The Backlog (Update 1): FF — February
February is Final Fantasy Month Here at the Backlog
If someone asked me my favourite RPG of all time, it wouldn’t be a Final Fantasy game.
It would be Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, a game in which you play an angel doing good deeds across the land. That, or Avalon Code, where you play the Chosen One, who is basically a librarian trying to write down the whole planet before the apocalypse happen.
If you asked me what the first RPG was that I ever played, excluding Pokemon, it’s probably the Nintendo DS version of Final Fantasy IV, originally titled Final Fantasy II when it came out on the Super NES. I got substantially into that game, before I had to return it to our local video store (remember those?). This kicked off a love affair with RPGs that has lasted through to adulthood, though I rarely have the time and/or patience to actually get through the sprawling worlds of modern RPGs (see: never having finished the Dark Brotherhood questline in Skyrim after 200 hours).
Final Fantasy IV was also the start of my curiosity towards Square Enix RPGs generally, which resulted in a rapidly growing collection of Virtual Console titles from the Wii Shop as a youth. Needless to say, those have also crept into the backlog as time wore on and my Wii aged.
So, in an effort to provide some structure to this project and to finally get through more of my Final Fantasy games, I’ve declared February as Final Fantasy Month. For the month of February, my life will be filled with crystals, stock personalities, and dudes named Cid.
Here’s a list of all the Final Fantasy games in my backlog:
- Final Fantasy (Virtual Console)
- Final Fantasy IV (Steam)
- Final Fantasy VI (Virtual Console, titled III)
- Final Fantasy VII (Steam)
- Final Fantasy X/X-2 Remaster (Steam)
- Final Fantasy XV (Steam, and is counting in the backlog this month only because I’ve never actually left the first continent after 50 hours because I just love my boys so much)
- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
- Final Fantasy IX, which I’ll still have as part of Xbox Game Pass that month and kind of want to try for the sake of thoroughness.
That’s the plan, for the sake of some structure, and to stop me spending half an hour going “what I am going to play” before I actually have some fun. February is going to be Final Fantasy month, and we’ll see how far we get before every quip made by the party’s tank makes me want to strangle them.
