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DocRetro
05-28-15 02:37 PM
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05-29-15 03:49 PM
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Expectations can be a Cruel Thing

 
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05-28-15 02:37 PM
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If you're reading this because of the relatively low score I gave this game, understand that I had a lot of built up hype going into Final Fantasy 6. I had heard a lot of claims of "best Final Fantasy" and whatnot, so I very reasonably thought it was going to be the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy gaming experience. At least, it would be better than what I had played before, so I thought. Now understand that, having never experienced these games as a child, I had also decided to play them sequentially. I started with FF1, moved to FF2 and so on. Now as it turned out, FF5 ended up being my favorite of the first five I played. Its gameplay was so good that I couldn't wait to see how much FF6 had improved on it. Unfortunately, with the bar set that high, I couldn't help but be disappointed.

To elaborate, we'll begin with the story. Final Fantasy 6's story comes with few surprises if you've already played previous Final Fantasy games. There's an evil empire, your characters are going to join the resistance movement, it's all fairly standard stuff. The surprises lie in two things, the first being the game's setting. While the traditional European Fantasy stuff is largely intact, in FF6, you get the sense that it underwent an industrial revolution without bothering to change to the Victorian style. You'll be riding the occasional steampunk mecha and piloting an airship that's far more like a blimp than a boat with propellers. I think it fits the somewhat darker tone of 6, kind of showing how there's not as much innocence in this decaying world anymore. The other surprise is that you'll be seeing the game's main villain and final boss quite frequently throughout the game, even right at the beginning. Now mind you, this doesn't actually mean much as said villain is a really bad character, having almost no backstory, character development, or even well established motivation, but it does mean that the fact that what you're fighting is EVIL is much more readily apparent. You actually get to see the evil empire's people do evil things, and you see them do it quite often. It goes a long way in making the player really want to defeat this heinous person.

However, on the other hand, the playable characters are almost all well-established, each going through a character arc or two of their own. A substantial part of the game is spent exploring the people you're playing as, to the point where it really eclipses the main plot of the game in an almost Evangelion-like narrowing of focus. It's a culmination of the direction the stories were heading in FF2 and FF4. 2 was almost all plot and no character, 4 had a decent mix of both, and 6 is almost all character and no plot, which is especially apparent in the last third of the game, which is spent merely traveling around the world and regaining the party members you lost in the transitory event by finding them and working through their various neuroses. Or not. You are only required to have three party members to beat the game, and while it's easier to beat the final dungeon if you have everyone, it's by no means necessary. I completely passed over rescuing main character Locke, for example, because he was my least favorite party member in the entire game, and I did this at the cost of the game's most powerful spells. But it didn't matter, I still stomped the final boss flat. Like many, many turn based games, you can feel free to reduce the difficulty as you please merely by grinding enough. But anyway, please do note that this doesn't evenly apply to all characters. Gau, for example, will get very little development or even much of anything. Same with Strago. But your main characters, Terra, Locke, Celes, Edgar, Sabin, etc. all do get their share of screentime with stories that surpass anything you've seen in a Final Fantasy game before in depth. Not that this is necessarily a good thing (I will always despise Locke even if he is more developed than the entire cast of FF5), but it certainly does make the characters, and thus the world around them, feel more alive. But anyway, barring a few particularly memorable moments, the actual plot of the game isn't likely to leave much of an impression on you. It has been a while since I last played 6 at the time of this writing and I struggle to think of more than 2-3 things that actually happened in the game and had a significant bearing on the plot as a whole rather than just the story of some character. But the moments you do remember, however, are likely to stay with you for time to come.

On to the gameplay. In short, the gameplay of FF6 is not only a step down from 5, it's also a step down from 4 and 3 and yeah it's pretty much the worst of any of the 2D games. But why is this so, you ask? It's a bit complex. Allow me to explain. Now, similar to how each character has their own personalized place in the story, each character also has their own personalized place on the battlefield. Every one of them is wholly unique, with the exception of Terra and Celes, who are near clones of each other in terms of what they can do and what they can equip, which is not a bad thing at all as the two of them are arguably the two most useful, powerful and versatile characters in the game. These align heavily with the classes of prior games (so you'll get Terra and Celes, who are more or less Red Wizards, Locke, who is an obvious Thief, Edgar, who's obviously meant to be a Dragoon, etc.) However, the game does throw you a few curveballs in regards to this, such as Sabin, the monk stand in who ostensibly has fighting game command inputs in order to do his special attacks, but falls behind in the equipment department and is thus fairly weak at the end of the game in contrast to your standard FF monk (unless you equip him with the relic that allows him to equip anything, that is). And then you have Gau, who is a totally off the wall ridiculous character that attacks by going into "Rages," in which he basically goes berserk after you choose a rage for him to go into, using random attacks based on the enemies that Gau has encountered. If Gau encounters an enemy, he gets the Rage for that enemy, so the game has over 200 rages for him to go into, and many of them have abilities beyond anything you'd expect, making him a very powerful character if you're willing to put some effort into experimentation and/or gamefaqs research. There are others as well, such as Setzer, who has attacks based strangely on gambling, or Relm who has an (exceedingly useless) painting gimmick. But the main problem is, for all this variety, the level progression of these characters is all mostly the same. True, they start off with different basic stats, but by the time you get to level 30 or so, their stats stop increasing entirely and the only further boosts you'll get from levelling up come in the form of Esper bonuses.

Let's talk about Espers, shall we? In essence, they're a simplification of the ingenious job system in FF5, but when I look at the way it was simplified, I can't help but think "if it wasn't broken, why did you fix it?" So here's how it works: the game has no traditional "Summoner" class like prior Final Fantasy games do. Instead, throughout the story, you'll find spirits who will choose to fight with you called Espers. These you can equip to any character, and they may then be summoned for special effects on the battlefield. However, these also cause two separate effects for the person equipping them, the first being what magic they learn. A few spells are indeed learned naturally, but most are acquired through Espers. Each Esper has a set of spells a character may learn from them, and while some Espers have some spells in common, the rate at which the character learns these spells will be different. And do note that this applies to absolutely any character with one rather unfortunate exception. Even Gau, the boy you resigned to doing nothing but letting the computer do random attacks for, can spend the entire battle casting Ultima over and over again if you so choose. While this is clever, magic is generally so useful that it overrides many of the individual abilities that your characters have, meaning that because every character can learn magic, you'll start to have characters blend into one another using similar strategies. This is made worse by the fact that, as I said earlier, after a certain point all the stat boosts you see from level ups come from Espers as well, meaning that you can influence what your characters' strengths are, and unfortunately, it's terribly easy to hit a stat cap for either physical attack or magic if you train properly. So if you play your cards right, by the end of the game you'll have characters with exactly the same stats and exactly the same spells, differing only in what equipment they can use and what their special abilities are. This truly is problematic, because as I've been alluding to, the special abilities generally do tend to lose their effectiveness as the game goes on (if they were ever useful to begin with) to a point where ultimately, the only real reason to use one character over another lies in what they can equip. But do keep in mind that the game makes it terribly irritating and time-consuming to actually max out a stat using Espers, even if it is easy to do. The reason for this is that you only get one Esper for each particular stat boost. So if you want to have multiple characters get the +2 to magic upon level up at once, tough luck, because only one character can get that boost at a time. So if you want to max out your party, you effectively have to put all but one of your party members in reserve and go grind with one character and the Espers you want on him or her until he or she is maxxed out, and then do it for the next character, and so on, because they don't get anything for levelling up without an Esper on them and the level cap is at 99. For what reason could they not just have a simple level up system for the whole game? Or perhaps use the FF5 system of level ups meaning nothing but HP/MP boosts and your actual stats being determined by job abilities and equipment? Either would have worked far better than this system, where you can lose stat points forever if you plan poorly. Things like this sour my enjoyment of the game.

But, as for the presentation, the game looks absolutely gorgeous for an SNES game. The sprites and environments are beautifully rendered, the spell animations are appropriately engaging, the colours pop everywhere, the designs for the characters and monsters are really nice, and overall it's just a really good looking game. Regardless of whatever other faults I can find in this game, I will never deny that it looks pretty as all get out. And the music is oh so fine as well. Each character generally has their own theme, and some of them are just amazing. Setzer's theme for example, is awesome, full of the grandeur you'd want of a swashbuckling airship pilot. Cyan's theme is pretty great too, can't help but love the haunting flute that accompanies him even if he's not the best character to play as. The boss theme is kind of goofy sounding for the tone of the game, but I can't help but enjoy it as well. However, while many have praised the opera house sequence, I didn't particularly care for it. I think it was a bit too ambitious for its time. Something like that would have sounded great on, say, the Playstation, but the Super Nintendo just wasn't the right format for it. Nonetheless, it's memorable as well.

Regardless of anything I've said, I'm still going to recommend playing Final Fantasy 6. It's an iconic game, and there's just no way to get into a serious discussion of the series without playing it. You'd be forgiven for not having played, say, FF2, but this game? Not so much. However do take all the praise you hear about it into careful consideration and temper your expectations, because if you didn't play this game as a child, you probably won't enjoy it as much as some other people seem to. The rose-tinted glasses around this game seem to be heavily in effect, and while the game does have its merits, I don't think it warrants that much praise. But, that is for your own discretion. Game responsibly.
If you're reading this because of the relatively low score I gave this game, understand that I had a lot of built up hype going into Final Fantasy 6. I had heard a lot of claims of "best Final Fantasy" and whatnot, so I very reasonably thought it was going to be the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy gaming experience. At least, it would be better than what I had played before, so I thought. Now understand that, having never experienced these games as a child, I had also decided to play them sequentially. I started with FF1, moved to FF2 and so on. Now as it turned out, FF5 ended up being my favorite of the first five I played. Its gameplay was so good that I couldn't wait to see how much FF6 had improved on it. Unfortunately, with the bar set that high, I couldn't help but be disappointed.

To elaborate, we'll begin with the story. Final Fantasy 6's story comes with few surprises if you've already played previous Final Fantasy games. There's an evil empire, your characters are going to join the resistance movement, it's all fairly standard stuff. The surprises lie in two things, the first being the game's setting. While the traditional European Fantasy stuff is largely intact, in FF6, you get the sense that it underwent an industrial revolution without bothering to change to the Victorian style. You'll be riding the occasional steampunk mecha and piloting an airship that's far more like a blimp than a boat with propellers. I think it fits the somewhat darker tone of 6, kind of showing how there's not as much innocence in this decaying world anymore. The other surprise is that you'll be seeing the game's main villain and final boss quite frequently throughout the game, even right at the beginning. Now mind you, this doesn't actually mean much as said villain is a really bad character, having almost no backstory, character development, or even well established motivation, but it does mean that the fact that what you're fighting is EVIL is much more readily apparent. You actually get to see the evil empire's people do evil things, and you see them do it quite often. It goes a long way in making the player really want to defeat this heinous person.

However, on the other hand, the playable characters are almost all well-established, each going through a character arc or two of their own. A substantial part of the game is spent exploring the people you're playing as, to the point where it really eclipses the main plot of the game in an almost Evangelion-like narrowing of focus. It's a culmination of the direction the stories were heading in FF2 and FF4. 2 was almost all plot and no character, 4 had a decent mix of both, and 6 is almost all character and no plot, which is especially apparent in the last third of the game, which is spent merely traveling around the world and regaining the party members you lost in the transitory event by finding them and working through their various neuroses. Or not. You are only required to have three party members to beat the game, and while it's easier to beat the final dungeon if you have everyone, it's by no means necessary. I completely passed over rescuing main character Locke, for example, because he was my least favorite party member in the entire game, and I did this at the cost of the game's most powerful spells. But it didn't matter, I still stomped the final boss flat. Like many, many turn based games, you can feel free to reduce the difficulty as you please merely by grinding enough. But anyway, please do note that this doesn't evenly apply to all characters. Gau, for example, will get very little development or even much of anything. Same with Strago. But your main characters, Terra, Locke, Celes, Edgar, Sabin, etc. all do get their share of screentime with stories that surpass anything you've seen in a Final Fantasy game before in depth. Not that this is necessarily a good thing (I will always despise Locke even if he is more developed than the entire cast of FF5), but it certainly does make the characters, and thus the world around them, feel more alive. But anyway, barring a few particularly memorable moments, the actual plot of the game isn't likely to leave much of an impression on you. It has been a while since I last played 6 at the time of this writing and I struggle to think of more than 2-3 things that actually happened in the game and had a significant bearing on the plot as a whole rather than just the story of some character. But the moments you do remember, however, are likely to stay with you for time to come.

On to the gameplay. In short, the gameplay of FF6 is not only a step down from 5, it's also a step down from 4 and 3 and yeah it's pretty much the worst of any of the 2D games. But why is this so, you ask? It's a bit complex. Allow me to explain. Now, similar to how each character has their own personalized place in the story, each character also has their own personalized place on the battlefield. Every one of them is wholly unique, with the exception of Terra and Celes, who are near clones of each other in terms of what they can do and what they can equip, which is not a bad thing at all as the two of them are arguably the two most useful, powerful and versatile characters in the game. These align heavily with the classes of prior games (so you'll get Terra and Celes, who are more or less Red Wizards, Locke, who is an obvious Thief, Edgar, who's obviously meant to be a Dragoon, etc.) However, the game does throw you a few curveballs in regards to this, such as Sabin, the monk stand in who ostensibly has fighting game command inputs in order to do his special attacks, but falls behind in the equipment department and is thus fairly weak at the end of the game in contrast to your standard FF monk (unless you equip him with the relic that allows him to equip anything, that is). And then you have Gau, who is a totally off the wall ridiculous character that attacks by going into "Rages," in which he basically goes berserk after you choose a rage for him to go into, using random attacks based on the enemies that Gau has encountered. If Gau encounters an enemy, he gets the Rage for that enemy, so the game has over 200 rages for him to go into, and many of them have abilities beyond anything you'd expect, making him a very powerful character if you're willing to put some effort into experimentation and/or gamefaqs research. There are others as well, such as Setzer, who has attacks based strangely on gambling, or Relm who has an (exceedingly useless) painting gimmick. But the main problem is, for all this variety, the level progression of these characters is all mostly the same. True, they start off with different basic stats, but by the time you get to level 30 or so, their stats stop increasing entirely and the only further boosts you'll get from levelling up come in the form of Esper bonuses.

Let's talk about Espers, shall we? In essence, they're a simplification of the ingenious job system in FF5, but when I look at the way it was simplified, I can't help but think "if it wasn't broken, why did you fix it?" So here's how it works: the game has no traditional "Summoner" class like prior Final Fantasy games do. Instead, throughout the story, you'll find spirits who will choose to fight with you called Espers. These you can equip to any character, and they may then be summoned for special effects on the battlefield. However, these also cause two separate effects for the person equipping them, the first being what magic they learn. A few spells are indeed learned naturally, but most are acquired through Espers. Each Esper has a set of spells a character may learn from them, and while some Espers have some spells in common, the rate at which the character learns these spells will be different. And do note that this applies to absolutely any character with one rather unfortunate exception. Even Gau, the boy you resigned to doing nothing but letting the computer do random attacks for, can spend the entire battle casting Ultima over and over again if you so choose. While this is clever, magic is generally so useful that it overrides many of the individual abilities that your characters have, meaning that because every character can learn magic, you'll start to have characters blend into one another using similar strategies. This is made worse by the fact that, as I said earlier, after a certain point all the stat boosts you see from level ups come from Espers as well, meaning that you can influence what your characters' strengths are, and unfortunately, it's terribly easy to hit a stat cap for either physical attack or magic if you train properly. So if you play your cards right, by the end of the game you'll have characters with exactly the same stats and exactly the same spells, differing only in what equipment they can use and what their special abilities are. This truly is problematic, because as I've been alluding to, the special abilities generally do tend to lose their effectiveness as the game goes on (if they were ever useful to begin with) to a point where ultimately, the only real reason to use one character over another lies in what they can equip. But do keep in mind that the game makes it terribly irritating and time-consuming to actually max out a stat using Espers, even if it is easy to do. The reason for this is that you only get one Esper for each particular stat boost. So if you want to have multiple characters get the +2 to magic upon level up at once, tough luck, because only one character can get that boost at a time. So if you want to max out your party, you effectively have to put all but one of your party members in reserve and go grind with one character and the Espers you want on him or her until he or she is maxxed out, and then do it for the next character, and so on, because they don't get anything for levelling up without an Esper on them and the level cap is at 99. For what reason could they not just have a simple level up system for the whole game? Or perhaps use the FF5 system of level ups meaning nothing but HP/MP boosts and your actual stats being determined by job abilities and equipment? Either would have worked far better than this system, where you can lose stat points forever if you plan poorly. Things like this sour my enjoyment of the game.

But, as for the presentation, the game looks absolutely gorgeous for an SNES game. The sprites and environments are beautifully rendered, the spell animations are appropriately engaging, the colours pop everywhere, the designs for the characters and monsters are really nice, and overall it's just a really good looking game. Regardless of whatever other faults I can find in this game, I will never deny that it looks pretty as all get out. And the music is oh so fine as well. Each character generally has their own theme, and some of them are just amazing. Setzer's theme for example, is awesome, full of the grandeur you'd want of a swashbuckling airship pilot. Cyan's theme is pretty great too, can't help but love the haunting flute that accompanies him even if he's not the best character to play as. The boss theme is kind of goofy sounding for the tone of the game, but I can't help but enjoy it as well. However, while many have praised the opera house sequence, I didn't particularly care for it. I think it was a bit too ambitious for its time. Something like that would have sounded great on, say, the Playstation, but the Super Nintendo just wasn't the right format for it. Nonetheless, it's memorable as well.

Regardless of anything I've said, I'm still going to recommend playing Final Fantasy 6. It's an iconic game, and there's just no way to get into a serious discussion of the series without playing it. You'd be forgiven for not having played, say, FF2, but this game? Not so much. However do take all the praise you hear about it into careful consideration and temper your expectations, because if you didn't play this game as a child, you probably won't enjoy it as much as some other people seem to. The rose-tinted glasses around this game seem to be heavily in effect, and while the game does have its merits, I don't think it warrants that much praise. But, that is for your own discretion. Game responsibly.
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05-29-15 03:49 PM
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Your review is well thought-out, and I love you took your time with it. Thank you for discussing the story score, a pet-peeve of mine if no one even attempts to explain any kind of detail. This is my favorite Final Fantasy (I've played all but #3), but hey, you clearly stated what your aggravations were with it. Great review!
Your review is well thought-out, and I love you took your time with it. Thank you for discussing the story score, a pet-peeve of mine if no one even attempts to explain any kind of detail. This is my favorite Final Fantasy (I've played all but #3), but hey, you clearly stated what your aggravations were with it. Great review!
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