I totally understand why this is the favourite Final Fantasy game of so many people.
It has a really solid story and even better characters (for the most part). I imagine this game was to a lot of people what Bastion was to me, i.e. the revelation that video games can be about more than just having fun.
The best thing about this game is its characters. You have some really great characters like Terra and Cyan, some solid characters like Sabin and some characters that don’t matter all that much but they’re amusing like Gogo.
Unfortunately, there’s also Locke, who is really weird and creepy and please stay away from Celes.
Another thing holding back the characters of this game is that most of the dialogue is happening while your party is entirely flexible and the game doesn’t even try to make the dialogue match the party, it just puts nameless text boxes on screen. Aside from it meaning a lot of opportunities for characterization are lost, I streamed this game for my partners, and we voiced it and it was just really frustrating to not know who should voice a given line.
Speaking of frustrations while trying to voice this game, some of the dialogue boxes scroll on their own (some of them because they’re somewhat timed to animations on-screen, some of them because ¯\(ツ)/¯) and they go way too fast. Even if you’re not trying to read them out loud they might be too fast for you if you’re not super familiar with the language you’re playing this in but fortunately the game is localized in a lot of languages so unless you’re Turkish you’re probably going to be fine.
If you know nothing about this game, you might be thinking “Well it’s cool that the game has a great cast I guess but I’ll probably just end up using the same party for everything”. Wrong!
Even ignoring segments that force you to use specific characters you’ll end up using most of the cast because there are multiple instances of using multiple parties to clear a dungeon. This is such a cool concept; I wish more games did that.
I wish the game would let you switch party members a bit more freely instead of just at the airship but it’s not a big deal.
I should probably talk about the combat a bit. After the fantastic FFV combat, VI was pretty much guaranteed to be a disappointment. And it was, but I was still expecting a bit better than this.
One big issue is that equipping a magicite does nothing at first. You need to actually win a few fights with it equipped to gain the spells it teaches you, so if you notice that your party is lacking something you have to make it through a bunch of combats first. This especially stings if you need someone with a healing spell. In the mid- to lategame, healing spells are pretty much the only viable options for healing because Potions and Hi-Potions heal basically nothing and there’s no readily available potion above them.
Another issue with the way learning spells works is that obviously you’re gonna teach everyone the strongest spells so everyone ends up knowing mostly the same spells so people with mostly useless command abilities end up feeling the same.
The fights themselves are also a pain to get through. Enemies have way too much health and random encounters take way too long. At the same time, way too many enemies have a lot of frustrating status effects and instant death effects.
You will eventually get some kind of broken thing. There are a lot of different broken things which I honestly really appreciate, but they’re often broken to a degree that combat gets completely trivialized and unlike in V where it feels like a reward for figuring out some broken build it just feels like a thing that happened because you played the game enough so it doesn’t really feel satisfying either.
Dishonorable mention to Ultima which is so strong it outclasses even the once per combat Esper summons so you end up with all these cool summons that you never use because Ultima is just strictly better.
Speaking of summons, it’s a bit sad to see that Titan and Leviathan didn’t get to be in this game, especially Leviathan who up to this point was as much of a part of this series’ history as Bahamut to me.
The music in this one is obviously good as always, but I was honestly a bit disappointed. A lot of it was just good and very little of it was great. The Decisive Battle is pretty much the only track that really stuck with me.
In conclusion, if you’re a fan of JRPGs, don’t play this game because it will make you question why other games of the genre don’t let you use most of your characters. Jokes aside, this is an amazing game and you should play it for the Opera scene alone, even if some features of it could have used some more refinement.
It has a really solid story and even better characters (for the most part). I imagine this game was to a lot of people what Bastion was to me, i.e. the revelation that video games can be about more than just having fun.
The best thing about this game is its characters. You have some really great characters like Terra and Cyan, some solid characters like Sabin and some characters that don’t matter all that much but they’re amusing like Gogo.
Unfortunately, there’s also Locke, who is really weird and creepy and please stay away from Celes.
Another thing holding back the characters of this game is that most of the dialogue is happening while your party is entirely flexible and the game doesn’t even try to make the dialogue match the party, it just puts nameless text boxes on screen. Aside from it meaning a lot of opportunities for characterization are lost, I streamed this game for my partners, and we voiced it and it was just really frustrating to not know who should voice a given line.
Speaking of frustrations while trying to voice this game, some of the dialogue boxes scroll on their own (some of them because they’re somewhat timed to animations on-screen, some of them because ¯\(ツ)/¯) and they go way too fast. Even if you’re not trying to read them out loud they might be too fast for you if you’re not super familiar with the language you’re playing this in but fortunately the game is localized in a lot of languages so unless you’re Turkish you’re probably going to be fine.
If you know nothing about this game, you might be thinking “Well it’s cool that the game has a great cast I guess but I’ll probably just end up using the same party for everything”. Wrong!
Even ignoring segments that force you to use specific characters you’ll end up using most of the cast because there are multiple instances of using multiple parties to clear a dungeon. This is such a cool concept; I wish more games did that.
I wish the game would let you switch party members a bit more freely instead of just at the airship but it’s not a big deal.
I should probably talk about the combat a bit. After the fantastic FFV combat, VI was pretty much guaranteed to be a disappointment. And it was, but I was still expecting a bit better than this.
One big issue is that equipping a magicite does nothing at first. You need to actually win a few fights with it equipped to gain the spells it teaches you, so if you notice that your party is lacking something you have to make it through a bunch of combats first. This especially stings if you need someone with a healing spell. In the mid- to lategame, healing spells are pretty much the only viable options for healing because Potions and Hi-Potions heal basically nothing and there’s no readily available potion above them.
Another issue with the way learning spells works is that obviously you’re gonna teach everyone the strongest spells so everyone ends up knowing mostly the same spells so people with mostly useless command abilities end up feeling the same.
The fights themselves are also a pain to get through. Enemies have way too much health and random encounters take way too long. At the same time, way too many enemies have a lot of frustrating status effects and instant death effects.
You will eventually get some kind of broken thing. There are a lot of different broken things which I honestly really appreciate, but they’re often broken to a degree that combat gets completely trivialized and unlike in V where it feels like a reward for figuring out some broken build it just feels like a thing that happened because you played the game enough so it doesn’t really feel satisfying either.
Dishonorable mention to Ultima which is so strong it outclasses even the once per combat Esper summons so you end up with all these cool summons that you never use because Ultima is just strictly better.
Speaking of summons, it’s a bit sad to see that Titan and Leviathan didn’t get to be in this game, especially Leviathan who up to this point was as much of a part of this series’ history as Bahamut to me.
The music in this one is obviously good as always, but I was honestly a bit disappointed. A lot of it was just good and very little of it was great. The Decisive Battle is pretty much the only track that really stuck with me.
In conclusion, if you’re a fan of JRPGs, don’t play this game because it will make you question why other games of the genre don’t let you use most of your characters. Jokes aside, this is an amazing game and you should play it for the Opera scene alone, even if some features of it could have used some more refinement.
frxnz
1 year ago