3-16 "The Prelude", this game's version of that recurring classic Final Fantasy track, plays here. The Beginner's House is full of scholars who discuss game mechanics. If you're only interested in the plot and don't really care how the game works, feel free to skip to the next section.

On the other hand, if you're here for Japanese usage examples, you might find some interesting ones here, though a number of the tutorial lines are more sentence fragments than strictly proper grammar.

とはいえ (to wa ie) gave me problems at first, but I finally found it in a native Japanese dictionary, and it just links two phrases with contrast, like "however", etc.

One scholar gives help on save points, but it's the same text as before, so I won't repeat it.

Accessories are more varied than in many games. Those that protect against status effects are practically a given, but relatively few games will give you options that provide multiple positive status effects, add useful passive abilities, or outright modify the command list.

Convenient, but do keep in mind that extra effects may make numerically weaker equipment preferable.

Useful when you want to let another character act first, or just save this one's turn for a more appropriate time.

Many healing spells can also target all allies. However, not every spell allows you to choose between a single target and a group, and multitargeting typically halves the spell's power... but except for a few oddball spells like Flare Star, the effect is never reduced by more than half, regardless of the number of targets.

Defending affects physical damage only, and naturally does nothing against defense-ignoring attacks.

Sorry, but this has nothing to do with running, though being surrounded does also complicate running away (you can't until one side is cleared of all enemies). The concept here is that all characters default to the front row when surrounded (though they can somehow manually shift into the back row that shouldn't exist), and they additionally take more (+50%) damage if hit in the back. Attacks from the back will also never miss (unless a special condition such as 'transparent' status prevents it), but only physical attacks are affected. The flip side is that player characters get the same benefits when attacking enemies from behind, though the enemy must actually be facing the wrong way, not merely drawn that way because of 'confusion' status or something similar.

Only physical attacks are affected, and some weapons and attacks ignore the range penalty. Rows are reversed when attacked from behind (since the left row, normally the front, is in the back of the formation, and vice versa), and all characters begin in the front row when surrounded (though, oddly enough, you can still manually switch them to the back row, and the damage modifiers take effect even though no change is visible).

Strictly speaking, 'protect' and 'shell' actually reduce damage of the corresponding type rather than affecting defense in any way, while 'haste' and 'slow' modify wait time between turns without modifying agility, but that's getting into technicalities.

A glitch in 'transparent' status makes it especially treacherous by causing instant-death magic to ignore immunity. It's only supposed to remove any chance to evade the spells themselves (as a tradeoff for absolute evasion of physical attacks), not negate any protection against their effects.

And so Phoenix Tails and the Raise spell become supreme offensive weapons against certain opponents. The poor things don't even get a chance to evade.

Naturally, 'reraise' works nicely against the occasional devastating attack, especially one specific boss much later on.

Infrequent references to prime traits appear later on, so it's nice to know what they mean.

Not counting Stragus's character class in the Japanese version, FF6 only rarely refers to learnable enemy skills as Blue Magic, though do note the blue casting aura when a player character uses them. Possibly the minimal use of "blue" results from organizing the standard spells by practical effect type (recovery, attack, or indirect) instead of the classic categories of White Magic (which can include certain offensive spells if they fit the theme) and Black Magic (which rarely consists only of purely offensive spells).

ぶんしん (bunshin), another of those difficult-to-translate words, seems to refer to something split off from a person (or creature) that acts on their behalf, but isn't actually that person. Bunshin is used to refer to a variety of things from the assortment of pseudo-self-replications in the Naruto series that range from harmless illusion to solid and almost as dangerous as the real person, to minions such as Kagura and Hakudoushi spawned from Naraku in Inuyasha that have their own personalities and desires and may even turn against their creator, so it's difficult to pin down the meaning. The usage here seems most closely identified with the ninja trick of making illusory decoys.

It's a low chance, but they're interesting to see, and the damage is hard to complain about (not counting the two that inflict instant death instead). The general concept would develop into something that later games in the series play around with more extensively and translate as "Limit Break" or "Overdrive".

This isn't a case of poor translation, but rather an adaptation to fit the fact that you can't rename these skills in the NA version.

Or, as an old Everything I Need To Know I Learned From Final Fantasy list puts it, "Bolt 3 and Reflect is a good strategy, but not in that order."