Nintendo Hard / Game Mod

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• There are plenty of mods out there for Baldur's Gate 2 to increase the difficulty of the bosses and make enemies behave more intelligently. Most notable among them, however, are two mods:
  • The Tactics mod. For an example, the De'Arnise Keep dungeon is suddenly filled with Spirit Trolls, which you don't even encounter until halfway through the game, and even then only one at a time, and as for Tor'Gal, the boss of the dungeon (keep in mind that this is one of the very first dungeons you can go to):
    • Has Improved Invisibility cast on him, preventing him from being able to be targeted by single-target spells.
    • Can berserk himself
    • Has Free Action cast on him, preventing any spells that restrict his movement from working
    • Is immune to fear
    • Automatically detects invisible characters
    • Drains his target's strength with every hit
    • Has an insanely high Healing Factor
    • Carries one of the heads of the Flail of Ages (the perfect anti-troll weapon), meaning you can't forge the best weapon for clearing this dungeon until it's too late.
  • Ascension, which beefs up all of the major boss fights in Throne of Bhaal (including Demogorgon), and turns the final boss fight into a massive Boss Rush against every major villain from both the main game and To B (including fighting every member of the Five at the same time). The only consolation is that you can recruit one of the Five to fight alongside you.
• Binary City, a Battle City hack except you control 2 tanks at the same time. Now a 4-directional action shooter has been turned into a puzzle game which requires a lot of thinking power, a lot of muscle coordination and a quick reflexes to win.
• Celeste has a very versatile movement system with a fascinating set of interactions in dashes, jumps, climbing and level gimmicks. Naturally, it swiftly built up a community determined to break said system in every way, shape and form. It didn't take long for utterly ridiculous tech to be found, much of which is frame-perfect, uses dedicated keybinds or TAS level precision to perform correctly, or requires the player to stand still in a room for several days to overload the game's timers. Fanmade maps such as Crystal Garden, Madeline Votes In The 2020 US Presidential Election D-Side (which is a real title), D1D7, and the Grandmaster maps of the StrawberryJamCollab all use these, on top of platforming far beyond the base game's difficulty and precision.
• The Destination Paris mod for Commandos 2 cranks the difficulty of a series already renowned for being Nintendo Hard as it is up to eleven. It adds more enemies to missions, makes them more ruthless, adds freezing cold to some missions that will kill your men without arctic gear (a feature in the main game, though only in one level) and takes away the Bottomless Magazines from the pistol. The final mission is particularly brutal, as if you don't react very very quickly, your men will all be spotted and killed within less than a minute.
• If you thought Dark Souls was not hard enough, the ascended mod takes it up even further. The mod increases enemy aggression, attack speed, and damage output. In addition to increasing the number of enemies, some of the regular boss fights have been turned into borderline unfair gank fights due to either adding an additional boss or cramming the boss’s arena full of enemies. An example would be the final boss from the 3rd game. Instead of being a one-on-one battle, the mod adds 4 additional bosses that the player must face.
• The Dwarf Fortress mod "Dig Deeper" is designed for people who have gotten the hang of regular DF and want a fresh challenge. And by "fresh challenge" we mean "endless tide of Orcs^note which are unique to Dig Deeper, have TRAPAVOID, can open locked doors, and are ridiculously brutal, fast-moving killing machines before your first caravan".
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Skyrim Rogue-like Encounters add enemies that hit hard and need a lot of hits to bring it down in every single groups of hostile NPC, including bandits. All of them are uniquely modeled, so they're easy to distinguish.
  • SkyDie - Prepare to Cry Edition turns Skyrim into a far more challenging experience. Fast travel and health regeneration are disabled, running depletes your stamina, potions have been nerfed and their prices have been increased.
  • Requiem - The Roleplaying Overhaul turns Skyrim into a brutally unforgiving game. The mod removes Level Scaling, making exploration at low levels extremely dangerous since most enemies will initially out-level you. Combat is now more difficult since regular running now consumes stamina and if your stamina is depleted during a fight, it can lead to you getting disarmed along with being weaker and slower. Certain enemies around the world are now deadlier than they were in vanilla: Archers can now easily kill an unsuspecting player. Trolls and Dragon Priests have greatly increased health regen, which can make them unwinnable unless you can exploit their weaknesses or have enough DPS. The player no longer has passive health regeneration, so they need to either invest in restoration or carry a lot of healing poultices or potions.
  • Wildcat: Combat of Skyrim seeks to make Skyrim’s combat far deadlier. Enemy attack speed has been increased and swinging a weapon and drawing a bow now cost stamina. The player now deals and receives more damage, certain actions such as casting a spell or doing a power attack will have the player and the enemy take extra damage if they are hit while doing them. If the player or NPC’s health falls below a certain threshold, not only will they take more damage, but they will receive one of several nasty debuffs such as having magicka be rapidly drained or getting constantly knocked down.
• Empire at War:
  • Republic at War tweaks the enemy AI to be absurdly intelligent and ruthlessly aggressive.
  • Thrawn's Revenge nerfs space stations into nigh-defenseless shipyards, Tech Level advancement is based on "Eras", and if a Hero unit is killed, they're dead.
  • Add to both examples the fact that the enemy faction has practically limitless resources and immediate access to Super Star Destroyers (or equivalent). Yeah, you're in for one hell of a ride.
• Final Fantasy Tactics wasn't the hardest game out there, despite a few truly grueling battles... So some people gathered together and created Final Fantasy Tactics 1.3, which removed many exploits, rebalanced classes and gave enemies ridiculously powerful items and classes way before you can attain such things (unless you steal and use Mediators, of course). To compensate, it also buffed a lot of the less useful classes (including monster classes), and adds Marche from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance as a recruitable character.
  • Inverted with FFT Content 1.3, which adds the new features but removes the increased difficulty.
• The RTS/FPS/Vehicle Combat game, BattleZone II, has the Fleshstorm 2 mod - a mod which is brutally difficult. One mission requires you to escort a large, slow, unarmed tracked vehicle (your mobile base) through narrow passes while the planet's atmosphere is on fire. The armor of your tank, your Assault Tank, and the mobile base are constantly being whittled down from the heat of the air, so you must constantly keep at least one of your units repaired by your shielded Service Truck. The canyons you're driving through are also dotted with enemies, so there's a delicate balancing act between repairing all your support units, repairing yourself, and repairing the mobile base. Several times during the mission, you have to move ahead to take out targets so the base can pass by safely - meaning you need to leave the protection of your service truck's repair laser. If you go too far out, you'll die before you can make it back to the service truck. If you take too much damage, you'll die before you make it back to the service truck. And unlike the other missions, you cannot eject, as your pilot will die almost instantly under the heat.

• Doom
  • Hideous Destructor is a weapon/gameplay mod where Doom plays like a tactical shooter with vanilla-like numbers of enemies who are at least as fast and tough as you are. If you get damaged you can bleed to death over time if you don't have the right items, you move at a realistic speed that is agonizingly slow compared to the Sonic-like speed of the original player character, and all enemies do tremendous amounts of damage. It's a truly harrowing experience and there is no room for mistakes.
  • While it's still in Beta, the Advanced Arsenal Pack for Brutal Doom turns an already tough mod into a nightmare, since now the lowly zombiemen can carry rocket launchers, which they never drop as pickups. If you want your own launcher to level the playing field, you gotta find one laying around.
  • The later parts of The Adventures of Massmouth, as well as its sequel, Massmouth 2. The enemies aren't numerous, but they have a lot of health and hit really hard, all while ammo is very scarce.
  • On the more vanilla side, the community has over 25 years' worth of mapsets in its archive, and a good number of them are so difficult that they make the infamous The Plutonia Experiment look like Entryway on I'm Too Young To Die. To name a few, there's Alien Vendetta, Scythe and Scythe II, Hell Revealed 1 and 2, Speed of Doom and Resurgence, Sunder and Sunlust. To note, some of these have absolutely no distinctions between difficulties for items and enemies, so even the supposedly easier difficulties are just as hard as Ultra-Violence; on the other hand, some extremophile mappers argue that the standard difficulty should be Hurt Me Plenty (medium) as opposed to Ultra-Violence (hard), so when they map for Ultra-Violence they go bananas; one such mapper, Ribbiks, has gone as far as to only release the Ultra-Violence version of his wad Magnolia to those that have finished it on Hurt Me Plenty, a difficulty where the wad already is tougher than whistling while chewing sugarcane.
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto III have Tightened Vice and Tightened Thrice, which overhaul all the story missions and a number of side missions to be much more difficult than in the original game, such as shorter time limits, increased wanted levels, giving the enemies more powerful weapons, or employing trolling tactics to mess with the players that are familiar with the original games' missions..
• Brotherhood of Shadow for Knights of the Old Republic. Beautiful storyline, excellent characters, and holy Yoda, what an epic scope. But the difficulty level is brutal. Especially the one-on-one duel with Mandalore the Indomitable where you are armed with an unmodified lightsaber and robes and he's armed with a pair of battleaxes! He's also got a Force resistance of "yes." The Tomb of Jesset Dal'Kest is worse. Specialized armor and weapons on everything you fight, no party member backup, and boss-level characters attacking in a Zerg Rush. Even the mod's authors admit that it's world-class brutal.
• The Legend of Zelda: Parallel Worlds is one of the hardest games you will ever play. After beating the game you'll probably think all of the quotes on this trope's quote page are referring to this game specifically. One needs only look at level 3, Farore's Isle, for an example: After a couple of non-challenging rooms (literally a couple!), you're faced with an unavoidable Firebar that you'll absolutely have to take a hit off of to get by. And you'll probably want at least three hearts, because the room after that has more Firebars and red Hardhat Beetles that deal two hearts of Collision Damage at a time. And the next floor down has more red Hardhat Beetles and the Crystal Switch you have to activate to continue further on. And you'll need at least two hearts left over after going through all of that, because on the way back you'll be forced to hit a Firebar again! And you can't use the book of Mudora to go back to the start of the dungeon, because that resets the crystal switch! And hey, guess how much the remodel (specifically designed to make the game easier) changed about this series of rooms? Besides brightening them up a bit, absolutely nothing!!
• Median XL, a Diablo II mod where monsters (especially Elite Mooks) are much stronger compared to the vanilla game and there are several "uberquests" that contain monsters which can instantly kill your player character, even at max level with good gear, and require elaborate strategies to be defeated. Some areas have witches which cannot be killed or targeted by your character, but if you get within their awareness radius, they will instantly kill your character (guaranteed, cannot be resisted and damage is infinite).
• Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch's single player campaign is composed of a series of pre-determined matches against computer controlled bots. However, each level requires you to reach the frag limit to finish in first place, and the bots are very aggressive, and while it's possible to lower their difficulty, it's hard to access and not available in the main single player menu^note So you know, you can lower their difficulty by doing it in the offline skirmish menu. Worse yet, they get infinite ammo for any weapon they pickup, allowing them to fire off weapons all day that would normally only have 7 shots at the most. And then some of the single player exclusive bosses battles are brutal, such as the Metool Daddy, and as the player cannot respawn during these fights, you have to start the fight over if you die at any point.
• The Misery mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat is so ridiculously Nintendo Hard that it practically redefines the trope and goes headfirst into Fake Difficulty. Everything, everything that could have been exploited for an advantage has been ruthlessly suppressed. The whole Zone is such a cruel and pitiless place now that you shouldn't expect to make money hunting for artifacts anymore - your main source of income will be other stalkers you hunt down and kill for their gear. And good luck with that, since they can take tons of bullets and can instantly snipe you in the head with a PISTOL from hundreds of feet away.
  • And just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, now the mod also makes stalkers completely unpredictable in their behavior. Oh, you just stumbled upon what appears to be a group of regular Loners? Cue the sudden cruel twist of fate when you quickly find out to your horror that these are actually bandits and/or mercenaries in disguise and they will immediately turn their guns on you. Oh, and the mod also removes the compass-map that you were so used to in the vanilla version, as well as other mods for this game; now you have to resort to opening up your PDA to check your map to find out where you actually are. And what about the feeling of getting rich quickly in the game? Sorry, this mod ensures that won't happen; now weapon/armor repairing and the purchasing of items suddenly became three times more expensive in the game compared to the vanilla version. The series was already notorious enough to be considered the Dark Souls of the First-Person Shooter genre. Yeah...
• The Neverwinter Nights series called Swordflight. Everything is meant to undermine you in the most unfair and cruelest way imaginable. Monsters always scale to your level, so even lowly monsters should never be underestimated. Regular monsters have beefed-up stats and abilities not found in the vanilla game, such as concealment for Battle Horrors or unlimited Gates for Pit Fiends. Rust Monsters and Bebiliths can destroy your equipment. Elite Mooks and Bosses In Mook Clothing are everywhere (have fun fighting eight Mariliths, not counting their little friends). Respawning Enemies and Random Encounters are scripted and always show up when you pass the same room over and over (and you will). Monsters have a chance to ambush you if you rest in hostile territories. Boss fights are always a nightmare because of minions, devices that constantly heal the boss and death traps that damage you. Liches and Vampires always respawn if you fail to destroy their Soul Jar or stake them on time. Not helping matters is a forced party member who's idiocy reaches monumental levels. To top it off, the designer recommends playing the mod with D&D hardcore rules.
• Pokémon has a lot of ROM hacks that ramp up the difficulty, despite (or perhaps because of) the series' low overall difficulty:
  • Pokémon Vega, a Japanese hack of Pokémon Fire Red, makes grinding a painfully time consuming affair by lowering the levels of all trainers and wild Pokémon down to as low as 10 or 15 fewer than the gym leader and evil team administrators' teams. It's necessary, though, since the major trainers come out swinging from the get go and never let up. By the third gym you'll have run into a Starmie with near flawless type coverage, a Kapwondo with typically late game moves like Surf and Aura Sphere, all likely 5 or six levels higher than your strongest 'mon, unless you went out of your way to grind enough for them. It's to the point where there's a popular fan mod of a fan mod, Vega Minus, which drastically reduces the level curve and enemy type coverage, while giving you more options for team building early.
  • Pokémon Clover, despite being a silly 4chan parody game, is remarkably more difficult than the average Pokémon game. The boss trainers have well-optimized sets that wouldn't be out of place in a Smogon metagame, utilizing annoying status moves and held items to maximum effect. The gym leaders in particular have at least one Pokémon that breaks the theme of their team in order to prevent the player from sweeping them with one or two Pokémon. Overlevelling is also an impossibility on the player's end, as there are Anti-Grinding measures that stop the player from doing so. And that's not getting into the lengthy routes, the brain-teasing puzzles, or the Kaizo Traps that litter the world.
  • Pokemon Blue Kaizo is possibly the hardest hack for Generation 1. Every Pokémon in the game has their movesets altered to be as lethal as possible, including those that can specialize in OHKO moves, Explosion moves, Status moves, and wrapping moves. You can expect to fight nearly every trainer in the game, and the dungeons also bumped up in difficulty, with far more lethal encounters than usual, in a maze-like area for a high punishment factor if you black out, and the dungeons are usually populated by trainers. The bosses have full teams of six, and many have wildcards, and they generally get much stronger as the game goes on, especially near the end. The AI can use healing items, and sometimes even switch. Unlike the games, Team Rocket becomes significantly more threatening, with powerful Pokémon, and switching and healing capabilities. You rival will always have a Mew as his main, which will get stronger as the game goes on. The only thing the AI can't do is use Revives, but you can't use Revives during battle either. Though catching all 151 Pokémon is actually simple enough, since you will face all 151 Pokémon.
    • Pokemon Crystal Kaizo takes Blue Kaizo's difficulty up to eleven. It's basically everything above, but with a few differences. The AI is bumped up for every trainer, from normal trainers to gym trainers, to Team Rocket grunts and scientists, to Cooltrainers, and finally, to major bosses, with ascending difficulty, and more diabolical strategies. Bosses that have been buffed include Whitney and turned Bugsy, one of the easiest gym leaders into one of the most annoying. And it gets harder from there...
  • Pokémon Crystal Enhanced is a game specifically made to be as hard as possible. For example, where Falkner has a Pidgey and a Pidgeotto around level 10 in the original, in this game, Falkner has a Skarmory, Aerodactyl, Gligar, and Mantine around level 17. And once you get to the post game, the gym leaders have no problems pulling out legendaries that surpass the level limit, and with Red the Pokemon can be up to level 165! And the creator made it to be nuzlocked too!
  • Pokémon Dark Rising, a hack of Fire Red, is one of the most difficult out there. Enemy trainers and gym leaders often have Pokemon you can't capture, the levels of these trainers jump from are to area in a way that requires Level Grinding to deal with, and even then the strategies of some of the bosses are efficient to the point of brutality.
  • Pokémon Blaze Black 2 & Volt White 2, a hack for Pokémon Black 2 and White 2. If played in the "Challenge Mode" (which you can access right from the beginning of the game), the difficulty will become absolutely brutal. ALL gym leaders have six Pokémon, most (if not all) holding items (some which you can only get by halfway through the game onwards), likely three or five levels higher than your team, not to mention the great type coverage and strategies they possess. So you want to use fire attacks against the bug type gym leader? First thing he will do is use Rain Dance (which will make fire attacks 50% weaker) while holding the Damp Rock item (extending the Rain Dance duration to eight turns instead of five). Good luck with that!
    • All of Drayano's hacks: Fire Red Omega, Sacred Gold/Storm Silver, and the first Blaze Black/Volt White follow that trope as their intent. They do give the player a fighting chance, buffing various Com Mons to a decent level, as you're no longer expected to find the strongest mon of the advantageous type and plow through the respective gym.
  • Pokémon Radical Red follows a similar formula to Drayano's legendary hacks; buffing Com Mons, adding several Anti-Frustration Features, and making the boss fights incredibly brutal. Plowing through teams with one or two Pokémon is an impossibility, and the player is forced to use strategies other than Attack! Attack! Attack!. Oh yeah, Mega Evolution has been added to the game, and the boss trainers get to use it well before you're able to. Have fun!
  • Pokemon Stadium Kaizo may be the ultimate example for Pokémon Romhacks. Considering it is a hard mode hack based on Pokémon Stadium, which is notorious for being Nintendo Hard, you are in for some of the most difficult battles imaginable.^note The most difficult battles of the original Pokémon Stadium series are much harder than even the Nintendo Hard Pokémon Romhack entries, including Vega and Blue/Crystal Kaizo. Rental Pokémon are buffed up significantly just so they can stand a chance at beating enemies with increased AI and better teams, movepools, and stats. There is also Kaizo Round 2, which takes Nintendo Hard well beyond up to eleven. Even with imported Pokémon, the Tournament cups and Gym Leader castle remain extremely formidable.
• Populous: Age of Chaos was an unofficial expansion for Populous: The Beginning which introduced a brand-new, 25-level, single-player campaign that was far, FAR more difficult than both the original campaign and the one from the official expansion, Undiscovered Worlds, for veteran players who had beaten those two campaigns.
• Lots of Super Metroid hacks are hard for the casual player, requiring tricks that only advanced players learn... but some hacks go the extra mile and are hard even for experts. Super Metroid Impossible, the various RBO hacks, and the original version of Cliffhanger are notoriously difficult.
• Similar to the Super Metroid example above, ROM hacks of Super Mario World are often ridiculously difficult to the point of parody. The most famous example being Kaizo Mario World, though that one can be better described as Platform Hell.
• Hacks of Yoshi's Island tend to be nearly impossible in terms of difficulty, often because they mix Artoon's love of instant kill spikes and lava with the original game's tendency to have absolutely gigantic puzzle levels. Just watch any one raocow has played for examples.
  • In particular, out of the non-Kaizo hacks, Kamek's Revenge is the hardest. The levels are much longer and more difficult than the original and getting 100 points in each can be extremely challenging.
• Super Thracia, a Kaizo hack of Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, admitted by the hacker to have not been playtested. By the time you get to Chapter 13, highlights include pitch black fog of war maps, enemies that gain capped movement upon attacking them, and invisible enemies that can ambush your units. Save states are basically mandatory to get through this one.

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