Final Fantasy VI Review 4

	Final Fantasy VI Review 4 by Djibriel
	Member Rank: Lunarian
	Posts: 1394
	Member Since: Sunday 14th March 2004

Scores	Plot	Graphics	Sound	Game Mechanics	Replay Value	Overall Score
	4	5	4	3	3	9/10

Note: All scores on a five-point scale, with five being highest, except for the overall score, which is out of ten.

"FF VI might be the buggiest game ever..."

"FF VI is absolutely loaded with info that was never actually used"

"What is the two move trick that beats 97 % of the game's baddies?"

For those of you who have no experience with the game Final Fantasy VI, these quotes may very well provide enough information to leave the game in their closet and never touch it. And yes, it is true: FF VI is one of the most messy games known to man, filled with severe bugs in the gameplay, spelling errors and a inconsistent storyline.

Then why has it grown into one of the most popular SNES games ever? Why are fans still creating websites, writing fanfiction, drawing images of its characters and spending hours and hours only to discover the most insignificant details of its gameplay?

The game starts of with three characters, but it's not until two get killed and one wakes up after this event that the story kicks off. Confused, scared and alone, 18-year old Terra Branford stumbles trough a world which is torn between the Empire, an aggressive force quickly rising in power and quantity, and the Returners, a small resistance movement dedicated to stop the Empire in its power-hungry tracks. Along the way, Terra meets other people who, for various reasons, agree to help her find her path and eventually aid her to achieve the goals she has chosen.
A total of fourteen permanent characters and six non-permanent characters will follow the player trough the story of Final Fantasy VI, and not always is Terra present; several personal cutscenes and scenarios can be played and after the dramatic climax of the first half, it is another character, Celes Chere, who decided that she will have to continue.
The characters are arguably cliché when you know other games created by Square, but at the time they were extremely memorable and they have been often mentioned as the main reason why Final Fantasy VI is so popular. If they are care-free gamblers who live their life guided by Lady Luck, thieves with a tragic past, mysterious assassins or raving lunatics bound on destruction, it doesn't matter; Square succeeded in leaving a deep impression on whoever has played the game. And each character is accompanied by his/her own theme song, creating the feeling that with those notes, we just took a peek into their very souls.

The battle system appears easy. Each character has its own skills. Later, the possibility to learn Magic opens, and special items called Relics can give the wearer other special abilities, skills or stat boosts. Also, equipment and weapons are bought and/or found troughout the game. By cleverly combining some of these items, armor and skills the possibilities can seem endless. It is mainly because of this that so many bugs pop up. The more possibilities you make, the more chance you have to forget to take in account that this or that doesn't quite work together.

The graphics, for a game released in 1994, are simply stunning. Mode 7, a way to make images seem coming towards you and going backwards again, was not used for the first time in Final Fantasy VI; however, many feel that on the SNES, it was used to full capacity. Final Fantasy VI leans more towards a 'realistic' layout of the graphics, as opposed to Final Fantasy V where the character and monsters looked more 'cartoonish'. Yoshitaka Amano, who created the concept sketches for all characters and produced several other concept images for the game bested himself. Or has this something to do with the fact that Amano recently admitted that Mog, one of FF VI its characters, is still his all-time favorite character to draw?

The music, as composed and arranged by Nobuo Uematsu, is still regarded as some of Uematsu's best work, some of the best music ever to have come from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and even as some of the best game music ever to have been composed. Most name the highlight of the famous Opera scene, Aria Di Mezzo Carattere as an extremely moving piece of music. Others hail the game's climax music, Dancing Mad (over fourteen minutes of music!) as one of the most impressive pieces ever written. Regardless, the Original Sound Version which held all of the music from the game on three discs sold so well that there were two more discs created, one with several songs played in concert and one with the piano only.

As said before, Final Fantasy VI has a major amount of possibilities when it comes to battles, and it is mostly this that grants it its replay value. While a large amount of the second part of the game is optional and can be played trough in any order you choose, the results will hardly ever dramatically change. But even then, with Final Fantasy VI being a complex game that will take a normal player about 24 hours to complete, people will find that the first time they played the game didn't exactly give them every treasure, every cutscene or even every character they could have gotten, often pushing them to play trough the game again and find the more elusive gems of this game.

There is but one great point of anger that the majority of the crowd has with this game. And, while unjustified for the most part, this point of anger is called Ted Woolsey. Final Fantasy VI was to be released in the United States, but Square felt that the US crowd would take offence to some of the parts of the story or other elements in the game, and the three men in charge of its changes, Ted Woolsey as translator and Weimin Li and Aiko Ito as remake planners, were told to censor the game for the US crowd. Words such as 'Death' and 'Blood', religious references and several images were changed, while Ted Woolsey did a very 'liberal' translation of the original, leaving several spelling errors and otherwise falsely translated lines. Some of the more progressive and possible offensive scenes in the game, including suicide and pre-marital teen pregnancy were censored to respectively fit a 'leap of joy' and a very young, but very married couple.

With newer games having 3D graphics (and good ones to boot), music that comes out sounding better due to improved quality and 100 % reply value as they are programmed to react differently every time you do something, a game like Final Fantasy VI must have a lot to offer to still keep people's attention. And if the world-wide popularity of the game isn't enough proof, then let me say that yes: this game has enough going for it to turn off your Xbox and play trough this game at least once. You'll never forget the characters, you'll be humming a tune from the game on the ride home and you won't regret the time you have spent.