Cerise Magazine

Final Fantasy VI is, as everybody knows, one of the greatest games ever made. Everybody happens to be right for a change, so heaping praise upon the thing is quite magnificently redundant. Amidst this praise, though, precisely why the game was so successful isn’t discussed; it’s something we simply take as read, occasionally fishing around for phrases like “epic story” and “three-dimensional characters”. The argument that it’s the story and characters that make the game a success, however, simply isn’t supported by the game’s content. Looked at in isolation, without making any allowances for nostalgia, the story is revealed to be juvenile, cliche-ridden and often just plain illogical, driven by characters whose choices frequently defy all reason. Remake it as an Anime and, quite rightly, nobody would consider it in any way special. Why, then, is it recalled so fondly?

The answer is that we’re not remembering the story itself, we’re remembering the experience of playing the game, because – in a way that the subsequent games in the series spectacularly failed to emulate – the game and the story are both functioning as part of the same aesthetic. It’s not a game with a story attached, or a story that lets you control the characters while they walk between town, it’s an experience where the game and the story are the same thing. It’s not surprising, then, that even those of us who couldn’t care less about the story of later installments still feel as if we’ve got a personal stake in the story of Final Fantasy VI, because the characters and the player are always working toward the same goal. Yet it only takes two games for this approach to completely unravel, and by Final Fantasy VIII the magic-fuelled time-travelling war in which the characters take part is constantly sidelined to allow them to whine about their preternaturally tedious love lives. It’s no wonder that, after the hype had died down, criticism of the story became increasingly vocal and divisive. The problem isn’t that the story is any more banal than we’re used to, it’s that, for the first time, it’s surplus to requirements. There’s simply no reason to care about the love story between Squall and Rinoa, because it’s wholly independent of the player’s actions.

In contrast, look at the rather more low-key relationship between Celes and CId in Final Fantasy VI. Stranded on an island together after a cataclysm which all but destroys the world, they become a surrogate family, with the elderly Cid referring to the much younger Celes as his “Granddaughter” despite not being a blood relative. He is, however, overworked and on the verge of dying of exhaustion. Taking control of Celes, it’s the player’s job to travel from Cid’s hut down to the beach and catch fish for him to help him regain his strength. Cid’s health is declining at a steady rate, and each fish he’s fed restores a portion of it, but – and this is what makes the sequence nerve-wracking, even to saddos who’ve played through the game dozens of times already – there are different kinds of fish, and their placement is random. Celes, not being able to walk into the water, must wait for them to come close to the shore before she catches them. This forces the player to make snap decisions; is it worth waiting at the shore for a particularly tasty fish to swim up, or should you save time by catching a less valuable one, then running back and hoping the layout is better next time? It sounds by turns tedious and irritating. And so it is. But because the player is forced to struggle against overwhelming odds in order to keep Cid alive, because there are no other characters on the island, because there is (literally, since his health declines regardless) no time to pause for breath, we’re involved in the relationship anyway. It doesn’t matter that the dialogue is ridiculously overwrought (“Hack, wheeze… I’m not long for this world”) or that “Grandfather is dying because he took care of you at the expense of himself” could only be more trite and sentimental if it involved puppies, because the player has a genuine stake in what happens next. We don’t need to be shown or told that Celes is frantically trying to keep him alive and that the world has gone to Hell; we experience it directly. You get the horrible feeling that were it done today, we’d get a twenty minute unskippable CGI sequence followed by Cid dying regardless, probably in slow motion with full orchestral accompaniment.

This approach goes beyond simple story events and into the actual game mechanics themselves. Each of the twelve major characters has a unique combat ability, but these aren’t arbitrarily assigned and help reinforce that character’s personality. In later games it’s de rigueur to have a similarly large cast whose can all draw from the same “pool” of abilities, but more often than not this simply renders the least-used characters pointless. If you need to steal a certain item in Final Fantasy VII, for example, you can just stick the “Steal” ability on one of your strongest characters, even if he happens to be a large, slow, clumsy man with only one hand. There’s a character that the story tells us is a thief, yes, but why bother using her when anybody else you happen to pick up along the way can do the job just as well…? The story and the game are doing different things. Final Fantasy VI, however, gives us a thief who’s the only character capable of stealing (overpowered hidden ones don’t count), a samurai who’s the only character capable of using fancy sword techniques, a wizard who’s the only character capable of accessing a certain spells… These abilities aren’t complicated, either; they’re written on the command window in big, bold letters, signaling to the player that THIS IS WHAT I DO. Even if a character’s ability is mostly useless, we’re never confused as to who they are and what their place in the world is. By defining the characters through how they relate to the act of playing the game, the cast remain well-defined and memorable where they would have seemed superfluous had the focus been entirely on their dialogue. The magic system works in the same way. The crux of the story is that the Empire is using magicite, the remains of magical creatures called Espers, to infuse its soldiers and war machines with magical power, but this is also how we teach our characters spells in-game, so the threat isn’t an abstract, it’s something we have to deal with if we want to succeed. Even if you ignore the dialogue completely, you can pick up the story simply through the act of playing it.

We should also consider how little the gameplay of Final Fantasy VI repeats itself. While the core of the game remains “Explore dungeon, encounter monsters, kill them”, we rarely do this in precisely the same way twice. We begin the game riding inside nigh-on invincible robot armor, nonchalantly storming a town and slaughtering the defenders without breaking a sweat. Our next objective, however, is to break out of the town, now robot-less, vulnerable and armed only with a knife. When that’s done with, we’re asked to control three groups of characters simultaneously, using them to defend an unconscious woman from advancing enemy troops. It’s not until this part of the game is over that we experience our first “straight” dungeon, and that’s immediately followed by white-water rafting through a maze of rivers. A later section takes place in a town occupied by the Empire, where the objective is to gather information through the use of disguises, rather than confronting the enemy head-on. When some characters are trapped on a haunted train, what could have easily become a combat-heavy slog from the caboose to the engine is livened up by little touches like friendly ghosts who’ll join you, a dining car where you can order food and puzzles requiring you to derail cars. All of this takes place within the first third of the game, and it’s more variation than we got in the previous five games put together. “Variation” is the key word, here: These aren’t gimmicks, they’re simply different ways of employing the core gameplay we’ve been dealing with since we started. Instead of relying on contrived, simplistic minigames to break up the monotony, Final Fantasy VI simply avoids being monotonous in the first place.

But most of all, the success of Final Fantasy VI is due to its ability to be all things to all people. The compulsory parts of the game are easy, with weak monsters and simplistic puzzles, while anything complicated is on the periphery for the player to explore at their leisure. The ability to control how the characters’ statistics increase through equipping magicite as their level increases, for example, is not remotely necessary if your only goal is to finish the game, but is immensely rewarding if you learn to exploit it. The best weapons, armour, spells and items are also found by ignoring the story completely and experimenting, but again, this isn’t strictly necessary, and if something’s too difficult or confusing then you can easily ignore it in favor of something else. The people playing purely for the story are happy, the obsessive collectors are happy, the algorithm freaks are happy, and so is everybody in between. You can’t say this of later games in the series, where combining items and spells together, drawing abilities out of weapons or navigating mazes using magic spheres was required to survive for any length of time.

Because this is Cerise, a brief note on the female characters: It’s traditional for Final Fantasy games to feature a virginal young woman with healing powers and some connection to an extinct race, but who ends up getting sidelined in favor of the hero being angsty / rescuing her. The obvious candidate in Final Fantasy VI is Terra, a half-human half-Esper who acts as a bridge between the two worlds, only… She’s never depicted as especially pure or nice, her magical speciality is fireballs rather than healing, and while she’s pursued by a few of the male characters, she ends the game happy on her own. Most interestingly, she’s also the one who gets to fall over and have cryptic flashbacks to her Dark Hidden Past, which is traditionally the domain of the male lead. Come to think of it, Final Fantasy VI doesn’t even have a male lead – female characters are scarce, but they’re the ones whom the game revolves around.

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Retro Review: Final Fantasy VI

May 2008 Issue

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