Well no, I pretty much assert that VI was unprecedented for its time for using sprites to tell it's story, you couldn't come up with a good argument to show how a game before VI did it better in telling a cinematic scene through mood and action. Instead you basically said it was surpassed by a game that came after VI came out and I said well yeah, I felt VI was surpassed by Chrono Trigger personally but guess what, I feel games surpass each other all the time, I can make lists of better games that surpass VII from it's own generation. You did mention V was better but gave no real explanation.
As for Terra's animations, you're missing part of my point because 1) Her sprite is superior cause it represents a better representation of a anatomical human being meaning we can get a little more personality out of her simple animations, 2) My argument is how it's used, going back to the comparison of Galuf's Death with Celes' Suicide attempt, VI used far more frames of animation to create a more stirring scene than V could with it's less developed sprites. VI's emotional sprites were used to represent a wider range of emotion based on context of the dialogue. Locke's thumbs up can be represented as cocky, encouraging, and humor just based on the context of the scene. While Bartz can as well, the developers didn't do as much as they could, in fact V's story really never needed much from the characters. This goes back to my silent movie anaology of how you wouldn't really get a good grasp of V's cast cause even with dialogue they are pretty flat in comparison to VI or even FFIV. Whereas scenes like Cyan watching his family board the Phantom Train, Terra convulsing in pain as she struggles to comprehend her esper form in Zozo, Celes' suicide attempt, and even watching the end of the world don't need words (most didn't even have dialogue) to not only express the mood of the scene but give you an idea of the who the characters are and what their state of mind was at the time.
To give another example between FFV and VI, when ExDeath and Kefka cause mass genocide in both games, the scenes are very different in scale in terms of how spites are used. In FFV, you see a Black hole appear above a city, switch to the interior of city, you see the screen shake, everyone makes surprised looks and then they get pulled up and we switch to a new scene. When the Warring Triad go wild in VI, you watch flashes of light, the screen shake, people running around screaming, the earth opens up and people fall in the earth repeatable slams open and shuts, one NPC tries to hold onto a person falling into the chasm and eventually you watch the shaking knock them both into the earth. You cannot tell me, that those scenes are equal in terms of using the games technology to tell a cinematic story. If you did, then I would tell you to check yourself for fever cause you've let your fanboy rage against VI cloud your judgement.
You didn't have an argument, so I consider our discussion over.
You missed my point if you felt I said devs did it so you could make friends, on the contrary my point was that devs placed in elements into a game that was usually difficult if nearly impossible to figure out in a first playthrough and would usually only be discovered by experimenting with actions in subsequent playthroughs. I actually have a guide for the SNES version of FFVI and it doesn't tell you how to save Shadow it simply states that its possible to do so. This isn't new for the genre either, the Spoon dagger in FFIV, getting the different endings in BoF, and most JRPGs of the 16-bit era have several weapons and items that can only be obtained by doing things that no player would know how to do in a first playthrough. My example of talking to friends to learn things is largely an anecdote of my own experiences in regard to this. Guides were awful back then, usually made by fans of the games who also happened to work for one of the gaming magazines of the day and made the guide for the magazine. It wasn't until the late 90s that guides started to get more sponsoring from the actual developers and thus get better accuracy. It's because of these elements that I know my 16-bit games backwards and forwards whereas later games don't have many of these types of things anymore. Even VII just has what? Great Gospel, HP Shout, Missing Score, and the Zack Flashback, everything else is mostly made obvious to the player.At least you gave up on that whole "The Shadow-waiting is counter-intuitive because back then JRPG devs wanted to give you something to talk about with your friends." I started to fear for your life after that one...
As for Shadow, he says he'll catch up to you, and if you don't leave the first time the game offers and you try again, you get the message that says you need to wait for Shadow, and you actually have to do that if you want him to show up. So its not as out of the blue as you people keep making it out to be. If it was more obvious then there would have been no reason to do it all you people are doing is basically whining around because the developer psyched you out.