[xwdv]

I still feel Final Fantasy 6 was the best JRPG of the retro era. At the time it had heavy themes you wouldn’t expect a child to grapple with: the ideas that the good guys can just straight up lose and having to live with the consequences, characters whose arcs may never truly be redeemed (because they can fucking die), and even complex issues like the passing of loved ones, committing suicide when all hope is lost, gambling addictions, slitting your own mothers throat for some money, rape and genocide, interspecies relationships, racism, speciesism, the rise of fascism and the use of technology to enslave the masses. It should be a required play through for a young child, and a seasoned adult should provoke conversations about events in the game.

[VyseofArcadia]

I genuinely agree, especially for gamers of my particular demographic who knew Final Fantasy VI as "Final Fantasy III".

I would like to point out, though, that there are plenty of games that the English-speaking world didn't get, at least not on their initial release, and there is one in particular that I want to highlight here as I don't see it get the fanfare I think its owed.

That game is Dragon Quest V, which takes a sampling of the mature themes you highlighted from Final Fantasy VI (and then some), but has coated them in a layer of whimsy that gives the whole experience the feeling of an oddly compelling fairy tale. I highly recommend it if you still have the time and patience for JRPGs. (And if you don't, the movie Dragon Quest Your Story is available in English on Netflix and is based on Dragon Quest V, albeit with a bit of a controversial addition towards the end.)

I'd also like to highlight Earthbound as a curiously mature JRPG for the time. I like to cite it as an example of a game that is more about the journey than the destination. It's not about saving the world, it's about painting cows blue and the third strongest mole and bubble monkeys. But it's also about accepting the world as it is, facing things that you might not be ready to face, the impermanence of everything, and making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then.

[jstarfish]

> Earthbound as a curiously mature JRPG for the time. I like to cite it as an example of a game that is more about the journey than the destination.

I could never put my finger on what made that game so compelling. The "Yakuza: Like a Dragon" game had a similar vibe. The working title for it might as well have been "Friendship is Magic."

> making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then

The lesson you were supposed to take away from it was to stop and call your dad every now and then.

[dfxm12]

I could never put my finger on what made that game so compelling.

The game's director and writer, Shigesato Itoi, is a creative writer by trade, so he brought a fresh perspective, and frankly, is a better writer than most who work on videogames. Being an outsider, he also wasn't bogged down by common video game tropes.

[smoldesu]

Mother 3 is totally worth playing too, for those who never got around to it. I played the English fan-translation a few years ago and it really floored me how well it developed the themes of Earthbound. It feels equal parts dire and slapstick, illustrated by cartoonish characters that live in truly trying times.

While I'm still a sucker for FFVI and FFVII, Mother 3 kinda achieves the impossible in many ways. It re-develops the themes from it's predecessor into a more accessible, more nuanced and funnier story. Characters get hurt, die, yell curse-words and contend with progressively more horrifying environments. Tonally it almost feels like Stand By Me, elevated to cartoonishly-evil stakes from the start. Best of all, the morals are immediately accessible to the player instead of being hidden as lore like most RPGs are want to do. For younger audiences, there should be no confusion about who is right and wrong and why they are that way. While Final Fantasy is written better overall, I feel like younger players would take so much more away from Mother 3. It really captures the "coming of age" storytelling that has been developed since Mother 1.

After getting to the end of that game, you kinda understand why Itoi doesn't want another game like that. The bar is simply too high, even by the standards of modern consoles.

[djur]

I agree with this except for one detail: EarthBound and Mother 3 especially are better written than any Final Fantasy game. (And I love Final Fantasy.)

[VyseofArcadia]

In fact he brilliantly used his outsider's perspective to lampoon and tweak them.

My favorite examples are the pencil statues, making fun of seemingly arbitrary obstacles in RPGs by introducing a self-admitted arbitrary obstacle, and the rolling HP counters, which cleverly introduced an element of real-time to an otherwise entirely turn-based battle system.

I would also like to once again shout out the third strongest mole as the most brilliant ludo-narrative joke in all of gaming.

[jstarfish]

> My favorite examples are the pencil statues, making fun of seemingly arbitrary obstacles in RPGs by introducing a self-admitted arbitrary obstacle

IIRC, the solution was equally silly-- a literal pencil eraser.

I remember the game having a lot of cheeky David Bowie references too. Starman is an obvious one as a recurrent character, and correctly figured that the fight with Carbon Dog wasn't going to end so easily.

[VyseofArcadia]

> The lesson you were supposed to take away from it was to stop and call your dad every now and then.

That's a good catch, thanks!

I also think the dad was intended to be a commentary on Japanese salaryman culture, and now that I'm older, from the dad's perspective I see another lesson about all the things you might miss if you spend all your time working.

[jstarfish]

> dad was intended to be a commentary on Japanese salaryman culture, [...] lesson about all the things you might miss if you spend all your time working.

Totally. Check out a few episodes of the "Old Enough" show on Netflix and you'll see the same; dad/mom is stuck running the restaurant while the kid goes on the epic errand. Adults have responsibilities and it was touching that the game respected that instead of vilifying him as an "absentee" parent. Childhood is your journey; your parents are just there to provide air support.

[coolbreezetft22]

Playing FF VI for the first time right now having wanted to play it for past two decade and loving it. Also played Earthbound for the first time earlier this year and agree with this sentiment. The music was also amazing

[RGamma]

Good to know I'm not the only one who just cannot let go of his 'to be played' list (though I'm only ~15 years behind wanting to play Earthbound). Recently finished SNES Chrono Trigger...

There even was a time I was under the illusion that I could experience all 'major' games in a reasonable timeframe after they came out.

And then the video games market blew up for good during the 10s and now there's so ludicrously many of them...

[hotnfresh]

Chrono Trigger’s easily #1 for me in the 16-bit era, but FF VI is damn good.

[aidenn0]

I love Chrono Trigger; it's also what got me into emulation. I wasn't allowed to have an SNES but my 486 could just manage to run an emulator (esnes I think it was called?) that could do SNES with no sound or translucency (there were keyboard shortcuts to toggle the layers so e.g. you could hide fog that would otherwise make the whole screen gray).

[isk517]

I remember playing Chrono Trigger on a emulator and it took me a while to realize that the fog in the future era was not suppose to be completely opaque.

[hotnfresh]

Oh man, no sound on Chrono Trigger is a shame. The music’s great.

[fbdab103]

I also vaguely recall a few of the puzzles used sound ques to note there was a hidden button.

[zerocrates]

zsnes is an older SNES emulator that definitely in its earlier days had some issues with transparent/translucent layers and had keys to turn each layer off. I think I remember needing to use those toggles for the same fog layers in Chrono Trigger that you're talking about (though I definitely wasn't on a 486). I think esnes may be a little bit older?

[gavinray]

When I was about 9/10, my grandfather put ZSNES on my computer, along with ROMs for most SNES games ever made.

ZSNES gave me some of the best memories of my childhood.

The coolest bit was that he had soldered a real SNES controller so that it worked with those old-school trapezoid 9-pin keyboard input things. I still think that is pure magic, to this day.

[zerocrates]

Probably the old "game port." That's cool. My experience was definitely more in the "use the A, S, Z, and X keys for the face buttons" realm.

[hotnfresh]

Serial was my guess, if it was in fact 9-pin. I don’t think I ever had a serial-port keyboard, but I did used to have a serial-port mouse.

Game port had more pins.

[aidenn0]

Just a tiny bit older: https://archive.org/details/ESNESv012a

[spinningD20]

Your mentioning of "rape" here sent me on a google journey... I don't remember anything like that happening or even being hinted at in FF6, what are you referring to?

[mjr00]

I assume they mean the first scene with Celes in South Figaro where she's being tortured. Rape isn't mentioned or even implied, in either Japanese or English, though.

[Match451]

I don’t recall anything like that in FF6 either. They even removed part of a scene in a rerelease where Celes is chained up and gets punched by a guard.

There are still plenty of other horrifying things in FF6 though.

[jamie_ca]

On the one hand there's Setzer "Let me swoop in on my airship to kidnap a beautiful opera singer" that was not likely to end in just a coffee date.

On the other hand, no way in hell does someone like Kefka invent something called a Slave Crown and then just use it to force someone to pilot a magic mecha.

[spinningD20]

This is not explicitly stating that it is rape by any means, and I don't interpret it that way. It seemed to me that Maria and Setzer had a history already and he was stealing her away from her opera life, which she may or may not have wanted, we are not told whether or not she even wanted to work at the opera house, or what those conditions were. Casting characters in these negative lights without explicit proof is just silly. Especially after you get the backstory on Setzer and his love interest - nothing else in the game paints him as character that would do something awful like that.

The grounds for "FF6 has rape in it!" seems super super shaky. It feels like the sort of thing where people are decided that Satsuki & Mae from Totoro are really "dead and ghosts" during the entirety of the movie. It's silly.

Don't scare people away from a classic for things that aren't true.

[jstarfish]

> Especially after you get the backstory on Setzer and his love interest - nothing else in the game paints him as character that would do something awful like that.

Did we play the same game? However you define "rape," Setzer was an amoral gambler and rogue whose idea of romance was kidnapping and forced marriage. His relationship with Darril was mostly one of sport. He planned to kidnap the opera singer, was duped into kidnapping Celes instead, and was only willing to help them save the world or whatever if Celes married him. She only got out of that by challenging him and literally beating him at his own game (gambling).

Setzer was misogyny incarnate...Darril, someone he had an actual "relationship" with, was only ever his girlfriend. The opera singer, he wanted to marry on sight. Dude's priorities were seriously fucked.

[spinningD20]

Let me rephrase... Regardless of the interpretation of intent, this was not "rape in ff6" or "discussing rape", and "rape" is not in ff6.

If I heard as a parent that a game has rape in it, I am thinking "there is a scene in which a character is raped", and there is no way I would let my kids play that game, regardless of the rating, until I felt they were mentally or emotionally ready to be exposed to such an awful scene.

This is not rape in a game or anything like that. Speculation or interpretation of events or intent is FAR different than a scene literally displaying such an act.

So, my commentary in this thread has been to clarify, there is no such scene in this game, and any interpretation or speculation is just that. It does not explicitly actually occur in the game.

[JohnBooty]

I don't think it's silly of you to bring this up. In fact I think it's crucial to reexamine nonconsensual stuff in fiction, even kids' fiction. But I don't think I agree with your conclusion here.

It's true: in the real world a forced marriage is more or less explicitly rapey.

But at some point we as a society decided that in light works of fantasy we don't need to really need to follow every single thing to its logical real-world conclusion.

I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.

[jstarfish]

> I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.

I was surprised to see they only now re-released Super Mario RPG. There's a forced-marriage story arc in that one too, and Mario Odyssey also had an abort-the-wedding mission.

I'm in a weird position where you don't agree with me, but I actually agree with you. Yeah, wedding implies an unwanted consummation, but there's already kidnapping and unwanted bondage (marriage), which are themselves serious crimes and boundary violations. What may or may not happen next isn't really the point since we're already in not-ok territory.

I don't have a dog in this fight, I was mainly arguing against the Setzer-wouldn't-do-that line of thought. He's a wildcard who lives for himself, not a saint. Celes leveraged his own ego against him to challenge him to a game-- and cheat at it to guarantee her success. She didn't need no man to save her. Even then she ended up having to babysit him later.

[no_wizard]

Celes is tortured, not raped (and its a shame they edited this in subsequent releases to be honest. The empire in the first half of the game loses alot of teeth in these "minor" edits).

I have played through FFVI more than a dozen times, including currently, right now, on my phone, I'm half way through yet another run, and I can't think of anything that invokes rape.

I'm also not really sure where gambling addiction comes in. Yes, Setzer ran a flying gambling airship, but its never really explored in any meaningful way.

This isn't meant to chastise so much as to set expectations aligned with the game.

The rest is true though. It does deal with passing of loved ones, attempted suicide, interspecies relationships (espers, Maduin / Madeline specifically), emotionless killers (Shadow AKA Realms dad, the entire personality of Kefka), abandonment, being able to love after trauma (The Terra story arc), fascism, prejudice (how the Magi are treated), genocide / mass murder for political gain (how the espers are treated), the dark side of technology, free will, the meaning of life, toxic masculinity (Edgar and women...oh boy I see it alot different now) and most importantly, never giving up no matter how hard things are or hopeless they seem.

Honestly, all of that stuff is there, and presented in what is (mostly) a pre-teen / early teen friendly way. If used appropriately, could be a spring board to discuss heavier things in life.

[DontchaKnowit]

Why should a young child grapple with rape, slitting mothers throat for money, suicide, gambling addiction, rape, genicide, etc?

You arent majing a very good pitch for this being a family fruendly game...

[jstarfish]

Bizarrely enough, the framing of these concepts is family-friendly.

These events happen, and kids do need to know about them in order to prepare for them. But there's enough abstraction to make it not be gratuitious or traumatic. It's like having Fred Rogers teach kids about this stuff versus George R.R. Martin.

"Family-friendly" doesn't mean avoiding difficult subjects altogether. Even the Bible freely explores all of these topics. Going to church is literally a family event.

[krapp]

> Why should a young child grapple with rape, slitting mothers throat for money, suicide, gambling addiction, rape, genicide, etc?

Have you read most faerie tales, or Bible stories for that matter? Or watched children's television? Or grown up in a less than perfect household?

These are simply the themes of real life, and only rare privilege allows one to reach adolescence blissfully ignorant of life's sharp edges. Better to have the lessons delivered by a compelling narrative that gives children agency then by real life which offers them none.

[hotnfresh]

Mass ecological devastation in the name of profit, complete with displacement of animals and the explicit suggestion that they might die as a result (The Lorax)

A sensitive individual takes seriously pleas for help from a vulnerable population at risk of being wiped out, while others mock the individual’s concerns as fake, and actively endanger the same population, echoing Western reactions to persecution of Jews and eventually the Holocaust in the lead-up to and during much of WWII (Horton Hears a Who)

[DontchaKnowit]

I mean fair enough, I have never played final fantasy VI, so maybe if I had it would make more sense, but that post read to me like :

Its full of rape and murder! great for kids!

[astrange]

I think saying FF6 is just a dark mature adult work does it a disservice; it makes it sound like prestige TV or something.

FF6 is specifically designed like an opera. It's European, fast paced, has a lot of classical music, comic moments, romance, gore, etc. That's not quite the same thing as an art film or Earthbound-inspired indie game about depression.

And the villain is a magical clown.

[dfxm12]

It's a coin flip with Earthbound, IMO. If we're talking specifically about kids playing through a game, Earthbound would be more relatable though. I think this goes even more so for kids in NA considering Earthbound's cheeky localization and western references.

source: played both at ~10-11 years of age.

[mitthrowaway2]

I feel the same way about Chrono Trigger, right down to (almost) all of those complex issues!

[raincole]

I'm pretty sure most parents (nowadays) will reach the exact opposite conclusion after reading your comment: the game should be rated as ESRB 17+ and banned for a young child.

[coolbreezetft22]

This type of comment has become such a cliche.

As a parent to young children I did not reach this conclusion and would love for my son to play this masterpiece. None of the parents I know are like this either.

I actually feel like this mindset was much more prevalent in the 90s than it is nowadays.

[gavinray]

Mmm, I would say Chrono Trigger and Tales of Phantasia were also up there.

[xwdv]

Chrono trigger is a great game, but I don’t think the story actually holds up that well. For one the time travel mechanic is fairly juvenile, and from what I remember the game is missing one of the most important elements of a good time travel story: when you see effects happen before the cause (which presumably is the work of future versions of characters traveling back in time), so you never reach that satisfying loop back where you meet the past version of yourself and realize it was actually yourself that you saw at that point in time. Instead you just do stuff in the past and it results in some changes in the future, but those changes should have actually always been there in the first place if you would have been successful. It employs an alternate timeline type of time travel which is easy to understand but not particularly accurate or mentally stimulating.

[andruc]

You should try the Brave New World mod for FF6, if you ever feel like revisiting it. Vast QoL improvements, among many other welcome and interesting changes.