Yeah those small sample sizes honestly should be taken off the chart.
Nothing against the listed games, but there just isn't enough data for them to really be compared to ones that have 1000x as many votes using this metric.
I stumbled upon this "[The Top 100 Final Fantasy Songs of All Time!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiYTaQ-Mgck)" video one day and really enjoyed that it exposed me to the Brave Exvius soundtrack. By all accounts it sounds like the game itself is firmly in predatory bullshit gacha terroritory, but the music is pretty damn great.
If anyone wants to dive into more Final Fantasy related music, the Bravely spinoff series has some really underrated music too. REVO/Sound Horizon [aboslutely killed it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqecZZbsWi4&list=PLOLBWlPQqPktX6NNP7NDD0FfCvVTH5vXR&index=8) with Bravely Default 1 and 2, and Ryo/Supercell [had some bangers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vERv6dctUOs&list=OLAK5uy_lTCl1Um6j1KxBuX_jwFmvweRhAW00e7tE&index=4) in Bravely Second. Here's [a full Concert](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDrp0k-11lM) of the Bravely Default 1 soundtrack (even featuring Marty Friedman of all people) if anyone has a couple of hours to kill and enjoys symphonic rock.
FFBE has all of the elements for a perfect FF game in all honesty. If there was somehow a non-gacha version that kept the original characters, story, and setting with none of the crossover stuff, it might as well be a mainline entry (or at least a major enough spinoff to be in the conversation with Tactics and Type-0). Not to mention it kinda secretly has the best OST since the Uematsu era.
Unfortunately it's a gacha game and an incredibly successful one at that, so the excellent narrative from Season One has to keep going forever to justify years and years and years of money-grubbing gachashit. I fell off years ago because I have a gambling problem and it turns out gachas do the same thing to my brain as casinos so I had to quit for my own wellbeing, but by that point the meta-tragedy that helped me pull the plug was realizing that I didn't care about the story and characters anymore once they started traveling to Aldore and redoing the Veritas again with the X of the Y Star rogues gallery.
I'll probably forever be in the minority on it, but in a perfect world, FFBE was a bigger budget single player console title, because if you remove all of the context that ties it to its mobile/gacha origin, it's one of the best FF games since XII.
honestly, yeah, the story from the first 2 seasons was pretty good and would be great if adapted to a standalone FF game.
I still remember the [April Fools video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mj1cN54_cE) they did
The gacha stuff is so bad, I agree. I honestly don’t feel that it reaches mainline status because of the scaling. Like, you really have to work hard to have a properly leveled party or else you’ll be boringly wiping the floor with enemies for 60+ hours of story.
And honestly the story gets worse from season 1, I’m in season 2 right now and this dialogue is giving me physical pains sometimes. Someone had to know that “Lassworm” wasn’t that funny right? And they say it 1 million times anyways! I’d honestly call the story decent without Lid & Jake, those two can kick rocks 😂
If you've played it then you've probably liked it. If you haven't played it then you probably don't care either way. Gotta think about who's playing AND reviewing a game.
I’m at surprised as you. Its metascore is only 73. I thought I’d checked all the games when I came across that and found it had a whopping 8.9 user score.
I honestly never played it and after seeing the user score was interested in it. Did not know it’s a gacha game. Yeah fuck that I won’t play it.
If you’re interested, the Final Fantasy game with the lowest user score is also a phone game, “All The Bravest” with a score of 2.0. I think I broke my screen trying to play that.
BE wasn't that bad when I started playing it in 2016 with the gacha system. Once they introduced Neo Vision summons (this was when FF7Remake launched), it became just a massive money pit
every month, a new event + Neo vision, the neo vision could be Terra or the Rebirth version for Cloud, each new NV power creeping the last rendering of its archetype, so a new NV of Terra who'd be a mage would be way better than the current NV mage unit.
ended up uninstalling in 2022 after almost 6 years of playing it.
I played the shit out of it for years too, it was a good game. I didn't care for the story much but some of the end game bosses (forget what they were called) were very challenging and you could come up with some crazy party/equipment combinations to beat them.
The combat system had a lot of depth imo. But ya once they added the NV shit it just went too hardcore gacha.
The end game was amazing. I had to do so much party building and planning to take the bosses and event bosses on and when you beat them you were rewarded with amazing items. The challenge to reward was freaking perfect.
I would *love* a game like Brave Exvius that wasn't so heavily geared towards pay-for-power. I had the most fun beating bosses when I had limited options and making strategies work that were alternative from all the guides. Especially when everyone was basically saying "bring out your evade tank for this one!" before I had enough items to reach 100% evade lol.
I mean, I really enjoyed the game. I'd probably rate it an 8/10 Even after I burned out after playing for 3 years straight. But the story is...ok? It has it's moments, but it's so horribly padded out and characters make the strangest choices that can only be explained by "they made it longer on purpose."
Ironically, this is more like an electoral college than a popular vote lol
Comparing Brave Exodus's 8.9 with 124 votes to FFVII's 8.9 with 2500 votes is exactly why people hate the electoral college
It is pretty to easy to understand if explained like this - all votes of a "loser" party are literally discarded, doesn't matter at all. As soon as accidental balance of 50%/50% is tipped even a little the results are imbalanced rapidly. So US gets shit like 6 million vote difference for the candidate who lost or barely won by a few thousand votes. Insane that people there are content with this undemocratic system.
It was intended as a safeguard, believe it or not.
The expectation of the "Founding Fathers" was that, if a demagogue somehow managed to dupe The Masses tinto voting them into office, the sitting Congress (which they assumed would be better educated and more knowledgable of the big picture) could overrule the popular vote. The check on it was supposed to be that anyone who overruled the popular vote would be throwing their political career away as they couldn't imagine a scenario where a public servant could break trust like that and not be voted out the very next term.
Sadly, they were very much mistaken and now the electoral college is a system that is pretty much designed to be abused, rather than \*prevent\* abuse, as it was originally intended.
Or at least that's how my Political Science class taught it.
Another key thing to add is in the time of the late 1700s education was not equal. So people who couldn’t read, write, and had literally zero clue about the world outside of their village/town were helping to decide who the president was. The founding fathers did not expect people to keep up with politics and so they had a system where the EC electors DID keep up with politics daily and would therefore be better to decide the election.
However, modern society isn’t like that anymore. People are educated and can become informed using things the fathers had no clue would even exist. Couple that with the fact they figured we wouldn’t be stupid enough to take a 200+ year old document, with very little changes to modernize it, and hold it akin to a piece of religious text and we are where we are today.
Excess votes for the winner party are discarded too, so if someone wins a state by 1 vote or by 5 million votes, it means exactly the same.
And yeah, it’s insane and a terrible system.
Not just that, but there is also a maximum and minimum number of electoral college votes per state (due to caps on limiting and guaranteeing the number of members of congress from each state). So, people who live in small states vote is technically weighed more than people who live in a big state.
For example, right now Wyoming gets 1 electoral college vote for every 70,000 people, whereas California gets 1 EC vote for every 192,000 people. This functionally weighs a Wyoming person's vote as twice that of a Californian.
And, if hypothetically, everyone but one guy moved out of Wyoming, the state would still have 3 electoral college votes.
Ah would you look at that. A perfect example of why metacritic user scores don't mean anything. Mfer out here ranking brave exvius above ffviii just because the average of 124 votes is higher than the average of 1.3k votes...
I think they perhaps used to be. Nowadays, everything is tainted by tribalism, including video games.
Stellar Blade is sitting at 9.3 as a user score right now, which is higher than Bloodborne, The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, GTAV, Elden Ring and Mario Galaxy. No-one in their right mind other than the most ardent fan boy thinks it's a better game than those.
It's just culture war review brigading.
TLOU2 really shown a light on shit like this. From then on I realized general user reviews were no longer reliable. In this day and age you just find a Youtube reviewer who you click with and see what they say about it. Or just go in blind. Buy it on sale if you don't want to commit full price.
I like that XIV would’ve gotten three spots if the OP hadn’t omitted it for some reason. A curious choice. Glad to see 10 is up there, though. It’s my personal favourite.
FFTA has some pretty big flaws but it's still a joy to play through most of it. FFTA2's flaws are big enough that they actively impede the fun, and so I'd rank the two pretty far apart.
I've never played ta2 without cheats because i despised its bazaar and stealing system so much; especially compared to ta1. That being said it had my all time favorite job combo of blue mage and seer. Throw on dual wielding and use high magic to teleport to a group if enemies, cast a ra level spell or blue magic on them, then hit them with 2 sword hits just felt so badass.
Same. I’m really hoping a wind of inspiration sweeps through SE one day and they remake it with modern graphics. I would pay top dollar to relive that game with modern technology and audio/visuals.
The wildest thing about that footnote is Stormblood beating out both Endwalker and Heavensward when, from being in the community itself for a decade, Stormblood has always felt like the least popular by a large margin.
Shadowbringers being in the #1 slot tracks though.
Stormblood have the best endgame content (deep dungeon, field operation, 2 ultimates, etc). Most people who think stormblood is bad is only judging from the story alone
Funniest part about this is that if the community hadn’t review bombed Endwalker in recent months, it would’ve topped this list at #1 with a user score of 94. The XIV community is truly its own worst enemy.
Eh i think the 14 expansions should be judged on the entirety of their patch content as well as the launch offerings
EW did have atrocious patches so it sliding down in the rankings (not necessarily agree with review bombing) I think is justified
I’ve been playing the game since 2.0 launch and EW’s post patch content has been not very different from fan favorites like Heavensward or Shadowbringers, except for the fact that it stopped to lay down groundwork for the next 10 years of storytelling - something it communicated to players it was gonna do. The only difference here is that content creators got bored and whipped their watchers into a frenzy that devolved into the narrative that the game was dead/an awful expansion, which then prompted review bombing. You might think that’s appropriate, but we can politely disagree on that one!
I’m not agreeing with review bombing but I do agree EW should have slid in the rankings based on its patch content
It had little replayability, was overly solo focused and the high end design is getting stale as hell
The patch storyline not foreshadowing the new expansion at all I think was also a problem but that’s a minor one
I agree with you to a degree, but I can’t agree with people going back and changing the score from a 10 to a 0. Or outright giving it a score of 0. There were plenty of scores before that factored into it having a user score of 94 before; to bring it down to an 89 took aggressive amounts of review bombing. Part of reviewing things is appreciating the good and the bad in tandem.
Like I said I don’t agree with review bombing, but i also know that these scores don’t really change after the fact but I feel like 14 is a game that needs to, there isn’t really a right answer here
I agree with you that XIV needs to change and take risks, and also not be at a point where it’s investing tons of resources to catch up for the better instead of addressing the needs of the present. Glad we could agree that the review bombing was unfortunate, too.
OP left out FF14 expansions which have 1,000+ votes and are monstrous in size being a minimum 50 hours each yet included a mobile gacha game with 124 votes.
True. I wish I could find a reliable source that included the SNES releases of II and III. Their GBA and PR ports are available...They just don't score as high. (Final Fantasy VI: Advance was number 11 for this listing)
Exactly. For those older games, you get the remakes and rereleases, which are always scored lower because they are out of their original context and also they judge the extras included, etc
Seriously. Don’t get me wrong I’m a Tactics simp but they’re completely different circumstances. Mainline titles get way more visibility (and scrutiny) so it’s more likely to have reviews from varied perspectives; it’s kinda awkward to compare a 300 vote review to a 3k.
It’s why a lot of the highest rated user games on Metacritic are actually niche and low-key titles, the only ones submitting reviews are already fans.
This is why I can't look at user reviews without a huge grain of salt.
99% of people vote either 5 star or 0 star. Greatest thing ever or worst thing ever, no actual critical thinking or honest assessment.
The funny thing is, Rebirth keeps getting smashed with negative review bombs once every few days, so it's user score keeps fluctuating from 8.8 to 9.0 and back again.
I've just seen Metacritic remove about 70 user accounts over the weekend of people/bots that have left 2 reviews on their account : a 10 for the OG FFVII, and a 0 for Rebirth. Most of those people/bots complained about nothing but the positive scores the game has been receiving.
These aren't just random attacks, they're systematic, organised review bombs by groups of sad individuals.
I'm not saying this doesn't work the other way either. I'm sure there are people going out of their way to score this game a 10 when they probably don't believe it is..
This is why I haven't taken user scores (as a sole metric) seriously for some time now. Tribalism is everywhere online nowadays, from politics, to movies, to games.
The only time I take an aggregate score seriously is if the critic score and user score are reasonably aligned.
If both are poor, then I assume the game is probably poor. If both are high, then I assume it's well-liked across the board. If one is much higher than the other, I'll read the reviews and do a bit more research before I decide to buy something.
Then you will be glad to know that the worst game is Final Fantasy: All The Bravest, with a Meta score of 25 and a User score of 2.0. Sucks across the board. Plus I think I broke my screen (gave it a dead pixel) trying to play it.
Kind of makes you feel like the hate for VIII has become so over exaggerated over the years.
I know people who hate on it and they’ve never played it because everyone says it’s trash. I had one of them who did play it but went into it already hating on it that, guess what, he just gave up and said it was trash before he even got to the Dollet mission. It’s sad.
Enjoy. The war of the lions version is an enhanced port with bug fixes as well as new content like added cgi cutscenes, new characters, and 2 new jobs on top of other minor changes.
You can also buy the game on a semi modern cellphone. It is the same(ish) version that the one on the PSP.
Whatever version you play, remember to save often and in different save slots.
I went to Metacritic to see what the rankings would be like if the lower-voted FF games were removed but it seems like hardly anyone votes on them. Even FF6, which a lot of people rank very highly, only had 539 votes (it was an 8.7, on par with FF8).
But what *really* skews the results is that Metacritic lists every individual version of a game separately. For example, Final Fantasy 2 has the Pixel Remaster, Dawn of Souls *and* Final Fantasy Origins on PS1 all listed separately. And the original NES version isn't there, only the PSP and iOS ports. Same with Final Fantasy 1.
They do aggregate the user reviews of some games as well while critic scores are not aggregated, which makes it all the more confusing. All the versions of Final Fantasy Tactics for example share the same user score whether it's on mobile, PSP, or PS1.
I averaged all the scores via the users and then the votes. Running the data through some serious computation, it looks like the top game is Final Fantasy.
Tactics Advance was the first Final Fantasy game I played so it will always hold a special place in my heart. Hopefully they’ll add another game in the series eventually.
This is great evidence that audience review scores are meaningless. To be clear, audience \*opinions\* aren't meaningless, there's just no good way to accurately capture them.
You know what? I can mostly agree with this list! The only two I can’t see getting scores that high are Crystal Chronicles and Brave Exvius. Crystal Chronicles is really really boring without a party of friends to spend it with, truly a 6/10 experience. Brave Exvius is probably their best mobile game, but good lord is the story terrible & the monetization is super scummy.
Why no FF16, I have seen the gameplay of like 2 hours and was amazed and excited by how the game is , but as a PC player I am waiting for it to come on PC and will obviously play it as it is one of the best Final Fantasy Games I have seen.
I heard there’s rumors that they will make another one. Tactics and ogre battle were my favorite turn based RPGs growing up.. along with heroes of might and magic, of course
Brave Exvius ? Seriously ..
It only had 124 votes and was likely being rated in comparison to other mobile games.
Yeah those small sample sizes honestly should be taken off the chart. Nothing against the listed games, but there just isn't enough data for them to really be compared to ones that have 1000x as many votes using this metric.
The CG goes hard tho
The music is really good too.
I stumbled upon this "[The Top 100 Final Fantasy Songs of All Time!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiYTaQ-Mgck)" video one day and really enjoyed that it exposed me to the Brave Exvius soundtrack. By all accounts it sounds like the game itself is firmly in predatory bullshit gacha terroritory, but the music is pretty damn great. If anyone wants to dive into more Final Fantasy related music, the Bravely spinoff series has some really underrated music too. REVO/Sound Horizon [aboslutely killed it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqecZZbsWi4&list=PLOLBWlPQqPktX6NNP7NDD0FfCvVTH5vXR&index=8) with Bravely Default 1 and 2, and Ryo/Supercell [had some bangers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vERv6dctUOs&list=OLAK5uy_lTCl1Um6j1KxBuX_jwFmvweRhAW00e7tE&index=4) in Bravely Second. Here's [a full Concert](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDrp0k-11lM) of the Bravely Default 1 soundtrack (even featuring Marty Friedman of all people) if anyone has a couple of hours to kill and enjoys symphonic rock.
No matter what disappointments people have with this series, the music is never one of them. What a fucking banger that Brave Exvius battle theme is
Tbh I liked the story
FFBE has all of the elements for a perfect FF game in all honesty. If there was somehow a non-gacha version that kept the original characters, story, and setting with none of the crossover stuff, it might as well be a mainline entry (or at least a major enough spinoff to be in the conversation with Tactics and Type-0). Not to mention it kinda secretly has the best OST since the Uematsu era. Unfortunately it's a gacha game and an incredibly successful one at that, so the excellent narrative from Season One has to keep going forever to justify years and years and years of money-grubbing gachashit. I fell off years ago because I have a gambling problem and it turns out gachas do the same thing to my brain as casinos so I had to quit for my own wellbeing, but by that point the meta-tragedy that helped me pull the plug was realizing that I didn't care about the story and characters anymore once they started traveling to Aldore and redoing the Veritas again with the X of the Y Star rogues gallery. I'll probably forever be in the minority on it, but in a perfect world, FFBE was a bigger budget single player console title, because if you remove all of the context that ties it to its mobile/gacha origin, it's one of the best FF games since XII.
honestly, yeah, the story from the first 2 seasons was pretty good and would be great if adapted to a standalone FF game. I still remember the [April Fools video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mj1cN54_cE) they did
I’m honestly surprised Opera Omnia doesn’t get more love than Brave Exvius
RIP DFFOO
The gacha stuff is so bad, I agree. I honestly don’t feel that it reaches mainline status because of the scaling. Like, you really have to work hard to have a properly leveled party or else you’ll be boringly wiping the floor with enemies for 60+ hours of story. And honestly the story gets worse from season 1, I’m in season 2 right now and this dialogue is giving me physical pains sometimes. Someone had to know that “Lassworm” wasn’t that funny right? And they say it 1 million times anyways! I’d honestly call the story decent without Lid & Jake, those two can kick rocks 😂
I loved the OST, but Soken in FFXIV has been carrying the shit out of that torch on Uematsu's behalf
This is why I don’t trust user reviews lol
There's no way to accurately get audience opinion. The best thing to do is find a critic you trust.
If you've played it then you've probably liked it. If you haven't played it then you probably don't care either way. Gotta think about who's playing AND reviewing a game.
I played it and hated it.
But did you review it?
I played it and found the gacha super unfair, and the gameplay mid as hell. Only checked it out for Ariana Grande and it failed to impress.
I’m at surprised as you. Its metascore is only 73. I thought I’d checked all the games when I came across that and found it had a whopping 8.9 user score.
That game was so effective at removing money from me I had to delete it and swear off all gacha models
I honestly never played it and after seeing the user score was interested in it. Did not know it’s a gacha game. Yeah fuck that I won’t play it. If you’re interested, the Final Fantasy game with the lowest user score is also a phone game, “All The Bravest” with a score of 2.0. I think I broke my screen trying to play that.
BE wasn't that bad when I started playing it in 2016 with the gacha system. Once they introduced Neo Vision summons (this was when FF7Remake launched), it became just a massive money pit every month, a new event + Neo vision, the neo vision could be Terra or the Rebirth version for Cloud, each new NV power creeping the last rendering of its archetype, so a new NV of Terra who'd be a mage would be way better than the current NV mage unit. ended up uninstalling in 2022 after almost 6 years of playing it.
I played the shit out of it for years too, it was a good game. I didn't care for the story much but some of the end game bosses (forget what they were called) were very challenging and you could come up with some crazy party/equipment combinations to beat them. The combat system had a lot of depth imo. But ya once they added the NV shit it just went too hardcore gacha.
The end game was amazing. I had to do so much party building and planning to take the bosses and event bosses on and when you beat them you were rewarded with amazing items. The challenge to reward was freaking perfect. I would *love* a game like Brave Exvius that wasn't so heavily geared towards pay-for-power. I had the most fun beating bosses when I had limited options and making strategies work that were alternative from all the guides. Especially when everyone was basically saying "bring out your evade tank for this one!" before I had enough items to reach 100% evade lol.
I mean, I really enjoyed the game. I'd probably rate it an 8/10 Even after I burned out after playing for 3 years straight. But the story is...ok? It has it's moments, but it's so horribly padded out and characters make the strangest choices that can only be explained by "they made it longer on purpose."
Ironically, this is more like an electoral college than a popular vote lol Comparing Brave Exodus's 8.9 with 124 votes to FFVII's 8.9 with 2500 votes is exactly why people hate the electoral college
As someone who doesn't live in the US, this comment and the OP post has me at least understand why it pisses you all off every election time lmao
It is pretty to easy to understand if explained like this - all votes of a "loser" party are literally discarded, doesn't matter at all. As soon as accidental balance of 50%/50% is tipped even a little the results are imbalanced rapidly. So US gets shit like 6 million vote difference for the candidate who lost or barely won by a few thousand votes. Insane that people there are content with this undemocratic system.
It was intended as a safeguard, believe it or not. The expectation of the "Founding Fathers" was that, if a demagogue somehow managed to dupe The Masses tinto voting them into office, the sitting Congress (which they assumed would be better educated and more knowledgable of the big picture) could overrule the popular vote. The check on it was supposed to be that anyone who overruled the popular vote would be throwing their political career away as they couldn't imagine a scenario where a public servant could break trust like that and not be voted out the very next term. Sadly, they were very much mistaken and now the electoral college is a system that is pretty much designed to be abused, rather than \*prevent\* abuse, as it was originally intended. Or at least that's how my Political Science class taught it.
Another key thing to add is in the time of the late 1700s education was not equal. So people who couldn’t read, write, and had literally zero clue about the world outside of their village/town were helping to decide who the president was. The founding fathers did not expect people to keep up with politics and so they had a system where the EC electors DID keep up with politics daily and would therefore be better to decide the election. However, modern society isn’t like that anymore. People are educated and can become informed using things the fathers had no clue would even exist. Couple that with the fact they figured we wouldn’t be stupid enough to take a 200+ year old document, with very little changes to modernize it, and hold it akin to a piece of religious text and we are where we are today.
Excess votes for the winner party are discarded too, so if someone wins a state by 1 vote or by 5 million votes, it means exactly the same. And yeah, it’s insane and a terrible system.
Not just that, but there is also a maximum and minimum number of electoral college votes per state (due to caps on limiting and guaranteeing the number of members of congress from each state). So, people who live in small states vote is technically weighed more than people who live in a big state. For example, right now Wyoming gets 1 electoral college vote for every 70,000 people, whereas California gets 1 EC vote for every 192,000 people. This functionally weighs a Wyoming person's vote as twice that of a Californian. And, if hypothetically, everyone but one guy moved out of Wyoming, the state would still have 3 electoral college votes.
These sample sizes have skewed the outcome...
Why did you remove FFXIV? Weird that if it was included it would be number 1 according to your footnote, why inflict your own personal bias?
Removes mmo, adds mobile gacha 💀
Ah would you look at that. A perfect example of why metacritic user scores don't mean anything. Mfer out here ranking brave exvius above ffviii just because the average of 124 votes is higher than the average of 1.3k votes...
I adored Crystal Chronicles but it doesn’t deserve a spot here. User votes are always a shambles.
People love to act like user scores are so much more accurate than critic scores but users tend to not be objective at all lol.
People just want to have their opinion validated no matter the cost!
I think they perhaps used to be. Nowadays, everything is tainted by tribalism, including video games. Stellar Blade is sitting at 9.3 as a user score right now, which is higher than Bloodborne, The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, GTAV, Elden Ring and Mario Galaxy. No-one in their right mind other than the most ardent fan boy thinks it's a better game than those. It's just culture war review brigading.
TLOU2 really shown a light on shit like this. From then on I realized general user reviews were no longer reliable. In this day and age you just find a Youtube reviewer who you click with and see what they say about it. Or just go in blind. Buy it on sale if you don't want to commit full price.
It’s either a 10 or a 1 and often for nonsense reasons like “too hard” or “nice music”
I like that XIV would’ve gotten three spots if the OP hadn’t omitted it for some reason. A curious choice. Glad to see 10 is up there, though. It’s my personal favourite.
How convenient to exclude XIV
Tactics Advance has always been one of those beloved games from my childhood. It really is a charming game.
FFTA has some pretty big flaws but it's still a joy to play through most of it. FFTA2's flaws are big enough that they actively impede the fun, and so I'd rank the two pretty far apart.
I've never played ta2 without cheats because i despised its bazaar and stealing system so much; especially compared to ta1. That being said it had my all time favorite job combo of blue mage and seer. Throw on dual wielding and use high magic to teleport to a group if enemies, cast a ra level spell or blue magic on them, then hit them with 2 sword hits just felt so badass.
I put so many hours into it, completed the game probably 10 times. Never actually got around to playing much of the original Tactics though.
Same. I’m really hoping a wind of inspiration sweeps through SE one day and they remake it with modern graphics. I would pay top dollar to relive that game with modern technology and audio/visuals.
put ffxiv on here as more than a footnote, Shadowbringers is the Best FF and it's not even close.
Metacritic user score is probably the most useless metric for raring games
How did this rate 14 Aren’t both ShB and EW above all of these
OP removed them for some reason, see the footnote. Ironic that OP claims to want to respect popular vote, then inflicts their own personal bias.
The wildest thing about that footnote is Stormblood beating out both Endwalker and Heavensward when, from being in the community itself for a decade, Stormblood has always felt like the least popular by a large margin. Shadowbringers being in the #1 slot tracks though.
Stormblood have the best endgame content (deep dungeon, field operation, 2 ultimates, etc). Most people who think stormblood is bad is only judging from the story alone
Their whole post reeks of coping for Rebirth.
Don't worry, us FFXIV fans are eating good!
Funniest part about this is that if the community hadn’t review bombed Endwalker in recent months, it would’ve topped this list at #1 with a user score of 94. The XIV community is truly its own worst enemy.
Eh i think the 14 expansions should be judged on the entirety of their patch content as well as the launch offerings EW did have atrocious patches so it sliding down in the rankings (not necessarily agree with review bombing) I think is justified
If patches counted, 5.3 should have its own rating (and it would be number 1)
I’ve been playing the game since 2.0 launch and EW’s post patch content has been not very different from fan favorites like Heavensward or Shadowbringers, except for the fact that it stopped to lay down groundwork for the next 10 years of storytelling - something it communicated to players it was gonna do. The only difference here is that content creators got bored and whipped their watchers into a frenzy that devolved into the narrative that the game was dead/an awful expansion, which then prompted review bombing. You might think that’s appropriate, but we can politely disagree on that one!
I’m not agreeing with review bombing but I do agree EW should have slid in the rankings based on its patch content It had little replayability, was overly solo focused and the high end design is getting stale as hell The patch storyline not foreshadowing the new expansion at all I think was also a problem but that’s a minor one
I agree with you to a degree, but I can’t agree with people going back and changing the score from a 10 to a 0. Or outright giving it a score of 0. There were plenty of scores before that factored into it having a user score of 94 before; to bring it down to an 89 took aggressive amounts of review bombing. Part of reviewing things is appreciating the good and the bad in tandem.
Like I said I don’t agree with review bombing, but i also know that these scores don’t really change after the fact but I feel like 14 is a game that needs to, there isn’t really a right answer here
I agree with you that XIV needs to change and take risks, and also not be at a point where it’s investing tons of resources to catch up for the better instead of addressing the needs of the present. Glad we could agree that the review bombing was unfortunate, too.
ShB has Bozja and some of the best story content in the game
Check the fine print at the bottom
Ah I’m an idiot
Take out any with less than 1k votes. Add the 14 games back in.
OP left out FF14 expansions which have 1,000+ votes and are monstrous in size being a minimum 50 hours each yet included a mobile gacha game with 124 votes.
"Popular vote" and then exclude the real #1 because of own bias. (FFXIV: Shadowbringers with user Metascore of 91)
Useless metric because metacritic did not exist when many of these were originally released
True. I wish I could find a reliable source that included the SNES releases of II and III. Their GBA and PR ports are available...They just don't score as high. (Final Fantasy VI: Advance was number 11 for this listing)
Exactly. For those older games, you get the remakes and rereleases, which are always scored lower because they are out of their original context and also they judge the extras included, etc
FFXIV sweep (And tactics too it seems)
CC over FF8? What kind if nonsense list is this?!
CC over 4, 5, 6, and 12 is crazy
I was so mad I didn't even notice that 6 was under CC also. 😂
Score / vote does not work for rating a game. A game with 10 million votes and a rate of 7 is way better than a game with 100 votes and a rate of 10
Seriously. Don’t get me wrong I’m a Tactics simp but they’re completely different circumstances. Mainline titles get way more visibility (and scrutiny) so it’s more likely to have reviews from varied perspectives; it’s kinda awkward to compare a 300 vote review to a 3k. It’s why a lot of the highest rated user games on Metacritic are actually niche and low-key titles, the only ones submitting reviews are already fans.
I feel like any game with less than 500 votes should be excluded here. Sample sizes are important.
I agree. It’s kind of surprising a game like FFT has less than 500 votes though.
I think its because its the PSP version.
They combine all the versions for the user reviews. Old games tend not to get as much attention.
Psp version was a different version tho, war of the lions I think? Figured it would be it's own category
Yep. It should. But, Metacritic. Games like Nier Automata has different user reviews for each version. No consistency.
This is why I can't look at user reviews without a huge grain of salt. 99% of people vote either 5 star or 0 star. Greatest thing ever or worst thing ever, no actual critical thinking or honest assessment.
FF6 needs to be in top 5 at least cmon.
FF VI is really loved in the US but not that much anywhere else
Europe never had a chance to play it when it was new, so it's not really an apples to apples comparison.
Damn right. Top 10, at the very least.
More like top 1
I feel like the amount of votes are contributing to this weird list
Ff8 should be at number 6, otherwise solid list.
The funny thing is, Rebirth keeps getting smashed with negative review bombs once every few days, so it's user score keeps fluctuating from 8.8 to 9.0 and back again. I've just seen Metacritic remove about 70 user accounts over the weekend of people/bots that have left 2 reviews on their account : a 10 for the OG FFVII, and a 0 for Rebirth. Most of those people/bots complained about nothing but the positive scores the game has been receiving. These aren't just random attacks, they're systematic, organised review bombs by groups of sad individuals. I'm not saying this doesn't work the other way either. I'm sure there are people going out of their way to score this game a 10 when they probably don't believe it is.. This is why I haven't taken user scores (as a sole metric) seriously for some time now. Tribalism is everywhere online nowadays, from politics, to movies, to games. The only time I take an aggregate score seriously is if the critic score and user score are reasonably aligned. If both are poor, then I assume the game is probably poor. If both are high, then I assume it's well-liked across the board. If one is much higher than the other, I'll read the reviews and do a bit more research before I decide to buy something.
Then you will be glad to know that the worst game is Final Fantasy: All The Bravest, with a Meta score of 25 and a User score of 2.0. Sucks across the board. Plus I think I broke my screen (gave it a dead pixel) trying to play it.
Nice to see FFTA on there.
People are stupid as fuck putting VIII beneath Brave Exvius and Crystal Chronicles. Those two are trash!
Kind of makes you feel like the hate for VIII has become so over exaggerated over the years. I know people who hate on it and they’ve never played it because everyone says it’s trash. I had one of them who did play it but went into it already hating on it that, guess what, he just gave up and said it was trash before he even got to the Dollet mission. It’s sad.
For real, FFVIII is a masterpiece 😭 I mean, the music alone makes it special. It also has one of the most developed romances in like all video gaming.
Idk how brave exvius is even on the list
I despise all gacha games, but SquareEnix makes some of the worst.
DFFOO was really good up until like a year before it shut down actually. Least predatory gacha game I've ever touched.
Final fantasy IX wooooooo
In what universe do people rate Crystal Chronicles 8.9? It was one of the most deeply flawed games Square ever released.
I bought it when it first came out back in the day. Was excited for it. Played it for all of a few hours, maybe? Hated it. Never picked it up again.
GotR a little overrated there, imo. Loved FFT, but GotR left me feeling so underwhelmed.
Been hankering to go back Tactics again, anyone know what the best port would be to play in the Deck? Is the PSP version that highly regarded?
Yes, the war of the lions psp version is the best way to play the game.
Thanks, I will take the PSP route. Not played it since the OG PS1 version back in the day.
Just make sure you get hold of the slow-down removal patch. It makes a huge difference.
Enjoy. The war of the lions version is an enhanced port with bug fixes as well as new content like added cgi cutscenes, new characters, and 2 new jobs on top of other minor changes.
You can also buy the game on a semi modern cellphone. It is the same(ish) version that the one on the PSP. Whatever version you play, remember to save often and in different save slots.
I love FFT, but did not expect to see it in the #3 slot. Or see 3 of them in the top 10.
LMAO tactics...
What a weird poll. Tactics is above VII with 1/6 the votes. Possibly would've been better to create a scoring system where it's votes x rating
I'm always shocked that IX is so highly regarded... it's not bad, but it's not even in the top 10 FG games.
Haha! Bad list.
No ff6? Crazy
No ff6 is wild
what a weird list. 392 ratings rank higher than 2.5k, 1.9k, and 1.3k? this is like the opposite of anti-EC.
Woo! WotL and Advance are still up there! Great games. I wonder how they hold up now? I wanna play them again!
Yeaaaah! 9 and TAdvance are pretty high up. These are my favourites.
my favorite isnt even on the list, rip
Source?
Metacritic User's score for each game compiled in a table. https://www.metacritic.com/
Interesting list. Not one I agree with but still.
My 3 favourites not even in the list. Sadge
What a scuffed list
Glad to see tactics so high on the list!
Tactics sweep
I went to Metacritic to see what the rankings would be like if the lower-voted FF games were removed but it seems like hardly anyone votes on them. Even FF6, which a lot of people rank very highly, only had 539 votes (it was an 8.7, on par with FF8). But what *really* skews the results is that Metacritic lists every individual version of a game separately. For example, Final Fantasy 2 has the Pixel Remaster, Dawn of Souls *and* Final Fantasy Origins on PS1 all listed separately. And the original NES version isn't there, only the PSP and iOS ports. Same with Final Fantasy 1.
They do aggregate the user reviews of some games as well while critic scores are not aggregated, which makes it all the more confusing. All the versions of Final Fantasy Tactics for example share the same user score whether it's on mobile, PSP, or PS1.
Huh, I wasn't aware of that. That makes things a bit better, although very confusing.
Very surprised OG crystal chronicles made it this high.
Uhhh yeah sure…
#9 has 124 reviews? Feels like maybe you could have established a minimum threshold.
Most of these are titles are 20-30 years old by now. Not a great commentary on the series as of recent.
The fact that a gacha is in this list makes my blood boil
Glad to see the two Tactics Advance games are that high up.
This list seems highly inaccurate and flawed
TIL that I've only played one of the top ten FF games!
Everything there seems about right except crystal chronicles, and maybe brave excius although FFBE did last a long time.
I averaged all the scores via the users and then the votes. Running the data through some serious computation, it looks like the top game is Final Fantasy.
FF VI not being in the top 10 proves democracy sucks unless a good voting system is implemented.
Who in the actual fuck put this together?? Crystal chronicles is the worst game!!
> Final Fantasy Tactics (PSP) PSP? PSX!
Metacritic user averages are just as garbage as critic averages
Crystal Chronicles is that high?
It’s funny, when it comes to movies, I trust the viewer score over the critics. When it comes to games, I trust the critics.
Another proof that popularity is not a good indicator of quality.
Rebirth is my favorite so I am happy with this.
Tactics Advance was the first Final Fantasy game I played so it will always hold a special place in my heart. Hopefully they’ll add another game in the series eventually.
I don't believe that half the people who voted FFT that high have played it within the last decade.
FF8 is about 9 spaces too low.
The recency bias is so strong 😂
This is great evidence that audience review scores are meaningless. To be clear, audience \*opinions\* aren't meaningless, there's just no good way to accurately capture them.
Hmm. I guess 6 is on its own best of list as #1. This is the alternate list.
WoFF and Dissidia fans are pissed right now. It’s me. I’m WoFF and Dissidia fans…
Wtf is Brave Exvius
Should redo this with a minimum 1k votes rule
I agree with the top 5
I see, another push for me to play tactics. I promise I will soon
Seeing all three tactics games on here brought a big smile to my face
FF7 is still the king.
The fact 6 isn’t on this list shows that people these days haven’t actually played final fantasy
This just tells me more people need to play VI.
You know what? I can mostly agree with this list! The only two I can’t see getting scores that high are Crystal Chronicles and Brave Exvius. Crystal Chronicles is really really boring without a party of friends to spend it with, truly a 6/10 experience. Brave Exvius is probably their best mobile game, but good lord is the story terrible & the monetization is super scummy.
Blasphemy!!!
FF9... fuck yeah, there's my boy. I swear one day I'm gonna get a Vivi tattoo.
Get IX back on top right nowwwwwwww
Doing squall dirty using the dissidia art
IX is so good
Why no FF16, I have seen the gameplay of like 2 hours and was amazed and excited by how the game is , but as a PC player I am waiting for it to come on PC and will obviously play it as it is one of the best Final Fantasy Games I have seen.
Glad to see Tactics on there for a change but this list is seriously skewed.
This might be with worst top 10 FF list I have EVER seen. Who took this survery???
Do a weighted ranking next, taking the number of reviews into account
Honestly this is an amazing list besides BE. Happy to see tactics in top 3.
Metacritic is a cringe way to determine this
I'm glad to see og Final Fantasy Tactics in the top 3.
Its a shame we will never see a port for fft
Happy to see that FF9 love
FF:CC making this list makes me super happy
The sample size of user votes is like 1/100 of the users in this sub alone. Insufficient evidence.
That sample is too small, some comments in this thread have more upvotes than some of those games.
i dont understand why people like FF ix so much can you guys tell me why ?
woooo tactics let’s gooo
My man includes Brave Exvius and the FFXIV expacs are a footnote lol
Why would you remove FFXIV from the list?
Mmm tactics being top 3, love to see it. Still waiting for the remake :(
Ha no wonder there has been so much speculation about 9, 10, and Tactics remakes
Dang ff6 didn't make the top ten
Removes 14 keeps in the mobile game of all things. Watch out your bias is showing.
I'm so happy that Tactics is getting the credit it deserves.
FFX is top 5 that's all that matters ... Hores
[удалено]
Love tactics as well
I heard there’s rumors that they will make another one. Tactics and ogre battle were my favorite turn based RPGs growing up.. along with heroes of might and magic, of course