"How does a game go from being so easy, to being so fucking hard?"
"The combat difficulty ramped up quickly, and suddenly regular enemies had health bars the size of Christmas Toblerones that I could only patiently chip away at all through early-to-mid- Janurary."
"Well this is a little bit more sensible than Darius pyramid; you got to have that lovely level 1, then after that it just goes straight down to Hell. In both directions."
"This is around the time where the game hates you for getting this far and decides to flip the "Fuck You" switch."
— Our own YMMV.Super Robot Wars Alpha page, on the Turn X's stage in Alpha Gaiden
"Oh, you wanna talk about shit hitting like tanks, try everything in the final area of the game, Mt. Itoi. I get it; the final area of an RPG is supposed to be tough, but was this area even playtested? Before, enemies at max were doing about 40-50 damage with the best equipment possible, but now I've got assholes doing that stupid One-Hit Kill shit all the time, and some who hit for insanely high damage, well above my HP limit and that's after all that fucking grinding. This is not a difficulty spike, this is a difficulty mountain, and it's called Mt. Itoi."
"This game has turned into a corridor of death with the flick of a switch!"
— Ross's Game Dungeon (on The Chosen: Well of Souls)
"We start off with 'Cryptic Hard' if you don't know what you're doing, 'Medium Easy' if you know exactly what to do. Then we progress to 'Bumbling Easy' (I didn't even know what I was doing here), and finally, 'GRIND YOUR BONES TO MAKE MY BREAD!'"
— Ross's Game Dungeon (on Captain Zzap)
Rob (after drowning in Ratchet & Clank (2002) on Easy Mode):"What. Is. THIS?"
Nathan (doing his Brian Cox impression): "What Rob's experiencing here is a well-documented gaming phenomenon, commonly known as a difficulty spike. They happen when, regardless of difficulty level, a game decides to challenge the skills of a player in an entirely new way. Sometimes, they can seem so insurmountably massive, that players like Rob just give up."
— PlayStation Access, "7 Crushing Difficulty Spikes That Will Utterly Destroy You"
The last dungeon in Final Fantasy III is fucking tough.
— Pat R.
