Well, I may as well get started with
this, since I think I've kinda-sorta got my tech issues sorted out.
I have some very interesting memories
of the year this game came out. It was my junior year of high
school, and I was finally getting the hang of this whole business of
what we were supposed to be doing for most of our K-12 school years.
This is not to say that I was a bad student, or anything. I was
hardly the greatest student ever, either. I guess the best way to
describe myself academically was that I was pushing dead average at
best.
Socially speaking, I'd always been
something of a gimp, to put it nicely. Still am, to at least some
degree, but not nearly as bad as I had been up until the fall of
1994. By then, I was 17 years old and finally starting to settle
into being something of a halfway workable human being. Over the
course of the previous school year and the ensuing summer, I'd begun
to make some real friends and to think that there was just maybe a
reason for people to think I was cool after all.
When this game was released here in the
States at the end of October, 1994, it was as Final Fantasy III
to keep the titles consistent with the original for the NES, and
Final Fantasy 4, which
had been released over here as II
in 1991. I didn't get to play it right away because my folks were,
wisely, I've come to understand, limiting the amount of time my
brother and I spent playing video games that fall.
I
can't recall what, exactly, my brother's issues were, but I do
remember what mine were. I'm terrible at math, and it was terribly
evident in my grades then. I'm also the kind of person who tends to
take any and every distraction I can get to avoid doing something
that I'm nervous or scared about doing, and video games were the
perfect thing for that, to the point that it was affecting all my
grades for the worse, even in subjects that I was passable or even
good at.
When
the winter break came that year, we were allowed to get the console
out of the closet and hook it up again, at least for a little while,
because we'd been good little boys who'd kept up with our studies,
had decent grades, and had been well behaved in general for the few
months preceding.
I
remember the night we first rented this game. My brother and I and a
couple friends of his went down to one of the local video rental
places to pick out games, and one of them was this one. I just wish
I could remember the name of the place we went. I don't think it was
Blockbuster Video because I don't think we had that chain here yet,
and I'm pretty sure it wasn't Video Mania, either, because we always
went entirely other directions when we went there. I could probably
find the place where it used to be if I went back to the old
neighborhood.
The
game itself is great. Technically, it was getting towards the high
end of what 16-bit machines could do. The sound and graphics were
really something else for its time.
The
story's great, too. I certainly don't know this story as well as I
do the one for Final Fantasy IV,
but there's a couple reasons for that. First of all, Final
Fantasy VI is my second-favorite
video game of all time, as I may have mentioned before. Part of the
reason for that is that this is the game where the main series really
started changing into what it is today. The story was half again as
long and at least as much more involved than they had been
previously. The same holds true of the overall game mechanic, but
I'll get into the specifics of those when I get to the relevant
parts of the game.
So
anyway, the story. Whereas Final Fantasy
could probably be called a Tolkienesque setting and Final
Fantasy IV was more Arthurian in
nature, Final Fantasy VI
is set in a decidedly steampunk world, set a thousand years after a
devastating war known as the War of the Magi, which had brought the
warring parties, humans and magical beings known as Espers, to the
brink of mutual destruction. At the conclusion of said war both
sides saw to the sealing of the three gods that had brought them to
such ruin, and the Espers created their own special realm to live in,
separate from the world of humans, with a seemingly unbreakable
boundary between the two.
Though
the game doesn't really go into what the Espers did over the next ten
centuries, the humans developed science and technology to what, in
our own terms, would be the steam age, with all sorts of cool stuff
going on. I know that's not saying much, but there's not much I can
think of to say now that wouldn't spoil things that might be better
served by explanations when I finally get to them in the actual game.
Truth is, I don't remember the game showing us an awful lot along
those lines that didn't specifically relate to the game in some way.
Using
this wonderful new technology, the Gestal Empire has rediscovered the
magical powers that had vanished with the Espers at the end of their
big war and is poised to use it to take over the world. We're
introduced to our hero, a young woman named Terra, as she's been
mind-controlled into helping the Empire follow up on one of its final
leads.
And
that's as far as I'm going to take it for now, folks. Trust me, in a
lot of ways, this is actually a better game than FFIV
was, and would be my all-time favorite, had its immediate
predecessor, in terms of US release, not already taken the spot.
We'll start to get into the hows and whys of all of this next time,
in Issue #001: Vap-O-Rub.
See you then!
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