20 years of FF3/FF6 goodness

The Core RPGC Main Forum
1

It has been 20 years since SquareSoft (RIP) gave us Final Fantasy 3 on the Snes.

What a wonderful game.

A wonderful story.

An incredible soundtrack which still amazes.

Great artwork.

So much gameplay variety.

What more could be said ?

Here I go… nostalgic mode.

I was never interested in the RPG genre.

A friend of mine absolutely insisted I give FF3 a chance…

I grumbled at first…

At first, I thought “Yeah, ok” “Like Star Wars Walkers destroying a town”…

When I reached the Whelk boss…

Music cued…

Holy Shit !

I dunno… it ruffled my feathers, hit the right strings, etc…

I HAD to see what happened next…

Afterwards, I was hooked…

I mean… hopelessly hooked…

I couldn’t let go…

I had to see what followed…

I got as far as the Opera House in ONE playthrough…

There was NO turning back…

I had to see the plot to the very end…

I lost touch with my friend.

Enter emulation.

It took me a while to figure it all out at first.

In a matter of months… I managed to conquer FF3.

I mean, raising most of my characters at level 99.

Even Gau.

Learnt all magics.

Afterwards, the Kefka Tower was a breeze for the most part.

The final battle was all too easy.

Yet so much fun to get there.

So…

Thank you Square Soft for giving us this magnificient gem 20 years ago.

Thank you Nobuo Uematsu for the incredible soundtrack. I have yet to tire of it.

Thank you Yoshitaka Amano for the artwork. Monster designs were unique here.

Thank you to Hironobu Sakaguchi for making the absolute best game out there.

All of you whom were brought up thanks to FF3/FF6… Give it a go.

Such an amazing RPG which has aged beautifully.

I wanted to say the same for FF7… but alas.

Then again… It could be nostalgia talking to me.

-DG

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well said, DG. well said.

3

No mention of how cobbled together that game was? Relm was the motherfucking (ticking time) bomb.

And its weird how much of Celes’ and Tina Terra’s story felt like they were a part of each other’s but couldn’t without risking the formation of a walking drama bomb.

Also, Gau’s Rages were simply ridiculous. Not only was it a pain in the ass to keep track of, but its impossible to collect them all (technically speaking), and there are several that require particular encounters like the other Mag Roaders that only show up during the Magitek Research Factory escape sequence, or finding where the Grenades are hiding at, or even the fact that some of his Rages are massively gamebreaking to get at the first opportunity like the Aspil’s Gigavolt ability being a glorified Bolt 3 spell which you can get as soon as right after the defense of Narshe sequence. Also Wind God Gau in the SuperNES version.

Also also, the M.Evade trick thanks to the Evade bug (which made Blind little more than a cool pair of shades in that game).

And Magic Power Supremacy. Yes, even you Mr. Bear and your myriad of magic based Blintzes (and your Suplexing a goddamn train). Plus Stamina’s absolute uselessness (only ever affects Regen and Seizure) and Speed’s near uselessness (the factor in which Speed actually affects the rate of your ATB gauge’s restoration is ridiculously small).

Also also also, the actual legitimate method of getting General Leo (and Madium) in your party for at least a short while, all thanks to the Game Over glitch and a serious bout of sequence breaking.

Or even just how levels work (in that, a level up only increases HP and MP by a certain increment at a given level regardless as to who is getting the level, possibly a stat boost in a base stat depending on the Esper equipped and the change in the level number which almost every level dependent calculation in the game uses (which includes everything from your basic Attack to Magic and even the effectiveness of most subabilities like Mog’s Dance, Gau’s Rages, Edgar’s Tools, Relm’s Sketches/Control and Locke’s Steal/Capture).

And the list goes on…

Its amazing to behold just how much of an utterly janky mess FFVI was/is and how beloved it is to a generation of gamers.

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I don’t really get it. Most of this stuff ranges from “extremely hard” to “impossible” to find, deduce, or otherwise notice when playing the game normally. I’ve played the game countless times and I had to look up half the stuff you just brought up. I doubt any of these are an issue, or even a consideration, for 99% of the people playing FF6.

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I’ve played Final Fantasy 6 so many times I’ve lost count. I’ve easily put over 1000 hours into it, and in fact just started another playthrough :v This time I intend to complete the game with only Celes, Edgar, and Setzer, because to the best of my knowledge I’ve never done that before :v

You know how the SNES console and cartridges were prone to yellowing when left in the sun? While my SNES has no significant yellowing, but my FF6 cart has a clearly visible line across the back of it, where it seats in the console. Above the line is very yellowed, below it looks brand new. 'cuz it spent so many years sitting in place :v

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That’s what’s so amazing about it. Its like looking at something with a 3D effect. From one particular angle, the image has a very neat crisp 3D effect going on, but from literally any other angle, the image is nothing more than a garbled blurry mess.

Relm comes so late in the game that there’s little point to using her or her Sketch/Control aside from learning all of Statego’s Lore, but there are enemies that make themselves invisible and if done wrong, you can easily find yourself staring at an incomprehensible mess.

Additionally, some of this jankiness was well known like the Vanish/Doom trick, and you had stuff like Beads being little more than vendor fodder due to a total lack of effectiveness.

Seriously, Square threw the entire pot of spaghetti at the wall, and they somehow got enough of it to stick to form a cohesive game (not that this was their only one, but by even their standards, the game was a MacGuver’d mess).

7

I think a large part of that is because, when it came out, it looked amazing, sounded amazing, and had a fantastic storyline (even if a bunch of idiots say it fell apart in the World of Ruin). And it still holds up today, 20 years later. It did appear to function properly, for the most part, and the only thing that would have immediately stood out to the average gamer was the low difficulty level. One-shotting Kefka with an Atma Weapon/Illumina/Offering combo, for instance :v

Of course, once the rumours made it out about all the various ways you could break the game, people started having fun with it :v But many of the bugs and glitches were hidden just well enough that they weren’t immediately apparent.

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Yeah, so the game wasn’t built all that well. It didn’t stop it from being fun. I remember how shocked I was when Relm’s Sketch bug was activated.

255 Atma Weapons, Illuminas, Offerings, Economizers, etc…

Woah ! Cool !

I’m fortunate that the bug didn’t erase my hard work down the drain. Knocks on wood

9

if anyone is a member of the speedrunning community, then you know that a lot of games have some bugs that can be exploited. It doesn’t mean the game was shoddy, because as mentioned, on a normal playthrough, you wouldn’t notice any of this. Seeing a speedrun of FFVi is actually quite amazing as well.

There aren’t a lot of games that DON’T have some sort of game-breaking glitch in them if you look hard enough for it or know where to look. With all those lines of code, it’s nearly impossible not to have a few here and there.

For instance:

There’s a wall clipping trick in the Legend of Zelda which allows you to skip to the next screen on the opposite side of where you were going (for instance, if you are on the right side, you manage to go to the next screen on the left).

Being able to wall-clip in A Link to the Past at a certain point in order to beat the game in under 5 minutes.

Phantasy Star II has an inventory glitch which can allow you to beat the game in under 1 hour and with Nei in the party.

Phantasy Star III has an Escapipe glitch which will allow you to skip the entire 2nd generation. There’s also a glitch which will give the character in your 5th party slot increased speed and defense.

Mega Man 2 has a wall-clipping trick which will allow you to zip across the entire screen and avoid a majority of the level in only a few seconds.

The infamous Minus World in SMB.

Being able to beat Super Mario 64 with only having 16 stars (or around that number).

Being able to pause jump in Legacy of the Wizard.

The item duplication glitch in Symphony of the Night and Lament of Innocence.

The list goes on. Each game was fun and solid in their own rights and under normal circumstances. As far as Final Fantasy VI goes, yeah, it seems the only important stat was Magic Power, as getting enough of that early on could make even your level 2 magic do massive amounts of damage easily.