Confessing my issue with 2.0 & the flipside of balance

[Hapanpappa 5]

A sincere thank you to everyone who worked on this mod. It was among the first FF mods I ever played and in terms of consistent overall quality, it's still at the top years and dozens of mods later. It seems that integrity&balance is at the core of the design - to a fault. In a crusade to fix the magnificently broken, different gameplay elements are kept in check to a point where the mod lacks a sort of visceral excitement in many areas toward the lategame. It all appears very regulated, constricted and in some cases even underwhelming. To demonstrate what the hell I'm talking about...

• The cursed shield is a pretty interesting concept and promises something unique. Once it's all said and done though, it's just another shield; comparable to other lategame shields. I mean it's good, but considering the unique mechanic and the wait, just not that... exciting. The original game's version was broken but exciting as hell and quite... flavorsome with its power and mechanic, teaching ultima and all that. 
• Some of the iconic, flashy top moves of characters suffer from this problem. Bum rush is decent enough but rarely preferable to hitting with elemental claws or setting statuses with other blitzes - in fact, I found it almost never preferable to other actions, even with a vigor build. It's not quite as guilty of the meh-at-the-end-of-the-day syndrome as Tempest, though, which is essentially a glorified critical hit. In fact, now that it doesn't ignore defense, it's exactly the same as a critical hit - it does good damage to be sure, but again: it's underwhelming when you realize it's "just" that. I wish these moves did something more unique, cool or anything that made them stand out a bit more; you have to wait a long time to get them too. The mere possibility to crit with tempest's hits, or giving a status effect to bum rush also etc. would be enough for a unique twist. I understand why they're designed how they are (to not make other options obsolete & overall design philosophy outlined earlier) but I guess what it comes down to is that there aren't that many flashy, unique moves in this game compared to later installments with limit breaks and stuff, so you just kind of want something a bit more thrilling. 
• Endgame weapons are given to you at an even pace, scattered randomly around the dungeons. Not many stand out in the way they're acquired or found, except the aforementioned shield which ultimately falls flat & Apocillumina which has a meaningful choice attached, but it'd be cool if it had a sidequest of its own before getting the sword to give it more prestige. Now it's just "clear the phoenix cave&go take the sword" instead of the big sidequests attached to some ultimate weapons in other Fantasies; those usually end up being the most exhilarating sidequests as well. Anyways, Omega weapon used to be among the select few that stood out, requiring you to defeat the Ultima weapon before Atma would evolve to its full potential. Needless to say, I don't agree with removing that small bit of excitement from the game too. I was super disappointed when nothing happened when I beat the boss.
• Not as important but feeding into the same overall problem - standout overworld enemies don't seem to exist anymore. Even the epic dino forest has been dummied to be an effortless farm ground. If there's one thing Fantasies have done right, it's give you a place or two where you can go flex your muscles against the toughest enemies in the game. Failing that, there's some super strong enemies scattered around that keep you on your toes when you explore the world. The only thing I recall that comes close to being an exception to this is the zone eater who actually puts up a decent fight when you're not expecting it. 
• Bosses are consistently thrilling in the mod. In a perfect world, you never beat a boss on your first try because you just don't know what to prepare for and there are some surprises along the way. BNW seems to take this approach and would succeed if it wasn't for the way too generous exp gain that inevitably renders some bosses' mechanics moot since you can just brute force them. And I hate to be that guy, I honestly do - but Kaiser dragon suffers from this. An interesting mechanic for sure and it tries to force you to play it his way, but it's over before you know it. A bit too literal interpretation of the "bosses are puzzles" ideology where there's nothing else to the fights after surviving a single cycle of a pattern. He needs to be made into a longer, more epic fight and change it to where he remains an optional superboss(so not block your path after you kill other dragons). I know BTB has an aversion to the term superboss but never mind the semantics, you don't need to adhere to whatever implications you feel burdens the term, it's still super cool as an idea and a popular one for that very reason. I swear the first question my vanilla-FF friends have asked when I recommended this mod to them has been "are there any superbosses?". Kaiser is one done right but it's just way too damn short for the fight to reach its potential. Even Doomgaze was denied a superboss level of power in service of providing an essential Esper for Relm.
• I have to say though, for me the toughest fight was Kefka as it should be; others have claimed to have beaten it on the first try which sounds like a tragic mistake. I can only assume the aforementioned overleveling problem is what causes that to happen. I had an awesome time with it but my EL's were around 15 and regular levels around 25 for that fight due to using exp off a lot. Although even with Kefka, his unique move Goner is underwhelming for an ultimate enemy attack move in the game, again contributing to my main gripe of heavily regulated & controlled content and balance environment to the point of feeling neutered. Magimaster's hail mary Ultima was nowhere to be seen either. I agree with this choice actually, but that brings me to the conclusion...
• I don't think any of these things are necessarily problematic in and of themselves but it all slowly added up to where nothing ever really ended up surprising or wowing me. In hindsight and as I'm recounting this stuff, it's funny how much even simple things feed into the player's excitement & anticipation with a game. So ironically I guess you might say my main problem with BNW is that it's too balanced, haha.  

I'd like to hear if any of this was interesting to you or relatable on any level. I certainly didn't expect to come out with an outlook such as this but there you have it. I'd like to shower y'all with praise now that I got that out of my system because I have plenty in store, but that's too much text already. 

[Mishrak 82]

I pretty much agree 100% with everything you've said.  These are legitimate issues with BNW and I've tried to push back on BTB's design philosophy over the years to help some of this.  Classic JRPGs always have the "COOL" factor. BNW discards most of this for balance, even with the "ultimate" weapons.  For all its faults, vanilla FF6 was a true JRPG complete with all sorts of "holy crap I'm god" moments.  BNW gets rid of almost all of those as it attempts to achieve a true balance.  

I definitely prefer to keep levels lower so the combat is more demanding.  I have found that the combat is the most rewarding part, similar to SMT: Nocturne.  Even if there aren't a lot of JRPG moments, there's still a lot of powerful build and party setups to be had in BNW.

Kaiser is getting an HP buff in 2.0.1, for what it's worth.

Nice post dude.

Edited March 25, 2020 by Mishrak

[Cecil188 6]

It's not a take that particularly resonates with me, but I don't explicitly disagree with really anything you've said. I'm surprised you found Goner to be underwhelming, though. It was a major danger point for me. If the fight were just Kefka alone, it's likely I would have prepared to shrug something like that off(especially with frequent Meteor as well), but Goner was one of the more troublesome attacks in that fight for me.

[AuthenticM 1]

I recently beat BNW 2.0. It was my first time playing it, and honestly I loved everything about how it is designed. The bosses in the World of Ruin were tough but fair, asking me to think about strategy, something the vanilla game never did. I love how thoughtfully balanced everything was, and it is the reason why I think this mod renders the original game obsolete. If BNW was just another hardtype mod that boosted enemy HP and attacks and made sure the player died a lot, that would just not be interesting at all to me. The game is already more challenging as it is compared to the vanilla game. I did die on my first try on most bosses in WoR, which forced me to reassess and sometimes come back later. And when I did and vanquished the boss, that proved very satisfying.

The hardest boss in the game for me (well, outside of Wrexsoul), was Atma Weapon. He killed me three times, each time with something new and unexpected. I reassessed every time and finally got him, which was very satisfying. However, if every single boss had been this demanding... I don't know, honestly. I'm not sure I would have stayed with the game until the end.

I also like that the game barely required any power leveling to proceed. The only time I had to power level was when I went to Kefka's tower, after doing every other sidequest in the game (including the eight dragons, but excluding Kaiser). I had to level my sub-30 characters to 30. That took me about two hours I'd say, and honestly, I would have prefered if the game didn't require that of me. By that point, I had been playing the game for around 70 hours, and I was ready to move on with my life. After that, I went through Kefka's tower, which still proved challenging. I got Kefka on my first try, but he was very much challenging and kept me on my toes for the whole fight, which lasted probably around an hour. While I thought the fight was thrilling and satisfying to beat, that was just honestly way too long. If Kefka had killed me sometime during his last two forms, I would have probably stopped playing.

Anyways, it seems like what you want isn't what Brave New World is intended to be. I think that's fine as there is a place for every experience. But the current design philosophy of BNW is very appealing to me and is the reason why I've been praising it so much recently and recommending it to everyone I've talked to. The game did wow me a lot over the many hours I played it. That was my experience with it, and I hope that BTB keeps iterating on the mod in the same manner he's been doing.

[Hapanpappa 5]

Thanks for chipping in, guys. Was pretty apprehensive about posting my thoughts in such long-winded detail; the more I thought about it the more I feared this would come across as too complain-y or abstract to spark discussion, and I haven't seen any prior talks whatsoever pertaining to this subject. 

@Mishrak A relief to hear someone share what I assume to be a sort of outlier viewpoint. The game is certainly at its best in the thick of strategic combat and that more than makes up for any disappointments along the way in my mind. But I don't think it would take much to find a perfect sweet spot - just a little something extra in the way of thrills or that "cool factor" would go a long way in making your party, and by extension the endgame, feel more exciting. Good thing regarding Kaiser, that's one boss who deserves to actually be experienced and fought to the fullest.  

@Cecil188 For whatever reason Goner didn't feel any more threatening to my setup than Meteor did, so that's why. And none of my guys ever died to it, which I was kind of hoping for at that point, channeling my inner Schwarzenegger "Come on, kill me! I'm right here!" because I was just begging for something to blow me away at that point. In fact, I had to be way, way more wary of his counter attacks than anything he threw at me on his own. I had a pretty defensive strategy so not sure if that did it. Other than that, a stellar fight overall.

@AuthenticM Great write-up, many of your points are very similar to how I've praised the mod on forums before. Vanilla has been obsolete for me since I first played BNW, and I'm not the least bit sorry about it. However I think you might've misconstrued the crux of my thesis; it's not about difficulty or how challenge is handled, I've no problems with that aside from maybe the exp gain rate which I perceive to be overtuned. Rather I'm just trying to ramble my way into figuring out what gave me a creeping sense of insipidness the longer I played and the closer I came to beating the game.

To try and put it as practically as I can; Imagine, if you will, multiple instances where a player "waits" for dozens of hours for a cool powerup for their favorite character, an ultimate skill/spell they know is finally coming or that piece of legendary equipment, only to find that they're all so very... OK/serviceable, not necessarily that unique, and ultimately they may end up not even using some of it despite being so excited for them. Kind of anticlimactic, don't you think? It inevitably impacts your... hype factor, as it were. 

It's all done for good reasons, clearly - there's an unmatched equilibrium that presides over the different gameplay elements and tools & choices offered to the player, to the extent where pretty much none are above the rest. It's uncanny in how balanced & regulated it is, keeping all the different options viable. The skill you had from the beginning of the game may be just as useful, or even moreso than the skill you just got before the final dungeon - and therein lies one of the negative side effects of it.

Edited March 28, 2020 by Hapanpappa