This review contains spoilers
Final Fantasy VI sticks its landing so well that I was tempted to rate it higher; your band of adventurers finding reason to hope and persevere in the face of Kefka's relentless nihilism and raw, destructive power is a really incredible moment. The finale and its aftermath are powerful and its hard for them not to leave an impression on you.
Sadly that final hour felt like it had as much character-building as the previous 30 hours beforehand. Between the vast playable cast, technology and translation limiting the dialogue in various ways, and the need to keep the game pushing ever-forward, so many of these characters simply couldn't be given the depth needed for me to really care about them until those final moments, though their designs are very charming (aided by the timeless pixel art).
The story itself is epic, the stakes constantly growing and intensity raising underneath the game's forward momentum, until the big twist happens; the World of Ruin. The World of Ruin is conceptually fantastic, the party torn apart and forced to find one another again in a world distraught. The execution is more uneven than that though as the relatively non-linear approach makes the pacing suffer at points in this half of the game, and also leads to you likely needing to turn to a guide to pick up your final few characters. It also makes the difficulty more uneven too as you can never be sure you're arriving somewhere at the point it was really designed for.
Combat is largely fine, with boss battles often being enjoyable and tense whilst more regular encounters can sometimes drift into mindlessly repeating the same few moves over and over; this is less a problem early on, but can start to grow dull or even frustrating in the game's late non-linear sections. I love how each character has a very clear identity at the start of the game in regards to their combat abilities, there's a lot of creativity here even if it does lead to characters feeling pretty unbalanced at points.
Unfortunately Magicite, whilst excellent at keeping you engaged with the development of your various characters, leads to all your characters doing basically the same things by the end of the game; almost every character can learn every spell in the game if you're willing to grind a bit, and spells like Life 2, Ultima and Cure 3 are so much stronger than any of your character's unique abilities. This is a fairly late-game problem, but ends up being another thing that ends up delineating the high quality of the first half of the game and the uneven quality of the second half.
Ultimately, in one way or another, the World of Ruin ends up being a bit of a let-down after the strong first half of this game and despite the powerful ending. It's not surprising to hear that this portion of the game wasn't originally intended to to be a part of Final Fantasy VI but was only added some way into the process due to the game's development being ahead of schedule; whilst FFVI's story would be much less impactful and unique without this second half, most of the game's systems start to feel a bit off to me in this portion in one way or another. FFVI is a beautiful game in many regards, with some amazing moments, but it has enough wrong with it that I find it hard to see it as the unassailable peak of the genre that many seem to.
Sadly that final hour felt like it had as much character-building as the previous 30 hours beforehand. Between the vast playable cast, technology and translation limiting the dialogue in various ways, and the need to keep the game pushing ever-forward, so many of these characters simply couldn't be given the depth needed for me to really care about them until those final moments, though their designs are very charming (aided by the timeless pixel art).
The story itself is epic, the stakes constantly growing and intensity raising underneath the game's forward momentum, until the big twist happens; the World of Ruin. The World of Ruin is conceptually fantastic, the party torn apart and forced to find one another again in a world distraught. The execution is more uneven than that though as the relatively non-linear approach makes the pacing suffer at points in this half of the game, and also leads to you likely needing to turn to a guide to pick up your final few characters. It also makes the difficulty more uneven too as you can never be sure you're arriving somewhere at the point it was really designed for.
Combat is largely fine, with boss battles often being enjoyable and tense whilst more regular encounters can sometimes drift into mindlessly repeating the same few moves over and over; this is less a problem early on, but can start to grow dull or even frustrating in the game's late non-linear sections. I love how each character has a very clear identity at the start of the game in regards to their combat abilities, there's a lot of creativity here even if it does lead to characters feeling pretty unbalanced at points.
Unfortunately Magicite, whilst excellent at keeping you engaged with the development of your various characters, leads to all your characters doing basically the same things by the end of the game; almost every character can learn every spell in the game if you're willing to grind a bit, and spells like Life 2, Ultima and Cure 3 are so much stronger than any of your character's unique abilities. This is a fairly late-game problem, but ends up being another thing that ends up delineating the high quality of the first half of the game and the uneven quality of the second half.
Ultimately, in one way or another, the World of Ruin ends up being a bit of a let-down after the strong first half of this game and despite the powerful ending. It's not surprising to hear that this portion of the game wasn't originally intended to to be a part of Final Fantasy VI but was only added some way into the process due to the game's development being ahead of schedule; whilst FFVI's story would be much less impactful and unique without this second half, most of the game's systems start to feel a bit off to me in this portion in one way or another. FFVI is a beautiful game in many regards, with some amazing moments, but it has enough wrong with it that I find it hard to see it as the unassailable peak of the genre that many seem to.