A brief review of every mainline Final Fantasy game, including those I have not played
#15 - Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy III, etc.
Apologies, again, for the radio silence. Some stuff (logistical and personal both) took longer to work out than I’d hoped, and I’ve been unable to make any of the letters I’ve been working on since come together in a way I’m at all satisfied with.
In any case, in honor of the release of Final Fantasy XVI, a game I cannot play because I do not have a goddamned PS5, I humbly present my complete review of the series. There are probably mistakes in here because I did this mostly off the top of my head. I also talk about major plot developments in Final Fantasy VII but I do mark the spoiler section with a big SPOILER SECTION thing. Sorry! In any case, see you soon!
Final Fantasy I
Not as “pure” an experience as Dragon Quest, not as sprawling as Phantasy Star, still such a treat. Like DQ it pulls a kind of fake-out where you think the quest is Saving the Princess but no, it’s a whole other thing. The moment when you cross the bridge and it cuts to your adventurers standing on the mountainside is still one of the lovelier moments in video games I’ve experienced. It’s still so cool: a classic late title card drop.
Though they’re not quite discernible as such it contains both of the basic elements of the Final Fantasy Dialectic – weirdo steampunk-adjacent sciency-fantasy (VI, VII, VIII, X?, XIII, XV) and the Serious High Fantasy (IV, V, IX, XI?, XII, XIV, XVI) thing – but just insofar as basically every monster they could think of is at some point or another a boss. It’s cool how, instead of mana, you can only use spells like five times before having to rest or use an item to recharge them. (The GBA version changes it to mana and it makes the game very easy.)
Final Fantasy II
This is the Akitoshi Kawazu one—he’s the guy who did the SaGa games, which are far weirder and more mechanically esoteric than Final Fantasy—except for this Final Fantasy game, which is really weird and mechanically esoteric. Famously the best way to strengthen your characters is to just beat the shit out of your own party. There’s this funny half-baked conversational mechanic where you learn “key phrases” and can select them in later dialogues. It’s cool! It seems like the kind of thing that could’ve spawned a whole field of game mechanics but it didn’t, not quite. There’s something like it in NEO: The World Ends With You but that’s like 30 years later. I’m sure there’s stuff like it in between those two. Everything of Kawazu’s seems kind of like this, though: jam-packed with weird ideas that nobody else seems to interact with. It’s a neat game! Not very fun, unfortunately. It has a great opening sequence, probably the best of the first three.
Final Fantasy III
This one has a story or whatever but I just don’t remember anything about it. I played up to the final boss on the Pixel Remaster version but I really don’t remember a goddamn thing. Whatever. There’s crystals. I think it’s the first one with chocobos. Maybe that’s II though.
Final Fantasy IV
This, to me, is the FF game that’s as “pure” as Dragon Quest I is. (All the Dragon Quest games are extremely pure so it’s an unfair comparison but I mean in terms of being the Original Version, the thing that will be iterated on again and again. Also maybe DQIII is the better comparison point. Whatever.) Everything’s kind of there in seed form, especially for the High Fantasy entries: well-defined, psychologically interesting characters, who enter and exit the party as the plot dictates; closely-interwoven mechanical and narrative elements; elegant, interesting dungeon design; high drama; travel between different worlds (in this case, an overground and underground world); an engineer dude named Cid you can play.
Purely by accident, I’ve played it the most out of any of the Final Fantasy games. The Pixel Remaster version is great. The PSP version is almost great but a little ugly. The DS version still has most of the good stuff, plus some new good stuff, but it feels oddly dry and dull. I don’t remember the GBA version. Did I even play it? It was on my DS for a while. Of the SNES games it’s the only one where all the forums tell you not to emulate the old SNES version, so I haven’t. It’s pretty short, which is nice. Basically everything in here probably gets done more interestingly later but it’s still a good time.
Final Fantasy V
For a long time I didn’t know what an RPG “job system” was. People would say stuff like, “I love the job system in Bravely Default,” and I wouldn’t know what they meant at all. At a certain point I began trying not to learn what it meant because I thought it was funny. Now I know, and will tell you: a job system allows characters to a) change classes whenever they want while b) retaining certain elements they’ve acquiried from other classes.
What this means is that Final Fantasy V is a weirdly expressive and experimental game. The story isn’t really anything, but it doesn’t matter that much, because it’s all about fucking around. Everything besides the crazy-ass optional superbosses is pretty straightforward, so you can basically do whatever and it’ll be interesting. There’s some books that try to eat you in a basement. You start off with a chocobo. One of your party members, Faris, is a cross-dressing aristocrat pirate. That’s pretty cool. It’s a good time—our favorite kind of time here at Corridors of Time.
Final Fantasy VI
I wrote a whole thing about this one. You can read it if you want. It’s a really good game! There’s a lot going on in it. I want to replay it.
Final Fantasy VII
Hot take: I love this video game. I love the world it’s set in. It’s wonderfully cryptic—I sort of love how esoteric it feels from beat-to-beat, like the plot is just eluding your grasp, unless you know to talk to Zack’s mom or whatever. It’s really beautifully rendered. The models are of course distractingly goofy (if endearing) but the environments are just so special. I don’t know. It’s wonderful.
The two great playgrounds in video games are the FFVII Midgar playground and the Disco Elysium playground. Both games are very much about games as a medium, so I don’t think it’s coincidental that they are both anchored by scenes in which adults are hanging out on a playground they’re obviously too big for.
Because, for a game that involves so much dialogue and narrative exposition and so on, Final Fantasy VII is also ludicrously game-filled. It’s a fully gamey game. It’s long and mechanically intricate. Combat takes forever because it is full of flashy little animations. Environments are fun to poke around in. There’s all this weird shit you can do and find—like FFVI, the game is full of secrets. Perhaps most relevantly, there are so many stupid little minigames. Most of them are annoying, especially the mandatory ones, but they’re there: games within games. It’s a game with rules full of games with rules.
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
In FFIV, least four party members off the top of my head “die” and then come back to life later. FFVI was very much about loss, albeit in a different way—while one of your party members can indeed die, it isn’t a central plot point, really; it’s just one (very sad) part of the broader catastrophe.
But in FFVII, of course, Aerith, the character whose existence is central to the salvation of the universe, is brutally and suddenly killed—like, really killed.
It’s the flip-side of the playground scene, where Aerith and protagonist Cloud are hanging out on the slide flirting. As with the apocalypse of FFVI, you, the player of the video game, really can’t go back to the way things were before. Far from the reassuring reiterability of old games, for which I assume people were already nostalgic by 1997, this was a game in which a character you are very narratively invested in, whom you perhaps equipped and leveled up—and who is ostensibly the key to keeping the world from exploding—could be suddenly and permanently stripped from your party.
Mechanically speaking, it’s like if you were playing Monopoly for the first time and you drew a card that said you had to throw a quarter of your properties in the real-life trash can and could not play Monopoly with them again; narratively speaking, it’s heartbreaking. It’s a far more interesting—and devastating—move, I think, than its passage into cliché would have one believe.
Here is artist and writer Tetsuya Nomura on this moment:
When a character in a video game dies, no one thinks it’s that sad. They’re just characters in a game, after all — you can just reset the game and try again, or you can always revive them somehow. I felt that their lives just didn’t have much weight. With “life” as our theme for FF7, I thought we should try depicting a character who really dies for good, who can’t come back. For that death to resonate, it needed to be an important character.
Not that I wish more games were really sad, but I do wish more were willing to go where this one went. It’s a game that, in the interest of narrative depth, keeps you from continuing to play one part of it; that inability, a mechanical lack mirroring the narrative loss, contributes to everything that follows.
There’s a lot else to the game, and some of it is great, and some of it isn’t as great, but on the whole I think it’s a great game—possibly my favorite in the series, in large part because it is a game about continuing to live in a world saturated with loss, but also because the backgrounds look so cool and stuff. The music is really good. Whatever.
Final Fantasy VIII
I’ve been playing this game for forever and haven’t beaten it. I don’t even dislike it. I just keep not playing it. It’s very strange. It was the first one I really tried to play.
If FFVI/FFVII is peak Steampunk-ish Final Fantasy, VIII is when the science fantasy stuff starts to go off the rails. You play as a parody of Cloud from FFVII—while Cloud is actually a depressive loser trying to seem cool, Squall is a brick wall of apathy and eye-rolling. It’s very funny.
You go to a school where they teach children to be mercenaries. Inside the school, which can also fly, is a jungle with dinosaurs in it. Everyone in the entire game acts like a total freak. Sometimes you swap bodies with some strangers from the past. The card minigame, Triple Triad, is famously excellent. I think you wind up going to the moon, or something? I don’t know. The mechanics are, at first, totally incomprehensible, but you can break the game to bits if you want to. There’s a great beach town. Hell yeah.
Final Fantasy IX
I haven’t played this one much because I was trying to beat VIII first, but it seems amazing. Here we see the resurgence of High Fantasy Final Fantasy. Sakaguchi’s swan song and all that. The character design rules. It’s a good game to have a turbo button for. I installed the Moguri Mod to make everything HD and it looks awesome. I’m going to play it soon.
Final Fantasy X
I played eight minutes of this game as a very young child and it made a big impact on me. It was my cousin’s save. I just walked around. It seemed beautiful and incomprehensible. I have not played it since. I know there’s a minigame called Blitzball. Canonically, in a novel written later, the protagonist’s head gets blown up with a bomb someone put in a blitzball and he dies, which is very, very funny.
I’ll play it at some point. A couple of my friends say it sucks but I bet I’ll like it. Who knows? God works in mysterious ways.
Final Fantasy XI
A friend told me once he tried to play this and could barely figure out how to move. I told him of my similarly abortive experience attempting to play Ultima VII on a laptop. This became a running joke for a while—the ideal video game is one so esoteric that you literally cannot move your character. I’m very curious but it will probably be a while before I do anything about that curiosity.
Final Fantasy XII
There are two canonical game-spanning Final Fantasy universes. The games Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, and Final Fantasy XII are all set in Ivalice. Ivalice was designed by Yasumi Matsuno, of Tactics Ogre fame (insofar as there is such a thing as “Tactics Ogre fame”). Tactics Ogre is one of my favorite games, but I haven’t played FFT. I will...someday.
This game is elegant as hell. It’s big and cool. The environments are terrific. I don’t actually have a lot to say about it. It’s literally Star Wars. I liked it a lot but not as much as other Final Fantasy games though I couldn’t exactly tell you why. I need to replay it more slowly I guess.
Final Fantasy XIII
The other Final Fantasy universe is called...Fabula Nova Crystalis Final Fantasy. I have no means of summarizing this universe or describing what it is that unites the different pieces, as I’ve only played some of FFXIII and have played none of the other games (FFXIII-2, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy Type-0…), and also none of it makes any sense.
Final Fantasy XIII owns. It’s so weird. It is one of the most bonkers games I’ve ever played. The dialogue is unhinged. The characters’ psychologies make basically no sense. They all wind up in a big robot thing that will turn them into icky monsters unless they complete their assigned tasks, though nobody has told them their assigned tasks; if they complete their tasks—which, again, they have not been told—they get to turn into a crystal instead. This is all from memory and I’m probably misremembering, because what the hell is any of this. The big machine thing is called a fal’Cie (it’s spelled like this—I did look this up) and when you’re turned into a tool of the machine you’re called a l’Cie. I got like 20 hours in. The battle theme fucking rules.
Final Fantasy XIV
I’ve played through the beginning of the first expansion. It’s good! I like it. It’s basically a single-player MMO, which is fun. I like the guys you hang out with: the smart kid, and the catgirl, and some other people. The music is really good. It was fun playing this after a million hours playing World of Warcraft because I felt like a genius because I knew the basics of tanking in MMO dungeons, everyone was constantly giving me some sort of accolade at the end of dungeons. Now you can just run dungeons alone, which is really nice, if sort of the coup de grâce of this ostensibly multiplayer game becoming totally sociality-optional. I like that, though. Other people are hard to play games with. I get nervous and stuff. You have to not fuck up, and also you have to say “Hi” in whatever the au courant house MMO style is. Sometimes it’s a waving emote; sometimes it’s a “what’s up”, sometimes it’s a classic “Hi.” Sometimes people don’t say anything. For some reason I always said “Howdy.”
The thing about this game is that it is so fucking long. You play every expansion in a row. It’s like, hundreds of hours. This is the Structural Problem of the Long-Lived MMO: either it becomes too long (FFXIV), or it becomes an inscrutable jumble of content (World of Warcraft).
It’s cool though. I’m down, or will be, eventually. I’m going to keep playing it on my STEAM DECK. I was worried that controller controls would be totally fucked but they’re actually not so bad. The feeling of lying in bed playing Final Fantasy XIV on my STEAM DECK was very decadent, like I was an ancient Greek aristocrat being fed grapes. However, like grapes, you can buy Final Fantasy XIV at the store. It’s an online store—but isn’t that even better? What a luxurious time we dwell in, sort of! I don’t have the psycho-emotional capacity to actually appreciate it, but I’m going to miss it when it’s gone. But that’s enough of that!
Final Fantasy XIV
All I know about this game is that it’s you and your bros in a car, and that you can put old Final Fantasy songs on on the radio. This is so funny to me that it seems impossible that this game doesn’t totally own.
BONUS
Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core
This is the weirdest fucking game. I played the PSP version. I hated it so much, then something clicked and I really liked it, now it’s unclicked and it feels gross to me to think about, in the way the apartment I stayed on the floor of once at the University of New Hampshire was gross—it was extremely clean, superficially, but it seemed somehow grimier for that cleanliness, and also these two dudes were sitting there playing like Counter-Strike or something on adjacent desktop computers in the same room we were trying to sleep in until like 3 AM.
I like Zack Fair as a character but I hate the various retcons this game pulls off because I am very protective of my stupid and particular vision of Final Fantasy VII, which is funny because a) it’s basically the most popular video game ever and b) I was 15 years late to the party. But Crisis Core is just so over-the-top. It’s perpetually about one step away from naming a character Jesus Christ and crucifying him. Perhaps surprisingly, I never cared that much about “One-Winged Angel” the song, and this game is basically based on that song, but it’s also like, I don’t know. It’s hard to describe. There’s a big slot machine that just pauses the action and runs incomprehensibly on the screen at random intervals. It gives you some bonuses…of some kind. The music is kind of bad and there are about four songs that ever play. I don’t get it, really. Or I do?
Final Fantasy Explorers
I played this for twenty minutes because I was wondering if it actually ruled. I don’t think it does. Ah well. C’est la vie. (l’Cie?)