Graphics for the original North American release were edited to cover up minor instances of nudity.

The original North American localization and release of Final Fantasy VI by Square for the Super Nintendo featured several changes from the original Japanese version. The most obvious of these is the change of the game's title from Final Fantasy VI to Final Fantasy III; because the previous installment, Final Fantasy V, wasn't localized in North America at the time, Final Fantasy VI was distributed as Final Fantasy III to maintain naming continuity, as they did with Final Fantasy IV. Unlike Final Fantasy IV (which was first released in North America as Final Fantasy II), there are no major changes to gameplay, though certain editorial adjustments exist in the English script. In a January 1995 interview with Super POWER magazine, translator Ted Woolsey explained that "there's a certain level of playfulness and ... sexuality in Japanese games that just doesn't exist here [in the USA], basically because of Nintendo of America's rules and guidelines".^[53] Consequently, objectional graphics (e.g., nudity) were censored and building signs in towns were changed as well as religious allusions. (e.g., the spell Holy was renamed Pearl).

Final Fantasy III North American Super NES box art.

The localization also featured changes to several names, though some of these — in the case of characters — were necessitated by technical restrictions of only six letters per name (e.g. "Stragus" was shortened to "Strago").^[54] Other changes were made for the game to meet Nintendo's aforementioned content guidelines (which Nintendo of America did to most games before the founding of the ESRB and its rating system)^[55] and simply due to differences between Asian and North American cultures. For example, Terra's Japanese name, Tina, sounds exotic to Japanese people, but is a common anglophone name.^[54] Finally, dialogue text files had to be shortened due to the limited data storage space available on the game cartridge's read-only memory.^[54] As a result, additional changes were rendered to dialogue in order to compress it into the available space.^[56] This translation was done in only 30 days by Woolsey alone.^[57]

The PlayStation re-release featured only minor changes to the English localization. The title of the game was reverted back to Final Fantasy VI from Final Fantasy III, to unify the numbering scheme of the series in North America and Japan with the earlier release of Final Fantasy VII. A few item and character names were adjusted, as in the expansion of "Fenix Down" to "Phoenix Down." Unlike the PlayStation re-release of Final Fantasy IV included in the Final Fantasy Chronicles compilation, the script was left essentially unchanged. Finally, while many fans continued to refer to the first "world" as the "World Of Balance" and the destroyed world as the "World Of Ruin", Square had begun to refer to the destruction event (that turns the Balance World to the Ruin World) as the "cataclysm" event, and in the bestiary unlockable, the game sorts the monsters as "Pre-C" (monsters that appear before the cataclysm) and Post-C (those that appear afterwards). This would continue throughout future translations, with the word being used more frequently to refer to the "world ending".

The Game Boy Advance re-release featured a new translation by a different translator, Tom Slattery.^[58] This translation preserved most of the character names, location names, and terminology from the Woolsey translation, but changed item and spell names to match the conventions used in more recent titles in the series. The revised script preserved certain quirky lines from the original while changing or editing others, and cleared up certain points of confusion in the original translation.^[59]