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Subjective
Scrappy Level
Welcome to Hell. Enjoy your stay!

There are times in video games where, instead of a character building up a fandom of hate, a level does. It could be that it is Nintendo Hard, clashes with the tone of the game, is infested with Goddamned Bats - or Demonic Spiders, or is home to That One Boss. In an MMORPG, another possibility is that the level is far too far away from everywhere else, making trips to it pointless.

Down The Drain is, if not the most common form of these levels, an extremely frequent one. See Xen Syndrome for when a large portion of the ending sections of a game suffer from this.

Most, if not all Bonus Levels of Hell qualify as Scrappy Levels. Contrast the Crowning Levels Of Awesome. Often caused by a Scrappy Mechanic.
Examples:

  • Psychonauts. Meat Circus. In addition to cruel jumping puzzles, a vicious Escort Mission, damaged-based insta-kills that eat your Dream Fluffs faster then you can extricate yourself, there's also a boss that requires some crazy good timing, and the entire premise of the level (a circus made out of raw meat) is deeply frightening and disturbing.
    • While disturbing, this troper didn't find the level itself all THAT awful... unless you're going for One Hundred Percent Completion and need to get every last figment that flies around the roller coaster track.
    • One thing that may have made things harder for a few people is that the double jump controls can actually glitch during the climb level, which sends the difficulty from very hard to keyboard throwing.
  • Just getting around the city of Darnasuss in World Of Warcraft is a chore for many players. Judging by the astounding length and number of subentries here, we might call this a Scrappy Game. Or just a fanbase with massively conflicting ideas on difficulty.
    • Just getting to Darnassus, located on an island in the corner of the world map off the continent mostly held by the other faction, is a chore. Unless you have a teleporting Mage handy.
    • And many players absolutely loathe the entire Gnomeregan instance: It's huge, it's confusing, the quests for it require endless running back and forth over the whole enormous city (it seems to cover more territory than Ironforge, Stormwind, and the above-mentioned Darnassus combined), and the rewards are entirely pitiful (unless you can be bothered to do this quest - those leather pants rock). Worst of all, one particular "watchdog" enemy can summon mooks, along with another watchdog, who can summon more mooks, and another watchdog, and... you get the idea. WoWWiki mentions a few more reasons: "the difficulty of certain pulls, how easy it is to wipe, or simply hatred of the music or the Gnomes themselves".
      • Not to mention that Gnomeregan is an unfortunately good example of Status Quo Is God.
      • On the other hand, in certain ways, Gnomeregan also subverts this trope: there is a particular Horde quest that allows a player to teleport directly into Gnomeregan from the town of Booty Bay — which creates a simple, direct route to the Alliance city of Ironforge, while also negating the extensive travel time caused by taking the longer 'overland' route.
      • Gnomeregan is such a Scrappy Level, in fact, that it will ''take down your server'' to prevent you from getting any joy from it. The vilest of all Scrappy Levels.
    • And then there's the Barrens, the zone that a lot of Horde players love to hate, and for good reason. For one thing, it's so large that even players with mounts consider traversing it a daunting task. Secondly, the conversations between players oftentimes degenerate into pointless chatter,innumerable references to Chuck Norris, or meditations on your mother's promiscuity. The Crossroads is almost constantly raided by Alliance griefers looking to kill newbies and relatively low-level NPCs (including vendors and quest givers) for fun. If you overcome all these obstacles, you're treated to a series of kill quests that lead you to run around a zone resembling Africa in climate and size, or searching for someone's wife without the quest NPC giving you any indication on where she might be. We all hate you Mankrik, and we're glad you're a widower now.
    • The Exodar is pretty nice once you get used to it, but many call for the head of whoever positioned the anvil and forge all the way across the city from the jewelcrafting trainer.
      • It's also a royal pain in the butt to access. However (unlike Darnassus)...at least it has an anvil. And a mining trainer...
    • And let's not forget the anvil and forge in the very back end of Orgrimmar. Really, the only city with a halfway friendly design is post-BC Ironforge, which isn't nearly so laggy now that everyone's in Shattrath.
      • Silvermoon deserves honorable mention for having a mailbox on every corner, while other capitals have about one. And it also has two banks for some reason.
      • And two auction houses!
      • Which is all entirely necessary because of how FRIGGEN HUGE Silvermoon is. I mean... seriously. I actually refused to play a Blood Elf for a short time for that reason alone.
      • Thunder Bluff, on the other hand, is considered one of the better cities in the game: Shops, trainers, and amenities are logically placed in relation with each other; and the bank, auction house, and mailbox are within a close enough distance of each other to be useful without causing the city to be clustered. Also, enough wandering shopkeepers patrol the lower tier between to the auction house and bank to make disposing of unwanted trash a breeze.
      • Ironically enough, people find reasons to whine and moan about Thunder Bluff...usually related to aesthetics, its lack of proximity to other capitals, the fact that teleporting there requires a higher-level mage...or the fact that, despite its sensible layout, no one ever seems to go there.
    • Another low level example: Silverpine Forest, home to the earliest elite monsters outside of instances, the Sons of Arugal, which are also rather high level for the zone.(The normal mobs that you need to kill for quests and such are usually between levels 12 and 15 or 16; Sons of Arugal are level 20 elites) Several of them wandered across the entire map (except the islands, which instead have an annoying density of undead gnolls or the dreaded murlocs and the undead village), mercilessly assaulting players that weren't careful enough. Thankfully, a patch reduced their amount significantly, but there is still at least one of them wandering around.
      • The most insidious thing about the Sons is that they look exactly the same as the lower level things you're killing for quests. They're very slightly larger, and very slightly darker, but if you're not really paying attention and just killing the 69,105th one of them, he'll eat your face before you know what hit you.
      • The real insidious things about the sons is the curse they cast on you, I escaped one once and continued to wander around the accursed zone. Soon my health dropped to about 5%. I moused over the tooltip on the curse and discovered to my horror that this DoT ticked once per minute for five minutes, and the RNG had blessed me this time, as it would likely do more than my entire hp bar in damage the next tick. So I sat, and waited, and then screamed obscenities at the spirit healer.
    • Durotar, the Orc and Troll starting region, is probably one of the major reasons there's a shortage of players who choose those races. Picture a vast peninsula of rocky desert, devoid of vegetation (save for a cluster of tropical islands...oh, and an occasional cactus), scenery (unless you like rocks), fun, joy, or hope. Compared to other races' starting zones, the place is sparsely inhabited, even by the NP Cs, and who can blame them? Bleak orange rock under an orange sky as far as the eye can see...and when you level out of it, you get to go to the Barrens!
      • This troper got so sick of the Barrens that she decided to level one of her trolls in the Ghostlands instead. And promptly got sick of the Ghostlands...which are like the infant bastard love child of the Eastern Plaguelands and Felwood.
      • Which is particularly annoying if you compare this to the portrayal of Durotar and the Barrens in Warcraft III: expanses of wild, untamed land with hills and tropical forests, most importantly of all, not dull.
    • The Badlands are especially annoying to get to for Horde players who haven't unlocked the flighpath there, since the Badlands is surrounded on ALL SIDES by predominantly Alliance-controlled zones. There are two possible paths to take. From the north, a Horde player will have to run through two contested zones with fairly high alliance populations and one low level alliance zone. From the south, a player would only have to run through two low level alliance zones, but must deal with the Burning Steppes and Blackrock Mountain, which contain level 55+ mobs (Badlands is roughly a level 40 zone).
      • The Swamp of Sorrows is equally bad for Horde players to access. If you're at a level for the zone to actually be challenging, count on dying at least once or twice while running through the Alliance town of Darkshire.
      • You could just go around the town. That being said, Swamp of Sorrows is bleak, dull and full of annoying mobs.
    • That said, any low-level contested zone that has both an Alliance and Horde-controlled town in close proximity to each other are easily some of the worst places to level in. Before the advent of Battlegrounds, places like Hillsbrad were literal warzones with entire armies of Alliance and Horde players gathering in their respective towns and trying to raid each other. (This is what gave the Horde town of Tarren Mill its nickname, "Tarren Mill is under attack!" — after the message spamming the WorldDefense channel due to Alliance attacks from the nearby Southshore.) Now, most of them are in the Battlegrounds or Arenas, but that doesn't stop small groups of griefers to stop by and mercilessly attack low level players, and if they are in a particularly bad mood, annihlate the entire opposing town. This is particularly troublesome in low level zones since town guards are usually around level 50 or so, meaning a decently geared level 70 player can easily wipe out an entire town and any opposing players in it singlehandedly.
      • Of course, the ganking part is only a serious issue on PvP servers. On normal servers...well, it is still an inconvenience when they've killed the flightmaster and questgivers.
    • Goldenmist village, in the Ghostlands. Specifically when you're trying to get your voidwalker at level 10. The area is filled to the brim with enemies who are A. One or two levels higher than you, B. So tightly packed together it's difficult to just fight one, C. Immune to your Crowd Control (Fear), and D. Rather strong. Not to mention the level 20 elite that wanders the area.
    • The Eastern Plaguelands can be a bit of a Scrappy Level for certain classes when they enter in the mid-50s; not only is it a fairly sizable zone that is laid out like a massive circle with an impassable center, making navigation tedious (especially without an epic mount), but it is filled with Goddamned Bats. Quite literally. The Plaguebats have a pretty wide aggro radius and worst of all can spam a "fear screech" that takes away control of your character for several seconds, interrupting any ability you were preparing, all while it beats on you. For cloth or leather wearers, this can get old very quickly. Oh yeah, and Tirion Fordring makes you kill twenty of the God Damned Bats. Enjoy.
      • And then there's a dreaded Scarlet Courier, and elite npc with 4 guards (also elites) that patroll the main road across the zone. Since most people don't pay that much attention to their surroundings while going through the zone, they tend to get suddenly ganked by the courier when it comes down the road from the other direction.
    • Desolace. Not only is it Exactly What It Says On The Tin and looks boring and depressing (especially in comparison to Feralas just south of it), it's huge and the quests are scarce. By the way, good luck finding the Alliance settlement there, at the far north of the zone behind a hard-to-spot mountain pass.
    • The expansion is much better overall in this regard (although half the zones rival the horde starting zones for looks), but has at least one Scrappy Dungeon, Blood Furnace, thanks to invisible Rogues patrolling the instance just waiting to assault you at the worst possible moment. Not only are they dangerous for a normal elite, they also respawn quite fast. This can make corpseruns for horde players hell, as you have a long way to get back to the entrance, and have a good chance to get attacked by a rogue when you try to catch up with your group, unless they know of this and went back. Overall, it's not the hardest instance, but it's definitely the most annoying one.
    • The first time This Troper went to the Undercity, he couldn't find the exit for two days.
    • Shattarath City is big, it's rather ugly, many vendors are hard to find, and there are no auctionhouses or class trainers. Not to mention many players dislike the idea of being forced to share a city with the opposing faction. Furthermore there's the dreaded Aldor Rise elevator, the bane of all players without flying mounts. The Aldor Rise is high enough that falling from the top is always fatal, and the elevator seems to have a tendency to go down a millisecond before you step on it, leaving you to fall just after it and die.
    • The recent Scourge invasion event basically turned the entire game world into the equivalent of Hillsbrad Foothills, pre-TBC, on a PvP server. The trouble there, however, was not the event itself; it was the behavior for which certain players were using it as an excuse.
      • Namely, everybody ganking all the vendors and questgivers.
  • The appropriately titled dam level of the first NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. And according to those gamers who managed to pass this annoyingly hard stage, the levels that follow it are if anything even bloody harder.
    • The very next level had one particular area with a near-impossible jump which, if missed, would force the player back to the start of that area. The trick is not to jump. Simply walking across the gap will see you through with no issues. So Yeah...
      • In the DOS Porting Disaster, said level has a completely impossible jump in the sewers, rendering the game Unwinnable without cheats.
    • This Troper remembers getting to the final level once in the c64 version once. Naturally, the game crashed at this point...
      • Having played through the game in an emulator with savestates, be thankful you didn't actually try to go through the technodrome or you likely would have thrown your controller through the screen.
      • I recall beating the NES version game without the use of cheat codes or glitches as a child. I still have no clue how exactly I did it. I remember that I could get past the dam (including the swimming portion) with alarming consistency, however.
  • The Sealed Cave in Final Fantasy IV. Not only is it where That One Boss, Demon Wall, calls home, but every door in the area is guarded by the Sub Boss Trapdoor, which has an instant-kill spell and morphs into another tough monster, Manticore, when killed.
    • Oddly (since the game takes a perverse delight in upping the difficulty level everywhere else) the DS remake takes a LOT of the Scrappy out of the Sealed Cave, thanks to an augment-spell combo that changes the Trapdoor fights from "pull your hair out" to "is that ALL?"
  • The Sewers from Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. These were overly long and filled with very difficult monsters and no sources of health, except for rats which couldn't give you health if you were a certain clan.
    • This troper has found that the Ocean View Hotel qualifies as the game's true Scrappy Level on subsequent playthroughs. The first time around, it's creepy and atmospheric. Subsequent runs through the Hotel reveal it to be an overly long linear crawl through a haunted house comprised entirely of tired horror movie clichés.
  • Riki's Mosperiburg dungeon in Saga Frontier. A room with a narrow, invisible path you must use to walk over spikes, with a random battle occurring each time you touch a spike, and the path is diagonal to increase the chances of you walking off the path; another room where you must fight 30 durable Magma Slimes that hit your LP, which is like your HP except it's game over if Riki loses all of his; and a non-standard Boss Battle where you must perform a variety of combos that need to use three to five characters each. Yay? This can be bypassed if you use: DSC (Self Linking Combo)
  • To varying degrees, every level after the first two in the NES game Battletoads are examples of this trope. Though if you have to pick just one, it's probably level 3, The Turbo Tunnel. Mind you, it's easy compared to some of the later levels, but the jump in difficulty in this level is so sudden that many lives and controllers have been lost in attempts to navigate this Nintendo Hard level. Level 11, "Clinger Winger", is another contender, due to the fact there are NO checkpoints at all in this level—if you mess up, you have to start at the beginning. Oh, and did we mention the bug that prevents the second player from moving at all?
    • What, no mention of the fact that the 'villain' in that eleventh stage chasing you is actually faster than you are at almost all times? Because that's almost as important as the second player 'bug.' It's a wonder Rare didn't program in another level-skip warp at this point (they actually stop long before this point, leaving you stuck as far as level 10).
  • The RC car level in the 16-bit Toy Story game counts (as does much of the rest of the game for some). You must use crappy controls to steer through a narrow maze, having to restart if you hit the side. To make it even better, you quickly run out of batteries, which you must pick up by steering into them with aforementioned crappy controls. Yay!
  • The Proving Grounds in Bioshock. It was a fairly unique shooter up until this point, and then the producers go and throw an annoying Escort Mission at us.
  • Sonic The Hedgehog 3: Carnival Night Zone, Act 2. Great fun up until you get stuck between two red and white swirling things... and you will. It's actually quite easy to get past them if you know how, but the game gives you absolutely no indication on how to, causing many players to get completely stuck. One of the few Guide Dang It moments in the Sonic series. This led to the rise of a video game urban legend — back around the time of the game's release, when you called Sega's help line (Remember those?), the line's automated greeting was supposedly along the lines of "Welcome to the Sega help line! To get past the red and white swirly things in Carnival Night Act 2...."
    • This Troper always has trouble with Casino Night Zone Act 2 in Sonic The Hedgehog 2.
    • The GameFAQs message board posters often refer to it as the Barrel of Doom.
    • This troper would also like to add the music of the level as a good enough reason to despise it.
    • Every single one of Big's levels in Sonic Adventure. Being required to complete tedious fishing levels in order to get to the final boss in what's otherwise a platformer game that's supposed to emphasize speed? Seriously? They're not hard once you get used to the system, but they feel completely out of place in the game, a very Unexpected Genre Change.
    • Metropolis Zone in Sonic 2. To make it worse, every other level in the game has 2 acts, but this has three to make the suffering longer. At least the BGM is cool.
      • With that in mind, imagine how it feels when one really doesn't like the music.
      • The Metropolis MAZE, the horrible horrible maze....
      • Mystic Cave zone and the damned pit.
      • Chemical Plant Act 2 and the damned bottomless pits, crushy things and Mega Mack. Made worse in that it's only the second zone in the game.
    • Marble Garden Zone in Sonic 3 also qualifies; uber-steep hills, out of control tops, spikes everywhere, hideously placed spiked maces and crushing spiked pillars, and enemies that like to pop out of nowhere. Oh, and both the sub- and main-bosses of the zone like to collapse the level on you, midway through each act.
      • Not to mention the final boss of the level when playing as Tails. This troper spent nearly half an hour trying to figure out how to actually damage him. He only did manage to do it once, and to this day, he doesn't know how he did it...
      • Damaging the boss isn't too hard once you figure it out- Tails' prop-spinning... er, tails... do damage if you line them up. The real kicker for this troper was, after managing to smack the boss a few times... all of a sudden, Tails' tongue starts hanging out and he sinks slowly and irretrievably to his doom. Turns out the whole 'Tails can't fly forever' thing didn't get shut off for this no-ground-nothing-but-flying boss if Tails is solo. I was not happy.
    • Sandopolis Zone in Sonic and Knuckles, as well, especially the second act, with the annoying ghosts and rising sand/timed switch door puzzles.
      • I don't think this troper ever actually lost a life in a Sonic game due to time running out until Sandopolis Zone, Act 2.
    • The final level in Sonic Spinball is utterly horrendous; all the required Emeralds are heavily guarded, there is virtually no safe ground below you, the climb up to the end boss is a nightmare, and the end boss itself is actively trying (and can easily) to knock you back down to the bottom of the stage. Compared to it, the rest of the game is a cakewalk.
    • Metallic Madness, the final level of Sonic CD, where you are very much in danger of time running out due to its multitude of one-way doors, timed (or simply time-consuming) set pieces, and hitting Sonic with a shrink ray which only really makes him harder to control.
      • While we're talking about Scrappy Levels and Sonic CD, how about Wacky Workbench? Combine a floor you can't stand on and forces you to jump high into areas where there are patterned background graphics that can kill you onto platforms near the top of the stage, those slowly snaking block platforms, cold blasts under most major jumps, and elevators that spin you and make you jump off oddly. Additionally, when you get thrown to the top of the stage, you have to work you way down, slowly, through the killer background, to the bottom of suspended pillars JUST NEAR the bouncy floor.
    • While the emerald hunting levels in Sonic Adventure 2 are unpopular with many, Mad Space, an extremely large level with uncooperative hints and Selective Gravity, deserves a special mention. Security Hall (another emerald hunting level) isn't too bad once you know it well, but until you do its very steep time limit is likely to drive you insane.
      • Mad Space isn't too bad in the main game; it's just long. Trying to get an A rank on it is pain incarnate.
      • To this day, this troper is only missing one A-rank mission with Rouge, and has been trying on-and-off since nearly the time the game came out (in 2001) to get it. Guess which level it's in.
    • 'Sonic Rush Adventure'' had a pretty decent difficulty curve, but anyone striving for One Hundred Percent Completion will shake their fist remembering the snowboarding mission. That level was awesome on its own, but with limited controls and a complete inability to stop moving it really feels like Fake Difficulty... that and the only way to figure out each checkpoint is by trial and error.
  • Shadow The Hedgehog was considered by some to be annoying enough to begin with, but the level that really takes the hatred is Cosmic Fall, which forces you to jump between moving platforms floating in space. It wouldn't be so bad, except that the camera seems to be designed specifically to screw you over; every single time you jump the camera will spin randomly, making it impossible to see where you're going to land.
  • The Water Temple in The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
    • And the Lakebed Temple in Twilight Princess. Hell, it's probably a good idea to put all the water-based Zelda dungeons here.
    • The Ice Cavern. It's frozen water. And horrible.
      • While we're on ice temples, Snowhead.
      • Which one? This troper found both to be tedious: Majora's Mask is notable for the Wizrobe mini-boss and that annoying wonderful pillar-puzzle in the central room, while Twilight Princess has excessive Backtracking and a large proportion of (admittedly non-lethal) bottomless pits.
      • For this troper, the true scrappy level of Twilight Princess was the Temple of Time, where you have to spend half the level escorting a statue through the dungeon's many annoying traps. There's also the rather challenging mini boss, a very easy to miss Boss key, and rooms filled with dozens of baby spiders that get in your way and tend to respawn when you leave the room and come back.
      • Just about every Dungeon past the Lakebed Temple is scrappy in one way or another. Sliding games, block games, and Wallmasters, oh my!
    • It probably says something that in the Master Quest remake of Ocarina of Time, which upped the difficulty of the dungeons enormously, the Water Temple inexplicably became easier.
    • Lord Jabu Jabu's Stomach in Oracle of Ages (not the dungeon of the same name in Oo T) puts all other water dungeons in all other Zelda games to shame. Plus all the other dungeons in those games. Heck, throw in most other dungeons in all other games, too. This place is insane.
      • The Great Bay Temple features a complicated series of switches, currents, waterfalls that must be frozen and thawed, etc. The crowning evil of this dungeon would be that in the second room there are three switches. Pressing the wrong ones reverses the current in the entire level, making it impossible for you to proceed until you return to hit them again. Also of note is the fact that almost the entire level is based around hitting switches that are blocking barely visible water flow through multicoloured pipes, and you must follow the pipes to find the next switch, despite their aggravating habit of exiting through doors that can't be opened from this side.
      • This troper remembers spending 2 game days in the dungeon, another for the miniboss, and having to do the whole dungeon again, only with the ice arrows after rewinding time.
    • On the topic of Zelda Scrappy Dungeons... Temple of the Ocean King. To this day, This Troper cannot bring himself to finish Phantom Hourglass, as he has yet to acquire the final sea chart, and is extremely resistant to the idea of going back into that dungeon.
      • Ditto for this troper, it's not exactly hard, but it's extremely boring and the constant backtracking is just tedious.
      • This troper gave up the internet for Lent, and thus Phantom Hourglass was the first Zelda Game he beat without a guide.
      • It's so satisfying when you get the Phantom Sword and can go through mowing down every last one of those armor-clad bastards, though. This troper did it twice just for the heck of it.
  • Most of Jak II could count, considering how hard that game was, but a major offender is the Hellcat mission. And the Escape from the Water Slums.
  • The fifth level in God Hand, which starts Nintendo Hard, proves to be inexpressably frustrating very quickly. One sequence sees you forced to play a cannon-shooting game in an attempt to sink pirate ships; the more you sink, the less enemies you fight in the Inescapable Ambush following, but due to the lousy controls of that game, good luck sinking any. Oh, and at the end of the level, you fight Demon Elvis, who's so hard that the entire next level is easier. Fun...
  • Xenogears, Tower of Babel. The way the game works, if you get into a battle in mid-jump (and you will), you drop like a rock afterwards. Add lots of platforming, moving platforms that double as monsters, and you've got a recipe for frustration.
    • Not to mention the inability to use the analog stick...
    • Let's not forget the Absurdly Spacious Sewer. This level seems to be a popular stopping point for players.
    • And let's not forget a few awkward jumps on the lower levels that it takes an hour and a half just to get right the first time
  • City Of Heroes has several:
    • The whole of the Shadow Shard. Complex jumping puzzles, incredibly nasty enemies, and four of the longest task forces in the game. Oh, and if you should fall off the Floating Platforms that make up the entire area and into the void, you're teleported back to the entrance and, unless you can fly or teleport, have to go through those complex jumping puzzles and nasty enemies all over again. And almost every mission takes place in identical caves. And the enemies are some of the tougher in the game. And the zone had so much promise, too!
      • I never found the Shadow Shard difficult to get around. Yay Flying! Most of the hate I've seen is for the Circle of Thorns' mission maps.
    • The Hollows come close; while not as bad, they involve mile-long runs long before characters earn their travel powers, and tend to put level 5 missions in level 16 enemy areas. Several recent updates have fixed these problems, including giving characters much earlier access to temporary travel powers and a slight revamp of the Hollows zone to include a hospital, a trainer, and a store, so you don't have to zone back into an adjacent zone every time you die or level. They've also changed the mission spawn points so they show up in areas with enemy spawns appropriate to the player's level.
    • The Perez Park zone is also a horror at low levels. Most of the zone consists of a huge, dark, confusing maze filled with large groups of enemies that are impossible to avoid. Even players with higher-level characters hate being sent back there due to the difficulty of navigating around it. Flight and Super Jump don't help due to the dense canopy of trees that forms a roof over the whole of the maze.
    • It's interesting to note that the developers have been learning from their mistakes: the most-maligned zones tend to be those that have gone longest without an overhaul. Faultline and the Rikti Crash Site (now the Rikti War Zone) were all but ignored by the players until they recently got complete overhauls. Faultline especially was loathed for the deep canyons that were easy to fall into and hard to get out of without flight. Boomtown, Dark Astoria, and Eden also seem to lack any sort of player presence at all, however, this is less because they are Scrappy Levels and more because there's almost nothing to do in those zones (a problem that also plagues Perez Park).
    • City of Heroes also has a Scrappy Tileset, if you can believe that. The tileset for randomly generated cave missions has a penchant for putting the mission objective in a specific universally loathed 5-story-tall room with ample places to lose track of enemy NP Cs. This wouldn't be so bad, except that one often needs to wipe out the enemies in the same room as the mission objective, for "Defeat -insert Boss name- and his Guards" and "Get the Mac Guffin" missions alike.
      • Which specific hated 5-story room are you referring to? The one in the limestone cave tileset, or the infamous "Nazi Hot Tubs" in the 5th Column/Council tileset? Both of them caused this troper unceasing headaches, but the later moreso, because the former stops showing up eventually, while the later still appears in most Council missions all the way up to level 50.
      • In addition to the above, after about level 30, most missions featuring the Circle of Thorns take place in their home city, Oranbega. Oranbega is filled with twisty passages and gigantic multistory rooms and portals that don't always work right and multiple spawns of enemies within aggro radius of one another. HATE.
      • Some archetypes hate Orange-bagel more than others. When playing a mastermind, stepping though a portal is to be feared above all other things because (a) you could walk right into a spawn with no real weapons to fight them off until the minions show up and (b) 50% of the time the minions won't come through the portal; they'll instead run through the corridors to get to you, usually past other spawns meaning you have an army deascending on your ass.
  • Not so much a level (because it doesn't have levels) as a stage, but the Independence War in Colonization. You have to pass it to beat the game, but it's so hard and just downright unfair (Where did the 18th-century English navy get teleportation technology!?) that many players just avoid it entirely (which makes the game unbeatable). Since it's a sandbox game, this isn't too bad, but as time goes on the game makes it harder and harder to play without fighting the Independence War, so eventually you have to either attempt it (and the longer you put it off, the harder it gets) or just quit.
  • Chapter Four of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door starts off relatively simple... and then Doopliss steals your body and leaves you as a shadow. Now you have to run back and forth from the tower to the town, and back again, multiple times with only Mario (and later Vivian)... but the enemies (already a bit tougher than usual) don't get any easier. And you can't go back to Rogueport, either, so if you went in unprepared, tough break!
    • Don't forget that one of the most frequent enemies has a sleep attack, which it will use frequently.
  • In Halo 3, the level "Cortana" should have been subtitled "Master Chief's Happy Funtime Adventures In The Ninth Sub-Basement Of Hell." If there's anything worse than Flood rushes plus endless needle death spamming your shields from Flood turrets beyond easy range of your weapons plus the walls being full of Infection Form pods that will pop open at a single stray shot, and thus re-animate all the Flood you've already killed behind you... let's just say that this editor played the level once to unlock it, on co-op, and will never voluntarily enter it again. Ever.
    • Bungie apparently has not learned its lesson after the atrocity known as The Library in Halo. Hordes of zombies. Limited ammo. Repetitive level design. Constant death.
      • This troper found battling relentless hordes of space zombies, while having to stay moving constantly & judiciously conserve ammo, to be rather exciting...
    • Actually Bungie seemed to have the absurd notion that Cortana needed narrower halls than in The Library, since at least in the original Halo, you could navigate around the zombies, or hell just even evade.
    • Tsavo Highway, the part after the broken bridge where the two dropships followed by a Wraith attack you. This area caused the troper's X Box 360 to overheat and get the Red Ring Of Death(red halo of death?) from getting stuck here for three hours. I figured out it was best to haul ass out of there before the dropships arrive.
      • Now try that on Legendary...
  • The Tower of Zosma in Baten Kaitos, which is a very good argument for killing anyone who suggests putting a Block Puzzle in a video game ever again.
  • Many levels in Halo 2 on Legendary, most notable example is Cairo Station, where in the hangars you battle waves of Grunts and Elites emerging from Mook Maker dropships, and the final wave is composed of Elite Mooks with Guns Akimbo and energy swords. The final room with the bomb is equally, if not more frustrating. Also, the gondola ride in Regret where you are assaulted by Banshees and Elite Rangers, Gravemind, where you face off with multiple Ultra Elites in the infamous "Breaking Benjamin Room",and Uprising, where as the Arbiter you only have a plasma pistol against heavily armed Brutes.
  • The Mario series. Frequently.
    • Level 7-4 of Super Mario Bros 3 is a water level with auto-scrolling which herds you through a veritable maze of deadly, immobile, invincible Jelectros while all the while a squid follows you, spawning more squids.
    • Take this formula, change the water to space, change the deadly jellyfish to deadly stars, change the music from pleasant to frantic, multiply the maze's length, and add a difficult boss to the end, and you have Space Zone 2 in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.
    • The (unnumbered) airship level from world 8 of Super Mario Bros 3 is a real nightmare: compared to the airship levels which end every previous world, it scrolls faster and has Floating Platforms spaced further apart. Equipping a P-Wing and flying above screen until the pipe makes beating the level easier, though.
      • The minifortress in World 8. In addition to the overall level being extremely scrappy, this troper was never able to find the door to the boss room until he purchased the strategy guide.
      • This troper always thought that 7-4 and most of World 8 were pretty simple. However, the last mini-fortress in World 7, or that one Doom Ship level that scrolls twice as fast as the others in World 8 cause me to break out in a cold sweat. More so the latter than the former, because I usually end up skipping World 7 just because of that level (along with a few others).
    • The (thankfully optional) level "Tubular" from Super Mario World, which forces you to play as a balloon version of Mario, having to float in between enemies throwing footballs at you, three waves of Koopas, and lava-spewing plants. Oh, and there's no solid ground, no halfway checkpoint, and the balloon won't last for the whole level - you must periodically get a new balloon powerup in increasingly hard to reach areas. Fortunately, it's possible to use a Blue Yoshi and a Cape in order to get through the level without having to use the balloon power-up once. It's tricky to pull off, but compared to going through the normal level it's cake.
      • This troper justified the purchase of the SNES Game Genie to his parents with this level.
      • "Soda Lake" is also considered a Scrappy Level by some. It's an underwater level that features Torpedo Ted, a type of enemy that is (thankfully) only seen in this stage. There are several spots that spawn them, they're quite fast (much faster than a swimming Mario, at any rate), there's almost no room to dodge them, and some spots REQUIRE you to swim right through where they spawn. Those spots often require the utmost perfect timing to get through without taking a hit. This Troper personally didn't pass that stage for years because of them.
    • In Super Mario Galaxy, there's a level where you have to go through the entire level, covered in lava, without being hit once, leading to this editor's emost recent instance of furniture being punched in frustration after missing a jump after going through the entire level for the fortieth time. Then when you unlock Luigi, you have to race a Shadow you who's much, much faster than you are, makes nearly impossible jumps, and will cause you to miss jumps if you happen to occupy the same space as him. This editor refuses to beat the game if that's what it comes to.
      • That star? That's nothing. Do you remember the one where you have to collect 100 purple coins on a planet where half the floor is lethal and the other half either vanishes or starts rotating when you step on it? Or the purple coin star where you half to dodge constant cannonballs and cope with shifting gravity with no chance to backtrack? Or the one where you need to use pull stars to move and have only a minute?...Come to think of it, most purple coin stars are evil.
    • Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, World C-4. There's a firebar at about the two-thirds point that requires almost inhuman timing (or being Super Mario, which, at that point, good luck) to pass. This video makes it look easy, but it's really, really not.
      • The Loopdeswoop Galaxy. Tilt the Wiimote a bit too much, or not quite enough, or speed up in just the wrong place, and it's into the void with you. Over and over again. Hilariously referred to as the "Shoop Da Whoop Galaxy" on GameFAQs for its ability to make people wish for a laser to shoot at the console.
  • The Mario Kart series' Rainbow Road tracks are universally reviled. In all versions, sliding off the track at any point results in a plummet into the abyss that costs several seconds to recover from. While other tracks feature similar areas (lava pits, water, etc.), the Rainbow Road is unique in having no solid ground anywhere except the actual road surface. Slipping just a little off on a turn means a punishing fall rather than a minor loss of speed from hitting the offroad.
    • Rainbow Road in the first Mario Kart (SNES) game has no rails to block the fall, and the course becomes extremely narrow in parts, and the course has thwomps that cause an instant spin-out when ran into, and the other racers are as speedy as in the rest of the Special Cup. Also note also that the CPU racers have a tendency to speed right through those damn invincible Thwomps and never fall off the course.
    • Mario Kart Double Dash 's Rainbow Road course shows that even though The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard, even it has trouble with this level!
    • The track is a little better in Mario Kart Wii (better being relative), as it has guardrails in some areas, but it still features numerous sharp turns, and several jumps that land on very narrow areas, such that hitting the jump plate at even a small angle means a long, long fall. Beating the CPU on this level usually requires both skill (to run the whole track at speed without falling) and luck (to avoid weapons and sideswipes that would throw you off the side of the road).
    • Mario Kart 64's is an exception... There's guardrails everywhere, so you have to be really trying in order to get yourself off the track. It's a Scrappy Level for an opposite reason: it's very long, very easy, and very, very boring. At least there's the ridiculous shortcut to skip half the track.
    • Mario Kart for the GBA, on the other hand, unleashed a Rainbow Road that's something to fear - and laugh at all at the same time. Rather than going without railings or railings everywhere, the level randomly has side-rails that launch you off the track if you even touch them. Ironically, these can wind up allowing you to skip most of the track in time trial mode (there are many areas where a perfectly-timed launch will allow you to shortcut things easily) - or if you're awesome enough in the plain race itself.
      • Mushroom Gorge in Mario Kart Wii is a nightmare for item use. Most of the track is made up of huge pits and you can only cross them by driving onto mushrooms that make you bounce up and over to the next one. If someone uses a POW Block or Thunderbolt as you are jumping, say hello to the abyss. Using a Star, Bullet Bill, or Mushroom? Don't bother using them during the jumps since going too fast will make you overshoot the next mushroom jump and you'll most likely fall off the track and the Bullet Bill has a good chance of running out in between jumps.
  • Snow Barrel Blast from Donkey Kong Country combined poor visibility with barrel-shooting sequences requiring perfect timing, and a single miss resulting in instant death. Like Carnival Night zone act 2, this level had its own entry on the Automated Help Line — and a shortcut which allowed most of the difficult sections to be easily skipped.
    • A sign of how subjective this trope is, this troper managed to beat Snow Barrel Blast first try. Not that he's bragging, mind you...after all it did take him three weeks to beat Tanked-Up Trouble. That level where you ride a moving platform and have to jump to grab fuel cans, all while avoiding enemies, with not much room for error? Yeah. Which is strange, since all in all it's really not that much harder than Snow Barrel Blast.
    • The bonus level "Animal Antics" from Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest is almost certainly the most difficult level in the game (except for maybe Toxic Tower), thanks to a specific part. You must transform into each of the various animal companions in the game. At one point, you turn into Squawks the Parrot, and must navigate a thorn-lined maze. There is no platform to sit and stop for a breather; you constantly have to keep flapping your wings to maintain altitude in a narrow space, as well as avoid deadly bees. Unfortunately, you also have to deal with gusting wind that will blow the parrot into the thorns, forcing you to constantly hold the opposite direction on the control pad. To say it's frustrating is an understatement, considering the rest of the level is a cakewalk. Oh, and the wind constantly shifts the direction it's going, forcing you to constantly adjust the direction you're flying to compensate.
      • This troper also found this level frustrating because in the snake area, if you timed your jump into a moving barrel wrong, you'd die (this is assuming you lost a life in the Squawks area, which you probably did) and have to start over from the Squitter area.
      • This troper, while not invalidating that Animal Antics is hell in a game, hates one level in Donkey Kong Country 2, even if it's one of his favorite games of all time. That level? Web Woods. Hellishly long and mind-numbing would be too kind a term— spending almost all the level as Squitter and going perilously over bottomless pits? And oh yeah. The DK coin? It appears on the end target. For a split second. And if you miss it (you will), you have to play the entire level over again if you want it.
      • The GBA remake made it slightly less scrappy by moving the Continue barrel further in the level (past Squitter's area, which was probably the easiest of that level) so you don't have to redo quite as much if you lose a life later.
    • Lightning Look-Out from Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble. If you find constantly running from deadly and extremely annoying lightning bolts that not only track where you are but anticipate where you will be to be fun, then you will have a masochistic blast with this level. The Lost World from the same game falls under this category too, as its five or six levels, each one with a sadistic gimmick, are pretty bloody hard.
      • A special mention goes to the final level of the Lost World in that game: Rocket Rush, where being a few pixels off will screw you over and the controls are... annoying would be too kind a term for many people. (Of course, the troper that added this is speaking from a perspective outside of his own: he is often called out of his fucking mind for one reason... he adores that level.)
  • The Marsh Cave in Final Fantasy I. Bring lots and lots and lots of antidotes (and potions too, but that's a given for any dungeon in Final Fantasy — this is just the dungeon that first suggests it). There's plenty of Goddamned Bats, but also Goddamned Spiders and Goddamned Undeads. And those Goddamned Fish-Men Wizards. If someone dies, you have to go all the way back to town to revive them. And the way back to town is looooooooong. And you'll probably get poisoned along the way. (okay, I'm done now)
    • You forgot to mention that while the poison is very annoying, the Undead frequently paralyze your team. And being paralyzed means that character is now useless, and stays that way for a long time. Add to this that most of your characters are going to die from a few hits, and that you'll be exhausted form the damned Squid-Wizard fight on your way out.
      • Oh, and the slimes and oozes. Which, due to their defense, were pretty much impossible to kill without using magic spells, which you have precious few uses of. Ask five people, and they'll come up with ten reasons why the Marsh Cave belongs on this list.
  • Mega Man 2 has Quick Man's level, of which two-thirds of it is a vertical maze of instant-kill lasers; Flash Man's power (which pauses time, stopping the lasers) can help alleviate it some, but it can't get you through the whole thing and also means unless you refill it you can't use it against Quick Man (who is weak to Flash Man's power). Heat Man's level possibly tops this if you try to tackle it early on, because it has an EXTREMELY long sequence of those annoying appearing/disappearing blocks, most of which is over a pit. Fortunately, if you do it after beating Air Man, who gives you the Item 2 Jet Sled, you can bypass that entire part (of course, Air Man will not die.
    • Let's not forget Gate's levels in Mega Man X6; instant-kill spikes everywhere, plus a sequence of rising instant-kill lava and slippery ice slopes, and an area for X that is all but impossible to traverse if you entered the previous level with the wrong armor for its level (you can't go back to switch armors once you enter Gate's domain, and the "wrong armor" is ironically the best weapon to beat the previous level's boss with). Utterly horrific. Also from X6 Blaze Heatnix's level. While not hard on the scale Gate's lab is, Heatnix's domain contained not only lethal rising lava, but about half a dozen ultra-annoying minibosses as well. Seeing as how X6 has hideous game balance in general, this is probably not surprising.
      • Let's not forget Blizzard Wolfang's stage (if it wasn't the avalanches in the first part, it was the falling ice blocks in the second), Rainy Turtloid (acid rain and long stretches of moving platforms over pits), Metal Shark Player (Stupid, stupid compactor areas), Ground Scaravich (annoying totem poles and mazes), Shield Sheldon (laser puzzles ahoy)...in fact, the only stages that can't be considered a Scrappy level in this game are Infinity Mijinion's and Commander Yammark's.
      • Nope, Infinity Mijinion's stage is a Scrappy level too, mostly because the entire first half of the stage is a Sub Boss fight.
    • Ouroboros from Mega Man ZX Advent is easier than Gate's domain in X6, but it's loaded to the rim with spikes, annoying enemies of all kinds, regenerating blocks, regenerating spiked blocks, the Boss Rush... yeah, all of that in one level. The fact that the whole thing's made from the world's supply of Model Ws turns it from the Scrappy Level to the Nightmare Fuel Level.
    • Hell, any of the side-scrolling hoverbike levels in the X series qualify, thanks to the annoyingly precise jumps needed to get through.
    • Speaking of Quick Man, in Battlenetwork 2 he ALSO has a horribly annoying stage, because you can't jack out of the detonators once you jack in, meaning you can't restore your health.
    • And speaking of battle network, any area that requires compression in 3.
    • Although it's only a small part of the level, the infamous lifts at the start of Guts Man's level in the first Mega Man have stopped many players from ever managing to get defeat all the Robot Masters.
    • The best thing about Quick Man's stage, of course, is that, for some reason, Capcom feels the need to keep revisiting it in later games. Mega Man X5, in particular, managed to make it even worse: it's bad enough that X-series characters slide slowly down walls, making it harder to fall past the lasers quickly enough, but Capcom then added in more lasers! And at the end of the stage? You fight That One Boss.
      • Guess what? Mega Man 9 has not only magma flows reminiscent of the Quick beams, but THE LASERS THEMSELVES make a return, complete with the sound effect!
    • This troper nominates pretty much every final stage of any game with a Hard mode where you don't get health increases and/or subtanks. Mega Man Zero 2 was hard, but at least the Boss Rush only had six bosses instead of the usual eight, and most of those weren't too bad. Mega Man ZX, on the other hand *shudder*. If he hadn't known about the Overdrive Tornado trick... things would have been painful.
    • It's not just the bosses, the Mega Man Zero and ZX games started going absolutely insane on hard mode, starting with MMZ 3. No weapon upgrades, no heart tanks, no subtanks (except one in the ZX games), no cyber elves, final destination. End result is fighting boss rushes and three stage final bosses (sometimes in the same stage, with no continue point) with the tiny life bar you have at the very start of the game.
    • Two words, repeated: Jump Jump Slide Slide
    • To be specific, Mega Man Battle Network has at least one of these per game:
      • 1 has all of Internet Area 4, which is full of Goddamned Bats.
      • 2 has FreezeMan's storyline, which is full of endless backtracking.
      • 3 has, as mentioned above, any level where the Press program is needed, especially BubbleMan's scenario where you first get it.
      • 4 has the levels at Castillo and the point collecting, or alternatively the whole damn game.
      • 5 has the totally-out-of-genre Hundred Slice Challenge in the middle of an otherwise decently fun scenario. Frustrating because it's a quicktime event in an RPG.
      • 6 has any time where you have to use one of the Link Navis.
      • Even the Spin Off games aren't immune; Battle Chip Challenge has the side area Hacker's Net and Network Transmission has the entire game.
    • Tornado Man's level in MM 9 almost caused this troper to give up the game alltogether. Damn spinning lifts.
      • Have fun with the Wily levels then.
  • The Desert Lands levels in Gauntlet Dark Legacy. The enemies are so tough and numerous that you can lose hundreds, if not thousands, of your hard-earned Hit Points.
  • "Make Ursa Major" and "Make Taurus" in Katamari Damacy. Both levels have as their requirement that you pick up exactly one of a given type of item - bear for Ursa Major and cow for Taurus. While any one will do, in order to get the best score possible (and avoid getting mocked by the King), you want the biggest one you can get. The problem is that you're being judged by the original King Of All Cosmos... and he is a fricking idiot. He counts statues of bears or cows (and in the latter case, milk cartons) as appropriate items. Nothing is more frustrating than spending five minutes building the Katamari to the right size, rolling towards the giant brown bear... and then bumping a bear cub and getting yanked out of the level. And then insulted by the King.
    • One of the Taurus start positions put you on the roof of a building. If you roll forward at all, you will pump into a tiny cow-colored pylon and - guess what? IT'S A COOOWWWW!!!! (Level ends).
    • The cows and bears showed up again in a level in the sequel, We Love Katamari, but this time you had to get one of either. Making it much less frustrating was a new feature added to WLK that let you restart a level if you were unhappy with your results.
      • What makes it even MORE annoying is that unlike other objects in the relevant stages, the cow and bear items WON'T vanish when they get too small to affect your Katamari's size. This means that it's possible to have an 8M Katamari poke against a tiny windup bear or bottle of milk that is small enough as to be invisible, and have the level instantly end.
  • The Penthouse mission from the John Woo game Stranglehold features an entire segment where you have to pursue the boss through the place while fighting off his mooks, which is made very frustrating due to the simple fact that there's lasers everywhere, and if you touch them, BOOM, you're dead, and you have to start all over again. And you don't get to find a checkpoint until the very end before the standoff.
  • The Kamchatka levels in Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix certainly qualify. The enemies have armor-piercing bullets, the grenades they lob come out of nowhere, and many times in the outdoor areas you can't see the bad guys until its too late.
  • The Good Future levels in Ecco the Dolphin: Tides of Time, mostly for the water tubes (a forced scroll level and a "dodge the garage-sized jellyfish" level, if you fall from either you have to do them all over again) followed by the "fly on air pockets and flying psychic dolphins from floating island to floating island" level...
    • Likewise, Defender of the Future has a level named Hanging Waters that was meant to be a homage to those water tube levels in Tides ... and it manages to be every bit as frustrating, if not more.
    • Let us not forget the original game's Welcome to the Machine. Five-minute long forced scroll level with a twisting path you have to memorize lest you be squished against the walls, enemies popping up from flipping nowhere to eat you... and if you lose to the final boss, you have to do it all over again.
  • The final level of Farcry, most notably the penultimate fight in the volcano's rim. Locked into a wide open area with hordes of rocket-spamming mutants, ninja snipers that can shoot you from beyond the draw distance, and a lone healthkit, on the far, far side of the arena. How do you win? By cheating and piling crap on the airlock door, so it won't lock behind you. Even then, you get sniped to death 9 times out of 10. And after that? If the designers didn't prove they hate you yet, as you round a corner, you get insta-killed by hidden guards with rocket launchers. After beating it, this troper began using "farcry" as an expletive.
  • The sections of Crysis which places the player in a tank and a VTOL transport are generally considered greatly inferior to the rest of the single-player game. The tank cannot be repaired or rearmed, so must be abandoned when it has taken too much damage, and the VTOL is fairly difficult to maneuver accurately. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that you are forced to engage alien flyers in combat, something which is quite frustrating.
    • The tank mission is nothing compared to the first alien ship mission with instakill aliens who are hard to aim at, and no gravity, and no map makes getting lost easy. This Troper has had to stop playing it several times due to the nausea.
    • Here's a list of all missions considered Scrappy by various crysis players and the reasons why: Contact(infinite range stealth detecting instgib boats) Recovery(invulnerable tanks and hard to find rocket launchers) Relic(extended vehicle section or a 5 hour underbrush crawl) Assault(helicopters) Onslaught(vehicle section) Awakening(cramped indoor section with rocket launcher enemies) Core(nausea inducing spinning) Paradise Lost(escort mission) Exodus(vehicle section) Ascension(vehicle section) and Reckoning(broken geometry) For the expansion, people hate: Call Me Ishmael(infinite range stealth detecting instagib 20mm cannons) Shore Leave(vehicle section with escort mission) Adapt Or Perish(vehicle section) Frozen Paradise(hold the line mission) Below The Thunder(indoor map with guass guns) From Hell's Heart(bullet hell on the train or another several hours crawl) and All The Fury(infinite range stealth detecting instagib aliens) and don't get me started about what people think of pretty much every multiplayer map.
  • To the unprepared, the Fanatics' Tower in Final Fantasy VI can get annoying fast: long, no save points, very frequent Random Encounters, and only magic attacks allowed (by both sides) except if you berserk yourself. And at the end, the boss's dying attack is almost guaranteed to wipe out your party unless you knew about the attack beforehand and had learned and cast Life 3 or were willing to spend a long time draining his AP (or used the summon that makes your party jump...). If not, have fun traversing up the staircases all over again! (Possessing a hidden item that eliminates random encounters makes this area drastically faster.)
    • On the plus side, with some relatively easy preparation, it's also an excellent place to help your characters learn spells. Doesn't make it any less annoying overall, though.
  • While most of the entirety of Kid Chameleon can be classified as this, Final Marathon and Hills of the Warrior take the cake; the latter, along with its ilk, involve being chased through an unrelenting maze by an instant-death spike-lined wall, while the former is essentially I Wanna Be The Guy light.
    • Hills of the Warrior (a relatively open level) is nothing compared to Bloody Swamp, where you have to hit the right cannon blocks at exactly the right time to advance through a series of such walls, else you get stuck, unable to advance, and run over by the Wall of Doom. Other popular candidates for the title of Scrappy Level are Under Skull Mountain III (the first of several excessively long levels), Forced Entry (another Wall of Doom level), or either Devil's Marsh (a teleport frenzy and an bunch of platforms trying to crush you, respectively).
  • Manaan in Knights Of The Old Republic. Especially the underwater levels.
    • Worse than Manaan is the Star Forge. Nigh unlimited enemies, no way to leave, and a luck based battle system that makes you save before every encounter in case your rolls mess up and kill you. KOTOR was fairly forgiving up until that point. Even being level 20 won't help you win.
    • This troper noticed that he was once low on health while hacking his way to the final area of the Star Forge, so he decided to go to the inventory screen to use an advanced medpack. The game killed him in the inventory screen. It might have been a programming glitch, but it still sucked.
    • In Kot OR II, this troper found the surface of Malichor V to be a long, pointless romp fighting insanely hard monsters just because they were in your way. Unlike the Sith Academy later on, there is no real treasure to find, and several points where the developers left big, dangling plotlines that never got resolved thanks to the game being rushed.
    • The most unpopular example by far is the Taris swoop race, a mandatory Unexpected Genre Change into an exceptionally cheezy racing minigame.
      • This troper has always found the entirety of Taris a Scrappy Level. It might be that you have a level cap of 20, so many (including this troper) decide not to level up the main character past the madatory level up on the Endar Spire. This means that, when you get to Dantooine, you can level up exclusively in the Jedi class you pick for him/her. Of course, this means you have to run around Taris with a 2nd level main character, who is terribly easy to kill.
  • In Drakengard, we have Leonard's Regret, specifically the verse "Gleamings". Aside from the waves of those ever-annoying bulb-armor knights, the end of the stage sees you fighting a dozen heavy cavalry. They have an attack that causes them to charge at you and send you flying if it hits. Since there are so many of them, several are guaranteed to charge at once, and Mercy Invincibility doesn't kick in until you recover, so prepare to be ping-ponged between several of them. Oh, and they love doing this while you're busy attacking one cavalryman and they're offscreen. And there are two more waves after the first. Best to call out Leonard for the last one...
    • In truth, all of the pact-partner side chapters are like this. "Arioch's Madness", due to miserable flight controls, is worse yet.
  • Final Fantasy IX has two arguable scrappy levels. One is Kuja's fortress (and this includes the hellishly annoying minigame with Regent Cid, of course) and Pandemonium, where switching between characters when it's highly inconvenient is a laborious and utterly fun sucking chore.
    • You're forgetting Oeilvert. No magic allowed and some of the enemies are stone statues that create copies of your characters to fight you. Also contains Ark, That One Boss.
    • This troper actually gave up the game for half a year after beating Kuja's castle. The reason was that, after finally taking forever to figure out how to get past the fifth screen, figuring out the near-impossible puzzles, leveling magic-based characters against enemies who switched weaknesses from Physical to Magical, and finally beating the dungeon boss (who, if memory serves, casts Reflect on herself), couldn't find the well-hidden exit until consulting three different Game FA Qs guides.
    • And who thought Fossil Roo was a good idea? It separates two great portions of the game, causing the player to deal with puzzles where flipping switches will cause giant spiders to take you to different places. Don't forget that if you miss an item and try to leave to reset the puzzle, it doesn't work. Random encounters occur every three steps, and the enemies all have annoying status effects; there are so many that you probably won't be able to block them all.
      • Giant ants. In fact, gargantuan ants—hence the name 'gargant'
  • Kingdom Hearts has the Atlantica level. Between the annoying controls, and the fact that the game never tells you how the heck attacking Ursula's cauldron is supposed to work, it's easily the most reviled level in the game.
    • Wouldn't that make Ursula That One Boss? The secret to beating her is cast spells of the same color as the cauldron and it'll knock her out for 10 seconds.
      • Which I've tried, and it doesn't work as planned. I've played through the game at least five times, and still consider that whole fight a Luck Based Mission, and her That One Boss.
    • The sequel still has Atlantica, but replaces the swimming with an even more annoying musical Rhythm Game. Thankfully, it's optional.
  • Kingdom Hearts 2 had Space Paranoids. It was a fun level, but many of the required sequences annoyed the hell out of this troper. (The Unexpected Genre Change light cycle game, and the Elevator Level drove me insane...)
    • Besides that, the light plays with your eyes and screws up your fighting.
  • The entirety of I Wanna Be The Guy is, quite frankly, one giant (intentional) Scrappy Game.
    • But there are still places that players hate more than others. The words "spike corridor" will cause many people to froth at the mouth.
  • The whole of the Luminoth Temple in Metroid Prime 2 is obnoxious, but the spider ball puzzle for the health tank is absolute murder. Incredibly unlikely jumps, horrible camera angles and one false move makes you start all over.
    • Of course, it gets easy once you realize that the red dots are where you're supposed to Boost off of. It's just the electricity that sometimes pulses through the orbs which are annoying.
  • Many players have an extreme dislike for Half-Life 2: Episode 1's elevator part. It's not as hard now because the developers patched it to be easier.
    • This troper loathed Episode 1's Antlion spawn ground. Mostly because he mistook the lever that opened the exit grate for the lever meant to open the grate to the final car to seal the spawn point. Of course, ANY level involving infinite-spawn antlions is a Scrappy Level for this Troper.
      • Actually in that particular area, you don't need to block all the spawn points, all you have to do is get enough time uninterrupted to spin the valve to open the gate and get out. The last time I played this I only ended up having to block 2 of the spawn points because Alyx managed to position herself in such a way that the antlions would ignore me.
      • Oh, sure, you don't need to. But this troper spent several hair-pulling hours trying just that. Fricking Antlions.
    • How about the White Forest siege at the end of Episode 2? Kill thirteen Striders in a row? AAAUGH! You have infinite resources of a weapon that can one-shot a Strider? Phew. You can only have one at a time with you, and the Striders have a nasty habit of blowing up your supply depots? Okay, so things even out to neutral. Until you notice that each Strider is accompanied by one or two Hunters that can and will shoot your Magnusson devices right out of your grasp.
      • This troper found that part to be great fun. Then again, this troper is also a nefarious cheater who made the Combine Assault Rifle do massive damage and carry ten times the ammo that VAL Ve intended it to carry. Then again, it's still more fun to just run the Hunters over with your 1969 Dodge Charger than to shoot them. Gordon gots him some SWEET wheels! Use them as a weapon, just like everything else Gordon can lay his power-armored hands on in that forsaken future.
    • 2 Words: Ravenholm and soiled
  • In the Prince Of Persia: The Sands of Time, near the end you lose your magic dagger. What follows is a fairly long stretch where you have to navigate a section where the camera is badly placed at inopportune times, that you need good timing for jumps that would otherwise kill you, and that you get harassed by some Goddamned Bats, though they tend to be less Goddamnedier than most bats.
  • Raining Blood in Guitar Hero III represents a sudden difficulty spike in the very final set, making it a Scrappy song for more than a few players, irrespective of whether one likes the actual music or not.
    • Guitar Hero 2 had similar songs, like Freya, which was a repetitive hand-cramping chordfest, or Psychobilly Freakout, which was very quick and random and could confuse the heck out of inexperienced players (or even veteran ones). And let's not even talk about Hangar 18...
    • You'll notice the original Guitar Hero has no mention yet. It's because people are still trying to forget "No One Knows" and "Cowboys From Hell".
      • And "Symphony of Destruction". Yeah, thank you for tossing us our first solo with an impossibly bad HO/PO system, Harmonix. THANK YOU!
  • Many of the minigame levels in the original Sly Cooper could qualify for this, but this troper looks with particular loathing on the two racing levels with Murray, as well as the "Piranah Lake" game in Mz. Ruby's lair.
  • The "Rolling" level in The Rub Rabbits! fills this editor with rage, as rolling your snowball along the track is very clunky and navigating the curves is a nightmare. Worse yet, you go through it twice, the second time replacing the snowballs with robots. It's a sore spot in what is otherwise an improvement over the previous game Feel The Magic: XY/XX in every way.
  • Elite Beat Agents, another rhythm game, requires you to tap on-screen symbols in time to the beat. Except on Canned Heat, where the correct timing is slightly out of sync with the song. Deliberately. This troper has been informed that it's a very clever and sophisticated musical style. Doesn't stop it being frustrating as hell and practically impossible to beat.
    • Say what now? I thought that Canned Heat waas simply off-beat, not off-sync. A bit frustrating, but once you put yourself in a jazz rhythm mindset, it's relatively straightforward. If you want a REAL Scrappy Level, try Survivor or Jumpin' Jack Flash. Rapid-fire beats and an absolutely UNFORGIVING health meter where one mistake kills you.
      • At least the taps for Survivor and Jumpin' Jack Flash are on the beats - if you can get used to hitting on every beat and can anticipate where the next target will be, it's just a matter of actually doing it. You have to intentionally unlearn everything you know about the game to clear Canned Heat on the highest difficulty levels.
      • As a drummer, I found Canned Heat very easy, and Jumpin' Jack Flash very difficult. Playing on the 2 and 4 instead of the 1 and 3 is a very "basic" skill drummers need to learn, and it comes up frequently in many rhythm games, so if you play a lot of those, it's a handy thing to learn.
    • If you thought Canned Heat was hard, try some of the beatmaps in the freeware PC port, osu! Combine three parts unforgiving drain with two parts mouse movement on a 800 by 600 pixel field (that's right - a mouse: say goodbye to pinpoint accuracy with a stylus), and tiny beats that are just barely big enough to fit your entire cursor over, and you've got some of the Insane beatmaps that users have made. That, however, hasn't stopped some people from clearing them at any cost. And some have even "S" ranked them. And don't get me started on trying to reach the four corners of the playfield in a matter of two or so seconds - and they have to be timed right. And a cluster*** of spinners in other maps that are almost impossible to clear without a tablet.
  • Case 3 of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All is often cited as one of the weakest of the saga. For different reasons, incluidng the need to Cross-examine a Clown witness who makes bad jokes at every opportunity, and giving you penalties if you press wrongly on him, for annoying the Judge and the prosecutor.
    • This troper actually liked that case for the amusing characters and the twists near the end, but utterly despised Case 2 of Justice for All. The thing is that