Games that are harder than Dark Souls

[Fox12]

Let me start by saying that Dark Souls is a fine game. It's tough but fair (mostly). The story is great, the gameplay is rich and diverse, and the boss fights and art direction are fantastic. However, as hard as the game could sometimes be, I never really found it as hard as people claimed. Maybe it was just the hype that made it sound harder than it was, but I could think of plenty of games that caued me greater difficulty.

I'm currently playing Persona 4, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite games of all time. Up til now it's been relatively easy, though it's significantly harder than Persona 3. Then I ran into Shadow Kanji, and he promptly kicked my ass. Multiple times. I've only started, and he's already harder than the final boss from 3.

Kingdom Hearts had several bosses who seem every bit as hard as Dark Souls bod fights, especially the Sephiroth fights.

I would also vote for most classic games, such as Megaman and Megaman X. As a kid I poured countless hours into boss fights that literally seemed insurmountable, and every victory felt like an achievement.

Which games would you hold up as brutally difficult?

 

[Euryalus]

Harvest moon it's a wonderful life. There were a bajillion chapters and you would have already done everything there was to do gameplay wise by chapter 3. It took a steel will to fight through the boredom of finishing. Fuck that game! xD

 

[Auberon]

Half the items from NES-era. Battletoads is notorious, as an example.

 

[Bad Jim]

This Mario romhack. It's called Mario Forever.


This guy is actually pretty good at it. He's way better at it than I am.

 

[Bombiz]

Maybe it was just the hype that made it sound harder than it was

it was the hype trust me. especially since Demons Souls was hyped up to be Harder then the average game people just expected this one to be the hardest thing ever.

any I WAANA BE THE X game.

 

[Spacewolf]

I seem to remember Star Wars bounty hunter being difficult as hell especially the Prison level which I'm pretty sure I just cheated past because it was handing me my ass.

 

[Frezzato]

Half the items from NES-era. Battletoads is notorious, as an example.

This, for sure. The outdated "arcade" mindset even extended into the PS2 era like with the first Sly Cooper game, which would kill you if you fell into water. Hell, counting water alone that would also include Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed.

You could even go further back to the DOS era. One of my personal favorites was Flashback, which was fairly brutal in terms of death. Desert Strike was like that as well.

No, scratch all the above. I'll go with Ninja Gaiden Black or something like that.

 

[scorptatious]

I found the Shin Megami Tensei games (Especially Strange Journey) to be pretty damn difficult.

The final boss in Strange Journey in particular gave me so much trouble. I had to level grind, remake my entire party, get materials for some of the best equipment in the game, farm a shit ton of Tetraja stones, and work around with the fusion system so no one had any weaknesses.

It was pretty satisfying finally bringing her down though. And with my party set up, I can say that I can beat her consistently now.

 

[NeutralDrow]

God Hand would be my first candidate forward. The only problem is, I'm tempted to put Hard Mode forward as the shining example (it took me 258 official continues, and god knows how many continues lost to ragequits, to beat it), but to be fair I'd have to compare it to Dark Souls NG+, which I was never tempted to do. Closest I've come is using some bonfire ascetics in DS2 to refight bosses.

 

[IllumInaTIma]

I didn't find Persona 3 or 4 to be particularly difficult (except the Contrarian King. fuck that guy), but they were definitely quite challenging. Now, if we want to speak difficult then there was no game more difficult than a god damn Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne. Just so you all know, I played that game on emulator, so I could use save state, used ArtMoney to get myself infinite makka, AND used a guide. AND THAT GAME STILL KICKED MY ASS!

 

[Weaver]

Half the items from NES-era. Battletoads is notorious, as an example.

Yeah I was going to say this. Silver Surfer is a game I had as a kid that was just way too hard.

 

[briankoontz]

I Wanna Be the Guy and I Wanna Be the Guy: Gaiden are great fun games and are very difficult, far more so than Dark Souls.

Minecraft is very difficult in executing advanced tasks that take specific knowledge and rare resources.

MMOs are more difficult in terms of the end bosses than the ones in Dark Souls.

When mainstream games focused on narrative they became easy, because a narrative can't progress if a player keeps dying. Dark Souls avoids this problem by having the gameplay and visuals be more impressive than the narrative.

 

[jademunky]

SMT: Nocturne was pretty brutal.

I still cannot beat the final boss (the REAL final boss anyway)

 

[Drummodino]

If you think Shadow Kanji was bad, I would love to see what you think of a boss fight a bit further into Persona 4. There's a big difficulty spike in that fight.

OT: Yea Dark Souls is nowhere near as difficult as it's reputation suggests. It's tough, very tough but fair. I'd say Dark Souls 2 is more difficult, it they added a lot more multiple enemy encounters and the enemy tracking is almost ridiculous at times now.

Also I'll say XCOM: Enemy Unknown on Impossible difficulty. That game is ludicrously punishing on that difficulty, one mistake and you could have your entire squad wiped and campaign wrecked. I've never gotten very far into it, Classic difficulty with Ironman (no save loading) is the best I've managed to complete.

 

[Adeptus Aspartem]

Ever played any Civilization game on the hardest setting? No?

Well, to put it gently: i'd rather run into the ancient dragon at SL 1 than fight Nobunaga on Deity once again.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

When mainstream games focused on narrative they became easy, because a narrative can't progress if a player keeps dying. Dark Souls avoids this problem by having the gameplay and visuals be more impressive than the narrative.

The reason that the dark souls narrative is interesting isn't the actual story and side stories themselves, but rather the fact that you find them and figure them out on your own with evidence. The game involves you in the story, so the story seems deeper than it actually is because the player figures it out.

Like take for example Iron Tarkus. The entire story of Iron Tarkus is that he's the first person who fights his way through Sen's Fortress, leaves his summon sign at the top so he can help others, goes to Anor Londo and then falls off the rafters in the cathedral because he's too heavy to keep his balance when he's attacked by painted guardians. The story is incredibly simple, but it seems deep and complex when you're forced to put two and two together figure it out based on his equipment and where you find his body.

Because of this the story as much a gameplay mechanic as the actual gameplay, because figuring out the lore of dark souls is almost like a separate game and experience (well, unless you get everything spoon-fed to you by EpicNameBro).

So yeah, I very much agree that modern games are easier because developers are afraid of gamers not being able to finish the story. Older games though, arcade titles for example, had no stories (or barely had them), and they were incredibly difficult, much moreso than Dark Souls. Hell, I have some NES games that I've never even had the skill or patience to beat, and I've been Dark Souls multiple times.

 

[Zakarath]

I'd say I found playing through Dragon Age: Origins on nightmare maybe a little harder than Dark Souls, but to be honest neither of them were that bad

 

[Klumpfot]

Solomon's Key on the NES. It's relentless. Platform puzzling on a timer with enemies everywhere. If you beat that game, I will salute you. Lord knows I can't.

 

[seaweed]

Most 8-bit games are leagues harder. Ninja Gaiden made me want to smash my controller to bits.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

It's more the exploratory and implicative nature of it. There are plenty of games that are harder, bullet hells and 2D platformers, but it's the mechanical difficulty of being precise with the controls and positioning, not the attentive difficulty of observing your surroundings and adapting, although the O&S boss fight certainly tests controls and positioning. And not to resurrect the corpse of artificial difficulty, but that plays a part in a lot of 'hard' games and is barely present in Dark Souls. Then there are types of bosses that are hard in different ways, Dark Souls bosses often involve knowing their moveset and dodging and finding weaknesses, and most of the time a change in attack pattern during the fight, as opposed to sponge bosses that just require a massive amount of damage to kill but aren't that difficult to fight, like Binding of Isaac's final bosses, widely regarded as pretty shit bosses compared to the rest in the game. For this reason there are a fair few MMOs with harder bosses than the ones in Dark Souls, but it's a cheap type of difficulty.

Basically Dark Souls is best game, is I think what I'm trying to say.