As above. Only counting games I've seen to their conclusion. Sometimes they will move.
I have played enough of XI, and have interacted with enough of its people, to know that it is a fine thing that I have no desire to play. I also have every reason to suspect I will feel the same about XIV.
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Well I've finally finished this game after touching it on and off for over half of my lifetime. From my first high school girlfriend teaching me about emulating a Super Nintendo on a Pentium 4 computer, to slapping the everliving shit out of Kefka with Ultimas and Quad Attacks. This is probably my forever favorite in the series. Not my favorite game, in fact I think there's enough warts here to maybe keep it out of a persona top five, but I don't think the top of this list will be changing much. Cultist Tower can pound sand though.
Some of my fondest memories with the series stem from playing Final Fantasy X with friends and relatives over the years. I think the game holds up exceptionally well, with some blemishes. That penultimate room wherein you must touch ten crystals while the camera slowly pans around you is one of the most excruciatingly bad sequences in the entire series. That it gets followed up by one of the best final boss fight sequences and conclusions of the series makes things significantly easier to swallow.
I did not encounter FFVII when it was new, and only started playing it around 2004. It's my partner's favorite game, and we're both looking forward (for different reasons perhaps) to the remake.
A raucous, frustrating, beautiful, broken hot mess. It was used as a blunt instrument to kill Sega's home console business. It features some of the most needlessly excessive animations in any game of its era. It has some of the best music in the series. You can break the game at the three hour mark and never look back. I love Final Fantasy VIII, and I hope there's never another game like it.
Believe the hype. Most of my complaints amount to "I wish the job system didn't involve so much grind" and "The encounter rate spikes are a bummer". Has the simpler, purer "fantasy" charm of the NES entries plus everything you love about SNES JRPG feel.
A huge part of why I show up for these damn games at all is the music, and to prove it I played like a billion hours of Theatrhythm. I even plopped down cash money for a bunch of additional tunes from Chrono Trigger and the like. For real, check this thing out if you are here and have even the slightest affinity for rhythm games.
One of the best playing games Square has made in donkey's years. Looks great. Tasteful remixes. Excellent handling of some of the more fraught, sensitive parts of the original text (cross dressing sequence isn't just punching down at queer folk! hurray!). And then they made some Choices. And while I'm open to what those Choices entail, I think they backload those Choices in a way that wasn't great and will make some people VERY ANGERY. But this is a quality game.
Set the tone for JRPGs for the next ten, fifteen years for a reason. Everything up to the class change is outstanding. Everything after that is merely genre defining.
A very humble origin for the series, I find the most pleasure with FFI in trying to play the game in weird ways. My Deep Listens podcast appearances about this game had me beat it with one permanently dead party member. If I played this again, I might try an all monks run. It's mostly a game of making your numbers big while making enemy numbers small, the most rudimentary of JRPG stuff. You're not here for a plot, which boils down to "Man is bad, can time travel, must do a kill." If you can hang with that, you can probably enjoy FFI.
Does it tell the same type of epic, faux-Shakespearean tale of big grown up FFT? Not in the slightest. Are the judges occasionally frustrating? Sure. Does this game provide a ton of commute length-sized Tactics battles with interesting decisions, wrapped up in a nice presentation? You bet your ass.
