Monday, February 06, 2012

Final Fantasy Games You Must Play

Andrew mentioned an article to me a couple weeks ago which centered around the idea of picking just 3 of the games from the Final Fantasy series as the ones that someone absolutely should play if they were only going to play 3 of them in order to get a feel for the series. Without telling me what the article picked he asked me to answer the question. But I wasn't really sure what question was being asked... Am I trying to guess which 3 they'd say? Which 3 I'd say? Which 3 should probably be said taking my bias for FFIV into account?

I ended up guessing that they'd picked I, VI, and VII. Depending on who you listen to on the internet either VI or VII is the 'best' game so I hedged my bets and picked both of them. Then I tacked on I since I figured if you wanted to get a feel for the series you should start at the roots. My own biased list would be IV, VI, and X. And in a general case I'd go with I, VI, and X. That way you'd cover 3 of the 4 hardware eras and you'd hit the 3 high points. (I liked VII, don't get me wrong, but as someone who played it long after it was released it never really resonated with me like it did most people.)

It turns out they actually chose IV, VI, and VII. Having now read the article it seems like they didn't care so much about getting a feel for the series but rather were just trying to pick 3 awesome games and I can't dispute that they did. Andrew also gave a very convincing argument for including VII that I hadn't known... It sold a stupid amount of copies. We're talking more copies of VII than were sold of the first 6 entries combined at almost 10 million! The only game to outsell it for the original Playstation was Gran Turismo. 3rd on the list was Gran Turismo 2. 4th was Final Fantasy VIII and 10th was Final Fantasy IX. Wow!

But I've been mulling the idea over in my head recently and think from a 'feel of the series' perspective there's a whole other direction that needs to be taken. There's one game that is very polarizing among fans of the series, and it happens to be the second highest selling in the series. Especially when contrasted with the highest selling entry I think it really demonstrates what Final Fantasy is all about. Some similar underlying themes (there's magic, you enter commands on a menu, there are side quests, there's crazy collection quests, there are summons, there's incredible music...) but two very, very different games. So I think having thought about it more the three games I'd tell someone to play to really feel Final Fantasy would be VI, VII, and VIII.

3 comments:

Monoboob said...

I would have picked I, VII, and Tactics as my favorite.

Sthenno said...

VI, X and Tactics. No feel for the series, just great games.

Feel for the series it would depend on whether someone had played other RPGs. I would assume that they haven't if they haven't played FF, so I would say I, V and X. I'm sure V would be a very controversial pick, but when I think of Final Fantasy, I think of innovative leveling and combat systems. I feel like those games give people an idea of the wide diversity of story, combat system and leveling system.

For someone who has played RPGs you could skip I and have space for another, so I'd probably put in XIV... oh no wait, VII.

Ziggyny said...

Tactics is such a fantastic game. I have a feeling the article was only looking at the numbered games but Tactics certainly is way up there even despite not having a number.