Final Fantasy is one of the most famous video game franchises in history. The first game in the series was released so long ago (1987) that I wasn’t even born at the time, and several entries that followed became classics of the role-playing genre. Final Fantasy 16, the latest installment is one of the biggest games of the year now in 2023 – this is a franchise that has shown an awe inspiring level of success and longevity.
One of the various classics in the series is Final Fantasy 6. When FF6 was released in Japan and North America on the Super Nintendo in 1994, Yoshinori Kitase (the game’s director) wasn’t quite in the position to travel abroad and get a sense for the game’s reception outside of Japan. On international PR tours years later, however, he was surprised to find that many Westerners – in contrast to the Japanese fans – seemed to actually prefer FF6 to the much more famous Final Fantasy 7.
I realised this too, perhaps even around the same time as Kitase, when I was a teenager and browsing gaming forums in the early 2000s. I grew up adoring FF7 on the PlayStation (my first console), so the idea that the preceding game was just as good, if not better, was exciting. I wasn’t able to play FF6, however, until it had an extremely delayed release in Europe in 2007, via the Game Boy Advance.
And, honestly, I wasn’t bowled over when playing through the first part of the game (although there were certainly some striking moments). I just didn’t feel a strong connection to the characters, perhaps due to the absence of Kazushige Nojima’s work. (Nojima is a writer who was involved in later games in the series, including FF7.)
Over halfway through the game, though, something remarkable occurs, and my opinion changed.
During a battle against the antagonist, (Kefka, one of the most famously malevolent villains in the series) the world is ravaged, and, as the game tells you, ‘changed forever’. According to the developers, this wasn’t even planned at first; it was something they discussed and then were able to add due to having more time than anticipated during development. This latter segment of the game is referred to as the ‘World of Ruin’.