FFVI: The Power Within — Part I: I Hate April's Fools

May 16, 2026

Part I of an ongoing retrospective on Final Fantasy VI: The Power Within, covering April Fools hoax culture on the early internet gaming community and the specific hoax that directly inspired the fan game's creation.

April Fools hoaxes hit differently in the early internet era — no social media to instantly debunk things, no ratio of skeptical replies, no fact-check articles within the hour. If a trusted fansite posted something, you believed it. The GIA (Gaming Intelligence Agency) demonstrated this on April 1, 1999, with a convincing fake announcement of a Final Fantasy VIII sequel called Final Fantasy Gaiden, featuring Seifer as the main character alongside Fuujin and Raijin, complete with screenshots and an MPEG of a battle scene. The reveal the next day stung — but the GIA's credibility was what made it land.

The hoax that actually mattered to this story came a year later. On April 1, 2000, ffonline.com published a hoax article titled FFVI: The Shadow of Light, claiming a secret SNES-quality sequel to Final Fantasy VI had been discovered at the Tokyo Game Show — with Shadow as the main character, confirming the fan theory that Shadow is Relm's father, and featuring a new chef character named Brenn with cooking-based attacks. Screenshots were included. A reader named Timothy Collett wrote in to RPGamer's Q&A column recalling that he stumbled across it the day after April Fools with no warning and was "rather steamed the next day." An Italian Usenet thread and a Chinese fan site that preserved the full article both date the hoax to April 2000. The Dream Horizons FAQ places it in 1999, but the evidence — including a screenshot of the ffonline.com archive listing — places it in 2000.

A group of people saw the same hoax and decided to actually build it. They started hosted on The New Final Fantasy before moving to dreamhorizonsoftware.com as Dream Horizon Software. That project became Final Fantasy VI: The Power Within.