It's called "Final Fantasy." It's not real. Not really.
Beaten: 2003, 2004, got 80% through in 2016
Version played: Gameboy Advance
Let's set the scene here: it's December 2003, and I, a precocious 14-year-old, have just received a new video game for the holidays. I'd heard of Final Fantasy before, but since my parents didn't allow consoles in the house, I couldn't play them until they came out for the system I actually had: the Gameboy Advance.
Needless to say, I was thrilled to dive in. I proceeded to play it nonstop over my entire break from school. And I really mean nonstop: I put 50 hours into it over the course of a week, which would eventually add up to over 300 hours in total.
I had never played anything like this before; I grew up on Super Mario and Pokémon. This was a whole fantasy adventure like I'd never seen before. And it was phenomenal.
In more recent years, I've seen people complain that the game was too childish and simplistic for their tastes. I get it, especially as a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics, but at the same time: it was perfect for me at 14. It had enough depth to keep me enthralled for hours upon hours and a really interesting story about whether a fantasy where you're happy is more important than reality. FFTA is simple on its face, but it doesn't pull its punches when it counts.
I was a little worried, when I came back to it in 2016, that I wouldn't enjoy it as much as I had when I was a kid. I needn't have worried. It was exactly as wonderful as I remembered. The pixel art was still gorgeous. The gameplay was still incredibly addicting. And the story still resonated.
I really don't think I could have picked a better starting place than this.
Marche comes out on top, easy. FFTA takes place in a fantasy world separate from reality, and the journey Marche goes through to get back to the real world is really interesting. But not everyone agrees that the world should change, and Marche faces no end of opposition from his own friends (and family) as he tries to set the world right. It makes for a very compelling tale.
I love a lot of the other characters, too — Ritz, Babus, Ezel, Shara, Montblanc, and so on.
While objectively I love Hitoshi Sakimoto's compositions for this and other FF titles, I really never listen to his soundtracks. I quite enjoy them when I'm playing the games, but I rarely seek them out on their own.
I am fond of a few tracks from this game:
Since the zones aren't something you can wander through freely, I'll instead talk about a weird quirk of FFTA: you decide what the map looks like. Every time you discover a new zone you can place it anywhere you want on the map, which gives you certain bonuses when you travel there and search for treasure... which, if you plan right, can include some of the best equipment in the game. Last time I played through it, I got the most broken ability in the game ridiculously early and wreaked havoc with it. 10/10, would do again.
I could talk about FFTA's gameplay for hours, so I'll try to keep it brief here. Unlike FFT, which solely features humans, FFTA features five playable races, each with their own set of jobs. While the vast majority of your party are random generated characters (and a few pre-built ones you can recruit on special missions), the majority are totally free for you to design as you like.
And man, can you come up with some incredible combinations. Take a human paladin and teach it a ninja's dual-wielding ability: now it can wield two swords at once. Make a moogle mog knight into a gunner, and now you can snipe people across the entire map. And my personal favorite: take a viera summoner and make her a red mage, which lets you doublecast summons.
(It should not come as a surprise that I am a red mage/summoner viera in FFXIV.)
Honestly, there are so many fun combinations. In FFTA you can use the skills from two jobs at the same time, so you can freely multiclass however you like within that character's available jobs. And some of the individual jobs are phenomenal, like Illusionist, which hits everyone on the map no matter the distance with powerful spells. Or the FF classic Blue Mage, which is particularly strong in this game.
And then there's the Law system, which I've always loved. Each battle has a particular set of Laws assigned to the battlefield, restricting you from certain actions and abilities. Later you can get around them with "antilaws," which negate the laws in use, but for the most part you have to do as the laws dictate. It adds an interesting layer of tactics onto the battlefield and informs a lot of your choices during a battle.