I, and love, and Final Fantasy VI

For the final 2D game of the series, I get personal

(I’ve just finished playing through the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series and tracking my thoughts on the evolution of the games. Here are my pieces on FFI, FFII, FFIII, FFIV, and FFV.)

What can I say about Final Fantasy VI? It’s my favorite game of all time; I’ve already heaped praise on it on this Substack. I could talk about the boldness of making a game with a nonlinear, open-world back half so early in the medium’s history. I could expound on how the Relic mechanics combined with the huge playable cast allows the game to maintain something of a job system even with more or less pre-set characters. I could find more to say about how FFVI was the first video game that showed me the storytelling potential of the medium. But instead, dear readers, I feel like exploring the thing that makes the world go ‘round: love. And that requires briefly diverting into some autobiography.

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I am a person who is often single. I don’t really have a great explanation for why, other than that dating is hard. I don’t love being on the apps and there aren’t a lot of opportunities in my day-to-day life to meet and appropriately flirt with people, so chances for romance don’t come around as much as I’d like.

This is occasionally trying, at least in part because it often feels like everyday life has a bias towards coupling up, emotionally but also practically. For instance: it’s easier to afford a nice place to live if you’re splitting the housing payment. It’s easier to fit in socially at adult functions like weddings or parties if you’re not one of the only people showing up single. This doesn’t really bother me, but I do clock it as a low-level annoying hum.

What does bother me, though, is when the media I spend time with replicates that coupling bias — and that happens more often than I’d like. The example I always cite, which may be a bit of an oddball, is the Netflix show She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (a show I’m somewhat of an expert on, if you’ve been following me for a bit!). This is without a doubt a groundbreaking bit of representation for queer love and a moving look at how, in the pursuit of feeling whole, we can hurt others as well as ourselves (“You’re worth more than what you can give to other people” is a line that will live with me). And yet: in the final episode — literally I think the last ten minutes of five wonderful seasons — two characters who have been best friends for the entire series, with zero romantic overtures, suddenly decide that they’re in love with each other, and that they’ve always loved in each other. What? Or, perhaps a more accessible example that I was reminded of by my She-Ra podcast cohost Lauren: Rey and Kylo Ren from The Rise of Skywalker, who’ve had three movies of tense, interesting up-and-down interactions of combativeness and respect and, in the last moments of Kylo’s life, decide to kiss pretty much out of nowhere. What is the point of that?

I recoil at developments like these because it feels like our media creators are trying to enforce some kind of heteronormative romantic teleology (ironic in She-Ra’s case!) — that any time a man and a woman are in close proximity to each other for a long time and have strong feelings around each other, romance is the necessary outcome. When I was discussing this with Lauren yesterday, she pointed out that major media outlets still treat this as a serious discussion; just last week, the Independent published an op-ed with the title: “When Harry Met Sally was right — men and women can’t ever be friends.” Good lord. If folks are giving serious space to the question of whether deep, fulfilling nonromantic relationships with people they might find attractive are possible, I honestly feel bad for them. As someone who’s found a lot of love and meaning outside of partnering up, let me tell you: elevating romance above all else is boring, predictable, and it closes off people to so much else that’s out there.

And so, let’s return to Final Fantasy VI.

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As I’ve noted here before, FFVI is a game about finding meaning in the midst of a world-ending crisis. Once Kefka blows up the planet at the end of the first act, each of our 14 playable characters has to make an active choice to go on fighting in a world where it seems pointless. They do this by figuring out what they really love, what to them is worth fighting for. And I find FFVI so moving in part because it’s very, very eager to show us that there are all kinds of ways to feel love in your life, and romance is only one of them.

For Locke and Celes, yes, romantic love is the factor driving their heroism. Although even that’s complicated a bit — we see how, for Locke (or maybe for both), romance manifests alongside guilt, specifically the guilt of not being there for the people who trusted you with their love. And, look, I’m not some anti-romance crank — my favorite musical moment in a game jam-packed with them hits during the credits, when Locke and Celes’ themes intertwine, creating a beautiful union out of two broken people who found meaning in each other. I think that’s awesome, and I wouldn’t trade this part of the story for anything.

But we’ve got 12 other characters, and romance isn’t really the motivation that powers any of them. For Edgar and Sabin, it’s brotherly love. For Strago and Relm, the love between a grandparent and granddaughter. Cyan moves forward to honor his lost family. Mog wants friends to travel with. Gau wants to be part of a community. Shadow wants redemption for abandoning his loved ones long ago. Setzer loves freedom. Not all of these are expressed with extreme depth, of course, but each character’s story is presented with enough care that you understand and feel their motivations. Arguably even the two hidden characters, Gogo and Umaro, slot in here: Gogo loves practicing his art, and Umaro loves… um… having a clan, I guess? Hitting stuff? Oh, Umaro loves physical fitness. There we go. Work those gains, Umaro.

And of course I haven’t yet mentioned Terra, arguably the main character of the game (or at least co-main with Celes). The way Terra’s quest for love develops is my favorite part of Final Fantasy VI’s narrative, and it kind of sets the table for the rest. When the game opens, Terra isn’t even sure if she has the capacity for love (at several points she charmingly/awkwardly asks other characters if they feel emotions). She’s a character who starts off feeling completely disconnected from everything, even herself, awakening to the game’s story with no memory of who she is. Then, as she’s thrust into a conflict against Gesthal’s empire, she forms bonds with her comrades, and these existential questions start bubbling up.

I really like this setup for Terra, which functions on multiple levels: for one, bereft of memories at the start, Terra’s a fun riff on the protagonist-as-player-cypher trope of JRPGs that pretty much every Final Fantasy but IV has done up to this point and that we still see in games like Persona today — her relatively emptiness allows the players to project themselves into her. But as you continue to play the game, for large swaths through her point of view, you unlock Terra’s own memories, bonds, and feelings — all while, as a player, you’re still in there with her! Your original empathy with this character is now employed in the service of learning to care about this world, which is precisely the same journey Terra’s on. What a neat trick.

And ultimately, Terra’s journey of love in FFVI sees her discovering meaning in found family. She’s empowered by the responsibility of caring for the children of the village of Mobliz, whose parents were killed by Kefka’s cataclysm, and through these acts of care she learns that she is indeed capable of love — the whole community of Mobliz, if not the world, is something she loves deeply.

I think this arc is just the tops. And where it lands for Terra has nothing to do with romance at all! This isn’t to say Terra is fully aromantic — we see Edgar flirt with her, and arguably she’s feeling a little something for General Leo — it’s just that, when Final Fantasy VI wants to show us how Terra has learned to love, it gives her a whole community of people to care for, not connected by romance or blood but by a mixture of circumstance and choice.

And man, I feel this, largely because this is how I’ve found love and meaning in my own life. It’s such a deep, thoughtful, unexpected choice, especially for a 16-bit game from 1994, and it’s so illustrative of the fact that Final Fantasy VI is made with such absurd care and love for its characters, a love that can’t help but bleed through the screen and onto its audience. Or, at least, onto me. It’s appropriate, then, that FFVI taught me to love video games.

It’s funny — when I started writing about the first six Final Fantasy games, I talked about how FFI was essentially a single-played adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, right down to requiring you to bring your own sense of character to it. And here in FFVI, we’ve more or less abandoned the D&D goal mechanically but end up making something that channels the real magic of TTRPGs — the characters that make the story worthwhile. For my money, when it comes to video games, Final Fantasy VI is the king of characters. I love them all. Even Umaro (eh, maybe).

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I started playing through the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters in April of last year. I took some breaks, of course (for Zelda, for work trips, for other life stuff), but the 2D Final Fantasys have been a key part of my leisure time for the last nine months. And man, seeing the credits roll on FFVI, I really felt like I had accomplished something, as wild as that sounds. I felt emotionally full yet drained, probably largely due to FFVI’s moving ending, but also because, hearing the lovely orchestrated versions of Uematsu’s “Prologue” and “Prelude” (which, as the final two tracks of FFVI, almost bookend the opening Prelude and Prologue of FFI!), it felt like I’d finished a journey.

You may have noticed that, as this series of pieces went on, the content of my analysis got more and more personal — from clinically discussing D&D stats, to dissecting narrative, to celebrating friendship, and finally love. That’s no accident — it mirrors how the games grow into themselves, I think, and it also mirrors how I contextualize these games in my life. I think the first Final Fantasy is neat, and I appreciate what it does for and with the RPG genre. I think Final Fantasy V is just a killer gaming experience that I’d recommend to anyone. And VI… well, you know.

I’m so glad that I got to experience the 2D Final Fantasys this way. It gave me a whole new appreciation for my favorite series of games, and in the end, there’s not a one of these I don’t want to play again — even III, which I didn’t love! There’s just so much richness and depth here, and thanks to the accessibility of the Pixel Remasters, I’ll likely be revisiting this series a lot more. Maybe I’ll even try the Four-Job Fiesta this year.

And I’m not done writing about Final Fantasy yet. Next up, I’m going to replay Final Fantasy VII Remake in anticipation of FFVII Rebirth launching at the end of February. I’ll cover both of them here. (And, spoiler, I have very personal feelings towards FFVII Remake as well.)

Thanks so much to the folks who followed along with this series with me, and thanks especially to Aidan Moher, who shared my pieces with his audience — a real honor considering Aidan literally wrote the book on JRPGs in the excellent Fight, Magic, Items. Aidan currently helms a newsletter called Astrolabe that I highly recommend.

With the caveat that it’s difficult for me to be objective about a game that means as much to me as FFVI does, here are my final scores for the 2D FFs. While I can turn on the game designer part of my brain enough to dole out some ratings, letter grades don’t really capture how I feel about this series. Hopefully my essays did better. Thanks so much for reading!

~~The Plugs Section~~

1. Speaking of love, my next Mortified show is on Valentine’s Day at Chicago’s lovely Athenaeum Center. Great for dates or people resentful about not having them!

2. Kickstarter’s Zine Quest starts next week, and the next time you hear from me, it’ll be about my next project! Which, by the way, might be relevant to folks who enjoy Final Fantasy.