Given how huge this base-breakingly popular series is, it's no surprise that its fanbase is very vocal and prone to disagreements.
The following Final Fantasy games have their own pages:
- The dividing lines can be boiled down to SNES-era-and-earlier supporters, most of whom will band around Final Fantasy VI and/or Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VII supporters (who tend to be hated by the former camp and anyone who prefers Final Fantasy VIII or Final Fantasy IX), and Final Fantasy X-and-later supporters, who are sharply divided on the merits of direct sequels like Final Fantasy X-2 and whether the MMOs are part of the main series. Other games' supporters tend to band together with one of these primary camps. Do well to know which camp is predominant in your area; talking about how great you imagine Sephiroth to be when you're on a forum filled with oldschool players is a good way of getting yourself mercilessly mauled. And the violent arguments within the Final Fantasy VII fandom alone are enough to cow a small island nation.
- Was Final Fantasy IV: The After Years a worthy successor or a lazy, rushed cash-in?
- Final Fantasy VII: Was the Compilation a good idea or not? Just about the only thing not up to debate here is that Dirge of Cerberus didn't play very well. There's also the legendary hatred between Tifa and Aerith fans. Curiously, slashing the two together will get both sides to stop fighting long enough to Squee, while shipping CloudxAerithxTifa will get both sides to toss rocks at you. It's got to be a meme. In camp one, you have "Sephiroth is the best Final Fantasy villain ever!" and in camp 2: "Sephiroth's an overrated Bishōnen mama's boy adored only by squeeing fangirls, and Kefka's way more evil and entertaining to watch!" There's even debate over whether the flower girl's name is Aeris or Aerith.
- Careful saying you like Final Fantasy VIII. Lot of real cranks for that one. Many of them people who had never played a Final Fantasy game before VII and were sorely upset because VIII wasn't a sequel, and they've never forgiven it for that.
- Final Fantasy IX, naturally, created a huge rift between the people who thought it was a good tribute to the old classical SNES-era games with its more lighthearted and idealistic themes and colorful world, and those who thought the FF series was, is, and should always be intended for more mature audiences, and saw IX as a big step backwards.
- Other points of contention regarding IX: Sci-Fi vs. Fantasy (VII and VIII had moved the series into almost completely Sci-Fi with Fantasy window dressing, while IX was more "pure" fantasy than FF had been since IV) and the art style (the change from VIII (the most realistic up until that point) to IX (the most "moe" of the main games) was a bit much for some fans.
- You should also be careful about saying you like Final Fantasy X-2. If you say it too loud in a public place where people can hear you, you'll get torn apart between the people who want to drag off with you and talk about how great the game was, and the ones who simply want to tear you apart for liking it.
- Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV. Should they be considered part of the main series despite the Genre Shift, or spinoffs despite the fact that they're numbered as though part of the main series? Are they even any good? And what about Final Fantasy XII, which had an MMO-inspired combat system despite being offline and single-player?
- Final Fantasy XI fans have two lines of thought: Either Red Mages need to be able to self-skillchain for 2 trillion damage while casting Meteor instantly while gangraping the 50 mobs around them, or that Red Mage is horribly, horribly broken, and needs to either be hit with the nerfbat or never updated at all, ever. The arguments have gotten so old most people go "Red Mages? Again?" and promptly ignore the thread. Another point of contention is meleeburn-style parties. Either meleeburns are the best thing that ever happened to the game and an elegant solution to the problems of Level Grinding and DPSer oversupply, or they're a cancer on the game that precludes people's training in basic tactics, excludes some jobs and perverts others, and has caused the seek function to be conquered by "Stop Having Fun" Guys.
- Final Fantasy XIII: Every single gameplay element apart from the graphics is either praised to ungodly levels or is causing cataclysmic shitstorms, depending on who you ask. It even split the professional reviewers to previously unseen levels. Also, Lightning's fans call her a strong feminist role model in a series that is famous for its Shrinking Violet style characters in revealing outfits. Her haters point out that she is rude, needlessly violent, glorifies the double standard that it alight for a woman to hit a man and is still far too Ms. Fanservice (such as her L'Cie brand being situated between her boobs).
- As for Final Fantasy XV (formerly known as Final Fantasy Versus XIII)... Let's just say you're better off reading all about it here.
- There are two types of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance fans. One side believes that Marche was right to undo the existence of Ivalice, so that his friends would face life (the Aesop of the game). The other believes that, through doing this, Marche is a mass murderer, like Hitler times a million.
- Every Final Fantasy sequel plays quite a bit differently than all previous games in the series, much more than most other video game series. So it is easy to see how fans could have a They Changed It, Now It Sucks! attitude towards the games in the series that aren't their favorite.
- There's also the fact they started to use less and less medieval High Fantasy settings and more Punk Punk type settings.
- It's best not to start a discussion on race and the characters. Asking whether Cloud or Tifa are Asian or not causes major backdraft in particular.
- People who think Final Fantasy XII's battle system was a right direction for innovation versus people crying for tradition.
- And, of course, which system made Final Fantasy popular to begin with, and why did the game go to a certain platform.
- The issue of sequels and remakes as a whole:
- With remakes, it goes like this: on the one side, you have the people who pitch a fit every time SE does something that isn't a completely new title. On the opposite side, you have vigorous defenders of porting/remakes whose usual favorite argument is media accessibility. In between you have the people who are in favor of porting/remakes in theory but have concerns over the actual ports/remakes SE has made due to quality etc. issues. None of them like the other very much. Further complicating this are the lines drawn between fans of different versions—for example, you have fans of the SNES pure-Woolsey translation of Final Fantasy VI and fans of the revised GBA translation. The first side argues with Nostalgia Filter over the translation and Good Bad Bugs and says that the flaws of Woolsey's translation (if they are even acknowledged) are a product of the times and circumstances and that he represents more of a step forward than anything. GBA advocates argue that the revised translation is more accurate to the original version of the game, are not amused by the Good Bad Bugs, and cite the additional content of their version as reasons for its superiority. Once discussion of what the character Setzer was "really like" gets started, run for the hills.
- Sequels. You have the fans who like sequels in general and in principle, the fans who only like some sequels, and the fans who hate everything the word "sequel" stands for. The arguments are absolutely vicious. Notably, many of these kvetchfests are fans using sequels as proxies in already-extant rivalries (Fans of VI have targets firmly locked on the Compilation of VII, which is a damning example/cause of favoritism, selling-out, quality decline, the hole in the ozone layer, and long lines in the DMV; fans of the franchises of VII and XIII are engaged in a sort of bizarre dick-measuring contest where sequel numbers are some sort of indicator of inherent worth of a thing). Perhaps ironically, the no-sequel-ever purists are quick to attack the sequel fans as being johnny-come-latelies who only care about getting more of their favorite FF game (that is the only one they have ever played) and accuse them of knowing nothing of the history of the series—and while it's true that SE doing direct sequels is a relatively new thing, it's also true that before they did direct sequels, fans begged them to do it.
- The main artists and design philosophy in general, particularly the heated rivalry between Nomura and Amano fans, a time-honored proxy conflict of the "old school" versus "new school" when it isn't an artistic debate on its own. (And it frequently is, because these two artists have a very different approach to their work on the series because... well, the one-sentence version is that Amano is an amazing illustrator but a poor designer, while Nomura is a poor illustrator but an amazing designer). Tetsuya Nomura has a gigantic Hate Dom (that explicitly wish death on him) as well as his fervently-adoring fandom. Yoshitaka Amano has fewer haters, due to both his role in the genesis of the franchise and his fandom descending on Amano's critics with all the kindness and subtlety of africanized bees. Akihiko Yoshida has his own fan issues as well, frequently related to underdog issues. Each of these three represent a different approach to visuals, and FF fans are willing to crucify each other over their dedication to design.
- Then there's the Bishōnen issue. You have the fans (many female) who love the pretty men, the fans (many male) who loathe the pretty men, and the myriad positions inbetween, usually connected to fanboyship of one of the above artists.
