Ladies, represent!

I know, I know, we always say that FF6 doesn't have a protagonist, but really, it does. It has two, in fact. Terra:


And Celes:



That's right, bitches. They're bitches. FF6 is the only game in the series where a woman can be considered the main character. It's the only RPG I can think of off the top of my head, too. Well, that and Phantasy Star, which I haven't played. And Parasite Eve, which I haven't played either. And I guess in the early Dragon Quests you can make your hero a girl if you want. (That was awesome. The DQ4 party of Mara, Nara, Alena, and Kammy? Unbeatable. Who says you need men to kill metal slimes? Anyway, I digress.)

This is another neat risk that the game developers made that they didn't have to. I'm sure there are many little boys out there who don't want to play video games where they have to be the girl, just as there are probably many who think that sitting through an in-game opera is totally gay. To this, I say: Way to go, Square. You weren't pandering here. You thought about what would be the best concept, and went with it, rather than market-testing and determining that 15-year-old boys want to have large, potent dongs, and then making your character designs accordingly.

The way Squaresoft generally treats female characters hasn't changed too much since FF4. There will always be three girls in your party. One will be the gentle, innocent, and naive white-magic user, who is the love interest of the hero. The secondary female character will be a cold and aloof fighter, who may or may not need to be mastered by the wang of some guy in the party, even though she pretends not to need teh cock. The tertiary female is a cipher whose main purpose is to be jailbait. Gee, these archetypes sure don't tell us anything about Japan, do they? The ladies of FF6 can indeed be catgorized in this way. Relm, of course, is the jailbait.



Celes is the frigid ice maiden.



Terra is the innocent girl with a magic pendant. Did you know she has a magic pendant? ALL Type A Japanese RPG female characters have magic pendants.



But surprisingly, this game manages to transcend the character types. Let's look at Terra, for instance: sure, she has the trappings of the heroine that needs protecting, in much the same way as, say, an Aeris, or a Yuna, or a Rosa. However, she's got some of the trappings of the traditional MALE FF hero too: amnesia, a history of working for the Evil Empire before joining the rebels, a knack for communicating with ellipses. Moreover, her big existensial crisis-- her fear of her inability to love-- is not resolved in a traditional way: ie, falling for the male hero. Instead she discovers what love is by being a mother to the abandoned children of Mobliz. This denouement is surprisingly feminist for something coming from Japan: Terra's personal discovery comes from herself, and isn't dependent on a man. At the same time, she is genuinely feminine, unlike the fantasy/sci-fi trope of the invulnerable warrior babe. Could you imagine a man like Cloud taking some time to run an orphanage and consider his capacity for love? OH WAIT, that happened-- in Advent Children. GOD, I hate that movie. Can we just pretend it never happened?


Celes, on the other hand, does get a romantic plot, but the love story with Locke is handled in a very subtle way, compared to the more love-centric FFs that we have come to expect in later years (FF8, FF9, FF10.) It's complicated by her past as a war criminal, and the fact that he has his ex-girlfriend's corpse hidden in some guy's basement. They never even say that they love one another; instead, they prefer to exchange as significant glances as 16-bit sprites are capable of, and to refer to one another's aweseomeness obliquely.






Celes' love is, in fact, the driving force that binds the game's disparate World of Ruin half together. For the first half of the game, she is depressed, nihilistic, and, dare I say, a total emo. "You'd better leave me here in this dungeon, because I'm not worth rescuing and I deserve to die!" "Omigod, Gestahl and Kefka, you are so awful to me! I wish I'd never been born!" and of course, the memorable "Everyone I love is dead, so I might as well throw myself off this cliff!" Then, when she starts believing that Locke could be alive, she becomes a beacon of positive thinking, and travels around the world to get people to put down their pints of Haagen Dazs, quit listening to Evanescence, and get ready to save the world again.





Also, keep in mind, that while these two ladies may have lovey-dovey character arcs, they can also use the Atma Weapon and Illumina. Oh yeah, and the Minerva.


So they're not delicate little flowers. Come on, Squaresoft, it worked so well! Plus, it's kind of nice getting to play a game as a girl. Why can't you do stuff like this more often?