Sega Chief

I was thinking I could set up some weird version of FF7 (something that goes up to and ends at Midgar maybe) that has weird mechanics to it, put it out, and see who can beat it the fastest. It'd probably be something like 1h30 per run, or faster if I strip out most of the story components.

Just a heads-up for the OP, the mod does work on the original 1998 version. The Steam game is just easier to set up as the 1998 version requires Aali's driver to be patched onto it before it will work properly on a modern PC.

The save file should work, but you might see some oddities.

One of the main goals of the 1.5 build is dealing with this specific problem. The build was planned to be done with by February/March but the balancing was so off that I had to start from scratch with a lot of the Disc 3 enemies; I've been rebuilding their AI, attacks, and stats then testing them against different parties.

That summon speed-up thing is still in beta and buggy as hell; there are other attacks that also use the same kind of flags that Ruby's tentacles do so I'd worry about including it with NT at this late stage. It's a separate mod as well so I'd probably leave that to the user's discretion to apply it to their game or not. I've been thinking about the issue with fight length. What I'll do is run some tests on a sample of bosses against a 'blind' team and then an optimal team. There's a lot of stuff I can't account for on the player's end but it should help things if I make adjustments to find a middle-ground.

Most of the bosses in NT do change their AI/attacks mid-fight.

The balancing for a lot of the later game is off; most of that comes from gradual changes made over time to the underlying systems like character stats, the change to how sources are dished out, equipment changes, that sort of thing. The overhaul I'm doing should correct it. As for boss HP and the duration of battles, that's up in the air; it's difficult to gauge duration. The vids I had were run at 20fps instead of the native 15fps but the 1.5 balancing run I've done was played at normal speed so I could try and get more into the player's head. I was juggling the idea of having a 'Fast mode' where enemy HP will be decremented by a certain amount so people can opt for faster battles, but instead I tried to spec fights to be around 6-8mins. It's just tricky to gauge it for blind attempts; I try to have elemental weaknesses be consistent with the physical characteristics of a boss like Earth for large enemies (most bosses are quite big) but I messed that up for human enemies (too many hard Poison counters) and it doesn't help for surprise encounters. As far as Disc 3 goes, I've been fine-tuning the bosses there and overhauling them. Some were very overbearing, others didn't really have much in the way of interesting mechanics due to quickfixes to get rid of bugs, etc. Lv.4 Limit bosses should have been specced as 'stepping stones' rather than full out superbosses so I've taken that into account with them. I've reinstated Emerald and Ruby as the game's superbosses instead, and made the rest more manageable for different parties. Defence and front row physical damage is proving problematic but I'll get there.