I really want to get more into JRPGs. I’m not into anime, but I like the visuals and the fun tone of many JRPGs. And a lot of them have interesting, in-depth RPG elements in terms of leveling/progression. These elements are usually more hidden than in western RPGs, but the process of discovery is actually fun sometimes.
But the RPG elements invariably go from interesting to gimmicky due to how easy these games become, usually at a very early point.
I get that many players just want to watch the anime cutscenes, and continually challenging gameplay is of secondary importance to them (or even outright undesired). But isn’t that what easy mode is for? Harder difficulty levels should be genuinely challenging throughout the whole game. But since JRPGs seem practically allergic to level scaling, you always get to a point when you’ve grinded enough that every combat encounter is trivial.
“Don’t grind, don’t do optional content,” they say. I really don’t want to have to consciously tie one hand behind my back in order to enjoy the game. JRPGs aren’t like the Souls games (let’s not classify them as JRPGs for simplicity’s sake) or TES or Fallout games where it’s fun to experiment with builds that have limitations. The ways to limit yourself in a JRPG are to deliberately skip most combat/side content or avoid using an overpowered character or attack that the game’s story will force on you anyway. It’s so disappointing and breaks immersion.
I’ve seen all the usual recommendations for genuinely hard JRPGs, but I’ve also seen most of them described as becoming easy once you figure out the leveling mechanics. But I don’t know. Have you ever played a JRPG that remained challenging throughout? Where grinding and micromanagement felt meaningful because you HAD to grind and micromanage in order to survive even basic encounters?
Jrpg difficulty is usually centered around boss fights, though, not basic encounters. I think, too, that combat frequency is important here. I’m not a fan of tons of random fights, personally, but if there is a lot of combat, it wouldn’t necessarily make sense for individual encounters to be life or death. In some games, though, there can certainly be some attrition across multiple fights. I recall enchanted Arms (a personal favorite) to be that way in certain stretches.
Having said all that, perhaps games in the Wizardry school apply (Wizardry, Etrian Odyssey, etc)?
My big issue with some JRPGs is that they escalate the difficulty too quickly. Like, the first ten hours or so you can basically play blindfolded and then BAM they hit you with a boss that seems impossible to beat. It’s only then that you realize that you are under-leveled (slightly annoying), or in some cases, that you don’t have a deep enough understanding of the combat system because the game didn’t challenge you enough (much more annoying).
I think being a little overpowered near the end of the game is fine though. It’s like a reward for playing through the game and learning its systems. Developers don’t want players to go through 80-90% of their game and then rage quit in the last part because it is too hard. I would argue that even the late game bosses in Elden Ring aren’t really that hard compared to the earlier ones (except for Melania, damn her!).
I’ve mostly drifted away from the genre, largely due to similar frustrations with lack of challenge, and disillusionment with traditional power systems that tacitly encourage repetitive grinding. Personally, I prefer systems that cap your power level or otherwise make grinding mostly pointless – that if you’re stuck on something you know the answer is going to be adjusting your strategy rather than pouring an hour into repetitive busywork with no risk. Unfortunately, even a lot of the games that do this part right still wind up pitching their difficulty level way too easy, hence why I mostly look elsewhere these days.
That said, might be worth looking at some of these:
Baten Kaitos and/or Mega Man Battle Network series. Both have JRPG aesthetics, but card-based battle systems that sidestep the worst grind tendencies (you need to go to new areas to get new cards). And conveniently, both have remasters coming out soon.
Riviera: The Promised Land or Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. Enemies don’t respawn, forcing you to be strategic about resource management.
Seventh Saga. The hardest fights in the game are against the other playable characters, who scale based on your level.
Final Fantasy XIII. For most of the game, you’re in a linear sequence of encounters with minimal reason to grind because character power is capped by locks in the leveling system until you progress the story. Much more emphasis on smart use of the battle system than on leveling up.
Shiren the Wanderer series. The roguelike structure limits grinding within each run because you only have so much food.
Etrian Odyssey series. You can definitely grind, but the difficulty stays pretty high, especially if you go into the optional post-game stratum. Closer to western RPGs in structure, but if you want something closer to a typical JRPG, then the “Untold” versions on 3DS that give you a fixed party with their own personalities and dialogue would probably make sense.
SaGa series or Last Remnant. They do a lot of wacky level-scaling stuff and adjustments to your power level to discourage mindless grinding. Not sure how effective they are since I don’t have much personal experience.
Final Fantasy IV DS. Doesn’t do much to alleviate grinding, but it pitches the difficulty fairly high all the way through.
I hear you. I often try these games and feel like I’m missing something. Like people put Dragon Quest 11 on the lists of best RPGs, and it is indeed cozy and varied, but in that game you won’t see anything resembling challenge until hour 60 or something.
Sadly the genre as a whole is like that, and if there are exceptions I’ve only found them in the most obvious place. As in Final Fantasy series. 6, 7, 8, 10, 13 provide consistent challenge, and those made before 10 have laconic and to the point anime cutscenes. And none of them has hot springs or beach episode or all that teen anime BS necessary for the genre. Chrono Trigger is another simple but good game close to FF series. You may think most of these games are old, but they play fine.
And outside of obvious games who you already know about if you know about JRPG genre I can only name something relatively small like Cosmic Star Heroine.
Earthbound kept me on my toes in 199X on the SNES.
Starting out might be a bit harder as it does get a little easier once you have more party members but I think it has a pretty solid difficulty curve if you don’t grind with only a few spikes. I’d call those “challenge areas”. Think Blight Town opposed to Undead Burg.
I’ve gone off JRPGs but not really for those reasons. I really don’t like grinding and to the extent a given JRPG’s combat/levelling system is complex and interesting, I get analysis paralysis/FOMO and end up using a guide, which robs the game of any sense of discovery. There’s also very few games I’m willing to commit more than 30 hours to these days and frankly I prefer my narrative games at around 10 hours. Most recently I tried Xenoblade Chronicles 3 but I bounced off it hard. The only ones I’ve had any success with in the last decade have been Bravely Default and FFVII Remake, and I didn’t finish those.
Grinding is such a dirty word. I know what people mean by that and it’s weird to me as this problem was kinda solved years ago.
I am currently playing Persona 4. If you ignore all the teen anime stuff it’s an interesting game where the story and gameplay are intertwined much more than in your usual RPG (except for a rare game like Fallout even in Western RPGs story and gameplay are very loosely connected, and usually in JRPGs it’s even worse so it’s cool seeing JRPG that has this connection). For the first half of the game grinding feels like a choice, not a chore. It’s hard to restore HP and mana, so to grind you have to rest, which spends your valuable time. There’s a very generous time limit, but the real reason you don’t want to rest is that you can spend that time on side-stories which the game calls Social Links. Later in the game for variety of reasons it becomes very easy to stay in dungeons as long as you can. Plus the tactical side of the game is quite limited and when you’re under-leveled you don’t feel like you’re playing a harder game, you feel like the game doesn’t want you there.
I’ve mentioned Chrono Trigger previously. This game as well as several Final Fantasy games did grinding the right way. First, it acts as a dynamic difficulty, just as it should. If you know what you’re doing you can beeline every dungeon and only kill those who stand in your way. Second, more importantly, is that when you grind you don’t just kill enemies for XP and gold: the combat system is tuned so that you always have optional objectives in those fights. You can steal some rare stuff during combat (in JRPGs enemies destroy some of their possessions with their dying breath so you have to steal it during combat), and you can catch or “eat” or turn into cards some enemies. You’re not grinding, you’re solving interesting puzzles, you optimize stuff. In poorer JRPGs the only puzzle is too spend minimum resources on trivial battles, but unless you have a timelimit a la early game Persona 4 it doesn’t feel meaningful.
That’s exactly what killed my start of Persona 4. I thought, why face multiple play-throughs of such a long game to see all the social links when I could use a guide and get them in one? Ugh, totally ruined the game and I quit soon in.
Final Fantasy VII REMAKE demolishes grind, and what I saw of the hard mode looks like the best difficulty…once you know the systems. It makes sense they pitch it as a replay difficulty. Being unable to use items means you don’t need to explore all the corners of each map for maximum power, which means you move the characters straight to their objectives. That matches the plot priority, so it feels good all around. I only got a little ways in and stopped, because I decided I should wait to acquire the DLC and a PS5 upgrade before doing the game again.
I think I’ve moved past most JRPGs. It’s hard to believe. They were such favorites decades ago. I keep thinking I love them, but I rarely put in the time to play one. (Which is another waying of seeing my endorsement for FF7R, since I actually played all of it.)
P4 was the epitome of analysis paralysis for me, and was when I realised the genre was no longer for me (not that I was ever massively into it, but I did enjoy and complete FFVII, Chrono Trigger, Skies of Arcadia etc). The whole social link thing made me feel like if I wasn’t min-maxing my time and choices, based on information I didn’t have in game, I was doing it wrong.
FF7R difficulty never worked for me for the same reason as DQ11: it feels like the tutorial only ends a few minutes before the end, and all the interesting battles are in that holographic battle arena. By this point I am already past the point of caring about the mechanics, I want to see the credits roll. After playing FF7R I played the original FF7 and I was surprised about how modern it feels compared to the remake. Graphics and voice acting (and especially music. Ok, that robot boss that you tried to disassemble before the fight was a cool idea too. And the Honey Bee sequence.) are missing, of course, but the story is straight to the point, there’s no filler, and there is a consistent challenge throughout the journey. With all its detail and high-quality graphics, FF7R felt like a budget title, it made you backtrack in the same small neighborhood as if it’s a eurojunk RPG like Witcher 1.
I feel like an old man yelling at Cloud Strife when I say that older JRPGs were much better, but it’s probably the only genre that I feel has gotten worse as time goes by.
I think people who talk about old (SNES era or earlier, since really most JRPGs I have played count as old these days) JRPGs being better have seriously rose tinted glasses for the most part. random encounter frequency alone murders most JRPGs older than a certain point for me. so much time wasted, everything I do constantly interrupted.
I don’t really mind random encounters if they play quickly. SNES era JRPG combats tend to play quickly (with the exception of many of the reprints which add load times that make the encounters much more time consuming).
For me, the biggest benefit of older JRPGs is length. Chrono Trigger is like 25 hours long, I think Final Fantasy 6 is maybe like 30? They have similar style plots, they just move through stuff way quicker. Heck, you’ll jump from pure sci-fi to pure fantasy to dinosaurs in half dozen hours in Chrono Trigger.
I find I lose steam in most games around the 30 hour mark, and can make it to 40ish hours only if I’m really enjoying it, like best in class games. I have finished SNES JRPGs and can’t bring myself to finish most modern ones.
Earthbound and Chrono Trigger don’t have random encounters and you can always see the enemies. Earthbound even has a auto-win mechanic for enemies that are too far below your level and enemies will also run away from you! It’s pretty sweet.
Final Fantasy VI has random encounters but the frequency isn’t as bad as other early FFs like Final Fantasy IV where you have to climb a infinite tower, beat a boss at the top, then backtrack out all the while suffering random encounters every inch along the way. This makes FFIV unplayable shit.
Another nice thing about the SNES-era JRPGs is that the loading times are functionally zero across the board, which massively reduces the friction on generic-fights combat. A ‘combat cycle’ (you hear the noise for a random combat, load, fight, then load back on the world map) is literally half or a third as long in something like FF6 than it is in a lot (…most) of the games from the PS1 era on. Obviously we’ve found some better solutions (generally fewer, more meaningful, less random non-boss combats) but I think the SNES games still largely play fine.
