How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

Final Fantasy VI is a great game. That’s not a controversial thing to say at this point. It enjoys almost universal praise and often comes out on top, beating out the RPG juggernaut that is Final Fantasy VII in many “Greatest X of All Time” lists. Despite its 16-bit limitations, FFVI manages to accomplish in storytelling, themes, and characterization what some films today can only dream of. If you ask any fan of the game what the standout moment of the story is, you may get an odd “Kefka vs. General Leo” here, or a “Sabin suplexing a train!” there, but far and away, the most popular, game-defining, number-one beloved scene is the opera.

But why?

In relation to the rest of the game, the opera is a blip on the radar. It’s an unrelated segue that links two major plot points. Any writer could have snipped this portion out and written around it, and the story would have progressed exactly the same way without any plot lost. In fact despite the heavy romantic themes of “Maria and Draco,” none of the characters involved have any emotional investment in the opera at all, and your party’s role (pun only mostly intended) in it is solely based on manipulating a character that they haven’t even met yet. So why did the opera make the cut? Why do so many fans point to it as their favorite part of FFVI’s story? What is the purpose of this sequence at all? To find that out, we have to take a few steps back.

Before Celes Chere masquerades as Maria in the opera “Maria and Draco,” she is found by the treasure hunter, Locke Cole, chained up in a basement in the occupied town of South Figaro. We learn that she is a general in the Gestahlian Empire and has recently been sentenced to execution. We’re not quite sure why, but it may have something to do with her objection to a preemptive act of war on the neutral kingdom of Doma. Then, just like every other character we’ve met thus far, we’re given a short summary of Celes and the option to name her.

The English translation of Celes’s text describes her as a “Product of genetic engineering, battle-hardened Magitek Knight, with a spirit as pure as snow…” which seems to point to an air of innocence about her. Though, the fact that we later find out that Celes led an assault on the city of Maranda contradicts the narrative. The real meat and potatoes to this scene is actually in the original Japanese text, which describes Celes as “Artificially built by the Empire, and specially trained, born a warrior, a Shogun who has fought many battles, and yet, beneath the mask of her rank, she is nobody…”

While it’s easy to see how the English translator could mix up “emptiness” and “uncorruptedness,”- after all, words like “pristine” and “immaculate” teeter on the line between both, the descriptions imply very different things. The English translation would lead you to believe that Celes is a noble character, but a victim of circumstance who would be a saint if not for the fact that she’s a general. The Japanese text implies that Celes’s only identity is the rank that she carries. The second detail that interests me about Celes’s introduction is the music that accompanies it. Every character, save Celes and the primary protagonist, Terra, have their theme songs playing when they are introduced. Thematically, the song that plays over Terra’s introduction, “Awakening,” makes sense because at the time, she suffers from amnesia. She doesn’t know who she is, and the music plays with that idea. Even so, there is a leitmotif of Terra’s theme worked into “Awakening” that conjures ideas of identity obscured just below the surface. For Celes, the song that introduces her is “Under Martial Law.” This same song also plays in any Empire-occupied town in the game, and suggests that Celes seems to be “occupied” by the empire herself.  Celes currently identifies with the empire, but doesn’t “earn” her true theme until we meet the “real” Celes, later.

It’s interesting to note that Celes has an artificial presence to her. Not that she is purposefully misleading the player or the other characters, but that she constantly proclaims herself to be something that the narrative demonstrates she isn’t. She protests that she is a general and not an “opera floozy” or a “love-starved twit,” but she eventually becomes both, an opera star and the lover of Locke. Additionally, everything about Celes is manufactured. Her magical abilities, which Terra has naturally developed, are the result of an infusion as a baby. Her special skill, Runic, lets Celes absorb the abilities of others. The emptiness inside Celes is so all-consuming that everything about her, from her misconceptions as to who she is, to the way she has trained herself in battle, to the ease that she becomes the opera singer, Maria, all suggest that she not only has no idea how to exist without her title as general, but also actively draws from everything around her to discover how she should relate to the world.

In the story of “Maria and Draco,” the titular characters are lovers residing in the Western Kingdom. The West is defeated during a war, and the spoils for Ralse, Prince of the East, include Maria’s hand in marriage. Ralse keeps Maria atop his castle where she pines for Draco. Eventually, Draco arrives to stop the wedding and defeats Ralse in a duel to save Maria. The climax of the play showcases Maria’s solo and dance sequence with a phantasmal Draco before she tosses a bouquet, a symbol of her love, from the balcony of the castle. During this scene, in which Celes, stands in for Maria, we finally hear Celes’s theme play for the first time. She has shed her life as a general and has now, under the guise of Maria, begun to find herself. It’s as if the game held off on her song before we got to see the “real” Celes.

But as I said, on its face, the scene means nothing. The importance of the opera becomes clear only after this point when we know how Celes sees herself.

A few gameplay hours after the opera, the world ends. And not hyperbolically, either. The villain causes an apocalypse that kills most of the population of the world. Celes wakes up on a desert island in the southeasternmost point on the map with her surrogate grandfather, Cid. As far as they know, they are the only two remaining living humans on the planet. Even the monsters outside the small hut in which Cid has taken refuge succumb to death without any input from the player just after they are encountered.

Shortly thereafter, Cid dies, leaving Celes alone, and the importance of the opera comes to light. Celes resolves to kill herself (despite what the English translation says. Nintendo actively censored any references to death.), and heads to the cliffs to the north. At this moment, her theme plays. The same song that played during the opera. Celes pauses, thinks to herself, makes her way to the cliffs and throws herself to the mercy of the ocean. It is almost exactly the same sequence of movements as the opera.

“Maria and Draco” is the way Celes learns to cope with the world after the apocalypse. Celes begins her story as a blank slate, but uses the emptiness left by the stripping of her title and identity to forge a way to survive in the world by absorbing from those around her. By becoming Maria, Celes adapts the fictionalization of the opera to her own life and converts it into a survival mechanism. This also helps her discover herself and gain the ambition to fix the broken, empty world by applying what she has learned.

EDIT: Since writing this article, I’ve come to find that the name of the solo Celes sings in “Maria and Draco,” Aria di Mezzo Carattere,” translates to “The aria of the half-character.” Apparently I’m on to something.

FFVI Japanese translation by Sky Render: http://sky_render.tripod.com/ff6script.txt