Pivot tables.

Excel is one of my favourite games, but I've never been able to completely grok those things.

They seem like a waste of time when it's much easier to use formulas to construct indirect ranges and work on those.

I'm pathologically stubborn and will stick with just about any game until I beat it, but Isshin the Sword Saint (Sekiro) took me a long time.

Mike Tyson

Pure Vessel in Hollow Knight. I have a file that's at like 111% and I just need to beat the final pantheon but I've never managed it. I don't even know how bad Absolute Radiance is, I've never made it that far.

About 100 hours on the final boss of FF8 because I fucked up and saved right before the fight with basically nothing in my inventory. I repeated the fight for literal weeks, trying different strategies and item use patterns and stuff.

It was very rewarding to complete, but I’ll never play that game again.

Sekero is just about my favorite game. I've completed it at least 20 times and will do so again.

I've beaten the Demon of Hatred 2 times and I never want to play that motherfucker ever again.

You underestimate my willingness to lower the difficulty if I'm stuck

There's like 10 years between starting Pokémon Red and beating the final four for me. I didn't have the guide books but eventually it was easy to get help from the internet for a handful of hangups. I put it down for a long time somewhere after like 4 gyms, came back years later, and spent maybe 6 months playing on the commute

Stay Puft...screw this pixel perfect dancing marshmallow lol so frustrating

Renoir, 2nd fight.

I've never seen what's beyond the fourth level of Battletoads for Gameboy. That fucking labyrinth.

Beat Emerald without much of a fuss.

Best Ruby after many many tries. X-Summon and KotR with only Cloud alive is the way to go.

Never beat Omega in VIII. Tried many times.

Celeste

There's one screen that's just keeeeps going in the very last level, shit took me like 20-30 hours spread over two weeks

Smough and Ornstein...took me three days to beat them. Never. Again.

The aircraft carrier landing in top gun

Gozer in Ghostbusters for the Master System.

As with any game of that era you had to play through the whole game with no save to reach the last boss. Sometimes you’d get taken out before reaching Gozer by the poltergeists on the stairs.

Then finally you’d have a few seconds to figure out what was going on before you were one-shot-killed by a projectile, with very like time to work out where you could have moved to.

I’ve still never truly beaten Gozer, but finally used save states to finish the game on my Anbernic a couple of years ago, meaning it took me about 30 years to see the ending.

Currently for me it's the Silksong Choral Chambers gauntlet. It's been about 5 months. I can get to the last two Sentinals, only as of last night, but fail. It's taken that long as I give up, don't play for a week, then go off exploring other areas.

Ugh. My friends and I recently played through "V Rising" . It's a good game. It's like Valheim meets Diablo but you're vampires.. Because of our busy adult lives we played together once a week for usually 2-3 hours. It's took us damn near a year to get to the final boss, and it was just wipe after wipe after wipe. We weren't making any progress. Like we couldn't get him down past 75% life no matter how hard we tried. We changed our skills and equipment, same thing. We looked up some guides online and they were basically like "git good"

We never beat him, because we didn't want to waste any more of our limited adult gaming time just getting crushed by a boss for hours.

It was such a slap in the face because nothing else in the game was that difficult. There were some tough bosses that took us down maybe 3 or 4 times. But this was just hours of getting wrecked without even getting close to winning. It was truly a morale blow.

Sigh... We switched to a different game, and I guess we will just never finish that one.

Combo of the Thunderbird and Dark Link at the end of Zelda II. The dual SOBs were impossible for me and everyone I ever knew until emulators and ROMs made it possible to save state and jump back in over and over.

Metroid Prime on the game cube. I've played through that game multiple times over the decades and never could finish off the Metroid Prime boss at the end. I got so very close a handful of times, but could never finish her off.

i gave up on consort Radahn. but i guess they made it easier later with a patch? never went back to try again after trying to beat him for a week.

DS3's Pontif Sulyvahn! GRR! I'll get you next playthrough! Just you wait!

In Hollow Knight, the Grimm fight. I spent hours learning the patterns. I’m pretty sure that’s what created the drift on my joycons during that time.

I've been stuck deep in Bomberman '93 for about 15 years. It's the boss level that starts with the multiple enemies on motorcycles and then progresses to a single boss who flies around the perimeter of the level and shoots fire. Every few years I'll load up my save and spend an hour or two re-learning the fire guy's patterns and making attempts, but never quite well enough.

I've heard Bomberman '94 is really cool, but I'm not allowing myself until I finish this one!

Metroid Dread was my first exposure to "tough but fair" bosses where every defeat felt earned. Every single boss took multiple tries, and every time I went through this cycle of trying a few times, walking away, debating whether I should quit altogether, only to come back a day or so later to repeat the process. I beat the entire game. Ravenbeak was of course the hardest, but man it felt good when I finally beat him.

I had a similar experience playing through various Soulslikes. The only other one I managed to beat was Tunic (I know I talk about that game a lot. It left quite the impression).

My mom. When she says, "Turn that off and get your homework done," I always cave.

The final battle in Star Trek 25th Anniversary (before it was patched). It's just not possible to win this!

The tank in Arkham Knight on the Xbox 360. I spent hours trying to get past it. Finally looked online and others were saying it took them days to get past it. Decided I didn't like the game enough to put that much effort into one fight.

Hogger

... fucking Hogger, man

I played Minecraft for over a decade before I bothered going to beat the Ender Dragon

Mike Tyson/Mr. Dream in Punch-Out!! (I did beat them with Game Genie though).

The final boss of the Who Framed Roger Rabbit NES game. That was some unfair BS!

Ballos from Cave Story. Mostly because the runback to that boss is literally called hell lol

In terms of total time since I first played the game to finally beating it, probably Cave Story's Ballos fight for me. I had a fan made port of the game for the PSP back in '06 ish, struggled a lot to get the regular ending, found out about the true ending, and couldn't ever beat the Last Cave (Hidden), much less gauntlet of challenges beyond it. I think at the most I had seen that there was a secret area beyond the "final boss" for the true ending and the fan name for it, but never been. I might have once gotten to it but I know for certain I never ever beat it or the true final boss.

At some point around about 2018 ish I think I saw that they had a rerelease for the game on the Switch titled Cave Story+, where I fell in love with the game all over again and finally played it to its true completion. I still have all of the screenshots and videos I took during my first completion of that boss fight. I think since then I have beaten it on Hard Mode, but only ever on the Switch version with Co-op mode which allows you to double your damage output being that you have 2 players, so it'll be interesting trying to go back and complete it again soon without almost any Health pickups at all.

The Jade Temple level for the final chicken egg in Guacamelee 2. It's fucking bullshit!