RPGs have come a long way since the days of choosing Fight, Magic, Item, or Run. From intricate systems to immerꦍsive open worlds, mod🔯ern RPGs do everything they can to push boundaries while still appealing to fans. One of the earliest innovations was the introduction of a tactical map to battles, making positioning just as important as stats and builds.

Even in a simplified digital fo🌼rm, commanding troops on a battlefield is hard. One mistake or an unforseen act of fate can ruin your carefully-laid strategy, forcing you to improvise. These tactical RPGs are some of the most punishing challenges available.

9 The Banner S♔aga

Mistakes Add Up

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Banner Saga is best known for its beautiful visuals and animation, and its series-spanning epic of a Viking clan's struggle for survival. We tend to forget that the game is also pretty darn hard... until we start a new campaign a✱nd are rudely reminde𝔍d.

The biggest challenge is that your warriors lose attack power as they take damage; don't expect any glorious last stands or heroic sacrifices in The Banner Saga. If a battle's momentum starts favoring the enemy, you'll find yourself in trouble quickly.

8 Tactics Ogre 🙈

Classically Difficult

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together was a predecessor to Final Fantasy Tactics. Like its more-famous cousin, Tactics Ogre tells a gripping and tragic war story through isometric grid-based battles with class-based progression. It's also more challenging, which is saying something.

The battles in Tactics Ogre can be just as grueling as those in Final Fantasy Tactics, but its slower overall progression makes it harder to adapt for a particular fight. The recent remake, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tactics Ogre Reborn, is a little more user-friendly, but not much.

7 Fire Emblem: Thracia 776🐭

Old-School Fire Emblem, But Somehow Harder

Classic Fire Emblem is infamou🌜sly merciless. Every single character is vulnerable to permadeath, and in most cases an unl🥂ucky missed shot or a one-in-a-hundred crit from an enemy is all it takes to send them to an early grave. Not only does this kill off a character you might have grown attached to, it also permanently reduces the strength of your army for the rest of the game.

Thracia 776 adds another layer of difficulty by adding a fatigue system. If a character takes too many actions in a single battle, they need to rest and can't participate in the next one. If you're not careful, you can run into a situation where you just don't have enough battle-ready soldiers to actually stand a chance of winning

6 🙈 ⛦ Hard West 2

Your Strategy Is A House Of Cards

Hard West 2 is a fun supernatural wild-west tale, but its combat means you'll need to be patient and lucky to see it through to its conclusion. Shootouts against undead revenants and gunslinging desperadoes are fun, but you need to take big risks that don't always pay off if you want to even the odds.

Killing an enemy fully refills a character's AP, effectively letting them take an extra turn right away. Of course, if your setup goes awry, or you miss, you'll leave a teammate out in the open as easy pickings when the enemy fights back.

5 🦄 Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor

"Survivor" Probably Doesn't Mean You

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Shin Megami Tensei is known for being a challenging, hardcore JRPG experience. It's not for the faint of heart at the best of times, so adding a tactical layer onto the series' standard eighty-hour campaigns and ruthless boss fights only serves to up the challenge.

Like the main SMT games, you'll have to spend a good amount of time grinding, training demons and fusing them to extract the powers you need. Don't hold anything back - the game sure won't.

4 Ultima: Qu𓆏est Of The Avatar ♔

The Real Virtue Is Perseverance

The fourth game in the Ultima series was released in 1985, and boasted a truly open world. The tactical combat is rudimentary but challenging, especially if you start in one of the game's more dangerous regions.

That's the thing about old-school open worlds; sure, you could go anywhere you want, but if you stumbled into a place you were woefully unprepared for (usually without any warning), that was on you. If 🐈you managed to finish Quest Of The Avatar back in the day, I for one salute 📖you.

3 XCOM Serꦅies

99.9% and 100% Are Not The Same Thing

XCOM is the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls of strategy games, known first and foremost for its brutal difficulty. Commanding a team of elite soldiers, you'll fight off an alien invasion one skirmish at a time. Even your best troops are a bad turn away from death, and when they die they're gone for good.

There are no guarantees in XCOM. A unit can have an almost-certain chance of avoiding a lethal attack, but there's always a possibility they'll get zapped. Sooner or later, the law of averages will catch up to you, and when it does, someone's going to fall in battle.

2 Jeanne d'Arc

You Might Need A Miracle

Based very loosely on the story of the legendary French heroine, Jeanne d'Arc has a lot of cool systems that make it unique among tactical RPGs. The downside, of course, is that you'll have to learn those systems from scratch and figure it out as you go.

In particular, learning to keep your units in a formation to take advantage of powers like Unified Guard takes a lot of getting used to. While this PSP titlꦆe ﷽is a rewarding experience once you get the hang of it, its learning curve has certainly caused its share of players to move on in favor of something a bit easier.

1 Bಞattle Brothers

Every Encounter Could Be Your Last

In most games, once you've leveled up enough you'll find you've outgrown some of the hardest parts. Battle Brothers is not one of those games. Even a routine encounter can leave your soldiers dead or permanently injured, making all the experience they've gained to that point useless. Even if your troops do manage to survive relatively unscathed, growth is slow and gear is expensive.

In a dark fantasy world filled with scheming nobles, ravening undead and bloodthirsty orcs, there's no shortage of danger. Battle Brothers is a game where you're never truly safe.