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.
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.