Best Ever
Role Playing Game?

Halfway through Final Fantasy VI, the villain wins. Not “appears to win” or “gains temporary advantage”—Kefka Palazzo, a nihilistic court jester who’s spent the game’s first half accumulating magical power while everyone underestimated him, actually destroys the world. The planet’s surface is scorched and rearranged. Continents shift. A year passes. When the game resumes, you control Celes Chere—one of fourteen playable characters—waking on a small island, nursing her dying surrogate father, with no party members, no airship, and no obvious path forward.

This is not where games went in 1994. The JRPG formula was well-established: gather party, defeat evil, restore order. Square’s own Final Fantasy IV and V had executed variations on this template with increasing sophistication. But director Yoshinori Kitase and writer Yoshinori Kawakami understood something about narrative stakes that their contemporaries didn’t: if you want players to care about saving the world, you have to show them what losing the world looks like.

The World of Ruin—the game’s entire second half—inverts standard progression logic. Rather than accumulating power toward a final confrontation, you spend hours simply finding your scattered companions, each dealing with the apocalypse differently. Setzer has lost the will to live. Cyan is writing letters to a woman who doesn’t know her family is dead. Shadow may or may not have survived, depending on a choice you made hours earlier (a consequence the game never signposts). The mechanical expression of this trauma is brilliant: you can theoretically reach Kefka’s tower with only Celes, Edgar, and Setzer, though the game’s difficulty assumes you’ll seek out everyone. The narrative expression is even more so: these reunions are earned, each a small story of recovery embedded within the larger arc.

But Final Fantasy VI’s formal innovations extend beyond its apocalyptic structure. The ensemble cast—genuinely unprecedented in size and balance—distributes protagonist status across fourteen characters with distinct combat mechanics and personal arcs. Terra Branford, the amnesiac half-esper who opens the game, cedes focus to Locke Cole and Celes for extended sequences, then to Edgar and Sabin Figaro for the brilliantly paced “three scenarios” section where the party splits and the player chooses which thread to follow first. No character is strictly mandatory after a certain point; no character is merely along for the ride.

The combat system supports this egalitarianism through the Esper mechanic—summonable entities that grant both powerful attacks and permanent stat bonuses when equipped. The system encourages experimentation rather than optimization: any character can learn any spell given enough time with the right Esper. Want Cyan the samurai throwing Fire 3? Go ahead. The practical effect is that players form attachments based on narrative preference rather than combat efficiency—an elegant harmony of story and mechanics.

And then there’s the opera scene. Celes, posing as the opera singer Maria to lure a gambler with a famous obsession, performs “Aria di Mezzo Carattere” in a sequence that represented the absolute limit of what the Super Nintendo could achieve: digitized vocals (such as they were), character sprites hitting marks on an elaborate stage set, a musical composition by Nobuo Uematsu that would become his most requested work. It’s corny by contemporary standards. It’s also genuinely moving, because the game has spent hours establishing Celes as a former imperial general struggling to understand human connection, and here she is, performing another woman’s grief while processing her own.

The final confrontation with Kefka remains singular in the genre. He’s become a god—literally, enthroned atop a tower of bodies arranged like Michaelangelo’s Pietà—and his philosophy is coherent nihilism, not cartoon villainy. “Why do people insist on creating things that will inevitably be destroyed?” he asks. “Why do people cling to life, knowing that they must someday die?” The answers your party provides (each character offering their own response if present) are explicitly sentimental: love, friendship, dreams. The game doesn’t pretend these are logical rebuttals. They’re just all we have.

Uematsu’s score—“Dancing Mad” alone runs seventeen minutes across four movements—elevates every emotional beat. The pixel art, overseen by Kazuko Shibuya, achieves expressiveness that many 3D games still can’t match. But the lasting achievement is structural: Final Fantasy VI proved that games could treat apocalypse seriously, could distribute narrative weight across an ensemble, could let the villain win and still find reasons to keep playing.

Thirty years later, we’re still catching up.

Decide for Yourself:

• The 2021 Pixel Remaster on Steam and mobile represents the definitive version—Uematsu’s soundtrack re-recorded with live instruments.
• For purists, the original Super Nintendo cartridge remains the authentic experience—Ted Woolsey’s localization has its idiosyncrasies.
• The Final Fantasy VI Original Soundtrack release presents Uematsu’s compositions without the Super Nintendo’s sound-chip limitations.