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In light of the upcoming version 1.10 of Brave New World, I figured now would be a better time than ever to finally write that follow-up article to the one I wrote about the nature of modding. This time, I'll be talking about game design as a whole, using inherent flaws in Final Fantasy VI that are addressed in Brave New World as key talking points. I'm going to state up-front that you don't spend seven years underneath the hood of anything without developing a resentment towards the people whose mess you're cleaning up, but I'm going to forgo my usual vitriol towards Squaresoft here in favor of remaining as objective as possible... and in the process hopefully imparting upon y'all at least something I've learned in the last seven years. Intent is three-fifths of bad game design We'll start on an easy point, but a very important one nonetheless. If you ask most anyone what makes Final Fantasy VI a bad game he or she will invariably respond by citing one or more of its three most infamous bugs: the Sketch glitch, the evasion bug, and/or the Vanish/Doom bug. Although all three of these are serious problems in definite need of repair, none of them are indicative of poor gameplay design (although a case could definitely be made for poor coding in the case of the Lovecraftian Sketch routine). They are nothing more than mere programming errors. Let's make a comparison. On one hand, we have the above-mentioned evasion bug, which causes the physical evasion stat to do literally nothing due to an incorrect ASM pointer. On the other, we have the "stamina" stat, which does practically nothing due to being deliberately designed that way. One of these things is an honest mistake; the other is a bad idea. If we examine the sizeable number of hacks available for FF6, we'll notice that those which fix the above-mentioned bugs are the most popular - and with good reason. But nearly none of them, Brave New World being the only example that I can name, address the fact that three of the four core stats in the game are virtually useless by design. And it's extremely easy for people, particularly those who view the game through nostalgia goggles, to fail to realize that repairing its bugs does not do anything to address its more fundamental underlying issues: the ones that are there on purpose. Don't invalidate your own systems Final Fantasy VI is, by both its narrative and mechanical design, a game where magic reigns supreme over all else. Of the above-mentioned core stats, the only one that functions to any worthwhile degree is magic power. Even Sabin, the game's resident "monk" archetype - a class known for being bare-fisted fighters with no magical powers to speak of - is ultimately reliant on his magic power rather than his strength due to his ultimate skill being a "magic" attack. And this isn't because the attack itself is actually magical in any way - it's flagged as such solely because the game's physical damage formula does not mechanically allow for a physical attack meaningfully more powerful than the ones that Sabin starts out with. At their core, games are basically a series of interlocked mechanics designed with the intent of being fun to play with, or failing that at least mildly interesting. One of the biggest mistakes that a game can make - and one that this game is particularly guilty of - is allowing poor design choices to render one or more of these systems moot. In this case, the decision for physical combat to be useless in the face of magic negatively affects every other mechanic that ties into it, which is quite a few of them given that damage formulas are, understandably, a core component of the game. Let's look at equipment for example. Armor isn't in a terrible place because defense actually does work in FF6, so there's at least a reason to want to put the stuff on (even if 90% of the time it's just a matter of picking the option that automatically equips whatever has the most defense). Some armor can also boost stats in addition to providing defense, but we really don't care unless they include one of the two "god" stats: magic power or magic evasion. So while we can definitely see the effect of useless stats in play here, it's really not as bad as it could be. Weapons, on the other hand, feel the burn hard. As one might expect, when the only meaningful form of combat is tossing around fireballs and lightning bolts, it really doesn't matter what the hunk of metal in your hand looks like or how strong it is. Unless it's boosting that almighty magic stat, it might as well be a moist towelette for as much good as it's going to do you. Like other characters of his ilk, Sabin wears "claw" weapons meant to reinforce his role as "he who punches things". But his special "punch stuff" attacks - even the ones that actually do physical damage - don't actually consider what he's wearing on his fists at all. For an even worse example, we look to Cyan: an unfortunately-named samurai and perhaps the most maligned character in the original game because, unlike Sabin, his special skill is all physical damage. Since his ability is sword-related, it does actually require that he be holding a sword in order to function, but as with Sabin these skills all have their own set powers and function the exact same regardless of whether that sword is a legendary Hattori Hanzo or just some cheap garbage he bought on the Home Shopping Network. Upon defeating one of the game's penultimate bosses, you are bestowed with the most powerful katana in the game. And while that sword may do a good enough job of feeding into that all-important reward/pleasure zone in the player's brain, it's functionally identical to the one Cyan had when you met him. Never offer a choice between fun and convenience On the subject of equipment, we come to what is possibly the biggest design misstep in all of Final Fantasy VI: the Sprint Shoes. These were an item that, when equipped, would increase your character's abysmal walking speed to acceptable levels. Players would acquire them about an hour into the game, after which they were happily equipped and never removed because that hour was one spent watching Terra walk as if she had two pot roasts strapped to her feet. The important thing to note about the Sprint Shoes is that increasing walking speed conveyed no combat advantages whatsoever. It did not help you get more turns, dodge better, or even help you avoid battles altogether (that last one is an entirely different can of worms altogether). Its only function was to make the game less annoying for the player at the cost of occupying an equipment slot that would otherwise be used for something that did provide a combat bonus. It's telling that this is the only design flaw that was ever addressed in the deluge of re-releases that Squaresoft has put out over the years. Every other version of Final Fantasy VI provides a "dash" button to allow faster movement without the need for extra equipment, but curiously it does so without actually removing the Sprint Shoes, whose effects will stack with the standard dash just in case you needed to break the sound barrier or something. It becomes quickly apparent through such decisions that Squaresoft is more fond of Band-Aid solutions to problems rather than actual solutions, such as resolving the aforementioned Vanish/Doom bug by making "boss" enemies immune to being made invisible rather than addressing the mechanical problem that causes instant death attacks to ignore immunity when used on invisible targets. (Needless to say, Brave New World adds a dash button to the game and removes Sprint Shoes. It fixes the Vanish/Doom thing properly, too.) Just because something is long does not make it hard To expand on the underlying problem with the Sprint Shoes, something that players and game developers alike have a difficult time understanding is that just because something takes forever to accomplish does not mean that doing so is a challenge of anything but one's patience. This is ultimately an issue with any game where your character grows stronger over time, as most any challenge can be overcome by "grinding" out more levels rather than re-evaluating your approach and adjusting your strategy. Good game design favors the latter over the former, and I won't elaborate much on that subject since my previous article already discussed my thoughts on "trial and error" gameplay at length. That said, the answer to the "challenge vs. time investment" question lies within the consequence for failure. In a more traditional arcade-style game, such as pinball, the punishment for failure is "game over" since the entire point of those games is to see how many points a player can get before they die. However, that model doesn't translate to a game that's actually meant to be completed, especially one like Final Fantasy VI that requires several sessions to do so (unless your name is Puwexil). The consequence of failure in FF6 - or any other game with a save feature, for that matter - is time, and the "challenge" comes from whatever you have to do to get back to where you failed. The above point is one of the biggest reasons why unskippable cutscenes, particularly those that precede a challenging encounter, are so vehemently despised by the gaming community at large, as they are the most extreme example of failing to provide any challenge whatsoever in the process of returning to the point of failure. It is thus of paramount importance in a lengthy, story-driven game like FF6 to not utilize save denial as a form of difficulty, since it ultimately inconveniences the player rather than challenging them. This is why Brave New World adds several save points to the game and would have added more had event space (and other coding issues) allowed. Compare this to an action-oriented game like "I Wanna Be The Guy", where the only difference between difficulty levels is that the harder ones offer fewer opportunities to save your progress, thus forcing you to go back and repeat more of the game should you happen to fail (which you will). The "save denial" model works here since the game is a persistent test of skill. People who persist at the higher difficulty levels often see themselves becoming much better at the game as a result, since they are forced to practice more of the game for each failed attempt to progress. Back to Final Fantasy, a common complaint that players have regarding Brave New World is that many bosses have a lot of health and take forever to kill. To an extent, this is warranted: bosses must be able to take enough punishment so that your own endurance is sufficiently tested and so that luck alone will not pull you through the fight. However, there is a very specific tipping point - that point being where the battle ceases to be dynamic and instead becomes repetitive - where real difficulty becomes "artificial" difficulty and an otherwise-fun boss devolves into a boring damage sponge. The "damage sponge boss" issue is one where Brave New World admittedly struggles to hit the mark at times, and each new version strives to come closer than before. One major roadblock is a simple lack of space to make enemy AI as robust as it could be, and it's extremely important to note exactly what I mean by that. The key is variety, not just in how the enemy behaves, but in how the player should best respond to that behavior. An enemy with fifty different attacks is no more interesting than the one who only has five if the answer to all of them is just "hit it until it dies". A good example of this is Guardian, a late-game boss that possesses the most health of any boss in Brave New World. However, it is rarely cited as an example of the aforementioned issue since Guardian is a "boss rush" fight that goes through several drastically different phases throughout the battle as it mimics the attack patterns of other bosses in the game. Contrast to a boss that either doesn't change at all or simply gets more powerful as you whittle down its health, which at its worst is a very common but far less-recognized variant of the above-mentioned unskippable cutscene. You want to design more than a numbers game I've got a guy, God love him, who has been one of Brave New World's biggest and most vocal supporters from its earliest days. And this guy, he loves his math. Like, a lot. Whenever I get to work on a new update (and often when I'm not), he is always there to throw numbers at me and to point out exactly which attacks on which characters can produce the highest ratio of damage over time. He even wrote out a formula to help him calculate these numbers on the fly. But with each passing version of the mod, there is more added to it that his "magic" formula simply can't account for. And that's the point. You know what's fun? Games. You know what's not? Math. Regardless of whether or not you agree with that, a key point of good game design is doing your best to make one that can't be solved by a magic formula. Once upon a time, I watched a man play through Brave New World. And this man was known for, among other things, his tendency to power-level his way through games (the above-mentioned "grinding" issue) well beyond the point of them providing any reasonable challenge whatsoever. And as I watched him play through the end of the game with a team of over-developed characters all pimped out with equipment that prevented enemies from afflicting them with status ailments, I thought to myself, "...this is quite possibly the most boring thing I've ever witnessed." Status ailments are a staple of turn-based RPGs and the primary "X-factor" that can't be accounted for when looking at raw numbers alone. Anyone who's ever played Pokemon might recognize things like blindness, paralysis, and confusion as one of the biggest mechanics separating an interesting game from "hit the other guy until either he dies or he kills you". However, Pokemon is a rare example of a game where, primarily due to its one-on-one combat system, status effects were implemented and handled well. More commonly in games that possess them, they are either ridiculously overpowered to the point of being exploitative, or useless on the whole since they won't work against anything you'd want to use them against and they (usually) don't work on you since the game hands out ways to defend yourself against them like candy. It's thus a very harrowing tightrope that status effects must walk in order to be a relevant part of game design without completely running away with it. One half of the equation is a simple answer: enemies should make frequent use of them against your characters and there should be no (or very limited) catch-all methods of completely avoiding them. The other half is a bit more tricky. In order for status effects to truly have a place in a player's arsenal, three things must be true: One, there must exist enemies which are threatening enough that the player would want to disable them to make fighting them easier (or even possible). Two, those enemies must also be durable enough that you can't simply dispatch them through direct offense in the same amount of time. Similarly, disabling them should not consume more resources than direct offense would. Three, and perhaps most obviously, disabling your opponent should have a reasonable chance of success. This means that enough enemies must be vulnerable to status effects that players will consider using them. With respect to that third point, it's important to consider exactly how disabling a given status effect is. In Final Fantasy VI, the majority of them are completely debilitating while the rest don't actually do anything due to either bugs or poor design. FF6 commits a particularly egregious sin by making many of its bosses vulnerable to the former type, thus making it an inexplicable example of both wrong ways to handle status effects. Rather, the statuses that stop your enemies dead in their tracks should only work on some regular enemies (about half is a good rule of thumb) and only in boss battles when there are several of them - and even then not on them all. By contrast, the weaker statuses should be resisted uncommonly or not at all, and ideally should be worked into boss battles where possible to make them more interesting. Bad design giveth, and good design taketh away One of the less fun aspects of being a modder of poorly-designed games is that it often feels like taking a flamethrower away from a child after a lazy developer handed it to them and told them to go nuts. Remember that quip I made earlier about how Sprint Shoes don't actually help you avoid battles? Well, there just so happens to exist a well-known piece of "hidden" equipment in the game that does exactly that: the Moogle Charm. In what I consider to be a flat-out admission by Squaresoft that FF6's battle system was not entertaining, they put in a way to negate it entirely. And you'd be amazed (or maybe you wouldn't) at how many players are upset to see it gone in Brave New World. I promised myself that I wasn't going to rip off Mark Rosenwater's Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons speech in this article, but at this point I need to bring it up. In his speech (which I highly recommend watching), Mark talks about the emotional impact that games have on players, and it's through that impact that they become fans. Players want to feel empowered, and nothing has the exact opposite effect on them more than taking away something that's ridiculously overpowered and shouldn't have been there in the first place. Some people will argue that if players didn't want to use it, they wouldn't, but I'll just cut right to the chase on this one and say that self-control is a terrible thing to balance your game around. On a similar note, Mark also cites the process of film editing, stating "...no scene is worth a line and no movie is worth a scene. If it's not serving the film as a whole, it needs to go." And just as with films, the editing portion of game design is a very important one that is too often overlooked in favor of the "quantity over quality" mentality that Squaresoft is particularly guilty of. There are many things in Final Fantasy VI that are too overpowered for their own good and far more that do nothing at all, and players will complain about removing content if you take any of it out. But you should. Everything in your game should have a purpose, or else it needs to go. "Less is more" is a philosophy that I live by, and as such it's almost always better to look at doing what you can with what you have than try to add more. It's all about choices The concept of "fun" in a game, or at least one that favors strategy over dexterity and/or stamina, can ultimately be boiled down to a single word: choice. Choice is what drives a game like Final Fantasy VI if it wants to be anything more than a 16-bit movie where you occasionally have to press "A" to progress. It's also where FF6 drops the ball the hardest, despite providing an illusion to the contrary. Final Fantasy VI boasted the largest cast of characters of any JRPG of its time, each with their own unique stats and skills, and the possibilities to customize them through the game's esper system, not to mention its vast array of weapons and armor, seemed almost limitless. But the holes in this facade were already discussed at length earlier: stats do nothing, magic was the only thing worth focusing on, and the esper system allows every character to learn any spell that they want, thus rendering the cast entirely homogeneous. For there to exist meaningful choice in a game, there must be a difference in what you are choosing from. "Diversity" isn't just a corporate buzzword: it's the spice that brings games like Final Fantasy to life. And by restricting access to which characters can use which espers, Brave New World provides meaningful choices to the player that didn't exist in the original game. It may sound counter-intuitive, but restrictions on the choices you make are what make them choices in the first place. If you were offered a million dollars with absolutely no drawbacks whatsoever, then it's not exactly a choice, now is it? The same would be true if you were given the choice between one of a dozen different options, all of which were equally terrible or useless. Final Fantasy VI, again, manages to do both of these things. I draw much of my inspiration from games such as the original Final Fantasy or the Might & Magic series, where you select a party of characters at the outset of the game and how it progresses varies wildly depending on that initial choice. And that constant, nagging thought of the "road not taken" is what lures a player back in to your game after they've finished it, and often times even before that. "Replay value" is a term that gets thrown around a lot with regards to video games, and with good reason: you want to get the most out of that fifty bucks you dropped on them, after all. It's because of this that I for so long resisted the addition of a "respec" system in Brave New World, where players can wipe a character clean in the late-game and rebuild them with different espers. If a choice can be so easily undone, I reasoned, then the player would not feel their lasting impacts and the choice itself would therefore be meaningless. I eventually acquiesced on the condition that this process be made to cost resources - an apparent violation of my "time consumption is not difficulty" rule, but appropriate in this case since the investment of time would cause a player to rethink an attempt to rebuild their characters frivolously. Partial information is a sin What ultimately tipped my hand and convinced me to go along with the "respec" system was the notion that players were unlikely to replay a ROMhack like Brave New World as they would an ordinary game, and that new players would not know enough about the game as they progressed through it to make truly educated decisions about how to develop their characters. While I still don't entirely agree with this reasoning, it does segue well into my next point. Players make choices based on the information they have, and lacking that information, will be forced to do so blindly. Failing to provide players with the resources they need to make intelligent decisions will reduce your game to "guess how many fingers I'm holding up", which is rarely anyone's idea of fun. It's a less-extreme example of a "leap of faith" in a more action-oriented game, wherein players are forced to progress literally by making jumps that they have no possible way of knowing whether or not they will survive. In ye olden times, RPGs would frequently come packaged with "feelies" such as manuals, fold-out maps, and various charts of information that could not be easily provided in-game due to technical limitations. Brave New World includes such peripherals, but in addition also modifies the game's shopping interface to severely limit the amount of up-front information the player is given about items. "Why", you ask? Because the partial information that was provided in the original is far worse than providing none at all. Prior to the hack devised for Brave New World's 1.10 release which allows players to review all of the relevant information about an item prior to purchase, we initially deliberately provided none at all. The key is that in providing players only with partial information, they are not aware of what they are not being told and will make uninformed decisions based on what they do know. If a player is instead told nothing, they know that there is information they don't know and will (generally) choose to seek it out. Put me in, Coach! Speaking of characters and decisions that aren't necessarily permanent, we come to an issue that has plagued almost every game, or at the very least every RPG, that has ever allowed you to change your characters at will throughout. "Benchwarmer Syndrome" as I like to call it is a problem that it often addressed in games, but almost never successfully. The dilemma is simple: "how do I encourage players to partake of every character they are given control of instead of favoring a selected few while ignoring the others?" Perhaps a better question is "should I?" Now, in a game like Super Mario Bros. 2, where your characters do not become any more powerful through continued use, this isn't a problem: you simply select a character for each stage whose unique talents best suit your approach. But in basically any RPG ever, the strong getting stronger and the weak getting weaker is a severe problem. Final Fantasy VI is a notable example due to its exceptionally large cast: twelve characters (plus two hidden characters, bringing us to a total of fourteen) with only four of them being controllable at any given time. Squaresoft's answer in the case of FF6 was to provide "leaked" experience to all inactive characters so that everyone grows more powerful regardless of whether or not they are actively used combined with a final stage that forces you to utilize all twelve of them concurrently. It's not a bad solution, all said and done, but it is a double-edged sword. The inherent issue with leaked experience is that it equally encourages NOT using your benched characters since they will grow with or without your help and players tend not to use benched characters unless they're forced to. Other games have tried more innovative approaches, such as the "wagon" in Dragon Warrior IV allowing your benched characters to replace active ones at a moment's notice (a great idea in theory, but under-developed in practice) or Breath of Fire III's "master" system encouraging the use of your "B" team with masters whose primary benefits (stat gains) did not mesh with your favorite characters but whose secondary benefits (new skills) could ultimately benefit them. Notably, BoF3's cast was also half the size of FF6's with a much more favorable ratio (2:1) of total characters to those allowed in your current team. Ultimately, we chose to forgo leaked experience with Brave New World both to encourage the varied use of a cast that is now actually as diverse as it claimed to be in the original game, as well as the fact that the way it utilizes espers to further develop characters beyond mere basic growth sort of has to be done the old-fashioned way of actually using those characters in battle. However, that's not to say that our answer is the right one. Unlike every other topic I've brought up thus far, I'm not offering a solution to this one: just thinking points. How a game chooses to handle this problem ultimately rests on the answers to many other questions, all of which this article has gone on far too long to get into now. Above all else, have fun At last, we get to the absolute most important aspect of game design there is: make the game that you want to play and have fun while you're doing it. My favorite piece of advice to give anyone in their creative endeavors is to stay true to your own vision, and others will follow. If you make your game trying to please anyone other than yourself, then it will fail. To that end, it's readily apparent to anyone who plays Brave New World that it's a hack created first and foremost to amuse its creators. While we receive occasional frequent criticism for some of the jokes and referential humor it contains, what is never contested is how funny I thought a joke was when I wrote it. People can tell the difference between someone who is making a joke because they're trying to be funny and someone who makes a joke because they are genuinely amused by it. Understand the truth in that, and you will understand the key to winning peoples' hearts. In the end, making a game is just like being a rock star: if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. (And also, if you're really good at it, you get groupie sex.)

As an update to everyone, I received word from FFTA, one of the other former Administrators of Insane Difficulty earlier tonight. Whatever happens from here on out, just know that this man was not to blame. He tried purchasing the site himself, but Archael would not have it. If he comes back here, I intend to welcome him back with open arms, and I expect all of you to do the same. He loved Insane Difficulty just as much as anyone else, and he tried just as much as the rest of the Administration to save it.

Thought y'all might want to know about this. I made a FF6 randomizer that has compatibility with Brave New World v1.9. It's called Beyond Chaos Gaiden.

UPDATE: the beta cycle for 2.0 has at this point drawn nearly to a close. There are a few outstanding issues and undelivered updates (listed in purple in the below changelog), but for the purposes of anyone who's been waiting for a finalized version, the current beta patch is pretty much that in all but name at this point (with an extra-special thanks to Bropedio for making it all happen). If you're interested in playing it, please check the pinned messages in the #Brave-New-World channel in our Discord server. What's new in 2.0:

I love Gau. He is great fun to use and his Rages bring a lot of options to the table. However, players often find it easier to stick with a few core rages and just use them because... well... details for 64 Rages is a lot to remember. The printme has all the info the player needs to know everything about all the Rages but the info is spread across multiple tables and tabs.So I've decided to do something to remedy it. I've taken the information from the printme, along with some information regarding some locations of the formations, and put it all in one single table. In addition, I've included a column where you can mark the Rages as collected or not and also sorted the Rages by attainability. These can be used to narrow down selections to only those available or help with making sure you have the ones you want.I hope that players can use this to make Gau just a little bit more accessible by reducing the information barrier that the Rages have.Anyway... I like spreadsheets. Here it is. Enjoy and happy Raging Edit: Updated to 1.9.0

Hello, my name is BTB, co-creator and designer of Final Fantasy VI: Brave New World. And like anyone with a job or hobby that attracts an audience, there are certain questions that tend to come up a lot to me in my capacity as a modder of video games... certain "frequently-asked questions", if you will. Today, I would like to take a moment to answer some of the most common/pressing of them. Why don't you just make an original game? Of all the questions modders are asked, this is easily the most offensive as it both belittles and completely misses the point of our craft. It's like asking someone who enjoys restoring classic cars why they don't just make their own. I'll talk about this in a bit more detail further below, but the short answer is that improving on an existing idea is an entirely different task from forming a new one and, more importantly, is no more or less valid a form of artistic expression because of it. Why did you change "X" thing? Game mods face a somewhat unique obstacle in that, unlike an original game, they are expected to justify their own existence. Design decisions are generally not scrutinized in a "vanilla" game to the degree they are in a mod, which makes a certain amount of sense given that players are actively looking for changes in the latter no matter how much its creator wishes they would treat it like the former. It's kind of like dealing with people who can't enjoy a movie because they're too busy comparing absolutely everything about it to the book. Modders take note: no matter how stupid, arbitrary, or poorly thought-out anything in a base game is, no matter how minuscule or insignificant, someone will question your decision to change it. I've had people ask me why I changed the names of certain enemies in Brave New World when their original names were literal nonsense words so unremarkable that nobody (including the person asking) remembers what they were. And you can fall back on logic or reason all you want to justify your actions, but ultimately the answer will be "because I didn't like what it was before and wanted to change it". And one of the most important things to learn as a modder is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Why DIDN'T you change "X" thing? Contrary to the above, the answer to this one is usually, "I couldn't". Modding is frequently bound by the restrictions of the source material or by how deep into the code we are able to dig, and things that may seem to the outside observer to be an easy copy/paste job often aren't. Also, do assume that modders (or at least good modders) have put a lot of thought into their final product and have considered all of the potential implications of even a seemingly small change. That said, ask away - I've made countless changes to my mods based on player feedback pointing out something I just hadn't thought of, and at the very least you're likely to get an interesting piece of developer insight in response. Why would you mod a game that you don't like? As the designer of a prominent Final Fantasy VI mod, it often confuses people to learn that I am not all that fond of the original game. While some mods are created by people who are deeply in love with the game in question, these mods are rarely of good quality since their creators saw so little room for improvement. More often than not, they end up veering into bad fanfiction territory and/or falling victim to the philosophy of adding more stuff just to have more stuff with absolutely zero regard for how well any of it fits in or concern for existing content (AKA "Squaresoft Design Theory 101"). This is not to say that good modders hate the games that they are working on; something obviously had to draw them in, after all. But I've come to realize that too much reverence for the game you're working with tends to prevent good or even necessary changes for fear of breaking from the traditional and familiar - this mentality is the reason I am often bitched at for fixing legitimate bugs and exploits. Good mods are ideally born from an attachment to an idea (or ideas) by people with a vision of their full potential and, more often than not, a certain degree of frustration toward their flawed execution that keeps them from realizing that potential. And this frustration - something generally lacking in people who are already happy with games the way they are - is what drives us to make a better game. On trial and error... So, this is neither a question nor a complete sentence and it pertains to game design as a whole rather than just modding, but it's an important topic to discuss here given the prevalence of "kaizo" hacks out there in contrast to an audience that is generally more accustomed to modern game design. For those unfamiliar, the term "kaizo" comes from the name of one of the earliest known hacks of its kind: a Super Mario World ROMhack that utilized extreme difficulty as a form of comedy, winding up as a sort of self-directed schadenfreude. This was an extension of the very first such games - a trilogy of Super Mario Bros. hacks called Syobon Action or "Cat Mario" - whose difficulty stemmed entirely from their "puzzle" elements which murdered the player in increasingly ridiculous ways for taking the most logical course of action, thus forcing a purely "trial and error" method of gameplay that (along with the racist sprite hacks of yore) has since gone on to stigmatize modding as a whole. The term is now used to describe any ROMhack of difficulty sufficient to warrant pure trial-and-error gameplay and tends to be freely (and often unfairly) used to describe mods that introduce difficulty of any kind. It's because of the above that Brave New World shies away from the "difficulty hack" label altogether, but it tends to draw arguments from players who (correctly) realize that it is, in fact, much harder than the original game. My personal take is that there seems to be some degree of resistance to the idea that the player should be made to think, that the game is a puzzle meant to be figured out rather than a mere interactive viewing experience. What some players label "punishment" is to me simply a part of the learning process. Learning involves experimentation, which by its very nature equates to trial and - more often than not - error. Brave New World was designed with the expectation that players would frequently die and be forced to rethink their approach to certain battles, but comparisons to games designed to make the player suffer are inaccurate and something that we wish to avoid. There seems to be a commonly-held notion that a good game should be easily beatable by a blind player ("blind" in the figurative sense, not literal) without failure and that anyone who thinks otherwise is one of those "Dark Souls" weirdos. There is little acknowledged middle ground between games requiring no effort whatsoever and those specifically designed to be unfair, which from my experience manifests primarily as an unwillingness to experiment. Again using Brave New World as an example, one of its major design philosophies is that the random encounter system should pose a challenge to the player's abilities to figure out how to deal with them quickly and efficiently, or else they exist for no other reason than to waste the player's time. A big part of this is a wide variety of enemy weaknesses and resistances so that no one attack or tactic is universally effective, thus forcing the player to adapt to each individual encounter. Sounds good, yeah? The result of the above design, however, brings to mind the cautionary advice of Mark Rosenwater against fighting human nature. It's become somewhat of a meme in the Brave New World community for a new player to complain that "X thing is useless because everything is immune to it", with that "X thing" usually being wind damage. And it's not that this statement is even remotely true (approximately 15% of enemies in Brave New World resist wind damage) so much as that players are so rarely forced to attempt different strategies in the original game's design and are very quickly discouraged from doing so at the first sight of failure. The unfortunate ultimate result of this phenomenon is a refusal to move away from "tried and true" tactics even when they fail, with players stubbornly attempting the same thing over and over again rather than trying something new (which, by the way, is the definition of insanity). In conclusion... And that's it for now. Perhaps in the future I'll do a "part two", but these are the questions that have been stuck in my head for awhile and itching to get out. Thanks for reading, and remember that modders are just people who perform a labor of love for no reward other than the hope that our work makes the world a better (or at least funner) place. (Or get us laid. That's pretty nice.)

So I did a thing with things and made a BNW Bestiary tool. Disclaimer: this is with unlockme data, so if you want to avoid spoilers (enemy HP), avoid this. Best opened with Excel. YMMV with Open Office or Libre Office. The idea is to be able to select a particular area and see the enemies and the formations within said area. As far as I’m concerned, this is finished. However I’m still open to some ideas. To save space, when there are multiple enemies within a formation they’re given a quantity rather than displayed multiple times. Also, areas that don’t follow the 3/16 and 5/16 encounter rates are given a special tab. Lastly, areas are sorted (for the most part) by the way they’re organized within FF3usME and I named each one myself, with some help from BTB. The exception to this sorting is, I grouped some of the more obscure overworld encounters together, and added a few “areas” that don’t actually exist in the editor, namely Doom Gaze and Phunbaba. Spreadsheet: http://btb2.free.fr/temp/BNW_1.9_Bestiary_1.4.xlsx Notes/Log:

current version: 1.658 The main ideas were to make the battles more dynamic and give each character more, well, character. As a result of that every character has now access to an individualized job list of 21 out of total 31 jobs (freelancer is NOT available) while each job level now has a permanent impact on a character's stats. For example klutz Bartz can not be a chemist and Lenna hasn't in her to go Berserker. More dynamic battles are achieved via !Brave, !Def and field elements. Move a future turn to now with !Brave or take two turns at a later point with !Def while modifying the field elements to your liking with each skill or ability used. Changed field elements affect damage, healing and status effect chance. major features: all party members can be renamed at any time difficulty can be adjusted via in-game menu elements play a larger role extending to every item, ability, status effect and monster rebalance of equipment, spells, abilities and enemies instead of helm, armor and relic you can now equip 3 relics relics add a mix of resistances, weaknesses and power bonuses to same-element attacks spells scale with weapon power keeping them relevant until the end spell lists have been altered, e.g. Fire1/2/3 was reduced to just Fire and there are now new spells replacing the missing spells items are not consumed but introduce a cooldown on !Item, !Mix, !Drink and !Throw auto-heal some HP after battle victory (trade-off for disabled potions) ATB does not proceed until the currently active actor is finished with their turn, but then moves instantly to the next event most importantly - a New Game Plus mode!

I noticed you kept making comments about why BNW isn't this or that after this comment of yours: "I cheated/turbo'd through to include some fixes on additions to the mod that I believe are a mistake" You do realize that anything you typed after saying that in terms of criticism against BNW is null, because you've modified the game to no longer be BNW? I'm sorry, but I agree with BTB: I think you attempted something from Vanilla in terms of a challenge run and applied it to BNW, and my addition to that is you did it without having even attempted to try the game normally first. What the hell did you expect? This mod is so significantly different from Vanilla, and your comments about your playthrough seemingly reflect that you were expecting Vanilla despite somehow knowing that the game was different. You went in with the readme and printme and assumed it'd have everything you need, and you'd be right if you didn't slap on a silly restriction out of the gate. I honestly can't take any of your criticism seriously against the game because of your challenge and personal modifications, because it doesn't reflect against normal play of the mod, and demanding changes to it in reflection of the experience you've had because of it just makes you seem... well, stupid. You personally seem really dumb for having done that. Your depressive statements about not knowing what the Stat Hat, Leo's Crest, or Slim Jim does? Did you even think to equip the Stat Hat? Leo's Crest? Did you see what either did? Did you attempt to take them into battle? You would have clearly seen what Leo's Crest did if you went into battle with it on Celes, or at least the biggest part of what it is. The Stat Hat, all you needed to do is unequip your helm and check the stats you got on it. Slim Jim? Did you attempt to use it in battle? Of course it doesn't look anything different from a dried meat being used in a menu. Did anything click there that made you think: "Hmm, maybe that has in-battle effects?" At this point I'm going to stop. You did something brave, but incredibly stupid, and went through this entire effort to post this demanding that there be changes because you dove into shallow water head first and suffered the consequences. Perhaps try the mod normally without restrictions first, then I may take anything you said here as serious feedback.

Hello everyone, I'm Elric, some of you may know me as the creator and lead eventer of FFT - Journey of the Five, from my various Fallout 4 mods, or as one of the admins of FFH. Raven told me about this site so I decided to join up. It's nice to see a new friendly community pop up.

At some point in every game developer's career, they are legally required to write an essay explaining why Super Metroid is the gold standard of game design, because when a game is so groundbreaking that it names an entire genre, it deserves to be examined. While my previous article took a look at Final Fantasy VI and pointed out a long list of game design "don'ts", this one is going to tackle the "do's". But instead of following same format as the FF6 article, I'm going to start out with a single point - the thesis of this piece, if you will - and then I'll spend the rest of my time coming back around to it. "People like playing games, but they don't like being reminded that the game was designed by someone." Now, that's going to sound kind of hypocritical coming from me given how much Brave New World leans on the fourth wall, but there's a huge difference between the initial impact of that statement and what I'm actually talking about here. Self-awareness in games is not a bad thing - the greatest thing about Hideo Kojima (or, for a more contemporary example, Toby Fox) is his unrivaled ability to remain one step ahead of the player, anticipate their actions, and react accordingly. Although my point does concern the narrative of your game as much as it does the mechanics, the intended takeaway is that it should always be the player initiating the action rather than the game itself. Of course, a game does need to give the player some direction or else you end up either lost or, in the worst case scenario, with what Penny Arcade once referred to as a "quicksand box". The goal is to direct players without making them aware of the fact. Playing a game is a personal experience, and so players are naturally inclined to want to make the game their own. Being a part of someone else's vision places you in a box with restrictions and limitations, so it's of great importance that those limitations are kept hidden from the player at all costs. It's because of this that I prefer to avoid "artificial" boundaries wherever possible, such as an invisible wall at the edge of a map or a game that's designed for the player to hit a hard level cap instead of a "soft" one. Anything that highlights a limitation in what the game is or has to offer will pull a player out of the experience just as much (and arguably more) than a bad joke will, and the best-designed games are the ones that make you feel like no matter how much you've discovered, there's always something more just out of reach. So, back to Metroid. The original game pioneered the ideas of open-world exploration, upgrades that open up new areas in addition to making you more powerful, and backtracking through old areas to access the new ones. It dropped the ball quite a bit due to the hardware limitations of the time - the entire game was a whopping 128 kilobytes - and the fact that it was the first of its kind. There were only a few upgrades that allowed further progression and so a lot of the world opened up very quickly, leading players to get lost more easily. This was compounded by the repetitive map design that, again, existed due to hardware limitations. Damningly, the game failed to telegraph its secrets well and made the fatal error of gating progression (which will be discussed just below) behind one such secret. (Fun side note: did you know that the origin of Samus's iconic "morph ball" is that the developers of the original game couldn't be assed to come up with a "crawling" animation that wouldn't set the NES processor on fire? Goes to show you how good ideas can be born out of limitations, even if that limitation is laziness.) See, there's a difference between figuring something out from a clue and being given no clues whatsoever and stumbling across the answer by, as Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw once put it, "...carting a truckload of miscellaneous knick knacks around, patiently rubbing them all one by one against everything else in the hope of hopping on to the train of logic unique to the game's designer." One gives a sense of accomplishment, and the other is literally brute-forcing your way through every possible option until you land on the right one. Super Metroid made an important compromise in this regard by adding a map system, which in the hands of lesser developers would ruin the core exploration aspect of the game but was instead used to great effect to hint at the game's secrets rather than laying them bare. Compare how the entrance to Kraid's Lair is discovered in Super Metroid by means of the in-game map system revealing its location, but not how to get there, to the original game requiring you to bomb nondescript tiles at random to find your way into lower Norfair. One might be critical of Super Metroid's above-mentioned approach for making things a little too easy to figure out, but bear in mind that this occurs very early in the game in what can still be considered to be its "tutorial" segment. Later puzzles are more subtle, such as the broken glass tube in Maridia hinting at the player to blow up the other one in order to continue(*). The important thing to note is that the game never flat-out tells you where to go, but rather invites the player to explore the path leading forward through its level design. Where the original game stumbled with this by opening up too much of the game too soon, Super Metroid presents new players with a deceivingly linear path for its first act, only opening up the bulk of its world after it's taught you how to properly explore it. (*The Mandela Effect shows up here seeing as a lot of people - myself included - recall the game pulling a Hideo Kojima on this one by showing off the solution in its "attract mode", which it doesn't. It does, however, act as a comprehensive tutorial of the game's basic and intermediate mechanics for a new player, which is pretty damn ingenous.) Of specific note in the above paragraph is the term "new" players. In the beginning of its second act, Super Metroid teaches you two tricks - not by text, but by literal example - that can be used to break the game. And while there's nothing that kids enjoy more than breaking things, what's extremely important is that at no point were we actually told to do so. The game simply gives you a pair of neat tricks that the astute player will realize can be used to skip the game's "intended" sequence of events. And one of the most beautiful things about Super Metroid is the ambiguity about where the line lies between what its developers intended and what paths the players have since forged for themselves. Now, contrast the next two games in the series. Fusion looked at how Super Metroid could be broken, scoffed, and then proceeded to railroad you so Goddamn hard that you had to cough up two hundred dollars every time you landed on it. Following massive fan backlash, the following game went to the opposite extreme but continued using the same flawed method of heavy-handed delivery. Rather than taking Super Metroid's subtle approach, Zero Mission beat you over the head with both directions and sequence breaking tools to the point of requiring them to get the best ending - which really begs consideration of whether it even qualifies as sequence breaking if the developers overtly intend for you to do it. One thing that Zero Mission shoots for with this approach, however, and succeeds in accomplishing is highlighting the "easy to learn, difficult to master" gameplay for which the series is equally known, but rarely lauded. Super Metroid is very approachable to the casual player, but it is one of the most brutally unforgiving games ever when played for score. And that specific word is very important, because the idea of score as a measure of performance in games has been a joke since the early 90's. The modern era has seen "challenge" runs, often of the self-imposed variety, replacing the bragging rights of yore from holding the high score at your local arcade. Upon completing Super Metroid, it presents the player with a screen detailing the percentage of items collected and the time taken to finish, thus providing both the basis for and a means of tangibly rewarding what would otherwise be completely arbitrary challenges. More importantly, it does this without ever explicitly issuing a challenge, thus going back to my point about the difference between the game initiating action versus the player doing so. This is by far the biggest area in which Super Metroid suceeds where Zero Mission fails. It's worth discussing the purpose of challenge in video games. Something that I've written about before is that many ROM hacks fall into the trap of making challenge their primary - and often only - notable feature. By contrast, Brave New World was developed to focus primarily on the fun of character development while its challenge is simply a means to an end: an obstacle that warrants that development to overcome. A good game is designed as a vehicle to present the player with opportunities to use the tools they're given, while a great game creates a seamless divide between the level of skill with those tools it demands in order to complete it and the level of skill that it inspires in order to master it. A good (albeit not infallible) litmus test for how well-designed a game is in this particular aspect is to look at how many of its tools, skills, and/or abilities remain useful in its final stages. A proper climax should be a culmination of everything that you've learned in a game up to that point, testing all of your skills and knowledge in more complex and varying ways than before. A typical role-playing game will fail this test miserably: players spend the entire game collecting a plethora of skills and abilities only to spend its closing moments spamming nothing but the strongest ones. The idea of "situational" skills that are only useful when the circumstances allow are often overlooked by developers and players alike, leading to games (RPGs most egregiously) that marginalize them since the ones that aren't situational end up being all that you ever need. The Metroid series as a whole avoids the above-mentioned issue entirely by designing the game around the core concept of Samus's abilities as a means of both combat and exploration. Going back to the "challenge" aspect mentioned above, it's entirely possible to complete Super Metroid with only a handful of its upgrades, but doing so requires great skill and mastery of the ones you do collect. And even on a casual level, the "fun" of any Metroid game is primarily derived from two sources: exploration and the player's movement. These two things go hand in hand; backtracking through previously-explored areas in order to progress is one of the chief defining characteristics of the Metroidvania genre, which in turn draws extra scrutiny to the means by which the game is traversed. Done poorly, this can be seen as padding meant to artificially increase the game's runtime. Done well, however, a combination of tight player controls and well-crafted level design can turn traversing old terrain with new abilities or from a different perspective into a completely fresh experience. Another thing that Super Metroid is particularly well-known for is the laconic nature of its player character; aside from a brief introduction at the outset of the game to set the stage, Samus does not speak at all and the entirety of the game's plot is presented through subtext. Now, I'm of the opinion that stories in video games are like panties: they can be interesting, but I'm much more interested in what they're covering up. Super Metroid, for all of its sparsity, managed to present one of gaming history's most memorable plot twists completely inline with its gameplay. Eight years later, Metroid Fusion showed us why Samus should never be allowed to speak. Fast-forward another eight years and Other M showed us that nobody on Nintendo's current writing staff should be allowed to eat with a fork. In summary, Super Metroid highlights something I believe to be not only a good game design principle, but a valuable life lesson, as well: show, don't tell. People will rise to far greater heights if simply given the tools and encouragement to do so rather than being explicitly shown the way. It was true in 1994, and it's still very true now 25 years later. Case in point, this article that been floating around in my head for awhile now, and it was playing a certain modern game that manages to encapsulate and build upon so much of what made Super Metroid great that inspired me to get off my ass and write it. And what more could an artist possibly hope for if not for their work to inspire others? (Oh, yeah... groupie sex. Definitely the groupie sex.)

Another patch from the old forum - I got mad that Terra and Celes didn't have pants. Here are alternate sprites that have pants. Two versions of each - one my own, one with extra modifications from Bauglir. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1p7kkoK6jG-eHVqSWpMbk40YjQ?usp=sharing

Honestly, if you did exactly what you did with BNW to vanilla, I'd expect similar responses to what you got here. Doing a blind challenge run as your first playthrough while expecting a different game/to know everything you need already, causing you to break your challenge rules and complain every time something popped up that didn't match what you thought would happen, and then getting mad at everybody that points out your mistakes is kind of an easy way to get people on your bad side. Especially when people have to repeat themselves because you obviously missed the point the first five times it was said, or twisted it to mean something else. I mean, I found this whole ordeal pretty hilarious at first, but now it's getting pretty sad that you keep trying to argue everything/make us look bad. If my first visit to NG+ found your NRB post, I still would have laughed at how much of a fool you were making of yourself, even if I never played BNW. Vanilla is a square hole and BNW is a circular hole, but yet you keep doing this and bitching that it's not fitting:

All, As many of you who know me are aware, I live in a city that is presently taking it up the ass from mother nature with no lube and minimal reacharound. For those of you unfamiliar with how hurricanes work, a second landfall is very uncommon, while a THIRD is basically nature saying "fuck this city in particular". This thread is for anyone wishing to donate to relief, but isn't quite sure where to donate to. J.J. Watts, a local sportsball player and all-around nice guy has set up a fundraiser page to collect donations, and that is where I suggest sending your money if you want to see it go towards ongoing relief in the affected areas instead of just the initial impact. Thank you all.

So one of the admins said "start a thread" re: the recent change to the Discord rules that prohibit outright pornography (defined as images containing genitals or breasts) in the NSFW channel. So I'm doing that. My perspective is that it was a useful channel have for a couple of reasons. Sometimes, you're having a conversation in another channel where something very NSFW comes up; in those cases, the channel can serve as a useful way to carry on that conversation without stifling anybody, while at the same time giving people the ability to manage the content they have to deal with. The other thing is that there were some conversations that were inherently unsafe for life, but fun to have, even if you couldn't accept shitting up other channels with them. Dr. Letha's contributions to the channel are a good example of this - they were fucking hilarious examples of pornography gone wrong. I don't think anybody actually masturbated to them, but being able to see them posted has improved my life. I don't think we should encourage any of our Discord channels to be environments where you go to have a fap or a schlick. But I also don't think that's what the channel was really used for, anyway. Aside from one guy who was banned for his abuse of the channel, anyway. New rules aren't a good way to keep that kind of culture in place. Cultural pressure is. I'd rather have a general understanding that it's cool for people, mods or not, to tell people to stop shitting up a channel with something that isn't in the spirit of things, and get backed up by mods if it doesn't stop (and the mods turn out to agree). It'd be healthier for the community if we all learned that continuing to knowingly piss other people off isn't acceptable, even if it's by doing something that's technically allowed. Let's not let trolls claim "I'm not touching you!" That said, turning off automatic embedding in NSFW would be a good idea. I've got no problems with that. Not everybody wants to see Letha's carnival show of body horror but I think we can all cope knowing it's there. But seriously turn it back on in general, I'm not sure why that was disabled. I'm not making a poll because this isn't a democracy - make an argument and maybe you'll convince somebody with it, but I don't think weight of numbers is likely to do it on this one. EDIT: Oh hey, apparently this worked. If you're the sort of person who just reads OP and responds, the status quo is restored, but remember - don't be a shitheel about it. Keep your porn collection between you and your preferred image board.

Quick edit with mouse all over the place to make you all cringe, for bonus points.

Jesus, where do I begin...? These changes seem really random and not focused in any way whatsoever. What is your goal here? What kind of mod is this? A difficulty mod? A content mod? Okay, so definitely not a difficulty mod. With these changes, you might as well not even mod any of the enemies, as changes this small will amount to literally nothing. ...Why? This seems more like a really shallow randomizer than a mod, at this point. So, not a difficulty mod, not a quality mod... What else is there? Every ability costs 13 AP? Why? What kind of sense does that make? That literally penalizes the player and actively discourages if not completely shuts down any kind of depth with abilities. All spells have both a positive and negative effect on them now? Why? So when I cast Cure, it poisons me or something? Okay, so you're trying to nerf the damage curve. I can get on board with this. Eidolons have multi-element? Why? All physical and magical attacks inflict poison and darkness? Why? All the base character names have been modified? Fucking why? Every ability costs 255 AP to learn? What the actual fuck? Why? What purpose does this serve? This actively encourages grinding. Reduced HP and MP I can agree with. Okay, so here's the thing. Unless you found a way to change the type of value HP and MP are, you can't have doubled the HP of all enemies, and here's why. 65,535 is the max HP that an enemy can have, and there are a few bosses that already have that maxed. This is a maxed out 16-bit value, and unless you are able to change that datatype without fucking everything else up, this is literally not possible to do. Look, it was not at all my intention to come here and shit on your work, but this is a mod that has come from a completely unfocused and scatter-brained vision. I would be shocked if you told me you actually tested this before releasing it and said you were pleased with the changes. If you want to link to it here, that is fine, but this mod will not be hosted on NGPlus. While there are many reasons for this, three changes combined are enough to make this call. You've increased the exp curve immensely, lowered the amount of EXP and AP you get per battle, as well as made it so that you need 255 AP for every goddamn ability in the game. That is incredibly poor design. That's not fun, that's a pointless grind that makes no sense whatsoever. You need to go back to the drawing board with this and figure out what exactly you want to make, and for the love of god, playtest it too. I know some people might think I'm being too harsh, but sometimes you need to hear the truth, no matter how harsh it is.

Thank you BTB, I'm happy to see such support from everyone. As the coordinator of this effort, I want anyone considering making a donation to know that all of the money donated will go towards giving DN a head start on his effort to make a new life for himself. The idea is that this small gift will be a show of support in troubling times and ignite hope where things may feel hopeless. I'm keenly aware that cyberbegging and online scams are a thing, and I want to make it clear to anyone who is considering making a donation, but who feel wary of such issues, that we will not be handing over cash. The money will go towards a bus or plane ticket first and foremost, to get DN to a safe place where he'll have the best opportunity to start a new life. Any money left over after that will be used to buy the necessities of life, such as food, clothes, hygiene products, a prepaid phone card, etc. It is unfortunate this is the way this must be handled, because everyone needs money, but I want to make sure everyone feels comfortable with donating. To that end, I encourage all donations, whether they be anonymous or not, however big or small. Everyone's financial situation is different and we all have different priorities. Nobody will judge you on the size of your donation. Even just a few words of encouragement is helpful to someone in DN's situation. Thank you for taking the time to read this and thank you for your support!

We here at NGPlus are proud to announce that the site is now open to the public! NGPlus is a site dedicated to video game mods and discussion with the whole experience of the player in mind. There are many sites that focus on difficulty on a whole, but we feel that the overall player experience is the most valuable thing, and we hope that this will quickly grow to be a place where we can just chill and do what we love to do: play games and have discussions about them. We've got a pretty decent amount of mods with that exact principle in mind, so feel free to head on over to the Downloads section and give some of them a shot, or you can swing by the forums to say hello! We also have a dedicated Discord server if that's your thing, so don't be scared to click the Chat button up at the top. We might be a little bit schitzo, but we're friendly, we promise! If you plan on being a part of the community though, we'd be glad to have you. Just make sure to take a gander at the Forum Rules before posting. I'd like to take this opportunity to also introduce you to our Moderation team. Ninjasdf, FFTA, Kaffe Myers, and myself are your Administrators. Rynzer, Anima Zero, Kjata, Mishrak, Hart-Hunt are your Moderators. We're all pretty chill for the most part. So, that's about it. Welcome to the site!

The purpose of this mod is to revitalize this old gem of a game. While not a hardtype mod, the difficulty is somewhat increased due to the removal of the bonus roulette, which was present after boss fights in the original game. As a result, your stats will remain at their initial values - 100 STR, 100 INT, 100 AGL - unless you increase them through consumables such as Elixirs and wines. This is a long-term project and now the focus is to lay a solid foundation for the mod. The difficulty rebalance will be done in later versions, after players provide feedback on how hard or easy is v1.00, and once I have a definite idea of how I'm going to tackle this aspect. Project Design, Hacking, Programming: the_E_y_Es Programming, Tool development: Valendian Additional Programming: Rosto Download version 1.03 Apply the patch on Vagrant Story(U).bin Features include: Teleportation is free Analyze spell hitrate is 100% Heal spell restores 75 HP, ignores armor 2-Handed weapons are stronger Break Arts are more powerful Staff Break Arts now use INT instead of STR Crossbows get a 10% hitrate bonus to melee New hitrate for Exorcism/Banish Manabreaker gem no longer blocks friendly spells Traps can kill Ashley Bonus roulette removed Training dummies removed Escapeway area removed New enemies New enemy attacks New Polearm grip And much more. Homepage: vszenith.wordpress.com

With the 2.0 release of Brave New World just around the corner and one of its most prominent changes being a complete overhaul of enemy AI, I wanted to take a moment to talk specifically about how to design a good boss fight in an RPG. Now, anyone who's played Brave New World at all in the six years since its initial release can generally agree on at least one thing: Atma Weapon is the fight to watch out for. He's big, he's mean, he caps off the first half of the game in an epic fight with its own special music, and I set out to make sure that every bit of that distinction was earned. All of the other bosses in Brave New World have slowly evolved over time to get to where they are now, but Atma in particular has barely changed at all for fear of fucking with the gold standard that I was holding everything else I was designing to. And that's particularly interesting since, when I wrote it, I really didn't know what the hell I was doing. There are many ways to go about making your boss difficult, most of which fall under the definition of "fake difficulty" and should be avoided. More important than if something is hard is why it's hard - I'm not going to complain if you have an erection, but I will be concerned if you got it from stabbing children. Giving your boss more hit points (beyond a certain threshold) does nothing except needlessly prolong the fight and, while random elements are necessary, relying too heavily on them will turn your fight into a luck-based mission. There are several reasons that Atma works despite the fact that his AI is not particularly complex or interesting by my current standards: most importantly, he uses a wide variety of attacks that are both directly and indirectly offensive, and his stats are fine-tuned to my personally-suggested guideline of, "make the fight just hard enough that you, the developer can beat it, but only barely, and then dial it back a notch". But even this is just scratching the surface of what really makes the fight tick. At their core, battles in RPGs are nothing more than a balancing act of priorities. At their most simplistic, those priorities are defense and offense. Will my character be able to survive another hit? If not, then heal, else attack. A third priority often comes into play in the form of a limited resource, most commonly MP for magical abilities, that might force you to think one more turn ahead. You can see right away that this isn't particularly deep, especially when that third priority isn't stressed hard enough either because MP is so plentiful or consumable items are so abundant to the point of never being an issue (extra demerits if said items are just as good as or better than any character-specific abilities that they imitate). Sadly, many RPGs are comprised of battles which are barely if at all evolved beyond the point of "hit the bad guy until it dies" - unsurprisingly, such games tend to be regarded by their fans for their stories rather than for their gameplay. I've stated in the past that status effects are the "X-Factor" separating an interesting battle system from a pure numbers game, and this is where we dive head-first into that concept at work. By expanding the above list of priorities to include both positive and negative effects on the player character as well as the opponent, suddenly there's a lot more to juggle. Indeed, Atma Weapon is a battle where negative statuses are applied liberally to the player while positive ones are periodically stripped by force. Atma himself gains status buffs halfway through the fight that the player can opt to remove. However, this is immediately followed up by a particularly devastating attack that will require action to recover from, thus effectively dividing the player's attention. Initially, these buffs were a one-time application which would simply reward any player who thought to remove them; the only significant change that Atma has seen in the last six years was my realization that a "set and forget" approach to this particular element meant that it didn't end up factoring into the player's list of priorities. In order for those buffs to be part of the great balancing act, they had to be a persistent factor throughout the fight, and thus a new core mechanic of the battle is preemptively dispelling those buffs at set intervals. The final ingredient in what makes the battle with Atma Weapon particularly rough is his inherent ability to regenerate health. That it makes the battle more challenging is obvious, but it's again important to note why. Looking at the player's list of priorities, we see now quite a few things: offense, healing, resource management, buffs and debuffs... but this can all still be simplified to "get on your feet and then attack", meaning that the player can adopt a heavily defensive approach to greatly minimize the risk of defeat. With the enemy afforded the capability to heal, however, offense can no longer be completely de-prioritized and becomes woven into the fight's balancing act in a way that it otherwise wouldn't. Other fights in Brave New World take different approaches to this problem, most notably Phunbaba's "rage timer" that earns the player a face full of Blow Fish if they go for too long without attacking, regardless of how powerful that attack is. So, where does good boss design have to go from here? We must look past offense simply existing as a single priority and break it down into several of them, else offense is a simple matter of "hit the bad guy with the strongest attack you have" since there's generally no benefit in not using the strongest attack available. This is a concept that the original game attempted to explore with "wallchange" bosses which would periodically shift their elemental weaknesses at random while gaining immunity to every other element. Unfortunately, it didn't quite pan out as they'd hoped since players found it preferable to simply ignore the gimmick by spamming non-elemental attacks. Even when Brave New World took this concept one step further by preventing non-elemental damage and thus forcing the mechanic on the MagiMaster boss, the result was more of a gear check than an interesting or challenging fight. So clearly, there was a flaw to this approach. Enter Kaiser, king of the dragons and famous dummied-out boss from the original game who finally got his global debut as one of many questionable additions to the GBA re-re-release of Final Fantasy VI. He also appears in Brave New World as a third "wallchange" boss who somehow ended up even less interesting than the two who preceded him. Of all the boss fights to get a complete rewrite in 2.0, none were as significant or as needed as Kaiser's, which basically takes the "wallchange" gimmick and makes it proactive instead of reactive. The elemental premise still exists here, but rather than waiting in boredom for a weakness to present itself the player must instead actively cycle through their available attacks in order to prevent Kaiser from unleashing its real ultimate power. It's an extremely hectic fight that, moreso than any other in Brave New World, tests the player's ability to balance multiple priorities if they are to have any hope of pulling through. And for the closest thing that Brave New World has to an optional superboss, I would accept no less.

Hack to allow preview of equipment in shops. Headered Unheadered ASM for synch: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6vvay7b6k4zdkza/gear_stats_BNW.asm?dl=0

Personally the new script is hit and miss for me. I don't really care for the extra jokes and references but I do like the character changes, Celes for example is a lot better IMO. The game already had a bunch of pop culture references in it already and it feels kinda bloated with all the new stuff. It feels a lot more shoved in my face as well, doesn't help that the humor doesn't really mesh with me either. For me the ideal thing would be to remove the extra jokes (references, stuff like that fart joke, the silly item names like the slim jims, ect.) but keep the frankly much better character additions (Mishrak has already given great examples). Unfortunately I do see anything like this happening because for one BTB has already stated he has no interest in rewriting the script. And two nobody can even mention the script without some purist screaming "They touched the script! Burn the witch, nail the script to their charred remains and push them off a cliff!". I hardly think I'm making much of an argument either. I dunno why I even typed all this, just wanted to give my two cents on the subject I guess.

I feel like we're partially losing sight here of what Stamina is even about, and asking it to be a better DPS stat is kinda missing the point of what it's even for in the first place, which is as a tanking stat against magic damage and statuses, while also offering some character specific utility. (Like Mog stumbling on Dance less.) Like for me, the reason I enjoy Stamina Strago is because it lets me put him in the front row without having to worry about him dying letting him get full damage from his Rod hits, combine that with a Black Belt and he throws out a decent amount of free counters besides while I have him do other things. I think part of the point of Unicorn Edgar is that he can be a good team tank, and with the newer inherent Cover bonus spears give he still gets both of his relic slots while other party members have to give up a slot for a Knight Cape or Hero Ring in order to do so, and besides that he gets the Gungnir which also gives him +50% hp at no downside, with the only other source of of +50% hp in the game having obvious big downsides that you have to build around to make it work. Also remember part of the point in this hack is you can never have your cake and eat it too, being immortal is going to come at a cost if you go all in on it, and in this case that cost is doing rather mediocre damage, in fact it could be argued trying to attack with your tank should feel like a wasted turn, because you did that instead of using any of his utility options so someone else who does have the better damage doesn't have to do it and can attack instead. Like have Edgar set slow instead of someone else, or have him open fights with Noiseblaster or Mute, that sort of thing, and leave the damage dealing to others that don't have to do the "Status Chores" because Edgar can already take care of them. I'm going to say something crazy here and actually state that Unicorn Edgar's low damage might really be a good thing, see I notice Edgar has this huge amount of status utility that doesn't rely on any of his stats that I don't think is really getting fully capitalized upon because he's usually regulated to a damage role of some kind. (In fact in BTB's own utility list Edgar has the highest total amount of utility available out of anyone.) Like suddenly what tool you use doesn't really have to do with trying to get out more damage anymore, you use Flash because you want to Blind enemies or Bio Blaster for the AoE Poison, not because of the damage itself. So yeah crazy rant over, now I really feel like I wanna try out Unicorn Edgar on my next playthrough. (Along with a front row Stam/Speed Relm that focuses on Brush healing. lol)

Look, I'll tl;dr the general response you've been getting for you, but even condensed it's gonna be a couple paragraphs. Being time-invested, nice, and intelligent is neither sufficient nor necessary for being treated well here. Helpful, to-the-point content of speech is generally appreciated. These things help, but you can be a lazy, unfriendly moron and still be popular. Look at Nowea, for example. Respect for others and for established social dynamics, whether they're in a position of authority or not, is necessary, at least. This is true of every social group. You are arrogant. Your speech is neither helpful nor to-the-point. You are, at best, superficially polite. You cannot reason your way out of that characterization. It is a subjective opinion, and it was one I was hesitant to form (for instance, I upvoted several of your earlier posts just to counter the dogpile of negative rep a little). But it's an opinion that seems to be popular. It's one that can be changed just as it was formed - slowly, and by demonstration, not by argument.

I just want to point out that JKnox did in fact create another account simply to double-dip on the negative repping. He had the same exact IP address. That is different from the same domain and pinpoints it was the exact same computer that created both accounts. My career is web development so I have a strong understanding of these things. Having been a part of this community for about 4 years now I can guarantee that it is not a toxic (except @Kyrios, he's a toxic piece of shit ) place. If it was I would've been banned long ago on Insane Difficulty for calling out people's bullshit. I enjoyed the community and people so much I created this place when Insane Difficulty was broken beyond repair and it was unable to be fixed. You and JKnox seem to be the only ones thinking this place is toxic. And most here know me enough that it takes a lot of stupid shit (on either side) being said in order for me to call someone out on it. Half the time the community polices itself and staff doesn't need to do anything. Stop with the insults and let's put this shit behind us.

> 23000 more gp is needed if players are expected to buy the 3 available espers without random battles. ...Why would the game expect you to play it without random battles?

Download Brave New World Here (New to Brave New World? Want to know what it's all about? Check out the Readme here or our list of Frequently Asked Questions.) It's that time again, my friends! After a beta cycle that went on much longer than we were expecting, Brave New World 1.9.0 is officially released today. The major features of this update include tying the game's cover and counter-attack mehcanics to stamina (the 'ol tank & spank) courtesy of Seibaby and one of the holy grails of FF6 modding in the form of GrayShadow's in-battle spell patch. There's also a lot more goodies in the Unlockme, including boxart courtesy of Shane at RetroGameCases and a little something special to snap into from our good friend Bauglir. As always, many of the changes in this update are largely inspired by the feedback I get from players who stream on Twitch or post videos on Youtube. I take something away from every playthrough I watch, and more and more with each passing update, Brave New World truly is the work of the amazing community that surrounds it. I can honestly say that the humble project Synchysi and I began work on over six years ago would never be what it is today without all of you, and for that and much else I am eternally grateful. I don't know what the future holds for this mod, but I am certain that you all will be a huge part of it. What's new in 1.9.0: Brave New World is now available as a reproduction cartridge courtesy of our good friends at Retro Circuits. And if liking things on Facebook is your bag, baby, then by all means go nuts.

I'm very interested in making a version of the script that includes the best of what BNW has to offer (some of the writing for Celes is particularly good) while reducing the density of memes, references, and fourth wall breaks. I enjoyed so very much about this mod. The mechanical design is stellar, from the HP scale to the proportion of enemies that can dispel you to the variety of options available to each character... it goes on. However, I strongly dislike rape jokes and anything adjacent to rape jokes. Also, for me the sudden shifts in the script's tone are more jarring than they are funny. I do think real-world references are appropriate in a few places. The Beginner's Hall can break as many fourth walls as it likes, as that's basically necessary for its purpose. The Ultros sections thrive on absurdity. Nearly any scene that plays the 'wacky hijinks' music could accommodate a few weird jokes. And so on and so forth. So I think such a project could be very interesting and also produce a version of BNW that would be accessible to a wider audience.

I would encourage you to read this interview with Ted Woolsey. http://www.playeronepodcast.com/forum/index.php?/topic/145-transcript-of-ted-woolsey-interview/ So Ted Woolsey made pop culture references and tried hard to capture much of the juvenile humor in the original FF6 script. Yet much of this was expunged because he had to rewrite the script four times in 30 days basically by himself. It has plenty of errors, still plenty of pop culture references and is deeply flawed. I do very much wonder how many pop culture references were in that first revision. None of your examples explain why specifically they’re bad, only that you dislike them. Those are two very different things. I’ll concede that some of BTB’s crass humor doesn’t sit well with me at times but overall, I’m willing to look past it for Locke’s lines at the Opera House, Celes’ dialogue during Locke’s scenario, Cyan’s dialogue that was rewritten to be proper old Shakespearean by a studied linguist @Bishop and the beautiful new Setzer scene in WoR Kohlingen. But you never actually made it that far so you didn’t see those. I’m of the opinion that you picked up BNW having already passed judegment and simply found the first really obvious reference and came here to be internet mad about it. None of your examples violate canon or change character personalities or anything of that nature.

I can neither confirm nor deny that.

I just wish to inform that I have now made downloads available to guest viewers of the site -- i.e. you don't need to register to download. If you bump into any issues, just holler.

As many of you are now aware, one of our own is currently going through some rough times. He has lost his home and is currently living in a shelter in his hometown of Hot Springs, Arkansas trying to find his way to Seattle where he can try to get back on his feet. Our good friend Madsiur of FF6hacking has graciously allowed us to use his Paypal donation system to help arrange for an outreach of our two communities to help D on his way. If you are able to help and wish to do so, we are very grateful: (donations closed - thank you all for donating!) I understand that many of us are strapped for cash in these tough times, but at the very least a kind word will go a long way right now. Thank you all for being such a great community. -BTB

NGPlus Rules So, like all communities, of course we have rules. Our rules are pretty few and far between, because quite frankly, the rules are the same everywhere. These rules are necessary, as they make the forums a better place for everyone. If you cross them, you're going to have a bad time. If you continually cross them, not only will you have a bad time, but you're going to find the banhammer dropped square on your head. So, since we don't want to ban everyone who walks through that door, do us both a favor and follow these, alright? Rule One — Be Respectful This rule is simply summed up as "Don't Be An Asshole" but I figured it was better to be a little more tactful. This website does not belong to you. You are a guest here. This is our home. Just as you wouldn't walk into someone's home and be an asshole, don't do it here, because the reaction will be the same. We are not obligated to uphold anyone's notions of "free speech" or even "fairness." The Administrators and Moderators will have the final word. Period. If you are told to do something by a Moderator or an Administrator that you feel is wrong, simply reach out privately, either to the one in question or one of their peers. Generic trolling will get you banned. If you're gonna flame someone, be creative about it, and make sure it was warranted to begin with. A little humility goes a long way here. Think before you chime in with your opinion on a given exchange. There will usually be some history behind it, so take the time to observe what might be actually going on and put the conversation into context before you decide who is "right" and who is "wrong." Above all, take into account who is posting — context is everything. Jumping in half-cocked will only make you look like an ass and piss off the people who actually know what's going on. Rule Two — Contribute To The Community Contribute to the site. Some people contribute by being helpful when someone posts a question. Some people make threads that stimulate discussion, or by uploading relevant and useful facts and information. Some people contribute by posting news from the gaming world. Others contribute by providing resources, others by simply making us laugh. Just add to the site. It really is that simple.

Hi all. Bishop here. Bishop is an old family name (we arrived in the colony of Connecticut in 1689), I am not actually a bishop. I am, however, actually a Catholic priest. (I may give thorough answers to your questions about religion; or I may ignore them if I am coming here to escape the fact that I am an introvert tasked with guiding people through all the most emotionally fraught moments of their lives. Depends on my mood.) I rarely visit chat but like to catch up on the forum regularly. I once organized a 1.3 "draft" that created six rather fun challenge runs, but I might be better known for breaking BNW.

Just giving everyone a heads up that I've slightly changed the way reputation works. Members will no longer be able to see who gave them reputation (both positive and negative). I wanted to keep the rep system in place because I think it's a good thing, but at the same time removing the who gave it part is a nice precaution to avoid any possible drama in the future.

Nice new site. Clean and easy to navigate. Oh and the distinct advantage of being able to register... always a plus. Thank you guys for trying to fix things however it goes.

I've written at length at this point on multiple aspects of game design, covering a wide range of "do's" and "don'ts" of a vastly complex subject. Today, as indicated by the title of the article, I'd like to take a step back and propose a basic rule of thumb which can give you a basic idea about how well a game is designed without analyzing it too deeply (or, at least without analyzing it from any other angles). This guideline is as follows: "How much opportunity and incentive does this game provide to the player to use all of the tools available to them?" The over-simplified version of this question is, "how many of the options given to the player completely suck?" such as a fighting game with a character that nobody would use unless they wanted to intentionally handicap themselves. This test expands that question by asking why that character sucks - are their abilities simply bad, or are they just bad within the context of a game environment that wasn't designed with their abilities in mind? Sometimes an item or an ability in a game is actually helpful, or at least it would have been had it been given to you sooner. And other times you have things that are clearly designed to feed that monkey drive in your brain just by existing, but are clearly useless upon closer inspection. We will apply this test to five popular game franchises and see how they hold up. Bear in mind that this is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of how well-designed they are on the whole, but rather how well they perform when judged according to this one specific guideline that is itself being evaluated as much as the games in question are. Also note that the term "tools" should be defined very broadly here to include basically any action the player can take: an attack they can use, an item they can collect, or even an environment that they can explore. Many people go through life embracing the question of, "why shouldn't I do this thing?" but today we'll be taking points away each time a game fails to come up with a good response to, "why should I?" So, without further ado... Super Mario Bros. Arguably the most basic of all platforming franchises, Super Mario Bros. should provide us with a decent baseline of expectations for this experiment. By its very nature as a pioneer of its industry, it will also provide us with examples of evolutionary leftovers from the era that bore it. Super Mario Bros. arose from the height of the arcade age and, in some ways, never really left it behind. Case in point, the supremely superfluous scoring system serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever and sticks out like a third nipple upon even mild scrutiny. That said, there is nothing in any Mario game which exists solely to boost your score (the same, interestingly enough, cannot be said for more "advanced" games like Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania), and so this entire mechanic can be safely ignored. The other vestigial mechanic of the series is its "lives" system, which at least upon its initial release was still quite functional. The original Super Mario Bros. demanded to be completed with either a minimal amount of fucking up or an excessive amount of grinding 1-ups from the only spot in the game where doing so was actually possible. Extra lives were otherwise very scarce, and collecting coins to earn more of them was, at least for the time being, actually rewarding. Throw in the fact that mushrooms, stars, and fire flowers (oh my) were vital upgrades because, again, arcade games were designed primarily to murder you and eat your quarters, and the first game in this long-running series is pretty coherent as far as our test is concerned. We shouldn't give it too much credit, however; given how basic it is, it would be like congratulating a caveman for discovering how to club his neighbor over the head. The second game, or at least the one we got here in 'Murrica, was a complete departure from the rest of the series as many sequels of the time were (bear in mind that Super Mario Bros. itself was a sequel to a vastly different game). Most notably, it introduced an incredibly cool character selection system that would be criminally neglected throughout the remainder of the series and significant exploration elements in its stage design. With the latter, however, we began to see the cracks form in the foundation of the series that would later grow into massive fault lines. Thoroughly exploring the game's "subcon" areas was critical to your survival as it contained both coins, which could be used to earn extra lives, and mushrooms, which would increase your more immediate survivability. The only problem was that each mushroom was applicable only to the stage in which it was found, severely diminishing the incentive to hunt them down in many of the shorter/easier stages - again, not the hugest of deals, but a portent of things to come. Super Mario Bros. 3 saw a return to the basics of the series running directly contrary to an attempt to be more progressive. The reappearance of the scoring system was an overt nostalgic throwback even by the standards of its time, but far more noticeable was the increasingly ripe corpse of the lives system dressed up in its Sunday best and being paraded around like it was Weekend at Bernie's. A game over would now send you back only to the beginning of a world rather than the entire game, not that you'd ever see it given that the game crammed more green mushrooms down your throat than a Dr. Seuss antagonist. Once precious extra lives were reduced from glistening oases in the middle of the desert to, "...if I hear that Goddamn Wonderwall song one more fucking time, I'ma strangle a bitch." Superficial aspects aside, however, Super Mario Bros. 3 fares about as well as you'd expect it to. The various power-ups were the real meat of this game and every one (except that damn frog suit) was a welcome sight whenever you happened across them. In fact, given their transient nature and the extreme rarity of the most desirable amongst them, they became a little too desirable and more often than not ended up being hoarded in players' inventories rather than actually being used. This issue was exacerbated by the fact that they existed in set quantities rather than variable depending on player action. The developers missed a critical opportunity at this juncture to take the franchise's iconic coins, which continued to litter every stage and made half the game feel like a dive into Uncle Scrooge's vault, and attach them to Mario's inventory rather than to the rotting carcass of his seemingly-infinite supply of lives. (Please note: SMB3 will be docked several points for the inclusion of the totally fucking sweet shoe in only a single stage where it ends up being more cool than actually useful.) Not much changed for awhile beyond this point in the series. Mario continued to cling to outdated mechanics long past their expiration date, culminating in a hilariously gratuitous appearance by Yoshi in Super Mario 64 to reward your efforts in finding every star in the game with a load of useless green shit, but they remained a relatively harmless and largely insignificant presence until their eventual abolishment. The important aspect is the incentive to explore the game's stages rather than running straight to the end, which is what these superfluous elements ostensibly existed to facilitate. When probing the depths of every stage stopped being necessary for the sake of survival, the series floundered a bit until it fully embraced the collect-a-thon genre. This issue was perhaps most prominent in SMB3, which presented the player with an amazing world full of secrets and almost no reason whatsoever to look for any of them. Curiously, the GBA remakes of both Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario World addressed this concern with the addition of the "dragon coin" system (present in the original version of the latter, but there was no incentive at the time to hunt them down), but Mario 3 was for whatever reason ported over lacking the one change that would have made a classic game even better. And that's terrible. Score: Fair The Legend of Zelda Looking at just the first game in the series, Zelda scores remarkably well on this test. Every item in the Goddamn toolshed that Link has stuffed inside his tunic has a legitimate and viable use, although a few of them do see an unfortunately small window of application. It would be nice to stumble across the Red Candle a bit earlier than the seventh dungeon, and you may as well not even bother getting the wooden boomerang in the first dungeon since you'll acquire its upgrade almost immediately thereafter in the second. But these are ultimately minor nitpicks in an otherwise solid game. Moving on to the second title, we see similarly high marks. Items here served almost exclusively as keys to new areas, leaving spells as the "functional" upgrades. And again, there are some nitpicks - Fire could have been more universally effective and Reflect could have worked on more types of projectiles - but ultimately every piece of Link's repertoire feels like it belongs there and has something to add to the mix. Moreover, the experience system provided incentive clear up until the end of the game to use those abilities to murder everything you came across. The 16-bit jump to A Link To The Past is where we start to see extraneous elements creep into the game's design. Link's inventory is larger now than ever before, and at least some of this shit should probably have been cut from the final product: the Magic Cape was just a redundant version of the Cane of Byrna, red and green potions had no reason to exist alongside the clearly-superior blue ones, and not one but three different spell medallions that each killed every enemy on-screen was just a wee bit excessive. Now, the potions might not have been an issue if it weren't the biggest design misstep in this installment: completely ruining the economy. Collecting rupees became excessively trivial in this game, rendering it invalid as a balance mechanic (i.e. purchasing cheaper red or green potions instead of the more expensive blue ones) and reducing any attempt to reward the player with financial gain to "thanks, I hate it." Hyrule's busted economy would persist through its next several games and would remain arguably the biggest flaw of the series for quite some time. While Link's Awakening and Ocarina of Time both had a few items that mostly sat in your inventory and took up space, by far the absolute most useless thing in both games was the mountain of rupees burning a hole in your pocket because you had nothing to spend it on. The creators even seem to be aware of this issue between the snarky messages from rupee chests in Link's Awakening and the crowning insult of rewarding the player for finding every gold skulltula in Ocarina of Time with an infinite supply of money which was, by that point in the game, literally useless. The closest that the series ever got to putting its economy back on track was the Oracle games, by which I mean that there was actually a decent amount of stuff to buy and rupees weren't being handed out to players like free candy from the back of Jared Fogle's van. The Oracle games are also a welcome return to form with regard to their deliberately purposeful inventory and are especially notable for featuring upgrades to several items that seem to arrive just around the time that you're starting to wonder why you're even carrying the damn things around. Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages both very clearly had their fingers on the pulse of what makes the series tick and combined the best elements of all of the games which preceded them while simultaneously learning from their mistakes. It's because of this that I choose them both to represent the Zelda franchise as a whole to render my final verdict. Score: Great (but Adam Smith would like a word) Mega Man The Mega Man fanbase is firmly divided between two types of players: those that insist on playing through as much of the game as possible using just the regular gun and those that have fun looking for opportunities to use the other weapons. While this article is written from the perspective of the latter camp, the existence of the former tells us a great deal about the design of the series and the unique challenges it faces as a result. More specifically, we must view the ability to play through the game's stages in any order - a staple of the Mega Man franchise - as one of the tools available to the player. Bearing this in mind, its design flaws become readily apparent. The stages are designed to be played in any order and this is reflected in their difficulty; each one is potentially the first one to be tackled and thus must be winnable without the benefit of any weapons other than your basic pea-shooter. This has the negative impact of providing little incentive to the player to experiment with their new weapons aside from the novelty value. Contrast to the Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania games, wherein subweapon use was greatly beneficial in preserving your health and, ultimately, surviving. A key factor in this discrepancy is the noticeable generosity that the Mega Man series has with health refills: were Mega Man's health pellets (which is to say nothing of E-Tanks) as uncommon as Ninja Gaiden's potions or Castlevania's wall chicken, there would be a far greater incentive to use all of the tools at your disposal in order to mitigate damage intake. Looking to the primary use of Mega Man's secondary weapons, we see a game that largely seeks to invalidate its own structure. Exploiting the weaknesses of robot masters to the weapons obtained from the others effectively trivializes every boss fight beyond the first in a typical Mega Man title, which in turn reduces the ability to play through the game's stages in any order to a simple decision as to which one to play first, with the rest of the order being dictated by the "weakness loop"(*). Mega Man 3 was the first - and only - title in the series to attempt to break away from this by having two loops joined together by a single robot master with multiple weaknesses, and this increasingly-stagnant series would stand to benefit from further exploration of this concept. (*Yes, the game becomes more interesting if you play the stages in a wacky order and don't exploit boss weaknesses, but I've said before that self-control is a terrible thing to balance your game around. There's nothing wrong with encouraging self-imposed challenges in your game, but you must provide the player with a tangible metric by which to do so.) A much more interesting take on the Mega Man formula would see each boss possessing minor weaknesses to several weapons as opposed to a debilitating weakness to a single one. This would change the flow of the battle drastically depending on which weapon was used due to the different behavior of each one and allow for a far greater variety of potential viable routes through the game. As for the stage design, some games in the series experimented with diverging paths within levels or optional exploratory elements that required certain weapons to proceed, but neither idea had the (apparent) intended result of promoting different routing choices since neither focused directly on strengthening that core concept. Instead, the design would have done better to focus on a dynamic difficulty curve with each stage posing greater hazards the later in the order it was attempted - and, thus, the more equipped you were to handle it. Score: Poor (Great with a few tweaks) Metroid Unsurprisingly, Metroid beats out pretty much any other game series out there when graded on this scale given that it's almost unfairly biased toward Metroid's core design concepts. Metroid games are specifically designed around the tools given to the player as a means of both progression and gameplay. This seamless integration makes every upgrade feel far more meaningful as a result with the only real downside being that the scavenger-hunt nature of the series makes finding your 50th missile pack feel a little like opening up a treasure chest full of soiled linens. So, really, what more is there to say here that I didn't already say in the article I wrote about Super Metroid? Well, games in the series tend to be somewhat on the easy side when played through casually, only revealing their true sadistic colors to players who attempt challenge runs. A low% run, wherein the player attempts to complete the game with as few items as possible, tends to see some fairly ingenious use of the items which are collected. Alas, this shoves all of Samus's other items by the wayside along with the equally ingenious tricks that can be pulled off with them simply because there's just no reason in any potential run of the game for those tricks to be used unless you're just screwing around. In short, if I had to find a failing with Super Metroid based on the criteria at hand, it would be that it's not a more robust version of itself. Enter the internet. Something that has become increasingly popular in the hacking scene are randomizers: programs which, well, randomize various aspects of a given game to generate virtually infinite replayability from a game that many players have beaten hundreds of times over by this point. They tend to be hit or miss, depending on the game in question. For example, Final Fantasy VI is an absolute mess of a game, and one of the more popular randomizers out there takes it and turns it into... well, an even bigger mess. There's no accounting for taste, I suppose. But something like Metroid, on the other hand? Samus is practically begging for it. If you love Super Metroid (and who doesn't?), definitely consider giving the randomizer a spin the next time you've got a hankering to play. And if you also like Zelda, you're in for a real treat. Due to an incidental compatibility between the SRAM usage by the ROMs for both games, it turned out to be possible to combine them into a single game, randomizing items from each throughout both games. And yes, I'm aware that what was supposed to be an examination of the Metroid series devolved into me shilling a fan product, but it's something I wanted to get around to sooner or later and it's not like I had much else to say here. (Also, you should play AM2R. It's fucking amazing.) Score: Excellent (guitar riff) Final Fantasy Obviously, we had to cover this one. I mentioned before when I touched on the concept of this test that the average JRPG would score miserably and if you've read everything I've written prior to this point you'll have a pretty good idea as to why. The issue certainly isn't the lack of options - if anything, you have way too many of them. Rather, there is simply no reason to not just pick the most powerful attack you have and spam it ad nauseam. Although by no means unique in this regard, Final Fantasy VI remains a notable offender due to the sheer excess of clearly superfluous options it provides. As I discussed at length in my article on boss fight design in RPGs, the complexity of combat in most JRPGs rarely progresses beyond, "hit the bad guy until he dies, stopping to heal thyself as necessary." Other options are indeed universally present - buffs for your characters, status debuffs for your enemies, or weaker attacks that might prove more beneficial if used under the right circumstances - but rarely if ever did any of them prove to be useful. Debuffs in particular are a subject I've elaborated on in the past, and their ubiquitous shittiness can be summarized thusly: they don't work on anything you'd actually want to use them against. Thus, the opportunity to utilize these options exists only on enemies for which there is absolutely no incentive to do so. Again, this is where Final Fantasy VI breaks away from the rest of the pack and stands out as a glorious example of what not to do seeing as several of its bosses are, in fact, vulnerable to status effects. Now, this might sound like a good idea at first - which it almost is - except that the majority of FF6's statuses will not merely weaken but will rather completely shut down whatever you use them on. There's a difference between an intelligent player effectively using the tools available to them in order to make a difficult challenge easier to overcome and a tool which destroys that challenge altogether. This highlights a significant issue with such abilities in RPGs. Seeing as they are tactical affairs rather than action-based platformers, their skills generally do not require quick thinking or reflexes in order to use. Implemented poorly, they're simply an "automatic win" button that the player merely needs to remember exists and think to use. Ideally, their use would be contingent on at least some degree of forward setup and planning and/or would render the battle easier rather than free. However, that requires careful consideration and battles designed specifically around the concept, so it's very easy to see why most RPGs simply go the route of status debuffs only being effective against trash mobs. So, coming back around to the original question: does Final Fantasy VI provide both opportunity and incentive to use abilities that, in any other JRPG, would have been completely ignored? Yes, it does, but the lack of careful design around this decision makes the result worse than if they hadn't tried at all. By allowing certain options to be so over-effective that there becomes little sense in trying any other option, you ultimately end back up at the same point where you started. Final Fantasy VI scores technical points on this front, thus proving that this litmus test is not without its flaws. Score: Abysmal Conclusion And there we have it: five popular game franchises judged by a single metric that hopefully provides some insight about how well their designs work. There are several other game series(...es?) that I'd like to visit in a potential follow-up to this article: Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, and a different RPG series that might shine a better light on the genre than today's selection did. But for now, this article about a quick and easy way to tell how well a game is designed is already, ironically, one of the longest and hardest (giggity) that I've ever written. I'd like to thank the various communities that keep reading these articles and whose encouragement helps keep them coming. I honestly can't think of a better reward for my efforts than to have played a part in inspiring so many of you. (Well, besides the groupie sex.)

I recently completed my first playthrough of BNW, and I think I owe it to the modders to provide some feedback on this huge project. Thank you for putting together a compelling mod for one of our favorite games. Since I played this at my leisure and didn't take notes along the way, this review will just be whatever comes to mind as best I can remember in order, along with scattered thoughts on the design decisions. First, let me start by saying I am a "big" fan of FFVI. Not enough to spend a few years modding it, but I've played the SNES release several times, and the GBA release once. It's one of my all time favorites, so I was very intrigued by the idea of a "fixed" FFVI, without the gamebreaking bugs and perhaps some actual challenge. It has been a few years since my last playthrough of vanilla, so I went in forgetting a few details, like Shadow's location in WoR. I also tried to keep spoilers for the mod to a minimum, though I saw the thread on Magimaster, and may have ended up overpreparing. WoB up to Zozo is pretty much the same. The tutorials are good, though I quickly forgot some of the things that Stamina and Vigor do. I actually went through the entire game treating Vigor as "physical attack" and Stamina as "status resistance, regen increase". Edgar's Figaro discount is missed, especially since there isn't too much of interest to buy, except for Tinctures, which brings me to my first criticism. Tinctures are too expensive. As stated in BTB's great article, magic was the be-all end-all of vanilla, and great effort was taken to make other forms of attack more viable. The high cost of Tinctures (1000G for a measly 50MP) treats magic like it is still the be all end all, and it makes it difficult to experiment with spells, since you only get 1-3 per Tincture. Only at the tail end of the WoR was I able to set aside enough money to max out on tinctures and go ham with Terra. I suggest either lowering the cost of tinctures, making ethers available for purchase, lowering the MP cost of black spells, or some combination of the above. Serpent River is the first part of the game where I got wiped, namely due to Albatross just demolishing you if you use the wrong attack. Since you can have two of them in a formation, and have no way of knowing what will set them off, I feel the fireball attack is a bit too punishing. The battle for the Espers has some potential for challenge, but at this point (and through the rest of WoB) Locke was kind of OP and could carry almost any team through an encounter. One of the things I looked forward to a lot in this mod was seeing the dialogue changes - if certain lines would be clarified, or if any expanded material could make it in to build the world up even more. I was pretty disappointed to see that even the conversations during the march to Tritoch didn't really have anything new or improved. The moment where you get the espers in Zozo is the first high point in the game. It's interesting to see who learns what. I also think it is interesting that some characters end up with only tier-2 magic. ELs are well explained, but as a system I think they are unintuitive. At first I tried to save them up, but as the difficulty ramped up, I just spent them on whatever I thought the character should be doing, always prioritizing speed when it was available. This seemed to work pretty well, and most of my characters ended up "well rounded" as opposed to the single-esper-centric "builds" I see in the character threads. There are a few things to say about speed. It could be my imagination, but adding speed levels does seem to make the ATB noticeably faster, and keeps the battle moving at a good pace. Enemies are the complete opposite, though - I have absolutely no idea how their speed works. I would set slow on every boss, and couldn't tell any difference. It is noticeable when affecting player characters. This implementation of ATB is a bit sketchy, too. While doing top-level menuing, monster ATBs continue to fill, but if you go into a submenu like items or spells, their ATBs pause. This can situationally be very advantageous, and I found myself abusing it in a number of fights. At times it felt like abusing the ATB this way was the intended method of dealing with some bosses who acted too frequently. The Magitek Factory is fun as ever, though I got wiped by a robot on that last screen after you get off the minecart (lol). I think the encounter with Kefka here is a good place for some dialogue changes if possible. Maybe make it more clear what the hell Celes does to bail them out. I think you could afford to spoil the player a bit more with exotic weapons/armor at this point, especially in the imperial storehouse. Everything else in WoB feels pretty much like vanilla until you get to the FC. And OH BOY. The FC. FC is the first low point in the game, that feels completely inferior to vanilla in pretty much every way. The random encounters are difficult but manageable - I'd say they are the limit of what could be considered "fair". But then you get to Atma, which is a bad gear check. Mind Blast is a truly random game over. If you're like me and couldn't find whatever item apparently gives Shadow access to Rerise, you're in even more trouble. Atma should be hard, as the final boss of WoB, but it took a LOT of tries to finally beat it. My team was Terra, Edgar, Locke, Shadow. I suppose I could have gone all the way back to the airship and picked up Setzer for Rerise, but I shouldn't have to do FC twice, and I imagine a lot of players will choose Terra and either Edgar or Locke for story reasons. Atma is a problem. What follows, however, is even worse. As mentioned before, I was very excited to see script changes which expand on the world and characters, and for some reason, the escape from FC is the only place that seems to have been a priority and it is awful. I can't begin to imagine what inspired that fanfic.net-esque emo exchange between Celes and that cutscene boss. The implication that Kefka gave her some power is also misplaced and never brought up again. Allowing Celes to use Shock is the only redeeming factor in the entire sequence. Believe me when I tell you that between the frustrating battles and cringey story changes, FC makes a very strong impression that leads to a lot of players not appreciating the rest of the mod as much as it deserves. I got super unlucky with Cid in the WoR, and thought his death was now forced after three failed attempts to save him. I wasn't feeling as sympathetic for Celes coming right after her self-loathing on the FC. Getting off the island and heading towards Tsen had some actual danger for Celes, which was nice. It feels more like a requirement to grab Sabin here rather than skip ahead for the 3 character finish lulz. And it's worth picking him up, because Celes' "seriously?" comment when Sabin is fooled by Gerad is great, and the kind of enhanced personality I was looking for from both of them. In general WoR was pretty brutal, and felt a bit unfair. Most of my characters entered in the low 20's, which gets you one-shot by quite a number of enemies. Stumbling onto Doom Gaze or any Dragon without picking up some elemental shields or powerleveling is game over. This is where the design philosophy of "take away the free stuff" falls apart. With so many characters and no shared experience, you have to rotate weak members in and out. As a result, you feel very weak throughout much of the WoR (and you are). Bosses take forever with these gimped parties. FOREVER. Hidon was the absolute worst boss in the game, much worse than even Atma Weapon. I generally went through the WoR with story oriented teams - Sabin and Gau rescue Cyan, Strago and Relm go after Hidon, etc. Even with Terra or Edgar around to babysit, oftentimes it felt like these were just flat out the wrong characters for those bosses. It felt like the bosses were redesigned around battle engine concepts, without consideration of player habits. It also seemed like they were balanced around the old experience sharing, not the new system where you can easily walk in on the red dragon at lv25 or less. Fanatics Tower was an improvement over the original. It was actually the second to last place I visited in WoR, thinking it would be like vanilla with the reflect gimmick, and that I could barely handle random encounters in other places in WoR. It turned out to be surprisingly easy, even the Magimaster. Gem Box is something I wish I picked up right away. The Colosseum, while more fair than vanilla, was also a lot less interesting, and very few bets felt like straight upgrades. I wasted quite a bit of time on battles just to find out that certain items just get swapped for a comparable item for another character. For some reason, a lot of nice gear could be exchanged for phoenix tears. I mentioned it in another thread as well, but Schemp is the funniest thing in the game, and just a brilliant application of scripting. The Dream Stooges attacking each other was a great touch as well, but the crass language doesn't fit and ruins the novelty of the battle. BTB's article talks about vanilla's Moogle Charm being an admission that the battle system isn't very good, and while that is true, it did serve another purpose - saving time. You're sure to run into a dragon or two that you can't beat until coming back later, and it is not fun to grind all the way through Narshe or Phoenix Cave a second time. There is also one part in Cyan's soul where you ride magitek armor, and the encounter rate is insane. A lot of frustration in WoR could be avoided by bringing it back. The esper system breaks down a bit as WoR goes on as well. It's very exciting to find new magicite, but equally as disappointing to find out that it only applies to one character. Kefka's tower was great. I entered with everyone between 28-34. Random encounters had that same feeling of "upper limit of fair" that FC did, and the encounter variety was fantastic. The bosses were all well balanced here - challenging, but didn't take ages to beat. I was surprised that Kaiser Dragon was very easy. When I sketched it with Relm and saw Ultima, I thought perhaps it was going to gear-check me and throw an Ultima at the very end, but fortunately it did not. Speaking of Ultima, it was great to finally get it in Terra's hands and start tearing up those last few encounters. It also made her feel very important in the final battle with Kefka. The final battle with Kefka is nearly perfect. Aside from Lode Stone being a little annoying on the first tier, all of it was balanced perfectly, and Goner is finally as scary is it should be when you have less than 2000HP. It felt great to finally cut loose and start using the X-Potions and Elixirs. Freely using Terra's magic in KT really highlights the need for better MP recovery options throughout the game. (continued in next post)

My problem with Dadaluma is that two crucial pieces of information are more or less completely opaque: 1) Slim Jim giving haste is only possible to see if you bring Scan or have stolen one and used it, and it's perfectly reasonable to assume that Slim Jim just does regen + jump because that's already a lot of things for one attack to do. (Yes, I know it doesn't actually CAUSE the jump, but that's what it looks like to someone who doesn't know what Slim Jim does.) 2) Up until this point, counter-attacks have been very simple. Blitz Albatross, get Fireballed. Tools Tusker, get Gored. Then all of a sudden, Dadaluma has an extremely complicated script with multiple interacting counterattacks and incrementing variables and shit, with no indication of it. My solution: An NPC in Zozo says "I've noticed Dadaluma gets lethargic after he eats..." Another NPC in Zozo says something like "I've watched Dadaluma fight. He responds to every attack with exactly the same counter!" or "I've watched Dadaluma fight. His attacks are a lot more threatening than his counters!" Now the relevant information is not completely hidden, and it's up to the player to figure out what it means. And if they don't talk to the NPCs, well, that's on them! And it has the added benefit of not changing the fight in any way, just giving the player some extra information going into it. If this were added, then when someone inevitably complains about Dadaluma being too hard, we can be like, "Did you talk to all the NPCs?" rather than "Just figure it out!" and it feels a lot better as a player, knowing it was their fault they missed it, rather than the game just hides it.

Download Brave New World Here (New to Brave New World? Want to know what it's all about? Check out the Readme here or our list of Frequently Asked Questions.) I don't normally do big update announcements like this for minor releases, but the community-driven nature of this update cycle has let to version 1.8 being a lot more spread out than we're used to, and 1.8.5 had a number of very significant bugs that needed patching. I want to thank everyone for their patience in dealing with the deluge of hotfix patches for the last few months while we got everything sorted out for a proper release, and I'd like to give an extra-special thanks to Seibaby for providing several new hacks for this update and earning his "Gold" BNW donor status. So, what's in the box for 1.8.6? Aside from the bugfixes, the major highlight is several new hacks concerning speed and/or theft. One of the biggest complaints we've had since the implementation of Think's nATB system was the significantly increased difficulty in escaping from fights. A rewriting of the ATB initialization code now allows your characters' speed to contribute much more significantly to getting first strike in battle, and a side effect of this makes running from unwanted fights much easier on average. Conversely, nATB also pushed speed to being a DPS god stat by removing the soft cap on its effectiveness, necessitating a rewrite of the speed code itself to lessen its effect at high levels and bring the slower characters a bit more up to par. Theft is addressed by allowing the speed of the "treasure hunter" to increase the odds of getting a rare steal rather than the old flat 1/8 chance as well as allowing successful theft attempts to qualify as a free action and thus give the "treasure hunter" a free turn immediately afterward. The other major hack to make it in allows Gau to Leap anywhere he finds enemies that he can rage, thus making it far less annoying to hunt down that one last rage that just won't fucking show up on the Veldt. While this does allow Gau early access to a few key rages at certain points of the game, it's largely a QoL change that will hopefully win over a few more fans to his camp. Finally, the addition of X-Fight to Shadow's Kagenui in the previous version proved... much more effective than I was counting on, in part by finally bringing to light the fact that the X-Fight damage penalty never stacked with the dual-wield damage penalty like it was supposed to. This turned Shadow into a one-man wrecking crew (even moreso than usual), at least for the players who were aware of the hotfix to fix the incorrect stats on the Kagenui, which otherwise had a whopping battle power of zero. As always, I'll close with a reminder to everyone that Brave New World is now available as a reproduction cartridge courtesy of our good friends at Retro Circuits. Feel free to contact them with questions about their products or even just to chat; they're great folks and I'm glad to have the pleasure of dealing with them. What's new in 1.8.6: (Oh, and if liking things on Facebook is your bag, baby, then by all means go nuts.)

Introducing: Final Fantasy 6: Tensei Latest Update: 27 November 2017 A large-scale hack, FF6: Tensei is an attempt to rebalance both the game and the world. With a smaller cast of characters -- nine playable main characters, with three hidden secondary (non-plot) characters, compared to the original games twelve-and-two -- a revisited and revised equipment list, and a massively overhauled ability system, FF6: Tensei is be a brand new experience to fans of the original game, while still maintaining a familiar, nostalgic framework. It's built around the basic story structure of the original game, with the same major story beats, but with a number of updates to individual characters that help the story take on a new form -- with a few additional surprises along the way. New features! Random Stat Increases at Level Up: Instead of using the Esper system, characters have a chance at a stat increase at each level -- the higher the stat, the greater the chance it'll increase, favouring a character's primary stats over their secondary ones. Of course, if you're unlucky, the wrong stats will increase -- or no stats at all. Stat Bits, Golden Apples, and Soma Drops: On the other hand, you can permanently increase your characters' stats through items! But be careful, there are only a few in the game... Unless you know where to look. Costumes: An entire set of battle sprite-changing gear! Will your characters go around dressed as a Soldier or a Merchant? Will they dress up as an Imp or a Moogle for Hallowe'en? Or will they be perfectly lazy and be a white sheet Ghost? New Town and Dungeon Maps: Some will be altered only a little, some will be redrawn completely... And some that are otherwise unchanged may have a few new surprises. New Spell List: With the rebalanced ability system, the spell list will be divided evenly between Black, White, and Time magic -- but only certain characters can learn given spells, and most won't have access to the spell list at all. New Abilities: Sabin now uses the Mantra ability to protect his allies; Leo wields Breaks to debilitate enemy spell-casters. There's an entire new set of ways to heal and to harm. Third Slot Abilities: With magic restricted to certain characters as their primary ability, the third ability slot remains empty -- that is, until you start finding relics to expand your skill-set. Will you use the Gear Brace and grant your characters the Magitek ability? Or will they use the Blaster Gem to Ravage their foes with elemental physical strikes? New Characters/Revised Character List: The cast is smaller, some familiar faces are nowhere to be found, and some new people are joining your team -- General Leo will be a permanent playable character, and newcomer Amelia -- Relm's mother -- is the resident dancing geomancer. Defined Character Roles: By limiting characters' access to certain skills, there's a certain level of strategy involved in planning your team, as each character's ability is useful in different circumstances. Hidden Characters: Say goodbye to Gogo and Umaro, and say hello to a few old friends... But just who is it who wandered through the Dimensional Rift? Spoilers, love. Spoilers. Brand New Script: A necessity with the other changes, much of the dialogue will be either heavily revised or completely new. I'm attaching an old 'preview' image that has a little bit of my in-progress Walkthrough (which I'm writing as much as an outline of the game, as a planning tool, as it is an actual walkthrough) over top of my Items spreadsheet, as well as a screenshot showing off one of the basic new features -- an expanded Skills field menu, with an additional working entry. (... And possible even more entries in the final game, depending on how I develop a couple of characters' skills.)

No, that is not how objectivity works. You don't just get a majority of subjective opinions and suddenly the poll magically changes the content from subjective to objective. You're wrong about that (regardless if everyone on the board dis/agrees with me) and try looking at a definition of the word "objective." What you're talking about is a majority of people's opinions (in your made up poll) favor the Woolsey translation. Although going by your thinking, if most users on insanedifficulty came down on you before that would mean they were objectivity right after you being wrong, right? I actually liked the earlier heavily cursing versions of BNW, since this is a game primarily about war and genocide caused by a mutated psychopath. For example, you have a protagonist who at one point, possibly, tries to kill herself. Many could argue she was justifiable since everyone else on that island thought the entire world was destroyed besides the small island they lived on. That situation is among multiple other dark scenarios (another protagonist joins a malicious cult of the god that helped "kill" his only other blood relative) throughout the game. This game did have rays of hope/light sprinkled throughout the game, but most of what happened was dark and depressing. Regardless of my opinions on the matter, Woolsey did the same types of things that you accuse the script changers of doing. What's a submariner in the context of this game? A sailor on a submarine, an underhanded baseball pitcher, or Namor? The closest thing we have to a submarine in this game is a diving helmet. People travel the seas in this game by the current, ship, or wooden raft not submarine. There was just no writer preceding Woolsey. Classic lines also doesn't mean unchangeable gold. You get the same understanding of the story and closer to the script without the censorship from the 90s. Also, does someone like Kefka, who is a nihilist and later a destructive god, really seem like someone to talk like that? Hell no.

This mod adds so many Quality of Life modifications, it's really refreshing. Love the fort condor teleport, the early game Enemy Away and the ability to Skip huge portions of dialogue! It overall edits a lot of things, adds quite a few unexpected bosses, changes items, materias, and equipment fairly drastically, and even grants you a way to easily grind materia levels late game! But then there are the bosses... they take a long time to kill for virtually no reason in my opinion; an opinion that doesn't seem to be shared by many, yet no one can deny that the outcome of storyline bosses' battles is already determined 1/4th of the way into the battle. It just becomes a process of "Rinse and Repeat until the boss is dead". Of course, there is the possibility that the fight will drag on long enough for you to run out of items, but you get easily used to the bosses' huge HP that you just instinctively gather quite a few items before each boss fight. Then there are the optional bosses. 100x harder than the storyline bosses. I don't enjoy difficulty and I thought the storyline bosses were well balanced and never really had anything close to a problem with any of them, but the optional bosses in this mod just reminds me so much of 1.3 where you just end up needing a way too specific setup to be able to win the fight. It just destroys any kind of build creativity since you have to abuse absolutely everything you can to beat those bosses. I really loved the game otherwise, but I am unable to finish it at this point because I don't find Disc 3 fun at all. As I said, I don't like difficulty; especially extreme level of difficulty, so this wasn't for me. Even saying that, Disc 1-2 were really awesome. As a side note: Death will bring happiness to everyone in the slums. --My wife playing FF7 and renaming Aeris to "Death".

BTB can correct me if I'm wrong, but your other post was redacted because it contained possible spoilers. This isn't some 1984 shit, it's common decency and consideration for those who have yet to play the game. If you used a spoiler tag it might not have been necessary to redact your post. I've been keeping an eye on your posts and they're a strange mix between incoherent and condescending. As you were answered in your post about where the forum rules are that this place is not toxic, I'd advise you to not be toxic yourself. I believe you're the first new member here to get smacked with a lot of negative rep, and that's a very rare thing. That said, do some self reflection and tone down the way you post and I'm sure you can turn things around.

Here are some mods from ID that I gathered not too long ago. I hope this helps! Castlevania - Symphony of the Night - HardType v4.8 Chrono Cross - Time's Anguish v3.7 Final Fantasy VIII (PC) - Requiem v2.2.9 Final Fantasy IX (PSX) - Unleashed v2.0.9 Final Fantasy X (PS2) - International - Punishment v1.5 Final Fantasy Tactics Advance X v1.0.3.1 Suikoden 2 - H1.5 Xenogears - HardType v4.1 Xenosaga - Episode I - HardType v2.1 Xenosaga - Episode II - HardType v3.9 Xenosaga - Episode III - HardType v1.3

Yo! Glad we could get this up and launched! I look forward to all the new stuff and I appreciate everyone's support in moving over. If I can help with anything just poke me on the discord. As for me, I play games on Twitch and nerd out about BNW probably far more than most people should.