Final Fantasy VI: Greatness or Nostalgia?
(previous article in the series)“Listen, Peter. When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here: just as our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. [...] And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream…”
Quote from The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis
Talking about Final Fantasy VI is difficult for me. The feelings I have for this game go beyond simple evaluations of graphical fidelity and gameplay mechanics. Final Fantasy VI is a game that defined me, for better or worse. It came at a time where I was very unsure about the world and the direction my life would take. I was pretty depressed about my life. I was a poor, chubby, asthmatic nerd with an inhaler, unpopular at school, sometimes bullied by jerks. My parents were divorced and I could only see my dad four times a month. I would barely see my mom since she was at work until late and was tired when she got home. I recall a few sleepless nights starting at the ceiling wondering about the point of my existence. I would tell my dad about how much school sucked and he didn’t know what to say to comfort me. He would take me to the game store on special occasions, perhaps because of the guilt he felt that we couldn’t see each other as often. On one of those trips I had the chance to purchase Final Fantasy III (VI in Japan). I was already a Squaresoft fan at that time and I had seen the advertisements for the game on TV. I was eagerly awaiting this game.
I scored the game and the beautiful game guide that day and delved into the adventure eagerly. What I experienced in that moment was sublime, beautiful and life changing. Final Fantasy VI was my Narnia, a place I could escape to when I wished to escape reality. I've played through this game probably a dozen times, if not more. Like the C.S. Lewis quote I started with alludes to, I don’t know if anyone else playing Final Fantasy VI will form the same connection with the game as I did. The Final Fantasy VI I have in my mind probably can’t be experienced or shared. I don’t even know if playing the game now would connect with me in the same way it did back then. But hopefully my words can serve to encourage a new generation to create their own memories with this classic.
The Final Fantasy III/VI player's guide was worth the extra 15 dollars just for the large size prints of Amano's artwork.
The best I can do to explain my adoration for this game is to share the scenes that impacted me. More than the story itself as a whole, some of the individual moments in this game are excellent. This will involve spoilers so apologies to those who haven’t played FFVI. I’ll try to keep them to a minimum whenever possible. If you don’t want to be spoiled, skip to the next section.
The intro sequence for Final Fantasy VI is captivating and continues the tradition that the series had established on the SNES. The macabre music, fiery font and stormy sky evokes thoughts of a descent into a hellish landscape. The shots of Magitek Armors trekking through the snow is a clear visual callback to the AT-ST mechs walking through Hoth in Empire Strikes Back. It was an effective way to get the player hyped to jump into the game.
I have a fondness for the main character of the story, Terra. Her struggle to understand her place in the world was something I could relate to at that time. I liked her philosophical interactions with the leader of the rebel group, Banon, and other party members early on in the story. They really did an effective job of drawing the player into her personal dilemma.
They tried put the player in Terra's shoes early on with this quasi choose your own adventure sequence.
Terra's plight has a very heavy X-Men feel to it. The existential dilemma of not understanding why someone was born under unique circumstances.
The opera scene that involves some of the characters was truly fascinating and memorable. It felt like an early attempt to add a cinematic sequence into a video game and I think it was mostly successful, despite the technological limitations. I appreciated the attempt at a truly immersive experience, and this scene excited me about the potential of immersive storytelling in video games.
Some games like Lunar for the SEGA CD were already using voice acting during this era, but this opera sequence was the best we had seen on the SNES so far.
Shadow is one of my favorite characters in the game. Shadow’s backstory is presented in a really clever way through dreamlike sequences when he is in the party. The implication that the guilt he feels for his past is slowly bubbling to his subconscious and manifesting in his dreams is profound. The mysterious background and limited availability of the character made him one of my favorites.
Shadow's dreams bring an unexpected amount of intrigue to the mundane action of sleeping in an inn.
The main villain, Kefka, is one of the more fascinating villains in the series. While he is comic relief at times and evil for evil’s sake, he does have a clear reason for being this way. He is the embodiment of the nihilist philosophy, that life is inherently meaningless. The notion of nihilist philosophy is kind of heavy material for kids, but Kefka does a decent job of breaking down his ideals into understandable terms.
"The Big Lebowski" was right, nihilists ruin everything.
The game takes inspiration from the Star Wars trilogy in the midpoint of this story. The bad guys essentially win half way through the game. That leads to a very interesting story choice by the writers. Celes and Cid are marooned on a deserted island. The player has to feed fish to Cid to keep him alive and there’s a high chance he will perish in the attempt. This causes Celes to despair and attempt to take her life. This was my first exposure to such heavy subject matter in a video game and it changed my opinion on what games could be as artistic media. This game communicated a lot of heavy stuff to a young me and if that isn’t art I don’t know what the fuck art is.
This game deals with a lot of heavy subjects but it never forgets to be fun. There are plenty of goofy sequences involving the main characters. Also, the comedic relief henchman trope makes a comeback with Ultros. He appears throughout the story to make jokes at the expense of the party and to make inappropriate advances at Terra. The game has something for everyone in its writing.
Ultros is like Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote all mixed up in a purple package. Gilgamesh, but on steroids.
Development History
Final Fantasy VI was very much Yoshinori Kitase’s creation. Hironobu Sakaguchi initially was the both producer and director, but he had recently been promoted to vice president of Square. The additional responsibilities forced him to delegate most of the scenario directing work to Kitase. Kitase used his experience with developing story cutscenes in FFV to good use in Final Fantasy VI, as the optional scenes and branching story elements were far more complex. Hiroyuki Ito was another important figure in Final Fantasy VI, and he served as co-director along with Kitase and he focused on the battle planning and design. Final Fantasy VI took about a year and a half to produce, by far the longest production for Squaresoft in their history to that point.
Squaresoft decided to bring Final Fantasy VI to the west under the title “Final Fantasy III”. Ted Woosley was assigned to the English localization of Final Fantasy VI, under very strict deadlines. He had 30 days to translate tens of thousands of lines of text. He took on the task, like a champ, as is usual. Unfortunately, Nintendo of America reared its ugly, Malboro-like head, and forced some draconian censorship policies on the script. Bars were changed into Cafés, wines was changed into cider, references to religion were removed, sprites with partial nudity or smoking were edited, etc… Still, I was impressed with how Woosley was able to preserve the meaning of the script through innuendo and clever use of language. References to women of loose morals became “licentious howlers”. References to burning people alive were changed to Kefka welcoming them to “his barbecue”. The suicide was left in the game and referred to as the “leap of faith”. There was also unnecessary removal of Japanese culture, like converting a character’s profession to Knight instead of Samurai, and katanas to blades. Unfortunately, there were a few scenes that were outright confusing and/or mistranslated in the English version. Considering the ridiculous deadlines that were imposed on him, the lack of development support, and NOA regulations, Woosley did the best he could.
The most egregious censorship happened during the tragic scene at the cliff.
Woosley did his best to preserve the meaning with some gallows humor but it seems a bit inappropriate given the context.
Story
The story takes place in a world where after cataclysmic magical wars, the ability to use magic has been lost to time. There’s an Imperial faction poised to take over the world, and a small band of rebels known as “The Returners” opposing them. In the middle of this conflict, a mysterious girl soldier named Terra is introduced. She is a soldier of the Empire and she is mind controlled into subservience. They were charged with entering the city of Narshe to extract a mysterious frozen creature. The creature attacks her and she is rescued by the rogue Locke. Locke is a member of the Returners and he removes the slave crown that was ensorcelling her. She realizes she is suffering from amnesia from the side effects of the crown. The Empire is interested in recovering Terra, so she escapes with Locke. Locke soon realizes that Terra is capable of using the long forgotten art of magic and wants to take her to meet the leader of the Returners, Banon. The story continues from there in a relatively linear fashion, although there is a notable three way split in the middle of the story between scenarios of 3 different party groups that converge at a later point. Possibly a nod to the Romancing SaGa series storytelling style. There is also a focus on optional scenes that further develop the backstory of the characters, a storytelling element established in FFV by Kitase. FFVI has the largest cast of playable characters in a Final Fantasy game ever. That adds to the epic feel of the story, but it presented a problem in using all of these characters at once when the max party size is 4. Fortunately there are multiple split party sequences, where the gameplay becomes slightly more tactical. The player can switch control between various groups to achieve their goals.
The game starts with some flashbacks that establish the intentions of the Gesthalian Empire and Terra's role as a biological weapon.
Some of the new storytelling/gameplay integration features added in FFVI, perhaps inspired by the SaGa series.
There are path splits (left) and sequences where the player juggles multiple parties (right).
Graphics and Concept Art
The art team on this game was stacked with a who’s who of Squaresoft talents. Tetsuya Takahashi, a former battle graphic designer for FFIV and FFV, was promoted to graphics director for this game. He would later become famous for directing Xenogears and founding Monolith soft. He gets credit for designing the look of the Magitek Armors. Yoshitaka Amano returned again to draw the concept art for the game, and his art was used as the reference for the character portraits and monster graphics. Tetsuya Nomura also contributed to monster and character design. He gets credit specifically for creating Shadow and Setzer. Kazuko Shibuya returned to the series to contribute her expertise in “chibi” style pixel characters. The excellent visuals and character designs in this game were clearly a collaborative effort of the top talent Squaresoft had to offer at that time.
There are more impressive graphical mode 7 scenes used in Final Fantasy VI than ever before. Walking on the world map uses a subtle perspective effect. Also Chocobo rides and Airship sequences use the perspective technique to good effect. And it is used heavily in the intro sequence with the Magitek armors and other cutscenes throughout the game.
Some examples of the impressive uses of the SNES graphic modes in cutscenes and Chocobo/airship travel.
Music and Sound
Nobuo Uematsu outdid himself with the soundtrack for Final Fantasy VI. There was a focus on instrumental orchestra music and operatic vibes, instead of more progressive electronic synth tunes. He also incorporated unintelligible digitized voices to enhance the opera style songs and they were also used in the sound effects for Kefka’s laugh. (there was a plan to include actual voice acting, but technical limitations prevented that from happening). The masterpiece of the collection is “Dancing Mad” a Carmina Burana inspired banger of a song. Some fans claim “One Winged Angel” is Nobuo Uematsu’s best song, but Dancing Mad is just as good, if not better. Another memorable operatic track is the “Aria di Mezzo Carattere”, the track used for Celes’ performance. An important innovation of the soundtrack was the addition of musical themes for each character. Every character gets a memorable theme that fits their personality, the most prominent being Terra’s melancholic tune that doubles as the overworld map theme. Other memorable ones include Shadow’s theme, which evokes Ennio Morricone, while Locke gets a bombastic theme befitting a fantasy hero (plus many others). And that’s without going into the many incredible battle songs and themes for the various locations in the world. As usual, I include a sampling of the songs but the whole soundtrack is worth listening to.
Gameplay
If there is an aspect where I think Final Fantasy VI is somewhat of a letdown, it is in the gameplay. The combat continues the ATB system from Final Fantasy V without major changes. But the job change system was abandoned for a return to static classes assigned to characters. Every character has one specific class ability tied to them. The biggest issue is class balance. Some characters have abilities that are utterly broken (Edgar’s Tools, Sabin’s Blitz, Shadow’s Throw, Gau’s Rage), while some range from sometimes useful to completely useless. At some point in the story, every character gets access to magic and that removes the uniqueness of some of the characters.
Sabin's Fire Dance and Edgar's Chain Saw make regular encounters trivial.
We haven't seen a pair of brothers this dominant in fictional combat since the days of Undertaker and Kane.
Equipment is extremely important in Final Fantasy VI. Relics are a new equipment type and they serve as an analogue of the customization provided by FFV’s job system. Many of the relics provide abilities that used to be attached to jobs, such as the dash, knight protection and counter abilities. The main criticism of the equipment I have is that some of it trivializes the difficulty to an extreme degree. There are some gear setups that allow a character to evade every attack and absorb most elements. Also the player can gain access to level up stat boosts which turn low level characters into juggernauts quickly. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to allow the player to trivialize the game to that degree, in my opinion.
Esper level up bonuses and broken relics are the secret to breaking this game in half.
Also worth mentioning, there are some nasty bugs in the original release of Final Fantasy VI that further serve to trivialize the difficulty. Due to a bug, the magic evade stat is used for physical evasion as well as magic. Makes it even easier to stack evasion. On top of that, the vanish status overwrites death magic immunity, which makes it so that enemies can be trivialized even more. There’s also a notorious bug that can crash your game if you use the sketch ability on allies. The Sketch bug was addressed in the second print run of the SNES cartridge but others were not addressed until the rereleases.
Rereleases
Final Fantasy VI was re-released for the Playstation as part of the Final Fantasy Anthology bundle alongside with FFV. It was virtually the same as the SNES release but with some bug fixes and additional 3D rendered cutscenes. The downside for this version is the additional CD-ROM loading times that were not present in the cartridge version.
The PS1 era cutscenes sure have their charm. And it was nice to the the original scenes realized in 3D.
It was also rereleased for the Game Boy Advance. This version has an improved localization, improved visuals, and removed some of the SNES censorship. It also has new content: 4 new espers, 3 new spells, 2 new dungeons, and bugfixes. On the other hand, some additional censorship was introduced into this version with the removal of a scene where an imprisoned Celes gets beat up by an imperial soldier. I was digging online for the reasoning for this change and apparently “there was an update to the Japanese rating system between the SNES and GBA releases, and under the new rules, the depiction of beating a bound woman would give the game a "mature" rating, which would limit how it could be sold or advertised.”
The Pixel remaster version of Final Fantasy VI was released in 2023 for the Nintendo Switch. It received the biggest overhaul out of all of the Pixel Remaster games. The pixel graphics were enhanced for modern devices, modern quality of life features were added and Celes’ opera scene vocal track was redone with real voice acting as the developers intended originally. There’s some debate whether the English singing performance is any good, which is typical for Square Enix. I decided to look into if they had undone the GBA censorship and apparently they censored more stuff, like the Empire rally with the soldiers giving a military salute. I dislike how censorship is still tolerated in the video game industry to this day when every other art form (literature and film, for example) it is looked at with scorn. It is sad that despite all of the new versions, the original Super Famicom release remains as the purest, unsullied version of this game. My recommendation is to look for a fan translation of the Super Famicom Final Fantasy VI. I hear through the grapevine that the “Ted Woosley Uncensored version” is the best option at the moment.
Not a fan of the updated look, if you ask me. Looks too much like a cheap mobile game.
FFVI Hacks
I’m a big fan of randomizer hacks for SNES games and FFVI has a pretty good one. Worlds Collide provides a randomized scavenger hunt set in the world of FFVI. There’s a competitive scene and discord community around the game. If these types of hacks are your jam, I recommend you check it out here.
There are other cool hacks of this game I haven't tried yet. If you know of one, let me know in the comments.
Aftermath and Legacy
Final Fantasy VI was released in Japan to critical acclaim. It became the highest selling game in Japan in 1994, selling 2.55 million copies. Final Fantasy was clearly established as the top JRPG series in Japan. The game received similar acclaim when it was released in the west in late 1994. It was the top selling SNES game in the month of October and eighth best selling SNES cartridge of 1994, selling 850,000 copies outside of Japan. American publications reviewed it as the best RPG console release of 1994. Even with all of this success, Square was disappointed in the results outside of Japan, but apparently not enough to slow the forward momentum with the series.
EGM and Gamepro reviews of Final Fantasy VI. While this game might not seem like much nowadays, it was a groundbreaking title in a lot of ways.
Let me know about your experiences with Final Fantasy VI. Did the story of this game move you as much as it did 12 year old me? Sound off in the comments. The next article will cover Chrono Trigger, another classic of Squaresoft’s catalog. Thanks for reading.
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