The question of difficulty came to mind while playing Metaphor. It was pretty challenging early on when resources were very limited and I was also learning the gameplay systems, but I’m starting to feel powerful now mid-game (while still being challenged a bit). That’s where I like to end up, typically. It has a nice ludonarrative feel for the games that typically have you killing god.
What do you like?
Great response. There’s definitely been a lot of change to streamline the experience in this way. Chrono Trigger’s a big part of what started that in JRPGs, too. Its move away from random encounters sometimes overshadows discussions about how tightly tuned that game’s encounters were.
Echoing Chrono Trigger again - you could skip all grinding, and then rely more heavily on item usage in the final battle (megaelixers and the like) or better yet, not, and it became much more fun, and either way you see and therefore expect battles, rather than them feeling like an interruption to exploration.
And if you really got bored, either on the first playthrough or a later one, there are so very many ways to mix up the teams, with new skills to “discover”, or try out if you read them from a guide.
It has its downsides (gfx, length I guess if you ignore the New Game+), but damn no wonder it is widely regarded as hands-down the single best JRPG of all time.