My "Favorite Final Fantasy" Rankings, 2022 Edition

The results of a recent Final Fantasy popularity poll, held in honor of the franchise's 35th anniversary, were being passed around the Internet recently, with most discussion homing in on FFX's Wakka ranking as voters' second-favorite character. The poll, conducted by Japanese streaming service NicoNico, with a small sample size and clearly influenced by memes of the moment, was no more authoritative than any of the numerous other surveys routinely run by gaming publications and fan forums. But it did remind me that my personal rankings have not been updated in over 12 years, during which time I have played a few newer entries, while some of my feelings on older ones may have changed or evolved. I've also decided to do away with separate lists for "story" vs. "systems," acknowledging that one cannot practically separate the experience of the one from the other. Which brings us now to my 2022 edition of "Omega Warzard's Definitive Ranking of Numbered Final Fantasy Games":

1. IV
• Final Fantasy IV is always the one I hold up as the ideal entry point into the series. This is because it exemplifies the qualities I personally have most enjoyed in any Final Fantasy: a well-paced narrative, a dramatic story, and battles that challenge me just enough to give me pride in my victory. The last time I did a ranking, I considered IV's story dated. It is not deep, but neither do more recent Final Fantasy games feel written for adult audiences, and the layers of convoluted nonsense they have added instead have actually helped IV age better by comparison. The gameplay, at first glance, might also seem the simplest in the series—it's the only Final Fantasy with almost no party customization options—but the satisfaction comes not in augmenting your units into godlike killing machines, but in puzzling out how best to play the hand you've been dealt to overcome the most thoughtfully designed boss battles.
2. IX
• While earlier games tried to push things forward, IX's combat deliberately regressed to a simpler form of the ATB system, and in that aspect felt more dated than all the older games. The frequency of the fighting made the journey a bit of a slog, so if you play one of the more modern ports that offers boosters to trivialize or even bypass battles, don't feel too proud to take advantage. Because the rest of the experience is essential—from beginning to end, one of the cleverest and most consistently compelling stories and most lovable casts of characters in any video game. Perhaps the only other negative about the experience is that, because the quality of the writing is so high, you'll feel obligated to play with a guide at all times, for fear of missing out on anything.
3. VII
• VII is a lot closer to the earliest games in the series, both by release date now and in the feel of its gameplay loop, than it is to XIV or XV, or to other modern RPGs. In its own time, both convention and comfort abounded in exploring its dungeons, flying across its overworld, and cutting down foes via its menu-based combat. Yet its world felt like something truly new and original, boldly ambitious in its art direction and subject matter. The story was not merely escapist fantasy, but treated games as a legitimate medium for its creators to earnestly express philosophy and spirituality, albeit it also opened the door to, and itself set one foot in, the pseudophilosophical nonsense that would later pervade and all but sink the JRPG genre.
4. VIII
• It's less an opinion than a matter of historical fact now that VIII's torpid narrative was the biggest stumble in the series up to that point. In contrast, its fast-flowing combat, accentuating almost every onscreen action with a timed button press, was the ultimate expression of the ATB system (at least perhaps until FFX-2, which I've never played and which doesn't count). And the journey did wrap up a lot stronger than it began, with the most exhilarating final boss theme and then the most satisfying ending cinematic in the series.
5. VI
• In hindsight, this was 2D Final Fantasy "Endgame"—the culmination of all that had come before. After IV, the series was the recognized leader in video games as a storytelling medium, and expectations were at a fever pitch for the next step forward. VI more than lived up, with a story that was bigger and writing by far more mature than its predecessors. At least, that's how I would have described the first half. The back half took a huge swing, quite literally wiping out everything that had worked so well up to that point, and it remains, to my mind, one of the great unfulfilled promises in gaming.
6. XIV
• This is a hard one to rank, since it continues to grow and evolve, with each major expansion almost but not quite a full story unto itself. The current base game, A Realm Reborn, is tedious and uneventful, and would probably rank closer to the bottom of this list. Heavensward (which is as far as I've played) is what earns XIV its place here. It offers possibly the weightiest climax of any Final Fantasy, though it cannot be properly appreciated in a vacuum apart from A Realm Reborn.
7. I
• Dated, certainly, but still elegant in its simplicity, largely because the original classes were so well and purely defined. No subsequent tank or DPS classes or characters have so wholly embodied their roles as the original warrior and monk respectively. It's fun even just to theorycraft about how different party compositions can be made to work in this game. And if it is perhaps a tad grindy, well, it probably still takes less time to get through than every other entry on this list.
8. V
• The job system was certainly more robust than ever, and there was great satisfaction to be found in mixing abilities from different classes to yield lethal combinations. But quite a lot of jobs were quite frankly redundant—too much the same as or worse than other jobs. The bloat makes it less accessible than I, and the story, while passable, is fairly generic JRPG, lightyears behind its immediate predecessor's diverse cast of heroes and antiheroes.
9. X
• The introduction of voice-acted and motion-captured cutscenes was both thrilling and jarring, as Tidus and friends presented as more starkly cartoonish than, ironically, the super-deformed characters I had grown up with. But the story still delivered some signature emotional highs, bolstered by composer Nobuo Uematsu's last major contributions to the series. The battle system was immaculately tuned and strategic, to the point of being exhausting.
10. XV
• Grand and effectively moody but nonsensical in its plot. The systems and mechanics were too numerous and complex for how unrewarding it felt to ever stray from the main road.
11. II
• Some later remakes/remasters made the notoriously unbalanced leveling system a lot less grindy. Freed of its punishing aspects, it becomes a serviceable JRPG of its age, with a just compelling enough story, though nothing to warrant a detour but for series completionists.
12. III
• I played about 20 percent of the 3D remake before hitting a wall. It had some charm, but ultimately felt like a bitter intermediate stage between I and V—less elegant than the former, less flexible than the latter.
13. XII
• I only sampled a small portion and found it grueling. I do know the characters and story, though not with fondness.
14. XIII
• I have not played this yet, nor am I very familiar with the characters or story. What I gleaned of it via Final Fantasy Record Keeper seemed senseless and convoluted.
15. XI
• I will likely never play this archaic MMORPG.

My Top 10 Most Hated Star Wars Characters

Here it is. As of Episode VIII, these are my "Top 10 Most Hated Star Wars Characters."

Note: This is a serious exercise, so only significant characters from the live-action films were eligible—no Clone Wars-only characters, no obscure extras, no non-speaking Jedi created purely to sell toys. I debated with myself whether to include Rogue One, but after trying to do this without it, I realized that I am not naturally a hateful person, and I would not have been able to name 10 characters I despised from only the saga films.

Also, the order is from "No. 1 Most Hated" to "No. 10 Least Hated of the Most Hated." I'm not gonna drag out the suspense. Starting from the top:

1. Poe Dameron
2. Cassian Andor (the Rebel captain from Rogue One)
3. Chirrut Îmwe (the blind Donnie Yen guy from Rogue One)
4. Maz Kanata
5. DJ (the stuttering Benicio Del Toro from The Last Jedi)
6. Young Anakin (Jake Lloyd version)
7. Bodhi Rook (the pilot with the aviator goggles from Rogue One)
8. Bail Organa
9. Vice Admiral Holdo
10. Chancellor Valorum

This is a living list. It is subject to change as new movies come out, or as my mood changes. Snoke contended for that last spot, but I realized that it was not so much the character I hated as it was the way he was handled.

My Top 5 Video Game FMVs

Yes, we've arrived at that point in this blog's life.  No more joking, I now make "Top 5" lists in earnest.  It's either that or I start playing weekly games of Madden 11 . . . demo (Colts vs. Jets all day!) and posting the play-by-play box scores.

Anyway, I was inspired after recently viewing the cinematic trailer for DC Universe Online.  DC Universe Online, being an MMORPG, held no interest for me as a player, but I am now glad that it exists, if only because it has resulted in the commissioning of Blur for this amazing mini-movie that will surely be the best thing about the entire game.

Blur may not be a household name, but it is one of the hottest computer animation and design studios around, its skills allegedly commanding per-minute charges in the $1 million range.  Blur does a lot more than just video game work, but its CG talent is undeniably a perfect fit for gaming, and it has done much to class up a number of otherwise mediocre products.  Before DC Universe Online, the studio caught my attention with a pair of similarly awesome cinematic trailers for the similarly yawn-inducing Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Well, Blur may be the king now--frankly, it doesn't have a lot of competition, as many developers have opted this generation to rely less on pre-rendered assets--but I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on the past and pick out five of my favorite pre-rendered video game cinematics.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis - Opening

The Resident Evil 2 opening movies were, in their own time, the most technically impressive CG FMVs on console, and Code: Veronica's roller-coaster intro is always a crowd-pleaser, but my personal favorite Resident Evil cinematic is the opening for Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.

RE2 allowed us to play in the aftermath of Raccoon City's fall to the zombie apocalypse, describing in journals how it all went down, but here we finally got to see the citizens making their hopeless last stand.  No longer contained within some mansion in the woods, the zombies were taking over the city streets, and the nightmarish spectacle was consequently more real than ever before.

Kingdom Hearts Final Mix - "Deep Dive"

The famous "Deep Dive" video was a secret movie contained in the Japan-only "director's cut" of Kingdom Hearts.  As a teaser for Kingdom Hearts II, it was as oblique and enigmatic as you would have expected from a Tetsuya Nomura production--even four games later, fanboys are still trying to decipher all its hidden messages.  But it also established another Nomura signature.

Considerably darker and more violent than anything else in the game, it was also plain cool.  Its significance to the story would remain unclear even hours into Kingdom Hearts II, but this non-interactive movie surprisingly provided more meaningful clues as to how future games would look and play, with its near-weightless style and balletic combat.  Here also were planted the seeds of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and you can even follow the lineage onward to the upcoming Final Fantasy Versus XIII.

Kingdom Hearts II - Opening

Many Kingdom Hearts fans, drawn to the series for its high production values and exciting combat, understandably skipped Chain of Memories for the GBA.  That posed a bit of a problem for players hoping to jump directly to Kingdom Hearts II, however, because although not a lot happened in Chain of Memories, the story definitely did not end in the same place it began.  To get these players up to speed, the beginning of Kingdom Hearts II recapped the story thus far in virtuosic music video form.

Actually, as a recap, it was almost useless to anybody who hadn't played the previous games.  But it was gorgeous, full of inventive imagery and editing (especially in the Chain of Memories section), and it rewarded players of Chain of Memories, bringing their imaginations to life by highlighting resonant moments that the GBA simply could never do justice.  My favorite part has got to be the shot of Sora and company racing up a staircase while Riku progresses upside down along the underside--a sublimely literal representation of their parallel journeys through the castle.

Onimusha 3: Demon Siege - Opening

This one requires little introduction, as it is regularly at or near the top of almost everybody's list.  The Onimusha series was originally conceived of as a cinematic game, and all of the core Onimusha titles have had ambitious opening movies, but Onimusha 3's by Robot remains the best.

I think all of the videos on this list are ones that I come back to because they are so replayable and stand well even out of context. Onimusha 3's intro, better than everything else in all of the Onimusha games combined, is the epitome of that--essentially a CG short film with its own complete and perfectly self-contained narrative arc.  Indeed, you would be best off just watching this and then skipping the rest of the game.  Not only is it all downhill from here, but nothing that follows even has anything at all to do with what is seen in this video.

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon - Opening

Bringing together almost every fighter ever to have appeared in MK up to that point, it was the slugfest to end all slugfests.  In my opinion, this is even better than the DC Universe Online video, for the sheer number of distinct characters that it is able to juggle.  If you were ever into the series, this was a glorious celebration and culmination of its entire history.  Even if you couldn't name even half the characters, it was just an awesome battle royal, rendered in astonishingly accomplished CG that was probably more than MK and Midway deserved.  Also, as will likely be the case with DC Universe Online, watching the opening movie is vastly more exciting than actually playing the game.

Distant Worlds

I was able to attend the "Distant Worlds: music from FINAL FANTASY" concert in San Diego last night. I thought the set list could have been more diverse (too much VIII and XI, not enough IX, nothing from I-III, V, or XII), the selections from XIII and XIV were less than inspiring, and the very poorly edited video presentations dragged down the legitimacy of the event, but ultimately it was still cool to hear Nobuo Uematsu's music played by a live orchestra (with Nobuo in attendance!).

In honor of the event (but mainly just for the hell of it), I thought I'd offer my personal rankings of the first ten (because that's as far as I've gotten) numbered Final Fantasy games.

Ranked by story:

1. IX
2. VII
3. VI
4. IV
5. X
6. V
7. VIII
8. I
- II
- III

Ranked by systems:

1. VIII
2. V
3. VII
4. IV
5. X
6. IX
7. VI
8. III
9. I
10. II

(I still haven't finished FFIII for the DS, but I'm pretty sure its placement won't change.)

The 5 Cutest Pokemon

(Yep, I'm still playing Pokemon more than anything else.)

5. Jirachi

4. Plusle

3. Mudkip

2. Marill

1. Azumarill

There you have it--my official, definitive list of the top five cutest Pokemon.  Accept no imitations.

My Top 5 Fat Guys of TV and Film

Kevin Smith's size in the news recently reminded me of my high school biology class. I don't remember much from that class, but I do remember my teacher saying that, aside from fat people, homosexuals were the only group that society at large was still allowed to openly discriminate against. My biology teacher was not at all a fat man, so I thought it an admirable show of compassion for a group that, true enough, most people were all too happy to deride. I don't remember what it had to do with biology, but I learned something that day. It's hard out there for a fatso, apparently even for a figure of Smith's stature.

Smith enjoys success as a director and screenwriter, but his public embarrassment got me to thinking about the struggles that fat guys face trying to make it in front of the camera. When Orson Welles literally exploded in the sound booth for Transformers: The Movie, it was not only a once great actor and filmmaker who died that day. That was the final nail in the coffin for the cultured, intelligent fat man in Hollywood. Looking back in search of great fat guy roles from the last twenty-five years, truly it is slim pickings. Like Welles, James Earl Jones possesses an awesome voice recognized all around the world, but when was the last time he was given a meaty live-action role to chew on? Rarer by far than the eloquent black, the respectable fat guy is the veritable white whale of screen acting. These days, the token fat character is often a jolly stereotype, ostensibly easygoing and unashamed, yet clearly meaning, with an impervious-to-criticism heart of gold, to discourage open mockery of innately hilarious physical attributes. Take Hugo from Lost, for example. I loathe him, not because he is morbidly obese, but because he is shallow and uncomplicated. Yet, when I criticize his character, I am automatically denounced as a "size-ist." In my opinion, characters like Hugo do more harm to fat actors than I ever could.

Nevertheless, I have scoured my memories to produce a handful of legitimately inspiring fat film and television characters. So, without further ado, let's get rolling (not literally) with my list of "The Top 5 Respectable Fat Guy Performances of the Last Quarter-Century," though I should warn you that there may be tears.

In the realm of the respectable rotund, John Rhys-Davies probably has an edge by virtue of being British. Just as much as Patrick Stewart is usually the go-to actor for refined bald man roles, Rhys-Davies is the guy you want to lend a bit of class to a fat guy role. You'd think I could fill this list with just his performances, but the sad reality is that, just like Patrick Stewart, Rhys-Davies has been relegated mostly to token supporting roles in film. That's disregarding his slumming it in direct-to-Sci-Fi Channel features. His finest work was on television as Professor Maximillian Arturo in Sliders.

As the scholarly elder of the motley crew of dimension-hopping Sliders, the professor was the unsung best character on the show. Rhys-Davies delivered consistently the most layered (multi-dimensional?) performance, depicting the professor as an egotistical intellectual, clearly threatened by his young student's genius, yet also proudly supporting him as mentor and surrogate father. Q-Ball was the brain, Wade the heart, and Rembrandt the soul, but I always found Arturo to be the true guts of the team. Through the more socially challenging alternate universes of the first two seasons (the good ones), it was his sagacity and informed morality that all of his compatriots relied upon to guide them.

Alas, in keeping with the historically shabby treatment of portly actors, Rhys-Davies was fired in the third season and replaced by Kari Wuhrer, his character seen off with one of the least dignified deaths in television history, perhaps topped only by every other character exit on what proved unexpectedly to be the most sadistic show of all time.


Truthfully, I don't remember very much about Mr. Belvedere. I just remember that, as a kid, I wanted a Mr. Belvedere of my own AND I kind of wanted to be him.

Apparently, the Mr. Belvedere character first appeared in Gwen Davenport's 1947 novel, Belvedere. He was first portrayed on screen by the non-fat Clifton Webb in the film Sitting Pretty. My Mr. Belvedere was the American sitcom incarnation played by Christopher Hewett.

Like Professor Arturo, Hewett's Lynn Belvedere, English Butler to the American middle-class Owens family, was a man of fierce will and ego yet also wisdom and humanity, alternating between butting heads with the youngest of the Owens children and lifting the brat up upon his figurative shoulders as a support through all the trials of growing up. And, while I'm sure, like most family-oriented sitcoms of its vintage, the show was often ridiculous and has aged horribly, my young self found Mr. Belvedere to be simply the classiest character on television.


Middle America may remember kung fu film legend Sammo Hung for his role as Sammo Law, fish-out-of-water detective on the Walker, Texas Ranger lead-in program, Martial Law, co-starring Arsenio Hall and Kelly Hu. Yeah, I know, there's not one thing right in that statement, yet it really did happen. On Martial Law, Sammo was saddled with the wretched double of being the gentle fat man AND the no-speak-English babyface Chinaman. A much better showcase for his abilities was the Hong Kong martial arts-crime film SPL: Sha Po Lang (AKA Kill Zone).

As the untouchable Triad boss Wong Po, he was about as far as you could get from Sammo Law. Fat Marlon Brando was a sad, disgusting joke, but kingpin Sammo was truly fearsome. Part of it was the weirdness of seeing Sammo as a bad guy, but this was far more than just a novelty performance. When a determined detective resorted to fabricating evidence to finally bring in the Triad boss, Wong Po did not stop at merely unraveling the flimsy scheme. As he totally annihilated the entire police squad, ordering hits on those who had the gall to cross him, and pummeling a few of them himself, any notions of a slapstick Sammo went out the window. And whereas Rhys-Davies and Hewett were simply the best actors for roles that were not explicitly written as fat, Sammo integrated his corpulence as an asset to his performance. Wong Po's luxurious proportions were a proof of his absolute power.


Yeah, I could only find three, and I was seriously reaching for that last one. Shall we widen the list to include fat females as well?


Rosie O'Donnell is a worthless piece of scum and a total waste of space. I hate her with every fiber of my being.

Top 5 Greatest Male Video Game Characters

During one of my writing workshops from my college days, I was asked to watch an out-of-context scene from an unidentified film and then compose an impromptu narrative of the clip from the perspective of one of the characters. The clip, as I learned later, was from the film Lenny, and it featured Dustin Hoffman, as comedian Lenny Bruce, looking on admiringly as a female stripper performed in a club. The stripper was by far the most prominent character in the scene, so I chose to write from her perspective.

After being given a few minutes to write, my fellow students and I were asked to read our narratives aloud. By the luck of the draw, I was to go last. Before my turn came up, I listened as the first of six female classmates read from the stripper's perspective as a woman reluctantly performing in order to make ends meet and thoroughly disgusted by the creepy guys that comprised her audience. Two more girls then followed with like-minded accounts from the stripper's perspective.

There was a short reprieve as the one other male student, besides myself, read his tale of the horn player who provided the club's soundtrack. The three remaining girls then resumed the parade of hard-luck stories of strippers who hated their jobs. The consistency of these narratives was evidently noticed not just by me--their readers began to chuckle as each encouraged the next to try and outdo the previous in conveying their shared sense of revulsion, and the other guy made some lame joke that I instantly forgot. And then it was my turn.

I depicted the woman as a confident veteran performer, who gloried in the power she exerted on that stage over every male in the club. It had seemed a sensible angle, based on what little I knew about strippers, which was absolutely nothing. The actress's sultry performance also seemed to be leading me in that direction, but perhaps I was merely projecting my own thoughts onto the scene.

My reading was met with complete silence, which I was prepared for. I might have salvaged things with a joke or ironic remark before or after--something to indicate at least that I knew where I was and had been through the last seven readings. No judgments were uttered, but I had managed to kill the jovial atmosphere, and, after an uncomfortable pause, the instructor redirected the session toward other topics.

I was not a woman. Still am not. Obviously. Moreover, I apparently had no grasp whatsoever of the female perspective. To that, I might have countered that none of my female classmates were strippers, so their stories were barely better-informed than mine. But, then again, I couldn't be certain. Besides, they were perfectly right with their accounts, which were spun out of honest impulses. As for me, no matter how hard I tried to imagine myself in the position of that female stripper, the truth was that I just couldn't do it.

What does any of that have to do with the title of this post? Maybe nothing. Maybe, all these years later, I just felt a need to tell that story. So, without further ado, here is my list of the "Top 5 Greatest Male Video Game Characters Who Could Not Have Been Swapped Out For Female Versions":

SPOILERS FOR ALL TITLES REFERENCED

Leon S. Kennedy (Resident Evil 2)
Leon's first day on the job as a member of the Raccoon Police Department happens to coincide with the T-virus outbreak of Raccoon City, which leaves him trapped and fighting for his life in the zombie-infested police station. That doesn't keep the rookie cop from falling instantly in love with fellow survivor Ada Wong, a mysterious woman who introduces herself by shooting at him.

Before the game is over, he'll go out of his own way to assist this uncooperative woman he knows nothing about, who is clearly hiding things from him, who shows no signs of returning his affections, and who is supposedly searching for her boyfriend anyway. Young Leon even ends up taking a bullet for her. Foolishness, perhaps, but also understandable in a crazy and pathetic sort of way.

Seifer Almasy (Final Fantasy VIII)
An orphan whose only home is the academy, Seifer has the skills to be one of SeeD's strongest agents, but he lacks discipline and the proper attitude to perform effectively as a soldier. Recklessly independent, his "romantic dream" is to become a heroic knight, the likes of which simply does not exist in the rather sterile world of FFVIII. When the militaristic path of SeeD can't get him to his dream, he succumbs to the lure of the wicked Sorceress, who grants his wish by appointing him as her knight.

In a simpler story, Seifer, with his strength and spirit, maybe could have been the hero. But FFVIII is just practical enough to be inhospitable to his delusions of gallantry. He ends up coming off as simply some overzealous guy who's read one too many fantasy novels, or perhaps played too many JRPGs. His childish obsession ultimately provides an unflattering reflection of the male adolescent player.

Snowe Vingerhut (Suikoden IV)
The son of a lord, Snowe believes himself to be the best friend of the protagonist (unnamed, so let's just call him Lazlo), but theirs is really more of a master-servant relationship. Nepotism sees him rising to captain ahead of the far more qualified Lazlo, but his incompetence in his first battle forces our hero to take command after Snowe flees like a coward. Feeling upstaged and emasculated, he uses his status to have his former friend banished.

But getting rid of Lazlo doesn't solve Snowe's problems. When the two next meet on opposite sides of a battle, Snowe has already lost his position through his own bungling. His noble status follows shortly after, and, as Lazlo wages a war against the Kooluk Empire, Snowe becomes a minor distraction of seemingly no consequence to the main plot.

Not only is Snowe not the hero of this story, but he's not even fit to be the hero's rival. Yet Snowe is not actually weak; his frustrations stem from his inability to live up to his own unrealistic expectations of himself. A spoiled upbringing convinced him that he was supposed to be a great man, when he's really just a pretty good one, and it's not until he's lost everything that he can finally pursue life with the clean slate that everyone ought to start with.

Steve Burnside (Resident Evil Code: Veronica)
Also gaming's greatest sad sack, Steve is not yet an adult, but his pitiful story is already an agonizing mass of misfortunes brought on him by his irresponsible father, whom he ends up having to slay (but it's okay, because, as a zombie, his father is technically already dead).

In a reprise of the Leon-Ada scenario, this time with the player character on the other side of the equation, Steve encounters a cute girl two years his senior, and, seeing her as the one bright light in a miserable situation, he strives to fulfill his self-imposed role as the "man" in their partnership. But Claire Redfield is no damsel-in-distress, and Steve wouldn't have a chance with her even if she weren't preoccupied with looking for her brother. Oh, and there's also the fact that they're trapped on an island full of zombies.

Steve actually does manage to save Claire on more than one occasion, but, somehow, unlike the macho movie action heroes who make it a point to look cool while doing good, nearly all of his big moments end with him embarrassing himself. The victim of a tragedy that he was too small and powerless to affect, for all his determination, he cannot hide the truth that he is still just a boy desperately seeking approval.

So, yeah, I only came up with four. Suggestions, anyone? A list constructed by just an individual can hardly be considered definitive. But, please, no Volgin and Raidenovich.