Final Fantasy VI Review: Episode I

Magical Predestined Ladies, Unite!

Then it all goes to hell.

It's been a while since I last ventured into a traditional JRPG. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what was the last one I played, given that Demon's Souls was not traditional. [Edit: My last JRPG was Persona 4 Golden. I'm an idiot.] It's also been super long since I played a Final Fantasy title, my last one being XIII. Of course, this isn't just any Final Fantasy. When people fight about which is the best, this one is often thrown in with much fervor.

My first one was Final Fantasy VII, which was also the first one to be rendered in 3D. While the graphics to that one were laughable by today's standards, it is also considered one of the greats and might still stand as my favorite. I don't know if nostalgia is a big part of that, but I just remember a supremely engaging title that was fun to play and fun to witness.

Ooh, intrigue!

My husband, whom I got into the series, played Final Fantasy VI well before me and insisted that I do the same. However, I have always had a problem with reaching back when it comes to media. If I get into a musician's second album, I often hesitate to check out the first. Classic movies of the 80's that I never saw may remain unseen for my entire lifetime. And looking back into the SNES era for games I haven't played, of which there are many, is daunting. There are so many games from what is now last generation that I haven't played that going truly old school (as opposed to playing a new game with old school graphics) almost feels foolhardy.

I didn't want to play his PS1 edition, so I waited until it was released digitally and on sale to buy it. So what I'm playing now is not the Final Fantasy VI of my contemporaries' childhoods but rather the 2011 digital re-release of a 1999 special upgrade of the 1994 original. The digital release didn't add anything, but the 1999 one for the Playstation added 3D-rendered cutscenes and some other graphic retooling. Note that this edition was released between Final Fantasy VIII and IX. I guess that's what the kids were clamoring for at the time.

Starting Final Fantasy VI leads to a brief explanation that the Empire is using Magitek armor and searching for espers, magical beings of the past. A thousand years prior, there was the War of the Magi, which ended with the abolition of magic entirely, turning society into something strictly agrarian or steampunk, depending where you reside. The player controls Terra, who wears a headband that prevents her from riling against her captors accompanying her on this mission to find an esper. Terra, of course, is mysteriously able to wield magic with no other tools to assist her, and thus becomes the center of much of the story. Her green hair is of little concern, though.

Small dose of cuteness.

After finding the esper, which kills off Terra's partners, Terra ends up unconscious and under the care of some locals. Meanwhile, the Empire is taking over cities left and right for no immediately clear reason. When Terra awakes, she and her new friends hop from city to city meeting more and more people invested in finding out what's going on with the Empire and their use of magic.

Thus far, the story hasn't really resonated with me, but it's not uncommon for a Final Fantasy game to take a while to get to its point. I hope I'm not wrong in assuming that there is more afoot than an Empire amassing magic and property. There better be something more sinister or complex going on. Still the narrative was initially engaging because certain events saw the team breaking apart and meeting new people more quickly than any other title I've played. I was about five hours in and had already controlled nine people in battle, which is larger than the cast of other Final Fantasy titles.

The divergent narrative was exciting and introduced a number of scenarios really quickly, including fighting enemies while floating down a river on a raft, battling a train while it chases you, and defending a mountain top with three teams in a maze. It's been a number of hours, though, since everyone has come together again, so I'm not sure if we'll break up once more, or if this is it. For the time being, Terra is out of commission, and I'm leading my party of four with Celes, a fallen general of the Empire who was fused with magic by her employers.

Sometimes conversation happens mid-battle.

Battles are typical Active Time Battle fare, though I do find it interesting that each character has unique skills I can utilize without using up magic points. Edgar uses Tools that you can purchase in shops, which have a variety of effects on enemies; Sabin, his twin brother, has Blitz attacks, which are basically fighting game inputs that do reasonable damage, and Cyan has sword skills he deploys based on how long the player waits for a timer to count.

Celes is inherently blessed with the ability to use magic, which is handy for curing your party if you're not an items fan. (I'm not.) Unlike all of other Final Fantasy games I've played, this is the first one where magic doesn't become available to everyone until a particular story point. In the others, either they could use magic from the start (after tutorials), or they were never allowed to use magic because of their class. Still, I appreciate magic being tied to the story. In this case, magic comes with the ability to summon espers, and one learns magic from the esper equipped.

It's not a terribly complicated system, though none of them are once in practice, but I'm finding that I have almost no reliance on magic yet. Celes is still the only one I use to heal, and the others chip in when appropriate. The summons themselves fall short of the grandiose animations I've become accustomed to starting with VII. They just appear, do something ambiguous, and disappear. Maybe espers acquired later on have more to offer.

That whole crazy thing.

Actually, battles are generally amusing to me since I never had to witness them play out like they do. When a party member attacks, he or she simply waves his/her weapon and damage is done to the selected enemy. Enemies attack by flashing, and occasionally there's an accompanying animation done to a party member. Only magic and skills have more pronounced animations that actually demonstrate the characters engaging with the enemies. Again, I'm not used to this, but I do know this was once how it was.

The only technological complaint I have is for the chocobo riding, which I've only done once as dictated by the narrative. It looks like Square tried to shoehorn 3D map travel into this 2D game by flipping the perspective so that chocobos actually run on top of the map. It looks just awful, though, because everything flattens, even buildings and mountains. It's like walking on a drawing. I'd have been perfectly content riding my chocobo on the same map in the same perspective as my party does. I do miss being able to rotate the map and see objects in the distance, though. But I get it.

In terms of progress, I've played over twelve hours, mostly due to grinding, and just passed the famous opera scene. I'd like to express that it was way overrated. As a game scenario, it works just fine and is in line with the rest of the game. That's not my problem. What bothered me is that the actual opera is merely fiction that doesn't enhance the main narrative.

Bosses get to look like people…kinda.

While the song is pretty, it is ultimately just a thing that happened, and I found it challenging to connect to it on any emotional level. Couple that with the fact that you can fail the actual opera scene itself, and I'm left a little confused about why its so impactful to some people. Some folks, who I'll refer to as Six-splainers, expressed that it was an impressive feat for the technology at the time. I guess I'm inclined to believe them, but I can't seriously be expected to be floored by what the SNES could or could not do in 1994 at this point. Either the scene contributes, or it doesn't, and in my opinion, it's the latter.

The scene also exemplifies a problem I have with Celes' character. She has no agency, and seems to be dragged around at the whim of all the other characters. She was a general! Unless that was a mistranslation, or I'm misunderstanding, this should an important facet of her character. Despite my efforts to make her important, putting her at the lead of my party, she thus far has been in command of nothing. And she only performs in the opera because someone else nominated her to do so. She even objects but does it anyway with no real argument.

One of the cooler scenarios.

I will admit that I'm waiting for that a-ha moment when it all gels together. As explained above, I am assuming it's coming. I was halfway through Final Fantasy X before I cared about a single character, but by the end of the game, I was shedding a few tears for them. It just took that special something to come out of the woodwork, and right now, I believe Final Fantasy VI has that. For now, I'm just going through the motions, and it feels like I'm running on the tracks, fighting a giant hype train.

All images obtained from GameFaqs. Although I'm playing on the Playstation Vita, the Playstation emulator doesn't allow screenshots. :-(

You Played Mario, So What?

Nostalgia's Strange Distillation of a Strange Video Game

I don't really care to engage anyone in the discussion of what makes someone a gamer or not. My take is that if you enjoy playing video games (plural), you are a gamer regardless of what those games might be. Still, I do feel a shred of disappointment when I meet someone whose passion is focused squarely on titles like Bejeweled, Angry Birds, or Words with Friends, which are all primarily mobile-based. There is nothing wrong with these games – they all provide a continual challenge, the first requiring both mental and physical dexterity to master –, but I usually gravitate towards those who enjoy playing plot-oriented games or those with really unique mechanics or graphics. I like the big games. I also don't play mobile games.

One thing I've noticed with regards to people in my age bracket, the roughly 30-35 year-old one, is that a common response to asking someone if he or she games is "I played Mario." This means a myriad of things, of course, as Mario has been featured in over 200 video game titles since his inception. What it does usually boil down to, though, is that the person used to play either Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario World as a child. (Make that age bracket 25-35 for the latter.) Unfortunately for me, the gamer seeker, it means that the only relationship they had with "core" games began and ended over 20 years ago. Again, this is not to pass judgment. Playing video games is a hobby, and everyone is willing to devote only so much time to it, which also can translate to no time at all.

With all sincerity, I do think that Super Mario World is one of the best games ever made. It features sheer entertainment value on its surface and a ridiculous ton of secrets to discover at its core. It's also a dramatic expansion of the world explored in the previous games in the series, which vary depending on whether you were raised in Japan on the United States. What I do find peculiar is Mario's lasting legacy in culture today. As judged by the folks at Guinness, he's the second most recognizable video game character to Pac-Man, something I can delve into later. However, Mario paraphernalia has become something of a badge of acceptance among people in general, not just gamers. It is wholly appropriate to wear something with Mario or another character from his universe, probably Yoshi, without any expectation being made of your gaming habits.

We all loved Super Mario Bros., right? Maybe. I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, actually. My neighbor did. I moved to my hometown when I was about five years old during my kindergarten year, 1987. In 1989, shortly before I turned seven years old, a pair of kids moved in next door, and they brought with them several Atari systems and the NES. I hadn't played a video game at home yet, and I was always excited to go over there and play. I honestly really enjoyed a lot of the Atari games, though I probably wouldn't touch any of them today. I can't even recall the names of what I played. Of course, along with the NES, my neighbors had Super Mario Bros.

I wasn't good at it or any game for that matter. I never got far in SMB mainly because I didn't have the time to master it. It wasn't inside my home, and as a kid, I had enough energy to want to go outside to play sometimes. I didn't discover warp zones without his or a magazine's aid. But the game did have some appeal, and I would enjoy picking it up now and again. Coupled with not being particularly good at it, I was The Exemplar for the sway – I would attempt to coax Mario across a large gap by moving my entire body in the direction of the jump, sometimes emitting a troubled noise with it. I may not have grown out of this. It's very compelling.

What this boils down to is that you played Mario when you were little. So did I. So what? Why does he get special treatment compared to countless other video game characters?

Saturation helps.

In the US, the Nintendo Entertainment System came with Super Mario Bros. by default. OK, that's notSuper Mario Bros., which was the majority of the offerings in 1985. It was nigh a guarantee that if you owned an NES, you owned SMB. Next, without going too far into it, the NES was the only video game system being sold. After the video game crash of 1983, stores were extremely hesitant to carry another video game system. The fact is that every manufacturer tried to make an Atari or an analog of an Atari, which created an overly segmented market, meaning little money for everybody involved, most notably the stores. When that got buried (like a certain game), "video game" became a four-letter word as far as stores were concerned.
exactly accurate. If you actually cared about value, you bought an NES that was bundled with

Due to the spectacular and extremely risky efforts of Nintendo, stores finally agreed to carry the NES, and it was a booming success. (If you'd like to read more about the whole ordeal, Greg Knight wrote a great essay about it on his blog, and he provides his sources for more reading.) Overall, Nintendo sold 30 million units in the US by 1991, which accounts for roughly 11% of the entire US population by that time. That is not only a significant chunk of the population, but it also translated to 30 million default Super Marios Bros. players. The only other games to achieve similar market saturation have also been bundled inclusions. I'm also neglecting to include worldwide sales on the game, which came out to about 62 million.

When you boil all of this down, it's fair to assume about 1 in 10 people (probably a little less given more precise analysis) living in the US between 1985 and 1991 have owned Super Mario Bros. This figure does increase when you account for people who just played the game at someone else's house but didn't own it themselves. The level to which Mario has left an effect on people around my age is significant. Even if you don't play any video games today, chances are that you played at least this one title on this one system. Let's not forget that the game was featured again in Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES, made available digitally via the Wii Virtual Console, and the countless number of people my age who were in college during the Napster (read: piracy) heyday. That was a time when a ridiculous number of old games were accessible through websites and emulators, their size being remarkably permissive even on dial-up connections at home.

Only Super Mario World after it achieved a notable amount of saturation, though not as much. Also, Mario's future games did not achieve the same amount of saturation although they were all successful. Oddly enough, despite retaining the weird elements of the original, these games also were more cohesive in their execution.

Super Mario Bros. didn't make sense, something which people eat up like candy.

I'm sorry to generalize, but we didn't really analyze games when we were little. We either enjoyed playing them or we didn't. Many of our favorite childhood games' stories were contained in their manuals, the conclusions sussed out by beating them. This isn't true of all games, but the largest extent to which SMB presents a story during its gameplay is by uttering, "But our princess is in another castle." You could argue that this counts as a twist, but it happens seven times during the course of play. This was positive, though, because it meant that there was much more game to play compared to the Atari offerings, which only boosted speed or enemy frequency to maintain challenge almost endlessly.

Mushroom

As much as we joke about the elements that make up Mario games, they managed to persist through multiple iterations. Everything that is ridiculous about the first game became iconic. Mario and his brother, Luigi, are plumbers who were magically sucked down a drain into the Mushroom Kingdom. For whatever reason, these plumbers were tasked with saving Princess Toadstool, a human princess in a world full of, um, mushroom people. The kidnapper is a giant bipedal turtle, Bowser, who spits fire. So far, none of this makes sense.

The plumbers, one at a time, must proceed through stages that inexplicably contain giant pipes everywhere, only some of which they can or have to enter to proceed. They can also breathe underwater ad infinitum, though that is eventually adjusted in Mario 64. The first enemy Mario encounters is a goomba, which is a mushroom-like thing that he can stomp on once to eliminate. (In 1985, this was not the most common way to murder animals or the like, I promise you.) The goomba is followed by a koopa troopa, a smaller bipedal turtle that can be stomped on so as to throw his shell around. To aid Mario in his quest, he must punch blocks with question marks on them, which can yield coins in a world without an economy, mushrooms that makes him grow larger for some reason, mushrooms that grant him extra lives because that's a thing down there, or fire flowers, which both alter his outfit and allow him to shoot fire. You encounter most of these things in under a minute after starting the game.

Also a mushroom

If the internet today is any indicator, it should then become no surprise that everything that made up Super Mario Bros. became memorable by virtue of the fact that it didn't make sense. Yes, it was a good game which featured challenging platforming gameplay and a handful of secrets and tricks. But these elements didn't contribute to today's popular culture; rather, they served to retain a section of that population as gamers and inspire future, more cohesive games. Each ridiculous aspect about the Mario universe stands out from one another and so becomes easily memorable and easily marketable in the future. Society loves disruption. Then, along came Yoshi, the Mario equivalent of a kitten.

Memories become distilled over time. Icons remain.

As stated above, Mario is not the most recognizable video game character ever. Pac-Man is. First, Pac-Man manages to increase the age bracket again from the larger end, and as I pointed out from my personal story, some people were still playing Atari in the late 80s. However, Pac-Man's fame came from the arcade; the Atari version of the game was so over-simplified that it was rejected compared to the original. His recognition stems from his form. He's a circle missing a piece, a yellow pie. Why he's not as marketable today as Mario probably lays with the fact that his universe lacks enough other pieces to be as interesting. Aside from Pac-Man, there are only the differently-colored ghosts and the white pellets. If Pokémon was only about Ash and Pikachu, it wouldn't be as popular. The hook is the pieces, the other pokémon, who are more memorable and universal than the games they star in. Again, this is a matter of popular culture versus smaller subsects, i.e., gaming or anime cultures.

Applying this idea to Super Mario Bros., it's not hard to discern why we hold Mario and the other pieces dear. Over time, the game has become pieces, all of which are weird and colorful, iconic and cute. To its credit, none of the enemies are menacing in their appearance save for Bowser, so they were adopted into popular culture as well. But you'll notice that while people will recognize a goomba or a koopa troopa whether or not they can name them, they are less familiar with other enemies from the series. They will recognize the sound of a coin being grabbed. And everyone knows the music. Why? Also as mentioned, you encounter these things in under a minute after starting the game.

This is ultimately the key behind each icon's success, including Mario. If you've played and finished Super Mario Bros., if you've played the game on and off at a friend's house, or if you started the game and decided it ultimately wasn't for you, you remember that first minute more than anything else about it. Everyone remembers the pieces despite having very different memories of the gameplay. Over time, the gameplay doesn't last so much, and this idea crosses over into other games that have become iconic over time, though less so, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter II. With enough saturation and enough disparate elements, those jarring pieces juxtaposed against one another become memorable and all that is left to remember if you didn't pursue playing video games as a hobby.

The same applies to movies (Indiana Jones, E.T., Back to the Future), books (If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, Amelia Bedelia, Choose Your Own Adventure), and even other forms of art (Mona Lisa, Persistence of Memory, Moonlight Sonata). We remember their essence and their elements more so than their experience or sometimes their names or the names of their elements. This is most true of video games because movies, books, paintings, and music don't require skill to complete experiencing them. Many people don't finish games, so it's the beginnings that matter most.

Mario rode the unexpected booming success of the Nintendo Entertainment System into our memories and our hearts despite us. He became equivalent with our childhood regardless of the amount of time we spent with him. He was something that was there when we were a child, and we either interacted by controlling or spectating. It doesn't take a psychology degree to know that we tend to hold pieces of our childhood dear even if our childhood as a whole was unpleasant. We hold onto the things we can remember because every day we forget more and more about what happened to us back then.

Unlike a good many things that existed back then, Mario is immortal. The people have chosen to keep him alive. I'm one of them, I suppose.

Images obtained from various places around the internet. If you own an image and would like me to remove it, please email me, and I will do so.