For various reasons I have never been an RPG player, however Dragon Quest 4 recently led to me to taking a second look at the genre. I had played Final Fantasy VII back in 1999, but the (opinion of younger-me) complicated stat tracking never really interested me, and neither did the story. Also I had a Nintendo 64, so, yea.

After finishing Dragon Quest I decided to play what I had heard was the best Final Fantasy game (bias most fans who were introduced to the series with VII aside).

Image Source: ffviman.fr

The opening didn't really do much to draw me in for some reason, although in hindsight I'm impressed with the way they managed to introduce the main character. After spending a few hours with the game though, I had become intrigued in the world I was presented with - each character had their own backstory and issues to resolve, and I was eager to see how things worked out for everyone. Most story progression occurs during cute, yet surprisingly well presented cut-scenes - the sprites are full of life and emotion, time and time again I would chuckle at the facial expressions and exaggerated movements of the characters.

I believe Final Fantasy 6 is a fantastic game despite its battle system.  I have never been a big RPG fan, but the active battle system manages keeps a sense of urgency.  The battles can occur far too frequently at certain parts of the game and in the latter portion I found myself having to grind a fair amount to be able to progress (something I was willing to do just to see where the story was going).

The world of Final Fantasy 6 is huge and actually undergoes changes during the progression of the story, I still have a gripe against the lack of a map screen though - being able to know exactly where I need to go via a map with location logos would have saved on a large amount of wasted time where I was hunting for village A by trial and error. This factor was made more obvious to me during the second half of the game - the entire world opens up and it was suddenly up to me to decide what I want to do and when, but where was I going to start, and how was I going to find this place!  Personally I found this sudden removal of guidance from the game daunting and frustrating, given that the game had moved at such a comfortable pace up until that point. It is at this point in the game where players are able to learn more about the individual characters storylines, but this lack of guidance seemed to be a barrier to progress the creators obviously wanted the players to make.

The soundtrack is fantastic, Nobuo Uematsu is a name I will remember, the praise I’ve heard for his music makes complete sense to me now - the music really helps with the epic feel of the game and is another sign of the high production values in general.

Overall Final Fantasy VI made be a JRPG believer and remains one of my favourite stories in gaming. I was finally introduced a game antagonist I could really hate too – something that no game has really managed to do, or at least no game I've played. All too often the enemy in games is some angry guy who wants to punish the world for something that has happened to them, Kefka is just plain crazy though, he just wants to cause chaos (I suppose there's a parallel to the Joker there actually). This is a game that I actually want to replay, despite the rough edges.

Now that I have played both Final Fantasy VI and VII, I notice that the series could have gone in a completely different direction if Square weren't so eager to push forward the graphical fidelity of their series.. If they had chosen to stick with the VI-like presentation and instead focussed on story and game mechanics, they could have made a far greater game. Oh, Chrono Trigger, case in point!