Most Depressing Final Fantasy Game

[The Man]

Most of the FF games have the existence of hope as a central theme. FFVI just lets things get a lot darker before it shows up.

Btw Scotty, your spoiler tag is broken.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

Yeah, I'm too sleepy to do spoiler tags right apparently, not that it was a big spoiler.

[Fox]

If we were including spin-offs in this I'd like to put in a note for Crisis Core. It's nowhere near as depressing as VI in terms of what actually happens, but playing the entire game with foreknowledge of what's going to happen in the end was pretty devastating.

Also the way it happened was pretty devastating. That entire final sequence, the way it was worked into the gameplay, was so unbelievably well done. I cried a lot, I am not ashamed to admit.

[Bolivar]

VI is the easy answer but I could see IX. Alot of mass murder goes down that hits harder because of the larger populations and otherwise whimsical feel. The black mages falling out of the airship was pretty heart-wrencing and there's also the implied ending.

[Taiga]

It depends. Regarding a game's ending, Crisis Core and Type-0 are the most depressing games to me. They really made me cry.
Regarding the overall atmosphere of a game, I'd choose X out of all the FF entries I've finished so far. I don't know if I can explain it well, but I think that "death" and "farewells" are major themes during the entire game which often create a heavy and depressing atmosphere. The few times you see the characters having "a good time" it's actually more or less faked (except for Tidus), so it's really not a pleasant journey at all at any point of the story.

[Laddy]

VI. Racism, imperialism, loss of family, genocide, a literal apocalypse, suicide, and rape allegory makes it pretty much sad as hell.

[Edge7]

This may seem cliche, but I think I was most depressed playing FF7 not because the game itself was depressing, but because of this screen.

FFVIIGameover.png

I don't know, but when I played this game as a twelve year old, I played with the illusion that these characters were somehow real in their own living, breathing universe. The game over was a harsh wakeup call that even in the context of FFVII's universe, the whole thing's just a movie. Like, your punishment for losing is BEING REMINDED THAT YOU'RE JUST LIVING A HOLLOW FANTASY.

And then there was that time when I beat the game and didn't know they lived until the credits ended...

[Bubba]

Will get some weird looks but FFIX. A lot of bad stuff happened in that game and perhaps the usual cheerful/whimsical nature of it made the shocks so much sharper when they happened.

Don't worry. The beauty of being on an online forum is that any weird looks you get you'll be blissfully unaware of.

[Pumpkin]

VI

IX is depressing but it also feels so hopeful. Most of the FF games do. VI for some reason to me does not. It feels hopeless the whole time