History TrainingFromHell / VideoGames

** That's not to say Good Shinobi training as a picnic. The adolescent students are expected to accept that they will never have an ordinary life, are Shinobi before all else, and will probably die young and with regrets. Yes, the fact you need to be training before a Good Shinobi school will accept your means Good Shinobi families traditionally [[TykeBomb train soldiers from toddlerhood]]. Training and sparring frequently use live steel, their training missions happen in the real world, and their teacher will only ever intervene against enemies of superior rank - high schoolers are expected to be able to handle ''assassination attempts'' from Evil Shinobi trainees without help. This is just one of many reasons that [[GrayAndGreyMorality Good and Evil are openly accepted as misnomers]].

* The live-action commercial for ''VideoGame/Halo3ODST'' depicts Tarkov and the other ODST trainees going through this.
** The SPARTAN training is known to be even more grueling. The children -- and they are children -- are finished with standard military training before they're ten years old. Before they hit they teen years they're being trained with live fire simulations with trainers who are really trying to maim and kill them. They're instructed to do the same.

* Basically all of ''VideoGame/{{Portal}}''.

** When you infiltrate the Lotus Assassins you learn that all Assassins must go through a weeks long training process where most thoughts of individuality and disloyalty are stripped away. Your character is allowed to keep their personality since a mid-level mook things he can use you to kill off his superiors It works for him... [[KlingonPromotion to a point.]]

* In ''VideoGame/JadeEmpire'', it is possible to purchase some training techniques that the Big Bad's Lotus Assassin army uses. One such technique, Deadened Nerves, is apparently taught to a student by beating him until he no longer feels it. First knotted rope is used, then bamboo rods, and finally iron staffs. Not that any of this actually happens in-game...
** Note that your character never goes through the indoctrination, general training or even gets the Lotus uniform... honestly, they need better quality control. Not surprisingly you get to betray them, free or kill their slaves and just wreak havoc. The villains are holding the IdiotBall then...
*** It was more Master Gang with the IdiotBall thanks to his ambition and rivalry with Master Shin than the assassins as a whole - odds are if the player had been assigned to any other Master for their training and indoctrination, things would've gone differently.

** It's subverted when you realize that it's training for ''bullet hells''.

** TruthInTelevision: G. Gordon Liddy, best known for his role in the Watergate scandal, also had [[FearOfThunder astraphobia]] and cured it by climbing a tree during a severe thunderstorm.

* The premise of the Windows PC game ''ChipsChallenge'' consists of Chip solving 144 NintendoHard puzzles to get into a club.

* ''NoMoreHeroes'' has a rather vanilla "training" in Thunder Ryu's gym, which is just dumbbells, bench pressing and squats (although Thunder Ryu is kind of predatory...). But it ''also'' has training from Hell when you give Lovikov the Lovikov balls. Judging by the sound effects, he teaches Travis his techniques by beating the crap out of him.

* The academy in ''MarioTennis: Power Tour'' has training machines that allow senior and varsity players to gain experience for learning Power Shots. These include a treadmill run, where {{banana peel}}s and barrels are tossed at you every few seconds; a devices where you spin around to collect coins while dodging jets of fire; and the "Duck Walk", an obstacle course where you mostly hop on one foot and try to avoid stepping on an electrified floor.

* In FinalFantasyTacticsA2, the Goug Nightwatch (a gang of rather wimpy Moogles) beg your clan to "train" them. Said training obviously consists in beating the crap out of them.

* The live-action commercial for ''Franchise/{{Halo}} 3: ODST'' depicts Tarkov and the other ODST trainees going through this.

* The Combat School mode in some ''MetalSlug'' games is like this; in ''Metal Slug 7'', your "training" missions start out fairly simple, but playing through the main campaign unlocks a series of progressively more insane challenges, such as keeping balls in the air while being continuously attacked, jumping as much as possible while fighting off enemy troops, playing a game of Chicken with a giant sled, replaying the giant mech duel boss ''without your giant mech'', trying to beat the final boss with no special weapons or extra lives as fast as possible, and fighting off ''a platoon of giant maneating plants with only a combat knife.'' Justified in that the main campaigns of the ''Metal Slug'' games are [[NintendoHard really freaking hard]].

* Inverted in ''[[MegaManLegends The Misadventures of Tron Bonne]]'' where the player as Tron is the one putting the Servbots through their paces. The attack training consists of the Servbot catching live bombs and then throwing them back at cardboard cutouts of the game's citizens, the speed training is three days of kitchen duty where you have to serve meals to the other Servbots under increasingly harsh time limits, and slothfulness is cured in the torture room using spikes, flames, and a 10 ton weight.

* The Combat School mode in some ''MetalSlug'' games is like this; in ''Metal Slug 7'', your "training" missions start out fairly simple, but playing through the main campaign unlocks a series of progressively more insane challenges, such as keeping balls in the air while being continuously attacked, jumping as much as possible while fighting off enemy troops, playing a game of Chicken with a giant sled, replaying the giant mech duel boss ''without your giant mech'', trying to beat the final boss with no special weapons or extra lives as fast as possible, and fighting off ''a platoon of giant maneating plants with only a combat knife.''

* Sean's Ending in ''VideoGame/StreetFighterIII'': First Strike and Second Impact. Ken instructs Sean of the only training possible to beat him: By properly defeating Ryu.

* In relation to the above, [[ZettaiHeroKaizouKeikaku Z.H.P.: Unlosing Ranger Vs. Darkdeath Evilman]] has basically all of the dungeons justified as training for the actual battle against the titular BigBad.

* In "VideoGame/MountandBlade" Warband, there are miscellaneous quests to train villagers to defeat incoming bandits. The training itself is simply stated to "put them through the paces of soldiering and discipline". But when one of the, gets the hang of it, you enter a sparring match with them. You stomp them down and they're a soldier.

* The freeware PC game ''[[http://bullethell.blogspot.com/2007/08/ygs2000.html YGS2000]]'' is more or less Training From Hell for BulletHell ShootEmUps.

** The Chocobo training in the Calm Lands. At first, you just have to steer a wild chocobo (who likes to run in every direction but the one you need it to), but as you progress through stages, the trainer starts to throw blitzballs at you. And then starts to throw birds carrying ''more blitzballs''.

* In ''KnightsOfTheOldRepublicII'', it's revealed near the end that [[spoiler: Kreia]] had orchestrated most of the events in the game, as part of a complex ploy to lure the Exile back to Republic space, put them through hell and make them stronger for it... ''[[TheExtremistWasRight and it worked!]]''

** According to the codex, to even get into the N-Program, candidates have to train for 20 hours per day, leading small combat teams through hostile terrain, with little sleep or food. Anderson reveals that N1 training, for instance, has the recruit dropped on an asteroid with no navigation data, no radio equipment, no food or water and only a limited amount of oxygen, with no objective other than "survive". N2 through 5 get even ''worse'', while N6 is conducted in active warzones. Out of the few who made it to N6, only those who've proven exceptional in the field, are finally awarded the coveted N7 designation. It goes without saying, Anderson and Shepard both graduated training with this rank.

* The ending of the first loop of ''DonPachi'' reveals that the events of the game were training for the [=DonPachi=] Squadron, an elite troop of super-soldiers. [[spoiler:It's hellish both physically ''and'' emotionally, because the enemy is in reality the player's allies, who are all posing as the enemy in order to allow this training regimen to happen.]]

* In ''JadeEmpire'', it is possible to purchase some training techniques that the Big Bad's Lotus Assassin army uses. One such technique, Deadened Nerves, is apparently taught to a student by beating him until he no longer feels it. First knotted rope is used, then bamboo rods, and finally iron staffs. Not that any of this actually happens in-game...

* In ''PhoenixWrightAceAttorney'', spirit medium and Phoenix's sidekick Maya Fey searches for a freezing waterfall to stand under for eight hours as part of her training. After failed attempts with Phoenix's shower and the local fire station, one of the characters during the ending sequence says that Maya did find a freezing waterfall...and caught a cold.

** Also, a mini-manga released in Japan with the DS remake of the first game shows a training montage the night before Phoenix's first court case. If Phoenix gets so much as a small detail wrong, Mia hits him with a shinai so hard, it breaks. The title approximates as "Phoenix's Special Training From Hell"
*** Makes you wonder why he's so nervous during his first trial. Must be the concussion.

* Corporate-run "[[MutantDraftBoard Biotic Acclimation and Temperance training]]" is part of Kaidan Alenko's backstory in ''MassEffect'', and he describes it as Training from Hell: "you either came out a superman or a wreck. A lot of kids snapped. Some died." Operating in the early days of human [[MindOverMatter biotics,]] before the study and training of them was regulated, [=BAaT=] involved rounding up teenagers who manifested biotic abilities and sending them to a barren space station at the edge of the solar system, with no access to the extranet, to be trained by turian (as in, "our enemies from the recent First Contact War") mercenaries. One of them, [[DrillSergeantNasty Commander Vyrnnus]], liked to tell his students "I was at the helm of the dreadnought that killed your father," and his teaching methods included breaking one student's arm because she tried to get a drink of water without using her biotics.