Hey, that’s not how you suplex a train!

Recently, video game developer Square Enix has been going back and giving the early installments of the Final Fantasy franchise a shiny new coat of paint, in the form of its Pixel Remaster rereleases. These aren’t full from-the-ground-up rebuilds like the lavish Final Fantasy VII Remake, but instead modest graphical upgrades to the first six Final Fantasy games, which also get some quality of life upgrades to their gameplay to make them more palatable to modern audiences.

But sprucing up an older title for rerelease always has preexisting fans wondering which bugs, glitches, and other possibly unintentional quirks will be retained as part of the game’s legacy, and which get sanded down and smoothed away. With the upcoming Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster, there’s one very big, very weird moment that Square Enix wants old-school gamers to know is still part of the game’s richly moving emotional experience.

Fear not, as martial artist Sabin (a.k.a. Mash in Final Fantasy VI’s Japanese release) still has the ability to pick up a train and suplex it, just like he did when the game first came out for the Super Famicom/Super NES back in 1994.

This was a pretty shocking discovery back in the day. Sure, Sabin and his companions fighting a train makes sense within the context of the game’s storyline, and this battle comes well after the player has gained the ability to suplex all sorts of smaller enemies. But with Final Fantasy VI coming out when the fighting game boom was in full force, the developers made the clever choice to tie Sabin’s special attacks to Street Fighter-like D-pad and button combinations. If you targeted an enemy but flubbed the motion/button inputs, a message would pop up informing you that Sabin’s attack missed. With the train being so much bigger than anything the player has faced with Sabin in the party up to that point, and, you know, a train, common sense would tell you that trying to suplex it would get you a you-missed message even with a perfect input. Those who were curious/crazy enough to try, though, were rewarded with Sabin indeed suplexing the sentient locomotive.

Despite being one of the greatest games ever made, Final Fantasy VI has a number of bugs in its initial release, so it’s never been 100-percent clear if the developers really wanted for Sabin to be able to suplex the train, or whether it was simply an oversight. Since the attack works on almost every foe in the game, it seems like the default for enemy programming is for it to be possible, but there are also monsters, like the flying ones seen in the video below, for which the suplex will always miss, and it’s possible that someone just forgot to change the train’s settings in the same way.

However, some Final Fantasy VI veterans have noticed one change to Sabin’s suplex skills. No, it’s not the restoring of “suplex” to “meteor strike,” as the attack was called in the Japanese release. It’s that the train is no longer flipped upside down as Sabin is slamming it back into the ground, like it was in the original version of the game.

Hopefully someone will fix that before Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster comes out on February 24, because without properly rotating it, a dude suplexing a train just looks plain silly.

Source: Twitter/@FinalFantasy via Hachima Kiko
Top image: YouTube/FINAL FANTASY
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