Nearly everyone likes FFX. It's FFXII that gets all the unjustified hatred...especially considering it's the best one in the mothership series, at least in my opinion.
Anyways. I have a love-hate relationship with this series. Of course it formed a part of my gaming library growing up, but I've kinda...moved beyond it. It's been a very long time - not since the days of the SNES, if then - that Final Fantasy was at the top of the JRPG genre, and I doubt it'll ever recapture the glory it once had. Partly because it's made by Square Enix, and Square Enix is Square Enix, but also partly because the genre has gotten so much bigger and better since those days. It's now a series with nostalgia value and very little else.
I don't have much to say about FF that hasn't already been said, I suppose. I think the Tactics spinoffs are better than the main games. I liked I through to VI and VIII, which was the first one I *really* got to play, but that was mostly because of Triple Triad. I was indifferent to VII and loathed IX. X was an experience, but I found its sequel to be better for giving Yuna a backbone and making her the star like she should have been in the first game. I absolutely HATE romance in games, and FF has some of the worst romance subplots in gaming; they totally eclipse the conflict going on in the world and turn the game from an epic into a tween angst fest. Type-0 HD was abysmal. Dissidia was entertaining even if it had the most horrible excuse for a plot ever. Theatrhythm is amazing and we need more instalments in it with more songs, because pre-FFXIII music is the one thing ever FF title got right.
The less said about FFXIII the better; I was firmly in the "hate" camp for it when released, and two sequels and several years later my views haven't changed much. I think XIII-2 would have made a better first game, because Serah had more personality in her little fingernail than her Cloud-expy sister did in her whole body, and Caius Ballad gave the series what it desperately needed: a villain. FFXIII was a trainwreck of a game with exposition so far outside the narrative you needed a glossary for terms and story summary - which the game even provided for you, haha - and a piss-poor battle system that amounted to "watch auto-battle to win" for the most part. Being funnelled down long corridors I can deal with; linearity is nothing new in JRPGs. What I cannot deal with is a complete lack of substance, which XIII had in spades. But I did enjoy XIII-2 a little, and Lightning Returns improved the combat even if it did away with everything else that made XIII-2 a better game than its predecessor.
I have very little hope for FFXV, because it appears to lack everything I want in an RPG: a strong female protagonist, an interesting villain, a solid battle system, and a cast that actually interests me. Jury is still out on the music until I get the full thing and listen to it, but Yoko Shimomura is no Motoi Sakuraba, Keiichi Okabe, or even Nobuo Uematsu. I've seen literally nothing that would make me believe this game is going to "save" the franchise fans are hoping it will. The whole "too early to judge" thing really isn't going to fly here either considering how long it's been in development. I'll buy it and play it, but I'm going in with zero expectations.
So, there we go. Feel free to call me out if you must; FF is one of those series that seems to divide its fans up very cleanly and cause them to go wild if they see an opinion they disagree with for some reason. Probably because it's one of the few franchises that changes so completely between each instalment, at least in terms of the world and the gimmicks they add to the slowly stagnating ATB system they're so fond of. It's always struck me as a little odd.
![[PokeCommunity.com] Final Fantasy Series](https://wallpapercave.com/wp/FAvVgtw.jpg "[PokeCommunity.com] Final Fantasy Series")
