Great JRPGs that are also hard, difficult, challenging

So here's the deal, I'd want to play a JRPG but every time I do that I end up in the same tired place : those games are way too easy for my taste. The first JRPG I played was Phantasy Star II on the Megadrive/Genesis and that one has a difficulty that I like. The fights could be epic, and not just on the bosses, the grinding too.

Anyway, considering
1) platform isn't a problem (tough I'd want something at least 16 bits onward I guess)
2) "challenging" might not be enough (sometime in reviews it feels like a way to spice-up the quality when really
3) I'm not masochistic, if a game is incredibly hard it's not for me
4) the game needs to be great in general, not just on its difficulty curve

what -according to you- would be the games that would sastisfy these criterions ?

Edit, as emerged from zeik's comment :
@zeik said:

Exactly ! That's the worst actually, because you play a considerable amount of time to get to that point where you master the game (its combat system, its leveling etc) then it feels as boring as it's easy. So that's exactly what I want to steer clear off, actually (thx for the other references, will look into that).

Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne (PS2 game on PSN) and Shin Megami Tensei IV for 3DS.

Also I shouldn't have to tell you this I'm sure but Demon's Souls is a bit of a masterpiece.

These are just the most obvious ones. But they're all very mechanically sound and great aesthetically. Great games.

Seconded.

The Persona games (especially the forgotten 1 and 2/2-2) have a great difficulty curve if you don't grind too much.

What I played of Resonance of Fate seemed pretty challenging, I have been meaning to go back to it in greater detail. Some of the combat sections were quite difficult.

I'm a tactical guy and I had a rough time multiple times in Valkyria Chronicles. If you wanna go back a couple generations, Skies of Arcadia (by the same company) had its moments too.

Look no further than Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. Seriously, that should be your first stop, that game will kick your ass.

SMTIV is also pretty hard at times but I like Nocturne more and I think it's a more difficult game. Both will satisfy that "hard JRPG itch" pretty well.

Ok, thx frostyryan and corevi. I had forgotten about Demon's Souls it's now back on my to-play-ist.

As for the Megami Tensei games, I've played Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga and it felt too easy so I gave up on the franchise more or less.

Also check out the very underrated Strange Journey.

I wouldn't recommend it as your first smt game though.

The Shin Megami Tensei is often labeled as one of the harder JRPG series out there (which includes games like Digital Devil Saga), but that can vary wildly depending how you approach it. If you don't know what you're doing and kinda stumble through them they can be very unforgiving and kick your ass repeatedly. But they're also one of those kinds of games that if you pick the right skills and do the right things in combat you can often kind of breeze through it after a point. This series is well worth playing, but they're not always the most balanced difficulty wise.

I think the Etrian Odyssey series has managed a more consistent difficulty curve. I think 3 and 4 especially managed to get the challenge down pretty well, always keeping you on your toes without ever feeling particularly unfair.

I think Radiant Historia was another good example of that. I thought that game was pretty tough at times, but in the way that pushed you to explore the combat mechanics rather than simply killing you a lot. It's a really great overlooked JRPG too. Good luck finding a copy nowadays though.

Well DDS2 does have a hard mode if you cared to give that another shot. I wouldn't consider DDS an especially easy JRPG though, so you might be a little more masochistic than you claim. (It also makes recommendations a little tougher.) You should probably give SMT: Nocturne a try on hard. If you have minimal experience with the franchise and go into it blind it might be what you're looking for.

I hear Renaissance of Fate is fairly difficult, but mostly for being outrageously obtuse. Haven't played it myself though. If you want good JRPGs that are also challenging, you should look into Tri-Ace's catalog in general.

Exactly ! That's the worst actually, because you play a considerable amount of time to get to that point where you master the game (its combat system, its leveling etc) then it feels as boring as it's easy. So that's exactly what I want to steer clear off, actually (thx for the other references, will look into that).

Final Fantasy Tactics for PSX (the PSP version is good as well I hear). Very challenging, excellent gameplay, good plot. Also has a distinct lack of anime bullshit for a Final Fantasy, the character designs are pretty grounded in reality.

The last remnant can be pretty difficult and has some epic-feeling battles. The regular battles are set to be more challenging than a lot of other JRPGs because the party is fully healed at the end of each one. I won quite a few boss battles by the skin of my teeth too.

I would disagree wholeheartedly that any of those games are ever a 'breeze,' regardless of whatever skill wizardry you can cobble together. Yes, once you know what you're doing, things get substantially more manageable, but that's all only true up to a point. Especially in pre-Press-Turn games, you can get party-wiped by anything if you aren't careful.

FFT, Nocturne , Souls series and Tactics Ogre PSP. They will all raise your blood pressure =P

The Tactics: Ogre remake on PSP is one of the most unforgiving games that I have ever played. I cannot recommend it enough.

ZHP: Zettai Hero Project is a rogue-like-lite from the team that brought you Disgaea. THe game is pretty unique and the whole point of the game is dying over and over again.

Will strategy games like Disgaea fit in here ? They're fantastic and challenging (but like all JRPGS you can just grind if youre experiencing difficulties).

Well you are kind of asking for the impossible looking for a jrpg that does not become easy after you master its systems. If a rpg is still hard, outside of bosses and optional content, even with the best strategies, equipment, and top levels then it is usually considered a horribly balanced game. That means without all that stuff the game would be impossible. So most rpgs outside of earliest have veered away from the Phantasy Star 2 design. Which is generally known for not being well balanced.

So for suggestions for that type of jrpg they would have to be from about the same era as Phantasy Star 2. The earlier FF are known for being pretty hard. FFIII and FFV are especially known for being hard. FFII can also be incredibly hard or easy depending on how you navigate and exploit its broken system but that's not a good game in any way shape or form.

Vagrant Story from what I hear might fit what you a looking for. It is an RPG without leveling instead you collect equipment pieces to create your own equipment. I hear to truly play it well you have to craft specific gear for pretty much every encounter. So that should keep the game interesting throughout.

For more current stuff only the more actiony variety of jrpgs come to mind. The Kingdom Hearts games can be pretty hard on the hardest difficulties. They will at least keep you on your toes.The Tales game and Star Ocean are similar from my understanding but I don't have much experience with those.

The World Ends With You also comes to mind. Controlling both screens never becomes trivial. The game has multiple difficultly levels plus it gives you plenty of options to further teak the difficulty. You can manually set your level anywhere below your current level for extra difficulty and better drop rates. You can also choose chain battles into a gauntlet without rest for even better drops.

All right. I didn't entirely give up on the franchise, for example I was under the impression that Persona 4 was a very different game and very highly rated so it wasn't written off, also it wasn't based on just my experience with that game but on my experience with jrpgs in general and my ignorance of the depth of the franchise. Anyway will probably give Nocturne a try.

@crembaq: "Breeze" is kind of an exaggeration, but I do think a few skills in Nocturne make the latter parts of that game substantially easier. Enough so that I would no longer qualify the game as "difficult". To be fair, that impression is largely based on the normal difficulty. I never finished my playthrough on hard, because I thought they made it hard in the wrong ways, but that could be what the TC is looking for.

Now that it's cheap and easy to get your hands on there's little harm it giving it a shot.

Eh, once you get the system down it's really not too tough.

Final Fantasy 12 allows for some really amazing, intense fights if you don't grind too much. Taking on higher level espers and hunt monsters at low levels are really challenging and fun.

Bravely Default's battle system allows for some really incredible fights too. I put in almost 100 hours of one playthrough this year and I spent 11 of those hours dying.

My favorite RPG for combat is Dragon Age:Origins on the PC on the hardest difficulty.

Any of the Tales games on higher difficulties are very hard. You can avoid grinding a little if you get very good at the combat. I recommend Abyss or Vesperia.

@eluent: P4 is great, but I wouldn't recommend it if you're looking for a hard game.

Two great 16-bit Jrpg which are difficult but largely forgotten about have to be Phantasy Star 2 and Phantasy Star 3. Any fan of Jrpg's should check them out! Also, yeah, I may have a fairly differing opinion but forget about Bravely Default. Any game that pads out it's length the way this game did should be tossed.

Seconding Vagrant Story. Gear and risk management is crucial to success so it's certainly not about grinding, and it's a pretty damn good game as well. Couple of real memorable characters, and it's got a neat story that takes a lot from Final Fantasy Tactics, meaning it draws from both the intrigue of politics and the grandeur of high fantasy.

Also seconding Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, which not only boasts of challenging SRPG gameplay throughout the entire story, but also of branching narratives from hard decisions that result in so many varying scenarios and endings. If someone were to tell me that it's a superior game to Final Fantasy Tactics, I wouldn't actually disagree immediately, if not for my nostalgic love of FFT.

And to get a little off-kilter with a recommendation, I would actually say give Child of Light a chance. While not technically a JRPG, it borrows a good deal from the genre, with some of its aesthetics and its ATB mechanics. Many would say it's inspired by Grandia. I personally have it in my top 3 GOTY. Nothing else that came out this year looks as gorgeous as this game does, and it's soundtrack is superb, too.

I played it on Expert because I'm no filthy Casual, and every battle until the very end when I was just backtracking to finish all the sidequests was super engaging. It's kind of sad that there's a good portion of people out there who only played it once when the difficulty settings were misleading, dismissing it immediately when they just ran through every battle as all style and no substance.

I actually had to pay a lot of attention to crafting and equipping Oculi, picking which skills to upgrade, switching party members in combat, and using Igniculus.

I think the rhyming dialogue can be a bit cringeworthy at times, but I don't get bothered by small stuff like that so that didn't really detract from my enjoyment. I actually really like how the backstory is fleshed out by the collectibles. Really adds to the fantastical/magic realism aspect of it.

It's only $6 on Steam today, and for a 10-12 hour experience, I think it's worth every penny. Just remember to play it on Expert, not Casual. Those are the only two difficulties since they patched that problem.

I'd also recommend Resonance of Fate. Its such a satisfying game when you finally get past a part your struggling with (which is pretty much every chapter). There's not a lot of room for error. The battles look pretty awesome too, certainly a spectacle when your characters are flipping through the air raining bullets on enemies.

Breath of Fire 2: Mainly because that game's balance is not in the player's favor. Each fight gives you little XP so you have to grind your way through some areas. This is the SNES version. The GBA version is much more forgiving.

Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter: This game makes you fight for every single resource in the game. Unless you cheese the game by exploiting the SOS system, you will find yourself scrounging for every health item and utilizing every trick in the book to gain an advantage against enemies. The game also requires you to use rare save tokens to save a la Ink Ribbons from Resident Evil. It is very satisfying to beat it without ever using the SOS system.

I will second this comment, if you want JRPGs with really cool and complex battle systems then Tri-Ace is your company. Also Resonance of Fate shouldn't be missed. It was so stupid of Sega to release this on the same day as FFXIII but Sega wouldn't be Sega if they weren't doing stupid things.

Destroying a block of concrete with my bare hands is also hard, difficult, and challenging but that doesn't make it good or even fun.

The thing that really really really really bothers me about cheap rpgs are they are lazily designed and lazily built and that makes it unfair. There was no mystery to how to beat Dragon Quest 8...just lots of grinding where even doing simple math exposed how much grinding you would have to do. Time is not much of a test or challenge. There are games like even the Demon's Souls had out right bugs and mistakes and which is very bad in "psuedo-rogue" games. And still others like RoS just obscure and obfuscate to the point you ignore the game's feedback.

If some high profile western developer pulled that we'd laugh at how juvenile, amateur, and broken the game is. Yet hardcore fans said "this is how they want it". Modern game design emphasizes showing the player "the rules", asking the player "What do you do?" in scenarios, and rewarding and punishing the player for following or breaking the rules. All too often these games fail all of that.

I find Resonance of Fate fairly tough but fun, learning the combat system is a must.

The early Dragon Warrior games are stupidly hard, mostly just 2 though. I know you want 16 bit and on, but there have been remakes and stuff (although they do make the game easier). The games are extremely simple for the most part, but it takes a lot of planning and skill to really get some things down. The games are always so open ended too.

@eluent: I'm fairly certain you're way more masochistic than you think. You want a game that doesn't get easier and easier the more you master its systems and earn necessary skills?........why? Isn't that what a game is?...

Go with Nocturne. Just do that. I'd recommend Persona 3 and Persona 4 because they are masterpieces, but they're not hard games. They're perfect for other reasons.

@eluent: Of course going with good skills and making good choices makes Nocturne easier, that's what a turn based RPG is - smart choices. Plus I think Zeik is flat out wrong, there are several different ways to approach the game.

If you want impossible, then play Etrian Odyssey IV or Untold on their hoghest difficulties.

Ok, I'm intrigued by that game, makes me think about a non-rpg and easy game -Brothers: a tale of two sons- which I actually love. Short duration, great, lovely artistic style. So I guess one of the flaw in the typical jrpg making is the duration : how to make a jrpg challenging when the games is to be played for dozens of hours ? And that's not even accounting for those that artificially expand the duration by giving bland stupid quest a la "go there to say this or take that" mini-quest). I don't think it's impossible, but I acknowledge it must be a formidable task.

I must also place a vote especially for Shin Megami Tensei IV for the 3DS... I think it's a great game and can be very difficult.

My suggestions would be

Parasite Eve, Vagrant Story, Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete (every boss scales to your level so you can't grind), Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King, or Xenogears.

None I would classify as unfairly hard but all offer a challenge.

@EXTomar @FrostyRyan@believer258

The ideal difficulty curve would take into consideration the improvement of the player and adapt the challenges in consequence. I'm convinced it's not easy, requires a lot of work and isn't very common in jrpgs (actually it's so rare you seem to see the ease as an essential element of the jrpg). But as my first jrpg (Phantasy Star II - I think the first jrpg you played and love has a great influence on you and your taste) shows, it's possible and it exists.

Vagrant Story (hardest learning curve period), Valkyrie Profile 2 (relatively difficult first time through and then has 50 successive NG+ difficulties, in addition to 10 internal seraphic gate difficulties each playthrough), and the Last Remnant (if you somehow beat this one without at least looking at an FAQ briefly I salute you, very easy to screw yourself; but also genuinely interesting/unique combat), PC version is much better.

Don't know if you count it but the Souls games are always up there in terms of difficulty.

There's a fair number of JRPGs where if you do only a handful of random battles they can be quite challenging, as long as you don't overlevel. There's also games where you basically can't overlevel like Suikoden III; though that game only gets challenging toward the end.

The hardest for me was Saga Frontier 1 and 2. They're extremely difficult and have various playable characters each with their own story. Both are for the PSX.

I never said anything about there being only one way to approach the game. I don't know where you got that idea. I just think there are some skills in that game that are too strong. If you use most of them the game is not just easier, but dramatically easier. To be fair, a lot of it is not immediately obvious, especially if you are inexperienced with the franchise, so they can be easily overlooked on a first playthrough.

I enjoyed EO4 the most due to various system improvements, but it's definitely on the easier side compared to the DS games. If EO4 is "impossible" then EO1 and 2 will break your will to live.

I find Radiant Historia to be fun. As somebody who really liked the combat in Persona 3/4, the other JRPG that the team developed seems more like a puzzle, which makes every fight really fun in a tetris sort of way.

Barring that, there's a mod for Final Fantasy Tactics that is all of the tactics action, but you cannot break the game, and it keeps being hard. I don't really remember what it's called, though...

FFX done and done. The best JRPG out there and it sure is challenging. I was 13 when i first played that game but i didnt manage to complete it until 3 years and 4 restarts later and everything i played since that (both new and old) has been easy in comparison. That may tell you more of me than the game but in my oppinion FFX is the best jrpg ever made and it is in the top 5 of the best games ever made in my humble oppinion.

That's certainly an opinion I've never heard before. With all due respect, have you played a lot of JRPGs?... Don't get me wrong, I kinda love FFX despite its flaws. But best of all time?

I didn't realize you decided to quote me in the intro post. I don't want you or anyone else to think Nocturne is some super easy joke of a game just because you pick the right skills. There are ways to make that game dramatically easier, but I'm not claiming it's an easy JRPG. Don't let what I said stop you from giving it a try.

@frostyryan: Well i have played a range of JRPGs covering all from Chrono trigger to Ni no kuni but i wont say im any sort of JRPG guru, My JRPG journey also started in 2000 so everything before that i have experienced in emulated form.

@frostyryan: i dont know about him,but ive played a ton of jrpgs and FFX is one of my fave FF games and also jrpgs ever.however,i will say it has its faults like the characters and story arent that great imo.im a gameplay and customization first gamer and everything else is whatever in alot of cases to me.so with that in mind thats why i love FFX because it has one of the funnest combat systems in the genre.it also has one of the biggest skill trees in the jrpg genre which gives alot of customization.the only skill tree i can think of thats close in size is path of exiles and thats a totally different genre.anyways i love it alot too,but i can see why others wouldnt if they want really good characters and story.

Sorry, I posted that rather hastily at work on my phone. Still, I think you're overestimating how much easier the game gets when you use certain skills. Yes, some builds make the game easier, and there are frankly some ways to break it, but both of those require that you've either gone through the game like everyone else who talks about how hard Nocturne is, or that you look up a guide. Knowing exactly how to play a game and exactly what skills to go for will make any RPG easy. I can't name any JRPG that has had a better balance between "very difficult" and "very fun" than Nocturne, so I can't help but strongly suggest that it be anyone's first stop when looking for a challenge out of JRPG's.

I never played the earlier Etrian Odyssey games, just IV and Untold. I had heard that they were harder games but couldn't really speak for them.

This is precisely what Nocturne does. I'll admit that some bosses in the latter half of the game do feel a little easy, but only some of them. The rest keep up a pretty good difficulty balance and curve, especially if you go through the Labyrinth of Amala (which you really should do, because it nets you the best bosses, the best ending, and some pretty good demons).