Difficulty Spike: Difference between revisions

** Stages 5–6 can be the first real difficulty spike in the original Castlevania. Stage 7 is a pretty modest spike after dealing with the [[Demonic Spiders|Medusa Head]] + [[Bottomless Pit]] combo.

** ''[[Castlevania Chronicles|Akumajou Dracula X68000]]'' is even worse. Stage 7 starts off with an infinite fleet of eagles carrying Fleamen, and you can only take 4 hits before you die (which you don't experience in the NES original until you hit Stage 13). And ''then'', there's those hard-to-avoid bubble enemies and the statues that shoot arrows at you...

** Special mention must go to ''[[Super Castlevania IV]]'''s final level. A [[Rise to the Challenge]] level with a floating spike-ball rapidly making it's way up, forcing you to be constantly on the move, while jumping from small platform to small platform where a single mistake could mean death. Add falling blocks, an unexpected section with floating rocks where you must have perfect timing else you get impaled by instant-death spikes and many annoyingly placed enemies that send you plummeting to your death if they hit you, and you get many broken controllers. It really doesn't help that, if you die, you must do it all over again.

*** The best part; the game still uses old-school ''[[Castlevania]]'' physics, which means that you have to do all of the above, ''without'' ''[[Jump Physics|controllable jumping]].''

** ''[[Rondo of Blood]]'' has a really easy first level. The rest of the game is considerably more difficult, especially Stage 2 (the alternate Stage 2 isn't quite as bad, but it requires doing a more difficult boss to reach it, which is a spike in itself).

* ''[[Illusion of Gaia]]''/''Time'' does this twice - first in Mu, and again in Angkor Wat. Prior to each you're probably laughing about how you're cutting your foes down like grass, then you receive a nasty wakeup call. Matters aren't helped any by the boss of Mu, the Vampire Couple, being considered [[That One Boss]] for many players.

* Even on the harder difficulty levels, ''[[Uncharted]] 2'' is challenging, but not frustratingly so. That is, until you get to Shambhala, where even one of the natives is capable of utterly slaughtering you in the blink of an eye.

** Uncharted 3 took several spikes of difficulty once you reach the ship graveyard. You now have to deal heavily armored mooks as well as snipers, brutes, and loads of mooks spamming grenades every five seconds all at the same time.

== [[Driving Game]] ==

** also, expect the [[Hard Mode Filler|Silver Coin Challenge]] for any given race to be much harder than the original race.

* Once you reach the last part in most ''[[Need for Speed]]'' games after ''Underground'', it's not uncommon to see people switching the difficulty from Hard (or Normal) to Easy. Be very careful in ''Most Wanted'' once you reach the Rockport borough!

* ''[[Dissidia]]: Final Fantasy'''s story modes do this somewhat. The first, the Destiny Odyssey set, has you fight low level opponents. The next, Shade Impulse, the enemies you fight are all at much higher levels, so you'll have to do some level grinding before going into it. Chaos, the final boss, is extremely cheap, and many new players give up on the game because of how tough he is. Next up, Distant Glory, has enemies take a jump in difficulty. The last, Inward Chaos, all of the opponents are maxed out.

** [[Up to Eleven|Beyond maxed out]]: the enemies you face in Inward Chaos start at level 91 and end up at level 110! To make matters worse, they're all set to the highest AI competency level, which means they'll block, dodge, and counter all of your attacks. And every single one of them has very high stats and some of the best equipment in the game (only the [[Infinity+1 Sword|exclusive level 100 weapons]] are better), so unless you have comparable equipment, you won't hit hard enough, and you'll get devastated by a single combo.

** And [[SNK Boss|Unlimited Rachel]] will haunt you again when you try score attack mode as the ninth match. And there's another spike with Unlimited Nu and Unlimited Ragna!

** And then there's ''Continuum Shift,'' where the boss of arcade mode is Hazama, who is several notches above the AI you've been fighting to get to him, partly because of some [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|blatant reading of your controller inputs.]] Oh, and he's Unlimited, which means he siphons off your health and refills his own ''by being near you.''

* The final Allied mission in the original ''[[Command & Conquer]]'' also qualifies. The Soviets have two bases, on of which is very close to where you set yours. It's small, but will get big if even you don't take it early. Even when do, you will still be under nearly constant attack from the other, very large base. In short, you are in for a very long fight. Add to this, the Soviet faction in the game is arguably broken, you will only win fights against them through sheer numbers. As a silver lining, one of the attack routes the Soviets stupidly use goes through a fairly big lake that, so you can get an added punch from your destroyers (which outrange most of the Soviet units) and cruisers (best range and firepower in the game, but their shots have a sad tendency to miss, but their worth it). You also get to use the Chronosphere to move a cruiser to a lake the Soviet base and pick off some of their buildings.

* The seventh Chinese mission, '''Operation: Nuclear Winter''', in ''[[Command & Conquer: Generals|Generals]]'' also deserves its place here: the GLA throws everything but the kitchen sink at you very early on, while you are short of supplies and has barely built your base. [[Fake Difficulty|Add to that the fact that]] [[Guide Dang It|they have a SCUD launcher platform that will fire and annihilate your forces/base if you have 5000 money or more]], and you get players having one hell of a surprise. After that, the game returns to its normal curve.

== [[Rhythm Game]] ==

** In the first games, Sky Tower is markedly harder than anything you've previously done, featuring ghosts that can move through walls, changing weather, enemies with attacks that hit the entire room, and potential Monster Houses that can be extremely dangerous.

** The mine is another major difficulty spike. It's a long maze level swarming with poisonous enemies, requiring you to find and defeat five giant moles. The first time playing, you ''will'' get lost and spend a long time aimlessly wandering. And it doesn't get any better afterwards; almost immediately you get forced through the [[That One Level|Fourside Department Store]] and [[Dark World|Moonside]], both of which are even more difficult.

* ''[[Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga]]'' has this applied to [[The Very Definitely Final Dungeon]].

** ''[[Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga]]'' also has this at Joke's End, which is a [[Marathon Level]], ice level and [[That One Level]] in one, coming right after a fairly easy set of side quests and relaxed happy areas of the game. And right before the even harder final dungeon.

*** The name seems oddly fitting now.

* ''[[Golden Sun]]'' has a large difficulty spike whenever you enter one of the 4 elemental lighthouses.

** Final bosses don't tend to count for this trope unless particularly absurd—like the [[Golden Sun: Dark Dawn|DS sequel]]! At the very end of a 20-30 hour game that got a lot of flak for being trivially easy from the start all the way through the penultimate triple boss (you may well never have the slightest pressure to touch your inventory in combat throughout the game), the Chaos Chimera is quite suddenly very, very powerful and grueling on the scale of the previous games' [[Bonus Boss]]es.

*** Depending on how you look at, the original games are less or more crazy. Blue's best Pokémon are Arcanine, Gyarados and Exeggutor, at Lv. 58. What's Red ''weakest mon''? Lv. '''73''' Espeon, FIFTEEN levels higher. Five less than in remakes (Lv. 80 Lapras versus Lv. 60 Pidgeot) but when you think about... Gym Leaders and E4 don't get upgrade. The strongest trainer you can easily rematch is Lance, with [[Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|Lv. 50 Dragonite]]. That's lower than Blue's weakest Pokémon! With wild Pokémon, it goes up to Lv. 52 Parasect in Mount Silver. However, it is only Crystal. In Gold/Silver, it's Lv. 51 Golduck. And then find where they appear! In other words, prepare for LOT of grinding.

**** In GSC, while the Elite 4 doesn't upgrade, there's also a ''slightly'' lesser spike between Blue and Red's levels. Fortunately, in the remakes, the Elite 4 ''does'' upgrade to help you level grind better. Of course, you'll need every bit of grinding you can get in preparation for Red.

** Then you go back and play the series in sequence again and realize the following. Tactics, reaction time, maneuvering, and mistakes that would let you S-rank an opponent in the first game would give you about an 8 at best in BN2, 4-5 in BN3, and would in all likelihood get you outright killed in the last three.

** Each game also has a massive difficulty spike upon entering the [[Wretched Hive|Undernet]]. Say goodbye to the slow, cutesy Mets, and get used to your deadliest virus no longer being a [[Killer Rabbit|Bunny]]. Say ''hello'' to meteor-raining mages, Spikies that move faster than any Bunny you've seen so far, arena shenanigans, and absolutely brutal enemy combinations that will happily murder you and eat your source code. Granted, it's not too hard to adjust to, but the sheer spike in difficulty more than makes up for it.

* ''[[Twisted Metal]] 2'' had a very strange difficulty curve. The eight levels went something like this: very easy > hard > very easy > average > very easy > hard > OMFG COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE > average.

** The difficulty of a level was inversely proportional to the amount of cover you could find, with the easy levels having places where the AI wouldn't even go. The second level was fairly easy, but only if you managed to pick up the full health before either an opponent grabbed it or the ramp leading to it got blown up taking all of the cover and the [[Weaponized Landmark|lightning generator]] with it, in which case it just got a lot harder. Then suddenly that seventh level had ''nine'' opponents in a small square field with no cover other than two windmills that explode after ten seconds of enemy fire. Good luck.

== [[Wide Open Sandbox]] ==