FF6 (our third finalest fantasy)

Torzelbaum said:

Does that still work the same way in the PR version?

That is certainly something I would want to be modified to be less tedious and annoying.

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bongo said that you can just turn off exp gain, so it seems like it, but then nothing in ff6 really requires that kind of min max stat grind

Pajaro Pete said:

bongo said that you can just turn off exp gain

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Yes but I would prefer to be able to just gain levels and not have to worry about that at all.

Pajaro Pete said:

nothing in ff6 really requires that kind of min max stat grind

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Even though this is still true.

The stat gain system works the same as in all previous versions, but they have made one or two changes to which stats are increased by some late espers.

I completely ignored esper stat gains when I played FF6 back in the day in favor of rotating them so everyone learned every spell. I know it's not necessary to play that way, but it's something different and seems more interesting to me these days, so I've pledged for my next time around to specialize members with certain espers so they gain stats that focus on their roles. Strength for fighters, magic for casters, etc. Actually, I dunno about etc. because I dunno what else really needs to be done. Defense for...tanks...? I guess I could make a tank with a defender accessory, or whatever it was. Anyway, it's basic stuff, it's just something I never really paid much attention to as a kid.

you don't need to worry about stat gains if you just spend five hours teaching everyone ultima by hitting cactaurs with superballs in that one desert

Paul le Fou said:

Strength for fighters, magic for casters, etc.

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Keep in mind that while he looks like a physical fighter, most of Sabin's Blitzes work off of his Magic stat. (All except Pummel and Suplex, I think.)

Pajaro Pete said:

you don't need to worry about stat gains if you just spend five hours teaching everyone ultima by hitting cactaurs with superballs in that one desert

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I mean, yeah, that's basically what I did when I played it as a kid. I want to try something different!

Vaeran said:

Keep in mind that while he looks like a physical fighter, most of Sabin's Blitzes work off of his Magic stat. (All except Pummel and Suplex, I think.)

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whaaaaaaaaaaaatttt how dare they

It's okay, he stores the magic in his muscles

q 3 said:

It's okay, he stores the magic in his muscles

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it doesn't come up a lot but sabin was the basis for magic mike

Sarcasmorator said:

It also ties in with her jump off the cliff later on.

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I am severely tempted to drop everything and write a page long essay on Celes' character arc... but I'm real busy.

Purple said:

I am severely tempted to drop everything and write a page long essay on Celes' character arc... but I'm real busy.

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I'd like to read that, fwiw.

Meanwhile I just googled "adlai stevenson final fantasy" to see why the fuck someone tagged this thread with his name, and that was a weird thing someone shitposted about 23 years ago that I'd never heard of lol

Purple said:

I am severely tempted to drop everything and write a page long essay on Celes' character arc... but I'm real busy.

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If you don't do it, I'm going to eventually. If nothing else, sister has the weirdest career arc in an RPG.

OK fine let's do this. So as we all know FF6 is remarkably on point thematically by way of having this huge cast where everyone* is weighed down by regrets about their pasts, mostly tied to losing loved ones, spend the first half of the game dwelling on that, then after the world ends, everyone finds a way to get over it, find hope, and move on. Terra and Celes, our main POV characters, technically both fit with that, but with both of them it's less about people dying and more of a general crisis of identity as both kinda had their whole youth stolen and are having to just kinda start life from scratch at... whatever age they are at the start of the game. Consequently by the way if you're ever inclined to look at games through a lens of "let's say the protagonist is trans," FF6 works damn well. The two have a bit of a moment of shared reflection about this once you have your whole party together, even.

* Umaro and Gogo don't really have any scenes to flesh them out at all, but whatever, they're kinda "bonus characters."

Terra quite literally had her past stolen what with the whole mind control device and all, and gets the extra baggage later when we learn about her parents for an extra dose of lost past, and eventually this resolves with her adopting a bunch of kids, so everyone gets to have a family and she can vicariously experience a halfway normal childhood and all that.

Celes meanwhile had her childhood stolen in a slightly more traditional way- getting locked into this whole fascist military islolated training and unethical experimentation thing, being raised as this elite killing machine and shot up with magic juice, then later getting to a point of rejecting all that. Definitely still a lot of guilt to work through between whatever she may have done in service to the empire and you know, the whole thing with people being tortured and killed to infuse magic power into her, and it's made pretty clear at a couple points that at no point has she ever seriously considered having anything approaching a normal life. It's either instrument of death and oppression forever or it's try to atone for being raised to become that forever.

So, we get the opera scene, and yeah, the corny simple big war, love interest at home stuff IS meant to contrast with how this is not at all what life is for any of our characters, and we're also getting the tough military gal puts on a fancy dress and sings and dances, woah, different way of looking at her angle, and while I don't think anything really clicks for her in the moment in a real way in the moment, the fact that we call back to it with the suicide scene makes it pretty clear that it lead to some pretty serious fantasizing about how different her life might have been if she'd properly gotten to have one. Being all super femme and pursuing romance having someone who really cares about her and whatnot.

And then, you know, the world freaking ends. Specifically, directly by the hand of that messed up guy who was in the same weird program that stole her childhood, could have been her pretty much, same experiences and all, not long after killing the only decent guy she grew up knowing, and after she'd tried really hard to make the whole world peace thing happen. And then the closest thing she has to family dies, which feels very much like something she could have stopped, because I mean technically it is. You can win that fish catching minigame. It just doesn't feel canonical to do so is all. So she gets even more into the whole how things could have happened differently and the general despair and hopelessness and all and like... the actual suicide attempt is fitting with the choreography of the opera scene, it's pretty on the nose.

And then of course she lives through that, finds out other people are in fact still alive, and specifically Locke, who was all flustered by her in the opera dress and broadly nice to her despite her history, and just kinda gets her head around the fact that life does not in fact actually end at 25 or whatever and the world and people she cares about are in fact still here, just gotta go kill a murder clown to keep them safe and then hey maybe actually get a start on that whole heavily romanticized civilian life sorta deal.

Terra and Celes are both 18. Add a year to account for the timeskip, I guess.

Excellent post, Purple.

Do we, as a people, pay attention to canonical ages? Or is it just vibes? Because Locke is (apparently) 25, which more or less accounts for how he has had a "true love lost" already... but I also never saw him as anything but 100% contemporary with Celes. Different world and all that, but 25 and 18 has big "Scott Pilgrim is dating a high schooler?" parallels in my head. Similarly, Edgar and Sabin are "mature" 27, and I get how that kind of has to be the case, as the Sabin/Edgar breakup had to occur a number of years back, and Edgar couldn't reasonably take the throne through shrewd gambling at 14... but I still get the impression Edgar is supposed to be a "young" King, and, for that fact, I would put him back at an almost "college age" maturity. Like, a lot of his moves strike me as not a monarch that wants to protect his people with age and wisdom, but someone who pumped an entire annual budget into a line item labeled "autocrossbow assembly". Edgar's defining character trait in my mind has always been that he was goddamned salivating at the chance to test how effectively his castle could turtle underground. And in other kingdoms, even Cyan being 50 seems old, as he's got a kid with a young sprite, and later figures out how to effectively catfish in a fallen world. That is a young man's game!

Anywho, just a personal thing, but my own feelings are that Terra is 100% a teenager, whether that be 16 or 18. Celes I think works a little older, because she has a fairly prestigious position (she is one of only three generals we ever see in an empire that literally conquered the world) and is just starting to come around on the idea that she might be successful, but successful in a field that is wall-to-wall homicidal maniacs. Getting kind of fanfic-y here, but I see her spending years looking up to General Leo as her model soldier-idol, but only recently realizing there are a lot more Kefkas in this army than Leos. I feel like that is the kind of thing that hits you after you've been established in your position for a little while, and, magic or no, Gestahl ain't promoting no 18 year old that he didn't find next to a magical gate.

Also, Kefka is apparently 35. Yes. That makes sense. This is definitely a guy heading into a midlife crisis. The only canonical thing I would change about Kefka for backstory is add "hints" that he is extremely divorced. Kefka's Tower is the Final Fantasy version of "I sleep in a racing car".

gogglebob said:

Do we, as a people, pay attention to canonical ages?

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Short answer: yes, and especially when observing works created in another cultural context. I see it repeatedly and unerringly where people bring their own biases to these readings (most often wishing that characters were older than they are, or refusing to accept they are as young as portrayed/intended). Whether you're tweaking these mental ages for fictional characters older or younger, even if official word on them exists, it's done in the service of making the subject more palatable to your own preferences within the story they inhabit. If their "canonical" age results in issues like romantic consent, or whatever else, I think it behooves to acknowledge that the creators made these choices and not talk around them. The work can survive the criticism, and it's actually important that it's highlighted if it does raise such issues.

Auron is definitely older than 35, though.

A general at 18, even one raised for that purpose by the army, is the only thing that strains my credulity. Generals have to have an awful lot of schoolin'.

gogglebob said:

And once you get past all that, I keep coming back to the idea that The Opera's "seriousness" was the Final Fantasy writers taking the piss out of other, older stories. Look! There is Celes playing the typical part of a damsel in distress, forced to marry another man while her warrior betrothed is lost on the battlefield. And you, audience, know we're better than that, right? Celes is actually a kickass general! All of our women in FF6 are not pining "opera floozies" like Maria, they studied the blade!

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On this subject: we can conjecture about intent forever (and never know one way or another), but for the game and story that FFVI is, it doesn't have much room to grandstand about being better than its peers and predecessors; in many ways it is worse. To the extent that I dislike any game in a series where I broadly like most or all of them, it ranks near the bottom, because I find it so consistently stifling in how it pigeonholes and writes both women and men in the roles they're afforded to play and the characterization they're allowed to have.

It has all these nominal strengths to its credit, like featuring two women as the co-leads, as much as anyone among the ensemble can grab onto a starring role and status... but the practical side of it doesn't live up to the premise. Terra's otherwise compelling arc is mostly conveyed through men in various positions of authority talking at her, telling, suggesting and goading what she should do and feel (a dynamic repeated by Ashe in FFXII), while Celes's entire narrative existence circles around Locke, someone who will take the word of a mass-murdering clown over his own ally, at proof that doesn't extend beyond "I guess I shouldn't trust women." These aren't character flaws or deliberate narrative maneuvering to support the rest of the game's themes because they are not followed up on; they're unconscious biases that seep into the character writing at every juncture from whoever was responsible, and that tone leans heavily toward unexamined machismo and stock gendered roles.

We--I--generally observe and like the thematic arcs around many of the characters, rate the signature scenes highly, but none of it exists in a creative vacuum. Terra may have been a male character early on in development, but her and Celes's narratives revolving around the concept of "love" (in very different ways) are almost certainly a result of them being women, and this being palatably a story that can be told about women. Celes's suicide attempt could not be more "tuned" for a woman to perform; a woman throwing herself off a seaside cliff in despair is a particular kind of folklore cliche that is exclusively reserved for women; men kill themselves in other, arguably less dramatic ways. Kaori Tanaka believed that her treatment and characterization of Edgar was different from other "sleazeball" ladykillers in fiction, because she wrote him from a woman's perspective, and all I can say there is that Tanaka was extremely close to the text and her characters, and its nature in total possibly escaped her or the people who might've edited her or added further aspects; Edgar fantasizing about a 10-year-old is what it plainly is and all localizations have had to grapple with the reality of the sentiment and what the hell to do about it.

It's not just what women get or don't get to do but how narrow the possibility for existence in the game even is for them. What's the point of a fourteen-person playable cast if it only extends to three women? If you can't find any there you start looking for them in the supporting cast, and it's just tumbleweeds all over... except when someone has to briefly exist and die for the sake of a man's narrative development. Rachel is this to Locke, Darill to Setzer, Elayne to Cyan--even the damn mascot character's girlfriend dies offscreen. When you've got characters whose grief is centered around losing their parents and parental figures, it's the dads who are individualized and emphasized as having been lost: Maduin matters, Edgar and Sabin's kingly father matters, Gau's father matters, Cid as Celes's grandfather matters--the women are either de-emphasized, unnamed or dead. This isn't a new paradigm for the series; V displayed the same bias... but in the ostensibly more character study-focused narrative of FFVI, these decisions weigh more, and the absence of women in any meaningful roles stings the harder when the primary cast on the men's part is occupied and represented by folks who to put it lightly could be characterized as having women problems. Not that the game is equipped to examine most or any of it--they're just quirks.

Any interaction I continue to have with FFVI on a narrative basis is mostly bargaining and compartmentalization. A number of queer readings are possible and legible in its cast; Terra as an aroace lead is just one way to interpret her particular identity struggle and eventual claim to it, but I recognize it for what it is: taking material that doesn't agree or fulfill me on the surface and making it "better" through my own interpretive devices that aren't strictly part of the text. It cannot be counted as a strength of the game; my personal lens prods me to do this with most media to begin with. I like aspects of other stories in it, cognizant of their flaws and aided by my own biases: Cyan's arc is founded on stock manpain, but you have the scene at the train platform, and he has a moustache, which believe me, counts for irrationally lot. Shadow is a pathetic man, but his failures and their resolutions aren't reliant on sacrificing a woman for them (though again, Relm's mother is never named or portrayed), and as such I'm more receptive to his melodrama.

It's not a detestable or even a bad story, especially in the wider arc of it and in its thematic crux... but I lack the affinity for most of the cast on an individual basis, or as a collective, where the descriptor "ragtag" communicates an absence of an interesting group identity rather than highlighting it. This is to my knowledge the only game in the series that was so heavily informed by an ensemble writing emphasis to reflect the nature of the cast--to my knowledge the primary cast's writers comprise at least Hironobu Sakaguchi (Terra, Locke), Yoshinori Kitase (Celes, Gau), Kaori Tanaka (Edgar, Sabin, Relm), Tetsuya Nomura (Setzer, Shadow) and Akiyoshi Oota (Relm) in the people who have been cited as having informed and guided those individual depictions, whether or not Sakaguchi and Kitase as the overall lead writers had the final say in the staff's contributions. I think the story around the characters manages to cohere and communicate its themes... but the character writing in the moment, or paired up amongst themselves, often does not, resulting in an equilibrium that a narrative so centered on character cannot support.

Bongo said:

A general at 18, even one raised for that purpose by the army, is the only thing that strains my credulity. Generals have to have an awful lot of schoolin'.

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Please tell that to Anime. PLEASE.

Celes being 18 implies that she is relatively inexperienced as a general compared to the other two, and that she was groomed for the position from a young age --- both of these facts are essentially part of the text of the game, so imho her age tracks (though maybe 2-4 years younger than I would have made her).

Auron is absolutely 35, and the older I get the more it makes sense to me.

Can we acknowledge that, one way or another, Auron gets a big ol' asterisk next to his listed age?

Nope not buying Celes is only 18, grooming and genetic modification or not. It's fine, I know I'm wrong according to canon and don't care. Agreed with Auron, and Cecil Harvey in FF IV for that matter.

RT-55J said:

Auron is absolutely 35, and the older I get the more it makes sense to me.

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When you're a teenager and you see that Auron is 35, you're like, "wow that's so old", when you're in your mid-20s and see that Auron is 35 you're like "lmao that's so goofy he's clearly way older than that", and when you're actually 35 and you see that Auron is 35 you're like "no this absolutely tracks, this is exactly how I feel"

Yeah my big problem with this sort of thing is like... WTF is even the source of these ages? It sure as hell isn't the original text, at least in the vast majority of cases where these random lowball numbers crop up.

Like is it just random interns slapping together art books and making personal calls as they eyeball concept sketches or what?

Pajaro Pete said:

When you're a teenager and you see that Auron is 35, you're like, "wow that's so old", when you're in your mid-20s and see that Auron is 35 you're like "lmao that's so goofy he's clearly way older than that", and when you're actually 35 and you see that Auron is 35 you're like "no this absolutely tracks, this is exactly how I feel"

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But what about when you're older than 35?

Torzelbaum said:

But what about when you're older than 35?

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"god i wish i were still a spry 35 year old spring chicken like auron"

Kefka is hated by his own troops and his method of conquering Doma was to kill everyone there, explicitly including imprisoned Imperial soldiers, so there was at least no requirement of strategic knowledge or aptitude for command to become a general. IIRC Gestahl was also planning on breeding Celes and Kefka to make an army of magic using child soldiers, so making them generals may have a way to elevate them to the same position as the much more popular Leo to legitimize them and their children, or to keep them loyal (not that that worked).

gogglebob said:

Do we, as a people, pay attention to canonical ages?

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For a lot of things, I do. For most manga and Japanese games, I mentally add a few years to the characters because there are so many Adventure Teen characters in a way that doesn't always make a lot of sense. Cloud being canonically 21 feels like it's pushing it (21 when he defeats Sephiroth and gets put in a tube, sure; 21 when the main storyline takes place a few years later, eeeeeeh). And there's just no way Auron is 35 (which I see Pete has already mentioned, now).