ファイナルファンタジーVI

For better or worse, FF6 is all spectacle and no substance. From beginning to end, the 30 hour adventure is packed full of memorable set pieces. If you have any interest in the Super Famicom's technical capabilities, it's hard not to be wowed by how creatively the hardware was used to create grandiose cinematic sequences. The opera (which is better in Japanese, since the words actually match the vocals), the flight towards Imperial territory, Cyan's dream, and the ending sequence come to mind as just a few memorable scenes. It's clear that a great deal of effort was put into the cutscenes, graphics, and audio, but it's also clear that the same level of effort was not applied to the gameplay.

The early game presents itself as though each character has a different utility, and for a short time they do, with their unique abilities being useful for a couple boss fights which are designed around those abilities. As soon as you're given the opportunity to form your own party and teach characters magic, unique abilities become irrelevant as magic becomes the most powerful offensive force in the game and lazy boss design becomes pervasive. The most dangerous thing most bosses in the World of Ruin can do is use mildly powerful aoe magic, which can easily be countered with either element-absorbing gear or by having one or two characters spamming party-wide healing. This game serves as a great example of why party-wide heals shouldn't even exist in RPGs. The low quality of the bosses is especially obvious given how FF5 had some of the more creative and dynamic fights in the series, making use of counters, status effects, conditional attacks, telegraphed attacks, and forcing row switches. Creating a setup to counter bosses in 5 was fun, especially since each job had different utility and could be used creatively depending on the situation. In 6, you can kill just about anything by spamming tier 2 elemental spells and party-wide heals.

The two characters whose unique skills might actually be useful in the endgame (Strago and Gau) are crippled by how much of a pain it is to teach them anything. Strago isn't acquired until near the end of World of Balance, and is probably one of the last characters you'll pick up in World of Ruin since you have to recruit Relm before him. By the time you get him in either world, there's little content left to actually use him, so the only way you'll build up his ability pool is by going out of your way to exclusively do so. The reason blue mage was in the first pool of jobs in 5 was so you could start building up an ability pool immediately as you played through the content, but 6 doesn't give the same opportunity. Gau similarly requires time spent exclusively building up his ability pool, and he's annoying as hell to re-recruit over and over, making the time it takes to build him far too tedious to be worth it.

Magic is very overpowered, especially given how heavily weighted the magic stat is in damage calculation. Adding even 10 points to magic can dramatically boost your damage output, which can easily be done through magic-boosting gear that becomes available from the mid-game onwards. Earrings also give a large stackable bonus to magic damage, and MP costs can be reduced through other accessories, although costs are largely irrelevant since every character has hundreds of MP by level 25. Even the best physical build can't hope to compete with a half-decent mage. There's really no sense in making characters into anything but magic-spammers, since nothing else can compete.

Random encounters are a nuisance. They rarely pose a threat to your party and start giving far too much experience by the mid-game. You can comfortably finish the World of Balance around level 20, and World of Ruin around level 30, but given the frequency of encounters and their large experience yields, you'll likely be overlevelled unless you intentionally run from everything. Between this and the aforementioned problems, I wonder why the game offers any customization options at all, since none of it is meaningful. There's no satisfaction in creating a good equipment/accessory setup, or investing points in stats through espers, as none of it actually matters and there are no challenges to overcome. At the time of release, this was without question the easiest game in an already easy series.

ATB now continues flowing during attack and magic animations, even on wait mode, which completely breaks the function of ATB. After inputting a command, characters and enemies have to wait for the animations of previously queued up commands to play out before they can actually act. This often presents a problem where you have the opportunity to input a command for a character, but the enemy has already input theirs and is waiting for two of your characters' animations to end. In such a case, do you wait for the animations to play out so that you can appropriately react to what the enemy does, or do you just guess what they'll do and input immediately so as not to waste time? If you're fighting multiple enemies, it becomes impossible to react to the current situation at any given moment, since their animations are often long enough for them to chain attacks back-to-back unless you queue up a command between their future actions. The speed stat and haste buff are irrelevant now since everyone has this long animation buffer that forces them to wait in line behind one another and makes it nearly impossible to get a higher turn per minute rate. These problems diminish the strategic possibilities that ATB originally presented. Rather than fixing the source of the problem, it seems the designers' patchwork solution was to make every boss behave in such a way that their actions are unthreatening and require no immediate reaction from the player, which ultimately makes for boring fights. The one compliment I'll give the battle system is that it introduced the ability to pass turns by pressing the X button, which was an overdue feature by this point.

Despite how much I think FF6 sucks as a game, I do think its spectacle makes it enjoyable. As I mentioned earlier, the set pieces are truly impressive. The story and characters themselves aren't anything special on their own, but the presentation carries it. The appeal is similar to that of an old special-effects-heavy giant monster film, like the original King Kong. It's fascinating to see such elaborate scenes built with limited technological resources, and it still looks beautiful today (the original version, anyway).