Waht do you feel makes an RPG challenging?

[Wolf Kanno]

We've seen a bit of discussion on this lately in other threads and forums, but I'm curious to see what people feel makes this genre challenging or what it could do to be more challenging. Let's talk game design! :jess:

[Pike]

For me personally - weird/unorthodox battle systems. a la Undertale.

[FFNut]

Puzzles that make you think. I remember going nuts with Luffia II as a kid.

[Depression Moon]

Well I'm currently playing Super Mario RPG Revolution and its enemies hitting hard or constantly inflicting Fear.

[Yellow_Magic]

Any battle system where one wrong move could lead to the party being almost annihilated or even a straight Game Over. See: My avatar

[Wolf Kanno]

In my experience, the most challenging RPGs I've played that didn't resort to some fake difficulty elements tend to be games that don't break the "your rules are not my rules" what I mean is that the battle mechanics of the player are used by the enemy as well. These also tend to be the types of games where status magic and instant death spells are actually effective. Games like Pokemon, mainline SMT, and older dungeon crawler style games like early Dragon Quest have offered the most challenging and satisfying gameplay I've gotten out of the genre.