FF8 dared to go beyond the dramatic game to the epic romance game, and is the most detailed and subtle work ever designed for the intelligent gamer.

FF4 is the first modern game with complex personalities and mythologies, blending multiple genres like sci-fi, adventure, history, and romance.

FF7 is the first psychological drama played out as a game, and showed that a main protagonist can be prematurely killed just as in Hitchcock's Psycho.

FF10 concerns physical manifestations of dreams, and the eternal recurrence of both thoughts and the persons in different generations who think them.

FF6 is analogous to Robert Altman's Nashville: lots of characters with individual stories and one enormous climax, though in the middle here.