final fantasy VI play-through thread, kupo!

http://i.imgur.com/0V2uttf.jpg

i am wearing a Sabin outfit at the moment

oh man, lol at the smooth synth jazz that plays whenever Terra has a sad

one thing you gotta love about VI is that it actually rewards you for searching in ridiculous locations for items in the towns

SABIN: Think a "bear" like me could help you out in this fight??"

:-0

kinda missin' Cloud's default "..." catchphrase right there

i'm exactly 2:00 in, and just reached the hideout.

how should we handle spoilers? tbh i've played up to maybe 30 hours in before, so i'm not too picky with people revealing where they are or whatever.

my problem is i renamed TERRA to Terra, thus committing myself to a scheme, and then as more and more characters showed up i became less and less happy with it

loooool

not gonna lie: i was tempted to consult a GameFAQ just because this may be the last time in my life i play this and i know there are thousands of secrets in this game that i'll never see. also, mainly, it's nice to have a head's up when a character is about to die or lose all their shit or something, so you don't blow a ton of gil in a shop just beforehand, or so that you can hand off your shit to other characters ahead of time.

but no, i will not. i'm playing this clean.

tempted to name everybody FARTPOOP xxp

What the hell is a repo man doing in a cave. who left their cadillac parked inside

always intense

sheesh, i skipped the far left classroom in Narsh the first time through (a couple hours through) because the guard itself was warning that i might need to level up a bit. i thought there might be a lvl 49 red dragon in there! i come back just now, leveled a bit after seeing some crazy shit in the first part of the game, and it turns out that far left classroom teaches the secrets of...how the reflect spell works...

*wolf cries in the distance*

http://i.imgur.com/N6qKrx4.gif

this game is great and also has the greatest soundtrack of all tiem

i havent played it in 10+ years and i still remember how the themesongs for all the major characcters go

kefka >>>>>>>>>

SABIN: Think a "bear" like me could help you out in this fight??"
― reckless woo (Z S), Sunday, November 3, 2013 5:59 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

he's more of a twink i think

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

my friend and i were going to record a rock opera version of the opera like 8 years ago but we never got too far on that project

the big plot twist in this felt super momentous back in the day, like no other game had done anything quite like that before, and it happens deep enough in that you think you're approaching the end maybe and then oops no not even close. the sheer size/length of the game was pretty incredible at least to me.

the world of ruin felt revelatory to me as a kid, i remember i spent months exploring the various locations, trying to find all the characters and secrets. i think this was one the best balanced ff games, the last time i replayed it i was still finding small things that i had missed in past playthroughs, particularly from the first half of the game. but most of the really rare and hard to find things do nothing to help you play the game or hinder the story at all, they're rewarding w/o being necessary i guess.

the big downside is the game is comically easy unless you set yrself artificial restrictions and there are almost no tactically interesting decisions to make in any of the battles. also the formula they use for steal success rates is overly punishing for no real reason

oh man, shadow's the best

"just know that i may leave at any time"

jeez shadow, so mysterious! and so afraid of commitment!

Poll of best PC from this game would be great, except there are only eight of us who would actually vote.

my problem is i renamed TERRA to Terra, thus committing myself to a scheme, and then as more and more characters showed up i became less and less happy with it

Been There

lol ff7 didn't run fast enough on my mac... sad. got........................ rhythTheatrhythm Final Fantas

playing through this again, i find myself with a new urge to shout out loud "MODE 7!" at key moments

FUCK YEAH MODE 7!!

this game is great and also has the greatest soundtrack of all tiem

it happens deep enough in that you think you're approaching the end maybe and then oops no not even close.

what's funny is it's exactly the same plot twist as link to the past but it happens 12 hours in instead of 1, making it 12 times as :O

guys are you playing VI or VII? Cause it seems like you're discussing VII?

we're definitely playing final fantasy VII

i think i played the GBA version of this and i don't remember anything about it. :(

i am playing the game that allows me to yell out MODE 7!

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?

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

i liked that part a lot too, really gives you that lotr ensemble vibe

yeah it's a great concept but tbh i find it annoying because i only have one pair of sprint shoes

someone said something like this upthread or in one of the other threads or in a dream but i like that as the game progresses certain characters develop shared histories that the other characters don't have. wish they were referenced from time to time tho: how awesome would it be if you did this procedurally, so that if you had sabin in your party when you infiltrated the magitek factory or whatever he reminisced about it later with someone else who was there. (for all i know they do this; i'm flying aimlessly around the world avoiding the floating island because i'm terrified that if i go there i won't be able to come back and I MUST HAVE SECRETS)

dayo otfm tho

i didn't grow up playing either this or LTTP so it's just now dawning on me that ocarina of time was not exactly novel in this regard

that rugpull was the height of game-story greatness to me as a kid (deus ex aside) but nevertheless i always suspected and now ff6 has confirmed that it was executed way, way too cravenly early

in lttp, i mean, but in oot too, because they are identical, because they are zelda games after 1988

like that as the game progresses certain characters develop shared histories that the other characters don't have. wish they were referenced from time to time tho

they sort of do, or do so obliquely. some of the dialogue btw locke and celes references their shared escape from south figaro, or btw shadow and realm. i think you can trigger certain cutscenes that reference gaul and cyan's relationship as well. there's not a tonne you can do as a player to influence these but party member selection can influence things a little - like if you bring both of the brothers to duncan's house in the wor or w/e. the relationships btw characters in this are really fairly dense and interesting i think.

i'm flying aimlessly around the world avoiding the floating island because i'm terrified that if i go there i won't be able to come back and I MUST HAVE SECRETS

haha this was really annoying to me - there are a bunch of things you can only do in the wob

party member selection can influence things a little - like if you bring both of the brothers to duncan's house in the wor or w/e.

i did see something like this -- walked into figaro castle at one point and somebody said "i wish sabin were here!" so i came back with sabin and there was a scene. can't now remember if it was an easter egg or if it was how to advance the plot but i was grateful for the nudge.

wait he says! do i look like a waiter?!

the only part 1 secret that you couldn't get back to was losing Shadow permanently, i thought?

I'd dabbled before but this is really the one that led to me spending a 1/4 of my life grinding away at jrpgs <3 >_<

So apparently you can do sabin's blitzes without the in-between arrows, i.e. ↓↓← instead of ↓↙←

What the fuck

lol i remember only getting good at the ↓↙← move via this game; was always hopeless at street fighter

Yeah you can totally do that stuff. Playing on emulator w analog joystick makes these easier to do but still kind of absurd how often they miss anyways.

especially once you get to the crazy 10-steppers

uh so is there a good snes mac emulator that can do button combos as a macro?

The only good one seems to be snes9x.

Dunno about macros though, maybe on a gamepad?

Keyboard config seems not configable

anyone have a good recommendation for a gamepad (under $40 if possible)? i don't mind playing FFVI using the keyboard, but i recently purchased Rogue Legacy for mac (it is soooooooooooooo good) and it would be a much better experience with a gamepad, kupo

i should probably take that question to a more appropriate thread, sorry kupo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1FlbfPu_TA

I love Zozo

Lmao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4QOzi7_FUE

I'm in Zozo too. I actually made it through, climbed those buildings, got the Espers, went and got about halfway through the Opera thing. Got tired and shut off the game and forgot to save!!! So now I have to go through Zozo again. Blitzing Slam Dancers.

the music in zozo is my favorite so far i think, except maybe for the beginning of the floating continent theme where it pretends it's gonna be maddening looped fairy fountain twinkle for a few seconds before getting real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbdAJBXbyKc

industrial percussion magitek facility theme also did not drive me crazy at all

all the music in this game is so classic

the zoso theme is so good. also the crazy chromatic melody in the battle vs Atma Weapon

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

This is going to sound really corny but I really love Setzer's line

'My life is a chip in your pile. Ante up!'

PRobably should have used it in my high school yearbook or something

I like all the old fan pages that come up when you start googling

http://www.icybrian.com/

i remember icybrian

Yeah, I think I saved right after I got that airship, so right after "Ante up!"

The opera scene was pretty rad. I really liked that sample they use for the voices, and the words on screen and notes not matching exactly works because it's opera so some syllabus are gonna be spanning multiple notes and whatnot. Also LOL at "You are speaking with octopus royalty!"

The female characters in this don't really get much to do story-wise. Celes is used as bait by multiple people at once and Terra is pretty much incapacitated (now she's an MIA Esper). Say what you will about Tifa but the one time she was captured she freed herself and then took command of an airship.

oh man, Ultros! I forgot about Ultros.

Agreed about the female characters; I want to say there are some stories actually driven by their actions later on in the game but it's pretty hazy.

the Celes plot in the WoR is pretty memorable. she kind of becomes the main character at that point

yeah terra and celes are both almost-main-characters moreso than any of the guys

http://i.imgur.com/KS1wwwQ.gif

man, i haven't even had time to play it for the last week. i got access to the airship, i saved the game, and then...nothing

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

I like Shadow's theme. He's the mysterious ninja with an 8-bit Morricone song. Love that mouth harp sample!

duh not 8-bit i dont know why i wrote that. chiptune

8-bit morricone: http://gamecola.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/protoman.jpg

Playing the demo of Bravely Default, game feels like one huge love letter to classic FF, V and VI in particular

man, i haven't even had time to play it for the last week. i got access to the airship, i saved the game, and then...nothing

― reckless woo (Z S), Wednesday, November 13, 2013 4:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I got to the WoR and figured out that this is where I stopped playing last time

Dunno why, probably because I didn't want to SPOILER CATCH ANY MORE STUPID FISH FOR CID

that took like five minutes

I'm like one dungeon away from WOR I think. My last battle had Ultros jumping in and then we convinced him to have his portrait drawn by a little girl and he was all "Ok, Uncle Ultty is ready to have this portrait drawn!" LOL this would never happen in a modern RPG.

So i never learned half of Sabin's blitzes because XYDownUp, I can't hit Y because it will just back out of the blitz and put me back on the fight menu screen. So i just tried XXDownUp for the hell of it and it worked! Why on earth did they put Y on those blitzes when they knew that the SNES button for Y also meant going back into the menu?

Also, I fought some slugs that were called "Slurm". The stuff in Futurama has GOT to be a reference to this game.

888SPOILERS888

So I love that Zozo is exactly the same in the WoR

They don['t give a fuck about kefka

Also what the hell at the teen pregnancy diversion! Seems racy for a game that changed 'Holy' to 'Pearl' in order not to offend Nintendo censors

yeah, pretty surprisingly heavy stuff. so was the Celes suicide angle!

Just got past the suicide thing. Wow. Way crazy, way more sad than Aeris imo. She actually jumps.

I'm pretty much right after the WoR, and I like how they took away everybody and made me play with Celes cos she's a character I haven't leveled up that much and now instead of running around with my overpowered team the challenge is back again. A friend last night gave me a tip to wait before leaving the Floating Island for Shadow, which was great, cos he's one of my favorite characters in the game.

fyi, not wanting to spoil but you should play that part over again if you got the suicide version of events!

I just got Setzer, gearing up for the final battle. So basically spending another 10-15 hours (or maybe double that) running around the World of Ruin revisiting everywhere I went to before. At this point I start thanking the huge character list because I'll be able to switch out my currently leveled-up party for members who have been sitting on the sidelines most of the game.

The art in this game is pretty impressive, mostly in the huge enemy sprites. Everyone always talks about an FFVII remake (either super modern or retro) but what if they made a 2D Final Fantasy in the style of VI but using all hi-res hand-drawn art and animation? That would look so sick, wouldn't it? Has anyone tried that?

Playing this with an Xbox controller is wonderful because I'm using ZSNES and even though I mapped directionals to the d-pad the L-analog stick works too so I can just use that for Blitz attacks. It is way easier than I remember it being with a SNES controller, though the modern guys can never do d-pads as good as they used to be.

Cool how the airship owner can make it rain w "GP Rain".

The smooth jazz intro to Terra's theme is so awesome!

smooth jazz?

I meant this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqEkbb-A27k&list=PL1908FF1F127876AA

hahh right. i think of it as the esper flashback theme. as with other FF soundtracks, very cool interpolations of the main themes/character themes

Just made it through the Fanatic's Tower, loaded up everyone with Wall Rings and for the most part let all the baddies cast magic that bounced off me and killed them. At this point I feel a little lost and directionless, as I pretty much just fly around and visit towns and storylines seem to start up and end at random. I'm probably just being too lazy and not remembering that _this_ character is from _this_ town and when I enter Doma castle I need Cyan in the party or whatever for something to trigger. But still, it's all really damn amazing, and the storytelling is wonderful. Even if I have to look at a Walkthrough to be told to bring Gau and Sabin to the small house on the northern continent of the world of ruin, it's still pretty special when it turns into a comedy/makeover sequence that turns very dramatic and then ends with a typically optimistic and sort of Zen affirmation of Life. The whole Phoenix sequence was pretty special, too!!

I've been thinking of what to play next, and I really want to play Final Fantasy IX. It seems to work fine in PCSX but I was wondering, is there any way to change the resolution on these games? I know the backgrounds are all still art but surely there must be a way to go from pixelly polygons to nice and sharp polygons, even if the low-res textures will still be there....

I threw up my hands with the Fanatic's Tower and just used whatever relic it is that zeroes out random enemy encounters.

Yeah I'm still loving this, but I'm getting a bit lazy, and now whenever I run into a bad guy I hold the FF button on ZSNES so all my characters are Level 50+.

The story seems to be the best out of all the FF games I've played, just because of the huge cast and most of the characters seem to have really good reasons to fight the bad guy beyond he's trying to destroy the world. Still, the look of FFVII is just so cool and minimal and colorful and weird, I have to rate it above VI for the battle animations alone.

FWIW I'm taking Strago and Relm to the newly resurfaced island and then high-tailing it to kick Kefka's clowny butt.

7 has wonderful environments and camera swoops and extravagant particle effects but man, those hands

(it was $3 on steam yesterday)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoQmQn7J0fk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HizdlmU0wwE

http://www.wikihow.com/Defeat-Kefka-in-Final-Fantasy-VI

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Spent a few hours yesterday wandering around that last dungeon and getting stuck :(

I finished this, yay!

I dropped in here just wanting to ask if anyone has played the new Steam release of Final Fantasy VIII and if it lets you change resolutions or anything. Because i started playing that and I'm only 5 hours in so I won't mind dropping if I can actually have super smooth and sharp polygons instead of pixelated polygons. I haven't seen anything about that anywhere (and it wasn't the case with the VII re-release) so I'm kind of skeptical on that front.

http://www.avclub.com/article/final-fantasy-vi-explores-human-pain-through-its-s-205365?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=feeds

The landscape and experience of the World Of Ruin should be familiar to anyone who’s been truly hurt.[

[citation needed

lol

I'm playing FFVI now on the SNES. What a big game for a little console. Only recently got to the World Of Ruin and already so much has happened. The opera scene is art, man!

I now have unfinished game saves for FF I-V, perhaps it's time to move on to VI so I can fail to finish that one, as well.

sadly after having recently played through Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, this game hasn't quite got the same overwhelming buzz and some of the plotlines and dialogue feel a bit disjointed, but it did come out before those and it is a fantastic game

I was wondering whether I was playing it whether there were two opera scenes, because everyone goes on about it as one of the highlights of gaming ever, and it was just - fiddly and annoying?

Anyway I spend a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms about a year ago and got really into this, but I think I left it in one of the "try and reload to get the right monsters on the Veldt" sections.

the opera scene was a pretty unique thing at the time but like every rpg since has had a musical performance in it somewhere

idk if i'd call it a highlight of the game

dammit. i need a folder to hold of my ilx bookmarks for threads dedicated to doing something that i started but did not complete

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

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