On the heels of the massive success that was Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII was always going to have an uphill climb.
All of that said, once more unto the breach! Here are the nine best Final Fantasy games of all time. A cavalcade of spoilers follows, as well, so please be warned. Whittling down dozens of games into a list of nine is a brutal exercise, allowing no way forward that doesn’t leave excellent entries on the cutting room floor. It seems unfathomable that we came so close to never having Final Fantasy as the iconic franchise it has become. Talking to Famitsu back in 2007, Sakaguchi said “The name ‘Final Fantasy’ was a display of my feeling that if this didn’t sell, I was going to quit the games industry and go back to really was a ‘final’ situation.” Another explanation for the “final” name choice was concerning Square’s precarious financial situation at the time -confirmed by series music composer, Nobuo Uematsu, in an interview with Wired back in 2009. When Hironobu Sakaguchi began working on the first Final Fantasy in the mid-1980s, he had a team of seven people, an uncertain product, and the belief that if this game didn’t make it, he was bowing out.
