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[go back: to the operatic page one]
WHERE IT GOES FROM THERE
The Opera House Scene ushered in an era of
Japanese console RPGs in which "dungeons" are replaced by
battle-inclusive set-pieces that rely on cinematic plots told through
scripted events. This era ended, unfortunately, with the advent of Pokemon
and the collection-oriented RPG. At the time of this writing, the
console RPG is a plaything of children who like collecting trading
cards. I rather liked the direction the cinematic-event RPG was headed.
Chrono Trigger, in which every dungeon is
orchestrated to Opera-House levels of melodrama, should have inspired
as many developers as it did gamers. Final Fantasy VII sees the
form of scripted events in a Japanese RPG at its shining peak. From
then, even Final Fantasy games became obsessed with collection
and customization.
What I find most appealing about Final
Fantasy VI is that, though it is not entirely customizable,
per se, it does allow me to play it in my own way. The sheer
volume of cast -- fourteen playable characters, including two hidden
ones (the enigmatic mimic Gogo, and the yeti Umaro) -- is undermined by
the gameplay element that dictates only four characters can be used at
once. This is cleverly forcing us to pick favorites. I, personally,
never use Gau. My best friend in college, Keith, however, was addicted
to Gau. I don't like Gau because he has no "attack" function. Rather,
you pick the name of a monster from a list of monsters. You earn the
list by fighting on the Veldt plain, where you found Gau. You choose
the "jump" command, and Gau runs off to train with the monsters. Then
you fight another battle, without Gau in your party. Gau comes back at
the end of the battle, and he's learned the techniques of the monsters
you were fighting when he "jump"ed and the monsters you were fighting
when he returned. I found this tedious. I always used to leave him on
the Veldt and fly away in the airship. Some people did not do this.
(Little did any of us know this would become the standard for RPGs of
the late 1990s. The collecting-monsters part, not the
leaving-the-freak-boy-and-running part.)
The Gau element is borrowed, mostly, from Dragon
Quest V. In that game, after a certain point, you gain the ability
to charm monsters. They might offer to join your party after any given
battle. However, this is all very random, and sometimes kind of
jarring. You might go two hundred battles without a join-up offer, only
to have one suddenly fly out at you in the middle of a dungeon, when
you don't care to deal with it. In Final Fantasy VI, the
differing gameplay mechanics are confined to a geographical region --
or a building, in the case of the fight-for-items mini-quest of the
Coliseum -- where you can experience them at your leisure, and you can
experience them fast, and hard.
Just, know that "hard" doesn't mean
"difficult." Every Japanese guy I talk to about RPGs will smack their
lips, suck down some cigarette, and intone that Final Fantasy VI
was where Final Fantasy entered the dark side. If they're a Dragon
Quest fan, they'll say this is because the game's battles are too
easy -- for once, you can fight every battle in the game, never knowing
that you even can put party members in the back row. (Final
Fantasy IV would gleefully punish you for having a wizard in the
front row.)
The game was also most outspoken about its
Yoshitaka Amano artwork -- both the Super Famicom box and the
instruction manual were covered in depictions of limp-wristed
albino men dripping in jewelled garments -- for one thing. Japanese
gamers of 1994 were yet a curiously homophobic bunch, still growing
used to the fact that some people liked this sexy-fairy-tale art style.
VI's soundtrack was issued in so many
incarnations (and piano arrangements) that the word "sell-out" wasn't
too far off the mark.
Though only 100,000 copies of the game
cartridge sold (to proud, inspired customers) in America, it was a
mega-hit in Japan, and the breaking point between Final Fantasy
and Dragon Quest. Before VI, Dragon Quest
players had been known to indulge in and enjoy Final Fantasy
games and vice versa; something about the big, bold, brassy, glittery Final
Fantasy VI, however, turned its most devoted fans into people who
wouldn't have their games any other way. This same something turned up
the noses of those who favored the father-son archetypes and agreeable
Akira Toriyama art stereotypes of Dragon Quest V. VI
was, all at once, where comparisons between the two franchises both
ended and began anew.
Yet one thing is apparent to me, as I write
this. As a critic and as a game-player, I am aware of all the things I
love about both franchises. I can tell you, frankly, that Final
Fantasy VI is a genius videogame. So is Dragon Quest V. Yet
the flaw that pops out most boldly to me when it comes to both of these
games is difficulty. Final Fantasy VI is easy. To put it
bluntly, it's very easy. You might be able to finish it without losing
a fight. The same goes for Dragon Quest V. The reason for the
dumbed-down difficulty is both simple to explain and hard to justify.
Final Fantasy VI's producers were
concerned, first and foremost, with making a masterpiece. As Metal
Gear Solid producer Hideo Kojima would have us know, if you seek to
make a masterpiece game, it can't be too hard. The player has to first
experience it from beginning to end in order to deem it a masterpiece.
And if the player isn't going to deem it a masterpiece, who will? The
critics? What good is that? A critic, when he plays a game, either
plays a game as a player or doesn't really play it at all. And for a
game to be played, it must be playable. "Difficult" infringes on
"playable." Therefore, Final Fantasy VI, which the producers
intended very much to be experienced (the twenty-minute ending
orchestra was, clearly, meant to be heard) from beginning to end, is
not difficult to finish. Money is gorgeously abundant, and you'll never
be left wanting for medicine, armor, or weapons. There are moments of
bewilderment while fighting bosses, though the game itself offers hints
at these times. In this way, Final Fantasy VI comes to feel
somewhat like an opera viewed with binoculars from a roller-coaster
car.
Again this brings us to the element of
"choice." In Final Fantasy VI, you choose the names of your
characters. Then you choose which four characters you want to use. Then
you use them to act out storyline sequences. It's like playing with
action figures, only with a tighter story, a set of rules, and more
button-pressing. Your choice to name a character "Billy" might stem
from what the character looks like, or the fact that his description
calls him a "treasure-hunter and trail-worn traveler"; your choice to
use Billy to fight at the top position during the final battle might
stem from the fact that Billy is named "Billy." When it comes time to
teach your characters some magic spells, Billy might get the first pick
of Magicites.
Whoever learns which spells first doesn't
matter, you may find. In Final Fantasy VI, every character can
be trained to be pretty much the same thing. V, with its
job-class system that focused on teaching each of the four characters
every skill and then reverting them to the blank-slate class, was as
much of a challenge as it was a celebration of ambivalence; VI
dwells in ambiguity. Each character is essentially the same, except for
their special ability. Edgar, a machine-fancier, can use "tools" such
as a drill or a chainsaw. Mash can use martial arts techniques inputted
through fighting-game motions. Cayenne can use sword techniques; Shadow
can throw bladed weapons; Relm can attack with sketches of enemies. Yet
everyone can equip the Ragnarok Magicite, learn the "Ultima" spell, and
kill the final boss in six hits.
Is this a "problem"? Not exactly. It doesn't
make the game "bad" so much as it makes it easier. As the game is very
much something like a good Charles Dickens serial novel, repeated
cliffhangers and all, it is designed to keep the player pushing buttons
until some reasonable, brassy resolution occurs. The developers, though
sure their game would be a masterpiece as long as it contained all the
right elements (their placement was not important), were not so bold as
to assume it was charming enough to involve millions of loving players
even though the gameplay might bore to high heaven. So these
"customizable" elements are slid into the game, all interchangeable in
their placement. We teach Billy the strongest spells because he's
Billy, and we like Billy more than we like the wild-boy, Retard. The
wide cast of characters lets us pick who we like and who we don't like.
It lets us form adventuring parties of as many as four or as few as one
character.
When we only take one player out into the
adventuring field, all of the others stay behind, either in some kind
of temporary base camp or, later in the game, aboard our big, beautiful
airship. In the base camp, they wander around and offer you vague hints
about which direction to head. On the airship, they most likely while
away the time playing poker. Either way, they're left behind. When left
behind, they gain no levels. They gain nothing at all. They're out of
sight, though not at all out of mind.
This is mostly interesting, and I will use
this detail to conclude that Final Fantasy VI, a true sign of
both the greatest year videogames have yet seen (1994), is great
because it represents, for a first time, a graphically and aurally
superior sequel-sequel that is, when it all comes down to the bit, not
as good as its pre-predecessor. The problem with Final Fantasy VI,
as a game, as a story, as an opera, and as something we love, is that
is encourages exclusion at all possible turns.
Fourteen playable characters, we have. We use
four at once. In the last dungeon, we use up to twelve of them, in
three parties (a sincerely clever final dungeon, that is), though
chances are one of our parties is going to have Mog at the lead; Mog,
with his Moogle Charm relic, has the pleasure of never entering a
random battle. This means that Mog's party is the dummy party. The
other two parties have maybe two strong characters each; that's one
strong character more than is required to take down any of the final
monsters. Mog's party, even, when it fights one of the mandatory
bosses, is going to come through with most every member intact. As you
have a bottomless inventory menu and more money than you could possibly
spend, it's no problem bringing the dead Moogle back to life, should he
die in battle.
I mentioned elixirs before. Elixirs are
medicinal items which heal all of a characters hit points and magic
points, so long as that character is alive. It's a magnificent item,
though only in words. It's the semantics of the little item-window
description, perhaps, that makes any player so reluctant to ever use
them. You'll know you can't buy them anywhere, and so you'll hoard them
until the game is over. Besides -- you don't ever really need
one. All you need to do is heal using magic, and then restore your
magic points using a magic-draining spell. Most all enemies have magic
points, anyway.
So yes -- Final Fantasy VI, as a
game, is enjoyed by players in unique ways visible in which characters
he doesn't choose for his adventuring party; a player's level
of involvement with the game, as a game (rather than as a story), is
measurable by how many elixirs he has in his inventory, a number
directly related to the number of clocks he's felt perversely compelled
to search at various inns scattered across the land. These little
observances hint at something dark bubbling beneath its youth-rousing
fantasy surface. This darkness is something beyond even the darkness of
the story's second half. Many of the kids who beat it more than three
times, I'm told, went so far as to immediately transform into Goths
upon the rolling of the final credit on their third run-through. This
is because the game houses a great darkness within it. Did the
designers know it was there? I detect that they did not. They went on
building their game with its shallow completionist side-quests and
faux-customizable system, inspired tangentially by opera, all the while
not suspecting that the form they had chosen made it impossible for
their game to not come out missing something.
**
It should be noted, right here, that there is
no way to score a "perfect" quest of Final Fantasy VI. You
can't collect every item. Halfway through the game, in an operatic
clash where, in a real opera, Final Fantasy VIII would have
become Final Fantasy IX, the world is ruined. When the world is
ruined, you face all kinds of choices. The player awakens as Celes on
an island, one year after the events of the first half of the story.
For a year, Cid, the old scientist who helped the Empire rise to power
and now sees the errors of his ways, had been tending to her. Now he
falls ill. As Celes, we help Cid, by fishing for his survival. We feed
him fish until he either dies or lives. Either way, Celes finds a raft
and sails to land in a dramatic sequence where the sky is stained
purple-orange. (If you let Cid die, Celes attempts suicide, only to be
washed back up on the same shore, where she finds the raft.) She then
meets up with Mash, who's holding up a burning house in a village that
has just been attacked by the mystic "Light of Judgment" spewing out of
the cruel final boss's tower. Soon, you meet up with Edgar, and then
Setzer, and eventually earn the airship. These four characters, should
they be your four favorites, are now free to attack the final dungeon
and kill the final boss. You can do this with two parties of one
character each, and one party of two. It's possible, though very
difficult.
I've honestly never done it.
It's just too easy to go around and get
everything else, anyway. The rest of the game involves you picking up
your teammates in any order you see fit, each pick-up involving a short
quest (the longest and most dramatic of which is Locke's) and then
attacking the dungeon when you can be bothered to.
There are gameplay choices, however. In a
house in Narshe, a man offers you a Magicite he found. It's "Ragnarok,"
and it teaches "Ultima," the strongest spell in the game (in 1994,
neither of these spells were "Online" yet, it seems). He offers to
either give you the Magicite, or melt it and make it into a sword. The
sword will be the strongest in the world, he assures you. Either way,
when you make your choice, the man dies. If you choose the Magicite,
you can teach everyone "Ultima." The only other way to teach "Ultima"
involves the "Paladin Shield," which you earn by wearing the crippling
"Cursed Shield" for 255 battles in a row. If you take the sword -- it's
not at all the strongest in the game. The strongest is "Illumina,"
which you earn if you bet the Ragnarok at the Dragon's Neck Coliseum.
Beat the boss, and win the sword, which randomly casts "Holy" on
enemies during battle. Together with the "Offering" relic, which lets
you attack four times with one weapon, and the "Genji Glove," which
lets you use two weapons, you can use this sword to attack the final
boss twelve times in one round, and probably kill him in that one turn.
It's some voodoo stuff.
Yet it's worth pointing out that you can't
get both swords, or even one sword and the Magicite. As far as a
completionist is concerned, then, the game is impossible to fully beat.
There are other challenges to occupy the time
of the obsessed player. The Coliseum, in which we can't control our
fighter, is a great time-waster. Save your game outside and then enter
and reenter continuously, fighting. If you lose, reset the game -- if
you're playing on a cartridge this is especially easy -- and try again.
Win some bizarre things, like Rename Cards, which let you rename
characters, or armor to use exclusively when in the
normally-debilitating "Kappa" state. The "Merit Award" is a favorite
item of mine -- it lets anyone who wears it equip any weapons or armor.
All of the game's side diversions take place
in its second half, the one about winning your party members back.
There's a little quest about killing these Eight Dragons, and unlocking
the final Esper power. The dragons themselves aren't so hard, and one
of them -- the Dirt Dragon, who's taking up troubling space on the
opera stage, looks like a stupid old Tyrannosaurus Rex. That's a dinosaur,
not a dragon. There's another side-quest confined in a magic
tower. In this tower, you can use no attacks -- only magic spells. Each
tier of the tower sees you fighting enemies with stronger magic powers
than the tier beneath. Yet you can just use the Moogle Charm to avoid
battles all the way up. Or you can cast "Berserk" on your party
members, reducing them to attacking fiends who will crush every
opponent. As for the boss -- cast "Berserk" on him, too, and he can't
hurt you with his devastating magic anymore. Like any old wizard, his
magic attacks are lacking.
So it is that for every challenge in Final
Fantasy VI there is a glowing, simple, easy way out. Any boss in
the game, save the final one, for example, can be eliminated in two
moves if hit with the "Vanish" invisibility spell and then the "Death"
or "X-Zone" spell. There's an experience
loop, for God's sake, a tiny ways into the game, apparent to anyone
with a turbo controller and an understanding of the menu cursor-memory
options. When I think back on the game -- as I do often -- I can't help
realizing how simple it all was, how there was never a moment when I
felt stuck or stumped.
The point of all this is for me to reach this
conclusion right here: the game aspect is flawed in that its designers
were so eager to tell you a story they handed you the proverbial key to
the city without conducting a thorough background check. What is
perhaps more important than this is that none of this probably ever
mattered to the person who first played the game in 1994. Back then, we
didn't even complain about random battles the way people do now.
Enemies popping up out of provably nowhere and challenging us to duels
every few steps was how we liked things, back then. Besides,
without battles, how else would we try out Edgar's new chainsaw, or
Tina's new Fire spell? How else are we going to earn that Economizer
relic, which reduces our magic spells to one point each, aside from
fighting countless near-impossible Brachiosaurs in the Dinosaur Forest?
The fighting of battles is one of two things (the other being
town/dungeon-exploration) that makes this a game rather than a
pixilated movie (or a sound-novel).
Playing this game again, in 2004, for the
purpose of writing this, has left me with a few new insights, and it is
with those that I will wrap up this review. The first thing is that I
rather like the diversity of selections for menu colors. I always liked
my background of the marble variety, stained imperial purple. There are
literally tens of thousands of other menu-color possibilities, and this
is important because it tells me a little bit more about how much
Yoshinori Kitase wanted me to enjoy his story. The rest of my insight
deals entirely with dark things.
One of the quickest subjects to come to mind
when a game-player hears the words "16-bit RPG" is what I like to call
"the darkness." There's a period in all of these games -- sometimes
that period is intentional, as in Final Fantasy VI or, most
masterfully, Mother 2 -- where the world is plunged into
horrible peril worse than all other perils, and the heroes must act
quickly. In Secret of Mana, there is a time when the skies over
the world darken and all of the townspeople cower in their houses. That
time passes soon, when the enemy is driven back into their final
dungeon. The sky remains dark when we fly into the final dungeon -- a
floating fortress, as it were.
In Final Fantasy VI, the dark part of
the story comprises the entire second half of the game. That second
half is as long or as short as you want it to be. This is most curious.
The heroine, Tina, is one of the optional characters to pick up. She
has lost her will to fight, and is caring for kids at an orphanage
somewhere. The first time you go to see her, she won't bother with you.
It takes coaxing to pull her away. In a true opera, Tina wouldn't come
back. It would be up to Celes, Edgar, Mash, and Setzer, a somewhat
random mishmash of characters, to save the world at last. It would
offer no grand finale outside its crashing music as the four heroes
died saving the world. You can win it this way, if you want, though I
don't think anyone dies either way.
The darkest parts of Final Fantasy VI,
however, exist just outside the finale segments. They're small quirks
of the design, hiccups of creativity on the part of a team that was
concerned with composing a masterpiece under the belief that if each
patch in the quilt is made of the finest silk, the color and
arrangement don't matter. In Final Fantasy VI we get characters
like Lone Wolf the thief and Siegfried the swordsman, who, rather like
Flyingman in Shigesato Itoi's Mother, show up from time-to-time
to provide something that could be called comic relief if we had some
notion what on earth they were driving at. Flyingman, in Mother,
at least, dies a noble death. What happens to Siegfried? He attacks us
from time-to-time in the Coliseum? Yet, who is he? What about Chupon,
right-hand-man of the jealous octopus Ultros? Why don't we ever learn
any more about him? Most criminally, what's the deal with Cid? Even if
we save him from death, we leave him on the island. If we go back to
the island in an airship with Locke, Celes, or even a full party in
tow, all he does is give us the same old "Try your best!" advice. Why
can't we take him with us? Though I have already said that the game is
much like an opera and operas don't resolve, usually, this is taking it
one step too far; in operas, I can't call out to the cast and tell them
to raise the dead girl and ask her what her favorite color was in life
so as to allow me to more accurately mourn her if it was orange. (Well,
I can do such a thing; I might get escorted out by police,
however.) In Final Fantasy VI I can bring characters
like Tina and Celes back to talk to Cid, the man who made them,
long after the world has ended and begun again with him trapped on a
solitary rock; long after the story has forgotten him, I am free to
remember, and walk back, and see him, and knock on the television
screen as he walks around freely, saying, "Get on my airship, old man,
and we'll take you home."
If Shigesato Itoi had planned this game, I'd
believe it if he told me this was intentional. As it was written by
Yoshinori Kitase, a proverbial kid just getting his feet wet, I'd chalk
it up to loophole. Kitase's Final Fantasy VII would be much
tighter in terms of its big risks, yet even dumber in terms of the
side-effects of its big risks.
I first picked up a guitar in 1994.
Naturally, one of the first things I learned was how to tune it. I kept
getting tripped-up in the tuning method. See, I couldn't fathom why the
third string was so different. The fifth string, for example, is
identical in pitch to the sixth string when played on the fifth fret.
The fourth string sounds like the fifth string in the fifth fret. The
second string is the third string in the fifth fret. The first string
is the second string in the fifth fret. Yet the third string -- it's
the fourth string in the fourth fret. My little instruction
manual told me that this tuning quirk was the "most important aspect of
the guitar as a musical instrument." Even as an aspiring mathematician,
I didn't understand it at the time, and so never was able to tune a
guitar. Just three years ago, I finally grasped it (while listening to
The White Stripes, incidentally), and can now tune a guitar. The only
problem is I can't explain exactly why this is the "most
important element" of the guitar without using all kinds of stupid
technical terms. Instead, I'll just talk about videogames: Shigesato
Itoi's Mother 2 is great because all of its uneasy
imperfections were planned. Square's Final Fantasy VI is great
because all of its uneasy imperfections were not planned. This makes
them different games, yet equally great, though one is clearly better
than the other. In Final Fantasy VI, when Cayenne stands at the
edge of the platform in the Phantom Forest, after the train ferrying
his family to the afterlife has departed, there's this awkward silence.
The rectangular train platform has no exit. Shadow stands in the middle
of the platform, poised, with his dog. Cayenne stands at the end of the
platform, head bowed. Mash is under our control. We can walk left or
right. Talk to Cayenne, and he says nothing. He doesn't move. A word
balloon doesn't even pop up. Talk to Shadow, and he says "Leave him
alone," of Cayenne. Mash says nothing. We run back and forth for a few
moments, in utter musical silence, unable even to open our own menu,
until the screen fades to black. How many players, at this moment,
tried to open their menu, only to find that you couldn't do it? I, for
one, did. What did I want to see? What did the director not want me to
see? This strikes me, today, as rather profound. I wonder if Kitase
understood how profound that technique was? I think he didn't (and
neither do I, honestly). That moment is very much like the tuning quirk
of Final Fantasy VI, very much the most important part of the
game as both a piece of narrative and as a videogame, for reasons I
probably can't ever explain.
What continues to strike me today about Final
Fantasy VI is the audacity of the game's one major choice.
Shadow, the ninja who would "slit his momma's throat for a nickel,"
tries to stop the end of the world at a crucial moment before the end
of the first half of the game. Kefka is attempting to move these three
statues of goddesses which precariously hold the earth's balance.
Shadow rushes to stop him while your team waits at the edge of the
Floating Continent in the sky, ready to jump to the airship. You're
playing this level on a time-limit. You have three minutes before the
end of the world. If you don't get lost even once (not too difficult),
you'll arrive at the exit with two minutes to spare. The options at the
exit are "Jump to the airship" and "Wait for Shadow." Choose "Wait for
Shadow," and your character stands back. The timer clicks down. If you
move from that one spot, Shadow won't come back. If you stay on that
spot, then, as the timer clicks down to three seconds, Shadow bursts
in, says he couldn't stop the chain reaction, and jumps away with you.
Either way, your airship is torn asunder and everyone is scattered.
Earlier in the game, when you first earn the
character Mog, there's a standoff situation. Lone Wolf has captured
Mog, after you caught him in the thievery act in a shack in Narshe.
Lone Wolf is holding Mog hostage on the cliff near the frozen Esper.
Step forward, and Lone Wolf tells you that if you take one more
step, the Moogle will get iced. Your character steps back
automatically. Step forward again, and Lone Wolf gives you the same
"One more step and the Moogle gets it" routine. What is the way out of
this predicament?
Well, oddly enough, the way to do it is open
your menu screen, press left on the control pad, and then press down,
cycling the cursor through your four party members' portraits. Move the
cursor twice, and -- this is the only time the game pulls you out of a
menu -- the screen fades back up, with Mog kicking up a fury and
shaking himself free of Lone Wolf.
I wonder where this idea came from? It's the
only situation like this in all of the RPGs I've ever played --
scrolling through your party members in a menu solving an onscreen
situation. It's odd, and quirky, and conceptual. There's nothing else
like it in Final Fantasy. The only thing that comes close is
Shadow's tendency to run away, during the first half of the game, after
the most random of random battles, without warning.
The dreams you see with Shadow in your party
at inns are bizarre, and hint at his connection with the evil Kefka,
and with the innocent little mage girl, Relm. Should you stop to
witness all these, Shadow's ambivalence at the end of act one should
feel something like Sydney Carton's in A Tale of Two Cities:
"It is a far, far better thing I do than
I have ever done.
It is a far, far better place I go to than
I have ever known."
Yet it is entirely our choice to interpret it
this way. Plays and novels, as storytelling forms, allow us to bring
our own morals and thinking tools to the analysis table, and come up
only with as much extrapolation as were are willing to stick onto the
side of their narrative structures. Videogames actually change
depending on how much we are involved with them. For example, if we
particularly love Final Fantasy VI, we may be spurred to fight
endless random battles at a time when Shadow is in our party,
necessitating a stay at an inn to heal. We may, if we're lucky, see one
of those dreams, spurring us to try to see their continuations. Whether
we see these dreams or we don't, we may or may not be inspired to stand
there at the edge of the Floating Continent, whose enemies are, if I
recall correctly, the hardest in the game, waiting for Shadow to come
back. If the timer's clicking becomes too much on our nerves, we jump.
Whether we wait for Shadow or not, the world is going to be ruined and
the last half of the game is going to be played out in a land of
misery. The rub is that if we wait for Shadow, he is alive to give a
soliloquy at the very end of the game, when his theme music borrows a
synthesized symphony orchestra and powerful leitmotifs, and becomes the
Final Fantasy theme itself, and we feel a sinking
feeling of catharsis. If we don't wait for him, he dies. If we saw his
dreams, and he dies, we think of him as some vague hero. If we saw his
dreams, and then we see his very last Dickensian soliloquy, we feel
proud at ourselves for having solved the mystery. We then instantly
know that we'll want to start the game over again every time we beat
it, effectively dooming us to play this game regularly for the rest of
our lives, even when we're in college and we have beautiful girlfriends
we should pay more attention to.
This is, at its best and at its not-best, the
most intriguing attempt at "interactive fiction" I've seen in an
operatic setting. Why does Shadow choose to stay and die in the tower
while all his comrades flee? Why does he invoke the name of his partner
from his innocent thieving days at the last moment? It requires the
extrapolation of diehards to reach anything resembling a conclusion. It
takes just a sketch with an artist's pencil to suggest literary value.
Fourteen-year-olds eat this stuff up. Adult men wish for more.
It's been a long time since a Final
Fantasy game aspired to any kind of high art. This was the first
and last recorded attempt. Final Fantasy VII would make a bold
attempt at a science-fiction-movie story to die for. Final Fantasy
VIII would harbor dreams of growing up to be a comic book about
teenagers. Final Fantasy IX would take spiritually flawed,
clumsy sweeps at the pure aspirations of the series' roots, and only Final
Fantasy X would be able to save what was left of the former
nobility. Dark times lay ahead for the franchise after Final
Fantasy VI (though the darkness in the next sequel was only in
tone, not in quality), predictable not even to the sixteen-year-olds
whose two-year-old cartridges had built up a layer of dust so thick the
game froze and glitched if Relm sketched the right enemy, resulting in
an after-battle discovery of 255 of every item in the inventory.
Final Fantasy VI ends with a dirty,
ruined world facing the light of hope, much like the folk-opera hero
Porgy on his cart facing the sunrise of a new morning, heading boldly
out to get that ungrateful woman who left him for a cocaine-dealer. By
the time it's over, the wind is blowing in the heroine's hair as the
music drums up to a crescendo and the credits stop rolling and the
montage stops montaging. Is it even an opera anymore? It has passed
through the continent of opera, crossed the ocean of rock, and come out
clear on the other side as something classifiable only as "Final
Fantasy VI." It is not as tight and focused as its closest
relative, Final Fantasy IV, though there's really no use
comparing the two. They are both what they are, and they are essential
videogames worth remaking far more than their elder cousins (VI,
with a three-dimensional take on Yoshitaka Amano's character designs
and/or a soundtrack by the NHK Symphony Orchestra, would be an
especially gorgeous situation). While Final Fantasy is about
reinvention, when you're playing VI, you ignore what it's reinventing
and just roll with what it's inventing. When it ends, it's the
end, though the choice is yours to even witness the last half, anyway.
Shadow, should he somehow wind up at the
opera with you, sleeps through the first act, and leaves during the
first intermission. He comes back ten game-hours later. Then he either
dies failing to save the world, lives failing to save the world, or
does nothing we ever care about in the first place. There's some
cleverness in there somewhere.
--tim
rogers will speak much more about this game in his review of final
fantasy vii, of all places
[next: NOW
WITNESS PROJECT FFDOG: BOOK FOUR]
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