For a game with Fourteen playable characters, Tier List-ing them actually came quite easy in Final Fantasy 6. There are a great deal of options for pretty much any play style in the game, from completionist to pure casual, and this tends to make them settle into different piles; always in the team, never in the team and best of the rest. Such titles are not the done thing in tier lists of course, but that should give you a bit of guidance as to why we’ve chosen to slot the following into their locations…
S Tier
- Shadow
- Edgar
- Celes
- Terra
There are a great deal of different skills on offer in FF6, with pretty much every character having their own ‘quirk’ of sorts, and how you chime with these will pretty much define how much you value each character. In this regard, the quirks on offer by these four characters are just too good to miss out on. Whenever they’re available, these were our absolute first choices for the team, and together they form by far our favourite overall team.
Despite being unreliable in recruitment terms, Shadow is by far the most reliable high damage option in the game, thanks to his Throw skill lobbing anything from elemental weapons to powerful Shuriken. Edgar is the random battle destroyer that tends to get super powered by his early game destruction, and both Celes and Terra become the best and most balanced magic users by the end of the game, thanks to a combination of their magic stat and equipment choices. There’s nothing that this team of members cannot deal with; their equipment encourages the complete ignorance of damage, thanks to absorption or evasion, and their damage is nigh unmatched at different points in the game. Arguments for others being better than these four will likely require caveats for poor equipment, excessive training requirements or situational highlights, none of which bother the four noted here. They’re powerhouses and should see as much use as possible.
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A Tier
- Gau
- Sabin
- Relm
- Locke
- Mog
- Strago
- Gogo
For our A Tier of party members, we’ve considered those that can be very powerful, but need a bit more work to bring online. These aren’t bad characters, in fact they can be just as good as those in the S Tier, but you’ll either need to do a bit more work to get them there or rely on some very specific equipment in the late game.
Gau is a prime example of this, because to get the most out of him you’ll need to spend a good amount of time on the Veldt, learning skills. This isn’t too difficult, but without a guide of sorts you’re essentially doing trial and error to work out which skills are worth using, and which enemies to ensure that you encounter. Strago is somewhat similar in this regard too, because just like Gau he can be super powerful, but you’ll need to seek out opponents to learn his Lores, which paired with his terrible equipment choices in the late game make him a bit more of a compromise than those in S Tier. Sabin is again similar; Blitz skills are powerful, but most scale with magic and his equipment doesn’t really work that way, especially in the World of Ruin, where his defence in particular will see him regularly take a lot more damage.
That’s probably the best way that we’d describe A Tier: Compromises. Locke relies entirely on weaponry and relics to function, but a well trained and equipped version will do well. Mog essentially needs relics to become an ideal Dragoon, but when he does the damage he inflicts will be fantastic. A Tier units need a little work then, certainly more so than S Tier, but they have the potential to reach their heights when it’s done. Relm is probably the closest to S Tier because of her huge magic damage potential, but Sketch and her equipment limitations mean there’s a not insignificant trade off taking place again.
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B Tier
- Setzer
- Cyan
- Umaro
Where we talked of compromises in A Tier, the three characters stuck in B Tier represent a great deal of sacrifices that must be made. These are units that require a serious amount of investment to get good, but even when they get there things aren’t exactly fantastic, and they don’t get anywhere near those in the tiers above. Often these are relegated to the bench save for sections of the game that require more than one party, but even then we’d recommend that you steer clear.
Setzer is the closest to a passable unit. His Dice options can allow him to deal some good damage, and changing this to Gil Toss opens up another avenue, but outside of these he’ll be pretty useless for the majority of the game and his weapon choices are laughable at best. Cyan suffers a similar fate, because outside of his Bushido skills he will bring nothing to the party… And most of his Bushido skills aren’t worth waiting for. There are some skills worth waiting for in niche situations, and Fang will do well in the early game for sure, but he’ll fall off super hard in the World of Ruin and lacks any real options to catch him up. Finally, Umaro is a strictly limited character that if anything deserves his own tier. He can be made into a semi-useful berserker unit in battle, but this game hardly calls for such a thing and besides, almost every other character can out damage him with a similar amount of setup. He and indeed the other two noted here sadly just don’t cut the mustard.
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Categories: Final Fantasy 6