Of all the FFs which did you feel was the easiest to complete overall?
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Of all the FFs which did you feel was the easiest to complete overall?
The one I had the easiest time with was VII
>>> IV was easy..:luca:
FF12. It was so easy they took the liberty of making it beat itself.
VI. I love this game so much but it offers the least in terms if challenge.
Depends which version of IV you played. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by black orb
Indeed.Quote:
Originally Posted by VeloZer0
Though my vote goes to FFVIII and the fact that leveling up actually makes you weaker. This set itself nicely with my playing style and I did not get a single Game Over.
I have never had an easy time with any FF.
I've always had some challenge.
Except in FFVIII. AND I WAS DOING A CHALLENGE RUN!
FFVIII is absurd because if you even vaguely understand the system, you can break it in an hour or two at most. It's not even a matter of going out of your way and getting Lion Heart on Disk 1 or whatever. You just have to use the Junction System. There, now the game is a joke.
Also note that the level scaling system is as broken as everything else because it means you have to put in even LESS effort by never fighting random battles. Just keep yourself at level 10 or some crap but Junction 100 Curagas to your HP and now you are immortal because even bosses will be doing triple digit damage for most of the game at most.
Tch, not putting FFX-2 in the poll made this a bit more difficult.
FF VI, I'd say.
I think VIII and IX are the only two games where I didn't see the Game Over screen during the events of the game. Oh wait I accidentally came across a Grand Dragon way before I was supposed to in IX so I did see one early in IX so it goes to VIII.
VIII has the most abusable combat system, but XIII plays itself with no actual input from the player, and zero actual decision making required.
VI has entirely too many ways to "break" the game. From early domination via Edgar's AutoCrossbow and Drill to later being able to exploit Vanish/Doom to obliterate everything and getting multiple Economizers at the very end, battles become a mere formality.
Final Fantasy IX
Final Fantasy VII comes next.
I really want to say FFX since it has so many counter-intuitive game design elements in it's battle system that makes the game a cakewalk, but it at least it has the Monster Arena so you can finally get a challenge (about 30 hours into the game) but VIII is just too easy to break, and it's damn near impossible not to stumble upon this fact either. You should not be able to build a party of gods in Disc 1 with that little amount of grinding.
To be honest, starting with VI, the series tries too hard to be accessible and thus every entry after it is generally way easier than the five games that proceeded it.
VIII for me for reasons mentioned, it's absurdly easy to abuse the system.
I once tested how long it would take me to become unstoppable in VIII. My HP was several thousand before the third hour.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
I dunno about that one. The fact I died several times before I realized to switch to Sentinel, or wasn't fast enough to switch to whatever job healer was, kinda shows you definitley need to do some amount of thinking during battle.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vivi22
Hang on, if they're counter-intuitive, how can you hold that against the game? That means you deliberately have to do things which are not obvious, which means experimentation and toying with things leads to an easier time. Which is true of pretty much any RPG, and is in large part the purpose of the genre? :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
I mean yeah X is mostly not a difficult game, I agree, but your argument seems odd.
e; With the caveat that I've not yet played much of V, I vote for III. There was one boss I had real trouble with but other than that the game was very easy. I liked it a lot, but very easy.
Thing is, you essentially only ever make three choices in XIII. Heal, tank, and attack. That's it. And it's generally obvious which is required and when. You might die once or twice when a new job is introduced or you meet the odd boss with a pattern you need to figure out, but such times are incredibly infrequent. I could probably count the number of times on one hand. And usually when you learn the pattern that caught you off guard once the way to counter it and timing required is obvious. An obvious optimal decision isn't really a decision.
For me, personally, FFX! I love it, but it's not too hard.
You're correct, I used the wrong phrase. My issue is that FFX basically has a very boring formula for winning battles, match the right character with the right enemy, big enemies can be dealt with by Overdrives and Aeons. The battle system doesn't leave much guess work for the player and in order to have a fun job with it outside of the optional content, you have to play it very counter-intuitively to get any enjoyment out of the story campaign.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister AdequateHang on, if they're counter-intuitive, how can you hold that against the game? That means you deliberately have to do things which are not obvious, which means experimentation and toying with things leads to an easier time. Which is true of pretty much any RPG, and is in large part the purpose of the genre? :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
I mean yeah X is mostly not a difficult game, I agree, but your argument seems odd.
e; With the caveat that I've not yet played much of V, I vote for III. There was one boss I had real trouble with but other than that the game was very easy. I liked it a lot, but very easy.
Though I'm curious to what degree you played FFIII, cause frankly it's one of the harder games. The DS version is much easier but the original has a tendency to screw you over if you are not careful.
I also agree that XIII is pretty easy because the strategy to victory is boiled down to the simple concepts Vivi22 showed. Death is also largely trivial and most of the game's deaths are a direct result from poorly implemented game concepts like main leader death = Game Over. I know they stole it from MegaTen but MegaTen handle it completely differently than XIII did which is why a lot of the deaths felt more cheap in XIII than say Persona 3 or SMTIII.
See this is where I partly disagree. While it is true that Heal Tank Attack gets you through the game, honestly, the same can be said for, like, every other Final Fantasy game. And with the occasional difficulty spike that already puts XIII above many other games. Game Overs are less of a serious thing in XIII than in other games and you're more likely to get one every now and then, but still; I never once got a Game Over on IV or VI while I did get a few on XIII.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vivi22
Also, this is a personal issue, but this strategy is almost never optimal and it bugs me when people call it that. Compared to other FF games there's a lot of ways to improve your battling efficiency in XIII. Staggering is often a waste of time. This is what the star system TRIED to push, as in motivating you to try to get 5 stars every time, but didn't really manage to. Nonetheless, the ways are there if you actually wanted to look into the battle system more in-depth.
The issue here is that the deaths are usually cheap shots and have nothing to do with strategy. The majority of my deaths involved a non-sentinel character being leader as opposed to just approaching the battle carefully. The fact death is trivial makes one wonder why they bothered since a slight tweak will fix things.Quote:
Originally Posted by Karifean
XIII's system just largely boiled down to the typical strategy most people use but only ramped up the difficulty by placing stupid restrictions on the player the game can manipulate for an easy win as opposed to the boss having a specific strategy the player has to figure out how to get around.
As for the optimal strategy, we can make that argument for most of the games in the series as every title generally has a more optimal way to efficiently win but when the game allows the lowest common denominator for victory to get the job done, it boils down to how much the player cares whether they put effort into the system. This is the fundamental problem with JRPG battle systems since the later half of the 90s.
Okay, that makes more sense, thanks for clarifying what you meant. I disagree inasmuch as any RPG has exactly that, and the fact that X makes it reasonably easy to deduce what your tactics should be is due to having strong game design in both visual and interface terms (i.e. you can see that a skink is a skinny, skittish thing so you should probably use Wakka or Tidus; you can see a flan is a... well, a flan, so physical attacks will be useless; and you can pretty easily scan things to learn all about them). But thank you for clarifying :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
Well I finished it so :greenie: Only part that gave me trouble was Garuda who, admittedly, hurt my bumhole quite a lot many times, mainly because I hadn't realized that the Dragoon's Tower had lots of stuff that would help me against him.Quote:
Though I'm curious to what degree you played FFIII, cause frankly it's one of the harder games. The DS version is much easier but the original has a tendency to screw you over if you are not careful.
My issue is that it is a matching game. Instead of letting me figure it out for myself that Tidus is better for weaker but agile enemies the game flat out tells me and proceeds to show me through it's strong visual design that Tidus will always kill these smurfers in one hit. Hell the fact it usually takes just one hit to finish them off is another problem. Being able to see turn order basically means that my entire strategy isQuote:
Originally Posted by Mister Adequate
Step One: Scan enemy types
Step Two: Figure out turn order
Step three: Match enemy with character, hit attack
Step four: win.
It may seem like there is more strategy than earlier installment where strategy comes down to mash X to win, but since the results are the same due to poor challenge, then I'm annoyed the game forces me to take two extra steps if the result is going to be the same. If the enemies had the ability to manipulate turn order more strongly and could take a few more blows, the system would be pretty good but as it stands it's just extra busy work for a battle that was always a one-sided victory like previous installments.
Which version did you play?Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister Adequate
XIII was one of the harder ones for me, especially once I hit Pulse. I died more times in that game than any other game.
I said VII is the easiest because I never refine magic to make my characters in VIII basically unbeatable, I only use magic I draw from enemies, which balances the game more. IX wasn't super difficult, but it took some grinding in certain spots. VII I never had to grind and they just hand you levels. It's a serious task for me to get to lv. 99 in IX, and in VII I barely had to make an effort. The characters level up so quickly and their HP just goes through the roof pretty early on. I didn't fight the WEAPONS, which could have made it harder, but the rest of the game was just a cake walk. Which is good because I didn't want to spend any more time than necessary playing it.
There were a few spots that gave me a bit off difficulty in VI, XII actually gave me a lot once I hit the Phon(?) Coast. I've heard IV on the DS is easy, but I haven't beaten it yet, so I can't say for sure.
Agreed, and most FF games are extremely easy. But other titles at least obfuscate the optimal choice in a lot of situations by inundating you with various options to explore. FFXIII does the opposite and removes options. You will always need a paradigm for tanking/healing, and one for attacking. Aside from that you mash auto-battle all day long. And you can argue that you don't need to use auto-battle, except there are basically zero instances in the main game where elemental weaknesses matter, and the battle speed is frequently too fast to adequately keep up without the battles feeling more stressful than enjoyable, and auto-battle will always make the optimal choices anyway, so manually selecting options is not only annoying, it's sub-optimal.Quote:
Originally Posted by Karifean
So for the entire game, from start to finish, you choose one menu option in battle over and over, and you choose between two, maybe three, paradigms, and you will always know when to choose them (and that's being generous since it takes hours before you can choose paradigms at all leaving you to only mash auto-battle). You'll never have to decide that you need to heal, but maybe Cura will suffice instead of Curaga so you can save the MP required to cast that Ultima spell on the next turn. You'll just see you need to heal, switch to the healing paradigm, and ride it out until your health is around full and switch back to attacking.
Basically XIII took the series from the strategy being obvious, but at least having to choose the best way to go about enacting it from several different options, to the strategy being the choice. I won't argue that a lot of previous FF titles aren't easy too. They absolutely are. But FFXIII took it to a whole new level by basically completely removing anything resembling decision making. I mean, people complain about FFXII's gambit system, but even if you relied entirely on that, you still had to put more thought into setting up those gambits than you put into every battle in FFXIII combined.
Agreed, it was a little odd going from FFVI where Terra is like level 4 and has under 63 HP to start off as Cloud with level 6 and already having 5x as much HP. I also do find that VII is the easiest game to get to level 99 with the exception of VIII but in VIII's case it's designed as a detriment to you.Quote:
Originally Posted by shion
Yet this goes back to what I said earlier, that the series has become much easier to make them more accessible to players.
Poll fail due to not having the true champion of easiest FF, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.
Come on, son!
This part right there is where I just can't agree. First off, Auto-Battle doesn't make the optimal choices.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vivi22Agreed, and most FF games are extremely easy. But other titles at least obfuscate the optimal choice in a lot of situations by inundating you with various options to explore. FFXIII does the opposite and removes options. You will always need a paradigm for tanking/healing, and one for attacking. Aside from that you mash auto-battle all day long. And you can argue that you don't need to use auto-battle, except there are basically zero instances in the main game where elemental weaknesses matter, and the battle speed is frequently too fast to adequately keep up without the battles feeling more stressful than enjoyable, and auto-battle will always make the optimal choices anyway, so manually selecting options is not only annoying, it's sub-optimal.Quote:
Originally Posted by Karifean
In Commando it doesn't make good judgment on when to use Blitz and before analyzing opponents you end up throwing in a Ruin when Attack would clearly be the better option, and vice versa.
In Ravager it completely ignores your Strength and Magic stat and just alternates between magic and strikes for the minimal extra chain boost as opposed to the extra damage. It does choose the correct element at least, but it's still suboptimal. And yeah, elemental weaknesses DO matter, since they still increase your damage output just as significantly as they always did, maybe more so. Which is what makes Imperil as vital as it is.
In Sentinel it always tries to Provoke enemies first, which can be very counterproductive. Often times I found myself quickly wanting damage reduction and not caring about Provoking.
In Medic it uses single Cures when everyone is in the green. Granted you might not want to have a Medic out at that point, but a Cura or Curaga would be far more efficient.
In Synergist and Saboteur alike, it makes poor judgments on what statuses to inflict. You really want to control those manually almost always.
So basically, the only reasons you wouldn't want to pick abilities yourself is A. your chosen abilities happen to be identical to Auto-Battle's. B. you feel like you wouldn't be fast enough to enter the commands to get the efficiency you'd like. C. you just don't care. If it's A, fair enough, but as you may have noticed, I don't think that's the case very often. It works but picking yourself would be better. If it's B, that's something you can get used to pretty quickly, in my experience. You do have enough time to pick your skills while ATB is still charging, unless you're somehow completely clueless on what to do. Are you ever? And if it's C, well that's fine for you but then don't just go calling the combat system that shallow, just because it is POSSIBLE to beat it that way. The same goes for many other games in the series and... now we're just repeating the argument.
@Wolf Kanno: Other Final Fantasy games do have that same kind of "if you put in more effort to be more efficient, you notice more of the combat system's depth" style of battling, but I would argue that XIII is actually among the series' best in that regard.
I really don't understand how y'all are finding VIII's so abusable. You must have to go out of your way to do it because I deal relatively the same amount of damage that I do in every other entry in the series.
Out of the ones I played? I, II, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII... Didn't play much of the last three. Toss up between VII and VIII. I can get pretty far without needing to grind on VII and VIII is pretty easy when you start GF spamming everything.
I actually thought that FFXIII had some challenging moments, despite the fact that I dislike the game as a whole. FFVIII definitely wins my vote, for the reasons already stated in this thread. FFVI, VII, and X get honorable mentions.
EDIT: Oh, and re: FFX, I have to agree with WK on the mechanics. It was a nice try at a slight change of pace, but it was so simple and blindingly obvious that after the novelty wore off, having to change characters every battle for the easy kill just became a mild annoyance. FFX was an attempt at a middle ground system between button-mashing and challenging, but ended up being just barely north of button-mashing.
FFX's battle system would've benefited from something like Shadow Hearts: Covenant's battle system: the less turns you take to end a battle, the more XP and rewards you get. Then there would've been more incentive to killing everything in one go.
Not sure what to judge this by. Total amount of optional hard content, or ease of completing the main story?
I think FF7's main story was pretty easy to complete. FF6 (SNES) didn't have a lot or hard stuff to do in the endgame, and the main story wasn't very hard either.
Once you max out the jobs V is really easy. Even the ever so feared Shinryu is a piece-o-cake as long as you have Coral Rings.
I can't think of any game in the series that I've played to completion that didn't give me at least one Game Over. It sounds like I skipped the easiest entries in the series, though (FFVIII and FFXIII).
FFX is mostly easy but there are one or two difficult boss battles (Seymour Flux and Yunalesca come to mind), although a case could be made that those battles are so cheap that they count as Fake Difficulty. FFVII gave me trouble at the Demon Wall and one other boss battle of which I've forgotten the name. FFVI gave me trouble at several points but that's mostly because it was the first JRPG I'd played in literally ten years (I'd played FFIV shortly after it came out). None of these games are particularly difficult in general but there are one or two tricky parts.
I do agree with Colonel Angus that FFV is really easy if you learn all the jobs. But then, even the hard version of FFIV is easy if you're overlevelled, and that's generally agreed to be one of the most challenging entries in the series.
I mean, I can see your point, I'm just struggling to see how any other FF or indeed RPG is much different from this. To me, the fact that I can tell at a glance who can do what is the very model of game design, so I think we'll just have to disagree on this one :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
PSP, as the OP didn't specify versions, but I don't doubt the original installment was rather harder.Quote:
Which version did you play?
I'm disappointed that you fail to understand the underlying issue here but I guess you would need to in order to enjoy X's insufferable combat system. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister Adequate
That makes sense. I just went through the original and find it hard to believe someone could say III was the easiest, but alas the DS/PSP version had to make sacrifices in order to work. Still a fun remake though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister Adequate
>>> Except for FF1 (nes) and FF2 all the other FF games are easy..:luca:
I voted for VII because it's the only one that's easy without having to rely on something. V may be easy if you max out the Jobs, VIII may be easy if you exploit its system, X may be easy if you use the characters properly, XII may be easy if you set up your Gambits well and so on, but VII is easy if you have eyes and can successfully push a button. It's the only FF I've played that isn't easy because of something; it's just plain easy.
Quin settled the tie for me. My vote goes to VII.
Voted for VII but completely forgot about the Junction system in VIII lol
Not sure what everyone's issue with FFX combat is, I think it's ridonkulously fun. Agreed that the overall game is easy because much of it is corridors but that's not why I play it. I play it because I love the fights and the sphere grid (and the characters but that's getting off topic)
Edit: IMO outside of the original NES games FF isn't a particularly challenging series, but that's fine. I don't play FF for the challenge; I play FF when I feel like running around like a dolt and killing monsters with magic and crap.
I believe the word you are searching for is "tactics", not "strategy". ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
FF7 gave me trouble at Demon Wall, but that's because I had fallen asleep while pressing X to win and missed that he wasn't as much of a complete pushover as the other battles in the game.
I can't comment too much on other games, as they may have given me a bit of trouble, but I last played many of them 10 years ago when I was crap at RPGs. :3 I also haven't played some of them. People say FF13 is easy, but I definitely had to redo more battles in there than in FF7.
Okay Stop.Quote:
Originally Posted by Quin
Stop.
STOP.
I am sick of FFVIII apologists using the word "exploit" or "if".
It is not a matter of going out of your way to break the game. it is not a matter of grinding. It is not in any shape or form difficult to bend FFVIII over your knee and snap its difficulty in half.
In fact, it is the exact opposite of difficult because you are REWARDED for NOT DOING ANYTHING. Don't level up? Don't fight any random encounter?S Now the game is a laughing stock to you because you spent five seconds buying 10 Tents at Balamb and gave your character a billion HP in the first hour of the game and all the bosses will be scaled to fight someone at level 10 so they do only triple digit damage at best.
FFVIII is not a game you have to be smart at, or to know what you're doing. You just need to read the damned mandatory Tutorial and then bam, the game is a joke.
Can you have Firaga, Curaga and Thundaga in the first few hours of any other FF game? I don't think you can. Level 3 spells are easier to come by than Level 2 spells in FFVIII.
While VII and VI did get easier then previous games, there was still thought required to breeze through them.
VIII and X, on the other hand, tell you right off the back how to handle the game, and never does it deviate from that, and the ability to use any character in the fight means every fight you are garunteed to have the win button that the game is basically screaming at you to use. (Well, not for optional boss's, but that's beside the point, I never liked doing the super boss's of any game. :p)
Even XIII required some thought into your paradigms.
Care to explain how you got the Refine abilities which let you get all of those wonderful magic spells without exploiting the systems or grinding?Quote:
Originally Posted by Forsaken LoverOkay Stop.Quote:
Originally Posted by Quin
Stop.
STOP.
I am sick of FFVIII apologists using the word "exploit" or "if".
It is not a matter of going out of your way to break the game. it is not a matter of grinding. It is not in any shape or form difficult to bend FFVIII over your knee and snap its difficulty in half.
In fact, it is the exact opposite of difficult because you are REWARDED for NOT DOING ANYTHING. Don't level up? Don't fight any random encounter?S Now the game is a laughing stock to you because you spent five seconds buying 10 Tents at Balamb and gave your character a billion HP in the first hour of the game and all the bosses will be scaled to fight someone at level 10 so they do only triple digit damage at best.
FFVIII is not a game you have to be smart at, or to know what you're doing. You just need to read the damned mandatory Tutorial and then bam, the game is a joke.
Can you have Firaga, Curaga and Thundaga in the first few hours of any other FF game? I don't think you can. Level 3 spells are easier to come by than Level 2 spells in FFVIII.
Yes, it is incredibly easy to break. If you know how to break it. If you know what abilities to pick up from GFs first, and what items give you good spells from refining them.
Most players, upon casually playing for the first time, don't realize half of that. Junction abilities and combat abilities are almost always grabbed before Refine abilities are.
Also, I hate to break it to you, but "not fighting anything" is exploiting the system itself. Again, it's not something that will be casually done. Heck, you can't even get Diablos for a while, and he's the only source of Enc-None. Most players don't actually run away from every fight (and even then, you can be screwed by some enemies if the RNG hates you).
Also, FFXII is the easiest. I got through about 75% of the game with two Gambit setups, and literally doing nothing except directing my characters around with the Analog stick (then I got bored and gave up).
You get to Diablos before heading to Timber. That's at most three or four hours into the game.
Also most of us played VIII when we were dumb babbies. I've met people who didn't even know they could Junction spells until Disk 2 or 3! If you in any way Junction magic to any stat, you are breaking the game.
Like I've already gone over, I did a Challenge Run for this game. i have done that that for no other FF game ever. And yet I still curbstomped every story boss, I still slaughtered every Propagator (nice "puzzle" there game where you can just kill your way to solving it) I did not grind, I did not play a single round of Triple Triad, and yet I still had no problem. All you have to do is use the system in any way.
Yes, finally! I though I was somehow shipped a different copy of FF12 than what everyone else is always describing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Skyblade
Unfortunately none of this equates to press X to win and I would have to actually put in a modicum of effort into making sure I play the game juuuuuust right to make it the easiest game ever.Quote:
Originally Posted by Forsaken Lover
Unlike that other one I mentioned before in which I put in no effort and still blitzed everything.
Easiest: VIII, without a shadow of a doubt. I see everyone talking about how "if you don't level, it's insanely easy" and I did level, I fought loads of random enemies, and it was stupidly easy. You just use the system it gives you. You can Card Mod yourself 100 Hero Potions and use them to be invincible for the entire final dungeon if you want. The good thing about VIII is that despite all this, it's still fun and has interactivity with it's limit break system.
Regarding XII, I feel it was easy a lot of the time but it was a massive grind, too, for a single player game. I feel this gives it the feel of being a difficult game because you don't want to grind and this leads to you facing bosses that you are not leveled appropriately for. At least, that's how it was for me.
Regarding XIII, you might have to choose between various paradigms but it's not simply Tank Attack Heal, that's for certain. It's Buff Debuff Stagger Attack Heal Tank. If you think you can play the entire thing without utilising both Stagger and Attack then power to you, but you're doing it wrong. Compare to that to every other game in the single player FF series where it is not Tank Attack Heal - it's Attack Attack Attack Attack Attack Attack (Maybe Heal) Attack Attack Attack Attack Attack (Maybe Heal). I honestly think 95% of my fights in the single player FF series outside of XIII have been fought by holding down one button. Seriously. XIII may give you a "smart battle" button, but it still requires far more input than the previous FF's I've played (which is basically every main FF) outside of the online games.
Hardest? XI and XIV, without a shadow of a doubt.
Uhhh...you mean, like, 20 or 30 hours, right? Because that's how much I usually put in before Timber.Quote:
Originally Posted by Forsaken Lover
Yes. Yes, I do.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loony BoB
I had a hard time choosing between IV and VI, but in the end IV was easier than any other for me. I didn't even find the hard version that difficult and I played a rom of it before the easy version.
That's bizarre to me, because I think IV is probably the hardest, certainly top 3.Quote:
Originally Posted by theundeadhero
Only the DS version, though.Quote:
Originally Posted by metagloriaThat's bizarre to me, because I think IV is probably the hardest, certainly top 3.Quote:
Originally Posted by theundeadhero
No, both. Getting through some of those places on the moon is a serious trial, even at high levels.Quote:
Originally Posted by The White Wizard of FynnOnly the DS version, though.Quote:
Originally Posted by metagloriaThat's bizarre to me, because I think IV is probably the hardest, certainly top 3.Quote:
Originally Posted by theundeadhero
The SNES US version isn't that difficult. The hard type (which was only released on the SNES in Japan, and later fan-translated and re-released internationally on other consoles), on the other hand, is aptly named.
I still find FF IV US Easy type to be harder FF VI-VIII to be fully honest. :p
Yes, but that's not saying much, since those are some of the easiest games in the series. :monster: Also, the U.S. game isn't actually the easy type. There was evidently another Japanese version of the game actually referred to as "easy type" that was even easier than the U.S. version. The U.S. version is generally considered to be about halfway between the two.
After watching a speed run lets play by awsome/summer games done quick of FF8 and having played it I think it's the easiest. 10 and 7 are reasonably easy too. i like 9 but cant say much for it's difficulty.
If you want a hard JRPG get a megaten game, Persona and SMT 3 hand me my head quite frequently. Digital devil saga is quite difficult as well.