O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
Well, the Pixel Remaster journey ends with Final Fantasy VI. It’s almost a shame, really, as this collection has been so wonderfully made that I can only hope more classic titles are given this treatment. But at least this collection ends with one hell of a game.
Final Fantasy VI has been a favorite FF entry for many and for good reasons. But it was also a game that hasn’t had a “perfect” version up until now. The SNES original had lots of strange bugs (even though some very beneficial) and a few translation quirks, along with the name change to Final Fantasy III in NA (PAL region didn’t get the game at all). The Playstation release had problems of its own, along with the slowness of the CD media. GBA release made a lot of compromises to get the game on the platform and its additional content, as was the case with the rest of the Advance releases, was of questionable quality at best. And the previously available 2014 PC and mobile version was ugly and had new issues.
Pixel Remaster version finally provides us with the perfect Final Fantasy VI you can play today. It gets the same improvements as the rest of the collection, like beautifully recreated pixel visuals scalable to high resolutions and with new awesome visual effects and particles. The already fantastic music is impeccably recreated with live instruments and, in case of the famous opera scene, sung vocals. Said opera scene also contains an unexpected use of the 2.5D look (think Octopath Traveler) which wasn’t really necessary, in my opinion, but does look nice. And in general, there are even more little details and layers to many scenes that go perfectly in tone with the original game look and feel.
The gameplay is mostly unchanged, while featuring the same improvements the rest of the PR games received, like the “Auto-battle”. Yet, a few of the character abilities were tweaked to be more intuitive in use. Sadly some things remain flawed: Gau is still annoying to play without a guide in hand, as none of his 200+ Rage modes have a description (and learning them is slow). But overall, the gameplay feels improved.
Chronologically VI was the first game in the franchise to give you control over who can be in the playable party. It was designed with the concept of not having a defined main character and while arguably it has been the case for the majority of the series up until that point (IV being the exception), the story still dictated who belongs to the party of heroes saving the world at any point. In VI, though, at many points you can switch characters around any way you want, including attempting to play the game with just one character. Each character, just like in IV, has a specific job (class), but in addition to that the concept of magicite stones was created that provides a chance for almost every character to learn magic. So while each character had completely unique abilities, almost everyone could be an efficient mage.
It’s a really cool twist on the way learning jobs worked in V and a basis for how VII and IX would work later, but this approach has some flaws. The biggest one is that in their attempt to make every character job and abilities interesting, Square has created an issue where some characters feel less useful or fun to play as. In IV the game was balanced around knowing which classes are available at any point. While V and III made it possible for you to have a party of Dancers for one particular fight in the middle of a dungeon and switch jobs immediately after. In VI if you put a Dancer in your party, you’re stuck with them until get your next chance to change the party structure. Plus, it doesn’t help that one third of the characters feels forgotten about for most of the story and they don’t get enough, if any, unique moments.
Speaking of the story – FFVI is most praised for its storytelling, so did it age well? Quite well, actually. The story, the characters, some of the topics and the overall structure of the plot still feel amazing today. The Big Thing That Happens still has few, if any, competitors. Its ensemble cast, while far from perfectly realized, is shockingly varied in the way they are written and explored. And the pacing of the game is really well thought out, feeling fresh and doing unexpected things even when being linear.
Yes, being so much more detailed, personal and mature than previous entries, there are ways this storytelling could be improved. Where IV and V are perfect as they are, with no real need to expand or go deeper, VI can occasionally rush things in ways modern storytelling wouldn’t allow. Events can jump from one beat to another with little to no transition and at times you can get moments, where you can get confused about how one moment lead into the other. So sure, while Square would get better with the pace and the cast in Chrono Trigger, that was released a year after FFVI (now that’s a game that demands a full Pixel Remaster treatment), this game is still so good that you forget about the flaws entirely.
So if you’ve never had a pleasure to play Final Fantasy VI before you’re in luck as Pixel Remaster is the best way to do it anyway. If you have, maybe it’s time to revisit one of the absolute best Final Fantasy games in the series with this shiny new version. Or, better yet, play the entire collection if you get a chance.