YMMV / Final Fantasy VI

A-D

• Accidental Aesop:
  • The group's whole big speech to Kefka about their purpose in life even after the world is in ruin followed by Kefka's Shut Up, Kirk! response can be seen as an Aesop — in this case, someone as vile and hateful as Kefka will never be able to see anything positively and will always have a bitter outlook on things even if people can provide a counterpoint to that argument and show them they are wrong.
  • Don't trust an unhinged person, the emperor seems to ignore all the red flags that Kefka is too dangerous and ultimately pays the price for trusting him.
  • Don't be so blindly loyal. General Leo is a genuinely good person who works for the emperor — however, despite how sinister and evil the emperor is, Leo stays loyal to him. This ends up costing him his life from the hands of one of the emperor's men no less when he finally realizes how bad they actually are.
  • When you harp on past losses, you can miss the good things in front of you or the chance for happiness again.
• Accidental Innuendo:
  • Some fans have taken Terra's "looks like a bear" comment about Sabin to mean a different kind of "bear". It doesn't help that Sabin takes Terra's remark as a compliment.
  • In the SNES/PS1 translations, if the Scan spell misses, it reads as "Unable to probe target!" If you know one of the definitions of "probe", it takes that on a whole new level.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Here.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Eight Dragons are legendary beasts that people warn you about early in the World of Ruin and form an ongoing sidequest, but they aren't nearly as dangerous as NPCs fear. Most of them have a Weaksauce Weakness to a status ailment that renders them largely helpless; the Ice Dragon and Holy Dragon are vulnerable to Silence, the Red Dragon can be Confused, the Skull Dragon can be Rasped to death (and has only 2000 MP, so that'll only take a couple turns), the Gold Dragon can be Berserked, and the Storm Dragon can be Blinded. Several of them also just don't have very powerful attacks or can have their offense dampened with simple strategies: Angel Wings nulls the Earth Dragon's earth attacks, Reflect Rings reflect all of the Holy Dragon's spells, and Celes can Runic all of the Gold Dragon's attacks.
    Particular mention to the Blue Dragon. The first time you fight it in the Ancient Castle, its stats are pitiful for that point in the game and it can be downed in a single round (especially since the Ancient Castle also contains the Master's Scroll). The second time you fight it, it isn't that much more powerful than before, it just has more HP and has an attack to inflict Stop. In both fights its gimmick is that it'll inflict debuffs on itself and then use Rippler to swap its status with a party member's, with the intention being that he'll steal the party's buffs while inflicting debuffs. The first problem with this is that he only uses Rippler if the party has buffs to steal, if you don't cast Haste, Shell, or Protect on them, he'll never use Rippler. The second problem is that in order for this trick to work, the Blue Dragon had to be made vulnerable to those self-inflicted debuffs in general, meaning you can afflict it with Blind, Poison, Sap, and Slow.
  • The Ultima Buster/Atma in Kefka's Tower (who happens to guard the first save point for Party 2) is supposed to be a stronger version of Ultima/Atma Weapon, a beast many consider to be That One Boss. However, all he does is spam -aga spells and Northern/Southern Cross (the former which can come off as an annoyance due to freezing, but he's likely to hit you with a Fire attack to unfreeze you anyway). He also adds some more tough attacks once he's low on health, but after getting hit with exactly 12 attacks, he charges up for three turns for an Ultima. All of this sounds pretty tough, but keep in mind depending on who you put for the second party, you can either reflect the majority of his attacks and/or absorbed them with Runic. Even Ultima itself isn't too terrible to deal with, considering he does absolutely nothing while you're pelting his health away with powerful attacks. The fact the standard boss theme plays as opposed to Ultima Weapon's/Warring Triad's theme (despite the fact he does give bring up a speech upon the start of the battle) puts the fact in that he's just a glorified miniboss.
  • The final battle with Kefka is relatively simple. Unlike the three previous phases of the battle, there's only one opponent, and overall he isn't all that dangerous, especially since he gives you ample warning to prepare for his ultimate attack. The HP to One attack can keep you on your toes, however. The fact that there's only one target means that the X-Fight/Genji Glove combo gets eight hits on the boss per turn, potentially ending the fight quickly.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • Early into the game, you're given a choice of three different character scenarios to do in whichever order you'd like. Terra and Edgar's scenario can be completed in a matter of minutes, and is straightforward. Locke's scenario takes a bit of exploration, but can be completed in thirty minutes or so. And then there's Sabin's scenario, which is three different scenarios chain-linked together. You've got the Imperial camp, the Phantom Train, and the Underwater Trench, all of which takes several hours to clear, since you're doing all of them in a row. It also features two of the Scrappy Mechanics in the game, with Shadow potentially leaving at any time and Gau's Leap in order to learn Rages on the Veldt, making the scenario even more frustrating. A lot happens to advance the overall story, but it ends up creating a scenario that drags on a little bit too long.
  • The World of Ruin in general can be a slog to get through once you've got the Falcon. All you're doing is building up for one big push on Kefka's Tower, mostly by finding party members and character-specific story tidbits. The open-world nature of the World of Ruin means a lot of time going from place to place with very little happening due to a lack of a cohesive narrative between these events, and it gets old quickly if you want to do everything.
• Awesome Music: The pieces players tend to remember most fondly are Aria De Mezzo Carattere, the centerpiece of the Opera House sequence, as well as the final phase of "Dancing Mad", the final boss theme. The Awesome Music page for the Final Fantasy series lists many more.
• Awesome Video Game Levels: Final Fantasy VI is remembered in part for having some of the best dungeon design in the entire series, if not the best.
  • The opening. You play as an unnamed girl in a Magitek weapon. You have an insane amount of power for the opening fights, and the atmosphere is mysterious and quite chilling.
  • The Magitek Research Facility, featuring one of the best music tracks in the game, several intense boss fights and a frantic mine cart chase to close it out.
  • The Opera, perhaps the most perfect blend of story-telling and gameplay in an RPG. The music is an entire opera on a 16-bit machine, the story is layered with symbolism and applicability, the tense time-limit fights are excellent, and it ends in a fun boss fight.
  • The music in the Phantom Train is one of the best as well, and culminates with a boss fight where Sabin can suplex a train.
  • The Floating Continent is another highlight, despite also being That One Level. The fact that it has a truly awesome soundtrack doesn't hurt anything, nor does the party's epic confrontation with Gestahl and Kefka. Nor does the fact that it leads into possibly the most devastating plot twist in the game.
  • The Phoenix Cave, another That One Level that still manages to be awesome, has to rank high on the list too. It's so complicated the party has to break up into two groups to progress through it, and each group has to help the other progress.
  • Kefka's Tower outdoes the Phoenix Cave's complexity by requiring three groups in order to get through, solving puzzles to help each other scale the twisted mountain of debris, with the music lending itself to some of the greatest tension ever in a video game.
• Badass Decay: Espers are a far cry from the all-mighty demigods that eidolons are in other Final Fantasy games. Even though it's justified through Magicite being weaker than a pure Esper, it doesn't lend itself well to gameplay.
  • Most of the attack Espers are too weak to be of use; Ifrit, Shiva, and Ramuh deal less damage than the -ra spells of the same element, but cost more MP. And the -ga spells are stronger than any attack Esper save Bahamut, and that's only because he ignores Magic Defense. While the Espers ignore Reflect, it's not enough to justify the low damage for such a high cost.
  • Healing Espers are useless, since every one of them teaches a healing spell that is more powerful than the Esper's healing magic. They also get around Reflected party members, but since it can only be used once per fight, it's not that useful. Phoenix could be hypothetically useful, since it revives all KO'd party members, but the healing potency is equivalent to a normal Raise spell and Phoenix teaches Arise, which revives a character at full HP.
  • Anything worth using the status effects Espers for (like Cait Sith, which causes Confuse on all enemies) probably has Contractual Boss Immunity to status effects anyways.
  • The status buff Espers are the only ones that are genuinely useful — Kirin, Carbuncle, Phantom, Zona Seeker, and Fenrir each grant a helpful status to the entire party, Unicorn casts Esuna on the party, Golem puts up a temporary shield to block physical attacks, and Ragnarok turns enemies into items. But you then run into the problem that they're Too Awesome to Use, as you can only summon an Esper once per battle.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • In the Narshe mines, you find a room used to test applicants to the city guard, where you must pick the proper path through a maze. Picking the wrong path results in lights surrounding you; tagging the correct light dispels them, tagging wrong initiates a battle with undead enemies, then you're sent back to start. Besides this part of the quest coming out of nowhere, serving no purpose, and never being mentioned again, one must wonder how the Narshe guards set up such a test that is clearly using magic in some form, when magic is thought to be a myth and normal humans can't use it.
  • The Imperial Air Force sequence. While flying to the Floating Continent, a squadron of flying Mini Mechas attack the airship, forcing the party to fight them off. In the middle of the battle, Ultros flies in on Typhon and engages you, ending with Typhon blowing the party off the deck. While in freefall over the Floating Continent, the party then fights the Air Force boss, which seems to be a sapient airship with two scowling faces as gunner attachments. The FMV in the Anthologies release notwithstanding, nothing in any of the game's releases hints that the Empire even has an air force, so they show up out of nowhere and then vanish back to nowhere. Not to mention that Ultros' entire schtick is being a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, and in this instance so is Typhon.
  • In the Returner hideout, you can find a random scrap of paper by a table. If you notice it but don't throw it away, Banon later remarks on it during the planning scene^note assuming Terra agrees to join the Returners. It's completely optional to find in the first place, nothing ever comes of it either way, and it just comes across as a very puzzling choice of Easter egg.
• Bizarro Episode:
  • Cyan's Soul, aka the Dreamscape. When the party is resting inside Doma Castle, Cyan is attacked by demons who want to devour his soul, and the party leaps in after them to stop them. What follows is an exploration of an M.C. Escher painting in a video game, then a recreation of the Phantom Train but now it's full of puzzles involving scenery objects moving about, and then a cave that seems to loop infinitely, before the party returns to Doma to face the Arc Villain of the subplot. It makes for one of the most unique and cool dungeons in the game, and the surreal and bizarre metaphysical layout fits as the interior of someone's dreams or soul.
  • Ebot's Rock, where Strago hunts the Hidon, a legendary monster he tried to find in his youth. Ebot's Rock is inexplicably full of small rooms (most of them small enough to fit on a single screen) that randomly teleport the player between them. The player has to find Coral because a sapient treasure chest is blocking the path to Hidon's lair and will only move if the party feeds it enough. So the party has to explore these rooms at random to find coral in the treasure chests. Once they have enough to appease the chest, it will move and the party can move past it to face Hidon. It's unclear why the developers created a dungeon consisting of a few small rooms that players teleport between at random, and why they would use it for this sidequest in particular, because the part about having to feed a sapient treasure chest coral has no explained connection to Hidon at all; it's just a very strange instance of an NPC Roadblock.
• Breather Boss:
  • Tunnel Armor, if you pick up the Thunder Rod in the cave; use it as an item to cast a defense-ignoring Thundara on it, ending the fight in one hit.
  • The Phantom Train, thanks to the Revive Kills Zombie mechanic typical of the series. Good thing, since the level leading up to it can be rather difficult with your lack of a magic user, magic users among the enemy, and potentially only two party members to fight it with if Shadow ran off beforehand.
  • The Flame Eater in Thamasa. It only has 8000 HP, not very much thanks to its Ice weakness and the party's widespread access to Ice-elemental weapons and spells. Your two required party members, Terra and Locke, were mandatory for long dungeons previously, and thus are probably well-trained and equipped. Also, you find an Ice Rod in the mansion just before you face Flame Eater, which when used as an item casts a defense-ignoring Blizzara — a Tranced Terra using the Ice Rod can one-shot the Flame Eater.
• Breather Level:
  • The journey to Jidoor is pretty lax to give players a chance to recover after the story and gameplay intensity of the three scenarios and the siege of Narshe. This is the first time the player has the freedom to form their own party from all the characters they've recruited, so you can take that opportunity to try out different party configurations and get a feel for how they synergize. However, your next destination after Jidoor is Zozo, which is That One Level.
  • The burning house in Thamasa. The only enemies you encounter are Balloons, which are weak to Ice and Water; Strago joins the party with a Water/Wind elemental Lore. You also have Terra and Locke in the party, and if they know Blizzara, they can also solo the Balloons. The boss of the place is the Flame Eater, who is also a Breather Boss due to his weakness to Water and Ice. The two dungeons before this (the Magitek Research Facility and the Cave to the Sealed Gate) were very long and very difficult dungeons, and in an hour or two you'll have to go to the Floating Continent, another instance of That One Level. The burning house is a cakewalk by comparison.
  • Narshe in the World of Ruin. Most of the enemies in the area only use physical attacks, aren't too strong, and have mediocre HP. Things are a little tougher in the mines, where Magna Roaders can cast tier-two magic, but it's still manageable. If you come here immediately after getting the airship, you'll be fine; if you come here later, the enemies are laughable.
  • The Cave in the Veldt. Most of your encounters in it will be Twinscythes, who only use weak physical attacks. Occasionally a Grogimera appears, but it also only uses physical attacks until its fourth turn. It probably won't live that long, given the strength of your party by that time. Or you can just use Phantom, turn everyone invisible, and make it so the enemies in this dungeon literally can't damage you.
• Broken Base:
  • Which is the best version of the game to play? The SNES version is a nostalgic classic, but its translation didn't properly represent certain characters and plot points, and it is riddled with bugs that can either crash the game or can be exploited to make the party overpowered. The GBA version fixed many of those bugs, has a script more faithful to the original Japanese, and has additional bonus content; but it has awful sound quality, noticeable lag for many attack animations, and while the translation is Truer to the Text, it lacks the charm of the SNES script. The mobile/PC port fixed the sound and lag problems and retained the bonus features and translation (for better or worse); but the new graphics were highly lacking with many sloppy environment features and character sprites that were too bright and stylized compared to the darker and detailed environments. The Pixel Remaster port returns to the SNES-style graphics with touched-up environments, has quality of life improvements to improve the gameplay, and runs much smoother than the GBA or previous mobile/PC port; but it lacks the bonus features from past ports, has its own slew of bugs and oversights (though they're slowly being patched), and while the sprites look better than the mobile/PC port, some feel that they're still too bright and stick out from the environments which use a darker palette. This is part of the reason the game has such an active ROM hacking community, to try to create an optimal experience combining the best features of each port.
  • Some love the World of Ruin for being an open world experience once you get the Falcon, allowing players the freedom to re-recruit their party members in almost any order they want, explore the side-dungeons in any order they want, and it gives every party member closure on their personal story arc. Detractors point out that the overarching story peters out here, the game instead focusing on resolving character arcs. Kefka, up until then a very active and threatening villain, is reduced to an Orcus on His Throne who is apparently content to just wait for the party to get to him in the final dungeon.
  • Who is the main character? While the game starts you off with Terra and she was selected as VI's hero representative for Dissidia, the fanbase is split in several directions. The main arguments against Terra are that she disappears for large chunks of the game (after defending the Esper at Narshe, and after the Floating Continent). Edgar is in your party the longest, as he's a required recruit early on in both game worlds. Celes also disappears for large chunks of the game, but is the character you start off as in the World of Ruin, as well as having an important scene on the Floating Continent. Then there's Locke, whose quest to find the Phoenix Magicite to save Rachel forms the basis for his entire character arc. There are even arguments made that Shadow is the main character, or that Kefka is. The fandom cannot agree, and the debates are sure to rage until the end of time.
  • The Esper system. Supporters love it for the degree of versatility it offers characters, with players able to teach them specific spellsets and boost certain stats to build characters the way they want. Detractors dislike that the ability to teach characters every spell and raise their four primary stats to high levels makes everyone a Master of All with little uniqueness in how they play. Then there's a group that dislikes that, for pure Min-Maxing, Espers are a lot of busywork to keep track of when characters are going to level up so they can receive the proper stat bonus when they do, and some players even advice keeping their levels low until they acquire espers, so they can get more level ups with them and thus more stat training. Since there is no natural stat growth like in other Final Fantasy titles (all characters gain the same amount of HP and MP at the same levels and no other stat increases), you have to pay attention to esper level bonuses if you want to train your party properly.
  • The age-old question of what to do with Ragnarok — turn it into a sword and bet in the Colosseum to obtain the Lightbringer, the Infinity +1 Sword; or take the Magicite, which teaches Ultima, and its summon ability can transform enemies into items, letting you farm Megalixirs, Miracle Shoes, Safety Bits, Ribbons, and Experience Eggs. There's no consensus on which is the better choice. Two major factors are if you're willing to put in the time to uncurse the Cursed Shield (since the Paladin Shield is the only other way to learn Ultima), or if you're willing to put in the effort to find out which enemies can be transformed into those rare items to farm. The GBA version and subsequent ports cooled this a bit since the Ragnarok sword can be stolen from part of the Final Boss, and the game can be saved afterward to keep it. But that still means not getting the Lightbringer until after you could have really used it.
  • Should the player try to save Cid at the beginning of the World of Ruin, or should they let him die? Many players argue that it's more thematically appropriate for Cid to die, because the fallout is that Celes is Driven to Suicide by jumping off of a cliff, but survives the attempt and gets a Hope Spot by seeing a bird with Locke's bandanna on it, prompting her to hold onto hope and leave the island. This ties into the themes of holding onto hope in the face of despair, even when all seems lost. This argument also says that Cid doesn't really do anything even if you save him, so there's no point in making the effort. There's also the fact that the death scene is, simply put, a lot better: it features a pretty elaborate cinematic and a lot more dialogue, and it actually gets acknowledged later on in the game (Celes's epilogue references something that only happened there), suggesting the designers considered it the "canon" option. Just as many people argue that saving Cid is more fitting, since it shows that Kefka's Straw Nihilist philosophy is inherently flawed by Celes saving Cid in spite of the trouble it takes. Also, saving Cid goes with the game's theme that you don't need a reason to live on, so long as you make the effort. There's very little consensus over which is the better option. The only thing anyone seems to agree on is that the method to save Cid is a huge pain in the butt.
• Complete Monster: Kefka Palazzo was the court jester of the Gestahl Empire. But through treachery and atrocity, he rose through the ranks and eventually became the world's most dire threat. His notable actions include putting a slave crown on Terra Branford and making her kill fifty of his own troops to test his control before making her attack an innocent village; poisoning the Kingdom of Doma's water supply against direct orders, killing innocent people including children; brutally murdering the noble general Leo by cowardly tricking him with illusions playing on his loyalty; and killing the Espers at Thamasa—along with his own men—without any remorse. Kefka reaches his worst, however, when he betrays and murders Emperor Gestahl and uses the power of the Warring Triad to turn the world into a poisoned wasteland. In the World of Ruin, Kefka rules on high, killing and tormenting on a whim with the Light of Judgement across the whole world. Finally confronted by the party, Kefka is incensed that they managed to find hope in this dying world, and proclaims he will destroy everything and create a "monument to non-existence". Misanthropic, nihilistic and deriving pleasure from suffering and destruction, Kefka serves as one of the most iconic and singularly vile villains in the entire franchise.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Slam/Veil Dancers in Zozo. When they are alone, they cast Blizzara, Fira, and Thundara, which can either one-shot a single character or ravage your entire party. In groups, they also carry a move that puts a party member to sleep. However, a lone Veil Dancer is very useful for restoring Celes's MP for free with Runic.
  • Literally every monster on the Floating Continent. Ninjas love to hit the entire party with powerful elemental attacks and you can't run from encounters including them. The Behemoths have powerful physical attacks as well as Meteor/Meteo. Dragons can not only use Revenge Blast to dish out crazy damage, but can use Snort/Sneeze to remove party members from battle, leaving the remaining two open to a pummeling. Even worse, if you Rasp away their MP to stop Revenge Blast, they start using Tail, which is almost as bad. The Brainpans will Stop multiple party members (through Smirk), leaving them open to tremendous damage from everything else, and one-shot them with 1000 Needles/Blow Fish. Misfits will shred you with Lifeshaver (although you can turn that against them with Gaia Gear). Platinum/Wirey Dragons have high offense and defense, lots of hit points, no weak points, and attack in groups of 3. Apocryphas/Apokryphos are usually pretty benign, but Level 4 Flare hits for about 1200, which is going to one-shot you if you're not obscenely overleveled. And the Chest Monster you find early on, Gigantos, will attack two or three times a turn and its special attack can deal upwards of 1000 damage.
  • Two of the three monsters in the Collapsing House. You're on a six-minute time limit to get in, grab the kid, and get out; however, the place is loaded with some crazy powerful items you'll want to snag. However, several of the chests are Chest Monsters, the Scorpions come in groups of three and inflict Doom/Condemned status, and Zokkas/Hermit Crabs can inflict Petrify with their final attack — which wouldn't be so bad except that since Celes is likely to be the only member of the party at the time, getting petrified is an instant game over.
  • In Darill's Tomb, you can be grateful that the Orog only appears in the first room of the tomb. On their first turn, they have a 66% chance of using Zombite, instantly turning a party member into a Zombie. Then they have two individual 33% chances to use it again in the same turn, potentially incapacitating three of your party members, at a time where if you skipped Sabin you only have three and thus this is a Total Party Kill. And even if you do have Sabin, don't relax yet, because the Orog can attack in pairs.
  • There's also the Blade/Soul Dancers in Jidoor. They throw knives, which ignore both row and defense. Even the lowly Dagger/Dirk, when Thrown, hits for around 800 damage. And the longer the fight goes, the stronger the knives they throw are. Spend too much time and they'll be throwing high end knives that hit for the 9999 damage cap. It's even worse if they're accompanied by Crushers. Crushers have an unusually high physical attack, a special move that is a triple-damage physical attack, and, when alone, they have a chance of countering everything with Lifeshaver, which drains a large amount of your hitpoints and restores that same amount of theirs. Crushers aren't quite demonic spiders on their own, but the combination of Blade/Soul Dancers and Crushers is hellacious.
  • The standard physical attacks of Mantodea/Greater Mantis will likely do over 3000 damage, killing any character that isn't significantly overleveled. You can first encounter them when your maximum HP is around 2000 or so. They're also found in conjunction with Sprinters, who are pretty benign on their own but who'll cast White Wind and heal the Mantodeas.
  • Face/Phase, a Palette Swap of Brainpan in the Phoenix Cave. Like Ninjas, you can't run away from them. They frequently use 1000 Needles/Blow Fish as an occasional counter. Adding to that, they can sometimes be paired up with Zeveaks/Parasouls, who can confuse you, and Necromancers, who have an annoying tendency to slap the Zombie status on unsuspecting party members. When alone, they'll start to use Death/Doom, Banish/X-Zone, and Flare spells. It's this enemy that may be the real reason why the Phoenix Cave is That One Level, simply because it has so many ways to incapacitate you.
  • The Tyrannosaur. It comes armed with an unusually powerful physical attack, an even more powerful physical attack called Bite that will pretty much always kill the target, and they cast Meteor, which will hit the entire party for around 1500. Oh, and if they attack in pairs, it's always a pincer attack, so you can't flee. That being said, they're worth a lot of experience and Magic AP, so they're a nice grinding target. And since they're only found in an out-of-the-way forest that you won't visit unless you deliberately seek it out, you won't be subjected to fighting them if you don't want to.
  • The Brachiosaur, the Tyrannosaur's bigger brother. Found in the same area of the World of Ruin, this thing opens almost every fight with Disaster, which inflicts a baker's dozen of status effects on everyone in your party. In addition to having 46,000+ HP, very high defenses, and the ability to eject characters from the fight with Sneeze/Snort, it can also cast Traveler, which inflicts (number of steps you've taken /32) damage, Meteor, and even Ultima. However, it's a mountain of EXP and Magic AP if you can beat it, and it drops an item that can trigger a Chain of Deals into the Marvel Shoes, so it's worth the trouble.
  • The Cultists' Tower is difficult on its own, but two of its denizens in particular are tough to deal with. L.20 Magics love to cast Banish/X-Zone, which is an instant death attack that ignores the reflect rings you'll be wearing. If you get in a fight with more than one of them and they cast Banish multiple times in a row, you're staring a Game Over in the face. It doesn't help that they have inherent Reflect status, and no elemental weaknesses to take advantage of. Then there's L.90 Magics. They use Meteor and Merton/Meltdown, which likewise cut through your Reflect Rings and will likely kill you if you don't cast Stop or Bserk/Berserk on them. The problem? Both Stop and Bserk are reflectable, and Level 90 Magic has inherent Reflect status too! The other problem? Meltdown damages everything in a battle, friend or foe, but the L.90 Magics absorb both fire and wind elemental, so Meltdown heals them!
  • Many enemies in Kefka's Tower:
    • The Sky Base, which counters any attack with up to four uses of Blaster, a One-Hit KO attack that can hit the party. It has a low hit rate, but with four uses the odds are not looking good for it to miss all four times...
    • The Scullion. It can inflict Doom on you and spams Wave Cannon and Atomic Ray.
    • Innoc/InnoSents attack in threes and open every battle with each of them using Brainblast to potentially Confuse three party members. Then they spend their time spamming Plasma, a powerful single-hit Lightning attack, or Freezing Dust, Freezing a party member. And every fifth turn they can use Lv.? Holy, which will hurt if it hits.
    • The Retainer/Yojimbo. A relatively inconspicuous foe, low HP, only uses physical attacks and Wind Slash...then you kill it. When it dies, it always uses Tradeoff/Eye for an Eye on the party member that dealt the final blow, inflicting Instant Death. It can be blocked like a physical blow, fortunately, so hope you have high Evasion (or Mblock on SNES or PSX) because it ignores Instant Death protection.
    • Also from Kefka's Tower and usually in the same rooms is the Outsider/Cherry (Madame in the Woolsey translation) battle. The former have Auto-Haste and love to spam throwing weapons while the latter has access to powerful spells such as Meteor and White Wind, which is a healing spell that targets all allies. What makes this fight even more annoying is that it is very difficult to escape.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Sabin's scenario after he gets separated with the party in Lethe River. Edgar/Terra/Banon's scenario is the easiest; the enemies in their scenario are fairly easy to defeat, and there are no bosses. Locke's scenario is a not-so-difficult stealth mission, and there's only one boss, which Celes outright tells you how to defeat. Sabin's scenario, on the other hand, is considerably long, has some more difficult enemies, one party member (Shadow) may leave him at any time except during Phantom Train, and another party member (Gau) has an unusual battle mechanic. One of the bosses, Phantom Train, is also very difficult unless you took advantage of Revive Kills Zombie. Additionally, one shall not forget the fact that this is the same Sabin who can Suplex the same Phantom Train and even himself for that matter.
  • The fight to defend the Esper in Narshe. You have to split up seven characters into three different parties. You then have to move all three groups to blockade the imperial troops from reaching Banon. The fights are reasonably challenging, depending upon the make-up of each party, but not too bad. What makes it really hard is that the imperial troops keep moving even when control is taken away from the player during battles starting and ending. This makes it pretty hard to heal your characters, or in a worse case scenario, move a party to stop a soldier from reaching Banon (automatic game over).
  • Zozo. Enemies suddenly have enough HP to survive more than one round from you, they begin using magic attacks regularly, and one type of enemy can even use items to heal itself or allies. Another throws weapons at you for a ton of damage. It's also one of the few dungeons to not have a save point.
  • The Floating Continent. The random encounters are much stronger than you expect (if the party had trouble beating the Air Force boss they fought earlier, they should get off the continent and start grinding), and on top of that, Ultima Weapon can be surprisingly powerful. Further compounding the problem, should you decide to save, you cannot get off unless you get through the entire dungeon! That's right, the cop out is right before Ultima Weapon, so you still have to fight incredibly difficult random encounters and trudge through the entire dungeon just to get off of the freaking island!
  • The GBA/mobile version in general can qualify, if you're used to exploiting some of the better-known bugs of the SNES version. Vanish/Doom doesn't work on bosses anymore. The evade stat works properly so that you can't be nigh unkillable with just magic evade anymore. Enemies can actually dodge your physical attacks, since evasion now works. Blind actually works properly this time, and you'll have to deal with it when it pops up.

E-H

• Ending Fatigue: The ending sequence is one of the longest in the SNES library, clocking in at about thirty minutes from defeating the Final Boss to the end of the credits. It can be shorter if you didn't re-recruit every party member, but not by much.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The game is well-remembered for its expansive cast and great story, both of which are considered some of the best in all of Final Fantasy, if not the best. The gameplay, however, is ridiculously broken in the player's favor. Even without the Good Bad Bugs from the original that have since been fixed, VI is one of the easiest games in the series, giving most party members abilities that let them wipe out enemy parties in one round. It's so broken in your favor, in fact, that it's possible to kill the Final Boss in only one round from your party. As such, the story is considered a high point for Final Fantasy, but the gameplay is sometimes derided as way too easy to break wide open.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • General Leo, for being one of the only decent citizens of the Empire and a Four-Star Badass to boot. His unwillingness to be fused with Magitek power, along with proof that he is more than capable of holding his own without it, definitely helps. Before there was Aerith, there were rumors of ways to revive Leo and recruit him as a permanent party member, simply because fans liked him that much, and because the brief moments that you get to control him showcase just how good he is.
  • Ultros managed to take on this role too, being one of the most memorable characters in the game. He's a flipping octopus, what more is there to say?
  • Sabin became one thanks to the train-suplexing incident that turned him into a Memetic Badass, but also thanks to getting some of the most amusing lines in the game.
  • Relm. She's cute as a button, surprisingly sharp-tongued, and once you can get the hang of her unusual combat style, she turns out to be inexplicably powerful with the highest base magic stat in the game. Yes, that includes Terra. Having a unique theme all to herself and turning out to be Shadow's daughter doesn't hurt either. You'd assume with all that she'd be an important character, right? Wrong. She has just enough lines to establish her character quirks and personality, and is otherwise completely superfluous.
  • Setzer, especially on account of his Cool Airship, the Blackjack. Also, he's a nihilist much like Kefka, but he's a Determined Defeatist in spite of it all, which gave him a nice fit with the game's central theme of hope in the face of despair.
  • Shadow the assassin and his dog Interceptor. He's the classic Ninja, and rather popular despite being an Optional Party Member for much of the game and being one of the most difficult to bring over to the World of Ruin.
  • Mog for being the first playable moogle in the series, as well as being very adorable, and an adorable Stone Wall at that.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • There was some fan speculation that Kefka was formerly Baram, Shadow's partner in crime that he failed to give a mercy killing to. There's no evidence to suggest that this is the case, but that's why it's called speculation.
  • Gogo seems designed to grow them. Under that mask could be Relm's mother, Baram, Banon... or the boss Great Mime Gogo of Final Fantasy V with the same name who cast himself into the void upon defeat. Gogo's ablities in VI even work like the Mime Job that V Gogo was guarding. Since FFV was not released outside Japan till long after VI, many players at the time did not catch the reference, leading to a massive amount of fan theories. In any case, there's no evidence to suggest who Gogo is under the mask.
• Even Better Sequel: IV and V both raised the bar in terms of what could be done with a JRPG, but VI married the best of both worlds to create a masterpiece. Not only does VI have good graphics and music which still hold up even now, but it's got some of the best Character Development and story arcs in the entire Final Fantasy franchise.
• Fanon:
  • Terra is often portrayed in fanworks as too naive to realize that she's being flirted with due to the scene with Edgar at the beginning. The only thing is, that scene wouldn't work if Terra was too naive to pick up on the flirting. She clearly recognizes it, but is troubled by the fact that she has no emotional reaction to it, making this a case of Misaimed Fandom.
  • Many fans like to spell Celes' last name as "Chère," as it's the feminine form of the French word for "dear/treasured/precious".
  • It's speculated that the Gogo who appears in this game is the same Gogo from Final Fantasy V, as the end of his "fight" ends with him throwing himself into the Void. And Gilgamesh, who debuted in that game, canonically travels through the different games through the power of the Void. Gogo's abilities also work the same way as the Mime job from V, suggesting it's the game person.
  • While fans have always liked to pair up Ifrit and Shiva, their appearance here is often credited with popularizing it, due to the fact they're found together and that they're shown interacting in the Esper Village.
  • Though official media hasn't outright confirmed if Celes was able to save Cid or not, its common to depict him dying as the canon version of events, with fans citing that the impact it has on Celes and her subsequent Hope Spot are much stronger for the story than if he survives, and given that he's left alone on the solitary island with nothing to do and little to eat, his survival is an Esoteric Happy Ending to the subplot anyway.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Kefka takes delight in Terra's destructive magical abilities, but it's not hard to interpret his delight as sexual attraction. In Terra's flashback, Kefka gleefully announces "You're all mine!" when he places the Slave Crown on her head. In Dissidia, Kefka's line to Terra — "Time to come home to Papa!" — could also be interpreted as a sign of his attraction to her. Fan art depicting Kefka and Terra together is easy to find.
• Fountain of Memes: Ted Woolsey's take on Kefka in the Super NES localization gave him many memorable one-liners. While future ports retranslated the script to be more faithful to the original Japanese, many of Kefka's more quotable lines written by Woolsey were retained. This ended up getting Kefka Rescued from the Scrappy Heap in Japan, and he's now thought of as one of the better villains in Final Fantasy due to his highly-quotable nature.
  • His vocalized laughter is perhaps his most memorable character trait, since it gets used any time Kefka is in a scene, often to announce his arrival or to punctuate something he said, and is even worked into the final boss theme. Even with voice acting becoming the norm for the series, some fans have opined that they want the original SNES sound effect to be retained for Kefka in future appearances, because it's just that iconic for him. The laugh is unchanged in the Pixel Remaster, and it's even reused as a raid boss in Final Fantasy XIV.
  • "There's SAND on my boots!" ^explanationAfter trudging through Figaro Desert, Kefka snaps at his bodyguards to clean the sand from his boots, bossing them around just because he can. This is one of his first lines of dialogue players hear, to boot.
  • "Son of a submariner!" ^explanationKefka's exclamation when Terra, Locke, and Edgar escape him at Figaro. Aside from sounding silly, submarines don't seem to actually exist in Final Fantasy VI. Later releases tweaked this to the less quotable "son of a sandworm!"
  • "I HATE HATE HATE (repeat x number of times) HATE YOU!" ^explanationHis enraged rant at Celes when she stabs him on the Floating Continent, collapsing and shrieking the word hate at her more than two dozen times. His re-translated dialogue is a less memorable string of insults.
  • "Hate hate HATE!" ^explanationExclaimed when he kills General Leo, and essentially a more succinct version of the above.
  • "'Wait' he says. Do I look like a waiter?" ^explanationHis mocking response to Sabin when he tries to flee from him in the Imperial Camp and Sabin shouts "wait!"
  • "This is sickening! You sound like chapters from a self-help booklet!" ^explanationWhen the party gives him a Kirk Summation at the end of the game just before the final battle, Kefka's response is the Shut Up, Kirk! statement.
  • "Run run, or you'll be well done!"^explanationHis taunt to Emperor Gestahl as he tries to avoid the Warring Triad's lightning strikes.
• Game-Breaker: Here.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Woolsey clearly had a classical education: Not only is Terra a counterpart to Celes (Earth and Sky), but in the famous Opera House scene, Celes replaces Maria, a famous singer. One of the most famous opera divas in history was named Maria Callas.
  • Terra's mother is named "Madonna" in the English version. Those familiar with pop culture believe it is a reference to the famed singer; those familiar with the Madonna Archetype would know this is a reference to the Catholic name used for Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, as a way to further connect Terra with the Messianic Archetype^howeverIt should be noted that Madonna's persona as an Ethical Slut is used as a way to contrast her name, and she is culturally Catholic herself, so there is a connection.
  • The final battle with Kefka is a dark, twisted parody of The Divine Comedy, with Kefka as God and the three tiers of enemies before him as Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Japanese players found Kefka annoying for his Straw Nihilist attitude. Woolsey drastically altered his character in the translation, turning him from a simple Monster Clown into a nihilistic maniac whose goofy mannerisms and wacky lines are little more than a facade to cover his undying hatred for everyone and everything. The Western fans loved it and he's quickly risen through the ranks over the years on the lists of the greatest video game villains of all time. This characterization was retained for Japanese retranslations, making Kefka Rescued from the Scrappy Heap.
  • Yoshinori Kitase himself has said that he often has Western fans ask him to autograph their Final Fantasy VI cases when in Japan he'd expect more for Japanese fans to ask the same of Final Fantasy VII.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Level 80 Magic in the Cultist's Tower seems designed to frustrate players who think Reflect Rings will make them untouchable. All it ever casts is healing magic (all levels of Cure, Reraise, and Esuna). This is hardly a problem if you're unprotected, but if you have Reflect, it takes forever to kill it. Thankfully, it's weak to poison - not that this makes having a powerful attack immediately followed by a bounced Curaga undoing all the damage any less annoying.
  • Outcasts in the Cave to the Sealed Gate, and their palette swaps, the Misfits, on the Floating Continent. They'll inflict Blind on the party, and use the Lifeshaver attack; and with their high magic, if they've been sufficiently damaged, it'll likely KO whoever it hits while healing the user. They're probably not going to end your game since they can only kill one person at a time and are otherwise unremarkable enemies, they're just very annoying. Also, the Outcasts are found in the main area of the Cave to the Sealed Gate, and as one of only two enemy types in this very long area, they're likely gonna be in every single fight you have for the dungeon. They're so infamous, many walkthroughs advise the player Steal a bunch of Gaia Gears from enemies near Thamasa and go through the dungeons with only party members that can equip them.^note Lifeshaver is Earth-elemental, and since Gaia Gear absorbs Earth, this reverses Lifeshaver to heal the party and damage the Outcast. At that point they're just annoyingly persistent.
  • Balloons, the bomb enemies in the burning house in Thamasa. They're not very strong; a good Blizzara will weaken if not outright kill them, and Strago comes with a very spammable Water-elemental Lore that can do the same. But not only are they the only encounter in the dungeon, but the flames you see also spark encounters with them, and contrary to Strago's advice it's pretty much impossible to avoid them. The result is that for a good half hour or so, every enemy encounter you experience will be the same enemies that are easily killed in one round, yet they keep coming.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Chadarnook is not a particularly difficult boss, as it only uses low-level lightning attacks that can be absorbed or healed easily, and it is weak to the common Fire element and has fairly low HP. The annoyance is that it regularly changes between its Demon form and the Goddess in the picture it is possessing. The Goddess will use status attacks like Lullaby and Entice, and casts Poltergeist, inflicting a status ailment that regularly drains your HP and cannot be healed. The two switch based on both an unseen timer in their AI script and on how many times you attack them, and it's possible that the Demon will come out, then immediately switch back to the Goddess just as you order an attack. Oh, and you can't kill the Goddess, she just regenerates. The fight boils down to waiting for the Goddess to switch places with Demon, then calling up a volley of attacks and hoping it doesn't switch back before they go off.
  • Doomgaze/Deathgaze, for being a Cowardly Boss that you encounter at random on the airship in the World of Ruin. He's got an annoying tendency to run away after just a couple of turns, and it can take anywhere from a couple of seconds to twenty minutes or longer to encounter him again! And you do want to encounter him, since he drops the Bahamut magicite upon defeating him, which teaches the very useful Flare spell. Of course, when you first get the airship, Deathgaze is about twice your level and will curbstomp you effortlessly if you encounter him. Oh, and make sure your party's levels aren't a multiple of 5, otherwise you'll drop dead from its Lv. 5 Death spell, ending the fight before it begins.
  • Wrexsoul, if you feel that Banish is cheating. Wrexsoul will possess one of your party members (and you're down a person for only three people) and you have no way to tell who, forcing you to kill them off one by one until he reappears. Then you can take a swing at him for a few turns before he possesses someone else and it starts all over again. This is why the Banish loophole is so welcome, because it lets you skip all that nonsense and permanently kill his two (otherwise respawning) minions he leaves behind to end the battle that way. It's telling that this particular loophole was kept in later re-releases even with the Vanish/Banish combo fixed, although the Pixel Remaster finally removed the exploit.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the SNES version, you can cast Vanish and then Doom or X-Zone on nearly any enemy for an instant win. This is because the programming that checks for instant death immunity was accidentally given a lower priority than checking if the target was invisible, meaning anything that had the Vanish status could be instantly killed. Remakes of the game fixed this mistake, although the Vanish-Doom combo still works on enemies who aren't immune to instant death.
  • Psycho Cyan. Basically, you use his second Bushido skill to have him counter the next attack, then you kill him off and revive him while the status is still active, making the counterattack able to trigger on any attack, including his own. Then you inflict him with Imp status, which makes him use a normal attack instead of the Bushido attack when he counters, preventing the counter status from wearing off after it's triggered. The result is that, once triggered initially, Cyan will attack an enemy, and then counter his own attack with another attack, then counter that with an attack, ad infinitum until all enemies are dead. The GBA version removed this bug, but fans still found another way to trigger it.
  • In the Cave to the Sealed Gate, there's a switch in a treasure chest that destroys a section of bridge up ahead, preventing them from reaching the end of the dungeon. This was likely intended to be a puzzle that forces the player to backtrack and figure out how to make the bridge reappear, except the developers overlooked that another switch that is obligatory to hit to reach the end will make the destroyed bridge reappear on its own. This results in the apparent puzzle being nullified and many players thinking the first switch did nothing.
  • The status ailment Blind does nothing because of a bug. Anything that was blinded would have an enemy they targeted get a massive Evasion boost when they attacked. The problem was that, because of an error in the game's code, Evasion doesn't do what it's supposed to do, instead relegating all evade checks to the MBlock stat. So the target's Evasion would go up, but because the stat did nothing, the Blind status wasn't detrimental in any way (except preventing Strago from learning Lores—he can only copy what he sees). This was fixed in the GBA version.
  • In the SNES version, you can exploit equipment and relics to raise the MBlock stat so high that characters (especially Terra, Edgar, and Celes via the readily-available Enhancer sword) will dodge virtually any attack, aside from defense-ignoring spells and skills.
  • A thread on the Let's Play Archive shows off a bunch of these. The most impressive ones (from a reader's standpoint) involve playing the game for several hours without saving, then getting yourself killed at exactly the right time to respawn in the early points of the game with access to the airship. It has lead to players (somewhat jokingly) playing through the World of Balance backwards just to see how weird and funny things get when the events of the game happen out-of-order. It has also resulted in, at long last, General Leo being playable (with some obvious restrictions to using him).
  • The infamous Relm Sketch glitch for the 1.0 SNES version of the game, which is both this and a Game-Breaking Bug. Sketch is coded so badly that using it runs the risk of deleting your save games, freezing the game, or even bricking the game entirely. Pull it off right, and it'll glitch up your inventory, filling it with hundreds of thousands of new items, some of which are otherwise supposed to be one-of-a-kind. The Soul of Thamasa, the Lightbringer, the Celestriad, all in multiple copies, not to mention tens of thousands of Daggers and hundreds of other Better Off Sold items that you can sell for an obscene amount of gil. This trick was removed in later versions of the game, and it also fixed the issue that caused the Game-Breaking Bug.
  • There is a glitch that allows you to spam Joker Doom, Setzer's ultimate attack which is supposed to be accessible only under certain circumstances (use an Echo Screen, then immediately switch to Setzer to use the slots), in almost every boss fight (and it is effective in nearly all of them). It's dangerous to pull off without frame-precise timing (although Pause Scumming allows you to perform it even in real-time play), but naturally, tool-assisted speed runs abuse the hell out of it. Here are two examples. This was not fixed in both the PS port and the GBA rerelease.
  • Guest characters, such as Banon and General Leo, lack a Chocobo riding sprite, as the developers presumed they aren't in the party at a time when you can do this. However, there's a Chocobo stable south of Figaro Castle which you can visit during the time Banon is in the party. It's a long walk, but doing it will treat you to the fun of Banon's glitched-out sprite riding a Chocobo.
  • The spell X-Zone/Banish kills all enemies and delays any scripts they would execute on death by a round. This makes the battle with Wrexsoul incredibly easy (though ending the fight this way denies your party loot and experience). Wrexsoul removes himself from battle and the party fights the Soul Savers, who automatically revive on death. However, if you kill them both at the same time with Banish, their revival is delayed a round, the game detects all enemies have been defeated, and you win the battle. This was kept in later re-releases.
  • The save point glitch, in instances where you have multiple parties and access to a save point. One party needs to step on a save point, and then you switch to a different party. As long as you don't move that first party off of the save point, the game thinks this second party is still on a save point, allowing them to use Sleeping Bags, Tents, and save. Provided that first party stays put on the save, the second party becomes able to functionally rest and save anywhere in the dungeon.
  • One of Gau's rages casts Roulette. This wouldn't be a problem, except the automatic targeting for Rages overrides Roulette's randomness, meaning that in his hands it always hits enemies and becomes a Doom spell that never misses.
  • The Rippler Lore that Strago and Gogo can use exchanges all status effects between the user and the target. This is normally intended to only work on normal, easily-spread statuses like Haste or Shell, but in the game proper, it works on everything that's considered a status, like the Critical status from being at low HP(required to use Desperation Attacks) or Shadow's unique Interceptor Guard effect. This means that if an enemy uses Rippler on Shadow, Interceptor is lost forever, but using Rippler on a target with low HP lets the caster use Desperation Attacks at any HP level.
  • Sabin's Suplex is subject to Contractual Boss Immunity with the exception of the Doom Train. Every enemy has a hidden "weight" stat that determines whether moves like Suplex can work on it or not, but the original SNES version gave the Doom Train the wrong weight, allowing Suplex to affect it. This leads to the amusing and memetic effect of Sabin being physically strong enough to suplex a moving train. This ended up being an Ascended Glitch in Final Fantasy VII with Tifa's Meteodrive Limit Break, which allows her to suplex any enemy, regardless of size. It also made Sabin a Memetic Badass among Final Fantasy fans, and has been kept in all subsequent rereleases of the game because of its memetic status.
• Growing the Beard: Final Fantasy VI wasn't the first plot-driven game in the series, nor was it the first character-driven one. But it's the one that married the concepts together to raise the bar and produce the standard that the JRPG genre would be recognized for to this day. It also took the production standards up through the stratosphere to a level few but Square themselves could match on the same hardware. It says a lot that there's still many fans that hold VI as the peak of the entire franchise.
• Harsher in Hindsight: During development, the developers were originally going to have Terra vanish at the end of the game along with the Espers, but thought that it would be going too far to kill her off. As such, she survives the events of the game, albeit while losing her ability to transform. Four games later, Square Enix pulled the same thing with Tidus, as he disappears at the end of the game when the fayth stop dreaming and Dream Zanarkand stops existing, though it's possible to bring him back in the Golden Ending of Final Fantasy X-2, and this time, they went through with it. Several games since then have ended with one of the main hero(es) dying in some manner. Even more eerie is that Terra was supposed to be male back when she was slated to die; the concept art of Male Terra even looks like the character who dies in X.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Terra's field sprite bears a physical resemblance to Bulma. Keep this in mind when playing Dissidia Final Fantasy where Kefka is voiced by Shigeru Chiba, who previously voiced Emperor Pilaf from Dragon Ball, and his somewhat Yandere-esque traits towards Terra throughout the story, when Pilaf attempted to blow a kiss towards Bulma.
  • Kefka was frequently compared to The Joker long before the character himself became a very Kefka-like sociopathic nihilist in The Dark Knight.
  • The way Kefka drains power from the Warring Triad is very similar to how the Joker would gain god-like powers from Mister Mxyzptlk in Emperor Joker.
  • There's many Pop-Culture Urban Legends about the Eight Dragons. By Petrifying the Blue Dragon, you can get the Raiden magicite without losing Odin, allowing you to get all the Magicite pieces at once. Then once you killed all Eight Dragons and got Crusader, you would be forced into a rematch with stronger forms of the Eight Dragons, ending with a fight against their boss, CzarDragon. Now, take a look at the Game Boy Advance port — the bonus dungeon Dragon's Den pits you against powered-up forms of the Eight Dragons to unlock the path to the depths of the dungeon where you fight the superboss Kaiser Dragon, he guards the ultimate Magicite Diabolos, and the Soul Shrine bonus dungeons ends with a fight against all Eight Dragons followed by Kaiser Dragon. And Kaiser Dragon's sprite and pre-battle taunt are all updated versions of CzarDragon's sprite and taunt found by hacking the SNES coding. It's like Ascended Meme and Dummied Out came together to have a beautiful ironic baby that made the fandom's rumors about cut content come to life.
  • A dummied piece of NPC dialogue refers to Setzer as a pirate while noting he owns the only airship in the world. It would be more than a decade until actual Sky Pirates appeared in the series.
  • The SNES version of the game had a relic called "Goggles" which were supposed to render the wearer immune to blindness. However, the truth is the Blindness status effect was bugged and had no effect on gameplay (other than the exception with Strago), making the goggles in turn have no effect either. The Goggles were doing nothing long before this trope was ever named! Or even before The Simpsons named it in the first place.
    There is a hilarious glitch involving the goggles which was heavily abused in a speedrun. However, it involves using them as an item in combination with the Sketch glitch, meaning that their original purpose is still useless.
  • Cyan is a samurai and his son who died in Doma is named Owain. Said son also vows to Cyan that he'll practice swordplay to protect his mother when he boards the phantom train to the afterlife. Fire Emblem: Awakening introduces a character named Owain, he's a myrmidon^*a sword-wielding class excelling in skill and speed, and is also quite attached to his mother.
  • There's a commercial that depicts Mog with a deep, manly voice at a desk, shooting up various monsters with lightning bolt. This would be decades before a certain other cute mascot with a masculine voice would take the world by storm.
  • After Celes attacks him on the Floating Continent, Kefka's initial response in the SNES translation is "Grrr...Aargh...".
  • One of the moogles you can fight with when Locke rescues Terra at the beginning of the game is named Cosmog in the Advance translation.
• Hype Backlash: It's often called the very best of the series, with only the similarly-hyped Final Fantasy VII coming close to it in popularity. As a result, newcomers can wind up feeling underwhelmed by the once-innovative gameplay or story.

I-S

• Iron Woobie: The main cast: over a dozen depressed/near-suicidal badass magic knights with heart-wrenchingly sad backstories that keep going in spite of how bad things are.
• It Was His Sled:
  • It was originally a twist that Kefka was the Big Bad. While Emperor Gestahl fit the mold of previous villains, who tended to be Tin Tyrant Evil Overlord types, Kefka had more in common with Gilgamesh or Borghen, just one of the Emperor's more eccentric and wacky flunkies who keeps popping up. Then comes the Floating Continent, where Kefka proves too insane to control, overthrows Gestahl, and takes power for himself. These days, the one thing most everyone is likely to learn about this game at a glance is that Kefka is the villain.
  • Thanks to Dissidia, everyone knows now that Terra is half-Esper. Again, probably one of the first things you're going to learn about her. It was supposed to be the Driving Question for the first third of the game or so as to what exactly was causing her to have such untapped magical power.
  • The entire existence of the World of Ruin was spoiled by the game packaging. The Floating Continent has all the hallmarks of a Disc-One Final Dungeon, so you know this can't be the final battle when you prepare to confront Gestahl, but you're probably not expecting Kefka to unleash an Apocalypse How that reshapes the continents. But one of Kefka's major claims to fame is that he "won", at least for a little while, so his destruction of the World of Balance is fairly common knowledge. Even then, it's impossible to look at walkthroughs and game guides without accidentally catching a sight of the second world map and/or its title.
• LGBT Fanbase: If you find gay VI fanart, there's a good chance it's going to feature Sabin. He's called a "bear" by Terra, he's incredibly strong, very polite, and decided Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right! when it came to his brother and his kingdom. Not hard to see why gay men would like this guy.
• Love to Hate: Kefka. He's a Straw Nihilist who wants to destroy life and hope because he doesn't see the point in any of it, making him a loathsome villain. But he also gets a lot of the game's most quotable lines, commits several acts of villainy like the poisoning of Doma and the raid of the Esper Cave, and his Evil Laugh is one of the signature sound bites of the series. As such, he's a villain, but the Catharsis Factor in knocking him down a few pegs is a highlight of the game.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Players have widely-varying opinions on which characters are the best, but several are in the running for the worst.
  • Gau has two problems going for him. It takes a lot of work to build him up into a powerful player as compared to others because of the time-consuming nature of fighting on the Veldt to learn his Rages. Secondly, when Gau uses a Rage, it turns him into a Berserker who'll only use a physical attack and a specific ability dictated by the rage. And good luck figuring out which Rages do what, because no version of the game will tell you. You're either going to have to look through a guide or just memorize a few. Gau can be a powerful character for players who know which rages do what through most of the game, but he gets overshadowed in the endgame by characters who are just as powerful but not as unpredictable. Many players don't bother building him up and only use him on those very few occasions when the game forces him into the party.
  • Cyan has the lowest Magic score, one of the lowest Agility scores, and his Bushido techniques require you to sit and wait several seconds while you charge up the meter. During that time, the fight is still ongoing and the rest of your party can't enter commands. While some Bushido moves deal decent-to-strong damage, most are various status effects and a low-power Life Drain, which are only moderately useful in general and worthless against bosses. There are a few specific strategies that make him useful, but these are situational at best. The problems with Bushido are somewhat fixed in the mobile and Pixel Remaster versions, which allow you to just select the Bushido you want from a menu. But even with the ability being given a much-needed change, few players bother due to Cyan being so slow and magically-inept.
  • Gogo can't equip Espers. This means he can't get the stat bonuses on level up granted by Espers. His stat growth will fall further and further behind the rest of the party as their levels increase. Although this doesn't bother casual players, many of whom enjoy Gogo for his versatility, players interested in optimizing stats tend to hate him.
  • Umaro's strategy is Attack! Attack! Attack!! Since he's in a permanent Berserk status, Umaro randomly selects one of three standard attacks with varying damage output, or uses an ice attack that hits all enemies. He can't learn magic, can't change his equipment except for Relics, and his two better attacks are each unlocked only if he equips a specific relic in one of his two Relic slots. However, even Umaro has his uses - he can still be useful in the Cultists' Tower as the only character who can physically attack, and some players like to use him in the Phoenix Cave, since a lot of enemies are weak to Ice in there. Many players also like using Umaro in the Colosseum since the A.I. Roulette that can be negative against all the other characters doesn't apply to him. The Pixel Remaster version makes his relics absorb a few elements and greatly increase his stats, but it's really not worth the trouble; other characters can be just as powerful but far more predictable.
• Magnificent Bastard: Shadow is a deadly ninja who hires his immoral services out to those who can afford him, while harboring a secret nobility beneath his callousness. Once an infamous train robber named Clyde, he was forced into hiding after the apparent death of his best friend and partner in crime, and though he started a family with a woman he loved, Clyde ultimately left them behind to become the mercenary he is today. Shadow helps the party throughout the game in pulling off great deeds of heroics, yet also takes on a paying job as one of the evil empire's lieutenants. After Kefka plunges the world into chaos, Shadow saves the lives of the party at the risk of his own, and ultimately works with them to take down Kefka once and for all. Shadow then accepts that his life's purpose has been fulfilled, and dies content in his efforts to save the planet.
• Memetic Badass: Sabin can suplex a train. And himself.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Celes's "I'm a general, not some opera floozy!".
  • Celes has two outfits - her yellow and purple uniform from concept art and FMVs, and her Stripperific Leotard of Power and Badass Cape. Fans mostly prefer the leotard.
  • Sabin's ability to Suplex/Meteor Strike the Phantom Train (read: lifting the entire train into the air and slamming it back down) has inspired scores of jokes and fanart of the incident.
  • From the Ted Woolsey translation, Edgar's description of Shadow's infamous reputation when you first meet him.
    Edgar: He'd slit his mama's throat for a nickel!
• Misblamed: As discussed in this interview with translator Tom Slattery, many blamed the English localization for removing Celes' torture scene from the GBA version. The scene was removed in the Japanese release too, and it's speculated that shooting for a CERO A rating was the reason.
• Moral Event Horizon: Kefka poisoning an entire kingdom, which was about to be conquered by his side with minimal casualties, against direct orders and solely out sadistic glee from killing thousands of innocents, is the point where it becomes clear that Kefka is far more of a monster than his Laughably Evil personality initially suggested.
• Narm:
  • Some of Kefka's lines can wade into this.
    Kefka: HATE HATE HATE!
    Kefka: Son of a submariner!
  • Everything about Rachel, for fans who find Locke's attitude towards her creepy. In particular, the crazed embalmer who bounces around the room cackling about the whole situation kind of ruins the sense of gravity in the revelation of Locke's tragic backstory.
  • Some of the attack names are this in the SNES version thanks to Character Name Limits, the ones that stand out being Meltdown becoming Merton and 1000 Needles becoming Blow Fish.
  • The siege of Doma. Knowing the Empire has a full camp set up and is attacking a fortified castle of battle-ready soldiers, you're probably gearing up for a Big Badass Battle Sequence. What follows is the Imperial troopers ineffectually throwing themselves at the castle walls or running in place, the Doma soldiers doing absolutely nothing to fight back and lamenting they can't hold them off, and then Cyan casually walks outside, kills the attack commander, and the Imperials turn and flee. What could have been an epic battle instead makes both sides look pathetic. The escape from the Imperial camp a few minutes later, where you fight your way through several scripted encounters of soldiers, is far more impressive by comparison.^note And for extra absurdity points, Cyan's plan is for the Doma soldiers to withdraw into the castle and wait out the Imperials — except that the Imperial camp is set up blocking the only land route to Doma other than the Phantom Forest, and Cyan later claims that the Empire had destroyed Doma's train network. Trying to wait out the siege when their supply lines have been cut off is a terrible idea.
  • When Edgar, Locke and Terra first visit Duncan's wilderness cabin, Edgar finds evidence that Sabin has been staying there. Namely his favorite flowers, tea, and dishes.
  • Sabin's ultimate attack in the SNES/PS1 versions was translated as Bum Rush, which is quite amusing for the wrong reasons. Later translations fortunately gave it a better name in Phantom Rush.
  • As a result of Nintendo of America's strict content guidelines at the time, the script for one of the game's most dramatic and sad moments had to be heavily altered in localization. Rather than have Celes throw herself off a cliff to kill herself because she's been Driven to Suicide, the translation instead has her go cliff-diving to perk herself up. This being in spite of the fact that the visuals are still heavily oriented towards Celes trying to commit suicide in despair, including her tears falling as she does. No one bought it even back in 1994, and the idea that Celes tried to kill herself was still very apparent, in spite of the attempt. The "cliff-diving" line is still regarded as one of the worst instances of Nintendo-driven Bowdlerization in history.
• Narm Charm:
  • Kefka's cheesy dialogue had a lot to do with what made him such a charming and memorable villain.
  • Sabin's Meteor Strike originally being translated as Suplex. Sure, it doesn't make any sense why a suplex suddenly throws the opponent in the air, but it adds to the original English translation's charm. Plus the phrase "Sabin can Meteor Strike a train" sticks out nowhere near as well.
• Older Than They Think: VI also introduced the Limit Break mechanic, three years before VII explicitly named the trope. In this game, they are the Trope Namer for Desperation Attack; every character has one, but they happen so rarely and at such low HP that most players can play through the entire game without ever seeing one.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • Sadistic villain that wants to destroy the world and transforms into an angel? Characters with developed personalities and their own personal problems? Vast amount of side-quests with plenty of Tear Jerker worthy moments? The two most important protagonists are female? Dealing with real-life issues like suicide? Big deal; it's been done in video games before. But in 1994, all of this (especially the prominence of female main characters) was brand-new. Not helping is the fact that Final Fantasy VII repeated the "sadistic villain that wants to destroy the world and transforms into an angel" formula three years later while achieving far greater mainstream success than any of its predecessors, which is why we call the "last-minute villain power-up" trope "One-Winged Angel" and not "Purple Clown God."
  • At the time of its release, almost all RPGs had fairly generic protagonists, and those that had more interesting characters had almost no major further development in play after you recruited them. This was the first game where character development was one of the primary focuses of the game, and having non-combat skill sequences like the Opera were unprecedented at the time. There was nothing like this game when it came out, and while a few developers in Japan did try to match it (with titles like Star Ocean), Anglophone gamers wouldn't see much like it again until the Baldur's Gate series. Nowadays, RPG games have become so cinematic that the Opera scene looks primitive in comparison, and has even become a punchline in a Final Fantasy In A Nutshell.
• One-Scene Wonder: Vargas, Sabin's Evil Counterpart who forces him to engage in a Duel Boss battle and was the Arc Villain of the early game plotline around Duncan. He's fought, defeated, and is never discussed again.
• Porting Disaster: While the Game Boy Advance port turned out okay, ports on non-Nintendo hardware always suffer somehow.
  • The PS1 version was ridden with slowdown, long loading times, and infrequent softlocks if the game was left on too long. It was somewhat fixed in the PAL version, but it still takes some time to load. The ending is a huge case of Soundtrack Dissonance, as the medley of everyone's themes was orchestrated to match the timing of the transitions between their ending scenes — in the PSX versions, this is all de-synced and the music ends up lagging so far behind by the final ending shot, that it's still on Strago's theme when the music suddenly cuts out to go to the next scene on the Falcon.
  • The mobile/PC port, like the one for V, which is just plainly ugly. There's a lack of artistic consistency between any of the games different art assets, with simplified character sprites, detailed Amano art for dialog portraits, poorly upscaled enemy sprites and backgrounds, and so on. For some reason, sprites are put through a smoothing filter, while the backgrounds are rendered sharply and don't conform to any resolution you can set the game to, resulting in things simultaneously looking flickery and blurry at the same time. The Finally, the PC port uses a giant, touch-centric interface that looks terrible blown up onto a monitor or TV, and can't be set to any common resolution like 1080p. The graphics are so hated that the fanbase pretty much immediately got to work with mods to redo them in various ways. The port was eventually delisted in favor of the 2022 Pixel Remaster version, which was met with much better reception.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • The Woolseyism of Kefka rescued him, as he was The Scrappy in Japan. Ted Woolsey's translations and edits to Kefka's character were kept in rereleases as well as ported back across the Pacific for his Japanese characterization. Becoming a Fountain of Memes and a Straw Nihilist really seemed to help, as Kefka went from being one of the lowest-rated villains by the Japanese fanbase to one of the highest-rated.
  • The 2022 Pixel Remaster version did this for the game on PC, which was previously a port of the terrible mobile version. The original PC release had visible texture seams, a wildly inconsistent art style, and generally just felt like the cheaply-made 2010's mobile remake that it fundamentally was. The Pixel Remaster version is a completely different beast that was rebuilt from the ground up, looking and playing much better for it.
• Sacred Cow: In spite of the Broken Base surrounding different versions and certain gameplay and story elements, the reception of Final Fantasy VI as one of the greatest entries in the series— if not the greatest— is a nearly universal one. Any claims of it being overrated being sure to draw huge amounts of fandom ire. It helps that its more contentious aspects are nowhere near as overshadowing as those of later games (especially Final Fantasy VII, which is either the greatest or most overrated video game of all time, depending on who you talk to). Even though a lot of its innovations on the JRPG formula have since been done to death by later games, they still hold up well to those used to the comparatively tame and by-the-book nature of most other SNES-era RPGs (barring only a small handful of other SNES titles). It also helps that, unlike other popular entries, VI has never been turned into a miniature Cash-Cow Franchise that annoys the fanbase.
• The Scrappy: The spoiled rich kid at the action house in Jidoor is hated by everybody for making you waste time with him making his father buy him useless items like a scale model ship or a robot imp. Sometimes up to ten times in a row. Especially aggravating if you're playing the Advance version and just want to get the goddamn Excalipoor.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Here.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Natural Magic Game. The basic rule is that only Terra and Celes can use Esper magic, since they learn it naturally. Gau can still pick up elemental magic from Rages, such as Aqua Rake, and Sabin can Fire Dance the night away. A NMG is the perfect way to get more familiar with each character and their skills. For instance, Strago and Relm are off to a somewhat false start in a normal game, since their magic is under-developed.
  • The CES Run. The only three characters you absolutely must have to complete the World of Ruin are Celes (who is the viewpoint character when it starts), Edgar (whom you have no choice but to encounter as Celes), and Setzer (since you need the airship to reach Kefka's Tower). Going through The Very Definitely Final Dungeon with three parties of only one character apiece is a very rough way to try and clear the game, but you can do it.
  • Low Level Game. You can't gain too many levels and you won't have Terra or Celes' strongest spells that's normally obtained in an NMG. Some dungeons and bosses become much more terrifying due to your levels being much lower than normal.
  • If Natural Magic games aren't hard enough, you can attempt the "No Equipment Natural Magic Game" (NENMG). No Espers, armor, weapons, or relics can be used at any point during the game, so your characters' ability to deal damage comes only from their natural abilities (Blitz, Rage, etc.). Simply grinding to level 99 is forbidden, and every optional quest must also be beaten, except for the Magic Master.
  • The console versions of Pixel Remaster allow you to customize how much XP and gil you earn from battles. One option halves XP and gil earned, and another disables it entirely. Doing this is entirely optional, but provides an interesting challenge.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Terra/Celes are a reasonably popular pairing in the fanbase, despite having only three brief interactions in the entire run of the story. In fact, despite them being the two most prominent characters, the game seems to go out of its way to keep them separated as often as possible.
• Signature Scene:
  • The Opera House. Nobuo Uematsu composed a three-act opera, on a 16-bit cartridge, for Pete's sake.
  • The boss fight against the Phantom Train, where Sabin can suplex it.
  • The beginning of the World of Ruin, where Celes is Driven to Suicide and throws herself off of a cliff in despair after Cid dies.
• Special Effect Failure: The cart escape from the Magitek Research Facility is presented in very poor Mode 7, with the track and passing ironwork looking like jumbled masses of brown pixels scaling towards the screen. It wouldn't get cleaned up into something presentable until the mobile/Steam release.
• Squick: On the Floating Continent, Gestahl offers a chance for Celes to rejoin him; whereupon she'll get busy with Kefka and produce some heirs for him.^note In the Japanese version and translations from the GBA version and on. In the SNES translation, presumably due to the translator misreading on account of deadlines, he gives a bog standard "We Can Rule Together" speech..
  Gestahl: Why don't I give you and Kefka the task of creating progeny to populate my new Magitek empire?
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The intro theme sounds Suspiciously Similar to the first few notes of Also sprach Zarathustra. The same theme plays as Kefka appears for the final boss battle.

T-Z

• That One Achievement:
  • The Beastlord achievement on both the SNES ROM's Retro Achievements set and discontinued 2014 version requires getting every Rage in the game. Doing this literally requires a guide throught the majority of the game, as it's incredibly easy to permanently miss monsters that can appear as Rages.
  • The Master Gambler achievement on the Pixel Remaster version. Although it doesn't require you to get all the possible combinations from Setzer's Slot ability like the Wandering Gambler achievement for the defunct Steam/iOS version, you still have to get the hardest Slot combination, Joker's Death. The way Setzer's Slots work, even if you line up the slots with precision, the odds are the last row won't align no matter what, nor can it align against certain enemies, not just bosses. Worse, one wrong and more likely combination will cause the "bad" Joker's Death, which kills your entire party no matter their immunities and doesn't count toward the achievement. At least the auto-battle function will randomize the results of Setzer's Slots and still count toward the achievement, but even so, you'll be in for a long slog unless you're lucky.
• That One Boss:
  • Rizopas, the boss of Baren Falls. Every other turn it has a 1-in-3 chance to use El Niño, an extremely powerful water attack. On his other turns he takes two actions, the first one has a 33% chance to be Mega Volt and the second has a 66% chance to be Blizzard; Mega Volt isn't too bad, but if Blizzard is single-target it can one-shot a character. The Rizopas has a fairly piddling 775 HP, so Sabin and Cyan can kill it in just a few turns, but the Rizopas is capable of doing the exact same thing back to them.
  • Number 128 at the end of the Magitek Research Facility. He immediately follows five waves of forced encounters between which you cannot heal, you have to fight him with three characters because you just lost your fourth (who is your only healer, no less). And while the preceding events gave you a lot of new magicite, you don't have time to learn their spells because you're locked in an area with no enemy encounters, and the encounters before the fight don't give enough magic points to learn anything. On top of all of that, Number 128 has three targets that attack independently while also carrying an extremely rare item (the Kazekiri/Tempest) that may take many tries to successfully steal, prolonging the battle.
  • Atma/Ultima Weapon on the Floating Continent can be very challenging for first-time players. The boss uses powerful magic, like Flare Star and Quake, that can deal significant damage to the entire party; it likes to follow this up by finishing off a weakened target with Flare. There's a trick that makes the fight significantly easier (casting Rasp on it to deplete its MP also kills it, and it won't use its stronger attacks since its HP remains full), but most players won't know that unless they look up strategies for fighting it.
  • The Tentacles in Figaro Castle. They'll use Entwine and Stun to inflict Slow on your characters, then use Seize on them. A character hit by Seize is removed from the battle and subject to a gradual Life Drain that heals the Tentacle that Seized it. Eventually the Tentacles let them go, but there's four tentacles so you can count on being Seized again very quickly. And if that's not bad enough, they'll use Poison and Bio, which continue to sap your health while Seize does the same. Finally, you only have a party of three people at best, and there's four Tentacles, all of which can use Stun and Seize; do the math. Unless you have Running Shoes equipped on Celes and Sabin (Hermes Sandals gives Auto-Haste making you immune to Slow, and they can only use Seize on a Slowed character), prepare for a very difficult fight.
  • The Storm Dragon in Mt. Zozo. He has tons of HP, a brutal physical, and spells that both hit the entire party and are of the hard-to-defend-against Wind element. Oh, and the game nudges you to go to Mt. Zozo immediately after getting the airship; if you do, your party will be seriously underequipped and underlevelled for a fight this hard. One of the Storm Dragon's abilities that he uses is non-elemental, and hits your entire party, meaning that even if you get a Thunder Shield to block the worst of it, you'll still be hurting quite a bit.
  • Wrexsoul, for being a Guide Dang It! Puzzle Boss. During most of the fight, Wrexsoul will "possess" one of your party members. To make him reveal himself so you can damage him, you have to kill your own party members until you happen to kill the one he's hiding in. And even then, he'll just repossess someone else after enough time has passed. You can win the fight by casting Banish, but then you don't get the item drop (a Guard/Pod Bracelet). However, the Pixel Remaster removed the Banish strategy, so you've got to do it the hard way in that version.
  • Magic Master is at the top of a difficult dungeon in which characters can't use physical attacks, blasts you with powerful magic, changes its elemental weaknesses and resistances after every hit, and has 50,000 HP and MP. There are many tricks that you can use make the main part of the battle easy (for example, it's vulnerable to the Berserk status ailment), but the big problem is its Last Ditch Move: when its HP reaches zero, it will cast Ultima, which will usually do more than enough damage to one-shot your entire party. Hope you either have Reraise or a lot of time on your hands with which to reduce its MP to zero.
• That One Level:
  • The fight in Narshe to defend the Esper against Kefka and his minions. It's the second combat in the game to use three separate parties to protect choke points against incoming enemy groups. Unlike the first fight, you only have seven characters to divide among the three groups. There are also more waves of foes. To cap things off, once you complete a fight, the enemy troops keep marching as you're stuck in menus. You thus have situations where you should have time to heal up between fights but can't because the next set of enemies has reached one of your parties. Defeated PC groups will appear back at the save point, but that party will no longer be protecting one of the passageways to Banon and the Esper, which is an instant game over if an enemy reaches him. Finally, the boss fight against Kefka is naturally going to be a pain since you'll almost certainly be facing him with a smaller party.
  • Zozo, thanks to its existence of Hill Gigas and Veil Dancers, both of whom can use powerful spells doing 200 damage to all your party members. It's also a very long dungeon with no save point before the boss. The game thankfully saves you having to go through it multiple times; the trip down and trip back up the tower are skipped in cutscenes.
  • The opera scene can be frustrating on the iOS version because of the vagaries of touch-screen controls, especially after Draco drops the flowers. If you make any kind of mis-step, you have to start the entire opera all over again.
  • The Zone-Eater's Belly on Triangle Island is an absolute nightmare on the iOS version. It was meant as a very arcade-like action challenge on the original SNES, but was not modified for the iOS/Android despite the fact that your input interface is a lot cruder. Get used to having the green men knock you off the platforms and/or being squashed by the crushing ceilings a LOT.
  • The Floating Continent, due to its confusing layout, shortage of proper save points, powerful Mooks, and the fact if you decide to drop back onto your airship half-way through the area to restock your resources or change party members, you have to start ALL THE WAY FROM THE BEGINNING when you go back up to the Floating Continent. Not to mention that most of the enemies in the random encounters are too powerful to risk level-grinding for XP and Gil, and some, like the Ninja, can't even be escaped at all.
  • The quest to save Cid. The designers deliberately made it hard because their intent was for the player to try to bring him back to health and ultimately fail, while still giving a small chance to actually save him. Succeeding requires completing a number of tasks that aren't explained to the player which is to feed him the fastest moving fish, or he may die even more quickly. There's also a Random Number God in play, as the types of fish available are randomly generated every time you talk to Cid (and there may not even be any fish at all!), and the fish may swim too far from shore to catch for awhile.
  • The South Figaro cave in the World of Ruin. It has exactly five enemies that attack in various formations, and all of them can inflict Confuse in some manner; you only have a party of two people at the time, and neither South Figaro nor Nikeah sell any Relics that can negate Confuse. Unless you're lucky enough to have such a Relic leftover from the World of Balance, you're screwed. Additionally, the dungeon is a fair length, and at the end of it you fight the Tentacles, That One Boss, without a chance to save or heal beforehand.
  • The Phoenix Cave, which forces you to split your party into two groups just to be able to get Locke back. There are spiked tiles that can damage you for 400 HP every time you step on one. If all the members of one party are dead, then the other party is considered dead, leading to a game over. Finally, especially for those playing a low level run or a "perfect stats" run, there exists Face/Phase, a Demonic Spider type enemy who you cannot run away from, randomly counters with 1000 Needles, and casts Stop. What's worse, you can't warp out with Teleport Stones; once you go into the Phoenix Cave, it's Locke or bust.
  • Cyan's Soul. One of the longest dungeons in the game with fairly tough enemies, two boss fights including an annoying Puzzle Boss that is quite difficult to beat, a party of three people (since Cyan is taken out), and you can't leave the dungeon until you beat the boss. It's possible a run through the game can be stopped cold here if you can't beat Wrexsoul. Your efforts are rewarded with the Masamune and unlocking all of Cyan's Bushido skills regardless of level.
  • Ebot's Rock, where you find Hidon (the source of what is considered Strago's best Lore, Grand Delta.) There is a treasure chest that wants Coral, so you have to find it in the cave and feed it to the treasure chest. The game doesn't tell you how many pieces it needs, so you are constantly running around collecting Coral to feed it. However, it's another Guide Dang It! — you have to feed the chest 22 pieces of Coral all at once; feed it a few pieces and you're just wasting your time.
  • The Cultist's Tower is a headache, top to bottom. Most of the enemies have the Reflect status, rendering the majority of your magic attacks useless. That wouldn't be so bad if you weren't restricted to using only magic attacks and items in the Tower. Even if you do make it to the top, the final boss will cast Ultima upon defeat, annihilating you if you forget to cast Reraise on at least one of your party members. And after all of that, you have to climb all the way back down the tower, fighting the same enemies you came across on your way up. And you cannot escape from most of these fights. The entire dungeon is optional, but the relic that you get for doing so is incredibly useful, as it lets you cast two magic spells at once. That is to say nothing of obtaining Edgar's Air Anchor, or the Holy Dragon which the player must defeat in order to obtain the Esper, Crusader. You can choose to avoid all this by grabbing Molulu's Charm first and equipping it on Mog (which prevents random encounters), but then you're just running up endless flights of stairs without Barret, Tifa, and Cloud bantering to take off the tedium.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • There's backlash over the differences between the more accurate GBA translation and the more nostalgic Woolsey script.
  • There's been backlash regarding the iOS/Android port, the main issue being the graphics changes (and particularly the character sprites, which look like someone just upscaled them in Photoshop, used the smudge tool on them, and called it a day — strange since they were apparently done by the same artist as the originals).
  • On the Pixel Remaster version, you can't win the fight against Wrexsoul by using Banish on his two minions anymore. You're doing it the hard way in the Pixel Remaster by killing one of your own party members and waiting for Wrexsoul to reappear. While it makes him a proper boss fight for Cyan's dreamscape, it also means that it's a very tough fight.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Due in large part to the game's original platform mandating some brevity, there are some plot points which are not nearly as well-explored as they could be.
  • While most fans will point to her as the main protagonist, Terra's past aside from her origins is left almost entirely unexplored. We never find out the full extent of her servitude to the Empire - we know she wasn't consciously serving them, but what exactly was she used for? And an even bigger question: what was her life like in-between being kidnapped by Gestahl as an infant and being mind-controlled by Kefka as a young adult? It seems self-evident that she was raised in Vector because Gestahl took her, but anything beyond that is pure guesswork.
  • There's no backstory on how Celes rose to the rank of General. Even what she did to get herself imprisoned or her motives for betrayal aren't explored, although she implies that she learned about Kefka's plans for the people of Doma and refused to let him commit mass murder. We know she was fond of Cid even before the start of the World of Ruin, and she seems to find Kefka's methods distasteful from the start. But anything beyond that is left out. For such a big part of the character's motivation, it seems odd that the game would omit what Celes did to get branded a traitor in the first place.
  • The script and gameplay build Terra and Celes as Foils; they're both former Imperials and innate magic users (one by birth, the other by making), the only female party members for a good part of the game, Terra is initially meek and hesitant while Celes is proud and forthright, and Terra has fire magic and offensive abilities while Celes has ice magic and defensive abilities. You'd think these two would play off of each other great. Too bad that they're only around each other thrice: the first two times, they barely say anything to each other, and their third conversation is during the ending. The only other times they might interact is while recruiting Terra in the World of Ruin, where Celes's dialogue is the same canned dialogue as any other character.
  • A lot of potential character interactions that could come up in the World of Ruin simply don't. The developers couldn't reasonably code events to account for every possible character combination, so most scenarios in the World of Ruin have generic canned dialogue no matter who is present. There might be one or two unique lines for a character that's important to another, but that's as far as it might go. Because of this, cast interactions are minimal and there's not any story enrichment from bringing certain characters to certain events; the Figaro brothers have a single line for their reunion, Celes has a single line when she sees Locke again, Sabin and Shadow have nothing to say to Cyan in either of his sidequests, and so forth.
  • Biggs and Wedge. weren't the subject of quite as many He's Just Hiding rumors as General Leo, but there were rumors that Biggs and Wedge had survived and could be encountered, having renounced their ways. Nope; their main purpose was just to be Those Two Guys that die when they encounter the first Esper, and that's it.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The game introduces the Limit Break system to the series, known here as a Desperation Attack. They only trigger when a character uses the Attack command at low health, only 1/16th of the time, and never in the first twenty-five seconds of combat. Because of these restrictions, a player can go through multiple playthroughs and never once trigger a Desperation Attack.
  • Jidoor's Auction House is the source of three unique items — the Golem and Zona Seeker magicites, and an extra Hero's Ring. Once you get those, all there is to see is Angel Wings, Angel Rings, and a trio of dummy auctions that you can never win.
• Unfortunate Character Design:
  • The folds of Kefka's robe in his god form in the final battle... well, some have taken it as evidence he really, really enjoys destruction◊. The fans have generally embraced the idea, since fighting his sworn enemies while sporting a huge boner seems like a very Kefka thing to do.
  • Emperor Gestahl's sprite gives him the appearance of being a dog-headed biped; eventually, even Squaresoft acknowledged the similarity in Final Fantasy XIV with a Shih Tzu puppy familiar named "Gestahl".
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Cid as a character has become increasingly controversial as the story's demographic ages. His intention, like a lot of Imperial characters, is that he's a fundamentally well-meaning guy who's in a bad situation and doesn't fully understand the consequences of what he's doing or want to admit fault, then has a Heel Realization and aids the protagonists. The issue is, the thing he was doing is experimenting on fully sapient beings capable of speech in a fashion that put them in immense pain and left them as ruined shells—at that point, the idea that he simply didn't realize what he was doing was bad (or wasn't bad enough that it was worth it for the greater good) starts to strain disbelief. Additionally, for all we see, this is something that cannot be fully credited to his superiors, as in the case of the most obvious candidate, Kefka, he created Kefka (suggesting he was already knee-deep in the whole mess by that point), and then knowingly used a similar process on Celes. This has led to him coming across as downright stupid instead of merely naïve, and that's often the favorable interpretation, with the less favorable one being that he's a full-on Mengele-esque Mad Doctor.
• Values Dissonance:
  • There is a rather strange plot point that ALL of the poor people in the town of Jidoor were criminals and exiled to go find their own town (how that impacted the economy of Jidoor is not explained). Sure enough, when you find the new town of poor people, not only are they mostly violent criminals, every one of them is a pathological liar and the game fully backs up the concept that the poor people are pretty much criminal scum by default. One townsfolk member in Jidoor conveniently explains that the only people left in the town are the Middle and Upper class, in case you might have thought that translation was poor and the intent was that criminals were banished rather than poor people.
  • In the SNES translation, it is said that people "throw themselves off the cliff to perk themselves up" in regards to the World of Ruin. Due to the awareness of suicide and mental health, this would not be allowed in any modern-day game, due to the line unintentionally glorifying suicide, no thanks to Nintendo of America's censorship policies. This line was thankfully changed in the GBA translations onward.
• Values Resonance: As cited by The Angry Video Game Nerd's review, the game's overarching themes of loss, grief, and hope resonate with a lot of people, especially those who have played the game as kids and are revisiting them as adults. The Nerd even compares the game's events to the real world's state of affairs in The New '20s, with the World of Balance being an equivalent of Earth before the COVID-19 Pandemic (and the "good old days" in general), the Cataclysm to the pandemic itself, and the World of Ruin to the post-pandemic days, where there's still uncertainty about the world's stability no thanks to the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Kefka's official art, and to a lesser degree his sprite, sport a feminine face and feminine accoutrements (makeup, earrings, beads in his hair). It's not clear that Kefka is male until his bodyguards refer to him as "Sir". He looks a little more masculine in some later versions, though.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: One of the game's high points is that the sprite work has held up well, even over twenty years since it came out. The enemy sprites are all finely detailed and some of them are massive and take up most of the screen, and they manage it on a palette of just 16 colors.^note Technically even less than that, since transparency and black are necessary parts of the palette. Meanwhile the playable cast is very animated and can convey a lot of emotion and physicality with just 40 frames of animation, which include wagging their finger, scowling angrily, winking, laughing, gasping in surprise, and more. The sprites were so well animated that some find them more emotive than the Playstation-era 3D models. Several 2010s sprite-based spinoffs, particularly Final Fantasy Record Keeper, would copy this game's sprite styles.
• Woolseyism: Like IV, the original SNES release suffered from the typical Nintendo censorship at the time, but the English translation by Ted Woolsey was regarded as one of the best translations of the 16-bit era, even though it wasn't the most faithful (Woolsey is the Trope Namer for Woolseyism, after all). He changed a lot of things in the Super NES release, some for cultural reasons, some for censorship (e.g. Kefka's "Son of a submariner!" was originally a simple "Damn it!"), and others just for dramatic flair. For the most part, they work, and provide charm that a faithful translation probably wouldn't have. (In particular, the Woolseyisms are commonly credited for Kefka being Rescued from the Scrappy Heap outside of Japan.) It's telling that Tom Slattery's Game Boy Advance translation kept many of Ted's changes.

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