Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

[nosimpleway]

Pretty sure Kefka doublecasting anything is a new thing, too, probably specifically to defeat "Just bring Celes and all Kefka can do is weak physical hits while you nail him with Fang, Cat Scratch, and Aura Cannon. This fight is supposed to be hard, dammit." He was also vulnerable to Stop if you happened to bring a Rage that could inflict that, wouldn't surprise me if that was patched out too.

Locke has finally found his ticket into the Empire to look for Phoenix, yeah, but also "Girl I've sworn to protect is going to do something dangerous, better go with her", turns out the central conflict in their budding relationship happens there.

That Locke is already looking for Phoenix is a bit of a plot hole, if you think about it. Cid, and thus the Empire at large, doesn't find out about magicite until the end of this sequence, when you get six of 'em at once to match the two you just picked up in the garbage dump. That discovery spurs Gestahl back to the Sealed Gate and eventually the slaughter at Thamasa... But apparently Gestahl has had one in his possession all this time, enough that rumors have spread about its power to revive dead people, and he never told anybody about it or figured out what it actually does.

[Thad]

Pretty sure Kefka doublecasting anything is a new thing, too,

Definitely. Complete with a Kefka laugh when he does it.

That Locke is already looking for Phoenix is a bit of a plot hole, if you think about it. Cid, and thus the Empire at large, doesn't find out about magicite until the end of this sequence, when you get six of 'em at once to match the two you just picked up in the garbage dump. That discovery spurs Gestahl back to the Sealed Gate and eventually the slaughter at Thamasa... But apparently Gestahl has had one in his possession all this time, enough that rumors have spread about its power to revive dead people, and he never told anybody about it or figured out what it actually does.

And it's more muddled than that. Edgar says, in Zozo, that "Gestahl already knew the secret of the espers' power back then"* (as in, when he attacked the esper realm when Terra was a baby). Locke adds that Celes got her power "at the expense of" an esper. I think what that's supposed to mean is that Gestahl knew the espers had power, and Cid was extracting it using those tubes, but the script, and in particular the line about "the secret of the espers' power", makes it sound like he already knew about magicite.

Mato doesn't really address that line in his analysis; it's not in his text at all. I checked the video and he starts to say something about it but then says "it doesn't really matter" and moves on. So I'm kind of curious whether that ambiguity was there in the original Japanese.

* Slattery translation, but the Woolsey version of the line is nearly identical

[Thad]

It occurs to me that I could also go check out the Toad Cave at this point. There's a crack in the wall at the Returner base that says a toad could fit through it, and Celes knows the Toad spell now (which replaces Imp/Kappa).

I was figuring I'd wait until I get the airship, though. I'm going to have to go through the Returner base after I get Mog anyway; I'll need to do the Serpent Trench loop to learn Water Rondo. (Or maybe I won't; maybe T-Edition has some new water environments. But I'm going to assume Serpent Trench is still the only one unless I see otherwise.)

On the one hand, I'm curious about the new area; on the other, I'm not really excited to go through the Cave to South Figaro and Mt. Koltz and then have to backtrack and go through them again (or hop on the raft and take the long way around) to get back to Figaro and go to Kohlingen. Waiting until I have the airship does seem like maybe the better call.

[nosimpleway]

Once you have Mog you can park the airship by Nikeah, grab a chocobo in town, ride all the way to the Phantom Forest, walk through there, hop over Baren Falls, walk across the Veldt, and go through the Serpent Trench for the water dance. You used to be able to chocobo through the Phantom Forest, too, but from what I understand you can't do that anymore. To my knowledge that's the quickest path, since it's mostly overworld on chocoback, and the route doesn't need the Returner's hideout.

I don't know what's in the toad cave, though, this is the first I've heard about it, so I don't know whether it's worth the detour at the point you're in now. Seems like there's not a ton of walkthroughs for the Pixel Remaster content out yet, hell, I'm still running into guides that spell it "Fenix Down".

[Thad]

This isn't Pixel Remaster, it's the T-Edition romhack. But I'm not sure how many English-language guides there are for that, either, since it only got a translation in November.

[nosimpleway]

Oh. Yeah. You did say that a couple times. Not sure how I got those wires crossed.

[Thad]

I decided fuck it, the point of this exercise is to check out the new stuff, so I made my way back to the Returner base and checked out the crack in the wall.

Not much there. Treasure room with some pretty good stuff in it. An accessory that prevents Silence, Petrify, Berserk, and Confuse. 7000 gil. I forget what else.

The drill seems crazy-expensive in this version of the game; it's 15,000 gil.

Haven't headed to Kohlingen yet. Think I'll probably proceed with my planned party of Edgar, Sabin, and Gau, and pick up Shadow when I get there. Seems maybe a little nuts to head off without Celes, the only character I've got who knows Cure at this point in the game, but I'll see how I do. I spent a lot of money on that drill.

I wonder if they improved the drill, or nerfed or moved the chainsaw. The drill always kinda seemed a little unfortunate; you buy it and then within an hour you've got the chainsaw, which almost entirely obsoletes it and relegates it to "thing you use instead of the chainsaw when you're fighting the undead." 15,000 gil seems like a lot to charge for it unless something's changed.

[Mongrel]

wait wait wait

You use the chainsaw for all occasions EXCEPT when fighting the undead?!

[nosimpleway]

Because of the extra horror movie reference, yeah.

Drill does damage, outside-of-mods never misses, pierces defense. That's all it does.
The chainsaw does damage, outside-of-mods never misses, pierces defense, and has higher attack power than the drill. Sometimes Edgar straps on a hockey mask and the chainsaw looks more like a modern tool than a steampunk abomination, and instant-kills the enemy. Against things that are alive it is always the better choice, because missing out on damage doesn't matter when you just kill the thing anyway.

Buuuut this is a fantasy game, and if you try to "instant-kill" an undead monster it immediately reforms with the same HP it had before Edgar took his turn. In those cases the chainsaw becomes "somewhat more damage than the drill, or absolutely nothing", and the drill becomes preferable. The game kind of goes out of its way to teach you this sort of interaction early in the World of Ruin (so, y'know, possibly several hours after you've gotten the chainsaw) by forcing Setzer into your party, making his next equipment upgrade the instant-kill Viper Darts, and then making the next dungeon an undead-infested tomb so the Viper Darts do virtually nothing against the monsters inside. I assume this sort of interaction is why Shadow's second-best weapon does instant-death but his actual best weapon inflicts Stop instead.

If I were modding the game I'd change the chainsaw from "maybe instant kill" to "maybe completely dismembers the enemy" like the Zantetsuken or the Odin/Raiden summons, so that it still worked on undead stuff. But I'm not a modder so I'm not sure that's actually plausible.

[Mongrel]

Oh I don't mind that it's ass-backwards in that sense. I'm amused by the subversion of what was - even back then - expectations based on a tired trope.

[Thad]

More stray observations:

I think T-Edition drops the random appearance of Shadow's dreams. I slept at two inns and saw two dreams. (There's no BGM in Shadow's dreams, so that ran up against the MSU-1 audio mod's problems with starting and stopping music; the town music keeps playing through the dream.) On balance that's probably a good change; the random occurrence was kinda neat in the original game but nobody's playing this hack who hasn't played vanilla.

Speaking of the RNG: I've made it through two stretches of game with Shadow in my party and he never bailed on me. IDK if his randomly leaving the party has been removed (or its odds adjusted) in the T-Edition or if I've just been lucky.

I've found exactly one shuriken so far; it was in the treasure chest at the back entrance of the herbalist's house in Kohlingen. I think maybe they're trying to do like FF4 where shurikens are really rare. Elemental skeins are for sale in the weapon shop, though.

(ETA the shuriken is an equippable weapon in this game, not just a throwable item.)

Shadow's dual-wield is buggy; sometimes when you're trying to equip a secondary weapon all the weapons will be grayed out and only shields will be available, as if he didn't have a dual-wield at all. Selecting "Best" equip always puts two weapons on him, though.

Every Cafe has the option to ask for quests. And so far only the South Figaro one has been monster-fighting; most of them have been simple fetch quests (go leave flowers at Darrill's tomb, that kind of thing). Even the Zozo cafe has a prompt to ask if any quests are available, but the barkeep tells you there aren't any. (By Zozo rules, shouldn't that mean there are? Hmm.)

Zozo was reasonably tough -- at any rate as I wandered around the first part of town there were a few times where I ran back to the entrance to use a tent and save. And that's with the best available armor at that point in the game.

Lots of good drops, though. I got a Thief Knife, a couple Kaiser Knuckles, a Gigas Glove...there was one point where I ran back to the entrance just to save so I wouldn't lose the drops I'd picked up. (That was abundance of caution more than anything, though; the only times I've seen a Game Over screen are still Banon deaths on the Lethe River. Though I also restored from an earlier save after running out of potions on the Decisive Battle, so while technically there's no Game Over screen there I should probably count it as a Game Over too.)

Chainsaw appears unchanged, so I don't know what's up with the drill being that damn expensive.

Another Gilgamesh fight, as you're climbing the stairs to find Terra. This doesn't replace the Dadaluma fight; that's still there at the top.

The Espers are nerfed. Kirin only teaches Cure and Regen (and teaches Regen at a x2 rate instead of the x3 rate in vanilla), etc. OTOH you're no longer limited to summoning once per esper per battle.

And I managed to glitch out the opera. I suspect the MSU-1 patch and PCM audio are the problem. I got as far as "Oh my hero" and the game froze. The entire track played through (and then looped) but Celes never made it as far as the edge of the balcony.

So that'll be fun to troubleshoot. I'll try deleting the PCM file for that track and see if that does the job. If not, maybe I'll try playing through the opera on an emulator or something, see if I can get through it like that and then copy the save back to my SD2SNES card.

[Thad]

Yep, deleting those audio files fixed the issue (though coincidentally when I pulled my SNES out to eject the cartridge, the A/V connector pulled partway out so I didn't have any audio when I put it back in, leading me to wonder at first what the hell I'd done that had managed to knock out all the audio -- I think I need to check how that cable's run and give it some more slack).

I learned that yes, Pummel can miss if Sabin is blind.

And I managed to get an "Incorrect Blitz input" at least once on Pummel, which leads me to believe it's not a problem with the diagonals on this controller. Maybe it's just spotty Bluetooth. I went ahead and ordered one of those 2.4GHz RF controllers to see if that works any better. At the very least I shouldn't ever have to worry about having to do the fucking pairing dance.

T-Edition switches up the Ultros Grand Finale fight in some entertaining ways. The audience gets into it, and chooses sides -- at various points throughout the battle someone in the peanut gallery will shout something and then either throw something at Ultros, throw something at you, or heal Ultros. I thought it was a nice touch.

[Thad]

Albrook has shuriken for sale. That'll come in handy once I'm headed to Thamasa, but that's a ways off yet; I haven't hit the Magitek Research Facility yet.

T-Edition definitely seems to have rebalanced everybody's stats. Celes's HP seem really low, and Sabin and Locke's MP seem really low. It doesn't look like Espers grant stat bonuses at level up anymore, which is frankly a bit of a relief because I'm really not interested in trying to min-max that shit; it just means I'm going to have to learn to handle characters who are a little more constrained by their class than in the original game.

The pub quest in Albrook is to deliver things to Maranda and Tzen. I think that's a neat idea, giving you a little nudge to go visit those towns even though they're optional. The hack is full of nice, well-considered little changes like that and that's one of the things that's really impressed me about it. This intensive a makeover on a game is always the result of passion and attention, but this level of care and competence is a real rarity and a consistent, pleasant surprise. It's still possible it'll take some turns I don't like, but I'm more than 10 hours in and I've found it consistently great. There's a reason it's become so highly-regarded in the ROMhack community.

I think it shows more consideration than some actual official rereleases of the game, but OTOH it is still a fan hack and as such it's not as polished as the official rereleases. That bug I mentioned where Shadow's weapons are grayed out even though they're equipable? I've hit the same thing a couple of times with Relics, where they all show grayed-out. It's a minor thing but, together with the music issues, an occasional reminder that yeah this is a hack and not something that went through an actual QA department.

Also: apparently it's Atma Weapon in the T-Edition/Mato translation, not Ultima Weapon. Makes sense given the character limit I guess.

[Thad]

Random localization thought:

You know, it's weird; of all the years I've been reading discussions of Woolseyisms, I've seen "Call me a treasure hunter or I'll rip your lungs out" referenced God knows how many times, but I'm not sure I've ever seen anybody in one of those discussions recognize "I'll rip their lungs out" as a line from the 1989 Batman movie.

Like, fucking everybody saw that movie, certainly most of the American audience who'd play FF3 on the SNES would have seen it, and I would venture that's a pretty memorable line. I have to admit some puzzlement that so few people seemed to make that connection.

Then again, Clyde Mandelin somehow made it to 2018 before realizing that "Fire! Fire! Heh heh heh" was a Beavis and Butt-Head reference.

[Thad]

Locke has finally found his ticket into the Empire to look for Phoenix, yeah, but also "Girl I've sworn to protect is going to do something dangerous, better go with her", turns out the central conflict in their budding relationship happens there.

Yes, the extremely plausible "Celes was a spy" accusation. Because clearly she and the other Imperials knew that somebody was going to sneak into occupied South Figaro, steal a merchant's clothes, steal a soldier's clothes, steal another merchant's clothes, take a bottle of cider to the old man who would give him access to a secret passage under his house, find another secret passage leading to a hidden basement, peek through the keyhole of a locked door while the soldiers holding her "prisoner" delivered a bunch of staged exposition, and then decide to rescue her and take her with him. Just as planned.

I think Locke might be a moron.

[Thad]

Magitek Research Facility:

The big change to the Ifrit/Shiva fight is exactly what I expected: you fight them both at once instead of having them swap back and forth.

Mostly works pretty well, but another one of those "this is a fan mod with some rough edges" things: there was no indication when I'd defeated Shiva except that I couldn't target her anymore.

Big change to the #24 fight: he's no longer vulnerable to Imp/Toad. He is vulnerable to Sleep. This fight wound up being really tedious; he kept healing when he'd get down below 50% health. And there wasn't much I could do to target his elemental weaknesses because he kept shifting to stuff I don't have, like Earth and Darkness. It was frustrating, one of those fights that I think came down to just a lucky RNG outcome where he didn't heal for a couple turns.

Music cue changes:

The boss at the end of the mine cart uses the FF7 boss theme and victory fanfare.

I couldn't quite place the music that plays when Kefka deploys the cranes; I wanna say Xeno-something but I'm not 100%.

The Esper realm in Terra's flashback plays the FF4 Feymarch music.

The Espers have been significantly rebalanced -- for example, Maduin no longer teaches the -ara spells, you'll have to learn from them from Ramuh, Ifrit, and Shiva. What Maduin teaches are spells that other Espers don't teach anymore (eg Shiva no longer teaches Rasp or Osmose, just the first two Ice spells). OTOH, more items teach spells than in vanilla; Edgar learned Reflect from a relic before I ever got any Espers.

It feels like this could get grindy but it's too early to tell for sure yet. The rejiggered character stats definitely change my strategy for who's going to learn what -- Locke and Sabin have such a low Magic stat that they're almost useless for curative or damage spells, so that means I should prioritize status spells for those guys; that sort of thing.

I've noticed from some of the screenshots that characters can be assigned to different classes; I'm not sure if that affects stats or if it's just cosmetic. I haven't gotten as far as any class- or costume-change stuff just yet.

[nosimpleway]

If they nerfed Sabin's magic it sounds like they also redid some of the damage calculations, because e.g. Aurablast is magic-based in vanilla. Maybe they went the Brave New World route and redid a bunch of moves to key off of Stamina for no reason other than "virtually nothing in vanilla keys off stamina".

[Thad]

Yeah, Aura Cannon wasn't as effective in the Magitek Research Facility as it was earlier on. (Of course its advantage in the Phantom Train is you're fighting a bunch of undead and it's Holy-elemental.) Phoenix Dance has felt surprisingly underpowered compared to Edgar's Flash. (Was Flash always fire-elemental?)

[Thad]

It's probably worth repeating that, for the most part, I think these changes are a good thing. Sabin is unquestionably the most OP character in the earlygame, and he could use some nerfing. I'd say he's still probably the most powerful character at this point in the game overall, though Edgar (between a pretty high Magic stat and the chainsaw) was the most useful character in my party in the MRF.

Nerfing Locke frankly seems a little cruel, though. He's got a high Speed stat and that's pretty much it, so it allows him to be be completely useless very quickly.

(That's not entirely fair. His attack stat is low enough that he was pretty useful dealing friendly-fire attacks to party members who were asleep or confused.)

[nosimpleway]

Flash is non-elemental in vanilla. It's light, not heat.