THE MUSIC
Final Fantasy VI's soundtrack is legendary, much of which is attributed to series composer Nobuo Uematsu. I'd argue that while this is definitely his best work, a huge amount of credit goes to the sound programmer, which the opening credits tell me is a guy named Minoru Akao. The SPC sound processor is given extraordinarily amounts of respect, but a lot of that is due to selective memory - for every Square game that sounded amazing, there were dozens of lower quality titles with hollow instruments, awful drums, bland guitars. In Final Fantasy VI, every sound sample - the acoustic guitar plucks, the moody trumpets, the pseudo violins - they all chill your spine. The gorgeous flute in the overworld theme ensures its status as one of the best of its kind. The battle themes aren't quite as memorable as FFIV's, but any qualms against them are immediately cancelled out by the massively epic final battle theme, a three-segment masterwork featuring choir vocals similar to the Opera (again, of quality nearly unheard of for the SNES), which breaks out in a rocking guitar piece similar to FFIV's and V's as you take on Kefka's final form. Like of the rest of the game, FFVI's soundtrack is held up to such high esteem because it's so consistently good - there are very few, if any, bad pieces amongst the fifty or so songs throughout the game.
Much like John Williams, Nobuo Uematsu is a very thematic composer, and every character has their own distinctive melody. Most of them are rearranged and show up in different places -Terra's theme acts as the overworld theme, with various arrangements playing at important plot points, and in the intro, Celes' theme is found in the Opera, and a slower version of the Figaro Castle theme plays whenever Edgar and Sabin reflect on their past. Many other themes are straightforward in representing the character - Locke's is fast, triumphant, and full of adventurous spirit; Cyan's is slow, with a Asian-flavored pan flute distinguishing him from your normal medieval knight cliche.
The solemn themes of the two children - Gau's is carried by a deep cello, with Relm represented by bagpipes - tells of their tragedies before you learn of their lonely pasts. They also contrast with their respective personalities - Gau's hyperactive beast-like attitude, Relm's brattiness - portray the innocence of children disparaged by the real world. Since neither of these characters are as prominent in the main story as the rest of the crew, the music does a lot of expand their presence.
The big triumph of the musical score is right at the end, when each of the character's themes are reprised into an expansive twenty minute medley. The actual cinema, which comprises of watching the characters escape and viewing some Mode 7 pans of the overworld, is ultimately a bit on the boring side. But this musical piece recaps memories of the entire game in this relatively short time span, which should immediately induce pangs of nostalgia, the kind that make you want to start a New Game right after the final credit rolls.
TRANSLATION NERDINESS AHOY
Unlike Final Fantasy II's dreadful SNES translation, this one received much better treatment when it came to the States. For starters, it's actually, you know, comprehensible. Ted Woosley's script has come under fire by certain Japanese purists, stating how so much depth of character is lost, and how Woosley made it too silly, and it totally didn't match the tone of the game. Yeah, they're talking about the same game where your characters just out of an airship and fight bad guys in midair. Woosley's script isn't always precisely literal to the original Japanese, but that's okay. Due to space constraints (English writing takes up much more space than Japanese), some of the sentences needed to be cut short and simplified, but it's astounding how well done it was otherwise.
For example? When Edgar, Locke and Terra escape from Kefka's grasp at the beginning of the game, he yells "Son of a Submariner!" at them. In Japanese, he squeals and yells (literally translated) "Damn! I'll definitely get back at you!" ("Hiiii, kusso! Kono kari wa
kanarazu kaeshimasu yo!") The way Kefka talks is a bit odd, since he tends to use somewhat more polite speech than your average gruff and tough villain, all the while still sounding threatening. As a result, he sounds particularly crazy. These can't be precisely translated into English, so Woosley decided to give him some vaguely comical lines while still portraying him as threatening. The methods may be different, but the general idea is more or less the same, and the shows that the translator actually knows what they're doing.
There are other little bits of amusement - when you talk to Kefka's soldiers as they set Figaro Castle ablaze, they give a Beavis and Butthead-style laugh and go "Heh, heh, fire!" Although the purists tend to look down upon pop culture references, it still fits the situation even if you're not familiar with the MTV duo, and it's a lot more interesting than the Japanese. (Literally: "Burn and die.") And you know that one part in South Figaro where Locke tuffles with a merchant, yelling "Call me a treasure hunter or I'll rip your lungs out!"? His line in Japanese is simply "Call me a treasure hunter!". In general, there's a lot more personality added to the dialogue, which a literal translation completely misses. In spite of these, some of these purists were so disturbed by the original translation that they rewrote a new version, this time making it more faithful, rehacked with the new writing, and released it as a ROM to play on emulators. As much as I feel bad about decrying a project that was done by fans (and thus, spurred by their own passion without any real compensation), I have to think they were kinda wasting their time.
A lot of the characters' names were changed too, which is a sure way to infuriate RPG nerds.
Most of them were pretty good ideas. I like the name Tina, but, as constantly argued, it sounds too "normal" for the type of character she is - while Tina may be exotic in Japanese (there is technically no "ti" sound natively found in the language), Terra is much more exotic and feels more appropriate. Since her name means "earth", it nicely matches the use of her theme as the overworld music. Mash is just kind of stupid sounding, although some people have tried to argue that it could be transliterated as "Matthew". They'd probably be wrong, because the extra long vowel at the end of the normal spell of "Matthew" (Masshuu) is a huge difference between the spell of his actual name ("Masshu"). I'll admit Sabin is still a pretty odd name. I still balk at "Cayenne" being dubbed "Cyan", if only because the color cyan is really kind of wussy, and doesn't really fit his stately personality, but it's closest they could get to the original name while keeping to the six character limit. I also still don't like the name Esper - the Japanese word "Genjuu" translates roughly to "illusionary beast", which sounds dumb in English, but Espers are supposed to have Extra Sensory Perception, hence the name ESPers. Magicite was originally called "maseki" or "magic stone", and the English word is fitting without sounding stupid. Magitek Armor is know simply as "Madou Armor", or "Magic Armor", which is far less cool sounding. Some names are spelled differently. "Kefka" was originally "Cefca" (looks stupid) and "Narche" was originally "Narshe" (same difference). All of the Moogles names in the beginning were changed, except for Mog - in the English version, they're all based on variations of the word Moogle phrase "kupo" (Kupek, Kupok, Kumama), while in the Japanese, they're based off of "Mog" (Moglin, Mogret, Moggie). The "Atma Weapon" was supposed to be "Ultima Weapon", another case where the true spelling wouldn't fit, but at least the spell is still called "Ultima" regardless. In the Japanese version, all of the characters had class names listed on the status screen - these are all gone in the American release.
Ultros the octopus was originally known as Orthros, which is actually the name of a two headed dog in Greek mythology similar to Cerebus - leave it to Japanese RPG designers to totally mangle a reference like this. Later in the SNES American version, Ultros fights alongside an enemy named Chupon - his name is supposed to be Typhon, another Greek figure and father of Orthros. This pairing made even less sense, but again, the references didn't make it through to the English release. No big loss.
Lots of enemy names were changed of course, mostly to fit in the limited character space. So were a bunch of attack names, including Cyan's SwdTechs. (In the Japanese version, you could actually rename them using different kanji.) A few of the changes, like renaming "Holy" to "Pearl", was done at the behest of Nintendo of America. Bars are changed to cafes, and other alcoholic references removed. A boss named "Deathgaze" was renamed "Doom Gaze", despite several references to characters being killed. A few of the scantily clad female monsters - like the Esper Siren or the boss GET NAME in the art house, are covered up. These changes are all pretty silly, but they have practically no impact on the experience overall.
There were a few errors - the soldiers in the beginning are supposed to be named Biggs and Wedge, referencing Star Wars, but "Biggs" was translated as "Vicks", which is actually closer to the original katakana but misses the allusion. "Phoenix Down" is spelled "Fenix Down", which I'm guessing was due to character limit issues (at least, I hope so.) A minor character named "Sigfreid" has his name spelled differently on various occasions. So yeah, there are some minor, minor issues, but nothing to get remotely huffy over.
OTHER VERSIONS
Although Final Fantasy III brought in tons and tons of fans, it really didn't get mainstream attention until Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation, released two years later in 1997. Due to the relative rarity of the cart, combined with high demand, finding a copy of the SNES cartridge became pretty difficult, and it become one of the most sought after games on the system. In the meantime, like all of its predecessors, Square was busy porting all of these games to the Playstation. In 1999, Square released the Final Fantasy Collection in America, a triple disc set that included the PSOne versions of Final Fantasy V (the first time the game was seen officially in English) and Final Fantasy VI, as well as a single CD soundtrack featuring music selections from both games.
The translation used in the Playstation version is almost identical to the SNES version. Minor spelling differences were cleared up (the "Fenix Down" and "Vicks" issues were corrected) and some of the censored monster designs were reinstated, but otherwise, there was little that was improved or fixed from the original release. In fact, it's a lot worse.
Most of the SNES-to-PSOne ports (FFV and Chrono Trigger, in addition to FFVI) suffered from a variety of technical setbacks. Amongst the worst were the constant load times. Instead of the screen pixellating like the SNES game, the screen broke slowly and separated in opposite directions across the screen, which attempted to mask the transition times to the battle. Getting into battle in the SNES version took maybe a second. Here, it takes about five. This was almost vaguely tolerable in the PSOne FFV, but FFVI has it even worse - there's slowdown. Lots of it. Every time a character attacks, it looks like the Playstation is struggling to put the damage totals on the screen. Just what is taxing the system so much? It's not like the graphics or the mathematics are that complicated, but everything moves much slower, to the point where there's significant lag in merely scrolling through menus. There's no way this should've been acceptable - part of FFVI's charm was the speed of the battles, and with that gone? It's a huge detriment.
But the sound got shafted even more. Again, the other PSOne games (save FFIV, which used streamed music recorded from the SNES game) had vague problems with the soundtrack, but this ended up far, far worse. The problem was, whoever did the port (apparently it's by Japanese mystery developer-for-hire TOSE, rather than Square themselves) simply took the musical samples used in the original game and plunked them into the Playstation's sound processor. They sounded fine on the SNES SPC chip - here, the Playstation doesn't handle them right, and some of them sound awful. Most of the soundtracks sounds acceptable, although slightly different than the SNES song. Some are butchered - just listen to the piano in the "Prelude" song in the menu screen. Everything is out of tune. Even the little "pling" sound effect of the cursor is impossibly grating.
So what advantages does the Playstation version have over the original? Not much. Again, like the other PSOne ports, there's an enemy gallery, which is pretty pointless. The CG scenes are far better than the ones featured in FFIV and FFV - they're based off of Yoshitaka Amano's designs, so the Magitek Armor look more like mechanical monsters than the mini-mechs found in game. They show off several key moments of the game, including the launch of Terra and her crew on their journey to Narshe, as well as Locke's rescue of Celes and brief clips of the Opera. While they're nowhere near the quality of FFVII's cinemas, they look okay, and also feature some nice arrangements of the music. But there's still only a few minutes of them - featured in the intro and ending - and their contribution to the package is negligible. Other than some amusing easter eggs - a 2D sprite version of Squall occasionally pops up walking around the bottom of the new "load game" menu screen - there's little reason to bother with this inferior version of Final Fantasy VI. But, hey, it was the first time the game was officially released in Europe. And the Relm sketch bug that was in the early North American cartridges is fixed. I guess those count for something.
Way down the line, in the late months of 2006, Square released Final Fantasy VI ported to the Gameboy Advance. The previous SFC-to-GBA ports received some nicely repainted terrain graphics, which drastically improved the way they looked. Here, the backgrounds were already pretty good, so nothing visually has changed, other than an alteration in contrast to better suit the GBA/DS screen. There's a tiny bit of slowdown in the battles, although nothing nearly as bad as the PSOne version. The music, as expected, has been downgraded a bit, and the transformation isn't quite as elegant as it was in the previous two GBA ports. Still, in spite of the fuzzy instruments samples, again it's remarkably more tolerant than the butchered PSOne game. Some people have claimed the Opera scene sounds better - I'd say it's about the same. Like the previous GBA ports, the character portraits have been added to their dialogue boxes, and a few new ones have been drawn for those who didn't have them previously (Kefka, Cid, Gestahl, and Esper Terra.)
So if the graphics are the same, and the music is kinda sorta worse, what does this actually bring to the table? Well, there are four new espers, which means four new sidequests to get them. These include Cactaur, Gilgamesh, Diabolos and Leviathan. These also teach a few new spells, such a more powerful gravity spell, a water-based spell called Flood, and a stat enhancement magic called Brave, which was introduced in FFXII and merely increases attack power. **There are two new dungeons at the end of the game, one is yet another one of those multi-party affairs. There's the standard omake bestiary and sound test options.**
Unfortunately these bonuses aren't quite as delicious as the "select your characters!" final dungeon in FFIV and extra job classes in FFV. The English version does get a slightly improved translation - without the space constraints imposed by the SNES release, some of the lines have been rewritten to sound a bit better. However, some were also rewritten completely ("Son of a submariner!" becomes "Son of a sandworm!", and in many cases, are more faithful to the Japanese version. (In the SNES version, Edgar remarks that Shadow would "slit his momma's throat for a nickel!", but in the GBA version, he says that he'd "kill his best friend for the right price.", which is closer to the original line.) Overall, the writing is a bit better, although many of the rewrites of classic lines feel totally unnecessary and do rob a bit of the flavor. Most of the enemy names have been restored to their original form, or at least, close approximations. All of the Moogles at the beginning of the game keep their original Japanese names, and the Class titles on the status screen have been restored. All of the major characters (including the main cast, as well as Ultros, Kefka and Gestahl) keep the names from the SNES translation.)
Oddly enough, the GBA release censors a particular scene regarding Celes. At the beginning of the game, when Locke sneaks into South Figaro, he spies on her being interrogated by Empire soldiers. In the original version, she's punched a few times, then collapses as the soldiers leave the room. When Locke runs in to save her, she's in chains. In the censored scene, the soldiers still interrogate her, but don't beat her at all. Before they leave the room, she collapses anyway. When Locke enters, she's still on the floor, no longer bonded to the wall. The reasons for this are the same nebulous reasons why Penelo's kidnapping scene was cut short in the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XII - apparently there was a hostage incident going on in Japan at the time (although the specifics I am not privy to), and Square felt that it would be in bad taste to leave them it. They also feared getting a higher rating by the CERO, the Japanese ratings board, which at that time, had recently revamped its system to be considerably harsher. Unlike FFXII, which had the scene reinstated for overseas release, the revised scene is still found in the American GBA version, although that's probably due to Square being too lazy to reprogram it rather than censorship.
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