SirNewtonFig

Intended level for the final battle is probably between 30-35. I think it's expected you start the tower at around 30.

As for Meteor, it could be helpful to know that this spell respects Magic Defense and Shell, so its damage can be mitigated significantly with some setup. This spell also comes out on certain triggers during the fight, so it can actually help to pace yourself a little less aggressively sometimes.

If you still feel the need to grind, Fanatics Tower is actually pretty great for GP (Tinctures sell for decent cash and you can get a lot of them really quickly here, plus they're nice to have for the final dungeon anyway). For something safer, I'm told the forest near Jidoor is good, though I've never tried. Best XP grind is Dino forest, though it drops off hard if you're over leveled — IIRC the enemies start to flee at level 40 or something.

I'm personally pretty indifferent to the final battle change. The randomization feels a bit out of place, but I can appreciate the motive around it. I also tend to play the game nowadays with the optional party randomization patch applied anyway, so I'm used to needing to be on my toes for unexpected party compositions.

I flat out disagree that the game is any better with 3-party K@N though. And that's fine, can't please everyone.

Narshe having 3 parties doesn't let you just choose to only use 2. 2 Parties lets you balance your teams better. 7 people spread over 3 teams is more dumb.

The final battle lets you choose your leading 4, but then randomizes the rest so that your can't just stack 6 people up with all your best gear. The uncertainty of who you might get when someone goes down means that you need to concern yourself with the development and loadout of everyone you bring.

BTB may have other reasons to add, but this is my understanding of the rationale behind these two changes. These were both very much deliberate decisions, and it doesn't seem likely that they'll be repealed.

This is usually a sign of a botched patch job. Is it a clean vanilla ROM with only BNW on top of it, or do you have any other patches in the mix? If isolating to only BNW doesn't work, you might need to try another ROM.

If someone is KOd, petrified, or zombied between phases, they'll get subbed out for a random character from the reserve list. If you have live characters swapping out, that sounds like a bug that I haven't heard of before.

What version of the mod are you playing?

If you're on 2.1, you have one more baddie to slay before the big prize.

You might find one on your return to the Ancient Castle. Anything else of note can be found on your way up Kefka's Tower. Though none of it is anything you need to worry about. It's mostly all detailed in the unlockme, which you'll get the password for after you beat the game — so worst case you can always experiment on a subsequent playthrough, or backtrack to see what you missed.

Because he's thz funnymzn!

Not actually a joke patch (apart from the Thamasian +vig Espers, but that's its own patch), he's put and almost unhealthy amount of honest consideration into the tweaks he's made here in an obsessive effort to further refine BTB's near-perfect balance, mostly geared toward BNW vets who have played the game too much and want something to mix it up.

So, the deep mechanical changes that make BNW so different are a result of a vast amount of assembly coding that is specific to the architecture of the SNES. Porting any of this to the pixel remasters would mean rewriting all of it from scratch in x86 assembly; there is little that could be salvaged as-is.

To further compound this is the matter of even knowing where to make the changes in the first place. Hacking the SNES version benefits from many, many years of reverse engineering and documentation of the ROM. No such documentation exists for the innards of the x86 iterations of the game. Very extensive reverse engineering of the code would be required before anyone could begin to even think about applying some of BNW's mechanics. It's just such an insurmountably hard sell, who would do it?

Is one of them how to correctly pronounce "PTerraTaCelese"?

I'd wager whatever patch added that non-standard font either assblasted the dialogue bank, screwed up some character encodings, or both.

As for what to do, make yourself a new clean patch job of just BNW without whatever other whack stuff you've got going on here, load your save up in that, and power on through it.

What in the heck... Did you do anything new to your ROM recently? What patches/versions are you using? That font doesn't look quite right either...

ITT: different people have different playstyles, there is no "right" way to play, etc. Inconceivable!

I would add that Marlboro is great utility for shutting down formations of dangerous humanoids in the WoR (Gogo's cave, Cyan's dream, KT, possibly others I'm forgetting). Usually they're hitting you with lots of physicals or spells (including some nasty spell counters), and the Blind+Mute from Bad Breath is a giant NOPE button for these enemies. Sure, it's only 1/3, but the 2/3 (Bio Blast) isn't exactly unwelcome in these situations either.

10 hours ago, thzfunnymzn said:

Maybe if Relm had a way to "auto-Brush", THEN I'd value it for a support Relm.

It would be pretty hysterical if you could have Relm Cover/Counter with a brush and she'd just... slap her damage away after taking the hit.

PS: where's my cookies, Copper??!!

On 5/31/2021 at 9:35 AM, sandokan said:

1. Is there a way to check effects of summoning and Esper in-game?

Oh, so this is a thing now: https://github.com/SirNewtonFig/BNWSummonDescriptions/archive/refs/tags/v1.0-rc3.zip

Grab "BNW Summon Descriptions with Menu Edits" from the ips folder and apply to your ROM. You can ignore the rest.

(This was built on the 2.1 beta, and I haven't tested it on 2.0 — but I'd give it at least 60% odds it would work Backup your ROM first to be safe!)

A streamer had something like this happen the other night where Florida Man (or Karen, as he called it) solo-kited tier-3 of the final battle until it ran out of MP. It's pretty funny when these weird little AI loops emerge and you can just sit back and watch the madness play out!

The thing about the Esper descriptions is that the game's built-in description handler only handles things up to a certain length. The equip and summon effects can't both be crammed into one description for every Esper without violating the syntactical conventions that BTB has used ubiquitously throughout the rest of the menus, which would be undesirable. It was decided to use the equip descriptions alone as of a few version back — since they were the New Thing, and many summon effects are unchanged, as you noted. It's not ideal, but it's the best compromise that was available at the time.

There is a hypothesized solution that would display the summon description when hovering the Esper's name while its spell list is open, and it'll get done eventually. But it requires assembly hacking, and there's just a really limited amount of time and/or ambition to dedicate to it at the moment.

#2 is sounds straightforward, but it's actually deceptively complex, because it requires having persistent memory (read: space in the save file) to store the allocation of ELs. Expanding the SRAM size isn't trivial, and neither is repurposing enough unused space within the existing SRAM. Some ideas have been tossed around, but it's far more effort than its worth for anyone to actually build.

11 hours ago, deno46 said:

Well I think by the lack of responses that my petition was not popular.

When asking to revert a deliberate stylistic choice made by the devs, you can probably expect not to get too much traction

Think about it like this: the way things are currently, you have the option to hear either theme. The way it used to be, the desolate overworld music is gone forever once you get the Falcon. You might not like it, but maybe someone does? And it's not like you spend much time walking around on foot after that point, so does it really impact you all that much to hear that theme for a few seconds here or there?

Thematically, it's not like the world got any less messed up just because you got your airship, either. The dreary overworld music helps preserve the theme that the world is a hostile and desperate place now. So get in your airship and go fix it!

Edit: as for how you could maybe "fix" it for your own purposes, back up your ROM, crack it open in FF6Tools, and tinker around until you figure it out. I don't personally know anything about conditionally manipulating background music on maps, so maybe you can teach me!

On 5/15/2021 at 1:21 PM, deno46 said:

What is the name of the editor you used to do this hack? Or did you went inside the game itself and changed thing manually?

A bit of column A, a bit of column B. BTB uses FF3usME for a lot of his work, which includes much of the spell, equipment, ability, character and enemy rebalancing, many menu descriptions, dialogue changes, and more. But there's a ton of changes that had to be done by writing custom code, either by using an assembler or via manual hex edits. Most of these changes are mentioned (and credited to the hacker responsible) in the Readme.

On 5/15/2021 at 1:21 PM, deno46 said:

Can you change the events happening?

Like, could you make the characters appear in albrook and then have an event there?

Yes, this can be done, but it's not easy. There are editors that are capable of making event edits, but some of them are a bit unreliable. I'm not very well versed in event editing, so I'll leave this for someone else to elaborate on. But it is absolutely doable. You'll likely see some custom events over the course of playing BNW, though I'm not sure what tools were used to author them, if any.

On 5/15/2021 at 1:21 PM, deno46 said:

My dream is to male a prequel of ff6 in the war of the magi. It wpuld be cool to make a whple new game with your engine, new stpry, new characters, new map. An ending.

I suggest heading over to FF6hacking.com and having a look around on the wiki and forums there of you're looking to get your feet wet with hacking this game. I suggest starting with something small and simple, and asking directed questions on how to do very specific things, you'll get the best reception if it's clear you're willing to do your research.

Using BNW as your base for a new hack will be challenging, but not impossible. FF6Tools (a browser based editor) works with it pretty readily, but the event editing can be a little fishy (it has made additional edits on my behalf before that I did not intend to make, like changing actor ids in event action queues).

I'd suggest getting familiar with modding vanilla first if you're starting from scratch with no background. There will be more tools available to you, and the resources out there will be more accurate.

You can find the patch and all its documentation in the downloads section of this site: http://ngplus.net/index.php?/files/file/12-final-fantasy-vi-brave-new-world/

All winning Slots are magic based, with the exception of any Espers summoned by triple-BAR that are stamina based (these exceptions should be noted in the printme in the Espers section).

On 5/9/2021 at 12:15 AM, Vaylen said:

it's about a proper powercurve for proc-sword based builds.

Proc-sword based builds are basically Terra/Celes only, since nobody else who can use them gets the proc booster equipment (if we ignore Dragooning, which has its own special considerations). Let's consider Celes then, as she's around when the blades first come online, and mandatory for the early WoR. Right from when you first get the elemental blades up until you get the Falcon in the WoR, using them against weakness (which is their purpose) exceeds the average output of any other weapon configuration you have access to at any given time for most builds. There are only a small handful of boss encounters in the mid-late WoR for whom none of these blades will hit a weakness. These blades will carry you just fine until you can get your Illumina or Apocalypse.

The only part of the game I can see being a bit of a bore would be the randoms as you traverse the WoR up to the airship: so the overland walk to Tzen from Albrook, Figaro Cave, and the tiny bit of walking around Kohlingen between the castle, town, and tomb. Pretty much everything else is chocobo rides. And even for these encounters, if you toss a Flametongue on Celes, she can hit the 3 primary elemental weaknesses on her own, so you can still snipe to your heart's content.

In short:

On 5/8/2021 at 11:45 PM, SirNewtonFig said:

There is no current mechanical need (and furthermore, the challenges are balanced around the options currently available)

The names are pulled from monster data, along with everything else about them, yes. For now, the Printme is the best cheatsheet you could need.