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Marathon Level

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Average lap time: 1:30:00. Estimated time to finish: around 52 minutes. Good luck.

"How much farther do we have to go?! This place goes on forever! Ah, there's no point in complaining about it. We must press onward! After all, how much more could there be?"

So, you've been spending about four hours charging through the Bonus Dungeon. It must be over soon, right? It's been about sixteen rooms worth of dungeon, you've fought past at least three Mini bosses, battled heroically past hordes of Goddamned Bats and Demonic Spiders and just have to be near the boss, right?

Nope, this is the Marathon Level, sometimes called a gauntlet, which means getting from start to finish is gonna take some doin'. The Marathon Level is to a dungeon what a Marathon Boss is to a normal boss: one that is incredibly long, and takes a huge amount of time to complete; e.g., a one hundred floor tower, or something similar. Heck, most examples of this are either the Bonus Dungeon or Very Definitely Final Dungeon, and at least half are literally a hundred floors high or deep.

While Marathon Levels can be easy to hate, don't judge them too harshly. These levels can be some of the best-designed levels in the game (sometimes), though they can also be susceptible to Space Filling Paths and Cut and Paste Environments. If you're particularly unlucky, a Marathon Level may end with a Marathon Boss. This trope is almost a given if it has a name like 'Cave of Ordeals'.

See also Marathon Boss, the boss version. Not to be confused with a level in Marathon. Checkpoint Starvation can make these levels quite maddening, and heaven help you if it's combined with Bladder of Steel.

Contrast Absurdly Short Level.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Adventure 
  • Poptropica:
    • Skullduggery is notably long because a majority of it revolves around pirate battles and plundering loot, not just solving puzzles. You need a lot of money to buy the best ship, and even on the optimal route, it's still a few hours longer than most other islands.
    • Astro-Knights is one of the hardest levels in the game, containing a lot of difficult platforming, complex puzzles, and even multiple boss battles. It had an official walkthrough released due to having the lowest completion rate of every island.
    • Cryptids Island is also no slouch, since after the lengthy opener, you have to explore five different places to find evidence of cryptids. Each of these visits takes a good amount of time, and there's a conclusion segment on top of it.

    Action Adventure 
  • ANNO: Mutationem: The Consortium's Elaborate Underground Base serves as the largest area coupled with a Boss Bonanza. The first section consists of traversing through linear paths of large rooms to collect color-coded key cards to open passages until reaching the central elevator. Followed by an area leading into a Wolfpack Boss and a Laser Hallway against waves of Mooks in research facilities to pass by into the inner part of the base.
  • Ōkami:
    • Any completionist who's ever played the game has spent untold additional hours getting the stray beads. Specifically, a set of three beads requires you to fight through a total of thirty demon gates in groups of ten each. The first two sets aren't bad... fifteen minutes to half an hour each depending on your skills. The third one however is at least an hour and a half of the toughest enemies in the game, below bosses. You can't save, and if you leave after finishing any gates you have to start the stage over.
    • Oni Island, the fifth dungeon, is the longest in the game. Lots of racing segments, tricky obstacles, fairly tough enemy battles, and a difficult boss. Even getting to the place takes a while.
  • Ecco the Dolphin has at least one: the infamous "Welcome to the Machine" from the first game. It's a five-minute long Auto-Scrolling Level, which doesn't sound so bad until you understand that it's also The Maze and Under the Sea, so it scrolls in all kinds of ridiculous directions. One wrong move and you get an Ecco pancake and have to start over. The wonky controls don't help either. And the final boss that follows has an attack that acts as a Mook Bouncer, sending you back to the Machine.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Silenced Cathedral in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is the only area that has two warp gates linked to it instead of just one. It's a huge, sprawling maze of a place full of puzzles (both block and otherwise) and the creepy, wall-climbing Zephonim vampires. It takes about two hours to complete if you know what you're doing, and it's only the second stage of the game. And that's the final version. It was supposed to be even longer, but a good portion of the Cathedral was Dummied Out due to various reasons.
  • Chapter 19 in Kid Icarus: Uprising consists of climbing a very tall tower from the bottom floor. Constantly lampshaded by Pit repeatedly asking his Mission Control "Are We There Yet??" (and annoying the hell out of her) and saying "This place is so huge, we even had a loading screen back there!" (the only other Land Battle segments that are so divided involve a Boss Rush.
    Viridi: Pit, I've got good news for the both of us. The Chariot Master is up ahead. SO YOU CAN FINALLY STOP ASKING ME IF WE'RE THERE YET!
  • Metroid:
    • Metroid Prime: The game has the first run of Phazon Mines, up until the Invisible Sentry Drone, and there are no checkpoints or save rooms. You're talking about roughly ten straight rooms of Space Pirates, Elite Pirates, and some devious puzzles and obstacles. Then there's the section that's topped off with the Elite Omega Pirate boss.
    • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: There are some sequences which Save-Game Limits kick in (save - walk a long distance - face a boss - walk some more - save again), most memorably before the Alpha Blogg and Spider Guardian fights.
    • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: Phaaze is the final area in the game (and by extension the original trilogy), and as such you have to go through an area for half an hour without saving, THEN beat the final bosses, which can take up to another 20 minutes if not more. Thankfully, dying only puts you back at the bosses - too bad it's the first of the three.
    • Metroid: Samus Returns: Area 3 has a large, robust layout, many powerups and items to find, and 10 Metroids to hunt. There's also Area 8 (the final one), a long road towards Queen Metroid that includes a tall, imposing vertical chamber, a sequence where Samus has to slay newborn Metroids, the battle against the Metroid Queen, and the way back to the surface (at the end of which a surprise extra boss battle awaits).
  • In the second season of Minecraft: Story Mode, Jesse and his crew enter a gauntlet to find one of the items needed to escape the nether realm, except the designer of the gauntlet implemented a six-hundred trial run, making the team Take a Third Option.
  • The Dark Tower, The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of 3D Dot Game Heroes has seven full-sized floors, the first six of which make you fight one of the previous temple bosses at the end. Luckily, there are warp portals at every odd-numbered floor that bring you back to the entrance of the tower to allow you to replenish your supplies.
  • The various Dark Realm levels from Onimusha but particularly the version in the fourth game, Dawn of Dreams. In most of the prior games, the Dark Realm consisted of at most 20 or so levels. Not only does Dawn of Dreams have 100 levels, but starting somewhere in the 20s those levels will either have replacement mooks, (so you kill one type of genma, and another of the same sort will appear out of nowhere to take it's place) and second or even third waves of enemies, so after finally wiping out all the starting demons and the ones that replaced them, suddenly a whole fresh wave of them will attack you and you'll have to start the process all over again. Successfully completing all 100 levels will require at least 3-4 hours of dedicated time. By the time you get to the later levels, it becomes obvious that the game isn't trying to throw enemies at you that are too powerful to handle, mostly it's just trying to get the player to run out of their valuable supplies, and mentally/physically exhaust them into making small but critical mistakes that will get them killed. There's also no way to save progress inside the Dark Realm, so you have to do it from start to finish in one shot, and if you want 100% Completion, all five of the characters in your party will need to go through all 100 levels by themselves. Good luck.

    Action Game 
  • Tomb Raider:
    • Barkhang Monastery and Temple of Xian in Tomb Raider II, some of the climactic levels in the game and each frequently regarded as a Best Level Ever.
    • At least half the levels in Tomb Raider III classify as marathon levels by the standards of the rest of the franchise (and the genre as a whole for that matter), this, combined with Nintendo Hard is the main reason behind its divisive reputation.
  • The Devil May Cry games have the Bloody Palace mode introduced since Devil May Cry 2, featuring a very long series of enemy and boss encounters that you're expected to finish in one session. Devil May Cry 2 and Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening have 9999 and 10,000 levels each respectively, but you can skip up to 100 levels at a time by choosing harder fights. Devil May Cry 4, DmC: Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry 5 have 101 levels each, but you fight through one level at a time, and with an extendable timer. Devil May Cry 5 also eases on this trope by adding a "Suspend" feature that allows you to take a break from the mode and continue from where you left off at a later time.
  • Bayonetta:
  • Nearly every single level of Ninja Gaiden II (PS3/Xbox 360) is this to an extent, few of them taking less than half an hour to beat. The most brutal however is chapter 11, an endless gauntlet where you will be assaulted by armies of mooks every ten meters, with a healthy dose of Checkpoint Starvation and a boss at the end.
  • Oni has a few of these levels.
    • Chapter 5 has you going quite a distance through the airport cargo hangars. There are two different pathways you can take.
    • Chapter 7 is no doubt the longest level distance-wise. You traverse various platforms, descend around three floors, and run across several electrified pipelines.
    • Chapter 14 has you going through the Syndicate's mountain compound, which is quite large.
  • Practically every single level in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions takes at least twenty-five to thirty minutes to complete.
  • Operation 101 of The Wonderful 101, a Brutal Bonus Level consisting of 30 missions, without any checkpoints in-between.
  • Extra Level 98 in Mendel Palace has multiple layers of Mook Maker panels that spawn aggressive Fighter/Cossack dolls, and no power-ups. Even the most careful of players will struggle to finish it in less than ten minutes, as the enemies attack by kicking panels, which will reveal more enemies and force you to be very careful about how to attack to minimize the number of dolls you have to destroy.

    Beat Em Up 
  • The Amiga game Yo! Joe! Beat the Ghosts has a first level that takes over half an hour to complete.
  • Streets of Rage has the boat level (stage five), which seems never to end. In the third game, most of the levels are really long. Especially stage 5. It literally takes you about 15 minutes to beat it.
  • The final mission of the Japanese version of Super Double Dragon is more than twice as long as its American counterpart. In fact, it was originally planned to be split into two separate levels. The third and fourth missions of the NES version of the original were also very long, incorporating many areas not found in the arcade version.
  • Final Fight's fifth level is a long, long, long trip across the waterfront with tons of enemies and no scene breaks whatsoever. It actually starts at night and by the end you can see the rising sun in the distance.
  • One of the downloadable challenges in One Piece: Pirate Warriors has you defeat no less than 9999 enemies. Even with a high-level character, it takes about an hour to complete.
  • The Amiga game Franko: The Crazy Revenge has only three stages (not counting the bonus stages in between these) but makes up for them with sheer length, each taking around from 11 to 18-ish minutes to complete. The levels can feel even longer with all of the constant load times.

    Card Games 
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction: Due to the game not restoring your Life Points in between Duels, you can get worn down when forced to face multiple opponents without an opportunity to head home to save and refill your LP.
    • After Domino Station is taken over by the Neo Ghouls, you face about four of them in succession. Thankfully, they don't have as many Life Points as a regular duelist, 2,000 LP in fact.
    • A similar thing happens with the Millennium Guardians and Paradox in China. The five Millennium Guardians have 3,000 LP, but they are stronger than the Neo Ghouls, and Paradox is stronger and he has 8,000 LP.
    • The Chevaliers on Pegasus's island have 10,000 LP. There are only three, but then you have to duel either Panik or Mimic of Doom, both of them having 15,000 LP.

    Driving Game 
  • The Nürburgring Nordschleife (aka "the Green Hell") counts as this by default in any racing game it appears in. It's 21km long, and the real-world lap record is 6 minutes and 25 seconds. The endurance circuit, which combines the Nordschleife with the GP track, is 26km long with a lap record of over 8 minutes. See also its real-life entry below.
  • BAJA: Edge of Control has 3-hour long BAJA 1000 races. Keep in mind that these races are on extremely rough terrain, with trucks that require players to monitor heat, clutch damage, and suspension damage.
  • Mario Kart:
    • Mario Kart 64:
      • Rainbow Road. So long, a controller pack usually doesn't have enough memory to save a track ghost. It can take up to two minutes to complete a lap. And you have to do three laps. When the track was remastered for Mario Kart 8, it was made a lot shorter, by making you only do one lap around the course, divided into three segments.
      • Wario Stadium is a big, maze-like track built within an extreme sports stadium; the game's manual states that its length will make it tough for players to stay concentrated in the race.
    • Mario Kart: Super Circuit: Bowser Castle 4 has a long, complex layout where drivers have to take many sharp turns and jump various successive gaps; and it still has to be traversed in three laps. When the track returned in Mario Kart Tour, the race was reduced to a single lap divided in two segments.
    • The All Cup Tour in Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, featuring all 16 tracks, which takes about 45 minutes to do on 50cc, and a bit less in faster difficulty levels. For individual racetracks, there's Wario Colosseum, whose length means that you only have to complete two laps around it instead of the usual three.
    • Waluigi Pinball in Mario Kart DS is the longest track in the entire game. Unlike most examples here however, the track itself is fairly straightforward to complete and actually fairly short when compared to most tracks in other Mario Kart games.
    • Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 7 is long enough that it's also one long lap around the course, divided into three segments, rather than one whole lap. It's one of three courses in its game to be a three segment course rather than a three lap one, the others being the two Wuhu Island courses (Wuhu Loop, where you loop around Wuhu Island; and Maka Wuhu, where you drive up Maka Wuhu then glide back to the beach).
  • The average time for a race in most tracks in F-Zero GX hovers between 1 to 2 minutes, maybe 3 on a particularly high difficulty track. The final track of the AX Cup, Green Plant Spiral, takes an average player over 4 minutes to complete. This is because it was designed to be played on an arcade machine, and thus the track's increased length is broken up into checkpoints along the way, which you can still see in GX despite them being functionally useless.
  • The Gran Turismo series, as well as the Nürburging, features the fictional (but based on a real location in Spain) Circuito de la Sierra (about 27km).
    • As if the previous variants of the Test Course weren't long enough, Gran Turismo 5 adds Special Stage Route X, a 30km oval with 2 10km straights, intended to allow the fastest cars in the game to reach their maximum speed.
    • Then there are the endurance races. The shortest consists of 30 laps around Special Stage Route 11 in the first game, which will take a little under an hour. The longest are the 24 Hours of Le Mans and 24 Hours of Nürburgring, both of which are in 5 only. Your best bet is to either get some friends to help you out, pause the game after running for 2 hours and leave the console on for several days in a row, or use B-Spec mode, which shortens the race to a more bearable 8 hours when sped up. It also lets the AI do all the driving, so you can do something else while your B-Spec driver does the racing, but you still gotta be there so you can tell him to actually pit. 4 also has the 1000 miles! series, a series of four 250-mile endurance races that take at least three hours each.
  • Project CARS makes races incredibly long to even start with long practice and qualification sessions depending on what you set it to. An average Career race at 100% time progression can take half an hour just for practice (then again that extra time can really help set up your car and pit strategy), a quarter hour for qualification and the main race being anywhere between ten and fifteen laps. Then you get to some of the specific endurance events such as the 3-Hour McLaren F1 Challenge that, even at 1%, will still take half an hour. Then there's Endurance races that take up to twelve hours, and then finally the 24 Hours of Le Mans that puts you in a race for, well, twenty four hours.
  • OutRun 2's derivatives (since SP) add "15-stage Continuous" mode into the mix, where you must drive a Ferrari road car throughout 15 stages in a pre-determined order continuously. If you are skilled and don't crash on any car or barrier, this doesn't need 15 minutes to finish, but even for a Ferrari vehicle, driving this way would render a serious issue.
  • Wangan Midnight has the Metropolitian Highway (Tokyo) time attack course, which combines all four Tokyo courses into a 60 km romp and takes over 12 minutes to complete with a fully-tuned car. Maximum Tune 3 adds the Kanagawa version, which is a 35 km runthrough of Yokohane Line and Wangan Line that takes about 7 minutes to complete with the same kind of car; Maximum Tune 4 expands this to also cover the Minato Mirai route for a 48 km ride that takes a little over 9 minutes. The Japanese version of Maximum Tune 5 has the Sub-Center version which is just slightly under 70 kilometers long and takes nearly 15 minutes to finish, again with a full-tuned vehicle!

    Due to their lengths, playing one of these courses requires you to insert an additional credit. As shown in an alert when you choose these courses in Maximum Tune 3 onward, DO NOT allow another player to challenge you while racing either of these courses, or you will lose the additional credit you inserted and have to insert credits again to take another shot at either course.
  • Fatal Racing's 3rd bonus race takes around 15 minutes to finish on Girlie mode... and over 40 minutes on a good day on Impossible, with low damage. Every other course can be finished (1st place, all laps done) in under 15 minutes on Impossible, even with high damage and a full house of 16 cars (15 or 14 computers). It is highly suspected that this is due to a mistake in the course's configuration. This is also one of the few tracks with unavoidable damage due to long jumps and the only track with moving ramps that can tilt beyond the vertical, causing you to ricochet off the walls and slam into the ground upside down in the middle of a very narrow track with no room for the other drivers to avoid you (not that they care). In short, unless you are playing on low damage (which defeats the point of the game) you either run out of lives and die in the first three or so laps or you survive only to see everyone else run out of lives and die, leaving you alone on the track for the next half an hour.
  • Most licensed Formula One games allow you to go the full distance of the real-life races, which all total up to around 190 miles (with the exception of Monaco, which still ends up being one of the longest races on the calendar just because it's slow). Furthermore, while real-world F1 races will time-out after two hours, not every F1 game includes this rule.
  • Forza:
    • The first three Motorsport games (and 6 as a showcase event category) had endurance races. In the first, the average time to complete one was about 45 minutes. The second bumped this up to an hour, and the third made it about 65-70 minutes. The two longest ones in 3 were the 17 lap (238 km) Le Mans race and 187 km Nürburgring race, the two tracks that are already marathon courses in their own right (see Real Life section below).
    • A limited-time only multiplayer lobby in Motorsport 4 had players race at Le Mans (which is by no means short) for three hundred and sixty laps. The absolute fastest lap time recorded is 3 minutes, 6 seconds. That's at least eighteen hours of racing, six hours short of the Le Mans 24h. Players who posted a picture of them on lap 360 were gifted a unique "Unicorn" car note  by the developers, which cannot be acquired in the game normally.
    • The Horizon series isn't exempt either. The "Horizon Finale" event in 2 has you driving through every town in the game in one super-circuit. The "Goliath Circuit" in 3 (which shows up once you level Byron Bay up to level 5) is a similar trek. Horizon 4 adds multiple marathon races for various disciplines, and Horizon 5 adds all the same ones to its even bigger map and even adds an extra-long Trailblazer PR stunt called "The Juggernaut" for good measure.
    • 7 has the "Survival of the Fastest" achievement, for which you have to win the Spa-Francorchamps 100 Showcase Event with the race length set to Extra Long, which is 69 laps for this course, or up to three hours. Better yet is the Sebring 300, the longest race in the Driver's Cup, whose Extra Long version is 243 laps, and can over 10 hours to complete. In Free Play or Multiplayer mode, the race length may be set up to 1000 laps for a circuit race or 24 hours for a timed race; god help you if you participate in a multiplayer race of this length.
  • Ridge Racer V has the 99 Trial mode, which is literally a 99-lap race around the Sunny Beach course. You need to get first place in the race to get the ultimate prize (it's just an in-game trophy, which the game built up way too much).
  • Need for Speed:
    • Need for Speed: Shift has one set of races designed to infuriate anyone going for 100% completion: Endurance. It consists of 5 races: 3 of them are 10 laps on ostensibly long tracks (the famed Spa-Francorchamps being one of them), one of them is 30 laps on a tiny figure-eight track, and then 3 laps on the legendary Nordschleife. THEN you get to challenge the 'Endurance champion' to complete the race sets. Even with heavily modified Tier 3 vehicles, the entire thing will take you a good 2-3 hours.
    • Hot Pursuit 2010 has Seacrest Tour, a roughly 44 mile race that will take a player likely 15 minutes to complete. It tends to be a Curb-Stomp Battle if one should make too many mistakes.
    • Most Wanted 2005 has several of them:
      • Hastings, a 3-lap circuit race with lots of sharp turns taking place across Downtown Rockport and Camden Beach, with one lap taking 3 minutes. The Pepega Edition variant, "Motherfucking Hastings", is even longer.
      • Petersburg & Camden, a Tollbooth race that takes place across the whole map, covering nearly every single tollbooth in Rockport, which takes about 8 minutes to complete.
      • Challenges #60 and #68 in the Challenge Series require the player to survive a pursuit at a high heat level for 15 minutes and 30 minutes respectively.
    • The 2012 version of Most Wanted has "Around the World" from the Ultimate Speed Pack DLC, a sprint race with a length of 13.1 miles. For reference, the longest sprint races from the base game, "Crashdown" and "Park and Country", both have a length of 4.8 miles.
  • Fuel has Endurance races, which take at least 20 minutes to complete, but then there is the Mt. Rainier Endurance race, the last of them all, where you have to cover 100 miles of offroading up and down mountainsides in a Muscle Car that is built for going offroad. It takes an hour and 15 minutes to finish. made worse by the level getting glitchy from the chunk loading process.
  • The aptly named Gigatrack in Trials Evolution. In a game where 2 minutes is normally the average track length, this one can take well over 15 minutes to complete.
  • WipEout HD has an achievement for causing the Time Trial lap counter to roll over. It rolls over at 99 laps.
  • At the end of every season in GRiD's career mode you can race the (12 minute long) 24 Hours of Le Mans, easily the longest, and toughest, race in career mode. If you're feeling up to it, you can actually do a quick race version that goes for anywhere from 12 minutes to 24 hours, depending on how daring you're feeling.
  • Test Drive Unlimited:
    • During a playthrough of the solo missions, there's a large amount of these races. The infamous Island Tour for example. You're very quick if you manage this 200-km (!) long race with a fully-tuned Saleen S7 TT or McLaren F1, both of which run up to around 262 MPH flat-out (and there's a lot of straights in the game) in less than half an hour. Or the Millionaires' Challenge, another entire island tour — this time with a timer (that's set to an hour!) and traffic. Both of these races are nightmares. And then there's still the damn car delivery missions. Long tracks in high traffic and you lose a LOT of money if the car so much as get scratched. TDU is a good contestant for being the king of Marathon Levels in racing games.
    • The PS2 version of the game has the King of the Hill series of races, with "Coastal Dream" being the longest race of all time with 166 km in Class A supercars. It takes more than 46-50 minutes to complete.
  • Certain faction missions in The Crew can keep you on the road for upwards of an hour (with at least one mission lasting over two hours in length). The developer, Ivory Tower, is comprised of a number of talents who previously worked on the aforementioned Test Drive Unlimited series so there is some precedent for this. Particular standouts include Los Angeles's Highway Child, a run around the U.S. through the highways clocking in at 1.5 hours, Miami's Showtime at 2, but the grand daddy of it all has to be Landmark Tour at Las Vegas. How long is it? It clocks in at a whopping 4 hours. Sure, you can pause if you're running solo, but if you're with another player? Bladder of Steel mandatory.
  • The 1996 Network Q RAC Rally Championship rally sim by Magnetic Fields has the Pundershaw stage as part of its championship calendar for the annual British rally. It's the longest stage in the game. And, to date, also the longest ever stage in any rally game. How long? It's up to 59 in-game kilometers, and takes up to 25 minutes to complete from start to finish. Yeah... The game has plenty of other long stages too (though none approaching the length of this one), and there's a very good reason why the key for "Pause" is listed among the main gameplay keys, rather than an afterthought.
  • The PC version of Mobil 1 Rally Championship from the same game series also has stages based on real-life British rally stages, with similar lengths. Pundershaw has been shortened to 42.82 km here, which is still 17 to 18 minutes.
  • TrackMania has much shorter races than most driving games: point-to-point races are rarely longer than a minute, and multi-lap races are usually 3 laps and take under two minutes total. Then Nations hits you with D-15 Endurance, a 10-lap race that will take you around 8 minutes. As if that wasn't enough, the very last track, E-05 Endurance, is a 60-lap monster where the Author time is almost exactly an hour. With the series' famed Level Editor, there's nothing stopping you from making Marathon Levels of your own - in 2, you can create races that are thousands of laps long.
  • Daytona USA can have the race length set by the operator to up to 500 laps on the Beginner track, 250 on Advanced, and 125 on Expert. And since this is an arcade game with no pausing, you better have a Bladder of Steel.
  • Redout has the Boss race mode, which uses teleporters to connect all five of an environment's tracks together into one circuit. There's a reason the story events are only ever two laps of a Boss.
  • Le Mans 24 in Endurance mode mimics the 24-hour race format with each in-game hour corresponding to 20 seconds real time on default settings for a total of 8 minutes, and 40 seconds real time on longest settings for a total of 16 minutes.
  • Modders for several sim titles (including RFactor and Assetto Corsa) have created the 44 mile/70 km lap of the Targa Florio course - a real road race in Sicily held until the 1970s - a very twisty mountainous course that takes around half an hour to lap at speed. There are also mods to include Isle of Man TT course (see Real Life section) into them.
  • Test Drive: Le Mans lets you play the 24 Hours of Le Mans in real time. You can save, but only on pit stops.
  • Wreckfest features a special stage ported from another Bugbear Entertainment game, Rally Trophy, that is over 11 kilometers long and takes about six minutes for a single lap.

    Fighting Game 
  • Super Smash Bros.:
    • A Multi-Mook Melee mode in the Smash Bros franchise is 15-minute Melee/Brawl/Smash, a long fight against Wire Frames (Melee) and Alloys (Brawl). And in Melee it must be done to unlock a stage.
    • Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The Great Maze from The Subspace Emissary. It marks a shift from shorter, individual platforming levels to a larger Metroidvania-styled labyrinth of interconnected areas. There are save points throughout the level though, and it's not necessarily meant to be played all in one go. Which is good, because the Great Maze alone takes up one-third of the "Subspace Emissary" story mode.
    • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate:
      • The Mysterious Dimension is by far the biggest sub-area in World of Light. Numerous unlockable characters and spirits are found here, and it also includes Pop Quiz areas that reward the player with additional goodies if the questions are answered correctly. It also has its own boss at the end (Marx).
      • The longest one for a single stage in World of Light is when you take on Galeem and Dharkon at the exact same time. First a Rise to the Challenge level with several fights in-between, then a Boss Rush consisting of six of the bosses you've faced up until this point, finally you face the True Final Boss. The whole set by itself can take upwards of 30 minutes or longer. In contrast, most other stages only typically take a few minutes at a time.
  • Skull Girls: Fukua's story mode pits her against every combatants and the dlc fighters, including Marie. All leading up to a brutal SNK Boss against Filia with much more health and tougher attack power.
  • The "100 Fight Kumite" mode in Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX pits you against 100 fighters, with no continues or pause breaks. Win or lose, you have to complete every single fight for your score to be recorded.
  • Bushido Blade features a 100-enemy slasher mode. Quite difficult since it's possible to be killed with a single well-placed attack. Finishing this mode unlocks a hidden character.

    First Person Shooter 
  • AMC Squad has a few, mainly due to the larger scope of the levels compared to the other Build Engine games:
    • The Revolution, which is a massive gauntlet of a level where you, as Highwire, lead a squad of rebels through the streets of a war-torn city and fight through squads of footsoldiers guarding chokepoints. It's also an Escort Mission where Highwire has to bring his friend Vladimir Lebedev with him, although much of the stress coming from escort missions is not there as Vladimir is Made of Iron and packs a machine gun with him.
    • City Under Siege, the opening mission of Episode 2, is this. A non-linear gauntlet of a city level where you fight off a Cycloid invasion in Los Angeles while helping the EDF figure out their motive for the invasion. Features a lot of backtracking and exploration elements as you search for keys to enter an alien bunker underneath the city streets.
    • Arsia Mons Colony is the climactic mission of Episode 2, and it is longer than both The Revolution and City Under Siege combined. Featuring 4 characters - Sang, James, Mikko, and Micky - as they fight off a mega-cult from destroying the colony across multiple levels, from the slums to the upper levels, then to the orbital elevator, subways, broadcasting station, and even the mines near the colony.
    • Zeta Base, an optional mission in Episode 2, is even longer. It's a massive 3-level trek across an abandoned research station within a colony that leads to a fight between invading Cycloids, zombified soldiers, demons, and robotic security forces. It's telling that this mission is considered optional, similar to Jungle Base, because of the sheer size of the mission.
    • Gaza Pyramids, the central mission of Episode 3, rivals Arsia Mons Colony in terms of length and number of levels. You travel across a recently unearthed Egyptian city, consisting of a tomb, catacombs, sanctuary, village, and aqueducts, and along the way pick up artifacts that allow the agents to traverse previously inaccessible areas. The mission feels like a mini-Metroidvania in terms of how progression is handled in this mission, as the player needs to collect specific items to reach areas to grab keys in order to unlock other areas, such as gauntlets that boost the player character's strength which grants them the ability to push specific walls out of the way.
    • Much of Episode 4 is grander in scope compared to the previous episodes, but Wetlands of Rowgar and Lookout of Irusoph stand out as the biggest missions of the episode so far. Each mission is 4 levels long, and consist of traveling through fantasy-themed locations such as a forest and a snowy village, as Micky and Merlijn respectively carry out their missions in these areas, and, in the second level of Micky's mission and the fourth level of Merlijn's mission, engage in a Boss Battle against a hydra (Micky) and a minotaur (Merlijn).
  • Borderlands DLC Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot requires you to finish twenty rounds each consisting of five enemy waves to complete her "harder challenge", made worse by becoming ball-bustingly hard a little less than halfway in to the extent that the only really practical way to finish these is to have max level characters join a low level host's room (as the enemy's level scales with the host player's level, and you don't get any experience points or loot). It'll still probably take you about four damned hours to complete one however, and there are three of these damned things! Easily the most likely reason you won't get 100% gamerscore.
  • The Cetan Ship in Perfect Dark is huge, features a difficult Escort Mission, and has enemies with cloaking devices or very tiny ankle-biting aliens who attack you in dark places. Worse yet, the level is actually longer on the higher difficulty settings, both extending the time spent there and decreasing the odds of success.
  • Halo:
    • Halo: Combat Evolved:
      • "Halo", the game's second level, is composed of very large valleys that the player must traverse.
      • "The Library" does seem to go on for ages and ages. It's not actually larger than any other given level in the game, but the fact that everywhere in the level looks exactly the same makes it feel like a marathon level.
      • "Assault on the Control Room" is one long trek through a bunch of similar looking rooms with an occasional outdoor break. Then you do it backwards, in "Two Betrayals".
      • "Truth & Reconciliation". At first, it feels like it's the same length as previous levels, but then you get to the Truth & Reconciliation you are supposed to board and have to fight off wave after wave of enemies. Then you board the ship, which feels like it would be the level break, but it just keeps going. Notable because it's only the third level.
    • Many of Halo 2's levels downplay this trope.
      • "Outskirts" starts off in some city streets, then you go across a beach, and finally enter a tunnel, which drags on for several miles.
      • "Oracle", despite having several Hold the Line sections, is quite long. You travel through some labs, ascend to cut the cable, and descend into another area that leads to a short Banshee section. After that, you backtrack through an area from the previous level.
      • "Regret" has you going through old ruins, riding a Gondola across the water, riding an underwater elevator to an underwater complex, riding another underwater elevator back to the surface, and finally riding a second Gondola to the Temple.
      • "Quarantine Zone" is the longest level distance-wise. You travel through several complexes, a canyon, a destroyed ship, and some caves before arriving at the Library's entrance. If that wasn't long enough, the last part of the level has you riding a Gondola.
      • "Gravemind" has you traveling through the various areas of High Charity entirely on foot.
      • "Uprising", which starts off on foot traveling through complexes, then using vehicles to go through several canyons and caves, and ending at more complexes.
    • Get comfy, because Halo 3's "The Covenant" is the longest level, not only in Halo 3, but in the entire original trilogy. On Legendary Difficulty, it can take over two hours to complete.
    • Halo 3: ODST's final mission "Coastal Highway" has you driving down a highway which stretches several miles. If that wasn't enough, it's also an Escort Mission.
    • "The Pillar of Autumn" in Halo: Reach is not only long, but also a Drought Level of Doom and has a 20-minute Hold the Line sequence near the end.
    • Halo 4
      • "Requiem" has you traveling a long distance.
      • "Reclaimer" has you riding on a Mammoth across several areas.
  • The Serious Sam games are known for their long levels.
    • The Great Pyramid in The First Encounter can take a while to complete. However, not only the final level is marathon level. Metropolis and Karnak are just extremely long and have the highest enemy counts in the game.
    • Grand Cathedral from The Second Encounter. The next-to-last War Sequence, in particular, is a real endurance-tester. Second Encounter also has the City of the Gods, Ziggurat, Courtyards of Gilgamesh and Tower of Babel, all of them which can take about an hour to complete on first playthrough.
    • While most of the levels in Serious Sam 2 are relatively short compared to 1. the Mental Institution's par time is an hour.
    • Later half of Serious Sam 3 have levels which last about an hour. Guardian of Time, the final level, can take even more with waves after waves of enemies.
  • The Super Spy has only two missions, but both take a long time to beat. The first mission takes place in a three story building with a basement, and the second mission takes place in a 16 story skyscraper. Even rushing through the buildings and skipping all non-essential rooms can still take several minutes to clear.
  • Turok 2 has only six main stages, but they are incredibly long, with some sublevels as long as the major levels of many games. Often easy to get lost in.
  • Medal of Honor:
  • The Caverns in GoldenEye (1997) is an extremely long and difficult level. Playing carefully on Secret or 00 Agent, it can easily take 20-30 minutes.
  • Doom and Doom II: Each level has a "par time", which is a reference time set by John Romero completing each level as fast as he could, rounding off the time he set, and adding 30 seconds to the result. Most levels have a par time between 30 seconds to 5 minutes, with the following exceptions that play this trope straight:
    • E2M6: Halls of the Damned, with a par time of 6 minutes, features The Maze and a fake exit, as well as quite a bit of backtracking.
    • MAP17: Tenements, with a par time of 7 minutes, has a complex map layout and, on higher difficulties, increased numbers of Chaingunners and Cacodemons.
    • MAP28: The Spirit World, with a par time of 7 minutes, also has a complex map layout with increased numbers of higher-tier demons on higher levels of difficulty.
  • Doom (2016) has "Lazarus Labs", which is so long that it's actually split into two parts.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 has a custom campaign, Suicide Blitz 2, which takes about twice as long as a Valve-created campaign. Even worse, you're down to three party members because one of them is carrying Gnome Chompsky [sic] to the end of the campaign, where it unlocks an Easter Egg, and is thus unable to use guns. note  Also, the game mode Iron Man has you play a campaign without any restarts. This means you have to beat the campaign in one try and dying means everyone is booted back to the lobby. It's no longer than a standard run of the game, but no restarts can make it look like you have to keep going.
  • Team Fortress 2:
    • The third stage of Dustbowl as RED team will usually take about 20 minutes to win, because the first point is very easy to take in comparison to the second. Although some maps will take longer, this stands out just for the sheer length of time spent in a single area of a single match.
    • The running joke about Hydro, TF2's only Territorial Control map, is that it's always either a one-sided Curb-Stomp Battle or a drawn out, back-and-forth stalemate.
    • Ghost Fort, the 2012 Halloween map, has a gruesomely long time limit of 7 minutes for both teams, up from the 3 minutes that is standard for King of the Hill. Every time MERASMUS! shows up to wreak havoc, the control point resets and must be re-capped once he is chased away. So which will end first... one round or your patience?
    • The infamous Hightower and 2fort can result in this, which is totally not helped by the fact that both maps are popular. Hightower is a Payload race map that has two ramps built in, both near extremely easy chokepoints.note  Hightower also does not have a functional Overtime (unlike other Payload races) due to a bug, so against decently competent teams the map will grind to a screeching halt the moment both carts make it to the final ramp. 2fort is a massive grindout because the intel room is located far behind the spawn room, which means that anyone you kill getting to the intel is going to have plenty of time respawning to kick your ass when you come back out.
    • The Mann vs. Machine missions Mech Mutilation (Mannworks) and Caliginous Caper (Ghost Town) have unusually long waves (10 minutes per wave at Mech Mutilationnote , 30 minutes for Caliginous Capernote ) but to compensate, lots of credits are granted at the beginning and the bomb comes back to the robot spawn if it stays on the ground long enough. The term "endurance mission" rightfully applies to them.
  • Half-Life
    • Half-Life has Surface Tension, the longest chapter in the entire game, and the one that shows off the widest variety of environments and enemies. Notable because most other chapters focus on one small area (an office complex, a railway system, a floating alien island, et cetera). It starts with you fighting some soldiers outside of the lobby and then assaulting a fortified position on a dam, then you escape through an underwater pipe and get chased throughout the desert by a helicopter while navigating a minefield; then you flee into a drainage pipe and come out to see that you're on the side of a mountain, and you are forced to fight the soldiers camped out there, eventually acquiring a rocket launcher and taking out that annoying attack helicopter when it returns; then you go through a military-held garage, encountering more soldiers, tanks, IFVs, snipers, and more mines, until you find your way inside of a building; then you enter a missile facility filled with tons of trip-mines, being an Unexpected Gameplay Change to navigating the trip-mine maze; then you come out and fight your way through a series of military-held garages and courtyards, which have more snipers and IFVs, then you fight your way through another series of courtyards where the aliens and soldiers are duking it out, with Alien Grunts and human marines shooting at each other, alien infantry clusters getting carpet bombed, Alien Grunts smashing soldiers through concrete walls, Gargantuas smashing soldiers with cars, marines getting mauled by headcrabs, artillery striking alien positions. Finally, after blasting through a military held building and getting outside to fight more aliens, you escape the courtyards only to be immediately pursued by a Gargantua in another garage. You eventually kill it by ordering an air strike on it and then blast a hole in the building, going through it and ending the chapter.
    • Half-Life 2
      • "Route Kanal" involves you proceeding through canals, sewers, and maintenance tunnels, fighting through and evading Civil Protection. After all of that, you end up at a Resistance base being bombarded by headcrab shells before hopping into the airboat.
      • "Sandtraps", which can be considered Half-Life 2's version of "Surface Tension", starts off with you driving in the dune buggy until you hit the end of the road, then you have a Hold the Line sequence near the lighthouse, which involves you fighting off some Combine troops coming in by dropships and, later, a gunship; then you have to trek across an Antlion-infested beach, which leads to your first encounter with an Antlion Guard, then you lead an army of now-friendly Antlions across another beach. Finally, you end up within Nova Prospekt's courtyards, where you fight two gunships before finally entering the prison, ending the chapter.
      • "Follow Freeman" is a pretty long action-packed chapter. First, you start out evading several Combine snipers on your way to meet Barney. Next, you, Barney, and some rebels push through the streets towards the Nexus building while evading the Combine suppressor. Then, inside the Nexus building, you fight your way through various rooms, disabling power generators, which includes a brief Hold the Line segment before the final generator, before heading to the roof. On the roof, you battle a gunship and several Combine troops. After that, you return to the streets where you have to contend with several Striders before proceeding through a car tunnel to a heavily destroyed building area. Finally, you end up in a neighborhood with more Striders, which you have to contend with, and find yourself right outside of the Citadel.
    • Half-Life 2: Episode Two has "This Vortal Coil", which starts with a Hold the Line sequence against several waves of Antlions. Then you proceed through a network of caves filled with Antlions and zombies, which involves briefly riding an old mining cart. Then you get chased by the Antlion Guardian through several caves. Then you come across a Resistance base where you wait for an elevator to come down while a battle between zombies and Antlions occurs. Finally, you ride an elevator back up to the start.
  • Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: Almost every area is this to some degree, but the East Wing and Main Castle take the cake.
  • PAYDAY: The Heist has the Overdrill, a secret challenge that requires players to follow a very specific series of events perfectly during a bank heist, and originally had players drill a gate for two hours while under near constant enemy fire to proceed. This has since been lowered to 33 minutes, however.
  • PAYDAY 2 has the heists White Xmas, Cook Off, Lab Rats, Santa's Workshop and Prison Nightmare, each of which allows players to stay and collect loot for as long as they like. While the minimum time for most of them is usually quite quick (the fastest is Prison Nightmare, which even has an achievement to reach the escape in under 4 minutes) the only limit on how many bags of loot players can secure is the game's innate bag limit of 1200. The Overdrill challenge from the first game also returns, and has the same time limit on the drill...but now you have to physically carry the heavy bags of gold to the drop point.
  • PAYDAY 3 has Cook Off return as a Legacy Heist - whilst you're limited to just 19 bags of meth here, cooking that many is going to take a while - especially with cops shooting you from every possible angle.
  • Unreal has many of these, mostly due to the large amount of backtracking and exploration:
    • The Sunspire has you ascending the eponymous towering structure. It's not so long because the climb is long, but rather because the first part of it is convoluted and maze-like with next to no guidance on how to proceed.
    • Bluff Eversmoking is no doubt one of the largest levels in the game. It involves a monastery on top of a mountain, the catacombs under said monastery, the water pipe system beneath both, the caves further down below that connect to the lake below the mountain, and a bell tower that houses the controls for a cargo lift that takes the scenic route around the entire level.
    • Cellars at Dasa Pass involves several Hold the Line setpieces against Krall, alongside other complicated combat puzzles.
    • Nali Castle, which has you complete several tasks all over the castle before you can proceed.

    Hack And Slash 
  • Astral Chain: File 6 is relatively long compared to the others in the game's main story. It takes the player through roughly seven different sections and often takes a few hours to complete, more if the player chooses to be meticulous about exploration.
  • No More Heroes has Rank 5, a tunnel that just keeps going and going. And at the end Henry pulls a Kill Steal.
  • No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: The Rank 4 and 2 stages. Rank 4 starts with a seemingly endless battle against Mooks in the parking lot of a supermarket; this on its own can take twenty minutes, and you haven't even entered the market yet! Rank 2 is short in comparison, but still stretches on a long way.
  • No More Heroes III: Many of the optional Multi-Mook Melee challenges, which present the mooks (and usually a Mini-Boss in-between too) in waves, only have a handful of these (at most five). However, there's a challenge that has fifteen waves, making up for a very prolonged assassination sequence. It's ill-advised to attempt it without having maxed the attack stats (and preferably the defense ones too) with WESN, and mastering the use of the special Death Glove skills is also recommended.

    MMORPGs 
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Raid instances, particularly the early ones. Molten Core, the first of their kind, could maybe be cleared in two hours or so if you had a well-equipped group that was capable of cutting through the trash mobs quickly... though if your group had the gear to pull that off, they probably didn't need anything from the dungeon in the first place. Parodied in Penny Arcade as Time Sink Cavern.
    • Blackrock Depths is a disorienting, non-linear underground labyrinth of a city many players visited only as required by quests for end-game content. It is the largest 5-man dungeon in the game and filled with bosses and events, but they are so widely scattered and the dungeon so confusing that getting to all of them could take upwards of four hours. As the gear was not exceptional most players only ran early parts of the dungeon and never saw the end boss when he was current content. When the dungeon finder was introduced this zone was split into three separate categories, each of which ignored several events and bosses.
    • The original Sunken Temple is smaller than Blackrock Depths but makes up for it with complexity and mob density. Simply getting to the instance requires running through a mini-dungeon located within a lake. Once inside the players could face as many as nineteen bosses and mini-bosses scattered across five floors connected via a series of staircases rife with switchbacks and side exits. Cataclysm revised the instance drastically, limiting it to only the largest floor with three bosses and four mini-bosses.
    • Gnomeregan is similar to Blackrock Depths in being a convoluted mess where most players used shortcuts and back doors to skip most of the instance. As the dungeon was low level and had no particularly impressive loot most players simply ignored it.
    • Ulduar and Icecrown are so huge that there are teleporter pads which unlock as you progress through. There are also repair NPCs, potion vendors, and even crafting stations. Most raid instances don't have friendly NPCs in them at all, let alone this many. Even today, when you can one-hit-kill everything in these super old raids, you'd be hard pressed to finish them in less than two hours: it just takes that long to get around. Wrath of the Lich King is also when they introduced the robot repair Jeeves, largely because trekking back to town for repairs was such a huge hassle in these enormous instances.
    • Though probably the raid that takes the cake in terms of Warcraft, is Ahn Qiraj. Nowadays it's two raids, but that's an update. It takes up an entire (albeit small) zone, all on it's own. The outside part is huge, with optional bosses, minibosses and trash mobs scattered around: and then the inside part is just about as huge. To 100% complete the entire raid can still take upwards of three hours, soloing at max level. That's if you don't get lost, in which case you can spend half a day in the place easily. The trash mobs are a gauntlet, and can roam around the entire enormous instance. Which means that if you're not careful, you can actually still die in this place. If you do get lost, it can become Bladderof Steel.
  • Kingdom of Loathing:
    • The game has Fernswarthy's Basement, an infinite-floor dungeon. The current record is about 11000 floors deep, though the last major reward is on floor 500, so most people don't bother going deeper. Subverted somewhat in that you can always stop and go back to the exact same floor you just left.
    • The Tower of Procedurally-Generated Skeletons, in which you must fight 373 increasingly difficult randomized skeleton enemies. You can find this tower by analyzing the mind of Jick, the avatar of the game's creator. (It's a self-parody of his rather noticeable fascination with skeletons.)
  • City of Heroes
    • The task force you could get from Doctor Quaterfield was twenty-four missions long, with several "defeat all enemies" missions and repetitive maps. Based on the official formula for calculating completion rewards, the median time for running it was over six hoursnote . In order to encourage more people to play it the developers had two options: make it shorter by cutting out the redundant missions or increase the reward at the end. Guess which option they chose.
    • In the single-mission department, there's the Underground Trial. An hour of slogging through subway tunnels, fighting enemies nearly non-stop, in order to face what is possibly the most difficult boss in the game. And to top it off, it's an Escort Mission — whichever poor sap on your team winds up with the escort following them gets to spend most of that hour not fighting, in order to keep the escort safe. If you're lucky, she attached herself to a support player, so they can use at least half their powers.
  • Guild Wars:
    • The Fissure of Woe can take several hours to complete even with a fairly-well prepared group.
    • Domain of Anguish. Although it consists of four sections you could theoretically do on separate sittings, the rewards are far better when all four are done in one sitting. Each of these individual sections can take an hour or more, and some (Foundry in particular) can take several hours. Back before the last expansion, Domain of Anguish full runs could take eight to ten hours, and that isn't even including the final boss.
  • Vindictus has Resenlian's Labyrinth; which also features Cut and Paste Environments and Doppelgangers.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic has Belsavis. Overall, it's almost twice as long as most other planets, and it takes long to get from one place to another. Balmorra and Taris are runners-up, mostly due to lots and lots of nasty wildlife slowing you down. Alderaan and Voss aren't quite as large, but you have Loads and Loads of Loading.
  • Wizard101 has a few instances that can qualify, but the worst has to be the Tower of the Helephant. It has seven floors (just above the average size of a dungeon); the kicker is that two of the three bosses in there do not play fair. The first boss is actually a Dual Boss where only one of the bosses can be harmed without a 90% resistance to all attacks while the other can cause your spells to lose an additional 50% from their hit chance. If any your spells fail (even after the first of the pair dies), then you're punished with an attack that rapidly drains more health than most schools have max health, and after the first of the two dies, the second flings about an extremely powerful storm spell. The final boss calls in a minion every turn and can use a strong attack that hits all players. Even with a fairly powerful and skilled group, it can still take up to four hours to complete, and it's expected that teammates will die along the way.
  • RuneScape:
    • Underground Pass is a long, long trek through a deep tunnel, filled with monsters, puzzles, and traps. Years after its release, it's still considered one of the most challenging quests in the game. And if this wasn't bad enough, you have to go through it again at the beginning of the "Regicide" quest.
    • The TzHaar Fight Caves, which require you to fight over sixty waves of monsters. When it was first introduced, there was no way to take a break, meaning you had to sit at your computer for over an hour fighting monsters.
    • The quest "One Small Favour" is basically a very long Chain of Deals that requires you to trek across several continents... and back.
    • The central challenge in "Elemental Workshop III" is a complex, 3D sliding puzzle that can take hours to complete...with a guide.
  • Seeing as it's built around group play, all dungeons in Eden Eternal are marathon levels, but a special mention goes to the positively nightmarish Ulta Hall; there are several groups of enemies each with their own Elite Mook, and even taking out a pack of the easiest monsters will do enough damage to you to make you sit down and recharge HP and MP. This continues for one half of the level, and after killing Tiamat, it gets worse; the entrance to the centre of the maze in the dungeon has you go through Smash Mooks with HP nearly equal to that of the bosses. The thing is, though, when you fight one, you fight two. After this, there are enemies that materialise to attack you, and the final two bosses of the dungeon, Kenny and Gamera, are both Damage Sponge Bosses with attacks proportionate to their HP. Hated this dungeon? Tough, because there's a second Trial version, which is even harder.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • The Palace of the Dead, a dungeon that is up to 200 floors deep. Floors 1 to 100, while long, has your progress saved after every 10th floor and if your party wipes, you simply start again at the last save that was made. Floors 101 to 200 are pure marathons and while your progress is saved like usual, this is only helpful if your group needs to take a break. A party wipe at this stage ends your run right there and there are no do overs. If you want to reach floor 101 and beyond again, you have to start over from the beginning or from floor 51 and work your way back again. To even reach floor 101, you have to get to it without a single party wipe or that run is no good and you'll have to start over. Stormblood adds in Heaven-On-High, which is the same thing (100 floors instead of 200), but going up. Endwalker also has Eureka Orthos which which is Heaven-On-High but going downward instead.
    • A Realm Reborn: The final dungeon, The Praetorium, is a very lengthy level because not only did it contain five bosses with three of them back-to-back at the end, there's also loads and loads of cutscenes inside the dungeon. What makes it especially lengthy is that all the cutscenes are unskippable, something the devs forcibly placed to prevent other people from ruining the experience for first-timers by speedrunning the dungeon and skipping through the cutscenes. There's a separate duty roulette just for the final two dungeons that offers huge compensation, because otherwise the queue times would be terrible since no one wants to spend an entire hour or so for one dungeon. Seeing how bloated in length it was, the devs made sure to avoid following the same format for future dungeons. Patch 6.1 finally reworked The Praetorum to cut down its length and bring the dungeon up to modern standards (but with unskippable cutscenes still), and separated the last two bosses out of the dungeon.
  • Phantasy Star Online 2 has a number of these as part of their story mode. The first one you deal with is EPISODE TWO Chapter 4 "Day of Resurrection". This has you having to fight off Brainwashed and Crazy ARKS operatives after you and Matoi over trumped-up charges, battling the Trio of Heroes twice, battling clones of one of those Trios, invading Falspawn, a Sanity Slippage-suffering Theodor, the Big Bad Luther and his One-Winged Angel form, Luther the Fallen. Even on Hardcore Mode, playing the stage will still take you at least two hours to get through.

    Party Game 
  • Mario Party:
    • Mario Party: Star Rush: The Master Tower in Challenge Tower. The Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert Towers have 30, 50, and 70 floors respectively. The Master Tower has 500 floors. Unlike the other Towers, the game automatically saves a checkpoint every 100 floors.
    • Mario Party: The Top 100: World 3 of Minigame Island. Not only does it have the most minigames of any world with 30, but the player is also required to make detours back to Worlds 1 and 2 before they can complete it.

    Platform Game 
  • Most levels in Apogee's Monster Bash have par times of 2-7 minutes. Episode 1, level 9 has a par time of half an hour.
  • The French Amiga game Nicky Boom (resurrected for cell phones) invokes this for every level. It's quite good.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog uses this trope a lot.
    • Metropolis Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - it has three acts instead of the usual two, and each one is quite long.
    • Sonic 3 & Knuckles:
      • Sandopolis Zone qualifies. It might not have been intentional, but the zone is still way too long, especially for Knuckles as it has a puzzle towards the end. If you can't figure it out immediately, you are going to run out of time. Very much Guide Dang It! territory.
      • Death Egg Zone Act 2 is not significantly longer than the Sandopolis stages, and after defeating the zone boss you immediately move on to the final boss, carrying whatever rings you may still have. Problem is that your time also carries over. You restart the final boss with a fresh clock if you time out, but there are no rings...
      • Act 2 of Carnival Night Zone is designed to make you waste time if you play as Sonic and/or Tails, and once you reach the end, you're treated to a very slow-paced boss fight during which the 10 minute timer can easily run out. Further compounding this is an area in which a spinning barrel blocks the path, which many players have trouble figuring out how to get past, and takes an oddly long time to get past when you do know how. Knuckles' version of CNZ Act 2, however, is comically short instead; it can literally take less than 70 seconds, and has no boss.
    • Sonic Adventure has a few:
      • Sonic's version of Casinopolis requires you to collect some 400 rings by playing the various pinball games before you can reach the goal. Unlike most examples of the trope, it's also a Breather Level thanks to the number of lives you'll rack up while doing this, but it will still usually take you around 15 minutes... and heaven help you if you lose all your rings and have to start over.
      • Hot Shelter is this within the context of Amy's story, which is so short it can be completed in about half an hour. There are only three levels in the whole thing, but Hot Shelter is longer than the other two put together. This is because Hot Shelter is the only level that Sonic doesn't visit, so it's up to Amy to showcase the level's gimmicks instead. The problem is that most of these gimmicks involve puzzles, and when you factor in Amy's slow speed and the constant need to deal with ZERO, the level ends up taking about 6-7 minutes at best when her other two stages take 2-3 minutes.
    • Sonic Adventure 2 (and Sonic Adventure 2: Battle) has Cannon's Core, a single, straight-shot marathon level with a mini-level for all of the playable characters except for Shadow. After this level is a double-feature boss fight. There's also Eternal Engine, which lives up to its name and Cosmic Wall which is the longest level behind Cannon's Core, although this stage is not seriously tough compared to the other two levels mentioned.
    • Nearly every level in Sonic Heroes takes upward of 10-15 minutes, which is unusually long for the series, to the point that the Genesis games had a 10 minute time limit. However, some levels are still much longer than the rest:
      • Team Chaotix's version of Mystic Mansion, in which they have to put out every torch of a certain color (red for the normal version, blue for the alternate mission) in the building — backtracking to the beginning of the level if they miss a single one. If you miss any torches, this can take upwards of half an hour.
      • Bingo Highway, again with Team Chaotix. If you want the emblem for level B you need to collect twenty chips. The first nineteen are tricky, but if you're not lucky enough to notice the one almost taped to the ceiling in a position you can only see when rotating the camera 180 degrees then you can stripe a good hour of the remainder of your life.
    • Eggmanland in the HD versions of Sonic Unleashed can (usually) take up to an hour to beat the first time through.
    • Sonic Generations features Planet Wisp, which is the last level and is pretty long. It's not actually that hard, but the level design can get quite convoluted. It can take around 6-7 minutes compared to most of the levels being around 2-3 minutes.
    • Most of the stages in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), but in particular the End of the World Stage which, like SA2, features all playable characters (minus Sonic and Blaze). The stage is filled with instant-kill portals and Iblis Worms, and with loading screens for each segment and no check points, this stage will take you a long while, especially if you die.
    • In Sonic Mania, the last stage, Titanic Monarch Act 2, has four sub-areas that takes roughly two minutes each to clear. Thankfully, the ten-minute timer resets for the Final Boss.
    • Sonic Advance features Egg Rocket Zone, which is long enough that it's the only level in that game that doesn't have a 10-minute timer, opting instead for a 5-minute countdown that resets at two points in the level. Having some fake difficult enemy placements (such as in your path as you come off a spring) makes it worse.
    • Sonic Superstars has abnormally long levels by Classic Sonic standards, most taking around 4-5 minutes on an average run. Bosses are often just as long, to the point that a casual player might come dangerously close to running out the clock multiple times per playthrough.
  • The Slumberland sewer area in Glider PRO.
  • Every single level in the Wii Platformer/art game de Blob. The average time of completion for a single level is approximately 2 hours, with no saving allowed in between, and without 100 Percent Completion.
  • Battletoads, considering its fast pace in some of the levels, seemed to have quite a few levels which seemed to last for a long time, especially for those who were used to Sunsoft NES games with fairly short levels. Levels 2, 3, 4 and last level are examples of it.
  • Super Metroid Redesign has the escape sequence timer extended from 3 minutes to 25 minutes. There is a very good reason for this.
  • Katamari Damacy:
    • The original game has the final stage, Make the Moon. It has a 25 minute time limit, and you are going to need every second of it, as your Katamari won't be big enough to properly complete the stage until the last two minutes or so, and you unlock Eternal 3 by reaching an even loftier size goal. The level was also included in Katamari Forever.
    • We Love Katamari:
      • The 17-minute "As Large As Possible 5" level in which you create the Big Bang itself. It lasts about twice as long as any other level in the game and feels really long, which in this case is a good thing.
      • The Million Roses level which has you pick up one million roses. Thankfully, you can do it over multiple sittings.
  • Kid Chameleon has The Final Marathon, which is aptly named - an extremely long, difficult linear level where you run to the right for a long, long time. It is the penultimate level, and immediately after you beat it, you face the big boss (though, thankfully, he has his own, separate level). The game itself is in some ways an example of this trope, as it is extremely long (over 100 levels, though you are likely to go through somewhere around 2/3rds of them on any given playthrough) and there is no way to save, meaning you have to beat the ENTIRE GAME in one sitting. This is fixed in the rerelease for the PS2, where there is a save feature.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Super Mario Bros.:
      • World 8-1: Long stage + only 300 "seconds" = guaranteed chance of hearing that ditty advertising that your timer is running low. Additional points for being the first non-castle level in the game without the invisible checkpoints, and no indication of their lack. If you die without seeing something like the familiar stair construction, it becomes incredibly discouraged at the prospect of the stage being impossibly long even if you were actually close to the end.
      • The final level is much longer than any of the equivalent levels earlier in the game. In an early case of Guide Dang It!, you also have to know how to go down a pipe in order to beat that level, even though pipes aren't in the instruction manual and are optional in every earlier level of the game.
    • Super Mario Bros. 2:
      • The last level of World 3 is one of the longest, most labyrinthine in the game (the final level is just as large, but it's justified for being indeed the last). Usually, a castle level is about to end after the player opens the locked door with a key guarded by Phanto. But here, opening that door only means 50% of the level is completed — the player's character still has to tackle three tall areas filled to the brim with enemies just to reach the castle's roof; only by that point will the game's boss music start hearing, signaling that the world's boss (Mouser in the original NES version and All-Stars remake, Robirdo in the Super Mario Advance Updated Re-release for the GBA) is about to be found.
      • The last level of World 5 is a more straightforward example. It has no alternate paths or even a Phanto chase like in 3-3. 5-3 is just simply long with wide screens filled with enemies, a long underground section which takes the player's character into a vertical climb inside of a tree that is also filled with enemies. They're still not done yet, because there's another long section where the player has to hitch rides on magic carpets across the trees to a cloudy area with enemies, concluding with another fight with Red Birdo and Clawgrip.
      • 7-2, fittingly for the final stage, takes place within a massive castle labyrinth filled with conveyor belts, Spikes of Doom, and enemies everywhere. Its the only stage in the game that has two branching pathways, both of which are required if you want to get both Heart Container Mushrooms. The level also has a Phanto chase, and four different boss battles, one of which includes the Final Boss Wart.
    • Super Mario Bros. 3: World 6 as a whole has ten regular levels, three fortresses and the obligatory Airship level, for a total of 14. To compare, the other long worlds only have at most nine regular levels, two fortresses and the Airship each (World 7 has technically the same overall amount of levels as 6, but two of them are brief Muncher courses, so as a whole it's still shorter). Among individual levels, there's the Fortress level of World 8, a complex horizontal maze with many doors, conveyor belts, block walls that can only be overcome with P switches, and so on (it's one of the very few levels in the game with a time limit of 400 seconds, as levels are typically short enough to only require 300 at most).
    • Super Mario World:
      • The bigger levels show up as a big dot on the map. For example, Vanilla Dome 3 consists of riding Skull Rafts to cross lava rivers, and since these are long, the level will invest a large part of the time available. It's actually the maximum length that a level can be in the game while still fitting within a single room (32 screens).
      • The very much Nintendo Hard Special World is worth mentioning. Tubular, Way Cool and Outrageous especially. But they pale in comparison to the very last level of the special world: Funky. How long is it? Know how the 2D Mario games have time limits on the levels? There's not enough time to beat this level. The only way to beat it is if you're very skilled with the cape... or if you brought (or found in the level) Yoshi, as the green berries (with no indication, and which appear nowhere else in the game) increase the time limit. The level design is quite clever however, and if you manage to brave all that, the very last part is filled with nothing but coins that you won't collect and will rather run under so you can reach the end on time. And all the better for it, as it spells out YOU ARE A SUPER PLAYER! After this level, you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done.
    • Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins:
      • Space Zone has longer stages than the other zones, to compensate for the fact that it only has two of them.
      • The castle is the longest level in the game, which is emphasized by the fact that it doesn't even have any checkpoints.
    • Super Mario Galaxy: "The Sinking Lava Spire", the first mission in Melty Molten Galaxy. And later you have to do it again untouched for 100% Completion.
    • Super Mario Galaxy 2: Clockwork Ruins Galaxy. Numerous traps and hazards must be sorted to get the main star. So many that, for those wanting to hurry to beat the game, it's easier to proceed to the next galaxy by getting the hidden star.
    • Super Mario Odyssey: This is a large part of the difficulty behind Darker Side of the Moon. It's 14 sections without checkpoints, with many being about the length of a full Power Moon mission elsewhere in the game.
    • Lampshaded in the Yoshi's Island games:
      • Level 6-5 of the original Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is called The Very Loooooong Cave.
      • A bonus level in the remake of the original for the GBA is called "Endless World of Yoshis". How endless? Even the Tool Assisted Speedrun takes over 7 minutes to finish the level (which is amazingly long for a non autoscrolling 2D platformer). It is also Nintendo Hard, and even has elements of Platform Hell.
      • A level in Yoshi's Island DS is called The Cave That Never Ends.
      • In a non-accurately named example, A Light in the Dark. Stuff like Yoshi's Island Easter Eggs at least has short rooms, but this place has something akin to a four story gauntlet before you reach the halfway point, at which point it becomes a two or three section skiing level and yet more platforming after that.
      • There are many examples in the Yoshi's Island ROM hack Kamek's Revenge, where the levels tend to be much longer than in the original. The first Marathon Level is 4-4 (The Sealed Ruins), which is a lot longer than any level before it and is also a confusing maze. 6-8 (The Climactic Finale) is also this, being composed of a series of difficult rooms. 5-Extra is another example, with 50 trials of increasing difficulty. (Strictly speaking there are 45 trials - 10, 20, 30, 40, and 49 are all just breather rooms). Many of the early trials can be cleared in a matter of seconds but some of the later trials (from 41 onwards) can take a lot of time.
    • Wario: Master of Disguise: Most of the levels in the game take at least an hour to complete the first time through. Going through them again won't be nearly as long once you get all the upgrades and gained knowledge of the levels, but most of them will still be longer than your average video game level. Since there are only ten levels (not counting the 5 special episodes that reuse maps), it makes sense.
    • SMWCentral's 9th Door Contest had this as a surprisingly common feature. Since they were supposed to be comparable to the 8 doors in Super Mario World's final level, the ones that were marathon-length were docked points.
      raocow: This is unreasonable! Look how long this... freaking thing is! It — it goes on!
    • Contests have this in spades, regardless of the game. The 2010 Super Mario World Chocolate Level Contest had Logup's level, which took some poor guy nearly FORTY MINUTES to complete because of how ridiculously long it was. And that's only because the boss didn't work. Here's a video. The Super Mario Bros. X contest raocow is playing has these too, like this Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance themed level and this Castlevania cave themed one. Every one of these could probably work as a full length game.
    • Luna Tower from A Super Mario Bros. X Thing was brutal enough that the game circumvented the usual limit on checkpoints by putting in obscure, essentially invisible warps to later parts of the stage that would be revealed once you'd reached those points the long way. Such "knowledge checkpoints" have since become a staple of level design in Super Mario Maker 2.
    • Bowser's Castle in Brutal Mario is one of these too, with at least twenty separate areas and about 10 bosses in total.
    • Something Else: Switch Room in the Evil Guy's moon base. To finish the level, Luigi has to press the four switches and activate the switch block bridge. However, each switch is behind an obstacle-filled path. The stage is so long, it counts as two exits.
    • Long levels are frequent in Super Mario World ROMhacks. Even if it's just one of the dime-a-dozen Kaizo Mario World rip-offs, many hackers decide that longer equals better. Particularly infamous for this is Super Mario Infinity's level Dark Depths, a cave level that essentially takes you to hell. It's been said to be worth an entire world of Super Mario Infinity levels. The individual levels before Dark Depths are thought to be worth a world of the original game each.
  • I Wanna Be the Guy has the Impossible difficulty, which is exactly the same as Hard (and, for that matter, all the other Difficulty Levels) but removes all save points, making the entire game into one extremely long Marathon Level.
  • The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: While the Dragon City is only somewhat more lengthy than other levels, it's extremely chaotic, and the later half of it is basically an endless stream of combat. There's also constant running back and forth between several places you need to be on a strict time limit.
  • Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse has the mountain range block (one of the two possible entry level castle areas, the one you have if you take the Alucard-optional route), which consists of SEVEN stages containing FOUR bosses. Even if you make generous use of Alucard's ability to bypass entire long sections of the block as a bat, you're still in for quite a long and grueling ride.
  • Castlevania The Adventure Rebirth has Stage 5, the last major stage in the game, as Stage 6 is essentially just the Final Boss battle. It's the typical Castlevania Clock Tower level for the most part, but has a lot of extra elements, such as a couple of halls filled with clocks, a few rooms with floating pendulums in the sky, a lift in a tower, and a sub-boss (all the stages have a sub-boss, but it still adds to the length).
  • Banjo-Kazooie: Click Clock Wood is literally four times bigger than any other level, due to its season-changing concept. Several tasks require being performed step by step across the seasons in order to get their associated Jiggies (examples include raising and feeding a bird, making a large plant grow, and helping a beaver return his home). This also makes this world the most difficult for the collection of all musical notes, since their distribution per season is scarce except for autumn.note 
  • Banjo-Tooie: The second half of the game consists of levels that approach the gargantuan scope of the Donkey Kong 64 levels, such as Terrydactyland and Grunty Industries). The need to solve several multi-layered puzzles, some of which in turn require traveling across worlds, just to get the Jiggies you'd obtain more easily in the earlier worlds as well as any level in the first game prior to Click Clock Wood, makes these worlds several hours long even when you know what you're doing.
  • Super Monkey Ball Deluxe: Ultimate Mode is where you have to go through all of the Beginner, Advance, and Expert stages in one sitting. You are able to save, but it possibly won't help that much. Also, this is the only way to unlock the Master stages. Good luck on Exam-C! Then there's Expert in general. It's 50 levels long and houses a grand majority of Monkey Ball's most infamous stages, including the aforementioned Exam-C. Bear in mind that Expert in Deluxe is comprised of two Expert courses.
  • Any of the final levels in Brutal Mario. The Mega Man styled level is a key example, it's actually three separate stages accessed by the same overworld tile, the first of which is a Marathon Level in its own right. Other key examples include Bowser's Castle (this is just part 1 of about 9 sections...) Practically, most of the later levels are designed like this because the same custom sprite is used to generate 90% of the enemies in each level, and merely acts differently based on level and screen number...
  • The Ganbare Goemon game Goemon's Great Adventure has the 5 castles. Each one of them is much longer than the average level and can easily take 20-30 minutes to just get through — if you're good at this. The last one, Floating castle, is even longer, being made from 4 parts, each having 2 long, difficult platforming sections.
  • Distorted Travesty:
    • "Veiled Detritus" from the original game is the only level to actually have a map screen, due to how enormous it is. That One Level "Secured Data Segment" also goes on and on and on... luckily it provides a teleporter room partway through so you can leave and pick up where you left off.
    • The second game has the final level: "the Bug". It is seriously almost as long as the entire rest of the game combined (although, given that the game is rather short, this isn't as bad as it sounds). Fortunately there are save points every few rooms.
  • Donkey Kong 64: All levels have a gigantic size with lots of things to do in them, but Fungi Forest stands out for having five major areas, and each of them has to be explored during day as well as during night.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989):
    • The Airport (Level 4) is one big maze of tunnels and high-rise buildings separated by Insurmountable Waist High Fences, all of which are brutal Platform Hell exercises that give you the game's first real taste of its utterly soul-smashing difficulty. Expect to perform a lot of painful backtracking, and possibly sidetracking as well should you lose one of your Turtles (which is a very likely event).
    • Area 5, the Foot Clan Fort. The pathway to the level-end boss is randomly chosen. This means that it could be under either the first manhole you choose, or the very last one. If you're unlucky, expect the level to become exponentially longer and more grueling as you'll have to constantly backtrack to restock your weapons in order to deal with all the Demonic Spiders that have replaced the Goddamned Bats of previous levels. And if you lose a Turtle, expect that exponentiality to increase by leaps and bounds, as the dungeon that contains your captured Turtle is also randomly generated.
  • Wily Stage 3 in Rockman 4 Minus ∞ is very, very long and confusing (though thankfully there's a map).
  • In Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey, Snow White's chapters are very long, as are Cinderella's.
  • Lots and lots and lots of levels in Mushroom Kingdom Fusion. Some examples:
    • All final levels in a world, since by definition they're designed to be longer than the others to provide a decent challenge. Hell Prominence (aka Bowser's Castle) in world 1 is a good example.
    • Toyland in general. This Castle of Illusion-style level is way, way longer than it probably should be, since it seems to be designed to recreate an entire world from the source game in a single stage.
    • Raccoon City. The fact it has hordes of constantly reviving undead does not help at all.
    • The final levels in X-COM and TFTD. It's a bit confusing too.
    • The Library level, based on the same infamous stage from Halo: Combat Evolved. It's at least as long as the one in the original game, which is a Marathon Level by itself. It's also not finished, apparently the final version will have a boss fight based on one of the game's bosses stuck at the end of it. And as world 9's 'world boss' level, you can probably guess how hard it is...
  • The Bowhemoth Challenge mode in Runbow. The game itself even tells you that your progress will not be saved.
  • Crash Bandicoot:
    • Crash Bandicoot (1996) has Sunset Vista. It is probably the longest level in the original trilogy. Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, which added time trials to all the levels in the first game, has a five minute time for the Sapphire relic in a game where most Sapphire times average 1-2 minutes, sometimes 3 for other very long levels. Another example is Stormy Ascent, which was not made available in the initial release and is even more intimidating in this regard. The N. Sane Trilogy officially added the level as Downloadable Content and its Sapphire time is 7 minutes. The Gold relic time is the longest by a huge margin as well, at 4:30, and the Platinum is not much shorter.
    • Most of levels in Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex are considerably longer with higher box counts than in previous games, but Gold Rush, level 22, definitely takes the cake, having five checkpoints and 209 boxes.
    • High Seas Hi-Jinks in Crash Twinsanity. Features a lengthy platforming sequence, a boss battle, a chasing sequence and another boss battle.
    • One of the common complaints about Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time is that most of the levels in the game are too long, which makes attempts at perfect runs for 100% Completion all the more frustrating, but the biggest example would have to be the N. Verted version of Rush Hour. The regular version of the level is already extremely long, with 441 boxes to break. The N. Verted version places the entire level underwater, which makes you move through the level even slower. If that weren't enough, the first half of the level is played using Dingodile, who is already a slow-moving character.
  • Pandemonium 2 has the final non-boss level, The Bitter End, which takes at least half an hour to complete (it's a mostly vertical maze full of backtracking through areas that get progressively harder, a sequence with rocket powered jumps, a chase sequence, and a miniboss), much more than basically any other level in the game.
  • The stages in Freedom Planet are already on the long side, but Battle Glacier stands out as especially long. Each stage has an in-game challenge to clear it in a certain time. Most stages give you 5 to 7 minutes. Battle Glacier's is 12 minutes, and that can only be done if you've mastered the stage, know its fastest routes, and know what you can skip. Going through it blind can easily take about an hour.
  • Stage 1 of Sparkster: Rocket Knight Adventures 2 is made up of three different sections, two mini-bosses, and one main boss.
  • The Windmill in A Hat in Time is one of the hardest acts in the game, as it's a long, linear climb with many difficult jumping and parkour sections. There are several checkpoints with healing hearts scattered about, and you'll likely need every one you can grab.
  • These occassionally appear in Ratchet & Clank:
    • The final planet in Ratchet & Clank (2002). True, it is about the size of a standard planet. However, most of other planets have a central hub with split paths that you can clear one at a time, while this planet is one long-winded road to the Final Boss. To make matters worse it is filled to the brom with Elite Mooks with quite a few dropships and tanks with huge range mixed in, and you most likely don't have R.Y.N.O., so you have to clear them slowly out with Visibomb Gun or Devastator.
    • Umbris and Gemlik's Base, for the same reason as above. Umbris isn't as annoying because it is essentially an obstacle course with few enemies, but evading indestructible machine guns and searching for timed buttons to open the doors will take some time, especially since all of this must be done at one moment in a maze. And end is essentially long Hydrodisplacer puzzle. Gemlik's base is on the other hand on par with Veldin because you have to destroy those beacon towers to advance, there are jet-fighters that like to bombard you, guards behind indestructible shields that shoot at you and you must dodge omnipresent exploding barrels on your long, long path to the end.
    • Both Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando and Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal have Gladiator Arena Challenges. While there are some challenges explicitly called Endurance Run and such that have 10-20 rounds which already qualify for this trope, there is an ultimate challenge for each game that really takes the cake. In second game the aptly named Impossible Challenge does not even show the number of rounds (it's 60) and ends in a battle with Megapede who itself takes quite a time to take down, though if you have Bouncer the entire challenge is rather easy given its power, ammo clip and amount of ammo dropped per crate. In the third game the Qwarktastic Challenge has 100 rounds, the 50th and 100th round are boss fights, and on top of that some rounds include special conditions, which can go really nasty for timed rounds where you fail instantly when time runs out.
  • Mega Man Unlimited has many levels that are longer than the average Mega Man (Classic) game's, but the fourth stage of the Occupied Wily Castle takes the cake. In a twist on the usual endgame Boss Rush, this level sees you replaying sections of each Robot Master's level before fighting them (including Yoku Man's), and in most cases they're the most difficult sections. If that wasn't enough, once you get through all of this and some difficult spike drops, you have a grueling Sequential Boss fight with Bass and Dr. Wily.
  • JUMP: Each hack, with the exception of YUMP, has a very long Bowser's Castle, as well as one unique level that tends to be even longer:
    • JUMP: Shattered Dreams. It has four sets of levels you need to complete (one per set), with each one being the length of a regular Super Mario World level, and then the hack's Superboss fight.
    • JUMP½: RNG, which is like Shattered Dreams but longer. It has six sets of levels, with one of three picked at random (as the name implies), and then this hack's Superboss fight (though this one has less health compared to JUMP's).
    • YUMP 2: The Yellow Switch Palace, of all levels. It seems to be identical to the original SMW's Yellow Switch Palace, but it forces you to take a "detour" that consists of an extremely long set of mini-levels.
  • Grey Area (2023)'s Brutal Bonus Level, "The Last Place", is a grueling trek that's not only full of the game's hardest challenges (in a game that's already Nintendo Hard), but requires you to complete five objectives around its huge map. There are no permanent save points (only checkpoints) either, so you have to do all of this in one sitting, which can take hours. If you need a break, all you can do is pause and alt-tab.

    Puzzle Game 
  • Several levels in Chip's Challenge can take a long time to complete, such as On The Rocks (level 33), Rink (61), Cityblock (87), Mix Up (132), Pain (134) and Cake Walk (146). And the Fan Sequels have even longer (and more devious) levels.
  • Puzzle Gallery: At the Carnival has the Grease Burger attraction. Solving a 3x3 word square may be difficult, but this puzzle set gives twenty seven of them in a row.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master ACE has the Another Road, a set of missions that can take over 15 minutes to clear.
  • The Castles of Doctor Creep has quite a few long castles, and you generally need to run through each room multiple times in order to solve all the puzzles. Baskerville is probably the most annoying in this regard.
  • Deadly Rooms of Death had a contest where the goal was to make the longest single room possible. The current record is about 1.7 x 10^45 moves:
    The architect of "Eternity 4": At the rate of ten moves per second it would take five and a half sextillion years to complete.
  • Case 51 of Criminal Case: Grimsborough. There are five chapters (as opposed to the usual four) and eight suspects to interrogate (while every non-tutorial case always has five), so it takes about an extra day to complete.
  • Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy: Chapter 4 is not only the biggest, longest chapter in the game, but also the longest in any game from the Professor Layton series. This is because it takes place in five major locations instead of one, and each place has its own assortment of puzzles, collectibles, and characters, as well as a full-fledged mystery to solve that is tied in some way to the search for the Azran Eggs. To make up for this, the game has only 6 chapters (not counting the epilogue) whereas the other games have any amount between 7 and 13, though it's still one of the longest games alongside Unwound Future and Mystery Journey (and Chapter 4 alone is why).
  • Stinky and Loof in Wonderland has "Stinker Rescue", which is the final level in the "Secret Worlds" story. The level is an long and intense gauntlet featuring just about every type of challenge you have completed in the game.

    Racing 
  • F-Zero 99: Mini Prixs and Grand Prixs are gauntlets where you race multiple consecutive tracks in a row with no breaks. Mini Prixs consist of three random regular tracks, while Grand Prixs are based on the Knight, Queen and King Grand Prixs from the original SNES game and consist of five tracks each. Unlike normal races, the player pool is culled by at least 19/20 players at the end of each race; furthermore, your placement in each race rewards rank points that are used to calculate your final standing. Participating in a Prix rewards points that go towards the weekly Leaderboards, giving you a chance to put your name on the map for fame and glory.

    Rail Shooter 

    Real Time Strategy 
  • Tactics Ogre. The Hell Gate bonus level is 100 floors long, each floor containing a full campaign battle (more than the rest of the game combined), without the free HP refills and saves you'd get between normal battles. Every floor contains some of the deadliest enemies in the game, many of which have petrify (gorgons in particular, can petrify numerous party members at any distance in one move!). In the PSX remake, you can save in battle and thus break this up into segments, and redo a level if you screwed up big time, but in the Super Famicom original, it's a 10+ hour mission, no saves, no free heals, and the game featured permanent death if you didn't resurrect the player before the end of the battle (meaning before you kill everything on the floor). Both of your rezzers petrified/dead? You lose, even if you were on level 99 and spent the entire day on this. Now that's a wonderful failure. Finishing this dungeon was not only harder than the final dungeon, the gear obtained totally trivialized any other content, even if you didn't abuse the infinite stat spell. In the original version, possibly qualifies as the longest marathon level in any console game.
  • Age of Empires I: The Great Hunt. So you just spent fifteen minutes dashing madly past wild animals, towers, and siege weapons to get two priests? You're maybe a third of the way through.
  • Age of Empires II: Into China, the third mission of the Genghis Khan campaign, can typically take anywhere between three and six hours to complete.
  • Pikmin Series:
    • Pikmin 2 has the three final underground caves (Cavern of Chaos, Hole of Heroes and Dream Den), all located in Wistful Wild. All previous caves have at most nine levels (basement floors), and frequently only five or seven. The ones in Wistful Wild are ten to fifteen floors long, and several of them take long to tackle due to the heavier concentration of enemies and hazards. Hole of Heroes adds multiple bosses, too.
    • Pikmin 4: Cavern for a King is a cave made up of twenty sublevels, most of which consist of fighting through a boss or otherwise giant enemy. As all other caves in the game are no longer than six sublevels, Cavern for a King is the longest cave in the game by a great margin. Each floor is on average shorter than the typical floor of another cave, but the length of it all together still adds up.
  • Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars has GDI mission 15 which leaves you no choice but to repeatedly Ion Cannon the main Scrin -base due to large numbers of Devastator Warships making conventional attack impossible - and when in an Ion Storm they, and possibly the structures under them, seem impervious to said superweapon.
  • AI War: Fleet Command: Every level. There's a reason it refers to a single-map game as a "campaign". For scale, the 10-planet learn-as-you-play tutorial can take 2-4 hours, and that's heavily scripted to accurately reflect a normal game (such a small galaxy ordinarily gives the AI an insurmountable advantage). An average game against AI of an appropriate skill on the recommended 80-100 planet galaxy? Upwards of 10-12 hours, not counting Real-Time with Pause. The sequel tends to be a bit shorter (mostly due to reducing interface clutter and tactical fiddle factor) but a game played to completion will still tend toward 6 hours on the shorter side.

    Rhythm Game 
  • Everhood's Green Mage Corridor is less a level, but more a self-imposed challenge that even Green Mage himself tells you not to go into. It's a corridor marked with tally marks for each of the years upon years upon years that everyone has been in the Everhood, and since it takes upon average 2.5 HOURS!! to go from beginning to end, you can see why the Steam Achievement for it is called "Is there an end...?" Doing so allows the player to take another option out of killing everyone.
  • Rock Band:
    • Endless Setlist: All 50+ songs on the first Rock Band disc, in a row.
    • Endless Setlist 2: All 80+ songs on the Rock Band 2 disc, in a row! And no pausing!
    • There are also a lot of individual songs (some DLC) that are real long:
      • "The Camera Eye" by Rush (Rock Band DLC) is over 10 minutes long.
      • Jailbreak (live) (from the Rock Band AC/DC track pack) is over 14 minutes (though Jailbreak does have a long bridge that might have been exciting to watch at Donnington, but is essentially the music equivalent of a Space-Filling Path).
      • The Beatles: Rock Band has the entire Abbey Road album available as DLC. This includes the B-side suite, which you can either play separate sections of... or you can play the whole thing joined together as the Abbey Road Medley, which will take over 16 minutes.
      • Rock Band 3 released 2112 as its inaugural DLC for the year 2012, Which you can play either as multiple shorter songs or as one uninterrupted track.
      • Rock Band 4 added "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" as DLC in July 2017.
  • Guitar Hero:
    • The final song in Guitar Hero II is "Free Bird", which lasts over 10 minutes, most of which consists of an extended fast guitar solo.
    • Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock: "Through the Fire and Flames" is over 7 minutes long and has a brutally difficult note chart. The guitar solo alone is 2 minutes long. Worth 3722 notes.
    • Guitar Hero: World Tour has "Pull Me Under". And "Stranglehold" (granted, most of it IS an extended slow part, but still).
    • Guitar Hero 5 has "Do You Feel Like We Do" (LIVE) by Peter Frampton, which is over 14 minutes looooong.
    • "Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock" let you play Rush's 21-minute long masterpiece 2112... which you have to play in seven separate sections.
  • beatmania IIDX has "Scripted Connection=> (Long Mix)", a 5 1/2-minute song that combines all three versions of "Scripted Connection."
  • Beat Saber: In a game where songs generally clock in at three or four minutes, a few are double or triple the length.
    • "Angel Voices" clocks in at just over six minutes.
    • About half of the Camelia songs are over five minutes long, though a special shout-out goes to "GHOST", which also boasts an 8.7 note per second stat.
    • The Rock Mixtape includes Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird"... all nine minutes of it.
  • DanceDanceRevolution 5th MIX and some versions of pop'n music have several "Long Version" songs that take up two stages and were about 3-4 minutes long, in contrast to normal-length songs that last between 1.5-2 minutes.
    • Some Oni courses on PS2 versions, such as Hardcore in DDRMAX, are up to 20 songs long, which is a total of about 30 minutes.
    • When it comes to single songs, no one song wears one out faster then "Love is Dreamless" by L.E.D.; even though it's not that much longer then the average DDR song (almost 2 minutes compared to 90 or 100 seconds), on Hard or Oni Mode, you're just BEGGING for it to be over by the last 30 seconds!
    • The arcade version of DDRMAX2 also had the Oni Road course, which was the longest course ever in an arcade DDR, made up of 10 of the hardest songs in the game at the time and ending with Maxx Unlimited. It was over 15 minutes long and contained 3,783 steps (if you count jumps as one step). And it was playable on a single credit, which was probably why it was removed from later versions.
    • In the Wii game Hottest Party 3/MUSIC FIT, players can do this to themselves as a Self-Imposed Challenge. There are two songs that are about 4 minutes long each, which are megamixes of the best or most popular songs from Hottest Party 1 and 2 respectively. Doing 6 of these in a row in a custom non-stop course? Hope you have a lot of energy, and I hope you didn't pick Expert!
  • Pump It Up NX Absolute has a Special Stage called Beat No. 4 Full Version. It's five minutes long and contains somewhere between 1000 and 2000 steps (it's difficult to be sure because of the way that Pump it Up counts freeze arrows). Fortunately, the Crazy chart has a mostly empty section in the middle to give you a breather. The Nightmare chart, on the other hand... doesn't. Then there's Gargoyle Full Song from Prime 2. It's six minutes long and has run-heavy charts, particularly the harder ones that have no breather segments at all, which means you will be stepping on 16th note runs continuously for six minutes straight. Passing these charts require a good stamina to be able to keep up with the runs.
  • Beat Hazard also includes a Survival mode that continues until you run out of music or lives.
  • Cytus has multiple songs that tip the 3- or even 4-minute mark, but special mentions must be made to the Cytus Alive songs and Chapter L. Most songs in Alive are at least 4 minutes long, the longest being "Vanessa" at just over 7 minutes. Chapter L not only has the longest song in the entire game, the 7:37-long "L2", but the shortest song is still 4 1/2 minutes in length!
  • MÚSECA's cuts of "Senbonzakura" and "Renai Saiban" are each a little over 2 1/2 minutes long in a game where songs are typically around the 2-minute mark. And they still take up only a single stage each!
  • Audiosurf has achievements for getting the Stealth bonus (for avoiding all obstacles) on a Marathon Level on Ninja Mono. One is for doing this on a 7+ minute song, the other for an 11+ minute song. Time to break out the Epic Rocking.
  • Portions of the In the Groove community are known for pushing themselves to the limit; how about a full, two-hour Pendulum set?
  • Rhythm Heaven (not including the Endless Games, which, well, keep going for as long as YOU can keep going):
    • Rhythm Heaven, the one for the DS, has Fillbots 2. Not quite as extreme as the other examples on this list, clocking in at around 3 minutes, but it is quite a contrast to the rest of the series, with songs mostly around the 60- to 90-second range and is the only stage in the entire series longer than its corresponding game's Final Remix stage.
    • The Final Remixes themselves: Except for the first game, each game is capped with a stage that takes one or two phrases from every prior stage, not including other remixes. Of particular note is the one in Rhythm Heaven Fever, which concludes with several phrases from the Packing Pests stage...and proceeds to extend itself by repeatedly throwing in fake endings.
    • Rhythm Heaven Megamix introduces the Challenge Trains mode, in which you have to play a series of stages. Fail three times, and you're out. Later Challenge Trains, such as "Extreme Sports" or "Rhythm Safari," can throw in as many as seven or eight stages. If you're on a roll, hope that it doesn't end for a while.

    Roguelike 
  • The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games have a few 50-floor dungeons that push any player's patience, but the 99-floor dungeons take the cake.
  • Etrian Mystery Dungeon has the Phantom Depths. Sixty floors with a boss at the end. Your party starts at Level 1 with no items and basic equipment (though you keep your skills), and all items are unidentified. You can't make checkpoint forts, and Suspend Save is your only option if you need to take a break, so no Save Scumming. If you lose, you have to start all over again. And on top of all that, you likely will need to backtrack to get enough items to survive the last few floors and the boss, meaning you may have to visit 100 rooms or more. Good luck. And if you're seeking 100% Completion, it only gets even more sadistic, because the boss has three drops, with only one being common.
  • ADOM has the Infinite Dungeon. Thankfully, most players won't ever have to do anything in it beyond grind at low levels or look for spellbooks. It's only important for Ultra Endings. Players will need to kill Filk the Ratling Bard, who is on a dungeon level decided by what the player's first kill was, multiplied by how many times the player has killed that monster. God help you if it was something common like a rat or kobold, because Filk will be hundreds of levels down into the dungeon. Secondly, the player needs to kill Malakai the Chaos Knight, who is on level 66 of the Infinite Dungeon, and has to be reached in one try.
  • The ultimate goal of Azure Dreams is to reach the 40th floor of the monster tower. Since it's magical, the tower always sends you back to the 1st floor when leaving it, forcing you to do it in one go, entering and leaving the tower before a lot to train your familiars and collect items so you can actually best the higher floors' monsters.
  • Darkest Dungeon:
    • The Courtyard from The Crimson Court DLC is the only location to feature Epic length expeditions, with each of them being being several times bigger than a Long dungeon, with dozens of rooms and extremely long corridors. Fortunately, you can leave these dungeons without incurring a stress penalty and you start from wherever you left off the next time you enter them.
    • The second-to-last quest in the main story, the third expedition to the eponymous dungeon, is labeled as an Exhausting level quest, meaning that you can camp up to four times, unlike twice for Long quests, once for Medium quests and not at all for Short quests. The area is rather large, with many rooms, and minibosses that can teleport you into a random and most likely unexplored region of the dungeon if not defeated quickly enough. One of those minibosses guards the quest goal at the end.
  • In Dungeon Crawl, the Abyss and Pandemonium cannot be exited easily once you enter—they both consist of infinite random levels with random loot and monsters (and for Pandemonium, randomly generated bosses) and can only be left if you stumble upon a portal out (with most portals out of Pandemonium leading into the Abyss). Getting the abyssal rune requires wandering around for thousands of turns since its likelihood of spawning increases the longer you're there, and getting all the runes in Pandemonium requires you to be ready for any of four different special levels with endgame bosses at any time. Needless to say, starvation is a serious concern, especially if you're sent to the Abyss unexpectedly!
  • The Binding of Isaac:
    • The XXXXXXXXL challenge of Afterbirth makes every floor gigantic, turning each one of them in to a Marathon Level on its own.
    • Afterbirth+'s final floor is at the maximum possible map sizenote , has multiple boss rooms that can contain previous "fake" final bosses, and its real final boss is a Marathon Boss on his own with 10,000 HP.
  • Spelunky 2: Want to get the most hidden ending in the game? You're going to have to not only get to the real final area by following a series of difficult tasks from the very start of the game, but you also have to have Hou Yi's Bow and the Arrow of Light on you and use that to shoot Hundun's eye after you beat him. If you manage to do this, you'll be sent to Cosmic Ocean, an extremely long series of randomized stages that require more than just descending to the bottom to complete. All other areas take 4 levels to traverse through, this area consists of 95 levels.

    Role-Playing Game 
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm:
    • The Spire is an immense black tower that’s far longer and harder to navigate than any of the game’s other dungeons, on top of being a huge spike in terms of difficulty. When your guide warns you that the climb may take all day, he isn’t joking in the slightest. It was even worse before an update added shortcut warps, since you had to backtrack through at least half the dungeon every time you wanted to leave and resupply. Even with the shortcuts, it’s still a long and grueling trek up to the aerie.
    • The Deep Web, the largest and most challenging of the game’s Bonus Dungeons. It’s not quite as bad as The Spire, since it comes with its own shop and inn, meaning you’ll never be starved for supplies, but it’s still quite a long journey from one end of the labyrinth to the other.
  • A Mario World hack (Demo World The Legend Continues) has a 100 floor tower for Big Boo in a similar style, and there's another which is called 100 Rooms of Enemies.
  • The Light Temple in Steven Universe: Unleash The Light is the longest level in the game, requiring progress by collecting several keys located in the other levels and having a wider range compared the more-simpler maps.
  • XenoGears: The final area, Merkava, takes hold of utilizing multiple pathways that lead to dead ends, and requires activating platform bridges that goes straight to Deus by interacting with certain terminals found dispersed throughout platforms that are far from each other which can only be reached by going through the maze path.
  • Final Fantasy
    • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of Final Fantasy is this, especially if you depend on your mages. Each floor is long and capped with a boss fight (on a trigger tile, no less; one misstep and you're doing the fight twice), and then you finally get to fight the end boss. Your mages, at max level, get 9 casts per level of magic (which is often the most efficient way to clear a crowd). Hope you left them something to do in that last fight...
    • Final Fantasy II:
      • The Mysidian Tower is a significant jump-up in dungeon length, coupled with dangerous enemies, three mandatory mini-bosses along the way, and plenty of sidepaths loaded with treasure.
      • The final dungeon run is a combination of the Jade Passage, a fairly straightforward dungeon with numerous Chest Monster mini-bosses guarding the Infinity-1 Equipment, and Castle Pandaemonium, a massive labyrinth with several sidepaths in order to obtain the Armor of Invincibility (and the hidden Infinity +1 Sword).
    • Final Fantasy III:
      • The last dungeon fits, since it consists of a long climb up a tower, a boss battle against what was up to that point considered the Big Bad, the appearance of the real villain, a Hopeless Boss Fight, and then another dungeon before the real final boss fight. And there's no save points. And the sequence after the first Big Bad is a Point of No Return. So if you die to the final boss (a very real possibility since this isn't one of the wimpy final bosses of later Final Fantasy games), you get to do the whole thing over again.
      • The extra dungeon in the basement (which contains the infinity plus one equipment). But you can save right outside it, so it's still not nearly as bad as the final dungeon.
    • The Moon in Final Fantasy IV. Even assuming you skip all of the Superboss battles to get the Infinity +1 Sword for each character, you're in for a hike to reach the Final Boss. You have to land the Big Whale on a small spot above a ramp on the Moon, go through three different caves before you reach the Moon Castle, then enter The Very Definitely Final Dungeon by stepping on a panel in the crystal room. Once there, you're going through eight very long floors, each one full of multiple pathways in Cut and Paste Environments, each one with a bunch of chests that contain monsters. It could easily take over an hour to reach the one and only Save Point in the dungeon, and it's still a ways away from the last boss. Going down the last staircase in the moon area puts you in a large crystal room where you once again have to keep descending, with every random encounter being a Boss in Mook Clothing, as evidenced by the boss music playing for every encounter here. Only after five more floors of very tough enemies do you finally reach the last boss, and the cutscene that plays beforehand takes about ten minutes until the true final battle starts. Whew!
    • The True Moon in Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. First, you enter its Subterrane, which reproduces the entire final dungeon of Final Fantasy IV, full of hard monsters and boss fights every three floors or so. But then, near the end of the Nostalgia Level portion, you go through three two-to-three floor areas based on the Elemental Archfiends you haven't faced yet. At thee end of that, at about Basement 16 of the Subterrane, you have a climactic battle with The Dark Knight. Your reward for beating that? You get to continue on and enter the Depths. There are roughly twenty-odd floors to the Depths, with four mandatory boss fights every five floors or so. And it just gets harder and harder and harder as you descend. The True Moon is, without hyperbole, longer than the other chapters of the game combined.
    • Final Fantasy VI
      • The Mage's Tower. It's optional, but it's a very long climb to the top of nothing but the same environment over and over again of walking up stairs, with only a few chest rooms to break it up. On top of that, you can only use magic in this dungeon, so the inability to restore your MP until close to the end is pretty rough. There's only one save point, and the boss at the top is a textbook Barrier Change Boss that takes a while to defeat. And once you beat the boss, you still have to walk all the way back down unless you've got enough magic left to use the Warp spell.
      • Kefka's Tower. It takes three parties to jump in, and while you can perform it any time after you get the Airship in the World of Ruin, it's pretty tough going even if you've completed everything else. Each party has a long trek down to one of three switches, including a Climax Boss in one of the Three Statues on each route, along with Checkpoint Starvation since there's few opportunities to save. It can easily take more than an hour to reach a Save Point in this dungeon, and the Final Boss has multiple form to go through as well.
      • There are three scenarios after the first battle with Ultros. While you have to complete all three, Sabin's is easily the longest. It requires a trek through the Imperial Base, meeting up with Cyan, and fighting through to the Phantom Forest, coupled with the Phantom Train immediately following it. And once that's done, you still have to go to the Veldt, find out the right way to recruit Gau, and then complete the Serpent's Trench, then finally hitch a ride on a ship at Nikeah to bring you to South Figaro. All of this is interspersed with long cutscenes, two sequences of walking through Doma Castle as Cyan without fighting, and several other plot developments. The player can recruit Shadow at the beginning, but he might randomly leave at the end of any battle, forcing rapid-fire saving just to ensure the player keeps him up until the Veldt (when he leaves automatically). While Sabin's route isn't necessarily the hardest of the three, it's still so intensely long and full of plot developments that it's typically recommended that a player save it for last. In any other part of the game, this disparate sequence of events wouldn't be that remarkable because it's more of a chain of multiple short to medium length separate plots. However, since it's framed as 1/3 of the different character paths but takes longer than the other two put together, it really feels like an eternity.
    • Final Fantasy VII
      • While not exactly a level, the original game features a really long boring sequence of staircases if the player chooses to follow Tifa's plan during the raid on Shinra Headquarters and sneaks in from behind. You get somewhat rewarded halfway though, finding an Elixir, but still you get to the top of every screen thinking it's going to be the last one. And it never is. The remake underscores the fatigue further by slowing the characters' walking speed and making the music more discordant the further up you go.
      • The snow section. The first section is a featureless plain where you have to use manually-placed markers just to avoid getting lost, all while trying to navigate to the right area. The second section is a huge ice cliff, where you have to keep your party's body temperature up by repeatedly pressing a button, lest everyone freeze to death. It's not that intrusive as it goes away whenever you enter a cavern, but it still slows your progress down to a crawl when you're outside. On top of that, the whole place is a maze, and it's very easy to get lost. At least there's a Healing Checkpoint if you feel like Level Grinding, but it's so late in the dungeon that you'll probably just want to get it over with.
    • The Pharos Lighthouse in Final Fantasy XII. Contains 100 floors, and you actually do have to climb almost all of them.
  • Boktai:
    • The Azure Sky Tower starts out 12 floors tall, and adds 3 more every time you complete it. It may not seem big at first, but there's a reward for getting it up to 99, and you have to start from floor 1 every time you try, and it's even worse if you got all the Emblems, since you need to fight a difficult boss at the end. Depending on your luck, individual floors can take anywhere from a minute (where the key and door are right nearby) to much longer (if you accidentally miss the damn Undead hiding the key while making your sweep, for example).
    • Dream Avenue in the second one works similarly (though thank the gods, the number of floors are fixed). This one depends on enemy layout however - since you'll want them to trip the switches that may drop the key, or nuke anything around it.
    • Vambery in Lunar Knights too, but you can do it in 10-floor segments. No hunting here - just kill everything in a small section, and you move on. Problem is that the all enemies have their levels scaled to match your current floor.
    • All three require you to finish the entire section before you can save - die or use a Fool Card/Escape, and the whole thing doesn't count. Souped-up bosses also appear at the end of both Dream Avenue and Vambery, up to the last miniboss in Dream Avenue, up to a L99 version of the final boss in Vambery.
  • Arc the Lad had a 50 floor long bonus dungeon. It didn't let you save. The dungeon returned in the sequel with additional floors if converting the save file from the first game.
  • Seeing how you can play through most levels and subquests of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines in under 15 minutes, the Nosferatu Warrens are VERY long by comparison, as you can spend several hours finding your way through them. Luckily, the levels have two emergency exits (the only instance of such in the entire game) for you to replenish spent ammo etc.
  • Beyond Oasis has a hidden 100-floor dungeon. It's worth it for the Infinity +1 Sword at the bottom, but wow.
  • Shin Megami Tensei:
    • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne has the Obelisk (145 floors) and the Tower of Kagutsuchi (666 floors). Although they both have elevators that'll take you past a good majority of those floors, it's certainly going to feel like you're walking up each and every one yourself. Also, as if to emphasize its sheer length, while the Tower has three large Terminals, the Obelisk only has S-terminals, which means if you have to go back down for whatever reason, you have to start the entire dungeon all over again. And it's not like they're not filled with incredibly annoying puzzles, extremely difficult bosses, powerful Mooks and a ludicrously high random encounter rate.
    • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse already beefs up several preexisting dungeons (most notably the two Tsukiji Hongwanji dungeons) from its predecessor and adds a six-floor dungeon to the Neutral routes, but most notorious is YHVH's Universe, the final dungeon on those routes. Despite having only four floors, each of those floors is obnoxoiously big, with massive islands to run across and as many as eighteen labeled sub-areas on each floor, all connected by teleport doors and cubes, some of which require finding certain locations to unlock, some others of which serve as shortcuts but require that one of your stats be high enough, and some of which are one-way doors designed to screw you over. Even with the DLC that lifts the level cap and Estoma to make enemy encounters go away (as you will likely have a party in the 90's or even 100's level range at this point), you will still likely get lost and spend hours just trying to find the way to the next floor if you don't consult a map. Flynn even advises you to zoom out the map so you don't get lost there. Its few saving graces: This is a game where you can save anywhere and get revived from a Game Over at no cost, and there are warp points you can activate so you can jump to ones you've visited already.
    • Digital Devil Saga ups the ante with The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, the Karma Temple. It's three times the size of any other dungeon, filled with the toughest encounters in the game and multiple mid-bosses, and features confusing mazes filled with false walls, invisible teleportation circles and damage floors. Also, it has very few save points and only two healing stations: one at the start and one at the two-thirds point.
  • Finding Arawn to cure Samson's curse in Beyond the Beyond qualifies for this. After completing a number of side quests you fight your way through the Gaea Shrine, which is like one big puzzle in it of itself. Then you climb a giant monster-infested Magic Vine in order to reach Arawn's Tower. Then you have to fight through the Tower and its puzzles to finally meet Arawn. Considering this game's only save point is at churches, you better prepare for a long play-through and have your characters appropriately leveled and stocked.
  • The Golden Sun series has a number of these:
    • The biggest offenders are the Elemental Rocks in Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Air's Rock in particular (which is also the first Elemental Rock to be tackled) has two parts (the cliff wall and the interior), each of which being a longer-than-average dungeon in and of itself. It requires the use of a Psynergy that's fairly expensive for utility Psynergy, and which requires unequipping all Djinn unless you're playing with single-element classes. You're also supposed to go there with only three party members; it's possible to get the fourth before completing it, but that requires fighting a Wake-Up Call Boss significantly underleveled. The area's one saving grace is that it has a very low random encounter rate.
    • Golden Sun: Dark Dawn has Otka Island. Too many rooms to count. You can get through the dungeon in a reasonable time for a dungeon if you use a guide, and a little longer to get all the items as well. Not playing with a guide? Too bad. Unlike everything else, there's no map. And to make matters worse, all the rooms look the same. Yes, it is very easy to get lost. Thankfully, the dungeon is designed for someone who knows how to navigate labyrinths (specifically, by using the "left hand rule", touch the wall to the left and walk along it, only going where the wall leads you). You can get all the items and the summon this way, however, it will lead to going through a LOT of unnecessary rooms and if it weren't for happening upon the items, an impatient person will wonder if they aren't going around in circles with this method.
  • At least half the dungeons in Avalon Code. When you're only 15 hours in and the dungeon consists of over 25 screens, each with their own mini-puzzle and monster battles, you know you've got a long haul ahead.
  • Wild ARMs 3 contains The Abyss, a hundred level dungeon with every encounter being an ambush with out a certain skill on all the characters. It also contains Ragu Ragula,one of the hardest bosses in the game.
  • The Eternal Tower in Phantasy Star Zero certainly lives up to its name. It's 101 floors long and while each one is short it eventually adds up. There's no saving so you can't turn off your DS during this. You can't use telepipes and can only return to town after beating a boss after every 10 floors. If you want the full rewards you have to beat it a total of three times, once for each difficulty. And you HAVE to beat it on Hard if you want to play on Super difficulty offline, once for each character you have. Thank God for the DS' Sleep Mode function...
  • Missions in Crisis Core can get really, really long at times, not counting the time you spend fighting the ridiculously healthy enemies. Cetra forbid you die to the mission-ending encounter. Here's a great idea: have the players fight 1000 elite Shinra troops meted out into consecutive groups of 9 and 1! It makes one dubious of the ending.
  • The last dungeon of Exit Fate (Vanaheim) contains three bosses before you get to the final boss, and the paths between them are fairly long; in a game where most areas have two or three save points, this one has five.
  • Persona:
    • The Sky Museum level from Persona 2, has this combined with a time limit.
    • Persona 3 has Tartarus, a tower that the party's school turns into during the Dark Hour. It has a total of 264 Floors, although floors are only unlocked as you progress through the game, and the minibosses located here are much tougher than the Full Moon bosses. The thing is that, despite the tower actually being plot-mandated to be climbed eventually, it is the location for grinding most of the time, so the player is likely to go through the tower in chunks here and there. If the player has done everything there is to do by the endgame, there will only be a few floors left to clear on the final day.
    • Persona 5 features this in droves at the end of the story in the original game(Royal's new palace is a typical palace, with only the new Final Boss on the final trip to the Palace). The last job for the Phantom Thieves occurs on 12/24, and it has to be done all in one day. There's a few ways to mitigate the worst of it, but it's still going to be one hell of a trek.
      • Mementos, the side dungeon that was playable alongside the story dungeons for the whole game. This location has a total of 66 descending floors of cursed subway tunnels. If you've taken care of the Mementos quests, you'll have likely traversed to the lower floors, and can skip straight to the bottom. If you ignored Mementos... Have fun going down all 66 floors at once, all without healing.
      • Mementos Depth, aka Prison of Sloth, the location behind the final barrier in Mementos. This is the Point of No Return... sort of. Futaba will say that the entrance to Mementos Depths can only be opened from the outside, so going inside means the party will be stuck until things are completed. But the game is generous enough to give the player a healing NPC at the entrance, and there is the option to leave the dungeon and go to the clinic and Airsoft to buy healing items and equipment.
      • Quliphoth City, the Very Definite Final Dungeon of the game. It occurs immediately after finishing up the Mementhos Depths, and after a lot of cutscenes — including the option to get a Bad Ending — and leaving the player already drained of dungeons at the beginning. The enemies here are pretty tough, with several Shadows wrapped in red auras, and capable of killing your party or simply Joker if one isn't careful. There are four minibosses to fight on each level before the player finally manages to get to the area of the Final Boss. Once again, the game is kind enough to have a healing NPC at the beginning of the dungeon, but the player cannot jump back to the beginning until they reach the end. If one wants to get healing midway through the dungeon without wasting items, have fun going all the way back. And this place doesn't allow access to the clinic or Airsoft anymore.
  • Baldur's Gate II has Watcher's Keep: Not that many floors, but when these floors include a teleporting maze, a dozen different puzzles, some of the toughest monsters in the game (including the Superboss of the un-expansion game encountered just by randomly entering a room) it literally takes about as much time as the rest of the expansion content. Luckily you can save the game.
  • Dragon Age: Origins doesn't exactly have short levels to begin with, but there are some that really outstay their welcome:
    • Completing Orzammar in its entirety is twice as long and twice as hard as anything else in the game, involving a huge amount of time spent running around both city and subterranean roads, encountering hordes of enemies and sidequests, several bosses (often lumped in quick succession), and a freaking tournament. It is exhausting.
    • While not as mind-bogglingly gigantic as Orzammar, the Circle Tower deserves a mention. It would be a typical Dragon Age: Origins level if it weren't for the fact that in the middle you suddenly get sent into the Fade and separated from your party, requiring you to first track down multiple Fade forms to shapeshift into, a process which in and of itself requires you to enter every part of the Fade about seventeen different times, and find all your party. When that's done you get to go back to the Circle Tower and complete the level. Oh, and once you enter the Tower, you have to do the whole thing without returning to camp for supplies or to switch out party members, something even Orzammar lets you do.
    • What probably takes up nearly as much time as Orzammar is Arl of Redcliffe, which takes you through an undead siege at Redcliffe, a slog through the demon infested Redcliffe Castle, then to the Tower (if you don't want to either kill Connor or Isolde to get shot of the demon possessing the kid), then a segment through the Fade ‘’again’’, potentially right after you slogged through the Tower’s Lost In Dreams. After that, you then learn why the whole debacle happened, Arl Eamon got poisoned by (possibly your former best friend) Jowan, a blood mage. To cure him, you need to find the Urn of Sacred Ashes, which has been lost for (literal) ages. Tracking it down requires you to go into Denerim to find a scholar, who isn’t there, and his assistant was killed and replaced. That leads you to Haven, a village up in the mountains, home to a religious cult. Then you have to get through an abandoned temple, filled with zealots, traps, and dragons. Then you have to fight a goddamned High Dragon to get into the temple itself, then through it’s challenges, which involve a Mirror Boss, and a logic puzzle. After that you return to Redcliffe and finally finish doing stuff for the quest (Arl of Redcliffe technically doesn’t end until Eamon calls the Landsmeet, ostensibly the game’s second act.). All of that is an hours-long trial. But there is good loot along the way, at least.
  • Mass Effect doesn't have very many main quests to start out with, so most of the missions are slightly longer than usual. However, Noveria makes up the bulk of the game. You must manage to find a way into a garage after breaking into a back office and finding computer evidence. Then, you must drive your vehicle all the way to a ruin site, repair a broken computer terminal, then use that in order to take a train to a human colony. You must then find some health supplies for an infection that has broken out, and THEN you finally fight Matriarch Benezia, the boss. And not only that, there's loads of geth and rachni that you must fight along the way. Oh, and there are barely any checkpoints.
  • The Demon Shaft in Dark Cloud is 100 floors long, and each floor has a random layout. Thankfully, you can leave the dungeon, and come back to the last floor you were on at a later point.
  • Etrian Odyssey has a quest called Explorers Guild Trial. It involves spending five days of game time on level B8F. This can take three hours, and the only thing that makes it beatable is the spring nearby that heals all health and mana. It returns in the remake, with Story Mode alleviating the process with events that can skip 8 hours of each day. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from strolling back and forth in the encounter-free spring room, but that's still tedious.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • In Morrowind, roughly halfway through the main quest, you'll need to visit Kogoruhn, the ancient stronghold of Great House Dagoth (of which Big Bad Dagoth Ur was the leader). You are tasked with finding three specific items in order to pass "The Warrior's Test" to be named Urshilaku Nerevarine. Two of the items are easily found in the domes on the roof. The third requires a trek through the multi-level dungeon and the extensive underground tunnels beneath, which are crawling with Dagoth Ur's Ash Creature minions, undead (including stat-damaging Greater Bonewalkers), and lesser Daedra. Even if you are able to complete it in one shot without having to backtrack to civilization to heal and restock, expect to spend at least an hour there.
    • Oblivion:
      • Any time you go into an Oblivion Gate. You have to go around and find a way to get to the main tower where the Sigil Stone is before you can get inside, then you have to fight your way up (which can take hours since your enemies level up with you) and then take the stone.
      • The final leg of the Thieves Guild "The Ultimate Heist" quest is basically two lengthy dungeon crawls slapped together, except the first in an actual dungeon and the second is sneaking your way through the Imperial Palace. And on top of that, halfway through the quest you have to fire a specific arrow of which you only have one of (it's recommended you save prior to firing it), and if miss you are screwed and need to start the whole quest over again.
    • There are multiple dungeons in Skyrim that can be rather long, but the longest of them is almost certainly Blackreach and the Dwemer dungeons attached to it. For starters, you must complete one of three Dwemer ruins which are fairly meaty in of themselves, but upon doing so, you enter Blackreach, a MASSIVE cavern with multiple secrets. To explore it from start to finish can take a few hours. This becomes a bit more understandable from a meta perspective given that Blackreach houses an Elder Scroll needed to complete both the main campaign and Dawnguard.
    • The Forgotten Vale quest of the Dawnguard DLC to Skyrim. The region you must work through is easily one third the size of the original game map. The fact that there is gratuitous amounts of Scenery Porn there helps, however.
  • Infinite Undiscovery has the bonus dungeon, the Seraphic Gate. While it's only 17 floors deep, and most of the floors aren't particularly huge, the enemies are all very powerful, and simply running from them all is a good way to get your party members killed (you must sheath your weapons to run). The floors that ARE big are very big, some of which take over 5 minutes to run through without fighting anything. There's only one save point (halfway down and just past a difficult bonus boss), one teleporter back to the surface (in the save room, also meaning there's no easy way out if you're simply farming for experience or item drops), and the super powerful boss of the dungeon, Ethereal Queen, can only be fought if you first beat another difficult boss immediately before her. And the dungeon's longest and most dangerous floors are AFTER the save point, meaning if you lose to Queenie, you've got another long slog ahead of you. The worst part? If you want full gamerscore, you have to kill her on Hard and Infinity mode, both of which can't be unlocked until you beat the game on the difficulty before it, meaning you have to beat the game 3 times (the Gate only opens up when you beat the game and load your save).
  • Fallout:
    • Fallout 3 's Broken Steel final mission, Who Dares Wins, is about the length of two regular missions, consisting of Sneaking into the Metro Station, then reaching the Enclave's final base, getting into their mobile platform, and either recalibrating the targeting system or letting it destroy what's left of the Pentagon. Also, if you're higher levels, you will meet about 4-5 Feral Ghoul Reavers...at once. Not even those Sentry Bots can save you; the most the sentry bots will do is thin the herd of weak feral ghouls will the Reavers eat their bullets like popcorn.
    • In Fallout 4's V1.5 Survival Mode, fast travelling is disabled, which means you have to physically travel on foot everywhere (aside from teleporting to the Institute) unless you are allied with the Brotherhood of Steel and have access to a Vertibird, and you can only save at beds, which may have very long trips between.
  • Baten Kaitos Origins has The Very Definitely Final Dungeon Tarazed. It's composed of four different 'blocks' that you have to traverse to shut down the power generators. Each block is a maze, full of loot, one-way paths, and dead ends, and every room looks the same. When you finally find the generator room, you have to solve a smaller maze puzzle to actually enter the room and shut it down. Even worse, the place teems with Machina Auto-Turrets, high-order Demonic Spiders that can effortlessly wipe away an hour or two's worth of progress. You'll want to save every chance you can, except the closest save point is rather inconveniently located, forcing you to run all the way out of Tarazed every time you complete a block. Did you get the impression that it's That One Level?
  • Chrono Cross has Terra Tower, a Reptite city dragged into time from another dimension. Not only is is very, very long, but it's also full of enemies and minibosses that take long to defeat.
  • The original Chrono Trigger has the Black Omen, which while optional is the game's equivalent of the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. It comes complete with a lot of minibosses, some tricky enemies, and a three-form boss at the end. Worse, there's a shop and teleport back to the entrance about a third of the way in, but nothing of the sort at the end, when you'd actually need it to get ready for said boss. It's also possible to abuse time travel to go through this dungeon up to three different times, though the treasure chests in them remain opened after the first time.
  • Diablo II:
    • Durance of Hate's second floor on the highest difficulty. Besides its incredible length (its area is several times a regular level), there's a chance for it to be filled of Stygian Dolls. Good luck making through that incredibly long level while fighting them every three rooms.
    • Replace "difficulty" with "tedium" and you have the Maggot Lair in Act 2. You have a giant maze of hallways, each a single sprite wide. As in, no enemies or allies can cross another enemy or ally; everything blocks everything's pathnote . This means you are forced to fight anything in front of you. And there are lot of things in front of you. And only one melee fighter can attack one enemy at a time. Decided to bring one of the town's lancing mercenaries with you? Well expect them to be either bored or dead. And if you had the misfortune of going the wrong way, well then it looks like you're going to have to go through said process all over again. Needless to say, it's not one of the game's more attractive experiences.
    • And as far as entire acts, not individual levels, are concerned, Act 3 is the offender. It is not necessarily bigger in terms of size, but the maps are much more labyrinthine and often require serious amounts of backtracking. It is also the main offender in terms of enemy difficulty relative to character level, since the game begins spawning Demonic Spiders in amounts better suited for Goddamn Bats roughly in the third act.
  • The optional Gladsheim in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World is so enormous and labyrinthine that the most common method of dealing with it is to get a paper and draw a map of it as you go. There are ten floors, only two of which have save points on them. And don't bother going online to look for a map of the place - it's randomized.
  • In Magi-Nation, we have the Shadow Hold. How bad is it? The Shadow Geysers and other dungeons are only about 20-30 mins. The Shadow Hold is at the very least three times that long, with enough dead-ends and false openings to lead anyone insane. It's so bad, it's actually optional.
  • Some dungeons in Dungeon Siege can take a long time to complete, especially the later ones. One of the worst offenders is the Goblin steampunk dungeon, where your party has to hack through giant mob after giant mob of high-level enemies. Even if you get fed up with it and decide to just rush through, it will still take at least 15 minutes until you finally reach the end.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has the Pit of 100 Trials, the game's Bonus Dungeon, which, true to its name, consists of no less than 100 levels filled with progressively stronger enemies. There's a rest stop every 10 floors where you can stock up on items (at a hefty premium, of course) or leave if it's getting too much, but you have to clear the entire thing in one go to reach the end and meet Bonetail.
    • Super Paper Mario:
      • The Pit of 100 Trials, much like its predecessor, is a lengthy 100-floor gauntlet filled with increasingly tough foes. However, this game ups the ante by including two Pits: first there's the Flipside Pit of 100 Trials, populated by normal enemies; beating its boss unlocks the Flopside Pit of 100 Trials, which is filled with exceptionally powerful Dark enemies. Even worse, once you reach the end of that one, the boss essentially says "I'm impressed, come back again and we'll fight", forcing you to clear the Flopside Pit a second time for a total of 300 levels before full completion.
      • There's also Sammer's Kingdom — after it's restored in the postgame, you can take on the full Duel of 100, which consists of a hundred battles in succession. Unlike the Pit, you do get the chance to save every 25 fights, but if you want an audience with Lord Sammer, you better have some time on your hands.
    • The Mario & Luigi series has a few of these, especially the final dungeons. Bowser's Castle in the first game must have at least 50 rooms in it along with all seven Koopalings, Fawful and the two stage Final Boss to contend with. Partners in Time has Shroob Castle, which is even longer and with four floors of that many rooms each, and Peach's Castle/Fawful's Castle just goes on and on and on and spans a good few hundred rooms plus a trip to the Airway in Bowser's Body. Neo Bowser's Castle from Dream Team is about as long as the first game's final dungeon but it also has three different trips to the Dream World while the dungeon of the same name in Paper Jam takes just as long as Shroob Castle plus several different bosses. Joke's End from the first one might count too, as might the two section Woohoo Hooniversity.
    • Super Mario RPG has several towards the end of the game:
      • The volcano area is quite lengthy with some hard hitting enemies and it is coupled by a two part boss fight, followed by another two part boss fight after that. Luckily, you catch a break after the first boss fight.
      • Bowser's Keep on the return trip. The castle is extremely long and has enemies that can kill a party member instantly. The length is padded out mostly due to the trials you have to complete by going through 4 of 6 doors and if you want to get all the ultimate weapons for the majority of your party, you'll be coming back to those doors that have them if you missed out since completing 4 of the trials puts you in a Point of No Return until you leave the castle and reenter. The end section is then followed up by two boss fights and you don't get a break in between them either.
      • The road to Smithy is a very long one. It's filled with tricky platforming, several boss fights, and respawning enemies on conveyor belts. Luckily, the factory area is very brief as it consists of every room being a major/boss battle with breaks in between.
  • Stella Glow: Chapter 10 is by far the longest in the game, to the point it makes use of all 12 round slots in the game's clock (each representing a full period, with some being Free Time and others being Mission Time), whereas all prior chapters rarely went past 6 or 7 (Chapter X also lasts 12 periods, but since the last ones pass by back-to-back during the main characters' ongoing battles across the Yggdrasil while they climb it in order to reach the moon, it's still shorter than Chapter 10 overall). This makes sense, as during this period the characters have to travel back to every major location, plus visit a new one, in order to unlock and assemble a song that holds the key to defeat the Final Boss, and each segment has its own robust sequence of battles and plot-critical cutscenes. It culminates with a Hold the Line sequence to protect Lambert, which in turn leads to a scene whose outcome is tied to the conditions necessary to eventually get the game's Golden Ending.
  • .hack//G.U. Volume 3 has a Bonus Dungeon known as The Forest of Pain a 100 floor dungeon packed with enemies and objectives that a player must complete. Though it's tolerated for lacking Checkpoint Starvation for the first half of the dungeon, but after that it's all the way or nothing.
  • Pillars of Eternity's mega-dungeon the Endless Paths started with three subterranean floors and gained an additional level for every 2,500 Kickstarter backers. It ended up with thirteen.
  • Suikoden III has the infamous Mountain Path. Not only is it an infamously long trek with constant Random Encounters with branching paths that lead to either dead ends or the wrong location entirely, but you have to traverse it multiple times, back and forth in different directions because it is between you and a required destination a multitude of times and you aren't allowed to circumvent it. Once you finally get Viki's mirror some 2/3s into the game you can finally breathe easy.
  • Every Pokémon game has an extra-long route, or series of route joined together, that you have to tackle. These almost always have no Pokémon Centers or healing NPCs, and usually contain tons and tons of trainers:
    • Pokémon Red and Blue has the first instance of this in the long routes connecting Lavender Town to Fuschia City (thankfully optional, as you can also reach Fuschia City by taking the much faster Bicycle path. If you want the Super Rod, however, you have to take the long route). Pokémon Gold and Silver lets you visit the same area in the postgame.
    • Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire has the long routes from Mauville to Fortree as well as from Fortree to Lilycove. Near the end of the latter, the path branches off to take you to Mt. Pyre and the game actually prompts you to go there, but not heading to Lilycove first to heal and obtain a fly point is an exercise in madness. And there's the never-ending surfing that plagues the last portion of the game.
    • The Orre games, Pokémon Colosseum and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, have Mt. Battle - you are forced to ascend the first Area as per the story, but afterwards you can go back there and scale 100 battles' worth of trainers. You can save on your way up, and transfer to and from each zone on demand, but if you want a special prize from the region, you need to do it all in one run (saves are permitted, mercifully).
    • Citadark Isle in Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness. Longer than any other area in the game, filled with trainer battles and Shadow Pokemon. You also have rematches with all 3 previously-fought bosses, plus two entirely new bosses, a legendary fight and the Final Boss. Just to show how insane it is, fully HALF of the game's Shadow Pokemon are located on Citadark Isle.
    • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl has the long walk from Solaceon to Veilstone, which has tall grass so that you can't use your bike and it's capped off with a double battle against a pair of Ace Trainers notorious for Boss in Mook Clothing levels of difficulty. There's also this game's version of Victory Road, which is infamous as one of the hardest Victory Roads in the series.
    • In Pokémon Black and White, thankfully eastern Unova and its long routes are confined to the postgame, but in the sequels you have to tackle them in the main story.
    • In Pokémon X and Y, the longer routes usually have a Pokémon Ranger or other healing NPC to alleviate some of the stress.
    • In Pokémon Sun and Moon, the Vast Poni Canyon begins with a battle against Hapu before turning into a long trek spanning multiple cave segments, many Trainers, and no Charizard Glide checkpoints until reaching the Trial at the end. Fortunately, Lillie is traveling with you on the first trip, and will heal your team at various points. The final segment of the Canyon, before the Trial, also lets you open a shortcut back to the entrance.
  • Rogue Galaxy has the Ghost Ship, a randomly generated dungeon with 100 floors only accessible in the post-game. Every ten floors is a boss room and on the 100th floor, there's a difficult boss battle. Not too bad, right? Well once you complete it, you can take a quiz at the entrance. If you pass it, which is fairly easy, you can do Ghost Ship EXTREME which is basically the entire damn dungeon all over again with even harder bosses and an even harder final boss all for Kisala's swimsuit. And if you have the testicular fortitude to do it AGAIN, you can get ANOTHER outfit revealing Simon's face.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age perfectly captures the intensity of the battle at Helm's Deep. The party must defeat a very large number of enemies in consecutive battles with no time to recover in-between. The enemy's numbers start to wear on you, and it gets harder as stronger enemies start to spawn towards the end of each. There are save points every few battles, and the party does get to fight along Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli who can one shot anything they attack, but the section takes awhile to beat.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is known for having rather large areas. However, Mechonis takes the cake in terms of length. The areas are all multiple floors and, while smaller than some of the areas before, you have a lot more floors to traverse through. In addition, you have a lot of mechon that will just act as distractions.
  • The Labyrinth in Path of Exile is a series of zones filled monsters and traps, leading to a 3-part battle with a Lightning Bruiser boss with randomized gimmicks you have to play around. You die once or teleport out, then you have to start from the beginning. On the plus side, the reward is quite substantial.
  • Both Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games have a case of Prolonged Prologue in the form of a long level before finally attaining the Global Airship.
    • The first level aside from the tutorial in Knights of the Old Republic is the planet Taris. Not even counting side quests, one must first obtain a disguise from the other side of the city's apartments, head to the Lower City, enter the Bek Base to get security papers to the Undercity, go through the sewers to reach the back entrance of the Vulkar Base to steal a swoop engine, win the swoop race, break in to the Sith Base to steal launch codes, and then head to Davik's Estate before FINALLY leaving the planet. Not helping matters is that if you're aware that the player character awakens to Force Powers after they leave the planet, you would want to hold off on leveling up the protagonist to get as many Jedi levels as possible. As you Can't Drop the Hero, you'll be going through Taris with the protagonist as The Load, depending on how low you want to keep the protagonist. If that's not bad enough, one cut area from the planet remains mostly intact in the game files, and it's known there was planned to be at least one more area in addition to all that. It is by far the biggest planet in the game, and it's before the convenience of any powers like Force Speed.
    • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of the first game qualifies not because of how vast the levels are, but because of the unending waves of enemies it sends at you.
    • The first level of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords starts you on the abandoned Peragus mining facility. While you awaken to Force Powers really quickly, you're sorely lacking in good equipment and you have to go through most of it alone, with only the voices of Atton (over the comlink) and Kreia (telepathically) as companionship. The rest of the facility is dead and overrun with hostile droids, leaving only Apocalyptic Logs as the form of local exposition. It's only at the final stretch where you finally get to fill out a full party.
    • Telos in the second game takes a while to complete. To begin, you're running back and forth doing sidequests to earn the favor of either the Ithorians or Czerka to get a shuttle off the space station. Then it crashes, you meet with Bao-Dur, and then you have to go through several mercenaries and a military outpost to find another shuttle to reach the polar region. That crashes too, but you're right at the doorstep of a secret Academy. A few lengthy cutscenes later, you finally get to reunite with T3 and leave the place.
    • The closing arc of Nar Shadaa in the second game starts with your character venturing into Jekk'Jekk Tarr themselves and getting kidnapped by Goto, punctuated with a battle between Mira and Hanharr in between. Following that is a series of events where your other party members handle various tasks to get to Goto's Yacht to rescue your character before you meet with Zez-Kai Ell and finish the planet. While all this is happening, you don't have free reign about Nar Shadaa until you finish, and if you were in the middle of working out a sidequest (especially involving that broken speeder) you have to abandon it for now. In the Restored Content Mod, the arc is even longer as it adds several sequences where your other party members fight through legions of bounty hunters to get to the Ebon Hawk.
  • Dragon Quest VII has quite a bit:
    • Alltrades Abbey. Right when you appear to get out of a dungeon, the game tosses another obstacle at you... or it makes you redo the floor. It's one of the most maligned levels in Dragon Quest history.
    • Nottagen, if only for the fact that you have to save the island three times, since your first two attempts make it WORSE. On your third time, you can doom it, but why would you?
  • Monster Hunter prides itself on long boss fights, so when there's more than one you have to fight through, it can certainly take a while, especially if going solo. If one monster takes 10-15 minutes to defeat, then going against three of them turns the otherwise lengthy 50-minute time limit into a genuine race against time, even when multi-monster quests have the health of each monster slightly lowered, and sometimes even if multiple hunters are involved. Four or five? Good luck with that. The toughest standard or DLC missions go for broke, often throwing five powerful monsters at you. One particularly nasty example is "Five Kings of Destruction" from Monster Hunter Generations. This quest pits you against five already powerful monsters (Gammoth, Astalos, Mizutsune, Glavenus, and Deviljho), two at a time, only each of them is a Hyper variant, which: have health and attack power on par with monsters a rank above them, can use faster and/or even more powerful attacks, go into Rage Mode far more easily, and never get exhausted. The solo world record for this quest is around 25 minutes.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III has the Sanctuary of the Dark Dragon where it splits all of Class VII, both old and new, into three teams and each section is a long section that has players constantly switching between the three teams and that there are three floors overall, each with a different gimmick. If that wasn't enough, there are also enemies where one can reflect physical attacks infinitely and the other can do the same, only with artes. After which, all 3 areas will have a boss fight at the end of their areas and when the three groups converge, they have to fight a boss who has to be damaged in certain phases, with Rean's group being the last. And then there's a Divine Knight battle afterwards with Rean and another member of new Class VII to take down the boss. And if you thought that was over, the final boss of that section is a Duel Boss between Rean and Azure Siegfried (though the battle takes place back beneath the Heimdallr catacombs). All this can take quite a long time to beat, even on a Very Easy difficulty. The final dungeon in comparison, Gral of Erebos, is just a short dungeon with no gimmicks but makes up for it with 3 boss gauntlets with each boss needing 3 specific party members that permanently leave the party after the boss fight is done, the final boss on foot, and two Divine Knight battles.
  • Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals has the Ancient Cave, 99 randomly generated levels, which upon entering, lowers all your characters to level 1, takes away all your items and equipment (except for the Iris Treasures and anything found in one of the blue chests...which are only found inside the Ancient Cave), and leaves you with only 10 potions. It's a massive slog and full of praying to the RNG gods that there are enough enemies to level up, but not the type to leave you with status effects or do insane damage. In this game spells are considered items, so if you don't find any quickly? Good luck. To make matters worse, there are mimics for both the red and blue chests you find in the cave, the blue variety of which are particularly nasty. Want to leave the dungeon? Well you better reach at least the 20th floor, where the item Providence can begin to appear; it may take much longer. And when you do leave the Cave? Everything you picked up from a red chest disappears, and the next time you go down everything resets. In the last five to ten levels, the party starts encountering very strong monsters unique to the Ancient Cave. Even the final boss of the Ancient Cave is a boss that you have to be powerful enough to defeat in three turns, because if you don't? It kills itself and you end up with nothing. No save points, randomly placed healing points (if you're lucky), monsters that scale even if you don't level up, no guaranteed items, and a final boss that you'll have to do it all again for if you don't get lucky enough with your draws? Yikes.
  • Might and Magic:
    • All dungeons in VI barring some small exceptions like Shadow Guild Hideout. Many of them take hours to clear, and advancing in them often involves solving convoluted puzzles. The notable examples are Castle Darkmoor, Castle Alamos and The Tomb of VARN, which all must be visited and completely investigated in order to fulfill mainline quests.
    • Might And Magic VII
      • Titan's Stronghold. Like the name would suggest, the place is big. Really big. In fact so big it is bigger than exterior map it is located in, but you can't use Flying to move quicker. Expect to spend a lot of time here if you want to explore it (which you want because the stuff here is really good), and Ancients help you if you're here for the related promotion quest.
      • Eofol Tunnels. It is smaller than Titan's Stronghold, but to compensate for it, it is a maze, and the path from one entrance to another zigzags to make the most of the surface. The fact it is full of Medusae that turn you to stone and are impervious to magic, and Behemoths that hit like their name would suggest and can take Dragon Breath to the face and tell the tale, makes the entire trip last very long.
  • Octopath Traveler: Zigzagged. The dungeon only actually consists of two rooms, but The Very Definitely Final Dungeon the Gate of Finis makes you fight through a lengthy eight-Boss Rush of leveled-up old enemies before pitting you against a monstrously-long True Final Boss, without allowing you to exit or save once you enter the gate.
  • Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ Omen has the Darm Tower. 25 floors of madness, and four bosses. Also, the Solomon Shrine in Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter.
  • NEO: The World Ends with You has the dive into Rhyme's mind in Another Day. Most dives involve three to five consecutive battles with Noise that have various buffs, but Rhyme has ten of those battles. Similarly, most of those dives have a time limit of three and a half to seven minutes(although you'll have to clear them much faster if you want a medal), but Rhyme's time limit is 25 minutes.
  • Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society has the Grand Cathedral, an utterly massive 3651 randomized Years long. For a little over an actual year from the game's Japanese release this meant the dungeon took on average 40 to 60 hours to complete while speedrunning. In April of 2022 it was patched to have elevators, which skip 30-300 floors at a time, spawn more frequently and added a Witch Petition to have Eureka notify you of when one has so you'd know to slow down and look for it. These changes brought the time down to just a few hours, and were carried over to the English release by default.
  • Bug Fables: The Cave of Trials consists of fifty consecutive battles with increasingly difficult enemies found through every stage of the game, or randomized enemies once the option is unlocked. Every tenth wave provides the option to heal (up to twice total) or quit, but the whole thing must be cleared in one sitting, as there is no way to save in the middle of it.

    Shoot Em Ups 
  • EXTRAPOWER: Star Resistance: Stage 4 is the length of three full-sized levels, taking you through a gauntlet of enemies in the Shakun Star's capital city, warps you away to the Ghost Gate to fight through weird enemies and a boss, and Then drops you in the ruins of the city to face a Zerg Rush of Mooks and Elite Mooks And Then lets you fight the actual Stage Boss!
  • Ikari Warriors - The original arcade version took place in what was essentially one very long level. The NES version had four levels, but each one was just as long as the arcade game itself. Of all the game's many flaws, this was the one thing that upset The Angry Video Game Nerd the most. The second and third games had reasonably shorter levels.
  • The glider/shmup level of The Adventures of Batman and Robin for the Sega Genesis is somewhere between 13 and 18 minutes long, depending on who you ask.
  • While previous Metal Slug games would settle for having six reasonably sized levels (five normal and one FINAL MISSION!), Metal Slug 3 smooshed together the last two levels into a gigantic fifth and final mission, which starts with your PC's aerial assault on the enemy's rocket base, has its first false ending with a reenactment of the original Metal Slug final battle, launches you into space in a cutscene, runs you through a mock vertical Shmup section, crashes you into the enemy spaceship, has you assault the alien hordes within alongside the mooks you were just killing five minutes ago, gives you another faux final boss, forces you to escape the self-destructing spaceship, throws hordes of clones of your previously abducted PC at you, throws hordes of ZOMBIE clones of your previously abducted PC at you, before sucking you out of an airlock and then FINALLY giving you the actual final boss...
  • Almost every non-Shoot 'Em Up level in Turrican II. Which is a good thing, since it's possible to go from the start of World 1-1 to the final boss in 30 minutes. Half the fun of the game is searching for the bajillion secret areas and shortcuts. The penultimate level is a true marathon, though, with almost no secrets and a forced trek through every corner of the record-length stage without any of the music that the rest of the game consists of.
  • The Training mode in Raiden DX is one continuous, 15-minutes long level, which may not be as long as some of the other examples on this page, but is very long for a Shoot 'Em Up.
  • Sin and Punishment 2 - Stage 6 is abnormally long compared to the others, and it seems even longer due to being right after the very short Stage 5. Taking as many as 35 minutes to completenote , it is the longest stage of the game by far, with Stage 7 only being long due to its high difficulty. It's this level that causes a lot of trouble for people trying to 1cc the game, and the game certainly doesn't let up on the difficulty despite the length of it.
  • Contra - The third and final stage in the arcade version was essentially one long trek into the enemy's lair, taking the player into several areas (a snowfield, an energy plant, and a hangar) before eventually entering the insides of a mysterious alien being and blowing its heart out. In the NES version, these were four areas (along with the 3D base/boss segments from the first two stages) were split into their own stages and expanded upon.
  • The Touhou fangame Phantasmagoria Trues has an Extra counterpart named Terminus that lasts around 25 minutes, which is on par with a full 6-stage playthrough of one of the main games.
  • Capcom's 19XX series are infamous for their extraordinary length for arcade standards. The first game, 1942, is a really good example: while the individual levels themselves take around 5-6 minutes to complete, the grand total number of the game levels is 32 stages long; this means completing a whole game takes around 160+ minutes or roughly more than two and a half hours to complete, and that's all done in a single credit clear of the whole game.
  • "Dead Ahead", the longest level in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number takes place on a boat filled with Colombian mobsters... and has 5 sections in a game where most levels have 2-3. Not to mention every section is twice as big as they are in most levels. Doesn't help the level's already infamous reputation.
  • Kolibri's final level, Remission, is a gargantuan maze that takes up around a third of the game's runtime all on its own - and that's if you don't get lost!
  • Most of the game modes in Progressbar 95 don't take very long for a single level... with the exception of PB XL. Based on Microsoft Excel, it foregoes the shooting of the main game modes for a Maze Game-style experience, where you need to navigate around the spreadsheet and get to the bottom while evading enemies and collecting bonuses... 20 times in a row. While not especially long objectively, it takes by far the longest of any of the game modes to complete a level.

    Simulation Game 
  • The infamous Desert Bus, part of the unreleased prank game compilation Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors. Surviving the entire eight-hour drive earns you one point, at which point you turn around and drive back the other way for eight hours. There is no end to the game, or to the torture. Adding insult to misery is the fact that the bus veers slightly to the right while driving, meaning you must stay at the "wheel" the entire time, or risk running off the road, at which point you will be towed back to your starting point. In real time. The point was to create the game that Moral Guardians could not protest for any possible reason. It says something that there's a charity event based around this game. The more you pay them, the longer they have to keep playing.
  • American and Euro Truck Simulator have grown into this after years of constant DLC releases. Assuming you're playing 100% vanilla without a single Game Mod, a trip from Catanzaro, Italy to St. Petersburg, Russia can easily take 5 hours of IRL time; and on the other side of the Atlantic, a trip from Seattle, WA to Albuquerque, NM can take just as long. If you use mods, you can combine in American Truck Simulator the Canadream and México Extremo mods to create a behemoth drive from Toronto, ON through Vancouver, BC and the American west coast all the way to Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco that could very well last a whopping 24 IRL hours. Luckily, the game not only has instant saving, but also has an Anti Poop-Socking mechanic (the driver's fatigue) that forces you to pull at a truck stop every ~45 minutes of playing time to break your concentration and make it more likely for you to take a break — after all, just like in real life, driving a virtual truck for many continuous hours really is fatiguing.
  • Many Harvest Moon games have a mine that goes down for many, many floors. The one in Friends of Mineral Town is 255 floors deep, and you have to get to the bottom in order to get one of the items — luckily, said item is pretty awesome. The deepest mine in DS is some 60,000 floors deep. The only reason to tough them all out? Bragging rights. This is made much more difficult as the player character has a Stamina/Fatigue stat that brings you closer to blacking out with each action you take. Even if you can last 255 floors, your character can't without preparation.
  • Anno 2070 has Power Games. The requirements are to eliminate four opponents (each a difficult AI individually, now set up in a combination where appeasing one will almost certainly piss off another two), build both Monument (which require considerable time and resources to build and incur hideous maintenance costs), settle large amounts of top-tier workers of all three factions (which means building and balancing every supply chain in the game), and accumulate a million credits (if you're anywhere near achieving the other goals, you can just leave the game running and wait for this one). Average completion time? Over a day, twenty-four real-life hours, if you already know what you're doing.

    Sports Game 
  • SSX 3 has the peak events, where you start at the top of one of Big Mountain's 3 peaks and have to either race or beat the trick score of an opponent all the way to the bottom of Peak 1. The All Peak events (where you start at Peak 3, the very top of the mountain) take around 25 minutes to complete.
  • The official Formula One computer games allow you to select what percentage of each race you actually want to do. At 100%, each race will take you anywhere from 90 minutes to over two hours, depending on the circuit, the weather conditions, and so on. And if you choose to do qualifying as well, then the races will take even longer!
  • Up until FIFA 06, the FIFA Soccer series would allow you to play matches in real-time: i.e. for the full 90 minutes. Since the games were balanced for much shorter match lengths, you could easily end up scoring (and/or conceding) dozens of goals. From 06 onwards matches have a maximum length of 10 minutes per half, which generally forces more realistic scorelines.
  • Endurance races in the Gran Turismo franchise:
    • The original features the All-Night races around Special Stage Route 11, which take around an hour each, and the Grand Valley 300, which takes 90 minutes to two hours depending on what car you use. Outside of endurance races, the Normal Car and Hard-Tuned Car series can take just under an hour each to complete.
    • 2 features the Grand Valley 300 km, the Laguna Seca 200 Miles and the Rome 2 Hour timed event, which all take around a couple hours each.
    • In 3, the longest individual race is the Tokyo R246 endurance, a 100-lap street race that can take as long as 3 hours to complete. Additionally, the Grand Valley 300, Laguna Seca 200 and Rome 2 Hour also return, along with a 2 hour race around Trial Mountain.
    • 4 scales up the epics to even higher levels; aside from the Super Speedway endurance (Which can be finished in less than an hour), two hours or so is generally the minimum for endurance race length, with the game also featuring a couple 4 hour events, two 1000 km races (which can take around 5-6 hours each to complete), 8 and 9 hour timed races, and three 24 hour events (Nurburgring, Le Mans with the chicanes, and Le Mans without the chicanes). Outside of the Endurance events, there's the 1000 Miles! series (An endurance series for classic cars; each race can take around 3-4 hours to complete).

    Stealth Based Game 
  • Metal Gear:
    • Metal Gear Solid has the stairs in the Comm Tower. There's nothing to do but just run up several dozen flights of stairs, with enemies right on your tail. If you stop to fight, even for a moment, you'll just get shot to pieces. It's just several long uninterrupted boring minutes of nothing to do.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and its mile-long ladder. It only lasts a few minutes, and the game's theme song does play in the background, but a few minutes of tactical ladder climbing action is far too many.
  • Hitman: Blood Money: The mission Death on the Mississipi, with seven targets to kill and documents to retrieve from a safe, especially if the player is going for Silent Assassin with no penalties (suit and weapons extradited from the scene).
  • In the Gold edition of Thief: The Dark Project, you have the "Thieves' Guild" mission. First there's a restaurant and tavern, then you enter a secret underground casino, then there's a sewer passage to Reuben's place, then... Well, you get the picture. This also makes the level somewhat infamous in the game's fandom, as most of the environments are rather bland, the whole level is quite huge and clues to progression are fairly few and far between.
  • Thief II: The Metal Age has the "Life of the Party" mission, where first you need to traverse half the city across rooftops (and if you choose to sneak into and rob all the buildings you're passing on the way, it will take twice as long), then search several floors of a huge fortress to fulfill several objectives, and then go back all the way to your starting location.
  • Dishonored has "The Flooded District", definitely the longest level in the game and the one with the most objectives. First the game nerfs you by taking away all of your gear and ammunition, and if you want if back you have to make your way to an entirely different map (the Greaves Slaughterhouse), then return to the main objective, which in this case is confronting Daud the assassin. Following that, you need to escape the Flooded District, which means making your way through a large field patrolled by Tallboys, a Wall of Light, and a guard checkpoint. Before you do that though, if you want to complete all of the side objectives you'll need to help a group of civilians escape from a tenement building to safety. Then you need to access the sewers to get back to the Hound Pits Pub, which is even longer if you've helped Granny Rags and Slackjaw out with their sidequests in previous levels, because you'll need to confront them before proceeding and finally ending the level.
  • Yandere Simulator has the Alphabet Killer Challenge (or ABC Challenge), which has you kill all 79 of the students in the school, except for Senpai, in alphabetical order and with no checkpoints. If the police is succesfully called to school, a student flees the school, or if you are caught misbehaving by either the teachers, the Student Council or Senpai, the challenge will be automatically failed and you will be forced to redo the whole thing from the beginning. Making sure that all dead bodies are well-hidden and all pools of blood are cleaned up is essential in order to beat the challenge, though thankfully the school is full of lockers to hide bodies in and there are certain weapons like the baseball bat which don't leave any pools of blood behind or make the protagonist's uniform bloody. The Student Council Room also has a set of tools to make things easier, but these lower the difficulty of the challenge if used. The challenge can be done in either the main story mode or 1980s mode in order to have different targets with slightly different routines and give it some variety.

    Survival Horror 
  • Alan Wake's final chapter, after the opening story segment, is about a 40 minute long level with zero story breaks, with about 3/5ths of that time spent driving back to Cauldron Lake while dealing with whatever threats the Darkness throws at Alan along the way. Compared to the rest of the game which has story beats occur throughout the chapter, it is essentially pure gameplay until the climax.
  • Parasite Eve has a lot of areas that take a long time to overcome:
    • The Central Park area is very lengthy with no activity other than one cut scene early on. The random encounter rate seems to kick in at every screen.
    • The sewers under Chinatown are lengthy due to the maze like structure and if you want to find every item in the area, you'll spend a good amount of time exploring every path for them. This area is also padded out by random encounters that have bats that can inflict Blindness on you.
    • The Museum of Natural History is very long on the revisit section in day 5. You're forced to wander all over the museum by going through several hallways or going up floor by floor just to be able to open another room somewhere else. To make matters worse, when you seem to be able to finally confront Eve at the top floor, the mini boss you defeated comes back and knocks you down to the ground floor and a T-Rex comes to life and attacks you. From there, you have to climb back up all over again.
    • Also for the Chrysler Building. 77 floors tall and every floor except the 1st, every 10th and the last 7, have randomized floor layouts so you can't exactly go and remember the patterns. There is an elevator, but you can't use it unless you obtain a key from a boss that is located on every 10th floor. No save points are here either, which means either you go all the way and fight the next boss to get the key and get back down the fast way, or you take the slow way by running down the stairs.
  • Clock Tower 2: The last scenario is significantly larger compared to the previous levels, even taking longer if you're aiming for the Golden Ending. The Barrows Castle consist of several rooms on two floors that has to be properly searched for the necessary items to progress and rescue the trapped survivors.
  • Resident Evil 4: Level 4-1. Assuming that you don't backtrack to get the free Broken Butterfly magnum, you have to retrieve the last piece of a puzzle key in a room with fire-breathing horse heads to unlock a door to progress further. Then, you have to obtain 2 Grails to unlock a door, one of which protected by 2 sets of 3 suits of armor with Plagas controlling them. Then Ashley gets kidnapped (again) and you have to survive an onslaught of flying insects. Then you have to head to a clock tower to get it running while surviving flaming rocks catapulted at you and the tower is swarming with Zealots inside and out. And when you leave the tower, you have to deal with another crowd (the leader of which has a freaking rocket launcher), then try to simply survive a locked room with TWO Heavy Armor Garradors (the other Zealots in the room are the least of your worries). And if you should survive that, as well as a Press X to Not Die cutscene, the last thing to do is simply survive the encounter with Salazar's 'right hand' until the elevator shows up! Count on spending at least an hour playing through this nightmare. The single hardest part of this level (if not the game as a whole) is between the start of the clock tower to surviving the cutscene, because there are no typewriters in between, so no opportunities to save. In the game's subsequent versions, the programmers at least had the mercy to put a typewriter right after the clock tower, making the fight with the 2 Garradors much easier to prepare for.

    Tactical Shooter 
  • Rainbow Six: Vegas's final mission may just be the longest mission in the series. You start on a bridge, and later fast-rope down to the bottom part of the Dam. Then you fight your way through the interior of the Dam all the way up to the top. The lack of supply crates makes this level feel even longer.

    Third Person Shooter 
  • Gall Spaceport (the canyon level) in the Nintendo 64 game Shadows of the Empire takes almost half an hour to finish. And dying at any point can reset up to ten of those minutes. It does have a cool boss battle with Boba Fett, though.
  • The final mission in Scarface: The World Is Yours. Tony's raid on Sosa's mansion requires you to go through one large bunch of mooks, an Anticlimax Boss, another bunch, then a second boss before you finally get to Sosa and a third boss fight. Drug distribution runs can also get lengthy, especially once you have to deliver to fronts in all four main areas. Best hope your Heat isn't high enough that no belligerent gangsters try raiding your fronts.
  • Jet Force Gemini: Goldwood and Rith Essa are the largest worlds in the game, as each has four individual levels, and among them, Rim (in the former) and Interior (in the latter) stand out for their longevity. Meanwhile, the largest individual level is Military Base in Ichor, which also happens to be very difficult due to the high concentration of enemies and Elite Mooks, and is also one of the levels that culminate with a boss battle.
  • Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain:
    • Krivorozhstal Mill has an 18-minute solo par time, more then twice the length of most levels, as well as a frustrating Escort Mission getting the mill workers and foreman to safety.
    • Worse is the 20-minute International University mission, the first two thirds of which are a Stealth-Based Mission, and in the first third, you can't move around with unconcealed weapons(such as sniper rifles) either.
    • Lorelei Salvage Rig, at nearly half an hour in length, is the longest mission in the entire series.
  • The second half of Chapter 3 in Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls can take up over an hour and a half between many cutscenes and game sequences. The worst part is that you can't save the game at all until finishing said Chapter.

    Tower Defense 
  • Defense Grid: The Awakening: Any level that has Grinder and Super Grinder as available challenges. Both of these will extend the number of waves to 99, and will easily take over an hour to finish, even with liberal application of the F key. Unfortunately, you still have to finish to earn medals. Fortunately, the score requirements—usually no more than 200,000 for gold—are absurdly low in proportion; a decent run will see a resource count of over 1 million. Unfortunately, you still need all cores intact to get the gold; lose one core and all of your work will have been for nothing.
  • Gemcraft has two examples:
    • Chapter Zero's endurance mode is effectively this, though you're unlikely to beat all 510 waves, as monsters grow in power exponentially, with the last waves being able to have HP well in the decillions or somewhere around that mark. The last level also turns out to be this, at 228 waves. While you're supposed to bomb the Gem of Eternity, you can clear the level the normal way. Also, both Labyrinth and Chasing Shadows have capped number of waves in Endurance on 1337 and 999 waves respectively, though while the first has maximum HP limit for the monsters, it's not the case for the latter and in extreme cases last wave monsters can have up to e100 HP and more.
    • In Chasing Shadows, the first two Vision fields have a whopping 99 waves. Subverted though since the level is completed when you charge Ensnaring Nodes and if you beat all waves without doing that you actually fail the level. It can still take time though. The Chapter Zero's example also returns as a Vision Field and this time you have to beat all 228 waves. You can also turn any level into a Marathon Level via the Battle Traits, which crank up the difficulty and add extra waves.

    Turn Based Strategy 
  • Item World in the Disgaea games tend to be like this, especially in the high-numbered levels. Even if you can leave and save every ten floors, it can be a very long, tedious ten floors unless you have a huge stock of Gency Exits. If you're going for the hyperdrive, you must do 100 floors in one sitting (on the highest level item possible). Makai Kingdom is even worse - dungeons can literally be thousands of levels deep, and the most number of floors you can skip with an item is 100. (Phantom Brave, thankfully, has an "escape" spell - so long as the phantom that can cast it is available, that is. Savvy players Fusion it to Marona.)
  • EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: The last few encounters in the Dark Force mothership'', dropping dozens of Mooks and supporting Elite Mooks at the start of the fight, and warping more in as the fight commences. Even the final boss fight is preceded by two whole rooms of enemies to drain your resources and possibly lose a few characters before even facing the Big Bad and his Co-Dragons!
  • There are many of these in Fire Emblem:
    • Chapter 17 of Path of Radiance, in the massive, burnt-out Serenes Forest. It's the longest slog in the game and is the only chapter split into multiple stages. Four of them. Fortunately there are save points between them, and you're also allowed to call in two reinforcements from your party at each stop.
    • The sequel Radiant Dawn had a ton. Chapter 1-6 is split into two stages with only a save point between them. Part 3's endgame is an interesting subversion in that it looks like (and is described as) a massive "rout all the enemies" bloodbath - there is something like 80 enemies to start and tons of reinforcements - but the battle immediately ends once any 80 units are killed thanks to an urgent plot development. Still, the enemy phase on every turn takes a long time. Almost every chapter in Part 4 is a tiring rout-all-enemies marathon. Lastly, there is the epic final chapter, split into 5 stages much like PoR's chapter 17, but you only get to choose 10 units (plus the 5 that are forced and one Heron) to last all 5 maps. You still get save points and, unintuitively, access to your supply convoy inbetween.
    • The Sacred Stones has the Tower and Ruins, optional dungeons that are 8 and 10 maps long respectively. They both become increasingly Nintendo Hard the further you go, and you aren't allowed to perma-save between floors. The only consolation is being able to swap anybody you want in or out of your party at each break. You also get to flee anytime (either through the menus or resetting and not choosing to continue the map), which is good to remember considering the series standard of Permadeath.
    • Every chapter of Genealogy of the Holy War is a Marathon Level. The maps are atypically huge and there are always several castles to seize before you complete the chapter, among other numerous things going on in the meantime.
    • The Blazing Blade has two of these chapters toward the end: "Cog of Destiny", a sprawling map where you must rout the equivalent of a small army to win (with 15 people, of course), and the appropriately-named "Victory or Death", a map so big it has three different routes to your destination, and enemies lying in wait around every corner - including reinforcements that literally appear from thin air when you step near them.
    • The Game Mod Elibian Nights has Karel's tale, which is six maps back to back - and Karel is all by himself. While they're not particularly long by themselves, it's still an endurance test because you never get a chance to restore your equipment, and you only get one Elixir with three uses. The upshot is that you have two Wo Daos and an Iron Rune, meaning that you'll never take a critical hit and you'll deal them out easily... except on the last two maps where the bosses also have Iron Runes. One of them is a trick Hopeless Boss Fight, though.
    • An infamous one occurs as early as chapter 3 in Mystery of the Emblem (Book II) and its DS remake. Your destination is a castle smack in the middle of a huge map, where the enemies have been thoughtful enough to raise the south bridge, forcing your non-flying units to take a long clockwise hike around. While you're capable of taking the bridge key from a village near the start and simply charging in, there's another village way up in the northeast with a useful ally waiting. The issue here? Marth is the only unit allowed to visit villages in this game. You also need him to seize the castle to end the map. Enjoy spending 20+ turns marching his butt all the way around if you want everything.
    • In the final chapter of the original Mystery of the Emblem, you must go through all three parts of the chapter without saving or switching party members. This is important because the clerics can only be saved by certain party members and they must be used in the first part of the chapter. This is no longer the case in the remake where they are considered separate chapters.
    • In Fire Emblem Fates, the final chapter for all three paths starts immediately after completing Chapter 27 without a chance of saving. Though in Revelation, there is a Marathon Level in Chapter 16 and 17 for the same reason.
    • Game Mod The Last Promise has chapter 26, a very large map in the vein of Genealogy of the Holy War, which requires you to seize three castles. Worse, it's a Timed Mission, but the 72 turn limit you have is usually more than enough.
  • Most of capstone levels (and quite a few others) in the assorted campaigns in Battle for Wesnoth.
  • Project × Zone:
    • The first game has Chapter 39, "Devils Never Cry". You have to defeat four separate bosses and their armies in order to trigger the actual objective of the level. This takes about an hour to do if you aren't adequately prepared. Ironically, the actual objective, once you reach it, is a Timed Mission (timed in turns, not with an actual clock).
    • The sequel has the final showdown with Byakushin, who, by this series' standards, takes awhile for the party members to finally injure her. To give players a break down of what they need to do in order: Part 1) Kill off all the starting bosses. Part 2) Kill Dokumezu, Dokugozu, and Sheath. Part 3) Kill Saya. Finally, players can kill off Byakushin. While this happens, Byakushin will keep on summoning monsters to gun for any of the three pillars that players need to defend and while that's happening, Byakushin will keep on firing potshots at your characters when they're in range of her attacks. Anybody caught in her Limit Break is as good as dead. Oh and that red liquid that's all over the stage? Walk into it and that character will take some Scratch Damage that will pile up because of so many tiles having them. Phew, talk about a race against time.
  • Stage 50 of the Normal Route in Super Robot Wars V is a long chapter since it settles the Yamato, Full Metal Panic!, Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam, Prince of Darkness and Cross Ange finales. Part one: fight off Dessler's fleet with the SR Point of finishing it in as few turns as possible while preventing Dessler firing the Dessler Cannon. Then once that's done, the leftovers of Goer's forces, 3 Crux Dogatie, the Hokushin, some Amalgam agents, and Embryo and his goons show up while taking away Lacus and the Eternal, Yurika and the Nadesico, Tessa in the Tuatha De Danaan if deployed, and Ange in Vilkiss, rendering the mentioned battleships out for the rest of the map. After defeating Embryo's Hysterica, he summons five more with the added requirement that they need to be defeated on the same turn, and Leonard finally appears in the Belial. Fortunately, both Sosuke and Ange reappear with full SP and will.
  • Super Robot Wars Z series:
    • Quite a few, but especially Scenario 50 in Z, which is rather long on its own, but after it's finished, there's a long exposition sequence, which thrusts the player back into combat against the Frost Brothers and Gym. The final scenario also counts since it's a three-parter and ends with you fighting the Big Bad doubling as That One Bossnote .
    • In Hakai-hen, one scenario recreates the Gundam 00 season one finale (along with some Gundam Wing and Code Geass thrown in): ZEXIS faces off against an army of GN-Xs, Tauruses, and the commanders of every major faction in the ADW. At a certain point, the Ptolemaios gets dragged off to a second map along with the Celestial Being Gundams facing off against another army of grunts, with Ali-Al-Saachez and Alejandro Corner along for the ride (the rest of ZEXIS shows up later). Finally, a third map comprises of Setsuna in the Exia against Alejandro in the Alvatorre.
    • Scenario 54 in the "Don't Trust Zero" Route of Saisei-hen opens with a fleet of Anti-Spiral units. Once those are taken care of, enemy reinforcements arrive in the form of the Anti-Spiral Gurren Lagann, Muge Zorbados with some of his own units and Zeravire. The final portion involves Team Dai-Gurren leading a small strike team inside the Cathedral Terra Lazengann to destroy the Anti-Spiral Gurren Lagann and its Mooks.
    • Scenario 48 in Tengoku-hen begins with a battle against Sidereal, half of which are comprised of Elite Mooks. Once they're destroyed, Barbiel, Shikuu and Straus will appear; following that, Australis takes to the field, though he won't attack. Unfortunately, whittling down Australis results in him going One-Winged Angel and summoning a group of Dimensional Beasts, beginning the final phase of the scenario.
    • The final scenario in Tengoku-hen: after a lengthy cutscene, Z-BLUE is transported to a map filled with enemies, many of whom can count as sub-bosses. Defeating them makes the Final Boss appear alongside another wave of the same sub-bosses. Reducing the Final Boss by a third of its Hit Points triggers another cutscene, ending with it regenerating its health and summoning stronger versions of the previous sub-bosses. Fortunately, all players need to do is finish the Final Boss to end the game.

    Visual Novels 
  • Some trials in Ace Attorney take a darn long time to finish.
    • Examples include the third trial of Case 1-5, which lasts over 7 hours In-Universe, just like the last one of Trials and Tribulations.
    • The last trial of Case 5 in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice is a good contender because of the sheer amount of testimonies and two Divination Séances being performed, but we don't have an official timestamp. As for investigation stages, the ones in "Turnabout for Tomorrow" and "The Magical Turnabout" come to mind; they're the only investigations to their respective cases, so it makes sense they're longer than usual (the usual being two or three investigations per case).
    • The final case in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is a doozy. You have an investigation phase and a trial followed after that. After the trial, you play a flashback case involving Phoenix Wright's last trial before he got disbarred. Then, in order to piece together what happened seven years ago and how they're affecting events in the present, you have to jump back and forth between investigation phases in the past and present and there's a total of eight places to look into. After that, you have the finale of the trial in the present time.
  • The final Class Trials in Danganronpa tend to last well over two hours, with the many twists, reveals and resolves which need to be made, in addition of defeating the Big Bad and the epilogue. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony sees the final class trial taking at least four hours to complete.

    Wide Open Sandbox 
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:
    • The game takes the trope literally by incorporating several actual marathons in which the player characters can compete, most notably a lengthy triathlon that circles the game map.
    • The final mission of the game, "End of the Line", takes about half an hour to complete in a game where most mission clock in at about three minutes. Mercifully, it's also the only mission to avert Checkpoint Starvation.
  • Grand Theft Auto V:
    • Taking place in a reimagined San Andreas, it includes more marathon races. The Alamo Sea-to-Los Santos race that requires about 30 minutes of real-time button mashing as the race begins with a swim down virtually the entire length of the inland sea, then an epic-length bike ride, and finally a run through the streets of Los Santos. The game includes several shorter races, as well.
    • GTA V also has two marathon-length side-missions as part of the Epsilon Project mission strand. One requires the player character Michael to wear a certain type of clothing for 10 in-game days (easier said than done as triggering missions or some activities or even saving the game and coming back later can often result in Michael changing his clothes automatically, resetting the clock). The other requires him to walk or run the equivalent of 5 in-game miles within a relatively confined area.

    Real Life 
  • Reading certain trope pages can feel like this if you try to read every example.
  • Running marathons, of course. They are 42 kilometers (26 miles) long! There are also half-marathons, which, you guessed it, cover half the distance of a normal one. Ultramarathons are even longer.
  • At a length of 12.9 miles (20.8 km), the Nürburgring Nordschleife (pronounced "Nord-shlife-uh") circuit is the ultimate Marathon Level of Motorsport. It is known less formally, but no less accurately, as "the Green Hell", a term coined by 3-time Formula 1 World Champion Jackie Stewart. Formula One stopped racing on this configuration after 1976 because of the sheer length, lack of runoff between the track and the barriers, and driver fatigue (drivers attempted to boycott the race that year, which showed how desperate everyone was to finally stopnote ). When it's not being used for official races, it's an effective tourist attraction, where people can drive it for a fee. Automakers also rent out the track for certain periods in order to try setting, and in some cases breaking, the overall production car lap record (which currently sits at 6:47:25, having been set by factory driver Lars Kern driving the 2018 Porsche 911 GT2 RS); its ample assortment of road layouts in a single track also makes it very attractive for manufacturers to test the performance of their sports cars. Furthermore, the Nordschleife course can also feed into to the GP circuit (this is the course configuration used for the 24-hour endurance race), which ups the complete length to over 16 miles.
  • At 37.73 miles (60.725 km), the Isle of Man time attack circuit is nearly three times the length of the Nordschleife. Unlike the Nordschleife, the Isle of Man circuit is mainly composed of public roads and is mainly tackled by motorcycles. Due to sheer length and the staggering number of bends (219 vs Nordschleife's 73), the track is taxing the motorcycles and their riders' stability more than any of the track combined. As of 2020, the current overall lap record is 16:42.778, set by British rider Peter Hickman in 2018 on a BMW S1000RR.
  • Circuit de la Sarthe in France, site of the world famous 24 Hours of Le Mans race, isn’t as long (running around 8.5 miles; still an impressive length for a race track) but of note is its massive “Mulsanne” back straight, which eats up a staggering 3.4 of those miles. Being modified from a public highway, this straightaway was so taxing on cars redlining it all the way down that in 1990, two chicane curves were inserted into the straight so there would be a reason for cars to brake and rev down (plus the FIA was on the brink of desanctioning the course unless the maximum length of single straight came in under 1.2 miles/2 kilometers). Outside of the Le Mans races, the Mulsanne Straight is part of the Departmental Road RD338 public highways, and is open to the public driving with two roundabouts between to slow the cars down, while there is a smaller section named Bugatti Circuit, sharing the grandstands and parts of the track, which hosts French MotoGP and other races.
  • And those are the track examples. In terms of actual events, endurance racing is entirely centered around this. Races are usually measured in time lasting anywhere from 3 to 24 hours - yes, you heard that right - with multiple classes, each class having cars that compete within it, on the track at the same time, which means lapping of traffic is a primary staple. Whoever crosses the finish line in first place after the clock runs out is declared the winner, both overall and in class. Since, of course, it is physically impossible to drive race cars - especially the fastest class or on tough tracks like the aforementioned Nordschleife, multiple drivers - anywhere from 2 to 5 depending on race, track, or regulations - share one car, with swapping taking place mid-race during pit stops. It is perhaps the most physically and mentally demanding of all sports, as a driver must manage the car pace, most of its gadgets, the tire wear, the fuel load and mileage, slow and fast traffic, and his own stamina. Likewise, it is also the most rewarding, as teams and drivers can get millions of dollars of prize money according to success and race prestige, but more importantly personal satisfaction with having done an incredible feat most people can only dream of; even teams that don't make podium still celebrate if they can just last the entire 24 hours. The 24 Hours of Le Mans is the world's most famous and prestigious of them.
  • In Mixed Martial Arts, Royce Gracie was involved the two lengthiest MMA fights in history, first his fight in 1995's UFC 5 against Ken Shamrock, which had to be interrupted at the 36 minute mark (as to not break the allotted timeslot for the pay-per-view) and resulted in a draw due not having any judgesnote . The second was the legendary match against Kazushi Sakuraba in the PRIDE 2000 Grand Prix, which was modified to have unlimited rounds of 15 minutes, and it lasted 1 hour and 30 minutes, which ended by Royce's cornerman throwing the towel after he was unable to walk after fracturing his legs due accumulated leg kicks by Sakuraba. His father Hélio Gracie on the other hand, had a fight with his former student Valdermar Santana which went for 3 hours and 40 minutes, ending when Hélio was knocked out by a slam followed by a soccer kick.
  • Test Matches in Cricket are well-known for the fact that they last four to five days each. Not playing consecutively, mind you, the players do get to stop and rest for the night every day, but the amount of time on the field for each player per match still well exceeds that of many other sports. Thankfully this isn't the only format of cricket available, as there are also one-day formats of varying lengths.

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