VI Down...

 So, I made a mistake.

In my last-minute clean-up of Final Fantasy VI before going to the final dungeon, I revisited Darill's Tomb and, with a bunch of monsters I profoundly out-leveled, turned off encounters.

Thus, only after finishing the game did it occur to me that Kefka's Tower might not be unique in not having any non-boss enemies, but that I had simply forgotten to turn encounters back on.

Thus, while I feel that, difficulty-wise I don't think I would have been too affected, as I'm pretty diligent about healing up and restoring MP between fights, I did rob myself of the true experience of that dungeon.

Still, while I might go take my "you've beaten the game" save file and muck around in the dungeon if I can to just experience those fights, I did get the climactic ones. There are several bosses to be fought in Kefka's Tower, which are of course not skippable, including the final two legendary dragons needed to gain the Crusader Magicite, along with a couple other less plot-relevant bosses and then the three members of the Warring Triad followed by the big fight with Kefka himself.

For years now I've been familiar with this final fight, if not precisely all of the mechanics involved. Honestly, having Terra spam Ultima over and over did most of the work for me. Indeed, it felt like there wasn't much of a "trick" to it - just heal the party up and pump out damage. The only character I lost from my original lineup was Sabin, mainly because I beat the second or third phase of the fight before I had a chance to revive him (story-wise he survives, and I think Locke came in to take his place - actually both Locke and Cyan were down, I think, at the end of the fight). Terra, even without the Soul of Thamassa to grant her dual-casting, was the star of the show, doing I'm pretty sure the most damage and getting the killing blow on the mad clown god.

For those unfamiliar, and who don't care about spoiler for this 30-year-old game, the final fight with Kefka takes place over four phases, each of which have their own unique battle music.

It's not entirely clear to me if you're really fighting Kefka the whole time, or some elaborate animated sculpture (the targets are all Statue of the Gods A, B, C, etc.) The first phase has a big hulking demonic figure with two arms that can be separately targeted (though again, I mainly spammed Ultima, which hits all enemies). I believe the inspiration for these phases was Dante's Divine Comedy, so this first one is Inferno.

Next, the second phase, which has probably the most unhinged music (the title of the full suite is "Dancing Mad," but I don't know if this part of it has its own title). Here you have I think four statues of what look like tormented souls (one of which actually looks a bit like Terra). Similar to the Neo-Exdeath fight, downing a target doesn't remove it from the sprite, so it can be a little hard to tell what progress you've made, but I do think each of these will do a little revenge blast when they die that hits very hard.

The third phase is really interesting - there's a maternal goddess figure (very Virgin Mary-like) over a reclining image of Kefka (very Pieta-style imagery) and the music becomes some kind of heavenly, serene organ music. I kind of love the concept behind this, because it shows Kefka's blasphemous claim to godhood, with all the imagery here seemingly benevolent (and certainly coded that way if you're Christian). But the melody of the organ is actually a variation on part of Kefka's theme, which we've previously heard more as a sinister, minor-key musical element.

Finally, when this phase is finished, you encounter Kefka himself, and all the quasi-classical elements of the music shift into a driving prog-rock blast. Kefka has a scary ability that will set all the party members to 1 HP, though a swift Curaga on the party will let most if not all of them survive whatever comes next.

Following Kefka's defeat, there's a sort of faux-credits sequence where we get little vignettes of the various party members escaping the Tower of Kefka as it collapses. Most of these are played pretty light, and giving us one last fun moment with the characters we've grown fond of.

However, there is one moment that feels like it's played for laughs, where Gogo and Celes have to punch in some commands while synchronized, which Gogo is obviously well-suited toward, and then Gogo falls in a pit and... I guess they die?

Played more tragically, Shadow decides to stay in the vast heaps of rubble, chasing Interceptor off (the dog, I assume is fine). I think I missed one of his backstory dreams (which you can get just by sleeping at inns with him in the active party - and with the mercy of the RNG gods) but I'm given to understand that there's no sidequest that will prevent this end for him - presumably dying in the tower's collapse. Furthermore, I've read online that Shadow/Clyde is actually Relm's father, but beyond Interceptor's affinity for the girl, I didn't see any clear hint at that, but it would make his death all the more tragic (I mean, that Relm doesn't even find out?)

The other source of tension in all of this is that, with the Warring Triad and Kefka dead, magic in the world is going away, including all of the Magicite (man, and I just got Crusader!) This also means the Espers, and with Terra as a half-esper, no one knows what is going to happen to her.

Well, good news: though she loses her Trance form while guiding the Falcon out of the canyons of detritus, they do catch her and she merely becomes fully human. In a bit of fun 16-bit animation, one of the last images we get is of Terra untying her ponytail and letting her glorious green hair blow in the wind, while the Falcon tours the world, seeing people rebuilding and recovering from the ruin Kefka wrought upon the land.

Naturally, I feel dumb and like I cheated myself for having accidentally missed the non-boss encounters from the final dungeon (I was meeting family in the evening, so it's likely I wouldn't have finished the game this afternoon if I hadn't made this mistake) but I still think I can reasonably say that I've experienced Final Fantasy VI.

I think that, given that I knew I would be biased toward it thanks to my greater familiarity with it (as opposed to just about all the preceding games - I think I knew "there's that one where you start off as a dark knight and then become a paladin") I've been trying to sort of temper my overall impression of the game, but let's just stop beating around the bush: this is the best of the pre-3D Final Fantasy games by a pretty wide margin. I really liked IV and V, don't get me wrong. But there's just so much more originality and creativity on display here.

Now, this does mean the end of my big Final Fantasy gaming project (at least once I fight some trash mobs in the Tower of Kefka) but I'm inclined to keep this rolling. I'll probably be getting Final Fantasy VII's latest port to play the original version of that game. The VII Remake games have genuinely been among my favorite video games (I've played a lot of games, so I don't know if I can confidently put them in my top 10 or even 20, but top 50 feels safe). Given my best friend's deep, lifelong (well, he was 9 when it came out) love of FFVI, I feel almost worried that I'll dare like VII better, but I think the general consensus is that the two of them occupy places 1 and 2 on the ranking (and it's up to you to decide which goes where).

I think there are more posts to be written about the lasting influence of Final Fantasy VI on not just the series, but also game storytelling in general. But I'm tired, so we'll call it here.