Well that's your opinion, the facts show that it's the most popular and the second most popular is FF X which is my favorite in the series and the third is VIII.

Are you sure you're not just one of the people who got pissed about FF leaving Nintendo for Sony or not relying on the age old nostalgia that always puts the older in front of the newer.

@Entroper - You seem to take to the Aristotelian order of importance for the parts of a story (that is, plot before character.) But how can you be uninterested in what happens to Terra next, and how that relates to her past? The game is trying to give the characters more depth so that the final confrontation with Kefka is more meaningful. The last half of the game paints an intricate picture of a dying world by using characters who are beaten down and defeated by their joint failure against Kefka, and their individual failures in their pasts. By conquering their individual failures, they find the strength to come together again and take on Kefka one last time. That's the plot for the second half of the game, and if you ask me, all the main-story plot twists it doesn't offer are a small sacrifice for what is achieved.

Besides, in most cases, talking to people in towns in FFVI gives a nice impression of their change and, most often, defeat because of the new world.

VII Brought RPG's mainstream. I even remember on YTV the guy talking about it. (Canadian youth Television channel). I've mentioned before people's first RPG's have a nice place in their hearts, and it's very easy to see why so many would have played 7 first. I liked it, but I still cannot tolerate the final portion of the cloud/sephiroth/Jenova story.

And the fact that VII and X (Then VIII) are the most popular may lend some credence to the More human and more realistic is good.

I'll admit, back in the days when FFVII I was one of the bitter people about Square moving away from Nintendo but I warmed up after I got the Playstation.  Sadly though, FF games have been going downhill since going to the PS (nothing due to the PS, they've just been going downhill).  

FFVII was good (though it took me a while to warm up to it) but not the best.  It had a decent but strange story and the characters had some life to them.  Add to that the fact it greatly improved the Esper system by changing to Materia and it was pretty good gameplay wise (unlike FFVI which had terrible gameplay).  I really think FFVII was the last really good FF game.

So I guess saying that the series started going downhill when it went to the PS is a little off, I should say that it started going downhill with FFVIII.  VIII wasn't a terrible game, it was just a terrible FF game.  The story wasn't really good and the characters were the most boring 2D characters I've ever seen in anything that's supposed to be story driven. 

With IX we had a game that tried returning to its roots and did a pretty decent job but the game just completely fell apart in the ending. 

FFX was just meh.  The characters and story were more interesting than the what was in VIII but all in all it wasn't a great story.  I didn't feel anything for the characters (other than thinking Tidus was a little snot) and even though they tried to build the story as some big unfolding mystery, it was bland and completely predictable.

With FFXI, to tell you the truth, I love.  I think it's one of the best MMO's out there but it's not really an FF game, it's just an MMO with an actual story with the name Final Fantasy slapped on.

With FFXII I tried to get into it twice and both times the story just bored me to tears.  The graphics were spectacular (as every FF game has been), the voice acting was great, the gameplay was the best it had ever ben in an FF game, but the story just couldn't keep me entertained.  I didn't care about the characters in any way at all and, well, it wasn't interesting.  I suppose this could be because it was a political story and those generally just bore me, but whatever.  I also had gripes with the beginning of the game how they kept introducing and taking away characters, the fact you didn't get to actually play until sitting there for 20 minutes, and I hate the license system (every character turns out to be the same).

I actually don't have high hopes for FFXIII and all its spin offs.  This isn't an anti-PS3 thing, just the FF games lately haven't been interesting.  I hope I'm wrong and I hope this is the game that makes me want a PS3, but I have a feeling this is going to be one long cinemat with a boring story and boring characters set in a world where infinite spin offs can happen so SE can whore out the franchise as long as peopel will buy it.  Hey, maybe at least we'll see the end of FFVII spin offs with this game. 

Well I don't know about the others but since IX is one of my favorites that's certainly not the case for me.

I still haven't played VI...it's on GBA right? I might just buy that...

@BenKenobi88 - Do that shiz.

It's actually a lot of people's opinion, and please stop the argument that we've all heard a billion times.  Yes, Square pissed off a lot of fanboys when they switched sides; no, that is NOT the only possible reason that someone could like the older games more than the newer.  All the facts show, BTW, is that FFVII got lots of sales; again, that doesn't mean that everyone who bought it thought it was the best FF.  We all know that great sales do not always mean great games, just look at Spiderman 3.  :)

I'm really getting tired of people twisting around what I say (not just in this thread, plenty others recently).  twesterm, in one post you say "I'm not surprised you don't like great games like FFVI" and then turn around and say "unlike FFVI which had terrible gameplay," so don't mince my words when yours aren't self-consistent.  If you read closely instead of just getting angry at me because "I don't like great games like FFVI" you'd see that I said I don't care about the characters' back stories unless they're woven into the plot.  FFVI just had so much going on at once that it couldn't possibly be as cohesive as IV or V.  Sure, some of the details are relevant to what's going on in the world, but it just doesn't hold my attention nearly as well as the other games do.

I never said I didn't like FFVI, I said I liked it less than IV or V.  Since IV and V are super fucking awesome, that means VI is merely awesome.  Happy now?  :)

I did like FFVIII's story, but I could hardly stand to play the game.  Sadly, I liked the ideas of junctioning spells to your abilities and getting various effects, and GF skills and what not, but the combat was just mind-numbingly slow, boring, and easy.  There was no motivation to build an awesome party, no armor, no point in leveling since it just auto-adjusted the enemies anyway... it was all just pointless.  Squeenix is getting remake happy lately, I'd like to see them remake FFVIII into a good game.  I really think it would be sweet.

I never played any of the PS2 FFs, so I can't comment on those.  I didn't hear good things about them, so my already waning interest in the series pretty much bottomed out.

A friend of mine is letting me borrow FFVII in a few weeks' time.  I'll really try to like it, and see how it goes.  I already know that I like the music.  :)

@Entroper - Heheh, "merely awesome". We gamers are so jaded. Fair enough. We'll agree to disagree about VI, but you're wrong.

 Actually, I do think FFVI has terrible gameplay (and it does) yet it is still my favorite game of all time.  Not many games can stand with bad gameplay, but FFVI has truly spectacular characters and music that more than makes up for the gameplay.  Luckily the bad gameplay isn't the kind that frustrates you, it's just simply broken gameplay.  Some characters abilities are simply completely useless (Cyan's Bushido-- takes way too long, Relm's painting-- yeah ok, Gau's jump-- aside from a few they're worthless, Strago's Lore-- not worth the effort) while others are completely overpowered (Terra's morph,Sabin's blitz, Edgard tools--CHAINSAW, a weapon you get for free early in the game and use until the end).  There are also the espers.  By the end of the game those bad abilities just stop mattering because you've made every character exactly the same and except for Sabin's and Edgars abilities, you just use the same few spells the entire game.  Like I said, it isn't the type of bad gameplay that makes you stop playing, it's just the kind that sucks a lot of the diversity in character skills that they were basing the combat on.  Also, there's the whole micro managing espers and their level up abilities that really just becomes more tedious and annoying than fun.

 You're simply missing what FFVI is about.  There is the over plot of the world gone to the shitter, but it's also just as much about those characters and watching them develop.  Each of them (main characters, not Mog, Gogo, or Umaro) struggles in world of balance, changes in some significant way, and makes interesting developments in the World of Ruin.  This game is about all of that, love, change, caring, hope, not just Kefka's fucked up the world and it's time to go stop that.  The good FF games are about the characters and FFVI is a shining example of character development in games will always be one of the truly great gaming examples even with its bad gameplay.