final fantasy VI play-through thread, kupo!

yeah i never "got" the opera. but i didn't play it until the emulator era. not that long after in years really but an eternity in terms of gaming and console generations and such, all those SNES games felt like lost treasures unearthed by archaeologists by then.

God I remember getting stuck so badly at the post-apocalyptic bit where you have to find most of your party again. I always found the opera scene quite funny but not in a way that was intentional on their part.

Having emulated it recently I think I actually prefer V to this one

when i played the snes ones V still didnt have an english translation other than an awful fan patch so i havent played it

There's stuff in this game I'd never known what to do if I didn't cheat a bit and look up a walk through occasionally. The whole secret switch in the Ancient Castle is mad - is it mentioned anywhere in the game?

Also I think I've no way of getting Shadow. Shame, I never really got to know him very well, flakey-ass clown

Currently stuck on the Cultist's Tower. Even with Wall Rings, it's a toughy

i'm pretty sure i got all the ancient castle stuff without a walkthrough but it may have just been on the instinct of "surely there has to be a boss fight or something in here, i'll keep wandering around until something happens"

cultists' tower i def said fuck it and came back later once i found whatever it is that lets you skip encounters

Yeah I might try that. The trick is to use Wall Rings on all the characters and just let the baddies cast spells that bounce off you onto them. It should work on paper but...

Yeah Ancient Castle you have to (SPOILER) walk five paces away from the queen's throne and hit a button and it opens a secret area but... I'd never have known to do that. Maybe a random NPC mentions it. Someone upthread said there's an awful lot of that - certain parts of the game only open up to certain characters and knowing who to use where is tricky. It's hard enough making sure everyone in your party is equipped and relic'd and espered in the optimum. I still don't know what I'm doing with Mog, Strago and Gau (or Gav?) - so many random ways to use their powers, I can't keep up.

the trick here is to not use strago or gau iirc, bunch of fiddly deep-cut bullshit in my opinion from age 17. relm i also kept deep on the bench but mainly because her baffling ability also crashed emulators back then.

spent my evening absent mindedly grinding some of my weaker people while looking at my phone. now I've gotta make 3 teams and storm Kefka's tower. I seem to have lost Shadow at some point. oh well

relm i also kept deep on the bench but mainly because her baffling ability also crashed emulators back then.

― |Restore| |Restart| |Quit| (Doctor Casino)

this wasn't an emulator thing, this was a massive bug in the 1.0 release of the game, they had to release a patched version

i don't know why ted woolsey decided to name a high-level spell after thomas merton

huh, okay. i'm sure I knew that at the time. garbled memories! i think i also resisted a lot of the "late" characters, they felt like the second-season's new thundercats to me.

Gogo is especially weird to be thrown in at such late notice. Not sure what he's good for other than being a consolation prize for not having the ninja

Dream team:
Umaro
Sabin
Celes
Terra

first time around I somehow beat the game without ever getting Terra back, which kinda blew my mind when she reappeared in the finale

whoa... so does she just kind of rock up, or is the ending different depending on who you have in your party?

I remember being really deflated when the world of ruin came around. Wanted my party back

it does feel a bit like WoR is less plot based and is more or less a series of side quests involving various types of dungeon. I didn't get to play Kefka's Tower tonight

xps ending is the same, but when the final battle is over there's a cutscene she joins, or something like that

been replaying this over the past month... as great as it is, it does suffer from the fact that it's way too easy. if it were just a tad harder it'd be a masterpiece.

but that opera scene? celes' suicide attempt? darryl's tomb? shadow's dreams? the apocalyptic nightmare that happens halfway through the game? so many parts of this game just break my heart in how devastating they are

is this for VI or VII

it looks like VI to me? unless you're making some joke I'm not getting?

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