4.5/5 ★ – NiGHTS108's review of Final Fantasy VI.

So, we’re finally out of the first 5 games of the FF series, and we’ve pretty much got our general tone established by now. Even our more experimental games so far, particularly the last two, have mostly been confined to the specific tone set up in FF1. Very Dungeons N’ Dragons-y, with a nice cast of characters going to beat up some evil villains, each with their own distinct strength and ability set in a vaguely medieval setting. So where do we go next? For our final game on the 4th generation consoles, how are we going to deliver one final ballad under the Final Fantasy name? Well, one way of doing it is expanding the scope of the series. Final Fantasy VI sees a pretty big shift into a much larger story, a more encompassing and modernised take on this series. I think the best way to describe this is it’s a very Hollywood game for this series, especially at this specific point. If the last game was all about embracing the fun loving and goofy sides of the FF series, this one mostly swings hard in the opposite direction. This is apparent right away, looking at the intro of the game. It has a strong, heavy, yet clear voice and sense of identity, welcoming you into its world via mystery and intrigue, and keeping aspects of the plot in the dark for quite some time. At large the way they tell the story here feels far more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen before, generally a very grandiose feel to the story itself and their methods of presentation. One thing I quite like about it is there never really feels like there’s one explicit main character, of course Terra is definitely the main character, but a lot of the time you’ll end up following a different group for a chunk of the game or just not have access to her. Even when you do have access, she doesn’t even need to be in your party unlike Cecil or Cloud from prior AND later games. I think that goes to show just how broad FF6’s focus is. Also how could we talk about FF6’s story without mentioning Kefka? GOD do I love this guy. He’s just as good as Sephiroth if not better for me and for all the opposite reasons. In one word he’s just so electrifying, kind of has some of that Monokuma appeal, of being pretty funny but also really sinister at the same time. He’s kind of the core of reasons I love Final Fantasy VI so much, he’s extremely subversive, at first they… mostly show him as something of a Gilgamesh type character from the last game, mainly the big bad’s right hand man but kind of incompetent and goofy, though quickly as the game goes on, it starts to really show that someone this unhinged with this much power and determination is kind of a horrifying concept, throughout the middle third of this game you’re pretty on-edge with what Kefka is going to do, especially after destroying the population of a castle and all. This builds and builds until eventually, what seems to be the big villain turns to the good side, yet Kefka escapes, disrupts the power of the warring triad keeping the world in balance, and fully embraces the pure villain role he was born to play. GOD do I ever love Kefka, like it’s fucked up too, he’s a villain that ends up actually winning for a whole year, ruling over the planet like a god and destroying any and everyone who disagrees with him. The whole last act of this game is really great, they really build up the idea of the confrontation at the floating continent to be the end of the game, and then here comes Kefka sweeping in to literally destroy the world. FF6’s storytelling is just… something else man. I love it dearly, overall there’s a really great message about love, Terra herself was born from the love of humans and Espers, and she has a great arc of understanding love herself. That seems to be the general core of the game, almost every party member has something of an arc of learning to love and appreciate what we have. It’s not really much of a romance type of love, FF8 is still two games away, but more of a hopeful and strong love. In general I think the whole world of ruin thing in the last act is a wonderful turn of events, Kefka never actually erased the characters hopes and dreams, instead he only reinforced them. The last third of this game in general is just… so great, the game takes a very non-linear turn, both in gameplay and story, it becomes this recruitment mission about finding all your lost party members and getting as strong as you can to take on Kefka, I love that you don’t even see Kefka until you’re basically at his doorstep at this point, it reinforces the idea further of Kefka being a god ruling the entire planet. I also really do have to emphasise the characters beyond Kefka, I think they’re just so great. Incredible that this RPG from 1994 can have stronger characters with better arcs than two visual novels from 2010 and 2012, huh. Okay but no really, they’re excellent, I love all their designs, I love all their interactions, I love all their little quirks, all of them are more than meets the eye and even the ones who don’t make a dent on the overall plot are still really charming. They all feel very much alive and convincing. I could honestly talk about almost all of the final 14 party members individually and what I love about them. Man I’ve gotten this sappy already and I haven’t even started talking about the gameplay yet, maybe I should have done that first, huh. Like the story, I think FF6’s gameplay kind of only gets really great closer to the end of the game. We’re back to FF4’s system again of characters being permanently aligned to jobs once you get them, but if we’re talking about jobs I do think it’s at least a big improvement over FF4’s system and even to an extent FF3 and 5’s. I’ll explain. Probably what bugged me most about FF4 is that, at least in the original game, you could only ever play as whatever characters the story deemed you should have. Once a character left the party, unless they came back later you’d never know if you can actually play as them again. It’s especially frustrating given some of them had really interesting moves like Palom and Poron’s Twincast or Dark Knight Cecil’s Darkness. FF6 offers our solution. You’re just… able to swap party members any time on the airship now! By the end you have 14 party members at most, and any of which you can swap out, and each of which have different abilities, it’s great! None of the main party members ever end up actually dying either, so in general there’s just a lot of room for variety and experimentation without the need for the endless grind of FF5’s job system. Speaking of which, even the way unique abilities function has been improved, they’re much more dynamic than just selecting a menu option, sure some of them you just select, while others require you to play a slots minigame or even input Street Fighter-esque combos to do attacks. It’s brilliant! The primary gimmick of FF6 though is in its Espers. These are where the iconic summons we’ve seen in the last three games come in. Summons, or Espers as they’re called in the story, are some kind of beast from an alternate dimension that possess magic abilities and are constantly sought after by both the party and Kefka. On paper, Espers seem pretty simple, and, well they are. If you get enough magic AP, you’ll learn a spell from them, and additionally they can provide extra buffs to your characters when they level up, be it stats or HP/MP. It’s not a super deep system at first but the picture really starts forming during the world of ruin, like most things in this game. You start gaining a lot more interesting abilities, and some of the level bonuses can be INCREDIBLY useful, including having a 50% buff on HP or MP. It’s very easy to level up your characters to 99 with 9999 HP and 999 MP, the one sorta drawback to this is levelling up your party a lot early on can kinda drag them down later, but if you don’t grind like crazy or anything it shouldn’t really have any negative effects. One minor addition which ends up actually adding a lot of nuance is the relic system, you can equip two per character and these usually have simple things like protecting from negative status ailments or giving you positive effects in battle, but it can also do different and more powerful things like replacing the attack command with something else, or sometimes even completely changing a character’s unique move with a different one, for instance Slots being changed to Gil Toss. Later on I don’t think they’d have really restricted something like this to accessories, but it’s a system that works in how simple it is and, once more, really REALLY comes into focus during this game’s ending. If I had one criticism of the overall gameplay it’s that yeah it can start a bit slow, but funny enough it can also end too fast! It’s very easy to just break the balance of this game completely and utterly beyond return, and while yes I like that a lot, it does end up with this being perhaps the easiest Final Fantasy game in the whole series besides maybe 7 looking back. Just as a note. Also I wanted to mention just how good this game can look! We had a little of that iconic SNES Mode 7 look in the past I suppose, mainly with the airships and usually some nice cutscenes, but this game goes all out with it. Both using an airship and riding a Chocobo now have a full rotating display of the map beneath you, which is just really cool in my opinion. Character sprites also have seen an improvement, FF4 and 5’s were largely just colourful versions of the NES’ sprites, but they’re more full body here, they seem to be almost twice as tall as the previous sprites, and it gives the game a really good appearance. Between this and Super Mario RPG, Square really had mastered visuals on the Super Nintendo, huh. Also of course the music is great, naturally I’d be remiss not to mention the incredible 17 minute multiple movement piece for the final boss, Dancing Mad, which is probably the best clown music I’ll ever hear. At large there’s something of an ascended quality to both the visuals and the music here, and I dig both of it. As a whole I think that’s a really great way of describing Final Fantasy VI, if you ask me, this is one of the very, very best games in the series for me. You could talk me into it being the #1 best ever, that’s how much I admire it. I know I’m probably supposed to describe FF6 as being the end of an era for Final Fantasy, I mean certainly it is visually at least, except I don’t like to think about it that way. Final Fantasy VI feels like a “bridge game” in the FF series for me, it was all about opening fresh new concepts for the future with a clear voice, while equally paying homage to what came before, and laying that style to rest. I think it really lands on a nice tone. I can appreciate this game both as the end of an era, and the start of an era. It had a heightened sense of what had come before, what had been successful, and how to give the series a fresh new look. To make a long story short, Final Fantasy VI has aged like the finest of wines, and I couldn’t possibly think of a better way for the 2D games to go out. It serves as both a dramatic climax, and a wonderful point for people new to Final Fantasy to jump into the series. I almost feel like I haven’t described how overwhelmingly positive I feel about this game nearly enough, it’s truly something special. As a love letter to what we’ve seen and the basis for what’s coming next, Final Fantasy VI is an utterly exceptional game that only raises the bar on this already great series. Grade: A Difficulty: D