FF6 - Brave New World

After nearly two years of development, version 1.0 of Brave New World is finally ready for release. What started out with my initial desire to properly case everyone's name turned into a rather innocent discussion between a co-worker of mine and I about ways to improve/fix the original game, which in turn became this.

Highlights

• In order to keyhole characters into the character archetypes we wanted them to fit, espers are now restricted by character, and all espers have had their spell lists and level up bonuses appropriately adjusted.
  
• Traditional levels and esper levels have been disassociated from one another to alleviate the feeling that players must LLG until espers have been gained. See the Readme for more information.
  
• In an effort to make vigor a useful stat (as opposed to the dump stat it was originally), a brand new physical damage formula was implemented.
  
• In an effort to make stamina a useful stat (as opposed to the garbage stat it was originally), several abilities now use it instead of magic power or vigor when determining their effectiveness.
  
• Several modified or new special effects have been implemented to accommodate new or changed skills, including:
  • Mindblow: Does 500 MP damage - the new level 2 sword tech.
    
  • Mantra: Altered to use stamina as an additional modifier - along with this, Sabin is likely the highest-stamina character in the game.
    
  • Chakra: A Mantra clone that restores MP to the party instead of HP - the new level 6 Blitz.
    
  • Among many, many others.
    
• Various bug fixes, including evasion, sketch, runic, genji glove, vanish/doom, and persistent statuses after death.
  
• Periodic effect formulas have been re-worked to accommodate the emphasis on making stamina useful, as well as a lower HP curve. In particular, periodic damage is now reduced by raising stamina, while regen healing is increased. Poison will also scale a little slower, while seizure is almost universally useful.
  
• Party level averaging has been removed at most parts in the game due to the added emphasis on stat growth via esper bonuses. An unfortunate side effect of this is that the World of Ruin has greatly varied difficulty depending on how it's chosen to be played.
  
• Virtually all weapons, armor, and relics have been re-worked so few are dead weight, putting the onus on the player to determine what the best load out is for a particular character and/or situation.
  
• All enemies have had their stats, resistances, weaknesses, status vulnerabilities, and battle scripts re-done or completely overhauled.
  
• The game script has been largely re-written in order to be a bit more faithful to the original Japanese dialogue. A largely irreverent "clean" script has also been included for those with delicate sensibilities.
  

Further information can be found in the Readme. It's a bit of a lengthy read, as my partner is quite verbose, but at the very least section 4 should be perused.

As there was very little graphical and map hacking and no sound hacking (due to both being beyond the scope of the mod and being beyond our skills), I don't really have any screenshots, and only one video. Most of what we did is fairly difficult to show through screenshots and videos anyway.

A mini-review was written by one of the early downloaders of the release version, for those looking for something somewhat shorter than the Readme to summarize the mod: http://levantiner1.blogspot.com/2013/06/...world.html

Download
Download link: http://www.insanedifficulty.com/board/in...available/
Alternate link: [Down for now}
Readme: [Down for now - can be found in the archive via download link above]
Changelog: [Down for now - can be found in the archive via download link above]

Note that the alternate link and the Readme may not always be up to date, as they're maintained by my partner. The most recent version of the patch will always be on my site. With respect to the Readme, the only thing this should affect is the changelog, and I update the one on my site when I get a new one.

Installation
The archive includes four patches: two base patches, and two clean patches.

Base Patches
Identifiable by the version number in the file name, these contain the bulk of the hack. Applying one of these to a ROM makes Brave New World fully playable with an uncensored version of the script and with some uncensored enemy and esper sprites.

Clean Patches
These patches contain the new irreverent clean script, as well as a re-censoring of the sprites that were uncensored by the base patch. The clean patch should be applied after the base patch, otherwise you'll end up with a mostly vanilla game with a smattering of odd dialogue and custom enemy palettes.

Each type of patch comes in two flavors: headered and non-headered, identified by the [h] (headered) or [n] (non-headered) at the start of the file name. Use whichever flavor applies to your ROM. If you're unsure, try the non-headered patch first.

Known Issues

• The World of Ruin map tends to glitch or "tear," especially around the Serpent Trench.
  
• The animation for the Phoenix esper can occasionally cause severe graphical anomalies. As far as we know, this is just superficial and will clear up after battle.
  
• Characters wearing a Knight Cape or Hero Ring will cover other characters the player may be trying to heal with a brush.
  
• Treasure chests containing key items will close themselves if you go to the menu screen (or otherwise reload the map) and will be empty if you attempt to re-open them.
  
• During certain battles, most notably the Cranes, the menu cursor will become difficult to see or disappear entirely - this is an emulator layering issue and has absolutely nothing to do with the mod (ditto for off-screen characters appearing layered over the HUD during in-battle cutscenes).
  
• More so here than in the original game, renaming your characters (especially those with short names like Cyan, Gau, and Mog) can result in weird formatting in dialogue boxes; the ones that appear during battle cutscenes are notable offenders since they don't wrap normally and can potentially result in text overrunning the dialogue window
  
• When casting the Remedy spell out of battle, it ignores the flag we created to use the caster's stamina in place of their magic power, which will in turn affect the spell's power potentially significantly depending on the character in question and their build

Discussion
Aside from this thread, there are two other "official" places of discussion for the mod.

NGPlus - A community of hackers and hack fans that were kind enough to give us our own forum for further discussion of BNW. This has more or less become the official BNW forum. It has replaced Insane Difficulty, which has gone the way of the dodo bird.
GameFAQs - Where most of the developmental discussion used to occur when BTB and I weren't on shift together. Now pretty much all discussion takes place at the Insane Difficulty forums linked above. This forum is basically dead at this point, but it still archives some old developmental discussion.