Rank the Final Fantasy games in terms of difficulty

Here is my ranking from hardest to easiest:

1. FF13. Some people think this game is easy (which is strange to me), but some of the bosses in this game (particularly a few of the eidolons) were brutal. It was a pretty fun challenge tho. For all FF13's faults, it has awesome boss fights that require a good deal of strategy.

2. FF5. Getting through the dungeons is quite easy, but some of the bosses in this game are beasts. I love the amount of strategy that the jobs system provides tho. You can literally make a very difficult fight much easier by having an intelligent job set up.

3. FF12. Some of the bosses were very tough, but what makes this game challenging is the constant need to grind.

Those three are the only somewhat challenging FF games. The rest are quite easy.

4. FF6. This a very easy game most of the time and it has a lot of overpowered moves for you to spam, but there are a few ridiculously steep difficulty spikes. Floating Continent anyone? I also find Kefka's Tower and the Kefka himself to be a little tricky.

5. FF4. I played the easy type, which lived up to its title (people have told me that the hard type is one of the most difficult games in the series), but some parts retained just a little bit of that old school challenge.

6. FF8. I know that abusing the junction system can make this game a joke difficulty-wise, but with normal junctioning, the game is not the cakewalk that some people make it out to be, though it's definitely one of the easier FF games.

7. FF9. This game is only tricky during disc one. After that, the game gets really easy, especially with all the handy support abilities you can equip.

8. FF10. This game has its fair share of challenging boss fights, but your party members seem pretty overpowered IMO, especially the summons. Also, the final boss is a pushover.

9. FF10-2. If you ignore a few of the difficultly spikes in some of the sidequests, this game is an absolute cakewalk. What's kind of disappointing is that the lack of challenge means that you don't have to really take advantage of all your jobs. You can pretty much plow through the game with two warriors and a white mage.

10. FF7. During my latest playthrough, I think I think I only died three times and one of those deaths was an accident while another was at the hands of the final boss. Honestly, FF7 is probably one of the easiest JRPGs ever. Limit breaks are just so ridiculously overpowered.

I haven't played 1, 2, 3, 11, 13-2, or 14, so I don't have an opinion on those.

What does your ranking look like?

Are you not factoring in the optional bosses?

I'm not. I don't fight superbosses for the most part.

You can factor optional bosses into your own ranking however.

FFXIII goes from walk in the park for 30 hours to freaking impossible in the last 30 minutes. The final boss and its miniboss minions leading up to it are simply insane. I had played the whole game without ever bothering with weapon upgrading, but I had to grind and farm a lot to defeat the end boss.

FFIV on DS pissed me off so much I had to abandon it near the end when it takes two of your strongest characters away for the millionth time and makes you fight a japanese-style recycled boss rush with a replacement character who can't level up and always dies in one hit, against 4 bosses with all-party status effect attacks like sleep and stone along with area damage attacks. Sod it, I can't be asked to deal with terrible japanese game design.

1 being the easiest and 10 being more hard

Final Fantasy VII has its hard parts. The chocobo breeding, the ultimate weapons (sidebosses), and a few bosses plus some tricksy dungeons with the endless enemy encounters made the game a bite challenging. 7/10

Final Fantasy VIII was easy mode. 2/10

Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Advanced. I'm assuming you haven't played these but you REALLY need to. Both were amazing and both had some moderately challenging boss fights.

Tactics: 6/10 Tactics Advanced 5/10

Final Fantasy XII was a little harder than the rest I played with its intense boss fights. 8/10

FF13 has some pretty brutal bosses. I remember when I arrived on Gran Pulse, i got slaughtered by most of the fiends. I actually enjoyed the game despite many people hating it.

FF10 was rather easy except for the Seymour battle on Mt gagazet. Actually needed to strategize there.

FF7 was a breeze

Crisis Core was decent enough

Haven't played the rest

XI asks more of the player and is most punishing when you die. the balancing is different too because you might be over-leveled for an area but still quickly die if you aren't in a full party or one of the specialized solo classes. even if you meet those requirements, you only want to fight one monster at a time.

i had some troubles in a few spots in XIII because the game controls how powerful you can get for each area.

beyond that, i've also played I, II, III, VII, IX, X, and XII. they're all more or less the same in difficulty in that you are free to grind if you are having issues. i guess XII has more balanced experience requirements, money drops, and asks a bit more of the player while in X you can be over-leveled very quickly though.

I will. I consider defeating superbosses mandatory in order to truly beat a Final Fantasy game.

Out of those which I have played:

I did not battle Ozma during my playthrough of FFIX. I think that was its name. Anyway, for that reason, I will not be including FFIX in this list.

Final Fantasy X: The monster breeder made ridiculous monsters which when compared to Ultima and Omega Weapon could be considered like looking at hills and then mountains. They were actually easy in comparison. I intend to finally beat Nemesis when the remastered version is localized.

Final Fantasy VIII: Ultima Weapon was not too bad, but once I drew Eden and started the limit breaks, it was over. However, Omega Weapon was ridiculous. I leveled up all my characters to ninety-nine and maxed out my Guardian Forces and I had plenty of trouble with it.

Final Fantasy VII: The Weapons were tough, but not as terrible as FFVIII Omega Weapon.

Final Fantasy Tactics: Once I max out Ramza's jobs and have a similarly powerful team, the main challenge of the game becomes obtaining Zodiac from Elidibus and getting the Byblos to join my party after that battle. I still play FFT sometimes which is why I am speaking of it in present-tense.

1. Final Fantasy X
2. Final Fantasy 13-2
3. Final Fantasy 13

those are the only games i have played in the FF unfortunately, but that's the order i would rank them in.

The ones in the main series I've actually beaten are FFIV (DS) FFVI, GBA and FFI (GBA).

FFIV was undoubtedly the hardest. Some of the boss fights were simply sadistic in their nature. The final dungeon is absolutely brutal, too, although, amazingly, I beat the final boss on my first try.

FFVI is the second toughest, although it's quite easy to break the game with certain items and upgrades (Celestriad can make any character merely decent into an absolute God).

FFI was a joke (even the super bosses barely put up a fight... I don't think that I died once in the game), but still pretty fun. The short length gives it more replayability thanks to the multiple character classes.

I still need to beat FFV (nearing the end and I agree with what TC said. Dungeons aren't too bad but hot diggity damn, some of the boss fights are nuts.) and FFXIII (Near the end of chapter XII. The goddamn airship thing that kept coming back always kills me. I will beat it one of these days.)

I still need to play FFII (the actual one that came in the Dawn of souls pac) and I need to replay FFIII on the DS because I action replayed my way through it the first time.

I really want to play the PSX trilogy, as well as X and XII.

I had the hardest time with FF13 unless we count Final Fantasy Tactics which started out butthard? Seriously, I never got very far in this game, less than 10 hours. The difficulty was pretty brutal and the worst part is that refighting a fight was a complete chore. Can't remember but involved restarting the game, wait for all the company logos, load data, go to the fight, keep spamming buttons for a few minutes to go through the unskippable dialogue. This chore is really what turned me away from the game because I kept getting owned by I was too lazy to grind and I was too lazy for these stupid restarts.

Final Fantasy II - This is hands down the most difficult game I've played in the entire series... or at least the original NES version, since I've no idea whether the remake(s) toned down the difficulty.

1.FF1- Game starts. You are on level 1. You walk to a random area in the world map trying to get to your next location. You then suddenly encounter a few enemies that are 40 levels above you. WTF

2.FF4-

3.FF6- It was so okay until I got the floating Continent where there was a sudden difficulty spike. The final dungeon was hell too because i had to use to every character. Some of them that I didnt used at all and was extremely underleveled.

4.FF13- mostly because of the summons.

5.FF12

6.FF5- there were only three bosses that gave me trouble: Neo Exdeath, Atomos and Soul Gun.

7.FF3- only at the end where you have to go through two dungeons and a few bosses without a save point.

8. FF9

9.FF10- Easy for the most part. the Final boss was only challenging enemy.

10.FF7

11.FF8- the easiest game in the series in my opinion. The trick is to not to level up at all. Just focus mostly on junctioning

The hardest game in my opinion is Final Fantasy XII. It contains the most difficult enemy in any Final Fantasy game. Yazmat is an option boss (the last one in the game) who has a ridiculous amount of life; 50 million hp to be exact. even at the highest level of 99 on all characters, it took hours to beat him. not only did he have a move that could kill every party member at once, but he could kill you with an attack regardless of your hp. Take into account the difficult to capture espers like Ultima and Zodiark and the game is bloody hard, and don't get me started on Giruvegan, that place still gives me nightmares.

The runner up is Final Fantasy XIII. The Long Gui is so damn strong that if you try to fight it after you beat the game, it'ld kill you in one hit. But the reason this game is hard is the boss Barthandelus. The first time i fought him i had to go online to see how to beat him. the second time it took me a month to get past him. nuff said

While I did certainly not play all the FF games, I found many of the FFXIII bosses more time-consuming than difficult to beat (and I did my upgrades). This is probably why I didn't even finish the game yet... :/

Looking forward to start FF XIV Online: ARR now, though =]