The Official Static Canvas Final Fantasy Tier List
Perhaps the least surprising ranking every compiled
Final Fantasy XVI is just on the horizon, and I know all of you are just jonesing to get into the boots of our man Clive and go on a big adventure fighting both epic monsters and accusations of being a Game of Thrones rip off. I’m getting ready to buy a whole new console to be able to play this at launch, and I hope that alone signifies what a huge fan of the series I am.
So with this in mind I’ve decided to compile my own personal ranking of the mainline series, and a few thoughts on each of them. For brevity’s sake I’m only including numbered games, X-2 and the XIII sequels (I’ve not played The After Years or Revenant Wings enough to properly talk about them).
Without further ado, The Official Static Canvas Final Fantasy Tier List:
S Tier:
Final Fantasy IX
The thinking man's ‘best Final Fantasy’ is one that admittedly requires further scrutiny. It's true for me at least that IX has the best opening dozen hours of any game in the series, mainline or otherwise. A brilliant baroque, theatrical dramatic series of events with a fantastic cast that unfortunately takes a bit of a dip in the back half, breaking it's pace and adopting wildly discordant sci Fi elements that just don't quite gel with what came before. Still a fantastic game, still up there with some of my favourite moments in the series. With those first hours and my favourite of the PSOne era soundtracks, the experience to be found here is so good that I still consider it to be best in show.
Final Fantasy X
I have a real soft spot for the world of FFX. I genuinely believe it’s the strongest cohesion of narrative and world building of any game in the series. Spira is a place with a brilliant illusion of history, politics and culture. The game itself a great, well paced pilgrimage that has its fair share of dramatic twists and turns and a really snappy combat system. Folk love to mock the laughing scene, but I genuinely believe it to be a brilliant moment of pathos, a willingness to be cringe in order to fight the darkness away. Yuna is one of the all time great Final Fantasy protagonists, both in terms of visual design and the emotional journey she goes on. A really bloody good game, even if the post game content does go a bit galaxy brained in its difficulty curve.
Final Fantasy VII
VII has a place in everyone's hearts. It was my first FF. An enthralling tale of false identities, corporate fascism, eco-warriors facing off against evil clones and even more evil suits. Iconic in the most pure and honest sense, it made you fall in love with it's cast then ripped your heart into pieces. I think history will always be kind to this game, even though it’s the popular choice it’s honestly that good, a fascinatingly deranged story backed up by a really cool world and brilliantly compelling combat system. That it’s remake made a whole game out of it’s opening hours should tell you everything about how iconic this title is.
A Tier:
Final Fantasy V
Of the pre-playstation FFs this is the one I've played the most. A cool, more open-ended sequel compared to what came before, there's a great emphasis on combat classes, with a huge selection to choose from that expands as the game progresses. That’s the killer selling point of V really. You can build your own team, change their identities on the fly to best suit your needs, and you are never punished for doing so. The Four Job Fiesta is a great showcase of the versitility of this system, but gameplay aside there’s also a strangely compelling story going on here, despite how rudimentary the narrative is. You come to care about these characters in a way I wasn’t expecting. A winner by any stretch of the imagination.
Final Fantasy VIII
Despite being the 8th mainline entry in the franchise, this has always felt like the difficult sophomore album of the gang. A strange, ambitious follow up to one of the GOATs of gaming, it pitted child soldiers against a cabal of time manipulating witches, asking vital questions about what the true cost of conflict is and has undoubtedly my favourite soundtrack of the bunch. Blue Fields evokes something powerfully nostalgic in me. The systems are broken beyond belief, the protagonist is a darling emo child and the game world is full of strange little oddities that almost make it feel like an object of power at times. Aliens, a mysterious crater, a cursed lamp, a bizzarre but very compelling collectible card game. It’s a fascinating addition to the series, very underrated, but not quite up there with the best on the basis of its cast, who I’m sure are beloved but feel weaker when pitted against VII’s powerhouse of a team.
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
Inevitably a tier list will result in some of these direct sequels being listed out of order, but the thing about the XIII trilogy is that because it was such a troubled idea to begin with, the direction it’s sequels goes in results in some absolutely wild experiences. Lightning Returns channels Majoras Mask and Shadow of Memories in it’s doomed sandtimer of a world. The series most ornery protagonist Claire ‘Lighning’ Farron, now twice reincarnated (I think) steps foot in the last vestiges of reality as the world comes to an end, her job to save as many souls as she possibly can, in an adventure that traverses cool biomes, funky citys and culminates in fighting god and quite literally being born anew in our world. It’s great. The clash of the campy nature of it’s premise and Lightning’s stony faced demeanour makes her every bit as iconic as her creator always wished her to be. A weird and wonderful title
Final Fantasy X-2
Where Final Fantasy X was a heavily curated pilgrimage through lands unknown, the player character an amnesiac himbo totally unafraid to ask even the stupidest of questions to effect an organic sense of exposition, X-2 approaches its world in a different way. I’ll go into more detail about this in an upcoming video about another direct sequel i’ve been playing recently but I am endlessly fascinated with what they did with the world of Spira in this game. A place forever changed by the collapse of it’s authoritarian state; in the throws of new discoveries in the wake of that giant sea bastard being gone, meaning that its old is new and its new is new, but what ties it all together is the sense of place that has retained between games. The world feels exciting to explore once more precisely because it is one you have become so intimately familiar. Also, and your mileage may vary on this, as a queer man I appreciate how aggressively gay the presentation of this game is. Girl power has never looked so good.
Final Fantasy VI
VI exists as this strange realm, mechs and magic, a wild story that goes absolutely apeshit at the halfway point. To take it as it was meant to be recieved way back in the 90s: a hugely ambitious title that nails the landing. Today? Still a brilliant experience. Great characters, a cool prototype for the legendary materia system that has its own cool quirks. Every party member has something different going on, but still has the capacity for further tinkering by the player. The game hits those emotional beats regularly and with gusto. The Haunted Train, the opera, Kefka’s maniacal laugh. Expansive, apocalyptic, hopeful. A brilliant game.
B Tier:
Final Fantasy XV
Perhaps the most unfairly maligned game in recent history, XV has always been embroiled in this narrative that it's unfinished. It's not. Perhaps it's not quite the game it wanted to be, due to a troubled development cycle and the messaging that it was originally going to be a spin off of the XIII trilogy. What is there, however, what I played start to finish and even got the platinum trophy for, was a fascinating, unique execution of an idea. Somewhat badly told story aside, this regal road trip is the epitome of 'dudes rock', hitting the highway with your bros fighting the empire, fishing, cooking amazing food and getting your feelings out in the open. Flawed, but captivating in its original state, I don't know what the updates brought to it as I haven't played it since but my memories of the game are warm and magical.
Final Fantasy IV
It’s very rare to have a protagonist in an RPG completely change their nature both narratively and mechanically, but this is executed extremely well in IV. The first FF Title to really feel like they had raised the stakes, a powerfully engaging tale of betrayal and redemption, with iconic character arcs, an enormous world to explore and a really snappy and engaging combat system, IV is a title full of really good ideas, memorable characters (the spoony bard included). A great entry in the series.
Final Fantasy I
The first entry in the series is inevitably going to seem much more rudimentary than that which follows it, but from the start a lot of the established series staples are already here. A very imbalanced class system aside, the game feels more like a point and click adventure at times: collecting items and figuring out how to use them, gathering clues from NPCs on how to solve particular puzzles. It's very clear that at the time this would have been seen as a greatly ambitious title; if the mythology is to be believed a final swansong for a company convinced it was experiencing its death rattle. Playing the pixel remaster recently, I'm thrilled to say it still holds up immeasurably well.
Final Fantasy XII
Folk will tell you that this game plays itself, but that's kind of the magic of it. Building combat paradigms is like assembling a pocket watch, hoping to God that everything clicks together. Once you've got some hours under your belt it's an absolute dream, even if other systems in the game don't quite gel in the same way (why the hell do I need a licence to wear trousers?). I really like the world design here too, there's a great sense of scope here, where cities feel enormous even though they are perfectly scoped to your needs and not a chore to navigate, dungeons are intimidating, plains are expansive and colourful. The cast is a bit duff, the story a bit too Star Wars, but there’s an undeniable charm to the overall package that makes this a solid entry in the series thus far.
C Tier:
Final Fantasy II
The words baby and bathwater come to mind when thinking about this first and most ironically named sequel. Gone are the player selected classes from the original, in comes a janky but ambitious system that moulds your party's prowess around action not predestination. It's a strange game, one that has to be wrestled with much more than it's predecessor, but it's a sense of things to come as the series would go on to drastically change things up with every new sequel. I don’t think history has been particularly kind to this game, but it has been many years since I last played it and that may be clouding my judgement a little.
Final Fantasy XIV
A Realm Reborn is not a game to be played solo, which is why it's so baffling that it's set up to be exactly that. XIV is at its best as a community hub, a space for spending time with your friends and not really thinking too hard about how the game is mostly fetch quests with the occasional dungeon thrown in for good measure. I didn't gel with the game, I stuck it out until the end of ARR because I was vaguely hooked by the story, but to me it seems very at odds with itself. Built largely for solo play but at it’s worst when you play it alone. I haven’t played any of the expansions, I hear they are great. The worldbuilding is second to none, and the fact that it’s so narrative heavy in the same way as the single player games are makes this one of the rare cases where I still consider this to be a true Final Fantasy game, just one you need to share with others to truly get the most out of it.
Final Fantasy XIII-2
How do you follow up a mostly disappointing entry in a longstanding franchise? Well, this is certainly one way. A bizarre, winding time travel adventure starring Lightning’s sister and ‘some dude’ as they face off against one of the series most blisteringly gay antagonists, Caius Ballad, an oscar worthy performance from Liam O’Brien. This is such a weird game. It’s kind of ambitious but at the same time dealing with a cursed legacy as it had to stitch stuff together from XIII’s nonsensical plot. The branching narrative allows for a lot of goofiness the game sorely needs. I have the image of Snow Villiers, Time Cop burned into the back of my retinas for life now. A fun game, not quite where Final Fantasy needed to be, but a worthy contender.
D Tier:
Final Fantasy XI
My sole memory of FFXI is making friends with someone early on who would go on to hound me for not skipping work to play, something that would eventually inspire me to log off forever. It's a challenging game to love, especially at the time I played it, as it existed before World of Warcraft's popularity consolidated 'the way MMOs are now'. It’s a fiddly experience, weirdly difficult and embroiled in the language of MMOs past. Progress hard to come by, the world itself so vast and unforgiving that a wrong turn could often spell death. Also at the time I played it, if you died you lost experience and could even end up levelling down, which fucked me off somewhat. But in a way all this esoteric ephemera makes the game all the more special. Those who adore it, who were playing it long after XIV came on the scene, do so for a reason. Not for me, but I appreciate the craft.
Final Fantasy XIII
A difficult one to get my head around. I don't really love FFXIII but I'd be remiss not to at least praise it for how good its combat is. A system that really makes use of the whole buffalo in the sense that you will need to use the myriad abilities unlocked in even ordinary combat encounters. Its fast pace also works in its favour as combat encounters genuinely feel like a brutal fight to the death, it's just a shame that it takes a good dozen hours to unlock the interesting stuff, and it’s world, while visually stunning, felt incredibly throwaway. It’s doing the FFX thing of pulling the player along a predestined path (ironic given the themes of the game') but none of the spaces you visit ever feel tangible in the same way. It’s dissapointing even if it did give way to some bizarre and wonderful sequels.
Final Fantasy III
I've only played the DS remake of this game, I don't know how reflective it is of the original, but I wasn't very impressed with what I played. Retreading a lot of the themes and systems of I with the more defined characters of II to create something not quite as good as either. Some cute ideas, like casting mini on your party to gain access through tiny cracks in doors, but it never really did anything substantial with this. A game that really could do with revisiting, especially now that a Pixel Remaster is available, but for now, it sits at the bottom of this ranking.
So there you have it. There isn’t a particularly wide gulf between tiers for me. I’ve always enjoyed this series in it’s myriad forms, and I’m sure I shall do so for years to come. What seperates S Tier from the rest for me is how these games creep into my brainspace on occasion, how I find myself compelled to return to them time and time again, in a way that I just don’t with the other tiers, even if those other games I have also loved. There’s something about IX, X and VII in particular that really speaks to me, a strong emotional bond perhaps enforced by who I was at the time I first played those games.
But you don’t want to hear about my childhood now, do you? Sound off in the comments your personal picks, and why I’m completely wrong in my rankings.