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Last Lousy Point

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Cappy: Okay Mario, you gotta find all the Power Moons and power up the ship!
Mario: Okay, here we go! Oh, there's one over here... Hmm, one over here... Oh, and there's one right here, woohoo! At this rate I'll find all those Moons in no time!
(five hours later)
Mario: Where the f*ck is the last Moon? Where is it? Where is it? Where is the goddamn Moon?!

This is the bane of all players seeking 100% Completion.

While most, if not all, of the other points that count toward completion are relatively straightforward or easy to get, there always seems to be one (or more) that just, well, isn't. This could be because the puzzle is just far harder than the other puzzles in the game (and possibly harder than the developers intended). Or it could be because it's extremely difficult, time-consuming, frustrating, or all three to do. Or it may be really well hidden or very easily missed and possibly Permanently Missable if one fails to get to it in time. Or it could be some combination of all of those. The last point doesn't even need to be actually harder than the other points in an absolute sense - if points are achieved randomly and independently, then from the nature of the probability the last point is expected to take twice as long to achieve as the second to last one because the second to last one could have been either of the last two, while the last one has to be whatever remains.

This is usually done to give a player a reason to come back and keep playing.

See also Missing Secret, which is when players are inadvertently given the impression there's a Last Lousy Point that doesn't actually exist; Completion Meter, what's telling you that something is missing; Replay Value, which is what this is (trying to) give; and Guide Dang It!, which is what a player may have to resort to to get that last point. Brother to That One Achievement and That One Sidequest. Compare and contrast That One Component, which is also highly difficult to obtain but typically necessary for in-game progress.


Examples:

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    Action Adventure 
  • Peasant's Quest has one in response to closing a drawer that you needed to open. And several more just because.
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night:
  • Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow has several, depending on which aspect of the game you're trying to get 100% in.
    • For getting 100% of all monster souls, there's Sky Fish. This monster only appears in two obscure and optional rooms, and appears so briefly that you'll have to stop time to kill it. To get the ability to stop time, you have to obtain the Chronomage's soul, which in turn requires you to obtain Galamoth's soul, which requires you to defeat Legion.
    • The Tsuchinoko. Unlike the Sky Fish, you can kill it without stopping time, but it's really difficult because it has a buttload of HP and it tends to disappear the instant it sees you. Equipping the Nemesis soul helps with the latter, but it's not a sure thing.
    • For getting 100% of the map explored, there's a secret area. To get into this secret area, which is behind a waterfall, you have to equip the soul that lets you walk on water while equipping one of the few souls in the game that lets you transform into a monster that charges forward through almost anything, including waterfalls.
    • For getting 100% of all items, there are a few items that can only be found on hard mode and a few items that you get for beating boss rush mode ridiculously fast.
  • In Gotham Knights (2022), by the time the player has reached max level (in New Game Plus) and finished every Collection Sidequest, they will have enough ability points to purchase every single ability... minus one. The last point comes from defeating every single member of 'Gotham's Most Wanted', who appear far too rarely for anyone to defeat more than a handful of them after a reasonable amount of gameplay. This could have been fixed somewhat with the criminals that can appear in the separate 'heroic assault' game mode... except those ones don't count.
  • The legendary Pokémon in Pokémon Rumble Blast are the bane of anyone seeking to collect every Pokémon. For starters, you only have a 5% chance of running into one instead of the usual boss at the end of a level. On top of this, most of the levels have multiple potential legendary Pokémon who can appear, meaning that even if one does decide to show up, it won't necessarily be the one you need. This is made even worse by the fact that the game counts each form of a Pokémon as an individual entry in the collection, as Arceus has a whopping 17 different forms it needs to be obtained in.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Seasons have Seed Rings, of which there are 64 and several of them are of questionable or no use. Four to six rings out of the lot stand out as especially irritating to get ahold of.
      • The first pair are two of the five Trophy Rings, which just say that you've done something and otherwise have no effect. In particular, the Rupee Ring and 100th Ring, requiring you to obtain 10,000 Rupees overall (not at once) and appraise 100 Rings (including duplicates), respectively. These are simply grindfests, plain and simple, with even the best ways of acquiring Rupees and random rings leaning on slow for the amount of each required.
      • The second pair is from Ages specifically; the Light Ring L-2 (which allows you to shoot sword beams even if you're missing up to three hearts) and the infamous Bomber's Ring (which lets you have two bombs on screen at once). The Light Ring L-2 requires you to complete a shooting gallery minigame with a score of 350 or higher. Sounds easy, but it's complicated by the fact that the odds of actually getting the ring are abysmal, and you're much more likely to get one of a number of easily acquired trash rings instead, with it usually taking over ten attempts to get the Light Ring L-2. The only bright side is that all the trash rings you'll end up with will help with the aforementioned 100th Ring. The Bomber's Ring, on the other hand, has a much higher rate of actually appearing, with the complication being that it can only be obtained from the hardest level of the Goron Dancing minigame, which is strict to the point of frustration. To top that off, it's once again not a 100% chance to get it, and you might end up with the Protection Ring instead, which not only is of debatable utility (all damage taken is one heart, whether it was originally higher or lower), but can easily be picked up by other means.
      • The final pair is a more meta example, those being the GBA Time and Nature Rings. On the original cartridges these Rings are trivial to obtain, being sold for 100 Rupees as long as the game is in a Game Boy Advance. The problem arises in the 3DS Virtual Console versions, where the games are emulated as if being played on a Game Boy Color, leaving the Advance Shops where you'd buy these rings permanently locked away. The rings are still possible to get by messing with passwords, but given that neither of them do anything in the first place, whether or not it's really worth the effort is up to interpretation.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has a minigame where Link is sparring with his teacher, Orca. The goal of the game is to hit Orca as many times as you can before he hits you three times. The last tangible reward is given at 500 hits, but if you manage to get all the way up to 999 hits, you get a brief cutscene where he tells Link he has surpassed him and starts calling you Master (he also asks Link if his index finger is tired). Orca's AI becomes increasingly more aggressive and counter-happy the more hits he takes, so good luck.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap has its final Heart Piece and the Sound Test locked behind the Figurine Gallery sidequest. It looks simple and feels like an optional task like it was in The Wind Waker, but in order to get the key to Herb's house and obtain the Heart Piece you need to show him a complete set. Not helping is that getting a new figurine is RNG based, and the cost increasingly gets more expensive over time as you obtain new figurines. The Phonograph and the 600 Rupees contained inside are a Bragging Rights Reward, but the bliss of having a full set of 20 hearts is made a lot harder through this sidequest alone.
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds has the Cucco Ranch minigame, where the player must dodge swarms of angry Cuccos who are attacking Link in a small, enclosed space. You lose instantly if any of the Cuccos touch you. To get the Piece of Heart you need to last for 30 seconds on the hardest difficulty, which is a decent challenge but nothing too ridiculous. However, completing this also unlocks Endless Mode, and some sadistic developer decided to put another reward for lasting 999 seconds (~17 minutes) on Endless. It's mostly a Bragging Rights Reward, not needed to max out Link's stats (all you get is a giant Cucco that sits on the world map and gives you hearts when you talk to it), but it ensures only the most insanely dedicated players will be able to truly 100% the game.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The Korok Seeds. There are 900 of them. You only have to find a little less than half of them to get all the upgrades, but all 900 count towards your file's completion rating, so if you want that to say 100% you have to collect them all. Bizarrely, the game seems to taunt you for actually doing this, as your reward for finding every single one is a literal pile of golden shit that does absolutely nothing. note  You also gain the ability to make Hestu dance whenever you want just by asking. Still does nothing in the way of game benefits, but if you found that entertaining, it’s a fun gimmick.
    • ''The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
      • The Korok seeds make a triumphant return, and this time there are 1000 of them note  and this time they can be found on Sky Islands in addition to the regular world map.
      • There's also a mission-specific instance of this during the sidequest to drive the pirates out of Lurelin Village: Clearing out the town requires you to wipe out a group of monsters who have a shared health bar. It's very common for players to wipe out all of the monsters in the village only for a tiny bit of health to remain, forcing players to find that one monster that they missed. In almost every case, it's the single Bokoblin that's hiding in the village well.
  • Metroid:
    • In the original NES Metroid, one Missile Tank in Ridley's Hideout requires either an insanely precise jump or a double bomb jump to reach. If you fail, you fall down an insanely long shaft and have to go all the way back around the Hideout to try again.
    • Metroid Prime:
      • There's a Last Lousy Missile Expansion in the Chozo Ruins, hidden in a Morph Ball tunnel off the Training Chamber Access Hall, whose entrance is nearly impossible to spot due to being obscured by shrubbery.
      • Each main game in the Metroid Prime Trilogy has at least one obscure enemy that seems to exist for the sole purpose of preventing the player from getting 100% of the Logbook scans, and in the first game's North American version, this spot belongs to the Ice Shriekbat. Like all other Shriekbats, these are difficult to spot, and divebomb Samus and explode as soon as she gets near them. Unlike all other Shriekbats, they never respawn. They also only appear in one room (Ice Ruins West) and are gone so quickly that you probably won't even know they were a unique creature. As some sort of cruel joke, the Ice Shriekbat's Logbook description suggests using the Thermal Visor to spot them, an item which, assuming you aren't Sequence Breaking, won't show up until about an hour after you encounter the enemies. In other regional GameCube releases as well as the Wii's Trilogy compilation, the Ice Shriekbats at least have the courtesy to respawn.
    • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes' infamous scan is the Ing Webtrap, an obstacle that blocks the doors during the battle for Dark Agon Key 3 in Dark Agon Wastes' Battleground - and only appears during that battle. Make sure to scan it before dealing with the enemy Ing that appear.
    • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption:
      • There's a specific type of Space Pirate (of which there are many almost indistinguishable variants) which only appears during a particularly difficult timed mission in which you fight a large number of Space Pirates while also having to deal with annoying ships that shoot at you from the distance. Thus, if you want to scan it, you'll likely have to let them attack the vessel where you are.
      • Of the 26 Friend Vouchers that can be collected, one requires doing a No-Damage Run through the Morph Ball segment on Norion where Meta Ridley is attacking you. Even just Collision Damage from him will ruin this achievement, and it's back to your last save (minimum six rooms ago) to try again.
      • For those who want to get every possible credit in the game, the Gold Credit for completing the Federation demolition trooper Escort Mission on the Pirate Homeworld without any member of the team dying. Keeping the required four of twelve alive just to progress the story is difficult enough in its own right. Keeping all twelve alive is an exercise in persistence and many, many save-loads.
    • Metroid Dread has the Missile+ Tank hidden by the Ferenia side of the Ferenia-Ghavoran tram, which requires you to use the Speed Booster to slide over a set of crumbling Pitfall Blocks so that you can perform a Shinespark to break a set of Boost Blocks beyond them. The trouble is that this requires you to do a wall jump and a slide while boosting, and you're only directly told you can do actions like that while boosting in easily-missable loading screen messages, so many people try to instead preserve the spark before the crumble blocks and use Cross Bombs to get across them - which is possible to do, it just has a much tighter window than the intended way.
  • Psychonauts:
    • The only way to unlock some of the cutscenes is to wander around the campgrounds; when you get to certain locations, the scene will be triggered. But there's nothing that tells you this, and in fact, you're encouraged to use the camp's Fast Travel system to get around quickly instead of going on foot. And to make matters worse, once night falls, you lose the chance to see them ever again. Thankfully, this doesn't count toward 100% completion in the game—but it DOES show up on your menu screen, leaving players to wonder how on earth they're supposed to fill in the missing movies.
    • The figments of imagination. The levels are filled to the brim with collectibles, and while finding them all can be challenging sometimes, they at least have the mercy of being easy to see and not terribly numerous. This is not the case with the figments: there are literally hundreds of them in each level, so even though they're handed out like candy at first, you can literally rack up hours of searching once you're down to the last dozen or so. What's worse is that they're semi-transparent, usually not very big, and can sometimes be in hard-to-reach places or even move around the level. The worst part, though, is that they're all very brightly colored. That may be all well and good in Deliberately Monochrome levels like Sasha's Shooting Gallery, but it's an absolute nightmare in Amazing Technicolor Worlds like Milla's Dance Party and Black Velvetopia, where using a guide is borderline necessary.
    • Rank 101. Not only do you have to get every collectible and figment, you also need to go back into Basic Braining and redo the combat training repeatedly, with it getting more difficult each time.
  • After completing the quest "Wonders of the World" in Solatorobo, you can get a special library book that is filled with lots of background lore and details about the series' mythos... but you have to work for it by doing a lot of menial tasks such as breaking stuff or going fishing for a long time. What makes it worse is that you are only given a vague progress bar to indicate how much work you need to put in, and doing one playthrough isn't even enough to fill one of the four category bars.

    Adventure Game 
  • Chicory: A Colorful Tale:
    • The direct hints Dad won't give you include lost kids, gifts, and litter locations. So if the tracker says they're somewhere in a very large region, you'll have to scour the whole place.
    • The Art Academy sidequest is required for both its own achievement and the "all decor" achievement. While you COULD simply mash that you're done with each painting the moment the art screen pops up, you only get ONE chance to do each painting, and a few of the art pieces require a certain amount of brush styles to be collected first before letting you start it, so unless you have enough to finish the academy from the start, you'll not be able to just go through it all in one go.
  • This goes all the way back to Colossal Cave, in which the Last Lousy Point is obtained by dropping a magazine in a certain room. People actually used to step through the game with a machine-level debugger to try and figure this one out.note  As a result, modern Interactive Fiction games often intentionally invoke this trope with a obscure and completely unnecessary action providing the Last Lousy Point (whereas all other points may be necessary in order to complete the game). The official or in-game solutions generally hang a lampshade on the Last Lousy Point, calling it such by name. For example, in the original mainframe version of Zork, the Last Lousy Point was obtained by sending off for a brochure. When it arrived in the mailbox, the value of the stamp was "One Lousy Point".
  • Lost Pig, which deliberately riffs on the years of Dungeon Crawling IF games with Kleptomaniac Heroes that followed Colossal Cave, has a single-point achievement that can be easily missed if you play it like a standard IF game, but is easy to achieve if you try (and there are several hints toward what's required if you pay attention). The final point required for 100% Completion is achieved by demonstrating to the dungeon's custodian that you're not a kleptomaniac hero, by not taking anything out of the dungeon when you leave at the end that doesn't belong to you.
  • Sierra adventure games are somewhat infamous for this:
    • For instance, looking at a six-pixel tall jogger who appears intermittently in the background (Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places)); searching every bit of evidence, sometimes twice (Police Quest), defeating every single type of random encounter at least once (Quest for Glory) and performing every required action at the earliest opportunity (Space Quest V: The Next Mutation).
    • One almost-cruel example is in Space Quest IV, where you have to pick up an unstable ordnance, and then immediately put it back, because carrying it around will get you killed. However, putting the unstable ordnance back where you found it causes you to lose most, but not all of the points you gained for picking it up. You need to do this in order to get the maximum intended points, in a genre where you are encouraged to pick up anything and everything you can find. (Amusingly, in some versions of the game, you can just barely manange to come back later and pick up the unstable ordnance again and hold onto it; this means you can finish the game with more than the maximum listed number of points.)
    • Gold Rush! pulls no punches, making it possible to win the game and easily miss 100 points in a 250 point maximum, while providing multiple solutions to puzzles and only giving max points for one specific solution.
    • Even the two EcoQuest games, designed for a younger audience, have pixel-hunting puzzles that require you to keep your eyes open in EVERY scene if you want 100% Completion. The second game is much worse with this, as you sometimes only get one chance to record an item into your in-game encyclopedia, and they can be pretty obscure within a scene. And yeah, each item is worth one point.
    • This happened early as King's Quest I: Quest For The Crown. Looking in the stump first before taking that pouch gives you an extra 1 point. Leaving the dragon's cave through the cave gives you zero point while leaving by the way you came, the well, will grant you extra points. Guesing the gnome's name on the first try will you maximum points.
  • The gold trophy "Perfect Crime" in Heavy Rain. Here are the requirements in a nutshell: Jayden, Madison, Lauren and Hassan have to die; Ethan has to get arrested permanently, Madison and Ethan need to fornicate (with Ethan forgiving Madison), and The Origami Killer needs to walk off free. Oh, and you can't skip any chapters while doing this.
  • Ben Jordan 2 Deluxe has a point you're virtually guaranteed to miss the first time through: You have to return the bowl you borrow from Annie. The Point of No Return doesn't help either. Might be justified, as getting all the points unlocks an additional, spoiler-heavy end cutscene.
  • The Amazon Trail has a few last lousy animals when it comes to photographing all the animal and plant species.
    • That darn Amazonian Manatee. It only pops its head out for a few seconds and that's it. You miss it, and it's gone for good. Time to head back to the boat, and try again. It's even hard to tell whether or not it spawned at all since the manatee doesn't appear immediately.
    • The Boto, or river dolphin, is another annoying creature that spawns rarely, but it's not as bad as the manatee. Unlike the manatee, the Boto initially sits under the water with its back protruding from the edge of the screen. Eventually it jumps, and sometimes it disappears for good after it jumps. The good news is that it takes a while for the Boto to jump, so you have ample time to photograph it (if you don't mind a poor quality picture).
    • The pirarucu in the Fishing Minigame. It's the biggest fish in the game and catching it is needed for 100% Completion. But it shows up very rarely. Expect to wait a long time at the fishing screen, that is, if it decides to show up.

    Alternate Reality Games 
  • Perplex City: Three cards from the first season remained unsolved years after the season ended. Luckily, they're not required to complete the game.
    • #251, The Thirteenth Labour, required a bruteforce decryption of a string of 352 characters. This was eventually cracked in February 2010, but the solution has not been shared.
    • #256, Billion to One, required players to locate a man based on a single photograph and the name "Satoshi". This was achieved in December 2020, using a facial recognition image search tool released earlier that year (the intended method was based on the "six degrees of separation" theory).
    • #238, Riemann, requires a solution of the Riemann Hypothesis, a mathematical challenge that hasn't been solved in over a hundred years of existence. The card even mentions the $1,000,000 prize being offered for solving the problem.

    Driving Game 
  • Crash Team Racing has a Last Lousy Relic. You need all the relics for a rematch against Big Bad Nitrous Oxide, but to get the last relic you need to unlock a secret race, which requires 5 gems. Each gem in turn requires 4 CTR tokens and then a win in a four race tournament. The tokens and gems do count toward completion percentage, though. There's also the Oxide time trials. You don't even get Oxide for beating all of them, just a shortcut to the scrapbook.
  • In Need for Speed: Most Wanted, in addition to completing your car garage and fully tuning them, and beating the game, you also have a list of "police chase" milestones to beat. One of them (be in a "hot" pursuitnote  for 30 minutes and escape successfully) is almost impossible to do, simply because the longer you run from the cops, the more proactive they'll be in shutting you down. That is, unless you manage to cheese the system and get into a 30 minute chase at the beginning of the game, when the cops don't pull out all those nice toys...
  • The Last Lousy Decal in Split/Second (2010) requires you to have a save file from Blackrock's previous racing game Pure. This is the only decal that doesn't have an associated Achievement.
  • Test Drive Unlimited and TDU 2 has Last Lousy Road, as 100% completion requires the player to drive on every single road on OÊ»ahu, and in the sequel, OÊ»ahu and Ibiza. The last road tends to be some tiny off-ramp interstate or a dead end road buried in some parking lot in the middle of nowhere. Players have to go over all of the map at maximum zoom to find the unexplored road.
  • Forza Horizon and its sequels are another Last Lousy Road examples since each game has an achievement tied to driving on every single road on the map. The third and fourth games are arguably the worst. Some of the roads are quite off the beaten path, and some dead ends and even driveways count as roads. Not only that, but such roads are depicted as a dotted line on the map making it even more confusing. Good luck trying to find that last single grayed out dash. The fourth game also has a Last Lousy Barn Find that only appears once you purchase Bamburgh Castle for 10 million credits.
  • Beetle Adventure Racing has nine multiplayer courses - three available right away and six that can only be played by acquiring all 100 bonus points from each track. What the last one takes will make you want to tear your hair out. It requires finding all 100 bonus points in Wicked Woods, the last and hardest track in the game. This is much more difficult than it sounds, since many of the points require pixel-perfect aim and all the ramps have slight lumps that will send you tumbling in completely the wrong direction since they're so cunningly placed. What's worse, the track is so crazy, you cannot afford to turn around and get anything you've missed - it's all or nothing if you want to get them all AND finish with a rank that will allow the points you've collected to count. If you miss a point crate on first pass, you might as well start over. If you've unlocked the police car, you're only halfway to being able to do it.
  • In Riptide GP Renegade, the Easter Egg for the Tropico circuit is far more difficult to collect than the others, requiring the player to launch their (preferably fully upgraded) jet ski off the halfpipe at just the right speed and angle.
  • Burnout Paradise requires you to find all the Smash Gates, Billboards and Super Jumps in order to get 100% Completion. Most of them are easy to spot (even if sometimes not that easy to reach), but some are tucked away in hidden places, such as a particular hard-to-see rooftop in Downtown Paradise. Thankfully, the stats screen breaks down the yet-undiscovered secrets by district, so you don't have to search the whole map (though the individual districts aren't exactly small by themselves.) DJ Atomika lampshades this during the game:
    DJ Atomika: Is it just me or are there other drivers out there with one Smash Gate left to find? Just one - just one, little row of yellow gates? Focus, Atomika... it'll be worth it!

    Fighting Game 
  • Super Smash Bros.:
    • Super Smash Bros. Melee:
      • The Diskun Trophy is not worth the effort, and wouldn't be, even if the game paid you by the hour to complete it. Ignore that trophy, you'll thank TV Tropes. It requires you to get every single point bonus in the game. It's worse than you'd think, since many will never occur in a normal match and are difficult to get even when it's all you're trying to do. It's obscene.
      • Young Link's Target Challenge is notably more difficult than the other ones; most of the targets are spread out very far and behind obstacles. But that's not the worst part: there's a massive Guide Dang It! at the beginning when you have to Wall Jump out of a pit, the only time in the game where this move is required. One of the only things that indicates this technique exists at all is Samus's 1-player mode completion video, which of course doesn't explain how to do it.
    • Super Smash Bros. Brawl:
      • The Subspace Bomb Factory (Part II) in The Subspace Emissary has two boxes which are difficult to get, but if you want the flag denoting you've done everything in the level, you'll have to get them. One has you enter a moving door in an autoscrolling section, bounce on a trampoline to leap off the top of the screen, use your double jump to get even higher, then attack to break open a box hidden out of view of the camera entirely. The other requires using a character who can wall jump to scale a vertical shaft (on your initial visit, this means Captain Falcon and/or Diddy Kong) to reach a door that contains the box beyond it.
      • There's trophies for beating every mode in the game except The Subspace Emissary on the highest difficulty setting (which you can't just use a Golden Hammer to forcibly gain).
      • The Meta Ridley trophy requires you to get close to beating Meta Ridley in The Subspace Emissary, then wait for a trophy stand to spawn (keep in mind the fight is on a timer), then throw the trophy stand at him, and then jump off the Falcon Flyer that you've been riding the whole fight and grab the Meta Ridley trophy out of the air before it disappears off the bottom of the screen.
      • To get the Stickers trophy, you have to obtain at least one of every sticker in the game. There are over six hundred of them and no way to influence which one you get.
    • One of the challenges in Smash 4 is to get 300,000G. It's quite easy to get G by playing Classic, All-Star, or Smash Tour modes, as well as completing certain Event Matches and getting some of the other challenges... but by the time you find out about the challenge, you've probably spent most of the money you can earn on trophies, and to get the achievement, it's not enough to simply have earned 300,000G over the course of the game, you need to have that much available to spend at once.
  • The Story Modes of the first two BlazBlue games tracks what percentage of the cutscenes in each character's story you have seen. However, the story mode for Calamity Trigger includes the cutscenes that play when you lose a match in that percentage, even when all it leads to is a Game Over screen. Since each character's Story mode contains multiple branching paths, each with their own fights, you basically play it all for the story and then do the entire thing again to get the defeat cutscenes. There is, at least, a text skip option - whether that does enough to make it worthwhile is down to the sheer patience of the player. Thankfully, Continuum Shift removed those cutscenes from the percentage.

    First-Person Shooter 
  • The Monster Condo level in Doom II has a secret area that permanently closes up 30 seconds after the level starts. Guide Dang It!... And of course it will take you at least 25 seconds to get there, assuming that you start the instant the level starts, know exactly where the secret is, and run all the way. There are also a few other levels throughout the game where 100% can't "officially" be obtained, but those are mostly due to bugs/misplaced monsters and zones.
    • Level 25 of the Game Mod Memento Mori does the same thing, only in this case there are five secrets to obtain in the 30 second time limit.
    • A thankfully tiny number of Doom custom levels, such as Eternal Doom Level 5 and 2002: A Doom Odyssey Episode 1 Level 9, contain secrets that can only be obtained after five minutes of playing time have elapsed. As soon as the clock hits five, a door opens for about 10 seconds, and then closes. If you didn't get the secret before the door closed, you're out of luck! Start over from your last save (if you made any!). At least Eternal Doom actually hints at this near the secret in question.
    • Zero Master became the first human to achieve the last lousy secret in the Doom II map Industrial Zone... 24 years after the game’s release. It was long known about, but due to the secret being misplaced, it's only accessible through an obscure glitch where collision detection instructions are skipped.
  • Far Cry 3 has one relic which is in a secret area in the cave with the boat, which you can only access the FIRST time you have access to that cave, that area will be inaccesible if you try to go there any other time.
  • Chapter 13 of Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch has a trophy tied to filling out its weapon collection, of which two can cause particular headaches trying to get — Sakugarne and Mega Ball, both of which can only be found by using Rush Search in specific spots of specific stages. The former at least gives you a context clue of a room full of Quint statues in the Wily Star stage, but the latter is found on an inconspicuous platform in Jupiter's stage that requires Tornado Hold to reach, which you might not have bought before going to this stage. Also, you need to finish the level after collecting either of these, as they're lost on death.
  • Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3: Finding the last one or two "Points of Interest" on a map can be annoying. Points of Interest appear on the map when you are near enough, and disappear after you have cleared them. Now, is that area blank because there's a Point that you haven't activated, because there was a Point there but you cleared it, or because there's nothing there to begin with? Only way to find out is to go and have a look.

    Miscellaneous Games 
  • Game Boy Camera could be a particularly terrible example of the trope. You could unlock special pictures with certain goals. Some would be like taking hundreds of pictures, trading tens of pictures to males AND females, or any other of random tasks.
  • Harvest Moon SNES not only has several hidden mechanics for calculating your final Ranch Master Rate, but some of them contain bugs.
    • Each girl's affection level must be between 496 and 511. If you instead raise their affection to 999, you'll miss out on one point for each girl, ending up with a maximum Ranch Master Rate of 994. To make matters worse, when it comes to your wife, you can't simply raise her affection to 511 and then leave it there, because maximising your score requires you to have two children, which can only happen if her affection reaches at least 650. To get the last Ranch Master point, you have to actively lower her affection after having your second child, typically by giving her gifts she dislikes such as weeds. And bear in mind that the exact affection score for each girl is never shown until the ending sequence.
    • Getting the maximum score for your crops is also challenging, although not quite as counter-intuitive; you can get the maximum score by shipping either 496-511 of a crop, or 1008-1023. Ship 512 instead of 511, though, and you get a zero for that crop. Once again, the total number shipped is only visible in the ending sequence.
  • The Binding of Isaac Rebirth. Seeing how the game in itself is a RNG, achieving Real Platinum God (or 1001%) is gonna take some time and luck:
    • The alternate form of Gemini, Steven, gained a ridiculously rare unique drop: the item Steven was removed from every drop pool except for Steven's, and Steven is far more likely to drop Little Steven. The Afterbirth DLC made Steven a lot more common by adding it to the Gold Chest item pool.
    • Both Meat Boy and Bandage Girl require fighting all four of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse bosses in one run. And while having the Book of Revelations helps guarantee you a fight with a horsemen, the fact that Death can be replaced with Conquest (who only drops the White Pony item) makes this even more luck-based. Again, Afterbirth makes this a lot easier using a trick involving the Box of Friends.
    • Any of the Secret Room exclusive items (1up, Black Lotus, Skeleton Key, Missingno, and Raw Liver), simply because Secret Rooms so seldom spawn items in Rebirth. The best you can do in Afterbirth requires a time-consuming method that involves infinite money, item restocking, and item pool randomization.
    • In Afterbirth+, completing the Bestiary is quite a feat. Mostly because of Brimstone Grimace and Broken Gaping Maw, two "enemies" (really more environmental obstacles) that appear very rarely only on specific floors. The Blue Conjoined Fatty also deserves a mention—it appears on only one floor, and only on Normal mode. Players who default to Hard mode will never see it unless they use a D10 at the right time.
  • Audiosurf has the Stealth Legend achievement. To get it, you have to play in the only mode where there are obstacles, at the highest difficulty level (ignoring the optional 'Ironmode'), and dodge every grey block. On a song of at least 11 minutes in length. This is compounded by the fact that the only file many players have that's long enough is "Albuquerque" by "Weird Al" Yankovic... which happens to be a very hard song to play, since loading it results in a track which repeatedly switches between 'slow', 'reasonably fast', and 'insanely fast'.
  • Given the Random Number Generator-based nature of the Animal Crossing series, collecting all of a given thing can end with this. It may take weeks for the game to generate the last fossil needed for your museum, you may need to wait almost an entire year for the last fish or bug to appear in a given month, the list goes on and on.
  • In Risk of Rain 2, unlocking an item entry on the Codex simply requires you to acquire it once. All of them can be acquired by playing the game enough times in anyway, except for two items. The Defensive Microbots is a Guide Dang It! that requires a specific setup using Artifacts to get. The Irradiant Pearl is the most time-consuming: you need to buy as many Lunar items as possible using rare Lunar Coin currency, find a Cleansing Pool in a stage, which only spawns in 5 of 10 regular biomes with no guaranteed way to spawn them, and trade one Lunar item and hope on a 4% chance it gives you an Irradiant Pearl instead of a regular Pearl (a patch buffed the drop rate to 20%, but it's still pretty hard to get).
  • Obtaining the final cryogen in SunDog: Frozen Legacy. It's on Enlie, which is 9 parsecs away from the nearest system, farther than your warp drive can go without an expensive upgrade. When you get there, everything is trying to kill you, even under circumstances where they normally wouldn't. The cryogen isn't in the city with the starport, and your ground scanner won't work to let you land directly at the other city. The overland trip is tricky and long, with some paths being almost invisible to the point of Pixel Hunt. All that to pick up the one thing you need for the final colony upgrade.

    MMORPG 
  • Billy vs. SNAKEMAN has secrets that nobody has found. The creator sometimes moves such secrets to less well hidden places. Special note goes to the "Enough Already" Trophy. It's worth only 1 Awesome point (It was years before there were any other known trophies not worth a multiple of 5 Awesome pointsnote ), and is obtained by grinding your Season stat to its cap. Unless you're really lucky and willing to waste Fiction 500 grade levels of the in-game currency, this means at least a month of dedicated grinding beyond the point more Seasons becomes anything more than a Bragging Rights Reward. And now you know why it's called "Enough Already".
  • When you reach level 50 in City of Heroes, it shows you as being one Experience Point away from level 51. There are any number of jokes among the player base about how you get that last lousy point.
  • In El Sword the game makes it apparent that it isn't the end of your progression when you reach the level 99 level cap. The final sections of the game switches to a Equipment-Based Progression system, furthered with the games stamina based Anti Poop-Socking. Makes getting your characters to their final absolute best, a final hurdle to overcome.

    Party Game 
  • Super Mario Party has a Last Lousy Minigame. The Team minigame "Half the Battle", unlike every other Team minigame in the game, will only spawn in Party mode if each of the four players has at least one ally. It's already fairly rare to meet this condition, and even if you do, there's only a 1-in-6 chance of the roulette actually landing on the game. This is especially galling because you need to unlock every single minigame to access the Challenge Road mode, and two of the playable characters are in turn locked behind this mode. Downplayed in that you can also unlock Half the Battle through Partner Party mode, where the "one ally per player" rule doesn't apply.

    Platform Game 
  • There are 1000 Lums in Rayman 2: The Great Escape, though "officially", there appear to be only 999 after a certain cutscene in which the Big Bad eats one of them; the "last lousy Lum" is hidden in one of the other levels, although only on certain versions. There's a bit of Fridge Brilliance in its location too: it's in The Tomb of the Ancients, home to the undead; presumably, that's where the Lum went when it died.
  • Donkey Kong:
    • In the first Donkey Kong Country, the 101st percent can be obtained by reaching a Bonus Stage hidden inside another Bonus Stage. The first bonus stage is a matching game where you time your jumps to match three objects. You can only get to the second bonus stage by winning the worst item (a single banana), which causes a barrel to drop. You then have to grab that barrel and crash through the wall before the "celebration fanfare" is over. And you can only use Diddy, because he holds the barrel in front of his body (whereas DK holds it over his head, and you don't have enough time to throw it and then enter the resulting opening).
    • Donkey Kong Land has several, but the worst is probably in the "Spiky Tire Trail" level, in which to get to a bonus stage you have to jump down what looks like a bottomless pit, with no real indication that it's anything but a bottomless pit.
    • In Donkey Kong 64:
      • Each stage has one hundred bananas, five golden bananas, and a blueprint for each of the five playable characters. The Hub Level itself has five golden bananas for each character, as well as an extra one earned after you've caught all Banana Fairies in the game. If searching for everything isn't hard enough, some of the bonus rounds you have to go through will make you wanna bite something.
      • There's also one final Battle Arena Crown that you can find, located in Hideout Helm. To get to it, you need to use Diddy Kong's barrel jetpack to fly to the top of the Blast-O-Matic machine that's (on your first visit) counting down to blow up DK Island. People who don't know about it will probably not think to look up there because the key to the last boss battle is available, Hideout Helm lacks many other collectibles contained in other stages (like Bananas and Coins) which can lead to people not thinking it has a battle arena (unless they dig into the pause menu), and it's entirely possible to get said final key without it (getting the key requires 4 Crowns, and there are 10 total in the game).
  • It's a common issue in the Crash Bandicoot series to go through a level smashing all the boxes you can find... only to learn you missed out on a single box somewhere in the level.
    • Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped has it worse with two levels that are accessed from within other levels - one of which is itself a hidden level. Fortunately, neither of these levels are necessary for 100% Completion, but only for 105% Completion which requires adequate timing in ALL levels to achieve.
    • Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time manages to top Warped not just in terms of how many boxes there are but also with how many collectables there are, with six Gems per level across 38 levels, each filled with hundreds of boxes, with an N. Verted Mode totaling to 456 Gems, coupled with an N. Sanely Perfect Relic for each level that requires you to break every crate and get at least 80% of the level's wumpa fruit on a single run. And that's not even getting into the Colored Gems, Flashback Tapes, and Platinum Time Trial Relics. Suffice to say, combing through each level for all of its collectables will leave you N. Sane.
  • There are two candidates for "Last Lousy Jiggy" in the original Banjo-Kazooie:
    • The first one lies beneath the instadeath propeller blades of the ship in Rusty Bucket Bay. To get it, you need to complete a series of Timed Missions, one right after the other, involving slowing down propeller blades, tiptoing above bottomless pits, and swimming through Grimy Water all within a short timeframe to nab it.
    • The other Last Lousy Jiggy is easily missed, since it's up the top of the giant tree in the level Click Clock Wood, at an altitude that is only reachable while the player is transformed into a bee and that you never normally have to go to. There's also the whole note issue. Click Clock Wood has four variations of the level, and you have to survive all 4 to get the hundred notes with the clincher being that you have to start from 0 if you die.
  • In Mischief Makers, every level contains one Gold Gem. Once you've collected it for each level, there are still two more to collect. The first you get for having an A rating or better for the combined time of all stages, and the second you get by choosing to interact at a certain moment in the ending cutscenes that can only be interacted with if you have all the other Gold Gems, including the one for the combined stage times.
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, you will automatically get an A Rank if you collect all of the rings in a level. They don't make this easy, though.
    • Metal Harbor has a single ring sitting completely by itself in a place you wouldn't check unless you knew it was there.
    • Pumpkin Hill contains a pair of rings floating in an arbitrary, obscured part of the abyss around the level, away from everything else of importance. They're also below the point in the pit that registers as a death, so the player has to use a magnetic shield, which can only be obtained rarely by digging at random around the level, and pull out at the last possible second in the fall. Some levels may have a ring or two placed outside normal reach just to make an A Rank impossible through that method. (Mad Space and Pyramid Cave are listed examples, discovered using Action Replay.)
  • Kirby:
    • Kirby Super Star Ultra, Kirby's Return to Dream Land, and Kirby: Triple Deluxe have The True Arena. Unlike the regular Arena, which is relatively easy once you get the hang of it, The True Arena is a brutal Boss Rush with amped-up bosses, even less healing items than The Arena, and at least one boss you haven't fought before until that point. You could just ignore it... if it wasn't necessary for 100% Completion.
    • Also in Triple Deluxe, to get 100% Completion, you need to collect all of the keychains. There is one rare keychain per level, and there is almost no indication whether or not you are missing a level's rare keychain (Unlike regular keychains, rare keychains are fixed, so unless you use a guide, you're not gonna know which rare keychain you have or haven't obtained in which level). Have fun scouring every corner of every level until you've found them all! The same goes for Planet Robobot, but this time the game at least tells you which stage a rare sticker is located in. Other than that, it's just as tedious.
  • A phrase "Veni, Vidi, Vici" reminds a lot of players of the extremely difficult to get Shiny Trinket in VVVVVV. Not only is it an order of magnitude more difficult to reach than any other trinket in the game, but your goal is separated from your start location only by one waist-high block, which any sane videogame protagonist would step over.
  • Ratchet & Clank:
    • In nearly all of the games, the skill points will be a mystery until you earn them (you didn't even know their names until you'd beaten the game once in the first game; there are also some games that subvert the "Not Seeing the Skill Point description" thing, namely Deadlocked, All 4 One, and Into the Nexus) and most of the challenge is figuring out what to do. However, there's almost always some skill point that's just plain hard, even if you know what to do (like in Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, where a Skill Point on Dobbo requires the player to kill all of the enemies with weapons from the first game, which are MUCH weaker than the new game's weapons). Some of them are almost Permanently Missable in Challenge Mode, since the criteria for the point also sometimes set the bar higher. Particularly annoying in Size Matters, where the point requirement for a space shooter minigame is set a lot higher in Challenge Mode...so much, in fact, that the best course of action may be to start a new game for 100% completion. The hoverboard race time trial skill points are also subject to this.
    • Going Commando has the Nanotech boost tucked high up in a corner at the start of Dobbo's Glider segment. Because the Glider deploy sequence has Ratchet fall for a bit before opening it, grabbing this Nanotech requires you to turn around mid-glide and go back to the start in order to have enough altitude to grab it.
    • The "Everybody Dance Now" Skill Point from Tools of Destruction. It involves getting tossing a Groovitron at every Enemy and NPC in the game to make them dance. Yes, all of them. The problem is, some enemies only appear in very specific places, and several are Permanently Missable until Challenge Mode, making them Last Lousy Points within a Last Lousy Point. Of particular note are your NPC allies Cronk, Zephyr and Talwyn (only available during exactly three War Sequences), the MANY variants of Pirates, the Obsidian Enforcers on Planet Reepor (of which there are only two, and who count as separate enemies from normal Enforcers), morphed Penguins (which also have many variations), and Rusty Pete (who only appears in person during and after the battle with Captain Slag).
    • "Vandal" in Into the Nexus. You have to break all of the windows on Planet Silox - but by "all", the Skill Point specifically refers to tall, sky-blue ones. These are regularly spread among other windows that have an identical shape but aren't breakable, with the only difference being their duller shade versus the ones you're searching for.
  • Super Mario Bros. examples:
    • Super Mario World has 96 exits all up. Most levels after the first world have two possible exits. The hardest to find is almost certainly the exit that leads to Soda Lake in Cheese Bridge Area: you have to fly under the exit gate (without going off the bottom of the screen, of course)—going above it will end the level—and come to a landing on a platform behind it. It's not that hard for a skilled flyer, but you have to somehow figure it out or have a remarkably happy accident before you even know that's where it is. You can also use Yoshi to make it easier, but good luck maneuvering through the moving sawmills to reach the exit in the first place (Mario can't use the ropes when he's mounting Yoshi).
    • Still having trouble finding exits in Super Mario World? Have you considered the path between Forest of Illusion 1 and Forest Ghost House? Both levels have a secret exit towards the other level, and both count towards the 96, which means the only path you might be "missing"... is a path you already have.
    • Super Mario 64 rewards the player for collecting 100 coins in any level with a star. That's all well and good, but some levels have barely enough coins to meet this requirement, including coins that only exist temporarily (one level, Jolly Roger Bay, has only 104 coins total). This leaves very little margin for error and often results in fruitless searches through the entire level to find those last few coins.
    • In Super Mario Galaxy 2, the absolute final star, only available after collecting all 241 previous stars, amassing 9999 star bits, and beating the final boss twice is without question the hardest level since Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. It's an even harder version of Grandmaster Galaxy (the hardest level in the game) with Daredevil Comet in effect (meaning Mario has only one hitpoint) and no checkpoints. Six sections, three miserable Boomerang Bros, and zero mercy.
    • Super Mario 3D World requires you to beat all stages with all characters to get the maximum amount of completion stars on your profile. And one of them isn't even available until you beat a certain level. Of course, you can always play every stage with friends, but the five characters compared to the four-player limit still forces you to play them at least twice. And before that, you have to complete Champion's Road, an Expy of Grandmaster Galaxy. And you have to complete it at least one more time.
    • In Super Mario Maker, any of the five Mystery Mushroom costumes unlockable only through 100-Mario Challenge in Super Expert would count. The Super Expert difficulty was created a few months after the game's release to separate out the courses people were having a tough time with in Expert. Most Super Expert courses have clear rates below 2%, and you have to clear 6 of them in a row without losing all 100 of your Marios.
    • Due to the sheer number of Power Moons in Super Mario Odyssey, it was inevitable that a few would end up in this territory. There are several candidates:
      • The infamous 100 Jump Rope Challenge, and to a lesser extent, the 100 Volleyball Challenge. Most can get around 50-60 jumps before losing due to the extremely tight timing that requires nigh perfect regularity, and after one or two fails, most just don't feel like going through the whole thing again. Same largely goes for volleyball, except it is more forgiving, more manageable, and easily exploitable by using the two player mode to trivialize it. The 100 Jump Rope Challenge can be trivialized even harder using a glitch, but that's if you know that it exists and can pull it off.
      • On The Eastern Pillar in the Sand Kingdom in the post-game. Not only does it require thinking seriously outside of the box (who would think to Capture a Bullet Bill and fly it that far out of the way?), it's quite the task to figure out how to maximize the Bullet Bill's range to reach it, and then you have to actually do it. Expect to run out of steam a split second before you hit home more than once.
      • Hidden Room on the Flowing Sands in the Sand Kingdom. Fortunately, unlike most of the others on this list, it isn't difficult or tedious, just very hidden, but the Talkatoo and Hint Toad/Uncle Amiibo hints don't help much. For those who don't want to resort to a guide, this is one of the most elusive moons in the game.
      • A Treasure Made of Coins in the Wooded Kingdom for the sheer cryptic nature of it. Who would think to Capture the Coin Coffer (which is difficult to spot in the very dark area in the first place) and then spit 500 coins onto a random plant in the pond? And since it's in the Deep Woods, its location hint doesn't even give you the exact location, only that it's in the Deep Woods.
      • Almost every moon on the Dark Side save for the hint art ones. First, a boss rush against all of the Broodals, including their giant mech. If that doesn't sound too hard, doing them back to back with little to no health refills in-between is several magnitudes harder than any individual fight. Most players resort to abusing amiibo, trudge back to the Odyssey after each one (each trip longer and more tedious than the last), or switch on Assist mode to refill health between the fights. And the other moons are from remixed challenges from earlier in the game, but with a twist that seriously ups the difficulty. The three hardest are probably Invisible Road: Rush! (traverse invisible platforms with harmful poison being spewed from Pirahna Plants as your only guide without Cappy to help clean up or jump over said poison), Vanishing Road Challenge (get through, on foot, platforming sections designed for the moped with a very strict time limit with no checkpoints without Cappy), and Breakdown Road Final Challenge (hope you can do 8 perfect long jumps in a row... without Cappy, just for good measure).
      • Long Journey's End, a middle ground between Galaxy 2's The Ultimate Test and The Perfect Run (you have more than one hitpoint, but no checkpoints). It's long, several sections are incredibly precise, and even experienced players will find their health eaten up right before the end thanks to the fourth-to-last challenge.
      • Souvenir Savant, an Achievement Moon that requires you to have found almost all of the purple coins, which themselves are very subject to Last Lousy Point. By the end of the game, you will probably have at least several levels that are missing only one group of purple coins - and unlike the moons, purple coins aren't tracked on the map and the only in-game hints to their location require a Bowser amiibo. Without one, you'll have to either scour the levels or look up a guide and go through each and every one until you find the ones you missed.
      • The 119 moons you have to buy from shops to max out the moon counter will eat up a wallet that's already been drained in the post-game due to the expensive costumes. Even by the time you get all of the normal moons, you will likely have to grind hard to get the 9999-coin costume piece, only to then grind again to get enough for all the moons (which come to 11900 coins - more than you can hold at once). Hope you like doing Luigi's Balloon World and/or that one mission in Bowser's Kingdom dozens of times over, since they're the fastest ways to fill up on gold.
  • In the licensed 102 Dalmatians game, each level has 100 bones. Many of them are just lying around and can be found by just exploring the level (in fact, it's hard/impossible to get no bones at all) and enemies always drop at least a few, but many bones are hidden in rather tricky ways. Each level has a few hidden in the ground, which have to be found with the uncooperative "sniffing" ability that loves to send you running in circles. Certain levels also have obscure sidequests that award bones. For example, in the first level, are some bones that can only be gotten by herding pigeons towards a pigeon statue. No hints are given that this is something you might want to do.
  • Most of the secret stars in Braid, the existence of which is never mentioned in the game. Special mention goes to Cloud Bridge, in which you have to wait for a cloud to slowly move left for at least two hours to reach a secret area. And before you think you can just leave the game running for two hours: you need to jump on the cloud at about the 50 minute mark and then continue waiting.
  • On your first playthrough of Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, you can only complete the game 98%. To earn 100% completion, you must complete the story and all 10 bonus levels again on New Game Plus.
  • La-Mulana has several ROM cartridges that are particularly brutal to find.
    • A1 Spirit is a nasty one; it's found by standing on the arm of one of the Goddess statues in the Tower of the Goddess...except the goddess statue disappears after you solve one of the puzzles. It's not lost forever, though, you just have to destroy the block that hides it, which takes a full box of Pistol ammo. Pistol ammo costs at least 400 coins per box.
    • The final Life Jewel in the Dimensional Corridor. You have to ride up to a platform on a miniboss' back, climb up to the screen above, stop a block at a very specific point with the Lamp of Time, and then pull off several tricky jumps through a spike-lined room to get it. You can't warp out of the Dimensional Corridor, you can't leave the room without killing the miniboss, and the Lamp of Time takes three minutes real-time to recharge after every attempt. Also, killing the miniboss will make it much, much harder to reach the upper screen where the Life Jewel is.
  • Hey friends, want to get 100% completion in Mega Man Powered Up? The number is written on your save so it's going to haunt you until you do! Well you're going to have to beat every stage in the game three times, once in each difficulty. Also, you'll have to beat all 8 Robot Masters with your buster to unlock them as playable. Then you'll have to beat every stage in the game three times with each Robot Master. Also, you'll unlock three alternate versions of Mega Man, one of which is deliberately terrible, but you'll have to beat the game three times with that specific version as well. Oh, and you'll also need to download Roll and beat the game three times with her, and either download or win Proto Man and do it three times with him. It doesn't matter if you download Proto Man or unlock him, because you unlock him by clearing the brutal Challenge Mode, and that's required for 100% as well! And then there's the unlockable level editor features. Oh, and even though it's a separate save file, you'll probably want to beat Classic Mode, a reskin of the original Mega Man, as well. To recap, you need to beat an insane challenge mode, fight the Robot Masters without weaknesses, find a mess of secrets, and also clear the game 36 times.
  • There are some prize bubbles in LittleBigPlanet that are really hard to get. They may involve multiplayer puzzles, or they may just be really well hidden. Gets worse when they're early in the level, as you still need to complete it in order to receive the "Collected All Prize Bubbles" rewards at the end.
  • In Celeste, one of the Golden Strawberries requires you to complete the first chapter without dashing.

    Puzzle Game 
  • Super Scribblenauts: The final Starite is found by using the time machine. There's a chance that the time machine will take you to a Nostalgia Level with the final Starite in it.
  • Antichamber: Have fun trying to find that one last image you're missing on the Hub Level's picture wall! A few of those Last Lousy Points are luck based. In particular, the middle drop in "Laying the Foundation" is completely luck-dependent. The game knows this and taunts you with it.
    The more you complete, the harder it gets to find what you've missed.
  • Most skins in Lumines Remastered can be unlocked relatively quickly by reaching them in Challenge Mode or Vs CPU mode. "45 Degrees" and "Rodent", however, require clearing all of Puzzle Mode's 100 stages and Mission Mode's 50 stages, respectively, and both of those modes take a while to complete, not helped by both having a lot of difficult objectives.
  • The first Katamari Damacy has a gallery of every object you've rolled up in the game, from thumbtacks to mountains. Players who decide to complete the gallery are in for a session of combing over every mission in the game, taking into account large objects (which necessitate maxing out your katamari's size within a strict time limit) and small objects (which vanish if your katamari grows too big, forcing you to explore at minimum size to ensure you didn't overlook anything). And then there are the horse-jumping steps. There are ten wooden steps, each hidden in a different mission, and each with their own comically complicated backstory in the gallery. Without using a guide, finding the infamous 4th step is effectively impossible. It's hidden in Make A Star 7 - underwater. There are a couple of landmarks nearby to help you approximately locate it - a Russian doll on the docks and a nearby landslide, but even if you know to search there, you still might not find it because it moves in an irregular figure-eight pattern, meaning standing still and waiting in the correct position is actually more effective than trying to grab it on the move. This was only discovered by hacking, as the water is completely opaque. And of course, making your katamari bigger will make it easier to catch, but make it too big and you've lost it. This object was so unfair that one of the few changes in the Switch remaster was moving it to a more reasonable location.

    Racing Game 
  • F-Zero GX has everything related to its arcade counterpart, F-Zero AX. There are a set of racers, a whole set of tracks, and a set of parts that can be unlocked by taking your Gamecube memory card to an AX machine. Sounds easy enough...except that if you live anywhere outside Japan, you can count yourself very lucky to live anywhere near one, rendering everything but the racers nigh-impossible to get outside of cheat devices. And even then, the alternate method for unlocking the AX racers still requires you to clear the already brutally Nintendo Hard Story Mode missions on Very Hard mode (one level for each racer). Each racer also has a special movie that unlocked when you win a cup with them on Master Class difficulty. There are 41 characters, meaning you have to beat the hardest difficulty 41 times. And that's not even getting into the interview questions at the end of the cup, of which there are four per character. Per difficulty level. And you can only ask one per cup victory. Go ahead and do the math.note 
  • In Mario Kart 8, you unlock vehicle parts by collecting Coins. The second-from-last part is unlocked at 2,800 Coins. The last part, the Gold Glider, is unlocked at 10,000 Coins. And you can only collect a maximum of 10 coins per race. Deluxe alleviates the length of obtaining the Gold Glider by decreasing the required amoung of coins from 10,000 to 5,000, which definitely makes getting said part much quicker, although you still need to finish at least 500 races (if you actually manage to collect all 10 coins in each one) to get it.

    Rhythm Game 
  • In DJMAX Portable 2, the Last Lousy Mission isn't "Enter the Pentavision", the last mission in the game. It's "Just 1%", a mission which, on top of having to chain three Fevers on each song, requires you to clear each song without the "MAX 1%" judgment (the lowest judgement rank that isn't a miss), yet you're allowed to miss notes.
  • DanceDanceRevolution:
    • DDR Extreme US had the Last Lousy Song "Memories", which was only accessible via a code released two years after the game's release.
    • DDRMAX US has "Drop The Bomb (System SF Mix)", which has to be unlocked either by playing 500 songs or completing the long and hard Hardcore Oni Course.
    • DDR Hottest Party has 24 unlockable songs, which require playing through Groove Circuit Mode (basically mission mode). The game has a total of 50 missions, which slowly ramp up in difficulty. Unlocking the first 23 songs requires clearing only the first 25 missions, with the hardest only reaching difficulty 6 out of 10. The very last unlock suddenly requires clearing all 50 missions. (This was back in 2007 when DDR still had a massive gap between 9s and 10s on the difficulty scale; it was pretty common that a player who could full combo a 9 would struggle to barely pass a 10.) The 49th mission's requirement is "Clear [this difficulty 10 song], single-spaced, without missing any steps", while the 50th mission's requirement is "Clear [this other difficulty 10 song] with no misses, an accuracy of ~95%, and no using Friendship Mode to help you". The high accuracy requirement means you can easily full combo the song and still fail because you didn't get enough Perfects. Oh, and the last song's steps change each time it's played. There are zero documented legit clears of either mission; everyone's used a controller (and even then it's still quite hard). Five years later the songs would show up in the arcades with their high-quality hard pads and no more single-spaced Interface Screw, and several perfect scores have happened, but no one with access to an arcade cabinet would spend hundreds on a custom hard pad just to plug it into an old Wii game that otherwise isn't catered to hardcore players at all.
  • The Rhythm Heaven series usually has one notoriously difficult minigame that makes getting Perfects across the board very hard. Sometimes the Remixes also contribute if they contain devious alterations to the tempo or the minigames.

    Role-Playing Game 
  • Baten Kaitos:
    • In the first one, the Last Lousy Magnus is usually either the Frost Cap (dropped by one enemy in the Trail of Souls, which you visit once), the Splendid Hair (age Shampoo for 336 hours real-time), or the Maskless Mizuti Shots (two pictures taken of one of your characers while in the middle of a very specific boss battle, one of which has a minuscule chance of appearing). All with an extra helping of Guide Dang It! and Permanently Missable Content, as none of these are even hinted at in game and many of them are only available once.
    • In the second game, several Magnus are easily Permanently Missable and some others require obscenely long aging times or convoluted magnus mix recipes. And this is not possible anyway if you don't have a copy of the first game (or at least a save file of it), otherwise your harmless Soul Jar can't be upgraded and you miss three magnus.
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm:
    • So you’ve scoured the game world for hours, and come up with exactly 29 Bitcoins, just one short of having enough to buy everything in the Bitcoin shop. Where could the last one be hiding? Turns out that it was only available immediately after a specific cutscene way back in Chapter 2, when Cornelia walked off and left the door to her hotel room open.
    • There are six Rare NES Games, which can be used to unlock special moves for each character. Four of the games are easy to collect, but the last two will have you pulling your hair out. One is a reward for clearing a series of Platform Hell bonus levels, and the other is tucked away in a hidden room that’s never hinted to even exist. (Hint: try investigating toadstools that suddenly sprout up around train stations).
  • For Etrian Mystery Dungeon, many drops for the Item Almanac could qualify, such as a Rare Random Drop from the rarest-occuring D.O.E. in a dungeon where 4 different ones could show up (and that's just the worst of the D.O.E. rare drops), or a sword which requires 2 rare drops each from the three dragon bosses. But arguably the king of this trope is the Green Shard from the Demented King in the 61-floor Phantom Depths, a Marathon Level which starts you at Level 1 with no items and must be completed without checkpoints. Clearing the dungeon once is a feat in itself. Summoning the willpower to beat it multiple times for the rare Purple Shard, which has a 15% drop rate, is another. The Green Shard? You have a 1 in 20 chance of getting it, and it takes hours to get just one drop from the Demented King. The reward? All of his drops create a shield which is only minimally stronger than the others. Even adventurers who have the perseverance to collect the other rare drops tend to get stumped here.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • The Windows Phone and Steam remakes of Final Fantasy III also have their share of this.
      • Similar to Final Fantasy IV, collecting all the bestiary entries and opening the treasure chests for the "Filling Up The Grotesquerie" and "I, My, Me, Mine" achievements. The majority of dungeons contain encounters so rare that you may never know they exist, and towns and dungeons are filled with secret passageways, making chests easily missable. Moreover, certain dungeons can only be entered once, making one mistake game-ending for completionists. And if that wasn't enough, the only way to review your bestiary and treasure hunting progress until the end of the game is by talking to an NPC located in an optional town in the secret passageway of an inn.
      • The bestiary achievement can only be unlocked by defeating the Superboss. But due to the unreliability of Mognet and a lack of consensus on non-DS ports of how to trigger events needed to access this boss, certain players have reported unable to finish this particular side quest.
    • Final Fantasy IV has a few Last Lousy Bestiary Entries for the "Know-It-All" achievement:
      • "General" (encountered while protecting Rydia in Kaipo) and "Captain" (encountered in the defense of Fabul) will run away if their henchmen are killed first and are only encountered during those times. You must kill them first to get their entries.
      • The boss fight with Dr. Lugae and Barnabas features two mutually-exclusive entries. If you kill Barnabas first, Lugae will take control of his creation and allow you to fight his upgraded form, Barnabas-Z. However, you won't get the "Doctor" entry if you do this. Likewise, if you kill Lugae first, you get his entry, but you won't get to fight Barnabas-Z for that entry, thus requiring a second playthrough for both "Doctor" and "Barnabas-Z".
      • To get all the entries for the Calcabrina dolls, you must kill one of one type, then all three of the other type, then the fusion form.
      • The Superboss fight with Proto-Babil requires Edge to steal an item from the Final Boss in a previous playthrough in order to access it.
    • Final Fantasy IX:
      • Steiner's Excalibur II can only be found in the last dungeon of the game (the game is four disks long) and you have to get there before the twelve-hour mark to get it (else you have to keep the game on for TWO YEARS to overflow the game clock). There's a guide online that perfected this challenge, showing that it's possible to get the Excalibur II and all missable items and remain at level 1 for stat gains. It'll take you hours to read it.
      • The game is kind enough to not keep track of completion percentage, but it STILL manages to drive the player insane by having an obscure "treasure hunter ranking" that tracks how many treasures you collect. This includes many "key items" that can be lost forever, one of which is because the guy who gives it to you needs three very easily missable key items and he DIES in the fourth disk — and no, you can't just steal it from his house. Many of the missable items are chests that, for some reason, get refilled (so you miss the chance to gain their previous contents), during periods when you have no reason to be anywhere near their locations.
      • Several of those key items are only available by playing very, very repetitive mini-games that don't otherwise grant a player any other rewards beyond non-unique Tetra Master cards (which aren't good for anything beyond playing Tetra Master anyway) long past most people's patience level. The worst of all is the Athlete Queen, which has a very small window of opportunity to get, and has you race against an NPC until he reaches racing level 80. His level only increases when you win, and he eventually becomes extremely difficult to beat. Good luck trying to get the Excalibur II in a perfect game if you count the Athlete Queen, as the limited window means you can't put it off until later.
      • Several of the best items that will help your party — with stats and by giving you abilities you otherwise couldn't get — have to be synthesised from weaker items that you probably already sold, or can be bought in stores that have already been destroyed, or are locked away in a town that was enveloped by giant tree roots.
    • Equipment that boosts stats also boosts stat GROWTH, meaning that you have to wear it starting at level 1 to get the maximum benefit out of it. Some of the best stat-boosting equipment is only available on disc four, and to get that far still at level 1 you need to run from every battle, find special "friendly monsters" to gain ability points, and use obscure strategies for many bosses. And to make matters worse, you have to get Marcus during the short period he is in your party to level 99, because Eiko later inherits his stat bonuses, but not his level (contrary to Amarant, who inherits Blank's level). Of course this also means you can't get perfect stats and Excalibur II in the same game barring the clock rollover glitch.
      • The nearly sole reason why many treasures, items, and events are a Guide Dang It! was due to Square releasing an online system alongside the game that told you where everything was, but to actually use the system proper, you needed a strategy guide published by Square which wasn't an actual strategy guide at all. Instead, the "guide" contained codes you used on Square's website to obtain the information.
    • In Final Fantasy X, you need to capture 10 of every monster in Spira note  in order to access the hardest boss in the game. By the time you get access to weapons with the Capture ability on them, catching monsters from earlier levels is fairly easy, and you can capture monsters in later levels as you're clearing them for story purposes. There is, however, one monster called Tonberry who has the lowest appearance rate of any monster in the game. You can run around for hours in the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth without seeing even one, and you'll almost definitely have caught 10 of the other monstersnote  in the game before then.
    • In Final Fantasy X-2:
      • If you miss talking to the Moogle-Suit person (Who turns out to be the real Yuna in disguise) towards the beginning, while pursuing the fake Yuna, you'll lose 100% completion.
      • The Dresspheres, and the Garment Grids - the best Dressphere in the game, the Mascot, is unlocked by talking to the innkeeper. In all five chapters. As well as get an Episode Complete in the final chapter for every location in the map, with every location being a Guide Dang It! in itself, because if you mess up early in the game on the Mi'hen Highroad and don't get a specific outcome of the machine malfunctioning mystery there, you lose the Episode Complete and the chance to get the Mascot on this run.
      • As for the Garment Grids, the last one you get gives you the intrinsic ability to use a Game-Breaker ability - if you never run from a battle during the entire game. It is also unlocked by viewing every possible enemy in its Oversoul mode - an annoying challenge that virtually requires fleeing from enemies regularly (thank goodness the Grid and its Game-Breaker carries over into a New Game Plus). Bottom line - Only about 40% of the game is completed if you just run through, and that other 60% is VERY easy to miss something out from, so if you want everything, buy a strategy guide (or better yet, check gamefaqs.com), or get ready to reset constantly.
      • And even if the player goes through Touching The Moogle early on and everything, the player can still end up with exactly 1% missing for the wanted 100%. All because you did not pick the 'right' choice at the beginning of Chapter 2.
      • Getting all the powers for the Blue Mage is an exercise in frustration, given that some of them are specific to boss characters who can be missed in a given play-through based on which choices you made in a given chapter, and even if you made the right choice to face that particular boss, they rarely use the power.
    • Final Fantasy XII:
      • The Rare Game are this trope personified. There are 80, and each of them have certain conditions to spawn in specific areas, ranging from simple (40% chance to spawn when you enter, 20% chance to spawn after killing a certain enemy) to the tedious (wait in this area for X amount of time, kill X number of creatures) to the outright batshit insane (kill all the enemies in this area before anything respawns, then leave and return).
      • While not as bad as Rare Game, filling out your Clan Primer can be just as infuriating. You might need to kill 10 of a particular enemy, and only one spawns in the area you're in, forcing you to move two areas away to make everything respawn so you can kill them again.
      • The monsters in Barheim Passage deserve special mention: If you want the entries for Zombies and Specters, you must allow the Battery Mimics to drain the power...and then survive the undead onslaught. You can get them later, but Zombies appear in the Tomb of Raithwall (which you won get to for another 10 or so character leves) and the Specters reappear as enemies in the secret areas of Barheim...at almost level 40!
    • Final Fantasy XIII-2:
      • Trying to get the Monster Collection fragment is particularly painful, as it requires you to defeat every enemy in the game, some of which are Superbosses capable of stomping you and many rare monsters that pretty much require a guide to even find.
      • The Lucky Coin requires you to win 7,777 coins at the slots in Serendipity. Against a very realistic slot machine, where there's no way to game the reels, rig the machine, or really do anything unless you have superhuman reflexes and a photographic memory. And if you do what some guides recommend and put a rubber band on the 'autoplay' button, then it cuts your chances of winning anything by 33%.
      • The Travel Guide: Academia fragment. It requires you to get 100% exploration on all Academia maps. Academia 400 AF is That One Level, Academia 4XX AF is a massive sprawling city with dozens of obscure little nooks and crannies, and Academia 500 AF is a platformer level with many out of the way platforms that are insanely hard to reach. Even worse, getting all the Travel Guide fragments unlocks the Battlemania Fragment Skill, which increases the chance of rare monsters spawning, and is something you'll definitely want to get.
  • The Last Lousy Vivosaurs in Fossil Fighters are a quintet of baby birds, one for each element (minus Legendary). Their abilities aren't generally that special, but the only way to get them? To get every other viviosaur in the game and max out their levels. That'll keep you busy for a while... However, it is possible to play with the Neutral-type one, Squirk, early if you get lucky using Aoptryx's Ancient Power "Transformation" ability.
  • Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 has the "Millionaire" trophy which requires you to get 100 million credits... which requires a LOT of grinding. The quickest and easiest way to do this without the DLC is to keep killing Clione, an enemy with high HP and defense, restoring health on every turn, over and over, because it drops a lot of credits. Which, with the right equipment and attacks used, isn't as hard as much as it's just tiring to do over and over. Also, just getting the dungeon containing this enemy in the first place requires several rounds of dungeon crafting from random boss-fight drops... With the DLC packs (which lets you go beyond level 99) it's slightly faster and more varied, but still grindy - after you reach certain levels you can safely start fighting stronger versions of the same enemy dropping more coins, and eventually move on to even higher-leveled "tournament" fights with higher payoff... still doing this over and over.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • The Frequent Friend trophy in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] is a huge pain to get, thanks to it requiring the use of the game's StreetPass functions, which are rather unreliable when it comes to exchanging data with other players. If you don't have any friends with the game, it basically becomes a Luck-Based Mission, due to the ability to StreetPass Non Player Characters being seemingly broken in the English version, meaning you'll just have travel everywhere hoping you pass someone and get the StreetPass to go through properly.
    • Players aiming for 100% in the Trinity Archives in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep may run into some trouble, for even after completing the individual reports of the three characters, the Item Collection screen may still be at 98 or 99%. There's no consensus on what makes up these last points, with some people saying you need to acquire all the special keyblades with the three characters (which implies beating what may be That One Boss of the entire series three times), while others point to the completely useless arena ticket itens and recipes (none of which go in the reports section and cost a lot of medals). Even if you manage to get the Item Collection to 100% quickly, you still have to play for at least 80 hours for a trophy.
  • Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam has finding the Wellington Boots, which also crosses over with some Luck-Based Mission to boot. To recap: You have to battle a Paper Broozer, a rare enemy that only appears in a few spots of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Said Paper Broozer won't drop them normally: it must first use a certain attack (out of three possible ones) to attack the bros. This attack throws a number of barrels that the bros must break with their hammers. Upon doing that, each barrel has a chance to contain loot. Said loot is usually coins, with a small chance to contain a rare item which has a one in seven chance of being the Wellington Boots, the other six possible drops being Beans. If you're very unlucky, this could take weeks to achieve.
  • Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force has the player collect Navi Chips/Mega Chips/Mega Cards. To gain them, you have to defeat stronger versions of the game's main bosses. Some of them really make it hard to get their strongest Mega Cards and if anything, it's much easier to get the rest of the Standard and Giga library since you don't have to run around trying to find the boss just to delete them for their cards.
  • The last few medals in Miitopia can be a real pain to get. If you want 100% Completion on these, you'll have to: Defeat every type of monster, obtain every type of grub (yep, the Rares and Very Rares count as separate types), collect every weapon and clothing, listen to every music, have every job reach the max level (50), reach max level relationship (99) involving two and four party members (yes, the medals separate this), reach +99 grub bonus on all stats, recruit/add at least 30 Miis to your team, do at least 100 quests, open at least 500 treasure chests, and clear the Tower of Dread. While some can eventually be done not too long after the post-game starts, the rest are either pure grindfest, Luck-Based Mission, or legitimately difficult to be done by casual players.
  • If you take it upon yourself to fill out the enemy data records in Mother 3, you will have to get the back sprites of every enemy in the game where appropriate. This includes going out of your way to back-attack enemies in the early chapters, before you can even acquire Look-Behind-Yous to facilitate this. Several enemies are also exclusive to earlier chapters so you miss out on their data entry if you finish a chapter too soon.
  • Nocturne: Rebirth has an item glossary, which is hard to fill out due to how some items can't be obtained through forging or shops at all and instead can only be obtained through a Rare Random Drop or a random Brave Clear reward. The worst offenders are Cloudy Bracelet and Decalogue, which are somehow even rarer than the game's Infinity Plus One Swords. It gets to the point where several New Game Plus runs are needed to even get a decent shot at getting some of these. Even though the game is Nintendo Hard in terms of combat, actually beating and Brave Clearing all the bosses is considered far easier than filling out the item glossary.
  • One Way Heroics has the Dosey Plus ending, which requires the player to find a very rare Parchment of Darkness, which will take a lot of Save Scumming at scroll shops at around 1000km or greater. Once they have that, they'll have to max Dosey's affection and beat the Demon Lord before she transforms into a Killer Hound, which is no easy feat even if the player already prepared her favorite food. While the other endings are harder in terms of gameplay, Dosey Plus is far more lucked-based.
  • Phantasy Star Nova has the "Mark of a Hero King" Trophy, which requires you to kill 11,111 enemies. That doesn't sound too bad, until you realize that the Quest with the most enemies only has 110 targets. It's almost certain that you won't get it without going out of your way just to kill a lot of things.
  • Pokémon:
    • There are one or two special Legendary Pokémon per game which are not available normally. These are usually obtained by storyline events, and with the One Game for the Price of Two mechanic, you usually have to trade for the last one. Some normal creatures are also version-exclusive. That's not the Last Lousy Point. The Last Lousy Point for Pokémon games are the Mythical Pokémon- those Pokémon you cannot get without outside help, usually obtained via a special Nintendo event (or, for the more opportunistic, using a cheat device). They may show up on the GTS (barring the ribbon holding mons that can't be traded) but they go FAST when it isn't someone just looking to store it there by asking for something impossible like a level 9 Haunternote . Four of them can be gotten from spin-off games at any time, which can be extended to seven with a Japanese-only bonus disk and some glitch abuse. Nintendo later started to repeat event distributions a lot more often than they used to, but it's still quite annoying. Thankfully, your Pokédex is generally treated as complete even if you don't have the event-only creatures.
    • There are some things that only evolve by trading, so you had better have either multiple copies of the game or a friend who also plays it. In the first games, Golem couldn't even be seen without tradingNote, since no NPC used it and there weren't any pictures of it lying around for your character to look at. Up until Gen VI, you couldn't request anything you hadn't seen, which made this sort of thing worse; now there's also an option to just type in a Pokémon's name.
    • There are also some Pokémon that can only be obtained by trading them while they are holding a specific item (Kingdra, Steelix, etc). Said item naturally could only be found one time at one place once in the game. However, in later games, some trade-item evolution Pokémon like Steelix are available in the wild, and some of the required items can now be obtained as prizes for minigames. Some of items can also be held by some specific wild Pokémon, typically at a rather low chance, so you can avoid minigames and just try to encounter those exact species with a 'mon at the front of your party that has the ability Frisknote  and the move Thief.note  However, the "robbing the wildlife" method can still take hours.
    • To make this even worse, Shelmet and Karrablast only evolve when traded for each other specifically.
    • Feebas. It's found on six randomly chosen tiles in a gigantic pool of water, and thanks to the random encounter system there is no guarantee that you haven't found its tile already but didn't notice. The evolution of Feebas, Milotic, also counts. Without looking at a guide, it would be difficult to guess that the slimy bug-eyed brown Feebas would evolve into the beautiful brightly-colored serpent-like Milotic. Furthermore the only way to cause the evolution is to make it beautiful by feeding it candies, which is otherwise pointless outside of an optional minigame. And in order to get enough Beauty, it usually requires a Special Attack-boosting nature, decent to high quality Pokéblocks, and semi-rare berries to make the candy with. Even Game Freak realized this was too much work. In HeartGold/SoulSilver, due to the removal of treat making, Feebas could be evolved by getting it massaged. Of course, you can only do this once a day, for just one hour a day, and if you miss it, you've gotta wait 'til tomorrow. Possibly as an apology, in Black & White, you can evolve your Feebas by trading it with an item attached, like many other Pokémon.
    • The Socialization Bonus requirement for getting Spiritomb is talking to people 32 times in the Underground. Add to the fact that one needs to leave and reenter the main part of the Underground to make repeated conversations count and it's a fairly tedious process for people who don't have anywhere near that many friends to play with. The only other way to get a Spiritomb lies within the Pokéwalker (a Pedometer with a Pokémon catching minigame built in) that was sold with Heart Gold/Soul Silver. Naturally this is still mind-numbingly hard, as you have to earn 100,000 watts to get the route Spiritomb's can be found on. At twenty steps a watt, you have to take two million steps before you unlock the route. At least this part is cumulative, once you get the route where you can get a Spiritomb, you still have to walk over 10,000 steps in a single day to have any sort of chance of actually seeing said Spiritomb, and even then the chances are still very low.
    • All this just makes many a player glad they're not tasked to find the 1 in 8,192 odds of seeing the shiny form of each Pokémon. It's impossible even with access to every game since Generation III in which all Legendaries and Mythicals have been caught. Some Legendaries are specifically coded to never appear in their shiny form, with said form only existing within the game's code for consistency's sake. And event exclusives are distributed specifically in either normal or shiny form, with the event either giving out one or the other. Arceus wasn't available legitimately in its shiny form until Generation 6, and that event only took place in Japan.
    • Chimecho in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire and their remakes. 1% chance of finding it on the summit of Mt. Pyre, which you'll probably only visit for the plot (or the awesome music), and a catch rate lower than some Legendary Pokémon. And since no trainers have one outside of one place with randomly-generated battles, you may not even know it exists unless you have a player's guide or look at internet walkthroughs. To add insult to injury, it's one of the weakest Psychic-types in the whole series. Thankfully, its baby form is easily found in Generation 4.
    • Another third gen problem is Skitty. It's found in one area of one route, but at only 2% chance of finding it, good luck and lots of patience are required. And in Gen IV, you had to wait for a swarm after you beat the game. It explains the fact that so few Skitty were found on the GTS up until Gen VI, when they finally became a more common early-game encounter. Occasionally Skitty swarm their route in Gen III as well, which relieves the pressure slightly.
    • In the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series, you have Kecleon. In Red/Blue Rescue Team you need to be level 90 or higher and have the Friend Bow, while in Explorers you have to be Level 99 or 100, have the rare Golden Mask and use a Pokémon that can learn the Fast Friend IQ skill. With that done, you need to find a Kecleon Shop and steal from it to have Kecleon call some friends to attack you. All of this adds up to a one in thousand chance against a very powerful opponent (and in Red/Blue Rescue Team, you have to actually make it to the end of a dungeon with the recruit still alive). Escape Orbs won't work until you actually go to next floor, by the way.
      • There are few other Pokemon that can count this, not because they're hard to beat like Kecleon, but the effort to encounter just a single one in a dungeon that actually allows recruiting. For example in Red/Blue Rescue Team Pidgey spawns 1.5% of the time on few specific floors of the one dungeon where you can recruit it, or Ponyta who spawns only deep in Joyous Tower.
    • In Sun and Moon, the Zygarde Cores and Cells are scattered throughout the games' world. Some are found inside early area houses you otherwise don't have the need to enter, and what's even worse, some are only visible only during the day, or only at night, meaning you'll almost certainly miss some of them. In fact, there are numerous stories on the internet of people missing one Zygarde Cell and had to recheck all areas with the help of a guide. In the same games, there are some Pokémon that will only show up as allies in SOS battles with other Pokémon, meaning you could go through the entire game without ever seeing one of them outside of trainer battles.
    • Legends: Arceus also has plenty that will leave you pulling your hair out. From the Unown to the Spiritomb wisps to certain Pokémon that evolve through some utterly convoluted means, there will be a few instances when you'll want to look up a guide. Justified; you are completing the very first Pokédex of the Sinnoh region, so of course you're going to do a lot of stuff For Science!.
    • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have several by virtue of using a Wide-Open Sandbox approach.
      • Certain species are incredibly rare in very specific small sections of Paldea. Applin is a good offender, since it's one of several species that require ramming into trees to be able to battle, and unlike its fellow tree-dwellers Pineco and Slakoth, its evolutions are not catchable to breed the lower form from.
      • Among the game's Legendary Pokemon, the four Treasures of Ruin are a real pain to get. Each one is sealed in a shrine whose location can be pinpointed through a lategame chat with Ms. Raifort, but each shrine is sealed with eight small stakes. That are scattered around the corners of the map. The only upshot is that if you're close enough you can see them glow, but that's barely anything.
      • With the semi-Legendary species at the end of the Pokedex, Iron Thorns in Violet is a good sight harder to obtain. The other Iron Pokemon have large areas where they can spawn, though some of said areas are hard to find. Iron Thorns does not have that, as it very rarely appears in a couple of small regions with highly varied spawn tables, so it can take a good few minutes for one to deign to show up.
  • Save the Light: Besides the possibility of being permanently locked out of achieving 100% Completion in "Hall to the Heart"note  and "The Labyrinth"note , the Nicer Regen Badge can only be obtained from Boltron. You have to give him Boltron Tokens and hope that he gives you the badge because he might spout random advice or give you another random item instead.
  • 100% Completion in the Shin Megami Tensei series commonly involves recording all demons (or Personas) in the game in your Compendium. There's always a few stray demons which are inaccessible without fulfilling several requirements, and then there are some that are only available through fusion accidents. There's also the different Alignment-Based Endings if you're playing a game that has them, with some being harder to unlock than others.
    • For 100% Completion of the compendium of Persona 3: FES, you need to unlock Orpheus Telos and fuse him. However, to actually get the ability to fuse him is that you must have every single social link maxed by the end of the game. It's nigh-impossible to complete this task without a guide: The game takes place over a typical school year with interruptions, and specific social links are only available on conflicting days — doubly so for the "girlfriend" social links, which break apart if you try to do multiples at once. In the original game, this involved spending every single day in the game in a very specific order (and intentionally getting one character angry at you); in the expansion, you have a few spare days at the end, but still cannot deviate from a very specific plan.
    • The main obstacle to completing the Compendium in Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth is the "secret fusions", which don't appear in the compendium until you've made them and can only be fused by one specific combination of Personas. And some of Q's secret fusions weren't secret in earlier games (like Michael and Pale Rider), which might throw some players off.
    • Shin Megami Tensei IV might be the most egregious example of this trope with how hard it is to do a Neutral run. Long story short, it's frustratingly hard.
    • Shin Megami Tensei V has the usual route-exclusive demons as well as the traditional Law, Neutral, and Chaos endings, but there's also a hidden fourth ending that involves completing some series of quests from some NPCs you have to scour the map for, one of which you can easily screw yourself out of, siding with the last group of people you would expect to be Neutral, and beating the resident superboss. Mercifully, you only have to do these steps once, as their completion carries over to subsequent runs.
  • Super Mario RPG has 30 invisible treasure boxes and you can get an accessory halfway through the game that will alert you if an invisible treasure box is in the area. Many players had gotten 29 out of 30 boxes and were stumped to see that the last missing one was in the main hallway inside the Mushroom Kingdom's castle. How do you get it? Jump on Toad's head as he opens the door when you enter the castle for the first time and then jump up above the doorway to reach the box. Missed it and saved afterwards? Too bad, start the game over. At the very least, the box only contains a frog coin.
  • In the Tales Series, there is a considerable amount of this.
    • There's the usual 100% items, monsters, weapons, armor, etc. But then there are the skits. The optional, story or even completion level dependent cutscenes that pop up. They can be easy to miss, since they don't instantly start, and only give that option after a few seconds pause. If you're hurrying along, you can easily miss them. Some are only available in ONE specific room after ONE specific event. Also, they usually have their own completion counter, and when some skits only show up on certain story paths, of which there can be more than one, you have to play through the game more than once.
    • Tales of Symphonia must be completed three different times to even have a chance at 100%.
      • Made worse in the Updated Re-release on the PS2 (Which is what the PS3 version is based off of.), where in order to get all the titles, you must complete the game a few more times with to get the new costumes for everybody (except for Raine, who gets hers from the Casino.) And what's worse is that certain characters will give two titles, one for them and one for the person they're closest to (Picking Genis' best friend scene will nab both his and Presea's costumes.) But if you pick somebody else only they will get a title (Picking Presea will only get her costume and not Genis'.)
      • If going for 100% completion including the skits, you're going to have to play the game 8 times, as every character has their own skit if you pick their ending.
      • Even worse, to get 100% on the Collectors Book you have to get Zelos as your best friend. The guy barely trusts you when he joins the team and takes a lot to win over. Even if you do everything right it may still take more than one playthrough to get him. Oh, and some of the choices that make him like you more have a negative effect on other people (like the equally difficult Presea, who fortunately doesn't give you anything for the Collector's Book).
      • And just as bad is Genis' strongest weapon, One World. To get it you need to beat 99.9% of the game. See, after you open the door to the final boss there's a scene and a teleporter to the boss. Instead of fighting the boss, you need to leave the room and go play a minigame that offered mundane prizes before now (you're not actually told the prize is better now). The minigame is very difficult. If you win, you get the Infinity Plus One Kendama. This is likely to be the last item you get in the Collector's Book.
    • In Tales of the Abyss:
      • Those last points will probably come from the Din's Shop weapons, seeing as the game never tells you exactly what you can find there, or how many points they cost (with Dymlos, the most expensive weapon in the shop, costing 160 points). And you only get a measly one or two points for most of items you bring in, and only certain items give points towards each category. There's a damn good reason GameFAQs has a whole guide dedicated to this shop.
      • The Full Metal Edge and Golden Armor: as a reward of a sidequest, you must pick one of the two, so you need a New Game Plus and pick a different option on it to have both registered into the Collector's Book.
      • The US version has a bug that makes one skit scene (#266: Poor Thing) unable to start. You can still watch it on the Skit Scene Viewer in a New Game Plus, but you'll never get it on the game itself, and it won't count for your completion status.
  • The Last Lousy Monster in Monster Rancher Advance 2 is Octochrome. The only way to get it is by raising an Octopee monster to S-rank, and then waiting to be randomly attacked by it. If you beat it, you get a code for it. The problem? Thanks to a glitch, it's totally unobtainable. Well, unless you break out the cheat device.
  • In The World Ends with You there are many things to buy, monsters to beat (on several difficulties each no less) and pins to collect and master. If you miss something along the way, never fear. Completion of the game allows you to return to any point in the game and redo any challenge or find anything you may have missed. There are two catches, both involving Pork City:
    • The Pig Noise you defeat in this dungeon are the only ones that get recorded in the Noise Report. They drop the same thing on all four difficulties, so defeating just one records all four drops, but the Noise Report also records the lowest level at which you've beaten a particular Noise. If you want a neat grid of "Lv 1" throughout the whole thing, you'd better go in at level 1/*, because if you level up during battle the Noise Report sees that you won at level 2.
    • The Pig Mazurka, encountered only once, is the only Noise that drops pin #300, "Pig". If you see its sell value of a whopping 250000 yen and decide to sell it for some quick cash, you've just screwed yourself out of 100% pin mastery. Even in their home base, Pig Noise never respawn.

    Shoot Em Up 
  • In Blazing Star, it is possible to get the L-U-C-K-Y Spelling Bonus in Stage 3, but the "Y" is easily missed by players who plow through the Mini-Boss quickly instead of waiting for it to appear.
  • In the M2 ShotTriggers series' Challenge Modes, there are segments based on the non-boss segments of each stage, the bosses of each stage, and whole stages. You also get medals for your performance, including the Gold Medal and a large Challenge Point bonus if you complete the segment without getting hit. Then there is the "All Play" challenge where you have to complete the entire game under Challenge rules. And no, the medal requirements don't change for All Play; if you want the Gold, you have to complete the entire game without getting hit.
  • In Streetpass Mii Plaza's Mii Force/Streetpass Squad, the very last Treasure a player is most likely to find will be one awarded upon defeating two specific enemies simultaneously. There are three of these in the game, and all of the enemies involved are Damage Sponge types, you get no health bar to make sure you can nail those last hits at the same time, and the enemies move around the screen. As it's a Streetpass game, it's not a matter of trying again and again—after you've screwed up three times, you'll have to gather up some more Miis and try again.
  • In Viper Phase 1, your end-of-stage bonus is multiplied by 100 if you kill every last enemy in the stage. If you so much as miss one enemy, your multiplier will drop to 50. Because the game screen shifts depending on your horizontal position, it is possible to lose that x100 multiplier because of an enemy you didn't even see. You can also lose that multiplier by getting killed, as it takes a few seconds after you die to respawn on the screen and attack again, and enemies may escape during that delay. Don't even think about going for a world-class score if you can't clear the non-boss portion of each stage on one life.

    Stealth-Based Game 
  • Assassin's Creed II: If you don't have a very precise map/guide and a way to make sure you know you've already visited a feather's place, good luck retrieving all the feathers, particularly in the last few ones after 90 (out of 100). Brotherhood and every subsequent game eliminated that problem by putting such objects of interest directly on the maps.
  • The Thief games require you to collect a percentage of the treasure on each level depending on difficulty level. On the highest levels, you can expect to spend many a frustrating hour looking for those elusive last few bits.
  • Dishonored requires you to collect every gold piece in a level for 100%, be it dropped coins in the street or the contents of each guard's wallet.
  • Dishonored 2 has an achievement for gold collection. Fortunately, you "only" need to find 60% of the loot. Unfortunately, it's 60% for the entire playthrough.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: The 64 Kerotan frog toys distributed throughout the game (Yoshi plush dolls in the 3DS version) aren't all that bad, set against the standard of other games on this page. There's a camouflage available that lets you hear Kerotans in a room or screen you haven't shot yet, so you know to keep looking for them. The real problem is the Kerotans you need to shoot during the bike chase scene. You only get about a second to line up a proper shot, and seldom have the time after making a shot to listen for the sound they make to confirm that you even got it. Save-scumming is the only safe option. Failing to get the Kerotan Rank after being completely sure you got all the Kerotans in the bike scene is, to say the least, highly distressing.

    Survival Horror 
  • When going for a 10-star ranking in the Silent Hill games, you will find that it's not a pure test of skill, but rather a checklist of many cryptic benchmarks that would take ages to figure out in the absence of a walkthrough. And you won't know if you've failed to meet one of those benchmarks until after finishing the game. Silent Hill 4 eases up a little bit by giving you an extra .2 stars as a freebie - meaning a score of 10.2 is possible.

    Turn Based Strategy 
  • Nintendo Wars:
    • In the first Advance Wars, unlocking COs is much more troublesome than it is in the sequels. Several of them require you to play through the game multiple times while meeting very specific requirements, such as only using a certain CO for the entirety of a certain series of missions. This can be especially hard to figure out since Max is so overwhelmingly good compared to the other two.
    • In the same game, the bane of perfectionists is the advanced campaign and its ranking system. Speed is the only thing that matters, but the S-rank requirements are so strict that they can only be achieved through intense AI and luck manipulation, making one wonder if the time limits were designed solely from a theoretical point of view. Even after a perfect play, the speed rating might still fall below 100% when it's literally impossible to be any faster.

    Wide Open Sandbox 
  • inFAMOUS had a problem with this in the form of Blast Shards. Cole could use an ability to find them on his radar, but the points were so small and scattered throughout the city that it could be a chore to find them all. inFAMOUS 2 made it a point to fix this issue by having the radar always point to the closest Blast Shard, no matter how far away it was.
  • Grand Theft Auto 2: The usual assortment of Insane Stunts and Rampage icons. Also, this is the first GTA game to feature collectables — you don't earn anything apart from a bare-bones bonus stage (which passwords unlock more easily, anyway).
  • If you use the cheat codes and then save in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one of the hidden packages will disappear permanently. There's also the Ambulance and Firefighting sub-missions, which can be controller-breakingly frustrating, especially if at a high level of the Firefighter missions you lose because you couldn't douse a burning man inside of a pizza restaurant.
  • Just Cause 2 has a particularly infamous example: Some of the cities are so MASSIVE and filled to the brim with things to collect and destroy that you'll end up with 100% completion but no official fanfare to mark it. The reason for this is that the 100% is a rounding error and you are short of it by a minuscule amount! Have fun finding those last few water-towers and that statue you didn't know you missed. It gets even worse if you feel like getting 100% completion for the entire game, since there are several collectables spread throughout the game world which aren't counted towards the completion of any of the towns or cities. In other words, you have no indication of where they might be other than that they're somewhere in the huge amounts of empty space between settlements.
  • The Five Finger Fillet side missions from both Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II 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.
  • The Simpsons Hit & Run has hidden collector cards, gags, and wasp cameras required for 100% Completion. Finding the cards is fairly straightforward, but the gags and wasps are needlessly cryptic. Gags require interacting with bits of scenery that are usually near-indistinguishable from the static props surrounding them, and the wasps remain invisible until you get right in front of them. Frustratingly, the collector cards get convenient checklists to keep track of which ones you've found, but gags and wasps don't.

    Other 
  • Take a look at the list of achievements for a given game on Steam. The ones with the lowest achieved percentages will be the ones which fit this trope.
  • TrueAchievements.com has a system for rating Xbox 360 achievements on their difficulty: Take the total number of gamers tracked who have the game (defined as having at least one achievement for that game), divide by the number of gamers who have that achievement, then take the square root to get the TAScore. The easiest achievements have a TAScore closer to 1.00. Once you get past 5.00 or so, you're in Last Lousy Point territory.
    • PSNProfiles.com has a similar system, but they just give you straight percentage points for how many gamers have managed that trophy. If less than 5% of game owners have a particular trophy, then...yep, you guessed it.
  • Resting your GamerScore on a number that isn't a multiple of 5 will likely cause a modicum of annoyance. Harmonix played on this obsession with nice, neat numbers with Rock Band 3 where there is an easy-to-earn Achievement worth 4 GS (you're likely to stumble on it during your first couple of plays). To get that number to a smooth 10 and set the universe back in order you have to earn a 6 point Achievement for linking your account with the Rock Band website for stat tracking.
  • Double Dragon Neon gives you 1 GS for starting the game, with the Big Bad mocking you with a "Now finish what you started!" as its description. Clearing the game and defeating the Big Bad will net you the remaining 19 GS. Not too tough, but very annoying.
  • In pinball, this is known as a "gatekeeper," named so because such an objective or collectible item effectively blocks the player's way towards total victory. Some notable examples include:
    • "Complete All Scenes" from The Shadow. "Khan Multiball" and "Shadow Multiball" only require you lock enough balls to start them, and "Complete the Battlefield" only needs 100 switch hits on one part of the playfield (which is small, compact, and full of bounciness so it counts up rapidly). Each Scene is timed and all require a minimum of four shots. It is not uncommon for even experts to have finished the other three while having only finished two or three scenes (or even just one or none at all).
    • The light labeled as "Illusions" in Theatre of Magic is also incredibly difficult. "Theatre" may require 7 left orbit shots and "Midnight" may require 12 right orbit shots, but each Illusion requires a minimum of 4 hits to the Magic Trunk and there are 8 Illusions in all. The saving grace is that Illusions don't have to be completed, just started, to count towards lighting "Illusions."
    • "Davy Jones Defeated" in Pirates of the Caribbean (Stern) requires that you've sunk all four ships, and only then do you even have a chance at dueling against Davy Jones, let alone defeating him. "Heart Super Jackpot Completed" could count too, as Heart Multiball is difficult to even begin because the game is choosy about letting you advance towards it, and you have to perform exceptionally well at Heart Multiball for the Super Jackpot to appear. Both of these goals require by far the largest amount of shots to complete. Pirates of the Caribbean pairs objectives with cardinal directions, and it is probably no coincidence that both of these objectives are assigned to the East sector—it is the cardinal direction with the greatest reward (a Special, which under default conditions is a free game).
    • It's a bit more complicated with The Sopranos. Under normal circumstances, "Episodes" would be the one that's the most troublesome and the longest to achieve, as unlike the other goals, this objective is actually five objectives (not unlike with The Shadow or Theatre of Magic above). However, the game is absolutely fine with the player letting the timer run out for all five Episodes. If the player chooses to do this, then "R.I.P." becomes the gatekeeper, as it requires you bury all eight characters as displayed on the top-right by lighting the R, I, and P letters in that corner eight times.


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