This Game is Insanely Unbalanced

[VillainFan42]

Now, don't get me wrong- Final Fantasy VI is my favorite main series game. Heck, it's my favorite game of all time. (Although IX could very well overtake it) But has anyone else noticed how poor the game balance is, especially near the start? I mean, think about it- with Magic, it starts off being pretty weak compared to the abilities of, say, Edgar or Sabin. But then once you get past the Magitek Research Facility, it suddenly jumps from weak to insanely overpowered. And it's not just that- some characters are pretty much useless. Well, by "some characters" I mainly mean Cyan. His ability is slow as molasses, even when playing the iOS version that fixes his ability. Except everyone on the planet has this weird, irrational hatred for the iOS and Steam versions, so it's even worse in the SNES/GBA versions. And he's not powerful enough to justify using him over the aforementioned brothers. Whose abilities, may I add, have pretty much no drawback to using and carry you through pretty much the entire game. Why cast Fire on the enemy party when you can just use Auto Crossbow to deal twice as much damage with no cost? Am I playing the game wrong or something? Cyan did start to pull his weight once I hit Kefka's Tower, but that's a pretty long time to wait for someone to be useful in combat.

 

[ZaXo Ken'Ichi]

No, you're not missing anything. Most FF games -most J-RPG really- are broken, and FFVI is no exception. There are plenty of issues related to cost/value between abilities. But the worst part is that the enemies and bosses are usually so weak (without grinding) that zero cost abilities like Attack or Sabin's Blitz attacks are all you need to succeed anyway, along with a dash of Cure here and there. So it almost doesn't even matter whether the rest of the abilities are balanced well, because they're far from optimal in most situations anyway. A small handful of abilities take precedence, and most of them are easy to obtain or already acquired at the start. It's the same with nearly every FF excluding XII, XIII, and it's sequels; ironic, since everyone believes those are the least strategic ones.

 

[TreasureHunter]

It's definitely unbalanced, particularly the further into the game you get. Eventually everyone ends up as a clone casting ultima on every boss. The characters are definitely imbalanced as well, though that's somewhat forgivable with the large cast size.