11 Best Final Fantasy Side Quests

The main story of a Final Fantasy game will always get most of the attention, and that's for good reason. Sprinting towards the credits for your whole playthrough, however, is a bad idea.

You are leaving so much behind: the side content in this series ranges from charming to genuinely extraordinary, and the eleven entries below all have one thing in common: at some point while doing them, I stopped thinking about the main plot entirely.

11 Final Fantasy V: Sealed Temple

Post-Game Content That Earns the Trip

The Sealed Temple is underwater, south of Phantom Village, and you can only access the full dungeon after beating the main game. It houses some of the strongest enemies and bosses in the entire game, including Omega Mk.II and Neo Shinryu, and connects to the Cloister of the Dead, which is a boss rush gauntlet that will test everything you've achieved across the playthrough.

Three of the four new jobs in the Advance version – Cannoneer, Gladiator, and Oracle – require the Sealed Temple to unlock, which gives it an additional pull beyond the challenge alone. It's hard, and it's supposed to be: you've finished the main game, and the Sealed Temple is the game's way of asking whether you're actually done. The answer is usually no, and that's the right answer.

10 Final Fantasy VIII: Triple Triad

A Card Game That Makes the World Feel Real

Triple Triad is a two-player card game played on a 3x3 grid, where the aim is to capture your opponent's cards by playing cards with higher numbers on the adjacent sides. The rules are simple, but I’ll warn you right now, there are variations that add complexity. There is also an enormous amount of cards to collect across the entire game.

What I love most about Triple Triad isn't the mechanics, though; it's what it does for the world. Finding out that a Galbadian soldier, who you've just beaten and who is probably meant to still be fighting you, will happily sit down for a card game with you if you ask is the kind of detail that makes a fictional world feel like somewhere people actually live.

The collectible card aspect keeps you invested across the whole playthrough, and even when everything else is falling apart, someone, somewhere, wants to play cards.

9 Final Fantasy VII: Chocobo Breeding

Catching, Loving, Racing, and Breeding Little Birds

The Chocobo breeding sidequest in Final Fantasy VII is, on paper, one of the longer and more involved optional activities in the series.

You catch Chocobos in the wild, bring them to a stable, race them at the Gold Saucer to improve their stats, feed them specific greens to raise their speed and stamina, and eventually breed them together to produce Chocobos of different colours. Each colour can traverse different terrain types. Green Chocobos cross mountains. Blue Chocobos cross rivers. Black Chocobos do both. Gold Chocobos go anywhere.

The reason you want a Gold Chocobo is Knights of Round, the most absurdly overpowered Materia in the game, hidden on an island in the ocean that you cannot reach any other way.

The whole thing is a joyful, time-consuming process that I have never once felt was a waste. I love these little birds. I love raising them. I love that the game hides its most powerful summon behind an activity that is fundamentally about caring for animals.

8 Final Fantasy X: Monster Arena

Pokémon Said Jump, Final Fantasy Said How High

The Monster Arena in Final Fantasy X has a simple hook: you carry special capture weapons and weaken enemies below a certain HP threshold to capture them alive, then bring them back to the arena to be fought by the party. The capture requirement forces you to actually travel and engage with every area of the game properly, which is already more than most side content asks of you.

What elevates it is what happens once you've collected enough. Special Creations appear as new monsters are bred from your collection, and some of them are among the most challenging fights in the game. The arena owner rewards you generously for each new creation.

You can't get a Game Over inside the arena, which means you can experiment freely without consequence. Overkilling enemies there doubles their item drops, creating a satisfying loop of combat and reward that kept me here for hours longer than I expected. The most expensive fight, against Nemesis, costs 25,000 gil per attempt. I paid it repeatedly. Worth it.

7 Final Fantasy VI: Eight Legendary Dragons

Kefka Ended the World, and This Is What He Released

The eight legendary dragons are let loose during the cataclysm that reshapes the world in Final Fantasy VI. In the World of Ruin, they've spread out across the landscape – some in dungeons, some in specific story locations, a couple hidden in places you'll only find if you're paying attention. They don't chase you. They just exist in the world, going about whatever a legendary dragon goes about. One of them has taken over the Opera House stage. The game is not subtle.

Each dragon represents one of the eight elemental types, and hunting them all down and defeating them breaks a seal that has kept the Esper Crusader locked away for a thousand years. That alone is a satisfying payoff. But in the GBA version and onwards, completing the chain unlocks the Dragons' Den bonus dungeon – harder versions of all eight dragons, each with a new gimmick, leading to Kaiser Dragon, the superboss at the bottom. And below that, the Soul Shrine.

It is an impressive amount of content built on top of an already satisfying optional hunt, and it fits naturally into the World of Ruin's atmosphere of a world that has been fundamentally broken.

6 Final Fantasy XV: The Perfect Cup Noodles

An Excuse to Fight The Scariest Thing in the Game, Hunger

In Chapter 8, as you're preparing to leave Lestallum, Gladiolus decides that what the group really needs right now is the perfect cup of instant noodles. Not figuratively. Literally. He has a strong opinion about the best Cup Noodles in all the land, and he is not letting you leave until this is resolved.

What follows is a quest that sends you after the specific ingredient for your ideal version of the cup, and depending on what you choose, that ingredient might involve fighting a Behemoth, a Zu, or a Karlabos.

There is something very relatable about the experience of deciding you want a very specific thing to eat and then going to unreasonable lengths to get it. The recipe you unlock afterwards is immediately obsolete once you've done the quest. That's the joke. I love it.

5 Final Fantasy X-2: Den of Woe

The One That Should Have Been Mandatory

The Den of Woe is a sealed cave in the Mushroom Rock Gorge where Shuyin has spent a thousand years in a state of grief and fury, sustained by the Pyreflies surrounding him.

Unlocking it requires tracking down all ten Crimson Spheres, which are scattered across the game, and documenting what happened to Nooj, Baralai, and Gippal during their training for the Crimson Squad. That context matters because without it, what happens inside the Den is significantly less impactful.

There is a world of pain waiting for you in the form of Rikku and Paine being possessed by Shuyin, Yuna being shown how he and Lenne died, and Shuyin summoning images of Nooj, Baralai, and Gippal to fight her. This is not a fun afternoon.

It is also directly tied to the main plot of the game in a way that most of the optional missions simply are not, and the fact that it's optional at all is a creative decision I have never fully made peace with. If you play X-2 and skip this, you are missing something that enriches the story around it.

4 Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift: Heritor Questline

The Job Class You Have to Find

The Heritor is a job class exclusive to Adelle, and you can miss it entirely if you're not paying attention. It unlocks after certain events, but the weapons that teach Heritor skills don't appear in the pub's mission list – you do the fight or event, get the weapon, master the skill found on it, and then repeat the process a few more times.

What you're working toward is genuinely worth it. Adelle, as a Heritor, can equip nearly all weapons and armor, has well-rounded stats, and access to a set of powerful abilities that reward both the effort of finding the weapons and the patience of mastering them one at a time.

The questline is structured so that you cannot rush it: a new weapon notice doesn't appear until you've mastered the previous skill, which gives it a natural pacing that fits the slow-burn nature of the game. It's one of those job unlocks that changes how you approach the rest of your playthrough.

3 Final Fantasy XII: Espers

More Lore Than They Get Credit For

The Espers in Final Fantasy XII are not the greatest implementation of summons across all Final Fantasy games, I'll say that upfront. But: only five of the thirteen are tied to the story directly. The rest require you to go and find them, which involves some navigational patience and a fight that is usually harder than it looks.

What makes them worth doing is the Bestiary. The lore attached to each Esper tells the story of beings who rebelled against the gods and lost, who were cursed as punishment for their defiance and locked into the forms you encounter.

It is pretty good writing, specific and melancholic in a way that the main plot doesn't always manage. Collecting all thirteen doesn't transform your party the way it might in another game, but reading through what the Bestiary has to say about each one is one of the more hidden rewards Final Fantasy XII offers to people willing to look for it.

2 Final Fantasy XIII: Missions

The Open World the Game Almost Forgot to Include

Final Fantasy XIII is famously linear for most of its runtime, which makes the Gran Pulse chapters feel like a different game. The Mission system is the main reason for that.

Cie'th Stones are scattered across the Archylte Steppe and activate as you complete other missions, each one sending you after a mark somewhere in the sprawling landscape. It is, functionally, the open world content that the rest of the game doesn't have. The marks range from straightforward to genuinely demanding, and the difficulty ratings are accurate enough that you know what you're walking into.

Having only one active mission at a time means you're making deliberate decisions about which hunt to take on next, which keeps the pacing from becoming overwhelming. For a game that spends so long holding your hand through corridors, suddenly handing you a landscape full of targets and saying "go" is a great shift, and the mission system makes the most of it.