Wasn't there like a 300 fight challenge tower in Mortal Kombat 2011 that only unlocked a skin for Mileena? That was definitely some bullshit!

 

Ooh, how about Steiner's "Excalibur II" ultimate weapon in Final Fantasy IX? To obtain it, you have to get to a place near the end of the final dungeon within 12 hours. Mind you, we're talking about a game series that frequently commands 40-50 hours of your time if you want to explore all the game has to offer. So if you're playing through the game normally, you essentially have no chance at earning it. If you're actually trying to get it, then you have to breeze through the game's mandatory events, skip most of the side-events, and potentially handicap yourself in your quest to obtain it, since you're trying to trudge through the final dungeon with minimal level grinding. If you're trying to get it for the sake of 100% completion, then that's even more difficult, because you have to do all that, while making sure you don't skip any of the missable side content or other items.

This was made even more impossible in the original PAL-region PS1 release, because of how the game was programmed, adjusting the frame rates also accelerated the clock speed, so you actually only had ~10 hours.

Those seeking to actually obtain the weapon in the original release often resorted to physically manipulating the disk drive to force the game to skip the game's cutscene movies, to give them more leeway.

Apparently, the recent remastered editions of the game make the feat far more manageable, though. Cutscene skips are built-in, and they added a fast-forward feature to the game that conveniently doesn't affect the clock speed.

 

Wasn’t that the skin that just her in like 5 strips of cloth?

 

And we all know gamers will go through 9 levels of bullshit for a bit of fanservice. I mean, look at the cost of the Dead or Alive costume packs. Which are actually probably worthy of their own entry in this thread, just for the sheer exorbitancy of it all.

 

Fuck me sideways with a pineapple they are the worst. I think tallied up on Steam, all the DLC for DOA 5 was close to $1500AUD.

What the merry fuck???

 

Worst part is is that they're still obviously selling, considering that DoA6 is still continuing with the same general business model.

 

In the definitive edition all the costumes are unlocked by Default, including the Mileena's outfit.

Speaking of 2011, the Krypt. Fuck you Ed Boon.

Also Sonic Adventure 2. To unlock Green Hill you need to collect all 180 emblems. Seems easy enough. But the levels are bullshit, and some of the requirements in these missions give the impression they wanted to fuck with you. I definitely ain't playing Knuckles and Rouge's stages again.

What bothers me about these unlockables is it comes off as the developers never play tested their own game. If I were a game developer and something was hard, I would tweak it to my liking. Well there are skill-gaps for people, so something like SA2 treasure hunting stages might be a breeze for a hardcore fan who played the game since it's release in 2001.

 

On the topic of game developers not bothering to balance properly/do the math, Diablo III initially had the achievement "Splinter is Coming" set to "kill 25,000 Wood Wraith enemies". With the state of the game at the time, these were the rarest enemies in the game, in the sense that they spawned in extremely low density. Maybe 5-10 in the entire game. So you'd have to constantly reset the game zone and farm a very limited area of the game for a very long time for the sake of some minor bragging right. It seems like possibly only one person in the history of the game bothered to achieve this goal, in its original state. Eventually Blizzard acquiesced to the complaints, and lowered the goal to a much more manageable 1,000. And later on, Blizzard introduced a randomized map play mode that could potentially spawn these guys en-masse, so it's not a particularly hard achievement any more.

Now the one that most people will consider an absolute grind is "Complete 10,000 Bounties", which is essentially a repeatable quest system, with each quest taking between 2-5 minutes, depending on how bullshit the RNG wants to be for you. The hardcore competitive players will eventually achieve this as a matter of course, because you typically need to complete Bounties to min-max your gear to the best possible levels, but the average player will probably eventually find these chores so mind-numbingly repetitive with relatively low rewards that they can only dedicate maybe an hour or two in one sitting to do a bunch of these, and in the best possible scenario, that's still like, 300 hours total. While I don't play the game continuously, constantly, I still play the game frequently enough, and I haven't gotten this one yet, sitting around 8,500 right now.

There was also the game's original "Inferno" difficulty at launch, and its utter lack of balance tuning. They just extrapolated numbers based on the previous difficulties and went "good enough". The game's second act was an absolute brick wall that none but the most dedicated and patient players would bother to attempt (some of the first enemies you could encounter in the act were swarms of wasps, that shoot a volley of four smaller wasps at you, and kite you like crazy. In a narrow canyon/corridor with virtually no room to dodge. And your weak gear meant it would probably take 20 hits to kill the bastards, while they could kill you in 1-2). Survival was a real catch-22 thing. The way the game's item drops were scaled at the time, the only way you could find gear that posted significant upgrades to what you could obtain up to that point was to fight in Act 2 or higher... which you could barely survive in because you mostly needed Act 2 or higher gear to have a chance at breaching that difficulty wall. Even then, the game's overload of OP ranged monster swarms meant that you could only feasibly handle the encounters with a kiting-heavy ranged playstyle. So melee characters were pretty much SOL. There were a few cheese strats that could render you virtually invincible, but the windows were pretty narrow so one wrong move and you could be fucked.

 

Similar to a sidequest in Suikoden II, where you had to reach certain points in the story VERY quickly, while having Clive in your party, or else the trail would run cold. You didn't get an item from it, just the proper ending to a character's story from two games.

 

Unlocking the surfing Pikachu in POkemon stadium. Prime Cup is Brutal , round two more so.

 

Yeah. Never played the game but I heard there was a battle with a Scyther (not sure if it was the second or first one) but Scyther has an extremely high base stat total for a pre-evolved pokemon, within the 500's. Combine that with the fact some of the rental pokemon have base stat totals in between 200 and 300, and you got yourself a difficult battle.

 

Urgh I’m relying FTL on my iPad and I forgot how much a pain the crystal cruiser is to unlock.
Everything is RNG based, you need to be lucky finding the sector the quest start is located in. You need to be lucky to go to the right destination marker to trigger the quest. You have to be lucky the next sector is one you need, lucky to find the right destination again, then for the 3rd part you need to be lucky to find the next sector type, and then again, lucky to find the destination.

 

You can't use any rental pokemon. only those from the game you want the Pikachu to go to. yes that Scyther is a huge pain but the rest are no slouches either.

 

This applies for any game that requires multiplayer to get 100%. So... you better have a friend and a second controller with you, or else you ain't getting that sweet 100%.

Also Skylanders requires you to own a character of every element. In later Skylanders games characters get specific abilities (Blast Zone can fly, Wash Buckler can climb up structures, etc.) Trap Team had it worst, as you needed to unlock every element gate. But no, you cannot use your old Skylanders, you need Trap Masters to unlock them. Which makes the old Skylanders aside from playing as them, ABSOLUTELY POINTLESS.