Games that skyrocket in difficulty at the very end

[Mad Dog McMutt]

We all know that most games get more difficult towards the end. However, some games get almost a little too brutal during the last part. What are some games that you guys have played where the difficulty at the very end was way too high compared to the rest of the game? I have a couple of games in mind. Super Mario Land 2's last castle was extremely difficult. For me that has to be the hardest 2d Mario castle of them all. Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks had 3 different end bosses, but you only have one health bar to make it through all 3. Those 3 battles took me over a day of nonstop trying to beat. Ninja Turtles Radical rescue is another that comes to my mind. I have beaten it 3 different times, but everytime it took me a couple of hours just to beat that final boss rush. The main console version of the 2003 Ninja Turtles game also had a very difficult version of Shredder. If you lost all of your lives you had to replay all of the last world's levels. What a pain.

[oldmanwinters]

The Lion King (16-bit) at the 2nd level, probably even a little harder on Snes than Genesis due to odd hit detection. Apparently, this was intentional to keep most renters from beating it in one day.

A lot of 16 bit era titles probably have similar difficulty spikes around level 2 for similar reasons. Sonic 1 and Aero the Acrobat come to mind

[TurtleManiac]

Megaman 7 for SNES, the final boss Dr Wily is very very hard I remember having to use all 4 energy tanks plus the super tank to beat him. Maybe for a really skilled player it can be done without energy tanks.

[Mad Dog McMutt]

Megaman 7 for SNES, the final boss Dr Wily is very very hard I remember having to use all 4 energy tanks plus the super tank to beat him. Maybe for a really skilled player it can be done without energy tanks.
That boss is really hard. I own almost every Megaman game and in my opinion that one has the most difficult final boss. I almost never play that one for that reason. Megaman and Bass had some really hard bosses at the end as well, but that whole game was brutal.

[oldmanwinters]

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? for NES is a peculiar game with some cryptic points (I never read the manual) but the final battle with Judge Doom is just so exponentially more of an endurance grind than anything else in the game, it makes me never want to play the whole thing again.

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I never had that kind of success with corner trapping and spamming him so the fight took me over half an hour.

[TigerClaw]

There's no mention of this one here, But Battletoads is a game that gets difficult with each level, You try really hard to pass one level, And then when you get to the next one which is more difficult.

[frank_one]

Mickey's Dangerous Chase for the Game boy. The last levels are extremely difficult.

[Wesley]

Yugioh Reshef of Destruction for gba. An already extremely difficult game becomes this towards the end.

[oldmanwinters]

Mickey's Dangerous Chase for the Game boy. The last levels are extremely difficult.

Heh, I know exactly what you mean! I had built up a ton of extra lives throughout the game but spent just about all of them on the last stage.

I wonder if the game might have sold a little better if Disney had used the Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers license for it, since the core gameplay was already so similar. Mickey Mouse was always a big name but there were just so many "Mickey Mouse" video games (way different from each other) in the early 90s I feel like that game boy title got a little lost in the pile.