Final Fantasy — Franchise

Square · Since 1987

Square's RPG series named after its creator's last attempt before leaving the industry. From an 8-bit Famicom RPG to the most commercially successful JRPG franchise, each numbered entry has reinvented itself.

Final Fantasy (1987) was made while Hironobu Sakaguchi was planning to leave the games industry — by his own account, part of the meaning of the name, alongside the need for a title that abbreviated to 'FF'. Its success saved Square and launched a franchise that has since sold over 180 million units. Each numbered entry is a standalone game with new characters, world, and mechanical systems, connected to predecessors only by recurring elements: the Crystal motif, the Chocobo creature, recurring character names. This anthology approach has allowed the series to reinvent itself with each entry rather than iterating on established characters — a commercial gamble that has produced critical and commercial peaks spread across four decades. Final Fantasy IV introduced active time battle; VI its most complex cast; VII its mainstream Western breakthrough; XIV's 2.0 rebuild demonstrated that a failing MMO could be rescued and made into one of the most successful games in the genre.