Final Fantasy 6 Review

Final Fantasy 6 has been on my backlog for the longest of time. It’s been my mark of shame, not having completed it all these years. This year marks the 25th anniversary, so I committed myself to getting this off my bucket list by then.

However, I’ve decided to cut my attempt short, with 20+ hours over the last 4 months. These are some of my opinions and review of the game, from the modern-day perspective.

Summary

A quick overview, for those that are not as well-versed with this game:

• Released on 1994-10-11 for North America
• Titled as FF3 in North America. Because it was the 3rd Final Fantasy game localized and released in that region. The world was smaller back then and globalization was a scary thought.
• Re-released on several platforms, mostly ports. The android/ios apps had some UX changes to accommodate the touch gestures, so they also made graphics changes.
• 25-40 hours of gameplay length

Review

I put 20 hours into the game before giving up. My progress was half the side-quests completed and Kefka’s Tower accessible.

I had to give up because my party was too under-leveled to finish the final tower. I was already at the cusp of giving and was trying to grind out the final level. But I didn’t really want to spend more time grinding and completing tedious side-quests for more equipments and skills.

Story

FF6 is continually praised for the plot. I can see this, if I put myself back into 1995. Video game story was not as deep as they are >2010.

There is an ensemble cast, with sufficient character development. But the massive number of unique characters requires more lore outside of the game to support it. Like how Morrowind has a bunch of lore hidden in books within the game. Within the game though, it’s not enough and it felt very fractured and I had troubles keeping track and interest in each character.

To review this with modern lens, I would say the plot is good enough to stand out amongst other games and the characters are very interesting. However, it would need more development and attention to create a more cohesive story.

Gameplay

This game uses a real-time RPG battle system, where the game will not pause while you decide your next action. This is pretty cool and well done, no qualms here.

My complaint is how many different game actions there are and how poorly they’re explained or implemented. Examples:

• It took me way too long to understand how to properly input Sabin’s Blitz
• Gau’s Rage is so badly implemented, I would use it as modern-day torture. It’s not sorted, there’s description on what does what, and I didn’t even know how to get new ones.
• Terra’s Morph is unexplained. When explained, the execution was pitiful because I didn’t know beforehand to optimize for its use.
• Setzer’s Slot seems bad. From reading guides, I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of skill element to this but it’s not mentioned. I couldn’t be bothered to figure this out
• Celes’ Rune was supposed to absorb magic but I couldn’t get that opportunity throughout the game

I will praise it for being very ambitious and experimental. But being experimental is not what makes a great game, iterating on experiments is what makes future great games.

There are too many damn random encounters. Way too many. I understand this is very much a Japanese gaming thing, as this practice continues to today (primarily in JRPG). I hate random encounters with all my heart, it made up 70% of the tedium in this game.

Overall, the gameplay was just okay after you got over the novelty (5+ hours in).

Music

There’s quite a few good tracks but not as many as people make it out to seem. Contrast this with Chrono Trigger, where it felt like there were 2-3x more memorable tracks.

Still, the music in this game is great by today’s standards.

Graphics

This game is beautiful and has aged well. That’s all that needs to be said.

Difficulty

This game exhibits many of the pitfalls of older games, some mario-hardness. It feels like they didn’t playtest and tune this for progression in difficulty. There are parts of the game where you can easily get one-hit. But battles surrounding that are trivial.

If this game were designed today, there are very many instances of bosses who need the parameters tuned.

Many players say this game is trivially easy. They don’t mention how long it take to get trivially easy and how much grinding is required. I didn’t optimize/min-max my way through the game and I didn’t grind levels: this is a hard game.

Compare with Chrono Trigger, which was actually trivial, again without min-maxing or grinding.

Overall

I view Chrono Trigger as the greatest RPG of all time and it holds up when played today. So an easy 10/10.

FF6 feels very dated in some areas but still has great merits. But it’s not 10/10. Not even 9/10, not if you were a gamer today.

Is it overrated? I’d say so. Once upon a time, it probably earned its reputation. But it has just aged not very well over the years, it’s blemishes stick out like a sore thumb.

With that being said, I would tell anyone to give it the ol’ college try (minimum 4 hours) before giving up. While it may not have worked for me, there’s going to be a lot of people who will enjoy this today.