FF6 ROTDS 1.3.1 review

Personally, I feel like this review misses the mark a little.

The game is not ruined, but you made the most terrible error: listen literally all what newbies/average player want, everybody will always complain about everything, no matter how much perfect is your work, so the only thing you can
do is doing what YOU want, not what the others want...

This is not the error that Nattak made. Make no mistake: this is what *you* want; it is not what Nattak wants. Remember, Nattak would probably list himself as a relatively average player of the game, or so I'd suspect. I don't believe that he was aiming to make a fight as hard as it was. There are two mistakes that I feel were actually made here.

1) Not defining the difficulty that this hack was aiming for clearly enough from the beginning. It has flip-flopped a little I think, and I think that's a large part of your problem with the hack Tenka. You're seeing it as a difficulty hack, but at one point it wasn't really intended to be one IIRC, which is why you're getting mixed signals. I think the beta testers would have had an easier time benchmarking ROTDS if they knew what it was aiming for. To be fair to Nattak, I wouldn't have come to this conclusion earlier either, because it's not obvious, and I think hindsight is the only reason why I have this feeling.

2) I may be wrong because I don't know firsthand, but I think Nattak didn't do enough testing without some sort of advantage (maybe some sort of godmode) to make testing faster. While being able to wipe enemies more easily is an advantage in that it accelerates the testing of events, mechanics, etc. it makes it hard to gauge how the battles actually play. I remember Nattak mentioned that he agreed the fight was too hard after playing through it himself more recently, which is part of the reason why I think there wasn't enough "normal" playtesting earlier. If the premise isn't true, disregard this paragraph.

Given the above, I feel that the nerf of the endgame is part of a correction of these earlier mistakes, and not the introduction of new mistakes. Most people, Nattak included, would enjoy this version of the hack more.

I'll admit, Zuriel should have been nerfed in beta in the first place, and this was partly due to my own mistakes as well, since this was several years ago and I was 15-ish. My mentality at the time was "If it's hard but not impossible to beat without grinding, then it's definitely balanced well enough". That's not even close to correct. To boot, I was too worried about being that guy that says the game is too hard when really it's just my own mistakes, and if I were better I'd have beaten it already. But I ended up sweeping legitimate balance qualms under the rug because of that! I think things would have turned out better if I'd spoken up fully instead of just barely deciding to ask to nerf Zuriel's HP a little.

Here's the deal though: you just don't like nerfs. It doesn't matter how justified or supported the nerf is, it seems to me like you would reject any nerf ever (short of a nerf that makes the game possible at all), whether it is in ROTDS, BC or anything else. If you say otherwise, look at it this way. You were already complaining about this nerf before you had seen either 1.0 Zuriel *or* 1.4 Zuriel. That screams to me that you weren't prepared to look at it with an open mind here. This entire review almost just seems to exist to complain about nerfing. You didn't even mention any of the other parts of ROTDS that people consider questionable, which as a reviewer you should have at least made note of, whether you address the complaints or agree with them.

I'm not trying to tick you off with this post, just trying to make a level-headed point here. 0:-)

(as an aside, I'm surprised you never posted this on ID. )

Everything you said was so true and on point, it's scaring me lol.