After playing Final Fantasy 8 I moved back a bit to play Final Fantasy 6. FF6 was originally released in Japan as FF6, but since they skipped some when porting them to the US, most people played this game originally as FF3 in the SNES. I played the Playstation 1 re-release. And coming off of the beautiful, revolutionary graphics in FF8, it was a bit hard to go backwards to a 16bit game, but the game itself was so awesome that it was easy to overlook the graphics.
Now this game has a lot going on, so I’m gonna break it really barebones:
Terra, a magical being, is found, raised, and brainwashed by the evil empire to try to take over the world. She meets people who free her and the party goes off to try to save the world from said evil empire. Except it’s not the empire so much as Kefka, the most evil awesome badass villain evar. About halfway through the game Kefka beats the party and destroys the world. Yep. The bad guy actually succeeds. Metal. The rest of the game is you going around, trying to find if your party members are alive or dead, finding how they (and the rest of the world) has dealt with the apocalypse, and getting back the hero bug to face Kefka again.
Yeah, that’s the barebones. And I say that because so much other story happens in this movie video game. I just Freudian slipped that. I’m leaving it, because even though this is a text-based game, and you do have to read, a lot, it’s very cinematic. You care about these 8-bit characters.
Final Fantasy 6, unlike several titles in the FF series, has a strong group of main characters. Each character (even some of the hidden characters) have at least some kind of backstory, as well as development, and usually their stories are highly interesting—or at least entertaining. Everyone who played this game had their favorite characters and party, many with lasting impressions. My personal choice party usually consisted of Locke, Terra, Sabin and Mog.
What Squeenix Needs to Fix
Release this game on the PS3. Update the graphics, go 3D character rendering if you want to, add voice actors if you feel you need to, but don’t change anything else. This game was perfect just the way it was. The 2D world left for interesting puzzles and hidden goodies. The fight system was old skool, turn based, I go you go, and that works. Even the cheesey and occasionally campy lines work for the overall mesh between silliness and complete horror as the game effortlessly flows from lighthearted to “He blew up the world!” You really need that balance because there is so much dark in the story.
Seriously, the only thing I would improve is the graphics, maybe an occasional cut scene (more than the 2 we got with the rerelease), and then releasing it on the PS3.
If you can find the GBA 'port', they added even more stuff - an extra island and a few more Espers. Very nice, if you have a GameCube with the GameBoy Player attachment thingy.
ReplyDelete@Matt: One of my biggest problems with replaying older games are the graphics. I really want a full-sized, beautifully rendered, FMV quality, PS3 version of the game, where the only thing they updated is actually the graphics, but keep everything else the same. 3D Dot Game Hero's style maps, fight sequence and system exactly the same... Here's hoping, but I don't think that Squenix will ever actually do it :(
ReplyDeleteHonestly, it's the graphics more than anything else that will turn me off of the older games. I can deal with the sound, the text reading, the simplistic game play (I actually prefer the menu/turn based fight systems). I have trouble looking at not pretty things. (Did I just admit that I'm shallow? Suck.)