Key Takeaways
- Final Fantasy games offer deep lore with themes of change, complex histories, and acceptance of death.
- Final Fantasy 15 has rich lore spread across games, movies, and anime, but unlocking a deeper understanding is challenging.
- Final Fantasy 14’s ever-evolving world blends high fantasy with advanced tech, drawing from franchise history.
Over the years, the Final Fantasy series has wowed fans with its rich, deep fantasy worlds brought to life by interesting cultures, characters, and dreamlike visual effects. As gaming technology progressed, so did the potential to store more information and deliver stories in a more nuanced way.
While once explaining the ruins of a technologically advanced civilization or a dragon’s motivations would have been in the realm of the imagination, there are now plenty of examples of Final Fantasy games with truly evocative lore, whether it’s delivered in one game, multiple, or across various media platforms.
7 Final Fantasy 9
A Deeply Introspective Love Letter To The Past
Most Final Fantasy games come with a theme or message, but Final Fantasy 9 might just be the most philosophical, though it may not seem like it on the surface. FF9 was intended to be a love letter to the pixel era and the PlayStation era, and it makes many allusions to locations, figures, and themes of the whole series.
As such, Final Fantasy 9 is a game about embracing change and accepting death, its world infused with lost civilizations, parallel worlds, and existential musings. Although much of its lore requires digging to uncover, the story dives into each theme, for example, Freya’s lost lover, Vivi’s tragic origins, and the identity of the main villain).
6 Final Fantasy 15
An Epic Tapestry Woven Through A Web Of Transmedia
Although Final Fantasy 15 is presented as a character-driven, coming-of-age road trip adventure, there is a lot to this game’s lore that often goes underappreciated due to the format of its delivery. The critique that too much of it was hidden is a valid one. For example, in-game, most of the information about the Starscourge, crystals, and Astrals is found within eight Cosmogeny books scattered around the world. Outside of them, there is no way to comprehensively dive into the lore.
The biggest hurdle for players who wish to dive into the game’s lore is the fact that much of the story is spread between the game, a CGI movie, and an anime series (Kingsglaive and Brotherhood, respectively). To properly experience the game’s story, never mind the lore, a timeline guide of Final Fantasy 15 and its media is required, which may be why so much of its lore goes overlooked.
5 Final Fantasy 7 Compilation
Lore Compiled Over Two Decades
Since Final Fantasy 7 takes place in a post-industrial world where, like the real world, much of the population’s history and culture had been wiped away in the name of technological progress and exclusive profit rights, it might seem as though the planet’s history (and in turn its lore) has been erased.
However, its many expansions (spin-offs and sequels) form a compilation of Final Fantasy 7. Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, Advent Children, the Remake trilogy, and more expand on the world-building and character backstories and allow fans to dive further into the mythology of the planet, the Lifestream, and Jenova.
4 Final Fantasy 13 Trilogy
With three games’ worth of story, it is unsurprising that the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy would have a depth of lore to it. However, the 13 games are generally not remembered as such. On the contrary, they are widely regarded as linear and opaque in their storytelling due to the first game’s restricted exploration and dense and confusing terminology.
However, those willing to go through the effort of opening up the menus and digging through the data logs will find a rich trove of world-building details, such as the complex, interwoven history of Cocoon and Pulse, the nature of the Fal’Cie and l’Cie, and more on Lightning, Fang, and Vanille’s pasts.
3 Final Fantasy 10 & 10-2
An Intimate And Richly-Realized World Of Culture
With the advent of expressive and realistic character models, voice acting, and cinematic storytelling, the team behind Final Fantasy 10 sought to create an intimate, emotional tale. While the journey was designed more linearly than previous titles, the richness of each area, including local stories, unique societal quirks, and distinct cultural rituals, keeps the world of Spira feeling ever-fresh and alive throughout the pilgrimage.
Much of Final Fantasy 10 revolves around the spiritual teachings of Yevon and Sin, but thanks to the series’ first sequel, Final Fantasy 10-2, players were able to explore Spira in a post-Sin world, delving deeper into the thinking and belief systems, and political shifts that had been suppressed before the fall of Yevon, and of course, the fates of the party from FF10.
2 Final Fantasy 14
A Celebration Of The Series’ Lore With New Twists And Avenues
Massively multiplayer online games are intended to be played for a very long time, meaning the game’s world is almost always seeded with meaty backstories and myths. Since the world is constantly being added to with patches and expansions, the world evolves, and new, pullable threads are constantly introduced for fans to theorize over.
As is tradition for Final Fantasy, Eorzea blends traditional high-fantasy with advanced technology, but it also draws from the entire history of the franchise, past and future, to add more and more color to the universe. The ongoing story, shaped by expansions like “Heavensward,” “Shadowbringers,” and “Endwalker,” explores the fates of ancient gods, broken civilizations, and the play between light and dark.
1 Final Fantasy 12 / Tactics
The Stories Shared Setting Of Ivalice
While other Final Fantasy games garner sequels and spin-offs based on their popularity, the shared universe of Ivalice, as seen in the Final Fantasy Tactics games and Final Fantasy 12, and even a non-Final Fantasy game, Vagrant Story, weaves a world of plot threads through incremental growth, which each title expanding the world incrementally.
The lore of Ivalice is not just wide but deep, as the Tactics games have an underappreciated level of complexity in terms of historical and political realism, from the Lion War to the Archadian uprising. As well as politics, the usual myth-making series is known for is all, of course, there. For example, the mystery of the ruins of the technologically advanced culture and the twelve Zodiac Knights of creation.
