Counting Down The Best Squaresoft Games Of All Time

“SquareSoft”.

Roll the name on your tongue. You’ll taste bits and pieces of an old empire’s lost cuisine, when the experts running the kitchen were among the best in the industry. Perfectly seasoned gameplay, fresh storylines. We ate like kings, and we didn’t even realize it at the time because we were too busy level-grinding like peons.

After Square married Enix, we were still given great titles here and there, but something was amiss. An occasional gameplay tweak, with upper management changes sprinkled in, and Square Enix games just weren’t the same anymore. Even with the rose-tinted glasses put away in a box with the rest of our biases, it’s still undeniable that Square’s golden age lies firmly planted in the 90’s and early turn of the century. That’s not to say that Enix didn’t bring along some ammo as well after the merger (see Kingdom Hearts).

Honestly this is probably a bad idea, but we’re going to rank our favorite SquareSoft/Enix games anyways (which is only marginally less reckless/offensive than ranking religious deities). Narrowing it down to 11 was hard enough as it is, and butts will likely be hurt in the process. For starters, we apologize to Ashley Riot for not making this list.

Our cynical nature, at best, makes us believe we’re above the transparent money grab that Kingdom Hearts seemed to embody. And at worst, it just makes us remarkably blind.

Fortunately, we’re not opposed to tossing that same cynicism into the freezer (because yes, we’re sure we’ll need to thaw and use it again at some point). KH should NOT have worked as well as it did. But as soon The Dream level kicked off, we knew that we were in for a real ride – and not that Disney World crap. What really caught us off guard were the unexpectedly dark themes, which wiped away any lingering dingleberries of our cynicism.

Squall should be grateful to Vaan and Lightning for heroically yanking the conch shell of FF controversy from his gloved hands. Before those two protagonists came sauntering along (bearing gifts of gender ambiguity and/or cardboard personality), Squall was the whipping boy for those that felt Final Fantasy was truly veering off course into the dark land of emo brooding and bad character design.

Critics/fanboys had a somewhat legitimate point – why the hell was Squall such a sphincter, when he had a dime like Rinoa constantly hitting on him? Ultimately though, the story was appropriately rich enough to keep us going, and all felt right by game’s end.

Of course, others will cite the gameplay as a primary fault – but frankly, we loved the complexity of the Junction system. And we were consequently incentivized to hunt down all of those GF’s beyond the normal “collect ‘em all” mentality.

Xenogears’ rapsheet fires off bullets that would mortally wound any modern game publisher’s patience: religion, Jung, Nietzsche, Freud, RPG.

We don’t know how this game got greenlit, and we don’t care. Today, such a project would likely never be born in our modern era of cautious spinelessness and politically correct idiocracy.

But SquareSoft was a different beast then, and we were a different prey. We had no problem being bombarded by longwinded existential diatribes, because it made our pubescent minds FEEL smarter. And at the very least, we could tune out the preachiness and enjoy the well-refined ATB system and Gears battles.

X doesn’t get enough credit. Maybe it’s unreasonably cruel of us to ask that you look past Tidus’ layered haircut and that laughing scene. But if your black heart can forgive those malicious war crimes, then you can start to examine the pulse that makes this game so great: the story.

Final Fantasy XIII’s narrative, for example, stands as the worst example of a FF storyline: it feels like a modern throw-away anime populated by stereotypes and failed characterization.

Final Fantasy X’s story, conversely, avoided all of those horrible “traditions,” opting instead for complex father issues, dubious religious values, and validated emotional payoff by the time the last “X” command had been pressed. Even the most minor character in your party felt infinitely more fleshed-out than Lightning, Vanille, and Snow combined.

That soundtrack. By God’s hairy bunion, THAT SOUNDTRACK. For the time being, let’s put aside the stellar integration of multiplayer action into the RPG genre. Forget the excellent real time battle system. And let’s go all the way: let’s also ignore the expertly woven story.

As soon as the “Nintendo” and “Squaresoft” logos popped up - accompanied by the hauntingly warm electronic echo that only a 16-bit game could produce - you knew that even if the gameplay was as vapid as a porn star, the music alone would keep you hooked.

Fortunately, the gameplay, in fact, did not suck. And neither did anything else about the game.

We’ve all heard the story: that FFIX was meant to be Squaresoft’s love letter to its fans, a magical trip heavily laced with nostalgia and tribute. After the stopovers in Gaia and Galbadia, it was time to return home.

If you’ve been away from your parents’ house for any extended period of time, then you’ll know what we’re talking about. You walk in the door, greeted by a waft of your mother’s cooking and an instant, if temporary, amnesia of anything bad that ever happened in that house.

Or in this case: The familiar “smells” of the old style towns. The welcome sight of the disproportionate character design. And when you (in a non-creepy way) witnessed Garnet rest her head on an inn pillow, you felt as if you were crawling into your own childhood bed.

If you didn’t start gaming until after the year 2000, then you may never realize the degree to which the 90’s kids were spoiled. We were those ungrateful little girls who, on their Sweet 16, whined that their brand new Mustang was the wrong color.

Because back then, SquareSoft could just sneeze, and a game as brilliant as FF Tactics would splat against the wall. Nowadays, we’d get something like Crystal Chronicles.

This was a thinking man’s game – no amount of droll “X” pressing would get you anywhere. It took away that tired criticism of JRPG gameplay amounting to repeated button-mashing and replaced it with intensely deep character customization, elevation changes, and a mature storyline.

Look, we loved Tactics Ogre, but FFT really brought the whole package together.

VII is NOT the pinnacle of the series. After skimming our nostalgic bias off the top of that now-cold soup, we realized that it did have a somewhat goofy anime story, funky translation, and an awkward weapon upgrading system.

And that’s all irrelevant.

Because no matter what you think of Cloud and crew, there’s no denying that this was THE most important game out of the entire RPG genre at the time. For awhile, this game was the very face of the Playstation generation. You can never wrestle away that hallmark from Cloud’s knurled hands.

The game isn’t overrated. Nor is it the best. But it did create a world that no one wanted to leave – hence the incessant calls for a remake.

Speaking of which, here’s that pinnacle we were looking for. A sweeping, dramatic opera scene. A sweet train sequence (sorry Squall – Sabin did it better). Uematsu’s best work. A thematically complex storyline. Empathetic heroes. Perfect pacing. Robust gameplay. And a villain that, in all likelihood, probably has a porn collection that would make Satan himself try to commit suicide were he to lay eyes on it.

That the sprite-based set-pieces of FFVI were more emotionally impacting than almost anything we’ve seen today is simply stunning. Every refinement of the game was more than a superficial layer of polish – the mechanics, gameplay, and heart were all built properly from the ground up. No, that polish was just the paint on the greatest warship SquareSoft ever set loose on the oceans.