Every character in Final Fantasy VI gets exactly one verb of their own. Sabin punches, Edgar builds, Strago studies, Setzer gambles — and the game files each of these FF6 commands under a single line in the Skills menu, one per hero that nobody else can touch. Fight, Magic, and Item belong to everyone. That top slot does not. It's the one place the roster is actually different from itself.
The strange part is what happens later. Espers hand out spells, and by the endgame every one of the fourteen can learn the same list — teach them all Ultima and they collapse into fourteen identical mages. So the commands aren't flavor. They're the last thing keeping the cast distinct before the magic system erases the differences. Here's every character's verb, what it actually does, and which ones quietly break the game.
| Character | Command | The verb, in one line |
|---|---|---|
| Terra | Trance | Morphs into an Esper-blooded form for doubled magic. |
| Locke | Steal / Mug | Takes an item; the Brigand's Glove makes it steal-and-hit. |
| Edgar | Tools | Eight machines: instant, MP-free, unblockable. |
| Sabin | Blitz | Fighting-game inputs for always-hit techniques. |
| Cyan | Bushido | Charge a gauge 1–8; higher charge, stronger cut. |
| Celes | Runic | Sheathes the sword to swallow the next spell. |
| Shadow | Throw | Turns weapons and scrolls into ammunition. |
| Gau | Rage | Becomes a monster he's leapt onto on the Veldt. |
| Setzer | Slot | Spins reels; the combo decides the effect. |
| Strago | Lore | Blue magic — learns spells by watching them. |
| Relm | Sketch / Control | Copies or seizes an enemy's actions. |
| Mog | Dance | Terrain-locked dances he can't steer. |
| Gogo | Mimic | Repeats the last ally's action for free. |
| Umaro | — | Permanent Berserk; relics pick his attacks. |
Commands you have to earn — Blitz and Bushido
Sabin fights like an arcade cabinet. His Blitz command wants a directional combo — down, down-left, left for Aura Cannon , a nine-press sweep of the pad for Phantom Rush — and a clean input unleashes the technique while a fumbled one wastes the turn doing nothing. Every Blitz always connects and ignores the back-row penalty, so Sabin can stand at the back, take half damage on defense, and still throw full-power fists.
The part most players never notice: Sabin looks like a bruiser, but his best Blitzes run on Magic, not Strength. Rising Phoenix , Razor Gale, Aura Cannon, and the level-70 Phantom Rush all scale off his Magic stat. Raging Fist and Meteor Strike ignore physical defense; Phantom Rush ignores magic defense. Build Sabin like a fighter and you're feeding the wrong number — the monk with the pixel-art suplex is secretly a caster.
Cyan is the opposite discipline. His Bushido — SwdTech in the original release — charges a gauge from one to eight, and the longer you let it climb, the higher the technique that fires: a plain cut at one, a four-hit Quadra Slam at four, a group-clearing Cleave at eight. The gauge runs on real time and ignores Haste and Slow completely, which is where the trouble starts. In the original, the whole battle holds its breath while Cyan winds up — everyone else just stands there. That wait is the single reason so many parties left him on the bench. Modern versions and the Pixel Remaster fixed it: you pick the level and Cyan charges in the background while the rest of the team keeps acting. Same swordsman, none of the tax.
Violence out of the inventory — Tools and Throw
Edgar opens a toolbox. His Tools are eight machines he uses like items — instant, free of MP, no input to fumble, unblockable, and unbothered by the back row. You don't earn them with levels; you buy most of them at Figaro Castle, which means Edgar's power scales with your wallet.
And the toolbox is loaded. AutoCrossbow rakes every enemy; Bio Blaster poisons the screen; Flash blinds it. Then it gets silly. Drill deals defense-ignoring damage to a single target, full stop. Chainsaw is a coin flip that lands defense-ignoring damage about three times in four and instantly kills the target the rest of the time — undead included. Air Anchor costs almost nothing, sticks to anything that isn't immune to death, and sets that target to self-destruct on its next move: a guaranteed kill on a short fuse. Debilitator stamps an elemental weakness onto a boss that never had one, so your best spell suddenly lands for extra. Edgar is the mechanic-king of Figaro, and his whole kit is a toolbox — the fantasy and the math are the same thing.
Chainsaw and Air Anchor don't care about a boss's HP bar. Chainsaw's instant-death mode ignores it entirely, and Air Anchor's self-destruct timer is a promise, not a chance. A surprising number of the game's set-piece fights fold to a random Edgar without ever losing a fair damage race.
Shadow throws things. His Throw turns a weapon or a special item into ammunition, and the damage rides on whatever he throws — hand him a stronger blade and it hits harder on the way out. It's the safest damage in the game: ranged, back-row-friendly, and it always connects. A Shuriken or Fuma Shuriken hits the 9999 cap even at Shadow's baseline Strength, and Skeans are elemental area attacks that lean on his Magic instead. The catch is simple — Throw eats the item. It's power you spend, not power you keep, which makes Shadow a burst of violence you have to keep restocking.
Borrowing the monster's power — Rage, Dance, and Sketch
These three copy the enemy. Gau, Mog, and Relm all fight by borrowing a monster's power, and all three charge the same price: you hand the controls to a dice roll.
Gau's is the deep one. He learns a Rage by using Leap out on the Veldt — he jumps onto a monster and wanders back a few fights later knowing its moves. There are 252 of them to collect, and the catch is brutal: the Veldt only ever spawns monsters you've already fought, so anything you walked past before the world changed is gone for good . Once you fire a Rage, Gau goes feral — he acts on his own, repeats the move, and inherits the monster's elemental weaknesses, its resistances, its status immunities, even its buffs. And none of it costs MP. That's the exploit the whole community runs on: find a monster that knows Meteor, and Gau throws free Meteors forever, no MP relic required. You give up the driver's seat and get a bottomless spellbook in return.
Mog's Dance is the gamble. He knows eight dances, each holding four moves, and once he starts he keeps dancing on his own until something knocks him out of it, firing a random one of the four every turn. The moves don't come up evenly either — the odds run six, six, three, and one out of sixteen, so the move you actually want is the rare one. Worse, dancing is tied to the ground he's standing on: on the terrain where a dance was learned it works every time, but on any other terrain it's a coin flip, and a failed dance is Mog tripping over his own feet and burning the turn. It's a lovely idea shackled to the floor.
Relm's Sketch is the one that doesn't work. She draws a monster and a phantom of it pops out to use one of that creature's two attacks, picked at random — and the damage scales off the monster's stats, not Relm's. That's the whole problem: Relm has the highest Magic stat of any character in the game, and Sketch throws it away to borrow some goblin's weak swing. It can miss, too, which wastes the turn outright against anything near her level. The Fake Mustache saves her by turning Sketch into Control, the half worth using — she seizes a non-boss enemy and picks its actions until she's knocked out or it gets hit. That's how you freeze a Brachiosaur and steal its Ribbon at your leisure, or hold a monster still so Strago can learn its Lore.
On the original US cartridge, a missed Sketch is the single most infamous bug in the series. The game still tries to draw the monster it failed to sketch, reads sprite data from the wrong place, and corrupts memory — flooding your inventory with rare items, garbling the screen, freezing the game, or wiping your save outright. It was patched out of later releases, but it's the reason some players refused to touch Relm at all. A command that borrows power so badly it can break the cartridge has a perfection all its own.
The specialists — Lore, Slot, Runic, and Mimic
Four verbs, four sharp ideas. The last four commands don't share a family. Each is a single clean concept, and two of them are among the best buttons in the game.
Strago's Lore is FF6's blue magic. He learns a spell by watching an enemy cast it — he doesn't even have to be hit, and he can pick a Lore up secondhand off Gau's Rage or Relm's Control. There are 24 to collect, and the ceiling is high: Grand Delta and Quasar deal non-elemental damage that ignores magic defense, Mighty Guard wraps the whole party in Protect and Shell in a single cast, and the situational tricks — the Level-based instant-kills, Roulette — win specific fights outright. Only one Lore, Force Field, can be missed , and it comes from a single fight in the final tower.
Setzer's Slot is the gambler made mechanical. Three reels spin, you stop them, and the combination decides everything from a wet firework to a full-screen wipe. Chocobop and 7-Flush clear the board; Mega Flare ignores defense; three BARs summon a random Esper. And then there's Joker Doom. Three 7s kills every enemy on the screen instantly, which erases most bosses that don't resist death — but two 7s and a BAR is the same instant death aimed at your own party, a guaranteed game over. The reels are rigged against you, too: the odds of lining up three 7s honestly are about ten in 255. Setzer's verb is a gamble, and the game is the house.
Only two Slot outcomes — Lagomorph and Chocobop — are guaranteed to be available at any moment; everything else depends on a hidden roll. On original hardware you can pause and unpause to line up the reels by sight, and an Echo Screen at the start of a fight nudges the internal counter so 7-7-7 becomes reachable on demand. A few bosses are coded to refuse three 7s outright — but not the party-killing version, so aim carefully.
Celes eats magic. Runic sheathes her sword and swallows the next spell anyone casts — enemy or ally — nullifying it completely and refunding its MP cost to her. Against a boss built around one big spell, that's the entire fight: you delete the spell and refuel Celes in the same motion. The cost is timing. She has to act before the spell lands to catch it, she needs a sword equipped, and she'll happily swallow your own healer's Cure if the turn order lines up wrong. It rewards knowing exactly what's coming.
Gogo closes the loop. Its Mimic repeats the previous ally's action for free — no MP, no items spent — which means a summon that's normally once-per-battle can fire twice, and your best turn can happen back-to-back. Gogo gets three more slots to fill with anyone's commands, so it can walk in carrying Tools, Blitz, and Steal at once. It's the clearest proof of the whole idea: strip a character down to nothing and hand it other people's verbs, and it becomes those characters. The commands are the identity.
So which verbs actually break the game?
Some verbs break the game. After all fourteen, the ranking sorts itself cleanly, and it sorts on one question: does the verb bypass the rules everyone else has to follow?
At the top are the three that ignore the game's cost systems. Tools is the best command in FF6 — instant, MP-free, unblockable, with defense-ignoring damage and two different instant-kills sitting in the toolbox. Rage is right behind it for the free, bottomless Meteor and 250-odd movesets it inherits. And Slot earns its place on Joker Doom alone: any command that can delete a boss outright is broken by definition, even when the reels fight you for it.
Below the top tier sits a strong group that wins fights without quite breaking them: Blitz for always-on, magic-scaling nukes; Lore for Grand Delta and Mighty Guard; Runic for turning a magic boss's best turn into your MP bar; Throw for safe 9999s; Mimic for doubling all of it. Then the situational verbs — Bushido, whose techniques are genuinely strong but gated behind that real-time charge; Control, useless as damage and priceless for stealing and Lore-farming; Steal, which becomes a fine attack once it's Mug. And at the bottom, the texture: Sketch, random and weak and historically a crash risk, and Dance, a good idea that trips over the floor.
The pattern underneath is simple. The commands that break the game skip a rule — no MP, no defense, no accuracy roll, or a flat instant-kill flag. The ones that stay texture hand control to a dice roll and scale off something other than the character holding them.
Which is the quiet tragedy of the whole system. By the endgame, Espers let all fourteen characters learn the same spells, and the efficient move is to teach everyone Ultima and cast it twice — at which point Sabin, Edgar, Strago, and Setzer are the same unit wearing different sprites. The commands are the last thing standing between this cast and that sameness. Sabin is only Sabin while he's still throwing a Phantom Rush. Build a party around the verbs while they still mean something, and take Edgar's toolbox and Gau's stolen Meteors into the Coliseum — that's where you find out which ones hold up once the wagers get real.
Common Questions
What's the best command in Final Fantasy VI?
Tools. It's instant, costs no MP, can't be blocked, ignores defense, and packs two instant-kills — Chainsaw's random execute and Air Anchor's guaranteed self-destruct timer. Gau's Rage is close behind for its free, MP-less Meteor and 250-plus inherited movesets, and Setzer's Slot outranks both in one specific way: Joker Doom kills every enemy on the screen at once, which ends most bosses that don't resist death. Everything else is strong or situational; those three break the rules.
Can Gogo use every character's command?
Nearly. Gogo has Mimic locked in and three open slots you fill with any commands you like — Tools, Blitz, Lore, Steal — with the right weapon for sword-based ones like Runic. It can't equip Espers, so its stats stay flat, but as a toolbox of borrowed verbs it's one of the most flexible characters in the game, and the clearest proof that in FF6 the commands are the characters.
Is it safe to use Relm's Sketch?
On the Pixel Remaster and every modern release, yes — the old bug is gone and Sketch just underperforms. On an original US Super Nintendo cartridge, no: a missed Sketch can corrupt your game, filling your inventory with junk, freezing the screen, or wiping your save. If you're playing the original, save before you sketch anything — or equip the Fake Mustache and use Control instead, which is the better half of her kit anyway.
Why does Cyan feel so slow?
His Bushido charges on a real-time gauge that Haste and Slow don't touch, and in the original the entire battle waits while it fills — everyone else stands frozen until Cyan swings. The techniques themselves are strong, especially the four-hit flurries and the group-clearing Cleave; the problem was always the wait. Modern versions and the Pixel Remaster let you choose the technique and charge it in the background, which turns Cyan from a liability into a solid attacker.