Ranking Every Final Fantasy Spin-Off Game

One of the greatest aspects of the Final Fantasy series is its music. Every track in the first nine games (and many from X and XI) was crafted by the legendary Nobuo Uematsu, before he departed from Square Enix to become a freelancer in 2004. His mantle has since been picked up by an array of similarly skilled musicians, amongst them Masashi Hamauzu, Naoshi Mizuta, Hitoshi Sakimoto and Yoko Shimomura, whose contributions to a collective library that now numbers more than 5000 tracks overall cannot be understated.

It is always great to see their creations celebrated - Classic FM has been known on occasion to put its snobbery to one side to showcase some of Uematsu’s best work to the classical community, whereas the Distant Worlds series of concerts have now been going strong for almost two decades.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy was Square Enix’s own love letter to their audial masterpieces, with more than 70 songs (and many more through lucrative DLC) enjoyable through an admittedly basic rhythm-based gameplay experience on the 3DS, with notes in each song corresponding to different stylus movements.

The balance was good, with at least one field, battle and event composition from each of the thirteen main series games that had been released at the time. Though spin-offs and sequels like X-2 and Tactics were completely ignored, this easily made it one of the best ways to experience tracks from across the series in one place at the time.