Final Fantasy XII is the game that brought me back to video games. I grew up loving the series but drifted away after VIII, with only a quick sugar rush through X in the years between between 1999 and 2007 - an eternity for someone in their teens and early twenties. I found much of this era uninviti...

For me, FFX is inextricably linked to the changing fortunes of Square in the early 00s. Sakaguchi’s decision to set up shop in Hawaii and double down on photorealistic graphics came to define X, just as the catastrophic release of The Spirits Within would define the hubris that effectively ended his...

Oh, FFVIII, what an ambitious mess you are!... To me, VIII is that younger sibling’s biggest swing of the PS1 era and, unfortunately, it left me shaking my head as the game drunkenly tumbled ass over teakettle off the back of the couch and shattered the family's good china. Very well said Will — bl...

Oh, FFVIII, what an ambitious mess you are! Someone more poetic than me once observed that FF and Dragon Quest are like siblings, with DQ as the responsible, stodgy older brother who works in insurance, has 2.5 kids, a golden retriever, and a haircut you can set your watch to while FF is the artsy y...

Well, this is the big one. It’s not the first and may or may not be your personal favorite, but if you ask the average gamer to imagine a JRPG they will almost certainly picture something like FFVII; it is literally a genre-defining title. It was also a system-seller for the ascendant PS1. Final Fan...

As a dyed-in-the-wool Final Fanboy in the 90s I was tremendously excited when FFVI came out on the SNES. To my chagrin, however, I initially bounced off of the game and never finished it as a teenager. While I had loved Cecil’s propulsively-paced hero’s journey in IV, FFVI left me cold. The story fe...