which jRPGs were your "ideal" difficulty level?

When developing your game, what other games do you look to as models for nicely balanced combat difficulty? Which classic jRPGs (or even other rpg maker games) did you play and feel that the combat was never too trivial, and never too difficult/grindy? If someone wanted to study the mechanics of a very well balanced game, which games would you recommend they take a look at? Note: I know some of this is subjective preference (people like different levels of difficulty in their games) but I'm curious what you all would say!

While I don't think that there's really an "ideal" difficulty, since different game difficulties cater to different people. I'd have to say though that for me something with a difficulty level along the lines of Chrono Trigger is probably a pretty good place to start. If you're looking for something that's a bit more recent that has a pretty good difficulty curve for what it's trying to do you could take a look at Alliance Alive, which has enough of a focus on strategy over grinding that you never feel as if the grind is necessary.

Actually, never.
To be perfectly honest, to me the vast majority of JRPGs have nothing such as a concept of difficulty.
To elaborate, let's take a couple of examples.
Golden Sun - Djinnis. The entire game mechanic was based on them. But if you had enough of them, all you did was just circle around djinnis and summon the most powerful combos. You'd outheal the damage you received thanks to 2 healing djinnis and 1 reviver. In fact I've never even used the reviver in the entire game.
Pokémon - there were multiple ways to win. In Gold & Silver you have more than enough money to just crush through with healing items. In Emerald I went just with Linoone, Swampert and Hariyama and it worked even though I wasn't even overleveled.
Doom & destiny was so incredibly easy even on hard difficulty. Due to the combat system being a charge turn battle system speed was quite essential, but you also had more than enough money. Two item spammers and two heavy hitters and you couldn't lose. Although there was one part where I had to grind some money to buy an equip.
And I could continue. Most turn based battle JRPG have this one strategy that completely takes away all the difficulty no matter what comes against you. Instead of fighting this problem though many games rely on artificial difficulty - they force you to grind, they make unreasonably powerful enemies and other stuff that artificially prolongs the game time.
There is only one case where real difficulty is there. When the resources are limited.

I like challenges in games (especially in tactical turn-based games). And I hate when they offer me the "Choose Difficulty" setting :/

Essentially you're saying all jrpgs have ty combat design and balance.
The sad thing is that this might be true.
The good thing is that it's up to us to change this.

I love Final Fantasy 1. It's certainly not balanced and most of the difficulty comes from the game not offering ways to remove certain nasty status ailments (like stun). It also has several design no-nos like instant death attacks with high probability of success. So it's not well designed by most measures.

But what I like about it is that it keeps you on your toes and doesn't hold back any punches. You never know when you're going to get into trouble and have to make that tough call of either heading back to town or pushing forward. For me, it makes the world seem like a more wild, untamed place to adventure in where your life is always threatened. JRPGs kind of lost this over time.

Final Fantasy X was sooo close to being perfect.

Until they screwed it up 2/3 into the game.

Like a lot of game released by Square Enix at the time, many were balanced in a manner that makes the player dependent upon buying a

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Honestly, for me it depends entirely upon what I am in the mood to play.

Sometimes I just want to take it easy, enjoy a story, & have some fun; other times I want to play something that if I am not paying attention to everything, the AI will run up & punt kick me in the genitals for my inattention.

I can't tell you what the ideal difficulty is, even for myself, because it's entirely dependent upon what I am in the mood for on a given day.

The "proper" version of Final Fantasy 4 (not to be confused with the easy, watered down version released in North America as Final Fantasy 2) does it pretty well I think. The game starts out easy and gradually ramps up the difficulty until you're at a point where foes are tough. Combat toward the end of the game can feel downright dangerous.

As for grindy, well that's another story. Anyone who fancies themselves as a completionist who has played FF4 knows how awful the grind for rare drops can be, and how many of them there are to chase after. Thankfully, none of them are mandatory, because some can have you grinding for days. For example, the Pink Tail (needed for the best armor in the game) has a 1 in 64 chance of dropping from an enemy with only a 1 in 64 chance of spawning in the first place. Yuck.

That better be some armor of invincibility or something.

With a defense value nearly 4 times higher than the next best armor and resistance and/or immunity to basically everything, it pretty much is.

"Want to know more? Log on to PlayOnline.com and enter XXXXXX to find out the location of item such and such so you don't get torn to shreds by the upcoming boss!"

To be honest, I like somewhat easy jrpgs. Which is to say, not Phantasy Star 2. So, Vagrant Story or below.

An armoire of invincibility.

This is a personal taste more than any kind of advice, but I tend to really enjoy combat systems that have a lot of variability in the outcome of combat, alongside high levels of skill and agency. I love going into combat not knowing whether I'm going to crush the enemies, barely pull through, or take a game over, and I like to have the power in my hands to (try to) determine that outcome, rather than an arbitrary Stat level of the enemies being the main determinant, or being at the mercy of an RNG.

For me, Star Ocean: The Second Story was probably the pinnacle of highly-variable, high-agency, challenging but never impossible combat. There were times I found myself dying multiple times just crossing from one town to another (thankfully you never lost too much progress getting a GO), and other times I stomped every enemy along the way, and it really did feel like every time things went wrong I could have done something differently.

Star Ocean 3 and Tales of Graces f also felt pretty good in this regard, with challenging battles where things could go wrong very fast but it usually felt like it was your fault if they did, rather than the fault of bad balance or bad design. It's worth noting that all of these, while clearly JRPG in structure, have ABS combat (on a separate battle screen) - being able to weave, dodge, block, and time your assaults certainly contributes a lot toward player agency.

I recently started playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, and I've found the battle difficulty to also feel pretty good, which is especially admirable given that it's a turn-based RPG (though with grid movement and a CTB system). About eight hours in, I still haven't gotten a GO, but I've been very close to it many times, and even random encounters can be pretty scary if the enemy gets initiative. I like how there are a lot of tools at your disposal (items, healing magic, S-breaks which bring your character to the top of the action list, etc.) but each one can be tricky to use properly (for example, you might be out of range to use items on an ally if you didn't plan properly, or your magic might be too slow). It's also nifty how limited Areas of Effect on most skills and magic mean that simply lining the same enemies up in different places on the battlefield can make the combat feel totally different. This kind of variability tends to mean a really good experience in my eyes.

That sounds nice, but considering the amount of encounters the average JRPG throws at you, personally I really wouln't want each of them to be a Life or Death scenario, that sounds exhausting.
For me I think most random encounters / trash mobs should be a pleasing distraction, while the difficulty being focused on mini-bosses and bosses, or some special exceptions. Most final fantasies follow this route, except the ones where the bosses are as easy as the random encounters.
P.S. You look like a person who would love Darkest Dungeon, it's not a classic JRPG, but has largely the same combat system, so I strongly suggest you try it.

Totally agree with you that in no game with frequent random encounters should every battle become a long, drawn-out, life-or-death slog! I'd only want to see that kind of design in a game with a small, basically fixed number of encounters (e.g. Disgaea).

The really cool thing (in my opinion) about the games I mentioned is that any battle, rather than every battle, could turn into a tight finish. Most of the time you could finish an enemy troop off pretty quickly, dusting them in 20 or 30 seconds and taking very few hits in return - but if you goofed (for example, walked into an enemy combo, or failed to notice an enemy whacking your backline spellcaster), a battle against that same enemy troop could get really messy. Overall, things still felt quick, and you still got that power fantasy - but it also felt exciting, because every encounter presented an actual sense of challenge and danger (even if that danger would only rarely come to fruition). The newer games in that set (Graces and Trails) also use Visual Encounters so that you can avoid most of the battles that you don't feel like fighting if you get tired of them.

It's also fine to go the Final Fantasy-esque route that you seem to enjoy where the random encounters are really easy (unless you walk in at critical HP) and the bosses are where the real challenge is presented. A lot of RPG players like that, too. Not personally my thing, but it ticks several of the checkboxes of things that players are looking for without taking away from the ability to progress through amazing worlds and narratives.


I tend to avoid playing dark or macabre games (and other media too; I hate horror films for instance), but I have seen this game several times on Mark Brown's GDT channel, and I think you did make a good pick for me as far as mechanics that I'd enjoy :)

One of the really interesting things about Darkest Dungeon seems to be how you sort of set your own level of difficulty based on how willing you are to cross your own moral boundaries. Do you pass on the best treasure, hidden in the deep darkness, in order to protect your adventurers? Do you take them into the dark to get that treasure, and then stick with them in spite of the flaws and fears they develop from seeing things best left unspoken? Or do you force them to get the treasure, and then mercilessly dump them by the wayside to combine the power of your loot with fresher, less damaged adventurers?

Personally I like the way FF7 did it (at least, I think it was FF7) where overall, the trash packs are generally easy to kill, except...not always. Occasionally, you'd encounter some really large enemy, and like always, you'd do your usual thing only to realize that it didn't die like all the others. Then it attacks, pounding somebody for 70% of their health with a single attack while inflicting them with some sort of nasty status ailment, and at that moment, the palms begin to sweat a little as the player wakes up.

This isn't really a discussion about making games with RPGMaker.
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