In the first few minutes of Final Fantasy VI, just when you think you’ve got a sense of the game’s rhythm, everything changes. Your amnesiac hero Terra, who you’ve been controlling for half an hour and are probably assuming will be your protagonist for the long haul, falls down a hole and passes out. And then you meet…
Final Fantasy V, a video game about four warriors who get together and beat up a giant tree, doesn’t try particularly hard to be innovative. In fact, it doesn’t try at all. Final Fantasy V is essentially an enhanced version of Final Fantasy III, proving rather definitively that Final Fantasy games don’t have to be original to be great.
There’s a scene in Final Fantasy IV that’s always stood out to me. It centers around the elderly wizard Tellah, who starts off with a puny library of magic but eventually, thanks to divine intervention and a magical house of mirrors, remembers that he’s actually a talented badass with access to every spell in the game.