As you can imagine from the title, I want you to list what you consider to be the easiest and hardest RPGs you've ever played. Try to stick to one title for each category.
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As you can imagine from the title, I want you to list what you consider to be the easiest and hardest RPGs you've ever played. Try to stick to one title for each category.
Easiest I'll give to Final Fantasy VII. I struggled with it a bit when it was my first ever JRPG, but outside of that it's just a very easy game with few real tricks to it; something like FF8 you can still misunderstand and have a harder time, but FF7 just *is* easy.
Hardest is Ys: The Oath in Felghana for sure. A seriously punishing and at times grueling game with some of the toughest bosses I've ever faced. Damn is it ever fun though. In hindsight I'm pretty sure the game expected me to grind in places, which I never did outside of a few instances of teleporting back to the save point when I was about to die and be reset there anyways to at least keep the EXP and items. It's also a game with no real tricks to it, what you see is what you get, and you just gotta grit your teeth and make it through. Oh all of this I'm talking about it Normal difficulty btw, the game still has Hard, Nightmare and Inferno mode <.< those will be fun for sure.
Easiest is a bit hard to pin down, but it’s most likely an FF since I find they rarely require a lot of thought to really progress. I could say FFI but I only played the ports, which are easier, so I’ll actually go with XIII. Even if some games were less complex, XIII is the only game that I literally beat by holding down the analog stick and pressed A. Sometimes I pushed the right trigger. I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t die once.
Hardest is without a doubt SMT Strange Journey. The music kept me going but it was so easy to drop it sometimes.
I'll just take only normal difficulties in account, since that's what the devs balanced the game for (which is to say, some game systems are completely broken by easier/harder difficulties, be that in your favor or against your favor), plus some games just don't have a difficulty option and i felt it unfair to not consider them just because another game has "story difficulty" where you can't game over unless you *really* try.
Easiest: This one was easy to get down to two contestants: Last Rebellion and Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure. I'm giving it to Last Rebellion because on top of being (arguably) the easiest RPG I've played, it was also definitely the easiest platinum trophy I ever got.
Hardest: A lot tougher to narrow this down, I would say probably Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden. SMT Nocturne is pretty high up there (I haven't played enough of Strange Journey to judge that one), but the thing with SMT is that you can always grind and improve your party setup if you get stuck on a boss. SRW Alpha Gaiden is one of those SRPGs that are purely linear and you can't grind in them, so when in the last 5-10 stages it became clear that my team just wasn't up to beating the bosses (one with a time limit, even), my best choice was to actually completely restart the game.
That said, my hardest pick is purely subjective because I'm just not good with having to manually build my teams with their stats and skills. Much better at on-the-fly decision making and reacting, which is why action RPGs were never even a consideration for my hardest pick, and both my contenders are heavily about building your team.