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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.
In newer mechanical changes: Gau now doesn’t need to Leap or be on the Veldt; he just learns the moves of every enemy you beat with him in the party. Espers don’t give stat-ups and only magic-users can equip them and learn spells. Shadow is no longer playable and Locke gets Throw as his second move. Setzer also gets Throw; most characters don’t get anything to replace Magic. Only Celes, Terra and Relm (!) can use actual Magic; the fact that Strago can’t strikes me as particularly odd given that if you’re going by “only characters who naturally have magic,” it should be either both him and Relm or neither of them. I’m guessing that in the author’s attempt to strictly limit magic they decided three characters was the right number (presumably for the final dungeon so that each team can have a caster). This severely hobbles Strago, as he starts with even less blue magic than usual and the monsters that have it have all been rearranged. There was a lot of annoying thought put into the Esper spell lists and the available natural magic Terra and Celes learn—for instance, Celes doesn’t learn Remedy or Life naturally, but you can get Serephim early in the World of Ruin to teach her both.
The major plot changes start in Thamasa (before that, it’s mostly little dialogue bits that emphasize the fact Geshtal adopted Celes and Kefka and raised them as his heirs), when Shadow dies fighting Kefka instead of Leo. Then Leo joins the party immediately and you can take 4 members to the Floating Continent. (Leo has Shock as a once-per-battle attack and also Banon’s Miracle ability; and he comes with a super-awesome special accessory too.) Banon takes Shadow’s role holding off Kefka, and you never wait for anyone. Arvis is waiting in Narshe to wrap up that plot and hand you the Ragnarok magicite. Leo takes Shadow’s place at the Colosseum; you need to bet a Sun Blade to get him. (Relm is in the Veldt Cave.) Siegfried shows up in the Underground Castle as a bonus fight for the Excalibur, but then the “real” Siegfried replaces Gogo as the mimic character. Umaro can be controlled, and he gets a new Gaia ability that randomly uses a Dance effect. Most characters get an “ultimate weapon” either at the end of their sidequest or inserted somewhere (there’s an extra Ultros and Ziegfried fight in Kefka’a Tower that gives a weapon for Relm, for example.)
The random battles in the World of Ruin get really nasty, and you’re constantly swapping around protective relics to deal with status ailments. This comes to a head in Kefka’s Tower, when a level 60+ party with the best available equipment (without grinding the Colosseum—maybe I needed to do that?) is still struggling through every random battle. I hit a roadblock and gave up at the three goddesses: Even cheating to level 99, they had so many overpowered attacks and free counters that I couldn’t handle them. (Goddess got a new ability that puts everyone in Countdown status and Zombies them after, even if they’re supposed to be immune to either Countdown or Zombie. WTF, man?)
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.
In newer mechanical changes: Gau now doesn’t need to Leap or be on the Veldt; he just learns the moves of every enemy you beat with him in the party. Espers don’t give stat-ups and only magic-users can equip them and learn spells. Shadow is no longer playable and Locke gets Throw as his second move. Setzer also gets Throw; most characters don’t get anything to replace Magic. Only Celes, Terra and Relm (!) can use actual Magic; the fact that Strago can’t strikes me as particularly odd given that if you’re going by “only characters who naturally have magic,” it should be either both him and Relm or neither of them. I’m guessing that in the author’s attempt to strictly limit magic they decided three characters was the right number (presumably for the final dungeon so that each team can have a caster). This severely hobbles Strago, as he starts with even less blue magic than usual and the monsters that have it have all been rearranged. There was a lot of annoying thought put into the Esper spell lists and the available natural magic Terra and Celes learn—for instance, Celes doesn’t learn Remedy or Life naturally, but you can get Serephim early in the World of Ruin to teach her both.
The major plot changes start in Thamasa (before that, it’s mostly little dialogue bits that emphasize the fact Geshtal adopted Celes and Kefka and raised them as his heirs), when Shadow dies fighting Kefka instead of Leo. Then Leo joins the party immediately and you can take 4 members to the Floating Continent. (Leo has Shock as a once-per-battle attack and also Banon’s Miracle ability; and he comes with a super-awesome special accessory too.) Banon takes Shadow’s role holding off Kefka, and you never wait for anyone. Arvis is waiting in Narshe to wrap up that plot and hand you the Ragnarok magicite. Leo takes Shadow’s place at the Colosseum; you need to bet a Sun Blade to get him. (Relm is in the Veldt Cave.) Siegfried shows up in the Underground Castle as a bonus fight for the Excalibur, but then the “real” Siegfried replaces Gogo as the mimic character. Umaro can be controlled, and he gets a new Gaia ability that randomly uses a Dance effect. Most characters get an “ultimate weapon” either at the end of their sidequest or inserted somewhere (there’s an extra Ultros and Ziegfried fight in Kefka’a Tower that gives a weapon for Relm, for example.)
The random battles in the World of Ruin get really nasty, and you’re constantly swapping around protective relics to deal with status ailments. This comes to a head in Kefka’s Tower, when a level 60+ party with the best available equipment (without grinding the Colosseum—maybe I needed to do that?) is still struggling through every random battle. I hit a roadblock and gave up at the three goddesses: Even cheating to level 99, they had so many overpowered attacks and free counters that I couldn’t handle them. (Goddess got a new ability that puts everyone in Countdown status and Zombies them after, even if they’re supposed to be immune to either Countdown or Zombie. WTF, man?)
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.