I Hate The ATB System More Than I Ever Did: Final Fantasy VI Edition
Honestly, the main thing I've done to counteract how stupid this ATB system in FFVI has been to just open up another character's magic or item menus and wait until my party is done with their animations,
then give them a command. But obviously that's kind of stupid and jank compared to FFV where it just
worked instead.
I don't know how much use I'm actually going to get out of this. Flare is powerful, but it's a single-target spell and I now have Ultima. Bahamut hits as hard as ever, but also summons are only once per fight.
Hey now, Ultima may also ignore defense, be AoE instead of single target, ignore reflect, and deal twice as much damage, but Flare costs half the MP! Surely that's worth something!
(It is not in fact worth something with how FFVI works)
…another goddamned playable character.
WHAT.
Okay, 'character' is a bit of a stretch. This guy right here is Gogo, whom you might remember as the name of the 'Famed Mimic' of FFV - and, indeed, Gogo here is a playable Mimic. This means he can equip other characters' abilities and Mimic their action but with very bad base stats that can't be improved and yada yada I don't care. Gogo has the following character dialogues:
"I am Gog, master of mimicry. It has been a long, long time since anyone visited me here… I have been idle for too many years… Perhaps I ought to mimic you. Tell me, what are you doing here? I see… So you seek to save the world. Then I guess that means that I shall save the world. Lead on! I will copy your every move."
And that's it. I'm pretty sure Gogo has no further dialogue. He's not a 'character' so much as he's a gameplay conceit for people who want to try it out for variety's sake, there's nothing else going on there. Still kind of a wild swerve to meet an extra optional character at the 11th hour like this - and we still haven't found Shadow again.
Much like Umaro, Gogo is basically a space filler bonus character. Unlike Umaro, Gogo can actually get a decent amount of use in a party outside of specific situations, and is also pretty easy to recruit early if you know where to go, so personally I quite like Gogo.
A dying old man gives us the Cursed Shield, a legendar(ily bad) item. Equipping it inflicts a -7 penalty to all stats, multiple elemental weaknesses, and pretty much every status effect known to man, including Berserk, so the character it's equipped on is pretty much a write-off. Equipping a Ribbon at the same time as the shield makes the character immune to most of the status effects, so they are 'merely' suffering multiple stat penalties and weaknesses.
The key here is that if we win an astounding 256 battles with the Cursed Shield, it turns into the Paladin's Shield, the best shield in the game - but it can only be equipped by the character who wore it for these 256 battles.
I am simply choosing not to bother. Life is too short.
Honestly, you can just slap on a ribbon and a podcast and walk back and forth on Cid's Island for a bit? It's not too difficult, and the Paladin Shield not only has amazing stats and resistances, but it's also the only other source of Ultima in the game (which incidentally is why some people say take the Ragnarok Sword instead of Esper).
Oh yeah, some shields teach you magic for some reason, if that hasn't come up yet. They don't
say it, but Flame/Ice/Thunder shields teach you -ra tier spells over time.
It's such a strange idea, that this guy would somehow literally be the last imperial soldier alive. This was a world-spanning army.
Could be he's just the last guy willing to wear an imperial uniform, considering most imperial soldiers... probably aren't well received after the whole "backstabbed everyone and ended the world" thing,
Though on that note, it's interesting to think about that the would-be big bad and his armies were straight up destroyed halfway through the game, the Imperial Army scattered to the four corners of the world, Vector destroyed, and Gestahl murdered by his own right hand man.
Here's the thing, though. We don't control the fighting character. They are auto-battling - but not by Attacking every turn, or doing the last entered input repeatedly. They are picking from their abilities and spells at random.
This means that even the strongest of my characters is completely incompetent in the arena. Whether it's Terra or Celes, they are picking at random from a list of two dozen spells, arbitrarily casting Tier 1 spells that do no damage, buffs that are irrelevant to their opponent, healing spells while at full HP, and so on. Terra there above can't beat a single fucking Cactuar; she just gets murdered before casting any remotely useful spell. It's a baffling system and I hate it.
The good news is: that means we finally have a use case for Uramo, because Uramo is permanently in a Berserk state, so he can only ever attack, and does so with considerable attack power.
Yup, best cases for the arena tend to be Umaro and Gogo, since they have very specific movesets (or can be tailored to specific movesets) unless you happen to have a character who just hasn't learned much magic, like potentially Shadow or Setzer. Still a fairly silly system though.
There are fourteen characters there, each with a unique mechanical gimmick, each with, ostensibly, a special role in the story. The reality of it, of course, is that we can grade these characters on a spectrum that starts with Terra/Celes and ends at Umaro/Gogo. And, frankly, either of these extremes are fine. It's fine that Gogo and Umaro are just mechanical gimmicks with a funky sidequest to unlock them that can fill a niche in your party if you're missing one. The real trouble lies in the middle part of the spectrum - in characters like Cyan, who enter the story with a bang and then proceed to just lie flat on the ground for twenty hours before suddenly remembering they're supposed to have a story, or with fucking Shadow, who I guess is Relm's dad??? Not that it's ever come up since that one flashback???
I'm gonna have to go sleep in every inn on the planet to check all the flashbacks so I can piece together an actual character from the fragments of Shadow that are given to us.
It's that middle portion that's the problem - those characters who ostensibly should have a prominent story role, should have real character arcs, should have drama to mine and interactions with other party members and who kinda just… Don't, or not enough, or too rarely, or only when you first recruit them and never again. In that category I would put Cyan, Shadow, Strago, Setzer, and Mog (on account of being the first playable moogle and the game completely dropping the ball on using that chance to explore anything about moogles and what they are and what happens to them in the apocalypse). Relm and Sabin both get a pass on account of being fun to be around, but they're still not really there.
It's come up multiple times until now, but this really is the biggest issue with FFVI's cast. Cyan is of course the easiest example,
And that's it! That's the dreams done.
Okay, look, there are more. But I've tried "sleeping once in every inn on the map," I've tried "sleeping to rest in between grinding sessions for my less-advanced character," and I've tried "spamming resting at a cheap inn," and I've been an hour at this, and there hasn't been a single other dream. Either I somehow missed all the right inns or they have such a low probability of triggering I'll be at this another two hours.
So, fuck that. If Shadow's backstory wants to remain mysterious that badly, it can stay that way. I don't respect this character enough to treat his backstory as a reward worth working for rather than a chore the game is locking behind arbitrary bullshit.
According to some research, Shadow's dreams are supposed to just be a flat 50% chance of happening when you sleep at normal inns (meaning other than say, Thamasa with its 1 gil cost). Could be borked in the Remaster or something, though?
Interacting with it causes the statue to blacken and crumble apart, leaving behind, what else, the Odin Magicite. It teaches the Meteor spell, which I would be more hype about if I didn't already have access to Ultima, which seems to make it redundant. Perhaps more importantly, though, its stat-up is a unique +2 Speed per level, which seems like it might be pretty good? Except for the issues I've raised before with Speed, hmm.
Fun fact, in the original FFVI this was the
only source of speed on level ups. The GBA versions added Giga Cactar as another summon with +2 Speed, and the Remaster patched in the +1 speed you found earlier after a few months.
There's more loot - the Gold Hairpin, which halves MP costs (it's funny how an item that would be an instant must-give to my spellcasters has me kinda reluctant just because of how many Relics there are and how we can only equip two
Gold Hairpins are also just not that useful in FFVI compared to previous games because Osmose is incredibly easy to learn, and MP totals are generally fairly high. I mean your party is what, mid 30s, early 40s by now and the average character has 400+ MP? That's enough for multiple encounter-ending Ultimas.
As we approach the statue, a tear shines - after a thousand years apart, Odin and the Queen are finally reunited, and their love causes Odin's Magicite to "surge with renewed power," and to transform - Odin becomes Raiden.
Oh look you already lost your +2 speed, that was fast
Suffice to say, there was plenty of advice for FFVI playthroughs that included
not upgrading Odin right away, on account of being the only source of Speed. Meteor, on the other hand, has another option somewhere.
Spoilers: the rest of the game is looking solidly like me casting Ultima every turn of every battle, forever.
Suffice to say, the fact that everyone can learn every magic just kind of... breaks the game when you get your hands on Ultima. Doubly so since you get Osmose so early in this game, compared to say FFV where it's a Tier 6 Black Magic you don't get until partway through World 3. MP costs
really don't matter much when at any time you want you can fully restore your magic by sucking the energy out of a random encounter.
Turns out Quick has a very interesting interaction with the Ultima-on-death thing.
Oh hey, it's that thing I had happen in FFV with Odin's battle time running out
just as he killed the entire party, fun stuff.
So, for lategame cleanup, I'm sure others can think of things I can't, but the main one off the top of my head is that Strago has a sidequest if you take him back to Thamasa, and Gau has some small story beats if you go visit crazy cabin man.
Also, character analysis, since we got our last recruit, Gogo!
Gogo is, effectively, the Mimic class from FFV ported over as a playable character. Not the greatest equipment selection, and rather middling stats which much like Umaro can't be increased because they can't use Magicite. The tradeoff is of course that Gogo is
extremely flexible as a character. With three slots to shove in any command you want, Gogo can ape tricks from other party members. I actually grabbed them super early on my own run and threw on Blitz to have another Phantom Rush user in the Phoenix Cave, and their Magic command gives them access to any and all magic learned by the current party they're in.
In particular, Gogo is up there with Umaro for "characters useful in the Arena", because the biggest drawback of the arena for a majority of characters is that if they've learned any magic, they have a massive pile of turn wasters to draw from. But Gogo can just... not equip the Magic command, to work around that.
