FAQs

Here's some questions I have received before regarding this hack, and some I thought up to ask myself.

Q. Why did you make the extended intro unplayable/can't move text along?

A. It's supposed to be like the ending movie, but an opening one. There's also a non-controllable mid-game (end of the WoB) movie-like event as well. These are there quite simply for you to watch and not to play. We decided to code it that way when making the event and to change it so you can advance the dialog boxes at this point would be basically re-working the whole thing and I'm not interested in doing that. At least there's an option at the start of a new game to skip it.

Q. Why is Professor Oak in the hack?

A. Back when this hack was first started sometime in like...2009, before it was 'RotDS', it was called 'Last Hope' and sucked far worse. Anyways, due to some heavy corruption I could not use the dialog editor at all, so I had to hex edit all text stuff. I changed the name of Cid into Oak because it was easy and doable, and used a slightly edited Arvis sprite for him. Then it just stuck, and eventually we did an authentic Oak sprite and decided to keep it. I'm not a Pokemon fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, I gave up after the Red one on Gameboy, which admittedly I did really enjoy. I do however like the idea of an alternate reality Oak doing dark experiments -- he is a professor of Pokemon in Pokemon, but a professor of Espers in this hack. Works for me!

Q. Why is Cloud, or 'X' character in the hack?

A. Characters was pretty much the first thing that was done back when first starting this hack, and back then there wasn't all that many complete, quality sprites to choose from let alone mesh together well palette-wise. I'm not a hardcore Cloud fan, or a FF7 'fanboy', I don't dress up like Cloud and go to cosplays, they were just available as characters at the time and I figured I could work him in easily enough in Locke's place, using Bushido (Limit). Same with the other crossovers for the most part like Tifa, Eiko... they were available as sprites that all worked well together sharing the various palettes, and I figured they would be easy to swap in and have their appropriate skills portrayed accurately, and went with it.

Q. Is this a "serious" hack?

A. Yes, it's a serious hack that takes itself very lightly at times. Humor is important to me and hard to resist implementing. It does contain a lot of random bosses, references, and some 'stoner' humor... but it's not a parody hack at all. I just used a bunch of random video games and themes that I am familiar with and threw them in the blender...which more or less resulted in a crossover hack. But, the main story alterations are supposed to be taken seriously, which I hope becomes somewhat obvious towards the end of the first half of the game. The goal was for it to be an entertaining experience, and I am totally aware that meshing all these characters together results in something that makes no real sense at all. If possible, try to think of it like some bizarre parallel world or alternate reality to FF6.

As stated in the readme:
It is a highly personalized modification of the original game and therefore naturally won't appeal to everyone. It's not a sequel or a prequel or a remake to FF6, it is just a massive mod and customization of FF6. If you go into it thinking like this I am sure you will have a much more enjoyable experience than expecting some high quality re-take on the game and coming out feeling disappointed.

Q. Why are the overworld maps changed, but not the other ones?

A. I myself am not good with map editing, or rather creating entirely new maps... the thought of creating whole new legit town and dungeon maps is daunting to say the least. It would take lots and lots of more time, time of which I don't personally have anymore. Hopefully someday there will be some or many new maps, maybe someone will volunteer as Lockirby did for the overworlds, in which I would be happy to do all the other changes required to get the maps up and running.

Q. For what purpose did you change the town names?

A. As an incentive to do new town maps someday lol. Since this won't be happening for who knows how long, I guess just to switch up the flavor a bit. Changing just the name of something is basically pointless though I do realize. Also I must apologize for changing the town names again and again between versions... naming stuff is hard! Until there is a "final" version, this is something that is likely to continue.

Q. What would you do differently if you could start over fresh again?

A. Probably opt to have a 100% original cast of playable characters.

Q. Why are the characters so much like the vanilla ones still?

A. It's fairly tough, without changing up the event structure more as a whole. I admit, Aurora is much like Terra still, I found that there wasn't a need to change it all that much personality-wise, since they both are still half-esper etc. and follow the same exact course of events. Obviously some characters required more of a makeover than others, like Locke to Cloud, Setzer to Otis... but for ones like Terra, Celes, Sabin, the new characters taking their spots just kinda fit the same way... They aren't carbon copies of the vanilla characters hopefully, but yes they could still use work to further differentiate. I'd like to think that for the most part the majority of them seem fresh.

Q. Why is Arc nothing like Arc the Onion Knight from the FF3 Remake?

A. Because he is not supposed to be that same Arc. Both SSJ Rick and I, who decided on his name, had no idea about the FF3 remake or Square naming one of the Onion Knights Arc, believe it or not. I've debated changing his name to something else just for this reason, but in the end Arc is the most fitting name for him we can imagine and everyone's used to it by now.

Q. Pretty much all the monsters have their own unique sprites, so why are there still some duplicate monster sprites?

A. Unfortunately the sprite editor, which was customized and expanded to allow for more bytes/sprites, has a terrible bug that is basically unfixable at the moment, where it won't allow us to go past a certain amount of bytes/space without removing the esper sprites at the end of the sprite data, like a snake eating itself, even though we have more than enough room... It's very sad, we had plans for all the rest and even opted to remove all the monster's shadows in order to have the last couple ones that were done and very much wanted.

Q. Do you consider yourself a good writer?

A. Somewhat, I used to enjoy writing back in school, does that count? But no, I'm not on a professional level. I enjoy writing, but it's nothing I'd consider a true skill. The dialog in this hack is not a candidate for a Pullet Surprise, but I tried! And thanks to SSJ Rick for going way out of his way to make it as good as we can.

Q. Who is your favorite character in the hack?

A. Probably Arc. He is the most original and I'm surprised how well his whole story and events worked out as a whole. I'd like to at some point add more completion and depth to him in terms of what might of happened to his father, and forgiving 'you know who'. Besides his story, I enjoy him in combat very much thanks to his updated Runic. Besides Arc, I also really like Reaper and Otis.

Q. What exactly did you, Gi Nattak, do for this hack?

A. I created the mod itself, basically I lead the project and am responsible for any decision-making and the majority of the story elements. I did the majority of the music, dialog, and event work - back when the first event work was being done, all the event work was done by Angelo, but once he couldn't work on it any longer I took up the reins. I finished and expanded more on his and eventually moved on to do much larger ones of my own, as well as the tons of smaller event tweaks throughout the mod. These v2.0 days SSJ Rick helps out a lot with new story/event ideas as well as dialog, so big thanks to him. Lord Envoy did the major new battle script work for many bosses, but I get down on many as well. I have nothing to do with anything sprite related except in strange cases like the overworld mini maps. I did all the items and item descriptions, spell naming and editing, and other incredibly tedious ventures such as adding in the Rage descriptions, monster stats/balancing...

Q. Will this hack work on my cell phone's SNES emulator?

A. As long as the emulator supports ExHiROM (up to 8MB ROM size) then it should.

Q. Will version 2.X be the last version?

A. I highly doubt it. We already have plans and lots of material for a future version 3.0, but it will be a long time if at all before that time comes. There will most likely be some kind of smaller update(s) before then.

Anybody got a Q for me? Please ask away!