Final Fantasy 10 Still Has The Best Game Opening In The Series

The Final Fantasy series has plenty of great video game openings, but 25 years later, the intro for Final Fantasy X still feels like the best of them. The HD remaster of the PlayStation 2 classic is getting ported to the Switch 2 this week, where it looks lovelier than ever. There I played the beginning of the game for maybe the dozenth time and it’s still incredible. Most fans would probably argue that Final Fantasy VII‘s opening remains the best in the RPG franchise, and one of the best in any game ever, and there are days on which I would agree with them. But the PS2 helped Square Enix take its cinematic ambitions to the next level, and Final Fantasy X kicked things off with an unforgettable cutscene. Instead of just gushing about everything that happens in the first 15 minutes of the game, I thought I’d rank the other top Final Fantasy game openings and make the case for why Final Fantasy X‘s intro comes out on top. 5. Final Fantasy VI Cutscene: The sight of Magitek Armor trekking through the snow was neat back during the SNES era but doesn’t have the same wow factor today. The camera panning over the Empire and Narshe, along with the excellent soundtrack, remain top-notch. Battles: Blowing away were-rats with magic beam canons that do tons of damage was a very fun inversion of the normal start to a Final Fantasy. Story: A mysterious woman being awakened from the Empire’s mind control by a magic beast trapped in a giant slab of ice? Very cool. The fact that it immediately segues into an escape makes it one of the best-paced narrative starts in the series. 4. Final Fantasy XIII Cutscene: Square Enix was flexing all of its visual muscles with this one. Feeling the heat from arriving three years into the console cycle, the company no doubt knew that its first flagship RPG for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 had to deliver, and Lightning’s escape from a prison transport sure does. If anything, the opening movie was too good, like an E3 hype reel that the finished game was never going to live up to, and which in many ways it did not. Battles: Final Fantasy XIII‘s combat was the pinnacle of the ATB system: slick, streamlined, and ultra flashy. The game wastes no time before introducing you to some epic encounters with a dazzling view of Cocoon in the background and some of the best battle music in the series. Story: There’s a tense, Mission: Impossible-lite quality to the intro for this one that helps propel you through the fact that it’s not very clear what’s going on or why. The issues that plague the game later on, however, like the lack of open exploration and the extremely byzantine worldbuilding, don’t matter much at the start. You’ve got a gun blade, you’re fighting stormtroopers, and you’ve got to keep moving through some very cool science-fantasy environments. Good enough. 3. Final Fantasy IX Cutscene: You could tell Square, at the end of the original PlayStation’s hardware cycle, was getting every ounce of juice it could out of that 32-bit machine. Its memorable cinematic vignettes had really grown into their own across Final Fantasy VII and especially Final Fantasy VIII. Final Fantasy IX applied that evolving sensibility to the series’ past, and in many ways the initial cutscene serves as a sort of thought experiment: “What if we’d had this tech when Final Fantasy IV came out?” You get intrigue on a stormy ocean, a giant castle with a sword going through it, and a classic medieval airship pointing toward adventure on the horizon. Battles: Bonus points here for avoiding the usual “press X to bash low-level mobs with your sword” sequences that most Final Fantasy games start off with. Instead, we get Zidane and his band of thieves putting on a play for the evil queen in an attempt to kidnap her daughter. The conceit ends up weaving some generic combat into some genuinely interesting and neat dramatic sequences. Story: Unlike most Final Fantasy games, IX actually begins with carefree exploration and a quick puzzle. But everything is kept very taut in the three-beat structure that goes from Vivi exploring Alexandria to the big show for the queen to a suspenseful escape that ends with a crash in the woods. From a gameplay perspective, it’s the most varied and rewarding intro in the series. And Vivi’s musical theme is an all-timer from Nobuo Uematsu. 2. Final Fantasy VII Cutscene: We start in the stars, then appear in front of a flower girl coming out of a back alley, before eventually panning over an industrial metropolis and then zooming in on a speeding train. Two of the most memorable minutes in video game visuals ever. Battles: The combat here is straightforward but with some fun wrinkles. Cloud has lightning. Barrett has a gun. Players get to see battles play out in 3D with action-sequence camera edits. It all culminates in a fight against a giant Scorpion robot that was already cooler than anything a Final Fantasy fan had fought up to that point. Story: It doesn’t get much better than being dropped in media res as a terrorist attack against a tyrannical corporation is already in motion. Not only does the action in Mako Reactor 1 ebb and flow, it also ends with a countdown timer, the sort of thing other games might save for near the end. Then it all blows up. Final Fantasy VII literally starts off with a bang. 1. Final Fantasy X Cutscene: Maybe the single best mini-movie Square Enix has ever put out there. In a futuristic city out in the middle of the ocean, all eyes are on a game played inside a massive sphere of water. The heavy metal song “Otherworld” plays with vocals by Till I Die’s Bill Muir. Meanwhile a mysterious ronin is wandering skyscraper ledges while spitting sake out at a floating natural disaster coming in off the sea. All of these elements would be very cool on their own, but the way they’re edited together with the lull in the music as Auron’s boot hits a puddle and the splashes start floating upward as something called Sin begins to engulf the city in what resembles the watery event horizon of a black hole makes it truly next-level. Battles: Not the best! Tidus and Auron cut through lots of little locust-lookin’ sea monsters. Instead of any memorable boss fight, there’s a pillar with tentacles you have to whale on for a bit and a coupling you have to cut to pieces in order to create an explosion to help you escape. Story: You have to be careful with “WTF” intros. Make them too opaque or chaotic and you’ll fail to hook players. Make them too obvious and they’ll be bored. Final Fantasy X is exceptional at explaining almost nothing but leaving you with just enough understanding to make you desperately want to know what just happened. A jock with weird clothes and daddy issues gets eaten by an asteroid-sized rain drop? Where did it take him? Why is it called Sin? And what happened to the really cool old man with the big sword? It’s enough to power you through the extremely slow and clunky bits that follow immediately afterward.