My cat recently played FF6, here's her review. If you don't speak cat, you can use the following button to translate it to English.
Finally got my revenge on FF6… I've played it a few times, but never finished it due to it annoying me in a few ways. With the Pixel Remaster I thought it's about time I finally get my revenge on the game and finish it. But first I had to deal with the triggers that made me rage quit on previous attempts...
Trigger #1: Esper Bonuses
In FF6, when you level up, the only things that increase are HP/MP. All your other stats stay the same. This is until roughly a quarter of the way through the game, where you get Espers. When equipped to a character, an Espers can give that character a small, permanent increase to a single stat when they level up. e.g. equip Bismarck to Locke, Locke levels up, gets Strength +2. Each character can only equip one Esper at a time, so you cannot get multiple boosts to the same character on a single level up.
When you win a battle, everyone gets Exp, and thus it's possible multiple characters will level up at once. This means you have to constantly micro-manage. If two characters level up at the time time, and you want both of those characters to get the same stat bonus, you must knock one of them out during the battle, or remove them from your party before the battle, win the battle, revive them, then win another battle. Annoying.
On top of that, which stat bonuses even count? Research tells me all sorts of conflicting information. Stat A is useless because of equipment B. No actually, stat A is super important because even though equipment B, situation C, and so on. AAARGH.
Solution
Make a decision and stick with it. And also not care if I make a mistake. So my decision was raising everyone's Strength and Magic equally, and to bring everyone's Speed up to 50 (or 51 for odd number base-speed characters). Somewhat like a "mixed sweeper" in Pokemon. I did the necessary micro-management, but not by knocking characters out. If two were about to level up simultaneously, I'd just give one of them a boost to the other stat and correct it later, or if it happened by mistake, just not care.
I've read that you can simply not care about stat bonuses at all, and consider them exactly that: BONUSES. If you do this, apparently the entire game is still completable. But, I couldn't go that far lol. xD
In addition, the Pixel Remaster has in fact greatly improved the situation with its boost menu. You can turn off random encounters, and you can also set Exp, Gil and AP individually to be boosted by 0x, 1x, 2x or 4x. In combination with the Growth Egg, This REALLY helps with the siltation. I'd even say I ended up enjoying sessions where I was just levelling up.
So, all in all, problem solved.
Trigger #2: Permanent Missables
This game has a lot of permanent missables. That is, stuff that if you fail to get them, and you progress, and save, they're gone forever unless you start a new save. One example would be the Ultima Weapon sword, a really powerful weapon. There's even three playable characters who you can completely miss.
There's also a Bestiary, which serves as a sort of Pokedex. If you think it's bad in Pokemon that you have to trade to get certain Pokemon, in FF6 it's even worse. Certain actions lock out bestiary entries forever. The only way a person could complete the bestiary in this game without a guide, is either through insane luck, or by literally trying every possible choice and reloading the previous save millions of times throughout the game, in addition to having 100 random encounters on every single screen that has them.
Then there's Gau's rages. Mog's dances and Strago's Lores, which is a similar situation to the Bestiary.
Personally, I REALLY hate permanent missables in games. You should always be able to go back and get stuff, even if it's harder. This is something I really like about Nintendo games actually.
Solution
The solution to this one was to research important permanent missables before starting the game, to get a little help from the web occasionally throughout, and other than that, to generally to not care. Well, "not caring" is probably the wrong phase. I did explore and I did try to find stuff. But I'm saying I don't care if I missed something. And the bestiary I just chose not to care about it at all.
Trigger #3: These Guys
Cool some new enemies. They look like robots, I guess I'll use Thunde…
*Level 5 Death*
Game Over.
WHAT THE FORK?!
Solution
Pretty obvious, make sure someone has a level that is not divisible by 5 when you're in the Magitek Research Facility, and later in the game. But man, how annoying.
Okay so those are the reasons why I rage quit from the game before. But I had my solutions, bought Pixel Remaster, and the game pretty much filled up my entire spare time for a week or so lol.
Turns out, FF6 is actually an excellent game with an interesting story and likeable characters. The micro-management in levelling up is actually quite fun once you decide not to take it too overly seriously!
I would also say The Pixel Remaster is the definitive version of the game. It IS missing the extra Espers and dungeons from the GBA version though. So hopefully they'll patch that in, although I doubt it.
The new Boost menu is a huge help as described earlier. It also reduces hours of levelling up by quite a bit, but not so much that you don't experience it at all.
There's also the auto-battle feature. During a battle, press X, the battle speeds up, and the characters automatically perform the last command they did. So if you selected Attack, they attack, if you used a spell, they do that. The nice thing here that it doesn't ruin the strategy, you still have to choose the best command. But, if you're just levelling up, or the best move is the same for the remainder of the battle, you can let it play out on its own rather than choosing the same commands over and over. The Pixel Remaster on console also has a proper menu system rather than the horrible mobile one that ended up in the Steam version a few years ago.
The graphics are upgraded, but true to the original, again unlike the mobile/Steam version which went with something different. Some people liked it, but personally I preferred the OG (and now remastered) sprites.
Well that's everything I wanna say about FF6. Not exactly a proper review, but whatever.
In conclusion, FF6 has gone from a game that I disliked for many reasons to one of my favourites. FF7 is still the best though.