I'm on a bit of a Final Fantasy bender lately. I'm playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth with my wife whenever she's got the time in her busy schedule, and when she doesn't, I play Final Fantasy 6 Pixel Remaster on my laptop... which I also play at work (shh).
YouTube apparently picked up on that and recommended me some nobody's channel, ranking all the games from 1-16, and comparing with their community of about 500 people who also voted.
I disagreed with it so much, although I'm not a hardcore fan or anything. I haven't even played them all, and some I played but never completed. Others I've played several times. But I did find it unusual that not only did I disagree with their ranking order, but I couldn't even understand how they could have come to their conclusions - both the youtuber and its community.
(pictures taken from in-game galleries and screenshots)
I can't say I've played them, because they're lame pixelly games. I've dabbled in III and V in the past but never got hooked. I hear very good things about IV though.
See, I played XVI relatively recently, just a few months ago, and although I did actually enjoy it quite a bit, I can't tell you much about it from memory, and that's not because my memory sucks (although it does). It was just... quite forgettable.
XV suffers the same fate. Enjoyable, but entirely forgettable. There's always attempts of blowing you away with extremely bombastic visuals and battles. But after a while, it just wears off. Every fight is the same and way too button-bashy, and the music just gets so absurdly exciting it feels like it exploded itself into a corner and couldn't find its way back. Ever heard of subtlety??
All this was to hide what is basically a pair of very weak storylines and unrelateable characters.
Honestly, even though I can't remember that much... XVI is kinda garbage in hindsight, even though I definitely enjoyed it all the same.
As for XV, I definitely wouldn't skip it out as a Final Fantasy fan, but it wasn't even designed originally as a full game, they just made it that way as an afterthought. It shows.
This is 90% of XVI's entire gameplay.
Honestly, I just wasn't a big fan of this one. My FF peer and oldest friend puts this as no.1 for god knows what reason. The whole story at least to me was as forgettable as the main character other than just how much I dislike his emo facade. The battle system blows, and the characters need to take a 3-point turn if you walk into a wall at too sharp an angle. I think a lot of people put a lot of merit in the battle and level systems but... it's just not for me.
The music though... fantastique!
If I never have to see this character again I'll be a happier individual.
That's pretty much all I have to say about VIII
Honestly I struggled to decide where to put these games. They are GOOD games. Excellent games. I just can't think of that much to say about them. I think there was a lot I didn't like such as XII's level up system and XIII's surprisingly weak story for a Final Fantasy game (especially given there were THREE parts to this game). Instinctively, XII is the far superior game between the two, but I can't put it above VII, nor below VIII, and they suffer for me personally for the same major reason: A meh story. Story is what Final Fantasy should be all about!
But yeah, XII definitely has the superior story, battles, world design, and general aesthetic feel compared to the mechanical sterility of XIII, and you have a ton of fun doing hunts and sidequests compared to basically none of that in XIII.
This could very well be a far better game than I'm ranking it, to be fair. I only played it once, and a very long time ago. As I play the remake now, very fond memories come back, certain dialogue and locations (Costa Del Sol, Junon, Gold Saucer). But the feeling I get when I think back is kinda clunky and sticky almost. The colours felt overly smoggy and saturated (kind of the point in some ways), and I didn't realate so well with the character designs which were not as quaint as pixels, but not as realistic as full-size humanoids.
It just felt kinda ugly. That's why it was such a great thing a remake was being had. All the shortfalls that made me feel off about the game are overcome by time and technology. Story, game mechanics, materia system and such - great stuff, and of course I can't avoid the mention that this game has probably the single most influential and impactful moment in all of gaming history.
The more I play the remake, the more the original should climb up the rankings as I start to appreciate exactly what it was trying to accomplish with limited technology.
I've no idea how such a brief blog is approaching 1,000 words so I'm gonna cut it short here and give my TOP 5 in a part 2! I wonder if anyone can at least agree on a top 5 witih me...?
Honestly I'm as surprised as the next person that I didnt put 7 in the top 3 but that just seems to be the expected outcome rather than how I truly feel.
