It may or may not be obvious online,
but to those around me it's clear that I love RPGs. Suikoden, Legend
of Dragoon, Legend of Legaia, Shin Megami Tensei, Fire Emblem, Secret
of Mana, Dragon Quest, you name it. I am also a big fan of the early
to mid Final Fantasy games. It was always odd to me however, that is
could never really get to liking Final Fantasy VI.
Generally speaking, there has always
been two major camps when it comes to Final Fantasy. Those who love
VI and those who love VII. I was always under the understanding that
you did not need to dislike one to love the other but this was most
definitely the case for me. I loved Final Fantasy VII, it was a game
with no flaws at the time. Now I still do love Final Fantasy VII but
it has a couple more problems than I remember. Some of the pacing is
a little off during Midgar and the middle segments of the game but I
still maintain that it's a fantastic game.
When I first played Final Fantasy VI, I
felt it had a terrible mechanic for Magic and Stats and that the
early stages of the game were very tiring. As a rule I don't like
RPGs where the characters effectively become clones of one another
inside battle. If every character can learn every spell in the game
then there is little thought needed when building a party. Sure, each
character has a unique skill but magic tends to overrule them for the
most part. Those few with really great skills tend to dominate party
set-ups and that's not a very good mechanically either.
Those were my first experiences with
the game. I did not want to “ruin” my characters by building them
with the wrong stats. This effectively pulled my game to a crawl as I
tried to micromanage learning magic vs building the best characters.
I recently got the GBA version of the game and decided to give it
another try. The sound was awful but we had a run feature without the
need of a relic. This time I was determined to play the game without
worrying too much about what stats to build with each character or
that they would eventually all have the same spells.
This time I was really having fun. The
“slow start” of the game flew past as threw caution to the wind
and proceeded to forget about those “wasted levels”. I did not
struggle. In fact the game was just the right level of challenge.
Once I reached the endgame it did start to become a little bit easy
with the overpowered magic spells but there were still a few monsters
with dirty little tricks to keep my entertained.
What I mean to say by this long winded
and frankly pointless post is that sometimes there are games I
misjudge. Maybe a lot of us do but I am glad that I went back to
Final Fantasy VI and proved myself wrong. Granted, I still find the
mechanics a little bit flawed. I find that learning every magic spell
or having stats awarded by needlessly shuffling through menus is a
terrible idea. A testament to just how good Final Fantasy VI is can
be shown in how little these affect the overall game.
If you have any similar experiences,
where you went back on a game that you thought you hated but managed
to find something you loved about it or maybe it's just a game you
never really could like that everybody else seemed to go crazy over,
drop a message below, I'd love to hear it.
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