30 best Final Fantasy games

In honor of the Final Fantasy series celebrating 30 excellent years this month, we look back at the 30 best Final Fantasy games of all time.

There’s something inherent in the best Final Fantasy games that may seem taken for granted in other RPG series’; comradery. While each entry has its own story to tell, there’s always a strong bond between the game and the player built on the backs of character growth as people, achieved through overcoming adversity at the bleakest of odds. No matter who was in your party, it was ultimately a party of interesting and thoughtful characters.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Japanese release of Final Fantasy (the game that started it all), I’ve taken it upon myself to rank the 30 best Final Fantasy games of all time. Impact, innovation, excellence and its historic importance are considered as determining factors. This list will include mobile side-game apps, offshoot series’, and Final Fantasy games that aren’t even truly RPG games! As such, some of the 15-ish mainline games won’t even make the list.

We’ll get it started with one of the better original handheld titles.

Best Final Fantasy Games #30 – Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings

Despite the vast majority of this franchise’s titles serving their own universes, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings serves as a daring sequel and continuation of the Ivalice Alliance series. Instead of offering the active-dimension battle system, Revenant Wings sees the sky pirates take their adventure to mass-scale battles in an actualized real-time strategy game on the Nintendo DS.

This underlooked title employed the main cast of the original game while gathering troops and sending them into battle under a neat variety of missions. The chapter-based system also sees units gather resources, perform specific tasks and even bring in summoned monsters for battle, giving an impressive amount of varied content for a decade-only handheld package.