Final Fantasy
I’ve been in love with JRPGs since playing Final Fantasy on the NES back in, oh, 1988, 1989? It’s a fun game to return to; even though a lot of people consider it archaic these days, I love the original Dungeons & Dragons style to the game, and the remakes aren’t that bad either.
Hacks
I’ve been branching out and trying some hacks, too. Here’s some thoughts on what I’ve tried out.
Final Fantasy Restored (plus more stuff)
This is what I’m currently messing around with. The base patch fixes a number of bugs in the original game, and then I’ve added some patches on top of that because they sounded interesting. What I enjoy is that it tries to not go too far astray of the original NES game, while improving the many things wrong with it.
Here’s what I’ve got going on (with Romhacking.net links):
- Final Fantasy Restored - 1.0 — many, many bugfixes: weapon categories and elements now used, many spells now do something, text fixes, more; many, many enhancements: real title screen, walk faster on B, Buy 10 option, confusion more interesting, warp and exit ask for confirmation, more; INT used in magic hit calculations and cure effectiveness
- Menu Color - Standard Blue
- Boss HP - Double
- Remove Ship Game + Add New Music — additional music composed for fiends and the final boss, but the ship game had to be removed to make room; there’s also a boss theme from the base patch
- RNG - Improved
- Final Fantasy Restored - 2019 Script Port — an even newer translation than Restored, translating from the Famicom game and sticking closer to Square Enix’s modern terminology, with a bit more expanded NPC dialogue
- Final Fantasy Restored Sprite Touchups — combination of animation fixes and restoration of some NES-style (rather than Famicom-style) animation frames and dungeon tiles
- Final Fantasy Restored Rebalancing — Buffs the thief/ninja, nerfs the late-game monk/master
- Final Fantasy Restored Debalance — “uncorrects” the store changes in Restored, restores the Peninsula of Power
- Final Fantasy Original Font
Final Fantasy Ultra Champion Edition
I played a bit of this, and it seems pretty neat! It’s a significant rebuild of the original game, with new classes, a different magic system, and tons of other changes I didn’t even experience yet. Unfortunately, it’s almost too different from what I’m looking for right now.
More information on the hack can be found on Romhacking.net.