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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
From:
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Some excerpts, since the wounds are still fresh. From the main readme:
"The first is that, due to bad coding/poor life choices[...]"
"[...]also fix some bugs it had so that it feels a lot more like a proper ability instead of a broken mess."
"[...]if you're the type of player that just mashes "A" to win, then Brave New World is not for you."
"[...] because whoever coded this nightmare was on crack."
"*There's actually an exception (Dice) since FF6 was coded by monkeys"
"*This game was programmed by monkeys, I swear"
"Others [...] were fucking retarded and were thrown in the trash where they belong."
"We thought it stupid that a cheap and freely-available item was functionally identical to a resource-consuming spell[...]"
"[...]this game's tangled mess of spaghetti code[...]
And from the locked/spoiler readme:
"[...]as part of our ongoing effort to remove hidden bullshit that really shouldn't have been hidden in the first place (people had a lot more free time on their hands back in the 90's)."
"An even MORE questionable design choice than the above was giving the player a magicite containing one of the baddest asses ever, only to have it immediately replaced with Hideo Kojima's biggest mistake."
"[...] the last thing we want to do is make the player feel like they need to drag Locke's vagrant ass along with them wherever they go[...]"
"For the curious and/or bored[...]"
"[...] but a cursory glance at the original code suggests that little, if any of that fucking mess was intentional."
"(warning: they're a goddamn mess)"
"[...]which I could very easily fix just by [...] but I honestly really don't give enough of a shit."
....I think some of those are enlightening even without context.
From:
no subject
Anyway, it was something about a sort of FF6 After Years setting where after FF6's plot happened, Magic no longer existed, so things like Items and Potions and Alchemy and Science became the dominant all powerful force, and then some new OC Big Bad built himself a lightning machine and tried to take over and/or destroy everything. The one part I clearly remember was the first time the entire reunited FF6 crew meet the new endboss: in an attempt to get him over as a new big serious threat to take seriously via the Worf Effect, he activates his lightning powers and instantly and in one move splortches Mog, Gogo, and Umaro, who are now dead forever.
Even back in my own shitty teen phase, even I remember thinking the choice of victims was immersion-breakingly obvious. Not only is it a rather glaring logic hole (we have established he has the power to turn three entire party members into a fine red mist instantly, but everyone else is able to band together and avenge them in a much more fair fight in which he somehow forgot he could do that) but seriously, those exact three? You very, very clearly just dropped a bridge on the ones who all happened to have the common thread of "the silly joke character/the character least relevant to the main plot." Not even the ones considered missable side characters by gameplay standards, because Shadow was fine, of course, even though he'd arguably ambiguously already died back in the actual game. No, this was a calculated fuck-you to your least favorites, and your least favorites were the ones you felt got in the way of your serious story for serious people. And that's teenaged me calling you out on this.
From:
no subject
Hi, I'm not still boggling over a bad fanfic storytelling decision twenty years later or anything.
From:
no subject
From:
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