Dear all,

I am very passionate about fantasy and sci-fi, especially the Final Fantasy series, in particular Final Fantasy 7. As well as playing fantasy and sci-fi games I enjoy reading it too and am a fan of Lord of the Rings. But even LOTR doesn’t quench my thirst for fantasy like playing FF7 did. I want to find stories similar to that of the Final fantasy epics. Similar plot, characters, magic, creatures, vehicles, weapons, basically everything Final Fantasy. I had a brief look in Waterstones and found Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, which is the nearest to what I am looking for that I had been able to find so far. However, I know there will be more out there that better suits or even (hopefully) matches or nearly matches what I am after.

Are there any novels out there that the writers of Final Fantasy took inspiration or influence from when making/writing the games?

Are there any novels out there that took inspiration or influence from Final Fantasy??

Are there any stories out there that are similar to the stories and events in any of the Final Fantasy games?? ??

Thanks guys

I want to know the answers to your questions too!
That's quite obvious. LOTR is "high fantasy", which is actually very, very different from "soft fantasy". High fantasy generally entails pre-industrial, sparsely-populated worlds of orcs, goblins, elves, dwarves, dragons etc and the battles and machinations of various pseudo-political entities and mages. Soft fantasy, though, can be anything that contains something magical, like time-travelling portals or wish-granting fairies. The first five Final Fantasies are mainly high fantasy but even FFI spoke of an ancient technological civilisation and even took you to its flying fortress.

Similarly, "hard sci-fi" is very different from "soft sci-fi". The former is the stuff of Asimov, with robots and space-faring vehicles and galactic colonisation. The latter tends to be set in technological societies but de-emphasises this fact, and probably doesn't entail interplanetary stuff. I think FF12 falls into this category, but I'm not sure.

FF7 (and 8) is therefore obviously soft sci-fi, mixed with some soft fantasy. FF10 is predominantly soft fantasy, but as in all the FF games, elements of both technology and magic are always present.


I know it doesn't answer your questions, but I too am very interested in this merger of soft fantasy and soft sci-fi that the FF series achieves; I'm not at all interested in the "hard" stuff which tends to give the "sci-fi/fantasy" genre a niche appearance that it doesn't deserve.

The "Otherland" series by Tad Williams is sci-fi for sure, but it's similar to FF in many ways: there's a group of people who assemble with a common goal and they go on a very long journey to uncover the truth and defeat their common enemy. Most of the last three books take place in a variety of fantastical Virtual Reality environments, which adds a fantasy element.

I dont know how similar they are to Final Fantasy but I love the Forgotten Realms Dark Elf books. I have all of them and they really good

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...+Salvatore&r=1

Dune deals with several similar elements as Final Fantasy VII-- technology, politics, religion, ethics, etc.

By saying this are you saying that there are books out there that are actually Final Fantasy stories?? (not walkthroughs/strategy guides)