Misused: Nintendo Hard

around 2011

Nintendo Hard has been around since 2007 (Or even older, who knows). The trope definition is that a game as a whole is difficult, emphasis on *whole* part.

However, there are two issues regard this trope.

The first issue is that. Difficulty, is a subjective topic. Everyone can have different view on how difficult the game could be. Let's say some people saids the game is easy while some feels the opposite. However, because games can come with different genre, of course people who used that game's genre would say it's easy for them. Not to mention, the standard of examples is purely based on other website's user rating, which is definitely not a fair way for standard.

Second issue is that despite the trope definition said it's the whole game being difficult, there are lots of examples being used to emphasis on certain level, boss or gamemode. Many wicks like that attached into That One Boss or That One Level due to Trope Decay.

And so I do the justice and begin the wick check, the task aren't easy cause the sheer usage of this trope, over 5000 wicks!. Also, this is my first time doing wick check, so if I put wick into incorrect category, I apologise. Wick Check - 76 out of 5820 wicks checked. Click me for wick check!

For now, the only valid solution I can think of is to salvage it into Super-Trope or turn it into definition only page.

• VideoGame.Lufia And The Fortress Of Doom: As was pretty much par for the course for early 16-bit JRPGs. The amount of grind you need to go through, combined with the clunky combat system, meant the game was no pushover to get through. By midgame, every enemy will hit your party for anything from 1/6 to 1/3 of their maximum HP with almost every attack, meaning you have to expend healing resources after almost every single battle in order to keep going.

• YMMV.Blood Stone: Every single car chase is this. Especially of note is the train chase through the ice fields, where you will frequently barrel straight into the water, and (in the home stretch) will die if you slow down for even a second. And the turret section in Siberia on the hovercraft is even harder!

• VideoGame.Rabbit Knight: This game is absolutely brutal, with incredibly frustrating enemy placement, tricky platforming and a ludicrous hitbox for Rory that detects damage when you're as much as one step away from an enemy. The fight against the Infected Knight is the cherry on top, with him spamming a nigh undodgeable spin attack that hits like a truck, chucking projectiles at you from the air and summoning Blue Mushrooms randomly that wander across the stage.

• VideoGame.Metroid Prime 2 Echoes: Between more emphasis being placed on combat and boss fights, and the latter being much more frequent and difficult than the first game, having to use an ammo system for your other beam weapons, a huge chunk of the game being spent in another dimension where you constantly take damage when you step out the safe zones, and the level design being more intrincate and maze-like overall, the game really raised the stakes in difficulty. This also why the game averts the Easy Levels, Hard Bosses approach seen in the first and third mainline games.

• Main.Sliding Scale Of Linearity Vs Openness: Time: All Things Come to an End is an Interactive Fiction example. The game persistently locks the player in small areas (typically 3-10 locations in size). Exploration is allowed within these areas, but no backtracking to regions previously visited. This makes the game very difficult as essential items can easily be missed for good.

• YMMV.Ace Combat X Skies Of Deception: Scarface One/Phoenix in "Operation X", flying his signature XFA-27. The Z.O.E Commander in the same fight is only slightly harder than the four FALKEN targets. Phoenix, however, is the hardest enemy in the entire game (Keep in mind that Skies of Deception is one of the most, if not the hardest game in the series.). He is obscenely quick, fast enough to fly behind your plane within seconds and shoot you down easily and agile enough to dodge even the QAAMs, as well as extremely aggressive to the point where you WILL hear the "Missile Alert" siren throughout the entire fight. That's on top of trying not to get sliced in half by the FALKEN's TLS. He's damn near impossible on Ace Difficulty, though thankfully, defeating him is entirely optional.

• VideoGame.Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon:
  • Occurs much, much earlier on compared to the previous games, primarily due to the game having much, much more of an emphasis on the Mystery Dungeon side of the crossover, especially when compared to the rest of the series, which usually included a balance between the Pokémon and Mystery Dungeon elements. Whether this is a good change or a bad change is hotly debated, especially with how the RNG of the Roguelike gameplay can clash with the linear story missions.
  • Wild Pokémon can evolve during a dungeon if they defeat another Pokémon, even the ones that should need a Hold Item. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't first introduced during a gauntlet of story-related dungeons, during which you have no chance to grind or restock on items. As an example, may Arceus give you mercy when that Wailmer evolves into a Wailord and suddenly learns Water Spout to drown your entire team.
  • The Awakening emera can also aid enemies should they pick up a looplet with it equipped. Needless to say, it becomes a survival-horror game if the enemy Mega Evolves and forces you to encounter the stairs quickly, as fighting them is impossible due to gaining invincibility for a couple dozen turns. This situation is a reason why you should always come with wands.
  • Either because of the story going so fast or your leveling up going so slowly, you'll have to take on the final chapter at around Level 25-30 which is shockingly low and doesn't give you a lot of room for error. Even a mission that is only 1-star difficulty can go south pretty quickly because your level and stats are still too low.

• VideoGame.Sven Coop: The Tetris maps. They are filled to the brim with picky platforming, powerful damage sponge enemies, and several puzzles that demand a good level of teamwork.

• XUniverse.Tropes M To R: Dead-Is-Dead mode. If you die, the game will delete your save game. This includes when the game is a bastard and teleports a capital ship onto your tiny fighter when you come out a jumpgate. It's hard enough that Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude each offer an achievement for completing all the storylines in DiD mode.

• DarthWiki.Mirai Nikki Cerebral Records: Lunatic difficulty throws more curveballs your way, and sometimes gives game-overs out of nowhere, or DEAD END flags where every option gets you killed in some fashion. Attack on Kazuto becomes a matter of "one mistake and you lose".

• YMMV.God Of War II: Theseus on Titan, who serves as a huge difficulty spike, even compared to the Nintendo Hard opening act. He can combo Kratos to Hades and back in his first form, proving to be more of an unpredictable opponent than the Mooks you've been facing so far. And then comes his second form, where he starts spamming projectiles at you from safety, starts summoning two Minotaurs at once to fight you at the same time, and causing large crystal spikes to pop up from the floor which, on Titan, one-shot you. Add all of this on top of the fact that the only way to hurt him in his second form is to shoot him with your incredibly weak bow. And your magic is limited, so the only way to restock it is to run around dodging attacks and killing the Minotaur for blue magic orbs. And it'll take several cycles of this before you even get the chance to finish him off. If you die, you go back to the first form. He also gets a cheap shot that wipes half your health if you're not blocking when you choose Restart. Have fun.

• Main.Joke Character: If you manage to beat Bayonetta's lost chapter Angel Slayer (big emphasis on if) you unlock Little King Zero, a legless skeleton with a beard (yeah…) who talks only in high pitched grunts. In combat, he's just as effective as Bayonetta and has the same powers and weapons. The problem is… there is no such thing as Scratch Damage with him. Any tiniest hit will take off his entire lifebar, leaving only his Last Chance Hit Point. Which means he can be instantly killed even by a single Decoration (the weakest among the weakest enemies)! Needless to say, beating the game above Easy Mode with him by using no items officially makes you a badass.

• ZombieApocalypse.Video Games: The Necroa Virus in Plague Inc. qualifies, though it is possible to win with this virus without actually creating zombies (though it is Nintendo Hard even in the lowest difficulty). There's even an achievement for doing so, and the symptoms you do get(cannibalism, psychosis, delirium, etc.) give you Technically Living Zombies anyway.

• ThatOneLevel.Survival Horror: The Thing (2002) has a stage almost identical to Metal Gear Solid's staircase sequence, except you're going down, there are automatic turrets on every level (that can take up to five grenade hits to destroy), scalding steam vents, seemingly endless streams of scuttling creatures that pop out of dead bodies (and attack you from front and behind), and the medic, your only hope of surviving the stage, turns into a monster at random points. If you don't have enough health packs on you, or enough firepower, it's impossible to get through the stage. And at the end of this stage there's a bomb that kills all of your squadmates, and destroys their gear. If you don't have a flamethrower at the end of the level, you will NOT be able to complete the game.

• VideoGame.Mitsumete Knight: True Final Boss: Two of them, who are mutually exclusive since they appear depending on if you're on a License of Heartless odd-numbered playthrough, or a even-numbered playthrough: General Kurgan of Orcadia in the first case, and Calbares, the One-Winged Angel form of Dark Prince in the second case. Hope you carefully saved up those rare Mandragore Roots/Magic Mushrooms you collected during your quest, because you'll need them against those guys.

• Main.True Final Boss:
  • Collecting all 65 of the weapons in Drakengard unlocks a 5th secret ending in which you fight the Queen of the Grotesqueries. Though it's a rather unconventional battle, more akin to a Rhythm Game than to a real boss, it is widely considered the hardest challenge in the game by far. To wit — after the first thirty seconds, there is no room for error. You'd have to be a robot to beat this in less than fifty tries.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne has you confronting the Big Good of this game, Lucifer. You have to complete the optional (and extremely hard) Labyrinth of Amala dungeon to fight him. Even crazier, his entire justification for the fight is to prepare you for a war against the Greater-Scope Villain of the series: YHVH.

• YMMV.Super Smash Bros For Nintendo 3 DS And Wii U:
  • Clear Classic Mode on 9.0 Difficulty without losing a single life^note For added difficulty, a Golden Hammer can't be used on this challenge.
  • Clear Kirby's Crazy Appetite on Hard.
  • "Keep 'Em Off the Ship!" requires you (and a buddy) to defeat several waves of Mr. Game and Watch as Fox and Falco. The problem is that in order to win, not a single enemy character can make contact with the stage; if one manages to slip by, it's an automatic Game Over. Both partners have to be in perfect synch with one another in order to deal with the sheer number of enemies coming in from all sides - if you're off by even a millisecond it's all over - and for this reason it's considered to be one of the most challenging co-op levels in the game. A similar event exists in single-player mode, but it's far easier since less Mr. Games and Watches show up.

• YMMV.Super Mario Maker: The game has a very large community of fans that don't even play it themselves but love to watch dedicated streamers play the low-quality levels that random people have created. For this reason, many content creators attempt Super Expert No-Skip runs so that their viewers can watch them play through the horrors that await. Other sub-communities include Troll Levels (levels designed to make players look like idiots), Puzzle Levels (levels designed to test players' knowledge or problem-solving skills), and Kaizo Levels (Nintendo Hard levels designed for players to show off their reflexes and platforming skills).

• VideoGame.Snake Rattle N Roll: The extra level in the Genesis version, although you don't have to do anything special to get to it (besides beat the game, although some would argue that's pretty damn special by itself).

• SequentialBoss.Platform Game: And then there's the True Arena, a Nintendo Hard ten-round Boss Rush with all of the upgraded "Revenge" bosses from Revenge of the King as well as Masked Dedede, Wham-Bam Jewel, Galacta Knight, and the brand-new Marx Soul with even less healing than the first Arena.

• Main.Game Mod: Pokemon Blue Kaizo and Pokemon Crystal Kaizo are both complete hacks that allow you to catch 151 Pokémon and 251 Pokémon, respectively. However, as indicated by the name Kaizo, they are super hard mode versions of the original, as opposed to mere hard modes.

• Main.Game Mod:
  • The WWII submarine simulation game Silent Hunter has a huge amount of mods, most of which are oriented to give even more realism to the game (and make it even harder). Plus they may add new ships or planes and -in the case of Silent Hunter III- you can even add sounds and short videos taken from the movie Das Boot.
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknowns community brings us the Long War mod, which extends the campaign, but more importantly, makes it FAR more difficult', to the point that the readme for the mod has several warnings that no matter how good you are at the base game, you're going to want to play the mod on Normal difficulty the first time. A deeper tactical focus and expanded class and item trees makes the game genuinely different. The game's developers themselves said that it "takes the game to a whole new level".

• VideoGame.Dad Series: 3. (Optional) Froth at the mouth and unleash rage at the boss.

• NeedsMoreLove.Video Games: Zodiac DX is a loose adaptation of an obscure webcomic that was Cut Short, and a great example of No Problem with Licensed Games. While it's very short, with a single playthrough only being about 25 minutes, there are three playable characters with different methods of attack, there's a wide variety of enemies to face, and the cutscenes provide some Adaptation Expansion, progressing the story past the point where the webcomic initially ended. The game also has the Nintendo Hard Maniac difficulty for those seeking a challenge that evokes the good ol' days, and two bonus modes in the form of a Boss Rush and a Triple Triad-style minigame, easily earning its asking price of $3 USD.

• Characters.Tokimeki Memorial Girls Side 1:
  • One of the toughest characters to win over in the game. His parameter requirements are really high, demanding at least 150 in several parameters and at least 100 in others, and his affection curve is incredibly steep. Even if his affection is at the highest, Kei will not confess unless the parameters have also been achieved.
  • He's the second hardest to win (Kei Hazuki is #1), thanks to his very high standards and the fact that he is your teacher and very well aware of it. Among other things, you cannot obtain his phone number and must wait for him to ask for dates - which for a good half of the game are likely to be restricted to school activities.
  • To a point. Like Kei and Himuro, he has high stat requirements more or less across the board, and like Himuro his being a member of the school administration complicates things and prevents the heroine from being able to ask him out. Players who get their stats high enough to meet his criteria on the way to trying for Kei or Himuro's endings, however, are likely to find that it's more difficult to get rid of him.

• PhantasyStarOnline2.Tropes N To Z:
  • Plan on fighting Dark Falz Luther on Super Hard? Better bring all the healing items you can carry and some friends to revive you when (yes, when) you get KO'd. Extra Hard then goes and gives him even faster attacks, a shield that appears over his main weak point, and new moves (including a double time stop!) Have fun!
  • Mining Base Defense: Despair. Not only are bossess and Elite Mooks far more plentiful than in previous iterations, but the field is wider and there are far greater elements in place that single-handedly threaten entire runs with their presence, including Falspawn Particle Cannons, which One-Hit Kill Mining Bases if left unchecked, infected Campships, which kill players as fast as you can say "Oh, Crap!", and the addition of new Waves with Falz bosses and greater enemy numbers than ever before. You get the A.I.S. on your side for this mission, but if you're not careful with how you use them, you can still throw an entire run down the drain with one slip.
  • Extreme Quests can get fairly nasty even for parties towards the end stages. The Solo Extreme Quest deserves special mention, which pits one player against nigh-insurmountable odds, AKA heaps upon heaps of ridiculous Level 80 boss fights.
  • The A.I.S. (ARKS Intercept Silhouette) (See Instant Awesome: Just Add Mecha!.) It comes equipped with a portable Photon Particle Cannon, and will make mincemeat of pretty much everything. However, it comes with a strict time limit; over-use makes it vulnerable to Falspawn infection and possession. Thus it is only used sparingly, such as Mining Base Defense: Despair/Ending, Gold Magatsu and Phantasm Battleship Yamato.

• DissidiaFinalFantasy.Tropes N To Z: Inward Chaos. You essentially fight every character in the game in a row, with most of them being over level 100 and able to perfectly predict your moves. To best simulate the experience, place the most sensitive part of your body in a vice and tighten it.

• Main.Incredibly Durable Enemies:
  • If this is combined with your character being a One-Hit-Point Wonder, just put down the controller and walk away...
  • This is one of the many reasons why the Shoot 'Em Up game Steel Saviour is Nintendo Hard.

• VideoGame.Eternal Daughter: Some of the levels and most of the bosses can be quite... Trying. But the game is no less fun for it.

• Creator.Alice Soft: Their games often have a steep learning curve, though some are definitely worse than others.

• Video Game.Amagon: You die in one hit, you have limited means to defend yourself, and enemies love to come in swarms. Yeah, this game isn't easy.

• VideoGame.The Chaste Fullmetal Maiden Leiria: The original is already quite difficult, but the remake is much more so.

• VideoGame.Guardian Rock: Unless you know what you're doing. This is especially true of the last level.

• VideoGame.Rayman Origins: You get infinite lives. You're gonna need every single one of them.

• Characters.Tokimeki Memorial Girls Side 3:
  • The player has to be very careful not to miss any of his events, or he will reject the heroine.
  • You have to touch him at all specified points, and win the Rose Queen title, to get his ending.

• VideoGame.I Wanna Be The Guy Gaiden: Just like its predecessor. Again, you have unlimited lives and checkpoints, so feel free to die as many times as you need to. Which will probably escalate into the hundreds and then thousands very quickly.

• VideoGame.Intelligent Qube: It is extremely easy to fall behind beyond recovery after one or two bad rounds.

• TabletopGame.Dragon Strike: Ironically, for a game meant to be played by novice players it can be rather easy to die due to some adventures having outright malicious trap and enemy placement.

• VideoGame.Just Shapes And Beats:
  • The Dash maneuver, which also gives you invincibility frames when you use it. You'll need it, and some levels are outright impossible to clear without using the dash.
  • True to the Bullet Hell genre, the levels are very challenging. When you're not being distracted by the pretty visuals or catchy music, the fast-paced gameplay tends to leave players disoriented. While multiplayer mode has the option of reviving teammates, it's still easy to get a Total Party Kill.

• NeedsMoreLove.Video Games:
  • Gex. The first game is often cited to be one of the best games on the 3DO, enough to warrant a Play Station port and two sequels. The first game, a side-scrolling 2D platformer with pre-rendered sprites, was about a gecko named Gex who was Trapped in TV Land by an evil (alien?) overlord named Rez who wanted to make Gex the new mascot. It was an excellent, addictive game that was Nintendo Hard but not unfair, with hilarious one-liners from Gex, voiced by Dana Gould. The sequel, Gex: Enter The Gecko for the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, featured Gex being bribed by a Government Agency of Fiction to go back into the Media Dimension to make Rez 'disappear'. The game had a Super Mario 64 style 'pointless item collecting' vibe. While it wasn't exactly as good as its predecessor, it was still an enjoyable experience (despite occasional bouts of Camera Screw). Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko featured Agent Xtra, a fellow secret agent, being kidnapped by Rez to get to Gex. Gex rescues Xtra with the help of his butler, Alfred the Turtle, his cousin, Cuz the Platypus, and Rex the Dinosaur. The gameplay is similar to the last game, except with the other characters, bonus stages, and a Debug Room. Unfortunately, Eidos apparently was too busy milking Lara Croft to continue with the series, despite many believing that it would make the leap to the Sixth Generation of Consoles.
  • God Hand. Silly, Nintendo Hard, and full of fourth wall breaking fun and shout outs to other games. Also insanely awesome with a very well thought out combo system that allows for fluid movement, allowing Gene to essentially be the Fist of the North Star. The music is beyond awesome, as well, even the fight with the Mad Midget Five has incredible music.
  • The Sega CD's library has its fair share of hidden gems, but none shine brighter than Popful Mail, a Nintendo Hard adventure platformer which also had some of the best voice acting of ANY game released for it's time. Dubbed voice acting, at that! It's a damn shame that it came out so late in the Sega CD's life, after it had been established that the system was a gimmicky add-on to the Genesis, because this game truly did make the best use out of the power of CD-based media (even if said power was throttled by the Genesis).
  • Super Monkey Ball. It's about rolling monkeys in plastic balls around obstacle courses, but it's Nintendo Hard difficulty, fun minigames, Scenery Porn, epic soundtrack, and cute characters are sadly ignored, and eventually got the series overshadowed by THAT BLASTED HEDGEHOG!
  • The Guardian Legend. A hybrid shooter for the Nintendo Entertainment System which pretty much embodied Nintendo Hard. Desperately in need of a next generation reboot!
  • Eternal Champions and its Sega CD sequel, Challenge from the Dark Side are two awesome fighting games from Sega Interactive that will make you come back for more! The story to these games is pretty cool and detailed (for fighting game standards anyway). Nine (thirteen in the sequel) fighters throughout time were destined to do great things, but they all died before they could fulfill their destinies and the Eternal Champion has set up a contest to determine the strongest fighter to revive with the knowledge that will help them avoid their death. The gameplay is pretty good, too and it will make you think of a good strategy to defeat the CPU opponents, but the Story Mode in the first game is EXTREMELY hard and if you lose a match, you will be sent back to the previous match. Thankfully, the sequel's story mode is easier and more manageable and you can even use some continues if you have to. The characters are cool and interesting, the music in both games is awesome and fitting and the first game has a training mode where you can hone your chosen character's skills. Even though the first game sold over 2 million copies in it's heyday, no one seems to know about it. It's a shame. Thankfully the original Eternal Champions on the Sega Genesis got re-released on Steam and the original Wii's Virtual Console.

• LuckilyMyShieldWillProtectMe.Video Games: Demon's Souls allows you to equip anything onto either hands, including two shields. There is a spiked shield that you can use to attack with, but given the difficulty of the game, it's probably better to use a real weapon.

• VideoGame.Space Colony: Described by the developers as 'A sim with a real personality!', Space Colony is a simulation game developed by Firefly Studios that places you in charge of a small space colony (fancy that) on an isolated planet, where you gather, process, and sell resources, complete missions, keep your colonists happy, and deal with whatever crises pop up. Best described as a fusion of Stronghold and The Sims.

• VideoGame.The Worlds Hardest Game: Described in the very title of each game! If you play any of these, do not expect an easy ride, unless you've beaten one of the games in the series with no deaths!

• VideoGame.Payday The Heist: You can perform a heist with no violence and no alarms being tripped, but good luck. It's Nintendo Hard.

• MemeticBadass.Capcom: Mega Man Zero. There's a reason he's reserved for perfect players.

• VideoGame.Hidden And Dangerous:
  • Be prepared to reload and retry a lot. You only get one save slot per mission, too.
  • Beyond the Nintendo Hard combat, the game often throws unexpected curveballs at you such as suddenly spawning hordes of enemies out of a building, potentially resulting in your entire team getting wiped out in seconds. The mission may also differ so much from the initial briefing that you may have to go back and change your mission loadout.

• VideoGame.Retro City Rampage: Fittingly. Well it starts out easy until at least halfway the missions are becoming hard. Near the end there's even the recreation of the infamous NES TMNT underwater level with deadly electrified seaweed too!

• WMG.Crimzon Clover: In Unlimited mode, the sea is colored red due to the blood of all players who have tried and failed to complete the mode.

• Funny.Marvel Vs Capcom 3:
  • When he defeats Arthur:
  And that's for lulling me into great side-scrolling adventures that were never possible to beat!

• Main.Earn Your Title: is all about earning the right to be called the Absolute Victory Unlosing Ranger and the faith of the world. Given that the main character starts out as a level one nameless bystander thrust straight into the Final Boss Battle, this turns out to be quite the endeavor.

• ShootTheMedicFirst.Video Games:
  • In some games, enemy units that are wounded will purposely retreat to be healed by their priest. This is particularly frustrating in Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 and Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War due to the prescense of enemies with Fortify. In Genealogy, Fortify heals every unit within a ten-tile radius, which covers entire enemy armies, while in Thracia, Fortify will heal every enemy unit except the healer. At least in Thracia you could capture some for your own use. In Path of Radiance, this also means taking advantage of the heal bushes, but that is more annoying than an actual threat.

• Main.One Man Party
  • Tactics Ogre avoids this mostly by keeping the bell-curve very low and punishing you severely if you are surrounded (with permanent character death thrown in for good measure). However, there is a Game-Breaker spell that will resurrect a dead character as an undead with half hp/mp and the same other stats, and a second post game Game-Breaker that will convert an undead character to a Level 1 Human — with the same stats. Characters that go through this are several order of magnitudes better than anything else you can field.
  • Arc 2 has optional character Choko, a walking, talking Game-Breaker who's a force to be reckoned with even at level 1! Level her enough and it's no exaggeration that you'll probably never have to attack with anyone else for the rest of the game. And thats even before the optional sidequest that unlocks her ultimate attacks. Equip her with the infinite MP accessory, and she's invincible. Though the final boss is so damn hard that using her is almost a requirement.

• WMG.Earthworm Jim: Think about it. Both of the heroes are in suits and wield guns. They also have to go through a series of Nintendo Hard levels to defeat a female alien antagonist (Queen Slug-for-a-butt and Mother Brain, respectively). In the ending, they are both revealed to be female (cows are females, bulls are males).

• VideoGame.Links Quest For The Hookshot 2 Quest: The original version, which has been preserved as Legacy Mode. In both versions, there's also Anarchy difficulty, which is a joke difficulty in which most enemy projectiles and lasers^note the only exceptions being ice, Hookrobe hooks, floating tiles/statues, giant fireballs, TeamUDF's fire stream attack, most of Genocide Heart's attacks, and Autimecia's boomerangs are replaced with wind. The latter was only partially tested, and it wasn't proven that everything can still be completed on it until years after its release.

• Literature.Killer Puzzles: The series as a whole was meant to be this, and it apparently succeeded, as Poskitt got as much correspondence from adults asking for help as he did from children.

• Main.You Get Knocked Down You Get Back Up Again: Enemies in God Hand can't hit Gene when he's grounded. Gene, on the other hand, can, and you'll need the extra bit of damage.

• VideoGame.Rayman Origins: Probably not as much as the original game, as Michel Ancel wanted to make sure the difficulty curve wasn't too brutal, and because you have infinite lives as well as frequent checkpoints, death isn't very punitive, but you will still die a lot. The second half of the game has some near Meat Boy-level sequences.

• Main.True Final Boss:
  • In the first Bushido Blade, to get the true final boss, you had to not get hit at all. There was a way to skip most of the opponents by running to a certain area of the map, take your opponent's legs out so they can't follow you, and jump down a well, which makes you fight only one more opponent before going onto the bosses. You still have to avoid getting hit to get the "real" ending for each character.
  • In the second Patapon game, defeating Dettankarmen three times makes him drop the Grey Rainbow, which is used to unlock Zuttankarmen, who doubles as the Super Boss. That, and he makes both Dettankarmen and Ganodias look like slaying a Kacheek in comparison.

• Headscratchers.Final Fantasy III: It was an endurance test. If the Chosen Four couldn't take down a mini-dungeon and two bosses in one shot, how are they supposed to deal with two full dungeons and six bosses in a single run?

• YMMV.Super Smash Bros For Nintendo 3 DS And Wii U:
  • Whether with customs or not, the Mii Gunner is this, and not just in Cruel Smash. They have an unfairly-long-ranged side smash and up aerial that have a ridiculous amount of hitstun, so much so that with other Miis they can trap you in an inescapeable combo that racks up your damage to high percentage without much effort.
  • The Mii Gunner's Forward Smash and Up-Air when fighting the Fighting Mii Team, especially in Cruel Smash and on Intensity 9.0. These attacks have ridiculous range, the hitbox hit multiple times and lasts a long time and they have a huge amount of hitstun. This can cause a lot of Miis to rank up your damage extremely quickly.

• IThoughtThatWas.A To E:
  • DoDonPachi dai ou jou Black Label and DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu Black Label are not alcoholic drinks. dai ou jou itself, officially translated as "Blissful Death", is not so-called because dying feels blissful in this game.
  • EZ2DJ is not telling you that being a DJ is easy. And the game is not easy, either. Nor is it a spinoff of D4DJ.

• Main.Flunky Boss:
  • Fathom-Lord Karathress in Serpentshrine Cavern is this as well, of the Turns Red variety: he has 3 flunkies (which are all pretty challenging bosses in their own right) and for each one that dies, Karathress gets an increase in damage output and one of their nastiest abilities. By the end of the fight, when you're attacking Karathress proper, he's demolishing your tank, messing up your healers' mana and one-shoting everyone with his Spitfire Totem if your damage dealers are not REALLY fast killing it when it pops up.
  • Every single boss in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles have two mooks fighting alongside them. These respawn all the time, and give no supplies whatsoever. They serve only to distract you from the main boss. Worse, the final boss have the hardest enemies in the game as its minions, and they instantly respawn if you kill both. Add to that two hits will kill you no matter unless you're seriously leveled, and you have yourself a fun battle. Infinite full-heal Cure spells is the only thing that keeps this boss from being Nintendo Hard.
  • Almost every boss in The Answer comes with a few minions. Usually you'll have to abuse the combat system to stop them from ever attacking if you don't want to die horribly.
• The Cave Ceiling boss in the horizontal scrolling Shoot 'Em Up U.N. Squadron (SNES version). It's this large moving machine on the ceiling whose weak point can only be attacked from below, and its downward flamethrower attacks shouldn't pose much trouble. The problem? There's a conveyor belt on the floor where homing missile launchers AND upward-firing flamethrowers will come in from both sides, making your life a living hell. Unsurprisingly, its That One Boss.

• VideoGame.Snake Rattle N Roll:
  • All in all, the game went over pretty well with critics and most reviews drew similar comparisons to Rare's other big-ticket NES title, Battletoads; namely, it's a well-done game with nice graphics, great music, innovative gameplay and very, extremely, stupidly high difficulty.
  • Just read down the list of attributes on that page. They're all present in some way.

• Main.Game Mod:
  • Factorio, by design from the devs, is highly moddable through Lua. Modders are able to easily create new prototypes and scripts by writing them in the mod's Lua files. These mods range from quality-of-life mods, such as extended reach, automatic research, and a creative mode, to difficulty-increasing mods such as Bob's Mods, Angel's Mods, and Marathon. All of these mods are hosted are on the official mod portal.
  • For starters, the AI was terrible, the difficulty was broken, and — most bizarrely — enemy units never upgraded beyond knights and archers. The "1.3" mod ramped up the difficulty (well, it is hosted by insanedifficulty.com), strengthened the enemy units, and tweaked mages to be a little less, well.. useless. This mod definitely qualifies as Nintendo Hard; the days of finishing off Altima with two Climhazzards are over.
  • On the topic of racing sims, Richard Burns Rally lives on through countless custom rally cars from various leagues such as the World Rally Championship as well as new rally stages and tweaks aiming to either make the game's Nintendo Hard handling more bearable or bring the game up-to-date for modern audiences. The game's developers even praised the modders for their reverse-engineering of the model formats when they released a 3DS Max script for exporting custom cars into the game. RBR is now Abandonware at this point due to a rather hairy licensing row between the now-defunct Warthog, Gizmondo (which in itself is also quite a long and complicated story to say the least) and Square Enix (who now owns Eidos, not to mention the uncertainty with Richard Burns' estate over re-releasing the game after his death, so it's become a necessary evil for fans to just pirate the game and call it a day, short of buying a used copy on the secondary market.
  • It's also been modded into Ancient Roman Fortress, Fallout Fortress and—inevitably—Pony Fortress. There are both "beginners' versions" that are less sadistically difficult that turn your dorfs into little Terminators and versions that make every monster six times stronger. There's also some really dreadful cheating possibilities in playing with the raw files; it's possible to make your forges spit out Unobtanium, for instance, allowing your tiny outpost to fleece an Elven caravan out of everything they own in exchange for one earring.

• NeedsMoreLove.Video Games: Black for the Play Station 2 might be a bit of tech demo game and quite short, but it's also a load of fun to play. Lot's of explosions, gun porn and destructible environments makes for some memorable moments, not to mention a difficulty level rarely seen in FPSs.

• LuckilyMyShieldWillProtectMe.Video Games: Dungeon Crawl takes this trope pretty seriously, as using a shield gives you a separate SH score instead of just adding to your AC. The higher your SH score, the better chances you have of outright blocking attacks. Certain magical shields (or a type of magical amulet) can even allow you to reflect ranged attacks back at your attackers! Of course, this being Dungeon Crawl, there are drawbacks — several kinds of attacks cannot be blocked by a shield at all (such as area-of-effect spells or enchantments), blocking gets harder the more attacks you have to deal with (meaning you can still get overwhelmed when fighting multiple foes), and using a shield makes it harder to use magic and impossible to use the more damaging two-handed weapons.

• YMMV.Shobon No Action: To top it off, Stage 4 is no longer passable in one life. The On/Off block at the beginning of the level only alters the length of the first two Firebars, lengthening the first but shortening the second allowing you to pass under it, but in the Flash port, it affects all of them, including the two immediately before the checkpoint, forcing you to pass through both Firebars at their maximum length, followed by one more right after the checkpoint placed in such a way that you cannot pass it. Thankfully the bars readjust their length after death.

• PhantasyStarOnline2.Tropes N To Z:
  • Upon release, it was basically impossible to get a net gain out of playing Mesetan Shooter without bringing friends. An update lowered its difficulty, but it's still difficult to acquire more Casino Coins than you paid for without at least one extra player. The March 2017 update further boosted potential payout by adding a Rainbow Coin that adds +20 CC, which is double up from the Gold Coin, which is only worth 10 CC.
  • Waves 7 and 8 in Despair get "EXTREME WARNING" with their darkened red sky. They're not lying.

• Characters.Princess Maker: * Multiple Endings: Getting close to Aspar in Princess Maker 5 gives the chance for two endings. The first is the simple Marriage To Aspar ending, with the other being the True Princess ending, which is considered the most difficult to obtain.

• DissidiaFinalFantasy.Tropes N To Z: Dissidia 012 plays this straight sometimes (the Assist characters will never take your place if you fall in battle), but in some storylines you form a party of five, and when the leader falls the next person in line takes their place, all the way down to the fifth person if the enemy is that tough. And they will be.

• VideoGame.Xenoblade Chronicles X: In the affinity mission in which you get it, the Ramjet Rifle, a prototype weapon with Skells in mind, is treated as such in-story. For said mission, you are testing the weapon on foot against creatures in Sylvalum. Said rifle has even worse stats (aside from its amazing tension point gain for the earliest point you can access the mission) than your starter rifle. If you decide to test the rifle against the larger creature as suggested by Alexa (which is quite a challenge if you don't know how to take advantage of its hidden potential), the results of said test give everything the rifle's designer needs to know that weapon as it is would be abysmal against the things Skells are made to fight (not taking TP gain into account story-wise).

• VideoGame.Yandere Simulator: A meta-example, something that YandereDev constantly points out as a theme and point of the game: "Getting away with murder should not be easy."

• UsefulNotes.British National Anthems: "Rule Britannia": The unofficial alternative national anthem of the UK, with words by James Thomson and music by Thomas Arne. Strongly associated with the Royal Navy due to its second line of "Britannia, rule the waves!", but also associated with the UK armed forces in general. A traditional part of the Last Night of the Proms. Also very challenging to sing properly for the average person without formal vocal training.

• VideoGame.Final Fantasy The 4 Heroes Of Light: "This game is so hardcore it doesn't even include a tutorial." That said, once you get a handle of the battle system and how to utilize the different Crowns to their fullest, things get laughably easy until The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, where you're stripped of all your Crowns and have to fight all seven demons again to get them back.

• AVGN.Tropes N To T:
  • Most of the games the Nerd play fall under this category, either through intentional design, bad controls, glitches or any other variety of factors. Many of them come directly from the Trope Namer, like Ghosts 'n Goblins, Ninja Gaiden, and Silver Surfer (1990).
  • He receives this while trying to beat Ninja Gaiden. It doesn't help.

• VideoGame.Extermination: Of a sort. Ammo can always be replenished at ammo stores in save rooms, and basic healing items are reasonably plentiful. However, sub-weapon ammo is significantly more limited, items to cure your infection on the fly are very rare compared to regular healing items, and while it's not too difficult to amass quite a few of the MTS Vaccine, they can only be used in save rooms. Thankfully they fully cure Dennis, restoring him to 100% health and completely erasing any infection from his body. Enemies also hit hard or raise your infection quickly, platforming can be somewhat jerky, and even the environment grows significantly more hostile over time.

• Creator.Alice Soft: Crutch Character: Due to the Nintendo Hard nature of most of their games, the player is generally given a character who can steamroll most of the early game with ease (Feliss and Rick from Rance, Shibagami from Daiteikoku), but rendering them unusable after certain events to prevent the player from relying solely on them. Interestingly, the main characters of each of the three Dai games also manage to be this due to having far better stats than pretty much every other playable character, particularly early on, but are incapable of getting character cleared, meaning they'll never get any New Game Plus bonuses like the other characters.

• Main.Stylish Action: Teaching through difficulty. Stylish action enemies are meant to challenge the player unless they adapt; just like the player's combat tools, enemies will vary in how susceptible they are to particular fighting styles. Unlike most Hack and Slash games, there are no harmless one-hit mooks, so memorizing the behavior patterns of every type of enemy is key to surviving fights. Mistakes tend to be punished harshly to help the player recognize what needs to be improved. On TV Tropes, we call this Nintendo Hard — a term from the old days of console gaming where many titles were ported over from arcade cabinets designed to snarf up your quarters.

• IThoughtThatWas.A To E: Or dying being Nintendo Hard.

• YMMV.Doom Eternal: ** The Ancient Gods - Part One cranked up the already Nintendo Hard game's difficulty up to eleven, to the point where many describe it as making the entire base game feel like a tutorial level. Enemy waves are more numerous and feature tougher demon combos; it's common for the Slayer to fight more than 2 Super Heavies backed up with numerous Heavies and mountains of Fodder in any given fight. The arenas are more cramped and typically filled with hazards. One Ups and BFG Cell pickups are much rarer, making it impossible to brute force levels with extra lives and superweapons, the new enemies are specifically designed to move you out of Complacent Gaming Syndrome strategies such as the Super Shotgun/Ballista combo. Lastly, the bosses in Part One are definite step-ups from the Final Boss of the base game itself.

• Video Game.Valhalla: Good luck completing the game without a walkthrough - even with one it's still an exercise in frustration as you need certain NPCs to do things or be in certain places and they will often point blank refuse to do them or be summoned to the required locations.

• VideoGame.Vib Ribbon: Despite the simple premise making use of four buttons, the combo system can get pretty frantic and challenging, more so in the second Silver and Gold tracks.

• VideoGame.Spider Man And The X Men In Arcades Revenge: Make no mistake, this game is hard! Your characters take a lot of damage from attacks, health items are scarce and none of the stages have checkpoints. There's also no continues in this game, meaning you'll lose a lot of progress past the tutorial level.

• Main.Game Mod:
  • Other ROM hacks are made with the intention of increasing the game's difficulty, and depending on the creator's ideas of how to accomplish that, it can result in the mod being Nintendo Hard and/or laden with Fake Difficulty, which may make them appealing to expert players but probably not to a mass audience.
  • The PC version of Prince of Persia had an even harder level hack called 4D Prince of Persia back in 1994. In more recent years, however, hackers became capable of deeper modifications, and now you can get many new level sets, tiles and character sprites — you may play with levels and graphics from the excellent SNES version. Someone even made a launcher to use all of the stuff combined.

• Archive.Made Of Win Late 2009: Negative Zero: Points to whoever made the laconic for Shin Megami Tensei redirect to Nintendo Hard.

• YMMV.Bomberman 64: * Scrappy Mechanic: Beating the game for the regular ending is tough but reasonable. Collecting 100 Gold Cards to reach the Rainbow Palace for the true ending? Near impossible without any sort of guide on hand. It's not just that the demand is stingy, as it requires all the gold cards of every stage and boss prior, but that the game doesn't even hint at or explain how any of these work, numerous conditions are extremely tight and/or obtuse as hell, and you have to get all five cards in each boss in a single go instead of retrying for individual cards. This mechanic alone makes this one of the hardest games in the franchise to complete.

• WebAnimation.Homestar Runner: Pretty much every game with the Videlectrix logo is extremely difficult. Stinkoman 20X6 takes more than just its visual style from Mega Man. Duck Guardian requires insanely quick reflexes and multi-tasking skills, Kid Speedy has a tendency to to randomly make your character's maximum speed slower than any of your opponent's minimum speeds, making the race impossible, Rhino Feeder sometimes crowds just about every pixel of the screen with snakes, making the game unwinnable, and 50K Racewalker literally cannot be beaten in anything less than 20 hours of continuous playing.

• VideoGame.Zombie Stories Roblox: To keep up with the original version's Nintendo Hard nature, "Contamination" features zombies that are significantly more durable than Slashers!

• Pinball.TX Sector: Among pinheads, TX-Sector is an uncomplicated game infamous for two things: its eye-watering lavender and hot pink backglass, and its Awesome Eighties Chiptune soundtrack. Fortunately, the game itself doesn't disappoint — it's neither insultingly easy nor annoyingly difficult, but has enough of a challenge to give players a decent amount of playtime.