Welcome back to We Want Comics, a column exploring various intellectual properties—whether they’re movies, TV shows, novels, or video games—that we would like to see adapted into comic books. With the release of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade coming this week, it seemed a good time to talk about a comics adaptation. . . but not of Final Fantasy VII. There’s so much Final Fantasy VII content out there, a comic would just be a footnote in this massive media venture that’s happening at the moment. If you want to experience the story of Final Fantasy VII, you’re already well served.
So I’m going to talk about one of the best games (some would even argue the best game) in this series—Yoshinori Kitase, Hiroyuki Ito, and Hironubu Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy VI.
Despite being almost thirty years old now, Final Fantasy VI has never been remade; it’s had ports, but never a proper remake. I suppose this is in part due to it coming out at the end of the 16-bit era, so its graphics, while dated, retain a charm that’s still appealing today. Hell, the added cinematics for the PlayStation port have aged worse than the game itself.
Still, there’s a sense that Square Enix has left this game on the shelf. Maybe it’ll get a remake someday, like the superb one for Final Fantasy IV, or maybe even an entire reconception like Final Fantasy VII, but for now, Final Fantasy VI is remembered by those that played it (or one of its ports) when it first came out, or those Final Fantasy fans that simply have to play all the core games. This means that a comic adaptation can be something special; an adaptation that doesn’t live in the shadow of a marketing push for a new game. It just has to be a great comic.
For those of you unfamiliar, Final Fantasy VI is about Terra Branford, who is being used by the Gestahl Empire for her ability to use magic. This is a big deal because magic vanished from the world roughly a thousand years ago. Terra is rescued by the Returners, a group of resistance fighters, who set out to find out where Terra got her abilities from so that they can harness them to fight back against the Empire. Meanwhile, Terra just wants to find out who she is after the Empire’s brainwashing has left her without memories. It’s grand and operatic, yet the most powerful moments in the story are smaller character beats. And with twelve main characters (fourteen if you count hidden characters Gogo and Umaro), there’s so much to explore.
And this is why Final Fantasy VI is so perfect for a comic book adaptation. It’s a great game, but it’s an even better story, and it’s a story that I believe could flourish in almost any storytelling medium. Given that the original game was told through tiny sprites with text boxes with a set limited on how much text they could have, it had to be blunt at times for the sake of pacing and clarity. A comic opens up a way to explore these characters anew, introducing subtle body language and composition choices not possible in the original game.
Even beyond that, there are so many gaps to fill in. Final Fantasy VI is an epic journey, where something like 90% of the player’s experience is in traveling from place to place, but most of the story that happens in this part of the game exists entirely in the player’s head. When the characters travel from Narche to Figaro Castle, there’s a few random battles where the player learns how to use some new character skills, but aside from that, the story stops. As players, we get a sense of the characters getting to know each other, fighting side by side, and learning to rely on each other, but the game doesn’t actually give us that, it merely encourages us to invent it. So the comic would have to create the travel and bonding a part of the story, adding new material and transposing scenes from towns and castles to the walks in between those locations. The biggest challenge of this adaptation would be to bring the journeying to life in a way that doesn’t feel tacked on, but rather fully integrated and essential. It can’t be filler; it has to be something readers will love.
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You know in Lord of the Rings, the chapter “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit,” when Sméagol catches a brace of coneys and there’s this whole interaction with Samwise and it gives us so much character? That scene doesn’t give us much in the way of plot, but it is beloved by fans of Tolkien’s book, and when Peter Jackson did his adaptation, despite those films running long, despite having to cut out and truncate so much, he made room for this scene in the theatrical cut, because he recognized how important it was. This is the sort of material a Final Fantasy VI adaptation would need to truly come to life, scenes where we not only get to know the characters, but the characters get to know each other, and we get a sense of the balance within the group.
In a sense, this is very much taking the Final Fantasy VII Remake approach, where it isn’t just about delivering the same game with updated graphics and sound, but about using new storytelling devices, expanding, and digging deeper. It isn’t a replacement for the original game, but a new way to experience this story, its world, and its characters. Since Final Fantasy VI is a Japanese game, but takes a lot of inspiration from European fantasy, it could benefit from having co-writers from these different cultures. Someone like Faith Erin Hicks, with her experience writing the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” comics and her own “Nameless City” trilogy, would be a good fit with her balance of epic conflicts and intimate character moments. Or Hiromu Arakawa, who did amazing work bringing the world of “Fullmetal Alchemist” to life, especially in the way her magic system was so fully integrated into the story and engaging, would be great too. The two writing together would be wish fulfillment. (Plus, both have the right sense of humor to make weirder aspects of the story like Ultros work.)
In terms of format, I feel like Final Fantasy VI should be serialized. Many of the plotlines in the game unfold in an episodic manner. If the story isn’t serialized, it could feel a bit like it’s veering all over the place, whereas with an episodic approach, I think the reader would be more open to the story following Terra’s journey, then putting a pin in that as we jump to someone like Cyan, introducing him and spending a big chunk of time with him before he joins the main group. I’m not entirely sure why, but I feel like comic readers are more open to this kind of storytelling, where the main story can be put on hold while we get a few one-shots that explore side characters or other aspects of the world. I mean, that’s what “The Old Guard: Tales Through Time” is doing now, and I’m really enjoying it. But something like Eleven’s sidestory with her lost sister in Stranger Things is at best tolerated rather than enjoyed by many viewers.
It’d never happen, but ideally I’d love to see Final Fantasy VI adapted as a series of European-style bande dessinées, where each installment is 60-ish pages long, in color, with expansive page real estate to play with so the world can really come to life. World building is a much bigger part of fantasy comics than almost any other genre (except perhaps science fiction), and when it isn’t given the space it needs to breathe, it genuinely hurts the story. In the case of Final Fantasy VI, it’s story told on a grand scale and the page size should match. When Terra, Biggs, and Wedge walk into Narche in that opening sequence, I want the space for the mining town to come to life.
When I played the game, I walked around, exploring every nook and cranny, talking to everyone I could, hunting for secrets. The comic needs to bring these locations to life in a way that has space for the reader to linger on a page, to explore the details, to get a sense of the place, not just to fill in the background behind the characters in a panel.
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Translating the art of the game to the comic is going to be a challenge. For one thing, which art? I mean, there’s Yoshitaka Amano’s concept art, but that’s a far cry from Kazuko Shibuya’s 16×24 pixel sprites that players spend most of their time with, and different again from the detailed headshots used in the menu systems, and from the cinematic sequences introduced in later ports of the game.
I don’t think there is any one answer to this question, but I do feel an art style with aspects of all of these would best serve the story. In my head, I see the art being something like Alex Alice’s work on his “Castle in the Stars” series, which I feel has something of Amano’s painterly approach, the cartoonish humor of Shibuya’s sprites, the more grounded look of the menu headshots, and the large-scale worldbuilding of the cinematics. Plus, Alice clearly has a deep love not just for steampunk aesthetics, but for the underpinnings that make it work. When he draws something mechanical, you know he understands how it would move, and he has a way of drawing these things where the form doesn’t warp noticeably from panel to panel, yet it’s not so rigid that it can’t be expressive. That and he’s meticulous in his design work and he infuses his world with a sense of history. Environmental storytelling is absolutely essential if Final Fantasy VI is to truly come to life as a comic. If the characters are in a town, the reader needs to immediately know which town based on the architecture and the costumes of the locals, otherwise the comic would be doing a disservice to this world.
And, obviously, this is the kind of book that would have maps on the inside cover. If you don’t have maps in your Final Fantasy adaptation, you are doing it wrong. Final Fantasy VI was a game, and people played with it through maps, and you need to tap into the way people played the game and find story beats that bring that to life. Sort of like how in the Bumblebee movie Charlie investigates her new yellow VW bug by sliding underneath and seeing a robot face there, mimicking the way kids would play with their toy Transformers by looking underneath and discovering the tell-tale robot bits. It’s this sort of care that makes a good adaptation.
And this is another reason why I really want to see Final Fantasy VI as a comic. I played the game, and it’s a 16-bit masterpiece, but it’s also completely devoid of voice acting (aside from Kefka’s laugh). And the sprites move in these caricatures of motion that suggest something more subtle than they can literally express. It’s a story that comes to life through interpretation—just like comics come to life as we imagine the life between panels, as voices are imagined from speech bubbles. Comics may not be able to translate some iconic aspects like Nobuo Uematsu’s incredible soundtrack, but they can capture some essence of the game that no other medium can, and I believe with the right creative team it could be a masterpiece in its own right.
And maybe, just maybe, a truly great Final Fantasy VI comic could be the first step toward a Final Fantasy VI Remake from Square Enix.
Now this last bit gets a bit spoilery, so if you haven’t played Final Fantasy VI yet, don’t read on.
One of the big reasons I’d love to see Final Fantasy VI adapted into another medium is because its structure works so wonderfully as a trilogy. It has distinct breaks and viewpoint changes. The first third is mostly told through Terra’s viewpoint from the opening attack on Narche to her esper side awakening and flying away. The second third would be framed like the second half of the story, with Locke as the primary character as he searches for Terra, going all the way up to the apparent ending of the series when he and the others attempt to take down Emperor Gestahl. Then everything goes wrong when Kefka ruins the world.
Continued belowThe third part is the World of Ruin, with the story picking up one year later with Celes as the primary viewpoint character as she reassembles the team again for the final confrontation with Kefka. The “false ending” aspect of Final Fantasy VI is one of its defining characteristics, and to really do the story justice, you have to embrace this. In a movie, you generally have a sense of how long it is, so the filmmakers can’t really do a false ending. You know it’s false because it’s coming too soon. But in serialized comics, there isn’t a set length or structure. The medium still has the ability to surprise and explore the fallout.
Through Celes, arguably the most introspective character in the series, we can rediscover the characters. All the characters in the story have their damage, but with Celes, I feel like she was at her lowest right when we first met her, and her experience with the other characters was healing for her. In the World of Ruin, that’s what makes her a beacon of hope. She has to find her friends, all of which are now at their lowest points, and bring them back. And through her we have a way to deepen Kefka too, since the two were kind of raised as siblings.
Most importantly, it’s a story that needs breaks. Final Fantasy VI is huge, and to have the same creative team on the title from start to finish, you’d need built-in breaks for them to stop and recharge and to work on other projects. And I’d really want the series to have the same creative team, because there are so many callbacks to pay off. In the finale, when Locke catches Celes, the layout needs to echo the same moment when he tried to catch Rachel. Having the same art team makes moments like this hit so much harder.
Look, this is a game where the final battle ends and for the next seventeen minutes, the story continues as each character’s arcs are wrapped up. In other words, the emotional payoff is the most important part of the game and it should be for the comic too. The last three minutes of the game are entirely non-verbal, told through music and visual storytelling, and while comics don’t have the music component, I feel like comics could really nail the game’s ending, with Terra walking to the bow of the Falcon and letting her hair out as the airship sails up and away into a beautiful blue sky.
