Any good challenging jrpgs?

[Jasede]

The Phantasy Stars aren't challenging RPGs.

To me it sounds like you are best off with one of the Wizardry clones like Etrian Odyssey.

I've heard about Lufia 2's Ancient Cave; it's legendary for a JRPG challenge.

I have spent DOZENS of weekends trying to beat this as a child. The final boss is a HUGE fuck you, and all the normal enemies before him are, too.
Do you know how long it takes to get to floor 100, the final boss, if you explore and level up thoroughly?
8-9 hours. Yes, hours. No saving. Rogue-like rules.

And then that fuck you boss that only heals you and ends the fight after 3 turns. FUCK.

The only thing I have never beaten as far as RPGs go.

 

[Damned Registrations]

That would make a huge difference, especially towards the endgame. Though I'm guessing it still meant leaning heavily on Mix, at least it doesn't just exclude most of the game's potentially interesting choices like the self imposed challenges.

Anyways, I wouldn't play that game again even if it had a fantastic balance mod that tweaked everything, because the endless forced cutscenes take forever. Blobbers all the way for me. LoT, Ancient Cave in Lufia 2 and the Ancient Cave mod for FF5 are some of the most interesting games I've ever played. Ancient Cave in Lufia 2 isn't quite roguelike btw; there are special chests in the cave that contain items you're permitted to take back out with you and bring back in from then on. It adds the dynamic of risk vs reward in regards to going deeper on a run to find more treasure or calling it quits to keep the blue chest items for next time (which make clearing the early floors pretty trivial after a while, but the deeper floors are always brutal.)

Star Ocean 2 and Tales of Destiny both had some pretty awesome optional dungeons as well. Not turn based combat in those however, though the former is rather difficult on the hardest difficulty setting. The latter is an homage to an old game called Tower of Druaga, and filled with impossible to intuit secrets and puzzles, some of which are required to finish it.

Has anyone made a difficulty mod for Valkyrie Profile? I'd play the hell out of that. It's a shame the harder difficulties just make things easier for a skilled player by giving you access to better equipment and characters.

 

[Jasede]

Blue chests or no, gold dragons murder you unless your agility is very high.. and silver dragons...

And even the goddamn boss is pretty much unbeatable unless you're using Dekar or get really lucky with blue chest drops. Or, creatively, kill yourself, which is harder than it sounds because he full heals you constantly.

It is by far the hardest RPG challenge I have ever faced, and even though I made it to the final boss plenty of times, I never beat him. Mind you, each run takes 10 hours. In one sitting. Those were long, long weekends. It's much easier in "Gift" mode, where you can pick your own party (and be optimal, Dekar, Guy, Arty, Maxim) but I stubbornly refused to give up all my blue items in my story party...

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Xenogears is challenging, too. It has anti-grind measures, I think, meaning you can't really outlevel an area by fighting a bunch of random encounters to make future areas easier. The encounter rate in some of the areas is high and the enemies remain difficult the entire time you're there, pretty much. There are also plenty of really tough boss battles, including a very crazy one mid-first disc. It has a really weird and bizarre story as well, is a pretty huge and epic game and also has really cool additional features, like "mech" battles, using characters you choose to in your party from a pool of recruited NPCs and more. Check it out.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Have you tried the FF5 ancient cave? I've never beaten the Lufia 2 one either, but it seemed doable to me in theory. The FF5 version though... dear god. The floors are timed to prevent safely grinding stuff forever, which makes it tricky to optimize grinding in between boss fights where the timer resets. I never made it past the 3rd boss iirc, and only made it past the 2nd boss a couple times. Each run feels quite different too due to the random equipment and classes you get.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Check the Tactics Ogre 100 floor optional/hidden dungeon near the end of that game. Challenging to say the least. Really cool that it has hidden NPCs you can recruit there as well as tons of hidden loot, a lot of which is the best stuff in the game.

 

[Jasede]

Have you tried the FF5 ancient cave? I've never beaten the Lufia 2 one either, but it seemed doable to me in theory. The FF5 version though... dear god. The floors are timed to prevent safely grinding stuff forever, which makes it tricky to optimize grinding in between boss fights where the timer resets. I never made it past the 3rd boss iirc, and only made it past the 2nd boss a couple times. Each run feels quite different too due to the random equipment and classes you get.

No. Maybe I'll try it while I supervise my students taking their final exam. That'd be a riot.
If it's good enough I won't notice them cheating...

 

[SionIV]

Again, nobody gives a shit about the monster arena. It's a sidequest made specifically to force you to grind. You can't even fight those monsters without grinding to even unlock them. I'm talking about a normal playthrough never involving anything more complicated than Summon > Attack for 95% of all combat.

Also LOL at it not taking time to gather 50 rare cards or farm 20 chocobos. You're spending more time playing cards than it takes to finish all the mandatory boss battles in FFX combined.

The frame of reference we're talking about here is a blind playthrough of FFV vs the rest of the series, in which case FFV will force you to change your strategy most often. You'll find bosses that are immune to your melee spam, or kill your tankiest characters, or permanently cripple your strongest attackers even after reviving them. You'll have to think about the fights and change things up to win these battles, and most of the boss fights are like this. This happens in FFX like twice before the end of the game, with the aeon killing gimmick and a boss where you don't have yuna.

Alright then, if we're going to ignore the hard content in the game it's much easier to complete Final Fantasy 8.

- It takes no more than an hour to get a full set of Junctions by playing cards in Balamb Garden, once you have this you can finish all bosses in the main story line.

* 5x cards won = 100 Tornadoes
* 10x cards won = 100 Meltdown
* Walking into any shop and buying tent = 100 Curaga
* 1x Zells card = 60% STR

That's the minimum, and it'll take less than 30 minutes to win that, 1 hour if you're picking up a few other cards too.

- You spend 10 minutes extra on killing the machine in Dollet mission (as many times as you want) to gain over 200AP for your junction abilities.

- You can pick up No-Encounter from Diablos rather quickly by breaking T-rexes so you don't level up. Once you have no encounter equipped, you'll never enter any random combat.

- With no encounter you'll not level past level 10, this means that you'll never fight bosses that are higher level than 10. This in return means that you'll be able to kill 70% of the bosses in the game with ONE normal attack (Seifer, Lizards, etc)/limit break (Edea, Elryon, etc) from Squall and they'll die. You don't have to spend time in a summon sequence, you don't have to do anything, just attack/limit break the boss once.

Let's put that into perspective. You're not going to be fighting any random encounters, in the entire game, you'll be fighting bosses at level 10 with you having stats that belong to a level 80-90 from spending ONE hour in Garden. Fighting bosses at this level means that 70% of the boss fights will take you 5-10 seconds at the most.

This will be my last post on the subject, as it seems like you have no idea what you're talking about. You can complete Final Fantasy 10 much faster by NOT using any summons. Leveling up the correct characters, using the right overdrives and early game the correct weapons (Elemental strikes, poison, darkness, petrify, slow, etc). Why summon Shiva that will deal 2,000-4,000 damage (end game, without farming) a hit when you can have Rikku give Wakka 9,999 per hit and then have him do a 12x wheel?

You have no idea what you're talking about, thank you for the discussion.

[Edited]: Visit any forum (Gamefaq, etc) where they have a large Final Fantasy playerbase that spend time on challenges and you'll see forum threads on which is the game that you become the most powerful in/is the easiest to break, and you'll have 10+ pages with people arguing between 7 and 8. People don't mention Final Fantasy 10, I wonder why?

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/197341-final-fantasy-vii/41255245

"Junction system in FFVIII was broken,oyou could get most of the best stuff before you leave the garden the first time"
"FFII and FFVIII wins this category."

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/928790-final-fantasy-xiii/47379941?page=5

"VIII, I abused the junctions"
"Wow. A lot of stupid posts here. FFX is not broken, its just really easy... FF8 is however, completely broken."
"You don't really need to invest much time at all in FFVIII to make your characters overpowered though."

Those are only a few of many threads, and they all say the same thing.

 

[Ash]

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Offers a nice solid consistent challenge up until the last few stages of the game, and generally excellent gameplay.

Vagrant Story is a rather hardcore RTwP JRPG.

You mentioned no FF, but there are ROM hack mods to be used in conjunction with an emulator that can provide a challenge on a higher level and the removal of exploits, if that sounds appealing to you.

Edit: turn-based only. Right. Well the other posts got you covered.

 

[Jason Liang]

People don't understand, it isn't that FFVIII is broken. It's that if you don't want combat, the game allows you to remove it and play the game as an adventure game.

 

[SionIV]

People don't understand, it isn't that FFVIII is broken. It's that if you don't want combat, the game allows you to remove it and play the game as an adventure game.

Because being able to one shot 70% (100% if you pick up Lionheart at Disc 1) of the bosses in the game and the rest in 2 hits isn't broken at all.

 

[Ash]

People don't understand, it isn't that FFVIII is broken. It's that if you don't want combat, the game allows you to remove it and play the game as an adventure game.

Got to be the most dumbest defense for FFVIII's stupidity I've ever heard. It takes a little experimentation and grinding to be able to break the game. Experimentation and grinding in combat.
"If you don't want to do combat and instead play the game as an adventure game, first you must do some combat! And learn the systems well."
A simple "Adventure Mode" or "Easy Mode" when selecting the game would cater far more appropriately to any such players and keep exploitable systems away from the more hardcore players.

Combat is half the game buddy. It's just not very well designed in FF8, that's all. Still not a terrible game though, even considering BOTH the gameplay and plot stupidity.

 

[Jason Liang]

What combat? You can easily run from everything before you get to Diablos, except for Ifrit and the other bosses. You can play 97% of the game on Adventure mode.

You can beat the game just by playing Triple Triad.

You can also beat the game by drawcasting.

 

[SionIV]

What combat? You can easily run from everything before you get to Diablos, except for Ifrit and the other bosses. You can play 97% of the game on Adventure mode.

You can beat the game just by playing Triple Triad.

You can also beat the game by drawcasting.

You can run from most of the enemies before you get Diablo, but there are a few exceptions.

Ifrit
6-8x Soldiers during the Dollet mission that you can't escape from.
1x Snake during the Dollet mission that you can't escape from.
Elynole
XT

It's still possible to get 0 XP from it if you abuse Seifer (kill of Zell and Squall) or use Break. There are also a few none boss encounters that you have to fight after you get No-Encounter.

 

[Ash]

All true to some extent, Jason, but it takes obscure preemptive knowledge to know all that. A very good understanding of the game's systems and events. therefore any newbie wanting adventure mode (poorly designed systems resulting in exploit mode more like) is not going to get it without extensive research. So even if that were the case and the devs intended this shit it's still incredibly dumb over simply offering an adventure/easy mode when selecting new game.

 

[Jason Liang]

I'm just saying, FFVIII is not designed like a typical JRPG. Between the complete level-scaling and Diablos' No-Encounter, there's practically no reason to level and no reason to grind and you don't even need to use the magic junction system. You don't need to upgrade your weapons either. RPG combat in FFVIII is practically just as an optional component as Triple Triad.

 

[Suicidal]

It's a shame you don't like dungeon crawlers, OP, as they're pretty much the only sub-genre I'd turn to if I wanted an actual challenge.

In all non-blobber JRPGs that I've played, the difficulty ranged from "basically plays itself" to "may sometimes need to use the right skill/equip the right item to win". I haven't played that many JRPGs though.

Out of the non-blobbers I'd recommend the Front Mission series, which are very fun and have a lot of content and interesting unit customization, but, again, if you want challenge you probably won't find any there (parts 4 and 5 do have a few challenging missions though). I'd also recommend the 1.3 patch/mod for Final Fantasy Tactics. Never played it personally, but I've heard that it makes the game a lot harder and adds new stuff.

 

[Machocruz]

I would just play a tactics/SRPG if you don't care about story or overworld wandering. Regular RPG is generally inferior for combat. Specialization matters.

 

[Hyperion]

Blue chests or no, gold dragons murder you unless your agility is very high.. and silver dragons...

And even the goddamn boss is pretty much unbeatable unless you're using Dekar or get really lucky with blue chest drops. Or, creatively, kill yourself, which is harder than it sounds because he full heals you constantly.

It is by far the hardest RPG challenge I have ever faced, and even though I made it to the final boss plenty of times, I never beat him. Mind you, each run takes 10 hours. In one sitting. Those were long, long weekends. It's much easier in "Gift" mode, where you can pick your own party (and be optimal, Dekar, Guy, Arty, Maxim) but I stubbornly refused to give up all my blue items in my story party...

And even with Dekar, unless you find a Dekar Blade, you may as well just quit because you still won't kill the fucker. Did it once while playing on an emulator since save state allows for multiple playthroughs. The rewards aren't even worth it. Went from 1 - 100 twice, and bailed out early because of shit drops and not risking blue items countless times...never got the last Iris treasure. Fuck you, Lufia 2.

I'll take doing the Ancient Cave 1-100 over dodging lightning strikes 100 times in a row in FFX any day, though...

 

[Jasede]

I got to him legit dozens of times but always fell JUST short of doing enough damage. No save states.
And I still never ever pulled it off, with a ton of blue chest drops on everyone, too.

It's incredibly hard. Now that I am older I know why I lost, though: I didn't kill the gold/silver dragons. They give a lot of XP.
Of course, if they surprise you, you lose your 7-8 hour run... (no savestates)

 

[Jason Liang]

Have a camera ready so you can take a photo!

 

[Hobo Elf]

I'm just saying, FFVIII is not designed like a typical JRPG. Between the complete level-scaling and Diablos' No-Encounter, there's practically no reason to level and no reason to grind and you don't even need to use the magic junction system. You don't need to upgrade your weapons either. RPG combat in FFVIII is practically just as an optional component as Triple Triad.

I'd be surprised if FF8 was designed at all to begin with. It felt like a kitchen sink system where they kept throwing shit at it just to see what would come out in the end, with little regard for any kind of thought into the balance. Didn't work out too well as we can see.

 

[SCO]

You know, there are Lufia 2 hardtype patches around.

 

[SCO]

BTW i prefer FFVIII at least 2.5x times over FFIX. Balance is overrated, and not being a furry is underrated.

 

[Jason Liang]

I'm just saying, FFVIII is not designed like a typical JRPG. Between the complete level-scaling and Diablos' No-Encounter, there's practically no reason to level and no reason to grind and you don't even need to use the magic junction system. You don't need to upgrade your weapons either. RPG combat in FFVIII is practically just as an optional component as Triple Triad.

I'd be surprised if FF8 was designed at all to begin with. It felt like a kitchen sink system where they kept throwing shit at it just to see what would come out in the end, with little regard for any kind of thought into the balance. Didn't work out too well as we can see.

My theory is that they were thinking
*We have rpg with a good story
*Girls might like this story so maybe they will play it
*But girls don't like to fight. They like to run away
*So we'll make it easy to run away in this game
*And let's not penalize girls for running away, especially from scary monsters
*And let's make an ability that gets rid of random fights all together so girls don't get sick of running away all the time and quit

When I was an English tutor I had a girl student who'd never played video games before. I got her to start playing FFVIII. She played for like 20 hours straight.

- Yeah I know this is TADA thinking and not Square thinking...