75** Drawing designs for Mr. Chic. It's a task that sounds simple enough, but is made needlessly difficult thanks to the game being notoriously finicky about what shapes it'll accept. What's more, for the majority of the shapes (star, heart, and v) the game [[GuideDangIt neglects to tell you that you that it has be drawn using only one line]] (i.e. not lifting the Celestial Brush off the paper) with your only clue to this coming from paying attention to the thickness of the brushstrokes in a girl's thought bubble. [[OneHundredPercentCompletion And all for a stray bead!]]
76* ''VideoGame/Onimusha3DemonSiege'' has an optional training mode that you unlock along the way. The training sessions are in no way easy, but they are completely doable, at least until you reach Critical training. It requires either almost superhuman reflexes or huge amounts of dumb luck to get through, especially in the PC port. Passing it gets you a neat item and unlocks the good ending.
77* Trying to get all the coins in ''WesternAnimation/WallaceAndGromit -- Project Zoo''? If you have, then the mere mention of the Lava World bonus stage will make you curl up in the fetal position and whimper. [[VideoGame/DonkeyKong Gromit has to climb a series of platforms while avoiding rolling barrels thrown by a gorilla.]] What's the problem? Due to spectacularly bad testing the Platform/NintendoGameCube version of the game contains a glitch where 99% of the barrels are invisible to the player. Barrels that result in instant death if touched. Oh, and did we mention the time limit? Getting the coins from this level requires truly psychic guesswork and timing, and the reward? Short clips from "WesternAnimation/TheWrongTrousers" and one preview from the 'Cracking Contraptions' series.
78[[/folder]]
79
80[[folder:Action Game]]
81* ''VideoGame/Bayonetta2'' has the Witch Trials, divided in to five different chapters of increasing difficulty. The first one is almost a walk in the park for anyone familiar enough with the game's mechanics, but they escalate ''fast,'' and until the fifth one each is longer than the last. The in-game difficulty is also hard-set for each one: Normal/Second Climax for the first, Hard/Third Climax for the second through third, and ''Infinite'' Climax for the fifth. By the fifth and final one, you're pitted against just about every EliteMook the game can have, with lightning-fast attacks that deal enormous amounts of damage, and even several boss fights. And items are disabled, although each wave gives the player a free health pickup, with Witch Trial V giving out four.
82* The Secret Missions in ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry'' can be really annoying.
83** The first ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry1'' has the mission "The Three Beasts" in which you have one attempt (unless you reset the entire mission) to kill three Shadows, the game's resident GoddamnBats. Your health is not the highest it can be and you're still developing your abilities. By contrast, the Shadows are coordinating their attacks and hitting like trucks.
84** In ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry3DantesAwakening'', there's "Untouchable", where you must kill 4 [[GoddamnBats Enigmas]] without taking damage, and "On Pins and Needles", where you must pass through an enormous corridor with spikes covering 3/4 of the said corridor advancing in an extreme speed towards you in different patterns to get the Blue Orb.
85** ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry4'' has LOTS of Secret Missions like this, but the two that really take this trope to the extreme are "Unbreakable", where you must kill three [[GoddamnBats Assaults]] and three [[DemonicSpiders Chimera Assaults]] without taking damage and without being captured by a [[GoddamnBats Fault]], and "Royal Blocker", where you must execute a Royal Block five times in a row against two Mephistos, so if you're hit or mess up the timing of the Block anytime during the sequence, you must restart it all over again. "Free Running" and "Steelplechase" have the potential to become this if you wish to complete them without "tricks", but if you don't care about completing them "cleanly", then they're not really all that difficult.
86* VideoGame/LEGOAdaptationGame:
87** The tractor race in ''VideoGame/LEGOIndianaJones 2'' is a major pain due to just how ''slow'' the thing is, with any potential mess-up costing you precious seconds to reach the next pass.
88** Any of the aerial races in ''LEGO Marvel Super Heroes'', because the flying controls can take some time to getting use to. And the ground races aren't much better because there's randomly generated traffic. Have fun trying to get around a truck or a city bus while trying to race.
89** Unlocking Saruman in ''VideoGame/LegoTheLordOfTheRings''. You have to use [[PlotTailoredToTheParty at least five character abilities]] to climb to the top of Isengard on very tiny platforms. And have 500,000 Lego studs (though this is the easy part if you wait to go unlock him until later in the game when you have some earning boosts.)
90** ''VideoGame/LEGOStarWars'': The Complete Saga has a pretty crazy achievement. You have to go through the whole Cloud City / Darth Vader boss fight level, while having the stormtrooper helmet on your head. This means you have to go through the level without ever being hit or ever falling down one of the many pits, or when you have to change to R2-D2 to open doors, hope that the NPC that takes control over your helmeted character doesn't change to another figure. If you try this really on the normal way you are probably working on it for all eternity. Though the achievement is also unlocked if you take on the helmet and then just exit the level, saving the found amount of money, because you technically finished the level with the helmet.
91* ''VideoGame/MirrorsEdge'' has its hair-pullingly difficult Time Trials, which have quite a few Achievements linked to them in the console versions. Playground 3 is generally considered the hardest Trial in the base game. Then there's the Chapter Speedruns, the hardest of which is probably Jacknife. And good luck with the Pure Time Trials DLC, especially Actino.
92* ''VideoGame/{{Skylanders}}'':
93** In the first two games, there was a sidemode called Heroic Challenges, where each Skylander unlocked their own sidequest and can try out any of the others and be rewarded with stat boosters. Most of them are pretty straight forward, but some are even noted by the games themselves to be difficult, and in ''[[VideoGame/SkylandersSpyrosAdventure Spyro's Adventure]]'', you ''need'' to complete every single one with at least one Skylander to reach OneHundredPercentCompletion. The challenge on these varies depending on the Skylander you're using, but as a majority of these harder challenges has an extra mission of not destroying things surronding what you need to destroy, melee-oriented Skylanders with large hitboxes are at an disadvantage, so if you want to complete them to earn [[ThatOneAchievement the achievement]] mentioned above, you're gonna have to rely on a Skylander whose attacks have a small hitbox, and even then, you're not guaranteed to have an easy time. The difficult challenges are as followed:
94*** Drobot's challenge "Save the Purple Chompies" requires the player to defeat 55 [[TheGoomba green Chompies]] while avoiding the purple Chompies. Kill one and you get a warning, kill one more and the challenge is over. The problem is, ''every'' Chompy encountered will be rushing towards you, including the purple ones, meaning it'll be a nightmare to avoid killing them.
95*** Double Trouble's "You Break it, You Buy it!" is in a similar boat. All troll enemies on the map must be defeated while avoiding breaking the vaces and paintings scattered throughout the level. Breaking vaces will remove five seconds from the tight time limit, but breaking two paintings will end the challenge, just like what happens in Drobot's challenge.
96*** Stealth Elf's challenge "Minefield Mishap" is a walk through a mace filled with mines that only spawn if the Skylander walks close enough, meaning that they either have to walk slowly and risk having the timer running out or charge ahead and have fast reflexes to avoid the mines when the spawn or else have their HP eaten up. Good luck!
97*** Zap's "Break the Cats" is another challenge that requires breaking things without breaking stuff that surronds them, in this case cat statues having to be destroyed while avoiding the vases. Unlike Drobot and Double Trouble's challenges, breaking more than one vase won't end in a failure, but it will reduce the timer, so attacking recklessly will punish you. And to make things worse, every time you break a vase, you have to listen to Cali repeating the same voice lines over and over again.
98** ''VideoGame/SkylandersTrapTeam'': Brawl and Chain's villain quest "Fairy Night Lights". It requires you to play as the villain Brawl and Chain and deliver fairy light to seven houses in under ten minutes. Sounds simple on paper, but the problem is that Brawl and Chain moves very slowly and doesn't have any way of moving faster. And then you have the layout of the level, which takes place in a ruin maze. Not only can you find yourself lost when looking for the houses, but after every time you deliver a light, you have to return to the starting point to pick up a new one, making it easy for you to lose your way.
99* ''VideoGame/TheWonderful101'': The Epilogue's Kahkoo-Regah mission is to win a NoDamageRun in [[UnexpectedGameplayChange robot-boxing.]] This is hard enough on the Normal difficulty, but on Hard you fight against the ''much'' tougher of the two robot battles, where his tells go by much quicker and some of them look similar to another. In 101% Hard, the game mercifully gives you the easier of the two mechas, except you can only actually drain its health bar by using KO Punches. This means that you have to endure doding attacks for a far longer period of time. And you still can't take any damage. Unlike the proper game with its myriad of items and upgrades, there is no way to make robot-boxing any easier, since your stats are not affected by the team's size or level.
100[[/folder]]
101
102[[folder:Collectible Card Game]]
103* ''VideoGame/MagiNation'' had a monster that could only be caught by completing a sidequest that spanned the entire freakin' game. A definite GuideDangIt, as many of the steps weren't even remotely hinted at in the game, could only be done at very specific points, and were completely random. The most annoying part was paying a ferry boat loads of money each time to reach a location, then paying more to make them wait for you. If you failed to pay them one time, they'd disappear and never return. One small misstep and this entire quest was moot.
104* There is a permanent mission/achievement in ''VideoGame/{{Shadowverse}}'' that requires you to perfectly score a 5 win streak in Take Two Mode ''three times''. While in theory, it can be possible with proper knowledge of the cards. What actually makes it difficult is that in Take Two, you cannot use your own decks and must randomly choose among 3 given classes, with each card of your deck coming from a draft system - You are given two pairs of cards, choose one pair and discard the other, do this 20 times to make a deck, for that Take Two campaign only. And oh, the ''challenge does not stop there'', as a simple defeat can render the achievement invalid for one run.
105[[/folder]]
106
107[[folder:Driving Game]]
108* The CTR Challenge for Hot Air Skyway in ''VideoGame/CrashTeamRacing'' is ''guaranteed'' to elicit a SkywardScream from you. The R is positioned in a place that requires such split-second timing on the jump button to catch that, even with a Turbo Boost or an Aku Aku mask to speed you up, you'll only get it if the RandomNumberGod smiles upon you. [[GodIsEvil He does not smile often]]. Your best strategy is to keep restarting the race until you get lucky and, of course, you ''still have to come first in the race for it to count''.
109** There's also the Relic Races, but only if you're aiming to get all the Platinum Relics. Just like in the mainline ''Crash Bandicoot'' platformers, the Relic Races are basically Time Trials, except you can freeze the clock for 1-3 seconds by smashing Time Crates scattered about the track. You can usually earn a Sapphire Relic without even trying, while the Gold Relics are a bit more challenging but doable if you strategize hitting all the 2- and 3-second crates. The Platinum Relics, however? To get those, you pretty much have to smash ''every crate on the track'' - doing so knocks 10 seconds off your final time, which is the one saving grace that prevents the Platinum Relic times from being completely impossible - and even ''then'' you'll have trouble.
110*** The Time Crates are always arranged in such a way that you can hit all of them in three laps, but most tracks have some crates located in awkward places, such as hard-to-reach shortcuts (such as the tunnel in Sewer Speedway or jumping over the river in Blizzard Bluff), right next to hazards (such as the crates in Papu's Pyramid located right next to man-eating plants that will cost you a crippling five seconds if you drive directly in front of them), or just floating off in the air in places that you wouldn't even think you could jump to (such as in Coco Park or Dragon Mines).
111*** Even if you hit all of them, you're still not guaranteed to beat the Platinum Relic time - you practically have to drive absolutely ''flawlessly'' on top of hitting every crate on the track, and while you can sometimes afford to miss a crate on the ground as long as you turn around to get it quickly enough, or just stop to hit two on the next lap (as they're usually placed in rows), crates located off certain jumps only give you one opportunity ''per race'' to smash them, and if you miss that opportunity, you have no choice but to hit restart, even if you're right at the end of the 3rd lap! Sewer Speedway is probably the hardest Relic Race to get a Platinum on for this reason, as it combines an awkward shortcut with three crates ahead of a one-way jump that's difficult to pull off consistently.
112*** By contrast, possibly the easiest track in the game to get a Platinum on is, ironically, Tiny Arena, the longest track in the game and one of the trickier ones to actually ''race'' on - possibly ''because'' of how long it is, which necessitates both a very generous time limit and an abundance of Time Crates. This means it's one of the only tracks where you don't need to smash every crate on the track to beat the Platinum time.
113** In addition to the Relic Races, there's also beating N. Tropy's ghosts in Time Trial, which is the only way to unlock N. Tropy as a playable character. Unlike the Relic Races, there's no Time Crates, you simply have to drive fast enough to beat his ghost. But before you can beat his ghost, you need to unlock it first. For most tracks, this is easy, and you can usually unlock his ghost without even trying - until you reach Oxide Station, where you need to practically beat his time ''just to unlock him'', and then you discover that his time was ''even faster than that''! There are also some courses where beating his ghost is actually ''harder'' than getting a Platinum Relic, usually the ones with awkward shortcuts; at least with the Relic Race you only have to nail the shortcut once to get the Time Crates there, but since N. Tropy's ghost can and ''will'' use shortcuts, that means you usually have to pull them off twice or even three times to avoid falling behind. Finally, if you're playing the ''[[VideoGame/CrashTeamRacingNitroFueled Nitro-Fueled]]'' remake of the game, just beating his times on the original 18 tracks isn't enough to unlock him - you have to beat his times on the ''Nitro Kart'' tracks as well!
114*** And after you've beaten all of N. Tropy's times, you're still not done - you unlock a ''second'' set of challenge times, set by Nitros Oxide, the BigBad of the game's adventure mode. Naturally, these times are even ''more'' superhumanly fast, and in the original game you don't even get anything for beating them (there was once a longstanding rumour that beating all of Oxide's times was the only way to unlock the otherwise-unplayable Oxide, but this was disproven). Not so in the ''Nitro-Fueled'' remake, which [[AndYourRewardIsClothes awards you with a unique skin for N. Tropy,]] [[BraggingRightsReward which you've probably already seen if you've played the game online.]]
115*** ''Nitro-Fueled'' takes it [[SerialEscalation another step further]] in the Gasmoxia Grand Prix update by adding another set of challenge times set by Emperor Velo XXVII, the BigBad of ''Crash Nitro Kart'', which are even faster than Oxide's times. Beating all of Velo's times will give you his decal for the Champion kart. After that, Beenox added developer times later on that will be even faster than Velo's!
116* Unlocking T.T. in ''VideoGame/DiddyKongRacing'' requires beating his best Time Trial time on every course in the game. The problem? T.T. is ''good.'' ''Really'' good. And being as it's Time Trial mode (and he's a ghost), you have no weapons at your disposal in order to beat him--just your mad driving skills and the game's famous "Zipper Trick," which requires you to let go of your accelerator right before hitting a speed-boosting Zipper. The good or bad thing (depending on [[NintendoHard how you like your games]]) is that, in the DS remake, this sidequest is now ''much'' easier due to the addition of upgrades to your vehicles. Using Pipsy in combination with an upgrade that increases your vehicle's maximum speed makes beating all T.T.'s times, if not a piece of cake, at the very least a muffin top.
117* ''VideoGame/ForzaMotorsport'':
118** ''Forza Motorsport 6'' has the Passing Challenge showcases, for which you need Zen-like precision to beat on any difficulty higher than Above Average. Especially the first one with the Ford GT at Sebring.
119** ''Forza Horizon 4'' has the Trial events for unlocking certain exclusive rewards[[note]]Usually clothing items, but sometimes cars[[/note]]. Not only do they require you to beat the AI in a series of races on [[HarderThanHard Unbeatable]] difficulty (which is a challenge in itself), but since it's a co-op event you have to hope you get ''five'' other drivers who are just as capable.
120** Also in ''FH 4'' are the PR Stunts, all of which you need to earn a 3-star ranking on for the Stunt Superhero achievement. The worst of these are the Drift Zones, many of which require extraordinary tuning knowledge and controller coordination to earn 3 stars.
121* ''VideoGame/FZeroGX'':
122** Story Mode has three particularly bad ones: chapters 1, 5, and 7 on Very Hard. The former two are timed courses during which you are required to go out of your way to collect certain items and have razor-thin margins of error (it is not uncommon for even expert players to complete Chapter 5 with ''less than a second'' left on the clock). Chapter 7 is a multi-lap race on a fairly technical course against a lineup of boosted AI vehicles which thwarts even people who have completed everything else in the game; it's bad enough to be a frustrating roadblock on ''normal'' difficulty even within the context of the {{Nintendo Hard}}ness of the rest of the game.
123** Unlocking the AX Racers in general (which requires the player to clear every Story Mode chapter on Very Hard mode.) The only other alternative is taking your memory card to an F-Zero AX arcade machine, and good luck finding one of those outside of Japan. Also, the memory card readers on many AX cabinets didn't even work, making the search for a usable machine even more difficult.
124* The ''VideoGame/SanFranciscoRush'' series has Keys (or in the case of ''Rush 2049'', Gold and Silver Coins) hidden throughout each track for unlocking hidden content. Many of these have cryptic methods of acquiring, but one one of the most frustrating is on ''2049'''s second course, where in order to reach a pair of coins, you have to drive against a barrier without exploding to get onto two wheels and shoot through a narrow vertical opening.
125* In ''VideoGame/WanganMidnight Maximum Tune 4'' onwards:
126** If you want the racing meters, you have to complete Story Mode's 60 stages without losing a stage at all, in a game where you have to continue after every stage; losing at any point in Story Mode delays the meter you can unlock by one entire loop. Oh, and there are four different kinds of meters to unlock, meaning that if you want all of them and spend the least amount of effort to do so, you have to complete Story Mode undefeated ''four times'' (240 stages); depending on the price per credit set by the arcade, this can set you back anywhere from 240 to 360 USD![[note]]The one solace is that if you retire in Story Mode before a race ends, it won't count against you, but do note that you will instantly lose and not be able to retire if the opponent crosses the finish line.[[/note]] The Story Mode A.I. isn't particularly difficult, but a last-second mistake[[note]][[ThatOneLevel Stage 58]] is most notorious for this; it ends almost right after a sharp left turn, where Shima ''will'' pass you and hand your ass to you if you mess up that particular corner[[/note]] or a stroke of bad luck with the randomly-generated traffic (such as a combination of a turn and a swarm of traffic trucks) means that meter unlocks are a test of not only patience but also nerves. This was made better and worse at the same time in ''Maximum Tune 6''. Better, but not by much, because you now need to beat a loop's worth of stages, even if the streak carries from one loop to the next. Worse, because the number of consecutive stages to beat, along with the number of stages in Story Mode, was increased to ''100''.
127** Soundtracks are unlocked in a similar way, again one per loop, and while the condition to unlock each one is simply "complete Story mode" and you're allowed to lose stages, it's still a ''ton'' of disproportionate [[FakeLongevity grinding]] and [[CrackIsCheaper spending money]] to do. Again, made worse in ''Maximum Tune 6'' with Story Mode being longer by 67%.
128* ''VideoGame/WipeOut HD Fury'': YOU WILL NEVER REACH ZONE ZEUS. Also, Zico mocks you. Seriously, [=PS3=] trophies and X360 achievements can be That One Trophy/Achievement too...
129* ''VideoGame/TheSimpsonsHitAndRun'' has the races in Level 2. One of your opponents is Lisa in the Malibu Stacy Convertible, which has near max acceleration and handling, and a 3.5/5 for speed, while the ''best'' car you have access to at this point in the game is the Elec-Taurus which has the same handling and acceleration but only a 2/5 for speed. Even if you are a perfect driver it basically boils down to pure luck whether or not you can cut her off and block her from passing you before she gets a lead, because once she is ahead of you there is basically nothing you can do to close the gap.
130[[/folder]]
131
132[[folder:Fighting Game]]
133* ''VideoGame/DissidiaFinalFantasy'' has the 151 Accomplishments system (basically Trophies or Achievements). Many of them (Defeat all characters 30 times each, participate in 300 battles, etc.) will be easily accomplished over the course of normal gameplay, and more even tell you the conditions for fulfilling them, so while they may require more grinding (one requires the player to deal 1.5 ''million'' points of HP damage over the course of the game. Max HP for any one opponent is 9999. This takes a while.), they're not ''difficult'' per se. [[ThisIsGonnaSuck Then you have the others]].
134** Time Attacker (Accomplishment #61) requires the player to clear the Arcade Mode (Preset character with preset abilities vs. a gauntlet of foes, ending with the game's SNKBoss) within 1200 seconds. For extra fun, the SNKBoss has a LimitBreak that he can use as often as he likes, whenever he likes, cannot be stopped from executing it, and its animation takes up ''[[OverlyLongFightingAnimation over a minute]]'', adding elements of the dreaded LuckBasedMission.
135** Obtaining all weapons and equipment (Accomplishment #145, The Ravenous Collector) requires not only an unholy amount of treasure-hunting and [[ItemCrafting trading]], but also random drops from enemies. The base item drop rate in Dissidia hovers around 1%. The enemies who have the gear you need dropped are generally only to be found in the Lunar Whale or Blackjack course of randomized computer-selected opponents -- where the opponents are anywhere from level 120 to 150, when the player is capped at 100 and are all at maximum CPU strength, in addition to the bonuses from having said best gear in the game. Even with all possible boosters to item drop rate, it's still under 10% for any one item. So, to sum up: First the player has to be lucky enough to get to face an opponent with the armament they need. Then, they have to be lucky and skilled enough to beat the opponent. Then they have to be lucky enough to get the drop. And if they don't get the drop, the opponent is gone and they have to wait until the computer then generates another opponent with the gear. And incidentally? These courses operate on a three-strikes-and-you're-out system. Lose three times and you have to start the process allll over again. (By the way, unless you're looking at a guide, you have no idea that this is the only way to get this armor or even that there ''is'' an accomplishment for getting said gear). Then is had to be done, ''again'', for Accomplishment #146, My Road To El Dorado, which is acquiring all accessories. Suffice to say that it requires the same as the all-gear one, except with ''even more'' [[ItemCrafting trading for items.]]
136** The accomplishments for battlegen-ing the colored gems (Numbers 126-133). Battlegen, for the uninitiated, is the Dissidia system wherein performing a specific action to the opponent, such as landing an [[LimitBreak Exburst]] or [[PunchedAcrossTheRoom slamming them into the wall]] has a chance to generate a pre-determined item. So, you can see from the get-go that it's a LuckBasedMission. Making it worse are the many elements of GuideDangIt inherent to the process. First off, the game never tells you that Battlegen-ing these items is what will fulfill the conditions of the accomplishments. Second, the game never even tells you that these gems ''exist''. Thirdly, the game never mentions that the only way to get at opponents from whom you can battlegen the gems is via either friend cards (in other words, online multiplayer elements) or the Stiltzkin cards. And finally, the game will never tell you how to get the Stiltzkin cards, you need either trial and error or a guide to figure out how to get all eight. That you will then have to fight. Until the game decides to have mercy on you and randomly generate the gem. And you'll be doing these multiple times, because accomplishment of this is part and parcel of the accessory accomplishment.
137* ''VideoGame/Dissidia012Duodecim'' tops everything the past game did, by changing the method of gaining crafting materials to having to go through multiple mirror matches to be able to farm materials. Or simply battlegen it off self-generated friend cards [[GuideDangIt if you knew you could do that]].
138** In addition, it has the ultimate exercise in masochism, the Labyrinth. Which is the airships from the previous game, in a new wrapping where you progress through a hundred floors with multiple different areas with different challenges to each area. It's also been reduced from three strikes to one strike, but you can increase the number of strikes by collecting backup characters, you also only get to use whatever gear you find in the labyrinth and don't get to bring any of it outside (except for a few pieces, of course you don't want to bring them back into the labyrinth because if you die in the labyrinth you lose everything you've collected so far). Progressing far into the labyrinth is the only way to get several item sets that are the only ways to pull off several builds. And don't forget that it lives up to its name with every path forward having multiple branches, which will often require some rather difficult combat actions to unlock, like getting a certain amount of medals from a card, achieving a certain level of boosting multiplier or [[NoDamageRun '''taking no damage''']], so it's fully possible that the path forward becomes impossible to unlock and that you therefore have to exit and start over again. Needless to say, doing a full clear of the entire thing will consume hours upon hours.
139** Note also that the labyrinth doesn't have a quicksave feature, so you can't take a break from your loong run through of it and do something else with your PSP, like play in other game modes or play other games entirely.
140* ''VideoGame/DragonBallXenoverse'' brings us ''Parallel Quest 47'': Super-Super Ultimate Series of Battles! You have to fight pretty much every good-aligned character, some multiple times! It starts off easy enough with Piccolo, Tien, and Yamcha, followed by Android 18 and Krillin. It gets easier with the appearance of Hercule and Videl, whom you can take out in seconds. Then Majin Buu shows up. [[FromBadToWorse Then SS Vegeta, SS Future Trunks, and SS Kid Trunks show up. After them is SS Goku, SS Goten, and Ultimate Gohan]], who can and '''will''' juggle you with spammed Ultimate attacks.[[note]]To explain, in Xenoverse, when you used a Super Sayian transformation skill (Regardless if it was normal Super Sayian or the Super Vegeta version) you could fire off super and ultimate skills without Ki loss so long as you matained the Super Sayian form. Thing is, you'll have to fight AI enemies in presets where they're locked in Super Sayian and not only did the AI knew about the abilty to spam ultimate skills and abused this as seen when you get to Goku, Goten, and Gohan, but the AI in harder missions would love to attack you all at once. Thankfully, both problems were fixed in Xenoverse 2.[[/note]] And if you're going for the Ultimate Finish? You get to fight SS3 Goku, followed by SS Gotenks, SS Vegeta, and SS Goku. AND THEN you have to go up against Gogeta and a revived SS3 Gotenks. And you've got to do '''all that''' in 15 minutes. Oh, and the first time you clear this mission, you've got to do it '''''alone'''''. It's also necessary if you want to complete Gohan and Videl's training, since this is where you get the I...I'm OK Z-Soul, meaning you've got to deal with the games cruel, stingy RNG. So unless you're EXTREMELY lucky, expect to do this mission '''A LOT''''.
141* ''VideoGame/DragonBallXenoverse2'' has ''Parallel Quest 74'': Galactic Patrol, Away! Say what you want about "Super-Super Ultimate Series of Battles!" but at least it wasn't a escort mission. Here? You have to beat all enemies, finishing with Frieza, while making sure Jaco isn't KOed. Sure, he can fight, but the CPU can and '''''WILL''''' target him over you, and just like with Super-Super Ultimate Series of Battles!, you have to beat this PQ '''on your own''' the first time. The first part isn't bad as you fight Frieza's grunts, but once you change locations, you'll be fighting the Ginyu Force, starting with Guldo, Burter, and Recoome. By the way, they're not the normal Ginyu Force, they're the Ginyu Force powered with demonic energy, meaning they'll use Bloody Sauce, an attack that will slow or even poison you or Jaco if it hits (Zen-O help you if Jaco is hit with poison since your healing capsules won't effect Jaco at all, or if you're too close for the move to give you both slow and poison at the same time). Get them out of the way, and you'll have Jeice, who's more than willing to fire off Crusher Volcanoes, and Ginyu, who has Baked Sphere, a Demonic Form-only Ult where he'll cover himself in a dark aura and slowly chase after you or Jaco before making it explode, doing heavy damage, protecting him from attacks and he's able to use it in the worse times if the AI is feeling nasty, like say in a middle of your combo (Thankfully, hitting him with Ki attacks, regardless if it's a super or just your basic Ki shots, while the dark aura is up will make him detonate it early.) Get through them? You get to fight Frieza, but at that point unless you're really good at clearing house, Jaco will have little to no health left at this point, and Frieza will spam Death Balls if he has the Ki to do it. Oh, and if you clear all of this in 10 minutes, Congrats, you get to fight Golden Frieza on top of all of that.
142* Survival mode in ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters Maximum Impact 2'', required to unlock all the stages in the game. Got a few hours to spare against increasingly difficult characters (everyone you're unlocked so far, trickier if the final boss is included among those characters), with a pumped-up version of one of them every 10 fights with additional perks you can't access? 200 fights, so even if you've unlocked up to Armor Ralf so getting hit isn't as much of an issue, you've got hours ahead of you, since you can't save your progress. Fail once, and you have to start over. Reading about the final challenges in ''VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters 2002 UM'' alone is downright scary if you haven't devoted your life and sacrificed your unlikely first-born for the skills required in the challenge mode.
143* ''VideoGame/MortalKombatDeception'' gives us Shujinko. Getting his moves is a GuideDangIt that you can only do after kompleting Konquest mode. Krap.
144* The Soul Arena in ''VideoGame/SoulCalibur 3'' have the challenge Beloved which is manageable on easy or medium but becomes insane on hard. You have to fight in succession: Raphael, Kilik, and Amy (Her attacks can not be blocked). If the player got the Queen's Guard sword for Raphael it becomes almost a LuckBasedMission.
145** Chronicles of the sword can become this. It is a sidequest because you unlock all canonical characters without it and any you unlock can only be played when you can play custom characters, who can easily get their moveset. It starts out easy and even fun, but as you go on you're either going to be spamming AI breaker moves constantly or cursing the now apparently psychic and cheating AI enemies in battlefields that just screw you over, such as ice where you fall off if you move to the edge, rather than being hit off it. You have to go through to get all the armor pieces for the character customization.
146* ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros'':
147** The Diskun trophy in ''Melee'' requires achieving every end-of-level bonus, including completing one of the main three single-player modes [[NoDamageRun without sustaining any damage whatsoever]], completing All-Star Mode [[CheckpointStarvation without ever recovering damage]], and obtaining obscure bonuses that will never feasibly happen without looking them up in a guide and then contriving a scenario rather than playing normally, like Button Holder[[note]]in which one holds down the A or B buttons for a whole match, deliberately handicapping oneself in a way that would never happen in a normal match[[/note]] or Lethal Weapon[[note]]requires one player to connect with all smash attacks, aerial attacks and special moves once, but no other attacks[[/note]], ''as well as'' bonuses that are really hard to pull off even if intentionally trying for them, like Power Shielder[[note]]requires the same player to pull off three frame-perfect shields every minute[[/note]] or Bob-omb Squad[[note]]one waits for a Bob-omb to wander around on its own, then picks it up in the second or two that it stands still and flashes before it blows up, and throws it away before the blast can harm the player[[/note]].
148** Getting the Crazy Hand trophy in ''Melee'', which requires you to beat Adventure Mode on Hard or Very Hard without continues. [[CheckpointStarvation This is much harder than it sounds]]; there are players who have obtained the Diskun, Master Hand[[note]]same requirements, but for Classic Mode instead[[/note]], Mew[[note]]same requirements, but for All-Star Mode instead[[/note]] and Giga Bowser[[note]]requires beating Giga Bowser, which entails beating Adventure Mode on Normal in under 18 minutes; there is no time limit at all for Crazy Hand[[/note]] trophies and can beat Level 9 CPU opponents and clear all Event Matches without breaking a sweat, who still have not earned this trophy, or even come close to earning the trophy, even decades after the game's release.
149** Olimar's trophy in ''Melee''. To get it, you have to have a save file of the first ''VideoGame/{{Pikmin}}'' game on your memory card. Simple if you have the game, but don't own ''Pikmin'', have no interest in playing the game and thus don't want to buy it, and don't know anyone who owns it? Then you can't get the trophy and thus can't get 100% completion; the trophy is impossible to get through in-game means as there exists no alternative way to unlock it for those who don't have ''Pikmin''.
150** Starting with ''Melee'', there's the Cruel Melee/Brawl/Smash modes, in which the power and skill of the computer is ramped up considerably. The best way to actually succeed at these (which also must be completed for HundredPercentCompletion) is to ''jump off the level''. But that only works in ''Melee'' and ''Brawl'', because in the fourth ''Super Smash Bros.'' the computer fighters will wait on the edge if you go off the stage. Counter attacks are your best bet, but even then good luck trying to KO just ''one'' opponent. You need to KO '''''eight''''' for HundredPercentCompletion in the Wii U version, by the way. (You just need four in the 3DS version.) And the eight-KO challenge can't be skipped (at least the one that requires Lucina).
151** In ''Brawl'', there's the sticker's challenge, obtained by getting every single one of them, easy until you reach the last ten, at which point not even Subspace speedruns in Intense nail you even one new sticker.
152** ''Brawl'', unlocking the Galleom Tank trophy requires completing BossRush mode on Intense. Unfortunately, the Boss Rush achievements are the only ones that cannot be skipped, and must be earned manually. [[DifficultyByRegion European and Australian players are laughing.]]
153** The Meta Ridley trophy, which requires the player to beat down Meta Ridley until he's near death, wait for a trophy stand to appear (the fight is [[TimedMission on a timer, by the way]],) then throw it at Meta Ridley, ''jump off the Blue Falcon, and catch the trophy in mid-air.''
154** ''For Wii U'' has the hellish "Unwavering Chivalry" event. The scenario: you're Meta Knight and the enemies are Marth, Zelda, and Peach. The catch: if you KO Zelda or Peach (or they self-destruct), ''you automatically lose.'' Sound difficult enough? Well, set it to Hard difficulty for the special prize and prepare for extreme frustration. Marth is absolutely ferocious and leaves very little opportunities for you to attack. The two princesses cluster around him and take much higher knockback from your attacks. Zelda also has incredibly powerful attacks and loves to spam Din's Fire from a distance while even Peach can be a hassle. You have two stocks for this event. ''You will need them.''
155** The "Kirby's Crazy Appetite" event isn't much better. It's essentially a reverse Stamina Match: Kirby has to eat food scattered around the stage and restore his damage to 0 before time runs out. Beating this one on Hard is required for the reward (and a Challenge), so that sets your damage to 140%. The stage takes place on the enormous and labyrinthine The Great Cave Offensive map, which is filled with Danger Zones that will deal 25% damage if hit and automatically KO you if your damage is above 100% (which it always is, even on easy). Food items spawn very sparsely from randomly-appearing treasure chests, barrels, or spawn on their own, then the food items themselves heal a random amount, adding a huge layer of [[LuckBasedMission luck]] to completing this. Also, said food items can be very difficult to spot on this huge stage when the camera is zoomed out and everything is chaotic. You are hounded by three King Dedede, whose damage they deal only adds on to the burden and can easily knock you into a Danger Zone, and they will eat the food as well. Then about a minute into the match two more spawn. You only have two minutes to complete the event, which is not enough time, yet there's no way to work around this. To make it even more disorienting, the game speed is set to 1.5x (although the timer is thankfully unaffected), which does give you the time needed, but barely. And to top it off, you cannot bring any kind of customization into this match (because an auto-healing badge would make it too easy).
156[[/folder]]
157
158[[folder:First-Person Shooter]]
159* Most of the Side Quests in ''VideoGame/{{Borderlands}}'' that feature you killing some sort of diabolical critter could count. You will die at [[ThatOneBoss Moe and Marley]], and [[ShoutOut Mothrakk]], many, many times[[note]]Mothrakk's easy if you pick up one of the rocket cars, spacebar to target lock him, then drive in circles spamming rockets. It'll take a while, the rockets don't compensate for moving enemies, but you'll eventually get him[[/note]].
160** ''VideoGame/Borderlands2'' has [[ThatOneSidequest/Borderlands2 too many to count]].
161** Donating fifty white guns to a local rebellious movement in ''VideoGame/BorderlandsThePreSequel''. You can only donate ten at a time, and every tenth gun will cause an event where you need to go and kill some people and recover the guns. It eats up a lot of inventory space and takes forever. Fortunately, you get a legendary Oz Kit as the quest reward.
162* ''VideoGame/DeepRockGalactic:'' Of all the sidequests, Gathering Fossils is probably the most troubling. While there's less of them you need to pick up to fulfill requirements, they're still individual objects, and they glow significantly less than the other two candidates for these. Worse, unlike the other two, they can spawn on high walls, which is mildly annoying in a team, and a ''friggin' hassle'' on Solo because [[RobotBuddy Bosco]] cannot identify them, and thus cannot dig them out, forcing you to get up there yourself. In particularly bad cases, this will either involve massive abuse and ammo expenditure of whatever mobility tool your non-Scout class has, or just zooming up there and taking a buttload of fall damage if you ''are'' the Scout; this gets especially bad in the Sandblasted Corridors, where the caverns get immensely tall.
163* Unlocking the invincibility cheat in ''VideoGame/GoldenEye1997'', often referred to as the "infamous invincibility cheat" by the game's fans, requires beating the Facility level on 00 Agent mode in under two minutes, five seconds. Exacerbated by the fact that accomplishing this task is highly dependent on the location at which Dr. Doak, an {{NPC}} with whom you must interact, randomly spawns. And Trevelyan can screw it up at the end by being too close to the tanks.
164* ''VideoGame/HaloReach'' has "If They Came to Hear me Beg..." The challenge here is to air-assassinate an Elite on the penultimate level from a height that would kill you. You'll mostly find yourself missing and going splat, hitting a Grunt instead, hitting the Elite with a normal beatdown, or the game just not recognizing your assassination. Have fun reloading the checkpoint.
165* Playing ''VideoGame/ModernWarfare'' on Veteran difficulty merits honors on its own. It's incredibly frustrating, and most players find themselves spending hours to get past single checkpoints. However, nothing beats out the Epilogue stage "Mile High Club." Beating this single level requires you to blast your way through an airplane full terrorists with no fragmentation grenades (you are in a plane, after all). Stopping in any place for too long means you won't make it to the objective in time. Simply lasting past the first row of seats is worth a few achievement points, and it's easily the hardest stage of the game. And at the end, if you've manage to get past the hellhole of enemies to get to the hostage situation, you MUST get a headshot on the terrorist holding the VIP. Otherwise, it's back to square one for you, because apparently "veterans only get headshots".
166* ''VideoGame/PerfectDark'':
167** The Platform/XboxLiveArcade version features some unlockable trophies that are needed to HundredPercentCompletion. Among them, there is one that requires you to [[SpeedRun speed-running]] through the highest difficulty setting, one that asks you to complete the entire aforementioned highest difficulty setting [[UnexpectedGameplayChange with your auto-aim off]], and even one that nobody on the internet have any clues about the requisites for it to unlock and just [[LuckBasedMission seems to pop-out once in a blue moon]].
168** The original ''Perfect Dark'' has some difficult side items as well -- specifically, the firing range. A skilled gamer could probably get most of the silver stars with a little practice. Getting all the gold stars, however, is nearly impossible. The major stumbling block is the [=AR34=]: You must get 500 points (a bulls-eye is 10 points) in 20 seconds with 100% accuracy, using an assault rifle. Oh, and the targets break when shot too much, so if you break a target and let even a single bullet through afterwards, you fail.
169* ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' added Contracts which have bonus objectives that encourage the player to try out different weapons or playstyles beyond their comfort zone. Some are really difficult to finish, though.
170** Many of the "Do X enough times in one life" objectives. You have to be really good at the game in order to achieve these, since progress towards one point of these resets on death - you can't just play many rounds to grind out these objectives.
171** The Thermal Thruster's bonus objectives require you to extinguish teammates or push back enemies with your launch animation. Because the Thermal Thruster is very slow, either with preparing it or actually launching, you can't expect to do this a lot of times in a firefight without dying. And because of its tiny area of effect and momentum before launching, trying to launch while moving can easily cause you to miss even when teammates are cooperating with you to help on the contract.
172** The Hot Hand first has a very strict requirement - nine Pyroland stars needed to unlock it, which means you need to finish every single bonus Pyroland objective, including the Thermal Thruster described above. While the contract itself looks rather simple — getting multiple kills with the Hot Hand — it's a lot trickier in practice. In normal play, like with most other Pyro melee weapons, you'd have an easier time killing an enemy with your flamethrower than with your melee, not to mention the amount of effort it takes to slap a person to death. This means the most efficient way to finish the contract is in Medieval Mode, and even then you're prone to being outranged by the Demoknights there.
173** The "Expert (class)" contracts. The main objective tends to be "Dominate a player as (class)", with side objectives being "MVP as (class)" and the aforementioned "Do X enough times in one life". Especially if the three available classes for the contract are none that you main. If you don't have a friend who is good at that class, then you're hot out of luck.
174** "Defend the (map objective)". For one, the objective is very oddly worded (it refers to killing people who are trying to capture the map objective, not preventing capture by standing near the cart or on the point). Then there's the fact that the objective requires a lot of points to be completed - thirty individual defense kills. And, because you have to defend the map objective, you're relying heavily on the skill of both teams, not just yours - you can't do this objective if the attacking team is absolutely crushing you, nor if the defending team just completely prevents anyone from touching the map objective.
175** The Gunslinger Contract. You have to kill 3 people with the gunslinger. Sounds easy right? Wrong. You can't use your mini-sentry, you have to melee-kill them. This wouldn't be a huge annoyance, were it not for the caveat of the Gunslinger being the only melee weapon in the game with guaranteed crits after you hit the same person three times in a row. It's insanely difficult pulling this off on any of the normal game modes in Casual, and you only stand a chance of completing it on Medieval Mode, which itself comes with the problem of engineer being extremely underpowered.
176** Any of the Map-Specific contracts for some of the more stalemate-prone maps, namely 2Fort, Turbine, and Hightower. Regardless of whether or not you think they're fun to play on, what makes them That One Sidequest is the restriction that you can't turn in a contract until a round ends. Since they're very prone to stalemates, expect to have to just grind away at a map for a long time.
177* Many of the Arcade League matches/Challenges in ''VideoGame/TimeSplitters2'' are painfully difficult, making other matches/challenges look like cakewalks. Here are some to deal with, for newcomers of the franchise:
178** "Men In Grey". It's an Assault match, so you have to dodge [[SentryGun autoguns]] and Accountants/Consultants[[note]]unplayable in Arcade Custom[[/note]]/Lawyers while completing objectives and destroy the fuel barrels and computers. You only have a partner to "help" you (read: distract) the opponents, who are most likely happy to mow both you and your partner down with miniguns while you are busy reaching the first objective. Getting a gold or a platinum medal is hard, but not as much as other matches.
179** "Can't Handle This". To sum it up, it's you versus an army of five [[EvilHand Handymen]] in the Nightclub, so your best option is to grab a pair of Tommy Guns and hide out in the foyer so you can mow down any Handyman unlucky to be in your line of fire. Have fun dying repeatedly when you're trying to grab a gun while trying not to get wasted by a Handyman or two.
180** "Superfly Lady". Similar to "Men In Grey", but in the Hangar instead of Training Ground. Unlike "Men In Grey", where it is possible (but difficult) to dodge autoguns, you ''have'' to destroy the autoguns in front of you as your first objective. It gets a bit worse in the second objective, not only because the switch opening the hangar doors is above you, but because there are a couple more autoguns present. Afterwards, where you have to destroy the fuel barrels to complete the match is easy, the autoguns present (and sometimes, the AI opponents) will make it hard for you. In a nutshell, shitfest.
181** "Bags of Fun". It's [[CaptureTheFlag Capture the Bag]] at the Ice Station with you and Sgt. Cortez against an army of 'Splitters. Simple enough, right? Not really. Not only are there five of them against two of you, they also have high stamina, and your partner, sadly enough, only serves as distraction. Talk about "useful partners," my ass.
182** Last for the Arcade League, we have "Nice Threads". Assault match, yes, but this time it's on Scrapyard, so prepare to meet a trio of [[MightyGlacier Sentry Bots]] and a whole bunch of autoguns both outside ''and'' inside. Thankfully enough, there's a Lasergun near your spawn, so you can use that to break inside easily without dying.
183** Starting off with the Challenges, "Stain Removal". Good luck trying to find any windows to destroy after dealing with the first set.
184** "Silent But Deadly". Like the other [[StealthBasedMission Infiltration]] challenges, you have to make your way to the exit point without losing Stealth Points. However, unlike the other challenges, you have to destroy an item (in this case, the communications dish in the Siberian outpost) ''before'' making your way to the exit point. It doesn't help when the door the the exit point may close on you before you even enter after destroying the comms dish, thus making you end up failing the challenge. And you have to eliminate the soldiers present in the area.
185** "But Where Do The Batteries Go?" It's simple. Run to the end of the Scrapyard [[note]]the Assault version, not the normal version[[/note]], pick up the item and return to the start. But what makes it hard is the amount of enemies in the level, the autoguns, and the fact that some enemies wield miniguns. By the time you make it out, you have a chance of either escaping successfully, or getting blown up by a rocket. Have fun!
186* In ''VideoGame/TimeSplittersFuturePerfect'', earning the gold medal for the Astro Jocks level is an extremely difficult task. The platinum medal is all but impossible.
187* ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' and ''VideoGame/DoomII'' had some fiendishly difficult optional secrets to obtain and enemies to slay, but others are so hard to get that they were thought to be outright impossible to obtain. For example, in the level "And Hell Followed", there is a raised platform you can't normally get to that is labelled as a secret. The only way to get it is to stand in a very particular spot and then use the blast of a Cyber Demon to launch yourself onto the secret. This is so hard to obtain that "100%" speedruns are allowed to skip this secret.
188[[/folder]]
189
190[[folder:Hack and Slash]]
191* ''VideoGame/GodOfWarChainsOfOlympus'' has the second Challenge of Hades, "Perfection". You have to beat 20 enemies without getting damaged at all. To make matters worse, you don't get to use magic at all and the enemies in question use attacks you can't block with the normal block. Tearing out of hair may ensue. If you managed to beat those, the third Challenge asks you to kill a number of enemies while your life bar automatically drains. Problem is, it might as well have required a NoDamageRun as your life will be cutting it close enough without taking any hits. The fourth Challenge gives you a tight time limit to destroy several items, one tight enough that you practically need to choreograph a routine to make it.
192[[/folder]]
193
194[[folder:Interactive Fiction]]
195* While many storylines in ''VideoGame/EightyDays'' are resolved in unexpected ways and places, the Goland romance deserves mention due to how unintuitive it is; you'd be extremely unlikely to either stumble upon the solution by accident or figure it out on your own. [[spoiler:You have to start by traversing Russia, head through the desert, then jump all the way to Australia, head across to South America in a very specific gyrocopter, wait in a rural village for a few days for said gyrocopter pilot to return out of the blue, then accompany him for another trip. And make it back to London. In eighty days.]]
196[[/folder]]
197
198[[folder:Miscellaneous Games]]
199* The Head of Cerberus missions in ''VideoGame/DeadIsland.'' You are tasked with activating speakers on rooftops, which doesn't sound so bad. However the waypoints are seemingly coded by trolls, they disappear when you get near them requiring you to set your own marker. To get to these locations you have to fight through waves of armed criminals, zombies, and the odd Ram or six, with a Suicider hiding just behind a corner. That's the first part. Later parts include RoofHopping, just finding a way up to the roofs is a challenge, then it turns into ''VideoGame/KaizoMarioWorld'' in first person. The third part of the quest takes place in the Quarantine Zone, maybe the toughest section of the game. [[ThatOneBoss Jason, The Butcher]] and [[FinalBoss Ryder White]] are easy in comparison.
200* ''VideoGame/KatamariDamacy'':
201** Ursa Major and Taurus stages. The stages are easy to beat since the King of All Cosmos accepts any bear or cow. However, getting the biggest bear and cow is an exercise in madness ''because'' the King of All Cosmos is an idiot who accepts ''any'' bear or cow, ''including'' bear carvings, men in bear suits, men in cow suits, and ''milk cartons''. One wonders how many completionists have thrown their controllers in frustration after the king prematurely yanked them out of the stage because he believes that the ''black and white patterned beach umbrella'' you accidentally rolled up is a cow. In such stages, your katamari ''starts'' next to the some of the tiniest bear/cows. Roll the wrong way at the start and you'll have to sit through the King of All Cosmos chewing you out ''again.''
202** It gets worse in the "Cowbear" stage in ''We Love Katamari.'' Not only do you still beat the level (and thus have to start all over again) if you get any bear or cow-related item, but if you're going for a 100% collection (which is also required for a Trophy in Katamari Forever), this level has a creature called the Cowbear. First off, it's really big, so you'll need to grow to a huge size, picking up most of the things in the level... while constantly avoiding the tiniest cow/bear items. Unlike other levels, smaller items do not disappear when you grow in size, so you might accidentally pick up something you can barely see. It also runs around the stage at a high speed, with two smaller but still sort of big bears running in front of and behind it... so it's recommended also getting rid of THEM first by knocking them away at the certain size where you're just BARELY too small to roll them up but still big enough to knock them over. Oh, and like other living creatures, when you're at the right size to pick it up, it runs away. So after getting that far, you'll just have to chase forwards and pray you don't accidentally roll into that cow parasol very close to you...
203** Even more insane is the infamous rose level in ''We Love Katamari'', where the player is tasked with collecting '''one million roses''' into a katamari, while never growing in size and only being able to pick up the roses one by one or in bunches of ten at a time. Thankfully, you don't have to do it all in one go, and most sane players just rubber-banded their game controllers into a set position and left the game running overnight to get it. Even using the rubber band technique it takes over 70 hours of leaving it running and can only done on one of the 3 stages.
204** The "Hot Stuff" level in ''Katamari Forever'', where you have to get your Katamari to 10000C* by picking up hot things. If you pick up cold things, your temperature goes down... and as long as you're not picking up anything, your temperature gradually drops. If you drop down to 0 C*, you fail the level. If you're not familiar with the level, you're bound to accidentally roll into a pile of ice cream/cold drinks/snowmen and instantly drop to 0 C*. Unlike other levels, you'll also want to avoid any hearts, as they make you absorb everything close to you - which in this level means enough cold stuff to instantly fail or at least drop your temperature significantly. And this level has an level-exclusive character who's standing in the middle of several snowmen which are almost impossible to avoid, and who's also so big you basically have to grow slowly while making sure not to go to 10000C* before you're big enough? Have fun. And even if you get this far, you'll ''still'' have to beat the level to keep what you rolled up, which can be pretty hard since there will be very few non-cold items left at this point. The easiest way to do this (which can still be a challenge) is to grow quite a bit bigger, then pick up the Sacred Torch (another level-exclusive item) which instantly gives you 10000 degrees and lets you beat the level.
205* ''VideoGame/Pikmin2:'' The Doomsday Apparatus is easily the most aggravating treasure to obtain since you need to grow 100 Purple Pikmin in order to lift it. Purple Pikmin can only be grown by converting another type via Candypop Bud, making it a tedious process to grow that many. On top of this, even if you use every single Violet Candypop Bud you come across and never lose a Purple at any point, you still won't have enough, meaning you have to backtrack to a cave at least once at some point. Once you do have enough Purples, the treasure itself takes at least a quarter of a day to carry back; and since you can only have a maximum of 100 Pikmin on the field, you'll be stuck for four minutes being unable to do anything but wait for them to finish.
206* ''VideoGame/PokerNight2'': You get three "random" pop up challenges at the beginning of a tournament that stay with you until you beat them. The reward is an item from one of the other players that gives you in game items (an outfit or head in ''[[VideoGame/BorderLands2 Borderlands 2]]'' and (of course) a hat in ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2''. Random has quotes because it is very, very common to get "Win a showdown with only a high card" as one of the last three you need to win [[VideoGame/PortaL2 GLAdOS's]] item. This requires you to win a hand with only the highest card, meaning that even a pair of 2s will beat it. You have to force out three of the four opponents, and then slow-play the remaining one and hope that they don't have any kind of a hand at all, and that they don't give up and fold on you, ''and'' they don't have a higher card than you. Even now, more than two years after the release, there are people who still haven't gotten that one challenge. It isn't even possible to [[SaveScumming save scum]] your way out of it, once it's in there there's no way to remove it.
207[[/folder]]
208
209[[folder:MMORPG]]
210* ''Videogame/CityOfVillains'':
211** Lord Recluse's Strike Force is this, especially if you're going for the "Master of Lord Recluse's Strike Force" badge that requires completing it with no defeats on your team and all temporary powers disabled. And the third mission of said Level 45-50 Strike Force awards a badge needed for an accolade power whose Hero equivalent can theoretically be achieved at Level 7 (Level 1, if you're lucky enough). And all it does is bump your Endurance up by five points. Yeah. That's balanced.
212** There are several "epic" badges in both games that have ridiculous levels of achievement as the developers expected them to be earned only by players playing that same character for years (in a game that encourages making lots of alternative characters, go figure). Players who actually care about these badges have simply found ways to "farm" for the achievements in much less time. But the developers have finally relented and relaxed the requirements on many badges, some being slashed by as much as 2/3 of their previous requirement.
213** Blueside's hated task forces are not hard so much as insanely long. Dr. Quaterfield's task force, in particular, is twenty-four missions long and mostly in the [[ThatOneLevel Shadow Shard]].
214* The process required to obtain Legendary items in ''VideoGame/DawnOfTheDragons'', especially the Shield of Ryndor and Sword of Conquered Kingdoms gear. The steps needed to get the fully-upgraded sword in particular are infuriatingly long. Getting the sword itself is the easy part -- complete four boss raids and craft the components. Its second evolution requires getting three stones from quest areas and three raid crafting items that are not listed on the in-game loot tables. The third evolution requires the acquisition of five "Enigmatic Items", which (like the aforementioned crafting items) aren't seen on any loot tables, and require using five specific combinations of armor/weapons/troops/Legions/mounts for specific raids on specific difficulties. Miss an item required for one of the Enigmatic Items? You can't get the upgraded sword. Forgot to or can't fight the Nightmare-level bosses that drop the specific component? No sword. It takes a minimum of 15 raids on the low end to have a chance to get all the pieces, and there is nothing in-game that explains how to get the final evolution. And the ultimate reward? A sword that, while great in its own right for PVP battles, is vastly outclassed by most premium weapons.
215* Epic quest for each class in ''VideoGame/EverQuest''.
216* In ''[[VideoGame/EyeOfTheBeholder Eye of The Beholder II: Legend of Darkmoon]]'', you have a sidequest where you have to trap 4 medusas in a room so they stand on a pressure plate. Not that they'll cooperate quietly; they'll keep poisoning and petrifying you.
217* ''[[Videogame/GuildWars Guild Wars: Eye of the North]]'':
218** The Rabid Bear. To score points with the [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy Norn]], you need to fight this bear with just a wooden club that does pathetic amounts of damage. Not a single player was expecting said bear to be a Level 24 tank with naturally regenerating-health, an ability that boosts his health AND grants him damage resistance, and another skill that lets him regenerate 8 points of health per second. By the way, that last skill casts and recharges in half the time even though he isn't technically a boss. The bear ALSO can make himself immune to knockdowns at times, and not all classes have fast enough interrupts to stop him. Some of the game's best builds have failed against this thing, and nowadays most players simply switch to a Ritualist or Necromancer secondary, then take him down with ghosts or curses. Oh, and if you manage to beat the Rabid Bear, then you can look forward to the Glacial Griffon, which not only is a boss, but is ''also'' a spirit-spammer. And thanks to a Ritualist update, all of its skills practically recharge immediately. Have fun!
219** The Great Norn Alemoot quest. The first task, moving ale barrels from a stack to a pole not ten feet away (after taking your first swig of booze) is easy enough. After running back to the start for your second helping of booze, comes the slalom: rather than simply running between posts, the mechanics of this part of the quest requires you to run to a certain point away from the posts after running between them. Running too close to either post, or running through the next part of the slalom without correctly running through the previous pair of posts will completely fail the quest and you have to start over. THEN if you manage to complete the slalom, is the incredibly tricky pig-herding (after taking a third swig of ale). Rather than pushing the pigs into their pen, they have to be body-blocked so they MIGHT move in the right direction..! All this within a time limit of a couple of minutes, all while your screen is fuzzing around because of the effects of the alcohol (though the screen effects can be disabled in the options menu). At least the Feel No Pain skill reward is worth it.
220* Many of the sidequests in ''Videogame/KingdomOfLoathing'' are exercises in extreme frustration and patience:
221** More time has been spent devising Hobopolis run strategies than anything else in the game, and for good reason. In order to get the best gear in the zone (a hamster which transfers the "Hobo Power" of several separate clothing items to meat and item drops/HP and MP regeneration), you must (a) join a clan and donate hundreds of thousands to gain access to their basement; (b) spend millions in meat to get enough healing items, turn increaser items and optimal gear to survive; (c) permanently acquire several skills that will make keeping fight counts low easier; (d) complete a sidequest outside of the zone where you use a binder to pick up "hobo glyphs" -- you can't even enter the area without all the glyphs, and this requires multiple ascensions to get access to all of them; (e) plan your strategy with a group of other people, and execute the plan with near-pinpoint accuracy, and (f) defeat the Hobopolis boss, Hodgman, in under 1100 turns. In a single day. And since you don't have enough time to kill any of the other bosses in Hobopolis, Hodgman will be at full power.
222** The Ruins of Fernswarthy's Tower features an unlimited-leveled basement that yields a unique item: a telescope that allows you to see the Naughty Sorceress' tower (which is fought through in the final quest in each playthrough/ascension). The only problem? To get the item you need for the telescope, you need to fight through '''500''' levels of monsters with scaling difficulty, along with stat and damage tests every few levels. Even in best-case conditions, you'll still have to wait until you're near level 30 and stock up on phials, healing items and stat boosters in order to get to the 500th floor. Even better? In order to get a more powerful telescope (which will let you see more of the Tower tests), you'll have to do it ''four more times''. And the telescope actually goes up to seven, so completionists will have to do two more on top of that. The reward is only available on floor 500, exactly, so you have to ascend to reset the basement -- which also resets ''you'', including all that LevelGrinding you did to prepare. Players can spend days (if not weeks) doing nothing but basement dive. Numerous guides have been written about this basement.
223** The "Frat Boy vs. Hippy War" quest. In the regular quest, you can just pick a side and kill all of the other, thus winning the war. If you want the best reward and the satisfaction of killing a ''lot'' of hippies and frat boys, however, you have to kill the exact same amount of hippies and frat boys until there's only one of each side left. And use a pirate flaregun during the ensuing boss battle. The pirates are '''''[[ScrewThisImOuttaHere gone]]''''' during the war, meaning you can't get a flaregun now [[GuideDangIt if you didn't know to grab one in advance]], and if you had tried using them anywhere except the boss fight, their normal effect would have been replaced with a message reminding you that the pirates are "really, seriously gone" and probably [[RedHerring convincing you that this is the wrong answer]].
224** One of the better skills in the game is Transcendent Olfaction, which gives the player the ability to select a single monster and fight it near-exclusively. It's great for main quests, item farming, level grinding, whatever. How do you get this skill? From the Manual of Transcendent Olfaction, which costs 200 filthy lucre. The maximum rate a player can earn filthy lucre is 3 a day. So if you want Transcendent Olfaction, you have to remember to do the side quest for it, every day, for just over two months, provided a player manages to earn all three in a day -- and since one of them will always come from an [[BribingYourWayToVictory Item-of-the-Month]] zone, there's a fair chance you'll have to stop at two. Originally, it was even worse -- you were offered three bounties a day, but could only take ''one''. The upside is, once you purchase the Manual, you'll never need to do it again [[AltItis on that account]]. The downside is, you'll probably now want to get the Bounty Hunter Hunter's ''lesser'' rewards, which will run you 145 more lucre. At least you'll be able to use that shiny new Olfaction skill to save turns...
225* ''Videogame/{{Latale}}'' has several, with the most prominent being Dotnuri. It's the perfect combination of PlatformHell (despite being a 2-D game!), FakeLongevity (each stage needs to be completed 20 times before you get the real reward...), BraggingRightsReward (the skill point from stage 1 is pretty good. The money boost from stage 2 can be made a joke with the enchanting system), FakeDifficulty (lag was already a problem with the normal game, much less one that requires surgical precision), OneHitPointWonder (it is a Super Mario Bros. ShoutOut after all) and LuckBasedMission (the enemies that can kill you move completely randomly. The only thing they won't do is fall off a ledge or die). Others include:
226** The Selki quests, which involves completing three ''separate'' quests ''multiple'' times against a mini-boss level opponent in a game where every time you first meet a boss, it will be ThatOneBoss. All that, for a rather unimpressive exp reward.
227** The elemental totems, which involves finding 50 of an item that has a mid to low chance of randomly dropping from a specific and rather uncommon enemy, which shoots elemental magic at you (which you aren't likely to have a resistance to). Then once you're done, you have to do the quest ''three'' more times. And then you have to do the ''other'' three elemental totem quests four times before you're done with them for good.
228* ''VideoGame/RagnarokOnline'' quests tend to be of the "Collect Three Hundred X" variety, which is not in itself all that bad. The "Veins Siblings" quest (which is part of the quest-line to open the high-end Nameless Island dungeon) combines "Collect Three Hundred X" with a luck-based payoff. It becomes necessary to collect some innocuous low-end drops to feed to a camel so it will poop for you, allowing you to continue with the quest. Unless you're amazingly lucky, you'll not get the requisite amounts of poop from your first try (or even your first few tries), requiring you to go gather more low-end drops. The poop-rate is random, which means a player might have to feed the camel literally thousands of items, translating into dozens of hours of competing with starting characters for trash mobs, in order to continue the quest. Even though [[ShaggyDogStory you never end up actually having to use the camel poop]], it does lead to a SugarWiki/{{Funny Moment|s}} as (after finally gathering the requisite poop) your character [[SarcasmMode reflects on his or her accomplishments.]]
229* ''VideoGame/{{Runescape}}'' has a fair few quests that make you think that the dev team is just evil.
230** [[BlatantLies One Small Favor]], a ridiculous ChainOfDeals FetchQuest.
231** The infamous and widely-hated Elemental Workshop III. It tasks you with solving ThatOnePuzzle, an enormous, multi-layered BlockPuzzle to start an elemental forge. The controls are rather wonky, it's extremely time-consuming, and the number of moves you can make is limited. If you run out, then the puzzle resets to the last checkpoint.
232** The Ratcatchers quest is deeply unpopular, not because it's difficult, but because it's ''boring''. It's a series of errands for various unsavory characters, all of which revolve around finding new ways to kill rats. Most of this simply involves fetch quests, but there's also an ''awful'' stealth section with bugged AI and a 'boss fight' where you get to watch your cat fight the rat king (and you can lose your cat here if you don't have a catspeak amulet). Finally, the rewards are mostly cat-related (aside from a decent 4,500 Thieving xp); if you don't care about the pet mechanics, you're out of luck.
233* ''Videogame/TheSecretWorld'': Two of the Investigation missions (puzzle-based sidequests) require the player to transcribe Morse code and translate it for the next clue. The first of these is in audio form[[note]]with accompanying video that is too fast to be useful as a visual aid[[/note]] and plays at normal speed, rendering it almost impossible for someone not trained in Morse code to follow. The second one is in blinking lights form, and while slower than the first, is still quite difficult to transcribe properly.
234** One mission in Transylvania, [[http://wiki.crygaia.com/view/The_Cost_of_Magic The Cost of Magic]], is absolutely ''despised'' for combining stealth, environmental hazards that have to be tanked, precision platforming, and overpowered mobs -- to the point where the general suggestion is to give it a miss until your equipment is HIGHLY overleveled, if not specialized.
235* Most of the Datacrons in ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'' can be fairly annoying to get, often involving lengthy platforming sequences, but particularly annoying is the Tatooine strength datacron, which is on top of a sandcrawler that you can't reach from the ground. To get there you have to ride a Jawa balloon from another sandcrawler halfway across the map. A balloon which takes about twenty minutes both ways to get between the sandcrawlers. Miss the couple seconds that the balloon is accessible or jump off at the wrong time, and you'd better be ready to sit around waiting for the next forty minutes.
236* ''Videogame/{{Wizard 101}}'' has Sunken City, a dungeon with the hardest enemies you can find in [[NoobCave Wizard City]]. Towers that the girl you're doing it for commands you to enter to defeat some more of the hard enemies, unavoidable battles with the [[RunningGag hard enemies]], only to find that you need to enter a tower with multiple floors to get a key for Grubb's place, and have to fight a boss with ''one thousand health''. And after the battle, you STILL have to go defeat Grub and collect the amulet.
237** Sunken City (and it tougher cousins Tomb of the Beguiler and Kensington Park) are actually meant for to be a challenge for teams of four wizards that had beaten the world so that is why they are so difficult.
238** The true That One Sidequest are Briskbreeze Tower and the Warehouse. Both are ten floors tall and contain [[MyRulesAreNotYourRules cheating bosses]]. Oh, and for those people that use the "flee, use potion, port to friend" technique, people cannot port into these towers. These are so tough the first floor is there just to warn people how tough they are.
239** Another dungeon, The Waterworks, was made for a new challenge for the new level cap. Five normal battles, two puzzle rooms (which can act as either additional battles or heal locations), and two bosses that have complex and powerful cheats.
240* ''Videogame/WorldOfWarcraft'':
241** Prior to the release of ''Cataclysm'', where it was removed, there was a well-known quest in the Darkshore area called Deep Ocean, Vast Sea that many young night elves encountered, but very, very few actually finished at an appropriate level. It involved swimming deep underwater with your character's breath timer to retrieve two boxes from ships infested with the well-known and much hated Murlocs that have a dense spawning rate, wide aggro radius, and in this case could swim through walls to ensure you would spend hours swimming back to your corpse before giving up until you could outlevel the quest and have sweet, sweet revenge on those bloody Murlocs. This quest was somewhat fixed and became much easier than it used to be later on, but the bad reputation and mediocre rewards still meant that few people did it if they had a choice. As of ''Cataclysm'', it's been completely replaced with a new quest "An Ocean Not So Deep," which does quite a bit to lampshade its predecessor's reputation. You now have to get to the ships, but use a weapon to wipe out the army of Murlocs blocking the way. The gnome involved mentions that maybe this will reduce the number of casualties.
242** The universally-loathed "Swabbing Duty" quest in Cape of Stranglethorn. To elucidate -- the captain of a pirate crew that you're trying to infiltrate charges you with [[MundaneMadeAwesome cleaning the ship's deck]], which takes the form of a minigame in which you have to keep the deck free of stains for two minutes. Unfortunately, the stains spawn at a ''ridiculously'' fast rate and have to be dealt with in a few seconds otherwise it's game over. If you have any kind of lag at all on your system the quest becomes near impossible. There are reports on various game forums of frustrated players giving up after ''days'' of fruitlessly trying to complete it, while others have had to resort to remapping their keyboards and creating macros. For a ''two-minute minigame''. The worst thing about it is that unlike 99.9% of the quests in-game, it's impossible to level past it, so if you're no good at the type of "twitch" gaming this quest requires you can get hopelessly stuck and left with no option but to abandon the quest. Yep -- no matter how powerful your character, you can be forced to forfeit an entire questline because you can't ''mop'' fast enough. In 4.2, possibly earlier, you can just talk to the whiny deckhand and pay him 1 Gold to do it for you. The captain even [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] this when you turn the quest in, telling you he "heard frenzied mopping" and figures it must have been you.
243** The Achievement system gives a lot of cool benefits and titles, but with sometimes insane requirements. Loremaster and Seeker titles require completing just about every quest in the game. The major new PVP title requires over 100,000 honorable kills. Some achievements in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' are very difficult to get, especially the Glory to Hero/Raider. Both require you to complete various difficult achievements in heroics/raids, many of which are impossible unless the whole group agrees to try and get it. Essentially it's That One Sidequest that requires you to complete a dozen other {{That One Sidequest}}s, a couple of which need a very specific group setup to even work. Wrong class? Tough luck.
244** On entirely different level, fishing achievements. Half of them require you to catch absurdly rare fishes or similar stuff. Mr. Pinchy probably being the worst. There are only about a dozen or so spots where you can fish for him (pools that need to respawn after 5-6 catches), and once you have it, the pet needed for the achievement is only one of four possible outcomes. You may use him three times over 6 days, and if you are unlucky enough, you never get the pet and need to fish for him AGAIN. And back when achievements were introduced, you had to be at the highest possible fishing skill and top fishing equipment to reliably fish in these pools, and they were highly contested for the normal catches. On the bright side, this makes the already boring task of leveling fishing all the way seem comparably tame (unlike other gathering skills, the difficulty doesn't influence the rate at which it increases -- you simply need like 30 sucessful catches at higher levels to advance a single point).
245** The Algalon quest chain is definitely That One Sidequest, needing 5 other That One Sidequests just to activate him.
246** Also consider the Meta achievement What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been -- You need to complete all of the holiday event Meta achievements, and each one of those usually has a few that are extremely annoying. Also, good luck if you're out of town during the 1 week some of these events run.
247** The ''very'' aptly named "the Insane" title and its acheivement, Insane in the Membrane. To get it, you need to be honored with the Bloodsail Pirates and exalted with the entire Steamwheedle Cartel, the Shan'dralar, the Darkmoon Faire, and Ravenholdt. The problems with this? For one, getting from hated to honored with the Bloodsails means killing Booty Bay guards, which kills your Booty Bay (and thus Steamwheedle Cartel) reputation. Even then, it is ''far'' from easy getting to exalted with the Shan'dralar (turn in Unique librams, along with other items, over and over and over) ''or'' the Darkmoon Faire (ditto, but with the hard-to-assemble Darkmoon decks), and getting to exalted with Ravenholdt is next to impossible if you're not a rogue (again, but with pickpocketed lockboxes). And you have to hold those reputations simultaneously.
248** Getting back to quests, one of the most irritating quests in the earlier levels of the game, still around to this day, is the quest Researching The Corruption, found in Blackfathom Deeps. The quest involves killing the satyr and naga mobs in the dungeon and taking out their "Corrupted Brain Stems," the quest requires you to get eight of them. Simple enough on its own, the only problem being that there will ''very rarely'' be enough of them for everybody in a 5-player group to finish the quest, meaning that a player will always need to run the dungeon two or even three times just to finish this quest. The drop rate for them is so wonky that it's entirely possible to run the dungeon with more than one player having already gotten some from a previous run and ''still'' have none of the players get enough to finish it.
249** Time Lost Proto [[http://www.wowwiki.com/Time-Lost_Proto_Drake Drake.]] Possibly the ''only'' consolation is that this isn't at all necessary but for some, to whom BraggingRightsReward is important, it is.
250** When it came out, the world quest "Like The Wind" was much reviled for not only its general trickiness (use a spell called Dash to go through orbs to reach a goal) but also how buggy it was. Sometimes Dash didn't move you forward at all, sometimes it sent you twice as far as normal, sometimes the quest would suddenly declare you off-course and send you back to the beginning. Since flying has been introduced to the Broken Isles, players just fly to the goal and collect functionally free loot.
251** ''Legion'' brought with it "Mounting Made Easy", whose name is pretty much purely BlatantLies. The ultimate quest for the Leatherworking profession, it tasks you with finding and capturing a Great Northern Elderhorn ([[CallARabbitASmeerp also known as a white moose]]) so you can make it your mount. Easy, right? Well, here's the catch: you capture it by lassoing it and then keeping up with it as it quite literally runs halfway across the entire zone, and the beast does its absolute damnedest to make the trip as miserable as possible for you. In addition to making sudden turns that almost guarantee the rope between you and it snaps [[TrialAndErrorGameplay unless you already know which path it's going to take]], it tends to run right through enemy mobs that will unmount you the moment they touch you (unless you're using the consumable Stonehide Leather Barding item, mercifully something Leatherworkers can make themselves fairly easily) as well as a free-for-all PVP area ''that automatically flags you for PVP when you enter it'', the only consolation being that the PVP battles only happen at certain times. Possibly the most infamous portion of the quest comes roughly halfway through, when the Elderhorn leaps down a waterfall; if you jump down after it, you'll most likely sail right past it as it lands on a rock halfway down and the rope snaps. Then you try again, following its path onto the rock and then down to the ground... and most likely die of fall damage in the attempt, unless you're under the effects of a food item which grants a massive buff to out-of-battle health generation or land in the ''exact'' right spots which let you survive the fall. The quest is such an exercise in patience, some players have questioned if it's even worth it for a non-flying mount with a non-unique model (a brown Elderhorn mount is a purchasable reward from one of the expansion's factions), and some simply dislike the mount because the mere sight of it reminds them of the horrible quest required to get it.
252** "The Green Hills of Stranglethorn" was a series of quests in which the player gathered pages of the book from all across the zone. Unfortunately? All the pages [[RandomlyDrops dropped randomly]] thoughout the ''entire'' zone. The ''entire'' Zone. Stranglethorn Vale is already a ThatOneLevel if you're on a [=PvP=] server due to it being a massive botleneck and people ''loved'' ganking and camping players. It wasn't uncommon for people to get multiple copies of the same pages or carouse the auction house to find the page they need.
253[[/folder]]
254
255[[folder:Platform Game]]
256* ''VideoGame/BanjoKazooie'':
257** The game features an infamous Jiggy in Rusty Bucket Bay that is widely regarded as the most difficult Jiggy in the game. It requires you to head down deep into the engine room of the level's ship, press a switch, navigate through a series of very narrow platforms with rotating fans, climb a ladder to exit the ship, jump into the water, and grab the jigsaw in the ship's propellers. All within a [[TimedMission strict time limit]]. Exacerbated by the fact that one misstep means failure, the difficulty of seeing the exact location of the Jiggy in the level's murky waters (which drain your OxygenMeter at double the rate, no less), touching the blades of the propellers mean instant death, and the game's relatively imprecise swimming controls. Nuts & Bolts even pokes fun at the difficulty of said Jiggy.
258** Mr. Vile's minigame in Bubblegloop Swamp is another irritating one. It seems pretty simple, at first glance: fruit pop out of the holes, and the task given is to eat more fruit than Mr. Vile does. Mr. Vile, however, is pretty darn fast, and the player must transform into an incredibly slow crocodile to access the minigame. A powerup can be unlocked later in the game that gives you super speed, making it relatively easier in that respect. But once you beat him, you have to beat him again, only this time, worms will pop up alongside the fruit, and eating a worm causes you to become temporarily stunned. Finally, you have to play the game a third time. ''This'' time, both fruit and worms pop up again, but you can only eat whatever is displayed at the top of the screen. (ex: If it shows a worm, you must eat worms, and eating fruit will stun you.) The display changes between fruit and worms every ten seconds. The fruit and worms themselves spawn randomly as well. And it all has to be done in succession to get the Jiggy.
259** The sequel, ''Banjo-Tooie'', has Canary Mary. This probably wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to race her on a vehicle powered by [[ButtonMashing repeatedly mashing the A button]]. To make things worse, the race against her in the last major level is excruciatingly long for that control method, ''and'' she has RubberBandAI. And to get HundredPercentCompletion, you have to do each race twice. She's so infamous that ''Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts'' had the [[HateSink Lord of Games]] taunt the player about it (see the page quote).
260** ''Tooie'' also has the Dynamite Ordinance and Clinker's Cavern challenges. Both consist of Banjo wandering around a maze-like area in first-person view while, under a strict time limit, trying to locate and destroy a decent number of creatures which are small enough to be hidden just out of sight, in rooms that all begin to look the same. And if you don't get rid of all of the Clinkers in time, you have to escape from the area before you suffocate and lose all health.
261* The Challenge Rooms in ''VideoGame/BionicCommando Rearmed''. Many of the later ones require insane coordination and timing, and can be {{Guide Dang It}}s. And you need to complete all of them for [[ThatOneAchievement the achievement]].
262* Getting all gems in ''Videogame/CrashBandicoot1996'' is an exercise in patience. To get a gem, one needs to break every box in the level [[NoDeathRun without dying]] once first checkpoint crate is opened. This includes levels like [[MarathonLevel Sunset Vista]], [[SecretLevel Fumbling in]] [[BlackoutBasement the Dark]], [[BottomlessPits The High Road]] and [[ThatOneLevel Slippery Climb]]. Some of the boxes require you to get a colored gem from another level to get to them, some are [[GuideDangIt hidden behind the background or require a]] LeapOfFaith and some are just hard to get in general. The ''VideoGame/CrashBandicootNSaneTrilogy'' thankfully makes the boxes' locations more obvious, and also removes the "don't die" aspect of collecting gems for the most part. The exceptions to this are when going for the aforementioned colored gems, which bring back this rule with a vengeance, and Slippery Climb is still among the levels with a colored gem in it.
263* ''Videogame/CrashBandicoot3Warped'' allows the player to reach [[BrokeTheRatingScale 105% completion]] by earning at least golden relics from every stage of the game. This is made very difficult by the fact that the game features several different types of levels and simply rushing through won't work in all of them.
264* ''Franchise/DonkeyKong'':
265** The DK Koin in ''Web Woods'' of ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountry2DiddysKongQuest''. It's one of the end-of-level rewards, meaning you have to get through the entire level to so much as get a single attempt at getting it, and if you miss you have to restart the entire level from the beginning. If that's not bad enough, the timing to get it is ''very'' precise and it is the hardest end-of-level reward to get in the entire game, guaranteeing you're going to have to try at least a few times unless you get very lucky. And if ''that'' is not bad enough, ''Web Woods'' is an utter slog to get through as most of it is inching along at a snails pace on web platforms, which will occasionally vanish beneath you at random just often enough to drive you bananas, waiting for Zingers to get out of the way or Mini-Neckys to swoop into range so you can hit them. By the time you get that DK Koin you will utterly hate spiders and anyone who associates with spiders.
266** ''VideoGame/DonkeyKong64'':
267*** Racing the beetle. It's not having to beat him that's so bad so much as the fact that you must have a certain number of coins by the end, and the beetle can [[CollisionDamage make you drop some on contact]].
268*** The mechanical fish, which requires you to shoot out all the valves of its heart in a time limit. You literally haven't a second to spare -- you'll need all 100 seconds in order to complete it and destroy the robot fish. There's also a glitch that makes the propeller go for longer after a certain point in the game -- having the Sniper Scope active causes the rate at which the propellers spin to tank while the timer stays the same. It's easy enough to fix by leaving first person mode or disabling the sniper scope in between shots, but since it's a counter-intuitive fix to a problem that doesn't show up anywhere else in the game, many people resort to workaround glitches or declare it lost forever.
269*** ''Beaver Bother.'' Herding giraffes is nothing compared to herding ''beavers'', into a pit that seems [[EdgeGravity scientifically designed to keep beavers out]], in a truly absurd time limit. Even if you approach them just right, the beavers won't necessarily go in the hole. About 50% of the time a beaver will go up to the edge and just refuse to fall, even if you're approaching the proper way. Most walkthroughs will tell you that nothing will cause that beaver to fall into the hole for about 10 seconds once they decide they don't want to go in, and you only have about 60 seconds to reach your goal. One level has '''two''' Beaver Bother minigames in it.
270*** Batty Barrel Bandit. It's simple: just stop the slots when the Golden Banana icons appear, get four in a row enough times, and you win. However, unless you're extremely focused, it's tough to get it right unless you've memorized it. However, the time limit is ridiculously unforgiving, and you can't afford to mess up more than twice before you run out of time.
271*** Anything involving Diddy's rocketbarrels. Pain in the arse to handle, and when combined with ''two'' PassThroughTheRings challenges, it's enough to make a sane player eat the cartridge out of pure despair.
272*** Hunting down all the Banana Fairies. ''All of them.'' Easy to tell if you're close to one, but good luck finding the rooms they're in, let alone taking good pictures of them..
273*** The 2nd Rabbit Race has caused people to fling their controller across the room. In fact, in the some versions, he's ''even faster'', to the point where he's even faster than Lanky while he has the Orangsprint and runs in a perfect line while. Even if you cut corners, it's entirely probable you won't be able to get ahead of him. Beating it is impossible without exploiting a glitch or getting him to get stuck on the Kasplat in the tunnel.
274** ''VideoGame/DonkeyKongCountryTropicalFreeze'':
275*** The Kong Temples have time trials now. Have fun.
276*** Several of the secret exits qualify, like the one which requires a very well timed bounce on a spikey urchin with Cranky, and the urchin breaks with one hit so you only get one shot at it (fortunately, the fruit respawns if you go offscreen) and the one in 6-7, that requires you to go 3/4s through the level without losing your Kong partner (the only DK Barrel in the level is at the very start) with electrical traps everywhere, made marginally better by the fact that Dixie is able to reach the secret exit. Or the one in 5-4 that requires Dixie; the level is fairly long, and again, has only one DK barrel at the start. Dixie's Kong-Pow move (to extend DK's Life Meter) is a gift.
277* ''Videogame/JakIIRenegade'', being a NintendoHard game by default, naturally has a host of these:
278** Getting gold medals in any race bar the only purely optional race in Port. They're all done on Zoomers which have handling similar to ''Wipeout'', something that can be hard to get used to. Finishing the storyline missions is already hard as it is, but getting the gold medals requires to make 5 ''perfect'' laps while using an available and hard-to-use shortcut and using turbo as much as possible, something that might take hundred attempts. Per race. And if you want all orbs, you must do this for ''all'' races, including optional ''reverse'' versions.
279** The PassThroughTheRings mission in industrial section of the city. This one includes walkways and you basically have to be on Zoomer, which makes it ''very'' easy to fall off. The one going through the West Bazaar is almost just as bad, requiring you to do a portion in a part that is inaccessible by vehicles.
280* ''Videogame/Jak3Wastelander'':
281** The Eco Grid game is bad if you need to complete it for story-line reasons already if you don't know [[GuideDangIt you can speed up Daxter]]. However, getting gold record is a nightmare even employing that, considering you need to complete the game ''4 times in a row'' (you may skip a few orbs for the last time) and for that fourth occasion there are actually ''two'' malicious programs, making it easy to get cornered and killed.
282** The gold record in Dark Satellite game. You may make a mistake 4 times (missing a symbol or pressing the wrong symbol) and continue. It requires immense precision, as without hitting multiple symbols at once further in the game you do not stand a chance.
283* In ''VideoGame/KirbyMassAttack'', completing all of the list objectives with "Gold Star Champion" standing out as the toughest one due to the fact that you have to beat each level and the bosses [[NoDamageRun without getting hurt]] to get all of the gold stars.
284* In ''VideoGame/KirbysReturnToDreamLand'', after you beat the main game, there's EX-mode which is basically the game's hard mode. [[spoiler: There's also [[BossRush The True Arena]] after you finish that, which borders on SelfImposedChallenge if you take it on with only one player, so hopefully you have some skilled friends to help you, as some of the bosses are nearly impossible for one person alone, even if they are very skilled.]]
285** From the same game, one of the final Energy Spheres requires you to brave the game's [[MarathonLevel very long]] final level, use a Trumpet to retrieve a key from a Key Dee, then bring that key to the next screen, through an incredibly difficult series of obstacles to the door holding the sphere. The next screen is full of lava, incidentally -- lava that instantly destroys the key. And as you got the key on the previous screen, that means playing through the very long level all over again just to get another shot. Is it any wonder cross-screen puzzles were removed by the time Triple Deluxe came along?
286* ''Franchise/MegaMan''
287** ''VideoGame/MegaManX1'' has the X-Buster upgrade in Flame Mammoth's stage. You have to do a pixel-perfect dash jump to the breakable blocks, which you have to bust through to get to the capsule. If you slip up even once, you have to start the stage over by leaving (or if you didn't beat the level beforehand, kill yourself) and try again. The developers themselves apparently realized how hard this upgrade was to get, so it's handed to you for free from Zero in the first Sigma level if you didn't get it here.
288** In ''VideoGame/MegaManX5'', two of the eight Dr. Light capsules are very difficult to obtain. One of them requires you to collect all the orbs in an AutoScrollingLevel (which is a candidate for ThatOneLevel in the entire franchise), and another involves guiding a tiny drone (it's one of X's [[PowerCopying Special Weapons]], so it has limited ammo) through a narrow, winding shaft, which the player needs to have extreme precision to pull off.
289** ''VideoGame/MegaManX6'' has you looking for over one hundred hostages to receive powerups, and if you fail to save them before they're contaminated with a Nightmare Virus, they're [[PermanentlyMissableContent lost]] and you have to restart your game to try again. To make it harder, one reploid has a Nightmare spawn almost right on top of him, meaning you have to immediately shoot it down or lose him.
290** ''VideoGame/MegaManLegends 2'':
291*** The dreaded S-Class Digger's Exam. You have precisely five minutes to run a gauntlet crawling with enemies specifically intended to slow you down by heaping FakeDifficulty on you: {{Mook Maker}}s, [[DemonicSpiders enemies with shields]], enemies that can disable your gun]], homing exploding enemies, and a brutal DualBoss at the end (and many of the enemies share ''multiple'' of these traits). Making matters worse is you're forced through with subpar equipment, no items, and only the near-useless Lifter subweapon: It's really telling that the mission is only even possible, though still ''very'' difficult, when abusing a glitch that lets you shoot faster. Passing this test is not mandatory, but you can only access the final sub ruin with an S-Class License, and the extra money dropped by enemies when you're an S-Class Digger is invaluable for weapon customization.
292*** Getting The Crusher, one of the most useful weapons in the game, requires you to be a JerkAss. Blowing up the statue in the Blitzkrieg fight, shooting at Johnny, shooting Apoo and Dah ([[TheScrappy not that we'd blame anyone for shooting them]]), attacking rabbits and pigs, etc. There's a shady dealer in Kimotoma who will only deal with you if you've reduced your [[GuideDangIt hidden "affection" values]] low enough by doing this. Of course, by being such an asshole is stuff gets 20% more expensive in stores, and the only reliable way to undo this is to donate tons of money to the church, so it will cost you a ''lot'' of money in the long run.
293*** The Pokte Island Quiz. You're asked 10 multiple choice questions ranging from simple (the world's largest lake) to obscure (which middle ages monk was the most famous scientist of his time). Nobody playing this game could be reasonably expected to answer many of these, it doesn't even serve as a teaching aide (when you get a question wrong it doesn't tell you the right answer), and trial and error is tedious as there is a pool of 200 or so questions for them to draw from. To make matters worse the music is a short loop of [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV1zqnoSgqE absolutely horrid ear poison]] and the controls are a touch dodgy, making it easy to pick the wrong answer by mistake. Fully completing the quest requires you to sit down and do a ''one-hundred question quiz'' without getting a single answer wrong: If you're going to do it grab a walkthrough, mute the tv, put on your favorite album, and pray you don't misclick over the next hour or so. If none of that is bad enough, your reward is the Zetsabre which is used to craft the Blade Arm: granted it's not a ''bad'' weapon but it's far from the best and [[PowerUpLetdown certainly not worth slogging through the quiz]].
294** ''VideoGame/MegaManZX'' takes full advantage of its {{Metroidvania}} format in the first game. How does it do this? [[LethalLavaLand Area K]] and its thousand-times-cursed [[EmergencyEnergyTank Sub Tank]]. First, you have to go through an area with a [[RiseToTheChallenge rising pool of lava]]. You then go up to an alternate area of the first section of the level, where you go to a computer and reset the speed of the lava to slow (somehow). After this point, you must then take the cable car back to the start of the area and challenge the [[AdvancingWallOfDoom lava wave]] you normally have to escape from to reach the boss, except holding at a section near the middle of the area (and if you miss you have to start again or die?), avoiding or quickly destroying enemies, and then you must break through a set of five pairs of blocks, the first of which forms a wall on a hanging ledge. In order to break these blocks, you must use a charged attack from a form that is not particularly mobile. And if you get too close, you will grab the wall and attack in the opposite direction and have to try again. While the lava is still approaching, mind you, which makes this require insanely careful timing. Then you go through a relatively short segment to hit a button. You just went through all of this hell to unlock a gate to a door. After that you need to go through to the end of the stage (hope you already trashed Flammole!), warp out, then haul it back there and deal with the mid-boss again, then scale the rising lava tunnel again to reach the door that the button unlocked. And then, just in case you spent too many lives on the aforementioned, you have to go through a short tunnel. Lined with [[SpikesOfDoom spikes.]] Underwater. And the water is boiling, so you'll periodically take damage, which snaps you out of your swimming mode, which you then have the length of your MercyInvincibility to turn back on (by jumping and hitting the jump button again, thus risking hitting the spiked ceiling). And then you have to get back out of this (i.e. play through the entire level ''again'') and make your way to a save point. [[CheckPointStarvation And you can't save during]] this whole hellish nightmare and keep your progress, not even the state of the lava speed.
295* ''VideoGame/{{Owlboy}}'' has the Cannon MiniGame. An extra challenging UnexpectedGameplayChange with clunky and confusing control scheme [[note]]to the point that some people found holding the controller upside-down helpful[[/note]] and screen transitions that will immediately crash you into a wall unless you memorized what's coming and started turning on the previous screen. There's also no way to quickly restart the MiniGame after failure, and the initial animation can be nearly as long as an attempt cut short. And that's not even mentioning the rings that need to be passed through for HundredPercentCompletion.
296* ''VideoGame/{{Psychonauts}}'':
297** Collecting every single Figment is a task best left to the masochistic -- especially in the Milla's Raceway sub-level. Due to the slope of the level, and the fact that it more or less forces you to be on your unwieldy Levitation Ball most of the way, it's very easy to fly too far or move too fast -- and if you accidentally take the wrong pathway, too bad! To make matters worse, unlike most video game {{Plot Coupon}}s, Figments are transparent and can phase in and out of visibility -- and some of them ''move,'' meaning you have to chase them down. It's possible to manually go up and down the race to collect the figments, but it's a painstaking process.
298** And the Black Velvetopia level, where the neon Figments fit a little too well into the black velvet level design.
299** Another thing about the game is the PUNCHING BAG MINIGAME, especially on the harder difficulties. The problem lies in the fact that the targets pop up and leave quicker than the reflexes of most human beings, and that once you've been thrown for a loop and miss a target, you miss six targets. This in itself is not bad except you '''lose points''' if you miss targets. Have fun getting that achievement.
300* Many people who have played ''VideoGame/Rayman2TheGreatEscape'' don't even know that the 1000th lum even exists. You need to look at one section of a wall in a cutscene to realize that it's a camouflaged secret tunnel to the 1000th lum. Despite your completion rate reaching 100%, the game still says that you have 999/999 lums.
301* In ''VideoGame/RaymanOrigins,'' there's the time trial for Mecha No Mistake. The level is ''already'' ThatOneLevel and notorious for its habit of killing players repeatedly; the time trial requires you to not only complete it flawlessly, but to complete it flawlessly on a ''very strict time limit'' that requires you to run almost the entire way. Some parts of the level actually get easier if you run the whole thing (such as the part with vanishing platforms), others do not. And the gear room, while rarely dangerous, is a ''huge'' time suck that makes it all the more difficult to grab the Electoon. Let alone the trophy...
302* ''VideoGame/ShantaeAndTheSevenSirens'': The Dance Parlor. How it works is that Shantae speeds left and right constantly changing speed while targets eratically move back and forth above you, and you have to hit them with a slow-moving projectile. You must hit all ten targets with 10 shots, which takes two rounds since you only get five shots per round, and missing even once means you failed. If that wasn't difficult enough, the game gives you [[GuideDangIt no instructions and no indication whatsoever]] if you're doing it right or wrong, performing well, or failing, and it's not immediately clear that you ''can't'' win in one round and need a second attempt, making it easy to think you're not doing it right. Not counting the time it's going to take to figure out what in the hell you need to do to win, it's going to take a solid hour of this accursed game to win the Heart Squid.
303* ''VideoGame/SlyCooperAndTheThieviusRaccoonus'' has the Master Thief Sprints, [[TimedMission speedruns of every platforming level]]. They're noticeably more difficult than anything else in the game. Tellingly, no other Sly game used them, and the [=PS3=] rerelease doesn't offer any trophies for completing them.
304* ''VideoGame/SonictheHedgehog'':
305** The Ski Slope snowboarding mission in the mission mode in ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure DX Director's Cut'', where you have to pass a line of rings with three high jumps on the last three ski slopes and go flying over the capsule to get them by hitting the red and white lines on the edge of the ramp, and your timing has to be pixel-perfect. The slightest mistake forces you to repeat the mission, and every time you repeat the mission, you have to play through the entire snowboarding section over again. As if this wasn't bad enough, if you decide to save this mission for last (which is, needless to say, entirely understandable), you risk running into a [[GameBreakingBug bug]] which corrupts your save file and forces you to do everything over again, this mission included.
306*** Make that "The Ski Slope snowboarding missions" (plural), because Tails has his own mission involving that section that's just as frustrating. For Tails' version you have to collect 13 flags on the slope. However, there's a few complications: [1. The flags are easy to miss due to you sliding down a slope on a snowboard. [2. All the flags are in the last stretch of the course and one is before a cliff, so if you miss it you'll need to replay the entire level (both because there's no checkpoints and because restarting a level costs a life, whereas quitting a level and reentering doesn't). [3. You're still racing Sonic (who has rubberband AI) and will instantly fail the level if he reaches the goal before you (it's not unheard of for Sonic to win the race when the player is just about to get flag #13). So you can't take your time collecting the flags.
307*** If you're going after emblems, some of the Level A missions can become this. They're not too bad with Tails, since they simply involve racing against a much faster opponent, and even Big once you get the hang of his [[FishingMinigame fishing]] [[ScrappyMechanic levels]], but Sonic's Level A missions involve getting to the goal in under a strict time limit (for example, Emerald Coast has to be completed in under 2 minutes), which, depending on the level, can be incredibly difficult unless you know the level by heart and pull off specific tricks. Same goes for Knuckles, who has to find the Master Emerald shards in under a minute (or, if playing [[ThatOneLevel Sky Deck]], 2 minutes). Amy's Level A missions in Twinkle Park and Final Egg are easy, but [[MarathonLevel Hot Shelter]] is rather difficult due to the strict 6:30 time mark.
308** ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure2: Battle'':
309*** Chao Garden. Not because of difficulty, but because of how unbelievably passive and tedious the Chao Garden and its games are. Also, [[GoodBadBugs while there are ways around it]], everything in the black market costs 10 times as much as would be reasonably expensive.
310*** The ''Sonic Adventure DX'' version is ten times more infuriating. There aren't any Chaos Drives, so the only way to raise chao skills is racking up a lot of small animals (Which give bigger bonuses towards levels, but subtract from stats that the animal is bad at.) And the Chao Races are made much more difficult by not being able to use your chao's Stamina skill as a speed boost, as hitting the buttons just makes pointless noise, oh, and if you do that you might accidentally [[ScrappyMechanic give the opponent a speed boost]], as the focus of the race keeps changing between your chao and the other 7 that you don't want to win. Its not all bad if you [[GoodBadBugs trick the system into giving Animal stats without using the Animal.]] But it still takes a long time.
311*** A lot of the bonus missions are also incredibly difficult to get an A rank on. The "find the lost" chao missions are nigh impossible [[GuideDangIt without using a guide]], and Rouge and Tails' go-kart missions (with requirements like "don't hit any other cars" and "don't touch the walls") are also painfully difficult.
312*** The Cannon's Core Chao has eluded many players to the point of insanity. [[spoiler: Remember, this level is about teamwork, and finding the chao here is no different.]]
313** Nearly ''every'' timed mission in ''VideoGame/SonicRushAdventure'' requires near-perfect timing. There is almost no margin for error, lest you fall short of the arbitrarily short time limit.
314** ''VideoGame/SonicColors'' DS has Mission 2 in Sweet Mountain where you have to rescue 25 Wisps. It isn't that hard if all you're trying to do is pass it or collect its red rings. However, it becomes a total nightmare when trying to S rank the mission. The part that especially makes it hard is when you reach the robot that tosses you up in the air where you have to dodge the balloon bombs to enter its mouth. You move at a very slow pace during that part which wastes your time and since it's a rescue Wisps mission, there are no extra time capsules to earn to give you extra time on the mission's countdown timer. By the time you're past the robot part you probably won't have enough time left to earn an S rank during this mission.
315** The Eggman missions in ''[=Sonic Origins=]'' falls under this. These missions feature previous Eggman battles that are made harder with tight time limits to get an S-Rank.
316*** ''Eggman: Fancy Footwork'' pits Sonic against the Egg Spiker (the Star Light Zone boss), but there is no floor and rings to help the player out. Defeating Eggman within 50 seconds for the S rank requires very quick reactions and teleegraphing where the Egg Spiker will release the bombs so you can instantly deflect them back at Eggman, with mistakes often causing you to waste lots of time or get killed in the process. The timer still continues during the Egg Spiker's explosion animation as well, giving you approximately five less seconds than the stated 50 seconds to defeat the Egg Spiker.
317*** ''Eggman: Speed Up'' takes place against the [[WarmUpBoss EGG-HVC-001]] (the PalmtreePanic boss). Looks easy at first glimpse, but there are spikes within the arena and no rings are provided to help the player. Additionally, the EGG-HVC-001 moves at a hypersonic speed, making it impossible to strike it until it flinches back to the back of the arena lest you want to get bopped into the spikes for an instant death. And unlike the original encounter, [[NoFairCheating you cannot run to the right to get an easy victory]], as the EGG-HVC-001 spawns at the very right of the screen now without a gap. You need to time the hits at the correct time to get the S-Rank of 15 seconds, or you're going to either get bumped into the spikes or have the EGG-HVC-001 run over you. Luckily, the timer stops once the EGG-HVC-001 is defeated, but you can still die to the spikes if the last hit leaps you back to one.
318*** ''Eggman: Blue Beam'' heads to the Egg Poison in the Chemical Plant Zone. No rings provided as usual, but the kicker is that he is also filling up poison and following Sonic at a rapid speed. Less time is given to deal damage to Eggman, and you'll probably get hit easily by the somewhat large hitbox of the droplets. Like the Egg Spiker, the timer still continues after defeating Eggman, so you have a bit less than the required 25 seconds for an S-Rank.
319*** ''Eggman: Spike Attack'' is the easiest of the bunch, but can be tricky with the more clumped iron ball obstacles making it slightly easier to accidentally trip into one while reaching the Egg Scrambler (the Mushroom Hill Zone boss). Eggman is also dashing away instantly, making it impossible to land many hits before he rushes away at the start, unlike in the normal encounter. The saving grace is that you're given Rings this time and the timer freezes once Eggman is defeated, so it's easier to rely on MercyInvincibility to rush damage on the Egg Scrambler.
320*** Besides the Eggman quests, there are additionally two quests that are excessively difficult to get an S-Rank on.
321*** ''Tornado Flyby'' requires you to collect as many rings as possible before the end of Sky Chase Zone, while avoiding enemies that have double speed projectiles. Although it sounds simple, this mission adds [[GoddamnedBats Octuses and Asterons]] that launches much more projectiles than the Turtloids that are normally in the zone. What is worse is that the placement of these enemies tend to be in tight areas with rings in the path of firing, which turns an otherwise BreatherLevel into a BulletHell where fighting back is extremely risky.
322*** ''Speedy Swim'' takes place on the AdvancingWallofDoom section in Hydrocity Zone Act 2, which is also heavily sped up with nearly no room for error. You also cannot miss a single ring for S-Rank.
323* The first ''VideoGame/SpyroTheDragon1998'' game has the level Tree Tops. The level itself is considered ThatOneLevel, but there is a dragon stuck on a platform that you can only get to by chaining supercharge jumps and it's known for being hard to get to. The game actually [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] this, the dragon compliments you on your jumping when you free him but Spyro grumbles, "You could have picked a better spot to get stuck in!"
324* ''VideoGame/Spyro2RiptosRage'':
325** There's a number of little sidequests for orbs, one of which involves riding an infamous trolley around a track to get 50 gears for some pelican. This seemingly simple task will leave you traumatized with the phrase that horrible bird says to you every single one of the hundreds of times you are destined to fail, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti_vGdM1EBo&t=45s "Trouble with the trolley, eh?"]] Was eventually acknowledged in the ''[[VideoGame/SpyroReignitedTrilogy Reignited Trilogy]]'' version of the game, where merely completing the sidequest gives you an achievement/trophy that's ''Gold'' in the [=PS4=] version.
326** The sidequest on the caveman level where you have to protect eggs from the raptors by running around and roasting them. The first time isn't that bad, because all of the raptors appear all in a row. The second time, however, they attack in a more or less random order, forcing you to run back and forth across the area to kill them all. If you miss a single jump or take a wrong turn, you're screwed.
327** The Alchemist sidequest. To start it's an escort mission with the mandatory stupid A.I that will walk into the enemy's range without even trying to avoid them. To make matters worse if the guy went out of his cave and to the right he can completely avoid the enemies and reach his destination in half the time. The sidequest is especially notable in that, if you kill all the enemies first with [[BraggingRightsReward Infinite Superflame]], you can easily notice the Alchemist always follows the same, pre-determined path, that is ''programmed to run into every single enemy''. That's right, you're supposed to escort him and keep him safe from ''all of them!''
328** The Crystal Popcorn is another difficult challenge, where the player had to collect more crystal pieces than Hunter, 10 during the first challenge, not that bad, 15 during the second, and Hunter's AI gets better too, also, leave the level without getting the second one, you'll have to do the first again.
329* ''VideoGame/SpyroYearOfTheDragon'' has a few annoying egg missions:
330** One that stands out is "Bad dragon!" in Fireworks Factory. You have to use a combination [[ElmuhFuddSyndwome "superfwy and superfwame"]] powerup to kill two flying enemies that resemble Chinese dragons. They're very long and thin and undulate constantly while they move, not to mention moving in a very erratic and twisty fashion, making them very hard to hit. Also, they're segmented, and each hit knocks a segment off, making them shorter and thus even ''harder'' to hit. And you can't just camp in a good spot and take potshots at them as they go by - if you stop attacking them, they start regrowing their segments, and they do it fast, so you need to be constantly hitting them, which as mentioned is very difficult due to the way they move. Oh, and if you kill one and then die trying to kill the other, ''the dragon you just killed gets revived''.
331** "Box the yeti." and "Box the yeti again!" in Frozen Altars. Basically ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin - you, as Bentley, have to win a boxing match against a yeti. Bentley's quick attacks have such a short range and his long-reaching attacks are so slow that it's a challenge just to get close enough to land a punch, especially when the yeti keeps smacking him in the face. Not to mention it's a ''timed bout'', so if you take too long, you lose. The strategy recommended by most is to just get close and spam the "jab" attack, but even that doesn't always work, as the yeti quite often blocks and counterattacks, so it really comes down to luck and [[ButtonMashing breaking your square button]]. Then once you're done, you get to fight him ''again'', this time in a three-round match. [[spoiler:Win in two rounds for a Skill Point.]]
332** "Catch the ice cats." also in Frozen Altars. You have to play a hockey match by freezing cats and pushing them into the goal (no, really). The cats slip and slide all over the damn place, making it really hard to get them in the goal, which is not helped by the fact that the opponent is both faster than Spyro and ''very'' skilled.
333** Both "Escort the twins." missions in the Spooky Swamp are also bound to make you more toxic than a nuclear waste site. Here, you have to escort a firefly to a cage holding an egg to blow it up with a bomb to get the egg. The thing is, like the Alchemist, instead of doing something logical like taking a straight path to the cage and lighting the bomb there, they light the bombs at the '''''beginning''''' of their paths and then walk right into '''''respawning''''' rocks and mushrooms '''''repeatedly''''' that will force you to start the mission all over again. The second one is worse since that twin is faster ''and'' follows a different path. A touch of FridgeLogic serves to rub salt in the wound, and not just because of the fireflies' blatant disregard for safety; as [[WebVideo/{{Caddicarus}} Caddy]] puts it, it makes less sense than the Alchemist holding the secret formula because ''at least Sheila has'' '''''hands!'''''
334** Taking the cake however is the yeti race in the Super Bonus Round. It's like the race in Lost Fleet where you pop tricks, hit stars, and run over crabs to fill your turbo meter, except this time you're racing against hyper fast PerfectPlayAI yetis who do ''not'' screw around and pretty much spend the entire race turboing full-throttle. The track this time is narrow, full of twists and turns, and has a lot of jumps spaced in a way that they are easy to overshoot or undershoot. If you slip up so much as once, miss one jump or one trick or one turbo star, you are ''guaranteed'' to come in 7th. Your only hope to win is to pull off as many Twisted Lemons as you possibly can on the very first jump of each lap and then carefully ration that turbo bar out between hitting every star so there is never a moment of the race you are not turboing, all the while jumping over the abyss at every turn to cut corners off of the track, because if you stop turboing even once during the race (even to pop a trick) you ''will'' be passed and won't be able to catch up. It's particularly jarring as the rest of Super Bonus Round is very easy.
335* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioSunshine'':
336** There's the warp pipe on the desert island -- simply unlocking it requires maneuvering the [[SuperDrowningSkills water-soluble]] Yoshi through a time-consuming and tricky series of platform jumps over water. Once you're in, you have to collect 8 red coins over lethally toxic water, which is flowing irrevocably one way and contains strong currents that carry you away from the coins, by performing precisely timed jumps from a ''moving leaf-raft that is rapidly dissolving beneath your feet''; and you have to steer it with FLUDD. And if you run out of lives, you have to get Yoshi back on to that island all over again. There's a Warp Pipe at the end, which any sane person would think sends you back to the beginning to get any coins they missed, that ''sends you back to Delfino Plaza'', meaning you have to do the tedious section with Yoshi ''again'' just to try the level again.
337** Watermelon Festival, requiring the player to maneuver a very fragile, difficult to control fruit through a huge group of enemies which can for the most part only be stunned temporarily. Those that can be killed don't usually get in your way anyways.
338** The Pachinko course. You're in a giant pachinko machine, and you jump on a bouncy part of the floor to get launched way up to the top. Then you have to navigate along thin nails in the wall to get to the red coins. Missing the outcroppings in the wall is quite easy when you can't easily maneuver yourself and rotate the camera at the same time. Miss even one and you'll fall to the inescapable bottom which has a hole you jump down to your death. Then you have to start over. To make matters worse, the level has [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard wonky physics]]: sometimes Mario will bump what amounts to an invisible wall, and other times an invisible force will thrust him in a direction you don't want to go.
339** The 240 Blue Coins. There are hidden coins scattered throughout every level in the game. Including [[NintendoHard most of the "secrets"]]. The Blue Coins vary in where they're found from obvious spots that require an unlockable power-up to [[GuideDangIt doing out of the way things like spraying the moon in a specific spot]] to [[NintendoHard controlling a boat toward one]] to just spraying anything you can find. And you need 10 to get a Shine Sprite. The game doesn't even provide you with a checklist; the best you're getting is that the map you can access with Z will tell you how many Blue Coins you've found in a level... but not how many total are in the level (it's 30 for every main stage, but Delfino Plaza has the [[MissingSecret incomplete-looking]] 19, Delfino Airstrip has 1, and Corona Mountain has the remaining 10).
340* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy'':
341** The three Trial galaxies, all extremely difficult {{Unexpected Gameplay Change}}s:
342** The Toy Time Galaxy has ''Luigi's Purple Coins''. The time limit imposed may as well not exist, as the [[OneHitKO Green Slime of Death]] will see to it that you die ''long'' before your time runs out.
343** Dreadnought Galaxy's Purple Coin challenge is a giant pain in the ass, simply because the MinecartMadness style of the level means you can't miss a single one.
344** The Daredevil challenge in Melty Molten Galaxy. In it, you have to play the first mission unharmed at all times. The vast array of hazards and potential ways to die, as well as the lack of checkpoints, will make you wish you had just fought Fiery Dino Piranha (which is already [[ThatOneBoss very difficult]] to do in normal gameplay).
345** The Cosmic Mario races can be tricky, but not overly difficult. The Cosmic Luigi races, on the other hand, are infuriatingly difficult. Cosmic Luigi employs many tricks that players themselves use to go quickly, such as the long jump, and makes stunts that a standard player could achieve maybe one in every ten times.
346** Not even Mario and bombs can make cleaning up garbage fun. There are two stars in Mario Galaxy that require you to clean up piles of garbage within thirty seconds, by using bombs that take ten seconds to explode.
347** The Daredevil challenge in Ghostly Galaxy. It makes the player go up against [[Main/ThatOneBoss Bouldergeist]] with only [[Main/OneHitPointWonder one bit of health]].
348* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy2'' has the Grandmaster Galaxy Daredevil Run. Aptly called "The Perfect Run", this mission has the player tackle [[BrutalBonusLevel the most difficult level in the game]] ...as a OneHitPointWonder. One single mistake (and there are dozens of places to make mistakes) and you're forced to start over from the beginning.
349* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioOdyssey'':
350** Jump-Rope Genius requires you to perform one-hundred consecutive jumps in the jump-rope mini-game. This has been regarded by most as the most challenging Power Moon to get in practically the entire game. While all you need to do is get in sync with the rhythm, the rope eventually turns fast enough that holding the button down for even a split second longer than needed will result in a loss. There are a few techniques that can make the challenge easier, such as [[ViolationOfCommonSense doing it while riding a moped]] (provided you position it correctly) or throwing Cappy in mid-jump to get more hang time as the rope gets faster, but even then it remains very difficult. The so-called "Talkatoo Glitch" was an early method to trivialize the challenge, but was patched out a few months after release. As is often the case, determined players simply discovered another bug, this one involving the nearby controllable MARIO letters, that is arguably easier to pull off and hasn't been patched.
351** Beach Volleyball is just as bad if you're playing single-player, as Mario by himself just isn't fast enough to hit the ball at times. In order to reach one-hundred hits, you must either learn to throw Cappy quickly and efficiently or jump into two-player and have yourself/someone else control Cappy.
352** The Master Cup Koopa Race in the Wooded Kingdom. The golden Koopa Troopa will skip the entire Uproot maze along Iron Road by doing a long jump across the {{Bottomless Pit|s}} next to it, throwing his hat, jumping off of the hat, then throwing his hat again. While this isn't the most difficult of maneuvers, it's likely to be the first time the player is required to use the technique and the distance means that you'll just barely make it even if you are good at it.
353** The Koopa race in the Luncheon Kingdom. Most of these races are across safe terrain, with the challenge being simply to go faster than the Koopas rather than precision platforming. This one on the other hand has you scaling half the volcano, with rotating platforms, deadly lava, Fire Piranha Plants and many other hazards to screw up your performance. Combine this with a likely lack of health, enemies that can temporarily eat Cappy until you defeat them and the Koopas jumping across what seems to be thin air, and it makes for a rather frustrating challenge. There exists a much faster back route you can take that can avoid much of this and allows you to finish in less than 30 seconds, but it requires you to know that it exists in advance and calls upon advanced movement strategy that takes considerable practice.
354** "Herding Sheep in the Fog", a mini-level that opens up in the Wooded Kingdom's postgame. You have to herd a sheep across thin walkways over bottomless pits, with very few handrails. You need very precise angles on your cap throws, or the sheep will go flying into the abyss and respawn at the very beginning. To make things worse, the Sheep can and will very calmily walk into the abyss if you leave it alone for too long.
355** Iceburn Circuit Class S has the AI play near perfectly on a racetrack where one wrong move can send you bouncing out of control. This is especially so in the hairpin turn that concludes a lap, as they take the turn pretty far on the inside--if you bounce even further inside, you have a strong risk of landing offroad, which severely hampers your movement. No wonder the racer you take control of was scared to participate.
356** And then there are some Moons you can only get with Glydon. Doesn't sound too difficult? Well, his gliding turns into more of a fast dive mere seconds after you press the action button, making the objective difficult as you'll more than likely not reach your target by a mile. These missions can be made easier by shaking the Joy-Con to maintain your altitude... [[GuideDangIt but the game never tells you about this mechanic.]]
357* The ''Mario'' [[VideoGameRemake remakes]] have bonus content for longer replay value. Most of these are hard to fully complete.
358** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBrosDeluxe'' has the scrapbook. Images are unlocked by eliminating enemies, clearing the main game, the [[HardModeFiller Star Courses]], and ''The Lost Levels'', and defeating Bowser using only fireballs. Then there's the Peach and Toad awards which require the player to earn every medal in all levels and earn a total of 1,160,000 points in Challenge Mode respectively. A near-perfect speedrun of collecting every Red Coin and Yoshi Egg (both of them well hidden), jumping on top of the flagpole, and fireworks (optional but helpful) is necessary to reach a good score. The 3DS Virtual Console version unfortunately makes two images locked due to lack of wireless connectivity.
359** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioAdvance'' gave us the Yoshi Egg Challenge where one has to find two eggs in Subspace per level. Fortunately, the eggs are located near where the Mushrooms once were. Unfortunately, this reduces your max health from 5 to 3 (or even 2). Plus, if you lose a life, you also lose any eggs you picked up.
360** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioAdvance2'' adds Dragon Coins to every level barring Bowser's Castle and the Switch Palaces. To achieve 100% completion, all five Dragon Coins must be collected in one run which mainly revolves not hitting any Checkpoints in every level (including castles and fortresses as these cannot be reentered unless one defeats Bowser first).
361** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioAdvance3'' is more difficult than the [=SNES=] version for getting 100% as there is the addition of six secret levels to take account for. These secret levels are much more difficult and longer than the extra levels. Conveniently, the requirement for unlocking the Bonus Minigames was lessened from 800 total points per world to 700, so one can grind for extra items in preparation for the new levels.
362** ''VideoGame/SuperMarioAdvance4'' gave us optional levels that [[BribingYourWayToVictory require an eReader, and eReader cards to get to]].[[note]]The cards are lost now, due to being out of print for several years. Only Japan had all the cards, [[NoExportForYou North America got a fraction of what Japan had, and the mode in the European/Australian versions were]] DummiedOut. The Platform/WiiU Virtual Console and Platform/NintendoSwitch Online releases rectify this by unlocking all 38 courses automatically.[[/note]] Many of them are extremely difficult homages to previous games each having the extra challenge of collecting every Advance Coin in one go. Like the main game, the e-Reader courses have no checkpoints, and some levels are much longer than the original.
363* In all versions, ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros3'' also has the White Mushroom Houses (colored blue in subsequent remakes). Hoo boy. Some players went through the game multiple times without even knowing that they ''existed''. Each world except the last has one level where collecting a certain number of coins before beating it will cause a special item house to appear. The ones in worlds 1, 2, and 4 are hard enough but not ''too'' terrible (1-4 just requires being quick with the multi-coin blocks, both 2-2 and 4-2 are fine as long as you're careful with the P-switch, and 2-2 is an AbsurdlyShortLevel even by [=SMB3=] standards), but the others are all kinds of annoying for various reasons:
364** 3-8 is ThatOneLevel of world 3, with Boss Bass ready to swallow Mario whole for a OneHitKO (the only enemy in the game that can do so). You can try to stay as far up in the level as possible...but getting many of the coins requires dropping all the way down to water level and going through a low, narrow passage.
365** 5-5 requires backtracking, getting a series of coins underneath Donut Lifts while a flying Para-Goomba is dropping Micro-Goombas on you, and dodging Venus Fire Traps, and you have to get every coin in the level. That's right, if you want the White Mushroom House, you can't miss even a single one.
366** 6-7 has the largest number of required coins of any of them, has even more coins under Donut Lifts than 5-5, is an auto-scrolling level with Fire Chomps chasing you, and requires keeping a Fire Flower all the way to the end of the level in order to melt the ice blocks near the exit. And again, you have to get every single coin in the level. ''Good luck.'' Oh, and if you do manage to pull it off? You get an [[JunkRare anchor]]. Congratulations.
367** 7-2 has coins in a water section that are flat-out impossible to get without a Frog Suit and still require pretty precise movement even ''with'' one. (Of course, that also requires having kept one from as far back as world 2 or 3 and [[ViolationOfCommonSense thinking to use it in a level that's mostly land]] instead of saving it for [[ThatOneLevel 7-4]]...)
368* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioWorld'', getting all 96 exits requires {{Brutal Bonus Level}}s Tubular and Outrageous, plus some tricky exits:
369** Cheese Bridge's secret exit requires passing under the gate at the end, which either takes very precise cape maneuvering or sacrificing a Yoshi.
370** Valley Ghost House's alternate exit requires using a control coin and P-Switch to create a path to the key, without being able to see where the path is going. If you're powered up, you also have to slide through a small Mario-sized gap before the P-Switch runs out.
371* The two ''VideoGame/{{Tomba}}'' games, being built around sidequests, naturally have a few:
372** ''Tomba!'' has:
373*** ''Unbreakable Wire'' tasks you with finding a wire that will open the doors in the Underground Maze. Not only does the game give you no clues whatsoever where to find it and not only do you have to comb the labyrinthine Haunted Mansion to get your hands on it, but it only appears when you happen to talk to a random NPC in the Underground Maze twice. Worse is this mission is necessary to beat the game.
374*** ''I Want A Gold Medal'' will make you pull your hair out. You're tasked with driving a go-cart to a goal within 24.96 seconds, a goal that is so prohibitively strict that using a trick that abuses the game's physics [[note]]Don't jump until you reach the green jewel in the water. Then jump when you get it, hit the next pig, jump over the next two for a total of three jumps[[/note]] will only get you there by 24.89. Worse is there's no option to retry; exiting the track dumps you out at Masakari Jungle forcing you to keep warping back with Charity Wings or Baron until you succeed. Completionists looking to get the ultimate buff item (which you need the gold medal for) and thereby beat the game 100%, will require likely require dozens of attempts. It might even be an intentionally hard case of TrollingCreator, as the Mermaid at the goal [[LampshadeHanging remarks]] that [[LeaningOnTheFourthWall the developers are going to be disappointed with themselves.]]
375** ''Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return'' has:
376*** "Quick! The Trolley!" is generally regarded as the hardest quest in the game, even more than the faster "Turbo Trolley" version that comes afterwards (likely because in order to even access "Turbo Trolley", you need full mastery of the trolley to complete "Quick! The Trolley!"). You have one minute and sixteen seconds to get a trolley to the finish line, riding it down a track with tight curves that require leaning, and ''very'' rarely braking to keep the trolley on the track. If you brake for even a ''millisecond'' longer than you should, you'll miss the time limit. And to add salt to your wounds, the game gives you a condescending "Awww, you failed!" every time you lose. ''Tips and Tricks'' magazine, asked why the quest was so hard, answered that Whoopee Camp were sadists.
377*** Kujara Washing is only slightly easier. You have 90 seconds to grab and throw six oil-covered Kujaras (furry bird creatures) into holes in a wall. Every round gets slightly harder: the Kujaras get more aggressive and move more erratically, the holes start moving, and ''then'' they start opening and closing. Even if you're good at it, having to do ''10 rounds'' for OneHundredPercentCompletion is enough to try anyone's patience.
378*** The [[BonusLevelOfHell Secret Towers]]. Each of them require a pair of GuideDangIt sidequests to even get the key to open. ''Then'' you have to find the door to each (also a Guide Dang It, as the game gives ''no'' hint as to where the doors are, and they're ''invisible''). And there are ''three'' of them. Most players give up long before discovering the PlatformHell within. And one of the Tower Song Parts is {{permanently missable|Content}} if you don't complete another sidequest before defeating a certain Evil Pig.
379* ''VideoGame/TyTheTasmanianTiger'': The Thunder Egg in the furnace in "Lyre Lyre Pants On Fire". Throughout the level, Lenny the Lyrebird lies to you, but there is typically some kind of indication of what you should do instead. For the Thunder Egg, he promises that this time he is telling the truth and you have to heat up the furnace. Unlike other times in the level, there is no hint of what you should do besides listening to him. If you try to heat the furnace, it won't work and he will say to heat it faster. No matter how fast you go it won't work. Many players have a hard time here. It turns out that the game is trying to trick you and he is lying again, you have to freeze the furnace. Nothing in the game will tell you this.
380* ''VideoGame/{{Vexx}}'':
381** The last few Hearts in platformer are pure That One Sidequest. In the final world, you need to collect six {{Plot Coupon}}s to get a Heart, and they're scattered all over an ''extremely'' twisty and precarious level with BottomlessPits at every turn, with plenty of scrawny, moving, and electrified platforms here and there that are all just ''begging'' to send you plummeting into the abyss. And if you lose a life? Too bad! You have to start collecting them all over again! The entire level is pretty [[ScrappyLevel scrappy]], but both of its "collect X of object Y" missions can drive players to rage.
382** The Sand Castle adds in some GuideDangIt. One of the hearts in the second world is supposed to be hidden in a "sand castle," according to its hint. There's a small castle made of sand in the desert, but it's too small to do anything with. Is it something else in the level you have to trigger? No. You have to go back to the ''first'' area and enter the castle behind the waterfall, which is an extremely trecherous platforming segment. At the bottom of ''one'' seemingly inconsequential platform, there's a thinner platform beneath, which you must LeapOfFaith to, to hit a switch. This lets you into the Sand Castle... which is a PaletteSwap version of the castle you just came through, and you have to ''do it again.''
383** There's also a Heart in Frostblight Mill that requires the player to fly underneath the island and grab it out of the air (with flight controls that don't allow for a whole lot of precision.) Naturally, screwing this up is probably going to get you killed.
384* In ''VideoGame/YoshisIsland'':
385** Getting 100% in each world is PlatformHell, but "Kamek's Revenge" takes the cake. Just getting to the skiing section is a nightmare, only to require the player to time each jump exactly right or start the entire level over again.
386** Find 5 flowers in each level. Even once you find their actual location (and the designed had no compunction against putting them in invisible '?' clouds) you have to figure out how to touch it or nail it with an egg. An AutoScrollingLevel presents obvious problems along with this.
387** Collect 20 red coins in each level. Most of these are hidden among regular coins, with just the slightest difference in color to differentiate them, and usually in spots that complicate already-tricky jumps. Others are hidden in side areas, frequently the kind that require replaying the entire level if missed once, or in flashing eggs, which have to be broken on something solid. Only a couple of levels have 21 red coins, most of which appear to be miscounts during level design, exactly one is a pressure-relief valve for a missable coin on mutually exclusive paths earlier in the level.
388** Finish with 30 stars in each level. Stars are functionally Yoshi's HitPoints, copious in supply but lost just as easily. It's far too common to meet the other two requirements, then get poked on the home stretch and lose [[LastLousyPoint one measly star]] getting Baby Mario back. There is an item that instantly restores 20 stars (giving you an instant perfect on top of your regenerating base 10), but these are rare and hard to find. That is, until you unlock the minigame to farm them... by getting all 100% in a certain world. And all these apply in full force to boss levels (and you can't use items during boss battles).
389[[/folder]]
390
391[[folder:Rhythm Game]]
392* ''VideoGame/BitTrip COMPLETE'' comes with 120 Challenges; 20 in each of the six games. To complete a challenge, you have to make a perfect run through it -- hit all the Beats, dodge any Avoid Beats, etc. In ''RUNNER'', this also extends to hitting everything that gives points -- but not all of them, or else you jump into a pit or another enemy. Challenges like Labyrinth (''VOID'': get through a maze of Avoid Beats and collect the Beats in a strict time limit); Fool You Once (''RUNNER'': a large portion of stuff that give you points actually forces you into enemies, also needs to time the jump pads for specific spots); Back Attack (''FATE'': a large portion of enemies come from the back, and so must stay alive to fire off at least a few shots to collect their Cores); and Harder, Faster (''FLUX'': starts slow, increases in speed and difficulty, and essentially limits your view to nothing in the middle of it all) require near mastery of the system being used.
393* ''VideoGame/CrossBeats'':
394** The unlock requirement for "Blue Destiny Blue ETERNAL" in ''crossbeats REV.'' A select few players in Japan received the song, and for other players to unlock it, [[SocializationBonus they have to match with someone who has the song, play the song, and clear it]]. It's worse if you're playing at a Round 1 USA location (as Round 1 is the only arcade chain in the US that has ''crossbeats REV.'' cabinets), as there's the matter of an entire ocean separating you from Japan. Some players on both sides of the Pacific have managed to coordinate getting the song to the US (by way of having a Japanese player lend their account to someone in the US using a fresh [=BanaPass=] or SEGA Aime card), but even then, it's still a hassle to spread the song to other Round 1 locations when the number of Round 1's in the US per unit of area is far lower than the density of arcades in Japan.
395** Unlocking [[HarderThanHard Unlimited]] charts in ''crossbeats REV.'' For licensed songs with Unlimited charts rated level 69 or less, the unlock condition is to get an S on the Master chart, and for Unlimited charts for licensed songs rated 70 to 79, an S+ on the Master chart. Challenging conditions, but at least there's room for mistakes. For charts rated 80 and above, as well as all non-licensed songs with Unlimited charts, however, you need a ''[[NoDamageRun Full Combo]]'' on the Master chart, which means a single lapse in focus can completely botch an unlock attempt.
396* Some of the ''[[VideoGame/DanceDanceRevolution DDR]]'' releases have one step chart [[note]]well, one on Single and another on Double, but of the same song and difficulty[[/note]] that's clearly much more difficult than the rest. ''DDRMAX'' had the first stepchart (i.e. the sequence of arrows you have to hit) with a difficulty rating of 10, on a song named Max 300 for its very fast BPM. ''[=DDRMAX2=]'' continued the tradition with Maxx Unlimited. On any given difficulty, these songs usually have the hardest stepchart on that difficulty. In the home versions, mastering a difficulty meant getting an "A" grade in every song on that difficulty, which basically boiled down to beating the Max song on that difficulty. (Later games tended to have several songs this hard).
397* ''VideoGame/{{DJ MAX}} Portable 2'' has missions that require you to complete a set of songs while fulfilling one or two goals at the same time (such as getting a high enough combo, keeping your accuracy high enough as you go from one song to the next, etc.). The earlier missions aren't too bad...with the exception of the "Rave 2 Wave" mission, which forces you to use the annoying CHAOS-W modifier, which causes notes to move in a wave-like fashion. And then you have the entirety of the later missions -- one mission tasks you with getting a high score, but at the same time increasing your scroll speed every time you use Fever. Another picks 4 random songs for you, turns on the Random Max modifier, and must be completed with less than 20 Breaks. Perhaps the most infamous missions is "Just 1%", which requires you to, on top of using Fever a certain amount of times in a row per song, automatically fails you if you get the MAX 1% judgment on a single note, all while having you play some of the [[ThatOneBoss hardest songs in the game]].
398* ''VideoGame/GuitarHero III''. "Through The Fire and Flames". Don't kid yourself into thinking you are Music/{{Dragonforce}}. You're not Dragonforce.
399** It's relatively easy on Hard (compared to other songs on Hard), but Expert... not so much.
400** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4IGty9U7Mo Not even the Dragonforce guitarists themselves could do it...]]
401* ''VideoGame/{{jubeat}} copious'' had some of the most unforgiving unlock conditions in the entire series, and is the reason later ''jubeat'' games just use more straightforward unlock methods, even if they require tons of grinding:
402** Unlocking "[E]" required a perfect score on a level 10 song.
403** Unlocking "Ryoushi no Umi no Lindwurm" required that you [[SocializationBonus and three other players in the same match]] achieve a [[NoDamageRun full combo]] on a level 10 song. Did one player miss a note? Well, the unlock attempt is ruined for everybody!
404** "Red Goose" combined the above two requirements to take SocializationBonus [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools way too far]]: You and three other players in the same match must achieve a perfect score on a level 10 song.
405* ''VideoGame/RockBand'':
406** On guitar, "Green Grass and High Tides", on drums "Run to the Hills" -- both not really because they're absurdly difficult, but because they're long, long songs that require the player to keep a very fast rhythm throughout. You ''will'' get painful cramps halfway through. Then you'll mess up and have to start over from the top to get those precious, precious golden stars. For sheer difficulty there's the DLC "Snow ((Hey Oh))" which calls for lightning fast hammer-ons all the way through.
407** The real [[SarcasmMode fun part]] is that if you play "Snow" on Rock Band 2 or any newer Rock Band game, the updated procedure for determining hammer-on and pull-off notes means that instead of lightning fast hammer-ons, you mostly need lightning-fast strums while changing frets.
408** "Short and Sweet" on ''Lego Rock Band''. The song is not particularly difficult or challenging -- in fact, it's relatively easy -- but it's long, long, long. Seven minutes!
409* Obtaining all the Perfects in any game the ''VideoGame/RhythmHeaven'' series. In order to get a Perfect rank in a minigame, you naturally have to complete it without making a single mistake, which is hard enough as it is (keep in mind, the games are very finicky about what counts as a mistake. You have to be completely precise; getting a "half-hit" won't count). But you can't just ''choose'' any minigame and try to get a Perfect on it, you have to wait until one is picked at random, and then you're given three tries to get a Perfect on it before you lose the opportunity. After that, you'll just have to wait until the next time it's picked. You can't even ignore it and try to complete it later when you feel it, because playing a different minigame instead still takes up one of your chances. Even if you're generally good at the games, the added pressure of knowing you only get a limited number of chances really doesn't help for your concentration, and neither does the anticipation of a [[HellIsThatNoise horrid sound]] that plays when a perfect run is broken. It just plain sucks when you complete a minigame perfectly when it hasn't been called up, as it won't count. ''[[MegamixGame Rhythm Heaven Megamix]]'' makes this both better and worse. Better in that you now have a visual indicator of how close you are to the beat; worse in that, ''because'' of this visual indicator, "almost" hits now count as misses, meaning there's even less margin for error.
410[[/folder]]
411
412[[folder:Roguelike]]
413* ''VideoGame/AncientDomainsOfMystery'' features several truly painful ones.
414** If you refrain from killing cats for about two-thirds of the game, you get a very good artifact ring. Most cats you meet will be hostile. Don't feel like bothering? Not only do you miss the ring, but you have to fight the [[LightningBruiser cat lord]].
415** Saving Khevalaster requires the player to find an amulet of life saving, and they aren't [[LuckBasedMission exactly common]]...
416** Satisfying the demented ratling requires you to feed him six artifacts. There's several fairly crappy guaranteed artifacts that you can use to feed him, but finding them all can be time-consuming. Furthermore, getting anything out of him requires you to be of chaotic alignment, which can make enemies of certain other [=NPCs=]. Your reward for feeding him the artifacts? He sends you off to fight [[ThatOneBoss Keriax]].
417** Gaab'Baay offers several difficult fetch quests. One of them requires you to find a giant boar skull. Giant boars are rare, very powerful, and don't always drop their skulls. Then, she asks you to find a scroll of danger, which is often even harder to find.
418** There are two quests that require you to remember the first monster you killed: the Courage Quest and the quest to kill Filk. The Courage Quest requires you to kill twenty more of the monsters you've first killed; if you started on a rare monster, this is easier said than done. As for Filk, he's found on the same level of the Infinite Dungeon as the number of kills, i.e. if you've killed fifty of the same kind of monster that was your first kill, then he'll be on level fifty. If you forgot what your first kill was, the Courage quest is nigh-impossible to complete, and the Filk quest basically requires you to brute-force it and search ''every'' level until you find him.
419** Hell, even ''saving a freaking puppy'' is a nightmare, as the dungeon it's trapped in is full of DemonicSpiders and its time limit is ridiculously short.
420** Getting the [[ArtifactOfDoom Scepter of Chaos]] requires you to dive down to level 66 of the Infinite Dungeon, retrieve the Scepter from [[KingMook MaLaKaI]] (a massively powerful Chaos Knight), and then climb out. With the mechanics of the Infinite Dungeon, it's the equivalent of going through a ''131 level dungeon''. Also, keep in mind that the Scepter of Chaos corrupts when you carry it, meaning you'll get quite badly corrupted as you climb out.
421* In ''VideoGame/AzureDreams'':
422** Finding the Healing Herb for Cherrl is a nightmare because ''it looks just like every other herb in the game'' and it can only be found on the 28th floor, which has plenty of powerful monsters on it, and if you find it, and don't escape the tower, there's a possibility that the healing herb might be [[PermanentlyMissableContent lost]] and prevents you from curing Cherrl's illness.
423** Finding out how to activate the construction of certain buildings, considering that some of them can only be created ''after'' you reach the top of the monster tower.
424* ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaac:Rebirth'' has the Challenges. Some are easy and fun, like "Computer Savvy", which starts you with Technologies 1 and 2, letting you laser your way through the game. Some are annoying, but not too difficult, like "Cursed!", which starts you with lots of extra health and a complete map of every floor...at the cost of being forced to take damage every single time you enter/exit any room. And some are just flat-out ridiculous, like "Solar System", which blindfolds you so you can't fire any tears at all, forcing you to rely on your orbiting attack flies' CollisionDamage to kill anything.
425** The Suicide King challenge. Ipecac + Mr. Mega + My Reflection gives you ''huge, exploding boomerang tears''. This is as difficult as it sounds.
426** ''Afterbirth'' adds the "SPEED!" challenge. It would be one thing to time the player sixteen minutes to reach the same boss that the game previously considered thirty minutes enough time to be considered "speedy," and inflicting damage every ''fifteen seconds'' if the player runs out of those sixteen minutes. It would be another to dial up the speed of every enemy in the game. This challenge does ''both'', and you start out as the base character, without his unlockable item-reroller, with only a speed boost. It is one of the few challenges in the game that has treasure rooms, although it's generally considered that the recommended strategy for this is "pray the RNG will give you strong items/a way to get a lot of health right from the start," as the accelerated enemies and the ''extremely'' strict time conditions are very likely to kill you if you get a poor start. To add insult to injury, [[KaizoTrap it is entirely possible to be killed by timer damage while picking up the trophy at the end.]]
427** Also added to ''Afterbirth'' is "The Guardian," by far one of the most difficult challenges in the game. In "The Guardian," you control an angel that can't fire tears and must instead use a sword to attack, but can fly and is invincible to all forms of damage. To make up for this, you spawn with the Punching Bag and Isaac's Heart familiars. If either of them take damage, it comes out of your own life bar. This might not seem like such a big deal at first...except that because of how the Punching Bag works, enemies will attack it instead of you...and the Punching Bag doesn't have any AI of its own, so it wanders aimlessly at a maddeningly slow pace. This turns minor inconveniences like Chargers, Gapers, or Globins into DemonicSpiders due to how fast they can move, home in on the Punching Bag, and potentially pin it in a corner for repeated CollisionDamage. Certain room layouts (including every layout with Mom's Hands as well as most layouts with Eyes and Grimaces), as well as certain bosses with homing jumps, are impossible to complete without taking damage. Sometimes the stupid thing just grazes against spikes or a campfire for unavoidable damage. And you have to beat ''It Lives!'' with this horrendous build. Concessions to the player are few and far between: you can "cheat" Curse Rooms since you can't take damage, Mega Troll Bombs will home in on you instead of the Punching Bag, and you can cut off the Brimstone lasers that become increasingly common on later floors with your body, but that's about it. If you get to the Womb with anything less than full health and four or five bars of Attack and/or Speed, you are, simply put, screwed.
428** ''Afterbirth+'' has "Ultra Hard," which is usually considered the hardest challenge in the entire game. Like "SPEED!" the character is base Isaac without the [=D6=], and every single floor has a permanent blend of four curses that cannot be removed by items that normally get rid of them: Curse of the Lost (no map), Labyrinth (two floors are blended in to one extra-large floor), Maze (a chance to teleport randomly to a different room upon trying to enter a room), and Blind (items are hidden until after picking them up, in a game where many items have a permanent effect and [[ScrappyWeapon some]] can even screw up the entire run without a good synergy); the former three combining to make every floor a colossal, confusing maze. Every single enemy or boss that could be a stronger version ''will'' be, and unlike the main game, they have no chance at dropping pickups to make up for it. Every boss room after the first floor will feature two bosses in one. Hearts of any kind are programmed to never appear on the ground. The only way to increase your health is through a regeneration-based or healing item, or through something that directly adds health to the life bar. Even things that would drop hearts directly, like the Hierophant card, will not. The challenge's goal is one of the longest and most difficult bosses in the game, and was in fact ''Rebirth''[='=]s TrueFinalBoss. While said boss could normally be reached with a path that gives you four items just prior to fighting him as long as you have enough keys, this challenge forces you through the path that does not.
429* ''VideoGame/FTLFasterThanLight'' has sidequests available to unlock new ships. One in particular, the Crystal Cruiser, requires an insane string of luck:
430## First, find the destroyed crystal ship. The ship is found during an event in which you find a distress call coming from within an AsteroidThicket, which only happens in Engi, Pirate, or Rock sectors. In addition, the event does not always spawn the crystal ship; other times you might find a wrecked pirate ship or find the crystal ship but fail to reach it. [[note]]Piloting a Rock ship gives you a blue option that is guaranteed to provide a crystal ship.[[/note]] Then, take the Damaged Stasis Pod from the crystal ship. You have to choose it over a random weapon and spare scrap, and it takes up an augment slot.
431## Then, find the Zoltan Sleep Research event, which allows you to reactivate it and grants you a Crystal crewmember. Said event is guaranteed to spawn in Zoltan sectors, and occasionally spawns in Engi sectors.
432## Then, find the Rock Homeworlds, which is not always guaranteed to spawn, and ''which may not be accessible even if it does spawn''.
433## Then, find a specific event in Rock Homeworlds (thankfully, this one ''is'' marked) that allows you to travel through a wormhole to the Crystal Home Sector.
434## ''Finally'', reach the marked beacon in the Crystal Home Sector. Note that you may be attacked by [[DemonicSpiders crystal ships]] along the way, which are armed with very powerful weapons and strong crewmembers that resist asphyxiation. The updated ''Advanced Edition'' offers an alternate way to unlock the ship, by beating the game with all Type A and B variants of the ships. ''Advanced Edition'' also introduces Type C variants, and the Rock Cruiser's one has a Crystal crew member from the start, allowing you to skip [=2/3=] of the quest, only worrying about which one of the mutually exclusive hostile sectors contains the Rock Homeworld (unless it doesn't spawn in the first place).
435* Recruiting Kecleon in the ''VideoGame/PokemonMysteryDungeon'' games. In the ''Rescue Team'' games, you need a level 100 Pokémon equipped with a Friend Bow. The ''Explorers'' games complicate this a bit. You need the IQ skill Fast Friend, which is only available on certain Pokémon after feeding them a large number of rare items. The Friend Bow is also no longer sufficient. Instead, you need the Golden Mask, found in a 75-floor dungeon where you gain no experience for defeating enemies who can be as high as level 90. Kecleon all have very high stats and a boosted movement speed, so even defeating one is a challenge, much less doing it repeatedly until you manage the 1/1000 recruitment chance.
436** Any escort mission in a higher level dungeon, ''especially'' when you don't know what the target floor is. You can't control escorts at all like you can your partners, and [[ArtificialStupidity they're prone to losing sight of you and wandering off in the wrong direction]]. Because of their low level, one hit from an enemy Pokémon will cause them to faint. Lots of dungeons also feature enemies with moves that affect the entire room, meaning that sometimes it's impossible to prevent them from taking damage.
437[[/folder]]
438
439[[folder:Role-Playing Game]]
440* In ''VideoGame/{{Anachronox}}'', to get one character's InfinityPlusOneSword you need to let PAL play in a children's area for a specific amount of time at a specific point in the game. If he plays for less than 6 hours or more than 8 '''realtime''' hours he’ll find other items instead. Even if he plays for the right amount of time but before reaching the specific point in the game he will get yet another item instead. This is a definite GuideDangIt moment as there is nothing in the game that hints at how long he needs to play or more importantly at what point the Infinity Plus One Sword appears rather than another item. And if you move more than a few feet from the window where you can see him, he comes out and the timer resets.
441* ''VideoGame/AvencastRiseOfTheMage'': Kalios' mini-quest has the player running around a lab full of overheating pots, using [[AnIcePerson ice magic]] to keep them from exploding. It was so frustrating for such a minor reward that the quest was patched to make it less unforgiving.
442* ''VideoGame/BaldursGateII'':
443** Jaheira's companion (or romance) quest is so buggy that there existed a certain subset of players who would actively warn players trying it, as the quest is prone to breaking easily. Finding it in the first place isn't necessarily the hard part (though it requires you to see a random encounter), but the quest can go south from the get-go if a certain questgiver doesn't show up, or if the player doesn't remember to sleep enough in the woods after completing certain stages. And ''God help you'' if you decide to sleep with her before the conclusion of the sidequest, presuming that this will be like every other Creator/{{Bioware}} game where the protagonist can have sex with their locked-in love interest at a certain point -- unless the sidequest was completed in the opportune fashion, attempting this leads to her ''leaving the party permanently''.
444** The EasterEgg "Big Metal Unit" sidequest in ''Throne of Bhaal'' requires the player to utilize an OldSaveBonus through the entire series in order to get the components needed to make the armor set in the first place (which you'll only hear about, if you haven't already imported a [=BG1=] file with a certain item obtained, when it's far too late). Nothing in the game indicates that the random pants you picked up in the first game, and the same kind of joke pants you find in ''II'' have any relevance other than as window dressing.
445* ''VideoGame/BatenKaitosOrigins'':
446** There's the nightmarish ''VideoGame/PacMan'' sidequest, which ''takes longer to finish than every other sidequest and the main quest combined.'' To accomplish it, you must feed one of your quest magnus one copy of ''every other quest magnus in the game''. 3 of them are {{permanently missable|Content}}, 3 of them take 30 hours in real time to create (seriously), and there's a ton more that are in highly unintuitive places. Some of them can only be acquired by accepting a sidequest ''that doesn't show up on your sidequest list'', some of them are semi-missable (you can recreate them, but it's a major pain to do so), and MANY of them can only be acquired by letting them age. One of the quest magnus you need to use for this doubles as an ingredient for the game's InfinityPlusOneSword. And to make matters even worse, you have no in-game means of keeping track of which magnus you've used for this. Forgotten which ones you're missing? Too bad! Your reward for doing this is permanent critical hits, which ''would'' be a GameBreaker, but by the time you're done with this nightmare, you should be good enough to stomp the final boss into dust without it.
447** For those who dealt with the Pac-Man sidequest by [[FanonDiscontinuity pretending it doesn't exist]], there's still "Gather the rock-people!" To do this quest, you have to move large stone statues throughout the Nekkar Quietlands by pushing them to the summit. Yes, pushing them, in a game where {{Hammerspace}} is a heavily JustifiedTrope. The EdgeGravity on said statues is beyond abysmal; you need to approach them with nearly pixel perfect accuracy just so the game registers the push, and even then it might not go the way you want it to -- which is a major issue, because it's nigh-impossible to get the statues away from the walls except by leaving the area and coming back, which would be merely very bad instead of unforgivable if only Nekkar wasn't filled with narrow passages. The monsters can also block your statues, forcing you to fight them -- and nearly every battle here features [[DemonicSpiders Queen Alraunes]]. And as though out of sheer spite, Nekkar is also filled with freaking '''invisible pit traps'''.
448* It doesn't compare with the Pac-Man sidequest listed above, but Mizuti's sidequest in ''VideoGame/BatenKaitos Eternal Wings'' needs to be mentioned here. Remember [[ThatOneLevel Zosma Tower]]? All those damn timed 3D [[BlockPuzzle Block Puzzles]], done with a static camera that sometimes doesn't show you what you need to see? Well, you're going back there, down into the basement for five all new levels of fun. One particularly nasty puzzle requires you to use an elevator as a block stop. ''While it's in motion.'' Finally at the bottom? Remember that irritating boss fight, between [[LuckBasedMission Xelha and the Ice Goddess]]? They recreated it, this time between Mizuti and the Shadow Wizard. ''Eternal Wings'' also has the Family Tree and Star Map sidequests. The former requires a bit of maneuvering as some members of the family can only be convinced to return to Quzman's home after certain others have returned and at least one ''won't'' return if a certain other one is already there, some of the deceased members require you to talk to one of the members back at his house multiple times in order to get them signed for, and just when you think you've finished it, Quzman lays one more member on you, which can't be obtained until this point and requires going back into the aforementioned basement of Zosma Tower. The latter is even trickier, as many of the fragments appear as drops from random encounters and the final piece [[spoiler:was with the Keeper of the Star Map all along; you have to ''repeatedly'' ask him for "info on the fragments" after returning every other fragment, then tell him that you want to complete the map and that he "deserves it", and he'll finally give you the Fragment, which you must then hand right back to him to complete the quest.]]
449** Few players will likely bother, but getting 100% completion requires the player to collect every Magnus in the game, of which there are 1022, among other requirements. 1022 is a lot, but it doesn't sound too bad for 100% completion right? Well the mechanics of acquiring some of the Magnus make this a living hell. Some Magnus will "age" into a new Magnus if held for a period of time. One of them, the "Shampoo" Magnus, will age into the "Splendid Hair" Magnus after ''two weeks''. Yes that's two weeks, '''336 hours''' of in-game time, and the icing on the cake is that any time spent in a menu will pause this timer, making it take even longer than it would normally! This mechanic is what makes the 100% {{Speedrun}} of the game one of the longest ever completed at ''341 hours''.
450* ''VideoGame/BoxxyQuestTheGatheringStorm''
451** The epilogue adds six bonus platforming trials, all of which are stupidly hard to the point of being [[PlatformHell outright sadistic]] at times. The reward for beating them all, a Rare NES Game, is worth it but thankfully isn’t necessary unless you’re just determined to finish all the [[CollectionSidequest Collection Sidequests]].
452** The old gatekeeper’s Inbox quest, which involves buying and delivering a new table from an antique shop in the next town. The problem is, the table shatters if you run into monsters along the way, or if you try to fast travel. The only two viable solutions involve SaveScumming your way down the path, resetting every time you trigger a random encounter, or using an accessory that turns off battles, but makes you walk veeerrrrrry, veeerrrrrry slllooowwlyyy. Unfortunately, both the accessory and the item that lets you save scum are [[GuideDangIt very hard to find]], so good luck being able to figure out either solution on your own (although the antique seller does give a hint if you fail too many times). By the way, like all Inbox missions, completing this quest is required to get the game’s best ending.
453* In ''VideoGame/BreathOfFireIV'', trying to find all the dragon summons all have a degree of GuideDangIt, but the worst of them all has to be the Sea Dragon. Obviously, it will be found in the sea, but where ''exactly''? An NPC gives you a vague hint about some rock formation, yes, and locating that formation is actually easy, but ''pinpointing'' the exact spot is going to drive you crazy. Oh, and there's also the fact that the boating minigame in of itself has a slew of {{Scrappy Mechanic}}s.
454* The Lost Sanctum quest in ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger [[UpdatedRerelease DS]]'' is quickly rising in the ranks as That One Sidequest. To wit: inescapable, scripted battles, going up and down the same mountain at least seven times, and not being able to progress without speaking to the right NPC to set off an event flag, despite having all the items necessary to proceed. And the rewards are quickly outclassed by those found in the post-game dungeon, the Dimensional Vortex. Hell, most of the rewards are outclassed by the rewards from the sidequests ''that were in the original game.'' The only upside to this is that the repetitive battles do allow for significant TP grinding, allowing you to quickly gain everyone's techs.
455* The Weather Lady recruitment quest in ''VideoGame/CitizensOfEarth''. You just need to let her find you during a rainstorm. Except normal rain won't do, and even though you can ask her to change the weather even before recruiting her, you can't select a rainstorm until you level up her talent, which requires having her in your party. It's all a LuckBasedMission, and you could very well go through the entire story without recruiting her.
456* Spheda in the Underground Channel in ''VideoGame/DarkChronicle''. The Underground Channel's floors are always quite small, so you will typically have a small shot limit, since shot limit is determined by the direct distance between the sphere and the distortion to start with, never mind how many walls are in-between. Additionally, the edge of every hallway is lined with pools of water that are deemed "off course," so if the sphere rolls into one from just ''slightly'' overshooting how much power was needed to send the sphere down the hallway, it'll return to where you took the shot from, with one less shot available.
457* ''VideoGame/DarkSouls1'':
458** Getting the dragon tail weapons is...challenging, to say the least. You need to cut off a dragon's tail to get them, which is troublesome when it's Seath (turns quickly and uses a tail slam attack), Crossbreed Priscilla (turns invisible and needs to be staggered before she'll become visible again), and especially Black Dragon Kalameet (trying to get to the tail of a very aggressive dragon that is usually facing you is...tricky, put it that way).
459** Maxing your covenants can be very hard, especially when it's Souvenirs of Reprisal or Dragon Scales, both of which are extremely rare drops...or the Forest Hunters, which ''don't use'' collectible items, you ''can't'' progress without invading and winning.
460* ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsII'':
461** The Blue Sentinels and Brotherhood of Blood have ridiculously hard levelling requirements that make ranking them up very difficult.
462** Getting some of the armour sets can be torturous, particularly hard-to-farm ones like the Charred Loyce Knight gear, but even worse are the Loyce Knight and Ivory King sets, which require you to farm the souls of Charred Loyce Knights - and you can't even use item-drop boosters to get those souls, because that makes the armour drop more often instead!
463** Accessing the Dark Chasm of Old requires you to locate Darkdiver Grandahl in three hidden, out-of-the-way locations, then fight your way through a very difficult area, and ''then'' take on an enemy who may well be ThatOneBoss if your build isn't great.
464* ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsIII'': Finding the Purging Monument for Lapp's questline requires you to solve a MoonLogicPuzzle that requires you to realise, using your psychic powers, that using a disguise item or spell in the exact right area of the nearby swamp will turn you into a humanity sprite. Note that the tolerances on this are pretty low, and it's very easy to accidentally turn yourself into a different disguise item such as a crystal formation or an architectural decoration!
465* Monochromon's store in ''VideoGame/DigimonWorld'' is a bane to speedrunners, as it's [[LuckBasedMission luck of the draw]] as to whether or not you'll be able to meet the sales quota in his store. The customers that come in don't always want the items that generate the most income, and some will storm out without buying anything even if you try to sell what they want at market value. Penguinmon's curling minigame can have traces of this trope to some players as well, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXBMHaP0MQI but at least its music is catchy.]]
466* ''VideoGame/DigimonWorld4'' has a sidequest that is already brutal in that you can't use heal techs/items once you get into the area where the quest is, and plenty of traps that do damage based on your MAX HP. As if that wasn't brutal enough, to unlock a specific digivolution for the Digimon you started as, you have to beat it on the hardest game difficulty setting (think ''Diablo II'' difficulty settings here), with a hinted at [[SelfImposedChallenge special condition]] that you finish off the boss with [[OneHitPointWonder one HP remaining]]. You don't have to do this to complete the quest, you DO have to do it in order to unlock the best reward, so it's kind of a twist where the self-imposed challenge is optional. To get yourself down to 1 HP without killing yourself (and automatically failing the quest, which means you have to start it over from the beginning), you have to use a quick-sand pit and let yourself get sucked in repeatedly until you have 1 HP left. Then you have to navigate your way past a lot of traps (hopefully you took out the walls first before you went down to 1 HP, if not, you're in deep trouble), and kill the boss without letting it hit you once.
467* ''VideoGame/DivinityOriginalSinII'': "On the Ropes" has the player character rescue Gwydian Rance from execution to gain a favour from Gwydian's mentor. As soon as they reach him, it degenerates into a three-way marathon battle with [[MultiMookMelee waves of enemies]] that [[GeoEffects blanket the area in oil and fire]] -- which [[ExploitedImmunity heal those enemies]] -- complicated further by the [[FakeDifficulty suicidal ineptitude of Gwydian's AI]].
468* ''VideoGame/DragonAgeInquisition'' has this in the form of the shard-collecting side quest. Scattered across every area you can visit are a collection of shards that help to unlock doors in a desert oasis. The problem is, some of these shards are hard to get to, requiring jumping and taking very unorthodox paths that you might have to look up a guide in order to find. Not to mention that there are ''more'' in the actual oasis itself, where most of those "jumping puzzles" come into play because there are rock arches, cliffs, and little nooks and crannies that you have to run around and find in an already very poorly laid-out area. All of this just for gear and permanent buffs that up your elemental resistance, which by end game you will most likely be able to ''make yourself.''
469* ''VideoGame/DragonFable'' has ''Embrace Your Destiny'', the final sidequest in Nythera's ''Rise of the [=DragonMage=]'' chain. Almost universally disliked by players who don't have a mage build or high alchemy levels because the player character's stats are always used when playing as a different character in a sidequest.
470* ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIII'' on the Game Boy Color introduces Monster Medals, dropped at insultingly rare rates from every single monster in the game. They come in three flavors: Bronze, Silver, and Gold, and you won't get the higher tiers until you have enough of the lower tiers. It's a cute idea, but then the final postgame dungeon challenges you to obtain every single Gold medal. You will get one medal at most per battle, only from the last monster defeated, and there is no way to boost your chance of getting one, plus ''there is no reward for doing so''. The questgiver just goes to sleep. Whee.
471* ''VideoGame/DragonQuestVII'' is the game where you find God. And then find out he's really the devil. But after you beat him, you have a sidequest where you can find God again. But you have to get all the shards, some of which are {{permanently missable|Content}}, to go to one dungeon, where you find shards for the other dungeon, and then you can fight God.
472%% Administrivia/ZeroContextExample- add context before uncommenting.
473%%** ''VideoGame/DragonQuestVIII'' has the Dragovian sidequest. Works fine until you face the Darksteel Dragon.
474* ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'':
475** The companion quests are hard enough to ''start'', which, often have to be triggered by being in certain places with those companions, but sometimes you may unknowingly make it so that you lose the opportunity to gain the "points" needed to start the quests. The worst case is Raul, who you can only find by going to a place filled with xenophobic Super Mutants that you aren't going to even want to try to get into until you're a decent level. However, once you finally get Raul, in order to start his quest, you need to talk with a few specific [=NPCs=] who you cannot have talked with before. If you have talked with them, then sucks to be you. Fortunately, this was fixed in a patch.
476** Starting [[ColdSniper Craig Boone's]] companion quest requires doing various unmarked actions with him to earn his trust; complete too many without him, and [[PermanentlyMissableContent you can never start it.]] Getting to Bitter Springs, the site of his quest, requires traversing an area swarming with [[DemonicSpiders Cazadors]] (and the occasional Deathclaw), where he can easily get killed in hardcore mode.
477** The Legend of the Star. You need fifty Sunset Sarsaparilla blue star bottle caps. There are only one hundred of these scattered throughout the game, and the physics mean you could easily bump into them and not notice them being knocked to the floor, or heaven forbid clipping through it. You can also get them through drinking SS, but that's only a 5%. Your only rewards are a crapton of worthless trinkets and [[WeirdCurrency bottle caps]], a unique laser pistol, [[ThatOneAchievement and a bronze trophy]].
478** Another quest, "I Put a Spell on You," isn't difficult and might not even be that bad for some people. You need to find a mole in Camp [=McCarran=], and it culminates in finding out that [[spoiler:a bomb has been planted on the monorail. You rush to deactivate the bomb, if you do so the game will actually give you the message that the bomb has been successfully defused. But then it might go off anyway. This is either due to you stopping to talk with Col. Hsu right before going to defuse the bomb which wastes too much time despite the fact that the game tells you to report to him after stopping the mole, or you happened to earlier on unknowingly tell the mole information that makes the bomb's detonation inevitable. Like stated before, this may just be a minor nuisance, unless the only save file you have that is from before you made any crucial mistakes is several hours behind your playtime]]. Both objectives count towards Boone's history points.
479** The quest "Come Fly With Me" is essentially a huge, layered FetchQuest that requires a lot running back and forth in one general location, albeit it a large facility. The requirements to get the best possible ending and the most EXP require tricky tasks like attacking or hiding from the huge [[InvisibleEnemy invisible enemies]] in narrow corridors in order to save a prisoner and navigating a large, heavily booby-trapped room to get to a computer. At a certain point, attacking hostile enemies in the presence of certain characters in this quest will cause them to attack in return. To top it off, the quest is riddled with a number of frustrating bugs and is prone to crashing.
480* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 4}}'':
481** Most of the "Silver Shroud" quest is simply hunting down and killing various baddies. Except for the ending where you have to save Kent from the drug dealer [[ThatOneBoss Sinjin]], who has a rifle to Kent's head, and he ''will'' shoot poor Kent [[NoNonsenseNemesis the moment you're done talking]]. Have fun reloading and running through the same [[LargeHam cheesy]] dialog a dozen times to take down Sinjin before he pulls the trigger. Especially if you are underpowered and have to [[{{Hypocrite}} use chems]] to get enough of a boost to pull it off. You can TakeAThirdOption by talking Sinjin and his goons into saving Kent for last so he can watch you die, but it requires the hardest possible speech check, so this only works if you have fairly high Charisma.
482** "Hole in the Wall" is required to get the Medicine Bobblehead and Curie as a companion, as well as [[PlayerHeadquarters personal quarters in Vault 81]]. After [[GuideDangIt a somewhat obtuse procedure for starting the quest]], to find a cure for Austin's illness, you have to trek through a sealed-off [[AbandonedLaboratory secret laboratory]] full of plague-carrying Mole Rats, including a [[KingMook Brood Mother]], and if you get bit, [[MaximumHPReduction the disease subtracts 10 from your maximum HP]]. There's only one dose of the cure, so if you [[SadisticChoice use it on yourself]], Austin dies and [[WhatTheHellHero everyone in Vault 81 hates you]], so no PlayerHeadquarters there for you. The quest gets even more "fun" because you have to go in alone: the quest is bugged so that when a companion is bit (and they will be) you get the disease. Have fun looking up how to use another bug to save both you, the room, and the kid from a mistake your brain-dead pack mule makes. The reward you get is a dimly lit supply closet that was reconverted into a room you can't improve (just like Home Plate in Diamond City).
483** "Cappy in a Haystack" from the ''Nuka-World'' DLC. Sierra Petrovita from ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' turns up at the park and gives you a set of special glasses to find 10 hidden Cappy mascot symbols spelling out a secret message. As the quest name implies, these little bastards are ''hard'' to find, as the markers on your map and compass vanish when you come within a 50-yard radius of each one, forcing you to comb every area very meticulously.
484** The sidequest from the same DLC to obtain the Quantum Power Armor is sort of a pain already because of how many Star Cores you have to track down with no map guidance to help you, but what tips it into the net is the fact that a bug can occur where the Terminal listing where the Cores are found gives you ''the wrong locations''. Yes, you can waste loads of time scouring Galactic Zone for where the terminal said [[LastLousyPoint that last lousy Star Core]] could be found, only to give up and then stumble across it in the World of Refreshment hours later.
485* In the first ''VideoGame/FossilFighters'' game, actually obtaining the series' MascotMook, [[UsefulNotes/TyrannosaurusRex T-Rex,]] is one of the most difficult tasks in the game. The area where its fossils can be found only appears post-game. And you can't even ''dig'' there to start with, because it's [[InterfaceScrew so hot, it interferes with your radar.]] You'll need to pay tons of money to build oases there to cool the area enough to even find fossils. Even then, T-rex is easily the rarest fossil in the area -- and you'll need to find every one of its parts if you want it to have all of its skills. (Thankfully, in the second game, it became the default starter for male trainers and was still pretty easy to find for female ones.)
486* The Kick all the Lucky Animals sidequest in ''[[VideoGame/DotHackGUGames .hack]]'' is one thanks to the need to hop all over the playing fields to find each variety, having to avoid getting BlessedWithSuck from the unlucky types, and getting them all is a GuideDangIt because the method for generating them isn't that obvious.
487** But the Flyer quest is an even better example, once you hit all the towns you have to wander the fields and hope that the medical team would even show up, and then it's very likely you got them on the list already. Unlike the lucky animals, there's no known method for making the Medical squad appear.
488** In ''[[VideoGame/DotHackR1Games .hack//Quarantine]]'', there's the Item Completion Event, which gets unlocked once you finish the main story. To complete that, you need to collect ''all the items and equipments in the game'', except for the rare ones. Seeing how most people spent the games collecting rare (often missable) items, and that it doesn't register the items until you take them to the quest NPC (which means all the equipments you sold, gave to allies or traded don't count), most players need to start from scratch. It doesn't help that there are dozens of weapons for each class, and 90% of them can't be bought, so you have to start [[LimitBreak Data Draining]] monsters all around, trading with everyone and abusing Springs of Myst or [[GuideDangit check a guide]]. Your reward for all that hassle? [[BraggingRightsReward A wallpaper]]. No wonder almost no one cares to finish it...
489* ''Franchise/KingdomHearts'':
490** The Hundred Acre Wood from ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsI''. This is a world were you go through a collection of minigames that are unlocked by finding Torn Pages in the various worlds. Unlike in ''Kingdom Hearts II'', the chests with Torn Pages in them look exactly like any other chest in the game and two of them are not even in a chest (they are instead in a bookcase in the lab in Halloween Town and a reward for getting 20 of the 100 Dalmatians that are also found in chests throughout the game). The minigames themselves can be a pain too as they require you to use the context sensitive command in the battle menu which can be difficult to use. The HD Remix alleviates this somewhat by turning this command into a reaction command.
491** While in the vanilla version getting [[InfinityPlusOneSword Ultima Weapon]] was not that hard, ''Final Mix'' turns it into a chore comparable to getting [[Videogame/FinalFantasyXII Tournesol]]. Thanks to changes to synthesis mechanics, to even ''unlock'' the damn thing, you need to farm for rare materials, many of which are available from a single monster and also require [[GuideDangIt using obscure tactics]] to actually get said drops. And the weapon itself requires many of rarest drops as well.
492** In ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsII'':
493*** There's the Poster Run minigame (30 seconds long) and the Magic Carpet Ride minigame (65 kills) to the Hundred Acre Wood. In the UpdatedRerelease, you have to contend with all of the above plus the Organization Mushrooms, of which [[LuckBasedMission Mushroom No. 8]] is far and away the one most likely to make your blood pressure spike to dangerous levels.
494*** Most of Jiminy's requirements are hard, but not insane, as long as you either take the time to plan things out, or know the secrets. But some (like the poster duty minigame mentioned above) is impossible unless you've leveled up two of your forms to their max, others all but require you to have Fenrir, an InfinityPlusOneSword gained by defeating Sephiroth (yes, [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII that]] Sephiroth), winning tournaments with a certain number of points that require leveling up all of your forms and summons to their max (which takes a few hours of level grinding) just to enter, and winning a 50 round tournament with battle level 99 (the highest level in the game) with an insane point requirement... It can get to the point where you just don't want to go to Olympus Coliseum ever again.
495*** The smaller tournaments can count for this as well. If you don't do it when you're able to, and you wait until you're very high leveled, your other party members can kill the other Heartless quickly. This is problematic in the Pain and Panic cups when you can't do the reaction commands to get the most points if Donald and Goofy keep slaying them too fast. In the UpdatedRerelease, Ohana! has been brutally nerfed, so it's twice as hard (instead of twice as dull) to meet the point requirements in the Titan Cups.
496*** The Atlantica singing concert portions are so damn cheesy/annoying in that, while not always needed to progress the story, if you're aiming for the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Legendary Weapons]] for your party members then you unfortunately '''have to''' put up with this tedious requirement in order to get the ingredients to forge said weapons. A great many people absolutely '''loathe''' the Atlantica section for this, these [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilPPtE8T7Z8#t=5m47s short]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurA1thuFS0#t=57s moments]] in [[WebVideo/KingdomHeartsInANutshell JustAPancake]]'s videos succinctly showcases the inner feelings most people have towards doing said parts in [[ThatOneLevel Atlantica]].
497** And ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts358DaysOver2'' has [[spoiler: unlocking Sora]]. You need to 100% the game's story mode which includes completing every mission as fully as possible, including taking down the [[{{Superboss}} Dustflier]].
498** Getting the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Ultima Weapon]] in ''[[VideoGame/KingdomHeartsCoded Kingdom Hearts Re:coded]]''. You need to clear the game, find the BrutalBonusLevel consisting of 13 floors, then beat all the insane Challenges in each level without dying to rack up enough SP to be able to earn the damn weapon [[BraggingRightsReward that you probably won't use]]. Oh, and the 13th floor features [[spoiler:[[{{Superboss}} Buggy Roxas]]]], a powered up version of an already powerful ThatOneBoss that gets [[TurnsRed specific sets of status buffs once his health drops to certain levels]]. Just a reminder: Die once, and you'll lose your hard-earned SP and will ''have to try the whole Sector again just to get another shot at getting Ultima Weapon''.
499** While certainly not as difficult as the requirements in II were, the reports completion requirments in ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsBirthBySleep'' give new meaning to the word tedious. Not only do you have to complete the levels as normal and find all the treasure chests and stickers and complete the minigames, you also have to obtain every possible item, d-link, keyblade (except the last one), shotlock, command style, ice cream flavor, ability, and passive fusion ability in the game (very difficult without a guide) and witness every attack and finishing move at least once, ''and '' you have to complete the Mirage Arena, which requires winning several difficult arena battles against superbosses, ''and'' playing the racing and command board minigames again, ''and'' collecting an ungodly number of the medals you receive from winning minigames and battles. ''For all three characters.'' Have fun playing the command board and Arean battles over and over in search of all those medals.
500** Upgrading the Moogle O' Glory in ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsX''. You have to run through five levels filled with DemonicSpiders, just for one materiel. Worse is that sometimes, a certain enemy, the Pester Jester shows up, debuffs you, and has you contend with other enemies. And unless you [[BribingYourWayToVictory bribe Square Enix]], it's only available on weekends. And it gets used in Proud Mode quests, making it mandatory for those.
501** ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsIII'' introduced a ''WesternAnimation/{{Ratatouille}}''-inspired cooking sidequest, in which you play short minigames to make dishes that give you temporary bonuses. For the most part, they aren't bad at all. However, the ones that involve cracking eggs are almost unanimously hated. It ''should'' be simple enough; just gently slide the analog sticks in opposite directions until you're told to press the correct shoulder buttons. The problem is the fact that when they say "gently," they ''mean'' it. There is almost no room at all for error, and you'll end up failing if you're ''ever so slightly'' too fast. Trying to get "excellent" ratings damn near requires ''surgical precision''. The worst part is that if you fail, you'll lose cooking ingredients, and have to go and find more (or buy them from the Moogle Shops if possible).
502* ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublicIITheSithLords'' had the infamous sequence in the Telos military base. Already the hardest part of the entire game, it's got this annoying side quest where you have to escort the dumbest person in the universe out of the base. It's not even a quest per se, you can just tell him to follow you out, and lead him back to the exit. The character's AI is so bad, he will only follow you if certain conditions are met (distance, direct line of sight, etc), leaving the player to go back for him every 10 meters. And god help you if he gets stuck behind something. The sequence can last at least 10 minutes, and besides a few light side points it's completely pointless. Of course it might be useful for lowering the cost of your healing spell, which is vital at this part.
503* The Fallen in ''VideoGame/TheLastRemnant''. Nigh impossible on a regular playthrough. Several of his attacks can randomly kill any party member in 1 hit, often killing more than 1 per turn. Any units that survive take roughly 50% damage. He also has a 10-turn limit after which your whole team is annihilated, regardless of how well you were doing. To top it off, improper (read: normal & suggested in-game) grinding makes the fight even tougher due to enemies scaling with your Battle Rank instead of your stats. To counteract this, people do the counter-intuitive "Low-BR" playthroughs in order to be maximize stat growth just for this fight. The Fallen's DLC reskin The Lost is ''even harder,'' with higher stats, better attacks, and he only gives you 5 turns before everyone dies. And there's even less of a reward.
504* ''VideoGame/LegendOfMana:''
505** One of the sidequests you can undertake is to rescue a despondant organ grinder from the Underworld. Which, for this subquest, are policed by {{Mook Bouncer}}s that will teleport you back to the very bottom level of should you so much as brush against one. And in the later levels, they disappear from view a few seconds after you enter the room. (At least the game does give you a little bit of mercy in that you encounter fewer of these bouncers each time you get sent back.)
506** Slightly less annoying, but still a pain in the rear, is an early subquest to sell lamps to the Dudbears. You're taught a few phrases in the Dudbear language, and then it's off to negotiate a series of dialogue trees so that they'll buy your lamps. It's somewhat made up for by the fact that you get 1000 Lucre per lamp, and the guy you have to give the money to doesn't even care if you don't give him the full 3000.
507* The optional Bros Attack mini games and BossRush in the ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigi'' series. In ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiBowsersInsideStory'' you've got the Cholesteroad, which gives you prizes for literally perfecting your attacks to the point you get hundreds of points on each, and the massage challenges for Bowser which do the same. In ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiDreamTeam'', there's the Mad Skillathon and Battle Broque Madame, which act the same for that game's Bros Attacks and Luiginary Attacks, and have you get over 800 points on each for prizes. These are all extremely difficult. There's also the turn limited Gauntlet and Battle Ring in game respectively, which is incredibly unforgiving as well. Oh, and the Giant Battle Ring in Dream Team as well, which is harder than anything else on normal mode and damn near impossible on hard mode (thanks to the strictest turn limits in RPG history). As you can tell, only the extremely dedicated complete them all.
508* Some various training simulation game in ''VideoGame/MarvelUltimateAlliance''. They all have a 20 minutes timer and your score is based on the time remaining and enemies killed. If you're angered that you didn't the top prize (1 free skill point), you have to start all over again.
509** In Captain America's mission, you have to fight your way and disarm some bombs which have a chance to set off if you fail the [[PressXToNotDie Quick Time Event.]] The final boss is Winter soldier who's activated a nuclear launch sequence. While his attacks are weak, he has [[DamageSpongeBoss a lot of health]] and you have to periodically break the fight to reset the timer and prevent the launch. Once you finally beat him, you still need to pick up his keycard and stop the launch.
510** In Wolverine's mission, [[ProtectionMission you have to protect 8 computers from an army of mooks and the boss, Warstar.]] The computers are scattered around the map and Wolverine primarily rely on melee attacks. [[ThisIsGonnaSuck Great]].
511** Storm and Spider-Man missions are similar. At the end of their missions, there's a boss fight and [[EscortMission you to protect an ally who can't keep himself of trouble.]] Worse, they'll occasionally get trapped and [[PressXToNotDie you can only save them through a Quick Time Event]].
512* ''Franchise/MassEffect''
513** The Moon mission from ''VideoGame/MassEffect1''. There's dozens of advanced Alliance drones carrying machine guns and rocket launchers which can shred through your health at an alarming rate. You get the mission at level 20, but most people can't complete it until level 30. Even worse, you'll want to do it as soon as possible to get your PrestigeClass.
514** [[VideoGame/MassEffect2 The sequel]] has the Secure Smuggled Cargo mission. Aria gives you the coordinates for a stash of goods on a nearby planet. Doesn't sound so bad, until you get there and find out you have to fight ''three'' [[HumongousMecha YMIR heavy mechs]], and if you take too long, they destroy the cargo. It's practically a guarantee that one of them will attack you while the other two go after cargo containers, and if all the containers are destroyed, they'll all chase you. Worse, this is most likely a quest a new player will do at a lower level, since you can access it fairly easily in Omega, which is the location the game points you towards when you start.
515** ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'' thoughtfully provides the Citadel: Hanar Diplomat side-mission, which is notorious not because it's hard, but because it's glitchy as hell and is prone to spontaneously imploding with no provocation at all. ''Walking past people'' can cause it to break.
516* ''VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork'' series:
517** HundredPercentCompletion of the Chip Library can be a bit of a pain depending on the chip(s) you're missing. Usually, you can get a greater part of them by playing the game normally, and a few require some specific grinding for... And then there's the ones that flat-out require manipulating the RNG of the game through the chip folder and enemy actions to even have a ''remote'' chance of getting. Don't feel like having to grind for specific chips and performing every action flawlessly? Well, hope you like them being a LuckBasedMission from the chip trader then! Some of the most infamous ones from the first game include Howitzer and Dropdown.
518*** It gets even more tedious when you're trying to obtain chips to form Program Advances, which also have a completion record to them. Not only do you need a specific chip, you also need it in a specific code, which means either having to S-Rank a hard-to-kill virus or even [[DoWellButNotPerfect intentionally tanking your Busting Rank at times]].
519*** Some of the chips needed for Library completion can only be obtained from Bug Frag merchants. What makes this difficult is that Bug Frags are painfully scarce most of the time. While Battle Network 3 makes it very easy to farm them with a CounterAttack on rematchable bosses, the other games are not as merciful — Bug Frags in 2 only appear in certain mystery datas, while in 4 to 6 they are obtained either from overworld green mystery data (at one Frag apiece) or from in-battle mystery datas (anywhere between 1 to 5). The latter often means defeating viruses in the BonusDungeon while trying to preserve a mystery data that shatters when anything so much as a Buster shot grazes it, and sometimes after all that hard work the prize isn't even what you want. You can also get them from Liberation Missions or in the Virus Battler minigame, but both methods involve performing the same actions over and over again and are just as tedious.
520** In 3, it's the Time Trials. To get the fifth star (which allows the unlocking of the Omega Navis), you have to clear every named Navi in the game (their beta versions, if available, excluding Bass) within a time limit. Not too bad, right, especially since a great folder can three-turn almost any boss? Nope. To clear them, you have to use the crappy pre-made folders found with random people in the game. You can't set a preset chip, so it's all up to randomness.
521** Also from 3 is the slab hiding the Hub.BAT Navicust piece. 20 battles in a row, with enemies that can cover the field with attacks, and the last few battles have the Aura nonsense going on.
522** In 4, there are a few sidequests that dispense key items but require you to spend some Zenny in the process. The C-Slider, which gets you access to the Undernet and the BonusDungeon has you fork out a total of 9000 Zenny across three locations. The Nebula Code, which opens doors that guard valuable goodies, requires you spend 10,000 Zenny. Oh, none of the key items carry over in subsequent playthroughs, which means you have to fork out the cash each time you start the game over in the next difficulty. What's even more damning is that the C-Slider is ''mandatory'' for certain scenarios that take place in the Undernet!
523** The fifth game has Liberation Missions, which are an UnexpectedGameplayChange that add Strategy RPG elements to the game's usual mechanics. The game is generally fair with these until you reach the final Liberation Mission in the postgame. This mission has the entire field sectioned off by three stages of barrier panels, creating an almost entirely linear path that leaves you little opportunity to strategize or explore, reducing progress to crawling your way towards the barrier keys one tile at a time. While you have [=GyroMan / ShadowMan=] to scout ahead, the key paths are all blocked by viruses and dark holes they can't cross, so they can't use their main strength effectively. The first key to begin the chain is hidden behind [=BlizzardMan=], who appears alongside [=CosmoMan=] but both are Beta-tier bosses that will put up a fight. Thus not only do you need to fight two bosses, but the map is laid out in such a way that the path to [=BlizzardMan=] crosses both their zones of attack. Speaking of which, the viruses in the map will teleport over the barriers to get you as you pass them, and include Swordies who will probably teleport right in front of you, blocking the path and making you waste a turn killing them. And since you're in the depths of the BonusDungeon, the V3 viruses will make 1-turn liberations very difficult. All of this combined makes the finale to the liberation missions a slog to grind through. [=ToadMan=]'s SequenceBreaking ability in ''Team Colonel'' greatly alleviates a lot of the tedium involved (letting you finish in as little as ''four to five'' phases), but ''Team [=ProtoMan=]'' has to do things the hard way.
524** "Self Research" in the sixth game is a 2-star job available at least halfway into the game, and requires the player to complete a Program Advance and show the record to the NPC. Said components of that Program Advance involve a Mega Chip found in the BonusDungeon and a chip only available from a Bug Frag Trader. And the reward for this is a Number Code for a Navi Customizer part that only works in multiplayer matches.
525* The piano sidequest in ''VideoGame/MegaManStarForce''. A ten-round battle with the highest-level enemies, your HP carries over between battles, a ton of attacks flying at you all at once, making them almost unavoidable, a lot of enemies having hair-tearing gimmicks (hit that giant eye enemy with its back turned? No damage, sorry!), an enemy that can heal itself and raise 200 HP shields (for reference, a lot of your cards don't even breach 150), and to top it all off, three 1000-HP enemies that fling attacks literally every half-second at you.
526* The Racer's Labyrinth in ''VideoGame/MonsterRacers''. A huge, 100-person long MultiMookMelee, across every terrain type in the game (both in the races, and in navigating the labyrinth itself), against opponents up to level ''80'' (when you're likely to access said labyrinth around level 60 or so). It all culminates in three of the hardest races in the game against three ridiculously tough and high-leveled bosses. [[spoiler: On the plus side, you get rewarded with a random Exotic monster if you win, and you can repeat the process as many times as you like for all the Exotics you want.]]
527* ''VideoGame/{{NieR}}'' has Life in the Sands. You have to get 10 Pink Moonflower Seeds. Sounds deceptively simple, right? It is. You can get Red, Gold, and Blue Moonflower Seeds at the shops, but there's no pink seeds anywhere to be found. You have to ''hybridize'' them, in a complex, multi-step process that is explained ''nowhere'' in the game, can be easily messed up if you don't know what you're doing, and either takes ''several days real-time'' or a lot of fiddling with the system clock. Your reward? 10,000 gold. At this point of the game, that's a drop in the bucket. [[LetsPlay/TheDarkId Trolled by Cavia!]]
528** The Pride of a Lover. It's a simple FetchQuest that sends you off to Facade to find a rare crystal. What's so bad about it, you ask? ''Finding it''. It's only available before the TimeSkip. Devola doesn't tell you about it. To find it, you have to talk to a NPC in Seafront on one of the rooftops, leave town, talk to him again, leave town ''again'', and then talk to him one last time, and the quest will start. The kicker? If you complete every other sidequest before the TimeSkip, you'll have exactly 50% sidequest completion. Absolutely ''evil!''
529* The sequel, ''VideoGame/NierAutomata'' has several.
530** Speed Star. Three races, all of which must be completed on foot - often forcing you to take the long way around - against an opponent who can simply fly straight to the goal. Insane amounts of chip optimization are required just to stand a fighting chance.
531** Heritage of the Past. You have to find four artifacts buried in the desert with the Scanner Pod Program. The desert is far and away the biggest zone in the game with barely any landmarks, you get ''no'' hints as to where the items are, and the Scanner only kicks in when you get within about twenty feet or so. Not bad enough? You can only find the fourth artifact after turning in the first three. On the bright side, the rewards for completing the quest include one of the best spears in the game.
532** Completing Reconnaissance Squad requires you to fill up 95% of your unit data. Doing every other sidequest will get you up to about 80-90% unit data. The rest? Better have a guide handy. There are many, many UndergroundMonkey variants of regular enemies that have a miniscule chance of spawning, usually in some unremarkable corner of a map somewhere. By the time you've finished this one, you've probably finished everything else in the game.
533** Upgrading your pods. Unlike your weapons, where the majority of the necessary crafting ingredients can eventually be bought from some merchant or another, pod upgrades requires materials that can only be found on the map, like gadgets and pure water, which means lots of tedious farming.
534** Unlocking the {{Superboss}} [[spoiler: Emil]] requires you to obtain and fully-upgrade every weapon in the game. Some of the weapons are found in GuideDangIt locations, and two of them are only sold by Emil while he's near the Resistance Camp ([[LuckBasedMission a location he rarely spawns in]]). And then there's farming the money and materials you'll need for all those upgrades.
535* ''VideoGame/{{Opoona}}:''
536** Fully befriending Ine. In order to befriend her, you ''first'' have to befriend Masao, which means you need to have a high enough appreciation for art, which means running around the world and being sure to check every single plaque for every artwork you come across. Then you have to make sure you're [[ItMakesSenseInContext famous enough to play the ukulele,]] and impress her with your skills. ''Then'' you have to bother Masao into giving you his sculpture of himself, and [[ShopFodder not immediately sell it for a giant chunk of cash as the game suggests you do]], but rather give it to Ine on the grounds that they're both exchange students from the same planet. And then, once you're done with all that, you have to play the ukulele for '''''fifty in-game days''''' to get her friendship to its highest point. And since [[LevelUpAtIntimacy5 the stat increases via her friendship]] is by far the most common out of all the possible friends, it's really more a BraggingRightsReward than anything.
537** Jingle's [[FetchQuest Rogue research requests]] can be this as well. In order to complete his research, Jingle will sometimes ask you for various {{Rare Random Drop}}s from the enemies in the world. A first-time player of the game is likely to simply spend time trying to earn the drops legitimately, which is an exercise in frustration all its own. A veteran or one using a guide knows that they can be obtained from Secret Codes as well... except that Secret Codes also happen to be ''extremely'' tiny pink stickers stuck randomly behind various pieces of furniture and landscape, and that spotting them is almost as much of a challenge. To make things worse, the Secret Codes that give the necessary drop appear far later than the quests that require them.
538* ''VideoGame/PaperMario'':
539** ''VideoGame/PaperMario64'' has Chuck Quizmo. It's not hard, just ''incredibly annoying''. You have to find a spot where he [[RandomlyDrops (might)]] spawn, then just keep running back and forth until he does. Over. And. Over. Again. He has fully one third of the game's Star Pieces, and will give you only '''one''' every time he shows up.
540** ''VideoGame/PaperMarioTheThousandYearDoor'' has the Pit of 100 Trials, the game's BonusDungeon found in Rogueport Sewers. The concept is simple: [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin it consists of 100 floors]] populated by increasingly tough enemies. Every tenth floor is a breather with a rare, if not exclusive badge/item and a pipe you can use to leave. Oh, and there are ''no'' save blocks or heart blocks. While the first levels are pretty easy, it's from level 51 that things start getting especially hard with the many DemonicSpiders. Some standout examples include [[BanditMook Badge Bandits]] (which can ''[[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin steal your badges]]''), Dark Bristles (very high attack and defense, not to mention all that spike protection), [[WhenAllYouHaveIsAHammer Piranha Plants]] (very high HP and attack), and [[EliteMook Elite Wizzerds]] (high all-around stats, ''definitely'' doesn't help that they're often found [[BossInMookClothing in groups of four or five]]). At the very bottom resides [[{{Superboss}} Bonetail]], ''the'' strongest enemy in the game, at least statistically, but remember, no heart blocks to recover HP and FP. Have fun.
541* ''VideoGame/Persona2'':
542** Eternal Punishment's cartography sidequest requires generous use of the Estoma spell (which doesn't work if you're not high leveled enough) and usually getting a rumor from demons to be able to fully explore the entire place. It's not fun and it can be draining; and if Salam didn't offer up a King's Ransom for his completed maps (the rewards are as good as one'd get from Final Fantasy IX's Chocobo Hot and Cold), nobody would do it.
543** Eternal Punishment's ancestral persona. There's three persona in the entire game that are only gotten through a series of heavily convoluted steps including donating 10,000 yen to a very out of the way shrine in a one-time dungeon that you'd easily miss. The others come from dialogue options at various points in the game, and then you have to spread the rumors to get them. Their only purpose is to one shot a boss that isn't that difficult to begin with; and even that may be out of your range if you can't summon Junnosuke Kuroda who requires four FOOL cards, which are very difficult to obtain.
544** The Seedy CD in Eternal Punishment is an optional dungeon at best. But one pain in the dungeon is that you're blocked off from summoning your persona. It's not bad on the first trip; but the second trip is loaded with physical resistant enemies. Unless you didn't spread the rumors to get the elemental weapons (or refined any from padparcha), you were out of luck.
545* ''VideoGame/Persona3'':
546** HundredPercentCompletion in this game is extremely difficult to achieve without a NewGamePlus. A player would be lucky to have two free days left at the end after striving to complete all social links, and adventures don't even take up a full day in that game. Granted, the reason you have so little time left is because there's a social link that can only be started in the last month, but even without taking this link into account, you'll only finish with about a week and a half left. And completing the Persona compendium requires maxing all the social links, grinding your character to level 90 fusing personas all the way up, and... you'll still have [[LastLousyPoint only 98% completion]] because three personas are only obtainable by special fusions ''[[GuideDangIt that the game never tells you about]]''. Norn can be guessed if you know a bit of mythology (Clotho + Lachesis + Atropos, the Greek equivilents of the Norns), but Messiah (Orpheus + Thanatos) makes sense only in retrospect. And without a walkthrough, you're not likely to know Shiva (Rangda + Barong) even ''exists'' (the only hint being that [[OlderThanTheyThink Shiva has always been fused this way]] in other ''Shin Megami Tensei'' games).
547** Specific Social Links that qualify is this trope in their own right.
548*** The Empress Link, Mitsuru. It opens up towards the very end of the game (late November) and requires not only maxed Academics to start, but also having scored first place in at least one exam. There are a limited number of exams in the game, and there's only one exam left after Mitsuru's link is available, so it's very easy to [[PermanentlyMissableContent miss]] this one. It doesn't help that you have very little time to hang out with Mitsuru or your other links in early December (with exams and [[spoiler:the group preoccupied with whether to kill Ryoji]]), and Mitsuru's unavailable during winter break, only becoming available once again at the same time as Aigis's link opens up (see below).
549*** Yukari's S.Link for American players, as the game doesn't localize dating practices between Japan and America, the things you're likely to do as an American will piss her off, making leveling her link up pretty difficult.
550*** Aigis (Aeon, only in FES and Portable) is even worse in that regard; it opens in January. You fight the FinalBoss by the very end of that month, so you're on a very limited time span to complete hers as well. Complicating things further, the Ultimate Persona of the Aeon Arcana (Metatron), which only can be fused after completing the Social Link in the current or a previous run-through, can be fused with a Nihil Weapon to obtain the best gun of the game for Aigis (Metatronius). Considering that the Antiques Store takes two days to complete it, this leaves a very, very small window of opportunity to get the weapon on the first playthrough.
551*** The Emperor Link, Hidetoshi. He's one of the few school Links who never calls to hang out on Sundays, robbing the Link of possible make-up time for points. The responses to his scenes can be a bit counter-intuitive too, you have to approve of his KnightTemplar behavior in finding rule-breakers for most of the link, despite {{Jerkass}} responses in Social Links normally being bad.
552*** The female protagonist's links are both easier and harder at the same time; she has more links open at night, but two of them are on a one-month time limit (the Moon for Shinjiro, and Fortune for Ryoji); Ryoji in particular has to be hung out with whenever you are given the chance to do so. If you miss one opportunity, the link will simply stop progressing. It also trips you up because of a large gap between Rank 9 and MAX - the Rank 9 event is on December 1, while the Rank 10 event is at the end of the month [[spoiler:assuming you let him live]].
553*** Right up there with them is trying to become Akihiko's LoveInterest in his link; unlike Shinjiro, Ken and Ryoji, Akihiko's romance route requires triggering multiple flags that you likely won't know of without a guide, and mucking up even one keeps their relationship strictly platonic. What's more, the link freezes at Rank 7 with no indication of when it can restart if you get there before October. ([[spoiler:It coincides with Shinjiro's death.]]) Most of the flags come long before this, so if you mess up going romantic with him you have to reload ''very'' far back to have another chance.
554** Several of Elizabeth or Theodore's requests fall into this too.
555*** "Please Clean the Bathroom" is an annoying case of DoubleUnlock. You need the Scrub Brush to clean the bathroom, which is a ''weapon''. Ken's joke weapon to be exact, which is only found as a reward for ''another'' quest: "I'd like to try Inari Sushi". This one requires maxed Academics, the slowest stat to raise in the game, and is one that players trying to max all Social Links will probably avoid since normally getting Inari Sushi at the Shrine uses up the afternoon. [[GuideDangIt The one time it doesn't is during this quest.]]
556*** "I'd like to try Oden Juice" is another annoying one, as the game is essentially lying to you when it says the quest has no deadline. A girl at school has it, but she'll only give it to you in exchange for all the Kyoto-exclusive drinks. The problem is you only visit Kyoto once in the game, during the class trip in mid-November. If you don't buy all the drinks in what little time you have there, this request is [[PermanentlyMissableContent lost]].
557*** Another case of the game not being fully honest about deadlines is one series of quests that requires you to get items from certain SEES members (e.g. ask Yukari for pine resin that she uses in archery). Those items are obtained by talking to the member in question at the dorm in the evening, but can only be obtained on ''one specific night''. If you miss that opportunity, you will be unable to finish the quest, and if you don't check the Velvet Room's requests often enough, you may get the quest too late to be able to complete it.
558*** All of the katana requests in Tartarus. Elizabeth will ask for one rare katana for each block of Tartarus, and they can only be found in rare chests. Which, as the name implies, have a low chance of spawning on any given floor... and the rare chest needs to spawn on a couple of specific floors in order to have a chance of containing the katana. Not difficult, just a really annoying LuckBasedMission, and there are ''five'' of these in the game, the fifth being in the unlockable BonusDungeon.
559* ''VideoGame/Persona4'':
560** Good luck maxing all the social links in one playthrough if you haven't played the game before.
561*** Margaret's link requires you to fuse Personas with specific skills, and given the game's skill inheritance system, you're going to need a lot of luck and rerolling to get what you want (on top of passing on other skills you're going to use yourself). That, and finding the right sequence of fusions will necessitate a guide and/or a lot of money.
562*** Ai is the easiest Social Link character to piss off. One wrong move, and you can have a Reversed or even Broken Social Link. There is also the fact that as long as you don't ruin the Social Link, you can end up dating her only to break up with her or vice versa. This can cause problems either way; you could end up with her breaking up with you if you actually wanted her for a girlfriend, or you can end up with her sticking with you even when you were interested in someone else, which is fairly annoying if you don't want to be cheating.
563*** The Fox's link involves completing several ''other'' sidequests, and many of them require you to spend timeslots that are better used on your other social links(although one silver lining is that you can see the Fox on any day you're free, even if it's raining). Two of its last requests also require the FishingMinigame, with the third-to-last one requiring you to get a Red Goldfish and at least one other fish, and final request needing you to catch The Guardian. ''Golden'' requires you to not only catch the River Guardian, but also the Sea Guardian. The latter requires unlocking the ability to travel Shichiri Beach, something that will take four days' worth of scooter rides to accomplish(since you need to unlock Okina City first).
564*** Naoto's link is the last to become available, and it also requires you to have maxed Knowledge ''and'' Courage to get it started. You also don't commence it by talking to her in school, either -- you have to find a mysterious man in the shopping district first, and he's only available on certain days of the week while it's not raining. Unless you're habitual in talking to every NPC almost all the time, you might not even notice the mysterious man or even draw the link to Naoto. One silver lining, though, is that she's often available on rainy days, since some of her conversations take place under the pavilion in the Samegawa Flood Plain.
565*** Shu's link requires maxed Understanding to even commence, and this social stat is very difficult to raise. You can work at the Daycare but it has low availability, and the paper crane folding requires some Diligence before you can even start. It's likely that you'll only be able to start this link late in the game, and despite it being a nighttime link you might not have enough time to finish.
566*** While Nanako's and Ryotaro's links are one of the few nighttime activities that you get with few strings attached, they require a lot of holdover sessions, even with a matching Persona. Nanako's link will also stall in the latter half until you max out your Expression. [[spoiler:You're also on a time limit to finish, as both links become unavailable after Nanako gets kidnapped and Ryotaro gets injured while pursuing the perpetrator.]]
567*** Eri's link can also be fairly difficult to complete, since unlike all other daytime Social Links, you can't hang out with her in the evening, thereby requiring you to draw fortunes for her or spend some holdover visits with her. It doesn't help that a good portion of the dialogue prompts don't give you any points with her, regardless of what you choose.
568** The "Please Feed the Cat" series of requests involves needing to take some time to spend on the FishingMinigame, and then going out of your way to feed the cat at almost daily intervals until it's satisfied. You'll need high Diligence to be able to get yourself a good stock of fish in one time slot, and if you miss a day or run out of fish you might not be able to finish all the requests on time. The final request in the series involves having to feed the cat ''twenty times''.
569** ''Golden'' adds a few quests given by Ms. Kashiwagi in January that enable you to unlock costumes. Some of the quests are as easy as answering quiz questions correctly, but one requires you to obtain an Animal Paw, which you trade for at Shiroku Store. Said trade involves 8 Magatsu Xandrite and 1 Mondo Stone (trading with the ghost who appears at the shrine), so obtaining the Animal Paw will be difficult if you haven't been keeping up with finding those materials.
570* ''VideoGame/Persona5'':
571** Chihaya's Confidant takes a lot of time and money to establish. First, you have to get a fortune telling, [[CashGate then pay 100,000 yen for a "holy stone"]] (She pays you back later but this is a steep price, especially early on in the game), ''then'' complete a mission in Mementos and finally talk to her to start the link.
572** Sadayo's Confidant requires you to pay 5000 yen every time you spend time with her (except Rank 7 and 10), even visits that don't result in a rank-up. After reaching Rank 8, an event will take place at school and unlock the Mementos mission, which means that if you get that high after [[spoiler:the protagonist fakes his death]], [[PermanentlyMissableContent you will be unable to finish the link]].
573** Like with [[VideoGame/Persona3 Mitsuru]] and [[VideoGame/Persona4 Naoto]], Haru's Confidant is the last to open up, and has steep stat requirements (maxed out Proficiency is required to progress past Rank 2).
574** Sojiro's confidant begins fairly early on, but not only do you need to wait for Futaba to join in order to progress to the latter half of the confidant, but you also need to max out your Kindness and defeat a DuelBoss that, unlike other Mementos bosses, takes up its own afternoon, to complete the confidant. His early ranks (3-4) are also notorious for being very slow to level up, and you will need to spend at least one evening making coffee.
575** While Iwai's confidant is available around the start of the second dungeon (since you only need to be able to travel outside Yongen-jaya at night), it requires Rank 4 Guts to start, and maxed out Guts to complete. The requirements are steep enough that you may not be able to start it for several months, and might not finish it on a playthrough.
576** Progressing through Makoto's Confidant requires eventually having to max out the protagonist's Charm stat, one of the hardest stats to max out on the first playthrough.
577** In ''Royal'', there's maxing out Akechi's Baton Pass rank by playing darts. He insists on playing 701, so since you only have 15 throws between you, you'll generally have to hit a bullseye every throw for the first 14 throws, then hit a 1 on your last throw. Unfortunately, this also means that it's impossible to end the game on Akechi's second turn, so you'll have to do this twice.
578* ''VideoGame/PhantasyStarIV'' has the dog quest, where you have to find a dog, which randomly pops up in one of five cities. If you don't have a specific item in your inventory, it runs away, and you have to search the other four cities. The only way to get said item is to find the hidden shop that has virtually no hints to where it is.
579* In ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'', the biggest goal for completionists is that you GottaCatchThemAll. But this requires so much work that only the most dedicated players will be able to do it... And you have only a limited time before the next gen comes out, making you do it all over again with an even bigger number of Pokémon. Well, until Gen VIII and onwards at least, where there is no national dex.
580** Way back in ''VideoGame/PokemonRedAndBlue'', getting HundredPercentCompletion was extremely difficult, since the lack of breeding meant that you could only get one starter Pokémon per game, and almost nobody was willing to trade away their own starter to complete somebody else's Pokédex. This didn't last ''too'' long however, as ''Pokémon Yellow'' gave the player all three Kanto starter Pokémon for free.
581** Special mention has to go out to Feebas. In the first two generations that it's obtainable in, it's only available through fishing on one route. Sounds simple enough. Except that you can only catch it by fishing on a handful of specific water squares. In an area like ''[[https://cdn2.bulbagarden.net/upload/8/83/Hoenn_Route_119_E.png this]]''. Also, the squares are set randomly whenever you give a new catchphrase to a man in an entirely unrelated town, and Gen IV has it worse as there are ''less'' squares that change ''daily''. And if you ever do eventually find one, make sure it's got a nature that prefers dry Pokéblocks/Poffins, since feeding it an obscene amount of these is the only way to evolve it into [[MagikarpPower something useful]]. Fortunately, later games remove this method completely and Feebas even becomes easier ([[GuideDangIt though still no cakewalk]]) to evolve through [[SocializationBonus trading with a Prism Scale]], though the Gen III remakes still use the original evolving method but makes it easier by removing the feel and nature affecting Pokéblocks meaning that you can just stuff Feebas full of Blue Pokéblocks to raise its Beauty and then level up and there's two spots on Route 119 which always guarantee Feebas depending on the time of day. But then came the Gen IV remakes to ''return'' on using Feebas' original catching method, though at least it can evolve through either way.
582** Trying to find Mirage Island (not to be confused with the [[VideoGameRemake remakes']] Mirages Spots), which is the only place to get some of the rarest and most powerful berries in the game. To clarify, you have to go to Pacifidlog Town, which is pretty late in the game and talk to an old man in a house looking out a window who will say if he sees Mirage Island that day or not that day. More often than not, he will say that he can't which means that you have to wait until the next day to try again, and since the Franchise/{{Pokemon}} games are set in ''real time'', you could literally spend ''weeks, months, or even longer'' just to find all of the berries in an extreme LuckBasedMission, and this is just one of many considering all of the fleeing Pokémon there are in the series. Made even worse is that the internal batteries will run dry after some time meaning you can't get island unless you use a specific method.
583*** The remake's Mirage [[http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mirage_Islands Islands]] [[http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mirage_Forests Forests]], [[http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mirage_Caves Caves]] and [[http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mirage_Mountains Mountains]], of which there are 8 each, all containing Pokémon you can't find in Hoenn or [[VideoGame/PokemonXandY Kalos]]. What makes them this is that they are randomly appearing once per day. Due to how it works, it is possible to receive the same spot three times in one week, or not receive the last one for many months. Worse, is that Gen VI Native Meowth, Porygon, Unown, Stantler, Kricketune, Cherrim, Glameow, Darmanitan, Cofagrigus and Tynamo lines cannot be obtained outside of this sidequest.
584** Then there's the ever increasing list of Mythical Pokémon, which are Mons that can't be obtained through normal gameplay. In the early days, the only way to get these was to attend (in-person) a Nintendo event where they would be given away; [[NoExportForYou depending on your country]] these happened either infrequently or never. These days they're more frequent, and many of them simply involve connecting to the internet during a limited timeframe, and online trading makes it easier to get the ones you missed. Heck, re-releases have made some of them obtainable in normal gameplay (Deoxys, Celebi and, through DLC, Keldeo).
585*** Another alternative is by claiming them from interactions with other games. ''VideoGame/PokemonRanger'' and all of its sequels have some way of aquiring a Manaphy and transferring it to a Gen IV game, where it can be bred to get Phione as well. Meltan can only be obtained by sending a Pokémon from ''VideoGame/PokemonGo'' to ''[[VideoGame/PokemonLetsGoPikachuAndLetsGoEevee Pokemon Let's Go]]'' opening the box one gets in return in ''Go'' to spawn about 30 Meltan, then sending it to ''Let's Go''. In addition Meltan can only be evolved into Melmetal in ''Go'', so that has to be done before it's sent to ''Let's Go'' to get it in the main series. ''[[VideoGame/PokemonDiamondAndPearl Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl]]'' is the most generous with these: an old man in Floaroma Town will give you a Jirachi if you have save data from ''Sword'' or ''Shield''; the old woman beside him will give you a Mew if you have save data from either ''Let's Go'' game; and once you become Champion, if you have save data from ''VideoGame/PokemonLegendsArceus'' with all 27 of the main missions complete, you'll find an Azure Flute in your room, allowing you to challenge Arceus (though you'll need to have caught Dialga or Palkia first).
586** Roaming Legendaries, which are legendary Pokémon that (as the name implies) roam the overworld, forcing you to chase them down in the hopes you can maybe find them in the tall grass; and if you ''do'' find them, they also have a high chance of fleeing battle, forcing the hunt all over again. It seems like ever since Generation II, Japanese law requires there to be at least one of these in every main game. Raikou, Entei, and Suicune in Johto; Latias and Latios in the original Hoenn; Mesprit and Cresselia in Sinnoh; Tornadus and Thundurus in old Unova; Articuno, Zapdos, or Moltres in Kalos (depending on the starter you chose) and cold Sinnoh... you're lucky if you so much as encounter one of these, let alone catch it. To add insult to injury, an NPC says that Mesprit is merely playing with you. Thankfully there aren't any of these in Alola or Galar (at least until the Crown Tundra pass), though the ''Let’s Go'' games are notorious for it since they use ''VideoGame/PokemonGo'' catch mechanics and all Pokémon can flee. Cue plenty of [[RageQuit rage quitting]] when that shiny you spent so long chaining for decides to flee on you.
587** The Dropped Item sidequest in ''Black 2/White 2'', which is the only way to obtain rare mons that can't be obtained anywhere else. In Nimbasa City you can find an item (actually an Xtranceiver), and upon obtaining it Yancy (if you chose the male player character) or Curtis (if you chose female) will start calling. You have to travel all across Unova, getting in specific ''unmarked'' spots that will trigger a call from them. You have to hit 10 out of 15 spots to start the (thankfully much easier) second part of the quest, which consists of making at least 15 calls in one of the areas the unmarked spots were in before (such as Lentimas Town), as opposed to just those single spots (unfortunately, however, the area at least one call at a time may be made in is selected randomly). Still, having a bicycle and a Pokémon that knows Fly would be handy.
588** Completing Pokéstar Studios in ''Black 2/White 2'' is an arduous task, but the "[[RomanticComedy Love and Battles]]" series is especially frustrating as the fights feature a lot of luck-based moves, making getting the best endings a matter of hoping the RNG co-operates.
589** Capturing Rayquaza in ''[=HeartGold=]/[=SoulSilver=]'' is a real pain. First of all, to even ''get'' to the damn thing, you need to have both Kyogre and Groudon in your possession, and they're [[OneGameForThePriceOfTwo version exclusive]]. [[note]]Kyogre in ''HG'' and Groudon in ''SS''.[[/note]] Even worse, you cannot use Kyogre and Groudon transferred from Gen III games; one of them has to be your ''own'', caught in Heart Gold/Soul Silver, and the other has to be the one someone else caught also in Soul Silver/Heart Gold, and traded to you. If you do achieve that, the actual battle with Rayquaza is absolutely terrible for two reasons: one, it uses Rest, constantly undoing your progress in getting down its HP. Two, it has Outrage. That move is already widely considered ThatOneAttack, but in this case, the one disadvantage of the attack actually becomes a disadvantage for the ''player''. Rayquaza will confuse itself after using it, meaning if you actually got its HP low enough to try and catch it, it'll end up knocking itself out and you'll have to start all over.
590** Getting Landorus in ''Black'' and ''White''. Similar to Rayquaza in ''HGSS'' above, the player must go to the Abundant Shrine with both a Tornadus and Thundurus in their party. You can only get one of each in your copy of the game. So basically you're expected to get someone to trade you a one-of-a-kind legendary for the chance to catch the bastard. Your version-exclusive must also be ''yours'', because if not…
591** Catching Legendary Pokémon in general is a pain. Not only are they incredibly powerful and capable of knocking out your party of Pokémon, but they all have low catch rates so you are going to be spending a long time trying to catch them as they keep breaking out of the Poke Balls you throw. And that's not even getting into resetting for good natures and/or Individual Values. Now as for the above entries...
592** Getting the TM for Energy Ball in ORAS. It requires ''both'' bikes, which was not possible in previous games so you wouldn't think to try it unless you found this in the Safari Zone and realized you needed both bikes to get it. Trouble is, you first have to find three different people across Hoenn and speak to them, one of which is in the Battle Resort not accessible until after the Delta Episode. The other two are in hard to reach, out of the way spots in locations you're unlikely to return to, with each one requiring a specific bike. Only then will Rydel let you have both bikes. Nowhere in game tells you that you can do this or how to do it. Worse still, Energy Ball itself is a powerful Grass-type move that many Pokémon (most notably Psychic and Ghost-types) can learn, increasing the desire to get it.
593** In ''Sun and Moon'', some Pokémon can be only caught by being summoned by SOS-call of completely different species. This is already a case of GuideDangIt, though it's at least slightly hinted in in-game lore. However, the percentages of calls are sometimes low and some require specific weather (for example, Sandile will summon [[InfinityMinusOneSword Gabite]] only if Sandstorm is on). Worse yet, some of calls [[CavalryBetrayal start attacking whatever you were chaining]], like Mareanie vs. Corsola or Sableye vs. Carbink, which, if you chain for [=IVs=] or Hidden Ability, can be pretty annoying, since it essentially forces you to restart entire chain.
594** Putting ''all'' of the above to shame, however, is the quest to collect all Zygarde Cores and Cells in ''Sun and Moon''. There are ''100'' of these spread throughout the entire region, and the game gives you ''no'' hint whatsoever as to where they are located. What's more, some of them only appear in the day, and some of them only appear at night. Adding insult to injury, some of them only appear in areas that are unlocked ''after'' you've beaten the Elite Four.
595** Professor Saguaro's final friendship event in ''VideoGame/PokemonScarletAndViolet'' can be quite obnoxious to complete. He wants you to go find a Sweet Herba Mystica. That doesn't sound too bad; just go back to the cave you found it in during the main story, right? ''Wrong''. The Titan caves are inaccessible after their relevant plot scenes, so you have to try and farm it from 5- or 6-star Terra Raids. These are only available in the postgame and can be [[ThatOneBoss very difficult]] to defeat, especially if you do them immediately without leveling up your team much. You're not even guaranteed to get an Herba Mystica if you win the raid either. You could get the Sweet Herba Mystica in just a few raids, or after ''several dozen raids'' if you're especially unlucky.
596** ''VideoGame/PokemonGO'' has a handful of research tasks that are extremely difficult or outright impossible to complete:
597*** Some tasks require you to either catch a certain number of specific Pokémon, catch Pokémon of a specific type, or catching one specific Pokémon. The issue? It's all random on what kind of Pokémon that will spawn near you, even if you go to different places. The worst task is catching Ditto because there's absolutely zero hint on whether or not the Pokémon you caught was actually a Ditto in disguise and it's all up to chance.
598*** The task "Evolve a Magikarp" is far easier said than done. Unless you happen to live near water, Magikarp are ''incredibly'' rare to find. On top of that, you need ''four hundred'' Magikarp Candy just to evolve one. The only upside is if you do manage to catch or hatch a Magikarp and make it your buddy, you only need to walk one kilometer to get a piece of candy (half the distance if you feed it a Poffin). You'll still have to do a ''lot'' of walking with your Magikarp to get enough candy.
599*** "Evolve a Feebas" is another task that is long and very grindy. It takes one hundred Feebas Candy to evolve it, but that's only part of the objective. The other part is to walk twenty kilometers with it as your active buddy. Unless you gotten lucky enough to hatch a few Feebas to get extra candy, be prepared to grind for it.
600*** "Defeat Team GO Rocket Leader X", which requires you to beat all three Rocket Leaders. There's a few catches to the task. First, you need a Rocket Radar to get them to spawn at a random Poke Stop. Second, you have to beat six Rocket Grunts to get the parts to build said radar. Third, the radar breaks once you beaten one of the leaders, thus you have to fight more Grunts to get parts for another radar. Lastly, it's up to chance on which leader will appear and you could be looking for specific leaders for a very long time if you're unlucky. You can also skip a few steps and buy the radar in the shop if you're willing to shell out two hundred coins for it.
601*** Tasks that involve you winning against another trainer is a major pain mainly because you have to be both skilled and lucky to win against another player. While you can have a friend easily rig a match in your favor, you either need a friend who is near you in order to battle or have a player on your friend list ranked at "Ultra Friends" so that the two of you can battle online. Getting a friend to Ultra rank takes a ''lot'' of grinding in the form of sending gifts as well as trading or battling in raids alongside them.
602*** The special research involving Genesect has tons of grinding on each set of quests. Two of the tasks are generally easy and quick (feed your buddy, take snapshots, etc), but the third always involve catching ''twenty five'' Pokémon of specific types, which are Normal, Fire, Water, Electric, and Ice. If you didn't start the quest when it was released, you missed out on the boosted spawn rate for specific Pokémon types and now have to do it the hard way. The grind can seriously drain your supply of Balls and if you were already low on them, you'll either have to grind stops/gyms for more or pay for more Balls in the shop.
603*** Some quests may give you the task of visiting a Poke Stop for seven days in a row. That means playing the game each day and going out to a stop to spin it. While it's not difficult by any means, it requires you going out each day to make sure you don't miss a day. Real life issues and bad weather can easily break the chain and make you start over.
604* ''VideoGame/PokemonLegendsArceus'':
605** Let's start with the obvious: for all that the Pokémon franchise is known for the tagline GottaCatchThemAll, it's almost never required for the story. In this game, though, "Seek out all Pokémon" is your primary quest; if you want to unlock the final battle against Arceus, you have to capture—not see, not defeat, ''capture'' every single Pokémon species you can find in the Hisui region.
606*** Except the Mythical ones, and thank goodness for that: Darkrai only appears if you have save data from ''Brilliant Diamond'' or ''Shining Pearl'', Shaymin only appears if you have save data from ''Sword'' or ''Shield,'' and Manaphy and Phione are easily the biggest GuideDangIt in the game, with said guide being in the Canalave Library. Which, you know, ''doesn't exist in this game.''
607** Remember those Pokédex completion quests? This game takes it even further because you have to catch, battle, feed and defeat large numbers of a species to fill its 'dex page. You can get a "complete" designation fairly easily, but want "perfect?" Prepare to grind a lot. Like up to 50 Pokémon battled or caught or whatever sometimes if you want to totally complete the page.
608** Several quests involve showing completed Pokédex pages. The numbers of Pokémon you have to catch and interact with to fill the page make it annoying. The Cherrim quest in particular is annoying because Cherrim is rare in the game, only found in shaking trees, and a bug made it practically uncatchable until a patch was sent.
609** Getting the Shiny Charm requires completing the Pokédex pages of all 242 Pokémon in the game, including Arceus and the Mythical ones.
610** The Balloon Race in the Icelands quest is a pain because it requires precise timing with your ride Pokémon.
611** Finding all 107 Spiritomb wisps through the areas. They're hidden in pretty out of the way places and good luck finding them while dodging wild Pokémon attacks.
612* Getting Ho-Oh and the Johto starters in ''VideoGame/PokemonColosseum'' and ''VideoGame/PokemonXDGaleOfDarkness''. Both quests require beating all 100 levels of Mt. Battle without changing your team. The only saving grace is that you can heal at certain times.
613* ''[=SatellaWalker=] "Machi no Heiwa wo Tori Modose!"'' had an optional sidequest that could be done after the first battle with Reiti in the form of finding ten colored stones around the town. What made this sidequest fall under this trope was how difficult it was to find all of the stones, as the game gave no hints as to where the stones were[[note]]the closest thing to a hint given was a caller telling the player that half of the stones were hidden around town while the other half were hidden inside the town's buildings each via the telephone box[[/note]], meaning that players would have to check everywhere possible to find all of them. Making things even more difficult was how players only had approximately '''two minutes''' to be able to find all of the stones before the next cutscene and second confrontation with Reiti would play. In fact, a number of players likely wouldn't have known about this sidequest's existence if they didn't use the telephone box during this small window of time. Thankfully, this game managed to be recovered and its ROM uploaded (though sans the [=SoundLink=] audio), so you can actually still try this sidequest yourself with an SNES emulator of your choice.
614* ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiIIINocturne'' has the Labyrinth of Amala, which is only mostly optional, but whose mandatory parts are ''significantly'' easier than its optional parts. Bear in mind that "significantly easier" in the case of a Megaten game is like saying "we're going to blow your head off, then burn and desecrate your corpse" instead of "we're going to burn you alive and mutilate your daughter while forcing you to watch." and so you can imagine the [[UnusualEuphemism treats]] you're in for in the rest of the dungeon. To top it all off, the last area has a door that can only be opened by the first ally to ever join you[[note]]If that ally evolved and/or was used as non-sacrificial fusion for another demon, that's still fair game[[/note]]. Hope you didn't dismiss said ally as being too underpowered at some point along the way, 'cause you ain't getting them back.
615** The Amala Grave Run involves using the Black Visor at every Burial Chamber to relive past boss battles with your current lineup. The Run's objective is to finish every single battle under a certain turn limit. While the first battles become laughably easy with endgame stats and demons, the Demonic Sponsor battles are hellishly difficult to break. Noah in particular has a nigh-flawless defense that can only be breached under highly specific conditions. Even should you complete the Run, it will do ''squat'' for you at the time -- in NewGamePlus, you have to advance once again until reaching the Labyrinth's first Burial Chamber, where you'll be granted ''an extra Press Turn''.
616** Outside Amala, there's Puzzle Boy in Asakusa. A young Manikin challenges you to beat a game he's already beaten. promising a reward. While the first five or so stages are fairly easy, the puzzles become mind-boggling in their complexity. Even with a guide, expect to spend at least a good hour on its twenty stages, which you'll have to do if you want Masakados at the very end of the game. Combined with the UnexpectedGameplayChange to a puzzle game, Puzzle Boy is considered to be the worst part of the game for how out of place and, unlike most of Amala, tedious it is.
617** Getting the Amala Ring in ''VideoGame/DigitalDevilSaga'' is quite the task. To be able to obtain it, you have to beat the [[VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiIIINocturne Demi-fiend]], who is called the hardest boss in RPG history. It's that hard to do. The kicker? The ring can't be obtained in ''Digital Devil Saga 1''. You get it by buying ''Digital Devil Saga 2'' [[OldSaveBonus and transferring data from your save file]] of ''Digital Devil Saga 1''. Yes, it's a sidequest that costs actual money.
618** ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiIV'' has the Fiend sidequest, which is a repeat from the Fiend encounters from ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiI'' and ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiII''. ''Seven'' Fiends are hidden across Tokyo. Each has a 1/256 chance of appearing when you enter their spawning grounds. By the by, if they don't appear when entering their area, ''you have to leave the area entirely'' to try again. It's easy to see why this is considered extremely tedious and frustrating to many.
619* ''VideoGame/StarOceanTheSecondStory'' has a combination sidequest plus ''final boss'': If you get to just before the final boss, and then leave and visit a specific town, it'll remove the boss's limiter, turning the final boss, who is easily doable around level 50 to a ridiculously powerful monster, requiring levels in the ''200s'' just to avoid being instantly killed even while wearing items which reduce the damage he does with his elemental attacks. The resultant grind is ridiculously long. Beating The Cave Of Trials also qualifies for this, although it's a great place to level grind.
620* ''VideoGame/{{Sudeki}}'':
621** The Omnium Collector sidequest, required for one character's InfinityPlusOneSword. As the title suggests, it involves finding a total of 21 chunks of Omnium, [[TwentyBearAsses which are dropped by enemies in the dungeon you just cleared]]. The catch is these things are expensive and drop only 5% of the time (at a generous guess) from an enemy that has only a 50-50 chance of appearing at each encounter, and said encounters can only be created by running repetitively back and forth between two rooms of the dungeon.
622** Heart's Heart requires going back into a dungeon after defeating the boss and being given every indication to leave. It's not [[PermanentlyMissableContent lost]] if you don't, but the way to get it afterward is so arbitrary some believe the event flags are badly programmed.
623** A collection request the player probably has the stuff for in their pocket when it becomes available, but just ''starting'' the quest requires heading somewhere out of the way that you have absolutely no reason to go, and claiming the reward involves tediously sneaking through an area patrolled by guards that will kick you out on sight.
624* ''VideoGame/{{Suikoden}}'' has one in the form of a BettingMinigame, which you must win to get some of the characters and thus achieve the HundredPercentCompletion and [[MultipleEndings Secret Ending]]. The fact that such game relies so much on luck (or is blatantly rigged, depending who you ask) and ''also'' can suck your money dry has earned it a Troper FanNickname: 'The Game that Shall not Be Named'. That and the original name is kind of silly-sounding.
625** [[VideoGame/SuikodenI The first game]]'s version can actually be a decent moneymaker (though it doesn't beat the "Coin in the cup" game), but the second game ups the difficulty to an insane degree.
626** The dice game is the best bit maker once you can do maximum bets, but ''VideoGame/SuikodenII'''s game will make you want to destroy your television.
627** Try leveling up ''every'' playable character's weapon to their maximum level. Have fun obtaining the money to do that, especially if you ''don't'' like playing Triple Storm or the Coin Game.
628** Finding [[spoiler: Pesmerga]] in the first game is pretty annoying mainly because you have to go all the way ''back'' to the top of Neclord's castle pretty late in the game, and you can't use an escape talisman in that area to instantly warp you outside afterwards.
629** There's also finding the ultimate magician Crowley in the first game, because he's hidden deep within a cave, and you have to feel around the walls for the secret passage to his chamber.
630** Recruiting Clive is a pain because it's basically a LuckBasedMission late in the game. It's easy, but it might take a lot longer than it should.
631** In the second game, getting all the Recipes for the cooking mini-game can be a chore, especially with the notoriously hard to get recipe #24 from the Do Re Mi Elves, and ''especially'' if you're trying for Clive's Quest at the same time, which is another "That One Sidequest" for its time limit.
632** The Aforementioned Clive's Quest is a time-limit game that, unless one is doing the [[GoodBadBugs Matilda Gate Trick]], is pretty hard to accomplish whilst still A) getting all 108 stars, B) Leveling up at a decent rate, and C) collecting anything, including some {{permanently missable|Content}} items like Recipe #24. It's a very fine Juggling act.
633** Getting all the dogs in ''VideoGame/SuikodenIII''.
634* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioRPG'':
635** The most expensive Frog Coin requires 500 coins to initiate a series of trades and you can only hold a maximum of 999 coins at a time. And you only get a Frog Coin every other time; most of the time it is...significantly less than 500 coins.
636** Seed and Fertilizer. You might not even catch the Fertilizer. But the InfinityPlusOneSword and [[InfinityPlusOneSword Infinity Plus One Armor]] are there.
637** The Frog Coin in Mushroom Castle. There is a hidden chest in the main room of the Mushroom Castle, which requires you to hop on the head of Toad to give you enough of a boost to actually get the damn thing. You have one shot at it, and no sign that it's even there. You do get an item that chimes when you enter the room that still has a hidden chest... but long, long after this event. And if you don't get it your first time there, it's [[PermanentlyMissableContent lost]].
638** Helping Toadofsky finish his orchestra without help is incredibly hard unless you have a really good ear for music.
639* ''VideoGame/VampireTheMasqueradeBloodlines'' has the defend the graveyard sidequest. Basically, you can decide to sub in for a ghoul who stays in the graveyard to make sure the dead stay dead (apparently LA has a zombie problem) while he goes out for a night on the town. Unfortunately, while the zombies don't take many hits to take down, there's a ''lot'' of them, so much so that by the time you make it to one gate to start clearing zombies, they'll already be mobbing the other gate all the way across the graveyard, and if either of them get knocked open, you fail. This is considered the hardest sidequest in the game, so much so that most players will opt for the other option (bringing him a hooker or, if female, pleasuring him yourself) which gives the same amount of xp.
640* In later ''VideoGame/WildArms'' games, to get HundredPercentCompletion you have to also fight the Black Box; a {{Superboss}} who is only available if you've ''opened every single treasure chest in the game.''
641** The series's ultimate That One Sidequest was [[VideoGame/WildArms3 3's]] version of the Abyss -- a 100-level, randomly-generated, tedious-''beyond''-tedious dungeon stuffed to the brim with the strongest enemies in the game. To proceed to the next floor, you have to collect five gems scattered around, and while it's not necessarily ''difficult'' to reach them, the tediousness is exacerbated by the difficulty of the enemies and the fact that you'll lose track of which floor you're on ''long'' before you reach one of the bosses that serve as checkpoints.
642** The cherry on top for this sidequest is the {{Superboss}} at the very bottom, Ragu O Ragla. He is as difficult as you might imagine him to be (he even gets his own special battle music!). You have to be completely prepared, as he uses all elements and counters all attacks. Then you have to fight him a second time right after you beat him. The prize for your day-long endeavor? A gear for a single party member that can only be equipped at the highest level.
643** In a moment of game design sadism the likes of which are rarely seen in [=RPG=]s, there is an enemy within the deeper levels of The Abyss (past level 60 and on) with an attack that will ''return you back to the very fucking beginning''.
644* ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles1'':
645** The quests for Rebuilding Colony 6. The quests themselves are simply a matter of collecting items, the problem is that these items are among the rarest collectables and drops of the whole game. These items include the Ice Cabbage, Rainbow Slug, Fossil Monkey, and the Black Liver Bean. In most cases, they are unavailable for trade, meaning the player really has to hunt for them, and they have less than a 15% chance of spawning and they only spawn in certain places, in a certain period. Notably, in the UpdatedRerelease that let you set quests as "active" to zero in on the required enemies/items, these quests ''cannot be set as active''. You're getting it all the hard way.
646** Fighting Breezy Zolos, while the fight isn't that bad, the unique monster is around a gigantic T-Rex with level 98, while you would be around level 30. The battle is much more about strategy on how to drag Zolos away from the giant monster rather than fighting it.
647** "Securing Provisions" requires you to trek into Tephra Cave and obtain an item. Sounds easy? It's found in the [[BeefGate late-endgame region]] of Tephra Cave. The entrance to the room with the item is guarded by a level '''97''' unique monster, there's another level 96 unique that spawns nearby, and several level 96 enemies patrol the area. You obtain the quest when your level is about the mid-70s. Even if you can somehow safely lure the unique monster away, once you get inside there's ''another'' level 96 enemy guarding the item. It is possible to lure that one away as well, but that requires even trickier footwork and AI exploitation.
648
649* ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles2'':
650** Most infamous is Ursula's quest, Bearing Her Soul. What's so bad about helping a cute little girl riding a polar bear become a singer? The sheer amount of time it takes. It's not difficult, but requires constantly [[AQuestGiverIsYou sending her on merc missions with other Blades]] to receive lessons, which award skill stamps. You need at least 250 of these stamps. When you start, each mission takes 10 minutes and rewards a single stamp. You can shorten the missions with the right Blade setup and later missions reward more than 1 stamp, but even well optimized, it'll [[https://old.reddit.com/r/Xenoblade_Chronicles/comments/7ysw6y/complete_ursula_quest_guide_finishing_her_quest/?ref=share&ref_source=link take around 16 hours to finish]]. You can at least do it in the background while playing the game normally, but that means you'll be sending Ursula off on another mission every five minutes or so for most of the game (if you're not unlucky enough to get her late in the game, as she's one of the [[ScrappyMechanic random rare Blades]]). The quest also ends in a huge AntiClimax: you're building up to a massive concert, with Ursula [[OffscreenMomentOfAwesome singing for various world leaders in the missions]], but the actual concert at the end is for ~20 people (half of which are party members) on the street. While Ursula is a powerful healer, healing isn't always necessary in the game and she's out of the party and unavailable the entire time you're doing her quest, and with other Blades being better healers (such as [[spoiler:Blade Nia]] and some DLC Blades), it's not really worth it unless you're going for 100% completion. The silver lining is that, with the missions being so short[[note]]most missions have a default length of about forty minutes with many being significantly longer, while the longest the lessons can be is 10 minutes[[/note]], it's a fast way to fill in other Blades' [[SkillScoresAndPerks affinity charts]].
651** Filling in Vess's affinity chart requires [[ItemCrafting making dumplings]] 100 times. Each one takes about a dozen items to make, so you're looking at tracking down over a thousand collectibles to be able to make all of these. [[GuideDangIt The game doesn't tell you all the items you need are found on another continent that's technically part of a hostile nation]], [[GameplayAndStorySegregation making you wonder how she kept getting the ingredients to make them]]. Even if you know exactly where they are and have a great arrangement of field skills, you'll still spend [[FakeLongevity at least an hour skip traveling to a landmark, walking over to and selecting the collection point, watching the long item spawning animation, then walking around to touch all the items, just to start over again]] dozens of times. And the reward you get from this? The ability to make more dumplings, none of which are worth it.
652** Filling out Poppi's Affinity Chart requires getting 50,000 points in ''Tiger! Tiger!'', an 8-bit style minigame. You're pretty much guaranteed to get that score if you collect all the chests and don't get hit in a single run and can do it in Easy mode, but it can still be an exercise in frustration at that difficulty level.
653** Getting Theory from the quest Blade-Sharp Memory. The quest is pretty easy until the end, where you have to find her and her Driver in [[DeathWorld Temperantia]], then defeat them. What makes this fight so difficult is that he will inflict damage on you whenever he evades one of your attacks, and has an art that gives him perfect evasion for a short period of time, so you're guaranteed to take a lot of spike damage. [[ArtificialStupidity Your party members won't stop attacking him when he does this, either.]]
654* ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles3'':
655** The looooong mission to complete Dorrick the giant robot is essentially this game's answer to the rebuilding of Colony 6. A FetchQuest of such massive proportions that multiple other sidequests are directly tied to your progression. Finishing the job even unlocks a ''second'' fetch quest, though this one is much shorter. And then, once every quest is done and over with, [[spoiler:Dorrick is hijacked and you have to destroy it. The only thing that makes it avoid ShaggyDogStory status is that you did in fact complete all of these other sidequests in the process, meaning that Colony 30 and its inhabitants are now in better shape than ever, and rebuilding it will be a lot easier.]]
656** The Nopon Register is simple in concept: you are tasked with getting a rock (long story) from a Nopon in each merchant caravan. In practice, that means you'll have to tour the ''entire world'' to do that. Quite a few caravans are optional to visit (some of them even require cleaning up a sidequest first), and when you get there it's easy to just forget to talk to the relevant Nopon. There's a reason you're given the sidequest very early and the game itself tells you to take your time with it; it ''will'' take up most of the game.
657[[/folder]]
658
659[[folder:Simulation Game]]
660* ''VideoGame/BlackAndWhite'': "The Shaolin" is a StalkingMission... for a [[AGodIsYou deity]] who manifests as a gigantic SparkFairy. The low margin of error to tail the titular HermitGuru undetected, combined with [[FakeDifficulty cumbersome camera controls]], all but guarantee many, many failed attempts.
661* Getting Gracie-brand clothing in the original [=GameCube=] version of ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossing''. Considering the speed at which the game expected you to mash the A button, it probably justified the purchase of many turbo controllers.
662** That taking your chances with Wisp or the taking the easy way out (which anyone can understand why) by using universal cheat code passwords at Nook's store.
663** The Gulliver items in ''City Folk'', due to its rarity and necessary accuracy to shoot down the spaceship to get the item.
664** Filling up the museum in general is tough throughout the series, as it normally requires the completion of at least one or two examples of this trope to complete.\
665Filling up the fish and insect exhibits are rather tough, since every one of the creatures only spawn during certain times during the day, timeframes during the year, or in some cases, during specific weather conditions. Some of the creatures are very rare, and in the case of fish, look no different from other, more common fish before being reeled in (i.e. a small shadow in the water could be something you could catch any day ''or'' the rare one you're after). Some insects can only be spawned by certain actions like hitting rocks with shovels, shaking trees, or leaving trash on the ground as bait.\
666The art exhibit is generally the hardest one to fill up in every game, since the player is almost entirely reliant on [[HonestJohnsDealership Redd]] for obtaining pieces at all.
667** Getting to shop from Redd at all could be annoying, since his spawn rate tends to be different from game to game, and often includes other requirements, like passwords, invitations, or fees to even enter his shop. When you do finally get into his tent, in every game after the first, there's also a very good chance that the piece he sells you will be a worthless counterfeit, and up until ''New Leaf'', there was no way to tell a counterfeit from the genuine article until you try donating it, making it a gamble that almost guarantees that you would waste tons of money on forgeries. ''New Leaf'' includes subtle differences between the real pieces and the forgeries, but this generally requires some knowledge of fine art to tell them apart without looking it up on the internet.
668** Toy Day in New Leaf is chock-full of these. How it works is you impersonate Santa Claus and deliver presents to all of your villagers to help ease Jingle's yearly workload. This wouldn't be too difficult, except in order to find out what a villager wants for Toy Day they have to bring it up in a conversation on any day from December 1 to December 23. This happens completely at random, and they'll only describe its color and/or category. There's no guaranteeing that they'll describe one or both of their specifications before Toy Day, meaning that you'll probably have at least one villager who never said what they wanted. Multiple villagers can request gifts within identical specifications in either color or type. This means that you can reach Dec. 24 with multiple requests for something green, or two requests for white furniture.
669* ''VideoGame/HarvestMoon'':
670** The fourth mine in ''VideoGame/HarvestMoonDS'' is a 65,535 floor nightmare MarathonLevel. The only real reasons to even try are A) To get the [[strike:Dragon]]Goddess Ball, which will grant you one of several wishes, or can be kept in your inventory to slowly increase your farm's rating and B) a special event that can only be seen by reaching the final floor. It's damned expensive (You pretty much have to fill your rucksack with [=TurbojoltXLs=] and [=BodigizerXLs=] to stand a real chance) and frustrating (the monsters there are the toughest in the game, and the mine pits can drop an instant death-bringing 100 floors at a time) and other than the aforementioned Goddess Ball, all the good mine items are in the much smaller Mine #3 -- which you had to finish to even unlock #4.
671** The Swimming Contest from ''VideoGame/HarvestMoonBackToNature'', which you needed to win to gain all the engergy bar-increasing Power Berries. You had to tap a button in a certain rhythm to swim at a proper pace: too slowly and Kai will beat you every time. Too quickly, and you'll run out of energy and have to stop for a few seconds... and ''everybody'' will beat you. There isn't even a prize for second place.
672** In ''VideoGame/HarvestMoonMagicalMelody,'' getting to the bottom of either of the caves. If you're really lucky, you'll fall down weak spots in the ground that send you down multiple floors. If you're not so lucky, you'll fall...up weak spots several floors. Using the hoe guarantees that you can go down, but that's only in special areas and only one floor at a time. Plus, by the time midnight rolls around, you'll need to save all of the stamina you can get. There are 100 floors before you get to the bottom. Oh, and the cave on the lake has a rare and valuable fish you need to catch at the bottom, so if you forget to bring the rod then opps, try again!
673* Claire’s Sanctuary in ''VideoGame/JurassicWorldEvolution'' has an achievement for medicating all 62 sick dinosaurs manually as opposed to delegating it to your ACU or Rangers. Hitting the giant Brachiosaurs isn’t so bad, but the Sinoceratops, Ankylosaurus and Stegosaurus like to destroy Jeeps and then you have the small Stygimoloch, Gallimimus and Struthiomimus that never stop moving and are a pain to hit. Plus there’s three carnivores you have to keep track of in case they break out and try to kill each other, though you can knock them out, and you’re racing the clock to get everyone medicated before the illness kills them.
674* Getting the wishing well in ''[[VideoGame/TheSims The Sims 2: Seasons]]''. To get it, you need to get a perfect score from the Garden Club. To do this, you spend hours and hours tending, spraying and watering your garden, praying that it doesn't snow or rain and destroy all your work, spend thousands of simoleons on flowers, hedges and decorations (Which also require a lot of upkeep) and eventually, [[MakesJustAsMuchSenseInContext talking to the trees to increase their health.]] When (if) you finally get the wishing well, you can select three wishes. Two of them are quite useful, but wishing for money gives you a pathetically tiny sum of 1000 simoleons (Which is probably nowhere near how much you've spent working on the garden) and all three wishes are likely to fail, with disastrous results.
675* In ''VideoGame/WarThunder'', optional seasonal events to win some free rare vehicles, as they basically force you to renounce to your job and social life if you want to complete all of them, unless you pay of course. Granted, you can simply skip them, but trying to participate will result in a lot of frustration (wit the sunk costs fallacy kicking in).
676** The summer and winter events are the "moderate" ones, as they task you with certain challenges that can be time consuming but ultimately doable (e.g. "capture strategic zones 20 times", "kill 12 enemies in a single arcade battle", "score 50 total assists"). However, you have to complete them in two days or you don't get progress. And you have three sets of challenges for ground forces, aircraft and navy, usually players stick only on one of them as getting all can be quite an experience of self-alienation. Some people renamed the Operation Summer event into Operation Suffer. God help you if you focus on the task that requires you to win 10 battles and by random chance you spend the whole day without winning any, as your team might get steamrolled even if you are the best player in the world. Or if you get incredibly (un)lucky and only get kills while trying to score assists only.
677** Then there are crafting events in spring and autumn, which will require you to actively play non-stop 6 hours per day (and only because there is a limit on daily progress) every day for two weeks if you want to get the top prize (usually a rare heavy tank or jet and you can only get one without paying as there is not enough time to get two top prizes). But you don't just play and achieve direct progress, oh no. By normally playing you get random drops of counted materials that you need to use for an additional, uselessly complex mini-game, the crafting part of the event. Since drops are random, you will find yourself swimming in materials that you don't need while lacking others, forcing you to trade on the marketplace (the event is purposedly designed as so).
678** You can face the consequences of these events even if you ignore them. First of all, players unlocking the gift vehicles will spam them in battles, sometimes ruining entire battles because either the vehicles are initially overpowered, or the occasional noob buys its way to the top prize and deploys it without any skill. Then, players pursuing tasks might engage in irritating behaviour, such as bombers climbing up to space after getting enough battle activity just to artificially prolong the game while they go doing someting else, so that they get materials for the crafting event without staying at the computer the whole day (unless a frustrated player decides to intercept them).
679* The original ''VideoGame/WingCommander'' had that infamous [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDdqKVrh-dU "Saving the Ralari"]] mission, which classifies as both EscortMission and LuckBasedMission. You don't need to save the Ralari to win the game and there is no way to do a HundredPercentCompletion due to the mission branching, but if you want to complete the game without losing any mission, this one is the 13th mission.
680* ''VideoGame/{{X}}-Universe'' series:
681** ''Any'' EscortMission save the one in the Terran plot. A small convoy of freighters asks you to guard them on the way to their destination. The correct answer is "HELL NO." The freighters are [[MadeOfPlasticine made of wet newspapers]], and attract small swarms of pirates every twenty kilometers that you need a destroyer to clear away, and the freighters are ''just'' fast enough to outrun a destroyer. At higher combat ranks, you end up fighting off squadrons of ''capital ships''.
682** "Follow Ship" is a StalkingMission that takes forever since you can't just call up the quest giver and tell him the target's destination, even though it's prominently displayed in the target's infobox. What's worse is that when taking these missions that [[TooDumbToLive lie near a Xenon-infested sector]], the target will randomly decide that its destined clandestine base of operations will have him/her to travel ''through'' that one sector, [[GoddamnedBats and will promptly get shredded by those ships]], [[DemonicSpiders especially if it's a Q]]. Particularly frustrating when you learn that you cannot go below 10 km or else the target will get spooked and the mission automatically fails. Try falling behind the target by about 20 km and the target will jump out with no way of telling you where the location is, which also ends in failure. Even once you beat it it's not over. If you do the Corporation sidequests, the RNG will dictate what missions you'll undertake and one of them will involve this.
683** "Retrieve Stolen Ship" requires you to make the thief bail out, which requires you to [[CherryTapping Cherry Tap]] the ship until the RandomNumberGod smiles on you. And if it doesn't smile on you soon enough, the chip damage caused by the Cherry Tapping will cause the recovered ship too slow to make it to the delivery point in time, unless you ''happen'' to be next to a shipyard and willing to dump half of your prize money into repairing it, or own a carrier ship with a warp device to haul the rescued ship[[note]]If you ''do'' have a warp-equipped carrier class, why are you even doing this kind of missions?[[/note]].
684** The final step of the Hub sidequest chain. You need hundreds of some of the game's rarest resources, which can take literally hundreds of '''real time''' hours to obtain.
685[[/folder]]
686
687[[folder:Sports Game]]
688* In the DS version of ''VideoGame/MarioAndSonicAtTheOlympicGames'', there are five missions for each character. One of Sonic's takes place at the triple jump. Your goal? To clear 15 feet... while making sure ''all your jumps are 50+ degrees DESPITE ALREADY WONKY ANGLE CONTROLS.''
689** If you think think that is bad, just you wait until you play the bonus prologue story in 3DS London 2012. The Olympic event missions during that force you to be perfect and test all your skills at the game.
690* The "So Far Behind..." challenge in ''VideoGame/MarioStrikers Charged'' involves Yoshi coming back from a five-goal deficit against Wario who has [[GameBreaker three Dry Bones on his side.]] You have seriously limited time and there's nothing stopping Wario and his team from scoring even more goals and you are almost certainly going to be constantly shocked by Dry Bones' Special Shots. Said shots will also paralyze your goalkeeper allowing an easy goal for the opposition. This isn't even ranked amongst the highest difficulty challenges but it sure feels like it.
691* Collecting all of the snowflake tokens in ''VideoGame/{{SSX}} 3''. White tokens on a white surface are not easy to spot.
692[[/folder]]
693
694[[folder:Stealth-Based Game]]
695* ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedI'':
696** Collecting all the flags. It doesn't help that they're tiny and are perfectly camouflaged thanks to the [[RealIsBrown gray and dusty]] look of the game. It's slightly easier in Acre because there are three separate flag types that are only found in a specific districts, but everywhere else only has a general flag type, so it's easy to miss flags and never know where to begin searching, short of having a good memory or [[GuideDangIt a guide]]. What makes this sidequest worse is that there is no reward to it.
697** There's also killing all 60 of the special [[KnightTemplar Templar]] enemies. They're located in certain spots in Acre, Jerusalem, Damascus, and the Kingdom. Some of them are fairly well hidden, and without a guide you'll probably only find them with luck. Add to that at least one, if not more, has the tendency to glitch and not appear leading you to believe you may have already killed it. There's no reward.
698* In ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedII'', you have to collect 100 feathers which are also as hard to find as the flags in the first game. However, they emit a sound when you are near, are much easier to find in the night time, and actually give you a reward this time around.
699* ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamAsylum'' has the Joker Teeth, which are required to complete the Riddler sidequest, but not added to the map along with the other secrets, and at least one set, those hidden above the hallway to the warden's office, are probably only noticed after the player has left the place.
700* In ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamCity''
701** The Advanced AR challenges are definitely this. The finicky controls make not hitting the walls or floor in the PassThroughTheRings challenge difficult to say the least.
702** "Identity Theft" and "Watcher in the Wings" are both a GuideDangIt to complete. Most of the other sidequests are marked on your map and give you clear notifications when their next part begins. For both of these, you have to find multiple specific locations that aren't marked on your map and are never hinted at, dead bodies for "Identity Theft" and the mysterious cloaked watcher for "Watcher in the Wings". The only help you get is that the locations for both quests follow a pattern: dead-end alleyways for the bodies and rooftops for the Watcher. But there are a ''lot'' of rooftops and alleyways in the game. For the Watcher, there's the added annoyance that he only shows up after certain story milestones, and after finding him you'll need to enter and exit a building before he'll appear again.
703* ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamOrigins'': The "[[ImprobableAimingSkills Deadshot]] Most Wanted" Side Mission is this to an '''absolute T'''. Like the final Catwoman dlc chapter mentioned above, not only do you have to create a stealthy opening to get the first three Beat Downs (unlike Two-Face, Beat Downs on Deadshot here are '''very effective''', just make sure to follow up with a Ground Takedown after each Beat Down to speed up his knocked-out status, with the exception of the third Beat Down so that his dazed-status gives you the time you need to flee to a gargoyle before his aforementioned mooks find you and start deconstructing gargoyles, which are '''very paramount''' in this side mission, since otherwise his [[MookMaker infinite mooks]] will start to tear holes into Batman before you can perform three full Beat Downs on him) to really knock down his HP meter, the good thing here is that, unlike Two-Face, his "infinite mooks" stop spawning once he enters his "hostage taking" phase. '''Unfortunately''', you need to clean up the remnants of whatever mooks he summoned, oh, and while it's nice to hear for first-timers, you'll have a '''major earache''' listening to the hostage bitch and moan about "Come on man, it's Christmas!" and his other '''endless freakin' spiel...!''' (It seems that Knockout Smashing Deadshot can be done to lower his HP, just do so only when you can get away without being noticed by his mooks to whittle his HP down little by little until the scripted hostage taking is done as he's on low hp) Oh, and be sure NOT to throw any batarangs or any projectiles in a trajectory that is very near his hostage-taking position when he holds said hostage. Otherwise, for some very odd reason, he ends up killing the hostage, pulling up a bullshit GameOver, have fun...
704* In ''VideoGame/{{Dishonored}}'', the Sokolov Paintings are this. This is an incredibly difficult sidequest, considering that most of the time, these paintings are hidden in places where nobody would even look for them, such as ''on the third level of a ruined apartment with three identical levels and nothing else on the other two.'' Not only that, but the game ''[[GuideDangIt never tells you you need to look for paintings]]'', unless you notice the giant squares in upgraded Darkvision.
705* ''VideoGame/GhostReconFutureSoldier'':
706** The "Body Count" weapon challenge in its fourth mission -- kill eight people with assault rifles within 30 seconds to unlock a new assault rifle. The problem is that in none of the combat sections in the level can a player be realistically expected to accomplish this without [[ViolationOfCommonSense making some questionably suicidal tactical decisions]] -- the first area requires stealth[[note]]trying to pick the enemies off one at a time is a no-go, since they will notice their buddies dropping and fail the mission, and teammates' kills by way of sync shots won't count for the challenge[[/note]], the second is filled with both panicking civilians and [[EveryCarIsAPinto easily-destroyed cars]][[note]]blowing enemies up by destroying the car they're taking cover behind doesn't count either, being near one when it explodes is instant death, and with the strict time limit for the challenge you can't afford to make careful shots and avoid killing the civilians, which is also a game over[[/note]], and the third has most of the enemies take cover behind a jeep with an automated turret[[note]]giving you a SadisticChoice: either ignore the auto-gun and get torn to shreds whenever you try to shoot someone, or blow it up with a grenade and promptly screw yourself out of the challenge when most of the enemies in this final section die in the explosion[[/note]]. The eighth level has the "Rifle Master" challenge with the same requirements, but this one is much easier since the level actually does throw enough enemies at you to accomplish it without having to worry about cars or civilians getting in the way.
707** "Master Sniper" in the penultimate level is another "fun" one. You're supposed to make fifteen kills with a sniper rifle without missing a shot, which is hard enough to do on its own, but a glitch apparently introduced in one of the patches causes the counter to reset after every kill -- you have to uninstall all patches and play the mission without them to get the challenge to work properly.
708* Doing a PacifistRun in ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid4GunsOfThePatriots'' is not too difficult... until you get to the already difficult Motorcycle Chase in Act 3. Even the official [[http://metalgear.wikia.com/wiki/Metal_Gear_Solid_4_Walkthrough/Act_3 Metal Gear Solid wiki]] describes it as a nightmare[[note]]"If you're going for no kills, this place is a nightmare; you will need to use your Tranq Pistol with all the skill of The Boss herself"[[/note]] and they're ''not'' kidding: You have no control over your movement, tranquilizing an enemy who then crashes his vehicle counts as a kill, the camera is [[ShakyCam shaky]] and sways all over the place, and you are forced to shoot your way through barricades. You want that Bandanna without farming Drebin Points for six weeks and OneHundredPercentCompletion? ''[[NintendoHard Good luck.]]''
709* Completing the Target Practice: R&D Platform side-op in ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolidVThePhantomPain'' is equivalent to an '''entire GuideDangIt''' mini-side quest, seriously. Good luck trying to complete it without aforementioned help...
710* ''VideoGame/OneWayHeroics''
711** Of note is the Tourist ending, which requires you to take control of the weakest class of the game and fill out a TravelJournal. Filling this out quickly requires the player to stand next to mobs of monsters and spend a turn writing in the journal, which is dangerous. However, taking too long to fill it out will just result in enemies outleveling the Tourist, leading to death anyways.
712** The Dosey Plus ending is less difficult, but far more of a LuckBasedMission because it requires the player to find an extremely rare Parchment of Darkness.
713[[/folder]]
714
715[[folder:Third-Person Shooter]]
716* ''VideoGame/Splatoon2'' has two of these.
717** Unlocking all of the Hero Weapon Replicas for [[Over100PercentCompletion 1000% Completion]]. Each one requires you to complete every level and boss in the single-player mode with it in order to unlock it for multiplayer, with there being nine weapons in all. Thus requiring you to beat the entire single-player mode nine times, all in order to unlock ''the ability to buy'' purely cosmetic reskins of weapons you probably already bought between online multiplayer matches. Though every level and boss can be beat in around five minutes with most weapons, it can get very tedious, and some levels can become quite difficult if you're not good with a certain weapon type or if the stage/boss fight was built heavily around the use of a different one. [[ThatOneBoss Try beating an already annoying boss that's meant to teach the player how to use a sniper rifle with just a bucket or umbrella.]] We'll wait.
718** The Golden Toothpick from the ''Octo Expansion'', with you having to go through the worst of Davy Jones' locker to get. Before you can even fight [[{{Superboss}} Inner Agent 3]] to get that reward, you have to clear all eighty stages in the campaign plus the final escape blitz, without making use of MercyMode ([[ThatOneLevel say hi to those levels for us!]]). That was the easy part, though, as Inner Agent 3 themselves is a multi-stage battle complete with CheckpointStarvation that is widely considered [[ThatOneBoss one of the hardest bosses in Nintendo history]]. Since other pieces of headgear in the game can grant you the same ability (Special Charge Up), you're looking at nothing more than a cool-looking BraggingRightsReward. Is a fashionable hairpin really worth it?
719[[/folder]]
720
721[[folder:Turn-Based Strategy]]
722* The first ''VideoGame/ArcTheLad'' game contains one of the most ridiculous sidequest goals ever: win 1,000 Arena battles. The battles are easy, and by the time you've gotten even halfway to 1,000 wins, you'll have earned enough experience points to bring your entire team to the [[{{Cap}} level cap]] several times over. The primary challenge involved in getting to 1,000 wins is simply being obsessed enough to keep fighting the same enemies, over and over again, for hour after hour, in spite of the sheer tedium involved in doing so. If you're actually insane enough to reach 1,000 wins, the Arena manager will reward you with a huge supply of the game's best accessories [[OldSaveBonus for you to take with you into the sequel]], then [[BreakingTheFourthWall tell you to turn off the console, go outside, and get a life!]]
723* ''Franchise/{{Disgaea}}'': From ''VideoGame/Disgaea2CursedMemories'' onwards there is the Land Of Carnage. For all purposes it's a different HUB area that allows you to fight the stages against enemies with insane stat boosts, but also the strongest weapons, emblems and armor pieces are only found while fighting in this area. However, actually getting there is always the hardest and most time-consuming task in the games. ''VideoGame/Disgaea4APromiseUnforgotten'' takes the cake by a long shot, though, with requirements that aren't explained anywhere and are absolutely impossible to figure out without a guide. Averted in ''VideoGame/DisgaeaDimension2'', where earning Carnage mode is straightforwardly unlocked through normal play.
724* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTactics'':
725** There's the only real sidequest in the game, which is a long series of somewhat unconnected events, which provides two of the best unique characters in the game, as well as a few others, and [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII Cloud]]. It requires you to visit unlabled sections of the map, and in some cases, use the otherwise ignorable 'rumors' section of the bar. The rumors section is only EVER used for background events (Basically, it provides info on the war that is the backdrop for the plot) besides this quest, and the plot of the game can be fully understood without ever going there. It's not so bad if you have a guide, but you'll likely never get to the end of it without a guide, as it's pretty common to forget the 'rumors' section of the game even exists.
726*** On top of which, to even do ANY of the long sidequest requires one to have taken -- and never dismissed -- Mustadio (who like all special recruited characters loses all relevance to the plot once they can permanently join).
727** [[BonusDungeon Deep Dungeon]] requires use of the rumors section to unlock as well, and is found in a very isolated portion of the map. The Deep Dungeon itself is completely unlit, except by spell animations and crystals left behind by dead enemies. In it, you need to find the exit to proceed to the next floor, which is completely unlabled even in the light, and even changes between one of five spots each time it's loaded. Within the dungeon, each floor has four very powerful and rare items hidden similarly to the exits, though their location is static. Finding these items require a unit to be equipped with an ability that is all but useless in the rest of the game. Even if you know where these items are, you have a chance of finding an Elixir (a useful item, but they hardly compare to what you lost) instead, rendering these items [[PermanentlyMissableContent unobtainable for the rest of the game]]. An item-finder with low Brave has a better chance of getting the good stuff, but [[GuideDangIt the game never tells you this]], and this is literally the only mechanic in the game where low Brave is beneficial. You can also learn Zodiac, the best summon in the game. To do this, while facing the {{Superboss}} of Deep Dungeon, you have to have a summoner get hit with the spell and not die. Summoners aren't known for their high HP, and this IS the most powerful summon in the game, so surviving it takes some foresight.
728** Like with Zodiac, Ramza can only learn the Ultima spell in three places (one of which is the final battle). The first two require you to convince Assassins with 100% success rate Stop, Charm, and Instant Death status effects to use a simple damage spell on you. And it requires you draw out fights with these said units much longer than might be considered sane.
729** Elmdor is wearing a full-suit of [[InfinityMinusOneSword Infinity Minus One]] equipment (and since multiple characters on your team can wear the same gear, you'll want to have that for the character who doesn't get first pick). You can steal it from him, but he has a very high evade rate. Until you steal the shield, you have about a 10% chance of success. Taking the shield puts it up to a 'whopping' 25%. All while trying to fight those Assassins who teach you Ultima, and Elmdor (who is no slouch himself). There are several other rare items that can only be stolen from specific bosses. After Elmdor, Meliadouls Chantage is most notable. While she's not particularly hard to steal from, it doesn't change that you have to equip a special ability on all of your characters to prevent her from doing massive damage and destroying your equipment.
730** In the War of the Lions updated port there is an event that not only requires you to stop at a certain type of town on a specific date (Agrias's Birthday) and have 500000 gil in your inventory, but requires Agrias, Mustadio, Alicia and Lavian all in your party. The later two are completely generic units who by the time you can recruit them are likely worse than any units you already have. For all this you DO get what is arguably the best accessory in the game.
731* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTacticsA2'', the quest "The Whole Truth" pits you against six Cassies (Malboro mobs), each with a breath ability that instantly charms anyone in its area of effect with 100% accuracy, another breath ability that casts both "Sleep" and "Slow," and an ability that cures surrounding allies, raises their defense, and casts "Regen" on them.
732** If you want a real annoyance, just wait until you encouter An Earnest Delight. It's a late-game dispatch mission, which can only be cleared if you have at least two Gria or Viera with complete MVP trophies or power level to around level 80 (when a well-built team can beat the final boss at level 50 on Hard).
733** The Nu Mou vs. Bangaa mission is a serious GuideDangIt; you have to complete the mission as ''both sides'' three times before you learn it's a BatmanGambit by a third party which the two then team up to fight.
734** Brightmoon Tor. First you fight about a dozen battles against reasonably difficult but still pretty easily beatable characters... and then you get to the top and some Level 99 monsters kick your ass almost before your first turn.
735** "Time To Act", the conclusion of the Goug Watch quest line. It normally wouldn't be too bad, but you only get ''one'' character of your own and the rest of your allies are AI controlled Moogles. One of said allies is a Tinker who loves to either poison his teammates or Haste all the enemies, making it possible to get overrun by enemies before your one character even gets a turn. One of the enemies is a Parivir who can kill any of the Moogles in two hits with [[ThatOneAttack HoarfrostBlade]], never mind the five other enemies that want a piece of the Goug Watch. Oh, and you lose if ''any'' of the Moogles die.
736** Even harder than all of the above, once you finish all 300 quests, you gain access to one final tournament. The first few battles are extremely tough even with a max-level party, but the absolute worst is the third or fourth battle. It pits you against a bunch of [[MightyGlacier Master Tonberries]] and a bunch of enemies who are only too eager to cast Haste on them. Oh, and they get to take about six free rounds before you're even allowed to move. And the Tonberries are guaranteed to hit for 999 damage in a game where it's nigh impossible to have more than about 600 HP. If you're really lucky, you might still have one character left by your first turn. And if, by some miracle, you manage to win? You don't even get a BraggingRightsReward, you get to watch the credits again.
737* ''Franchise/FireEmblem'':
738** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThracia776'':
739*** Recruiting either [[CoolOldGuy Conomore]] or [[LadyOfWar Amalda]] is quite a pain in the ass due to how many reinforcements keep coming and coming and coming. And worse, if you want Amalda, you have to bring Sleuf to do so... and an unpromoted Sleuf = easy to capture Sleuf. (At least Miranda was a MagicalGirlWarrior...)
740*** Xavier. Basically, the story is that he and his men are being forced to fight you against their wills because the bad guy has their family members as hostages. You have to free the eight hostages and get each specific hostage to talk to the specific enemy whom they're related to, thereby causing that soldier to switch sides. If any of the enemies captures one of your units before being turned, game over, you're screwed. If any of them dies before being turned to your side, you can't recruit Xavier. (Mercifully, once they've switched sides, it's fine if they die--and also mercifully, the eight enemies who need to be turned won't attack the hostages--though other enemies will, and any of them who are on your side will attack any who are not.) Once all eight have been turned to your side, ''then'' you can recruit Xavier. And there's even another ridiculously frustrating item to acquire in the same chapter you get Xavier. If you manage to leave alive or capture then release all of the Leonster soldiers, you get the Member card that allows access to the lone secret shop in the game. The problem is that while the soldiers are armed with Javelins often they force themselves into positions to attack your units directly, or attack units that can counter, and they are all lv1 soldiers with barely any stats to speak of so death is a near certainty. And there are sixteen of them spread around the map!
741** In ''VideoGame/FireEmblemTheBlazingBlade'', unlocking chapter [=19xx=] requires first unlocking chapter [=19x=], then defeating the Magic Seal, Kishuna, in that chapter. Kishuna is surrounded by high-level units, has decent defense and insanely high evade, and will leave either after twelve turns (unless you kill the boss) or the turn after you attack him, whichever comes first. It's near impossible to kill him without getting a critical hit, making this a LuckBasedMission at its finest. And for a side dash of GuideDangIt, even if you do this you won't unlock the chapter unless you played the tutorial story first and leveled a character up to level 7 - and since [=19xx=] only shows up in the AnotherSideAnotherStory mode you unlock when you first finish the game, you most likely skipped the tutorial story altogether.
742** Recruiting Ilyana in ''VideoGame/FireEmblemPathOfRadiance'' is a challenge. You have to get Ike to her, not have her attack you, and make it back to defend your fort. She has barely any health, and the enemies outnumber you about four-to-one.
743** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemRadiantDawn'':
744*** Recruiting the final character [[spoiler:Lehran]]. To do this, you must deploy [[spoiler:[[CrutchCharacter the Black Knight]]]] in the Part 1 Endgame, and then Ike needs to fight [[spoiler:the Black Knight]] in Part 3, Chapter 7. Now, the problem here is that under normal conditions, Ike will be unable to scratch [[spoiler:the Black Knight]], who in turn will generally only need two hits to ''obliterate'' Ike. The only way to survive is to make Ike fast enough to avoid the second hit, and then pick him up with another unit and have them flee far, far away before the enemy's turn. And grinding Ike for this encounter won't help either, because if you manage to win, you can't unlock [[spoiler:Lehran]] anyway.
745*** There's a bit of dialogue during the ending that only appears under highly specific conditions and can only be found on a second playthrough. [[spoiler:First, you have to have Soren battle Micaiah during the first Greil Mercenaries-vs.-Dawn Brigade clash back in Part 3, Chapter 7. Then, you have to choose to save Pelleas at the beginning of Part 3, Chapter 13--hence the need for a second playthrough--and have Soren battle ''him'' during the Part 3 endgame. Best off using a siege tome for this, because you'll be lucky to even get close to Pelleas before the battle ends--and it's probably not a bad idea to do the same for the Micaiah battle, because she's surrounded by loads of other enemies including the Black Knight and also because when you fight enemies who are also player-controlled at other points of the game, their weapon uses are actually consumed by their attacks. After that, you just have to make sure that both Soren and Pelleas survive until the end of the game.]] If you do all of these things, [[spoiler:Pelleas will tell Almedha that it would be wise to meet with Ike, and she'll see Soren and recognize that he is in fact her long-lost son.]]
746** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses'':
747*** Getting Felix's Hero Relic, the Aegis Shield. While the paralogue itself is easy, the shield is not obtainable unless all the villagers survive. The villagers are scattered throughout the map, and while they will make a beeline towards the exit, a mage and several strong enemies guard it, meaning that unless the player beelines for that area with cavalry/fliers from turn one, at least one villager is likely to die.
748*** Getting Rhea's supports with Byleth for the support library. Rhea is an NPC during Part 1 and can't be invited to tea, or participate in group activities, so the only way to raise her Relationship Values is by DialogueTree choices, Faculty Training, or gifts (which can only be bought in limited amounts per chapter, and are best saved for recruitable students). In addition, both her C and B supports become PermanentlyMissableContent several chapters before the end of Part 1, leaving you with a very tight time-frame to unlock them. And worse, her S support is only available on the Silver Snow route.
749*** Filling out Dimitri's support log is also difficult, as not only is he only available on one route, but he's locked out of initiating support conversations for the first half of the post-timeskip chapters (Chapters 13 to 17).
750*** Hubert and Ferdinand's support chain is another one that's fairly difficult to complete. They can only achieve a C support before the timeskip, so even if you have the points for a B support, you'll need to grind the points for the A and A+ supports after the Time Skip. Since Hubert is only available on Crimson Flower, which ends sooner than the other routes, you don't have much time to do this.
751*** Obtaining the "Opera. Co Volunteers" dancer battalion. In order to obtain it, you need to bring either Dorothea or Manuela into [[spoiler: the invasion of Enbarr map on any non-Crimson Flower route, and have them reach a certain area in that same chapter.]] The problem is that the game gives no hints that you should bring either of the two units into the map to obtain the battalion, making it easy to miss when the chapter is over.
752*** Recruiting Ferdinand without a New Game+. He has a combination of his B support being locked behind the timeskip (which would not only lower his requirements but also give him a small chance to join for free) and wanting heavy armor (there are only two tutors, Alois and Gilbert, and both are unavailable during Chapter 10.). The most a player can do is get his support to C+, bringing his requirements down to D+ instead of C. [[note]]The Dexterity requirement is trivial, as Byleth starts with 9 of the required 10 at no support, and any support will bring it down to any Dexterity.[[/note]] [[spoiler: To players that want to minimize the death toll, Ferdinand is also a required recruit, making this especially annoying.]]
753* ''VideoGame/LuminousArc2'':
754** The Spa Battles. It's an entirely optional sidequest near the end of the game, which the party was asked by {{Expy}}s of ''VideoGame/LuminousArc'''s Cecille (Cecillia) and Huge (Yugo) to clear out the [[MascotMook Kopins]] from their hotsprings, with free spa baths (AKA special Hot Spring Intermissions for the HundredPercentCompletion). Think it'll be easy since it's just Kopins? No, it's not. Each hot spring location is a series of battles against high-levelled stat-specialised Kopins, with either extremely high Defence or Resistence, which you won't know until ''the battle begins'', meaning it's easy for players to accidentally dispatched the wrong party members for the battle. The last battle of each location is with ThatOneBoss [[spoiler: [[VideoGame/LuminousArc Vanessa]]]], who can easily dishes out more damage than your HP can withstand without proper preparations (even when you nullify her Fire magic, her boosted physical attack can still hurts you). Oh and you face her while those high-levelled Popins keep on respawning and bothers you with their numbers and speed.
755** After each battle with [[spoiler: Vanessa]], you can view a Hot Spring Intermission with one of the party members who's deployed throughout the series of battles in one location. The fun comes in getting the other Intermissions from other party members you don't use normally in tough battles. You can have only 5 of the party members' Intermissions from this sidequest per playthrough. Each new hot spring location is tougher than the last. [[SarcasmMode Yippee]].
756* ''VideoGame/StellaDeusTheGateOfEternity'' allows you to recruit the AntiVillain half of the BigBadDuumvirate, Viser. This is a game-long sidequest (he is only recruitable whilst StormingTheCastle of the FinalBoss) and is so convoluted that it's ''beyond GuideDangIt'': of the game's two guides on Website/GameFAQs, one is only half-sure how to recruit him and the other offers no suggestions whatsoever.
757* Getting the [[GameBreaker Vandaler class]] in ''VideoGame/VandalHearts''. It's an EleventhHourSuperpower for your main character that gives him every learnable spell, autoblock on all frontal and side attacks, an absurdly high block rate for back attacks and sky high stats and unique equipment that's better than anything in the game. You just have to find each of the six Prisms, one in each chapter, in battles that aren't repeatable. Some of the Prisms just require you to examine a strange looking tile, some require you to talk to a certain person in a tavern, complete a secret objective in a battle and then talk to the person again, despite them not actually telling you the objective. One requires you to find and not sell three unique, valuable items in previous chapters that are only found by examining out of the way tiles in intense fights. And after that, each one puts you into a special challenge battle in which you not only have to defeat all the enemies, but make sure to get the special item in a difficult to get to chest. One such battle requires you to actively place your units not to kill enemies with counterattacks and navigate a difficult block pushing puzzle in which one wrong move makes it all impossible. Do all this, you get to use the Vandaler class for the past few battles. The easiest Prisms to find require you to send a unit to a counter intuitive location on the off-chance that funny looking tile isn't just a quirk of some mapper's choice and is one of the pre-designated special item location.
758[[/folder]]
759
760[[folder:Wide-Open Sandbox]]
761* Picking up all the orbs in ''VideoGame/{{Crackdown}}''. Unlike ''Grand Theft Auto's'' packages, there are hundreds upon hundreds orbs, many small and easy to miss, and with such density (and vertical displacement) as to be maddening to find even with a map. Reaching a scenario where one or two orbs are missing is extremely easy. To finish, the save likes to corrupt on people shortly after or before getting all the orbs.
762* In ''VideoGame/EndlessOcean: Blue World'', after completing the main plot, you find out that you need to save up a million [[GlobalCurrency pelagos]] in order to continue further. Your side jobs typically only reward you a couple thousand at best, and you've likely already been spending lots of money on gear upgrades. And what's worse, once you make the million, [[spoiler:you're only charged half that amount anyway]].
763* The ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAuto'' series has many examples.
764** The Taxi missions. You have to collect 100 passengers one at a time, each of which demand to be driven the entire length of the island you're on, to get the useless ability to make taxi cabs (and only them) jump into the air on command. The only saving grace is that you don't have to do them all in one go. ''San Andreas'' trades jump for infinite nitro, which is only mildly better for all that effort.
765** The Paramedic missions, specifically in ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIII''. A top-heavy ambulance that's prone to tipping, no map support, pitiful time bonuses, and no cumulative progress made this a LOT harder than it had to be. And God help you if you try to do this in the Portland area [[spoiler: after killing Salvatore]]. ''Vice City'' was just as bad, considering that if you did it early, you had to drive on the beach, which had so many bumps and such poor traction that you would probably do a complete roll by accident. ''San Andreas'' was hardly better, considering the ambulance could roll over smaller cars and flip itself, the huge world map could put targets far away, and the available time resets itself with each level (unlike ''Vice City'', which let you build up a generous amount of extra). On top of that, the overlapping roadways can lead to you driving over or under your targets, forcing you to backtrack to the right road.
766*** The ''San Andreas'' Paramedic mission goes from frustrating to a complete cakewalk if it is done in the small town of Angel Pine, as most targets will spawn within the towns limits, putting them close to the town's medical center.
767** Any rampage side mission that forces you to use a melee weapon against armed opponents. The slow swinging speed of most weapons mean that the gangsters can easily chip down your health as you try to chase and kill them.
768** ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAuto2'': Kill Frenzies, the equivalent of rampages in later games, in the PC version. They aren't particularly hard in the first district, but become one of the hardest challenges in the whole ''GTA'' franchise once you reach the second district. They start requiring killing cops or destroying cop cars instead of civilians or regular vehicles, which not only is more dangerous, but also more annoying since usually there aren't enough cops chasing you (and therefore you'll run out of time). Besides, there's a notable GameBreakingBug which permanently corrupts your savegame after completing a Kill Frenzy activated by entering a vehicle initially placed on a trailer. The only known player [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9uSWI4chx0 who has proved to have completed all of them]] did so through different exploits and glitches.
769** ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIII'':
770*** In the mission "Uzi Rider" you're given the crappiest, slowest, worst handling car in the entire game and told to go to another island and shoot up dozens of members of an enemy faction. Anyone who's ever played a ''GTA'' game can tell you it's hard to even '''get to your destination''' without wrecking the car you're currently driving; now imagine having to get there, deal with a good amount of armed gang members and get back to where you started, all with a car that's ridiculously easy to flip over (flipping over a car in ''GTA'' irretrievably destroys it) and with the police relentlessly chasing you all the time. Also, you cannot under any circumstance leave the car. And to top it all off, when (not if) you wreck the car, the goon that's traveling with you is revealed to be its owner, and he and his pal get pissed and proceed to shoot you full of holes.
771*** "A Ride In The Park" requires you to drive around Belleville Park, grabbing checkpoints under a time limit. This would be manageable if you weren't required to use the [[HummerDinger Landstalker]], a car that is slow and has a tendency to slide around and flip over a lot. Thankfully the mission is a side mission not required unless you're going for 100% Completion, [[GuideDangIt but actually finding the car needed to start the mission with no help can be a challenge in itself]].
772*** "Big 'N' Veiny". Picking up magazines while using a none-too-good and rather unstable van, over a long and timed route. You start with 20 seconds on the timer and each magazine adds only two seconds. It does not help that you can lose the trail briefly and waste valuable time trying to pick it up again. Sure, there's a "shortcut" method involving pushing the van all the way to the end so you can kill the eventual target and spare yourself the trouble, but it is real time-consuming. And, just like the Portland paramedic missions, it becomes almost impossible if you don't finish it before [[spoiler: the mafia goes hostile]].
773*** Firefighter in Shoreside Vale in ''III'', due to the difficulty in quickly getting across the two islands.
774** ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoViceCity'':
775*** The RC Plane missions -- the horrid flying controls had legions of gamers tearing out their hair in frustration. Any missions requiring players to fly real planes, in fact, since most of them are required. It only gets worse when the player has to do most of them with a plane with the poorest handling in the game.
776** ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas'':
777*** Zero's RC missions. Nearly impossible. Thankfully, not required.
778*** The driving school. Pull off stunts and park with perfect accuracy in a time limit without so much as a scratch on your car. Not required and the reward for gold is a let-down, but still annoying. The final mission requires you to drive the full length of the city and back in a very short time while taking absolutely no damage. To stress just how hard this is, driving ''up an incline'' fast enough is enough to damage your car in some cases. Beating it requires precision braking and the good fortune to have as little traffic as possible between you and your goal. There is also an unfortunate, but funny occurrence: on PC, the driving school sidequest cannot be done with an old keyboard because the player is required to press three keys simultaneously.
779*** The final Ammunation shooting range challenge, which is done with shotguns. The NPC shooters have crap aim, but shotguns have spread so they never miss, and the final segment has you all sharing a target. Winning is a matter of hoping they don't shoot whatever part you're aiming at.
780*** The trucking missions. Hitch up a trailer and run from cop cars hounding you all the way to your destination. Get hit too hard and the load detaches, which can fail the mission depending on where that happens. You can risk driving on the train tracks to dodge the cops, but then you run the risk of the train hitting you.
781*** The cycling races. To start off, you need to get yourself to the top of an extremely high, steep mountain. Once there you can start several races that require you to hurtle down the mountain tracks on a push bike at ridiculous speeds whilst being jostled and cut off by AI riders. If you cycle off the track (or are rammed) then you almost certainly won't make first place. If you fall off the bike then you almost certainly won't make first place. You will be disqualified if you shoot the other racers (you will quickly try to resort to this). One race even involves an obstacle course with narrow balance beams. The worst part is that there is no easy way to restart the races if you fail, so you will have to climb back up the mountain every time you screw up. In fact, the quickest way to get back for another go is to reload a save at your airport base, fly halfway across the state and crash into the summit. Luckily, it's easy to cheat this one: you can park cars on the track to screw up the other racers, and the game will not disqualify you for shooting the racers if they've already finished. Instead, it eliminates them. Lose on purpose and murder the victors. Automatic first place win.
782*** The Quarry missions are generally pretty straightforward, until you get the the final one. This involves the use of a crane to dump bodies in the back of a truck. This would be relatively simple were it not for the fact that said crane has some of the worst controls in video game history. You also have to do this in 8 minutes, as well as doing some other often pedantic activities on that same 8 minute timer.
783** ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoLibertyCityStories'': The side mission "Car Salesman" is very repetitive and painful to complete. It seems pretty straightforward at first, requiring you to "test-drive" with certain customers in different ways which may involve driving recklessly, fast, slow or off-road. A meter will determine how satisfied the customers are. However, if you so much as screw up even once then your meter will decrease and eventually fail the ENTIRE mission, forcing you to start all over again. That's not even the biggest insult considering there's 6 levels of this (with 4 customers to impress each) which get harder as you progress, all while a timer is set. You will often end up shooting dead your customers in anger. While it is optional, it is required for 100% and to gain protection money from the auto shop. It can only be hoped that this disaster of a side-mission never makes it into another GTA game again.
784** ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIV'':
785*** The fifty stunt jumps are so incredibly, irritatingly finicky. Some of them are more straightfoward, but a lot of them will see you doing the same jump over and over again until you somehow meet the conditions the game deems as being exactly right. There's no real strategy you can use either, as there are only so many variations you can make on speeding a car off a ramp.
786*** Killing two hundred pigeons for the "Flying Rat" sidequest/achievement isn't particularly difficult, especially if you're using a guide for their locations, but it's regarded as being extremely boring, takes a very long time, and has the added annoyance of frequently gaining you a wanted level after shooting them, as no silenced guns are available.
787** ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoV'' has the [[ChurchOfHappyology Epsilon]] missions. The vast majority of them are not fun or challenging; they're tedious, time-consuming, scattered all over the map, and require you to spend exorbitant amounts of money to advance in. One requires you to wear a set of robes for ten days straight; the only way to conceivably complete it is to continue going to bed without ever switching to another character. Another mission requires you to deliver five rare cars; if you don't know where they happen to spawn, then it's a huge case of GuideDangIt. The most infamous mission requires you to run five miles in the desert. And just to rub salt in the wound, the missions are notoriously buggy; saving at the wrong time can make them impossible to complete. The silver lining is that this is one of the only side quests in the game that actually gives you a sizable monetary reward should you actually complete it.
788*** That is, if you complete the last mission ''correctly''. In order to get the money, Michael is supposed to shoot up the Epsilon vehicles and get away during the last mission. If you let them keep the money, the Epsilon officials will instead give you a "reward" that is...a rusty, old, barely functioning tractor.
789* Similarly, most racing missions in the latest ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAuto'' and many clones. RubberBandAI at its worst.
790** Let the cars get ahead of you. They'll [[UnusualEuphemism Charlie Foxtrot]] each other in an orgy of self annihilation. Then drive calmly, slow down in turns, and you're cherry. The biggest problem is your vehicle's endurance: You don't want it to be a flaming wreck until just after you passed the finish line. If you're playing IV, use one of the rear engined cars (like the Comet). Compared to the Ambulance missions in III and the RC missions in SA, the racing is a cinch.
791* Collecting every last blast shard in ''VideoGame/InFAMOUS'', it doesn't help that after a certain amount of them your Electricity storage stops going up. Also adding insult to the injury, you only get a bronze trophy for collecting them all. You at least have an ability to sense nearby shards, although one of them is hidden so far off the coast that you can neither sense nor see it...
792** ''VideoGame/{{inFAMOUS 2}}'' made this much easier. After completing 60 sidequests you can buy Blast Shard Sense, which will spot the closest blast shard to your location. Of course, by that point you're almost finished with the game and have collected most of them anyway, but it's nice to have. (They also give you a gold trophy for collecting them all as opposed to a bronze.)
793* Getting 100% completion in every area of ''VideoGame/LittleBigPlanet'' is an exercise in futility. Completion of some of the harder areas like "The Metropolis" or "The Canyons" is possible, but to ace "The Islands," "The Temples," and "The Wilderness" AND obtain all of the items in the stage is practically a superhuman feat. The worst offender is [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47MF6o5_Uto a spinning wheel of death that will throw you into an instant-death electrocution]] if you have not either: A) perfectly memorized the working's of LBP's physics system, or B) inherited a sort of muscle memory due to playing that part of the stage over and over. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T29bgo-ZDls You'll still feel stupid when you find out how to do it the easy way]].
794** Getting 100% displayed for an area does not involve finishing the whole level without dying, it is simply a matter of getting all the treasure bubbles. However, getting the Play trophy is very difficult.
795*** Acing the first Don Jalepeno level. You have to beat the level without dying. Said level's primary theme is explosives. That you handle manually. Which is easy enough to do if you're careful (provided you don't accidentally stand on the wrong part of one of the switches). Then you get to the final stretch, and they throw jetpacks into the mix (more specifically flying under a series of three pillars with precise timing, then dropping a bomb on some terrain. At least twice).
796*** Really getting 100% completion on this level is arguably worse, given that at least one chunk of items requires another player (and reminding you once more that this is the explosives level... With friends like these...).
797** There's also getting hundred percent completion on the [[ThatOneLevel Serpent Shrine level.]] It's not acing the level that is difficult [[ThatOneBoss (Although the boss fight is pretty irritating)]], it's the multiplayer puzzle where you must have one person manually raise and lower the fuzzy balls that bring safety, while another person goes through a tunnel of snakes. While most multiplayer puzzles can actually be completed by yourself using two controllers, this is not one of them. Only people with videogame-themed superpowers are able to pass through the tunnel with success. Even worse, what the other person is doing is always far easier-looking then it actually is, which can lead to profanity.
798** Not as much ''hard'' as just really time-consuming, but ''[=LittleBigPlanet=]'' for Vita has the "Get a Life" trophy, which requires you to spend 1440 ''active'' minutes, or 24 hours, in Create Mode - which is a LOT even if you enjoy creating levels, and even more painful for those who aren't into the making-custom-levels-aspect of the game. "Active" is the keyword here - it only counts the time you're ''doing'' something in-game, so you can't just leave the console on for hours and go do something else... unless you "cheat" this by having something touch and affect the touchscreen when the cursor is onscreen. Even with this trick, it's gonna take a while...
799* Starting your very own kingdom in ''VideoGame/MountAndBlade''. It involves such an amount of politic and logistic elements it must be played as an entirely different game. It's also much more difficult just to stay alive unless you have done your deal of public relationships work beforehand, as every lord will otherwise see you as a threat to their status as hand-picked vassals of their Kings.
800** Also the [[EnemyCivilWar Claimant quests]]. Each faction has a claimant to the throne with a sob story behind it. You require ''200'' renown just to be eligible for the quest. Then, a war ensues between the claimant's significantly smaller faction and the original faction. Your reward, should you succeed, is a lifetime appointment as the marshall of the new faction, which is a mixed blessing at best. It ''does'' help towards the ultimate goal of seizing your own kingdom since being a marshall gives you a lot of respect with your subordinate vassals.
801* ''VideoGame/RetroCityRampage'' has those arcade games that Player can play. They aren't too difficult, except for the one based on Bit Trip Video. The first 2 levels are really simple, but from level 3 up to level 7, it's a real pain to finish, especially if you want to get all the gold in every level to unlock Commander Video. Not to mention, [[ScrappyMechanic crocodiles will only let you jump on them when they feel like it]].
802** For the second-rate sprees, "Pick a Fight with Dynamite" is the most frustrating. As soon as Player throws the dynamite, the civilians will scatter, making multiple kills difficult. Furthermore, the dynamite has to destroy vehicles completely, meaning if a car explodes because it's on fire, it doesn't count toward the score. Finally, it's very easy to kill Player with the explosions, so even if the score passes the mark for a gold medal, it won't count if Player dies.
803* The Five Finger Fillet side missions from both ''VideoGame/RedDeadRedemption'' and ''VideoGame/RedDeadRedemption2'' requires you to press the button sequence as fast as possible especially the last sequence of buttons which requires mashing the button sequence three times in a row without even making sure that the buttons are shown on-screen or you lose the minigame by timeout. Both games have five attempts, you must beat with all people and are required for 100%. In the former game in order to get the Reyes Rebels outfit requires you to complete the Five Finger Fillet in Torquemada. Thankfully the minigame is a lot easier in the PC version of ''2''.
804* Mention the tow truck missions to any player of ''VideoGame/SaintsRow2'', and they will regale you with how frustratingly hard and annoying it is. To start, the tow truck is slow. And the cars you hitch behind it love to wobble and wave, and eventually jackknife, usually getting you stuck. Especially on the higher levels when you have several gang cars shooting at you, it's a hair puller. And to top it off, you can't heal. If the tow truck starts smoking before level 6, you don't have a chance. And there's no checkpoint, so if you blow up 2 feet from your destination on level 9, you go all the way back to level 1.
805** Heli Assault in ''Saints Row 2'' is generally terrible, simply because of Stilwater's design - every time an enemy manages to close in on your ally, s/he will ''[[ArtificialStupidity immediately drive under a bridge or railway]] [[SpitefulAI just to prevent you from defending them]]''. Trying to get low enough to shoot under the bridge will generally result in crashing into a tree or the cramped buildings to the sides, because the helicopter controls are already overly-sensitive in its element, but somehow get even moreso when you're low to the ground, as if there's some sort of helicopter-attractant that every building and bridge in the city is partly built out of. And let us not forget that there are helicopters that chase you while you're doing the mission and escaping from their missiles is not only impossible, but they cause a shitload of damage that might turn everything into shit really quickly. And then your escort has the balls to yell at you as if you're not even trying to defend them. This activity is so terrible, that most consider Level 6 to be absolutely ''impossible'' to complete. ''The Third'' generally makes the entire activity much more fun, solely because Steelport has far fewer roads that can't be seen from a helicopter; the trade-off of less cover from police or Morningstar snipers when you have them after you is very acceptable when the option to ''actually defend yourself'' is almost never denied to you anymore.
806** The final mission, specifically the bit where you have to pilot a helicopter (sensing a pattern here?) and use it to take out targets on the side of a building while avoiding being shot down by other helicopters (which pack missiles that will take you down in two hits). The targets are very small and recessed into the building, the helicopter controls are, as always, so clunky as to demand a better descriptor, and the helicopters coming for you can fly so fast that they'll usually be able to lock onto you and hit you with at least one missile before you even orient yourself toward them. Oh, and your helicopter will crash if you bang into the building a few too many times. ''Not'' a fun experience.
807** Escort is another irritatingly-difficult one. You're basically driving a hooker and a client around town while they [[AutoErotica get it on in the back seat]], evading news vans along the way. Problem is, those news vans are very fast ([[FakeDifficulty possibly even faster than when you drive them]]), relentless, and will occasionally set up roadblocks in front of you. Even worse, shooting guns to kill the vans' drivers lowers the Pleasure meter (which needs to fill up for success), though satchel charges don't seem to drop the meter. But the worst part is that you will sometimes be required to drive to a certain place (often on the other side of town), perform powerslides, run over people, hit other cars, etc., and the Pleasure meter WILL NOT MAKE FURTHER PROGRESS until you do so. Good luck dodging news vans with nothing better to cover than two people having sex in the back of a car for that long.
808** In ''VideoGame/SaintsRowTheThird'', Snatch is even more irritating than Escort. Why? The people you need to snatch [[ArtificialStupidity sometimes get stuck on your car and won't get in]]. Sometimes they get knocked down and take precious seconds to get back up. Maybe they do get in the car, but some asshole gang member pulls you out of the driver's seat, making them get back out. And all while you're trying to get them in the car, you've got an entire army of gang members trying to kill you, often bringing in the Specialists and Brutes. It won't take long before they bring in enough Morning Star snipers to turn the whole damn place into a laser rave, and need we highlight the fact that their sniper rifles can make your vehicle explode after a few shots?
809*** Another reason is that Escort is now easier, since the vans are slower and not as numerous. However, the irritating "do X before the Pleasure meter will fill further" requirements are still intact...at least for traditional Escort. There's also Tiger Escort, which trades that for [[ItMakesSenseInContext a tiger in the passenger seat]] that will occasionally claw the Boss and [[InterfaceScrew cause your steering to drift left or right randomly]], along with an Animal Rage failure meter that will decrease over time, unlike standard Escort's Footage meter.
810*** Snatch and Escort-yes, even the airport Escort mission-pale in comparison to some of the Heli Attack missions[[note]]specifically Kinzies missions which use a different helicopter to Pierces [[/note]]. Not only are you firing rocket launchers around with a helicopter [[SarcasmMode (Always a good ride, those helicopters)]] at tiny, squirrely cars that are shooting at a slow-ass car which you must protect, but there is no automatic targeting. And there are buildings and roads in the way. And to get close enough to actually fire at the cars, you must go close enough to the ground that you are constantly bumping into things. And helicopters are shooting at you. It doesn't help that your partners constantly yell at you every time they get hit.
811** Come ''VideoGame/SaintsRowIV'', the baton gets handed to Genki's Mind Over Murder, in which you need to throw people, cars, and pink plastic heads through the appropriate circles. It sounds easy enough until you look at the areas where the targets are actually found, which are so encrusted in barriers, balloons and other paraphernalia that there's barely room for the people and cars, while the heads come in strictly limited supply so if you run out it's time to start over. For extra fun, many of the target circles are in inconvenient places, such as trying to fit a car through a narrow alley or throw it past the inexplicably indestructible power lines, and the areas are far enough apart that trying to get Gold in the hardest of the three missions is difficult even with all the super-speed upgrades (and if you accidentally burned through a gauge on a couple of barriers, just restart). Just for additional giggles, you do not benefit from an unlimited power gauge in these missions -- unlike the TK Mayhem ones -- and those without particularly beefy machines may find it extremely jerky and hard to aim, especially in mid-jump.
812* ''VideoGame/SimCity'' 2013 has one sidequest that requires you to have less than 5 fires in [[TimedMission 5 hours]]. Due to an existing bug in the game which causes the fire trucks to cluster together into a group and put out fires in the same spot, this has become a LuckBasedMission in which all you can do is have at least one maxed out fire station, and pray that at least one of the trucks doesn't go join the cluster, due to the fact that the game will up the ante and set multiple buildings on fire at the same time nearing the end of the timed quest.
813* Remember [[TheScrappy Screwball]] from the base version of ''VideoGame/SpiderManPS4''? Remember her lack of a mute button? Remember her penchant for allying with criminals for the sake of online clout? Well now, she has her own dedicated sidequest that comes up not once, not twice, but ''three times over'' in the [=DLC=]. They're basically reskins of Taskmaster's sidequests, from the stealth missions to the drone chases, but now with absurd requirements for anything higher than just passing them that can only be reached by doing certain tasks in places Screwball sporadically marks on the field. And you'd better go for them or even just pass them on your first go if you don't want to hear Screwball's commentary on how you failed.
814* Each title of the ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' series has a contribution to make.
815** ''Shadow of Chernobyl'' has the many, ''many'' "go help X person at Y place fight off Z attackers" jobs that will be dumped into your PDA upon entering an area, such as helping the Loners at the Garbage fight off a group of Bandits who believed their odds were better than the last fifty guys who tried to take one lousy warehouse. These jobs are trivial, tedious, and have negligible reward for the expenditure of time and ammo, especially considering that you have to go someplace else to pick up the reward (the location depending on who gave you the job, which you won't know until you ''do'' the job). With how corpses linger, taking the time out to do the missions repeatedly - which will happen if you backtrack quite a bit - can lead to absurd amounts of bodies piling up in doorways and chokepoints. The cherry on top? You can't get rid of the quest without either going to the person who assigned it to you (via radio) in person and telling them to shove it, or waiting a couple of in-game days for it to time out, during which it will be clogging up your journal and messing with the active objective on your mini-map. Another entry for this trope includes the "[[TwentyBearAsses retrieve a monster body part]]" missions, which are acknowledged within the game as tedious, especially because as soon as you accept the mission the odds of finding the necessary body part on a monster seem to plummet. The only consolation is that you can get the parts ahead of time and stash them for when the missions come up.
816** ''Clear Sky'' has the Faction Wars system. Joining a faction gives you access to advanced weaponry and armor from that faction, but to actually get the really good stuff for less than the price of three black-market kidneys, you have to help your chosen faction destroy the group opposing it. This would be less difficult than it sounds, were it not for the breathtakingly stupid AI. Hours can be spent wiping out squads of enemy troops and taking a control point, only for your team to not send people there to hold it. Or said guards getting lost en route. Or the AI just refuses to acknowledge you took the point because there's another guy two miles away. The payoff is immense, with high-level armor and guns given to you for free, but considering how difficult it is to get the AI to cooperate, it's almost easier to just scrounge up the cash to buy the gear. There's a reason that the Faction Wars system was dropped for the third game.
817** ''Call of Pripyat'' has one of the Ecologist missions, where you get to babysit a scientist as he takes readings from anomalies. It takes several minutes, during which you are attacked by hordes of monsters and zombies coming in from all directions. The anomalies that are being measured can and will kill you. If the egghead gets interrupted, he has to re-do part of his tests. The scientist is armed but tends to die pretty easily. ''And you have to do it twice.''
818[[/folder]]

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