another tip is that the enemies don’t realise this so the invisibility status is also very broken for much of the game
there’s a saga level of broken/interesting mechanical shit in ff6 but yeah these games don’t succeed at communicating this or compelling you to experiment
FF6? You simply had to be there
The combat is tricky. You’re not supposed to use any of the cover, it’s only there for the enemies. What you’re supposed to do is play this like 3rd person Diablo and use your abilities to constantly heal. I… haven’t got it down yet
final fantasy 6 is just broken, tho. of course it’s frustrating and incomprehensible, there are more bugs in the combat engine than there are working pieces. kawazu games are deliberately overwrought, the weird mechanical artifacts are the result of a human trying to communicate, ff6 is just straight up unfinished and ATB sucks
ff6 fully sold me on the value of rebalance hacks
Never thought I’d see the day when SB turned on FF6 but god damn, here we are
FFVI is good because it’s overambitious but in a way that has a hard time scanning as such 25 years later, so you have to read into its own fascination with mysticism and its operatic qualities and so on. like it has by far the most faithful representations of amano’s drawings and it feels like that should be more appreciable.
I have always found the combat hard to get a purchase on short of breaking it wide open, it feels like you’re either struggling or cheating, and the original English release is excessively terse, and so unfortunately while so much of the game is bound up in the SNES’ limitations, I would almost rather not play that version.
like on paper it should be obviously the best one and yet it’s uneven in actually bad rather than interesting ways
use the steam con you said
it’ll be fun you said
i dont think it’s a bad game but i do think you should play the brave new world hack instead because the vanilla game is so broken that it has no actual design
Really tempting me to play FF6 as my before bed game. In Japanese!!
This is the hottest of takes, we’ve spun ourselves into the sun
This is really fascinating, since most Westerners played FF before SMT. I’m not sure what precisely you’re having trouble with but here’s some stuff that may or may not help:
FF stat buffs and debuffs really aren’t that useful, whereas in SMT they are essential. Haste and slow are spells you’ll often use, and maybe barrier or shell if you’re getting smoked on a particular boss. Most people never use 2/3s of the spells.
success in SMT is more focused on mitigation, attrition, and of course hitting those elemental weaknesses. FFs 5 thru 9 are more about using your party to build an engine of death. In 6, the relics along with your choice of characters and your equipment to a lesser extent are your main vehicles for agency. Experiment a little bit, pay attention to the damage numbers, and you may see results
don’t be afraid to use elixirs, etc, those real good items that you only find every so often
Gau and Strago are the more cerebral characters, if you’re an FF head and want more options, these are who you’ll gravitate to. But I remember on my first playthrough being more into Terra (save morph for bosses), Sabin, Edgar (tools are good), Shadow, even Cyan (can’t stand to watch that tech bar fill up anymore), these are the easy damage people, big numbers with some flash thrown in
in the options, set the cursor to remember you last actions in battle. You’re building a death engine, and we want to keep that puppy running smoothly
as for elements, generally fish and robots dislike lightning, undead hate fire, I believe humanoids are weak to ice. Weaknesses and resistances are way less arbitrary and pretty dumbed down compared to SMT
can’t think of anything else other than positioning matters, a lot of Edgars tools (maybe all?) still do damage from the back row
you’ll use most new abilities you come across in SMT out of necessity – when you get new stuff in FF6, it’s just more toys in the bag
I may in the future but after a quick Goog on this, idk if the solution is to rebalance the game so that every ability and spell has its place. Peak FF is arbitrary by nature and the puzzle box mentality is a disservice, forcing order onto choas
yeah the patched GBA version is my preference by far over any real serious rebalancing
this was the inspiration for my FFT patch at one point: Romhacking.net - Hacks - FF6A (E) Woolsey Slattery Compromise Patch
of course you also need:
Yeah FF6 was the « prestige » game of its time and the multitude of now kinda unimpressive setpieces was a large reason for its success
The opera scene in FF6 is the equivalent of shooting brown people underwater in a giant water tank that’s falling from the sky or whatever it is you do in Uncharted 2
i dont understand the aggression here its really weird
The game contains several next-logical-steps and innovations given what they had done before, and the ambitions of the individual staff members on later projects caused them to either fail upwards or downwards 
We can’t make it 1994 again
i played nocturne before beating or even playing much of any FF game, and likewise found the former infinitely more intuitive. it’s tight and responsive, there are clear dynamics to any given fight and even when you get smoked and don’t understand why, there’s always a logical way to respond by studying the mechanics and reviewing your options. FF games are loose and “flexible” by design in order to accommodate the widest possible playerbase, but in practice it makes most of them (with several notable exceptions) so mushy and formless that nothing feels intuitive and you don’t really have to come to grips with the mechanics or proper playstyle until it’s too late and you’ve already fucked your build and have to cheese the final bosses with broken strats and pray they land.
i’m almost done with smt1 which i adore but conversely feels a little lopsided and unclear (in an endearing way imo, it is very funny to cheese a boss with wimpy chip damage over 50 turns because your demons and equipment are underleveled but status procs are so OP and keep them tied up the entire time)
This is all true
I fell in love with Nocturne because it felt so stripped down but also so right, mechanically like a lost late era 8-bit game but with design logic that took until the 2000s to formulate
Does FF6 really have builds? Again, this is super interesting to me, people going from SMT to FF. Not sure what everyone’s age is but being born in the 80s and introduced to FF first, that series for me has always been narrative first (gimmicky or otherwise), and then shape what you can out of the amorphous blob of passive and active skills, refining my approach on later playthroughs after experiencing other takes on the JRPG
This is an extreme example but I wonder if stuff like Matador, where you’re trained early on to retool to overcome a major obstacle (and this startegy mostly works for the entirety of SMT 3 and 4) doesn’t really translate to FF – because in FF, while you do have to ability to nullify damage types and status afflictions, when you retool your party you’re really retooling the locomotion of how you’re dealing damage – SMT’s system of fortification and element exploitation vs FF’s spinning of plates
i always felt ff5 was the one for the Systems heads where 6 puts the narrative first and foremost, so all the weird buggy/unintuitive combat mechanics got overlooked? idk
ff6 is definitely one of those “this is why gamefaqs exists” sort of game that was full of misleading stats & obscure hidden items that break the game wide open. that particular era of jrpgs-as-mechanical-puzzlebox except the puzzle is more a byproduct than the product