Games that are harder than Dark Souls

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

#1: Battletoads (NES). On the bright side, it resulted in my favourite Youtube video compilation of all time.

#2: Ninja Gaiden (NES), though most of that is due to the final chapter.

#3: Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume (DS). Suicidal esoort missions are even worse when you need a certain amount of overkill on enemies to succeed.

#4: SaGa/Final Fantasy Legend (GB). Insane random encounter rate. When a party member dies three times, they're gone forever. Yeah...

#5: Blast Corps (N64). Not the Carrier missions, but the Time Attack required to access the final missions. Destroy every little toolshed and barn in a small country town in 30 seconds or you FAIL.

I'd estimate I complete 95% of the games that I play, even Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. I have beaten every Mega Man game, every Metroid on Hard mode, every Kingdom Hearts boss in the series on Proud/Critical... but these five are scars on my mind that shall forever taunt me with elusive victory just out of reach.

 

[sabercrusader]

I wouldn't say Shadow Kanji is harder than the final boss in Persona 3, hell, the strategy to beat Shadow Kanji is actually really simple and easy to figure out, your problem is likely that you aren't high enough level for what the fight requires.


That said, the Persona games are challenging. I would say that the Ninja Gaiden games are harder than Dark Souls, as well as Call of Duty games on Veteran and some of the Halo titles on Legendary.

Also, Bioshock on Hard, fuck that shit.

 

[JagermanXcell]

The lack of DMC3 here is astonishing.

DMC3 throws you in, expects you to know the basics quickly and as on the fly as possible, and then proceeds to throw the very best it has at you. Yes you can upgrade weapons, but only to slightly increase the damage, because what you really really want is as many moves as possible. The more varied you are in your play style, the better you will do. Try to spam, and you will most likely die/get a low score... you chump. And why would you want to spam? The game teaches you early that style=viable.

Dark Souls is great, but DMC3 has a really fun way of presenting the git gud levels of difficulty.

And since I'm still on the topic of old Capcom games, early Mega Man games had some great challenge behind them. Play carefully or die painfully.

EDIT: Also SMT Nocturne aka Persona 4 difficulty on steroids.

 

[Avaholic03]

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.

I used to be with you, but there are some cheap tactics you can use to grind out a win on Impossible. Each level takes a ton of turns, leap-frogging your guys up and always having a couple expendable guys for each mission. But as long as you don't care about saving civilians on the terror missions, the only levels that might give you trouble are the bomb diffuse ones, and that's only if the random map layout screws you pretty bad.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Demon's Souls? Never played Dark Souls but I keep hearing the first game was way harder.

 

[TheSYLOH]

Kerbal Space Program.
There's a good reason that EVERYBODY plays it with a mod that includes a landing computer.
Landing on an object without an atmosphere is tough as hell.
Neil Armstrong didn't have it this tough, NASA at least supplied the Moon Lander with an automatic landing system (albiet one that initially tried to land him in a rock field and was spitting out an error code the entire time).

Now try to land on the Mercury equivalent with enough fuel to get you back.
Or try to land on the Kerbal equivalent of a Jovian Moon.
or the NASA created asteroid retrieval mission.
Or make a single stage to orbit shuttle.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Demon's Souls? Never played Dark Souls but I keep hearing the first game was way harder.

I think it's more the fact that Demon's Souls was first rather than it actually being mechanically harder (although pure black tendency in Demon's Souls is a *****). I played Dark Souls before Demon's Souls and didn't find Demon's Souls particularly challenging (though I did find it quite a bit more annoying because of the damn weight limit system). The real difficulty in Demon's Souls is changing your world tendency, and actually trying to keep white world tendency (which means never dying in human form), or trying to play through black tendency (which means much more difficult enemies). The problem is, if you're playing online you can't actually affect world tendency so neither of these extra challenges are present (you're always in grey), and without black tendency, or the fear of dying and losing white tendency Demon's Souls really isn't much more difficult than Dark Souls.

 

[SmallHatLogan]

The lack of DMC3 here is astonishing.

About as astonishing as Persona 4 getting a mention in a thread about game difficulty.

Demon's Souls? Never played Dark Souls but I keep hearing the first game was way harder.

It's pretty hard to judge really because the skills you acquire in one game transfer to the others. For example I played Dark Souls before Demon's Souls and I found Demon's Souls to be way easier because Dark Souls had taught me so much about how the games worked.

On topic there are plenty of games that have optional difficulty levels which I'm sure make them way harder than Dark Souls. If we're just talking about the medium or default difficulty setting in a game the first few that spring to mind are Castlevania, Castlevania 3, Zelda 2 and Super Meat Boy

 

[Pink Gregory]

Who's finished Another World/Out of this World?

You're better men/ladies than I.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

Getting A+ on every light and dark world level in Super Meat Boy was infinitely harder than Dark Souls ever was.

 

[Zac Jovanovic]

A lot of games on hardest settings are harder than DS. Volgarr the Viking for example is harder by default thogh.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

Who's finished Another World/Out of this World?

You're better men/ladies than I.

I have, fun game for its time. Was not that hard, but didn't give any pointers whatsoever.

It's a difficult question because we're going to be comparing genres. I don't know many games in the same genre as Dark Souls and few games have succeeded to do the same kind of action.

Talking about games that require more personal skill however, many platformers would count. Like super meatboy, cloudbuilt, the older games etc.

A number of strategy games played on the hardest difficulty also count. Of course Dark Souls is nothing against pro Starcraft players duking it out either.

Games like XCOM (old and new) played on the hardest difficulty are definitely harder strategy wise. The Dragon Age series played on the highest difficulty (or the community modded Nightmare+) will probably make you cringe as well.

I think in general, many games with a difficulty slider that goes all the way up to batshit insane level would qualify.

 

[Valkaar]

Well, old Nintendo games like Contra were challenging enough.

I Wanna Be The Guy and its Gaiden edition were brutal, the first moreso than the latter. Mostly due to the grappling hook.

As far as older computer games go, the first Wasteland game was pretty unforgiving.
The doctors were pricy so if you had mortally or even seriously wounded characters early on they were as good as dead, since there was a bleed-out mechanic. It gave weight to every wound your characters received and you had to react accordingly. What I mostly loved about it, however, was that every action had consequences. You wanted to kill the kid that taunted you when you fell into the lake? Well, you'd better be ready for the whole town to come after you after the deed.

As for Minecraft's difficulty, it largely depends on your spawn point. For example, I was recently spanwed in a small archipelago with one tree and one berry bush. Had to grow a forest to make a raft and escape to the mainland.
Wasn't too difficult, in my opinion. Just time-consuming.

 

[syaoran728]

Tales of Graces R started as what I was used to in the franchise, but ramped up the difficulty part way through and I had every boss kicking my ass for a while.

 

[MJpoland]

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.

I used to be with you, but there are some cheap tactics you can use to grind out a win on Impossible. Each level takes a ton of turns, leap-frogging your guys up and always having a couple expendable guys for each mission. But as long as you don't care about saving civilians on the terror missions, the only levels that might give you trouble are the bomb diffuse ones, and that's only if the random map layout screws you pretty bad.

If you think XCOM: Enemy Unknown on Impossible was difficult... try the Long War Mod. Its more difficult than the impossible base game even on normal difficulty. More enemies each mission, they have more health, more abilities, damage reduction, health regeneration and upgrade more and more over time. And that's only a very small part of what the mod changes in game. Mission example: Late exalt missions, you are outnumbered 4:1 (all enemies travel around the map so you would need to be extremely lucky to not end up engaging all of them at the some point), they have much more HP than you, deal 2 times more damage than you (freaking 22 critical damage roll yesterday against soldier in hard cover dammit) and spam rockets and grenades at you. I don't even want to know what would happen on higher difficulty settings.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

SMT: Nocturne was pretty brutal.

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

Would have to agree here. I beat him once and went back to the game months later just to give it a go for old time's sake. I COULDN'T DO IT. One hard-ass boss.

I think Strange Journey is probably worse difficulty-wise as a whole though. And I would probably call it more difficult in the final stretches than both of my experiences with Dark Souls 1 and 2.

 

[Blitsie]

Tales of Graces R started as what I was used to in the franchise, but ramped up the difficulty part way through and I had every boss kicking my ass for a while.

As a rather non-hardcore JRPG player, biggest mistake of my life was pushing the difficulty in that game higher than "medium", that difficulty spike you hit when you run into a bossfight is absolutely ludicrous, I could be steamrolling everything beforehand but running into a boss is the equivalent of charging an oncoming tank with a toothpick, actually never finished the game due to a super frustrating boss, ugh.

 

[kortin]

Dark Souls isn't hard. It is challenging and fair. Because of that limitation, I'd say most games with a difficulty button will be harder than Dark Souls. CoD on its hardest difficulty, Kingdom Hearts on its hardest difficulty, Civ5 AI on its hardest difficulty...

See what I'm getting at? The draw of Dark Souls is not that it is impossibly hard, but it's challenging enough and fair enough to provide a unique kind of challenge, one that you will never blame the game for because you know you could have prevented any mistakes you make. Most games these days aren't like that. They ramp up difficulty by increasing enemy damage and health. One thing Dark Souls has ruined for me is actually all of those games and more: all games that have a difficulty slider, I essentially only play them on the normal or easy difficulty because I can't be arsed to deal with the bullshit enemy scaling.

So yeah, most games are harder than Dark Souls if they're on the game's hardest difficulty.

 

[Scars Unseen]

I don't know about hard, but I still get too creeped out when playing System Shock 2 to finish the game. Probably because I always play it late at night with the lights out and headphones on. I still haven't gotten myself to even start Amnesia. I'm just kind of a wuss when it comes to horror games. They tend to crank my imagination up to eleven. Fuck water levels.

The Colony Wars games on the PSX were pretty damned hard, and then of course there's Dwarf Fortress, with it's own unique outlook on "fun." The Battlecruiser games were just ridiculously dense and La-Mulana is a classic example of Guide Dang It. [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GuideDangIt]

There's a lot of definitions of "hard" one could use for video games, and some of them will be more challenging to some people than others.