Challenge Runs

So since FF games tend to be fairly easy, especially on repeat playthroughs, I usually use hard mods and difficulty patches. However, something bizarre occurred to me. I have literally never beaten vanilla FFVII "fairly." Back in the day I only used GameSharks for everything and in more recent years my runs of the game have been with the aforementioned mods which obviously substantially alter things to how they were originally.

So at present I am going through vanilla FFVII, or at least I intend to. I'm really dividing my attention lately between that and P2 and a billion other things. It's a headache. However since I've heard a lot about how easy VII is, I figure I'm gonna have to go with a challenge run.

I figure a low level forced class run can work. I tried something similar with VIII but VIII is such a goddam mess that even that challenge wasn't enough to make it hard. But here, I will only be allowing each character to do certain things ie. their class. Cloud will be a Paladin so he can use physical attacks and Cure. (I can't recall if Cecil had anything besides that like Esuna....) Aerith will be a pure White Mage and Vincent will only be allowed to use Buffs/Debuffs and other stuff like that. This is my idea going into the game, anyway. I think it sounds interesting and restrictive enough to make the game challenging yet not so restrictive as to make things dull. I mean, No Materia Runs? What's even the point?

Anyway, have you tried any self-imposed challenges to make your beloved FF games harder for you and to spice up replays?

I revived Aeris/th and gave myself 8 mastered enemy skills.
I've also used Seifer and Edea on disk 3 in final fantasy VIII.

It seems I use cheats only to get new characters or things I can't normally get.

"Starter weapons only" is fun in FFVII. Or at least, it's fun so far, I'm only part way through disc 1 with it. But I always liked the idea of using the iconic weapons from start to finish. Especially with the remake coming up, you can see it strapped to his back the whole time so it'll be weird to swap it out for the Force Stealer or what have you.

Of course, not only does it limit your stats but also your materia slots. So it's a double whammy challenge.

I can only do that for Kingdom Hearts. I feel like in a Final Fantasy game you'd be crippling yourself hard.

For me, it usually comes down to class systems which has various effects on the games you try it on. I never really felt liked it worked out so well in VII and VIII partially due to how spread out some skills can be in the game so it makes the early sections boring.

Limiting magic in VI was kind of interesting because you never realize how much of a crutch mechanic it is until you make one character a dedicated healer and find yourself in odd situations where you have to actually bother using items since you benched said healer. FFII and XII benefit from a class system the most I feel.

Most challenges I do are hardly challenges and more just me screwing around or just playing the game how I feel the designers meant for it to be. For instance, I usually try to never grind in FFVI and VII and just rush through the game as quickly as I can to maintain a sense of challenge. Likewise in my last playthrough of FFX, I stopped leveling after each character completed their part of the sphere grid. In VIII, I limit myself to one set of 100 for each spell so basically only one set of Fire, Fira, and Firaga instead of everyone having all three, which makes for a much more interesting game. In FFV, I usually ban Freelancer and Mime to make the last stretch of the game more interesting.

In games like Tactics and Tactics Advance I either go all mage/unconventional classes for FFT, or I use the Auto-battle feature to test out how good my builds are. In TA and TA2, I'll make parties composed of one race but different jobs for each.