21 Hardest RPGs Overall, Ranked

There is a wide range of RPGs, from easy and fun to tough and harsh. We’re going to focus on the second one today and list the hardest RPGs released so far.

Many people call them “RPGs,” but role-playing games are actually some of the best video games ever. Their difficult ways of progressing and their complicated stories make for a memorable experience that you can’t get anywhere else. That complexity can also mean hard. These harsh RPGs can have some of the best and worst games in the genre, depending on whether they have hundreds of systems to deal with or were made for masochists.

There are satisfying fights and a lot of deaths in these games, and every RPG fan should play them for the unique experience, no matter how hard or time-consuming they are. It’s unclear whether fans actually enjoy how hard these games are, but it does make victory taste even sweeter when players finally beat these tough enemies! It’s the work that goes into getting past some tough challenges that can make these events seem very scary.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Since Baldur’s Gate 3 came out, it has been nothing short of a huge success. Most players still can’t believe that a CRPG was one of the biggest games of 2023. This game by Larian Studios has clearly set the standard for what role-playing games should try to reach. It has so much content that it blows my mind.

The material that Larian has packed into Baldur’s Gate 3 is so great that players could spend thousands of hours on it and still not see everything. The fighting can also be pretty hard; some enemies can wipe out the whole party if the player’s strategies aren’t flexible and failproof.

Final Fantasy 4 (3D Remake)

In the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy 4 is one of the best games. It shows how well the gameplay parts can fit with an incredibly interesting story. Watching Cecil slowly change from a Dark Knight to a Paladin as he realized his mistake was a lot of fun. This amazing story could be experienced with a new look in the 3D version that came out for the DS and was soon available on Mobile and PC as well.

However, most players noticed that the game had become much harder, even though most people liked the graphics update. If the player wasn’t ready, bosses were very strong and could wipe out the whole team. Some people had to grind before big fights because their powerful weapons would beat them down over and over again. Even though it was fun to be challenged, the difficulty of this JRPG might turn off fans who like easier games.

Demon’s Souls

Before Dark Souls became a big hit for From Software, Miyazaki worked with the company on Demon’s Souls. It was a lot of fun to play this PS3-only game back then, even though it wasn’t as famous as it should have been. Fans were lucky that the game was faithfully remade on PS5, so they could enjoy this masterpiece with a new look and see the start of the Souls series.

Demon’s Souls is without a doubt one of the best games for Sony’s newest system, but there’s a catch. Some people might not want to play this game because it is so unbearably hard and has so many frustrating features. If, on the other hand, players decide to brave the early game, they’ll get used to the game slowly before quickly beating bosses.

Elden Ring

It’s hard to call Sekiro a standard RPG, but From Software’s newest game definitely fits the description. People who play Elder Ring join the world as characters they made up, and they can explore the Lands Between however they want. Since some new features make Elden Ring a bit “easier” in some places, many would say it’s not nearly as hard as some of the other Dark Souls games, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still very hard.

Starting the game without being helped makes it a nightmare for people who aren’t used to this type of game. The fighting is also very hard, the bosses are very scary, and there is no way to move.Because it’s so big and complicated, Elden Ring definitely deserves to be called one of the hardest RPGs ever made.

Monster Hunter World

There are other games besides the Souls series that have tough fights with huge bosses. Fans of the Monster Hunter series have been having fun for years with its big boss fights featuring strange, huge monsters. In fact, the whole game is boss fights, and players move from place to place trying to catch big monsters to defend their lands and get stronger. The only way to get better is to fight these enemies, and some fights can last for hours.

When players fight a monster for a long time, they might get knocked out near the end of its life. This game is one of the hardest for some players because it takes a lot of time to play, the battles are very tough, and you have to be patient and use strategy to beat some monsters.

Dragon Age: Origins

The Dragon Age story doesn’t look anything like it did when it first started. In its first version, Dragon Age: Origins, a more standard role-playing game (RPG) was released. It had tactical camera mechanics and “auto-combat” when players fought an enemy. All you had to do was keep an eye on a party and use tactics to get an edge over the AI. Dragon Age: Origins isn’t a particularly hard game for some, but it can be a nightmare for those who “make the wrong moves.”

Because the game is open world and doesn’t guide you through exploring, it’s possible for players to get lost and end up in a place they shouldn’t be. Bad news even worse: those players might get stuck in certain areas until they beat a certain boss or finish a needed quest. When you add in the need for the right party splits and stat distribution, it’s easy to see why some players might feel overloaded.

Nioh

The Japanese company Team Ninja made Nioh in 2017. They are best known for their work on the Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden series. Ninja Gaiden might seem like a good game to compare Nioh to, but the gameplay is more like Dark Souls from FromSoftware.

Team Ninja has put out a lot of tough games in the past, but Nioh is the hardest game they’ve ever made. There is a follow up game called Nioh 2 that came out in 2020 and is just as brutal.

King’s Field

King’s Field, which came out in 1994, is the first book in a series with the same name. FromSoftware made the PlayStation 1-only game. Their highly acclaimed Soulsborne games have made them one of the most respected game developers of all time.

Anyone who has played a FromSoftware game before knows that King’s Field is intentionally hard so that players have to fully understand and learn how the combat works. Even though the graphics haven’t aged like a fine wine, fans of the FromSoftware style should still check out King’s Field because the makers did a lot with the money they had at the time.

The Last Remnant

The Last Remnant came out first on the Xbox 360 in 2008. It then came out on PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and mobile devices on and off. Square Enix made the game. Their Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series made them a huge name in the JRPG field.

A turn-based fight system is used, which is what you’d expect from a Square Enix game. Of course, The Last Remnant’s battles are some of the hardest in the history of JRPGs, making them much harder than those in the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series.

Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn

People who play role-playing games used to know BioWare for their Baldur’s Gate series before the Mass Effect series made them famous. Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, with an incredible Metascore of 95, is the most praised game in the series, making it one of the most popular RPGs of all time.

The difficulty of Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn comes from the fact that players have to choose a smart and strategic way to fight. When players learn the different methods, the combat becomes bearable. But for people who are still trying to figure out how to handle the complicated combat, it can be a nightmare.

Bloodborne

Bloodborne by FromSoftware took the winning recipe from Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls and put it in Yharnam, a place that looks like it was from the Victorian era. The city of Yharnam is much scarier than any of the other Soulsborne games. However, the darkness of the city has a strange beauty that makes it feel like a gloomy fairy tale.

This game is not the same as the Dark Souls series just because of its setting; it also has a much more aggressive way of fighting.Bloodborne trades slow, methodical shield-wielding for fast gun and sword action. It also rewards players for being aggressive by letting them heal quickly after taking a few hits, but this doesn’t make the game any easier because taking a chance on an extra attack will usually kill you quickly.

Pillars Of Eternity

Most people who play CRPGs will think that Pillars of Eternity is pretty easy, but a lot of people forget how hard and complicated this type of game can be.

The changes to core stats and the fact that battle could pause in real time made Pillars of Eternity hard to understand for many. But the game requires players to have 100% ability uptime across all 6 characters at all times, while the game is going in real time. This wouldn’t be a problem normally. Even though the pause button helps, Pillars of Eternity is much harder than most games because of its broken mechanics. This is probably why Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire picked turn-based combat instead.

Legend Of Grimrock 2

Based on how hard the first game was, Legend of Grimrock 2‘s tough battles were probably a result of the game’s bigger size and scope.

Legend of Grimrock 2 is one of the best dungeon-crawlers that hasn’t been a copy of Diablo that has come out recently. The game has big areas that are full of monsters, traps, and puzzles that players must be careful to avoid. Grimrock 2 is different from most dungeon crawlers because it has an open world that you can fully explore and is full of secrets and wealth. People who rush through this game and don’t pay attention to the side content will have a hard time.

Divinity: Original Sin 2

Divinity: Original Sin 2‘s battles are both fun and tough. Both enemies and players have armor values that work like second life bars, but they also protect against crowd control.

This means that in Original Sin 2, the best plan is to do as much damage as possible in one turn. This is called “alpha striking.” It gets worse because enemies can move in a lot of different ways, making ground effects and damage-over-time skills useless. Divinity: Original Sin 2 is very hard to beat if you don’t have a character who deals damage and a character who keeps the crowd under control.

Final Fantasy Tactics

This game, Final Fantasy Tactics, is very hard to get into. Compared to other Final Fantasy games, Tactics had a lot more difficult turn-based battles and pushed tactics a lot more than the main games.

Because of this, a lot of Final Fantasy fans felt left out when the game’s early hours required almost perfect play. Early on, not having any skills makes Skibidi Toilet very hard, which might turn off many experienced turn-based RPG players. It gets a lot easier as you play and gain new skills, but many series fans won’t bother with Tactics because of how hard it is at the beginning.

Fire Emblem Fates

The three games in the Fire Emblem Fates series are all known for being hard turn-based RPGs. Each game in the series had a different way of playing. For example, Conquest was more about clearing out levels to get more gold and experience.

That which is wrong with this series is not Fates, but Fire Emblem: Awakening.Awakening was meant to get people interested in the series by reducing the number of techniques enemies used and being more forgiving overall than previous games. Many players went straight from Awakening to Fates, where they found the game to be much harder than they thought it would be.The big jump in challenge from Awakening to Fates was, at the very least, jarring. Fire Emblem Fates isn’t a terrible RPG by any means.

Shin Megami Tensei Series

In the Shin Megami Tensei series, it’s hard to say which game is the hardest. A lot of the games in the series are both hard and fun to play.

A lot of Western gamers know about the Persona series, but there are dozens of other games in the Megami Tensei series as well. All of them are known for having tough turn-based fighting and post-apocalyptic settings in cities. The key to winning these games is to use demons and take advantage of your enemies’ flaws in battle. Don’t let the trouble get you down, though. Even though the fighting can be painful, the stories in these games are well worth it.

Dark Souls

Dark Souls is the only game that has ever made me feel both sad and proud at the same time. A lot of people think that this line of games is the hardest ever. Some might say that’s too much, but it’s based on truth.

In Dark Souls, death is a way to learn. When you die, you lose your souls, which are used to level up and improve your gear. When someone dies a second time, their Souls are gone for good. This makes every battle more intense, and it gets incredibly intense during the game’s boss fights, where players can die in two hits. Its difficulty teaches players how to beat impossible odds and get better in and out of the game.People who play Dark Souls might get angry a lot, but it’s the perfect example of how games can be art.

Gothic

Fantasy and magic go well together in any RPG setting, but the Gothic series does a great job of showing a world with magic. The world of Gothic is pretty grim, and people have to dig for magical ore that might help them win their lost war against the Orcs.

Things go terribly wrong, and the miners take over part of the colony. They then make plans to leave. The main figure is in the middle of all of this. No one can be trusted, and if you try to be the good guy like you do in most RPGs, things will go horribly wrong. The controls are also very bad compared to current games, which makes the already hard combat in Gothic even harder.

Darkest Dungeon

Most people think of dungeon crawling when they think of big ARPGs like Diablo or Path of Exile. Like Legends of Grimrock 2, Darkest Dungeon is a dungeon-crawler that moves more slowly and carefully.

It is also a lot harder. A lot of people say it’s not fun because it’s too hard. The turn-based fighting in Darkest Dungeon is mostly based on percentages, like in games like XCOM. In this game, the only thing that is almost certain is that a character will die. It’s important for players to keep their characters’ sanity up, or they could lose them to the evil animals that live in the darkness.

Wizardry 4: The Return Of Werdna

Wizardry 4: The Return of Werdna is by far the hardest game I’ve ever played. Different from the first Wizardry, players take on the roles of the bad guys from the first game. The idea was creative, but it didn’t work out at all.

The players took on the main characters from the first three Wizardry games and used the same skills they did in those games. This made the player’s fights unfair, but things got even worse. In this installment, experience points were taken away totally. This meant that battles didn’t give any rewards and the progression system that made previous Wizardry games so fun was gone. It’s not a surprise that this game didn’t do well when it came out; only the most dedicated Wizardry fans liked how hard it was. But its uncompromising challenge means that every RPG fan who likes tough games should play it.