10 Gruelling Video Game Levels That Were Just The Beginning

9. Chapter 1 - Viewtiful Joe

Dark Souls Opening
Capcom

The Gamecube era was, despite its financial failures, one of the all time best eras of Nintendo in the company's history, from a creative standpoint. And one of the system's standout cult classics was the stylish beat-em-up, Viewtiful Joe.

Shame, then, that the game is dead set on making sure that you never see the game beyond its first level.

Chapter 1 of Viewtiful Joe is infamously unforgiving to new players, throwing you at tons of enemies without properly teaching you the controls, and with nowhere near enough life to survive without a LOT of concentration and thinking on your toes.

And on its own, that would be fine. But not five seconds after you get your titular Viewtiful Joe powers does the game then throw a helicopter at you, whose only weak spot is centimeters away from its whirring copter blades that chop entire valleys off of your life if it hits you.

Oh, and like any self respecting beat-em-up from the early noughties, you have a limited number of lives. Lose them, and it's back to the beginning.

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John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?