Here's the Final Fantasy series ranked, as voted by thousands of you
As we took votes to decide the RPG Site Readers' Choice for our Best of 2017 awards, we also asked you to make a difficult decision: to name your favorite Final Fantasy game.
This wasn't for no reason - December 2017 marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Final Fantasy for the Famicom in Japan. It'd take a few years for it to arrive in the West, but the impact of the game was immediate: it helped to truly revolutionize the concept of the console RPG and helped to define the general style of Japanese RPGs for decades to come. To celebrate we published a range of articles about the series (we'll link them below alongside some of our favorite past FF editorials) but we also asked you for your favorites. Final Fantasy fans - we love (to argue over) a list!
With thousands of votes cast, voting swung this way and that excitingly throughout the polling, which lasted around three weeks. Three clear leaders emerged pretty quickly, but the gap between them shrunk, grew and then narrowed again, with some of that top three switching places. Below that, other entries rose and fell in surprising ways.
We limited the vote to the main, numbered Final Fantasy games. So, what comes out on top? Here's the ranking - most votes to least, winners up top:
- Final Fantasy VII
- Final Fantasy IX
- Final Fantasy VI
- Final Fantasy X
- Final Fantasy XV
- Final Fantasy VIII
- Final Fantasy XIV
- Final Fantasy XII
- Final Fantasy IV
- Final Fantasy XIII
- Final Fantasy V
- Final Fantasy XI
- Final Fantasy III
- Final Fantasy II
- Final Fantasy
What about how it all breaks down? Well, the top three games account for the vast majority of votes - FF7, FF9 and FF6 swept away 49.2% of the total votes between the three of them. A similar story happens in reverse at the bottom end of the table - perhaps because of their age, the still excellent FF, FF2 and FF3 only manage to pick up just 3% of the vote between them.
New release FF15 just barely pips FF8 to the final spot in the top five by a few percentage points - and it'll be interesting to see if this position holds once the game is a little older. The highest online entry is unsprisingly the current one - which is a pretty excellent game in its own right. FF14's latest expansion, Stormblood, reached the top ten in our readers' choice awards for 2017.
Do you agree with the ranking? What did you vote for? We'd love to hear in the comments below.
Our other FF 30th editorials: