TV tropes has an entire page on “Nintendo Hard” where games from the NES era used to be brutally difficult owing to the technical limitations of that system.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard
Recently playing through Link to the Past for the first time I found it to be an exceptionally difficult game especially in the final few dungeons. But then I played Minish Cap and other than the penultimate dungeon, the game was comparatively much more forgiving. And I think in general video games from the GameCube era onwards have been way less difficult than those in the NES and SNES era.
What was the reason Nintendo shifted from making difficult games (barring exceptions like Donkey Kong Country games)?
by mrnicegy26