Final Fantasy 6: A Soldier’s Contingency (SNES, played on RG552)

A mechanically heavily edited and rebalanced hack with light storyline changes. The first thing you notice is that they redrew all the character portraits and edited character sprites. This also rearranges a lot of the music to mix in tunes from other games; and replaces many enemies with either completely new enemies (often from other FF games) or redrawn sprites (in the case of many bosses). Lots of bugfix patches are applied, there’s auto-dash, and the various well-known “exploits” are all removed.

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Overall: This is clearly the author’s personal “good parts version” of FF6 and reminds me very much of the Playable Golbez hack of FF4—it started with swapping in a character but expanded to creating the author’s ideal version of the game. My biggest complaint is the difficulty—especially once you hit the world of ruin, there are lots of new stronger monsters, lots of overpowered bonus encounters, and lots of cases where you need much more careful strategy than ever in vanilla…but none of the tricks work, so you need to either over-grind or read the creator’s mind. I was entertained and in some cases impressed, but I won’t be going back.

Other Hacks and Replays, Early Spring 2023

Legend of Zelda: Fall of the Moon (NES, played on RG552) - A hack of the original Legend of Zelda that I got off the KinHank card. After dying a bunch and then trying to explore with cheat codes on (and not finding good ways to proceed), I eventually looked up more details. Turns out there’s lots of wandering, very high difficulty, and no sword for at least two dungeons. So: Nope.

Zelda Challenge: Outlands (NES, played on RG552) - A better hack of the original Legend of Zelda. I still ended up using some Game Genie codes to get through this, because the difficulty is still a notch higher than vanilla, but it’s much more reasonable. The sword is easy to find in the first dungeon. The stuff you have to buy is generally reasonably-priced from the outset; but make sure you build up lots of cash for the white sword, the four bomb bag upgrades, the three pieces of Meat you need, and two money-or-life rooms. Extensive graphics overhaul swaps around a lot of the monsters, which can make their behavior surprising (Zols will eat your shield!). The “One Way!” caves, which respawn you elsewhere on the screen when you leave, make for some clever puzzles. The hints (both that you pay for and from Zelda in dungeons) are actually generally useful. I ended up following a walkthrough for the second half (and rather slavishly for the last two dungeons) because I kept missing things, and Ganon’s Vault (level 9) would have been terrible if I hadn’t, but I think that’s really a matter of how hardcore you are. A review I saw likened this to playing the original game for the first time, and I think they did successfully capture the need to explore and feeling of discovery; but at the same point the difficulty level gets too high for me to play honestly. (I can beat the original LoZ without cheats; there are too many Darknut rooms and too many overstuffed screens in this, and you can’t get the better swords until much later than vanilla.)

Illusion of Gaia (SNES, replayed on Retroid Pocket 2+) - I hadn’t done a proper playthrough of this since 2005, apparently, and I wanted something I could blaze through in a weekend. It was always my least favorite of the “Heaven and Earth” games from Quintet, probably because it doesn’t allow for grinding or backtracking, and has a bunch of missables that can heavily impact the difficulty. I had forgotten how quickly the plot of this game gets crazy--The raft sequence is only after the second dungeon. Then shortly afterwards you’re dealing with slave traders who are selling slaves to vampires to hunt for treasure in the lost continent of Mu. The running theme is that strange creatures—whether human-like and peace or the “demons” you fight—are all creatures transformed by the light of the comet that’s approaching for the fourth time in Earth’s history. And I wish that someone was obsessed enough to give this a retranslation treatment, with a more condensed font and better-proofread English, because I suspect there’s a fair amount of nuance that’s lost. Still, it’s a solid action-rpg with a wildly imaginative premise that doesn’t outstay its welcome.