There is no correct Final Fantasy ranking. I need to say this upfront because the internet has a way of treating every numbered list as a declaration of war, and I’d like to establish the terms of engagement before hostilities commence. This statement, that no definitive ranking exists, will anger approximately everyone who has ever attempted to make one, which at this point includes most of the internet, a significant percentage of gaming journalists, and at least three subreddits that have been arguing about it continuously since 2015.
Every list is wrong because every list reflects personal experience rather than objective quality, and Final Fantasy is the franchise most capable of being simultaneously brilliant and disappointing depending on which entry happened to be your first, how old you were when you played it, and whether your emotional state at the time made you receptive to a story about saving the world or a story about falling in love or a story about four friends on a road trip who keep stopping to eat at diners. All of which are valid Final Fantasy experiences. None of which are comparable.
I’m going to make a ranking anyway, because the internet demands content, I demand the opportunity to explain why Final Fantasy IX is more charming than great, and this combination of supply and demand has been driving cultural discourse since approximately 2007. Let’s proceed.
The fundamental problem: comparing apples to spaceships
That is why it is harder to rank Final Fantasy than it is to rank just about any other franchise: the games have the same name and practically nothing else. Call of Duty games are similar in terms of genre, point of view, control system and the overall gameplay loop. The structure of assassin creed games, a system of stealth, a climbing mechanism, and a map of icons are similar. It is possible to compare them since they are variations of familiar templates.
Final Fantasy games are united by the presence of crystals, chocobos, a character by the name Cid and by the ambiguous philosophical stance that friendship could be stronger than cosmic forces of a god-like nature. That’s it. VI is a steampunk ensemble drama where the villain succeeds in destroying the world. VII is a cyberpunk identity thriller where the protagonist isn’t who he thinks he is. VIII is a romantic melodrama with a card game that’s more addictive than the main story. X is a sports movie crossed with a religious allegory set in tropical paradise. XII is a political simulation featuring a protagonist most players forget exists. XV is a road trip. XVI is Game of Thrones with summons the size of buildings. Making a comparison between these games is akin to comparing, a sandwich, a symphony, a sunset, a tax return and a therapy session. They are any and every thing that exists. These are as far as the similarities go.
Most ranking attempts solve this incommensurability problem by creating categories, such as story, combat, music, graphics, replay value, and emotional impact, then scoring each game numerically across those categories. This approach produces results that are technically defensible and emotionally meaningless. You can mathematically demonstrate that XII has a more original combat system than X. You cannot mathematically demonstrate that XII is a better game than X, because ‘better’ involves feelings, memories, timing, and personal context that no spreadsheet can quantify.
What I actually value (and why my ranking is deliberately biased)
My ranking prioritizes emotional durability. Not emotional impact in the moment, because lots of games can make you feel something during the climax. I’m interested in which games stay with you. Which endings you think about unprompted, months later, while doing unrelated things. Which character arcs surface in your mind during conversations that have nothing to do with gaming. Which musical themes make your chest tighten when you hear them in a concert or a YouTube compilation at 2 AM when you should be sleeping.
By this metric, Final Fantasy X is near the top of my list because its ending destroyed me emotionally in 2002 and I still think about it while buying groceries in 2026. That’s twenty-four years of emotional durability. No film, no book, no television show has maintained that kind of persistent emotional presence in my life. The game earned it through seventy hours of storytelling that built to a conclusion I knew was coming but couldn’t prepare for.
By this same metric, Final Fantasy XII ranks lower despite having objectively superior game design in several measurable categories, because I felt nothing when it ended. The Gambit system is brilliant. The world-building is detailed. The political narrative is sophisticated. And when the credits rolled, I put the controller down and thought ‘that was well-made’ instead of ‘I need to sit quietly for twenty minutes.’ Well-made is admirable. Emotionally devastating is memorable. I rank for memorable.
Final Fantasy XV ranks oddly high on my list for a game I consider structurally incomplete. The final campfire scene, where four friends sit together one last time before the ending, made me cry. Not because of what was said, but because of the sixty hours of road trip memories that gave those final words weight. The preceding ten hours of the game were a narrative mess. The last ten minutes were perfect. And perfect endings redeem imperfect journeys, at least on my ranking criteria.
The modern entries that broke every ranking
Final Fantasy XVI threw a grenade into every existing ranking by being a fundamentally different type of game. It abandoned turn-based and ATB combat entirely in favor of character action combat designed by the man who made Devil May Cry 5. It told a story about political oppression, slavery, and revolution that felt more like a prestige HBO drama than anything the franchise had attempted before. And it polarised the fan base in such a manner that even the VI-versus-VII debate seemed a civil disagreement between two friends.
What position would you place a Final Fantasy which does not play like a Final Fantasy? Assuming you appreciate the spectacle of battle and like a moment-to-moment combat, XVI is not only a top-five contender, but it is a top-five game. Assuming you appreciate party management, the strategy aspect, and having the sense of being in charge of a group of people instead of a single character, XVI hardly qualifies as a Final Fantasy in any way. The game compels you to find out what Final Fantasy means to you at a personal level, and your response will put it where than any objective measure of quality would put it.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth brought about another issue altogether. It is a sequel to a remake that, in its turn, was a version of the original one that had been even more distanced by now, resulting in a version of a version of a thing as you may recall it, compared to the way it was actually. Ranking Rebirth asks you in what category you rank it in terms of it being an independent experience, or rated as a part of the Remake trilogy, or the 1997 era that is ingrained in the memory of every person old enough to have ever had a PlayStation. Every framing will result in a different hierarchical and all of the three framings are correct and all of them are partial.
And then the question–no one would have thought of asking it–does Metaphor: ReFantazio count? Developed by the Persona team under the Final Fantasy-like banner of the spiritual DNA of Square Enix, it is played like the logical continuation of all JRPGs on what they have worked for 30 years to develop. Add in spiritual heirs and the sort of games that are taking the philosophy of the genre into the future, but are not under the brand name, the ranking gets totally out of hand. By making entries in numbers only, you lose the context in which the ranking is interesting. There is no white and black. There never was.
The entries everyone agrees on (and the ones they don’t)
We can find some placements with which practically all the rankings tend to agree. Again VI and VII are in the top three. The controversy lies solely on which of the two wins the crown and that argument has been going on since 1997 and neither has reached the verge of agreement nor is likely to ever do so. X is a frequent top 5 list member. IV is usually well regarded but hardly anybody is fond of it. These are those safe places, which lead to agreement and not arguments.
The MMO entries present an additional factor of confusion that most rankings deal with by assuming that they are non-existent. According to some measures, Final Fantasy XI and XIV are the most commercial hits in the franchise. XIV especially has received the label of the best MMO of all time and has earned the most money of any single-player Final Fantasy game. It is like pitting an MMO against a single-player RPG, though, as it is pitting a marriage against a first date. They are fundamentally different in terms of time, completion has different forms, social dynamics occur differently and there exist different relationships between player and narrative. They are either omitted in most of the rankings or have a an apologetic asterisk alongside them. Both of the solutions are not fulfilling.
Rankings are interesting and the controversial. IX is the third-greatest of the entry, or a pleasant but victimless nostalgiaism, according to whether one who places it in its place is over or under 35. VIII can either be a misinterpreted masterpiece or a magnificent blunder that has a system of fighting that proactively strikes against player who tries to fight it without prior calculations. XIII is practically invariably down there in the lower half, yet the champions of it are vehement and growing more and more outspoken, as time dims the instantaneous disappointment.
Every Final Fantasy ranking tells you more about the person who made it than about the games being ranked. The list I trust most approaches each entry entirely on its own terms, measuring what each game attempted against what it achieved, rather than forcing sixteen wildly different creative visions into a single evaluative framework. That Final Fantasy ranking is the only honest way to do this exercise, and even that approach requires accepting that honesty doesn’t mean objectivity.
Why ranking Final Fantasy matters despite being impossible
It is both nonsensical and crucial to rank Final Fantasy. It would be useless since the ranking will be erroneous: mine, yours, everyone. It is necessary since the exercise brings you to say what you appreciate in games. Are you more narrative or mechanical ambitious? heartbreak or mind foment? Insurgent artistic gambit or elevated ease of use? Your Final Fantasy ranking is your statement about values in any game and knowing your values will help you pick better games, engage in more meaningful discussion of design and understanding more about those entries that you previously dismissed because they focused on something that you considered less important at the moment.
So make your list. Share it. Defend it passionately. Accept that it’s wrong. Then do the game at the bottom of your list, since I can promise you that there is something there that you didn’t play, that one of us found the most fulfilling gaming experience of all the things that we have ever done and that the reasoning behind it might bring you to a deeper understanding of the medium, narrative or self. Final Fantasy does that at best: it has a way of rewarding re-evaluation. Even those bad ones are not in vain, should you be willing to put away spreadsheet and simply enjoy them.
Of the author: [Icicle Disaster] has charted Final Fantasy as an equal number of times by seven different platforms, if not all forms and emotional states. Each ranking is different from the last. He sees this as a testament to personal development as opposed to sign of indecisiveness although his therapist has construed otherwise on the topic.
