P-Wing

Why Hard Games Are Fun

• By Refia
• October 23, 2016
• 2 Comments

There are a lot of people who play only easy games or hate when games are difficult. I am not one of them.

Most people who are of such a persuasion would call me a masochist or think that there’s no point in struggling to beat a game and think it’s a waste of time. But I think there is something of value to a hard game, as long as it’s fair difficulty. I’ve played hard games all my life. I grew up playing the NES, and a lot of the games I played were hard because that was just the norm, so I got accustomed to not necessarily being able to beat a game just because I put forth a mediocre amount of effort. I played games like Ninja Gaiden and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link a lot as a kid  and I could never beat them at the time. Despite that, I didn’t think much of their difficulty, and I had fun anyway trying to play them. But I wasn’t satisfied with that once I became an adult. I went back and beat many if not all of the games I struggled on as a kid to get my revenge on my childhood, and it was a rewarding experience. One by one, I beat Castlevania, Zelda II, Ninja Gaiden, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, and more.

What started as me stubbornly wanting to best the games that always bested me quickly turned into an obsession. I played hard games I never had as a kid and beat them, too. Beating the 6 Mega Man games on the NES I think really set this into full swing for me. I had long hated the original series because I had just dismissed it as impossible to beat for anyone, but I soon discovered that with just a little effort, planning, and patience you can get through just about any challenge. And it was fun, too.

Eventually I played the Sunsoft game Gimmick!, which had a level of difficulty (to get the good ending) far beyond a lot of games I had played. Not only do you have to beat the game, you have to do it while finding all of the secret items, a few of which are in very perilous rooms or require you to kill yourself if you fail setting up the path to them, but also you have to do it without using a continue.

I spent weeks learning it and getting good enough to finally achieve the good ending, and I enjoyed every moment of it because I could see myself gradually mastering the physics and the game mechanics and the quirks of the levels and bosses. The game has a unique feature that distinguishes it from many other platformers in that your projectile is also used as a moving platform you can ride on and jump off of, and the gameplay is possibly the most advanced of almost any other game on the system, and probably the best platformer I’ve ever played. The music was amazing, the barebones story was amazing, and the controls are tight and precise. Overall it’s extremely well designed. But it’s hard. And a lot of people will give up on beating it or getting the good ending just because it’s hard, which is a real shame in my opinion. 

In the opening cutscene, you see a girl that gets a toy for her birthday, which is the character you play as, named Yumetarou. The other toys she has notice and get jealous, so they kidnap her, whisking her to another dimension, and Yumetarou follows them to try and save her. By the time you get the good ending and save her, it really feels like you went through an arduous trial saving her, and it feels like you earned it, like it wasn’t something that was guaranteed from the get-go, and I really like that feeling.

A lot of these games aren’t hard because they’re badly designed, they’re hard because they require you to be skilled and smart as you play. That’s something that easy games will never bring to the table, fun as they may be sometimes. I seek out hard games that are well designed because to me they are much more satisfying to beat.

It has nothing to do with me being elitist about skill, either. I am awful at video games in general, but I still enjoy the feeling of overcoming a challenge. The fact that I have to put in more effort than others might to achieve the same thing just makes it more enjoyable when I manage to do it. A lot of hard games are really enjoyable to play once you’ve mastered them, and you feel like you are one with the game, like you might as well have programmed it because you know how it will react in any given situation and can respond on the spot accordingly. I never get this intense feeling of fun with a game that just hands me the win and never asks me to truly master its inner workings.

A lot of people complain that they don’t have time for hard games or they don’t think it’s fun to keep failing at them in order to get good, and that’s fine. You can enjoy video games any way you want to, but what I’ve never understood is when people determine hard games are bad just because they don’t want to put effort into it. With these games, it’s the same as a sport or playing an instrument, but with video games. Yet no one bats an eye when someone enjoys playing complex musical pieces that require a lot of skill and time investment over easy ones. Most people tend to enjoy them more.

People look at you like you’re insane if you play hard games for the difficulty. People like to say that games that aren’t challenging are still fun, and they definitely can be, but I think that games that have the aspects that make that type of game fun but are also hard are even more fun than that because of the sense of accomplishment you get. You really feel like you got something out of the time you invested, and sometimes the skills you honed beating a game transfer over to other games of the same genre too and I find it pretty rewarding. Hard games are really fun to me, and I think with a little patience, they can be to anyone.