Final Fantasy - the classics

"A true paladin would sheathe his sword"

For the longest time I've had one of the most garish gaps in my own video-game expertise it is possible for one to have- I lacked a classic video game franchise of my own for which I held the utmost personal experience and regard. The furthest back my personal experience went was Metal Gear- and that was a franchise I only really got into, to the degree of fanaticism, around the era of MGS 3- not exactly straight to the source of the river. As such that is something I've tried to amend over the years falling into an obsessive series omnibus of the Divinity Games (Still haven't finished Beyond Divinity because I found it just that odious to endure), Splinter Cell (Sans Pandora Tomorrow because that one still hasn't been ported to modern software despite a PC version having actually existed at some point in time apparently.) And Baldur's Gate (No notes- literal legendary franchise even to this day.) But beyond that there has always been a glaring omission to my own knowledge base- that of Final Fantasy.

Now, Final Fantasy has not enjoyed the smoothest road directly to my heart. Indeed, it's often felt like Final Fantasy entered into that space of a game someone should enjoy if they love games, rather than just one that people naturally do- and when you enter into that equation a equally natural friction enters into the relationship of expectation versus personability and taste. I almost felt inclined not to care when all the Xbox world lost their collective britches at the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII back when I was first becoming aware of the gaming landscape around me, and thus avoided a lot of that world when it came to. It would be years later until curiosity won me over, I would play the demo for Final Fantasy XIII-2, find some latent spark of potential and realise that "Hey, this franchise everyone says RPG lovers will love? This ol' gal might have a bit of fun to her! Who'd have thought?"

From there my experience tumbled forth like water breaking the dam. I brought Final Fantasy XIII, played a good portion of it before moving on (Still haven't finished it. Thanks for asking.) Found temptation call me towards the legendary Final Fantasy VII- really got into that one, found an unforgettable world and iconic beyond iconography itself cast of characters. Got swept away on the hype-train for Final Fantasy XV, buying and playing through 'Type-Zero' just to get access for the demo of XV, loved that game despite it's blatant and still enduring flaws. Totally ignored the PlayStation exclusive XVI during it's marketing and release. Picked up XVI the day it dropped on Steam- really impressed by it, some of the best character and world work in the franchise as I had experienced it. Oh, and of course I played XII in the lead up to XVI's steam launch. Can't forget that... experience.

But through all of that there has always been this wide disconnect between the Final Fantasy I proport to know and this franchise worth of anthologies that stretch back to the heart of gaming as we know it. I've truly neglecting video gaming history and... I guess I just got tired of missing out on all that. Some place between playing through the VII Remake saga (which I forgot to mention) and Crisis Core (There's so bloody many Final Fantasy games!) a seed of curiosity got sprouted. What are the references that are so very core to the identity of this franchise that they come back entry after entry? But really I think it was Stranger of Paradise that really pushed me off the edge. A game that not only retells the original game (a game to which I was ignorant) but also (as I've come to learn across my journey) adds a bizarre connective tissue bridging across all FF games? How can I appreciate that without diving in face first? So you know the drill- Omnibus time.

Thanks to the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters I've had the chance to not only dip my toes into the past brought to the present with life-saving improvements, (Like the ability to buy multiple items at once in the store in Final Fantasy 1) but giving a true-to-the-original pixel style which, whilst slightly homogenising these game's visually- does so much more to capture the heart of the original than those honestly garish PC remakes that existed throughout the 2010's. I lacked the context to really know what fans hated about them at the time but now, on the other side of this experience, I totally get it- those look like a disaster in motion!

So let's start simple- with Final Fantasy 1. Final Fantasy 1 is a very interesting prospect to me, because it's not the only classic Japanese fantasy RPG game from this time period that I've tried to get along with. Actually I tried to find some spark for the Dragon Quest franchise by going back to it's original entry only to find a game so rudimentary and dull that I bounced off the series entirely. I still can't find the ability to care about Dragon Quest- sad as that is. Though my time with Final Fantasy 1 proved to ultimately be anything but. There is a simplicity to the first Final Fantasy, absolutely- but within that simplicity comes a frightening playability which cuts through all the apparent shortcomings to just become an easily digestible experience.

There's very little Final Fantasy asks of you. You have your set of characters, blank slates with names, who assume classes of your choice from the get-go among a pretty standard set of professions. Monk, Warrior, White Mage, Black Mage, etc. Final Fantasy 1, as you can imagine for a game of it's age, troubles itself little with creating a narrative with characters and progression and instead just gives you the basics- Four elemental crystals that need purifying. But that isn't to say the game is without structure- in fact, Final Fantasy 1 actually lays out a structure most of the other pixel games follow suite with: an almost Metroidvania style 'travel where you can'. As you progress you'll unlock new modes of travel that allow you traverse rivers, then seas, then the skies. It's genuinely so much better than the strung-along moon logic most RPGs of the early age found tantalising.

Now just because Final Fantasy is simple, that doesn't mean it's barren. Actually FF has a world with a few interesting details scattered here and there, the ruins of some ancient civilisation called the Lufenians, and a far-passed scientist of theirs who long ago mastered airship technology called... Cid? That's right, Cid is the first reoccurring name in the franchise, who'd have guessed? Then, right at the end, the narrative takes a near unhinged swerve into time-travel and a causality loop that feels so slyly bizarre I couldn't help but laugh. That famous complex nature of Final Fantasy plotlines shines through even in their very first outing, what a hoot!

In heart Final Fantasy is mostly about enduring dungeons that grow increasingly gruelling as it comes to resource management, which can actually make it quite the struggle what with your very limited spell slots (Yes, Spell Slots. This was before MP became a function.) Recovery is a real challenge until you realise how the healing staff works, that knowledge alone kind of breaks the game a little. Bosses are more of endurance bouts than real challenges of strategy with one glaring exception. Turns out that, for some insane reason, the Pixel Remaster bases itself almost exclusively off the original Japanese release of these games in all but one crucial metric. Chaos, the final boss, comes from a 2000's re-release called 'Dawn of Souls'. A re-release which, crucially, made Chaos much tougher in order to compensate for extra dungeons which the game borrowed from later Final Fantasy games. And by 'much stronger' I mean health times a factor of five!

That sounds insane, and it is- Chaos is twenty levels tougher than anything else in the game- but to be fair.. the original Chaos was as about tanky as a Warmech, which isn't hugely tanky. (The Warmech being an insanely rare enemy spawn mini-boss whom I spent about thirty minutes grinding to get to.) New Chaos was so tough and hit so hard that it forced me to learn a mechanic I literally did not know existed at any other point in the entire game because I didn't need to know... buffs stack. That's right, in FF1 buffs don't run out and then stack- which is a necessity when Chaos is one shotting people left-right-and-centre, but utterly overkill for anyone else in the game. So not exactly perfectly balanced, but fun without doubt. I do slightly love the fact that the Final Boss truly is the baddest creature in the land- we don't get that often!

Now before we move onto 2 I might as well share my sin with you. You might have noticed that I mentioned the Warmech, an uber rare spawn who is the bane of any FF completionist, and winced. Why would I force myself to face that thing, I just wanted to experience these games right? Well something along the way of playing FF poisoned my sanity and I realised that no, I don't want to just experience the game's on that small level- I wanted to know them fully. And thus expanded my mission further than I had done for any Omnibus previously. I wasn't just completing these games, I was 100%-ing them. And doing so on my first run- which meant I picked the perfect game to realise this because Final Fantasy 1 is the only game in the franchise as far as I know without any missable achievements or bestiary entries. Thank god I started using a 'missables' guide for the next entries- they got a little tough from here on in.

Final Fantasy 2 gets a bad rap, and I sort of get it, but I also understand the huge wave of praise the original release got for being an 'anything but safe' sequel. Ditching the largely simple story of FF1, FF2 weaves a tale of an evil empire scouring the land, a royal resistance crushed underfoot and a heavily foreshadowed story of corruption that feels underbaked but I love that they went there. There's even an attempt at giving player character's some basic personalities and even canonical names- truly Square were shooting for the moon with this game! As it happens, Final Fantasy 2 actually underwent several revisions over it's development as temperature shifted between doing a direct sequel following the basic formula of the first game or something newer and distinct- a decision that would come to shape the Final Fantasy franchise from that point onwards.

Perhaps FF2's most controversial, whilst also it's most interesting, idea would be the bad levelling system. It's pretty messy by modern standards, but at the time I gawk at the sheer ambition Square were attempting and laud the bravery to go with it. Totally eliminating the level-based experience point system of most every other RPG in the world, FF2 adopts a skill-development system wherein every attribute a player has can progress independently after every fight. Your HP, your MP, skill with a sword, skill with a dagger, skill with each independent spell- all grow separately under a metric of 'whatever you use, you become better at.' Sword users will grow their sword stat and fire spell wielders get better at it. Take damage and your health grows. Deplete mana and your magic grows. It's a natural levelling system which predates the excellent Elder Scrolls system and offers a route for Role Playing totally unexplored in any other game of the time. Truly revolutionary!

It's also pretty bad. You see, weapons skills (and spell skills) level from 1 to 16, with each level indicating how many times your weapon actually hits each turn. So yes, when you have a sword at level 5, each swing actually hits the enemy 5 times. Quite powerful, no? Too powerful, actually. If you hit max level with any weapon by the endgame you can steamroll through anything, even the final boss, without sweating. Of course, because of how convoluted levelling actually is, it's unlikely you'll hit max level unless, oh I don't know- you're trying to 100% the game and thus need to figure out the levelling system in order to max out at least 1 weapon skill and 1 spell. What a terror that would be, right? So here's my attempt at a crash course. (Please skip the next monster-paragraph if you can't stand overly complex systems explained to death.)

There are level bars under every weapon, but they don't increase every fight- even if you use the corresponding weapon for that fight. So what gives? As it turns out, you only get experience for that weapon type if you use that weapon the equivalent amount of times to the level you have in it. That is to say, you need to use your sword three times in a fight in order to get sword experience for that fight. (And yes, this calculation is made independently for every fight.) But that's easy, right? After all, your sword swings multiple times every time you use it corresponding to your level, doesn't it? Not quite, you see the calculation only counts the amount of times you actually press the attack key, not how many times the attack hits. If you only attack once and the attack lands 15 times, you'll only get the credit for attacking once and not get any XP. (The calculation is a little more complex than that, with negative experience entering into every fight that takes into account the difficulty class of each enemy you fight- but my explanation works just fine if you ignore all that.) 

So the best way to level your chosen weapon is to, whenever you face a large group of enemies, put everyone else on standby and have your levelling character wail on each enemy with one attack each, overkilling is allowed and multiple hits will never bleed onto another enemy meaning you can massacre every large group of enemies you stumble onto for a little EXP shot. But there's a problem even there- the max level is 16 and the largest group of enemies you can possibly find is 8! By the time you're fighting at level 8 there's no group of enemies that will last more than one swing from you! So what gives? Well in comes my cheat code- dual wielding. Dual wielding weapons causes a double attack on each swing, and these attacks do count as a separate activation which is counted towards the XP calculation. Making use of this not only allows you to speed through weapon skills in the early game, but makes Firion, the FF2 protagonist, look like a badass. So did you get all that? I bloody-well had to in order to complete this game!

Outside of utterly perplexing levelling, Final Fantasy 2 introduces some series staples for the first time. Cid returns with another airship, only this time Cid is alive! Chocobos are given their debut into the franchise and we even get our very first Behemoths! Gods alive, what a sight they are! Of course, we also get the Iron Giant, but given that the Iron Giant is this game's Uber rare- I wouldn't blame anyone for not knowing that. (Took me about half an hour of grinding to get him.) Also introduced in Final Fantasy 2 is the frankly ridiculous death count some of these games love so much- pretty much everyone in FF2 dies, it's grimly hilarious. Oh, and this game's music really steps up the game. The Castle of Pandemonium theme is actually a series high.

Oh, and as for my quest for 100%, Final Fantasy 2 was my first dose of missable content. Code words, random hidden chests, blink-and-you-miss-it locations- FF2 seemed as determined to ensure you don't experience everything as I was to get that sweet 100% on my first go around. Luckily I had the power of guides on my side! Final Fantasy 2 was good, overly ambitious but I prefer over-ambition to... Ubi-slop. Liked the game, can't wait for the Netflix adaptation.

Final Fantasy 3 kind of feels like a do-again of 1, only with much more ambition and experience behind them. Narratively 3 is kind of the blandest, going back to the 'Warriors of Light' concept from the 1st game only lacking the insane time travel stint of the final hour of Final Fantasy storytelling and instead settling for... I actually can't remember. Throwing aside the 'everyone dies' angle for a more light hearted story, with a little bit of character sprinkled in for good measure in the silly characters of the world, leaves less of an impression but isn't quite unwelcome as one might think. Sure Xanthe won't go down as one of the greatest villains ever, particularly as he doesn't even make it to 'Final Boss' status, but I remember his name, which is more than I can say for the actual Final Boss who is... um...I have it here in my notes that this game has 'the least interesting Final Boss', let me look it up... Right, the lady cloud- yeah, this game ain't winning any narrative awards. But that also wasn't really the point with this game.

Enjoying one of the larger worlds to date, and the introduction of moogles, Final Fantasy 3's claim to fame is the 'Job System' which would be my first introduction to a concept that gave me chills. Jobs were always this thing that later Final Fantasy games dabbled with which sounded daunting- giving the player the freedom to pick classes also gave us carte-blanche to screw up. Just look at my Final Fantasy 12 crew who had dual jobs picked at seeming random and struggled to face any of the true endgame content- I didn't want to end up in that hole again! Luckily Final Fantasy 3's job system is, honestly, quite darling.

Jobs are classes you can switch to freely at any point, opening up versability to your play style and meaning you can approach any fight in anyway. Need a team of mages for this fight? Go ahead! There's no penalty for job switching and it just means you're incentivised to buy four sets of every armour type as you progress. This also allowed for the team to develop more specialised and tough boss encounters, including some decently tough optional bosses that fill out the gameplay experience. We also get the best Airship yet in 'THE INVINCIBLE' which acts as a genuine home base- albeit one you get pretty late into the game to enjoy.

Ultimately despite being narratively basic, FF3 proved to be the most engaging, and thus the most materially fun, Final Fantasy game yet. But there still felt like some degree of potential left on the table that wouldn't be realised until a couple of games down the line...

Final Fantasy 4 might be considered one of the real break-through moments of the franchise, where Final Fantasy really figured out what it needed to be in order to have a future in the, to become very crowded, RPG space. It was the moment that Final Fantasy really started to focus on Characters, introducing a morally grey (at least initially) protagonist in Cecil, driven by relationships and loyalties explicitly laid out throughout the plot. He has a woman he loves despite his ills, a king he serves despite their onset tyranny and a child he adopts after murdering her mother and destroying her village. Yeah, FF4 isn't perfect with it's characterisations yet, and some personalities feel a bit flat, but ambitious is an understatement for all they were planning.

This also marks the very moment that Final Fantasy stopped being a pure turn-based franchise, for all those that bemoan the apparently 'implacability' of Final Fantasy's game style and their shirking of those 'turn based roots': these games stopped doing that in 1991! This is the start of the ATB real-time/turn based function, wherein every character has an 'action bar' that fills up in real time requiring players to stay active and in the moment to not get slapped silly by enemies. This also takes us back to the fixed classes for characters, but matches them with unique functionality which makes these various classes feel somewhat unique. Also, characters actually naturally learn spells this time, rather than requiring you to go spell hunting all over the world. God I missed that.

There's a lot of character and special 'above and beyond' aspects of Final Fantasy 4 which made it my favourite thus far. A rare party limit of five gives almost overwhelming choice in the early game, gear feels more intentionally placed to have specialties pointed towards upcoming threats making the 'click optimize and push forward' meta obsolete, encouraging actual thought into planning. Octamammoth's evolving sprite which lost more tentacles the more you fought him was cool, coward character Edward actually fleeing battle when his health get's low really characterised who he was, even just recycling the jobs from 3 into actual roles which characters possesses instils the world with a sense of immediate death and objectivity. You can place the role and it's connection to society instantly naturally filling out the scope of the world. Of course, that isn't to say the game is perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

Bards are functionally useless, now expending potions to heal everyone for no reason. Character growth moments lack the grace one might expect from a narrative this ambitious, character relationships evolve so quickly the narrative feels like it's in first forward. (Remember I talked about Cecil adopting a girl who's village he burned and mother he killed? Yeah, that happens like... the next day. And She, Rydia, seems cool with it.) And whilst some of the narrative twists seem really grand and interesting, others seem mind-numbingly dumb. Rosa and Rydia getting unsanctimonious dumped from the party for no other reason than 'woman' only to be let back into the party thirty seconds later is both a waste of time and a plot hole. (The team left them on Earth, and bumped into them again on the Moon. How the hell did the girls manage to catch up? Did they hold onto the ship as it flew into space?)

Still, Final Fantasy 4 really feels like the moment the Final Fantasy we would come to love came into view. And I'm not just saying that because this is the first time we see 'Bombs'. We have protagonists that actually rank in character, a cast some people might actually want to revisit and a world that felt like it had purpose and heft. I understand why this is one of the few games in the franchise to enjoy a follow-up (Final Fantasy 4: The After Years), even if I'm not invested enough to actually seek out and play the thing.

Final Fantasy V is the biggest and fullest feeling Final Fantasy so far. In fact, it was the one that took my longest to 100% by five or so hours out of this collection. It also presented me with great music and the prettiest visuals so far from the get-go, so my expectations were high. I knew that Final Fantasy V would see the return of the job system, but what I didn't expect was for this to be a marriage between jobs and narrative driven storytelling! I honestly thought the two concepts would be largely divorced in my head out of necessity, and whilst there is a level of objectivity which is lost under free-form job placement, I'll be honest- it kind of comes together in the finished project.

FFV's jobs are a world more interesting than they used to be. This time around you can level whatever job you want, but they actually have a proper levelling limit, as befitting their separate levelling metric to base levelling. All jobs get points after every fight which push them towards levelling up, each level up grants a 'universal skill' from that job, one of which can be slotted in conjunction with another job. For example, if you get the two-handed perk from levelling up the warrior tree (wielding one weapon in two hands to double the damage) you can then equip that perk whilst wielding the Samurai class to double the damage of the powerful Katana's they get to wield. Already this blows open the customisation of the job system.

In narrative FFV goes once again for the light hearted approach of 3, only this time with a wit and humour that some find endearing. I thought it made the story less engaging, but I could appreciate the odd funny line from Bartz, (our canonically named protagonist) or Gilgamesh. (Yes, Gilgamesh is introduced here.) Unfortunately, thanks to that narrative, Final Fantasy V also has the most missable content with two huge world shifts that render entire tables of enemies redundant. Filling out the bestiary for this game was a nightmare, and this was the first time I wished I hadn't neurotically decided to 100% this franchise.

Also, speaking of negatives- can Blue Magic die in a fire? Blue Magic is the ability to use an enemy skill, which can be pretty powerful however- You have to be hit by that enemy skill beforehand. Whilst being a blue mage. And that might just be the most annoying stipulation I have ever seen in a class ability in existence, with the exception of the 'gambler' skill from FF6 but we ain't there yet. First off- there's no way to know what skills you can steal, so you better have a guide open with you because there's only a handful across the entire game. Secondly, some of these skills are insane. Take 'Death Level 5' for instance, a spell which kills anyone who is a level divisible by five. Yes, just straight kills them. Which means you have to get your mage to die to this spell (having it miss doesn't count) whilst ensuring that at least one person in the party isn't a level divisible by five because a party wipe demands a reload. Also everyone levels up at pretty much the same rate so you're only ever a couple battles away from everyone being the same level.

Then there are some spells that enemies only ever target themselves with. So now you need someone else in your party with the Beastmaster class who needs to land the control skill in order to control the enemy and make them use the skill on the blue mage. But then there are skills that an enemy can't target a party member with, meaning that you need to use control to take over an enemy whilst another party member casts reflect so that when the enemy casts the spell on themselves it reflects and hopefully hits the blue mage. Or just make everyone blue mages. And, of course, one of the achievements asks you to get every blue mage spell. Hated it.

There feels like a lot of grind to Final Fantasy V which was almost non-present in previous games. World 2, for example, features a galling jump in difficulty for 10 level plus 15,000 health overworld enemies out of the blue. Several quest-threads just kind of stop, leaving the player to wander around aimlessly trying to figure out where to go next. And all guidance just slips by the back-end meaning 100% searchers have to drag their sorry hides around the entire world space to go bestiary filling. That being said the challenge was appreciated with the exception of the series-first superbosses, Omega sure had me pulling out all the stops, I just wish that 'the stops' didn't include 'strands of hair' as his abilities utterly transcended logic to the point of sheer RNG. I had to pray my way through his reaction moves everytime I 'Rapid Fire' 'Two handed' katana-ed him!

Exdeath was certainly a weaker antagonist, not least of all thanks to that dumb name, but I found the characters and their tales to be enjoyable and full enough. No one character is drooling depth, but with a lighter narrative like this one that just seems more tone fitting, I suppose. I have to praise Final Fantasy V at least for having some of the coolest endgame sprites and the start of the 'Neo' naming convention that the franchise would come to love from here on out.

Which bring me to Final Fantasy VI. I wish I could come to this game with a more nuanced and cold take, but you know the drill already. Final Fantasy VI is easily the best of the Pixel Remasters games- it feels like the grand opus of everything that Final Fantasy had been working towards up to that point, sans the levelling system for Final Fantasy II because I literally think Square have never tried something like that again. (At least Bethesda carried the torch.) From the moment go Final Fantasy VI has the most gorgeous visuals of the series thus far, the most intriguing world building in this unique post-magic fantastical industrial-era tyranny and a jaw dropping, I can only assume iconic, intro. Actually, the only question I was really asking myself throughout all of this game was... how does it compare to Final Fantasy VII- the only game that is largely considered it's rival. Traditional wisdom gives FFVI the prize but from the lens of hindsight, regarding only the original FFVII, I wondered if the same conclusions would dawn on me.

Story really is the guiding heart of Final Fantasy VI, and this game's grasp of character and world feels a genuine step up from all previous attempts. Every character from this vast cast has genuine place and a desire for purpose in this story that frames itself around that search, giving a valid path of growth for just about everyone save the mascot characters and Gogo. Who is just... I don't understand Gogo. Like at all. Now true, I wouldn't say there's anything particularly profound about an RPG narrative where every character is framed around a search for purpose but FFVI seems so tightly wound to this concept that they create a heart around this ideal that transcends what might otherwise be considered somewhat pedestrian. I came to care about pretty much everyone. Also, 'Magitek' is introduced for this game. Yay.

FFVI also manages to wiggle itself around the whole 'class' system, whilst giving everyone consistent classes to better fill out the world building they introduce 'relics' that act as substantive modifiers to the way you play that can, in some instances, prove as powerful as job perks from FFV. We also see a whole slew of really unique class types. Celes' Runic Knight class is quite circumstantial, but an interesting idea. Gau's... whatever he is makes for an interesting trade-off between versatility and control. Strago is a much better blue mage- in that he doesn't need to be whacked in the face by a spell to learn it, he merely needs to see it be performed in a fight. FFVI's ATB bars refill so much slower than previous games' and it isn't until you see the depth of command at your disposal that such a choice makes sense.

Espers are a curious addition to the toolset, operating like Magatama from SMT 3, every Esper you equip slowly bleeds their skills into the equipper as you level up with them, and others even buff stats if you level up with them- creating that kind of optional character building for those really looking to min-max their character builds. They also relate back in the story in a significant way which adds a sense of gameplay-narrative congruity that enriches the overall experience. Glad they made summoning feel worth a damn this time around.

Kefka is the villain this time around and the man has an earned slot among the franchise greats. His laugh is an iconic haunting byte punctuating an inexplicable clown routine which feels in danger of making him seem incompetent, but rounds-off into sheer unpredictability. Kefka is the first villain who feels genuinely interesting to see on the screen as well as to just hear about off it. Even if you never really get to dissect who he is directly, there's enough context to draw conclusions. Kefka's general ridicule even by his own peers, his status as an errant experiment by a tyrannical emperor all belies a search for purpose underlined by a malign nihilism which drags him to madness even at the height of his strength and power. There's a depth to Kefka utterly absent from other antagonists and I was left just wanting more from the man, not so much more of the joker-esque jester antics that are typically highlighted in other games he shows up in (like Dissidia) But more of the silent torment that wracks through him. What drew him to the way that he is? How was it growing up with Terra? What was their dynamic like? How must it irk him to know everything that gives him worth was extracted and copied from Terra's natural talent? It's almost a shame this game doesn't give us these stories, feels like potential left on the table rather than just margins designed to be read into.

But FFVI is very confident about it's storytelling. Enough that key character moments are sometimes left to complete optional chance. You'll sometimes be dragged away from one set of characters to control another simultaneous scenario, or meet someone new entirely. That confidence is warranted. VI has a strong cast of characters that nearly all get completely satisfying arcs from start to finish, such that those who don't, like Shadow, feel utterly intentional to instil that forlorn longing for resolution which keeps fans wistfully wondering for years to come. ("What if Shadow had a chat with Relm- just for a moment! >sigh<")

I do have my issues. I think the Esper system is cool, but it does homogenise character abilities near to the end of the game, making everyone spell slinging demons. Sabin's QTE blitz system is just annoying. Not difficult, just a waste of time to do everytime. Setzer's slot machine can go jump off a cliff, I spent three hours trying to get 777 for the achievement before learning the game nonsensically rigs the result for no reason. Also, it can randomly kill the party if you set it on autobattle (which happened for me thrice. Screw Setzer.) Also, and I get this is slightly unfair, 'Aria Di Mezzo Carattere' is way too close to Aerith's theme. I know, I know- this one came first- but I can't help but compare! Only Aerith's theme is justifiably iconic for emotional range and musical depth, which makes 'Aria Di Mezzo Carattere' feel like the first half of a breath, bizarrely incomplete. Unfair, but I have to be honest.

Finally, I need to talk about the World of Ruin. I did not know that Dragon's Dogma 2 was a send-up to Final Fantasy 6 but now it seems utterly obvious, the WOR is such an interesting place for a FF game to go in. Cutting the thread of narrative off and leaving you in an open ravaged world- it's utterly unique and chillingly daunting. Also curious how the protagonist seems to shift from Terra to Celes for a time, making this feel like a narrative that transcends character and rather settles on the drive towards purpose itself. Final Fantasy 6 left me with a sensation I can't shake- I think there's a genuine masterpiece in mould that makes up the game, but it isn't quite on the screen. Whereas Final Fantasy 7 earns it icon standing through everything we see, Final Fantasy 6 lingers on the heart and mind more, to such an extent it leaves a longing to realise all of that heart in action. I think a Final Fantasy 6 remake could, and would be incredible, but for the game we have today, compared to the original FF7, I have to give it to my boys in Midgar. More distinct world, more full antagonist, and slightly more nuanced meta-narrative; but I love both games and the choice between the two is not cut and dry!

The Pixel Remasters have been a fantastic route into gaming royalty. Each game held something special and I didn't fully dislike a single experience, which across a franchise as storied as this one marks something honestly special. I've always wondered about the legendary status of Final Fantasy and honestly held off on this little retrospective just in case reality did not live up to the stories. What I experienced what not what I expected, not by a long shot, but not a disappointment. What I found was a playability and relevance for each one of these games even in the modern age, to a degree that makes me slightly aggrieved I never did this earlier. I've learned a lot not just about history, but the evolution of a legend- and something makes me curious where the games went next... Final Fantasy VIII remaster next?