I'm pretty deep into the FF rabbit hole and have been since I was barely able to read.
Personally, I have never finished 1 or 2. They're extremely user unfriendly and terribly balanced, so you have to either be a JRPG die-hard or a massive FF fan to even try. The pixel remasters fixed a lot of broken shit, but still. There are better games.
3 is kind of borderline. Lots of great ideas executed not terribly well. Good game, but only barely. The PSP remake is a lot better, if you can get past the hideous art style. Start here if you really, really like the genre.
4 is the first game I'd say is truly just a good game in and of itself. It's still a bit of a mess due to its age, but it's perfectly playable. This one has a ton of remakes for some reason. There's The Complete Collection on PSP, which I think is the best one. There's the 3D remake on DS, which I haven't played a ton of but it seems okay, if really slow. Then there's the pixel remaster, which is basically Complete Collection with some added quality of life features and minus The After Years, which isn't very good anyway.
Like current_horror said, none of them have anything to do with each other. They (almost) all have chocobos and black mages and gil and all that shit, but it's just a shared universal framework. Nothing more. There are a couple exceptions, but none in the main series.
I'm pretty deep into the FF rabbit hole and have been since I was barely able to read.
Personally, I have never finished 1 or 2. They're extremely user unfriendly and terribly balanced, so you have to either be a JRPG die-hard or a massive FF fan to even try. The pixel remasters fixed a lot of broken shit, but still. There are better games.
3 is kind of borderline. Lots of great ideas executed not terribly well. Good game, but only barely. The PSP remake is a lot better, if you can get past the hideous art style. Start here if you really, really like the genre.
4 is the first game I'd say is truly just a good game in and of itself. It's still a bit of a mess due to its age, but it's perfectly playable. This one has a ton of remakes for some reason. There's The Complete Collection on PSP, which I think is the best one. There's the 3D remake on DS, which I haven't played a ton of but it seems okay, if really slow. Then there's the pixel remaster, which is basically Complete Collection with some added quality of life features and minus The After Years, which isn't very good anyway.
Like current_horror said, none of them have anything to do with each other. They (almost) all have chocobos and black mages and gil and all that shit, but it's just a shared universal framework. Nothing more. There are a couple exceptions, but none in the main series.
Adding my input. I loved the remakes of FF3 and FF4 on the DS. Also, FF Crisis core on the PSP was amazing.
Cool! Thanks!!! Will probably get one soon