Final Fantasy’smainline installments have been lengthy affairs for the vast majority of the franchise’s decades-long history. They might not bethelongest RPGs, but they are anything but short. Whether it’s a sprawling storyline, a rich amount of side content, or both, each title will take some time.
For those among us who want to “100 percent” each game, some chapters will be particularly grueling. (Although surely all the more rewarding when we can say we pulled it off.) These are our picks for the longest of them all, excluding the MMOs, which are essentially in their own ballpark entirely.
Just to emphasize,we aren’t counting Final Fantasy 11 and Final Fantasy 14. Not because they’d win (they would!), but because as MMORPGs, they’re just “built differently.” A true completionist would be devoting thousands of hours to them.
Oh, one more thing.We aren’t ranking them by the difficulty of their respective platinum trophies, either; after all, we believe there’s more to truly 100-percenting some of these than the trophy/achievement lists alone might indicate.
7Final Fantasy 7 Remake
Final Fantasy 7 Remake is hardly the longest game in the series. This introductory chapter in Square Enix’s trilogy-length reimagining centers entirely on the city of Midgar; the journey is fittingly linear as a result, and the main story can be completed in 25 or so hours.
That hour count is upped considerably if you complete every side quest, of course; but it’s not the side quests that cause issues here. Rather, it’s FF7 Remake’s Hard Mode difficulty setting.
For starters, players must finish the story first on Normal (or Easy) before Hard is even unlocked. Simple enough, but Hard Mode is… pretty demanding. Not only are enemies far tougher both offensively and defensively, but some even gain devastating new abilities.
More pressingly, items cannot be used, making MP the primary source of healing beyond benches - which no longer restore MP. If you’re heading into one of Remake’s dungeons, you’d best learn how to conserve it.
FF7 Remake also tacks on some additional optional battles at the Shinra Combat Simulator!
6Final Fantasy 15
Final Fantasy 15 launched with a ton of content. It might not be immediately apparent - after all, the story was short, not to mention downright disjointed. In some parts, it was frankly unfinished.
But the content was absolutely present. No fewer than eight increasingly challenging dungeons pepper the game’s main continent, the last of which is a nightmare of platforming prowess.
Plenty of mark hunts against powerful foes were present as well, and those dedicated enough to 100 percent FF15 would need to catch every rush, raise their Survival skill to max, seize every Photo Op… it’s a lot.
Over the next few years, Final Fantasy 15 received four single-player DLCs (even more were planned before being canceled!), a wide assortment of added content for the main game, and wildly of all, a separate online multiplayer mode with its own tale to tell.
All of this post-launch material racks up dozens more hours, and Comrades is such an intense grind - not to mention nearly devoid of other players - that Final Fantasy 15 has become a monument to the lengths we’ve got to go in some games before we can claim to have seen it all.
5Final Fantasy 12
Exploration is the name of the game in Final Fantasy 12, which feels rather ahead of its time given its 2006 release date. There’s so much to see in the large stretch of the game’s planet which Princess Ashe and associates must traverse on their quest.
The main goals of combing every corner include finding ultimate equipment aplenty, putting 50-odd voracious marks to the sword, and gathering every optional Esper.
Esper collection will take players to the farthest reaches of the realm, from sprawling caverns to a crystalline labyrinth to an utterly destroyed former kingdom. But it’s those mark hunts that may get the last laugh. Omega Mk XII will force you to draw upon every ounce of strength that your party can muster, and Yiazmat requires literal hours to beat while packing about as much godly punch as Omega does.
If you’re playing the HD remaster entitled The Zodiac Age, at least you can speed things up. On the other hand, there’s now a 100-stage relentless gauntlet of battles in a new side mode which culminates in a duel against every Judge in the Archadean Empire. Do not expect to make it to the top your first time. Or your twentieth.
4Final Fantasy 10
Final Fantasy 10 has a meaty main storyline filled with trademark Final Fantasy twists and turns and an unforgettable ending. It also has the tough Monster Arena, which includes not just fighting gruesome beasts, but catching a ton of the critters used in their creation. Tougher still are the Dark Aeons, and toughest of all is the punishing Penance.
If you seek to destroy Penance in particular, you’ll probably want to max out every character’s Sphere Grid. Doing so is not as simple as running everyone through every path, which would take a solid 70+ hours. No, you’ll need to fill in all those empty nodes along the way, and filling them up with the best stat boosts mandates a truly epic grind.
You’ll also need to obtain each character’s fully-powered ultimate weapon by obtaining every associated Sun and Sigil. Many of these are linked to some of the most frustrating mini-games that Final Fantasy has ever seen.
Dodging 200 lightning bolts? Check. Winning a gauntlet-style chocobo race with perfect timing while evading the angriest birds this side of the famous cellphone game? Check. Catching a bunch of butterflies? Somehow, this one gave us the greatest grief.
Add the full-fledged underwater sports league side quest of blitzball into the blender, and Final Fantasy does not mess around.
3Final Fantasy 9
We’ve spoken previously about the toll it can take when a Final Fantasy contains frustrating mini-games. Spoilers - we’ll tell them again twice before list’s end, starting with the beautiful Final Fantasy 9.
We love Chocobo Hot & Cold, the dig-‘em-up mini-game located in several of Gaia’s secluded areas. We adore searching the world map to match miniature screenshots of hard-to-isolate little spots where glorious treasure awaits, be it powerful equipment or new abilities for our beloved chocobo steed. It’s all charming, but it can also be hair-pulling, and it’ll take a long time to finish.
Jump rope and racing Hippaul, both found on the streets of Alexandria, both necessitate borderline-unreal precisely-timed button inputs at their hardest stages of difficulty.
There’s also an infamous side quest toward the end of FF9’s story that involves such roundabout gameplay at such exact moments that the internet collectively lost it when someone posted footage of it and a good 99 percent of the fandom had never so much as heard of it.
And then there’s the in-game card game. Whereas Final Fantasy 8’s Triple Triad has been reasonably well-received, Final Fantasy 9’s Tetra Master is a tangled web of bizarre concepts that has never clicked for many players.
The rewards are far less, too; Triple Triad was key to much of FF8’s best stuff, but mastering Tetra Master nets you the optimal outcome to a single event and nothing else save for the bragging rights when you’ve found every card.
Most notoriously of all is the methodology for acquiring the best sword in the game, Excalibur II. If you haven’t reached FF9’s final dungeon within 12 hours, it simply will not be there. If you aren’t rushing the story, it’ll probably take you at least 40. So, uh. Yeah.
2Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
What if there was a Final Fantasy game with Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s punishing unlockable Hard Mode and a far longer main questline that also brings along the highest number of mini-games that the franchise has ever seen, and surely the highest percentage of them that have infuriated a not-insignificant portion of the playerbase?
What if it was bursting with side quests, too, as well as six sprawling open regions packed with completionist-minded objectives? What if there were several battle arenas, most of which are exhaustive, and even an affinity system which dictates the identity of the character whom the protagonist spends an unforgettable evening with toward the end of the story?
Indeed, behold Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. This is a role-playing game that has been soaked in side stuff. A chocobo racing league, a 2.5D fighting game, a simulated starfighter in the style of Star Fox (?!), and so much more; not to mention the best and most comprehensive card game we’ve yet seen from Final Fantasy.
Note: Queen’s Blood is so good, though…
Yeah, all of this WITH a difficult Hard Mode lined with unique restrictions. FF7 Rebirth demands dedication.
1Final Fantasy 10-2
The thing about Final Fantasy 10-2 is that it nicely includes a running tally of your completion. Every little thing that you do adds to the meter. In a game that is largely defined by its hefty amount of side quests, seeing how much you’ve progressed therein is a blessing.
There’s a heck of a catch. Final Fantasy 10-2 is so unforgiving in the narrowness of its windows of opportunity for so much of its optional offerings that the odds you will hit the 100 percent mark without a guide are virtually zero.
Right from the jump, if you don’t talk to a specific NPC who sticks around for all of ten minutes, you have lost. Your 30 or more subsequent hours touring a post-Sin Spira with pop star Yuna and her devoted sidekicks may be a blast, but they will never be everything they could have been.
The game’s ending changes if you achieve this deeply intimidating goal. You’ll never see it will outside of the internet otherwise. Individual elements of a complete playthrough of other Final Fantasy titles are tough enough to pin them to this list, with FF7 Rebirth especially egregious.
But there is nothing quite like the feeling of defeat that struck us when we realized how close, yet how bitterly far, we came to 100 percenting FF10-2 our first time through it.
