Is it just me, or does this map look an awful lot like the FFV world map?
I don't know if it's just you, but to me they look completely different. FFV has a smaller central sea around which four continents are arranged in a diamond, with the large ones being in the southern left and northern right corners, while those in the other two corners are smaller and more acting as connectors for the two main ones, and then a tiny island chain/strip of land further to the southern right corner, while FFVI has a massive continent in the top left corner, then a long vertical continent taking up two thirds of the right side of the map with a istmus connection to it, and then there's a third, smaller southern continent.
The map it does reminds me of? FFVIII. Mark another tack in the "FFVIII is intended as FFVI's successor" column.
...this was such a titanic spoiler. Why not let the let's play proceed to those discoveries naturally, instead of anticipating them? What's the point?
Indeed, I'm not sure if any other FInal Fantasy in the thread so far has achieved the same amount of spoilers as FFVI did in just one update... which is very weird, as I feel like this game in particular loses a lot of its impact if things are revealed before they happen. So, the people who like FFVI would be making it a worse experience intentionally here, which leaves me puzzled.
Anyway, I said in the past of the thread that FFVI can't be remade into a 3D remake because it'd lose a lot of what makes it so good, because it is an ultimately 2D experience and some of its best passages would not translate to a 3D game, especially one in the modern style, regardless of the amount of reworking it would undergo. So, now I need to prove it, which I'll be doing by commenting on sections of the game as they come up in the let's play and explain why they'd either lose all of their impact or be straight up impossible to adapt in a 3D game.
I want to point out beforehand, however, that this isn't a dismissal of 3D itself - FFIX is the best game in the series and it is 3D; I'm saying that
FFVI specifically is one of those cases (like Cats) where the story is already in the perfect medium to express itself (2D pixels) and moving to another medium would only make it less pleasant to experience.
And let's start from the very beginning: the into sequence! It is a genuinely impressive piece of visual storytelling and a fitting opening to a grand saga - for a 2D videogame. It was astounding in its days and it still works very well now, but that's specifically in the framework of 2D simulating 3D. In modern 3D, however, a group walking through the snow like this would be pedestrian; 3D can obviously make impressive visual stuff of its own, but not in the contest of "walking to a not-especially-visually-interesting-town through the snow". And in fact, in 3D games which have long walking sequences in the style of this opening, it's often quite boring - the exact opposite of what you'd want at the start of a game like this and, most important to my point, something where the process of adapting the game to 3D would rob it of what made the original impressive. So, this means that any 3D adaptation would need to rework this, which would be pretty hard, since by definition Narshe is a small town at the edge of the world, and thus should not be visually impressive enough to justify a proper introduction. Either way, something of the original spirit would be lost here.
Next is the fight in the caves against Narshe's soldiers with the three moogle groups, with the visual labyrinth from above and the team switching to stop the multiple encroaching teams. Already the ability to switch between multiple teams is something that a lot of modern games have problems due to their obstinate need to force an action-type combat style where it doesn't belong, but in addition to it, the element of moving between groups to stop the enemies from reaching Terra also requires a certain visual approach that doesn't really fit with the "behind the shoulder" camera angle that all modern game seems unwilling to abandon even when they'd work better without it. The best way I can think of to adapt this would be to have an annoying minimap on a corner of the screen that shows the progress of the various enemy teams so that the player can see the progress there and switch the team they're controlling as needed, but it feels like that would not carry the same amount of urgency as the 2D approach of seeing the entire cave system at once does. And also like something that'd be very engine intensive. Anyway, I'll say that it's not inconceivable that this sequence could be adapted in a way that doesn't make it a pain to play through or too complex to run, but it does seems like another perfect showcase of how FFVI is ideally structured to take advantage of a 2D environment, which would not at all be easy to transposed to a 3D one.
Following up to that, we have the sand-submersible castle (submariner, even? of which Edgar is a beloved son?), which is pretty much presented to us as a cutscene, so would be translated to 3D into a video of some sort. This is not technically difficult to do, but I do wonder if an FMV would be able to capture the comedic bit of Kefka being left behind properly when it has to do the work without the benefit of sprites. How did Kefka not get dragged down alongside the castle? How did he survive? Can those questions be answered in a way that it's both visually credible and visually funny? I imagine it'd be possible, but I did wanted to point out that the 2D spritework is excellent to keep such questions away from the viewer's mind - something that a 3D adaptation would need to work harder to achieve, I feel.
And lastly, the mid-battle interruption with Locke and Edgar discussing Terra's magic power after she cast a spell mid-battle. This is the kind of thing that truly can only work in the context of FFVI as it is structured: since battles go by turns, they can be stopped for a quick aside, the sprites allow for a lot of emotions and facial expressions to be conveyed in a way that would require big close-ups when using 3D models, and the whole thing is a throwaway thing that the players can miss and a way in which the game is directly reacting to the player's actions, proving to the players that they have a certain level of agency, small as it may be. All of that would not work in a action-based 3D combat style that would, one suppose based on previous evidence, be the way a "3D remake" would be handled; interrupting the flow of action like that would require a cutscene in an action-based RPG, thus requiring an highly scripted encounter, which is a lot of extra work that would not be justifiable for something meant to be missable content. And making it mandatory detracts from the spirit of the thing, since it would force a player to use Terra magic, robbing them of freedom. Something which happens quite frequently in modern games, I might add.
So, that's that for now - a list of things that a "3D remake" of FFVI would have a very, very hard time translating accurately. I have more to come, especially when we see more of some characters' abilities, but I'll keep them for when the let's play gets there. My hope is that, by the time the game is over, I'll have provided a comprehensive enough argument for why FFVI is only as good as it is insomuch as it is taking full advantage of being a 2D game, and that translating it to 3D would completely rob it of many of the things that make it memorable. 3D is not always better, modern remakes are not always better, and FFVI is as perfect a case study for this as it would be possible to pick; I would never want to see a FFVI 3D remake.
Also, unrelated to the analysis:
They are, huh, two characters named Biggs and Wedge who go everywhere together, that's basically it. I think they're also usually soldiers?
As usual in Final Fantasy games (and mentioned above by others), if something seems strangely out of place, there's a 50% chance it'll be a Star Wars reference. I imagine that giving the name of two rebel spaceship pilots to two imperial mech-suit pilots was the game's attempt to be subtle about it, which worked pretty well in its favor, apparently. And the Star Wars references getting subtler instead of blatant might be progress?
