The iconic RPG Final Fantasy VI has powerfully influenced the direction of not just the FF series itself but also modern gaming. You can fairly argue that it is the first truly great console RPG, period. The story and gameplay have deeply affected not only the Final Fantasy fan base (which is, admittedly, already susceptible to such otherworldly charm) but also many creators and players in both the U.S. and Japan, FFVI has, for a very long stretch of time, reigned atop many journalists’ and fans’ lists as the best game of its kind. And even if it’s no longer the undisputed champ in that regard, a case can easily be made that it ought to remain near or at the top of any conversation about what constitutes the summit of console RPG gaming.
Final Fantasy VI achieves narrative brilliance through its storytelling. It leads us deep into the lives of a multitude of characters and uses an ensemble approach to melt those tale-telling barriers that create distance or shades of difference in empathy. Our heroes in the story are on a quest—a hero’s journey—for their own good, the good of the planet, and a few for the good of their bad. It’s a rich narrative revolution that happened when the time was right.
Final Fantasy VI was the first game I became engrossed in. I felt like a character in a novel that I had a direct hand in guiding. It was an immediate experience, and in a form that wasn’t at all immediate to me, then I wasn’t opening the poor, old Dragon Warrior cartridge. It was a big deal, and it unraveled in a way that felt like a big deal as well. It was a sprawling and epic story in a way that took time to tell. It had way more characters than anything I had taken to in the same way, and it had a distinct way about it to boot in that it really did seem like a tale of Warriors of Light. And then came the clown.
The most memorable moment in Final Fantasy VI was when Celes tried to kill herself. After the world had ended and all of her friends were dead or gone, Celes found herself all alone on a tiny, pathetic island. She had only Cid to talk to, and Cid wasn’t feeling too well; it seemed many of their meals consisted of poisonous fish, after all. Celes sang a melancholy song atop a cliff and leaped and then the display cut to black. It was much different from the pathetic deaths of Aeris or Tidus, because Celes did something that might seem unthinkable and completely out of the blue to any preteen or adolescent girl playing the game.
A strong area of this game is in its excellent rendering of the main antagonist, Kefka Palazzo. While many villains in the Final Fantasy series are depicted as tragic or misguided, Kefka isn’t one of them. There’s nothing redeemable about him, or even understandable when it turns out, by the game’s end, that he has betrayed everyone–including the Emperor Gestahl, for his own ends and has ascended to godhood. He is simply a force of dark, chaotic energy whose aim is to annihilate, whose laughter (as chilling a sound effect as has ever been heard in a video game) suggests he would be perfectly content ruling over a landscape of pure death and destruction.
Not only is Final Fantasy VI a storytelling masterpiece, but it also shines in gameplay and mechanics. The game has an incredibly deep and flexible battle system. Characters can equip with magicite that eventually offers moves and even character summons called espers. Naturally, characters in the FF world have certain strengths, but the use of magicite reminiscent of the Job System in Final Fantasy V, makes for a game in which you can basically tune characters to carry out your personal strategy.
The distinctive feature of Final Fantasy VI is its variegated cast of characters. Each has a personal history and a unique set of skills to bring to the table; none are just carbon copies of another generic warrior or mage. And in FFVI, where in some previous installments the characters have often been indistinguishable in battle because their skill sets were so similar (everyone had a basic fight command that did the same thing, for example), here the characters have abilities that set them apart both from one another and from the average denizens you encounter as you go along. Not only does each have a basic fight command, as in lots of RPGs, but in addition, most of them have one or two special commands that only they can use.
The game presents an idea unfamiliar to most players: it allows lead players to control several character parties all at once. This is as intense as it sounds. When your group holes up in Narshe to defend the city against Kefka, the very bad man we love to hate, you’re essentially pitting two RPG parties against his nutso onslaught. Party One takes the left path; Party Two takes the right. And these multi-party battles retain all the excitement and tension we know and love.
I adore the World of Ruin, the second act of Final Fantasy VI. Once Kefka has almost literally brought about the end of the world, the game’s world ceases to exist as we knew it and is reassembled in a new form. This broken world is seemingly in two parts: a shattered Northern continent and the shattered remnants of our once-proud Southern continent. All of the characters have been thrown or blown to the wind in one way or another, and our job (as the protagonists) is to people our new vessel with meaning by traveling the world to get the band back together while (separately) unraveling what Kefka has done.
Also pacing the game well is, of course, the building of intensity for action events and then the quieting down once those are over. The opera house sequence was definitely a showstopper, and I still think of it as one of the key events in video game history, Moore said. The expert way in which Brant orchestrated this very operatic moment was successful and life-affirming. That was much more than graphics or sound, it was about the story Figaro, the Empire, Setzer, Mario, Celes, and the Star Piece and about the moment when you were playing a particular piece of the story and the narrative’s song sang so loudly.
Final Fantasy VI can hardly be discussed without touching on its extraordinary musical score. The game remains an audacious adventure with a structure that sometimes defies traditional storytelling, and that goes for its musical accompaniment as well. Yet, even by the lofty standards of previous Final Fantasy installments and that already augmented for the Fantasy format, this is a soundtrack that stretches well beyond typical video game fare.
From the poignant and melancholic Terra’s Theme to the triumphant and stirring Fanfare, the soundtrack of Final Fantasy VI encompasses an astonishingly pushy and directional range of musical styles that continue to surpass much of the medium’s subsequent work, their selection and sequencing within the game, and the dialogue that the great composer Nobuo Uematsu has been working from. Uematsu scored an opera. He not only oversaw the Aria di Mezzo Carattere and an underground version of the overworld theme, but he also composed all the songs for the game and most of its underscore, and befitting what a lot of direction those songs had taken and the sequencing that was much praised in the instrumentalization that is to say, for the use of the orchestra.
Equally unforgettable are the game’s battle anthems. Battle Theme and Decisive Battle give the combat sequences an added weight. They have what I can only call a driving militarism to their sound. And who can forget Kefka’s chilling, unmistakable theme? Its notes are so discordant that as soon as The Unforgettable Laugh starts playing it becomes a genuine signature tune for gaming’s most infamous villain.
As for the last stage theme in the music of Final Fantasy VI, “Dancing Mad”, it may be the best. The composer himself called it among his top three” most important pieces for the entire soundtrack of that game!
What really stands out in the soundtrack is the incredible effect of the leitmotifs. When you hear those musical refrains attached to a certain character, you can actually feel that character in your bones. Do you like them? Are you afraid for them? You do? Well, then, the music’s got you: those leitmotifs are pure musical genius. They are the DNA of the basic tune that is being translated through the whole score.
The influence of the music isn’t confined to the game: The pieces are performed in concert halls around the world, presented on several albums, and covered by numerous artists. Many composers and musicians have found plenty of inspiration in the music that Nobuo Uematsu wrote for Final Fantasy VI. I don’t confine my admiration for the soundtrack to nostalgia, either: Final Fantasy VI is still securely in my collection of top games I’ve ever played. And if playing games were a form of listening to music Final Fantasy VI would definitely register in my collection of top tunes.
Final Fantasy VI has a far-reaching legacy. Many games that have come out since its initial release bear its influence. It is a game cited by fans and critics alike as a favorite in the long-running Final Fantasy series. Games released in more recent years, ones that players keep returning to, or ones that are beloved by players for various reasons, all owe something to Final Fantasy VI. They’re like branches on a tree, the tree being the RPG genre that have grown outward since VI was an influence on their respective development teams.
One of the most notable elements of the Final Fantasy VI video game’s legacy is its excellent and groundbreaking storytelling. Its characters, while not as visually striking as those in Final Fantasy VII, have a dimension and depth that give players a genuine emotional investment in them. The game itself is not very plot-heavy, but it gets top marks in all other categories that make up a good story. The game is an important milestone in setting the standard for future RPG video games to have a depth and complexity of narrative that had previously only been seen in books and films.
How has it influenced subsequent games? We can look to its mechanics and overall game design for the answer. The magicite system it pioneered, think of your party equipping Espers, and then those Espers teaching your characters magic and specific abilities, has proved influential enough by itself to count as a precursor to material a in Final Fantasy VII or to the quartz system in Trails of Cold Steel. Both those games, by the way, are much better with their systems than this one is with its, but reliable old Final Fantasy VI didn’t screw up the way that some poor, unfortunate RPG might have screwed up a similar system in development.
Final Fantasy VII left a seemingly permanent mark on its massive fanbase, and on those who painstakingly created it. For many, it still ranks as the most beloved art of the “Final Fantasy” series—whether for its seemingly boundless 2D world, its ensemble cast of supremely creative characters, or to its significance as an early and very valuable shift toward increasingly mature, character-driven storytelling in videogames. For those of us who grew up with it, who have since spent many years attempting to understand why it was so good and why it left such an enduringly positive mark on our lives, it’s clear that our love and respect for the game translates directly to our participation in its superlative fan community.
When I look back at all the time I spent with Final Fantasy VI, I’m hit with this awesome feeling of appreciation. The game really was a major staple for me when I was a pre-teen. It’s sad to think of how so many kids these days won’t get to have the same experience with the game(s) that I did. But that’s what was so great about Final Fantasy VI, even if you already put hundreds upon hundreds of hours into it, you could always go back and almost re-live the game all over again, re-discovering, or sometimes even just remembering, all the secrets that it held.
