So, while I had never played very far into it, Final Fantasy VI was the first game in the series I was really aware of (though the dark-clad knight in some cardboard cutout that I recall vaguely from early childhood might have been Cecil from IV, then known as II) and so I'm a little biased toward it as "the" classic Final Fantasy game.
But, to be fair, by reputation and by what I'm now experiencing playing the game, it is earning that.
I've now worked out a deal with future party-member Setzer to use his airship to travel to the southern continent and confront the Empire and rescue some Espers from a Magitek factory.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Square seemed to pull out all the stops when conceptualizing VI. I should note that, graphically, the Pixel Remaster has made some changes and embellishments on what released for the SNES (and I'll talk about the Opera in a moment) but in terms of art direction, there are some huge departures from the previous games. Yes, there have always been elements in these games of high technology, most notably the sci-fi environments encountered in IV. But while there are still some castles to be found in VI, they have ventilations shafts in their towers.
Zozo, in particular, feels hugely different.
At one point in the game - after a lengthy journey where the characters get split up (one branch of which includes the segment on the Phantom Train) and then reunite for one of the game's "multiple parties" segments (which, as a WoW player, I think of as "raids") a few characters need to go looking for Terra, and this takes you to the wealthy town of Jidoor, which has a classic medieval Final Fantasy town vibe, but where the lower class citizens were all banished, and were forced to go create a new town up in the mountains called Zozo. And it is there that we discover Terra was last seen.
Zozo, unlike any other town I've seen in an earlier Final Fantasy game, feels modern (well, modern for the mid-90s). While, being a video game settlement, it's tiny, the town has the vibe of a dense urban slum, with tightly-packed apartment buildings. Zozo doesn't really function as a town the way that most towns in these games do, as you'll be attacked anywhere in there and the "stores" don't actually have anyone who will sell you anything.
The dense town of urban decay - which literally has bodies lying out on the street - has a vibe that I think was popular in my childhood, an era when the cyberpunk genre was really big (a genre that, all apologies to modern cyberpunk authors, I think is almost redundant given how we're already in a society dominated by the internet where megacorporations dictate how we live). It's honestly something that I think as a kid I would have found kind of off-putting and depressing, but thirty years later kind of hits a note of nostalgia. Zozo is scuzzy to the extreme.
But it's also here that one of VI's major progression systems is introduced. Terra is being tended by Ramuh, one of the Espers that, being basically human in form, can pass as human and live in secret. Ramuh escaped from one of the empire's Magitek laboratories, and is hoping to enlist the Returners in liberating his fellows. Ramuh's three companions, Siren, Cait Sith, and Kirin, didn't make it, but transformed into Magicite upon their deaths. Ramuh allows the same to happen to him, and thus we get our first Magicites.
Each character can have one Magicite equipped at a time, and as you battle things, the Magicite will (permanently) teach you spells - for example, Ramuh gives you, if I recall correctly, Thunder, Thundara, and Poison. Additionally, some Magicite will also affects your stats when you level up - I believe of the first four you get, one has your Stamina go up an extra point with each level, another increases the HP gains you receive by 10%, and another increases your Magic attribute by 1 when you level up. Finally, each of these Espers can be summoned once per battle by the person who has them equipped.
At the moment my strategy has been to try to swap them out so that everyone learns as many spells as possible - especially Cure (taught by Kirin). But I think in the long run it'll also be important to have Espers equipped that will give certain character the attributes they most need. Celes and Terra, as the two native spellcasters, will probably be characters I focus a lot of Magic stats on.
Right now the Figaro brothers are profoundly powerful with their unique abilities. I got the Chainsaw on Edgar (which I must confess I got some online help with) and between that and Sabin's Meteor Strike (which in the SNES version was just called Suplex) I can dish out a ton of damage in single-target scenarios. And in fact, both have powerful AoEs as well. I wonder if these will remain as powerful moving forward.
Indeed, very few characters, it seems, have much reason to just use the standard "attack" command. Celes does when she's not casting spells (I haven't encountered a ton of spellcasting enemies, so her Runic command doesn't get a lot of use). Locke was doing this until I got a relic that changed his "Steal" to "Mug," and while given that he wasn't putting out much damage compared to the Figaros anyway, having him focus on combat larceny has been a pretty standard practice.
Following Zozo, and needing an airship to get to Vector, the imperial capital, another of VI's iconic sequences (and there do seem to be a lot of those) takes place - in which Celes takes the place of an opera singer whom she looks like as bait for a scoundrel gambler who happens to have an airship and intends to kidnap the singer.
Now, the fact that this kidnapper is a future party member is... a bit intriguing, as he's a full-on villain here.
But this opera sequence is where I think the Pixel Remaster went really hard. I do have vague memories of this in its original SNES form, and while it was a real spectacle, in the Pixel Remaster they do a couple things I genuinely didn't expect.
The first is that they play with camera angles. All of these games have had the top-down (or slightly-tilted top-down, maybe more tilted in VI) perspective, but we get shots of the stage from various angles, with the sprites redesigned to show off... well, angles that we don't usually see them from. It's not constant, but it's a sort of shocking vision as we're reminded that, oh yes, we're actually in 2024 right now (at least as I'm writing this) and video games have definitely figured out how to show off a 3D environment.
The other is that the singing in the opera has full voice acting. As in, it's really sung, with, like, lyrics being sung by voice actors in English.
Now, the SNES did have very occasional voice acting - think about the opening of Super Metroid "The Last Metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace." But that was seriously exceptional, and I don't think it was really until the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox generation that voice acting in video games became the rule rather than the exception. So yeah, this really knocked my socks off.
Playing through all these iconic moments, though - Suplexing the ghost train, having the second Ultros fight on the opera stage - the one thing is a little surprising is how easy things have been. Both of those fights only lasted like two or three rounds, and while with Ultros I probably did do a little grinding (trying to learn various spells and such) with the Phantom Train I really didn't at all (ok, I spent long enough in the Veldt to have Gau do his thing one time, but that hardly seems excessive).
Not all the fights have been easy - I took on the second bout with Kefka (which comes after defending Banon from several waves of imperial soldiers - though there's a recovery bucket you can return to between fights) with Locke, Gau, and Edgar, I believe, and well after I'd set Gau to one of his Rages, Locke and Edgar were both knocked out by a single attack, meaning I had to just sit there and cheer Gau on to finish the fight (he did prevail, but with a fairly small number of hit points left) but I wonder overall how much of a challenge the game will wind up being. My general rule (and this is probably the subject for a whole post) is that I like a game that is difficult enough to get me to engage in its game systems - you don't want something where you can just hit the basic attack over and over and succeed - but not so difficult that it feels impossible (yes, I know that I play FromSoft games, and for some reason they feel like an exception to that second rule, probably because of some sort of "tough but fair" philosophy).
Anyway, I'm still playing through stuff that feels relatively familiar to me. But I'm running out of big moments that I already know pretty well.
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