Games designed to be hard

Is there any other games designed to be hard? From what I can tell, Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden games are the only "hard by design" from the absolute get-go-- hardcore badge of gaming honor type games to ever exist. It was explicitly stated that their goal was to create a difficult game aka intentional hard. When game testers said it was too hard, Itagaki made it harder. There are other nods to making fun of the player that chooses to use easy tactics like ninpo reducing your score or the Ninja Dog mode aka the dev basically calling you a bitch. Perhaps some found the game easy, but that isn't the point. The point that the intention and goal was to be a hard game. People usually confuse this with the following:
accidentally hard games or the casual and spoonfed zoomer gamers raving about some community reddit following wanting to pat themselves on the back ala Dark Souls games or something. Keep in mind I'm dismissing self i posed "challenges" or anything newgame+ esque, outside the regular and normal game.

DS wasn't designed to be hard/wasn't the dev's goal.
IWTBTG said the same thing.
Battletoads was just hard.
Aladin and Lion King were hard with the intention of having kids re-rent/continually rent the game, so maybe this counts, but it is more of a predatory thing than it is a honorific gaming thing.

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Souls games aren't hard

everyone except normies, youtubers, and redditors know that

can you now come up with any examples game that was actually designed to be hard?

>Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden games are the only "hard by design" from the absolute get-go-- hardcore badge of gaming honor type games to ever exist
XYXXXY

There's a steam tag "Difficult" kthx

Games being designed to be hard is a misnomer, it's all about level of the competition. You're thinking about complexity.

I'm not claiming the game is difficult. I'm saying it was their clear intention to make a difficult game and not discussing on whether they were successful in that goal or not. I just don't know of any other examples that clear by developers. Do you understand?

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No. It's clear Itagaki wasn't trying to make a "complex" game. Itagaki agreed it was a badge of hardcore gaming honor in an interview. They wanted to make a difficult game.

all NES era games were intended to be difficult so you would spend more time trying to beat a game with one hour of content if you dont count failed attempts at beating stages.
all arcade fighting games were also made to be difficult, street fighter 2 is famous for its absurdly hard boss characters.

I don't think famous NES hard ganes were intended to be hard. We have spoken goal by any dev saying so. They were hard by limitation and just because some were bad games, or oddities. Most had no continue save state, and it wasn't common place to put a password system into every game. Games were not meant to be completed like every game is expected to be now.

Same with SF2. It was hard because people didn't know how to play fighting games back then. Only Akuma ks actually hard, but this is a later version of SF2. Fighting game bosses were meant to be hard, but fighting games as a whole are more meant to be for 2 human players to go at it and the storyline is just sorta tacked on or arcade mode while you wait for another player. Otherwise it's just a who can get the highest score machine.