Baten Kaitos Origins took the mechanics from Eternal Wings and revamped them to remove a lot of the flaws the first game suffered from...and then made Origins a hell of a lot harder. The infuriating luck-central battle system, Guide Dang It! loaded Item Crafting, and bothersome leveling mechanics were removed and replaced with a much more streamlined battle system and After-Combat Recovery that eased Fake Difficulty, but the regular encounters took about seven levels in badass and the bosses were cranked up to truly vicious levels. It's rather telling that the game can give you items like the Book of Mana, which heals you completely for the equivalent of a single turn's wait (and would be a total Game-Breaker anywhere else) and it's still hard. At several points, including two-hours deep into a dungeon with zero ways to any place to improve your deck, you can come upon groups of enemies as large as five, with each being able to two-or three-hit any of your three characters if you haven't been leveling up very much. Better hope you packed that Escape card into your deck. Of course, following this dungeon you get the two meanest back-to-back bosses, possibly even bigger of a shock than the immediate boss battle after changing discs earlier.
The first two Boktai had an all-around average difficulty, but the third one (released only in Japan) abruptly hiked the difficulty up to Mars with a much-reduced MP meter, much stronger enemies, and fairly difficult motorcycle levels. Then Lunar Knights comes along and inverts things, being much easier than even the first two. Unless, of course, you count those frigging stylus-pen fighter jet levels.
This is the case for Breath of Fire II compared to its predecessor. Many standard enemies and bosses are entirely capable of wiping out your party in just a few hits, and deal negative statuses and status debuffs with greater frequency. Adding in the ability of your foes to hit multiple times per attack (each shot capable of landing a critical hit), or counter-attack damage, these things (along with the significant reduction in power of the main character's dragon transformations) mean you will be in for a very long, very tough experience from start to finish.
There are a lot more Bottomless Pits in Dark Souls than there are in Demon's Souls, and the standard enemies are even more of a threat. And while Demon's Souls let you farm items to recover HP and MP, Dark Souls limits healing to 5-20 Estus Flask swigs and what you can do with miracles while the MP system is replaced with fixed numbers of spell, both of which are only restored by using a checkpoint. On the other hand, bosses aren't nearly as hair-pulling.
Dark Souls II, while fixing several of the more obscure and frustrating elements of the original Dark Souls, more than makes up for it in the difficulty department. Weapons and armor have much lower durability this time around, rings actually have durability and can break, the levels are more hazardous, Hollow form no longer prevents players from being invaded by black phantoms, enemy numbers and concentration are greatly increased, Poison and Toxic status effects are much nastier, and much more.
The Blacksmith has only a finite number of Titanite Shards to purchase. You don't get a merchant with an unlimited number until possibly very late in the game, depending on the order you do the areas in. In a bit of a Troll move, you can access a blacksmith that sells infinite Large Titanite Shards very early. Fat lot of good that'll do you without enough regular ones, though. And no, the Emerald Herald won't eat them in order to break them into smaller pieces for you.
Because enemies disappear after dying enough, you can only get so many souls from grinding the same area over and over, and also miss out on enemy loot. Scholar of the First Sin fixed this by making enemies respawn infinitely... but only if you're in the Company of Champions covenant, which makes enemy attacks stronger, your attacks weaker, and disables all co-op play but not invasions.
Combat for the player character has slowed down, meaning blocking, attacking and healing with Estus all take far longer. Dodge-rolling does not go as far unless your Equip load is very low and doesn't have any many invincible frames until Agility is increased significantly. Many more enemies also have attacks with autotracking: they can change the attack's direction some times after starting, making the window for dodging smaller.
Want even more Perma-Gravelord fun? Enter the Covenant of Champions as soon as you get into Majula. The Covenant of Champions not only boosts enemy strength and defense to basically New Game Plus levels in a first run, but also revs up the amount of enemies and gives them surprisingly smart AI. Enemies in normal mode just kind of attack you if you aggro them; Covenant of Champions-fueled enemies will actively signal to and work with other enemies to tear you down.
Want even more fun? The Covenant of Champions will make normal enemies act like New Game Plus enemies, New Game Plus enemies act like New Game Plus Plus enemies, and so on.
Dark Souls III's combat is a lot more difficult than the first two games. While your player character is a little faster and more reactive, the enemies got a lot more faster and aggressive than you did. Armor offers far less protection both in terms of damage mitigation and especially poise, sorceries and miracles pack less of a punch than they used to, and shields even less so. Enemies have a wider variety of attack patterns, have attacks that make it difficult to time your roll or punish roll spamming, and give you less breathing room once they're on you. And like any self-respecting RPG, the trilogy contain Mimics. In the first two games, they were first encountered at roughly the halfway point of the game (in case of Dark Souls II, again dependant on the path you take, but even at the earliest possibility no sooner than about a quarter in the game). In Dark Souls III? Literally the first chest most players are going to find on a first playthrough (and considering the other can only be gotten by either excessive grinding or some parkour...)
While Devil Survivor was by no means a cake-walk, it was still a decent challenge. Devil Survivor 2, however, is absolutely insane comparatively. Revised combat mechanics that nerf the old Game-Breaker combos, more missions with side-objectives (enemy doesn't escape, Escort Mission, etc.), the enemy teams are much sturdier, and bosses that are ten or fifteen levels ahead of you. Yet grinding is as slow and ineffective as before.
Played straight in Dragon Quest II. The game is a lot more unforgiving than its predecessors. Several late-game enemies are Demonic Spiders, and the Cave to Rhone is notorious for being one of the most difficult dungeons in the entire franchise. You only have three party members, one of which has the tendency to die very easily if you're playing the NES version.
Inverted in Dragon Quest III, IV and V. While the games do have a couple difficult dungeons and boss fights, they're nowhere near as difficult as [DQ2] was.
Beginning with Dragon Quest VI, it heads back to this territory. Enemies, dungeons and bosses start to become a lot more challenging. Dragon Quest VII has a lot of difficult boss fights, and one section in the game that's required where you cannot use spells at all. It throws Wolfpack Bosses at you note such as for example, The Time Being (TimeSage in the PS1 original) who will destroy your party if you're not prepared for them.
Dragon Quest IX was designed with this in mind. Bosses again wise up and employ strategies that you need to find ways to counter them, lest you want to be sent back.
Fallout 2 is significantly harder than the original game at first, thanks to some stat reconfiguration, less loot drops and starting your adventure with much weaker weapons. (Though as if to compensate, with a little luck and Save Scumming, it's possible to get Game-Breaker guns and armour almost immediately after starting the game.) It also starts off with a famously bad tutorial level, and unlike the original, you can't avoid the Final Boss. On the other hand, companions are a lot more useful and the ingame timer has been removed.
Even without using the newly added Hardcore Mode, Fallout: New Vegas is noticeably harder than Fallout 3. The game has a more "hardcore" stats and combat engine (i.e. armor is much more important, both for the player and enemy humans), combined with restricted character growth (no more reaching 10 in every stat and 100 in every skill in a single playthrough). Additionally, in contrast to Bethesda's Wide-Open Sandbox philosophy where enemies level globally with the player and thus you can explore pretty much the entire game world from the beginning, Obsidian ex-Black Isle uses a more traditional design where Beef Gate monsters will kill you to death if you try to explore an area of the game world before you've reached the appropriate level.
There are some more subtle changes, as well. While Fallout 3 made it possible to have 85% damage resistance from armor, New Vegas armor subtracts a flat rate from damage, but maxes out at 80% resistance (and that can be bloody hard against some hits, like the Anti-Materiel Rifle). V.A.T.S. gave an automatic 90% damage resistance (higher than was normally possible) in 3, but only gives a 25% boost in New Vegas, and the Grim Reaper's Sprint Perk was nerfed considerably, so staying in V.A.T.S. constantly is much less feasible and grants smaller rewards. Ways to treat broken limbs and radiation sickness were also reduced, making them a bigger danger (to a greater degree than they had been in the original Fallout games, where the joke was that the 2 Rad-X needed to reach The Glow in Fallout constituted 100% of the radiation treatment required in the first two games). Until DLC raises the Level Cap to ridiculous levels, the Courier had fewer skill points and Perks available than the Lone Wanderer, making resource allocation more important overall. All of this combined to make New Vegas considerably more challenging than its predecessor.
Fallout 4 adds even more challenges of its own, making it harder than 3 and New Vegas. To start, VATS no longer pauses time, instead merely slowing it to a crawl, so you'll have to think on your feet when using it. Radiation has been overhauled, so each rad you take reduces your maximum HP by one point until treated with Radaway or a visit to the doctor, making encounters with feral ghouls all the more harrowing since each rad-filled hit makes you that much more brittle. Those feral ghouls are a lot more nimble and aggressive as well. Many other enemies have also undergone changes that make them more dangerous: super mutants may now try to suicide bomb you to oblivion, radscorpions are bigger and burrow through the ground to ambush you, and sentry bots are hulking mechanized tanks that can take a beating and, when near death, self-destruct in a bid to kill you when it dies. But perhaps the biggest change was a simple mechanical shift taken from Hardcore Mode of New Vegas: health is restored from healing items over time instead of instantly, so you can't use Menu Time Lockout to instantly heal to full health.
Final Fantasy is already Nintendo Hard. The very first thing Final Fantasy II does is kill you. This is partly for dramatic purposes, and partly to let you know what it's going to be doing with considerable frequency the rest of the game. (The fact that its leveling up system practically encouraged masochism didn't help)
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is more reliant on fast reactions and precise timing than the two previous FFXIII games, and Easy Mode is a similar difficulty to standard difficulty on those. Normal is a definite step up from Easy, and then we have Hard Mode, which is only available on New Game Plus.
While Early Game Hell is considered to be a staple in Fuga: Melodies of Steel's gameplay, it was still quite manageable with game-breaking strategies commonplace in people's runs. Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2, while making the children more powerful, also made the challenge wall much more steeper, as there are less defensive options this time around with many skills involving self-buffing the current attack team rather than screwing over the enemy. What doesn't help are the much more aggressive enemy units, especially with them being able to damage you over time or even siphon away your life gauge to heal themselves, as well as upgrade themselves to be even more painful to fight as the battle rages on. The altered Soul Cannon mechanics from the first game also make every boss much more stressful as it's very easy to hit the automatic loading threshold despite any upgrades to the armor you install to extend your health, and even using the Managarm can screw you over in the long run as it's an instant KO to any child that uses it and nulls any experience you might've gained in that encounter.
Almost anyone can beat Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 in just about a week with all the trophies unlocked (if the player uses a guide of some sorts, but then again, the game is pretty easy). Hyperdimension Neptunia V? You will tear your hair off from the sheer difficulty of the game where enemies and bosses hit a lot harder than what they should be, plus a lot of enemies regenerate health on their turn. Not to mention, most enemies have a really high defense stat until you guard break them.
Megadimension Neptunia VII easily surpasses both mk2 and Victory in terms of difficulty spike, where the enemies hit even harder. Characters' movement in battle is now limited, combo structure has become slightly different due to removal of the Combo Points feature, and characters are no longer fully healed when leveling up and must return to a town to heal. The EXE gauge no longer carries over between battles but has become a consumable resource within a single encounter. To compensate for these, features from previous games (such as Guard Meter and Break Attacks) are replaced with a new Standard Attacks and Parts Break, as well HDD transformation now costing one EXE Drive gauge instead of 20% SP. However, even with all these compensations, it doesn't make things easier, as certain areas force players to go in solo or in pairs; in addition healing items/SP skills/EXE Drives are not as effective as before and HDD mode barely boosts stats.
Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and, to some extend 358/2 punish the player for every oh-so-little attempt at Button Mashing and force them to carefully customize the Protagonist's abilities prior to each Boss Battle. Add the fact that you can't see the Secret Ending when you're playing on Beginner's Mode and you got yourself a perfectly good reason to bash your Handheld Console into the next available wall.
Many players would probably consider Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories to be drastically harder on the first playthough after playing the first game. You had to use a card for every action you took and carefully customize your deck (which some bosses would mess with a lot). The remake for the Playstation 2 was a lot easier, but still a challenge if you didn't know what you were doing.
Less of a sequel and more of DLC, but after Kingdom Hearts III was cited to be notoriously easy, the additional bosses of Re:Mind are a sharp increase in difficulty, especially the fourteen additional superbosses. How much harder? The last of the secret bosses, accessed after beating the previous thirteen, plays a Bad Ending because you're expected to lose the first time.
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team not only makes the enemies and bosses hit even harder, but also features Action Commands that are incredibly intricate even by Mario & Luigi standards. Even dodging in battle, previously controlled merely with single-button presses, now also require moving the Bros. with the circle pad.
Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam is harder than even that. Circle-pad dodging has been removed, but to compensate, you have to worry about controlling three characters at a time instead of just two which makes dodging attacks that hit multiple people harder. On top of that, regular enemies have even more intricate attack patterns—in the second half of the game, there's a very real chance of blowing several 1-Up Mushrooms on a normal encounter—many of the bosses require actual strategy past simply "attack until defeated" (one of them actually punishes you for spamming your most powerful moves, like you've probably been doing for the entire game if not the entire series up to that point), and the Giant Battles are more frequent and much more involved than in the past two games, to the point of Unexpected Gameplay Change.
Then BioWare decided that Mass Effect 2 was too easy, so they ramped up Mass Effect 3 to the point that "Normal is the new Veteran" by making the enemies smart enough to use your reliance on cover againt you, forcing you to come up with better tactics. The Reaper forces (as well as Cerberus Phantoms) gained the "sync-kill" mechanic, which is a One-Hit Kill should they get into melee range, while Cerberus use smoke bombs and Vanguards equipped with riot shields that each require special tactics to defeat. However, Mass Effect 3 removes many of the Fake Difficulty and Numerical Hard aspects of the previous games (e.g. every single enemy having biotic-blocking shields on higher difficulties in 2 , damage sponge enemies, dumb squadmates in the first game (they still can't hurt enemies worth a damn in most cases, though.)) Although the re-addition of some Game Breakers make the single player campaign significantly easier if approached with the right strategy, and several DLC packs introduced a variety of overpowered weapons to the game for both singleplayer and multiplayer.
The first Mega Man Battle Network suffered from several balancing issues (most noticeably, the Final Boss and Superboss only had 1000 HP, an amount your character could reach), easy Boss Battles (a number of NetNavis would not move at all during the fight, allowing you to pick them off while dodging their attacks), and the typical growing pains of a new franchise. The sequel (and subsequently the remaining games in the series) would buff bosses, nerf chips, and remove MegaMan.EXE's ability to auto-recover after any and all battles, adding an element of health management into the mix.
The second game in the Mega Man X: Mavericks games is much harder than the previous or following games. Enemies hit very hard, one-hit kill field obstacles are in every stage and the bosses have some crazy endurance. It's telling that the original game had a second version released just to tone it down some. The remake put it more in line with the reasonable difficulty of the other games, but it's still hard compared to them.
Mother 3 is noticeably more difficult than EarthBound (1994). Enemies in general have more HP, but the bosses in particular are far more durable, with even some of the earliest bosses boasting HP scores comparable to what you'd be dealing with around midgame in the previous title, while not losing any of their lethality. This makes playing smart with stat buffs/debuffs and status ailments a lot more important to victory then before.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is significantly harder than Paper Mario 64. Enemies and bosses hit a lot harder, employ status effects more often, and have more HP than they did in the previous game. The Final Boss in Paper Mario had 99HP. The final boss in this game has 150HP, which, combined with Cognizant Limbs that you need to spend time killing, is significant leap and makes the fight take quite a while unless you powered up a lot. The Superboss has a meaty 200HP and hits like a truck.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, both compared to Pathfinder: Kingmaker and to the Pathfinder adventure path it was adapted from. Kingmaker already verged on Nintendo Hard at the "Core" difficulty setting (theoretically supposed to be the setting most similar to the tabletop), but WOTRtakes it even further, giving enemies after chapter 1 tons of extra hit dice, save bonuses, and spell resistance. Theoretically this was meant to rebalance the game—like Kingmaker, you can have six party members at a time without counting animal companions (where most tabletop gaming groups are classically four PCs and a GM), and the original AP was criticized for being overly easy due to the Game-Breaker nature of the mythic abilities—but the hit dice changes alone make many low-level spells completely useless after chapter 1, and the game can feel like it's run by a Min-MaxingKiller Game Master even on "Normal".
Persona 5: The original version of Persona 5 was a bit on the easy side, even compared to the standards set by the previous two ''Persona'' games which were themselves pretty easy compared to mainline ''Shin Megami Tensei''. However, the Royal re-release reworks this somewhat, with most of the Palace Rulers having their battles reworked to up the difficulty, usually for the better and, in the case of Shadow Okumura, worse. Some sections of palaces that ended up being non-puzzles like the Maze of Darkness in Sae's Palace were made more difficult, with the aforementioned Maze of Darkness going from having perfect visibility as long as you have Third Eye Mode active to Third Eye Mode just letting you see your hand in front of your face, and not while sneaking.
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. Building off the addition of abilities from the prior generation is the major revamp known by the fanbase as the "Physical-Special split": meaning that individual moves, not entire typings, could be physical or special. This combined with many Pokémon seeing changed movesets, overall meaning that many of the creatures were not only now capable of better type coverage, but they can take better advantage of their stats than ever before. These changes to the game mechanics were ultimately for the best, but it meant that long-time players were thrown off-guard. What actually makes it qualify for this trope are some of the Gym Leaders and the Elite Four. Because the games had poor type distribution, some of the bosses had to have diverse teams by necessity, meaning they not only had themed Pokémon with coverage moves like the others, but they also straight-up had Pokémon to counter you. Candice has a Fighting/Psychic-type Medicham on her Ice team to deal with any Rock-types, Volkner has a Water-type Octillery on his Electric team to screw any Ground types, and Flint, who is a Fire-user, only actually has two Fire-types in his team; the rest don't even have a common weakness with the Fire-types. And finally, even with the changes in Platinum that mitigated this issue, Cynthia's team is built to have total type coverage regardless, and includes a Spiritomb (which, at the time, had no weaknesses) and a Garchomp with perfect IVs (at a time when the species was considered so powerful, it was banned from the competitive metagame).
Pokémon Black and White invoked slightly more Artificial Brilliance, with even standard trainer Mooks switching Pokémon out to absorb hits or spam stat-up/stat-down moves to annoy you. Both Black and White and its sequels also introduced the scaled EXP system, which gives more EXP to KOs with underleveled Pokémon and less EXP to KOs with overleveled Pokémon, meaning that it was much more difficult to over-level a Pokémon and brute force your way through the game.
Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. While Sun and Moon were already more difficult than X and Y due to the permanent return of the scale EXP system, it also kept that game's EXP. Share system.note Any Pokémon in a battle gets the full EXP, while the rest of the party gets half.Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, while keeping these elements, also made many of the boss fights significantly tougher than the originals, with Totem Pokémon especially being buffed to have stronger ally Pokémon and utilize coverage moves and strategies that are practically guaranteed to catch you off-guard and give you a difficult fight. Especially if you played Sun and Moon and were expecting to encounter the same teams, strategies, or boss fights. There are also additional boss battles, with one of them widely considered one of the most challenging in the franchise. In general, the remakes and third-versions usually attempt to make at least some fights more difficult, but this game took it up a notch.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is easily a contender for the most difficult game in the series, due to the lack of level scaling meaning you could easily find yourself fighting enemies way above your level and get overwhelmed by sheer statistics. However, even if you follow the level curve the games can get pretty tough, especially with the Team Star Boss battles. Their last Pokemon will always be a "Starmobile" that's been strapped to the front of a giant car and changed to the type the boss specializes in. These car Pokemon can take a ton of damage and dish out just as much, and will likely take multiple Pokemon to bring down even if you have a type advantage.
Played straight in Pokémon Colosseum, which features some actual AI and teams that didn't consist of crap Pokémon. And if anybody has the misfortune of having Evice's Slowking use Skill Swap on his Slaking (which it often does), he can quickly become That One Boss if you weren't expecting it. The developers put some serious thought into making Colosseum more challenging than the rest of Gen III, having the computer actually play to its team's strengths or work around its weaknesses. All that said, the game doesn't know how to deal with Ghost-types.
Tales of Rebirth is much more difficult than Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Destiny 2, due to the lessened power of healing and a combat system that required a lot of thought put into what you are doing with it. Many seasoned veterans die multiple times in the Early Game Hell.
The first The Witcher game was pretty easy, with some exceptions like the fight against The Beast. Then came the second Witcher game, whose starting area was so difficult on launch many people had to crank the difficulty level down to Easy just to have a chance of victory.
Parasite Eve was generally an easy game with one or two parts being a bit difficult. Parasite Eve 2 ramps up the difficult in several ways. Due to the EXP system being revamped for powering up your spells instead of leveling up Aya, her HP is at a fixed value of 100 and only rises with different types of armor you outfit her with. With such low HP, Aya can easily die in a few hits if you aren't careful. The game also follows the route of Resident Evil where there's fixed camera angles (the first game had the camera show the whole area and panning with Aya's movement when needed), tank controls, and nonsensical puzzles.
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