The Nintendo Wii didn’t set the world on fire in terms of JRPG games, but the ones it did have, whether they were sequels to existing franchises or new incarnations, all seemed to have something more engaging and challenging.
The 10 best JRPGs of the 2010s
The 2010s was the time for JRPGs to come into their own.
It felt like the Wii had a bunch of games with weird and complicated systems that you were forced to engage with; otherwise, you’ll find yourself scrambling. You can’t just grind to get big in these games; you have to play games on their own terms, and that can lead to a lot of tough battles.
We’re going to explore some of the strongest JRPGs on the Nintendo Wii.
8
Arc Rise Fantasia
Deceiving Beauty
Arc Rise Fantasia is one of the most colorful looking games on the Wii, but don’t let that healthy look fool you because it has some brutal gameplay that will make you rethink whether or not you’ll even be able to play this game. There’s a huge amount of customization in this game, and failing to interact with it means you’ll be on the short team more times than not when facing one of the game’s various difficult bosses.
These battles can be over in seconds if you’re not careful, with ridiculous team-wiping attacks and combos coming together; you won’t be able to breathe if this encounter continues. There’s a lot you need to take advantage of when fighting these bosses, from base weaknesses to figuring out how to interrupt attacks to managing your SP so you can deal damage effectively. It’s so complicated that if you don’t remember to cheat some part of the fight to your advantage, it will be game over for you for most of your playthroughs.
7
Xenoblade Chronicles
Cruel New World
Xenoblade Chronicles introduced a new iconic series to the Wii, featuring an exciting story and complex, strategic combat. While it feels MMO-inspired at first, you quickly discover that attacking depends on positioning the battlefield in relation to your enemies and monitoring various resources. There isn’t really a traditional healing skill to use in this game, so you need to keep those skills available to use whenever you can and trust that your AI-controlled party members are doing their best to stay alive.
Then you have the boss battles, which are among the most challenging I’ve seen in a JRPG. The “see the future” mechanic means you have to constantly be prepared to figure out what the bosses are going to attack with, and sometimes that means sacrificing offense for defense. It makes these battles a wild game of chess where the tide can turn at any time, and fighting hard to change the next move that will destroy you can be really hard to find when you’re rolling seven different cooldowns and a special chain gauge all in real time without a break in the action.
6
The Final Story
Challenge to Open Page
The Final Story it’s one of the most surprisingly mature and beautiful JRPGs you’ll see out there, and I’ve always appreciated it as such. And it’s an incredibly difficult game to master. This action-based JRPG has various systems that you will have to interact with in order to figure out what to do at any given moment during combat.
Positioning and how you interact with your environment is important, and managers often require you to think outside the box in order to borrow from their most common health portfolios. It can be a tough game to master when it comes to combat, and while it may seem easy at first, it’s nothing, and some bosses in the game can really test your positioning knowledge and overall fighting style.
5
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of a New World
New World, New Systems
Perhaps the most difficult thing about Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World is the unexpected departure in gameplay that you find here compared to the previous game in the series. This is a straightforward, rare sequel to the Tales series, and here, you’re mostly playing a monster-collecting game. Because of that, you have to go into Pokémon mode here, focusing on their evolution throughout the game, and if you do that, the game can be a bit slow at times.
The problem is that if you ignore it, because some of the bosses in this game are invincible. On top of that, the team AI in this game is very unreliable, so expect to find your teammates dead most of the time in every difficult battle in the game because they don’t even know how to survive.
Also, you know that the main character is usually the hardest to kill in most games? Well, here, Emil is a glass cannon for years. He can deal tons of damage, but only goes down in a few hits. No matter what you do, Emil goes down unless you take out your opponent quickly. I don’t know why they made this game like this, but it has a different level of urgency than most games when fighting in the Tales of series.
4
Monster Hunter Tri
Remember When This Series Hated You?
Monster Hunter is one of Capcom’s biggest money makers and is firmly established in the world of casual gaming, but back when Monster Hunter Tri released, it was reserved for none other than the most hardcore gamers out there. Monster Hunter Tri is a brutal experience that also served as the multiplayer introduction to the series. And what a presentation it was because there is no hand holding, no shortcuts, and no way around difficult obstacles but through them.
You need to prepare well for the fight, because it’s not like you can outrun your opponent here. This game is janky, and it gets worse when you fight underwater, which was the original feature of this game and added more frustration to the gameplay.
The hardest thing is that the combat is slow. It’s all based on animation, and if you swing at the wrong time, you’ll just have to accept the consequences because you have no choice but to watch it end. If anything, it was the game that caused Capcom to restructure its approach to the series and finally focus on making the fighting accessible, because here it was very difficult to attract the fans that really wanted it.
3
Shiren The Wanderer
Roguelike pain
|
Engineer |
Chunsoft |
|---|---|
|
Release date |
2008 |
|
Platforms |
Nintendo Wii |
Shiren the Wanderer may have a game look that can be light and airy. But don’t judge a book by its cover, because this experience is as difficult as it gets. The concept is a roguelike turn-based shooter, and it’s one of the most brutal in the genre I can think of.
Your level is constantly reset, you can lose valuable items, and you can make one wrong move and lose hours of progress. Each dungeon floor can introduce new enemies that can shoot you once if you’re not paying attention, and it’s just a very stressful and stressful game that wants you to die a lot from the start.
The randomness of the game is what makes it so difficult. You can fall prey to enemies that appear earlier than they have the right to show themselves, have wild situational effects applied to you that can put you in situations you cannot overcome, and if that’s not enough, this game has the most difficult post-game content ever imagined, with bosses upon bosses that will demand all the time of your attention.
2
Baroque
Endless Surprises
Baroque is one heck of a gaming experience, and it doesn’t hold your hand at all and makes sure to beat you over the head with your mistakes throughout the game. The idea of the game is to wander from floor to floor of this mysterious tower to find out what the hell is going on, and on each floor, you will face a variety of different enemies and bosses.
The combat is tight, so that makes things difficult to even catch up on, but then again, your weapons change throughout the game – you can lose them if you throw weapons at enemies. That means you can find yourself without weapons at the most crucial time of the game. But that’s also the point of the game, as each death makes you learn more about the story and better prepare yourself to face the threats ahead. So expect to die a lot here, because the game wants you.
1
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Costs of War
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn is one of the hardest games in the series, and one of the best games in the series. The most punishing part of the game is the enemy AI. They are ruthless, opportunistic, and make sure that any mistake you make is punished tenfold. If you fail to make a good opening move and expose one of your units, you can be sure that the enemy will strike, and that strike will hurt.
The reason it will hurt is because of the permadeath feature that wipes your unit permanently. This can result in you having to do it the hard way, or having to start all over again. It makes the fights more exciting and more intense, because the stakes feel more real. Your character’s lives are on the line here.
10 Most Addictive PS2 JRPGs
These PS2 JRPGs aren’t just fun, they sink their claws into you and never let up.
