The 10 Most Frustrating Moments From Classic Nintendo Games

[RetroSonicHero]

Personally, I'd put the whole "you gotta beat the game twice BS" from Ghosts and Goblins near the top.

 

Lol....ok.

 

I can't even imagine what it was like to be a kid back in the 80s and have spent hours and hours mastering the game, only to get to this screen.

[mbd39]

I'm really surprised the turbo tunnel isn't there, since it's always on these kinds of lists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Hwlngmad]

On 7/16/2021 at 8:14 AM, Tempest said:

I guess I never noticed the DW II difficulty issue because back then I never over leveled, I always tried to get through the end at whatever level I was.  So if it was hard I assumed it was because I was underleveled for the area.  Then again I always thought the last area of DW II was cheap to begin with, you can get absolutely slaughtered by many enemies if you get a bad roll of the dice (they cast Defeat a lot IIRC).  I never knew if was a bug.

 

On 7/16/2021 at 6:04 AM, newtmonkey said:

I have completed the NES version of Dragon Warrior II several times, most recently just a month or so ago (on real hardware).  There is no "rubber banding" or level scaling.  Like with most if not all 8-bit and 16-bit console RPGs, each area has an "encounter level" it uses to pull fixed random encounters from a table, and enemies all have fixed stats.  Some encounters are harder than others, and of course areas meant for later in the game have harder encounters as well (but then again, you would have stronger characters later in the game as well).

 

It's a tough game with some definite difficulty spikes, but the game can be finished without any grinding as long as you make good use of consumable items, spells, and running away from difficult encounters.

Well, what I do 100% know is that the Dragon Warrior II versions on the GBC (and I believe the SNES version) is easier than the NES one.  What exactly they did to ease it up a bit, not completely sure.  However, back in the day I got through Dragon Warrior and Dragon Warrior III and not Dragon Warrior II.  However, I will admit a very plausible (and likely) reason is that I wasn't a tremendous JRPG player and perhaps a number of other factors led me to not finish Dragon Warrior II as opposed to finishing the first and third entries.  Still, I do believe Dragon Warrior II had some type of mechanism that made the game more difficult than the first and/or third entries that I played.

[newtmonkey]

7 hours ago, Hwlngmad said:

 

Well, what I do 100% know is that the Dragon Warrior II versions on the GBC (and I believe the SNES version) is easier than the NES one.  What exactly they did to ease it up a bit, not completely sure.  However, back in the day I got through Dragon Warrior and Dragon Warrior III and not Dragon Warrior II.  However, I will admit a very plausible (and likely) reason is that I wasn't a tremendous JRPG player and perhaps a number of other factors led me to not finish Dragon Warrior II as opposed to finishing the first and third entries.  Still, I do believe Dragon Warrior II had some type of mechanism that made the game more difficult than the first and/or third entries that I played.

What they did for the GBC and SFC versions was to increase the EXP/GOLD you get from each encounter, so that you become more powerful much quicker.  I am pretty sure they also reduced enemy stats to make them easier on top of that.

 

There are some difficulty spikes in DW2, so that's probably why it feels more difficult than DW1/3.  A lot of the stronger encounters can't really be muscled through simply by having a high level and require you to know how the AI behaves and react accordingly with spells (or just running away).  DW1 has so little strategy involved that combats are simply wars of HP attrition, that this kind of scenario doesn't exist in that game.  DW3 was balanced better as I believe they took complaints about DW2's difficulty to heart when designing that.