Final Fantasy VI — Read This Review, Or I’ll Paint Your Picture
I think one of the best feelings in the world is to be sitting in front of your television, kicking ass and taking names, enjoying a gorgeous soundtrack and drinking in amazing visuals. Occasionally, you look down at the SNES controller in your hand to remind yourself that you’re playing a game that was made fifteen years ago.
I am not ashamed to say that Final Fantasy VI is one of the best games ever. Why would I be? The graphics were some of the best for their time, the music was nearly all amazing, and I had nearly no problems with the game. I say nearly, because if the game was perfect, well then it would be the best game ever, now wouldn’t it? Still, Final Fantasy VI is a pie made of awesome, and I’ll dish it all out, one slice at a time.
VI starts out telling the story of a war that happened a thousand years ago. I couldn’t help but wonder, why tell me this? Why not show me what happened a thousand years ago? It’s not a criticism, just a curiosity. I would love to play out what happened in the War of the Magi a thousand years ago. With all the sequels and prequels for other Final Fantasy games they’ve already made (The After Years, Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, X-2, Revenant Wings, etc.), you’d think that they would’ve released Final Fantasy VI: The War of the Magi by now. While I’m on the subject, a prequel about the first sealing of Exdeath in Final Fantasy V would be nice, too, but I’m not holding my breath.
As the opening credits roll, the game shows off some Mode 7 graphics, and gives the player a taste of its awesome music. Anyone who wasn’t impressed with the opening of the game probably don’t like games anyway or are Final Fantasy VII fanboys, so there’s little loss there.
Despite not liking IV for constantly swapping out my characters when I first played it, I got used to such a mechanic when I played other games, and even came to appreciate the change in tactics that an alternate party required me to make. In VI, the cast of characters is so large that there’s something there for everyone. If not for everyone having access to the same magic after a certain point in the game, it would’ve been exactly like having a job system with individual characters representing the jobs. It’s still like a job system, except with the magic users removed. Some characters are more gimmicky than others (Relm and her Sketch ability, for example), but by the time you get to the end of the game, it shouldn’t matter, as most people probably gave Ultima to everyone and grinded.
That’s good advice. I’ll should try it sometime.
Hey, here’s one now!
I wish there was more clothing theft in a video game.
Between the Dragon Quest series and the Final Fantasy series, storytelling in RPGs progressed much farther than they would’ve otherwise, and VI is no exception to the rule. Although this game has been out for quite some time, I won’t spoil what happens, but suffice to say that about halfway through the game, stuff happens that usually doesn’t happen in an RPG, or any other video game for that matter, and I do believe that because RPGs dared to tell a good story, other video game genres began to follow suit.
Hey, Philadelphia, how’s the weather over there?
Heh, I thought so.
As in pretty much all Final Fantasy games from the first one all the way up to X, battles are a simple matter of selecting stuff from menus so that you don’t die. VI introduces a very early limit break system where if you’re at critical health, you can sometimes pull off a super move in desperation. Having not wanted to keep characters so low in health, I’ve only ever done such a thing maybe once or twice out of all of the times I’ve played through this game, so the desperation moves might just as well have been left out for all the good that they do.
Not content with giving a character access to all of the summons at once, VI was the first game to start messing around with the summoning formula. Instead of being able to summon all of them at will like they were nothing more than powerful versions of your magic spells, summons were treated more like equipment in VI, and a character could only have one equipped at once. Battles were usually easy enough that you didn’t need to strategize which summons you used. Boss fights, you definitely needed a strategy. Regular fights… not so much.
Square was usually very good about eliminating glitches, but VI was unusually riddled with them, most famously the Sketch glitch. This was so horrible a glitch that you could actually lose your save files from it. Or suddenly find yourself with a lifetime supply of Atma Weapons and your HP maxed out. You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Fortunately, future releases patched up the glitch, but not before many a gamer came across it and cried out in anguish. Myself, the first time I encountered the glitch, I simply reset the game and I think I actually just started anew. I didn’t want to benefit unfairly from a bad glitch, nor did I want to lose out unfairly as well.
What an incredibly intelligent insult.
Well, more things stuck against the wall when they made this Final Fantasy than in past games in the series.I would heartily recommend this game to everyone who enjoys an RPG. It’s just too bad that many people who started with Final Fantasy VII seem to have gotten it in their head that everything made before VII sucks, and will defend their belief with the same kind of fervour and idiocy that religious zealots use to defend their god. But that’s a story for another time.
Other releases:
PlayStation – Final Fantasy VI, 1999; Final Fantasy Collection (with Final Fantasy IV & Final Fantasy V), 1999; Final Fantasy Anthology (with Final Fantasy V), 1999
Game Boy Advance – Final Fantasy VI Advance, 2006
To be continued…
Screen shots generated by the author
About The Author
Joseph
Panthera Editus | In the great frozen land in the north known as Canada, a little to the east of that other frozen land in the north known as Alaska, resides the gaming enthusiast whom most people know as Joseph. When he’s not gaming or writing about gaming, he likes to enjoy life’s little ironies. Twitter
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I recall once having the interweb conversation with Angela way back when…
I remarked at how RPG fans once relentlessly judged people whose first such game was Final Fantasy VII. There was a palpable feeling through much of the established subculture that the Johnny-C-Bad-come-latelies would ignore the back catalog of the 16- and 8-bit eras in favor of whatever could use polygons and cgi. But, as the years pressed on, enough time had passed that the presence of the many people who were young enough for it to be a natural starting point swelled, and the stereotype starting ringing false.
I admit to looking down on them with the old saw of “my fandom is better than your fandom.” I also then felt that way about anime fans who could watch Toonami and had never taken part in a dubbing-cord party (you kids have it too easy, now get off my lawn). Thankfully, I grew out of being 17 some time ago and earned a little maturity and wisdom in the process.
Still many of the shall-we-say legitimate neophytes were sadly unable to dig back in to the past. Such rarities as 8- and 16-bit RPG cartridges take more effort and cash to acquire that it’s understandable most wouldn’t bother. They would probably have to dig up the hardware to play that strange, old cartridge technology with as well.
So, these rereleases are often the only exposure most RPG fans born after the 80s has to such classics – but these releases are of inconsistent quality and after fail to bring back a classic when its studio doesn’t have big bucks with which to republish.
Still, I was very pleased with the GBA remake of Final Fantasy VI. It even had unusually creative bonus dungeons and bosses compared to its predecessors. The new translation was wonderful, save for the line “They have weapons of MagiTek destruction.” The best-known game breaking bugs were swept away (rather superficially, but I’ll spare you a retelling of the bug analysis I did elsewhere back when it was released.) The music, of course, fell short of the original, but I was surprised at how serviceable it was. I would dare say that for anybody who doesn’t want or need the historic perspective, the GBA release is currently the best version of this best Final Fantasy game.
So to any of you who have yet to play this timeless classic, yet me prod you again: You owe it to yourself to play this masterpiece. Dust off a GBA, or warm up that DS or Lite. It had a reasonable printing run, so copies are still easy to come by wherever GBA carts are still sold (HINT: Try online).
And Joseph is right: M. Night Shamalamdingdong WISHED he could have come up with the twist in THIS story. It has aged well; few – if any – stories have bothered to raid the idea, even with the embarrassment of riches in games the genre has come to enjoy in the years since.
Perhaps I’ll edit this comment to include the Amnesia Lane graphic at the top.
Well, emulation has helped to make available some of the older games, especially since the Wii’s Virtual Console doesn’t seem to be working out as well as most had hoped. Yay, now we have access to all the Mario and Zelda games… so where are the Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests? Where’s Earthbound or the Soul Blazer trilogy or even Legend of the Ghost Lion? Yeah, sure, we’ve begun to receive the Final Fantasy games at a snail’s pace, and we’ve got ports of them for our handhelds anyway, but still.
I can see the same problem with the Virtual Console as with the PSN in another recent thread here, where there could be license fees blocking our access to most games. But Earthbound was published by Nintendo! Surely that should eliminate most of the red tape. And I wish I knew why Square was dragging their heels with Final Fantasy.
I first played Final Fantasy VI back in 2001, the utterly dreadful PSOne version. I didn’t like it, and I thought it was overrated. I couldn’t be bothered to finish it.
I gave it another shot on GBA back in ’08, and it became my favorite game in the main series. It’s probably one of the most bizarre examples of me (or anyone?) changing an opinion completely on a game, but during that second playthrough, I realized why it was deservedly placed on a pedestal by RPG fans.
I probably should have blogged about it back then, so whoops! In fact, I could probably fill up a whole month with posts and features I sidelined.
My first experience was about the same when it came to Final Fantasy IV. I did not like it, but that was because I was playing the original, stripped down version that North America got on the SNES. Oh, emulation! Anyway, I played a remake on the GBA and found it to be a lot better than I remembered. I still like IX the best, but IV is definitely not as horrible a game as I remember.
Well, Nintendo would be sued from all sides if they dared to rerelease Earthbound in today’s troll-tastic intellectual property culture (particularly with the tremendous amount of music sampling in the soundtrack).
While most could be worked around without totally destroying the game, nobody in-house seems to want to bother putting in the work (or legal doesn’t want to risk missing something).
A fairly comprehensive and easy to digest overview can be found at Earthbound Central.