The Stack

I began this weekend hoping that I’d have just one more post to do on FF6, but after multiple hours of play, I still haven’t made a serious attempt as Kefka’s junkyard-like tower of magically-attracted debris. Oh, I’ve visited it, and I think I might even be able to conquer it at my current level, but it’s going to take more time and preparation than I felt like giving it at the time. You see, it splits the party in three, and that complicates things.

This isn’t the first time the party has been split. Way back near the beginning, there was a part with three sub-scenarios that I had to play out with different characters, but that was different: the scenarios were self-contained and independent from one another, and were played out in sequence. More recently, the descent into the treasure cave to find Locke involved splitting the party however you like into two groups, then switching to control whichever group you like at any given moment. And you couldn’t just use one group and leave the other alone: every so often, each group would run into an obstacle that could only be cleared by having the other group stand on a pressure plate somewhere.

Kefka’s tower works like that, but with three groups, which makes it a lot harder to decide how to split things up. Through most of the game, you get your pick of four characters out of the entire party roster, so it’s easy to take your choice of combat specialist, your choice of mage, and your choice of guys with weird special abilities, and still have one slot left over for whoever you’re trying to level up. With three groups and 14 playable characters, you don’t get much choice of who to take. You just get to choose who to partner them with — and my experience is that some combinations have a much easier time surviving than others. It isn’t just a matter of taking one from each of the four categories I just mentioned — you have to take into account that characters are going to be killed or disabled sometimes, and get some redundancy in there, like a mage who can fight in a pinch. (Or, I suppose, you could just grind until everyone is level 99 and not worry about it, but I want to enjoy playing this game.)

Then there’s the equipment. The very best armor and weapons are, of course, not available in stores: you have to find them locked away in dungeons or loot them from bosses. There’s an item called the Atma Weapon ¹Another questionable transliteration: some versions call it Ultima Weapon. But Atma fits pretty well too. It’s a glowing lightsaber-like thing that visibly grows with the wielder’s experience level, as if responding to the strength of your soul. that simply does way more damage than any other weapon I’ve seen. I try to always have it equipped, but there’s only one in the game, which means only one of the three groups can have it. I suppose I could just unequip it whenever I switch control to a different group, but that starts to get cumbersome. And it becomes even more cumbersome when you factor in the Espers. I frequently swap those around between characters even when I’m dealing with only one group, to make sure everyone gets a chance to learn their spells, and also because many of them grant permanent stat increases when their wielder levels up. I’ll probably have to just abandon that habit in the tower if I don’t want to spend 90% of my play time in inventory menus.

Or, like I said, I could stop optimizing and do more grinding. I think it was Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw who said that Final Fantasy gives you a choice at the end: you can spend 40 hours building up your characters to the point where you can take the end boss easily, or you can spend 40 hours fighting the end boss. This kind of applies to the entire final dungeon as well.