I got through the rest of Final Fantasy 6 solo, alternating between Celes and Shadow.
I think FF6 fails at motivating the player to play it well, and when the enemies start to give a little bit of pushback 20 hours in, it’s just annoying. But this time I just had to play well from the start, and the second half of the game really shined.
The thing that game lets you get away with! You have haste, protect, shell, regen, all lasting for the entire battle. You can have both Reflect (immunity to standard magic) and Vanish (immunity to standard physical attacks) on. Then use Drain to fully restore HP while hurting enemies, and Osmose to do the same with MP (do not cast it on the undead though) Then there’s Reraise to get you back to life if you die?
Of course as the game goes on it feels more and more like a yugioh card battle as it throws more cheap tricks at you (« that instant death attack is a special one that ignores your instant death immunity » (this is real I’m not making it up)) and you have to find other ways to bypass them
Few tricks:
- float ring makes you levitate, add vanish and the earth dragon boss literally cannot hurt you
- you can kill some magic enemies by removing all of their MPs. The Disc 1 megaboss Atma/Ultima weapon gets more dangerous at low HPs but you can just reduce all its MP to 0 with Rasp instead and watch it croak.
This also works on the cultist tower boss, who also conveniently can’t cast Ultima on death with no 0 MP - FF6 got some really weird defense formula, damage is like « (256-def) * (bunch of numbers) » Getting defense from 0 to 128 is as effective as getting it from 254 to 255. It makes it very easy to finetune a character’s def/mdef in the world of ruin; sacrificing def to raise mdef from say 170 to 220 will reduce magic damage taken by 2/3
- break, the petrification spell, rules, countless statues follow my path
Maybe I was a little harsh on FF6. It goes hard during the fake ending and world switch. The baroque tower of gods final boss is so much… There basically hasn’t been anything better before or since. Uematsu doesn’t have it in him to make one good normal battle theme in his life (have to listen to them for 20 hours/game) but he gave everything for that opera medley which you’re not even likely to get to hear in full
Peak videogame trading quest is going to the depths of a grueling volcano with 2 different parties to recruit a thief, then visiting a forgotten remote village with the thief to unlock the door to the world’s best blacksmith, have him make you choose between getting the most powerful magic stone in the game or forging it into an uber sword, picking the sword, betting that sword in the coliseum to get an even better sword. Then throwing that sword like a javelin at the final boss instead of equipping it
