Which one was the most difficult for you?

[DMKA]

For me, personally, it was FFIV.

That friggin fire cave with the living doors in it. Arrg!

[blackmage_nuke]

If i gave 1-5 a genuine attempt i think 2 wouldve been the hardest. Of the ones ive completed viii was difficult until i learnt to stop using gf's and leveling up

[VeloZer0]

FF1, not even a competition. It is the only game where I have had enemies get a preemptive strike and and kill my entire party before I even had a chance to input any commands.

It not only has difficulty derived from being a difficult game, but it also is extremely difficult because of plain old unfairness.

[Sephex]

II seemed to give me the most trouble, but I managed to complete the game. Only ever did on GBA, though.

[Del Murder]

Any FF isn't hard if you powerlevel. So the one the required the most powerleveling would be the hardest. For me, that was FFII. I have waking nightmares of fighting battles where I have my characters bash each other over and over again to get HP and defense ups. Also, I remember getting to many bosses to find out all my characters do 1 damage on it.

[Gamblet]

I wanted to choose FF III, but it had Sages and Ninjas. (I did not use them really)

So I went with FF II, which gave a lot of trouble too. Thank god I was playing the Origins version on PS1, with the Memo save option.(Did other versions have that option too?)
FF II did not have any overpowered special characters/jobs either, so you really had to build up your characters well.

[Flying Arrow]

For me, it has to be one of the first three. I went with 1.

IV and V are generally not difficult. There are challenging areas but everything is usually doable in one try if you're even moderately sensible about your equipment and items.

Everything from VI to X are more or less cakewalks. If I see a Game Over screen at all, it's usually because of an unfortunate set of status effects and bad luck. There are occasionally some difficulty spikes (and of course the superbosses) but nothing too drastic.

From what I remember of XII, it maintained a decent challenge throughout. Maybe it's because I only played it once and learned the system as I played, but I never really ran into too much trouble.

In XIII there will be a lot of deaths, but in a way SE made death into a mechanic with the 'retry' feature. Given how frantic and fast-paced the battles are, it would have been really frustrating to have to adapt on the fly the first time fighting a behemoth or something. The game isn't hard per se, but there is a steady enough difficulty curve and, in general, battle is more about quickly mixing and matching behaviours vs. behaviours than conventional RPG strategy. Given the lack of necessary resource management, XIII has a more action-gamey flow and thus needs to be able to kill the player character on a regular enough basis.

[Wolf Kanno]

FFI - The NES version specifically. If you have not played the actual Famicon/NES version or a at least a faithful rom then you didn't play the challenging version. It's not just that the game requires a heavy amount of grinding, it also suffers from being really buggy and half the crap in the game doesn't do what it's suppose to. If an item says its effective against certain enemies, it isn't. Half the black magic spells don't even work (mostly the extremely useful buffing skills which makes the updated versions of the game a joke) as well just running into encounters like the one VeloZer0 mentioned. smurfing Mindflayers...

FFII isn't too bad for as grind heavy as it is. FFIII is pretty nice up until you hit the super long final stretch and suddenly realize how rare Phoenix Downs are and how the game was built before save points. Cloud of Darkness and her four guardians are assholes who will rape you and make you lose several hours of your life...

FFIV, if you play the version with original difficulty, mainly the Super Famicom or PSX port, then yeah, that game is really nasty with huge difficulty spikes. that come out of nowhere. The DS remake has it's fair share of "That One Boss" and they made the freaking Warlock/Sorcerer's in the Lunar Core probably the most feared enemy in the game since they are extremely fast and love to start the battle by nuking you with -aga spells. A group of 3, has you praying that Edge is fast enough to go first and use a Smoke Bomb.

V is challenging if you don't know what you ar doing, but we can say that about all the FF games. VI-X are a joke like Flying Arrow said. XII can be challenging but it really depends on whether you know what you are doing and how much of the side-quests you are doing. If you plow through the story, the game isn't too bad until Giruvegan. If you have been doing all the side-quests, you probably died alot, but the final stretch of the game will be disappointingly easy. XIII is also not so difficult, not counting certain Mark Hunts (Neo Ochu anyone?) but I also feel like it's the game that not only makes dying feel absolutely irrelevant, but also the game that kind of jumps back to FFI's tricks by just cheap shooting the player alot. The "Leader dies = Game Over" mechanic was really poorly implemented in this game, especially when the game liked to force you to use weaker characters as a lead, or when you jumped into a Eidolon battle and the game liked to change your party and paradigm roles without consulting you, or when the game liked to just nail you with unblockable instant death...

[Gamblet]

FFIII is pretty nice up until you hit the super long final stretch and suddenly realize how rare Phoenix Downs are and how the game was built before save points. Cloud of Darkness and her four guardians are assholes who will rape you and make you lose several hours of your life...

I have a confession to make.... I... used save states on the emulator..

[VeloZer0]

You don't get full credit for beating the game, but I wouldn't feel any shame either. I am a firm believer that if you can use emulator tools to enhance your game experience you should.

FFIV,

What would you evaluate the difficulty is between the SNES hardtype and the DS version? I have only ever played FF4 easytype and FF4: DS. Is the game experience different enough to warrant giving them a spin? Keeping in mind I am usually very busy and have to make time for any video games I want to play.

[Wolf Kanno]

It's kind of difficult to say really, cause on the one hand, the DS version really beefed up a lot of the monsters and bosses but you also have the augment system which allows you to overcome it a bit better. In the PSX/Hardtype version, it's noticeably more challenging than the SNES version and getting a party wipe from random monsters is not uncommon in the game, yet strategies and set-ups that worked in Easy Type still work so it's not like the game isn't going to throw anything at you that you haven't seen. You'll just notice that the game likes to nail you with debilitating status effects that tend to have high success rates, and certain attacks suddenly do close to 2x or sometimes rarely 3x damage to your party. Zeromus and many of the optional bosses in the Lunar Core are far nastier than you would remember. The GBA version emulates the original hardtype to a certain point but I never felt it had the same level of difficulty spikes in the later sections of the game like the PSX version did.

Overall, I might say the DS version is definetly the harder version, simply cause it involves having to relearn a lot of the bosses and enemies. Golbez and the CPU bosses are both notoriously more difficult in the game if you are not prepared, though some bosses (like Zermous) are actually much easier since he isn't just spamming his party rape spell Big Bang over and over again, not to mention they removed the whole trick with the Dark Matter item which is what made that fight challenging in the original difficulty.

[Flying Arrow]

The "Leader dies = Game Over" mechanic was really poorly implemented in this game, especially when the game liked to force you to use weaker characters as a lead, or when you jumped into a Eidolon battle and the game liked to change your party and paradigm roles without consulting you, or when the game liked to just nail you with unblockable instant death...

The paradigm set-up thing in the Eidolon battles is unforgivable. SE clearly didn't care whether or not they were making something good at this point. Imagine playing FFV and discovering at the beginning of a boss fight that your badass two-handing mystic knight is now a dancer and that you have to lose to be able to switch back to your previous build.