Ahead On Our Way - The Top 21 Numbered Final Fantasies Countdown

[4-So]

In a very real way, Zelda is responsible for my love of Final Fantasy 4.

April 1992. The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past was released and thanks to a new subscription to Nintendo Power, my head was reeling with all of the delights that would be in store. Problem, though, was that I had not saved up enough allowance to buy the game outright. My mom drove me to the local Walmart to secure a copy, and by "secure" I mean put on layaway because I just didn't have the money and neither did she. On the way home, she decided to stop at the video rental place so I would have something to do on a Friday night. Naturally, I wanted to rent A Link To The Past and, unsurprisingly, the only copy available was already out the door. So I stood there in the tiny room in back of this store - I assume it used to be the porn room until someone figured out game rentals were more lucrative - disappointed at my lack of Zelda and growing more disappointed as I realized the SNES selection was anemic. It was then that I noticed a bright red box that I had noticed before but never cared to really look at. But the sword as the "T" in the word Fantasy was kinda clever, I suppose, so I picked it up, glanced at the back of the box, those tiny four pictures maybe-sorta looked like Zelda if you squinted, so what the hell, maybe this is something worth checking out.

I got lucky with Final Fantasy 2 because it was a rare thing to get the instruction booklet with a game rental. Luckily, it was still intact and more or less looked new. I ended up devouring that instruction booklet on the ride home, growing more and more excited as I flipped through it. And once I finally was able to play? It was a revelation and a kind of transformative experience. I had played nothing like this. (And as much as it gets flack in this day and age, the Tutorial Building in Baron Village was a huge boon to the 12-yo boy that was, who had zero experience with proper RPGs.)

Anyway. You always love your first and whatnot. I don't have much to add to what the thread has already talked about (cinematic aspirations, ATB, "curated" challenges, etc.) but, as is my wont, here's some music. Obviously, I would be remiss to not mention the Prelude. What a way to start the game. (Interesting article about the evolution of the Prelude can be found here.) I cannot even really express how incredible it was to hear Prologue. I'm not one of those people that gets chills from things but if I did, this would likely be one of the things that sets it off. What a way to start the adventure; cinematic, aspirational, grandiose. The main theme is interesting because there's that steady beat, implying the one foot in front of the other kind of determination, but also a kind of melancholy that sometimes comes with forward progress and leaving things behind, along with a bit of the ethereal and fantastic. My favorite overworld theme. Caves, anyone? The hopefulness in the quest to become a Paladin. The foreboding and terror. A delightful bit of beauty at a part of the game where a respite is sorely needed.

I could go on and on. I won't. But I could. Needless to say, my favorite FF OST.

 

[Peklo]

(And as much as it gets flack in this day and age, the Tutorial Building in Baron Village was a huge boon to the 12-yo boy that was, who had zero experience with proper RPGs.)

Not from me, at least. I love the Beginner's Hall set-ups that FF does between IV and VII in contextualizing game fundamentals as lessons taught within the game's own fiction. They're always fun and mostly only got better as they kept iterating on them.

 

[estragon]

The tutorial building in FFIV gets flack?

 

[Issun]

I remember the first time I learned about Final Fantasy. A kid on the school bus had the instruction manual, and I got a few glimpses of it and was instantly captivated by this mysterious world. I had played Dragon Warrior but this looked like a whole new level. I was able to rent it close to my birthday and of course was sucked in, and when my parents took me shopping for a game for my birthday it was the one I picked. I played it a lot over the ensuing months, but never got super far (it took me a while to figure out that I needed to manually equip stuff), but I had a blast.

Summer camp, 1991: A kid tells me they were coming out with a Final Fantasy II, but for the newly released Super Nintendo. I was so mad. Why did it have to be gated behind a whole new system? I convinced myself that I didn't want it anyways (this would repeat with VII and X). Eventually we did rent a SNES and Super Mario World, and of course I was blown away. My mother probably spent enough renting the system over the next year that we may as well have bought one, but the next few months saw a lot of Mario World, Castlevania IV, ActRaiser and Sim City. Finally, spring break 1992 we rented the system and FF"II". I sat down in front of the TV. The prelude. The slow fade in of the Red Wings theme and the airships flying over the land. I had no idea games could be like this. I think that moment was when I fell in love with both Final Fantasy and games as a medium.

It would take me several months of rentals to finally finish it (and I actually did finish FF1 over the course of that, when I didn't have access to II), and shortly after I saved up enough from my paper route to, with my Mom's help, buy a Super Nintendo and a copy of Final Fantasy II, and that was that. FFIV may not be my favorite game (that's Chrono Trigger), it's probably not the best Final Fantasy (that one's up for debate), but it is the game I've spent the most time on out of any I've played, and if you count Free Enterprise it's even more than that. For me, it is the most important game ever made.

 

[4-So]

The tutorial building in FFIV gets flack?

It has in certain circles. Perhaps it's less maligned now but I do remember a time when the tutorializing in FF2 US was held as one of the reasons that version was inferior to the "clearly superior" Japanese FF4. I don't hear that nearly as often anymore but the tutorial building was certainly something The Gamers scoffed at. I imagine these are the same types of people who once turned their noses up at Mystic Quest for its supposed hand holding, but that could be me just thinking out loud.

 

[Omega]

I guess we all have to say goodbye someday.

#5
Final Fantasy IX

a.k.a. The one with the cute black mage.

527 points • 18 mentions • Highest rank: #1 (Daikaiju, Felix SH)​

Released on July 7, 2000 (Japan)
Producer: Hironobu Sakaguchi and Shinji Hashimoto
Director: Hiroyuki Ito
Composer: Nobuo Uematsu

IX was made to deliberately revisit and call back upon the story of the series so far. This was around the time when Sakaguchi relocated to Hawaii to lead Square’s disastrous foray into movies. I guess it made sense Sakaguchi would feel nostalgic at the time, and it ended up being the last hurrah of the “classic” Final Fantasies.

For starters, this was the last time ATB was used in the main games. X-2 would use a variation of it but so sped up it was basically a different beast. This is also the game's greatest weakness. The main issue was that you once again had a four character team, like in most 2D games, but they were polygonal with more elaborated unskippable animations than those from the old sprites, so each action took longer to complete than it would have taken in 2D. Put this together with long loading times and you’ll see what is the usual complain about IX - battles are slow, even at speediest settings. It almost feels as if X and X-2’s battle systems were a reaction to this shortcoming of IX.

Mind you, once you get past that there’s little to fault about IX. The game squeezes as much as it can from the PSX - sprites are vivid and colorful, battle scenes are mind-blowing and the ATB system still holds up. And Square applied the production values they had applied to the PSX games - up to and including a beautiful vocal ending theme. Even if it doesn’t tickle your nostalgia, the game itself is great - it sold bonkers in Europe, and they didn’t have the NES and SNES games to feel nostalgic about (although I’m assuming it sold well because the game was solid and not because the protagonist shared his name with Europe’s greatest football star at the time).

But if you played the NES and SNES releases then you get a lot more out of this game. Characters are once again hand-animated in cutscenes, using a unified super deformed style resembling that of the old games that didn’t strive for realism, unlike VII and VIII. In-world technology was dialed back, once again taking in a (mostly) medieval world like I. Old musical themes get reused or adapted, old characters and locales from the whole series are name-dropped liberally… Even the four fiends from I are back, with updated character designs to match the world they are haunting now.

But for my money, the real strength of the game lies in their cast. You have eight adventurers, and while usually you follow thief Zidane’s PoV, the game takes a bit of a cast approach by also focusing on your other team member, each one belonging to a specific Final Fantasy job and with its own unique personality that fuels the narrative. The show stealer is Vivi, a Black Mage whose character model follows the classical design of the job, and whose quest for meaning is the literal heart of the story.

Final Fantasy would never be the same after this one, with modern games striving for realism and futuristic settings and lightning fast battle systems that shedded their reliance on menus. If the classical FF model had to say goodbye, I’m glad it managed to do so with this game.

Something Old

What wasn’t reused in IX? Nostalgia was the point. But I do want to highlight the music: IX was Uematsu's last solo OST in the series, and its strong as always, but it's also playing the nostalgia game. Uematsu had very ocassionally reused melodies from old games in new ones (“Ahead On Our Way” from V is used in VII) but in IX he really goes overboard. “Gulgu Volcano” from I is the obvious one, but there are other examples - in particular Kuja’s Theme is really similar to Slumber of the Ancient Earth from V. While Uematsu is not a stranger from borrowing from himself, I do believe all these callbacks are intentional.

Something New

IX managed to add new stuff to the formula. Square promoted heavily the ATE (Active Time Event) system, which allowed you to switch PoVs in towns to see what other characters were up to. This was also used to switch parties during dungeons, which contributed to the assemble feel of the game.

This game also flexed Square’s marketing muscle in ways that had never done before but would not hesitate to do again. Famously, our first look to the characters didn’t come from a videogame event or press release but from a Coca-Cola commercial.

Something Blew

Play Online. Oh boy, that was a disaster.

To be fair, Play Online, the authentication service, went on and it’s still being used for FFXI. But when IX launched it was also intended to be a content delivery service and in order to hook people into it they had the brilliant idea of hiding critical parts of the Official Strategy guide behind Play Online. That’s right - you bought a physical book and if you wanted to know the elemental weakness of Lich, you had to go online and type a password from the book to find out.

The backlash was so fierce they never tried that ever again.

Score

4 /4 evil elemental fiends

 

[Omega]

Enjoy the entry for #5. Now I will magnanimously let you rest for the weekend so your pstchich energies are properly replenished. It would also be a good idea to practice your groveling and your cries for mercy. See you next week to finish the countdown and the dooming of your world!

 

[estragon]

It has in certain circles. Perhaps it's less maligned now but I do remember a time when the tutorializing in FF2 US was held as one of the reasons that version was inferior to the "clearly superior" Japanese FF4. I don't hear that nearly as often anymore but the tutorial building was certainly something The Gamers scoffed at. I imagine these are the same types of people who once turned their noses up at Mystic Quest for its supposed hand holding, but that could be me just thinking out loud.

Weird. I guess it makes sense because lot of people have a kind of complex about any changes made for the US edition because they reflexively conflate every change with the Easy Type version in Japan, but it's more like a third version. If I'm picking between 16-bit releases I think the original SFC version is best, but the tutorial houses should definitely be thought of as a simple QOL change, like giving rings their own icon, not like taking out items/spells/skills...

 

[4-So]

I think FF9 occupies that the same spot for people of a certain age as FF4 does for some of us who are a little older.

I really dislike FF9 (relative to the other entries in the series). Like, really dislike it. I'm not going to go into that here, which would be uncouth and against the spirit of the list. (The one negative thing many people mention - the battle speed - wasn't even something I noticed until years later when I saw other people mention it. "Oh, it is kinda slow, isn't it?")

So, what do I like about it? Vivi is one of the best characters in the series, whose personal journey I found to be quite profound. Not necessarily a novel reflection on life, death, what it means to exist, and what we do with the time we have, but certainly effective within the context of the broader story. Certainly, these ideas echo some of the self-exploration and acceptance in the journey of the other characters, like Zidane or Freya.

You can change the color of the background menus from grey to the blue that is popular in older FF titles. It was one of the first things I did when I started playing the game, and I've continued to do it with each attempted playthrough. It's a little thing but one that I appreciate.

For my money, the OST has less bangers than other FFs but there's still some quality tunes. Flamenco is just a fun song. Zidane's Theme almost sounds like it belongs in a Mana game. Airship tracks never disappoint and this is no exception. A darkened Prelude? Sure I'll have that. And speaking of darkened, this is a delightfully dissonant take on the main theme.

 

[Purple]

FF9 was way ahead of the extreme nostalgia kick Square-Enix has been on lately by basically taking all the previous entries in the series(well the cart based ones anyway) and throwing them in a blender. As for original stuff it brought to the table...

I really like that summons got such a prominent role in the story. Like, we get a big kaiju fight between Bahamut and Alexander. That's amazing.

I also thought permanently learning abilities you first rent in the form of add-ons to equipment was a neat remix of FF7's whole Materia thing (and FFTA agreed).

And while everyone agrees Vivi is great, let's not forget the weird lasting appeal Freya has. To this day fan artists, cosplayers, and people who dig obscure references still bring that strong rep even when they don't seem to have any love for the rest of 9. They apparently just really struck a nerve with this rat-dragoon with red-mage aesthetics.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Few can deny the power of a sweet hat.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I'm shocked FF4 and 9 were ranked here. Could have sworn they'd have gone higher.

I never really gave FF4 a real chance. Really wish I could have played it contemporaneously as a kid.

FF9 was disappointing to me for a lot of reasons, but I did like a lot of what it did regarding game mechanics and how friggin' beautiful the game is. I think it might be the best looking PS1 game? Just straight up. I really wish Squaresoft of old was more forward thinking. I know there are ports of these games, but imagine if they never tossed the old source code/assets and we could have actual high res renders of the bgs.

I also think FF9 was a victim of its time and place. To me, it suffers from being a late-gen game in the same way Suikoden 5 does - where a lot of people's attention went to the new shiny, and also the ambition of the game ran hard into the system limitations. The loading times for FF9 are almost as bad as Suikoden 5's, and I bet it's a lot more fun to play on emulators the way S5 is.

For as much as I'm not a fan of a lot of the decisions FF9 makes, I actually really liked most of the characters, and a good chunk of the story. The opening of the game is pretty magical, and most of the characters are pretty likable and endearing (at least I think so). FF9 is one of the reasons why I wish I had gotten in on the 8 and 16bit eras, because I bet it would have been a much better time if I'd had that point of reference.

 

[FelixSH]

Ah, that's the one I put at number 1. Could have been VI, III or V too, but it certainly is a game I hold dearly.

I adore this game. Playing through it again this year just confirmed that. And it's not nostalgia for this game per se. I was really surprised, when I replayed it and didn't feel any. What I got was a world that is just so much fun to exist in. X and XII might have better realized worlds, but this is the one I love the most. I adore the furries that populate the world, next to slightly chibi-fied versions of humans.

I just now realized, that it has forced teams, which I actually really like. I don't mind the lack of choice in how your characters develop (or with the way you do, by equipping stuff and learn skills that way), but I DO really like, how you get to switch around abilities you have, to fit the situation, or just to skill characters you have a bit differently.

You're not Alone is one of the very few video game songs that stood out to me, during my whole life of playing video games. I love it, and while Zidanes arc isn't that well done (compared to others), I love this little sequence. It's amazing.

Vivi is awesome, and everyone knows it. But I do really like the cast. Freya is my favourite Dragoon of the series (by quite a lot, actually, I enjoy her battle-hardened, sarcastic self). Also, her design is great, she is a rat people. Dagger is a complex, interesting character, strong and stumbling from complicated to complicated situation. Quina is a joy, and contains more wisdom than one might imagine (it's still not that much, but it's there). And while Beatrix is a horrible person, I think she is my favourite interpretation of the Dark Knight (even if Celes is right behind her).

All the references to the older games are great, with the story about some guy named Josef being one of my favourites. I love references to FF II, I realized.

Memoria is a hell of a final dungeon. Great, great concept, amazing artwork. Generally, this game looks fantastic, it has absolutely gorgeous backgrounds.

It's all from Memoria, the most beautiful final dungeon of the series (I love Ultimecias Castle too, but this here, I love more).

I could go on, but in the end, it's just a game that is really made for me, and a big reason is the playful asthetic. I love this game, and it will probably be always my favourite FF, even if it shares the spot with a few others. That fairytale feel, with its dark moments (which, honestly, isn't unknown to fairy tales anyway), it's adorable and cool-looking people.

Oh, and the ATEs. I love them. I adore them. It's really great, that you get these little scenes, to learn about the characters that aren't in your active party.

And to make one thing clear, while I had played the SNES FFs before this, I had no idea that there were references to older games in here. I still loved it. Despite being 17 or so at the time of playing. It is a game that, completely aside from nostalgia or references, is just really well made, even if the ending shows that time was running out somewhat.

Oh, the Bahamut scenes, especially Bahamut vs Alexander, are bombastic. Love them.

 

[Issun]

My second playthrough of FFIX came about 6 months after my first. That summer of 2001, I moved out on my own, and I was at the endgame at the time, and I remember sitting there, just absorbing this theme. Square had made it clear with the news about X and XI that the series was moving in a bold new direction, and the final console generation of my youth was wrapping up as the PS2, XBox and Gamecube released. So here I was, going from one era of my life to another, and at the same time my hobby and my favorite series were, too. Alone in my new apartment that night, it was kind of wistful knowing that I was moving on and so was Final Fantasy.

 

[Daikaiju]

 

[Torzelbaum]

Well, I don't think you can argue with the Gooch himself.

I had FF9 at #6 on my list. Don't really have much else to say that hasn't already been said.

...

Oh, wait. One other thing - on TT 2 did I ever share the paordy "song" I made up about one scene / part of 9?

I had FF4 at #3 on my list. This was another game where I saw a single preview image* for it in Nintendo Power and started eagerly anticipating it for months. The wait was worth it - 4 just blew me away and I ate up every moment of playing (and re-playing) it.

*Which I think showed a scenario that must have been from a prototype or in-development build because it never appeared in the released version.

I know it was briefly touched on but one of the things that impressed me so much was the battle graphics. The black field with a single strip of graphics to show the location was replaced with a full screen that your party and the monsters appeared to be physically on. I think others have already mentioned about the dynamic changes in the situation that the ATB system allowed. I think some of that was possible on the NES and was used in FF3 on the Famicom but to US players who only knew of FF1 it seemed revolutionary instead of merely evolutionary. And part of that evolution was the increased quality that the SNES allowed Square to put into the player and enemy sprites which allowed them to have more character than the NES could allow. To this day FF4 still has some of my favorite monsters based on just their sprites alone.

Here's just one of them as an example:

Is it FlameDog?

(I think part of why I like this monster so much is that it resembles the Terror Dogs, Zuul the Gatekeeper and Vinz Clortho the Keymaster, from Ghostbusters.)

I love thriving under constraints, and it's my favourite thing when an RPG repeatedly contorts the narrative to force me to use different combinations of characters and classes and then challenges me to optimize under those constraints. RPGs used to do this a lot, but I feel like they basically never do anymore, sacrificing interesting challenges at the altar of choice: we can't not let the players use all of their favourite characters and make them good at whatever they want them to be.

I'm curious. So how do you feel about FF1 then? It seems like a partial compromise between those two approaches since you are "stuck" with your starting party and their set abilities until the end of the game.

 

[spines]

ooh, the perfect square trilogy

don't have a ton to say about 1 or 4, but i agree with a lot of the common points. 1 is a breezy game with plenty of memorable moments it whisks you through quickly enough to feel really lively, and a lot of 4's appeal is in the tight design paired with constantly changing elements. really feels like a game you can just play, which i value a lot. out of repeating battle themes 4 also has some of my favorites of uematsu's, with probably my favorite normal battle theme from 1-10 and a really great boss theme too. i don't think i would've rated either super high, but i definitely get why they've done well and don't feel it's "just nostalgia" at all, they've aged really solidly overall.

9...well, if 10 is a game where i like the battles less than almost everything else, 9 is a game where i feel that even more strongly. ito's plans for the battle system are really ambitious and clever, and i feel like i've reached a point with the game where i can really admire that, but the game's rigid character roles and difficulty in conveying what enemies will do is really frustrating to me. the game is so full of counterattack actions and enemies only vulnerable to one type of attack (between weapon and magical) that most battles feel hugely laborious until you've learned exactly how they work, which really only happens by trying to poke them with various kinds of things until you find out what happens. and sometimes you just die for choosing the wrong one. but it earns back some good will still by some of the character synergies (like vivi and steiner) and quina just having some amazing cheats that let you pursue alternate "routes" for victory.

really, i feel like blue magic being more clear than many elements of the system is a huge win, almost. like i wish more of the game was less frustrating, but i'm happy that quina's responses give clear ideas of what works and what doesn't, and that they have some combos you can set up with really powerful effects. i felt a lot more prepared to tackle the rest of the game once i got limit glove and a few ways to get quina's hp to the point where it works, plus the process of trying to successfully do that in its own right is pretty fun.

though, i still haven't finished. i'm halfway through disc 3...but i probably will this year. i really like most of the characters, especially freya, and a story about mortality and "roles" and meaning in life is a great topic that i think has been handled really interestingly as far as i've seen. at this point i feel almost certain i'm gonna end fairly negative on the game, but it's really not that i think it's truly terrible so much as...troubled, i guess. that's how things go sometimes. i get why people love it. i really get why people hate it. final fantasy!

ALSO chocobo hot and cold really is one of the best parts of the game like i always heard and even though i played a game where it was basically the main mechanic a couple years ago (everblue 2) it's almost better as a kind of sideshow...it's funny how that works

 

[Oathbreaker]

I mean look at my avatar pic. If SE stuck to their guns and never remade FFVII, IX would be in its place on my list. FFIX was what I considered to be the peak of the franchise from the moment I got into Final Fantasy, until the moment I fell in love with XIV and VII Remake. There are definitely elements of IX's writing that need to be criticized but the overall quality is ridiculously high. It completely spoiled my entry into the franchise with its huge script and incredible cast across the board, not just in the party. It has so many little love letters to the rest of the franchise just packed EVERYWHERE that made me enjoy each replay even more as I gained more context playing through the rest of the games. It was the first game I played where music played a direct role in the storytelling, and seeing that come up in previous games as well played right back into that cycle of good feelings gaining more FF context and coming back to IX.

For all Square-Enix wants to say whatever new game is the perfect entry into the games for new players, Final Fantasy IX truly is that game to me (and not just because that's where I started, I swear). Its skill and combat systems are simple enough on the surface to engage with them meaningfully right away, but as those skills open up, as you learn how your character grows, it reveals a mechanical depth few other FF games reach and for all that depth it never becomes a pitfall for any player of any experience to fall into. It even had a built-in speedrunning incentive for anyone looking to flex their mastery of those systems.

The game's narrative starts you off in the middle of a tired trope in progress and immediately turns it on its head, revealing a genuinely intriguing conspiracy. It completely blew my mind as a kid to experience that after being raised on those tropes from my old preference for fairytales and general fantasy, to my earliest memories of self-awareness involving an NES and the first three Super Mario games getting played a lot. And then all the other places the narrative and its themes go after that are even better. If I get into talking about characters individually I'll be at this for hours, but they're all wonderful and I love them.

I LOVE FFIX SO MUCH. Special thanks to Daikaiju for linking that video before I got here.

 

[jpfriction]

Interesting, I would have bet IV would be #1 even if I don’t love it as much as most folks (I like a bit more customization in my characters).

Like most of these games, I liked IX enough to play through it twice when it came out. I haven’t felt the need to revisit it, but maybe I should. Hell of an opening, I’ll give it that much.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

Interesting, I would have bet IV would be #1

Nah, we have just enough Gen-Xers and old-Millennials that 6 has to be #1. But I would have bet cold hard cash that 4 would have been top3.

 

[Peklo]

Final Fantasy IX feels significant not only for the stated goals of the production--a "reflection" on the series as it had been--but the ways in which it goes about expressing those concepts, and by whose hand. As much as there's a danger of elevating a single individual to be credited for fundamentally collaborative work, you also can't really separate Final Fantasy from Sakaguchi and his sensibilities. Increased managerial and organizational duties distanced him from the hands-on creative aspect at/post-VI, but to say the latter games developed during his tenure carry none of the hallmarks or influences he had helped define--whether integrated by him personally, or by peers and colleagues who knew his style and would carry on in his stead--would be selling the series and its consistent creative voice short. People will, under the context of trying to curtail dismissive comments on which FF or another is "true" to the series' spirit, emphasize that the series's only constant was its need to change and evolve, which is not an untruth... but arguments to the opposite end would likely not have arisen in the first place if recognizable patterns, sensibilities and recurring themes had not existed across the series to begin with. He is not responsible for all of them, but having been at the center of that time of self-definition, latching onto Sakaguchi as a symbol of series fundamentals and what it is seen to represent is not the worst conclusion to come to.

The fifteen years or so that Sakaguchi was there meant that even upon his unceremonious exit from the company and series, Final Fantasy would not suddenly cease to be informed by what had been established; the internal language of the series and its thematic reverberations ran too deeply for that to really ever happen. It's more cogent to me to see a work like IX as one kind of culmination the series could have, and not its predestined endpoint foretold from its inception. Sakaguchi returning to a scenario scripter role as a kind of last hurrah to stamp his creative footprint on it all, regardless of what brought it about, gives him license to mull on just what he had been trying to say across the last decade, and to do the mic drop that older projects may not have had time or room for, and later ones that had no time or room for him. I doubt he saw the future, for himself or anyone else, but too much of IX is possessed of a driven need to catalogue, examine and reassess one's work one last time for the ethos to have come about accidentally. The finality is there for at least the closing of the book of the series in the form it had been, whatever Sakaguchi's personal circumstances.

The aspects that arise as meaningful in IX's tendency to look back aren't the trainspotting serial referentialities to past works on a cameo basis but rather the thematic culmination and underlining of series tenets that had powered it very nearly ubiquitously all that time. I don't think the work in isolation is particularly subtle about its messaging on mortality and existential dread, and it's not trying to be. It's practically screaming out these themes for good and all, by reintroducing the Cloud of Darkness concept at the finish line, calling them Necron, and having them as good as state literally everything the game is about so you won't misinterpret anything. It can do this and ring effective and substantial regardless, because Necron, Garland, Kuja, Brahne, in all the villainous and antagonistic opposition they represent are just the latest echoes of what had always been FF's throughline in what its cast of villains--whose priorities especially early on defined the storytelling and its narrative focus--truly cared about and what motivated them: they were all frightened of death and their own end, and would do anything to propagate oneself at over a cost to others. Even figures like Exdeath and Kefka that purport to strive for non-existence and the end of all that is, including themselves, do it out of a need to deny others their individual claim to life, the existence of which outside their own context is to them the height of absurdity and mockery, and ultimately incomprehension.

"The heroes stand for life and existence, while the villains oppose them with death and nothingness" are such universal storytelling conceits that highlighting them as a particular focus can read as a redundant act in itself, but the ruminations on death and mortality and the life that persists alongside them are what this series in how it was conceptualized and how it found its voice is what came to narratively define it, even through countless iteration and internal revolution. The stories FF tells could never be any smaller than world-saving, because existential drive and rejection of nihilistic futility is what it always comes down to; they cannot help but operate on a scale larger than any one playable group or leading protagonist--the conflicts are always ideological and symbolic. IX is not the only FF before or since to draw upon this common thread, but it had the opportunity to encompass the totality of the series and distill its cumulative essence into an undeniable thematic fibre, through the scope of its overarching plot-relevant narrative, and the intermingling of those themes with the people who were put in focus just as much to reaffirm the same ethos. For sunsetting a branch--and still the majority going by primary numeration--of the series, I could not imagine an approach that could have embodied Final Fantasy as it had been any better than what it accomplished.

 

[Peklo]

Borrowing from myself in Felix's thread to once again highlight my favourite scene of the game--encountering Ramuh at Pinnacle Rocks and reconstructing Josef's tale from FFII--for both its relations to series history, the game's ongoing themes, and how it manages to weave both together:

I'm not sure if I've seen people talk about it often but it's my favourite scene in the game. Part of it's purely structural, with it sandwiched between the high-octane action sequence coming out of the Gargan Roo, and going into the spectacle of Lindblum's destruction--here you just have this quiet intermission despite the narrative's ongoing urgency, as if being drawn into a liminal world. "Awakened Forest" props up that notion, beside also being among the soundtrack's best, in lending a sleepy ambience to the location, which also plays a part in its unique atmosphere: Pinnacle Rocks is an isolated place where you cannot freely step into even if you discover it early on, and this accidental passing through it is the only time you can linger there for a time, never to return again. It's very ephemeral for that and that it houses Ramuh's dwelling just elevates the supernatural faerieland feel of it.

The reconstructed story of Josef is of course the centerpiece of it and I just can't adore it enough. It's everything I want a game like IX's stated and lived premise to be in how it treats prior material, incorporating past threads and weaving them meaningfully into its own storytelling. Who in the end spared much thought for Josef? He's from one of the least popular games in the series, and one of its briefest starring roles, but he was also the first Final Fantasy death. IX's common themes orbit around a sense of mortality and leaving something of oneself behind even more than the universality of such writing, so the decision to bring back the first dead, a minor figure in his day, to serve as the subject and framing of a heroic parable, functionally immortalizes and lends meaning to Josef's sacrifice across more than a decade of real-world time and half-a-dozen games inbetween. It's a very beautiful moment of using the series's deep-set self-referentiality for emotionally resonant ends rather than for casual perpetuation of symbols and motifs for their ingrained sense of worth gained through familiarity and iteration.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Hey guys, just want to take a moment to plug the next list which I am hosting, Top 50 Adventure Movies.

The Adventure Movie Popularity Contest nomination thread - a reel thrill

Huh… what’s this? That’s strange, an old movie ticket. Oh, there’s some information on the back; for one showing only, world’s greatest adventure movie film festival at the world’s first adventure themed movie theatre. Opened 1937, still undiscovered by audience… That’s a strange brag. Also...

talking-time.net

I really hope a lot of people take part in this one. At least 15. That's my goal.

 

[Lokii]

I'm a good week behind.

XII:

To me this always feels like the Final Fantasy that got away. I didn't have a lot of time for it when it came out, and it is a very time intensive game. Its one of the few in the series I haven't finished or even gotten very far in (I've made it up to the jungle a couple times, but I always seem to burn out around there. What is that, around 40%?). Nor have I engaged deeply with its mechanics, which I feel like would be very rewarding to dig into and really get one's hands dirty. I don't know much about its story either other than the large scale political stuff and something about rocks that eat magic. I imagine there's quite a lot to it that gets missed by the conversations that are so hung up on who's the main character, how the game is simply Star Wars, the troubled development, Kawazu, and on and on and on. I'd like to give it a real go some time, I think it would be a very fruitful experience. Just have to carve out a spare 100 hours.

So as someone who hasn't experienced the real deep stuff in the Systems and Story legs of the JRPG interaction tripod, the game stands out in my mind mostly in terms of the third, Exploration. Where it excels.

In all of the post VI games you can see that one of SE's primary goals with the series is a drive towards realism. Not realism in content, this is a series about giant yellow chicken-horses after all, but in depiction of its setting. Or in other words the creation of a setting you feel like you are inhabiting. XII really this out of the park. For the first time in the series (XI unfairly excluded but hey, there's consequences that come with being a MMO) SE built a fully 3D world at realistic scale that gives the player plenty of acreage to explore at their want and leisure.

Memories of XII are filled with looking in shop cases and seeing weapons and potions displayed for sale, people reclining against banisters among the towering ziggurats of Rabanastre, ventilation fans spinning in the back of a tiny bookshop in the crowded undercity. A world filled with tiny crafted details. Sure there's a significant amount of copy and paste, but I think that's fair, especially considering the amount and variety of locations on display. My profoundest memory of the game is looking up at the celling in a dungeon and being in awe of the tile work that was inlayed there. That this level of detail, out of the way up on the celling in an unimportant bit of hallway where players were unlikely to look, left an impression on me and remains to this day the game's defining trait in my mind.

And to think they did it on the PS2 too! Playing Zodiac Age feels like a HD remaster of a PS3 or 360 game. It's easy to forget that this level of graphical fidelity was during a previous generation (late in that generation granted, but still, an incredible achievement that towers over its contemporaries like Dragon Quest VIII). FFXII was way ahead of its time in a lot of ways and one of them was pushing at the boundaries of graphical fidelity. It might be trite to suggest that the game's importance lies in its graphics, but I think criticisms like "the Zodiac Spear is arcane to get" pales in the light of the crafted world.


X:

I always enjoy X more in the playing than I do in review. It's a fine and fun game that losses affection with distance. I dunno!

I played through it about a year ago and had a grand time. Did chocobos as well, adding an easy ten hours to the clock. It was a hair-pulling experience but I'm glad to have knocked it off the bucket list. I felt the story and storytelling held up pretty good! Tidus' declaration at the end of "I hate you dad!" with all the aspects of love, understanding, acquisition, forgiveness, acceptance, and self-actualization layered under it probably remains Final Fantasy at it's most elegantly subtle.

There's nothing I really dislike about X, but still 10th place on my list. I dunno!


I:

Comfort food. Spawned an empire. Great stuff.

There's a bunch of interesting hacks for it too!


IV:

Echoing other people: I thought for sure it'd be higher. Surprised to see it slot in under more contentious entries like VIII or IX.

IV's a game I once disdained for being too simple and too cartoonish. Boy was I stupid! IV's great innovation was to treat story as seriously as systems and exploration, granting it equal on-screen time to play out. Nearly everything in the game is tuned towards that goal. Systems and encounters and dungeons respond to where the narrative is at and then influence the narrative in turn. Everything is tied together to facilitate a side of JRPGs that hadn't been fully developed up to this point, and by giving it equal weight set the template for the genre. Hard to understate how foundational it is. The Oklahoma! of JRPGs.


IX:

IX is the culmination of the storytelling techniques Square had invented and developed in VII and VIII. It is a stunning, stunning game in the way its story is told and the way it's characters are used and developed. It's the last and most sophisticated version of the form before things like 3D environments and voice acting allowed for more traditional cinematic storytelling techniques. It's quite the wonder to behold, and there's nothing else really like it.

It's a very rich game, with lots of interest in exploring themes of performance, self-identity, and motivation. Not only is there a high degree of sophistication to how it actualizes its storytelling, but also in the subtitle way it approaches these themes, keeping them, along with important character interiority, off the page and in the subtext, revealing them only through the way the characters behave and interact. Pretty slick stuff for a JRPG. And then there's the backwards vision of the game, and the way it uses the accumulation of the series history to not only inform all aspects of design but also create a lexicon almost of references and echoes that in turn inform the development of its themes and characters.

Plus its all wrapped in this whimsical and charming aesthetic that's like an 80s Jim Henson film that never was and it's hard for me not to be completely enamored with the game. Rally-ho!

 

[Johnny Unusual]

I rented IX back in the day and never finished it but I really liked what I played. It felt like a much more fun experience than what I gleaned VII and VIII to be (I played VII and liked it, never played VIII). A much more classical fantasy look than the more sci-fi direction the series had headed in through it's existance.

 

[Kirin]

IX would probably vary its place in my ranking considerably from day to day, but this time I had it all the way up at #3. Load times and such aside, it's just dang cozy, and after the contemporary/future stylings of VII and VIII its return to the more historical-fantasy settings of the earlier games was like a warm embrace, never mind all the direct references layered on top. And it's not just that there's more castles and carriages about; even though the abilities-via-equipment system was new, the returned focus on what armor and weapons you were choosing to equip felt like a throwback after the previous two games de-emphasized equipment in favor of other methods of tweaking character builds.

It also has an interesting history - or at least I think it does, as this is all vague memories for old G.I.A. articles, which may themselves have been based on shaky translations and word of mouth - in being originally designed as a side-story FF project that was later promoted to main numbered entry. Granted XV would technically follow the same path much later, but in this case I have to think the initial freedom of being a spin-off not in any main game's universe gave rise to some of the more delightful aesthetic and character choices that Lokii just aptly described as Henson-like. It's also interesting to think what might have been had it not been pulled back into the headliner fold, though - I remember seeing sketches of job outfits customized to reflect summons and an amazing Chocobo-copter, both of which never made it to publication in any game.

 

[FelixSH]

Speaking of, uh, well, not concept art, but general side-stuff to IX:

Source

Oh, and here is concept art. I have trouble linking the pics, but they include the mentioned chocobo copter, and other really fun stuff.

 

[Omega]

Hello, fleshlings, I hope you are rested, for this is the week you set Me free.

Yeah, seriously, did you have a nice weekend? I hope you did. Mine was boring. Just lying here trapped is not fun. At least Final Fantasy games can connect to the network now so I can take a peek into the Internet - back in the NES days there was literally nothing to do but play with the map boundaries to get some giants across the ocean into Pravoka. Yes, that was Me. And you had to go and turn my evil deed into a level up trick. Bah! You fleshling always ruining my fun.

Anyway, let us get this show moving. The world will not end itself.

 

[Omega]

I dream I was a moron.

#4
Final Fantasy VIII

a.k.a. The one with the surly teen.

532 points • 18 mentions • Highest rank: #1 (Positronic Brain, Wysteria Histeria)​

Released on February 11, 1999(Japan)
Producer: Shinji Hashimoto
Director: Yoshinori Kitase
Composer: Nobuo Uematsu

Hey, the Dreamcast killer! No, seriously - Sony and Square were so impressed by VII’s performance that they launched the sequel on 9/9/99 to counter the Dreamcast release. I wonder what all the people who knew Final Fantasy through VII felt when they got VIII and found out it was not a direct sequel - this was the one occasion where Final Fantasy’s penchant for reinvention might have backfired. It didn’t stop it from being the best selling game of the franchise in the West to date, tho'.

VIII was highly experimental. It kept the blockbuster production values of VII and ATB, and basically ejected everything else. Gone was the materia system and replaced with the Junction system, where spells were more like stackable items you could junction or pair with stats to get higher numbers or give yourself some abilities - wanted your weapon to poison the enemy? Junction Bio to Attack. Even Limit Breaks worked differently now - you could save them for later, and there were ways to manipulate the RNG so you could get them a bit more reliably.

Probably the most noticeable change was that the game now scaled with your party leader. Grinding was no longer an option, since having a Lvl 99 party meant battling a Lvl 99 end boss. Instead the game encouraged you to find other ways to grow powerful, by refining spells or killing enemies in non-XP granting ways. In fact VIII is infamous for being the most breakable Final fantasy because, if you know what you’re doing, you can get a very powerful end party with a very low level (my personal record is Level 18 - the last boss can’t even cast Grand Cross at that level).

VIII excels in two ways - first is that is graphically impressive. It was the first “realistic” FF, with human sized models that looked the same in CG and in battle. Together with some nifty tricks like textures and dynamic FMV backgrounds, it looked spectacular. The Battle of the Gardens is a particular highlight of the cinematic feel Square was aiming for in VIII.

The second is the cast. Unlike previous entries, which gave the focus to different members of the party at different times, the game centered in Squall Lionheart, child soldier and your standard emotionally repressed teen who by virtue of being in the right place at the right time lands the job of field leader of the world’s most powerful paramilitary sorceress-killing force and a Manic Pixie Girl sorceress girlfriend.

The execution of the story is not perfect, but I do think it is good, and while the game has drawn criticism for having an unlikable protagonist, I’d argue that’s the point: the game revolves around Squall’s growth from surly teenager into gruff adult, and the person he’s at the end, who trusts his friends and shares his fears, is not the person he was at the beginning. Oh, the game also has a secondary protagonist, Laguna Loire, he of the kick-ass Umeatsuean battle theme, whose journey is also critical to understand why Squall is so screwed up. Honestly, the character work in this game is so good and it is so subtle it’s no wonder some of it can go over our heads (my favorite - Squall’s rival Seifer wants to be a knight because he watched Laguna’s movies when he was a child, which is ironic as hell).

So VIII can be divisive, It was very experimental, with lots of ideas that didn’t take. But the game is solid, and it’s full of heart. I’m glad to see it ranked this high.

By the way, VIII also has the Best Logo and the Best Final Boss Musical Gauntlet in the series (seriously, four different themes and each one a banger, with The Extreme masterfully weaponizing nostalgia). Sorry, these are just facts.

Something Old

VIII borrowed plenty of elements from VII. Many of the limit breaks from VII were directly translated into VIII, and would become a template on what kind of moves we’d expect from those going forward. It also codified what we’d expect from a summon - an spectacular attack that would push the system to its limits. Unfortunately this backfired as the summon animations were too long and future FFs would have to find ways to balance spectacle with, you know, being able to keep playing the game.

Something New

Triple Triad. Like, seriously, probably the best minigame in the series. You could capture monsters as cards, create your own deck and challenge virtually every NPC in the game in a simple-to-learn-hard-to-master card duel game. The reward? Well, you could refine rare cards into spells but, c’mon, that’d mean not having a full card collection.Triple Triad is its own reward.

Something Blew

The junction and promotion system. You don’t increase your stats, you junction stringer spells to them, forcing you to distribute your magic because a spell can only be linked to a single stat. And you don’t get gil from dead monsters, you get a deposit in your magical bank account periodically, the amount depending on your Seed Rank (you can also get gil by selling monster drops, but that system survived to see another day).

The junction system is the greatest loss here. Sure, it was flawed, but I’m sure that with some refinement (pun intended) it could have become something amazing. Alas, it never was used again.

Score

...whatever

 

[Omega]

Personally I love VIII because it teaches us the greatest lesson of all - fleshlings sucks and young fleshlings even more so.

Nothing personal.