Every Final Fantasy VI Character, Ranked

Final Fantasy VI hands you fourteen playable characters and never once tells you which of them is worth building. There is no fixed hero, no obvious lead — just a cast that keeps growing until you are staring at a party menu with more faces than slots. Here is that whole roster of Final Fantasy VI characters, ranked, with the one piece of information the game buries: almost every one of them can learn every spell, so the ranking is not about magic at all.

Which means the real question is not who casts the biggest Ultima. It is what each character does that no one else can — and, quietly, which of them the game spends its best writing on. Those turn out to be two different lists.

How the Ranking Actually Works

Magic is the great equalizer. Every Esper you equip does two jobs at once — it teaches its spells, and it decides how much each stat climbs when that character levels. Learn every Esper's magic and everyone but two people ends up able to cast the entire spell list, Ultima included. So the endgame caster you picture is not a character. It is whoever you handed the right magicite.

That leaves the real differences somewhere the game never points to: the command each character brings to the menu, and the ceiling their gear can reach. Terra and Celes get a head start — they learn a set list of spells just by leveling, no Esper required, and Terra walks in already knowing Cure and Fire. Everyone else waits on magicite. The two who can never learn magic at all, Umaro and Gogo, are the reason the bottom of this list exists.

The physical ceiling is a single combination, and it is the same for the whole top tier. The Genji Glove lets a character hold two weapons, so one attack swings twice. The Master's Scroll turns one attack into four. Stack both and a single turn becomes eight hits — the most damage the game can produce in one action, once you have fed that character Strength on the way up. What gates it is not a stat. It is weapon selection: only characters who can equip a wide range of weapons reach it, and that is most of what separates the top of the list from the middle.

The modern version also changed the math. The old trick that let you make a boss vanish and then delete it in one cast is gone, and abilities that used to misfire — Sketch, the sword techniques — behave now. This is the cleanest the game has ever run, so characters who just stand up and hit hard finally get full credit. Four things decide where everyone lands: the command, how their best Esper pairing carries into endgame stats, the weapon and relic ceiling they reach, and the one job they do that you cannot get anywhere else.

Read against that table, the cast sorts into four tiers by combat value, walked in turn below.

Final Fantasy VI, ranked by combat value.

The S Tier — The Five Who Break the Game

These five reach the ceiling. They share one trait — a wide weapon selection — and each brings a command that turns a good fighter into a problem for the game's math.

Terra Branford is where most players start and where a lot of them stay. Morph briefly doubles her damage and defense, and because she has the weapon range for the eight-hit setup, she is the one character who can double an already-maxed physical turn — eight hits of 9999 without much coaxing. She leaves the party after the world breaks and rejoins at Mobliz; go and get her.

Locke Cole is the one most Japanese rankings put first, and the reasoning holds up. Steal is the only dependable way to pull items off an enemy, which points him at his weapon rather than magic — and his weapon is the point. The Valiant Knife ignores defense outright and hits harder the lower his health drops; hand him the Atma Weapon instead and he is the textbook eight-hit carry. He also has the highest Speed in the cast, so he acts first and steals before anything dies.

Edgar Roni Figaro carries the early and middle of the game single-handed. Tools — the Auto Crossbow, the Drill, the Chainsaw — deal strong, consistent damage with no MP and no charge time, which is exactly what you want before magic comes online. He keeps a broad weapon selection for the eight-hit setup later, so he never falls off; he just stops being the only answer. He is waiting in Figaro Castle almost from the start.

Sabin Rene Figaro is Edgar's runaway twin and the purest damage button in the cast. Blitz costs no MP, and his best techniques hit for non-elemental damage that most defenses cannot reduce — Bum Rush reaches the cap for free, and the eight-hit stack pushes him past it. The one knock is a fumbled input wasting the turn. He joins on Mt. Kolts.

Celes Chere closes the tier and doubles as its safety net. She is the second character who learns magic on her own, so she is never stranded without an Esper, and her physical ceiling matches Terra's. Runic is why she earns a slot even in a fight she cannot out-damage: it swallows the next enemy spell whole, turning a boss's big cast into her own MP. Against anything that leans on magic, she is a wall.

The thing worth noticing is what these five share, because it is not a damage stat. It is the weapon breadth that unlocks the eight-hit turn. That is the real gate on the top tier — not who hits hardest bare-handed, but who can hold the gear that matters.

The A Tier — Utility and Specialists

These four solve problems. None of them tops the damage charts, and it does not matter, because each one does a single thing nothing else in the cast can.

Mog earns his place on one relic. The Moogle Charm shuts off random encounters entirely, and he is the only character who can wear it. That reads like a convenience until every step through the ruined world is silent — it changes how the back half of the game feels to play. His Dance layers terrain effects on top, but the Charm is the reason he is here. He is in Narshe.

Setzer Gabbiani gambles for a living and it shows in his command. Slot spins three reels for unblockable results scaled off his Magic stat, and his Fixed Dice ignore defense the way the Valiant Knife does, pairing cleanly with the eight-hit stack. The catch is real: leave Slot to auto-fight and it can roll Joker's Death, which is exactly what it sounds like — an instant loss. Play him hands-on. He joins with his airship, the Blackjack, and comes back at Darill's Tomb.

Gau borrows other people's power. Rage lets him take a defeated enemy's entire skill set, and some of what he can borrow is properly broken. The cost is the setup: you collect Rages by Leaping into the wild on the Veldt to fight things, and once a Rage is running you do not get to steer him. Japanese guides file him under "for experienced players," and that is fair — huge upside, real homework. He lives on the Veldt.

Shadow throws things for a living, and Throw is one of the highest single-hit commands in the game — hurl the right item and it deletes a boss. His dog, Interceptor, guards the party at random on top of that. But he comes with the sharpest edge in the roster: leave him behind on the Floating Continent and he is gone for good, and if he ever dies, Throw leaves the game with him. That last part is the one that's easy to overlook — losing Shadow also caps Gogo forever, because Gogo can only copy commands that still exist. Keep him alive.

Four characters, four problems solved: encounters off, unblockable damage, borrowed movesets, delete-a-boss throws. That is what an A tier looks like when the S tier already owns raw output.

The B Tier — Strong, With a Catch

Strong, once you meet a condition. That is the whole tier. Each of these three is good, and each asks you for something first.

Cyan Garamonde swings the most dramatic weapon in the game and makes you wait for it. SwdTech is a menu of sword techniques, several of them devastating — multi-hit finishers, defense-piercing cuts — but every one makes you sit through a charge before it lands, which is why he reads as slow next to a free Blitz. The modern version fixed the bugs that used to swallow his best techniques, so the wait pays off now. He is at Doma first, then Mt. Zozo.

Strago Magus casts the enemy's own magic back at them. Lore is Final Fantasy VI's blue magic — spells you learn by surviving the attack that teaches them, some of them hitting very hard. The catch is MP: Lore is expensive, so he is a poor pick for a long dungeon even when he wins a single fight outright, and filling his list means hunting specific monsters, the same chore Gau asks for. He is in Thamasa.

Relm Arrowny has the highest raw Magic stat in the entire cast — as a straight caster she out-nukes nearly everyone. The catch is her own command: Sketch is unreliable and rarely worth the turn, so you run her as a mage and quietly ignore her gimmick. Give her the brush built for her and she is a top-class caster; without it, Terra and Celes are the steadier hands. She joins at Thamasa too.

None of the three is weak. They are B because the S tier just shows up and works, while these three ask for setup first — a charge bar, an MP economy, the right piece of gear.

The C Tier — The Curiosities

Two recruits break the rules. Both are optional, both live in the ruined world, and both trade an entire growth system for one spectacular trick.

Umaro is a Yeti with the highest HP and Strength in the cast and no command list at all — you cannot tell him what to do. His weapon and armor are bolted on and cannot be changed; everything you steer comes from two relics. One gives him Character Toss, where he grabs an ally and throws them at an enemy for more than a maxed physical hit. The other gives him Snowstorm , an ice hit across the whole enemy line. Kitted properly he posts the single biggest numbers in the game; equipped with nothing he is a warm body. He is in the Yeti's Cave near Narshe, and only after the world breaks.

Gogo is the most interesting character in the game and one of the two weakest at the same time. Mimic repeats whatever the ally before them just did — an Esper summon, a double-cast, anything — for free, and you can also hand Gogo up to three other characters' commands and build a custom slot. Here is the trap: Gogo cannot equip Espers, so they never take a stat-boost level and their magic never grows past what the party already knew when you found them. Japanese players say it plainly — Gogo would be top-tier if they could take magicite bonuses. They cannot, so they stay frozen. Find them at the end of the Zone Eater's belly.

C tier is a placement, not an insult. Both of these do something no S-tier character can touch — Umaro throwing a teammate for more than a capped physical, Gogo mirroring your best caster for free. They just pay for it by sitting out the system that scales everyone else.

The Other Ranking — By Writing

Now flip the whole list. Rank these fourteen by how well they are written instead of how hard they hit, and it comes apart almost completely — the characters you bench for being weak turn out to be the ones with the most to say.

Terra carries the emotional spine. A weapon built by an empire, learning slowly and painfully what it is to love and belong, she is the closest thing a game with no lead has to a heart — and her stretch at Mobliz in the ruined world is where that lands. Celes is right behind her, holding up the entire second half; the opera scene and the cliff on the solitary island are the two beats nobody forgets.

The characters you bench for being weak are usually the ones with the most to say. — the shape of every Final Fantasy VI roster argument

Then the inversion really shows. Shadow, a mid-tier fighter you might never build, is the best-drawn character in the cast — his dreams, his past, the dog that will not leave. Cyan, a B-tier swordsman most players retire early, carries the single most affecting storyline in the game: the loss at Doma and the letters that follow it. Edgar's coin-flip for the throne, giving his brother the freedom to run, is the beat Japanese fans point to first. Even Sabin suplexing a train sits inside real love between two brothers.

And Kefka, who never joins your party, is why all of it matters — an antagonist who actually wins, who wipes the world clean at the halfway mark and rules the wreckage. Nothing else in the story lands without him.

Set the two rankings beside each other and the point makes itself. Umaro and Gogo, the endgame curiosities, have almost nothing to say. Shadow and Cyan, the fighters you would cut first, say the most. The only names that top both lists are Terra and Locke — the rare pair who fight at the ceiling and carry a story worth the screen time.

The same fourteen, ranked by writing instead of combat. Kefka is not playable, but the story is his.

Once you know the roster splits this way, the next thing worth learning is the layer underneath it — which Esper you pair with whom, because that is what decides whether your carry reaches the eight-hit ceiling or stalls two tiers short. And the place all of this stops being theory is the endgame: Kefka's Tower and the bonus gauntlet past it, where a party built on the wrong four characters simply runs out of turns. Build for that, and the list above stops being an argument and starts being a plan.

Common Questions

Who is the best character in Final Fantasy VI?

Locke, with Terra half a step behind. Locke gets Steal, the ignore-defense Valiant Knife, and the highest Speed in the cast, so he acts first and hits through armor; Terra stays close because Morph doubles an already-maxed physical turn. It matters less than it sounds, though - because almost every Final Fantasy VI character can learn every spell through Espers, you can build a favorite into a monster too. Pick who you like, then feed them the right magicite.

Can you miss any characters in FF6?

Yes, three ways. Umaro and Gogo are both optional, easy to finish the game without recruiting - Umaro is in a cave near Narshe, and Gogo is hidden at the end of the Zone Eater's belly. Shadow is the dangerous one: if you don't wait for him on the Floating Continent, he is lost for good, and losing him also deletes his Throw command from the game - which quietly caps Gogo, since Gogo can only copy commands that still exist. Wait the extra few seconds for Shadow.

Does it matter which characters I level up?

It matters for everyone except Umaro and Gogo. Leveling is not just a bigger number here - the Esper equipped when a character levels decides how much each stat grows. So who you level, and with which magicite, shapes them more than the level itself. The one rule: match the Esper's stat boost to the stat that character's command runs on - Strength for physical carries like Locke and Sabin, Magic for casters and for Setzer's Slot.

How many playable characters are in Final Fantasy VI?

Fourteen permanent playable characters - the largest cast in any mainline Final Fantasy. Two of them, Umaro and Gogo, are optional and can be missed entirely, so plenty of first playthroughs finish with twelve.