1. Dragon Warrior (NES)

The Final Fantasy series mostly sticks to the core, numbered games. But over the years, there have been plenty of diversions. From Chocobo Racing for the PlayStation to Mystic Quest, there have been plenty of games to exist outside of the Final Fantasy "canon." And one of the first was definitely one of the best. Dragon Warrior is a little-known role-playing game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, an "8-bit" console machine that surfaced back in the mid-1980s. Though not many people got a chance to play Dragon Warrior due to it being on a relatively obscure platform, the game made several interesting changes to the Final Fantasy formula. Rather than having you build a party of multiple characters, Dragon Warrior focused on one character. To make up for this obvious deficiency, the character was multiclass, combining the skills of a fighter with some white-mage healing and plenty of black-mage combat spells. So your little guy could definitely fend for himself.

Final Fantasy at its finest.

Like most other Final Fantasy games, Dragon Warriors is filled with plenty of lengthy, story-driven sequences as you attempt to save the world from ultimate evil. But unlike the rest of the games in the series, none of those sequences came up in combat. No awesome monster-summon animations, no nothing. Omissions like this are probably what led to the game being overlooked by many of the series' "hardcore" fans.

Many of the monsters you'd face in the game were completely different from the stuff you'd find in the rest of the Final Fantasy line. Most of them are pretty forgettable, save for a little slime-like creature that you'd fight early on in the game. Also, movement in the game is pretty slow, making it all the more surprising that the game completely lacks chocobos. But both in spite of and because of the numerous changes Dragon Warrior makes to the Final Fantasy formula, it definitely stands the test of time and stands out easily as one of the greatest Final Fantasy games ever made. Though, yeah, more summons would have probably helped.