Final Fantasy – important, but very dated NES JRPG
Final Fantasy II – meh
Final Fantasy III – meh
Final Fantasy IV – amazing, aged very well
Final Fantasy V – good
Final Fantasy VI – beyond perfect
Final Fantasy VII – best game ever
Final Fantasy VIII – beyond perfect
Final Fantasy IX – not perfect, but one of my fav games ever
Final Fantasy X – not perfect, but one of my fav games ever
Final Fantasy XI – stupid MMO that should’ve been called “Final Fantasy Online”
Final Fantasy XII – good, big disappointment
Final Fantasy XIII – disappointing, but had great combat, had a great sequel (FF XIII-2)
Final Fantasy XIV – stupid MMO that should’ve been called “Final Fantasy Online II”
Final Fantasy XV – not yet released, will be an action RPG made by the Kingdom Hearts team
Nah, we’re not quite at the game yet. I was kind of surprised by my desire to get a PlayStation. My brother had an N64, and there were a few games I liked for it, but nothing I really loved aside from Super Mario 64. The PlayStation was something we completely ignored (being a Nintendo household, we thought of it as a Sega-like system), but it had really great commercial campaigns for games like Parappa The Rapper, Resident Evil, Medievil, Metal Gear Solid, and Final Fantasy VII. I saw the commercial for Final Fantasy VII and didn’t know what I was looking at! It didn’t have much gameplay footage, but it had these incredible videos featuring demons (which turned out to be the Ifrit summon), rad looking anime characters (Cloud, Aeris, Sephiroth, and Jenova), and a steampunk-style world. I couldn’t tell what the game played like, but I knew I liked stuff that looked rad, and this game looked rad.
There was also a lot of hype surrounding the release of Final Fantasy III (really VI), and I knew people loved that game, so the follow-up would likely be great. The word epic was thrown around a lot about FFVII. The story was supposed to be amazing. It was supposed to take a really long time to beat. It had swearing in it. The packaging was classy white, and had awesome character art on it. Without ever having played the game, I knew I wanted it. The game I wanted the most was Spawn: The Eternal (I was into comics), but that game was a piece of garbage. So thankfully Santa couldn’t find it, and asked the guy working at Toys R’ Us what he thought the best PS1 game was. Thankfully, he was right.
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“The word epic was thrown around a lot about FFVII. The story was supposed to be amazing. It was supposed to take a really long time to beat. It had swearing in it.”
Final Fantasy VII was created as a super game. Square knew they were making something special for both Japanese and North American audiences. This was an RPG that was engineered to succeed overseas. It was not a half-hearted effort like Mystic Quest, or Secret of Evermore (although those games are both rad in their own ways); Final Fantasy VII was an ambitious, big-budget juggernaut, with a new director, and a more modern setting.
Hironobu Sakaguchi stepped down as director of the Final Fantasy series after Final Fantasy V. He acted as the Final Fantasy series Producer up until Final Fantasy IX. Sakaguchi left Square as its Vice President in 2003 after directing the super expensive Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within CG-animated film. The movie had an enormous budget, and lost over 90 million dollars at the box office. After leaving Square, Sakaguchi formed a new studio called Mistwalker in 2004.
The director of Final Fantasy VII was, instead, Yoshinori Kitase, who previously directed the two mightiest, most wonderful Super Nintendo omega-beast RPGs: Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. Kitase’s background was in animation writing, and started at Squaresoft as the game designer for Final Fantasy Adventure (also known as “the game before Secret of Mana”) for the Nintendo Gameboy. He then went on to do field planning, event planning, and scenario writing for Final Fantasy V, before getting to direct Final Fantasy VI, which he was also the Event Planner and Scenario Writer for. Kitase has said that early motivations for writing the Final Fantasy series were to tell film-quality stories, with timed music, and facial expressions. Final Fantasy VII expanded upon his desire to tell film-quality stories, as well as tell fantasy stories, not always in a traditional fantasy setting.
Head on over to page three for the final history…