That One Level - Television Tropes & Idioms

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Sivert Fjeldstad Madsen: Since you've made every game... Did you actually beat Battletoads?
Lord of Games: I assume you mean that tunnel level with the hoverbike. I, er... well, of course I beat it. It’s not as if I or anyone else would release a game that couldn’t be finished with standard human reaction times.

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There are times in video games where, instead of a character or boss building up a Hatedom, a level does. It could be that it is Nintendo Hard, clashes with the tone of the game, is infested with Goddamned Bats (or Demonic Spiders), is home to That One Boss, has you trying to outrun an Advancing Wall Of Doom or otherwise sticks you with forced scrolling, has a Scrappy Mechanic in play or is The Maze level. In an MMORPG, another possibility is that the level is far too far away from everywhere else, making trips to it pointless.

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

Most, if not all Bonus Dungeons and Slippy Slidey Ice Worlds qualify as That One Level, but at least there's the consolation of not needing to do it to beat the game. Contrast the Crowning Levels Of Awesome. Any Platform Hell game worth its salt is obligated to make every level like this.

Sometimes That One Level polarizes the playerbase—a portion of players find it infuriatingly hard while others don't have much of a problem with it. This can be a matter of general skill, familiarity with a particular control scheme or just plain luck, depending on the level. Regardless, about the least helpful thing that can be said about one of these is "I never had any trouble with it" or worse, "I got through that on the first try," especially without any helpful information included.

Because there are so many of Those Levels, they've been categorized by genre for your viewing convenience:

Miscellaneous Examples

"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 t
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 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.
- Mac players are laughing here. On their version, one digger can release another if its horizontal position is one pixel away. Use this to make a little step, and the level is solved with two diggers! Of course, the Mac version has its own That One Level, "The Steel Mines of Kessel". Bombers are your only terrain-removing skill, and you need to save 90%. The Mac version has a limit of 80 lemmings instead of 100, and on this level they forgot to adjust the percentage to correspond, so the result is you can lose only eight instead of the intended ten. The kicker? Three "thorns" in the terrain that weren't intended to block the lemmings actually will on the Mac version, so it requires more bombers than it should. It's possible, but it took this troper ten years to solve.
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 (after getting the pointer on screen which was hidden during the previous sequence of course), and goes downhill from there. Especially frustrating is fighting the skeletons with a sword, and the controls are terrible. And the level ends with a minigame where you need to pull a rope just before Barbaros reaches you ... and yes, failing this minigame does count as death.
- There's also the Frost Breath level, which is a very frustrating mirror puzzle where three incorrect fires of the cannon result in losing a life, or the Dragon Scales level, a long and intricate level with a lot of steps that requires a LOT of forethought or else the player renders the level Unwinnable.
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.
The 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.
- Missions with insta-kll missiles above/below a certain height are almost always reviled, as are those that force usage of guns only or have radar jamming in play.
- The first game (Air Combat outside Japan) had possibly the worst canyon mission of any, and a lot of that was Fake Difficulty due to terrible graphics. It was an incredibly narrow canyon and it was very very difficult to tell the two walls apart so every turn was an opportunity to crash due to inability to judge distance.
- X brings us "A Diversion" where you have to escort six helicopters to a location... but there are infantry-wielded RPGs along the route that don't appear on radar until the helicopters get close enough, unlike what the briefing says about luring them out. Plus some of these wankers (yes, I went there) appear in locations that are inconvenient to target if you stick too close to the helicopters, and trying to stay behind them can backfire if you end up falling too far behind. Plus once you actually reach the location the helis need to get to, you find it's also defended by SAMs and triple-A, so you can't take a breather yet. And you need to save all six to get a S-rank, with all of them being One Hit Point Wonders. Did I mention that if you want to get the ace for this mission, you need to run ahead of the helis to take him down, and almost certainly will lose at least one trying to get back to them?
  - X also has "End of Deception II" with the Alect Squadron-piloted Fenrirs, a shitty boss fight if ever. Fortunately, it gets better after they go down.
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.
Not really That One 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 upstaged by the game proving it's better than you. Because you are facing a professor.
Laserdisc game Road Blaster's 9th (and final) stage (which is pretty much either Turn Left to not die, Press this pedal to not die, or both). let's summarize: it starts off with a turn that, if you don't know it's coming, you'll lose a life. the turn commands are strung so close together that the checkpoints in the level actually occur in the middle of a turn command (thankfully, you won't be responsible for the turn in progress). If that was the extent of the problem, it'd be bearable, but NOOOOO, it has to have TWO frame-perfect S-turns in the last stretch of the level. it's one thing to lose a life for getting the command wrong. it's another altogether to lose a life for holding the previous turn just longer than it had to be. oh, and did I mention if you try and cut a turn short, you die?
Ed Edd N Eddy the mis-EDventures (at least the non-GBA version) has ~~scam~~ level three. the scam would not have been so bad if it was not for this. after you get past the first, yes the first obstacle, you get a cut scene where it turns out that some stupid birds put Jimmy's dolls up in some trees, so you have to get them out using the tower of Eddy and put them in the sandbox. now when you drop something, it comes back where it was before you got it. not here. instead, you have to start the whole task all over that does not seem so bad, but the programmers put in these squirrels (yes, animals are your enemies) that come out of the trees and attack you. but if they attack you, you drop the freaking doll that you were trying to get in the sandbox and you have to start the thing all over.
Trauma Center: Under The Knife, as an Atlus game, is hard- so much so that a previous version of this page listed every mission as That One Level. However, most fall into the "tough but fair" catagory, with two exceptions:
- Deftera. While most missions are ultimately tests of skill primarily, Deftera is nearly 90% luck. If two pairs of Deftera hit like colors at the beginning of the second stage, you might as well ragequit. Either the tumors will kill the patient outright, or you'll finish with the tumors just in time to fight MORE tumors when like colors meet AGAIN- never having the opportunity to attack Deftera itself.
- Level 5-2. You know it's going to be a pain, since it's called "Under The Knife", which implies a certain epic climax. Your enemy is the parasite Kyriaki, who is annoying, but usually pretty striaghtforward. This time, however, you have to treat five patients in a single mission, with only ten minutes on the timer. Making matters worse is the fact that getting through a Kyriaki mission requires nothing so much as skill with suturing. The stylus motion for suturing is not only undetected by the game half the time, but it's the first thing you start screwing up when your hands start to get tired. The final insult? That ticking ten minute timer hanging over your head is a god damned lie. When it hits zero, you don't fail the operation- your assistant just announces that backup has arrived and you can finish this patient and take a rest.
- Also, while not unfairly difficult, the last chapter of the game is simply uncreative. Having defeated (or, actually, redeemed through a version of Combat Therapy) the Big Bad, you have to fight through a Boss Rush to get to The Man Behind The Man- the same seven strains of GUILT you've been fighting for half the game, just requiring faster action. A shameless retread which is made more aggrevating by losing what forgiveness these missions had previously.
- While technically Bonus Levels, the X Missions also deserve mention. Though they're not named for difficulty in Under The Knife, they are in every succeeding sequel...under Extreme difficulty. While all of the X Missions are indeed beatable, they all borderline on Fake Difficulty given that you have to have memorized the pattern for defeating the offending disease down to freaking muscle memory.
  - Especially Kyriaki in Under The Knife. (Shudder)
Repton is a fairly straightforward game, certainly pretty easy by the standards set by later games in the series, until you reach the eleventh level, "Giant clam". On this level you have to collect diamonds while being pursued simultaneously by three monsters; their unpredictable movement means that often when you turn a corner to get away from one, the others will now be ahead of you. There are no rocks provided to kill the monsters, and every diamond in the field must be taken before leaving that area. Oh, and when you exit the area, a rock blocks it off, so the lower area must then be completed without losing a life.