I beat Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 on European Extreme and got the Lightning God trophy in Metal Gear Revengeance on "Revengeance" difficulty. Those felt pretty great. It's things like this - things that give you no quarter in difficulty and sometimes expect unfair and seemingly impossible things of you - that make it obvious Dark Souls isn't the be-all difficult game. At least for me. Obviously what is "difficult" changes for every person there is.
To elaborate, these difficulty settings are like so: European Extreme (get spotted, game over) and the Lightning God trophy (beat game on hardest difficulty, get S ranks in EVERY fight). The minute to minute gameplay doesn't change much in both cases. You know how to sneak up on a guard in MGS, just do that; you know how to beat an Irving in MGR, just do that. But do it perfectly or try again. MGR was particularly frustrating in this case, because a single mistake can lose you the S rank and you have to start again, so even "easy" fights can be screwed up by complacency or fatigue. But for the most part, only a few key areas gave me trouble. But the boss fights... this was the true problem in all three games. All were pretty damn hard, but I only had controller throwing level of problems with one boss in each game. MGS2 was the Vamp fight. MGS3 had The Fury. And MGR's devil was Monsoon. Both the Vamp and Monsoon fights feel like they simply expect the player to redo the fight over and over and over until muscle memory and frayed reflex nerves stretched to their limits finally see you through.
Vamp is a nightmare due to his speed. He jumps around with hard to track movements, throws a knife which you must either shoot down or dodge and then he jumps again. Repeat. Occasionally, he'll throw a special knife that traps your shadow in place, preventing you from moving. Free damage for him pretty much. That's all at the start of the fight. As it continues, the less health he has, the faster he moves. This culminated in me being so unable to accurately follow and counter him, that I eventually would just drag the aiming reticle across the screen in Vamp's jump direction and fire when I "felt" he was there, before my eyes could actually register if he was.
The Fury certainly lived up to his name. His fire attacks do enormous damage, killing you in two bursts. If you're lucky, the fight will drag on long enough for you to heal naturally enough to take another without dying. If anyone has played the original MGS on higher difficulties, they'll recognize this fight as the Vulcan Raven fight in third person with no reliable radar (your own motion radar is hindered by the vast amount of bats in the boss room). He's infuriating just due to the incredibly small margin of error available to you. You can be winning straight up, with 3/4 of his health gone when a bad corner turn and a lucky jetpack landing on his part make you flame-broiled Snake.
Monsoon, much like Fury, is hard due to the steep limit on mistakes you can make. And like Vamp, he is fast enough to throw you off your game consistently - he's no Vamp, but he's quick. There are also two additional problems: he does long combo strings with every hit requiring a parry; and you need to beat him with NO DAMAGE to yourself to get the "no damage" bonus which rewards you enough points to secure the S rank. MGR has a ranking system scored on multiple aspects like total combo length and number of Zandatsus performed. Unfortunately, there are no opportunities for Zandatsu in the fight, meaning as far as I know, you need to make up for those lost points, hence the no damage. As I said before, this fight is practically based on twitch reflex and muscle memory. "Here's his combo string. Press square now, now, now, now, now and NOW and counterattack. Now parry the ranged attack, rush him. Back off, parry some more..." and so on. It's maddening because the constant reference to muscle memory can loop back around on you and make you disassociate your actions with the game AKA not being "in the zone". This is when most people take breaks, but I'm always afraid that will make me lose the instincts I'd built up over the fight. As a final cherry on top, the end of the fight checkpoints you as you enter the final stage (you must parry his final attack, do a short QTE and cut his ass up). The problem is retries are counted against you and nullify an S rank. So if you lose there, you need to do the whole fight again. Well, actually that would be fine since you've been doing that all along. Unfortunately there is no "restart fight", only "restart checkpoint" which brings you back to the final attack stage, of course counting as a retry. Therefore, in order to start the fight from the beginning, you must complete the WHOLE level once again, and of course, re-record all those perfect S ranks against basic enemies once again. Just... fuck.
I know this not because I actually failed to block his final attack but rather, once the final stage checkpoint happened, I noticed I had about ten points of damage done to me. I didn't know when it happened, but it apparently did and thus, my S rank was now impossible. It was a rough time.
Wow. Been a while since I wrote this long a thing. And on this God awful Android tablet keyboard, too. Please direct any complaints about spelling and grammar errors to that little Hell spawn.
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