So I beat FF6 this morning. Emulated the original US SNES version.
I'll just come out and say it: I enjoyed it less than I expected to. Don't get me wrong, I did like it a lot, but idk, I wasn't enamoured by the game. I've just spent my half-hour walk home trying to work out exactly why. Here's what I came up with (and keep in mind this probably makes most sense if you've experienced the game, and will have spoilers):
So the World of Balance (the first half of the game) is pretty great. We get introduced to an awesome set of characters, pretty much all of whom are likable, most of whom are useful (not a fan of Gau or Cyan, though in the latter case he was kind of bad because I didn't use him a lot). There's a great plot going on too - Empire taking over, our heroes all trying to survive and eventually bring it down - complete with plot twists and dastardly opportunism and all that stuff. Great villains all around here. The famous opera scene is also pretty great (though completely different from what I expected). And the climax of this bit, where you go to the top of the floating continent and [BTW, major spoilers, probably] Kefka betrays Gestahl, pushes together the three statues (plot-important statues!), and basically succeeds in destroying the world is fantastic.
The beginning of the World of Ruin is also great. It's very lonely when you wake up, with only one person there with you, and you can't go anywhere. Really effective storytelling here, especially the point just before Celes decides to leave the island.
The story also stays good for a while. You run into some of your earlier characters, start putting together the party again, and it's all great. Then the game really opens up.
And that's where, for me, it stops working as well. So far we've had a fairly focused, character-based story, and now everything opens out, and the best we really get are little vignettes for each of the (14 total, though you don't have to meet two of them, and you can just not meet all but three) characters. Some characters' plotlines are decent enough (Terra's works fairly well, for example), but others (Strago, for example) get a lot of emphasis and new plot that doesn't entirely fit imo. And some (Locke, imo) get very little (despite his arc being finished off). And, other than a couple pairings (as far as I can tell, it's pretty much just Relm and Strago, maybe Shadow too, except that I accidentally killed him off :/), all the character interaction seems to have just plain vanished. Which is imo generally the butter of character-driven story (with the bread being how the characters themselves grow and develop - which, as I said above, also feels lacking).
Some of this also means some threads or implied threads of story just never get resolved. For example: Celes' whole thing is how she feels like she doesn't fit in (as far as I understand, anyway), and Locke shows her that some people do care, and the two of them have some great character moments in the first half. Maybe that's a budding romance, maybe not (he's got someone else to think about anyway). In any case, it doesn't matter, because when you find him again nothing is said on the subject. The best you get is her moving next to him on the airship in the epilogue.
Related - Setzer only agrees to let the party use his airship if they let him marry Celes, to which they (kind of) agree. This is never acknowledged again.
idk, little things like that just made me feel the game ran out halfway.
I could make comparisons to Chrono Trigger, to be fair: six characters, a fairly heavily-plotted section of the game, up until a big climax, after which you can either do a bunch of sidequests/character vignettes or go straight to the final boss. The difference here is that imo all the characters get their complete character arcs during the plotted section of Chrono Trigger, and all these character vignettes do is kind of fill in non-essential backstory - with the exception of (if you count it) the [again, major spoilers, for Chrono Trigger] revival of Chrono, though you can argue about whether that's a sidequest or just part of the main quest that you can skip. That's all the spoiling Chrono Trigger needs.
Might also be worth comparing to BotW for that matter - do whatever you want most of the game, after you've beaten the first bit, and fight the final boss when you want to. Thing is, in that game, all of the story feels like stuff you uncover, rather than it being presented to you in two kind of opposed ways.
The same character complaints work for Kefka, btw. Great characterisation in the first half, does nothing in the second half except sit at the top of a tower, waiting get yelled at and be an underwhelmingly easy boss. He gets some really great lines though, in both halves.
On the other hand, the music was great. Again, the Opera scene was one of the highlights - that tune is really lovely (although the translated lyrics don't fit to it at all), and any time it reappeared (again, Celes alone on that island) really did get to me - as well as any appearances of Terra's motif, i.e. the first OW theme. Actually, all the OW tunes are great. Kefka's theme is great fun too - starts out kind of silly, gets progressively more threatening. Wonder who that reminds me of...
Battle themes were also good - the main one is perfectly good, the main boss theme is fine (still prefer FFIV's ), Save Them! is fantastic, the other boss theme (the level 2 boss theme? idk, this one) is also great.
Dancing Mad... I might be crucified for this, but I don't... love all of it. It is great, but imo it just stops way too much for it to be intense. Which is sad, because they did some really cool stuff with it - the third tier has one of the few fugal moments in video game music, for those of you who know or care what that means; and I enjoyed that for the first three phases they seamlessly transitioned between the three stages of the theme. And, while the last section has all sorts of fun mixed-metre, it also has a slower section that doesn't really help imo. Maybe my opinion was affected by the fact that (as I said above) I found him underwhelmingly easy.
To be clear, I'm unsure whether me finding him easy was my own fault for over-grinding or not. Which is my next point: it's not generally a grindy game - the first half does a good job of switching you between party members and stuff, and if you really like a character, you can generally carry them with other party members until they're ready. Problem for me is the bits where you're supposed to make up multiple parties, you're pretty much forced to use characters you don't like. Which I guess is fine, if the ones you didn't use weren't way underpowered for the most part. To be fair, some of them catch up quite well (I didn't really use Mog until the final dungeon, but he ended up on my team in the final battle cos he was just that good), but others just... don't. Add to that that you gotta beat enemies to learn spells, as well as to make the Cursed Shield any use, and the game still ends up encouraging grinding to get some of the best equipment/abilites.
Alternatively, you can just... not do the sidequests and everything for all the good armour and espers, but that feels like skipping out on some of the game and needlessly hindering yourself.
Overall, I think my experience is probably best described in the same way my impression of the Opera House sequence is - it was hyped up a lot, for a lot of elements, some of which were there, some of which... didn't seem to be. Maybe it was weird translation (not convinced that's the case), Maybe it's how I played the game - a lot of short sessions, with a few longer ones nearer the end. I don't know. But in any case, I'm a little underwhelmed. Still enjoyed it, of course, but... yeah.
Oh well, started doing FF7 now, about 45 minutes in. See if that one lives up to the hype.