Final Fantasy 6 (or III, as it was originally known in the US)

While I have not played very many, this is easily my favorite Final Fantasy game of all time and a shocking testament to how a game made nearly 30 years ago can hold up so well to this day. This was one of the first video games to truly tell a story worth caring about, and it pushed the SNES to its limits in order to do that.

This game is beautiful, this game is a masterpiece that everyone should experience, this game was so good that even though I had the entirety of the plot spoiled to me from a ProJared video I was still filled with shock, awe, laughter and sadness all the same. Final Fantasy 4 crawled so this game could fly into the heavens. I am actually shocked how much raw emotion and character development can be packed into a sprite based Super Nintendo game that every RPGmaker game in history since then has tried, and failed, to replicate.

As for what version you should play of the game, there is actually an interesting discussion to be had here. I personally recommend the SNES original with the Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition, a patch that keeps the fun and charm of the original translation while fixing most all of the censorship they had to do at the time for the game as well as some of the errors Ted made translating the original script back then. It also has some nice QOL fixes that do not heavily change the game, such as speeding up certain animations like Cyan's bushido to make your life less of a pain. Overall this is a very clean and fun way to play this game, just grab a ROM file of the game, use Lunar IPS to patch it with the previously linked patch and you're off to the races with your SNES emulator of choice. If you would prefer something you can play on Steam, the Pixel Remaster is quite nice looking however, although I prefer the original music and am not sure about the translation as I have not gone through all of the game on it yet. Regardless, I'm sure it is just as great a way to experience the game from my short playing of it (as long as you use a mod to get rid of that terrible font), but I would definitely recommend the patched SNES version.

I think I will use this paragraph to talk about some of the potential quirks and downsides to this overall wonderful game. First of all, it is turn based, but its a fun turn based where it's very open ended (especially later in the game). Unfortunately, there are also random encounters, which is probably the most negative thing I can say about the game but overall if you can stomach these I would 100% give this game a try, you will not regret it. Also, to the one guy that's as stupid as me, when you get to getting Sabin as a character on Mt. Koltz, no, its not your emulator thats broken, his fighting game inputs thing requires you to press an extra button or something beforehand. I kind of found that out the hard way and gave up my first playthrough for a couple months... oops.

Overall Score 5/5 (Absolute must play)

Bonus: Want to check it out for yourself? Here's a link to it on Steam!