opiumcloud
11-24-2006, 01:12 PM
Not having posted in what seems like forever, I would like to rejoin the eyesonff community by sharing some well-conidered opinions on the overall quality of the various games in the ff series, guaranteed to shock and offend. No, seriously, here's my ranking and rating (1 to 10) of each game and spinoff in the series, plus a brief review of each game underneath. My numerical ratings are based a scale that ranks the ffs against my standard for all video games, not my standard for ffs, with a truly average game scoring 5.0-5.5, and no game ever released scoring a 10, as no video game has yet deserved one. I haven't ranked FF XI, because I believe that enjoyability is a large part of a game's quality, and the enjoyability of an online game will vary too much from player to player, not just because of personal preferences, but also trends in the online gaming community which are beyond the control of the original developers. When rating games, I tend to place the greatest emphasis on innovation, refinement of play mechanics, and the synergy between visual design and style of exposition.
FF Tactics: 9.5/10
FF VII: 9.4/10
FF VI: 9.4/10
FF VIII: 9.1/10
FF V: 9.0/10
FF IV: 8.7/10
FF X: 8.6/10
FF XII: 8.2/10
FF II: 8.1/10
FF IX: 7.5/10
FF Mystic Quest: 7.4/10
FF I: 7.2/10
FF X-2: 7.1/10
FF III: 6.5/10
FF Crystal Chronicles: 6.0/10
FF Tactics Advance: 4.6/10
#1 FF Tactics:
This game's story is so epic, that at times, it seems that the story was wasted on a game designed with a focus on battles, although at other times, the format of the game seems to suit the story perfectly, as when the characters speak during mid-battle. The plot of this game has the theme of "exploring history in search of truth," and demonstrates, through allegory, the biases of the societal forces which allow for the recording of history, and the tendency of historians to attribute heroic characteristics to the victors of any scenario, regardless of their true alignment, or intentions. At many points in the plot, unexpected events occur, with the attentive player having received just enough information to speculate on the motivations of the characters involved, and playing through the game, there were many such moments at which I speculated improbably twisted scenarios, only to be shocked when future events actually confirmed my dark suspicions, or clarified the scenario to be even more depraved than I had imagined. This is not an incredibly violent game, nor is it atmospherically dark, in the film noir sense. But it is a deeply philisophical game, which doesn't under-represent the magnitude of human suffering, the tendency of humans to abuse power, or the unreliability one's personal allies in societies conducive to individual scheming. The character of Delita, who comes across as contradictorily skeptical and idealistic, is too much of a master-moralist, in the Nietzschean sense, to qualify as a hero, but is too difficult for a player, sensitive towards his motivations, to villainize. Even the abberant supernatural elements of this mostly human and political story work well from a literary standpoint, as the relationship between Ajora, the Lucavi, and those who seek the Zodiac stones is represented with style and subtlety, adding Faustian intrigue to the plot.
The gameplay of Tactics is reasonably balanced, in the sense that there are not many situations in which one overly powerful and convenient approach to winning battles makes every other possible strategy obsolete. Like other job-system games, the player can create these situations himself, by overcommitting to the equipment and abilities for a particular job for certain characters, thereby forcing himself to use the same strategy for every battle, or sacrifice the majority of his characters' power, but the game itself offers many different feasable play possibilities. Different sections of the game will present different challenges depending on how the player's party is configured, such as Ramza's one-on-one battle with Gafgarion, the "outnumbered" battle at Golgorand execution site, or the rooftop "save Rafa" battle, and unless the player's party is so ridiculously overpowered as to allow for massively inefficient gameplay, the tactical perameters of each battle require a rethinking of the player's strategy, as elements such as attack strength, attack range, and character mobility must be alternately prioritized.
The ability to review story scenes and look up public information about the characters adds to the immersive element of the game, and the player's ability to appreciate the plot. This game is superb because its many innovations are effectively implemented, its visual design effectively portrays compelling, medieval-style fantasy, some characters are incredibly well-developed, and even the lesser characters are given enough development to fully serve their role within the incredibly literary plot.
#2 FF7:
Although this game is frequently criticized for featuring "angsty characters" and a large number of anime and video game cliches, critics of this game's plot should consider that fan perception of the originality of this game has been lessened considerably by the future inclusion of similar character and plot dynamics in the final fantasy series, particularly in FFVIII and FFX. This video game features truly incredible storytelling, and this game should be called cinematic not just because of the inclusion of FMV, but because of the large number of visual metaphors expressed in the game's visual direction. Consider the parallel between the stars in the game's opening and the sparks Aerith watches shooting out of the open electrical panel, or the fact that Midgar's poor literally live underneath its rich. The low-polygon-count 3-D presentation of this game give it a visual style which emphasizes the geometric nature of objects, and the producers of the game have changed a technical limitation into a stylistic enhancement. The game's usage of light and dark, squalor and cleanliness, gloom and beauty, give it a literary theme of naturalism, by representing the products of human technology as ugly. The sweeping "theme of Final Fantasy VII", which compliments the wide-open world map prior to the summoning of Meteor, is first hinted at in "Holding my Thoughts in My Heart," which plays at the precipice of the dystopian technopolis of Midgar. The game's various themes communicate the producers' vision of which environments represent hell, and which represent heaven. Even the ironic real-life double-meaning of "finding the promised land" is parallelled in the game by Shinra's misinterpretation of the religion of Aerith's race. The game spends a lot of time exploring the identities of the characters of Cloud, Aerith, Tifa and Sephiroth through dreams, memories, and hallucinations, and rather than including definitive, conclusive scenes in which the whole truth of the characters are revealed, the game challenges you, much like a David Lynch film, to discover the reality of various events by logically reconciling the various perspectives from which they are viewed. This is "angsty storytelling" at its most beautiful, as it challenges the players to make an effort to understand the characters, much in the same ways that the game designers would probably like to see more interpersonal understanding within humanity.
This game improved upon the limit breaks of FF6, which could only be used by deliberately keeping the characters at dangerously low HP levels, by adding the limit bar, and the barrier and mbarrier bars also made combat more interesting, leading many players to wonder why they were subsequently removed from the series. Some minor design flaws in this game include the three-character limit in battle, which reduces the player's ability to diversify the roles of the heroes, and leads the player, on a logical level, to wonder why the other heroes are unable to participate. Also, the overavailability of gil makes purchasing weapons and items too easy, and minimalizes the usefulness of alternate methods for party growth, such as stealing weapons and items.
If the battles as a whole seem too easy in this game, it is because the game was designed with the intention of challenging the player to experience it, rather than challenging the player to get through it. The game is filled with a variety of fun methods for winning battles, from high-powered summons to enemy skills, and some otherwise difficult boss battles become unloseable after equipping a specific accessory. Part of the coolness of this game is the fact that it was the first major RPG to allow the players to develop extremely poweful heroes, by combining abilities such as auto-resurrection, auto-haste, multiple counter attacks, mp absorbtion, and much more. In other words, the lack of challenge is largely deliberate, and designed to give the players freedom to choose which resources to throw at a particular battle, rather than forcing the players to throw everything they have at most battles in order to have a chance for victory. The inessential-but-fun nature of the sidegames, such as snowboarding and chocobo-breeding, mirrors the inessential-but-fun nature of the majority of the special abilities in this game which may be used during battle.
FF VII must also be commended for the distinctively unique visual design of every dungeon and section of the map. Walking on the snowy north continent of the overworld, leaving footprints in the snow, feels completely different than walking in the shadow of Midgar, and getting lost in previously-unexplored environments, such as the chaotically-mapped Great Glacier, is more of a pleasure than an annoyance. Experimenting with different characters and weapons is fun in this game, and this is complimented by visual touches which were unique to this game at the time of its release, such as showing a different weapon in the battle character model's hand, depending on what is equipped.
I played FFI, FFIV, and FFVI before this game, and on my first playthrough of FFVII, I mourned the absence of some elements included in FFVI, such as multi-party battles, and FFVI's non-linear second act, but in time, I came to realize that in terms of characterization and presentation, FFVII is the quintessential Final Fantasy game.
#3 FF6:
This game features a large, ensemble cast of heroes, and the overall design of the game is built around the ensemble cast, which is incredibly gratifying. The game forces you to use certain characters at certain times, FFIV-style, but also encourages you to pick favorite characters, and gives you the freedom to use any characters you choose most of the time. There are many places in the story where additional dialogue will be exchanged, or entire extra secenes will be available, if you choose to bring along certain characters to certain locations, or story scenes, but the game does a wonderful job of giving the player the impression that he is in control of the story, and rewarding him in different ways for his play preferences. The second act of this game, in which a single character must re-recruit all of the other heroes to confront the villain, with little initial knowledge of the characters' whereabouts and a radically-changed world map, is structurally, the best vehicle for exposition in the history of RPGs. The score by Nobuo Uematsu, which includes themes for each character, is incredibly melodic, well-composed, and complimentary to the action and emotion of most of the scenes. In musical composition, but not sound quality, this is the greatest video game score ever.
#4 FF8:
I have mixed feelings about this game, because although it is my fourth-favorite FF game, its design was singlehandedly conducive to the end of the golden age of Final Fantasy, because this game served as a precedent for ff designers to consider "realism" in an FF game to be a virtue in its own right, and substitutable for some of the emphasis which they had previously placed on originality, continuity, and integration of the various aspects of a game. Starting with FF8, every game in the FF series is very epic in scope, but fails to fill the framework of its design with sufficient plot and character-related details. In Final Fantasy VII, there are so many tiny, optional events which round out the mythos of the game's world in ways that may be unappreciated at first, but collectively contribute a sense of groundedness to the fantastical setting. Take the discovery of Gast and Ifalna's videos in Icicle, for example. Final Fantasy VIII still has these types of details, such as the ability to read about GARDEN on Squall's workstation terminal. It just doesn't have nearly enough such details to flesh out the world, and after FF8, this element of the series only gets worse. Upon reaching Esthar, the largest city in FF8, the player almost as quickly leaves it, and less seems to be happening there than in the small island-town of Balamb.
FF8 is a great game. Although somewhat ruined by the story of FF7, FF8's hero does have dynamism and personality, and the ability to read the hero's thoughts is a great enhancement to the game's storytelling. Many recurring symbols emerge through objects, equipment, and special effects in battles, to represent the characters: the cross, the lion, the angel wing. The abstract "flower field" scenes lend significance to the literal ones, and the significance of Laguna, Julia, Raine, and Ellone's story lends a sense of inevitability to Squall and Rinoa's attraction. Figuring out and using the junction system is lots of fun for the player, although the gameplay could have been improved significantly with one or two simple changes, such as limiting the amount of magic that the party may draw from each monster.
#5 FF5:
If my sole determining factor for rating each game were "lack of flaws," then FFV would get a 10/10, because really, there is nothing wrong with it. I'm not saying the game is perfect, merely that every element of it is at least adequate, and many elements range from very good to great. The script contains a great deal of comedy, but still manages to inspire the feeling that the player is on a serious mission, rather than trapped in a newgrounds flash animation. The character sprites and battle backgrounds are a big improvement over FFIV's, detail-wise, and for the first time in the series, the musical score has a cinematic feel, with musical changes cued by events as often as a transition between zones. FFV's 16-bit iteration of FFIII's job system gives the player a variety of choices for character development, and although the game contains fewer characters than FFIV, it actually seems to contain more, because over the course of the game, the player will have used characters whose battle functions are similar to those of all the FFIV characters, plus more. None of the character personalities demand specific jobs, but it is amusing to make "crazy old man" Galuf into an appropriately crazy berserker, or force pirate Faris to be a tame white mage, imagining her scowling at you through the screen. Rather than only allowing you to go where the plot wants you to, FFV frequently gives the player the opportunity to "get lost" or "get in over their head" FFII-style, but unlike FFII, going to a dangerous area too early in FFV doesn't always mean instant annihilation, and is sometimes a good way of leveling up or finding useful treasure. The large amount of "missable" treasure, such as while escaping the fire castle, adds to the replay value of the game, and in an impressive turn of detail, Square has designed a unique sprite set for each job for each character, so Lenna and Butz will both look different, as a thief.
For whatever reason, the soundtrack of FFV isn't frequently mentioned as one of the best in the series, but it's my second favorite (after FFVI's). The regular town theme, 'Tenderness in the Air,' has the same soothing effect as FFVI's 'Kids Run Through the City,' title screen theme 'Ahead On Our Way' does a better job of psyching me up to play than the traditional arpeggio prelude, the opening 'A Presentiment' is heavenly and very emotional, and some of the villain and battle themes are very dense and more sinister-sounding than anything John Williams has come up with to score similar scenes. 'Evil Lord ExDeath,' 'Battle With Gilgamesh,' and 'Intension of the Earth' are particularly strong. If one can overlook the sampling quality, the audio of this game plays much like Richard Wagner's music, and actually features fewer dull stretches than the opera composer's music does.
#6 FF4:
Although not the first FF game to feature a large cast of characters with predetermined classes, this game does a much better job than FFII of getting the idea right. Fighting with five characters simultaneoulsy in the ATB system is very fun, and the 'revolving door'-style gameplay, with characters constantly joining and leaving the party, creates an impression that FFIV's story is one of a class struggle that encompasses the experiences of each character, but transcends the experiences of any individual character in scope. FFIV is to FFII as Les Miserables (epic) is to Don Quixote (episodic).
The strict character class system in FFIV, and frequent inflexibility in character choices, give it some severe gameplay drawbacks, specifically pertaining to battle tactics. The black mage will almost always spend his turn in battle casting his strongest black magic spell, the white mage will heal, the monk will attack, and the bard will get pwned. Short of reviving characters and restoring MP, when necessary, the battles in this game practically play themselves, which isn't to say that they're not fun, only that they're shallower than they might have been, even considering the period of the game's release. The atb system itself is a major innovation in this game, as it allows for characters to receive a number of turns in battle proportionate to their speed superiority, making character speed good for something other than turn initiative each round, and chance of escaping battle, as it is in previous FFs. However, the lack of a visible ATB bar for each character on the battle screen is a major flaw, as it further detracts from the player's possibilities for strategic battle by making it difficult to predict the order of turns. As in the rest of the 16-bit FF trilogy, the composition quality of the music for this game is superb, although the compositions tend to be shorter than in FFV and FFVI, causing more looping, and also fewer, meaning that the same compositions will sometimes be used with irritating frequency.
#7 FF10:
Although which FF game has the mechanically-best battle system is heavily debatable, FFX has the best-implemented battle system of the entire series, except possibly for FF Tactics. The battle screen in FFX loads quickly, battles are bug-free (remember the 'mblock stat' and 'dark status' bugs in FFVI), and the turn system in FFX takes into consideration character speed and execution time for moves, in order to determine when to give each character another turn, rather than working in battle rounds, like in FF 1-3. The result is a battle system tactically similar to the ATB system, except which allows for easy character and equipment swapping, and features no delay between the selection and execution of a move, keeping the battles moving along at maximum speed. The quality of battle action animations are at a series high in this game, and overkill bonuses, plus the ability to fight using Aeons, give the player extra battle mechanics to consider, just when hacking and slashing start to get a little dull. Although originating in Lunar, the in-battle voices in this game add a lot to it, with what characters say in battle often determined by the opponent, or combination of characters in the party, rather than merely the move being executed.
The voice acting in FFX is generally high-quality, although the abundance of voice acting serves to disguise the fact that the characters have much less to talk about in FFX than in FFVII through FFIX. Like FFVII, FFX often features five-minute cutscenes filled with dialogue, although the actual amount of dialogue present in five minutes' worth of voice acting is significantly less than in five minutes' worth of text boxes, with the final result being that FFX features a shallower story with less character development. The game's story has an annoying pattern of explicitly emphasizing moral dilemmas which should already be obvious to the player (ex: dialogue such as: "Is it really okay to hate the Al-Bhed?"), overemphasizing the emotion of particular scenes ("Nobody could believe that Yuna was about to call the final Aeon, and that meant..."), and allowing its characters to act too much like themselves (Wakka's continued objections to disobedience towards Yevon's teachings, even after exposing Yevon's corruption). After the reasonably mature stories of FF7-9, this game's story comes of as positively childish, despite featuring a good amount of philisophical content regarding the nature of death, because the dialogue is written with a constant degree of paranioa that the player won't understand the significance of certain scenes, and most of the time, the characters exist not to interact, but rather to be different from one another.
One particularly annoying flaw in FFX is the field exploration screen, where the edges of navigable areas do not in any way correspond with the position of walls and barriers, so the majority of the time, field avatar Tidus is exploring a dungeon or forest until he runs into a barricade of... absolutely nothing! This causes the player to spend more time looking at the minimap for the position of the abstract walls than the field screen for the position of the illustrated ones, and actually discourages the player from enjoying the level of detail that the illustrators have put into the game's environments. The music in FFX, while not bad, is also unspectacular.
#8 FF12:
FFXII has great scripting, and a worse-than-mediocre script. Although many previous installments of the FF series feature great storytelling, FFXII is the first and only game in the FF series to feature good writing of the specific lines of dialogue spoken by the characters. Each FFXII character's dialect, class, education, etc, is artfully expressed through their speech, without obscuring the meaning of what they have to say, and the fact that in spite of this great strength, FFXII still somehow manages to feature a weak story, is evidence of the dispensibility of good dialogue scripting in RPGs, compared to in playwriting, where good dialogue scripting is absolutely indispensible. FFXII's cutscenes, like FFX's, seem to be triggered primarily by arriving at new plot-related locations, rather than seeming to evolve naturally from exploration of the world, which is a weakness in both games, because it gives the player the impression of being dragged along from A to B to C. Good RPGs, even when they do exactly this, do a better job of disguising it than FFX and FFXII, by allowing a greater variety of play situations to trigger cutscenes.
FFXII's gambit system is great, and adds a lot of fun to the gameplay, but it is incredibly hard to find battles in FFXII which are challenging, but not impossible. Defeating the werewolves roaming Giza plains, for example, is a task which goes from impossible to easy within the space of a few experience levels, and the employment of the licenses and equipment obtained while gaining those few levels. One minute, the player's party is so weak that no possible strategy is effective enough to defeat them, and the next minute, the player's party is strong enough that any reasonable strategy will do. So for a game with as deep of a battle system as FFXII, FFXII provides very limited opportunities for its players to engage in battles where their own strategy will mean the difference between victory and defeat.
Battling in FFXII is actually very fun, and the aforementioned flaw should be less adversarial to most players' enjoyment of the game than it might seem to be. Another strength of FFXII is the extreme open-endedness of its play possibilities. Large sections of the game open up not very far into it, and the player is left with the option to advance the plot, or to explore uncharted areas of the map, hunt monsters, run fetch quests, or buy better equipment and magic. It is not possible to buy all of the strongest equipment with the money obtained simply by running through the plot of the game, and this is a great strength of FFXII, because choosing what to buy is more interesting in this game than in games where the player may easily purchase everything.
#9 FF2:
This game might have had the largest story of any console game for the time of its release, and inspired many future story-driven RPGs. It improved upon FFI in almost every way, and could be ranked much higher, except for the fact that it is incredibly difficult for any 8-bit game to have the scope of a 16+ bit game. This game, however, is much better than most 16+ bit RPGs, because very few of them live up to their potential like FFII does. Riding over the world map in this game's vehicles, like the snowmobile, was just plain cool, and the character advancement system was logical, and flawed only in its failure to appeal to geekdom like the number-encumbered advancement systems of future games.
#10 FF9:
This game is like the popular guy in school. It has lots of die-hard fans, because the designers made the game in a deliberate attempt to attract them. "Everyone liked the oprea scene in FF6? Then let's put a play in this one. And a card game, like in FF8. And some characters that were manufactured. And a princess, and a dragoon. And let's make everything cute. In the design of this game, eclecticism is a method rather than an influence, as in the grade-school exercise of writing a story and putting all of one's best friends in it, yet the presentation of this game still somehow manages to be more mature than that of FFX, although the plot is less compelling.
The soundtrack for this game is superb, featuring a great amount of quality music, underscoring everything from the game's characters to its environments to its events. The ability to split up while exploring towns, and watch cut scenes chronicling the adventures of the estranged characters, is cool, and the characters are cool as well, but unlike in FF6, another FF game with cool characters, there is no dramatic impetus driving the story forward. As a player watching the cutscenes, it is hard to root for particular outcomes of events, because everything happens arbitrarily, and whenever it seems that the party has finally inherited a mission, the next plot point changes the whole situation and makes the mission obsolete, rather than simply throwing an obstacle between the player and the completion of the mission.
This game has the least systematic innovation of the entire FF series, and the elements of the series' battle system reprised in this game were never the series' best in the first place. Battles are fought FFIV-style, with only one or two feasable choices for how to spend each character's turn, there's a lack of variety of monsters within each environment, and a lack of opportunities for the player to challenge himself by entering a dangerous environment before the plot demands it. The battle screen loads slowly, and the battles themselves seem to run less smoothly than in any other ATB-based FF game, with frequent incidences of irrational lag between character turns, and between the selection and execution of an action. Sometimes an ATB bar can fill from empty to full during this lag time, making the order of turns just as confusing as if there were no ATB bar at all. The prerendered backgrounds in FFIX are, individually, even more gorgeous than those of FFVII or FFVIII, but FFIX is significantly less atmospheric than either of those games, with many sections of the map seeming to have been pasted together randomly.
#11 FF Mystic Quest:
I've ranked this game lower than games such as FFX and FFIX, but I'm probably going to have more good things to say about it than those games, because there's always the temptation to point out redeeming features of canonically poor games, just as there is the temptation to focus on the flaws of canonically spectacular games.
There's not a lot of music in this game, but the music is bright, and keeps well with the atmosphere of the game. The "battlefield" screens in this game are actually a good replacement for an overworld map filled with random encounters, since creating a finite number of monsters on the map gives completionists more of a sense of objective, although creating "battlefields" wouldn't work as well in a game like FF7 as it does in this one. Being able to use the weapons to navigate the field screen adds a fun action rpg element to Mystic Quest, making this FF the one with the most things to do on the field screen, despite having the simplest overall structure. My biggest complaint about the design of the field screen is that enemies respawn after leaving each screen. If the designers created battlefields to put a finite number of enemies on the overworld map, then why didn't they also put a finite number of enemies in the dungeons, in order to allow a player to complete the game 100% by defeating them all? There's plenty enough there to allow the player to level sufficiently to win the game by defeating them once each. The personalities of each of the hero's four allies are distinctive, yet vague, and by showing less information about the characters, the game encourages the player to imagine more of it. Although Mystic Quest isn't particularly replayable, I've never gotten bored while playing it, except in that $*#(%# confusing Volcano level. The illustrations of the enemies weakening as their HP is depleted add significant flavor to combat, and I also wonder why this feature hasn't been incorporated into the more mainstream FFs.
#12 FF1:
Out of all the FFs, this and FF3 have aged the most poorly. FF1 is a good game, with good music, and a storyline that is epic in scope for the time of its release, but so are all the higher-rated FFs, and most of them are less tedious to play.
#13 FFX-2:
The original FFX had a story with many elements of maturity and many elements of immaturity. Story-wise, FFX-2 actually elected to discard all of the elements of maturity while keeping all of the elements of immaturity. Paine's character is PAINEfully underdeveloped, for which there is no excuse in a 32-bit game with only three playable characters. This game is the only one in the series with poor music, which is campy and repetitive, with the exception of the two vocal J-POP songs, which are decent. The animation of the 3-D models is also noticeably uninspired in this game, with many NPCs engaging in unrealistic and irritating animation loops.
Despite having a weak story and poor music, this is still a good game, and probably the best in the series in terms of diversity of play. Less time is spent battling in this game than any other in the FF series, and more of that time is spent playing mini-games. Rather than having field screens be bland paths seperating towns, there are many things in each environment to interact with. 'Hanging out,' in the world of FFX-2 is fun at times, but the poor overall presentation of the game keeps the player from wanting to do too much of it. Although FFX-2's battle system is slightly worse than FFX's overall, the battles in FFX-2 can be fun, with the combination of FFX's battle camera and ATB. Re-working ATB to consider the position of enemies, and giving the characters the ability to delay enemy attacks by hitting them at the right time, was a good idea, but the variety of mechanically-unique battle scenarios in the game wasn't sufficient to encourage players to actually formulate tactics around this mechanic.
#14 FF3:
Like FF1, FF3 requires a lot of leveling up, and rewards its players for doing so with little more than the ability to get through it. The job system in this game probably gave it the deepest character advancement system in the history of JRPGs at the time of its release, but seems like nothing special today. Perhaps I tend to like obsolete story-based games, such as ff2, more than obsolete system-based games, such as ff3, because as a gamer, I am more interested in a game's story than its system. Or perhaps these great "system-based" games of ages past only seemed great to computer geeks who insisted upon viewing the difficulty they presented as design depth. FF3 has the most music of the 8-bit trilogy, but nothing as melodic or memorable as the overworld theme, bridge-crossing theme, or Matoya's cave from FF1.
#15 FF Crystal Chronicles:
The inspiration for and design of this game are quite generic, and it is clear from playing it that during its design, the truly creative FF talent at Square was fast at work on other titles. Although sub-par for an FF, Mystic Quest is endearing, while Crystal Chronicles is just unmemorable.
#16 FF Tactics Advance:
A good story could be written based on the precepts of Tactics Advance's story. A character accidentally uses a magical artifact to transform his own world into that of his favorite FF game, and the identities of his parents and friends in the new world have been transformed according to some combination of his desires, and logic. Unfortunately, this game's story isn't it. I'd like to say that the game was created by children for children, but I don't think that's true, either. Everything about this game's battle system is both derivative of other tactical RPGS, and simplified from them, except for the addition of the judges and their 'laws', which more often than not are completely ignorable, because they forbid you from doing things you would never do anyway, like using soft in a battle where none of your opponents can petrify. The only thing the judges are really good for is slowing down the already slow battle system by taking 'their turn'.
The slow pace of the original Tactics' battle system was interesting, because it allowed you to stop during battle and do things like look up your enemies' stats, in order to predict how much damage they would do to you on their next turn. You can still do this in FFTA, but in such a relatively shallow game, why would you want to? This game's "tactical gameplay" is like tic-tac-toe, and it's "plot advancement" is like counting sheep.
Flame away.
FF Tactics: 9.5/10
FF VII: 9.4/10
FF VI: 9.4/10
FF VIII: 9.1/10
FF V: 9.0/10
FF IV: 8.7/10
FF X: 8.6/10
FF XII: 8.2/10
FF II: 8.1/10
FF IX: 7.5/10
FF Mystic Quest: 7.4/10
FF I: 7.2/10
FF X-2: 7.1/10
FF III: 6.5/10
FF Crystal Chronicles: 6.0/10
FF Tactics Advance: 4.6/10
#1 FF Tactics:
This game's story is so epic, that at times, it seems that the story was wasted on a game designed with a focus on battles, although at other times, the format of the game seems to suit the story perfectly, as when the characters speak during mid-battle. The plot of this game has the theme of "exploring history in search of truth," and demonstrates, through allegory, the biases of the societal forces which allow for the recording of history, and the tendency of historians to attribute heroic characteristics to the victors of any scenario, regardless of their true alignment, or intentions. At many points in the plot, unexpected events occur, with the attentive player having received just enough information to speculate on the motivations of the characters involved, and playing through the game, there were many such moments at which I speculated improbably twisted scenarios, only to be shocked when future events actually confirmed my dark suspicions, or clarified the scenario to be even more depraved than I had imagined. This is not an incredibly violent game, nor is it atmospherically dark, in the film noir sense. But it is a deeply philisophical game, which doesn't under-represent the magnitude of human suffering, the tendency of humans to abuse power, or the unreliability one's personal allies in societies conducive to individual scheming. The character of Delita, who comes across as contradictorily skeptical and idealistic, is too much of a master-moralist, in the Nietzschean sense, to qualify as a hero, but is too difficult for a player, sensitive towards his motivations, to villainize. Even the abberant supernatural elements of this mostly human and political story work well from a literary standpoint, as the relationship between Ajora, the Lucavi, and those who seek the Zodiac stones is represented with style and subtlety, adding Faustian intrigue to the plot.
The gameplay of Tactics is reasonably balanced, in the sense that there are not many situations in which one overly powerful and convenient approach to winning battles makes every other possible strategy obsolete. Like other job-system games, the player can create these situations himself, by overcommitting to the equipment and abilities for a particular job for certain characters, thereby forcing himself to use the same strategy for every battle, or sacrifice the majority of his characters' power, but the game itself offers many different feasable play possibilities. Different sections of the game will present different challenges depending on how the player's party is configured, such as Ramza's one-on-one battle with Gafgarion, the "outnumbered" battle at Golgorand execution site, or the rooftop "save Rafa" battle, and unless the player's party is so ridiculously overpowered as to allow for massively inefficient gameplay, the tactical perameters of each battle require a rethinking of the player's strategy, as elements such as attack strength, attack range, and character mobility must be alternately prioritized.
The ability to review story scenes and look up public information about the characters adds to the immersive element of the game, and the player's ability to appreciate the plot. This game is superb because its many innovations are effectively implemented, its visual design effectively portrays compelling, medieval-style fantasy, some characters are incredibly well-developed, and even the lesser characters are given enough development to fully serve their role within the incredibly literary plot.
#2 FF7:
Although this game is frequently criticized for featuring "angsty characters" and a large number of anime and video game cliches, critics of this game's plot should consider that fan perception of the originality of this game has been lessened considerably by the future inclusion of similar character and plot dynamics in the final fantasy series, particularly in FFVIII and FFX. This video game features truly incredible storytelling, and this game should be called cinematic not just because of the inclusion of FMV, but because of the large number of visual metaphors expressed in the game's visual direction. Consider the parallel between the stars in the game's opening and the sparks Aerith watches shooting out of the open electrical panel, or the fact that Midgar's poor literally live underneath its rich. The low-polygon-count 3-D presentation of this game give it a visual style which emphasizes the geometric nature of objects, and the producers of the game have changed a technical limitation into a stylistic enhancement. The game's usage of light and dark, squalor and cleanliness, gloom and beauty, give it a literary theme of naturalism, by representing the products of human technology as ugly. The sweeping "theme of Final Fantasy VII", which compliments the wide-open world map prior to the summoning of Meteor, is first hinted at in "Holding my Thoughts in My Heart," which plays at the precipice of the dystopian technopolis of Midgar. The game's various themes communicate the producers' vision of which environments represent hell, and which represent heaven. Even the ironic real-life double-meaning of "finding the promised land" is parallelled in the game by Shinra's misinterpretation of the religion of Aerith's race. The game spends a lot of time exploring the identities of the characters of Cloud, Aerith, Tifa and Sephiroth through dreams, memories, and hallucinations, and rather than including definitive, conclusive scenes in which the whole truth of the characters are revealed, the game challenges you, much like a David Lynch film, to discover the reality of various events by logically reconciling the various perspectives from which they are viewed. This is "angsty storytelling" at its most beautiful, as it challenges the players to make an effort to understand the characters, much in the same ways that the game designers would probably like to see more interpersonal understanding within humanity.
This game improved upon the limit breaks of FF6, which could only be used by deliberately keeping the characters at dangerously low HP levels, by adding the limit bar, and the barrier and mbarrier bars also made combat more interesting, leading many players to wonder why they were subsequently removed from the series. Some minor design flaws in this game include the three-character limit in battle, which reduces the player's ability to diversify the roles of the heroes, and leads the player, on a logical level, to wonder why the other heroes are unable to participate. Also, the overavailability of gil makes purchasing weapons and items too easy, and minimalizes the usefulness of alternate methods for party growth, such as stealing weapons and items.
If the battles as a whole seem too easy in this game, it is because the game was designed with the intention of challenging the player to experience it, rather than challenging the player to get through it. The game is filled with a variety of fun methods for winning battles, from high-powered summons to enemy skills, and some otherwise difficult boss battles become unloseable after equipping a specific accessory. Part of the coolness of this game is the fact that it was the first major RPG to allow the players to develop extremely poweful heroes, by combining abilities such as auto-resurrection, auto-haste, multiple counter attacks, mp absorbtion, and much more. In other words, the lack of challenge is largely deliberate, and designed to give the players freedom to choose which resources to throw at a particular battle, rather than forcing the players to throw everything they have at most battles in order to have a chance for victory. The inessential-but-fun nature of the sidegames, such as snowboarding and chocobo-breeding, mirrors the inessential-but-fun nature of the majority of the special abilities in this game which may be used during battle.
FF VII must also be commended for the distinctively unique visual design of every dungeon and section of the map. Walking on the snowy north continent of the overworld, leaving footprints in the snow, feels completely different than walking in the shadow of Midgar, and getting lost in previously-unexplored environments, such as the chaotically-mapped Great Glacier, is more of a pleasure than an annoyance. Experimenting with different characters and weapons is fun in this game, and this is complimented by visual touches which were unique to this game at the time of its release, such as showing a different weapon in the battle character model's hand, depending on what is equipped.
I played FFI, FFIV, and FFVI before this game, and on my first playthrough of FFVII, I mourned the absence of some elements included in FFVI, such as multi-party battles, and FFVI's non-linear second act, but in time, I came to realize that in terms of characterization and presentation, FFVII is the quintessential Final Fantasy game.
#3 FF6:
This game features a large, ensemble cast of heroes, and the overall design of the game is built around the ensemble cast, which is incredibly gratifying. The game forces you to use certain characters at certain times, FFIV-style, but also encourages you to pick favorite characters, and gives you the freedom to use any characters you choose most of the time. There are many places in the story where additional dialogue will be exchanged, or entire extra secenes will be available, if you choose to bring along certain characters to certain locations, or story scenes, but the game does a wonderful job of giving the player the impression that he is in control of the story, and rewarding him in different ways for his play preferences. The second act of this game, in which a single character must re-recruit all of the other heroes to confront the villain, with little initial knowledge of the characters' whereabouts and a radically-changed world map, is structurally, the best vehicle for exposition in the history of RPGs. The score by Nobuo Uematsu, which includes themes for each character, is incredibly melodic, well-composed, and complimentary to the action and emotion of most of the scenes. In musical composition, but not sound quality, this is the greatest video game score ever.
#4 FF8:
I have mixed feelings about this game, because although it is my fourth-favorite FF game, its design was singlehandedly conducive to the end of the golden age of Final Fantasy, because this game served as a precedent for ff designers to consider "realism" in an FF game to be a virtue in its own right, and substitutable for some of the emphasis which they had previously placed on originality, continuity, and integration of the various aspects of a game. Starting with FF8, every game in the FF series is very epic in scope, but fails to fill the framework of its design with sufficient plot and character-related details. In Final Fantasy VII, there are so many tiny, optional events which round out the mythos of the game's world in ways that may be unappreciated at first, but collectively contribute a sense of groundedness to the fantastical setting. Take the discovery of Gast and Ifalna's videos in Icicle, for example. Final Fantasy VIII still has these types of details, such as the ability to read about GARDEN on Squall's workstation terminal. It just doesn't have nearly enough such details to flesh out the world, and after FF8, this element of the series only gets worse. Upon reaching Esthar, the largest city in FF8, the player almost as quickly leaves it, and less seems to be happening there than in the small island-town of Balamb.
FF8 is a great game. Although somewhat ruined by the story of FF7, FF8's hero does have dynamism and personality, and the ability to read the hero's thoughts is a great enhancement to the game's storytelling. Many recurring symbols emerge through objects, equipment, and special effects in battles, to represent the characters: the cross, the lion, the angel wing. The abstract "flower field" scenes lend significance to the literal ones, and the significance of Laguna, Julia, Raine, and Ellone's story lends a sense of inevitability to Squall and Rinoa's attraction. Figuring out and using the junction system is lots of fun for the player, although the gameplay could have been improved significantly with one or two simple changes, such as limiting the amount of magic that the party may draw from each monster.
#5 FF5:
If my sole determining factor for rating each game were "lack of flaws," then FFV would get a 10/10, because really, there is nothing wrong with it. I'm not saying the game is perfect, merely that every element of it is at least adequate, and many elements range from very good to great. The script contains a great deal of comedy, but still manages to inspire the feeling that the player is on a serious mission, rather than trapped in a newgrounds flash animation. The character sprites and battle backgrounds are a big improvement over FFIV's, detail-wise, and for the first time in the series, the musical score has a cinematic feel, with musical changes cued by events as often as a transition between zones. FFV's 16-bit iteration of FFIII's job system gives the player a variety of choices for character development, and although the game contains fewer characters than FFIV, it actually seems to contain more, because over the course of the game, the player will have used characters whose battle functions are similar to those of all the FFIV characters, plus more. None of the character personalities demand specific jobs, but it is amusing to make "crazy old man" Galuf into an appropriately crazy berserker, or force pirate Faris to be a tame white mage, imagining her scowling at you through the screen. Rather than only allowing you to go where the plot wants you to, FFV frequently gives the player the opportunity to "get lost" or "get in over their head" FFII-style, but unlike FFII, going to a dangerous area too early in FFV doesn't always mean instant annihilation, and is sometimes a good way of leveling up or finding useful treasure. The large amount of "missable" treasure, such as while escaping the fire castle, adds to the replay value of the game, and in an impressive turn of detail, Square has designed a unique sprite set for each job for each character, so Lenna and Butz will both look different, as a thief.
For whatever reason, the soundtrack of FFV isn't frequently mentioned as one of the best in the series, but it's my second favorite (after FFVI's). The regular town theme, 'Tenderness in the Air,' has the same soothing effect as FFVI's 'Kids Run Through the City,' title screen theme 'Ahead On Our Way' does a better job of psyching me up to play than the traditional arpeggio prelude, the opening 'A Presentiment' is heavenly and very emotional, and some of the villain and battle themes are very dense and more sinister-sounding than anything John Williams has come up with to score similar scenes. 'Evil Lord ExDeath,' 'Battle With Gilgamesh,' and 'Intension of the Earth' are particularly strong. If one can overlook the sampling quality, the audio of this game plays much like Richard Wagner's music, and actually features fewer dull stretches than the opera composer's music does.
#6 FF4:
Although not the first FF game to feature a large cast of characters with predetermined classes, this game does a much better job than FFII of getting the idea right. Fighting with five characters simultaneoulsy in the ATB system is very fun, and the 'revolving door'-style gameplay, with characters constantly joining and leaving the party, creates an impression that FFIV's story is one of a class struggle that encompasses the experiences of each character, but transcends the experiences of any individual character in scope. FFIV is to FFII as Les Miserables (epic) is to Don Quixote (episodic).
The strict character class system in FFIV, and frequent inflexibility in character choices, give it some severe gameplay drawbacks, specifically pertaining to battle tactics. The black mage will almost always spend his turn in battle casting his strongest black magic spell, the white mage will heal, the monk will attack, and the bard will get pwned. Short of reviving characters and restoring MP, when necessary, the battles in this game practically play themselves, which isn't to say that they're not fun, only that they're shallower than they might have been, even considering the period of the game's release. The atb system itself is a major innovation in this game, as it allows for characters to receive a number of turns in battle proportionate to their speed superiority, making character speed good for something other than turn initiative each round, and chance of escaping battle, as it is in previous FFs. However, the lack of a visible ATB bar for each character on the battle screen is a major flaw, as it further detracts from the player's possibilities for strategic battle by making it difficult to predict the order of turns. As in the rest of the 16-bit FF trilogy, the composition quality of the music for this game is superb, although the compositions tend to be shorter than in FFV and FFVI, causing more looping, and also fewer, meaning that the same compositions will sometimes be used with irritating frequency.
#7 FF10:
Although which FF game has the mechanically-best battle system is heavily debatable, FFX has the best-implemented battle system of the entire series, except possibly for FF Tactics. The battle screen in FFX loads quickly, battles are bug-free (remember the 'mblock stat' and 'dark status' bugs in FFVI), and the turn system in FFX takes into consideration character speed and execution time for moves, in order to determine when to give each character another turn, rather than working in battle rounds, like in FF 1-3. The result is a battle system tactically similar to the ATB system, except which allows for easy character and equipment swapping, and features no delay between the selection and execution of a move, keeping the battles moving along at maximum speed. The quality of battle action animations are at a series high in this game, and overkill bonuses, plus the ability to fight using Aeons, give the player extra battle mechanics to consider, just when hacking and slashing start to get a little dull. Although originating in Lunar, the in-battle voices in this game add a lot to it, with what characters say in battle often determined by the opponent, or combination of characters in the party, rather than merely the move being executed.
The voice acting in FFX is generally high-quality, although the abundance of voice acting serves to disguise the fact that the characters have much less to talk about in FFX than in FFVII through FFIX. Like FFVII, FFX often features five-minute cutscenes filled with dialogue, although the actual amount of dialogue present in five minutes' worth of voice acting is significantly less than in five minutes' worth of text boxes, with the final result being that FFX features a shallower story with less character development. The game's story has an annoying pattern of explicitly emphasizing moral dilemmas which should already be obvious to the player (ex: dialogue such as: "Is it really okay to hate the Al-Bhed?"), overemphasizing the emotion of particular scenes ("Nobody could believe that Yuna was about to call the final Aeon, and that meant..."), and allowing its characters to act too much like themselves (Wakka's continued objections to disobedience towards Yevon's teachings, even after exposing Yevon's corruption). After the reasonably mature stories of FF7-9, this game's story comes of as positively childish, despite featuring a good amount of philisophical content regarding the nature of death, because the dialogue is written with a constant degree of paranioa that the player won't understand the significance of certain scenes, and most of the time, the characters exist not to interact, but rather to be different from one another.
One particularly annoying flaw in FFX is the field exploration screen, where the edges of navigable areas do not in any way correspond with the position of walls and barriers, so the majority of the time, field avatar Tidus is exploring a dungeon or forest until he runs into a barricade of... absolutely nothing! This causes the player to spend more time looking at the minimap for the position of the abstract walls than the field screen for the position of the illustrated ones, and actually discourages the player from enjoying the level of detail that the illustrators have put into the game's environments. The music in FFX, while not bad, is also unspectacular.
#8 FF12:
FFXII has great scripting, and a worse-than-mediocre script. Although many previous installments of the FF series feature great storytelling, FFXII is the first and only game in the FF series to feature good writing of the specific lines of dialogue spoken by the characters. Each FFXII character's dialect, class, education, etc, is artfully expressed through their speech, without obscuring the meaning of what they have to say, and the fact that in spite of this great strength, FFXII still somehow manages to feature a weak story, is evidence of the dispensibility of good dialogue scripting in RPGs, compared to in playwriting, where good dialogue scripting is absolutely indispensible. FFXII's cutscenes, like FFX's, seem to be triggered primarily by arriving at new plot-related locations, rather than seeming to evolve naturally from exploration of the world, which is a weakness in both games, because it gives the player the impression of being dragged along from A to B to C. Good RPGs, even when they do exactly this, do a better job of disguising it than FFX and FFXII, by allowing a greater variety of play situations to trigger cutscenes.
FFXII's gambit system is great, and adds a lot of fun to the gameplay, but it is incredibly hard to find battles in FFXII which are challenging, but not impossible. Defeating the werewolves roaming Giza plains, for example, is a task which goes from impossible to easy within the space of a few experience levels, and the employment of the licenses and equipment obtained while gaining those few levels. One minute, the player's party is so weak that no possible strategy is effective enough to defeat them, and the next minute, the player's party is strong enough that any reasonable strategy will do. So for a game with as deep of a battle system as FFXII, FFXII provides very limited opportunities for its players to engage in battles where their own strategy will mean the difference between victory and defeat.
Battling in FFXII is actually very fun, and the aforementioned flaw should be less adversarial to most players' enjoyment of the game than it might seem to be. Another strength of FFXII is the extreme open-endedness of its play possibilities. Large sections of the game open up not very far into it, and the player is left with the option to advance the plot, or to explore uncharted areas of the map, hunt monsters, run fetch quests, or buy better equipment and magic. It is not possible to buy all of the strongest equipment with the money obtained simply by running through the plot of the game, and this is a great strength of FFXII, because choosing what to buy is more interesting in this game than in games where the player may easily purchase everything.
#9 FF2:
This game might have had the largest story of any console game for the time of its release, and inspired many future story-driven RPGs. It improved upon FFI in almost every way, and could be ranked much higher, except for the fact that it is incredibly difficult for any 8-bit game to have the scope of a 16+ bit game. This game, however, is much better than most 16+ bit RPGs, because very few of them live up to their potential like FFII does. Riding over the world map in this game's vehicles, like the snowmobile, was just plain cool, and the character advancement system was logical, and flawed only in its failure to appeal to geekdom like the number-encumbered advancement systems of future games.
#10 FF9:
This game is like the popular guy in school. It has lots of die-hard fans, because the designers made the game in a deliberate attempt to attract them. "Everyone liked the oprea scene in FF6? Then let's put a play in this one. And a card game, like in FF8. And some characters that were manufactured. And a princess, and a dragoon. And let's make everything cute. In the design of this game, eclecticism is a method rather than an influence, as in the grade-school exercise of writing a story and putting all of one's best friends in it, yet the presentation of this game still somehow manages to be more mature than that of FFX, although the plot is less compelling.
The soundtrack for this game is superb, featuring a great amount of quality music, underscoring everything from the game's characters to its environments to its events. The ability to split up while exploring towns, and watch cut scenes chronicling the adventures of the estranged characters, is cool, and the characters are cool as well, but unlike in FF6, another FF game with cool characters, there is no dramatic impetus driving the story forward. As a player watching the cutscenes, it is hard to root for particular outcomes of events, because everything happens arbitrarily, and whenever it seems that the party has finally inherited a mission, the next plot point changes the whole situation and makes the mission obsolete, rather than simply throwing an obstacle between the player and the completion of the mission.
This game has the least systematic innovation of the entire FF series, and the elements of the series' battle system reprised in this game were never the series' best in the first place. Battles are fought FFIV-style, with only one or two feasable choices for how to spend each character's turn, there's a lack of variety of monsters within each environment, and a lack of opportunities for the player to challenge himself by entering a dangerous environment before the plot demands it. The battle screen loads slowly, and the battles themselves seem to run less smoothly than in any other ATB-based FF game, with frequent incidences of irrational lag between character turns, and between the selection and execution of an action. Sometimes an ATB bar can fill from empty to full during this lag time, making the order of turns just as confusing as if there were no ATB bar at all. The prerendered backgrounds in FFIX are, individually, even more gorgeous than those of FFVII or FFVIII, but FFIX is significantly less atmospheric than either of those games, with many sections of the map seeming to have been pasted together randomly.
#11 FF Mystic Quest:
I've ranked this game lower than games such as FFX and FFIX, but I'm probably going to have more good things to say about it than those games, because there's always the temptation to point out redeeming features of canonically poor games, just as there is the temptation to focus on the flaws of canonically spectacular games.
There's not a lot of music in this game, but the music is bright, and keeps well with the atmosphere of the game. The "battlefield" screens in this game are actually a good replacement for an overworld map filled with random encounters, since creating a finite number of monsters on the map gives completionists more of a sense of objective, although creating "battlefields" wouldn't work as well in a game like FF7 as it does in this one. Being able to use the weapons to navigate the field screen adds a fun action rpg element to Mystic Quest, making this FF the one with the most things to do on the field screen, despite having the simplest overall structure. My biggest complaint about the design of the field screen is that enemies respawn after leaving each screen. If the designers created battlefields to put a finite number of enemies on the overworld map, then why didn't they also put a finite number of enemies in the dungeons, in order to allow a player to complete the game 100% by defeating them all? There's plenty enough there to allow the player to level sufficiently to win the game by defeating them once each. The personalities of each of the hero's four allies are distinctive, yet vague, and by showing less information about the characters, the game encourages the player to imagine more of it. Although Mystic Quest isn't particularly replayable, I've never gotten bored while playing it, except in that $*#(%# confusing Volcano level. The illustrations of the enemies weakening as their HP is depleted add significant flavor to combat, and I also wonder why this feature hasn't been incorporated into the more mainstream FFs.
#12 FF1:
Out of all the FFs, this and FF3 have aged the most poorly. FF1 is a good game, with good music, and a storyline that is epic in scope for the time of its release, but so are all the higher-rated FFs, and most of them are less tedious to play.
#13 FFX-2:
The original FFX had a story with many elements of maturity and many elements of immaturity. Story-wise, FFX-2 actually elected to discard all of the elements of maturity while keeping all of the elements of immaturity. Paine's character is PAINEfully underdeveloped, for which there is no excuse in a 32-bit game with only three playable characters. This game is the only one in the series with poor music, which is campy and repetitive, with the exception of the two vocal J-POP songs, which are decent. The animation of the 3-D models is also noticeably uninspired in this game, with many NPCs engaging in unrealistic and irritating animation loops.
Despite having a weak story and poor music, this is still a good game, and probably the best in the series in terms of diversity of play. Less time is spent battling in this game than any other in the FF series, and more of that time is spent playing mini-games. Rather than having field screens be bland paths seperating towns, there are many things in each environment to interact with. 'Hanging out,' in the world of FFX-2 is fun at times, but the poor overall presentation of the game keeps the player from wanting to do too much of it. Although FFX-2's battle system is slightly worse than FFX's overall, the battles in FFX-2 can be fun, with the combination of FFX's battle camera and ATB. Re-working ATB to consider the position of enemies, and giving the characters the ability to delay enemy attacks by hitting them at the right time, was a good idea, but the variety of mechanically-unique battle scenarios in the game wasn't sufficient to encourage players to actually formulate tactics around this mechanic.
#14 FF3:
Like FF1, FF3 requires a lot of leveling up, and rewards its players for doing so with little more than the ability to get through it. The job system in this game probably gave it the deepest character advancement system in the history of JRPGs at the time of its release, but seems like nothing special today. Perhaps I tend to like obsolete story-based games, such as ff2, more than obsolete system-based games, such as ff3, because as a gamer, I am more interested in a game's story than its system. Or perhaps these great "system-based" games of ages past only seemed great to computer geeks who insisted upon viewing the difficulty they presented as design depth. FF3 has the most music of the 8-bit trilogy, but nothing as melodic or memorable as the overworld theme, bridge-crossing theme, or Matoya's cave from FF1.
#15 FF Crystal Chronicles:
The inspiration for and design of this game are quite generic, and it is clear from playing it that during its design, the truly creative FF talent at Square was fast at work on other titles. Although sub-par for an FF, Mystic Quest is endearing, while Crystal Chronicles is just unmemorable.
#16 FF Tactics Advance:
A good story could be written based on the precepts of Tactics Advance's story. A character accidentally uses a magical artifact to transform his own world into that of his favorite FF game, and the identities of his parents and friends in the new world have been transformed according to some combination of his desires, and logic. Unfortunately, this game's story isn't it. I'd like to say that the game was created by children for children, but I don't think that's true, either. Everything about this game's battle system is both derivative of other tactical RPGS, and simplified from them, except for the addition of the judges and their 'laws', which more often than not are completely ignorable, because they forbid you from doing things you would never do anyway, like using soft in a battle where none of your opponents can petrify. The only thing the judges are really good for is slowing down the already slow battle system by taking 'their turn'.
The slow pace of the original Tactics' battle system was interesting, because it allowed you to stop during battle and do things like look up your enemies' stats, in order to predict how much damage they would do to you on their next turn. You can still do this in FFTA, but in such a relatively shallow game, why would you want to? This game's "tactical gameplay" is like tic-tac-toe, and it's "plot advancement" is like counting sheep.
Flame away.