Peter Fenzel guest hosts as John Perich, Richard Rosenbaum, Jordan Stokes, and Red Pages Podcast’s Justin Bortnick take the Final Fantasy VI book club through week 4, from the nobility of General Leo to the madness of Kefka, from the isolation of Thamasa to the overreach of Vector, and from the magitek research facility to the end of the world.
→ Download the Final Fantasy VI Podcast
Possible Episode Titles
- “The Truth and Reconciliation Brunch Buffet”
- “Every Week in Ultros is a Great Week in Ultros”
- “Chocobo Benedict with Goat Cheese and Asparagus”
- “Anyone can reproduce with anyone because it’s cool”
- “It needs to have a face… because you need to punch it”
- “The schoolgirl and the octopus are placed into superposition”
- “The Age of Ultros”
- “8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8”
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.
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 all the way to Vector)
- Week 4 (this podcast): 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.
Regarding the espers and humans bring biologically compatible, I recall reading somewhere that espers were humans transmogrified by the Warring Triad into supersoldiers for their own armies back before the Triad became statues.
I think that may have been in the GBA port and not in the original SNES translation, or I’m recalling some odd bit of trivia I read years ago about this game.
‘Cause the Empire’s gonna take, take, take, magic
and the Kefka’s gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
and I’m just gonna save, save, save, save, save
Save the world, save the world.
I let Shadow die the first time I played through the game (back in 1994, when it was new, the only coverage was gaming magazines, and I didn’t know any better), not expecting that that would happen, because I had a lot of the same assumptions you guys were discussing… since he flits in and out of view for the whole game up to that point, it’s reasonable to expect him to get out of there *some*how, like he always has before.
Replaying the game now I feel like Shadow joining the party for the Thamasa segment, only to “leave to find the espers in his own way” is almost completely pointless. Unless you walk around fighting random encounters before proceeding in the story, you don’t actually get to use him for the story events at that point–he mostly sleeps through the fire in Thamasa and leaves before you do the Esper Mountain dungeon. I sort of feel like his presence there is only to establish the Relm-Shadow connection.