Final Fantasy VII voted best in the entire series by 55,000 readers of Retro Dodo, in a tournament poll that pitted 16 of the most influential titles in the canon against one another and produced some achingly close results along the way.
How the Final Fantasy VII voted best poll actually worked
Retro Dodo selected 16 titles from across the Final Fantasy series and ran them through a bracket-style tournament, leaving the choice entirely to readers. The response was enormous: 55,000 voters turned up across the rounds, with some individual bouts decided by only a couple of hundred votes. That kind of margin, in a poll of this scale, tells you everything about the depth of feeling the series inspires.
Many voters flagged the first round as the hardest, arguing that Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy VII should have met in the final rather than being drawn against each other earlier. With a catalogue this strong, bruising early exits were always going to happen, and those complaints are, in their own way, a tribute to how many genuinely great games the series has produced.
A winner from round one, but never a comfortable one
Final Fantasy VII progressed from the very first round, but it was not always dominant. On more than one occasion it advanced by only a couple of hundred votes, meaning the competition was real throughout. In the end, though, it claimed the top spot, and it is difficult to argue with the outcome when you consider the game’s place in the history of the medium.
Whether you first encountered Cloud Strife on the original PlayStation release or came to Gaia via the remake, Retro Dodo’s position is simple: what matters is that you have experienced it. That sentiment resonates. Few games in any genre have left quite the same cultural mark, and the poll result reflects that loyalty running across generations of players.
The Square Enix series as a whole has sold an estimated 210 million copies, across 16 main entries and a substantial number of spinoffs. Choosing a single best title from a lineup that broad is no small ask, which is precisely why handing the decision to tens of thousands of readers, rather than a single editor, made sense.
There is also an interesting footnote from Retro Dodo’s wider gaming tournaments: Final Fantasy VII did not always fare so well when competing outside its own series. In the site’s Best Retro Game competition, it lost to Metal Gear Solid in an earlier round, with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time eventually taking that crown. Here, on home ground and measured against its own siblings, it has finally claimed a victory that many fans would say was overdue.
What the vote says about the series
A poll of 55,000 is not a casual click-through. People sought it out, argued about the brackets, and came back across multiple rounds. The closeness of several matchups confirms that the series has no weak eras in the minds of its audience: different titles matter deeply to different players, for different reasons tied to different moments in their lives.
Final Fantasy VII may have taken the overall title, but the real story of the poll is that virtually every game in the bracket had its fierce defenders. Retro Dodo has promised further tournaments, so the debates are far from settled.
