World of JRPG's

I always felt the best ones were the ones that had visible fights on screen, like Chrono Trigger, and if you actually just did all those you'd be perfectly leveled the entire way through the game.

Final Fantasy is in weird place here because it has random battles, but also had plenty of non random battles and if you just did all the non random ones and avoided as much random fighting, as you possibly could, you'd also be pretty balanced against the bosses when you made it to them.

But things like Dragon Quest and even Secret of Mana, which I loved, relied heavily on staying in one area and just grinding to get to the appropriate power level to reasonably fight the next boss. I hate this. Once I've explored a zone, I want to move on. It should have been balanced that once I poke around in every nook and cranny, I should be ready to move on.

There's nothing worse than fully exploring everywhere you can, doing all side attractions and what not then moving to the boss to open up more of the game only to be slapped with doing marginal damage and dying to a single attack because you didn't complete 17,000 fights against the same 4 enemies yet.

Difficulty curves are exceptionally difficult in turn based RPG games.

If the game is too easy, you have essentially designed a game that requires the use of very few mechanics and thus lacks depth or replay-ability. Fewer options to choose from essentially makes an easier game to balance the difficulty, but you remove player agency. A good example of this (and I mean good) is Final Fantasy X which has player agency in the form of the sphere grid, but the system is mostly linear until the late game and the mechanics basically force you to use the right character against the correct enemy for the first 10 hours or so of the game. This is good design because it forces the player to engage with the systems that exist in the game but gives them very few options to shoot themselves in the foot.

Conversely, if you want a more open player-agency design, I would recommend looking at the balance difficulty of Final Fantasy V with some notable asterices. This game gives a lot of player agency in terms of team composition and stat allocation (in a round-about way) but this comes with the down side that most encounters have to be designed punishing to certain playstyles to encourage changing your party configuration. While grinding in most games feels like a chore, FFV actually adds achievable "goals" in either mastering jobs or unlocking more job abilities, which basically increases your character's overall flexibility. The downside is that bosses can be brick walls so a pseudo-fail state (as in, keep progression but respawn in the last inn) would be a nice patch that would make the game easier for new players. Additionally, systems like the 4 job fiesta would be nice as a "hard mode", if a game were ever to ape that design.

Both of those designs work for me, personally, as long as the game is upfront about it's design decision and that the difficulty scales appropriately to the number of choices I have (This means the game has to essentially become easier, because permutations dictate that my team composition might be radically different from someone else, or there need to be mechanics that help make "catching up" faster like FFV/Bravely Default)

FF3 (or 6 depending)

Give me wicked story lines or branching stories instead of hard, challenging etc...

Difficulty towards the end game should be about using the mechanics in complex ways as opposed to building stats.

Persona 5 Royal was easy towards the end stat-wise but as you came up against enemies that didn't have weaknesses, you had to rely on technicals. That sort of shift in tactics is welcome.

The top of the fanatic's tower in FF6 comes to mind as well. You have only magic. There's multiple non-stat based solutions to it including reraise or endless rasps.

mega man battle network does it proper by slowly introducing stronger enemies n chips to the players when progressing the story. your health and attack go up gradually as you find powerups. No exp bar needed, difficulty is tied to the story and areas

I should not have to grind to beat the main campaign. Enemy encounters and XP should be balanced so that I won't be underleveled as long as I don't skip fights and won't be over leveled as long as I don't grind. Save the hard stuff for optional dungeons and quests.

Likewise enemy weaknesses and puzzle solutions should be solvable with in game resources that are not hidden from the player. I should not need a guide, and should not have to check 1,000 in game tomes to find a secret password. Again optional stuff, secret best gear, etc. are fair game.

I like always a challange, but not unfai challange like in shin megami tensei, but i like it if the game is hard from beginning to the end. But shure, get a bit easier start is sometimes welcoming. Sadly a lot of game start hard and get easier (playing a lot hard mode, could be different in normal). Because when you start to optimize your chars, a lot games just get to easy. I like Final Fantasy X, the endgame has just some enemies you can't defeat that easily because they stone the whole party or kill them after dying. You need to give it some thought, nur just using any attack but the right skills. I kind of like the dificulty of Soulhackers 2. It's hard, just hard from beginning to the end, at least the bossfights. But sadly the optimization part for these bosses is a bit annoying, since you missing the ressources to get the right demons you need to defeat them. I'm not far enough in Metaphor, so far it's rather easy, sometimes you need certain classes to defeat an enemy properly, but after you get the weakness or movepool of the boss, it's easy enough.