No. 3 – Cecil

Cecil is Final Fantasy's best hero. And we'll break the news to you now, Cloud is not on this list. Blasphemy? Perhaps. But we can't have both of them. So we had to choose and we went with Cecil. We'll grant that Cloud may have resonated with more people, powered in large part by the marketing machine that was behind the huge promotion of FF VII (Cloud was everywhere in the late '90s). And the two actually share a lot in common, as both have light and dark sides that are revealed during their games. But as a character, the complicated, teenage angst of Cloud's winding back story involving his dark-haired other half Zack just can't compare to the simple, powerful mythology of Cecil. As a franchise, Final Fantasy incorporates and makes references to many different world mythologies and we think that Cecil's redemptive and symbolic transformation from a dark knight to a paladin on top of a mountain is much more representative of Final Fantasy's ties to old legends. Plus Cloud had a really stupid looking haircut.