RPGs are games governed primarily by numbers. Your stats are numbers, your weapons are numbers, and even the enemies are just a bunch of abstract numbers if you think about it. It all comes down to the numbers, from the damage you do to the probability of you doing it.
Speaking of probability, a staple of RPGs is items being randomly dropped by certain enemies. Every game handles this process differently; some enemies only drop materials, others drop entire pieces of equipment, but for whatever reason, certain enemies won't give up their rare goods unless you pry them from their cold, dead hands. And oftentimes, not even after that! Here are some items and materials from various RPGs that, for whatever reason, are ridiculously difficult to get your hands on.
8 Sword Of Kings - Earthbound
The Sword of Kings is the only weapon in the entire game that Poo can equip. If it ain't the Sword of Kings, he ain't interested; it's his bare fists or nothing.
Since it's the only weapon Poo will use, it is a naturally fantastic sword, but the only way to get one is having it drop off one of the Starman Supers that roam the Stonehenge Base. Your odds of getting the Sword of Kings off a Starman Super are roughly 1 in 128, which has proven so legendarily frustrating that many Earthbound players abandon the notion of ever laying hands on it.
7 Ultra Rares - Kingdom of Loathing
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Kingdom of Loathing has a list of 13 special items collectively known as the Ultra Rares. These items, when equipped, can have all kinds of wacky, game-changing effects on the world, with such notable examples being the Incredibly Dense Meat Gem, which increases your Meat, Moxie, and MP, and the 17-Ball, which provides buffs to all damage types.
How do you get Ultra Rare items? Honestly, nobody knows. No, seriously. The game's community has literally tried for years to crack the code, but these items seem to just pop up at complete random. Nobody's even managed to suss out their precise odds. Only a game like Kingdom of Loathing could make an entire class of items so pointlessly obtuse for laughs.
6 Shiny Pokemon - Pokemon Series
It's a bit mean-spirited to refer to Pokemon as "drops," but considering what they put us through to obtain them, let's just call it fair play. While Shiny Pokemon don't have any practical difference from their normal counterparts, their sheer rarity has driven many to frustration as they've tried to figure out ways to game the system and improve their odds of finding them.
People have written entire mathematical equations to determine the precise probability of encountering a Shiny Pokemon. As of the most recent releases, that probability is about 1 in 4,096. And if you can believe it, that's actually better than it used to be.
5 Cola Bottle - Live A Live
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The Cola Bottle in Live A Live is a special, infinitely reusable consumable item that immediately deals 999 damage to any enemy you use it on. Someone must've really shaken the heck out of that thing. If you could get it, it'd be a game-breaker for sure, but the only way to get it is to defeat the secret boss of the Contact scenario, King Mammoth.
King Mammoth is a very difficult boss that requires an extremely precise strategy to deal with, so you need to be super-prepared to even attempt to take him on. Even if you beat him, though, he only has a 1 in 3 chance of dropping the Cola Bottle, so all of your efforts may end up being ultimately pointless. Who's ready for some save scumming?!
4 Ukemochi Liver - Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. King Abaddon
Late in Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon, you'll receive a request for a special item known as Ukemochi Liver. Apparently, it's needed to create a potent medicine for some nondescript important person. Well, how hard can it be to get your hands on some liver? Turns out, very.
The only way to get Ukemochi Liver is to donate money to the local shrine, 300 yen a pop. Every donation has a probability of about 1 in 256 to yield an Ukemochi Liver. Amusingly, this request is literally the only thing in the game you can even use this item for, so its existence is not much else besides a rude gesture toward 100 percent completionists.
3 X Buster Mk-III - Mega Man X: Command Mission
You might not know if you've never played this game, but the enemy encounter rate in Mega Man X: Command Mission is absolutely ridiculous. You can't walk five steps without running into a random encounter. You would think that this might be potentially beneficial if you were looking for X's best weapon, the X Buster Mk-III, since it only drops from the Cannon Driver enemies in the last dungeon.
Well, don't worry, the game thought of that too, which is why the odds of getting the Mk-III off a Cannon Driver are a measly one percent. It is possible to fudge your odds a bit by equipping Good Luck Force Metal, but that only improves drop rates by around three percent and is no picnic to get your hands on either.
2 Gale - Kingdom Hearts
In the first Kingdom Hearts, the only Keyblade keychain you can't get just by playing through the story or finishing side objectives like the Colosseum is the very last one, the Ultima Weapon. The only way to get the Ultima Weapon is to synthesize it using the various materials dropped by Heartless.
Most of the synthesis materials in the recipe aren't that difficult to find, with many of them dropped semi-regularly by prize-giving Heartless like the White Mushrooms. The Gale materials are the lone exception. Gales are exclusively dropped by two enemy types in the very last world, the Angel Stars and the Invisibles, and their drop rates are only eight percent and six percent, respectively. Hope you like the End of the World, because you'll be hanging around there for a while.
1 Memory - Darkest Dungeon
Darkest Dungeon's Color of Madness DLC adds several new District buildings to the Hamlet, one of the most useful being the Mill. As long as you have a Mill in your Hamlet, your Heroes will no longer suffer random hunger checks in dungeons. Sounds like a solid deal, right? Well, don't get excited yet, because to build the Mill, you need ten Memories, special materials dropped only by the DLC's miniboss, the Thing from the Stars.
The Thing only has a 50 percent chance of even spawning, it's a very difficult enemy to defeat (as if every enemy in Darkest Dungeon wasn't already bad enough), and your chances of getting a single Memory from beating it are only about one in seven on Veteran missions. Those are some pretty lousy odds. You can also get Memories by defeating The Sleeper, but that's hardly an improvement.