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Final Fantasy VI Advance Review
Written by Louise Yang on Friday, February 16, 2007
Engaging battles, large cast of playable characters, added espers, one of the best 16-bit RPGs ever
noticeable slowdown on chocobos and airships
What can I say about Final Fantasy VI that hasn't already been said five times already by everyone who picked this GBA port up last week? No matter what I write, 16-bit purists will continue to decry the translation changes and retro-FF-enthusiasts will still consider it the best Final Fantasy game ever. Instead of going over the differences between FFVI Advance and previous versions of it, I want to write about it with the perspective of playing it for the first time.
FFVI is set in one of my favorite type of environments: a steampunk environment. Don't know what steampunk is? Think of the industrial revolution. Add to that some espers and mysterious magic users and you have the world that FFVI takes place in. Instead of a cast of unnamed, generic characters, we're introduced to memorable people like Sabin, Shadow, and Terra. Most notable from the cast is our favorite villain, Kefka, who somehow always comes up in Top X Evilest Game Character lists.
I'll let you in on a little secret: I used to despise turn based RPGs. I know, it's hard to believe considering how many RPGs I play nowadays, but the whole waiting for your turn and selecting what to do from a menu seemed slow and pointless to even me at one time. Why wait around to execute an action when I could just play another game and have a character slash a sword in real time? That's what I thought until I started playing FFVI. The Active Time Battle system (ATB for short) put a pseudo real-time element into the game that promoted a sense of urgency during battles, but not so much that I got frustrated when I was first learning which attacks/magic to use for what character. During a fight, each character has an action bar that is slowly filled. When the action bar is full, players can issue a command to that character. If more than one character has a full action bar, players can choose which character to give a command to first, instead of being forced to issue commands by the order of which character's bar was filled first. There are two modes of fighting. For those who want a real-time feel, enemies can continue to attack even when the player is still trying to decide on an action. For people who want to take their time, they can set the fighting to "wait" which makes turns fighting into a traditional turn based affair.
Fighting in all of the previous Final Fantasy games always turned into a chore after a few hours for me. It was the same thing over and over: select a melee or magic and then attack. Cure/revive characters when necessary. While FFVI doesn't stray far from this formula there are things in it that make fighting more enjoyable. One character has an ability called Blitz that, depending on what button combinations you press, executes some pretty powerful special attacks. Another character has a skill called Bushido which requires the player to wait for a gauge to build up in order to unleash another crazy attack. These deviations from the standard attack are what makes FFVI easier to play than any previous game of the series.
Final Fantasy games are known to have some pretty impressive music and FFVI is no exception. Sure, it doesn't have a full orchestra backing it up but that doesn't mean the music in the game is a simple collection of blips and bleeps. Even now, I can hear the Magitek Factory music in my head. I haven't played FFVI on my GBA, so I can't really comment on whether the GBA does the game justice but I can say that the DS speakers make the music sound fairly decent most of the time. There are some inconsistencies in sound quality between something like the regular battle theme and location themes, but I don't notice it unless I really listen for it.
The biggest question I had when I heard FFVI was coming to the GBA was whether the GBA was powerful enough to support a game that already pushes the SNES's capabilities. Most of FFVI is fairly smooth, but there is some noticable slowdown when there are too many moving things on the screen. The slowdown is most prevalent when on the airship or riding chocobos on the overworld map, so I'm thinking that maybe the GBA isn't the greatest at handling Mode 7. Nonetheless, those parts are still playable, just not very pleasant.
Despite the slowdown and sound quality inconsistencies, I'll still recommend FFVI to anyone who wants to play an RPG. What's even better is that it's portable. You can fight Kefka while taking a crap! What can get better than that? I'm not much of a 16-bit purist, so I actually prefer FFVI in portable form. The game itself is timeless. It's not so old that people are turned off by the primitive graphics and it has an engaging enough battle system that those new to turn based RPGs won't get bored. It still has the same fun factor as the SNES game, but now you can take it anywhere you want, so what more can I say?
posted 2 weeks ago