COMPLETED(?): FF6 Brave New World (v2.0)

[swordianmaster]

ughhhhhhh.

ughhhhhh I wanted to like this hack, it has so many good ideas and ughhhhhhhh

i even waited from 1.3 to 1.6.1 to 2.0 and a lot of things have changed but there's still ugh

To quote what I told a friend: Okay. I've played through the whole thing and yeah. Even now, I can't recommend BNW. It's... complicated to actually put into words, but the long and short of it is that for every fantastic thing it does, it also does something I can't fucking stand, and it does a lot of fantastic things.

If that sounds like damning with overwhelming praise, you're right!

For those curious, Brave New World is a full overhaul/rebalance hack for the SNES version of FF6 (or, rather, FF3) that has a whole bevy of under the hood changes including a touched up script, greatly improved character diversity (through character-limiting espers and thus spell access/stat growth) and a complete reworking of the game's stat formulas to pull it out of the trap the original game has of Magic being your god stat and the overwhelming statistic push to turn everyone into roided out spellslingers.

Unfortunately, it has a lot of problems, both in-game (balancing difficulty is hard, it turns out, and while they managed to get the first half of the game almost pitch perfect, the second half devolves into the same FF "You Can Only Win Through Overwhelming Force" game as every other FF endgame) and out of game (off-hand comments in the readmes combined with a few throwaway lines and attack names make me really question about the maturity of the writer, someone who thinks using words like 'retarded' and 'trigger' and constantly badtalking the game they're modifying is an acceptable way to act).

I was willing to give it a chance again with the newest update. I was willing to give it more than the chance it deserved, even, given that kjorteo has been playing Dragon Quest 2 and I've been thinking heavily about the very oldschool-oriented difficulty curve that expected you to grind for a substantial amount of time for levels and gear.

Unfortunately, it all fell apart at about the same point for me as it did the last time I tried, despite those considerations in mind. Somewhere between a third of the way through the World of Ruin to halfway through, difficulty becomes a binary. Either you're an adequate level and just kind of shrug off everything, or you're so much as a few levels behind and suddenly you're playing trampoline with the phoenix downs and struggling to put out fires as bosses and even random enemies counter most of what you throw at them with party-wide nukes. By the end of the game I was probably underlevelled, because random encounters were torturous, and so I spent the entire final boss violently abusing my SNES Classic's rewind function. There is no more comfortable middleground where you actually have to think about your choices, where the gameplay matters. It's either too easy or too hard, with no median.

After all, if we let you use those wildly debilitating status ailments on the enemy, or if we let your characters be immune to more than two or three at a time, well, then it's too easy, isn't it?

I'm done with romhacks for now, and if anyone wants to hear my opinion on difficulty/accessibility in video games:

I cheated the game, because it was cheating me.

I didn't play this to grow.
I didn't play this to improve.
I have enough room to do that living my life, which is an unending cavalcade of misery.
I took a shortcut and ended my suffering.

I experienced a hollow victory over a poorly-tuned game.
Nothing was risked and my sanity was gained.

It's sad that you think the difference matters.

Comments

[kjorteo]

For the record for the other commenters, we're going through Dragon Warrior 2 on our similarly hacked NES Classic. It's a patched version of the game from ROMhacking that makes the enemies give twice or more the experience and gold payout per battle, and it also has some small UI menu fixes (like actually providing room for your DEFENC stat to properly read as DEFENSE, etc.) All else is completely unchanged, including the original NES Thy Dungeonman localization. It's not a smarmy overhaul with an all new script and stat rebalancing and etc. It's literally just NES Dragon Warrior 2 but fixed menu/stat screen text and less stingy monster payout. And even then, as Sword put it in IM, "you'll still have to grind like a motherfucker; you just won't need to grind like two motherfuckers."

I apologize for indirectly making you think about all of this because of that. I, uh, I was just trying to tackle a game I'd long wanted to try; I didn't mean to make you play a smarmy ROMhack. *blush*

But yeah, this... there's a tendency for the complete overhauls to devolve into smugness, since 1) everyone has a grand idea for what the game balance totally should have been, and 2) the kind of people devoted enough to make a ROMhack by definition kind of have to know the game inside and out and a lot of them tend to expect you to as well. BNW sounds like it's actually a cut above your standard "nerf the obvious OP classes, give all the monsters 50x their stats, put in a masturbatory git gud speech in the readme about how you need to THINK and use STRATEGY now, that's it that's the hack." It does a lot of great quality-of-life tweaks that more games should have. But like you said, every good decision has a bad one to counterbalance. At the end of the day, this is still a stereotypical "overhaul" ROMhack. Which is unfortunate, because of all the good ideas it happened to have along the way.

Oh, well.

[penguinmayhem]

What is it with so much of the gaming community and "let's make this as obnoxiously unfair as possible" anyway? Whole lotta people out here who seem to think that just making something really difficult in an arbitrarily unfair way makes it automatically good.