Ben Adams, Shana Mlawski, John Perich and Red Pages Podcast‘s Justin Bortnick kick off the Overthinking It Book Club with an introduction to FINAL FANTASY VI. Join us for a discussion of video games as art, artisanal hand-crafted emulators, video game auteuers and more!
→ Download the Final Fantasy VI Podcast
The Overthinking It Book Club
The book club has always been an experiment to see if we, the worldwide community of Overthinkers, can have as much fun looking at a work of literature as we have when we talk about movies, TV shows, and music. Now, we’re taking that idea into a whole new medium, and turning our eyes to the world of interactive fiction – fancy talk for video games. Beginning the week of October 15, we’re going to spend a month and a half playing the RPG classic Final Fantasy VI, in honor of the 20th Anniversary of the game’s North American release. Here’s the plan.
Get The Game
If you have the game already, great! Time to dust off the SNES and get cracking. Otherwise, the game can be acquired for iOS and Android.
The Syllabus
We’ve divided the game into six roughly equal chunks. You’ll get the most out of the club if you have played through these sections by these dates:
- Introduction: October 15
- Week 1: October 22 (Chapters 1-2: Narshe through the Returner’s Hideout)
- Week 2: October 29 (Chapters 3-5: Locke’s Scenario, Terra’s Scenario and Sabin’s Scenario)
- Week 3: November 5 (Chapters 6-7: From Narshe to Zozo and the Opera House to Vector)
- Week 4: November 12 (Chapters 8-10: From Vector through the Sealed Gate, Thamasa, the Floating Island, and the World of Ruin)
- Week 5: November 19 (Chapter 11: Cid’s Island to Darril’s Tomb)
- Week 6: December 3 (Chapter 12: Kefka’s Tower and wrap-up)
The Forums
For our discussion, we’re going to use a special section in the Overthinking It Forums. Friday before each section begins, we’ll open up a forum for the coming week with some study questions to get our discussion started. As you play over the weekend, you can answer our questions in the week’s forum, start your own discussion topics there, and chime in on discussions that others have started. Everything up to and including the week’s section of the game is fair game for discussion—but if you’ve played ahead, no spoilers for what is to come! (We’ll open up a “all-game” thread for those.)
The Podcast
Sometime mid-week, we’ll release a podcast where a panel of Overthinking It writers and guests will talk about the game. We’ll talk over the week’s gameplay, address some of the study questions, and highlight our favorite discussions from the forums.