So begins the finest Japanese style RPG of all time.
FFVI was released in North America in October of 1994. Though it was the sixth game in the series, it was only the third game released in the United States and thus w
as titled Final Fantasy III. It's still what I think of when I think about RPGs. Graphically it was one of the most beautiful games of it's time, it has one of the best soundtracks to ever grace a 16 bit game, and it had one of the most fleshed out and enjoyable combat systems of its day.None of these things make really make Final Fantasy VI stand out today, however. What keeps FFVI relevant are the story and characters. It was horribly translated in its first iteration. Some concepts that require entire phrases to express in English can be represented by single characters in Japanese, and because of this, there were entire lines of dialog that had to be omitted from the American version because of technical limitations.
None of it matters. The game just has... moments. The Opera, The Falcon, dozens of others. And the characters, oh my the characters. It wasn't pure good vs pure evil... at least not from the start. You had characters in it for money, honor, women, people running from their past, and people trying to find their future. Green haired women with amnesia actually weren't cleche in 1994 either. FFVI had a way
of making you genuinely care about the little sprites you moved around on screen. Some of them die. Others don't turn out the way you'd like them to, and that's part of what makes the game so great. Good wins in the end, but it's far from cut and dry.Final Fantasy VI looks like a cartoon, like all JRPGs it plays like an interactive version of Microsoft Excel, but thematically it reached so far beyond anything else of its day. It's not Dickens, but in the Relm of video games the story may as well be classical literature. FFVI might seem a bit trite today, but that's only because so much of what came after it borrowed from it so heavily. If you can deal with JRPGs at all, you owe it to yourself to play it, if you can't, well... there's always this.
