![]() All my life I’ve followed hero stories that are about saving the day, and I’ve seen my share of dark nights of the soul or tragedies where the heroes lose. There was something magical about its goal of finding hope, of providing hope, in a world that seemed to have run out of it. I only remember it as being a game that I was enthralled with, excited about. Yet somehow despite such destructive chaos, I don’t remember FFVI as being a depressing or sad game. If someone hadn’t used Celes much in their party, for example, they were in for a rude awakening when suddenly she was your only character and would need some intense level grinding in order to survive. And depending on how you played the first half of the game the second half could have had an intense learning curve. You have to try to maintain, to get stronger, to withstand the impact of arriving in towns you previously visited only to walk amongst the burned-out husks of once familiar buildings. As the player, it’s a journey that you undertake. ![]() It’s not simply a story where you watch this unfold for the heroes. The nature of the Final Fantasy games as roleplaying games made this that much more intense. Mature in the very weight of the story, the darkness that it makes you walk through. Not in terms of language or nudity, or even gratuitous violence considering how much of the visuals of the game were cartoonish pixelations. To this day it remains my consistent mental idea of just how mature a game can truly be. Cities are destroyed, people are dead, and now your characters must reckon with how they can continue to fight on and be heroes in that aftermath. Even Avengers: Infinity War had the promise of Endgame to come set things right. There’s no saving the world that was it is gone, broken. The only path forward for players is to prevent the already dying world from going completely under. The result of Kefka’s move was a full-on apocalypse. I’d seen films like Empire Strikes Back where the good guys lose, but in a “darkest before the dawn, time to regroup” sort of way. It completely altered my understanding of the heroes' journey in storytelling. This sudden and unexpected shift in the narrative was mind-blowing for a 13-year-old player like myself. At this point, the players must explore a post-apocalyptic version of the world map they had come to know, and slowly track down all of the other characters in an effort to defeat Kefka and save their dying world from him before all is truly lost. She desperately tries to nurse an ailing Cid back to life before eventually leaving the island. It opens on Celes, a character that your party picks up during the first half of the game, living with only one other person, NPC scientist Cid, on an isolated island. After escaping the collapsing floating landmass where this confrontation happened, the heroes’ airship is destroyed and the group is scattered. Just we players might have thought the end of the game was at hand, a huge cataclysm throws the world into devastating ruin. ![]() Yet just when players might think they’re about the save the day, Kefka moves from comic relief henchman into the game’s primary antagonist, killing Gestahl and seizing the goddesses’ power for himself.
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