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In a video game series, there's usually expected to be a rough increase of difficulty as the series goes on, as to challenge the fans of the original. However, in some cases, this difficulty increase will be a lot harsher than expected, and will send a game series straight into Nintendo Hard or (if something has gone terribly wrong) Platform Hell. Often, this happens with the second game, which becomes the black sheep of the series when the difficulty level of the third game goes to roughly the same level as the first, and it's quite likely to happen when a game receives a Mission Pack Sequel (because difficulty and level design change is usually the only change made). On the other hand, some difficult series can just go straight up when it comes to difficult as the series goes on, such as Platform Hell and Bullet Hell games ( Kaizo Mario World and Super Mario World hacks being good examples), or games like Ghosts N Goblins which started Nintendo Hard, and where the only direction to go for difficulty is up.
Some games get around this by making the game no harder than the original, but including a Hard Mode, or, if there were already difficulty settings in the previous game, a new Harder Than Hard mode.
A subtrope of Sequel Escalation where the difficulty is what's made higher than the original. May lead to the harder game being the Oddball In The Series if difficulty is increased too much, as seems common with second games.
Typically, games that are harder than their predecessors are widely criticized for it.
Compare Harder Than Hard, Surprise Difficulty.
Contrast Sequel Difficulty Drop, Easier Than Easy.
Examples:
- Super Mario Bros (at least the Japanese one branded 'The Lost Levels'). Note that the Lost Levels we got let you save after every level. In the original, you could only continue from the start of each world (assuming you know and don't mess up the code) Also, in the original version, you had to beat the game 8 times to get the secret levels. Without warping.
- Probably also Paper Mario and Mario And Luigi with the second games, at least statistically the vast majority of enemies were made more difficult.
- Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door also introduced Stylish moves and the Superguard Action Command, which made statistically difficult enemies substantially easier, as well as letting you use your companion as a damage sponge in difficult situations.
- Super Mario Galaxy 2 is harder than the first one. The prankster comets crank up the challenges to 11 and World S can overstep Nintendo Hard territory.
- Remember Luigi's purple coins? Remember how there were more coins than you needed, and you had more than 2 minutes, and there weren't a bunch of psychotic clones chasing you down to kill you? Well, It Got Worse.
- On the other hand, this time there are some actual solid platforms to stand on. Good thing, too, because otherwise, it would probably be practically impossible.
- The Legend Of Zelda (Adventure of Link, the one with the RPG elements and such like)
- And then Spirit Tracks following Phantom Hourglass (they have the same engine).
- Yoshi's Island (DS sequel's secret levels compared to the original's secret levels, and probably the same with the world 5 levels).
- Kaizo Mario World 2 was this (Platform Hell games can arguably only go up in difficulty...)
- Super Puzzle World (went from normal puzzles to flat out requiring glitch use and physics manipulation to complete).
- The Second Reality Project (Second game was generally harder and longer than the original)
- Super Mario Infinity (second game had 90mph Bullet Bills and 100 floor Marathon Level dungeons).
- Riven: The Sequel to Myst (yes, that's the actual subtitle) was way, WAY harder than the first. Later games (especially the third, made by the the people behind The Journeyman Project while Cyan was busy with Uru) were more forgiving.
- Here's an example: it was possible, albeit not trivial, to brute-force the ending of the first game without ever having once visited any of the Ages. Everything you need is on Myst proper; finding the red and blue pages and the two halves of the torn-up memo merely tells you where to look. Riven, on the other hand, requires that you make at least one full tour around the island-turned archipelago, which involves a fair share of puzzle-solving, and two major puzzles that must be solved to complete the game involve clues scattered across the entire environment. Reaching the Rebel Age involves not only finding the five animal symbols but also working out the D'ni numeric system, and accessing Gehn's Age requires you to correlate the D'ni symbols for colors with the coordinate locations of five different landmarks. Further minimizing the amount of guesswork the game permits is the fact that one clue out of each set is either lost, broken, inaccessible or otherwise unusable, meaning that the only way to proceed is to find the other four clues and use process of elimination to figure out the missing one.
- Ace Attorney games get harder and harder as the series progresses. Then the trope Inverts for the fourth game, making it easy again.
- Probably because it has a new main and all that.
- To be more clear, the sequels up until Apollo Justice included vaguer clues and higher penalties, including several "make one mistake and you lose" scenarios.
- They also messed with your expectations. In the first game, whenever you did something right, the music would stop and your health bar would slide off-screen. The second and third games subvert the hell out of these expectations, such as keeping the health bar and music on-screen for half the conversation or having the bar slide off... the zoom right back in just in time for a penalty.
- Haggle Man 2 from Retro Game Challenge.
- Guitar Hero II
- Guitar Hero III got even worse. To the point that fan complaint forced Neversoft to ease up for World Tour.
- Prince Of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame is definitely harder than the first game. The enemies are tougher and more numerous, the jumping puzzles have forced two-story falls that hurt, and the Malevolent Architecture is as malevolent as ever.
- Viewtiful Joe 2 is substantially harder than the first game. There's more mooks, bosses have more health bars, and some have unblockable attacks.
- Jak II. Comes along with focusing more on combat.
- Likewise, the Prince Of Persia Sands of Time trilogy.
- X Com Terror From The Deep was much harder than the original due to an undetected bug— in the original game. Specifically, loading a saved game reset the difficulty to the easiest level, no matter what difficulty had been chosen at the start. Reacting to complaints about the game being too easy, the easiest level of Terror from the Deep was made harder than the hardest level of the original game. To make matters worse, the original bug was fixed in the sequel, so if you were foolish enough to choose a difficulty level higher than the easiest one... well, hope you picked out a nice tombstone.
- Not that it mattered - in the original release of the sequel, there was another bug. That locked the game on the highest difficulty.
- Metal Gear Solid 2 - Well, sort of. There are now higher difficulties to test your skills in. There are also more guards and hazards.
- Donkey Kong Country 2. The back of the box even said something like "and they've put some challenge in it this time".
- And then Donkey Kong Country 3 starts easy and ends up MUCH harder than DKC 2.... or just about any platform on the snes.
- Pokemon games themselves have had this trope invert but then play straight. The most notable difficulty spike was in Generation IV. Generation I could be trivialized by a Good Bad Bug, but even without it, it couldn't be that hard to solo with your starter (or Mewtwo). Gen II actually had a Difficulty drop. Despite a few trainers like Whitney and her Miltank and Red (Being high 70s-82) and that Gen II games had better AI than the first, they were a lot easier. Gen III brought the difficulty back to the Gen I level, and while it was somewhat noticeable, it could still be beaten fairly easy. Now Generation IV, however, THAT is when it started to get a lot harder. Not only was there the big Physical-Special split, but the changed movesets also made it so that Pokémon were more likely to know a move that'd utterly screw you. (Much more diverse movesets to deal with weaknesses) Despite that Gen III had some trainers like that (Winona's Altaria can and WILL use Earthquake on you if you have an electric type out), Gen IV has a lot more of them. And as an added bonus, because some types were so few in number in Gen IV, Themed trainers like Gym Leaders and the elite four had to improvise instead of re-using the same type several times. Candice for example has a Medicham in her team (when it's not ice type), Volkner has an Octillery in his team to screw any Ground types, and Flint, who is a fire-user, only actually has two Fire types in his team; the rest don't even have a common weakness with the fire types. No longer were you able to fight members of the elite four who simply repeated the same pokémon and beat 'em by spamming the same move...you actually had to have multiple ones!
- The remakes and third-versions have also upped difficulty a little bit.
- Despite that Platinum does give a wider variety of pokemon to use (Such as how you don't have to pick a So Okay Its Average fire type if you didn't get Chimchar, you had the option to get Hondour easily) and how many trainers go back to themes instead of playing aroudn with them. Generic trainers have more powerful Pokémon, Gym leaders are tougher and have better lineups and its Mascot Legendary (Giratina) is much, MUCH harder to catch than Dialga and Palkia (catch rate of three as opposed to the latters' 30). And that's before we get to the added extra content... the only mercy from the devs is that the Elite 4's levels have been reduced. But only for your first confrontation with them, all their Pokémon gain 10 more levels after obtaining the National Dex. Gee, Game Freak, you're pals.
- Generation I had Yellow, in which Koga suddenly tosses a level 50 Venomoth at you, and Sabrina has pokemon in the mid 50s. OUCH.
- Emerald had a few difficulty increases, but overall, it wasn't that much harder than Ruby and Sapphire. If anything, it was a little more fair for those who picked Sceptile, the one starter who did not gain a Secondary type when it evolved. Namely because not only was there Team Aqua (who used water pokemon), but also the Champion, Wallace, used primarily water Pokémon. However, if you did fight Steven, he was significantly harder. And don't forget how difficult the rematches could get in Emerald!
- Fire Red and Leaf Green were actually where rematches started. While the game itself was a lot like Generation I with some rebalances (ie, Sabrina wasn't that big of a threat because you could spam Bite on her pokémon now), the rematches and the advanced elite four were notably harder than the originals. With some exceptions. (Poor Agatha still winds up using mostly Poison types...)
- Don't believe people who claimed that Generation II was Ruined FOREVER by dropping Whitney's Miltank by only ONE level...that doesn't make her or any other gym leaders ANY easier! Other than Miltank, most of the pokémon on average had a level increase! Not only do they have Generation IV movesets, but abilities, stat changes, etc. Clair not only gained a Gyarados, but they actually go ABOVE 40! Whitney's Miltank? Being level 19 doesn't make any difference...Ghost types don't work against her anymore, stupid Scrappy ability! Also, Kanto deserves a special mention - Game Freak actually listened to some of the complaints about Kanto in G/S/C being easy. Now virtually everything after the Elite four got a buff, (Making Blue no longer a sudden Difficulty Spike) in addition to not only having rematches, advanced elite four (Which isn't as high as Platinum's, but they come with 6 pokémon PER MEMBER) that EV-and-bred their pokémon to hell, and RED getting a buff. (You thought high 70s to 81 was high enough? Well how does every pokemon being 80+ with a level 88 pikachu with volt tackle sound? Oh wait! And I'm not done - He has HAIL!)
- Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. A lot of people never beat the Boost Guardian. The worlds were huge and pretty much all of the bosses were hard, and Dark Aether didn't help the situation much either.
- Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest. The game's first attempt at Metroidvania long before GBA, but this turned out a lot like Zelda 2, and had tons of Guide Dang It.
- After years of complaints about the easy nature of Metroidvania style games and in an effort to appeal to westerners, IGA cranked the difficulty nob Up To Eleven in Order of Ecclesia.
- If you thought "Run To The Hills" and "Green Grass and High Tides" were bad, Rock Band 2 will hit you with the 4-hit combo of "Battery", "Painkiller", "Panic Attack" and "Visions".
- Tomb Raider 3. This happens throughout the series (with each of the later Core Design games being tougher than the first), but TR 3 has by far the most extreme surge in difficulty
- Medievil. Level 1 in the sequel is teeming with extremely difficult musket-armed enemies that were introduced in the first game in Level 4, and in small numbers.
- Oh No! More Lemmings, the sequel to Lemmings
- Sonic & Knuckles continues the ascending difficulty curve from Sonic 3, although there's a noticeable difficulty drop between Launch Base and Mushroom Hill Zones when playing the two games back-to-back as Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
- But the Genesis Sonic 2 was notably easier than the first. The Master system or Game Gear Sonic 2 however....
- Sonic 2 was more difficult than the first game - by quite a large margin. With the exception of Labyrinth Zone, none of the original zones hold a candle to those found in the sequel (the special zones to collect Chaos emeralds were also far more challenging). Not to mention the fact that virtually every boss is much tougher than those in the original game, and that the cakewalk final boss is replaced by back to back difficult boss fights with the player as a one hit wonder. In reality, the second game is probably the most difficult in the series though your mileage may vary.
- Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, the sequel to Path of Radiance, was criticized for its drastic difficult spike, which made it difficult for new (and even a few veteran) fans to get into.
- Though that was mostly the localization team's fault, for renaming Radiant Dawn 's difficulty levels "Easy", "Normal" and "Hard" when they originally where "Normal", "Hard" and "Maniac", yet for Path of Radiance they had instead removed Maniac and added Easy (Which was, well, rather easy). Thus, it looked like it got harder, when actually they were about the same.
- Fire Emblem 5 plays this trope very Straight. Then 6-8 get gradually easier.
- Unless that is, you decide to play the harder difficulty settings. Or even Hector mode in 7. (Hector mode on normal has plenty of harder maps than Eliwood mode.) Even 8 does have its share of random DifficultySpikes. (Grado Keep on Ephraim - that's one of the hardest maps in the game to do if you want to get everything right.)
- The puzzles Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box are more challenging than its predecessor. Of course, they couldn't just rehash the same puzzles over again.
- Played straight in the 2nd Bloody Roar, which suddenly had some actual AI. Then the people who could actually program AI left the company. The the 4th game tries to "balance" this by adding an SNK Boss that gives an instant game over if lost against.
- Played straight in Super Robot Wars Original Generation on the GBA. The first game could be defeated by mindless rushing and having Latooni dodge and counter everything (since the enemies hit rate would frequently end up at 0). In the second game where the enemies stats were NOT complete crap and the game suddenly required about as much strategy as Fire Emblem.
- Although an Updated Rerelease and not a sequel, Pokemon Puzzle Challenge gives an odd example. Easy, Normal and Hard are easier than they were in Tetris Attack, but the game adds Intense, which is even harder than the original's Very Hard - the AI can fill half the screen in one shot.
- Played straight in Dragon Quest 2. Inverted in Dragon Quest 4 and 5. Inverted with all of Dragon Quest Monsters sequels.
- Played straight with Izuna... which is worrying since the first game was Nintendo Hard.
- If Spinoffs count, played straight in Pokemon Colosseum, which feature some actual AI and teams that didn't consist of crap Pokemon. Inverted in Gale of Darkness, though it still had better AI and teams than the portable games. Inverted later on as no game after Colosseum ever had the same level of AI.
- Repton 2 requires completion of the entire game without passwords or the ability to save, and also includes the notorious luck-based meteor-dodging sections, making it by far the most demanding game in the series. Later games returned to the format of separate levels with passwords.
- Final Fantasy I was already Nintendo Hard. The very first thing Final Fantasy II does is kill you. This is partly for dramatic purposes, and partly to let you know what it's going to be doing with considerable frequency the rest of the game. (The fact that its leveling up system practically encouraged masochism didn't help)
- Left 4 Dead 2 is a lot more difficult than the previous game. Zombies are now everywhere you go instead of being scattered or appearing with hordes, new special infected makes old strategies like camping or being in narrow halls a bad idea, crescendos are now "run from point A to point B" in order to stop hordes from coming forever, one finale now has two Tanks appearing at the same time, and the survivor AI are so bad that the game just gets even harder. Anyone who was used to playing Advanced or Expert in the first game will be in for a rude awakening if they try to play on those difficulties off the bat in the sequel.
- The arcade version of Double Dragon II is basically an improved version of the first game, only it replaced the punch and kick buttons with two directional-based attack buttons, removed the extra life bonuses (meaning that you only have the lives you start the game with), the bosses are ridiculously overpowered compared to the first game, and your health is only partially replenished when you complete a stage.
- Then the NES version of Double Dragon III cranked it up to eleven with only a single life and the only health replenishment occuring between levels. Caused the Angry Video Game Nerd no end of grief.
- Ninja Gaiden 3: There are no infinite continues in as in the predecessors. Worse is that the Japanese version is much easier. See Difficulty By Region.
- Every Bemani series has a tendency to introduce more difficult songs every few installments, and as such needs to either add a new difficulty rating or rewrite the entire scale. Examples of songs that redefined difficulty:
- DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou plays this trope straight if you regard it as a sequel to DoDonPachi and ignore the not-developed-by-Cave DoDonPachi II; its first stage starts off somewhat challenging, and the first stage boss, rather than being a Warm Up Boss, is the opposite.
- In turn, DDP was a huge leap over the original Don Pachi.
- The latest Touhou games (Subterranean Animism on up) are markedly worse than the earlier games.
- Metal Slug 3. If you used n continues to reach the end of Metal Slug 2, expect to use anywhere between 2n and 3n continues for 3. And God help you if you're playing the Xbox Porting Disaster, in which continuing puts you back at the start of the stage.
- Halo 2. Thankfully (or not, to some fans), Halo 3 was toned down.
- Halo 2 is an interesting case in that the normal difficulty is actually noticeably easier than the original game (faster regeneration, not having to worry about health, enemies die noticeably more quickly and don't dodge as much, much easier to score instant-kill headshots, a wider selection of better weaponry, vastly improved friendly A.I.), while the heroic and legendary difficulty are much harder than their equivalents in the original game, due to factors such as much weaker shields, Jackal Snipers, level design that makes it much easier to get surrounded and plasma-raped, etc.
- Gradius III Arcade, said to be one of the hardest games ever. Most subsequent games were easier.
- Mortal Kombat? Fine arcade fighter, with a few tough fights but nothing unbeatable. Mortal Kombat II? Fucking kill me. Every single character is an MK Walker. Not just bosses and hidden enemies either, EVERY SINGLE ONE! Midway actually made Mortal Kombat 3 somewhat easier, but spiked it again with Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.
- The excelent Tower Defense game Gemcraft went from being one of the easier TD's to being the one of the hardest in its sequal, Gemcraft 0
- Played with in Wing Commander: Secret Ops, the sequel to Wing Commander: Prophecy. Originally, the game was offered as a free download by Origin/EA, but first you had to fill out a survey with name, address, email, etc. One of the questions asked you which Wing Commander games you'd played, and which ones you'd completed (if any). If you marked that you'd completed a Wing Commander game before, when you downloaded the game and put in your activation code, it would quietly set the difficulty to the appropriately titled "Nightmare" setting.
- The arcade version of Super Contra. The first game was Nintendo Hard but fair, this one is total bullshit difficulty.
- Banjo-Tooie, the sequel to Banjo-Kazooie, is much more complex and challenging than its predecessor.
- Syphon Filter was a fairly difficult game. The sequel, by contrast, is powered by your tears and frustrations. Every stealth sequence is long, filled with enemies, and requires the player to find the one path that will avoid instant failure. Combat sequences are long, filled with instant death scenarios and enemies armed with the multitude of instant death weapons. Bosses are spawned directly from Satan's codpiece.
- Tetris: The Grand Master 2: The Absolute PLUS makes achieving Grand Master much harder due to the new grading system. The number of Western GM's in TGM1 is most likely in the triple digits, but there are exactly three Western TGM2+ GM's as of this writing.
- Bioshock 2, despite playing as a 7-foot tall Big Daddy rather than a human as in the first game, the second game is harder, possibly due the Splicers getting stronger and more mutated, or more probably due to the fact that many of their weapons do more relative damage, and you're now expected to fight dozens of them at once instead of just 2 or 3 at a time.
- Sin And Punishment 2. Not only is it much longer than its predecessor, it is also shades harder.
- Soldier Of Fortune II, mainly because the AI is much more of a cheating bastard.
- The early levels of Jedi Outcast are a lot tougher than the equivalent non-Jedi, shooter-based levels in Dark Forces and Jedi Knight. This is largely due to the vastly improved A.I. of the Imperial Stormtroopers, which lets them strafe back and forth quickly while firing, making it much harder to hit them and turning them into an actual credible threat (at least until you get a lightsaber and the ability to reflect blaster bolts). Outcast is also more stingy with health and especially shield pickups, and the damage of the enemy's weapons also seems to have been jacked up a bit.
- Star Trek Elite Force 2 is noticeably harder than the original game, but this is mostly because the first Star Trek Elite Force was unusually easy (with every enemy except the final boss doing very little damage individually, and very generous placement of health and shield refills), so much so that the Harder Than Hard difficulty was much closer to what most other FPS shooters consider Normal difficulty. The difficulty of Elite Force 2 is much closer to that of a mainstream shooter, and the later levels get genuinely hard even on the default difficulty.
- STALKER: Clear Sky is noticeably tougher than STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, due mostly to the addition of many Fake Difficulty elements such as an enemy hit detection system that causes shots to randomly not register when you shoot someone, and magical homing enemy frag grenades. Thankfully, these (and many other interface and gameplay issues) were mostly corrected in the third game in the series, STALKER: Call of Pripyat.
- Descent II: The Vertigo Series was an Expansion Pack Difficulty Spike. The main Descent II game was much easier than the first, but this troper can't even get past the first level of Vertigo on Insane (lots of Goddamned Bats and lack of powerful weapons). Descent 3 was also considerably more difficult, with increase in the dodginess and toughness of the enemies. Especially if you're trying to avoid dying, as Death Is A Slap On The Wrist there (you have unlimited lives, and restart from checkpoints instead of the beginning of the level, although your weapons still get scattered).
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