Well, it’s kind of ambiguous, but Shadow’s scene in the ending has the party escaping from Kefka’s tower, but Shadow steps off to the side. He sends his dog, Intercepter, off and says:
Go on, Interceptor! Get going!
Take care of yourself, boy…
Baram… It looks like I can finally stop running… Come and find me, all right?
Baram being Shadow’s dead friend, this last line always implied Shadow’s death to me. But it’s not totally clear.
I just remembered one point in FF6’s favor: it has, by far, the best song in the entire series (Magitek factory theme).
I had to vote for the original Tactics, despite its opaque plot, poor localization, and highly imbalanced gameplay. It was just fun. Until MMOs came along, there was no other game I played anywhere near as much as Tactics.
I voted for Tactics. I loved pretty much everything about it. Plus, tactics is my favorite sub-genre of video games (Ogre Battle anyone?).
Also, the Crystal Chronicles line for Gamecube, DS, and Wii also belongs on this list as they bear the Final Fantasy title.
I have a soft spot in my gaming heart for the first one. It was the first RPG I had ever played and I loved the openness to the world and numerous choices of classes and gear. I subscribed to Nintendo Power at the time and received their Final Fantasy strategy guide. I must have read that thing front to back at least 5 times.
However, I must not be a true FF fan because I never fell in love with 6. It had a good story, interesting characters, and lots of variety with classes and abilities, but it never clicked with me. They were always juggling the characters in and out. I knew I could never get too attached because they’ll just leave again in a few minutes. I would have some combat moves memorized or a good combo of different players, but then it was yanked from me and I had to start over again with a different set.
In confession, I never had a SNES and didn’t get around to playing VI until a couple of years ago when my son was first born. I was kind of distracted by only playing for an hour at a time, 2 days a week. It was slow moving through that game.
I would go with Final Fantasy VI for all the reasons that have been mentioned already. I think Kefka is one of the best video game villains of all time, and it also has some of the best music of all the games. My personal favourite is the Terra Theme
The main thing I disliked about FFVI was the frequency of random battles. I think they are the worst invention in the history of gaming, and really hurt JRPGs in general. It would be a different thing if the battles were actually challenging, but in most games they come down to casting one or two aoe spells. Just looking at the battle start sequence and the victory poses afterwards often takes longer than actually killing the creatures you’re up against.
Well, I’d say the best song in any game is a tie between two overworld themes.
Most people don’t realize this, but FF3j had lovely music, especially for the NES. I guess the DS updated it and it does indeed contain the original overworld theme.
Listen to it here:
Boundless Ocean from FF3 in the original NES
Then, there is FF6’s overworld theme, which has already been mentioned. It’s amazing.
Listen to it here: Terra’s Theme
Ah, I also liked Tactics, but not as much as some of our friends. I liked Tactics Ogre on the GBA, but never played the N64 Ogre Battle game I know you liked. What happened to that series, anyway?
I didn’t include Crystal Chronicles intentionally. I guess I figured it was like Mystic Quest…way outside the series. I haven’t heard a lot about it, really.
It’s pretty much a toss up twixt 6 and Tactics for me. With 10 and 7 trailing in second and third. Unfortunately the series, and pretty much all console RPGs, have gone down hill considerably since FMVs became to norm. If I wanted to watch a movie I wouldn’t be playing a video game.
VI definitely tops the list for me, for all the reasons previously mentioned. Plus it was the easiest to get your characters to God-like levels (thank you turbo controller-raft loop trick), which is fun for a second playthrough.
If I had to list (based on the ones I’ve played), it’d go:
I still to this day haven’t played VIII, but really want to.
Yeah, I would if I were you. It isn’t the best, but I think sometimes it gets overbashed by people. It actually has some pretty cool stuff in it.
Mmmmm… an excuse to think about the old/best FF games. I’d rank the top group something like:
8 and 10 are at the bottom for me, of the main line games. They’re still worth playing once, though.
5 was worse than either, to me. 8 is sappy and 10 is great, although its voice acting is horrible.
I loved Gilgamesh in 5(and 12, by the way), but everything else was really lame. Exdeath might be the worst main villian in the series.
The thing is, it really didn’t -used- to be that one. If you played FF1 or the original Dragon Warrior, random battles were -hard-. You stood a very real chance of dying in them. They were where the challenge of the game came from. Yes, you had to grind on them on a lot, but everytime you moved into a new area, you were in danger.
Somewhere along the way though, RPGs became more about stories and not about grinding enough to survive the attacks in the next area. And this phenomenon persisted. Modern JRPGs generally show enemies on the ‘world map’ - and I’m tempted to try to make excuses like “now that the technology supports that” but bleeping Ultima III on the Apple II was able to do this, so there’s really no reason an NES game couldn’t have.
Of course, some of the Western RPG solutions for the problem are just as bad - I personally hate the “there will always be bandits at that bend in the road until you kill them and then there will never be bandits again” approach. It’s just hard to accurately model a ‘dangerous environment’, since, by rights, the world should be a ton bigger than any of the places the game displays - which means that, to some extent, respawning ‘random’ monsters make more sense.
Since you asked, pretty much nothing. The last game in the series was Ogre Battle 64 in 2000. They released a couple of other games that were side-stories or gaidens such as Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis in 2002.
After that, Square-Enix bought the rights to the series in 2002 and have done jack and squat with it. I keep hoping they will someday return to it when Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest have been run into the ground and they are looking for something fresh. The potential with the pointer feature of the Wii remote to move quickly around a battle field to direct units in pseudo-real time really appeals to me.
Where’s Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2? 
ETA: My favorite… I can’t decide. I’m biased towards anything with blue magic. 
I was very torn between VI and VIII, but I went with 8, which was the last FF that I really enjoyed. I thought that some parts of it were not well thought out, but some things were just spectacular.
I never finished 9 and 10, wasn’t interested in MMORPGs (still am not, really) and I figured that since Square had disappointed me twice in a row, that I wasn’t going to buy any more games from them. Some parts of the games were great, but in 9, there were way too many movies, and the characters in 10 aggravated the hell out of me for the most part. I really only liked Auron and Kimahri.
I’d like to put in a good word for Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, too. They aren’t technically Final Fantasies, but people who enjoyed a Final Fantasy would probably enjoy these games as well. CT was originally put out for the SNES, but there’s a very nice PSX port of the game, too.
The one I had the most fun with was FFTA2 but it wasn’t in the list, so I picked FFT. I’m not sure why I’m drawn to the tactics titles more than the main series. Less grinding, I guess, and the battles actually feel like battles.
Have you played Persona 3 and 4 on hard mode? Those are games where the normal common battles can be lethal. And the bosses can be ridiculously hard. Great stories as well.
Maybe there’s a Star Trek-like connection with the even numbers being better than the odds. Let’s see…despite the absence of VII and the presence of II and XII, I’d say the evens pretty easily takes this one.
I have Chrono Cross and it’s good, but I never finished it. Chrono Trigger was the first RPG I managed to play through, and my favorite JRPG of all time. It inspired me to complete FF6, a game I already owned and one I quickly grew to love. (FF7 was great, too.)
Where’s the love for Kefka’s theme, by the way? It’s probably the only video game composition I can recall completely without raking my brain; I could listen to that tune for hours on end.
Son of a submariner!
I don’t even think tactics should be on the list. It’s not that I think it’s bad or somehow unworthy, but I can’t really compare such a vastly different game. Tactics is only vaguely like other FF’s. it’s like trying to look at FF6 against Half-Life and then compare those to Starcraft. Honestly, how can you even compare them?