GeradFigaro

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)

If there is only one specific way to defeat the enemy, then it’s not a strategy - it’s a solution. Atma being unbeatable without slow/dispel/reraise (and randomly unbeatable with them) is bad. It’s a gear check. You either go in with the required spells to win, or you lose. Bringing scan to Magimaster isn’t strategy - it’s a requirement, and this is the same thing. If I bring something like Sabin/Cyan/Gau, or Mog/Realm/Locke, what can I do to win? How can I use armor, relics, and ELs to win without dispel/reraise or even slow? That is strategy.

@Nowea ATB felt like an exploit because even though player and enemy ATB stop while in a submenu, it still gives you time to think. It's also very unclear whether the enemy ATB fills during stuff like healing spell animations, so I imagine a lot of plays will do what I did, and camp out in a submenu to see if a heal makes it in time, or just to think (which defeats the entire purpose of an active battle system). I don't think the Coliseum should be a free better gear shop either. This could be a good place to upgrade items (tincture->ether), and maybe access a mix of upgrades and side grades for the same character that the item applies to. It would also be a great place to introduce some unique relics that could do things like provide elemental defense. It does not have to be pick your poison. @Reiker I did fight bosses with and without slow. Even with slow, they sometimes get three attacks in a row. I'm sure it's doing something under the hood, but it isn't apparent. I couldn't begin to guess at what percent slow actually affects an enemy ATB. See above for my comments on ATB abuse. Atma is not a strategy check. Mind Blast WILL wipe you if you are unlucky and not overleveled. I did keep him slowed on all attempts, though I never found dispel magic (where was this in WoB?). Simply finding a particular item that grants a specific spell like Rerise, or knowing ahead of time to bring a specific member with a specific spell, are not strategy. It's just bad design. I don't think I've read a single post about Atma that wasn't critical. Printme is unfortunately not an option for everyone. A lot of people will play the way I did - on an emulator (phone, 3DS, etc). They don't have a computer next to them, and I can't even figure out how to navigate to the printme from this website on my iPhone. The readme is formatted illegibly on an iPhone as well. At the very least, a mobile-accessible resource must be provided, but armor/relic info really belongs in the game itself.

Overall it was an interesting game. It certainly dragged on with certain bosses and the high encounter rate, and for every improvement over vanilla, there was a moment that disappointed. I think you've put something really nice together here. Going forward, try not to get so caught up in "fixing Square's mistakes". Think more about what's fun for the player, and why we enjoyed vanilla so much (the good and the bad). I don't have time to replay every revision, but I look forward to trying out an even better version of BNW one day.

As for miscellaneous stuff and quality-of-life fixes, I really appreciated seeing safe/shell/reflect/reraise in the battle menu. The loss of the ability to switch weapons/shields caused me to lose a number of battles, however. There is a need for some kind of armor/relic description on the equip screens. There's too much unequipping/re-equipping to try and figure out what does what. The changes to action priority (item, attack, magic, etc) is welcome and felt like an essential balancing factor. I miss the status colors from safe/shell, though I understand why they are gone. I never felt the need to turn off exp. In the absence of moogle charm, an option to increase/decrease the random encounter rate would be an incredible addition. Character-specific comments Terra - Although it's hard to use morph for a while, it's really fun once she becomes tanky enough to survive a hit. Double recovery from items/spells/regen is neat. While morphed she feels powerful compared to the rest of the cast, but not OP. Her normal stats are on the low side, but she's probably as perfect as you will get her. Locke - Monster in the WoB, bordering on OP. He remains pretty good even in WoR. I didn't use his recovery magic very often since he is the primary damage dealer on whatever team he ends up on. It would be nice if there were some more interesting things to steal. Edgar - Favorite character in vanilla, and he's still pretty good here. Tools are great as ever, though Defibrillator looks weird (he still shoots the anchor). Mana Battery is the only one that feels distinctly underpowered, only doing about a Tincture worth of recovery. His spell list is great, and he is well balanced between offense and defense. While he can do a lot of damage as a dragoon, I found it better to keep him on the ground for Tool and recovery utility. Sabin - Another monster in WoB, and ended up being my highest level character. He works great on every team. It's hard to keep track of which blitzes use vigor or stamina. Mantra and Chakra feel a bit underpowered, especially considering that they don't affect him. Add in the cutscene where he S-S-S-S-Suplexes the Phantom Train! Cyan - Most improved character from vanilla. Empowerer is probably OP, and about half of his Bushido is useless. He's actually usable now, which is great, but he still feels too one dimensional. Gau - Being able to Leap off the Veldt is fantastic. Many of the rages are great too. If only there was some way to see which rages do what in game. He's a bit too fragile. Celes - She doesn't really feel that different from vanilla. Second best spell list, better stats than Terra, but somehow still doesn't feel great. Giving her Shock in WoR saves her from the bench. Setzer - I know there's a trick to slots, but I couldn't figure it out. I could get the diamonds whenever I wanted and that was all. He felt very underpowered, though I'm sure he's a lot more fun when you can summon random espers on demand. I never even saw the airship bomb or 777. His physicals are worthless. Strago - X-Magic outclasses Lore, and I only found about eight Lores anyway. He and Relm need a bit too much babysitting to stay alive, even with auto-safe. Relm - She just feels objectively worse than Strago. She only really has Meteor and Flare for offensive magic, and Sketch seems useless in most encounters. I never found her Control item. Brushes as a healing weapon is a neat idea, but most of the time she'll just be throwing out RegenX. Shadow - This squish is the only character I had to take to Dinosaur Forest for some grinding. The Shuriken and Kunai feel underpowered. His better weapons should be cheaper so that you feel free to use them more often. Mog - Powerful as a Dragoon. I found dances really lacking by comparison, and only found three of them. Gogo - Neat idea, but I prefer story characters, so I barely touched him. Umaro - Nobody uses this thing. (continued in next post)

Edgar was my favorite character in vanilla, and he’s still my favorite here. Very reliable survivability, healing, damage, and status. A great fit in any party. I didn’t focus on any one Esper. All my characters are balanced to whatever degrees their espers allow. Maybe I’m playing wrong, because at low 20’s everything in WoR was a huge threat, but at 30, the remaining challenges were trivial, even Magimaster.

Yeah, having them attack each other was a great touch.

Is Terra supposed to have lower base stats than Celes?

Back the topic of script, Cyan’s Soul has both bad writing and the best new addition in the game. “Fuck you Moe” is the kind of juvenile cringe nobody cares for. But Schemp. Schemp is brilliant. When he interrupts Wrexsoul, I actually laughed for real. It’s like...that accomplishes what Ultros was meant to be in vanilla, which makes it fit even though it’s such a nonsensical reference to have in the game. That part needs to stay. Also whyyyyyy is a Sabin Gau party so bad at saving Cyan.

See my edit above about weaknesses.

There’s a lot to like about this mod, at least in WoB, but I don’t know what you’re thinking with numbers like that. A lot of these WoR bosses are taking me upwards of a half hour to beat (or worse if I die). I hate to say it, but I’m actually getting bored, and I love FF6. It’s just every single enemy has SO MUCH HP. I’m noticing that a lot of fights and even random encounters are designed around the assumption that the player is bringing the optimal team, which completely defeats the purpose of locking the characters into “classes” and limiting what they can do. I don’t want to take the long trek through Phoenix Cave, Narshe, etc just because I didn’t know ahead of time that an elemental dragon would be one-shotting my party, or as is more often the case, my characters can *survive* against the boss, but don’t have the right spells or abilities to hit weaknesses, so the fight takes forever. Atma is another example, where if you don’t bring float it’s basically unwinnable, and if you don’t bring rerise, you’re at the mercy of RNG whether mind blast and a follow up will wipe you. And if you don’t know that ahead of time, you get to go through the floating continent twice. It was a really bad way to cap off the WoB, and it’s really disappointing to see that it is a theme in WoR.

Is there a reason Hidon has about ten million HP?

It would be awesome if there were a mobile friendly version of this and the readme/printme.

+1 vote for removing the questionable “pop culture” jokes and maintaining the serious tone of the story. Surely nobody actually laughed at “do a barrel roll”.

Still going through my first run of BNW (1.9). Finally got through the Floating Continent. Now, up to this point I have to say the mod has been pretty fantastic. There's some questionable dialogue or enemies here or there (too much "learn which enemies counter physical/magic and don't do that"). It has been very interesting to see formerly useless characters like Locke and Cyan become OP monsters, but I'll make another thread like that. For now, I just want to give you some feedback on FC. Floating Continent is the first point where I thought the mod is a straight downgrade from vanilla. The high encounter rate with stronger enemies makes it a slog, and you really don't feel like exploring to find all the treasure. Atma Weapon is insane. I think I spent three or four hours on that thing with Terra/Locke/Edgar. Yes, I could have just spammed Ice 2 with Strago, but I don't like Strago. In the end, I realized that I hadn't checked Shadow's esper, and sure enough he learns float (doh). That made the first phase trivial, but the second phase is just way too RNG. Each Mind Blast and Meteo is a potential game over, and both Glare and the Raid+physical combo could one-shot anyone. If you try to heal someone who gets killed, it wastes a turn and then you're REALLY in trouble. In the end, Meteo and Mind Blast didn't give me an instant game over, and I managed to get enough damage in with morphed Terra. I'm all for boss fights that take a few tries to figure out, but this was just way too much, and each try took way too long. It would be a huge roadblock for less experienced players. As for after that...which one of you has the mega hard on for Celes? I like the idea of fleshing parts of the story out more, but that was fanfic-level cringe. She never struck me as a brooding, borderline emo-type character. Giving her Leo's sword (with shock!) was a cool surprise (wasn't it Kefka's sword though?), but the short timer ensures that you'll die the first time when you're still figuring out that the whole sequence has been converted into a big Celes blow job. Finally, in WoR, after three attempts, it seems impossible to save Cid, resulting in a back-to-back Celes drama double whammy. I get that you want to put a little more focus on her character since vanilla kinda just throws her at you, but the way you went about it made her a lot less likable to me, and cheapened one of the most important parts of the game. Consider returning to the original scenario for the FC, but keep the sword.

Cid’s death isn’t forced? I must have had shit RNG. It was giving me 1-2 fish of medium/Cid allergy speed every time for three attempts to save the poor guy. One time he died so fast he didn’t even get to say goodbye. What is supposed to happen to make it easier? Just got to Thamasa. The dialogue at Leo’s grave - now that’s Celes. And the relic is amazing. Makes her much better for WoR.

Why would the enemies on FC being strong demonstrate the strength of the empire? At this point in the narrative, we just saw that the empire is shit in the face of a handful of espers. FC is apparently the world of espers unleashed. My issue with the enemies here is the high encounter rate. When you walk three steps and get sucked into a two minute encounter, you naturally feel disincentivized from exploring. I do appreciate the way status effects are implemented here, even getting to use bserk(!) to prevent behemoth meteos, the battles are just too frequent and drag on too much. You cannot sap or poison Atma. You can slow it but I honestly can’t tell the difference. Shadow does not have re-rise either. Maybe it was easier in an older build? Re: Celes, do you really think it had to be that heavy handed? At this point in the game we know virtually nothing about her, just that she betrayed the empire (but not why), maybe was a spy, and saved us at the magitech facility. All this “I am a weapon, blah blah blah” stuff is totally made up and comes out of nowhere. I could buy it if her motivation was more “I can’t let the empire do this, vector is ruined, Leo is gone, etc”. She doesn’t have much, but she is very protective, and she is inspired by Locke (this is her motivation in vanilla). She NEVER broods, unless you count the (now forced) suicide sequence, and even that only came when she thought she was literally the last person alive in the entire world.

The patch seems to have helped. Thanks for the suggestion. Got up through the opera. I really like how the new script communicates the intent of the story much better. There is ONE line I think should be changed though. Many players bring the Figaro Bros along to the Opera. When the party recruits Setzer, Celes takes a two headed coin from Edgar and uses it to fleece Setzer. Sabin realizes that it’s the coin Edgar used in their bet, and his response is “What the hell, Edgar?” Sabin should not sound angry. This is supposed to be more of an “oh shit, Edgar lost on purpose so I could have my freedom” revelation. Maybe instead of what the hell, something like “oh my god” or even the original “brother, don’t tell me...”. Sabin already respects Edgar, and now he realizes that Edgar sacrificed his freedom so that Sabin could live the way he wanted. This is his most emotional moment in the game.

I didn’t know about the encounter patch. Thanks for helping me out. I’ll give it a try, though it sounds like it still doesn’t totally correct things. Strange, I didn’t feel overleveled going into the battle against Kefka in Narshe. Are things balanced with the incorrect encounter rate in mind? If devs are looking for enhancement ideas, setting encounter rate would be a huge QoL improvement. Maybe just a simple “high med low” in the config menu. The battles are very interesting, and I love to see how every enemy is changed from the original game, but sometimes I just want to get from point A to point B and not have to waste time on wave after wave of weak enemies that are no threat.

Just gonna throw this out there, but random encounter rate gets a little crazy at times. Two steps is not enough.

So I finally got the time to properly patch the game and start over. Played up through Ultros and Cyan’s scenario. Havent seen much of the crass language that the mod is usually criticized for. Was that cleaned up along the way? So far everything is really great. It’s nice to have to think about new random encounters (though it usually boils down to “what triggers the counterattack”), and status effects being relevant makes the combat much better. One suggestion I’d make is to make equipment management a bit easier. Whenever I go to a shop, it seems like every equipment gets the “this is an upgrade” triangle even when it is equal (haven’t tested worse yet). It kinda sucks to buy duplicate hard leathers or whatever early in the game. With so many relics being changed, it’s also kind of hard to track what they do since you only see the description on the equip screen. It would be nice if you could also see the description for currently equipped gear. Other than that, no complaints so far. Very excited to see how the game picks up once I reach Zozo.

Ughhh. Maybe a good feature in the future would be an option to start at zozo.

Ah. That makes sense. Does anyone have an MD5 of a properly patched ROM? Will I have to start over?

New player here. Started 1.9 from scratch. Playing on BSNES on 3DS. A few errors I’ve noticed: - the tutorial people say tents don’t exist. I can buy them. - the tutorial people say that tonics and potions heal fractional HP but they do not - supposedly stealing from monsters is bad. I just get tonics - the upper left guard in Figaro’s central walkway has no dialogue - stooge dialogue pops up during the Vargas battle - hitting Vargas with an Aurabolt triggers what I presume is dialogue for suplexing the Doom Train. Kaiser Dragon dialog follows Very cool mod. Looking forward to getting to the actual differences in magic and stat building.