I'm now not only in the World of Ruin, but I've also got all but one of the playable characters I had gotten in the World of Balance (the holdout being Mog - and I haven't gotten Umaro or Gogo yet).
It's hard to look at Final Fantasy VI objectively the way I think I've been able to for the previous five games, in part because it's a game that I do remember from even before I had an SNES, and on top of that, it's my best friend's favorite video game of all time, so I guess in a kind of empathetic transference I feel a lot of his nostalgia for it.
I've written before about the ways in which the game feels like another step in the evolution of the series, particularly in how it divests itself of a lot of the medieval fantasy tropes that had been present in the first five games (though, unlike VII, it still retains a bit of that, given that a lot of the towns could easily fit in one of the previous games without much change).
But I think I have a few more observations - some neutral, some positive, some actually kind of negative, about the game.
First, let's talk about its bleakness: even before Kefka blows up the world, the world of VI is pretty dark. Not only do you have a conquering empire crushing everyone under their boot-feel and mind-controlling Terra to act as one of their super-soldiers, but you've even got stuff outside the Empire like Jidoor exiling all of its poor people to the anarchic slum of Zozo (I'm not expecting a lot of sophisticated politics in a 30-year-old SNES game, but I think if they fleshed out this segment in a remake we might get a little better sense of how Zozo got so scuzzy, because as it stands there's a likely unintentional implication that poor people will naturally devolve into violent thugs without an authority to keep them in line).
Of course, the World of Ruin, and particularly Celes' time on the Solitary Isle with Cid, is particularly dark (I didn't get the darkest version of it, because I caught enough Delicious Fish to keep him alive).
Earlier FF games do deal in some dark moments - IV has you begin your adventure as an agent of the evil empire, II sees entire towns wiped off the map by the evil empire, and V, while mostly a bit more upbeat, has a late-game moment in which several towns get sucked into the void, but the ending seems to make it clear that this is all reversed by defeating Exdeath (I'll also throw in there that the reveal of Castle Exdeath's true form is a pretty horrific shocker - the entire series has trained us to understand that the big bad's lair will be all blue crystals, and that's what the castle looks like until the illusion is dispelled and it's shown to be one giant mass of flesh. I guess given that the big bad is ultimately an evil tree, perhaps he thought that turnabout was fair play - if we were going to make our homes out of wood, he'd make his out of meat. Of course, Castle Exdeath is far from the final dungeon, and the actual final dungeon is a little more "cosmic crystal" like the other games).
Next, let's talk about structure:
I have a confession: I've been using a walkthrough. The reason here is just a fear of missing out on things. If it hadn't been drilled into me by my aforementioned best friend, I'd have likely left the Floating Continent before the timer ran out and thus lost Shadow as a party member permanently.
There is definitely a line of breadcrumbs in the World of Ruin that leads you to regaining most of the party members (I didn't even realize re-recruiting Sabin was technically optional).
But there's definitely less of an A to B to C structure in the back half of the game than the World of Balance part. To an extent, this is just the natural consequence of a structure that limits your movements - the very first game basically forced you to play most of it in order because you just couldn't get anywhere else, but then when you get the Airship, the world opens up in a big way.
At the moment, the objective is certainly to get all the party members, but I'm also curious to see how obvious the breadcrumbs are to get, for example, the other Magicites (I've been coasting on the second level -a rank spells for a long time, and I feel like I've got to get the -ga rank ones pretty soon, right?)
I will say that I think there's a double-edged sword to having a really open design. I know that a lot of people love the fact that, for example, the characters' journeys in Baldur's Gate III can go in so many different directions. But I guess I'm someone who really wants to have that golden ending, and isn't really down for replaying a whole game to try to do things differently.
Something I love about a game like, say, Alan Wake II, is that you get the full story if you beat the game (well, you get the full story if you beat the New Game Plus). I honestly think that the reason I fell off of BG3 upon arriving at the eponymous city is that I just became overwhelmed with the need to make sure every character's arc turned out the way I wanted it to - what had begun early on as a casual, "let's see where this goes" way of playing it devolved into "ok, wait, what exactly do I need to do to make sure that Shadowheart chooses not to kill the Nightsong? Say nothing? Really? That actually makes sense but I would not have thought of it."
FFVI doesn't have quite the granularity of different story paths to it that BG3 does, but I can definitely say that I looked up how to ensure that Cid doesn't die at the start of the World of Ruin.
Switching gears: let's talk Magicite.
I... I actually have to be honest here. I don't know if it's my favorite system.
See, on the surface it's great that you can get everyone to learn all the spells.
But I think it starts to homogenize characters that, prior to getting magicite, were very distinct. I'll still use Edgar's Tools and Sabin's Blitzes, but I'm starting to hit a point where basically any fight will have me mostly just casting spells on all four of my active characters. And while Terra is still doing way more with them (I have her double-equipping Earrings and I've had her using Magicite that boosts her Magic stat on level-up) it makes things like Cyan's Bushido feel underwhelming.
I also don't love that you're basically penalized if you level up when not using a stat-boosting Magicite.
I think if I were to redesign the system, I'd probably have the Magicite give a percentage bonus to that stat while it's equipped, and then perhaps grant the spells it offers while equipped, but not teach them permanently. Maybe Terra and possibly Celes would be exceptions here, where they get to actually learn those spells permanently.
Again, games have gotten more sophisticated over time, and this was certainly a big, experimental leap (and likely taking inspiration from V's Jobs system).
I think in a revamped version of the game, you could also evolve the characters' unique abilities to grow and develop in fun ways over the course of the game. Sabin and Cyan learning new techniques is very cool (and is basically like the way that the VII Remake series has had characters learn their unique weapon abilities).
Anyway, Magic is also easy to use a lot of because once a character has Osmose, they basically will never run out of MP. Mind you, I don't hate that, but it does de-emphasize physical attacks.
VI is shaping up, even with its flaws, to be very likely my favorite in the first six of the series, and I say that knowing that I genuinely liked both IV and V (I appreciated I-III, but they all felt sort of proof-of-concept-like, with III being the first game that felt like it was approaching true ambition, but which got blown away by IV's confident arrival in the 16-bit era). There's a decent chance we'll be getting whatever the latest port of the original FFVII, so when I finish this one I might have to check that one out (and will compare it to the preceding six games and to its decades-later remake series - which have genuinely been some of my favorite games ever).
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