Games I Should Have Played: Final Fantasy VI

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be looking at games I've had sitting on my shelf, silently mocking me for having not played them yet. Some are undoubtedly classics; some are probably just steaming shitpiles. But I'm going to find that out for myself, and hopefully have some fun in the process.

I understand now why I didn't get Final Fantasy games for so long, and why I now really love (a lot of) them. Approaching Final Fantasy games as the kind of video game experiences that we've come to expect – that is, ones where choices and player input are the king – is the wrong approach. What Final Fantasy games do, and it's something that I've noticed to a far greater degree with VI, is literally "cast" you in the Final Fantasy play. This isn't a game to create, it's one to discover.

Final Fantasy VI treats you like an actor, though you've only been given part of the script. You need to discover the rest using the knowledge you've gained from playing (practicing) with other video games, other JRPGs, and probably most importantly of all, other Final Fantasy games. You can choose to go down a different path than the game wants or needs you to, but that only leads to a dark, empty place full of deaths and excessive violence. No, the only way to survive Final Fantasy VI, and most JRPGs actually, is to play by the very specific, idiosyncratic rules laid out by the game.

My hats are off to anyone who can do this using pure intuition. It really would be like walking out as the main character of a musical and not knowing any of the lines, yet being able to pull off the performance anyways. I absolutely had to play through Final Fantasy VI using a walkthrough, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. There are so many weird little things that can leave you for dead without a second glance. Unless you studied ahead of time, how would you know to use a Phoenix Down on an undead enemy? Or that you can use Vanish on a boss, followed by Doom, to beat (most of them) all of the time? You wouldn't, and you would struggle, and you would die a lot, and it wouldn't make any sense why this was happening.

I would normally think of this kind of game design as "wrong," but I had such a blast playing this game that even just following the instructions on the walkthrough made the game highly enjoyable. There was a specific task to accomplish and a specific way to do it, and it was my job to carry out that task. At least Final Fantasy VI is pretty upfront about it. There are too many games that are just as linear, just as strict, but try to make it seem like you're really in control. You're not. You never are. The illusion can sometimes be rewarding, but Final Fantasy VI is almost Brechtian in its refusal to fall victim to the pretense of suspended disbelief.

Now, of course, that doesn't extend to the actual plot of the game. Final Fantasy VI is the same kind of "fuck the empire" plot we're used to by now, though VI has the benefit of being the first to do it really, really well. Unlike a lot of later entries in the series, VI has a really strong premise and really fun and interesting characters. It's interesting that VI is often held up as the pinnacle of the series and of JRPGs in general, especially considering how radically different it is from those games in its willingness to experiment (while staying within the traditional tropes of the JRPG, of course).

The game doesn't follow a single protagonist and his group of loyal pals; it follows a group of fourteen freedom fighters who are spread about the world and are coming together to resist Gestahl and his maniacal joker-servant, the now-legendary Kefka. The scenery isn't your typical "lush green village" followed by "brown trek through the wilderness" followed by "final battle on a sheet of ice"; Final Fantasy VI changes up the scenery to include a ride on a ghost train, a battle on an industrial mine cart, and several scenes at a solitary house on a beach. This doesn't even take into account that the world pretty much literally ends at the halfway point: if you haven't played the game, I won't spoil it here, but let's just say that some events conspire to fundamentally reshape the world, effectively turning the plot thrust of the first half of the game on its head.

This kind of daring nature extends to the characters as well, who are all given broad enough personalities that they are instantly recognizable given their (necessarily) short screen time, but who are idiosyncratic enough that you quickly develop favourites. Whether it's the amnesiac, taciturn Terra (a Final Fantasy trope by this point, but not when VI was released) to the bodybuilding Sabin to the womanizing Edgar to the feral Gau, each character is given enough personality to carry a game of their own, all without resorting to the kinds of empathy-building that VII or VIII force on you (even though I also like those games SO SUE ME).

From a gameplay perspective, FFVI is the most successful interpretation of the standard random encounter/turn-based battle system that players of the series have come to know and love. Part of the reason for this success is actually because the amount of customization you can do is limited. Each character not only has a specific speciality – Edgar, for instance, can use tools such as drills and chainsaws to inflict damage, while Cyan has a variety of "swordtechs" that require the player to strategically wait for it to fill up. Probably best of all is Sabin, who requires Street Fighter-esque codes to be inputted for maximum damage. These different abilities make strategizing a necessity, and gives the game some character that can sometimes be lacking in more standard setups. The ability to transfer these abilities would have been to the detriment of the game, I think, so it's a really nice touch.

Yes, you'll eventually be traversing the landscape in an airship, and yes, there are quite a few moments of complete nonsense. But there's also a scene where Celes has to pretend to be an actor in an opera (a tacit acknowledgement of the MO of the game, perhaps?), an attempted suicide, many scenes in pubs, and a ninja assassin for hire. This outlandishness and willingness to push the boundaries of what game developers had even thought up in the 16-bit era must have been completely revelatory back in 1994. Now, it's a little bit quaint, but shows the lack of willingness on the part of modern developers to push any narrative envelopes the way FFVI does.

So I definitely had a blast with FFVI. It lives up to all the hype, and is just as vital today as it was seventeen years ago. Maybe too many scenarios end in incongruous boss battles, and maybe it's too long for modern tastes. But maybe these things are just part of the charm, part of the idiosyncracies, and we just need to learn our parts. Few games tap into that "actor" quality like FFVI, and as a self-professed theatre nerd, it was pretty revelatory to see that kind of design in action. And mostly, this makes me want to do what I've been meaning to do for awhile, which is to play through every Final Fantasy game in the main series, so keep an eye out for that.

But I can't help but feel that after Final Fantasy VI, such an endeavour is going to feel a little bit like a letdown.