Description
A thousand years ago, the War of the Magi occurred. People remember it as one of the most horrible tragedies in history. Since the War of the Magi, magic has been all but forgotten, technology began to grow, and people returned to seemingly normal lives. The only true worry people have is the Empire, whose leaders are looking to revive the great force once known as "magic".
The Empire had heard word of the remains of a mystical being, known as "Esper", being found in the mining town of Narshe. Quickly, three soldiers were dispatched to find this Esper and bring it to the Emperor. One of the soldiers, a young girl, triggers a power in the Esper that initiates a dangerous series of events. The only ones who can help her are a rag-tag band of rebels and heroes, who offer their very hearts and souls to save the world from the mad plans of the Empire.
The sixth entry in the
Final Fantasy series was dubbed
Final Fantasy III in the West because three out of the five previous installments of the series had not been released there at the time. Similarly to its predecessors, this is a role-playing game where the player controls a party of characters, travelling between various locales in the world, fighting randomly appearing regular enemies and bosses, and making the characters stronger by improving their skills and getting better equipment for them. The game maintains the ATB (active time battle) system of the two previous installments in the series, spicing traditional turn-based combat engine with a real-time element.
In battle, every character can fight using weaponry and items, and each has a special combat skill as well. It is also possible for nearly every character to learn magic spells. By finding various Espers and equipping them on characters, the player can improve their parameters in different ways and choose the magic spells the characters should learn.
Unlike most other Japanese RPGs, the game does not have a single main character. Rather, the player-controlled party can be considered the game's collective protagonist. The first part of the game develops linearly, with one of the characters playing a central role; however, during the second part the player is associated with a different character initially, exploring the game world, recruiting characters, and completing sub-quests in a non-linear fashion.
Alternate Titles
- "最终幻想6" -- Chinese title (simplified)
- "Zui Zhong Huanxiang 6" -- Chinese PSX title
- "Final Fantasy VI Advance" -- GameBoy Advance title
- "Final Fantasy VI" -- Japanese/European PSX title
- "FF6" -- Common PSX abbreviation
- "ファイナルファンタジーＶＩ" -- Japanese PSX spelling
Part of the Following Groups
User Reviews
The Press Says
| Trigames.net |
Sep 02, 2009 |
 |
100 |
| Legendra |
May 07, 2005 |
|
100 |
| Digital Press - Classic Video Games |
Dec 10, 2003 |
10 out of 10 |
100 |
| RPGamer |
Nov 11, 2004 |
10 out of 10 |
100 |
| RPGFan |
Nov 25, 1998 |
99 out of 100 |
99 |
| Gaming Target |
Aug 16, 2006 |
9.9 out of 10 |
99 |
| Game Players |
Oct, 1994 |
98 out of 100 |
98 |
| Video Games |
Dec, 1994 |
95 out of 100 |
95 |
| Nintendo Life |
Nov 22, 2009 |
 |
90 |
| Cubed3 |
Oct 15, 2004 |
9 out of 10 |
90 |
Forums
Trivia
Awards
- #28 in FLUX Magazine's (Issue #4) Top 100 Video Games of All-Time.
- In the VideoGames magazine (March 1995) "1994 Game Awards", it was named "Best Role-Playing Game".
- The game received three awards in GameFan's 1994 "Megawards" (Vol 3, Iss. 1): "Overall RPG Game of the Year", "Best SNES RPG Game of the Year", "Best SNES Music"
- Game Players issue Jan. 1995 named it the "best SNES RPG game in 1994".
- Voted #7 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll published by Game Informer Magazine (Issue 100, August 2001).
Language, Translation and References
It is a popular rumor that the lead translator for the English version,
Ted Woolsey, apparently lacked professional translating experience. The discrepancies in translations have been attributed to this fact for several years. As with many translations, name changes and dialogue 'corrections' are left entirely up to the staff, but there are many who believe that these erroneous changes are due entirely to the fact that Ted did not have the knowledge to translate the text fully.
In the SNES version [I am unsure if this applies to the PSX remake], the two soldiers that escort Terra at the beginning of the game are named Vicks and Wedge. This is a mistranslation, and a reference to Star Wars, where there are two pilots named Biggs and Wedge.
One of the main characters in this game is an avid gambler named "Setzer" (he even has a casino build on his airship). Supposedly, this was meant to be the German equivalent of "one who places a bet" or "placer". While it technically means this in German, it is never used that way; "Setzer" is rather used for "typesetter" (well, not that typesetters are common nowadays anyway). Yet another example of Japanese usage of German "names".
Larry, Curly, and Moe are named after the slapstick comedy threesome The Three Stooges.
Miscellaneous trivia
There were two SNES releases of
Final Fantasy III, the later release contains minor hardware revisions, as well as tweaks to the game itself such as the disappearance and renaming of certain items (Hero Ring, etc).
In the original SNES release of the game, Relm's "Sketch" ability is very buggy. Using it consistently against certain enemies can cause all sorts of interesting problems such as graphical distortions, random status effects and/or inability to use party members, a hacked inventory full of items/spells that are not even possible to get, large amounts of various items/spells and sometimes even a wipe of all the game's saved battery data.
Not sure if this applies to the PlayStation version, but it certainly does to the original SNES release. In the config menu, characters can be set to either Controller 1 or Controller 2... making this in effect a 2 player game. However, this control to the second player only works in battle and NOT on the overhead view maps or levels.
The European PlayStation release also contains the
Final Fantasy X demo disc.
The game manual in the PlayStation version contains a major spoiler, by casually mentioning a major plot twist while listing the bonus content available after completion of the game.
Soundtrack
The entire 25-minute opera sequence is available on CD as played by a full orchestra with singers. It's on the album "Orchestral Game Concert #4," (translated, CD is Japanese) which is sadly, itself, hard to find.
There have been multiple albums released with the game's soundtrack, all of them in 1994: a three-CD set with the original music, two CDs with orchestral and piano arrangements of certain tracks, and a CD with unused or remixed tracks.
More details are to be found at Wikipedia.Later developments
Sometime in the mid-1990s, Square released several models showing off their new 3-D system. Much of what they used were characters and images from
Final Fantasy VI, modeled into new 3-D. For this reason many people were expecting a sequel using these same characters or some kind of spin-off game. Much speculation was around Project Reality (the Nintendo 64) which promised to be a console system built around rendering 3-D graphics. In the end, nothing developed from these rumors about
Final Fantasy VI and Square's following game in the series,
Final Fantasy VII became the first to use 3-D modeling techniques.
