Genre: RPG
Year: 1994
Developed by: Square
Published by: Square
Platforms: SNES, many others
#2
Feeling Like: Terra Nova
The only game that ever had a chance of topping my number 1 is Final Fantasy 6. After whetting our appetites with Super Mario RPG and Final Fantasy 4, Dave V. and I continued to seek out similar experiences on the Super Nintendo. We found some worthy contenders in Breath of Fire 2 and Secret of Mana but it was Final Fantasy 6 (3 in North America, but the officially correct number is 6, so we’ll go with 6 from now on) that changed the way I looked at gaming.
Before, it was an entertaining way to deliver challenge, visuals and music to my hands, eyes and ears. Once I started Terra’s journey to discover who she was, I was transformed. I cared more about this game than any book to date, or any TV show I’d previously been obsessed with. I was emotionally connected from the very first minutes of the game. It’s not just nostalgia either; Square has released a handful of ports and add-ons for the best Final Fantasy that proved good games are good forever. I was relieved to find not only has it aged well, it’s still my 2nd favorite game ever.
Is there an intro that can top this? Imagine being limited to the Super Nintendo hardware and producing one of the most memorable, cinematic moments in gaming history. The image of three soldiers in Magitek Armor marching towards the village of Narshe is as unforgettable as my childhood home, or my mother’s face. It may not look like much today from a visual standpoint, but tell me you don’t feel something watching it. RPGs are fantastic avenues for portraying emotions, and Final Fantasy 6 is one of the best to do it. The music is sublime and this wasn’t a passing fancy; I reckon I’ve listened to at least one Final Fantasy 6 song a week for the last 30 years. It is impossibly good.
“The Overworld Theme” sounds like a distant wanderer is performing his Mangum Opus.
“Awakening” is only played a few times, and highlights Terra’s confusion and sorrow of her past.
“Magitek Research Facility” is just as cold and metallic as it needs to be.
“Figaro Castle” perfectly encapsulates the desert castle, and its ruler. The OCremix “Anthem of Exile” is a stunning rendition. I get chills when the second trumpet chimes in, invoking the royal brothers playing a duet next to each other.
“Cyan’s Theme” is the lamentation of an old, bitter warrior.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more fired up to conquer bad when I heard “Searching for Friends.” That flute is godly, and just listen to the Pixel Remaster version. It’s even better!
The music serves a purpose; because Square was tasked with creating a sweeping, epic story that required players to heavily invest the characters, they had to lean on the auditory themes and sounds. You can’t even come close to replicating a regular human face, so they did it with subtle animations and possibly the best gaming soundtrack ever. As far as I’m concerned, this is the best work Nobuo Uematsu has ever done. I feel guilty not listing a dozen more tracks, like the oppressive overworld in the World of Ruin, or Locke’s triumphant theme or Dancing Mad.
Ok, well I have to link to Dancing Mad.
Can’t have a Final Fantasy 6 post without mentioning Kefka, my favorite villain in gaming.
He starts from moderately humble beginning as one of the evil Empire (there’s always an evil empire in Final Fantasies)’s generals. He goes insane experimenting with Magicite and soon can’t be reasoned with. He poisons a castle’s water supply against orders, murdering dozens. He burns a castle. He kidnaps Espers for his own greed. He eventually transforms the entire world by betraying the Emperor and moving the statues that govern very fabric of nature. He becomes more unhinged and nihilistic every time you see him. And, much to our heroes’ chagrin, more powerful.
To the point where he wins.
The story took so many twists and turns that I never knew what to expect, but I seriously never believed I’d see a bad guy emerge victorious to this degree. Once you escape the floating continent (sorry to link another song, but my God what a track…), you’re met with disturbing image after image. The very Earth below you swallows people whole. Villages are completely erased, mountains crumble, the population decimated. Your ship, your sacred transportation and home away from home, is ripped in half and your intrepid crew scattered to the winds. The zoomed out shot of the planet breaking apart and the quote “On that day, the world was changed forever” was seared into my eyes. Once again, Final Fantasy 6 is playing Chess while other SNES RPGs were playing with checkers.
If the first half of the game is the heart, then the second half is the soul. Going from a party that’s eleven strong to just Celes on a deserted island with a dying paternal grandfather is about as big a case of whiplash in gaming that I can think of. It is impressively depressing – the bright blue skies have been replaced with a permanent orange haze. The musical theme is dark, without a spark of hope. The landscape is completely altered, with some towns completely inaccessible by land. Monsters will randomly take damage, as if to quietly point out that everything is rotting. At this point, you don’t even know if anybody else is alive.
Bereft of friends, or hope, Celes attempts to commit suicide if you don’t save Cid and, naturally on my first few playthroughs, I didn’t. It’s remarkably effective and something you rarely ever seen heroes do. Usually all it takes is one speech of encouragement, or a quick side quest to remove any doubts from a protagonist’s mind, but not here. It makes the stakes feel massive, it highlights how big your failure was and solidifies Kefka as evil incarnate. Celes flinging herself off the cliff is right up there with the march to Narshe as a hugely memorable moment.
She survives the fall, and a token reminds her that hope is alive and she has to continue on. Eventually climbing your way into what’s left of civilization could have been an entire game on its own. Every friendly face you recognize, every ally you re-recruit is a massive moment. Having them back in your party finally gives you some teeth (solo combat in Final Fantasy 6 can be brutal at times) but also you get to hear their musical theme once again. The strengths that make the game worth playing are many, but the cast of characters is certainly a top candidate. They each have their own unique visual design and colors. Their musical accompaniments give you the exact idea of the personality they have. I don’t need hours of backstory, or hundreds of lines of professionally voice acted lines to get an emotional connection. I know who they are, I know they kick ass against monsters. Less is more.
The brilliant part of the World of Ruin is that once you get another airship, it’s completely up to you where to go, what to find and who to rescue. You can, in theory, take on the final dungeon without a full contingent. But why would you want to? Why would you miss out on the hundreds of treasures, or Espers to acquire, or magic spells to learn, or amazing vistas to gaze upon? Don’t you want to see how Narshe handled the apocalypse, or if the Empire’s home base is still around? Is the Veldt still the Veldt? What happened to Shadow? Because the first half of the game is so effective at world building, the second half dares you to miss out on seeing the incredible changes that happened on that fateful day.
It’s one of the few RPGs I’ve beaten more than once, and at this point the count has to be up to a dozen times. I’ve tried the Game Boy Advance version, the Brave New World mod and the incredible Pixel Remaster since the start of the 500 alone. I know the game so well that even slight changes to the script will grab my attention. I know at a glance which version is being displayed. I know the text font, I know the character models, I know the spell names. It’s probably a good thing they improved upon some of the combat mechanics from the original – the battle system was fun, but inherently broken in many regards with some stats being completely meaningless and cheesy magic strategies (namely Vanish/Doom) negating some boss fights entirely.
Kyla wouldn’t let us do it that way. Did I mention you can play Final Fantasy 6 with a buddy? In my case, my then-girlfriend-now-wife Kyla. You can choose which characters you each control in combat, leading to some great combinations and teamwork. I mentioned that Sabin’s blitz commands would probably be too difficult for her to input, only to shut up a moment later when she was Pummeling and Suplexing with greater accuracy than I ever could. I hope she had a great time playing it together; it was the first RPG we completed as a duo and we’re still together 11 years later so it can’t have gone that badly. She DID wish we hadn’t grinded so much in the dinosaur forest before taking on Kefka. But I wanted that Economizer so damned badly!
I’m doomed to compare every RPG and every Final Fantasy to this one. I can’t help it – the bar was set so high that I’m forever chasing that sensation. Every scenario present, every set piece feels important. The victory of Kefka is still fresh in my mind – you do defeat him, but the world will never go back to the way it was. I’m beyond impressed with the scale of the world considering what was under the Super Nintendo’s hood. I still find the character sprites so endearing, that games like Octopath Traveler excite me solely with their pixelated visuals.
It may be the kind of thing you can’t go back to. Contemporary RPGs like Persona 5, Baldur’s Gate 3, or Witcher 3 have the kinds of bells and whistles we need to get invested in a story and characters. You don’t have to imagine a ransacked house, you can see it. You don’t have to ponder what Strago’s voice would sound like, they’d get an experienced actor to show you. There is no more limitations on what developers can show us.
But I still steadfastly defend old-school games like this, and it’s not just countless memories of playing alongside Dobbo on our laptops in the Echo, or ushering Kasim and Aslam upstairs while our parents chatted to show them what I finally rented from Blockbuster Video, or seeing the 20 minute finale, or finally un-cursing the cursed shield, or learning who Rachel was, or uncovering the origin of Relm’s true father, or swiping a soldier’s clothes, or beating up Ultros (again), or slamming Kefka with four Ultimas in a row with Quick and the Gem Box. It’s the classic design, the refinement on two previous Super Nintendo Final Fantasy games that’s evident with every line of dialogue, every bit of humor, every spell cast or armor equipped or hidden pathway uncovered.
It was awe-inspiring upon launch, and it continues to swing with the big dogs of today. I will play this game anytime, in any form. Except for the mobile versions, those graphics are putrid.
And while Terra’s theme is my favorite in the game, the Crystal theme perfectly sums up my feelings on Final Fantasies. A series filled with incredible characters, massive set pieces, villains you want to take down and a sense of technical, peerless wizardry.
The 500 