LogFAQs > #934512802

Every party member from a game thats been released in the US, anyway.

Despite being a regular visitor of Board 8 for more than five years now and following umpteen ranking topics during that time, Ive never done one myself. But that changes now! And to ease myself in, I decided on a subject that necessitated playing through 14 JRPGs that bottom out at 40 hours for a thorough run and that are so famously polarizing in pretty much every way that every single spot on this list, positive or negative, is inevitably going to piss somebody off. So to make sure everyone still has some fun with it no matter what, Im gonna throw in a prediction contest - with a prize!

To join, just make your guess at the Top 10. You can do that here in the topic or through a PM if you dont want others to meta-pick; either way is fine with me, but if you do go the PM route Id recommend you to make a post and let me know about it anyway because PMs seem to be getting eaten sometimes on GFAQs these days. Scoring will work based on how far off you are for the individual 10 characters. If you put Character A in the #5 spot and his actual spot ends up being #2, youll get 3 points. If youre way off and his actual spot is, say, #46, youll get 41 points. Lowest total score wins. In the unlikely event of a tie, whoever got the higher number of Top 10 characters correct will take it, and if that still doesnt solve it, well go to whoever got the most positions exactly right.

The winner gets a $25 Steam gift card. If you somehow manage to get every Top 10 character, Ill bump it to $40. If youve hacked into my computer and have the whole Top 10 in the exact correct order, Ill go to $50. What do you have to lose, right?

The ranking will start next Tuesday, so predictions will close on Monday, February 24th at 11:59 PM EST. I will post the complete list of the 95 characters youre working with in the next post just to make sure theres no confusion about who may or may not qualify.

Just a couple other things to note:

• Yes, I really did do a fresh playthrough of every one of these with this list in mind. I did every sidequest, saw every scene, watched every skit, even read the damn in-game synopses where applicable. If theres a line of dialogue in a game, I saw it. So while I can almost guarantee everyone reading is going to disagree strongly with at least one thing on this ranking, trust me, its not because I didnt do my due diligence in putting it together. I also did the writeups immediately after finishing the respective games to make sure everything was fresh in my mind. That also means this project has no chance of joining the long ranks of unfinished ones on this board; everythings done, I just have to post it. Hooray!
• I tried to avoid talking about spoilers as best I could, but theyre sometimes necessary. So I will try to use spoiler tags for specific plot events when theyre needed - you can still follow along with the ranking even if theres games you plan to get to in the future. Plus, as these writeups are generally fairly long, Im including a TL;DR at the end of all of them, and all of those will essentially be spoiler-free.
• I know theres fan translations out there for some of the other games in the series, but I wanted to keep things official or else Id be opening up a whole can of worms with translation differences (both in fan works and in official releases) and so forth. The exception is that I used the PSX version of Phantasia for reasons that are probably obvious to series fans and that I dont feel the need to go over unless someones really confused by the decision.
• I didnt take into account any supplemental material. The manga one-shots for Abyss, the Leia novel thing for Xillia, the Zestiria anime - those sorts of things werent included in my rankings. Even I have to draw the line somewhere.

That should about cover everything, but if anything about the prediction contest is unclear just ask. Hope yall enjoy.

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