10 Most Unforgiving Checkpoints In Gaming History
2. Magatsu Inaba And Mandala - Persona 4
With Persona 3 and 4 recently launching on modern systems, new fans of the franchise have been able to go back and realise just how good they had it in P5. As great as these games are, they are certainly products of their time. Persona 3’s one gigantic dungeon is tedious compared to Persona 5’s exciting locales, and Persona 4’s final area is extremely punishing.
The game’s final dungeons, stacked back-to-back, are home to some truly aggressive enemies. Exploring Magatsu Inaba and Magatsu Mandala isn’t too bad, just time consuming, taking probably around 90 minutes depending on how frequent and how long your enemy encounters are. However, the issue is that between these two different areas, there isn’t a single checkpoint. For whatever reason, if you die on the final floor of Mandala, then you’re sent back to the start of Inaba.
And you don’t even have to die… some enemies are just able to send you back to the start by touch.
Add in a few mini-bosses along the way and that’s bad enough, but it somehow gets worse. At the end of this trek is a ton of classic JRPG exposition spread around the two final battles… again, all with no autosave whatsoever. Fall here, and you go right back to several hours ago. Brutal.