I had written this in the ERA RPG thread:I still think that FF6 is much bolder and thought-provoking than Chrono Trigger ever achieved to be. At the end of the day, CT is just nostalgia lane in how it tries to ape previous eras in the same way Back to the Future introduced it. It's an ultimately harmless experience that is "feel-good". FF6 was a freight train going at full speed and with the brakes smashed with a hammer by the designers themselves. At no point FF6 is made with the assumption that it is going to be a good experience for the player, it is made with the drive to do something new, and they did just that. It just keeps throwing things at you at an increasingly faster pace through the adventure to the point that your regular linear JRPG business becomes a character-centric open world and non-linear JRPG at the end. Sometimes it fails (the minecart section, the broken battle system), sometimes it works so spectacularly that you can't seem to remember any other game to be so bold at what it does the same way FFVI is.Chrono Trigger gets all the praise for its sidequests but they're not even all that, most of them are backtracking central, with one being particularly egregious in the way you have to go back to the carpenter after doing fetch quest for each era for the masamune. Or How Lucca's Sidequest is just back and forth between several eras to fetch some items. FF6 though, each character is its own sidequest, the main motivation isn't to get an item, it's to. A lot of JRPGs are one and done for their character arc after you recruit them, in FF6, you don't just see their character arc, you see how they conclude long after getting them too. This whole open-world is open for you to search and then get to discover how the characters have lived and how their past haunts them, and how they look into the future. They subverted sidequests to become about the characters you really care about, and to examine them far further than most JRPGs did at the time. That's what excellent side-quests should be, especially in a genre lauded for its characters. Sidequests aren't just a fun bonus, they are the backbone of what makes up the world of FF6, but it isn't even mandatory because the goal is to make the player motivated to get them of their own volition. It doesn't want the player to say "I have to do that", but "I want to do that". And that is a fundamental difference in how they are perceived as enjoyable, fulfilling or just busywork.You get to learn so much too. How incredible it is that FF6 still manages to make something new with the nightmare world of Cyan ? Exploring the mind of Cyan himself, having a look at his pain for the family and friends that he lost and how it still haunts him. That's something that is very strong, FF6 was going Lynchian in the SNES era in depicting a surreal world of pain and misery in the examination of a character. FF6 knew that rhythm and timing are so important to nail down that it doesn't tell you to fetch the tablet of power or the fragments of a sword in XXXX AD or at the other side of the world. The focus was always the character that is in front of you, and it was enough to become a monument in the genre.