I feel like talking a bit more about FFVI. Here is one angle that’s always been one of the main sources of my enthusiasm: how FFVI redefined the JRPG town.
The original town formula of DQ1 is that towns were places to buy equipment, get hints about the next place to go, and above all they were havens where you could rest after a brutal, attritional march on the overworld. As JRPGs evolved their overworlds became easier and easier – and without the march, there can be no haven. With their key role stripped from them, towns turned from a relief into a chore. When I ran into one in most early 90s RPGs, my heart sank because it only meant 20 minutes of talking to every NPC to trigger the next story flag.
FFVI was the first JRPG that fully internalized the “town problem” of the genre, its philosophy is: “all towns must crackle with tension and surprises”. Right away it announces this by having you attack the game’s first town Narshe as a mind-controlled member of the villain’s army, then sneak around its cave system to escape it.
The next town you visit you end up sneaking around in in disguise. Later in the game there is the bandit town of Zozo where you walk up tenement staircases full of random battles in between talking to NPCs who constantly tell you lies. There is the sinister emperor’s capital where you are clearly invited on false pretenses and where you know the friendliness is skin-deep. And there is the seemingly normal town that suddenly triggers a timed “house is on fire, go in and rescue people and take sidepaths to gather treasure if you dare” event in the middle of it.
And that first town, Narshe? You return to it twice: the first time, it is a friendly RPG town you can walk around and buy things in as usual – and paradoxically this is interesting because you remember all the doors you couldn’t open the first time. The second time, it is a desolate ghost town where everyone has perished save one Moogle you can recruit into your party.