First there was the final boss of Sonic Unleashed. It was probably one of the few aspects of the game I actively didn’t like, and I actually liked Eggmanland and the nighttime stages. There’s two phases, but the issue is mainly in the first phase. The first phase is split into two parts where in the first part, you’re slowly moving towards Dark Gaia while avoiding fireballs he throws at you or punching them if you’ve realized you can’t dodge them. You have a health bar that you have to watch out for since you can’t restore it on your own. It just drags on for a while and it’s not hard but not fun either. Then you do some QTEs which are also kind of mindless, and then the next part has you running through the temple as Sonic, which is basically just a usual daytime stage which I normally love, but you’re on a time limit and there’s a lot of annoying obstacles. Since I’m being forced to do it rather than just replaying the stage for fun since I like them, I find it more annoying than it would usually be to learn the obstacle placements and dodge them. You have to do everything here three times, and the first and second time it’s manageable, but it gets insane on the last go. At the very least your health during the first section is restored between each one, but still. The QTEs in particular get really tight unless you’re doing this one exploit I always use to make them easier, but if you fail, you have to redo that entire section and your health doesn’t refill. Then the Sonic section is just as bad, and you’re allowed almost no room for error. So you’ll just end up dying a ton. The second phase is much better where you play as Super Sonic and have to destroy Perfect Dark Gaia’s shield by boosting into snakes, though it is dragged down a bit by the ending being flooded with QTEs, including one where you have to mash the X button 60 times (also ran into a rare glitch that I don’t believe is documented anywhere on the internet besides
here). I just found the first phase poorly designed and irritating, and it’s definitely not helped by the game sending you to the boss right before when you get a game over, and not ranking you on your first playthrough for arbitrary reasons. Not that it would have been a good rank anyway, but still. I was just forced to grind for lives to keep my sanity.
The next one is Mario and Luigi Dream Team. The game’s normally not super hard, but there’s a Hard Mode you get when you beat the game, and that one is. I feel like some of the difficulty is just from the game sending you back to your last save point when you game over, essentially either forcing you to rewatch every pre-boss cutscene if you ever lose to that boss, or risking you losing progress if you don’t want to save before literally every enemy encounter. It existed in the first three games but those games didn’t let you save whenever you want, while this game does, so it makes no sense to be a feature other than to add artificial difficulty. But it’s still generally pretty hard without that. Early in the game, the enemies can easily two-shot you while you’re slowly chipping away at their health. The bosses are mostly not that bad, you just have to watch out for attacks, like how Mammoshka kept killing me with this one giant rock attack that’s really annoying to dodge. They’re pretty hard, but they can definitely be beaten, especially with the right Bros. Attacks. Thanks to that and the fact that you’re leveling up, I felt like the normal bosses and enemies actually got a little
less painful to deal with the longer you played. On the other hand, the giant bosses in this mode are crimes against humanity that most definitely get harder as you go on. It’s mainly because I don’t like the controls of these in the first place, and now I have to do them but basically perfectly since healing isn’t as viable and you can’t level up to make the fights easier. The first two are fine but then Earthwake was a huge pain in the ass, mainly because of his hammer attack that shreds your health if it hits you but requires being deflected with perfect timing no less than seven times back to back, and the fact that beating him efficiently, which by extension lessens the amount of times he’ll use that attack, involves basically destroying your touch screen with the stylus. Somehow the Zeekeeper fight was even worse. It was so bad I actually stopped playing here. It was bad in the main game, and I was dreading it here. The main issue, besides the fact that he’s constantly running away from you and you don’t have many chances to attack, is that he has one attack that forces you to use gyro controls, but I swear that
at least 80% of the time they just don’t work well. Then, by proxy of it being hard mode, your attacks are basically scratch damage but he just destroys you with all of his attacks. It’s mainly that attack that made me stop playing because I genuinely felt like the gyro controls made dodging the attack impossible, plus my 3DS was crashing a lot and the last thing I wanted was that to happen right after I beat the fight. It’s probably the only fight on this list I’d say was truly awful and not just frustratingly hard, and I would absolutely never try it again if I did manage to beat it. Also, like I said, since it sends you back to your last save point, you’re forced to rewatch the cutscene every time you die, which gets unbearable.
Also, one more thing I wanted to mention is the Wily Capsule from Mega Man 7. Everyone says it’s the hardest boss in the series but… well, yeah, it’s definitely hard, definitely the hardest final boss in the Classic series specifically, besides maybe the Mega Man and Bass one or the one from the second GameBoy game. That elemental orb attack is genuine bs. But I feel like if you have a full set of four E-Tanks, and maybe one or two W-Tanks because Wild Coil is a trash weapon, it’s not as impossible as it’s made out to be. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still super unfair, but just having that many healing items makes it that you should be guaranteed the win. It’s just that I was thinking I would be stuck here for an hour but it wasn’t that bad. It definitely blows that they force you to replay the entire boss rush and the fairly easy first phase before getting another chance at it, but still.
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