Final Fantasy VI Advance is one of those RPGs that just sticks with you. You start off with Terra, this mysterious girl with amnesia, and before long you're thrown into a rebellion against an empire that's basically steamrolling the world with magic-powered machines. The cast is wild—a thief with a heart of gold, a king pretending to be a gambler, even a yeti who joins your party if you feed him the right food.

The Esper system is where things get really interesting. Instead of fixed classes, you equip these magical beings to learn spells and boost stats, so you can tweak characters however you want. I spent way too much time grinding to teach Celes Ultima, but it was worth it when she started melting bosses.

And the music? Uematsu’s soundtrack is unreal—you’ll catch yourself humming the opera scene or the overworld theme days later. The GBA version adds some extra dungeons and tweaks, though the sound quality isn’t quite as crisp as the SNES original. Still, if you’ve never played VI, this is a solid way to experience one of the best stories in the series.