Poll: Best Final Fantasy Game.

[Simonoly]

I'd have to say IX is my all time favourite. Wonderful art design and a brilliant main character who wasn't a whiny, moody teenager. Also, Vivi is and always will be, my most cherished FF character.

After that, I'd say XII was my next favourite simply because the gameplay was awesome. There was just so much to do and find outside of the main story in XII - all those bounties, ultimate weapons and additional summons to find among other things, which was a real treat after the slightly more anaemic affairs that were X and X-2.
I also really liked being able to actually choose my characters weapon sets, which allowed for a massive amount of flexibility in the battle system.

Unfortunately, I really didn't enjoy the new direction that SE took with FF13. So that's where my relationship with the series ended.

 

[The_Scrivener]

I'm playing 6 right now and it having double the votes that 7 has baffles me. For one, there's a talking Octopus who has dialogue so bad it wouldn't be allowed into the script for a Ninja Turtles cartoon. And second, the random battles are absurdly smothering. There are two poorly written words for every 90 random battles in this game. How is having to fight the same monsters over and over and over and over again good gameplay? I have to do nothing but press the same button. It's so tedious. Good RPGs break up the story/battles. This one is like a 90/10 ratio at best.

Also, I just did another one of those "split the party up" screens. I didn't have any ability to change the party members. Why give me the damn screen at all? What is the polish people are imagining for this game?

Those of you who love this game, have you played it since 1996? It has aged so much worse than any other classic RPG on the SNES.

The octopus is supposed to have terrible dialogue. He's the stereotypical Japanese comic relief villain... The Turks in FF7 were hardly better. (and were certainly less memorable, I mean, it's an octopus)
Also, I don't think that was the "change party members" screen. I think you're referring to the "choose which branch of the story to play through next" screen.
There'll be a change party members screen that you can change when the time comes.

Also, when you say it has aged, in what sense? Graphically, the 2D sprites have aged a heck of a lot better than the blocky old 3D used in FF7.

You're saying that an actual syndicate of dubious human beings working for a corporation that controls the government were hardly better than a talking octopus with playground bully dialogue?

My issue with this game is that it is all over the radar tonally. FF7, 8, 9, X, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Tactics, you name it, had a very consistent tone. It isn't about comic relief or light-hearted moments. Earthbound had flying photographers and talking slimes, but it never broke its own tone. This game literally has someone's family dying a half hour before a purple octopus infiltrates an opera house to arbitrarily screw with the performance by dropping an anvil onto the head of someone he's never met. The suspension of disbelief required to be immersed in this game is superhuman.

And my God are the battles high variance. You may as well be rolling dice. Most of the bosses have one dick-move attack that just obliterates you out of nowhere. It's heinously unfun to be taking hits for 5-10% of your HP tops for 10 minutes and then get hit with the same 80% of your HP attack two straight turns and have to redo the fight and just hope you don't get screwed again. I am dominating random encounters, but have had 2 game overs just from bosses randomly blowing me out after having zero trouble with them the first 90% of the fight.

It isn't a bad game in the least. It's charming and it's fun. But half of the story-driven scenes in this game are on the same professional level as sock puppetry.

And no, I remember the choose which branch of the story to play through screen. This wasn't it. This was a "choose your party" / "well not really, take these two" menu.

And I haven't said anything about the graphics. Graphics mean nothing to me in terms of what is dated/what isn't dated. I retro game with the best of them. This game is dated because it has no idea how to balance its sincerity with its ludicrousness. Kefka would come off as infinitely more insane and troubling if the entire world he inhabited wasn't a really long Saturday morning cartoon.

 

[Raika]

My favorite game of all time is Final Fantasy X-2, so I'm going to go with that. It's a far cry from the pseudo-intellectual exercises in pretentious melancholy presented by its most recent predecessors and actually has a sense of humor about itself even as it presents the series's best character development of the series's best character. It also has the best battle system in any J-RPG ever and an unbelievable wealth of content spread out across a fantastic world presented as almost completely open to the player from word one. Some people take issue with it, though, ostensibly because girls have cooties.

 

[mohit9206]

http://www.epicwallpapers.net/wallpapers/final_fantasy_x2_3_1440x900_3328.jpg

i like this one

 

[xplosive59]

VI > Tactics > IX > IV > V > I > VII >> XII >>>> VIII = II = III > X >> XIII

 

[Gormech]

The first one. Way back when you made 4 warriors of light and carried them together through the lands of random encounters. The hours of pure text to give backstory. The hidden levels towards the origional Ultima Weapon. The dungeons that broke the 4th wall and made you really play the game differently than it had seemed to be ment too. It was all there.

 

[mohit9206]

i dont understand the hate towards final fantasy X-2

 

[Zeraki]

I'm glad to see VI and IX rated so highly. Especially IX since that was considered the black sheep of the series for years. So much so my cousin(who was a huge fan of VII so I should have known better) actually talked me out of getting it by saying how horrible it was. So I never actually tried it until I was much older and absolutely loved it. It was everything I loved about the older games from the SNES era. So yeah, I don't take my cousin's advice on video games anymore.

VI is my absolute favorite. While parts of it may not have aged well, it's had the biggest influence on me out of all the games in the series. It has, in my opinion, the best soundtrack, the best villain and some of the best characters in the series. It was also the first game that ever made me actually cry.

And it wasn't over a character death or anything like that... it was over the music. The Opera is still one of my absolute favorite parts of the game because of how well that whole scene is done. Despite there being many great orchestrated remakes of the song, nothing fills me with the same emotions as the original arrangement in the game(mostly because every other version always screws up Celes' aria).

 

[DirgeNovak]

IX (Great characters, great story, great combat, great everything)
VI (Very close to IX in my heart)
X (Would have been №1 if not for fucking Tidus)
XII (Great story (bite me, TC), cool expansive world)
IV (Story didn't gel with me, but cool characters)
VII (The god-awful characters and laughable script drag it down several notches, but very solid game)
V (I love the job system, but the game is pretty forgettable)
VIII (Same problems as VII with weaker combat)
I (Aged badly, but still enjoyable)
III (Aged badly, and not very enjoyable to begin with)
XIII (Worst characters in FF history, barely interactive)
II (Broken piece of shit)

The Final Fantasy series in a nutshell.

 

[southparkdudez]

Kinda bias if you don't show all the Final Fantasy games. People might have a different opion.

 

[FinalDream]

I picked X this time, although I do love 6-8 the most, I always like the world and story in X.

X-2 gets a bad rap in my opinion and is a solid game, XIII is ok, not that bad, with XIII-2 been really enjoyable for me.

 

[Feylynn]

I favorite in order are likely: IX, T, VII, VI, CC, XII, VIII.

As the only real controversial item here that might need some context. I recognize that Crystal Chronicles (The original, none of this newer stuff) is here or there, but I have a lot of siblings and had 4 real cheap GBAs so I always had people to play it with. I also liked its style, sound, and general story. That game ended up defining my idea of adventure a lot.

VIII I also do not recognize as a "good" final fantasy. But I like it, it has just enough weird stuff and silly magic junctioning and highschool superhero military melodrama for me to be amused. The love story is the worst in FF, the music is only occasionally as good as the others. (13, Worse than 14, at least has a better love story than 8 strangely enough, VanilleXFang seems to be a pretty strong case. They talked to each other at least once. More chemistry then Squall and Rinoa had.