In Defense of Final Fantasy VI

by Tucker Hoog 

The author of the editorial "The problem with Final Fantasy VI", Sean Daughtery, says the magic system is the least inspired concept ever to appear within the games and it had no limits. I completely disagree. I thought the magic system was the best one ever made in the FF series. I believe Espers and Magicite added a lot to the game by making them both living things and things you could use. When Ramuh turns himself into magicite and gives you his friends that died while fleeing Vector you get the ability to teach different spells to different people.....just like in FF7 except in FF7 you could equip more materia then you could Espers but the materia magic took longer to learn. In Sean Daughtery's Editorial he says FFV and FFVII all had limitations of their magic system while FFVI had none. This is entirely untrue. In FFV you could have anybody learn any "Skill" by making the characters a specific job and in FFVII all you had to do was equip materia to a certain characters to learn the spell and you could equip up to about 20 of them by the end of the game! In FFVI you could only equip one esper that taught you the max of about 7 spells and there was only around 2 of them that taught that many. Most of them taught around 3 or 4 spells.

I cant really argue with him about the game being not very challenging...... Its true, the game was extremely easy but then again would you rather it was the hardest game ever made?

The editorial also says the characters lacked "individuality" me and many other people believed this game had the most in depth characters in the series. I believe the characters in FFVII and FFV lacked "characters". They could all learn the same spells and had no special skill to make that specific characters unique. While in FFVI the characters each had there own skill to make them unique.

He also says there is too many useless skills that a few characters had in FFVI. Well, there is a simple solution to this....don't put the people with useless skills in your party! FFVI had the most characters ever offered in a FF some with bad skills, others with great skills. I suggest you use the people with good skills and not bad ones.

Something that was not mentioned in Sean Daughterys editorial is the story line. I believe FFVI had the most amazing story line ever thought of. Th espers, the Empire, and the Returners together all made the perfect story line. Who would have ever thought Kefka would kill both General Leo and the Emperor himself. The Returners which fought a hopeless battle against the Empire also added to the game. The Espers which the game centered on were absolutely brilliant and how Kefka found a way to drain there powers to create magitek armor and then took more espers, drained there powers, and made more magitek armors. Terra, who was part esper and part human, and Celes who was artificially infused with magic were the two main characters in the game. And Locke who saved them both when they were in trouble making him look like the hero of the game.

By writting this I hope you all see how incredibly good of a game FFVI truly was.