With the recent release of Dark Souls, I have started pondering one question - What are some of the greatest hardcore role-playing games of all time? Here are a few of the ones I have played, some recent and some classic: 01 - Demon's Souls [PS3, 2009] 02 - Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne [PS2, 2004] 03 - Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land [PS2, 2001] 04 - The Dark Spire [DS, 2009] 05 - King's Field III [PS, 1996 - released in North America as King's Field II] 06 - Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard [DS, 2008] 07 - The Witcher: Enhanced Edition [PC, 2008] 08 - Kagero: Deception 2 [PS, 1998] 09 - Shadow Tower [PS, 1999] 10 - Two Worlds II [PC/MAC/XB360/PS3, 2011] There are also two games on the horizon with serious hardcore potential, namely Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and Dragon's Dogma. I'd like to hear which hardcore RPGs the rest of you like, as I am sure there are plenty of you who would name classics like Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle, Virtual Hydlide, or Might & Magic. I don't have much personal history with those games, but I'd love to know if there were any great titles that I have missed along the way.
[QUOTE="TarotMasterJF"]With the recent release of Dark Souls, I have started pondering one question - What are some of the greatest hardcore role-playing games of all time? Here are a few of the ones I have played, some recent and some classic: 01 - Demon's Souls [PS3, 2009] 02 - Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne [PS2, 2004] 03 - Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land [PS2, 2001] 04 - The Dark Spire [DS, 2009] 05 - King's Field III [PS, 1996 - released in North America as King's Field II] 06 - Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard [DS, 2008] 07 - The Witcher: Enhanced Edition [PC, 2008] 08 - Kagero: Deception 2 [PS, 1998] 09 - Shadow Tower [PS, 1999] 10 - Two Worlds II [PC/MAC/XB360/PS3, 2011] There are also two games on the horizon with serious hardcore potential, namely Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and Dragon's Dogma. I'd like to hear which hardcore RPGs the rest of you like, as I am sure there are plenty of you who would name classics like Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle, Virtual Hydlide, or Might & Magic. I don't have much personal history with those games, but I'd love to know if there were any great titles that I have missed along the way. I came into this thread thinking Nocturne - good call. I have Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World for Genesis and that is definitely hardcore as well - I couldn't find a way to beat it & the instruction manual is like a hundred pages long. I mostly just roamed around trying to figure what to do while getting my butt kicked.
I thought that the first two Fallout games were pretty hardcore. If you trained your stats wrong you were shafted by every one and if you trained them well enough you would always be tempted to steal from people and kill the good guys and take their stuff.
A game is pretty hardcore in my book when it makes you think differently and not by having a crap ton of menus and a gigantic world.
I like your list! Even though I'm not sure what the moniker of 'hardcore' entails...
The Etrian Odyssey games were frickin' brutal.
Challenge is something that is lacking in games and getting destroyed until you can master certain strategies of you own should be charished these days!
What is the point of hardcore RPGs? Surely an experience-based system is supposed to make a game moreaccessible by letting sane people see it through to the end without needing to spend half their clock learning the basics. I understand that completing a game should feel like a reward, but when the core principles of the workings of the game imply that there's an easy way out for beginners then why should it be them who suffer through it? And as for the two recent ones that seem to have come from absolutely nowhere, a challenge in an RPG should come from deciding how to use the mechanics to your advantage, not the mechanics themselves.
Of the top of my head, any of the Wizardry games, but particulary 1-7. Hand mapping dungeons on graph paper, random surprise one-hit-kill enemies, Getting your party wiped and having to create a brand new party and level them up, just to get your dead party members back, teleport and spin traps that render your loving created graph paper map useless, accidently teleporting your party into solid rock and losing them forever...etc, etc. The concept and gameplay is simple, but these games were out to hurt you, lol.
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