By popular demand, I present to you…
(Final Fantasy VI)
I don’t have nearly as much experience with Final Fantasy VI as a lot of other GAF members do, or as much as I’d like to have (with respect to how much time I’ve had with FF4, for example). I rented it once when I was a kid, played it for a bit, and really hated it. I hated FF6 a lot. I hated the music (yes, I genuinely
hated the music when I was younger, and it was probably of the biggest factors in me not playing it ever again until I was in my teens), I hated the setting, I hated the art direction, etc.
I can be a bit of a stubborn person, and I was way more stubborn when I was a kid. I resisted change. I felt like Final Fantasy VI signaled a drastic change in terms of setting, scope, and direction for the series and I didn’t want any part of it. It’s a little weird because I vaguely remember one of my cousins playing it once (I have a memory of him playing through some sequence in Narshe), and them enjoying it… which usually means that I might enjoy it. I was attracted to FF7, for example, partially because they played through it constantly. So… out of my stubbornness, I never finished FF6 when I was a kid, so I don’t really share the same nostalgic feeling that other people seem to have towards it.
I didn’t end up playing and finishing Final Fantasy VI until high school when I bought my own copy of the SNES cart. I ended up liking it, if only for scenario reasons and graphical/musical prowess. I didn’t get much out of the ability customization (I honestly feel like this aspect needs rebalancing or certain blocks in place to prevent skill homogenization… and maybe I’ll go for a 1-Esper per character run, I dunno yet) or the battle system (where the change was that you could switch characters’ menus now). The main reason why I started this playthrough was because I can’t exactly remember the proper reason as to why I don’t like the dungeon designs in this game. It didn’t necessarily have to do with only aesthetics.
So, that’s what I want to figure out. I’ve only played FF6 only maybe… 4 times? That’s not nearly as many times as I’ve played FF4, so forgive me if I get facts wrong.
Anyway, let’s begin.
I think this game is the obvious turning point as to the fact that they wanted to make Final Fantasy more cinematic. Final Fantasy IV certainly was like that before, with its fixation on narrative and fixed character jobs. But Final Fantasy VI had the advantage of time (ie: Squaresoft getting used to the Super Famicom, working with the SPC 700 and Mode 7 a little more to achieve desired more cinematic results). It’s rather interesting, though, because Sakaguchi stepped down from directing the game after most of it had been completed (though he’d written the story and directed a lot of the event scenes (before handing that job and directorship over to Kitase).
Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
So… FF6 is cinematic. You can tell that from the title screen alone.
Opening Theme (up to 1:12)
When you start up the game and leave it running for a little while, you get a little scene depicting the camera moving down, showing stormy clouds, and down to focus on a faraway town in the shadows, with only the lights from their houses visible. This ends up setting the mood of the game a little bit, and it kind of changes what the player’s first impression going into the game is going to be like.
It tells the player several things, but I’ll hold off on listing them until we get through this next bit first.
I’m not particularly fond of this sort of game design, where scenes come before gameplay. But I understand what they want to accomplish. These are technical feats on the SFC, so I completely get it. And it doesn’t really bug me much either. It’s just that when developers go overboard and make their cutscenes the centerpiece of their game design and philosophy that I take issue with it (no i’m not taking potshots about another game in the series released this decade why do you guys keep saying that in all of these playthroughs i’ve done) Though I’m one of those bozos who thinks Final Fantasy should be
less cinematic (which is why I was incredibly indifferent to the Agni’s Philosophy tech demo), but I digress.
Opening Theme (Part B) (Up until 2:21)
I’ve always liked these kinds of things in video games, actually, and I sort of miss them. Yeah, we still get them now, but they generally seem to serve as credits or opening scenes rather than giving the player a general view of what the game world is supposed to be like. I remember falling deeply in love with the
Illusion of Gaia one when I was little, for example. It seamlessly blended in with the title screen, let me know parts of the narrative, let me understand the world that I was about to run through when playing the game, etc. Sure, the text is sloppy, and it isn’t that well-directed, but I really liked it for some reason. The
Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past one is really freaking impressive and I remember being hooked on watching it too.
And I liked this one a lot when I first played FF6. It generally does the same thing that the others I mentioned did, though there were two ways they could have done this. Choosing scenes that depicted what the text was referring to (The War of the Magi, for example; A Link to the Past does that in its intro about people clashing over the Golden Power), or they could have continued setting the scene for what Terra and her troops were about to do.
I think what they ended up doing (the latter option) is more cohesive, despite the scenes not necessarily always matching the text. The bit about steam engines kind of matches the Narshe portion of the scene, and the bit about enslaving matches the Empire portion. And the mistake portion completely matches up with the stupids scaling the cliff to do something stupid in Narshe. It’s fine.
Also can anyone spot the grammatical error in the Empire screen?
Nothing’s happening except wind gusting around. I guess it’s to give some sort of gravity to the last line uttered above. Oh, yeah, I like the background here. It’s really nice.
Oh, there’re the stupids I was talking about earlier. And considering the previous line, I’m going to guess we’re going to do something completely stupid.
(This is Biggs. I can see how they got Vicks out of it; ビックス could be read like “Bicks”. And again, there isn’t really a “v” in Japanese, “Biggs” probably sounded a little dumb for those not super-familiar with Star Wars, and Vicks sounds a little more normal.) Hold on, wouldn’t that make the girl Luke Skywalker because they’re acting as our wingmen?
Aw shiet.
Say, did you know that in Final Fantasy games, Biggs is usually Wedge’s superior officer?
So if you put two and two together, you can surmise that “Espers” have something to do with magic given that they’re talking about the War of the Magi. Everything magic-related had to have been destroyed since then, but this thing being here is a little curious.
Why are they calling her a sorceress if magic’s no longer around? How curious.
Forget that noise; this means she’s gonna be in our final party, then, if she’s got mad skillz like that.
Hey man, silent protagonists can be pretty cool.
No, I’m not biased or anything.
Opening Theme (Part C)
Well, this is one of the most iconic scenes in RPGs in general. Watching them trudge through the snow in the foreground, with the town you saw earlier on surfacing in the background little by little. The scene direction here is really good, and the music enhances it (which is why I think most people really like the scene here).
Oh, and credits surface on the horizon. This is… quite movie-like. I’m not going to go through a lot of these because, well, you all know who a lot of these guys are and I’ll probably be repeating myself from the Final Fantasy IV playthrough. Let’s save it for the post-game.
Ted Woolsey will be our translator during our stay. Woolsey worked on Chrono Trigger, SaGa III, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, and a game that some of us would like to forget, Shadow Madness. The term “Woolseyism” comes from his last name, and refers to script changes that aren’t very faithful to the original Japanese script (but hey man, they generally worked). Seriously, go read that script where someone retranslated Chrono Trigger exactly as the Japanese script was written and it’s really awful.
If it means anything, I like the Final Fantasy VI SNES script a lot.
So, as I was saying before, the intro tells us several things:
- It sets the tone for the game in terms of musical use and the colours used throughout the intro (lots of dark colours, set at night, staging a reconnaissance mission in an isolated town in the north, even the snow falling assists in this.
- You’re introduced to the main character and the main villain in the prologue screens.
- You get to listen to a few of the musical motifs in this opening theme.
- The entire introduction shows how cinematic this game is going to be. The credits screens, the game relying on animations over dialogue in some circumstances, etc. The game tells its story through the background/foreground art design, camera pans, character animations (and there are a lot of them), Mode 7 use, the depth of the soundtrack, etc.
- The stormy clouds and the colours used at the beginning at least clues the player into the mood and atmosphere of the game and blending it into the small narrative of the War of the Magi. In general, scene direction is good at the beginning and it’s generally consistent as the game goes on.
- Backgrounds and foregrounds are more detailed than ever before. Backgrounds take really good advantage of CRT blending as I went a little into depth about in the Final Fantasy Community Thread
Probably bunch of other stuff I’m missing right now, but the opening scenes tell the player a lot.
Well, we now know that Vicks and Wedge aren’t part of the new Tomb Raider development team, right?!
Let’s look at our Band of Brothers.
Oh, uh… I can’t differentiate the two, so we’re going to do this instead.
As you can tell, front rows and back rows are in this game, in the way that FF2, FF3, and FF5 did the modifications before it. But the west wouldn’t really know that, so I would imagine that the shift from one row automatically being for the back to being able to put anyone in the back row when needed was a welcome change for people back then.
The girl has two spells available to her: Cure and Fire. They are expensive so we’re not going to use them.
I think this is cute. If you do something wrong in the menu like select something that isn’t selectable, the menu Mode 7s out.
Mysterious Girl is kinda decked out here. I expected just a weapon and a piece of clothing. MithrilKnife grants +30 ATK, the MithrilShield grants +28 Def/+18MDef/+LOL Evade. Leather Cap adds +11 Def/+7 MDef, and Leather Armour adds +28 Def/+19MDef.
I’m sure everyone knows that the Evade stat in FF6 SNES doesn’t matter, right? Briefly, the Evade Bug in FF6 makes the P.Eva stat do nothing. M.Eva would be the one that determines the characters’ rates of evading both P. and M. attacks in this version. Blind doesn’t really do anything outside of affecting Strago and thus the Goggles don’t do anything (no, seriously, the goggles… they do nothing!). So… yeah. It has a few other issues, but those are the big ones.
We’re going to get into Relics later. They’re nice things.
The two goons are stronger than Mysterious Girl in almost every way except Magic Power. Hm. Well, that makes sense because she has access to a few spells and they don’t.
People complain that they don’t know what stats mean, but they’re self-explanatory in a lot of RPGs if you’ve played a lot of them. They just have different names: Vigour = Strength, Speed is self-explanatory, Magic Power is self-explanatory, Battle Power factors into the calculation with vigour to see how much damage you’ll cause, and I assume the rest of the stats are self-explanatory.
Stamina in this game refers to a lot of stuff, actually. It’s different in a lot of FF games. So in FF6, it affect stuff like your resistance to Instadeath, how much Regen’s going to affect you (like how fast it recovers HP), how much damage you take from Sap/Poison, how much you get healed from Tintinabars, etc. It’s kind of hard to max out Stamina in this game if you wanted to (so if you really wanted to do it, I’d probably keep your selected character(s) at lower levels to take advantage of Stamina bonuses that Espers give you.
The first thing you’ll probably notice when you level up and ever check the stats menu is that the only things that change whenever you level up are your HP and MP. If you didn’t know that before, ya certainly know that now! This feeds into the game’s growth/custom system, but we’re not going to talk about that now. So, if you want to take advantage of the growth bonuses that the custom system affords to the player, don’t grind a ton before you get access to that stuff. Of course, that might not affect your playstyle anyway.
And if you don’t believe me regarding stat growth, check into the next update.
We only have a dinky little pendant that we can use when we’re poor. They totally prepped for this recon mission.
We have a ton of options available to us. I might knock the battle speed back to 3 so it’ll be easier to take screens. Battle mode is always going to be set to Active because we’ve GOTTA GO FAST. We also have the chance to modify the text windows and menu in various ways…
OH GOD WHAT’S HAPPENING
Battle Theme
I’ll reveal a secret. The main battle theme is one of the biggest reasons why I hated the game’s soundtrack when I was little. I hated the backing because it sounded too rough, I think. Yeah, I was a strange kid. Anyway...
It’s no use! Lobo, Lobo, bring back Sheriff Lobo! Lobos can either be your first or second enemy in this game. Um, these get a little harder in the next sequence but you can OHKO it with a Magitek Armour blast.
Speaking of which, you’ll notice that we have a brand new command! No Attack command or anything. Mysterious Girl gets access to Magic in addition, but the Magitek command is a fairly interesting one that we’ll look at momentarily.
Also note that the boxes for the Magitek Armour are kind of big and not normal character-sized so we can’t go anywhere cool.
So, are we on the good side or the bad side?
Guards are boring. They have a 33% chance of inflicting crits. They’re boring.
The biggest news is that we can summon UFOs in this game to bring people back to their home planet! I’m guessing this is Pupu’s prototype.
The other attacks that Mysterious Girl has access to are:
- Fire Beam: Fire elemental (60 atk pwr)
- Ice Beam: Ice elemental (61 atk pwr)
- Bolt Beam: Lightning elemental (62 atk pwr)
- Heal Force: Heals People
- Bio Blast: Poison Elemental damage to everyone (60 atk pwr; no displacement damage so it’s still strong when used in a group; also inflicts Poison and Stop)
- X-Fer: Summons a Damn UFO (has a chance of failure with regards to Instant Death)
- Confuser: Confuses all enemies
- TekMissile: Ignores Defense; non-elemental damage; can inflict Sap
I just took this to show you what Bolt Blast and Ice Blast look like.
Guys, I hate mowing down enemies like this. This is designed to show you how inferior everything is to the Empire’s technology, and what they can do with powerful weapons in their hands, but man I dislike it when I’m super-strong and the game presents little challenge to me.
Here’s something new. This game introduces the Pincer Attack, something used in this game, and in Final Fantasy VII (and, like, one battle in FFX). Yeah, so in a way, you kind of see that FF6 was building up to FF7, and you end up seeing a lot of callbacks to FF6 in FF7. It’s interesting. Pincer Attacks will start the surprised party at 0 ATB. And anyone that’s attacked from behind will take more damage. And you can use group attacks on one side like I did.
There’s a glitch associated with this. So rows are supposed to be unavailable for this, but if you select Row when the enemy catches you in its own pincer attack, it’ll make the party turn around and switches everyone to the back row (because everyone’s supposed to be in the “front row”
. What does this mean? If you want to physically attack, your attacks are weakened, so bear that in mind.
So Bio Blast is kind of broken in this part.
Yeah, maybe the
only mine shaft we have access to.
Game, I’m not a stupid.
(continued in next post)
Next Post: Lightning-Absorbing Snails!
