What's the biggest jump in difficulty you've seen in a retro game?Pic related for me. The last level was just absurd compared to the rest of the game.
This guy.>>12887996My brother never got past that part.
Difficulty spikes in the middle of a game are good design. If you look at SMB3 the entire game is designed around that idea, with castles and airships being the spikes which are generally followed by easy stages. The player gets better and giving him easy stuff afterwards empowers him even more. Modern design thinks difficulty should be a linear flat slighlty uphill line which is boring
FE3 final dungeon(s) got me thinking how ludicruous it would be to ask someone to do this on actual hardware with no prior knowledge and not suffer a wipe that likely eliminated hours of progress>Can only save in the overworld>Final dungeon is 3 separate huge dungeons (potentially 4 assuming you grab the last jobs which you in all likelyhood will) full of enemies with some of the hardest enemies in the game and with instant kill abilities>If you gun it for the final boss in the world of darkness you straight up lose - Its invincible and you cant run. You need to know to go and fight the other bosses in TWoD before you can actually kill the final boss (Without the game telling you this ofc, so in all likelihood you face at least one loss from just this)>While we are on it, one of the other bosses in TWoD straight up just kills a single party member each turn and thats all he does which can easily suprise you if you aren't ready>So eventually you trudge back after potentially 2 defeats and a shitton of backtracking through the longass dungeons only to fight the final boss when you realize that while you can now injure it, it still does assloads of damage and the only way you genuinely can defeat it is a pure numbers race>You suffer a wipe, weep, and repeat, but this time grind like a motherfucker just to have an HP pool to survive the onslaughtI enjoy a dungeon that actually feels like a properly scary challening place but holy shit FF3s final gauntlet does not fuck around
>>12887996the ristar final boss. the entire game is a cakewalk and then you get hit by a brick wall. i loved it. it was the only part of the game that required practice for the no-continue run
>>12888082>This guy.Really? He's easily abusable. Knock him down with a special or something, then walk away from him, he'll jump or slide towards you, so you do a jumping attack and repeat the process.
>>12887996>The final levelThat game is hard all-around xcept for the first level
>>12887996From MM7>According to Yoshihisa Tsuda, it turned out as tough as it did because Keiji Inafune said, "Let's make the very last fight insanely hard!".The whole game is piss easy, then you get here and unless you have a ton of energy tanks you're in for a bad time
Devil may cry 3's Cerebus is pretty infamous. For me he was the second hardest boss in the game and you face when you are still learning what the buttons do.He's way this relatively tame game has an undeserved reputation for difficulty.
>>12888131Could be worse, too. The DS remake gives all bosses at least two attacks per turn and they go off at random. The final boss gets FOUR, and if you're very unlucky, she can chain party-nukes one after another and you'll be doomed to die.
>>12888131You know, I often think to myself that I couldn't have used save states and probably hadn't figured out how to use them yet when I emulated this game circa 2002 because I distinctly have memories of making the climb up the Crystal Tower several times, and indeed dying to at least the Two-Headed dragon and certainly the CoD, but at the same time I wonder if I'm not gaslighting myself, because this really is a brutal gauntlet, and I don't know if I would've had the patience after a while.
>Rayman 1. Has a fun child-like setting and a breezy saunter through the first stage and then it's just bullshit on top of bullshit.>Ys 1Kind of hard at the beginning when you're too frail to defeat the basic enemies, but being able to save anytime and anywhere, you can cheese your way to a high enough level to get through without trouble. Then you get to ... any of the bosses and they are shockingly the hardest thing on the NES by far. Nothing comes close to how bullshit they are. >Baldur's Gate: Dark AllianceYou go to a crypt full of zombies and have to fight some crystal ball and it's a big step up in difficulty.>God of War The cerberus breeder. Fuck this.>Mario Land 2Nice and easy game until Wario's castle at the end. No checkpoints, some tricky jumps, then a 4(?) phase final boss. I always like these threads.
>>12888546So far I've only bothered to try beating her once, failed and moved on. It sends you way too far back. I think I did farm for levels at Bahamut cave afterwards for couple of hours but never tried the final dungeon again.
>>12888615I too like this but I kinda wish there was a website database for this. I kinda imagine it as each game page having a timeline and it goes from green to orange to red. How cool would that be?
Ecco the Dolphin has a few. The Machine is kind of obvious, but also less of a difficulty spike than just a bunch of memorizing. The fight against the Asterite is quite hard no matter what because it's so tight. This jump though in City of Forever is very tricky. So much so that they put a hidden passage in the level to bypass it for those who got so stuck they just went poking everywhere thinking it's impossible.
I remember this boss fucking me up as a kid. Partially because I didn't realize that you can destroy the wrecking ball.
>>12888615I love Wario's Castle but it does illustrate the problem with this kinda thing, since the rest of the game doesn't have that kind of fun
The first Ultros fight in FF6 qualifies, I think. He hits relatively hard, but what makes it tough (for newcomers anyway) is the fact that you have to babysit Banon, a weak shitter with little HP and defense unless you grind a bunch, and if you're not careful he can easily die to his Tentacle attacks, and then it's game over. Not saying he's actually difficult, but he's the first fight where you actually have to play a bit more methodically, make sure you keep your HP up, and not just spam Attack like a baboon, which has filtered some noobs in the past.
>>12888514I learnt to do this fight without Tanks. I actually liked it a lot, the design is very smart.
For me is the change in armor and attack mechanics in Warcraft 3 from Reign of Chaos to The Frozen Throne, mostly because of how easy the base game is with damage calculations.Everything melts under piercing attacks, so you could make murder zones with towers and kiting enemies through them. Then TFT gets a major overhaul by introducing new damage types, buffing Fortified armor and more, making you more resourceful when defending your base and favoring going out and attacking over turtling.
>>12888120It also makes you keep your guard up or down in weird times, which can make for nice unique gameplay experiences sometimes.>>12888667>I learnt to do this fight without TanksMe too, on original hardware, but I never liked it. It's just something I suffer through in an otherwise relaxing game. Something about it feels cheaper than even the more bullshity parts of 8 like the snowboard parts.
>>12888615>GoW2This crazy old chap on titan difficulty.
>>12887996Castlevania (NES) and stage 12, with the Frankenstein boss fight, and the bone/skeleton dragon enemies before it, but especially the hunchback that hops around and shoots you during the boss... it's a pain. If you get around that, there's the corridor before the Death boss, on stage 15, and it's an absolutely miserable time... It's stil a fantastic title though.
>>12887996not an original pick but ninja gaiden. the difficulty before 5-2 is surprisingly mild, I wouldn't call it easy but definitely more smooth in difficulty than many less infamous games. every screen past that is tuned for maximum pain.
>>12888715TFT is crazy hard if you don’t respect the featured unit of each mission. For example, the attack to interrupt Illidan’s ritual at Dalaran is doable if you use the newly introduced faerie dragons and very tough without them. UD4 is a bar fight if you don’t use ships and trivial with them. BE5 (where you meet the Draenei) is stupidly easy if you abuse couatl. I think three examples is enough.
Feeling gaaa~aaaayhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B64f48ewdo
Rayman has at least 3 of them all on its own.'How can you have 3? That's just a difficulty curve!'No. Each one hits you like a wall compared to what the game was asking of you a moment ago.It's an absolute cunt of game.
>>12887996I wouldn't say "biggest", but Act II in Diablo 2 has a handful of gameplay checks for players that only rush in aimlessly.The beetle/scarabs make you consider elemental defense% and auras more, there's a lot of cramped spaces in their dens that make you evaluate the situation better regarding spells, getting swarmed and minding your positioning, the Horadric Cube opens the doors to tinkering with your inventory. I think there are more things to consider but that's a good difficulty spike in a game.
>>12888615Beat me to SML2.>BattletoadsTurbo Tunnel is that much harder than the first two levels, and even harder than a couple of levels that come afterwards. Clear rental filter.>Double DragonThe woods level is such a fucking difficulty jump compared to the previous levels. On the same level, you suddenly get shoved into a looping maze, NEED to understand you can actually enter the caves despite not being allowed to enter any doorway prior to this, and NEED to be able to do perfect jumps to avoid falling in pits and to get across some moving platforms. The next two levels are also full of bullshit, but the BS starts at the woods.>Battle of OlympusCrete. Prior to Crete, the game is more or less fair, and you can avoid the majority of damage once you git gud with the range of your club/sword. Then you get to Crete and the entire area is full of soldier enemies that take multiple hits to go down, attack at range, AND are on both the ceiling and floor so you can't just travel on the ceiling with Hermie's Sandals. Oh, and the entire area is one giant maze that doesn't follow the rules of physics.>Power D.O.L.L.S.The 3rd or 4th mission, where you send in 4 people to rescue someone. The game isn't exactly easy prior to this, but this mission is brutally hard and that much harder than every other mission in the entire game except the final mission, which is a difficulty jump all it's own.>Kirby's AdventureThe Meta-Knight battle. At worst, you have the mini-boss rush tower prior to Meta-Knight, but it's just testing your ability to beat the mini-bosses you've been fighting all game long, and you can use any ability you want. Meta-Knight on the other hand, it's just a straight 1vs1 and you are using the sword no matter what.
>>12888615>Ys 1>any of the bosses and they are shockingly the hardest thing on the NES by far. Nothing comes close to how bullshit they are.Not even close
>>12887996The final phase of Sigma in Mega Man X4.
It just occured to me that there's gonna come a time like maybe a decade from now when Dark Souls will be classified as a retro game. And whenever someone makes a thread like this a decade from now, it's gonna be filled with zoomers whose first action games were Dark Souls games.
>>12888131I was pretty satisfied with FFIII's final dungeon as well. Ancient Labyrinth was a great warmup with it being challenging but short enough you could eventually blow through the gatekeeper boss and get to the base of the Slyx Tower. That was your final save point in the game, but going back to the airship to rest and get MP back meant making another trip through the lab, and then returning through it again.I tackled it in stages, first exploring and mapping a large amount of Slyx, backing out and saving, then diving Eureka and getting the secret jobs, saving again, and then probing Xande and the final boss. Because you can save before Xande (Although you have to climb the tower again), it's not so terrible to figure out the final dungeon, but it will likely take a few runs.A lot of old RPGs you have to get in the mindset of approaching it like an expedition, where you spend at least a few attempts with a pencil and paper drawing maps. Once you can document the layout of a dungeon you can figure out how to optimize your travel through it.
>>12888538I felt like that too on DMC3's release. Got to cerb, got my ass handed to me a dozen times or so, thought the rest of the game was going to be a ball buster and was pleasantly happy considering DMC2 was something I blew through in the first day I got it. Once you got new weapons and abilities under your belt though, things got relatively easier.
This piece of shit filtered me for weeks.
>>12890569It's also gonna be filled with a ton of even younger people who never even heard of Dark Souls and don't even know why the genre is called soulslike, just like roguelike fans often get surprised when they hear there's a game called rogue
>>12888131I don't know why FF3 gets this reputation when FF2 does the same multiple dungeons marathon and the dungeons are arguably harder. I guess Dark Cloud hits like a truck more than the Emperor.
>>12892930Teleport spell in FF2 is so broken that it made the final dungeons easier. At least for me.
>>12888615>Ys 1For me it's the last boss being harder in the remake because he destroys the ground every time you hit him so if you don't hit him in the right areas you get trapped and can't do enough damage to beat him or you fall through the floor.
>>12887996I thought this thread was about literal jumps so the first thing that sprang to mind was Castlevania Chronicles, there's a jump near the end that's tighter than anything else in the game
>>12888664they did it for padding, and to justify the crazy number of lives you could get. plus if you game over there you have to go redo the other six boss fights.
>>12889953yeah, the death hallway and boss was harder than the final boss. I can pretty much clear the game deathless until frsnkenstein
>>12893931>until frankenstein
