Scrappy Level - Television Tropes & Idioms

Nintendo

Every Water Temple in every Legend Of Zelda
- And the Lakebed Temple in Twilight Princess.
- The Ice Cavern. It's frozen water. And horrible.
  - While we're on ice temples, Snowhead.
- Snowpeak Ruins. The knee-deep snow, the icy floors, the Block Puzzles, the sliding ice things (you know the ones), the Freezzards... the ball and chain does little to abate the Scrappyness.
  - Not to mention, of course, the javelin throwing ice things, the Chilfos. The ones that can only be destroyed with the aforementioned Awesome But Impractical Ball and Chain. Which slows you down to an annoying speed (or lack thereof). And leaves you open when you try to target and doesn't do a blessed thing about the needles of icy death coming from them when you don't. Oh god I hated the Chilfos. Even more than the giant Freezards.
  - The mini-boss guarding the Ball and Chain (or, rather, swinging it at you) isn't a pleasant fight either; beating him without getting hit is a pain in the ass. Although, if you can manage to get behind him and nail him with the Mortal Draw, it's an instant kill.
- 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.
- 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.
  - The real kicker for the Great Bay Temple (and whole game) is that you have a TIME LIMIT. In the other games, you could just keep bashing things in different ways all night long until you got passed.
- On the topic of Zelda Scrappy Dungeons... Temple of the Ocean King. Phantom Hourglass is not exactly hard, but it's extremely boring and the constant backtracking is just tedious.
  - 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.
- Okay, since we're on the topic of Zelda, I submit the 6th dungeon in the original NES classic. Being the first appearance of the Wizzrobe enemy, and also swarming with shield-eating Like Likes, paralyzing Bubbles, and almost impervious Darknuts. If the orange ones are annoying, then the Blue ones are infuriating.
- No, the ultimate Zelda Scrappy Level has to be the Ancient Ruins from Oracle Of Seasons. For one thing, it was huge—the boss battle was on the fifth floor. For another, it prominently featured the Magic Boomerang, which was introduced in the level—which half the time ended up with you accidentally walking into a pit when you hit something and control shifted from the boomerang back to Link. And another quarter of that time spent screaming at the damn thing to go in the direction you needed it to. Then there was that mad dash for the Boss Key with the walls closing in... and finally, the boss itself, which required both mad boomerangin' skills and quick timing, all done in a pit of quicksand!
  - Though the Indy-esque 'wall-shuddering doom-a-thon' is funny, although often fatal.
- What about the Goron Maze on the Moon in Majora's Mask? You have to go HIGH speed on extremely narrow ledges, have to bounce off objects at the perfect angle to hop onto another platform. There is NO room for error.
  - Of course, with that one, if you get it right from the start the level pretty much plays itself.
- ARGHH! DAMN TRIFORCE SHARDS! (Wind Waker). Seriously, what made Link (Hero of time) think, it would be a GOOD idea to smash his triforce into a thousand little pieces and throw them all around Hyrule?!?!
The Test Of Fear from Star Fox Adventures, oh my god. It takes about twenty failed attempts to even figure out the CONTROLS for the damn thing (hint: move the control stick in the opposite direction that the cursor is moving), and even then how hard your little cursor thing moves seems completely arbitrary. Even after you learn where the biggest cursor movements come in, it still takes superhuman reflexes to react on time.
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.
- Metroid Prime has Magmoor Caverns, which is disliked because it's not so much a zone as a glorified transit tunnel between the other zones. A transit tunnel filled with lava. Nice music tho. The real Scrappy Level, however, is the Phazon Mines. Looks dull, has lots of annoying jumps, and is filled with Space Pirates who lock all the doors in the room until you kill them all (the background music also changes to the appropriately name "Pirate Fear" until you kill them all). Also, it has Metroids! And when you first enter it, you have to pass what is commonly called "the gauntlet". Basically you have to go through half the zone, fighting countless Pirates, beating two minibosses and completing a rather annoying morphball maze featuring lots of electrified walls, all without being able to save the game!
- Super Metroid is a very well designed game, but Maridia earns many player's ire for the large amount of backtracking required to get all the items.

Other

Castlevania 64 had a few reviled levels (when it's Not the Scrappy Game), thanks to sluggish movements and unhelpful camera angles. But the worst is the one in which you had to carry an exploding gunpowder keg. One, you can't run, or it'll blow up, instantly killing you. Two, you can't get hit without an Earth Shattering Kaboom. Third, you can't put it down. The path is naturally goes along ledges, filled with God damn bats and their cousins. And yes, there is a time limit.
- That section's pretty easy, actually. The Scrappy Level is the original version of Duel Tower, which they forgot to put save points in.
ANY Clock Tower level in any Castlevania game. Moving platforms, conveyor belts, Medusa Heads, wall-to-floor-to-ceiling spikes, and to top it all off, a boss battle with Death in most recent games. Fun stuff.
- Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse does its best to avert this. Not only is the clock tower completely optional, but reaching the end allows you to recruit Grant, whose improved jumping and climbing abilities actually make the stage fun as you work your way back through the obstacles.
Castlevania 's Stage 16 (the third-to-last stage and the first section of the last area) has you crossing a stone bridge with gaps and Goddamned Giant Bats that take as many hits as the original Giant Bat from Stage 3 to kill. Did I mention this is only the third-to-last stage? The next stage has Goddamned Fleamen, and the final stage is the battle with Dracula the Goddamned Bathead. Oh, and since this is the last stage, you lose 4 out of 16 HP per hit, which means you die in just four hits.
In the PC game of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, most of the game is well-balanced, and not too hard to complete. However, the last level of the Hippogriff Flying minigame is super-tough to beat— it's a tricky Pass Through The Rings challenge, where you can only miss at most 3 rings, or you have to start over. And you have to beat it to complete the game.
Illusion Of Gaia.
- The raft cutscene after the first boss is reviled by fans, as it is purposefully boring to make the player empathize with the characters. It doesn't help that no one seems to know exactly what actions trigger the end of each sequence.
- The Atlantis inspired level which involved raising and lowering water levels, filled with hard hitting enemies, the game not providing any easily obtained healing items (every Healing Herb is unique.) containing That One Boss even IF you know where to find the secret portal to Gaia so you can transform yourself into your knightly powerup mode. Because, hey guess what, the boss is a Vampire couple who've got one of your friends on a timebomb. So not only are they a BITCH to take out, you're fighting time, with a weakened character.
Cave Story: Immediately after a grueling string of penultimate bosses, the player aiming for the Best Ending is thrust down into the Bonus Level Of Hell, the Sacred Ground—a place with enough instant-death spikes to make I Wanna Be The Guy seem reasonable, plenty of Goddamned Butes (yes, that's their name), and a final boss that can only be described as That One Sequential Boss. Oh, and did I mention all of your weapons are reverted to their lowest levels as soon as entering?
- Not to mention the Bonus Level Of Hell prior to that, "Last Cave (hidden)." If you completed this level without uttering the phrase "GOD DAMNED PRESSES" once, you either used a different expletive, or you are God. Or you watched an LP and know that you can boost past under them before they fall on you. (Incidentally, they are called Presses, but many people call them Thwomps, or just Instant Death Spawns of Pure Evil.) And your weapons are reverted to their lowest levels as soon as you enter here, as well.
  - Or if you were dying, angry, and couldn't remember how fast Presses fall, and you just sat there and abused the often ignored Spur attachment Whimsical Star, which whirled around you and damaged the presses from a safe spot. When the first one exploded, KILL THEM WITH THE SPUR! HAHAHAHAHA!
The flashback sequences of Lucas' childhood in Indigo Prophecy, due to their horrible implementation of stealth based mechanics in what is otherwise an Action Adventure game.
The "UFO Catcher" side mission in Yakuza. Yes, it's entirely optional, and the reward for beating it (a step towards 100% completion and a decent weapon) isn't crucial, but having to use a crane game to pick up a whole bunch of stuffed animals is the epitome of tedium. Tedium then turns to rage as the loop of stupid, tinny, "cheerful" music bores into your brain, the annoying depth perception issues keep you from getting a bead on your target, the wonky physics engine causes the toy to fall out of the claw as it's moving towards the redemption chute, and the claw itself takes an excruciatingly long time just to move back to the starting point and reset itself.
Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb had an incredibly sadistic level near the end. A crazy Nazi starts chasing you in a drill tank. While running from the drill tank, you have to get across several bottomless pits, either by simply jumping, or by using your whip to swing from a conveniently placed horizontal beam. Doesn't sound too hard right? Here's the kicker: Some of the whip swing pits are very close together, and during the swing, you have to let go of the whip just slightly before you reach the terminus of the swing. If you let go just slightly too late, you will overshoot the small platform and fall into the next pit! To make matters worse, there are no checkpoints, so if you die, you have to start the whole level all over again, Unskippable Cutscene and all! At least the game doesn't make you run toward the camera!
- At least, if you make it past that run, you get to see an immensely satisfying cutscene in which the drill tank goes down a bottomless pit and the Nazi inside screams in terror. But make no mistake, you have to earn it.
- The recent Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings has an equally frustrating last level. You have to swing a piano at Nazis. The problems? The piano is slower than your joystick, the unchangable camera makes it hard to hit them, they're climbing ladders that, once they get part way up, you can no longer hit them, and if they shoot you once, you die. Never mind that you've been able to take multiple bullts before, one hit, you die.
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is enjoyable on the whole, but has a couple of "why why why" moments. For the most part, for instance, the jumping-around-on-ruins-and-between-ledges mechanics are smooth and allow you to rapidly get through areas. However, in one part of the game you must jump around the walls, pillars and chandeliers high up in a large building, making your way over to two switches on opposite sides of the room. This is perfectly fine up until the point where you have to make it across an innocent-looking jump (pretty much identical on both sides) from some planks to some other planks. Where Nathan's been happy to do semi-automatic jumps and physics-defying jumps between tiny ledges earlier, these two gaps cause him to have a brain aneurysm and forget how to jump long, instead deciding to take a short leap and then forget how to grab ledges.
- The final gunfight is a hair-pulling exercise in trial and error, too, unless you're a shotgun expert by then. The game's mook turned Big Bad has an insta-death sniper rifle that, unlike other snipers, hits you even if you're rolling. There's a ton of soldiers in the way, and after the first quarter of the fight, you end up behind breakable crates. Which the Big Bad shoots to pieces. So you have to memorize where the enemies appear, take them down quickly enough to avoid running out of cover, and not waste your ammo on the invincible-even-though-he-isn't-armored Big Bad. It all ends with another trial-and-error mess in which you have to figure out exactly when to dodge between crates.
The Occupation of Arteria Carpals in Armored Core for Answer. The level consists of a fake briefing, crossing into the center of one of the worst battlefields in the game, hearing that the entire level is a trap to make you die, then seeing not 1, not 2, but 4 of them come flying in, ready to kill you. Your ally is worthless- they'll slaughter him in a matter of seconds, then they rush you. Unless you know exactly what you're doing (which essentially comes down to cheap tactics or sheer luck), you die, very quickly. Best part? The Hard mode version adds another enemy.
- Last Raven had so many Scrappy Levels, almost to the point of turning it into a Scrappy Game.
- From must really be made up of a bunch of sadists, seeing how the computer cheats in practically every game in the series...
Spartan Total Warrior has an escort mission in which you have to guide the mathematician Archimedes through a horde of Roman Legionaries. This suffers from a total lack of checkpoints of any kind despite an incredibly long setup, a gigantic map in which everything looks the same, having nowhere near the supplies you need, and having far too many mooks for the button-mashing hack-and-slash combat engine to stand up to while protecting Archy. The kicker, however is that he is suicidal. It's one thing to be a frail old man who is unable to keep up with the cream of the Spartan military. Willfully running into fires is quite another.
Naruto: Rise of the Ninja has its racing levels. They are especially difficult when you have to use chakra concentration and climb up buildings. Never mind the fact that Chakra Concentration takes FOUR SECONDS to charge up to use, and another second and then ANOTHER four if you fail.
Building 2 in Metal Gear was a pretty creative, if difficult, level in itself, with various types of gameplay depending on what floor you're in (straight-up stealth, running away from pursuers, shooting, a maze, and so on), but was ruined by one piece of bad level design which makes the whole thing like pulling teeth. This is that one of the elevators will only go up, and the other elevator will only go down. It doesn't help that the radio gets jammed, so you can't even send or receive calls. Most walkthroughs will tell you to go to the basement first to get the scene with the False Pettrovich, which basically forces you to backtrack most of the building in order to reach the right points of certain floors. It also means that if you take the downwards elevator to the basement or the upwards elevator to the roof by accident, you are forced to complete either a gas maze (with a boss at the end) or an instant alert chasing sequence just to get to an elevator that can take you somewhere better.
The rooftop level near the end of the Ghost In The Shell Playstation game. You go left a millimeter, you fall off the building. Go right a millimeter, you fall off the building. Try to climb the cable, you fall off the building.

Close Action Adventure

Naturally, Sierra games are full of these:
- In the original version of Space Quest I, you have to escape the Arcada before it explodes. Yet you are not explained ANYTHING about this other than "the Arcada was boarded by unknown assailants".
- And speaking of Space Quest, a number of arcade sequences in the series are rather hair-pulling, even by adventure game standards:
  - The Scum Soft Maze in Space Quest III, where Roger must slowly go through a repetitive labyrinth of cubicles zapping garbage, where missing even one can (or indeed, wandering too near to just about everything) results in an instant death.
  - The Zero-Gravity Skating sequence in Space Quest IV... even on a system slow enough to work at the right speed, it's still damn near impossible.
  - Rescuing Cliffy in Space Quest V... really a Luck Based Mission, but the odds of your fuel running out are really really against you.
- The desert in King's Quest 5. Finding the oases and the bandit camp (and a certain item that you need to complete the game lest it becomes Unwinnable) is trial-and-error, unless you have a map. And even after getting past that one, there's the catacombs of Mordack's dungeon late in the game, with a very confusing map system.
- The stupid cliff climbing section in King's Quest III — you have to inch Gwydion down a cliff with no indication as to which pixels are the very, very small minority which will not send you plummeting to your death.
Microscope Puzzle in The Seventh Guest. Probably 90% of the people who will tell you that they didn't have to skip this puzzle with the hint book are filthy liars. And for good reason.
- Unfortunately, the AI isn't random in the least—if you do the exact same movements every time, the computer will do the same moves every time, depending on your PC specifications. Even attempting to mimic a You Tube solution video will cause you to lose if your PC is faster or slower.
Any of the bike fights in Full Throttle. They weren't well programmed to begin with, but they're actually unwinnable using ScummVM if you don't just cheat and use the instant win code.
- Also the segment where you have to kick the wall to sneak into the Corley Motors factory. There is literally no indication of where to kick beyond an extremely vague clue that the kicking spot would have been short enough to be reached by a child. So, good luck pixel hunting!
Case 3 of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All is often cited as one of the weakest of the saga. For different reasons, including 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. Tip: don't Press him when he's grinning.
- Case 2 of Justice for All. The thing is that Phoenix is present on the day of the murder, which requires you to essentially sit through TWO days of boring investigation segments before you even get to the first courtroom sequence, and the minigame that makes the investigations tolerable isn't even introduced until the second. Plus, the solution to the case is obvious right from the start, which makes the whole thing something of a trudge.

Close Adventure Game

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.
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...
- There's a worse one, though: Level 7, Stage 2, "The Flying Pyramid". It's a small, self-contained arena. First wave: axe-wielding female Giant Mook, cannon-wearing fat guy, Mook. Second wave: another axe-wielder, a Giant Mook with a sledgehammer, and a knife-carrying skinny guy. Third wave: a mohawked Giant Mook, a regular mook, two axe wielders, and a knife-carrier. Last wave: a Sensei. And there is no checkpoint—if you die at any point, you start over.
  - Don't forget Death Shudder, which is the point at which most God Hand players give up. God Hand is a game that is all about managing the number of enemies that are fighting you at any given time. So you get through the first part of Death Shudder, which has a couple Kung Fu Mooks (though if you don't approach them in EXACTLY THE RIGHT WAY, you get jumped by a whole boatload of Giant Mooks. You stride on, thinking you've gotten through the worst of it. Not in the slightest. Once you get into the next area, the doors lock behind you, and you're met with: 3 Elite Mooks, 3 Elite Axe Women, an Elite Giant Mook, and Tiger Joe, a boss mook from earlier. Not to mention the fact that they all rush you as soon as you enter the room, and when you kill the Tiger Joe, it spawns a Trident Demon, yet another boss from earlier in the game capable of completely ruining you.
Kenpachi's Story Mode path in Bleach: Blade of Fate is built around two-on-one battles. Of course, he's the one who's outnumbered, since he's too much of a Badass to have a partner. The first match is Byakuya Kuchiki and Renji Abarai. Byakuya can hit you from anywhere on the screen, and Renji has a massive number of distance attacks. Kenpachi? He has nothing that hits at long range. The best you can do is rush in and pray you don't get flanked. The second fight is against Hitsugaya and Hinamori, two of the game's biggest projectile users. Again, you can only rush in and hope you're not flanked.
- Hanataro's (yes, Hanataro) story mode in Bleach: Shattered Blade, especially the fifth fight against Ikkaku. Forcing you to control a Joke Character whose entire movelist can heal the opponent against a CPU controller character with a hell of a lot more speed and range on his weapon? Boo on you, Sega.
- In Bleach: Dark Souls, any level that makes you fight against the Grand Fisher. The son of a bitch cheats! And the first time, you fight him with Kenpachi, who isn't that bad a character but is utterly outmatched by Grand Fisher. A runner-up is the level where you play Orihime (who was needlessly weakened for this game) against generic Hollows, who deal far more damage than they should. It's an Escort Mission where you protect Hanataro, but Orihime is so slow and weak that Hanataro will have to do most of the work!
Super Smash Bros. Brawl has a brutal level at the end of the Subspace Emissary which combines small portions every single other level. The player also had to go through and beat every single character they had unlocked yet (all but Sonic, Jigglypuff, Toon Link, and Wolf) and all bosses they had fought yet (all but Tabuu), making for a total of 43 fights. This level took up roughly 2 hours of play time on Easy mode. Luckily, you're able to save in the middle of the level, and switching characters also removed all damage.
- There are some that can be bad on Intense, such as Battlefield Fortress, but the Canyon and Entrance to Subspace take the cake. Both of them are short, which would be a good thing, but what happens when the levels are made to be so short? Just ask undercoverfilmer00v if you get the chance. Don't get the picture? Well, what is going on is that there are no doors to serve as checkpoints, so the stages each have to be cleared in one shot. Oh, but here's the best part: at the end of both stages are Giant Primids teamed with tough enemies. You can abuse the terrain on Canyon to get around this problem, but not so much at Entrance to Subspace.
- The Ruins. Bad enough on Normal, ridiculous on Hard or above. Nearly every single GoddamnedBat makes an appearance somewhere, as do a good proportion of the Demonic Spiders in the game. You've got the auto scrolling section with the mites knocking you back into the scrolling screen of death as you try to break down barriers of bricks in the path, a relatively annoying puzzle section with switches, a four battle platform ride where the terrain and enemies go from bad to worse, and well... it's downright annoying. At least there's an easy end battle and decent music thought. Also, agreeing with Entrance to Subspace, which is basically a Demonic Spider Boss Rush.
- Intense is the scrappy level, full stop. The Great Maze is actually pretty easy compared to, levels like the Meta-Ridley level. WHYYYYYYYYYYYY. Why did it take me 3 times to get past the first stage in that level. Oh right, Autolances and Metal Primids
Floor 20 of Soul Calibur IV's Tower of Lost Souls (Ascend) easily qualifies with enemies that are equipped with auto guard impact S, auto negate throw (one of them has S rank) and one of them healing after guard impacts. The only way to win is to spam unblockable moves (best way is with auto unblockable).
- The second to last group of floors includes groups of A Is that seem better than the highest difficulty available in vs mode. They also switch back and forth in the middle of combos to produce super combos. When you finally beat these three levels of hell, the Final Boss of the Ascension almost seems like the developers wanted to see just how impossible they could make a fight.

Close Fighting Game

Bungie

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, widely agreed upon as one of the worst Scrappy Levels ever made. Hordes of zombies. Limited ammo. Repetitive level design. Constant death.
  - The real reason the level is hell: When you are playing the level, both Cortana and Gravemind like to have moments, where everything slows down as you hear them talk. The dialogue just turns the entire level into one giant Mind Screw.
- Tsavo Highway Legendary, 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.
  - Useful tips- try to keep your Marines alive- they'll distract brutes if nothing else. The fort thing up on the hill has trip mines you can use to hit the brutes who jump out of the dropships. Use the first Fuel Rod Gun to blow the hell out of packed Brutes, then use it to blast the hell out of the Wraith.
  - Or if you want to see something really awesome..make sure two or three marines are armed with Fuel Rod Guns. They shoot those things with astonshing accuracy, have limitless ammo. Those dropships are usually down before a single brute gets out.
- "The Oracle" on Legendary. There's the infamous Elevator of Doom infested with Demonic Spiders of the Flood type spawning from Mook Makers, and the level is also home to That One Boss, Mr. Heretic Leader. The elevator section makes the Library look easy.
- "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us" in Halo 2's Metropolis. Two words: Sniper arena.
- The "Nothing but Jackal" sublevel of Delta Halo, which consists of a canyon followed by a waterfront area, infested with Drone swarms and Sniper Jackals, both of which are Demonic Spiders on Legendary, and little prospects for cover, particularly from the Drones, since they tend to flank you out of your cover.
Halo 1: The "Into The Belly Of The Beast" sublevel (the grav lift hanger) of "Truth And Reconciliation", on Legendary. Randomly grouped enemies spawn at random intervals from the doors, and there can be up to four Gold Elites, ie Demonic Spiders, which will lay waste to you and your squad with their insta-death swords and ninja-style abilities, unless you quickly take them out, easier said than done. A Luck Based Mission to some degree.
Neither High Nor Low in Marathon is one of the worst examples in video game history, due to the crippling lack of save points, the complete lack of recharge stations, and the traps from hell. If you start this level with a full shield (preferably a double shield), you might have a chance. This is one of the last levels in the game too.
- By far the most widely loathed level is Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap!, infamous for a "puzzle" in which several platforms must be raised and lowered by switches into an approximately stairway-like configurations. The problem is that each switch is in a different room far away from each other, and the platforms are a ways away from each other, making it difficult to judge whether they're at the correct height. Oh, and since Marathon has no jump key, you have to Grenade Jump from one platform to the next in order to test it. Over and over.
  - Amusingly, this level was altered in the fan remake so that the platforms automatically go to the correct position, and the computer terminal which used to provide hints for the puzzle now nets a message from the developers and a boatload of heavy weaponry.
- And worse, Acme Station and Post Naval Trauma. Two vacuum levels in a row, with few opportunities to refill your O2 and shields. The narrow corridors don't help either.

Rare/Free Radical

Surface 2 in Golden Eye, considering you can't see a thing, and the objectives are very far from each other.
- And it constantly spawns enemies homing in on you. But no, that's not the Scrappy Level, because that would leave no place for Aztec. Why is Aztec a Scrappy Level? Set to 00 Agent, and let me count the ways:
  - The very start is a deathtrap with three guards with grenades and assault rifles against you with a pistol. If one throws a grenade, it's a question of whether you decide to hit restart or just die. Your survival is entirely based on what they decide to do.
  - The level is a hive of respawn points for enemies with either high-damage assault rifles or even higher damage hitscan lasers with crippling knockback. You will succeed or fail based on where they are spawned, not on the basis of anything you might do.
  - The centrepiece of the level is a gargantuan fuck you trap, with the shuttle bay doors closing and forcing you to open them in order to complete the mission. Climbing the ladder up to them borders on impossible, and beating the mission can only be done by closing the doors yourself because the final script switches state without checking if they're open or closed. Yes, you basically can only win by exploiting a programming oversight.
  - There's more. Part of the mission involves reprogramming the shuttle. To do this, you must do battle with Jaws, who totes double assault rifles. This is while the infinite guards come to kill you. You must then retreat to the control room, and then fight your way back to where Jaws was, so that you can fire off said shuttle, where the above ladder comes into play.
  - Even the official Player's Guide says this is a Luck Based Mission. Fortunately, it also says that the guards are finite until you kill Jaws.
- The easiest (or not) level of Golden Eye: Control. You have to protect Natalya as she tries to reprogram the guidance system of the titular EMP weapon so it does a reentry into Earth's atmosphere instead of K Oing London's electrical security systems (thus allowing Trevelyan to steal all the money from the London bank unhindered). This involves trying to keep her alive while hordes of enemies come and try to shoot her, and she just STANDS THERE where she can easily be shot (which to be fair, you kinda have to do in order to reprogram the damned thing). She dies in only two or three hits, and to make things worse, the desks and computers near the console Natalya's working on, like everything else in the game, are Made Of Explodium, and are close enough to kill her if they're destroyed during the shootout. And of course, you fail the mission if she dies.
  - Here's a tip: Blow up all of the desks & computers except for the one Natalya uses (the one directly in front of the large video screen) before meeting up with her again. Not only does it get rid of potential hazards, but it also gives you a better shot at the guards.
Most of Time Splitters 2 is straightforward arcade-style action, and that's part of the reason why the NeoTokyo level is so universally loathed. The first half of the stage involves following a baddie back to her gang's hideout without her or any of the numerous security cameras notcing you. It doesn't help that she strolls along at a snail's pace, and that getting noticed for even a second means starting the whole damn level over again.
From NOLF 2: A Spy In HARM's Way, the level "The House Where Melvin Used to Live" features infinitely spawning ninjas, and a very finite amount of ammo and healing on the ground. Normally, you'd be able loot supplies from dead enemies, but on this level, they vanish immediately after you kill them.
Rusty Bucket Bay & Grunty Industries. Fer fook's saek.
- The reason Rusty Bucket Bay is so hair-pulling is because it's somewhat Nintendo Hard. There are at least two parts where instant death is highly likely (the part with all the gears, cogs, and propellers, which is a somewhat tricky moving obstacle course above a Bottomless Pit, and the oil-water, which drowns you on the surface and does so twice as fast below it; hope you find a ladder). In addition, one of the few enemies in the game that does more that one damage point per hit is super-frequent here (the ugly green worm that pops out of holes in the walls when you get close). Having to make yet ANOTHER attempt at getting all 100 notes in one go because of one slip-up is hard.

Crytek

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.
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.
- 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.

Valve

Many players have an extreme dislike for Half Life 2: Episode One's elevator part. It's not as hard now because the developers patched it to be easier.
- Antlions lend themselves to Scrappy Levels. I would point to the first half of Sandtraps, where hordes of Antlions spawn at you if you walk on the sand. Of course, the game immediately makes up for it by letting you control the Antlions in an attack on a Combine fortress.
- How about the White Forest siege at the end of Episode Two? 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. Oh, wait, you can run them over with your HOT ROD. Awesome.
  - Not to plague a Subjective Trope with Natter, but it should be noted that many consider this level to be the Crowning Moment Of Awesome of the franchise to date. Again: subjective.
Nova Prospekt's defence level. Oh lord.
Half Life has one: Xen. The whole crux of it. You just went through going through Black Mesa, fighting for your life against an alien invasion and a military clean up batallion. What are you treated with? Platformer hell.
Team Fortress Two has 2fort, which is known among the more experienced players for having dozens of long, boring corridors, an unintuitive map design, an average of four snipers per server (maybe one of which is aiming for something that isn't another sniper), an average of five engineers per server (maybe two of which have achieved more than five sentry kills), and it taking herculean efforts to capture the flag. It does have a large fandom in TFC veterans and people who are new, though. But then, Capture the Flag maps (with the exception of Turbine) in general are disliked due to their stalemate-heavy matches.

Other

Medal Of Honor: Frontline, the "The Golden Lion" level on Hard. Lots of snipers and enemy ambushes, alarms triggering more such ambushes, Rail Shooter truck ride sequences where it's hard to aim at enemies, health items are few and far between, the lack of in-level save points and Demonic Spiders-type behavior of many enemies on Hard exacerbates things.
- Nijmegen Bridge, too. Snipers on top of the bridge girders, endlessly respawning waves of enemies, lots of enemy hiding places, machine gun nests, all made harder to see by the fog.
- One Word: Snipertown.
"Mile High Club," The Stinger level in Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, is a Timed Mission set on an airliner. There is not enough room to move, the Mooks outnumber you, the rest of your team won't move up until you clear the area, and if you're going for the "Mile High Club" achievement, you die in four hits and only have one minute to reach the hostage, who you must rescue with a headshot; if you go for a kneecap, the level ends with the message "Veterans only get headshots." If you make one false move, you'll either die or fail anyway because you wasted time. It's the kind of level where you don't need a walkthrough so much as choreography.
- Where do you begin with the defense of the Ferris Wheel? To set it out for those who haven't played this level; You and a cripple (who can't move, and can only shoot a pistol) have to fight off at least a hundred respawning enemies all armed with fully automatic rifles for 6 minuites while waiting for a helicopter to arrive. You have 5 Claymore mines to defend your ally with, and if he dies, game over. Luckily, most of the enemies go after you, instead of him. And if you stay behind the ferris wheel, which makes very good cover, attack dogs spawn in packs, which instant kill you unless you press a button in a 0.1 second window of oppourtunity. I survived Veteran by hanging out in a small booth, and shooting anyone who came inside. It was not suprising to see 10 or more grenade markers on the screen at one time. And if a grenade landed inside, then nothing I could do would save me from death, so I stayed in my booth for 6 minutes, praying to a god that I didn't believe in that no grenades would fall into my safe little hideyhole. There are also areas off to the side that would make for very, very good defensive spots, if the concentrated radiation didn't instant kill you. Hope you can hear the tiny little ticks of your geiger counter over the constant, tremendous roar of enemy gunfire!
- In the followup game, Call of Duty: World at War, the level "Heart of the Reich" is now infamous among players on Veteran mode for it's insanely overdone difficulty, unfair gameplay and sheer luck required to complete it. Grenade spamming, endless respawning enemies, enemies that can shoot you through large ammounts of rubble, all you need for your controller breaking rage.
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.
- An Escort Mission that was unique in the depth of guilt trip it laid on the player. You could fail this repeatedly without gameplay consequence, but watching a little girl die while a mournful motherly voice underscored the tragedy of it seemed far worse than restarting it from the beginning.
  - Which is made up for, in its entirety, at the end- you're so spliced out at that point, and you've got the Big Daddy armor, which means you can take on a close-range Big Daddy with a wrench. It was so very worth it.
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.
- Two words: Temple Ruins. The level where it is most obvious that The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard. On higher difficulties, the enemies are all Demonic Spiders who can magically detonate grenades before they're supposed to go off, have pixel-perfect accuracy at ridiculously long range while your weapons have "prodigious recoil"(Marathon 2 manual) and can hardly hit a target, have "x ray vision" through smoke and foliage, etc.
The final level of Condemned 2: Bloodshot is just all-around annoying, what with Mooks everywhere, limited health pickups, a frigging helicopter you have to fight and enemies with special powers who cause your screen to go blurry as Ethan (your main character) holds his head in agony as a shrill, irritating noise rings in your ears.
- In addition, Black Lake Lodge post the bear sequence seems to fit this trope for a lot of gamers, as it abandons the normal horror gameplay for a little while in favor of disarming bombs and busting caps in SWAT guys Tom Clancy-style.
Some will agree that there is one truly bad level in Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy: the one where a giant worm bursts forth and insta-kills you if you step on the sand. Luckily, you are allowed to skip one mission in each of the three segments of the game, and this and the other (slightly less, but still) annoying missions are roughly evenly distributed across the three segments. Other much-maligned levels include the one with the invincible Boba Fett and the ones with the invincible rancors.
- The level where you lose your lightsaber is pretty bad. Considering the game discourages you from using anything but your lightsaber except in rare cases(Guns are always dodged by enemy jedi, and regular enemies are much easier if you cut them down while deflecting thier attacks.), it's such an abrupt annoying change in gameplay.
Star Trek: Elite Force 2 has an extremely long and complex sequence where the Enterprise-E is assaulted and starts taking borders — constant shootouts with the threat of being blown to pieces, a sudden control change midway through, and several impossibly timed missions that involve a ridiculous amount of intricacy add up to what is essentially the biggest escort mission ever.
The flying levels in Turok: Evolution. The game's controls are awkward and unresponsive at the best of times, but for some reason they're much worse in these levels, the mouse Y-axis is inverted and cannot be adjusted, there's an invisible ceiling with variable height that sends you stalling into the wall (and insta-death) if you hit it, clipping glitches, low-res textures that make it difficult to judge distance... and almost half of the game is made up of flying Scrappy Levels.
The final level of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, the Grand Cathedral. Despite the undeniable Crowning Music Of Awesome, the level takes the game's War Sequences so far Beyond The Impossible that it becomes positively Nintendo Hard. The Great Pyramid, final level of preceding game in the series The First Encounter, is slightly less bad on this account. Of course, being subjective and all, some others consider them Crowning Levels Of Awesome.
Red Faction, late on, squares you off against enemies with an instakilling hitscan gun that shoots through walls. Mandatory savescumming, much?
- What's more annoying is that when you get that same gun, your enemies gain the ability to know when you're lining up a shot at them through the wall and too often step aside just as you fire. And that gun has a very slow reload cycle. And of course you never get any warning that someone's lining up on you with it, but they do.
Vietcong has quite possibly the most realistic "sewer" level of all time, take that as you will. There are levels where you're forced to go into underground tunnels to fight Vietcong soldiers, and the tunnels are extremely small and cramped, forcing you to crouch most of the time, your teammates won't follow you in meaning you're constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure an enemy doesn't one-hit-kill you from behind, it's incredibly dark and everything looks the same, there's multiple paths with no indication of which path is the right path meaning you'll often go in circles looking for the exit, and to top it off many of them are filled with one hit kill booby traps which are hard to spot in the dark. What makes matters worse is that there are three of these levels, and each of them are thirty minutes long at least, and one of them has underwater sections where it's quite easy to drown if you don't know what you're doing. But at the very least they're not the stealth missions of the sequel Vietcong Fish Alpha, don't even get me started on those.
Star Wars: Dark Forces had a scrappy level fairly early, Anoat City (the third mission). It's basically going through a maze of sewers, and it's a real sewer, with real sewage. So if that thought alone doesn't make you want to leave, well there's those dang Dionagas (the creature that pulled Luke in while he was in the Death Star's trash compactor in Episode 4), it's dark, and well, did I mention it was a maze?
Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast has Nar Shaddaa, all of it. The previous mission, you just got back your lightsaber and force powers. So, does the game provide you with plenty of stormtroopers to cut loose on? Nope! Instead, you get a non-stop diet of snipers and grenade-throwers!
The second snowspeeder level in Super Empire Strikes Back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3fqoy27cb0
Final Doom. Plutonia Experiment. Level 32, Go 2 It. Full stop. For those who can't tell from the rather frantic pace of the video (finding a non-speedrun of the level is nigh impossible), it's packed to the gills with Cyberdemons, which if you recall are end-mission bosses by themselves that haven't really LOST any power since then. If that wasn't enough, you also have more ArchViles than there are weirdos at an anime convention, all individually capable of both heaping on the damage on their own and resurrecting said Cyberdemons. And, like many WA Ds did in the Doom days, their numbers double if you're playing co-op. If you're intending to actually clear a path through the monsters in order to survive, as opposed to having Jedi-like reflexes, expect to clear the level (if you can) with a kill rate of somewhere around 1000%. Yes, one thousand. Meaning you would have killed each individual enemy ten times over.
- If you think that level's bad, try Hell Revealed's later levels, especially level 24 of that megawad Post Mortem. To keep it short, you are completely surrounded by enemies from all sides, and unless you're playing on a source port, it's impossible to save your game during this level.
Star Wars: Battlefront II has several unbalanced maps, but the worst offender is Polis Massa, where the CIS/Rebel faction spawns soldiers in the hallway ahead of one of their starting command posts. This makes it nearly impossible for the Republic/Empire to hold on to their forward base even early in the match and extremely difficult to recapture, cutting down their reinforcements and making it very difficult to win. The Republic/Empire's best strategy for winning is to actually capture the CIS/Rebel bases from behind and let them have their own starting bases, reversing the imbalance, but it's extremely difficult to pull off. Capture the flag mode on this map is a little more popular for multiplayer....but it still lags really badly most of the time.
Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend, the Military Base. Your entire inventory - guns, ammo, and items - is taken away at the start. This happens a few times throughout Postal 2, such as at the Brewery on Wednesday, but in those cases, you can recover your whole inventory during the course of the mission. Here, all that you can find are a few Standard FPS Guns. None of the interesting Postal weapons, save the weak throwing scissors, and a sledgehammer near the very end, which would be nice as it's normally a one-hit kill. However, the vast majority of the enemies are heavily armed and armored soldiers, and their helmets make them immune to the sledgehammer. Add to that the fact that there's very few health pickups and even less armor, and it essentially becomes an exercise in saving and reloading until you get lucky and manage to survive.

Close First Person Shooter

Dynasty Warriors

Dynasty Warriors 4 was the scrappy game of the series, due to enemy generals receiving power ups after standing back up from being knocked down. This included everything from attack or defense ups (merely a hassle, except against Lu Bu or on the highest difficulty) to full life plus musou refills. Dynasty Warriors 4 XL removed this, but was scrappy in its own way, such as Lu Bu's ultimate weapon, which required you to get 2000 kills on his stage at the hardest difficulty, which pits you against the Peach Garden Oath Brothers at the end.
"Dynasty Warrios 6," Chang Ban, Wei Scenario. Trying to get to Liu Bei is hard enough IF you kill the peasants, but you have to avoid them if you want to complete one of the targets. You also have to kill Zhang Fei, who gets a power charge that makes him comparable to Lu Bu. And if you DO kill the peasants, and you kill more than one, KOIE's poster boy Zhou Yun comes chasing after you. If you don't kill them, he comes after you anyway. And this is all while having to deal with the time limit which extends to the moment Liu Bei gets to the boats, which is pretty damn quickly.

Other

Hades from the first God Of War is a rare Scrappy Level that's actually Hell.
- Hades felt like Filler and raised some serious Fridge Logic issues regarding Kratos' suicide.
- This editor cracked up when, after dying one too many times to the terrain in Path of Hades, the game prompted him to switch to easy mode, with the note that "this will only affect combat." Yes, because that would certainly help me deal with niggling jumps and climb your blasted whirling bladed cylinder of pointy doom.
- The extras disc for God of War II reveal that the Hades level was the only one that wasn't play tested, hence the difficulty.
- Some people find every obstacle course and puzzle sequence in that game to be a Scrappy Level/sequence. They worked fine and all, but they were damn hard/annoying. Especially outrunning those spike walls, and dragging that cage up the mountain.
Most of Dead Rising, especially the mall gardens if you haven't killed the convicts driving around and / or are escorting an NPC who can't walk unaided.
- Convicts that constantly bloody respawn. You'd think cutting someone to death with a katana would prevent that sort of thing. Instead, you have to destroy the vehicle too, then they stop respawning.
Diablo II: The Flayer Jungle. Let's see... massive randomly generated maze-like area which you'll probably have to explore every bit of to find both objectives (one being required to beat the game) brings the tediousness, and the Fetishes that the area is named after bring the pain like none other. And... just read the entry, and remember that groups of these monsters are all you're going to be running into.
- Even worse is the Flayer Dungeon. Claustrophobic, ugly, full of traps, poison, exploding Fetishes and giant sea monsters that you can't hit properly. Unfortunately, you need to complete it. There is also the Swampy Pit, a second Flayer Dungeon that is non-mandatory. No one ever goes down there. Ever.
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.

Close Hack And Slash

NC Soft

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!
  - The Shadow Shard has been made slightly more tolerable; a jetpack vendor was added to each zone, providing a way to circumvent the gravity geysers (or at least recover if you miss). The task forces still suck, but they at least give great numbers of reward merits for completion (except Augustine, which isn't that long).
- 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.
  - 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.
In the beta MMO zOMG!, there's a quest called The Gauntlet, which involves you travelling through an already hard area to a sublevel, touching a statue in the deepest part of the area, and then running back to the entrance while avoiding the huge swarms of nearly impossible-to-defeat enemies. If you die, your only options are to be revived by a crew member (who is probably too busy trying to survive to offer any help), or start the quest over. There have been a fair number of threads in the forums complaining about its difficulty, and people gloat about completing it without any other players helping. Anybody who has had the pleasure of doing this quest immediately realizes why people so often complain about the Otami Ruins area.

Other

Anarchy Online has a few of these, but the most immediate one is the zone called Pandemonium. Pandemonium is the zone that is considered the hardest zone in the game to travel through, consisting of monsters that are of higher level than your party/raid, usually travel in groups, including gatekeeper monsters that posses a higher level than the players attempting the zone (naturally) and with monsters attacking in groups high enough to be the end of most raids that would attempt the zone. Oh, and you take damage over time in the zone. With the Alien Invasion expansion, Sector 42 would attempt to be the Scrappy Level, but Pandemonium still holds that title.
World Of Warcraft example, Karazhan. Long. Tons of trash easy. Boring. An essential part of raiding because you have to do it over and over to get to 25s. There were very few things that made this place not suck ass. At least it had Shade of Aran and Opera.
- Opera you say? Random of three boss fights, two of which are rather amusing, one which is obnoxious. Say hello to the Big Bad Wolf. Of probably 6 months of raids I saw the other fights exactly once each.
- Mount Hyjal. Participating in one of the most important battles in Warcraft history? Great! Realizing that it's essentially a huge Escort Mission where you have to kill loads and loads of enemies every time you attempt to kill a boss? Not so much. And by the time you get used to mindlessly slaughtering the enemy mooks, you get to Archimonde.
- From classic WoW, Gnomeregan. Oh God, Gnomeregan. There's one stretch near the end which consists of a long trench filled with mobs, with elevated walkways on either side. If players, while on these walkways, get too close to the edge, they aggro the mobs down below. Who proceed to run towards the group. By running all the way to the end of the trench where there's a way up. Pulling all the other mobs in the process. Hilarity Ensues.
  - For extra hilarity, it's very easy to miss one of the alarmbots earlier and have them do the same to the entire instance.
- The Oculus. Just... AAAAAAAAAARGH. THERE ARE NO WORDS. Oh, and let's not forget the first chamber of Azjol-Nerub. Pull a group of enemies around a tiny corner? No problem. But wait! One of the enemies has no Aggro table and will randomly leap at someone other than the tank. One is a caster and has to be line-of-sighted around the last bit of the turn. And one has a mind-control-type ability that will neutralize the tank, killing all aggro and setting the mob loose on the party. Manage to get through that? Congratulations! Now the next wave is coming on its own! And you have to do it three times... after which the BOSS comes at you! Oh, and back up too far from the turn? THE WHOLE THING RESETS! AAAAAAAAARGHHH!
More of a Scrappy Star System, EVE Online's Jita. The system chat is flooded with scammers, Real Money Trader bots and spam trades involving overpriced crappy rare drops. At any given moment, there's 1000+ people in the system resulting in bad lag, sometimes resulting in waits of up to five minutes just to get in or out, and often the shortest route going through Caldari space will pass through it. "A wretched hive of scum and villany, inside a much larger wretched hive of scum and villany".
- Jita is so bad, even the developers don't like it. Star systems are divided into groups of five to twenty called "nodes", and there are usually two nodes on every dual-cpu server blade that make up the Tranquility shard. Jita is so crowded it gets its own blade, and all attempts to get people to move out of the system have failed miserably. At this point, CCP has given up and now tests any new hardware they get by putting Jita on it and seeing how long it lasts.
Plenty of players in the Guild Wars Expansion Pack, Eye of the North, hit a grinding halt in the storyline once they reach the Shards of Orr. You have to go through to complete a third of the main storyline, but the place is an underground dungeon swarming with high-level undead, including skeletal wizards who just LOVE blinding you, then running up and shocking you into knockdown with a close-range lightning spell. Later on, they throw in priests and clerics, who keep replenishing their allies' obscene amounts of health or form a frustrating challenge to the only viable method of dealing with most undead, i.e. smiting magic. There are also several poison-gas-spewing traps, and Resurrection Shrines tend to be located smack dab in the middle of the enemies you just died trying to eliminate. THEN you have to fight them immediately after with a 15% Death Penalty each time.

Close Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game

Nintendo

The Mario series. Frequently.
- Level 7-4 of Super Mario Bros 3 is an underwater Fixed Scrolling Level 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 (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.
  - "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.
- Anywhere in Super Mario 64 DS that requires you to use the Wing Cap. ARRRGGHH! No control, no turning, I can't get up as high as I need, oh look I plummet to my death! Fun for all. Now where's those cannons...
- 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.
- This one is more of a scrappy mini-game. In the Battlerock galaxy, during the third star mission, you can access a secret area with piles of trash on it and a robot who wants you to clear it up by throwing Bob-Ombs at them. This wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the 30 SECOND TIME LIMIT, the fact that those Bob-Ombs take FOREVER to explode,and that the only way to really get all of the piles of trash is to throw them on 5 small yellow spots on the ground. Fun. Then in the Dreadnought Galaxy you get to do it all over again, only this time there are 6 little yellow spots to aim for, and NO INCREASE IN THE 30 SECOND TIME LIMIT. For added amusement, try playing these levels as the less sure footed Luigi. Grrrrah.
- Super Mario Sunshine's damn boat ride to Bowser in the last level. You must turn Mario just right and fire the FLUDD to propel the boat. It is very easy to crash the boat and tip you into the lava, an instant death.
  - Izzat all you got? Sunshine is a veritable minefield of these. How about the level where you have to steer an unsteerable watermelon past a horde of enemies hell-bent on knocking it into the air? Or the one where you have to make Yoshi spit juice at fish to turn them into platforms above Yoshi-dissolving water? And god help you if you run out of fruit juice halfway through.
  - Let's not forget about those darn mini-stages, in which every other platform is either moving, has tons of holes in, or disintergrating beneath your feet, and the camera is swooping around so much that that jump you judged you'd make, has now sent you plummiting off the edge. Not to mention that they all share the same Ear-Wormy tune.
- 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.
Stage 5-5, the Cave That Never Ends, and stage 5-7, Super Hard Acrobatics, from Yoshi's Island DS. The first is an obnoxiously difficult forced-scrolling stage that very nearly lives up to its name. As if that weren't enough, once you get to the exit ring, you find out you passed it quite a while ago, but the scrolling wouldn't let you go to it until just now. The second is, unsurprisingly, composed of vicious jumping puzzles and dodging on moving platforms. If this weren't bad enough, unless you specifically set yourself otherwise, you're probably carrying Baby Donkey Kong into the stage, which cripples your speed and aerial ability.
- In the original Yoshi's Island, The 5th bonus level "Kamek's Revenge". To obtain all those red coins, you first had to perform two whole screens of skiing and hit all the obnoxiously difficult placed items with perfectly -precise jumps, THEN, you had to hunt down a bunch of them on a huge, nonlinear helicopter course (which happens to be timed—run out of time and you fall to your doom). Miss just one coin, and your only option is to die and try the whole thing over again.
  - The first section of that stage—where you have to make your way across a whole bunch of tiny floating logs without getting knocked off by Kamek or the pitchers—ain't no picnic either.
  - "Poochie Ain't Stupid" is a goddamn lie.
  - "Beware the Spinning Logs". That is all.
  - "Endless World of Yoshis/Crazy Maze Days". Doing the same damn section of killer spikes and falling three times is incredibly annoying.
  - "The Very Loooooong Cave". It isn't the length of the level that makes this one a pain, it's that it requires a steady sequence of very precise jumps, which due to the continuous auto-scroll, you have essentially no time to prepare.
- Pretty much every single one of the secret levels in Yoshi's Island DS (Welcome to Yoshi Tower, Yikes! Boiling Hot! A Light in the Dark and Yoshi's Island Easter Eggs) is this. The former is a scrolling level of Nintendo Hard puzzles and lava, the second a Nintendo Hard level of lava practically making up most of the level, the third has very little light/visibility and a hated ski section and the latter seems to want to be Kaizo type evil puzzles (aka, lots of spikes of instant death and perfectly timed jumps needed).
  - Number Ball Special was another annoying level, with the scrolling and looping stage, but it was probably less noticeable because it was between a rock (A Light in the Dark, arguably the hardest level in the game) and a hard place (Yoshi's Island Easter Eggs, the other hardest level in the game).
This one goes to the Wario Land 4 veterans: DOODLE WOODS.
- *Twitch...twitch* AAAUUUUUUGGGGHHHHH! Nooooo where's the last piece! Sod the CD, I want to move on! *sobs* And him...that, that, that HORRIBLE pig-ghost-bastard-thing...
- It was annoying, but personally I'd say the Big Board is even more annoying on harder difficulties. Whether you can complete it with 10 000 coins for the bonus music completely depends on what numbers you get at each of the dice blocks, as does getting the jewel pieces to open the upcoming boss door, as does even exiting the level (especially if you've got like 10 000 coins and all pieces, and get randomly lightning struck to death by the random number generator thing before you can reach the keyser.
- The bits in Super Princess Peach where before a boss level, you have to get past a short obstacle course using the stylus.

Sega

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...."
- Another thing about Carnival Night Zone act 2 is that the level is designed to waste time; with all the bumpers and the sheer length of the level, odds are when you reach the boss you'll only have 3 minutes or so left on the clock. And of COURSE the boss in particular is one who uses a strategy where you can only get a hit on him once every 30 seconds or so. So unless you can somehow get a lot of hits on him at once (which isn't easy, I don't mind telling you) then odds are you'll time out before finishing the fight.
- Casino Night Zone Act 2 in Sonic The Hedgehog 2.
- The GameFAQs message board posters often refer to it as the Barrel of Doom.
- 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.
  - The Metropolis MAZE, the horrible horrible maze....
  - Mystic Cave zone and the damned pit. Instead of being bottomless, an unnecessary row of spikes means that if you're Super Sonic, you have to wait until you run out of rings to die.
  - 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.
- Sandopolis Zone in Sonic and Knuckles, as well, especially the second act, with the annoying ghosts and rising sand/timed switch door puzzles.
- 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.
  - Aquatic Mine is worse. So is Death Chamber.
  - Death Chamber's not too bad in the main game, although the third and fifth missions are tough thanks to that goddamn underwater door. Knuckles' portion of Cannon's Core, though...
- 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.
- Eggmanland in Sonic Unleashed, ESPECIALLY the 360/PS 3 version, where you're forced through 45+ minutes of non-stop Nintendo Hard suffering.
  - To explain: The stage seems like a normal (if incredibly difficult and requiring pitch-perfect timing) daytime Sonic level at first, but then you hit the first hourglass and switch to Werehog form - and that's when it hits you that you're going to be switching between Sonic's two forms a lot during this level, and given that Werehog levels on average take about 15 minutes, you can tell this is going to take ages before you finally hit the goal ring. Indeed, given the number of times you switch between Sonic's forms in the final level, it's really something like five or six levels in one. Even subsequent runs, after you've learned the stage, can take upwards of 20 or 30 minutes. To add insult to injury, the very last challenge in the gauntlet from hell is a Werehog brawl against two Dark Titans. It's as if they were actively trying to make people hate the Werehog gameplay.
  - Not to mention Adabat. It's just one bottomless pit after another in those bloody werehog levels.
- The portable Sonics have their own brand of Scrappiness. Cases in point:
  - Labyrinth in the first portable Sonic. As if the original wasn't evil enough, they mess with the palettes for the underwater sections, and Sonic actually feels slower than in the original.
  - Scrambled Egg from Sonic 2 (Game Gear and Master System). unless you know the layout of all the vacuum tubes, it's essentially Trial And Error Gameplay at its worst.
  - Electric Egg from Sonic Chaos. Electrified floors, high-speed vacuum pipes that lead to suddenly-dropping platforms, and a mesmerising tileset that may distract you until its's too late.
  - Robotnik Winter from Sonic Triple Trouble. Apart from some slippery flooring and nasty speedtraps, the updrafts you need to use to climb up vertical shafts are notoriously unreliable, which often results in plummeting into an icy chasm.
- Dino Jungle from Sonic and the Secret Rings. It feels so out of place, and that egg mission doesn't help...
- First, take a level which is literally a giant, bottomless, pit, then add some visually interesting platforms, lots of grind rails, strong winds, and for good measure, toss some spiked Air Launchers among regular ones, so that the player has to learn where the lethal ones are, lest they want to see Sonic fall to his doom. Finally, add a couple of tricky platforming sections, combine it with a fiddly control scheme, and ta~da!: You have the Levitated Ruin levels from Sonic and the Secret Rings.
- The first Dragon's Lair stage from Sonic and the Black Knight. Fallaway floors to bottomless pits that are impossible to see coming. Endless swarms of enemies whose sole purpose in life is to block all of your attacks and then knock you into said bottomless pits. Giant armored titans surrounded by those endless swarms of enemies whose sole purpose in life is to knock you into the bottomless pits. Oh, and there's a time limit.
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.
Circus Park. Circus flipping Park. This set of stages from Billy Hatcher And The Giant Egg can be a right royal pain in the arse, having super thin slides containing numerous jets of fire, spikes, holes in the middle of the path, and jumps - often in quick sucession, as well as having an abundance of rails where you must let go of the egg, Egg Rings that swing and require perfect timing in order to not have Billy or his chums fall to their doom, and normal Egg Rings which are often used to cross long gaps which need ridiculous timing to get right. Oh, and was it mentioned that they're often used with the swinging Egg Rings, thus giving you a strange perspective, making the normally-fairly simple act of jumping into an Egg Ring a nightmare?
Aladdin (at least the Genesis version, not sure about the SNES version) has "The Escape", a level where Aladdin must try to make his way through lava, large boulders rolling toward him, platforms that sink into the lava, and bursts of that lava that are potentially fatal by causing Aladdin to fall in.
The Lion King has the second level, Can't Wait To Be King, and the eighth level, Be Prepared. In the former, Simba must jump from giraffe head to giraffe head, then go through two ostrich rides that, if the jumps aren't dead-on, will kill him. After all of that, Simba must swing on rhino tails and get through confusing monkey tosses (Simba must roar at the pink monkeys to change where they will throw him). In the latter, Simba must go through a lava level, fighting bats and leopards, and getting past lava geysers and stalactites dripping lava. After all that, Simba has to ride a rock over lava while trying to avoid getting tossed into the lava by bats.

Capcom

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 X 6; 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.
  - And, depending on the order you do things, thanks to the ever so aptly named Nightmare System, you have to do Yanmark's or Turtloid's level in the dark! OK, there's a spotlight on your position, but it doesn't help that much.
  - Worst level ever: Metal Shark Player. The entire stage is the crushing ceiling stage. The first section is fine because Ride Armor is immune to crushing. The second gets annoying. The third?... Spikes and ice. It's like giving a teenager alcohol and a car.
- 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. Let us not get started on the 3D ones in X7 and X8.
- 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 Battlenetwork, any area that requires compression in 3, due to the pain of needing to requip and rearrange the Navi Cust setup so often.
- 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! Of course, these are less 'laser' than 'magma jet' in both incarnations. Thank god for the Concrete Shot, eh?
- It's not just the bosses, the Mega Man Zero and ZX games started going absolutely insane on hard mode, starting with MMZ3. 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.
- Mega Man Battle Network has at least one of these per game:
  - MMBN1 has all of Internet Area 4, which is full of Goddamned Bats.
  - And ElecMan's stage, which has invisible floors, trial-and-error battery puzzles, and infected programs which you can't tell from the regular ones until you talk to them, at which point they attack. However, the real problem in the stage is the timer— once it runs out, Mega Man stops healing after each battle.
  - MMBN2 has FreezeMan's storyline, which is full of endless backtracking.
  - MMBN3 has, as mentioned above, any level where the Press program is needed, especially BubbleMan's scenario where you first get it. Don't forget the endless fetch quests, which are somehow MORE irritating in this game than in any of the others.
  - MMBN4 has the levels at Castillo and the point collecting, the Demonic Spiders in alot of areas, especially the Undernet and Murkland... or alternatively the whole damn game. MMBN4 is easily the "Scrappy Game" of the series.
  - MMBN5 has the Ship Comp, a water dungeon which you have to guide your current Navi through. While they are underwater they are perfectly fine until they run out of "cyber-air" [[ (really!)]], at which point their HP starts dropping rapidly until you either hit a cyber-air pocket or exit the water. Oh, and there's random encounters the whole way, including while you're attempting to fight the currents that push you back and drain your air, and while you're trying to avoid the whirlpools that drain your air. Oh, and you had to do this several times before fighting the boss. And to top it all off, you had to come back here later in order to get some of the items that you couldn't collect if you wanted a 100% completion.
  - MMBN6 has the Aquarium Comp where you have to solve fish riddles via 'escorts', that's right! Not only do you have to figure out the correct key NPC for the very vague riddle, you have to escort him as well! And when you pick him up, sharks appear and you had to avoid them via a Pac Man-ish minigame and some of the sharks more very quickly. If one of them catches your escort, he gets eaten and you'll have to run all the way back to him and start over, all with lovely Random Encounter with some annoying virues. And to top it all off, you have to do this again at the end of the game as part of the Boss Rush!
  - Even its Spin Off games aren't immune; Network Transmission has the bank stage and the final area and Battle Chip Challenge has the entire game.
- Mega Man 5 has Wave Man's level, with the jetski portion. You're in a jetski, so you don't have the slide and you're a bigger target then usual. You only have the Mega Buster to use, and you have to go through two sections filled with jetski-riding Sniper Joes and evil robo-dolphins, bookending a giant octopus miniboss. The problem? You can't pause at all during this section, meaning that you can't use any E-tanks, meaning that you have to make it through two enemyspam sections and a miniboss on one tank of health and awkward controls.
- MM6 had Plant Man's level, with a long section involving jumping over water filled pits via springs. Problem is, the springs don't always spring you as high as you need to go, dumping you into the pits on a regular basis. Oh, and then there are the lovable robot pirahnas jumping out of the water to further ruin your jumps.
- MM8 Oh God, Mega Man 8...the rocketboard sections. I've still never finished that game. I can BARELY pass the first one. The second? Not a bloody chance...
  Jump! Jump! Slide! Slide! *shudder*
- Mega Man Star Force 2 has the Bermuda Maze, which can only be properly navigated through with hints given from Hertzes. All well and good until they start outright LYING to you and you have to check the color of the stars displayed in the sky, making things even more jumbled and confusing.

Rareware

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.
- 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.
  - The GBA remake made Animal Antics 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.
  - Let's not pass Toxic Tower with one sentence, people! It's a level where poison keeps on rising at all times and you have to escape, taking the forms of the different animal buddies. The first part has you playing as Rattle the Snake, doing jumps that kill you if you miss them by an inch. The second part has you flying away as Squawks the Parrot, shooting bees that block your way and navigating through a dungeon labyrinth.
  - Another one from DKC2 is Klobber's Karnage. The second part of the map is entirely composed of parts where you are put in a rotating barrel and required to shoot yourself through bee-barriers, requiring the exact freaking timing. Missing just slightly will lose you a hit, which you only have two to spend in one part.
- 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.
Conkers Bad Fur Day had U-Bend Blues, an extremely frustrating romp of a diving sequence just under halfway through the game, which was made somewhat easier in the game's remake...where Mugged definitely takes the cake for scrappydom.
Rusty Bucket Bay from Banjo-Kazooie, especially the engine room of the Rusty Bucket itself. In the original Nintendo 64 version, all the notes were record-based, and they reset to the initial spots they were collected from every time you die or leave a level. This gives you hell when trying to collect them all in Rusty Bucket Bay, as one screw-up can lead you to your death in the engine room, and once you're done collecting all the notes there, if they're not the last notes you need, you could only pray to God that you won't pull the croak chain and have to do it all over again. Thank heavens that you don't need to recollect the notes again in the Xbox Live Arcade version.
To varying degrees, every level after the first two in the NES game Battletoads are examples of this trope. There are two in particular that stand out, though:
- Level 3, Turbo Tunnel. It's easy compared to some of the later levels, but the jump in difficulty is so sudden that many have simply given up on it and not even seen the later levels.
- Level 11, "Clinger Winger". While not as well known as the aforementioned, those who do make it this far are confronted with a level so nasty the programmers must have actively hated the player to put them through it. Like Turbo Tunnel, it takes lightning fast reflexes to make it through, except is even harder, has no checkpoints whatsoever, and forces you to fight a boss at the end, and if you lose, you have to do it all over again. Just to top it all off, a bug prevents the second player from finishing the level, making it impossible to beat the game as two players. It's easy compared to some of the later levels, but the jump in difficulty is so sudden that many have simply given up on it and not even seen the later levels.
- Level 9, Terra Tubes. For those that tried completing this game on a real NES without savestates and such, this is the true landmark of vileness. The fact that it's one of the later levels in one of the hardest games ever made that lacks a save system, password system and infinite continues is just the spicing. This level is by far the longest level in the game, riddled with obstacles... Such as enemies that shoot at you from offscreen and kill you in one hit if you touch them, dodging vicious spikes in a move-left-or-right segment, three races against an Advancing Wheel Of Doom that forces you to rush through some really nasty environments filled with spikes and roadblocks, an underwater part with spikes where Electric Eels randomly spawn, randomly attack and therefore randomly KILL YOU because yo really have no control underwater, meaning that if you're lucky, you live. Any sane level would be over by now, but no, not Terra Tubes. After all that you're greeted with three more Advancing Wheel Of Doom races, this time underwater and MUCH MORE DIFFICULT. If, against all odds, you survive these races, you get another segment of swimming underwater with spikes and enemies, this time also a lot harder than the first. Not only are the eels back, but also Hammerfishes and normal sharks that are faster and knock you into spikes easier. Did I mention that at one point you encounter a few of these in a corridor of spikes, and even if you dodge the spikes perfectly one touch from them will send you to your doom? If I didn't, it's because of the next part of the stage, where Rubber Ducks come at you and kill you if they get near. There's no avoiding them, so your only hope is to get them to turn around and attack them from behind. This usually works, but sometimes the game glitches and they turn around once you start beating them and kill you. The final duck comes from the front with no means of making it turn around, you have to time your punch precisely at the right time to beat it, or you're dead. Then comes the last part of the level: Another move-left-or-right segment, one so hard that it makes Level 3 look like Fireman defeating Icecream. It's not the hardest level, but by far the most annoying because of its length, fake difficulty, REAL difficulty and the inability to warp past it. Even the best veterans of this game that can beat Level 3 flawlessly every time usually lose a couple of lives or credits here.

Other

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.
- 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.
  - This is actually MUCH harder with the keyboard, as many keyboards have a limit on how many keys they will register you pressing at once. It turns out that if you remap the jumping controls to your mouse, it makes the section MUCH easier, as you don't have to worry about the limit. That said, it is still nightmarish; the final section shown at the top is by far the hardest part of the game, and is leagues harder than everything else in the game. Its odd, because the rest of the game is actually pretty easy, so its all the worse in comparison.
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!
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.
- DAMN YOU INVISIBLE METALHEADS! Also, the march to Metal Kor which is topped off by the boss himself.
- The mission where you have to destroy the walking bombs that are headed for Torn's hideout. Each one takes a TON of firepower to destroy and peppers you with bullets if you get so much as an inch too close. (Crashing a motorcycle into one first helps.) Additionally, you have to navigate your way through the city in the most timely manner possible in order to meet the strict time limit. Oh yeah, did I mention that this is an illegal mission? Hello Crimzon Guard!
Jak III has a level like this. It was a mandatory mission, too. Missiles follow the vehicle you're on all the way to the docks area. You have to go around the docks, shooting buoys to make them light up so the missiles will go for them instead of you. The missiles are fewer than five feet behind you at all times, only one (out of around seven) will attack the buoys at a time, you have to fly low enough that the missiles will lock on to the buoys, but rapid changes in altitude will usually cause the missiles to catch up, you can't just stay as low as possible because of the low bridges in the area, the missiles don't always lock on to the buoys, you can't turn too sharply or for too long, you can't go straight for too long, and even if you're doing it perfectly, they'll catch up anyway.
Black Castle in the freeware game An Untitled Story. The whole area is full of spikes and nasty jumps, the worst of which are the arrow blocks that launch you into the spikes if your timing in jumping into them is a little off. It doesn't help that the save points are spread thin and that on any difficulty higher than the second the game starts taking away your save points IWBTG style.
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).
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.
In 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.
- In The Warrior Within, there were parts when the Dahaka is chasing you. These aren't that problematic in themselves, but there was one where the camera locked on it. The problem? You can't see where you're going, you're trying to run through an obstacle laden course, you can't jump over the obstacles, and when the Dahaka hits you, he also drains your sand tanks. If you could see where you were going, that section wouldn't be half as difficult as it was.
- The word "Scrappy Level" came to mind at the series of Dahaka chases after the battle with [[Spoiler:The Empress]]. The Battle is rather tough, so you probably used some sand tanks to beat it. Then you have to run from the Dahaka. And then you have to do it again. And one more time for good measure. The last chase is rather long and brutal, and you're probably out of sand tanks before you reach the final chase in this sequence. There's no enemies or sand refills until after you reach the next save point, which is after you successfully finish the three chases, which means that every time you fall or get caught, you restart the sequence. The only saving grace is that you have a chance to save after the boss fight.
The Cave of Bad Dreams from Rayman 2 is an especially vicious Scrappy Level. Right from the get-go, it's full of almost-invincible Wall Masters that sap your precious health, and lots of jumping puzzles with very tiny sinking platforms—and heck, very tiny not-sinking platforms as well. There's a long and tedious sequence where you have to carry two orbs (basically keys) across several platforms filled with enemies to their bases in order to advance, and dropping the orbs and/or accidentally throwing them into the void is all too easy. After that, you have to go down a long slide race against the boss, which has lots of Bottomless Pits, sharp crystals that slow you down AND hurt you, and the indescribably freaky teeth of the boss. When you're done racing him, you STILL have to fight him as a boss, and he's one of the Guide Dang It-iest Puzzle Bosses this side of the Spider Ball Guardian. To top it all off? Once you're done with that, if you accidentally select the wrong option in the end-of-level cutscene—and it's the one that's automatically highlighted—you get a Nonstandard Game Over and have to do the whole frickin' thing over again!
- Obligatory mention of the Sanctuary of Stone and Fire. It had THE longest level segment in the entire game, and had several annoying bouncing-berry-over-lava sequences (one which you had to go through twice), AND a crystal ball puzzle! Thank goodness there wasn't an annoying boss at the end...
The Ice Land stage in Impossamole although ironically it's not a Slippy Slidey Ice World until the second part. As usual it has Everything Trying To Kill You, which this time includes snowmen, snowballs, and penguins. Many of the obstacles are often impossible to avoid taking damage from, eg the Invincible Evil Snowman that randomly throws volleys of snowballs, narrow hallways(precluding the use of the Bubble Gun) packed with enemies and enemy-generating doorways which often spawn enemies on top of Monty, falling icicles situated next to Spikes Of Doom, which can bounce Monty back and forth until death(no Mercy Invincibility to these), the usual offscreen enemies that you sometimes can't avoid falling on(especially the Shaft of Doom in the second area, which also has spikes at the bottom), near-unavoidable rolling snowballs, pirhana and mine filled water pits that you sometimes have to swim through, eg the Green Waterfall from Hell, which has falling icicles, a Goddamned Bird guarding your escape from the water, and an unavoidable spike pit immediately afterwards, and the lack of health items and powerups doesn't help either.
The Lion King game adaptation, released in '94 in conjunction with the film, ended for many young players in only its second level ("Can't Wait to be King"), partly thanks to a deviously complicated puzzle involving apes throwing the player between trees and realining their throwing paths to progress. And those who figured it out were rewarded with an ostritch riding sequence (with jumps that required absolutely perfect timing) and another, even more complicated ape puzzle.
- The sixth level ("Hakuna Matata") is as bad as this: besides the hard boss fight (a gorilla), there is a platforming puzzle involving logs in a waterfall—in other words, you have to climb small platforms which are in a steady fall. "Annoying" is too soft to describe it.
La Mulana's Bonus Level Of Hell, the Hell Temple. If you love Trial And Error Gameplay, "Land of Hell" rooms that take you back several rooms once completed, very finicky jumping puzzles, a Wall Jump room so sickeningly frustrating that you'll wish death upon the developers, and a man in a swimsuit as your reward, you will LOVE the Hell Temple.
- Not to mention the fact that the final puzzle requires you to leave the temple to collect an item necessary to complete this puzzle, making you redo the entire Hell Temple again. The kicker? You have to do this twice.
- If you don't play Shoot Em Ups, have fun solving the puzzle in the 21st room of the Hell Temple, as it requires you to get 120,000 points in the Parodius clone PR3. Some players have gotten others to do this puzzle for them.
Also in La Mulana, the Twin Labyrinth is full of witches, confusingly arranged, has a poison gas trap for part of the game, is partly inaccessible for a long time, has an EXTREMELY annoying boss(if you don't have the right equipment), garish colors, very confusing puzzles(although all of the game haas that, so its sort of moot) and the music is annoying.
The Castle in Mickey Mousecapade. Chock full of regenerating Goddamned Bats and Demonic Spiders, many screens that must be accessed by jumping up, and if you fall back down, the enemies respawn, in addition to a downgraded version of That One Boss and a Boss In Mook Clothing. And if you go past the Degraded Boss without the key to the Boss Room, it's Lost Forever, as backtracking will get you killed by the respawned miniboss.
Dirk Valentine And The Fortress Of Steam is an awesome game, but don't even mention the Inner Engine Room. Near the end of the level, there's a part where you have to jump onto a platform that has two of the Baron's guards on it. This wouldn't be so bad if weren't for the fact that you have to make the jump from a tiny Floating Platform that moves back-and-forth above a Bottomless Pit while being shot at. It's almost impossible to aim and actually kill the Goddamned Bats before landing on the platform, you've only got three hit points, and dying sends you right back to the beginning. NOOOOOO!
Earthworm Jim takes this almost literally on For Pete's Sake. It's almost too bad the series had to make him so likable.
- Earthworm Jim 2 has The Flyin' King. Have fun trying to guide an explosive and really, REALLY bouncy balloon to the end of a long level while being constantly bombarded by homing pigs that cling to your vehicle and are difficult to shake off that are launched from catapults, which are indestructible, meaning you can't stop them. You have to constantly backtrack because the balloon bounces backwards if you poke it the wrong way, near the end of the level there are slime waves that push the balloon backwards and if you accidentally shoot at the balloon (not that hard, because some of the erratically moving, but killable enemies move behind it), it explodes. If this happens or if you happen to die from the pigs, you have to start ALL OVER AGAIN.
- Earthworm Jim 2 also features the minigames where you need to save Peter Puppy (the puppy from the first game's "For Pete's Sake!", mentioned above)'s puppies by bouncing them on a giant marshmellow before they hit the floor and splat like an egg. Let too many puppies splat and Peter goes ballistic, turning into his giant purple monster form and mauling Jim, taking off quite a bit of health.
As Toe Jam And Earl generates its levels randomly, one might think it would be immune to this trope. One would be wrong. The game features quicksand terrain, and as one advances through the levels, the odds of it showing up increases. A complete game usually involves at least two levels almost completely covered in quicksand. Quicksand prevents your character from walking at their normal speed, and can bring them to a virtual halt, while not hindering enemies at all, and is usually populated by whirlwinds, invincible hazards that pick up your character and deposit them in random locations, often over a hole that will drop you back down a level.
Jet Set Willy. Just type "The Banyan Tree" into Google and watch the carnage.
Spend some time with Little Big Planet's Bunker. You'll never again see electricity as a positive force in your life.
Chapter 2-1 of Ikaruga, because there is simply no pattern to chaining it.
The first Ratchet And Clank game features Planet Oltanis, where several tricky jumps must be made without the aid of Clank. What makes it really hard is Oltanis is near the end of the game, so you've had a long time to become adjusted to using Clank to assist with jumps. Luckily, the two most difficult parts of the level are optional, netting you unnecessary (but useful!) items.
- There's also the sewers in Blackwater City, where you try to escape a rising tide of water. You will not beat it, however. The trick is getting as far as you can so you can swim the rest of the way before Ratchet drowns. Fortunately, you only have to do it once, and Ratchet later gets the O2 mask, meaning you never have to deal with that particular problem ever again for the rest of the series.
- R&C 2 gives us Planet Greblin, which forces you to hunt for crystals in a vast snowy wasteland, just brimming with Demonic Spiders called YETIs.
- The third game doesn't feature any really bad levels, although the laser-redirecting gimmick on Obani Gemini is a bit boring and repetitive compared to the rest of the game.
- Deadlocked has the Tower of Power in the Avenger Tournament, where one misstep in a long jumping puzzle will send you back to the bottom.
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back has the level Cold Hard Crash, a nightmare if you're trying to get the "destroy all crates" gem. You have to play through the first half of the level without dying to reach the death course, a difficult, checkpoint-free path covered in crusher traps and nitro mines, almost entirely on slippery ice. When you reach the end of the death course, you need to activate a switch and do the course BACKWARDS to get the new crate the switch spawns at the beginning of the level, at which point you take the platform back to the main level and complete it. Oh, and there's a single, hard-to-find crate hidden just offscreen. Missed it? DO THE WHOLE THING OVER AGAIN.
Orbitus 2 in Jazz Jackrabbit is a major example of this, largely because of a single section of it that due to absurdly bad level design easily outclasses nearly every example of Platform Hell. It's Nintendo Hard even if you use slowdown. You must squeeze the title character into a tiny passage at the very bottom of a chasm. Then you must jump out of the end of the passage, all the while pushing against a force field that is propelling you forward, and trying to actually jump despite the fact that you're in a tiny passage with a low ceiling and only the last pixel of space that you can occupy without falling actually allows you to jump. And the destination of your jump has a force field just like the one that was in the aforementioned tiny passage. From which you must jump onto the wall directly above you and wall jump forward into ANOTHER TINY PASSAGE. And directly above the passages are one-way paths that will force you upward and away from the passages, forcing you to repeat the whole process, AND the ground beneath said passages are trampolines that bounce you into the one-way paths. This run of the level should give you an idea just how bad this is, considering that it forced the Let's Player to cheat in order to beat it. And he even points out about three quarters of the way into the video that "Not even I Wanna Be The Guy was that hard."
- Not bad level design, but a bad bug introduced in the CD version. The edges of the trampolines are not supposed to make you jump, however in the CD version, they do for some unknown reason, making this section hard as hell. The original floppy version never had the problem.
Titania is the most hated level in Odin Sphere. Slimes that can only be killed by magic and the uber annoying Wise Man battles make for the least fun section of the game.
Pretty much Ghostbusters for NES. While the pre-Zuul part was basically just the same boring thing over and over again, if you didn't do it well enough there is no way in hell you'll even clear a single floor once Zuul shows up. Have fun starting from the beginning again!
The Advancing Wall Of Doom levels of Eversion definitely qualify as this, particularly the second, where you have to outrun a huge mass of what looks like blood, with Evil Hands flying from it, having to dodge the Evil Hands shooting up from the pits, AND having to navigate a maze near the end of the level which requires both speed and pixel-perfect positioning to get through the gaps in the maze (because if you're even slightly to the left or right, it won't let you through, which is made particularly aggravating by all of the above factors) in order to get the final five gems of the level in question.
- How about World 8 in the new version? Zaratustra was nice enough to remove the random eversions...but enough of a Jerk Ass to make a newer, and much longer stage with even more difficult platforming and Endless Corridors that loop until you find the next eversion point. Oh, and you need to loop through one section once in World 8-6 just so you can clear out enough blocks just so you can get through it in 8-5. And if you die after the halfway point through the section? The blocks, which are no longer accessible thanks to a still killer wall, regenerate, causing you to waste even more time!
Dynamite Headdy has the last part of Fun Forgiven as a scrappy section of an otherwise tolerable level. Headdy has to travel from one end of a large spike pit to another with a bunch of hangmen. He can shoot his head like a grappling hook, except a) with poorer range than any grappling hook and b) instead of swinging, his body just gets lightly launched in the direction of his head. Oh, and the hangmen (the points you can grapple on) are constantly flipping in and out of reach. Not hard when you learn it, but given that it's near the end of the game, it's hard to get any practice.
In the original Nintendo Hard Ninja Gaiden game, the very last level is next to impossible. You have berserk eagles, unlimited respawning enemies (and you can't scroll them off), platform level hell, etc. If you manage to survive three sections of hell, you are treated to the classic final boss trio, one of which requires you to dodge randomly moving objects, one to hit an enemy that scrolls on the ceiling, and one that again spews out random going objects that hurt. Granted you are given health refills, but if you die in any of those bosses, you start all over. Most gamers I know just gave up on the game at this level.
- Interestingly, due to the game design, it is quite possible to survive this stage without getting hit due to non-randomized enemy patterns, spawns, and palcement. A lot of the first Ninja Gaiden is learning how to kill things on the run and never, ever, ever stopping your forward movement. Ever. Just keep running. Kill birds on the fly.
- Even more fun is the fact that after beating the first boss, the game goes into the usual post-boss routine...including DRAINING YOUR WEAPON POWER FOR BONUS POINTS. That leaves you to fight eternally-airborne boss number two with nothing but your sword. I finally bit the bullet and just sacrificed a life, fought my way back through Act 6, and fried him with firewheels. Then the game drained my weapon power AGAIN prior to boss number three and I had to cough up ANOTHER life and fight through Act 6 AGAIN(before I learned you could destroy the demon's tail and attack its heart with the sword unimpeded).
Plok has the absolutely ridiculous Gohome Cavern. Start of the level, you must kill a Demonic Spider who drops a temporary invincibility power-up, use it to jump onto spikes...then immediately afterward, you lose your legs. Seriously. Meaning you have to hop through the remainder of the level, which features slopes covered with spikes, on top of a lot more of those same Demonic Spiders. The trick here is to go under the spikes...but bear in mind, you're hopping...and did we mention there are FOUR of these slopes? Oh, and in the middle of these slopes lies two areas where you must kill a group of five Goddamned Bats...each. And after said slopes, it gets worse. You must make four consecutive jumps (yes, JUMPS, while you're still hopping) with near pixel-perfect timing, all the while avoiding the three InvincibleMinorMinions and the projectiles they launch. All this just to get your legs back...and it's not even over. Say hello to the upper level, consisting entirely of the same Demonic Spiders you encountered earlier paired with Goddamned Bats that you must kill to proceed. Also, this level lacks checkpoints...so if you die here, enjoy getting your legs back again!

Close Platform Game

Nintendo

The Mario Kart series' Rainbow Road tracks are much 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 even a small angle off means a long, long fall. Beating the CPU (and especailly other players) 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.
  - Except for the fact it's got frickin' Chain Chomps. Fail to avoid those and you will get tossed of the track if you're a Doom Magnet.
  - Mario Kart 64 has a Scrappy Level too, however: Banshee Boardwalk.
- 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.
  - Also, Luigi's circuit, filled with puddles of water that will cause you to spin out... that of course, the computer never runs through.
  - 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.
- Moonview Highway in Mario Kart Wii is arguably even more annoying than Rainbow Road due to you driving with a bunch of cars, trucks, and bombs with wheels, all which either squish you (coming at you) or send you flying (going away from you/bomb). Even more obnoxiously, some of the cars swerve from lane to lane, making it harder to dodge. Luckily, there's a predictable pattern, but even after recognizing that, many safe driving passages between cars are sometimes incredibly narrow. On a similar note, Toad's Turnpike Mirror Mode from Mario Kart 64. The automobiles are not driving with you, they're all driving at you!
  - Funky Stadium is by far a scrappy battle course in Mario Kart Wii. Like Hyrule Temple in the Super Smash Bros games, it's very very large, thus it makes it easy for players to gather up points and then constantly run away and/or hide.
F-Zero GX. Story Mode Chapter 7. My God, the absolute horror of this level's Fake Difficulty is simply legendary. This infamous, somewhat NSFW rant says more on the subject than anything that could be posted here possibly could. And isn't it fun that to unlock one of the secret racers, you need to beat this bastard of an unfair race on Very Hard difficulty? (hint: it isn't)
- The original F-Zero has the Death Wind courses, in which powerful gusts blow your machine to the side, making for an odd angle to drive at. Death Wind 1 is not so bad, but Death Wind 2 has extra corners that make the wind much worse.
- F-Zero GP Legend has Illusion: Abyss Drop, a technical course with no guardrails. I think that's enough reason to call it scrappy.
Kirby Air Ride: Checker Knight and Sky Sands. Especially Checker Knight.

Other

Monaco is the scrappy level of every Formula One game. A thin race track where it need super braking skills to not hit a wall and with at least 20 something cars on the track pretty hard to win.
- Truth In Television: Monaco is the Scrappy Level in real-life Formula One. It's the only track where drivers have made it onto the podium without ever finishing the race simply because everyone else crashed before they did.
  - While we're on the topic of Scrappy Tracks in real-life racing, the San Jose Grand Prix, a Champ Car World Series course consisting of streets in downtown San Jose, Calfornia, wasn't too popular either. San Jose is notorious for its bumpy, cracked, pothole-filled streets, and to add on to the problem, two sections of the course required cars to drive over light rail tracks at high speed; for reference, the top speed of a car in the CCWS is typically around 220-230 mph. On top of that, the course was very tight and narrow, and half the starting grid dropped out in mid-race in 2005, the first year of the SJGP.
  - Let's not forget the two Scrappy Levels in NASCAR: Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway. Nine times out of ten, races at the two aforementioned tracks WILL have a big wreck taking out at least 10-15 cars, usually more...
If you haven't mastered powersliding in Daytona USA, its Expert course is gonna give you hell. It seems even harder when you take into account the strict time limits that the game imposes.
- It can be done, though. You just need to practice, practice, practice.
"Mercedes Showdown", the final driving mission in Gran Turismo 4. You are given the all-powerful Mercedes SLR Mac Laren, but it's configured so it handles "like a fish out of water", adding an element of Fake Difficulty. Your opponents are group of much less powerful Mercedes who are given a 3 minute head start. Not to mention you are driving on the world's Real Life Most Scrappy Racetrack, the Nurburgring. A grand champion of Nintendo Hard.
- The Opel Speedster challenge- for some reason, the CPU cars are driving tuned Speedsters, so unless you sink a few hundred thousand into your car and sit around tuning it for every bit of extra speed, you won't have a chance. Even then, good luck.
Need For Speed Most Wanted had some quasi scrappy levels in them. The police chases later on in the heat levels 4 and 5 to be exact get more frustrating then anything else. While not a level they get much harder because you have to deal with spike stripes that if you run over them, it's pretty much means that you get busted. The SUV's don't make matter's worse, but what does is the helicopter. If you happen to get away from the police unless you are in a building or in a tunnel the helicopter will be on your ass until it has to leave because it has to refuel.
Forza Motorsport 2 has a Scrappy track, the full "King Cobra" variation of the already-annoying Test Track, which includes enough impossibly tight hairpins and 90-degree bends to make me wish I was playing a NASCAR oval track instead. One race late in the game's career mode is an invitational with a 700 horsepower limit, and getting cars that powerful around the King Cobra track is a colossal headache for even the most experienced racing sim fans, especially since the shortage of straightaways and the emphasis on extremely tight turns means you're spending a lot of time pushing a car capable of 200+ MPH around the track at roughly 60. Making things worse, this track suffered from a leaderboard glitch (drivers were posting lap times of .008 seconds) that required a complete wipe of the track's online top lap times. Including the hard-won legitimate ones.
Initial D: Arcade Stage has Irohazaka, a narrow road (thanks to being a one-way street in real life) with at least 27 hairpin turns. It gets worse in Initial D Arcade Stage 4, where getting the best time or winning a round is a matter of grinding against the inner rails to get around the corners very fast. And if you start grinding a rail too early? You get reversed! IDAS4 also has Myougi, where a mechanic involving hanging up your steering if you exceed a hidden, arbitrary speed limit on a corner means that you can't go very fast through this course. And the embarassing part about this course? It's a beginner-level course.
Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune is a highway racing game...until you get to the Hakone course, which is a mountain pass. Thanks to Maximum Tune's super-drifty physics, you will be hitting guardrails a lot the first few times on this course. Ironically, the two Story Mode stages set on Hakone are the easiest in the entire game, due to the AI being extremely weak on this course.
Snowboard Kids had a number of hard scenarios and bosses, but one takes the cake as ridiculous. In the second game, you have to bomb a giant Snowman that fires back down a course in the dark. Fun. Later, you have to race a giant dinosaur. Slightly less fun, but not too bad. Then you have to fight a giant robot even harder than the snowman down a fogged course. Actually, that was pretty fun (to some). The horrible part is when you have to race through a down hill course firing newspapers at tiny mailboxes with the bare minimum number of shots WITH A TIME LIMIT. That's not even mentioning that one of the mailboxes is actually hidden on a shortcut behind a normal looking patch of trees.
Burnout 3's final race series with Indy cars. Long races with infuriating rubber band AI (that can pounce on you after one mistake), and the Indy cars handled as well as boats through molasses.

Close Racing Game

Two from Command And Conquer: Tiberium Wars:
- For GDI, you have Albania, in the middle of Act 3. You have to escort a team of engineers inside an enormous Nod base and capture reinforcement bays to build an airfield. This wouldn't be that bad if it weren't for the fact that engineers die if the enemy so much as looks at them funny, and the enemy AI prioritizes engineers as the first thing they shoot. And if you lose all four engineers, game over!
  - Ah. This player found that level pretty simple. Just keep all your Engineers on the safe side of the the bridge, clear a path, and ferry the engineer in via IFV.
- A much more complained-about GDI mission is Croatia, the immediately preceding one. Here, you don't have a construction yard, or even enough reactors to power your entire base at once, so you are tasked with juggling power between base defenses. Then you must keep doing the same thing against even tougher attacks, while simultaneously fighting your way to the other side of the map and escorting an MCV back to your base through constantly-respawning hordes. And the moment that MCV enters your gates of your worn-down base, then the enemy lets loose with full force. The sanest solution is to sequence break and assault the enemy bases at the very beginning, when they are the weakest.
- For Nod, Operation Stiletto. Your mission is to capture two GDI Construction Yards and two Scrin Drone Platforms, in the middle of an all-out battle between the two factions. You have to capture all four Construction Yards/Drone Platforms intact, while the respective AI of both factions will mercilessly pummel each other, and usually taking down one Yard or Platform will fundamentally weaken that particular base to the point where the enemy will stomp clean through the defenses and crush you, or turn around and attack the other base which is now drastically weakened since you took out its support. Worst part is that you get almost no warning that the enemy is going to destroy their opponent's base, and usually by the time you know its going to happen, you don't have the troops ready to stop them.
Command And Conquer: Red Alert 3 has the last Allied mission. Your objective is to destroy seven strategically placed Iron Curtain machines, which make the Soviet Premier's palace invulnerable, and then take down the palace. Every one of the Iron Curtains is in the middle of a Soviet base except one, which is in the middle of an urban area whose all apartments are garrisoned full of Soviet infantry. You have a time limit: On easy it's an hour, on medium and hard it's thirty minutes. The island you and your co-commander are given as a base location is pretty easy to defend, but has only four ore mines and two oil derricks, a pretty small amount compared to most maps in the campaign (considering you probably are too busy taking down the Iron Curtains to clear yourself a way for a secondary base to increase your resource gathering speed). The enemy begins by sending huge tank rushes, which are easily countered. Then, when about fifteen minutes of your time has passed, they suddenly send an enormous infantry assault, just in case their lack of such attacks has made you forget to build anti-infantry defences. About the same time, the Soviets start attacking with V4 launchers (which in this game can't be countered by shooting the missiles, so you are required to have units to take them down before they can reduce your base into shreds) and their superweapon activates. Five minutes later, the soviets start to bring dreadnaught battleships against you via the river and attacking you with helicopters and zeppelins. At this point, even the hardiest Allied general is reduced to a crying pile on the floor.
One of the Zerg-arc missions of Starcraft has you trying to hunt down Dark Templars on Char. There are several teleporters on the level, and they'll make a break for it if you ever move a single Overlord out of position, or leave it unguarded by regular troops. And if a single one escapes, mission fails. Thank god for level-skipping cheats.
A generic one that this editor really hates is the "Defend the Alamo" scenario: you're horribly outnumbered, you have low resources, you have to defend your little outpost from a usually better armed enemy invasion. The worst part is, unlike the historic event at the Alamo, you must defend your post, or you start over. Apparently the commander in the sky is incompetent that s/he must be ousted for doing what pretty much amounts to the impossible.
- As an example, in the 9th mission in Dungeon Keeper, you have to defend your dungeon from wave after wave of heroes, coming in three directions. You do get some time to prepare, but plan wrong and everything will go awry. Fortunately after that, everything is much easier.
- World In Conflict really loves to abuse this situation. Only it takes it a step further. Since the way you control territory is by means of control points, not only do you have to defend up to three "Alamos", you have to press on an offensive elsewhere. This wouldn't be bad if you had more than 4 tanks and 6 squads of troops, and you need about 1 tank and 2 squads minimum to hold a spot for a respectable amount of time.
- One of the worst ones is in Company Of Heroes, mission 12 and 13. Your main objective is to defend not one, but two locations: Hill 317 and a little town nearby called Mortain. The first part isn't too bad, it's mostly driving the Axis out. The second part however, will really test players, as if the game wasn't hard enough up until then. Not only will you be pounded from every direction on Hill 317 (and you have to defend Mortain), but the Axis will pound you with mortars and 88 flak guns. And all you're given is whatever you were able to save from the last mission plus a howitzer.

Close Real Time Strategy

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.
Space Channel 5 Part 2. Report 4. In the Core, besides the game's usual cruel timing, you're subjected to a 'let's play in reverse' mini 'if you get this wrong you're dead meat'. That, and, if you played averagely on the other sections of the report, you have only four lives. Let's not even mention the 'Escape' part, which has odd beats and the robot-shooting is pure hell.
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.
- 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.
- There's also Let's Dance, which doesn't have an unintuitive beatmap or punishing timing. What it does have (on hard mode) is the first life bar that drops so quickly that you can hit every beat and still fail the level if your timing isn't spot-on. And pairs it with some very long pauses in the action where the bar ''will' drop because there are no beats to hit and restore it.
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!
Let There Be Rock on Bass in Rock Band 2. No real challenge, it's just the same note over and over and over keeping your finger on the green fret till it goes numb.
- Don't forget that Let There Be Rock is a scrappy on drums too. Most boring beat ever, for a LONG TIME. But, more importantly, we must remember the true scrappy song. The one, the only, Visions. EVERYONE hates this song. Never have I spoken to a person who has said anything closely resembling, "You know what song I like to play in RB@2 and/or listen to? Visions." It is an impossibility.
- The Live rendition of Let There Be Rock on the AC/DC track pack is worse: it's much the same as its on-disc version, except it goes much faster (meaning that "boring beat" will now kill your main arm... and it'll still be boring) and it goes for over 8 minutes (not including a 1 1/2-minute Big Rock Ending).
Every "MAX 100%" mission in DJMAX Portable Black Square. In other words, you need 100% accuracy to pass each of those missions. It's like taking the final battle of Guitar Hero III, changing the song to "Through the Fire and Flames," and making you a One Hit Point Wonder.
Stage 5 in Parappa The Rapper is generally agreed to be the most loathed in the game, where the protagonist, his bladder nearly ready to burst, has to out-rap all his previous senseis to get ahead of them in line before he wets himself. Some brutally difficult note patterns, combined with the game's weird take on timing, has caused many players to give up hope on ever reaching the sixth and final stage.
- The spinoff, Um Jammer Lammy, also has a scrappy level as its sixth and, again, penultimate level, where the player character slips on a banana peel, breaks her skull and is sent to Hell, where she has to perform on-stage in a concert if she hopes to return to the realm of the living. This song features some tricky button patterns as well, even moreso than in the previous example, but its crippling flaw is how awful the level's background music is in comparison to that of the rest of the game.
In Frequency, Tony Trippi's Motomatic, Orbital's Weekend Ravers Mix, anything made by Komputer Kontroller or Symbion Project, and finally the last song, Robotkid vs. Intersekt with a punishing synth track that only masters could attempt.
"Holic" from beatmania IIDX and Dance Dance Revolution. The song (for the most part) does not follow the standard 4/4 time signature of most music, which trips up many first-timers, and in beatmania IIDX, its Another chart has one of the series' first examples of Difficulty Spike—at the very end of the song, you're greeted with a clusterfuck of 250 or so notes, which are enough to make you fail easily. This has resulted in many players getting as high as an AAA on the song...but having 2-10% less life than needed for a clear.
- Also, many of the later boss charts in the DDR series are particularly scrappy. The American PS2 Challenge chart for "Horatio" is pretty much known for being an example in bad charting. The Shock Arrows used throughout the song, when hit, not only break your combo, but also lower your life AND make the arrows temporarily invisible for a split second. This was simplified in both the arcade and the Japanese versions of the game, fortunately.
- Would you believe that an easy song can also qualify as scrappy? In the PS2 port of beatmania IIDX 3rd Style, there are any number of songs whose timing is off, many of which are easier songs. The result: easy clears, but horribly low scores. The most infamous example of such a song is "Gambol," which came to (in)fame when it was revived on 9th Style...but didn't have its timing fixed. Konami acknowledged this and gave its Normal chart fixed timing in IIDX 12, but left the Hyper chart as is. Finally, in the PS2 port of IIDX 11, Konami decided to take Gambol's bad timing a step further: it gets a new, Another chart with the exact same notes as its Normal and Hyper charts...but the timing is rigged such that you can only get Just Greats and Bads, with anything outside of the timing window for a Just Great resulting in a Bad. For additional fun, play this chart with the Hard modifier, which swaps out the Groove Gauge for a more traditional Life Meter in which running out of life will instantly eject you from the song.
  - As of IIDX 15 for the PS 2 and IIDX 16 in the arcade, cheat codes allow you to apply Gambol Hyper/Another timing to every song in the game
The fireworks stage of Rhythm Tengoku is unpopular with fans of the game for many reasons: the music isn't that great, there are no quirky characters or strange scenes, and the timing is rather difficult. The Bon Odori stage is equally unpopular with many of those playing the game on an emulator. The DS sequel's Scrappy seems to be Fillbots, which requires precise timing and, in the second version, lasts for nearly three minutes.
Many a Cluster F Bomb resulted from the desert level in Patapon. To get through, players must work up to Fever and summon a rain miracle to cool the sand in front of you; if you don't, your army melts to oblivion in a matter of seconds. The kicker is that, until the sequel came along, there was no timer on your miracles, so the best hope of getting through without a sudden lava geyser eradicating your troops was to just redo the juju every time you hit Fever, which took forever. And good luck if you mess up the beat.
- And one reason Meden isn't too popular is that she gets kidnapped in each game...and to save her, you have to chase her carriage across the aforementioned deserts.

Close Rhythm Game

Squaresoft

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.
- The ~~Demon Wall~~ Trapdoor only turns into the Manticore (or the Yellow Dragon, deeper into the dungeon) after it uses its instant-kill spell.
  - And this isn't entirely true...I've cheated and been very high level by this point with codes (I sometimes prefer to play for the story, not the level grinding), and can kill these in one hit. Sometimes they STILL turned into the Manticores.
- 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 Sylph Cave and Summoned Monsters Cave are candidates for this too; they're the only dungeons with damage floors (forcing you to recast Float on the party every new level, or whenever a character is knocked out), and they're full of secret passages and confusing turns (got turned around? Time to recast Float again!). Even worse, one has a number of teleport pads in it that bring you deeper in; however, there's one pad near the end that will toss you right back to the World Map with no warning, forcing you to do the whole thing over again and hope you remember where the exit one was. And finally, you've got to go through them at least three times altogether (if you're strong enough to defeat both bosses in the Summoned Monster Cave in the same trip. If not, your only option is to grind and come back later).
- The Cave of Magnes is another difficult level (one with a far more persistent frustration factor), especially since being forced to remove Cecil's metal equipment renders him almost useless, and he is unable to act if the player does not do so. Even with your party losing its best physical attackers, the monsters are still a step above those of the previous dungeon, but without their elemental weaknesses.
  - As I recall, the trick is to keep his armour on: If the enemy hits him, there'll be almost no damage, and he can still use his ability to leap in front of the injured while otherwise immobile somehow.
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.
- The Ice Cave. Disgustingly happy music: check. Birds whose touch turns you into stone: check. (the cure, Gold Needles, cost around a limb a piece) Mindflayers whose touch turns you into DEAD: check. Dark wizards who always get a free turn, attack in groups and have a 50% chance of attacking with the most powerful multi-target fire spell: check. No plot significance whatsoever: check. Having to get that dumb crystal out of there anyway: check.
  - And many people will go into the Ice Cave far earlier than the normal plot would otherwise suggest, as it can be used in a common Sequence Break to get the airship and thus class promotion before the volcano.
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.
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.
- 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.
- The sequel still has Atlantica, but replaces the swimming with an even more annoying musical Rhythm Game. Thankfully, it's optional.
- Chain of Memories's Atlantica doesn't differ from the rest of the game much, although the Shadow Heartless are replaced with Sea Neons. Then again, Hundred Acre Wood replaced it due to how slowly Pooh walks and how he rarely follows you very reliably (like when you have to climb up on the cart or do the "bouncing game").
The Pharos in Final Fantasy XII. Exceedingly long, powerful enemies, and really annoying puzzles. One of which will cause you to be transported to a room with monsters that will kill you or wipe out half your party.
- The Pharos is a 100-floor tower that was created by the Occuria as a test of those who sought their power. King Raithwall, the last person to ascend the Pharos, left a message IN HIS OWN BLOOD by the entrance that pretty much said "Don't fuck around with the Pharos". Initially, it seems rater innocuous, if not downright awesome-looking. (The music's also pretty cool.) After solving a tedious but simple puzzle and fighting an easy boss, you leave the first floor to ascend through floors 10-48. This puzzle is based on killing one type of enemy while avoiding another. However, this one is not alluded to except in the examinable text that combines obtuse riddles with Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe. Save point, boss, and you're done with the first Ascent... out of three. FFFFFUUUUUUU-
- At the start of the second Ascent, you're presented with a choice: give up the use of either items, magick, weapons or the minimap for the duration of the Ascent. Minimap, right? Did I mention that the three next levels are veritable mazes, full of false walls, one-way doors and loads of enemies? The enemies are Demonic Spiders, mainly those of the "tanks that break through your defenses and come with Status Buffs active" vairety, with some "teleporting status-bombers" thrown in for variety. Past that is a slugfest of a boss that will destory your party if you chose anything but the minimap. Then there's the third Ascent...
- The third Ascent is by far the worst. All of the enemies are either: a) bombs that swarm you and explode before you can kill them off (they're also immune to your Elemental Rock Paper Scissors unless you have the insane MP to spam Holy) or b) flying Mooks immune to melee attacks. The puzzle is a teleporter riddle made up entirely of Guide Dang It, sinc succeeding requires reading the aforementioned obtuse clues around the area. Even so, you'll end up at a dead-end unless you smash through a fake wall and touch another teleporter. By far the worst part is when you end up on an impassable platform with four teleporters and two flyers. Two mistakes here and you're taken to a brutal, brutal room full of infinitely spawning undead that constantly inflict Disease (Max HP = Current HP so healing doesn't work; dying and being rezzed leaves you with 1/1 HP) Survive for 5 minuetes and you end up back at the start. It turns out the correct teleporter is the same color as the door you went through an Ascent ago. WHO WOULD REMEMBER THAT? Then they ask you for another teleporter you're bound to get wrong (hint: it's behind another false wall) which teleports you to a fight with aBoss In Mook Clothing golem. Then there's another boss and a save point. That's right. No save points until after all the shitty parts. Then there's two Climax Bosses and a shitload of cutscenes, but at least it's over.
  - Believe it or not, the Pharos is also my favorite level in the game.
- There's also a Bonus Level of Hell, Subterra, in the basement. that somehow goes Beyond The Impossible and makes everything harder... by doubling the enemies' stats and placing you in near-total darkness. Did I mention that the minimap is ineffective, one enemy likes to become invulnerable while nuking you (a Puzzle Boss in iteslf) and the Bonus Boss is That One Flunky Boss? the game is generally pretty easy, but Subterra is beyond Nintendo Hard.
- Other contenders of this trope include:
  - The Great Crystal, where the minimap is disabled, the main map is completely useless, and most of the enemies are Demonic Spiders, especially the cougar-type Oses, which use an attack that removes 75% of your current health and inflicts every single one of the game's myriad Standard Status Effects. Other enemies are invisible until they attack. Every area looks exactly the same, so you might accidentally respawn earlier enemies and get status spammed by those cougars again.
  - The Necrohol of Nabudis. Optional, sure, but being swarmed by invisible Baknamies that can use percentile-based elemental nukes completely sucks.
Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 has one mission where you have to survey people and find out what the most popular resolution was. Problem here is that some people either give more than one or give one that could have more than one meaning. Of course you have to restart the mission all over again if you get the answer wrong. However, doing this mission multiple times changes the top resolution, so not even Save Scumming will work here! While the Head Editor does give a slight hint at what the answer will be, everything is vague here. What also makes this annoying is that there are TONS of NP Cs on the field to talk to, including a few on the rooftops for some odd reason so unless you have a high move or jump stat, have Fairy Shoes or Galmia Shoes, or have a Gria unit, you might not be able to reach the highest NP Cs. And you can't forget talking to people behind their doors either. Since all the units on the field are considered guests, you'll waste time watching them do nothing.
I'm sorry, the rest of this wiki, but no Scrappy Level in any FF game compares to the final dungeon of FFIII (the DS rerelease, though from what I've heard, the original is just as bad), the Crystal Tower and the Dark World after it. The Crystal Tower has:
- Space Filling Paths, of the switchback and false path variety
- The most demonic of Demonic Spiders in the whole game
- An obnoxious boss at the end.
  - And when you're done with that, there's a long Unskippable Cutscene, then you go to the Dark World, which has all of this PLUS a literally unbeatable boss at the very beginning, FOUR obnoxious bosses, and then the final, stupidly hard boss after all of that. All of this which would be par for the course in any Very Definitely Final Dungeon, except as soon as you enter the Crystal Tower, there are no save points. Not a one. If I could have three wishes, the first one would be to add save points to this area, the second would be to punch every playtester who didn't think it needed save points in the face, and the third would be for a zillion bucks.

CRPGs

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.
- 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.
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.
- The most unpopular example by far is the Taris swoop race, a mandatory Unexpected Genre Change into an exceptionally cheezy racing minigame.
Neverwinter Nights 2's final level qualifies for this. It's the only level in the game with infinitely respawning, sometimes annoyingly difficult enemies, its design is a confusing maze with teleportation doors, thereby preventing you from making a beeline for the exit without fighting hordes of powerful undead, and if you attempt to rest, enemies will interrupt you, thereby preventing you from recovering health and spells. After this, there is an obnoxious miniboss fight against three Shadow Reavers, possibly qualifying for That One Boss.
The Underground City/Maze level in Baldur's Gate. With the party AI's very poor path-finding ability, it was a complete bitch to navigate the very narrow maze, while avoiding tough undead warriors that are immune to slash attacks and has a fair amount of magic resistance. You also cannot rest anywhere without getting ambushed by said enemies. Which is bad, because a monstrously hard Boss Fight is at the end of this scrappy maze.
- The moral of the story? Specialize in blunt weapons early on in the game.
- Also, the Firewine ruins. It is basically the Underground City, except this one also has endlessly respawning Kobold Commandoes in it and you start in the middle, with only one route out of three being the way out.
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of The Mad Overlord. Level 3. Gah! I hate the 3rd level. Pits everywhere—and you have to walk into one before you can map it, which is why most players skip it using the elevator or they find a clear path to the stairs to level 4 and never explore the rest of the level. Other levels have pits too.. but the 3rd level is the worst. And then I think it's about level 7 when the ^$$?@@! vampires show up. They hit you once and you get drained 3 levels or so—which usually by that time represents several days worth of play time. All you can do is send your Samurai or Ninja after them, hope they get initiative and a decapitation, otherwise prepare for the hurt.
The Gehennom levels of Net Hack are often disparaged by players, not because they are hard, but for the exact opposite reason: after spending the first 30-odd levels scrapping along, fighting for your life every step of the way, you now have to plod through endless twisty corridors, mechanically chopping down enemies, with only an occasional demon-lord to break the monotony. This wouldn't be so bad except there are about 20 levels of it. Finally you reach the Wizard of Yendor and the challenge-level zooms back up again. There are magical ways to speed up the process, but still.
- And making it even worse, once you get the item you went down there for, you have to walk all the way back out because the item prevents you from being able to teleport between dungeon levels.
- This is one of things the NetHack variant Slash'EM attempts to fix, by shortening Gehennom while adding more special (ie dangerous) levels.
Ancient Domains of Mystery's "Tower of Eternal Flames" is four levels tall. Every step on every level causes damage and has a decent chance of destroying some of your equipment or inventory. Both of the effects can be somewhat mitigated, the damage by fire resistance and the destruction by blessed rings of ice and fireproof blankets, but drakelings take damage even with fire immunity and the two items are not perfectly effective. On the top level, you have to tunnel to the Fire Temple, which is disconnected from the rest of the level. This requires certain items, which of course may have been destroyed earlier in the Tower. Then, in the Temple itself, there is a very large number of dangerous enemies.
The Isle of Crypts in Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant. I dare you to try making it through this trap-infested hell that's crawling with powerful enemies and some truly evil puzzles without a strategy guide. If you've collected the various optional map pieces along the way, you'll at least have some hints on how to solve the puzzles, and holding on to a couple of items you may or may not have picked up near the beginning of the game with no obvious use then will tone down the traps a bit, but if you were lax in exploring the City of Sky, didn't get one particular Plot Coupon out of the dozen or so out there, or haven't been paying close attention to the game's mythology, your progress will come to a dead halt.
- And then there's the Tomb of the Astral Dominae itself, at the bottom of the Isle, but mainly due to the enemies you'll face. If you know what to expect and have built your party accordingly, the battle droids are tough but managable, even the Cosmo-Bot. If not... get ready for even more hell as plasma cannons scythe through your party, especially the back rankers, and your spells make the enemy giggle, coincidentally turning the Cosmo-Bot into That One Boss. And then the Big Bad and his elite guard show up... oh, and did I mention the puzzle madness doesn't stop down here?
The entirety of Eye Of The Beholder fits this trope, both because it's Nintendo Hard, and because the game saves automatically when you rest (which can be problematic if the character you thought was unconscious is actually dead.)
Avernum 4's Eastern Gallery manages this entirely through Demonic Spiders, giant insects known as chitrachs. They're fairly hard to hit, they have high HP and damage resistances, and every time you perform a melee attack on them they have a chance of blocking and damaging you. Oh, and there are 227 of them out for your tender flesh. Enjoy!
In Arcanum the Black Mountain Clan mines are annoying as 1.Unlike every other part of the main quest, you can't talk your way past them. 2. It's littered with traps and is more or less the only place in the entire game to include them. 3.When you finally finish it, the lead you get from it manages to be pointless!
Some examples from Might and Magic games:
- Might and Magic 6 - Control Center. Enjoy fighting hundreds of robots armed with blasters. Plus, not only can they break your stuff, but the aptly-named Terminator Units can Eradicate you.
- Might and Magic 7 - Eofol Tunnels. Filled to the Brom with Medusae and Behemoths. The worst part? You can't do an totally invisible run because of a jump that requires the Jump spell, which still breaks Invisible.

Other JRPGs

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)
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
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.
- And speaking of those damned Crayzee Dayzees, 3-3 in Super Paper Mario has them in this jump-centric level. They hit you when you're in the middle of a jump, and there's a good chance you will start back at the bottom of the tree. And when you finally make it out of there and deal with this level's miniboss, you still have quite a bit of jumping to do...and it's possibly made worse by having a few Lakitus roam the sky.
- If you don't just hop on Game FA Qs, chapter 2-3 of Super Paper Mario is the ultimate in Scrappy levels. To wit - you have to play out extremely long, unbearably boring minigames to run up 1,000,000 Rubees to pay for a vase. Even though you really only need about 10,000 (the rest can be found once you've got that), it takes forever and a year just to get that much and if a player does not talk to people much then it is theoretically possible to go for the full million. Thankfully, every bit of that minigame work can be skipped over if you just hop on the Internet and figure out how to get the hidden stash of them without worrying about paying NP Cs to tell you.
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.
- The very short passage through the Outer Dimension (right after you meet Mizuti) is like this. Lots of skill required to navigate, recognize the enemies and time your hits, and at least three unique Magnus involved... which are photos.
- Origins has Tarazed. It's an Eternal Engine in which about half the rooms look exactly the same. Oh, and it's huge - the biggest level in the game by far. Thus an already long level is stretched out even further by the player having to find a room to use as a landmark at regular intervals. Did I mention the one-way paths? At least the music played there is among the best in the game (which, for this game, is saying a lot).
Golden Sun 2 has Air's Rock, the rest of the rocks are annoying, but Air Rock takes the cake, it is hard to figure out even WITH a guide.
The Lantheon Gorge in Tales Of Symphonia is annoying because you have to set up all of the wind blowing plants, and if you mess up, you get sent way back. As well as that, every enemy in the place has ridiculously powerful poison effects.
- Ymir Forest is another. The level itself is easy enough to navigate, but you can't get out of it until you bring a kid a fruit.To do this involves knocking it off a tree and then following it around the level and making sure none of the fish eat it. Never mind just reaching into the water and picking up the fruit, that would be logical.
- The Meltokio Sewer is a complete pain (dear god the sliding block puzzles), coupled with bad background music.
- The Temple of Darkness is easy, except for the fact that the AI of the Shadow Blobs that you have to lead to the bottom is absurdly stupid, and the path to the seal is full of twists and turns.
- The Book of Forbidden Anamnesis is entirely luck-based. To be fair, it IS a Bonus Level Of Hell.
  - Worse than that in Dawn of the New World: Gladsheim. 8 by 8 Square with rooms that randomly interconnect, tons of (thankfully weak) enemies, and you pretty much have to fully explore each of the 10 Floors in order to proceed in the dungeon. Oh, and what you went in there for, Marta's Kismet, yeah, the Bonus Boss at the end only has a 5% chance of dropping it.
- The Temple of Lightning. Only has the bolts of lightning coming down from the sky in the sequel (though both have plenty of electric hazards), but both games have those goddamn dark twisting chambers.
  - It's worth mentioning that the lightning in the second game affects the Karma Meter. Hit 14 times, and you DO NOT get the best ending.
In the same series, Tales Of Vesperia has this as The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. A huge, sprawling dungeon with a confusing layout, full of Demonic Spiders? UGH.
The 13-floor Bonus Dungeon Pork City in The World Ends With You. On every floor, you're confined to using one brand of pin and unbranded pins, which will especially suck if there's a brand whose pins you don't give a crap about. Worse yet, the Noise in this level consist almost entirely of Goddamned Frogs; namely, red Brassbanfrogs that absorb long range attacks, and yellow Tradishfrogs that dish out plenty of damage. And of course, on the roof after clearing the 13th floor, you face That One Boss Panthera Cantus, who can kill you in 2-3 hits even if you are at level 100.
If you decide to tackle the Milky Well dungeon in Earth Bound from the moment it becomes accessible, watch out, as mushroom enemies roam the grounds, capable of inflicting the Mushroom status effect, which functions as a combination Confusion + Interface Screw effect, leaving you susceptible to the attacks of the other difficult enemies roaming the area... not to mention the difficult boss fight at the end.
- Don't forget the mines. Oh, good heavens, the mines...basically, you have to find five giant moles. Each one is similar and will take some sort of magic to defeat. The problem? The mines are swarming with enemies who can't wait to poison you, meaning your stores of magic power will be drained. Ugh...
- Peaceful Rest Valley, anyone? Every enemy is a Goddamned Bat: the Mobile Sprouts with the ability to make more Mobile Sprouts as well as heal themselves and suck away your PP; the Li'l UF Os and Spinning Robos that can give you colds; and the Territorial Oaks... do I need to say what they do? If you face two of these four at the same time, you're in for a world of hurt.
- Mt. Itoi in Earthbound Zero personifies this trope. Swarming with Demonic Spiders, Elite Mooks, and Goddamned Bats that give next to no experience when defeated, coupled with Earthbound Zero's nigh perversely high Random Encounter rate, easily make Mt. Itoi the most difficult area in the game, if not the entire series. In fact, when asked about the difficulty of Mt. Itoi, the game's creator said that he just wanted to finish making the game and didn't bother to balance it.
- Mother 3' Back Beat Battle Hard and Family Matters: 2nd Movement are perhaps two of the hardest songs to combo in the entire game, the former due it its erratic rhythm and time signature, and the latter because, it being a medley of classical songs (whose tempos are a bit hard to find if you don't have an ear for such music), it changes. tempo. constantly.
The final dungeon of Suikoden V is a combination Scrappy Level and Guide Dang It; when you enter it, you're forced to choose three full battle parties of six members, and have to constantly switch between them. If you don't have eighteen party members up to snuff? Too bad, you can't leave. This can make the game nigh Unwinnable unless you know it's coming ahead of time, or obsessively create backup saves.
- Not quite, you CAN leave the dungeon if you talk to your party-changer at the entrance, but it's still a pretty nasty place. And sadly, the best area in which to level up is the area before it. And if you want to change your party you can't just warp back to your castle until you go to the final dungeon, which sends your party changer back there when you leave said final dungeon.
The Sand Caves, near the end of Beyond the Beyond.
I've yet to meet anyone who likes Digital Devil Saga's Very Definitely Final Dungeon, the Karma Temple. Invisible walls, invisible pit falls and invisible teleportation circles combine to create a labyrinth born from the depths of hell itself. Combine that with a distinct lack of save points, the toughest random encounters in the game and even meaner sub-bosses, and you arrive at something that will scar you. And not in the cool, "badge of honour" way. The bad kind.
- Speaking of Shin Megami Tensei dungeons named Karma, the Karma Palace from Persona. Full of pit traps... most of which eventually take you back to the entrance... but one sequence of which is necessary to trip exactly right in order to actually reach the boss. It's not truly a Guide Dang It, but one sure helps.
Though all of Tartarus could count in Persona 3, the fifth block is especially annoying. It is mostly dark, except where multi-colored disco lights are thrown around. Not only is this difficult to look at, enemies onscreen (Shadows which are black) are nearly impossible to see until they bum-rush you. Better get used to using your radar.
Pokemon. Four generations of games and they still haven't figured out just how horrendously boring the caves are? Repetitive scenery, little sense of direction and the possibility of being attacked by Goddamned Zubats at any time.
- Surfing on water routes isn't much better, but they did seem to learn their lesson as there were far less in the fourth generation compared to the third.
- The third and fourth generations also brought in weather areas which sound cool in theory, but having a battle paused every turn to remind the player than it is still raining/sandy/hailing doesn't just slow down the battle, it starts to get a little insulting...
  - Justified in that raining/sandy/hailing usually had an effect on the battle at hand, but yeah, we could do without "the storm raged" every. single. turn.
  - Any part which involves sliding around on ice. Especially frickin' Candice's frickin' gym. I hated that bit so much...
  - Worse is the route (and part of Mt. Coronet) in fourth generation that featured fog. Fog that lowers your accuracy, making your pokemon miss *nearly every single time,* but has almost no effect on your opponent. Add to this the fact that defog is just about the most useless HM ever (and only pokemon with wings can learn it, preventing you from giving it to a common pokemon like Bibarel).
  - Would the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games fit here, or would they be in a different category since they're Roguelikes? Either way, the scrappy level for Red/Blue Rescue Team would be Purity Forest. It's 99 floors long, you can only bring one Pokemon, said Pokemon is reduced to level 1, and all of your money and toolbox contents are destroyed. You're pretty much at the random generator's mercy here.
- Another from the 4th gen: the muddy terrain around Pastoria and inside the Great Marsh. There's a good chance of getting stuck when walking into a marsh tile, in which case the player must press different directional buttons repeatedly to become unstuck. This has to be done at practically every single step. As if that wasn't excruciatingly slow enough, each of those little wiggles to free oneself can result in a wild Pokemon encounter.
  - Stare closely at the screen and you can see that the sticky tiles are slightly darker than the ones that aren't. Nintendo always makes this trick in Pokemon games, like Koga's invisible wall Gym.
.hack// has a few of these. Chosen Hopeless Nothingness from the end of the first game is a major example, as it's 5 floors (the maximum), Goddamned Bats make up every single encounter here, and it has That One Boss at the end of it. Then there's Generous Bemused Virgin from the third game, which forces you to include a level 1 character in your 3-person party (whereas everyone else is level ~65 at this point), and has quite a few enemies that would be Demonic Spiders even without this handicap. The worst offender by far, however, is Reincarnated Purgatorial Altar. For one thing, it breaks the clearly established 5-floor dungeon limit rule to have 10 floors. For another, there's a ton of encounters in each floor, most unavoidable, and every encounter puts you up against a boss. Every boss fight in this game (except for the Cubia fights) requires Data Drain in order to kill, and abusing Data Drain can cause plenty of negative effects, such as stat problems. And that's if you're lucky—if you're unlucky, you'll actually lose experience and level down. If you're REALLY unlucky, you can even get a Nonstandard Game Over. And of course, Murphy's Law dictates that this is most likely to happen in floor 10, which will most likely cause your disc to be thrown into the wall.
Rogue Galaxy, Gladius Towers. A pair of 8 floor towers with a ridiculously confusing overlapping layout that has you switching towers every second floor, with countless dead ends that makes the ingame map completely useless. And once you're done with one of them, you still have the other one left. At least the enemies aren't too bad.
Guardian's Crusade has the dreaded swamp level. Since you're still in the beginning portion of the game, chances are, your levels are low. This does not help when you combat enemies who almost always knows AND uses poison. Not only do they take a HUGE chunk of your life, they will also use Terror against you which prevents you from attacking. If it gets to Baby, it won't even be able to heal you. So now you're torn between trying to heal and stay alive before they do worse! AUUUGH!
In Tales Of The Abyss, the world map has a lower frame rate than towns and dungeons, which means you move slower, and if you have to rotate the camera, it swings around p.a.i.n.f.u.l.l.y.s.l.o.w.l.y, however, enemies don't seem to move around any slower. Also, after battles, the world map takes significantly longer to load up than dungeons do. So, let's put not one, but two dungeons technically as part of the world map, and stick extremely annoying factors for both!
- Inista Marsh - you move even slower than you usually would because, well, it's a marsh, the ground is unstable. When you're going through it, you have a chance of running into the Behemoth, a monster that can kill you very quickly and easily, and if you defeat it it will not drop anything, not even experience, and it will still be able to attack you again. And Tear's title that prevents encounters has no effect on it at all.
- Meggiora Highlands - You need to go here twice. The first time, it's a timed mission. Technically you don't have to complete the mission on time, as the game will still progress in the same way if you don't, but a friendly and harmless NPC dies. The second time, it's impossibly huge, and if you want to make the boss at the end a bit easier and get all the dungeon's loot, you have to solve four very irritating block-style puzzles.

Close Role Playing Game

Scrolling

In the Gradius series, if a stage involves crystals, you will most likely hate it. Gradius II 's third stage (fourth in the Famicom version) is a crystal stage that, at one point, throw a storm of large blocks of crystals at you, which break into smaller blocks when shot enough times. If you die in this stage, consider your remaining lives gone too. And then the arcade version of Gradius III has a stage where, near the end, cubes fly toward the left side of the screen and will randomly change direction and/or speed up; many a life has been lost here. In fact, on the PlayStation 2 version, there is a "Cube Attack" mode which lets you practice this part.
- Don't forget the Lava Stage, where you are bombarded with lava bombs which burst into indestructible shrapnel when shot, as well as Goddamned Bats and a narrow tunnel near the end where the fireballs can spawn right on top of you; getting past this part is a Luck Based Mission.
- If a stage is a mechanical fortress, it's going to be a Death Course, especially in Gradius III (arcade/PS 2 version). Swarms of Zubs, aka Goddamned Bats teleport in to assault the Vic Viper, then there's Malevolent Architecture in the form of flying ceiling tiles, followed by ships that leave behind indestructible wrecks when killed, miniature Degraded Boss versions of the invincible spider mecha from Gradius II, a Laser Hallway, Smashing Hallway Traps Of Doom, as well as a Mini Boss that must be fought while dodging those, and an invincible giant blue spider mecha boss where you must navigate through the legs. At the entrance to Bacterion's lair, you must blast through Regenerating Walls that have organic Smashing Hallway Traps Of Doom in between. After you defeat the Anti Climax Boss, you have to escape through a narrow Turbo Tunnel, better have an extra speed-up or two.
  - The fortress in Gradius V, Stage 7 incorporates the obligatory High-Speed Zone into its first half, which includes a diagonal climb through dozens of closely-placed gates, followed by Beacon, That One Boss. The first half of Stage 6, with the green slime spigots and tilting environment, is also an infamous Scrappy Level. Doesn't get much easier in the second half, where the screen scrolls backwards, then you fight a Boss Rush of Those Several Bosses (Rolling Core, "Ball-in-a-cage" Core, Big Core MKIII 2.0, Covered Core II)
- The first stage of the Famicom version of Gradius II. After the first portion of the stage — the mini-suns from the arcade version — the stage continues, now with larger suns and the #$%@ing solar prominences from Stage 3 of Life Force/Salamander. On top of having to carefully navigate these, you have to deal with more Goddamned ~~Bats~~ Birds and those orb-like things that take several hits to kill. From here, the game gets easier for a bit, though the difficulty goes back up for Stages 3 and 4.
- Gradius ReBirth, Stage 4. Skeletons of lizard-like skeletons with ribcages that scatter into indestructible shrapnel (similar to the aforementioned Gradius III arcade lava stage) when shot, and snake-like creatures that jump out of the sand to surprise you, followed by a corridor of said creatures that jump around in arc paths that are impossible to predict the first time around. Although you can destroy them, they take a good number of shots before they die.
The Tutorial mode levels in Bangai-O Spirits. You know you're in for a Nintendo Hard experience when you die many times in the tutorial levels.
- On that note, practically every non-tutorial level as well. Every so often, you find one that isnt built around constantly spamming your Desperation Attack, but even then it's still difficult because they removed omnidirectional aiming.
Stage 5 in Subterranean Animism has left many a player tearing their hair out. Goddamned zombie fairies!
- And on that note: Mountain of Faith, Stage 4, Lunatic mode. Expect to convulse on the floor, screaming about waterfalls.
- Perfect Cherry Blossom's Stage 4 is also a supreme pain in the ass. Not only is it one of the longest stages of the game, but there are many enemies of the stage, particularly in the second half, that like to throw some pretty damned dense danmaku your way, particularly the lines of orbs, which explode in a ton of bullets aimed at you when they die. And if you manage to get past all of that, you still have to face the Prismriver Sisters, Those Three Bosses.
Stage 6 in R-Type Delta, especially the part where you fight Capsulon. The mini-boss essentially splits the screen in half and the space left to dodge enemies and bullets would make a Bullet Hell game proud.
- Capsulon nothing. Try the end of the fourth stage in R-Type III, which features a maze through which... plasma, or something, takes periodic trips through, which way it goes depends on what openings are in fact open at the time, and some of them open or close partway through a plasma stream, totally changing its path! The plasma is ridiculously fast, meaning that if you aren't exactly where you need to be beforehand, you're screwed. Then you fight a midboss, and then you have to go through the goddamned maze again, BACKWARDS! In a game in which, without the Force device (which you WILL lose due to dying), your ship cannot fire backwards. ARRRRRGH!

Rail Shooter

If you're going for medals in Star Fox 64, Sector Z will give you hell. You need 100 points for the medal, and assuming things go right, 66 of these points will come from destroying the missiles headed for Great Fox. The problem? Your wingmen (and Kat, if you're coming from Zoness) will "help" you destroy the missiles. What's wrong with this? You don't get points for missiles that your wingmen land finishing shots on, which tends to turn the stage into a somewhat Luck Based Mission. Oh, and you can't shoot your wingmen out of the way without forfeiting the medal no matter how many points you get.
- Speaking of Zoness, that level has searchlights that all need to be destroyed to continue on the same path, and some of them are quite hard to hit due to obstacles. You also pretty much need to destroy them all for the medal, as they give good points.
  - And before that we have Aquas, the only underwater level in the game, using a submarine that functions a bit differently compared to the Arwing and Landmaster. You can't charge up shots, and you use an infinite supply of torpedoes instead of bombs. They also provide some light, which is very much needed to see anything. And pretty much every enemy you encounter down there qualifies as Goddamned Bats.
- The original Star Fox has Sector Z—take Sector X, add wireframe beams, and add a section where you have to dodge rotating wirefream beams, and you have yourself an asshole of a level.
Sin And Punishment has Stage 3-2, which changes the game from a rail shooter to a sidescrolling platformer. It's very awkward to play.

Close Shoot Em Ups

For the most part Darkstar One is a forgiving game to people not having the fastest, most accurate trigger finger. Unfortunately at times you are taken out of your cockpit, and dumped into a turret mini-game, which compared to a regular space-battle is almost ridiculously hard. Espeically with the second one, which the official forum actually has service to play through that mission.
- Made no better by the game ramping up the difficulty for every upgrade item you have picked up to that point. One of the upgrades you're likely to have maxed out on if you're a terrible shot is, y'know, turrets to do your shooting for you, so that not only aren't you a great shot, but you've managed to set up your ship so you don't have to be.
Anything dealing with flying through a mine cluster in a Wing Commander game. You have to maneuver painfully slowly through these if you want to make it through. At least you can shoot asteroids out of your way. Try the same with a space mine and...BOOM! Twenty-one gun salute city for you.
- There's also the mission with cloaking torpedoes in Wing Commander III. Don't stray from that capital ship, or you'll miss the torpedo, and the mission becomes a failure.
- The mine clusters? Sheesh! They are NOTHING compared to infamous Kurasawa-2 mission in WC1. Yes, the one with Ralari defense (you have about ten seconds to destroy 4 heavy cat fighters, or else the craft you're suposed to be protecting goes boom). Beat it once, after maybe a hundred tries or so.
The eighth mission of Starlancer. Your capital ship is under attack, your wingmen are inept, you have to kill several waves of fighters, twelve torpedoes, and everything else that the mission throws at you. Your reward for failing in what basically is a superheroic effort? Relocation to a new base followed by execution.
The level 'Playing Judas' from the original Freespace: The player's ship is a captured junkpile with the resilience of wet tissue paper, the enemy fighter patrols consists of Dragon-class fighters, and there's no backup. Despite this, however, the level's true crime is being so spirit-crushingly boring without any real payoff.
- And 'A Game of TAG' from Freespace 2. Your armament consists of some missiles that "tag" the enemy ships so your cruisers can shoot them down. Unfortunately they're not very good at it, and once you've got missile lock it would seem much easier to nail them with something that's deadly itself. It's never explained what the point of this is given that in all other missions capital ships are more than capable of gunning down fighters without this help. And just to add insult to injury, when you finish the mission you're told that the new weapon has been rated a "total success"—despite the fact that your character is testing it, your opinion won't be asked for.
- 'Proving Grounds', the very next level, was worse. Capital ship in trouble? Check. Waves of enemy bombers? Check. Enemy cruiser jumping in to attack? Check. It probably wouldn't be so bad if the medal for the level didn't require keeping the Aquitaine's hull (health?) above 50%, but with all those things and that final objective...only mission I ever turned the difficulty to easy. Even assaulting the Sathanas wasn't that bad.
X-Wing Alliance: This game had a level in which you need to escort a shuttle from its base to the hyperspace point. Said shuttle becomes the primary target for every single TIE fighter and bomber on patrol, which frequently shred it.
- Also, the level where the Star Cruiser Liberty falls under attack by robotic controlled TIE Fighters. Half of which are suicide ships. And that fighter wing you're a part of? They either can't be bothered to help, or are no help at all. Only level I used the "Take Leave" button and skipped.
- Star Wars X-Wing has such an infamous scrappy level that the level appears in an expanded universe book as a scrappy level for a training simulator.
X3: Reunion, while not having actual levels (the game is a sandbox-style commercial/fighting sim), has a mission where you are taken away from your ship and given a fast, unarmed light fighter; you're then told to race two other people in fighters exactly the same as yours through a pointlessly long series of target markers. The whole thing is made very hard by the fact that the AI pilots seem very good at navigating the course, while you have to follow tiny blue arrows in the outermost part of your HUD just to visualize the targets. Of course, missing one target means you have to redo the whole thing, as the NPC pilots will leave you in the dust if you backtrack. Considering the course is way longer than necessary, this can very much cause your mouse/joystick to suddenly and violently take flight.
- And if that isn't enough, this level was made even harder with one patch.
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader. Razor Rendezvous. You have to fight TIEs off of the Redemption, your Nebulon-B carrier, disable a Star Destroyer, while evading it's massive ion cannons and turbolasers, AND the swarms of TIEs the SD has with it. With ZERO help from the dozen or so other Rebel fighters in the battle. And with the paper-thin-shielded B-Wing. Several other levels in the game are also Scrappy, most are Scrappy if you're trying to get Gold or *shudder* Best Ever medals.
- Ironically, it's the shortest stage in the game, with players doing speedruns as fast as 35 seconds.
In Star Trek: Klingon Academy, there is a mission where you are piloting a cloaked Bird of Prey, and you have to sneak up really close (<100 kellicams) to a large cruiser in an asteroid belt to listen in on a secret conference. The problem: there are four enemy vessels patrolling the system, and you have pilot your own vessel in weird patterns to avoid getting caught. Each enemy vessel is surrounded an imaginary sphere with a radius of 15,000 kellicams that you absolutely, positively, must not enter. And did I mention those ships were moving? So you have to be constantly watching your radar and your distances indicator. Then, after listening in, you have to sneak out again! And guess what? Later on in the game, you have to do the exact same thing AGAIN, only in a nebula instead of an asteroid field! Joy!

Close Space Simulator

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.
Mission 19 in Devil May Cry 3. There's this bit where the Demonic Spiders known as Abysses appear and you have to kill them off before the huge hourglass in the background runs down. If you don't, the Abysses reappear but your damage taken and items used stay as they were right before the hourglass had reset. Then it caps off with the horrible blob Arkham, who is most certainly That One Boss. The Boss Rush levels in 3 and 4 also fit to some extent.
The two levels where you fight a helicopter in 24: The Game. It has a very large health bar, and can easily maneuver around any hiding place you find, and since you're fighting with heavy weaponry you have to stand completely still to shoot it. The second one adds the difficulty of far fewer hiding places, plus a bunch of guys on the ground shooting at you.
- From the same game, the level where you are chased by a bunch of cops through a neighborhood. You have to be a certain distance away from any squad cars before you can move on, and they're all just as fast as the car you're driving, plus they make the cops from Grand Theft Auto look like responsible drivers. Basically your only hope is to hope that when you enter the neighborhood, there will be two large trucks there that you can let the cops run into, which will slow them down enough that you might get away if you keep going in a straight line.
The Re Boot action game (based on the animated series of the same name) for the Sony Playstation takes frustration to a new extreme. It's not enough that the entire premise of the game is flawed (you fly around on your hoverboard sealing up network "fabric tears", you can't fly up or down, and it's near impossible to make precise jumps). In the third level of the game, you must complete your mission in a set timeframe, travelling through an area that looks like a toxic waste factory. You can't make a crucial jump to get to a network tear, so you land on a pool of toxic waste, where a massive creature that looks like a tapeworm POPS RIGHT THE F#$@ OUT and bashes your character around. You can't even move quickly enough to avoid it because the graphics lag incessantly, and you sure won't be able to finish the level on your first, second or tenth try.
Lego StarWars. Yes, Lego Star Wars. Trying to get Jedi Master status (collecting enough studs to fill an onscreen meter) on the level "Defense of Kashyyyk" is downright infuriating, mostly due to the beach section that has you trying to use the Force to pull up plants to get studs as respawning enemies swarm everywhere, all after you. Pulling up the plants takes a few seconds, leaving you a sitting duck, and if you get hit you stop and have to try again. And when you die (which you will), most of your studs scatter everywhere as you rush to get them back before they disappear. Lose too many studs, and you'll most likely have to start the whole level over. Forget the Goddamned Bats, here you'll be cursing the Goddamned Clones, the Goddamned Droids, and ESPECIALLY the Goddamned Walkers.
- In the original LGSW 2 for the PS 2, Dagobah was frustrating because of the Goddamned Bats that interfere with Luke's efforts to raise Artoo to the timed mushrooms. When remade for the PS 3's LGSW:Complete Saga, it become impossible.
While the 100-Floor Vambery Tower Laboratory of Lunar Knights has the fairly reasonable stipulation of "floor number equals enemy level," the fifth and tenth floors of each series of ten can be incredibly frustrating for several reasons: The fifth floors have no Edge Gravity and wind constantly screwing with your movement (and falling off an edge is an instant Game Over, while just having a character killed results in switching to the other character, which itself causes the problem that if your gunslinger is dead, four of the enemies require timed guarding to kill them very slowly by bouncing their projectiles back at them), and there are enemies on every platform that can inflict confusion, removing your ability to lock on to enemies and randomly rotating your movement axis. The tenth floors, meanwhile, are winding hallways with stun-inducing Evil Eye turrets and multi-hit-immune Lizardmen that must all be killed in order to progress. After a certain amount of time, giant spiked balls (which deal damage in the quadruple digits) fall from the ceiling at regular intervals, and normally the Lizardmen are smart enough not to walk into them. If you don't have the Bomber gun, missing a Lizardman or an Evil Eye can be the death of you.
Gears Of War...oh my god, Gears of War has the Kryll level. You're in a junker, driving through some wrecked streets, and have to kill the aforementioned Goddamned Bats with a UV turret. Simple enough. However, you can't drive and fire at the same time, so have to switch between the two. And even though there are three people in the vehicle, you are apparently the only one capable of doing anything.
- And oh dear fuck, you better not be trying this on co-op. One person does the weapon, one person does the driving! Hooray! Except you still can't drive and shoot at the same time. You better have the best communications skills in the world, or else your gunner is going to be shooting a weak beam while your driver is going to be driving at half speed. And God help you if one of the Kryll gets stuck at a point where you can't shoot it and keeps doing damage.
  - This level is all about the driver, the trick is to stop shooting anything about halfway through and let your (Hopefully decent) driver lay down on the gas to speed out before the Krylls make you aspolde.
- Oh fuckity fuck they did not learn their lesson with the sequel. In 2, you get the joy of driving a similar tank across frozen lakes while artillery punches holes in it (touching water = instant death, as you might imagine.) And then you have to fight through many, many checkpoints while Seeders bomb you, Reavers try to block you, and troikas blast the hell out of your armor.
The Sewer level in Enter The Matrix. How bad is it? Let me count the ways:
- Dull colors and pitch-black areas throughout, making it insanely easy to get lost. (This level is, in this editor's opinion, Exhibit A in The Case Against the Real Is Brown Aesthetic.)
- Three escort missions that will end the game if any of your fellow rebels die.
- Bottomless Pits everywhere. If you do not jump in just the right manner in a couple areas, you just drop to your death like a stone.
The Sewers in Blood Rayne 2 started out a fun level, with layouts for good combats, well-placed explosives, opportunities to blast minigun turrets, and the longest railgrinds to shoot down. When the suicide bombers showed up, they showed up en masse, and required harpooning puzzles to survive and get through areas, including Playing Tennis With The Boss at the end of the level.
The nightmare levels in Max Payne. They each start off cool and creepy, and then tack on an infuriating maze. The first maze has you running down featureless hallways endlessly until you take the right combination of turns. The second has you running around a maze of bloodtrails in otherwise featureless blackness. Every time you reach a dead end, a scream plays that exactly mirrors your own.
Resident Evil 5, from the ending of chapter 5 onwards, changes from "zombies" to "dead guys with guns". Which is especially horrible since you can't run with a gun but the enemy can. Good luck.
- On co-op mode, the little portion of level before the actual fight with Wesker. You're running away from Wesker inside of an active volcano and Player 1 and 2 get separated. While Player 2 as Sheva is still running away, a rock bridge collapses and you're dangling over lots of lava. The only way to get her to climb up is to mash the same button for a long time and it's VERY unforgiving. If Player 2 falls, the level starts all over again. You'd expect Player 1 to be able to come help but they can't, so the entire level hinges on one player's button mashing abilities.
- Level 5-3. Chris and Sheva have to go through three Reapers, a small army of Lickers, Albert Wesker, and Jill Valentine. Trying to get an "A" ranking on this level is a horrible experience.
- Level 4-2, mainly because it shows how limited Sheva's AI is. There is a giant laser beam that is scorching the ground, and Sheva has a hard time understanding that it is not a good idea to go chasing after enemies instead of dodging the laser. Then the developers apparently forgot what game they were working on and added a long Light And Mirrors Puzzle to go through, with killer light.
- 6-3. Okay, what do you have to do again? Oh right, take down a massive mob of AK 74 wielding Majini, one regular Gatling Gun Majini, one super Gatling Gun, two reapers, and two boss fights. Thank God for selectable chapters and rocket launchers. Good luck getting an S rank.
'Fear Effect', in numerous areas, most notably the part where you have to sneak through the kitchen. You have an uzi. Everywhere else, you have a chance to shoot the bad guy who's trying to kill you. Why is it that one scrawny little guy in a chef's hat can cause your death by just acting surprised to see you?

Close Third Person Shooter

Fire Emblem

Fire Emblem 10 (Radiant Dawn) has a level near the end of the game where you have to fight dozens of dragons to make your way to the very powerful king of Goldoa. Their brute force and numbers makes up for their terrible strategy and poor luck, and they feature both physical and magic attacks. Unless you use the battle save (unavailable in Hard and less than fully honorable at any difficulty), one mistake can cost hours of work.
- There's also one earlier in the game (Chapter 3-13) where you have to play as under-leveled characters fighting against a nearly endless wave of laguz. Especially egregious because Ike, the best unit in the game to which everything falls in two hits, is the enemy boss. You have to rely upon mostly brain-dead ally units to do the dirty work for you, and only one of them, (the one referred to by fans as the "3-13 Archer") actually puts up a fight. There were several joke topics on Game FAQs about how "3-13 Archer" was the best character in the game.
  - Don't forget that Soren might have a Blizzard tome by now, which not only allows him to attack from half the map away and probably kill anyone who isn't being rescued, but waste a really good tome on units that you don't want to kill.
  - At least 3-13 is redeemed (somewhat) by the Crowning Music Of Awesome it plays. 4-3 doesn't have quite this much luck. Sure, it's probably the least scrappy of the Fire Emblem desert levels (which, given how bad they always seem to be, isn't saying much)... but then try playing it your first time through without a guide. You won't realize that Sothe's ultimate weapon and the Dragonfoe scroll (both of which are EXTREMELY helpful in Endgame) are buried here, much less where. You won't know to send Micaiah to the far east (which is quite counterintuitive, by the way) to get Stefan. And you won't know that you have to hurry to gather kills before the Black Knight shows up and annihilates all the enemies in his path. Yeah, in case you didn't get the message, that level is a MASSIVE Guide Dang It.
Any Fog Of War chapter in any game is met with groans of disgust, but "Battle Before Dawn" in FE7 has a reputation for being particularly sucktastic, especially in hard mode.
Radiant Dawn's 4-5: the one with hoardes of feral laguz coming at you, swamp that lowers movement rate everywhere, and a boss that would summon four more enemies every single turn, and, if you got close to him, would teleport away. At least it's a mage boss.
FE6 has one late in the game. Chapter 21: The Sword Of Seals. Let's see, we've got reinforcements arriving in groups of four, and as many as five of these groups arrive on certain turns early on. Most of these are Dragon Riders/Dragonlords, one of the toughest classes out there. It's also a really big level. Then once you get close to the boss, you've got another really powerful enemy character showing up, one that all indications thus far have shown might be recruitable. He isn't. He won't attack you, mercifully, but he and his units will get in your way if you decide not to engage them in battle. Luckily, reports that you have to leave him alive to get to the Gaiden Level aren't true. Then there's a boss whose HP breaks the usual cap and who also has insane strength and defense. Here's hoping your mages have either been loaded with Angelic Robes (which you can actually buy in the secret store in this game) or have developed high dodge rates. Oh, and don't bother staying near the start and waiting for the waves of reinforcements to come to you, or else you'll have trouble beating the level in 30 turns, which is required to get the Gaiden level—and remember, you need to get every Gaiden level to unlock the Perfect Run Final Boss.
- On that note, Chapter 16, Retaking the Capital. There's a rather powerful enemy General who must be kept alive in order to unlock the Gaiden level. I recommend putting him to sleep to get the bulk of your forces past him and leaving one unit with high HP and dodge, stripped of their weapons and packing an Elixir or two, in his range to keep him busy. Also, mages/sages and monks/bishops with Bolting/Purge.
Any time there's a desert level in an FE game, you know trouble is headed your way, because your movement on the desert is mega-slow. Paladins normally move 8 spaces, but on deserts it's 2 spaces. Magicians (Non-mounted of course—hope you trained some. And no, this doesn't include the Spoony Bard.) aren't affected by this, and neither are fliers, which the enemy army typically has a whole lot of. FE6 makes it worse by forcing you to use Sophia—a level ONE magician who dies in one shot from just about everything—on is desert level, which just so happens to include Fog Of War. And you need to keep her alive AND pass the level in 25 turns or you won't get the Bonus Level. Now, desert levels typically hide items in the sand. You find them by putting a Thief or high-luck-stat unit on the space where the item is (just barely evades Guide Dang It by putting the items near bones on the map). Going back to FE 6, you have to protect Sophia in Fog Of War, worry about the time limit AND worry about finding all the items... AND one final item that only Sophia can find! Did I mention the Bishop with a Sleep spell who can freeze Sophia and make her helpless to just about anything? And odds are she won't resist it either—her resistance is low, considering she's level ONE.
- C15 of Path of Radiance. Not only do you have a desert that slows down everyone except mages, flying units, and thieves; the map is full of Laguz shapeshifters whose stats after transformation are impossible to predict. Between this, the Guide Dang It locations of the treasures and Stefan, and the fact that you're rewarded for not killing the Laguz who are making every effort to kill you...
Chapter 13 in Shadow Dragon. Shooters and their 3 to 10 range all but flood the map. They are at least immobile for the most part, so you can shake off the mobile enemies—which are few at all, and easily taken care of individually even on Hard 5—and then proceed to drain their ammo....except each of them has more than 5 shots and the sole Fort on the map is covered by most of the Shooters. Either that or relying on luck and the fact that the AI Shooters won't necessarily attack people in their range when recruitable characters like the one in this chapter will attack the very people who can recruit them regardless of reasoning.

Nintendo Wars

Advance Wars has a number of levels that stray away from genuine challenge into Fake Difficulty and general annoyance:
- Crystal Calamity in Advance Wars Dual Strike is the scrappiest of many teeth gnashing missions. Your first objective in the level is to fire off all nine Silos in the level whilst operating under a real time timer in an otherwise turn based game. The Timed Mission is one thing, but if the enemy secures even ONE Silo, you lose. What's worse than that is that if you spend too much time fighting and do too much damage to the enemy forces you charge their special moves, leading to the very definite possibility of an enemy tag break that grants Black Hole two turns for each unit meaning they'll almost certainly reach at least one silo. Talk about Fake Difficulty. And it doesn't even end there, as there's a second objective once the first one is done, and if you mess up there, you have to repeat the whole thing again.
- Pincer Strike. So many units, so many indirects, so much forest, so much fog, so much possibility of a Tag Break involving Drake, so much Fake Difficulty.
  - Pincer Strike becomes really, really easy with Sasha and Colin on Blue Moon. Lots of funds per turn, nothing to spend it on and the ease with which Market Crash is charged = no tag power for Jugger/Drake.
  - Or use the 3-day strategy. Yes, it's possible to beat that mission in 3 days.
- Surrounded, especially the Hard version. It's made even worse that you don't automatically win by routing the enemy force, and only win by capturing the towers with your ever so slow Infantry, so Kindle looks like a big time cutscene abuser.
- Verdant Hills. The AI just loves to Tag Break ending on Javier's turn. Since Javier ensures control of at least one tower, he will have so much defense that he pretty much prevents you from retaliating against your reduced control over the chokepoint.
- Ring of Fire has difficulty dissonance on its fronts. How does the top front manage to be so very difficult but the bottom one which is the one that matters manage to be so very easy?
- Neverending War on Hard Campaign involves having the map flooded with enemy Neotanks while you can't deploy anything better than a normal Tank. Some suggest to get the airport, but that's still a dragged out war. And the 100 Speed limit is how many Days again?
- Into The Woods. Just......Into The Woods.
- Dark Ambition is a boring piece of garbage thanks to Olaf's Winter Fury power that makes pushing through the defense of the HQ so annoying. In fact, if it weren't for that Stealth you get, you probably would lose thanks to the Megatank. (Yeah, what were you thinking, Allied Nations? You regarded the reverse engineering possibility and they actually would be causing you to lose if they actually had a Stealth of their own.)
Sunrise in Days of Ruin also qualifies. The Nest provides explosive bombs to rip apart your units at the most inconvenient times, infinite free units which can whatever Caulder damn well pleases, and lasers covering rough terrain to keep your forces spread thin and repeatedly suffer the abuse. And it's made worse that Caulder, with daily healing and ridiculous combat boosts to anything near enough his unit or just his unit itself, makes Sturm look like a Joke Character (considering the general toned down CO effects). Watch as a Duster with him loaded effortlessly destroys your Fighter. It's amazing how the level has a consistent Day-To-Day guide on You Tube that makes it so easy to beat. Oh, and here's the best part: you have to repeat the level 10 times to get a certain medal.
- Said Day-To-Day guide is pretty much the only way to complete it, and even that only if Caulder feels like following it. For instance, if he uses a Fighter instead of a Duster, you're screwed because he's only able to target your precious bombers instead of being distracted by other units. Also, said guide completes the mission in around 10 days at most. If you don't win by 13, Caulder pretty much tells you to give up. Now thats nothing uncommon for video game villains, but unlike most others, he's not bluffing.
  - This completes the mission in six Days.
The "Kanbei's Error?" mission of the original Advance Wars. The normal Campaign version of it is quite easy, with the biggest challenge being if you're trying to unlock an optional series of missions that requires you to finish this mission and the two previous in a certain number of turns (and even that's not too hard). The Advance Campaign version, though, cranks the difficulty way, way up, making it borderline impossible to win without a day-by-day guide or lots of trial and error.
Metro Map in Days of Ruin. The blue team not only starts with a property advantage, but get to work with a nasty forest clump that is even more bothersome to the player. It desperately needs a Day-To-Day guide, but the sole one available is for the high score that requires too much luck, even with Save Scumming.

Super Robot Wars

Due to the length of the Super Robot Wars series, a number of potential scrappy levels have shown up in the games, like the Macross Plus stage in Alpha 3. You begin the stage with only two units, both of which have fairly low HP and damage. Your enemies include a rather large number of units, particularly the infamous Ghosts, a new type of plane which has downright insane dodge rates, possibly the highest in the game, bar a few bosses. Normally, this wouldn't be much of a problem, as your characters can usually cast buffs on themselves in order to increase their own hit and dodge rates. However, for the beginning of the stage, you not only have no access to your buffs, but your morale is down, meaning an overall decrease in stats. Despite having two of the fastest pilots in the game out, you rarely get above a 30% chance to hit. Even when backup finally arrives, you still have no way of increasing your chances to hit for a good while, so even getting through the stage at that point is an exercise in luck, frustration, and lots of soft-resets.
- The Scrappy Level is OG Gaiden Stage 15. Not only it pits you against a horde of (thankfully not reinforcements coming) enemies which has crazy dodges, united morale point... it later features one winning condition that requires a certain character to do it. Then, Player Punch occurs, then That One Boss appear... Good God, this level not only frustrates me on the game, but also frustrates me on the story and mentality to the point that I really wish this level could just go away...
  - Let's go for a classic: Super Robot Wars 3, "true" final mission. You're on a map with a gran total of THREE enemy units, two of which are the infamous Valcyon (the final boss mecha of SRW2), and the other being the Neo effing Granzon. Now, count the facts that in this game Focus and Hot Blood were RARE seishin, you couldn't upgrade neither mobility nor weapons of your units, morale raising seishins had a prohibitive cost and the two Valcyons were weak enough to die in a few hits without effectively raising your morale. Add that the final boss's morale went up by at least 15 for each turn due to your characters hitting him (not counting eventually shot down units), he could fire TWO times for each turn (so did your units, but it was more like a 'get twice the chances of getting shot down'), had insanely high HP and Armor and his morale could cap at 200 which meant EVERY SINGLE ATTACK WOULD KILL YOUR UNIT RIGHT AWAY....
Super Robot Wars Destiny. All of it. It starts out as a great game, with a lot of anime getting their introduction into the franchise, such as Megazone23, Godmars, Daltanius, Macross 7, and Big O. It also explores the idea of what would've happened if the Earth had been sealed away, Irui Ganeden's goal in Super Robot Wars Alpha 2. And it ALSO features the OZ and the Neo-Zeon Movement as allies, simply because they're the only groups left that have the manpower to save the Earth, meaning Haman Karn arguably makes her debut as a Super Robot Wars protagonist. Then things get sour, fast. The Original Generation mooks are unbelievably fast and accurate to the point they're more dangerous than the final boss, every Super Robot has abysmal armor to the point even if fully upgraded so they're useless by the halfway point of the game, and you'll probably be using Fire Bomber as a blatant crutch.
- You want scrappy, Try Mission 23 of that game, You cannot destroy the Adrasteas in that mission or it is game over, and you cannot allow the enemy to advance to the other side of the map which means you have to box in 2 Adrasteas and reduce their HP to 20% while knocking off the enemies flunkies, then the Reinforcements, do not get me started on them, because you have to fight a THIRD Adrastea in addition to his the flunkies that he brings, and even before that you have to fight 6 Garland GR-2's. (Garlands have High evasion rates) Which means you will be spamming Seishins out the ass just to keep up with protecting the area you are ordered to guard.
- Another mission that will piss the hell out of you is Mission 37 which is a two part mission but the second half is what will reallly drive you mad! In the second half of that mission you have to hit 4 switches, one every 8 turns, the real problem is that the enemies have high evasion/accuracy and can respawn if you don't leave 6 of them active. So mentioning the Fire Bomber Units being a crutch, yeah you will need them for this.
There is also Super Robot Wars 2's final stage. Similar layout to 3's, with you against the Granzon, Valsion, and two Punch Clock Villains from Gundam ZZ of all series. Things go sour fast if you want to beat the Granzon for the Bragging Rights Rewards. The game, as long as you know what you're doing, isn't impossible or even very long... but by GOD that level is hard since the Granzon is immune to all projectile attacks and armor three times as thick as the Valsion's.
Pretty much the meat of both the OG games on GBA fits this trope if you're going for the skill points.
- Speaking of which, the introduction of the Inspectors in OG 2. "But it's a Hopeless Boss Fight," you say. "you're supposed to lose!" No, not this one. This one is Hopeless only in that it's damn near impossible to win. The challenge of that stage is surviving. With only a battleship which you have had few to no opportunities to build up (depending on the route split) and three mid-level mecha, which have had no opportunities to be powered up (if you were able to get a certain Secret weapon, that's about it). Against a bunch of Mooks, a couple enemy battleships, and three End-game bosses that can probably kill your mecha in a single hit. And you have to escape through the far side of the map. That is to say, right through them.
  - Oh and get this: One of the secrets of the game requires that you not escape the battle, but you have to beat them, and taking out one of the most dangerous for last. And due to the set-up of the stage, it will be tough every time, even with the bonuses normally gained though a New Game Plus.
The final stage of the PSP remake of Advance. Tough grunts and ridiculously high HP bosses with HP regen are nothing new, especially if you took the Nadesico route at the last path split and had to fight Don Zaucer... but unlike most levels in this game (or in the non-skill point using installments of the franchise in general,) there is a TURN LIMIT. You have 10 turns to wade through the strongest grunts in the game, backed up by TWO overpowered bosses, one of whom as far as I can tell has an automatic 0% chance of being hit (and not the type that goes away after one attack,) with the only ways to even HIT her being to use accuracy boosting spells (and SP is rather limited in this game overall, though by no means as bad as in certain other titles,) and her own counterattack range and accuracy being ridiculously huge. Thankfully, she's not REQUIRED to be defeated to clear the stage (though have fun clearing it with her sniping you constantly)... but the actual boss is so much worse. Some 260K HP, of which he regenerates 10% a turn, exceptionally high EN, which he also regenerates, and his attacks use far less of it than they ought to (not that you can really hope to drain his EN even without the regen, due to the turn limit), a VERY powerful and accurate MAP attack, and the ability to move and attack TWICE per turn. Oh, and while not guaranteed, he is surrounded by high HP/Armour grunts, some of whom have HP regen, all of which if they are right next to him can Support Defend (take a hit for him for half damage) THRICE PER TURN. It might be worth noting that this is also the game where enemy accuracy increases with each attack - if you dodge an attack, the next attack aimed at that character will be at a cumulative 15% accuracy boost, meaning that with enough attacks at any one character, eventually they WILL get hit (and there are more than enough enemy units for this).

Final Fantasy Tactics

Final Fantasy Tactics has two. The first is the Dorter Slums area, the fourth storyline battle in the game. At this point, you've got some level 3 characters (if you're lucky), and very few abilities, not to mention two guest characters who strain believability with their inepititude. They have three archers (one of which is mercifully unarmed), two black mages, and a comparatively-high-HP knight. In other words, they have range, you don't. If you're trying not to lose any of your generic troops, the battle is a lesson in patience and luck.
- The second level is the Duel Battle between Wiegraf and Ramza. Unless you have a very specific setup with a very specific inventory, this battle sucks. Wiegraf has an attack with an effect range of four squares that cannot miss, and he will always move to the maximum range before attacking, and does lots of damage (three shots in three rounds will kill an equivalent level Ramza if you don't heal). So it comes down to either killing Wiegraf before he kills you, which is hard because he's probably more mobile than you, or fighting a long, drawn-out battle consuming expensive resources. Did I mention that, on average, Wiegraf blocks two out of three attacks, even when the hit percentage is 90%? Extremely annoying battle.
  - And immediately after the duel, with no chance to save you go up against Velius, That One Boss.
  - The absolute worst part about the duel with Wiegraf is that it's one of a string of battles you cannot interrupt. It's preceded by a Storming The Castle level, and if your only save file is after the successful storming, you are trapped, with no chance to withdraw, buy new gear, gain more Job Points or EXP, obtain the necessary very-specific-setup-and-inventory, etc.
- The first fight against Marquis Elmdor and his two assassin girls. On the one hand, all you have to do to end the fight is critically injure one of them. OTOH, if you've been leveling normally up to that point in the game, they outclass you in every way. The assassins can inflict negative status (KO, charm, confuse) on a character with 100% success if the character isn't protected against them. The Marquis himself is essentially a souped up Samurai, meaning he can use powerful area attacks that require no charge time. Oh, and he can teleport with 100% success. The PSP version makes it even worse because he has Safeguard, meaning you can't steal his great equipment. The worst part? This first fight is an Escort Mission; if the relatively pathetic Guest Character is KOed, you lose. Naturally, the character will rush right into the enemies.On top of all of this, if you don't have ninjas on the field, the bosses will always go first and you have a very high chance of not even getting a turn before the Guest Character is dead and the battle failed. Like the above fight against Wiegraf, this is also one of a string of battles that you can't interrupt.
  - Just to add to it, the assassins can Invite your party members—not Charm, Invite. As in, convince them to pull a Face Heel Turn and teleport away with Elmdor at the battle's conclusion.
  - The easiest way to do this is to actually utilize a Game Breaker exploit by capturing a Pig during the one story battle in which this is possible. Breeding and poaching the offspring in your roster can get you Chantages, which give female characters who equip them permanent Regen and Re Raise. Any female unit with this item equipped is completely unkillable. Raise up a pair of female ninjas with these equipped and have them rush the assassins, since ninjas are the only class that can go first. The assassins will ignore Rafa and gun for your ninjas, who will die, then Reraise on their respective turns and be able to start wailing on the assassins with no consequences. Without the Chantages, this battle is a lot harder, though you can still use ninjas as bait and revive them once they've drawn fire from Rafa.
  - If you can't catch a pig, you might want to send in a couple of Chocobos that are no doubt filling out your ranks. Sending in two Chocobos along with Ramza and one other unit will not only cause the assassins to focus on the Chocobos, but it will cause Rafa to back down instead of charging into the battle. Unexplained, but it works every time.
"An Earnest ~~Two~~ Five Timer Date" in Final Fantasy Tactics A 2.
Side mission "Time to Act" in Final Fantasy Tactics A 2. You are in charge of protecting 5 moogles (Black Mage, Moogle Knight, Fusilier, Tinker, and Thief) and you're only allowed to send out ONE person from your clan to support them. What makes this extremely aggravating for most players is some of the moogles can be downright stupid and suicidal. The Tinker will constantly spam Red Spring if no one on your side has Haste or he will use Green Gear to try and cause Poison to the enemy. Tinker abilities can hit either friend or foe, which makes this a Luck Based Mission. The moogle Thief may spend more time trying to steal than actually fighting. If one of the moogles gets knocked out, you lose.

Other

Chapter 7 in Valkyria Chronicles is one of these combined with a That One Boss and a heaping portion of Guide Dang It. Seriously, it's so absurd that it's almost laughable. You have to fight a gigantic tank about ten times the size of your own. It's armed with five machine gun turrets that can cut your infantry to shreds instantly, and two gigantic cannons that can slice off more than half your tank's HP in one go. First, you have to destroy all of its machine gun turrets so you can approach the monstrosity with your Lancers (not that kind). Then, you have to shoot at the bottom of a bunch of conveniently-placed ruin walls so that they fall over, blocking the path of the tank. It will then shoot at the wall with its main cannon, which causes three radiators to pop up. These radiators are only around for one turn, and take about four attacks to destroy - assuming you don't miss, which you often will - and you can only destroy one of them per turn. After you destroy two of the radiators, an invincible Valkyrie warrior arrives along with other reinforcements. The Valkyrie can instantly kill any character that isn't your tank, often knocking out three or four footsoldiers in a single turn. If you manage to destroy the final radiator, you then have to attack and destroy the tank itself now that it's finally vulnerable, while scrambling to rescue the soldiers that got killed off by the Valkyrie. Does this sound bad enough yet? There's also a strict turn limit.
- Actually the radiators can be killed by just lobbing one grenade into it rather than shooting it with your Lancer that many times. Not to say that the stage is not still incredibly hard though.
Any X-COM: UFO Defense mission that has chryssalids. Can you say "zombie apocolypse with ambushing giant insects creating more zombies"?
- X-COM: Terror From the Deep missions with underwater flying chryssalids. Namely, mixed crew missions, alien base attacks, alien artifact sites, T'leth, lobsterman battleships and dreadnoughts shot down underwater.
- MOST missions in XCOM2: Terror from the Deep, including cargo ship terror missions, the second part of the alien base raid, and the Alien Artifact raid. The latter two have a LOT of Tentaculats.
- Similarly, there are two types of level in UFO Aftermath that will give you a bad case of twitching: anything involving the Deathbellows (aka the Squad-Killing Abomination From Hell), and most things involving bases, especially in the later stages when the aliens are breaking out the big guns. Having your entire squad wiped out by the balloon fish behind that door you carelessly opened? Hurts. Having them wiped out by an alien rocket launcher with a blast radius larger than some European countries? Hurts even more.
The Nightdwellers Level of Disgaea. Despite the fact that the intro to the level is one of the funniest scenes in the game, the level itself is terrible unless you're horribly overleveled. The entire stage is covered with a GeoEffect that causes everybody, allies and enemies, to randomly teleport around the stage at the end of each turn, which makes forming any coherent strategy pretty much impossible. It is possible to destroy the symbol that causes the effect, but it has a ton of HP, and you have to rely on luck to get any strong attacker near it. And you can only hope that your healers don't get teleported next to that freaking Red Ranger...
In Heroes Of Might And Magic V, the third chapter of the Inferno campaign requires you to defeat an enemy who starts with three Sylvan castles (a faction type that's unbelievably imbalanced), and all you're given is one Inferno settlement that can't access its best units (the only redeeming quality of their entire army). You are required to make a run and grasp the first enemy castle ASAP, but even after you succeed at that, the enemies' attacks will start raining on you, having multiple dragons and ents, units that you can't even match before you can upgrade the castle you conquered into its full power (because the only one that didn't have a dragon portal to start with was the outermost one). In addition, the enemy has a ridiculously powerful hero who will keep respawning in their biggest castle every time you defeat him, something that by the normal mechanics of the game wouldn't even be possible (if your hero is beaten, you lose the game).
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.
Age of Wonders features a very difficult campaign in general, but the third dwarf mission, The Hall of Heroes really takes the cake. You start with a decent-size town and few resources, with your objective being to find the titular location. The briefing conveniently forgets to mention that you will come under attack almost immediately from the north and east by Frostlings, while the Dark Elves attack simultaneously from underground. The teleporter to get to the Hall is hidden underground, past heavy fortifications, and is personally guarded by two Karaghs. Resources are few, the AI will seem to be everywhere, and it will take many tries before you either get lucky or figure out one of the few strategies that has a decent chance of working.

Close Turn Based Strategy

Grand Theft Auto

Ohhhhhh, the race against Hilary in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Imagine racing against a supercharged muscle car with a puny little family sedan, with the cops on your tail. This one little mission has spawned countless pages of text on GameFAQs explaining every theory and method in this world to beat it.
- Not to mention the fact that the police only pursue you and leave Hillary alone. Even worse, the game inadvertently punishes you for getting too far behind or too far ahead of Hillary, because your main obstacle, traffic, only appears within 100 meters or so of your car. If the distance between your car and Hillary's is great enough, you get bogged down in traffic while he has a clear road with no such obstacles, either allowing him to catch up (if he's behind you) or get yet further ahead (if he's in front of you). Either way, much hair was torn out.
- And there's a glitch where you might fall straight through a bridge just before you cross the finish line. Hoo, boy.
- 'Checkpoint Charlie' from the same game. A checkpoint race where you need every single second to do the course... and you have to do it in a boat, which means that you can never predict how you'll come off of a wave, or how you'll land after a jump. Not something you'd ever want to do again.
- This editor recalls a tactic that worked. Along the race course is a safe house of sorts you can purchase, or at least a garage you can store a car in indefinitely. Before the race, store a Cheetah or sports car of choice. When you do the race, you still have to do good, but once you get to the safe house, quickly switch cars. Granted you may lose time, but with good driving skills you can win the race with relative ease.
- The worst thing about this mission is that it doesn't even make sense. Hilary is supposed to be the best driver around, that's why you want him. So why would you have to race him first? If he only works for people that can beat him, he's oviously NOT the best driver. If you hire a plumber, you also don't have to prove to him that you're better at plumbing than he is, because if you were, you wouldn't need him.
  - The whole point of that mission was to show Hillary he could trust you and that you would not leave him. He has abandonment issues according to one of the characters.
Grand Theft Auto III has a mission in which you're given the crappiest, slowest, worst handling car in the entire game and told to go to another island and shoot up dozens of members of an enemy faction. Anyone who's ever played a GTA game can tell you it's hard to even get to your destination without wrecking the car you're currently driving; now imagine having to get there, deal with a good amount of armed gang members and get back to where you started, all with a car that's ridiculously easy to flip over (flipping over a car in GTA irretrievably destroys it) and with the police relentlessly chasing you all the time. Oh, did I mention you cannot under any circumstance leave the car? And to top it all off, when (not if) you wreck the car, the goon that's traveling with you is revealed to be its owner, and he and his pal get pissed and proceed to shoot you full of holes.
- The ambulance optional mission is also ridiculously difficult for forcing you to collect all the 78 patients needed to get the infinite run in one go. You cannot fail after so many patients and build up to a total, as you can with the fire truck, police car or taxi optional missions. The ambulance also handles and takes damage quite poorly, accidentally running over any patient forces you to restart, and the cops refuse to give you even this much free reign—ding a cop car and you are still fair game, humanitarian mission or not. Sure, it is optional, but that infinite run is very useful, even if you are not after Hundred Percent Completion. Expect to spend lots of time on it.
- In the final mission, "The Exchange", you are stripped of all your weapons and dropped in a courtyard outnumbered and outgunned by Cartel members. Then you have to negotiate the wharf, which is a sniper alley, followed by shooting down a helicopter with a rocket launcher from a long distance away. If the chopper gets away, you start the whole thing over again.
- The "Espresso 2 Go" mission. Nearly impossible to hit all the espresso stands in time unless you look for them all first(they show up on the map when you see them), very tiring. Even more tedious finding a good route.
"Big 'N' Veiny". Picking up magazines while using a none-too-good and rather unstable van, over a long and timed route. You start with 20 seconds on the timer and each magazine adds only two seconds. It does not help that you can lose the trail briefly and waste valuable time trying to pick it up again. Sure, there's a "shortcut" method involving pushing the van all the way to the end so you can kill the eventual target and spare yourself the trouble, but it is real time-consuming.
Flight school in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Hours upon hours upon god-damned hours at failing to pull off perfect barrel rolls and loop-de-loops, and it's necessary to continue the game.
- The New Model Army mission which is the remote control mission from Hell. A form of escort mission where you control a helicopter ferrying about things, having to precision drop items and bombs, all in a tight time limit.
- Zero's first mission was truly frustrating—for a while, it made even the next two seem managable—in that you stand on a roof, shooting down model bomber planes with a minigun so they don't get a chance to destroy Zero's transmitters. These little buggers just keep coming from every single direction and worse still, our pacifist "friend" Zero simply won't stop whining at you.
- And how about the mission where you have to act as some sort of air pirate and jump from your plane to another one in order to kill four mafia assassins? It's not just the difficulty of the mission (flight school is way more difficult) but the sheer ridiculousness of not choosing to just gun them down after they land. And also the minutes you spend flying until you get to the place where you intercept the incoming airplane.
- The one where the government guys land at your airstrip, and you have to drive up the ramp of their plane as it's taking off. All while dodging the guys still on the airstrip and the barrels falling out of the plane. The barrels fall right in your path, but if your speed drops even a tiny little bit to avoid them you won't catch up to the plane. Gaahh!
Any of the missions in Grand Theft Auto IV where you need to chase someone in a vehicle and gun them down at the same time. The shooting-while-driving mechanic is well implemented; it's just really hard to track your target effectively while avoiding the obstacles inherent to driving at top speed. And you'll always have to drive at top speed. Complicating this is that half of the missions require you to kill your target while they're still driving and the other half have scripted events where the target gets out of their vehicle and goes on foot (and they're invulnerable until they do this)—and the game usually doesn't give you any indication of which it's going to be.
- The motorcycle chase ones are the worst, because you'll usually fall off your bike from the slightest brush against any obstacle (at which point they'll invariably escape by the time you can get back on.) I nearly broke a controller on the mission "I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots, And Your Motorcycle," in which you have to chase and gun down a ~~professional stunt cyclist~~ mob guy who starts the mission with a block's worth of lead on you, while the game throws every conceivable obstacle at you, up to and including trucks overturning right in front of you. I finally got it after I managed to shoot out his back tire (while this was a recommended tactic, it only happened out of sheer luck.)
- You're forgetting the mission in which you must chase two motorcyclists through a subway tunnel. Eventually they split up, and don't forget how many trains are coming at you.
- After completing the "Ruff Rider" mission Weazel News chatter on the radio reports something like 'two men on motorcycles chasing through the streets'. To which the answer was 'Sod that'. Just jack a nearby car, crush the biker under your wheels and chuck a grenade into the mix. Kaboom. Ker-ching'.

Other

Driving cars in Mafia The City Of Lost Heaven is rather awkward, due to their erratic controlling—realistic, because the game's set in 1930's when you didn't exactly have great manouverability in cars. This doesn't really bother normally, but then the game throws in a level where you have to win a race with such a car in order to advance the story. Despite the developers releasing a patch where you could choose the race's difficulty level, the racing bit still causes very uncomfortable memories for many.
Sosa's mansion, the final level of Scarface: The World is Yours. Three bosses, a ridiculous number of Mooks armed with the same weapon Tony gets to use and no checkpoints. Sure, the first one is an Anti Climax Boss... but that bunch of Mooks you need to kill to get to him will reappear if you let Tony die and are booted back to the start. The second one is fairly okay if you've still enough health on Tony, but the third and final boss is effectively Implacable compared to the others before. Alejandro Sosa takes multiple chest shots from the otherwise-one-hit-kill Desert Eagle and can dish it out as good as he can get.
Sibrand's assasination in Assassins Creed. Insta-death water. Jumping from pole to pole over said water with mechanics that don't work very well.
- And the level leading up to Robert de Sable, which involves nothing but mowing down legions of soldiers again and again, is plain dull. Historically King Richard went back to Europe because he didn't have enough troops to hold the city he'd just captured—now we know why.
The final bossfight in Prototype: Giant monster with tons of health, your normal attacks are useless, the military are constantly shooting and bombing you while you fight, and the only way to get health is to stop and grab a human to eat. Oh yeah, and you're on a timer. Good luck!

Close Wide Open Sandbox

"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 bump 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.
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.
Incredible Crisis, a minigame compilation/widget game on the PS 1, featured a very annoying level just before its halfway point where the player character has to match the weight of a golden piggy bank with the contents of her shopping bag, Indiana Jones style. Even worse, the player is given less and less time to solve the problem after each subsequent failure, and seriously, who the hell wants to do maths in a party game?!
Even Cooking Mama has an example: In the Hot Dog and Taco recipes of Cooking Mama: Cook Off, you must catch the ingredients in the bun/taco shell, which would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that you can only hold it on the sides of the screen. And the meat falls down in the middle, so you must time it so that it falls on the bun/taco shell in the middle of moving from one side to the other. Hard enough to pass, hell to get a Gold Medal on.
Some of the minigames in Rayman Raving Rabbids can be annoyingly difficult, or just annoying. Like "Bunnies are Heartless to Pigs", where you have to guide a baby pig to its mother through a garbage dump, in which are hidden Rabbids who will jump out and torch you and the pig with a flamethrower if you run into them. The only thing guiding you is the sounds made by the pig (if it starts squealing, there's a Rabbid ahead of you), and you have to listen for them by holding the Wiimote next to your ear. Oh, and you have to do all this in 25 seconds or less. And later, you play a version with a Rabbid distracting you by blowing into an air horn.
- Not to mention that the air horn version would often send too much data to the Wii Remote speaker at once and cause nothing but static or silence for... however long until you inevitably failed the minigame.
- There was also the bathroom-door closing game. A lot of people had enough trouble with just closing the doors, but not me. Then I got to the redux, where there was a Rabbid walking around you couldn't hit. Inevitably, I'd fire on one of the doors just as he decided to walk and get hit by it. Goddammit.
The President's Run in Driver. Your felony meter starts at max, so every cop in town is after you and drives at maximum speed, the roads are slick with rain and snow, and you're driving a slow and sluggishly handling limousine, so the cops are much faster than you. The PSX version also has FBI cars which can cause you to get stuck in the wall. At least your car can take more punishment than usual.
- The Chase in Driv3r. A motorcycle is already hard to control in the first place, in this game it's made doubly hard by the clunky, buggy play controls.
There's a short driving portion of the game Monty on the Run that requires perfectly timed jumps or else you'd die. And there's no way of knowing when to jump unless you've been through it before. I used a cheat to get infinite lives, and still had to play the level 117 times.
The shmup Space Megaforce has twelve levels. Level eight, which seems to take takes place in some kind of ship's graveyard, is the hardest one. In that level, shooting the walls will cause pieces to break off and become dangerous projectiles. Most of your weapons have bullet patterns that will cause you to hit the walls constantly, and most enemies are objects, such as gun turrets, mounted on the walls in places that are hard to hit. It's hard.
The four words that can make any good Lemmings player pull their hair out down to the last follicle: We All Fall Down. Four levels of the same thing, one in each skill tier. One long, high platform that the lemmings start on (with twenty more lemmings added for each skill tier), one long platform below leading to the ship. And all you need to do is dig. It seems simple, until you realize that every single lemming must dig or else they will fall to the lower platform and splatter horridly. If they are even one pixel above the very bottom of the upper platform when they fall, they splat. This puts space to dig at a premium. Oh, and to top off this wonderful tribute to utter masochism, you must save every lemming, or else you can't go on.
- Most players have their own personal Waterloo with that game... little surprise that a common pasttime for fans of the game is to gather as many Lemmings as they can in a tiny space and activate the Nuke button.
That stupid, stupid crossword puzzle from Jump Start 5th Grade. You're supposed to go through the museum to find the answers, but this is impossible. Seriously, try it—it'll take you forever. The only known way to beat this level is to cheat—that is to enter random letters until they turn green, indicating they are correct.
Zack And Wiki: Barbosa's Island starts by making you pull a trap door that will kill you unless you grab a grate in a split-second, and goes downhill from there. Especially frustrating is fighting the skeletons with a sword, and the controls are terrible.
Hitman 2 has a level called At The Gates, where the sole objective is to get from one end of a valley to the other, evading swarms of ninja guards. This isn't actually all that hard in itself. However, the highly trained ninjas apparently do not have the slightest understanding of basic road safety and have a habit of getting themselves run over by the truck convoys going through the underground tunnel. This would invariably result in the body being discovered and the alarm being raised, ruining the player's chances of getting the top mission ranking of Silent Assassin through no fault of their own. This would happen about four times out of five and could happen at any point in the mission, even when you were just seconds from reaching the exit. The only solution was to just keep trying again and again and hoping you got lucky.
- The Motorcade Interception mission of Hitman 2 is an exercise in hair-pulling because of the way the civilians are handled. Their starting positions and walking routes are randomized, and they run to get the nearest guard immediately if they see you with a weapon. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that without a weapon, they don't even notice you exist. Unfortunately, this is a sniping mission, so you have to carry a rifle from either the start of the level or your contact elsewhere to the nest. AND you're liable to get noticed while you're waiting in the nest for the motorcade to pass by, AND it's quite possible to go through all of this and then miss the shot anyway. This is especially annoying if you're trying for Silent Assassin rating.
Wind Hell—I mean, Wind Hill, in PangYa / Albatross18. Unlike on other courses, the wind is not consistent across an entire hole; there are wind currents that differ from the rest of the course's wind, and you don't even know the speed of these currents. Complicating matters is the alteration of the game's physics; slopes will affect your ball much more, rough is much thicker, and the ball has to take an extra bounce before backspinning. And you will now have to deal with a tree on nearly every hole, and the wind currents just love to hang out with the new trees.
The very insanely, long stairway in the communications tower of Metal Gear Solid. You CAN'T avoid getting spotted by a security camera, even when the "Throw a chaff grenade before entering new doors" worked before, forcing Snake to run up an insanely long flight of stairs, being chased by a shitload of enemies—in a game where it's usually suicide to take on more then three or four enemies at a time. Oh yes, there's also the Guide Dang It that if you ran out of the room with the camera instead of rushing for the stairs, you're stuck in an infinitively respawning chamber with no way out (it's probably a glitch, but unwinnable until you reload). Even after mowing all the enemies down, the towers are still irritating for the insanely long time it takes to go up and down it, even when Snake's running.
The slow-tempo stages of the Lumines series. Depending on how filled with blocks your screen is when you get to them, they can either be these or chances to milk craptons of points. Lumines II is quite nasty with these kinds of levels, putting slow levels right before the last stage of each of the game's Challenge modes. In fact, one stage that was in the original had its line speed halved for II.
The planet Telos in Adventures of Rad Gravity is one big Death Course, riddled with Spikes Of Doom, some of which require the health-draining Energy Disc to cross, Advancing Spiked Walls Of Doom, Conveyor Belts of Doom, Smashing Hallway Traps Of Doom, dart-shooters raining down on you, and to top it off, a teleporter maze in the middle of it all.
Ace Combat primarily has these in levels where the mission/parameters have nothing to do with the Difficulty setting; the "game stopper" was AC5's "Four Horsemen," mission 12b. It's only one of the two paths, but you're given no clue that your answer to a wingman's question in mission 10 will have any consequence. Things aren't so bad on the other path, while this one requires you to perform four consecutive timed destructions of radar sites, which means that you have to take into account your weapon's travel time and your own travel time — go past the radar site and you fail, while if you get in position too early you'll have to break/slow down, which can cause a stall or wasted time (especially if you have to turn around to reposition yourself for another attack run), and you have less time between each radar site. Did I mention that your wingmen may mess up their approaches against their own targets which you don't see and cause everyone to have to abort their attack run and try again?
- All of the 21st-century console Ace Combat games have had a mission that involved flying through a tunnel, but other than 04 (the enemy planes are optional, otherwise it's just straight-path flying with altitude changes at the entrance/exit of three straight tunnels and one crooked tunnel that you don't even have to enter) and one of the operations in 6 (optional unless you were going for 100% completion) there was another complication to make the mission harder to complete — not just harder to "get S rank" or unlock stuff, the Scrappy is from — than it sounded:
  - Zero had "Valley of Kings" which made you brave a gauntlet of Anti-Aircraft Artillery, Surface-to-Air Missiles and Pillboxes just to get to the tunnel. Flying above 2000 feet would lead to a missile warning: if you didn't get below that in time, you'd have a missile launched at you from out of nowhere and automatically hit you. Did I mention the bridges in the way? Finally, if you're not using the FAE Bomb or the MPBM you'll need to make multiple tunnel runs since you have to destroy all of the joint locks for each V2 controller before the controller itself can be hit. ('Consolation': at least if you enter the tunnel through the south, the named ace in the tunnel who appears after you destroy the first two controllers is flying away from you and thus makes possibly the game's easiest kill; it's certainly the easier named ace in an Ace Combat game to shoot down.)
  - 5 introduced the twisty-turvy tunnel later used in Zero but with multiple altitude changes along the way (not just at the entrance and exit of the tunnel), had enemy fighters in the tunnel in front of you headed in your direction, and whereas you can just slow down in all other tunnel missions and use autopilot to stabilize your flight path) here you have an enemy fighter hot on your tail the whole time!
  - In "Chandelier" in 6 you had to travel a long way to the action with nothing going on before then having a ton of heavy anti-aircraft fire tossed into your face on top of some ships (including missile boats!) and the last of Strigon Team, ace pilots one and all; after you destroy all of the targets (which will take quite some time since some require multiple hits and from particular angles) your wingman goes down and even heavier AAA appears in the form of a double-stacked line of gun towers; only after you destroy those can you go after the remaining targets and the very end has you flying into the tunnel which itself can attack you by firing a cruise missile into your face. And this is assuming that you got this far, as unlike "Valley of Kings" which gave a definite time limit you have to complete the mission before too many cruise missiles are fired and can hit Gracemeria, so you'll have to guesstimate how much time/cruise missile launches you have left based on the dialogue. (Fortunately if you manage to survive the AAA on the way in, there's a conveyor belt underneath Chandelier that carries the cruise missiles to its rear; destroying the cruise missiles before they can be loaded will buy you some time depending on how you're balancing it with destroying the targets.)
  - That's nothing compared to "The Liberation of Gracemeria" and the horrific boss battle against Ilya Pasternak. Even if you're flying the Nosferatu, it's still extremely hard.
Collecting all the paintings in Animal Crossing. Yeah, you heard me. Other rare sets can take literally a year or more to complete, but at least you can't forge a bug or fossil. Damn you, Crazy Redd!
Obscure: The Aftermath sort of does this with Mei's sister, Jun. It's almost painful enough to just let her die before she goes into it.
The on-foot missions in NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams are hell to get through, especially the ones in Memory Forest and Crystal Castle. Good luck passing, let alone A-Ranking.
- Sky Concert is another annoying example—NiGHTS flies a bit slower than you need to hit the notes in time of the music, and you're only allowed a few misses before getting a Game Over. I've lost count of the times it took me to pass that level...
I'm not sure where to put this since the game has levels of all genres, so I'll just put it under Other for now and someone else can move it. How has nobody mentioned Shadows of the Empire? Two words: Speederbike Level. You're racing against other guys and you have to go at a high speed to beat them. Problem: If you hit something going at any speed above slug-speed? You die. Also, there's a turn every second and there are no end to the obstacles. It also forces you to hit the highest speed possible to make some jumps.
- All in all that is perfectly achievable with a a lot of practice... but then on the highest difficulty the level is at night which coupled with some ever present fog means you can't see crap ahead of you and must run the level on memory... but you can get easily confused given that most of Mos Eisley is made of about the same 10 types of structures at most, so screw that.
Their Finest Hour in Battalion Wars 2 is henceforth nominated. Due to the shaky controls of your options in the Airbase defense, you have to contend with either potentially jumping out of the MG Tower without warning and not necessarily knowing how to get back into it, or if you switch to either air unit, you have to keep track of how you handle the Wiimote or else you might crash into something. Either way, the starting part is annoying. Oh, but the worst is yet to come: there are AA units all over the place, the Airbase you spend the whole time trying to capture will produce Fighters and Gunships, and all you get to fight them with is the Fighters, which, of course, have to contend with the AA units even if you do overcome the faulty controls. It's no wonder the time limit for a Perfect S Rank is 16 minutes.
- In the first game, X-Day. How many times did you die on that beachhead? Or right after that beachhead? Or...
  - There's also "Siege of the Vladstad", which is a perfectly acceptable level right up until the end. And that's even if you realize the Vladstag has a side entrance.
Not really a scrappy level per se, but the desert you must cross to get to California in Oregon Trail II gets on many people's nerves.
Brain Age 2's unskippable connect-the-dot images and acrostics. And when more than one person is using the same game card, drawing a picture of something the game tells you to. All of the above includes getting embarrassed as the game proves it's better than you. But hey, you are facing a professor.

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