Who Had The Last Laugh?

These just never get old

Kefka has fallen and the world is... still pretty crappy. But at least it's short one psychotic clown and in my book, that's a victory. Along with Kefka, this marks the end of the SNES trilogy of Final Fantasy games! To be honest, my primary goal in doing this was to play through all the classic Final Fantasy titles, which to me, is everything before 7. Mission accomplished! That's not to say I'm done, far from it, I'm just saying my main goal is complete and everything later is beyond my expectations. But before I get ahead of myself, let's commence with the review.

Final Fantasy VI is undoubtedly the best Final Fantasy game thus far. The graphics can be startling at first compared to the simple, smooth nature of the other two SNES titles but once you get used to them, they are a vast improvement. Along with the best looking world comes the strongest characters and the most diverse gameplay of any Final Fantasy to this point.

That's the poooooooower of love!

Although Terra is once of the central focuses of the game, she never overshadows the other characters which is a huge accomplishment for a game like this. She actually was almost never part of my party thoughout the majority of the game. I preferred the martial arts blitz's of Sabin, Celes's magic absorption technique, Shadow's instant kill weapons, and Cyan's Sword Techs. Not only for their strength in battle but their storylines also interested me a lot. Sabin is one of the least developed characters in the story, a huge oversight if you ask me, but despite what's left unsaid, he's a funny and interesting character in his own right.

Building characters up is also a lot of fun since there are so many different ways to develop them. Along with the standard EXP level ups, which are far more meaningful in this game than in V, giving them different Espers can alter their stats and give them magic abilities. By the end of my game, every characters had almost every spell available to me as I mixed and matched Espers and it's satisfying to receive those new spells. Characters have many different forms of equipment too, some of which can be fun to experiment with. Setzer's Fixed Dice, one of the last weapons you get for him, is a lot more powerful than it seems, sometimes providing max damage (9999) to any enemy!

All of the character's are that way and it makes for the most driven game in the franchise. Still, the game had it's missteps, too. Some bosses required tactics bordering on ridiculous. One boss actually requires you to kill your own party members while two other enemies are attacking you at the same time. Fortunately, these kinds of encounters can be nullified by a game-breaking glitch that lets you instant kill almost any enemy in the game by simply using the Vanish spell on the enemy followed by an X-Zone or Doom.

Also, the nature of character development where any character can receive any spell can start to make the characters seem bland by the end of the game. It never hits a level of Final Fantasy V where they're all interchangeable, but knowing that your mage and your main fighter both have the same spells can be odd.

Finally, despite some great moments in the game, the overall plot is rather underdeveloped, especially by the end. While the fighting against the empire is interesting, the World of Ruin never feels like it has a direct purpose. We're fighting Kefka but is it out of a sense of revenge or some greater purpose? They tell you that he's oppressing people but without any visual evidence of this, it feels rather weak, especially compared to the World of Balance where you see the soldiers in all the occupied towns.

The SNES in all it's glory

And with that, we have arrived onto the Playstation era of games. Fortunately, Steam has provided a bit of a delay to my screenshot dilemna by adding Final Fantasy VII and VIII on their marketplace, which I picked up on sale in anticipation of this. The gamepad support is a little wonky and while I got a mod that helps make it better, it's still not perfect, so I may be changing things up with my setup here in a little bit. Still, I've got easy access to screenshots and with Steam's cloud saves, I no longer have to shuttle my save file back and forth from my desktop and my laptop! Yay!

If you are curious about these two games on Steam, my next post will have some information about the mods available. Obviously, changing up the gameplay of these classics borders on heresy but there are some phenomenal graphics mods that can greatly spruce up your experience.

It's like I'm really there!

Final Fantasy Rankings:

Final Fantasy 2 < Final Fantasy Adventure < Final Fantasy < Final Fantasy III < Final Fantasy V < Final Fantasy IV < Final Fantasy VI

Game on!