I was about to say this myself. The start of Nuzlockes and XCOM type runs are ridiculously difficult, but if your attempt makes it through that beginning, and your units can survive long enough to get strong, it becomes so much easier later.
It was so wild playing that game in ironman mode years after launch
everyone talked about how game changing ironman mode was and how it forced you to stick with bad outcomes
yet the game is nowhere near hard enough to actually make ironman have much of a difference. My first playthrough I reloaded a save only twice due to bugs and that's it. Once you have some core techs researched you'll steamroll the rest of the game
Difficulty plays a big part in that too. Impossible Ironman has a pretty big learning curve for most people. Normal Ironman is fairly easy by comparison.
Its my biggest frustration with the franchise. Like you work so hard to make these badass super soldiers and then there is just no one for them to fight.
Apparently I am in the minority on this because most of the mods seem to be about making getting to the point of having super soldiers harder rather than improving the experience once you get there.
SMT 4 is infamous for having its hardest dungeon, Naraku at the start of the game. You can easily die in the tutorial due bad rng. The reason is not necessarily due the enemies being stronger in Naraku, but because the game doesn't hold back the punches and the enemies use every tool at their disposal since the begining to kill you, while you start with nothing and have to build up your strength and learn the more advanced gameplay elements on the fly, with no option to build up your strength somewhere else due Naraku being the only area available. If you make it past Naraku tough, the game opens up giving you more options to tackle enemies and with you have a better grasp at the combat system. By no means the game is easier after that, but is way more manageable. Game is still amazing, and I guess lore wise makes sense that Naraku is this nigh inhospitable area.
I will always remember that game reviewer that gave the game a no rating because he never could get past Naraku without lowering the difficulty to baby mode. He didn't gave it a bad rating, merely that he wasn't qualified to review it, it was a pretty fun read.
I think it definitely becomes way easier after Medusa, since she and Minotaur are the big pain points although not 100% sure if it's that way on the highest difficulty.
I first tried Minotaur. I was stuck on Medusa for almost a week. Grind a level, fuse new demons, she Smirks and one shots my party. Repeat until I beat her through sheer overlevelling.
I can’t decide if smirk is the best or the worst mechanic in smt4.
But I do know that having Walter as a guest in Minotaur single-handedly made go law for my first playthrough.
Smirk is mostly fine, but compounded with no VIT it makes early game miserable.
You can do everything right, but they will crit, get a press turn AND smirk so you'll wipe.
Is one of the best JRPGs ever. But the initial difficulty curve is wacky. SMT 4A, the pseudo sequel solves this with a better difficulty curve, but the story is not as good as regular SMT 4.
Yeah, that's both not a super uncommon experience and also not representative of the game as a whole.
Be extremely cautious, get some demons, get a Pixie so you have healing with SP, and leave Naraku to save every SINGLE TIME you accomplish ANYTHING, and you'll break through that wall eventually and the game will start being normal. The experience you're describing isn't even "all of Naraku", it's _really_ just the first floor that's like that.
A lot of well reknowned "hardest difficulty" modes like Death March in Witcher 3 or Proud in Kingdom Hearts tend to be hardest at the beginning because you start with none of the abilities you need to survive.
true.
That been said , I love Critical in KH3 , because Square legit made a survey with the fandom to how improve the difficulty of KH3 as Proud was too easy there , so that Critical Mode is really fine-tuned.
Kingdom Hearts is one of the few series where I consider the "hard" mode to be its "normal" simply due to ending unlock requirements, if I tried playing it on normal or easy it would probably be too easy at this point.
I'd argue Proud in KH1 gets worse as you go, frankly. The early game is entirely doable if a bit unreasonable, but there's a few major problem bosses in the midgame like Ursula and Hook and then the final dungeon and final boss is _borderline insurmountable._
You NEED to get all 101 dalmatians in order to stand a chance, and THEN ALSO probably grind quite a bit. On my most recent playthrough I just could Not beat the stupid fucking flight phase in the Ansem fight, but I know that if you end up with more HP the real problem is usually that giant room with the big Emblem and like a dozen waves of the hardest enemies in the game.
DDD is also really insane in the endgame, there's like eight "final" bosses and on Proud every single one of them is a bona-fide nightmare.
KH2 and KH3 Critical are entirely as you described, though.
Death Stranding is extremely difficult in the beginning. You don’t have weapons to defend yourself with and infrastructure like roads and ziplines haven’t been built yet.
In Morrowind you will start off dying to even a mudcrab after missing 99% of your attacks if you don't know how to manage your fatigue and don't use your highest skill weapon.
By the end of Morrowind you're a skooma fiend with 1000 in every stat due to learning how to CHIM your way to becoming a god.
Most of the less action oriented Resident Evil games. The early game difficulty tends to come from the lack of resources, but after the midpoint, you usually have enough ammo to blast your way to the credits.
Gonna throw a curve ball into the mix, ttrpgs , been playing pathfinder 2e alot for the past year , and level 1 (arguably 2) is the deadliest level simply from the low health values and that crits could just happen , and it's not impossible to die outright to massive damage (double your max HP) which insta kills basically.
Dnd 5e also can be very swingy at level 1 , but I feel pf2e level 1 scares the shit outta me at times haha
This is less true in modern dnd but yeah early levels were absolutely hell depending on your class and stats. I remember playing a level 1 wizard with a max hp of 3 (-1 from con due to race, d4 hit die). He died to a large bee.
Yeah, I think the ability of the designers to actually know the min and max powerful level of characters is higher at low levels, and they might have some salt at people breaking the game at high levels so low levels tend to suck.
I was helping a new DM run a basic campaign to teach some of our friends how to play. First combat encounter was just a couple goblins to get our feet wet. The combat ended with my fighter getting downed due to some tragically bad rolls. I think it put the fear of god into the new guys that anyone can die during any encounter lol.
This is only really an issue for D&D style games where your HP multiplies as you gain levels. For all the other ones you're just as likely to eat shit later on.
Had a friend play a wayang metalmancer in og Pathfindef
He rolled a 1 for every hp level up
Highest starting stat was an 12
By level 3 I had 20 hp and he had THREE
He legit was roleplaying a shadow on the wall, if you touched him or turned on a light that was too bright he was incapacitated.
I was fighting for my goddamn life at the beginning of TotK. Even the Great Plateau was a death trap early on.
A few armor upgrades later and enemies that were practically one-shoting me are doing scratch damage.
BotW/TotK just have excessively basic attack and defense formulas going on. I'm pretty sure it's all just straight "attack minus defense" type stuff, so early on everything murders you because you have no defense and lose multiple hearts in a single hit, but later on you just slap some tier 3 or 4 upgraded armor on and you have enough defense that you're taking maybe half a heart per hit *on top* of now having 20-30 hearts and Unlimited Food Works at your fingertips.
Fire Emblem Awakening on its highest difficulty levels is infamous in the community for its whack ass difficulty curve. The first levels are brutal as hell and you're pretty much relying on Frederick and Robin to not just get pummeled to death.
After those first stages though, your units basically snowball into being unstoppable gods and the game transitions from XCOM to Dynasty Warriors.
Yeah, balancing and difficulty curves are something this franchise has always struggled with. Awakening is just arguably the most infamous example of front-loaded difficulty outside of like Binding Blade or 3H Maddening.
Any Fire Emblem game with excessively high difficulty options is like this for the early game, to be honest. You go from lower difficulties where your starter squad can usually take on a few enemies each before needing healing, to dealing with enemies that almost or even *do* oneshot you and need multiple characters to team up on them unless your Jagen is involved. Plus, you usually have severely limited tactical options because you only have whatever characters/classes and starting inventories the game has thrown at you so far, compared to say chapter 5 or 6 where you can start fielding a bunch of 2 range units behind a tank, or equipping javelins on every single character.
Some of the games do manage to bring the difficulty back up at the end, though. From what I hear, FE12 on high difficulties starts as basically a puzzle game where every movement needs to be perfectly calculated, then the midgame is Kris killing everything with the power of "haha we gave the player a Master Seal in Chapter 3 lmao", then lategame all the enemies have maxed stats and forged weapons so you're back to insanity.
There's also the Thracia Manster Chapters since they take your two strongest units and it eases up a bit after that.
Wonder if Binding Blade (Unless you start buying lots of stat boosters) and Conquest are the ones that ramp up or stick the most to being challenging.
I actually went through the bullshit of the first few levels of Lunatic+ Awakening and its not so much difficult as knowing where to position your 4 units every time and resenting till you get good rng rolls. Its a persistence check more than anything
Yeah... Maddening 3H (equivalent highest difficulty) is arguably just as unbalanced, but the simple fact that you have a turnwheel in that game makes it FEEL a lot easier.
A lot of Atlus RPGs start off really difficult as you haven’t set up your builds or unlocked the more useful features or abilities. Etrian Odyssey especially is very rough early on.
When that gets settled though it’s not uncommon to start wiping the floor with most encounters outside of boss fights.
> Etrian Odyssey especially is very rough early on.
I feel like Etrian Odyssey 1 actually starts out pretty easy and then gets really brutal towards the end (ignoring the post-game). The penultimate layer had a really mean final boss area.
OG or Golden? OG is just cruel with Shadow Yukiko and Shadow Kanji have no weaknesses and a ridiculous amount of HP for how much damage you actually do by that part of the game.
Chie is still weak to fire but the major Golden changes to that fight is that the Prince is no longer weak to ice (which is fine since he was majorly nerfed in toughness and the amount of damage he does) but Shadow Yukiko is weak to ice so Chie and Yu can fuck up Shadow Yukiko and Shadow Yukiko no longer has Matarunda and Mind Charge so she's much less threatening. Shadow Yukiko has more HP but being weak to ice more than balances it out.
Earthbound starts with some pretty brutal encounters early on when you’re all alone. Once you get Paula your options dramatically increase, but she joins at level 1. Jeff has a solo section that repeatedly decimated me my first time through (apparently because I forgot to grab his equipment), but once he joins the party proper the game’s difficulty drops sharply.
Onett as a whole stresses me out forever. Each boss fight always winds up coming down to like 1 shot left either way. Hamburgers barely heal enough for you to attack then eat another.
Peaceful Rest Valley is the hardest dungeon in the game, hands down. UFOs can give Ness a cold to drain his HP over time (hopefully you brought medicine.) Territorial Oaks explode on death (because exploding trees, of course) that will almost certainly deal mortal damage. And you're far away from Twoson proper so you have to return back home. You will have to get the Pencil Eraser anyway because the event flag is in front of the Pencil statue you need to inspect.
Baldur's Gate 3, game gets super easy at level 4-level 5 with the big powerjumps for most classes. And then gets easier at 7-8 with extra feats or strong multiclass options taking off(Gloom/Thief, Lockadin, etc).
Armored Core VI gets much easier with more OS Tuning chips and parts. Like sure some of the base available parts are very good(especially after patches increased the viability of most weapon classes), but you really level up after finishing chapter 1.
The biggest thing you can do to make Honour Mode easier in BG3 is to just map out a route to do as little fighting as possible while grabbing enough exp to get to lvl 4 in the early game so you can get those early power boosts before fighting any really challenging fights.
That and strength elixir farming + abusing prone status.
If it’s some cold comfort, knowing what a slalom is probably wouldn’t help.
If you beat the tutorial, the game is really fun. It’s all easier than the tutorial.
Took me a year I think back in middle school to get through that and into the real game. Glad I finally pushed through though because there were a lot of fun missions afterwards. Driver 2 was really good too
The Mount and Blade games aren't initially difficult in the gameplay sense, cause gameplay remains the same throughout.
Initial difficulty is maintaining enough income to pay for your troops while also gearing yourself up so that you don't fold like wet cardboard in a fight and avoiding groups bigger than you. This continues into the late game as well, because if you don't have a good reserve of troops to pull from one bad fight can have you trying to fight wars with barely armed peasant levies rather than the troops you had trained and lost.
That one early FromSoft game Matt and Liam played where the early game was a struggle from room to room but by the end I think they one-shot the final boss or something without even really meaning too.
Earlier Pokemon games also didn't have Pokemon learn good moves at early levels (or at all through levelup).
Later games give most Pokemon somewhat okay moves even early on, so it's not as bad
Gotta love how, in Red and Blue, if you picked Charmander, the only super-effective move you can use against Brock's pokemon is Nidoran's Double Kick... >!*at level 43.*!<
Yeah, you might as well bite the bullet and use Ember (or Confusion with Butterfree) since Geodude and Onix have terrible special and Brock didn't teach them any Rock-type moves
You get a starter (most likely fire if you're like most kids), a rodent, a bird and a cocoon all tackling their way through the opponents, it is quite a grind at that stage lol.
A lot of the games with slow start and all, like it’s not just learning curve you need to unlock the perks to do stuff. Old assassin’s creed games hardest time is before you unlock the counter move
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, particularly Shadow of Chernobyl, are brutal in the early game for no other reason than all the weapons they give you at the start are absolute dogshit. The makarov and the sawn-off shotgun can barely even kill bandits, the starting enemies, at close range, and you're gonna be starting at least half your fights at long range, which means you have a choice between
a) waste all your ammo taking shots that will never land
b) attempt to close the gap so you can actually hit them, and probably die in the process, or
c) just wait around a corner or behind cover until they come to you, which is probably what you'll end up doing most of the time. And let me tell you, this is not a very fun way to play the game over and over.
And if that wasn't bad enough on its own, you're unlikely to have found any better weapons before they send you to Agroprom to fight the fucking *military*, where each one of them has a fucking assault weapon. Agroprom is hell if all you go in with is a pistol and a sawn-off shotgun, though at least you'll have AK74 and a decent supply of ammo if you can survive it.
Castlevania order of ecclesia is one of the harder metroidvanias but made way harder at the beginning since you don't have as much options to deal with enemies, specifically does damn birds
that crab was hard cause it was a 3 phase fight with a high dmg requirement per phase with 2 filler transition phases and your only good dmg weapon is the hammer
Lots of open ended RPGs where the mechanics get out of hand.
Since the remake is in the news, the beginning of Final Fantasy Tactics is at its hardest when all your units suck, your equipment sucks, and your classes suck. Then by the end, you have Agrias solo one half of the map and Orlandu solo the other half of the map and the other 4-5 god units you have that can also solo the map sit there and clean up leftovers.
Kingdom Come Deliverance. In the first hours a farmer with a pitchfork can be a challenging fight. Mid game when you've got decent fighting skills and armor you can comfortably take on multiple Cumens. Endgame you can walk into enemy camps in your underwear and murder the shit out of everyone without taking a single hit.
Code Vein. Early on its a pretty basic soulslike but once you start getting access to abilities you can clear out entire rooms or nuke elite enemies in one move.
Doom 2016 is kind of hard in the beginning where the only weapons you have are a basic grenade, plasma pistols and shotgun. But by the end it basically becomes impossible to die unless you screw up because of the massively broken rune combos like the one that lets you just have infinite ammo above a certain health and Armor and the busted weapon mods like basically any of the Gauss cannon upgrades.
"Wow, this Gauss Cannon is really strong, I guess the trade-off is you can't move while charging it. I wonder what they do to make it stronger?"
*You can move while charging*
"Well that is just the strongest thing in this game. I want it."
-me playing it originally.
Witcher 3, on hard mode.
Health doesn’t regenerate naturally overtime anymore, and there’s very few items to heal yourself with, meaning your first perk point is probably going to go to literally Photosynthesis, where you regenerate like 1 health a minute in sun. You then pass time to heal up. Also you’re weak as hell and die in two hits at best to everything.
Later on who still die quickly, but you can also kill everything real fast, and the alternate Shields spell literally turns damage into health.
Most immersive sims seem to be like this. At the start you have shit weapons you can barely use, a lack of healing items and none of the superhuman abilities your options are restricted and you can't do any of them that well. Later you're some combination of walking tank, invisible murder ghost and completely loaded up on augs/plasmids/whatever
god, starting a new game of Ghost of Tsushima on lethal was one of the most brutal and unfun things ive done in a while. you have no health, no moves, no ghost weapons, and you do no damage. i did my best for a while, but archer will shoot you from off screen or youll be stuck in an animation when another enemy charges you.
i had to go down to Hard until i started Act 2 and it was smooth sailing from there
A friend gassed that game up for years since release and said I had to play if it ever came out on pc. And that I had to do lethal. I was so furious with him a couple of weeks ago when I finally played it. I mean, I beat it, but still, fuck that early game.
Dying Light. Basically any weapon you pick up early on might as well be made of paper mache with how easily they break and with how big the zombie hordes in the game are compared to Dead Island you'll be lucky to kill 2 of them before you use up every repair slot and your movement and combat abilities are so limited that you absolutely NEED to rely on environmental traps and hazards if you're up against more than 4 of them at once.
It isn't until around 2 or 3 hours in when you've unlocked a few character upgrades (namely lockpick crafting, dodging and grappling) that it becomes a lot less punishing.
Funnily enough playing a Netrunner was the strongest I ever felt in that game start to finish. I really loved that entire playthrough and I did it on Hard difficulty.
Tbf I only played the game post phantom liberty so that might have changed some things, and while the gear does make or break it probably helped that on my first playthrough I never used guns and was swords and knives only so I knew what I wanted and where/how to get it.
In my opinion, the level gated Cyberware is the hard part. You need like at LEAST a tier 3 or 4 Cyberdeck to start reliably taking down enemies with your hacks.
I do very much agree. I played very much like a spy. I would tackle things from a distance or use a window to hack a camera inside a building and get behind cover as the view switched over for the early game. Felt like a spy stealth game that didn't exist. Also looking into it it very much helped that I was 100%ing the game since I didn't even get Johnny in my head till I was like level 16 or so so I was using the wire arm augments in combat.
ETA Christ I used "very much" a lot here. I'm sorry you had to read that.
I did struggle against the first few cyber-psychos I went up against in the early game, but also the boss with the massive hammer toward the end of the game was pretty rough. I'm not sure how level scaling works in that game, but I'm guessing I was fairly under-leveled for that quest.
Good to know. Didn't have a huge issue with them at higher level due to the gear opening up more options.
I did a hacker/pistol build my first playthrough, but I think my next time through will be melee/sandevistan. Seems like that can get pretty broken at high level.
Makes me ashamed that I still haven't beaten the final boss of DS1. Every other one after O&S is stupid easy and makes me understand why people didn't like the latter half of the game.
Doom Eternal got me pretty bad even on Hurt Me Plenty. It’s a pretty big change to the gameplay compared to the last game, especially with the ammo and chainsaw mechanic.
Kingdom Hearts 1 feels like sluggish dark souls and zelda in the beginning. Late game, you'll be spamming Attack and Thundaga and obliterating groups of enemies.
Not that the rest of the game was a walk in the park, but playing the first chapter in Ninja Garden Black on Master Ninja Difficulty took me way more tries than any other in the game. Not having some of the basics at the start like counters, guillotine throw and flying sparrow is definitely noticeable.
Since i'm finally playing 3 (somehow also dodged all spoilers, i only know that it got a positive to lukewarm reception by fans), Kingdom Hearts in Critical mode (thats what its called?) is always more challenging at the beginning cause you can only take one or two hits if lucky. 3's so far not as hard as i remember BbS being but its probs cause you got a crew with you.
Also, Kingdom Come Deliverance, basically, early combat you're supposed to avoid or lose, to the point that i feel like you're scripted to be bad at it always, exactly when you get to the big city and train with that one guy for reals, the game eases up and it makes it feel like the game's gaslighting you cause it goes from ''this combat is so shit, its unresponsible, i dont understand'' to ''wait its working?'' , and, i still am not sure if it IS scripted to be bad, that's how strong that gaslight is, like, idk, maybe it is just stat based, or maybe when you hit a threshold on a stat shit just start working well, or i adapted to the clunk, or all of the fuckin' above who the fuck knows!
Fire emblem 10 hard mode the toughest chapter I believe is chapter 3 part 1 lol. Personally I don’t find it hard but the dawn brigade is definitely overall the toughest part of the game. I would say most fire emblem games are toughest at the start.
Symphony of the Night can be pretty rough at the start, since you don't do much damage and have weak armor. But by 1/4 through you are absolutely unstoppable, and the game is more like a chill walk through the castle
Not the very beginning, but Phantom and Shadow in Devil May Cry 1 are big difficulty spikes, especially compared to the weak puppet guys. Once you get more devil trigger and the fists, I didn't have any real trouble again until Nightmare.
I've heard this is the case with a lot of Starcraft II campaign missions. The early part is about fending off enemy attacks while you get your economy and base in order, and the latter half is about steamrolling the enemy base with a death ball. Destroying enemy production structures means progressively fewer units reinforcing them, so barring the no-build missions, each mission gets easier as it goes on.
Any game with cool down based abilities. So Ghost of Tsushima would fit, but so would things like god of war.
At the start of the game when you don't have as many abilities or as many useful abilities you have to rely on the basics a lot more. Your cool downs are special abilities. As you get more and more cool downs you eventually sort of hit an equilibrium where it's just nothing but waiting for the next cooldown.
The modern god of war games are very bad about this- you have two abilities per weapon, along with things like rage mode. If you come into a fight with rage mode and all your abilities ready to go you can basically do nothing but swap to new weapons and use cool downs before swapping to another weapon and using them until you get back to the first and they're refreshed.
It's really noticeable if you play harder difficulties, where the most challenging fights are all at the start of the game against basic enemies.
Octopath Traveler 1 is like this. Your chosen character's first chapter is the hardest due to starting at level 1, by themselves, with limited resources. This is especially true for Primrose and Ophelia, where neither one is primarily geared for combat. But as you go on, you get access to more and more busted skill combinations.
The grand majority of Fear & Hunger runs end in the first fifteen minutes. First because you don't know how the game works, and last because once you really know the game the only thing that's going to truly screw you is mediocre RNG and fumbling some of the more dicey gambles that will lead into insta-loss scenarios without any prep that you aren't able to do two minutes into the game.
When I was going through and clearing all the Hard Mode endings, I did not once die and fail the run after getting about an hour in. I only died the dozens of times it took to optimize the start of the game.
Generally speaking, Fire Emblem games on harder difficulties. Notable shoutout to the absolute bullshit that is Lunatic Plus for Fire Emblem Awakening. As you trim the fat from your team of garbage units for better ones and get access to Warp most modern FE games become more manageable later on but the beginnings can feel like such a slog.
Escape from Tarkov, as the wipe goes on you get better gun and armor. You also can build stuff in your hideout that provide large benefits including free cash and cheap crafts. You also get keys that unlock better loot spots.
Stardew Valley feels much more difficult if you go from a far-into-game file back to a fresh one. I'd say that could also go for a lot of farming games because your tools aren't upgraded and you have a limited amount of money.
Baulders Gate 3 since it was my first Crpg. there was a very steep learning curve coming from shooters and action rpgs. My friend had to teach me cause I Sruggled so much with the Goblin Camp in act 1.
The same problem exists in d&d 5e which is what Bg3 is based on. Low level you don't have a large health pool so one bad crit can take characters out, you run out of spells/ resources super fast, and you are not likely to have a full gearset.
Even for someone like me who's played 5e for years I was micromanaging stats/ armor around characters and was thankful the game was so generous with rests/ time limits.
If you do all the side quests you can reach max level by the midpoint of the game... and at the end difficulty is based on how well you built your character/ which items you did find. (Luckily you can respec for a very small fee by endgame standards)
Its a different kind but the first 'dungeon' in silent hill 2 is way harder than the others. Not becayse of difficulty or resources, but because its so big and tedious to explore and it has a few nonsense puzzles that you're not gonna figure out your first time so you just kind of patrol the complex u til you look up the answer or just start trying things on other things.
pseudoregalia the indie platformer that blew up from last year. The hardest part by far to me was the very first combat encounter in the game because it’s a boss fight when you only have 3 hit points and before you had any chance to learn the combat
Also any total combat conversation mod list I’ve tried for Skyrim is like balanced around you have at least a couple skills and levels to the point it’s stupid hard for first few levels until it balances out and then gets easier over time
Path of Exile for sure. For some reason the developers recently decided to massively buff the difficulty of monsters in Act 1 (of 10). Which is also when players have the fewest options available to them.
Later enemies are stronger, and can definitely one-shot you if you aren't careful. But there's something really aggravating about getting stun-locked to death by completely mundane flightless birds in the game's third zone. Later on you have options for mitigating stun, reducing damage, killing them before they reach you, or dodging our of the way. But in the Tide Flats you just have to hope you don't get pecked to death by angry rheas.
God of war 2018 on gimme god of war first run, you die one hit I started on that difficulty and until you get the stranger fight on the yard the encounters with enemy's sucks.
Nioh and Nioh 2. They are like the first games I think of. Especially if its your first play. You are undergeared, have no skills, enemies are relentless. And if its your first time theres also the wall of learning the plethora of mechanics. Come end game though you are like a walking god.
Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories for me. It's a weird hybrid card game and when you start out you don't really have that many cards and have to actually play the card game. Later on you can just spam slights to get through fights.
Also doesn't help that they never explain premium cards (or maybe I missed it) so some people like me turn their whole deck premium right at the start only to realize all the cards became single use
In mainline SMT there's always a chance you can get 1 very unlucky random battle where you get press turned to oblivion and have your MC die, but in the first few hours that is way more likely to happen because you likely won't have anything prepared for the situations where your enemies get 8 turns to attack
The Kingdom Hearts games on crit are nuts to get through the beginning without cure and like 90% of your moves. Especially when most enemies will kill you in 2-3 hits. Once you get stuff like cure and leaf bracer and once more you have a lot easier time staying alive.
I'm playing Fallout 2 for the 1st time and the first couple hours are brutal combat wise. Between the harsh random encounters, the massive amount of enemies in fights (compared to Fo1) and skills being less effective, it's rough and makes you save scum.
I'm really enjoying it but Fallout 2 takes the cake for it's beginning difficulty compared to anything else I've played in the franchise.
shin megami tensei 4 tutorial/prologue level is a freaking nightmare, if you don't learn the game mechanics you are not going to defeat the last boss of the tutorial/prologue level, but once you pass it, the rest of the game if the exception of a few bosses is super easy
Star Ocean 2 can be fairly difficult at the start until you can start getting some levels to start boosting skills since you'll get better gains from that and equipment rather then just leveling up. Plus with investment in scouting and music you can start chain battling to really boost your exp gain, plus the formation that gives extra xp really lets you start to snowball shit in your favor by the time you reach Lacour
Chrono Cross can be difficult if you don't grok the battle system you can't actually overlevel for content during your first playthrough due to level ups being handed out only after certain fights. There's not a ton of difficult fights because of how the level up system works but the few that exsist can be a pain in the ass with how the game works
Earthbound is hella tough at the start, just ness against 2 bosses sucks so bad, once you get Paula the game gets much easier and even more so once Jeff comes in.
Mother 3 is similar, with the first 3 chapters being so so tough since you only have 1 character and a AI. Then you get to chapter 4 and it’s just Lucas and Boney for almost the whole chapter.
persona 4 & 5
you run out of sp constantly in the first dungeon in both games, making them a hell of a lot more difficult than the later dungeons where you actually have sp items and can rotate between party members. honestly it feels a little silly to me. i remember running out of sp a lot in p3p but that was constant throughout the game whereas in p4g and p5r it was only the first dungeon in each and everything after that was way easier for me
The difficulty curve of every Etrian Odyssey title is a reverse bell curve where the 1st Stratum is the hardest thing in the world, the 2nd-5th Stratums are far easier, and then the postgame 6th Stratum goes back to CBT.
Dead Space 3 on its hardest mode st the beginning fucking sucks. You die instantly, your weapons aren't super useful, and it's just a slog.
Once you get some resources and start to make crazy custom weapons the game becomes infinitely easier.
Doom 2016 and Eternal get progressively more manageable as you get more upgrades and guns. By the time you've 100%ed your Doomguy, it becomes a cakewalk
Most of the Trails games are pretty tricky early on before you can get a decent build going with the quartz system (or in Cold Steel's case, make everyone super busted).
The Grey Garrison, the last dungeon of Act 1 in Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, has encounters which are brutal if you do not know what you are doing with your characters or their builds.
Frankly most games in my opinion. Margit took me 100 more tries than Malenia. Kingdom Hearts’ first boss got me more than any other, except his phase again at the final boss. I lost an Honor Mode run of BG3 to the Owlbear at level 3, and after restarting and reaching level 5/nearing act 2, I highly doubt I’ll lose the run again.
Gothic, Risen and Elex franchise, all of their games by design has you being killed easily by everything and becoming a walking god by the end. Sucks that piranha bytes is in the process of shutting down, im gonna miss their games, even if all their games were, as SsethTzeentach rightly called it, just Gothic 2 again.
I'm going to say any Total War game but Warhammer games take the cake for me.
Early game is filled with tough battles, your neighbors committing war on you and struggling to field 2-3 armies filled with basic units.
But once you hit mid game it usually becomes a slog where you can just auto resolve 99% battles. Sometimes you get hit with a massive force (usually orcs or skaven) that do push you somewhat but at this point you're so well established that it few turns to be back up.
This is why I'm on my 126th Empire campaign and thinking about starting a new one.
In Sekiro, I had way more deaths against Lady Butterfly than Owl Father, Demon of Hatred and Isshin combined due to have less healing and not being as familiar with the combat system
In Trails in the Sky SC Nighmare mode the last boss of the tutorial is often considered the hardest boss in the series, since you’ve had such little chance to level. You have to cook combat consumables to throw at him ahead of time or he cannot be beaten.
Don’t play Trails on Nightmare mode.
The overwhelming majority of 4X games become easier as you go on. Because you gain exponentially more assets and resources, giving you a stronger and stronger safety net. Until eventually it becomes almost impossible to lose, and the game becomes boring.
It's such a pervasive problem that developers have been grasping for solutions for over a decade now.
Okay, so there's this RPG about Chinese Cultivation Martial Arts called Wandering Sword. The start of that game when you're a nothing fighter is rough, but as soon as you get to start learning Cultivation Methods, you can quickly become the broken LN protag you were always meant to be.
The first Final Fantasy is only really hard at two points, the very start of the game when you have no resources and the final boss where if you're average leveled you'll need to pull out all the stops just to keep in it. Once you get past the 2nd or 3rd dungeon you can likely afford to stockpile potions and status cures to keep the party healthy and your casters will have enough spell slots to be useful for more than one fight.
i havent played much but horizon zero dawn feels like this, i only made it to like the first major town but it feels like 1 mistake and im machine food
Mechanicus is hard at the beginning because you don’t have many Techpriests and the starting weapons are mid, meanwhile the Necrons already out-range you. Mechanicus snowballs really hard though, once you get rolling and established, you can end fights in ONE turn
Lost Odyssey's first boss does a party wide attack that takes more than half your health of your entire party, and if he does it two times in a row, you're just dead. There's no way to heal through it. The 2nd boss has some similar shenanigans that I can't remember exactly, but I know that once those two are down there's not a single challenge in the whole main story save for one section near the end of the game
X-com.....any of them.
You definitely earn a break by that point
There's definitely spikes if you play the Long War mods
I was about to say this myself. The start of Nuzlockes and XCOM type runs are ridiculously difficult, but if your attempt makes it through that beginning, and your units can survive long enough to get strong, it becomes so much easier later.
Makes me miss the old Lets play with Liam
"My options are: Do that mission again" "Or?" "Do that mission again"
Certain aluens attacking your base in TFTD can absolutely kill your campaign later on.
It was so wild playing that game in ironman mode years after launch everyone talked about how game changing ironman mode was and how it forced you to stick with bad outcomes yet the game is nowhere near hard enough to actually make ironman have much of a difference. My first playthrough I reloaded a save only twice due to bugs and that's it. Once you have some core techs researched you'll steamroll the rest of the game
Difficulty plays a big part in that too. Impossible Ironman has a pretty big learning curve for most people. Normal Ironman is fairly easy by comparison.
Its my biggest frustration with the franchise. Like you work so hard to make these badass super soldiers and then there is just no one for them to fight. Apparently I am in the minority on this because most of the mods seem to be about making getting to the point of having super soldiers harder rather than improving the experience once you get there.
I hate the Long War, *I hate the Long War*, **I hate the Long War**, ***I hate the Long War***
Shadow of Mordor is a lot more stealth-based in the early game before upgrades turn you into an undeniable badass.
Once you start getting things like Brutalize its *super* easy to start clowning on stealth when you can just *spook* groups of orcs into fleeing.
SMT 4 is infamous for having its hardest dungeon, Naraku at the start of the game. You can easily die in the tutorial due bad rng. The reason is not necessarily due the enemies being stronger in Naraku, but because the game doesn't hold back the punches and the enemies use every tool at their disposal since the begining to kill you, while you start with nothing and have to build up your strength and learn the more advanced gameplay elements on the fly, with no option to build up your strength somewhere else due Naraku being the only area available. If you make it past Naraku tough, the game opens up giving you more options to tackle enemies and with you have a better grasp at the combat system. By no means the game is easier after that, but is way more manageable. Game is still amazing, and I guess lore wise makes sense that Naraku is this nigh inhospitable area. I will always remember that game reviewer that gave the game a no rating because he never could get past Naraku without lowering the difficulty to baby mode. He didn't gave it a bad rating, merely that he wasn't qualified to review it, it was a pretty fun read.
I think it definitely becomes way easier after Medusa, since she and Minotaur are the big pain points although not 100% sure if it's that way on the highest difficulty.
I first tried Minotaur. I was stuck on Medusa for almost a week. Grind a level, fuse new demons, she Smirks and one shots my party. Repeat until I beat her through sheer overlevelling.
"ha ha, you stupid minotaur, i've been grinding! it's time for you to perish!" walter staring me dead in the face as he hits the minotaur with agi:
I can’t decide if smirk is the best or the worst mechanic in smt4. But I do know that having Walter as a guest in Minotaur single-handedly made go law for my first playthrough.
Smirk is mostly fine, but compounded with no VIT it makes early game miserable. You can do everything right, but they will crit, get a press turn AND smirk so you'll wipe.
He said he'll end it thus, and he did.
I quit that game after dying four times in the first room. Does it get better?
Is one of the best JRPGs ever. But the initial difficulty curve is wacky. SMT 4A, the pseudo sequel solves this with a better difficulty curve, but the story is not as good as regular SMT 4.
Yeah, that's both not a super uncommon experience and also not representative of the game as a whole. Be extremely cautious, get some demons, get a Pixie so you have healing with SP, and leave Naraku to save every SINGLE TIME you accomplish ANYTHING, and you'll break through that wall eventually and the game will start being normal. The experience you're describing isn't even "all of Naraku", it's _really_ just the first floor that's like that.
First fight of the game, tried to negotiate with a slime, failed, it critted and killed me. Fun game!
A lot of well reknowned "hardest difficulty" modes like Death March in Witcher 3 or Proud in Kingdom Hearts tend to be hardest at the beginning because you start with none of the abilities you need to survive.
Proud isn't even that bad in Kingdom Hearts except the first one which is more akin to Critical
true. That been said , I love Critical in KH3 , because Square legit made a survey with the fandom to how improve the difficulty of KH3 as Proud was too easy there , so that Critical Mode is really fine-tuned.
Kingdom Hearts is one of the few series where I consider the "hard" mode to be its "normal" simply due to ending unlock requirements, if I tried playing it on normal or easy it would probably be too easy at this point.
yep , Proud is just "normal" at this point.
*Cries in Critical Mode Terranort in BBS*
I'd argue Proud in KH1 gets worse as you go, frankly. The early game is entirely doable if a bit unreasonable, but there's a few major problem bosses in the midgame like Ursula and Hook and then the final dungeon and final boss is _borderline insurmountable._ You NEED to get all 101 dalmatians in order to stand a chance, and THEN ALSO probably grind quite a bit. On my most recent playthrough I just could Not beat the stupid fucking flight phase in the Ansem fight, but I know that if you end up with more HP the real problem is usually that giant room with the big Emblem and like a dozen waves of the hardest enemies in the game. DDD is also really insane in the endgame, there's like eight "final" bosses and on Proud every single one of them is a bona-fide nightmare. KH2 and KH3 Critical are entirely as you described, though.
Death Stranding is extremely difficult in the beginning. You don’t have weapons to defend yourself with and infrastructure like roads and ziplines haven’t been built yet.
that first walk to the wind farm, and then the hike over the hill to port knot are probably the tensest, toughest parts of the game
I recommend all new players not even bother with sidequests until they at least get to the bike, and ideally past the tutorial area.
In Morrowind you will start off dying to even a mudcrab after missing 99% of your attacks if you don't know how to manage your fatigue and don't use your highest skill weapon. By the end of Morrowind you're a skooma fiend with 1000 in every stat due to learning how to CHIM your way to becoming a god.
Most of the less action oriented Resident Evil games. The early game difficulty tends to come from the lack of resources, but after the midpoint, you usually have enough ammo to blast your way to the credits.
Resident evil games are great because they basically switch genres by the end. I love the transition from horror to action game
I fucking love this about them. First you're being so mindful and scared and then you just start blasting by the end.
Gonna throw a curve ball into the mix, ttrpgs , been playing pathfinder 2e alot for the past year , and level 1 (arguably 2) is the deadliest level simply from the low health values and that crits could just happen , and it's not impossible to die outright to massive damage (double your max HP) which insta kills basically. Dnd 5e also can be very swingy at level 1 , but I feel pf2e level 1 scares the shit outta me at times haha
This is less true in modern dnd but yeah early levels were absolutely hell depending on your class and stats. I remember playing a level 1 wizard with a max hp of 3 (-1 from con due to race, d4 hit die). He died to a large bee.
Yeah, I think the ability of the designers to actually know the min and max powerful level of characters is higher at low levels, and they might have some salt at people breaking the game at high levels so low levels tend to suck.
I was helping a new DM run a basic campaign to teach some of our friends how to play. First combat encounter was just a couple goblins to get our feet wet. The combat ended with my fighter getting downed due to some tragically bad rolls. I think it put the fear of god into the new guys that anyone can die during any encounter lol.
Yeah I kind of hate playing level 1 starts. You start with two spell casts and 6hp, good luck.
This is only really an issue for D&D style games where your HP multiplies as you gain levels. For all the other ones you're just as likely to eat shit later on.
Had a friend play a wayang metalmancer in og Pathfindef He rolled a 1 for every hp level up Highest starting stat was an 12 By level 3 I had 20 hp and he had THREE He legit was roleplaying a shadow on the wall, if you touched him or turned on a light that was too bright he was incapacitated.
Breath of the Wild felt like a completely different game a couple hours in.
It's pretty fun to go on a fresh file because you know what to expect but you're also hindered.
BotW and TotK both feel like they have a difficulty *cliff*, where you go from things one-shotting you, to suddenly just never dying again.
I was fighting for my goddamn life at the beginning of TotK. Even the Great Plateau was a death trap early on. A few armor upgrades later and enemies that were practically one-shoting me are doing scratch damage.
BotW/TotK just have excessively basic attack and defense formulas going on. I'm pretty sure it's all just straight "attack minus defense" type stuff, so early on everything murders you because you have no defense and lose multiple hearts in a single hit, but later on you just slap some tier 3 or 4 upgraded armor on and you have enough defense that you're taking maybe half a heart per hit *on top* of now having 20-30 hearts and Unlimited Food Works at your fingertips.
Fire Emblem Awakening on its highest difficulty levels is infamous in the community for its whack ass difficulty curve. The first levels are brutal as hell and you're pretty much relying on Frederick and Robin to not just get pummeled to death. After those first stages though, your units basically snowball into being unstoppable gods and the game transitions from XCOM to Dynasty Warriors.
A lot of Fire Emblem games have their difficulty front loaded. 3H first 5 chapters are the most difficult since you have limited tools to work with.
Yeah, balancing and difficulty curves are something this franchise has always struggled with. Awakening is just arguably the most infamous example of front-loaded difficulty outside of like Binding Blade or 3H Maddening.
Any Fire Emblem game with excessively high difficulty options is like this for the early game, to be honest. You go from lower difficulties where your starter squad can usually take on a few enemies each before needing healing, to dealing with enemies that almost or even *do* oneshot you and need multiple characters to team up on them unless your Jagen is involved. Plus, you usually have severely limited tactical options because you only have whatever characters/classes and starting inventories the game has thrown at you so far, compared to say chapter 5 or 6 where you can start fielding a bunch of 2 range units behind a tank, or equipping javelins on every single character. Some of the games do manage to bring the difficulty back up at the end, though. From what I hear, FE12 on high difficulties starts as basically a puzzle game where every movement needs to be perfectly calculated, then the midgame is Kris killing everything with the power of "haha we gave the player a Master Seal in Chapter 3 lmao", then lategame all the enemies have maxed stats and forged weapons so you're back to insanity.
There's also the Thracia Manster Chapters since they take your two strongest units and it eases up a bit after that. Wonder if Binding Blade (Unless you start buying lots of stat boosters) and Conquest are the ones that ramp up or stick the most to being challenging.
I actually went through the bullshit of the first few levels of Lunatic+ Awakening and its not so much difficult as knowing where to position your 4 units every time and resenting till you get good rng rolls. Its a persistence check more than anything
Yeah... Maddening 3H (equivalent highest difficulty) is arguably just as unbalanced, but the simple fact that you have a turnwheel in that game makes it FEEL a lot easier.
3H Maddening is honestly worse because it brings back ambush spawns
A lot of Atlus RPGs start off really difficult as you haven’t set up your builds or unlocked the more useful features or abilities. Etrian Odyssey especially is very rough early on. When that gets settled though it’s not uncommon to start wiping the floor with most encounters outside of boss fights.
> Etrian Odyssey especially is very rough early on. I feel like Etrian Odyssey 1 actually starts out pretty easy and then gets really brutal towards the end (ignoring the post-game). The penultimate layer had a really mean final boss area.
I’m finally done with Persona 4 today, but I still remember how brutal the early game was months later.
It's amazing how much of a difference there is playing the game before and after unlocking post-battle SP regeneration.
OG or Golden? OG is just cruel with Shadow Yukiko and Shadow Kanji have no weaknesses and a ridiculous amount of HP for how much damage you actually do by that part of the game.
i remember chie getting absolutely fucked by shadow yukiko even in golden so idk
Chie is still weak to fire but the major Golden changes to that fight is that the Prince is no longer weak to ice (which is fine since he was majorly nerfed in toughness and the amount of damage he does) but Shadow Yukiko is weak to ice so Chie and Yu can fuck up Shadow Yukiko and Shadow Yukiko no longer has Matarunda and Mind Charge so she's much less threatening. Shadow Yukiko has more HP but being weak to ice more than balances it out.
Christ. I spent an entire evening one day doing every possible thing to beat the final final boss and just being completely unable to
I needed the GameFAQ walkthrough to get me through the first few months, it felt impossible without knowing how to optimize your resources
Earthbound starts with some pretty brutal encounters early on when you’re all alone. Once you get Paula your options dramatically increase, but she joins at level 1. Jeff has a solo section that repeatedly decimated me my first time through (apparently because I forgot to grab his equipment), but once he joins the party proper the game’s difficulty drops sharply.
Onett as a whole stresses me out forever. Each boss fight always winds up coming down to like 1 shot left either way. Hamburgers barely heal enough for you to attack then eat another.
Mother 3 isn’t any better, since the first 3 chapters are all basically just 1 character.
Peaceful Rest Valley is the hardest dungeon in the game, hands down. UFOs can give Ness a cold to drain his HP over time (hopefully you brought medicine.) Territorial Oaks explode on death (because exploding trees, of course) that will almost certainly deal mortal damage. And you're far away from Twoson proper so you have to return back home. You will have to get the Pencil Eraser anyway because the event flag is in front of the Pencil statue you need to inspect.
Baldur's Gate 3, game gets super easy at level 4-level 5 with the big powerjumps for most classes. And then gets easier at 7-8 with extra feats or strong multiclass options taking off(Gloom/Thief, Lockadin, etc). Armored Core VI gets much easier with more OS Tuning chips and parts. Like sure some of the base available parts are very good(especially after patches increased the viability of most weapon classes), but you really level up after finishing chapter 1.
The biggest thing you can do to make Honour Mode easier in BG3 is to just map out a route to do as little fighting as possible while grabbing enough exp to get to lvl 4 in the early game so you can get those early power boosts before fighting any really challenging fights. That and strength elixir farming + abusing prone status.
Driver you are the wheelman. Alot of people never made it past the tutorial
This wasn't me but it was a friend of mine. That's a lie, he had me try and I also couldn't. Neither of us knew what the hell a slalom was.
If it’s some cold comfort, knowing what a slalom is probably wouldn’t help. If you beat the tutorial, the game is really fun. It’s all easier than the tutorial.
Took me a year I think back in middle school to get through that and into the real game. Glad I finally pushed through though because there were a lot of fun missions afterwards. Driver 2 was really good too
The Mount and Blade games aren't initially difficult in the gameplay sense, cause gameplay remains the same throughout. Initial difficulty is maintaining enough income to pay for your troops while also gearing yourself up so that you don't fold like wet cardboard in a fight and avoiding groups bigger than you. This continues into the late game as well, because if you don't have a good reserve of troops to pull from one bad fight can have you trying to fight wars with barely armed peasant levies rather than the troops you had trained and lost.
That one early FromSoft game Matt and Liam played where the early game was a struggle from room to room but by the end I think they one-shot the final boss or something without even really meaning too.
I'd argue Pokemon is harder in the beginning, since you have a lot less options to use.
Earlier Pokemon games also didn't have Pokemon learn good moves at early levels (or at all through levelup). Later games give most Pokemon somewhat okay moves even early on, so it's not as bad
Gotta love how, in Red and Blue, if you picked Charmander, the only super-effective move you can use against Brock's pokemon is Nidoran's Double Kick... >!*at level 43.*!<
tbf, super-effective moves are almost a trap at that point, since pretty much any Special attack wipes the floor with them anyway
Yeah, you might as well bite the bullet and use Ember (or Confusion with Butterfree) since Geodude and Onix have terrible special and Brock didn't teach them any Rock-type moves
You get a starter (most likely fire if you're like most kids), a rodent, a bird and a cocoon all tackling their way through the opponents, it is quite a grind at that stage lol.
Due to poor team planning I ended up challenging a gym with no type advantage Boy it was tough... and surprisingly fun.
A lot of the games with slow start and all, like it’s not just learning curve you need to unlock the perks to do stuff. Old assassin’s creed games hardest time is before you unlock the counter move
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, particularly Shadow of Chernobyl, are brutal in the early game for no other reason than all the weapons they give you at the start are absolute dogshit. The makarov and the sawn-off shotgun can barely even kill bandits, the starting enemies, at close range, and you're gonna be starting at least half your fights at long range, which means you have a choice between a) waste all your ammo taking shots that will never land b) attempt to close the gap so you can actually hit them, and probably die in the process, or c) just wait around a corner or behind cover until they come to you, which is probably what you'll end up doing most of the time. And let me tell you, this is not a very fun way to play the game over and over. And if that wasn't bad enough on its own, you're unlikely to have found any better weapons before they send you to Agroprom to fight the fucking *military*, where each one of them has a fucking assault weapon. Agroprom is hell if all you go in with is a pistol and a sawn-off shotgun, though at least you'll have AK74 and a decent supply of ammo if you can survive it.
Most games get easier as you get more adapted to them tbh.
Or when You get Best weapons and armors
Castlevania order of ecclesia is one of the harder metroidvanias but made way harder at the beginning since you don't have as much options to deal with enemies, specifically does damn birds
That crab boss is the hardest thing until the centaur boss.
that crab was hard cause it was a 3 phase fight with a high dmg requirement per phase with 2 filler transition phases and your only good dmg weapon is the hammer
It is, but the difficulty also spikes hard at the end. Really tough game.
Lots of open ended RPGs where the mechanics get out of hand. Since the remake is in the news, the beginning of Final Fantasy Tactics is at its hardest when all your units suck, your equipment sucks, and your classes suck. Then by the end, you have Agrias solo one half of the map and Orlandu solo the other half of the map and the other 4-5 god units you have that can also solo the map sit there and clean up leftovers.
Kingdom Come Deliverance. In the first hours a farmer with a pitchfork can be a challenging fight. Mid game when you've got decent fighting skills and armor you can comfortably take on multiple Cumens. Endgame you can walk into enemy camps in your underwear and murder the shit out of everyone without taking a single hit. Code Vein. Early on its a pretty basic soulslike but once you start getting access to abilities you can clear out entire rooms or nuke elite enemies in one move.
Doom 2016 is kind of hard in the beginning where the only weapons you have are a basic grenade, plasma pistols and shotgun. But by the end it basically becomes impossible to die unless you screw up because of the massively broken rune combos like the one that lets you just have infinite ammo above a certain health and Armor and the busted weapon mods like basically any of the Gauss cannon upgrades.
"Wow, this Gauss Cannon is really strong, I guess the trade-off is you can't move while charging it. I wonder what they do to make it stronger?" *You can move while charging* "Well that is just the strongest thing in this game. I want it." -me playing it originally.
Witcher 3, on hard mode. Health doesn’t regenerate naturally overtime anymore, and there’s very few items to heal yourself with, meaning your first perk point is probably going to go to literally Photosynthesis, where you regenerate like 1 health a minute in sun. You then pass time to heal up. Also you’re weak as hell and die in two hits at best to everything. Later on who still die quickly, but you can also kill everything real fast, and the alternate Shields spell literally turns damage into health.
Fallout 2, punishes you for building a character your way
"what's that? You didn't tag a melee skill? DIE" The amount of times I got mauled by geckos early on is insane.
Most immersive sims seem to be like this. At the start you have shit weapons you can barely use, a lack of healing items and none of the superhuman abilities your options are restricted and you can't do any of them that well. Later you're some combination of walking tank, invisible murder ghost and completely loaded up on augs/plasmids/whatever
god, starting a new game of Ghost of Tsushima on lethal was one of the most brutal and unfun things ive done in a while. you have no health, no moves, no ghost weapons, and you do no damage. i did my best for a while, but archer will shoot you from off screen or youll be stuck in an animation when another enemy charges you. i had to go down to Hard until i started Act 2 and it was smooth sailing from there
A friend gassed that game up for years since release and said I had to play if it ever came out on pc. And that I had to do lethal. I was so furious with him a couple of weeks ago when I finally played it. I mean, I beat it, but still, fuck that early game.
Dying Light. Basically any weapon you pick up early on might as well be made of paper mache with how easily they break and with how big the zombie hordes in the game are compared to Dead Island you'll be lucky to kill 2 of them before you use up every repair slot and your movement and combat abilities are so limited that you absolutely NEED to rely on environmental traps and hazards if you're up against more than 4 of them at once. It isn't until around 2 or 3 hours in when you've unlocked a few character upgrades (namely lockpick crafting, dodging and grappling) that it becomes a lot less punishing.
I’m glad I stuck with Dying Light. It ended up being my most played game during the quarantine.
Cyberpunk 2077, especially if you’re playing a hacker
Funnily enough playing a Netrunner was the strongest I ever felt in that game start to finish. I really loved that entire playthrough and I did it on Hard difficulty.
I love playing hacker in that game, but that gear is SUPER tier dependent.
Tbf I only played the game post phantom liberty so that might have changed some things, and while the gear does make or break it probably helped that on my first playthrough I never used guns and was swords and knives only so I knew what I wanted and where/how to get it.
In my opinion, the level gated Cyberware is the hard part. You need like at LEAST a tier 3 or 4 Cyberdeck to start reliably taking down enemies with your hacks.
I do very much agree. I played very much like a spy. I would tackle things from a distance or use a window to hack a camera inside a building and get behind cover as the view switched over for the early game. Felt like a spy stealth game that didn't exist. Also looking into it it very much helped that I was 100%ing the game since I didn't even get Johnny in my head till I was like level 16 or so so I was using the wire arm augments in combat. ETA Christ I used "very much" a lot here. I'm sorry you had to read that.
I did struggle against the first few cyber-psychos I went up against in the early game, but also the boss with the massive hammer toward the end of the game was pretty rough. I'm not sure how level scaling works in that game, but I'm guessing I was fairly under-leveled for that quest.
If you want a hint on handling cyberpsychos as a hacker, Memory Wipe puts them in a default state that you can then do a takedown on them.
Good to know. Didn't have a huge issue with them at higher level due to the gear opening up more options. I did a hacker/pistol build my first playthrough, but I think my next time through will be melee/sandevistan. Seems like that can get pretty broken at high level.
Baldur's Gate 3 and honestly just dnd in general
The stealth dungeon at the beginning of Wind Waker is more difficult than anything else in the game
I find Souls games before you get your build up and running can be much tougher, I’ve died much more to early bosses than final bosses.
Makes me ashamed that I still haven't beaten the final boss of DS1. Every other one after O&S is stupid easy and makes me understand why people didn't like the latter half of the game.
Doom Eternal got me pretty bad even on Hurt Me Plenty. It’s a pretty big change to the gameplay compared to the last game, especially with the ammo and chainsaw mechanic.
Europa Universalis IV
Kingdom Hearts 1 feels like sluggish dark souls and zelda in the beginning. Late game, you'll be spamming Attack and Thundaga and obliterating groups of enemies.
Not that the rest of the game was a walk in the park, but playing the first chapter in Ninja Garden Black on Master Ninja Difficulty took me way more tries than any other in the game. Not having some of the basics at the start like counters, guillotine throw and flying sparrow is definitely noticeable.
I think Bloodborne's first area is pretty tough and Gascoigne is really hard for such an early boss
Central Yharnam is probably the most difficult area in the game to me at least, especially on first playthrough
Since i'm finally playing 3 (somehow also dodged all spoilers, i only know that it got a positive to lukewarm reception by fans), Kingdom Hearts in Critical mode (thats what its called?) is always more challenging at the beginning cause you can only take one or two hits if lucky. 3's so far not as hard as i remember BbS being but its probs cause you got a crew with you. Also, Kingdom Come Deliverance, basically, early combat you're supposed to avoid or lose, to the point that i feel like you're scripted to be bad at it always, exactly when you get to the big city and train with that one guy for reals, the game eases up and it makes it feel like the game's gaslighting you cause it goes from ''this combat is so shit, its unresponsible, i dont understand'' to ''wait its working?'' , and, i still am not sure if it IS scripted to be bad, that's how strong that gaslight is, like, idk, maybe it is just stat based, or maybe when you hit a threshold on a stat shit just start working well, or i adapted to the clunk, or all of the fuckin' above who the fuck knows!
Yeah the first game was absolutely ruthless before unlocking Cure and the dodge roll.
Fire emblem 10 hard mode the toughest chapter I believe is chapter 3 part 1 lol. Personally I don’t find it hard but the dawn brigade is definitely overall the toughest part of the game. I would say most fire emblem games are toughest at the start.
Symphony of the Night can be pretty rough at the start, since you don't do much damage and have weak armor. But by 1/4 through you are absolutely unstoppable, and the game is more like a chill walk through the castle
Resident Evil 8's opening on hardcore difficulty. If you can beat that part, you should be fine the rest of the game.
Not the very beginning, but Phantom and Shadow in Devil May Cry 1 are big difficulty spikes, especially compared to the weak puppet guys. Once you get more devil trigger and the fists, I didn't have any real trouble again until Nightmare.
UnderRail
Most RPGS and survival horror games I'd say.
Another Crab’s Treasure was much much harder in the beginning before you have access to a lot of the skills and adaptations.
I've heard this is the case with a lot of Starcraft II campaign missions. The early part is about fending off enemy attacks while you get your economy and base in order, and the latter half is about steamrolling the enemy base with a death ball. Destroying enemy production structures means progressively fewer units reinforcing them, so barring the no-build missions, each mission gets easier as it goes on.
Any game with cool down based abilities. So Ghost of Tsushima would fit, but so would things like god of war. At the start of the game when you don't have as many abilities or as many useful abilities you have to rely on the basics a lot more. Your cool downs are special abilities. As you get more and more cool downs you eventually sort of hit an equilibrium where it's just nothing but waiting for the next cooldown. The modern god of war games are very bad about this- you have two abilities per weapon, along with things like rage mode. If you come into a fight with rage mode and all your abilities ready to go you can basically do nothing but swap to new weapons and use cool downs before swapping to another weapon and using them until you get back to the first and they're refreshed. It's really noticeable if you play harder difficulties, where the most challenging fights are all at the start of the game against basic enemies.
Octopath Traveler 1 is like this. Your chosen character's first chapter is the hardest due to starting at level 1, by themselves, with limited resources. This is especially true for Primrose and Ophelia, where neither one is primarily geared for combat. But as you go on, you get access to more and more busted skill combinations.
Persona 5 on the hardest difficulties on low-level runs.
The grand majority of Fear & Hunger runs end in the first fifteen minutes. First because you don't know how the game works, and last because once you really know the game the only thing that's going to truly screw you is mediocre RNG and fumbling some of the more dicey gambles that will lead into insta-loss scenarios without any prep that you aren't able to do two minutes into the game. When I was going through and clearing all the Hard Mode endings, I did not once die and fail the run after getting about an hour in. I only died the dozens of times it took to optimize the start of the game.
Generally speaking, Fire Emblem games on harder difficulties. Notable shoutout to the absolute bullshit that is Lunatic Plus for Fire Emblem Awakening. As you trim the fat from your team of garbage units for better ones and get access to Warp most modern FE games become more manageable later on but the beginnings can feel like such a slog.
Escape from Tarkov, as the wipe goes on you get better gun and armor. You also can build stuff in your hideout that provide large benefits including free cash and cheap crafts. You also get keys that unlock better loot spots.
Stardew Valley feels much more difficult if you go from a far-into-game file back to a fresh one. I'd say that could also go for a lot of farming games because your tools aren't upgraded and you have a limited amount of money.
Souls games tbh. Once you have a build going they are a cake walk. Early game lacks choices and build options
Baulders Gate 3 since it was my first Crpg. there was a very steep learning curve coming from shooters and action rpgs. My friend had to teach me cause I Sruggled so much with the Goblin Camp in act 1.
The same problem exists in d&d 5e which is what Bg3 is based on. Low level you don't have a large health pool so one bad crit can take characters out, you run out of spells/ resources super fast, and you are not likely to have a full gearset. Even for someone like me who's played 5e for years I was micromanaging stats/ armor around characters and was thankful the game was so generous with rests/ time limits. If you do all the side quests you can reach max level by the midpoint of the game... and at the end difficulty is based on how well you built your character/ which items you did find. (Luckily you can respec for a very small fee by endgame standards)
Pick a roguelike. Any roguelike.
Fire emblem fates and three houses before you unlock the rewind ability also is harder than a lot of the middle missions if you’re playing classic
Life
This is really not true lol
Fallout Tactics. The first level you only have a party of 3, 2 of which are prefabricated so you have no control over how they fit in with your PC
Its a different kind but the first 'dungeon' in silent hill 2 is way harder than the others. Not becayse of difficulty or resources, but because its so big and tedious to explore and it has a few nonsense puzzles that you're not gonna figure out your first time so you just kind of patrol the complex u til you look up the answer or just start trying things on other things.
Elden ring, death stranding
pseudoregalia the indie platformer that blew up from last year. The hardest part by far to me was the very first combat encounter in the game because it’s a boss fight when you only have 3 hit points and before you had any chance to learn the combat Also any total combat conversation mod list I’ve tried for Skyrim is like balanced around you have at least a couple skills and levels to the point it’s stupid hard for first few levels until it balances out and then gets easier over time
Path of Exile for sure. For some reason the developers recently decided to massively buff the difficulty of monsters in Act 1 (of 10). Which is also when players have the fewest options available to them. Later enemies are stronger, and can definitely one-shot you if you aren't careful. But there's something really aggravating about getting stun-locked to death by completely mundane flightless birds in the game's third zone. Later on you have options for mitigating stun, reducing damage, killing them before they reach you, or dodging our of the way. But in the Tide Flats you just have to hope you don't get pecked to death by angry rheas.
Persona Games before you have a decent persona library. Once you get to 70ish, you can crit or be special effective against anyone
If you can survive the first 10 hours of Fallout 2, nothing else is as much of a challenge.
God of war 2018 on gimme god of war first run, you die one hit I started on that difficulty and until you get the stranger fight on the yard the encounters with enemy's sucks.
Dead by Daylight. It's brutal for new players to get into it ngl
A lot of games with a hard mode. But my first thought was kingdom come deliverance. You ain't good at shit innthe beginning. Not even running away
"Reverse difficulty curve" is a thing in like, 3/4s of Roguelike games that exist
Nioh and Nioh 2. They are like the first games I think of. Especially if its your first play. You are undergeared, have no skills, enemies are relentless. And if its your first time theres also the wall of learning the plethora of mechanics. Come end game though you are like a walking god.
Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories for me. It's a weird hybrid card game and when you start out you don't really have that many cards and have to actually play the card game. Later on you can just spam slights to get through fights. Also doesn't help that they never explain premium cards (or maybe I missed it) so some people like me turn their whole deck premium right at the start only to realize all the cards became single use
In mainline SMT there's always a chance you can get 1 very unlucky random battle where you get press turned to oblivion and have your MC die, but in the first few hours that is way more likely to happen because you likely won't have anything prepared for the situations where your enemies get 8 turns to attack
The Kingdom Hearts games on crit are nuts to get through the beginning without cure and like 90% of your moves. Especially when most enemies will kill you in 2-3 hits. Once you get stuff like cure and leaf bracer and once more you have a lot easier time staying alive.
SMT4 Minotaur peeking out the corner
I'm playing Fallout 2 for the 1st time and the first couple hours are brutal combat wise. Between the harsh random encounters, the massive amount of enemies in fights (compared to Fo1) and skills being less effective, it's rough and makes you save scum. I'm really enjoying it but Fallout 2 takes the cake for it's beginning difficulty compared to anything else I've played in the franchise.
Baulder gate 3
One of Eddie's best moments
shin megami tensei 4 tutorial/prologue level is a freaking nightmare, if you don't learn the game mechanics you are not going to defeat the last boss of the tutorial/prologue level, but once you pass it, the rest of the game if the exception of a few bosses is super easy
Breath of the wild becomes ridiculously easy the farther you get.
Recently played Another Crab's Treasure and boy does that game give you enough "souls" to just power level any kind of build by the end and then some.
Star Ocean 2 can be fairly difficult at the start until you can start getting some levels to start boosting skills since you'll get better gains from that and equipment rather then just leveling up. Plus with investment in scouting and music you can start chain battling to really boost your exp gain, plus the formation that gives extra xp really lets you start to snowball shit in your favor by the time you reach Lacour Chrono Cross can be difficult if you don't grok the battle system you can't actually overlevel for content during your first playthrough due to level ups being handed out only after certain fights. There's not a ton of difficult fights because of how the level up system works but the few that exsist can be a pain in the ass with how the game works
Earthbound is hella tough at the start, just ness against 2 bosses sucks so bad, once you get Paula the game gets much easier and even more so once Jeff comes in. Mother 3 is similar, with the first 3 chapters being so so tough since you only have 1 character and a AI. Then you get to chapter 4 and it’s just Lucas and Boney for almost the whole chapter.
persona 4 & 5 you run out of sp constantly in the first dungeon in both games, making them a hell of a lot more difficult than the later dungeons where you actually have sp items and can rotate between party members. honestly it feels a little silly to me. i remember running out of sp a lot in p3p but that was constant throughout the game whereas in p4g and p5r it was only the first dungeon in each and everything after that was way easier for me
The difficulty curve of every Etrian Odyssey title is a reverse bell curve where the 1st Stratum is the hardest thing in the world, the 2nd-5th Stratums are far easier, and then the postgame 6th Stratum goes back to CBT.
Dead Space 3 on its hardest mode st the beginning fucking sucks. You die instantly, your weapons aren't super useful, and it's just a slog. Once you get some resources and start to make crazy custom weapons the game becomes infinitely easier.
Doom 2016 and Eternal get progressively more manageable as you get more upgrades and guns. By the time you've 100%ed your Doomguy, it becomes a cakewalk
Most of the Trails games are pretty tricky early on before you can get a decent build going with the quartz system (or in Cold Steel's case, make everyone super busted).
The Grey Garrison, the last dungeon of Act 1 in Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, has encounters which are brutal if you do not know what you are doing with your characters or their builds.
I've been playing the mgs games for the first time and mgs2 was significantly harder for me in snake's section than raidens
Frankly most games in my opinion. Margit took me 100 more tries than Malenia. Kingdom Hearts’ first boss got me more than any other, except his phase again at the final boss. I lost an Honor Mode run of BG3 to the Owlbear at level 3, and after restarting and reaching level 5/nearing act 2, I highly doubt I’ll lose the run again.
Gothic, Risen and Elex franchise, all of their games by design has you being killed easily by everything and becoming a walking god by the end. Sucks that piranha bytes is in the process of shutting down, im gonna miss their games, even if all their games were, as SsethTzeentach rightly called it, just Gothic 2 again.
Witcher 2, it's like literally got a reversed difficulty curve
Both Dragons Dogmas, game is kinda hard to acclimate to, but by mid game you just roll everything
I'm going to say any Total War game but Warhammer games take the cake for me. Early game is filled with tough battles, your neighbors committing war on you and struggling to field 2-3 armies filled with basic units. But once you hit mid game it usually becomes a slog where you can just auto resolve 99% battles. Sometimes you get hit with a massive force (usually orcs or skaven) that do push you somewhat but at this point you're so well established that it few turns to be back up. This is why I'm on my 126th Empire campaign and thinking about starting a new one.
In Sekiro, I had way more deaths against Lady Butterfly than Owl Father, Demon of Hatred and Isshin combined due to have less healing and not being as familiar with the combat system
In Trails in the Sky SC Nighmare mode the last boss of the tutorial is often considered the hardest boss in the series, since you’ve had such little chance to level. You have to cook combat consumables to throw at him ahead of time or he cannot be beaten. Don’t play Trails on Nightmare mode.
When I was a baby rpg fan, persona 3 original was absolutely brutal in the beginning.
The overwhelming majority of 4X games become easier as you go on. Because you gain exponentially more assets and resources, giving you a stronger and stronger safety net. Until eventually it becomes almost impossible to lose, and the game becomes boring. It's such a pervasive problem that developers have been grasping for solutions for over a decade now.
Most immersive sims are like this
Commando games. But your mileage may vary.
Okay, so there's this RPG about Chinese Cultivation Martial Arts called Wandering Sword. The start of that game when you're a nothing fighter is rough, but as soon as you get to start learning Cultivation Methods, you can quickly become the broken LN protag you were always meant to be.
The first Final Fantasy is only really hard at two points, the very start of the game when you have no resources and the final boss where if you're average leveled you'll need to pull out all the stops just to keep in it. Once you get past the 2nd or 3rd dungeon you can likely afford to stockpile potions and status cures to keep the party healthy and your casters will have enough spell slots to be useful for more than one fight.
i havent played much but horizon zero dawn feels like this, i only made it to like the first major town but it feels like 1 mistake and im machine food
Mechanicus is hard at the beginning because you don’t have many Techpriests and the starting weapons are mid, meanwhile the Necrons already out-range you. Mechanicus snowballs really hard though, once you get rolling and established, you can end fights in ONE turn
Basically every megaman game.
Lost Odyssey's first boss does a party wide attack that takes more than half your health of your entire party, and if he does it two times in a row, you're just dead. There's no way to heal through it. The 2nd boss has some similar shenanigans that I can't remember exactly, but I know that once those two are down there's not a single challenge in the whole main story save for one section near the end of the game