Blog
Game Genealogy: Final Fantasy
A Look Back at 12 Titles and 23 Years
by Sarah
Series Game Genealogy
With March 9, 2010 marking the long-awaited North American launch of Final Fantasy XIII, it was time to take a look back at the last twelve games in the series, as well as discuss the highs and lows of one of gaming’s most prolific franchises. Chocobos, blitzball, Triple Triad, North American misnumbering, Materia vs. Draw, and the Sphere Grid are just a few topics debated by our panel of Final Fantasy fans as we celebrate over two decades of role-playing goodness.
Part I: Final Fantasy I - IX
Part II: Final Fantasy X - XIV and Beyond
Game Genealogy is a new Gamervision series that chronicles a video game franchise’s history interspersed with commentary from our own staff members. Feel free to join in the discussion in the comments section.
Written By: Sarah LeBoeuf
Edited By: Paul Ritchey
Produced By: Paul Ritchey, Mike Sadorf, Tim Frisch
Commentators:
Sarah LeBoeuf
Luke Brown
Chris Buek
Tim Frisch
Nick Murphy
Jonathan Cooper
Mike Sadorf
Ricky Nguyen
Comments
Nice retrospective!
FF I is un-fucking-playable compared to any future installments, even the second one. CGI cutscenes wouldn't be able to save it.
And no love for FF Legends which begot the Mana series? That's like FF's cool cousin it only gets to see every couple years over summer family reunions.
@Karoshi: I would have loved to include all of the spinoffs and whatnot, but that would have made this even longer! So we decided to focus on the core games. Maybe we'll save the rest for another day.
wow... there's a lot of cool shit in there.
When you look at the catalog of games the FF series has spun off or spun into it's pretty impressive -
Legends begot both the Mana and SaGa series (Square's first million-selling title ever) even before the FF7 explosion. If you can find one or can get an emulator the Wonderswan version of Final Fantasy Legends is super sweet. In fact, the WS versions of all the pre-FF 7 games are arguably the best: seeing as how they were pretty much ported over to the GBA and future iterations without all the touch-screen fuck-around-ary of the DS editions.
wow...there is a lot of cool thing around here!!!
Awesome job, guys!!
I liked it.
Yes to Final Fantasy Game watching. I remember my first experiance with final fantasy 7. it was me, my brother, and my friend Steve. My brother was too young to really care about the story, so we'd let him play the battles..which he was really good at. No one but me understood the materia system..so that'd be up to me to get. And we let Steve walk around while we watched the story.
This was our life. At my house. Every day, For like 2 months (I was 8 , Steve was 9 and my brother was 6)