Favorite Game Series #1: Final Fantasy

There’s one game series that stands above all the others, to me. It’s the game series that continually redefines itself in each new game and is always willing to take risks and try new things.

Final Fantasy III/VI for the Super Nintendo blew me away. I’m not sure if it was the first Final Fantasy I played — the chronological list I found suggests that Final Fantasy Mystic Quest would have been the first. But it was the first that really redefined for me how great stories and great characters could combine with great gameplay to make something truly obsessive.

I couldn’t afford a Nintendo when it came out, so I missed the first two games in the series. Final Fantasy IV (which I believe I played before FF3/6) was fun. These games defined the JRPG genre from then until now.

Final Fantasy VII tossed the whole thing on its head with its first 3D offering on the Playstation. Everyone else scrambled to keep up.

Final Fantasy VIII added what I still think is the best love story in the series. Final Fantasy IX went back to the roots with a bunch of callbacks to the earliest games in the series. Final Fantasy X… well, FF10 wasn’t my favorite.

Final Fantasy XI was the first MMO based in the Final Fantasy universe, and showed how the iconic job switching, combos, limit breaks and chocobos could work when the world was thrown open to its players. I played this a lot back in the day.

Final Fantasy XII gave us the gambit system and some of the most memorable characters in the series.

Final Fantasy XIII simplified the combat system and the environments in order to focus on the story of a group of cursed heroes who knew from the very beginning that they were destined to fail (although the sequels offered some redemption).

Final Fantasy XIV fixed all the issues I had with FF11 and is the MMO I still play today.

Final Fantasy XV asked the question, what if the heroes were a boy band? And they made it work, again with a plot that doesn’t go where you would expect.

That’s just the main series. I’ve played Final Fantasy Type-0 (hated it, sadly, too twitchy). Mystic Quest was actually a port of a DragonQuest game. Theatrhythm was just good fun for people who loved the music. Chocobo Mystery Dungeon brings roguelikes to Final Fantasy.

I haven’t even mentioned the hundreds of hours spent on Final Fantasy Brave Exvius…

But really, there’s one sub-series in the Final Fantasy series that I love more than all the others.

Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Final Fantasy Tactics A-2, Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen and Ogre Battle: Let Us Cling Together.

I have spent SOOOO much time in these games. I don’t know how many times I’ve played FFT. FFTA and A2, I bought a Gameboy for those (well, and Pokemon. And Tetris.) I add the two Ogre Battle games because they are essentially Tactics moved over to the Ogre Battle series. I just spent $200 on an original, boxed copy of March of the Black Queen… and I have Vandal Hearts, another game by the same designer, in my “to play” shelf.

Final Fantasy Tactics spawned an entirely new genre — tactical strategy RPGs — that I don’t believe had been done on consoles before. They added to that the richness of the iconic job mechanic and the depth of the story and made something special. I’d stand in line to buy another game in this series.

I would play any new game in this series, sight unseen. I’ve missed dozens of Final Fantasy games due to not having the systems they came out for, or not being able to afford them at the time (like Crystal Chronicles), but even those I haven’t played kept trying new things and continually lead the way for other games and game series to follow.