10 CRAZY Difficulty Spikes In EASY Games

Even the most casual games can get hardcore. We’re going back through the biggest games from recent years that weren’t too tough, but suddenly slapped us with something crazy difficult. Here are the hardest moments from some of our favorite easy games.

#10 The Final-Final Test Badge Marathon [Super Mario Wonder]

We’re starting off with one of the most kid-friendly games that’ll also make you smash controllers and rip your Nintendo Switch in half. Super Mario Wonder is a charming platformer that revitalizes Mario’s 2D adventures, making them feel fresh all over again – and it’s usually pretty dang simple for players of any skill level to beat. But we’re not beating the game here. If you manage to do everything, and I mean everything, then you’ll unlock the cruel Final-Final Test Badge Marathon – a level that cycles you through every badge you’ve unlocked so far. Hope you’ve been mastering those badges, because you’ll need all the skills to conquer this ridiculous marathon.

This is the level where we wasted so, so many 1-Ups. If you haven’t been collecting fat stacks of Green Mushrooms, you better go back. You’ll need dozens as you agonizingly, slowly claw your way through each difficult section, slowly ascending this mountain of pain – all for your reward at the summit. The last trial is by far the worst. You’ll have to hop on bubbles over a bottomless pit while Mario is invisible. Maybe the designers at Nintendo do have an evil streak. And this is after a series of difficult badge trials, so the pressure is really on. If you fall, you’re going way, way back.

This would’ve been higher on the list, but there’s a useful trick that makes this trial beatable. If you play with a second player – or even better, just join with a second player using another controller – a marker will permanently appear over Mario’s head. Even if he’s invisible. This little trick makes an impossible trial just this side of possible.

#9 The Floating Coliseum [Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom]

Anyone fool enough to stumble into the Floating Coliseum early in Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is about to get their wake-up call. While Tears of the Kingdom is hardly an easy game, it is one paced for casual players – this ain’t Dark Souls. If you’ve been grabbing hundreds of apples and cooking them, you’ll have infinite healing. But infinite healing isn’t enough to help Link survive the Floating Coliseum.

Located in the vast (and incredibly spooky) underground depths, the Floating Coliseum is a combat challenge that initiates after trying to open a treasure – and you’ll find it directly beneath the Coliseum Ruins on the surface. Approaching the chest causes gates to slam shut and Lynels to appear from cages. Link has to fight a series of Lynels that only get tougher with each wave.

You’ll have to defeat five Lynels total – all of them are infected with gloom, so any damage you take can’t be healed while you’re underground. You’ll need special healing items to remove gloom, and even with a stack of weapons, Lynel are so tough you might lose an entire armory of swords just trying to bring these things down. The challenge gets really bad when you’re stuck fighting Silver Lynels in the final stretch, which are some of the toughest enemies in the game. They might be THE toughest enemies in the game.

This challenge is a real slog, but we used a dirty trick to win. Because this is Tears of the Kingdom, you can build ridiculous Zonai death machines and summon them whenever you want. Build a wall of cannons and drop them down to pelt these Lynel to pieces – it takes a long time, but it beats wasting literally every item you’ve got to win. And for doing all this, you’ll earn yourself the Majora’s Mask helmet. Not a bad reward for such a diabolical battle.

#8 Fairplay – The Race Track [Mafia: Definitive Edition]

Everything old is new again and even remakes can’t escape the curse of ridiculous difficulty spikes. The infamous race track returns in the remastered version of Mafia – an open-world shooter that was one of the first contenders to GTA3. While Mafia is considered a classic for a reason, one of its most infamous levels is still hated today. And while the original Mafia isn’t easy, the new release definitely sands off almost all the rough edges. But it doesn’t fix the driving sequence that’s still absurdly tough.

If you’re playing the game on Classic difficulty, the ridiculous race track level is just as hard as before. You’ll be driving a terrible, barely functioning old-timey race car that handles like a battleship. Cornering is atrocious and your fragile vehicle can break down if you hit a corner too hard, permanently ending your racing attempt and forcing you to start again. The only way to win is to play with absolute perfection – and even then, you’ll be behind the first racer the entire time. Don’t give up, because the final racer will (usually) disqualify himself in an accident, letting you pull ahead at the very last second. This definitely happens in the original game, but some players think it just doesn’t in the remake’s Classic Mode.

Even with that extra help, this is one of the most hated sections in a well-loved game, and we’re almost proud that the developers decided to leave in one of the most challenging parts in a mostly much-less challenging game.

#7 Post-Game Booster [Super Mario RPG Remake]

Here’s a game that was purposefully designed to be easy – Super Mario RPG is a kid-friendly RPG with a smooth difficulty curve that only really challenges casual players at the very end. While many 90’s kids will say the Axem Rangers were the big stressful power boost, when we replayed Mario RPG’s latest remake, the Axem Rangers didn’t stand a chance. No, the real difficulty comes after beating the main game. There are new challenges, including a more powerful version of the secret boss Culex. Normally, we’d definitely put Culex 3D – he’s an incredibly difficult boss that takes a lot of luck and a whole lot of Red Essence to survive. The boss unleashes constant party-wipe insta-defeat attacks, sometimes multiple times in the same turn, that require perfect blocks to avoid. Miss those perfect guards and you’ll have to start from scratch.

All the post-game bosses require perfection, but the worst for us was the rematch with Booster. Engine 023 Booster is completely ridiculous for a very specific reason – his boss fight is literally glitched. When you enter the boss fight, Snifits will cheer Booster on and charge up his powerful attack. Once Booster can attack twice in a row, the fight is over. Too bad there was a glitch early in the game where Booster would retain his speed boost between rematches – before the fix, the only way to win was collecting Red Essence to survive a few of his attacks that deal 9999 damage. While glitched, this might be one of the hardest boss fights of all time. And this is all from a game meant to be played by newbies to the RPG genre.

#6 Ghost Dog Chase [Animal Well]

What starts as a simple and spooky platformer becomes a very different beast after beating the game. Animal Well is one of the most unique games we’ve played in a long time – a game that behaves like a Metroidvania that’s actually a puzzle game, but it becomes an ARG or Augmented Reality Game after beating the final boss and getting the credits for the first time. There are multiple levels of credits which all require absolutely insane puzzle-solving logic that we won’t get into here, because there’s a challenge much earlier in the game that’ll chew you up and spit you out.

While exploring the Dog Area of the map, filled with ghostly canines that have to be distracted with frisbees, you’ll reach a difficult gauntlet to progress. To finish this area of the map, your little guy needs to grab a strange disc and sprint across the map, all while a massive ghost dog chases you down. The ghost dog makes even the simplest platforming so much harder as it circles you, moving in unpredictable patterns and blocking paths. You can briefly distract it, but not for long – and that doesn’t even factor in all the other dog ghosts biting at your heels as you try to complete an extremely long gauntlet.

There are more aggravating sequences in the game. There’s a puzzle where you have to carefully jump across a section of the map without touching the ground. And even that isn’t as bad as the sudden spike in difficulty when escaping from this dog. And there’s a useful trick to escaping the dog – using the Animal Flute, you can teleport across the map, lure the dog far away, then rush back to the Dog Area and skip half of the sprint all while the dog tries to catch up. Even with this trick, the dog chase is going to be remembered for a very long time.

#5 Meduso [Sea of Stars]

The toughest boss in the colorful retro JRPG Sea of Stars isn’t the final boss – it isn’t even the secret true final boss. The biggest problem appeared late in the game and totally took us by surprise. Meduso is a robotic head with multiple arms that generate canisters. There are four different canister types, and the only way to win is by prioritizing which canisters you smash before the boss can unleash four attacks on your party in the same turn.

The boss can unleash different attacks with red canisters, blue canisters or purple canisters. Purple canisters are the worst and deal high damage to your entire party, while the green canisters heal the boss itself. You have to carefully manage what canisters are hitting you each turn, because you can’t break all four that appear in the later stages of the fight. This boss is a guessing game that only gets worse the longer you fight it, and because of the sudden steep difficulty curve, we’re happy to add Meduso to our list.

#4 Toxic Tunnel [Crash Bandicoot 4]

Crash Bandicoot might look kid-friendly, but beneath the colorful characters and early platforming, there’s a cruel game that takes joy in your suffering. Crash Bandicoot 4 seems like a casual game until you start hunting down all the gems. If you’re going for gems, Crash 4 wants you to fail. Levels that are normally totally doable become nightmarish – and one of the best examples is the Toxic Tunnel.

This level has everything. Spinning traps on slippery cylinder platforms, minecarts you’ll need to dodge, bottomless slime pits and more. Things don’t get really bad until you follow the multicolor gem path, which is a gauntlet of everything that’ll stress you out and make you choke at the last second. You’ll need to master slide-jumps to complete near-impossible jumps and finish four separate gem trials. Each trial is harder than the last, turning a relatively normal level into one of the toughest in the entire series. And you have to do all the gem sections without a single checkpoint. This level is just brutal.

And because Crash 4 is evil, if you really want to earn 100%, you’ll also need to play a flipped N. Verted version of the level. You just made it through the longest, toughest level in Crash 4. Now do it again.

#3 Daego, Majima & Saejima Boss [Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth]

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth couldn’t make life easy for us. The JRPG sequels to the Yakuza games are generally pretty simple – like Dragon Quest, these are games you can play on auto-pilot for almost their entire 100+ hour runtime. There are spikes in difficulty or sections you’ll need to grind to level up, but nothing a normal RPG player can’t handle. For the most part, these games are smooth experiences – even the final bosses don’t make us sweat too hard. The real tough parts are when you’re stuck fighting old friends.

In Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, the heroes must visit a trio of former legendary Yakuza and ask for their help. Like any old legends, they won’t help without a fight – and it’s easily the most challenging fight in the game. Just one of the trio is as tough as any previous boss fight, but all three makes this a real slog. You’ll have to survive waves of their attacks and fight them in unique brawling sequences that don’t appear anywhere else. If you try taking them down all at the same time, you’re basically guaranteeing defeat. They’ll unleash special HEAT moves that other bosses don’t have – and they’ll brawl your hero to the death.

You’ll need three different types of elemental damage to effectively fight this trio, then take them down one-at-a-time. This fight puts your skills to the test, and even if you go in fully prepared, you’re still looking at a boss fight that can last over 40+ minutes. Because there’s no easy way to grind for levels at this point, this is somehow even more difficult than the bonus bosses in the post-game. A Power Rangers team of robot mascots are impressive, but they can’t compare to these three.

#2 Cavern For A King [Pikmin 4]

Pikmin 4 turns into a test of endurance in its final dungeon – a cavalcade of every horrible monster and boss fight you’ve run into so far returns. Creatures like the dreaded Waterwraith return for a second round as your Pikmin desperately try to evade its giant rolling pin, and that isn’t even the worst of it.

The Cavern for a King is twenty levels of pure pain. There are killer robot spiders that fire machine guns, giant long legs on blocky toy terrain and the horrible Smoky Progg. While the Waterwraith is much easier to deal with on the second round thanks to your Purple Pikmin, there’s no easy way to deal with the Smoky Progg. This poisonous monster can infect and rapidly wipe out your entire legion of Pikmin by itself – and that’s just one floor out of twenty. Getting to the bottom is an absolute slog for players expecting a challenge that matches the rest of the game. When a game mostly gives us bite-sized bits of level to explore and consume, the final challenging dungeon in Pikmin 4 gives us so much more to chew on.

#1 Nightmare Survival [Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth]

You’d think post-game bosses like Gilgamesh would be the toughest challenge in a game that’s basically beatable for anyone that’s a fan of action-RPGs, but the toughest challenge has nothing to do with casting magic or beating up bosses. The worst opponent you’ll face in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is the house. Playing card games at the Golden Saucer is required for 100% completion, and only the most manic players will even attempt to overcome the Nightmare Survival trial.

On the Nightmare difficulty of Survival, you’ll need to win 5 rounds of card games – normally you’ll draw new cards for each round, but in Nightmare, you’ll only draw new cards for the first three rounds. That means your cards need to be absolutely perfect – and you need to get lucky enough to unlock the cards you need at the right time. If you search for strategies online, there are guaranteed methods to win with the right enhancement cards, but imagine trying to win before you could just search for the perfect method online. Nightmare Survival isn’t even the only overwhelmingly tough Queen’s Blood card game challenge in the game. If you’ve been following the card game story, you’ll also face the unbeatable Shadowblood Queen in battle much earlier, and with fewer useful cards in your deck.

Both Nightmare Survival and the Shadowblood Queen are painful traps in your path to doing everything in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. What feel like fun little diversions become stressful exercises in pure masochism. If you want to feel pain in FF7 Rebirth, start by playing the mini-game trials, then complete every Queen’s Blood card battle. You’ll start to think like Sephiroth. Maybe the world would be better off destroyed by a giant meteor.

And those are 10 recent examples of cruel difficulty spikes in games – and some of these are no-joke tough. Even for an experienced gamer that’s seen everything, some of the challenges in games like Super Mario RPG Remake are next-level. We’ve played lots more games that are pushing the boundaries of difficulty like Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree or Nine Sols and plenty of these moments are comparable to those games. Maybe even worse.