There is a very strange moment in Final Fantasy VI that has always baffled me.

Relatively early in the game, after your party splits into three separate groups to take on their individual branches of the story, you are presented with a section dedicated to the character of Locke.  Locke, your party’s “treasure hunter” extraordinaire, travels back to the now-occupied-by-the-Empire town of South Figaro to cause some mayhem in the hopes of slowing up the Imperial advance. 

Now, this section of the game is notable for several reasons: first of all, Locke’s main method of sneaking around town is to beat people up and, quite literally, steal the clothes right off their backs.  Once his opponents flee, naked and ashamed, Locke is free to roam about in their guise.  Secondly, this particular section also features some of the most awkward dialogue translations in the game, at least in my opinion; lots of strange turns of phrase and (seemingly) incomplete thoughts.  This, tangentially, is related to the moment of confusion in question.

At one point during Locke’s mission, you must figure out how to gain access to a fortified mansion on the far side of town.  It is implied by various townsfolk that there is an old man who used to work in the mansion, and might know of a way in.  Now, the trick here is that the old man doesn’t like to talk to anyone except for the fellow who brings him his “cider.”  Locke, ever the consummate rogue, decides that the best way to gain an introduction is to therefore find the cider guy, beat him up, and take his clothes and his cider.

This is accomplished easily, and with items in hand, the player rushes off to talk to the old man.  Apparently unconcerned about the sudden change in his cider guy’s appearance, the old man happily informs you that there is a secret passage leading to the mansion hidden in his basement.  To access it, simply give his grandson the password.

This is when it happens.

The old man… doesn’t remember the password.  Instead, you have to go downstairs, talk to the grandson, and guess from three presented options as to what is the right one.  Get it right, and he opens the door.  Get it wrong, and he somehow renders you unconscious, steals your disguise, and ejects you into the streets (he’s a tough little kid).

It sounds simple enough, but what has always bugged me about this was that I felt like I was missing some secret piece of information that would make this entire event seem less arbitrary than it did.  No one in town provides any hint as to what the password could be, and the player has zero knowledge to assist them, basically creating a situation where they have a 1 in 3 chance of getting it correct on sheer luck.  Sure, the penalty for getting it wrong isn’t large – just some repeated trekking back through town – but the idea of pure guesswork being the only criteria didn’t sit well with me.

Younger me, back in the original days of playing through the game, assumed that I made the mistake; I didn’t talk to the right NPC, I missed some clue earlier… any number of different ideas went through my head.  As I got older, and my playthroughs of the game increased in number, I began to suspect that this was actually the result of an odd translation error; that the key piece of information had been Ted Woolsey’d into obscurity.

On my current playthrough, though, once again coming to the same moment, I decided to do a little additional research to see if there was some explanation for it.  After some in-depth internet research, combing through FAQs and fanpages and the like, it turns out that, no, I wasn’t missing anything.  When all is said and done, this is just an example of bad game design, pure and simple.  Creating a situation where the player has absolutely nothing on their side other than random chance is sloppy, pure and simple.

My suspicion is that this sequence is the result of yet another bug in this notoriously buggy game; that someone just never got around to finalizing the puzzle sequence, or putting out the correct clues needed to get through without guesswork.  This is, as I say, pure suspicion, but it seems the most logical reason to have such an odd piece of gameplay thrust in for no apparent reason.  Someday, perhaps, I will find one of the designers, get a few drinks in him, and find out the truth.

Someday…