anyone have distinct memories of their first Final Fantasy or how they got into the series? share them!
as a kid, my parents sent me to live with grandma in Charleston SC every summer. there was an older boy that lived next door, met him while he was fishing in the lake behind my grandma’s house. i don’t know how it happened but i asked him “do you like games” and he, of course, said “yes” and we went to his house, up to his room, and he showed me his collection of PS1 games. i must have been 10 or 11 at the time.
anyways, he had FF8, which didn’t look super interesting to me, but he came over to my grandma’s house one day, brought ff8, and he played it on my grandma’s huge old-fashioned projector TV (pictured); i remember being immediately entranced with the music; specifically Balamb Garden theme, and my interest in the series immediately increased.
that was my first “experience” with Final Fantasy, later during one of those summers my friend’s friend lent me their Game Boy Camera to “play with for the week,” and I subsequently traded it at the local Babbages for in-store credit (i was a psychopathic kid); these events were significant because thanks to that in-store credit, I was able to purchase a used copy of Final Fantasy 7; and at the time, my brain was immediately drawn to the spiky-haired guy holding a big sword on the cover. i spent the rest of that formative summer playing Final Fantasy 7.
I went to a Go Kart place and for some reason they had second hand games in there. I saw FF3 for SNES and for some reason just wanted it.
A little before that a friend had lend me FF Mystic Quest which was my first ever RPG and liked it.
So I end up purchasing FF3 expecting something similar to MQ and as you can imagine I was blown away by all of it. That intro, the graphics, the story, characters.
FF6 remains my favorite game of the series because of this and have enjoyed every release since then.
FF6 is a great choice; you can see a lot of Final Fantasy 7 & 8 elements budding up, like the “equipping espers” being a precursor to materia or junction system. has some of the best music in the series as well, including one of my favorite boss themes “Decisive Battle”