This is easily my favorite out of the Final Fantasy series. There were good ones before this one, but this is the first one in which I actually cared about the characters, and all of them at that. The battle and materia system mark a departure for individualized-by-default characters, but that is a perfectly logical step when considering the otherwise lack of a summoner/healer starting on disc 2. This was also the first one in which Square really pushed merchandise on the FF games, which was odd. Sephiroth didn't cause half the mess Kefla did in the previous FF did, but the way his scenes were carried out and directed make him more evil of an opponent than Kefla.