I would like to point out, though, that there are plenty of games that the English-speaking world didn't get, at least not on their initial release, and there is one in particular that I want to highlight here as I don't see it get the fanfare I think its owed.
That game is Dragon Quest V, which takes a sampling of the mature themes you highlighted from Final Fantasy VI (and then some), but has coated them in a layer of whimsy that gives the whole experience the feeling of an oddly compelling fairy tale. I highly recommend it if you still have the time and patience for JRPGs. (And if you don't, the movie Dragon Quest Your Story is available in English on Netflix and is based on Dragon Quest V, albeit with a bit of a controversial addition towards the end.)
I'd also like to highlight Earthbound as a curiously mature JRPG for the time. I like to cite it as an example of a game that is more about the journey than the destination. It's not about saving the world, it's about painting cows blue and the third strongest mole and bubble monkeys. But it's also about accepting the world as it is, facing things that you might not be ready to face, the impermanence of everything, and making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then.
I could never put my finger on what made that game so compelling. The "Yakuza: Like a Dragon" game had a similar vibe. The working title for it might as well have been "Friendship is Magic."
> making sure to stop and take a coffee break every now and then
The lesson you were supposed to take away from it was to stop and call your dad every now and then.
The game's director and writer, Shigesato Itoi, is a creative writer by trade, so he brought a fresh perspective, and frankly, is a better writer than most who work on videogames. Being an outsider, he also wasn't bogged down by common video game tropes.
While I'm still a sucker for FFVI and FFVII, Mother 3 kinda achieves the impossible in many ways. It re-develops the themes from it's predecessor into a more accessible, more nuanced and funnier story. Characters get hurt, die, yell curse-words and contend with progressively more horrifying environments. Tonally it almost feels like Stand By Me, elevated to cartoonishly-evil stakes from the start. Best of all, the morals are immediately accessible to the player instead of being hidden as lore like most RPGs are want to do. For younger audiences, there should be no confusion about who is right and wrong and why they are that way. While Final Fantasy is written better overall, I feel like younger players would take so much more away from Mother 3. It really captures the "coming of age" storytelling that has been developed since Mother 1.
After getting to the end of that game, you kinda understand why Itoi doesn't want another game like that. The bar is simply too high, even by the standards of modern consoles.
My favorite examples are the pencil statues, making fun of seemingly arbitrary obstacles in RPGs by introducing a self-admitted arbitrary obstacle, and the rolling HP counters, which cleverly introduced an element of real-time to an otherwise entirely turn-based battle system.
I would also like to once again shout out the third strongest mole as the most brilliant ludo-narrative joke in all of gaming.
IIRC, the solution was equally silly-- a literal pencil eraser.
I remember the game having a lot of cheeky David Bowie references too. Starman is an obvious one as a recurrent character, and correctly figured that the fight with Carbon Dog wasn't going to end so easily.
That's a good catch, thanks!
I also think the dad was intended to be a commentary on Japanese salaryman culture, and now that I'm older, from the dad's perspective I see another lesson about all the things you might miss if you spend all your time working.
Totally. Check out a few episodes of the "Old Enough" show on Netflix and you'll see the same; dad/mom is stuck running the restaurant while the kid goes on the epic errand. Adults have responsibilities and it was touching that the game respected that instead of vilifying him as an "absentee" parent. Childhood is your journey; your parents are just there to provide air support.
There even was a time I was under the illusion that I could experience all 'major' games in a reasonable timeframe after they came out.
And then the video games market blew up for good during the 10s and now there's so ludicrously many of them...
ZSNES gave me some of the best memories of my childhood.
The coolest bit was that he had soldered a real SNES controller so that it worked with those old-school trapezoid 9-pin keyboard input things. I still think that is pure magic, to this day.
Game port had more pins.
There are still plenty of other horrifying things in FF6 though.
On the other hand, no way in hell does someone like Kefka invent something called a Slave Crown and then just use it to force someone to pilot a magic mecha.
The grounds for "FF6 has rape in it!" seems super super shaky. It feels like the sort of thing where people are decided that Satsuki & Mae from Totoro are really "dead and ghosts" during the entirety of the movie. It's silly.
Don't scare people away from a classic for things that aren't true.
Did we play the same game? However you define "rape," Setzer was an amoral gambler and rogue whose idea of romance was kidnapping and forced marriage. His relationship with Darril was mostly one of sport. He planned to kidnap the opera singer, was duped into kidnapping Celes instead, and was only willing to help them save the world or whatever if Celes married him. She only got out of that by challenging him and literally beating him at his own game (gambling).
Setzer was misogyny incarnate...Darril, someone he had an actual "relationship" with, was only ever his girlfriend. The opera singer, he wanted to marry on sight. Dude's priorities were seriously fucked.
If I heard as a parent that a game has rape in it, I am thinking "there is a scene in which a character is raped", and there is no way I would let my kids play that game, regardless of the rating, until I felt they were mentally or emotionally ready to be exposed to such an awful scene.
This is not rape in a game or anything like that. Speculation or interpretation of events or intent is FAR different than a scene literally displaying such an act.
So, my commentary in this thread has been to clarify, there is no such scene in this game, and any interpretation or speculation is just that. It does not explicitly actually occur in the game.
It's true: in the real world a forced marriage is more or less explicitly rapey.
But at some point we as a society decided that in light works of fantasy we don't need to really need to follow every single thing to its logical real-world conclusion.
I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.
I was surprised to see they only now re-released Super Mario RPG. There's a forced-marriage story arc in that one too, and Mario Odyssey also had an abort-the-wedding mission.
I'm in a weird position where you don't agree with me, but I actually agree with you. Yeah, wedding implies an unwanted consummation, but there's already kidnapping and unwanted bondage (marriage), which are themselves serious crimes and boundary violations. What may or may not happen next isn't really the point since we're already in not-ok territory.
I don't have a dog in this fight, I was mainly arguing against the Setzer-wouldn't-do-that line of thought. He's a wildcard who lives for himself, not a saint. Celes leveraged his own ego against him to challenge him to a game-- and cheat at it to guarantee her success. She didn't need no man to save her. Even then she ended up having to babysit him later.
But in fiction, especially fantastical works like FF6, we can't make claims about the original work (ala "there is rape in FF6") based on those kinds of extrapolations.
I have played through FFVI more than a dozen times, including currently, right now, on my phone, I'm half way through yet another run, and I can't think of anything that invokes rape.
I'm also not really sure where gambling addiction comes in. Yes, Setzer ran a flying gambling airship, but its never really explored in any meaningful way.
This isn't meant to chastise so much as to set expectations aligned with the game.
The rest is true though. It does deal with passing of loved ones, attempted suicide, interspecies relationships (espers, Maduin / Madeline specifically), emotionless killers (Shadow AKA Realms dad, the entire personality of Kefka), abandonment, being able to love after trauma (The Terra story arc), fascism, prejudice (how the Magi are treated), genocide / mass murder for political gain (how the espers are treated), the dark side of technology, free will, the meaning of life, toxic masculinity (Edgar and women...oh boy I see it alot different now) and most importantly, never giving up no matter how hard things are or hopeless they seem.
Honestly, all of that stuff is there, and presented in what is (mostly) a pre-teen / early teen friendly way. If used appropriately, could be a spring board to discuss heavier things in life.
You arent majing a very good pitch for this being a family fruendly game...
These events happen, and kids do need to know about them in order to prepare for them. But there's enough abstraction to make it not be gratuitious or traumatic. It's like having Fred Rogers teach kids about this stuff versus George R.R. Martin.
"Family-friendly" doesn't mean avoiding difficult subjects altogether. Even the Bible freely explores all of these topics. Going to church is literally a family event.
Have you read most faerie tales, or Bible stories for that matter? Or watched children's television? Or grown up in a less than perfect household?
These are simply the themes of real life, and only rare privilege allows one to reach adolescence blissfully ignorant of life's sharp edges. Better to have the lessons delivered by a compelling narrative that gives children agency then by real life which offers them none.
A sensitive individual takes seriously pleas for help from a vulnerable population at risk of being wiped out, while others mock the individual’s concerns as fake, and actively endanger the same population, echoing Western reactions to persecution of Jews and eventually the Holocaust in the lead-up to and during much of WWII (Horton Hears a Who)
Its full of rape and murder! great for kids!
FF6 is specifically designed like an opera. It's European, fast paced, has a lot of classical music, comic moments, romance, gore, etc. That's not quite the same thing as an art film or Earthbound-inspired indie game about depression.
And the villain is a magical clown.
source: played both at ~10-11 years of age.
As a parent to young children I did not reach this conclusion and would love for my son to play this masterpiece. None of the parents I know are like this either.
I actually feel like this mindset was much more prevalent in the 90s than it is nowadays.