What IS a “Final Fantasy”?
A 2025 perspective
Final Fantasy is historically a franchise of evolution. Each entry seeks to build and improve upon what came before – purposefully mixing up its approach to story, characters, exploration, combat, and RPG mechanics.
In its first few decades, that tradition often put FF at the forefront of innovation shaping the JRPG genre, albeit not without its missteps along the way. But this philosophy of change and iteration over time has increasingly led to a question of identity – what IS a Final Fantasy?
Many people have posed the question over the years and come up with different answers – and understandably so. With decades of history and so many different games acting as people’s entry points and personal favorites, it’s not a simple formula any one person can map out on paper.
I myself have tried to tackle the question of FF’s identity many times before, even becoming something of annual tradition if this January article is anything to go by.
And while there is no single factor you can distill such a complicated topic down to, I still have a list of core elements that come to my mind when I reminisce on the series that I love, and why I came to love it.
So now, let’s take a look back. Here’s what I’ve got:
A sprawling adventure. The heroes’ journey. Starting from small town beginnings and escalating to global circumnavigation. There’s a reason why overworld maps and airships and all those trappings are still so beloved to this day, and the conceit of the self-insert hero from town A gathering a party of misfit adventurers to smite the forces of evil with the power of light and friendship is still a staple of the genre
A big bad, a bigger bad, and sometimes an even bigger bad with bad guy filling. There’s the villain you can see from day one, but there’s almost always an even darker and more dangerous force of unimaginable scope and power lurking in the shadows. When you finally do meet them on the battlefield, you aren’t always guaranteed to prevail. And even when you do, odds are: that wasn’t even their final form
Hard hitting narrative themes, often coming down to the meaning and value of life – frequently realized through the juxtaposition of great sacrifice and loss. Without getting into spoilers, there’s something both existential and triumphant in Final Fantasy’s treatment of conflict and the drive to overcome it – no matter what form it takes or how severely it strikes at our emotional core
The beating heart and our window into the world: the JRPG party. A cluster of personalities spanning a whole rainbow of lovable doofs to standoff-ish tough guys and quietly resilient young dreamers. The relationships that form, the camaraderie that blossoms, the rivalry and ribbing that ensues. We bear witness to their bonds of loyalty, friendship, and even romance. Sometimes we suffer great loss along with them, but in the best of cases, we forge unforgettable memories for life
Also: the tactical role of the party – spanning countless jobs and classes and specialties that you can mix and match. There’s no joy quite like obsessing over your party composition, planning your strategies, wondering what evolutions your characters will undergo and in some cases, what secret or ultimate jobs you can attain by the end game
The RPG experimentation. The almost fearless and defiant drive to evolve the mechanics of what came before. Whether it’s FFVII’s Materia or FFIX’s abilities learned from equipment or FFX’s sphere grid or even the controversial FFII skill leveling system, FF has always iterated on or wholesale changed what tools the player has at their disposal to form their party and their playstyle, inviting different kinds of critical thinking and dedication to the good ole JRPG grind – culminating in some truly game-breaking kits of combat supremacy
The magic of the world. The summons or the Aeons or the Eidolons or the Espers – whatever great power it is that elevates the fantasy of the fiction to awe-inspiring proportions. Whether it’s high fantasy or borderline steampunk, FF’s world always connects man and magic, monsters and mythology in such a way that it never gets old. Even if the names of the spells or the creatures stay the same, the evolutions of these magical elements over time has become a unifying element of the worldbuilding
The towns. The overworld map. The dungeons and the trials. There’s a charm in the now almost predictably themed locations, the familiar-even-when-they’re-new points of interest on the map – whether they come in the form of a cobblestoned castle courtyard or a shanty seaside village or a sprawling grassland valley and that one mithril cave over there. Oh and a snow level. There’s always a snow level somewhere, right?
The quirks. The laughs. The weird ass humor peppered into the triumphs and the tragedy. Sure, there’s usually some world-ending threat looming overhead but there’s always gonna be that one whacky random NPC obsessed with something infinitesimally small in the grand scheme of things, along with character designs that borderline seem like they should break the fiction. Some of the humor hasn’t aged the best (looking at some of Zidane’s early lover boy lines or most things involving Wakka…) but the stakes of what we stand to lose in the fight against evil don’t hit the hardest without the contrast of levity and light
The mascots, the series staples and franchise icons. From the crystals of light to the airships and Cid to Chocobos and Moogles and Cactuars galore. Whether it’s recurring trash mobs like slimes or your not-so-trash mobs like behemoths or even just the simple consistent naming scheme of fire, fira, and firaga – there’s a FF lexicon that has grown and been firmly cemented in the greater gaming community for life. You can look at a giant yellow birb and know: this is Final Fantasy
The MUSIC that moves the earth beneath your feet, making reality fall away and tugging you instantly into a place that’s nostalgic even on first listen, as if discovering a home you hadn’t realized was ever lost to time. You cannot understate the historic quality, the bar-setting brilliance, the iconic and classic and timeless nature of the FF music. From the original Prelude to One Winged Angel and beyond, FF has been pushing the boundaries of what music is and can be in the video game medium. Whether it’s Uematsu or not, FF has a sound that will ring in the annals of history and for good damn reason
The secrets and the easter eggs. The ridiculous things no one could find without a guide – whether it was one you bought in an actual bookstore (yeah kids, that was a thing) or looked up on a gaming website with more pop-up ads than actual written words. FF games are littered with hidden things to find. It could be a chest you shouldn’t have opened or a super-secret badass summon or the game’s ultimatest ultimate boss that will pound even the most weathered adventurer into the ground; there’s always something cool that some dev tucked into the fabric of the world somewhere
The side content for better or worse. Side quests of little consequence and nonsense. FF has long been a pioneer of many things: job class systems, ATB combat, emotionally charged narratives. But side quests? Maybe not its strongest of suits. But even though other pillars of the genre have figured out the loop a little better, there are still side quests and optional objectives aplenty in FF games. Some even help to deliver that narrative goodness and worldbuilding lore we crave, and others relate to the next point on the list…
Mini games that delight and frustrate in equal measure. Card games and races and sporting events if that’s what we want to call Blitzball… At their peak, you get a Triple Triad or a Queen’s Blood, and in their valleys you get… well most of what’s involved with unlocking FFX’s ultimate weapons. And sometimes, you even get a fishing mechanic that’s so ridiculously in-depth that it spawns a whole FFXV VR game… Yeah, FF’s history of mini games is a varied and many splendored thing, that’s for sure
The JRPG grind and spikes in difficulty. From the days of random encounters to Chadley’s most cracked VR AI abominations, FF games want your time – and we want them to want it… mostly. If you love FF, odds are you’re addicted to the JRPG loop and thrive on the grind. You’re here for the EXP and laboriously long late-game dungeons. You want to tackle the optional super bosses that make the final main story villain look like a washed-up old has-been. But there’s also always a chance that there’s some mid-game boss (Seymour…) that spikes up the difficulty (Seymour…) and is ridiculously unfair (SEYMOUR AS;FJLDK) that’ll make you want to tear your hair out (and then his) (and then yours again)
The eternal quest to excite and engage players with variations on turn-based gameplay, from ATB to increasingly real-time player input. But at its current apex, this relentless march forward has left the dregs of turn-based behind almost entirely, at least in the mainline entries. Perhaps it’s possible they’re finding a new way forward with the hybrid combat system in the FFVII Remake trilogy, or maybe they’re truly abandoning the past from FFXV and XVI onward. Only time will tell
Conclusion: Where we are today, and looking forward
The challenge with Final Fantasy and its core identity, at least in the last decade looking mainly at FFXV and FFXVI, is that the games seem to tick fewer and fewer of these boxes – at least in terms of what I’ve come up with here today.
And I use the word “challenge” on purpose. What I mean is that in the pursuit of constantly evolving and iterating and experimenting and enabling developer creativity, as well as the business imperative to expand and grow the audience, Square has made things particularly difficult for themselves.
On the one hand, they’ve undeniably succeeded in reaching totally new players – gamers who never would have engaged with a pixel art or turn-based JRPG. They prefer action and/or modern open world experiences – and so the latest entries speak to them in a way that previous FF titles don’t and perhaps never will.
But in doing so, Square has struggled and arguably at times even failed to serve their core audience – the people who fell in love with FF in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. And in failing to serve their traditional fan base, they’ve lost some of them along the way.
They’ve essentially fractured their audience – making it hard to serve multiple demographics with their biggest budget, mainline titles – upon which hinges not only the financial health of the franchise, but the current definition of its identity as well.
In constantly changing and evolving the FF formula – whether to enable developer creativity and gameplay innovation or to drive global audience growth and sales – it has become infinitely harder to retain and define what a Final Fantasy is and should be.
That said, I don’t think it’s a hopeless situation for the series today. If anything, the FFVII Remake trilogy shows that the core FF DNA is still very much understood by the creative minds at Square. They haven’t forgotten what those things are that people have fallen in love with over the years and have found ways to bring them forward, making the kinds of games they’re clearly passionate about as well.
Sure, community reception hasn’t been 100% unanimous. And even setting aside my own bias (FFVII Rebirth is the first and only game ever to even come close to challenging FFX as my own personal greatest game of all time), you have to admit that the critical and popular reception of the remake trilogy so far has been much more positive than not.
With all that in mind, I think FFXVII has every chance to surprise us, hopefully in a lot of very, very good ways – whether you’re an old fan or a new one, or not even a fan yet and you’re still waiting for the right game to pull you in. Plus, that’s not even mentioning all the rumors about the FFIX and Tactics remakes… but we’ll leave that topic for another day.
Ask me a year, five years, or ten years from now. I may be replaying FFX or VII Remake or XII or heck, even FFXVIII. And my answers could be a little different – but I think a lot of what’s at the heart of making a Final Fantasy a Final Fantasy will be somewhere in this list I’ve crafted. The essential DNA will be there, buried deep in the bedrock of the franchise – from its history through to its present and future.
But those are just my thoughts – what are yours?
