[2021] Do you need to beat the game to unlock Nightmare

In the future patch there will be a Nightmare difficulty independently from the rest and you'll get an achievement for the "highest" difficulty used so if you lower to hard you'll get the achievement for hard

Originally posted by kome360: Thank you for the patch, but I suspect you may have over-buffed the difficulty. Please ask your customer base if the nightmare difficulty is "extremely frustrating unless you put your mind to planning out boss battles and even regular battles for weaknesses" or "impossible without quitting your day job to grind and study".

Hello, Nightmare difficulty is supposed to be the difficulty where you need to use all the game systems to their maximum (weaknesses, crafting, crystal merging, optimizing your build for every boss battles, etc...) if you can win against the bosses by using all the systems it mean that the difficulty reached the expected balancing, if you want an harder experience but without the optimization and grind Hard difficulty is here. There may be other balancing to Nightmare difficulty but only if it's really impossible but unless a boss is beatable by optimizing there won't be any changes because it's what Nightmare difficulty is supposed to be sorry!

Well, it's not the same person that balance the craft than the one that balance the difficulty so ...