Image: Final Fantasy VI official art. Square Enix.

Fun fact: this website includes a blog where I occasionally update my readers on whatever Final Fantasy gaming I’ve been doing lately. It’s called My Mystic Quest. You’re reading its newest entry right now.

The last time I updated this blog it was mid-June, and I had announced that I had taken a break from Final Fantasy VII to revisit VI. I’ve taken several breaks from VI since (that’s right, breaks within a breaks, Inception style), but I’m back and getting serious about it now.

As I said two months ago, my mission with this re-play of the game is to be as “completion-ist as possible.” That means power leveling my characters, collecting the best items to be had in the game, and basically building up the power of my characters to maximum absurdity.

In researching what there actually is to find in the game I’ve discovered that there are far more powerful items than I was ever aware of as a child. (Note: I’m playing the GBA version, while I played the SNES version as a kid. I’m aware many of the items changed names in the porting process, but their functions generally did not.) The Molulu’s Charm allows you to avoid all random encounters! The Celestriad reduces all magic spells to a cost of 1 MP! The list goes on…

How did I not know this stuff was in the game before?! Argh.

I’m not there yet, but as I pick these things up I suspect Final Fantasy VI will become a profoundly different game to me. I’m somewhat enamoured with the concept of anything that makes a familiar game absurdly easy, allowing me to be totally uninhibited in my exploration of it.

The “completion-ist” task suddenly sounds a lot more exciting.