 So, Final Fantasy VI or Final Fantasy III is it's called in the United States. Why is this game such a big deal? It's probably the gigantic story or the 14 playable characters, which is to this day the most in the series, or maybe the main villain, Kefka, or maybe the battle system, or maybe the incredible soundtrack. It could be any number of things, but be forewarned, I'm not going to slobber all over the game, but I will start with the obvious highlights. For a brief overview of the story, there's an evil empire and there's a rebellion, referred to as the Returners. Some of the evil empire's slaves named Terra escapes their control after discovering an Esper, or a magical being, but Terra has no memory of anything about her past. Some dude named Locke stumbles upon her and agrees to bring her back to the returners until she can regain her memory. She eventually agrees to help the returners fight the empire, and that leads to all sorts of wacky adventures, including two estranged brothers, an exiled empire general, a swordsman whose family was murdered, some crazy ass dude from the woods, and like a dozen other people who were given backgrounds as well. What I really like about the story is how high the stakes are raised. I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that suicide is involved. Offing yourself in a Super Nintendo game? Woof, that's heavy. And the way it's written and the way it comes about is completely organic. You really do feel the weight of the successes and failures that have been throughout. But yeah, the story takes no shortcut. It's as full and complete a story as you'll find in a video game to this day, so if you're into that, here's your goldmine. Another major positive is the battle system, which is very detailed, featuring all sorts of cool stuff like customizable magic, formations, relics, tons of items, tons of equipment, and special abilities. Sabin, for instance, has you input a sequence of Street Fighter style commands to execute attacks. His brother Edgar has a weird set of tools to choose from. Locked steel stings from enemies. Realm, uh, draws people? Okay. Setzer has a, uh, uh, slot machine? Okay, whatever works. The point is, they do a great job making each character truly unique. It's very well done, and it holds up really well over time. It's by far the most enjoyable part of the game. My only criticism of the battle system is that it could be a little more balanced. The game really encourages you to employ all sorts of tactical maneuvering with formations and equipment or whatever. But guys like Sabin, Edgar, and Cyan are so powerful that you can just wipe out any enemy with the same attacks over and over. Regardless of what else you do, I know RPGs are pretty easy by nature because of the ability to grind, but you pretty much have to disqualify yourself from using certain attacks if you want to make the battles even a little interesting. Still, I don't think that's a big deal. It's not a deal breaker or anything like that. Final Fantasy VI also shows the right way to do quick time events, particularly during the opera, for example. You fight your way to the villain up in the rafters while the show continues below. You have to make sure you select the right lines in the opera or you'll get booted out. It's an interesting idea, and there's all sorts of little instances like that that add quite a bit of variety. So I completely understand how someone could become obsessed with this game because there's an overwhelming amount of special abilities you can obtain for certain characters. There's collecting all the espers, there's having each character learn every spell from each esper, plus there's stuff like the Colosseum, which is a rather ingenious idea where you can bet on items and battles to win better items that are otherwise unobtainable. The OCD collector gamer type would be in Hog Heaven here. Now, here's the part where I have to be careful because I'm going to criticize Final Fantasy VI, but let me break it down this way. If you look at the opera scene on YouTube, you'll find comments like, one of the most touching moments in video game history and it's such an iconic scene and I had tears in my eyes and... It's like, okay, why is that? What exactly is it that makes this scene so emotional? Because here's exactly how the scene comes about. Our heroes need to find a way to get into the evil empire, so they decide to seek out this rich dude, who's a setser, who owns the only airship in the world. They find him at this opera house trying to get out some broad named Maria, who's playing the lead in that night's show, and he plans to kidnap her so they can elope or something. Some villain conspires to mess things up for some unexplained reason and to protect Maria, you switch her out for Celis, a sorceress who is in your party who just happens to look almost exactly like her. And so Celis agrees to perform the opera accordingly and does so. And that's it. It's strange because the opera seems like it should be this big sweeping emotional moment and yeah, the music is undeniably fantastic, but it's not this big moment at all. The words behind what she's singing don't really have any meaning because she's merely filling a role. She's not singing about anyone, but the character in the opera. There's not even a read between the lines meeting anywhere. In fact, the entire scene isn't significant in the slightest to the main storyline. So then what's the point? I think the developers at the time wanted to make the biggest game possible for the sake of demonstrating what was possible in a video game. Remember, this was 1994, so many, many people still dismissed video games as simple nonsense for kids. The development team wanted to prove something and why not? They should absolutely be commended for their efforts for making an incredible game. But it needs to be pointed out that the story is just huge for the sake of being huge. Why? To serve as a high profile example of how storytelling can be done in a video game. And as a result, there's many, many playable characters for no other reason than to have many, many playable characters. There's an opera scene just for the sake of having an opera scene. And yeah, at the time it's very impressive, but now it rings a little hollow and a little self-indulgent and it makes the game more of an exhibition and a little more of a show-off instead of being immersive and engaging. Oh yeah, the depth and the narrative makes Chrono Trigger look like an episode of DuckTales by comparison. But by the time you get to Cyan's backstory, which is really over the top, or when you're introduced to Strego and Realm and all the stuff with that general Leo guy, it's like, enough already, I just don't care about these people. Let's get on with it, please. Another issue with having such a huge story is that it leaves too much out of the player's control. There are times when you can't help but feel like a gopher running your party from one long story sequence to the next without much to do in between. I know this is kind of an old, tired talking point, especially with modern games, but if I wanted to read a book, I'd go read a book. I'd like my game to actually be interactive more often than not. Don't get me wrong, a huge part of what makes Final Fantasy VI unique is the narrative, and there aren't many other games on the Super Nintendo that had me playing for hours just to see what would happen next. For instance, it truly has one of the all-time great video game villains in Kefka, who is one screwed-up character. He's like the video game version of Randy Macho Man Savage. He's always entertaining, but he's always got this unstable edge that can freak you out. There are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, like when you meet Gaw and random Kefka stuff. And there are a lot of sappy moments, too. Like, geez, could they lay it on any thicker with Cyan's backstory? And some of it works, and some of it doesn't, but it does have a very satisfying ending. I just wish the story was a bit more focused, like, you know, just get rid of a few characters, maybe? I don't mean for the criticism to come across that harshly, but it does go with the territory of being such a high-profile game that's been raved about for 20 years. I do want to get across the fact that I do enjoy the hell out of Final Fantasy VI, and there shouldn't be any doubt on any aspect that it's easily in the top 10 Super Nintendo games ever made. And yeah, ultimately Final Fantasy VI is great because of its wealth of creativity and battles, because of the incredible soundtrack, and because of its undeniably memorable story. But as time goes on, it rings just a little bit hollow for me because it comes across as an overwrought exhibition of game design, albeit a very impressive one.