Ah.. the eternal question of which FF is best...
Short and simple: Without any hesitation, FFVI has been *THE* best.
Explanation below: (Warning! Long rant below)
In FFVI, the amount of characters, their background stories, the villians (Kefka)
.
The overall storyline, the soundtrack, the hours needs to play thru, the *meaningful,
not useless (like blitzball)* side stories/quests, (still love the opera scene), the grinding
(Loved the vanish/doom trick). I loved every single moment of FFVI. I could not get enough.
FFVII = Second best. Well executed game/story/villian. Disliked Cloud for just a bit, but eventually got use to him. Liked that this was the 1st early polygon style FF game. Cut scenes were used where appropriate, unlike today.
FFIX = Third best. A joyful return to the classic RPG elements after the dump that was FF8.
Loved the soundtrack as well. Square owed me FFIX after I bought FF8 (I still feel Square still
owes me...)
Most Hated
FF8 = Drawing Magic off enemies in a RPG (Seriously WTF??!?!?) & *REALLY HATED* all
the main characters.
FFX = Blitzball in a RPG(WTF?!) that pissed me off the most and again, I hated *ALL*
main the characters.
FFXII = Linear map,no towns, no EXP/insta-heal/, characters that I barely even cared about.
Basically, I'm of the view that FFVI was a perfect "9.5" , then dropped a notch to "9" with FFVII and then when into "-10" on FFVIII, and then back to "7.5" with FFIX, and then went "-8" on everything else up to the current series.