A Defense of FF6 Involving a Non Spoony Bard

by Kamarile 

Let's make an analogy. How many of you here have heard of a guy called William Shakespeare?

Yes, the bald guy with the funky collar who wrote 'Hamlet'.

How many people would deny that Shakespeare (or whoever wrote his plays) wrote some of the greatest and most influential works in the English language? Not many. His plays have reached such an extent of fame that he has become a historical icon, and a good number of his plays' titles have become household names.

Now what does this have to do with FF6?

Quite simply, the arguements I have seen here against this game have revolved around the fact that the more recent Playstation Final Fantasy games are superior in terms of graphics, plot, sound, and everything else that people can possibly think of. Now let say first that I loved FF7, and it is one of my favorite games of all time. The graphics, while those blocky people annoy you at first, are quite endearing; the music is very good (Aeris' theme still makes my stomach churn in a melancholy way), and I liked the confusing plot. God help me, I even liked the ending!

I also liked FF6 when I played it (which was after FF7, by the way). My only misgiving about it was that the final boss battle was far too easy, but other than that it was a great game. Kefka was as scary as Sephiroth, but in a different way. Terra was just as messed up as Cloud, but in a different way. You had the same general plot idea: 'Hero with some sort of amnesia gathers together a group of allies and fights against the Evil Emperor, who is killed by a Greater Evil, the hero defeats the Greater Evil, The End'; but the games still manage to be quite different from each other, in terms of both gameplay and plot. Let's face it. FF6 and FF7 are two DIFFERENT games.

I wonder what would happen if Shakespeare had written his plays today. To us, the style of theatre in Elizabethan England would have been dreadfully boring. There was minimal stage space, very few costumes (often the actors would dress in a mixture of costume and normal clothing for performances), no scenery, no lighting. The plots of his plays were all borrowed from some place or another; his writing is difficult to interpret much of the time, simply because the slang in the sixteenth century was so different than our own. So we take away visual grandeur, original plot, and a good translation from Shakespeare's plays, yet they are STILL considered to be literary masterpieces. If William Shakespeare had written his plays today in the way they were written five hundred years ago, he'd probably be laughed off of the stage.

The same thing goes for FF6. If it were released for the first time today, with the same graphics, the same sound quality (note that I do not say 'music' here), and the same plot and dialogue, people wouldn't play it. It would replace FF8 as the black sheep of Final Fantasy. People would ask what the world was coming to. There would be breaking of disks, and burning of Playstations.

Are you starting to see a connection here? The fact is, FF6 NEEDS to be put on some sort of pedestal-- not ABOVE the games of today, but apart from them. Old classics are not MEANT to be compared to today's games; they are meant to be enjoyed side-by-side. FF6, like Shakespeare, is a classic because once you delve through all the things that supposedly differentiate it from games like FF7, you see that it is just as good. Shakespeare might not have been able to come up with an original story, but his characters were brilliantly written-- it is often said that he was the only writer of his time who could portray women accurately. He also wrote some incredible poetry (of course), that is amazing even by our standards. FF6 had some very memorable scenes, surprisingly well-done characters (considering that there WERE fourteen of them. I myself find the lack of a 'true' main character very refreshing.), and of course, some beautiful music, even if the game WAS made for an SNES with heavy censorship, antiquated graphics and sound, and whatever else people attribute to its poor quality. To compare FF6 to FF7 or Xenogears would be like comparing Shakespeare to Steven Spielberg, or Tolkien to a modern fantasy author. It is done, but it shouldn't be, because it simply isn't fair to compare what was with what is and what could have been. Maybe Shakespeare today would never get a movie contract, and maybe FF6 today would never see the light of day, but that doesn't at all detract from the fact that they were, and hence, still are, what we call 'classics.'

"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends."

-"A Midsummer Night's Dream"