Summary
There’s only one thing scarier than the fact that theFinal Fantasyfranchise is, as of this writing, 37 years old. It’s the fact that, if you happen to read this article years into the future, it will be that much older. If you’re fairly young, that might sound mythic; if you’re old enough, on the other hand, you may begin to viewyourselfas mythic. Either way, it’s wild.
If there’s one thing Final Fantasy fans are known for, it’s opinions. How could we not have opinions? There are 16 mainline entries and counting, plus a plethora of spinoffs and even several direct sequels. Today, we’ll be sticking with the numbered fare, the big, celebrated, venerated, sometimes reviled, chapters that ultimately define the series. From the NES original to the PlayStation 5, we’re counting down to the FF crown.
Updated Jun 06, 2025 by Quinton O’Connor:You know, we’re looking back at this article, and wow. I wrote a lot. Alas, I realized… I had even more to write. Final Fantasy just gets you like that, doesn’t it?
16Final Fantasy 3
Let’s get something out of the way right off the bat. Final Fantasy 3 is not a bad game. It’s a rough-around-the-edges effort to follow in the footsteps of Dragon Quest 3, intentionally or otherwise, with a class-swapping job system that lets your party take on the mantles of a wide array of fantasy archetypes. Fearless knights, spell-slinging mages, cunning thieves, and more.
That ‘and more’ is part of the problem. Final Fantasy 3 rather bites off more than it can chew, with over two dozen interchangeable job classes, a high number of which are either impractical as a rule or only useful in highly specific situations.
This hurts the game’s central concept, and the largely unengaging storyline doesn’t help. Not that we’d expect much from the NES era, but one of its peers in that trilogy had already done things better in that regard.
15Final Fantasy 13
Well, at least Final Fantasy 3 didn’t try to make its story the main attraction. FF13’s got the opposite issue; at every turn, it desperately seeks to engage, and if that pans out, more power to you, but it sure didn’t click for us.
It’s not that everyone in this cast is unlikable; in fact, Lightning, Sazh, and Fang are a trio of decent people caught within the cruel fate of a terrible tale.
There are bright spots. While the gameplay takes forever to open up, and the leveling system is basically Final Fantasy 10’s Sphere Grid without so much as the faintest glimmer of player-dictated customization, the combat is smooth and satisfying.
Plus, best battle theme in the series? Best battle theme in the series. It’s just a shame about… so much else.
We’re not ranking the sequels, but for the record, we think Final Fantasy 13-2 is the superior game overall, even if its villain is downright dreadful. As for Lightning Returns… it’s certainly a video game. We’ll give it that.
14Final Fantasy 2
Final Fantasy 4 is frequently celebrated for bringing the first full-fledged story to the series, but with respect, that’s a disservice to Final Fantasy 2. Sure, it’s simple fare. And yes, ‘Guy speak beaver’ is one of perhaps three things Guy ever says.
But FF2 deals with loss to an extent that’s just not seen in many games of its era, and it sticks with those losses in a way that still surprises first-time players.
Foremost among the common critiques of the game is its bizarre stat-building system, which eschewed any semblance of a traditional approach in favor of a system that - until the recent Pixel Remaster - was so oddly unbalanced that players were better off having Firion and friends beat themselves up in battle to grow stronger.
You could even suffer statreductionsif you didn’t do things just so. These issues have largely been rectified, but the awkward mess of the core experience persists.
13Final Fantasy
There’s a convention among many fans of far more franchises than Final Fantasy that states you’re able to’tnotrank the original entry highly, purely on the grounds that it’s the first. Eh. Final Fantasy is fun.
There’s a timeless quality to choosing classes for your four OG Warriors of Light, sticking with those classes (and their upgrades) the whole way through, and seeing how well you fare for it. The simple adventure works just fine for what it is.
That doesn’t mean we don’t think a bunch of titles in Final Fantasy’s history haven’t surpassed it! This is a perfect pick-up-and-play old-school RPG, but it simply lacks the sort of depth that makes future entries shine.
Even so? That moment half an hour in, when you cross the newly-repaired bridge, the legendary Final Fantasy main theme kicks in, the game’s title flashes on the screen? Just as epic today as it was 36 years ago.
12Final Fantasy 4
We promise we’ll stop being so mean to the 2D era after this. Final Fantasy 4’s leap from 8-bit to 16-bit architecture was just as big a jump narratively as it was graphically, with a cast of characters far more well-defined than anyone who came before them.
The heroic Cecil, the conflicted Kain, the mystic Rydia, and all the rest. This is pulp fantasy at its finest, and the introduction of the Active Time Battle (ATB) system helped the series stand out from its contemporaries.
There’s a love-or-hate goofiness to the way so many characters sacrifice themselves only to be revealed as fine later on, and we aren’t in love with the Saturday morning cartoon nature of it all.
At least they went so completely ham with Cid that it circled sheer silliness and somehow turned into awesomeness - the man was holding a bomb while he jumped from an airship to the ground below and came away unscathed.
11Final Fantasy 15
On the one hand, you’ve got to admire any piece of media that begins with four chums pushing their out-of-gas luxury automobile down a road to the tune of Florence and the Machine’s cover of ‘Stand by Me’.
On the other hand, what ought to have been Final Fantasy 15’s actual beginning was sliced off and turned into a Hollywood movie with a 12 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and that’s only the start of a lengthy list on how Frankensteinian this game becomes.
Final Fantasy 15 is the resurrected corpse of what was, at one time, Final Fantasy Versus 13. Whereas its earlier form would have been an operatic tragedy, the developers behind FF15 went for more of a charming road trip vibe for much of the game’s runtime.
Hey, no shade; these are probably the best parts, even if the actual storyline barely moves past its one-fifth mark in those first eight of fourteen (!) chapters.
The trouble truly starts when those remaining chapters are relied-upon for the remaining four-fifths, and their breakneck, hyper-linear pace is a veritable trainwreck as a result.
Robust post-launch content helps, and the game’s ending is shockingly good by contrast, but this Final Fantasy will forever feel at odds with itself, a fun if flawed open world extravaganza that then searches for the ghost of Versus 13 and comes up painfully short.
10Final Fantasy 8
Final Fantasy 8 is a good game that has the somewhat unfortunate distinction of launching at a time when Square was tossing out great ones left and right. As an audiovisual experience, there was nothing else like it in its heyday.
It’s got arguably the best summoned monsters system in the series, and its often-maligned junction system is, frankly, woefully misunderstood.
(Hot tip: you don’t need to draw 100 of any spell. There are far better ways to get those than in battle.)
Protagonist Squall Leonhart portrays a pretty realistic depiction of the kind of antisocial behavior that arises among justifiably troubled adolescents, too, and many of the big setpiece moments land.
FF8 stumbles elsewhere, with some jarring plot beats, a fairly bland love interest for Squall whose relevance only grows as the story unfolds, and a story that relies on the strength of that middling romance’s portrayal above all.
Triple Triad, though? Ten out of ten, no notes. Except this one, technically, because, you know, we used the “note” formatting.
9Final Fantasy 11
The franchise’s first of two forays into the field of MMORPGs, Final Fantasy 11 takes full advantage of the increased allowance in scope to deliver the deliciously lore-stuffed realm of Vana’diel. Final Fantasy had long been famed for its cool worlds by 2002, but it took a project of this magnitude to go all-in.
The depth of Vana’diel’s many cultures, historical events, and the political machinations between its ruling parties blew minds at the time.
Infamously, FF11’s difficulty for solo players at launch was so great that it was entirely possible to leveldownif you performed poorly, and so many monsters were capable of felling single adventurers in seconds.
It was a hostile environment unless you had a group of dedicated friends, though this has been toned down significantly through the years, and the introduction of AI-controlled NPC party members has made FF11 far more approachable.
8Final Fantasy 12
The world of Ivalice is as much the main character of Final Fantasy 12 as any individual person… for better and worse. There’s no shortage of intriguing souls - Balthier, Basch, and Ashelia are all charismatic in their own ways, and the villainous spin on Cid is a fan-favorite antagonist even if the primary foe of Vayne Solidor pales in comparison.
Perspective lead Vaan probably gets more hate than he deserves, but he’s still a weak link to be sure.
But for all the noteworthy characters, no one really gets a satisfying arc in FF12, a game so much more interested in showing off its (spectacular) setting than maintaining proper pacing for a story with definite highs but far too many lows.
That said, the Gambit system is one of gaming’s best efforts to handle computer-controlled party members without sacrificing player input, and it’s a crying shame it hasn’t shown up since.
If you’ve never played FF12, go with the 2017 remaster; The Zodiac Age fixes many of the game’s shortcomings, even if it can’t solve its poorly-paced main scenario.
7Final Fantasy 5
No other game on this list has benefited more from a retranslation than Final Fantasy 5. It skipped the West at the time of its release, premiered here with a messy port riddled with a bland script some years later, and then enjoyed a sublime fresh localization on the Game Boy Advance.
FF5 was always on the brink of feeling like the series' most rambunctious, swashbuckling adventure, but it wasn’t until then that its cast feltfun.
That’s FF5 in a nutshell, especially now - fun. It’s a game about a neat little group of characters who embark on an old-school high-fantasy quest and revel in it along the way. The job class system is so good that fans get together every year for randomization runs where they’re stuck committing to specific builds.
Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta capitalizes on this backdrop to raise money for charities, too, so it echoes the same feel-good fun time of the game itself.
