Esse merece todo o reconhecimento, já que é a junção de tudo que deu certo nos outros Final Fantasy anteriores a esse. Mas é o melhor Final Fantasy, como muitos dizem? Na minha opinião, não. Ainda prefiro o Final Fantasy XII, mas para um game lançado no Super Nintendo, é realmente impressionante tudo o que o jogo nos proporciona.

Tem momentos aqui que eu de fato nunca vou esquecer. Logo no começo do game, já tem uma cena bem marcante com os Magitek caminhando na neve, foda demais. Entre outros momentos que não vou citar aqui para não dar spoilers, o tom do jogo é bem mais sério também se comparado com os outros, mesmo tendo quase sempre momentos de descontração.

A melhor parte para mim foi a primeira metade do game, que realmente é muito boa, apesar de demorar bastante para engatar de vez e você se envolver realmente com a história. E que história! Uma pena que só a primeira metade seja realmente muito boa; a partir da segunda, já fica no padrão de sempre. Mas, no geral, é uma boa história.

O combate, no geral, é o mesmo, com algumas adições, mas eu gostei bem mais do combate aqui do que no Final Fantasy IV. A maioria dos personagens são interessantes, e levando em conta que são mais de 10 personagens, isso acaba sendo bem relevante.

E sobre o vilão, que muitos dizem ser um dos melhores da saga, pelo menos para mim foi bem decepcionante. Um vilão operante apenas, faz malvadezas e é isso, sem profundidade nenhuma. Pelo menos no game, não é passado nada do porquê ele faz as coisas que faz; então, ele faz as coisas simplesmente porque é mal.

A trilha sonora, como sempre, é impecável, muito boa mesmo. Mas isso sempre foi o padrão nos Final Fantasy. Os pontos fracos do game acho que ficam por conta da segunda metade do game mesmo e algumas coisas que são resolvidas de forma simples.

A duração do game também é um ponto fraco, já que são umas boas 30 horas para fechar ou quase 40 para fazer os 100%. Sei que é um RPG, então é normal ser longo, mas nesse caso, menos seria mais. Metade do tempo acho que seria o ideal.

Minha Nnota para o game é 8.5/10.

I've been truly left without words for the last couple of hours. Few and far between are the times that I've considered a gaming moment to be truly legendary. Final Fantasy VI has gifted me that and oh I am so thankful. I will now give myself the titanic task of attempting to convey some of my feelings about this great adventure.

I say feelings because most of the time that is what videogames give me. Whether it's wonder, some flavor of boredom, rage or anything in between; I believe that they all can be cherishable moments that serve as a reflection of what the PIECE OF ART (in this case) is trying to say.

That's also the style of reviews I like to write - kind of. They are more like a reaction rather than an objective summary of what happens in the game etc.

One of the first things I noticed after booting the game for the first time is the amount of polish it has compared to its predecessors - and I mean polish everywhere. There are more and more fluid animations, sprites look beautiful, the bestiary is large and thicc and it even feels like it's the biggest and most varied OST of any FF so far - and oh man, the writing and dialogue.

As I've mentioned before i think, the thing that makes me dislike a game more is weak plot and writing. It's not that a game has to have a serious plot or serious grown up writing about real life things, after all, we are playing videogames. What I look for and what I like the most is when the words are inspiring. When they aren't lazy. I love when I see wit and personality. I like when writers are brave enough to make their characters imperfect and human-like. I love that they all have their quirks. I love how they all exist in a tragic world and have very tragic things happen to them that make them what they are - and it's all told in such a smart and tactful way.

I love how Edgar is always a hopeless romantic and how he's always saying cheesy one liners to women. I love how Sabin is this tunnel visioned knuckle head that lightly mocks Celes when she suggests he might have been hurt after the world ends. I love how one of the characters is a moogle that can communicate with humans. I love the most that these traits aren't their whole personality. It shocks me and it's almost eerie how they managed to create so many playable characters (14!) that feel this developed. I mean, I have seen movies and read novels that have characters that are way more one-dimensional than the FF6 cast. This game might have even given me the first instance where I actually do remember the names of some of the characters i spent almost 50 hours with.

There are so many memorable moments in the game - tragic, wholesome and funny. It honestly surprised me how it just kept going and going. There's a section where you fight the undead and suplex a train. There's another where you find an abandoned kid raised by wolves and you adopt him into your party (a salute to Gau). I did feel sometimes that events were sometimes not connected in the most fluid way. Sometimes it did feel kind of forced and most of the time I felt kind of lost in what the game wanted me to do.

That takes me to the plot. I felt it somewhat similar to FFII in that it's this epic story of the empire vs the resistance. The Gestahlian Empire vs the Returners in this case. Magic is gone from this world because the empire has taken all of it because of some mystical beings that possess it (or create it?) and they were friends with humans, but there was a huge battle eons ago that left their friendship in shambles and eh, you should definitely go play it to understand it better - but it's definitely convoluted and a slow burn at first. You're introduced to characters relatively slowly, but many things happen quickly and when your party eventually starts getting large you get split and you get tasked with scheming schemes and thinking of ways to mess up the empire's plans. It's always a classic underdog story and our main villain is one hateable asshole. Which is good! Because it really drives the story. There is a fully voiced (sung?) opera, river poisoning, samurai dreams, a mercenary that becomes your friend and a little brush stroke of incelhood - and of course in a very FF style, it ends with you taking out a good amount of gods and celestial beings. A great story in my opinion.

This is all such a silly and wonderful experience that I highly recommend. It celebrates absurdity and storytelling and the beauty that is to understand that we all suffer as humans in very similar ways. The games in the pixel remaster series have all so many quality of life upgrades that the grinding time for many of the games sections can be reduced to your liking, making this a very appealing experience to have nowadays.

Anyway:

5 double casted ultima spells out of 5 🧿🧿🧿🧿🧿 (with an entry to my personal hall of fame)

As some of you may know, this concludes my journey of going through the first 6 Final Fantasy entries. Thank you for the ones that have read my reviews so far. I'll be back for FF7 and beyond!

Certainly the most ambitious project by Square until Chrono Trigger (and later, FFVII) and a game full of soul, nuance, and enormous emotional content.

The soundtrack is undoubtedly one of the best moments in Nobuo Uematsu’s career, if not the best, and a third of the party characters are easily among the best characters to ever appear in a JRPG. Visually, the game is a considerable leap compared to its predecessors on the SNES.

Final Fantasy had already been experimenting with multiple world maps in a single game, but I think perhaps World of Balance and World of Ruin are my favorite implementation of this idea. Like many, I have criticisms of the World of Ruin, but it is extremely powerful to finally have access to the airship again and go in search of your comrades to the sound of "Searching for Friends." And how much more powerful are the moments in VI, with music like "Terra's Theme," "Dancing Mad," and the entire Opera House arc. The Opera House in particular looks so beautiful in the Pixel Remaster. And not just that but all the theatricality that this game has for an SNES game, with its characters making faces and gestures, acting, and the emotion that these performances convey. That moment with Celes is one of the best moments in the series, no doubt.

It’s worth noting that the good humor of the series is not left aside even in such a serious game. I really like the moments with Ultros, despite these moments being somewhat nonsensical and out of sync with the general tone of VI.

That said, all this grandeur and ambition end up being FFVI's downfall. One thing I greatly admire in its predecessors (FF III, IV, and V) is how they manage to have an almost impeccable pace and how the ideas don’t end up being problematic for the gameplay.

For me, one of the worst things about Final Fantasy VI is precisely its bloated party. While a third of it is spectacular (Locke, Celes, Edgar, Sabin, Cyan), another third is quite uninteresting (Setzer, Terra, Shadow, Strago, Relm), and another third is simply ridiculous and shouldn’t even be in the game (Gau, Umaro, Mog, Gogo). I don’t think this mix of serious and well-developed characters alongside joke characters worked well in VI; it’s probably the worst implementation in games with multiple characters. And this is even worse when the game has multiple dungeons that require you to use these ridiculous characters. Not every character among the 108 you recruit in Suikoden is mandatory to use. Hell, not even in Chrono Cross (which has a much worse party than VI) are you forced to use them.

Another problem is that some characters are particularly useless to use in older versions of the game since the mages are simply overpowered, and in the end, everyone kind of turns into an Ultima battery.

Speaking of joke characters... I don't like Kefka. Like... at all. I genuinely think he’s one of the worst villains in Final Fantasy. I never quite understood the charm of a stupid clown like him and think Gestahl ends up having a more interesting role. Kefka's only saving grace for me is his grandiose final battle and, of course, his theme. "Dancing Mad" is one of the best prog music tracks I've ever heard in my life.

Regarding pacing, I have mixed feelings about the game’s pace; it may have the worst pacing of a Final Fantasy by Sakaguchi. Much of the first arc forces you to play with specific characters, and while it’s a good way to introduce these characters and tell a bit about them, these sections aren’t always fun to play. The second half of the game has an interesting premise that I particularly like, but the execution is generally disjointed and unbalanced. I find it an acceptable tradeoff, and it’s really nice to see how certain arcs conclude in this second half, but it’s far from a flawless execution.

In the end, VI is a very impressive game, especially for its time, with some of the most memorable high points in the entire FF series. However, it’s a game that stumbles a lot with an overly caricatured villain for the game it’s in, a protagonist who is too dull (Celes seems more like the protagonist of the game than the girl on the cover), and with a strange and unbalanced pace. It has too many characters and doesn’t know how to handle them. Not to mention that other games in the series did more and did it better. In terms of gameplay systems, its successor seems like a VI 2.0 with the Materia system.

For all these reasons, I really can't elevate Final Fantasy VI to the best game or best JRPG of all time. I think that’s a rather simplistic way of dealing with this game. Possibly not even among the top five FF games. IV and V executes their ideas way better and VII and IX are pretty ambitious too and doesn't trip over itsideas in such a big way that VI stumbles sometimes. And of course there's XIV, too...

Luckily, the Pixel Remaster simply allows you to brute-force through some of these problems. Simply turning off combat in the multi-party dungeons greatly improved my impression of the game as a whole, and the melee characters are less useless now too. The redone opera is amazing, and it’s a shame they didn’t redo more moments like that. Having played the PS1, GBA, and now this version, I can say this is my favorite way to play FFVI. I definitely end up liking the game way more than before playing this version.