I have played and enjoyed every single Final Fantasy game. Even XIII has some great stuff going for it. The series strong suit is that it’s never stale. Each game is a fresh, new take on a somewhat familiar net of design philosophies.
My favourite is XII. I love its job and gambit system, as well as the world design and music. IX comes just a tiny bit short, then V, probably.
XII is my favourite as well. Interesting how controversial gambit system ended up to be, some love it, some hate it. I personally love that it gives the freedom to do any type of weird stuff you’d like to do and maintain good pace in battles.
Those who dislike it, I imagine, don’t enjoy combat where the player doesn’t have to push buttons, but 1) you never have enough gambit slots for everything you’d like to do, so you have to adapt and choose magicks/items yourself at times; 2) many RPGs suffer from exactly the opposite problem - you encounter a familiar enemy, know of one efficient way to defeat it and have to choose the same options in battles against it time after time just because you know that it works; mindlessly pushing a few buttons isn’t much different from not pushing any buttons at all in this case.
The problem with the gambit system was it was too easy to script an attack setting that the battles played themselves and you could only lose if you were grossly out leveled.
Finished the game like this by just walking thru it, just killed the challenge. And it wasn’t set up well to use commands, more just the gambit system.
“If weak to fire then cast Fira”. You don’t even need to have your characters learn the weakness first by scanning them, they just intuit every weakness.
XII was one of the first mainline games I played through, and I really got into it. After playing most of the rest, I get why it doesn't come off as a "proper" FF game. That said, I always wanted more just like it. Perhaps a spinoff, or maybe ivalice alliance could be reinstated as a more tactics-focused FF franchise while the main line goes on doing... whatever it did for XVI.
I’ve played Tactics only this year and was surprised how much XII resembles it in mechanics despite these games belonging to different RPG subgenres. It lead me to think that XII only happened because there was this proper foundation of Tactics, so I doubt there’d ever be another mainline game in Ivalice, but more Tactics games are possible, I think.
I wish I’ll have enough time at some point to get to the Ivalice storyline in XIV.
1 - ...I respect the historical importance of this game.
2 - Actually, dual-wielding shields and attacking yourself to grind evasion is peak game design.
3 - Beta for FF5. Shame about that final dungeon.
4 - First game that actually holds up.
5 - Peak.
6 - I liked this game up until I found out that I was supposed to be grinding three distinct parties the whole time.
7 - I went into this expecting the first 3D installment to be another example of historically important but poorly aged. Was pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up.
8 - I went into this knowing it's the weird one. I was the sicko that liked 2, but I still couldn't get through it.
9 - Bought it alongside 8, when I dropped 8 I never got around to this. I will eventually... maybe...
10 - Perfects the classic formula while still feeling sufficiently modernized. Uh, for some definition of modern...
12 - Hated hated hated the combat. Painfully tedious to take manual control, automation is too primitive. And I don't want to automate the game away, I want to play it!
1 - …I respect the historical importance of this game.
I had a coworker who swore by this game in the nineties. When I finally got to it, I played most of the way through, but lost the save and haven’t been able to pay through again.
4 - First game that actually holds up.
Played through in college over a weekend. Got pretty far in. Loved it.
6 - I liked this game up until I found out that I was supposed to be grinding three distinct parties the whole time.
Borrowed from a friend in high school and beat sneaking to play overnight. Fell in love with the series here. My friend from work said this was the weakest of the three, but I appreciated the story.Three distinct parties don’t matter if you constantly rotate them and then use the yellow dinos to power level.
7 - I went into this expecting the first 3D installment to be another example of historically important but poorly aged. Was pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up.
High school friends were all into it. I couldn’t play until I could get it to play on Bleem! Currently on my 15th play through.
8 - I went into this knowing it’s the weird one. I was the sicko that liked 2, but I still couldn’t get through it.
Friend of mine and I played all the way through on this. The draw system is unusual, but looking back it was a great story. It was weaker without the cyberpunk dystopia of Midgar, and felt like I was now playing as the enemy. I also remember the trigger system infuriatingly.
9 - Bought it alongside 8, when I dropped 8 I never got around to this. I will eventually… maybe…
This got so much criticism when it came out. It’s actually a beautiful game that sticks close to the original premise.
10 - Perfects the classic formula while still feeling sufficiently modernized. Uh, for some definition of modern…
The grid on this is different, and the game is linear compared to some of the others. In contrast the characters are each so distinct. Also, the voice acting was a huge change.
15 was also automated. My problem with an open world is that it feels like you should scrape the world clean. Also, I was never sure when to move forward and got stuck forever in the first area.
2 gets a bad rap. Hitting yourself to increase max health works against yourself in the long run. Many late game monsters do % of max health damage. Characters with inflated max health will struggle more in those battles. I played the game normally with minimal grinding and ran into no issue.
Percentage-based damage doesn't make you struggle more with more health, it just means a few attacks take the same number of hits to kill. You're never any worse for it, and you're still better against every other attack in the game.
Tactics is my favorite by far, possibly because of how grounded its story feels compared to most other Final Fantasy. The tactical combat is also amazing, unlocking the jobs from playing and leveling up different combos instead of at set points of the story (FF3, FF5) was very engaging. There was a lot to discover and teen me didn’t access GameFaqs often back then.
Anyday now I’m going to spend “decades” playing just to get the child prince into his teen years. I’m 99% sure the texts of the game won’t change, but it’ll be funny nonetheless.
Tactics was actually my first introduction to FF as a whole. I was intimidated by the numbers attached to the titles of all the other ones, so tactics seemed like a good place to start. I still love the music and the atmosphere of Ivalice, and I feel like so much is left unsaid about that realm.
I love how the 3 first music you hear are one of inner calm, with Ovelia praying, suddenly changing to tension with the arrival of enemy soldiers and finally one of the best combat music of the game
Vagrant Story takes place in Ivalice as well and is the only game I’d say I love as much as Tactics when it comes to sheer vibe/atmosphere. The opening gameplay sequence is amazing.
Yeah dude, Tactics was incredible. Art style, music, gameplay, story, just the vibe, man. My only beef is that it had the typical FF ending feeling of getting too sort of “out there”. Went from a very human story to the typical third act of oh now there’s some big weird big bad I have no emotional investment in to pose a more serious threat I guess.
Agrias remains one of my all time favorite characters.
I’m a real youngster here, so my first final fantasy game was 16, but I really loved it so I picked up 14 and 7 remake. I never really got into 14 because MMOs, but 7 was an absolute blast! I’ve got rebirth and 16 lined up, but lately I’ve been getting more and more into retro RPGs so I’ve been considering going back and playing some of the older titles. I’ve heard tons of good things about 6, but I wonder if anyone else has any recommendations?
FF VII and FF VIII where the first two games I played in the series, but i was very young and didn’t really know what I was doing. I think we had rented one game, and borrowed another. I really don’t remember much about either game, but FF IX came out on ps1, and to this day it’s my image of what FF means.
The unique worlds, characters, incredible (at the time and not bad for today) cutscene cinematic. It was the first game I discovered you can outpace yourself and wind up in a battle with a level 60 dragon when you’re only level 13.
My brother really got into FF X and i remember watching him play. To this day, I hate Blitzball lol. We both sucked at it.
FF VII-2 for the psp was actually really cool. I don’t remember much anymore but the story, gameplay, and music were all great. I would like to try replaying it!
I played a little of XIII and quite a few hours of XV. The games have really changed. Especially XV, some things have improved for the better but there’s a lot of tropes and unfortunate stereotypes that could have been…removed.
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