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Playing through Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX back-to-back really drives home just how much of a turning point the PlayStation era was for the series. The series moved on from being so iterative and really started getting experimental in big, albeit sometimes messy ways. I’m not sure if there were too many cooks in the kitchen, but one thing for sure is that kitchen got a lot bigger. These 3 games feel like they come from larger teams with bigger ambitions, each one trying to push the franchise in a new direction, rather than just refine or tweak what came before.

Final Fantasy VII is the obvious line in the sand. Moving from the SNES’s 2D plane into fully 3D character models layered over pre-rendered backgrounds is such a generational leap that it’s almost hard to recognize how dramatic the shift was back in 1997. And then you add in the shift to a disc-based system, which suddenly gave the developers room to tell a much grander, more cinematic story. That dramatic generation shift carries forward into Final Fantasy VIII, where the character models lean toward the more realistic proportions. And the way it blends those gameplay models into the full-motion prerendered cutscenes goes from “pretty neat” in VII to really technically impressive in VIII and IX. In fact, by the time you get to IX, it often feels so seamless that I don’t realize that I’m in a cutscene until it slowly takes my control away from the character. That’s to say nothing about the cinematic CG cutscenes in IX. You can certainly tell Square was getting really good at making CG movies at this point. And pair all that with the music which, never once falters across the whole series, and the whole presentation just rockets these games so far beyond what the NES and SNES entries accomplished visually and emotionally. Those earlier games still told great stories and built strong character connections, but this is where the series starts flexing in a completely different way.

What stands out just as much, though, is how willing these games are to tear up their own series conventions. The battle system changed in Final Fantasy IV to the ATB, and that ATB persists into Final Fantasy IX, but the magic system in this trilogy of games gets broken down to bits and rebuilt twice. For the past 6 games you needed to have a mage class in your party if you wanted to cast spells (Except in Final Fantasy II, but we don’t talk about that one much). But the materia system in VII suddenly enables anyone in your party to run a black mage build. Or heck, your strongest melee fighter can have a couple spells to fall back on when the situation calls for it. Then the magic gets reworked entirely again in VIII with the junction system which while I have my criticisms, I can see why some people love that system. It’s as they say, reasonable people can come to different conclusions. Perhaps that’s one of the trade-offs with this era: you can’t just slip back into the old familiar rhythms anymore. Every new Final Fantasy asks you to relearn how it works, and while that keeps the series from going stale, it also makes each entry a bit divisive. If you gel with the system, it becomes a new favourite. If you chafe against it, you call the game garbage.

Something I didn’t fully appreciate before playing through these games is just how influential the Final Fantasy series was on the JRPGs that came after. You can see ideas, themes, and even mechanical DNA from VII, VIII, and IX echoing into other franchises that I already know I love, like the Tales Of series. It’s easy to look back now and poke at the jank or criticize the systems that NOW feel dated, especially when later games iterate on and improve those ideas. But it’s important to remember that when these games originally came out, they were trailblazers. While other franchises were content to slightly iterate on their previous games to be consistent and familiar, Final Fantasy was out there challenging what it even means to be called a JRPG anymore.

And yet, for all that, I keep circling back my personal ranking of these games. I still prefer the SNES trilogy of games. IV, V, and VI have aged much more gracefully, at least for me. Part of that is probably timing, as they came out at the end of the SNES lifecycle and really pushed that hardware to its limits. The people making the games at the time were already experts in pixel art and creating interesting 2D locations and set pieces. Compare that to the PlayStation games, where making games in 3D was still in its infancy, and you can feel the growing pains. The way the textures are stretched and warped on awkward 3D models, it just isn’t good to look at in this day and age. The PS1 Final Fantasy games are absolutely ambitious in ways that are commendable, but innovation doesn’t always equal timelessness. Final Fantasy VII’s overworld models are laughably simple, they look they could be made of clay or cardboard. And sometimes navigating those pre-rendered backgrounds was confusing in ways I don’t think were intentional. 4

Now, I haven’t played the Final Fantasy VII Remake, I’ve just seen screenshots and a few clips here and there, and it looks incredible. But it does make me wonder whether all three of these games need that kind of treatment. Do they all deserve to be rebuilt with modern sensibilities now that we understand 3D design so much better, or is it okay for them to exist as artifacts of their time? They may not hold up as cleanly as some other classics, but their impact is undeniable. And there’s something to be said for leaving history intact, rough edges and all.

From here, I’m heading into the last stretch of this little project: Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII. X is a weird one for me, I made it all the way to the final boss when I played it on my PS2 back in 2005, but never actually managed to finish the game off. And now that it’s been so long, I struggle to remember anything other than the very main story bits (and that laughing scene). XII is even stranger; I’ve played the first half of the game at least three separate times on different systems and never committed to seeing it through. Honestly, those unfinished games was a large part of my inspiration for embarking on this journey in the first place.

After that, I honestly don’t know what comes next. Maybe I’ll keep going with the numbered entries, the XIII trilogy, the XV multimedia juggernaut, and XVI, which I know shocking little about. Or maybe I spend some time detouring into the side stories like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Or maybe I pivot to an entirely different franchise, and finally give the Tales Of series the full play through it probably deserves.

Whatever direction I end up going, I have a feeling I’ll keep writing about it. At this point, that’s kind of half the fun.