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The story
A thread on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo G board asked, “What’s the greatest Final Fantasy game?” According to posters, Japanese players tend to champion FF5, FF6, and FF10, while overseas players’ support clusters around FF7 and FF8. Some noted this pattern was sparked by discussion of which FF titles various Hololive VTuber members have played. The thread saw takes like “FF6 poured too many resources into presentation” and “FF7 kicked off the cutscene-heavy era, leaving less room for imagination,” while others pushed back by noting that FF6 and FF12 often top overseas fan-ranking projects — turning it into a debate over the gap between gut feeling and actual poll numbers.
What people said
There's still a solid faction of old Japanese guys backing that one too.
No way.
A totally linear game where everyone's playthrough turns out the same is just too boring.
The main couple just aren't charming at all.
Not 6.
The source for the thread title is which FF games Hololive members have played (Hololive being a VTuber agency).
The Japanese members are almost all 6 and 10.
The overseas members are almost all 7 and 8.
Sourcing this from VTubers is a joke.
In actual overseas poll rankings, 6 comes out on top pretty much every time.
12 is usually up there too.
Square Enix as it stands now isn't capable of topping that.
That comment sounds like it came from a fujoshi scriptwriter (slang for female fans of boys'-love fiction).
Same story as Gundam SEED — it's the same generation.
It got trashed because it was completely linear with an arrow guiding you around — of course people complain when there isn't even a world map.
The 20th Anniversary Ultimania scenario book says 7 actually drew more criticism than praise back when it launched too.
Still, it's the second-best-selling entry ever, and it's been a while since an FF blew up like that.
It even became a mainstream social phenomenon.
Name recognition keeps climbing and currency values keep inflating, so of course the newest entry tends to top the sales charts.
If it didn't, that'd honestly be a huge failure.
I shivered when he headbutted Materazzi (a joke conflating FF9's Zidane with footballer Zinedine Zidane's infamous World Cup headbutt).
Once 7 pushed the series into cutscene-movie territory, leaning on story became kind of unavoidable.
Yeah, I genuinely felt like room for imagination disappeared starting with 7.
It feels less like playing and more like being made to watch.
Sorry, that's unit sales, not yen figures, so it's beside the point.
Then it must've been sold dirt cheap.
Just guessing, but a game that originally cost 9,504 yen was probably being sold at something like 980 yen — about 90% off.
That "I loooove the protagonist~" stuff feels like a virgin's fantasy, it's rough to watch at this point.
Sorry, but neither of them has any charm even on their own…
11's basically a different game that just happens to share the name (it's the MMO entry).
Guess it was too advanced for a baby like you.
That one would absolutely blow up as an oepn world game.
Typo, meant open world.
The prequel, Origin, is a great game.
It's kind of a pioneer of what you'd call time-loop stories.
Having a cold open before the title screen was innovative too — it really shows off the staff's creative sense.
It's an atmosphere game.
FF always used to push into new territory, so it felt like the first time the series played it safe, and I didn't like that.
Even Sakaguchi himself called it the most polished FF.
But if you actually surveyed fans on polish and completeness, I bet 6 would land dead last.
That kind of gap in perception is probably what's behind the series' decline now.
But baking the character's raw level straight into the damage formula makes zero sense, no matter how you look at it.
How would they even remake that mid-air falling battle scene?
Especially since they're diehard fans of other numbered entries, yet they try to frame it as fans of 8 and 9 fighting each other.
The ones who say this are always 8 fanboys.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
In fan polls for the FF series, gut-feeling impressions and actual tallied results tend to diverge. While the thread claimed “overseas fans favor FF7 and FF8,” some pushed back, noting that FF6 and FF12 often top the rankings in overseas fan-voting projects — turning the gap between perception and statistics into a central point of debate. FF6 is said to have been called “the most polished FF” by its own developer, Hironobu Sakaguchi, yet it’s also a game that splits opinion, given experimental-for-its-time features like factoring a character’s raw level directly into damage calculations. As for FF7, some pointed out that the ‘FFVII 20th Anniversary Ultimania’ notes it faced criticism at launch over its linear progression and the arrow indicators on the world map — a reminder that its current reputation as the “greatest FF of all time” wasn’t the consensus from day one, but was largely shaped years later, a detail that’s easy to overlook.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Mystery] What’s the greatest Final Fantasy? Japanese fans say “5, 6, or 10,” foreigners say “7 or 8”.”
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