LogFAQs > #882803124

Judgmenl posted...

Why are people lauding FFVI's story? It has characters so underdeveloped they might as well be NPCs.

Because it hits the right balance of having enough character to be better than most of the previous games (except possibly IV), but not having the pretentiously shitty characters nearly every game afterward (except possibly IX) was dragged down by.

Most of the later games were overwritten as hell and created with Japanese narrative aesthetics in mind. The early games wind up being more generically universal simply by virtue of them not having enough cartridge memory to waste on inane bullshit backstory/plot or enough pixels to waste giving Celes an outfit made entirely out of 10,000 belts.

FFVI was right about the point where the game was JUST ENOUGH FF, but not too much.

FFVII usually gets the nod over FFVI, though, mainly because it was the first game a ton of Western gamers ever played, because the RPG market in the West really surged once the PS1 came out (in spite of their being a lot of solid RPGs on both the SNES and Genesis, and both FF and Dragon Warrior/Quest starting on the NES).





EDIT: Or, to put it another way, it's Boba Fett Syndrome in a lot of ways. Boba Fett in the original Star Wars movies barely had a character, had about three lines of dialogue, and died like a chump, yet thousands of nerdboys creamed their pants over how cool he was. Then Lucas gave him an actual backstory in the prequels and pretty much ruined the character forever.

Sometimes, less is more.


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