Final Fantasy VI, Final Thoughts
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Final Fantasy VI: Closing Thoughts
Random fun fact: FFVI ended up being shorter than V by a couple of hours, just as this Let's Play was shorter by five updates than V's was... But 30k words longer; it's a shorter game, but it's much denser, which is something I had anticipated a while back, I think.
So.
Final Fantasy VI is in many ways the heir of Final Fantasy IV, and it shares one defining keyword with its predecessor: Ambition. It's at the heart of everything the game is trying, and it's the source of all its triumphs and all its failures.
On Story
Final Fantasy V's storyline mostly played it safe. It used broad archetypes, fairly static characters, an uncomplicated villain and a straightforward quest. It was fun, full of charm and whimsy, but compared to IV it played things relatively safe in the writing department.
Final Fantasy VI instead is an operatic, experimental work. It shoots for the moon every time, crashing down to earth often. It has a cast I might describe as 'unnecessarily large,' few characters of which it's able to fully develop and explore - in this way it's also reminiscent of IV.
In fact, I would generally say that VI is in pretty much every way IV done bigger, bolder, and better. Like it, it is a melodramatic story focused on an ensemble cast of people grappling with their nature, relationships and dreams, with a theatrical inclination, full of dramatic twists. But its characters are more complex, its plot more interesting, its stakes clearer, its antagonist more memorable. Its peaks are higher, and its lows, while often frustrating, are rarely as low.
Celes, Terra and Locke stand at the top of the heap here, as characters whose plotlines have basically no misses. Celes, in fact, has some of the highest notes in any Final Fantasy so far with the Opera and the Solitary Island, while Terra's introduction is one of the all-time best RPG openings. The way the game explores agency and identity through them, as two women raised as living weapons, each in their own way, is one of its strongest throughlines, and the fact that Terra and Celes barely interact with each other is one of the game's biggest missed opportunities that could really elevate it to a masterpiece. Sabin, Strago and Relm are all characters that are fun to be around even if they have little arc or character development, because they don't really need to - they're there as supporting cast to be other characters going through the drama machine. Mog, Umaro and Gogo sadly don't have even that much going for them, being basically extras there to fill out party rosters - but to be frank, in that regard, they're still no less memorable than Yang. Edgar and Setzer, meanwhile, are the physical embodiment of that "Glowing Anime Recommendation Only 70% Caveats" joke, mainly because they are where the game has concentrated all of its 'being weird about women' energy, and I still don't hate them. They're better than Edge, to be sure. Cyan, meanwhile, embodies the game's highs and lows - the man doomed to eternally seesaw between some of the most tragic drama in the game and being Funny Man Talks Weird that the writing is making fun of, trapped in a hell of inconsistent tone, the contradictions of the game's plotlines incarnate. Shadow, meanwhile, embodies the game's nature in a different way, in that he's literally unfinished. They ran out of cartridge space and/or development time to round him out into a full-fledged character, and this is showing up everywhere across the game's writing. At every turn a bold, new idea that would have worked if it had just a teensy tiny bit more exploration.
In the worst parts of the game, this results in plot developments that feel like ass-pull, twists that the narrative has neither explained nor earned, that happen simply because the writer needs it to happen; in these moments, this writer feels almost like an antagonistic force, someone you're fighting against for FFVI to be the best story it can be. At best? You won't even notice what's missing.
Here's a question for you:
What was Terra's childhood like?
We know that Terra was abducted by Emperor Gestahl as a baby. We know that, around twenty years of age, Kefka put a slave crown on her and used her as a mindless weapon. Later, she was found, the crown taken off, and she woke up an amnesiac, slowly developing feeling and goals of her own. But what happened in between? In the twenty years between her abduction and the slave crown? What was her upbringing like? What relationships, if any (and 'none at all' would be full of implications all on its own), did she have with any other human being? Even Celes has more - we know that Cid considered himself a parental figure, that she was subjected to Magitek infusion at a young age, that she was raised as a weapon, but at no point does Terra say anything about that twenty-year back; in fact, as far as the text is concerned, it doesn't seem like she has any memory of it.
There is an entire person there, Proto-Terra, whose story will forever remain unknown. And for the most part? You don't notice it. You don't even think about it. The game is good enough at drawing your attention away from that missing gap that it doesn't truly register as a problem. Final Fantasy VI is full of little things that could bear elaborating upon, that should at least be mentioned, and when it's bad they stand out conspicuously and draw you out of the experience, and when it's good you never even think about it.
Something I think about a lot and never ended up talking about in the main updates of this Let's Play is how the game uses unmarked dialogue. Very often in group scenes where the game can't know which character will be in your party, the game uses unmarked dialogue boxes, so it's unclear which member of the party is speaking - or even more often, one of the characters will step forward or move in some way, indicating they are speaking, but still use the canned dialogue line.
The result of this is that if you're playing the game 'naturally,' not obsessively screenshotting every single line of dialogue, then the characters will autocomplete their development in a way that's unique to each player. Depending on who you take with you on a given plot beat, Setzer, or Edgar, or Terra, will end up having lines that aren't 'theirs', they've just been assigned them because they happened to be in the party at the time, but because the player experiences these lines as spoken by them, they will contribute to their perception of that character, develop them in a different way from their friend who also played the game with different characters. There are entire fics living in potential in whoever you decided to take to Zozo to find Terra and expresses concern when they find her unconscious and thrashing in her esper form.
And that's, I think, a very clever way to handle the limitations of the hardware, the way the game can't possibly account for branching dialogue paths for party composition, and it means each player's FFVI is a little different a story. But it's also emblematic of the game as a whole: it's full of gaps, and at its strongest you either don't notice it, or they build these gaps into the experience of the game, making it better for them. At its weakest… Well. I could just make a list of everything that I would like to be there in the game that isn't, starting at petty stuff like 'give the Warring Triad characterization' and ending all the way at 'you gotta do the esper plot different, man, that whole thing's just baffling, why did you genocide them at the halfway mark of the story with zero plausible explanation on how it happened?' but let's talk about one thing in particular.
On Kefka
Kefka is the best Final Fantasy antagonist so far.
Look, I know, controversial hot take, but the thing is: the competition isn't fierce. Garland/Chaos are a big fat nothing. The Emperor has two things going for him, his visual design and the late-game twists where he takes over Hell, and is otherwise a void. Xande is a disappointment and the Cloud of Darkness an elemental evil without any depth. Golbez is charismatic and menacing, but his late-game twist is that he's not even really to blame for anything and was being manipulated the entire time, and Zeromus is, again, a big fat nothing. Kefka's only real competition at this stage is Exdeath, and all the ways in which Exdeath is good are rooted in him not even bothering to try.
Exdeath is a fun, bombastic, effective ham of an antagonist with absolutely zero depth, a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain whose merits is in delivering a great performance of the most shallow archetype imaginable. He is as good as he could possibly be, because he's safely executing an archetype with a low, low ceiling.
In a long series of stock villain archetypes, Kefka is trying something new, and tripping on his own toes every five feet until he makes it to the finish line with his nose broken and his face covered in blood but smiling through the pain. A comedic antagonist turned world-destroyer, the narrative keeps handing him wins he hasn't earned (though it does it while kicking him in the shins over and over every time), and he is the crux of the most frustrating and negative aspects of the game - Kefka Always Wins, until he doesn't. And that's a flaw. That's a massive flaw, which nearly cripples the game. He keeps pulling wins that the game barely even explains, let alone justifies, culminating in the actual apocalypse.
But the style, though.
I've seen Kefka described as a 'nobody to nightmare' villain, a joke antagonist turned deadly, but I don't really think that's true. Dude was always lethally dangerous. The first thing we see him doing is set fire to an entire city, and when we meet him again, he successfully carries out a genocide. He's a coward who keeps running away from fights, yes, but it's always so he can carry out some greater evil. He is a general of the Empire, one of the men in charge of its world conquest, and he embodies the primal truth at the heart of imperialism and fascism: that it's driven first and foremost by force and violence, that it has no higher ideology or ambition than forcing its will upon others because it defines itself in oppositional relations. In this, he is the closest to the Emperor, the game's fake-out antagonist, and the Emperor dies when he fails to grasp the full truth of what he built his power on.
And yet at the same time he's funny. He is genuinely a funny little guy with great one-liners, a killer aesthetic, and evil panache in everything he does. He pulls off one of the pro gamer moves of all time by succeeding in his goals as a villain and destroying the world. And unlike in FFV, the world isn't getting un-destroyed with his death; people have to learn to rebuild. Kefka's victory is the game's major innovation in writing antagonists, and like all firsts, it handles it awkwardly and badly at times. But the apocalypse itself and its immediate follow-up are up there in the greatest moments of RPG gaming, and one of the World of Ruin's failings is precisely in Kefka not being there enough, in his threat just fading in the background until the very end.
But what a comeback! What a finale! An angel shining from heaven, wielding the power of stolen gods, driven mad by nihilism! Using the aesthetics of Heaven, divinity, light, is something that hadn't been done in a Final Fantasy game before and I think it's easy to overlook when looking back from the future where the series' most popular and famous antagonist has a theme titled 'One-Winged Angel'?
Basically, every pratfall Kefka makes in writing, he makes up for in presentation, and I think that is true of basically the entire game.
On Presentation
It's simple: The music of Final Fantasy has never been this good. The sprite work has never been so gorgeous. The world has never looked so cool. The background tiles have never been so colorful and characterful. It's so fucking gorgeous. The opera??? The final boss??? The intro sequence??? Even just booting up the starting menu looks absolutely fucking cool. The games have never looked or sounded better. Obviously I am playing the Pixel Remasters, which beautify every game, but even just looking at clips of the original SNES Final Fantasy games, there is a vast gulf between V and VI, let alone IV.
On Gameplay
The gameplay's a mess.
I respect what the devs were trying with the Relic/Magicite/Class combo system trying to get the best features of IV and V in one package - character-based abilities, stats and advancement, combined with the flexibility to adjust their stats, give them job features, give them magic, combining the character focus of IV with the flexible advancement of V.
It doesn't work.
The Magicite system both breaks the game open and dilutes characters' uniqueness in a morass of magic spells that can be learned by anyone, so no one has unique strength and weakness and in fact the player is incentivized to sand off their edges and round out their build to make everyone omnicompetent, which dilutes their specificity and makes them bland, while the Relic system fails to have the strong focus of the Job system because any Relic that could give a unique class command could instead be a straightforward stat boost or status immunity. The job system wasn't perfect by any means and had its flaws, but the entire game plays out like FFV's endgame, where the characters' unique builds started to dissolve into average when you got enough ABP to train 'must-have' skills on all your characters and so everyone was either a multi-hitting tanky fighter or an omnimage capable of casting everything with Summoner's Magic Stat and Monk's HP. That was when the game lost what made it so good to play, and FFVI is like that pretty much the whole way through.
Which is a shame, because the bosses are some of the best in the series, the phase mechanics have never been better used, the whole concept of Magitek as the 'identity' of your main opponent for the first half of the game is great, eight legendary dragons each associated with an element is a great concept for a series of optional antagonists, and the dungeons have never been less frustrating to go through. I had fun even! They're short and have a cool identities and plot beats! But the mechanics are awkward in a way that eventually ends with you just blowing the game wide open with Ultima because it's not worth engaging with. Even if there was an equivalent mechanical framework to base it on I can't see a Four Job Fiesta equivalent for FFVI short of modding the whole game (which somebody did, and it's pretty popular, apparently!) because the player-side mechanics don't gel together in the way they should.
That said, casting Ultima is the most satisfying magic experience I've had in the game. It beats even summoning Bahamut.
Conclusion: On Haunting
When I finished FFV, I finished it. I processed what my experience had been, sat down, wrote about Faris and about climate change, posted it, and then I was done. I have thought very little about FFV since. It was a fun game and I occasionally think about maybe doing that Four Job Fiesta thing, although likely not so soon after finishing the game once.
FFVI is going to haunt me, though. I don't have a clear, coherent thesis I can type in a thousand words and say 'the game is light on plot but if you interrogate it more deeply than it wants you to it's about the burden past generations have put on us,' because you don't need to interrogate FFVI too deeply to get that kind of meaning, it's already there, the game wants you to believe it's about all these big themes and messages and existential questions it's put front and center, its guts splattered across ten thousand screenshots, and sometimes it's right and sometimes it absolutely fails, and everything I think about the game I already said while peering through those guts like an aruspex. This Let's Play has been the length of a novel; "I refer you to my body of work."
But now I have the game in my head and I don't think it will leave. I will wake up at night and think, 'but it's such a missed opportunity that we never enter the Esper World and see their society before it's wiped out,' and I am going to turn in bed and think, 'but isn't it kinda messed up that there's an entire person Terra used to be who only exists in implication and died unmourned?' at the same time as I put on Aria di Mezzo Caraterre on for the twentieth time. If I got my hands on Final Fantasy DIssidia today the first character I'd play would be Terra. I can't not see Gaius van Balsar from FFXIV as a direct answer and counterpoint to General Leo now, it's so obviously baked in his DNA.
Final Fantasy VI is a deeply flawed masterpiece pushing the limits of its hardware and the abilities of its writing staff both to their limit, and it is tearing at the seams, crumbling under its own weight, throwing out history-making bangers as the same time as steam explosions take it off at the knee, and I'm going to be thinking about it long after I've stopped giving a shit about Xande, which happened roughly five minutes after the credits rolled on FFIII.
I would really like to see where Square goes from there, in the three-year gap in which the SNES remains a current console. How they build upon it in their non-Final Fantasy games, now that they've truly mastered the system they're working with. But I'm not going to be playing Chrono Trigger (for now) or Bahamut Lagoon or Treasure of the Rudras, because there is something more interesting to me:
The generational leap that came with the release of the Playstation, the advent of 3D, and the game that defined a generation of RPG and spawned its own entire franchise of spinoffs.
Final Fantasy VII.
…after I've taken like a week to recover from that writing marathon and focus on other stuff I need to take care of.
Thank you for reading.
Credits
I would like to thank all of my Patrons for sponsoring my writing. If you would like to donate to my Patreon, you can find it here.
Random fun fact: FFVI ended up being shorter than V by a couple of hours, just as this Let's Play was shorter by five updates than V's was... But 30k words longer; it's a shorter game, but it's much denser, which is something I had anticipated a while back, I think.
So.
Final Fantasy VI is in many ways the heir of Final Fantasy IV, and it shares one defining keyword with its predecessor: Ambition. It's at the heart of everything the game is trying, and it's the source of all its triumphs and all its failures.
On Story
Final Fantasy V's storyline mostly played it safe. It used broad archetypes, fairly static characters, an uncomplicated villain and a straightforward quest. It was fun, full of charm and whimsy, but compared to IV it played things relatively safe in the writing department.
Final Fantasy VI instead is an operatic, experimental work. It shoots for the moon every time, crashing down to earth often. It has a cast I might describe as 'unnecessarily large,' few characters of which it's able to fully develop and explore - in this way it's also reminiscent of IV.
In fact, I would generally say that VI is in pretty much every way IV done bigger, bolder, and better. Like it, it is a melodramatic story focused on an ensemble cast of people grappling with their nature, relationships and dreams, with a theatrical inclination, full of dramatic twists. But its characters are more complex, its plot more interesting, its stakes clearer, its antagonist more memorable. Its peaks are higher, and its lows, while often frustrating, are rarely as low.
Celes, Terra and Locke stand at the top of the heap here, as characters whose plotlines have basically no misses. Celes, in fact, has some of the highest notes in any Final Fantasy so far with the Opera and the Solitary Island, while Terra's introduction is one of the all-time best RPG openings. The way the game explores agency and identity through them, as two women raised as living weapons, each in their own way, is one of its strongest throughlines, and the fact that Terra and Celes barely interact with each other is one of the game's biggest missed opportunities that could really elevate it to a masterpiece. Sabin, Strago and Relm are all characters that are fun to be around even if they have little arc or character development, because they don't really need to - they're there as supporting cast to be other characters going through the drama machine. Mog, Umaro and Gogo sadly don't have even that much going for them, being basically extras there to fill out party rosters - but to be frank, in that regard, they're still no less memorable than Yang. Edgar and Setzer, meanwhile, are the physical embodiment of that "Glowing Anime Recommendation Only 70% Caveats" joke, mainly because they are where the game has concentrated all of its 'being weird about women' energy, and I still don't hate them. They're better than Edge, to be sure. Cyan, meanwhile, embodies the game's highs and lows - the man doomed to eternally seesaw between some of the most tragic drama in the game and being Funny Man Talks Weird that the writing is making fun of, trapped in a hell of inconsistent tone, the contradictions of the game's plotlines incarnate. Shadow, meanwhile, embodies the game's nature in a different way, in that he's literally unfinished. They ran out of cartridge space and/or development time to round him out into a full-fledged character, and this is showing up everywhere across the game's writing. At every turn a bold, new idea that would have worked if it had just a teensy tiny bit more exploration.
In the worst parts of the game, this results in plot developments that feel like ass-pull, twists that the narrative has neither explained nor earned, that happen simply because the writer needs it to happen; in these moments, this writer feels almost like an antagonistic force, someone you're fighting against for FFVI to be the best story it can be. At best? You won't even notice what's missing.
Here's a question for you:
What was Terra's childhood like?
We know that Terra was abducted by Emperor Gestahl as a baby. We know that, around twenty years of age, Kefka put a slave crown on her and used her as a mindless weapon. Later, she was found, the crown taken off, and she woke up an amnesiac, slowly developing feeling and goals of her own. But what happened in between? In the twenty years between her abduction and the slave crown? What was her upbringing like? What relationships, if any (and 'none at all' would be full of implications all on its own), did she have with any other human being? Even Celes has more - we know that Cid considered himself a parental figure, that she was subjected to Magitek infusion at a young age, that she was raised as a weapon, but at no point does Terra say anything about that twenty-year back; in fact, as far as the text is concerned, it doesn't seem like she has any memory of it.
There is an entire person there, Proto-Terra, whose story will forever remain unknown. And for the most part? You don't notice it. You don't even think about it. The game is good enough at drawing your attention away from that missing gap that it doesn't truly register as a problem. Final Fantasy VI is full of little things that could bear elaborating upon, that should at least be mentioned, and when it's bad they stand out conspicuously and draw you out of the experience, and when it's good you never even think about it.
Something I think about a lot and never ended up talking about in the main updates of this Let's Play is how the game uses unmarked dialogue. Very often in group scenes where the game can't know which character will be in your party, the game uses unmarked dialogue boxes, so it's unclear which member of the party is speaking - or even more often, one of the characters will step forward or move in some way, indicating they are speaking, but still use the canned dialogue line.
The result of this is that if you're playing the game 'naturally,' not obsessively screenshotting every single line of dialogue, then the characters will autocomplete their development in a way that's unique to each player. Depending on who you take with you on a given plot beat, Setzer, or Edgar, or Terra, will end up having lines that aren't 'theirs', they've just been assigned them because they happened to be in the party at the time, but because the player experiences these lines as spoken by them, they will contribute to their perception of that character, develop them in a different way from their friend who also played the game with different characters. There are entire fics living in potential in whoever you decided to take to Zozo to find Terra and expresses concern when they find her unconscious and thrashing in her esper form.
And that's, I think, a very clever way to handle the limitations of the hardware, the way the game can't possibly account for branching dialogue paths for party composition, and it means each player's FFVI is a little different a story. But it's also emblematic of the game as a whole: it's full of gaps, and at its strongest you either don't notice it, or they build these gaps into the experience of the game, making it better for them. At its weakest… Well. I could just make a list of everything that I would like to be there in the game that isn't, starting at petty stuff like 'give the Warring Triad characterization' and ending all the way at 'you gotta do the esper plot different, man, that whole thing's just baffling, why did you genocide them at the halfway mark of the story with zero plausible explanation on how it happened?' but let's talk about one thing in particular.
On Kefka
Kefka is the best Final Fantasy antagonist so far.
Look, I know, controversial hot take, but the thing is: the competition isn't fierce. Garland/Chaos are a big fat nothing. The Emperor has two things going for him, his visual design and the late-game twists where he takes over Hell, and is otherwise a void. Xande is a disappointment and the Cloud of Darkness an elemental evil without any depth. Golbez is charismatic and menacing, but his late-game twist is that he's not even really to blame for anything and was being manipulated the entire time, and Zeromus is, again, a big fat nothing. Kefka's only real competition at this stage is Exdeath, and all the ways in which Exdeath is good are rooted in him not even bothering to try.
Exdeath is a fun, bombastic, effective ham of an antagonist with absolutely zero depth, a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain whose merits is in delivering a great performance of the most shallow archetype imaginable. He is as good as he could possibly be, because he's safely executing an archetype with a low, low ceiling.
In a long series of stock villain archetypes, Kefka is trying something new, and tripping on his own toes every five feet until he makes it to the finish line with his nose broken and his face covered in blood but smiling through the pain. A comedic antagonist turned world-destroyer, the narrative keeps handing him wins he hasn't earned (though it does it while kicking him in the shins over and over every time), and he is the crux of the most frustrating and negative aspects of the game - Kefka Always Wins, until he doesn't. And that's a flaw. That's a massive flaw, which nearly cripples the game. He keeps pulling wins that the game barely even explains, let alone justifies, culminating in the actual apocalypse.
But the style, though.
I've seen Kefka described as a 'nobody to nightmare' villain, a joke antagonist turned deadly, but I don't really think that's true. Dude was always lethally dangerous. The first thing we see him doing is set fire to an entire city, and when we meet him again, he successfully carries out a genocide. He's a coward who keeps running away from fights, yes, but it's always so he can carry out some greater evil. He is a general of the Empire, one of the men in charge of its world conquest, and he embodies the primal truth at the heart of imperialism and fascism: that it's driven first and foremost by force and violence, that it has no higher ideology or ambition than forcing its will upon others because it defines itself in oppositional relations. In this, he is the closest to the Emperor, the game's fake-out antagonist, and the Emperor dies when he fails to grasp the full truth of what he built his power on.
And yet at the same time he's funny. He is genuinely a funny little guy with great one-liners, a killer aesthetic, and evil panache in everything he does. He pulls off one of the pro gamer moves of all time by succeeding in his goals as a villain and destroying the world. And unlike in FFV, the world isn't getting un-destroyed with his death; people have to learn to rebuild. Kefka's victory is the game's major innovation in writing antagonists, and like all firsts, it handles it awkwardly and badly at times. But the apocalypse itself and its immediate follow-up are up there in the greatest moments of RPG gaming, and one of the World of Ruin's failings is precisely in Kefka not being there enough, in his threat just fading in the background until the very end.
But what a comeback! What a finale! An angel shining from heaven, wielding the power of stolen gods, driven mad by nihilism! Using the aesthetics of Heaven, divinity, light, is something that hadn't been done in a Final Fantasy game before and I think it's easy to overlook when looking back from the future where the series' most popular and famous antagonist has a theme titled 'One-Winged Angel'?
Basically, every pratfall Kefka makes in writing, he makes up for in presentation, and I think that is true of basically the entire game.
On Presentation
It's simple: The music of Final Fantasy has never been this good. The sprite work has never been so gorgeous. The world has never looked so cool. The background tiles have never been so colorful and characterful. It's so fucking gorgeous. The opera??? The final boss??? The intro sequence??? Even just booting up the starting menu looks absolutely fucking cool. The games have never looked or sounded better. Obviously I am playing the Pixel Remasters, which beautify every game, but even just looking at clips of the original SNES Final Fantasy games, there is a vast gulf between V and VI, let alone IV.
On Gameplay
The gameplay's a mess.
I respect what the devs were trying with the Relic/Magicite/Class combo system trying to get the best features of IV and V in one package - character-based abilities, stats and advancement, combined with the flexibility to adjust their stats, give them job features, give them magic, combining the character focus of IV with the flexible advancement of V.
It doesn't work.
The Magicite system both breaks the game open and dilutes characters' uniqueness in a morass of magic spells that can be learned by anyone, so no one has unique strength and weakness and in fact the player is incentivized to sand off their edges and round out their build to make everyone omnicompetent, which dilutes their specificity and makes them bland, while the Relic system fails to have the strong focus of the Job system because any Relic that could give a unique class command could instead be a straightforward stat boost or status immunity. The job system wasn't perfect by any means and had its flaws, but the entire game plays out like FFV's endgame, where the characters' unique builds started to dissolve into average when you got enough ABP to train 'must-have' skills on all your characters and so everyone was either a multi-hitting tanky fighter or an omnimage capable of casting everything with Summoner's Magic Stat and Monk's HP. That was when the game lost what made it so good to play, and FFVI is like that pretty much the whole way through.
Which is a shame, because the bosses are some of the best in the series, the phase mechanics have never been better used, the whole concept of Magitek as the 'identity' of your main opponent for the first half of the game is great, eight legendary dragons each associated with an element is a great concept for a series of optional antagonists, and the dungeons have never been less frustrating to go through. I had fun even! They're short and have a cool identities and plot beats! But the mechanics are awkward in a way that eventually ends with you just blowing the game wide open with Ultima because it's not worth engaging with. Even if there was an equivalent mechanical framework to base it on I can't see a Four Job Fiesta equivalent for FFVI short of modding the whole game (which somebody did, and it's pretty popular, apparently!) because the player-side mechanics don't gel together in the way they should.
That said, casting Ultima is the most satisfying magic experience I've had in the game. It beats even summoning Bahamut.
Conclusion: On Haunting
When I finished FFV, I finished it. I processed what my experience had been, sat down, wrote about Faris and about climate change, posted it, and then I was done. I have thought very little about FFV since. It was a fun game and I occasionally think about maybe doing that Four Job Fiesta thing, although likely not so soon after finishing the game once.
FFVI is going to haunt me, though. I don't have a clear, coherent thesis I can type in a thousand words and say 'the game is light on plot but if you interrogate it more deeply than it wants you to it's about the burden past generations have put on us,' because you don't need to interrogate FFVI too deeply to get that kind of meaning, it's already there, the game wants you to believe it's about all these big themes and messages and existential questions it's put front and center, its guts splattered across ten thousand screenshots, and sometimes it's right and sometimes it absolutely fails, and everything I think about the game I already said while peering through those guts like an aruspex. This Let's Play has been the length of a novel; "I refer you to my body of work."
But now I have the game in my head and I don't think it will leave. I will wake up at night and think, 'but it's such a missed opportunity that we never enter the Esper World and see their society before it's wiped out,' and I am going to turn in bed and think, 'but isn't it kinda messed up that there's an entire person Terra used to be who only exists in implication and died unmourned?' at the same time as I put on Aria di Mezzo Caraterre on for the twentieth time. If I got my hands on Final Fantasy DIssidia today the first character I'd play would be Terra. I can't not see Gaius van Balsar from FFXIV as a direct answer and counterpoint to General Leo now, it's so obviously baked in his DNA.
Final Fantasy VI is a deeply flawed masterpiece pushing the limits of its hardware and the abilities of its writing staff both to their limit, and it is tearing at the seams, crumbling under its own weight, throwing out history-making bangers as the same time as steam explosions take it off at the knee, and I'm going to be thinking about it long after I've stopped giving a shit about Xande, which happened roughly five minutes after the credits rolled on FFIII.
I would really like to see where Square goes from there, in the three-year gap in which the SNES remains a current console. How they build upon it in their non-Final Fantasy games, now that they've truly mastered the system they're working with. But I'm not going to be playing Chrono Trigger (for now) or Bahamut Lagoon or Treasure of the Rudras, because there is something more interesting to me:
The generational leap that came with the release of the Playstation, the advent of 3D, and the game that defined a generation of RPG and spawned its own entire franchise of spinoffs.
Final Fantasy VII.
…after I've taken like a week to recover from that writing marathon and focus on other stuff I need to take care of.
Thank you for reading.
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