FINAL FANTASY VI

The only conclusion I can come to when people praise this game is that they're severely blinded by nostalgia. After playing it for the first time, it's easily one of the worst classic final fantasy games. The remaster itself is great, it looks nice visually and I didn't encounter any bugs. The controls were fine. I have no issues with this version of the game. But the game itself is just terrible. -It tells you that you can form a party of any characters and then forces you to use ones you haven't touched, meaning you're now in a fight against strong enemies with severely underleveled characters. As far as I can tell, they don't level up or gain exp passively, either. So there's no point in investing in characters you enjoy using since you'll have to use them all anyway which makes the party system basically pointless. -It does the same revolving party member thing that 4 does, just on a lesser scale. So while it's less obnoxious than in 4, it's still very annoying. -The ATB system is genuinely one of the worst battle systems I've experienced and it baffles me that they not only kept it after FF4 but it took them until FF10 to stop using it. It's not fun, it's clunky, and it makes combat feel infinitely worse. Given it already struggles to be good, the presence of it in this game does it no favors. -You can very easily softlock yourself which is never excusable in any game. There's the above with being forced to use weak characters but also, there are fights that you outright require certain spells to win and if you don't have them, it's literally impossible. The Cultist Tower, for example. If you don't have Reraise from Phoenix or a specific Esper that lets you leap into the air, the boss fight is impossible to win because it's guaranteed to cast a spell that kills you as it dies. While the tower is optional, there's still no indication that you NEED Reraise, and if you don't have it you'll spend at least an hour getting to the top and fighting the boss only to realize that you can't win. I assume this is a port problem and that the original didn't have auto or quick saves, but either way the game autosaves right before you fight the boss. So at best you have to roll back to a quick save from before you entered the top room and do the tower over again later. At worst, you're softlocked because you can't leave, even Teleport doesn't work, and you have to go back to a save that you potentially made hours ago. That's horrible game design. -The story isn't that good, and Kefka isn't that memorable of a villain aside from his laugh. Aside from standard villain stuff like poisoning water, he basically does nothing at all except move the warring triad statues, then he becomes a god or whatever and you don't see him again until the end of the game. He has no real personality other than being a little eccentric compared to past final fantasy villains. The story painted him to be someone driven mad from magitek experiments, but you see absolutely none of that. You see none of the implications of the experiments besides that he can use magic and he's a horrible person, and there's not even any real impact from that revelation. He's just there. There's also not really a lot of engagement with the idea that magic is some ancient, lost art. It's mentioned a few times, a few characters are shocked that Terra can use it in the beginning, there's a small village of people with weak magic, and that's about it. If you want to write a story with that as the focus, you need to do more to show how magic affected the world and how its lack of a presence affects it in the modern day beyond "everyone just uses technology now and sometimes people are put through experiments to force them to have magic". -Damage is absolutely insane. Literally everything past a certain point either one shots you or two shots you. At one point no matter what equipment combinations I tried, I had to rely on Setzer being lucky enough to dodge every attack and roll high numbers with his Fixed Dice weapon just to get through a boss fight. That shouldn't happen. -The soundtrack is probably the weakest of the classic games. Not horrible, but most other FF games have a far better soundtrack. -They tried to not have a single main character, but the problem is that it results in every character's story being mostly ignored or just very flat overall. No one's really that interesting and none of them are given a lot of time to develop as characters except Terra. They all get one (1) tragic event in their past, and that's basically all there is. I'm actually astounded at how bad this game is. It starts pretty strong but it gradually falls off and by the time you get to the world of ruin, it's just flat out bad. If you want to play a good classic FF game, play FF3 or FF5. Don't play this one.

This is probably the best game in the series.

Definitely the best of the 2D Final Fantasy games in terms of story and music. The gameplay, however, not so much. I do not like being forced to use different characters. I like the characters that I like. I don't want to use characters that are not my characters. There are like 15 playable characters and they force you to use almost all of them at some point. Besides that, this is probably the easiest 2D Final Fantasy game. There are no superbosses, and Terra is so stupidly overpowered that everything becomes a joke as soon as you get the Soul of Thamasa relic and learn Quick. But still, it's a good game. 10/10 story and music, but gameplay issues I highlighted knocks it down to a 7/10.

Absolutely back asswards that none of the extra content like bonus dungeons was added to this and square enix is so out of touch with what their customers want in the west we'll probably never get it.

One of my favorite FF games.

Like all pixel remasters it's a good game. If you were a fan of the original you will like this game. Like all PRs the game would have benefitted from the extra content offered in remakes from like 2014 etc. FF6 had great characters and still offers that in this version so I still recommend this game .