Final Fantasy Is a Different Genre on Every List

Final Fantasy has sold more than 212 million units, and the entry most people mean when they say the name, Final Fantasy VII, turns 30 next spring.¹

This July the series was busy celebrating a different game. Final Fantasy X reached 25 years on 19 July 2026, Square Enix commissioned an anniversary logo from Tetsuya Nomura, and four days later the X/X-2 HD Remaster landed on Nintendo Switch 2.²

All 16 rankings below hold Final Fantasy. Not one of them holds the same Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy has no recurring hero and no continuous world, which leaves every list free to nominate a different game as the series.

Sixty-four franchises, and Super Mario has the easier job

The widest games question the site asks puts Final Fantasy in a bracket of 64 franchises, alongside Pokémon, Minecraft, Call of Duty, The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario.

Volume is what Final Fantasy brings to that company. Guinness World Records named it the most prolific role-playing game series in February 2017, by which point 87 RPG titles had carried the name, spin-offs included.³

Super Mario brings the thing a franchise bracket rewards fastest: a character anyone can draw from memory. Nintendo's mascot needs no plot summary and no 60-hour commitment, and he is the name across from Final Fantasy in the shot below.

The word "franchise" flattens what Final Fantasy actually is. Sixteen numbered entries share a title, a crystal motif and a job system, so a newcomer asking where to start gets sixteen defensible answers and no obvious one.

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Final Fantasy VII against Ocarina of Time: the series reduced to one disc

Widen the question from franchises to individual games and Final Fantasy stops behaving like a series at all. Across 32 candidates for the best video game ever made it appears exactly once, as Final Fantasy VII.

Square Enix counts more than 15.7 million copies sold for Final Fantasy VII since its 1997 PlayStation release, the largest total any single entry in the series has managed.¹ It is also the game that put Japanese role-playing games on Western shelves in numbers, sold on three CDs and a cinematic opening.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time draws the comparison in the shot below, and nothing else in the field is gentler: Tetris, Chrono Trigger, Half-Life 2, Super Mario Bros., Red Dead Redemption 2.

A single-game bracket is the hardest test a long series faces. Everything Final Fantasy worked out after 1997, from the job systems to the voice acting to the MMO, counts for nothing on this screen.

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Final Fantasy VI or Final Fantasy VII: which one is the series?

Point the question inward and the competition changes completely. Every one of the 15 options here is a Final Fantasy, running from the 1987 original through Final Fantasy VII Remake.

Final Fantasy VII is the commercial answer. Final Fantasy VI is the answer people give when they want to be taken seriously: a Super Famicom game from April 1994⁴ built around an ensemble with no lead, and a villain who wins halfway through and wrecks the world. It is the game Final Fantasy VII runs into on screen.

Final Fantasy IX, X, XII, Tactics and XIV Online are on the same 15. Each recruited a different generation, and each generation is convinced the series peaked at the moment it arrived.

None of these entries was built to beat the others. Final Fantasy V is a job-system puzzle box, Final Fantasy X is a scripted story with actors, Final Fantasy XIV is a subscription MMO on a patch schedule. What they have in common is a title and a crystal.

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Two Final Fantasys and The Witcher 3 on one RPG list

Sort by genre and the series takes two of 18 places among the greatest role-playing games ever made: Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VI.

Both are there for the same reason. Between 1994 and 1997 Square taught a mass audience that a game could carry a 40-hour story, and Final Fantasy VII carried that lesson outside Japan.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt stands opposite, representing the tradition where the story bends to the player instead. Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium and Fallout: New Vegas belong to that school.

Calling both traditions "RPG" is what makes this list unstable. Final Fantasy VII tells one fixed story well; Disco Elysium refuses to tell the same story twice. However that resolves, Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII are competing with each other here too.

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Dragon Quest got there first

Rewind to the decade the series began and Final Fantasy appears twice on a 16-strong list of the best Japanese role-playing games of the 1980s. Square Enix dates the first game to December 1987 on the Famicom and its sequel to December 1988.⁴

Dragon Quest is on that list three times, and it was there before Final Fantasy existed. Square Enix still keeps 27 May as Dragon Quest Day, the date Enix shipped the original in Japan in 1986.⁵ Dragon Quest III supplies the opposition in the shot below.

The two series never converged in size. Dragon Quest has sold over 97 million units worldwide, less than half what Final Fantasy has managed.¹

Phantasy Star, Megami Tensei and EarthBound Beginnings fill out the decade. On a 1980s list Final Fantasy is the fast follower that outlived what it was following.

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Chrono Trigger and the 16-bit years

Restrict the field to one machine and Final Fantasy claims two of the 20 best SNES games: Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy IV.

Final Fantasy IV reached the Super Famicom in July 1991, and Square Enix marked its 35th anniversary on 19 July 2026 in the same breath as Final Fantasy X's 25th, because the two games shipped on that date ten years apart.⁶

Chrono Trigger sits across the pairing below, and it came out of the same Square offices with an overlapping team. Super Mario World, A Link to the Past and Super Metroid are the platform's untouchable three.

This hardware is where the series earned the reputation it still trades on. The sprite art, the scores and the multi-hour story all matured here, before 3D arrived and changed what a Final Fantasy looked like.

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Final Fantasy X turns 25

Final Fantasy X is the series' representative among 18 candidates for the best PlayStation 2 game, and it is the anniversary that made this a Final Fantasy summer.

It was the first Final Fantasy built for Sony's second console, and Yoshinori Kitase has said work started in 1999, straight after Final Fantasy VIII.⁶

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Gran Turismo 4, Metal Gear Solid 3 and Silent Hill 2 are on the same list. Shadow of the Colossus provides the matchup pictured.

The voice acting is what dates Final Fantasy X and what defined everything after it. Nobody at Square had recorded a fully voiced Final Fantasy, so actors auditioned in the meeting rooms by the office reception, a process Kitase now calls "very amateurish", and he reckons the game came out holding "all the elements that would later define the series".⁶ Every Final Fantasy since has been written to be spoken aloud.

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The Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster, entered as a repair job

Some rankings judge a game that already existed. On this 15-strong remaster list the Final Fantasy option is the Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster rather than Final Fantasy X.

The remaster has now outlived the console it was made for. It arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 on 23 July 2026, twenty-five years and four days after the game it repairs.²

The Last of Us Remastered lines up beside it, and other publishers brought the same idea: Metroid Prime Remastered, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Resident Evil HD Remaster.

A remaster list quietly rewards whichever original aged worst, because the more a game needed fixing the more impressive the fix looks. Final Fantasy X is an odd fit for that logic, since the 2001 version still runs.

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A Realm Reborn: the credits that name the 2010 players

Among 19 candidates for the best Japanese role-playing game of the 2010s, the Final Fantasy option is not the MMO Square Enix shipped in 2010. It is Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, and the extra words carry the whole story.

Final Fantasy XIV arrived in 2010 and was rebuilt from nothing. Naoki Yoshida produced and directed the replacement, which launched in 2013.

Two Guinness World Records titles record what that rebuild cost. A Realm Reborn holds the longest end credits in an MMO at one hour 38 minutes, because the team listed the players of the failed 2010 game in them as thanks, and it also holds the record for the most original pieces of music in a video game, at 384.³

Persona 5 takes the other slot below, on a list that also carries NieR: Automata, Dragon Quest XI, Xenoblade Chronicles and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Final Fantasy XV is the series' second entry here, and the MMO beside it is still growing: Yoshida has set the sixth expansion, Evercold, for January 2027.⁷

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Final Fantasy VII Rebirth against Baldur's Gate 3

Nostalgia carries a series a long way, so a list restricted to the current console generation is a useful check. Final Fantasy takes two of the 15 PS5 places: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Final Fantasy XVI.

Rebirth is the middle chapter of a trilogy whose ending now has a name and a season. Square Enix announced Final Fantasy VII Revelation at Summer Game Fest on 5 June 2026 for spring 2027, directed by Naoki Hamaguchi and produced by Kitase, with Nomura as creative director.¹

Baldur's Gate 3 occupies the opposite corner, and Sony's strongest hand fills the rest of the field: Astro Bot, God of War Ragnarök, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Demon's Souls.

Rebirth carries an odd handicap on a list like this. Square Enix counts more than 140 perfect review scores across it and Remake,¹ and a 2024 game retelling a 1997 game still has to beat original work in front of an audience that knows the ending.

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Mario Kart World, and a Final Fantasy that arrived late

Move to Nintendo's newest hardware and Final Fantasy is represented by Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, among 14 candidates for the best Nintendo Switch 2 game.

Intergrade reached the console on 22 January 2026,⁸ years after the PlayStation version. Mario Kart World holds the other half of the pairing below, and that game shipped on 5 June 2025, the day the machine launched.⁹

The lateness has a long history behind it. Final Fantasy left Nintendo hardware for the PlayStation in 1997 and stayed away, and Square Enix is now correcting the record in both directions at once: Final Fantasy XIV reaches Switch 2 this month.¹⁰

Fourteen options is a thin field for a console just over a year old. Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition, Borderlands 4 and The Duskbloods are the competition, and several of them are ports as well.

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Seven of Square Enix's fifteen best are Final Fantasy

Rank a publisher's back catalogue and the shape of the company shows through. Of the 15 best Square Enix games here, seven are Final Fantasy: VII, VI, X, XIV, IX, Tactics and VII Remake.

That is a description more than a compliment. Square was founded in September 1986 and merged with Enix in 2003,¹¹ and nearly half of what the merged company is remembered for carries one title.

NieR: Automata is the name printed opposite Final Fantasy VII, and it leads the rest of the catalogue: Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest XI, Kingdom Hearts II, Secret of Mana, The World Ends with You, Octopath Traveler.

The counter-argument belongs to those eight. Chrono Trigger came out of the same building a year after Final Fantasy VI, and a publisher list weighted seven to eight in one direction makes everything else read as a side project.

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Nobuo Uematsu, ranked against himself

Change the axis from games to scores and the series gets a second ranking to itself: 14 options, each of them the soundtrack to a Final Fantasy.

Nobuo Uematsu wrote most of the early ones alone, on hardware with a handful of sound channels. Final Fantasy VI is the score people reach for first, an April 1994 Super Famicom soundtrack⁴ that finds room for a full operatic scene.

Final Fantasy IX from 2000 is the connoisseur's pick, and it appears on the other side of the frame. The later scores here, X through XVI, came largely from other composers as Uematsu stepped back from full-time work at the company.

The music has outgrown the games it was written for. Uematsu founded the Distant Worlds concert series with the conductor Arnie Roth in 2007, and it has since given more than 250 sold-out performances, including the first video-game concert staged at London's Royal Albert Hall.¹²

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Drop the series filter and one score qualifies

Ask the same thing without the Final Fantasy filter and the series is back to a single entry. Of 15 candidates for the greatest video game soundtrack ever written, that entry is Final Fantasy VII.

Final Fantasy VII's score travelled furthest outside gaming. Distant Worlds took the series to Carnegie Hall in 2018, eleven years after its first performance in Stockholm.¹²

Undertale gets the facing slot below, and the category is stacked: Ocarina of Time, Chrono Trigger, DOOM (2016), Journey, NieR: Automata, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

One entry is a poor showing for a series that holds the world record for the most original music written for a single game.³ Everything Final Fantasy scored before 1997, and everything it has scored since, is missing from this screen.

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Unreal Engine put Final Fantasy VII Remake next to Fortnite

Some rankings have nothing to do with genre, era or platform. This one sorts 16 games by the engine underneath them, and Final Fantasy VII Remake is how the series qualifies.

Epic Games announced in December 2015 that the remake was being made in Unreal Engine 4, quoting Kitase on placing Square Enix's trust in Epic's tools rather than the studio's own.¹³

Fortnite completes the pairing below, which Epic wrote the engine for as well. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Black Myth: Wukong, Batman: Arkham Knight and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice make up the rest.

Nobody picks a game for its middleware. Sorting by it anyway produces the widest mismatch in the set: a 40-hour retelling of a 1997 role-playing game against a free battle royale.

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Final Fantasy Adventure vs Tetris on the Game Boy

The last list is the one where Final Fantasy is least famous. Among the 15 best Game Boy games the series is represented by Final Fantasy Adventure, from 1991.

Final Fantasy Adventure is barely a Final Fantasy. Square shipped it in Japan in June 1991 as Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden, a Final Fantasy side story in the literal sense,⁴ and it grew into the Mana series, which dropped the borrowed name.

Kitase was on that Game Boy project, a team of six that was almost all new hires, with Koichi Ishii directing.⁶ He went on to produce Final Fantasy VII and, thirty-five years later, the trilogy remaking it.

Tetris is the name Final Fantasy Adventure draws in the shot below, and Tetris holds the record for the best-selling puzzle video game at 30.26 million copies on the Game Boy alone.¹⁴ Pokémon Red and Blue, Link's Awakening and Super Mario Land are here too.

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Final Fantasy Resonance arrives in October

Sixteen questions produced sixteen different Final Fantasies: a franchise the size of Minecraft, one 1997 disc, two 16-bit cartridges, an MMO rebuilt after a public failure, and a monochrome side story that changed its name.

A seventeenth is already on the way, and no list here has a place for it. Final Fantasy Resonance, the first HD-2D game in the series, is due on 22 October 2026 with Cloud, Tidus and the Warrior of Light in one cast.¹⁰ Every ranking above works the same way underneath, by the pair-by-pair method.

If the Final Fantasy you would defend is missing from all sixteen, build the list that has room for it.

More rankings, more angles

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• Super Mario vs The Legend of Zelda: 16 Rankings, One Argument — one Nintendo team, two franchises, every console shared
• 35 Years of Sonic the Hedgehog, Ranked 16 Ways — Sega built a mascot to beat Mario