# Final Fantasy Is a Different Genre on Every List
> Final Fantasy X turned 25 in July 2026. Across 16 rankings the series is a JRPG, an RPG, a soundtrack, a remaster and a Game Boy also-ran.
*By YPB Team · Published July 31, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/final-fantasy-ranked-many-ways*
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Final Fantasy XIII cosplay at Animethon 2017 — one series, 16 very different rankings. Photo: IQRemix, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Final Fantasy started on the Famicom on 18 December 1987 and has passed 212 million units sold. It has been a NES role-playing game, a Game Boy spin-off, a SNES epic, a PlayStation phenomenon, a broken MMO, a rebuilt MMO, and a remake trilogy whose finale arrives in spring 2027. Final Fantasy X turned 25 on 19 July 2026, and the X/X-2 HD Remaster reached Nintendo Switch 2 four days later.
That history is why the series turns up in 16 rankings below that have almost nothing in common. Sometimes the whole franchise is one option. Sometimes every option is a Final Fantasy.
> Ask "what is the best video game franchise" and Final Fantasy is one name among sixty-four. Ask "what is the best Final Fantasy" and it is all fifteen.
## One franchise among sixty-four
The widest question the site asks about games puts Final Fantasy on a list of 64 franchises, next to Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Call of Duty and Minecraft.
Final Fantasy brings 39 years and more than 212 million units to that comparison, a total it passed in mid-2026 after reporting 207 million in January.
Super Mario brings something a franchise list rewards more directly: a character almost every person on earth can draw. Nintendo's mascot needs no explanation, no 60-hour commitment and no plot summary.
The awkward truth for Final Fantasy on a list like this is that "franchise" flattens it. Sixteen numbered entries share a name, a crystal motif and almost nothing else — no recurring hero, no continuous world, no single game a newcomer can be pointed at.
Sixty-four franchises, and Final Fantasy is one line item among Mario, Zelda and Pokémon. Play it →
## The whole series shrinks to one disc
Widen the question from franchises to individual games and Final Fantasy stops being a series at all. On a 32-option list of the best video game ever made, it appears exactly once, as Final Fantasy VII.
Final Fantasy VII earned that slot in 1997 and has sold more than 15.5 million copies, making it the best-selling single entry in the series. It is also the game that put Japanese role-playing games on Western shelves in numbers, with a marketing campaign built around three CDs and a cinematic opening.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the entry it meets here, and the rest of the list is no gentler — Tetris, Super Mario Bros., Chrono Trigger, Half-Life 2, Red Dead Redemption 2.
A single-game list is the harshest lens a long series can face. Thirty-nine years of iteration collapse into one 1997 disc, and everything the series learned afterwards counts for nothing.
Here the franchise shrinks to one 1997 disc, up against every other game ever made. Play it →
## The argument the series has with itself
Point the question inward and the competition changes completely: on this ranking all 15 options are Final Fantasy games, from Final Fantasy I to Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Final Fantasy VII is the commercial answer, with 15.5 million copies sold. Final Fantasy VI is the answer people give when they want to be taken seriously — a 1994 SNES game with fourteen playable characters, no single protagonist, and a villain who wins halfway through and destroys the world.
Final Fantasy IX, X, XII, Tactics and XIV Online sit on the same list. Each one recruited a different generation, and each generation is certain the series peaked when they arrived.
A ranking like this cannot settle anything, because the entries were never trying to beat each other. Final Fantasy V is a job-system puzzle box, Final Fantasy X is a linear story with voice acting, Final Fantasy XIV is a subscription MMO. They share a title and a composer.
Every option is a Final Fantasy, so the argument stops being about the series and starts being inside it. Play it →
## Two entries from one series, on the same genre list
Sort by genre instead and Final Fantasy gets two slots on an 18-option list of the greatest role-playing games ever made: Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VI.
Both earned it for the same reason. Between 1994 and 1997 the series taught a mass audience that a game could carry a 40-hour story, and Final Fantasy VII sold that idea outside Japan.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the entry it faces here, and it represents the opposite tradition — a Western RPG built on branching consequence, where the story bends to the player rather than the other way round. Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium and Fallout: New Vegas belong to the same school.
Calling both traditions "RPG" is the weakness of this list. Final Fantasy VII tells one fixed story beautifully; Disco Elysium refuses to tell the same story twice. A voter has to decide which of those the word means.
Two Final Fantasys make this one, which means they also compete with each other in it. Play it →
## Where the name came from
Rewind to the decade the series began and Final Fantasy appears twice more, on a list of the best Japanese role-playing games of the 1980s: the 1987 original and Final Fantasy II.
The name on those cartridges is an accident, and Hironobu Sakaguchi has spent years correcting the story about it. The myth says "Final" meant the last game of a studio facing bankruptcy. Sakaguchi's version is duller and better: Dragon Quest was being shortened to "DraQue", his team wanted a title that abbreviated as neatly in the Roman alphabet, "Fighting Fantasy" was already trademarked, and they "reluctantly went with Final Fantasy as a last resort".
Dragon Quest is on this list too, three times, and it got there first — Enix shipped the original in 1986, a year before Square answered. Dragon Quest III is the entry Final Fantasy meets in the frame below.
Phantasy Star, Megami Tensei and EarthBound Beginnings fill out the decade. On a 1980s list Final Fantasy is not the pioneer; it is the fast follower that eventually outlasted the pioneer.
The 1987 original and its sequel, on a list where nothing on screen has voice acting. Play it →
## Filter by console and the answer is a game most people missed
Restrict the field to one machine and Final Fantasy shows up as two 16-bit entries: Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy IV, on a 20-option list of the best SNES games.
Final Fantasy VI arrived in 1994 and reached North America as *Final Fantasy III*, because three earlier entries had never been released there. Americans of a certain age learned the wrong number and have been correcting for it ever since.
Chrono Trigger is the game it meets here, and it was built by an overlapping team at Square in 1995. Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Metroid are the platform's untouchable trio.
The SNES is where the series earned the reputation it still trades on. The music, the sprite art and the multi-hour story all matured on this hardware, before 3D arrived and changed what a Final Fantasy looked like.
Filter by console and the answer changes to two games most people skipped in 1994. Play it →
## Twenty-five years of Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy X is the series' entry on an 18-option list of the best PlayStation 2 games, and it turned 25 on 19 July 2026. Square Enix marked the date with an anniversary illustration by Tetsuya Nomura, a two-record *Eternal Calm* vinyl set on 1 July, and the X/X-2 HD Remaster on Nintendo Switch 2 on 23 July.
Final Fantasy X sold 8.5 million copies on the PS2 — the fifth-highest total on the console.
The four ahead of it are Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Gran Turismo 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Gran Turismo 4 — and San Andreas and Gran Turismo 4 are both options on this same list. Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 3 and Silent Hill 2 are here too.
Final Fantasy X was the first game in the series with fully 3D environments and recorded voice acting. Every Final Fantasy since has been written to be spoken aloud.
Final Fantasy X turned 25 on 19 July 2026. On this list it is one PS2 game among eighteen. Play it →
## The same game, judged as a re-release
Some rankings judge a game that already existed. This 15-option list ranks remasters, and the Final Fantasy entry is not Final Fantasy X but the Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster.
The gap between those two things is six million copies. Final Fantasy X sold 8.5 million on the PS2 and 14.6 million across every platform it has since appeared on, and the Switch 2 version that landed on 23 July 2026 adds to the second number.
The Last of Us Remastered is the entry it faces, and the list is full of the same idea executed by other publishers: 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. The more a game needed fixing, the more impressive the fix looks — which is a strange way to judge a 2001 release that still runs.
The same game again, now judged as a remaster rather than as a game. Play it →
## The entry that only exists because the first attempt failed
On a 19-option list of the best Japanese role-playing games of the 2010s, the Final Fantasy entry is not Final Fantasy XIV. It is *Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn*, and the extra words carry the story.
Final Fantasy XIV launched in 2010 as one of the worst-received MMOs ever shipped. Square Enix suspended subscription fees, apologised publicly and replaced the development team.
Naoki Yoshida took over and rebuilt the game from scratch, relaunching it in 2013 as A Realm Reborn. He has said he believed at the time that it "wouldn't be possible" for an MMORPG that failed at launch to revive itself. Final Fantasy XIV now reports more than 25 million registered players and is the most profitable game in the series.
Persona 5 is the entry it meets here, on a list that also holds NieR: Automata, Dragon Quest XI, Xenoblade Chronicles and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Final Fantasy XV is the series' second entry — a game that spent ten years in development and still divides the people who finished it.
The entry here is A Realm Reborn — the rebuild of the 2010 launch Square Enix had to apologise for. Play it →
## Two current entries, no nostalgia to lean on
Nostalgia carries a series a long way, so a list restricted to the current generation is a useful test. Final Fantasy takes two of the 15 slots on the best PS5 game ranking: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Final Fantasy XVI.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the middle chapter of a remake trilogy whose finale now has a name and a date. *Final Fantasy VII Revelation* was revealed at Summer Game Fest in June 2026 for spring 2027, directed by Naoki Hamaguchi with Tetsuya Nomura and Motomu Toriyama, and produced by Yoshinori Kitase.
Baldur's Gate 3 is the entry it faces, and the field is Sony's own strongest hand: 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. A 2024 game retelling a 1997 game has to compete with original work, and much of its audience arrives already knowing how the story ends.
Two entries from the last three years, on a list with no nostalgia to lean on. Play it →
## On the newest console, the series arrives as a port
Move to Nintendo's latest hardware and Final Fantasy is represented by Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade — a 2020 PlayStation game with better textures — on a 14-option list of the best Nintendo Switch 2 games.
Mario Kart World is the entry it meets, and the mismatch is the point: one is the console's flagship launch title, built for the machine, and the other is a five-year-old game arriving late.
Final Fantasy's relationship with Nintendo is worth the context. The series left Nintendo hardware for PlayStation in 1996 over the cartridge format, and the correction is now complete — Final Fantasy VII Revelation launches on Switch 2 simultaneously with PS5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S in spring 2027.
Fourteen options is a short field, because the console is barely a year old. Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition, Borderlands 4 and The Duskbloods are the competition, and half of them are ports too.
On Nintendo's newest console the series shows up as a port of a five-year-old game. Play it →
## Seven of the fifteen options are the same series
Rank a publisher's back catalogue and the shape of the company shows through. On this 15-option list of the best Square Enix games, seven options are Final Fantasy: VII, VI, X, XIV, IX, Tactics and VII Remake.
That is not a compliment so much as a description. Nearly half of a 50-year-old publisher's best work carries one title, and the anniversary calendar reflects it — Final Fantasy X at 25 in July 2026, Final Fantasy VII Revelation due in spring 2027.
NieR: Automata is the entry Final Fantasy VII faces here, and it heads the list of what else Square Enix made: Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest XI, Kingdom Hearts II, Secret of Mana, The World Ends with You, Octopath Traveler.
The counter-argument belongs to those games. A publisher list dominated by one series flatters the series and buries everything else, and Chrono Trigger in particular has spent thirty years being called the better game by the people who made both.
Seven of the fifteen options are Final Fantasy, which tells you what the publisher is. Play it →
## Forget the games and rank only the music
Change the axis from games to scores and Final Fantasy gets a ranking of its own again: 14 options, every one of them the soundtrack to a Final Fantasy.
Nobuo Uematsu wrote most of the early ones alone, on hardware with a handful of channels. Final Fantasy VI is the entry people reach for first — a 1994 SNES score containing a full operatic scene and "Dancing Mad", a fourteen-minute final-boss theme written for a sound chip.
Final Fantasy IX, from 2000, is the connoisseur's answer and the entry it meets in the frame below. The later scores on the list — X, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI — were largely written by other composers as Uematsu stepped back from full-time work at the company.
The music has since outgrown the games it was written for. For Final Fantasy X's 25th anniversary in July 2026, Square Enix pressed twenty of its tracks onto a two-record vinyl set called *Eternal Calm*.
Same series, different axis: forget the games and rank only what you heard. Play it →
## The music question, opened up to everyone
Ask the same question without the series filter and Final Fantasy is back to one entry. On a 15-option list of the greatest video game soundtracks ever written, that entry is Final Fantasy VII.
Final Fantasy VII's score is the one that travelled furthest outside gaming. Uematsu's music has been performed by orchestras for two decades through the touring Distant Worlds concert series, and Square Enix ran a 35th-anniversary edition of it in 2022.
Undertale is the entry it faces here, and the field is a reminder of how strong this category is: Ocarina of Time, Chrono Trigger, DOOM (2016), Journey, NieR: Automata, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
One entry is a poor way to represent 39 years of music. Everything the series wrote before 1997 and everything after it is absent — the category where Final Fantasy is strongest is the one where it fields the least.
Widen the music question past the series and fourteen entries arrive to fight it. Play it →
## Ranked by the software it was built in
Some lenses have nothing to do with genre, era or platform. This 16-option ranking sorts games by the engine underneath them, and Final Fantasy VII Remake is the series' entry on it.
Square Enix built Final Fantasy VII Remake in Unreal Engine 4 rather than its own technology, and the choice carried through the trilogy. It is why a Japanese role-playing game from a studio with decades of in-house tools shares a foundation with Fortnite.
Fortnite is exactly the entry it meets here, and Epic Games wrote the engine. Black Myth: Wukong, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Batman: Arkham Knight and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice make up the rest.
Nobody chooses a game for its middleware. Sorting by it anyway produces the sharpest mismatch in the set — a 40-hour story-driven remake against a free battle royale with hundreds of millions of players.
A ranking sorted by middleware, which nobody outside the industry would think to build. Play it →
## The far end of the range
The last list is the one where Final Fantasy is least famous. On a 15-option ranking of the best Game Boy games, the series is represented by Final Fantasy Adventure, from 1991.
Final Fantasy Adventure is barely a Final Fantasy. It is an action role-playing game with real-time combat, released in Japan as *Seiken Densetsu*, and it grew into the Mana series — so the Final Fantasy name on the Western box was a marketing decision that the sequels dropped.
Tetris is the entry it meets, and Tetris shipped bundled with the Game Boy itself. That made it one of the best-selling games ever released. Pokémon Red and Blue, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Super Mario Land are also here.
The same series that is one of 64 defining franchises, one of the 32 best games ever made and the subject of two rankings of its own is also a licensed spin-off on a monochrome handheld, up against the pack-in puzzle game.
A 1991 Game Boy spin-off, against Tetris and Pokémon. This is the far end of the range. Play it →
## Sixteen questions, one series
Final Fantasy is a JRPG, an RPG, a franchise, a publisher's back catalogue, a soundtrack, a remaster, an Unreal Engine showcase and a Game Boy spin-off — and it is a different size in each of those sentences. Sometimes the whole 39-year history is one option among 64. Sometimes every option on the screen shares its name. It's the same trick behind every ranking here — judging things [two at a time](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison).
All 16 rankings, in one place:
- [What is the best video game franchise?](/ranking/what-is-the-best-video-game-franchise)
- [What is the best video game of all time?](/ranking/what-is-the-best-video-game-of-all-time)
- [What is the best Final Fantasy game of all time?](/ranking/what-is-the-best-final-fantasy-game-of-all-time)
- [The 18 Greatest RPGs of All Time](/ranking/the-18-greatest-rpgs-of-all-time)
- [The 16 Best JRPGs of the 1980s](/ranking/the-16-best-jrpgs-of-the-1980s)
- [The 20 Best SNES Games of All Time](/ranking/the-20-best-snes-games-of-all-time)
- [The 18 Best PlayStation 2 Games of All Time](/ranking/the-18-best-playstation-2-games-of-all-time)
- [Top 15 Video Game Remasters of All Time](/ranking/top-15-video-game-remasters-of-all-time)
- [The 19 Best JRPGs of the 2010s](/ranking/the-19-best-jrpgs-of-the-2010s)
- [What is the best PS5 game of all time?](/ranking/what-is-the-best-ps5-game-of-all-time)
- [What is the best Nintendo Switch 2 game?](/ranking/what-is-the-best-nintendo-switch-2-game)
- [Top 15 Square Enix Games of All Time](/ranking/top-15-square-enix-games-of-all-time)
- [What is the best Final Fantasy soundtrack?](/ranking/what-is-the-best-final-fantasy-soundtrack)
- [The 15 Greatest Video Game Soundtracks of All Time](/ranking/the-15-greatest-video-game-soundtracks-of-all-time)
- [What is the best game built with Unreal Engine?](/ranking/what-is-the-best-game-built-with-unreal-engine)
- [The 15 Best Game Boy Games of All Time](/ranking/the-15-best-game-boy-games-of-all-time)
Pick the question you actually care about, and vote it out.
## More rankings, more angles
- [Resident Evil: One Franchise, 14 Different Verdicts](/articles/resident-evil-ranked-many-ways) — thirty years, fourteen incompatible verdicts
- [Super Mario vs The Legend of Zelda: 16 Rankings, One Argument](/articles/super-mario-vs-legend-of-zelda) — two game franchises, judged side by side
- [35 Years of Sonic the Hedgehog, Ranked 16 Ways](/articles/sonic-the-hedgehog-ranked-many-ways) — a mascot, a soundtrack, a Jim Carrey credit
