Games with huge difficulty spikes

Because, up til that point, it had remained around the same level of difficulty. Then, in the very last area of the game, it becomes incredibly easy.

...

...

everytime

...

Any S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game ever

Breakdown for Original Xbox.

The White Gauntlet was just fucking rape.

I only really agree if you think the game drops after the start. I never really had any trouble with STALKER games after I got some gear.

nethack

The difficulty spike happens multiple times, but the biggest is floors 23-30

cop is just hard and stays super fucking hard when you're aganist mercs, exoskeletons and/or monoliths.
If you get an exoskeleton yourself, it should be fine

The visuals weren't the only things that got scary in this level.

Play on the hardest difficulty, the game is paradoxically more balanced the harder the game is because it was designed around the hardest difficulty.

Well, on my first playthrough I nearly cleared both the catacombs and New Londo looking for the second bell. That was a spike of sorts

I remember the Alladin place being more difficult than this place but then again this was going on 15 years ago.

Which enemies are exactly hard?
the sarafan?
the hylden dudes?
don't remember any LoK game being any hard

The PS2-era GTA trilogy's missions all seemed to quickly escalate from having piss-easy missions, to reasonably challenging (if-not occasionally annoying) missions, to fuck-off controller-throwing hard missions.

Thank God for the PC versions with manual aim. (I'm aware San Andreas had manual aim on console too but it fucking sucked because you couldn't adjust the sensitivity or anything)

If you guys still have the game, there are some community levels that put story mode difficulty to shame. I'd definitely like to play with you guys.
lbp is fucking dead and I want to reminisce. FUCK YOU SUMO

KH:Chain of Memories also has a huge difficulty spike in the form of Vexen. Both the GBA original and the remake.He's objectively better at the game than you with a bullshit special ability to prevent scrubs from getting by him. Forcing you to adopt his strategies and git gud. Its unfortunate the rest of Sora's story never reaches those heights of difficulty again and the game becomes a fucking cakewalk comparatively.

Riku's story mode is an even higher difficulty spike. So much so that he had to gain an extra game mechanic and a buff to deck strength in the remake just to make that mode bearable

Love Chain of memories but fuck the way it handled boss difficulty at times. Raised the stakes by a huge margin but never kept it up.

I always found it interesting that in Soul Reaver 1 & 2, fighting is discouraged and it's better to just run, especially in 1, because if you get hit, your Soul Reaver disappears and your HP will start to slowly dwindle, whereas in 2, if you use your Soul Reaver you can arouse it so much by killing enemies,that it start to drain away your HP and not only that when you kill an enemy with the Soul Reaver, the blade absorb the soul, not you, so you don't recharge your HP from it. At least in Blood Omen 2 and Defiance they encourage you to fight, to upgrade your health(BO2) or to learn new combos(Defiance).

I think he is referring to the demon enemies that exist in the spectral world as well. Not only do they have lots of hp(especially the red ones), but they also do considerably huge amount of damage.

More like huge difficulty drops. It's like The Elder Scrolls or Fallout with its hobo phase.

yea, those are the hylden dudes.
they did more dmg than normal enemies, though the only danger in them was them being able to chase you in the spectral realm. When i replayed it, i didn't find it that hard, infact, those were the only ones being any fun to fight against.

kek

I found Riku's story mode to be easier, but that might be because I kept getting useless cards as Sora. With Riku I had less random elements to worry about. Even his weakest decks are balanced so all the worlds are beatable without excessive grinding.

It can be easy when you know what's going on but on your first playthrough you have to replay the mission a few times to figure out all the mechanics and spawns necessary to get through it without losing someone. It also requires you to use all classes together and the player may not be particularly familiar with how some of the vital functions of classes like the engineer work since they're barely used in previous missions, unless you're dumb enough to actually waste time using them to disarm mines. It's not super hard or unfair (maybe it's a bit too much of a puzzle for a strategy game, which is fair criticism), but it's a big spike on all the preceding missions that are basically just; "capture enemy basecamp to win".

STOP
PARROTING
THIS
MEME
metacognix.com/stlkrsoc/WhatYouKnowThatAintSo.html
And no, the difficulty setting does NOT determine how often YOUR shots hit the target. It roughly determines how often the NPC shots hit you, maximum if the NPC is shooting you from point-blank range, dropping off to the value of gamedata\config\defines.ltx's hit_probability_gd_novice at the distance set by hit_probability_max_dist (in gamedata\config\weapons\weapons.ltx), which defaults to a mere 10 meters. It apparently remains at the hit_probability_gd_novice value (default 20%) beyond that. Set hit_probability_max_dist to a higher value (like 100 or 1000) for a tougher game at any difficulty level.

For proof of the statements in the above paragraph, set the two parameters mentioned there to 0 (zero hit probability beyond zero distance from the player) and play. The difficulty you select doesn't matter; master difficulty is fine. See the "Vanilla Bullet Sponges? Well, Yes and No" thread, page 2 for more details.

Yes, there are those that claim hit probability affects the player's accuracy, but many of the mods claiming to fix this change other parameters like the fire_dispersion_base of some weapons and/or the k_disp of ammo. The effect of wide dispersion and limited range of early-game pistols and sawn-offs (especially if in bad condition) lead many to apply such a "fix". They notice an improvement with rifles and wrongly credit this parameter "fix".

MGS5
The entire game is easy (unless you're going for S-rank in which case it's trial and error until you find an optimal route) but "backup, back down" is a relatively big spike in difficulty and you'll find tons of casuals claiming they weren't able to pop a single tank the entire mission, or that they got killed by tanks even though in the game you quickly learn if you sprint away from where a tank is shooting you are guaranteed to take no shots.

You kind of ruin your own point. They're not hard for being hard, but hard because on console the controls are shit.
they're not, just enable the frame rate cap. Disabling it messes up the timer and a bunch of other things like braking distance or wind's effect on aircraft that negatively affect your score. I remember some autistic 2006 talk on gtaforums about how one of the medals in one of the schools actually required an autistically precise input sequence that you couldn't deviate from by over 40ms if you were playing at 60fps.