So, I have finally gotten around to playing Final Fantasy 6 (the super famicon version). Thought about posting this in the games you are currently playing thread, but I guess this is more appropriate.
So I am going to go out on a limb here and offer the very controversial opinion that FF6 is a pretty dang good video game. So yeah, my opinion is pretty in line with the majority, however, I will be making some criticisms of it in the following and some comparisons with later FF games that could be construed as unfavorable so I just wanted to be sure to mention that I really liked it.
As I mentioned here https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/506-the-thread-in-which-we-talk-about-the-videogames-we-are-currently-playing/1669, this was my second attempt at the game and it was certainly a lot more successful than my first attempt some 17-18 years ago which I frankly don’t remember to well. As can be surmised from the date of that post I also played through this game very quickly compared to my normal speed for JRPG or SRPG type of games, so something about the game must have grabbed me. There are external reasons for this as well, as I realized about halfway through the game that I was playing it quickly and should be able to finish it before I am embarking on a longer trip to Denmark (will be going home and outside Japan for the first time in 2 and a half years) if I continued at the same pace. As I was afraid that I would drop the game/forget too many details if I had more than a month’s break I hurried up.
However, the reason that I was playing it quickly and was able to keep up that pace is because something about the pacing of the game facilitated this. This is actually somewhat mysterious to me, because in terms of the battles themselves the game was not super-engaging to me (certainly less interesting then Energy Breaker and Black Matrix mentioned in my post linked above) and yet in combination with various surrounding elements the game was overall a more compelling experience. The game overall just felt really well paced I guess.
Having read a variety of internet discussions related to Final Fantasy over the years, I have often come across the opinion that the older games, and FF6 in particular, is better-written with more compelling characters and story than the later entries. I think this is rather interesting, not because I think the game is necessarily less compelling than later entries, but because the game notably has a simple story with characters who fit mostly into broad archetypes and don’t have a massive amount of dialogue onscreen.
I played the game in Japanese and I cannot really comment on any of the English translations. In the Japanese version, I enjoyed most of the character writing in the dialogues. While the characters were simple, their personality was quite well-expressed and each felt like they had their own voice. The writing was overall sufficiently snappy, I even laughed a few times and I think the game has a nice mix of humor and more serious plot beats, weaving them together rather well. The somewhat exaggerated animations also helped imbue these characters with personality and charm, I loved all the little finger-wagging animations for example.
Note how I refer to the characters as charming. I enjoyed a lot of their interactions, but I also can’t say that I was super emotionally invested in them. The game sketches a lot of potentially compelling, if arch-typical stories. I enjoyed the little romance between Locke and Celes (who was probably the most compelling character overall in the game for me), but again this was sketched through very few lines of dialogue. Overall my point is that the game is good at sketching a story and characters in a rather minimalist way. Personally this made me less invested in the characters than I was in say Yuna and Tidus from FFX. They felt more like fully-realized characters that were explicitly developed on-screen. This of course has the downside that if you don’t like what is explicitly put on the screen you are going to dislike the game. On the other hand, with FF6 because it is overall less explicit giving you what feels more like a broad-strokes narrative and archetypal (but still with enough personality quirks to not feel too generic) character beats, it is possible to insert more of your own interpretation into the story and characters. I believe that this is the origin of the idea that the game is better written or more mature than later games that I sometimes see. Of course doing this type of writing well is not easy and so this claim may still be correct, I just think that in terms of character development and exploration FFX is much more interesting (see SU2MM for more of my thoughts on FFX).
The plot of the game also has a lot of coincidences, convenient and somewhat peculiar plot beats etc. but overall I feel like these mostly work within the atmosphere the game is going for. It somewhat annoys me when people bring up the same type of stuff as being much more of a negative in later games, while singing the praises of FF6, however. On the other hand, to some extent the difference in judgment is probably because suspension of disbelief is stronger in FF6 as the pixel-art world feels less one-to-one with the world it represents and similarly the story, broad-strokes as it is, feels less one-to-one with the story that it represents, if that makes any sense? This is also related to the idea mentioned in the last paragraph, namely that people can insert more of their own interpretation.
I have to say that I don’t quite understand the popularity of Kefka as a villain. He has a few amusing lines here and there and a few memorable scenes, but overall he is just kind of there. I don’t mind a villain who is just evil, but I don’t find him to be a particularly good example of this either. I remember reading a lot of discussions back in the day where people would passionately argue whether Kefka or Sephiroth was the better villain. I don’t even like Sephiroth that much, but I guess I am team Sephiroth, having finally played both games. : p
Kefka is also partially related to a structural issue I had with the second half of the game. Overall, I thought it was conceptually interesting to split the game in the way it was and I loved the initial setup after the time-skip with Celes exploring the destroyed world and finding the first couple of teammates. It felt appropriately depressing (looking at the internet, apparently I got the most depressing version) with the gradual return of hope as she finds out that others are alive. However, at some point the new world-map started to lose its initial novelty-factor and became just a place to look for new side-quests and the initial atmosphere of a world in despair faded away. Then you finally go to Kefka’s location, go through a dungeon and beat him. It felt slightly anti-climactic with him just sitting there waiting for you.
On the other hand, I think the pacing of the first half of the game was pretty immaculate and while I had some issues with the pacing in the last half, overall it was still pretty good and I did keep coming back to the game. I really enjoyed the various ways the mechanics were used to tell the story (such as Locke’s steal command allowing him to steal disguises in one small section of the game). It was also interesting to me to see how the relatively simple graphics were utilized in various way to create prototypical cut-scenes, as there were multiple places in the game where the story was told not simply by characters standing around talking at each other. Overall, the game was visually nice to look at and the graphics have definitely aged more gracefully then those of FF7 (although I got used to those pretty quickly when playing the game as well though).
A few remaining stray thoughts: Equipping espers to learn magic was mostly fun, but the fact that some conferred bonuses on level-up made me waste to much time checking when characters were about to level up in order to swap out espers in those moments. I would always be annoyed when I forgot to do this. Not sure if this is a positive or negative. That ultima spell and double magic cast accessory sure was useful in the final dungeon and against the last boss. Almost made things a bit to easy, but I guess I mostly have myself to blame for that especially as I also spend an hour grinding levels before entering the final dungeon (I think most of my people were around 45 as I entered). The game took me almost 40 hours to play and it ever-so-slightly overstayed its welcome, but I was sufficiently motivated to finish it off.
