No props for me. I didn't beat them. Looking up what to do defeated the purpose for me so I moved on to the next game.

Nowadays I simply don't want to spend tonnes of time on mastering few skills just to progress the game, like I used to. 1-2 hours TOP! With the emphasis on 1h. Anything above that and even if I have time, I start feeling guilty for wasting it.
However, if the game is good, I'm more than happy to replay it with much higher difficulty. For example, Witcher 3, which I started on "story and sword" and replayed it on "death march", which complete transformed the game for me, in a good way.
Either way, if the game doesn't respect my time, I don't respect the game.

Exactly. TW3's base difficulty should be the one below Death March and Death March as normal with a harder difficulty on top of that. Death March entirely changes the game and makes you have to engage with the brilliant systems under the hood like prepping for monsters and forces you to do the master weapons and armour grind and the vast majority of side content. A higher difficulty could be balance to make you complete every little map marker for any EXP you can get and it would avoid that easing of difficulty in the latter half of the game. Alas.

Changed the thread title and discussion slightly, I think this is more of what I was getting at, poll still stands.

I have beaten some of the hardest games in the industry. It's not about difficulty. It's about whether or not I know or can tell the difficulty was made artificially cheap. If I deem that it is, that's when I'll find a save-state version, or get myself something like a Game Genie. I'm not going to suffer through an intentionally bad design choice just because some suit decided to think about his profits first. I'm going to fix it by leveling the playing field. Because lets face it: if you're playing something where the game is rigged against you, and you do something outside of those "rigged" rules so it's fair, you're not cheating. You're correcting.

Losing all my Turtles for 20th time on that dam level in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The longest I ever needed to defeat a boss was the final boss of Elden Ring DLC, which is the hardest boss From Software ever done to a point they needed to nerf him twice since the release

It took me 2 hours with my build

And around 5 hours with my BF build (he couldn't beat it so I did for him)

I don't think anything ever came close to that


That said, some maps in Fire Emblem can take much longer than that. Soren's paralogue in FE Engage took me 5 tries on Maddening, around 8 hours divided in multiple attemps

Camila's paralogue took me 4 tries, until I realized I need to warp-skip her map because all the reinforcements were madness, around 6 hours waste I think

Elincia's Gambit on Radiant Dawn (hard mode) and some maps in Fates: Conquest (Hard mode) were terrible too, I remember getting stucked two, sometimes three days even

But this is because I was purposefully looking for the higher difficult settings, so in this sense is my fault

Final Boss of Metaphore isn't that bad at all. It's long, but that's Atlus or a lot of RPGs in general. SMT games are truly difficult but in a fun, rewarding way. They are brutal but fantastic. Nocturne is not an easy game and I adore it. Not because of difficulty, just because it's a fantastic game. One boss, if you choose a certain route based on your choices in the game. Has you needing to switch out demon party members on the fly as every turn the boss changes his weakness. It's intense!

Metaphor bosses(and SMT for that matter) are not hard

They are puzzling. You fight them once and then need to strategize a build to counter that boss. Even Persona 3 is similar in this sense (4 and 5 are too easy so that's generally not needed)

The nature of the skill system in Metaphor allows easy customization of your party, so you can quickly build a great enemy counter. I don't think I ever need to fight any boss more than twice, except a Dragon which I only needed because I was underleveled

SMT is much harder to built an strategy because you are tied to demons with specifics combat kits that you can only change by skilk inheritance and demon fusion. Which is totally doable, but much more time (and resource) consuming, this means you can't always build a perfect strategy and need to rely on RNG and playing optimally sometimes

It took me over 2 hours and I had all the side content done nearly and that's after I had to load a save and drop to story mode and all the attempts before that. That boss was one shouting me, no matter what I did I couldn't get an attack on him, they all seemed to be blocked so I put the coin spell in all my characters and chipped away at him and I just res as soon as he killed me cause of Story mode. 

I have no idea how anyone managed that on a higher difficulty than Normal, I could have done it on normal but it would have take 4 or 5 hours easy. I wanted to play Nocturn but after Metaphor it's off my list and Persona won't move out of high-school which is a setting I can only do once, can't stomach the teenage dialogue. If they evolved the series and you were in college, maybe holding down a job and in a Yakuza style and sized world, I'd go in for it straight away.