That One Sidequest

""Remember Canary Mary? Did you have fun racing her? How I laughed when I was setting up those levels. I'm still laughing!""

- The Lord of Games, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts 'N Bolts

An optional, nonessential, usually out-of-the-way part of a video game that is extremely difficult and/or time consuming to complete, yet is nonetheless required for 100% Completion. These are generally far more difficult than anything else in the game, and, in extreme cases, may be classified as nigh impossible.

Casual players of the game do not even bother with this. Most serious players of the game attempt to do this, fail miserably, give up and move on. Only the truly dedicated Hundred Percent Completionists remain, but even many of them fail and inevitably accept defeat. In the end, many players wind up hopelessly stuck at 99%, and give up before ever reaching the coveted 100% Completion. Why? They've been derailed by That One Sidequest.

Usually considered infamous within the game's fanbase, the game's message boards are filled with posters either asking for help on how to beat That One Sidequest, or, more likely, angrily ranting about it.

Note that, despite the name, this isn't necessarily a sidequest in the RPG vein. This commonly shows up in other genres, including First Person Shooters and Sports Games, as That One Challenge.

This is sometimes an Unexpected Gameplay Change Mini Game, Luck-Based Mission, or Timed Mission, and may be all three. Particularly brutal games may contain two or three of That One Sidequest. If That One Sidequest cannot be solved legitimately without referring to a third-party source, see Guide Dang It.

See also That One Level, That One Boss, Last Lousy Point.

Note that Self Imposed Challenges do not count as examples. That One Sidequest is a part of the actual game that is required for 100% Completion.

Action Adventure

 * Metroid games have quite a bit of these on their paths to 100% Completion.
 * Zero Mission and Fusion in particular have rather well-hidden items that can be a pain to get to. The one Energy Tank in Zero Mission, just outside Robot Ridley's lair, will have you ripping your hair out. Guaranteed.
 * And there was an underwater part in fusion that had two ways to get back up to the main station. One was to get the ice missile and blast your way past those balloon enemies. The other method involves shinesparking over extremely rough terrain in sector 4, past several enemies that may or may not simply be in the wrong place at the right time, and then break through a wall of blocks with said shinespark effect still intact. It's all here in this video. What do you get for all your efforts aspiring to shinespark perfection? A different set of dialog when you reach the map room!
 * You also have to go back and get it anyway. Which can be difficult in and of itself, to some players.
 * Super Metroid also has its fair share. THE ITEMS ARE IN THE WALLS!!!!! And who would have thought that one pipe in Brinstar, that looked like every single enemy spawn tube, would lead you right to that Missile Expansion?
 * The only game in the series, it seems, that relents is Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. It still had its own brand of That One Sidequest, however.
 * Onimusha 3 has an optional training mode that you unlock along the way. The training sessions are in no way easy, but they are completely doable, at least until you reach Critical training. It requires either almost superhuman reflexes or huge amounts of dumb luck to get through, especially in the PC port. Passing it gets you a neat item and unlocks the good ending.
 * The figurine quest in The Legend of Zelda the Minish Cap is a pain. There's 136 different figurines, which are gradually unlocked throughout the game. To get them, you have to pay special Mysterious Shells. The more figurines you own, the less likely it is you'll get a unique one—unless you pay more shells. Eventually, you'll probably run out of shells, which means you have to buy them, at the low, low price of 200 Rupees for 30. To cap that, you have to beat the game once to get access to the last 6 figurines. Once you've collected the first 130, you gain access to the sound test and the final Heart Piece.
 * Forget the Minish Cap, what about the Nintendo Gallery in The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker?! That requires you to get a deluxe picto box (Only accessible past a certain part of the game), which can only carry three pictures at a time, and get a full-bodied, front shot picture of every single character in the game. This includes bosses. And enemies. Ever tried to take a decent picture of something when it's trying to kill you? And did I mention you have to wait a full day for every single figurine to be made? Oh, and the characters that you can't take a picture of (Great Fairies, sage spirits, etc.)? You have to buy them. According to the guide, there are 134 in total. That's 268 times you have to play the song of passing. Have fun.
 * To help a little, using the New Game+ lets you keep your figurines, and starts you off with a Deluxe Picto Box...even though you still can't develop the pictures until you reach the second dungeon. So choose wisely on what pictures you take.
 * It is just barely possible to complete the entire gallery without having to use the New Game+. Apparently, if you take a picture of Link's grandma, you also get a picture of his sister, and if you get a picture of Tetra on your first visit to Hyrule, you get the entire pirate ship's crew. And, you can take pictures of the first two dungeon bosses while you're fighting them again in Ganon's castle. And to top it all off, you can take a picture of the final boss during the battle, save, then go have it made.
 * The real killer is the Red Wizzrobe in the Wind Temple. He is highly mobile and is constantly summoning enemies that block your view when trying to get the picture. On top of that, he never appears again in the entire game, causing many players to beat him before being told that their photographs weren't clear enough...
 * And the amounts of sheer Guide Dang It and just plain inconsistency. You need to take pictures of everything that is alive. This includes the fairies you put in your bottle, which the average player is conditioned to think of more as items than as characters, and the harmless tiny crabs on a few beaches that you have no interaction with whatsoever. It does not include the King of Red Lions, arguably the most important supporting character in the game. Taking a picture of any one of the Killer Bees gang in Windfall counts for all of them, despite each of them having their own lines...but you need to take individual pictures of each of the island Koroks, who all say the same thing. Which palette swaps count as individual enemies? Apparently, whichever ones the developers felt like, as there are both black-robed and white-robed Wizzrobes that count as one enemy - and this is downright evil when it comes to the above Red Wizzrobe, since a player who tried to take both would naturally assume that said enemy is just a normal Wizzrobe and there is therefore no need to take its shot. Would they think to do so because it's a miniboss? Well, all the minibosses before now were perfectly ordinary shots, right? There are also three individual pictures of Darknuts, never mind how they all follow the same pattern. And then of course, there's Kogoli, an otherwise ordinary character at Dragon Roost that just randomly disappears after a plot event that doesn't involve him in any way, screwing over players who were putting off the tedium of getting all the NPC pictographs.
 * Of course, there's the matter of the reward for doing the entire Nintendo Gallery. It's
 * If there's any consolation, it's that there's one figurine that isn't required to get a complete gallery. However, said figurine is only obtainable through a That One Sidequest of its own that requires a Game Boy Advance and a GBA/GC link cable, and since Carlov disappears after you get a "completed" Nintendo Gallery, you can't obtain 's figurine if you've gotten all of the others.
 * Getting all 20 hearts in The Legend of Zelda a Link To T He Past includes not one but two luck based missions.
 * While we're on the topic of Zelda, what about the Big Poes in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time? You have to use your horse and start in a specific location in Hyrule field and head in a specific direction to make the Poe even appear, and you have to chase - at high speed - said Poe and shoot it twice before it disappears. And you have to find all ten in order to have access to the final empty bottle.
 * This can be made considerably easier by just waiting in the spots where they spawn, they will respawn there after a little while and you can shoot them as soon as they appear. Finding the right spots is still tricky though. Most of the spots are on fairly easy-to-remember, because of them being certain landmarks.
 * This can still be tricky no matter what, as some of the Poes, like the one near the crossroads leading into Gerudo Desert and the one on the small outcropping over the river have a nasty tendency to spawn inside walls and disappear about a full second later.
 * There's also the Piece of Heart you get by racing Dampe a second time. You have to do it in less than a minute, which is extremely hard even if you use the Longshot to speed through the last room. Thankfully, there is a way to cheat; playing any warp song pauses the timer for about two seconds (so you'll have to do it a lot).
 * Getting the Biggest Quiver from the Horseback Archery Range in the Gerudo Fortress. Very little room for error. It's incredibly hard to get the 1500 points required, and for extra fun, it's entirely possible to end up with 1,490 points. When something like that happens, it feels like the game is taunting you.
 * The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask has Anju and Kafei, which involves a lot of waiting, many travels, and for players to accomplish One Hundred Percent Completion, needs to be done twice.
 * Also, the race against the Deku Butler after beating Woodfall Temple. You follow the Butler through a long tunnel, and if you mess up once, there's a good chance you'll have to start the entire thing over again, and at the cost of a whole heart.
 * Other example will be the Swamp Shooting Gallery. This particular challenge gets you the largest quiver and a piece of heart, but is impossible without superhuman reflexes or repeating over, and over, and over, and over, and over...
 * That gallery is much more forgiving than the Town Shooting Gallery, which requires you to shoot, on average, more targets per second to get a perfect score.
 * The Gilded Sword's increased power and reach makes it worth getting, but it can be tricky to do so. Basically you have to go swordless for a night, beat the boss of Snowhead Temple, win at the Goron Race Track before the second day is out, and go swordless for another night. The Race Track is the hard part, as the high speed steering can take some getting used to, you have to watch your magic, especially if you didn't get the meter upgrade, and if another goron bumps into you on an incline, you lose your spikey rolling. For extra fun, try doing this all on your first visit to the zone. The temple is doable without a sword, though getting all of the stray fairies takes some finesse.
 * Compared to other items in the game, the Gilded Sword is actually EASY to get. You can play the song of time and Goron Race over and over until you get the gold dust, go swordless and play the Song of Double Time twice, give the sword back again, and play the Song of Double Time two more times. Of course, this does waste an entire three days.
 * Want to obtain all the ship and train parts in The Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass and The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks? Then you'd better be ready to sacrifice your life and sanity to the randomness gods. All the ship parts in PH are random. Thankfully, there is a sure-fire way to get four of the parts of the golden (and best) set - accomplish specific tasks in multiplayer mode. Need I say more? Spirit Tracks makes it apparently easier by having you cash in specific treasures for train parts, but the treasures are random. What's really obnoxious is that each game sets certain treasures as being rarer than others, with some being absurdly rare. This means that while the big treasures are fairly easy to get enough of, you will be hindered by the worthless trash that you need fifty bajillion of but the game has made nigh-on impossible to find.
 * Don't forget the Dark Ore sidequest. Not only is Dark Ore 200 rupees a pop, you also have to have opened a couple of specific warp gates, and also have to go through what must be the temple of Tektites, with their god Rocktite. Oh, and did we mention that you can only get hit once, otherwise you won't make it with enough? And if you're one short? Then it's all the way back to the Fire Realm to shell out another 200 rupees for you!
 * That one is a bit broken, as if you manage to kill Rocktite just before fetching the Dark Ore, it will not respawn when you pass through the tunnel.
 * The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess: Poes. They are scattered all over the (very large) map, you don't even get a hint as to where they are, and they only show up at night.
 * At least the reward is useful—more so than other Zelda examples, at least. If you kill all 60 poes, he'll give you 200 rupees every time you talk to him, essentially making him a free power source for your magic armor.
 * Of course, by that point in the game your wallet is perpetually filled to the brim from all the enemies you've killed, and the only point in the game you might actually need your armour would be the final battle, in which case there is a nice huge treasure room to raid instead.
 * And don't forget the Cave of Ordeals. FIFTY FREAKING ROOMS WITH EVERY KIND OF ENEMY IN THE GAME. The final room even has three Darknuts (see Boss in Mook Clothing). Oh yeah, and there is next to nothing in terms of healing items, and the rooms are small. Let that sink in.
 * The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games: It is absolutely insane what you have to go through to get all the Magic Rings in this game (or all 64 rings really, between both Seasons and Ages).
 * First, there's the Bomber's Ring. It requires you to score perfectly (8 rounds out of 8, flawlessly) on Platinum, the highest difficulty level. It's a game where you have to enter the button sequence EXACTLY as it's given - in the right order and with the exactly same rhythm and timing. And on Platinum, some of those sequences are more than 10 buttons long. You have to do that perfectly 8 times in a row, and even at that level, it's still randomized.
 * Then there's the Light Ring L-2. It's one of four rings that can be won by scoring 350+ at the Lynna Village target gallery. The game itself isn't that tough, but the absurd rarity of this ring is. You'll win the other three rings (which you can get in other ways) dozens of times. But to win the Light Ring L-2 (available ONLY from this mini-game) requires such astronomical luck, because of how extremely rare it is, that it's like winning a real-life lottery. You'll spend hours upon hours upon hours winning the same rings over and over again before you probably just give up and content yourself with 99% completion.
 * Really, to gain all 64 rings across both Oracle games has to be the most extraordinary feat in the Zelda series. You have to play both games at least twice (four playthroughs in all) in order to account for unlinked and linked versions of both. And there are some (like the Rang Ring L-2) that are so laughably rare that you can go through all four playthroughs and never see them. They're that badly randomized.
 * Special mention to the linked game Hero's Caves, each of which contains an exclusive ring as its final prize. Each of them is itself that one sidequest.
 * Easy to get but hard to find is the Gold Joy Ring. It can only be found by bombing an unmarked spot on a literally random wall in the Goron caves in Ages. How anyone was supposed to find this one is beyond comprehension.
 * The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword has a harp minigame to finish up the Lumpy Pumpkin quest line. It gets particular rage because you don't get direct feedback on whether you're doing it right until the song ends (although the harmony sounds incomplete if you're doing badly). Add to it the potential difficulty a player has with using the harp (hint: it uses the gyros, so don't go upside-down!), and the fact that you have to listen to the proprietor yammer on whenever you have to restart, and you can see why players deride it.
 * The Rickety Coaster. Getting a Piece of Heart requires going really fast, which isn't too much of a problem. The problems is that the motion controls don't work to well and interpret "lean left" as "lean right" from time to time, making it a Luck-Based Mission.
 * One of the Heart Pieces comes from a minigame where you must shoot tossed pumpkins with your bow. This is extremely difficult, since you have to hit almost every pumpkin to earn the prize, requiring very careful aim and shot-leading with a really drifty and wobbly motion controller. It's especially frustrating because the pumpkins aren't worth fixed amounts of points—their value goes up as you hit more of them in a row, and drops back to the lowest level if you miss one. As if that's not bad enough, some of the pumpkins are worth double points, but they show up purely randomly (you could get several 2X-kins or none at all in any given round). Plus, the guy throwing them often waits an irritatingly long time between throws (it's a Timed Mission!). And he throws them farther and farther later in the game, often over the top of the screen so you can't even see the damn things for half of their trajectories, but sometimes he'll switch back to throwing them a short distance without warning just to mess with you. Good lord...
 * In order to get all the stray beads in Okami, you have to defeat the final blockhead by painting on his weak spots. They only appear for less than a second, you have to remember the exact order. If you fail, boulders drop from the ceiling, and you have to run away from it before you can do it again.
 * It's worth noting that this particular blockhead has eight weak points. The average human being can retain seven items in short-term memory at a time.
 * The Black Devil Gates: Fighting ten very long and difficult battles in a row, without saving or leaving the cave in between fights. It doesn't help that the enemies are powered up, many of the hard enemies such as Red and Blue Ogres and Bull Chargers appear three at a time, and the one in Kamui requires you to go through six extremely long battles with about 50 enemies per battle, which takes about an hour.
 * There's also the races for the Gimmick Gear and the Marlin.
 * And the race with Kai which requires you to memorize all of the shortcuts on a fairly long track and utilizes Rubber Band AI.
 * That FUCKING beehive. only worth 20 praise, it requires you to roll one round object from in water from at least the middle of Agata Forest to the bear at the top beginning. Unlike the acorn and cabbage that are also part of the sidequest, the beehive is so jittery that it will slide backwards at even the slightest incline, even if you try to brace it by a rock. It also seems to be magnetically drawn to the cliff that takes up the last half of the challenge, and if it falls off, you have to start all over again.
 * The Looter's Caverns in Beyond Good and Evil have caused more than one player to attack their TV screens in a fit of rage. They require you to maneuver the not-very-manueverable hovercraft through a maze of twisty passages lined with mines, lasers, and obstacles, all the while "racing" against the doors, which close on a timer—and some of which are almost impossible to get through in time without using speed boosts. If steering into a bomb-lined wall twenty times doesn't drive you to madness, hearing your sidekick shout the same things over and over again will.
 * Speed boosts are dirt cheap. You can grab them out of crates in the middle of nowhere. And you're going to have a bunch left over by the end of the game anyway unless you spam them during races and looter's caverns. This is pretty much what they're there for.
 * "Mandrake Is The Best Medicine" in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, wherein you have to get Mandrake Root. Doesn't sound so hard, right? Well, did I mention that it's dropped by Mandragoras, which only appear in one level, and only in the areas of that level that take the longest time to reach from the starting points, and which explode without dropping anything if you don't kill them quickly enough? Not only that, but the enemies in this particular level are extremely annoying. So, yeah.
 * What about the late-game mission that requires you to collect an Alexandrite? The only place it's found is as a 1/5 drop chance at the end of a fairly difficult bonus dungeon, and if you get one of the other 4 drops instead, you have to to the whole dungeon over again.
 * Or the one sidequest Abram hands out that requires you to get some Merman Meat? There's just one little catch: Mermen don't drop Merman Meat - Loreleis do. And they don't do it very often. This can be blamed on a translation error - the original Japanese version had a gender-neutral name for the item instead, although who knows why they didn't simply translate it as "Mermaid Meat"...
 * La-Mulana has the life jewel in the Dimensional Corridor. If you don't know what you're doing, it'll be easily Lost Forever. If you know what you're doing but have trouble getting it right, you'll hate waiting to recharge a certain item that needs to be used at an exact moment to make a tricky jumping puzzle possible.
 * It can't be Lost Forever thanks to damage boosting, but messing up still makes it even more frustrating to get than it already is.
 * Anyone who's played Illusion of Gaia remembers gathering Red Gems. They range from easy to Guide Dang It, but that one. The third red gem occurs only in your home town, so once you leave it's Lost Forever, but that's not the annoying part. To get it, you have to wait for the fisherman on the docks to have caught a bucket, which you examine to get the gem. You can only change how he is by running inside and then back outside to check on him. And, on top of all that, there's a one-in-God only knows chance of him actually having got the bucket. Step One: Eject cartridge. Step Two: Ball-peen hammer.
 * Trying to get all the coins in Wallace and Gromit - Project Zoo? If you have, then the mere mention of the Lava World bonus stage will make you curl up in the fetal position and whimper. Gromit has to climb a series of platforms while avoiding rolling barrels thrown by a gorilla. What's the problem? Due to spectacularly bad testing the Game Cube version of the game contains a glitch where 99% of the barrels are invisible to the player. Barrels that result in instant death if touched. Oh, and did we mention you're on a time limit? Getting the coins from this level requires truly psychic guesswork and timing, and the reward? Short clips from The Wrong Trousers and one preview from the 'Cracking Contraptions' series.

Action Game

 * Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga has the most stupid achievement in existence. You have to go through the whole Cloud City / Darth Vader boss fight level, while having the stormtrooper helmet on your head. This means you have to go through the level without ever being hit or ever falling down one of the many pits, or when you have to change to R2-D2 to open doors, hope that the NPC that takes control over your helmeted character doesn't change to another figure. If you try this really on the normal way you are probably working on it for all eternity. Though the achievement is also unlocked if you take on the helmet and then just exit the level, saving the found amount of money, because you technically finished the level with the helmet. For me it feels like cheating, but there is no way around it.
 * The secret missions in Devil May Cry can be really annoying.

Collectible Card Game

 * Pokémon clone Magi-Nation had a monster that could only be caught by completing a sidequest that spanned the entire freakin' game. A definite Guide Dang It, as many of the steps weren't even remotely hinted at in the game, could only be done at very specific points, and were completely random. The most annoying part was paying a ferry boat loads of money each time to reach a location, then paying more to make them wait for you. If you failed to pay them one time, they'd disappear and never return. One small misstep and this entire quest was moot.

Driving Game

 * F-Zero GX's Story Mode has three particularly bad ones: chapters 1, 5, and 7 on Very Hard. The former two are timed courses during which you are required to go out of your way to collect certain items and have razor-thin margins of error. Chapter 7 is a multi-lap race on a fairly technical course against a lineup of boosted AI vehicles which thwarts even people who have completed everything else in the game; it's bad enough to be a frustrating roadblock on normal difficulty even within the context of the Nintendo Hardness of the rest of the game.
 * Unlocking T.T. in Diddy Kong Racing requires beating his best Time Trial time on every course in the game. The problem? T.T. is good. Really good. And being as it's Time Trial mode (and he's a ghost), you have no weapons at your disposal in order to beat him--just your mad driving skills and the game's famous "Zipper Trick," which requires you to let go of your accelerator right before hitting a speed-boosting Zipper. The good or bad thing (depending on how you like your games) is that, in the DS port, this sidequest is now much easier due to the addition of upgrades to your vehicles. Using Pipsy in combination with an upgrade that increases your vehicle's maximum speed makes beating all T.T.'s times, if not a piece of cake, at the very least a muffin top.
 * Just use the first hidden character you found (and it is really easy) and it is a piece of cake.
 * Wipeout HD Fury: YOU WILL NEVER REACH ZONE ZEUS. Also, Zico mocks you. Seriously, Play Station 3 trophies and X360 achievements can be That One Trophy/Achievement too...

Fighting Game

 * The Diskun trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee, which requires achieving every end-of-level bonus, including playing through the entire single-player mode without sustaining any damage whatsoever. This was so bad that Super Smash Bros.. Brawl removed the end-of-level bonuses entirely, perhaps to eliminate the temptation to give a reward for getting them all.
 * Brawl does appear to have an example of That One Sidequest of its own: unlocking the Galleom Tank trophy requires completing Boss Rush mode on Intense.
 * Thankfully, for those who only care about getting all the trophies, the game lets you claim up to five of the accomplishments without actually earning them.
 * Unfortunately, the Galleom Tank trophy is not one of them, as the Boss Rush achievements are the only ones that cannot be skipped, and must be earned manually. European players are laughing.
 * Both Melee and Brawl feature the Cruel Melee/Brawl modes, in which the power and skill of the computer is ramped up considerably. The best way to actually succeed at these (which also must be completed for One Hundred Percent Completion) is to jump off the level.
 * Mew Trophy. At least Diskun is pretty much just a Guide Dang It set. The Mew Trophy is a Luck-Based Mission.
 * Similar to the Mew trophy in Melee, there's the sticker's challenge, obtained by getting every single one of them, easy until you reach the last ten, at which point not even Subspace speedruns in Intense nail you even one new sticker.
 * Although it is easy to create a stage with conveyor belts that lead Sandbags to you. You can hold down the Attack button and a lot of stickers will come out.
 * In Brawl's event mode there's "Advent of the Dark King", in which Link, Zelda, and Pit fight Ganondorf. Sound easy? I forgot to mention that you're Ganondorf, who has VERY SLOW attacks. On hard mode (which is required for 100%) all 3 will corner you and prevent you from attacking. I decided to recreate this battle using Team Brawl (level 9 Ganondorf vs Link, Zelda, and Pit all at level 9, then 8, then 7) and found out that not even the freakin' computer can do it. With that said, good luck.
 * The Meta-Ridley trophy, which requires the player to beat down Meta-Ridley until he's near death, wait for a trophy stand to appear (the fight is on a timer, by the way,) then throw it at Meta Ridley, jump off the Blue Falcon, catch the trophy in mid-air, and then get back on.
 * Getting back on is completely unnecessary - the player can't die after Meta Ridley does - and it's possible (technically) to kill him at just the right moment that his trophy falls on the Blue Falcon anyway. But the latter requires you to wait for him to do just the right move when his health is low (and it's still timed, after all) so most players will have to make the plunge anyway.
 * Mortal Kombat: Deception gives us Shujinko. Getting his moves is a Guide Dang It that you can only do after kompleting Konquest mode. Krap.
 * Survival mode in King of Fighters Maximum Impact 2, required to unlock all the stages in the game. Got a few hours to spare against increasingly difficult characters (everyone you're unlocked so far, trickier if the final boss is included among those characters), with a pumped-up version of one of them every 10 fights with additional perks you can't access? 200 fights, so even if you've unlocked up to Armor Ralf so getting hit isn't as much of an issue, you've got hours ahead of you, since you can't save your progress. Fail once, and you have to start over.
 * Reading about the final challenges in King of Fighters 2002 UM alone is downright scary if you haven't devoted your life and sacrificed your unlikely first-born for the skills required in the challenge mode.
 * Dissidia Final Fantasy has the 151 Accomplishments system (basically Trophies or Achievements). Many of them (Defeat all characters 30 times each, participate in 300 battles, etc.) will be easily accomplished over the course of normal gameplay, and more even tell you the conditions for fulfilling them, so while they may require more grinding (one requires the player to deal 1.5 million points of HP damage over the course of the game. Max HP for any one opponent is 9999. This takes a while.), they're not difficult per se. Then you have the others.
 * Time Attacker (Accomplishment #61) requires the player to clear the Arcade Mode (Preset character with preset abilities vs. a gauntlet of foes, ending with the game's SNK Boss) within 1200 seconds. For extra fun, the SNK Boss has a Limit Break that he can use as often as he likes, whenever he likes, cannot be stopped from executing it, and its animation takes up over a minute, adding elements of the dreaded Luck-Based Mission.
 * Obtaining all weapons and equipment (Accomplishment #145, The Ravenous Collector) requires not only an unholy amount of treasure-hunting and trading, but also random drops from enemies. The base item drop rate in Dissidia hovers around 1%. The enemies who have the gear you need dropped are generally only to be found in the Lunar Whale or Blackjack course of randomized computer-selected opponents—where the opponents are anywhere from level 120 to 150, when the player is capped at 100 and are all at maximum CPU strength, in addition to the bonuses from having said best gear in the game. Even with all possible boosters to item drop rate, it's still under 10% for any one item. So, to sum up: First the player has to be lucky enough to get to face an opponent with the armament they need. Then, they have to be lucky and skilled enough to beat the opponent. Then they have to be lucky enough to get the drop. And if they don't get the drop, the opponent is gone and they have to wait until the computer then generates another opponent with the gear. And incidentally? These courses operate on a three-strikes-and-you're-out system. Lose three times and you have to start the process allll over again. (By the way, unless you're looking at a guide, you have no idea that this is the only way to get this armor or even that there is an accomplishment for getting said gear).
 * The above, again, for Accomplishment #146, My Road To El Dorado, which is acquiring all accessories. Suffice to say that it requires pretty much the same as the all-gear one, except with even more trading for items.
 * The accomplishments for battlegen-ing the colored gems (Numbers 126-133). Battlegen, for the uninitiated, is the Dissidia system wherein performing a specific action to the opponent, such as landing an Exburst or slamming them into the wall has a chance to generate a pre-determined item. So, you can see from the get-go that it's a Luck-Based Mission. Making it worse are the many elements of Guide Dang It inherent to the process. First off, the game never tells you that Battlegen-ing these items is what will fulfill the conditions of the accomplishments. Second, the game never even tells you that these gems exist. Thirdly, the game never mentions that the only way to get at opponents from whom you can battlegen the gems is via either friend cards (in other words, online multiplayer elements) or the Stiltzkin cards. And finally, the game will never tell you how to get the Stiltzkin cards, you need either trial and error or a guide to figure out how to get all eight. That you will then have to fight. Until the game decides to have mercy on you and randomly generate the gem.
 * Extra fun: You'll be doing the above multiple times, because accomplishment of this is part and parcel of the accessory accomplishment.
 * The Soul Arena in Soul Calibur3 have the challenge Beloved which is manageble on easy or medium but becomes insane on hard. You have to fight in sucession: Raphael, Kilik and Amy (Her attacks can not be blocked). If the player got the Queen's Guard sword for Raphael it becomes almost a Luck-Based Mission.

First-Person Shooter

 * Unlocking the invincibility cheat in Golden Eye 1997 007, often referred to as the "infamous invincibility cheat" by the game's fans, requires beating the Facility level on 00 Agent mode in under two minutes, five seconds. Exacerbated by the fact that accomplishing this task is highly dependent on the location at which Dr. Doak, an NPC with whom you must interact, randomly spawns.
 * Don't forget about how Trevelyan can screw it up at the end by being too close to the tanks...
 * Many of the Arcade League matches/Challenges in Time Splitters 2 are painfully difficult, making other matches/challenges look like cakewalks. Here are some to deal with, for newcomers of the franchise:
 * "Men In Grey". It's an Assault match, so you have to dodge autoguns and Accountants/Consultants /Lawyers while completing objectives and destroy the . You only have a partner to "help" (read: distract) the opponents, who are most likely happy to mow both you and your partner down with miniguns while you are busy reaching the first objective. Getting a gold or a platinum medal is hard, but not as much as other matches.
 * "Can't Handle This". To sum it up, it's you versus an army of five Handymen in the Nightclub, so your best option is to . Have fun dying repeatedly when you're trying to grab a gun while trying not to get wasted by a Handyman or two.
 * "Superfly Lady". Similar to "Men In Grey", but in the Hangar instead of Training Ground. Unlike "Men In Gray", where it is possible (but difficult) to dodge autoguns, you have to destroy the autoguns in front of you as your first objective. It gets a bit worse in the second objective, not only because the . Afterwards, where you   is easy, the autoguns present (and sometimes, the AI opponents) will make it hard for you. In a nutshell, shitfest.
 * "Bags of Fun". It's Capture the Bag at the Ice Station with you and Sgt. Cortez against an army of 'Splitters. Simple enough, right? Not really. Not only are there five (yes, five) of them against two of you, they also have high stamina, and your partner, sadly enough, only serves as distraction. Talk about "useful partners," my ass.
 * Last for the Arcade League, we have "Nice Threads". Assault match, yes, but this time it's on Scrapyard, so prepare to meet a trio of Sentry Bots and a whole bunch of autoguns both outside and inside. Thankfully enough, there's a Lasergun near your spawn, so you can use that to break inside easily without dying.
 * Starting off with the Challenges, "Stain Removal". Good luck trying to find any windows to destroy after dealing with the first set.
 * "Silent But Deadly". Like the other Infiltration challenges, you have to make your way to the exit point without losing Stealth Points. However, unlike the other challenges, you have to destroy an item  before making your way to the exit point. It doesn't help when the door the the exit point may close on you before you even enter after destroying the , thus making you end up failing the challenge. Oh, and did I mention that you have to eliminate the soldiers present in the area?
 * "But Where Do The Batteries Go?" It's simple. Run to the end of the Scrapyard, pick up the item and return to the start. But what makes it hard is the amount of enemies in the level, the autoguns, and the fact that some enemies wield miniguns. By the time you make it out, you have a chance of either escaping successfully, or getting blown up by a rocket. Have fun!
 * Earning the gold medal for the Astro Jocks level in Time Splitters: Future Perfect is an extremely difficult task. The platinum medal is all but impossible.
 * In Team Fortress 2, some of the achievements are borderline impossible without staging them with a few friends. This was most painful when the achievements were required for new unlockable equipment. An example medic achievement: killing twenty enemies in a row paired with a Heavy without either he or the Medic dying. For the Demoman, destroying five Engineer buildings within the span of a single ten-second Ubercharge (one Engineer can only place four buildings, and placing them close enough would rend two of them obsolete).
 * Many of the medic achievements, at least, require counterintuitive or downright counterproductive play. Ubercharging a scout is the most obvious example, but First Do No Harm requires you to get the highest score on your team without scoring any kills. The easiest way of obtaining it is to heal people who are about to score a kill instead of people who are injured. Oh, and to let people die if they're scoring too high (i.e. sabotage your best players).
 * Ironically, this is after a patch changed a few of the worst Medic achievements. One required healing the same Heavy while they went on a 20-kill streak (now reduced to a manageable, but painful 10-kill streak) in which neither of you was allowed to die. Nevermind that you can be killed in less than a second by the more offensive classes as a Medic, and don't forget that there are two classes that can one-shot a Heavy, even with you healing him to 150% of his normal health. Oh, and the best part? The Heavy has his own version of the achievement, so you get to do it twice.
 * The corresponding achievement was meant to encourage both sides to try and attempt to earn it. In theory it made the cooperation better. In practice, most people tend to earn one achievement off of someone more experienced (since they can actually accomplish the feat), who more than likely already gained the corresponding achievement a long time ago, and couldn't care less if you got it or not.
 * The other classes' achievements are more reasonable, in general, but some are still extremely difficult to get in normal gameplay (I'm looking at you, Scout).
 * Many of the achievements are luck-based, which makes for getting 100% completion nigh impossible. The most notable one is Search Engine, where you have to kill 3 invisible spies with your wrangled sentry. The only possible way to get this achievement consciously is to have a Pyro set an invisible spy on fire and land a killing blow. Otherwise, just have your sentry permanently wrangled and shoot everywhere, praying you hit a nitwit of a spy.
 * Currently, With Friends Like This is the hardest achievement to get, which requires you to play on a server with 7 or more of your friends. Currently the fewest number of players hold this achievement.
 * And even that pales to the achievements for gathering enough views on a YouTube replay. You read that right. There are achievements for having your Team Fortress 2 Replays gather enough views on YouTube. How many? The final achievement for this requires, oh, 100,000 views. Last Lousy Point, indeed...
 * Playing Call of Duty 4 on Veteran difficulty merits honors on its own. It's incredibly frustrating, and most players find themselves spending hours to get past single checkpoints. However, nothing beats out the Epilogue stage "Mile High Club." Beating this single level requires you to blast your way through an airplane full terrorists with no fragmentation grenades (you are in a plane, after all). Stopping in any place for too long means you won't make it to the objective in time. Simply lasting past the first row of seats is worth a few achievement points, and it's easily the hardest stage of the game.
 * Remember kids, veterans only get headshots.
 * As an explanation for the above, if you manage to get past the hellhole of enemies to get to the hostage situation, you MUST get a headshot on the terrorist holding the VIP. Otherwise, it's back to square one for you...
 * The updated rerelease of Perfect Dark on Xbox 360 features some unlockable trophies that are needed to 100% Completion. Among them, there is one that requires you to pretty much speed-running through the highest difficulty setting, one that asks you to complete the entire aforementioned highest difficulty setting with your auto-aim off, and even one that nobody on the internet have any clues about the requisites for it to unlock and just seems to pop-out once in a blue moon.
 * The original Perfect Dark has some difficult side items as well - specifically, the firing range. A skilled gamer could probably get most of the silver stars with a little practice. Getting all the gold stars, however, is nearly impossible. The major stumbling block is the AR 34: You must get 500 points (a bulls-eye is 10 points) in 20 seconds with 100% accuracy, using an assault rifle. Oh, and the targets break when shot too much, so if you break a target and let even a single bullet through afterwards, you fail.
 * "If They Came to Hear me Beg..." The challenge here is to air-assassinate an Elite on the penultimate level from a height that would kill you. You'll mostly find yourself missing and going splat, hitting a Grunt instead, hitting the Elite with a normal beatdown, or the game just not recognizing your assassination. Have fun reloading the checkpoint.

General

 * The Updated Rerelease of any classic Square Enix RPG will include a new sidequest, which are definite That One Sidequest material.

Hack and Slash

 * God of War: Chains of Olympus has the second Challenge of Hades, "Perfection". You have to beat 20 enemies without getting damaged at all. To make matters worse, you don't get to use magic at all and the enemies in question use attacks you can't block with the normal block. Tearing out of hair may ensue. If you managed to beat those, the third Challenge asks you to kill a number of enemies while your life bar automatically drains. Problem is, it might as well have required a No Damage Run as your life will be cutting it close enough without taking any hits. The fourth Challenge gives you a tight time limit to destroy several items, one tight enough that you practically need to choreograph a routine to make it.

Miscellaneous Games

 * Katamari Damacy's Ursa Major and Taurus stages. The stages are easy to beat since the King of All Cosmos accepts any bear or cow. However, getting the biggest bear and cow is an exercise in madness because the King of All Cosmos is an idiot who accepts any bear or cow, including bear carvings, men in bear suits, men in cow suits, and milk cartons. One wonders how many completionists have thrown their controllers in frustration after the king prematurely yanked them out of the stage because he believes that the black and white patterned beach umbrella you accidentally rolled up is a cow.
 * Also of note is the fact that in such stages your katamari starts next to the some of the tiniest bear/cows. roll the wrong way at the start and you'll have to sit through the King of All Cosmos chew you out again.
 * Even more insane is the infamous rose level in We Love Katamari, where the player is tasked with collecting one million roses into a katamari, while never growing in size and only being able to pick up the roses one by one or in bunches of ten at a time. Thankfully, you don't have to do it all in one go, and most sane players just rubber-banded their game controllers into a set position and left the game running overnight to get it.
 * Even using the rubber band technique it takes over 70 hours of leaving it running and can only done on one of the 3 stages.

MMORPGs

 * Lord Recluse's Strike Force in City of Villains, especially if you're going for the "Master of Lord Recluse's Strike Force" badge that requires completing it with no defeats on your team and all temporary powers disabled.
 * Not to mention the fact that the third mission of said Level 45-50 Strike Force awards a badge needed for an accolade power whose Hero equivalent can theoretically be achieved at Level 7 (Level 1, if you're lucky enough). And all it does is bump your Endurance up by five points. Yeah. That's balanced.
 * The arguably easier Statesman's Task Force in City of Heroes has the same requirements for getting the "Master" badge. However, there is no accolade tied to it so the badge is mostly a Bragging Rights Reward.
 * There are several "epic" badges in both games that have ridiculous levels of achievement as the developers expected them to be earned only by players playing that same character for years (in a game that encourages making lots of alternative characters, go figure). Players who actually care about these badges have simply found ways to "farm" for the achievements in much less time.
 * Recently the Developers have finally relented and relaxed the requirements on many badges, some being slashed by as much as 2/3 of their previous requirement.
 * Blueside's hated task forces are not hard so much as insanely long. Dr. Quaterfield's task force, in particular, is twenty-four missions long and mostly in the Shadow Shard.
 * Many of the sidequests in Kingdom of Loathing are exercises in extreme frustration and patience:
 * More time has been spent devising Hobopolis run strategies than anything else in the game, and for good reason. In order to get the best gear in the zone (a hamster familiar which transfers the "Hobo Power" of several separate clothing items to meat and item drops/HP and MP regeneration), you must (a) join a clan and donate hundreds of thousands to gain access to their basement; (b) spend millions in meat to get enough healing items, turn increaser items and optimal gear to survive; (c) permanently acquire several skills that will make keeping fight counts low easier; (d) complete a sidequest outside of the zone where you use a binder to pick up "hobo glyphs" - you can't even enter the area without all the glyphs, and this requires multiple ascensions to get access to all of them; (e) plan your strategy with a group of other people, and execute the plan with near-pinpoint accuracy, and (f) defeat the Hobopolis boss, Hodgman, in under 1100 turns. In a single day.
 * The Ruins of Fernswarthy's Tower features an unlimited-leveled basement that yields a unique item: a telescope that allows you to see the Naughty Sorceress' tower (which is fought through in the final quest in each playthrough/ascension). The only problem? To get the item you need for the telescope, you need to fight through 500 levels of monsters with scaling difficulty, along with stat and damage tests every few levels. Even in best-case conditions, you'll still have to wait until you're near level 30 and stock up on phials, healing items and stat boosters in order to get to the 500th floor. Even better? In order to get a more powerful telescope (which will let you see more of the stat/item conditions for the N.S. Tower), you'll have to travel through an additional 800 floors. Players can spend days (if not weeks) doing nothing but basement dive. Numerous guides have been written about this basement.
 * Several of the food-based challenges require eating massive quantities just to get a trophy. The "Bouquet of Hippies" achievement requires eating 8 herb brownies, every day, for just over two months straight (at the cost of a significant chunk of Mysticality points).
 * The "Frat Boy vs. Hippy War" quest. In the regular quest, you can just pick a side and kill all of the other, thus winning the war. If you want the best reward and the satisfaction of killing a lot of hippies and frat boys, however, you have to kill the exact same amount of hippies and frat boys until there's only one of each side left. And use an item that randomly drops in a different area in the ensuing boss fight. That area is inaccessible during the war.
 * One of the better skills in the game is Transcendent Olfaction, which gives the player the ability to select a single monster and fight it near-exclusively. It's great for main quests, item farming, level grinding, whatever. How do you get this skill? From the Manual of Transcendent Olfaction, which costs 200 filthy lucre. The maximum rate a player can earn filthy lucre is 1 a day. So if you want Transcendent Olfaction, you have to remember to do the side quest for it, every day, for six and a half months. This side quest was designed and implemented after the game's New Game+ feature was implemented (which allows for multiple lucres in a day), but there's increasing requests from the player base to increase the rate players can obtain lucre. Once you have Transcendent Olfaction on a character, though, you never need to do it for that character again. (It's a Hardcore auto-permed skill, which is to say, it's available in every type of run - save maybe Avatar of Boris, which works on a different skill set - and renders itself permanent once learned.)
 * There is a well-known quest in the Darkshore area of World of Warcraft called Deep Ocean, Vast Sea that many young night elves encounter, but very, very few will actually finish at an appropriate level. It involves swimming deep underwater with your character's breath timer to retrieve two boxes from ships infested with the well-known and much hated Murlocs that have a dense spawning rate, wide aggro radii, and can swim through walls to ensure you will spend hours swimming back to your corpse before giving up until you can outlevel the quest and have sweet, sweet revenge on those bloody Murlocs.
 * This quest has been somewhat fixed and is much easier than it used to be, but the bad reputation and mediocre rewards still mean that few people do it if they have a choice.
 * As of Cataclysm, it's been completely replaced with a new quest "An Ocean Not So Deep," which does quite a bit to lampshade it's predecessor's reputation. You now have to get to the ships, but use a weapon to wipe out the army of Murlocs blocking the way. The gnome involved mentions that maybe this will reduce the number of casualties.
 * The universally-loathed "Swabbing Duty" quest in Cape of Stranglethorn. To elucidate - the captain of a pirate crew that you're trying to infiltrate charges you with cleaning the ship's deck, which takes the form of a minigame in which you have to keep the deck free of stains for two minutes. Unfortunately, the stains spawn at a ridiculously fast rate and have to be dealt with in a few seconds otherwise it's game over. If you have any kind of lag at all on your system the quest becomes pretty much impossible. There are reports on various game forums of frustrated players giving up after days of fruitlessly trying to complete it, while others have had to resort to remapping their keyboards and creating macros. For a two-minute minigame. The worst thing about it is that unlike 99.9% of the quests in World of Warcraft, it's impossible to level past it, so if you're no good at the type of "twitch" gaming this quest requires you can get hopelessly stuck and left with no option but to abandon the quest. Yep - no matter how powerful your character, you can be forced to forfeit an entire questline because you can't mop fast enough. Nice work, Blizzard.
 * In 4.2, possibly earlier, you can just talk to the whiny deckhand and pay him 1 Gold to do it for you. The captain even lampshades this when you turn the quest in, telling you he "heard frenzied mopping" and figures it must have been you.
 * The Achievement system has recently been added that gives a lot of cool benefits and titles, but with sometimes insane requirements. Loremaster and Seeker titles require completing just about every quest in the game. The major new PVP title requires over 100,000 honorable kills. Some achievements in World of Warcraft are very difficult to get, especially the Glory to Hero/Raider. Both require you to complete various difficult achievements in heroics/raids, many of which are impossible unless the whole group agrees to try and get it. Essentially it's That One Sidequest that requires you to complete a dozen other ThatOneSideQuests.
 * A couple of which need a very specific group setup to even work. Wrong class? Though luck.
 * Yea well, take a look at the newer Glory of the Ulduar Raider achievements. Though I will admit Immortal was absurd given the random nature of a lot of the fights. At least the new one doesn't require that.
 * On entirely different level, fishing achievements. Half of them require you to catch absurdly rare fishes or similar stuff. Mr. Pinchy probably being the worst. There are only about a dozen or so spots where you can fish for him (pools that need to respawn after 5-6 catches), and once you have it, the pet needed for the achievement is only one of four possible outcomes. You may use him three times over 6 days, and if you are unlucky enough, you never get the pet and need to fish for him AGAIN. And back when achievements were introduced, you had to be at the highest possible fishing skill and top fishing equipment to reliably fish in these pools, and they were highly contested for the normal catches. On the bright side, this makes the already boring task of leveling fishing all the way seem comparably tame (unlike other gathering skills, the difficulty doesn't influence the rate at which it increases - you simply need like 30 sucessful catches at higher levels to advance a single point).
 * The Algalon quest chain is definitely That One Sidequest, needing 5 other ThatOneSidequests just to activate him.
 * Also consider the Meta achievement What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been - You need to complete all of the holiday event Meta achievements, and each one of those usually has a few that are extremely annoying. Also, good luck if you're out of town during the 1 week some of these events run.
 * The very aptly named "the Insane" title and its acheivement, Insane in the Membrane. To get it, you need to be honored with the Bloodsail Pirates and exalted with the entire Steamwheedle Cartel, the Shan'dralar, the Darkmoon Faire, and Ravenholdt. The problems with this? For one, getting from hated to honored with the Bloodsails means killing Booty Bay guards, which kills your Booty Bay (and thus Steamwheedle Cartel) reputation. Even then, it is far from easy getting to exalted with the Shan'dralar (turn in Unique librams, along with other items, over and over and over) or the Darkmoon Faire (ditto, but with the hard-to-assemble Darkmoon decks), and getting to exalted with Ravenholdt is next to impossible if you're not a rogue (again, but with pickpocketed lockboxes). Oh, did I mention that you have to hold those reputations simultaneously?
 * It's been estimated that, starting from scratch with a level 80 toon, it will take about 360 man-hours to complete. And if you're not a Rogue yourself, you'll either have to level an alt, or get a friend to help. But, as they say, your friends are not The Insane. You are.
 * Not quite as bad nowadays. The Shan'dralar faction has been removed completely so it is not required for the achievement. Also, the Darkmoon Faire has been revamped with several new ways to earn reputation, although the new methods can only give you so much per month.
 * Relic weapons in Final Fantasy XI. You just have to be lucky enough to have the correct base relic drop during a Dynamis run, buy over a hundred million gil worth of Dynamis currency (and your linkshell will at best give you a discount since selling currency is how Dynamis runs are funded), convince your linkshell to take the time to beat up a foe that Randomly Drops a certificate you need, then convince them to stop after beating up fifteen other bosses to try to defeat an easily bored Metal Slime that drops the final ingredient. Easy, right?
 * Then there are the Near Eastern equivalents, the Mythic Weapons. First, you have to beat the Treasures of Aht Urghan storyline and complete every Assault mission, including getting to floor 100 of Nyzul Isle, and get the desired base weapon from Nyzul Isle (each Randomly Drops from bosses) just to open the quest. Then you have to beat up eight endgame bosses across Aht Urghan. Then you have to beat all the Assaults again, buy or aquire tens of millions of gil worth of Alexandrite, earn 150,000 tokens in Nyzul Isle (which in practical terms means doing it without buying any items), and earn 100,000 ampules of therion ichor in Einherjar. Then you have to aquire three proofs which randomly drop from the three penultimate bosses in a long ladder of bosses. Finally, you have one last boss fight to complete, solo—and if you manage to screw this part up, you have to get those last three random drops again. Even easier, right?
 * Ebisu's Fishing Rod and skilling a craft to 100 for the headache inducing win.
 * As for quests that sane players actually regularly perform, the journey to obtain the Utsusemi: Ichi spell probably qualifies. It entails collecting a large number of randomly dropped items (between about 100 and 200, depending on the item) to gain notoriety in a far-away settlement. Then one needs to travel to this settlement and take on a final quest, involving travelling through an area infested with aggressive, high-level enemies. The real challenge in this barrage of quests is that it is not only very tedious, but also quite dangerous and difficult for newer characters. And what bites the hardest is that you need this spell if you are going to try the Ninja job class for any given reason.
 * La Tale has several, with the most prominent being Dotnuri. It's the perfect combination of Platform Hell (despite being a 2-D game!), Fake Longevity (each stage needs to be completed 20 times before you get the real reward...), Bragging Rights Reward (the skill point from stage 1 is pretty good. The money boost from stage 2 can be made a joke with the enchanting system), Fake Difficulty (lag was already a problem with the normal game, much less one that requires surgical precision), One-Hit-Point Wonder (it is a Super Mario Bros. Shout-Out after all) and Luck-Based Mission (the enemies that can kill you move completely randomly. The only thing they won't do is fall off a ledge or die). Others include:
 * The Selki quests, which involves completing three separate quests multiple times against a mini-boss level opponent in a game where every time you first meet a boss, it will be That One Boss. All that, for a rather unimpressive exp reward.
 * The elemental totems, which involves finding 50 of an item that has a mid to low chance of randomly dropping from a specific and rather uncommon enemy, which shoots elemental magic at you (which you aren't likely to have a resistance to). Then once you're done, you have to do the quest three more times. And then you have to do the other three elemental totem quests four times before you're done with them for good.
 * The goddamn Rabid Bear in Guild Wars: Eye of the North. To score points with the Norn, you need to fight this bear with just a wooden club that does pathetic amounts of damage. Not a single player was expecting said bear to be a Level 24 tank with naturally regenerating-health, an ability that boosts his health AND grants him damage resistance, and another skill that lets him regenerate 8 points of health per second. By the way, that last skill casts and recharges in half the time even though he isn't technically a boss. The bear ALSO can make himself immune to knockdowns at times, and not all classes have fast enough interrupts to stop him. Some of the game's best builds have failed against this thing, and nowadays most players simply switch to a Ritualist or Necromancer secondary, then take him down with ghosts or curses.
 * Oh, and if you manage to beat the Rabid Bear, then you can look forward to the Glacial Griffon, which not only is a boss, but is also a spirit-spammer. And thanks to a recent Ritualist update, all of its skills practically recharge immediately. Have fun!
 * Also in EOTN is the Great Norn Alemoot quest. The first task, moving ale barrels from a stack to a pole not ten feet away (after taking your first swig of booze) is easy enough. After running back to the start for your second helping of booze, comes the slalom: rather than simply running between posts, the mechanics of this part of the quest requires you to run to a certain point away from the posts after running between them. Running too close to either post, or running through the next part of the slalom without correctly running through the previous pair of posts will completely fail the quest and you have to start over. THEN if you manage to complete the slalom, is the incredibly tricky pig-herding (after taking a third swig of ale). Rather than pushing the pigs into their pen, they have to be body-blocked so they MIGHT move in the right direction..! All this within a time limit of a couple of minutes, all while your screen is fuzzing around because of the effects of the alcohol (though the screen effects can be disabled in the options menu). At least the Feel No Pain skill reward is worth it.
 * Wizard 101 has Sunken City, a dungeon with the hardest enemies you can find in Wizard City. Towers that the girl you're doing it for commands you to enter to defeat some more of the hard enemies, unavoidable battles with the hard enemies, only to find that you need to enter a tower with multiple floors to get a key for Grubb's place, and have to fight a boss with one thousand health. And after the battle, you STILL have to go defeat Grub and collect the amulet.
 * Sunken City (and it tougher cousins Tomb of the Beguiler and Kensington Park) are actually meant for to be a challenge for teams of four wizards that had beaten the world so that is why they are so difficult.
 * The true That One Sidequest are Briskbreeze Tower and the Warehouse. Both are ten floors tall and contain cheating bosses. Oh, and for those people that use the "flee, use potion, port to friend" technique, people cannot port into these towers. These are so tough the first floor is there just to warn people how tough they are.
 * Another dungeon, The Waterworks, was made for a new challenge for the new level cap. Five normal battles, two puzzle rooms (which can act as either additional battles or heal locations), and two bosses that have complex and powerful cheats.
 * RuneScape has a fair few quests that make you think that the dev team is just evil.
 * One Small Favor, a Chain of Deals Fetch Quest that's taken Up to Eleven.
 * Elemental Workshop III, where you have to manipulate a bunch of blocks on a grid to operate a machine. Takes a frustratingly long time, but if you have any desire to use the machine to make more equipment after the quest is over, it's possible to "break" the machine so that you have unlimited turns, and possible to make it so that you can use the machine in ten moves or less.
 * Assuming you can get through the quest in the first place.
 * Ragnarok Online quests tend to be of the "Collect Three Hundred X" variety, which is not in itself all that bad. The "Veins Siblings" quest (which is part of the quest-line to open the high-end Nameless Island dungeon) combines "Collect Three Hundred X" with a luck-based payoff. It becomes necessary to collect some innocuous low-end drops to feed to a camel so it will poop for you, allowing you to continue with the quest. Unless you're amazingly lucky, you'll not get the requisite amounts of poop from your first try (or even your first few tries), requiring you to go gather more low-end drops. The poop-rate is random, which means a player might have to feed the camel literally thousands of items, translating into dozens of hours of competing with starting characters for trash mobs, in order to continue the quest. Even though you never end up actually having to use the camel poop, it does lead to a Crowning Moment of Funny as (after finally gathering the requisite poop) your character reflects on his or her accomplishments.

Platform Game

 * The three Trial galaxies in Super Mario Galaxy, all extremely difficult Unexpected Gameplay Changes.
 * The Toy Time Galaxy has Luigi's Purple Coins. The time limit imposed may as well not exist, as the Green Slime of Death will see to it that you die long before your time runs out.
 * Dreadnought Galaxy's Purple Coin challenge is a giant pain in the ass, simply because the Minecart Madness style of the level means you can't miss a single one.
 * But at least Dreadnought doesn't force you to constantly switch sides on a platform with questionable physics at best, making insane jumps over huge electric fences. Battlerock, on the other hand? OH HELL YEAH!
 * Don't forget the Daredevil challenge in Melty Molten Galaxy (bwahahaha).
 * The Cosmic Mario races can be tricky, but not overly difficult. The Cosmic Luigi races, on the other hand, are infuriatingly difficult. Cosmic Luigi employs many tricks that players themselves use to go quickly, such as the long jump, and makes stunts that a standard player could achieve maybe one in every ten times.
 * Most would argue that Super Mario Galaxy 2 is one giant collection of these.
 * Especially the Grand Master Galaxy Daredevil Run. The star is aptly called "The Perfect Run" because if you make a single mistake anywhere (and there are dozens of places to make mistakes) it kills you and forces you to start over from the beginning.
 * In Super Mario Sunshine, there's the warp pipe on the desert island - simply unlocking it requires maneuvering the water-soluble Yoshi through a time-consuming and tricky series of platform jumps over water. Once you're in, all you have to do is collect the coins... over lethally toxic water... which is flowing irrevocably one way and contains strong currents that carry you away from the coins... by performing precisely timed jumps... from a moving leaf-raft that is rapidly dissolving beneath your feet... and which you have to steer with FLUDD - an unreliable and oversensitive rudder to say the least... and if you run out of lives, you have to get bloody Yoshi back on to that island all over again... (seethes quietly).
 * It should be noted that getting the Yoshi there isn't really that hard, but the course is a bitch and a half.
 * Watermelon Festival, requiring the player to maneuver a very fragile, difficult to control fruit through a huge clusterfuck of enemies.
 * ...which can for the most part only be stunned temporarily. Those that can be killed doesn't usually get in your way anyways. The poison river can at least be cleared even if you miss a coin or two, by slowly working your way back to the start while balancing on the stage's edge. Did I mention that the river is suspended high in the air and has an edge the width of your foot?
 * PA-FREAKING-CHINKO. Basically, you're in a giant pachinko machine, and you jump on a bouncy part of the floor to get launched way up to the top. Then you have to navigate along thin nails in the wall to get to the red coins. Missing the outcroppings in the wall is quite easy when you can't easily maneuver yourself and rotate the camera at the same time. Miss even one and you'll fall to the inescapable bottom which has a hole you jump down to your death. Then you have to start over. Which is just peaches.
 * The 250 Blue Coins. There are hidden coins scattered throughout every level in the game. And every level means every level including most of the "secrets". The blue coins vary in where they're found from obvious spots that require an unlockable power-up to doing out of the way things like spraying the moon in a specific spot to controlling a boat toward one to just spraying anything you can find. Oh, yeah, and you need 10 to get a Shine Sprite and the game doesn't tell you where to find them or even provide you with a checklist. Because looking everywhere in the world for something that seems insignificant is so much fun!
 * "Go Fast on the Trolley!" in Tomba 2. If you brake for even a millisecond longer than you should, you'll miss the time limit. And you do it twice, with an even worse time limit the second time. That assumes the ridiculous speed the trolley moves doesn't throw you off the rails beforehand. And to add salt to your wounds, the game gives you a condescending "Awww, you failed!" every time you lose. Tips and Tricks magazine, asked why the quest was so hard, answered that Whoopie Camp were sadists.
 * From the same game, the Secret Towers. Each of which requires a pair of Guide Dang It sidequests to even get the key to open. Then you have to find the door to each (also a Guide Dang It, as the game gives no hint as to where the doors are, and they're invisible). Oh, and there are three of them. Most players give up long before discovering the Platform Hell within.
 * Not to mention that one of the Tower Song Parts can become a Lost Forever if you don't complete another sidequest before defeating a certain Evil Pig. Sadistic, indeed.
 * To be fair, this could be because the developers literally hated making the sequel, so they made the entire game ridiculously hard on purpose.
 * Racing the beetle in Donkey Kong 64. It's not having to beat him that's so bad so much as the fact that you must have a certain number of coins by the end, and the beetle can make you drop some on contact.
 * Donkey Kong 64 also has the mechanical fish, which requires you to shoot out all the valves of its heart in a time limit. You literally haven't a second to spare—you'll need all 100 seconds in order to complete it and destroy the robot fish.
 * That one wouldn't be so hard if it wasn't for a glitch that makes the propeller go for longer if you have over 100 Golden Bananas, meaning you pretty much have no chance if you're trying to get it after beating opening the last level. It's possible, but requires you to exploit the ability to hit covered lights from a certain angle.
 * Any mention of That One Sidequest in DK64 would be incomplete without mention of one particular mini-game: Beaver frickin' Bother. Herding giraffes is nothing compared to herding beavers, into a pit that seems scientifically designed to keep beavers out, in a truly absurd time limit.
 * Beaver Bother is a lot easier if you don't approach the beavers directly. Approach them from the side and they will fall into the hole when they aren't looking.
 * Anything involving Diddy's rocketbarrels. Pain in the arse to handle, and when combined with two Pass Through the Rings challenges, it's enough to make a sane troper eat the cartridge out of pure despair.
 * But, given Diddy's Ensemble Darkhorse status and the Crowning Music of Awesome that is the Jetbarrel theme, this troper practiced often just to get around. And you'll need it because you use Diddy's Jetbarrel for ANOTHER Pass Through the Rings challenge in Hideout Helm and using the Jetbarrel to shot swirches is one of Diddy's two challenges, which are last by the way so you're going to be short on time. Then you use the Rocketbarrel in Diddy's phase of K. Rool's fight.
 * All of these pale in comparison to that bloody arcade game. In order to get a golden banana for 100% completion, you must beat an (insanely difficult) version of the original Donkey Kong Arcade Game. With the old-school game's extremely precise timing and only one life, it can take an ungodly amount of time to complete... and you have to beat it twice in order to face the end boss. * headdesk*
 * Actually, if you use the d-pad instead of the analog stick, it tightens up the controls a great deal, making the game slightly easier. Unfortunately, nothing in the game mentions this. Guide Dang It.
 * To make it worse: it's harder the second time around. And there's ANOTHER arcade game that you have to unlock, though the target here is to get a specific score.
 * Let's not forget the extra Golden Banana quest: hunt down all the friggin' banana fairies. ALL OF THEM!!!
 * The 2nd Rabbit Race has caused people to fling their controller across the room.
 * Another Rare platformer, Banjo-Kazooie, features an infamous jigsaw piece in Rusty Bucket Bay that is widely regarded as the most difficult jigsaw in the game. It requires you to head down deep into the engine room of the level's ship, press a switch, navigate through a series of very narrow platforms with rotating fans, climb a ladder to exit the ship, jump into the water, and grab the jigsaw in the ship's propellers. All within a strict time limit. Exacerbated by the fact that one misstep means failure, the difficulty of seeing the exact location of the jigsaw in the level's murky waters (which drain your Oxygen Meter at double the rate, no less), touching the blades of the propellers mean instant death, and the game's relatively imprecise swimming controls.
 * Nuts & Bolts even pokes fun at the difficulty of said Jiggy.
 * And if you haven't gotten all 100 Notes or the Jinjo Jiggy, you'd better get 'em before trying to get this Jiggy or pray that you get to it with enough time to get out from behind the propellers; grabbing the Jiggy doesn't keep 'em from starting back up!
 * Mr. Vile's minigame in Bubblegloop Swamp is another irritating one. It seems pretty simple, at first glance: fruit pop out of the holes, and the task given is to eat more fruit than Mr. Vile does. Mr. Vile, however, is pretty darn fast, and the player must transform into an incredibly slow crocodile to access the minigame. A powerup can be unlocked later in the game that gives you super speed, making it relatively easier in that respect. But don't think you've won just yet! Once you beat him, you have to beat him again, only this time, worms will pop up alongside the fruit, and eating a worm causes you to become temporarily stunned. But wait! There's more. Now you have to play the game a third time. This time, both fruit and worms pop up again, but you can only eat whatever is displayed at the top of the screen. (ex: If it shows a worm, you must eat worms, and eating fruit will stun you.) The display changes randomly from fruit to worms. The fruit and worms themselves spawn randomly as well. And it all has to be done in succession; if you screw up, it's back to the first game. It's more annoying than difficult.
 * You only have to start again from the first game if you leave the area. You can start again from where you left off, but it requires you to let him bite you, costing you two hit points.
 * Banjo-Tooie has Canary Mary. This probably wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to race her on a vehicle powered by repeatedly mashing the A button. To make things worse, the race against her in the last major level is excruciatingly long for that control method, and she has Rubber Band AI. And to get 100% Completion, you have to do each race twice.
 * What about the Dynamite Ordinance challenge? Or Clinker's Cavern? Both of which consist of Banjo wandering around a maze-like area in first-person view while under a strict time limit, trying to locate and destroy a decent number of creatures which are small enough to be hidden just out of sight, in rooms that all begin to look the same. Oh, and if you don't get rid of all of the Clinkers in time, you have to escape from the area before you suffocate and lose all health. If you're lost, tough.
 * At least the Clinkers make a tell-tale noise when you're near. The hard part is finding them in the room.
 * Collecting every single Figment in Psychonauts is a task best left to the masochistic—especially in the Milla's Raceway sub-level. Due to the slope of the level, and the fact that it more or less forces you to be on your unwieldy Levitation Ball most of the way, it's very easy to fly too far or move too fast—and if you accidentally take the wrong pathway, too bad! To make matters worse, unlike most video game Plot Coupons, Figments are transparent and can phase in and out of visibility—and some of them move, meaning you have to chase them down.
 * And the Black Velvetopia level, where the neon Figments fit a little too well into the black velvet level design.
 * Though not many people have played it (or played it and liked it, anyway), the last few Hearts in platformer Vexx are pure That One Sidequest. In the final world, you need to collect six Plot Coupons to get a Heart, and they're scattered all over an extremely twisty and precarious level with Bottomless Pits at every turn, with plenty of scrawny, moving, and electrified platforms here and there that are all just begging to send you plummeting into the abyss. And if you lose a life? Too bad! You have to start collecting them all over again! The entire level is pretty scrappy, but both of its "collect X of object Y" missions drove her to rage.
 * There's also the Sand Castle, which adds in some Guide Dang It. One of the hearts in the second world is supposed to be hidden in a "sand castle," according to its hint. There's a small castle made of sand in the desert, but it's too small to do anything with. Is it something else in the level you have to trigger? No. You have to go back to the first area and enter the castle behind the waterfall, which is an extremely trecherous platforming segment. At the bottom of one seemingly inconsequential platform, there's a thinner platform beneath, which you must Leap of Faith to, to hit a switch. This lets you into the Sand Castle... which is a Palette Swap version of the castle you just came through, and you have to do it again. Siiiigh...
 * Spyro the Dragon 2 had a number of little side quests for orbs, one of which involves riding an infamous trolley around a track to get 50 gears for some pelican. This seemingly simple task will leave you traumatized with the phrase that horrible bird says to you every single one of the hundreds of times you are destined to fail, "Trouble with the trolley, eh?"
 * The sidequest on the caveman level where you have to protect eggs from the raptors by running around and roasting them. The first time isn't that bad, because the all the raptors appear all in a row. The second time, however, they attack in a more or less random order, forcing you to run back and forth across the area to kill them all. If you miss a single jump or take a wrong turn, you're screwed.
 * Can't forget the Alchemist side-quest.To start it's an escort mission with the mandatory stupid A.I that will walk into the enemy's range without even trying to avoid them. To make matters worse if the guy went out of his cave and to the right he can completely avoid the enemies and reach his destination in half the time.
 * That sidequest is especially notable in that, if you kill all the enemies first with Infinite Superflame, you can easily notice the Alchemist always follows the same, pre-determined path, that is programmed to run into every single enemy. That's right, you're supposed to escort him and keep him safe from all of them!
 * The Crystal Popcorn was another difficult challenge, where the player had to collect more crystal pieces than Hunter, 10 during the first challenge, not that bad, 15 during the second, and Hunter's AI gets better too, also, leave the level without getting the second one, you'll have to do the first again.
 * Year of the Dragon had some tricky side quests too:
 * Box the yeti! Box the yeti again!
 * You're Doomed! You're still Doomed!
 * Whack a mole.
 * Mega Man ZX takes full advantage of its Metroidvania format in the first game. How does it do this? Area K and its damned Sub Tank. First, you have to go through an area with a wave of lava following you quite closely until you get to an area that instead has a rising pool of lava. You then go to a computer and reset the speed of the lava to slow (somehow). After this point, you must then go through the entire lave wave section again, this time speeding through to an area near the middle of the area (did I mention if you miss you have to start again or die?), avoiding or quickly destroying enemies, and then you must break through a set of four blocks, the first set of which forms a wall on a hanging ledge. In order to break these blocks, you must use a charged attack from a form that is not particularly mobile. And if you get too close, you will grab the wall and attack in the opposite direction and have to try again. While the lava is still approaching. Then you go through a relatively short segment to hit a button and go through the rest of the stage as normal and take the cable car back to the start of the area. You just went through all of this hell to unlock a gate to a door. And then, just in case you spent too many lives on the aforementioned, you have to go through a short tunnel. Lined with spikes. Underwater. And the water is boiling, so you'll periodically take damage, which snaps you out of your Swimming mode, which you then have the length of your Mercy Invincibility to turn back on (by jumping and hitting the jump button again, thus risking hitting the spiked ceiling). And then you have to get back out of this and make your way to a save point. And you can't save during this whole hellish nightmare and keep your progress apart from the lava being slowed.
 * The Ski Slope snowboarding mission in the mission mode in Sonic Adventure DX and Sonic Adventure DX Director's Cut, where you have to pass a line of rings with three high jumps on the last three ski slopes and go flying over the capsule to get them by hitting the red and white lines on the edge of the ramp, and your timing has to be pixel-perfect. The slightest mistake forces you to repeat the mission, and every time you repeat the mission, you have to play through the entire snowboarding section over again. As if this wasn't bad enough, if you decide to save this mission for last (which is, needless to say, entirely understandable), you risk running into a bug which corrupts your save file and forces you to do everything over again, this mission included.
 * Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. Two words: Chao Garden. Not because of difficulty, but because of how unbelievably passive and tedious the Chao Garden and its games are. Also, while there are ways around it, everything in the black market costs 10 times as much as would be reasonably expensive.
 * If you think the Sonic Adventure 2 Chao Garden is bad, the Sonic Adventure DX version is ten times more infuriating. There aren't any Chaos Drives, so the only way to raise chao skills is racking up a lot of small animals (Which give bigger bonuses towards levels, but subtract from stats that the animal is bad at.) And the Chao Races are made much more difficult by not being able to use your chao's Stamina skill as a speed boost, as hitting the buttons just makes pointless noise, oh, and if you do that you might accidentally give the opponent a speed boost, as the focus of the race keeps changing between your chao and the other 7 that you don't want to win. Its not all bad if you trick the system into giving Animal stats without using the Animal. But it still takes a long time.
 * It really is not as bad as it could be if you realize the following. First, in both games a chao can easily get all the emblems before their first reincarnation, meaning you only have to raise it once. Two, animals are significantly better than chaos drives, it takes about 3 animals(2 if flying) on average to level up that stat, but it takes about 5-7 chaos drives to level up. Third, you cannot level down due to animals, so if you had just leveled up with power, and start feeding the chao bunnies, you very little/no power. Fourth, the amount it takes to level is constant no matter how high your level is, so the amount it takes to get from level 97-98 is the same as it takes to go from 1-2. Lastly, you can transfer your chao between SA 1 and SA 2 via GBA link cable, so you only need 1 strong chao for some 10+ emblems? That's nothing compared to the amount of time it takes to get the all A rank emblems.
 * A lot of the bonus mission are also incredibly difficult to get an A rank on. The "find the lost" chao missions are nigh impossible without using a guide, and Rouge and Tails' go-kart missions (with requirements like "don't hit any other cars" and "don't touch the walls") are also painfully difficult.
 * Many people who have played Rayman 2 don't even know that the 1000th lum even exists. You need to look at one section of a wall in a cutscene to realize that it's a camoflaged secret tunnel to the 1000th lum. Despite your completion rate reaching 100%, the game still says that you have 999/999 lums.
 * How the 1000th lum got there is a mystery, since Razourbeard ATE it early in the game.
 * Thankfully made easier in the Playstation version, where there are only 800 lums and Razorbeard eats a red lum instead.
 * The Super Mario Advance series gives us a few:
 * Super Mario Advance gave us the Yoshi eggs. Did we mention that you don't get any extra hit points now? And there's no way to know where the Yoshi eggs are? In subspace!
 * For more fun, if you lose a life, you also lose any eggs you picked up. Hope you remember where the eggs where the first time and don't mind starting over!
 * Super Mario Advance 4 gave us optional levels that require an eReader, and eReader cards to get to. And many of them were extremely difficult homages to previous games. Yeah.
 * The cards are Lost Forever now, due to being out of print for several years. On top of that, only Japan had all the cards while other places got a fraction of what Japan had.
 * Super Mario World, getting all 96 levels. But that means all the exits. Including Valley Ghost House's alternate exit. And the Special World.
 * In Yoshi's Island getting 100% in each world is Platform Hell, but 'Kamik's Revenge' takes the cake. Just getting to the skiing section is a nightmare, only to require the player to time each jump exactly right or start the entire level over again.
 * This is just the tip of the iceberg, almost every level in this game is That One Level.
 * Nearly every timed mission in Sonic Rush Adventure requires near-perfect timing. There is almost no margin for error, lest you fall short of the arbitarily short time limit.
 * Rush's Spiritual Successor Sonic Colors DS has Mission 2 in Sweet Mountain where you have to rescue 25 Wisps. It isn't that hard if all you're trying to do is pass it or collect it's red rings however it becomes a total nightmare when trying to S rank the mission, the part that especially makes it hard is when you reach the robot that tosses you up in the air where you have to dodge the balloon bombs to enter its mouth. You move at a very slow pace during that part which wastes your time and since it's a rescue Wisps mission there are no extra time capsules to earn to give you extra time on the missions countdown timer. By the time you're past the robot part you probably won't have enough time left to earn an S rank during this mission.
 * Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped allows the player to reach 105% completion by earning at least golden relics from every stage of the game. This is made very difficult by the fact that the game features several different types of levels and simply rushing through won't work in all of them.

Rhythm Game

 * Guitar Hero III. "Through The Fire and Flames". Beating it on Medium is worth praise in many circles.
 * It's relatively easy on Hard (compared to other songs on Hard), but Expert... not so much.
 * Rock Band : on guitar, "Green Grass and High Tides", on drums "Run to the Hills" - both not really because they're absurdly difficult, but because they're long, long songs that require the player to keep a very fast rythm throughout. You *will* get painful cramps halfway through. Then you'll mess up and have to start over from the top to get those precious, precious golden stars. For sheer difficulty there's the DLC "Snow ((Hey Oh))" which calls for lightning fast hammer-ons all the way through.
 * The real fun part is that if you play "Snow" on Rock Band 2 or any newer Rock Band game, the updated procedure for determining hammer-on and pull-off notes means that instead of lightning fast hammer-ons, you mostly need lightning-fast strums while changing frets.
 * "Short and sweet" on Lego Rock Band. The song is not particularly difficult or challenging - on the opposite it's very easy, but it grows very repetitive on all of the instruments, it's overly long (7 minutes!), and it's boring, boring, boring as hell. Expect your drummer to fell asleep on his instruments halfway.
 * Some of the DDR releases have one step chart that's clearly much more difficult than the rest. DDRMAX had the first stepchart (i.e. the sequence of arrows you have to hit) with a difficulty rating of 10, on a song named Max 300 for its very fast BPM. MAX 2 continued the tradition with Maxx Unlimited. On any given difficulty, these songs usually have the hardest stepchart on that difficulty. In the home versions, mastering a difficulty meant getting an "A" grade in every song on that difficulty, which basically boiled down to beating the Max song on that difficulty. (Later games tended to have several songs this hard).
 * DJMAX Portable 2 has missions that require you to complete a set of songs while fulfilling one or two goals at the same time (such as getting a high enough combo, keeping your accuracy high enough as you go from one song to the next, etc.). The earlier missions aren't too bad...with the exception of the "Rave 2 Wave" mission, which forces you to use the annoying CHAOS-W modifier, which causes notes to move in a wave-like fashion. And then you have the entirety of the later missions—one mission tasks you with getting a high score, but at the same time increasing your scroll speed every time you use Fever. Another picks 4 random songs for you, turns on the Random Max modifier, and must be completed with less than 20 Breaks. Perhaps the most infamous missions is "Just 1%", which requires you to, on top of using Fever a certain amount of times in a row per song, automatically fails you if you get the MAX 1% judgment on a single note, all while having you play some of the hardest songs in the game.
 * Obtaining all the Perfects in any game the Rhythm Heaven series. In order to get a Perfect rank in a minigame, you naturally have to complete it without making a single mistake, which is hard enough as it is (keep in mind, the games are very finicky about what counts as a mistake. You have to be completely precise; getting a "half-hit" won't count). But, oh wait, you can't just choose any minigame and try to get a Perfect on it, you have to wait until one is picked at random, and then you're given three tries to get a Perfect on it before you lose the opportunity. After that, you'll just have to wait until the next time it's picked. You can't even ignore it and try to complete it later when you feel it, because playing a different minigame instead still takes up one of your chances. Even if you're generally good at the games, the added pressure of knowing you only get a limited number of chances really doesn't help for your concentration, and it just plain sucks when you complete a minigame perfectly when it hasn't been called up, it won't count.
 * Bit.Trip COMPLETE comes with 120 Challenges; 20 in each of the six games. To complete a challenge, you have to make a perfect run through it - hit all the Beats, dodge any Avoid Beats, etc. In RUNNER, this also extends to hitting everything that gives points - but not all of them, or else you jump into a pit or another enemy. Challenges like Labyrinth (VOID: get through a maze of Avoid Beats and collect the Beats in a strict time limit); Fool You Once (RUNNER: a large portion of stuff that give you points actually forces you into enemies, also needs to time the jump pads for specific spots); Back Attack (FATE: a large portion of enemies come from the back, and so must stay alive to fire off at least a few shots to collect their Cores); and Harder, Faster (FLUX: starts slow, increases in speed and difficulty, and essentially limits your view to nothing in the middle of it all) require near mastery of the system being used.

Roguelike

 * Recruiting Kecleon in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games. In the Rescue Team games, you need to raise a Pokemon to level 100, equip a Friend Bow, and defeat Kecleon until one joins you. It's a 1/1000 chance and they're insanely strong and at double Speed, but persistence is key. The Explorers games complicate this a bit. In order to make it even possible for a Kecleon to join you, you need to raise a Pokemon that can learn the Fast Friend IQ skill to level 100 and feed it enough gummis that it can learn said IQ skill. But wait—there's more. You either need the Golden Mask or Amber tear, one is in a 99-floor dungeon that reduces your level to 1, while the other is in a 40-level dungeon with similar restrictions. If you get that, you still only have a 1/200 chance and those Kecleon can still kill you effortlessly. You'd better have a plan and a ton of Reviver Seeds.
 * Any escort mission in a higher level dungeon, especially when you don't know what the target floor is. You can't control them at all like you can your partners, and they're prone to wandering off in the wrong direction.
 * ADOM features several truly painful ones.
 * The Cat ring sidequest rewards the player with a powerful artifact ring if they refrain from killing cats for the entire game. As most cats are hostile, this is quite a feat.
 * Saving Khevalaster requires the player to find an amulet of life saving, and they aren't exactly common...
 * Gaab'Baay offers several painstaking FetchQuests.
 * There is a quest that makes the player kill 20 of the monster (s)he first killed. If the player is unlucky, they'll wind up making their first kill on a rare monster and will have trouble completing this quest.
 * Hell, even saving a freaking puppy is a nightmare, as the dungeon its trapped in is full of Demonic Spiders and it's time limit is ridiculously short.

Role-Playing Game

 * Final Fantasy X is a prime offender. Obtaining each character's Infinity+1 Sword is an extremely simple effort, but acquiring the sigils, key items that are required to power up each weapon to its full potential, is invariably a highly arduous task. Infamously, getting two sigils requires achieving a perfect score in a highly luck-based chocobo racing Mini Game, which is every bit as annoying as it sounds, and by dodging two hundred lightning bolts in a row in another Mini Game that demands, well, lightning-quick reflexes. Wakka's sigil and overdrives, while not difficult to acquire by any means, require at least ten hours of blitzball, the game's love-it-or-hate-it Unexpected Gameplay Change mini-game.
 * The lightning bolts were comparatively easy compared to the chocobo racing task (had 0.7s) for a long, long time. The logical conclusion is that whoever programmed that one had a grudge against the guy who designed Caladbolg.
 * The butterfly minigame. You have to run down paths, collecting all the blue butterflies, while avoiding all the red ones, all before time runs out. What's that? That sounds easy to you? Well then, perhaps we should mention the Depth Deception-inducing camera angles, the dark blue lighting that makes identifying the colors ridiculously difficult, and the fact that each time you fail, you have to fight a battle (the penalty for hitting a red butterfly) before backtracking all the way back to the start. The time between attempts is always longer than the attempts themselves.
 * European gamers have it even worse: if you don't collect all crests as you go along, you'll have to backtrack later... usually through paths containing a Dark Aeon. And getting one of the spheres necessary to get Auron's best Overdrive also involves getting past one. If you forget either of two specific treasures the first time you visit the temples in the PAL version, you have to face some of the Dark Aeons just to regain access to those temples. This can really screw you over if you're trying to fully-power Yuna's Celestial Weapon, because you NEED all the Aeons to do that, which in turn requires all of the treasures.
 * Rikku's Sigil isn't annoying for its difficulty, but for its duration - you have to do a lot of walking, often to areas of Bikanel that are spelled out in unnecessarily cryptic fashion by a stone about twenty miles from the nearest save point. Even with a "No Encounters" item strapped to one of your characters, you'll still be walking around a very boring desert for something like three hours.
 * Final Fantasy XII is another bad one. To get the game's most powerful Infinity+1 Sword, you practically need a strategy guide, because it requires you to leave four treasure chests alone without giving you the slightest indication of where those chests are. There's another way to get the weapon, but it's a 1/1000 random treasure chest drop. Another nasty sidequest involves a trek into Phase 2 of the Henne Mines, the game's most difficult Bonus Dungeon. It's an hour-long journey through a narrow and confusing dungeon infested with Goddamned Bats. There are no saves, and at the end of the Mines is Zodiark, one of the game's three most difficult optional bosses. The reward for beating Zodiark is the ability to use him as a summon, but because he requires the character to be under a certain dangerous status to use his ultimate attack, Zodiark is Awesome but Impractical.
 * The 1/1000 chest isn't as bad when you consider the easily manipulated RNG, if you know how to manipulate it.
 * Danjuro, the ultimate dagger, is dropped by a single Rare Game, which has as its requirement 256 enemies to be slain in the Great Crystal, and then at least another 32 each subsequent time. All of the enemies are at a particularly high level, and can even take out Level 99 characters if given half a chance. While there are an unlimited number of enemies to kill, each one can take at least ten seconds to kill. If a player killed one every ten seconds, the first spawn would take 42 minutes to appear. Add onto that the obviously low drop rate for the Danjuro, and you've got a quest that is begging to be evaded via cheating or skillful moving around. Similar enemies have confirmed quirks to make dropping easier, i.e. Nelvihek's Grand Helms by leaving the screen as the enemy dies.
 * Pretty much any of the ultimate weapon sidequests with the exception of Fomalhaut (which can be obtained long before the end of the game).
 * In Final Fantasy XII, filling the Sky Pirate's Den is an example of That One Sidequest made up of other That One Sidequests: finding all thirteen espers, completing all Hunts, completing the beastiary (of 500 monsters, several of which are 'rare spawns' and may only have a 1% chance to spawn, one particular set requires you to take an hour and a half to completely wipe out two adjacent zones to get the target monster to spawn, fourteen times), defeating a dozen hidden optional bosses in nondescript mazes (one of which, Yiazmat, requires two hours for a speedrun of maxed-out level 99 characters), powerlevelling every character about 20 levels above the point you fight the final boss, perform all the end-of-combo Concurrences (when you have no in-game way of finding out how many there are let alone how to do them), and fully exploring every map (including unmarked hidden areas). And to top it all off, this isn't what gives you 100% Completion—completing the Den is is a prerequisite for a completely different challenge.
 * Finding Omega Mk. XII is an exercise in hair-pulling frustration. The most satisfying part isn't beating him, but actually tracking the mofo down.
 * Final Fantasy VI has several:
 * Intangir. Not hinted at all in the guides or the game, but invisible, extremely powerful, heals from any elemental attack (a.k.a. all your magic at this point except Stone and a few Rages), uses Meteo (does a lot of damage to two party members as a counter) and then turns invisible again. If you use him as a Rage, he just casts Pep Up (suicide attack that takes all your MP and HP and gives it to an ally, and ejects you from the battle so you can't be revived). But if you want to have 100% completion, you have to fight him. Except...Gau still doesn't have 100% completion because of a bug! Oh, and did we mention that you can only find Intangir in the first half of the game? Or that it is stronger and has more HP than the final boss of the first half? (In older versions of the game, you could utilize a Good Bad Bug to kill him in one turn, but that's no longer an option in the Game Boy Advance version.)
 * There's also the Auction House, which you must visit in order to obtain the Zona Seeker and Golem magicite. It isn't very challenging because it only involves sitting through the auction, but the chances of either one appearing are incredibly small. Even worse, in the GBA remake you are required to get a sword from there if you want the Gilgamesh esper, and that has an even worse chance of showing up, and when it does it costs 500,000 gil. If you buy a bare minimum of gear, you may have 300,000 gil by that point...
 * Mog is a total Guide Dang It, but you don't want to go into the Esper world without him. You also can't get Umaro unless you have Mog.
 * Mog's Water Rondo, especially. The only time when you go underwater is the serpent trench in the World of Balance. If you get to the World of Ruin and then see his empty slot when you're going for One Hundred Percent Completion then you're too late. And even when you pick up Mog in the Wo B, the serpent trench is probably the furthest thing from your mind at that point, right when the story is really picking up speed. The saving grace was in the Advance remake where you get to have one last underwater battle versus Leviathan. And even then, you had to have Mog in your party while fighting him.
 * Strago has one of these if you're trying to get all of his Lores. One in particular, force field, is only cast by Doom in Kefka's castle. The boss is pretty much at the end of the dungeon, right before the final boss himself, and you're going in with three parties. This means that if you don't explicitly know which party goes to that boss, and you guessed wrong on your first run-through, then you have to teleport out of the dungeon and try again. That and all the high-powered monsters in Kefka's castle, plus the castle being pretty much a Boss Rush in itself makes this all the more irritating.
 * The Phoenix Cave. Requires a whole lot of switching, and if one party dies, both parties are dead. Not to mention actually finding the dungeon can be quite difficult to begin with... To make matters worse, it's required for two of the best weapons, the best shield, one of the best healing spells, AND the best attack spell.
 * The eight dragons.
 * Doom Gaze.
 * Getting Cleave. You can get it at level 70, but instead you have only three party members instead of your usual four, and you have to kill one of them in order to bring out Wrexsoul, but you don't know which one. Cleave isn't even that good.
 * Getting all the Lores.
 * Anything in the Colloseum. Total luck-based mission.
 * The GBA version brings the Dragon's Den, a highly confusing dungeon filled with powerful enemies and mini-bosses that could give the final boss a run for his money, rematches with the eight Legendary Dragons which are much, much stronger than before, ending with a battle against the even nastier Kaiser Dragon. Better yet, for One Hundred Percent Completion you have to complete the Dragon's Den twice, as you'll then fight yet another Bonus Boss, Omega Weapon where the Kaiser was.
 * While we're on Final Fantasies, let's not forget the Sunken Gelkina in Final Fantasy VII. Completely optional, but a prime source for some rare Materia and stat-boosting Sources. Of course, to get them you have to fight unique creatures that can take three or four 9,999 HP Demis before normal attacks can take them down. And wipe out the party without breathing hard (if you've been progressing normally up to that point and not Level Grinding). Fun.
 * There's a reason why Yuffie's Infinity+1 Sword is one of the first weapons you can find in that dungeon: Using the morph command with it does not reduce its attack power. combine the Morph materia with Double Cut or Slash-all and...
 * Two words: Emerald Weapon.
 * Two more words: Ruby Weapon.
 * Two more: CHOCOBO. BREEDING.
 * Guide Dang It meets Luck-Based Mission with a side of Squick. And if you sold your Chocobo Lure materia, forget it.
 * Getting all the Enemy Skills is pretty difficult. One of them won't get all of them because only bosses use Trine and you get it after you kill the last boss that uses it (unless you wait to complete the Pagoda sidequest until after you get the last Enemy Skill Materia). You can only get Pandora's Box once. Chocobuckle is even worse, because if you're too strong, or you think I've got KOR now so why don't I just sell Chocobo Lure?, you won't get it. And a spell actually has to hit and you survive it; Manipulate is pretty much the only way this will happen with some spells, and some have instant death.
 * It bears mentioning that one of the easiest skills to pick up is "Death Force" (requires Manipulate, but that's one of the most useful tools against that particular enemy's autocounter attacks anyway). Death Force makes a character immune to instant death attacks and is super useful (to the point of being necessary) to pick up a skill like "Roulette" (which randomly kills a single target, make sure to use Death Force on the manipulated enemy itself too, just in case).
 * Final Fantasy IX. Excalibur II. It requires a ridiculous Speed Run, and is found in the final dungeon, after most other sidequests become unavailable- suffice to say that if you completed the game fast enough to find it, you didn't experience much of the game.
 * Wait, giving the speedrunner a strong weapon for the final boss fight is a bad thing?
 * Well, yeah actually. Running through Final Fantasy IX under 12 hours (which implies that the gamer has to already jump through hoops and do some strategic homework to survive a few fights) proves that you don't need the sword after having made it so far already in such a short amount of time. Running through 4 discs (on one of the better games in the series) for a 108 powered holy sword really screams Schmuck Bait. After having done all of the work, what would really be the point in using that sword when any possible threat that required that sword is already dead?
 * In addition, locking it to those who don't do a speed run is. On that note, Quina's skills, like most games' Blue Magic, definitely qualifies. Instead of merely being hit by the attack, Quina has to 'Eat' enemies, meaning their HP must be dropped to 12.5% (or 25% if Quina is Tranced) and then using the command, with no indication whether the enemy will give a skill or not.
 * Getting the highest score in Tetra Master. There are hundred different cards in the game and you can carry 100 at once. For max points you have to get 1 of each, some of which are only used by one player in the entire world. If you’ve found the right player, you may still have to play several times against him before he uses the card you want. Even if he uses it, you have to win the round and have the card turned into your color by the end of the battle to get it. That battles between cards are often randomly decided, doesn’t help either. Then you have to have a different arrow combination on each of your cards. If two cards have the same arrow combination, you get less points, even if the cards are unique otherwise. And then you have to get each card to rank A. Normally cards start with either rank P(hysical) or M(agical). Then, when you use them in the card game, they get randomly (and very rarely) upgraded to rank X, if you have them battle other cards. Then, when you use them after they turned X, you use them again and they may turn to rank A (what is even more rare than turning to X). And you have to do this with all 100 of your cards. Oh, and while you’re trying to get them to rank A, you may loose a game and the other payer takes your unique card, meaning, you have to win it back from him. And the best of all? You don’t even get a reward for doing all this. Not even a Bragging Rights Reward. Nothing, except the score shown in your card menu.
 * Final Fantasy IV the Pink Tail, needed to get the best armor in the game. It is randomly dropped by the Pink Puffs/Flan Princesses, which only appear in a single room in the final dungeon and have a 1 in 64 chance of appearing in a given battle. Even if you did find the Pink Puffs, each one has only a 1 in 64 chance of actually dropping said ore (and that's when it dropped an item at all, which only has a 1 in 20 chance of happening). Some players have literally fought hundreds of battles against the Pink Puffs and not received a single Pink Tail - very annoying to say the least.
 * In the original Japanese version (and the subsequent re-makes in all regions), the 1 in 64 drop rate (on top of 1 in 20 chance of dropping anything) applied not only to the Pink Tail, but also to FOUR optional summons for Rydia and nearly every character's best weapon; the fact that the enemies which can drop these items appear more often than the Pink Puffs offsets this only slightly. Subsequent versions of the game added even more subquest items with this property. If you try to get them during the regular course of the game, expect to be obscenely overlevelled by the time you get to the end!
 * In Final Fantasy X-2, the sidequests to get the Lady Luck and Mascot Dresspheres are difficult (read: virtually impossible) unless you're good at math, and have a ton of patience and a guide book. And a willingness to play the game about six times to get a perfect score up through the end of Chapter Four. If you even forget to rest in one chapter, no Mascot dressphere for you. If you don't beat Shinra during the actual Spherebreak tournament, you have a 50% lowered chance of getting Lady Luck until the end of that chapter, and a 75% by Chapter Five (at least, I believe those are the numbers). Lady Luck is actually completely worth the trouble (doubled EXP, Gil, Items, and the points you need to gain new abilities).
 * Final Fantasy VIII has the Queen of Cards sidequest, which sounds straightforward at first: trade unique Triple Triad cards to the Queen of Cards so that her artist father can create new unique cards. The poblem is that you can't just give her the cards she asks for - you have to lose them to her in a card game, during which she's likely to use the Random draw rule and one of any number of bizarre trade rules designed to make sure you lose half your other unique cards to her in the process, all of which you'll have to win back the hard way. Every time she wins or loses a unique card, she moves to a new randomly-selected location somewhere around the world map, with only a vague hint as to her destination. The cards that she requested, and the new uniques her father creates, are distributed to random NPCs around the world with no hints to their locations at all. Failure to complete this quest before Disc 4 results in all these cards becoming Lost Forever, although you can still encounter the Queen of Cards. Oh, and hey,.
 * Technically, all of the cards in the Queen of Cards Quest can be obtained from the Left Diamond Girl aboard the Ragnarok on Disk 4, but just to be able to challenge her requires that you complete not one but two vaguely hinted-at sidequests (the CC Group and the Chocobo Forests), plus realize that the Ragnarok is even available on Disk 4, when everything that the game has told you so far would indicate that it's not, and find the convoluted path that takes you to it.
 * Also notable is the Obel Lake sidequest, in which Squall must talk to a mysterious shadow hidden in an inconspicuous lake on the world map, who gives him vague clues to find more vague clues at locations that have no significance otherwise. These clues lead you to rocks with seemingly random letters on them that create an anagram when grouped together. When you finally get to the end of the sidequest, the treasure you find is a Three Stars, which teaches a GF the ability to cast three spells for the cost of one. Not really worth the trouble, especially since you can get them elsewhere.
 * Several sidequests in Final Fantasy VIII with Centra Ruins, where you must first go through the ruins and defeat Odin under an unnerving time limit and then battle dozens of powerful Tonberries in order to summon and defeat the extremely powerful Tonberry King (none of this is hinted in the game) and Chocobo Forests, where you must find several annoyingly secluded forests throughout the world map and solve the confusing puzzles within, with the only in game help being a cryptic douchebag who more often than not leads you in the wrong direction, sidequests being arguably the worst.
 * Sidequests being ungodly rare and not ever worth the prize for completing them, save the addicting card game.
 * The Deep Sea Research Facility deserves a mention too. The first challenge, defeating two Ruby Dragons and then Bahamut in a sequence is not particularly challenging to a player who knows what they're doing and is Genre Savvy enough to solve the puzzle quickly. The second challenge, reaching the Bonus Boss at the bottom of the dungeon is significantly harder, becoming a nightmare for players who aren't prepared and utter tedium for players who are, who will be spending compulsory battle after compulsory battle summoning the same GFs, that is, if you haven't bothered to go through with the popular Game Breakers (in which case the game is largely a breeze anyway). I hope you got that ability that lets you see hidden save points way back on disc one. You'll need it at the bottom.
 * You can actually get Move-Find any time you want after obtaining the GF (which should have been done on disk 1, but the game gives you a second chance on disk 4) as long as you set it as the learnable ability. Also, the forced battles that you face if you use Zell are beneficial to those looking for 100% Completion, as it's the best way to farm Cursed Spikes, of which you need 100 to get Quistis' best Blue Magic limit, as well as some other items that completitionists go for..
 * There is an NPC that does mention the Tonberry King (where he was though, I forget). As for the deep sea underwater center, the puzzle performed early on will determine whether or not you have the necessary pressure needed to open the doors and raise the cage. The scripted battles only occur if Zell breaks the pressure machine. If the puzzle is solved correctly, then Encounter-None can be used in the deep sea center.
 * One trophy/achievement in Final Fantasy XIII requires you to five-star every mission. Have fun with that.
 * Even worse is the trophy/achievement earned for having held every weapon and accessory available in the game. This essentially involves completing every mission (as one accessory is only earned after completing the last mission) and farming Adamantoise and/or Long Gui for Platinum Ingots and Trapezohedrons, which will be needed for gil and upgrading weapons. There's a reason this is often the last trophy/achievement that players earn.
 * Dragon Quest VII is the game where you find God. And then find out he's really the devil. But after you beat him, you have a sidequest where you can find God again. But you have to get all the shards, some of which can be Lost Forever, to go to one dungeon, where you find shards for the other dungeon, and then you can fight God.
 * Dragon Quest VIII has the Dragovian sidequest. Works fine until you face the Darksteel Dragon.
 * Humorously, during the Boss Rush against all the dragon's forms, the Darksteel Dragon is the easiest if you have Dragon Soul, since all forms have their HP halved, and Darksteel's gimmick is very low HP and very, VERY high defenses, and Dragon Soul ignores defense. All other forms require 2 or 3 shots of Dragon Soul from a fully-tensioned hero. Against Darksteel? One shot at 20 tension, maybe 50, and he's done.
 * Suikoden has one in the form of a Betting Minigame, which you must win to get some of the characters and thus achieve the 100% Completion and Secret Ending. The fact that such game relies so much on luck (or is blatantly rigged, depending who you ask) and also can suck your money dry has earned it a Troper Fan Nickname: 'The Game that Shall not Be Named'. That and the original name is kind of stupid-sounding.
 * The first game's version can actually be a decent moneymaker (though it doesn't beat the "Coin in the cup" game), but the second game ups the difficulty to an insane degree.
 * The dice game is the best bit maker once you can do maximum bets, but Suikoden 2's game will make you want to destroy your television.
 * A bit of Fridge Brilliance here—in the first game, the gambler character obviously wanted to join your team and was using the Triple Storm game as a formality. In the second game, it was run by a con artist who really didn't care that much about your army, just making money.
 * In the second game, getting all the Recipes for the cooking mini-game can be a chore, especially with the notoriously hard to get recipe #24 from the Do Re Mi Elves, and especially if you're trying for Clive's Quest at the same time, which is another "That One Sidequest" for it's time limit.
 * Funny thing that while getting the Recipes are That One Sidequest, the actual cooking mini-game is a fan favorite.
 * Of course the fishing mini game to get the ingredients needed to actually cook all the recipies outside the mini game is an exercise is mind numbing tedium.
 * The Aforementioned Clive's Quest is a time-limit game that unless one is doing the Matilda Gate Trick, is pretty hard to accomplish whilst still A) getting all 108 stars, B) Leveling up at a decent rate C) collecting anything, including some Lost Forever items like Recipe #24, it's a very fine Juggling act.
 * Getting all the dogs in Suikoden III.
 * In Pokémon, of course, the biggest goal for completionists is that you Gotta Catch Them All. But this requires so much work that only the most dedicated players will be able to do it... And you have only a limited time before the next gen comes out, making you do it all over again with an even bigger number of Pokemon.
 * Special mention has to go out to Feebas. In both of the two generations that it's obtainable in, it's only available through fishing on one route. Sounds simple enough. Except that you can only catch it by fishing on a handful of specific water squares. In an area like this. Did I mention that the squares are set randomly every time a completely-unrelated saying in an entirely unrelated town changes, which can happen on a whim? Oh, and if you ever do eventually find one, make sure it's got a nature that prefers dry Pokeblocks/Poffins, since feeding it an obscene amount of these is the only way to evolve it into something useful.
 * No longer do you have to have the correct nature! Game Freak has heard your pleas and has included in HG/SS an upgraded massage, which both increases happiness and beauty. If you do it 8 times, you can max out your beauty and that's that.
 * At least with Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, you have to manually change the phrase yourself to trigger a tile change. Diamond/Pearl/Platinum are even worse; they change every day. Thankfully, Feebas appear very often on their designated tiles, so once you lock on, you can just keep fishing on that tile.
 * Or you could just make sure to get a female one and then you can breed for the right nature. And have extras for your friends.
 * Then there's the event-only Pokemon: Mew, Celebi, Jirachi, Deoxys, Manaphy, Shaymin, and Arceus, which can't be obtained through normal gameplay - only through giveaways done by Nintendo. Luckily these are more common than they used to be- in the early days there was usually only one chance to get the event Pokemon in a given generation, which usually involved traveling to select events such as conventions that were inevitably nowhere near you, but now there are several giveaways in each generation, and they're done through a wireless download, often at a relatively easy-to-get-to toy or game shop.
 * To allow players to get Mew, it is now a prize in the Wiiware My Pokemon Ranch... only if you upload 999 Pokemon into the game.
 * Oh, gosh...how could the fleeing Pokemon not receive special mention? It seems like ever since Generation II, Japanese law requires there to be at least one of these in every main game. Raikou, Entei, Suicune, Latias, Latios, Mesprit, Cresselia...you're lucky if you so much as encounter one of these, let alone catch it. To add insult to injury, an NPC says that Mesprit is merely playing with you. Thanks, Professor...now I know what games Pokemon trainers play in Hell.
 * Encountering one for the first time is actually easier than most think. They can appear anywhere (well, at least anywhere outside). Best solution is to go to an area with weak Pokemon (like the route right outside your hometown) and use a Repel. Repels keep wild Pokemon that are at a lower level than the first Pokemon in your party from bothering you, so if your that Pokemon is at a high enough level that weak Pokemon will avoid them, but low enough that the Pokemon you're chasing is still at a higher level, you're guaranteed to see the running Pokemon. Chasing and capturing theem is still a bitch, though, even if you are using methods to trap them.
 * Getting Shedinja is a Guide Dang It all its own: You have to have no more than five mons and a Poke Ball.
 * Kingdom Hearts. Hundred Acre Wood. Enough said. (Bonus points for being a bit of a Guide Dang It too.)
 * In the Sequel, add the Poster Run minigame (30 seconds?!) and the Magic Carpet Ride minigame (65 kills?!) to the Hundred Acre Wood. In the Updated Rerelease, you have to contend with all of the above plus the Organization Mushrooms, of which Mushroom No. 8 is far and away the one most likely to make your blood pressure spike to dangerous levels.
 * Penny Arcade has the best summary of this torment.
 * Most of Jiminy's requirements are hard, but not insane, as long as you either take the time to plan things out, or know the secrets. But some (like the poster duty minigame mentioned above) is impossible unless you've leveled up two of your forms to their max, others all but require you to have Fenrir, an Infinity+1 Sword gained by defeating Sephiroth (yes, that Sephiroth), winning tournaments with a certain number of points that require leveling up all of your forms and summons to their max (which takes a few hours of level grinding) just to enter, and winning a 50 round tournament with battle level 99 (the highest level in the game) with an insane point requirement... It can get to the point where you just don't want to go to Olympus Collusseum ever again.
 * Until you realise that to get the secret ending, you can also just finish the game in Hard Mode, which is the mode you should have played from the beginning, because it provides actual challenge during the story...
 * And 358/2 Days has . Goddamn Dustflier!
 * Phantasy Star IV has the dog quest, where you have to find a dog, which randomly pops up in one of five cities. If you don't have a specific item in your inventory, it runs away, and you have to search the other four cities. The only way to get said item is to find the hidden shop that has virtually no hints to where it is.
 * In later Wild ARMs games, to get 100% Completion you have to also fight the Black Box; a Bonus Boss who is only available if you've opened every single treasure chest in the game.
 * The series's ultimate That One Sidequest was 3's version of the Abyss—a 100-level, randomly-generated, tedious-beyond-tedious dungeon stuffed to the brim with the strongest enemies in the game. To proceed to the next floor, you have to collect five gems scattered around, and while it's not necessarily difficult to reach them, the tediousness is exacerbated by the difficulty of the enemies and the fact that you'll lose track of which floor you're on long before you reach one of the bosses that serve as checkpoints.
 * The cherry on top for this sidequest is the Bonus Boss at the very bottom, Ragu O Ragla. He is as difficult as you might imagine him to be (he even gets his own special battle music!). You have to be completely prepared, as he uses all elements and counters all attacks. Then you have to fight him a second time right after you beat him. The prize for your day-long endeavor? A gear for a single party member that can only be equipped at the highest level.
 * In a moment of game design sadism the likes of which are rarely seen in RPGs, there is an enemy within the deeper levels of The Abyss (past level 60 and on) with an attack that will return you back to the very fucking beginning.
 * Any Oblivion player who doesn't still have "Seeking Your Roots" somewhere in the back of their list of active quests to this day either specifically avoided starting it (by never picking up a single Nirnroot, ever) or console hacked or otherwise cheated like a maniac to clear it.
 * There's no time limit on the quest and Nirnroots can be picked up while doing pretty much everything else. To fully complete the quest 100 are required but there are over three times that many scattered throughout the game.
 * Of course, when you consider how big the game actually is...
 * Similarly "The Museum of Oddities" in Shivering Isles is one for players not all that interested in completionist-y dungeon diving. Unlike Nirnroots, some of the objects you must collect for this quest spawn randomly.
 * For Morrowind, That One Sidequest is definitely the one about finding all Sanguine items. All 21 of them, tucked into the most remote corners of Vvardenfell.
 * Another in Morrowind is acquiring Eltonbrand. First, it requires you to acquire Goldbrand as part of an obscure quest that you are extremely unlikely to find on your own. (The one person in the game who tells you about it isn't exactly trustworthy and even then, his directions are bad, leading you to swimming around in the ocean further south than you need to.) Then, you get directions from Boethiah to find him/her (it's complicated) a sculptor to rebuild his/her shrine. If you manage to do that, then wait the two in-game weeks required for the statue to be built, you can finally claim Goldbrand. To upgrade it into Eltonbrand, you need to become a vampire (something most players of the game may not even realize is in the game for many, many hours) and perform a specific quest with a specific amount of gold in your inventory. THEN you get Eltonbrand. Complicated and near impossible to find on your own, but very worth it.
 * Another Oblivion quest would be the collector, finishing that one is a pain, unless you opt out midway through and finish the others in that questline instead. Ir doesn't help that the original printing of tbe strategy guide actually gave an additional location for a statues that doesn't exist.
 * Finding all the Keepers on Citadel Station in Mass Effect. Even when you know exactly where they all are, you literally have to walk/run to every remote corner of the station in order to scan all 21 Keepers.
 * Luckily, you can complete that quest by talking to his buddy and then telling him you won't do it. The true That One Sidequest in Mass Effect is getting all the companion achievements. In order to get those, you need to finish most of the game with a specific character in your party. Doesn't sound too bad? Well, that's not the main quest we're talking about... The kicker being, there are six of these achievements, and only two spots in the party. Meaning you need to finish 75% of the sidequests thrice.
 * Getting Liara's is especially bad, since you don't get her until you're already about 24% through the game, leaving absolutely no margin for error.
 * Liara is not bad. Just don't complete any Citadel sidequests. Follow the main quest straight to her. Far more egregious is the Super Power Gamer, which requires you play the entire game and every sidequest to squeak by the level cap at 50, then start a new game on the same career and play the entire game including every sidequest and UNP, to barely squeak by at 60 during the final gauntlet about five kills away from the Big Bad.
 * The DLCs give more Margin for Super Power Gamer - Your first playthrough will end at lvl 54, and Pinnacle Station will gladly shower you with xp.
 * Also, the Moon mission in the first game. There's dozens of advanced Alliance drones carrying machine guns and rocket launchers which can shred through your health at an alarming rate. You get the mission at level 20, but most people can't complete it until level 30. Even worse, you'll want to do it as soon as possible to get your Prestige Class.
 * The sequel has the Secure Smuggled Cargo mission. Aria gives you the coordinates for a stash of goods on a nearby planet. Doesn't sound so bad, until you get there and find out you have to fight three YMIR heavy mechs, and if you take too long, they destroy the cargo. It's practically a guarantee that one of them will attack you while the other two go after cargo containers, and if all the containers are destroyed, they'll all chase you. Worse, this is most likely a quest a new player will do at a lower level, since you can access it fairly easily in Omega, which is the location the game points you towards when you start.
 * You can turn this into a Curb Stomp Battle is you just use the Cain. Just fire it at the middle, everything dies, except for the crates.
 * Alternately, abuse the game's AI. The mechs only trigger when you pass a certain point on the path to the mechs; using the missile launcher, you can simply stand in the starting area and take them down without ever entering the "main" area.
 * Anachronox is heavily inspired by Final Fantasy, including following this trope. To get one character's Infinity+1 Sword you need to let PAL play in a children's area for a specific amount of time at a specific point in the game. If he plays for less than 6 hours or more than 8 hours he find other items instead. Even if he plays for the right amount of time but before reaching the specific point in the game he will get yet another item instead. This is a definite Guide Dang It moment as there is nothing in the game that hints at how long he needs to play or more importantly at what point the Infinity+1 Sword appears rather than another item.
 * The piano sidequest in Mega Man Star Force. A ten-round battle with the highest-level enemies, your HP carries over between battles, a ton of attacks flying at you all at once, making them almost unavoidable, a lot of enemies having hair-tearing gimmicks (hit that giant eye enemy with its back turned? No damage, sorry!), an enemy that can heal itself and raise 200 HP shields (for reference, a lot of your cards don't even breach 150), and to top it all off, three 1000-HP enemies that fling attacks literally every half-second at you.
 * An example in the prequel series, Mega Man Battle Network: In 3, it's the Time Trials. To get the fifth star (which allows the unlocking of the Omega Navis), you have to clear every named Navi in the game (their beta versions, if available, excluding Bass) within a time limit. Not too bad, right, especially since a great folder can three-turn almost any boss? Nope. To clear them, you have to use the crappy pre-made folders found with random people in the game. You can't set a preset chip, so it's all up to randomness. The other one is the slab hiding the Hub.BAT Navicust piece. 20 battles in a row, with enemies that can cover the field with attacks, and the last few battles have the Aura nonsense going on.
 * Getting all of anything in a Mega Man X game certainly qualifies.
 * The Kick all the Lucky Animals sidequest in .hack is one thanks to the need to hop all over the playing fields to find each variety, having to avoid getting Blessed with Suck from the unlucky types, and getting them all is pretty much a Guide Dang It because the method for generating them isn't that obvious.
 * But the Flyer quest is an even better example, once you hit all the towns you have to wander the fields and hope that the medical team would even show up, and then it's very likely you got them on the list already. Unlike the lucky animals, there's no known method for making the Medical squad appear.
 * Tales of Symphonia has a few annoying sidequests, but none quite as bad as getting Sheena's Treasure Hunter title. It requires you to find every treasure chest in the game, a feat that is made significantly harder by several factors, such as many of them being well-hidden, others rendered inaccessable after certain points (most notably almost every chest from the human ranches and the two late-game visits), and possibly a glitch in counting (many Katz will give you an incorrect count for the number of chests you've missed in an area, and there are several reports of people getting stuck at 99.6% despite using a guide for the ENTIRE game).
 * How about Colette's Dog Lover title (name every dog in the game) or Zelos's Gigolo title (talk to every female NPC in the game with Zelos as your onscreen character and with his Personal EX Skill equipped)? Not to mention Genis's I Hate Gels! title, which requires you to reach the first fight against Pronyma, more than halfway through the game, without using a SINGLE Gel, EVER. And since Gels are pretty much the only healing items you have... Sure, Raine can heal your HP, but what about MP?
 * The Gigolo title can actually be gotten far easier by this method: Get the three golden items, a spider figurine, a shard of glass, and some other sort of something, from the various inner self battles towards the end of the game in the now empty Half-Elf village. Before moving on to defeat the Big Bad, go back to Meltokio and talk with Zelos's butler. You'll get the title automatically. Now, does this still count? Oh, yes. Why? Guide Dang It. Come on. Would you have really ever thought to do that if I hadn't pointed it out just now?
 * The Gigolo title for Zelos is easy to get in game, so long as you know it exists. And even if you don't, the mofo gets items from every girl he talks to. And money. And if you put luck items on him (which are pretty easy to get) you'll get rare items like Rune Bottles from the girls you talk to. And if your luck stat is still low, just rest at the inn. Why would you ever not have Zelos as your onscreen character, and why wouldn't you talk to every girl you see? It just takes a little exploring. The truly difficult titles are the Colosseum titles, specifically for Raine and Genis. Even with the best equips you can get for them, they take forever to kill anything if you don't have the right EX Combination. Not to mention Raine's Sole Survivor title. Or the low level play through (in which all your characters combined levels needs to be UNDER level 46) at the Remote Island Human Ranch, near the end of the first disk. There's also defeating at the end of the Colosseum to get Last Fencer for item completion. Using the wooden sword up until the Kilia battle. 100% completing the monster book? Figurines? Items? Nifelheim? Finding all the Demon Weapons? This game is full of irritatingly tricky and frustrating titles. At least getting Zelos' Gigolo title really helps you with item gathering.
 * Also, Paw Dandy takes FOREVER to get to pop up, and will only pop up if you've gotten the equally hard to get skit with Presea and Corrine. And it's one of Regal's titles, so if you want that 100% completion you're going to spend a long while waiting for it to show up.
 * The skit in question ("Poke-Poke") is Lost Forever if you don't see it before entering the Temple of Lightning. The skit only shows up during the trip to the Temple of Lightning and (as mentioned) takes forever to appear (exponentially longer than the trip to the Temple should take you).
 * Tales of Symphonia 2 had a VERY annoying dungeon knowns as Gladsheim. It's only ten floors... each of which takes forever. You're only allowed to save on the third and sixth floors. Did I mention that each floor is so repetitive, you'll be begging for a way out? To advance, you have to get to each of the four corners on the grid. But wait, there's the treasure on each of the floors, each of which grant you special abilities. These treasures are put in random squares. And the square's aren't all "go wherever you want." There are one way squares, dead end squares, and the like. It doesn't help that most of these squares look exactly the same, so you'll wonder if you're going in circles. And if you die on the final boss, you have to start from your previous save. Which will probably be on the sixth foor.
 * When I took on the Gladsheim, I kept paper handy and drew a friggin' map while playing. I hoped it would help if I went on a New Game+, but the place is randomized.
 * Even worse is one of Emil's titles requires you to play through a good portion of the game without ever changing his title, therefor robbing him of some very crucial stat buffs. Getting 100% of the skits also requires a lot of patience and waiting.
 * Tales of Vesperia has its "Secret Missions," which are special tasks you can complete during boss fights that give you extra Grade and reward you with a costume title if you get them all. A lot of these are easily done, but then there's Yeager. Jesus mothereffin' Christ, Yeager. First of all, you have to fight your way to the second half of the battle, which is quite a task in itself as he attacks very quickly and is very strong. When he, you might figure, and rightly so, that the Secret Mission is to get it to somehow stop working. You do this by breaking his guard - a difficult task with normal enemies, let alone a boss - and having Raven use his first arte (which explodes on enemies if they've been guard-broken) within an extremely tight timeframe. Needless to say, there are tons of Youtube videos and message board posts asking how the hell you pull off that process correctly. There are still enough variables involved so that success is pretty much random.
 * By the way, have fun trying to get the spear Brionac (one character's best non-Fel Arm weapon)! The sidequest for getting this one involves ten distinct parts, none of which are hinted at in-game and are very easily missable. The first two parts must be done before you even get the character in the party! To top it off, if you miss just one part, the weapon is Lost Forever unless you start a New Game+. Fortunately, you can purchase the ability to carry all of the weapons you obtained in your previous save file with enough Grade, which isn't hard to obtain.
 * Yuri's Dark Enforcer Title is fairly vague on how to start it and like Brionac above has a very small window to complete each part.
 * Let's not forget about the entire dog map sidequest.. Actually, yes, let's do just that.
 * The dog map isn't really that hard, it's just the game never tells you that you need to mark every location listed in the "fields" category of the world map (actually 95% of them), not just fill the map with the blue blur. You can easily complete the quest simply by checking the fields list and doing them all in order. What's worse, many guides don't even give this information.
 * Tales of Phantasia had the Elwin and Nancy sidequest. So many event flags, one of which, if memory serves me correctly, can only be accomplished during a very short period of time in which you wouldn't normally be passing through that town. Anju and Kafei were easier to unite.
 * Gelda. Fricking. Nebilim. Have fun dying.
 * Getting all the cooking titles in Tales of the Abyss is also a pain, if only because of how freaking long it takes. Each character earns a title for mastering all twenty recipes. To master a recipe, they must cook it thirty times. Oh, and once you've cooked something, you can't cook again until after you fight another battle. That means one must fight a minimum of 3600 battles in order to get the cooking mastery titles for all six characters. To put that into perspective, unless you grind a lot, you probably wouldn't fight much more than 600 battles during the course of the entire game. At least cooking levels can be carried over into a New Game+...
 * It helps if you know that you don't need to actually win a battle to cook a recipe again. Entering a battle and then quickly running away can speed up this process substantially. Still repetitive as hell, though.
 * Baten Kaitos Origins has a sidequest that takes longer to finish than every other sidequest and the main quest combined. To accomplish it, you must feed one of your quest magnus one copy of every other quest magnus in the game. 3 of them are permanently missable, 3 of them take 30 hours in real time to create (seriously), and there's a ton more that are in highly unintuitive places. Some of them can only be acquired by accepting a sidequest that doesn't show up on your sidequest list, some of them are semi-missable (you can recreate them, but it's a major pain to do so), and MANY of them can only be acquired by letting them age. One of the quest magnus you need to use for this doubles as an ingredient for the game's Infinity+1 Sword. And to make matters even worse, you have no in-game means of keeping track of which magnus you've used for this. Forgotten which ones you're missing? Too bad! Your reward for doing this is permanent critical hits, which would be a Game Breaker, but by the time you're done with this nightmare, you should be good enough to stomp the final boss into dust without it..
 * It doesn't compare with the one listed above, but Mizuti's sidequest in Eternal Wings needs to be mentioned here. Remember Zosma Tower? All those damn timed 3D Block Puzzles, done with a static camera that sometimes doesn't show you what you need to see? Well, you're going back there, down into the basement for five all new levels of fun. One particularly nasty puzzle requires you to use an elevator as a block stop. While it's in motion. Finally at the bottom? Remember that irritating boss fight, between Xelha and the Ice Goddess? They recreated it, this time between Mizuti and the Shadow Wizard.
 * The Lost Sanctum quest in Chrono Trigger DS is quickly rising in the ranks as That One Sidequest. To wit: inescapable, scripted battles, going up and down the same mountain at least seven times, and not being able to progress without speaking to the right NPC to set off an event flag, despite having all the items necessary to proceed. And the rewards are quickly outclassed by those found in the post-game dungeon, the Dimensional Vortex. Hell, most of the rewards are outclassed by the rewards from the sidequests that were in the original game. The only upside to this is that the repetitive battles do allow for significant TP grinding, allowing you to quickly gain everyone's techs.
 * Good luck maxing all the social links in Persona 4 if you haven't played the game before. Magaret requires lots of sheer luck and money sunk into her link, Ai's is the only one that can break or reverse, the Fox's take a few days to accomplish each and if you aren't doing them concurrently with your main quest, you can never catch up, and Naoto's requires max courage and knoweldge. While knoweldge is an easy stat to raise, courage is not. At all. And those are just the more obnoxious ones.
 * Persona 3 is even WORSE. A knowledgeable player in P4 can finish all the social links with a month to spare, including time for adventures. The same player in P3 would be lucky to have two days left at the end, and adventures don't even take up a full day in that game. Granted, the reason you have so little time left is because there's a social link that can only be started in the last month, but even without taking this link into account, you'll only finish with about a week and a half left.
 * And completing the Persona compendium requires maxing all the social links, grinding your character to level 90 fusing personas all the way up, and... you'll still have only 98% completion because three personas are only obtainable by special fusions that the game never tells you about. Norn can be guessed if you know a bit of mythology (Clotho + Lachesis + Atropos, the Greek equivilents of the Norns), but Messiah (Orpheus + Thanatos) makes sense only in retrospect. And without a walkthrough, you're not likely to know Shiva (Rangda + Barong) even exists.
 * Shiva is actually far simpler than the others if you've played other SMT games for one reason - Shiva's "recipe" has never changed in the entire series. If you've played any SMT or Persona game before, you'll know what Rangda + Barong will make.
 * Star Ocean the Second Story has a combination sidequest plus final boss: If you get to just before the final boss, and then leave and visit a specific town, it'll remove the boss's limiter, turning the final boss, who is easily doable around level 50 to a ridiculously powerful monster, requiring levels in the 200s just to avoid being instantly killed even while wearing items which reduce the damage he does with his elemental attacks. The resultant grind is ridiculously long.
 * Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. The Pit of 100 Trials. Have fun.
 * Super Paper Mario: Having fun yet? How about doing the same thing twice?
 * But of course the Bonus Boss won't fight you unless you beat it for a third time.
 * The original Paper Mario has Chuck Quizmo. It's not hard, just incredibly annoying. You have to find a spot where he (might) spawn, then just keep running back and forth until he does. Over. And. Over. Again. He has fully one third of the game's Star Pieces, and will give you only one every time he shows up.
 * The most expensive Frog Coin in Super Mario RPG requires 500 coins to initiate a series of trades. And you only get a Frog Coin every other time; most of the time it is...significantly less than 500 coins.
 * Guide Dang It: Seed and Fertilizer. You might not even catch the Fertilizer. But the Infinity+1 Sword and Infinity Plus One Armor are there.
 * Another Guide Dang It: The Frog Coin in Mushroom Castle. If you don't get it your first time there, it's Lost Forever.
 * To clarify, there is a hidden chest in the main room of the Mushroom Castle, which requires you to hop on the head of Toad to give you enough of a boost to actually get the damn thing. You have one shot at it, and no sign that it's even there. Mercifully, you get an item that chimes when you enter the room that still has a hidden chest. Long, long after this event.
 * The Fallen in The Last Remnant. Nigh impossible on a regular playthrough. Several of his attacks can randomly kill any party member in 1 hit, often killing more than 1 per turn. Any units that survive take roughly 50% damage. He also has a 10-turn limit after which your whole team is annihilated, regardless of how well you were doing. To top it off, improper (read: normal & suggested in-game) grinding makes the fight even tougher due to enemies scaling with your Battle Rank instead of your stats. To counteract this, people do the counter-intuitive "Low-BR" playthroughs in order to be maximize stat growth just for this fight.
 * There is a trick to defeating The Fallen, that while it requires a bit of grinding, pays off in the long run. The trick is grinding a specific character with a high rank in Hexes so he gets Cachexia, an energy-draining spell. If used at the end of the round, it prevents the boss from using his mega-attacks. It's fairly easy after that. However, The Fallen's DLC reskin The Lost is even harder, with higher stats, better attacks, and he only gives you 5 turns before everyone dies. And there's even less of a reward.
 * Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne has the Labyrinth of Amala, which is only mostly optional, but whose mandatory parts are significantly easier than its optional parts. Bear in mind that "significantly easier" in the case of a Megaten game is like saying "we're going to blow your head off, then burn and desecrate your corpse" instead of "we're going to burn you alive and mutilate your daughter while forcing you to watch." and so you can imagine the treats you're in for in the rest of the dungeon. To top it all off, the last area has a door that can only be opened by the first ally to ever join you. Hope you didn't dismiss said ally as being too underpowered at some point along the way, 'cause you ain't getting them back.
 * The good news regarding that door is that you don't specifically need that first ally as they are when you first get them. Any evolution or fusion involving that ally will work, but  The reward might not be worth the effort, as all you get is.
 * To elaborate: the optional Amala Grave Run involves killing all past bosses in a limited amount of turns. A very limited amount of turns. On the other hand, the reward is an Extra Press Turn.
 * Getting the Amala Ring in Digital Devil Saga is quite the task. To be able to obtain it, you have to beat the Hitoshura, who is quite possibly the hardest boss in RPG history. It's that hard to do. The kicker? The ring can't be obtained in Digital Devil Saga 1. You get it by buying Digital Devil Saga 2 and transferring data from your save file of Digital Devil Saga 1. Yes, it's a sidequest that costs actual money.
 * Digimon World 4 has a sidequest that is already brutal in that you can't use heal techs/items once you get into the area where the quest is, not to mention plenty of traps that do damage based on your MAX HP. As if that wasn't brutal enough, to unlock a specific digivolution for the Digimon you started as, you have to beat it on the hardest (I think) game difficulty setting (think Diablo II difficulty settings here), with a hinted at special condition that you finish off the boss with one HP remaining. I know self-imposed challenges aren't meant to be here, but you don't have to do this to complete the quest, you DO have to do it in order to unlock the best reward, so it's kind of a twist where the self-imposed challenge is optional. To get yourself DOWN to 1 HP without killing yourself (and automatically failing the quest, which means you have to start it over from the beginning), you have to use a quick-sand pit and let yourself get sucked in repeatedly until you have 1 HP left. THEN you have to navigate your way past a lot of traps (hopefully you took out the walls first before you went down to 1 HP, if not, you're in deep trouble), and kill the boss without letting it hit you once. Did I mention the boss can summon lightning that can strike you anywhere if you don't keep whaling on it accurately?
 * In Legend of Mana, one of the sidequests you can undertake is to rescue a despondant organ grinder from the Underworld. Which, for this subquest, are policed by Mook Bouncers that will teleport you back to the very bottom level of should you so much as brush against one. And in the later levels, they disappear from view a few seconds after you enter the room. (At least the game does give you a little bit of mercy in that you encounter fewer of these bouncers each time you get sent back.)
 * Slightly less annoying, but still a pain in the rear, is an early subquest to sell lamps to the Dudbears. You're taught a few phrases in the Dudbear language, and then it's off to negotiate a series of dialogue trees so that they'll buy your lamps. It's somewhat made up for by the fact that you get 1000 Lucre per lamp, and the guy you have to give the money to doesn't even care if you don't give him the full 3000.
 * Fallout: New Vegas The companion quests are hard enough to start, which, often have to be triggered by being in certain places with those companions, but sometimes you may unknowingly make it so that you lose the opprotunity to gain the "points" needed to start the quests. The worst case is Raul, who you can only find by going to a place filled with xenophobic Super Mutants that you aren't going to even want to try to get into until you're a decent level. However, once you finally get Raul, in order to start his quest, you need to talk with a few specific NPCs who you cannot have talked with before. If you have talked with them, then sucks to be you. Fortunately, this was fixed in a patch.
 * There's also The Legend of the Star. You need fifty Sunset Sarsaparilla blue star bottlecaps. There are only one hundred of these scattered throughout the game, and the physics mean you could easily bump into them and not notice them being knocked to the floor, or heaven forbid clipping through it. You can also get them through drinking SS, but there's only a 5% of their showing, meaning you need 1000 bottles. Your only rewards are a crapton of worthless trinkets, a unique energy pistol, and a bronze trophy.
 * The chance for a bottle to drop a star cap isn't determined until you actually drink it, so you can get 50 caps right near the start of the game if you aren't averse to a little Save Scumming.
 * Another quest, "I Put a Spell on You," isn't difficult and might not even be that bad for some people. You need to find a mole in Camp McCarran, and it culminates in finding out that.
 * Sudeki has the Omnium Collector sidequest, required for one character's Infinity+1 Sword. As the title suggests, it involves finding a total of 21 chunks of Omnium, which are dropped by enemies in the dungeon you just cleared. The catch is these things are expensive and drop only 5% of the time (at a generous guess) from an enemy that has only a 50-50 chance of appearing at each encounter, and said encounters can only be created by running repetitively back and forth between two rooms of the dungeon. Also, unlike every other collection sidequest in the game, this is the only place to gather omnium, it never appears by breaking the crates that litter the scenery.
 * Two other sidequests are equally obnoxious, but for Guide Dang It rather than tedium. One, Heart's Heart, requires going back into a dungeon after defeating the boss and being given every indication to leave. It's not Lost Forever if you don't, but the way to get it afterward is so arbitrary some believe the event flags are badly programmed. The other is a collection request the player probably has the stuff for in their pocket when it becomes available, but just starting the quest requires heading somewhere out of the way that you have absolutely no reason to go, and claiming the reward involves tediously sneaking through an area patrolled by guards that will kick you out on sight.
 * Knights of the Old Republic 2 had the infamous sequence in the Telos military base. Already the hardest part of the entire game, it's got this annoying side quest where you have to escort the dumbest person in the universe out of the base. It's not even quest per se, You can just tell him to follow you out, and lead him back to the exit. The character's AI is so bad, he will only follow you if certain conditions are met (distance, direct line of sight, etc), leaving the player to go back for hin every 10 meters. And god help you if he gets stuck behind something. The sequence can last at least 10 minutes, and besides a few light side points it's completely pointless. Of course it might be useful for lowering the cost of your healing spell, which is vital at this part.
 * Final Fantasy XIII-2 has the Lucky Coin fragment. To get it, you have to win 7777 coins at the slots. Besides likely requiring a high starting investment, this can take hours of mind-numbing slots. The game does include an auto-play option, but the way the game is set up you need to be at least paying peripheral attention to take advantage of the special modes that give decent payouts. Not hard, but very, very boring.

Simulation Game

 * The original Wing Commander had that infamous "Saving the Ralari" mission, which classifies as both Escort Mission and Luck-Based Mission. You don't need to save the Ralari to win the game and there is no way to do a 100% Completion due to the mission branching, but if you want to complete the game without losing any mission, this one is the 13th mission.
 * Getting Gracie-brand clothing in the original Game Cube version of Animal Crossing. Considering the speed at which the game expected you to mash the A button, it probably justified the purchase of many turbo controllers.
 * That taking your chances with Wisp or the taking the easy way out (which anyone can understand why) by using universal cheat code passwords at Nook's store.
 * The Gulliver items in City Folk. In all my time of playing the game, I've only even seen the UFO once, and of course by the time I got out my slingshot it was gone.
 * Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has the fortune cookie furniture, for completionists out there. Usually, this kind of Luck-Based Mission is forgiven if it is lenient enough, but some furniture are only available temporarily. Of course, those special furniture rarely show up during daily rotation, so the only other option is buying them using Leaf Tickets, but their high price of 50 Leaf Tickets and the possibility of getting duplicates can cause not only tediousness but also a quick money drain for completionists. This also extends to unlocking special Memories that require certain furniture from said event because of this.
 * The fourth mine in Harvest Moon DS: a 65,535 floor nightmare Marathon Level. The only real reasons to even try are A) To get the Dragon Goddess Ball, which will grant you one of several wishes, or can be kept in your inventory to slowly increase your farm's rating and B) a special event that can only be seen by reaching the final floor. It's damned expensive (You pretty much have to fill your rucksack with TurbojoltXLs and BodigizerXLs to stand a real chance) and frustrating (the monsters there are the toughest in the game, and the mine pits can drop an instant death-bringing 100 floors at a time) and other than the aforementioned Goddess Ball, all the good mine items are in the much smaller Mine #3 - which you had to finish to even unlock #4.
 * This is actually fairly easy if you have the Kappa Hat from the 3rd mine - it prevents your health from falling below zero, so long as it isn't zero before you fall through a hole. So you find the hole in the floor, eat some Black Grass (which is common as dirt) and bingo, you'll have zero health after you fall through. And the monsters won't harm you when you're wearing this hat.
 * And before that, you had the Swimming Contest from Back to Nature, which you needed to win to gain all the engergy bar-increasing Power Berries. You had to tap a button in a certain rhythm to swim at a proper pace: too slowly and Kai will beat you every time. Too quickly, and you'll run out of energy and have to stop for a few seconds... and everybody will beat you. There isn't even a prize for second place.
 * Harvest Moon: Magical Melody: Getting to the bottom of either of the frigging caves. If you're really lucky, you'll fall down weak spots in the ground that send you down multiple floors. If you're not so lucky, you'll fall...up weak spots several floors. Using the hoe guarantees that you can go down, but that's only in special areas and only one floor at a time. Plus, by the time midnight rolls around, you'll need to save all of the stamina you can get. There are 100 floors before you get to the bottom. Oh, and the cave on the lake has a rare and valuable fish you need to catch at the bottom, so if you forget to bring the rod then opps, try again!
 * The Hub plotline in X3 Terran Conflict. Requires several hours of building massive factories to pump out the absurd number crystals, microchips, and other refined materials.
 * Getting the wishing well in The Sims 2: Seasons. To get it, you need to get a perfect score from the Garden Club. To do this, you spend hours and hours tending, spraying and watering your garden, praying that it doesn't snow or rain and destroy all your work, spend thousands of simoleons on flowers, hedges and decorations (Which also require a lot of upkeep) and eventually, talking to the trees to increase their health. When (if) you finally get the wishing well, you can select three wishes. Two of them are quite useful, but wishing for money gives you a pathetically tiny sum of 1000 simoleons (Which is probably nowhere near how much you've spent working on the garden) and all three wishes are likely to fail, with disastrous results.

Sports Game

 * Collecting all of the snowflake tokens in SSX 3. White tokens on a white surface are not easy to spot.
 * In the DS version of Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, there are five missions for each character. One of Sonic's takes place at the triple jump. Your goal? To clear 15 feet... while making sure all your jumps are 50+ degrees DESPITE ALREADY WONKY ANGLE CONTROLS.

Stealth Based Game

 * Due to a bug, it's impossible to get 100% completion on the V R missions of the PC version of Metal Gear Solid. One of the missions teaches the player to use the run & shoot trick, but holding down the necessary keys listed does not work. This is either a mistake by the PC conversion team, or the old problem of PC keyboard I/O not understanding too many simultaneous keypresses (the run & shoot trick requires you to hold down 5 keys at the same time).
 * Collecting all the flags in Assassin's Creed. It doesn't help that they're tiny and are perfectly camoflauged thanks to the gray and dusty look of the game. It's slightly easier in Acre because there are three separate flag types that are only found in a specific districts, but everywhere else only has a general flag type, so it's easy to miss flags and never know where to begin searching, short of having a good memory or a guide. What makes this sidequest worse is that there is no reward to it.
 * In the second game, you have to collect 100 feathers which are also as hard to find as the flags in the first game. However, they emit a sound when you are near, are much easier to find in the night time, and actually give you a reward this time around.
 * Not to mention killing all 60 of the special Templar enemies. They're located in certain spots in Acre, Jerusalem, Damascus, and the Kingdom. Some of them are fairly well hidden, and without a guide you'll probably only find them with luck. Add to that at least one, if not more, has the tendency to glitch and not appear leading you to believe you may have already killed it. There's also no reward.

Turn-Based Strategy

 * Final Fantasy Tactics has a few. First off, there's the only real sidequest in the game, which is a long series of somewhat unconnected events, which provides two of the best unique characters in the game, as well as a few others, and Cloud. It requires you to visit unlabled sections of the map, and in some cases, use the otherwise ignorable 'rumors' section of the bar. The rumors section is only EVER used for background events (Basically, it provides info on the war that is the backdrop for the plot) besides this quest, and the plot of the game can be fully understood without ever going there. It's not so bad if you have a guide, but you'll likely never get to the end of it without a guide, as it's pretty common to forget the 'rumors' section of the game even exists.
 * Deep Dungeon requires use of the rumors section to unlock as well, and is found in a very isolated portion of the map. The Deep Dungeon itself is completely unlit, except by spell animations and crystals left behind by dead enemies. In it, you need to find the exit to proceed to the next floor, which is completely unlabled even in the light, and even changes between one of five spots each time it's loaded. Why do you want to go there in the first place? Well, two reasons.
 * First off, each floor has four very powerful and rare items hidden similarly to the exits, though their location is static. Whats worse, however, is that finding these items require a unit to be equipped with Move-Find Item, an ability that is all but useless in the rest of the game. Second, even if you do know where these items are, you have a chance of finding an Elixir (a useful item, but they hardly compare to what you lost) instead, rendering these items Lost Forever. How do you increase your odds of finding the good item? Use a unit with low Brave, a stat which, by the time you get to Deep Dungeon, all of your characters should have over 80. And your odds of finding the elixir instead is equal to your brave. While it's easy to lower, a player playing without a guide who just happens to be using Move-Find Item is likely to just get the Elixir, be happy at the nice little reward, and move on blissfully unaware that he just lost the best armor in the game.
 * The second reason is so that you can learn Zodiac, the best summon in the game. To do this, while facing the Bonus Boss of Deep Dungeon, you have to have a summoner get hit with the spell and not die. Summoners aren't known for their high HP, and this IS the most powerful summon in the game, so surviving it takes some foresight. And good luck if you want to have your own summoner teach it to another summoner in your party, which while possible, is a VERY Luck-Based Mission.
 * Like with Zodiac, Ramza can only learn the Ultima spell in three places (one of which is the final battle). The first two require you to convince Assassins with 100% success rate Stop, Charm and Insant Death status effects to use a simple damage spell on you. Not to mention it requires you draw out fights with these said units much longer than might be considered sane.
 * It's generally recommended that you learn Ultima in the first of the two fights listed above. Because the second one features Elmdor wearing a full-suit of Infinity Minus One equipment (and since multiple characters on your team can wear the same gear, you'll want to have that for the character who doesn't get first pick). You can steal it from him, but he has a very high evade rate. Until you steal the shield, you have about a 10% chance of success. Taking the shield puts it up to a 'whopping' 25%. All while trying to fight those Assassins who teach you Ultima, and Elmdor (who is no slouch himself).
 * There are several other rare items that can only be stolen from specific bosses. After Elmdor, Meliadouls Chantage is most notable. While she's not particularly hard to steal from, it doesn't change that you have to equip a special ability on all of your characters to prevent her from doing massive damage and destroying your equipment.
 * Final Fantasy Tactics sidequests, in short, are a mix of Guide Dang It, and drawing out fights with That One Boss. The worst part is that so many of them are possibly Lost Forever, meaning you can't just leave them as 100% completion side-tasks for the end of the game.
 * Recruiting the final character in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. To do this, Ike needs to fight  much earlier in the game. Now, the problem here is that under normal conditions, Ike will be unable to scratch, who in turn will generally only need two hits to obliterate Ike. The only way to survive is to make Ike fast enough to avoid the second hit, and then pick him up with another unit and have them flee far, far away before the enemy's turn. And grinding Ike for this encounter won't help either, because if you manage to win, you can't unlock  anyway.
 * Recruiting Illyana in Path of Radiance was a challenge. You have to get your main character to her, not have her attack you, and make it back to defend your fort. She has barely any health, and the enmies outnubmer you about four-to-one.
 * In Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword, unlocking chapter 19xx requires first unlocking chapter 19x, then defeating the Magic Seal, Kishuna, in that chapter. Kishuna is surrounded by high-level units, has decent defense and insanely high evade, and will leave either after twelve turns (unless you kill the boss) or the turn after you attack him, whichever comes first. It's near impossible to kill him without getting a critical hit, making this a Luck-Based Mission at its finest. And for a side dash of Guide Dang It, even if you do this you won't unlock the chapter unless you played the tutorial story first and leveled a character up to level 7 - and since 19xx only shows up in the Another Side, Another Story mode you unlock when you first finish the game, you most likely skipped the tutorial story altogether!
 * ...unless you'd already done a playthrough skipping the tutorial story, at which point you'll notice that all of the characters from that story will be horribly underleveled whereas they'll keep all level-ups from the story if you played it. You'll never skip the tutorial again.
 * In Fire Emblem thracia 776, recruiting either Conomore or Amalda was quite a pain in the ass due to how many reinforcements kept coming and coming and coming. And for worse, if you wanted Amalda, you'd have to bring Sleuf to do so... and an unpromoted Sleuf = easy to capture Sleuf. (At least Miranda was a Magical Girl Warrior...)
 * In Final Fantasy Tactics A2, the quest "The Whole Truth" pits you against six Cassies (Malboro mobs), each with a breath ability that instantly charms anyone in its area of effect with 100% accuracy, another breath ability that casts both "Sleep" and "Slow," and an ability that cures surrounding allies, raises their defense, and casts "Regen" on them.
 * If you want a real annoyance, just wait until you encouter An Earnest Delight. It's a late-game dispatch mission, which can only be cleared if you have at least two Gria or Viera with complete MVP trophies or power level to around level 80 (when a well-built team can beat the final boss at level 50 on Hard).
 * The Nu Mou vs. Bangaa mission is a serious Guide Dang It; you have to complete the mission as both sides three times before you learn it's a Batman Gambit by a third party which the two then team up to fight.
 * Speaking of Final Fantasy Tactics A2, do the words Brightmoon Tor ring any bells? First you fight about a dozen battles against reasonably difficult but still pretty easily beatable characters... and then you get to the top and some Level 99 monsters kick your ass almost before your first turn.
 * Even harder than all of the above, once you finish all 300 quests, you gain access to one final tournament. The first few battles are extremely tough even with a max-level party, but the absolute worst is the third or fourth battle. It pits you against a bunch of Master Tonberries and a bunch of enemies who are only too eager to cast Haste on them. Oh, and they get to take about six free rounds before you're even allowed to move. And the Tonberries are guaranteed to hit for 999 damage in a game where it's nigh impossible to have more than about 600 HP. If you're really lucky, you might still have one character left by your first turn. And if, by some miracle, you manage to win? You don't even get a Bragging Rights Reward, you get to watch the credits again.
 * The first Arc the Lad game contains one of the most ridiculous sidequest goals ever: win 1,000 Arena battles. The battles are easy, and by the time you've gotten even halfway to 1,000 wins, you'll have earned enough experience points to bring your entire team to the level cap several times over. The primary challenge involved in getting to 1,000 wins is simply being obsessed enough to keep fighting the same enemies, over and over again, for hour after hour, in spite of the sheer tedium involved in doing so. If you're actually insane enough to reach 1,000 wins, the Arena manager will reward you with a huge supply of the game's best accessories for you to take with you into the sequel, then tell you to turn off the console, go outside, and get a life!
 * Luminous Arc 2's Spa Battles, oh god. It's an entirely optional sidequest near the end of the game, which the party was asked by Expys of Luminous Arc's Cecille (Cecillia) and Huge (Yugo) to clear out the Kopins from their hotsprings, with free spa baths (AKA special Hot Spring Intermissions for the 100% Completion). Think it'll be easy since it's just Kopins? No, it's not. Each hot spring location is a series of battles against high-levelled stat-specialised Kopins, with either extremely high Defence or Resistence, which you won't know until the battle begins, meaning it's easy for players to accidentally dispatched the wrong party members for the battle. The last battle of each location is with That One Boss, who can easily dishes out more damage than your HP can withstand without proper preparations (even when you nullify her Fire magic, her boosted physical attack can still hurts you). Oh and you face her while those high-levelled Popins keep on respawning and bothers you with their numbers and speed.
 * After each battle with, you can view a Hot Spring Intermission with one of the party members who's deployed throughout the series of battles in one location. The fun comes in getting the other Intermissions from other party members you don't use normally in tough battles. You can have only 5 of the party members' Intermissions from this sidequest per playthrough. Each new hot spring location is tougher than the last. Yippee.
 * Getting the Vandaler class in Vandal Hearts. It's an Eleventh-Hour Superpower for your main character that gives him every learnable spell, autoblock on all frontal and side attacks, an absurdly high block rate for back attacks and sky high stats and unique equipment that's better than anything in the game. You just have to find each of the six Prisms, one in each chapter, in battles that aren't repeatable. Some of the Prisms just require you to examine a strange looking tile, some require you to talk to a certain person in a tavern, complete a secret objective in a battle and then talk to the person again, despite them not actually telling you the objective. One requires you to find and not sell three unique, valuable items in previous chapters that are only found by examining out of the way tiles in intense fights. And after that, each one puts you into a special challenge battle in which you not only have to defeat all the enemies, but make sure to get the special item in a difficult to get to chest. One such battle requires you to actively place your units not to kill enemies with counterattacks and navigate a difficult block pushing puzzle in which one wrong move makes it all impossible. Do all this, you get to use the Vandaler class for the past few battles.
 * The easiest Prisms to find require you to send a unit to a counter intuitive location on the off-chance that funny looking tile isn't just a quirk of some mapper's choice and is one of the pre-designated special item location.
 * Obscure PlayStation 2 game Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity allows you to recruit the Anti-Villain half of the Big Bad Duumvirate, Viser. This is a game-long sidequest (he is only recruitable whilst Storming the Castle of the Final Boss) and is so convoluted that it's beyond Guide Dang It: of the game's two guides on GameFAQs, one is only half-sure how to recruit him and the other offers no suggestions whatsoever.

Wide Open Sandbox

 * The Grand Theft Auto series has many examples.
 * The Taxi missions. Collecting an inordinate amount of passengers one at a time, each of which other demand to be driven the entire length of the island you're on, to get the useless ability to make taxi cabs (and only them) jump into the air on command. The only saving grace is that you don't have to do them all in one go.
 * The Paramedic missions, specifically in Grand Theft Auto III. A top-heavy ambulance that's prone to tipping, no map support, pitiful time bonuses, and no cumulative progress made this a LOT harder than it had to be. And God help you if you try to do this in the Portland area . Vice City was just as bad, considering that, if you did it early, you had to drive on the beach, which had so many bumps and such poor traction that you would probably do a complete roll by acccident.
 * Firefighter in Shoreside Vale in III, due to the difficulty in quickly getting across the two islands.
 * The final Ammunation shooting range and trucking missions in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
 * Grand Theft Auto Vice City's RC Plane missions are an even better example - the horrid flying controls had legions of gamers tearing out their hair in frustration.
 * Same for Zero's RC missions in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Nearly impossible. Thankfully, not required.
 * Any missions requiring players to fly real planes, although, unfortunately, many of those were required. It only gets worse when the player has to do most of them with a plane with the poorest handling in the game.
 * There is also an unfortunate, but funny occurrence. On PC, the driving school sidequest of San Andreas cannot be done with an old keyboard because the player is required to press three keys simultaneously.
 * Except for the fact you can just activate mouse controlled steering, then just press forward and reverse, then turn.
 * Speaking of the driving school, the final mission requires you to drive the full length of the city and back, with an insane time limit. You also need to take zero damage, which means that not only can you not hit anything but you need to cross you fingers every time you mount the kerb or brake too hard.
 * Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The Driver mission. And that's all I'm saying, though I will point-out that the next mission (The Job) justifies how hard this one.
 * Specifically what makes it irritating is the fact that
 * Get a 3 star wanted level first- your opponent should run over one of those tire poppers, allowing you to finish the race a little more easily.
 * Another San Andreas example is the cycling races. To start off you need to get yourself to the top of extremely high, steep mountain. Once there you can start several races that require you to hurtle down the mountain tracks on a push bike at ridiculous speeds whilst being jossled and cut off by AI riders. If you cycle off the track (or are rammed) then you almost certainly won't make first place. If you fall off the bike then you almost certainly won't make first place. You will be disqualified if you shoot the other racers (you will quickly try to resort to this). One race even involves an obstacle course with narrow balance beams. The worst part is that there is no easy way to restart the races if you fail, so you will have to climb back up the mountain every time you screw up. In fact, the quickest way to get back for another go is to reload a save at your airport base, fly half-way across the state and crash into the summit.
 * Picking up all the orbs in Crackdown. Unlike Grand Theft Auto's packages, there are hundreds upon hundreds orbs, many small and easy to miss, and with such density (and vertical displacement) as to be maddening to find even with a map. Reaching a scenario where one or two orbs are missing is extremely easy.
 * Let's not forget how the game's save likes to corrupt on people shortly after or before getting all the orbs. Can't let you do that, 4-star Agent!
 * Similarly, most racing missions in the latest Grand Theft Auto and many clones. Rubber Band AI at its worst.
 * Let the cars get ahead of you. They'll Charlie Foxtrot each other in an orgy of self annihilation. Then drive calmly, slow down in turns, and you're cherry. The biggest problem is your vehicle's endurance: you don't want it to be a flaming wreck until just after you passed the finish line. If you're playing IV, use one of the rear engined cars (like the Comet) Compared to the Ambulance missions in III and the RC missions in SA, the racing in all version is a cinch.
 * Mention the tow truck missions to any player of Saints Row 2, and they will regale you with how frustratingly hard and annoying it is. To start, the tow truck is slow. And the cars you hitch behind it love to wobble and wave, and eventually jackknife, usually getting you stuck. Especially on the higher levels when you have several gang cars shooting at you, its a hair puller. And to top it off, you can't heal. If the tow truck starts smoking before level 6, you don't have a chance. And there's no checkpoint. Blow up 2 feet from your destination on level 10? Too bad skippy, back to level 1 with you.
 * Escort is another irritatingly-difficult one. You're basically driving a hooker and a client around town while they get it on in the back seat, evading news vans along the way. Problem is, those news vans are very fast (possibly even faster than when you drive them), relentless, and will occasionally set up roadblocks in front of you. Even worse, shooting guns to kill the vans' drivers lowers the Pleasure meter (which needs to fill up for success), though satchel charges don't seem to drop the meter. But the worst part is that you will sometimes be required to drive to a certain place (often on the other side of town), perform powerslides, run over people, hit other cars, etc., and the Pleasure meter WILL NOT MAKE FURTHER PROGRESS until you do so. Good luck dodging news vans with nothing better to cover than two people having sex in the back of a car for that long.
 * In Saints Row the Third, Snatch is even more irritating than Escort. Why? The people you need to snatch sometimes get stuck on your car and won't get in. Sometimes they get knocked down and take precious seconds to get back up. Maybe they do get in the car, but some asshole gang member pulls you out of the driver's seat, making them get back out. And all while you're trying to get them in the car, you've got an entire army of gang members trying to kill you, often bringing in the Specialists and Brutes. It won't take long before they bring in enough Morning Star snipers to turn the whole damn place into a laser rave, and need we highlight the fact that their sniper rifles can make your vehicle explode after a few shots?
 * Another reason is that Escort is now easier, since the vans are slower and not as numerous. However, the irritating "do X before the Pleasure meter will fill further" requirements are still intact...at least for traditional Escort. There's also Tiger Escort, which trades that for a tiger in the passenger seat that will occasionally claw the Boss and cause your steering to drift left or right randomly, along with an Animal Rage failure meter that will decrease over time, unlike standard Escort's Footage meter.
 * Getting 100% completion in every area of LittleBigPlanet is an exercise in futility. Yes, I've heard that people have done it. These people are lying. Somehow, someway, they have cheated. I can understand completing some of the harder areas like The Metropolis, or The Canyons. But to ace The Islands, The Temples, and The Wilderness AND obtain all of the items in the stage is practically a superhuman feat. The worst offender is a spinning wheel of death that will throw you into an instant-death electrocution if you have not either: A) perfectly memorized the working's of LBP's physics system, or B) inherited a sort of muscle memory due to playing that part of the stage over and over. You'll still feel stupid when you find out how to do it the easy way.
 * Getting 100% displayed for an area does not involve finishing the whole level without dying, it is simply a matter of getting all the treasure bubbles. However, getting the Play trophy is very difficult.
 * Acing the first Don Jalepeno level. [/thread]. for those who haven't played the game, suffice to say, you have to beat the level without dying. Said level's primary theme is explosives. That you handle manually. Which is easy enough to do if you're careful (provided you don't accidentally stand on the wrong part of one of the switches). Then you get to the final stretch, and they throw jetpacks into the mix (more specifically flying under a series of three pillars with precise timing, then dropping a bomb on some terrain. At least twice).
 * Really getting 100% completion on this level is arguably worse, given that at least one chunk of items requires another player (and reminding you once more that this is the explosives level... With friends like these...).
 * Most of the Side Quests in Borderlands that feature you killing some sort of diabolical critter could count. You will die at Moe and Marley, and Mothrakk, many, many times.
 * Collecting every last blast shard in In Famous, it doesn't help that after a certain amount of them your Electricity storage stops going up. Also adding insult to the injury, you only get a bronze trophy for collecting them all. Furthermore, five of them require that Cole is evil.
 * You at least have an ability to sense nearby shards, although one of them is hidden so far off the coast that you can neither sense nor see it...
 * In Famous 2 made this much easier. After completing 60 sidequests you can buy Blast Shard Sense, which will spot the closest blast shard to your location. Of course, by that point you're almost finished with the game and have collected most of them anyway, but it's nice to have. (They also give you a gold trophy for collecting them all as opposed to a bronze.)