Final Fantasy 6 Unified World (Idea)

Alright, it had occurred to me that due to the nature of Final Fantasy 6, all of the custom stories (Unless it has EXTENSIVE level and event editing) is destined to follow the SAME pattern; the heroes team up, the world meets the apocalypse, they reform the team and save the world.

However, what if we want a story that doesn't go that way?

I propose that we can work together to try to create a NEW base.

Instead of 2 worlds, we can have a Unified world that combines elements from both worlds into a single one.

I don't mean in terms of ALL the towns, I mean for instance, we could make it so that we add in the different dungeons, caves and unique locations from the world of ruin into the world of Balance, similar to the third world from Final Fantasy 5.

An example of what I mean...

We begin in Narshe, then we go down to Figaro, and from Figaro, we can go either Left or Right; Right leads to the normal cave, then South Figaro, then the Sabil Mountains and then the Returner's Hideout.

But what's to the left? It's a NEW cave, and hat cave could be the one that the turtle is needed to access in the WoR to access Figaro, and after navigating it, we come to Kohlingen. I made a mockup of this before.



Another aspect that could easily be worked into it is that Zozo is a place we normally go, but what if we HAD to go through Mt Zozo in order to reach the next town, and therefore the start of the Setzer segment of the game before we can start the Vector one?

The team could say "Hey, we got Magicite and therefore magic now, we just need to go to Vector, but how do we do that? none of us have a boat."

So, they need to navigate through the town to get the clock code, which opens up the passage into Mt Zozo, and instead of leading to Cyan, it leads to the other side of the new river which allows us to cross.

But, another thing we could incorporate into this is using the world of ruin as a sort of 'tunnel' or 'underworld' area, such as if we need to go underneath a town, cave or anything else to access a new area.

Such as having a castle in the mountains where we can't land the airship, we need to go through a cave which leads to an underground path we can take to a secondary cave that completes the path needed to get to the town, or it could function as a sort of underwater world of sorts, and the Falcon could become a submarine, since the player never gets the means to have a boat of any kind, which can open up early exploration before the airship, or reaching sunken ruins.

Another thing this can have is that the game DOES end on the floating continent; which allows for the means to go back to the world map via the normal way, but we fight Kefka, and upon his defeat, he opens up a portal to another world, which could be Kefka's Tower, which begins the final segment of the game.

As this would have aspects from both worlds, the Colosseum would always be available (though limited by either strong enemies, or needing good items to get better ones, such as a Rune Sabre to get an Enhancer, which in turn can be wagered to get a Crystal, etc, but each time, the enemy would step up a whole notch.)

While I didn't flesh out all of the details, this could be done if we all work on it and come up with the way we can work on it and together, we can make a new base for future FF6 projects that will make for awesome things. =3

By making numerous events, maps, event triggers, NPCs and map exits useless, which is what would happend by not using the WOR towns maps, you could add a few new dugeons, or event towns, without reaching the maximum elements I described.

That would be without a doubt an interesting hack.

Doing this would undoubtedly make the game have roughly the same playtime as the whole game (maybe a little more or a little less) depending on how we end up balancing it.

In some of my custom event practise, I managed to get a new event in Narshe to work by removing the guards that come out to attack you, and replaced it with Terra walking out of the mineshaft with the screen shaking before she fell unconscious, which affected nowhere else in the game other than the beginning, so just imagine what we can do if we dummy an entire world full of events and exits. =3

One aspect that came to mind was that instead of the serpent trench, we could use a WoR cave/dungeon (such as the Phoenix Cave) that requires the player to properly plan and navigate the area with a reduced and weakened party, but the enemies would be adjusted accordingly to make it challenging, although not impossible.

Would anyone be willing to join me in this endeavour?

That's a great idea. It would open things up for some great original hacks and maybe even some good remakes of the earlier games in the series. Hmmm, SNES versions of FF1,2,3 could be a lot more doable with this as a base.