Which was the easiest Final Fantasy?

[Forsaken Lover]

but XIII plays itself with no actual input from the player, and zero actual decision making required.

I dunno about that one. The fact I died several times before I realized to switch to Sentinel, or wasn't fast enough to switch to whatever job healer was, kinda shows you definitley need to do some amount of thinking during battle.

[Madame Adequate]

I really want to say FFX since it has so many counter-intuitive game design elements in it's battle system that makes the game a cakewalk

Hang on, if they're counter-intuitive, how can you hold that against the game? That means you deliberately have to do things which are not obvious, which means experimentation and toying with things leads to an easier time. Which is true of pretty much any RPG, and is in large part the purpose of the genre?

I mean yeah X is mostly not a difficult game, I agree, but your argument seems odd.

e; With the caveat that I've not yet played much of V, I vote for III. There was one boss I had real trouble with but other than that the game was very easy. I liked it a lot, but very easy.

[Slothy]

Thing is, you essentially only ever make three choices in XIII. Heal, tank, and attack. That's it. And it's generally obvious which is required and when. You might die once or twice when a new job is introduced or you meet the odd boss with a pattern you need to figure out, but such times are incredibly infrequent. I could probably count the number of times on one hand. And usually when you learn the pattern that caught you off guard once the way to counter it and timing required is obvious. An obvious optimal decision isn't really a decision.

[Jinx]

For me, personally, FFX! I love it, but it's not too hard.

[Wolf Kanno]

I really want to say FFX since it has so many counter-intuitive game design elements in it's battle system that makes the game a cakewalk

Hang on, if they're counter-intuitive, how can you hold that against the game? That means you deliberately have to do things which are not obvious, which means experimentation and toying with things leads to an easier time. Which is true of pretty much any RPG, and is in large part the purpose of the genre?

I mean yeah X is mostly not a difficult game, I agree, but your argument seems odd.

e; With the caveat that I've not yet played much of V, I vote for III. There was one boss I had real trouble with but other than that the game was very easy. I liked it a lot, but very easy.

You're correct, I used the wrong phrase. My issue is that FFX basically has a very boring formula for winning battles, match the right character with the right enemy, big enemies can be dealt with by Overdrives and Aeons. The battle system doesn't leave much guess work for the player and in order to have a fun job with it outside of the optional content, you have to play it very counter-intuitively to get any enjoyment out of the story campaign.

Though I'm curious to what degree you played FFIII, cause frankly it's one of the harder games. The DS version is much easier but the original has a tendency to screw you over if you are not careful.

I also agree that XIII is pretty easy because the strategy to victory is boiled down to the simple concepts Vivi22 showed. Death is also largely trivial and most of the game's deaths are a direct result from poorly implemented game concepts like main leader death = Game Over. I know they stole it from MegaTen but MegaTen handle it completely differently than XIII did which is why a lot of the deaths felt more cheap in XIII than say Persona 3 or SMTIII.

[Karifean]

Thing is, you essentially only ever make three choices in XIII. Heal, tank, and attack. That's it. And it's generally obvious which is required and when. You might die once or twice when a new job is introduced or you meet the odd boss with a pattern you need to figure out, but such times are incredibly infrequent. I could probably count the number of times on one hand. And usually when you learn the pattern that caught you off guard once the way to counter it and timing required is obvious. An obvious optimal decision isn't really a decision.

See this is where I partly disagree. While it is true that Heal Tank Attack gets you through the game, honestly, the same can be said for, like, every other Final Fantasy game. And with the occasional difficulty spike that already puts XIII above many other games. Game Overs are less of a serious thing in XIII than in other games and you're more likely to get one every now and then, but still; I never once got a Game Over on IV or VI while I did get a few on XIII.

Also, this is a personal issue, but this strategy is almost never optimal and it bugs me when people call it that. Compared to other FF games there's a lot of ways to improve your battling efficiency in XIII. Staggering is often a waste of time. This is what the star system TRIED to push, as in motivating you to try to get 5 stars every time, but didn't really manage to. Nonetheless, the ways are there if you actually wanted to look into the battle system more in-depth.

[Wolf Kanno]

See this is where I partly disagree. While it is true that Heal Tank Attack gets you through the game, honestly, the same can be said for, like, every other Final Fantasy game. And with the occasional difficulty spike that already puts XIII above many other games. Game Overs are less of a serious thing in XIII than in other games and you're more likely to get one every now and then, but still; I never once got a Game Over on IV or VI while I did get a few on XIII.

Also, this is a personal issue, but this strategy is almost never optimal and it bugs me when people call it that. Compared to other FF games there's a lot of ways to improve your battling efficiency in XIII. Staggering is often a waste of time. This is what the star system TRIED to push, as in motivating you to try to get 5 stars every time, but didn't really manage to. Nonetheless, the ways are there if you actually wanted to look into the battle system more in-depth.

The issue here is that the deaths are usually cheap shots and have nothing to do with strategy. The majority of my deaths involved a non-sentinel character being leader as opposed to just approaching the battle carefully. The fact death is trivial makes one wonder why they bothered since a slight tweak will fix things.

XIII's system just largely boiled down to the typical strategy most people use but only ramped up the difficulty by placing stupid restrictions on the player the game can manipulate for an easy win as opposed to the boss having a specific strategy the player has to figure out how to get around.

As for the optimal strategy, we can make that argument for most of the games in the series as every title generally has a more optimal way to efficiently win but when the game allows the lowest common denominator for victory to get the job done, it boils down to how much the player cares whether they put effort into the system. This is the fundamental problem with JRPG battle systems since the later half of the 90s.

[Madame Adequate]

You're correct, I used the wrong phrase. My issue is that FFX basically has a very boring formula for winning battles, match the right character with the right enemy, big enemies can be dealt with by Overdrives and Aeons. The battle system doesn't leave much guess work for the player and in order to have a fun job with it outside of the optional content, you have to play it very counter-intuitively to get any enjoyment out of the story campaign.

Okay, that makes more sense, thanks for clarifying what you meant. I disagree inasmuch as any RPG has exactly that, and the fact that X makes it reasonably easy to deduce what your tactics should be is due to having strong game design in both visual and interface terms (i.e. you can see that a skink is a skinny, skittish thing so you should probably use Wakka or Tidus; you can see a flan is a... well, a flan, so physical attacks will be useless; and you can pretty easily scan things to learn all about them). But thank you for clarifying

Though I'm curious to what degree you played FFIII, cause frankly it's one of the harder games. The DS version is much easier but the original has a tendency to screw you over if you are not careful.

Well I finished it so Only part that gave me trouble was Garuda who, admittedly, hurt my bumhole quite a lot many times, mainly because I hadn't realized that the Dragoon's Tower had lots of stuff that would help me against him.

[Wolf Kanno]

Okay, that makes more sense, thanks for clarifying what you meant. I disagree inasmuch as any RPG has exactly that, and the fact that X makes it reasonably easy to deduce what your tactics should be is due to having strong game design in both visual and interface terms (i.e. you can see that a skink is a skinny, skittish thing so you should probably use Wakka or Tidus; you can see a flan is a... well, a flan, so physical attacks will be useless; and you can pretty easily scan things to learn all about them). But thank you for clarifying

My issue is that it is a matching game. Instead of letting me figure it out for myself that Tidus is better for weaker but agile enemies the game flat out tells me and proceeds to show me through it's strong visual design that Tidus will always kill these smurfers in one hit. Hell the fact it usually takes just one hit to finish them off is another problem. Being able to see turn order basically means that my entire strategy is

Step One: Scan enemy types
Step Two: Figure out turn order
Step three: Match enemy with character, hit attack
Step four: win.

It may seem like there is more strategy than earlier installment where strategy comes down to mash X to win, but since the results are the same due to poor challenge, then I'm annoyed the game forces me to take two extra steps if the result is going to be the same. If the enemies had the ability to manipulate turn order more strongly and could take a few more blows, the system would be pretty good but as it stands it's just extra busy work for a battle that was always a one-sided victory like previous installments.

Well I finished it so Only part that gave me trouble was Garuda who, admittedly, hurt my bumhole quite a lot many times, mainly because I hadn't realized that the Dragoon's Tower had lots of stuff that would help me against him.

Which version did you play?

[Pumpkin]

XIII was one of the harder ones for me, especially once I hit Pulse. I died more times in that game than any other game.

I said VII is the easiest because I never refine magic to make my characters in VIII basically unbeatable, I only use magic I draw from enemies, which balances the game more. IX wasn't super difficult, but it took some grinding in certain spots. VII I never had to grind and they just hand you levels. It's a serious task for me to get to lv. 99 in IX, and in VII I barely had to make an effort. The characters level up so quickly and their HP just goes through the roof pretty early on. I didn't fight the WEAPONS, which could have made it harder, but the rest of the game was just a cake walk. Which is good because I didn't want to spend any more time than necessary playing it.

There were a few spots that gave me a bit off difficulty in VI, XII actually gave me a lot once I hit the Phon(?) Coast. I've heard IV on the DS is easy, but I haven't beaten it yet, so I can't say for sure.

[Slothy]

See this is where I partly disagree. While it is true that Heal Tank Attack gets you through the game, honestly, the same can be said for, like, every other Final Fantasy game.

Agreed, and most FF games are extremely easy. But other titles at least obfuscate the optimal choice in a lot of situations by inundating you with various options to explore. FFXIII does the opposite and removes options. You will always need a paradigm for tanking/healing, and one for attacking. Aside from that you mash auto-battle all day long. And you can argue that you don't need to use auto-battle, except there are basically zero instances in the main game where elemental weaknesses matter, and the battle speed is frequently too fast to adequately keep up without the battles feeling more stressful than enjoyable, and auto-battle will always make the optimal choices anyway, so manually selecting options is not only annoying, it's sub-optimal.

So for the entire game, from start to finish, you choose one menu option in battle over and over, and you choose between two, maybe three, paradigms, and you will always know when to choose them (and that's being generous since it takes hours before you can choose paradigms at all leaving you to only mash auto-battle). You'll never have to decide that you need to heal, but maybe Cura will suffice instead of Curaga so you can save the MP required to cast that Ultima spell on the next turn. You'll just see you need to heal, switch to the healing paradigm, and ride it out until your health is around full and switch back to attacking.

Basically XIII took the series from the strategy being obvious, but at least having to choose the best way to go about enacting it from several different options, to the strategy being the choice. I won't argue that a lot of previous FF titles aren't easy too. They absolutely are. But FFXIII took it to a whole new level by basically completely removing anything resembling decision making. I mean, people complain about FFXII's gambit system, but even if you relied entirely on that, you still had to put more thought into setting up those gambits than you put into every battle in FFXIII combined.

[Wolf Kanno]

VII I never had to grind and they just hand you levels. It's a serious task for me to get to lv. 99 in IX, and in VII I barely had to make an effort. The characters level up so quickly and their HP just goes through the roof pretty early on. I didn't fight the WEAPONS, which could have made it harder, but the rest of the game was just a cake walk. Which is good because I didn't want to spend any more time than necessary playing it.
.

Agreed, it was a little odd going from FFVI where Terra is like level 4 and has under 63 HP to start off as Cloud with level 6 and already having 5x as much HP. I also do find that VII is the easiest game to get to level 99 with the exception of VIII but in VIII's case it's designed as a detriment to you.

Yet this goes back to what I said earlier, that the series has become much easier to make them more accessible to players.

[Colonel Angus]

Poll fail due to not having the true champion of easiest FF, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.

Come on, son!

[Karifean]

See this is where I partly disagree. While it is true that Heal Tank Attack gets you through the game, honestly, the same can be said for, like, every other Final Fantasy game.

Agreed, and most FF games are extremely easy. But other titles at least obfuscate the optimal choice in a lot of situations by inundating you with various options to explore. FFXIII does the opposite and removes options. You will always need a paradigm for tanking/healing, and one for attacking. Aside from that you mash auto-battle all day long. And you can argue that you don't need to use auto-battle, except there are basically zero instances in the main game where elemental weaknesses matter, and the battle speed is frequently too fast to adequately keep up without the battles feeling more stressful than enjoyable, and auto-battle will always make the optimal choices anyway, so manually selecting options is not only annoying, it's sub-optimal.

This part right there is where I just can't agree. First off, Auto-Battle doesn't make the optimal choices.
In Commando it doesn't make good judgment on when to use Blitz and before analyzing opponents you end up throwing in a Ruin when Attack would clearly be the better option, and vice versa.
In Ravager it completely ignores your Strength and Magic stat and just alternates between magic and strikes for the minimal extra chain boost as opposed to the extra damage. It does choose the correct element at least, but it's still suboptimal. And yeah, elemental weaknesses DO matter, since they still increase your damage output just as significantly as they always did, maybe more so. Which is what makes Imperil as vital as it is.
In Sentinel it always tries to Provoke enemies first, which can be very counterproductive. Often times I found myself quickly wanting damage reduction and not caring about Provoking.
In Medic it uses single Cures when everyone is in the green. Granted you might not want to have a Medic out at that point, but a Cura or Curaga would be far more efficient.
In Synergist and Saboteur alike, it makes poor judgments on what statuses to inflict. You really want to control those manually almost always.

So basically, the only reasons you wouldn't want to pick abilities yourself is A. your chosen abilities happen to be identical to Auto-Battle's. B. you feel like you wouldn't be fast enough to enter the commands to get the efficiency you'd like. C. you just don't care. If it's A, fair enough, but as you may have noticed, I don't think that's the case very often. It works but picking yourself would be better. If it's B, that's something you can get used to pretty quickly, in my experience. You do have enough time to pick your skills while ATB is still charging, unless you're somehow completely clueless on what to do. Are you ever? And if it's C, well that's fine for you but then don't just go calling the combat system that shallow, just because it is POSSIBLE to beat it that way. The same goes for many other games in the series and... now we're just repeating the argument.

@Wolf Kanno: Other Final Fantasy games do have that same kind of "if you put in more effort to be more efficient, you notice more of the combat system's depth" style of battling, but I would argue that XIII is actually among the series' best in that regard.

[Depression Moon]

I really don't understand how y'all are finding VIII's so abusable. You must have to go out of your way to do it because I deal relatively the same amount of damage that I do in every other entry in the series.