Doomed Hometown / Final Fantasy

• In Final Fantasy II, Fynn is taken over by the empire, and all of the protagonists' parents are killed, prompting them to want to join the rebellion, in addition to wanting to find Maria's brother Leon. The rebellion eventually retakes Fynn, though. It's also one of the few towns that doesn't get utterly wiped out by the Cyclone.
• In Final Fantasy IV:
  • Rydia's hometown, the village of Mist, is burned to the ground early; this is notable in that the destruction was performed by the hero. Also, most of the inhabitants survived (though the rest of the summoners were wiped out).
  • Damcyan Castle, Edward The Spoony Bard's home, is destroyed by Red Wings early on.
  • Eblan Castle, home of Edge and his Ninja clan, is stormed by Rubicante and his forces sometime before you meet him, his people however relocate to Eblan Cave.
• In Final Fantasy V, Bartz's hometown is disintegrated late in the game. Strangely, nothing plot-relevant happens here, and you can play the game through without ever visiting it, and thus never learned it's his hometown.
• Final Fantasy VI:
  • Early in the game, Kefka starts to burn down Figaro Castle as a punishment to Edgar for refusing to give Terra up to him. For a moment, it seems like Edgar may lose his kingdom. But instead, he gets away and then the entire castle sinks Beneath the Earth. While not immediately accessible right after this event, Figaro remains available for the player's use all the way through the game, ever after The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Kefka does bring an end to Cyan's kingdom. Killing everyone in the Kingdom by poisoned well.
  • Narshe, the first town in the game, eventually ends up (mostly) abandoned, desolate, and swarming with monsters.
• Final Fantasy VII:
  • Cloud and Tifa are from Nibelheim, which was razed by Sephiroth. (It later got rebuilt and repopulated in an attempt to conceal that it ever was destroyed, which briefly confused the heroes). Later (chronologically speaking), he and the party are forced to leave Midgar to avoid the authorities. This is shortly after Shinra destroys the Sector 7 slums, where AVALANCHE is based. And then the entire city is mostly destroyed later on!
  • Corel, Barret's hometown, is razed by Shinra troops, which is his main motivation for rebelling against them.
  • Pre-game hero Zack's hometown of Gongaga is destroyed by Going Critical. What's worse is that Crisis Core reveals that however the reactor exploded, it occurred during the four years he was a test subject. When he arrives, the whole fact that the town is mostly a crater and there are gravestones all around the huts of whoever survived doesn't seem to really faze him.
• Final Fantasy VIII:
  • Trabia Garden, the garden from which Selphie was transferred to Balamb, is heavily damaged by a missile strike one-third into the game. Just to nail it further, when you'll get to visit the place, you can visit a graveyard with numerous tombstones of the people that perished to that attack.
  • This may happen to Balamb Garden, the current home of your cast barring Irvine and Zell, if you fail to sabotage the missile attack on it. This however gives you a Non-Standard Game Over.
• Tidus from Final Fantasy X is from the city of Zanarkand, which is attacked at the beginning of the game; when he comes to, the people of Spira insist that it was destroyed a thousand years ago. The truth is that the real Zanarkand was destroyed a thousand years ago, but its former inhabitants' souls created a memory of the city as it looked like back then. This so-called Dream Zanarkand, where Tidus came from, is alive — people are born, live, and die there — but it is nevertheless just a construct that will go away if the souls that created it are convinced to move on.
• Final Fantasy IX has so very many contenders for this trope. Practically every major city is seriously razed by the end of the game, including Alexandria, the home of Dagger and the first place we meet Zidane and Vivi, and Burmecia, Freya's hometown. Lindblum, Zidane's de facto hometown also gets partially razed, and is in a constant state of rebuilding until the end of the game. Terra / Bran Bal also counts, since it's really where Zidane came from and is remarkable because it's a doomed alternate dimension.
• Final Fantasy XII: Basch and Gabranth were born in a country called Landis, which was conquered by Archadia years ago. It's unknown if Landis still exists, but its downfall is the reason why both Basch and Gabranth are so fanatically devoted to the cause of their new homes, because they do not want to see another Landis.
• In Final Fantasy XIII, the villains' plot is to cause this, and they succeed, though the heroes manage to avert the "everyone dying" part. This also turns out to be the case for Oerba, Vanille and Fang's hometown.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2 has New Bodhum, a rebuilt version of the original that was lost in the previous game. Due to extremely screwed up time anomalies, you see mirages of the town's future as a desolate wasteland. Indeed, the next time you visit (seven centuries later, two centuries after Cocoon's literal Colony Drop), only one chunk of rubble can still be called a building... barely. The new journey is aiming to stop this from happening, though, and it succeeds... sort of.
• Final Fantasy XV has Noctis' kingdom of Insomnia, home of the crystal, invaded and left in ruins as per the prequel, Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV.
• Final Fantasy XVI has the Grand Duchy of Rosaria, home of the Rosfield family, sacked by the Holy Empire of Sanbreque with help of the duchess and turned into an imperial province where Bearers are persecuted and regular purges happen.
• The unnamed-and-never-seen hometown of the hero from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Its destruction is only mentioned in the hero's first line of dialogue, and never alluded to after that.