Games that were ruined by their difficulty

I see Battletoads is mentioned. Dragon Quest 2 (NES version) The game was known for being very hard. Level grinding was not that fun given the nature of the battle system in that game.

Of the newer games.. Castlevaina: Lord of Shadows was extremely difficult. I never finished that one because of it. Metroid Fusion had a boss that I could never beat so I sold the game. For someone who has timing issues between their hand and eyes.. that game is not one to play.

Too easy: Kingdoms of Amalur the Reckoning which is the lovechild you'd get if Skyrim, WoW and God of War had a baby. I am currently playing through it and though I absolutely adore the game, even on the hardest setting, I destroy everything effortlessly. This is also why most of the mods that exist for that game are solely to increase its difficulty.

Phantasy Star 2 is a good candidate here. This games forced you to grind every single step of the way, including the very first minutes of the game. Imagine that, in 2014, a RPG where you can't even enter the first dungeon before you've leveled a good 2-3 hours. That's like being given a book and asked to read page 1 twenty times before being allowed to go to page two.


I agree with 7th Saga. To date, I am the only person I know to have beaten it legit, without help, cheats or guide. I was 18, alone in my first apartment in the middle of nowhere (I worked at a farm) with lots of time to waste on my lonely nights. Good times. Not really.

Oh, good lord, Phantasy Star 2 was tough. Not ruined, I think, since I still love it, but I know the insane dungeons turned a lot of people off to the game. That's a pretty fair analogy about the grinding, too, I think, ha ha.

Hi kids! Do you like JRPGs? Of course you do, otherwise you wouldn't be here! Today, we're here to discuss a lovely (not allowed to say the word I wanna say on this site) JRPG for the Nintendo DS, and recently iOS, Android, and coming soon to your Steam Store, Final Fantasy III! (No, not the one with Terra, that's Final Fantasy VI.)

Anyway. Final Fantasy III for the DS is a remake of Final Fantasy III for the NES, where the four Light Warriors now have names and very, very rudimentary personalities. Personalities don't matter here, because FF3 is the prototype for the Job System seen in much more competent/better games in the series (read: Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy Dimensions) where you can change your character's job, and thus, abilities they can use in combat.

But wait! You can't do it for free! You had to pay Capacity Points to change in the original FF3. In the DS version, you can change for free... at the cost of a penalty to all your stats for a few combats. Yes, you're going to cripple the whole party for a few fights just by deciding "Naaaah, I don't really need three black mages right now..." The penalties are worse if you're switching from a martial job (like monk, knight, viking, or thief) to a caster job (black mage, white mage, red mage, &c.) and the penalties last longer if there's a massive job level difference between the jobs.

And yes, if you switch jobs during the penalty phase, the penalty gets worse/lasts longer.

There is no way to mitigate the penalty for switching jobs.

Don't worry. Thanks to the DS's 2000-polygon limit, only three enemies can be on screen at a time (as opposed to Final Fantasy I's nine-enemy limit, or FF3NES's six-enemy limit.) Enemies got their stats massively buffed. Massively.

Oh, and bosses, to compensate for the rebalancing of jobs and new abilities, get two turns in a row in combat. (Or three, or even four for the last two bosses in the game.) Most bosses have full-party attacks that, while not as damaging in the NES game, are absolutely devastating in the DS version. These full-party attacks are used at random, and two successive ones can instantly kill the Light Warriors.

Thanks to the way the game handles combat initiative, there's a chance a boss can go first in a round, or God forbid, a battle. So... yes. You can start a boss fight and have Luneth, Arc, Refia, and Ingus absolutely curb-stomped before you can even start the fight. Don't worry, all is not lost! All you have to do is restore your last saved game, and--

--...what do you mean, "You can only save on the overworld map because there's no save points, just like in the NES version?"

Best post ever, would read again. A+++


Seriously, this is why people make cheats on the DS and any game designer that ever thinks that the player should be punished for a game decision needs a boot to the face. Just like early MMOs.

"You died because your video card sucks which caused you to lag, allowing the MASSIVE enemy group someone else angered to catch up to you while you tried running like a nancy and exploded your pixels all over your 17 inches CRT? Well, in this game, wneh you die, you lose experience. If you had just leveled, you'll lose that level. Woops. Haha. Sorry. Not."

I may or may not have traumatic issues because of this possibly hypothetical story.

I actually bought my nephew FF III for the DS for his birthday, and he had a heck of a time with the final dungeon, just has not been able to beat the game so far. I feel terrible, I had no idea it was so tough. I still wanna play the NES version, I wish they'd translate it and port it to Virtual Console or something, my Japanese is kind of nonexistent!

Ha ha, Aeroprism, I feel the same way, I can't stand feeling punished for a game play choice, it drives me crazy. I know exactly what you mean about the MMO thing, I remember more or less screaming in existential agony after dying in the most infuriating ways in this old MUD I used to play, The Two Towers.

So last time on Sailor Moon Z, I talked about how absolutely terrible Final Fantasy III for the DS was, and how certain design decisions make for one incredibly craptacular RPG "experience." Let's get the bad taste out of our mouths.

Let's talk about Final Fantasy IV for the DS.

It's a remake of the SNES classic, Final Fantasy IV (no, not the one with Firion. You're thinking of that other Final Fantasy II.) and, to its credit, the game sounds absolutely beautiful, and the voice acting is great all around, even if Yuri "Protagonist of Every JRPG Anymore" Lowenthal voices Cecil Harvey. Fun fact: Yuri Lowenthal, not content to voice the Prince of Persia, Radix Farrence in Star Ocean 1's remake, the Persona 3 Protagonist, and Sasuke Uchiha in the crappiest anime about ninja ever produced by humanity (not Ninja Scroll: The Series), also voiced the male Courier in Fallout: New Vegas. Yes, doing pain grunts counts as voicing a character.

That said, let's start with the random encounters. FF4DS's random encounters, like FF3DS's, are massively buffed up from the 16-bit era. Those sandworms you can randomly encounter in the Damcyan Desert? They can one-shot kill you. A lot of monsters do a lot of damage with their basic attack, to the point where your party might as well be wearing cardboard armor for all the protection it gives you. (Bosses had their stats buffed, too, but that's another paragraph.)

About a third of the way through the game, you get to go to the Lodestone Cavern, where any character wearing metallic equipment is permanently paralyzed in combat. Considering Cecil is a knightly paladin at this point, this is a problem because his swords are awesome. Fortunately the nearby city sells three daggers that aren't made of metal that only he can equip!

(SPOILER WARNING: The Flameshard, Frostshard, and Shockshard SUCK MAJOR. I say without hyperbole that you can do more damage with your equally terrible unarmed attack than you can with those piece of crap knives.)

"But Snorb!" you say. "I played Final Fantasy IV, why didn't you just buy a bow and a whole bunch of arrows and give those to Cecil!?" Good question! Thing is, Cecil can't equip bows in Final Fantasy IV DS. Squenix's reason for doing this is

A couple paragraphs ago, I talked about bosses. Bosses aren't actually buffed as much as the monsters, but some of them do have frustrating gimmicks. The Antlion, an early boss, countered every physical attack made against it in any version. In FF4DS, it does the same thing... then you notice its eyes change color. And it starts counterattacking magic...

That's right. The bosses, whose gimmicks you know by heart if you know FF4 like the back of your hand, decided to pull a Punch-Out Wii and messed with their gimmicks so you need a new strategy. That's not bad, and I really love it, but there's one major problem with this: The Giant of Babel's CPU. It's protected by an Attack Bit and a Defense Bit. The Attack Bit attacks the party, the Defense Bit heals the CPU. Kill both, and the CPU steamrollers two random party members and revives the Bits.

You are told in every version to kill the Defense Bit. While this advice holds water in the GBA version (where the Attack Bit's attack is rather pitiful and the Defense Bit heals about 2000 HP per turn), doing this in the DS version will result in a very short, frustrating battle, followed by a hole in your wall about the size of an opened Nintendo DS as you hurl it at the wall. The Attack Bit hits the entire party like a dump truck in this version while the Defense Bit does some rather pathetic token healing to the CPU. You are still told to kill Defense Bit before fighting the CPU, so I guess this is "Barrett, be careful!! Attack while its tail's up!! It'll counterattack with its laser!" for the portable generation.

Two other frustrations make Final Fantasy IV DS not as fun as it should be: Augments, which give your party members extra abilities, are earned by either revisiting dungeons after you beat them and have no reason to go back, or by giving departing party members Augments that you hope you won't need later in exchange for actual good abilities.

The most terrible thing about FF4DS: The Rainbow Pudding sidequest. That no-good (obscenity deleted) (bleep) (I should probably leave this chain of profanity out) (hilariously obscene complaint) (extremely profane comment about Rainbow Pudding) Rainbow Pudding sidequest. One recurring NPC wants a Rainbow Pudding for his girlfriend. Cecil being the protagonist volunteers is shanghaied into getting one for him.

Rainbow Pudding is dropped by Flan-type enemies, several of which you've met by this point. Too bad for you that they have a .4% (decimal point assuredly not a typo) chance of dropping one when you kill it. Even with the Augment that boosts rare drop rates, you still only have a .8% chance of getting Rainbow Pudding. People have been known to take weeks to get one.

Your reward for getting Namingway his thrice-bedamned Rainbow Pudding? You win JACK. (Some would consider "But you get to advance Namingway's little subplot!!!" as a reward. I would consider that you reconsider your idea of what considers a reward.)

At least the CG promotional art for Rosa (this game's love interest) made her look really sexy, so... I guess that takes some of the bad feelings for making me remember this stupid Rainbow Pudding quest away.

(Edit: Removed a couple words near the end that, while not censor bypassing in and of themselves, could be interpreted as bypassing the censor if you're in the right state of mind. But after playing some of the games on this list, you might not be. Or might be.)

Ahh well this is where I disagree, dear captain Snorb. I played FF4 DS twice (once very recently) and I found it very, very easy. Yang is so uberly overpowered that the Dark Elf cave was a cake. The augments made the second playthrough laughable. Make Cecil take every attack, buff his HP, heal him. The others can go about destroying everything with total impunity.

Also: uberly is not a word.

Yeah the sidequests were pointless and sucked, really bad. On that we agree.

The boss fights required timing. The Golbez battle where Rydia arrives? You either destroyed him or got one-shot but his shadow. Rubicant and Valvalis as well. (I remember only the Americanized names used on the SNES from playing through this game about twenty times in my life).

Still: very fun game!

I actually really liked the FF IV DS game, I thought it was a very interesting take on FF IV and added a ton of variety and depth to the game. Great experience for a longtime FF IV fan. I'm sort of in the middle on the difficulty, I thought it was much, much harder than the original, but very fair, and a good, healthy challenge.

Yes, FFIV for the DS is a great conversion ! One day, I must continue it at last and finish it ! (I've finished once the original on Super Nintendo).