TW: This piece discusses suicide. If you are uncomfortable with that topic it may be best to avoid.
When Final Fantasy VI was released 30 years ago this week, it didn’t become the cultural hit that its successor became. It was a massive success among fans and critics alike. In it we saw the first Tetsuya Nomura character designs before he went on to be lead designer on Final Fantasy VII, Yoshitaka Amano’s last run as lead designer after working on the first six games, and a fond farewell to the Nintendo era of Final Fantasy. It is one of my favorite games of the series, and while I’ll do my best to talk about it, nostalgia can be a blinder to objectivity. I may fail, but that’s okay because this is very much a game about failure.
While every Final Fantasy game finds a ragtag group of adventurers band together and kill god, there is something so uniquely flawed about the cast of Final Fantasy VI. These aren’t carefree explorers or newcomers in a strange world. They aren’t students or destined to be king or chosen by magic crystals to become warriors of light. Instead, they are a group of people who have already lost. Whether by their own mistakes or circumstance, each character has failed in some large way before the game even begins: Cyan’s family dies before he’s playable, Terra is a brainwashed amnesiac forced to work for the empire, Celes isn’t even brainwashed and still works for the empire. The list goes on, with Locke causing his girlfriend’s amnesia and subsequent death, Sabin’s total abdication of responsibility forcing Edgar to be king, and Shadow’s abandonment of his partner and daughter. In this 14 character cast, you’d be hard pressed to find a single character, besides maybe Gogo and Umaro, who comes to the story without first experiencing some massive, life-altering personal loss, most of which they are directly responsible for. What’s more is that at the game’s act one climax, with the party formed and friendship on their side, they lose. United, they fail to stop Kefka’s plans. They’re beaten and thrown to the wind.
Final Fantasy VI strives to be a game without a main character, where any member of its massive party could walk through town or across the world map, where everyone is given a personal arc separate from the central plot of the game. I don’t think it succeeds in this. Terra is and will always be the protagonist of the main plot, but at the start of The World of Ruin, the game’s second half, the weight of the narrative is passed over to Celes. Celes was raised by the empire, experimented on, and lied to by them until she eventually breaks free and joins our party. She is my favorite character in this game. In the World of Ruin we find her on a small island under Cid’s care. Cid is her de facto grandfather. When she’s well enough to stand, it becomes her turn to take care of him. The player must bring Cid fresh fish to return his strength, but it’s very likely that they will fail. Cid will die. Celes will find herself alone. This triggers a scene that devastated me on my first playthrough. Celes, having lost everything, now alone on a small island, gives up. She leaps from a high cliff attempting to end this struggle once and for all… but again, she fails. She washes up on shore feeling defeated, not even successful in taking her own life.
Despair is a heavy, sturdy thing, and hope is often small and fragile, which is why it’s so apt that Celes’s salvation from despair comes from a bird carrying a piece of cloth. The cloth reminds her of her friend Locke, who may still be out there. It’s nothing, a completely insubstantial leap, but it’s enough. She decides to find a way off the island. She decides to keep going.
It wasn’t until after I had beaten the game that I learned that this section is completely optional. If you’re able to feed Cid the very fastest fish rather than the slow guys, he will recover and Celes won’t drop into the pits of despair quite as much as she does otherwise. I’d argue that that is the lesser of the two options. In a game so much about failure and defeat, playing through Celes’s suicide attempt is gutting, but it makes her actions afterwards that much more impactful. Terra may be the more plot relevant one of the two, but Celes becomes the beating heart of the game. Terra has resigned herself to stay hidden in a mostly abandoned village, so Celes wanders this devastated world collecting her old friends with one mission in mind: they are going to keep trying. This is summed up so well by the stoic swordsman Cyan, who has been spending his time in The World of Ruin in an odd pen pal relationship with a woman who shares his grief. In his final letter he writes, “We humans have a tendency to become trapped in the past and refuse to move on. I implore you not to let this happen. Now is a time for you to look forward, and rediscover love and all of the other joys of life.”
In the way that things often contain their opposites, a story so relentlessly about defeat and despair becomes one about hope and perseverance. The game, more than it is about fighting the clown turned god Kefka and saving the world, is about finding a reason to live in a world that feels cold and oppressive. It’s about continuing on even after you’ve lost. Kefka taunts the party moments before their final battle, citing the impermanence of life and asking them why they keep coming back to fight, to which each member replies with their reason for living, no matter how lofty or small. Terra, finally ready to step up as the leader of this group, yells back, “Because it’s not the end that matters! It’s knowing you have something to live for right now, at this moment!” and one by one you realize this entire game has been about taking this group of grief-wracked fools and finding their reason to continue on.
Final Fantasy VI may not be the best Final Fantasy, but it is one I adore despite its flaws. It brings the Super Nintendo era to a close with such energy and scope, and I think that’s what immortalizes it for fans. It’s a game about taking one last chance even when you’ve been beaten down before, which is perhaps the most Final Fantasy sentiment you could have given that the entire franchise is named after this being the developer’s last chance at making a successful game. It is a game for losers, those who have lost but are still continuing on, those who persevere in spite of circumstance, those who keep going.
Dave Tomaine is a comic writer and musician from Philadelphia. You can find him at @cavedomain and @FFBedtime on Twitter.