You can do that!? Well then...

Fire Emblem Awakening on Lunatic +, SMT4 on hard, YS Seven on Nightmare with NO guard, and finally Ys: Oath.

Yup! Make sure you game over, go through that 8 second game over screen, pay him once. Next, die again and you get a free pass back to life with the easy difficulty... Some of the later bosses got harder, but I only died like 5-6 more times. One boss really gave me trouble, but I wasn't thinking through exploiting its weaknesses.

Totally forgot about this, Lunatic was great, Lunatic+ can go die in a hole. Fake diffculty is such a drag.

Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii.

Both. I got through Ninja Gaiden Sigma just fine, but maybe it was because I actually enjoyed playing it. This one however is not only a chore, but it just seems more cheap difficult for some reason.

Deadly serious, did you ever play the game? It's insane.

This and New Super Luigi U make rest of the games look super easy. 

I feel there are plenty of hard games these years.

Just not the AAA productions anymore. They're too streamlined and too aware of the moms saying "you won't get another game 'till you finish the last one."

I recently collected the final secret in VVVVVV and started getting the S ranks on the speedruns. That shit's tough, but any game can throw curve-ball challenges outside of the main quest, which in itself wasn't that hard.

...come to think of it, I don't think I've completed anything super hard this year, but I'm back to playing some Rare N64 classics I missed, and those are definitely giving me white knuckles right now.

I don't think I've played any hard games really, I've completed games, whether easily or not. The difficulties I've had have just been down to frustration. If I do have one it is Xcom Enemy Unknown, it's curve was a little silly and because of the curve, frustration of missed attacks and losing important team members I gave up.