7 Most Frustrating Puzzles In Final Fantasy History 

I pulled an all nighter doing the deep sea research centre in FFVIII. The save point doesn’t become available until you’ve completed the final fight. It was just beginning to get light when I beat ultima weapon. I went to the save point and accidentally hit load instead of save.

I actually found the Bevelle Cloister to be worse than the Macalania Cloister, but that's more due to the tight windows for some of the button presses to change paths. A puzzle you didn't mention was the Chocographs from IX. Playing Chocobo Hot and Cold was fun for me, finding exactly where to go was not. I've never managed to get the deep sea chocograph without looking at a guide.

I mean it could be worse with Macalania Temple. You could have had the European version of the game meaning that once you found out that you needed those destruction sphere's to get Anima, you headed back to the Temple only to find out that Dark Shiva was there. That was a fun thing to fun into when I was seven.

The hidden cave in ffx-2, where you had to keep track of, amongst other things, how many combat encounters you have had, how many cheats you had opened, the number pin for the last gate you opened, and then do arithmetic to solve the current gate pin. There were 16 gates I think (it's been years since i played it). It was... a lot.

Im shocked you chose garamscythe over the Great Crystal as far as puzzles go. The lack of a usable map made navigating harder and keeping track of where gates are located and their switches

While the Macalania Temple is frustrating, I found Bevelle's to be even moreso. The timing was so unreliable for confirming directions when navigating on the floating pedestal. It was far too easy to miss arrows purely due to poor timing of the flashes, rather than any sort of input error. It was so annoying, ugh. ;w; That said, the Final Fantasy X-2 tower calibration puzzle still gives me nightmares to this day. 😂

The worst part of the lightning tower recalibration is the distracting stock animations of the characters when you press each button. It makes me think that I have to wait until Rikku's done her little jump slash before I can press another button.

The puzzle in FFVIII's Ultimecia castle where you had to figure out the paintings was the one that stumped me more than any of these puzzles. Although yes, a lot of these puzzles were nightmares.

Rikku's idle animation while someone else is doing their minigame is precious.

Can confirm as I’ve done each and everyone of these at least twice (except icicle ridge). But i’d pick the great crystal over garamsythe watarway, there is just simply no way you make any reasonable progress without either manually drawing a map yourself or looking up for a map online. No way you’d ever just stumble upon ultima or omega by chance, and get decimated, you’d have work your ass to get all the way up and then get decimated.

Personally I think you're missing the single worst and most frustrating one of all- The Great Crystal in the original FF12. It's not bad at all in The Zodiac Age with all the added convenience features, but in the original game it is absolutely hellacious.

LOL, I'm currently re-playing FFX2 after many years and I JUST dealt with the lightning tower recalibration yesterday... (I think I had blocked it from my memory, but this video is quite timely)

Shout out to ma boi Nasir for coding that sliding puzzle behind Sakaguchi's back in Final Fantasy I 🫡

Worst part of Macalania temple was completing the puzzle and then accidentally stepping on the pedestal reset tile.

Most frustrating puzzles in Final Fantasy games? Literally the entirety of Final Fantasy X and X-2. Hands down. Especially when attempting to not only acquire, but also power up the Celestial Weapons. Most other Final Fantasy games, you just needed to find the right treasure chests, fight the right bosses, or grind certain enemies an unconscionable number of times until a weapon got randomly dropped. What had to be done to find and power up all of the weapons was frustrating and mind-numbing! I was only able to fully power Rikku, Yuna, and Auron's weapons. If anyone was able to fully dodge 200 lightning bolts in a row with no pause, or catch all the blue butterflies without hitting a red and triggering a battle, or collect enough balloons while dodging birds while riding the most unresponsive chocobo in all of Final Fantasy... then I applaud you and hope you still have some active brain cells remaining. I couldn't do it. And admittedly, I had absolutely NO desire to play Blitzball beyond what was absolutely necessary.

The great crystal in XII trying to get to Mark fight. I never got to it even after following a guide for each gate. Frustrated me to no end!

I remember getting heated at the FFX ice sliding puzzle and wondering if i had to come back later.. pretty sure i got it though

FF12 had the crystal dungeon and the late game one where the mini map was hazy. Found my ultima blade there luckily because I was lost 😅

The jumping puzzles of FFXIV are a weird case, because an enormous portion of their difficulty can be attributed to simple control scheme issues; In short, they're platforming puzzles in a game that is fundamentally Not a Platformer. It's arguable that MOST of the difficulty comes from how the controls make it difficult to jump the proper distance and how the colliders of the terrain aren't necessarily a tight fit, making situations where you slam into an invisible wall when it seems visually obvious that you should have made a certain jump easily. This ends up being the largest barrier to the achievements attached to the jumping puzzles: Becoming demoralized by a system where most of your losses simply feel unfair, in a game that usually avoids eliciting that feeling.

First time (and every time after) that I played FF12, I bumbled into Garamsythe Waterway after the initial plot. Thought it would be a good place to level up early on... turned out all my level 10 rats, bats, and ghosts were replaced with level 60 basalisks, gigantoads, and malboro overlords. Scared the crap out of me at first... but it didn't stop me. I started practicing Mists instead. There's a full-heal save crystal RIGHT THERE in the sewer entrance, so I just started full healing, then nuking, rinse/repeat. I both got good at Mists, and eventually learned how to stack enough Mist damage to kill those level 60 foes, getting insanely good treasures to sell, leveling up RAPIDLY, and I think even getting some later game equipment from the loot I sold at the bazaar. Pretty sure I got the Yoichi arrows and/or bow set from doing it, maybe I'm misremembering. But it was hilarious.

FF12’s “great crystal” and the “waterway” would have been impossible without a guide. It just wouldn’t be worth the time to me.

And speaking of FF8, anyone remembers the Obel Lake puzzle? The one that has you hum in five random spots and then sends you to a desert that has some rocks telling you that they lie and other rocks giving you a nebulous direction? Not difficult if you have a guide. Hair pulling if you don't.

I just knew the clock puzzles from 13-2 would be on here. Some of them are ridiculously hard without cheating. As in, there are sites that instantly give you the solution after you screenshot the clock in question.

Garamsythe Waterway really wasn't bad at all in my opinion. I think Great Crystal is more deserving of this list!

7:03 Just to clarify that you have to get onboard the Hydra and talk to everyone first. Then you can go deeper to fight Ultima Weapon. I'm mentionning it because i still remember how many years i've been stuck on this one. If you don't do that you will see the hole below but cannot go throught it. Thanks to Piggyback

I didn't find Macalania Temple that frustrating, to be perfectly honest. Once you know the solution, it's fairly easy. The Cloister that I had problems with was Bevelle's. The fact that you have to press X at specific times just to ensure you're going the right way on those damn platforms is annoying to me. And while, yes, you're guaranteed the Destruction Sphere treasure of Bevelle (likely done because you only get one run of the cloister, unlike the others), there's another chest you can grab with a fairly potent lance for Kimahri, but doing so requires you to bring an extra Bevelle sphere to the end, something you'd never know you'd need to do without a guide.

Honestly as a kid I had more trouble with the Bevelle cloister of trials than Macalania-- it was the only time I had to look up a guide because I got so frustrated!

Ffxv Pitious ruins remains a triumph of game design for those who finished it. It's a travesty that there wasn't a psn trophy associated with it.

I personally found Bevelle temple a lot more obnoxious than the Maccalania temple. I could at least see where I went wrong and even though it took a few extra steps, everything I needed to solve it was fairly close. With Bevelle I was stuck on a track, tapping my foot while I waited for the platforms to circle around again only to get a bad pattern and not able to stop the stupid platform, it's torture and I hate it.

For me the most frustrating part of Macalania Temple is that it kills the flow of the story. Story wise i get it. The Guado are trying to trap or stall the party. Still my gosh they did their job too well. After taking down the first major storyline boss, the mind is pumped to see what happens next. Only to be stuck sliding on ice for soooooo long😢.

I'm not usually the type to do the side quests, especially in the more recent games. I usually do my research first see if it's worth putting myself through the torture. Worst puzzle in my opinion is The Great Crystal in Final Fantasy XII, got totally lost and looked up a guide.

World of Final Fantasy's Icicle Ridge was just another Gym Challenge from Pokémon in several ice and one water Gym's puzzles. I also ground levels to get all the treasures and fight the holy dragon, which allowed me to do even more mirages' boards I never thought Ice Path (the original Ice puzzle, IIRC, in Gen 2) would help me anywhere but the later Gens Edit - Shoal Cave had some ice sliding puzzles, too, in Gen 3 now that I think about it.

Two thing about the ff8 deep sea research center bit. 1. When zell breaks the machine, the enounter rate isn’t increase, they are fixed. As in the fights on each screen happen on the exact same tiles each time. Once a fight was completed, it would not retrigger unless you left the screen and came back. This was actually a useful feature as you could guarantee to fight 3 of the enemies that you can mug curse spikes from in the first area which were needed for dark matters. 2. Bahamut would make you fight a ruby dragon no matter what answer you pick, however if you answer correctly, you wouldn’t know until after the fight and he asked you the next question. This was also exploitable as ruby dragons give a ton of xp and are fairly easy to kill with the right setup.

36 10 59 97. idk how i've never forgotten that combo.

the FFX 100 lightning strikes in a row drove me insane

That 13-2 clock puzzle... Back in the day, it drove me so crazy, I wrote a code in Matlab to solve it. Never bothered me again. 🤓

I definitely didn't appreciate the Gargant Roo puzzle in FF9 the 1st time I played. Every time you went the wrong way, you're out of 1-2 mins every time when you include random encounters. That part took me about an hour my 1st playthrough. Good times though

WoFF Icicle Ridge being here is a disservice to actual puzzles that are shown here. The ice puzzles are incredibly simplistic and you have all the mirages you need before even reaching this place.

Surprised at no Pitioss Dungeon in XV, platforming in a non platformer to forever to get through.

Didn't really dislike any of these besides the Tower calibration one. When I saw the title of the video, I immediately thought of the Temple of the Ancients from VII and Fossil Roo from IX (Fossil Roo was EXTREMELY frustrating for me the first time I did it over 20 years ago). I also consider the Gunners Gauntlet from X-2 (just can't grt proficient with it for some reason) and I thought of my first time doing the Bevelle Cloister of Trials (took me literal hours to do the first time).

Card collecting in the undersea research facility was what made me go in there frequently

If pitioss isn't top spot I call shenanigans

I absolutely loved the clock puzzles in XIII-2!

The waterway puzzle in 12 is not that bad, but a real annoying puzzle is the great crystal, especially if you're trying to get to Altima or Omega MKXII. THAT'S A TRUE ANNOYING PUZZLE!

Macalania just takes patience. Bevelle is truly frustrating. You need to time your buttons perfectly a few places…and going back over the same path a dozen times can aggravate.

The puzzle that gave me the most random trouble in any Final Fantasy game yet would have to be the cloister of trial puzzle in the Djose Temple in FFX. I don't know what it was, but the first time I encountered it back when I initially played FFX I just could not figure out how to get to the destruction sphere at the back and didn't want to leave early as I had gotten the puzzles and the extra secrets down easy in all the other temples up to that point. Legit took me like nearly 2 hours just flipping all the switches around to all the different configurations to try to find out what I was doing wrong. It wasn't until I randomly pushed the pedestal out into the void to do it correctly that I got it. I think what caught me up was that I tried pushing the pedestal out there before when the right switches weren't set and from there I just assumed that pushing it out there wasn't part of the solution. Definately caused me some chagrin as the puzzle wasn't *that* hard and I was just being a big dummy, haha.

Macalania Temple is made even worse by the fact that in the original version (and possibly remakes), leaving the room to save restarts the puzzle and it was easy to do this unintentionally.

The most frustrating puzzle in any RPG I ever played was The Dead Sanctuary in Wild Arms. I had apparently not set the bomb close enough to the green statue when I had tried that, so I spent a literal week trying to figure out how open the damn door, before I was able to get a friend with an internet connection to find the answer for me 😂.

Final Fantasy vi: "The queen takes 5 steps and stops". That puzzle was the reason I never found the 8th dragon for ages.

I still hate those gahdamn lightning towers. I've played through X2 so many times and I've never completed them. It was hardest on PS2 because Paine's sections moved down so fast that they were almost blurred on older TVs.

Man I LOVED the clock puzzles in XIII-2. They were so fun. If you were a numbers person and really enjoyed teasing out the logic in solving those, they felt so rewarding.

If i may, i categorize some of these as mini games not puzzles.

The Garamsythe waterway control wasn't infuriating at all. You literally get the simplest instructions in one of the houses in the Lowtown that simply says according to compass directions which switches to turn on and in which order. Then you pull up your map - Upper side of the map is North so you can easily guess where the other sides are.

The Great Crystal in FF12 was far worse for me, than the Waterway. Having such a limited time to run from gate to gate, fighting enemies, and no map/cardinal direction help was brutal.

I found Bevelle beyond infuriating. And the freaking 200 lightning bolt puzzle in the thunder plains was just abysmal.

how did the lighting doging from 10 and the jump rope from 9 not make it on the list?

6:53 “Damned imbeciles. why do you wish to fight” “It is our nature. There is no real reason. Maybe we were born…only to fight” Ngl one of my favorite quotes in the game

heh I still can't even beat the Vivi jump rope minigame

Bevelle was Much more difficult than Macalania, IMO. I had to look up a map for that one.

I really appreciate the love you guys give to spin-offs/sequels games in your videos. Keep up the good work!

Anyone who though Garamsythe was hard clearly never tried to 100% the Great Crystal in Zodiac, including weapons.

Before opening the video, only reading the title the first image that came into my mind was Cloister of Trials: "starts the video and Tidus appears doing that...."

I never had an issue with Macalania Cloister. Bevelle however....

Not Necessarily A Puzzle In The Traditional Sense,But Navigating The Great Crystal In Giruvegan &/Or The Pharos At Ridorana For Some Of The Marks/Hunts/Espers In Final Fantasy XII Are Pretty Puzzling.

Macalania temple is always a pain in the ass, but the one i always look up to avoid runing around for hours is the Zanarcand one. Dude the movent speed on that temple is pure shit.

I felt like FF7 the scene after the gold saucer. I felt like the desert itself was a puzzle finding barrels, brother

man this channel is such a vibe, but i have not played nearly enough final fantasy to watch a good chunk of these videos without being concerned about spoilers for >20 year old games i havent played yet. i will say, i dont think i beat a single temple in ffx without googling it, half of the time i missed somewhere i didnt know i could interact with or walk on. wild stuff. this video is great though! :)

I can’t believe i did all the cloisters back when i was 10 with no guide, replayed ffx last month and i couldn’t do it without help.

Ebot's Rock in FF6 is just plain awful. The entire dungeon is dark and all you have is a small field of view around you. You navigate the dungeon by stepping on switches, which teleport you to a random room with a scrambled arrangement. The objective is to find chests that contain Coral. Then you have to take the random Coral to a mimic chest in a room you randomly access, and it only lets you pass if you feed it enough Coral in one approach. The problem? The game doesn't tell you how many you need, nor does it tell you how many you have. It only tells you how many each chest gives you when you open it. How much Coral you feed the chest doesn't accumulate, either. You actually have to have the full required amount when you approach the mimic, or you have to start all over. It's absolutely unbearable and is usually the first thing FF6 romhackers change when given the chance.

Finally beat the Thunder Towers! Praise the PC esc strat! Rikku’s 2nd tower was hardest to me because registering, memorizing, and physically finding the correct buttons to hit simultaneously was challenging.

getting X-2 ribbon melted my brain, idk what it is i just could not figure it out. even with a video guide! The endless random battles didn't help my train of thought lol

The Garamsythe Waterway triggered EVERY ocarina of time player with our hate for the water temple

"The formidable Ultima Weapon" Did you forget that you can beat Ultima Weapon before it can even get a turn?

Crisis Core ... another reason why that puzzle sucked was that you couldn't see on that little screen on the PSP.

Bahamut's cloister of trials in FFX was the most annoying for me. That dumb on rails thing just seemed like they designed it and then said "nah, it's not frustrating enough....what if we required correct timing to change direction as well!"

as someone who loves final fantasy puzzles and minigames, i enjoyed each and everyone of them on this list, some harder than others, but also easier to be manipulated. for the clock puzzle in 13-2 for example, i paused the game and wrote the numbers down on paper and solved it simply by trial and error until i knew where i had to step on first, like a sudoku game, i didnt know an online addon existed which solves it for you. and ill take it a step further. final fantasy 9s "find the brother" was one of the worst ones. i had to record them switching places and slow the video down to 0.5 speed and i still had to guess in the end due to them being so distorted in the last jump, it was hard to tell. i even managed to do vivis 1000 rope jumps twice, by simply getting drunk to blink less and be able to have tunnelgaze onto the pop up. but FOR THE LOVE OF GAMING!!!! final fantasy 12s fishing game to get the last medallion to be able to get tros sword?? if tower recalibration is tough for you, then GOOD LUCK!! my eye hand coordination is no longer fast enough to beat the fishing game. i am simply too slow to be able to finish it, due to the whole line of input moving too quickly from one side to the other. the pause button doesnt work, you cannot write down the codes to memorize them, the codes are waaay too long, you simply see it and immediately have to enter it and I CANT DO IT ANYMORE and it is FRUSTRATING!! of all puzzles and minigames it is the only one i was never able to do and from now on i WONT ever be able to do it anymore.

I'd make 10s entry as ALL the cloister of trials. Freaking hated those things

Some of what you consider a "puzzle," I would classify as a mini game. They are different as mini games have variables while puzzles have single solutions.

This is a good list of some of the more challenging, and sometimes fun, puzzles, but it's the mini-games that usually cause the most frustration for me, such as FFIX Jumping Rope, FFX Lightning Dodge & Chocobo Race, FFX-2 Shooting Game, FFVIIR Pull-ups, and FFVIIR: Intermission Shinra Box Buster.

Not me genuinely enjoying ice slide puzzles xD I need to occasionally look shit up (especially w Macalania cloister of trials) but if it's just sliding here & there, it's fun xD

One puzzle I didn't know how to clear by myself until a Super Nintendo Magazine had the guide for it was Falls Basin in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, I think this was in the mid 1990's when I played that game.

Surprised that blizzard area in ff7 original didn't make the list. I think the ff12 puzzle was the most frustrating. Not only did it take trial and error, but it taunts you from the beginning of the game. And the payout is highly disappointing.

Most frustrating? Magus Sister. Magus Sisters were the most frustrating because you had to get everyone 😂

Man I'm glad puzzles are easy 😌 nowadays 😊

the garamsythe waterway is not a labyrinth, its a maze. a labyrinth is a single long path leading to the center and back. a maze has branching paths and dead ends.

Tue most frustrating puzzle was the friendly creatures from FF IX. The puzzle spaned the entire game and if you missed a creature or fed it the wrong stone, you'd have to restart the whole game.

its so interesing that there is no entry from FF1-6. Neither 15 or 16. Was the complicated puzzle element a trend from the 2000s?

Macalania temple wasn't too bad. The Great Crystal from FFXII? Holy hell

The clock puzzle in FFXIII-2 was more enjoyable than frustrating to me. Also, i expected Pitioss Ruins in FFXV to be included in this list as it was the most annoying puzzle i have ever encountered in the FF series. I raged the most on this puzzle. I don't want to remember that puzzle anymore lol xD

Before watching, Bevelle or Zanarkand Cloister of Trials.

I understand the choice of the Garamsythe Waterway, but anyone who has played Final Fantasy 12 knows the true punishing puzzle that is the Great Crystal at Giruvegan.

Not to derail the series, but I was playing this video while playing Baldur's Gate 3 at the same time and, I swear, your voice and the camp song goes really well together!! XD

The Macalania temple I remember my mom asking me to help with. It tripped me up every play through and I solved her puzzle as if it had been the first time I'd seen it.

Shinra manor was a piece of cake in comparison to the other puzzles.

As a kid I never unlocked Bahamut and the Deep Sea Research Center, and honestly who did without use of a strategy guide? There is absolutely zero reason to assume there's an invisible, hidden dialogue option beneath the regular options. Such an incredibly stupid decision.

Also, if you go back to macalania temple later you have to defeat dark shiva just to get in, which involves close to max stats, celestial weapons and super armours. I accidentally trod on that plymth return button when finished too many times too, so frustrating!

I LOVED the clock puzzles in XIII-2. They were my favorite of those anomaly puzzles in that game😂❤ My most hated ones out of this list are the Thunder Towers Calibration mission and Macalania Temple Cloister of Trials though. I was stuck at them both for quite a long time, lol.

For me, the most annoying puzzle was in Endwalker - when you had to sneak around to get back to your body after it got possessed by Zenos

I remember my 1st try to get the Destruction Sphere in Macalania Temple. I had got to the point where I had the Sphere-associated treasure. I just needed to figure out how to get out of the temple while retaining the item. I think I had softlocked the puzzle somehow at the end & had to restart all over again. The 2nd time I didn't even bother with the Destruction Sphere & finished the puzzle to get out. I will admit I'm not the greatest with puzzles, but I had managed to get the previous prizes with some minor trial & error, & even got the Bevelle prize on the same playthrough.

Not a puzzle but trying to get Cid to live in FFVI always takes me an hour+, insufferable