Game Review: ファイナルファンタジーVI
2018-Sep-05, Wednesday 21:22![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Final Fantasy VI is my favorite Final Fantasy, and playing it through again hasn't changed that opinion.
I didn't own an SNES as a child, but several of my friends did. I remember us playing through FFVI together, trading off at various story points, taking turns naming characters--I named Setzer "Han" because he was a gambler and a scoundrel and also I was ten--but I didn't get very far. I came in wherever the person's save was, and of course it wasn't a group game or anything like that. They absolutely kept playing while the rest of us weren't around, and so I only remember bits. The Opera House where I got to name Setzer, of course. The opening crawl, obviously inspired by Star Wars, with Tina (Eng: "Terra"), Biggs (Eng: "Vicks"), and Wedge piloting their mage armors across a desolate snowfield toward the lights of Narshe in the distance. Protecting Banon on a raft down a rushing river and repeatedly choosing the looping fork to take advantage of his healing ability. But no consistency. No real understanding of how the story all fit together. All that came later when I played it through on my own.
If you've played the game, you're hearing the music now.
FFVI has one of the most captivating opening sequences of any game I've played. Which is no surprise, because as I said, the techniques are clearly drawn from A New Hope. There's an opening text crawl with backstory about the Great Magic War (Eng: "War of the Magi") and how it utterly destroyed the old world, but from the ashes a new civilization arose that looked to steam and steel rather than sorcery. Except for for the Empire, which now seeks to revive the power of magic that had caused the downfall of the old civilization. It's a constant theme throughout the game that multiple people comment on--have humans really learned nothing? Are there truly people who will pursue power at all costs even if it risks the whole world?
Spoiler: yes.
Biggs and Wedge talk about the frozen genjū--a word referring to mythological beasts or legendary monsters with no good translation, which was localized as "Esper"--and how there have been so many false reports but this time it seems genuine, since the Empire sent a "special weapon" along with them. After a bit more discussion, the three of them set out through the snow toward the distant city of Narshe, marching while Tina's theme plays. It's not exactly the same, but while watching it I thought of what my father told me about when he went to see A New Hope in the theater back when it came out, and how the opening scene with the starfield and the ships firing at each other was like nothing he had ever seen before. FFVI's opening was like that for me. The scraps of FFVI I had seen were nothing like this lonely field of snow and distant lights.
The opening of FFVI kindled a love for the magitech aesthetic in me that has never died.
Everyone on the south end of the table is a protagonist.
One thing I like is that the game doesn't have an obvious protagonist. In the beginning it seems like it's going to be Tina, because she's the starting character and because she's special. She's a sorceress with the power of magic, an art lost for a thousand years, and there's an early conversation between Edgar and Locke where they marvel over her powers. But after a few hours, Tina returns to Narshe and the frozen genjū there, which awakens something in her and she transforms into a red-eyed, glowing pink monster and flies away. It might be Matthew (Eng: Sabin) and Edgar, the twin princes of Figaro, but while they have a lot of plot early on, it drops off pretty quickly. It might be Locke and Celes, thethieftreasure hunter and Imperial general turned member of the Resistance, but while Celes takes center stage in the second half of the game, Locke vanishes until almost the end. It's probably best to say that all of them are protagonists, with other characters like Shadow and Relm and Cayenne (Eng: Cyan) taking a secondary role. And nearly every character gets their own leitmotif that follows them through the game and underscores their actions.
Well, Gogo and Umaro are just kind of there.
There is something that binds all the characters together, though, and that's their pasts. Everyone has something in their past that's unresolved and that is dealt with over the course of the game. Locke failed to protect his girlfriend, and she lost her memory and later died in an Imperial raid. Setzer's girlfriend was the only other airship pilot in the world and died when her airship crashed. Matthew's master Duncan died thanks to his other apprentice's actions (or at least, so he thinks). Shadow abandoned his partner-in-crime to be captured and later abandoned his daughter. Gau was abandoned as a child and raised by monsters. Tina isn't even human and doesn't know what that means. Celes is unique in that the real important, character-defining moment for her happens during the course of the game and can be influenced by player action.
This meant that I had a very difficult time choosing who to put in my party for any section that offered me free choice. Especially later on, when leveling had erased most of the distinctions between characters and all their power came from magic, all of the protagonists and several of the secondary protagonists like Relm and Setzer were good choices and I had to whittle it down. I tried to mix things up a bit, to make sure everyone got a bit of screen time, because even though it would have been mechnically optimal to bring only powerful mages and just blow everything up, the emotional connection I had to other characters through the story meant I couldn't do it.
Other than Cayenne. I hope he enjoyed his retirement on the airship and his last hurrah fighting Kefka at the tower.
His theme song is one of the best, but he's just not that good in battle.
"Then everyone here will burn to death! Hahaha!"
FFVI is almost two games with a hard divide in the middle. The first half, universally referred to by fans as the "World of Balance," is the most similar to a traditional Final Fantasy narrative. After the opening, Tina is roped into joining the Resistance. Like in Final Fantasy II, there's an Empire that wants to conquer the world and there are plucky rebels, the Returners, who oppose it. The first part of the World of Balance is about recruiting others to the Returners' cause and fighting the Empire, mostly embodied in the person of Kefka.
Kefka is a major reason why Western fans love FFVI so much. A lot of it is the localization--many of Kefka's most iconic lines are less compelling in Japanese, like how "I hate hate hate hate hate [...] hate you!" is just ちくしょ ちくしょ ちくしょ ちくしょ [...], "Damn it damn it damn it..."--but it's also because he's so hateable. He ignores General Leo's rules of warfare and captures Doma Castle by poisoning everyone in it, including Cayenne's wife and child. He later murders General Leo and all the genjū he can get his hands on in pursuit of the power released by their deaths. And he runs from every battle, so the player doesn't even get a satisfying victory over him.
Kefka, like Celes, is a product of the Empire's experiments into magic, and he becomes their greatest asset in gaining more magical power. Once the party assaults the Magical Research Facility and inadvertently shows the Empire that magicite is the true way to unlock the genjū's powers, Kefka makes it his mission to kill every genjū he can find to harvest their magicite. He betrays the party after a peace conference--on the Emperor's orders--and even betrays the Emperor in the end. There is no villainous depths to which he will not sink, and his only reason is to watch it all burn. He doesn't have a good motivation or a real personality, but he's certainly fun to hate.
The plot goes from defeat the Empire to get the genjū's assistance to stop the genjū's rampage and back to defeat the Empire. And on the Floating Continent, among the ruins of what used to be the genjū's homeland, the party confronts the Emperor and Kefka as the Emperor attempts to seize all the power of the Three Warring Gods for himself and rule the world unchallenged.
And then they lose, and the world is torn apart.
No fish to be found.
The moment when Kefka moved the statues on the Floating Continent is one of the most memorable moments in gaming for me, up there with when the Pig & Whistle Society, my World of Warcraft guild, killed the Lich King, or with "Kharak is burning." I had thought that the World of Balance was the game, so when it turned out that there was an entire second half of the game I didn't know about, like in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, I was astonished.
The second half is called the "World of Ruin," and unlike the World of Balance it is referred to as that in the game, at least in Japanese. 引き裂かれた世界, "The Sundered World."
Celes awakens in a bed, tended by Cid, the former head of the Empire's magical research. He tells her that she's been asleep for a year, that the animals and plants on their tiny island are sick and dying, that there were other people on the island but all of them jumped from the cliffs to the north in despair, and that the rest of the world might not even exist anymore. Then he takes sick, saying he hasn't eaten in days, and that the only food is the fish on the beach.
It is possible to save Cid's life here, but the game doesn't tell you that and the first time I played, I didn't. And honestly I think Cid dying makes a much better story. Celes awakens after a year without knowing where any of her friends are, alone on an island with the person who raised her, and then he dies despite all of her efforts to save him. As far as she knows, she might be the only human left alive. Crying, she runs out of the house and makes her way to the cliffs on the north of the island, where she finds a dead bird, confirming to her that the world truly ended a year ago and all that's left now is its death throes. And then she casts herself into the sea.
She lives, of course, because it's not an extended game over sequence, and finds the raft that Cid built and a bird with a bandana over a wound, indicating that there is still life out there somewhere. So this becomes the inciting incident in Celes's past that she needs to overcome, and she sets out into the world to find her friends and stop Kefka, all to the tune of mournful music and howling wind. It drives home that even though she chose to fight on, it might be too late, that Celes's quest might be fruitless, and even if other people are alive--even if Locke is alive--maybe there's nothing they can do against a living god.
Some parts of the combat system are legitimately amazing.
I learned last year that Final Fantasy VI is regarded as a mid-tier game in Japan, rather than the triumph it is in America, and I was very surprised before I looked up why. Part of it is that a lot of Kefka's character is from the localization, and in the Japanese he's not nearly so memorable. But a large part is that Final Fantasy V and its job system came out in Japan but not in America, so Japanese gamers were coming from a mechanically complex and interesting system to one where most of the characters are useless unless you make them identical.
FFVI has a great story and mood but the gameplay is uninteresting. Each character has an implied class with a single battle command to go with the universal Fight, Magic, and Item, and that's really the only mechanical thing that separates them. Celes can use a sword to absorb magic, Matthew can use Certain Death Techniques (Eng: Blitzes) and input a sequence of fighting game commands to activate them, Stragos can mimic monster skills, and Mog can dance. Gau, Gogo, and Umaro are the only characters that really break this trend: Umaro is uncontrollable in battle and Gau is uncontrollable after activating one of the Rages that let him mimic monster abilities. Gogo can do anything as long as he's mimicking another party member. But unfortunately, most skills become worthless about halfway through the game because magic is so powerful and magicite allows you to teach anyone any spell. Character differentiation rapidly falls away when everyone knows Fire 3 and Ultima and spends every battle just using magic, and while that's thematically appropriate for the incredible destructive power of magic returning after a thousand years, it's much less fun than actually requiring planning. By the end of the game, I had multiple people who all knew Ultima and all did 9999 damage per cast of it, so that's how I won every battle.
Edgar's tools? Nah, cast Ultima. Stragos's blue magic and Relm's artistic skill? Nah, Ultima. Ultima solves every problem and everyone can get it, so there's no strategy required at all. Just cast Ultima. There's even an accessory that reduces all MP costs to 1 and it's possible to get as many as you want, so MP becomes a complete non-factor by the end.
And even before then, the MP-absorbing Osmose spell either (rarely) fails or restores all missing MP, stealing hundreds at a time from monsters that are all overflowing with it, so as long as a character has 1 MP, they can have full MP.
M-m-m-magic indeed.
Magic is so overwhelmingly powerful that not only is there no reason to use any other strategy, the normal course of gameplay will lead to that outcome. Sure, not everyone playing will get that accessory, but everyone will get thousands of gil that they have no use for and Ethers can be bought in town, so it's easily possible to refill to max MP between battles and use Osmose in battles. What's more, I imagine most people are going to want to find all the characters they collected back in the World of Balance and doing so naturally leads to nearly every location in the World of Ruin. Most locations are technically optional, since it's possible to defeat Kefka with only three characters, but only a few locations--the Ancient Castle, the top of the Fanatics' Tower--aren't part of getting those lost characters back. Everywhere else is required to find someone and going through all those locations will get a bunch of extra magicite and levels and spells that make the end of the game trivial.
I certainly noticed that in my playthrough. I was reading a walkthrough to refresh my memory and it had very detailed strategies for all of the boss battles, including party members with equipment loadouts and which row, back or front, to put everyone in. I didn't need the description of the boss's special abilities and other enemies accompanying them either, since I'd just blast everything with my most powerful spells until it died and that worked on every single fight in the game.
I didn't play much of Final Fantasy V, but I remember a lot of changing jobs to adjust my tactics for different bosses or even random monsters. I never had to do any of that in FFVI because I always had some magic way to solve my problems. Overpowered magic fits the themes but makes the actual gameplay boring to an even greater degree than most wandering monster JRPGs. If the strategy for 99% of all battles is "Cast my strongest magic, which I always have available no matter who is in my party because everyone can learn everything" and the remaining 1% is just bouncing magic off a party member with Reflect to bypass a monster with Reflect, it's just Spam A to Fight but with a few more button presses.
"No, it's nothing. I'm doing this for myself."
He's lying.
I need to talk about the music, because this is Uematsu's best work.
A while back, I bought the Final Fantasy X soundtrack and listened to it, driven by the memories of songs like "To Zanarkand" and "Auron's Theme," only to realize that a lot of the music on that album just wasn't memorable to me. And sure, it was the first Final Fantasy that wasn't solely worked on by Uematsu, but even in Final Fantasy VIII I barely remember anything other than "Liberi Fatali." But in Final Fantasy VI I love almost every single song.
I mentioned leifmotifs before and it's not like using them is a revolutionary concept, since they've been a part of concert music for centuries, but they weren't heavily used in video games at the time that FFVI was made. Then, music was generally area-based and shorter, often designed to loop forever without getting too annoying. Final Fantasy VI had some of those kinds of songs, of course, with Terra's Theme pulling double duty as the overworld theme and Terra's theme herself, but there were quite a few pieces that only showed up in cutscenes or to emphasize a point. Locke's Theme, when Locke was making a decision or being heroic, and the contrasting Forever Rachel when he's filled with doubt. Catastrophe, a variant on the part of Omen, the opening theme that plays over the description of devastation wrought by the Great Magic War, drives home just how high the stakes are as the Emperor and Kefka stand on the Floating Continent. Entering a pub and hearing Shadow's Theme is always exciting before he permanently joins, and when Celes finds Setzer in the World of Ruin and gets the airship, the mournful "Dark World" is replaced with Searching for Friends as she realizes that maybe there is a chance they could save the world after all.
And of course there's Dancing Mad, the theme for the final battle with Kefka atop his tower. In a time when most video game songs are a few minutes long at best, it's seventeen minutes, with organ and 16-bit vocals as befits the throne of a living god, and has four separate sections which play during the four parts of the battle against Kefka.
My favorite Distant Worlds concert I've ever attended was the FFVI-themed one with a full-length orchestration of "Dancing Mad."
An angel without mercy.
Before attacking Kefka, the party pauses to wonder what the results will be. If Kefka controls the Three Warring Gods, and the Three Warring Gods are the source of all magic, then that means that destroying them and Kefka will destroy all magic and magical creatures, which includes the genjū...and maybe Tina. But the consequences of letting Kefka continue to reign over the world are worse, so they battle their way up his tower, past the detritus of the World of Balance and Kefka's guardians, and fight him at his throne on the top.
Kefka's design is obviously religious in nature, but there's one element of the fight I never previously realized. He has an ability called Heartless Angel (Eng: Fallen One) that he uses immediately when the battle starts that reduces all party members to 1 HP. And part of being at low HP in FFVI is that the character sprites collapse to their knees in exhaustion.
Kefka starts the battle by making the party kneel before him.
Rest in peace.
Many other Final Fantasy games have better gameplay than FFVI. Some of them have better stories. But none of them have better music and atmosphere, and none of them have such high marks in so many categories. I get that FFVII is the Final Fantasy that really exploded JRPGs in the west and so of course that's the one that Squeenix is going to pick to remake. But even though I haven't played FFVII at all, I'd rather they have tried to make FFVI.
Or then again, maybe not. I've seen the hideous graphics on the mobile and Steam versions. Perhaps it's best that they not ruin it any further.
FFVI is still a masterpiece, and even with the antiquated design it's absolutely worth playing today. Even though the Legend of Heroes games are close to surpassing Final Fantasy in the JRPG hierarchy for me, it's games like FFVI that make it close. I've been wanting to replay it for years and this was forty hours of my life that was well-spent.
I didn't own an SNES as a child, but several of my friends did. I remember us playing through FFVI together, trading off at various story points, taking turns naming characters--I named Setzer "Han" because he was a gambler and a scoundrel and also I was ten--but I didn't get very far. I came in wherever the person's save was, and of course it wasn't a group game or anything like that. They absolutely kept playing while the rest of us weren't around, and so I only remember bits. The Opera House where I got to name Setzer, of course. The opening crawl, obviously inspired by Star Wars, with Tina (Eng: "Terra"), Biggs (Eng: "Vicks"), and Wedge piloting their mage armors across a desolate snowfield toward the lights of Narshe in the distance. Protecting Banon on a raft down a rushing river and repeatedly choosing the looping fork to take advantage of his healing ability. But no consistency. No real understanding of how the story all fit together. All that came later when I played it through on my own.
If you've played the game, you're hearing the music now.
FFVI has one of the most captivating opening sequences of any game I've played. Which is no surprise, because as I said, the techniques are clearly drawn from A New Hope. There's an opening text crawl with backstory about the Great Magic War (Eng: "War of the Magi") and how it utterly destroyed the old world, but from the ashes a new civilization arose that looked to steam and steel rather than sorcery. Except for for the Empire, which now seeks to revive the power of magic that had caused the downfall of the old civilization. It's a constant theme throughout the game that multiple people comment on--have humans really learned nothing? Are there truly people who will pursue power at all costs even if it risks the whole world?
Spoiler: yes.
Biggs and Wedge talk about the frozen genjū--a word referring to mythological beasts or legendary monsters with no good translation, which was localized as "Esper"--and how there have been so many false reports but this time it seems genuine, since the Empire sent a "special weapon" along with them. After a bit more discussion, the three of them set out through the snow toward the distant city of Narshe, marching while Tina's theme plays. It's not exactly the same, but while watching it I thought of what my father told me about when he went to see A New Hope in the theater back when it came out, and how the opening scene with the starfield and the ships firing at each other was like nothing he had ever seen before. FFVI's opening was like that for me. The scraps of FFVI I had seen were nothing like this lonely field of snow and distant lights.
The opening of FFVI kindled a love for the magitech aesthetic in me that has never died.
Everyone on the south end of the table is a protagonist.
One thing I like is that the game doesn't have an obvious protagonist. In the beginning it seems like it's going to be Tina, because she's the starting character and because she's special. She's a sorceress with the power of magic, an art lost for a thousand years, and there's an early conversation between Edgar and Locke where they marvel over her powers. But after a few hours, Tina returns to Narshe and the frozen genjū there, which awakens something in her and she transforms into a red-eyed, glowing pink monster and flies away. It might be Matthew (Eng: Sabin) and Edgar, the twin princes of Figaro, but while they have a lot of plot early on, it drops off pretty quickly. It might be Locke and Celes, the
Well, Gogo and Umaro are just kind of there.
There is something that binds all the characters together, though, and that's their pasts. Everyone has something in their past that's unresolved and that is dealt with over the course of the game. Locke failed to protect his girlfriend, and she lost her memory and later died in an Imperial raid. Setzer's girlfriend was the only other airship pilot in the world and died when her airship crashed. Matthew's master Duncan died thanks to his other apprentice's actions (or at least, so he thinks). Shadow abandoned his partner-in-crime to be captured and later abandoned his daughter. Gau was abandoned as a child and raised by monsters. Tina isn't even human and doesn't know what that means. Celes is unique in that the real important, character-defining moment for her happens during the course of the game and can be influenced by player action.
This meant that I had a very difficult time choosing who to put in my party for any section that offered me free choice. Especially later on, when leveling had erased most of the distinctions between characters and all their power came from magic, all of the protagonists and several of the secondary protagonists like Relm and Setzer were good choices and I had to whittle it down. I tried to mix things up a bit, to make sure everyone got a bit of screen time, because even though it would have been mechnically optimal to bring only powerful mages and just blow everything up, the emotional connection I had to other characters through the story meant I couldn't do it.
Other than Cayenne. I hope he enjoyed his retirement on the airship and his last hurrah fighting Kefka at the tower.
His theme song is one of the best, but he's just not that good in battle."Then everyone here will burn to death! Hahaha!"
FFVI is almost two games with a hard divide in the middle. The first half, universally referred to by fans as the "World of Balance," is the most similar to a traditional Final Fantasy narrative. After the opening, Tina is roped into joining the Resistance. Like in Final Fantasy II, there's an Empire that wants to conquer the world and there are plucky rebels, the Returners, who oppose it. The first part of the World of Balance is about recruiting others to the Returners' cause and fighting the Empire, mostly embodied in the person of Kefka.
Kefka is a major reason why Western fans love FFVI so much. A lot of it is the localization--many of Kefka's most iconic lines are less compelling in Japanese, like how "I hate hate hate hate hate [...] hate you!" is just ちくしょ ちくしょ ちくしょ ちくしょ [...], "Damn it damn it damn it..."--but it's also because he's so hateable. He ignores General Leo's rules of warfare and captures Doma Castle by poisoning everyone in it, including Cayenne's wife and child. He later murders General Leo and all the genjū he can get his hands on in pursuit of the power released by their deaths. And he runs from every battle, so the player doesn't even get a satisfying victory over him.
Kefka, like Celes, is a product of the Empire's experiments into magic, and he becomes their greatest asset in gaining more magical power. Once the party assaults the Magical Research Facility and inadvertently shows the Empire that magicite is the true way to unlock the genjū's powers, Kefka makes it his mission to kill every genjū he can find to harvest their magicite. He betrays the party after a peace conference--on the Emperor's orders--and even betrays the Emperor in the end. There is no villainous depths to which he will not sink, and his only reason is to watch it all burn. He doesn't have a good motivation or a real personality, but he's certainly fun to hate.
The plot goes from defeat the Empire to get the genjū's assistance to stop the genjū's rampage and back to defeat the Empire. And on the Floating Continent, among the ruins of what used to be the genjū's homeland, the party confronts the Emperor and Kefka as the Emperor attempts to seize all the power of the Three Warring Gods for himself and rule the world unchallenged.
And then they lose, and the world is torn apart.
No fish to be found.
The moment when Kefka moved the statues on the Floating Continent is one of the most memorable moments in gaming for me, up there with when the Pig & Whistle Society, my World of Warcraft guild, killed the Lich King, or with "Kharak is burning." I had thought that the World of Balance was the game, so when it turned out that there was an entire second half of the game I didn't know about, like in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, I was astonished.
The second half is called the "World of Ruin," and unlike the World of Balance it is referred to as that in the game, at least in Japanese. 引き裂かれた世界, "The Sundered World."
Celes awakens in a bed, tended by Cid, the former head of the Empire's magical research. He tells her that she's been asleep for a year, that the animals and plants on their tiny island are sick and dying, that there were other people on the island but all of them jumped from the cliffs to the north in despair, and that the rest of the world might not even exist anymore. Then he takes sick, saying he hasn't eaten in days, and that the only food is the fish on the beach.
It is possible to save Cid's life here, but the game doesn't tell you that and the first time I played, I didn't. And honestly I think Cid dying makes a much better story. Celes awakens after a year without knowing where any of her friends are, alone on an island with the person who raised her, and then he dies despite all of her efforts to save him. As far as she knows, she might be the only human left alive. Crying, she runs out of the house and makes her way to the cliffs on the north of the island, where she finds a dead bird, confirming to her that the world truly ended a year ago and all that's left now is its death throes. And then she casts herself into the sea.
She lives, of course, because it's not an extended game over sequence, and finds the raft that Cid built and a bird with a bandana over a wound, indicating that there is still life out there somewhere. So this becomes the inciting incident in Celes's past that she needs to overcome, and she sets out into the world to find her friends and stop Kefka, all to the tune of mournful music and howling wind. It drives home that even though she chose to fight on, it might be too late, that Celes's quest might be fruitless, and even if other people are alive--even if Locke is alive--maybe there's nothing they can do against a living god.
Some parts of the combat system are legitimately amazing.
I learned last year that Final Fantasy VI is regarded as a mid-tier game in Japan, rather than the triumph it is in America, and I was very surprised before I looked up why. Part of it is that a lot of Kefka's character is from the localization, and in the Japanese he's not nearly so memorable. But a large part is that Final Fantasy V and its job system came out in Japan but not in America, so Japanese gamers were coming from a mechanically complex and interesting system to one where most of the characters are useless unless you make them identical.
FFVI has a great story and mood but the gameplay is uninteresting. Each character has an implied class with a single battle command to go with the universal Fight, Magic, and Item, and that's really the only mechanical thing that separates them. Celes can use a sword to absorb magic, Matthew can use Certain Death Techniques (Eng: Blitzes) and input a sequence of fighting game commands to activate them, Stragos can mimic monster skills, and Mog can dance. Gau, Gogo, and Umaro are the only characters that really break this trend: Umaro is uncontrollable in battle and Gau is uncontrollable after activating one of the Rages that let him mimic monster abilities. Gogo can do anything as long as he's mimicking another party member. But unfortunately, most skills become worthless about halfway through the game because magic is so powerful and magicite allows you to teach anyone any spell. Character differentiation rapidly falls away when everyone knows Fire 3 and Ultima and spends every battle just using magic, and while that's thematically appropriate for the incredible destructive power of magic returning after a thousand years, it's much less fun than actually requiring planning. By the end of the game, I had multiple people who all knew Ultima and all did 9999 damage per cast of it, so that's how I won every battle.
Edgar's tools? Nah, cast Ultima. Stragos's blue magic and Relm's artistic skill? Nah, Ultima. Ultima solves every problem and everyone can get it, so there's no strategy required at all. Just cast Ultima. There's even an accessory that reduces all MP costs to 1 and it's possible to get as many as you want, so MP becomes a complete non-factor by the end.
And even before then, the MP-absorbing Osmose spell either (rarely) fails or restores all missing MP, stealing hundreds at a time from monsters that are all overflowing with it, so as long as a character has 1 MP, they can have full MP.M-m-m-magic indeed.
Magic is so overwhelmingly powerful that not only is there no reason to use any other strategy, the normal course of gameplay will lead to that outcome. Sure, not everyone playing will get that accessory, but everyone will get thousands of gil that they have no use for and Ethers can be bought in town, so it's easily possible to refill to max MP between battles and use Osmose in battles. What's more, I imagine most people are going to want to find all the characters they collected back in the World of Balance and doing so naturally leads to nearly every location in the World of Ruin. Most locations are technically optional, since it's possible to defeat Kefka with only three characters, but only a few locations--the Ancient Castle, the top of the Fanatics' Tower--aren't part of getting those lost characters back. Everywhere else is required to find someone and going through all those locations will get a bunch of extra magicite and levels and spells that make the end of the game trivial.
I certainly noticed that in my playthrough. I was reading a walkthrough to refresh my memory and it had very detailed strategies for all of the boss battles, including party members with equipment loadouts and which row, back or front, to put everyone in. I didn't need the description of the boss's special abilities and other enemies accompanying them either, since I'd just blast everything with my most powerful spells until it died and that worked on every single fight in the game.
I didn't play much of Final Fantasy V, but I remember a lot of changing jobs to adjust my tactics for different bosses or even random monsters. I never had to do any of that in FFVI because I always had some magic way to solve my problems. Overpowered magic fits the themes but makes the actual gameplay boring to an even greater degree than most wandering monster JRPGs. If the strategy for 99% of all battles is "Cast my strongest magic, which I always have available no matter who is in my party because everyone can learn everything" and the remaining 1% is just bouncing magic off a party member with Reflect to bypass a monster with Reflect, it's just Spam A to Fight but with a few more button presses.
"No, it's nothing. I'm doing this for myself."
He's lying.
I need to talk about the music, because this is Uematsu's best work.
A while back, I bought the Final Fantasy X soundtrack and listened to it, driven by the memories of songs like "To Zanarkand" and "Auron's Theme," only to realize that a lot of the music on that album just wasn't memorable to me. And sure, it was the first Final Fantasy that wasn't solely worked on by Uematsu, but even in Final Fantasy VIII I barely remember anything other than "Liberi Fatali." But in Final Fantasy VI I love almost every single song.
I mentioned leifmotifs before and it's not like using them is a revolutionary concept, since they've been a part of concert music for centuries, but they weren't heavily used in video games at the time that FFVI was made. Then, music was generally area-based and shorter, often designed to loop forever without getting too annoying. Final Fantasy VI had some of those kinds of songs, of course, with Terra's Theme pulling double duty as the overworld theme and Terra's theme herself, but there were quite a few pieces that only showed up in cutscenes or to emphasize a point. Locke's Theme, when Locke was making a decision or being heroic, and the contrasting Forever Rachel when he's filled with doubt. Catastrophe, a variant on the part of Omen, the opening theme that plays over the description of devastation wrought by the Great Magic War, drives home just how high the stakes are as the Emperor and Kefka stand on the Floating Continent. Entering a pub and hearing Shadow's Theme is always exciting before he permanently joins, and when Celes finds Setzer in the World of Ruin and gets the airship, the mournful "Dark World" is replaced with Searching for Friends as she realizes that maybe there is a chance they could save the world after all.
And of course there's Dancing Mad, the theme for the final battle with Kefka atop his tower. In a time when most video game songs are a few minutes long at best, it's seventeen minutes, with organ and 16-bit vocals as befits the throne of a living god, and has four separate sections which play during the four parts of the battle against Kefka.
My favorite Distant Worlds concert I've ever attended was the FFVI-themed one with a full-length orchestration of "Dancing Mad."
An angel without mercy.
Before attacking Kefka, the party pauses to wonder what the results will be. If Kefka controls the Three Warring Gods, and the Three Warring Gods are the source of all magic, then that means that destroying them and Kefka will destroy all magic and magical creatures, which includes the genjū...and maybe Tina. But the consequences of letting Kefka continue to reign over the world are worse, so they battle their way up his tower, past the detritus of the World of Balance and Kefka's guardians, and fight him at his throne on the top.
Kefka's design is obviously religious in nature, but there's one element of the fight I never previously realized. He has an ability called Heartless Angel (Eng: Fallen One) that he uses immediately when the battle starts that reduces all party members to 1 HP. And part of being at low HP in FFVI is that the character sprites collapse to their knees in exhaustion.
Kefka starts the battle by making the party kneel before him.
Rest in peace.
Many other Final Fantasy games have better gameplay than FFVI. Some of them have better stories. But none of them have better music and atmosphere, and none of them have such high marks in so many categories. I get that FFVII is the Final Fantasy that really exploded JRPGs in the west and so of course that's the one that Squeenix is going to pick to remake. But even though I haven't played FFVII at all, I'd rather they have tried to make FFVI.
Or then again, maybe not. I've seen the hideous graphics on the mobile and Steam versions. Perhaps it's best that they not ruin it any further.
FFVI is still a masterpiece, and even with the antiquated design it's absolutely worth playing today. Even though the Legend of Heroes games are close to surpassing Final Fantasy in the JRPG hierarchy for me, it's games like FFVI that make it close. I've been wanting to replay it for years and this was forty hours of my life that was well-spent.
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Date: 2018-Sep-06, Thursday 14:07 (UTC)Though I believe that Karma was enacted on me with FFXIV's Sigmascape, version Kefka. Fighting Kefka and the Goddess statue was really just a humbling expirience.
My favorite part was the Opera House as well as Relm with "Uncle Ulty". So many classic moments though! that game was brilliant.
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Date: 2018-Sep-06, Thursday 16:19 (UTC)The opera scene is one of my favorites too! But the reveal of Ramuh, Tina's history as half-genjū, finding Daril's airship, or the opening sequence with the march on Narshe all match it.
Still my favorite Final Fantasy.
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Date: 2018-Sep-06, Thursday 14:17 (UTC)https://www.amazon.com/Final-Fantasy-III-Players-Guide/dp/1572800399/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536243387&sr=1-4&keywords=Final+Fantasy+III+guide
This was my favorite guidebook but it also contained spoilers and analysis on some of the plot points. I had to recently get myself a new copy and I am so glad I did.
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Date: 2018-Sep-06, Thursday 16:36 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-Sep-09, Sunday 12:45 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-Sep-11, Tuesday 15:13 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-Sep-12, Wednesday 01:12 (UTC)