Final Fantasy - Every Main Game Ranked From Worst To Best
This article is sponsored by Raycon. More on them later. I don't think there's another game franchise out there that is named quite as badly as Final Fantasy. When key creators at Square were workshopping names, there was a rumor that Hironobu Sakaguchi was due to leave game development if the first Final Fantasy didn't go so well, but upon further research, this might just be nonsense.
In truth, there have been enough games in this franchise for the name to be completely irrelevant now, but with over 100 games under that name, that's a lot to rank, so yeah. I'm gonna scale that down a bit and only talk about the main Final Fantasy games today, plus some choice spin-offs that I felt like talking about maybe.
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With eight hours of play time and a 32-hour battery life, they can pump out a ton of music between charges, so you won't be caught short without your music. There's a way to do so that also supports my channel. That's {969}, Rabbit. Final Fantasy 14 had absolutely no business being as terrible as it was with numerous technical problems coupled with broken mechanics like a bad experience system that didn't reward healers properly, and it was just a terrible time overall for everyone apparently.
It was supposed to be a more realistic take on an MMO, but it was not fun in the slightest. Burn it to the ground. I have a similar sentiment towards Lightning Returns, although perhaps not quite as bad. I remember this game being announced and the world collectively laughing as it became very evident that Martin Luther Toriyama was a little too obsessed with lightning.
It's got a fun concept: save as many people as you can before the world ends, like a more simplistic version of Majora's Mask, but the execution is sloppy, with all the quests boring me to tears. You can tell it's not a game designed with a time limit in mind from the start, and it feels very weird to play.
If you think Final Fantasy has only now become weird and experimental, then clearly you have never played Final Fantasy. 2 credit has to go to Square for not resting on their Laurels and instead seeking out a new way to play an RPG, but I really don't like how experience It works in this one. Your stats don't all go up at once.
They increase based on what you're doing in battle, and hey, that's a cool idea, but it's such a pain in practice. If you want your HP to increase, you need to use it. You need to get hit with props. For trying to reinvent the wheel, I don't think it should be square shaped. The rules of this article are probably a little shaky, but as a shorthand.
I'm going to be talking about pretty much all of the numbered Final Fantasy games and any significant spin-offs to those numbered games. That's a loaded sentence, but it helps me include Final Fantasy for the After Years, which was such a bizarre concept for a game that I don't entirely hate both in game and out.
We're 17 years down the road, which is interesting for the story but less so for the gameplay because RPGs have done a lot since 1991, and the after years have the vibe of an overweight washed up rock star on a comeback tour. just. I've ever played, it's perfectly serviceable and actually a welcoming return to the former, as Final Fantasy 2 was busy being.
It feels like something made by an RPG maker. It's fine, but Final Fantasy has long been a lot better than just fine. You can skip over this, and you're not missing out on much, and I want to say you can skip over Final Fantasy 13-2 as well, although for a different reason. Less praiseworthy The reason that Final Fantasy games don't often get direct seek is an even rarer one.
Justified sequels and 13-2 do very little to justify their own existence, especially off the back of 13's pretty average gameplay. We have higher standards. Please note that the original Final Fantasy is actually not that bad at all. 1987 was hardly the birth of a new genre for article games with Final Fantasy flying the flag for RPGs, but it was able to bring this style of game to the growing Nintendo crowd and subsequently did very well for itself.
It is basic as hell, though, and obviously missing a lot of the refinements that would come later, but given where Final Fantasy has gone since, it can be refreshing to go back to something this simple for a change. Simple doesn't mean bad. I frequently forget that Final Fantasy 12: Revenant Wings exists.
Now that I do. I'm reminded how much this game isn't as good as Final Fantasy Tactics, which we sadly aren't talking about today because it's more of a spin-off series and anything attached to a numbered game is okay. It doesn't set the world on fire or anything, but it will offer you something different to what you're likely used to in Final Fantasy.
Dildo's tactics are so much better with the benefit of hindsight. There were so many bad decisions made with Final Fantasy 13. But the combat is a drastic shift away from anything that Final Fantasy has done before, and while I don't hate it in a vacuum, I do kind of hate it when you're playing through a 50-hour RPG.
It's a messy game full of bad writing and underwhelming characters, but I would say that all of this is presented pretty much flawlessly. And if this game looks and sounds really nice, and if the same work was put into making the game less linear, then we've been looking at something wonderful. Here, hey, what was I saying earlier about unjustified?
