ReCast FF3: War of the Magitek

@C-Dude
What were your main motivations for this hack?

What are the main goals of this hack?

Well, it started with a frustration that the early Final Fantasy games (the 2D entries) suffered from abhorrent art clash.  Earlier games had it worst, with field sprites, player battle sprites, and then romance-era style paintings for the enemies.  There was an indescribable dissonance of scale in battle, having our heroes stab at the ankles of their enemies who towered over them.

I was originally motivated to hack by PowerPanda's "3 Scenarios" patch.  I wanted to play through it, but without the aforementioned art clash.  I was also interested in turning the Imp status into Pig, mostly as a pet-peeve because the two are basically identical ailments (which later turned into Addle, granted, but that's another matter entirely).  But "Pig" ended up clashing with the setting, so I made it "Moogle" instead.

As I started trying to inject graphics into the game, I took an interest in story pathing to change the pace of the game.  After all, that's what "3 Scenarios" was shooting for in the first place, why not build on that.  I was subjected to a 'shattering glass' realization when I read that the World of Ruin is woefully short compared to the first half of the game.  I had never realized how limited that segment of the game was and I wanted to expand on that.  Fans of FF6 focus on Leo, so I wanted to take a different approach and explore Banon further as a character.  In the original, he kinda runs rampant over Edgar in the beginning and then gets completely forgotten.

Another matter I wanted to address was the game's gender ratio.  It bothered me that there were only three female player characters in the game, one of them being a child and another being a mannequin to pitch woo at (   "I'm a general, not some opera floozy!" )
Since I was hacking the game anyway, I took the opportunity to explore some what-if scenarios about the cast, placing Setzer into the ancillary role Darryl originally held and changing Cyan to create distance from the slain family at Doma, whom I felt were improperly grieved.

I suppose my goal was what any hacker really shoots for... to see what I could do with the engine and to see if I could put a novel spin on a classic story.