There were a lot of hard RPGs on the PlayStation 1, but this list has the most to offer!
Because different groups of gamers have different tastes and preferences from each other, video games have gotten a lot easier over time. There are some new games that are just as hard as games from twenty years ago, but for the most part, the difficulty has gone down across the board.
This means that when current gamers play PS1 games again, especially RPGs, they are often surprised by how much harder the games were back then. There are gamers who love the old-school challenge of games like this and gamers who hate it and want a more relaxed experience in their games.
Vagrant Story
Vagrant Story was a very different kind of RPG, especially for its time. It was about a "Riskbreaker" agent who was falsely accused of murder while trying to find out about a plan between a cult and a high-ranking politician. The world is beautiful and has some really cool cutscenes. Players can explore the tunnels below the destroyed city of Lea Monde.
However, Vagrant Story is known for being a lot tougher than most current RPGs. Throughout the game, players have to think much more carefully about how to fight, and many of the puzzles are surprisingly hard. Also, there are no shops for players to go to. Instead, the game puts a lot of stress on players making their own weapons and customizing them for each journey.
Persona 1
Some gamers make fun of the famous new Persona games because they are so much easier than the first games in the series. This was never more true than in Persona 1, which had so many enemies that they were all different from one another, making the game much harder than it needed to be. This difficulty may stay with the future remake.
People who played Persona 1 found it really hard because there were so many enemies, especially in later levels. It felt like players had to grind more than in most RPGs. However, there are some things that made this easier, like the fact that the game wasn't as long as some of the later, more massive games in the series.
King’s Field
Finding that one of the hardest tasks in any PS1 RPG came from the people who would go on to make Dark Souls is not a surprise. King's Field, FromSoftware's first video game, was a hard early version of the 3D RPG computer game. The FromSoftware team started working on it for PC, but they chose to switch to PlayStation instead.
People who play King's Field go into a cave full of monsters and have to find the dark door that will bring great evil into the Kingdom. There is a lot of history behind this dark adventure, but King's Field isn't very similar to later FromSoftware games, maybe in terms of how hard it is.
Chrono Cross
The world of Chrono Cross is similar to that of Chrono Trigger. It came out in 1999 and quickly became a popular, if hard, JRPG. The main character, Serge, goes to a parallel world by chance and dies there ten years ago. This causes the world to change a lot. There is a lot going on in Chrono Cross, and the story is especially hard for its time.
Since Chrono Cross doesn't have the usual leveling system of an RPG, players have to be much smarter about how they use their party in battle. Even though players can beat the game, going back to the original version will be strange because Chrono Cross is so different from many current RPGs.
Dragon Quest 7
In the history of video games, Dragon Quest is one of the longest-running JRPG series. As shown by the fact that the seventh game came out for the PlayStation 1 in 2000. Dragon Quest 7 is very different from the others in the series. The fight system is very hard, and the game's huge open world can take hundreds of hours to explore without doing any side tasks.
The main character, who isn't named, goes back in time to save different continents so they can still live in the present day, where there was only one small island left. This makes a huge world appear over the course of the game, which is why many players never finish Tunnel Rush.
Alundra
Alundra was first released in 1997. Like many other RPGs, it had a silent main character named Alundra who went on a trip to a village where people had horrible nightmares about killing people and found out that he had the power to walk through dreams. Alundra fights an evil force to save the town by going into the dreams of the people who live there.
Today, people still find it hard to solve the amazing problems in Alundra, which is a beautiful throwback type of game that has never been updated.Alundra has been praised for decades, mostly because it has a lot of hard, well-thought-out tasks that you have to solve to move forward.
SaGa Frontier
SaGa Frontier is an interesting game that is part of a very hard series. At the start of the game, players can choose from seven possible main characters. One thing that makes SaGa Frontier different from other RPGs is that each of these seven characters has a totally different story.
The game takes place in a system of worlds called "The Regions." Players can go on adventures across the system and come across parts of the stories of other characters. As each character's story is finished, the game gets easier, but players will be pushed in a way that few PS1 games have ever been, both at the start and throughout as they learn how to use the tricky controls and deal with the tough combat. The game has also been remastered.
