A thread on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board got going about Famicom-era games that gave players a hard time. Titles mentioned included King’s Knight, Takeshi’s Challenge, The Transformers: Convoy no Nazo, Spelunker, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Tower of Druaga, Hydlide Special, Ys, Kamen Rider Club, and Kakefu-kun’s Baseball. The debate centered on how many of these games were built so you couldn’t figure out the objective just by reading the manual — you needed a strategy guide or to swap tips with other players at the arcade — and on whether that counted as the same kind of difficulty as today’s “unfair” game design, or something different in nature.
It's a memorization game — once you've memorized it, you can clear it.
Though I leaned on a turbo-fire controller.
Takeshi's Challenge
Spelunker
Ghosts 'n Goblins
Even the arithmetic drill game [Keisan Game] was brutally hard.
Ys III was easy overall.
(FYI, all Famicom versions.)
The Famicom version of Ys III is rare enough you'd question whether it even exists.
These days the hardest part is just getting your hands on a copy…
That game just goes on forever — what even counts as clearing it?
The Transformers: Convoy no Nazo
Ninja Gaiden
Cleared all of them on original hardware while following a walkthrough site.
I watched a clear video on YouTube recently and finally went "oh, so that's how."
Dragon Quest IV is the only one I ever managed to clear.
I was already an old man by then, no way I could've done it.
Rest in peace, please.
The stage 9 loop is impossible, right?
Stage 2 is easy if you go for the upper route early on.
The rest is easy.
It was originally an arcade game, and apparently arcades would keep a notebook out so players could trade info with each other.
There were guys at the arcade who'd hog Druaga on a single 100-yen coin for ages — drove the arcade owners nuts.
And the guys who knew the tricks would block the screen so no one else could see.
I've boycotted Bandai ever since.
I actually liked it, though it assumes you'll farm cash on the roulette.
Wait, you actually cleared it?
Cleared it once. It was a long time ago though, so I don't remember much.
Super Mario 2 [The Lost Levels] was hard, if I recall.
Then there's Spartan X [Kung-Fu Master] and Yie Ar Kung-Fu, which were even easier than Super Mario.
Yie Ar Kung-Fu just loops every 5 stages, so anyone could clear the first 5.
Is Yie Ar Kung-Fu basically the ancestor of 1-on-1 fighting games?
I could never get used to the high jump in Spartan X.
Wasn't until I'd played Street Fighter II that I could actually move the way I wanted to.
The monster's so overpowered it crushes your own units over and over.
The only thing I vaguely remember is the "Teriyaki Cannon."
These days you even get people screaming "unfair" just because an enemy took an action.
Yeah, that game's brutal.
I did manage to clear it once, but I never got far enough to optimize my time for the multiple endings.
Background and key points of the discussion
Back in the 1980s, there was no internet, so strategy info for Famicom games was limited to printed guidebooks or word of mouth. In the thread, testimony emerged that for Tower of Druaga specifically, arcade-goers would swap tips through a notebook left at the arcade — a completely different premise from today, where you can just search online and get the answer instantly. That gap is behind the recurring sentiment in the thread that “back then, games were basically built so a kid couldn’t clear them.” At the same time, some posters drew a line between that and today’s “unfair” design, arguing that the old unfairness came from immature balance tuning rather than deliberate difficulty design — a distinction worth keeping in mind rather than just romanticizing the past.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Are there any Famicom games that were really hard?“
