Final Fantasy Creator Reveals Which Entry He Thinks Is 'Most Complete', and It's Not Final Fantasy 7

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Before entering this comment section, that was my prediction! Mastapiece. My favorite FF game, and one of my top five games of all time.

No surprise it's FF VI. Absolutely peak final fantasy. Classic Uematsu soundtrack, great story with an iconic villain and a lovable cast. Active Time Battles and a phenomenal Esper system for customization. Square at the height of their pixel art powers with some beautiful sprites. Ultros, the opera scene, train suplexing...

It's a shame they kind of butchered the pixel remaster. I'd try playing a romhack version on an emulator if you're interested, preferably something based on Woolsey's wonderful translation (son of a submariner!).

The OG still holds up, and I actively don’t want them to try and remake it into some 3D version. I feel like that’d kill its soul.
Whats the best rom hack to play?
- I recommend Woolsey Uncensored, I think it's a really strong translation that combines the best of all worlds. The Dancing Mad mod was also recommended to me recently as a way to add uncompressed, higher quality music samples. I don't have any experience using it, but it looks like it should work on top of Woolsey Uncensored. Your mileage may vary, though.
- If you want the extra dungeons at the end, you can get the 2015 PC version or the GBA version with the sound and color patches applied.
I enjoyed the remaster, although I've only played the original once or twice. What about it did you find "kind of butchered"?
- It's not as bad as the mobile version from 2014 (seriously, go look it up if you don't believe me!), but I still prefer the original art and sprites. Butchered is maybe too strong a word though, that's more fair to say about the mobile version.
  EDIT: forgot to mention they used the GBA translation as a base and discarded many iconic Woolsey lines from the original, like "son of a submariner!". There are obviously a lot more changes but I'm not going to be full purist and claim everything was objectively better on the SNES just because that's the version I'm used to. You can look at the full differences here.

Final Fantasy 6 had always been the best one. 4 is awesome too. 7 is fine.

Of course it's not FF7. Every FMV used different models, half of the second disk has dialog for Aerith, the weapons (that you fight) felt like half a battle each, and the story was an absolute mess.

It's still the best one, it just felt like it had so much more potential.

Which is why it gets so many offshoots and spin-offs and got a remake before anything else.
Are you talking about the chibi models vs. more realistic models? I think that was an artifact of an FF trope left over from the NES era where the world sprites were limited to one tile due to NES hardware limitations while the battle sprites were more detailed 1x2 tiles, and this was kept all the way up to FF6 where they finally used the same sprite for world and battles.
I have no clue why they went back to using different/less detailed models for world exploration in FF7 (if I had to guess they were unfamiliar with the PSX hardware and the chibi models used fewer polygons), but that go a long way to explain why the FMVs sometimes used different models--IIRC, the FMVs with chibi models played directly from the field, and the ones with more detailed models had some kind of scene transition into them, or otherwise were used for major plot beats. It's good they abandoned this entirely with FF8 onwards, though.
- The more simplistic models being used with the FMV backgrounds was done to keep the framerate of the characters high while the PSX was busy with MPEG decoding.
Also, if you go looking at speedruns and people who look at the code, this game is held together with spaghetti code, bubblegum and duct tape. So easy to just break something.
- Original FF6 broke easily as well. There's that girl character that has that ability to paint monsters and then mirrored versions of the monsters attack for you. Often the game was left in a corrupted state and crashing after a while. I usually loaded a save immediately but once the last save was a long time ago. I managed to enter a cave, a town, or something. Loading fresh data meant the game would no longer crash. All my item inventory slots were filled with random trash, though, which I sold to get rid of. Afterwards I had so much money, I could max out my equipment, potions, etc.
It famously launched unfinished, though not quite on the level that Xenogears was unfinished.

Kefka. That's why. He is the only villain to win by losing. He got what he wanted and drove everyone into his hand. He is by far the most cerebral villain in the franchise. So many stories leave out that having a phenomenal big bad is what makes a hero a better hero.

I've been thinking about this while I switch back and forth playing Elden Ring's DLC and Infinite Wealth.
In Elden Ring my motivation is simply that they are in the way and I want to go through them. The excitement of defeating someone is only strengthened by how many times I didn't before I finally do.
Infinite Wealth, on the other hand, introduces complete assholes you want to beat up and then you get to. Which is just way more cathartic and the build up is always going to be the same for nearly every player, because the bad guy is actually shown doing shit most people hate so you start to actually hate them and want to defeat them.

Between this and weighing in on what defines Final Fantasy (in the original interview), Sakaguchi sure didn't shy away from the controversial topics in the fandom.

“I understand and know that this is a very widely debated topic, but I really think it has turned into something that has a different meaning for everyone,” says Sakaguchi. “If I had to give some kind of core ingredient, I would say it’s the story and world. These two are a must for any Final Fantasy and the common denominator across all of them. The world setting needs to contain some kind of thematic element that is loosely tied to current events. I think the world itself needs to have some kind of thematic backbone or message that gives a different perspective, or a thought-provoking prompt for players.”

The beauty of Final Fantasy is that, with each entry being different from the others, every game of the series ends up resonating differently with different people.

The "best" Final Fantasy varies greatly depending on who you ask, for a combination of factors, including nostalgia and subjective opinions on the different aspects of the game (story, characters, gameplay).

It's what I love about this series. You may play ten games, but the eleventh will still surprise you in some way. Even if I don't like a specific entry, I can still appreciate that they tried something new and unique, and I always look forward to playing the next one.

There’s no doubt about this. My favourites in the franchise usually differ from other people and fans that I know. It really does make it a pleasure being a fan of Final Fantasy as it holds such a diverse fandom that conversations often hold interesting takes, views and more.

"In terms of the Final Fantasy that I think is the ‘most complete'; I believe Final Fantasy 6 comes close, and does stand out above the other Final Fantasies, especially because it was the last Final Fantasy to use pixel art in all of its visual expression," Sakaguchi said.

I agree and could have told them this a decade ago.

I seriously wanted them to remake ff6 in the same style that ethra is being made in. I was not a fan of ff7 and beyond, and seriously stopped caring about FF series from ff11 onwards. None of them felt like final fantasy.

I like a lot of FFXII even though I get why it isn't as beloved as others.

The only thing I can think of to make 6 even better is if it used 5's job system. 5 single handedly killed having static classes for the characters for me. I want to be able to make anyone anything if they're not going to straight up let me make my own character.

I totally agreed when I was younger but over the years I've grown to appreciate when the game makes me play a "suboptimal" class/job. I learn to love some of the quirky characters because they make me try them.
When I'm given all the jobs I compulsively try to level them all because I'm broken that way.

FFVIII had those gun swords that had no gun functionality whatsoever. I kept thinking "this will be the upgrade that lets me shoot the gun, or launch the blade, or supercharge the blade with an explosive hit, or something to justify the fact that the handle is a revolver." Each successive upgrade, it increased my expectations that the gun function would be awesome, because otherwise it would have been an earlier upgrade.

Don't you press R1 when your attack hits to pull the trigger for extra damage? You do use the revolver part, just only in close combat.
Or did I hallucinate that? It's been over 20 years since I played it.
- No, I'm replaying 8 via the mobile remaster right now and that is what you can do and how the game essentially explains why it happens. It only works with Squall and Seifer as well.
- It's explained in a battle but it's easy to miss. I completely missed it my first playthrough
Pressing R1 at the time you hit your opponent with a sword attack fires the gun for extra damage with proper timing.
- When you fight Seifer, you can also press R1 when he attacks you and he will do extra damage to you
You used the gun in specials in ff8, it explains it but didn't really ever show it.

The Pixel Remaster is just bleh. They did a George Lucas.