Oh shit i missed something very relevat to my interests. Honestly my list fluctuates all the time and like, the possiblity of including Tactics makes it even worse

I think

1. IX
2. X

is pretty solidly true for me

But 3 could be any of IV, VI, VII, or Tactics for me depending on mood.

I also have huge soft spots for XII and XIII and think both are underated (for different reasons, also XII has been more appreciated in recent years).

9, 7, Lost Odyssey, 6.

8 has wonderful music and graphics but the story and characters are pretty much doodoo.

I played the entire XIII trilogy despite thinking XIII was a colossal failure on all fronts. I thought it was so uniquely, fascinatingly bad that I just had to see how they’d try to build on it going forward, and to Square Enix’s credit, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns were infinitely better games, not that it necessarily amounted to much. I said 8’s characters and story were doodoo but XIII was just abominable Squenix nonsense all the way

• XII - not being the main character (or half of the party being the main character) made for really interesting dynamics as the party were swept through each others’ worlds, and I loved how it implemented rtwp. More games should have a gambit system.

• X - Easily my favourite turn based battle mechanics in a game. Turn order and manipulation, overkills, overdrives, kicking a ball at someone’s head and calling it an attack, Auron. The Zanarkand sequence at the start might be my favourite opening to a game, too.

• Origin: Stranger of Paradise - I will not accept that this is some “alternate universe” or reimagining of the first game, as far as I’m concerned it’s a banger of a prequel with a story that does a great job of deconstructing the heroes of light trope and overcomplicating the plot of the first game enough to bring it in line with other entries. The Souls-like gameplay changed up the classic formulas in interesting ways, and implemented the classic classes really well within that.

1. Tactics
2. IX
3. X or maybe VII hard to decide

1. Tactics
2. VI
3. XIV

I still have Red Chocobo trauma, Kefka still has my favorite boss BGM, and XIV is almost ENTIRELY being carried by Masayoshi Soken and the Primals right now.