Final Fantasy has never been known for its soul-crushing difficulty. Sure, you have uber-bosses that can bust your nose something rotten from time to time, but the overall play experience is typically quite smooth. This is especially true if you are playing more modern re-releases of older games.
That being said, with a series this large, some interesting spikes are bound to crop up, and Final Fantasy has its fair share of them. Not all of them come from challenge alone, however. Let’s explore what that means and dive into it. We are going to stick to the mainline for this list, but honestly, I am going to cheat once or twice despite that loose disclaimer.
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Final Fantasy VIII
Final Fantasy VIII is an odd duck. Black Sheep gets thrown around a lot because it had the unfortunate fate of following up the most popular game in the series – the one that launched it into the stratosphere. Of course, weirdness is not difficult, so let’s go into why Final Fantasy VIII should be on this list.
The Junction and Draw system is bonkers. It makes no sense, it follows its own mind-bending logic, and it invalidates Magic across the board. Not only that, the game takes a long time to explain, does a terrible job to boot, and leaves you gimping your party by accident. If you get to grips with it, the game becomes trivial and that leads to boredom. Hard to beat a game if you are asleep.
Final Fantasy XIII
Lightning and Co. have had a hard time. Whilst far from bad Final Fantasy XIII tends to be looked at with a fair amount of scorn. A lot of it is overblown of course, but not all of it. This game is hard because it takes tens of hours to actually get going. It’s an awful lot of hand-holding and being force-fed irritating characters.
Not to mention the staggering amounts of jargon that infest the game. It’s not uncommon to hear people getting completely lost in the hubbub of the main story and that leads to people dropping the game. Solid gameplay mechanics can’t save XIII from the glassy-eyed look of an audience lost.
Final Fantasy IV
Classic Final Fantasy can be difficult by virtue of the games being old. The NES trilogy certainly has its fair share of nonsense, and the earlier entries on the SNES can be a pain too. Final Fantasy IV is often considered one of the harder entries, although its difficulty is somewhat overblown.
Final Fantasy IV operates without a Job System and its cast rotates regularly. This leads to many encounters being tailored to your party’s current makeup. This lends the game to more of a puzzle vibe than a raw strategic one. Once you realise that, the challenge tends to melt away a bit. Not easy, but not the hardest of the bunch either.
Final Fantasy XV
A running theme of this list is to poke holes at the various black sheep that have existed within the series roster, Final Fantasy XV joins the conversation. We are going to cheat here and go mainly off of the launch state of XV since that’s what most people experienced.
This game was unfinished, and even after all of its updates, it still feels a bit messy. XV is a perfectly fine game overall, but when you have to navigate a vapid world filled with half-told stories about characters you don’t know without DLC or expanded content, it just gets hard to parse. It’s like trying to eat paradoxically under AND over cooked spaghetti in the same mouthful.
Final Fantasy V
The challenge in V comes from its return to the Job System first introduced in Final Fantasy III. This system completely overhauls the combat and character progression in a way that can simply be overwhelming. At the Jobs wrack up, it becomes harder to grasp which jobs are worth using, and what they even do.
This is abundantly clear when trying to use the Chemist and Blue Mage, both of which require a deep understanding of the game if you want to use them. Getting that understanding on your first playthrough is impossible without some sort of guide, so plonking it here felt right.
Final Fantasy XI
Rolling in with more sneaky cheats, Final Fantasy XI is here because it’s really hard to get into nowadays. Sure, servers are kicking around somewhere, but there aren’t many players and the game is very focused on end-game group content. You know, the usual when messing with an MMO.
Even if you took out the woes of the modern gamer, Final Fantasy XI in its prime was a nightmare to get into because the game was plain weird. It was a good kind of weird for the right kind of person, but the worst kind of weird for just about everyone else. Let’s just say that you spent a lot of time doing a whole lot of nothing (and I loved it).
Final Fantasy III 3D Remake
Final Fantasy III spends a lot of time being kinda awkward to play. It was originally released in Japan only, and this naturally made it nearly impossible to experience in the West. Not only that, but its debut on the DS with a full 3D remake completely borked the balance.
What we had then was a game that couldn’t be played in its original form, and was quite the pain to play once we got our grubby mitts on it. This is mostly down to enemies being unnaturally scaled to adapt to the changes in the battle system. The game was fine, but we’d recommend any other version of this game if you want a smooth experience.
Final Fantasy Tactics
I know I mentioned mainline as the restriction for this list, but Final Fantasy Tactics absolutely gets a free pass. Why? Because it exists in Ivalice, and that is 100% mainline material.
Getting down to business, however, Final Fantasy Tactics is an absolute beast when it comes to difficulty. Nail-biting tactics combined, serious consequences, and a Job System all combine to make a wonderfully engrossing, yet painfully difficult experience. Especially if you are new to the genre.
Final Fantasy II
Final Fantasy II is the darkest horse amongst a paddock of black sheep. This game is hated by the vast majority of the fandom. A convoluted and unexplained progression system combined with lengthy dungeons, ludicrous encounter rates, and unforgiving spawns leaves a bitter taste in many mouths.
The only reason Final Fantasy II doesn’t top the charts is that it has been vastly improved since its original launch. In fact, in its most recent incarnation, the Pixel Remaster, Final Fantasy II is legitimately an excellent game worth experiencing. Heck, its curve has been softened to boot.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Crystal Chronicles is the hardest game by far. No other game even comes close because no other game required quite so many hoops to jump to get working at launch. This is a cooperative game that required a ludicrous amount of hardware to function, and without it, the game was a painfully bland single-player slog.
Surely it’s Remaster that fixed all of that, right? Not even close. This game, decades later, still manages to disappoint and frustrate in equal measure thanks to a baffling level of tedium required to play with friends. Even then, so many other issues were added for seemingly no reason. Crystal Chronicles, despite not being mainline, gets the number one spot because I still haven’t managed to beat the damn thing and I’ve been trying most of my life.
That’s all we have on Final Fantasy for now. Be sure to check out our other lists and guides for more Street Fighter content.
