Overcoming Difficult Video Games | GameSided Roundtable

Greetings! This is our weekly GameSided Roundtable feature, where our writers converge to provide their opinions, wishes, statements or critical thought on one general topic centered around video games. Sometimes it can be funny, sometimes it can be serious. Contemporary, classic; we hope to cover a wide variety of things in this segment as a group. If you wish to submit an idea for a GameSided Roundtable discussion topic, you can leave the editor an email at: daniel.george@fansided.com. We’ll totally give you (and your Twitter account, if applicable) a shoutout!

This week’s GameSided Roundtable topic: “What is the most difficult video game you have ever completed?”

Martin Benn (Twitter)

Final Fantasy XIII is a game where you can’t even set the difficulty, but the prologue before the action really begins is so long that it took me 3 years of passing time before I finally pushed through and beat that game. A total gaming session of about 70 hours took 3 years to complete because it just that bloated in the beginning. Once the game opens up? It was awesome. It was great. It was everything you love about Final Fantasy. The 30-40 hours before that? Felt like RPG Call of Duty, with narrow path corridors directing you in all the directions you need to go.

The hardest thing about the game was trying to care about what happened at the end of the next corridor.

Rebekah Valentine (Twitter)

If I’m being honest. I don’t typically play games of above average difficulty. I felt accomplished when I completed Ori and the Blind Forest; I got stuck at the final boss of Donkey Kong 64…and that’s about it for challenging games I’ve played.

However, last month, my guild in World of Warcraft conquered Blackrock Foundry on Heroic difficulty–all ten bosses. There’s no real way to “complete” World of Warcraft, but clearing the current top level raid is about as close as you can ever get. The final boss of the Foundry, Blackhand, has become well known as being very “tightly-tuned”. A single mistake by a single player was enough to end the encounter, and it was all but mandatory to have every one of our twelve players alive going into the final phase of the encounter. We spent a grand total of 78 wipes fighting for the kill over the course of three weeks, and finally destroyed him with a single fire spell from the one guy left alive. It was epic.

The elation I felt when Blackhand toppled is like nothing else I’ve experienced in a game before, and I’m confident that I poured all my skills as a gamer and a teammate into that fight. It’s the first time I’ve ever cleared a top-level raid on a high difficulty.

With Hellfire Citadel out just this week, my guild is once again fighting its way through the bosses, hoping for another glorious win like the last one. In a few months, we’ll be staring down Archimonde…and hopefully walk away with another, even more glorious victory to celebrate.

Keith Myers (Twitter)

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but the answer is probably Kingdom Hearts. It is a game that is supposed to be very kid-friendly, and perhaps that was the problem. There was just something about KH’s particular combination of controls, camera and physics that simply didn’t agree with my brain. I found the platforming elements to be brutally difficult at times, and a few of the boss fights were near impossible for me.

Oddly, I didn’t have nearly as much trouble with any of the sequels and spin-offs. I thought that perhaps it was that I was simply getting better at these types of games, but that apparently isn’t the case. I recently purchased a copy of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD, and am having the same problems I had when I first played the original game.

Next: Unique Zelda, Overcoming Giants & The Most Hellish FPS Campaign Ever.