While old-school games might have had a reputation for being brutal, I think the modern era is the true golden age for difficult games. That's in large part thanks to the fact that devs are taking a smarter approach to difficulty these days, and two separate directors behind two entirely different Japanese RPGs famed for their toughness seem to have converging ideas about how to make a good, hard game.
"Based on all of our experience developing RPGs, we believe that battles are supposed to be an obstacle that players need to figure out the solution to," Shin Megami Tensei 5 director Shigeo Komori tells GamesRadar+ via email. "They shouldn’t be designed in such a way that it’s possible to win by simply pushing buttons without thinking much. That might be why the series ended up being associated so strongly with high difficulty."
