Friday, May 10, 2024

How to Do a Final Fantasy VI Remake

 I'm roughly halfway through (I think) Final Fantasy VI, currently (unchanged since my last post) cleaning up various things before I go to the Floating Continent and... well, see the game change significantly for the back half. (Spoilers for a 30-year old game?)

I do think I need to temper some of my reactions to the game given that this is the first one really filtered by nostalgia, but I also know that the general consensus surrounding VI at least in the U.S. is that it's the best (even if VII is also deeply beloved). And folks at Square Enix have talked about how they dream of making a similar from-the-ground-up remake of VI the way that they've done with VII.

The biggest challenge, they say, though, is the cast. After games like IV where Cecil is very clearly the main character, and V where the cast does share the spotlight fairly well, but there's only five total party members (and only four at any given time,) VI's guiding philosophy was that all the characters were the main character. Granted, I might give privileged positions to Terra, Locke, Celes, and maybe Edgar and Sabin, but the goal was to ensure that everyone had something of an arc.

Now, I know that the second half of the game is where a lot of these personal stories get resolved, so I'm still in a bit of a set-up phase, but I am getting a sense of the game's overall shape.

Speaking with my best friend, whose favorite video game of all time is VI (though he's never beaten it! He's working his way through V's Pixel Remaster for now - we've been doing this in parallel) he suggested that if we had an expanded remake like VII has gotten, he would put the end of the first game at the big battle at the Narshe mines.

This does feel like a natural spot - while the game starts in Narshe, you have the separate legs of the journey trying to get Narshe to join the Returners, Locke meeting Celes in an occupied South Figaro, and Sabin coming to understand the depths of Kefka's depravity before he, Shadow, and Cyan take their trip aboard the Phantom Train, and then later meet Gau on the Veldt.

The funny thing, though, is that as a place to cut, you actually wind up ending the game before the mechanic of Magicite even enters the picture. That could actually be great - you could basically not have to worry about it when designing the first game, and instead focusing in on the characters' individual powers.

I'd guess, then, that the second game (assuming this would be a trilogy like VII) would likely begin with the search for Terra, eventually getting your first Magicite in Zozo, Celes' starring turn in the opera, and then the trip to the Magitek facility in Vector, the opening to the world of the Espers, meeting Strago and Relm, and finally the Floating Continent. That might be a lot, but it's actually kind of similar to VII's remakes where you cover a lot more ground in the second game.

It's actually sort of funny to me that VI is generally agreed to sit alongside VII as the best of Final Fantasy's entries (I've heard a lot of people putting the MMO Final Fantasy XIV alongside them, but I can only really do one MMO and also I think it's PC only and not on Macs anyway) but unlike VII, which has had tons of prequel games and a sequel movie, as far as I know they've never returned to the world of FFVI, other than various remasters of the original game.

I've been a massive fan of VII's Remake trilogy so far, and frankly wish that future Final Fantasy games would use its combat system much as many of the pre-X games more or less re-used IV's Active Time Battle system. Seeing the world of VI fleshed out and detailed as the VII remakes have done with that game, and seeing those characters rendered in modern, realistic graphics with more space for performances and voice-acting... really it would be freaking awesome.

Given that this is the last of the Pixel Remasters, I'm trying to stop and smell the roses as best I can. I feel like I'm clearing a massive backlog of classic games while also walking through a kind of museum of game design.

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