Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy VI. Most people who would have any interest in this game have probably already played it. But as the modern FF games continue to grow in popularity, perhaps there will be more folks curious about how the series progressed before FFVII.
While there may be some better SNES games out there in this genre, it’s very hard to find serious faults with this one. After playing through it several times, and experiencing almost all the game has to offer, I still have fun playing. And that’s the most important thing. This game never becomes a chore to get through. That’s just something I cannot say of most modern games.
The first thing most who play the game for the first time will notice is the visual quality. Games from the Super Nintendo era, RPG’s in particular, do not get much better looking than this. With wonderful character sprites, detailed towns, fantastic enemy designs, and a mode seven graphics world map, there’s not much to complain about. Some who started out with next-generation systems may complain that the graphics here are too simple and unrealistic. But if you’re a fan of 2D in general as I am, you should be very happy.
The most visually impressive aspect of the game is probably the battles, where detailed enemies take up a large portion of the screen and most the various spell and attack effects are superb. The dungeons can be a little plain sometimes, and are probably the game’s biggest graphical problem. But there are still nice touches here and there, and some of these areas that do things a little less traditionally (such as the monster-filled town of Zozo, and Phantom Train) manage to impress.
The game’s battle system is very similar to those found in Final Fantasy IV and V, with a few more features and minor changes. The Active Time Battle System is still used here, and used well. There are as many as four characters in the party at one time, and each character has access to attacks, magic, and a unique skill belonging to that character alone. There are a couple of secret characters who are exempt from these rules, but this is how the system is generally setup for most of the game.
If you take no action at all during the battle, enemies will continue to attack. Depending on your settings, enemies will also attack while you are scrolling through your item list or deciding what spell you would like to cast. This is designed to give battles a sense of urgency. It works at times, usually during a boss battle, or a normal battle when your characters are underpowered. The standard random battle in FFVI is easy enough though, that things do become dull after a while.
Fortunately though, the unique character skills I mentioned earlier liven things up a bit. One character, Sabin, has attacks that require special button combinations. Another, Cyan, has a charging meter, where different attacks occur depending on how fully charged this meter is. These things, to put it simply, give you something to do besides just hitting the attack button over and over until the enemies are all defeated. You probably won’t be looking forward to enemy encounters, but they don’t become the dreaded task they can when a poor battle system is part of the game.
Things also get more complex later on due to the power of creatures called Espers. When a character equips an Esper, he or she can summon it once per battle to either attack the enemy or assist the party defensively. More importantly though, by equipping these Espers, characters can learn new spells and get statistical bonuses when gaining levels. Many may like the fact that (again with a couple of exceptions) every character can learn every magic spell in the game. It may not make much sense for a warrior to also be an excellent spell caster, but I think it works well here. You can customize your party in almost any way you’d like.
There are some other innovative aspects of the game play, such as dungeons and special battles where you split your characters into multiple parties and switch between them with the press of a button. In order to get through part of a dungeon, you might need to have one party step on a switch to hold a door open for another group. It also makes the game a little more difficult with having the extra characters to keep track of all at one time, and the strategy of deciding how to split them up and divide your equipment is nice.
Most of the early parts of the game are very linear. It’s established almost immediately that the Empire is totally corrupt and that you must help a resistance group, the Returners, to defeat it.
You have a set order in which you need to do things to progress the story, and there really aren’t a lot of side quests. Without spoiling too much of the game, I can say that this changes a good deal around halfway through. There is suddenly near complete freedom, to the extent that you can bypass almost everything else and deal with the last boss whenever you feel you’re ready. Of course, you’ll be missing the vast majority of characters and have very weak equipment and magic if you do. The game’s story suffers quite a bit because of this freedom, though. Most of the remaining plot events are optional, and explain a particular character’s feelings or history. There’s no longer a solid story to follow until taking on the final dungeon.
In general though, the game has an interesting plot and very likeable characters. The text does seem quite a bit simplistic at times, with the occasional error, but it surpasses many games of its era at telling an enjoyable tale. Just compare the story here to Breath of Fire II with regards to translation quality and you can really appreciate the work that went into FFVI.
This title also has one of the most entertaining villains of the Final Fantasy series, in Kefka. Sometimes amusing, sometimes terribly cruel, he wreaks more havoc than just about any other RPG villain. Another point in the story’s favor is that the seemingly predictable conflict between the Empire and the Returners definitely doesn’t continue the way you would expect.
One of the game’s best features is the soundtrack. Nearly every song heard during the game is a good one, and many of them surpass the music in far more technologically advanced games. Some, while simplistic, are very emotional, and the more upbeat songs are great to listen to as well. The random battle music doesn’t get too annoying, despite the fact that it never really changes during the game.
Replay value is about as good as it can get for an RPG. With all the side quests and secrets, there’s a good chance that you’ll miss things on your first time through the game. And with so many options for building up your characters using Espers, not to mention the huge number of playable characters in general, each time through the game can be considerably different.
All in all, this is a great title for fans of traditional console RPG’s. It’s really not an innovative game for the most part, but it gets the job done and it’s easy to see why it’s become so popular over the years. If any of this sounds at all interesting to you, I’d strongly recommend giving the game a try. If it’s difficult for you to find a place that sells SNES games, you can try purchasing the Final Fantasy Anthology for the PlayStation. It contains both Final Fantasy V and VI, though it has some load time issues compared to the cartridge.
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