The Final Fantasy VI Retrospective

on July 25th 1894 the Japanese Navy would fire the first shot in what would become the first Sino Japanese war in which they and China fought for influence over Korea this followed Decades of Japan restructuring and modernizing practically every aspect of itself from a feudal society to an industrial one as part of the mai restoration which included not only renewed military strength but a commitment to westernization and imperialism this would be outlined in the new Constitution signed in 1889 conferring absolute power to Emperor Magi while this war wouldn't be Japan's first move towards Empire it would be the one which would catch the attention of Western powers and unite the Japanese people and government under a common goal within one year Japan would devastate the disorganized and unprepared Chinese forces and claim victory over the Ching Dynasty earning the recognition they sought from the west and Japan would continue this Imperial streak for several decades and nearly a full Century later on April 2nd 1994 a similar Imperial conflict would be thoughtfully explored in what many would Herald as one of the greatest RPGs of all time [Music] while Final Fantasy 5 was able to stand tall amongst the pack breaking the 2 million unit Mark for the first time in Series history there was still a growing sentiment among players that the market for RPGs was becoming oversaturated the 1992 holiday season had seen several high-profile RPGs hit store shelves to compete with the likes of Dragon Quest 5 and Final Fantasy 5 and the following year would see a torrential downpour of them dragon slayer Legend of Heroes 2 artha east4 Albert Odyssey elard lufia and the Fortress of Doom Breath of Fire And even Square Zone S densetsu 2 and Romancing Saga 2 all made their way into Japanese stores in 1993 among many others this created new pressure for the Final Fantasy staff to come up with new ideas to keep the sixth installment fresh just like with the previous games every member of what was now a team of 30 people was asked to pitch in ideas for what they wanted to see in the game among those ideas were two pitched by Hero Nobu sakaguchi himself the first would be that the Game feature an ensemble cast in addition to such an idea being a bold way to stand out from other RPGs sakaguchi w to explore the concept of telling a story with a wide cast wherein each of them gets the chance to be the lead he would cite iki kajiwara as 1966 Sports manga star of the Giants as the first time he saw this mode of Storytelling and he wished to do the same the second would be to move away from the swords and sorcery flavor of fantasy that the series had adopted for its first five entries despite the aesthetic being so prevalent in the series up until then sakaguchi katas and other members of the the team weren't as enthralled in it as they were with science fiction this is why machines and other forms of advanced technology had made their way into the game settings so often yoshinori katas shared sakaguchi sentiments about classical fantasy and felt that there was an aura about the team that suggested a desire to move away from using magical crystals as the focal point of the story and so it was decided that Final Fantasy 6 would step into a slightly different Direction with a world dominated not by Magic and crystals but by metal and machines with a story driven by a larger group of characters who each would get their time to shine in their fight against an evil empire but aside from that it was mostly unclear where the story would go what tone it would take or what new game mechanics would be implemented the team would figure all that out as they went as developments officially began right after the release of its predecessor while just about every member of the team would pitch in ideas for for the characters their scenarios would primarily be helmed by a handful of the staff namely sakaguchi Kass tetsuya nura Ki Tanaka and akiyoshi OT and while sakaguchi was initially leading the charge on bringing everything together as the game's director as had been the case for the first five games before too long his duties and obligations as Square's Executive Vice President would begin to take priority over those as director of Final Fantasy 6 rather than have the game suffer from his inability to fully entrench himself in it he would instead have kace step into the director's chair and sakaguchi would fill the role of producer taking care to monitor the Project's development and guide it as best he could with his promotion to director kitas was now in charge of weaving together the team's disparate scenarios into a cohesive hole working with each of the writers to refine their stories all the while however he wouldn't be the only person credited as a director for the game name while sakaguchi had that sole distinction for the previous titles Final Fantasy 6 would also see the title bequeathed to series veteran hero Yuki ETO who had created the active Time battle system the series had been using since its fourth entry however despite the gravity of the title ETO would maintain that his work on ff6 was practically the same as it had been for the previous two games regardless while katas was in charge of Final Fantasy 6's dramatic elements Ito helmed the battles and Saka GUI would help sand down the rough edges to marry them together meanwhile the game's visual design would be handled by a who's who of series veterans kazuko shabuya would return to design character sprites tetsuya n returned to do Monster designs hideo minaba designs the architecture of the game world and tatsuya Takahashi would not only create the world map but the hulking magitech armor depicted in the game's opening sequence development would for the most part progress smoothly though not without a few wrinkles for several of the staff it was their first time working on a final fantasy project and some like battle programmer yasuyuki hasbe could feel the mounting pressure and expectations sound engineer AG Nakamura initially felt lost before listening to Final Fantasy 5 sound effects for ideas and even then it was still laborious work to top it all off none of the data used to make Final Fantasy 5 would be reused for six this decision would be made not at the behest of sakaguchi but organic Al by the team in the words of akosi OT quote I think it's because the team changes for each game it isn't really about pressure from fans rather everyone has a certain Pride about not wanting to do the same as others we all hate the thought of resting on someone else's Laurels so the next Final Fantasy is always something new end quote adding to this Tomo inazawa saide it's a bunch of be blood types as you can see the most difficult parts of the game's development came towards the very end end when the team entered a period of major crunch in order to fix bugs and manage memory the former would be a constant nuisance to the point where sakaguchi would begin to sing about finding more bugs to the tune of Nobu U Matsu's score while the latter was an arduous process which still had to be done manually leaving more opportunities for user error what's more there were no tools available to help programmers to easily find these errors when discussing the game's development decades later katas would recall the game's final debugging phase as an exhausting Affair to the point he would miss the game's initial reception entirely as he took additional time off to recover from the hellacious crunch but like with its predecessor anticipation for Final Fantasy 6 was steadily growing seemingly in an effort to capitalize on the series growing popularity Square would reissue the first two games with minor updates on a single famcom cartridge in February 1994 meanwhile preview coverage and advertisement for Final Fantasy 6 had already begun circulating in magazines but there was one Outlet which sakaguchi had clamored for years now to feature Final Fantasy in its Pages jump as we've discussed earlier in this series sakaguchi would regularly meet with Jump's editor kazuhiko torishima during the development of Final Fantasy 4 to seek his input on his work so that it would be worthy enough to be featured in the magazine and while final fantasies 4 and 5 would be passed over for what was in sakaguchi mind a prestigious honor Final Fantasy 6 would be the first in the series to be featured in not weekly shown and jump but its sister publication V jump through a series of interviews and previews starting in January 1994 this would also include a special videotape featuring gameplay character primers and the game's development staff singing a song specially composed by Nobu uatu and and hero Yuki Ito approaching premonition which was not a part of the game's original [Music] [Applause] [Music] score everything was lining up for another rousing success as Final Fantasy 6 would be completed on time and under budget releasing on April 2nd 199 4 in Japan after a full year of exhaustive development but they wouldn't be the only ones to push themselves to the point of exhaustion to meet their deadline as the process of localizing the game for the North American Market would be fraught with its own complications and restrictions not the least of which was that the script would have to be completed in just 30 [Music] days [Music] following the release of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest in October 1992 Square's output in North America had slowed to a trickle as squaresoft were struggling with their localization efforts for Final Fantasy 5 they would only manage to publish one title in the meantime S densetsu 2 retitled Secret of Mana on August 6th 1993 while it would be one of the top selling games for the Super Nintendo in the initial months of its availability and indeed retain much of this momentum through the following year its sales would unfortunately lag behind those of Final Fantasy 4 ultimately selling a mere 330,000 copies outside Japan and while squaresoft would publish capcom's Breath of Fire in the territory in August 1994 specific sales figures for that title are elusive this was all despite strong critical reception which when combined with chart placements for both titles suggested that there was an appetite for RPGs in North America however between sales charts and secret of mana's real-time combat it seemed that there was an even stronger and more prevalent desire not just for action games but for games that were more graphic mature or realistic at least visually and the epitome of this was midways 1992 arcade Juggernaut Mortal Combat but this graphic fighter wouldn't be alone in its ability to depict objectionable or violent content later that year Night Trap would release for the Sega CD and its depictions of violence against women tame as they are would compound with the Gory violence of Mortal Combat drawing the outrage of moral Guardians and generating murmurs of Federal Regulation Sega would attempt to Stave off such government oversight in 1993 with the establishment of the video game rating Council or VRC in which Nintendo refused to participate out of a combination of feeling that they didn't need to regulate themselves due to Nintendo's own content policies and the generally adversarial climate of the industry at the time unfortunately the VRC being only used by Sega would be nowhere near enough to stop senator Joseph liberman from taking the industry to task which would ultimately result in the adoption of an industrywide rating system following two hearings led by the senator in December 1993 and March 1994 these ratings Loosely based on those used by sega's VRC would be administered by an independent body the entertainment software ratings board or ESRB beginning in September 1994 and continuing to the present day as this was wrapping up squaresoft's in-house translator Ted woy was in the thick of working on the English script for Final Fantasy 6 by this point development back in Japan had been effectively completed this would be to wy's benefit benefit as unlike his time working on Secret of Mana he wouldn't be contending with constant changes being made to the script day after day but the trade-off would be that he would have somewhat meager support when actually working on the script they pretty much had finished the game and I had the benefit of also some rough drafts of some of the strategy guides that had some pictures of what the you know what the things looked like and it wasn't done yet but basically the game had been finished and I asked for a complete set of videotapes which I never received but any rate that's that was pretty much it I I was given a short amount of time to do it and uh and given the game the game cartridge and said go and so and also of course I was given the files there were probably 70 to 80 discreet different files that had screen text in them and it wasn't contiguous I had a small team over there to work with but basically I was not able to do anything with the text until I got it down to a size where it would fit so I translated the game and took a lot of care I was given 30 days to do it which is not a lot of time for I think there was about 1,300 pages of text and like I said it wasn't ous it was it was broken into into pieces and you know and people that were scenario writers would just take a chunk of scenario and dump it in and they put the code in code out piece or or or headers there and they didn't care where it was they just stuck it in the file and bounced it so it all fit in the different pieces so at any rate no I I just I had to do my best to kind of keep in mind all the different pieces of the of the game of course i' played the game through and had beaten the game so I kind of remembered you know sort of generally the the the game but the thing was huge you know it's hard to kind of keep all that in your brain unfortunately Wolsey had to continually cut down the script in order for it to fit despite Final Fantasy 6 being on a 24 megabit cartridge there wasn't enough space for a one to1 English translation to fit after his second attempt woy would opt for a more granular approach retranslating each part of the game in isolation before assembling the disparate pieces together similar to how the game's character stories were written and assembled this would be the first version to fit on the carts allowing wisey to finally play through the game with a functional though not necessarily final English script after all there was still the matter of Nintendo's content policy to consider and Wolsey had realized early on that he would have his work cut out for him on that front we'll discuss some of the particulars of W's work in more detail as we go but for now we'll leave it at that in any case Wy would complete his work on time that summer squaresoft began marketing the game in April through Nintendo poers pack watch section albeit retitled Final Fantasy 3 to maintain numerical consistency in the territory and their efforts would ramp up further as summer turned to fall however rather than trying to sell the game on the merits of its cast or drama the advertising would instead attempt to appeal to boys seeking power fantasies despite much of the game's narrative and emotional core being driven by its female characters as we'll discuss in due time marketing materials would shy away from mentioning them instead trying to turn MOG the Mughal into a powerful Warrior wizard brandishing a knife on the front cover and print ads while zapping monsters to Ash in a TV commercial okay kid show me what you got yeah right next yes next ooh scary next next next next Final Fantasy 3 do you have What It Takes Final Fantasy 3 from squaresoft next despite this shift in branding to suit the North American Market however success was not guaranteed not only were RPGs still a niche genre in North America but the game's release would be sandwiched between those of Mortal Kombat 2 which would be released uncensored on the Super Nintendo and Donkey Kong Country Final Fantasy 6 would be facing an uphill battle in the west when it was finally released on October 11th [Music] 1994 from the moment the player boots up the console Final Fantasy 6 begins to establish its tone gone are The Whimsy and mysticism of past titles instead the player is greeted by dark storm clouds accompanied by a pipe organ slowly progressing in a series of six pitches each one building a top of the last until [Music] the music crescendos crashing down with two dissonant chords revealing the title engulfed in flame the use of the organ invokes a certain grandiosity typically associated with religious contexts historically they've required large spaces for their mechanisms and a lot of money to build purchase and install costs only religious organizations and the ultra wealthy could afford the vast spaces of churches would exacerbate its dulet tones which could be heard from miles away imparting the idea that only God could create such powerful and overwhelming sound during the Golden Age of Hollywood this Association that audiences would have already made with something holy and pure would be used to symbolize a character's fall from grace through the use of dissonance tones this would give rise to how the organ is used here as Shand for something Unholy even satanic it's an effective and clear statement of intent Final Fantasy 6 is going places its predecessors had never dared the scene pans down we see a town nestled among the cliffs lanterns flickering in the distance before we are made privy to the conflicts which have plagued this [Music] world a thousand years ago the world had been engulfed in a horrific conflict called The War of the Magi reducing it to a scorched Wasteland and wiping out magic entirely since then in place of magic man has rediscovered other resources and Technologies such as iron and steam engines ushering in a new age and with this new era of technological achievement would come the Rise of an Empire which seeks to use their technological Supremacy and whatever source of magic may still remain to conquer the world repeating the same mistakes their ancestors made long ago on a high cliff overlooking the town we we saw are three Imperial troops in bipedal walking tanks two of them are surprised that an esper was discovered there so long after the war of the Magi thinking it's probably still alive based on the urgency of their orders one of them bigs is wary of the woman accompanying them a sorceress who incinerated 50 Imperial soldiers in magitech armor in mere minutes the other Soldier wedge explains that the slave crown on her head renders her totally incapable of independent thought and that She'll follow their orders after making their long Trek across the snowy Plains the trio arrive at the town of Nar whose Town guards attempt to fight them off but their efforts are meaningless against the might of their magitech armor they Crush all resistance between them and the Frozen esper sequestered to deep in the town's minds but it all goes arai when they reach the creature the esper begins to emit a strange Aura enticing the young woman to approach it as it seems to atomize her cohorts before seeming to attack attack her as well with a stream of electrical energy later the young woman awakens in the home of one of the town's folk Who removed her slave crown and allowed her to regain her thoughts but all she can remember is her name Tara Branford before she can get her bearings however the town guards come knocking at the door demanding she be turned over to answer for her Rampage the old man who found her urges her to run and hide in the mines where she falls through the ground after being cornered while knocked out from her fall some hazy memories of being an imperial slave begin to come back to her murdering other soldiers at the behest of a man named KFA and Emperor gastal declaring that his Empire will soon be unstoppable with the coming revival of magic at their fingertips before Tera can be apprehended by nar's guards however she's saved by a thief a treasure hunter named lock Cole who vows to protect her until her memory returns suggesting that they make their way south to the kingdom of figuro L to the town guards catch up with them moreover lock is a member of a resistance group The returners and Tera having seemingly been one of their magitech soldiers could prove to be a valuable Ally if she can be convinced to fight alongside them but the Empire is hot on their tail as they and Figaro's ruler king Edgar are forced to quickly flee the castle when KFA arrives looking for terara setting Castle figuro Ablaze and tarnishing the Kingdom's treaty with the Empire during their escape from Castle figuro terara reveals her ability to use magic when the trio fight off kefka's soldiers shocked that their amnesiac companion is capable of such power Edgar and lock agree that they must take her to meet Bannon the leader of the returners and that she could single-handedly turn the tide of the war thus begins Final Fantasy 6 this opening hour does a wondrous job of establishing tone transitioning from the dark and Sinister title screen into a series of expository text blurbs lay to top the dower World we're about to enter scored to noou O Matsu's for boing Omen through the mystifying opening credit sequence and into the Power Trip of stomping through Nar and powerful magitech armor Final Fantasy 6 is quick to make the player understand not just intellectually but emotionally just how Bleak the situation seems to be through giving them so much power in the game's opening minutes they feel the overwhelming power of the Empire while new players who may not be accustomed to the series are given a safety net to learn how to play the game in real the not necessarily dangerous battles when the player reaches the esper they get a taste for the more mystical undercurrent of the story that's yet to unfold and when lock makes his appearance and he and terara meet up with Edgar it becomes clear that despite how the first half hour may have felt there is still hope that not All Is Lost and having most of this be experienced From tera's perspective is what sells it the world of Final Fantasy 6 is a far cry from those of its predecessors while the core conflict of a ragtag group of rebels fighting an overwhelmingly powerful Empire returns from 2 and four it's the details atmosphere and especially the presentation of that conflict which catapult Final Fantasy 6 to Greater Heights no longer is the setting rooted in the Aesthetics of medieval European fantasy but closer to that of the Industrial Revolution by way of Jules ver magic has all but ceased to exist for a thousand years and since then societal advancements has come through technological breakthroughs this is made readily apparent by the brief glimpses we see of the imperial capital Vector in these early portions of the game instead of the palace being constructed of stone and brick it's made of welded metal surrounded by a maze of industrial facilities extending far off into the distance and the Empire's heavy use of these higher Technologies including magitech a fusion between technology and Magic seems to be what empowers them however while magitech seems to be solely owned by the Empire this does not extend to all industrial wonders figuro castle for for example is its own high-tech Marvel while it mostly appears to be your standard medieval flavored Castle the turbines visible at its highest points hint at its full capabilities the castle is able to submerge itself beneath the Sands of the desert and move around when necessary such as when kfka sets fire to it when he comes around looking for Tera and Edgar himself is quite the engineer making heavy use of different tools and Gadgets in battle similarly Setzer who joins the party later on owns what is purported to be the only airship in the world the Blackjack and seems to be its mechanic as well unlike previous games airships which were effectively sailing vessels with wings and propellers the Black Jack is closer to a zeppelin being hoisted into the clouds by a large dirigible and yet despite this proliferation of Technology the world hasn't been completely overtaken by it Nar having a snowy climate and being nestled at the base of some mountains in the far north keeps warm through the use of geothermal heaters scattered throughout the town but places like mois and thamasa remain fairly quaint and have yet to feel the effects of the Empire's Conquest there is still some character to these places however some more subtle than others the first hints of this can be seen in South figuro which hosts a large Mansion for the wealthiest person in town who also happens to be an informant for the Empire his daughter even lets it slip that he's personally dined with one of their generals when Figaro's public alliance with the Empire breaks down early in the story South figuro is quickly brought to its knees thank to the information he gave them and they use his house as their main base of operations he seems remorseful about it but only because he didn't need the money he received for doing it also because he probably wasn't expecting his home to be occupied combine this with how jador which has a literally vertical class hierarchy wherein the richest man in the world lives at the northernmost part of the town has no lower class citizens and how those Lower Class People all left to establish the Dank town of Zozo to the the North and you can clearly see a light though pointed critique of classism underpinning parts of the world Zozo however shows that it's not exactly the most enlightened critique it's full of liars thieves Thugs and low lives it's the only town that has Random Encounters this would suggest that these are all inherent to any one of a lower social class at least in this world but I think this is more of a side effect of zozo's gimmick as a puzzle dungeon the player is meant to disregard what the people here say because they're all liars thus eliminating possible solutions for a clock puzzle to unlock the Chainsaw for Edgar I don't think there was any ill will on behalf of the development staff after all many of them were working for low pay at square up until Final Fantasy 5's development I think it was the result of shortsightedness in trying to come up with an interesting location Zozo that also held some thematic meaning within the world in isolation Zozo is an interesting place thanks to its gimmicks and visual design the latter of which takes the game's Aesthetics and amplifies them visually Final Fantasy 6 is much grungier than its predecessors colors are more muted reflecting the narrative's more Bleak and somber tone environments are more detailed as well which AIDS in defining the game's visual design and instills the world with a greater aesthetic depth and visual Clarity character designs are similarly more complex despite being the same Siz as they've been since the first game this may be because Final Fantasy 6 op not to have scaled down Sprites for them in the field and Overworld like they had done previously and instead have them use the same Sprites both in and out of battle Not only would this open up how visually complex each of them could be since now they wouldn't have to make compromises for an additional set of smaller Sprites but it also allows them to be even more expressive than they had been in Final Fantasy 5 which itself had set a high bar with over two dozen field Sprites and about a dozen battle Sprites per job per character here most party members have three to four dozen Sprites used in both combat and the field which is very much appreciated as Final Fantasy 6's cast is composed of numerous complex and phenomenally well-rounded characters though some definitely got more attention than others more so than any other entry up to this point Final Fantasy 6 has a cast to experience their own thoughtful character arcs over the course of the adventure and most if not all of them tied directly back to the game's core themes in the interest of examining those themes in detail for this section I'm going to preclude the resolutions to their arcs until much later on that means that some of the discussion here may seem a bit incomplete but we'll wrap back around to them at the appropriate [Music] time lock Cole a thief who insists on being being called a treasure hunter is the first persistent Ally terara meets and the one who acts as our initial representative for the returners upon meeting her and realizing that her memory is a blank slate he vows to protect her before bringing her to Figaro on the way to The Hideout he also makes the same promise to Celeste when he finds her locked up and beaten down in South figuro lock is charming daring and a bit snarky all qualities of a traditionally heroic character but beneath his confident exterior lies a guilt conscience which informs just about everything he does long before joining the returners lock was romantically involved with a woman from Colin named Rachel who was the only person in town that called him a treasure hunter rather than a common Thief they would go on adventures together until one fateful Excursion saw a bridge collapse as lock attempted to cross it Rachel dashed toward him to shove him over to the other side saving his life but she fell into the chasm below lock found her thankfully still alive and brought her home but when she woke up she was stricken with amnesia from what was likely head trauma she didn't know who lock was and rejected his affections Rachel's father who had never liked lock blamed him for what happened and forced him to leave her alone so she could get on with her life lock solemnly acquiesced and left town though A year later he would return to find that Rachel had been killed in an imperial attack and in her final moments her memories returned and she called out for him lock Harbors tremendous guilt for what happened to Rachel both for her losing her memory in the first place and not being there to protect her from the Empire this is what moved him to join the returners becoming Edgar's contact with the rebel group and why he's quick to declare himself tera's and later celeste's protector it's an understandable if not Noble motivation for his character but when the player reaches Colin lock quickly goes from sympathetic to creepy and obsessive when each each party member is introduced they're centered in the frame and given a brief blurb describing them locks says that he's searching for relics of the past and while what exactly that might be remains unclear for some time in Colin the purpose for his search is made clear an old man at the edge of town has preserved Rachel's body and when lock learned of this he resolved to find a way to bring her back from the dead all the while paying the old man to keep her preserved like this until he can find a solution it's a romantic in a maob Gothic sense but that Romanticism is easily drowned out by how unsettling it is let's be clear lock is a flawed character even before the player finds Rachel's preserved body it's evident that he's motivated by his failure to save her he joined the returners because the empire were the ones that killed her his desire to protect every woman he meets is born out of his guilt for not being able to protect her Tara and Celeste are to an extent replacements for Rachel in this regard he just can't let go of his failure but this takes his inability to let go and move on to a whole new extreme it's excessive downright fanatical and to some it could make lock seem less sympathetic and more deranged this didn't destroy his character for me not completely anyway but it certainly detracts from any sense of endearment I previously had for him this twist to lock may have been carried over from sakaguchi original idea for the character being an older enigmatic possi darker figure who would have served as not just a friend but a rival to terara the early concept obviously shifted during developments with a backstory about how he had traveled the world with his father who was actually a treasure hunter and doing his best to follow in his footsteps after he passed there was so much else different about the characters in The Game's early development period which I'll cover as we go along that I'm not sure how the initial darker concept for lock would have worked out maybe this Rachel twist wasn't a hold over and was added to turn player perceptions of lock on their head it's also worth noting that the localization removes references to a legendary treasure that could potentially bring Rachel back instead ruminating on the possibility that something could even do it at all dialogue from a patron of Jad door's Auction House similarly points towards the existence of such a legendary treasure though without the first direct reference to such a McGuffin for its compound with and because of the way it's phrased here it doesn't exactly do a good job of cluing players into the Poss possibility that Rachel could be saved after all a spark of hope in a seemingly hopeless scenario borderline Lost in [Music] Translation like its predecessor Final Fantasy 6 also has two sibling party members of Royal standing the twin brothers Edgar roon figuro and Sabin Renee figuro the former is the king of figuro a flirtation ious but fiercely loyal man devoted to the best interests of his kingdom with a gift for engineering the latter is hard-headed and impatient but clever and holds a strong moral compass and has been away from home for a decade honing his skills as a martial artist the two are close but hadn't seen nor heard from one another since Sabin left his departure was preceded by the death of their father the previous King who was rumored to have been poisoned by the Empire his dying wish was for his sons to rule their Kingdom together but Sabin wanted no part in it he was appalled at how callous and flippant everyone around him seemed to be about the situation thinking only of the line of succession he was sick of it all sick of the fakeness of the people around him sick of the war he wanted more than anything else to be free knowing his brother also sought release from the path laid before them Sabin asked Edgar to join him to leave this place behind and live their lives on their own terms Ms worried about what would happen to their Homeland if they were to both leave Edgar offers to decide their fate with a coin toss whoever wins gets to do what they want this is shown in a flashback when the player stays the night at figuro Castle with both brothers in their active party and while the result of the coin toss isn't shown it's a foregone conclusion Sabin won and chose his freedom even though he didn't want to leave the responsibilities of being King on his brother's shoulders after this flashback Edgar tells Sabin that he often wonders if their father would be proud of him to which Sabin responds don't you ever doubt that what makes this even more touching is the reveal when Setzer joins the party later that Edgar's coin was double-sided meaning that he willingly gave up his freedom for the sake of his brother he knew how frustrated Sabin was and didn't want him to be Tethered to a position he had no desire to fill it's heartwarming and perfectly in character for Edgar he's a bit of a slime manipulator publicly supporting the Imperial regime which may or may not have killed his father while covertly funneling resources and other support to the returners even his flirtatious ways with women may be a part of this as after introductions are made he tends to cool off the charm but he also uses it to learn more information about a situation though considering how persistent this aspect of his character is it could be an Earnest part of him which he uses to his advantage or a mask that slowly became him in the game itself it's not really explored but the Creator and writer for the figuro brothers scenarios kri Tanaka wrote up an extensive backstory for them which helped inform how she wrote them and their stories while Edgar was initially going to be a more cliched sleazy pervert Tanaka would turn the dial back on this to turn him into more of a chivalrous character she wrote in his backstory that his fondness for women was born of a combination of his mother dying when he and Sabin were infants and an unrequited Crush he had harbored for a cousin of their father this this woman would tell him in no uncertain terms that Edgar had to grow up to be a good man which pushed him to become chivalrous unfortunately she would be killed in what Tanaka has called a political rivalry but her vivacity and wit would instill in Edgar a personal vision for the ideal woman and perhaps had a bit of influence on his own personality Sabin meanwhile was a frail boy due to a genetic disease he had inherited from their grandfather as a result their father held the younger twin in low esteem seeing him as being unfit for consideration to succeed him to prove himself to his father Sabin began to train his body and learn martial arts under the tutelage of Duncan harkort twice a week since he was 8 years old these outings with his master would instill in Sabin a fondness for the outdoors and a desire to live beyond the castle walls Tanaka would put all of this and other details about Figaro's history and culture into a dojinshi figuro noon Tales from Desert though today it's difficult to come by and as far as I know it hasn't been translated and apparently in an insert included with it Tanaka notes that readers shouldn't look at it as canonical whether or not it is officially part of Final Fantasy 6 is somewhat irrelevant however as the backstory found within its Pages came from the person who created and wrote for these specific characters using this information to inform her creative process I've discussed it not because of any notion of Canon but because it helps us get an of where Tanaka's headspace was when writing Edgar and sabin's scenarios by the time we meet Sabin in the game we learned that he didn't train alone as Duncan's son Vargas was also under the great Master's tutelage but Vargas became jealous of Sabin believing that his father preferred him over his own son and that Sabin would be named Duncan's successor in running his dojo this resentment pushed Vargas to murder his father and Sabin would pursue him to mount Colts where he finds the wouldbe heir locked in combat with Edgar lock and terara Sabin tries telling Vargas that his father was going to choose him as his successor but he is so consumed with jealousy that he refuses to listen to sabin's please Sabin defeats his former partner and though it's not clear if Vargas survives their duel the death of his master and loss of a friend clearly weigh heavily on him but he's delighted to reunite with his brother telling him that while he's been living in the wilderness he's been keeping tabs on what's been going on back home and his concerns that figuro is becoming a puppet state for the Empire but when Edgar says that the opportunity to strike back at the Empire has come Sabin immediately agrees to join the cause mostly because this is something he's wanted to see for years but also because he feels his late Master would be proud to know one of his pupils helped bring peace to the world I rarely have just Edgar or just Sabin in my party to me they're a package deal they compliment each other well with Edgar being the brains and Sabin being the brawn but the former doesn't doesn't have a monopoly on the one Brain Cell between them at times they do pass it back and forth moreover Final Fantasy 6 has a decent number of optional scenes and dialogue that are contingent on the player having certain characters in their active party at certain places or during certain scenes and I really did not want to miss any with these two in particular the flashback with the coin toss gets me weepy every time [Music] when Edgar terara and lock pass through South Figaro on their way to The returner's Hideout they briefly cross paths with the infamous and enigmatic mercenary Shadow at Edgar's insistence they steer clear of him but intermittently throughout the story he can be paid to join your party for a little while however he has a 1 in6 chance to leave at the end of a battle barring certain condition Shadow's only constant companion is his dog Interceptor and tends to keep to himself but if the player stays at an in while he's in the party there's a chance that they'll be treated to a peak behind the mask and shown his dreams there are initially four that can be seen and they're totally missible but they're the only way of getting his backstory years ago before putting on the Mask two train robbers named Clyde and Billy or baram in the localization pulled off a heist that would net them more than a million Gill for this baram felt they ought to change their name to reflect their accomplishment proposing the shadow Bandits or simply shadow in the localization but the authorities were hot on their heels and baram would be Gravely injured despite Clyde's insistence that he could get his partner to a nearby Town baram argued that he would just slow him down but before Clyde could leave him baram requested that Clyde mercy kill him so he wouldn't have to suffer any torture while in captivity Clyde hesitates and runs away unable to take his own partner's life and leaving him to die scared and alone from there Clyde would end up in a remote town where he's found by a woman and her dog who attempt to nurse him back to health Shadow is haunted by his failure to save baram and has run away from not only his old life but his old identity and even his emotions he's cold and detached never telling anybody about who he is or what he's been through only the play is privy to what lies behind that mask and even then only so much is stated outright he does let the metaphorical mask slip a bit in a brief exchange with terara when she's in a moment of distress telling her that a lot of people in the world have actively suppressed their emotions people like him it implies that he's all too aware of what he's become and harbors some regret over it we'll get into this more later on but Shadow is a phenomenal example of show don't tell and I commend tetsuya nura who had been holding on to the basic concept of a ninja with a dog since Final Fantasy 5 for writing his scenario this [Music] way among all soldiers in the Kingdom of Doma alone Samurai stands Above the Rest Cayenne gamond retainer to the king and devoted husband and father and yes despite how it spell that is how it's pronounced he's one of the oldest party members and his age is reflected in both his difficulties grappling with technology and his particular manner of speaking in the original Japanese he refers to himself with the personal pronoun sesha a very old fashioned way of referring to oneself that literally translates to clumsy person it was apparently used by feudal era Samurai to exhibit modesty in their abilities it's especially apropo for cayenne because of how clumsy he is with machines but his Samurai esque speech patterns don't end there at times he ends his sentences with de gozaru another term not really used in modern Japanese but emphasizes cen's traditionalist character it's basically a way of saying is are or to be for the English version Ted Wy reworked this aspect of cen's character so that instead he would speak in a manner similar to early modern English peppering archaic words like Thy Dost and thou and addressing people around with the title of Sir or lady culturally it isn't quite the same as the more Samurai specific bent of the Japanese but it gets across the basic idea of a traditionalist character and that's what matters most in both versions Cayenne stands Out Among the rest of the party through his archaic manner of speaking but his traditionalist mentality belies the effervescent sentimentality weaved into his character while he wouldn't readily say as much especially in the company of others Cayenne truly did love his wife and son but like most most everyone else in this story The Empire would have a cruel fate in store for them when we're introduced to Cayenne he's effortlessly fending off Imperial forces from the front gate of Doma castle in the chaos General Leo the Imperial officer overseeing The Assault on Doma is ordered to return to the capital by Emperor gastal himself despite his high standing in the Empire Leo was an honorable man who cared for those under his command during his Siege on Doma he was making a concerted effort not to risk any more lives than strictly necessary regardless of whether they were his soldiers or those of Doma he still saw enemy combatants as people first and foremost the same cannot be said for KFA Palazo the psychopathic clown who takes over the operation in Leo's stead kefka quickly gives the order to poison doma's water supply through the river leading to the deaths of everyone in the castle including Imperial solders taken prisoner the king and cayenne family while Cayenne is in time to share some parting words with his Le he's too late to do the same with his wife and young son by the time he reaches their quarters they're already dead he flies into a rage confronting Imperial forces at their encampment where if not for sabin's timely intervention Cayenne could very well have been defeated overpowered by the sheer number of troops ready to descend upon the camp Cayenne agrees to travel with Sabin to Nar and the only way there is through a nearby Forest except it's no ordinary Woodland as it houses the Phantom train an ethereal locomotive which FES the spirits of The Departed to the afterlife after narrowly avoiding such a one-way trip Cayenne notices the station where they've been left off is where the spirits of the people of Doma are boarding and among them are his wife and son it's too late for them their time has come but before the train completely pulls out of the station they call out to him telling him that they love him and to never forget them them it's a somber melancholic moment one which is punctuated by a brief period of Silence Cayenne old life and everything in it is gone now this instilled in him a deep hatred for the Empire but his animosity doesn't consume him he's still a respectful honorable and above all empathetic man through and through while I wasn't able to confirm who exactly wrote Cayenne scenario I did learn that he's sakaguchi favorite character of the bunch seemingly because of the jux position between the masculinity that comes with being a Samurai and being out of his element in the world moreover there was an entire character cut from his story who would have given Cayenne more opportunities to show vulnerability and open up this character Angela would have used a whip in battle and had a big sister sort of relationship with him there would be a bit of flirtation though nothing serious but Cayenne would ignore it until later in the story at some point he would begin to reflect on the flattering things Angela would say to him and begin to think that maybe they weren't just flattery maybe they were true but he wouldn't reciprocate any seeming affections instead staying loyal to his late wife while seeing a bit more of this side of him would have been nice I think what we ultimately got in the final game is palpable enough adding another character to facilitate to this would probably have just cluttered the story while on their roundabout Journey back to Nar Sabin and cayenne encounter a wild child on the velt named GA a boy who is seemingly thrown out by his father when he was born as he believed him to be a monster so for his entire life he's lived among beasts and monsters on the velt and while the people of the nearby town of mois would become aware of him over time they didn't know much about him and tended to keep their distance all they knew for sure was that GA liked dry meat and when Sabin and cayenne give him some he begins to follow them like a lost puppy and offers them a special treasure as thanks the treasure turns out to be a diving helmet that the three of them used to Brave the currents of the serpent trench on their way back to Nar there's really not all that much to say about gal what you see is pretty much what you get he isn't very socialized and has limited speech often resorting to howls and growls like the animals that raised him but he isn't simple-minded he's able to grasp abstract Concepts like friendship and emotion and he isn't humorless when Sabin and cayenne properly meet him after feeding him GA takes pleasure in trying to keep up with sabin's movements treating it like a game he finds cen's use of the word thou to be amusing and decides to call him Mr thou but in the original Japanese he calls him gozaru but when Cayenne doesn't respond well to the nickname and Sabin explains to GA that Cayenne just lost his family the kid shows empathy and remorse apologizing and trying to explain that he's not a mean person the relationship between these three characters is similar to that of a surrogate family which is emphasized by what they've all lost as kri Tanaka has pointed out gaw and Sabin are children who have lost to their fathers and cayenne is a father who's lost his child in a way they fill in each other's gaps and Sabin and GA have similar affinities for the Wilderness as the former spent the past decade living mostly outdoors and the latter has lived in the wild for his entire life that being said GA is one of those characters who is here not to tie back into the main story but to widen the scope of the game's World which is a tad surprising considering that the other character yoshinori katas wrote for the game is one who plays a significant role in the story [Music] it's a bit difficult to talk about Celeste without waiting into certain other major talking points so let it be known that we will discuss her in Greater depth as we go prior to joining the party Celeste Sher was an esteemed general of the Empire on the same footing as Leo and KFA with her big claim to fame being the conquest of Miranda it's a role that she had prepared for her entire life having been granted a special education growing up to go with her magitech infusion but as the Empire encroached on the Northern Territories she learned of kefka's plan to exterminate the people of Doma by poisoning their water to which she presumably objected for this she was branded a traitor and imprisoned in a basement in South Figaro again it's not directly stated that this is why she was chained up but it is heavily implied when when lock finds her she's chained to the wall and has been beaten pretty badly with her execution being planned for the following day lock frees her from her bindings and like he had done with terara vows to protect the disgraced General she helps the returners defend Nar from an imperial attack being led by KFA which she had heard rumors of while in captivity there's tension at first as Cayenne believes her to be an Imperial spy and is prepared to cut her down on sight but when lock refuses to step aside and terara tells Cayenne that she was part of the Empire too the befuddled Samurai sheaths his sword Edgar sums up their Collective sentiments nicely the Empire is evil but not all of its citizens are cayenne still doesn't trust celest but she doesn't let that get to her she merely tells him to decide what to believe based on what he sees Celeste is a Steely character at least at first a true warrior who has only ever known conflict there's not a trace of Domesticity to be found but her objection to kefka's plans for DOMA show that she isn't completely heartless when Edgar tries to tell her not to think lock has a thing for her she brushes off the notion of Love entirely clinging to her identity as a soldier but over time her Frosty exterior and reticence to aspects of life outside of War begin to thaw unfortunately as I've already said getting into more of the particulars of her character requires discussing certain aspects of final fantasy 6's story and set pieces which I would like to discuss in Greater depth than the scope of a character analysis would allow we will definitely be wrapping back around to Celeste in order to infiltrate the imperial capital the party stages a Gambit to enlist the assistance of ceter gabani the owner of the world's only Airship the Blackjack he's a bit of a fatalist resigned to whatever hand fate deals him yet rather than wallow in a depression he instead views this as liberating he'll jump at the chance to risk it all and if he dies then that's just how it is at least in his mind but it takes a bit more than the prospect of such an obscene gamble to convince him to Ferry the group to the heart of the Empire he was planning to abduct Maria a famous opera singer during her performance at a prestigious Opera House Celeste who according to the impressario Bears a striking resemblance to Maria fills in for her in order to get aboard setzer's ship so that she and the party can have a little chat with him when he realizes he's been deceived Setzer actually admires celeste's Moxy and agrees to help her and the others if she becomes his bride she weaponizes his love of gambling to turn the tide to her favor using a coin toss to determine whether she'll marry him or if he will help them she wins the bet but only because she used Edgar's double-sided coin which amuses Setzer so much that he isn't even mad he still agrees to help there there is one major discrepancy in his motivations between the original Japanese version and wo's localization however in Japanese Setzer isn't a fan of the Empire as they've been bad for business but in the English script he says the exact opposite that the Empire has made him Rich this is down to how Setzer phrases it in Japanese where he uses the word agari or to go up this seems pretty cut and dry but really it's a Japanese way of saying that business is poor having gone up in smoke or gone belly up if we were to apply the general linguistic idea to English an understandable mistake to an extent especially given the time crunch woy was under but a complete 180 to this aspect of setzer's character all the same most players would probably find Setzer to be a fairly shallow character for most of the game but those curious enough to travel back to the Blackjack while it's grounded at a particular point in the story are treated to an easily missable scene where we get a bit more insight into the kind of person he really is underneath not only is Setzer especially protective of his ship but when he was young he had a dream that he would one day own the fastest airship in the world back then that ship was the Falcon owned by a woman named Daryl she and Setzer were Fierce Rivals but also extremely close friends possibly lovers but when she and her ship went missing czer was devastated and let go of his dream in his own words he felt like he lost his spirit this reframes sets her from being a bit of a thrill seeker who is resigned to his fate to someone who no longer values his own life beyond a wager and according to one of the V jump interviews his facial scars are reflective of this as at least some of them are from various Misadventures he had where he put his life on the line it's almost as though he gambles to feel that spark of excitement he used to get when racing Daryl through this one easily missable scene Setzer becomes a more sympathetic character I personally really like him like Shadow Setzer was originally conceptualized as a gambler job for Final Fantasy 5 by tetsuya nura but it wasn't used there because it apparently had too much personality nura brought the concept back here because personality was exactly what everyone wanted for the game and so the Gambler became Setzer and nura like with Shadow would write his scenario like with Shadow there's a subtlety to setzer's character that you have to read a bit between the lines to fully appreciate but whereas the subtlety of Shadow's character is in reading his past and his connections with others through clues in and outside of dialogue with Setzer it lies more in reading his emotional [Music] state after returning to Nar from the imperial capital word gets around that Lone Wolf the pickpocket is skullking about town when you finally confront him he attempts to dissuade you from coming any closer by holding a Mughal hostage but the Mughal struggling causes them both to lose their balance and hold on to the edge of the cliff for dear life the player has a choice of either saving Lone Wolf and getting a gold hairpin or saving the Mughal and gaining a new party member the optimal if not obvious choice is to save the Mughal though it isn't because he really adds much to the story this is MOG he's one of the Mughal that helped lock protect and unconscious Tera in the Nar Minds at the start of the story he joins you because an esper told him to in a dream and that's kind of it he is a completely optional and Superfluous party member the only notable aspect of his character comes from the localization where he is dripping with era appropriate attitude that wasn't present in the original Japanese and as I briefly touched on earlier '90s attitude MOG would be the Crux of the game's marketing efforts in North America MOG is where the cracks in the execution of The Ensemble idea start to show at least in terms terms of narrative and characterization thankfully not every party member is so inessential but when you have characters like Cayenne CES and the figuro twins characters like MOG feel even less substantial than they already [Music] are at the eastern most edge of the world lies the secluded Village of thamasa where the people are particularly irritable and secretive it doesn't take long to understand why as lock Tara and Shadow find a boy successfully casting a fire spell when he thinks no one's looking despite this an elderly villager named stro Mages denies knowing anything about magic but after his granddaughter is nearly consumed by a house fire caused by the little pyromaniac from earlier he comes clean about their magical Heritage everyone in thamasa is descended from those magically enhanced humans left over from the war of the Magi they were feared by normal people who felt they were the reason the war broke out in the first place and hunted them down to near Extinction a few survivors made their way here established thamasa and their descendants remained here ever since stro decides to help the party find some Rogue espers feeling that the nearby mountains were a likely spot due to how ripe it was with magical power and that it was a sacred place I'm leaving out a few key details here but again we'll come back to that despite his Advanced age stro is one of the more exent party members in the game he spent his life studying monsters with a particular interest in the great Beast hayon which he and an old comrade of his gungho had hunted in their youth but he put his dream of defeating it on hold when ebot's rock where hyon resides sank into the sea decades ago he's also well-versed in the history of magic and espers and is quite pensive about these matters he's also a bit of a goof much to the dismay of his adoptive granddaughter realm there's a particular energy to him though a propensity to spring into action at the drop of of a hat he can be immature but he knows when to cut the crap and get serious and when it comes to protecting realm he tends not to take any chances while stro is the oldest member of the party at 70 years old realm is the youngest at a mere 10 she's also fiercely independent ignoring her grandfather's demand that she stays home while he goes off with lock and terara skullking about as she tries to follow without being spotted she's even able to guiltrip ultros a mischievous spilop pod who shows up frequently to annoy the party into letting her paint aort Port of him while he's in the middle of fighting the others but her magical abilities manifest through her art allowing her to turn her paintings into living simulacrums of their subjects which she uses to attack enemies she's acutely aware of how skillful she is with this too and she isn't above using I'll paint your picture as a threat as hot-headed and mischievous as she can be though realm is as kind-hearted as her grandfather and just as protective of him as he is of her though he isn't the only connection she has among the cast when she's first in introduced she's immediately drawn to Shadow's dog Interceptor and although Shadow tries to Ward her away warning her that he bites Interceptor actually takes a liking to realm following her to the next room with no sign of aggression strange later when she actually joins the party she already has a momento ring equipped which protects the wearer from instant death effects through the power of her dearly departed mother surprisingly realm isn't the only party member who can equip this Shadow can too and in Shadow's nightmare flashbacks the town he's ended up in is clearly thamasa this is further compounded by his final flashback that can be seen later on where Clyde is seen leaving thamasa and telling the dog to stay behind to protect the girl but the pooch follows him anyway while the game never comes out and says it the implications are obvious Shadow is realm's estranged father what's more this inference is made entirely through Framing and context clues aside from Shadow telling realm that his dog bites I don't think they share a single scripted inter action in the entire game I'm not exactly sure how involved akiyoshi OTA realm's Creator and scenario writer was with this particular aspect of the character or if it was conjured up by tetsuya nura and yoshinori katas sanded down the rough edges on both characters to make it work but like I said when discussing Shadow it's expertly handled originally there were plans for a scene where stro would confront Shadow about it at a bar stro would ask Shadow to show him his face just so that he could know for sure that it was him he wouldn't ask him to stick around just for realm sake even if he was her father Shadow obliges him removing his mask though only showing his face to stro not even the player would see him in response stro would have thanked him hesitated a moment before calling him shadow and suggesting they share a drink like with the cut character Angela while I feel this would have been nice to have it also wouldn't have been necessary the added dynamic between stro and Shadow would have been the one reason to keep it but without knowing whether there were more planned interactions between the two that were cut or what additional context would have surrounded or triggered to this scene I can't say for certain how truly impactful it may have been but the interview which described this scene did directly confirm that yes Shadow and realm are father and [Music] daughter aside from a few weak links Final Fantasy 6 has the strongest party in the series by far up to this point with some minor exceptions just about everyone feels like more than just a stock archetype or a retread of characters from previous entries but I've neglected to talk about our initial perspective character terara up until now part of this is because terara while not exactly a blank slate isn't a particularly active character for a good chunk of the early game that's not to say she isn't engaging or interesting though because she absolutely is she's an enigma the only person in the world at least until they find thamasa much later on to have been born with the gift of magic she didn't need to be augmented like celess she's just naturally able to use magic this is why both the Empire and the returners want her the former so they can have a powerful living weapon as a tool of conquest and the latter to have a fighting chance against gal's war machine but this neglects what terara wants in life having been a slave to the Empire for her entire life only now being physically and mentally free she has no idea what to do with her life magic comes naturally to her but she doesn't know if she can trust the returners at first because for all she knows they want to abuse her power like the Empire had done she even begins to resent her abilities fearing them and Edgar being clumsy with his wording and accidentally implying that Tara is inhuman because of her powers certainly doesn't help simply put she's afraid more tragically aside from Fear confusion and anxiety Tara is unfamiliar with and doesn't know how to process most emotions Edgar flirts with her when they meet and while she recognizes that he is flirting she doesn't really feel any particular way about it fueling her anxieties about not being normal or possibly being inhuman but as the story evolves so too does her character as she begins to take a more active role in the events transpiring around her in the words of hironobu sakaguchi who is responsible for writing her character quote in the first half of the game her personality is very passive we did that because we wanted to show her growth as the story progresses in the process of being manipulated and used by others she gradually awakens to her own destiny The Awakening of the self of One's Own Humanity those are her themes end quote ironically this Awakening to her sense of humanity comes through the revelation of tera's inh humanity after defending the Frozen esper from kfka and his troops terara makes contact with it and she transforms into a more beast-like ethereal version of herself belting out a ghastly shriek before bolting into the sky unable to control whatever power had just been unlocked from within her before too long it's revealed that terara is half esper The Offspring of an esper named maduan and a human woman named meline Madonna in the localization who found her way to the esper World long ago when disenchanted with the sins of humanity the espers themselves were originally humans transformed by the gods to fight on their behalf in the war of the Magi but upon realizing that their conflict only brought destruction the three Gods granted free will to the espers and turned themselves to Stone warning their Creations that they must never be awakened the localization fumbles the details a bit but that's the gist of what happened after the war the espers created their own realm and sealed it a away from the human world they wished to live in peace unafraid of being hunted down by humans in search of gaining magical powers of their own and until meline wandered into their world their lives were peaceful she herself didn't bring conflict but about a year or two after Tera was born the gallian Empire attempted to invade the esper World gal's forces managed to capture a few espers but the Elder would raise a barrier to cast out the Invaders and protect their realm from further attacks UNT fortunately maduan would be expelled from this world while trying to save meline and an infant Tera he was unsuccessful and Not only would he be captured by the Empire but gastal himself would take terara from meline realizing that as a half esper she could be a great Boon in his quest for power once terara learns the truth about herself and her past through coming into contact with the Magicite that was once her father she begins to accept that she has a much bigger responsibility to both human and esper kinds than anyone could have imagined her very existence is proof that the two can coexist peacefully but the Empire is standing in the way of that Bannon and Arvis believe that if they can find the sealed gate to the esper world terara could possibly open it and communicate with the espers in an effort to bring the Empire to its knees but more importantly to Tara her Heritage gives her some amount of hope that she can understand that most quintessential human emotion love it's something that she's yearned to to feel and understand since the early hours of the story and is one of many ways in which Celeste serves as a foil to terara as with numerous other aspects of celeste's character we'll touch more on that point later on but these two characters are nearly Polar Opposites of each other while both had served the empire terara was an unwilling participant while Celeste strived for greatness as a warrior terara is able to cast magic naturally while Celeste had to undergo experimentation to become a run Knight their Elemental affinity are in direct contrast as well Tera can initially only cast Fire magic whereas Celeste can only cast ice Tera actively Pines to understand human emotions such as love while Celeste finds such Pursuits to be frivolous in other words when we're introduced to them Tera strives to find her Humanity while Celeste has actively suppressed it even their names play into their juxtoposition with terara being synonymous with the Earth and Celeste with the sky or Heavens actually we should probably rethink that one a bit as in the original Japanese version terara was actually named Tina there are a few names this could be short for but given the character's background as the product of a human woman and a powerful otherworldly being I'd imagine that Christina would be most likely as the name can be read as a feminine form of Christ who himself was the son of God and a human woman the Virgin Mary moreover Christina was also the name of an early Saint who suffered tremendous abuse at the hands of her father a Roman prefect for for the Island Town of Ty which parallels tera's own upbringing under Emperor gastal who was effectively her adoptive father the reason her name was changed from Tina to Tera during the localization process was because play testers strongly disliked it it was plain humdrum to English-speaking players and so Ted Wy would acques and change her name to terara this also affected Sabin who was named Mash in the Japanese version as for why these specific names were chosen I couldn't find any definitive reason I'd imagine Tara was chosen to highlight her and celeste's status as foils for each other as I've already described but I don't know for certain interestingly this Dynamic was originally a bit different instead of Celeste Tara was supposed to be in contrast with lock who would have had celeste's runic ability and as mentioned when discussing his character the two would have been Rivals moreover terot was originally conceived as a male character in his early 20s rather than an 18-year-old girl but but even during those early stages the character was still half esper while she isn't my favorite member of the cast though she is definitely up there Tara is absolutely the lynchpin of Final Fantasy 6's narrative and themes she's a complex character who's simple to grasp and her status as an amnesiac in the early hours makes her a solid receptacle for exposition and while she is fairly passive in those early hours she's not without some amount of agency she's offered the choice of whether not to help the returners and when she awakens to her esper Heritage she begins to actively participate and help steer the story without her there wouldn't be a plan to try and communicate with the espers or try to open the sealed gate and without her agreement and cooperation the plan wouldn't have been put into motion at all despite being an ensemble piece terara is one of Final Fantasy 6's most important and prominent characters this prominence extends beyond the game itself as series concept artist Yoshi taka Amano would create more artwork of her than any other character in the series he's made it no secret that she's his favorite character in the series to draw but a particular trait from his illustrations didn't make it into the final game her hair color Amano depicts her with blonde hair while kazakos shabuya Sprites have green hair at some point tera's Sprite did have blonde hair in addition to other differences in her design and Amano would base his art on shabuya work for most of the characters when amano's designs came in and shabuya reworked the Sprites to resemble them more closely she changed Tara's hair color so that she would stand out more from other characters I've seen people argue about what color her hair really is whether the green is meant to be indicative of her magical Heritage Etc and her various appearances in later spin-off materials have only added fuel to that fire I personally don't care too much either way though the thought of her hair being green because of her esper heritage is admittedly an interesting [Music] idea not only are espers a major focal point of the world narrative and themes but they also serve as a core component of Final Fantasy 6's gameplay and character building gone is the job system of ff5 but in its place is something of a Crossroads between it and for every character has their own defined abilities reminiscent of the various jobs including some new ones and some commands can be altered or upgraded with certain relics two relics can be equipped at any time with a wide range of effects from the aforementioned ability enhancements like turning attack into jump steel into mug and dual wielding to raising certain stats and protecting against various status conditions espers come into play in the form of Magicite a crystallized form of their remains imbued with magical power Not only was Magicite used during the war of the Magi by humans to gain the power of magic as stro tells us much later on but they can be used to teach magic to basically every party member while terara and Celeste can also learn spells through leveling up with Magicite they can learn some spells more quickly as well as have a greater variety of them Magicite is also the only way to permanently raise a character's stats on level up provided the particular Magicite that's equipped grants such a boost otherwise whenever they level up they only get a boost to their HP and MP the way to learn spells from Magicite is like leveling up jobs in Final Fantasy 5 the character still has to earn a certain amount of AP magic points in the localization from battles which still use the ATB system until the spell is unlocked and added to that character's spell list but unlike jobs in Final Fantasy 5 spells have multipliers tied to them which affect the amount of AP required to unlock them the higher the multiplier the fewer ability points are required only one piece of Magicite can be equipped at a time though and while they can be used to summon their esper in combat they can only be called once per battle and at least in the case of the offensive espers like ramu and Shiva they're pretty weak weaker than a level two Elemental spell in fact and as such aren't worth the MP cost it's the support espers like Phantom and carbunkle that are more worth using in battle though because they can only be summoned once per battle the player is a bit disincentivized to use them for fear of wasting their sole cast fittingly for a story where the world was nearly destroyed by it magic is fairly powerful in Final Fantasy 6 it's highly effective even against enemies that don't have exploitable elemental weaknesses and because everyone can learn magic from Magicite theoretically everyone is able to break the game or at the very least bend it over their knee however not every party member can really take advantage of this at least initially some characters like lock and Sabin have pretty low magic stats and relatively small MP pools so while they can use magic they won't be nearly as effective as characters like terara MOG or even Shadow or gal Cayenne gets the worst of this with his pitiful 25 magic stat being the worst in the game and because permanent stat increases only come when a character levels up while equipped with the right Magicite it can take a fair amount of time for some of these characters to become as proficient with magic as an unboosted Tera but because of just how many party members have a decent magic stat boosting the others is almost a moot point especially considering how the game utilizes such a wide cast of player characters at various points the player will be prompted to split the party into smaller groups and cycle between them to accomplish their goal this is introduced early on when lock is trying to protect an unconscious Tera from nar's town guard in the mines a group of Mughal including MOG come to their aid it's a novel idea and ensures that more characters will be used more often without having to constantly swap out the standard for party slots though it can also be a thorn in the side of those players who like playing with particular characters to the detriment of others of course you can just divide those favorites up among the groups to even them out but the result usually ends up being that there's a bit of dead weight somewhere this division also does nothing to handicap the pervasiveness or effectiveness of magic as there are so many Adept Mages and other potential spellcasters that you could easily end up with two or three in a single party unfortunately there are large gaps between sections of the game where you have to split the party up like this and they're initially used more for defensive formations against groups of enemies but thankfully this isn't the only way that the characters are given room to breathe there are parts of the story where the party splits up or characters break off from the group forcing the player to use them for a certain section of the story until they meet back up but the earliest example of this is also the most egregious after bringing terara to Bannon lock is sent to South figuro to sabotage the Empire's northward advancements while the rest triy to use the leth river to make their way back to Nar after a scuffle with ultra Sabin dives into the Raging Waters to finish him off but is separated from the others at this point the player is given the choice of who scenario they want to follow before everyone regroups in Nar terara and Edgar's is brief and mostly automated locks is more involved but generally doesn't take too long what keeps it interesting is that it's a stealth section where getting caught has him start from the beginning Sabin though while not uninteresting is orders of magnitude longer than the other two combined seeing him wash up north of Doma where he meets Cayenne Venture through the Phantom Forest where they board the Phantom train and nearly lose their lives cross the V where they meet GA Brave the serpent trench to nikkia and take the ferry from there to South figuro where a Fade to Black will close the scenario aside from the egregious disparity between those scenarios lengths I personally welcome the party splitting and perspective shifting it allows for more time to craft parts of the script around the presence of specific characters and dedicates parts of the game to not only only familiarizing the player with each character's play Styles and abilities but also to dedicating some time to leveling and building them up even if such portions tend to be on the shorter side it's still appreciated especially when one considers how varied and diverse this party is in terms of gaml while just about every party member fits into the mold of a job or archetype from past entries there are some new additions and curveballs thrown into the mix to keep them from being mere retreads Edgar for example is a machinist using various gadgets and tools to deal high damage or inflict status conditions his autoc crossbow for example is extremely useful in the early game for dealing with multiple enemies swiftly and his bio Blaster is an easy way to deal poison damage to enemies susceptible to it without having someone spend MP to cast bio his chainsaw is especially useful dealing massive damage and having a 25% chance to instantly kill its targets but you have to solve a puzzle in Zozo in order to find it Edgar is strong and surprisingly versatile but only if you put the work into a acquiring his full arsenal and learning how each of them Works Sabin is this game's monk but his Blitz ability allows him to unleash special techniques of varying power effects and Elemental affinities they're unlocked at specific levels and require specific button inputs that the player has to remember from checking them in the menu not unlike fighting games such as Street Fighter 2 amusingly diagonal inputs aren't strictly required in place of them you can press one of the two cardinal directions they sit between and the game will accept it as correct there's a surprising amount of utility and Variety in sabin's blitzes his basic Pummel may just be a flurry of standard punches and kicks but his AA Bolt And Fire dance deal holy and Firebase damage respectively the former which is effectively the Kamehameha wave from Dragon Ball is acquired surprisingly early on especially for something which deals solid holy damage at no tangible cost aside from not being able to choose the target the ladder meanwhile targets all enemies and doesn't divide the damage his Mantra Blitz can even heal other party members as well as cure them of blindness poison silence and sap conditions the downside is that they're all healed by sabin's current HP divided amongst them and Sabin himself isn't healed lightly suggesting that maybe one should consider equipping him with an esper which bolsters his HP gains and of course the suplex can't go unmentioned after all Sabin is so ridiculously strong he can suplex a train Celeste has the special runic ability which has her absorbed to the next spell cast in battle regardless of whether it comes from an enemy or an ally and she recovers MP equal to the Spell's cost it's a basic utility skill one which can be a bit of a pain to play around if you're trying to use magic to defeat an enemy but it can be useful technically runic is actually a status condition that Celeste receives when the command is selected and it's lost either when a spell is absorbed or her command menu opens again originally lock was going to have this command back when he was a darker figure and rival to Tera but It ultimately went to Celeste despite being a samurai Cayenne doesn't carry over any of the job's abilities from the previous game instead he practices the art of Bushido which sees him gain new abilities and battle techniques as he levels up their effectiveness varies though most of them are unblockable and some have additional status effects but the real Achilles heal of cayenne Bushido is the windup time in order to activate a particular technique you need to select the Bushido command and wait until the meter charges up to the level you want to use neither raising his stats nor granting him haste can speed up the process he has a very respectable base strength stat so it's not like his Bushido techniques aren't good it's just that the trade-off to use them is a little steep and some are a bit situational for example his level two is a Counterattack and only a Counterattack generally speaking his fourth technique quadr slam tends to be one of the most optimal ones to use between its four unblockable hits and placement just shy of the center of the meter it's decently safe and reliable but often times when he's in your party your best bet may just be to attack normally GA is a strange hodgepodge of a blue Mage and a Berserker with a light dash of geomancer thrown into the mix having lived on the velt for so long GA has picked up some interesting abilities from the local wildlife and as you encounter more and more enemies over the course of the game more of those enemies will make their way to the velt when in the velt the player can command GA to leap during a battle and he'll temporarily leave the party he'll return at the end of another battle and depending on what enemies were present when he left the party he can learn a new rage rages are basically GA specific magic spells having the same effects in addition to granting gaw a special buff based on which rage was used for example Templar casts Fire 2 and gives him the protect status and hazer will cast bolt to and make him immune to instant death he's basically copying particular enemies after casting the rage though Gaal will go berserk unable to be given direct commands until he's petrified and cured knocked out and revived or until the battle's over and aside from using items or leaping when on the velt rages are all gal can do until you get access to magicites he's powerful to be sure especially early on before you get Magicite he can already use level two Spells at that point but between the method of acquiring his rages the need to memorize what they do because their names are just those of the enemies he emulates and his going berserk after using them I found gaw to be a tad obtuse to use far from unusable of course in fact I wouldn't be surprised if certain rages make him a total game breaker stray cat for example is certainly powerful especially considering that unlike with magic he can learn from Magicite gal's rages don't have any MP costs so there is a trade-off there personally I didn't really like using him but I can sort of see the appeal like Edgar Setzer represents a whole new new job archetype for the series in his case The Gambler his weapons are cards and dice and his unique slot command can lead to a handful of different effects depending on the combination the player lands on this can range from a meager healing spell to calling an esper to inflicting instant death on all enemies or possibly the party the efficacy of the slots is tied to setzer's Magic stats which is a tad on the low side so bolstering it with Magicite is a good idea it helps that despite the intention of the slots being random they can be easily manipulated if one knows what they're doing both through using certain commands in battle to change the heximal value from which the slot command pulls from and by pausing and unpausing the game as the slots are spinning to get the desired result more easily of course you could just equip Setzer with the coin toss Relic to throw your spare change instead with the amount of damage done Rising with his level Setzer can be fun to use if only for the novelty the rest of the party are basically what you would expect from their archetypes though some have a Twist at it to them Tera can morph into her esper form in battle after she's earned enough AP doubling her offensive capabilities and cutting damage she takes from Magic attacks in half for a limited time or until the player hits revert MOG is a dancer but who can only learn new dances when fighting in a new environment which those dances evoke in a sense he's a bit of a geomancer too though like gal he also becomes uncontrollable once he starts dancing Shadow is a ninja but he also has passive access to his loyal Hound inter his Canine Companion has a chance of blocking physical attacks for him and countering with a vicious bite or charge attack which deals non-elemental magic damage Interceptor can't be controlled but having him be part of Shadow's bag of tricks is a fun way to incorporate him into the game play stro is a blue Mage but instead of needing to be hit by an enemy's skill to learn it he merely needs to observe it I suppose this may be why Blue Magic is called LS in this game the attack doesn't even need to be successful for him to learn learn a new lore which is even better however if he's inflicted with blindness he won't learn new LS because well he can't see it realm is an abstract version of a Beast Master using her paintbrush to create a duplicate of the enemy to fight on her behalf unfortunately because of how the enemy stats tend to be in this game her sketch ability usually isn't all too powerful or useful and that's without getting into how buggy the ability can be under certain conditions sketching can Rec Havoc with the game and even wipe save data this bug was patched out in the version 1.1 revision of the game but thankfully her base magic stat is the highest among the party making her especially formidable after learning a bit of black magic rendering realm's main gimmick moot but again that's kind of the rub because anyone can learn magic from Magicite and because magic is so powerful by the end it's easy to end up leaning on spellcasting despite the wide variety of unique and interesting characters and abilities at your disposal even those with poor magic stats can be useful in this regard either by casting support spells like haste and protect or only using damaging spells to exploit enemy weaknesses for maximum efficiency there's also the earring relics which boost magic power with the only downside being a relic slot and they can be paired to make the Boost even more dramatic between the generosity of the Magicite system and the way enemy stat tables tend to be balanced the result is one of the easiest games in the series so far if not the easiest this is compounded just a bit further by two new features the first is desperation attacks which have a 1 in 16 chance of activating when using the attack command when a party member is in critical Health these are unique powerful attacks which are meant to help turn the tide of a tough battle but because of how easy the game can often be they tend to be a very rare occurrence the second is this little tapier like creature that appears when a party member has been suffering from certain status afflictions for too long in battle it'll cure them if if you neglect to do so yourself and again that's all without diving into how buggy the game can be thankfully aside from the aformentioned sketch bug most players are unlikely to come across them as they tend to be fairly esoteric but two particularly notable bugs are the non-functional evasion stat and the infamous vanish Doom bug which allows almost any enemy to be defeated instantly regardless of whether they're immune to instant death status this is because of the order the game checks status conditions and immunities the vanish check precedes the instant death check and because magic always hits those who vanished the game doesn't bother to check if the target is immune to instant death I didn't use this trick Beyond briefly testing it on an intang gear but I'm sure it makes a fairly easy game that much breezier to play the only other additions made to Final Fantasy 6's gameplay were the inclusion of two new battle formations the side attack and surrounded the former sees the Party attack the enemy from both sides while the latter as the name suggests sees the party surrounded by enemies while both of these formations eliminate front and back rows being surrounded turns this into one of a handful of detriments the party's focus is split in either direction and they take more damage when attacked from behind it's effectively an ambush as their ATB gauges start empty casting magic that would normally affect all enemies will only target one side of the field and because they're surrounded they can't flee they have to fight but even this doesn't really shake up the difficulty that much the only point that felt anything like a difficulty Spike was the magitech research facility where the Empire has been conducting their experiments on espers to try and harness their power the enemies here are highly resilient in the face of most physical attacks but fold like paper when faced with a little lightning bolt and thankfully ramu turned himself to Magicite for you to use not terribly long ago so you should should be able to push your way through this industrial processing plant fairly easily to save the espers from the hands of the Empire just as ramu asked of [Music] you the magitech research facility is bookended by some of the best and worst examples of Final Fantasy 6's visuals and story telling the slow approach toward the Imperial continent is a tense harrowing scene from the search lights shining into the night sky that can be seen all the way from the next continent to the Imperial Palace Rising above the setting sunlight into the inky Sky dominating the city skyline below it feels like a scene straight out of Blade Runner and yet it ends with the visual mess of pixels that is the rail Escape even when played on contemporary televisions where the pixels would blend together it's difficult to process what you're seeing its only saving grace is that it's relatively brief and doesn't require the player to really interact with it despite there being choices on which route to take you wind up in the right place no matter what even the development staff weren't happy with this sequence even with the super famicom mode 7 Graphics they had to construct this sequence by hand pixel by pixel and their result is underwhelming at best and borderline nauseating at worst Final Fantasy 6 uses mode 7 a fair amount actually the most prominent implementation of the effect is on the world map which is now permanently tilted to give it a sense of depth and scale this is taken to Greater Heights when riding a chocobo or flying the Airship expanding navigation from two to three dimensions the serpent trench sequence also makes use of mode 7 and unlike the rail Escape it uses a scaling and rotating Sprite like the world map of course there's also the aformentioned approach to Vector which never fails to give me chills the expanded use of mode 7 whether it be for the sake of being technically impressive or artistically striking is a major component to Final Fantasy 6's visual identity but it's the latter which enraptures me personally there's a strong understanding of cinematic language on display here how to evoke specific emotions with just the placement of the camera and the framing of a shot for example the low angle on the approach to Vector emphasizes the power of the Empire by making them appear larger and the game's iconic opening credit sequence uses a high and wide angle to show that they're ambitious when used separately both high and wide angle shots make the subject appear small and weak with high angles it's because of the perspective the viewer is looking down on them the inverse of looking up towards something shot from a low angle wide angles meanwhile tend to emphasize space depending on what's in the frame and how far away the subject is wide angles can make them appear small through contrast surrounding them with empty or negative space the opening credit sequence combines these two angles with the action of its subjects the magitech armor marching across the negative space of the snowy plains as their destination slowly begins to appear Over the Horizon rather than depicting the Empire as small and weak here instead they're framed as confident and Resolute Final Fantasy 6's overall presentation feels like the culmination of the path that tekashi teita had set the series on when he was working on Final Fantasy 4 approach ing the storytelling from the perspective of editing a film and having the drama and narrative Drive the game and evoke a genuine emotional response from players this is even extended to how battle scenes help tell the story with characters moving all over the frame no longer constricted to set positions like they had been for the past two games and these emotions are evoked not just from the visuals but from the score more so than with previous titles nobuo omatu explores a wide range of tones emotions and genres in Final Fantasy 6 spanning 61 tracks with a total length of about 2 and 1/2 hours it's difficult to know where to even begin I've already discussed how the opening track Omen sets the mood with its use of the organ but the track continues through the opening Exposition and credits to establish a forboding atmosphere with a glimmer of of Hope in its third section tonally the score does a lot of heavy lifting to guide The Narrative not that this had never been the case before but it's much more pronounced here even outside of narrative use though the soundtrack still boasts some standout pieces the varied Town themes for example all evoke not just their Vibes but more subtly their standing in the war those which haven't been subjected to Imperial occupation are set to the light-hearted kids run through the city which reflects the quiet and Rel relatively uneventful lives of the towns folk as they go about their [Music] business meanwhile those under martial law are scored to well under martial law a wearier piece which sets the player just a bit on edge the dichotomy between the two tracks is most easily recognizable in South figuro which played kids run through the city on your first visit when the town is free but it's replaced by under martial law during lock scenario as he attempts to sabotage the Empire's advancement toward Nar it also plays in the towns on the Imperial continents which have long been subjugated by the [Music] Empire however there are a handful of towns which have their own spoke themes nar's theme is pretty understated but also just a bit unsettling like something is skullking behind you practically breathing down your neck ready to strike at any moment Zozo which is basically a dungeon disguised as a town is accompanied by an unsettlingly upbeat little diddy which like Nar keeps the player just a bit on edge it sounds nice but there's something about it that feels wrong almost [Music] Sinister similarly the espers theme is dripping with Mystique just like the espers themselves there's an otherworldly element to it an uncertainty of whether they can be trusted or if they would trust you but as the track continues as you remain in their presence you'll be greeted with a taste of what they're capable of whether it's because they trust or fear you however is another matter [Music] entirely while I find the standard battle theme to be generally pretty solid with its frenetic mixture of horns and bitcrushed guitar [Music] the boss theme the decisive battle is much more my jam it's basically a Prague Rock piece which while not as eclectic as battle on the big bridge comes out swinging and keeps up the energy for the whole battle I look forward to boss battles if only because they're set to this [Music] piece there are two dungeon tracks in particular that enraptured me Phantom train and magitech research facility both for similar reasons for these two tracks o Matsu Incorporated diagetic percussion to reflect their setting Phantom train starts with the sounds of the locomotive's engine thking down the track though before too long it's replaced by an actual drum track magitech research facility however retains the metallic Stomps and clanging of the various mechanisms used to torture captive espers throughout the entire piece it doesn't let you forget where you are and what's at stake that this place is a slaughterhouse a temple erected for the purpose of industry and technological advancement built on suffering and [Music] cruelty of course we can't talk about musical storytelling without discussing U Matsu's continued experimentations with light motifs while in Final Fantasy 5 he would primarily play around with the game's main theme which represented the party as a whole the individual characters would have varying levels of attention paid to them musically in Final Fantasy 6 every party member gets their own musical motifs with some seeing those themes incorporated into multiple tracks the biggest example of this is terara whose theme is first heard as she while under Imperial control trudges across the plains to Nar in the game's opening [Music] then Revisited when she wakes up in AR's home in Nar and finally solidify as the Overworld [Music] theme it's even weaved into protect the espers which plays a few times throughout the game most notably during the defense of [Music] Nar tera's theme is a perfect encapsulation of her character confused and determined to Define her sense of identity and her place in the world but with a gentleness that belies the tremendous power she wields and while the use of her theme for the Overworld could be interpreted as a statement that she's the quote unquote main character out of The Ensemble I think it would be more accurate to say that it reflects her status as the main perspective character we experience so much of theory story from her point of view and learn about the world through her eyes other party members like motifs embody their characters in more creative ways Shadows theme for example foros the Epic and Fantastical instrumentations that color so much of the game score instead opting for the more stripped down twang reminiscent of spaghetti westerns in his book on Final Fantasy 6's music Sebastian Deen specifically names composer anyo moricone score for director Sergio Leone's dollars trilogy as a potential inspiration for Shadow's theme what supports this assertion is Shadow similarities to Clint Eastwood's character in these films colloquially known as the man with no name they've both discarded their names and are seemingly only out for themselves but are capable of Acts of heroism despite their seemingly selfish dispositions there's also the cyclical relationship between westerns and the films of Akira kurasawa to consider as a fist full of dollars was an unauthorized remake of Yojimbo and kurasawa himself would often borrow from western films the result is a theme which crosses cultural boundaries to establish the kind of character Shadow is even before we have the opportunity to recruit [Music] him Cayenne theme acts as something of an inversion of Shadows while the latter evokes Spaghetti Westerns the former pulls from the samurai films that influenced the genre since Cayenne is a samurai it's only fitting but more to the point his theme reflects not just his character but also his story unlike Shadows which serves as an introduction to his seemingly laconic disposition what's more is that Cayenne story is laid bare as soon as we meet him he's an honorable samurai who's rooted in Tradition with the shakuhachi that leads his theme being as precise with its notes as he is with his blade but as tragedy strikes his Steely resolve is shaken and his emotional distress musically manif FS as the traditional bamboo flutes trading blows with the woodwind section until finally giving way it's the perfect distill of cayenne painting him as the proud warrior he is while also retaining the depth and emotional complexity of his [Music] character some of the other party members themes aren't as dynamic as this however but that's not to say they're bad they're all great in their own way a personal favorite of mine is realm's theme which is a Serene and tranquil piece that encapsulates her good heart and fun fact she's U Matsu's favorite [Music] character but then there are those light motifs which like teras are incorporated into other tracks to give additional depth to the characters specifically the themes for the figuro brothers and lock the former pulls double duty not just as Edgar and sabin's theme but the theme for figuro Castle it's Grand bombastic and Regal fit not just for royalty but for the twins Larger than Life personalities but whenever we get a glimpse into their past before Edgar became king we are treated to a slower more somber rendition of their theme aptly titled coin of Fate reflecting the unfair circumstances set upon them they both want their freedom but between them only Sabin had has any sort of calling in life and so Edgar makes the decision to resign himself to the throne while still making Sabin feel like it's his decision it's morose it's melancholic and it's [Music] magnificent locks light Motif moves in a similar direction for its repre when we're first introduced to him and his theme plays it immediately breaks the tension of the Mystique and Imperial scouting run on Nar to give us a traditionally heroic theme to cast light on what is so far been a dark and D setting and this theme continues to be used for Big Hero [Music] moments [Music] but when we're confronted with Lock's past and his guilt for what happens to Rachel the melody is incorporated into her theme giving it a more tragic quality and associating it with her death regardless of how you feel about what lock is doing about it this use of light Motif helps to add greater emotional depth to his character bearing all of this in mind it would be easy to declare nobuo Matsu as a supremely talented composer who more than understood how to use his compositions to help flesh out the characters that he was given their profiles and based his work on written descriptions but astonishingly this was the exact opposite of U Matsu's process for writing Final Fantasy 6's character themes rather The Melodies were written in isolation and then applied to the characters he felt worked best so does everything I and countless others have had to say about the game's light motifs suddenly mean nothing when faced with this information of course not it's art and as such is subject to the interpretation and views of The Observers as much as it is the author if not more so these musical motifs may have been retrofitted but that doesn't make theem they invoke in the player any less meaningful but if we are going to have a meaningful discussion about Final Fantasy 6's music characters and music tied to the characters there's one sequence in particular that cannot go undiscussed the opera house and yes that means we are finally going to get into details about [Music] Celeste the impetus is simple the esper ramu asks the party to infiltrate the magitech research facility in the heart of the imperial capital to free the other espers that have been subjugated to torturous experimentation for years but they don't have a way of getting there however in jador they meet the impressario of the Opera House who's received word from the gambling Vagabond Setzer that he's planning to crash the next performance of Draco and Maria to whisk away the leading lady Maria and force her to marry him it just so happens that not only does Setzer have the only airship in the world but that Celeste Bears an uncanny resemblance to Maria It's Quickly decided that Celeste will pose as Maria in the show and when Setzer arrives the party will sneak onto his Airship and try to convince him to take them into imperial territory cess is initially opposed to the idea after all she's a general not some Opera flusy but she ends up going along with it since it's the best chance they have right now even if her singing is a bit Rusty meanwhile ultros still bitter about his scuffle with Edgar and the others on the river has been eavesdropping as he's followed the party here and plans to drop a 4ton weight from the Raptors above the stage onto celeste's head during the show leading to lock and the others springing into action as the show plays out and Setzer draws ever closer with so many layers and moving Parts it's difficult to know where to even begin when discussing the Opera House sequence everything about it is absolutely dripping with p it's practically impossible to remove any piece of it without significantly affecting the whole at the heart of it is celess herself the disgraced former General who's joined up with the resistance movement that the Empire has been fighting for some time but there's more to her character bubbling beneath the surface at the end of the magitech research facility following the Opera House sequence kfka claims that Celeste was actually spying on the returners the whole time as Cayenne had initially suspected however whether this was of her own accord or was part of a larger Gambit by Emperor gastal is left a bit ambiguous after all it's heavily implied that her status as a traitor is because she dared to question kfa's plot to poison Doma so there is probable cause for her to want to defect regardless of whether her joining the returners was a conscious Act of Espionage or a part of gal's manipulative machinations Celeste still took pride in having once held such a high rank in the Empire but after spending time among the returners and forming bonds with them particularly with lock Celeste begins questioning her own feelings and loyalties the first sign of this is in cenan where we learn Lock's backstory if Celeste is in the active party then after everyone else leaves the basement where Rachel's corpse is preserved she'll come back down for a moment alone to reflect on Lock's guilt he couldn't protect Rachel but he vowed to protect her she now seems to understand what Edgar meant when he told her that lock had a complicated past when lock checks in on her as she's getting ready to go on stage he turns beat red and gets flustered when he sees her in her Opera gown she asks him why he helped her Escape in South figuro and he alludes to his failure to protect Rachel in response Celeste Cuts right to the Bone asking lock if he did it because he thought it could make up for failing to save Rachel he doesn't say either way instead telling her her that the ribbon she's wearing looks good on her from there the player is prompted to memorize the lyrics so that the performance goes off without a hitch the show's already started and it's almost time for her part the Opera's Overture has already set the stage a war rages between the East and the west and Draco great hero of the West yearns to see his lovely Maria once more it's after Draco starts singing that Lo excuses himself to check in on Celeste and it's just before she takes to the stage that we we learned that the Western forces have fallen and Prince Ross of the East is taking her as his bride but her heart continues to yearn for Draco from there the player has to select the correct lyrics and guide Celeste around the castle so that the show goes smoothly it is possible to fail but the game gives you a few chances to try again before you get a game over but the mechanics of the scene are merely a formality its true beauty lies in how Celeste is able to throw herself so completely into to her performance not because she's a trained soprano like the real Maria but because of how the words she's singing on stage resonate with the emotions she's feeling offstage she's starting to fall for lock which as a soldier is something she had never considered a meaningful Pursuit she's been struggling to reconcile her Pride as a former general of the Empire with these new emotions she's experiencing outside of it and this internal conflict is in a way made manifest in the story of the Opera with the the Eastern Prince Ross forcibly taking Maria's hand in marriage while her heart still belongs to Draco interestingly the Western forces that attack before the ceremony are pallet swaps of the merchant outfit Lockes in South figuro one of two he can be wearing when he meets and rescues Celeste the East vying for Maria against her will dominating the Western hero who she loves it reflects the conflict between the Empire and the returners a force which wants celest for what she can offer in terms of military or political power fighting another which not only supports a cause she actually believes in but is the side of her hero it's not a perfect reflection of her situation as Maria's loyalties lie with the side she was on at the start which is being overruled while Celeste is actively defecting from the Empire where she began but in both cases they're making the choice of where their allegiances lie and both of them hinge on affections for their respective Heroes Celeste has been stewing on this for a little while now but her lifetime working towards becoming a great and powerful General has left her unwilling or unable to process or Express these emotions when she Dons that cream colored gown and ties her hair with that blue ribbon she's doing what she's probably never had the opportunity to do before become someone else if only for just a few minutes she isn't Celeste share magitech Knight and esteemed general of the gallan empire she's simply Celeste and it all comes pouring out when she gets up on stage and starts to [Music] sing this is Celeste laid bare everything about her up until now has led to this moment it's the point where she finally lets go of her past allegiance to the Empire and fully commits herself to the returners and lock while that does have a sexist undercurrent to it revolving a female character's Arc around romantic affections for a man I think such a stance would be horribly reductive this is about more than celeste's romantic feelings it's about her opening up the thawing of the Ice Queen and this is exemplified further in the original Japanese script where the direct and authoritative tone of her dialogue changes into something more traditionally feminine as soon as she puts on her Opera gown which persists even after the Opera looking at the game's development history it's surprising how much Celeste changed but also stayed the same originally sakaguchi didn't want her to have many big moments but katas took a shine to her character and started working her into the story more her position as an Imperial spy was originally much firmer she was deliberately feigning being an ally and in these early stages using magic took a much greater toll on her mental and emotional stability at times she would suddenly go off the deep end and burst into crying fits because of this she wanted someone who she knew she could rely on and that person would be lock who would treat her compassionately as her moment of inevitable betrayal would draw closer Celeste would have realized that she had fallen in love with him and it would have torn her up inside but over time her rougher edges were softened and Celeste became the character we have now and she would ultimately become Kat's favorite of The Ensemble I'd like to believe that these early ideas for Celeste wouldn't have hurt the Opera House sequence in fact it may have possibly been strengthened by the heightened internal conflict but without knowing more details of how her magic induced hysteria would have been depicted or how different her personality may have been or how she joined the party in those early Concepts I can't say for sure but I am in the same boat as katas when I I say Celeste is my favorite character and it's the opera house that cements this the opera house is a stunning set piece brimming with emotion despite the highly compressed and limited range of the vocal Samples used for the actual singing what makes it come together is a combination of earnest execution and emotional resonance it's a phenomenal exhibition of Storytelling through symbolism metaphor and simple character work and it never fails to make my eyes well with tears every time I listen to celeste's beautiful Arya what's more is that this becomes her light Motif going forward later on during a truce Celeste is ashamed of what happened in the magitech lab and can't bring herself to talk to lock despite his insistence that he still sees her as a friend it's during this scene that we first hear her light Motif outside the Opera starting with the turmoil that engulfs her emotionally before revealing how emotionally vulnerable she really is with a music box- like rendition of [Music] hararia the timed gameplay section to stop ultros above the stage piles on the tension a role which was originally going to be filled by bigs and wedge from the opening sequence and the empresario declaring Celeste to be lock Queen after the spilop pod's defeat is a heartwarming thematic cigra and while it's easy to dismiss the action is window dressing I feel it helps to elevate the whole sequence to literally operatic levels especially when one considers how much of not just the Opera but the wider scope of Final Fantasy 6 itself seems to Echo The Works of giocomo Pini who tended to put a strong emphasis on his female characters of particular note was the aonomus female protagonist of toska which was one of several Italian operas which saw 20th century Greek soprano Maria kalas rise to prominence with her performances of Aras not dissimilar to those CEST performs here just as well the name Maria may have been a direct illusion to colos what's most surprising in all of this is that despite how wonderfully executed the Opera House sequence is and how brilliantly Final Fantasy 6 as a whole Echoes the medium nobody involved actually had any experience with Opera while sakaguchi had told T who wrote the Opera's lyrics as a love letter for the woman who would become his wife to actually attend one in order to get a feel for the atmosphere and tone of such a performance in its natural surroundings he ultimately wouldn't heed his mentor's advice he would base the look of the game's Opera House on that of Albert Hall in London or at least how it was presented in Albert Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much it wouldn't be until years later that he would finally visit Albert Hall at which point he thought to himself that he should have made the trip after all as for noou uatu the self-taught composer took on the challenge of composing an opera with the same Gusto as he would for any other piece he wasn't worried about how it would have been received by a player base that was presumably unaccustomed to such a highbrow form of art being stuffed into what was considered a low brow medium in fact the original version he presented to sakaguchi was a beefy 45 minutes long which the producer told him was no good that 15 minutes would be fine and true enough 15 minutes was all that was needed any more could have sullied the experience and made it overstay its welcome but unbeknownst to U Matsu the Opera could have been an opportunity for the collaboration of a lifetime as after the game's release he would receive a phone call from Dragon Quest composer koichi sugiyama who upon learning about the sequence toou amatsu that he wished he would have contacted him about it earlier so that they could have worked on it together to me the Opera is the crown jewel of Final Fantasy 6's score a score which is already far above what uatu had accomplished previously without the Opera it's simply incomplete but I would like to draw special attention to the official release of the soundtrack which has its tracks ordered in what may seem to be an odd way at first glance for example terra's theme which plays on the Overworld map is track 26 placing it long after after other tracks which would first be heard long after the player's first traversal of the world map but their order seems to be deliberate relaying the game's story through its soundtrack rather than acting as a faximile of the mechanical order of events in other words you can listen to the soundtrack in isolation and still get a complete and fulfilling experience just from that I've done this a few times and I absolutely recommend doing so if you haven't already it's partially because of nobuo U Matsu's masterful compositions that I do not hesitate to describe Final Fantasy 6 as an opera you can play otherwise I attribute this quality to the Grand conflict encompassing the [Music] narrative at first glance it's easy to dismiss the Rebels versus Empire conflict of Final Fantasy 6 as being yet another homage to Star Wars after all both sakaguchi and katas had been fans of the films since their adolescence and as I've discussed in previous installments of this retrospective series final fantasy has had Star Wars influence in its blood since the very beginning with the second Game's plot being inspired directly by The Empire Strikes Back and GZ in Final Fantasy 4 seemingly being modeled after Darth Vader the Star Wars argument has a fair number of points in its favor too there are several direct and indirect references to the films strewn throughout the game the two Imperial soldiers who accompany terara to Nar at the start of the game are named bigs and wedge after two of the X-Wing pilots who participated in the assault on the Death Star in the original film though Ted W's localization bungled this a bit by mistranslating bigs as vix when lock finds Celeste chained up in South figuro if the player has him wearing a soldiers outfits the two will quote Luke's first meeting with Leia almost verbatim Imperial troops call the returners scum like Grand mof Taren the Falcon the Airship once owned by setzer's long past beloved Daryl is a direct reference to the Millennium Falcon the defining feature of one of the strongest swords in the game the Ultima weapon localized as atmo weapon due to character limits is its ethereal blue blade that evokes the lightsaber there are other Illusions but I think you get the idea but I feel that a blanket compared comparison to Star Wars would be terribly reductive and it mostly boils down to how differently the empires in both stories are depicted in the Star Wars Trilogy the actions of the Galactic Empire are rarely shown beyond their immediate conflict with the Rebel Alliance each film features barely more than a single direct instance of the Empire exerting itself on anyone who isn't with the Rebellion searching Tatooine for R2-D2 and C3PO stopping whoever they view as suspicious characters and having a local informant in Star Wars strong arming Lando calisan to surrendering control of cloud city in Empire and occupying the forest Moon of Endor in Jedi but in all three films we don't get a sense of what these situations really entail the people of mosle don't seem to care much we don't see how their occupation of cloud city affects anybody except for the principal cast who were already on the run and the Stormtroopers didn't seem to know effect or care much about the need of Ewoks until they fought back only the informant in the original film gives any concrete idea of how far-reaching and influential the EMP Empire is without the film's opening shots suddenly communicating the idea remember low angle shot that's not to say that the Galactic Empire had no power or influence in the world of the fiction even without diving into what expanded universe works were published by the early 9s it's obvious that they had the resources and militaristic might to control a Galaxy but there's a difference between knowing something on an intellectual level and understanding on an emotional level as I've already discussed the world of Final Fantasy 6 is marked by the conquest and presence of the gallan Empire we understand how Emperor gal's war machine has affected the lives of countless people through listening to their stories and seeing their homes invaded and turned upside down by Soldiers the men of the occupied cities and nations are forcibly conscripted into the military and deserters are punished harshly if not outright executed gal's lust for power knows no bounds as evidenced not only by the contemptible way he commands his forces but in his torturing of espers to harness the power of magic this in turn enables his chief scientist Del Norte marges to experiment on humans to create magitech soldiers to further tighten the Empire's grip on the world it's this firsthand look at what the Empire has done to the world and the lingering effects of their conquests which makes them feel more threatening than the Galactic Empire at least from where I'm standing this also applies to the empires of ff2 and 4 both of which also had an extreme level of Fantastical Detachment separating them from the harsh realities of imperialism while there are obviously still Fantastical elements laced into the gallan Empire unlike Emperor matus or zus gastal himself is in a manner of speaking much truer to life he hasn't found a way to summon demons from hell or died and come back as the Lord of hell he isn't a moonman with mind control Powers he's merely a man a Despicable man with the resources influence and apparently Charisma to fund his imperialist Crusade and Inspire others to throw away their lives to strengthen his power from a western perspective it's easy to look at gastal and and his Empire and draw a direct line to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany after all both are defined by an insatiable lust for power being leaders of their own fascist regimes for having done a thorough job of conquering their neighbors and their contempt and torturous treatment of those that are other the Empire's salute as seen in a flashback early in the game even resembles a Nazi salute moreover gal's obsession with espers can be read as an analog to Hitler's obsession with the occult although despite pop culture's fascination with this idea it's mostly been a product of sensationalism possibly born of attempts to rationalize how such a despicably evil regime could possibly be built by humans I don't begrudge anybody who immediately thinks of the Nazis when discussing the gallan Empire it's more than understandable since as far as the subject of dictators and fascism is concerned they're the easiest comparison to make but while I feel the comparison is applicable it's not the only correlation that could be identified Germany may be the easiest first world country to point to as having had an imperialist streak in in the past Century but during World War II they were just onethird of the Axis powers with the other two being Italy and more pertinently Japan the story of the Japanese empire is a complicated one spanning the latter half of the 19th century into the 1940s the seeds of what would become the Empire would be planted in 1854 when the United States forced Japan to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa thereby opening two Japanese ports for American ships not for the purposes of trade but for provisioning and Consular representation in 1858 Japan would fall to Western pressure and sign a series of similar treaties with Russia France England and Holland as Western Nations continued to encroach upon Japan's ports Samurai around the country which under the Tokugawa Shogun it was more of a loose conglomerate of feudal States than a United whole began to doubt the efficacy of the government's policy of seclusion Samurai and choshu and Satsuma would begin planning a couet against the Shogun it in 1866 taking their respective Dao representatives of the shunet hostage in doing so the two domains would focus on expanding and modernizing their militaries for this purpose as under Tokugawa rule there had been little technological advancement meanwhile the Shogun it was in the throws of transitioning to a new head of state following the death of Shogun tokuga eoi later that same year Emperor K would also pass away with his successor being his 15-year-old son Emperor Magi all of this gave the rebelling Samurai and choshu and enough latitude to put pressure on the Shogun it growing descent among the disperate domains over their rulers cow Towing to the West would see more of them begin to unite against the government and this dishonor would prompt Shogun Tokugawa yoshinobu to step down on November 9th 1867 for the first time in over 500 years the emperor was now in a proper position of power while the young Emperor Magi would rule over the whole of Japan the government itself would be largely composed of samurai from choshu and Satsuma with the goal of expanding expanding the modernization efforts they had begun in their own domains to the whole of the nation this would affect everything from the government to Social and economic systems with the ultimate goals being to bring Japan together as a united front and becoming a World's power to fend off Western influence enrich the country strengthen the Army thus began the Magi Restoration in 1871 iur tomomi vice president of the Council of state would lead a mission to send several Statesmen to Europe and the United States in an effort to renegotiate those unequal treaties that had been signed during the Tokugawa era though this assignment now known as the iwakura mission would be unsuccessful in doing so the Statesmen sent abroad would gain valuable insight into Western education economics manufacturing technology Etc upon their return to Japan they would successfully Lobby for the government to adopt the same philosophies as industrial Western nations in order to put Japan on the same footing this would result in the establishment of numerous new systems reforms and organizations over the next two decades such as required Elementary education a cabinet for the Prime Minister the bank of Japan the Army general staff Universal military conscription and the founding of Tokyo Imperial University among others despite the outwardly Western appearance of the governmental structure however it was still very much an oligarchy ruled by those who had come from choshu and Satsuma that had helped to establish the Magi government in the first place the newly formed Parliament the diet had very limited power which arguably could only be exercised at the will of Elder Statesmen and above everyone was the emperor himself who not only held ultimate power in the government and stood Above the Law itself but the reformers who put him in his position of absolute Authority Justified this through the Shinto doctrine of divine Imperial descent purporting that his subjects pledge their absolute loyalty to him and his direct Representatives this would be enshrined into law as part of the new constitution introduced in 1888 and which would go into to effect on November 29th 1890 under the title of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan the mag restoration wasn't necessarily popular at first frustrated Samurai who mourned The Fading of their traditional privileges had begun organizing rebellions to fight against a westernized government in response the government would rescind their right to bear swords and they would lose their stipend with the quelling of the Sato Rebellion by the national Army in 1877 the last vestiges of feudal Japan with be wiped out with their traditional way of life gone many Samurai would enter the world of Journalism leading to the majority of Japanese newspapers being highly critical of the Magi government the sole point of concurrence between the citizenry the press and the government was pushing back against the Western Powers who had taken advantage of them during the Tokugawa periods this growing nationalist fervor would Foster demands to push towards imperialism to expand Japan's sphere of influence just as those Western Nations had been doing for centuries this would begin with a focus on economic Prosperity which would come from trade with other nations Korea would be a primary focus of this with Japan purchasing about 90% of their exports by the 1880s and while Korea would be suffering from the after effects of two couet Tas and economic depression throughout the decade Japan would bolster its military power especially its Navy in preparation for war with Korea in the future and because of Korea's ongoing political and economic issues the Japanese craving for imperialism not only grew strong longer but began to adopt a deceitfully well-meaning ethos that of bringing stability and civilization to what they believed were broken or barbaric Nations however Japan was not the only country that had their sights set on Korea China and Russia had been making moves on Korea for some time while the Magi government was focusing on domestic policy for the sake of internal stability what followed was an extended period of diplomatic courtship mainly between Japan and China for influence over Korea primarily in the area of trade things started coming to a head in 1889 when Korea teetering on the edge of famine limited rice exports violating a treaty with Japan and hurting Japanese Merchants Japan demanded that Korea pay an Indemnity to compensate for their losses but Korea refused even after these restrictions were lifted the following year rice exports would continue to shrink for the next few years all the while accounts of Koreans giving preferential treatment to Chinese Merchants would persist much to the shagrin of the Japanese populace and press but the straw that broke the Campbell's back would come in 1894 with the assassination of Korean reformer and I apologize if I'm mispronouncing this Kim OK gun who had participated in the failed gapson coup of 1884 where members of the royal family had been decapitated after the coup failed Kim fled to Japan avoiding attempts on his life from King gong and the Min family the Japanese government had tried protecting him as their interests were more or less in line with each other even giving him a monthly allowance but a Korean employed by King gong would befriend Kim and lure him to Shanghai where he would murder Kim on March 28th 1894 British authorities apprehended the Assassin and turned him over to Chinese authorities who would subsequently turn him loose they sent Kim's corpse to Korea where it was decapitated and the rest of the body divided into eight parts each to be sent to one of Korea's eight provinces the rest of Kim's family would also face punishment hanging his father imprisoning his brother and his wife and daughter made slaves of the Korean government the Japanese were Furious and soon a former Chinese minister at Tokyo was implicated as part of the assassination plot which in turn implicated the Chinese mission in Japan as being a smoke screen to find Kim the dismemberment of Kim's body was an especially egregious affront to Japanese sensibilities which further framed China as striving to offend the Japanese as thoroughly as possible while China despite attempting to dissuade the Koreans from dismembering the corpse only for their message to arrive too late saw Kim's fate as Justified for committing high treason meanwhile Russia had begun working on their Trans Siberian Railway which when completed could tip the scales in their favor for territorial influence if Japan wanted to assert themselves on the world stage and become a major power it was now or never Kim's assassination would merely act as a pretense for igniting the fires of war the Chinese had looked down on Japan for centuries now it was time to serve them some Humble Pie and begin to spread modernity throughout Asia Japan ceased diplomatic relations with Korea Now using Force to get what they wanted they would hold their King hostage ruthlessly quash the Rebellion that would rise up in response and forcefully Institute reform programs as the Sino Japanese War Began while Japan's efforts at modernization and strengthening its military certainly contributed to their victories Chinese forces were also woefully disorganized and ill equipped there was no National standing army but disperate contingents of soldiers representing the various regions of China few of which were armed with more than bows and arrows facing off against the Japanese with their rifles it was common for Chinese soldiers to strip off their uniforms find civilian clothes and flee out of fear of being executed they didn't take prisoners so why would Japan Japan who had been a signatory to the 1864 Geneva Convention would initially treat Chinese prisoners as they would their own soldiers but after the battle of Pyongyang such Humanity would no longer be displayed by the Japanese enemy combatants would often be found with slit throats and bullet wounds in their backs supposedly because taking more prisoners would stretch their supplies too thin as Japanese forces continued moving Inland regardless the callousness and cruelty of the Japanese was apparent meanwhile Western Nations had taken great interest in Japan's Victorious campaign recognizing them as not just a new world power but the foremost power in all of Asia all the while drawing flattering comparisons to various other nations the war would come to an end in April 1895 5 less than a year after its outbreak and while Japan would ultimately give up on reforming Korea merely a month after the war's conclusion and their efforts would be quickly undone by King gong they would eventually Annex Korea in 1910 now that seems like a lot to consider when discussing the gallan empire in Final Fantasy 6 and that's because it is believe me when I say that I did my best to condense the information as best I could while not losing the important details as it turns out summarizing nearly three decades worth of a country's history especially when that time period marks the transition from one governmental Focus to another requires a bit of leeway but what set me down this rabbit hole is the shape of the Imperial continent aside from warbling edges and a big extra slab of land on the Eastern side connected by a single Bridge it Bears a striking resemblance to Hokkaido the northernmost region of Japan while Hokkaido didn't hold the seed of power during the Magi era it was one of if not the first major territory to be annexed into Japan proper as part of the restoration looking at what's presented in the game itself we can see some parallels between the Japanese empire and the gallan empire for one both were facilitated by modernization with Japan going through its own Industrial Revolution and the gallan Empire not only using high technology but also creating magitech to set themselves above other nations the satmo rebellion was led by Samurai who were trying to cling to their traditions and would be the last gasp of feudal Japan before being wiped out by the national Army Doma a country unto itself would be the last vestage of a world Guided by Traditions snuffed out by the gallan Empire and the treaty held with figuro can be viewed as a loose analog for Japan's relationship with Korea though given how much of a tangled web that was forgoing a direct comparison for this instance would be understandable but like with previous entries there's more to Final Fantasy 6's World in characters than what was presented in the game itself I touched on Final Fantasy 4 set shiroh hen in my ff4 video but I'm going to dig just a bit more into the equivalent that was published ahead of the release of Final Fantasy 6 within its Pages lies a wealth of information about the world its history and specific events which may have been in the back of the developer Minds while working on the game even if a fair amount of the information didn't make it into the game itself we are going to be focusing specifically on the gallan Empire which in the game itself gets very little of its background divulged Beyond a failed invasion of the esper World during which they captured several espers and Tera and how their capture would facilitate the development of magitech long before the Empire there was the autonomous military organization which was part of the world peace Council 50 years after the council was established they became an unnamed Empire with the intent of safeguarding world peace nearly 500 years later the world begin to undergo a series of industrial revolutions and artistic renaissan then just shy of 150 years after industrialization there's a cou d'a within the empire in which gal's father is involved though the extent to which isn't clear gastal himself according to Final Fantasy 6 set shiroh hen is about 13 years old when this happens but the book Final Fantasy 6 the complete published by the same company in September 1994 5 months after the game's release instead states that he was born 9 years after the coup the latter is also what's presented in the much more recent Final Fantasy ultimania archive volume 1 but we're going to be sticking with what was published first 21 years after the coup the Empire bolsters its military as the Imperial Palace in Vector is completed 18 years after that gastal ascends the throne and names the Empire after himself they start acting aggressively but B their time time for now in response nar's weapons trade expands and Rivals its coal trade catching wind of this the Empire has Nar sign a non-aggression pact which sees the latter officially adopt a position of neutrality in regard to whatever it is the Empire plans to do 2 years later the Empire launches the first gallan campaign during which they wage war with the other territories on the southern continent albrook Miranda and Zen also during this campaign were the births of Celeste and Terra and the latter's capture by gastal in the wake of his failed invasion of the esper world it's not clear how successful this first campaign was overall as it stated plainly in the game that Celeste was ultimately the one to conquer Miranda and neither the game nor the book are specific about when albrook or Zen are annexed there's a slight hint that their Conquest was recent when Edgar mentions to kfka that the Empire has been busy in the South but it's just a bit vague over the next 4 years the magitech research facility is established which is headed by this game's Sid among the first subjects for magitech Infusion is one of gal's generals KFA Palazo while he was successfully granted incredible magical abilities the procedure was imperfect and it left his mind shattered rendering him insane though he would still serve as a general despite this after the process had been perfected Sid would successfully perform the procedure on a young Celeste without any side effects General Leo would refuse magitech infusion four years after the first campaign the Imperial Army would have its Chain of Command restructured 2 years later the king of figuro is poisoned and dies the Empire may or may not have been involved in this 2 years after that a full decade after the first campaign the second gallan campaign begins according to the book The Empire descended on the western continent during this time but there is no Western continent in game so we're going to to go with the interpretation that they targeted the western side of the northern continent it's during this campaign that Rachel is killed during the attack on cenan figuro forms an uneasy alliance with the Empire which leads to a riot in South figuro which may or may not have been instigated by the returners and magitech armor is first field tested 5 years after the start of the second campaign is when the Empire begins engagements with Doma and the following year the Third gallan campaign begins in the two years leading up to the start of the game the southern continent is fully conquered with Miranda getting the worst of it at celeste's command the battle is particularly gruesome and the city is set a Blaze before it's over Miranda is put under Imperial occupation and the men are forcibly conscripted into the Imperial Army looking at this history we begin to see a few more parallels between the Empire of Japan and that of gastal both had a change in leadership brought about by a coup both restructured their militaries and pursued technological advancement as prologue to their conquests both were in conflict with Samurai who sought to hold on to their traditionalist ways both engaged in a bit of diplomacy with future targets of their campaigns and perhaps most damning both of them held their respective Emperors above all else with the restoration being attributed to Mai and gal Plastering his name on his Empire and that's to say nothing of the heinous experimentation going on with the espers echoing Japanese treatments of prisoners during World War II among other atrocities which Japanese nationalists contined to deny ever happened even to this day Dragon Quest composer koigi sugamo was a notable figure among this group right up until his passing in 2021 this isn't to say other Imperial regimes throughout history can't be applicable to gastal but given who made to the game I'd imagine that hironobu sakaguchi yoshinori katas and the others probably would have been more familiar with the history of their own country and its allies than anything else but all of these comparisons to real world empires have have yet to answer one simple question what does gastal want what's his endgame Magi wanted Japan to be recognized as a world power and his subjects wanted to bring what they thought of as salvation to the rest of Asia gastal well for most of the game it isn't made clear later on when he's declared a ceasefire in the wake of a group of espers laying Siege to Vector the returners ask him why he started the war in the first place and he just says that his design desire for power got the best of him not the most far-fetched explanation as there have been plenty of people throughout history who desired power for its own sake but I think that there's just a little bit more there at the banquet gastal invites the returners to after the ceasefire is declared the player is prompted to answer a few questions from him strictly speaking there are no wrong answers but specific ones Curry more favor with him than the rest as part of a hidden point system which will determine what rewards are received when you leave the palace based on the responses with the highest point values gastal respects personal conviction seemingly Above All Else however that doesn't really tell us that much but what could be a clue to some deeper perhaps subconscious motivation is his name gastal is awfully close to gastal as in gastal Psychology which purports that a group or collection of individual parts or aspects make up something entirely new and that human perception tends to examine things in pattern or as a singular structure rather than a collection of smaller things working together this was proposed by Austrian psychologist Max verer in the early 20th century as a rejection of structuralism which instead sought to break down perceptions and experiences into smaller parts vert's proposal would be expanded upon by others in the field of psychology in the years to follow and criticism has been levied towards it for being logically cyclical but for our purposes we're going to be working with the most basic definition with this in mind I don't think it's too far out of left field to think that gastal views the world as a single entity or at least that it should be unified under a single organized structure or principle no more countries no more division among people no more conflicting cultures only peace of course this peace would only come through conflict and be maintained through the threat of force but the imperialist mindset either wouldn't see the contradiction in this or would view it as a necessary evil when View through this lens gastal becomes even more dangerous than he already is a Confluence of ego Charisma and self-righteousness hellbent on controlling the World by any means necessary but this is all assuming that the illusion to gestal psychology was intentional on the part of the developers and not just a loose coincidence that came about through localization as someone who doesn't know Japanese looking solely at gal's name in Japan gutura doesn't really imbue me with confidence one way or the other however there is another hint toward gestal psychology that's adjacent to gestal himself alongside Max verer there were two German psychologists who are credited as being the fathers of gestal psychology vulf ganger and Kurt kofka the latter of whom may be invoked directly by one of gal's generals kefka patoo I've mentioned KFA in passing here and there before now but have yet to comment much on his character or his Pres in the story truthfully it's difficult to discuss KFA in any meaningful way without the appropriate context as his role in Final Fantasy 6 shifts and grows as the story progresses at first he's a bit of a comic relief character pedy ordering soldiers to clean the sand off his boots while standing in the middle of a desert but he moves between this and being a violent psychopath poisoning doma's water in order to kill every last person in the Kingdom one minute which includes killing his own men who were taken prisoner and fleeing from Battle like a coward to the next in either mode his presence is often heralded by his playfully menacing cackle this insanity is the result of a botched magitech infusion as previously mentioned and while it's never explained exactly what kind of person he was before that not even in set shiroh hen It ultimately doesn't matter his mental instability and oscillating role in the story are reflected in how he refers to himself in the original Japanese script as I briefly discussed in my Final Fantasy 5 retrospective the Japanese language has numerous ways of referring to oneself compared to English which just has I me and my KFA has a tendency to swap his personal pronouns frequently from the neutral Watashi to the immature and boyish Boku or Boku chin to the masculine and self-rising orama this paints an accurate picture of kfa's character immature egotistical and is generally psychotic KFA Revels in his own cruelty and cares not for the sanctity of life this is made clear early on when he forces the slave crown on Tara's head to control her and he uses her power to emulate dozens of his own men to test this control his inhumanity and callousness is well known throughout the Empire earning him the eye of many soldiers and especially General Leo Kristoff who by contrast is respected on both sides of the conflict for his strict adherence to a strong moral code code and a desire for diplomacy to put into perspective just how well regarded Leo is when he apologizes to Cayenne personally for kefka's actions in Doma Cayenne doesn't blame Leo for it suffice it to say Leo and kefa don't get along one bit and while his relationship with Celeste prior to her defection is left a bit vague it does seem as though he's curried particular favor with Emperor gestal himself likely because his willingness to enact even the most depraved destructive plans in the name of the Empire Works to the emperor's benefit in a way this could be signified by his surname paloto which is the Italian word for Palace or Castle reflecting his higher standing in the eyes of the emperor but it could also be cut down to the word PSO meaning crazy or insane moreover Palazo is pronounced similarly to palaso the Portuguese word for clown and isn't far off from the Italian equivalent Pacho a mad clown in the Palace of the emperor this High standing in the Empire has granted him certain privileges namely that he's made much priver to gal's plans than anybody else including the esteemed General Leo though he also uses his position to play mind games with his enemies for example he successfully if briefly swws doubt within lock by telling him that Celeste was actually spying on the returners for the Empire the whole time and later when the party brings Tera to the sealed gate to the esper world to ask for the Esper's help to stop the Empire KFA arrives hot on their tail and blusters about how letting terara fall into the hands of the returners was part of a grand plot to get her to open the gate this may partially be true though as the Imperial checkpoint on the route to the sealed gate was mysteriously evacuated so that the returners could pass at just the right time and kfka and his men arrived shortly after the party at the very least it's plausible that gastal took ad of Tera joining up with the returners though whether her joining up at all was part of a much larger Gambit is unclear this isn't a criticism by the way KFA is very obviously a trickster character at this point so him muddying the waters on what may or may not be true makes sense at the very least getting terara to open the sealed gate does seem to have been planned by gastal given both the evidence I've already put forth and what comes about as a result a group of espers breach the gate and set Vector Ablaze taking taking the Blackjack down along with it according to Sid they went berserk when they learned that the captured espers they came to save were dead upon seeing their power firsthand gastal tells the party that he's lost the will to fight knowing that the espers have the power to destroy the world in an effort to show the espers that humans can be peaceful he declares an end to the war and imprisons KFA for his actions in Doma but he knows that won't be enough and requests that terara finds the espers and convince them that the Empire and Humanity at large are not their enemy not convinced that gastal doesn't have ulterior motives lock comes with Tera while the rest of the returners who have similar reservations stay in Vector to try and find more information gestal has General Leo leads the mission who not only hires Shadow as a bit of extra muscle but also has Celeste join their expedition creating tension between her and lock the crew splits up and Tera lock and Shadow happen upon thamasa where the the descendants of the Magi still live here they meet stro who accompanies them to the nearby mountains brimming with magical power where he believes the espers may have taken Refuge at this point Shadow grows frustrated and leaves to find the espers on his own they find the espers and it turns out that they briefly lost control of their powers when they entered the human world hence the destruction of vector for which they express remorse the espers meet with General Leo in thamasa and peace talks begin to get underway and then KFA is here and he brought some elite soldiers in magitech armor to enact Emperor gal's true plan to kill the espers and present the resulting Magicite to gastal it was all one big setup kefka's power has grown considerably as well as he kills the espers with ruthless efficiency but his cruelty doesn't stop stop there he orders his troops to raise thamasa to the ground simply because he doesn't like how it looks betrayed by the emperor he had served for so long Leo attacks kefka but it's futile the madap clown has grown far too powerful for a mere man to scathe and what he was attacking wasn't even the real kefa but an ucer double after some head games taunting Leo with a projection of gastal kfka swiftly ends the good General's life saying that he'll justify it to gestal by saying that Leo was planning to betray the Empire but the situation goes from bad to worse as more espers from Beyond the sealed gate burst through to help their friends but it's already far too late KFA seizes this opportunity and turns every last one of them into Magicite empowering himself even further thankfully the rest of the returners were able to figure out the emperor's plan ahead of time and get out of vector while they had the chance but the damage is done this is the point where it becomes absolutely clear that gastal not only condones but heartily endorses everything kefa has done so far there is no bottom and he's perfectly happy with KFA continuing to grow more powerful since KFA is basically a living weapon as far as gastal can tell KFA stands only for the Empire so long as what he does is for the good of his regime he'll allow it even if it means losing General Leo but gal's hubris clouds his judgment kfka may be a product of his Empire's doing but the crazed magitech clown has his own agenda there are hints to it throughout the story with the most obvious being in the magitech research facility and when he has a field day with the espers descending upon thamasa in the latter example he gloats that the magical power he's gaining will be used in the name of his own Empire in the former he waxes lyrically about how powerful he's become how he's extracting magic power from espers and how he'll restore the statues referring to the gods that had ignited the war of the Magi a thousand years ago who turned themselves to Stone to end the war and the source of all magic in the world the original Japanese script takes this bit one step further with kefa declaring himself to be capital G God but this was changed to all powerful to comply with Nintendo's policy at the time regarding religious references as for where the statues actually are stro theorizes that they may be beyond the sealed gate to the esper world he mentions this when he lock and Terra find another Trio of statues which tell the story of the Three Gods which the original localization fumbles with a little bit being inconsistent about whether these are the actual statues or not I'll admit I did get a little bit confused before checking against outside sources to confirm that no these statues in the mountains are not the statues the real statues are the ones stro believes are beyond the sealed gate and it would seem that gastal believes this Theory as well because after kefka's actions in thamasa the two of them head straight through the gate which was blown wide open by the espers that kefa just added to his Magicite collection it's clear now that both of them want the statues and the ultimate power that comes with it however while gastal wants them so he can subjugate the world kefka's endgame is unclear but what matters now is is stopping [Music] them shortly after gastal and kfka pass through the sealed gate Tera can feel the planet stirring in agony below the Blackjack the land begins to break apart as the island to the east of vector ascends into the sky gastal and kefa have found the statues and if they're moved out of alignment the results would be catastrophic changing the face of the world they have to be stopped now after fighting through the Imperial Air Force and a final battle with ultros and his friend chupon your self- selected party of three lands on the floating continent Shadow is found close by unconscious but safe apparently the Empire tried to kill him once his Services were no longer required thankfully Interceptor is safe and sound in samasa but either way Shadow is ready to take the fight to castal himself in retaliation for the double cross initially he rejects the party's offer to join up but he quickly relents they have a common goal now and their target is close the floating continent is obviously nothing new to Final Fantasy but the concept's use and presentation take on New Dimensions here while it functionally serves as a difficult dungeon with a major antagonist at the end like in the first game the atmosphere is a far cry from the high-tech space station that was overtaken by Tiamat rather than being made of cold steel or even Lush Greenery and glistening Seas like the iteration from Final Fantasy 3 this floating continent is more alien it isn't exactly clear what the environment is made from it looks like a combination of dirt Stone and rusted metal coalescing into forms that appear almost organic as though there are piles of desecrated corpses littering the landscape moreover there are strange tunnels that move the party to different parts of the dungeon and they appear flesh likee the fact that one of the more common enemies here are Misfits which resembles the top half of a bloody skeleton with an enlarged rib cage that appears to hold a mound of meat and flesh behind it certainly lends Credence to the idea this Corruption of natural forces is reflected in the score which starts as a sped up version of the series iconic Prelude before being overtaken by a manag of electronic and metallic noises overpowering the harmonious Melody that once represented the natural forces of the crystals in previous [Music] titles it's also the most dangerous dungeon yet while there are several easily manageable enemies encountered regularly as you make your way to gastal such as brain pans ninjas and the aformentioned Misfits there are also a handful of far more deadly beasts waiting to strike the iconic Behemoth has a nearly one in five chance to appear sometimes in groups of Two And there are two different kinds of dragons that like to come out to play thankfully despite the power these beasts have at their disposal they're pretty easy to dispatch through exploiting their Elemental weaknesses and as we've previously discussed magic is already fairly powerful in this game so while random counters on the floating continent could give you a bit of trouble here and there they're not absurd not even the optional mini boss gigantos a monster in a box guarding the best weapon available for shadow up to this point is much of a challenge it has a weakness to poison but if you have stro in your party and he knows level five death gigantos can be instantly dispatched with that in fact the floating continent is a great playground for stro as the enemies here use various abilities that he can learn as LS level five death included plus being a mage he's able to take advantage of how strong magic is to make the dungeon more comfortable that being said focusing solely on offensive magic isn't enough to defeat the final obstacle standing between you and gastal the ancient Beast Ultimo weapon its presence is foreshadowed by a scholar in albrook who notes that there were two Ultimo weapons used during the war of the Magi one was a sword that channeled the power of the wielder into its blade and the other was a beast created solely to destroy as I've mentioned before due to character limits they were both localized here as atmo weapon while magic isn't necessarily ineffective against Ultima weapon after all its magic defense is considerably lower than its defense stat it has enough HP that it can take a fair bit of punishment and is strong enough to easily put players on the back foot this is especially true in its third and final phase where it uses powerful spells like tornado and quarter which respect ly reduce the target's HP to a 16th and a quarter of their current amount while also having a 1 and three chance to counter any attack with Flare this phase can be circumvented entirely however by reducing its MP to zero with rasp not because it wouldn't be able to cast magic but because depleting Ultima weapons MP is an alternative win Condition it's just a matter of whether you want to drain its 5,000 MP at a rate of a few hundred points per rasp or cut down its 24,000 HP for anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 or so points of damage per attack but at the cost of the Beast becoming more dangerous as its HP drops lower to really drive home the power of Ultimo weapon the fight introduces a new battle theme battle to the death that reflects the grandiosity and franticness of fighting such an ancient and Powerful Beast through an emphasis on booming War drums and a Melody that instills a feeling of anxiety through slightly dissonant [Music] tones I struggled a bit with Ultima weapon on my first playthrough but thankfully there's a save point shortly before the fight so it's not like losing to it is a major setback after my first loss I barely struggled against it and just outside its pit you're presented with the opportunity to return to the Blackjack if you're so inclined the only caveats to doing so are that shadow won't join you believing he doesn't have the right to fight by your side after doing mercenary work for the Empire which leads to him taking all of the stuff you equip to him and that you have to start the floating continent all over again when you return Shadow will be waiting for you at the start though and he'll still have all that stuff you gave him but with Ultimo weapon out of the way it's time for the final confrontation with KFA and gastal Shadow takes his leave the aformentioned guilt of having sold his skills to the Empire eating away at him thankfully the party won't be a man down as Celeste catches up to us just as we reach our goal everything we fought for has led to this moment and with the statues mere feet away the stakes couldn't possibly be higher but it seems we're already too late gastal has already begun to sap the statues of their power knocking Celeste out from in front of her friends and restraining the rest of the party gastal offers her the opportunity to procreate with KFA to produce magically enhanced Offspring in the name of of his Empire at least that's what he says in the Japanese version in the localization he just says that ruling with him is their Birthright adding to this kefa hands Celesta sword saying they'll forgive her betrayal if she kills the party the word kill even makes it into the localized script though this was likely an oversight and for a moment it looks like she's going to go through with it until she quickly turns around and stabs kefa instead insense at the sensation of pain and the sight of his own blood kefa turns to the statues and forces himself into their midst to take their divine power for himself fearful that the cackling madap is about to awaken the gods and wreak Untold havoc on the world gastal attempts to use his new power to kill kfka but the magical field generated by the statues absorbs the emperor's spells KFA demands the gods to Smite gastal and after a brief struggle the power hungry Emperor is struck down down with his last breath gastal pleads with kfka not to awaken the gods there would be no one left to rule over no one to worship them as living Gods but KFA doesn't care he wordlessly kicks the weakened gastal off the edge of the continent ending the life of his Emperor and his Empire as KFA begins moving the statues out of formation however Shadow leaps back into the fry saving Celeste from the edge of the continent and quickly moving to push the statues back to their original positions unfortunately he knows at this point he's only delaying the inevitable while he struggles with kefa the rest of the party are flung from the plateau by the magic field Shadow tells them to get out of here that the others are counting on them and not to worry about him he even promises they'll meet again though he probably doesn't fully believe that himself the floating continent begins to tear itself apart as the party rushes to a spot where they can jump back to the the Blackjack it's a frantic Sprint where every second counts capped off with one final decision do you jump immediately or do you wait for shadow either way the result is the same with the statues out of alignment the balance between them is broken the Earth begins to shift rise fall and fold explosive bursts of magical energy engulf large swaths of the surface violent winds cause the Blackjack to break apart mid-flight and Scatter the party and to cap off the devastation we see a shot of the planet surface from out in space as the music gives way to cold Eerie silence the world is Ablaze and the continents have begun to break and drift apart the apocalypse is here truthfully I can't help but see loose parallels between kefka's murder of gastal and by extension defeating the Empire and the fall of the Japanese empire in the simplest terms they were both brought down by enemies of their own making and the final large Nails in their respective coffins were cataclysmic in nature kfco was a product of the gallan Empire's magitech research being one of the first magitech experiments and whether through ignorance or hubris gastal seemingly never entertained the idea that KFA would eventually turn against him after amassing so much power while under his command meanwhile the Japanese empire would effectively sign their own death certificate with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 the vast majority of Japan's oil was sourced from other countries with the United States being one of their largest suppliers but after Japan's continued invasions of Allied territories President Franklin D Rosevelt enacted an embargo on oil and steel to Japan in the hopes that it would force Japan to stop trying to expand into Mainland Asia because the US wasn't interested in going to war with the islands Nation the the Japanese believed that if they were to destroy the US naval fleet at Pearl Harbor then the Americans would be demoralized and reverse course allowing them to continue to invade East Asia of course this wouldn't work out as they had hoped instead of removing an obstacle in their path Japan had awakened a sleeping giant and in 1945 the US would drop two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unleashing a destructive force greater than anything the world had seen before of course whether or not dropping the bombs was necessary in the first place has been a topic of intense debate and scrutiny for decades but regardless that is what happened and it effectively ended the Empire of Japan the details obviously differ but the commonalities are interesting however I would like to make it clear that while kefka's role in the downfall of the gallan Empire is analogous to the United States's role in the downfall of the Japanese empire I am not trying to say that KFA himself is meant to rep present or act as any sort of commentary on the United States itself in the context of the analogy he's the product of huis that destroyed the force that brought him into the conflict now everything has changed completely there is no more Empire the world is being ripped aunder the party is scattered and defeated KFA has won he'd been going on about how powerful he is and now he's basically become God and and yet we still don't know his endgame based on how callously he ignored gal's warning that there would be no one to worship them and nobody to rule over it doesn't seem that he's interested in power for power's sake so what does he intend to do with it perhaps the answer lies in the new world he's created on that day the world was changed forever countless people lost their lives and the world has become more hostile and less hospitable than ever it's on a small island where we re-enter the story where celest awakens in a solitary cabin under Sid's watchful eye he tells her she's been unconscious for a full year that the others who were on the island with him have long since died and that the two of them may be the only people left in the whole world seeing as they're the closest to family each other has they resolve to live the rest of their lives here with Celeste affectionately calling Sid her granddad but as the old scientist celebrates having a grandchild he enters a coughing fit he hasn't eaten since he took ill a few days ago and has grown weak Celeste gets him settled to bed and goes to catch some fish for him hurrying back and forth between the shore and their cabin to feed her beloved Granddad every time she enters their Abode she finds Sid walking back from the far side of the room to return to bed but eventually after one of her trips she finds him already in bed unresponsive stricken with grief Celeste tries to snap her Granddad out of it but to no avail Sid the man who practically raised her the man who took care of her to the det of his well-being for a whole year celeste's last tie to the Old World Is Gone with the world having fallen into Decay and the people she loves most certainly dead Celeste caves into Despair and tearfully casts herself off the edge of a nearby Cliff not wanting to live alone in this cruel Mor abund world hours later she washes back ashore having survived her attempted suicide waiting beside her is a seagull which she notices has been treated for an injury with a bandana used as wrapping a bandana that looks a lot like locks as the bird flies away Celeste is reinvigorated surely this is a sign that lock is still alive and if lock is alive maybe the others are too not all hope is lost maybe there's still a chance to set things right back at the cabin she reads a letter that Sid wrote just before he expired telling her to go downstairs take the raft he had been building in secret and find her friends she accepts her granddad's final parting gift and sets off into the world of ruin this introduction to the game's second half is heart-wrenchingly beautiful on the floating continent any lingering doubts about celeste's loyalties would have been assuaged as a result the player wouldn't be suspicious of her at the start of the world of Ruin we are now able to fully trust her just as lock had moreover celeste's Awakening to this Dying World is an inversion of tera's Awakening in Nar at the start of the game while both are unfamiliar with their respective circumstances and were looked after by older gentlemen while they were incapacitated Tera wasn't sure if she could trust Arvis and had to quickly evade hostile guards while celest not only knew and trusted Sid but decides to stay with him affectionately calling him Granddad while terara longed to understand what love feels like Celeste is already in the company of a loved one and has already begun to Harbor romantic feelings for Lock And as terara quickly met lock who vowed to protect her Celeste just as quickly loses is Sid the only person she believes she has left in the world terara gradually found reasons to get involved in what was going on around her and take charge of her Destiny while Celeste attempts to take her own life when the few reasons she had to keep going seemed to slip away to see someone as brave and strong willed as Celeste break down like this is genuinely heartbreaking and the repurposed battle sprits help to make these scenes far more impactful than anything done in Prior installments what's most striking however is how it echoes the Opera House scene specifically when Celeste as Maria tossed the bouquet from the balcony back then it represented celeste's casting away her former allegiance to gastal and the start of her new life here she seeks to end her life in a similar manner by casting herself off the edge failing to hold back her tears but throughout this sequence we are also introduced to an important visual Motif the very first living thing we see in the world of Ruin is a seagull wandering the Island's Shore and it's still there when Celeste is grabbing fish for Sid as Celeste makes her way to the Cliff's Edge she spots a dead seagull a reminder of the state of the world the seagull with the bandan is the first thing she sees when she wakes up on the shore later and it's what gives her hope that lock and The Others May yet live and seagulls or at least white birds continue to sporadically appear throughout the second half of the game representing life and hope in a world plagued by death and despair how the scene is scored is also nothing short of phenomenal at first we only hear the natural Ambience of the scene but when Celeste finds Sid's lifeless body and reality begins to set in her theme begins to play with its tumultuous opening reflecting her emotional state it fades out after she jumps but when she notices the seagull's bandana Rachel's theme kicks in which as we've discussed earlier makes heavy use of Lock's light Motif acting as a deao secondary theme for him so now forever Rachel has taken on the meaning of Hope for Celeste as much as it's still a representation of Lock's guilt for what happened to Rachel however this isn't the only way that this sequence can play out it is actually possible to save Sid's Life by bringing him the right kind of fish saving Sid is tedious and surely would be the desired outcome for firsttime players after all why would we want Celeste to lose the only person she has left but the reward for doing so is quite frankly Hollow he simply jumps out of bed now feeling much better shows Celeste the raft and sends her on her way while he stays behind she promises to bring her friends back to meet him properly but after that he's fulfilled his purpose never to be seen or heard from again the mechanics of the situation are deliberately obfuscated as yoshinori katas originally designed this section with Sid's death being the main route he relented a bit allowing players the chance to save him but made it so the player wouldn't know which fish to catch for him in order to ensure that most players would experience the sequence as it was intended but let's set authorial intent aside for the moment and examine the situation for what it is narratively nothing fundamentally changes if Sid lives but going down this path even if it does quickly merge back onto the main route is far less satisfying on an emotional and thematic level and he doesn't even react when Celeste brings lock or anybody else over to meet him later if Sid dies we get to see Celeste at her lowest point see one of the game's emotional highlights and how she finds the strength and motivation to pick herself back up if he lives however the game basically shuffles you along to the next part with Sid as your Shepherd in a manner which isn't all that emotionally engaging the one Saving Grace is that most players are unlikely to experience this outcome on an initial play through and even if one consults a walkthr so that they may have an optimal playing experience there's no t ible benefit for saving him either no material rewards just an emotionally dull alternative to one of the most powerful scenes in the game and time wasted trying to catch the best fish and that's without getting into how certain parts of this sequence as well as a fair amount of the world of Ruin at large were bowdlerized in the localization up until this point I've brought up various changes made in Ted W's English localization for Final Fantasy 6 ranging from genuine mistakes to deliberate alterations I'm not here to rag on his work he was given an incredibly strict deadline with little support and he also had to work within the constraints of Nintendo's content policies given those conditions he produced something which while flawed is adequate less than ideal but to call it a bastardization of the original text would probably be just a bit too far in the words of Clyde mandolin whose translation comparisons for Final Fantasy 6 have been an invaluable resource for this project quote the game itself shines so brightly that it makes the translation flaws seem less obvious and less significant end quote the world of Ruin is predicated on death and Decay so wisey definitely had his work cut out for him here and for the most part he manages to dance around the more maob topics while retaining the tone for example in the Japanese version the other people who were on the island with Sid committed suicide by jumping off the northern Cliffs when they lost all hope but in the localization this was changed to having passed away of boredom and despair however because it would have required significant technical work to alter celeste's attempted suicide for the localization the text surrounding it was Rewritten to suggest that jumping off the cliff was a good way to raise one's spirits and that it was something the others had done before in the original Japanese script celes instead recalls what Sid had told her about the others how they jumped off the cliff to release them from this Mortal coil it's a laughable attempt at obus skating what's actually happening and I would be astonished if anybody over the age of 10 had taken the set face value amusingly Nintendo's official guide book for the game would hardly tried to hide the scene's true nature and another unofficial strategy guide published by a prima imprint would see right through this pitiful smoke screen and straightforwardly call it a suicide attempt unfortunately wy's hands were tied on the matter and his other workaround that people were dying of Despair and boredom isn't all that much better than the alternative but again it still maintains The Bleak tone to some it could even be more effective than hurling themselves off a cliff to end their hopeless lives but regardless it doesn't make the perked up reworking of celeste's Rock Bottom moment any less egregious but I don't blame him it was an unwinable situation despite this bit of corporate mandated censorship however this introduction still does a fantastic job at presenting the main atic through line for the world of [Music] Ruin true to what its introduction suggests the world of Ruin is a hostile place with its own perils setting it apart from the world of balance in terms of gameplay a lot of enemies now inflict the zombie and petrify status conditions either of which will inflict an instant game over if the whole party is Afflicted with them thankfully there are relics that can be purchased relatively early on in this back half of the game that guard against them but that comes at the cost of one or both of your Relic slots as suggested by the final shots of the old world the landscape has been completely changed the land has been broken up and pieces have shifted to different areas on the surface some parts sank into the polluted sea and others that had been submerged before such as the serpent trench and ebbit rock have risen to the surface it would probably be a bit generous to describe any of the remaining land masses as continents massive archipelago is a bit more accurate their ecosystems have been totally devastated with the Lush plains that had once covered most of the world decaying into Barren wastelands only small pockets of forests and grasslands remain clinging to Life by a thread and the general Melancholia of this world is captured wonderfully in the new Overworld theme dark world [Applause] as Celeste finds her way to civilization other survivors fill her and the player in on additional details the day of the cataclysm the debris left over from the destruction amassed to the center of what used to be the Imperial continent assembling into a massive Tower reaching the heavens Heavens a top of this Tower is none other than the cause of the Calamity kefa himself who has effectively become a God and he uses his light of judgment to Smite any who oppose him or just to inflict more destruction on the world seemingly out of boredom the tower is actually one of the first places you can approach once you've left the solitary Island but it isn't accessible on foot but that's the tip of the iceberg the cataclysm also released several Wicked beasts that had been sealed below the surface the demon humbaba the terrible Doom Gaz and the eight Legendary Dragons and kefka's Tower isn't the only structure that has been erected as a monument to the Mad God many ordinary people who had given into despair formed the cult of kefa erecting the fanatic's tower on the now Arisen serpent trench in his honor some say they've sold their souls to him but there are murmurs that those despondent cultists may snap out of their fervor if a loved one calls out to them whereas the world of balance was partially defined by its linear narrative and structure the world of Ruin only briefly continues to follow this path after Setzer returns to the fold and unearths another Airship he had been keeping in storage the player can either head straight for kefka's Tower or seek out the rest of the party it devolves from a focused narrative into a series of side quests with scant Direction some Whispers here a riddle there and a bit of player born curiosity are all that are needed all the while the overarching plot comes to a halt until you finally decide to enter kfa's domain obviously character focused nonlinear storytelling and narrative momentum aren't mutually exclusive but considering the circumstances of the world of ruins Inception and development I get the feeling that the development team could only do so much with this half of the game because the world of Ruin wasn't part of the original plan for Final Fantasy 6 the floating continent was supposed to be the final dungeon and the party would stop KFA from destroying the world then and there but development had been progressing quicker and more smoothly than the team were anticipating and sakaguchi and katas began discussing how they could possibly rework the story a bit to make the game even better since they were ahead of schedule it was decided that they would expand the story and have it continue after the world had been devastated by kfka thus the world of Ruin and with how bad the crunch got at the end of development it wouldn't surprise me if the team was more focused on individual character stories Dungeons and the like than they were on giving it all a firm structure as a result several new Dungeons and side quests and such have opened up or been made available though some can only be accessed after certain party members have been recruited but because of the open-ended nature of the world of ruin the difficulty curve for most of it is a bit stagnant it's still on a mostly steady curve with the player being given more powerful Magicite more frequently to maintain its trajectory however before too long any sense of challenge can quickly melt away thanks to the new equipment and Magicite that's now available fire ice bolt and cure 3 Life 2 and three holy localized as Pearl meteor flare and returning from Final Fantasy 2 Ultima here to finally claim its Throne as the most powerful offensive magic spell it costs 80 MP deals massive non-elemental magic damage ignores barriers and targets all enemies there are two ways to learn Ultima either from the Ragnarok Magicite or by purifying the cursed shield into becoming the Paladin Shield the best shield in the game and learning it from that but both come at a cost Ragnarok doesn't have any prerequisites like the shield but when the opportunity to attain it arises the player can either take the Magicite as is or have nar's blacksmith who has been holding on to it for decades melt it down and Forge one of the most powerful swords in the game also named Ragnarok this sword can then be wagered at the dragon's neck Coliseum to acquire the even more powerful Illumina so it's between teaching Ultimo with a Magicite that can metamorph enemies into items which can come in handy or having a highle sword The Shield method is available regardless but it's far more tedious to purify the cursed Shield it has to be equipped to any active party member with one notable exception I'll wrap back around to and they have to participate in 256 battles where AP is awarded upon Victory compounding this is the Staggering number of debuffs and Status conditions The Shield inflicts most of these can be mitigated with relics but the whole ordeal is a massive time sync one which is well worth the effort if you choose the sword but a Time sync nonetheless however by the time you're able to make these decisions you'll likely have recruited most of the party and be fairly well equipped already adding Ultima into the mix is frankly Overkill and all that is without considering how underwhelming much of the end game game can feel already doomgaze for example who you randomly encounter while flying the Airship is susceptible to Fire and fleas the battle before taking too much damage giving you ample opportunities to heal yourself up before fighting it again and while the eight Legendary Dragons can be absolute Terrors for those going in blind most have a crippling Elemental weakness are susceptible to status conditions which completely deflate them or are simply underwhelming by the time your levels hit the high 30s or low 40s even the Fanatics Tower where you can only use magic and are confronted by some of the trickier enemies in the game can be mostly circumvented by bringing MOG and his Mughal charm which prevents Random Encounters and all of this is to say nothing of the economizers that can be dropped from brachiosaurs in the dinosaur Forest which reduce the casting cost of all spells to a single MP when MP totals are well into the hundreds of course the economizers are a bit of an edge case as they're dropped from a rare enemy spawn that is effectively this game's equivalent of the warmech from Final Fantasy 1 but the point stands it is stupidly easy to break the world of Ruin in half with minimal effort magic being overpowered has been the case since the world of balance but it's even more pronounced here with the ability to freely teach any spell to any party member and bolster their magic stats with certain Magicite the only real limiting factors are the time the player wants to invest in building up their party and the Damage cap with the latter simply delaying the inevitable perhaps this can be attributed to the same reason as the creation of the optional super bosses in Final Fantasy 5 the desire to make the game beatable by casual players but without any optional bosses that require more than brute force or exploitation of a single crippling weakness to be found the open-endedness of the Magicite system feels a bit wasteful giving the player the ability to customize their party as they like but at the cost of the character's uniqueness and without a true test of what they've built up sure they still have their special ability but you can also give all of them Ultima and Ultima nukes everything that being said the amount of time and effort it would take to build everyone up to the point of homogenization is far more than it would take to build on their inherent strengths so while it is still a valid criticism it probably wouldn't be much of a tangible issue for most players however there were actually plans for a super boss to be challenged after defeating the eight Legendary Dragons the Kaiser dragon or SAR dragon as it's called in the day for the English version due to character limits data for it still exists on the ROM but unfortunately there is no AI script attached the exact reason it didn't make the cut isn't clear but I wouldn't be surprised if the AFF forementioned crunch may have played a part in it I'm a bit torn on the execution of the world ruins structure and narrative on the one hand while there is a wealth of things to do the world doesn't feel as alive as it was before feeling rather disorganized and at times difficult to remember where things are but at the same time that's kind of the point the world is teetering on the edge of the Abyss civilization is barely hanging on and what few people remain are under the thumb of a wrathful God who could wipe them out at any moment there may not be any concrete narrative structure or forward momentum after the first couple hours or so but that doesn't mean there isn't any motivation to push onwards it seems to me that katas sakaguchi and the rest of the team were confident enough in the strength of their characters that players would view the prospect of reconnecting with them to to be sufficient motivation after all the game was conceived with the core ethos of having an ensemble cast who could all be viewed as the main character and so the world of Ruin not only brings a couple of character arcs to completion before opening fully but also teases another in the same stretch of time to tell the player that not only will they be recruiting them but they'll also see a day new ma to each of their arcs however as was the case in the world of balance some party members are given greater Focus than others leading to the the original mission statement being put into [Music] question not only did the world change on that fateful day but so did most of the party scattered and defeated everyone has spent the last year taking stock of their lives and their places in the world of Ruin and adjusting according ly some lost the will to fight others held on to what hope they could in their own way and the results overall are a mixed bag each party member has their own recruitment quest with everyone besides Edgar and Setzer technically being optional and these scenarios can be sorted into one of three categories apotheosis in which their growth reaches its apex and their Arc sees its conclusion progressing but resolved later where they may or may not be in the midst of their Arc but either way their resolution is found in another side quest after recruiting them and business as usual where they haven't experienced any sort of internal conflict in the interum and joined the party without much of a fuss the category a character's recruitment Quest falls into doesn't necessarily reflect how fleshed out that character may be but the point stands that certain characters were clearly prioritized over others with some hardly being given anything at all I use realm as an example sometime after the cataclysm AER the richest man in the world commissioned her to paint a portrait of the esper lakshi after he won the respective Magicite at the auction house as she was painting it a demon named chadarnook took a liking to realm's painting and possessed it as she was working on it after the party exercises it realm joins them without a second's thought telling aler she'll be back to finish the painting when she's finished saving the world no discussion of what she was up to before the painting no no mention of how she feels about the state of the world she joins up and that's it for her of course she does play a part in sto's Recruitment and subsequent side quest but her involvement there is to facilitate her grandfather's story while one could point to realm's spunky personality as a defense for her acting this way I'd argue that this would be reductive one of the things that makes a character three-dimensional is their emotional range how they respond to different circumstances and stimuli realm is a character who is only ever shown to be happy sneaky and snarky and while this limited emotional range doesn't make her a bad character I still like her it does make her feel a bit flat you'd think that living through the end of the world and losing contact with her friends and grandfather would have a more apparent effect on her and lead to more of a reaction when we meet her in aer's mansion but no it's business as usual this doesn't extend to everyone in this category however Edgar and Sabin may not have changed much in the past year but they've each adjusted their priorities to accomplish new goals sabin's been traveling the world to help people in need and find his friends and he's likely the first party member the player will recruit despite not technically being required when Celeste enters Zen kefka's light of judgment is cast on the Mansion at the north end of town there's still a kid trapped inside and Sabin is able to hold the roof up for a few minutes while celest goes in to rescue him after which Sabin joins up with her as for Edgar he's undercover as a thief named Gerard leader of the Crimson Bandits when Celeste finds him in nikkia as it turns out Castle figuro got stuck underground and some tunneling sandw worms broke these Bandits out of their cells when submerged Edgar dawned this disguise so that they would lead him back to the castle allowing him to save everyone trapped inside he doesn't even let celess in on what he's doing until she's followed him into the Castle's engine room which is filled with a ton of nasty worms clogging up the Machinery he couldn't blow his cover because he didn't want to risk the bandits not leading him there out of fear that he'd lock them up again there is no Arc for either of the figuro brothers in the world of Ruin in fact there isn't really much of an arc for the figuro brothers at all in the entire game sure Sabin does get a brief side quest where he learns that Master Duncan is alive and is taught his most powerful Blitz technique but even this isn't the culmination of any Arc no conflict internal or external is resolved by doing this but they're still fun and interesting characters because of their backstory and personalities however there was orig Al going to be a much darker turn for the two of them if the timer ran out while trying to save the boy in sen instead of a game over samon would have actually been crushed and killed and if the player were to return to sen later on with Edgar in the party the surviving twin would spend the night desperately scouring the rubble for his brother in a futile attempt to save him this was cut from the final game due to their already being an abundance of maob scenes and moments in the back half of the story story which is understandable but I can't help but wonder how emotionally devastating that scene would have been especially for those players who like me tried to keep the twins together as often as possible death is common place in the world of Ruin but whether it was meant to bleed into mogs recruitment is a bit ambiguous originally there was going to be a Mughal hole in Nar that would open up after the Calamity the party would have en in and found about 20 Mughal inside with one of them being MOG you would have had to figure out which one was him in order to recruit him but he would move so fast that it would have been easy to lose track of him instead when you make your way back to Nar you'll find that the town has been abandoned with all the doors locked and the streets having been overrun by monsters MOG is just hanging out in the Mughal Den deep in the town mines but unlike before he's the only Mughal to be found he's glad to see you and he immediately joins up but there's no acknowledgement of the other Mughal not being here the situation becomes a bit more interesting when you check the wall MOG was facing to find a mugal charm which in the Japanese version is called malulu charm named after one of the Mughal who helped defend Tera from the town guard at the start of the game it makes one wonder how MOG is processing the possibility that his species is now doomed to Extinction and if it was the cataclysm that was responsible for their death or something else that happened as a result maybe those new monsters skullking the town and Minds gotth them did MOG always have this charm did mulu give it to him within the past year before she died too did MOG drop it or was he hanging it up in honor of her memory this is one of those situations where I feel I may be reading a bit too deeply into it if only because MOG himself is otherwise such a simple unassuming character but at the same time the fact that there's enough here that leads me to asking these questions at all makes me feel like MOG could have been a bit more fleshed out than he was unfortunately we don't get any more out of him about it as aside from some inconsequential optional dialogue and recruitment quests which require the presence of specific characters the majority of the party don't get specific lines of dialogue attributed to them for most of the rest of the game this can be seen early on if you recruited Sabin before finding Edgar the former doesn't get a single line of dialogue during the latter's recruitment scenario until the very end and the two lines he does get are mostly perfunctory this very same thing did happen occasionally in the world of balance but the world of ruins character focus makes it even more pronounced in all likelihood this may have been a byproduct of the nonlinear structure of the world of Ruin because as said before aside from Celeste Edgar and Setzer everyone else is technically optional and isn't recruited in a strictly linear order it's possible that given how late the world of Ruin was conceptualized and how much crunch the team endured in the final stretch of development Focus was placed more on the party members being recruited at the moment than the ones doing the recruiting it's also likely that there just wasn't enough cartridge space left for more dialogue and checks for every single party member's presence checking the ROM file for the game shows that it's about 3 megabytes which is exactly 24 megabits suggesting that the team filled the cartridge to the absolute limit once again creative ambition brush es up against the reality of data restrictions this crunch period also saw a shuffling of events from the world of balance into the world of Ruin as another of the game's optional party members umaro the yeti was originally meant to be recruited in the former in a manner similar to gaw the final game even still has NPC dialogue and narish referencing him instead he's recruitable after MOG rejoins you all you have to do is go to his cave with MOG and toe and your Mughal pal will order him to come aboard the air ship I didn't talk about umaro or the other new party member go go in the previous section because there's very little to say about them umaro is a Berserker so you can't control him or teach him magic but he does have a couple of exclusive relics which slightly expand his capabilities and go go just like the boss from Final Fantasy 5 is a mimic only here you can assign them any command you please and they'll gain access to all the magic usable by the other party members they're fighting with but like umaro go go also can't equip Magicite so their stats will always be pathetically low they also can't purify the cursed Shield they aren't even really a character they're found in the belly of a monster that's swallows dimensions and they decide to mimic you saving the world because well they have nothing better to do whether or not this is the same go go from ff5 doesn't really matter it could be since that go go warped themselves into the void between dimmension after Barts and the others bested them in what can be charitably described as combat and here they are in the belly of a dimension eater but truthfully it's little more than a cheeky reference one which completely passed by Western players in 1994 as Final Fantasy 5 had been passed over for localization at the time a saga which I covered extensively in my ff5 retrospective and because of goo's enigmatic nature players would speculate and theorize as to their identity and backstory for years the most common assertions I've heard have been Bannon who is neither seen nor mentioned in the world of Ruin General Leo and Emperor gastal though apparently Daryl and Shadow's old partner baram have also been theorized but obviously there isn't any evidence to support any of them nor is there really anything alluding to go go as an actual character even their original recruitment Quest wherein they would cycle through pubs disguised as different party members and would join you when you talked to them with the party member they were pretending to be doesn't elucidate their identity the speculation would be put to rest by katas himself years later who when asked about it in an interview said that goo and umaro were added just so the player could use them in battles with that in mind is it really so bad for them to be such Bland Nothing characters I'd argue no since like MOG they can be skipped entirely without consequence but at the same time this approach to these characters further shows the s in Final Fantasy 6's mission statements how can go go or umaro be considered to be main characters by anybody even setting aside the reason they were included they're Superfluous and missing them doesn't hurt the experience similar to Setzer scene on the downed blackjack in the world of balance I use that as an example because that bit of easily missable character work is reiterated during setzer's scenario in the world of Ruin and it's done in a way that not only doesn't feel redundant but helps to deepen our understanding of his character before the cataclysm he didn't have all that much to live for leaving everything his own life included up to chance back then it wasn't difficult to see that his confidence was mostly a facade but now in the end times the mask has come off he lost everything that day his world his wings and his friends it left him a broken man drowning his sorrows in booze this was how he spent an entire year before Celeste finds him in col and while he's glad to see that his friends are alive after all his confidence has been completely shot he feels that the world is far too chaotic now for him to be of use he's just a gambler and the deck is stacked against him the old world the one where he felt he could afford to put on the veneer of a cocky swashbuckling Vagabond can never return the house is won and he's cashed out what little he has left it doesn't take much for Celeste to snap him out of this depressive State however just a nudge in the right direction telling him that if he doesn't like the way the world is now then he should do something about it he was Fearless before and he can be Fearless again it's quite the 180 but thankfully this is only the beginning of setzer's scenario setzer's most defining asset is his Airship or at least it was until it was destroyed its destruction cut him deeply but he's been holding on to a trump card this whole time a second Airship even faster than the Blackjack the Falcon which he's kept stored in the Tomb of his deceased cohort Daryl Daryl had told him years ago that she wanted czer to have the Falcon if something happened to her but he rejected this sentiment declaring that it'll be his when he beats her in a race that never happened the Falcon crashed and took Daryl with it when she attempted to take the ship as high and as close to the stars as she could the wreckage was found a year later and Setzer restored the Falcon and stored it in her tomb in his mind it still belonged to her and the Very sight of it tore him up inside it's only now that he's found a greater purpose in life than merely seeking Thrills that he's worked up the gumption to try again and it's probably what Daryl would have wanted it's one thing to be told someone's backstory but it's another thing entirely to witness it play out in front of you zetzer scenario does a wonderful job of relaying information that had been available previously for the benefits of those that missed it it without feeling repetitive for those who had already caught it the first time around it's all about presentation the use of flashbacks characterizing Daryl herself tying setzer's past into his present and setting it all to a beautiful repre of his theme in Epitaph solidifying the sentimental side of his [Music] character Setzer says so himself that the Falcon Daryl's parting gift to him will be what gives them all one last shot at bringing kefa down it's a beautiful Capstone to his character and it's accompanied by the introduction of a brand new theme not just for flying the Airship but for the world map as a whole searching for friends gone is the downtrod in organ sapping all hope and in its place is a beautiful piece encapsulating the renewed optimism held not just by Setzer but by the whole crew as they seek the rest of their scattered [Music] [Applause] comrades from there Celeste gives the order to follow a pigeon to Miranda which leads to the recruitment quest for cayenne the first party member to fit firmly into the second category in Miranda a woman named Lola has been continuously receiving letters and flowers made of handwoven silk from her boyfriend in mois this is a continuation of an optional Side Story from Sabin scenario earlier in the game where he and cayenne help the boyfriend send his letters to her however all the adults in mois are dead the only survivors were children and a couple of teenagers who will wrap back around to in due course reading the most recent letter reveals that the handwriting is cayenne when Cayenne had passed through Miranda after the collapse he learned that Lola had been writing to her boyfriend every day not knowing of his fate despite never getting a response in his own words something inside him snapped that day and he took it upon himself to keep her hope alive by writing back to her pretending to be her late partner telling her about how he was helping to rebuild mois and longed to see her again it was through this process that Cayenne realized that like Lola he was stuck in the past clinging to loved ones who would never come back wallowing in his own despair but by the time the party finds him he's begun making strides to move past this trauma reading books about simple Machinery to overcome his technophobia making silk flowers to unsheath his sensitive side and writing one final letter to Lola confessing the truth and encouraging her to move forward and live her life to the fullest but it's easy to see that he was also writing it down for his own sake so that he would take his own words to heart you can even have him deliver the letter himself at which point Lola will confess that she knew the letters weren't from her boyfriend but reading them made it all hurt just a bit less she wishes that she could meet the person who did write them knowing that they too surely must have felt similar pain as her but as the party tries to tell her that he's right here Cayenne interjects merely reaffirming the points made in the letter to look to the future I really like Cayenne I liked him before the fall and I especially like him here he's one of the game's more complex characters being such a staunch but well-meaning traditionalist in a world that's left him behind his Macho exterior hides a soft Center that he's tried so hard to keep hidden only exposing it here under the promise of anonymity and when that anonymity is lost sure he's embarrassed but now there's an understanding that it doesn't make him any of a man or a warrior he's introspective enough to recognize his faults but guarded enough that he needed to see those faults in others before coming to terms with his own emotional damage yet this isn't the end of cen's Journey if he's in the party when resting at Doma Castle he won't wake up the following morning having been trapped in a dreaming state by the Monstrous Rex soul and its Trio of dream Stooges to Feast upon the guilt and sorrow he still Harbors from the loss of his family his Kingdom and the world the wck soul is an amalgamation of souls who lost their lives in Wars throughout history and at the behest of the spirits of cen's wife and son the party Journeys through Cayenne soul and subconscious witnessing tender moments he shared with his late family to find the stoes and the Rex soul and expel them from within afterward Cayenne is briefly reunited with the spirits of his wife and son who remind him that they will always be with him with his mind now clear and his soul free of Doubt Cayenne instantly gains access to all of his Bushido abilities he's now fully prepared to face the future this is The Natural end of cen's Arc learning to forgive himself and gaining closure it builds off of what was presented during his recruitment quest in an organic and satisfying way unfortunately I can't say the same for the rest of those in Category 2 just as Cayenne hypothesized gal returns to the velt in order to get stronger to fight KFA you recruit him by simply fighting on the velt with an open Party slot waiting for him to show up as though he had dived for a new rage he's just happy to see his friends but his story reaches its conclusion in an optional scene that's initiated when he and Sabin pay a visit to the odd gentleman who lives just north of the velt Sabin puts together that this man is probably ga's father who believed his son was a demon and tossed him out onto the velt when he was born the party comes together to make GA look presentable for a more proper reunion with his estranged father but it's ultimately for not as the man denies ever having a son instead he recounts a recurring nightmare of his that sounds very similar to the story of how GA ended up in the wilderness while in the same breath complimenting GA on his nice clothes saying that his parents must be proud of him Sabin who had spearheaded this whole operation is ready to throw hands but gaw stops him saying that he's just happy his father is alive the groundwork for this scene was laid well in advance all the way back in Sabin scenario early in the game with some missable dialogue in the pub in Vector implying that ga's father is an alcoholic and the result is surprisingly touching GA was never given much Focus outside of this optional digression which unfortunately has no tangible reward at the end of it his character had been pretty static throughout the game and while this experience hasn't really done much to overtly affect that it does cement the idea of the rest of the party serving as a found family for him but this wasn't a point of conflict for GA he never expressed any consternation about having a place to belong or people he could depend on so while this resolution is touching it's also in service to a conflict that never [Music] existed then there's stro who joined the cult of KFA sometime in the past year it's not really commented on but it's easy to read between the lines he thought had died fell into Despair and whether willingly or not joined the cult if you bring realm there she'll shout some sense into him and he's overwhelmed with joy to see her again though she still chastises him for being so weak willed because she knows he's better than that even in a touching reunion like this their Dynamic is the same as always it's cute his side quest expounds on this a bit more while also building on his background as a monster hunter in all his years of study there was one Beast hyon that he was never able to face because its dwelling ebot's Rock had sunken into the sea but the Calamity saw it rise from beneath the waves and Upon returning to thamasa stro learns that his old hunting buddy gungho tried fighting the great beast and was Gravely injured gungho begs stro to avenge him and despite feeling that he may be too old to fulfill this long held dream ultimately accepts the challenge he wants to put his self- admitted obsess sessioned to rest and realm is adamant that she joins him during the fight stro is able to learn his strongest lore Grand train and after pulling through stro regales gungho with an over embellished version of the tale but it's after the old Duffer falls asleep that the player learns that gungho was never injured in fact he had never faced hyon at all he was merely acting at realm's behest so that her grandfather would finally muster the wherewithal to defeat hyon once and for all and fulfill a Dees long dream that stro thought he could never see realized this subplot is an affirmation of realm's love for her grandfather as well as a way to build stro up both mechanically and emotionally ahead of the final battle he finally defeated The One That Got Away the anchor that had been holding him back for decades what separates his Arc from gaws is that even though his unfinished business with hyon is understated it is stated now he's free to pursue a new dream if he so chooses or settle down and live out the rest of of his days with the peace of mind that comes with having accomplished all he had set out to do in life after saving the world of course however there were initially other plans for sto's development early on he was going to be the focus of a Sim cityes miname where he would build up a village but this was cut early on for scheduling reasons besides that there was also another member of sto's family present in the story his 65-year-old geomancer wife Lara whether her inclusion would have been at the expensive realm is unknown but she and sto would have initially had a somewhat standoffish relationship bickering about how the other was older and surely to die first by the end of the game they would ultimately reaffirm their Devotion to and vow to protect each other even if it meant they would die first without further details it's difficult to say just how effective this Dynamic would have been or how it would have benefited sto's character compared to what we have but if Lara would have been an additional party member like scra's character and Angela may have possibly been then perhaps things would have been just a bit too crowded for what it's worth I think what we got with stro in realm while a bit light is still Charming without being overly sacarin but in order to even recruit stro you need to recruit realm and to recruit realm you have to make a stop in the new cave on the velt where you'll find either her or Shadow depending on whether you waited for him back on the floating continent knocked unconscious by a pair of powerful behemoths either way they'll be accompanied by Interceptor and you'll bring them to thamasa to rest where the player will witness their dreams Shadow's dream shows him as Clyde leaving thamasa telling Interceptor that he wants the girl to live in a peaceful world as we've already discussed the girl he's referring to is realm whose own dream is a flashback to when her father left years ago stgo and Interceptor triy to console her but it's no use she's already figured out that Daddy is isn't coming back it's brief but absolutely devastating especially when you realize that the scene also acts as confirmation that because of your actions Shadow isn't coming back for you either your only constellation is Interceptor sticking by realm in battle this was the case in my first playthrough using a relocalization patch for my second playthrough from which the majority of the footage you've seen was recorded I rectified my mistake and waited for shadow he regains Consciousness quickly but he opts to continue resting while his loyal Pooch stands guard by the time you return to thamasa to check up on him he's already gone thankfully one of the towns folk tells you where he's headed the dragon's neck Coliseum where you can wag your items for the chance of getting better items if one of your party members can win a fight in the arena without your input Shadow came here in search of a specific dagger the ichigeki or striker in the localization he had heard a rumor that it was in the cave on the velt so he went there but he was wounded before he could find it it's easily found in there before finding Shadow and upon wagering it in the Coliseum he emerges to fight defeat him and he tells you that he's only here now because fighting is all he knows he readily joins us when we tell him that we're aiming to take down KFA saying that fighting him would be the ultimate test this is the only time when Shadow is a permanent fixture in the party without him seeking any sort of compensation before or he was either around because he was being paid or he otherwise wouldn't come back to the Airship at this point he's gone from a self-serving mercenary to a proper Ally however his Arc has yet to reach its conclusion but we'll discuss that when we discuss the ending but trust me laconic as he is Shadow exhibits more growth over the course of the story than his daughter Shadow isn't the only party member whose recruitment comes in two parts though terara also shares this distinction though you're able to cross paths with her very early on in the world of Ruin she's become the matriarch of the children of mobles whose parents were killed by kefka's light of judgment the oldest survivors were Dwayne and Karine who are only teenagers and all of them immediately took to Tera as soon as she arrived calling her their mama the player will likely have already recruited Sabin by the time they wander over to mois so there will be an expectation of recruiting a party member as soon as they're found but Tera bucks this idea telling you that the children need her and that she's lost the will to fight the more she tries to understand what she's feeling the less she understands it she can't even defend the kids from the demon humbaba who regularly comes to terrorize what's left of their Village after fighting off hanaba themselves you leave for the time being but are able to continue this subplot after raising the Falcon upon the party's return it's revealed that Karine is pregnant much to Dwayne's consternation in order to skirt around the subject of teenage pregnancy Ted waly avoided mentioning that they're teens and instead wrote that they're a married couple again unfortunately his hands were tied but thanks to this slight reframing The Core theme was able to be retained humbaba comes back to attack mois once again and when it blows half of your party away terara transforms into her esper State and steps in to stop the demon once and for all the children are initially frightened by her cesal form but when one of them recognizes that she's still their mama all of the children crowd around her to show their love for her and that's when terara realizes that this unfamiliar feeling she's held for her adopted children was love all along the very feeling that she's been trying to understand since the beginning it's her love for them that gives her the strength to fight not just for herself but for their future and so she agrees to join us in fiction it's not only common but often expected to resolve a character's yearning to understand love by giving them a romantic partner Final Fantasy 6 subverts this notion wonderfully as for why this direction was taken sakaguchi who wrote Tera scenario became a father during the game's development with the arrival of his daughter he thought deeply about how impactful the simple notion of ushering a new life into the world was this would be the impetus for Dwayne and Karine having a baby but I suspect it may have also played a role in tera's Arc developing along a similar trajectory when you become a parent your priorities change as do major aspects of your life to do well for your child you want to protect them and make sure they grow up healthy tera's well to fight was spurned by a desire her need to protect her kids and I'd imagine that sakaguchi would do the same for his daughter and so we're left with the last party member to recruit who ironically was the first to to join us all the way back when the story began in Nar you don't have to save lock for last I certainly didn't on my first playthrough but the dungeon where you find him requires that you divvy up your characters into two parties to Traverse it so ideally you would want to have at least eight party members before descending into the Phoenix Cave to make it more manageable by the time you do the Phoenix Cave it will have been so so long since you've had to switch between parties like this the core idea is perfect for an ensemble cast like this yet it is so underutilized only really popping up in the game's opening and closing hours thankfully the Phoenix Cave is designed specifically around this mechanic and uses it well but this isn't why I say it's best saved for near the end of the journey celeste's journey in the world of Ruin began with locks bandana giving her the hope she needed to pick herself back up and find him and the rest of her friends in one final effort to take back their world what would be a better book end to this new beginning than a tearful reunion how about two lock has spent the past year tracking down a specific piece of Magicite that of the Phoenix who according to Legend had turned to stone long ago those Legends also state that even in this state the Phoenix could still return The Souls of the Dead to their bodies the Magicite is deeply cracked but lock is still hopeful that it could bring Rachel back and it does at least briefly in the short moments Rachel has she reaffirms her love for lock but also tells him that it's okay for him to let go of the guilt that he's carried for all these years to move on with his life and to love the person he holds affection for now just as he loved her the localization stumbles with this because of how it was phrased in the original Japanese instead saying that lock needs to learn to love himself again but this is what she actually says with her last breath Rachel Wills the Phoenix that gave her life to be reborn so that lock may use its power power in the battle to come Celeste waits for lock upstairs and is prepared to comfort him but he feels reinvigorated the weight of his guilt having been lifted from his shoulders he's not completely okay but he knows he will be as long as he has Celeste with him until then they have a job to do it's a Bittersweet conclusion to Lock's story but ultimately a hopeful one he loses Rachel for good but his efforts to bring her back brought him closure no longer must he remain Shackled to the failures of his past now he can move forward to build a bright future with someone new I noted much earlier how Lock's inability to let go made him come off as being a much more off-putting than he probably was meant to be and that this aspect of his story made him less endearing to me personally but upon seeing the resolution to his story and the completion of his Arc I can forgive this lock was a Broken Man faithful to a fault he still flawed in the end only willing to move on when effectively given permission to do so but these flaws just make him more human and that's how I would describe the world of Ruin as a whole human in the last section I noted that the Game's plot practically stops at this point in the game in favor of side questing for party members and while this is true in the macro sense saying this also makes a certain value judgment on the characters because while it's true that nothing is happening in the world itself as you get the band back together almost every party member still has some story to tell it just so happens that none of them have a direct impact on the wider narrative at play at least in terms of the nuts and bolts of what happens aside from who is ultimately present for those events as I've already stated certain party members got more focused than others out of a cast of 14 characters only about five of them Celeste Setzer terara cayenne and lock saw resolutions to their character arcs that started in the world of balance three of them G Shadow and stro had a bit of character work that was rooted in aspects that were found in the world of balance but weren't guaranteed to be seen the figuro brothers while fun and complex characters didn't really have significant arcs at all in the game what was there was all in the world of balance unless the player didn't see the coin flashback until the world of Ruin which is entirely possible and realm MOG umaro and go go don't experience any growth at all throughout the story Final Fantasy 6 was developed with the core idea of an ensemble cast who could all be plausibly described as the main character however if the way I've discussed their arcs hasn't made it abundantly clear I would say that the team failed in this regard katas himself would even suggest as much in an early design document for Final Fantasy 7 noting that even if a player would choose to view gal for example as the protagonist the story wouldn't reflect that but I wouldn't say that an ensemble cast was a poor idea in and it itself or that there are any quotee unquote Bad characters just that there's a spectrum of depth among them despite the disparity among the characters however there is still a single thematic through line which not only persists among them but embodies the core conceit of the world of Ruin searching for a reason to live whether it be to secure a bright future for the world's children to protect others to be an artist or to simply be with those they care about everybody has something that makes them want to go on living even as the world Falls to Pieces so while the plot of the world of Ruin may have come to a halt the story kept going it just pivoted to focusing on characters and themes than events but the more you do in the lead up to the final battle the more explosively the train will burst out of the station for the final act because only at the very end is it made explicitly clear what it was we were fighting for this whole time [Music] [Music] on the day of the Calamity debris from all over the world coales at the center of what was once the Imperial continent assembling into a massive Tower of mechanical Decay that Rose into the heavens a monument of the end times at top which stands KFA himself but before walting into the madcap's domain Celeste pauses to consider the ramifications of what must be done kefka's godly power comes from the statues of the Gods so destroying them will relieve him of his power but the statues are the source of all magic as well as the espers and stro posits the possibility that all magic espers and by extension Magicite will disappear so will terara disappear too terara is perturbed by this thought but but says nothing the party quietly accepts that they may very well lose her after the coming battle and push forward for the good of all Keva Tower is the culmination of everything the game has built up both thematically and mechanically before even entering the final dungeon you are prompted to divide everyone into three groups you were encouraged to find the whole party and now you're going to use them with two left over if you got umaro and goo the dungeon design is simple yet elegant separated into three bespoken paths for the navigation of each group there are a few obstacles that require another party to remove and everyone ultimately crosses paths near the end for a switch puzzle before separating and rejoining once again at the top of the scrap Heap and to call it a scrap Heap is more than apt as I've mentioned several times the tower is built from debris pulled from all over the world but it isn't until you actually enter it that you realize just how apropo a description it is the tower is composed of heaps and mounds of refu waste junk and other detritus most of it came from Vector as many of the Interior spaces from the magitech research facility compose the majority of the Interior spaces one recognizable space from vector's Palace that makes an appearance is the prison block where kefa was held during the banquet with gastal and in kefka's old cell standing in the exact same spot is a familiar foe Ultima weapon though it's been powered up since you defeated it on the floating continents it's stronger now and this is reflected not only by a new color palette and a bit of animation for its mechanical bits but by a change in name in the localization it's no longer Atma weapon but simply Atma while later versions would retain the original Japanese Ultima Buster it's an optional battle but the reward for defeating it is a safe point materializing where it stands its presence isn't explained in the text but what it decrees at the start of the battle is ever so ominous it had been abandoned by its creators on this Mortal plane and has spent eternity pondering the meaning of existence and now it may finally know no reading between the lines Nets you a straightforward answer destruction Ultima Buster is the toughest of the three optional bosses in kfka Tower by a long shot yet it's arguably the least rewarding the safe point is somewhat fleeting as it's early on in the track the other two optional bosses are the final two Legendary Dragons gold and skull dragon neither are particularly difficult at this point and the relics they drop aren't by any means bad as they respectively increase Max MP and HP by 50% but they're unimpressive by defeating the final Dragon however the player is rewarded with the Crusader Magicite which boasts a 50% increase to MP growth as well as teaching meteor and meron or rather meltdown but Crusader becomes much more intriguing when one Witnesses it as a summon as it calls forth not one but three entities who do battle with each other and inflict massive damage on everything including your party in that sense it isn't particularly useful as a summon but it echoes the war of the Magi and both Crusader as well as the name used in the Japanese version Jihad are historically associated with Holy Wars between European Christians and middle easterners this is all a roundabout way of saying that the Crusader summon seems to represent both the war of the Magi and the gods themselves which is made slightly more apparent when each of your three parties faces off with one of the three Gods before the final confrontation with KFA himself the resemblance between the Triad and the three entities called with Crusader is notable the gods themselves have been largely enigmatic throughout the story we know their significance to the world and its history but until we actually confront them they've represented little more than the destructive power of magic it's only now that we even get names for them demon with power over fire fiend who commands ice and goddess who commands lightning and storms and in the localization the first two are respectively renamed Poltergeist and doom trios of gods aren't uncommon in real world Theology and mythology so to try and attribute influence to any specific Pantheon would be a bit of a Fool's errand it isn't impossible but doing so feels a bit misguided when one looks past the generic names they were given in the game itself and instead towards tetsuya's original concept art for them where he had given them names with more specific connotations zerin sephos and Sophia respectively the depth and complexity of each of these varies so forgive me if I gloss over a few details as I attempt to provide explanations that are relatively simple to digest within the zoroastrian pantheon zerin is a deity of time who would later be the Creator deity of their own movement within Zoroastrianism called zervis in which their power is infinite and total the information I was able to find about zerin and zervan ISM was fairly dense and even contradictory likely owing to zervan being of zoroastrian origin but information regarding zervan ISM seeming to come exclusively from outside sources moreover zervan ISM seems to have died out within a few centuries of the introduction of Islam to Iran the only consistent aspect of zerin is their dominion over time which is very Loosely applied to their in-game counterpart through their use of the stop spell the name of the second God sephos translates to sephirot in cabala the sephirot are the 10 aspects through which God is able to manifest either independently or in conjunction with other individual sephira they tend to be depicted either in the form of the tree of life or mapped onto the body of man cabalists believe that through understanding the sephirot wisdom understanding knowledge kindness strength Beauty Victory Splendor foundation and kingship so too could one begin to understand God's creation of the universe finally we have Sophia the Greek word for wisdom as well as the name of a major Gnostic deity Sophia's Fall From Grace came about when she desired to to mother a child without a male partner nor the blessing of God the Father with the result being the best seal Demi urge whom she cast out of the Divine realm the Demi urge believing he was the only being in creation would create the material plane as we know it Sophia would then be cast out of the ploma for her foolishness confined to her own realm beneath it but above that which the Demi urge had created she would ultimately be welcomed back to the ploma when the quote fullness she had lacked in mothering the Demi UR returned so loosely speaking the three Gods represents the infinite expanse of time creation and wisdom possibly it's entirely possible that Nomo was only using these names for flavor as nothing else about or surrounding them save for zeran's use of stop magic really reflects the qualities of their namesakes in any meaningful way maybe this is why these aren't the names they were given in the final game regardless of whatever deeper meaning there may be behind their intended names however by the time we reach them they no longer hold the power they once had upon their defeat the statues crumble but the power of magic Still Remains KFA had already drained them of their power meaning that only when he is defeated will magic cease to exist luckily for us the Mad God is only just ahead this will be the first time the party or the player sees or hears from him directly since the floating continent and in all that time we still seem no closer to understanding his motivations than when we started but rest assured everything is about to become clear with the statues destroyed the last thing left to do is confront kfka he's been waiting for you knowing you would Ascend his Tower and has been preparing to him this is a game he's already won you are all nothing to him insects easily crushed beneath his heel with the divine power he possesses he intends to slaughter and Destroy everyone and everything depending on who you brought with you the party's dialogue may be spoken by different characters just like in the recruitment side quests but for the sake of Simplicity I'll be referring to whoever spoke in my playthrough Tera points out that even if kefka destroys that which people have worked so hard to build they can always rebuild it this is when kfa's philosophy begins to reveal itself as he asks why people would build things at all when they know they will inevitably be destroyed why do they strive to continue living their lives when they know they're eventually going to die terara tells him that the end isn't what matters but what one does with the time they're given to find happiness despite knowing that it will come to nothing in the end KFA mocks them all asking if they've been able to find happiness in this Dying World to which everyone emphatically declares what it is that's kept them going and pushed them here to fight for it love family friendship and freedom despite kfa's best efforts everyone has found a reason to live even as the world slowly dies around them he flies into a rage letting loose his light of judgment on the world as his Tower shifts and transforms around them he intends to destroy it all Here and Now rejecting the very notion that anyone could find any reason to live in a world of death from there you're prompted to arrange the 12 party members you've brought with you in any order for this mer on Gauntlet of a final battle there are four phases the first three are against the different sections of the biomechanical Chimera that is the statue of the Gods followed by the final confrontation with KFA himself in all of his wretchedly Divine Glory any party members who are knocked out at the end of a phase are replaced with the next ones on your list at the start of the next section but losing all four in a given phase still grants a game over it's a gradual Ascent from the base of the statue to kefa and it is in in rapturing to see even more enchanting is the score for this final battle the Behemoth dancing mad consisting of four movements one for each of the four phases of the battle noou oyatu has weaved other motifs from the rest of the game score with new musical ideas to capture the literal and thematic Ascent of the action beginning with the reinvigorated repre of the Empire's light Motif catastrophe now led by the indistinguishable pipe organ [Music] leading into a disquieting [Music] interlude before the tempo picks up dramatically percussion pushing the tension as the organ and chorus battle for dominance and the transition between movements is seamless as the battle ascends to further phases dancing mad is a truly wild and resplendent track especially considering its source it's cliche to say but I find the comparison of Nabu omatsu using the SNES sound chip to make dancing mad being analogous to Michelangelo painting the cine Chapel with crayons to be app it's a vibrant complex piece which is held back only by the hardware but those limitations don't hinder the work but rather highlight the complexity it perfectly captures the frenetic action of the battle itself through each of its phases while also musically guiding the player through the symbolism of the statue the Statue and its three sections have been subject to several interpretations over the decades one which occasionally pops up is the idea that the statue is a rematch against the three Gods but aside from the name there isn't anything to support this none of the three sections resemble the individual statues nor do they share any of their attributes or abilities this idea seems to originate from the Nintendo players guide for the game which had not been written with consultation from The Game's development staff and future Source books wouldn't so much as mention the notion so it's fair to say that the idea isn't well supported perhaps the most popular interpretation of the statue and the one to which I personally subscribe is that it's an encapsulation of Dante alig's Divine Comedy I also discussed the divine comedy in my Final Fantasy 4 video noting various symbolic and thematic parallels between the two the parallels here are much more concise and direct concentrated entirely in this single battle at the start is a demonic creature whose lower half is rooted beneath the ground it's only visible from the waist up similar to how Satan was frozen in a lake of ice in the lowest circle of hell in Inferno thus the first phase represents hell the second phase consists of multiple entities suffering in a realm above hell but beyond the reach of Heaven's light the battle between the organ and the chorus comes to a head as the two begin trading blows more frequently overlapping with each other in a bid for [Music] dominance this is purgatory and the third the top of the statue resembles Michelangelo's Madonna de laa or simply laa which depicts Mary holding the body of Jesus Christ after he was taken down from the cross the female figure in this phase of the fight is named Maria in the Japanese version which gives Credence to this interpretation moreover the Musical Battle has been won by the organ which has shed its edgy discordance and is now eliciting the tones one would expect to hear from it in a [Music] church this is heaven and after joury journeying through hell purgatory and Heaven Dante ultimately meets with God himself and would be shown the totality of creation he's captivated by it unable to truly capture the Splendor he felt in that moment its beauty like God himself is truly Transcendent almost incomprehensibly so but whereas the god in Dante's work is a being whose love shapes Creation in Final Fantasy 6 we have kfka who when confronted before the battle begins does the exact opposite declaring that he will destroy everything and that life is meaningless and to drive the point home he not only takes on a vis similar to that of the Fallen Angel Lucifer but is introduced by the very same musical cue on which our story began he is in every way an inversion of Dante's God even repurposing a presentational aspect of the story meant to signify its Beginnings to instead act as a harbinger of the end [Music] life dreams hope where do they come from and where are they headed these things I am going to destroy that is the final Declaration of Palazo god of magic before the climactic final confrontation begins and now that we've put everything on the table it is finally time to deconstruct kefka in full despite starting as a comic relief character kefka has been an agent of chaos from the very beginning before the player even met him his first appearance is actually before we meet anybody else he briefly passes through the corner of the frame during the game's prologue a fleeting Glimpse at someone who cares not for any rules or decorum when his presence in the story is made more concrete he's shown to be a dangerous psychopath testing his control over terara by commanding her to burn dozens of his own men poisoning Doma murdering countless espers General Leo and Emperor gestal and inciting an apocalypse to gain godly power which he uses solely to destroy until you reach him at the very end there's never so much as an inkling of an explanation for why he does what he does his mind being fractured from the imperfect magitech augmentation could be a reason but I think the answer lies in the proclamations he makes here at the top of his Tower KFA is a stone cold nihilist believing that life has no meaning beyond the final state of existence and when he's confronted by the party who all passionately declare their reasons to go on living in spite of the inevitable end of everything he not only rejects their philosophy but is seemingly incapable of even comprehending it some have posited that his maining godhood gave him a certain Clairvoyance to understand the true nature of existence or at least what he interprets as such but I disagree while he only pontificates on such things after becoming the god of magic his actions are still very much in line with what they were before death destruction and control he didn't usurp gastal on the floating continent because Celeste stabbed him he had been planning to do so for a while he was just biting his time until the right moment kfka being a product of the Empire who ascended to godhood leads me to recall perhaps the most famous quote of 19th century German philosopher Friedrich n God is dead God remains dead and we have killed him ncho wasn't the first person to posit the basic idea of the phrase but he worded it so succinctly that one would find difficulty in meeting anybody who couldn't understand it despite the quote itself having been chopped off the end of a protracted paragraph and N would linguistically underline this point in later Edition of the gay science explaining that the Christian God is Unworthy of belief as intellectuals and philosophers of his era had been assing him for some time in an era when morality and religion were inextricably tied to each other in Western Europe Nia theorized that as faith in God decayed so too would people's morality and possibly their will to live should they be confronted with his symbolic death so he posited that one's morals not be shaped by God or religion but by man so one may give their meaning to their life on their own terms thus there are two sides of nihilism life is meaningless so who cares and life is meaningless so let's make the most of what we have the returners readily accept the meaninglessness of life yet are unshaken in their resolve but kefa so entrenched in his pessimistic brand of nihilism hasn't succumbed in the face of his own philosophy but rather charged head first toward becoming an Overman an Uber mench in order to fill the god shap shaped whole in creation to give meaning to life and that meaning is the only thing he can comprehend Oblivion the ultimate end State despite now having the power to give any meaning to existence he could desire he's so far gone that he simply can't fathom there being any other value than death Decay and destruction KFA Palazo is a flat character but it's what he represents and how his philosophy opposes Our Heroes that makes him an effective villain he's easy to hate and endlessly despicable but he's also deceptively realistic the Nexus of Kurt kofka and fron kofka I'm sure some of us have had something of a nihilist phase growing up likely in our adolescence but there are those people for whom it wasn't a phase they got stuck in the darker end of the nihilism spectrum and stayed there for years even decades wallowing in the belief that nothing they do will ever matter in the grand scheme of things and either lashed out started hurting themselves or worse kefa is that person given the power of God and that is terrifying it's this terrifying power that you have to confront when you finally rise above the statue of the Gods and come face to face with him however he doesn't provide that much of a jump in difficulty over anything else you've faced so far he casts some tricky and Powerful spells like meteor and Ultima as well as using train to Blind and silence the entire party meaning you better have either mitigation or a quick response the ladder is especially needed when faced with his signature ability Fallen one which reduces the entire party to a single hit point and if he had just used Revenger then you won't have any of your Buffs active to uplift you including life three again he isn't terribly difficult but he can overwhelm you if you fall a bit behind on Buffs or healing but like always it's a relief to finally see him crumble after the final hit connects only this time after all the pain and suffering he's caused there's a sense of catharsis in seeing the dissolution of KFA that simply wasn't present for any previous Final Fantasy villain because by a long shot he was the most personal foe thus far as soon as KFA is defeated the tower begins to collapse beneath everyone's feet whoever was left on the Airship quickly joins up with the rest of the party as Tera morphs into her esper form with Celesta declaring that they all need to work together to get out of here and back to the Falcon but as terara begins to charge forward she collapses and their Magicite begins to vanish with KFA defeated all of the Magic in the world including the espers and Magicite will disappear but with what little power she has left terara vows to get them all to safety their escape is intercut with a curtain call of sorts where each member of the game's cast is Ed for their role alongside an object of significance to their character followed by a brief scene of them assisting the others as part of their escape these vignettes act as kodas to their respective arcs showing how they've grown over the course of the story Cayenne has conquered his technophobia Setzer has moved past his fatalism and learned to trust his instincts lock and Celeste even share a scene where the two reaffirm their commitment to each other as she tries to go back for the bandana that inspired her to find everyone and he saves her from a deadly fall and all of these vignettes are set to a medley of everyone's musical themes but there are two in particular which stick out as Tera guides some of the others through the remains of the magitech lab the Magicite that was once her father maduan tells her that he and the rest of the espers will disappear forever and that she may vanish as well in the English version he adds that she could possibly stay in this world as a human if her heart has grown a strong attachment to something or someone though the original Japanese script merely implies that because of her esper Heritage something will happen to her too the esper fate is one of the cruestv suffered the game itself doesn't really put too fine a point on it but it's certainly Bittersweet Tera for what it's worth doesn't Linger on it too much right now she's focused on making sure her friends Get Out Alive the other scene is Shadows the repre of his theme reads as far more tragic than the others and while everyone else is rushing to escape he slinks off into a dank corner of the collapsing Tower Interceptor as loyal as ever attempts to follow but Shadow commands him to leave him and be a good boy before sequestering himself further away from his comrades once he reaches a dead end he hunkers down and mutters that he's done running and that he looks forward to seeing his old partner again the Japanese script all but says that shadow is ready to die here but the English script is more vague having him say I'm going to begin all over again it implies an ending without directly saying Shadow is going to die especially given the context but that context also belies the idea of a new beginning it's clumsy like much of W's adherence to Nintendo's content policies but as I hope I've made clear I'm not putting the blame on him he did his best given the circumstances and those who read between the lines can pick pick up on the original intent quite easily regardless this conclusion to Shadow's Arc is interesting he was never able to move past his guilt and now that his business on this Mortal coil has concluded he feels he has nothing left to live for or perhaps this can be read as a Redemption of sorts Clyde's cowardice cost baram his life and closing himself off to his emotions as Shadow didn't ease the pain or guilt on the floating continent he failed to stop KFA from pushing the statues out of balance even if he knew it was a feudal effort he may see defeating KFA and saving the world as atonement for his mistakes the ultimate atonement in fact the only thing left is to meet baram in the next life and hope they're Square it's a tragic ending but it's on his own terms and I respect that shadow aside terara is able to successfully lead everyone to the Falcon and continues to take point to guide the ship through the crumbling wreckage coming down around them but she's growing weaker and and as they escape Into the Blue Sky she loses Consciousness unsure if she's going to survive she telepathically communicates to Karine as she's ready to give birth telling her to do her best in this new world Setzer quickly Dives to save Tara throwing everyone off balance and he succeeds terara now back in her human form survived the drop and while her esper powers and Magic itself have disappeared for good their Collective efforts have quickly borne fruit the sea and skies are clean and blue the plants are healing and the birds are flying alongside the Falcon as it makes its way around the restored planet and the credits role at the very end Karine and Dwayne welcome their child into the new world and the party witness people everywhere beginning to rebuild without fear of their work being struck down by a wrathful God all set to the sole use of the iconic Final Fantasy title theme Tera moves to the bow of the ship and for the first time lets her hair down letting the wind rush through her locks as we see a flock of birds fly over familiar locals the message is made clear hope has returned to this world and this time our heroes will make sure that it's here to stay thus concludes Final Fantasy 6 as I'm sure you could probably tell I had a lot to say about Final Fantasy 6 part of this is because it's larger and denser than any of its predecessors but also because it is far and away one of the most Sublime games I have ever played with wonderfully Rich characters and a story which kept me engaged from beginning to end it's not a perfect experience however the game isn't all that difficult the Magicite system can ultimately lead to every party member feeling the same and nearly half of them have little depth or growth as characters the world of Ruin is also a Mercurial experience trading structure and plot for character stories and a focus on new themes but I personally love character-driven stories with strong themes so while it wasn't much of an issue for me I can see others feel that the game spins its Wheels here the lows aren't horrifically low but the highs are tremendously High particularly with the presentation the title screen the opening credits the Opera House the coin toss celeste's suicide attempt and the final battle are all astonishingly beautiful and gripping Nobu omatsu score is my favorite of the series so far so much so that when I went to a Distant Worlds concert earlier this year I bought a physical copy of the soundtrack I love Final Fantasy 6 but I do wish it wasn't so easy especially coming off of its predecessor thankfully Square would bring this game out of mothball several times in the ensuing years though whether any of these subsequent versions of the game would improve upon the original and amend its shortcomings is [Music] [Music] debatable as was the case with its two predecessors Final Fantasy 6 would be ported to the PlayStation being released in Japan and North America in March and October 1999 respectively and in February 2002 in pal territories while the Japanese and pal versions of this port would be available as Standalone releases with the former also being available as part of a bundle with its predecessors the North American version would be available exclusively alongside Final Fantasy 5 as part of Final Fantasy Anthology this release retained Ted W's script from the Super Nintendo version though did correct a few minor errors such as renaming vix to bigs and changing Phoenix down to the proper spelling while the script wasn't altered to undo the censorship that had originally been imposed on it every instance of visual censorship has been erased this version also inherited all of the extra bells and whistles of the PlayStation ports of ff4 and 5 including dashing without Sprint shoes a bestiary and new fmvs at the beginning and ending of the game and out of all three of these PlayStation ports I can say without a doubt that the fmvs for six are by far the best they're gorgeous absolutely stunning they help to actualize various moments throughout the story in a way that the original release could never do exemplifying its gravitas with only the briefest glimpses at events I also found it interesting how Shadow when on the Phantom train briefly thinks of Realm and that this is depicted by quickly flashing her Amano artwork almost completely blown out in a flash of white it's cheap it's funny but it works however this port also comes with the same issues as those of its two predecessors ff5 especially sound effects and music while not terrible are noticeably different from the original and the performance is absolutely atrocious with lag and excruciatingly long load times and I mean that while this is one of the versions of the game I passed over for this video I have played a bit of the PS1 Classics version on my vaita and even after adjusting settings to improve load times it was still pretty unbearable yet amazingly the ending sequence doesn't suffer from any lag or desync issues so if you can stomach waiting upwards of 5 Seconds every time you open a menu or transition in and out of battles and Maps this version of the game is just fine less than ideal but the overall experience remains intact despite the speed bumps it wouldn't be until Final Fantasy 6 advance for the Game Boy Advance released in November 2006 in Japan February 2007 in North America and June 2007 in Europe that more significant changes and additions would be made most of these alterations were similar to those made in the GBA versions of its predecessors such as character portraits and dialogue boxes a brighter color palette to accommodate the unlit screens of the original GBA model and the returning bestiary and music player the music quality has also taken a bit of a hit but unlike ff5 advance I found this version of ff6 is soundtrack to be disappointing to put it mildly some tracks still sound mostly fine but others didn't transition gracefully dancing mad got hit especially hard with a narrower soundscape and a lack of transitions between movements now it's just a hard cut listening closely it sounds like the soundtrack was slightly rearranged to play better to the handheld strengths and while in my opinion it's nowhere near as good as the original version it mostly gets the job done I got a a comment or two on my ff5 video putting me on blast for not mentioning mods to make certain versions of the game better I know there's a music restoration mod for the GBA version of ff6 as well as other mods for another version of the game which we'll discuss shortly I didn't bring them up then and don't intend to go into detail about them now because my goal is to examine these games as they were when they were originally released also because I wasn't aware of these mods for ff5 and that's to say nothing of that video's tight schedule which I detailed in its postmortem over on patreon I am however more aware of the modding scene surrounding ff6 and while I don't intend to go into detail about say Brave New World I can at least mention them but yes if the quality of the GBA versions music really bothers you that much there is a mod that brings it closer to the original Advance also introduces some bug fixes including one for evasion which surprisingly doesn't alter the game's difficulty all too much though it does make Mount Zoo a bit more tedious if you haven't taught at least level two magic to your party there's also a fair bit of slowdown both in battles and when flying over the world map though due to the nature of the game play it's mostly just an annoyance and thankfully the music doesn't slow down with it but one of the most significant bounds to the advanced version is the inclusion of a completely new localization written by Tom Slattery he was ecstatic to be working on what had been a staple of his childhood and was given far more leeway with his planning than Ted woy had in 1994 this led to not only a more accurate and faithful script free of censorship from Nintendo but the creation of a new font for it and its predecessor so that their text was more legible on the then new game boy micro some of the more iconic wo isms would be carried over but overall the script is a market improvement over the original however this isn't to say that this version wasn't censored in some way a few Sprites were altered in the North American release in a similar though not not identical manner as the original Super Nintendo version but more notably the scene where Celeste is beaten by Imperial soldiers was altered to the two merely taunting her this particular change was present even in the Japanese release of this version and it quickly led to speculation in the west about a possible recent kidnapping incident in Japan Slattery would put the speculation to rest in a 2012 interview with RP gamer pointing out that the original game predated the establishment of Japan's Computer Entertainment rating organization and that Square enx likely wanted the advanced version to get an all ages rating which would be denied if the game depicted violence against a restrained human being no kidnapping incident had occurred or played a part in making this decision I'm not sure how fans feel about this change but I'm personally not all too bothered by it given the choice I would have retained it as it serves to bolster the Despicable nature of the Empire but nothing is fundamentally lost with its exclusion which is good because this change would persist in all subsequent versions of the game with the exceptions of digital re-releases of the SNES and PS1 versions but unlike those versions The GBA version boasts additional postgame content just like the advanced versions of ff4 and 5 upon first entering Nikia in the world of ruin a member of the returners recognizes you and tells you about some espers that escaped the Empire's research lab just before you went there in the world of balance and there are hints pointing toward their existence strewn throughout the world three of them Leviathan cact and Gilgamesh from Final Fantasy 5 can be attained at any time after gaining access to the Falcon Leviathan is interesting as it teaches characters the water Elemental spell flood while boosting stamina by two points on level up cacar is only really notable for being the only Magicite that boosts the speed stat besides Odin which not only boosted it by just one point but is often upgraded to Ryden funny enough Ryan's Magicite is supplanted by gilgames who has the same plus two boost to strength and teaches the quick spell in addition to the new Valor spell which doubles the power of your party's next physical attack overall not a bad set meanwhile the fourth Magicite diabos teaches highle gravity magic and boosts HP gains by 100% however it can only be acquired by conquering The Game's new super boss the restored Kaiser Dragon Master of the eight Legendary Dragons released by The cataclysm it was Infamous among fans for years with several rumors as to how to encounter it flating around schoolyards and forums since the mid90s and with the release of Final Fantasy 6 Advance those rumors have finally been made real it's sequestered in the lowest depths of the new Dragon's Den bonus dungeon which is only unlocked after defeating the original eight dragons and it contains much more powerful reincarnations of each of them on the way to fight their Master like kfa's Tower the Dragon's Den requires three parties to navigate it but its status as a bonus dungeon with a super boss at the end and necessitates a bit more preparation on practically all fronts while you do gain experience points from battles here the same isn't true for AP you'll need to teach everyone the Spells they need ahead of time the dungeon is cleverly designed requiring the player to fight powered up versions of the eight dragons in order to unlock new Pathways and solve puzzles before ultimately confronting the Kaiser Dragon which is the most exhilarating battle in the entire game it has several lives each consisting of over 60,000 HP with all the powers of the other dragons Brute Force isn't enough here you have to be proactive with setting up your Buffs healing and of course casting Rays on at least one person by the end of the fight as the Beast instantly drags everyone's HP to zero upon its defeat it's a tough fight tougher than the rest of those in the den but that's why I enjoy it it finally presents a proper Challenge in a game which previously felt almost completely devoid of it I also found Kaiser's speech before the battle starts to be intriguing it explains that the Dragon's Den is meant to be a Haven for lost souls while cursing you and the rest of humanity for your capacity for violence and destruction it despises humans and you especially for your callous slaughtering of its kind depending on how you interpret its words its declaration that your time is at an end could either be specifically about the party or all of humanity obviously in terms of gameplay the Kaiser dragon's power exceeds that of kefa but I wonder if the same would hold true when the fiction is examined divorced from gameplay it's a little thing and not one worth much speculation but it did Peak my imagination but that isn't the end of the new bonus content after saving your clear data and conquering the Dragon's Den one final challenge the soul Shrine is unlocked it's basically just ff6 advances version of the Closter of Trials from its predecessor a series of rematches with enemies faced throughout the game including the dragons their reincarnated forms and the Kaiser dragon and once again the reward is just a key item acting as proof of completion I did give it a go to see how far I would get but was stonewalled by a red gutter that decided to Blitz my party with Ultima several times oh well all told Final Fantasy 6 Advance is a solid version of the game while the colors are a bit bright and the music quality is taking a few steps down in my opinion every other aspect of the game is strong enough to overcome these draws backs but if they do bother you there are fan patches to alleviate these shortcomings and the Dragon's Den while a bit annoying at times is a fantastic endgame challenge for those who crave it the GBA version would act as the basis for the 2014 mobile version from Matrix software which would make its way to PC in December 2015 and as was the case with their version of Final Fantasy 5 this version of Final Fantasy 6 is atrociously ugly it didn't take terribly long for fans to start start modding it and figuring out that this version of the game and this presumably is also the case for the mobile version of ff5 isn't simply based on the GBA version it actually includes the ROM as a reference to recreate the game with new Assets in real time by the end of January 2016 progress to restore the game's original 16-bit Sprites to the PC release was underway but visuals aside this version did sport a few quality of life improvements which were actually helpful 8way movements Auto saves quick saves and a sped up Auto Battle were all carried over from its predecessor an optional hint system was added the original version of the soundtrack was restored numerous balance tweaks were implemented and perhaps most significantly for General gameplay Cayenne Bushido techniques no longer require the player to wait for a bar to fill up to select their desired attack instead you merely select the symbol representing the technique you want to use and cayenne will charge up automatically as you issue commands to the rest of the party as was the case with Final Fantasy 5 I did not play this version of ff6 despite it technically being an updated version of the advanced Port once again part of this was because of my apprehension about the visuals and the UI but also because as of July 2021 this version has been delisted from Steam and Mobile storefronts in the leadup to the release of the Final Fantasy pixel remasters later that same year however this new version of Final Fantasy 6 would be delayed to February 2022 and screenshots from an issue of fitu in December 2021 suggested that this remaster in particular would be receiving some special treatment for this video I played the switch version of the pixel remaster that was released in April 2023 with additional quality of life improvements namely the ability to turn off Random Encounters a new pixel font option the ability to swap between the newly arranged and original soundtracks and adjustable experience AP and Gill yield Fields with the presence of these boosters I decided to try and make my playthrough of this version a bit more optimized than before leveling up as little as possible before acquiring Magicite to enhance stat growth and setting the experience multiplier to zero when learning magic so as to not waste level UPS on raising the wrong stats or having no gains at all I ended up having to level up a bit more than I was hoping to early on just to have a chance at survival and now have a much deeper respect for those who engage in low-level runs but as I pressed further my goal became more attainable those of you who have watched my videos on the first five Final Fantasy games will know that my personal feelings about the pixel remasters are fairly positive aside from some minor gripes some take issue with the aesthetic homogenization applied to these early titles as part of this collection which I understand but aside from the lack of personalization features for the UI I didn't mind this all too much until now while the backgrounds and environments are well realized the character sprites feel out of place they're often too saturated with warm colors clashing with the backdrops which themselves are a bit washed out like in the GBA version this is especially noticeable with terara and kefka the latter of whom has had a lot of the Green in his clothing replaced with more red like in the mobile version it's not exactly inaccurate when compared to a mono's artwork but it is less interesting but there are other presentational woses with the pixel remaster the blocking of some scenes is the same as it was in the GBA version despite framing no longer being an issue speaking of which the framing of the opening titles Is Not Great the magitech Walkers are larger in the frame than they were before while the snowy foreground extends higher up into the shot and the mountains and night sky have been changed from being cloaked in Inky Darkness to looking more like a Dusky lavender I hesitate to say that the shots been ruined completely but by making the Walkers larger in the frame and edging out the sight of their goal the intent and imp impact of the original shot is degraded this is even worse in the PC and mobile versions where there were no opening credits making the trudge across the snowy Plains feel more slow and listless than dramatic the minecart escape sequence at the end of the magitech research facility has also been given a much needed facelift it no longer looks like a pixelated mess but the empty gradient backdrop leaves a lot to be desired and then there's the soundtrack which waffles between a well realized version of U Matsu's original score and and sounding just a bit off the third movement of omen which plays during the opening credits is a prime example of the latter but even some of the tracks which I would place in the former category at least to my ears don't quite fit in Final Fantasy 6 but this is a purely subjective qualm I like a lot of the pixel remasters Arrangements in isolation just not always in the game and if you think this version of the score as a whole is better than the original SNES Arrangements that's perfectly fine I don't want to take that away from you however the biggest point of contention with the soundtrack seems to be with the opera house which has been given some special treatment rather than being a highresolution pixelated Recreation like one may expect it's rendered in square nx's increasingly prolific HD 2D style which sees 2D Sprites placed in 3D environments textured in a manner reminiscent of 16 and 32-bit pixel art games of the 9s with a dash of modern lighting and rather than synthesized voice samples filling in for the Opera's vocals the lyrics have actually been recorded in several different languages naturally I heard the English version first I had been avoiding listening to it until sitting down to play this version for myself and I have very mixed feelings on the one hand I understand that Celeste the character is not a trained opera singer expecting her voice to be as suited to the medium as the other performers would would be ludicrous and U Matsu kept this in mind when he half jokingly suggested doing real vocals for this version but on the other hand bringing in a vocalist who isn't trained in Opera for the part leads to the track sounding off Hannah Grace was the vocalist for the English version of celeste's Arya and she's a good singer but she's also clearly out of her element here I know that's the point and I mean no disrespect to her but it leads me to wonder where the line is when comes to actualizing the intentions behind one's art and what the audience will tolerate when that art is built at least partially on stylistic dissonance it also doesn't help that the original version left the specifics of everyone's vocals to the player's imagination out of technical necessity so anyone who's played any previous version of Final Fantasy 6 may be going into the pixel remaster with their own idea of how the Opera should sound never mind the fact that this is the only part of the game where there is anything close close to voice acting which makes the whole Enterprise feel just a bit more jarring and out of place not inherently bad just off I sampled the other foreign language versions and found that despite the language barrier I was still able to pick up on celeste's performance being unrefined the dramaturgy is consistent across every iteration yet I still found myself moved more by the Italian French and German iterations with Antonello Rondon performing the Ian version and morgane his performing the French and German versions apologies if I mispronounced their names as it turns out they're both professional opera singers Amo soprano and regular soprano respectively while Hannah Grace studied Jazz vocals at the Royal Welsh College of Music and drama most if not all of the other vocalists for Celeste were also trained opera singers who were asked to adjust their singing to sound more amateurish which may explain why they affected me more than the version sung in my native language again I mean absolutely no disrespect to Hannah Grace but judging by what was accomplished with every other version I feel that perhaps hiring a trained soprano would probably have been the better call if only so they would know how to adjust their performance to suit the role overall there are definitely aspects of the pixel remaster that irk me as someone who has played previous versions but it's by no means a bad way to experience Final Fantasy 6 for the first time personally I would sooner Rec recommend either the original SNES version ideally with the Ted Wolsey uncensored Edition patch or the advanced version the former has the original visuals and music and retains the torture scene the aformentioned patch also touches up the script to retain the charm of wo's work while being truer to the Japanese text but the latter has extra content that I feel is worth checking out for those who want more of a challenge and the brightened visuals and tenny soundtrack also have fan patches to bring them more in line with the original but if you only have a PS 4 PS5 or switch then the pixel remaster is adequate of the versions I've played the original is probably my favorite sure it isn't all that difficult and Wy script contains numerous flaws but these shortcomings fade away when I reflect on my experience as a whole I suppose as long as you're looking to engage with the World characters story and themes it doesn't really matter which version you play the heart is still there and it's been there ever since its original release on April 2nd [Music] [Music] 1994 fantasy [Music] the anticipation for Final Fantasy 6 had been building for months leading up to release in addition to TV and print ads a final fantasy Festival was held for two weekends in February first in Tokyo from the 11th to the 13th and then in Osaka on the 19th and 20th FF Festa 94 featured the opportunity to play Final Fantasy 6 ahead of its release an exhibit featuring the artwork of Yoshi taka Amano and even a special fully articulated model of the magitech armor featured in the game that was available to purchase for a whopping 1.2 million yen or approximately $1,555 at the time despite the heavy snowfall the event was well attended and the excitement for the latest installment grew the week Final Fantasy 6 was released was slower than usual when it came to game releases as remarked in that week's issue of fitu which only featured 12 games in their regular cross review section the best pick blurb joked that other companies probably didn't want to compete with Final Fantasy 6 and based on their panelist reviews they may have been right to do so Final Fantasy 6 scored a 37 out of 40 the highest yet in Series history handily surpassing the 34 bestowed upon ff5 and barely nudging out ff4 36 moreover it would be tied for famu's best rated Game of the Year alongside Ridge Racer that December the game's critical success would be reflected by staggering sales numbers selling over 2.55 million copies by the end of the year exceeding the total lifetime sales of its immediate predecessor which had sold 2.4 million units and becoming Square's most successful game ever at the time in an interview with KN aawara for electronic gaming monthly Square's publicity manager expressed that he hoped this success would be reflected in the North American market like in Japan critic were positively glowing with their praise egm not only gave the game a 36 out of 40 highlighting stunning music and visuals with an unmatched level of emotional engagement but also named it their game of the month and recognized it with an editor's Choice Award Game Informer and Game Pro would each award it near perfect scores in their respective November issues with the latter citing the only shortcoming in scary Larry's opinion being the chibi sized characters among the big magazines reviewing the game at the time the big outlier was Nintendo Power which while not outright negative were certainly more measured in their score for the game with an overall rating of 14.9 out of 20 citing play control as its weakest aspect Final Fantasy 6 was an instant hit being the bestselling SNES game at babes the month of its release it went on to be the eighth bestselling game in the United States in 1994 however its debut on Nintendo power's top 20 charts would be at the number 15 spot only two places ahead of Final Fantasy 4 which would remain the following month while its successor was nowhere to be found but come the next issue in January 1995 Final Fantasy 6 would return to the newly Rec christened power charts in the number three spot peaking at number two in February and March it would stay in the power charts for 48 consecutive months until Nintendo Power stopped tracking SNES games in January 1999 sales figures for the North American SNES version specifically haven't been released but based on the information that's available it can be extrapolated that it sold around 500,000 copies a notable step up from its predecessor in the territory however to the upper brasset Square including hironobu sakauchi the game underperformed in the West after all this was when the company set their barometer for Success at 1 million units even after the release of the PlayStation version which in North America had been bundled with the then previously unreleased Final Fantasy 5 Final Fantasy 6 would only manage to sell 860,000 copies outside Japan by March 2004 with about 364,000 of them coming from the AFF forementioned Anthology bundle still very respectable but not enough to be considered Successful by square and while the Game Boy advanced version of the game would far decently well in Japan selling 137,000 units the week it was released in fall 2006 and 281,000 units overall in 7 months it wouldn't sell even half as many copies in North America in its first month only moving about 64,000 units much like with Final Fantasy 5 Advance however this could partially be attributed to the Game Boy Advance being phased out despite there being a gba slot on the Nintendo DS why pay $40 for a game for the old system when a game for the new system cost just as much but while sales in the US and Europe continued to fall short critical reception in these territories was consistently strong and spotting Final Fantasy 6 ranked as not just one of the best final fantasies not just one of the best RPGs but as one of the greatest video games of all time grew increasingly common over the years when confronted with this Western appreciation for the game sakaguchi would always be perplexed as he wouldn't have thought the sales figures would have led to such an outpouring of love for the game today he jokingly asks Western fans if it's their favorite quote why didn't you buy it back then but it's not the lists and rankings churned out by Gaming news sites that affirm Final Fantasy 6's impact and Legacy but the strong adoration it continues to engender from fans nearly 30 years later it isn't uncommon to hear Western fans Champion it as their favorite in the franchise how they were so engaged with its cast moved by the Opera House scene stunned by kfa's destruction of the world or moved to Tears by celeste's attempted suicide the game is so celebrated that its original North American version would be included as one of the 21 titles bundled with the Super Nintendo classic edition mini console in 2017 but in a way I think the biggest signifier of the game's Legacy can be seen in the distant world's concert series which in 2012 would bring the music of the game's iconic dream oath Opera to Royal Albert Hall in London the very Concert Hall that inspired the look of the game's own opera house and they would do it again in 2017 it all came full circle Final Fantasy 6 would also be the earliest entry in the franchise which would see one of its characters appear in tetsuya nura's Kingdom Hearts series with Setzer making a brief appearance in the early hours of Kingdom Hearts 2 as Twilight Town's incumbent struggle champion this is how I was first introduced to the character and at the time I thought little of him after having played ff6 myself while I can appreciate the direct call back to one of his more iconic lines my life is a ship in your pile time to Annie up I find his attempt at goting roxus into throwing the title match to be pretty out of character hey rack how about you throw the match for me let me win and I'll make it worth your while but I digress there are certainly those who feel that Final Fantasy 6 is overrated whether it be because of somewhat lackluster gameplay or the seeming aimlessness of the disconnected scenario of the world of Ruin after Decades of Praise heaped upon it by fans with the word Masterpiece regularly entering the conversation and an equal amount of time building and expanding on the genre including seeing other games that take inspiration from it it's understandable that some people would feel that it either isn't all that special or that its flaws are more detrimental than its fans like to think such voices are in the minority and while I respect these opinions and agree that the game has its flaws I feel that it strengths more than than make up for those flaws in recent years there's been demand both from fans and employees within Square enex for a complete remake of Final Fantasy 6 with cuttingedge graphics and full voice acting even sakaguchi is eager to see such a project come to fruition and while yoshinori katas hasn't ruled out the idea he has expressed that such a prospect would be difficult and that it wouldn't materialize for quite some time while I understand the desire for such a remake After experiencing the pixel remaster rendition of the Opera house I'm not sure a remake could live up to what's already in my head for these characters but that's just me when it was first released Final Fantasy 6 set a new standard for RPGs and it broke the mold for what a Final Fantasy game could be no longer did it have to center around crystals now crystalline objects could merely be a facet of the world and Story the setting didn't have to be medieval just Fantastical and the characters could be complex and engaged aging without having to base their personalities or arcs on their job class the possibilities were now endless and it was all thanks to Final Fantasy [Music] 6 after an intense velopment cycle hironobu sakaguchi Yoshi Nori katas and the rest of their team were elated to see Final Fantasy 6 reach such dizzying New Heights and once they had recovered from the hellacious crunch they were ready to get to work on the next game in the series as they were want to do however the video game industry was already preparing itself for the next Leap Forward Nintendo and Sega had already begun to pull back the curtains on their new consoles the Nintendo Ultra 64 and the Sega Saturn both systems would boast the ability to render detailed 3D Graphics in real time with Nintendo having partnered with silicon Graphics as part of their Project Reality initiative and Sega flaunting the Saturn's use of CD ROMs for its games once again sakaguchi and the rest of the final fantasy team were at a Crossroads but now it wasn't just a matter of what platform to develop for but also whether the seventh game in the series would stick to familiar 2D Sprites or make the leap into the third [Music] dimension [Music] hello hey sakaguchi it's Hy oh Hy I wasn't expecting to hear from you so soon congratulations on Dragon Quest 5 oh thank you you're too kind anyway I know you're neck deep in ff5 right now but I've been mulling over what we talked about with Toriyama when we were in America and I just want you to know that I'm all in really are you sure oh yeah even if it takes years between the three of us we could create a game unlike any other well then I guess we better get [Music] started [Music]

Channel: Andrew Bluett

Views: 144,330

Keywords: video essay, analysis, Andrew Bluett, LordDrubie, retrospective, review, FF7 Rebirth, Gestahl, Gestalt Psychology, gametrailers retrospective, Chrono Trigger, Advance, GBA, FF6, JRPG, role-playing game, Super Nintendo, FF3, SNES, retro, localization, Ted Woolsey, Square, Squaresoft, Anthology, PS1, Square Enix, Pixel Remaster, chocobo, masterpiece, best game, Final Fantasy XVI, Final Fantasy XIV, Dawntrail, documentary, warring triad, remake, video game, PlayStation 5, resonant arc, opera house

Id: qj_SiCJo_zM

Length: 300min 25sec (18025 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2023