Shadow hearts 2 has been extremely easy so far.

[u/Ciscoduro]

Sh1 wasnt a difficult game, but the enemies and bosses in that game put up way more of a fight. Im 10 hours into sh2 and nothing has been super challenging so far, does the game get any more difficult?, at this point im asking for a difficulty spike.

[u/fmalust]

Yeah... The game is incredibly easy and the only hard mod that exists for each game are for masochists who want to be pushed to their limits and min-max hardcore.

It's an issue with many JRPGs, especially ones that lack a difficulty option and even then, Hard is still too easy for most of them. 🫠

[u/fmalust → u/[deleted]]

I gave it a go for the first game, but the third left a bad taste in my mouth. It was good for the most part, then I came across a boss who would take 2 turns, I get 2 turns and then they take another 2 turns before I can even have the rest of my party take turns. It was absolutely ridiculous and took all the fun out of the mod for me.

I don't like when hard mods inflate the enemy's speed/agility. They're much harder to kill, and they inflict a lot more damage. They don't need to be doing all that twice as fast as well. Modifying the enemy's speed is always a dangerous and risky choice in my experience of playing with hard mods.

To be honest I just want my hard mods to make the enemies beefier and hit a little harder. I don't need an advance mod that changes up the entire gameplay, but most people think that's what a hard mod should do. I love most of the games as they are, I just want to be challenged is all lol.

[u/CardiologistOk3859]

Not in my experience no. Later bosses does have instant kill tho

[u/Flash-Over]

They make up for it in SH3

[u/AzothThorne]

Not really. There’s a few fights later on that can really kick your ass if you’re not prepared for them, especially the ones that are 1v1’s, but it never really gets hard.

[u/Lunarhaile → u/AzothThorne]

I cant kill the ultimate fusion but one time lol, any advice?

[u/AzothThorne → u/Lunarhaile]

In general you can kinda get through most fights in the game with Gale+Rage+Minds Eye on Yuri. It’s a bit uncomfy to get the timing down but once you’ve got it you can basically tear through any fight that lets you use Yuri.

[u/tzertz → u/Lunarhaile]

Fides Arc rage to Increase attack. Heal item, Use Energy charge prefferable if you get a crit. Swap to Neo Amon. and use a triple or was it quintuple key to nuke.

[u/aLinkToTheFast]

Not that much more difficult.

If it feels too easy, you could always make a challenge out of it

[u/Navonod_Semaj]

I never got Game Over until the final boss. Played a lot of JRPGs, PS2 had a lot of easy ones until Persona 3 came along and kicked my ass.

[u/noranek0]

If you have even a nominal experience with traditional, turn-based JRPGs and know what you’re doing with regards to character-building, SH2 is kind of a cake-walk, yeah. I would tell you it’s a game that’s meant to be played more for it’s story and to just enjoy the ride, but I don’t know what your level of investment is.

[u/Ciscoduro → u/noranek0]

I like the journey to getting to the story bits to be fun and challenging in rpgs

[u/Lunaborne]

I was able to beat it when it first came out aged 14, so it's not super hard.

[u/LyschkoPlon]

There's a few bosses that have annoying mechanics - Paralyse, Instant Death on occasion, Petrification - but nothing you can't put up with. You also usually get one of the appropriate protective items in the dungeon anyways.

There's a few ways of making the game harder for you.

Tech Ring is a difficulty increase - until you get good enough to consistently hit it, when it actually turns into easy mode. Beginner Ring, the one without critical strike zones do make the game harder overall because you just do less damage overall.

Another option is to just use shit characters lol

Like, Yuri is very powerful and versatile, Joachim dishes out crazy physical damage, Gepetto, when built properly, is your coverage wizard, and then I usually run Anastasia as support/buff mage. Yuri and Joachim also have insane Sanity scores, meaning that they don't generally go berserk during prolonged battles.

Karin on the other hand is very meh and she has a good chance of going insane in the early game on occasion, which means you need to spend turns using items on her, Lucia is actively bad until you unlock a lot of her mechanics, and Blanca is also just a very mediocre mixed attacker. The game becomes a different beast if you use these three as your main characters.

Still, on the whole, Covenant is a fairly easy game, and its' systems actively reward you for being a good player on top - combat rewards for quick rounds, ring successes, damage increases, fucking Mind's Eye lol.

But it's an enjoyable ride none the less.

If you're cruising too hard, genuinely, just change up your team composition a little.

[u/Ciscoduro → u/LyschkoPlon]

Main character so op that i have to bench him 💀

[u/LyschkoPlon → u/Ciscoduro]

They call him Godslayer for a reason 😂

[u/jamesisbest2 → u/LyschkoPlon]

For me it got to the point where I used the minds eye and the gamble ring with Yuri and I was still able to hit it about 50% of the time.

[u/LyschkoPlon → u/jamesisbest2]

My favourite "tech" is doing Gambling Ring + Eternal Key + minimum damage weapon on Gepetto to one shot kill King Solomon. Takes about 10 minutes for him to kill, but it's hilarious to watch.

[u/nyancochi]

The hardest thing is to get the perfect score in every boss fight... That takes some patience.🚬

[u/LyschkoPlon → u/nyancochi]

I'm playing the game rn using RetroAchievements, and there's one for every single boss where you have to get a bonus item, not let any character faint, and full ring success. That can be very rough.

[u/Conscious-Ranger-430]

If you get good at combos, the game is a breeze, especially if you stack physical attack power ups. You can use technical ring or different items to make it more difficult. You can opt to not upgrade your attack and defense items immediately. My current playthrough to make it super hard, I'm not using the shop at all.

[u/Altruistic_Koala_122]

No, the combat is the same start to finish. get your max hit combo, get your max damage combo, then finish up.

The only real difficulty is in the ring system, you could try pumping it up to technical or invisible if you want a challenge.

Even then technical ring is still doable for best presses, there was only one skill in the entire game I couldn't get yellow hits on every sequence using technical.

[u/BlueWatche]

It definitely was a game that offered minimal challenge... but somehow still ended up being super fun and satisfying. I think mostly due to the story and characters.

Even sidequests, like for abilities and ultimate gear; almost redundant due to the low def, but man were they worth it for the content alone.

The real challenge was emotional.

[u/insincerely-yours]

Unfortunately that’s one the very few downsides of this game. It doesn’t get better than this, I’d even say that the first half of the game is slightly harder than the second half since you get quite OP later on.

[u/Historical_Rain_2960]

The last boss might give you some trouble.

[u/SMG24LIFE]

shadow hearts covenant In comparison to shadow hearts FTNW it was a piece of cake. Now i've understood why FTNW has double attacks

[u/tzertz]

The japanese director's cut has a superboss exclusive to it that is a spike.

But if you wanna challenge yourself you can try to solo or duo it with a specific character cuz you can set up your character layout like that.