“On that day… the world was changed forever…”

And they made this game within the span of a year??

Most cinematic game on the SNES, no contest. I knew this game was influential but I never realized to what degree until I actually made it through myself. After watching my brother play it here and there as a kid, to attempting a half dozen times between now and then, I never fully grasped it. Till now.

This is by a team at the top of their game. If every Final Fantasy before it had growing pains, this was the full culmination of what a JRPG or a Final Fantasy meant, plus bonus points for pushing into new directions. IV had the focus on story but not as much on gameplay, whereas V was the opposite. VI manages to (almost) be the in-between. There’s still a huge focus on story, but I think the magicite system and relics allow some level of customization for your otherwise very distinct characters. You can’t really have IV and V within the same game, but this is a very strong effort to bridge the gap.

I grew up thinking this game was extremely dark and it is… at times. The Doma scene in particular still lives rent free in my mind, but there’s also a ton of goofball humor, possibly even moreso, that balances out all the death and dismay. In addition, there are a lot of fun story scenarios, such as the opera, a town full of liars that you have to deduce the truth from, switching between parties till they meet up at their destination, etc. This cycles through a ton of JRPG standards that every game since has based entire games around.

Square really could have just made the World of Balance and everyone would have considered it a good if not great game, but they added an entire second half (back third?) just because they were ahead of schedule. Damn. And it’s not just some addendum, it’s an entirely new open world to explore and there are still tons of things to do in it (most of it being optional). I think this is what cements it in its place as an all-time classic. It essentially functions like FF IV: The After Years, except you didn’t beat the boss, the boss won.

Almost every dungeon has some weird or goofy gimmick going on, it’s not just run around and grind, there’s probably a puzzle of some kind or some other way to mix things up.

Back to the cinematic feel, this definitely feels like a stage play itself, as I’ve noticed a lot of JRPGs do, but it literally has one within it (okay opera). But there’s also a bunch of on-rails moments (one quite literally) which lends to a sense of urgency and scale.

I can feel the influence on a series like Suikoden, with a rogue band of marauders, some of which you might recruit optionally. If FF VII was “the” JRPG of all time (at least culturally), then this was the game that gave them the chutz pah to make that one as cinematic and as memorable as it was. But this one was still more ambitious. Don’t even get me into all the RPG Maker projects I’ve played that shamelessly ape elements from this game. Every single weird little nuance you can explore within a top-down JRPG was done here. This thoroughly wrote the book on all of it. How do you even follow that up? Well I guess with Chrono Trigger (arguably an even better game?!) and then move to 3D afterward. Square really was IT by the end of the SNES life cycle.

The graphics didn’t age amazingly, but it’s still one of the better looking games on the SNES and utilizes every sort of trick to achieve a cinematic feel on a system that could barely handle it. My only complaint is that some of the character animations could be more fluid, or the occasional crappy tile placement here and there. Honestly it’s just a nitpick and doesn’t bother me, but it’s proof this game isn’t perfect. It’s just pretty close.