Silver Goggles: A review of Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy VI was released in 1994. 20 years and several revisions later it was re-released for the android OS. This is the version I played for the purposes of this review. It is not particularly about the 2014 smartphone edition and I do not care that they made the graphics better or let me touch the screen and these things fall outside the scope of this review.
Industry and Fantasy and Then the Game Starts
After a brief glimpse of Kefka (more on him later) and some words detailing the game world's impressively uninteresting history, the game opens with two soldiers and their mute chattel. They all ride big robots and can kill anyone very easily. I can, because I am them. We have to find an Aztec lizard-bird in a crystal as part of an operation which makes increasingly less sense as the game's plot becomes clearer. It turns out that Biggs and Wedge are not the heroes of our story, as the crystal bird deletes them with its mind and the game starts anew. But it shows us that the empire is really strong, yet the magical crystal bird is much stronger still. It shows us the game is not set in the traditional Japanese fantasy setting, but is instead a somewhat confused world that is a bit in the future, a bit in fantasy, but mostly in 1830-60 Europe. Despite a prominent reference to firearms as one of the three defining features of the current state of the world, none appear in the game.
Instead of Biggs and Wedge, it was the other one who was important. She's a magic-user being exploited by the Empire who once killed 50 magitek knights in an event that's very unclear, but lets us know she's the big kahuna.
The game feeds us more information about the Empire and the return of magic. It's all pretty rote and the game doesn't waste any more time than it needs to letting us know. We are instead introduced to our protagonist (more on that later), Locke, and given the quest (mobilising the underground resistance group 'The Returners') that keeps me occupied for the game's first act.
The Returners are an international guerilla force consisting of the old guy in Narshe, another old guy in a cave, Locke, and one other guy. Apparently up until now they've been about as successful as you'd imagine that outfit to be. But now Terra changes everything. The Other Guy is our first port of call and our next dose of plot. He lives in a mechanical castle that can move through the sand and he is the king there. At this castle we have the first showdown with Kefka (more on him later), the chief antagonist throughout the story and probably the game's most noteworthy character. We're at the castle for all of five minutes, a recurring situation as we dribble across the world map at a fantastic rate throughout the act.
Map Churn and Why Final Fantasy VI's World isn't Real
At around this time, strolling through the Veldt or somewhere, I realise just how much of the map I've churned through. The game's barely started, the plot is still making its opening moves and I've walked and rafted across a couple of continents. If the start of the game was France, it's like I've walked over to Bangladesh before lunch. In the game after this, Final Fantasy VII, when you're this far in to the game you still have hours before you leave the first city. In Final Fantasy VIII again, although you've gone out on a couple of day trips you're still very tied to your starting location as your home at this stage. But move ahead to Final Fantasy IX and you're back to globetrotting and have ticked off half a dozen locations by now.
This is a symptom of a fundamental difference between the two pairs of games. In essence the world of VI isn't supposed to be a world. It's just backgrounds, stages, places to run through. The NPCs aren't supposed to be real people, just a less immersion-breaking version of 'press x to jump' pop-ups. In VII you spend hours in Midgar because what Midgar is and what Midgar does are critical parts of the story. In VI, Vector is just the place where the king lives. You travel across the world so fast purely because it's more fun to change the background all the time than have the game all take place in one house, and that's really the only reason the world exists at all. You never spend more than 10 minutes in a town because they aren't really towns. If the game was 3d you'd be able to rotate the camera and see that they're just pictures of houses held up by scaffolding, with NPCs having cigarette breaks behind them. I don't think this is necessarily worse, or lazy, and I don't think it's by accident. It's no coincidence that VI and IX, the two games that take place on sets and stages, feature plays as key parts of their plot. But more on that later.
So we're in the middle of act one of the game, which is split in to a pretty standard three acts. The party you recruited on purpose gets separated and they all have their own stories where they recruit more people by accident. Splitting the group up (and even letting me pick which order to do it in!) was better than I expected from a 20 year-old game. It's also a nice way for the game to shift the focus around and shine a spotlight on a few different characters. Or it would be, if they actually did that.
Final Fantasy VI Features Fourteen Playable Characters
A thing Yoshinori Kitase said is:
“We began work on Final Fantasy VI with the idea that every character is the protagonist of the story. Everyone on the team contributed ideas for characters into a melting pot. We were very keen to design a game featuring individual episodes for each character. In fact, Final Fantasy VI’s influence may have been responsible for the greater emphasis on character creation in subsequent titles in the series.”
This is repeated all over by people talking about the game as one of its big contributions to the advancement of games, one of the reasons it should still be remembered and played today and why it turns up on lists of games that are good. But just because that's what they said and that's what they set out to do doesn't mean that's what happened. (It didn't.)
They didn't not do it, though. They just didn't do it enough. Instead of a game where every character is the protagonist, they made a game where no one is the protagonist. Instead of everyone on the development team contributing ideas, they seem to have followed what is apparently the traditional method of videogame design and gave the characters out in pairs to different people to write as they saw fit with no oversight.
The result, you'll be surprised to learn, is inconsistency. There are three characters who are in charge of pushing the plot around and whose development is a part of the main thread of the narrative. Then there are a handful of second-tier characters who get one or two of these "individual episodes," if you bother to do them, but have no real relevance to the story. The rest of the characters are just bullshit.
Fourteen characters is too many. A game like this without a clear protagonist is interesting. I'm torn on how I feel about the characters. I think basically it's a sort-of good idea that they didn't think all the way through, and then executed quite badly. Compared to what came before, it's a big leap forward. Looking at what came afterwards, they (or anyone else) never really built on it. As a result it's this orphaned experiment, and what is maybe the definitive JRPG has a cast of characters completely unlike anything else in the genre.
Or, actually, it's all overblown and it really isn't that different to everything else. Take away that top layer of characters and you're left with something extremely familiar. Your Cyans and Shadows and Sabins work just like your Zells and Red XIIIs and Lulus. The shit characters are like the ones from the earlier FFs that Sakaguchi wrote.
The interesting thing, then, is how there's no main character. And this is interesting for what it doesn't do as much as what it does. Up to this point, in RPGs both Japanese and Western, the main character is basically a cipher for the player. Often silent and often with a customisable name so they can have your actual dumb real-life name. If they have a personality, it will be a benignly bland fresh-faced unobjectionable protagonist you can project yourself on to without difficulty. They're just your avatar in the game world. The term avatar itself comes from the nameless protagonists of the interminable Ultima series of RPGs that fill a similar place in the Western canon that the early Final Fantasies do in Japan.
The ramifications of not giving us this pilotable flesh-drone come from both sides: as a player, you have to look at the characters of the game as actual characters with motives and feelings, instead of just you and the sort of people you'd maybe have as friends if you weren't a piece of shit. As a story, the game now has to provide these people with motives and feelings, as you no longer have any characters who will gladly walk in to any dungeon or castle because they know that that is how you win the game.
So that's interesting and we'll come back to how they dealt with that for the characters later. Back to the story. Split up in the three groups like this is where I find both my first positive and negative moments with this game. You have a nice bit with Locke where you are sneaking around past all the imperial guards and whatnot, and every now and then you have to steal the clothes off their backs for a new disguise to get past the next staircase. Eventually you find Celes and escape with her. You then have to go backwards through a dungeon you've already been through. This is the first time the game really drags for me. Stuck with only two party members (neither of whom have autocrossbow) is when it becomes the horrible grind. You can't do the random fights perfectly, and this plays on some part of my mind. You're attriting, no way around it. No Tools or Blitz or Pray, the big MP-free healing and hurting stuff. You're taking damage, you're losing MP. This bothers me. As soon as the first fight is over I'm already counting down until I can get out and get my HP and MP back to full. And with just two of you, just hitting with basic attacks, every fight is a chore.
As I'm playing this part of the game my little brother is staying with me, and he's playing VII on his Vita at the same time. He's only really playing it because he knows I want him to. He likes the story and the FMVs just like I did when I was his age but he can't stand the random fights. And I can't act like he just isn't 'up to the challenge'. I can't pull some 'back in my day/kids today' shit, because random fights are fucking terrible. In retrospect it's impossible to see how they were ever a good idea. It's his second time trying to play VII, and as I write this up months later, I'm pretty sure he didn't finish it this time either. And that's a shame, but I can't blame him. The fact people are still making games with random fights in is staggering. But also drearily unsurprising.
Luckily after this section there's a bit with Sabin and Cyan which is the same except about 8 times as long. After being introduced to Cyan, a very noble samurai guy who sadly loses his family a moment after we meet him, I go through a forest and then down a 'ghost train' which goes on forever. I lose a little bit of health each fight through no fault of my own, and just hope I correctly predicted the amount of potions I would need about 4 hours ago when I was last at a shop. I am sick of it by the time I'm about 6% through it and it takes me a couple of joyless days to force myself through the rest of it. Eventually, finally, it is over. The train pulls up at a station and we leave. Sabin essentially says "fuck that fucking train in its fucking train-blowhole," which is exactly how I feel. Him and I both laugh. Then the game hits you with a sucker-punch. People get on the train after we get off. Ghost people, since it's a ghost train. Cyan's ghost family, to be precise. You just have to watch as he stands there, shouting uselessly as he sees his wife and young son for the last time. All that joyless grind on the train put me right in the mindset of Sabin, but then this miserable shit puts you square in Cyan's shoes as you watch your family get driven away in to the void. It's really sad and I actually feel sad, which I didn't expect. In fact I feel bad. Guilty for being flippant and forgetting about Cyan, even though to this point he's been a terrible pastiche. It only lasts a second but it was one more emotion than I assumed this game would provide.
After this all the separate groups come together as what is now recognisably 'the party'. You have a little set piece where you have to defend that magical crystal bird from the intro and stop it falling in to the hands of the empire. You have your first fight with Kefka (more on him later). And our poor magical tortured Terra turns in to a pink monster and flies away, proving she's too weird and too not-there to really be the main character (because there isn't one. And also because she's the 'special magic girl' who is the main female and non-lead in every single Final Fantasy I've played). It's the end of Act 1, everyone.
Act 2 and This Game's Mythology is Terrible
So we have to go find Terra. We do and it's not hard: after passing through a couple of very dull towns you find she's in another one, at the top of a tall tower (if only it was the tallest tower in this game). There's no boss at the top of the tower, just her in bed. I guess pacing dictates that as there's no climactic fight at the top, we have to 'have a scene' to make up for the joyless journey we just made. The scene we get is some world-building delivered by Ramuh, an esper who is here. It's very bad. The message the story gives us is very confused. There's a general 'unchecked industrial progress and exploiting the world is bad'/'mucking about with powerful stuff you don't understand is bad,' theme, but unlike the environmental message in Final Fantasy VII, which is coherent and and fits perfectly into the world of the game, the vaguely anti-nuclear message here is a mess. The bad guys are the most advanced, industrialised country, they have the big army with the tanks and missiles and all this, but the actual 'danger' is espers and magic, which is totally divorced from this. And despite it being the most advanced guys researching and developing new, scary stuff, it's actually all backwards-looking, tying it in to all this esper shit from 10 billion years ago. It's a halting, nascent attempt at having some kind of message about our actual world whilst also hitting a lot of the tropes of standard videogame fantasy fare. I think the having your cake and eating it problems are best displayed by the weak-as-shit event that happens for the first time here, and an embarrassing amount of other times later on - Ramuh commits suicide so that he can become a special crystal you can use to be strong and have spells. The big crime the empire is doing? Hunting and killing espers to turn them in to magicite. Unlike Final Fantasy VII, where the antagonists are abusing and exploiting the planet in a couple of different ways, and you essentially have to stop them from doing this and let the planet sort itself out, here you have to do the exact same thing that is the crime of the guys you're trying to stop. But it's fine because all the espers you meet are totally fine with killing themselves so that you can be powerful enough to stop them being killed. This is terrible and never acknowledged at all. After you have like 10 of these magicite things it's not like you get an option to maybe leave some of these poor guys alive. No one ever even shows a hint of remorse. Just hurry up and die so I can put you on my arm.
The Play Within a Play and Final Fantasy VI as Theatre
The opera. Rightly the game's most famous scene, and one I think is very important to the game's themes and symbolism. Someone at Square loves plays. Making the characters act out a play happens in VI, VII, VIII and IX. (Well, a film in VIII.) But there's an important thematic difference in the plays in VI and IX to the ones in VII and VIII. In VII and VIII, you're just playing around on stage. Someone clearly thinks this is a good thing to put in to these games, and they're apparently not too wrong. It gives you a chance to goof around and mess up and embarrass yourself without consigning any villagers to their deaths. The theatre scenes in VI and IX do this too, of course, but they also play the plays straight, the play within a play.
Celes gets the opera to herself, and it's a big moment for her in the narrative and the start of her getting more attention in the story. Up to now, she's been very subdued and evasive. Then, playing an actress playing a part, she gets to sing lines that are very revealing about herself. It's not the deepest shit in the world, of course, but she sings about being shifted between two sides in a war, potentially being trapped and living a life she doesn't want to and just generally feeling morose and helpless. This is a pretty bold move for a game made on a 24MB cartridge. Less so, however, in the world of theatre - a form VI apes and mirrors and borrows from so heavily that I think it's really just trying to be an interactive version of it.
It's everywhere in the game. The blocky characters and the limited amount of memory for dialogue mean subtlety is out, so hammy gestures, melodrama and caricature are in. The characters (especially, for whatever reason, Edgar, and of course Kefka) often make blatant asides to the 'audience', out-of-character comments about the action unfolding that are just for you.
We have a bona fide fully-dedicated comic relief character in Ultros, the undisputed lord of talking to the audience. He exists only for us, appearing to break up tedious or serious stretches of the game for our amusement, never having any consequence. Even his flimsy pretext of hating the party is dropped the moment he thinks he might have genuinely upset little Relm.
Even the battles. The battle screen is framed exactly like a stage. For dramatic moments in the story, the game will switch to the battle view, the perspective of the theatre, to bring us closer to the characters and let them move more dramatically (as much as these little sprites can move dramatically). Both General Leo and Emperor Gestahl die in the battle screen, as the game uses the depth provided by the view to experiment with a little blocking in the otherwise 2D experience. Both of these deaths are provided by Kefka, the absolute king of the theatre that is FFVI, but more on him later.
The midsection of Act 2 is much like the midsection of Act 1, in that you move very quickly across the map and have a lot of fights without really doing anything. We finally get up close to the Empire and meet Gestahl and General Leo, and they're all awful garbage. For all that Kefka is cartoonishly evil, Leo is even more farcically good. Every comment about him and action by him is so ludicrously noble and honourable that it really does make you question how exactly he works for this definitely evil empire. Not to mention how we are supposed to believe that Kefka, the man who will poison a city-state because he is bored, and Leo, a man who presumably would rather die than force one of his soldiers in to unnecessary overtime, were appointed as equal commanders in chief of the Empire army by the same person, who apparently also thought this was somehow a good idea and that either one of them would be remotely suitable. Plus Celes too, I guess, just in case his judgement wasn't in question. That's all we really get to find out about the Emperor. He's a big idiot who is very greedy. Somehow he has conquered the world and we just have to accept this because Vector has more train tracks than the other towns do.
From there we're off to the magical village, the village where magic, which has been gone for fifty thousand years or whatever, exists and is practiced by everyone and always has been. We meet Strago, who deploys another Ramuh-tier expository turd on to the player, and Relm, who exists to make this slightly less awful, and just about works. From the magical village we have to walk through a cave to go to the really magical village. Sensing my rapidly-diminishing desire to ever play another second of this game, Ultros appears. He is here purely and unashamedly to save me from the boredom of the game's awful story, and it totally works and I think this moment is genuinely the best part of the entire game. He doesn't give a shit about what we're doing, takes the piss out of himself and is really just here to fuck about. I am really in favour of this. You fight him, because that's what you do in this game, but Ultros is very aware of how stupid it is and the whole thing quickly descends in to farce. He cheats, breaking the game's rules and doesn't care. There's a bit where Locke moves down right to the bottom of the screen so that he's just poking his face up over the edge of the menu, and asks us what the shit the game is doing having the 10-year-old girl talk to the giant enemy octopus. This isn't just an aside but a full on Ferris Bueller time-stop and stare in to the camera. The fight breaks down because Ultros hurts Relm's feelings and then feels guilty and lets her draw a picture of himself, and then flees when he sees that he's just an octopus. Dissecting it like this kind of kills the humour in this scene which is sad because it is genuinely funny, but I wanted to do it because to me this scene is the game showing that it's aware of its flaws, that the combat is pointless and boring and that the story is stupid and boring. It's proper pantomime, and it's only funny because the joke is about the fact you're playing a stupid game.
Like I said, it works, and gees me up enough to make it to the really magical village, where a new bunch of those espers are here to die and enter my inventory. More of the exposition and plot happens, I'm sure you know it all. General Leo dies and the floating continent starts floating and it's all looking bad for Team Good Guys.
Magic is this big unthinkingly-ever-present feature in FF games, and I think Kitase tried to do some interesting things with it in the games he directed so I guess I better talk about it.
So this giant chunk of the world is floating around now, thanks to magic. Good old Leo was tricked and killed by magic. Magic's bad, guys. It's what almost destroyed the world ten million years ago, didn't you hear? But is it? Those magic guys in the magic town sure seemed to think so. They genuinely hesitate about using their magic to stop a house burning down and killing the people inside it. (Why even learn it assholes?). But what do they know? The game tells you it's this fearsome civilisation-destroying danger, but that's not what it shows you. For you, it's the great equaliser. Early on, I was more-or-less forced to tote Celes or Terra around for their ability to heal everyone at once, which is so powerful and basically mandatory. All men are not created equal. But with open access to magic, the playing field is balanced. Edgar is a king and Gau is a blathering jungle idiot, but once magic is out of the bag they're equals. Maybe this is exactly why magic is seen as civilisation-destroying. You always hear about how bad it is from 'elders' and mayors and other such entitled fucks who probably feel like society will collapse without their patriarch asses having full control over it.
Magic literally breaks the class system. I more or less hate character classes in games, especially rpg ones. In Battlefield or whatever it's ok. I can just respawn as a different one in ten seconds. It's my job not my life. Final Fantasies (except the good ones) are big in to classes and I am not. One person can cast healing spells and this other person can only jump. That's all they can really aspire to in life. And if it turns out jumping isn't really any good then I guess they're fucked. They have to stay on the airship while those of us born to rule do all the important things and get all the gil. Classes are still in FFVI, but magic means they don't really matter. Everyone gets a twist to make them unique, but there's no one who can only attack by throwing your expensive one-of-a-kind swords for mediocre damage. Magic is a big deal in Final Fantasy games, and along with "crystals" makes up pretty much the entire plot of all of the bad ones. I'd like to think they were making a subversive point about it and its role in society here. But I think it's more likely they were making this ensemble story without a clear leader, where 'anyone can be the main character,' and that would really fall down if half the characters were just flat out terrible. But I'm still going to point out that it's the women in your group that are good at magic.
Right, back to the floating continent. This is the first (of three?) properly big, hard dungeons, or at least that's how it panned out for my playthrough. The random fights are tough here, compared to the rest of the game so far. Really in this game I found the random fights a lot tougher than the bosses, mostly because fighting 4 things at once is a whole lot harder than fighting one. But more on that later. It isn't really a very interesting dungeon and is only really made bearable by its pretty beefy soundtrack. With the main difficulty coming from the random fights, the challenge is essentially hoping that you bought enough potions and ethers before you came, which is as engaging as it sounds. But the climax of the floating continent is where the story's main thing happens and it's where we finally get to talk about Kefka.
Kefka, the Harlequinade and the World of Ruin
Ok so before we talk about Kefka I've got to briefly mention the Harlequinade. I'm sure the writers of FFVI thought a lot about regency period English theatre so it's really no surprise to find parallels here.
So the harlequinade was this sort of slapstick comedy acrobatic shit that happened at the end of more serious plays in early modern and industrial England. It's a corruption of the Commedia del'Arte of Italy by way of France. It's like a set thing: there's always the same few stock characters - Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon and so on. There's a lot of jumping around and falling over. I guess it's worth noting that the slapstick, as in where we get that term from, is from this. The Harlequin would skip around hitting people with it and using it as a magic wand. You get the idea. This whole thing was wildly popular apparently.
So, harlequins. Kefka often gets referred to as a harlequin, even in official literature. I think people think it's a sort of clever word for clown and that's about as far as that goes. But he's not really a harlequin, going off these stock types. There's a couple of key similarities - he's smarter than everone around him, cunning and devious, and, most importantly, he can use magic, which I'll get in to in a sec. But the harlequin is also the hero, a lowly servant and also a romantic, who uses his cunning to obtain Columbine, the girl of his dreams. Kefka's much more like the clown. Specifically, a clown in the style of Joseph Grimaldi.
Grimaldi lived in roughly the period VI sort of takes place, and he reinvented the stock clown character, making it a runaway popular success, elevating the clown to the heart of the story, and pretty much laying what are still the foundations of being a clown today. Looks-wise, the clown is a whole lot closer to Kefka. Harlequins wear masks and those weird diamond-print onesies, whereas Grimaldi is the guy who invented that whiteface clown makeup that haunts children's nightmares and is also notable on Kefka's face. They even wear pretty similar outfits, which is no mean feat for something Amano designed. Importantly, the clown is the villain. Grimaldi's clown satirises and mocks society and the people around him. His clothes are a joke on the excesses of high fashion. Like our antagonist, Grimaldi engages the audience, his act is more of a performance than even those around him, full of asides and interacting with the audience. And, like Kefka, Grimaldi's clown was such a success that he rose in prominence to become the central character of the story, even as the villain. And, most importantly, he got control of the Transformation.
The Transformation was the part of your night of regency theatre where the clown and harlequin would turn up, in your serious, dramatic play, and transform the world with magic. The set would change dramatically, twisting in to something of the clown's creation, full of tricks and traps, which the clown and harlequin could change at will. Some characters from the serious play would be chosen and changed and moved to the new world, and the rest would be abandoned. And all of this would be done with magic, at which the harlequin was peerless. The similarities to the transition in FFVI from the World of Balance to the World of Ruin are pretty stark. The World of Ruin is VI's harlequinade, the world transformed by Kefka to his design, his mockery of the old world he seemed to have such a problem with. Our party changed by the experience and forced to finish their story in a world that's all about Kefka. End of Act 2.
So while Regency-era comic theatre is one way to see the transition from the World of Balance to the World of Ruin, the start of Act 3 gives us another one, which it should be noted is a bit of a downer. Nuclear war. The transition itself is no Scooby Doo screen-wobble bullshit but a very ominous scene of things flying down, landing on the world below and causing huge firey explosions that is played to silence, one of the few silences in the entire game. Right before it all goes off, we meet 'Ultima Weapon,' a creation of pure energy built to destroy on a mass scale, built during the last war, the war that the present world of FFVI was largely set up to prevent ever happening again. And Kefka sets it all off moving these statues, doing this terrible thing you can't undo or take back once you've done it no matter what. The opening of the act is one of the most bleak and miserable moments in the entire Final Fantasy series. I should also note it's the stage where Celes becomes the main character for the remainder of the game but we'll talk about her in a bit. So you start on this barren obliterated island in this awful toxic sea under an uncool-looking red sky. The world hasn't just 'changed', it is completely fucked. If you walk around the island you meet these fucked up twisted monsters that just die in front of you. Cid, the only other person in your new, awful world, is sick with a mysterious untreatable illness and your new, awful life consists of trying to catch fish from the toxic sea that hopefully aren't too fucked up and diseased for him to eat, and then feeding him and talking to him and trying to ignore the fact he's about to die. It's all very Grave of the Fireflies. This is Final Fantasy talking about the real world for the first time, something that would continue strongly in Final Fantasy VII but then kind of peter out again after popping it's head in for FFX. It's really nice, I think, that a game series in which every single game is about saving the world, that they would try, if only just for a couple of games, to actually deal with stuff that might destroy our world rather than just a really old crystal. I said before that this game struggles with trying to talk about real stuff whilst also being mostly about magical girls killing blobs of slime in dungeons, and it's worth noting this whole nuclear thing is dropped without a trace as soon as you leave this little island. But for this one scene it's right the fuck on. I can't however mention the climax -and best part- of this scene without first complaining about 'choices' in this game. There's been a lot said about choices in videogames and how to do it right or wrong and I wont get in to all that too much here except to point out that the only two types of choice you ever get in this game are fucking terrible. First off you get the totally meaningless choice. At one stage I got to pick if I wanted to turn this 'Ragnarok magicite' I found in to an esper or a sword. That's all you get to make that decision. Maybe the sword is garbage or maybe it's the only way to kill the end boss. You're not really making a decision here, not one that's worth anything. The game's just making you be a coin and flipping yourself. The other type of decision is the one you get here, which I think is best demonstrated in the original Bioshock's incredible decision, "Do you want to kill a bunch of 6 year old girls for no reason?" Here the choice is "Do you want to kill Cid or...not kill him?" What's worst about these, beyond how again they're not really choices at all, or how they're often mixed with the first type of shitty decision to just be a pointless punishment to the player who didn't google the 'correct' decision first, is how they defeat themselves by thinking the player will make a good story. People hate fucking up, they love making 'perfect saves' and there are pages on the FF wiki for 'missable content' because players would rather shit themselves than potentially miss out on obtaining a mediocre sword.
No one playing this game like a normal person is going to choose to kill Cid. And this is terrible because the scene you get if you let him die is the most powerful moment in the whole game. Players are never going to pick for awful things to happen to theselves. That's a big part of why awful things happening is such an important part of so many memorable stories.
In case you don't know, if Cid dies then Celes tries to kill herself. When it happened I was genuinely stunned. This is some dark shit, especially for a game which is most of the time a bit of wink-wink piss-about. I can't think of another game that has dealt with this. Not some heroic sacrifice or some noble or poetic 'it's time' thing, just, we fucked up and everything went wrong and life is ruined and I want to kill myself. It doesn't work, of course. She washes up on the beach and is given hope by a bandana, but the scene is amazing and it also sets up the theme of the rest of the game: Kefka won and ruined the world and everything in it, but hey we're still here so we might as well make a go of it. But yeah you can miss that if you didn't want to lose a fucking fishing minigame.
After that little bit, the whole middle of Act 3 is just you walking around the world and regrouping your party. There's kind of no real plot left in the game except for the very end. There's just a lot of dungeon-crawling with most of the characters getting a (often their only) scene of character development. So here we're going to talk about combat in a sec, but first we're going to talk about the characters. All of them.
So we're gonna start with the big ones and work our way down. Although it's an ensemble piece some characters have much more significant roles than others and I don't think it can really be disputed that Terra, Locke and Celes are the closest we get to protagonists, each one only really stopped by large absences in the story (presumably for this very reason) and the subsequent shift in focus to one of the others. I don't think it's a coincidence that the game's three acts begin with Terra, then Locke, and then Celes waking up in bed, and how those characters lead their respective parts of the story.
Our first protagonist is Terra. She starts off with amnesia and caught up in events she knows the least about of everyone involved, both of which are big ticks for rpg leads. She's the offspring of a human and an esper, born from what was apparently one of the most romantic pairings of all history. This makes her the special magical girl. More so than chocobos and people called Cid, this is the real identifying trope of Final Fantasies. A young girl with a unique magical gift who is somehow going to change the world. They never seem to like their role in life (which is a shame), and Terra is no different. She spends the whole game under the shadow of whatever fruity experiments were done on her before the game starts. You never really find out exactly what was going on. You get flashbacks where the emperor's making her kill a bunch of dudes, but then you're told she killed 50 imperial soldiers in a couple of minutes. Was the emperor making her kill his own army? I mean, we know he's dumb based off his recruiting policies but this is pretty special even so. But yeah, Terra is defined by her uncertainty - doubt over who she is, what she's supposed to do, what her life means, if she can ever love or feel anything. Taking some control over her life and deciding to help the Returners ends up turning her in to an esper for a bit and she sits out the bulk of the rest of the game. She comes back in for the end of Act 2 to bring the espers out, but then in the World of Ruin she's one of the last people you'll recruit. Interestingly, you meet her very early: she's just not up for coming along. After being a slave of the empire and then being essentially used as a tool by the Returners, she's finally taking a bit of me time. She's taking charge of her life a little bit, and running some weird town of children. She eventually rejoins the group, but only after she's learned what it is to love, and how to reconcile that with turning in to a flying monster and casting fire spells. She comes back on her own terms, which is a nice finish for a character who spends the rest of the story unsure and confused and getting used by others.
Next up is Locke, our protagonist for the midgame, although the transition isn't all that stark as he's been around for essentially all of Act 1 and talked more than Terra already. Locke talks a lot in general: he has the most dialogue out of everyone in the game. He's also always very fucking chipper. He has the personality and dialogue of a protagonist, but that's about it really. He really doesn't have much to do with the plot - Terra's central to everything, Celes is playing both sides, Edgar's a king with a robot castle. Even Setzer has an airship and Strago tells us about esper land, but Locke is just some fucking guy.
We also don't get to focus on him on his own for a long time like we do with Terra and Celes. He's always part of the gang, making jokes for everyone and whatever. And when we do get to see what he gets up to on his own, it turns out he's fucking mental. He had some bad breakup with a girl who then died, and so he's kept her corpse in some weird suspended state in some guy's basement. He then dedicates his life to finding some piece of crap that I've forgotten to bring her back to life, and it turns out all his interactions with Terra and Celes are weird transference of his feelings and regrets with this dead girl and aren't even about them. Obviously you don't leave a corpse frozen in a creepy basement-shrine for no reason, and so eventually in the World of Ruin you find the thing and you can bring her back to life. It's not a bad little scene: Locke, the playful chatty joker, finally gets this big moment he's waiting for and working for for years, and it's really sad and really serious and he doesn't have anything to say. It's bittersweet and he gets closure and can finally move on. I can't though. He kept a girl's corpse in some dude's basement for years. That's really weird, man. Locke's not a cool guy. Like his relationship with Celes works out and stuff, but I'm not really on board with it anymore because I know that up until that point the relationship was really his misplaced feelings about this dead girl he was keeping in stasis in some guy's basement. What the fuck.
Celes is our World of Ruin lead. I've already been through the opera and the island, which are her two big moments, so there's not a lot else to say. Basically she's very cold and distant and has trouble relating to anyone, but then eventually builds up the courage to let her guard down around Locke. You'll have noticed the pivotal moments for everyone revolve around being able to love people, even if you're all weird or whatever. That's the theme I guess. Beyond that, Celes starts off with the Empire and in Act 2 she goes back to them a bit. I wasn't sure if she is for real back with them or just doing it to help you out. It wasn't ever really clear and I'm not sure the game really cares so whatever. There's a bit when she's back on their side where Locke tries to talk to her but it doesn't work out, even though they clearly both want it to. That not being able to say what you really feel thing is a big part of real life, and films and tv, but it's pretty fucking rare in videogames so that's nice to see I suppose. Cool.
Edgar & Sabin. These guys join early and stick around. Edgar especially has plenty to say and do, and has some outsider shot at joining the 'main' characters. Certainly if the full cast was developed as much as him they could make that 'everyone is the main character' claim without it being a lot of bullshit. Sabin probably takes a back seat, more 'Edgar's brother' than the other way around, but he's a good voice in the party - focused without being a bore, entertaining without being unserious. For a guy who ran away from life to live on a mountain he's surprisingly well-rounded. Edgar's more of a joker, but it seems like a tactic, a performance for other people, something he uses to downplay things while doing serious king stuff. Talking of that, he's a pretty lame king. He ditches his kingdom as soon as you show up and doesn't really seem to care what's up with it when he's away. And on the other side he doesn't really have any political or military power he can leverage for your gang, despite being, you know, a king. He doesn't even have any fucking money. Also feel like it's definitely worth noting that the game hints pretty strongly a few times that he's an actual paedophile. And that the game plays this for laughs. Like it's fine, he's just being a 'scamp'. Why? Why would they do this? I don't know, maybe it is fine. Maybe Edgar's reign has seen his kingdom become some sort of libertarian pedo-utopia. Maybe it's just fine in the world of Final Fantasy VI. I mean, I don't know what they believe. We don't get a lot of examples of regular relationships in this game. There's that soldier sending letters to his girlfiend, then there's Locke and his creepy dead girlfriend, and then you have Setzer who's announced that he's going to kidnap a woman and marry her against her will. People are like, annoyed by that, but only really so far as it will mess up the opera. The underlying idea of kidnapping women for yourself seems mostly accepted. Cyan even pretends to be that dead soldier so he can write letters to his girlfriend for his own benefit. Who the fuck are these people? I'm glad their world got burned and ruined, these guys are the worst.
Talking of Cyan, let's do him next, since they really start to tail off at this point. Cyan gets a surprising amount of development considering his almost total irrelevance to the plot and all the other characters. His 'love-thing' or whatever is his family, who die shortly after you meet him. Well, I guess it's more dealing with them being dead and him still being alive. This is a little more nuanced than what everyone else gets so they get to do a little more with it. There's this very odd nightmare-palace thing where the rest of your party is inside Cyan's brain when he's sleeping. It's just odd. I think it's supposed to be about helping him realise he can let go, but there's these magical dream children who are controlling his mind or whatever and it's just a big mess. I have no idea why it's in the game at all. But his other bit, you find out he's been sending letters to the girl with the dead soldier boyfriend, and he's pretending to be the dead soldier boyfriend. But in a rare move for this game, it turns out it isn't just weird and creepy, and he's actually trying to use his own experience to help this woman move on. And when you track him down, you can root through his little cave house and you see he's been turning his mind to other stuff: there's some samurai sex book so I guess he's over his wife, and there's a book on machines - Cyan being an old fashioned type never understood or approved of them, but now, rudderless in a new world, he's gone and sorted himself out in a broadly normal and unmessed-up way. He seems like the only one who's had a healthy reaction to all of this, and so that's nice. Well done Cyan.
Shadow isn't quite the terrible flimsy character he first seems. He does seem genuinely unhappy about the bad stuff he's done in the past, but he never really communicates this to anyone. I guess that's fine because he's all torn up and surly now, but also it stops him from really coming across, and then at the end where he decides he's tortured himself enough to make peace with what he's done and promptly kills himself, it comes out of nowhere and makes the otherwise upbeat ending a bit messed up. Weird time to throw it in there.
Strago and Relm have a nice relationship with each other. They're very stock as characters go but their patter as nice, especially as they come in to the story right when it gets all serious. Beyond that though, yeah. Their thing is that they love each other. Neat!
The rest of the characters are bullshit. The game doesn't give a shit about them so I'm not going to either. Really, they're terrible. On to the combat instead.
Combat is one of the four things you do in the game, along with walk around, read people talking, and inventory management.
JRPG combat is a weird abstract rendition of fighting iterated a million times over the last three decades. It's probably the defining feature that warrants the J in JRPG. Coming in to a game, you know a bunch of rules and truths before you ever see them, from fundamentals down to specific idiosyncrasies. You know you'll pick each character's action, at the appointed time, from a small menu - which despite only containing maybe five items, will certainly feature at least one (e.g. 'Defend') that you will literally never use. You know you'll get a pile of numbers or a big bar representing your characters' life, and you'll know that when it reaches zero they aren't actually dead, you just need to use an item on them. Or a spell, but you know you won't get that for a while. You know there will be 'status' effects that can be inflicted upon you, and you know that these will be disabled from working on anything you'd want to use them on, but the game will let you learn them anyway.
It is insanely rigid. Racing games have more variation. With it come your archetypes. Final Fantasy has its job classes: white mage, monk, dragoon. The same ones, always. There’s a type of player who enjoys this. You can probably tell from how I wrote that sentence that it's not me, so I'm not really sure on the appeal. Maybe it's on that raw level that makes Tetris satisfying. You find a good shield in a chest, and you bring up the menu so you can equip is on your fighter, because that's where it's supposed to be. You put your white mage on the back row, because you know she'll be barred from wearing all the good shields. It's all known. It's a language you've learned and it's nice to demonstrate it once in a while. Winning a battle with everyone performing their allotted role can be neat and pleasing.
But it's very fucking old and it never changes. And I say all this because by VI, the designers know it. They're getting bored of it, and more importantly getting constrained by it. They make fun of it: one time when you're fighting Ultros part way through the battle he casts a little run of boosting spells on himself back to back, and then apologises for it in one of the game's theatrical asides. He knows hes broken the rules of JRPG fighting in pursuit of making the game more interesting, and perhaps is wary of upsetting the orderly system, and therefore the player. It's both a joke, a stepping outside of the game to laugh at itself and its ritualised play-combat, and also perhaps an attempt to squeeze some challenge out of the tired system. The designers clearly know the system inside and out. As we move to the later dungeons, they don't make everything tougher by just increasing enemy HP and making them do more damage. They utilise a set of tricks designed to be the most annoying and disruptive to the system and player as possible. Inside the big slug where Gogo lives the enemies are full of status effects. Not the standard ones, like confuse or others that end when the fight ends, or poison, the ur-status. It's all imp and zombie, ones that severely handicap you and last after the battle and can't be cured by the spell that cures status effects. There's no thematic reason for it. They're just the most annoying ones to inflict, so it inflicts them as much as possible.
In the cultists' tower you can only use magic. No hitting people or using any abilities. No attempt to make it make sense. Just: here's a restriction to make the game harder.
In the dungeon you visit to find Locke you're forced to make two parties, and in the final dungeon, three. With the game's, or I guess the genre's, focus on inventory management and equipment, and the way levelling-up works, this is a real pain. There are characters you didn't really take to, that you always left on the airship, that you're suddenly forced to use for the hardest fights in the game. Like Setzer, who is terrible. They're a lower level than everyone else and they don't know any useful spells or anything. And then the gear. You always make sure your party has the best clobber, but it's expensive enough to kit out your main 4. When you have to equip 12 guys at the end, my neat relic set ups and cool armour fell apart completely. I didn't even own 12 hats. Strago had to fight Kefka with just his bald head.
Talking of the final Kefka fight - what the fuck even does all the Christian symbolism in Japanese games and anime even mean? I have a strong feeling it is thrown in completely meaninglessly. We didn't develop any symbols in our story, let's use these ones from old paintings. This will work.
It's the end boss, the climax of the story, and it's just a dumb mess. How unserious must the developers have been.
So, after you all say why you're fighting, and you kill the lame boss, the tower collapses because of course. This escape serves as the ending and credits, despite it also featuring one of the protagonists killing themselves. I guess that works, really. Shadow was a quiet guy, and he's killing himself for himself, not for me or you or Gau. No fuss.
But yeah I actually really like the ending. I distinctly remember grinning at the screen when it goes through each character - Starring 'David' (or whatever you called him) as 'Locke' and so on - because it worked so perfectly with the non-real world, with seeing the game as theatre. Especially at the end, where it thanks 'You', as in the player, for playing. Over the last few years there's been a lot of talk about games being very cinematic, and some people think they shouldn't be, because they're games not cinema, or whatever. In hindsight, VI seems way ahead of the curve here. Theatre is the perfect way to see a game like this. The story (script) is there, fixed, but a play exists as the sum of its script and its performance, and the game exists as the sum of its story and its being played. Explicitly calling out all the names you used as though they are the actors for the 'roles' of Edgar, Terra and so on is great, and not just for making me feel justified in not using their 'proper' names.
The rest of the ending is really good too. A lot of games just sort of 'stop,' even if you save the world or everyone dies or whatever, but this has a real finality and wrapping-up of everything that I've only seen again in this game's immediate sequel. All the shots of the landscape, of plants growing again, a baby being born, a house being repaired: it revels in the world. Which is nice considering we spent the whole game trying to save it. And as the airship flies through the clouds and birds flock over the trees and all the party laugh and make poses it hits some genuinely transcendental notes. It's a fantastic ending.
With moments like the ending, the opera, Ultros in the cave, I feel like it's important to remember that like 80% of the game is really pretty shit. I spent more time in the menu screen moving belts around than I did on all the good parts of the story combined.
My final playtime was 34 hours 43 minutes.
I had gameovers against Tunnel Armor, the two Cranes (twice) and the Storm Dragon.
My party of choice was Celes Edgar Sabin and Relm.
