Hellhouse [Final Fantasy 7 Remake]
FF7R is a difficult game compared to the cake-walk original. You’ll be sweating bullets while battling revised bosses — or unique enemies that get a boss upgrade. About halfway through FF7 Remake, you’ll have to defeat the infamous Hellhouse. This thing is hard. Like, why-is-this-so-hard hard. To make things extra frustrating, you probably barely have Aerith equipped at this point, and you’re still struggling with her unique gimmicks. Also, you’ll be stuck with only two party members instead of the usual three. Great, why not just make this hard boss even harder?
You’re just thrown into the deep end when Hellhouse arrives. This guy is the definition of absurd — the boss is a robotic house that flies around on a jet engine, launches swarms of missiles, and turns invincible for long periods of time. It can also suck up your party members with unblockable attacks. He’s incredibly annoying, and he’s a very long fight no matter what you do. Even if you know the tricks, Hellhouse is a pain and a half to fight.
And this is a joke boss! That makes losing twice as humiliating.
The Racetrack [Mafia]
The big race in Mafia makes my skin crawl and my blood boil. I get sick thinking about this race. In a game that once prided itself on realistic physics on crummy ’20s automobiles, why did they also have to force us to drive with perfect precision? When I was a kid, I never replayed this level if I didn’t have to. Winning is pure luck — the cars handle like tricycles stuck in molasses — and if you hit a corner just the wrong way or bump a car ever-so-slighty, your racing dreams are instantly over.
Your car takes corners like a turtle with nowhere better to be, and your opponents are basically perfect. They will always grab an early lead on you, zipping out of the starting gate with unnatural speed just to make this terrible racing level even worse. So you’ll be panicking and trying to catch up, prone to make more mistakes when your driving must be flawless.
Even driving normally can wreck your car! Going up hills in just the right (or wrong) way can lead to bent tires, removing any chance you’ll successfully complete this nonsense race. This is one of the most astonishingly difficult sections of an otherwise great game. Here’s hoping the upcoming remake fixes this one.
Relive the toughest parts of some classic games. Find them on the next page.
