10 RPGs With Insane Difficulty Spikes

Sometimes, an RPG starts easy, making you think you’re in for a casual experience, and then out of nowhere, you’ll find the game stabbing you with a pointy, hard-to-overcome difficulty spike.

It can be startling and can even turn some players off of games entirely, but then there are the thrill seekers who love to see a challenge in an otherwise breezy experience.

These RPGs don’t seem too hard on the surface but house some of the craziest difficulty spikes in any video game. RPGs are the guiltiest of genres, so let’s get into it.

10 Black Myth: Wukong

Not a Souls Like, Or So We Thought

Black Myth: Wukong is one of the best games of 2024 and one of the strangest experiences out there. Initially, the game feels incredibly linear and small, with little story and nothing but repetitive combat encounters to push you forward.

That changes in a hurry as the game opens up increasingly as you progress, changing from small areas to sprawling Labrynthian locations with tons of secrets and side quests to explore.

The big difficulty spike comes in Chapter 2. In Chapter 1, you are mowing down everything in sight, taking down bosses in one or two tries at most, and then the final battle of Chapter 1 takes place to jack up the difficulty, but nothing prepares you for what is waiting in Chapter 2.

The Tiger Vanguard, Yellow Wind Sage, and other bosses there will drive you completely mad. Your reflexes and skill point allocation need to be up to par or you’ll be retrying these fights repeatedly.

It gets crazier from there, with the subsequent chapters upping the ante even further.

They introduce fights with confusing mechanics, unstable hitboxes, and other increasing moments of nonsense to get you to throw your controller out the window. It’s all very rewarding, though, so it’s worth pushing through if you can handle the heat.

9 Final Fantasy 10

I Hate You Seymour And For Good Reason

Final Fantasy 10 is a beloved classic, but if there is one thing that stands out, it’s the wild difficulty that takes place in the latter half of the game.

The battle that encapsulates this best is the fight against the iconic and painfully difficult Seymour Flux. This battle is so twisted that it doesn’t make sense the first time you play it.

Status effects are being thrown every which way, the boss’s HP is completely nuts, and you’ll find your party being one-shotted every other turn if you’re not careful.

If this seems like an outlier, it’s not, as the boss fights start to get even more complicated from there, with Yunalesca and some of the final bosses being incredibly tough.

You might expect a bit of a challenge from early 2000s JRPGs, but even with a sound strategy and well-leveled party, it’s hard to handle just how difficult this game becomes, and that’s without even mentioning the various side quests you can go on that lead to fights with monsters with the HP into the millions.

It’s a great game, but be ready for a harsh reality check in its second half.

8 Divinity: Original Sin 2

So Much Fire. It Feels Like It Won’t End

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a massive RPG that allows you to play in the style and the way you want, but that freedom doesn’t come cheap.

The beginning of the game is decently tough, but the real difficulty spike comes from the Oil Slug fight in Act 2. While it’s a fun fight, you are tasked with fighting oil slugs in an arena constantly on fire.

It’s a hilarious and brutally tough battle as everything in sight is burning, and you need to figure out a way to survive while taking out the enemies causing the fire in the first place.

This fight was hellish in every way, forcing you to use your environment, equipment, and mind to overcome it. It is one of the toughest and most memorable moments in the 80+-hour game.

7 Sekiro

Genichiro Ended Many Playthroughs

Okay, so Sekiro is a tough game in its own right. We know this, but most bosses and challenges can be overcome with careful preparation and tight reflexes.

That all changes once you face Genichiro for the first time. This fight on the roof of a temple is known as the litmus test in Sekiro, which challenges everything you’ve learned until that point.

The difficulty spike here is beyond belief, especially when you’ve already conquered such foes as Lady Butterfly.

The fight is blazing fast, with Genichiro giving you barely any room to breathe, and it all gets more trying in his second form, which forces you to master the art of lightning deflect, which is an awkward technique to pull off.

The worst part is that once you’ve won, you realize that the true challenges of the game have only just begun.

6 Final Fantasy 16

The DLCs Were Brutal For A Game That Started On Easy

Final Fantasy 16 is one of the easiest games I’ve ever played, plain and simple. The main bosses give you checkpoints throughout the fights that refill all of your potions and items to make sure nothing ever gets too difficult.

While it’s enjoyable enough as a game, this lack of difficulty for the big fights was frustrating, and it diminished these gargantuan enemies that were supposed to strike fear into you.

That all changed when the Rising Tides DLC arrived, as well as the Echoes of the Fallen.

First, the Echoes of the Fallen DLC introduces the first super boss of the game, with a fierce showdown against the iconic boss Omega that is incredibly long, has bullet hell segments, and requires a healthy heaping of potions to keep you healthy.

That challenge comes out of nowhere, but the Leviathan fight takes the cake here.

The final fight of the Rising Tides DLC against Leviathan starts easy enough, but the midpoint of the battle has a ridiculous DPS check that is completely off-brand compared to the rest of the game and not only produces an instant-fail state, but even gives you a unique cutscene where a terrifying tidal wave swallows you and the world.

Figuring out the correct sequence to attack here is hard, but the crazy number of projectiles coming at you is challenging to dodge, too, and if you get hit, you’ll be able to take fewer hits.

So, in short, it is an easy game overall but has some of the hardest, most brutal DLC fights you’ll likely come across in gaming.

5 Tales of Arise

We Didn’t Expect What Happens With Ganabelt

On the surface, Tales of Arise looks like a joyful, lighthearted adventure. But if you dig a little deeper, it’s about slavery, existentialism, and finally being able to feel pain, so let’s throw that notion out the window.

To accompany the mature themes, there is a tremendous difficulty spike about 10 hours into the game. The boss, Ganabelt, has an enormous build-up, and the fight doesn’t disappoint.

This fight is over the top visually and mechanically, and keeping track of what is happening on screen is as tough a task as any.

Ganabelt has arena-wide attacks that require you to break him out of his attack animation to survive or DPS checks, and his health pool is enormous.

Unless you come ready with many health and CP potions, this fight will blow you away difficulty-wise.

The rest of the game has similar spikes for each boss, with the final stretch of the game being a unique and sadistic brand of brutal design that almost demands you purchase the game’s DLC items or lower the brutality, which is cheap, but it is what it is.

4 Xenogears

Existence is Futile Thanks To Deus

Xenogears is a classic for its story and epic scale, but there comes a point in the game where it’s almost unplayable if you don’t prepare properly.

That point is the final boss, Deus. Yes, final bosses are supposed to be tough, but Deus presents a challenge that doesn’t make sense. See, your massive robot vehicles called Gears need fuel to work.

At this point in the game, there is a save point before the final fight, and then, a vast multi-phase fight plays out that requires all of your party to participate.

All of your party means all your Gears, and, likely, you haven’t developed everyone as most players pick favorites, so your damage won’t be great. You’ll also have a limited amount of fuel; if you don’t have enough, it’s curtains for your Xenogears adventure.

Suppose you have previous saves before the final dungeon. In that case, you can go back and get this fuel, but that’s so much progress lost, and it’s a frustrating, sudden, final difficulty spike created from rushed game design rather than a difficult fight.

3 Darkest Dungeon

Hope You Like Despair Because There Is Plenty

Darkest Dungeon was a breath of fresh air when released in 2016, but it was also a game with one of the craziest difficulty spikes around.

The game starts off easy enough, taking your group of adventurers through countless dungeons to find treasure and fight bosses, but the difficulty spike comes shortly after you’ve completed the opening missions.

As the missions get more difficult, your team may all of a sudden start turning on each other, your heroes may get stressed out, and sometimes, they might just have a heart attack and die. That’s right, in a video game, your characters can just drop dead from a heart attack, never to return. Fun, right?

Of course, there are ways to mitigate this, but that includes picking up victories over enemies throughout the dungeons, which only get increasingly more challenging. If that doesn’t sound hard enough, sometimes, your heroes will simply refuse to attack. They will refuse to obey the attack command, and if that happens, well, that’s just life in Darkest Dungeon.

One particular difficulty spike comes from a witch boss known as the Hag, where she cooks your party one by one in her cauldron, not allowing herself to be attacked unless you want to kill your team. This fight drew a particular ire in a game that quickly reveals its cruel face.

2 Lost Odyssey

How Hard Can An Electric Eel be to defeat?

Lost Odyssey is a classic JRPG, and many consider it the true Final Fantasy 13.

The fight in question is named Bogimoray and this fight is absolutely brutal in every way. It’s multiple phases, it’s early in the game, and essentially requires you to find an item that is obscurely hidden in the area prior, and it comes after an unskippable story scene.

With that fun medley in mind, you’re tasked with killing off two gigantic monster eels that feed off bug companions. The fight is brilliant in its creativity but a nightmare in its execution.

The bugs charge up the Bogimorays, and when they charge fully, they unleash an attack that generally one-shots everyone unless you’re highly prepared with protective and healing magic.

I revisited this one recently, and despite knowing the way to beat it, Bogimoray was an absolute pain to get through. Considering how breezy most of the game’s challenges feel after and before it, it’s quite the outlier.

1 Elden Ring

Put your foolish ambitions to rest

Elden Ring is a hard game, but it gives you a wealth of options to negate that difficulty, such as the Mimic Tear, being able to summon friends or strangers to help, and creating perfectly broken builds to take down the horrors of this world.

That difficulty hits a spike early on in the form of now-legendary boss Margit. At this point in the game, you likely don’t have any outstanding summons, and your ability to summon friends is likely in low supply.

That leaves you, possibly a Jellyfish and your low-level garbage equipment, versus a boss that smartly warns you to put these foolish ambitions to rest.

Margit introduces the player to the brutal, delayed, and near-infinite seeming combos that the rest of the bosses will employ, and that introduction is rough.

Margit is so overpowered, shredding your health in mere seconds, and has short- and long-range attack options that make you nowhere safe on the battlefield.

You will find yourself scrambling throughout this fight in a relatively small arena. Despite Margit seeming large, he moves so fast that you’ll barely be able to get distance before he unleashes his next attack.

Other fights in the game are arguably tougher (Malenia), but in the early hours, Margit has become one of the most legendary difficulty spikes in the history of gaming, and for that, he takes the number one spot.