The following is an essay adapted from a video essay script I wrote. I’m posting it here for now because I fear that I won’t be able to make the video in a way that I’d be satisfied with for a while, so perhaps for now I’ll release this, and my tensions surrounding leaving things unfinished, here on the page.
This contains end-game spoilers for Octopath Traveler and full spoilers for Final Fantasy VI. It is strongly recommended that you at least play through Final Fantasy VI before reading.
Prologue: Octopath Traveler and the Purpose of Nostalgia
Sometimes you find yourself wishing you could retreat to a simpler time, when you didn’t have to be cynical about things in life and you could just take them at face value, fueled with the seemingly infinite reserve of childlike wonder and starry-eyed excitement for the next thing and the next day, when you get to do it all over again.
I found myself grudgingly making a wish like that in the most unlikely way recently when I was struck by how disappointed I was with Octopath Traveler, and I was having the hardest time putting my finger on why. It’s a gorgeously realized tribute to the golden age of Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) with a pop-up picture-book aesthetic that marries high-definition visuals with the 16-bit sprites of the Super Nintendo ’90s, and a soundtrack by Yasunori Nishiki that would bring out emotions from even your most robotlike friends.
And yet, like listening to a shrink-wrapped copy of a Beatles cover band tribute album instead of a worn-out decades-old issue of Abbey Road, there was something off about Octopath Traveler. Like many loving tributes to something dearly beloved, the game lacks the soul that possessed all of those Squaresoft titles back in the 1990s.
I found myself being incredibly cynical and wary of what Octopath Traveler set out to do after about ten to fifteen hours of play. In my most jaded bouts of frustration playing the game, I wondered if Octopath Traveler had been created for the sole purpose of appealing to the older players’ nostalgia in order to relieve their pockets, wallets, and bank accounts of their cash. I felt that with a game that had about 24 years of hindsight into a rich history of JRPGs from Square’s catalog alone, it’s strange to see how ultimately middling or flat Octopath Traveler ended up being in anything other than aesthetics. In a way, the game was ambitious in its attempts to take elements from its veritable buffet table of JRPG inspirations and fit them all onto a single plate, but that was precisely why Octopath Traveler was so frustrating to me, and I’m also not a big fan of buffets. It demonstrates both an insatiable hunger and passion for a variety of tastes and styles, but it also means willingly accepting bloat and a lack of focus. I’m still talking about the game here, by the way.
In the ’90s, Squaresoft (now Square Enix) had a stupefying streak of influential titles that sent ripples into the genre of JRPGs ever since. Final Fantasy V takes the typical Job system of JRPGs where you would assign a class like “Warrior” or “Black Mage” or “Thief” to a character like in Dungeons and Dragons, and expanded on it so that you can essentially merge Jobs together and create satisfyingly overpowered combinations. Romancing SaGa is a game that allowed the player to choose between eight different characters at the start of the game, so that there was more freedom and variety in the way the game was replayed, and people’s first experiences with the game would be fairly divergent from each other.
The developers of Octopath Traveler wanted to have its Final Fantasy V Job System cake with SaGa-structured frosting and eat it too, leading to characters being restricted to their base jobs, stunting more creative combinations, and sometimes presenting obviously optimal builds for certain characters; such as Runeblade Tressa, Runeblade Tressa, and also Runeblade Tressa.
Or maybe the lack of focus I was talking about earlier manifests in the way that the somewhat optional true finale of the game, with its cascading allusions to Final Fantasy VI’s final stretch, felt tacked on and out of the blue despite its attempts at worldbuilding. Imitating Kefka’s Divinely Comedic Statue of the Gods at the end of Final Fantasy VI for even a moment doesn’t do Octopath Traveler any favors. We have no personal investments or reasons to care about this conflict between an Eldrich abomination and eight characters who don’t have enough history or chemistry to elicit an emotional reaction as a unit.
Even when I tried to focus on Octopath Traveler as a game simply presenting intimate case studies of its eight characters, even when the final chapters of some characters resonated with me, I started getting tired of how repetitive the stories became, and I couldn’t get over the fact that there was something empty in the way the characters interacted with each other. Vastly different strangers traveling together and experiencing life’s hardships as a unit is the foundation of practically every JRPG in existence, and it seemed to me like this was something Octopath Traveler was implicitly offering me. But pressing + to see characters banter and interact made me feel incredibly removed from the camaraderie that fuels the love millions of people have for JRPGs in the first place.
I know I’m not the only one who thinks this: I recently spoke with someone on Discord who just bought Octopath Traveler on Steam and he told me he was “excited to see how the eight characters’ stories weave together.” He had the same exact excitement I had when I started the game, and seeing this reflection of my former ignorant puppylike self in this man, I decided I had to free him from the shackles of his expectations. After much deliberation I decided to take him out back behind the shed and I shot him, I just straight up picked up a gun, and just —
— told him there aren’t going to be any significant interactions between the narratives of the eight characters and told him to focus on the game as intimate case studies, and he might enjoy it better that way. His silence was an auditory black hole I’d created with some truth bomb-particle accelerator. The joyous light that radiated from his voice, gushing about his new game he purchased with his hard-earned money, had been snuffed out by my almost fatherly attempts to save him from the grave reality that Octopath Traveler is really about eight people live-tweeting their poignant life stories in the same minivan that’s capable of fast travel.
I take no joy in these criticisms toward Octopath Traveler because I enjoyed my time with it and I can sense the reverence the developers have for the games released during the JRPG’s golden age (Also, because one of my best friends bought this game for me for my birthday, and I don’t want him to feel bad). I can tell a lot of people really enjoyed this game and some people are simply glad to see a game from Square Enix that doesn’t seem ashamed of being turn-based again, which must be refreshing. But if it doesn’t bring anything new to really take away from the experience, and it doesn’t even refine what was great about older JRPGs, then I think we’re all better off just playing those older JRPGs again in the first place.
Octopath Traveler frustrated me so much when it came to how it barely misses that mark of brilliance on all fronts for the sake of nostalgia that I actually did go ahead and play one of those older JRPGs again for the first time in years, almost out of spite.
Perhaps that’s the greatest gift Octopath Traveler can ever give me, because the time I recently had with Final Fantasy VI was rapturous. It was like sitting down and catching up with a dear old friend.
Once in a While, Talk to Me of the Old Days
The best thing about taking a nostalgia trip back to 1994 to play Final Fantasy VI on a Super Nintendo — the best thing about returning to any work in any medium — is that you come back to it with a completely different lens. You have a history with it, and it has its own history as it has existed in the hearts and discourse of many over the years. It’s yet another reason why I find something like Octopath Traveler somewhat disingenuous even if I know the developers probably meant well. Don’t feed me vague nostalgia or jog up memories from older games; make a game worthy of being nostalgic over and create new memories. I don’t want to be implanted memories like some Blade Runner-Harrison Ford-Ryan Gosling-replicant (actually, I think I would like to be Harrison Ford. What a dreamboat.) As of now, I really can’t think of a lot of moments that are etched into my mind by Octopath Traveler’s narrative and visual storytelling, despite having more tools to do so; sometimes less is more.
Final Fantasy VI was the second Squaresoft game I ever played back when I was in high school after finishing Chrono Trigger. Upon its completion, I decided that JRPGs were like “the literature of video games,” and me being the absolute nerd that I was back then, I set out to play a bunch of JRPGs and devoured most of the Final Fantasy games and some other Squaresoft titles for the next few years. I don’t think I’ve ever really been that hungry for JRPGs since.
Playing it again today, I find myself feeling those hunger pangs again, and I’m struck by just how expertly crafted this game is, how much love was put into these characters and situations and the sprite work and the music, just all of it. More importantly, I find myself resonating with it a lot more now than I did back when I played it the first time, the second time, or even the third or fourth times. This spontaneous decision to play Final Fantasy VI now, when I’ve almost lived for a quarter of a century on this Earth, it felt precisely like the right time to play it again.
I’ve talked so much about nostalgia and having a history with a game and all of that, but something that really hit home for me this time around is that the game itself has a sort of nostalgic quality. By that I don’t mean “nostalgia” in the way that Octopath Traveler goes “hey, remember this part in Final Fantasy VI where you fought this really gross giant monster-man blob, and then you like, met God, except he was a clown… and then he told you about… how meaningless life is…” Jesus…
What I mean is the steampunk world of Final Fantasy VI itself has a past and a present that feels lived in; it has a history, and everyone in the game diegetically feels its effects very deeply. They are living beings experiencing history as it writes itself and repeats itself, and they reflect on it constantly.
Final Fantasy VI begins with a quick history lesson, in fact, about a War of the Magi a thousand-years ago that sets the stage for the rest of the game. It establishes the reason for the current industrial steampunk setting that was new ground for the series at the time. It implies and inquires about the cyclical nature of history. Soon after that, some dialogue hints at the existence of Espers, magical creatures that fought in the War and were driven to near extinction, before the game fades into that coldly captivating image of three armored suits trudging through the snow toward a cliffside town. Within one and a half minutes, the player is in the know about the world’s history and the War of the Magi, just enough for there to be some intrigue and incentive to keep playing.
Everyone in the world of Final Fantasy VI knows about the War of the Magi. They’re actually incapable of shutting the fuck up about it. It’s why when another war between the Gestahlian Empire and the rest of the world begins brewing, you can just sense the trepidation and anxiety within all the townspeople when you talk to them. The first time you set foot in South Figaro, the first town you travel to in the game, Nobuo Uematsu’s town theme, “Kids Run Through the City” starts to pleasantly ease itself into your eardrums and yet you’re met with this bittersweet feeling. And then you start talking to the people in the town and they’re all like “Do you think the war’s actually gonna happen?” or “Wait, you’re joking about the war, right?” or “No really though, is there a war going on right now?” I honestly think that Uematsu has never really captured that bittersweet quality in a town theme ever again except for maybe VII’s town theme, but it really works here because it neatly and subtly complements that undercurrent of wartime anxiety so well. It immediately evokes peace, but as you listen to it a bit more you kind of get this nagging feeling that the peace might not last forever. And then you see South Figaro occupied by the Empire a couple hours later into the game; the music’s replaced by a more militant piece, and there’s this profoundly sad realization that the town had been sold out by the resident millionaire, and only soldiers roam the streets instead of children running free.
Even the amnesiac Terra knows about War of the Magi. She probably made a few players roll their eyes at first since amnesia has been a bit of a trope even for its time; hell, even the last Final Fantasy title had an amnesiac in it and that was less than two years ago. Locke, the second party member introduced in VI, bursts out with a “YoU hAvE aMnEsIa?!?!” in the most comical yet genuinely serious sort of way that the sprite art really brings out so well.
But Terra’s amnesia is so important to the way this story unfolds, because she is someone so ignorant of her past that she feels out of place in a world where pretty much everyone either already has a troubled past or will have one soon enough. Everyone that isn’t a Moogle or a Yeti or a genderless Mime has a troubled past, and don’t even get me started on their moms. “YoU hAvE aMnEsIa?!” is revealed later to be reminiscent of Locke’s reaction to his lover Rachel’s amnesia shortly before she dies to an Imperial attack. Edgar and Sabin’s father died when they were rather young, thrusting the responsibility of ruling Figaro to the both of them. Shadow refused to mercy-kill his partner-in-crime. When he was a baby, Gau was left behind in the wilderness by his father. All of Cyan’s countrymen and his entire family are poisoned and die before his very eyes. Celes was a general of the Empire before defecting. Setzer lost his best friend in an airship crash. Strago and Relm are descendants of the magic-wielding humans that fought in the War of the Magi.
Everyone has a history and it informs and motivates all of their actions, even the irrational ones. Especially the irrational ones. All Terra really knows about herself is that she might have done some terrible things as a mind-controlled pawn for the Empire, and the player is even complicit in some of these actions even within the first few minutes of the game when they control Terra, Biggs and Wedge operating Magitek Armor and blasting people protecting their homes.
Maybe that’s why we as players can relate to Terra even though she’s a relatively passive protagonist for the first third of the game; she really has the roughest time navigating through all the stuff that happens to her and her identity. We take part in some of her wrongdoings by being her mind-controller at the start of the game. Then when she wakes up from unconsciousness, no longer enslaved by external forces, she realizes that she’s one of the only people on the planet that can naturally use magic, and spends a lot of the time being confused and scared about the future, rightfully so.
Interestingly whenever we’re introduced to the past lives or trauma that plague the playable cast in Final Fantasy VI, we’re usually shown the male party members experiencing the trauma firsthand, either through flashbacks, or dreams. They’re usually these brooding reflective moments reinforced by Uematsu’s ability to take these characters’ musical themes and effortlessly modify or subvert them toward melancholy, mourning, or nostalgia. Uematsu uses leitmotif more than ever before in Final Fantasy VI, and in the case of the male party members, they always have these dramatic and sometimes outright bombastic character themes. Compare Setzer’s rousing strings and brassy arrangements in his character theme to the piece “Epitaph” that plays much later in the game when he reflects on the death of a dear friend, which goes for much more muted instrumentation with guitars and mandolins. The exception here is Cyan who experiences a lot of the trauma in real-time, but more on him later.
When we’re introduced to Terra, we don’t really get that dramatic entrance. Her musical theme never really presents itself with the heroic flourish that many of the male characters get as an introduction. Her theme plays during the credits, but like how the scene visually plays out, it has a somber air to it and has a hint of uncertainty towards the end. The piece that plays when we can finally name Terra, “Awakening,” also incorporates Terra’s theme, and has the uncertainty layered on even thicker with this meandering passage at the beginning, followed by these staccato-ed notes, and then finally the melody enters softly, almost getting drowned out by the arpeggios and the strings droning underneath. The closest thing we ever get to a more heroic rendition to her theme is when we finally hear it in the overworld, after coming out of this cave on the way to South Figaro. Terra’s theme in its most resolved form is a march, suggesting that Terra is starting to find a sense of purpose, if not simply a goal to strive toward with newfound friends.
I spent probably way too long talking about character themes just now, not just because the music is so integral to the game as a whole. The music of Final Fantasy VI makes it a point to express how Terra stands apart from everyone else in her search for an identity. She has no past to motivate or drive her. All she knows is that she feels guilty about being used by the Empire to do these terrible things that she barely remembers, and that’s why she reluctantly decides to fight for the Returners at first. And then, just when she’s starting to find some sort of stride and a sense of self, she discovers that she’s actually half-human, half-Esper and understandably loses her shit. That’s like if you didn’t only discover that you were half-alien, but you also found out that your biological dad was an alien when you were just a little kid, and you walked in on your parents having weird kinky alien sex at three o’clock in the A.M. because you couldn’t sleep. Oh Terra, you poor thing. We really need to get you to a therapist. I probably need to get myself to a —
Terra’s sense of self is so shattered by this revelation that she literally can’t control herself, becomes feral, and is only slightly stilled by an Esper named Ramuh, who tasks the party with rescuing his fellow Espers at the Imperial Magitek Facility in the Empire’s capital.
Terra being out of commission for the next few hours leads to the game shining the spotlight on Celes, who serves as a foil of sorts for Terra. She’s the other grown woman out of the game’s fourteen-character playable cast. Her character theme is also not a heroic one, and it doesn’t even play when we first meet her. Celes’ character problem is at once similar yet vastly different from Terra’s; instead of not remembering anything about her past at all, Celes’ issue is that she had a very prestigious past, she had status and her role in the world was clear. Now she’s defected from the Empire and isn’t really sure of what to do, how to navigate all of this. Celes starts out in the game incredibly guarded and almost lashes out at people with reminders of her past life, and you can just see her clinging to this identity of “former Gestahlian general.” There’s plenty of choice lines that really drive this aspect of her characterization home, such as: “I’m a general, not some lovesick twit,” or “I’m a former general, not some opera floozy.”
God, I just have to say that I love the work that translator Ted Woolsey did in this game.
“Opera floozy.”
Speaking of opera floozies, it’s time to talk about everyone’s Favorite Opera Scene in Video Game History (which is probably still one of the only opera scenes in video game history, but it sounds a lot more Important when you say anything with “in video game history” at the end of it because we recklessly try to imbue importance to like, pretty much anything in a game to make video games seem like A Very Big Deal or an AVBD, if you will).
I think everyone tends to focus a lot on the #meta aspects of this moment, like I’ll always hear people talk about how it’s “a story within a story” and all of that but I don’t think they ever really try to unpack it a bit more afterwards; it just sounds cool when you call it “a story within a story” and then slap a sticker that says “Brilliant!” on that shit and call it a day. There are so many things that Square got right with this scene though and you know what, I’m just gonna gush about it for a bit, alright? Right, let’s do that.
That Part Where I Gush About the Opera Scene
Diegetically, we have the people in the world of Final Fantasy VI putting on an opera performance reflecting the times they’re living in. The story of the opera is laughably simple, yes, but it also shows once again that the people existing in Final Fantasy VI are painfully aware of what’s happening to them, and are putting on an opera because of the cultural zeitgeist of “oh god, this is just like the war from a thousand years ago. Holy shit.” Maybe it’s just for entertainment. Maybe it’s satire. I don’t know, but it highlights more of what I was talking about earlier with the inhabitants of Final Fantasy VI’s world being preoccupied with nostalgia and with their own history.
Of course, then there’s Celes herself performing in the opera. She says she’s not an opera floozy but apparently, she’s got some singing chops; y’know, she’s been practicin’ her scales. It’s a really telling moment when a person who’s mourning her loss of identity is then thrust into this situation where she has to pretend to be someone else, to play a part in a fictional war that reflects her nonfictional existence. Her status as an Imperial general was a role she had to play, too; now she’s just playing a part for the other side, that’s all.
She’s a former general who — in order to lure in the airship-flying gambler Setzer who’s in love with an opera singer — impersonates said opera singer who plays the character of Maria in the opera, who — in the plot of the opera itself — halfheartedly plays the role of fiancé to a prince of the Eastern nation that conquered her homeland. Celes also confronts Locke about his reasons for saving her in South Figaro before going on stage. She suggests that in his mind, he was saving Rachel too; Celes had unwittingly played a part in Locke’s own personal drama of redemption. All this roleplaying and assuming new identities from Celes also subtly foreshadows a later scene in the Magitek Facility where Kefka tries to suggest to everyone that Celes has been a double agent infiltrating the Returners. There’s so much role-playing in this role-playing game from this one situation alone! That’s self-aware as fuck!
Speaking of role-playing and being self-aware, the other layer that’s underneath all of this is Final Fantasy VI itself being pretty cheeky about its own place within the genre of RPGs. I mentioned that when I was in high school, I considered JRPGs to be “the literature of video games,” but I’m sorry to say that my high school self was probably really fucking pedantic, and that the 8-bit and 16-bit Final Fantasy games and other RPGs like them have more in common with something like theater rather than literature (…Oh no… that actually sounds more pedantic than what I said in high school…)
The theatricality of the Final Fantasy games was something that was always kind of there, simply in the way most JRPGs presented characters on the field and during story beats. There aren’t exactly “camera angles” or “montage” in the way that film does. Indeed, video games hadn’t gotten to that point post-Metal Gear Solid where every game really started to ramp up the cinematic influences.
Instead we have a static view of our characters interacting on-screen, who will always face away from us if they face the top side of the screen, and almost look directly at us if they’re facing the bottom side of the screen. Final Fantasy was also the series that popularized the third-person, side-by-side layout of battle scenes (even the words “battle scene” semantically implies a sort of theatrical element), where enemies were placed on the left side and your party is on the right; this was fairly novel when the first Final Fantasy was released, especially when compared to similar games that came before it like Dragon Quest. There’s a very evident fourth wall that we the players position ourselves behind in Final Fantasy, directing and watching the pace of the conversations of our characters, or the battles that play out between monsters and our heroes.
The series fully began to channel its similarities with theater in Final Fantasy IV, where there was a lot more of an emphasis on staging the characters on the screen so that there was some semblance of the 16-bit sprites exhibiting blocking or “acting.” Sprites became much more expressive as the series continued, and what we have here in Final Fantasy VI is such a leap in graphical fidelity that the same sprites are used both in battle scenes and in the overworld.
More importantly, Final Fantasy IV made use of the battle scene itself to single out important plot events, such as Tellah finally using Meteor against Golbez or Cecil’s trial to become a paladin. Turns out Final Fantasy IV’s lead designer Takashi Tokita loved him some theater back in the day, and his emphasis on character drama in IV is echoed again here by the developers of Final Fantasy VI, where we see this marriage of narrative and gameplay in several moments of Final Fantasy VI’s battle scenes. The Opera scene in Final Fantasy VI draws our attention to the series’ debt to the theater, and Celes’ moment in the Opera even has you selecting her lines in a way that kind of mimics selecting commands when you’re battling, keeping this minigame of sorts in line with the core gameplay. It’s a delicately crafted scene that engages us and also reflects Celes’ character in the process. And I looooove it.
As I mentioned before, Celes literally performing and assuming a new identity in this Opera foreshadows her narrative beats later in the game, and we see this manifest itself first in the Magitek Facility, where Kefka tries to sow some deceit amongst the Returners and uses her former identity against her. Locke starts to doubt her, and so Celes, a woman lost in her search for her true self, trying to prove who she really is to the man she might begin to love, channels a spell to magically whisk away Kefka, his troops, and herself to another location to prevent the Returners’ arrest, never to be seen again until much later in the story.
After escaping capture, our heroes return to Terra, who has finally regained control of herself and also apparently remembers practically everything about her origin as a human-Esper hybrid. She relates it to us in a way that only video games can, and we suddenly find ourselves uncomfortably playing as someone we’ve never seen before.
We realize quickly that this is Terra’s father Maduin, and we are directly flashing back (Flashbacking?) to his first meeting with her mother, Madeline. We see the trepidation and the mistrust of the Espers as they all encounter this human woman who wandered into their domain to escape war. They are human in all but name.
They all ask the same sorts of anxious questions; their fears mirror the war-ravaged humans in South Figaro and the rest of Final Fantasy VI’s present. Maduin urges Madeline to stay. Out of the depths of the 16-bit Super Famicom imagination (Super Famimagination?), the two sprites dance and spiral skyward together, each leaving a trail of stars behind them.
The stars converge, and Terra as a little baby appears, almost out of some sort of cosmic event. As I watched this while playing it again at age 24, my eyes were once again transfixed to this image, so memorable and strangely beautiful in its simplicity.
Like any delicate and blissful moment in this game so far, this doesn’t last, and the Empire attempts to capture as many Espers as they can before they are sealed out of the Espers’ Domain, along with Maduin, Madeline, and Terra. The Emperor Gestahl murders Madeline and seizes the baby. He laughs in the cartoonish, maniacal variety. It is gravely tragic.
After this, we get a long series of events leading up to the Empire and the Returners forming a truce in the present. The Espers had ravaged the Imperial capital in a fit of rage, and the Empire and the Returners decide that in order to save all of humanity, they would need to work together to make peace between humans and Espers. The truce turns out to be a ploy by Gestahl and Kefka to lure all the Espers into one location, and Kefka reduces all of them into magicite, a gem-like state of concentrated magic. They use the newly discovered statues of the Warring Triad — an ancient trinity of gods eternally and catastrophically at odds with one another unless positioned in perfect balance — to summon the Floating Continent and rule the world as gods among men. The Returners attempt to stop them but are quickly swept aside. Kefka tests Celes’ loyalty by having her kill her comrades. She turns the blade on him, and in a desperate rage, Kefka kills Gestahl and shifts the Warring Triad and the world out of balance and into ruin.
As a teenager playing this game when I did, I was of course utterly shocked by the sheer gravity of the devs displaying what was essentially the end of the world halfway through the game. Many years later, I discovered that the developers of Final Fantasy VI didn’t even plan to have more going on after the Floating Continent; that they were going to simply have the heroes best Kefka and Gestahl in the end, and save the world right then and there.
As an adult who occasionally feels like he’s still a teenager, I find it baffling that the World of Ruin chapter of this game exists almost out of a sort of whimsy, a desire to continue exploring these characters and their motivations against the backdrop of the end of the world. The writers and designers of these characters loved these little 16-bit sprites so much that they didn’t want it to be over. I don’t blame them. Thanks to their vision and empathy for what they’ve created, I fell in love with these characters a decade ago.
The Rediscovery of Love and the Beauty of Life at the End of the World
For the first hour or so after Kefka ascends to godhood, we see the World of Ruin through Celes, who finds herself on a desolate deserted island with Cid, the Magitek Engineer who was her caretaker of sorts when she was raised as a Magitek-infused human. Celes, in a particularly sentimental mood, perhaps out of the pure shock that she’s even still alive, decides to call Cid her “long-lost grandpa” in acknowledgment of their history. Cid tells her that there were other people on the island with them, but they all gave up hope and threw themselves off of a cliff to the north. She has apparently been comatose for an entire year. Cid alone has been taking care of her the entire time and is now dying. Celes lets him rest and decides that it’s her turn to take care of him for a change. She catches and feeds him some fish. Cid can live or die depending on what sort of fish you feed him, but the game doesn’t explain this to you, and it’s likely that most people will unwittingly allow Cid to die on their first go-round.
When I played Final Fantasy VI for the first time, I let Cid die, and I watched as Celes broke down after losing the only person left in her life, and was moved to tears by her laments of being alone in the world before she stood over that cliff and hurled herself off of it.
As far as I can remember, this was the first time I have ever shed tears at a video game. It’s a beautifully directed moment that stands out among the all of the Final Fantasy games. Over the years, I started picking up on a few things. The sequence of Celes feeding Cid fish to keep him alive is done entirely in silence, until Celes’ theme plays when she realizes Cid is dead. Celes’ theme begins with this anxious series of notes playing over an ominous ocean wave of low, rumbling strings; it all ascends higher and higher, until a gentle and tender melody enters. This is only the second time that this variation of her theme comes up, and once again, like Terra’s theme, Celes’ theme doesn’t sound heroic. Her theme is introduced in a context removed from herself and her entrance into the story, during the Opera; her theme is a variation of the Aria she performs. This is incredibly fitting considering what we discussed earlier; in the same vein as how Celes takes on multiple roles in her life, it’s almost as if Celes takes on the Aria as her own, as if she found something meaningful, something to cling to in that Aria, and decided to hold onto it for herself.
Celes stands over the cliff in a way that mirrors how she stands on the moonlit balcony during her Aria scene. Instead of throwing a bouquet to signify her attempt to move on from her love lost in her act in the Opera, she throws herself off the cliff because she has lost everything. It is heartbreaking and devastating, thankfully relieved by her washing ashore again and finding Locke’s bandana on a bird. Just the thought of seeing Locke again gives her the motivation and the strength to continue living.
Whenever I experience art these days, I tend to be somewhat clinical about the craft and meaning behind it all. Some of you might think I’m doing that right now with this incredibly long piece. I just told you about the artistry behind what makes this scene so powerful, and I had realized these things for years now. But I hadn’t realized how much this really meant to me as a person until I played it again now, at this point in my life.
I won’t pretend to know the depths of what it’s like to truly experience loss in my life, not any more than the average person anyway. I’m living a relatively comfy life, all things considered; I’m mostly still in one piece. I don’t know what it’s like to lose someone close to you or a family member when nature runs its course. Sometimes I morbidly wished that would happen to me, just so I could know what that’s like, so I could try to empathize with the people I care about who do know. And yet a quick glimpse into the darkest corners of my imagination tells me that I might not be able to handle an experience like that right now, because there have been days where I have been so destitute of the motivation to even get through the day over the past year, perhaps out of boredom or exhaustion or angst. I don’t think I’ve ever truly felt that way before until now.
I’m not saying I feel like throwing myself off of a cliff all the time or anything. I just lost a lot of hope over the past year. I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t think I actually related to Celes in this moment until I experienced that loss, that hopelessness.
I haven’t had a good cry in a while.
The sight of a bandana tied onto an injured bird being the catalyst for Celes to continue living might seem incredibly silly. And yet, I’m grateful that such a moment exists. The simple notion of reconnecting with someone that you thought you’d lost, love of your life or not; that’s the reason to continue living. That’s beautiful. We all need something to cling to, if only to get through the day.
Cyan knows this. He probably had it worse than most of the party members, not only watching his family poisoned to death before his very eyes, but seeing them metaphysically depart to the other side on a one-way trip on the Phantom Train. Final Fantasy VI handled his grief in a way that was unprecedented in the series. Usually up until this point, Final Fantasy and plenty of JRPGs like it would have some melodramatic “death theme” that plays after a character death. Case-in-point, many of the deaths in perhaps the greatest melodrama of all of JRPGs (I don’t mean “melodrama” as a bad thing here, by the way), Final Fantasy IV, played this tune whenever someone died (Spoiler: Usually, they weren’t really dead).
Cyan grieves for his dead family in absolute silence, absently staring at the pavement. You could try to talk to him, but he wouldn’t give you any response. If Shadow didn’t peace out early before the Phantom Train sequence, all he tells you is to leave him alone. You just have to move on.
Cyan’s entire arc hinges on this loss. We go through most of the game not really thinking about how Cyan processes this aside from the occasional hateful outburst toward the Empire from him. But then when we finally reunite with him in the World of Ruin, we find him exchanging letters with a woman named Lola, whose lover had already passed, perhaps even earlier than the world-altering events of Kefka’s godhood. Cyan, perhaps out of pity or out of an attempt to move on from his grief, impersonates her lover through his letters, and eventually realizes that he has to bring the act to a close.
While Cyan truly comes to terms with his family’s death through a surreal dreamscape where you fight three wacky Dream Stooges among other things, I think this honest letter to Lola not only acts as the start of him fully coming to terms with loss, but also as a neat summation of what the game is truly trying to tell us.
“We humans tend to allow the past to destroy our lives. I implore you not to let this happen. It is time to look forward, to rediscover love, and embrace the beauty of life. You have so much of life left to live…”
This is truly what Final Fantasy VI is about. It’s about the history of our lives and being able to learn from it instead of falling to crippling despair over its tragedies or willfully ignoring its lessons. It’s about coping with loss and finding the strength and love within yourself to continue living anyway, even if it seems like you’ve lost everything.
So earlier when I said that everyone and their mom had a troubled past, I was kind of half-joking about that; but now, this is actually the case after Kefka becomes a god and zaps everyone. Everyone in this world experiences loss and grieves for a world they took for granted. There are townspeople that you’ve talked to before who reminisce about the wartime they had experienced hours ago in your playthrough. It was undercut by anxiety before but now it all seems so quaint; it seems so silly to have complained about it. But even they muster up the strength to rebuild and continue living in the face of a literal god that threatens their existence everyday out of spite.
Many of the other party members only truly come to terms with their grief after the world was ravaged by Kefka, grief that they’ve carried with them even before the world ended. It’s almost as if they failed to save it the first time because their grief or their motivations were left unresolved. Terra’s own episode of self-discovery in the World of Ruin is a microcosm of this unresolved tension leading to failure. Throughout the entire game, Terra has been searching for a purpose, and something that she seemed to cling to early on was love, whatever that even means. She asks about love in the broadest of strokes, and asks about it candidly. One of the earliest instances of this is when she asks Celes if she had ever loved anyone. Celes, at the time an impassible iceberg, dismisses the question as if it were a childish or naïve one. On the way to make peace between the Espers and the Empire, Terra, perhaps correctly sensing a gentleness within General Leo, asks him if she could ever love someone, being the product of a human and an Esper. Leo simply replies with an “Of course!” and tells her that in time, she too will experience love. She is ever searching for love, yearning for it to the point of bursting; I will never forget her impatiently uttering the words, “But I want to know what love is… now!”
In the World of Ruin, in the town of Mobliz, she finally begins to understand what love is when she finds herself taking care of a whole village’s worth of children as well as a teenage couple, Katarin and Duane. I think up until this point in the story, whenever most people see Terra achingly attempt to discover what love is, they think she’s talking about romance, and considering that she does tend to talk about it in terms of her being the child of a human and an Esper, I would say that she probably did think of love in those terms. But in a ruined world, thrust with the responsibility of Mobliz’s orphans, it seems much more fitting that Terra found in herself a maternal love rather than just being shoehorned into a romance, instead witnessing and counseling the uncertain romance of Katarin and Duane, who have a child on the way and apparently had stressful arguments about it.
When an ancient demon named Humbaba threatens the village, Terra has lost all will to fight because of her new role as a mother, and gives a half-hearted attempt to fend off Humbaba and fails. It is only until she realizes that she has to fight to enable the future of the children that she succeeds to not only defeat Humbaba, but also accept herself completely as a human and an Esper at the same time.
And so, with newfound resolve, our heroes go searching for their friends and tie up some loose ends. We try to reunite Gau with his father. We hunt and slay a monster that Strago has tracked for years and rejuvenate his adventurous spirit. We fight our way through a living nightmare of an art gallery, rescue Relm, and vanquish a pervy hentai demon from possessing a painting of Lakshmi. We find Locke in a fabled cave, who has finally found a legendary treasure in his desperate attempt to bring his lover Rachel back from the dead, and learns the same valuable lesson imparted to all of Final Fantasy VI’s characters and its audience. We then fight our way through Kefka’s Tower, defeat the reborn Warring Triad, and confront Kefka himself at the peak.
It is here, at the end of our journey, where Kefka delivers his ultimate nihilist manifesto: that it is the fate of all things to die, and so it is pointless to cling to lives that are finite and have no meaning. Up until this point, it seemed like Kefka was always destroying things just for the sake of it, like it was simply fun and entertaining to him. It’s only here that Kefka starts acting like that annoyingly pedantic, definitely-not-a-Neo-Nazi dude in your undergraduate Philosophy 101 course who just won’t shut the fuck up and concludes that “destroying everything totally makes the most sense, bro.” And while it might seem a bit sudden for Kefka to start spelling out his convictions for exterminating every living thing on the planet, it’s a pretty natural extension of his hateful disregard for life and humanity. It’s likely that within that year of him wielding such power, he’s had some time to reflect and come to an understanding about what life means to him.
Kefka now becomes the literal embodiment of the apathy and despair that prevents us from creating our own meaning in our lives. The party counter this with their own convictions and purpose for living. They each express what is meaningful in their lives, and what they’ll carry with them unto death. They celebrate the day-to-day concerns and finding joy within those precious moments of life. Kefka’s frustrated, snide response of likening their joy to a self-help book so perfectly captures the cynicism toward something as wholesome as having dreams or hopefulness for the future; it so perfectly antagonizes our desire to wear our hearts on our sleeves in a dog-eat-dog world where it would be considered naïve or childish to be genuine, honest, and kind.
We arrange our party for one last confrontation and fight our way through Kefka’s own Divine Comedy to give everyone a chance to live and love in a meaningless world, and it is every bit as cathartic as it is memorable. We fight an imposing demon in Hell, a writhing carnal mass of human and animal flesh in Purgatory, and a Pietà-statuesque pair of deities in Heaven before we finally meet God in a golden sea of clouds showered in holy light. Uematsu’s final battle theme masterpiece, “Dancing Mad,” has an organ cadenza and an organ fugue that evokes Bach, a composer who wrote hundreds of sacred pieces and famously signed all of them with S. D. G. or “Soli Deo Gloria” — “Glory to God alone.” The organ fugue that plays during the Heaven tier of the boss fight is where the Bach influences really come out in full force, and yet we can also hear Kefka’s theme seeping into it.
All of this classically sacred, Judeo-Christian theming is corrupted, subverted, and recontextualized into Kefka’s nihilistic worldview. Unlike Dante’s Paradiso where he meets God and is directly bestowed an understanding of God’s love, this is where God Kefka utters his famous query and subsequent answer: “Life… Dreams… Hope… where do they come from? And where do they go? Such meaningless things… I’ll destroy them all!”
After surviving a spectacular fight filled with fantastic sprite visuals and Uematsu’s final boss prog rock stylings, our heroes defeat Kefka in his heaven, and all’s right with the world. His tower begins to crumble, as killing Kefka and the Warring Triad results in magic being extinguished from the world entirely. This also brings Terra’s existence into question since she is both a human and an Esper, and while she struggles in pain to stay alive, she musters enough strength to help lead the others back to the airship. The credits roll in this charming, character-driven sequence where all the party members get a moment to shine, working together to survive the tower’s collapse. I always liked how the credits treat the sprites like actors in this amusingly redundant way, like “Celes as Celes Chère.” It reinforces the game’s awareness of itself as an almost theatrical experience, but it also enables that really wholesome last credit at the end where it says, “AND YOU.”
During the character credits, we’re shown a dialogue between Terra and her Esper father Maduin. He tells her that if her heart is strongly attached to someone or something in this world, she might be able to remain a human being and continue living. Soon after this, we see Terra in flight, guiding Setzer’s airship to safety as the last of the Espers finally dies out. Terra’s power fades completely and she begins to plummet, and Setzer sends the airship diving after her. We then cut to the children of Mobliz watching over Katarin as she is in labor. A voice tells her to be strong and hold on, just a little longer, and we discover that the voice belongs to Terra, desperately calling out to Katarin even in her weakened state. Terra’s love for the children of Mobliz has literally kept her from nonexistence. As I said before, we all need something to cling to, if only to get through the day.
After the staff credits, we have the final sequence of the game, with the anthem of the Final Fantasy series triumphantly and proudly set to the party flying over various towns, witnessing the creation of new life. We see that Katarin has successfully given birth to her child. The people of Thamasa rebuild a home that was burned down earlier in the story. A seed that was planted at the start of the World of Ruin chapter has sprouted, and flowers are blooming. The kingdom of Figaro stands tall and proud in the desert. And as the Final Fantasy theme reaches its climax, Terra — finally free from searching for love and a purpose in life, finally fulfilled — runs to the front of the airship and lets her hair down, her locks flowing free in the breeze. It’s a fitting, cathartic, and life-affirming image to close this wonderful tale.
Epilogue
I began this essay with an admittedly cynical take on a game that unapologetically alludes to Final Fantasy VI, and while I still stand by my reasons for being disappointed, I only do so out of a wish for these tributes to the pinnacle of 2D JRPGs to actually try to surpass being empty callbacks and become something far greater. I know that the creators of Octopath Traveler were simply trying to pay homage to a game that inspired them. I certainly understand where they’re coming from. Final Fantasy VI has inspired me ever since I played it years ago, and while I mainly set out to write this because it personally moved me in the most profound and unexpected way this year, I also hope that this ends up being a trigger for some people to revisit the game, as well as anyone who hasn’t played it to do so for the first time, either before or after reading this (I told you to play the game first, damn it!). I wrote what was essentially the Sparknotes of the plot of Final Fantasy VI, but like any story that stands the test of time, it is still worth experiencing even if you already know what happens. Obviously, I would recommend that you go in as blind as you can manage, but a game is meant to be played, and I’ve left out of many elements of the game both for the sake of time and to leave the rest of it to experience for yourself. Play it again if you’ve played it ten times before, or play it if you’ve never played a video game all the way through before. If you had to pick one video game in your entire life to play, this would probably be my first glowing recommendation.
Final Fantasy VI was the last game in the series to be released on the Super Nintendo, and the last main series Final Fantasy game before the franchise’s transition onto the Sony PlayStation. It is the best in its class, the cutting-edge paragon of sprite work storytelling to Final Fantasy VII’s bleeding-edge deep-cut into the third dimension. It is still the fastest iteration of the Active-Time Battle system that has lasted for six whole games. It is a game that fills itself to the brim with rich character relationships and little hidden interactions rather than shying away from them. These are often touted as reasons to play this game. But I want to suggest that Final Fantasy VI has done more than just provide finely crafted entertainment. Final Fantasy VI is a deeply personal love letter to its characters and its audience, a call to action, a hopeful celebration of finding joy in life, even in our darkest hours. I began playing this game again in an attempt to excavate the ruins of a golden age, not to learn from it or grow, but to escape the present. Final Fantasy VI didn’t let me get away with that; it is a Library of Alexandria of life lessons packed into one SNES cartridge. It reminded me of all the things I will always treasure, always learn and learn again in this lifetime: to try and seek the good in people; to find joy and love in the quotidian and apathetic day-in, day-outs of adult life and to carry on, in spite of how difficult it all is.
It is a dear old friend, telling me to look ahead, telling me, “You have so much of life left to live…” We go way back.