Nintendo Hard / Turn-Based Strategy

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• The Advance Campaign of the first Advance Wars game is notoriously unfair, with levels that are pretty much impossible to beat without resorting to a day-to-day guide due to the game's liberal use of The All-Seeing A.I. in Fog of War levels.
• Battle for Wesnoth combines this trope with Unstable Equilibrium. The easier difficulty levels and beginner campaigns are fairly forgiving. On harder difficulties you'll find yourself reloading multiple times *per turn* because the RNG decided to off one of your hard to replace high level units: even if you can beat the current level without them, you'll be screwed later on. And that's if you use solid tactics. If you don't, it's much worse.
• Conviction (SRPG): The gameplay is based on Langrisser, but the player has little unit variety in the beginning and enemies tend to get more advanced troops before the player can. By the time the player can promote and use a greater variety of troops, most of the missions are going to have speed-based objectives such as rescuing NPC units, making it important to use turns optimally. Since campaigns are one-time only, it easy to end up with underleveled characters if the party doesn't spread enemy kills evenly.
• Considering the nature of the task given to the player, Fate of the World is unsurprisingly extremely difficult. Throughout the game, you not only have to worry about counteracting global warming, but you're a Slave to PR trying to care for a world run by Artificial Stupidity.
• The Fire Emblem series is quite difficult, with a few exceptions. Enemies always outnumber you, new recruits are often quite weak, Permadeath applies to everybody with only a few games allowing for resurrection and putting strict limits on it, characters can easily fall behind if they don't get any kills in just one mission, you have a fairly limited amount of money, shopping must be done during battles, inventories are often very small, weapons wear down and if they break units are totally defenseless with the strongest weapons often having the lowest durability, and character growth is totally randomized with a scant few items that can boost stats by one or two points. The two games that break some of these rules, Gaiden and The Sacred Stones, are actually the easiest of the bunch.
  • Beyond ridiculous is Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Wii. Your main character is one heck of a Glass Cannon with extra glass, the Crutch Character gets weak fast, and one slip-up in the early chapters and it's game over.
    • In RD's aptly named "Hard" mode (which was "Maniac" in the Japanese version; they sadistically decided to lower the difficulty names a notch in reaction to complaints about earlier games being made easier when localized), you cannot see the enemy's range, and have to count the squares yourself. Most enemies give little EXP/stages give almost no BEXP. There's no weapon triangle, so no chances of using that to win. To make things worse, almost every single mook is more powerful than you. Also, battle saves are disabled, forcing you to start the level all over again if you've messed up. There are far more difficult Fire Emblem titles than this one, though. Like...
  • Fire Emblem: Thracia 776. This game is known for being extremely difficult, and its reputation is well-deserved. The game constantly presents the player with difficult scenarios (the Munster prison break arc, Saias showing up, fighting Reinhardt, the defense of Tarrah) and has an RNG that is a lot more strict compared to the rest of the series (with accuracy going from 1-99 instead of 0-100, accurate hits that tend to miss, inaccurate hits that can screw you over), enemy and obstacle placements that can be a pain to deal with, limited resources, permanent status effects and dismounting having much harsher penalties compared to Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, and the ill-prepared player will receive a game over or lose a unit every time with the constant difficulty spikes after the first 3-4 basic chapters. The game comes packing a handful of features (capture, rescue, fatigue, night combat and surprise ambushes due to the Fog of War mechanic, leadership stars, etc.) that further increase the game's difficulty. The player is of course given plenty of tools to adapt to these challenges, and by virtue of the game's high difficulty level you're essentially forced to use them. Getting the highest rank of SSS requires a lot of skill and planning.
    • Among the requirements for a SSS rank is having the maximum number of living units, which means not only keeping all of your units alive but also recruiting every possible unit. This game contains arguably the single most convoluted recruitment sequence in the series history (although both Tellius games have tried to challenge that, their ridiculous recruitments are pure Guide Dang It!, whereas even if you know what you're doing, recruiting Xavier is really, really hard.)
  • Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, the next game after Thracia 776, is the only one that might rival it for "hardest game in the series on Normal difficulty" (later games added increasingly higher difficulty levels in order to simultaneously make the series friendly to newcomers and provide challenges for veterans who enjoyed the ridiculousness of the early games). While fatigue meters, leadership stars, and unit capturing are gone (and only the last has ever returned, in a much less frustrating form), Fog of War became a mainstay, as did gaiden chapters, with the addition that missing even one of these gaiden chapters—or allowing the Infinity Plus One Swords that you acquired therein to break prior to the end of the chapter in question—would cause the game to end three chapters prematurely. It also has several unites that suffer from issues in accuracy, speed or both. This was also the game that codified the series' desert maps (namely the part about the hidden items scattered across the maps, something that Radiant Dawn extended to nearly every map), except this game's incarnation of the desert map was also a Fog of War map...with a requirement for unlocking a gaiden chapter...that involved keeping alive a freshly recruited and forced party member with stats so poor that were she an enemy, your main character could kill her in one round with his starting stats.
  • New Mystery of the Emblem on Lunatic ramps the difficulty past 11 and up to 15. Not even exaggerating. Even if you expect Shadow Dragon Hard 5 difficulty, you're going to have a miserable time on Prologue 4, not even halfway through the prologue chapters, showing how much of a joke in comparison Hard 5 is. Three words: 19 Attack Archer. Yep, the difficulty level adds more enemies, including the archer. Unfortunately, using the Wi-Fi features makes the game significantly easier, and there is no rank past the easy to achieve A rank. (Note that this is the first game in the series into include Casual Mode, which makes units retreat until the next chapter instead of dying for good, so much of the difficulty is completely optional.)
    • If you beat Lunatic, you unlock Lunatic+. It's exactly like lunatic... except that enemies always go first in battle.
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening includes New Mystery of the Emblem's Casual Mode for those wanting a less difficult game. However, even with this turned on the unprepared will have trouble on hard mode, and Lunatic mode...well, let's say that most players will have trouble on the prologue. And if you manage to be all that? Lunatic+ decides to make a comeback. It's randomized whether enemies get Vantage+ (the ability to attack first), Luna+ (ignores half your defense), or Hawkeye (attacks will always hit, making Fragile Speedster classes even more fragile), Players have to resort to Save Scumming for the first few chapters because Frederick can't save them now! In some cases, an early level is completely impossible no matter what you do.
    • Awakening also has the DLC map "Apotheosis". On its surface, it's just a really, really tough enemy rush that uses Lunatic+ skills even if you're playing on a lower difficulty—probably impossible to do without Level Grinding on other DLC maps or the like, but fairly straightforward and can easily be handled with enough power leveling. Finish the first wave of enemies by the end of Turn 2, however, and the "secret path" is unlocked. Like the normal version, it's five waves of enemies, but they're even stronger, especially the boss of the final wave, and the last two waves have turn limits.
  • Fire Emblem Fates has Conquest, the Nohr campaign, which is designed to be the harder route. This includes limited exp and money, and more complex victory/defeat conditions. Even those playing Phoenix mode (where your units revive on the next turn if they're defeated) will have difficulty in this route, as several chapters have defeat conditions that aren't simply "lose all of your units".
    • While it lacks the money/experience limitations of the Conquest route, Revelation is even tougher, bringing back elements that hadn't been seen in the series since Radiant Dawn, such as Fog of War, or even earlier, such as the shifting maps previously unique to the GBA games.
• Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth for the Playstation. It's a tactics RPG with a ridiculously complicated magic system (which you'll have to master if you want to get anywhere in the game), and the battles are all stacked heavily against you. There's one early-game mission where you have to save someone who starts on the other side of the map, surrounded by enemies, and you have to rescue her. Did I mention that Permadeath holds true for any character you lose and that getting hit from behind is a basically guaranteed One-Hit Kill?
  • Which includes your guys. If you want to replace the fallen teammate, you'll have to recruit a Level 1 character. Hours upon hours of Forced Level-Grinding commence. (Incidentally, guess why this game got poor reviews and is basically unheard of.)
• Make no mistake, Mordheim: City of the Damned is a game that wants you dead. Your units start off very weak and because of the Morale Mechanic, just losing two of your Five-Man Band will cause a rout (and a mission fail). Any unit that falls in battle has the chance to lose their equipment (which can include rare and valuable gear) and also has a chance to suffer permanent injuries, possibly leaving them nigh-useless. On top of everything else, you still have to pay their wages daily and earn enough Wyrdstone to pay off your Supporting Leader and avoid a Non-Standard Game Over. Your first few warbands will fail just down to not knowing the full game mechanics and optimal character builds for each faction. Story missions bring on a whole new level of this, as they feature infinitely-respawning enemies who aren't affected by morale and no weaker than normal (they may even actually be stronger than normal), not to mention they're usually tailored to your factions' main shortcoming. This is all coupled with a Spiteful A.I. which will seemingly use any dirty tactic to screw over your campaign: the AI won't just loot their own dead to deny you bounty items for the mission, but en masse loot your dead to deprive you of any powerful gear you have; if your warband is hanging by a thread and carried mostly by one powerful Hero Unit, the AI will cheerfully suicide-Zerg Rush him with as many disposable units as possible to take him down, steal all his gear and leave him with a crippling injury in the process; if you have a Wyrdstone shipment coming soon, the AI will focus entirely on grabbing all the Wyrdstone on the map and ruthlessly hunting down any of your units which manage to get hold of some; if you just suffered a bad loss and are trying to train up some raw recruits, the AI will send their units after them and gleefully massacre them before you can get any use out of them.
• Nectaris, also known as Military Madness, is an example of this trope in a turn-based strategy game. The Playstation version's CD case doesn't kid when it says "This mission calls for only the most seasoned operators with the wit and cunning of a chess grandmaster." Things get tricky by mission 3, the enemy matches your numbers and has the advantage of a factory to repair units. In the later missions, and especially in hard mode, you will often be pitted against ridiculous odds; the enemy will have a lot more factories than you, have soldiers spread throughout the entire map, the player will be grossly outnumbered and have inferior weapons (the game loves to give the player's side "Rabbits," buggies that move quickly and pack a pretty good punch but apparently have cardboard armor. Meanwhile, the computer will get half a dozen Slaggers, tanks that have heavy armor, staggering firepower, and move faster than any other tank in the game). Making things worse is that in the original game, it was impossible to save mid-mission, and the AI was damn good for 1989. In nearly all of the later missions, the player will have to exploit the AI's flaws and have no room for error to even have a snowball's chance in hell. Even if you played perfectly, you need quite a bit of favor from the random number Gods to get through any of the later missions. Consider yourself a pro if you can beat the entire game without save states.
• Robot Warlords is ridiculous in its difficulty. Your Humongous Mecha are fairly fragile and poorly-armed. The ones attacking you have neither of these weaknesses. Every mission has a strict time limit, barely giving you enough turns to work with. You only gain the ability to upgrade your mechs after you complete the eleventh level. There are only eleven stages in the story mode. You literally have to beat the game to level up.
• Rondo of Swords is a ridiculously hard strategy-RPG. The challenge derives from gameplay that is superficially similar to typical Fire Emblem / Final Fantasy Tactics-type stuff while being critically different in the details; incredibly fragile player characters resulting in little margin for error; and just plain challenging enemy setups. Once you learn the unique and unusual combat mechanics of passing through allies and enemies, though, it isn't particularly difficult.To drive the point home:you are likely to lose any tutorial past the 3, where you aren't told what to do any more.
  • It also lets you pull out of battle at any time, resetting all your characters' "Hurt" statuses while keeping any experience earned, which makes it easy to level your way through obstacles... To a point. Enemies stop giving xp once your level is 10 levels higher than theirs. You might still have problems getting through the levels.
• Serious Sam: The Random Encounter has random battles against up to more than a hundred enemies at a time. It gets difficult really fast and game overs are numerous.
• While easier than other Nintendo Hard games, Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2 produced nightmares in which the final bosses of the game would show up early and often, usually just there to scare you, but at least one time you have to survive multiple turns in a real fight against the Final Boss Or what the heroes thought was the final boss.... little more then 1/4th through the game. Did I mention the bosses can heal almost half their HP in one turn every turn and usually can kill any character of yours in just one hit? And the final three missions are nothing but bosses over and over.
  • The most infuriating of these aforementioned bosses is ZweiZerGain, which has heightened damage resistance, increased hit/evade rates, and most notably the support ability After Image which makes any move completely miss it, even if you have a 100% hit rate. He pulls After Image so much one has to save after every move and abuse the reset function to try and hit him.
  • Super Robot Wars F and its sequel F Final were horrifically sadistic, with a wide range of mooks who were mostly invulnerable to the most common attack type in the game, insane dodging capabilities and the power to tear right through even your best units.
  • Let's not forget about Super Robot Wars 3. The goddamn Beam Absorb ability was so broken that pretty much every beam attack is useless and in fact *heals* the opponent. The second-to-last level has you fight *six* end-of-game bosses, all of whom go out of their way to hunt down and kill your weakest units.
  • A Portable manages to inherit the Nintendo Hard Skull-throne. Its enemies have high hit rates, and hit hard, compared to your low hit rates. To make matters worse, this game introduced a new system where each time a unit dodges an attack, the dodge rate decreases until it gets hit. This means the old tactic of "send in a a Fragile Speedster and have it dodge everything" isn't going to work. Plus the enemies do enough damage to make you cautious about even your Super Robots. Combine all this with the low accuracy rate you have in general, and you'll be grouping your units around battleships with their accuracy/evade bonus aura a lot. Of course... grouping your enemies together makes you vulnerable to Map Attacks... and the final bit of difficulty? This game employs a Fire Emblem style RNG, AKA: No resetting.
• As part Visual Novel, Tears to Tiara 2 has various difficulty modes and a rewind option. So what's so bad? You are always outnumbered and mooks three or five levels below you have higher stats than your characters, let alone the boss 5 levels above you with ridiculous aoe attacks. Towards the end, even tank characters will survive only two, at best three attacks. A frequent complaint on Japanese release is "Easy Mode isn't". It was common enough the developers made a Very Easy Mode.
• XCOM's spiritual successor, Xenonauts, has become infamous due to its aerial combat system - especially in the more recent builds. The ground missions can be nasty too, especially alien base assaults.
• Xenosaga has a little level called the Song of Nephilim. You're dropped here and forced to solve a puzzle that was never explained. In fact, the entire ship is never explained thoroughly. Luckily, by the time you finish it, you will be so overleveled that the rest of the game will be easy.
• The infamous XCOM series:
  • X-COM: UFO Defense is a gruelingly challenging strategy game, where genius-level tactics and a measure of dumb luck are practically necessary to progress. Later level enemies make it all the harder: Chrysallids are highly mobile Demonic Spiders that can chase down your men and turn them into zombies who proceed to wipe out the rest of your squad; while Ethereals spam psionic attacks to render your squad scared out of their wits, if they're not killing each other. If the stories of the development team for Enemy Unknown requiring new hires to beat this game first are true, the fact that EU was released at all should be considered a miracle.
  • X-COM: Terror from the Deep. Oy vey. One-Hit-Point Wonder player units (at least to begin with; any that survive to gain additional HP are the unlucky ones) that graduated with honours from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, and you can't even save and reload a level because they're randomly generated each time you enter. High Explosive Round spam was about the only way to get further than about 3 months of game time before getting sacked for sucking so bad.
    • Even then, you'd best be prepared to spam very slowly, as the action point system means that your characters will only be able to do a tiny amount of stuff if you want them to be able to act during the aliens' turn.
    • The original installment had a bug where whatever difficulty level you selected, you were reverted to the easiest after the first combat. TFTF not only fixed that bug but also increased the overall difficulty, but that doesn't stop the Urban Legend of Zelda about locking the difficulty to maximum.
    • Not to mention the numerous problems with the game itself, difficulty notwithstanding. For example: weapons that can only be used underwater. Don't read the weapon descriptions? You won't know until you try to fire that torpedo launcher on dry land! Whoops! Tentaculats. Tentaculats. An enemy that, when it kills one of your soldiers, turns the soldier into a drone that can hit exceedingly hard. When you kill the drone (which, by the way, retains the original soldier's armor rating, so woe if you outfitted them with the best armor), the killed drone immediately becomes another Tentaculat. And finally, Lobstermen, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin: giant, bipedal lobsters. With guns. And claws. And very tough exoskeletal shells that reduce damage from all sources by at least 70%, along with the highest HP available to non-tank units. If that's not enough to scare you, how about the fact that the only weapon that can reliably damage Lobstermen is the class called "bladed weapons", which require you to run up to the Lobsterman, who is armed by the way, and basically punch him in the face. The late game was made notoriously difficult by the appearance of Lobstermen, who, once they showed up, ended up in every other mission.
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown has an "Impossible" difficulty setting. Aliens get aim boost, critical boost, health boost, while your soldiers lose all boosts they might have had and become more easy to panic. Also, alien aim boost makes them totally negate half cover and makes full cover act like half cover.
    • The developers supposedly intended Impossible difficulty as literally impossible, where the point would be not to win but to see how far you can get before losing. Naturally, a few people have already managed to beat it.
  • XCOM 2 is quite grueling in its own way. The aliens' technological development always seems to outpace yours, so you will often find yourself trying to play catch-up with your armor and weapons as more powerful alien troops take the field. Most missions also have turn limits in which you have to complete objectives, and as the game progresses, you will often find yourself having to take bigger risks to beat the clock. In fact, the game is one big Timed Mission, as you are also trying to complete various objectives while the aliens' Avatar Project advances, and if the project is allowed to succeed, it's an instant Game Over. You can undertake missions that will set back the project's progress, but you won't be able to rest easy for long, as the project will be completed in due time, so you will have to make all due haste.
    • God help you if you add some of the expansion packs, particularly the 'Alien Rulers' DLC which causes you to randomly get ambushed in the field by superpowered, juiced-up boss versions of one of three different enemies, with monumental amounts of HP, insanely powerful attacks, and (worst of all) the ability to act after every single action one of your soldiers takes (fortunately they would flee when they took enough damage, and their HP didn't recover between encounters- but unfortunately neither would the soldiers they murdered whenever they showed up). Making matters worse, you still had to deal with them at the same time as the game's normal strict mission time limits. The 'War of the Chosen' expansion, while it also gave you a lot of powerful new tools to work with, also pitted you against the titular Chosen, deadly alien assassins who would mess up your day with their devastating unique powers. Having to take time out from your normal campaign objectives to try and track down the Chosen and stop them from interfering once and for all can really pile on the pressure when the Avatar Project is still rolling inexorably towards completion.
• Yggdra Union is probably the hardest game on the GBA, although subverted that the game actually got easier later on by performing better. Most of the time, you must plan ahead for a turn or two so that your enemy won't form a union to wipe yours out. This is especially true when facing bosses such as Gulcasa, with his unique Genocide card, or the nigh-maxed Baldus. Playing badly will make the game outright hard due to the lack of +2 MVP bonuses and good items.
  • The PSP version makes things easier by adding in more save slots (50 as opposed to 3), a new playable scythe user in Mistel, and most importantly, a suspend state feature which, unlike the ones found in Fire Emblem, do not delete themselves upon reloading, meaning you could just save scum your way to the finish.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule GB, critical hits and fumbles tend to happen at the worst possible times, enemies are often very strong, and despite the encounter rates being percentage-based, you will find yourself in a lot of battles. If you lose a monster it's gone forever, and getting a Game Over in an RPG World means you permanently miss rescuing whichever of Yugi's friends was trapped there.

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