Aspect Analysis - A Plot of Convenience: Final Fantasy VI

It's about that time of the week I go out of my way to shit on a classic, and to be fair this time it's a game I absolutely love. Being one of the games I grew up with, Final Fantasy VI remains one of my favorite games of all time, but there has been a thing I have noticed in recent years about how inconvenient much of the plot of the first half of the game is, and it's honestly a bit distracting once you notice it.

The first instance of this happening is when Terra gets caught in a cave in running from the imperial guards, only to land in a cave full of Moogles who so happen to be willing to help Locke out and save Terra's life. This one happens early and isn't too bad as we don't really know a whole lot about what's going on yet. This one is easy to let slide because of that.

It gets a bit more egregious later on when you reach the river where you fight Ultros, the giant perverted octopus. Sabin gets knocked off the raft and happens to land near the Kingdom of Doma just as they are felled by Kefka's poison, giving you the perfect opportunity to join up with Cyan. Again though, there is a degree to which you can forgive the convenience is it does a fantastic job at showing the terror that is the Empire and continuing the game's themes of people of all walks of life and all over the world uniting together to fend off a common enemy.

Though the next bit is a bit hard to overlook, and that is finding a homeless child named Gau who lives among the monsters and happens to have a helmet that will let you breathe underwater so you can catch a river current back to Narshe in time for the epic battle. This one doesn't really have a justification, it's just pure convenience.

But the previous two pale in comparison to Setzer. See, he is a traveling gambler with the worlds only Airship, which you are in need of to reach the Empires capital city of Vector. Turns out he wants to kidnap the lead of a play at the Opera House named Maria, so you hatch a plan to sneak aboard his ship by replacing Maria in the stage play with Celes, who just so happens to look so much like Maria that the person running the play cannot tell the two apart.

Also, Celes just so happens to be a natural actor and singer despite having never done it before. And let's not forget what the actual odds of Setzer letting them use his airship after being swindled like this are, something that the party would have zero ideas of as they had never met Setzer before in their life. There... really is no justification for how absurd this little stretch of the story was. At least the Opera scene it led to was genuinely fantastic, even if it was kind of painful how they got there.

I still think you should play Final Fantasy VI. It is a classic RPG title for a reason and does far more good then it does badly. But I do think it's fair to point out the flaws like this the game does have that detract a bit from making it an even better game then it already is.