Let's not even get started on what would happen if you ever decided to play with the Old Axe Armor while stuck at level one in Portrait of Ruin.

As Albus, it's a breeze until you reach the Skeleton Cave, in which you'll probably have a much harder time than Shanoa due to lack of items and the Zombie familiar, which can block fireballs for you. Order of Ecclesia, an already really hard game, becomes a nightmare until a certain point if you're playing as Shanoa.

Hard Mode Level 1 Cap without starting a New Game +.And to add more insult to injury, you can't even use the Bragging Rights Reward you get for beating the mode in a normal game in CoD like you can in LoI, making it practically useless. Former's version is still much easier than latter's and actually changes things other than the amount of damage the enemies can take and dish out, such as giving bosses additional attacks and changing a jumping puzzle, while the latter focuses more on enemies that take absurd amounts of abuse to kill and who kill you in 1 or 2 hits unless you spend the first 10 hours of gameplay grinding levels on skeletons.

Castlevania: Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness both have 'Crazy' modes unlocked after completion.

If it's simply a very difficult Hard mode (or for that matter, a very difficult game), it is not an example.Įxamples of Harder Than Hard include: Action Adventure Please note: If it's a difficulty level that's higher than an already existing hard mode, it's an example. Some games get so notorious for these modes that people will forget that normal (and easy) modes exist and only base their opinion off of the hardest difficulty modes, even if the normal difficulty is actually pretty sane.Ĭompare Nintendo Hard, Sequel Difficulty Spike, Surprise Difficulty, Rank Inflation, Brutal Bonus Level.Ĭontrast Easier Than Easy, Mercy Mode, Sequel Difficulty Drop. In many games, difficulty settings that are denoted as Harder than hardest often indicate they are not adequately playtested, and the game might be unwinnable at that setting. Of course, some games have their own names for the standard difficulty levels as well as for their ultra-difficult setting. Sometimes this can only be selected if you've already beaten the game, or beaten it on 'Hard'. Many games have several difficulty levels for the player to choose from: there's 'Easy,' there's 'Hard,' and usually one in between the two, which is typically 'Medium.' However, 'Hard' often turns out not to be the hardest level: there's an even higher difficulty level which puts 'Hard' to shame.

System shock 2 normal difficulty