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?