FF6 is simultaneously a good and a bad game. The many reasons it is a good game are so obvious they need no mention to those who have played; they are quite adequately covered in the other writeups. Nonetheless, someone should point out the warts as well. Here we go!
- The random encounters make no sense. The mines of Narshe have packs of wild Repo men that attack on sight???
- The random encounters come way too quickly (though not as bad as Final Fantasy 9). Part of this is just the small sense of scale due to the large character icons. It seems like you fight monsters every 10 meters.
- Also, the random encounters are far too weak. With cure being as cheap as it is, if you survive the battle, you will be at full health for the next one... so what use are groups of monsters that provide little exp and no threat? They slow down the game, boring.
- Figaro castle. Okay, now that's just weird.
- So, the town of Zozo has low-life scum, right? And the world hasn't seen magic for thousands of years, so no one actually believes it exists anymore, right? Now, how is it that so many people in Zozo have magic?
- Osmose is way too powerful. It restores the caster's magic by hundreds of MP (a lot). It costs 1 MP. One hit with that every battle and you're looking at being able to last forever without resting.
- The characters get way too escalated. In the later stages of the game, your characters can deal many times their own Hit Points in damage. This actually makes more real-life sense than the steady battles of attrition that Final Fantasy usually has... but the battle system does not allow strategizing on the defense, except for slow in-between battle equipment shuffling.
- Swordtech 1, the blitzes, and especially the tools are all better than fight. Why EVER fight with the characters that have these attacks? Sure, you can choose who to hit, but usually this is usually irrelevant compared to the boost in power. In the case of the tools, the improvement is so strong it's kind of obscene.
- The size of an HP is very different between characters and monsters. If a powerful character has 1000 HP, then a medium-low level monster can have something like 3000. And that's the HUMANOID monsters. This also has the effect that if one of your characters is confused, the damage he does to your party is proportionally much greater than the damage he can do to your enemies, even after a reduction for attacking allies.
- Every level, if you are using an Esper at the time, you get a bonus based on which Esper you are using. Optimising your party generally involves flipping around the desired espers just before level-up. There is no restriction on how many people can get the bonus from each esper (for example, the +2 vigor esper generally gets passed around among the fighting characters, the +2 magic power espers among the magicians). Now, this provides a way for the player to have some input as to the development of the characters, which is great. However, it's extremely annoying to figure out who is about to level and then move the esper onto that character (for some weird reason you need to explicitly unequip it from the other character first. Look, I want this character to use it, hand it over, OK?). Either a convenient UI for this kind of activity, or making the bonus selection independent of esper allocation would be a significant improvement.
- Levels are not a big deal and they don't get further apart very quickly. This is not in itself a problem, so long as the increase in skill is not dramatic at each level. But with the level espers? The stats of each character just shoot up.
- One of the stats, vitality, is nearly useless. In fact, it sometimes does more harm than good.
- When you are fighting the five last bosses, any dead characters in your party are replenished from the other characters who are sitting around... whenever you progress to the next boss. However, if your party is wiped out, you can't pull up the next 4. This is really really annoying and makes no sense.