Hey You (Day 216)

My co-op partner and I are about 7-8 hours into the Evil Type romhack of Final Fantasy VI. Primary features include greatly enhanced difficulty and rebalanced character skills and magic. In these early stages of the game (before we start acquiring Espers), the main rebalancing seems to be in Locke's Steal skill. You get very early access to an item that changes your Steal to Capture (Mug in most other Final Fantasy games) which greatly increases his early game utility. It also appears that the variety of items you can steal is much higher, with an emphasis on acquiring slight upgrades on what you might otherwise be able to purchase--as well as a lot of X-Potions. Fortunately, the game's difficulty warrants such relatively easy access to strong restorative items.

As I've mentioned before, Final Fantasy VI is a fantastic game with one major weakness in that it strongly lacks difficulty. So far, this romhack is doing an excellent job at remedying that problem. Most random encounters require thought to conquer and boss battles require preparation instead of mindlessly spamming skills. I felt like I could get away with using Edgar's Autocrossbow above all other tools because Noiseblaster and Bioblaster were never really required. In this version of the game, Noiseblaster (which confuses enemies) is an invaluable disable for just about all regular encounters. Bioblaster is even useful against bosses as it usually applies a poison based off their maximum HP.

Without the supply of X-Potions stolen from random enemy monsters, many of the early dungeons and encounters would be infinitely more difficult. Similarly, the equipment Locke has managed to theft from our opponents has given us a leg up against increasingly challenging opposition. That is not to say that the difficulty is unfair, per se. In fact, I'd rate it somewhere along the line of the difficulty of Persona 3 or 4--in fact, maybe even not that hard. But it's certainly challenging enough to be interesting, and that's all I can really ask for. I love Final Fantasy VI and this is just the thing it needed to get me to replay it.

We've just reached the top of the tower in Zozo where Terra lies, so if I'm not mistaken we'll be acquiring our first Espers very soon. We're going to be planning out the stat growths our characters will receive--something that I have never once paid attention to in the past. I wasn't unaware of it, but it was never before necessary to prioritize. The game just wasn't challenging enough. In this playthrough we'll be doing what we can to specialize our characters so that they are uniquely tailored to the roles we need.

At the same time, we're trying to do as little grinding as possible. After all, the original intent of this romhack was to ramp up the difficulty of a game that sorely needed it. Why go against that spirit? By the time we reached the end of Final Fantasy V, our party was around 39-40--just enough to feel powerful but not so powerful to trivialize enemy encounters. That's definitely what we'll be shooting for.