So, yeah, despite being "an old" and growing up in the golden era of SNES JRPGs, I have never played through Final Fantasy 6 until now, even though I have owned 5 different copies of it. All of my friends were definitely into JRPGs back in the 90's, but I just wasn't. I liked Chrono Trigger, Secret of Evermore (not Secret of Mana), Illusion of Gaia, and Super Mario RPG, and that's it. Final Fantasy 4 and 6 (we called 'em 2 and 3 back in those days) just never hooked me.
There is a video version of this article embedded at the bottom, so skip down there if you don't wanna read.
However, thanks to the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters finally releasing on Xbox I have been properly motivated - with achievements - to give the games another chance. And I'm glad I did. I've played through Final Fantasy 4 and 6 so far and plan on going through 5 as well. I've learned a lot about the games themselves as well as why I've struggled with JRPGs over the years.
First off, these games are obviously still great. I didn't realize how obtuse they can be, though, and there were quite a few times where I had to look up what to do next because the games don't tell you freaking anything most of the time. Major props to everyone that actually played these back in the 90's and figured everything out before the Internet made everything much easier. Funny story - Back in the 90's my friend would call and ask me to dig through my stack of Nintendo Power magazines to help him through Final Fantasy 6 - so it's neat to have some context on why he needed so much help. Sup' Curtis, if you ever see this.
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I've also been surprised to find that just about every boss fight or challenging encounter is pretty much a gimmick fight - or at least the ones I struggled with and had to look up how to beat them always seem to be. It always seems impossible but then the solution is "cast this one spell for the first and only time ever or use this item you never use any other time in the game" and then you blast through a boss easily. Seriously, the sheer number of bosses that have a ridiculously simple solution really shocked me. It makes me wonder if I've been playing every other JRPG wrong all these years too.
What was also a pleasant surprise is just how much of the guts of these games are still present in Super Mario RPG, which as I mentioned is one of the handful of JRPGs of the era I actually liked. Music and sound effects and the humor and all of the pantomiming during cutscenes that I loved in Mario RPG are all present in these earlier Final Fantasy games. I went in thinking I was going into a totally new world but I actually ended up feeling right at home.
The Pixel Remasters are a wonderful way to get into these games for someone like me that kind of struggled with JRPGs. Letting the game auto battle and fast forwarding through battles made it a lot more fun for me. Turning random battles off entirely when I just wanted to get through an area is also a godsend. Having options for 4x gold and XP let me experience everything the game had to offer without too much grinding - and if I did grind at least it went super fast. And most of all, being able to save anywhere or just use quick resume on the Xbox eliminated any other frustration almost entirely. These Pixel Remasters are amazing.
Finally playing thrugh Final Fantasy 4 and 6 for the first time in 2024 has also helped me realize why I've struggled to get into most other JRPGs over the years. What I've discovered is that I just don't really like menu-based turn-based JRPGs, and as time has gone on that feeling has only intensified. I do like action JRPGs, like Star Ocean and Namco's Tales series, but I find it practically impossible to play modern turn-based JRPGs. I say "modern" there, but what I mean is basically any of them from the PlayStation until now.
What happened to JRPGs in the PlayStation generation? Well, everything got way, way, way too epic and cinematic. Final Fantasy and other JRPGs basically became movies with endless cutscenes and battles that lasted way too long because every single goddamn move had to be cinematic and flashy. It was admittedly incredibly impressive at the time, seeing it after the simple sprites of the SNES era, but they wasted so much of your time pretending to be (bad) movies. I say bad movies because I think pretty much all video game stories are mediocre-to-bad, but that's a rant for a different video. To put it bluntly, I haven't been particularly impressed with JRPG cinematics since I was like 15.
I'm much more focused on gameplay than story and cinematics, so picking attacks with stupidly long animations and then watching a bunch of cutscenes is really, really, really, really unappealing. SNES era turn based fights were super fast and a lot more fun for me.
I also feel like the storytelling in the old games was actually better despite being much simpler. You know exactly what is going on, and what a character is thinking, and the emotional response the game is expecting from you, all with a single sound effect or musical sting and seeing characters dancing around and pantomiming for a few seconds. Compared to the needlessly long meandering cutscenes in most JRPGs from Final Fantasy 7 to now, I greatly prefer the simpler style of the older games.
I know everyone loves the Persona series and the Atelier games these days, but I just can't do it. Modern menu-based turn-based games just grind my gears, and sitting through endless cutscenes for a bad story I don't care about is agony. The over stylized combat menus in Persona 5 and Metaphor also make my eyes bleed and I don't want to play them but, again, that's a rant for another time.
I'm hoping the Suikoden and Lunar remastered collections coming on 2025 will be more my speed for what I'm looking for in a JRPG compared to anything that has released since.
I hope you enjoyed my little story about how I finally experienced some classics while learning some unexpected things about the games as well as figuring out why I've struggled with JRPGs over the years. I'm not saying modern JRPGs mostly suck ass, but I am saying I greatly prefer the SNES golden age before everything got all epic and unnecessarily cinematic.
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