final fantasy VI play-through thread, kupo!

you have to finish this game if you haven't finished it before. the final dungeon + battle + ending are fantastic.

i pledge to finish this game. enough is enough, i'm 30 years old, it's time to beat final fantasy VI

this is one of the only games i have finished in my life. i am bad at finishing games

played this way too late last night. i'm about 5 hours in just reunited the team at Narshe.

dayo have you played VI before? if so how far did you get before you quit?

Yeah I got up to the part where sabins blitzes started being like hadouken moves

I might have had an airship

we're definitely playing final fantasy VII
― 乒乓, Monday, November 4, 2013

I just lost Galuf. What do I do?? :(

afaict the thread title definitely says we're playing final fantasy VII. am i crazy here?? xp

Ha, when I played this it was on emu, with just a keyboard, and my approach was just to never fuck around with Sabin's blitzes at all. It was a minor handicap for a certain period of the game but nothing that really affected anything. I later had it on a cartridge and my strategy had become hard-wired - I never did get into Sabin at all. Wish I could remember what I named him though....all my characters were named after anime heroes IIRC.

Thread title says "VI" on my screen....?

on my computer this thread is about faceball 2000 wtf

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f6/Final_Fantasy_Mystic_US_boxart.jpg

help i'm stuck

Thread title says "VI" on my screen....?

― Doctor Casino, Monday, November 4, 2013 1:06 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark

Not sure what's going on with your computer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2QrWzsfghA

cause seriously, it says vi

forks please take your final fantasy vi junk to the final fantasy VI thread: Final Fantasy VI: Kind of Playable in Retrospect

this thread is about people who are playing through final fantasy VII

so simpsons youtube macro otm then

http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Confuse_(Status)

I played about 2.5 hrs, just beat Vargas. Currently braving the river rapids on a raft. This game is fun! I played this before but I don't think I even got to the Opera scene.

hey buddy, take the FFVI talk to the FFVI thread: Final Fantasy VI: Kind of Playable in Retrospect

dayo, no.

this time dayo has taken it TOO FAR.

http://i.imgur.com/frmRrXC.png

leave some things sacred, eh

Does dayo have mod powers?

on that sephiroth shit

forks, please take your FFVII talk to the appropriate thread: Final Fantasy VII: Kind of Playable in Retrospect

this thread is ONLY for the disccusion of FFVI.

thanks.

dayo casts meta
it's not that effective...

making me feel like http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060303163640/finalfantasy/images/0/01/Fanatics.PNG

Cyan's introduction is pretty cool. You take control of him, walk up to the opposing general, and declare "I am your worst nightmare". Then you defeat the invading army in a single battle! I wonder if that was a Rambo reference made in the original Japanese, or if it is something added in later. Is the SNES original the most accurate translation? Ideally I would have the original Japanese Super Famicom ROM with a English patch. Has anyone had success with one of those?

So my battle w Kefka was going badly, the ninja is the only one left alive in my party, and his dog comes out of nowhere and saves us! So cool!

Constantly switching through characters is something I didn't expect, or have forgotten about somehow, but it's a really cool game mechanic. I'm glad they brought it back for parts of VII.

This music in this is amazing, of course. Music is pulling pretty much 80% of the weight for every Final Fantasy game.

SNES had a great sleigh bell sample.

Kind of amazing NOA let the scene stay in of Cyan finding his murdered family, that was horrifying!

xxxpost It's a nice way of making sure you don't, later on, just lean on only a few characters you've really maxed out...you're sort of forced to spend time with all of them and their stories, and that in turn makes you build up a kind of affection for them. Or even kind of fill in some blanks imagining their relationships - X and Y both went through the big mountain adventure together, back at the beginning of the game! Makes it feel more like LOTR or name your other source material - the "party" is always getting reshuffled and scattered, not everybody was there for everything. At some point I think there are too many characters and it kind of breaks this - FF7 went back to a much smaller cast, for better or worse.

(also thinking of this: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2006/07/i-was-a-goblin-but-i-wasnt-a-hobbit/ )

it's very well done how many of the character relationships are sketched out in this game; there's a lot purposely left out and implied

VII continued this tradition somewhat - at least, it started that way, but then it kinda gave way to crazy over-exposition fast. but VI did a more impressive job drawing the wide epic cast, IMO, especially in the before/after world divide

replayed this just a year or two ago and it held up better than any non-chrono trigger jrpg i can think of. probably the best game ending ever

the mode 7 march to narsh over the opening credits is still square's best 'cinematic' moment imo

the world of ruin felt revelatory to me as a kid

otm

These NPCs are pretty wonderful. I imagine most of them have one line (well, maybe 2, after the world switches over) but rather than some procedurally-generated dialog (filled with weird made-up words that do nothing but make you feel like you are in a role playing game) they tell a story. It is probably a simple folk tale or old fable shared long ago by East and West. Or maybe an everyday drama like someone mad about a broken clock. Or maybe a joke that has no purpose to the plot or open world, but adds to the overall aesthetic. 16-bit Cyber-Steampunk retro-futurism.

Replaying it, with the original chiptune and pixelart masterful 16-bit presentation, is a wonderful trip into nostalgia. Totally awesome! Living On The Edge! These games have some revolutionary ideas - zen/animist/cultist/wicca/capitapocalyptic/Marxist global digital revolution. Storytelling has taken a HUGE step back from these earlier, sketched-out, pixellated masterpieces from the Golden Saucer Age.

Mode 7!!

man i loved this game so much. just reading the wiki on it; i have no recollection of umaro at all

pretty sure i had a savegame where i got every character up to lvl99

Umaro was pretty easy to miss and for me a waste of time but still so sweet that they included stuff like that for you to find (or not).

one thing that's nice about playing this on an emulator is that grinding is waaaaay easier. i can set SNES 9X to 15x speed, tap left and right on the world map, and hold down the attack button and get through a random encounter every 5 seconds or so. last night i logged about 2 hours of grinding time in about 7-8 minutes.

it's kind of a dangerous feature, actually, because now i'll be superleveled for the next section and it won't be challenging.

in recollection i think the opera sequence is one of the best bits of any video game i've ever played

xp tbf it's probably one of the least challenging FF games as it is, and they intentionally give you plenty of room to grind

i dipped back into this again, just navigated the lethe river and am at the crossroads. i remember being really excited by this part, the idea that i could play the game in different orders. i wish they did more with this because iirc there really isn't anything interesting that comes out of doing the storylines in any specific order except the fact that you can deequip yr party at crucial moments to get access to certain new items or w/e.

again iirc if you do the wor characters out of the order they sort of nudge you into you can trigger certain cutscenes that you won't get otherwise. i remember purposefully skipping sabin in one of my playthroughs as a kid because i liked the idea of playing the game on my own terms, i would do the same with the palaces in link to the past, although doing those in non-suggested order is actually p helpful.

also i want to, again, admire just how much stuff there is in this game, how many random chests and items and cutscenes the hid throughout the game

one of my friends recently was telling me that life post-transition felt like living in the world of ruin, this cataclysmic event that ripped everything apart

since 2016 i've kind of been struggling with... for me, this world is a dystopia. no question. i've kept asking myself over and over, with the world being fucked the way it is, why i bother. i had this kind of idea in my head of "dystopia" as equating "world not worth living in". pain and suffering and injustice and all that crap.

thinking about ff vi as a dystopia just now, something just sort of clicked. for me games aren't about winning, they're about existing in a particular space, a particular time.

the first half of ff vi was fine and all. it was really on rails. a lot of set pieces. i guess it was a decent enough story and all but i wasn't really invested in it. like i have more agency in the story than i do in, say, "space ace", but not by much.

i liked the game better when i got to the world of ruin. i wasn't just going through the set pieces the game wanted me to go through in the order it wanted me to go through them. i could do things when and how i wanted to do them.

if i didn't enjoy doing that i could always just stop playing, but i didn't stop playing. i had more of a sense of accomplishment doing stuff when the game wasn't holding my hand and telling me what to do next.

it wasn't _hopeless_. that's the thing that gets me about it. various characters at various times struggled with despair, but the world itself... ruin and despair are very different things. dystopia and apocalypse isn't necessarily about everybody being killed, it's just, like... being separated from the people and things that are important to me. that's what i feel most acutely.

the story of final fantasy vi for me isn't about defeating evil or restoring balance. it's about connecting with people i care about but have become separated from because of some fucked up shit that happened. that's, like, the entirety of it. it's difficult and arduous and every single person takes work to connect with again. the payout for that is not just that they're back in my party. i am able to connect with them on a deeper level, know them in ways that i didn't back in the world of balance.

i could say, maybe, that if i could pick a dystopia to live in, it would be the World of Ruin, but the truth is that i live in the dystopia i live in, and i get to choose how to deal with it. i think i'm going to choose to act like i'm living in the World of Ruin. i can see myself being happy, living in that dystopia.

lovely post. and timely, i just got to the world of ruin last night, after having put the game down several months ago out of annoyance at running out of time on the floating continent. i look forward to approaching the dystopia with this in mind

great post, Kate - both about life, and the vibe of this game. you're right, it goes beyond the nonlinearity of the WoR, it's the sense of the characters having loved through so much, both together and apart. i'm sure someone somewhere has written about the "party" in RPGs and fantasy fiction as a form of chosen family, but this game may offer some of the best raw materials for the player to put together that kind of narrative and emotional connection. always liked the sense of having these different clusters of people who had been there for each other's particular low points and recoveries. barely any dialogue but it works.

i should probably find the time to replay it myself, it's been a while

i was rereading the game's resolution and i was honestly kind of horrified lol

i'm sure magic can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people but in the subculture i come from magic = queer

which means that i don't exactly feel driven to complete the WoR endgame, lol

great post; encapsulates some feelings i've also had about the second half of FF VI and why it sticks with you after so much time, though i never articulated it quite that way

FFV is when final fantasy became final fantasy for all the reasons I love
FFVI is when final fantasy became final fantasy for the other reasons

No look, this is great and all, like really, it's fantastic, but I yearn for the naivety, the pre-modern sensibilities of V. The difference in gameplay speaks for itself. No one is going to argue that VI wasn't a downgrade in terms of gameplay, and I'm not willing to write that off. I really love VII too, but so far, VI feels stationed between the masterpieces that are V and VII, not committing to either side. Obviously only a criticism that can be applied with retrospect. Also, I haven't even reached the WoR yet so I should probably just shut my damn mouth (fingers) and keep pressing on.

5 and 7 being better than 6 is pretty much gospel these days at least among more hardcore jrpg heads

i do need to replay this someday tbh, its been 20+ years now

Making me want to throw in 5 again. Which I can, since I bought the cartridge release of FF I-VI remastered on the Switch last year on a whim!

6 reigns supreme for me.

the pixel remaster of 6 fixes some of the gameplay bugs from the SNES version (like evasion not working properly). that puts it on par with 5 in terms of gameplay imo.

there's solid character building in 6 but it's through equipment & magicite rather than an explicit jobs system.

6 is better than either 5 or 7, no idea what the diehards are thinking

I admit I prefer 6 to 7 by some margin

HD2D remaster of 6 when