And here's the conclusion.
To be honest, after a bit of discussion, I struggle even more with this. I think I'll stand by the ordering of ranks 10-6 (the previous post), and I can justify VII's lower position for what comes up here. But what I initially had written as number 1 is now reconsidered!
This is the problem when your game franchise is just so frickin' good. A ton of them can all justifiably be placed in the no.1 spot.
But here's mine, based on a mix-bag of overall game quality, rose-tinted sentimentality, and musical bias, being a musician and all.
Top 5!
5: XI & XIV
These were the Massive Multiplyer Online's (MMO), XI being their first ever. Man, it turns out its still going, with about 40,000 monthly users or something. Gee, this was the peak of my happiness in life I think (at the tiem). Simpler times. I spent about 1 month of hours over a period of 6 months on this game.
XI was very damaging though to every other aspect of my life. This is the first and only time I got deeply addicted to something and even lost my girlfriend-at-the-time to it.
After 6 months, It was really getting outta hand even by my teenage standards, and I heroically vowed to end it. I went to one of the big city shopping areas in-world, with huge crowds of other online players, and I yelled out 'FREE GEAR', and just handed over all my high level stuff. I was stripped bare, and I quit out forever.
As for XIV, I also had a great time and it's certainly the better game. But, I never wanted to get myself addicted like with XI again - so I didn't. I still played a good few hundred hours over a lengthy time but I maintained an actual working adult life simultaneously and, keeping to real life, never made any human connections lol.
This game is massive, but never overwhelming. It perhaps lacks humour, but the story is well-balanced and despite its length, never feels overly heavy or burdensome. Of course, the fishing was exceptional and one of my favourite parts of the game XD
4: VI
I'm playing the Pixel Remaster right now. I'll just say that the passion involved in this remake is abundantly clear. It comes with all the features I mentioned in my previous post about all the Pixel Remasters, including the gorgeous concept art gallery:
It gives you options to revert back to the original music, graphical and text styles, access to the art gallery, you can turn on and off random battle encounters, you can speed it up, auto-battle, and generally customise it to how you want, with the full acknowledgement that people don't really have the patience for a turn-based system as it was all those years ago. But you can if you want. the option is there.
Also, you have access to the conceptual art of the world and monsters which is just amazing.
Best of all though, the music has been completely re-made, real singers included when it comes to the opera scenes! and just... exceptionally orchestrated throughout to the point you can just listen for hours without even playing the game itself. Absolutely wonderful.
Also, for such a pixelly game where you just blast through the text-based story, it's actually quite deep with a lot of melancholy, darkness and regret, but also humour and hope. It covers all grounds. You can't emotionally connect as much as you would with a modern game with voice acting and all, but still. Let your imagination free.
3: X
I was still in that very impressionable stage of life when X came about. This was the first one with voice acting, which was more often than not hilariously terrible but at the time I didn't really think about it other than that infamous laugh scene.
But this was, for the time, a HUGE game. Again, the heavy, heavy world building of fantasy zones just took me away like a really good book. And it was my first time really experiencing grinding to level up for hundreds of hours I suppose, just to beat the extreme high level monsters. The leveling up system is hard to improve upon, and I probably played the mini-game Blitzball more than the main game lol.
Beautiful blend of musical styles, and a fascinating story concept that starts off giving you the impression of a rather cliche time travel 1,000 years into the future and ends up, well... not being that but something more bizarre. Very cool!
2: IX
IX was pretty much the one I actually started on and was initially my choice for Number 1. No other game really sticks out more than IX from he PS1 era. It appealed to my sense of fantasy quite deeply, as it is indeed the most... phantasmagorical (very nerdy final fantasy music reference literally nobody will get) one of the whole series I reckon. While a lot of the games are based similarly around a kind of renaissance or medieval European period, the amount of colour and magic and sheer variation in humanoid figures blows me away in this installment.
If this was musical ranking, IX would absolutely be number 1, and I would bet if it came to a public vote, the result would be the same. This games music showed such a deep understanding of how the world should feel, you get easily transported there yourself. The quintessential features of all western period music is absolutely spot on, from flamenco to ragtime, classical to pop. Ahh, perfection.
The biggest reason this game appealed to me is that its has particularly thought-provoking, philosophical struggles that each character has to go through. The impact that had on a child version of me is hard to overstate.
So yeah, FFIX has always been my favourite, and that's not even needing to take into consideration gameplay mechanics, graphics, yadda yadda. I just loved it all.
1: Review Time
Ok I realise my word count is getting obtuse again. So I'll leave number 1 as a mystery, finishing off with a review I was always going to do. So which one is it? I missed out a few: Mobile games? FFX-2? FFXIII-3?? Tactics? Awakening?
... I think you know.