Final Fantasy VI Replay Retrospective Review
I was avoiding this one, because I knew it would be controversial. Final Fantasy VI is a good game. But it isn't my favorite, and I'm not sure in the end, it will even be in the top 3. There's a lot to recommend this game. It came out the year before Chrono Trigger, and it has a very similar feel in terms of characters and story presentation.
That's all very good. Each character in their personality here feels unique and interesting, and there are a LOT of them. The first half of the game, things really gel. It's an interesting story, it has a good narrative trajectory, but in the second half of the game, things feel a bit more disjointed, and the fact that there are so many characters actually works against it as you proceed to interact with them all.
Mechanically, I feel like this game falls a bit flat, because it is very easy to have ever character master every esper, which makes characters feel very samey on the combat level, with only their unique abilities and some stat differences (due to the espers they had equipped when leveling) to differentiate them.
That said, Kefka is a great villain, and the opera scene is fun and iconic. The final battle is one of the most fun in the series, and it really benefits from the huge cast of characters, but overall, the game doesn't feel as compelling as Final Fantasy IV does, so I put IV above VI in my rankings.
It may help matters (or hurt them depending on your opinion) that I didn't play FFVI to completion until I was an adult. I rented it when it came out (for those of you too young to remember, there used to be stores that you would go to and pay to rent a video game for a few days), and I played probably 8 hours of it before I returned it. And then I didn't touch it for 7-8 years after that. So I don't have the feelings of nostalgia that others have for this game. That said, onto the lists.
The Good
The Characters: It's truly impressive with a cast as large as this that they really develop nearly every character, even some of the villains.
The Final Boss: I'm not exaggerating when I say this fight is one of the best in the series. It's so much fun to be making your way up a tower of a boss while relying on your huge party to handle it when someone falls. We will see a similar mechanic in Final Fantasy VIII, but we aren't there yet, and there, I think it works against you, whereas here, it feels really good and epic.
Espers: In general, I think these are cool. From a plot level, finding various espers is rewarding, and from a mechanical level, for most of the game it's cool to be unlocking new abilities. It's not until you really sit down and decide to master them that it works against the game mechanically.
The Story: At least for the first half of the game, as things are being revealed, and you are learning more about each character, the story is really interesting and engaging. It's also super memorable. Unlike some of the earlier games, I remember this plot very well.
The Music: I don't think I mentioned this in my FFIV review (that music is also very good), but the music here is one of the first times in the series that it becomes so good that I just want to listen to it on its own.
The Bad
The Open World Part: In the second half of the game, the world opens up, and you have to find each character and recruit them again. This feels really disjointed after a really well constructed first half.
Everyone is the Same: Once you master all the espers, which is not that much of a chore, every character has all of the same abilities available to them. The only real differences are their stats, their unique abilities, and their equipment. VERY late in the game, you can do some very interesting builds with equipment, but until then, it feels like I just have a party of the same character over and over.
Rankings
FF IV
FF VI
FF V
FF III
FF
FF II






















