Old Game Plus: Final Fantasy 6, #1: To the Returner Hideout

2016
December

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Discussion and play-along of classic games, with perspectives from both long-time fans and a brand new player.

Show is on twitter at @OGPlusCast. Hosts are @HamletEJ, @healiocentric, and @Ghostcrawler.

Bumper audio from Balance and Ruin. Header art from Lusipurr. Views expressed here are personal and do not represent Blizzard Entertainment or Riot Games.

Final Fantasy 6, #1: To the Returner Hideout 3

Dec 18, 2016

Now underway with the game, we witness the opening scene with Terra and the Esper, and venture to Figaro Castle, South Figaro, and the Returner Hideout. Episode ends after the fight with Ultros and the split into three scenarios.

For those playing along, the next episode (planned for two weeks from now) will cover the three scenarios and the boss fight that follows them.

Images:

Original US SNES box art

The opening crawl

Edgar and Locke pause fighting to discuss

Always good advice

Download this Episode

3 Comments

almost eight years ago

Snacks

A fun detail early on , prior to entering the mine: if you follow the path straight into the mine, you get introduced to the idea of Pincer battles - surrounded by Narshe guards and dogs. But! If instead, you try to explore the city, the guards and their dogs will fight you - so you wind up avoiding the pincer battle altogether! There's a lot of little touches like that that didn't need to be done, at all, and they're not super obvious!
almost eight years ago

Drew

I was between Jay and Greg in age when this game was released and had been well and truly tapped into early jRPG through the NES and earlier SNES games. Back toward the release of the original NES, Nintendo pushed hard to generate interest in Enix's Dragon Warrior (I think including it with a Nintendo Power subscription at one point), and that game as well as the NES port of Ultima Exodus were what sucked me into the genre.

On the one hand at the time there was no internet, so not very many channels for game makers to get their products into public awareness, but on the other hand, there were so few channels (and so few game systems) that it was very easy to cover all or most of them. Between Nintendo Power, GamePro, and EGM, I'm certain I knew about this game well in advance and was very excited.

Listening to Melissa discuss her initial experience with the game, it made me realize the extent to which SquareSoft almost assumed you were already familiar with the encounter system. Many of the decisions were logical evolutions of the system used in Final Fantasy IV (and V, as is later discover), which I think is where they assumed most of their players would be coming from. By itself though, the decision to start combat in the Magitek armor with its different menus rather than the traditional combat commands was a bit jarring. The fight against Whelk was also a bit abrupt, though mirrored the first boss encounter in Final Fantasy IV's Mist Cave almost exactly.

Very happy you all are doing this! Looking forward to your discussion of espers and the role they play in the game world and especially the effect they have on party dynamics.

Also, I don't know that there's necessarily anything further to unpack from it, but I'm curious about your thoughts on the alternate use of character sprites as well as more traditional encounter graphic representation of the villain in this series. In IV, there's a point at which Golbez starts being represented as a PC sprite rather than a tall, painted boss, and it signifies a transition. Wondering how that might be interpreted in this game.
almost eight years ago

Patches

Quick note about the tutorial house you mentioned: It was EXTREMELY prominent in many Square games before this one. There were a whole bunch in FFIV (released as 2 in the US) and I remember one in Chrono Trigger (though the intro to CT had so many interesting distractions that it was easy to miss).

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