That One Level / RPG

A frustrating RPG level appears! What will you do?
> Enter
> RUN
Sorry... I can't let you do that.

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Example subpages

• Dark Souls
• Etrian Odyssey
• Final Fantasy
• Monster Hunter
• Pokémon
• Tales Series

Other examples

Squaresoft/Square-Enix

• Brave Fencer Musashi:
  • Steamwood, and not just because it's a Timed Mission when you have to go inside. Imagine, if you will, having a slowly rising bar. When it gets to the "OK" zone, you press X to fill another bar until it gets to the top. Now imagine the first bar going inhumanely fast, requiring you to either use skillful Button Mashing or to have completely superhuman reflexes, and each hit filling up only a fraction of the second bar. Furthermore, you generally have 35 seconds to get to the next valve (60 if the game's feeling generous) and complete this task before you start over from Valve 1. Oh, and if you miss the OK zone, the second bar goes DOWN.
    • And that's just the first time. The second time, several of the wheels aren't even attached to their respective valves, so you have to go find them. While dodging steam leaks which by the time, you have the legendary equipment which allows you to double-jump. With your only means of traveling up levels an irritatingly-slow elevator. And jumps that can easily cause you to plummet back down to the bottom.
  • The Gondola Chase that appears late in the game is also quite miserable. You basically travel down a tunnel in a gondola and swing left and right to dodge stalagtites and ants. You get only four hits, there are only TWO checkpoints, and the controls are so sensitive it's easy to swing right into an obstacle or not swing far enough trying not to swing into an obstacle. At least you only have to do it once.
• The Harena Ruins in Bravely Default. Only three floors, but this is early enough in the game that you're still trying to work out which jobs work best with whom. The entire area is filled with Status Effects-spamming enemies - damage-sponge Sandworms that inflict Blind, Venomous Snakes with Poison, and Great Caits with Silence. There are also traps that inflict Blind to the entire party if you fall victim to them, and they're frequently placed such that if you don't move the right way immediately once they trip they'll hit you. They can be avoided if you level up a character's Freelancer job until they have Dungeon Master, but this, again, is early enough in the game you likely haven't. At the end is a Dual Boss fight where one of the opponents can heal himself with your Potions, and the other deals massive damage and Silences you - and the game doesn't inform you that you only need to kill the former of the two, as the latter will run off when either of them reach half health, meaning you're likely to waste resources.
• Mount Emerald in the DS version of Chrono Trigger. Not because it's hard — it's actually pretty easy, in fact — but because in order to get 100% Completion you need to climb it at least five times, and the encounters are almost all unavoidable, and there are no convenient shortcuts down the mountain, so you have to fight those same battles again on your way back. In a game that otherwise seems to pride itself on avoiding this sort of unnecessary padding, this gets boring fast.
• Chrono Cross
  • Gives us the Dead Sea. It features 1) a confusing area peppered with tough battles (including the Tragediennes — and you'll want to fight them to get overpowered elements), 2) That One Boss (the infamous Miguel), and 3) the point where the plot infamously collapses in on itself with all of the navel-gazing and Ass Pulls.
  • Terra Tower. Terra Tower is a long uphill climb to reach the Dragon God. It's swarming with TerraTerrors and has several Goddamned Minibosses, as well as a sizable Info Dump halfway up. Just to add to that, in a game known for Scenery Porn and awesome music, the backgrounds are dull and a large portion of the tower has no music, just generic ambient sounds like running water, which turns Terra Tower into an interminable slog.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest II:
    • The Road to Rhone is long, inhabited by the strongest enemies in the game by this point which attack frequently, and features rooms full of hidden trapdoors that send you back to a much earlier point in the dungeon if you step on them, made all the more infuriating because of the final piece to the MacGuffin hidden in a completely non-distinct tile. Even if you find the dang thing you still have to walk all the way out just to complete said MacGuffin (on the other side of the world no less). Part of the reason this game has a well-deserved reputation as Nintendo Hard.
    • There isn't even a saving grace once you get to Rhone itself. Even stronger enemies, many of whom will self-destruct and take 1/3rd of your party with it, a blurry landscape thanks to all the snow, and the only save-point is in a shrine nestled in the middle of a lake far from the cavern's exit.
  • Dragon Quest III: The cave to the Necrogond. Not nearly as frustrating as the Road to Rhone in the previous game, but tough nonetheless. One enemy, Armfuls^note whose name changes depending on what localization you're playing can attack twice per turn, and have party-wide hitting paralysis breath that hits. In this game, it's a Total Party Wipe if your party is dead and paralyzed.
  • The Dharma Temple/Alltrades Abbey in Dragon Quest VII fits this trope to a T, as well. Dharma Temple being the place you typically obtain new classes and skills in Dragon Quest, instead you're thrown into an extremely difficult dungeon that you cannot exit while having your skills sealed away. Good luck if you didn't think to buy any Medicinal Herbs beforehand!
  • Dark Ruins in Dragon Quest VIII is packed with Demonic Spiders and Goddamned Bats. Over-leveling will not do you much good, as they can withstand a bit of punishment. If you're playing the Nintendo 3DS version, random encounters can spawn in narrow hallways, forcing you to fight them.
• Kingdom Hearts
  • Atlantica. In fact, it's easily the most reviled level in the game, though Monstro (which comes directly before it) is heavily competing for the title. What makes it so frustrating is the Unexpected Gameplay Change from jumping to swimming, and the controls for going up and down are very unintuitive. This also means a lot of Sora's attacks and abilities don't carry over, including several of his powerful finishing moves, and you have to change up his abilities every time you go to Atlantica. It's also home to That One Boss, Ursula, who has a gimmick that's not only frustrating to figure out, but damn near impossible to do on Proud Mode.
  • The sequel still has Atlantica, but replaces the swimming with an even more annoying musical Rhythm Game. Thankfully, it's optional.
  • And speaking of Monstro, which is Atlantica's fiercest competitor in regards to "most despised level," it has an unintuitive, frustrating layout of several interlocking chambers, some of which require obnoxious vertical platforming with a camera that just doesn't like you. And at the end is the Wake-Up Call Boss.
    • Monstro is basically the Kingdom Hearts version of the infamous Water Temple. Those six chambers look exactly the same, and if you got lost just once, unless you had a really good sense of direction, you have to start all over again. At least Atlantica tried to help you stay slightly oriented by putting trident marks on the walls to point you to the palace. Monstro? No such luck. Also, in Monstro, if you come out onto a ledge, chances are, Heartless are going to spawn and they will kick you off and you have no way of getting back up onto that ledge once you're done with them. At least in the Water Temple, enemies stayed where they spawned unless you got too close to them.
  • Wonderland is also pretty obnoxious due to Gravity Screw and Moon Logic Puzzle included. Quite a few people had serious problem to find anything there.
  • Kingdom Hearts: 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"). Thankfully, the Updated Re-release on the PS2 fixed this. And in the GBA version of Riku's trip through Altantica, his deck is deliberately terrible. The idea is to use the Sea Neon card to randomize the strength of your cards. How long does the Sea Neon card work? 1 reload, which means virtually every fight in the area will force you to do about half of it with garbage cards. And just wait till you get to the boss...
  • In Kingdom Hearts II, Port Royal also gets this treatment by some fans, as it is simply a Theme Park Version of the movie with Sora, Donald, and Goofy barely involved in the movie's story, plus frustrating combat against cursed undead pirates.
  • Space Paranoids isn't all that hard, but the Light Cycle sequence is truly hellish, mainly due to how the damn thing controls. And if you aren't able to read your opponents' moves before they happen, then you're just screwed.
    • The Grid from Dream Drop Distance also has the Light Cycle challenges, but after the mandatory round with the Commantis, which is That One Boss to some, it's mainly just taking out the guards. It's only slightly easier than the Light Cycle sequence in Space Paranoids.
  • Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days has the forced Stealth-Based Mission. It wouldn't be so bad if Axel didn't have a tendency to just stand around and let himself get caught. Or that Kingdom Hearts always had a slightly wonky camera system that sometimes is more of a hindrance then help.
  • 358/2 has a few missions like this, mainly the ones concerning defeating those few bosses. Two kinds that really come to mind, though: defeating the Emerald Serenades and collecting Organization XIII Emblems. The former is self-explanatory, the latter is just plain hell because you need to have maximum mobility to even stand a chance of grabbing every Emblem in time.
  • Keyblade Graveyard's Twister Trench in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. There aren't any enemies here, just massive, multi-colored tornadoes, that chase you all over the map. If you're caught by one, you're thrown into an alternate dimension with several waves of giant Unversed. Although after you beat one it goes away, it's so hard to dodge the next that it's really simpler to just fight them all. Not helping is that these alternate dimensions are seemingly designed to be as visually confusing as possible, with constantly spinning backgrounds and invisible floors that make it difficult to tell where you are in relation to the Unversed swarming you, on top of being just plain hard to look at.
  • The Cavern of Remembrance in Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix +. It's a chore in itself to make it past the platforming puzzles of the Mineshafts (and it's downright impossible if you haven't leveled the correct Drive Forms enough) and the forced fights against Demonic Spiders in Heartless' clothing, but after you make it past all that, you still have to defeat waves of Nobodies that can kill you very easily if you're not careful. Your reward for surviving through all that is gaining access to the Data Organization XIII battles, each of which make the aforementioned torture seem easy in comparison.
  • Kingdom Hearts coded and Re:coded get in on the frustration with Hollow Bastion. As soon as you defeat Jafar in Agrabah, Malificent breaks your keyblade, barring you from using any commands or even breaking blox, and you're put through a gauntlet of maddening timed platforming before you spend the rest of the world with Goofy and Donald. This generally involves giving them a command then waiting around for their dismal AI to pull it off, and though they're generally effective in combat, Sora cannot attack in any way and can only use potions. At the end of this, your keyblade is restored, and then without time to even switch commands, you have to fight Pete, Pete with D-Thundaga, Riku, Riku again, and a far more dangerous Riku. Even then, you're thrown into Riku's datascape where your stats are horribly weakened until you restore them. The only opportunity to backtrack during any of this is right before the boss gauntlet.
  • The Arendelle World in Kingdom Hearts III involves Sora traversing through the endless piles of snow (as well as a detour into the Frozen Labyrinth) where without any guides, makes it very difficult to recognize or know where you're going or even where to find the collectibles. It doesn't help that the level itself is not just a retelling of the movie but the fact that Sora and co. are barely involved with the main cast, which adds to the frustration and slogfest of the level.
• While probably not as infuriating as some of the above examples, the Junkyard area in Legend of Mana definitely qualifies. Paths change with no warning, depending on if you talk to certain NPCs or not. Certain paths become inaccessible if you happen to change your mind and go another direction. Towards the end of the level is an NPC that will teleport you all the way back to the beginning, from where you'll have to struggle all over again to get back to where you were. Even with a guide, it's difficult to navigate as you have to talk to or ignore certain NPCs whose helpful advice consist of lamenting to you in vague terms. Pair this with mandatory encounters on certain paths, and you have yourself a scrappy level indeed.
• 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)
• The infamous Battle of South Moundtop scenario from SaGa Frontier 2. The condition for winning are either defeat Fake Gustave or survive for 8 turns. Since Fake Gustave and his steel soldiers are virtually invincible, you're better off trying to hold him for 8 turns, which is also very hard. If his troops kill your leader or they invade your base it's all over, and Fake Gustave and the steel soldiers can get really quickly into your base. He will usually only move on the 4th or 5th turn, but if you dispatch of his infantry very fast he will start moving earlier, making the scenario Unwinnable.
• Secret of Evermore has a maze where you control the Dog and have to escape by running around air ducts in the castle. Turns out all the ducts lead you around in one giant circle — the duct that leads out is hidden behind a bookcase out of your view and thus you'd never know it was there.
  • How about the path under the waterfall? You're in the dark, all the paths look the same, there are no save points or shops here to restore yourself, and there's a constant supply of respawning enemies.
  • And then there's the Dark Forest, an endless maze of trees with dead-ends and lots of enemies. You will get very lost very fast. The game is merciful by giving you a subtle hint — the trees in the foreground sometimes have demons in them, and if you follow the paths with the demons you'll find the exit. Of course, the game never tells you this. And to add to the insanity, when you get to the bridge and beat the boss, you find out it isn't over - the forest is split into two sections, you've still got Part 2 to go, and Part 2 also has a boss. This all is also without mentioning the fact that there's an alchemist found at one of the dead ends off the actual path with an alchemy formula for you and if you took the time to pull the Oglin up from the well at the start of Gothica, then he'll be at another dead end to offer you a charm, one of which can only be gotten here and only if you had gotten the Thug's Cloak beforehand.
• Fancy Mel's Atelier from Threads of Fate. It's essentially some Platform Hell minigames with a wonky forced 2D perspective... in a 3D game that happens to have some already awkward jumping controls. To make matters worse, is once you get to this point, there's no way to leave or save until you've beaten the minigames. So if you manage to beat a couple of them and then die, it's back to start for you! The final coffin in the nail is there is no justifiable reason to do the minigames: You need to wait for Mel to return and are only playing the minigames to pass the time, but as you may have guessed, just sitting on the porch and cracking a cold one until Mel comes back isn't an option.
• 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 the game's superboss Panthera Cantus, who can kill you in 2-3 hits even if you are at level 100. You briefly visit Pork City in the main story, but you only go to a couple floors before the less difficult bu still challenging fight with Leo Cantus.
  • This "difficulty" is heavily mitigated the moment that you realize that Angel and Reaper class pins are unbranded. Which, simply put, means that you can equip them on any floor you want. Although obtaining them typically requires bumping the difficulty up to hard to beat various noise, it helps greatly.
• Trials of Mana gives us the Woods of Wandara. While the original version isn't so bad, the remake changes a few things to really make you want to leave. First off, there are poison pools in several areas that can be tricky to navigate around. Second, there are both 2D and 3D segments, and while the 2D segments have some limited 3D mobility, all of them involve some manner of platforming challenge which can be tricky (one of which is mandatory if you want to get Mispolm's Ring for reasons that will soon become obvious). Third, the actual enemies. The shrooms and chobins aren't much of a threat, but then there are the Tremorkin and Queeneebs, the former of which poison and topple with their attacks and the latter hit hard with Spear of Light or use Strengthen to hit harder, and both take quite a while to bring down for differing reasons. And fourth is the reason you want that ring: Mispolm, who flings statuses, Grumpkins and general pain like they're all going out of style. Have fun with that.
• 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...
  • 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
    • If you only move after starting a jump, you'll never initiate a random battle. (So in theory, you could traverse entire areas with no encounters.) However, even if someone tells you this before you waste a lot of time falling out of the sky it's still a very tedious way of getting through jumping puzzles.
  • One last bit of frustration for that level comes from Gameplay and Story Segregation. The Tower of Babel is a vertical platforming dungeon, but it is also a gear dungeon. It is shown several times before AND afterwards that your gears can fly.
  • Let's not forget the Absurdly Spacious Sewer. This level seems to be a popular stopping point for players.

Atlus

• The original Devil Summoner has Chinatown, a level so annoying that the special edition of the game actually included a map for it. It's a huge teleporter maze, and some of the warps don't have the usual fade to black that others do; so if you're not careful you could get warped without even realizing it. To make it even more complicated, it has four different entrances, each with their own path to the boss in the center.
• 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 Large Karma Terminals that you can teleport to, 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. And this place has no Vendor, so you will have to leave and then come back if you want to sell any of the Cells that you can get here.
  • Digital Devil Saga 2 has an early-game dungeon known as the Internment Facility, and while the enemies aren't too bad, the dungeon's gimmick will irritate you. Once you reach a certain point, the Jailer Kumbhanda will start chasing you while you try to locate the information and items needed to trick him, getting progressively harder as you go through the dungeon. The Jailer can even catch you while you're talking to someone, averting Talking Is a Free Action.
• The Paranoia levels in Majin Tensei II: Spiral Nemesis, You will be tearing your hair out because your human's walking distance is heavily minimalized except on Plains, Humans are necessary to occupy the enemy bases in most of the levels. Gee takes the cake though as most of the map is mountain and sand! Which means you will only be able to walk 1-2 squares per turn. Combine that with 3 demon generators near the end and 2 Pendragons near the start which has a large range of attack and you will be raging. The only saving point Gee has is that it has 4 regeneration panels. (2 near the start and 2 in the middle)
• Megami Tensei 2 specific areas; The Rotting Sea of Flames, and Infini. The former has you take damage each step until you get Izanami's robes to protect you from them. The Latter is a sadistic 9 floor dungeon littered with pitfalls and the strongest demons in the game.
• The PSP remake of Persona 2: Innocent Sin introduces a movie theater that has all sorts of extra dungeons in the form of movies. One of these is School of the Heart, Part 1, which is an incredibly annoying maze with rather powerful random encounters (around level 16; it's possible to get here when your party averages level 4). Some doors don't work, others do gobsmacking amounts of damage when you try to use them, and the ones that do work lead to minibosses which usually aren't too tough, but warp you elsewhere after you beat them.
• 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.
• Floor 7 of the Void Quest in Persona 4 is nothing but intersections that randomly throw you into different directions, so it's all too easy to have an overpowered Shadow ambush you. On top of that, the mandatory midboss is on this level, and skipping it will make you miss out on a key item needed to access the end boss. (Thankfully it's easy to backtrack to.) The trick, which you are never told, is that only the dead center of the intersection will spin you, allowing you to skirt around the sides... but of course, while the Shadows tend to avoid the intersections, they have no trouble chasing you while you're trying to dance around the edge.
• The Evil Spirit Club in Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth. After the lighthearted Breather Level that was the Group Date Cafe, you get a dungeon full of Demonic Spiders that can wipe out the party in a few turns through nasty skill combos^note namely, Corrosion skills followed by the corresponding second-tier multitarget skill, confusing floor layouts with difficult puzzles (including tricky math equations) and very dark lighting (which eventually becomes an outright Blackout Basement) that makes it every hard to navigate. The F.O.Es also step things up; while earlier ones would patrol set paths or stand in one place, the onese here chase after you directly or attempt to Jump Scare you. It doesn't help that the dungeon is also Nightmare Fuel to many, having a design reminiscent of survival horror games like Silent Hill.
  • The final floor of the Inaba Pride Exhibit in comparison to the rest of the dungeon. It's a massive floor split into 4 quadrants. Each quadrant has a gate, and you need to walk through all 4 in a specific order in order to open up the floor's exit. The real issue is all has to be done in one visit: if you leave the floor without activating all the gates, they'll reset. So you essentially have to go through all 4 gates without leaving to heal. Oh, and every F.O.E from earlier floors in the dungeon returns here. Hope you've memorized how each one reacts to the Holy Flame!
• Persona 5:
  • Futaba's Palace may be a Breather Level, but after you send the calling card, you still have to progress through one more floor filled with enemies and lacking in cover. Worse still, is that those enemy mobs tend to contain Anubis, a Shadow without weaknesses which forces the player to spend a non-trivial amount of resources to beat while packing both flavors of instant-kill spells. Sometimes you get pairs of Anubis. Trying to clear the floor while still having a fresh party for the upcoming boss is difficult. Thank Philemon the first phase ends prematurely for story reasons and you get healed between phases.
  • Okumura's Palace is crawling with Demonic Spiders Arahabaki and Girimehkala, random encounters that reflect physical and gun skills, which forces the player to expend SP to get rid of them. Its corridor and room design makes it difficult to ambush enemies, and it has an annoying airlock puzzle at the end. The Royal Updated Re-release makes it even worse as Okumura himself is given an awkward difficulty spike making him That One Boss. The level is widely disliked for story reasons as well due to Morgana's antics wasting over three days of valuable time and making Haru seem like a side character in her own arc.
  • Shido's Palace is infamous for being very long, requiring the player to fight through five minibosses to finish, and in between each miniboss, the party has to traverse narrow corridors which offer little cover and navigate rooms with statues that turn them into mice. The random encounters already keep the player on their toes in normal circumstances; getting caught while Rattled can quickly spell death. And just when you think you're ready to send the calling card after the final miniboss, you get interrupted by a two-phase boss fight on the way out.
• In Shin Megami Tensei I we have the Cathedral which is a dungeon that has about 16 floors total. 8 above ground and 8 under ground where you fight Archangel Michael and Asura respectively. Enjoy the slog for the Neutral ending.
• 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.
  • The Alaya Shrine. Harder enemies than any prior dungeon. Several types who are immune to conversation. Several with either area instant kill attacks, or status ailment attacks. None of this would be overly problematic...except you only have two party members.
  • Even worse than any of the above is Thanatos Tower from the Snow Queen Quest. The enemies are reasonably powerful, and some have instant-kill spells, but that's not what makes it challenging. If any of your party members die, their persona is sealed in Tartarus, on the second floor. Tartarus has even higher level demons, and you'll have to trek back there every time a party member faints if you want to use their persona. On top of all that, there's a time limit on the dungeon, and no save points. And god help you if you're after all of the party's ultimate personas: to get the items to fuse them, you have to beat Thanatos tower as the first dungeon in the game.
• Shin Megami Tensei if...: The World of Sloth, you have to wait a complete lunar cycle for each individual area of the tunnels to be opened up; there are a lot of empty areas, and the lunar cycles only advance by moving around...
• Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne seems to be out to get the player every time there's a dark dungeon. You NEED Lightoma/Light Balls, or you can't even see the map. Not to mention they usually have some crazy puzzle going on (the four Oni, the hills...)
  • While not as hellish as some of the later dungeons in terms of puzzles, the Obelisk is still incredibly annoying to go through, especially in your first playthrough. For one: it's massive compared to any other dungeon before, with a lot of dead ends, the save spots are far and between and NONE of the ones inside the Obelisk allow for fast-travel, which means if you get out to heal or buy items, you WILL have to do the whole dungeon from the first floor. It doesn't help that at the last floor you have to go through a boss rush, fighting each of the three Moirae Sister sisters separately before fighting them all together, and you cannot save between one battle and the next.
  • Don't we all love the Diet Building? No, no we don't. Fake walls and doors that get you teleported away for being tricked...
  • Amala Labyrinth. The Cursed Zones are beyond frustrating. That and Dante tag. And the Invisible Walls. And the mazes of doors... Okay, EVERYTHING in it.
    • The Second Kalpa deserves special mention just for the fact that the whole thing is one massive Difficulty Spike. The first floor has a gigantic maze which is a pain in the ass on its own, but then you jump down a few holes and stumble into what seems to be a large, empty room. Hope you like navigating mazes with invisible walls! But the Cursed Zone there really takes the cake. You lose half your health every couple of steps you take, there's a lot of one way doors that exist solely to get you turned around, but it's the random encounters that'll really get you pulling your hair. The demons you fight here are level 65, at least, and know a variety of horrible moves (Dormina + Eternal Rest, anyone?). And you're probably around level 40 by the time you find this place.
    • The Third Kalpa can be annoying to navigate if you haven't been paying attention to your Main Character's stats and Magatama mastery. You need certain amounts of Strength, Magic, and Luck and have specific titles in order to even fully explore the first floor and first sub-level! Though that's bad, you're in for a world of hurt because the first time you go through the sub-levels beyond the first one you'll have to play a game of tag with Dante and he'll reset the switches if he catches you, in addition to possibly killing a demon with Stinger.^note If this happens to one-shot the Main Character, Instant Game Over. After you get through that, you'll have to fight him and while Dante is no joke, as his artical in That One Boss shows his entire arsenal is That One Attack.
  • The White Shrine. The doors teleport you, and using different entrances to a room will send you elsewhere. On the second floor, the doors don't teleport you (in fact, there are no doors), the floor does. To top it off, one must face a Goddamned Puzzle Boss Albion at the end of it. And it's worse if you want to find the reusable instant-death artifact.
    • The Red Shrine, as well. The World of Shadows gimmick is annoying, and you have to go through this at least twice. And the second floor requires a map to get through it on the first try.
• If you like conveyor belts you can't step off and often take you right into a pitfall and stumbling around blindly in the dark, you will definitely enjoy sector Delphinus in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. And if you think all that fun is over, prepare for some more torture...
  • Not to mention the 5th floor, which combines the darkness with the conveyor belts. You had better get the Visualizer main app...
  • And then Eridanus throws in rooms full of nothing but trap tiles, accessed through one-way doors, and an entire required area of teleport traps and another of pitfalls (and more one-way doors). Take the wrong pitfalls and you wind up at a part of the teleport maze that takes you back to the start of that! This is ignoring the encounters, some of which are the first to not have weaknesses (but can still hit your whole party — hard). Also, that new Visualizer App you just picked up in Delphinus? Doesn't work on the dark zones in here.
  • Sector Grus mixes a one-way-door maze on one floor with a teleporter and conveyor maze on the other. There are no shortcuts midway until you pick up Unlock C, which is positioned at the end of the Sector. If you needed to return to base to restock midway, well, hope you remembered the way forward. And once you actually reach its end, you're reminded that you'll have to contend with another difficult boss to proceed.
    • The eastern part of Grus, available only on a New Game Plus, is a trial-and-error linear path to a one-way door maze with Phase Shifting thrown in. And may the Great Will have mercy on you if you decide you want full map coverage, as you have to enter the same one-way door maze over and over and over just to access the southeast corner of its first floor. Redux gives you the Omen Bug and Guidance Angel apps to make navigation bearable, but no less tedious; the base game offers no such luxury.
  • Horologium decides to take the mindscrew route: let's have the player walk across nothing. Seriously, there's no hint that you have to walk off the platforms (every time you do, it actually changes the map boundaries). And while you bumble around looking for the path, the Random Encounters bleed away at your health. And then the next floor has fire pillars pop up out of nowhere, which can't be turned off without a path to an elevator — surrounded by teleports. Keep in mind that said encounters have skills like Megidola, Ragnarok, Killing Wind... and you probably recognize the name Rangda from other games...
    • Horologium's 4th floor full moon puzzle. You'll be wandering around trying to find the right teleport, and then go in during the wrong phase.
  • The Second Sphere of the Womb of Grief in Redux marks a significant Difficulty Spike in the dungeon. The previous two floors were not too tough — while the numerous currents carrying the player around in circles into teleport squares could get tedious, they were at least bearable. Past a certain point in the Second Sphere, the player is forced to traverse an enormous swath of damage tiles leading up to a series of pitfalls. Only one of them provides the way forward, and the rest lead the player back to the start of this torturous section. Even with the Nurse Sub-App to mitigate the damage tiles, the whole journey is certain to be draining on the player's healing sources. Enemy Search encounters can also include the infuriating Futotama, and the boss at the end is Ishtar, who is her own league of frustrating.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV's dungeons are some of the simplest in the mainline series, and even if you do get lost or stuck you can at least save anywhere or bribe Charon to bring you back if you get killed. Still, a few dungeons stand out from the others:
  • The first dungeon in the game, Naraku. You don't have the worthwhile skills to make survival trivial just yet (no guns, which are the only means of doing no-MP party-wide attacks), and you don't have the HP to survive more than a few attacks before needing healing, so expect to see the Game Over sequence at least once or twice.
  • Tsukiji Hongwanji. Just like the final dungeons of the routes, it contains teleporting doors and one can easily get lost, if one door sends the player back to the entrance and needs to backtrack, only to try to remember which door lead to which area now. And since this is part of the entrance exam for members of the Ring, you don't get to have an NPC party member, either. Instead, you get a candle with its own HP bar. And if that HP bar is depleted, either by losing part of its own HP every round or demons attacking it during the set battles, the player fails the mission and needs to restart it. And towards the very end you have to fight a Taraka that will buff its defense and attack the candle.
  • Camp Ichigaya at least in the main Tokyo anyway. The place is littered with one-day doors; make a wrong turn and you get railroaded through more one-way doors back to the first floor. You have to backtrack in this fashion at least once if you're tackling the area with Walter, as there is a point where you must fight one of two bosses, head back to the first floor, then head down to kill the other boss and proceed on.
  • Purgatorium, the final dungeon of the Chaos path and penultimate dungeon of the Neutral path. Two sections have you constantly switch between two floors as you try to find the correct sequence of teleports to get to the exit. When you switch from one floor to the other, the camera rights itself after initially being upside-down so your horizontal map movement is reversed. On top of that, you can't talk to any of the demons present here other than that of the Terminal Guardian's, so you won't be able to scout demons, negotiate to escape battle, etc. In contrast, the Law and Neutral route final dungeon has no such stipulation on demon conversation.
  • Lucifer's Palace, the final dungeon of the Law and Neutral routes. All the doors teleport the player to a hallway that looks practically identical to the entrance one, with a minor difference on the number of treasure chests, and only one of them leads to the two mini-bosses Lucifuge and Belial that you need to fight, in order to proceed. The second half of this dungeon is a bit easier, as it doesn't look identical, but still has one-way doors at times, that can force a player to backtrack and try a different door, before making it to the boss.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse:
  • Tsukiji Hongwanji is back! While you no longer have to transport a candle through the hallways, the explorable area is much bigger thus ensuring that you will get lost at some point.
  • The Cosmic Egg is pretty standard along the game's difficulty curve, with one exception: If you die, Dagda won't be able to resurrect you and you will lose unsaved progress as a result.
  • YHVH's Universe, which is incredibly huge to the point where there exist warp devices to jump to individual sections of floors to shorten return trips and repeat visits. The level also includes teleporters and one-way doors to frustrate players even more, can be potentially crawling with Demonic Spiders that boast ridiculous amounts of health and most of them are immune to scanning (thus forcing you to recite their elemental resistances and weaknesses from memory), and to top it all off, none of the enemies can be talked to, so you have to fight through every random encounter you happen to get involved with.
• Shin Megami Tensei V has the Temple of Eternity. Compared to the Da'at areas and the other dungeon in the Demon Prince's Castle, the Temple is particularly bland in design, and yet you'd think that's the worst offense the place commits. Not long into the area, you start running into high-level demons like Chi You and Mada - this wouldn't be such a big deal if their levels weren't in the 80's at a time where you're just starting to enter the 70's, and the level bias mechanics didn't make fighting them hell. The dungeon gimmick is also more unwieldy: there are gates which freeze and resume time, and while time is frozen, you can't fight enemies, break item boxes or open doors, and the last of these means you have to plan your transit route before you start the clock back up lest you get your ass kicked. Despite having more than one leyline fount per floor with which to heal or restock, it's one long slog from the entrance all the way to Metatron. You'd think the God of Law wanted potential challengers to His reign to give up in frustration or tedium with the way the joint was designed... which, given His general mentality in the series, may kind of be the point.

BioWare/Obsidian

• Baldur's Gate:
  • The Underground City/Maze level. With the party AI's very poor path-finding ability, it can be a complete bitch to navigate the very narrow maze, while avoiding tough undead warriors that are immune to slash attacks and have 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 maze.
  • The Firewine ruins. It is basically the Underground City, except this one also has endlessly respawning, and surprisingly deadly, Kobold Commandoes in it and a ton of traps. You start in the middle, with only one route out of three being the way out.
• Baldur's Gate II:
  • The initial dungeon, aka Chateau Irenicus, not because of difficulty (which is easy) but because it can be long and boring. There is a mod that allows to directly skip the whole section and go to the surface, it also gives the special items that you would have found otherwise.
  • If you decide to fight Kangaxx, you will find one of the most fearsome and annoying That One Boss of the game. When he assumes his true form, is immune to all weapon except +4 and more, which are not very common. He will also cast infinite labyrinth spells to your party members if you don't have the required protection spells.
  • The hidden dungeon of the Twisted Runes is probably the most hard battle of all the game, unless exploiting area of effect spells and the bad enemy AI.
  • In the expansion pack Throne of Bhaal it is however challenged by the final guardians in the Watcher's Keep and the optional confrontation with Demogorgon, which can be insanely hard if you don't know the right tricks and don't play powergaming. The whole Watcher's Keep however is memorable because it's probably the best part of all the game and those difficult fights are worth the effort.
  • Didn't we mention the final decisive battle of Throne of Bhaal? You can't even rest or restore your spells, while facing waves of demons and a powerful That One Boss.
• Dragon Age: Origins:
  • The "Lost in Dreams" portion of the Circle of Magi quest, in which a Sloth Demon sends you to the Fade, which you cannot prevent by any means, and you have to fight through a sprawling, backtrack-heavy area with dull environments, barely any dialogue, and tons of fighting with very strong enemies, and the Final Boss himself goes through about 5 different forms before he dies. There exists a fairly popular mod that does nothing but skip the entire sequence.
  • Orzammar. Long, dull, repetitive, predictable, and nary a third option to be found anywhere, least of all in places where the first and second options are both equally stupid. It's also nearly as long as the Brecilian Forest, Redcliffe, and the Circle Tower combined.
  • The outside of Fort Drakon, where Dragon Thralls attack alongside many ranged Darkspawn. If you hold back, the Emissaries will kill you with their spells, and if you charge, another Dragon Thrall appears. The General battle in the Alienage is also quite difficult, since infinite Darkspawn pour in as you're fighting.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition has the Forbidden Oasis. The main purpose of the locale is to recover shards from various hard-to-reach locations. There is only one way to get to most shards, it's easy to go in circles, and of course the map is so unhelpful it's practically pointless. You can spend an hour trying to figure out what level a shard is on and how to get there. If the shard is on the level above you, there's a good chance you'll have to go all the way across the map and back to get up there. (On the plus side, the Oasis is a completely optional portion of the map and not at all required to complete the main game. It's not at all uncommon, especially on the higher difficulties, for players to ignore it entirely, since the rewards for completing it are not necessarily worth the trouble.)
• Knights of the Old Republic:
  • Manaan. 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.
  • The most unpopular example by far is the Taris swoop race, a mandatory Unexpected Gameplay Change into an exceptionally cheesy racing minigame.
  • More annoying than the swoop race is the mandatory shoot-them-up mini-game that pops up as soon as the Ebon Hawk takes off Taris. The worst part about it is that if you lose, you'll have to rewatch minutes of unskippable cutscenes. And that's assuming you saved just before boarding the ship, and not earlier. And that your game doesn't crash right after you finally win it, as several players have reported.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
  • The Peragus level and the main Trayus academy. Running speed in space is no longer a problem (probably due to the Manaan complaints from the first game), and neither is difficulty, but they are just so boring, with little payoff compared to the amount of time spent running around.
  • Malachor V. If you don't kill all Storm Beasts while you play as the Exile, your chances of surviving there as Bao-Dur's remote are close to zero.
  • Nar Shaddaa, near the end of its questline. Attractions included: no Player Character, fighting your way through trained killers as new, non-Jedi character (Mira), facing bounty hunters with non-Jedi characters most players wouldn't otherwise pick (Mira, Atton, T3- M4) and storming Exchange's boss heavily defended yacht with only two squadmates, who WILL get stomped, even if you pick stronger ones (like Kreia). It goes much smoother in subsequent playthroughs once you have the foresight to make Atton a Jedi and save all his level-ups until then.
  • Lastly there's the Dummied Out planet M4-78, which many players say should have stayed gone. Only accessible with the alternate version of the Restored Content Game Mod, it's viewed as a slog to play through with an endless series of Fetch Quests and puzzles as well as the entire storyline being a "Shaggy Dog" Story with the Jedi Master you were seeking Getting A Bridge Dropped On Him. The general consensus among the playerbase is to go through it once for the additions to the game's overall story then drop it forever.
• Mass Effect:
  • Therum, which is most likely the first story planet the player will go to upon leaving the Citadel. It starts out with a long drive in the Mako, consisting mostly of plowing through geth outposts. It's not too difficult, but if you're not used to the Mako's handling, it's way too easy to plunge into the lava or get slaughtered by Armatures. After a while, you leave the Mako and fight through several waves of geth, eventually coming up against a squad of geth infantry and an Armature, which can easily one-shot a low-level Shepard. Then, you enter the mines to find Liara, and have to fight a Wake-Up Call Boss immediately afterwards. At higher levels, it's not too bad, but most players will want to fill out their party as soon as possible. And if you want the Asari Ally Achievement/Trophy you're going to have to go in low-leveled as you need to save all other sidequests until after you have Liara in the party.
    • Oh, and just for fun, both the Armature fight and the boss fight against the Krogan Battlemaster? Both preceded by unskippable cutscenes before the fight but after the autosave (since you can't save in combat, that means you start from before the cutscene). The run-up to the Battlemaster fight must be going for some kind of record, as it is preceded (between autosave and fight) by an unskippable dialogue, an elevator loading screen, and then another unskippable dialogue before going straight into the fight. This was very mercifully fixed in the Legendary Edition.
  • There's also the dreaded moon base. You initially hear about that mission (in which a VI has "gone rogue" and is defending a lunar base with approximately ten million rocket drones) fairly early on in the game (it's triggered by hitting level 20, which doesn't take a long time). Three bases full of drones, half of which are equipped with rockets that can kill you nearly instantly. Good luck if you actually try to go and do it immediately after getting it.
  • Planet Nodacrux, the location of the follow-up mission to Feros. Known among fans of the game as "Oh please God no, not that planet!". Its an example not because the mission is overly difficult (its a simple smash-and-shoot, actually), but because Nodacrux is covered in what comedian Buddy Hackett used to call "big, gigantic, mean-looking, evil Nazi mountains" that you have to somehow climb over in the Mako. On average, it takes a person ten to fifteen minutes of mountain climbing just to get to where you can get out of the Mako and spend a minute and a half shooting Thorian creepers.
  • The "Pinnacle Station" Downloadable Content has one in the form of the subterranean survival map, in which you must survive for over 2 minutes and 20 seconds against an army of rocket launcher equipped geth, including Geth Primes which you only encounter a couple of times in the main game and always appear when you can use the environment to kill them. This time you have to kill them the old fashioned way.
    • Ahern's survival mission is even worse. You have to grab a data cache, then hold out against infinite waves of fully armored turian soldiers for five minutes. There's only two plausible defensive positions on the map? And the soldiers use rocket launchers and tech sabotage too? The only help is that you can hack two automated but slow-firing turrets to help you.
    • Due to the way difficulty works in Mass Effect 1, most games played on Insanity difficulty are less a test of skill (enemies are just as dumb and predictable as ever) and more a test of patience. This is because every enemy relentlessly spams 'Immunity' and takes forever to kill. What is just annoying in the rest of the game, however, makes Time Trial and Hunt missions on Pinnacle Station on Insanity difficulty an exercise in hair-tearing frustration, as you have no choice but to kill fast on a difficulty level revolving entirely around not letting you kill fast.
  • Playing a fully-leveled up Shepard on New Game Plus makes Insanity playthroughs quite manageable, with the notable exception of the final area of Feros. The Zerg Rush of Thorian Creepers becomes much tougher with the added resilience of higher difficulties, so prepare for a slog.
• Mass Effect 2:
  • Horizon. It's the first mission against the Collectors, and you're up against everything they have. It starts off with simple fights against Drones, then throws in Assassins, Husks, Harbinger-drones, Scions, and finally a boss fight against a Praetorian. Later on, this is normal fare, but it's difficult here because it's quite early in the game; none of your (non-DLC) party members have their bonus powers unlocked, there's minimal weapon choice, and you're at a fairly low level to boot.
  • The disabled Collector ship. When you first get attacked by the Collectors, they trap you on small flying platforms and fly in reinforcements, consisting of all three Collector types, as well as two Scions. This doesn't seem too bad, until Harbinger ASSUMES DIRECT CONTROL of one of the Collectors. Harbinger excels at knocking you out of cover, especially low cover, which is all you get on the platforms. In addition, the Praetorian fight later on in the mission is a pain, especially considering you have to deal with Husks and Collectors while you fight. What makes this level the worst is the very first minutes: You've got incoming platforms filled with Collectors while one platform sits outside the field of battle with a Scion on it, constantly moving back and forth from two positions which are GUARANTEED to flank you wherever you are. On Insanity, this means getting torn to shreds whenever you pop out of cover to take out said Scion, or it means getting torn to shreds after Harbinger knocks you out of cover while you're having to recover your shields from a direct Shockwave blast from a Scion, which prolongs your regeneration by precious seconds. Hopefully, you should have been getting whatever offensive and defensive upgrades are available by that point...
  • Archangel's recruitment mission is another tough one. Once you reach Archangel, you have to defend him from a large group of advancing mercs and mechs, including a boss. That's the easy part. Now you have to go down into the basement to shut emergency shutters to prevent enemies from breaking in. This section is full of vorcha, varren, and krogan who can eat through your shields and health quite quickly (and most of them have regenerating health). Next you have to fight another boss, who makes a beeline straight for Archangel while his mooks pin you down. Finally, you have to defend Archangel against a swarm of mercs while a gunship takes potshots at you. Oh yeah, and you've got a "time limit". If Archangel's health is depleted, you lose. This mission is especially nasty on Insanity, rivaling Horizon. The shutters deserve elaboration. You press a button and a ten-second timer starts counting down. If anything crosses the shutter's path, the shutter declares it unsafe and aborts the closing process. The first shutter is easy; if you sprint to it and hit the button, by the time vorcha start pouring through into the tunnel beyond, the shutter will be closed. The shutter to the left takes you down a very narrow corridor with pipes blocking the path, and vorcha hunkered down behind the pipes. It gets especially nasty if there's a Pyro behind one of the pipes and you don't realize it, because he will stunlock you to death the moment you jump over the pipes (and if you do realize it, a corner detection glitch means that you can't kill it with powers without jumping over the pipe). On the right hallway, you come to a very open room, teeming with vorcha and varren. They endlessly respawn through the shutter, and the room is so big that by the time you've killed the ones up close, the far end has been fortified with vorcha and krogan. And when you do get to the shutter, you better hope they don't unleash varren, because they run fast enough to interrupt the shutter and restart the countdown.
  • The Derelict Reaper. The last part where you need to destroy the core and fight wave after wave of Husks is near impossible on Hard/Insanity. The core only being available to attack for short periods which you can easily miss because you're too busy staying alive doesn't help.
    • If, on the other hand, you happened to equip the M-90 Cain mini-nuke launcher...
  • And in "Lair of the Shadow Broker", the mandatory car chase. Good luck trying to steer with low mouse sensitivity. You may also have to disable motion blur because otherwise you'll end up trying to drive an indistinct, well, blur through a completely black screen.
  • Tali's recruitment mission is very difficult as well, more specifically the end fight against waves of infinitely respawning geth and a colossus which keep you pinned down with suppressive fire at essentially all times, as well as the fact that any area touched by the sun drains your shields. Did I mention that the only way to get the Geth Pulse Rifle is to play it on Hardcore or Insanity?
  • Grunt's recruitment on Korlus. You know how krogan are really hard to put down? You face a lot of them, including one area that might as well be called You Don't Have Enough Ammunition Row, where you have to deal with a seemingly endless chain of armoured krogan clones. When not fighting krogan, you're in awkward positions killing Blue Suns mercenaries, including shielded heavy weapons troops. At the end, you get to take on a shielded and armoured heavy weapon miniboss, backed up by the heaviest kind of mech in the game, supported by four krogan who flank you and rip you apart with shotgun blasts, in an area with awkward cover.
• Mass Effect 3:
  • The final level. A nasty Difficulty Spike and a jarring shift in tone combine to make London a thoroughly unpleasant level. For starters, it throws seemingly endless waves of every variety of husk at you, all while you scrabble around to find a decent chest-high wall to stand behind. Then, in lieu of a final boss, you have to deal with anywhere from four to nine Boss in Mook Clothing types, all of which can kill you in two hits — whilst dodging a Reaper laser, which is a One-Hit Kill. While none of these elements themselves are that difficult, there is simply no margin for error: either you fight perfectly or you game-over. It's even more painful when you compare it to the Suicide Mission in Mass Effect 2.
  • Grissom Academy... at least in London it's the endgame, so you have all your party members, some high-end equipment, and probably several skills maxed. The Academy is very early, so none of those options are available to you — and you can't shelve it for later like other non-priority missions, because the game automatically fails the quest if you don't do it past a certain point. The mission itself is hell, with multiple Atlas Mechs backed by Centurions, Guardians, and — worst of all — Engineers. You know, those guys who drop party-killing turrets and heal Atlases. The fight in the atrium — where Centurions cover everything with smoke, Engineers lay down turrets near shield pylons, and Guardians constantly advance on you, all of which get covering fire from an Atlas — is easily one of the hardest firefights in the game. And at the end of the level, where they have the decency to give YOU an Atlas, you still have to Hold the Line against multiple waves of troops and other Atlases, more or less guaranteeing that your own mech is going down before the fight is over. Even more so than London, players contend that this level is Mass Effect 3's most difficult.
  • The friggin' Geth Dreadnought. First part of the mission? Several landmines are planted all over the ground that you can easily step on that will drain your shields and health, which leaves you wide open to an attack if a Geth attacks you. Then things get even better for the second half. Now you're in a section where a shockwave regularly blasts out every 5-10 seconds and drains your shields away and the only way to not get hurt is to take cover, only sometimes even if you are you'll still get hurt. Couple that with the fact that the Geth in this section completely overwhelm you and you will definitely have to replay this nightmare multiple times.
  • The final battle of the Tuchanka arc. Remember the One-Hit Kill Reaper beam mentioned above? Not only do you have to constantly dodge that, you also have to avoid being stomped on by said Reaper, while fighting about six Brutes. To make things worse, the battle takes place in a small enclosed area with no cover, meaning that you'll often avoid one Brute only to stumble right into the next or get hit by the Reaper's attack. It only gets worse if you're playing an Engineer, an Adept or an Infiltrator, because those classes fare badly in melee, which is impossible to avoid here.
    • It is, however, considerably easier to simply sprint past the Brutes to the objective. It's still difficult — attempting to run through a horde of Brutes with a Reaper firing on you will do that — but you'll pull out a lot less hair (particularly infiltrators, who can do so while invisible).
  • While very funny and lighthearted, some fights during the Citadel DLC may be brutal depending on the class you picked. The first part especially, where Shepard has no medi-gel, a single pistol with only a handful of ammo, only a single block of health, and has to fight very smart enemies who love to spam him/her with grenades and drones (so spamming powers from afar is delicate). The worst part is that this pistol is rather heavy, which tends to increase the cooldown of Shep's powers. If you are a Soldier, with usually nothing but your weapons to deal damage, good luck killing 10 (shielded) enemies and their drones with 40 bullets or so. On the opposite, while Infiltrators may navigate through that level rather easily, they will stop smiling once they have to face themselves — as in, an invisible enemy able to deal truckloads of damage and then cloak again to go into hiding.
  • Also from the Citadel DLC, the final part of the quest "Citadel Arena: Unusual Scores". You're instructed to fight geth enemies at the Elite level on the Spin Zone map, only to end up on a glitchy map on Super-Elite difficulty, with the fourth and final wave consisting of Demonic Spiders from each enemy type: Reaper Banshees, Cerberus Atlas mechs, Geth Primes, and Collector Praetorians. Plus, losing on this map means death. Happy hunting!
  • The fight in Afterlife that concludes the Omega DLC can be tough. You're facing about five Adjutants and a company of Cerberus mooks — assault troopers, centurions, nemeses, the works. Also, you have to free Aria from the stasis field before it kills her. What makes this tough is that you're in the middle of a very cramped nightclub with limited cover facing a husk variant that can Beam Spam you, or merely Zerg Rush you and kill you.
  • Eden Prime in the From Ashes DLC, which becomes available before you've even gone to Palaven. If you go then, however, you will get to meet all of Cerberus's most hair-pulling minions, considerably before they would usually have turned up in that playthrough. It's basically Grissom Academy, only far earlier in the game.
  • From the Expanded Galaxy Mod:
    • The "Evacuation of Thessia" side mission, which plays out via the Galaxy Map, is prone to this. The Normandy is tasked with ferrying groups of refugees, soldiers and/or key personnel from the planet's surface, all within a pitched battle between Alliance fleets and Reaper forces that have blockaded the planet. Guide Dang It! is in full effect — there is no real way to know which units are the most valuable from a War Asset standpoint, and if you don't follow a certain chain, you'll miss out on a Talon Gunship that can be deployed within the Normandy's cargo hold. The Reapers start chasing you more and more quickly as the "rounds" of rescue go on, so much so that unless you've invested into every ship upgrade (including one that is conditional on completing a side mission from the previous game), you will always be outmatched by the Reapers, who will run you down and cause a Game Over. And your reward for doing all this? Most of the time, you'll condemn numerous Alliance crewmen (up to and including entire fleets) to destruction for a marginal victory, and you can easily screw it up enough that you'll come out of it at a loss.
    • 'Operation: Paladin, part of the Ark Mod submodule. You might think that having access to the entirety of Shepard's squadmates across the past two games might make the Hold the Line mission on Palaven's moon to protect a critical outpost much easier. Not so. Nearly everything in the mission, including what squadmates you bring (ME2 squadmates are recommended to help lighten the load), the enemy fighters you "tag" with a special weapon, the mechs you have onboard and the squadmates you've acquired up to this point all play a factor in the mission's success, and you can (and will) be swarmed by units of high-level enemies that will quickly drop you if you don't know what you're doing. Even seasoned players will find themselves frustrated with the onslaught of enemies, akin to Priority: Earth's final horde mode siege or a Gold-level multiplayer match. Some online sources (including the mod creators themselves) tell players to wait until just before the endgame before attempting this mission.
• Neverwinter Nights:
  • The snow globe. Not only is it quite possible to glitch so that if you killed any of the dryads/dwarves they remain attacking you even after you turn the snow globe to make them friendly, but it culminates in a fight against a full-scale white dragon, a procedure that is very likely to end in you being horribly slaughtered multiple times.
  • The beholder caves in "Hordes of the Underdark", especially for a full caster. In the first layer, you risk having your spells and buffs stripped away by enemies who, while fragile, are capable of inflicting a staggering amount of damage very quickly. In the second, you are guaranteed to have your spells and buffs stripped away by the environment, plus all your magic items, meaning that while you'll be facing relatively weak ettercaps and low-level spiders, they're able to cause meaningful amounts of harm to you — especially since they spam web attacks that lock you in place, and many of them have Strength-reducing poison. They do not, however, provide very much XP at all, because the calculations for that are based on your level, not how difficult the fight is.
• Neverwinter Nights 2:
  • The Highcliff castle. It's full of ghouls which have a stunning attack, and they actively use it to render your party immobile. Then they proceed to Zerg Rush you and wipe you out with regular melee attacks, reapplying the stunning effect over and over and not letting you break free. This is the case of a screaming need for a mage in the party — however, by that point of game, you haven't recruited one yet (except for Elanee, but she has only one offensive spell), and if you play as a mage, your own level is too low to have spells which would be effective in this situation.
  • The final area can be this to some, since it's filled with a large number of powerful undead and golems, and also adds a high chance of being attacked while resting, unlike with any other dungeon in the game. It's also filled with traps, which can make things difficult since it's the point where the party is unlikely to have a rogue unless the player character is one.
  • Old Owl Well. First, the orc caves are long and repetitive, with endless expanses of cave filled with mostly the same groups of orcs along with loads of traps. Second, the orcs in question are surprisingly tough fights; each one hits for a good amount of damage and take a while to go down, and if you screw up, you can easily end up alerting more orcs and having to fight a swarm of the bastards. Third, when you finally think it might be over, the orc boss tells you that the real leader is in a different cave entirely. Other than that, there's almost no story content to be found. To cap it off, you're forced to switch out one of your party members for Casavir.

Other Western RPGs

• 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, including one of the nastiest bosses in the game.
• In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, the Black Mountain Clan is terribly annoying and where you will probably encounter your first Difficulty Spike. The halls are littered with traps, being the only area in the game to include them so extensively. Also, most, if not all of the enemies in the mountains are made of rock or lava, and damage your weapons if you hit them and your armor if they hit you, making that part even worse for melee fighters. Most annoying, however, is that the lead you get from it turns out to be bogus and you only get back on the main quest from something you learn after you abandon the worthless lead.
• 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!
• Baldur's Gate III:
  • The "Trial of Faith Leap" in Shar's Gauntlet, a Secret Path puzzle that requires players to walk along a hidden path. Straying from this path will, at best, teleport you back to the starting point, or perhaps to one of the platforms that dot the path. At worst, however, it can kill a party member. While memorizing the general path to take is easy enough through Trial-and-Error Gameplay, the path becomes particularly narrow and perilous the closer you get to the end, making it ever easier to risk a party member dying and needing a costly resurrection (or Save Scumming). It is considered by many to be the lowest point of an otherwise good game, and it's not uncommon for more experienced players to simply cheese this particular puzzle by casting Fly and simply hop-scotching to the platforms and the end of the puzzle.
  • The Haunted House in the Lower City is generally agreed to be the worst quest in the entire game due to the annoying questgiver, an obscene amount of invisible enemies and difficult-to-disable traps, and the massive detour you have to take halfway through that requires you to complete an entirely different quest to resolve this one. To salt the wound further, the good option in which you rescue Eccentric Artist Oskar and preserve his marriage just earns you a worthless painting, while the evil option in which you let him die in the end or ruin his marriage gets you a pair of magic rings you could have obtained by simply not having rescued him to begin with.
• Cyberpunk 2077 has "(Don't Fear) The Reaper", a secret final story mission that entails V and Johnny launching a one-man raid on Arasaka HQ. As opposed to the other final story missions, you will have no back-up at all: it's only you against the most powerful footsoldiers and machines Arasaka can throw at you. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that your maximum HP is reduced by 25% at the start of the quest, and falling. You also only get one shot at making it to the end, and no mid-quest saves: if you die, the credits will roll, and you don't get to retry unless you reload a save from before you started it. The odds are stacked firmly against you, and the game treats this as a Suicide Mission: if you actually make it through and live to tell the tale, you will have earned your place as one of the greatest Edgerunners in history!
• Diablo II:
  • Act III. You have to slog through a jungle with switchbacks and dead ends populated by a) native pygmy men who either swarm and stab you or shoot you from afar with blowguns, which are led by shaman with the ability to revive the pygmies; b) enormous mosquitoes that drain your stamina and poison you; c) literal Demonic Spiders that are larger than you. This is on top of an act-long fetch quest which forces you to fully explore the jungle and the sewers of a nearby city looking for the unusually well-preserved remains (eye, brain, heart) of an old wizard.
    • 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 on the tediousness, and the Fetishes that the area is named after bring the pain like none other. And... just read the entry, 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.
    • Then there's the Durance of Hate. It's not too bad in Normal difficulty but in Nightmare and Hell the level area is greatly increased into a huge sprawling maze of corridors, also inhabited by those exploding Fetish dolls.
  • There's the Maggot Lair in Act II. Three levels of narrow single file tunnels with glitchy unresponsive slime doors, players getting stuck all the time in the narrow passages, then throw in the those lightning enchanted scarabs that everybody loves for good measure. And when you meet the boss, it takes so long for the room to load up that by the time you do, everything in the room has killed you during the lag. Oh, and as a final Fuck You, the boss will toss horrific poison all over the place on death, making sure you leave on 1 HP and making it essentially impossible to save your minions/hireling.
  • The Arcane Sanctuary presents you with four paths at the start, only one of which leads to the Summoner and the portal to the Canyon of the Magi, meaning that most of it is unnecessary. This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that it's a maze of bridges with lightning traps, Ghoul Lords that can cast powerful spells across the platforms, and ghosts that can fly over the space. The worst part is that this is mandatory to enter the Canyon of the Magi, and it's often difficult to get a group. to go in here.
• Patch 2.4 of Diablo III introduced Set Dungeons, special levels which can only be accessed if the player is wearing six pieces of the relevant class-specific armour set.^note  Or five pieces and a Ring of Royal Grandeur. Beating the dungeons requires completing one of two objectives relating to the armour set's abilities and killing a minimum number of enemies without taking fatal damage; mastering the dungeons requires completing both objectives and killing every enemy in the dungeon in under four and a half minutes. The mere concept is somewhat polarising — those in favour like having to think about how best to use the strengths of the armour sets, those against despise Timed Missions on principle and/or don't find the objectives in any way fun — but even those who like Set Dungeons find at least one for each class that is infuriatingly difficult to master.
  • The Wrath of the Wastes dungeon is not just the most detested Barbarian Set Dungeon, but one of the most detested in the game, as one objective is taking no physical damage for the entire dungeon. Which is made very difficult by the other objective — casting Rend on ten or more enemies simultaneously five times — as well as swinging pendulum traps and enemies whose attack animations don't even seem to need to connect directly to register a hit.
  • The Crusader has the Roland's Legacy dungeon; while the objectives are easy enough to achieve, the dungeon is packed with Imps that run away when nearby enemies are attacked, and it's painfully easy to lose stray enemies in the enormous map. Diablo III message boards are filled with Crusader players venting their spleen about having one enemy left to kill with seconds left on the clock and no idea where it is.
  • The Demon Hunter is generally regarded as having the easiest Set Dungeons, but the Unhallowed Essence dungeon has the worst reputation of the four owing to the need for particular kindness on the part of the enemy density RNG gods to achieve the objective of hitting twenty or more enemies with a single Multishot six times.
  • Mention the Uliana's Strategem dungeon to a Monk player and stand back to avoid being caught in the fire of their rage. Although Patch 2.5.0 softened the objective of detonating Exploding Palm on 21 or more enemies three times to the much more achievable 15 or more enemies four times, the objective of taking no fire damage for the entire dungeon remains almost impossible without the ultra-rare Star of Azkaranth amulet equipped either directly or via Kanai's Cube, and it is easy to lose stray enemies in the dungeon's enormous map.
  • The Raiment of the Jade Harvester dungeon was once the most despised Witch Doctor dungeon owing to the invisibility ability of the Writhing Deceiver enemies (which could thus hide until long after the player ran past them), but after Blizzard disabled that ability in Patch 2.4.1, the dishonour passed to the Helltooth Harness dungeon, which has an enormous map and enemy density that makes killing 20 or more enemies with a single Wall of Death four times very difficult without fatal damage-risking kiting.
  • The Wizard is widely viewed as having the most difficult set dungeons on average, but the most hated is a tossup between the Delsere's Magnum Opus and Vyr's Amazing Arcana dungeons. The objectives in both dungeons are not difficult to achieve with the right support items, but both maps are large enough that covering them in under four and a half minutes can only be done with frequent Teleport spamming, and the labyrinthine layout of the Vyr's dungeon makes it easy to lose track of one or more of the over 600 enemies.
• In Drakensang 2 has the Temple of Efferd, which is full of Giant Enemy Crab monsters which are tough to kill and can wound you pretty easily, but thankfully is a Bonus Dungeon.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Arena:
    • The Imperial Dungeons is basically the tutorial level equivalent of a Sink or Swim Mentor. Straight from character creation, you're dropped into a dungeon with a basic weapon, no armor, and (if you're a mage) no magic. Explore, and you might find some decent gear — or you might run into a thief or lizard man that'll kill you in one shot. Head straight for the shift gate, and you'll wind up in town in the middle of the night, when the outlaws are out. You'll then have to run around one of the game's ridiculously large town maps hoping to find an inn where you can spend the night before the thugs get you. Todd Howard, head designer for later games such as Morrowind and Skyrim, admitted that he attempted this dungeon 10 times and never got through.
    • The fourth dungeon, the Fortress of Ice, will destroy you if you haven't yet gotten a handle on the game. If the ice-breath-spamming Snow Wolves don't get you, the plate-armored knights certainly will, and without at least an elvish-quality weapon (or some magic) the Ice Golems are literally invincible. Adding to that, there's only one path to the end (barring Passwall shenanigans), so there's going to be a lot of hitting dead ends and backtracking, or looping around in circles. Hope you stocked up on True Heal potions...
    • The Mines of Khuras may be the worst of all. Two huge, confusing levels packed to the gills with various kinds of Demonic Spiders. Hell Hounds, Homonculi, Zombies, Golems, you name it. Adding insult to injury, there's precious little treasure to be found, meaning exploring the place nets you little more than another cheap death from something spamming magic at you from behind.
  • Daggerfall: The beginning dungeon, Privateer's Hold, is only slightly better than the Imperial Dungeons in Arena. Right out of the gate are deadly spell-casting imps that can only be damaged by steel weapons or better (pray you start with or find some!), skeletons that take less damage from bladed weapons, and bears.
  • Morrowind:
    • Roughly halfway through the main quest, you'll need to visit Kogoruhn, the ancient stronghold of Great House Dagoth (of which Big Bad Dagoth Ur was the leader). You are tasked with finding three specific items in order to pass "The Warrior's Test" to be named Urshilaku Nerevarine. Two of the items are easily found in the domes on the roof. The third requires a trek through the multi-level dungeon and the extensive underground tunnels beneath, which are crawling with Dagoth Ur's Ash Creature minions, undead (including stat-damaging Greater Bonewalkers), and lesser Daedra. Even if you are able to complete it in one shot without having to backtrack to civilization to heal and restock, expect to spend at least an hour there.
    • The final quest for the Bloodmoon expansion involves you being taken into Mortrag Glacier to participate in Hircine's hunt. What makes this quest very difficult is that you will have to navigate a maze full of Werewolves that move quickly and hit like a truck. If you are not careful, you might have to face a group of them all at once. Although there is an NPC you can request to help you, he can be overwhelmed and killed by them. Since you will be dragged into this area unwillingly, you may not have had time to prepare for this mission. Luckily the final bosses are a cakewalk compared to the onslaught of werewolves you faced in the maze.
  • Skyrim
    • The penultimate dungeon consists of the same Draugr enemies you've seen in every ruin and tomb up to that point; the only catch is this time you have no follower and the dungeon is a lot longer. Depending on how much you've leveled, this can mean either a swarm of standard Draugr, or Scourges who may have shouts (and will destroy your stamina with frost spells) and Deathlords who do have shouts and, on top of that, take lots of abuse before going down, plus one Dragon Priest (though he's surprisingly fragile). Given that dungeons aren't even that long, it's an improvement. The game also throws a couple of dragons at you there... but they don't level-scale, so they'll probably end up as the easiest to kill for you.
    • The Corridor Cubbyhole Run in Labyrinthian. Have fun getting pelted to death by magical traps in a hallway too narrow to dodge effectively, with safe spots placed far enough that you may not get to them without getting hit. And may the Nine help you if you brought a follower, because they're not smart enough to take cover and will cause you to take a boatload of splash damage as a result.
• Fable has Bargate Prison, where the Hero is incarcerated thanks to Cutscene Incompetence, endures a pointless unskippable period locked in a cell, is pushed into an irrelevant Racing Minigame, gets a chance at escape, and has to repeat the entire sequence because the first escape attempt can't succeed and the Hero can't just attack the Warden while he's reciting poetry with his back to him. Moreover, the entire mission is worse than useless, since the person you rescue from the prison gets recaptured in the very next quest.
• Fallout 2:
  • The very first level. You build your character, expecting to use guns, to be handed a spear and told to go kill dozens of giant ants. If you don't have Melee or Unarmed as tagged skills, you'll probably be hitting about one in every four swings. To boot, the only medicine hurts your Perception (and ability to hit), you have to blow up a door which can backfire, and when you think it can't get any worse, the boss of the level must be fought hand to hand. Betcha can't guess what the boss's specialty is, can ya? Oh, and traps are everywhere. That said, simply dashing through the level and ignoring all enemies is entirely feasible (and basically recommended).
    • Each of the three premade characters has an easy way to beat the boss: you can fight him, convince him to back down, or just steal the key. This suggests part of the Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth playstyle the series is fond of. Now, if your three tag skills are Energy Weapons, First Aid, and Gambling... good luck.
  • Then there's the Wanamingo Mine. Located in the settlement of Redding, it's available early and clearing it out is required to earn some potentially large monetary rewards. Unfortunately, the eponymous wanamingos are numerous, resilient, and hit hard, and their queen is even worse; a low-level character will be slaughtered. As will a mid-level character, and probably a high-level. Really, now, the best bet to doing this is to have a suit of Power Armor, and for most, by the time that happens, the Chosen One will be so rich and powerful, that the money earned won't mean anything anymore. Even exploiting Wanamingos' weaknesses (which are pretty obscure and counterintuitive — they're deathly afraid of crippled legs and fire), and herding the AI into firing lanes with a small army of party members, a mid-level player still has expend so much resources that the reward barely covers them.
• Fallout 3:
  • Old Olney is simultaneously one of the easiest areas of the game and one of the hardest as it is crawling with Deathclaws, giant lizards with machete claws that rend even higher level players with ease. Deathclaws can be easily taken to more manageable levels by using a Dart Gun to cripple their legs but they still can take a beating. The sewers are marginally more difficult, because you can't outrange the inhabitants. The Deathclaw Sanctuary is much, much harder, since you're fighting in tight corridors and the Deathclaws there can ambush you.
  • Point Lookout is That One Expansion Pack, being populated by super-tough tribesmen and mutated hillbillies with weapons that are haxed to bypass damage resistance. Especially the first quest at the Calvert Mansion, where you will expend your supply of Stimpaks like popcorn. Save Scumming is mandatory.
• Fallout: New Vegas:
  • The gold-plated clusterfuck that is the Quarry Junction north of Sloan. Let's see... Deathclaws? Check. Mother Deathclaw and her brigade of lil' bastards? Check. Deathclaw ALPHA MALE?! Check and mate. The entire area is rather clearly meant to serve as a Beef Gate to prevent players from taking the north road; higher-level characters can pull it off, but it requires either top-level equipment or slowly plinking them from an unreachable area.
  • Also in New Vegas, Vault 34. Armored Feral Ghouls, confusing labyrinthine design, and several underwater areas are annoying enough, but the entire place is also irradiated, so good luck if you don't have tons of Rad-X and Rad-Away.
    • A lack of anti-radiation supplies can be mitigated if you can make it to the clinic, where a locked safe can be raided for several doses of Rad-X and Rad-Away. Assuming you know how to navigate the mazelike hallways.
    • If that wasn't bad enough, it's possible, on some platforms, to set off a Game-Breaking Bug which corrupts any saves made inside the Vault, making it dangerous to even go near the bloody place. Oh, and don't think you can just rush inside without saving (having cleared out the Ghouls previously because you probably had to leave halfway and replenish your Rad-X and Rad Away), burst into the armoury, take everything that isn't nailed down (including several unique weapons, plentiful ammo, and the extremely useful Pulse Gun), rush back outside, and THEN save... because that'll be corrupted, too. So you'll have no choice but just to leave all that precious gear in there to rot. That being said, by the time you're powerful enough to actually make it past all the Demonic Spiders, chances are you won't really need them anyway. (Also, the above glitch was discovered on an unpatched game, so it's possible it's since been fixed.)
  • The ENTIRETY of the Dead Money DLC. To start off, you're stranded in a dark maze-like city with NONE of your equipment except for some food and a holorifle with only 20 shots. The ghost-like enemies you find will just get back up if you shoot them, there are large sections of the city with poison gas that drains your health quickly, and there are barely any stimpaks or beds around to heal yourself. It gets slightly easier once you get to the Sierra Madre casino (mostly because there is an easy to find supply room with Stimpaks, ammo, some armor, and a couple police pistols)... but then you run into holograms which you obviously can't shoot but can kill you in a second if they see you. And that's not getting into the speakers all over the resort and casino that cause the bomb collar strapped to your neck to explode if you hang around them to long, killing you instantly. It's all worth it though for the end where you can murder the guy who locked you here in the first place.
    • Putting a few extra points into the Survival skill makes it far easier, however, and the Old World Blues Them's Good Eatin' perk will give you a chance to find very effective food items on Ghost People you kill.
  • The Lonesome Road DLC gives us "The Courier's Mile". Ground zero for a nuclear missile, radiation levels can climb above 25 rads per second, and it is filled with Irradiated Marked Men — which practically require one hit to kill due to the radiation healing — as well as Irradiated Deathclaws which deal radiation damage. The one good thing? The deathclaws have zero damage threshold and resistance. Not that it matters much since they'll still have 500 health, at minimum.
• Fallout 4
  • Lexington, at least for low-level players. A new player wandering in can easily attract the attention of the patrolling Raiders occupying the ruins...including the Raider with a Fat Man. One incautious shot and a bomb whistle will announce that in this game, the bad guys get heavy weapons too. On the upside, you can get a Fat Man early in the game if you're careful.
  • Thee secret Vault in the quest "Hole in the Wall", which is stuffed to the gills with mole rats. This, in and of itself, wouldn't be an issue except for the fact that these mole rats are infected with a virus that, in the event that you contract it, results in a penalty of 10 maximum HP. The only way to remove this is with a cure that you find near the end of the vault, which is the only one available in the game. If you give the cure to a sick child, you'll end up stuck with the mole rat disease forever. Be prepared to do some hardcore Save Scumming if you wanna make it through without getting sick (or abuse a glitch).
    • Compounding the problem is the fact that how you can contract the disease involves Fake Difficulty bordering on glitchy. Obviously you can get the disease from being bitten by one of the mole rats. But you can also contract it if a mole rat bites a friendly character. Even if that character is your Mr. Handy companion, or just the Vault Protectron you can activate to patrol around, both of whom are robots. This unintuitive problem, combined with other seemingly random infections, means a player who doesn't like to say "Guide Dang It!!" is likely to assume the disease is simply unavoidable. (Unless you check your status on your menu, you don't even know you've been infected until the end of the mission.) Essentially the player must dismiss any companions, kill the non-hostile Protectron if they activated it, monitor their Pip-Boy status, and constantly quicksave/ quickload in order to get the good ending for the quest without suffering a permanent health debuff. The reason why you get the disease even when somebody, even a robot, gets bit is because the disease is a perk and seeing how only the player can get more perks, it gives a very obnoxious reason to save scum through this annoying quest.
  • Quincy. Simply put, the place is infested with high-level Gunners armed with more energy weapons than an Enclave convention. For the mooks. Then throw in a power armor operator with a Fat Man, two more power armor operators, yet another Fat Man operator, a guy with a missile launcher, Assaultrons, mines, enclosed spaces, and half the nightmarishly high-level enemies have elevated positions so you can't sneak up on them. Either bring a Gauss Rifle and take your time, or show up in power armor, open with an artillery strike, and summon Minuteman reinforcements so they'll (briefly) give the Gunners something other than you to shoot at.
  • The Mass Pike Interchange. Its only be accessed via elevator, and, since you'll need to clear the Gunners at the bottom to get to said elevator, you know have an Assaultron waiting at the top that will one-hit-kill low-level players and plenty of high-level players as well. Once you manage to somehow survive the initial death laser, you're now faced with multiple heavily armed Gunners, one of which is in power armor. But really, you're just going to be insta-dying to the Assaultron a dozen or more times.
    • This level is completly avoidable...unless you want McCready's unique perk (+20% chance to make headshots in VATS), in which case get ready to ride an elevator into a laser beam over and over and over again.
• Icewind Dale II has quite a few:
  • Battle Arena. You have 1 minute to defeat a random monster with difficulty scaling up. The catch? The arena is a 3x3 square. To win a single battle, you need to win 3 fights on 3 squares so they form a line, Tic-Tac-Toe style. There's a minimum of 250 battles to complete the quest. You're allowed only one combatant and the rest of your party is automatically locked-up. Battle Arena is completely optional, but if you skip it you'll be missing out some very good quest rewards.
    • For those who are truly sick of the Battle Arena, there is a mod that will allow you to bypass the fights but still get the items.
  • Felwood. Didn't put any skills points in Wilderness Lore skill? Good luck finding your way around this trap-filled maze, as the areas are identical.
  • The Black Raven monastery. To reach the Underdark, you need to complete 8 trials. Don't have a monk in your party? Good luck fighting without armor and your favorite magic weapon. Which is probably why people prefer to slay all the monks rather than enduring the trials.
• Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos has the dreaded White Tower. The first floor's music can cure deafness, the second floor is puzzle-based, BUT the third floor features never-ending waves of powerful ghosts who can phase through the walls, attack you through the walls, and will keep surrounding you easily, making movement in any direction impossible and death inevitable. One LPer tried to deny existence of the White Tower, refused to go to the White Tower, and then denied being in the White Tower.
  • There is a way to make dealing with the ghosts quite a bit easier using Vaelan's Cube. It even restores mana when used on a character after killing a ghost with it. However, actually bringing the Cube along to the White Tower in the first place counter-intuitive, as it has to be used to enter a town near the Tower (which destroys the Cube), and your business in the Tower cannot be completed without first visiting the town. However, everything you need to do on the third level of the White Tower can be accomplished before that.
  • Counterintuitively, you can use the Vaelan's Cube in the weapon slot. This means never losing a single cube, having multiple cubes to fight level 3 of white tower even after unlocking Yvel city.
• Lands of Lore 2 has the Ruloi Citadel as the most irritating level by far. Much of it is wide open area, and the only enemy around (apart from the boss) is annoyingly fast, flies, and attacks you only with ranged attacks. One of the said attacks raises pillars of energy next to you, and a couple of seconds touching them will easily kill you even at the highest level. And these flying enemies like to retreat back to cubbyholes high up in the walls to heal themselves up. At least the enemies don't respawn. If the fighting isn't annoying enough for you, much of the level requires you to jump up and across narrow ledges, and falling too far will kill you in this game.
• The 4 Jewels dungeon in Legacy of the Ancients. Go down seven levels worth of "everything has double the hit points and wants to kill you," booby-trapped chests, shitloads of traps, and the final level is split into four parts, leading you to climb back up, walk around more of the maze, drop back down, get treasure, and repeat. Oh... and the fact you have to climb your way out of the dungeon you've already plundered? VERY annoying.
• 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.
    • The most reviled level, however, has to be Castle Darkmoor, where you have to trek for an obligatory quest item. Not only the place is giant and the advancing requires solving some obscure puzzles involving teleporters that like you to teleport right in the middle of a group of monsters, but said monsters, specifically Maddening Eyes, like to cause Insanity at alarming rate and they can dispel you along with Liches here, meaning no buffs if you don't want to recast them every five steps.
  • 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.
    • Also from Might And Magic VII, perhaps even more egregiously, is the Titan's Stronghold. It's a dungeon loaded with dragons and the eponymous titans, who are nigh-impossible for anything but and endgame party to deal with (you'll stop by here much earlier than that). The only feasible way to get through to retrieve the MacGuffin within was with the master-level Air spell 'Invisibility'. The purpose of said MacGuffin? To allow your Archers to receive their final promotions, which in turn allows them to learn master-level Air magic.
    • If you're doing the second Archer Promotion Quest so that your Archer can use master Air Magic, either you're doing something wrong or you can already kill whatever that place can throw at you. Probably the latter, as the former would require you to not have a Wizard or Warlock/Arch Druid in the party and not be compensating for it somehow.
• The Gehennom levels of NetHack 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 variants Slash'EM and UnNetHack attempt to fix, by shortening Gehennom while adding more special (i.e. dangerous) levels.
• The ultimate/penultimate dungeon in Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the House at the End of Time, which has swarms of incorporeal enemies, The Wild Hunt members that make immunity to gaze attacks, a near-useless defense otherwise, suddenly crucial, and is actually two near-identical maps laid on top of each other with no visual difference to indicate which layer you're currently on.
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has The Enigma, mercifully a Brutal Bonus Level. On top of huge amounts of puzzles that create significant backtracking and which almost everyone looks up the solutions for, it's full of undead enemies while requiring the presence of character who usually specializes in illusion spells undead are immune to. It's also full of traps and enemy abilities that wear players down by making them exhausted and damaging their wisdom, weakening their saving throws against those spells going forward. This is all Gameplay and Story Integration, because it's the lair of the demon lord Areshkegal, and as such designed to drive people to exhaustion and madness until they give up trying to solve its puzzles and submit to her will.
• Players of Planescape: Torment have found various parts of Curst to be the scrappy part of the game. From the daisy chain of treacherous quests, to the prison break of an angel beneath, to the warzone Curst becomes on returning.
  • Curst, beyond the extreme combat emphasis compared to most of the rest of the game, also is worse because of the Guide Dang It! aspect. It is possible to rest in the prison, but only through dialogue through an NPC who only offers the option if you talk about completely unrelated topics with him. In which case, you could just spam Cloudkill. Of course, if you didn't think to buy Cloudkill yet or bring someone capable of casting it, that's tough because you can't go back until after you defeat this area.
  • Ravel's maze, although the location of many Crowning Moments of Awesome, also features the toughest and least avoidable fight up to that point in the game. Immediately following the Boss Battle, shades pour into the maze, preventing players from recuperating and saving.
  • The entrance to the Fortress of Shadow, is dark, disorienting, and crawling with greater shades which the Nameless One has to face alone. Some builds have no choice but to run like hell, dying many times in the Trial-and-Error Gameplay of finding the correct triggers to get past it.
  • The Nameless One's maze. Finding the exit is nothing short of a Guide Dang It!. Fortunately, the whole maze is optional.
  • The Modron Maze. Having fun navigating in a 8x8 maze (that's around 64 rooms, depending on the Randomly Generated Levels) full of identical rooms.
• Uplink had the LAN levels, which threw a LOT of people. Though it was fixed in a patch, certain LAN levels (they're randomly generated) were Unintentionally Unwinnable, you needed one hell of a computer just to competently attempt them (at minimum, you generally have to run 3 bypasses and usually almost all of your LAN tools, plus the standards like trace tracker and password crackers/deciphers at proper moments. If you never learned how to manage your processes in that game before a LAN popped up, you learned then.), and what's worse is that logging into the mainframe always alerted the sysadmin to your presence, starting a countdown to get the job done, which was a real killer if the mainframe was right next to the main gateway, giving you about 20 seconds to crack the password/encryption, get into the system, complete your mission, and log out before you get booted by the sysadmin.
• The sewers from Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. A long, visually boring slog through an unintuitive maze, in which the basic enemies were somewhere between Goddamn Bats and Demonic Spiders, and which had degraded bosses that appeared as boss fights earlier in the same level, and no sources of health except for rats, which Ventrue can't feed on. There is an item which allows one to replenish health by defeating enemies, which makes this bit much much easier, but the quest chain for getting that item involves going to the museum, which is a Scrappy Level in its own right. And even this item only makes the sewers bearable; it doesn't do a thing to make them fun, or to mitigate the fact that (apart from Chinatown) the sewers mark the point at which the game shifts away from the story- and character-driven gameplay that made it a Cult Classic, and toward one endless combat section after another. And it never shifts back.
  • One of the game's developers later said that if there was one thing he could change about the game, it would be cutting off half of the sewers.
  • The Ocean View Hotel qualifies on the second and later 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. This one's especially interesting because, in spite of the game's strong, long-lived cult following, the only major awards it ever won was for "best level" for the Ocean View Hotel. And while one of the things that makes the game special is its abrupt genre shifts (in this case into survival horror), anyone who's played the Ocean View Hotel more than once thinks of it as "that place where I can't die and where I have to do a lot of tedious up and down maneuvers."
  • Adding insult to the Disappointing Last Level's injury, the Final Boss is literally impossible if one does not have a gun, and very nearly so if one does not have the skills to use it (unless one hits it with the conveniently placed searchlights, thereby paralyzing it and bringing it within easy melee reach).
• Wizardry: Proving Grounds of The Mad Overlord. Level 3. 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. It's usually around level 7 when the vampires show up. They hit you once and you get drained 3 levels or so — which usually 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.
  • Fortunately, those levels are entirely optional — the only floors you have to visit are 1, 2, 4, a tiny part (4 spaces on a 20x20 map) of 9, and 10.
    • In fact, you don't even have to do that, at least in the original (Apple II) version. Casting MALOR in combat has a chance of randomly teleporting you to level 9, a short walk away from Werdna's lair. (Of course, if you're not cheating, you'll probably want to visit the other levels to gain experience and items first.)
• 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 manageable, 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?
• Wizardry 8:
  • The Trynnie/Rattkin tree, more for annoyance factor than for real difficulty, even though there are still many ways to get killed. First, it's high above the ground and not all paths are guarded by rails, making it very possible for you to fall off for a possible Total Party Kill unless you have Valkyrie in your team and her Cheat Death triggers. Second, it's full of narrow pathways and plenty of NPC which block entire path so they make it damn near impossible to pass around them and they also get occasionally stuck in the gates, forcing you to rest so they can go away in the meantime. This makes also any battle taking place here last ages as you see five enemies and twenty trynnies defending/moving/attacking each damn turn. Enemies here include status-spamming plants and faeries that keep maximum distance from you while spamming blind and AoE magic attacks. It does not help that two main-quest items are located in Rattkin part of tree - the most far-away bough. Apparently the creator of Wizardry Reforged mod hated it so much he just removed the level with in-game explanation being that the tree burned down.
  • Rapax Rift and Castle. Rift has lava in which you can accidentally fall and get scorched for your trouble. Both have very frequent enemy encounters with dangerous opponents in large numbers, notably with Rapax spellcasters. While single Noxious Fumes from them won't do much, ten of them in a row are different matter. They also can cast same buffs as you to reduce your combat efficiency, so every battle will take a while. Lastly, both places are extremely difficult to navigate for first timers and completing whatever quest you want to do there is needlessly complicated.

Nintendo

• In the first two The Denpa Men games, there's Ice Island. In the first game, it's full of multiple tough enemies, including the first enemies in the game (and some of the only ones, too) who outright resist Light attacks — up until now, reliable to the point of almost being an Infinity +1 Element. In the second, the level is suddenly full up of Frictionless Ice puzzles — and to make matters worse, they're not quite frictionless in the way most gamers would intuit them, and actually do require a bit of player input to properly slide to where you want to go. The second version also has holes, meaning that the only way to actually leave the level is by bringing a Teleporter item with you, or happening upon the mid-dungeon warp point.
• EarthBound (1994):
  • Peaceful Rest Valley is the game's first major Difficulty Spike and a nasty introduction to the game's more dangerous status effects, with every enemy being a Goddamned Bat or Demonic Spider: the Mobile Sprouts with the ability to make more Mobile Sprouts as well as heal themselves and steal your magic, the Li'l UFOs and Spinning Robos that can give you colds, the Ramblin' Evil Mushrooms can nail you with Mushroomization that also inflicts Interface Screw (that can't be cured via PSI or items), and the Territorial Oaks, where the rolling HP mechanic first becomes the difference between life and death. Worse still is right around this point is when Ness's "Homesick" status ailment may pop up for the first time with no warning: imagine trying to battle your way back to a save point to recover with a 12.5% chance that you'll waste a turn. Even worse is Ness is your only party member at this point: you'll need at least three or four Teddy Bears absorbing enemy attacks to make it through in one piece.
  • The segment in between trapping all the zombies in the tent and reaching Saturn Valley is a nightmare. You have to go through the Threed tunnels, which contain only three unique enemies barring the boss, but the Zombie Dog is very powerful and the Zombie Possessor is one of two enemies in the whole game who can possess a character with a Tiny Li'l Ghost, which either attacks you for 1-10 damage or stop you from attacking for one turn. The boss, the Mini Barf, is nothing special (though it can drag out the fight by drastically reducing everyone's accuracy via making everyone cry), but then Grapefruit Falls comes, where you have to make your way through multiple enemies that can put up a fight and possibly deal with the Tiny Li'l Ghosts preventing a critical character in whatever strategy you're using from moving for a turn, letting the enemies brutally murder your party. The kicker: there is no phone in either of these areas. If you die, you start back at your last save point, most likely the Threed Hotel, with the only bit of mercy being that the Mini Barf isn't there any more if you decide to continue.
  • If you decide to tackle the Milky Well dungeon in from the moment it becomes accessible, watch out, as Struttin' Evil Mushrooms roam the grounds, capable of inflicting the Mushroomized status (which functions as a combination Confusion + Interface Screw effect), leaving you susceptible to the attacks of the other difficult enemies roaming the area. Thankfully, the boss at the end, the Trillionage Sprout, is easily handled if you have either certain PSI or items, but in the former's case, the Tough Mobile Sprouts might end up draining all your magic away via PSI Magnet by the time you reach it.
  • There's also the Gold Mine. Basically, the objective is to find and defeat five giant moles known as Guardian Diggers. Each one is similar and will take some sort of magic to defeat. However, the place is The Maze, teeming with Noose Men (tie up your characters and waste turns), Mad Ducks (drain PP that you'll want for the Guardian Diggers), and, worst of all, Thirsty Coil Snakes and Gigantic Ants (loaded with poison attacks).
  • How about the Fourside Department Store after the lights go out? You've temporarily lost your Black Magician Girl and the store is choked with a Demonic Spider of every kind: Musicas can hit multiple times per turn with Thunder and put the entire party to sleep, Mystical Records hit hard and can heal other enemies, and Scalding Coffee Cups also dish out heavy amounts of Fire-based damage to everyone. Getting massacred by records and coffee cups never ceases to be humiliating. Due to the fact that the store's floors are only connected by elevators, it's all too often that you'll be greeted by a swarm of baddies that you can't avoid. You'll likely need revival items to get past it the first few times through... the catch is, once the department store has turned into a dungeon, you can only buy them in Saturn Valley, which is a very long trip.
  • Right after the Fourside Department Store is the dreaded Monkey Cave in Dusty Dunes Desert. You wander a cave of monkeys guarding doors, who will only move if you give them an item they demand. Said items are available in the cave, but thanks to your very limited inventory space (made worse by how you have only two party members at the time) expect to do lots and lots and lots of going back and forth to solve the massive Chain of Deals, all the while listening to very obnoxious music.
  • The Stonehenge Base. It's a long labyrinthine dungeon, the monsters are a step up in difficulty from anything you've faced, and the 1-in-128-drop-chance Sword of Kings is here, the only weapon that Poo can equip without lowering his stats. It's difficult even if you're not trying to pick up the sword, as Starmen, Mooks, Octobots, and Power Robots litter the premises and don't go down without a fight. And, if you finish the boss of the dungeon, the Starman Deluxe, say goodbye to finding the sword, as it causes all the enemies inside to permanently despawn. At least if you're patient enough to grind yourself stupid looking for it, you'll become so over-leveled that you can practically sleepwalk through the rest of the game without much of a problem.
• EarthBound Beginnings:
  • Duncan's Factory. You go here after getting Lloyd in your party to fire a bottle rocket at a rock blocking your path. Unfortunately, the place is a maze full of enemies who are quite a bit stronger than anything you've faced so far. The worst part is that Lloyd is only at level 1 when he joins, and in order to progress you NEED to keep him alive when you reach the end of the dungeon.
  • Mt. Itoi/Holy Loly Mountain personifies this trope and Disappointing Last Level. It's not only long, but it swarms with Demonic Spiders that give minimal experience when defeated, healing opportunities are few and far between, and the random encounter rate is beyond sadistic. Though you eventually come across EVE to help you with fights, she joins very late into the entire ordeal, and she's only around for a little while before she gets destroyed. In fact, when asked about its difficulty, the game's creator said that the game was too close to its scheduled release date and there wasn't enough time to properly balance it. And it shows.
• Fossil Fighters has the BB Brigade base. It's not annoying because it's long (it's rather short, in fact). It's not annoying because it's complicated (there's no real puzzles to speak of). It's annoying because, in a game where all the battle encounters up to that point have been optional, it's full of aggressive opponents who will swarm you and constantly force you into mandatory battles. They're not especially difficult, but they're nigh-on endless.
• Golden Sun
  • The first one has Altmiller Cave. Not only is it long and filled with nasty enemies, but it's also completely dark. The only light you get is from torches and the standard little bubble around yourself. You either have to bumble around rock mazes, trying to remember where you have and haven't been, or waste Ivan's PP and use Reveal constantly. And, to rub salt in the wound, the bottom floor has an infuriating puzzle involving memorizing a riddle you heard at the start of the dungeon, unless you cheat and use Reveal to see the colors of the rocks.
  • Another aggravating part is Lamakan Desert. The dehydration mechanic wouldn't be so bad, if your characters would just shut up about the heat. It also doesn't help that the boss of that area, Manticore, is the first boss that can move twice per turn, so you're not likely to be ready for it.
  • Golden Sun: The Lost Age's Elemental Rocks are annoying, but Air's Rock takes the cake, it is hard to figure out even WITH a guide. The game doesn't even give you a reason to bother with Air's Rock, as it doesn't tell you that an important and plot-centric skill is located there. When you finally do tackle it, you start out solving a bunch of annoying maze puzzles that require you to use a PP-draining skill over and over again. Air's Rock is near the beginning of the game, so you have very little HP and PP, hardly any good equipment, and the enemies are a significant cut above what you've seen so far. After the mazes, you get to climb up the mountain, solving annoying platform puzzles and engaging in a lot of Trial-and-Error Gameplay on the way. When you reach the top, you've likely spent nearly as much time as you did in the previous game's final dungeon. But, reaching the top isn't the end of Air's Rock; horrified, you soon discover that you're only one third of the way done. You then venture inside the stone, and proceed to make your way down, level by level, to the heart of the mountain, solving annoying and repetitive block puzzles along the way while the enemies have got an upgrade at this point. After you finally reach the heart of the mountain, a process that takes about as long as the climb up did, you've got to go back to the top level and go down a different way this time, using the newly revitalized tornado machines to worm your way through previously inaccessible areas. Only at the end of this segment, which is also about the same length as the initial climb up the mountain, are you done with this horrible, horrible level.
    • Oh, and if you take your leave without getting the Summon in there...
    • To add even more insult to injury, if you played the first game, the plot-centric skill that you learn here was one you were taught for free in a town in the first Golden Sun.
  • The Sea of Time. You're navigating currents, with your only clue on what to do being the song from Yallam that Yepp wrote. The controls are irritating, it's difficult to get out of the whirlpools once you're in them, and the music is little more than ominous drums, which quickly goes from 'atmospheric' to 'SHUT IT UP'. Also, one slip-up will send you back to the beginning. It also finishes with an invincible and pseudo-Hopeless Boss Fight if you decided to tackle it as soon as it becomes accessible. Even when you had managed to find the weapon needed to make the boss vulnerable, it's still a contender for That One Boss. If you didn't save before fighting it, you're going through the Sea of Time again.
  • In Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, Otka Island. Just Otka Island. You need the Sol Blade to get inside this hellhole, and the encounters inside can prove it if you've been slacking in your Level Grinding. But that's not the worst part. The damn thing is a ginormous maze, spanning several Zelda-esque square rooms. That's not the worst part, either. The auto map is absolutely useless when it comes to finding your way, simply showing the image of the room from above with a giant ? in the center. There are four good chests mixed up in there, meaning that without an actual map, you will invariably get lost. That's STILL not the worst part. The worst part is after all that madness, after referencing your position, checking your map in triplicate, and finally getting to the end, you are greeted with a summon tablet... guarded by the Ancient Devil. Get used to the soft reset command, and I hope you don't have Sveta on the front line when you commence combat. I really hope you don't. (To clarify, Ancient Devil has an attack called Demon Sign, which turns one of your active party members against you. If Sveta's on the field, he'll almost certainly use it on her. Suddenly, all of Sveta's awesome attacks and healing spells aren't so much fun anymore...)
    • Also in the third game, the Craggy Peak Ruins. It's a Zodiac-themed dungeon — cool, right? Actually, the puzzles put to the different signs are just insulting. As in, "the game gives you a really obvious hint as to which spell to cast, you cast the spell, puzzle's over" kind of insulting. The only exception is the Capricorn puzzle, a massive Difficulty Spike that easily outclasses anything the Very Definitely Final Dungeon or Brutal Bonus Levels offer, taking the crown of "hardest puzzle in the game" by a landslide. The Capricorn puzzle is so difficult, some players contend that it is impossible to beat your first try without using a guide or getting the game to tell you the answer through Insight psynergy.
• Mario & Luigi:
  • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga:
    • Teehee Valley saddles you with a Escort Mission where you need to protect Princess Peach from being kidnapped by the local mooks, which is unnecessarily annoying thanks to Peach's Artificial Stupidity. You then have a Boss Battle against Trunkle, which can be fairly difficult if you don't know what you're doing.
    • Walking along the Seabed can be a pain due to the slow movement speed and awkward swimming controls. Special mention must go to the sections where you have to swim over a bunch of spikes. Thankfully averted in the remake, where you can swim really high. Still kinda awkward when swimming above objects that you'd technically be able to swim over normally, but can't.
    • Joke's End, as it's a long, confusing labyrinth with difficult puzzles and annoying music, with the worst part being the fact that you spend most of the area being split up. In this series, only having one Bro. severely weakens you, as it prevents you from using Special Attacks or reviving a knocked out Bro. And since the enemies in Joke's End are either very tough or very annoying, you're probably gonna spend half the level running from every fight you see just to stay alive. Unless you grind for a long time once you get the Bros back together, you'll enter Bowser's Castle severely underleveled (which, funnily enough, is actually easier to navigate because it's far more straightforward and doesn't require the Brothers to be split up).
  • Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time:
    • Toad Town Ruins. Remember Joke's End sequences from the previous entry where the Bros had to explore alone for a good chunk of the dungeon? Well, Toad Town Ruins might be arguably worse, since almost the entire level involves the Bros and their younger selves being separated the whole time, with special mention going to the Babies' sections, as they are considerably weaker than the adults which makes battles longer and tougher. And for extra fun? Every enemy here enters the Goddamned Bats category, featuring Shroids, Skellokeys and Love Bubbles. Prepare for a lot of pain when crossing this place. At least there isn't a Boss Battle to worry about though.
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story:
    • The Flab Zone. Despite being the only main area inside Bowser's body without puzzles that involve Bowser changing the environment from the outside, the Flab Zone is arguably the most difficult and tedious to traverse for other reasons. For starters, the whole area is a huge maze where the main gimmick is asking the local NPCs for directions. The catch? To get said directions, you first have to play a quiz game with them, where the only way to know the answers to said quiz is listening to a long, gameplay-halting conversation with Bowser before answering a myriad of questions (up to seven for the final quiz). Get one wrong, and not only you'd lost your chance, but you have to fight a local Mook to even try again. Playing along with these NPCs is entirely optional, but that means you'll have to guess the correct path through the labyrinth instead, which can be even more tedious. Not only that, but the bouncing sections of this level are extremely annoying due to wonky physics. Coupled with a That One Boss fight at the end of the dungeon, and you have what's possibly the most difficult area of the game just halfway through the story.
  • Mario & Luigi: Dream Team:
    • Driftwood Shore. Though the layouts aren't anything too difficult, the enemies are incredibly annoying, as they either have ways to bring even more enemies into the battle (Fly Guys) or have insanely high defenses that forces you to fight it in a very gimmicky way (Durapurls). The Dream World version isn't any better, as it features Lakitus (another Enemy Summoner who can bring Spinies into battle) and Piranha Plants, which can summon Nippers in the background to attack you, effectively giving them two attacks per turn. It also features some of the worst NPCs in the entire game, with both the Mole Hunt Shelltop and the Seadrings being widely disliked for their annoying gimmicks that only serve as Padding. Arguably, the only saving grace this whole beach has is its beautiful music and the extremely fun boss battle against the Elite Trio.
    • Dreamy Somnom Woods. Why is this place annoying? Well for one thing, it's a gigantic maze based around a tree, with a puzzle right at the start that can easily confuse anyone who doesn't think to look around a bit more before progressing. It's also got quite a lot of easy but somewhat annoying enemies, and comes capped off with That One Boss at the end of the dungeon... and That One Boss at the beginning (to enter you have to fight Pi'illodium, to exit you have to fight the Zeekeeper, at least the first time around). It has really nice music though.
  • Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam:
    • The third and last visit to Sunbeam Plains can be very frustrating to navigate for beginners, as almost the entire area has been littered with paper terrain which makes it a labyrinth full of dead ends with no indication of where you should go. It's a lot easier to complete this part if one knows what they are doing or with a proper guide, but if none of these are available, prepare to spend a good chunk of your time just figuring out the correct path.
• Mother 3:
  • Back Beat Battle Hard and Ode to Ancestors, 8th 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.
  • Strong One. Listen to that. Now imagine trying to COMBO that. It does NOT help that the only consistent enemy who uses this melody is also the SAME enemy that has a one-in-128 chance of dropping a VERY powerful item. If you're looking for that item, you will learn to hate this song.
  • Learned to hate Strong One yet? Here's the Masked Man version. As if the original wasn't hard enough, this one has the very last portion of the refrain sped up, likely JUST to screw with your combo.
  • In regards to actual levels, there is Chapter 3 as a whole. You have to control Salsa, a Joke Character with overall pathetic stats, and are forced around to do repetitive tasks by a despicable bastard who mistreats Salsa at every opportunity he gets, even when he has done the tasks flawlessly. To top things off, the final portion of the chapter pits you against a hard boss, with the characters you can control being Salsa, who is Joke Character, Kumatora, a Squishy Wizard, and an AI controlled Guest-Star Party Member that is most likely to waste his turns rather than attacking.
  • The Club Titiboo Attic near the end of Chapter 4, as the game takes a rather nasty Difficulty Spike when the only characters available to use are Lucas, whose PSI abilities are limited to weak healing and one offensive attack at the time, and Boney, who is a Fragile Speedster that only has one special ability: an Enemy Scan. The place is a labyrinth that is swarming with Goddamned Bats at every corner, forcing you to waste precious PP points and items if you want to get rid of them quickly. This attic is also home to what many consider to be the most infamous boss in the entire game.
  • The ocean level in chapter 7. You've got to make your way across the bottom of the ocean to Tanetane Island. Obviously, you can't breathe underwater, so you have to get air by kissing mermen. If you run out of air, you wash up at Tazmily Beach again, and have to do the whole level over. In addition, there's also a good deal of excellent items down there (including an Awesome Crown for Lucas) that you can only get by going through long caves with nowhere to replenish your oxygen supply, meaning it's pretty much suicide to get it. Also, there's a surprise Heads I Win, Tails You Lose battle at the end.
  • And then you get to Tanetane Island. You eat the mushrooms. Now you are in a nightmarish world where you have to fight giant smiling faces (and the only way to tell them apart is by the background and theme song used in battle — helpful if you know what each enemy's PSI weakness is), take a bath in toxic sludge a completely normal hot spring that has nothing wrong with it whatsoever, and generally survive one of the most creepy portions of Mother 3.
• Paper Mario
  • The original Paper Mario isn't too difficult, but it does have some hard or simply tedious areas:
    • Chapter 4 in general. It requires a lot of backtracking between Shy Guy's Toybox and Toad Town to return all the stuff the Shy Guys stole from the residents. The Shy Guys themselves all have seven HP, requiring a couple hits to take down unless you have damage boosters or use the Star Storm power to clear them at once, and one of them, the Spy Guy, can potentially lock you out of your moves with their hammer, while another, Pyro Guy, can deal lots of damage.
    • Lavalava Island. Among its enemies are Jungle Fuzzies which require Button Mashing to get rid of, and three different kinds of enemies able to poison you, all with high health, and you will need to pick the place apart to find the Yoshi Kids.
    • Flower Fields can quickly get tedious with its backtracking, dull music before breaking the Huff Puff Machine, and being populated with lots of Demonic Spiders, and then forcing you to fight Huff 'n Puff. At least it's home to the Amayzee Dayzees which you can grind against to quickly hit the level cap and trivialize the rest of the game.
  • Chapter 2 is annoying in both of the first two Paper Mario games. The first one has the moment the Dry Dry Ruins need to be found in the 8x8 square that is Dry Dry Desert with the only thing to point you in the right direction being a stone that flashes as you get close to the correct square. All this while being chased by persistent and annoying enemies. The second game involves navigating a large tree while being followed by an army of 100 tiny creatures. The good news is their pathfinding skills are actually quite good; the bad news is they still get caught on edges making it easy to loose them, you need to have all of them with you at once and there is an enemy that makes them panic and run should it show up.
  • 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! It doesn't help that one of the most frequent enemies in the chapter has an attack that can put you to sleep if you don't guard properly (which will likely happen often). Then when you end up going back to Creepy Steeple, you have to go through a room with a bunch of Buzzy Beetles and Spike Tops. Buzzy Beetles can at least be flipped over by jumping on them, but with no Spike Shield badge yet, you're out of luck with the Spike Tops. And 4 defense means that, unflipped, you'll need to have an attack-boosting badge just to deal any damage with the hammer. Nope, no POW Blocks for sale at the Twilight Town store, either. Hope you've gotten really good with Earth Tremor (which uses up about half of your star meter)... or have the Quake Hammer Badge.
  • The Pirate's Grotto in The Thousand Year Door. It is very long, the enemies can be a pain and there is the boat section involving dodging waves that might be the most frustrating part of the game.
  • Riverside Station of Paper Mario 2's chapter 6 was a bit annoying to get through. The enemies are pretty tough, including the Spiked Parabuzzy, and who can forget that damn garbage chute puzzle.
• Super Mario RPG has the Moleville Mountain minecart segment. Not that it's difficult, in fact it's actually impossible to lose as there's no penalty for crashing or derailing other than losing some time. The issue is, is it goes on forever with basically nothing to do: the first part is basically a maze with absolutely no feedback whether you're doing well or not and darned-near constant annoying tire-screeching sounds, and the second part is a side-scroller where you basically just watch Mario move right until the game decides it's time to let you get back to the adventure. Worse, is unlike other minigames like Midas River or Booster Hill that are mandatory to do one-time, is Moleville Mountain gives no rewards whatsoever the first time you do it, nor are the rewards for doing it subsequent times any good (just a meager handful of coins with a high-risk of getting nothing). Now's your chance for a bathroom break, because Mario's gonna be busy for a while...
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has Spirit Crucible Elpys, which qualifies for many reasons. It's a comparatively long dungeon that's full of confusing overlapping passages, tough enemies, environmental hazards (pools of poison and bottomless pits), requires a ton of high field skill checks to proceed, and ends with an extraordinarily annoying boss fight. But what really cements its place here is that it's full of a miasma that prevents everyone except Tora from using their higher leveled specials. The effect get worse the further you go, to the point that at the end, you aren't even capable of reach max affinity with any other characters, meaning most of your best attacks are useless. Oh, and due to story reasons, the first time you go through it you won't have your most powerful blade with you.

Other JRPGs

• Baten Kaitos:
  • The first game:
    • The Tower of Zosma, which is a very good argument for killing anyone who suggests putting a Block Puzzle in a video game ever again. The way up isn't horrible, if you're good at these things, but Mizuti's quest...
    • 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.
  • Baten Kaitos Origins:
    • 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? Or the four maze rooms? Or the Machina Auto-Turrets, horrendous Demonic Spiders that swarm through the halls? At least the music played there is among the best in the game (which, for this game, is saying a lot).
    • The Nekkar Quietlands. It's full of Demonic Spiders and pit traps that greatly complicate a would-be simple layout, and they're impossible to see coming unless you already know where they are, leading to lots of Trial-and-Error Gameplay. And when you beat it, you're given That One Sidequest, which requires you to stay much longer than you did in beating it in the first place.
• The Sand Caves, near the end of Beyond the Beyond.
• Bloodborne has Yahar'gul, the Unseen Village. Unlike other stages, this one is swarming with Bell Maidens who continuously respawn enemies, sometimes right behind you (and you only get Echoes for killing them the first time). It's full of Lesser Amydala that will try to snatch you as you run past or blast laser beams in your direction. And then there's the infamous "Gank Squad," a trio of NPC Hunters that will tear you to shreds without extremely careful baiting.
  • The Forbidden Woods. While the enemies there are not terribly dangerous, they can inflict poison. What makes this area a pain is that it's so massive, to the point where it's easy to get lost in. It doesn't help that the stretches between lanterns and short cuts are really long.
  • The Upper Cathedral Ward isn't very large, but is filled with Brainsuckers that can steal your Insight and Yahar'gul Wolf Beasts — one area in particular is a pitch black cathedral with six of them grouped up, and it's very easy to accidentally aggro all of them. And then it ends with Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos...
  • The Nightmare Frontier. Big, easy to get lost, and has tough enemies such as Loran Silverbeast and rock throwing giants that are placed in difficult positions which are incredibly hard to get to. Not to mention the rocks they throw could one-shot you if you don't spend a lot in vitality, this area also introduces the Winter Lanterns.
  • The Nightmare of Mensis. As the final area of the game before 2 optional final bosses in Hunter's Dream, it is certainly tough. Upon venturing further, you'll immediately be induced with frenzy by the Brain of Mensis located far away in a tower, this makes navigating difficult since you'll have to put up with Loran Silverbeast constantly attacking you when you're busy trying to staying out of the Brain of Mensis' line of sight and hiding behind objects. This area is massive and littered with tough enemies such as Winter Lanterns, rock throwing giants, hunters, and many more.
  • The Defiled Chalice Dungeon. Most of the dungeon wouldn't be bad, but it comes with an extra side effect of cutting your HP in half. The actual dungeon is hell enough, but then you get to the bosses — the Defiled Watchdog of the Old Lords (which can literally OHK you with every single attack thanks to its Fire damage) and the Defiled Amygdala (ditto, with much higher range and more RNG involved to boot).
  • The Great Pthumeru Ihyll Chalice. This is where the Chalice difficulty reaches its limit and bombards you with super-strong enemies. If you make it through them, you get to fight the shotel-wielding Pthumerian Descendant and the Headless Bloodletting Beast, two of the most difficult bosses in the entire game including the DLC content. By comparison, the final Chalice boss Queen Yharnam is hilariously easy.
• In the Breath Of Fire series:
  • Breath of Fire I had a land of dreams maze, where there were panels that, if stepped on, swung the entire map around repeatedly. Let me repeat that: the entire map gets rotated at high speeds. This might not be so bad if many of these panels were on single path ways (with no landmarks to tell which way is forward and which is back). Which means that you could, and would, probably be going back and forth for HOURS, trying to find your way forward. Additionally, the one shop in the entire dream world sequence leading up to aforementioned rotating maze has all the healing items mislabelled. Glorious.
  • In Breath of Fire II, we have Memory Tower. It uses a very strange inversion of the Fog of War trope; it shows you everything on the floor you're on except the area right around you. Unfortunately, it defines "the area right around you" as about half of your screen, forcing you to memorize the exact layout of the place, which can feel quite maze-like in some areas. This means a lot of random encounters as you move around trying to get a clear view, which is exacerbated by the fact that you're forced to have Spar in your party, who is (depending on whether you got the Guide Dang It! shaman power-up for Spar) either the weakest character in the game or second weakest only to Jean.
    • There's a level much worse than Memory Tower, in the form of Highfort. It starts off rather pleasantly with the fact that there are two beaches that you can use to get to it from your whale, and if you go on the wrong one, you'll encounter a Beef Gate without even realizing what you did wrong, since the other one is on the other side of the continent. Once you enter, say hello to the Point of No Return, followed immediately by losing three out of four party members. The one who is left is not the main character, in a game without Leaked Experience. Weren't using that character? Well, let's hope you didn't use that save point. Oh, you did? Then restart the whole game, and we hope you won't miss those 20 hours of work. Even if you were using that character, said character is something of a Glass Cannon, and there are indeed Random Encounters (and a boss battle) before you reunite with the party. And once you do, you are greeted with an obnoxiously large maze section with obnoxiously strong random encounters all throughout, some of which have the Death spell. On that note, so does the third boss of the place, which also halves all damage that isn't Holy elemental. The second one absorbs any elemental magic you use on it, and has a very nasty That One Attack in the form of Typhoon. And to get to this boss, you must first enter one of those three portals you see in front of you, with no indication of which one will work. Guessed wrong? Restart the whole thing! And the translators spelled two of the bosses' names wrong.
  • Breath of Fire III has the Desert of Death. A rather silly Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence is the only thing preventing you from skipping it, and a dialogue translation mistake will make it much harder for you to make it through unless you know the very precise set of directions that will take you through it. Additionally, if you wander there too long, and run out of the water canteens, your max HP lowers with every step you take until you either finish the desert or go to rest at an inn.
  • Breath of Fire IV gives us Fou-lu's tomb. Incredibly frustrating? Check. Monsters that are a step up in difficulty from anything you've encountered? Check. A puzzle that can permanently lower your HP until you rest at an inn? Check. And, for added level scrappiness, it's sandwiched in between the game's two examples of That One Boss — you fight Won-qu to enter, Won-qu being the hardest boss up to that point in the game. However, I and II show up at the end of the tomb to relieve him of that title.
• Code Vein has the Cathedral of Sacred Blood. The map is enormous and labyrinthine, with nearly identical passages throughout the length of it, a large number of powerful enemies (including a horde attack in an enclosed area), and the risk of falling to your death just trying to navigate it. This area also introduces the Successors' Vestiges, which are scattered throughout the map and only visible as a small red glow. Miss even one before facing the boss, and you're locked out of the Golden Ending unless you reload and try again. The game does offer a break at the halfway point, after the mid-boss, to explore a different stage altogether (and obtain a very versatile Blood Code), but woe betide you if you forget to activate the mistle after said mid-boss to return.
• Demon's Souls has plenty of these.
  • The Valley of Defilement. It's dark, you have to traverse wide-open areas so it's easy to get disoriented, most of the place consists of swamp that will infect you with Poison and/or Plague, and worst of all, while immersed in the water, you're completely incapable of backstepping and rolling, and your movement is severely slowed, making you a sitting duck for enemies that can easily kill you in one hit (and are otherwise, unaffected by the water).
  • The damn bridge in Boletaria 1-2. It's not bad when you learn how to play the game more effectively, but good lord. You have the dragon shooting you with the fire, but the worst part was of course at the end. Archers in front of you but you can't go forward to much you'll provoke TWO heavy soldiers and you can't move back anymore because the damn dragon will blast you.
  • World 3, the Tower of Latria, which has monsters that can paralyze and then One-Hit Kill most players in a single attack. Plus, it's incredibly dark, and several paths drop off very suddenly, so you may be plummeting to your death before you fully realize you walked off the edge.
  • Oh, world 4-2. Dangerous shadow enemies that respawn until you kill the (also dangerous) Reaper that's summoning them, ninja shadow enemies that sneak up on and stealth attack unsuspecting players, Storm Beasts sniping you to death whenever you dare walk outside without a Thief's Ring, and 90% of the level is composed of narrow paths suspended over fatal drops. At least the boss is more fun than the silliness preceding him.
• Digimon World Dawn/Dusk have two very frustrating levels: Loop Swamp and Shadow Hell. The first doesn't have many strong enemies, but it involves teleporting through whirlpools. Problem is, the whole area looks the same, the Random Encounter rate of the games is very high (and no Repels), and most missions on this place involves talking with multiple NPCs, which are a chore to find. Shadow Hell doesn't have whirlpools, but it's a very large area that looks the same, have many dead ends and the Random Encounters are not only frequent, but they have several Damage Sponge enemies.
• .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. And the boss at the end of floor 10 is a Marathon Boss.
• As mentioned in its own section, Dark Souls has its infamous poison swamp levels such as Blighttown, Farron Keep, and the Profaned Capital. In an interview prior to the game's release, Hidetaka Miyazaki was kind enough to let the fans know that he knows how they feel and put several into Elden Ring.
• 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.
• The mine in Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals for one reason: That Minecart minigame, which has very few check points and isn't easy what so ever. If not for this, the Mine would be a very nice introductory dungeon.
• Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals has a few good candidates:
  • When you tackle the Northeast Tower, your party is comprised of two solely physical fighters and your main character, who very much leans on the “knight” side of Magic Knight. The monsters there, who are a step up from anything you’ve faced so far, love to spam party-hitting attacks, which means Maxim - your sole healer - is going to be running out of MP like he sprung a leak.
  • The Karlloon Shrine isn’t particularly difficult on its face, but it’s frustrating for a different reason: it’s one of only two dungeons you can’t later return to. Trying for 100% Completion and missed a chest? Too bad!
  • The Dankirk North Cave is both relatively long and full of confusing puzzles. And after you tackle the first part - home of said confusing puzzles - you get to go into the basement, which is crawling with super-powerful Asashins.
  • Dragon Mountain is long, full of tough monsters, and is home to both the annoying grass-burning puzzle and The World’s Most Difficult Trick.
  • Not only is Gratze Dungeon full of some of the toughest enemies in the game, but you’re trapped there until you escape, which is rare for this game. Also, much like the Karlloon Shrine, you can’t return, so hopefully you got everything the first time…
• In Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, the Crystal Tower counts because, without the Game-Breaking Bug, you're forced to go through the entire dungeon without weapons. It's made easier by the ability to use wands as magic items, but even then there's only so much they can do, and the game never tells you this option exists. You can also try spamming skills, but that's going to lead to a complete lack of SP pretty quickly. And Star Lights aren't cheap, especially in a game that has a fairly balanced economy (at least at this point in the game, where you're selling off anything you have just to get the newest armor for one of your characters).
• Mega Man X: Command Mission:
  • The Grave Ruins Base is home to a highly-annoying security beam mechanic. The beams are Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Red beams will throw a somewhat-difficult random encounter at you, yellow means it's about to turn red, and blue beams are passable. All beams are red by default. The only way to turn these beams to blue is to fight the enemy encounters...but as you progress, they reset themselves faster and faster, to the point where the last encounters only turn them yellow. Oh, and all doors in these rooms are locked while the security beams are active. And then there's the Revolver Room, which can be moved with a pair of switches, except you're not told what combination of moves will take you to the next room, and other rooms lead to some pretty good treasure. Also, if you leave an area, forget to collect something, and then go back to grab what you forgot, ALL of the security lasers will have reset themselves.
  • Gaudile Laboratory; more specifically, the Eternal Forest. Each room has two exits, one containing an easier enemy fight and a harder one, and there are up to eight rooms; the easy path has much less, though. It's easy enough to just get through it the first time around, but getting 100% Completion requires at least ten trips through it, as there are many things like a Deployment Center item, several Figure Tokens, Tank Parts and Spider's Infinity +1 Sword, the Joker. While getting the Joker isn't too bad because it's on the easy path, the rest of them require the hard path, which ramps up in difficulty fairly quickly, and will have you facing endgame enemies and even the flunkies of a Superboss by the end of it! The rest of the Gaudille Laboratory isn't a cakewalk either; there are motion sensor alarms that will summon a decently-powerful random encounter at you and some of them move around. Thankfully these motion sensors can be bypassed by dashing.
  • A footnote: there are no teleport points in the middle of any dungeon. Meaning, if you go in and then want to go back to do some shopping, or check on the Deployment Center, you start at the very beginning of the level. This makes the aforementioned Eternal Forest more annoying than it needs to be because it's in the middle of the dungeon and after you finish a run of it, you can't go back; you need to warp out and run all the way back.
• Megadimension Neptunia VII has the Senmuu Labyrinth, a 5-floor dungeon (though the final floor only contains one boss enemy) with tough enemies, but the main reason it's annoying is the fact that it has no map and is made up entirely of identical-looking plain black blocks with white outlines. While it's completely optional for the main game, if you want the "Treasure Hunter" trophy you'll have to deal with this dungeon's challenges, which includes not only one, but two "defeat all enemies" challenges. Oh, and one group of enemies are hidden inside a secret room which can only be accessed by jumping through a wall, with no indication that this particular wall contains a secret!
• Stonehenge in Monster Racers. Although many areas up to this point have had some kind of gimmick, Stonehenge's is particularly nasty: The inside of the level changes depending on which switches you hit inside of it, completely changing your path through the level. There are tons of switches throughout the level, and hitting certain switches can block your access to others. Also, most of the level looks the same. Have fun trying to find your way to the center!
• Opoona's Dome Ruins are a particularly nasty dungeon. The dungeon itself is longer than the other dungeons so far, and can only be navigated through a series of sinkholes and elevators that's confusing and not always intuitive. Many of the enemies are outright Damage Sponges, even with the magic attacks your new party member brings. Oh, and there's a chance that you'll encounter a brutally difficult random enemy in the room right before the boss, likely defeating you and sending you all the way back to the city. The boss itself is no slouch either, having multiple hearty enemies and healers.
• The Phantasy Star series is definitely not without its horrific dungeons. A good amount of the ones in Phantasy Star II come to mind, with Climatrol being the first one to really kick your butt. Wren's Cave in Phantasy Star III will kick your butt, too, especially since you only have two characters to tackle it with.
• Blue Cave in Quest 64. Twice as long as any other dungeon. The first third has a bunch of tree branches with the correct ways pointed but you explore the rest in case of loot. The last third is a large causeway maze to the other end. Skelebats are the in the maze.
• 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 in-game 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.
  • The Gladius Towers were long, but at least the enemies were easy enough and no one can say the inside of the towers weren't cool to look at. The Leo King's Castle from the same chapter, however, was an absolute bitch to complete, as near every enemy in the castle and the path leading up to it were cheap (even by Rogue Galaxy standards) and the dungeon was nothing more than miles and miles of endless repetitive blocky walls. Capping this hellhole off at the end is a boss fight against the Mad Witch, one of the most mind-breaking difficult boss fights in the entire game.
• Skies of Arcadia gave us Moon Stone Mountain, a long dungeon with powerful enemies that had floor tiles that could open up and drop you back to the beginning. The first couple tile sets are marked so you can tell which tiles will open up, but later sets trade the Xs and Os for triangles, so you have to guess. And then you get to the end and realize you forgot to get the Moonfish, so you have to go all the way back again!
  • This annoyance is bolstered by one simple fact: If you want all the chests and 100% completion to get the "Legend" title, you HAVE to take all the wrong paths at least once.
  • South Ocean thanks to the occasional Graver Random Encounters. They can not only drain your health to heal, but have Eternum, which you only have one way to defend against at the time, which depends entirely on you using an absurdly rare random drop/chest item to teach Aika at least two of her (character-specific) special moves. And you'll have to use this move EVERY TURN unless you feel like having at least one of your characters KO'd, which at standard levels takes off a fourth of your technique pool for the turn.
• 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 Deep Twilight Forest also qualifies, especially if you want to get all of the treasures. The ruins part is not so bad, but the forest part beforehand can be frustrating since many of the paths are obfuscated. Deep, indeed.
• Valkyrie Profile:
  • The Hard Mode-only Clockwork Mansion's main attraction is a massive series of rooms that constantly shift places whenever you enter or exit a room. However, it was at least solved by a Guide Dang It!, and you could repeat it indefinitely since there's a Reset Button without any setbacks — except the hours spent on figuring it out without a guide.
  • The Tombs of Amenti, available only on on Hard Mode. The entire place is a twisting mess of corridors filled with annoying obstacles and enemies by the truckload. Navigating the dungeon using the map is useless: you have to use a guide to find the two keys needed to summon the dungeon's boss, Akhetamen. And Akhetamen is no pushover.
  • The Celestial Castle, also available only on Hard Mode. The bottom of the first couple of rooms are wide open spaces, and if you fall off, you return to the World Map and have to spend another amount of your limited number of turns in order to re-enter the dungeon. Said rooms are filled with ledges that require precise jumps, treasure chests that explode and knock you backwards when you open them, and monsters that screw up your jumps unless you get an item that turns off encounters. Thankfully, it's only for the first few rooms. If it was the whole dungeon...
  • The second game has the Palace of the Venerated Dragon. The battle arena for the light colored areas is a straight, narrow corridor that's made narrower by torches. In these arenas are ghost-type enemies, meaning they can't be hit by anyone except mages and archers, with high magic attack, and a wide attack range. The enemy leader, who you have to kill to finish the battle quickly, is on the opposite side of the corridor, with at least two or three of those ghost types between you and him, meaning there's virtually no way of getting to the leader without getting hammered by at least a few of their spells.
• Wild ARMs has a good few annoying levels.
  • Pleasing Garden is infamous for how easy it is to get lost in. Good luck memorizing which portals you have to step on to progress through the dungeon and backtracking is not a good idea as this place has a habit of shifting around, making the getting lost problem so much worse.
  • Tripillar is notorious as it splits up your party so they must each traverse the tower solo. Unfortunately, the monsters are the same difficulty as Volcannon Trap. Jack's speed and Meteor Dive can one-shot most monsters but Rudy and Cecilia are in for a world of hurt. It's one of the three levels that was removed from the remake.
  • Giant's Cradle in the original can be one very long headache for anyone with slow reaction times. Good luck dodging spears that shoot out of walls and send you down holes. Then there is the gauntlet of spears you must dash through, but if you don't stop in time you will fall down a hole and have to do the damn dash again. And at the end of the room there are two spears that shoot out that are nearly impossible to avoid.
  • De La Metallica has some of the most annoying puzzles in any JRPG. First there is the 'knowledge is the treasure' puzzle where you have to read five bookcases and figure out which chests in another room need to be opened to unlock the door. Then there is the infamous 'two doors puzzle.' Four out of the five doors have pretty solid clues as to which door to take but good luck trying to figure out which path to take on your first pair of doors. Oh, and you only have two people in your party, with your strongest member incapacitated, making dealing with monsters that much more of a pain.
  • Heaven's Corridor is another one that's difficult to get through. If you don't watch it, you will end up stepping on traps that send you right back to the beginning of the level and, if that's not enough, good luck with the diamond chasing puzzle. Have fun running around and around trying to catch a silly diamond to open the door to the next part- which then features the exact same puzzle with a different layout. Fortunately, this one's optional.

Independent Games

• The sewers in Alter A.I.L.A., to see the good ending you have to go through these sewers at least SIX times over the course of playing through the game FOUR times.
  • And it's JUST A BUNCH OF SQUARES!!
  • Fixed in the remake though, you still have to traverse the sewers 2-3 times mostly to get everything hidden in it.
• CrossCode gives us Grand Grys'kajo. It's where Lea obtains both the Shock and Wave elements, but getting there is an exercise in patience. The whole temple is a Marathon Level, since it's actually three separate dungeons. You can get Wave and Shock in any order, but both sections have long puzzles where the timing of certain elements starts to become a factor, the enemy rooms are harder, and multiple new puzzle mechanics are introduced. Grand Grys'kajo itself is the the final third, but it can't be accessed until another quest is completed where Lea and company deal with an out-of-control anti-virus program and a mob of Shad blocking the entrance. This quest requires you to move far away from the temple, all the way across the previous area, before you're allowed to head back. Once the main temple finally opens, it combines all of the elements from the two smaller temples and amps them up, including throwing in a Recurring Boss. All of this ends up making Grand Grys'kajo a chore to clear.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The 7th Stand User, for the most part, is a game with Easy Levels, Hard Bosses... with one exception, the Arabian Mansion. It's crawling with enemies, you need to run around it several times to get everything you need to leave, and you're constantly being pursued by Rolling Stone which causes a Nonstandard Game Over if you touch it. Think you've outrun it? It'll probably just spawn near you in the next room. What's more, you can accidentally make it move faster if you talk to Silver Fox, regardless of what you choose to do with him. The difficulty is mitigated a bit by the fact that you have an extra character for this dungeon, but said character is AI-controlled.
• There are two real contenders for this in Last Scenario. One is Archaeopolis, which is full of extremely slow-moving platforms that aren't synchronized, so you often have to wait for some time before they line up right. Its only redeeming factor is that it's short. The other, the Underground Waterway, is frustrating for a different reason — you can't backtrack and the random encounters are hard, so if you didn't bring enough supplies, you're screwed. Oh, and there's a Wakeup Call Boss at the end.
• Lies of P:
  • Chapter VII - Lorenzini Arcade and the Grand Exhibition. It starts off deceptively easy, as the road to the Arcade only contains puppets who are so listless due to the King of Puppets' recent death that they barely put up a fight. Once you reach the Arcade however, the game takes a deep dive into Survival Horror, with more advanced forms of the carcasses (most of which inflict decay) being introduced, numerous ambushes, areas blocked off by toxic gas, the Arcade being a bit of a maze, plus several difficult minibosses, including the Jester Puppet who is one of the fastest and most aggressive enemies in the game, to the point where the game gives you backup in the form of several carcass monsters in order to stand half a chance against it. The Grand Exhibition isn't much better, with steampunk robots that pursue you to the ends of the earth, electric bomb throwing puppets harassing you as you try to navigate narrow beams (while a miniboss also stalks the rafters), plus a wrestler miniboss who is insanely fast. The only consolation is that the chapter's boss, Champion Viktor, is one of the easiest in the entire game.
  • Chapter IX - Return to Krat Grand Central Station and Collapsing Krat. Much like chapter VII, the first part is a dark slog through the carcass infested station, with even more unpleasant varieties of enemy being introduced, including carcass-infected puppets. Escaping the station leads to Collapsing Krat, which is full of bottomless pits and crystals that cause instant death if not removed quickly enough. The final part of the level introduces the Alchemists, who are all Elite Mooks. Like chapter VII, the 2 bosses are relative pushovers compared to the nightmare preceding it.
• In Shadows Over Riva there's a town-sized labyrinth within the final dungeon, with the goal being a slightly different looking spot on one of the walls. Without a walkthrough, your party will likely starve.
• Seraphic Blue has quite a number of difficult areas one needs to traverse.
  • Chaos of Envy: You have one character and have to fight a powerful boss on your own who hits hard and can one-shot you, and after that, you have to run away from a group of enemies while fighting them.
  • War in Darmstadt: There are portions of the map that have fixed encounters, you have to rescue 5 people, and at the same time during the encounters you have a chance of being hit with Corpses, Lucifers, and Airship Wreckage, and they all can inflict status ailments. The only saving grace is that there are no Random Encounters.
  • Benedicta's Tears: A very long dungeon composed of Darmstadt and the Skyscraper. The Darmstadt section has chances of you encountering the Meatball enemies with a group. Killing them first will trigger Battlefield Restaurant which makes the enemies eat the party. Then we have the Skyscraper, which has many encounters of their own and 4 bosses. There are also enemies called Imprisoners which can use Monolith Crash which kills off a single character due to their high MEN stat and killing them locks you out of using skills and items which makes killing them near impossible due to their high Physical Defense. The boss that gives the most trouble aside from the boss at the end is Drift Warrior Machine which in itself hits hard.
  • LAJ: Long dungeon with powerful enemies and dark sections you have to traverse, and before even going through that, you have to fight enemies on an airplane that takes damage as you do and requires TP to repair, and yes the Meatballs from Benedicta's Tears are here alongside Sky Dragons. Then you have the LAJ Gears and Die Stahl Walkure.
• The Inca Ruins in The Sword and the Fish. They are long (VERY long) and the random encounters enjoy a dramatic increase in strength and frequency in comparison to the previous dungeons (not to mention that they take a loooooooong time to kill. I'm talking three-five minutes per battle, which occurs practically every ten steps). Even with Presto Mundo's Me Love Me Life tech skill, this place is still frustrating.
• Undertale has the CORE in a Neutral/Pacifist run. Despite its relative brevity, it's notorious for being a hair-puller. It has the hardest-hitting Random Encounters in the game, and learning how to Spare them is often counter-intuitive and takes multiple turns to figure out and execute. A Neutral player can just attack... but the baddies aren't lacking in hit points and defenses either, which makes it equally as frustrating. To reach the end, you've got to decide between solving one of the hardest puzzles in the game or facing a gauntlet of three successively more difficult enemy encounters (there is a third option but it's only vaguely hinted at so not many players will realise). And after all that, your reward is a showdown against Mettaton EX, who, while not being That One Boss, is still a challenge.