Games That Are Absolute Hell to 100%
Ultimately the line between Actual Hell and just time consuming/annoying is subjective, but in general guidelines are things that are some combination of 1. being ridiculously time consuming, 2. being extremely grindy/boring compared to normal gameplay, 3. having a lot of content that is not directly related to the main game, i.e, large focus on one or more minigames/side modes (looking at you, FFX), and/or 4. just being extremely difficult. It helps if the normal gameplay is actually good. For instance, Superman 64 would be considered unpleasant to play at all, let alone 100%, so its inclusion would be redundant. Submissions welcome, with as much excruciating detail as possible.
8 Games
Inspiration for this list.
Titles are basically achievements that each character gets. Here are some highlights:
Go through the first 10 hours or so without changing the protag's weapon (he is your main damage)
Get through the first 15 hours or so without a single party member going to 0 HP, ever
Get through the first 20 hours or so without ever using healing items
Talk to every single dog in the game (about 20)
Talk to EVERY WOMAN IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME
Get every single treasure chest in every area
Gamble at the casino until you get 777
Most of the way into a game, fight a boss with an average party level well below what you'd normally have at this point. (The easiest way to do this one is have the 2nd party member be dead as much as possible so that he doesn't get exp. The trick here is that sometimes various points in the story will just revive him, so you'll often have to put him down in the middle of a fight or boss fight)
ToS has an affinity system. I believe 5 different party members require having max affinity to get one of their costumes, and the affinity is only checked at a specific point late into the game, so that's about 5 playthroughs. Admittedly I'm pretty sure some of these are not in the gamecube version.
Complete the figurine book. To put it briefly, there are almost 300 figurines in the game, all of which have to be crafted out of pellets of various rarities. This requires a lot of grinding, to put it lightly.
Complete the collectors book. Get every fucking item in the entire game.
Complete the monster list. Fight every monster. There are some rather rare encounters that are world map only, so good luck with this one.
Minigames: Tales of Symphonia has its share of unpleasant minigames, but unlike FFX, you don't get ultimate weapons for it, you just get a little title that probably isn't even that good.
Titles are basically achievements that each character gets. Here are some highlights:
Go through the first 10 hours or so without changing the protag's weapon (he is your main damage)
Get through the first 15 hours or so without a single party member going to 0 HP, ever
Get through the first 20 hours or so without ever using healing items
Talk to every single dog in the game (about 20)
Talk to EVERY WOMAN IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME
Get every single treasure chest in every area
Gamble at the casino until you get 777
Most of the way into a game, fight a boss with an average party level well below what you'd normally have at this point. (The easiest way to do this one is have the 2nd party member be dead as much as possible so that he doesn't get exp. The trick here is that sometimes various points in the story will just revive him, so you'll often have to put him down in the middle of a fight or boss fight)
ToS has an affinity system. I believe 5 different party members require having max affinity to get one of their costumes, and the affinity is only checked at a specific point late into the game, so that's about 5 playthroughs. Admittedly I'm pretty sure some of these are not in the gamecube version.
Complete the figurine book. To put it briefly, there are almost 300 figurines in the game, all of which have to be crafted out of pellets of various rarities. This requires a lot of grinding, to put it lightly.
Complete the collectors book. Get every fucking item in the entire game.
Complete the monster list. Fight every monster. There are some rather rare encounters that are world map only, so good luck with this one.
Minigames: Tales of Symphonia has its share of unpleasant minigames, but unlike FFX, you don't get ultimate weapons for it, you just get a little title that probably isn't even that good.
HLTB has 100% completion at 700+ hours, and that's the average across the 15 people to have reported it. The amount of level + material grinding that this game requires is insane, to say the least, especially nowadays without the multiplayer functionality.
Lots of minigames (that fucking rhythm minigame takes the cake), combat that does not hold up against superbosses making for objectively at least one of the hardest fights in the entire series (not in a good way), command grinding, and if all of that isn't enough, you have to do it 3 times because that's how many playable characters there are
getting the True Ending requires likely over a hundred hours of gameplay, full analysis of every single abnormality (this alone requires several runs), dealing with extremely difficult fights in a system that is frankly not designed to handle them, etc.
Koroks + full armor upgrades. Representative of TotK as well, since they're very similar
idk why they did it but the final mix version of this game specifically made Synthesis a hellish process
Monster Arena setup and the fights themselves + the ultimate weapons almost all being locked behind a bunch of really unfun minigames
Weapon grinding + the RNG around growing a white flower
