I’m writing this as someone who has a lot of nostalgia for FF6, even if as a kid I never made it to WoR. Playing the game in full today, I’ve come to appreciate some aspects more while also becoming much more aware of its problems.

My main issues with the game stem from how there are simply too many characters. Terra, Locke, and Celes felt like they got the best screen time and character moments by far, but they only make up 3 of the 14 party members. That’s not to say they all have nothing going on, but I think it would have been much better if the cast size was reduced. This could have given more dedicated screen time to the other characters and really help flesh them out.

One example where the large cast really hurts is the many sections when players get full freedom for who is in their party. Many lines of dialogue during these parts use more generic wording and won’t list the speaker’s name, so I can only assume these lines are completely the same no matter the characters you pick. Even if I don’t expect Square to account for every possible party combination, for me it really took away from the characters when I could see how easily they could be swapped around in these parts. A reduced cast size could still help with this, but I think forcing at least 1-2 characters to be used in these sections (which FF6 already does at certain points) would have helped a lot too.

It really felt like Square was either rushed for development time and/or they wanted a large cast just for the sake of it. I can still recommend people play FF6 since there are good parts to it, but I just find it difficult to recommend over many other RPGs.

I think I get why a lot of people like this game, and it does have some really good qualities, but I had quite a few problems with the recurring chasing enemies that really detracted from my experience.

SCP-173 felt the most well made out of the bunch. Having to stare it down as the blink meter forces you to quickly find safety was something I really enjoyed at first, and it provided a very unique experience. Overall I still like 173 but I have to mention it was quite frustrating whenever it would suddenly appear in front of me (sometimes scripted, sometimes not) and simply being low on your blink meter would lead to death.

SCP-049 is another recurring chasing enemy but one without anything that makes 173 interesting. He just runs you down at a constant speed, instantly kills when he reaches you, and has no counterplay. This is as basic as enemy design gets and felt more like he was included just for being one of the more popular SCPs.

But then we have SCP-106. On paper, and during the first encounter, he can be pretty interesting. Being able to pop up at any time means you can never feel too safe, and with visual and audio cues to give proper warning so that you aren’t instantly killed. He won’t directly kill you but will instead send you to his pocket dimension, giving you some chance at escape. It sounds like it fixes some of my issues with 173 and 049, but 106 ended up being the most tedious to deal with by far. Running away from him felt just as monotonous as running from 049, both are just running after you at a constant speed. 106 can be stunned with the Tesla gates, but those aren’t always around, and even when they are it feels no less annoying. The pocket dimension sounds nice as a way to not just kill the player, but trying to escape the pocket dimension always felt like plain old luck. Being able to appear at any moment, instead of building tension, led more to irritation as no matter the task at hand, 106 can suddenly show up to halt your progress and force you to run around for a bit. And with how frequently he ended up appearing, he was just irritating to deal with.

I think the overall quality of the game is still fine. The atmosphere while exploring the facility can be great at times and there’s clearly a lot of love put in with the vast amount of SCPs featured, especially for a mostly solo project in the early 2010s. It’s a free game that’s only ~3-4 hours so it’s hard to recommend against it (or the multiplayer version), but my issues with SCPs 173, 049, and 106 still brought the overall experience down for me.