An interesting thing happened during around 1993. I guess maybe even more so 1992. Games release dates became something I cared about. I think the SNES was the first item ever pertaining to video games where getting it at launch mattered. Then the grueling march towards the consistently pushed back release date for Zelda 3.

I don’t even remember when I found out they wouldn’t just call it Zelda 3, but I remember Christmas of 91 coming around and being told the game wasn’t coming out in time for the holidays. Of course, instead we got FF4, and whereas I liked Zelda 3 it failed in my opinion to be as cool as FF4. Making one of the next big release dates the one for Final Fantasy III (FF6). Sure, there were some others, Street Fighter II’s SNES port comes to mind, but FF6 launch was going to be a big deal.

Oh, and there I got again, renumbering the entry, but 4 to 6? Yeah, turns out there was a missing step only released in Japan between 2 and 3 in the US. That game, Final Fantasy V (FF5) wouldn’t be a concern though for a couple more years and the expansion of easy to attain information and ROMs on the internet.

This game’s release brought both Chris M and K together the first few weekends the game was out. Once again, I think Chris K. bought this initial copy. However, with Chris K. being less of a fixture around the house after the summer of 1993 maybe he didn’t. It makes more sense that he came to see it at the house because he didn’t get his own this time, especially since he was kind of on the outs with all of us. So perhaps I don’t have all the details on the acquisition of the game correct. In fact, I recently discovered I had the official strategy guide for the game in my belongings. So, it seems more likely we knew how big a deal the game was and forgot the drama around our group and let Chris K. come over and play.

One of those weekends occurred during a piano recital weekend. See my mother being a piano teacher was prone to having these soirees from time to time. Exhibitions for her students to play newly mastered pieces for their friends and loved ones. Then eat food. These events would take up the front of the house and required the rest of us to either attend or to be as silent as the dead. Now this shouldn’t be an issue, I had my own television, we could just hold up in my bedroom like fugitives and play all day. However, the new television was nineteen inches remember. We can’t play our first playthrough on my little thirteen-inch boob tube. No, we need the big boy, luckily this game came out shortly before we lost the television room to Jake and so during the height of Mom’s recital, the two Chrises, Georgums and I experienced the Opera scene from FF6 for the first time during the recital.

What a time to be alive in the 16-bit graphic era. The narrative of this Opera scene was as follows. Our heroes are invited to an Opera house to help the owner with a veiled threat at the great female lead of the production. It just so happens that one of our heroes looks just like the star and we can disguise her in character as the starlet and she can perform the Opera and surprise the would-be terrorist when he strikes. And so, starts the adventure. Now here is where it gets fun, the culprit we are looking for turns out to be a giant purple octopus that has been annoying us throughout the plot of the game. His plan was to push a giant four-ton weight from the rafters above onto the star and destroy the production. Luckily for us the weight is so heavy that he gives us a nice round number estimate on how long it will take him to push the weight and our heroes are off to save the opera.

Bolstered by the game’s composer Nobou Uematsu’s score, we race through the drama with the opera going and the piano recital adding backup to all the games drama. We wouldn’t finish the whole game that night, but we did finish the Opera scene and then had the goodies (food) from the recital. Once Jake moved in a week or so later, I moved the SNES with the television to the front room of the house. There we finished the first playthrough of the game during a weekday afternoon, while students practiced their pieces in the background for the next recital. The end of the game was too easy, we had the best spell in the game learned on our main heroes and we just plowed through the end game, but all these years later the two separate parts of the playthrough match up in time with the move in of Jake and the awe of going through some of these new FF6 events for the first time with piano music faintly in the background.

Much like before, everyone had to play the game through, and I can remember going through a second time to find the optional characters I missed the first time through. However, for as exciting a game as it was not quite as time consuming over the years as FF4 was. See where FF4 was a 10, FF6 was a 9.9. Which is a weird place, the game lived up to expectations and is beloved, but we can see it’s hard to beat that first awe the genre gave.

I think the sprawling number of characters also hurt it a little bit. While fun play wise, this game didn’t have the baby face cast you could start to love as much as the final 5 in the previous entry. And the new ultimate villains Joker to the Darth Vader analog felt the same to me. Beyond that, Vader wasn’t the final antagonist, there was something secret and bigger at play in FF4. So, during FF6 the thought that Kefka’s Joker was playing to some deeper more sinister evil was ever present. When he was just a crazy clown that wanted to watch the world burn, sure he is more relatable to humans that way, but for a grand fantasy ends of feeling disappointing to kill him and that be that.

It is also important to note that during the time of FF6 was junior and senior year of High School, there was a lot more going on with the PC, those games and just being almost an adult. Perhaps that as well is why it’s a 9 for nostalgia instead of and absolute 10. But then there was also FF5 which we didn’t know about but was a SNES Final Fantasy main line game.

This one is interesting because I wouldn’t really catch wind of what it was and be able to play it until after Final Fantasy 7 comes out.

By 1998 though home PCs were getting powerful enough to “fake” older consoles hardware to allow us to run the older game ROMs. ROMs standing for the Read Only Memory that the old NES and SNES games were stored on in their cartridges or Arcade games on their arcade boards. Now that the Nintendo generation had given way to the budding 3d of the PlayStation, going back to older games didn’t require old equipment, and in the case of overseas games, didn’t require an overseas console like Keith’s friend Ricky’s Super Famicon.

It was around this time that Marty got into MAME, which was an emulator for old arcade games. He would play hours of Shinobi, to an extent where I was getting really tired of the short games narrative to be honest. He played a lot of it and by now I had decided the Ninja Gaiden series was better.

image 52 Shinobi for the arcade and the ROM hack of FF V.

But the world of emulation and game ROMs was open. In that world I discovered that someone had taken FF5, and had painstakingly translated the story into English, which with the help of a SNES emulator that could be installed on the PC, allowed one to download the hacked ROM game and play it. This let English speakers be able to read the story without having to be literate in all forms of Japanese writing.

I happily did all that setup and got to work on a lost title. Well sort of, the problem was now, as we will find out FF7 had already been out for months and while going back to the SNES was fun it was hard to want to play an “old” Final Fantasy when the new one was just sitting there in a file cabinet and just required the hit of a power button to lay down and explore more of its world.

A year later, Squaresoft, Final Fantasy’s development studio would just straight release an English translation of the SNES game for the PlayStation. I would go back again and hit those old SNES Final Fantasy notes, which were 5 and 5 if I recall. I tried real hard to get through both, I think I played about half way through on the PlayStaion version of FF6 before sputtering out a bit. And then tried FF5 again. The games were fun, but as I had gone through now two worlds of the PlayStation era Final Fantasies, going back to the simpler SNES times was a bit hard. Then the game sat there. It wasn’t until the 2010s that I finally gave the game a full push on FF5 and enjoyed it.

It's because of this that I don’t really count the game in my personal list of the games. To me it started with 4 and ends with the sequel to 10. But during this span 5 is just a side note.

Here now at the end of the FF6 section I think it comes to note something. Part of what makes these games fun is sharing in the experience. Which seems weird for a one player narrative driven story. However, this series also really brought to light the fact that watching someone play and backseat gaming was actually as fun, if not sometimes more than having to do the inputs oneself. A 90s hint at the ideas behind streaming.

That being said, FF4 and FF6 were not strictly one player. Interestingly enough if you plugged in a controller into the second player port, both of you could navigate the combat. So, there was on some occasions when we could get along that we would control certain characters and truly play the game as a two-player adventure. This of course came with the perils that if someone pissed you off you could just as easily control his characters as your own, but as I said a couple times this was fun.

But until 1997 FF6 would be the shiny new Final Fantasy game. And once again for all I said to say it wasn’t FF4, it was a fun loved game, just how could it live up to the hype FF4 built for it. Now, at least I understood that things can be fun but maybe don’t go into every new version thinking it will surpass the one before it, I am sure Final Fantasy 7 will help reinforce that idea…