Top 10 Lists: The Top 10 Games That Will Probably Make You Visit Gamefaqs

While there are many features like the boards, user reviews and Top 10 lists, gamefaqs (like the name implies) was primarily created to host FAQs for video games. When the internet didn't exist, being stuck in a game meant that you had to buy a magazine, phone the publisher, and maybe even resort to asking around on the schoolyard. Ironically, it was also back then that most games almost required help to beat them - nobody ever told you were to go, the difficulty level was brutal and game design simply wasn't as well-developed as it was today. This list features 10 games that, if you play them today, will probably make you come to this page to read the FAQs that were posted for them - and also a few more recent titles. The games that made the list had to score in three departments: The game has to be good, because littering the list with obscure games that are impossible to figure out would make for a boring read. The game has to frequently get the player stuck (this is the softest rule), and the puzzles must be very hard to figure out, sometimes almost impossible. Granted, most games on the list don't score well in all three of these departments, but it was the overall score that eventually led me to my decisions.

If you've only played the more recent Metroid games, you'll probably wonder how this one made the list. Ever since the Super Nintendo was released, Metroid games had maps that marked points of interest and (in some cases) NPCs that told you where to go. Well, the original game had none of that. The most obvious problem is the lack of a map, so many gamers drew their own one. Also, back then it was just the planet, Samus Aran and a small bit of backstory, forcing the player to figure the game out on his own. Shooting red doors with missiles seems trivial, but back then, you probably didn't know that you can now open them after acquiring the missiles - let alone remember where the red doors were located. The icing on the cake were completely unsuspicious blocks that you had to blast with bombs. With no map, you were lost in the first place, you had no idea where you had to advance, and the one block you had to blow up really could be anywhere. Good luck with that...

Probably the funniest part about this entry is that no one will agree with me. Some will wonder why it's even on the list, while others will say that it should be ranked way higher. BoF3 is one out of two games on this list that are there just for single scene in the game, but that very scene can be so hard to get past that it deserves making the list just for that part. Concerning BoF3, I'm talking about the desert, of course. Later in the game, you'll have to cross a desert from a 3rd-person-perspective, and the concept itself is really cool. You can only wander at night, and there's sand everywhere - nothing but sand till far beyond the horizon. With no map, you have to use the stars for reference, and you get a tour guide who tells you how to use these stars for navigation. I did this so often that, roughly ten years after playing this game, I can still recite what he told you: "Follow the polar star until the south star is centered south. Then, head south for three days. After that, turn east after you arrive at the oasis." You did exactly that and ended up where you started. Then you did it again, and again, and again... in the following years, I heard two theories why this scene was so messed up. Someone told me that the scene was translated wrongly, rendering the desert crossing impossible in all western releases. Another person claimed that the tour guide was actually evil and tried to prevent you from reaching your destination. The actual solution, however, is that a random NPC will tell you that the tour guide is forgetful, and explain the right path. Talk to him and you'll succeed on your first try. Overlook him, and you're royally screwed.

Reading further into this list, you'll start to notice a pattern: If several games from the same series cause you trouble for the same reason, I bundle them together because it would be unfair to give credit to just one of them, and boring to list them all. The DW/SW series is also notable because finishing the game is a very trivial task. The problem is caused by a myriad of hidden items that appear in virtually every game, the most prominent ones being the "fourth weapons", special and very powerful weapons that exist for each character and are the holy grail of collectibles in these games. To obtain them, you had to play on hard, play a certain stage, and fulfill certain conditions. Usually, you wouldn't even know that and probably mistake the 4th weapons for rare drops, similar to unique weapons in World of Warcraft. However, even with that knowledge, you still don't know where the 4th weapon is and what you have to do, the conditions themselves can be very tough even if you know what to do, and with several dozen characters per game, a single human person could probably never find them all in a lifetime. Shortly after every new release, there is a lot of discussion going on around hardcore players who try to figure out the exact conditions as a community and, fortunately, share their knowledge through guides.

Like the DW/SW series, Cross Edge can be finished without any help. It's significantly tougher, but still doable. The real catch is the infamous TruthEnd, which requires you to play on Hard. That's a challenge in itself - Cross Edge does, in theory, allow grinding, but it takes ages to gain a level and the effect is insignificant at best. Instead, you'll have to set up skills, equipment and a party to gain maximum power, and just barely defeat a boss - and then do it again for the next boss. The battle system itself is complex enough that a certain review marked the game way down for having too many bars on the screen at once. The real deal, however, is that you have to meet more than two dozen conditions while playing the game - violate even one of them, and you'll only get the normal ending. These conditions contain defeating only a certain opponent in a battle against two or more bosses without attacking the other one, and watching events that require you to backtrack at certain points in the main story. None of these conditions is impossible to fulfill randomly, but getting every single one of them without even knowing that the TruthEnd is there equals winning the lottery. Many RPGs have true endings that are deviously well hidden (did you even know that there's an entire dungeon left in Persona 4 after you reach the good ending?), but Cross Edge's easily takes the cake.

This might be too much of a generilization, but I wanted to give credit to the entire series without cluttering the list. The early FF games are your generic "no one tells you where to go"-RPGs. It's just you, the world map and a quest, and you have to figure almost everything out on your own while the obscure random encounter rate drives you nuts. The three Final Fantasy games on the SNES are generally more streamlined, but still unclear at certain points. Once you get to the PSX-era Final Fantasy games, that problem is almost gone and you've got your "easy to beat but almost impossible to complete" kind of games. More recent Final Fantasy games are absolutely infamous for having completely insane optional bosses. The programmers who designed the Weapons in Final Fantasy VII knew every tidbit about the battle system and designed bosses that can hardly be defeated if you exploit every single possibility. The Monster Ranch in FF 10 is even worse, as it spawns several monsters that can kill even the most well-trained party in one blow. These bosses will leave most gamers without even a trace of an idea on how to even start fighting them, and their purpose is to challenge even the most hardcore gamers. Oh, and concerning Final Fantasy 7, I won't even start talking about Chocobo breeding...

To be honest, all the earlier Wild Arms games probably belong on this list, but the third one deserves the pole position. Wild Arms 3 has dozens of dungeons that are filled with puzzles, but these aren't why the game is here. Instead, it's because of the world map. WA3 has a three-dimensional world map and the problem is, it's empty. To find locations, you have to push square, which then causes some kind of sonar to scan the nearby area. If the town or dungeon you're looking for is there, it will then permamently be visible on the world map. Throughout the game, you will generally only get vague directions and have to scan every nook and cranny of the world map yourself, which is tedious, but not hard. To help you, the developers have added coordinates into the game, so if you are stuck searching for a location, you can its the coordinates from someone else. The only real problem occured when I got the directions for the next dungen and couldn't find it for my life. After getting the coordinates on a message board, I still couldn't get there and eventually came to the conclusion that it cannot be reached by land. The person helping me then sent me to an entirely different continent where I had to complete a series of sidequests to tame a dragon that I could then use to fly to where the dungeon was. What the...? After playing on, I got to a point where I had to find five rocks and didn't get any directions, couldn't find a single one of them for several hours and just stopped playing. Ever since, I call the map in Wild Arms 3 the "World Map of Doom".

Adventure games had to show up here eventually. These games are designed to make you get stuck - the controls don't go past telling your character where to go, picking lines in a dialogue and interacting with items, but the solutions were usually so obscure that trying every single combination of items on every mysterious spot probably got you through faster than actually thinking about stuff. Almost any of these adventure games would arguably belong on this list, so I just bundled them all together. You can up the ante even more, however, by bringing text adventures into the mix - these games required you to read texts and tell your character what to do, and one of the challenges was to actually find the right words. Adventures are a dying breed, but series like Phoenix Wright or Another Code are still running strong, and download services like the Xbox Live Arcade have breathed new life into the genre. Almost all of these games are still very difficult, but not as hard as their ancestors.

When I told you that BoF3 was one out of two games on this list on here for a single scene, you probably expected Sonic 3... and were wrong. Metal Gear Solid is my pick, and you already know why. In an infamous cutscene, Psycho Mantis messes with you by reading from your memory card and moving your controller and then starts the actual boss fight. The catch is that he can read your controller input to predict your every move, but the truly evil thing about this fight is that you can still hit him by spraying bullets with the machine gun. Any sane person would now try to perfect this, but I don't even know whether it's possible to defeat him like that. So what do you do? The European manual even went so far to advertise Konami's hotline with "Is Psycho Mantis too tough? Call this number: " and I don't even want to think about how much the people there got yelled at when they told confused players the solution. To win this fight, you have to plug your controller into the second port and then fight as usual. Who in the world would ever think of doing that? This might be the most obscure puzzle I've ever seen in a video game, and I actually believe that not a single person has ever figured this out on his or her own. That being said, the fight against Psycho Mantis alone warrants a spot at number three.

I'm not even sure whether or not Castlevania II is actually cosidered a good game, but it definitely constantly riddles the player, and with things that are almost impossible to figure out. This game is infamous today because of the Angry Video Game Nerd, who pointed out all the flaws in the game design. it's generally like Metroid: You traverse an open world, hardly know where to go, and have to figure out everything by yourself. The big difference is that, while everything in Metroid at least made a little sense and could be figured out with trial & error, Castlevania II is downright unreasonable. There are cryptic items that you have to use in even more cryptic ways, and one particularly infamous part requires you to equip an apparently useless orb and kneel down in front of a random wall for several seconds. To its credit, impossible stuff like that was pretty common back in the days, and people willingly consulted walkthroughs posted in the major magazines.

This is the absolute epitome of impossible as far as good games go, and everyone who has played this should agree with me. One piece of knowledge that you need before I get started is that Phantasy Star is a crossover between a JRPG and a first person dungeon crawler, and in these dungeons, everything looks the same. And I don't mean looking the same like in games that get marked down by professional reviewers, but actually being identical down to the very last pixel. Phantasy Star was shipped with a walkthrough if I recall correctly, but it was released without one on the Phantasy Star Collection, so let's try to look at this from the perspective of a person who doesn't use an FAQ. The first few hours aren't actually that bad. As the dungeons get bigger, you will learn how to draw maps, and this will work for the time being. The first tough part is a giant pool of lava on the world map that damages your characters with every step. Your instincts will tell you that you need protective boots, but an FAQ will tell you that you need to just suck up the damage and walk through. After that, the dungeons get harder and harder, with teleporters and other traps, and since everything looks identical, it's impossible to decide your location after being teleported. By that point, you will need maps from a guide. Eventually, you'll reach a ridiculously huge ice continent that is surronded by thousands of mountains, and obtain a large vehicle. What's its purpose? Well, apparently, a select few of these mountains can be leveled with that huge vehicle you got, creating a valley that leads to the next dungeon. Things get out of hand once you reach the final dungeon, the infamous Baya Malay Tower. This thing is huge, spanning six floors, traps are spammed all over the place and you actually have to walk through a random wall to get an item. If you manage to reach the top, you will see a still picture and nothing happens. You have to bring up the menu and use the item you found behind that wall, but still, nothing happens. You actually have to bring an item that you found in another dungeon, and if you don't have it at that point, well... I don't even want to imagine that. Phantasy Star is fine in the beginning, but later on, it will make you think that the developers tried to purposefully create a truly impossible game, because it was their idea of a joke. You cannot make a harder game, because impossible is already impossible. There is no "more impossible".

It should be noted that this list is very subjective. One person might get stuck at a puzzle that another player immediately figures out, and yet another person could accidentally solve it without even noticing that the puzzle is there. There are also lots of obscure games that are arguably harder to figure out than Simon's Quest, but in those cases, the difficulty is mostly due to bad game design. Honorable mentions go to Alundra and Lufia II, which challenge their players with intense logic-based puzzles, as well as the entire Zelda series, which would have ranked at #11 if I could have made a Top 20. As it stands, these are games that lots of people had trouble with, so even if you personally breezed through them or found every secret yourself, it doesn't mean that everyone did. Thanks for reading.

List by vyse_1986 (09/30/2009)