The nine weirdest summons in Final Fantasy history, ranked

destructoid.com:

Final Fantasy XVI is nearly here, and we already know most of it will revolve around the series’ beloved summons. The Final Fantasy series is home to some of the coolest summons in the history of gaming, magnificent creatures that would easily squish any Pokemon in existence. It’s also home to some of the most batsh*t bonkers summons ever, so let’s take a break from worshipping the ever-popular Bahamuts and Shivas and celebrate the weird ones!

SquareSoft set out to change how the world saw the Final Fantasy series with its seventh installment, which apparently meant they had to change how people saw Chocobos as well. The result is a summon called merely “Fat Chocobo”. That’s it, that’s all it is — a giant Chocobo. Its mighty secret ability? None. We just summon him above our enemies and have gravity cause him to fall on their heads. The Fat Chocobo’s model isn’t even animated, meaning that the creature might already be dead by the time we drop it.

We understand Square meant this as a tone-deaf joke, but the concept of Fat Chocobo gets more insidious once we think about it. Chocobos don’t get like that in the wild. Also, the world of FFVII is filled with Chocobo creators, meaning that there’s at least someone out there breeding Fat Chocobos for the purpose of selling them as weaponized anvils. FFVII’s Fat Chocobo would be the original angry bird if he had the energy to muster hate without it immediately resulting in a fatal heart attack.

The success of Final Fantasy VII embedded SquareSoft with the unwavering belief that they could do no wrong going forward. FFVII featured some peculiar summons, yeah, but it’s with FFVIII that they popped open the forbidden well of summoning wackiness. Whereas the weirdness of FFVII ends