Sabin Train Suplex

About

The Sabin Train Suplex refers to a scene in the 1994 role-playing game Final Fantasy VI for the Super Nintendo console in which the character Sabin performs a suplex professional wrestling move on an enemy boss called the Phantom Train. The scene gained notoriety for an absurd battle animation showing the monk character picking up the entire train to perform the suplex.

Origin

Final Fantasy VI^[1] was released in Japan on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in April 1994, followed by a North-American release in October of the same year. In the game, the player encounters the Phantom Train,^[2] a dungeon and boss fight with a sentient train locomotive. During the fight, in which the party is running away from the still moving train, the monk Sabin^[4] is able to perform his move “Suplex” (renamed “Meteor Strike”^[3] in later versions) on the locomotive, lifting the entire train up into the air and slamming it into the ground. The fact that Sabin is able to perform this move on the train can be considered an oddity within the game,^[10] as most other large enemies and bosses are immune to the attack.

Spread

On February 12th, 2008, YouTuber MoogleBoss uploaded a video^[8] of the boss fight in which Sabin defeats the train with a single suplex (shown above), which managed to gather nearly 500,000 views in the following 6 years. On July 7th, 2011, web artist Zac Gorman posted a comic^[5] on his art blog showing Sabin preparing to suplex the Phantom Train accompanied by the caption “I’m Motherfuckin’ Sabin” (shown below), a popular term used by fans of the monk character. As of March 2014, the post managed to gain over 1,700 notes.

On July 29th, 2013, DeviantArt user EiffelArt uploaded an illustration of Sabin lifting up the Phantom Train (shown below, left),^[6] which managed to get over 10,000 views and 750 in eight months. On October 23rd, Redditor Jin_Winspear uploaded an image to the r/gaming^[7] subreddit showing Sabin performing the suplex on the Phantom Train (shown below, right), which gathered upwards of 3,000 upvotes in five months. On November 9th, 2013, Tumblr user 1986tigerlion^[9] posted an image showing several pieces related to the Suplex, two being Zac Gorman’s comic and Jin_Winspear’s image, which managed to gather nearly 12,000 notes within the first three months after posting.