Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

Final Fantasy VI, Final Thoughts
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.
 
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What a phenomenal LP this has been so far. I'm excited to transition from "Final Fantasy games I heard about as a kid but couldn't play because I didn't have an SNES" to "games I actually experienced; let's see if they hold up". Can't wait to see how FFVII goes.

Also, I said this on Discord, but: imagine how different FFVI would have been if its production had been pushed back literally just one year. FFVI on Playstation, with two or three discs of potential content available to it! Would it have been so incomplete? Could it have benefited from a longer development cycle? We will never know.
 
Guess we're going beyond the Pixel Remasters. Shall you be playing FF7 on PC, Omnicron, or via a PS1 and phone screenshots? :p

Overall FF6 seems to be a fun ride, and I certainly found the various stuff explored within it quite interesting. A few scenes were even great, like the Opera House, even in screenshot form. It does seem to suffer from 'too many ideas, not enough refinement' as design decisions go, though, both with characters and gameplay.
 
I think I still vastly prefer FFV over FFVI, having seen both complete LPs.

I think my issue is that I just don't care about FFVI's characters. I played halfway through the game and I was into the characters, but seeing that none of them go anywhere just made me totally lose interest.

FFVI's characters feel like cool ideas that don't get fully explored.

Bartz, Faris, Lenna, and Galuf are my buds and I love them. I'd really rather take a very good, well made kid's cartoon about kids going on an adventure with some serious themes (Gravity Falls, for example) over a giant, overly complicated, fundamentally incomplete mess of genius.

I just feel like a crazy person, since everyone loves FFVI and FFV is basically forgotten.
 
I remember another FF6 deep dive review that said 'there's a fine line between artful ambiguity and clumsy omission'. The guy was talking about Shadow at the time (no surprise), but Omicron's review has pointed out to me that the same could easily be said of FF6's cast as whole, possibly the game itself even.

On FF6's gameplay, I'll at least give it credit for being the perfect counterexample to use against any grognard who keeps complaining about how games used to be so much harder back in the day (well, that and FF Mystic Quest, but I don't think you should be citing that game if you wanna make a point)
 
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Guess we're going beyond the Pixel Remasters. Shall you be playing FF7 on PC, Omnicron, or via a PS1 and phone screenshots? :p


This is the version of the game which I own on Steam. I do not know if and how it differs from the original Playstation version, or whether there are or were any other 'competing' ports and remakes, the way there are for the Pixel Remaster, except of course for Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is its own whole thing.

Incidentally, my final review of the Pixel Remasters is that they are fantastic adaptations of old games that really feel nostalgic and nail that 'how your inner child remembers the old consoles, rather than what they actually were' sweet spot of modern retro gaming, and if you have any desire to play or replay the NES/SNES Final Fantasy titles I heavily recommend them - although of course III and IV have their own full 3D remakes which you might prefer for their more modern style and voice acting.

I would like to renew my thanks to @Tempera for gifting me with the PR bundle which started us all on this journey. Go read her Pokemon Quest, In A World We Must Defend.
 
I just feel like a crazy person, since everyone loves FFVI and FFV is basically forgotten.

I don't think that's crazy at all! I like both for different reasons and I'm sort of ambivalent on whether it's better to achieve a modest goal or fail at an ambitious one when it comes to games, but while I found FFVI more interesting I definitely wasn't as invested in their character arcs as I was in the FFV crew beating Exdeath. So it makes sense to me.
 
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.
FF14 takes so much inspiration from FF6, it's crazy. Garlemald is basically identical to Vector, using the same aesthetics, same magitek, and Solus even fuckin' looks like a reimagining of Gestahl. And as you pointed out Gaius is basically a direct refutation of General Leo - though Regula van Hydrus from the Warring Triad storyline is a more direct Leo reference. It's really fascinating.



This is the version of the game which I own on Steam. I do not know if and how it differs from the original Playstation version, or whether there are or were any other 'competing' ports and remakes, the way there are for the Pixel Remaster, except of course for Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is its own whole thing.

Incidentally, my final review of the Pixel Remasters is that they are fantastic adaptations of old games that really feel nostalgic and nail that 'how your inner child remembers the old consoles, rather than what they actually were' sweet spot of modern retro gaming, and if you have any desire to play or replay the NES/SNES Final Fantasy titles I heavily recommend them - although of course III and IV have their own full 3D remakes which you might prefer for their more modern style and voice acting.

I would like to renew my thanks to @Tempera for gifting me with the PR bundle which started us all on this journey. Go read her Pokemon Quest, In A World We Must Defend.
Well, while we're on the subject, I think now's a good time to start talking about mods.

FF7's a pretty old game with a funky translation ("This guy are sick.") and a reliance on some absolutely incredible prerendered backgrounds that unfortunately get turned into pixellated messes when viewed on modern hardware. This is something the community has spent the last decade or so attempting to rectify with things like a full retranslation, using AI upscaling to redo all the backgrounds in full HD and even replacing basically every model in the game with updated ones that keep the same proportions, so if you're interested you can turn that Steam version of FF7 (which is probably the best way to play the original game these days) into something akin to the Pixel Remasters you've been playing through up to now.

If you're not interested and want to see the game in its original state that's completely fine, but getting this all set up is pretty easy since there's a community mod manager that basically does it all for you.

I just feel like a crazy person, since everyone loves FFVI and FFV is basically forgotten.
Only in the west. In Japan it's very fondly remembered, even over 6. It'd probably be the same over here if we'd gotten it localized when it first came out.
 
I do not know if and how it differs from the original Playstation version, or whether there are or were any other 'competing' ports and remakes, the way there are for the Pixel Remaster, except of course for Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is its own whole thing.

I'm glad you asked. The graphics are upscaled but not redone. Basically everything is smoother, but still using the same models and textures, and still has that PS1 kinda blockiness. I don't think they upscaled any of the FMV's though. It's still playable, but it clearly wasnt originally designed for the kind of high resolution displays we have today. There's a mod you can use though similar to what's been done with Resident Evil 2/3 that uses machine learning to clean up the graphics even further.

As discussed uh, elsewhere, FFVII has a notoriously iffy English translation. Luckily, the PC version is retranslated, clarifying some stuff while keeping the vibe that the original almost entirely intact. This website has an almost line by line comparison of the three versions, but spoilers abound.
 
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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.
It's always been interesting to me, looking at the first six Final Fantasy games and how they sort of... alternate between what they focus on. FFI, FFIII, and FFV are all story-lite (though FFV has a bit going on), while mechanically focusing on their respective job systems and the development from "static choice with upgrade" to "swap as needed" to "customize with learning skills". Meanwhile, FFII, FFIV, and FFVI all pushed further and further in the domain of having big sweeping epic stories and characters. FFII was a clumsy first attempt, certainly, but FFIV picked up from there with the new hardware of the SNES, and FFVI honestly knocks it out of the park. Granted it smacks someone in the head when it lands outside the park, and the batter tripped over second base and tumbled the rest of the way to home plate, but it's still a fairly magnificent hit.
Basically, every pratfall Kefka makes in writing, he makes up for in presentation, and I think that is true of basically the entire game.
Kefka is the most memorable villain of the NES/SNES Final Fantasy games, and it isn't even close. Yeah, I know there's some people in the thread expressing dislike or hatred of him, but let's be honest that's still invoking something. What does basically every other FF villain so far invoke, other than maybe some "dang he's some cool saturday morning cartoon shit" with Exdeath?
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.
Oof. True, but a big oof. Mechanically, FFVI is ambitious... but quite possibly the weakest entry of the entire Pixel Remaster collection. FFI, FFIII and FFV all have variations of the class system that iterate on each other to give characters distinct (or not so distinct in lategame FFV) roles, FFIV has pre-defined classes and roles for each character, and FFII... well, at the least I feel like your characters don't just become Ultima blobs by the endgame?

Meanwhile, Magicite breaks FFVI wide open as early as 5 or 6 hours in, when all of a sudden the entire party can pass around little sparkly rocks until they all get to be your dedicated backup healer and support caster on top of already having whatever character role, and your best magical fighters like Terra and Celes lose what little unique identity they had with a magic learned by level ups list because they'll just learn it from Magicite anyways. For example, did you know Terra learns Meltdown somewhere past level 80? Celes learns the entire Blizzard line of spells and eventually Ultima?

Nobody really cares, because you'll never see them naturally learn spells ever again once Magicite is on the table. The Relics, at least, I think could be worked around, but throwing magic in the mix too homogenizes your characters a bit too much.
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.
So what you're saying is, Final Fantasy VI fanfiction to be expected soon?

Though joking aside, I think that's a big part of what makes FFVI so fascinating to me. I still hold that FFV is the superior gameplay experience by far, but also there's... not a lot left to do or talk about with the characters involved? They had their little adventures and plotlines. Meanwhile, there's just so much left unsaid with the cast and characters and world of FFVI to think about and discuss. It's been a while, but early one someone posted a fanfic I can't recall the name of that's a post-game character analysis of sorts with Kefka's ghost going around doing stuff, and that's just one possibility. I'm willing to bet there's a massive untapped FFVI fanfiction market I've never really explored.
Guess we're going beyond the Pixel Remasters. Shall you be playing FF7 on PC, Omnicron, or via a PS1 and phone screenshots?
Why take phone screenshots for the PS1 version? Just skip the middleman and play the phone port in the first place :V

...At least, I could have sworn there was a mobile port. Searching the android app store gets me "FFVIII Remastered" but no Final Fantasy 7.
 
I'm glad you asked. The graphics are upscaled but not redone. Basically everything is smother, but still using the same models and textures, and still has that PS1 kinda blockiness. I don't think they upscaled any of the FMV's though. There's a mod you can use though similar to what's been done with Resident Evil 2/3 that uses machine learning to clean up the graphics even further.

As discussed uh, elsewhere, FFVII has a notoriously iffy English translation. Luckily, the PC version is retranslated, clarifying some stuff while keeping the vibe that the original almost entirely intact. This website has an almost line by line comparison of the three versions, but spoilers abound.
Checking the wiki's version differences, if they're to be believed, the most important difference is that the PC version - and only the PC version - has mouths re-enabled.

Apparently there were mouths on the OG PS1 version's models, but disabled, while the PC version uses the original mouths-enabled models. All subsequent re-releases (IOS/Android, modern consoles) re-disable the mouths.

So, congratulations, you'll be playing the Special Mouth Edition of FF7 I guess.
 
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V and VI are easily my fave of the early era stuff, my actually scorching hot take is that it just isn't fair to compare I-VI to VII-X-2/XII-XIII-2 (I'm going to deliberately exclude Both MMOs, XIII-3 XV, and XVI from this and I'd probably create a third and fourth catagory for XIII-3/XV/XVI and the MMOs.

They just share very little of the same DNA other than the earlier games leaning a bit more on turn based combat and somewhat building off the Magicite system to an extent, and the later you get into the series the more that you just can't really compare the early stuff to modern stuff, like XV is a modified Kingdom Hearts game and XVI is a full on Action-RPG.

I am also an ardent XI defender but that's a whole essay on it's own.
 
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Checking the wiki's version differences, if they're to be believed, the most important difference is that the PC version - and only the PC version - has mouths re-enabled.

Apparently there were mouths on the OG PS1 version's models, but disabled, while the PC version uses the original mouths-enabled models. All subsequent re-releases (IOS/Android, modern consoles) re-disable the mouths.

So, congratulations, you'll be playing the Special Mouth Edition of FF7 I guess..

Having played both versions, being able to see Cloud scowling adds immeasurably to the experience.
 
Man, I can't help but think the FF7 Remake is premature now. They should have done Remakes of the first six games first. Granted, the first few would be less "Remakes" and more entirely new games "inspired" by the originals with how barebones they were…

Well, while we're on the subject, I think now's a good time to start talking about mods.

I second this. Very much. Even when I do a "Vanilla" playthrough (or at least try, I think I'm on failed attempt…4? 5?) I still include the graphic overhauls. At this point I'm pretty sure all the character models have gotten a makeover (in a variety of styles), but even if you just do the field/battle textures it makes a difference. The mod manager makes things a piece of cake too.
 
About the V vs VI popularity, I'd say it's nothing more than cultural inertia. The masses who might have elevated V to an instant classic didn't get their hands on it until a proper and easily available translation (the GBA version, considering how the PSX translation was), so in the meantime VI had more time to burrow in the collective pop culture. And for the most part, people in general aren't (or well, weren't at least) running to play older games outside some interested groups.

It's been a while, but early one someone posted a fanfic I can't recall the name of that's a post-game character analysis of sorts with Kefka's ghost going around doing stuff, and that's just one possibility.
It was me, but deleted it due to being to spoilery a subject by that time (even if I mentioned just to make a point that I can't remember now).

For the curious, it's Dead Man's Logic here (it wasn't posted to FF and it was before the time of AO3).
 
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.
I mean, there's another Garlean Legatus who's a more direct reference: Regula van Hydrus, who's named after Regulus, brightest star in the constellation Leo, uses wide-area blast attacks with a greatsword, and is associated with the Warring Triad questline and the game's own 'floating continent' region.
 
I mean, there's another Garlean Legatus who's a more direct reference: Regula van Hydrus, who's named after Regulus, brightest star in the constellation Leo, uses wide-area blast attacks with a greatsword, and is associated with the Warring Triad questline and the game's own 'floating continent' region.
And is legatus of the 6th legion.
 
Been loosely following along with the LP, might chime in now that it's getting to a FF I've actually played.


This is the version of the game which I own on Steam. I do not know if and how it differs from the original Playstation version, or whether there are or were any other 'competing' ports and remakes, the way there are for the Pixel Remaster, except of course for Final Fantasy VII Remake, which is its own whole thing.

Incidentally, my final review of the Pixel Remasters is that they are fantastic adaptations of old games that really feel nostalgic and nail that 'how your inner child remembers the old consoles, rather than what they actually were' sweet spot of modern retro gaming, and if you have any desire to play or replay the NES/SNES Final Fantasy titles I heavily recommend them - although of course III and IV have their own full 3D remakes which you might prefer for their more modern style and voice acting.

I would like to renew my thanks to @Tempera for gifting me with the PR bundle which started us all on this journey. Go read her Pokemon Quest, In A World We Must Defend.
Modern releases of FF7 on PC and all consoles are based on the 1998 PC release, which has some differences but they're more trivia than major changes to the experience. The Playstation network release on PS3 I think is the most recent time the actual PS1 version was rereleased, (edit: scratch that, it was on the Playstation Classic. That memorable and successful device.) not counting how you could buy new PS1 disks direct from Square Enix until just a year or two ago. Never saw FF7 on sale but I picked up FF9 that way.
 
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Talking about the 2D-era FF villains has got me thinking about how other RPG villains from the same time hold up in comparison. The first one who springs to mind is Lunar's Ghaleon, since he was a surprisingly good compromise between fun, OTT cartoon villain and actually having more depth and motivation. Sort of like if Exdeath was more fleshed out without losing what makes him fun in the process (even if Ghaleon looks more like Sephiroth, or rather the other way around).
True, most of his development came in the later PS1 remake, but even in the Sega CD original there was still more to him then there was with many other RPG villains at the time.

...Huh, now I'm imagining you'd see a lot of 'Did Ghaleon do anything wrong?' debates if Lunar was more well remembered these days.

As for other RPG villains at the time, Earthbound's Pokey and Giygas sure stand out. The early Shin Megami Tensei games also come to mind, though more for who their villains even are than how they're characterised. Heading over to wRPGs, I remember a couple of Ultima villains were surprisingly complex for the time, e.g., Lord Blackthorn in Ultima V
 
Interestingly, this is only really the case on the Anglophone internet; amongst Japanese players, the consensus is that V is the better game.
So I decided to actually check this after seeing it brought up so often in the thread, and my findings are generally not agreeing with this idea. Modern Japanese polls have FFVI beating V by a solid margin, results on Pixiv are also pretty lopsided (VI has about double the arts of V), and VI scored noticeably better on Famitsu (37 to V's 34). VI also does consistently better in crossovers like World of Final Fantasy. There might be people who like it more, but in terms of popularity... nah, not really. The most that I can say in terms of concrete facts rather than hearsay is that V may have sold very slightly more than VI in Japan.

Really, the vibe that I get from interviews is that the team are aware that the game is more popular internationally (one interview with one of the creators said something along the lines of far more Americans having asked him to sign their VI cartridges), but that's because it tends to be regarded as "just" the high-water-mark of the generally excellent SNES days in Japan, rather than a massive quantum leap over just about everything else on the system and only challenged by Chrono Trigger as the best console RPG of its era. Basically, VI is considered a better game Japan than IV and V, but that gap becomes infinitely wider to you when the only version of IV you got is a cut-down and generally-enshittened version with a dodgy translation and you didn't get V at all.
 
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Nothing earth-shattering there, but it's nice for most of them to have a comment written in their distinct voice. I like that Cyan's line implicitly highlights how he's gotten over his fear of machines, which is emphasized by him being found in the engine room with Gau instead of in the main deck. And the game really wants Leo to be a tragic character whose passing is sad and who meaningfully impacted Terra's arc, huh?
Which is bass ackwards, because it's not like Leo standing up to the Empire inspired her to defect, she defected first while he dithered.
 
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