Final Fantasy / YMMV

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Aluminum Christmas Trees: Dark knights, also known as black knights, were a splinter group who refused to serve lords or kings. Instead they either looted and raided, hunted bounties, or lived off charity in much the same manner as a Japanese ronin. As they had no master, and thus no squire, they would paint their armor a signature black color to prevent rust and damage. Dark knights were considered a necessary evil, as they would protect villages and peasants from invaders and bandits, but would also cause problems in the regions they inhabited sustain themselves. In some legends, black knights were reputed to be nigh-invincible in combat.
Badass Decay: Leviathan was one of the most powerful summons in early installments (second to Bahamut in III, the King of Eidolons in IV, one of three level 5 summons in V), but became more of a mid-game summon starting with VII, and is now a part of the 6-pronged elemental wheel seen in the latest installments, alongside "basic" summons like Ifrit and Shiva while his old role was effectively given to Alexander. Final Fantasy XV inverts this by making Shiva and Ifrit more badass and elevating them to Leviathan's level.
Cheese Strategy:
- Generally, one boss per game is undead and thus vulnerable to being one-shotted with a healing item. Occasionally, bosses are vulnerable to another status that is so debilitating it effectively gives the player immediate victory, such as Taharka in Final Fantasy IX (vulnerable to Heat).
- Final Fantasy X: The final boss Yu Yevon is something of an Almighty Idiot who doesn't use particularly powerful attacks or defenses (other than one flunky healing him for 9999 damage, but the party can easily outdo that kind of damage). One particularly well-known strategy involves exploiting his lack of Contractual Boss Immunity by inflicting the Zombie status on him, causing his own ally to damage him for quite a bit of damage. This is more or less the point, coming after very difficult battles: Yu Yevon was the driving entity behind Sin's constant regeneration and destructive impulses, but over millennia became entirely helpless without an Aeon to possess and turn into Sin anew.
Contested Sequel: Every Final Fantasy game somehow manages to become more controversial than the last one.
Critical Dissonance: The entire series. Critics almost universally give Final Fantasy games high scores. Fans on the other hand are a heavily fragmented Broken Base. Name any game in the series and, though the proportions will vary, you will find people who hate it, those who love it, and those who don't feel strongly either way.
Crowning Music Of Awesome: The soundtrack. Nobuo Uematsu's scores are practically worshiped by many fans of the series, and have spawned tons of remix projects and orchestrations.
Evil Is Cool: Who doesn't remember the villains in this series? There are even a few examples in online fandom of people who have stated they want to be like Sephiroth or Kefka. Taken to the extreme with Caius who is canonically the most powerful antagonist in the series so far.
Fandom Rivalry:
- During The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games, there was one with the The Legend of Zelda series, especially Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VII (and also by extension, Link Vs. Cloud). Both franchises were probably the most iconic ones of their respective consoles, and people used to compare them out of their fantasy settings (despite the fact that they were for the most part very different). So it was a natural extension of that generation's Console Wars. Just like with the previous console war's Mario vs. Sonic rivalry, an official Link vs. Cloud fight was finally made possible when Cloud was added to the fourth Super Smash Bros. game as DLC.
- With Dragon Quest, as both are the two pivotal franchises in the Eastern RPG genre of games, yet take wildly different approaches; Dragon Quest tends to be more whimsical and features the cartoonish artstyle of Akira Toriyama, while Final Fantasy delves into Darker and Edgier territory with its stories and features a more realistic artstyle for most of its installments. Beyond that, Dragon Quest is almost purely-fantasy based and has stayed true to its turn-based roots for decades, while Final Fantasy delves in Science Fantasy more often than not and has become more and more of an Action RPG series as the years have gone by. This rivalry has continued to endure even after their companies merged to form Square Enix and both series have had crossovers in media such as Itadaki Street and Super Smash Bros., though it's slightly less intense thanks to those. And above all else, both fandoms will generally agree that Chrono Trigger is a masterpiece that takes the best of both franchises, thanks to it being a collaboration by the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest teams.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: It is quite popular in France, likely due to the population of France's love of fantasy themed fiction.
- SNES Final Fantasy titles are very popular in America, due to more complex storylines that their contemporaries, not to mention memes based on the bad translations, like "Spoony Bard" and "Son of the Submariner".
Growing the Beard:
- It is generally agreed that the series has done this, but there is no absolute consensus to when this happened, being the subject of massive Flame Wars. General consensus is it happened somewhere from IV to VII (and old-school Japanese fans would readily assert III, but all non-Japanese fans missed that particular boat). Each game in that span, in their own ways, radically improved upon the gameplay, plot and/or characters compared to what came before.
- It is also generally agreed that the A Realm Reborn relaunch of Final Fantasy XIV signified a second beard-growing in The New '10s. While there have still been debates about some of the games that followed, in general ARR's launch in 2013 marked a general improvement in the quality and effort put into Final Fantasy titles, with XIV itself taking a major lead position with its expansions.
- The beard growing seems to have been slightly slower with the single player entries but seems in full effect by the mid-2020s. FFVII Remake and Final Fantasy XVI both have metacritic scores in the upper 80s and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is drawing the best reviews the series has seen since the the SNES and Early Playstation Eras.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- A commonly believed though untrue story behind the series' title; it was called "Final Fantasy" because Squaresoft was going bankrupt and everyone in the company expected this to be their last game, and Hironobu Sakaguchi was considering giving up being a video game designer and decided to let this game decide for him. Instead the game was hugely successful, saved the company and Sakaguchi's career, and is now a pillar of the JRPG genre.
- It's widely believed that the reason Square took the franchise to Sony was because of Nintendo's insistence on using Cartridges for the Nintendo 64. Over 20 years later, Square Enix announces they're porting VII, IX, X, X-2, and XII^note to a Nintendo system for the first time, specifically the Nintendo Switch, which is Nintendo's first cartridge-based system since the N64.
- Final Fantasy IV was originally planned to be a totally different game for the Famicom with a magazine page advertising a Cook and Carpenter as job options. While the game didn't go too far in development and without elaborating what the Cook and Carpenter would do, those two jobs would later be available in Final Fantasy XIV.
- The story of Final Fantasy VII originally being meant for a Nintendo 64 release is well-known. However, one of the rejected prompts for the game went to become Xenogears, with both games releasing on the PlayStation and not the Nintendo 64. Shortly after Xenogears's release, its development crew would go onto found Monolith Soft, who would later make Xenoblade Chronicles, a second Creator-Driven Successor for Xenogears...after Monolith Soft had been bought out by Nintendo. And then things came full circle even more so when both Cloud and Shulk were add to the fourth Smash game, thus allowing them duke it out.
- The Final Fantasy series has long had a Running Gag of featuring a comedic duo named Biggs and Wedge in every game as a Shout-Out to Star Wars. Star Wars: The Bad Batch seems to have decided to finally return the favor by introducing a character named Cid — Cid being another name that's reused Once per Episode in Final Fantasy.
Misblamed:
- Some have unfairly pointed fingers at Final Fantasy for creating the idea that Bahamut, a whale from Arabic Mythology, was a dragon. In fact, Final Fantasy got it from Dungeons & Dragons, as Final Fantasy was based a lot off of D&D Second edition.
- Tetsuya Nomura became this trope thanks to being the Creative Lead of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII ^note that was a major focus of the company in the early 2000s. When VII became a huge hit, Nomura not only became the go-to artist for many subsequent main series titles, but he became director and producer of several Compilation titles, and fans began to blame anything wrong with the series on him. This is despite the fact that outside the Compilation, he had only ever been an art and character designer. Note that this is exclusive for the pre-2010s games, as some 2010s-era games begin to credit him as a Creative Producer. This welled up again in the wake of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, both of which had controversial design decisions that fans blamed on Nomura — even though he didn't write either game.
- The XIII trilogy and XV saga both earned intense hatred for directors Motomu Toriyama and Hajime Tabata — "Toriyama'd" became shorthand for Trolling Creator during the XIII trilogy's run in the spotlight, and Tabata got a lot of flak for releasing XV as an Obvious Beta that he tried to finish with patches and DLC. In both cases, while they certainly merit some blame for the games since they directed them, neither is entirely at fault: the major criticism of the XIII trilogy was its confusing and nonsensical stories in XIII-2 and Lightning Returns, and Toriyama didn't write those two games, Daisuke Watanabe did. As for XV, its Troubled Production is infamous for spanning a decade from its initial reveal to its release (2006 to 2016) and Tabata was only director from 2012 on, and the project had a lot of behind-the-scenes problems that caused it to be delayed prior to Tabata coming on and none of them can be blamed on a single person.
- When Final Fantasy XIV was first released in 2010, it was panned heavily from critics and players alike for being full of glitches, having illogical gameplay mechanics, and having a lot of Cut and Paste Environments. Hiromichi Tanaka was the director at the time and was also the director for Final Fantasy XI. Tanaka got the blame for the failure that Final Fantasy XIV went through, which resulted with him being forced out of Square Enix (with a note that he had been one of Square's founders in the 1980s). Although he was rather famously awkward with the news media in general and made some specific gaffes during the initial press cycle for XIV, fans of the 1.0 game feel Tanaka was made to take the fall for a disaster that had a lot of responsible parties.
Older Than They Think:
- People think that the pretty, angsty protagonist only started happening when the games moved onto the Playstation. Either they do not know about Cecil Harvey, or they are actively practicing denial.
- Percentage-based damage. The Gravity spell family—which first appeared in Final Fantasy V—is the most famous example of this: Gravity takes 50% of the enemy's HP, no matter how much HP he has. However this first appeared all the way back in Final Fantasy II with the Blood Sword, which always took a certain percentage of the enemy's HP, no matter how large it was.^note
Only the Creator Does It Right: Some fans will tell you the series began to lose its way once Hironobu Sakaguchi resigned from Squaresoft, and its subsequent merger with Enix from 2001-2003.
Popular with Furries: Red XIII from VII, Kimahri from X, the Bangaa race, the various Behemoth breeds, and some of the summon designs ensure that a lot of anthropomorphic fan-art surrounds the franchise.
Remade and Improved: The series has had this happen for the first six entries. Thing is, each of these games has been remade at least twice, and the arguments are less about the remakes being better (as almost all of them are considered improvements over the original game) and more about which remake is the best way to play the game.
- Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II were rereleased on the Playstation in the Origins release, which updated their graphics and music, as well as brought some of their aged gameplay elements to modern times (for the 1990s). These were later also ported to the Game Boy Advance in the Dawn of Souls release, adding bonus content and further updating the mechanics, again to Playstation Portable, adding even more content, and later the Pixel Remaster releases which kept almost every change except for the additional content.
- Final Fantasy III on the NES walked so that the SNES games could run, and was well-received for what it did and how it pushed the series. However, the DS remake gave the game a much more cohesive plot, characters with distinct personalities, and a more robust job system. The Pixel Remaster release found a "best of both worlds" approach and is now considered the definitive version of the game.
- Final Fantasy IV was the game that caused the Final Fantasy series to explode in popularity, to the point where it has been remade no less than four times. The Advance translation cleaned up the script and added all sorts of bonus content, the DS remake was widely seen as a Hard Mode version of the game that brought a new challenge to veteran players, the PSP 20th Anniversary Collection married both releases together and brought the sequel and a new Interquel to the picture, and the Pixel Remaster featured graphical touchups and rebalancing but left out additional content. Generally, the PSP version is considered the superior remake.
- Final Fantasy V was considered a moderate success at the time of its original release, but the game never saw a proper international release until the Anthology Release on Playstation, which was considered an awful port. However, the Advance version changed everything, featuring an irreverent script lampooning series-wide tropes, as well as making the cast of characters far more memorable than the original game, not to mention the bonus content added, have resulted in the Advance version being considered the definitive version of V, even ahead of the Pixel Remaster.
- Final Fantasy VI has one in the form of a character. The International script of the game (first put together by Ted Woolsey, creating the Woolseyism trope in the process) compared to the Japanese script, turned Kefka from a forgettable villain into a Laughably Evil Laughing Mad Omnicidal Maniac which caused his popularity to soar. Every time the game has been remade in Japan since the GBA port, his character has been based on the international version.
Sequelitis: Much like the beard-growing detailed above, it is frequently argued by some that somewhere between the very late 90s and through to about 2010 (with the release of the original XIV and Final Fantasy All the Bravest), the franchise began to suffer quite badly from a case of sequelitis (with the aforementioned examples being extreme expressions of the malaise). Much like the beard-growing, however, precisely when the franchise began suffering serious issues, or whether the problem has even been entirely consistent, is one of the most mileage-varying topics one can discuss in the fandom (with a real risk of discussion becoming Flame Bait).
Silent Majority: Every game (in the main series, anyway) has gotten great reviews from critics and fans alike and sold millions of copies. You wouldn't know it from visiting online forums, where players will line up to tell you that each individual title (and especially the most recent one to be released) is one of the worst video games they ever played and almost ruined the series.
Visual Effects of Awesome: Alongside Awesome Music, this is the other trope that most fans universally agree on, ranging from the elaborate opera scene and destruction of the world in VI, to the warping antics and titanic Astrals in XV. The most common ground for these are a) the ever-present summons, and b) the more recent fight scenes.
Win Back the Crowd: Many fans gradually grew disillusioned with how Square Enix handled re-releasing many of the older entries from 2014 onwards, with many of the games from I - IX being remade for mobile phones with varying degrees of cheapness before being sloppily ported to other platforms, culminating in the egregiously ugly V and VI remakes. When the Pixel Remaster series of remakes for Final Fantasy's I through VI were announced in 2021 with little fanfare, before soon being released with even less only on PC and mobile, along with the confirmation of each game lacking any of the bonus content from each of their different versions released over the years and the look of the games falling into similar pitfalls the aforementioned V and VI remakes did^*, many were naturally sceptical of whether they would be any good. Come release, many were surprised to find the visuals looked nice, with really slick transitions and effects, the new arrangements of the soundtracks were excellent, and that each game had unadvertised balance changes that refined each game while staying true to the originals^*. On the technical side of things, the PC versions have menus optimized for larger screens instead of being carried over from the mobile versions, support up to 21:9 ultrawide resolutions, and all versions have the pixel art of gameplay elements stay on a consistent grid. As a result, many have actually called the first three Pixel Remasters the definitive versions of each game and have regained some faith in how Square Enix is handling the series' older games.

YMMV / Final Fantasy

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