The Persona franchise has, in recent years, become known as one of the most grand and sweeping franchises in gaming. Separate stories with similar premises, the Persona games manage to create huge worlds filled with fascinating characters without ever having a game that feels like a particular miss.
However, one thing the Persona games aren’t afraid to do is create difficult challenges for players. Across the various renditions of the main Persona games, they have all kinds of difficulty levels, and players haven’t been afraid in the past to call out versions of the games for reducing or increasing the level of difficulty too much.
6 Persona 5
Though Persona 5 isn’t one of the harder games in the Persona franchise, it makes it on list of difficult games for a couple of reasons. For one, it is easily more difficult than the ridiculously simplified Persona 5 Royal, but secondly, there are some aspects that make Persona 5’s base game harder to complete than some of the others.
One of the biggest factors is sheer runtime, which for Persona 5 averages around 97 hours. This means it isn’t exactly one of the quickest experiences for casual gamers to get through, but it is still a much more comfortable experience for players once they get to know the ins and outs of combat. Side characters like Futaba help a huge amount in combat, and most enemies and bosses are fairly manageable compared to those that appeared in earlier entries of the franchise.
5 Persona 4 Golden
Persona 4 Golden was the added version of one of the most popular games in the history of the franchise. The strange thing is that while adding content and improving on many aspects of the original Persona 4 game, Golden actually made a number of things about the game easier rather than adding any difficulty.
Golden adds a lot in terms of texture and platform updates, but there is hardly an aspect of the game that remains untouched from the original. Story additions like a bad ending and multiple new events that take place throughout the school year pad the length of the game, but actual combat is much easier than in the original version.
4 Persona 3 Portable
There are multiple versions of most Persona games, especially the third one, which is due to receive an upcoming remake in yet another edition of the tale. Persona 3 was the first time the franchise mixed the social life and dungeon-crawler elements that have become the staple blending of the Persona games.
Portable was an easier take on Persona 3, partly because it was the game that introduced difficulty options into the franchise. This version had a number of shifts, some of them purely cosmetic, such as allowing the player to change the main character’s gender and more. The difficulty was mostly similar to other versions of Persona 3, but with minor shifts that made it decidedly easier.
3 Persona 4
The original version of Persona 4 is one of the biggest hits the franchise has ever had, but there was a level of difficulty in it which, though not drastic, was significantly higher than the remade version of this entry in Persona 4 Golden. This version of the game was originally released at the very end of the PlayStation 2 era.
Though Persona 4 didn’t change drastically, and most of what changed was additional content in terms of characters and storylines when the Golden remake came out, the difficulty was higher in the original because the controls weren’t as well sorted out as they would be in the later remake.
2 Persona 3
Persona 3’s original version was one of the harder original games in the franchise. While this had the format that players are used to in Persona games featuring a main character adventuring with a party through a variety of dungeons, the biggest issue was that the party alongside the player hadn’t been figured out to the extent it later would work.
This led to players struggling in dungeons constantly due to their party leaving them as they tried to keep going. High encounter rates compared to later editions and difficulty with different aspects of the early game in particular made Persona 3 a struggle for many players as they tried to get into the new format of the franchise.
1 Persona 2: Eternal Punishment
The follow-up game to Persona 2 was an early entry in the franchise which hadn’t yet established itself apart from the franchise that it span away from. Nevertheless, Eternal Punishment is still well-remembered among the Persona community, mostly because of the intense difficulty involved in the game.
The biggest issues were that the encounter rate of enemies in dungeons was ridiculously high compared to later games in the franchise, and negotiating was also much harder than it would end up being in other games. While this was an early version of what would become the combat and social aspects known to fans of the later Persona games, there is no doubt that Persona 2: Eternal Punishmentwas an extremely difficult and, at times, frustrating version of these games.
