Retro Revisits: Final Fantasy VI

By Matt Conlin

This is a tough call but I’m about to break the mold and say that Final Fantasy VI is my favorite video game in the series. That’s right: VI (or III depending on who you ask). It had all the elements that made me want to play it. It had a good story, a great battle battle system, and awesome music thanks to Nobuo Uematsu. I could pick this game up and literally play it for hours.

**Warning Minor Spoilers Ahead**

It stars Terra, a lost girl being hunted by the government, and more specifically a psychopathic magician who wants to purify and rule the world (shocker) and the thief who tries to save her life throughout all this. Sound familiar? Yeah, it does. Because they did the exact same thing again in Final Fantasy VII except they changed a few of the minor details around. Terra is, ultimately, Aerith. She is an Ancient and comes from an Old World order of magic sprites. And of course the government needs her magic to power their weapons but doing so might destroy the planet. So you can go cry to your Mommy about how I’m being mean and making fun of Final Fantasy VII, the supposed BEST RPG EVER, or you can accept the fact that it has roots in its predecessor and take your pick as to your personal favorite.

**Spoilers End**

The game itself has a very easy battle system. Unlike the previous games, these characters are not interchangeable with their jobs. They have expertise in whatever it is they were meant to do, meaning Terra will always do magic, Locke will always be a thief. You can learn new things and some of the spells and powers can be mastered but it’s fairly straight forward.

The other big step forward with this game is that it gives you freedom to move around to an extent and explore the world but it still clues you in better as to where you must go. The games before it allowed a lot more open movement on the map and far less detail as to where you were supposed to go next. The Final Fantasies after it had more claustrophobic maps or eventually even gave up on the world map all together. Having this middle ground is what made this video game– and the two after it– so strong.

And that concludes my opinion. So now I leave you with this fun intro video for the PlayStation reformat: