Difficulty curve brutality.

Easy. Normal. Hard. Slowly increase as you go along?

Pretty simple, right? Three difficultys, one for casual players, one for people who enjoy gaming, and one for those who like to stress themselves out? How can any developer screw this up, right?

This is a thread devoted to those games wehre the difficulty curve is so broken that it ceases to be a curve, and becomes a brick wall. Games Where playing on easy mode, is like playing on a different game's hard mode, and where playing on hard mode, the first level feels like trying to survive a death sentence.

So, in the personal opinion of anyone who reads this thread, what is the game with the most perfect difficulty curve, the one with the most broken, sadistic difficulty, and the one that, in your opinion, jumped around more than a grasshopper on red bull.

(as a side note, yes, I am looking for brutal games that I could play)

Anything by Capcom is brutal even in easy difficulty, and worse at much harder levels.

The World Ends With You is just..well, perfect difficulty curve. You can adjust the difficulty at any time. Heck, on Easy, you have the option of playing at lower health or higher health too, for those that just want to get through the storyline.

The one with the most sadistic, and the one that jumped around a lot...hm, well, any of the Xenosaga games fit that bill. Some bosses were pathetically easy under the right circumstances, while you could hit a brick wall with some if you didn't have the right ethers(aka magic for those of you not well versed in Xenosaga).

Me, personally... I'm going to give the Perfect Natural Difficulty Curve award to Knights in the Nightmare, because, dispite it being a bullet hell game, it genuinly leans you into the game, never dropping you into anything notably harder than the previous round, yet it always has something different. Even though the mission formula never changes, the way that the terrain and map play into it is so well worked, that even the small changes create a total need to re-write your strategy. Each of the enemies has a distinctly unique capability that is jsut as infuriating as any other. You rerely even notice that the game is getting harder, but its constantly a challenge at the same time.