Most people who perfer 6 are going to like 9 best of that era.

It was a throwback to 1-5.

I don't think i've played much of 9. i've got to pick that up some time. 7 and 8 were such dissapointments i skipped 9.

As such 12 has been my favorite post 6. Which is sad... because the story and characters sucked in it, though only thing that made it worthwhile was the battle system was new... so i played that for a while until i got to cloud city and saw Darth Vader and Lando Calrisian. Or atleast there Final Fantasy counterpoints.

I love the FF traditional battle system, but i need to give a crap about the characters to play it.

 Probably Dragon Warrior.  It came out first.  Bamboo stick & Shield ruled!  Well actually it didn't... but i liked to go with a different starting set up then most people.

Yeah, I loved 12 besides the characters, and the forced ''serious'' tone of the story. All blonde humans with flat personalities. No diversity or depth.

VI is the greatest, but IX was the best one since. VII is a good game, but not even in the same league as those two games.
Also, how are people saying that VII has the best characters? Yuffie and Cait Sith are universally despised, for good reasons. Cloud is a brooding antisocial jerk. The only character I really liked was Aeris, and she died. Barret had the most unfortunate scenario though. He was essentially a stereotype.

How much do you want to bet that the majority of those who said VII was their favorite played it first?

I use a tier system to rank FF games for me, with each tier representing a large gap in quality. Keep in mind I am directly comparing how much I would enjoy playing these games today, not how fun they were for theiri time. Mine go like this:

Tier 1: FFVI > FFIX

Tier 2: FFIV > FFV

Tier 3: FFX

Tier 4: FFVIII > FFVII > FFXII

Tier 5: FFIII > FFI > FFII

You can also translate this into a grading scale, where Tier 1 represents an A, 2 a B, 3 a C, 4 a D, and 5 an F.

I know some people may be mad at me sticking all NES FFs at the bottom, but they really just aged very poorly. They were fun for their time, but I can't replay them right now, and that's what matters in the end. I can replay VI or IX anytime and enjoy them thoroughly. I will never replay anything below Tier 3 again, simply because I strongly disliked those games.

VIII is only above the other 2 because Triple Triad is awesome.  VII is only above XII because I can't stand anything about XII >_>.  Okay, that's not completely true.  The moveable camera was great, as was the lack of random encounters.  Other than that the game was ridiculously easy and played itself with the gambit system, the characters were awful, and the plot was a bad Star Wars rip. 

I think the only reason I rate 1 so highly is because I played it for the first time when I was so young, so playing it is very nostalgic for me.

I can replay 1 fairly well. Reason being it doesn't have any plot. 2 and 3 sucked though.

That's my problem with the newer ones. The story actually hinders my playing them because there is so much crappy story.

I mean the entrance to 12 was like... 15 minutes, to play a tutorial, then there was another 15-20 minutes of story.

This thread just goes to show how smart Square is. Look at all the tastes that are displayed here. Square has managed to please just about everyone's taste at one point or another with their Final Fantasy series. That's why it is the biggest RPG in the world.

As for the actual thread topic, I loved IX. It was my first JRPG if you exclude Pokemon. The thing is, I've also loved VII, X, and XII, but all for different reasons (never played VIII). The best part of IX was the original 4 characters. Zidane, Garnet, Steiner, and Vivi were just so charismatic. The other characters on the other hand were trash. I moderately enjoyed Freya, but the others were just not interesting and didn't measure up to the original 4. I also loved that you could have 4 people in your party and everyone had a class. Maybe it's because I played FFIX first, but I've always felt parties of 3 were just too small, especially when there are 8+ characters to choose from.

That's actually one of the reasons Suikoden 3 and 5 are near the top of my list of greatest RPGs. I loved the 6 person parties. So, Naz, definitely pick up one of the Suikodens if you can; they're wonderful. Just avoid number 4. I've never played 1 or 2, but I've heard 2 is great. I need to download it for my PSP (I know, that makes me a pirate, but there's no way in hell I'm paying $100 for a USED copy of that game, especially when none of that money goes back to the creative minds that made the game.)

Well my favourite FF is FFVI and my second one FFIX..

But is a close one because their are things I prefer of FFIX and things that I prefer of FFVI.

My Rankings of FF:

FFVI
FFIX
FFX
FFVIII
FFIV
FFV
FFII
FFIII
FFI
FFXII
FFVII


Oh and about last gen. FFX and FFXII brought something in their games that I would like in the new FF's.

FFX = Building your characters, I love the sphere grid YES I am serious, It made for me the game so more appealing because I was tired of the level up system.. I always hated the fact that if you were level 100 you still could be very weak while that is impossible if you have the sphere grid where you can build all your Characters to the maximum (or almost). Well if the game had no Sphere grid I would certainly had no save date of +300 hours;.

FFXII = A LOT OF YOU WILL DISAGREE but I am so happy that the game didn't had RANDOM ENCOUNTERS. It made the game mor fun for me and also faster.

Why? Well an example:

Before FFXII if you checked your walktrough for an item and you found out that the item was in CAVE X at FLOOR 12. It was a pain in a ass to get there. Every ten steps you made you got attacked and it always took a lot of time like 30 minutes to get there and 30 minutes to get out (Depends if you had Teleportation in the game or not).

Well in FFXII you just go in the cave and can run to the item in like five minutes without being attacked and go out again in 5 minutes...

Well that makes the game more fun for me and I can not believe that no one was ever annoyed by those Random encounters..