FFVI Review Post

[Flying Arrow]

I don't know, losing out on one heavy melee character in a game filled with heavy melee characters in exchange for buffing up a squishy mage doesn't sound like a bad trade to me, though I agree your second statement is most likely the original intent of the designers.

This is a terrible trade, especially since the second half of the game throws multi-party dungeons at you. Kefka's Tower asks you to build a team of 12 to take it down - losing Shadow means losing one of the 14 possible characters for that section. This means you're forced to use one more of the four gimmick characters (Gau, Mog, Gogo, Umaro) rather than a fully-decked-out heavy.

And I just want to also say that this fully-decked-out heavy with a unique Throw ability is way less grind-intensive than a lot of the other characters in the game. Without this heavy in your party have fun jumping through all the hoops to make Gau, Strago, or Mog interesting or at all fun to use. Also, have fun teaching Esper spells to Relm that everyone else already knows because, well, you tossed Shadow in the garbage to give her a more central role in the party.

The other issue with VII's customization is that the game suffers from the same Achilles heel of VI and well most of the FFs have, which is that the game isn't difficult enough to warrant a complex strategy for the customization system it gives you. If you're debating about the merits of using Barrier over Deathblow materia, I would argue you don't really need either cause neither holds any real benefit for what the game throws at you. The most precise character customization will get you about the same results as a party that has the four elemental magics, a cure materia and maybe a summon or two. It's really more for the tinkering which many people (myself included) enjoy and in that regards, I understand where you are coming from.

This isn't a problem with the customization system, though. This is a problem with the game balance. As games, both VI and VII give you 10,000 guns when all you need are 5 or 6. This is true, mega-bosses or not (which make up < 1% of the playtime).

As individual customization systems it's the difference between giving the player a hand full of stuff to grind and permanently unlock and giving the player hand full of stuff that is already usable but can only be used selectively under certain stipulations. Both allow for "customization" in that the player can tailor his party just so, but only one isn't a grindy checklist open to every character and doesn't result in the player not beefing up his characters because the system itself holds the weight of a feather.

Think of FFVIII and the Draw mechanic. Why not just draw one spell and then have that character know it permanently, instead of making it a scaling inventory that incentivizes drawing 100 of every spell. This is just time-wasting, plain and simple, and most players have been saying this for years as the major flaw of VIII. Either get rid of the draw mechanic, create an alternative way to value spell totals re: Junctioning, or force some kind of limit on who can use what (rather than that limit being you don't want to waste your whole life drawing 3 sets of 100 Fire).

VI's system begs a similar question of, if there's no distinction or limit on usage, why not just GIVE everyone everything the second it becomes available and cut out the bulltrout grinding and swapping. But if they did this, there'd be no point to whole system. Their solution was to hide a checklist of skills behind miles of grinding, obscuring the issue.

Well not quite, leveling useless materia can lead to getting the infinitely more useful and overpowered Master Materia so this really comes down to whether you are planning for the long game or just the short game. Obviously for a first timer it's short term which is where I'll concede your point but for a long term goal it's still useful to level everything, not to mention if your spending time leveling useful powerful materia, it wouldn't hurt to level up that garbage bin materia you haven't used for 60 hours, so effectively this is what I was getting at about leveling for the sake of leveling.

Any garbage bin Materia you're leveling (and this is the argument) takes the place of something else in your team's Materia build. You can't level everything at once. So if you want to waste a slot beefing up Mystify, say goodbye to Steal, or Sense, or Deathblow, etc.

Not to mention, the ultimate payoff (Master Materia) is much more demanding than about anything in VI. To get the Master Magic, for instance, you need to level up every green orb, including the one you only find in the game's final stage. Not only that, but say you don't stop the train in North Corel...

Whether the Master Magic requirements are good design or not, getting Master Magic is akin to a late-game bonus. Yes, it kind of dumps some of the customization intrigue of the Materia system, but it's buried way at the end of a game in which you've already been forced to play it straight for 95% of it.

In VI, you're bogged down with worthless spells (as you'll yourself argue) and Espers before the halfway point. Since the game hands out ABP so liberally, you're expected to have started swapping and filling out the Esper checklist before you escape Zozo.

No other RPG makes me dread actually learning abilities for my dudes. Once you take down a 20ABP boss and your whole team clears 2 or 3 skills each, it's time to either play the swapping game or start making the cut on what you want people to learn because it adds nothing of value to their build. If the former, you're homogenizing and not customizing. If the latter, you're literally not playing part of the game.

To me, teaching characters skills you don't intend to use is not really beneficial, it's just busy work you give yourself, something to do while you're leveling other characters, and I do feel that teaching characters like Cyan and Sabin is actually harmful to them because it makes the player not use them to their full potential.

I don't see how this is the case. Most players can see that Blitzes (for instance) are generally much more effective than most spells that Sabin can cast. But even if this is the case, you're now saying that VI's magic system is such an ill-conceived monstrosity that it actually hampers gameplay (it sucks, yeah, but it doesn't hamper character builds).

The Magic system in VI is a crutch for newbie players, because the characters personal skills will only take you so far if you don't know what you are doing. Magic has just high enough damage potential to make the game a cakewalk but it's the abuse of the Esper's level up, gear twinking and relics that will bring out the most stupidly overpowered character builds. While I agree it's far less flexible than VII, I still don't feel it's detrimental, but that is probably just me.

Using Blitz or Tools is much more intuitive than all the tedious swapping and spreadsheet-checking the Esper system encourages. Maybe by the end everyone is belting out Ultima and Cure3 to beat Kefka because the game has allowed the player to at absolutely no cost and very little time spent - but, well, therein lies the problem with this crutch of a system.

It being less flexible to VII isn't even the issue, though. We've (at least I have) been bringing VII into the conversation to shine a clearer light on what VI brings to the table with its systems.

EDIT:

I wanted to respond to this before the next volley of posts:

Equipping different gear does not equal customisation. I feel like I've been trusting this argument too much to intuition, so I'm going to provide the following assertion for others to challenge: "Equipment boils down to, optional or otherwise, story driven (read: accessibility) attribute bonuses akin to leveling. This is limited by static character class and therefore not uniquely customisable."

In FFVI (and most FF games) gear generally does not equal customization. It's a linear progression from Iron to Steel to Bronze to Gold to whathaveyou. Bigger numbers as a result of getting to the next section of the game where enemies have strong numbers (so the player must, too).

Occasionally these pieces of equipment have a property that make them beneficial in some way for certain sections, but that's about it and is not unlike equipping the relevant ring. Not equipping, for instance, the Ice-absorbing Armor for the Ice Cave generally provides no benefit. The characters generally lose nothing for having a piece of equipment that either negates or absorbs damage. Not using the Ice Armor in this situation is a gimp-run and nothing more (much like not teaching your characters every Esper spell you can is a low-level run rather than customization).

So in the case of FF games, I think your statement is true. The only time it's not true is if a game is designed to focus not on bigger numbers, but unique properties, options and the dynamic between character and equipment.