20 Video Game Hard Modes For True Masochists

Fire Emblem’s main appeal, including Fire Emblem Awakening, is its vibrant cast of heroes who you can level up, pair up together, and then watch as they slowly fall in love with each other.

So what does the hard mode of this game do? It makes it so that before your favorite character can fall in love, they can fall dead on the battlefield and stay there forever.

Fire Emblem Awakening’s Hard Mode enables a special permadeath where every hero except for Chrom and the protagonist will permanently die if they lose all their health during battle. A single mistake can take away your favorite character and prevent them from forming a relationship, which, by the way, is necessary to unlock some additional party members once the game introduces your paired couples’ children.

To make things even worse, Hard Mode isn’t even the most difficult setting in the game, as you can also unlock the Lunatic Mode, which functions identically to Hard Mode, except for making your characters more vulnerable and giving your enemies all sorts of buffs to exploit those weaknesses to the best of their ability.

Lunatic makes it almost impossible to move past the first chapter, let alone keep all of your shipping candidates alive.