I also enjoy starting tales of games on the hardest mose reasonable difficulty right from the beginning.
What I mean by reasonable is if the tales of game's difficulty comes from the AI being smarter and going for weaknesses more or intentionally gunning for your mages and healers first. Also them using artes they do not normally use on lower difficulties (especially bosses and mystic artes. I really like when bosses have access to mystic artes that they don't use on lower difficulties).
I hate it when the difficulty part just comes from stat bloat and that is when it gets lame. Tales of abyss' unknown difficulty was this and the type I actually hate. The game wasn't harder in that the enemies were any smarter, they just gave enemies like 1,000,000 HP and cranked up their defense to the point where you are just doing 1s damage-wise, and so now the game is just a lame endurance test where you wail on a enemy and see how long you can keep doing this until you get bored. (Thankfully the later tales of games like vesperia, graces f, the xillias, etc. found a better balance between the stat bloat stuff. Well tales of arise can be suspect since for this game they just decided to give mad enemies super armor where they can't be stunned and then bloated the HP again, =/).
Some games have various titles you can learn via doing challenge run type stuff. Like in symphonia lloyd had a title where you had to use his starting wooden swords up until a certain point of the game. Genis had the title where you couldn't use gels, and colette had one where you couldn't let anyone die I think it was. Vesperia also has a similar no gels up to a certain point title for karol, and so I was doing that one hard-ass boss fight near the beginning in the game and doing everything in my power to avoid using that gel.
GTag:MadDogg730 PSN:lMadDogg NNID:xMadDoggx NS friend code:5313-0564-0819 Go buy cyber shadow like right now.