Legitimate Difficulty Progression?

[Ganondorf]

Does a legitimate progression of difficulty exist in gaming anymore? I'm not talking about just plain HARD games; although they're few and far between, they do exist. I'm talking about a game starting you out with baby steps, and steadily working you up to near frustrating levels. Last Bosses that are actually, like... difficult, etc.

This all came about from the recent Diablo 3 debacle, with the "too-steep" then "too-shallow" difficulty scaling between acts in Inferno (but let's not get into that here...). Frustrated with the end result, I hooked up my NES and started playing through Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, having not played it in about 10 years. It was so satisfying beating that game back in the day, partly I feel because the progression of each fight was so good. Get your ass kicked by Sandman, only to finally beat him and have it kicked again by Super Macho Man, only to finally beat him and get clobbered by Tyson. I got to thinking, and I honestly can't remember experiencing this since the SNES days; MAYBE to a lesser extent, the N64 days.

Honest question: have there been any games in the past few years that accomplished this, at least somewhat?

[Ragnus]

Dark Souls. Start every area getting your ass kicked left and right before feeling like a total boss when you figure the place out.

[Kaisha]

Dark Souls has no progression. It's just a cliff from start to finish.

I'm trying to think of games that have a progression that don't have RPG-like mechanics you can just grind at and bruteforce your way past a hurdle.


Guitar Hero series perhaps?

[AoE]

Vid relevant

[Hiryo]

Bayonetta? Start off with easy mobs and get introduced to more and more crazy ones. If you don't learn how to play better you'll get stomped.

[Caiyuo]

Vid relevant

Was going to post the same thing, p. interesting watch

[Krazy]

There's a mod for Grandia that sounds like what you're looking for.
http://grandiaredux.blogspot.de/

The guy who made it posts on GameFAQs and says the game gets gradually harder and by the time you start getting to the optional dungeons they're hard as shit.

[Icarian]

Problem with Diablo 3 is that it's not the kind if difficulty you overcome with skill, it's just gear, you can be the most skillfull player around and you'll get your ass kicked until you reach a certain gear threshold

I basically did the same, played mostly in the same way from act 1 inferno till I beat Diablo, there was no "skill" or "experience" gained because monsters do exactly the same in Hell and inferno, they just hit harder, have more HP and get an extra affix, it's just a numbers game

in Dark souls you need to be skillful or you'll get your ass handed to you, if you get killed it's not because you didn't have enough gear or you got one-shotted without a way to avoid it, it's because you failed to dodge/block or whatever

Same goes for Fighting games

edit: uh-oh. read the OP in a wrong way, disregard my post, likes someone said above, Dark/Demon Souls is a good example on how difficulty should be done