Final Fantasy has 217 titles, not counting DLC.

The mainline series has 16 titles. But don’t be deceived. Those 16 titles have numerous remakes. And I don’t mean ports. I mean full-scale remakes.

Take Final Fantasy III. There’s the original Famicom version, then the 3D remake first made for Nintendo DS then ported elsewhere, then the pixel remake made for PC and smartphones then ported to consoles. So that’s three Final Fantasy III games, and that doesn’t include Final Fantasy III for SNES which is actually Final Fantasy VI.

Oh, but we haven’t scratched the surface. Not at all.

You see, certain Final Fantasy games have their own spin-off. For example, Final Fantasy VII has a prequel called Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Which got its own remaster called Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - Reunion. And there are even more Final Fantasy VII spin-offs.

There are mobile specific Final Fantasy games: Final Fantasy Adventure for Game Boy, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for Game Boy Advance, Dissidia Final Fantasy for PSP, King’s Knight: Wrath of the Dark Dragon for smartphones.

Chocobos have their own spin-offs: Chocobo Racing, Chocobo’s Dungeon 2, Chocobo Stallion.

And finally, there are Final Fantasy games that at first glance don’t seem related to Final Fantasy but are Final Fantasy games nonetheless. This includes Justice Monsters Five, which is a pinball game for smartphones that has since been delisted.

Do I recommend playing every Final Fantasy game ever made? No, not really. Square Enix has released some truly horrifying Final Fantasy dreck. But it’s interesting to see what wild stuff exists with the Final Fantasy name.

@atomicpoet

My son and friends went to a concert in Toronto on the weekend of Masayoshi Soken, the music from the Final Fantasy series. (apparently it was really fantastic)

So I asked him "alright which is the BEST final fantasy game?" (I watched a housemate play a few hours of.. VII? VIII? back in college)
He said "Its complicated; and contentious." and then an hour long treatise about it that ur post reminded me of.

Im happy for those that enjoy FF, just seems daunting to me.

Third spruce tree on the left It sounds more complex than it actually is. Most FF games are not related to each other. Most are pretty much standalone. Different games don’t even have the same characters.

I think the reason why it’s so complicated and contentious is precisely because Final Fantasy games are so different from each other.

The other thing is, Final Fantasy games are not hard. They’re just long. You grind, grind, grind, get your level up, so you can defeat the boss.

@atomicpoet @tezoatlipoca Final Fantasy sounds too much like real life!

Robert J. Berger Third spruce tree on the left You’d be surprised how many people play games to pretty much just do things they’d regularly do in real life. You’d think most people would want to use video games to do extraordinary things. But often enough, they just want to do boring things.

@atomicpoet @rberger @tezoatlipoca Home Office and Living Room Simulator. You can play it recursively in-game, but if you play during work hours you get hostile messages from the boss and the webcam tries to follow you into tbe bathroom.

Robert J. Berger Third spruce tree on the left You’d be surprised how many people play games to pretty much just do things they’d regularly do in real life. You’d think most people would want to use video games to do extraordinary things. But often enough, they just want to do boring things.

@atomicpoet @rberger @tezoatlipoca I actively fantasize about a life where full time tending a herd of goats is a viable life choice. Feed, groom, muck, drink some wine and go to bed. I'm not looking to be the "Google of goats", I just want a life where the problems in front of me are solvable without a global cabal of oligarchs fighting me every step of the way.