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Maniac
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naraku is pretty fucking brutal and it's also one of the only dungeons in the game with some actual texture to its design to drag the difficulty out even more. minotaur and medusa are both quite powerful and difficult and they're fought almost back to back, so they leave a pretty big impression on you. but you're about level 15 when you beat medusa, and then you're level 30 the next time you fight a boss with more hp than her (xi wangmu), you're level 45 the next time you fight a boss with three press turns (koga saburo), you're level 60 the next (and last) time you fight a mandatory boss that has any chance of killing you (kenji). like, the difficulty curve of that game even in numbers makes no sense, but it definitely does just completely jump off a cliff after medusa to be certain.
you mentioned the fiends, but probably the thing I enjoyed the most playing that game is how I had to make a party from scratch to beat red rider. it took me a couple of hours of planning, but it was fun to have to adapt to a challenging bonus fight like that and then overcome him. it's genuinely a shame someone was dropped on their head as a child, made their way into the SMT4 dev team and decided "you know how in SMT1, a heretofore 21 year old game that has aged like milk, they had fiends spawn in one place on the map once every 1/256 times you zone into the area they're in? let's do that again in 2013!"
of those three, the one I liked the most was apocalypse. you might like strange journey -- speaking of balancing, I think that game achieves the best balance of fairness and oppressiveness of any game in the franchise, but it has its problems.
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