Final Fantasy VI/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Accidental Innuendo: Some fans have taken Terra's "looks like a bear" comment about Sabin to mean... something else. Doesn't help that Sabin takes it as a complement.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: The GBA and SNES English releases have different translations. Both were done well, but they end up portraying some characters in distinctly different ways.
    • Setzer is probably the character that changed the most. In the SNES translation, Setzer is a happy-go-lucky thrill seeker who Jumped At the Call. In the GBA version, he's almost the exact opposite: he's willing to take crazy risks because he's a world-weary nihilist who simply doesn't care whether he lives or dies, which is why he's always gambling with his life. Notably, his appearance in Kingdom Hearts II seems like a Flanderization of the first version. It's also possible that both portrayals are correct and his happy-go-lucky attitude is a bit of Stepfordism. For a long time, I've wondered if Setzer spends the whole first half of the game drunk.
    • Edgar also undergoes changes, most notably in his first interactions with Relm. Originally dismissive of the young child artist, the GBA version has him saying "Hope you're still around in eight years." You see his flirting on the whole as a sign of genuine promiscuity, a personality quirk, or a form of obfuscation. According to a non-canon doujinshi written by Soraya Saga (the Figaro character designer), he's got a Freudian Excuse: his mom died when they were kids so he's drawn to seek female companionship where and however he can. And if you think about it, "hope you're still around in eight years" is a pretty bleak thing to say considering what happened just before he said it. The statement carries the implication that she's likely to die before she reaches adulthood.
    • Non-translation related: Locke Cole: star-crossed lover or incredibly creepy man who's so fraught with attachment issues that he keeps his dead girlfriend preserved in a crazy old man's basement?
    • Terra: is her Esper form just a simple transformation, or does the Esper have its own will and mind separate from the human side? In the case of the latter, is it an entirely different person from Terra, or just another side of her personality?
    • Kefka: Complete Monster who destroys everything he can because he thinks it's fun and believes love and friendship are just temporary diversions from the inevitability of death, or a very dark Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds so twisted by Magitek experiments that he actually can't feel love and friendship anymore and destroys because it's all that gives meaning to his life now? Dissidia Final Fantasy actually nudges towards the latter, with one of Kefka's iconic nihilistic speeches being voiced with a very sorrowful and melancholy tone... only for its sequel to nudge back towards the former where he's a shining Manipulative Bastard. Chronologically, Dissidia shows him becoming more pitiful in death than he ever was in life (Dissidia Duedecim is a prequel, not a sequel). One thing that can't be denied is that, monster or woobie, Kefka's a mad dog whose very existence and reason for living run counterpoint to the world he exists in. And then between releases of the original game too. In the Japanese version, Kefka was a laughing idiot and practically a Scrappy, while in the English version, Ted Woolsey made him deeply hateful and cruel while keeping his sense of humor, which made him even darker than if it had been removed.
  • Anticlimax Boss: In the battle aboard the Phantom Train, Siegfried only has 100 HP and will die in one attack. Played for Laughs, as Siegfried had been talking about how good a swordsman he is just before the fight.
  • Awesome Music: The. Entire. Soundtrack. The piece players tend to remember most fondly is Aria De Mezzo Carattere, the centerpiece of the Opera House sequence. The Awesome Music page for the Final Fantasy series lists many more.
  • Best Known for the Fanservice: A non-fanservice variant. The game is certainly remembered fondly for many other reasons, but ask a fan to name a scene from the game and odds are your answer will be "the opera".
  • Broken Base: Debates over the quality of the World of Ruin part of the game, whether the SNES or GBA release is the superior version of the game, and whether Kefka is the greatest RPG villain of all time or just a cheap knock-off of The Joker.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Step 1: Get the Ragnarok Esper/Paladin Shield. Step 2: Teach everyone Ultima. Step 3: Spam Ultima. Step 4: ???? Step 5: Profit! Bonus points if you do this and then complain on the internet about every character being the same.
  • Complete Monster: Kefka. Oh boy, where to begin... enslaving Terra and using her as a weapon, poisoning Doma's river, killing General Leo, capturing countless Espers at Thamasa, destroying the entire world, and then picking off survivors with the Light of Judgment. It's also a big reason why he's one of the more popular villains in the series. Other villains have a Freudian Excuse, or are Well-Intentioned Extremists, and so forth. Kefka has no justification for his actions, any potentially sympathetic aspects of his backstory are overridden by how absolutely horrible he is now, and he has no underlying goal behind the destruction he causes because destruction is the goal. He just loves to wreck, kill and destroy anything and everything he can because he gets a kick out of it.
  • Designated Good Adopted Grandparent: Cid. After his esper infusion process turned Kefka into what he is, he tweaks the process and then runs it on the child he has been entrusted to raise, which is to say Celes. Maybe he tested it on some more folks before he did it to her, maybe he didn't, but she was certainly too young to give any kind of meaningful consent to the procedure. After that, he let her be raised as a Child Soldier. But nobody ever calls him out for this particular ethical shiner.
  • Ear Worm: Terra's theme. In addition to being Awesome Music, of course.
  • Ending Fatigue: The entire World of Ruin. After the party acquires the Falcon near the beginning, the game takes a sudden shift along the Sliding Scale of Linearity vs. Openness and completely abandons any attempt at linear storytelling. What had been a tightly-woven, suspenseful plot becomes a collection of (almost) completely independent segments concerning each individual missing party member that can be done in (almost) any order the player feels like. The shift in focus, from linear to open and from event-driven to character driven, can make it feel as though the story comes to a screeching halt at the game's midpoint. More literally, the actual ending sequence itself is very long for an SNES game, clocking in at about thirty minutes.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: General Leo is a more traditional example of the trope.
  • Epileptic Trees: There was some fan speculation that Kefka was formerly Baram, Shadow/Clyde's partner in crime that he failed to give a mercy killing to. However, it is never firmly established whether he was this or not.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple:
    • A fairly significant portion of the fanbase ships Terra/Locke despite the fact that Locke/Celes is the Official Couple. Celes/Edgar is also a fairly common ship, and the Japanese fanbase for Terra/Sabin is quite significant.
    • Setzer: Setzer reacts with interest when Terra's name is first mentioned, and Terra is the only person to ask Setzer a personal question during the whole World of Balance: when the world is destroyed, it's Setzer who grabs Terra from the split deck of the Blackjack. Setzer will save Celes in the ending instead of Locke if Locke is not present. Celes will also encourage Setzer to fight Kefka and to recover his friends' airship, snapping him out of despair.
    • Special mention for the Kefka/Terra (Japanese) fanbase. There is definitely a good bit of fanart for them.
    • Some fans also ship Terra and Celes. Celes in the ending is frightened that Terra would disappear, and shows grave concern for her fate. After they escape the tower, it is Celes that looks for Terra, finding her unconscious on the airship's engine and pulls her off. Celes is shown standing behind Terra when she takes off her headband in freedom. This suggests that Celes should be in the party whenever they are in Mobliz for Terra's recruitment.
  • Fan Yay: If you find gay Final Fantasy VI fanart, there's an extremely good chance it's going to feature Sabin.
  • Faux Symbolism:
    • Terra's mother's name is revealed in a flashback to be Madonna/Madeline. Real subtle, game.
    • Kefka's final battle has the aformentioned three tiers of eldritch abominations, these parallel The Divine Comedy, with hell, purgatory, Jesus Christ and the virgine Mary/Heaven, and the meeting with Kefka as God, who says that life is meaningless.
  • Game Breaker: Lots. The game is perhaps one of the easiest of the series, and it takes very little effort to make your characters much, much stronger than anything they'll ever have to face. With the proper setup, it's even possible to take down the Final Boss in one turn! Even the Bonus Dungeon added to the GBA version isn't much of a challenge, as most of the new Bonus Bosses can be killed just as simply.
    • The magic spell Quick. which lets your character instantly take two more turns without any enemy being able to respond. Combine with a Gem Box/Soul of Thamasa to cast two spells a turn, and that's five spells per round. Add in the fact that Ultima is another game breaker, hitting all enemies, ignoring defense, reflect and split damage, and thus will do 9999 damage to enemies pretty much every time. You're only limited by your MP.... cue the Econimizer/Celestriad, reducing the cost of all spells to 1. Alternatively, the Offering/Master's Scroll, a Genji Glove and two weapons. 9999 damage a hit, times four hits with each weapon, times two weapons. Add in Quick to get two free turns...
    • In the SNES version, it was possible to kill any enemy, including bosses (except for the game-ending boss), by casting Vanish on said enemy and then casting Doom or X-Zone. This was because the Invisibility status effect (which Vanish causes) makes it impossible for spells to "Miss". And, for some strange reason, "instant death" wasn't actually included as part of the standard Contractual Boss Immunity to status ailments: they had a 100% chance of dodging them, but if you somehow managed to get the spell to connect in spite of this, it would indeed work.
    • The aptly nicknamed Wind God Gau. Equip him with the Offering, Tempest, and use the Stray Cat Rage. Gau will attack four times each turn, possibly at 8x normal power for each attack, and has a chance of casting Wind Slash each attack to hit all enemies. This trick no longer works in the GBA rerelease, as Gau and Gogo can no longer use the Merit Award that lets them equip the Tempest,
    • A bug in the SNES version causes the M Block stat to determine a character's chances of blocking both physical attacks and magical attacks. A lot of weapons and relics increase M Block, making it fairly simple to raise M Block to 127%, at which point any attack, magical or physical, that can be blocked probably will.
    • Some characters could have their Defense stat raised all the way to 255, when physical blows will do a single point of damage.
    • While it must be noted that the GBA release fixed many of these, Ultima spam remains viable. Very viable. The GBA also added in even better weapons for characters, and made what were formerly the two best weapons (Ragnarok and Ultima Weapon) farmable by letting you face the final boss over and over, and you can steal the swords from two parts of the boss.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In the Japanese version, Kefka was The Fool and was generally considered annoying and shallow. In the American translation, however, Woolseyisms made Kefka the goofy yet sinister Monster Clown we know and love (to hate).
    • The game itself is this in regards to the Final Fantasy series. It's one of the most popular games among fans, especially among old-school SNES players, and considered a big rival to its successor, but has received little attention from Square-Enix compared to the rest of the main series, many of which have sequels or remakes with enhanced graphics. The reason behind this is because in Japan, it was not all that popular. In fact, it was considered a step down from Final Fantasy V, which Japanese players loved due to its Job System, customization choices and sheer cuteness. In the US though (where Final Fantasy V was not released before Final Fantasy VI, and when it was released, it wasn't that well liked), the game is a definite Ensemble Darkhorse.
  • Good Bad Bugs:
    • The developers forgot to give the Phantom Train immunity to Sabin's Meteor Strike/Suplex ability (and, on another note, it lacks Contractual Boss Immunity against one-hitting it with a Phoenix Down). Being able to slam a possessed, undead train at full speed forcefully into the ground while running from it made Sabin a Memetic Badass and lead to The Spoony One's famous "MOTHERFUCKER SUPLEXED A TRAIN!" reaction.
    • In the SNES version, you can cast Vanish and then Doom on nearly any boss for an instant win. In the GBA version, you can no longer kill enemies who are immune to instant death attacks with this method, but it still works on all enemies who aren't.
    • There's Psycho Cyan and Wind-God Gau and Gogo, though the latter was fixed in the GBA version. The former was technically fixed as well, but it can still be triggered by another method.
    • And then there's the broken status ailment, Blind, which does not affect your accuracy at all. Even your party's evasion stats are broken; physical evasion simply does not work, but magic evasion counts for both physical and magical attacks, so pouring all boosts in M. Evasion can make your characters near impossible to hit! Sadly, this was fixed in the GBA version.
    • In the GBA version, the Confusion + Attack (Setzer/Gogo) + 7-7-Bar is pretty much an instant kill against anything (Even against the invincible Guardian(s)). Period. Though I'm not sure you could call it a bug..
    • The Valiant Knife. It completely skips enemy defense when calculating damage, does full damage from the back row, it can't be dodged, and most importantly, doesn't do half damage when used with the Offering, unlike... pretty much everything. One of those features would be good, two would be considered great, but all of those together make you think "there is no way this could have been intentional."
    • Setzer has a minor one: Fixed Dice don't do halved damage with the Offering/Master's Scroll either. And it's easy to, ahem, fix them.
    • In at least all versions, you can unlock the RNG needed for the beneficial Joker's Death. All you have to do is use an Echo Screen, then immediately switch to Setzer to use the slots. If done right and a bit of luck, it gives you a Joker's Death that kills all enemies, regardless of resistances. This was not fixed in both the PS port and the GBA rerelease.
  • Iron Woobie: The main cast: about 10 depressed/near suicidal badass magic knights with heart-wrenchingly sad backstories.
  • It Was His Sled: Terra is half-Esper. And if you think Emperor Gestahl is the Big Bad, boy are you in for a surprise...
  • Love to Hate: Kefka, who else?
  • Magnificent Bastard: The English version turns Kefka into this, making him more like The Joker and indicating he had a plan to betray his Emperor all along.
  • Memetic Badass: Sabin can suplex a train.
  • Memetic Mutation: Kefka's "son of a submariner!" and Celes's "I'm a general, not some opera floozy!"
  • Memetic Outfit: Celes has two outfits: her yellow and purple uniform from concept art and FMVs, and her Stripperific Leotard of Power and Badass Cape. Fans mostly prefer the leotard.
  • Memetic Sex Goddess: As far as a lot of fans (and fanartists, including doujin artists) are concerned, Celes has a body that could make Hugh Hefner blush.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Kefka's moment could be debated, though right around the point that he poisons Cyan's entire city, killing everyone dear to him just for the hell of it, could be a good moment to consider. It could arguably go earlier than that. How about when he places Terra under mind control; the first thing he has her do is incinerate fifty of his own men.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Siegfried, Lone Wolf, Kappa and Vargas, all of whom end up being completely unimportant to the story.
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Some reactions to playing this game nowadays are: Sadistic villain that wants to destroy the world and transforms into an angel? Characters with developed personalities and their own personal problems? Vast amount of side-quests with plenty of Tear Jerker worthy moments? The two most important protagonists are female? Dealing with real-life issues like suicide? Big deal; it's been done in video games before.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: FFVI has a number of popular ones.
    • At least two, Natural Magic and CES (Celes/Edgar/Setzer), are unique to this game.
    • Natural-magic low-level game.
    • There are also a few hardtype hacks. Some of them are very succesfull at making the game both harder and more balanced.
  • That One Boss:
    • From the original, there's the Storm Dragon in Mt. Zozo. He has tons of HP, a brutal physical, and spells that both hit the entire party and are of the hard-to-defend-against Wind element. Oh, and because of in-game nudging, you're most definitely going to be hitting up his dungeon right near the beginning of the World of Ruin.
    • Atma/Ultima Weapon on the Floating Continent is usually very challenging for first-time players. The boss uses powerful magic, like Flare Star and Quake, that can deal significant damage to the entire party; it likes to follow this up by finishing off a weakened target with Flare for 700 (when generally most people won't break over 1300 by this time.) Ultima Weapon is a bit easier to beat if the player knows his AI script - he only uses his really dangerous attacks when he's low on health. If you cast the mostly useless Rasp spell on him to deplete his MP and kill him that way, his HP will remain full so he'll never use those stronger attacks. Of course, the game doesn't tell you that he dies when he runs out of MP. Perhaps the AI script accounts for the fact that Ultima Weapon dies if he runs out of MP? It'd explain why he'd use a weak, inexpensive spell like Flare on a weakened target instead of just nuking them again.
    • WrexSoul, for being a Guide Dang It Puzzle Boss. During most of the fight, WrexSoul will "possess" one of your party members. To make him reveal himself so you can damage him, you have to kill your own party members until you happen to kill the one he's hiding in. You can kill him with X-Zone/Banish, but then you don't get the item drop.
    • Number 128 at the end of the Magitek Research Facility may qualify due to his placement. He immediately follows five waves of forced encounters between which you cannot heal, you have to fight him with 3 characters because you just lost your 4th (your only healer, no less), not to mention that one of those characters is Locke (whose offense sucks at this point). And while the preceding events gave you a lot of new magicite, you don't have time to learn their spells because you're locked in and can't grind. On top of all of that, he's a difficult boss in his own right, with three targets that attack independently while also carrying an extremely rare, and powerful, item that may take many tries to successfully steal, prolonging the battle.
    • In the Advance version of Final Fantasy VI, we get the reborn Holy Dragon from the Dragon's Den. All the Eight Dragons have a gimmick. Holy Dragon asks for "Aid from Heaven". What this means is that he constantly casts Curaga on himself, for devastating high amounts of healing. He has a widespread Holy attack called Saintly Beam, in addition to Holy; Holy being the hardest element to defend against. Oh, and he loves to counter attacks with Heartless Angel, which he will often dualcast with Saintly Beam, which is an OHKO for the entire team.
    • Chadarnook, himself not a particularly difficult boss as he only uses low-level lightning attacks that can be absorbed easily. The catch comes in when he randomly changes places with the lady in the picture he's possessing. The lady will use status attacks like Lullaby and Entice, and casts Poltergeist, inflicting a status ailment that regularly drains your HP and cannot be healed. The switch between the two at random, and it's possible that the Chadarnook will come out, then immediately switch back to the lady just as you order an attack. Oh, and you can't kill the lady, she just regenerates. The fight boils down to waiting for the lady to switch places with Chadarnook, then call up a volley of attacks and hope he doesn't switch back before they go off.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: There's a lot of Internet Backdraft over the differences between the more accurate GBA translation and the more nostalgic Woolsey script.
  • Toy Ship: Relm and Gau.
  • True Art Is Angsty: This is the part of the series where characters really started to get really depressed, including the good old metaphyiscal "oh, goodness, what am I?" angst first manifested with Terra's identity crisis. Naturally, people consider it mature.
  • Unfortunate Implications: General Leo's chibi artstyle by Amano; he looks like a racist caricature of a black person.
  • Woolseyism: Famously, by Woolsey himself.
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