Eight long weeks of Rolling: Final Fantasy VI

I'd been eyeing picking up the PC port of FFVI with an emotional range running far closer to trepidation than excitement. I've always been worried that various games won't live up to my memories - FFIV, for example, is just kind of dull and dodgy - but Square put VI up for what felt like a low discount during BF sales.

I say "felt" because $4.80 USD doesn't really seem like a great deal for a >20 year old SNES game, port or no port, but as it turns out Square's webstore messed up and accidentally reversed the discount. So it was actually supposed to be less four eighty, not on sale for four eighty, and man I am not playing anything north of five dollars for this game. But I happened to have bought during the price error, so I guess that's good? Oh well, thanks store error, you save me the monies again.

Or technically don't, since it's not like I would have bought it if it wasn't at least this cheap.


 Controller used - I feel like I associate Final Fantasy games with the Playstation controller, so I went with the DualShock 4. I should note its a little weird, if you force close the game, the dpad breaks, or at least did a couple times. Like I said in the DS4 review, support is a little wonky. In this case I'm not sure which part of the software pipeline is acting up. FF6 seems to have its own config for the DS4, which makes me wonder if maybe Steam is the one bugging it out? I would as such not recommend the DS4, which ultimately comes back to why I didn't finish the game. Getting accustomed to it for this was a decision that haunted me.

Before we talk about the game itself, or the core of the review, let's talking about what FFVI:steam is. It's a port of a mobile game, to my understanding, with weird sprites and a weird filter and a lot of general weirdness. PC gamers as they tend to immediately took to modding the game, though I don't know how ultimately successful they were. Regardless, a quick googling brings up this thread on the steam forums which instructs on how to mod the game. I installed the de-filter hack, the vibrant reshade and the font fix. I didn't want to go with the border fix. CRTs were square. I played this game last on a CRT. I played the game windowed, anyway.

In fact, playing FF6 is kind of a weird trip, because the game is far enough back for me that I imagine it as both far vaster and yet oddly smaller than it actually is. I didn't remember a big chunk of the storyline as I went through it, but it's been a long time, so maybe I played it with my then best friend or skipped parts of it through rentals or I'm not even sure. I didn't actually own a SNES or FF6, but I might have rented it. Whew! Partially new world, basically.

To give context for FF games around FF6 and why I was worried, well. I reviewed FF8 and FF7 recently, finding 7 better than I remembered and 8 a little worse. I played FF5 several years ago when it was first translated, and thought it was pretty good. FF4 I played through on my DS lite in 2010, and it wasn't especially memorable - certainly not a game I would call a classic - and the original NES FF I tried maybe ten or so years back finding it completely awful. So I was a little worried it would fall in the direction of 4 and not suit me at all.

Visually the FF6 port on Steam is ... I want to say worse looking in most ways, but better in a couple key ways that don't make up for it but still work just fine. FF6 had really gorgeous pixel artwork that was by and large pretty poorly animated: the port worsens this without adding much. It replicates the Mode 7 trickery FF6 used for the airship and a couple other scenes, which just looks ridiculous in an amusing manner. You can't really get angry at it for that. The backgrounds look too soft and glossy, which I think people have referred to as a 'rpgmaker look'. Inversely, character sprites are more expressive, so there's some benefit in cutscenes and the like. Edgar waggling his finger never gets old, and Celes has some cute expressions. Basically, it looks worse. I can't help but feel the palette used is simply off, the game doesn't have the visual punch it did on the SNES, but I don't have a SNES or a working good quality CRT to plug it into so it's hard to say.

The audio is CD quality, but... Ok this is really weird... It sounds CD quality at all times but it uses high bitrate audio to replicate the lower bitrate of the SNES chip at points. That's my best explanation. So it sounds really great most of the time, though it could use more tracks, and then it sounds completely bizarre. There aren't enough tracks, but they're all good. Final Fantasy music is familiar and enjoyable.

FF6's gameplay is on the most part pretty standard early 90s RPG gaming. You have an overworld you wander around, towns and dungeons of various kinds, then battle encounters. There isn't much else. Where FF6 shines, mind you, isn't really in the battle encounters. I don't know if the port was heavily nerfed or something, but besides some mid-game grinding to make sure a deeper cast of characters had the healing/dispel magics I don't feel like I really outleveled the game. Not intentionally, anyway, but it was ridiculously easy. I admit I was grinding when I was getting to the end (and it somehow overwriting my save, which I'll get to, is why I stopped) but that has to do with the game forcing you to use three different parties at the end.

Anyway the big twist of the game and one I'm trying to not spoil anything narrative-wise results in two very different "halves" to the game. The beginning of the game is very linear, though it has multiple paths at one point, but then after a defining moment the game changes entirely and becomes almost a proto-open world sort of game. It's part of what makes this game so enduring, as although there's "less" content in the second half, you can spend a long time doing all sorts of silliness. Mostly treasure hunting and the like.

Plotwise (and here we descend toward the negative) FF6 is again a game of two halves. The individual character stories are limited, but they're punchy and most of the cast has a lot more energy put into them than you'd expect for a 16-bit RPG. Although almost every character has the same arc, they all hit pretty well. The game uses its assets well in this regard and I found some of the writing was a lot smarter than I expected. Inversely the larger, grand story of the world is on the most part pretty weak. There's not much motivation given and a lot of the cast seem barely invested. The problem comes back to an issue FF games have in general: The world feels rather empty. It's not as bad as FF7 in this regard, but there's still only a handful of towns and each of those only has a couple buildings.

There's actually a bit of a weird trip right at about the beginning of the final third where you have to go through various towns, and for a little - since you don't currently have the airship - the game actually feels well populated. Then you get the airship and there's nothing out there and I guess that's the big problem, airships.

I've never been surprised at gamers gushing over Final Fantasy games; the branding has been really strong for a long time. Early FF games are doubly so, since they're tied to the zenith of Nintendo in nerd subculture. But whatever, I'll probably get some scorn over this one: FF6 definitely isn't a flawless game. I don't know how much comes down to the port, but in the second half of the game the tuning is just bizarre. The random encounter rate is jacked up to completely absurd levels sometimes, and it makes the dungeons completely miserable experiences. I tried playing through most of the game without walkthroughs, and that worked fine in the first half, but in the second between the garbage nonsense layout of dungeons and the constant throbbing tedium of endless meaningless random encounters I just kept one up for a lot of sections. And some parts were still incredibly, suffering level bad.

And no, they're never hard. Again... Is this the port? The difficulty I remember from my childhood just isn't here. The game is weirdly easy and can be tedious and it just turns into a complete slog in parts. The other aspects of the game are mostly very good to great, but sometimes the vomiting of random spawns just makes the game downright unpleasant.  And yes, there's ways to mitigate or reduce random spawns, but that's not a great excuse.

Also, and this is heresy to my generation of RPGers, but I think Kefka is complete trash and found the parts of the narrative with him in it just dull. I think I'm the exception here and that's fine, but I found him completely lacking in every capacity. Except the distinct laugh, I liked that, but he's just "oh so crazy!!" and that does nothing for me. There's no real motivation or past given, and it kinda dries the narrative for me when those are needed to explain why the emperor puts up with him at all.

So would I recommend FF6? That's a tricky one. I really enjoyed about 75% of the game, but about 25% is just stone terrible and it's hard to balance the two in my mind. Too much of the game is a slog, you just get that "walking in heavy rain" feeling where you're plodding forward. A lot of the story-telling isn't just "impressive for the time" though, it's just impressive. It's way less sexist and way less to tropes than more recent works. They manage to slam so much into tiny little sprite characters. The game doesn't even have a main character, it threads a narrative out of multiple little stories, and it's a bit surprising how refreshing much of the writing is. Basically, I'd say yes, though I have to admit by the end of the game and the last dungeon I was pretty much out of energy. The game has a good ending, but the last dungeon is just way too much.

Also the port's implementation of quicksaving and/or saving in general is bad. The port is basically bad all around, and lacks core features you'd expect. One of my few wipes in the game set me back hours of work, not because I hadn't saved, but because the game A) has no quit option B) the DS4 controller can and will break if you force close C) it doesn't go to the main menu when you wipe, it does some nebulous reloading D) back to A, you can't go back to the main menu, so I saved the quick save and as it turns out it saved over my active save? I'm honestly confused as to how, but here I am, with a good 1h30m of grinding just gone. Pretty trashcan. I was grinding (there's a reason you kinda need to, as you're supposed to use a full three parties at the end) to do the last area and it just flattened whatever remaining energy I had for the game.

So FF6? Good, not as great as I remembered it, but bad in the expected ways of being a little too sloggy. Good in ways that surprised me. The port? Bad, and probably one of the worst ways to play the game. Unfortunately, I don't think there really is a great way to play FF6. It could use a more compelling re-master, and I'd generally not recommend playing any current implementation. If you must, I'd probably emulate it.

I'm hoping FF7's remake does well and leads to a remake of other popular FF games. I don't know where I'd put 6, 7 and 8 were I to try to give them some pointless hierarchy, but it's certainly a good game deserving of a proper re-master that fixes the weird graphical issues, maybe adds a couple new battle tracks.