ReCast FF3: War of the Magitek

"Hound" is a free step-mine.  You need to walk the dog to make it better.

That's good to know.  I didn't pick up on that at all.  That said, other than the fact that it can be turned into a disk-one nuke if you run in circles for a few hours, the attack still isn't as interesting as what most of the other characters have at their disposal.

With regards to the sea horse, I debated shrinking it and decided instead to use it as a 'dragon' sprite.  The mythical hippocampus is roughly that size, so I thought it would be an okay sprite to leave.  Perhaps if I change the name "Latimera" to "Hippocampus" it'll make that intent clear... it was a fluke that serpent's trench was completely vanilla as sprites go and I understand why that would be jarring to the player.

Honestly, I didn't even realize that the hippocampus was a mythological creature until you said it here.  I always just thought that name was just FF6 being FF6.  The other serpent trench enemies looked fine to me after a second's thought since jellyfish can be pretty huge and corals are variably-sized.

Admittedly I wasn't trying to be definitive with this hack

Yeah, I feel like this came through from what you've said in the past.  Statements like that were mostly aimed at the RHDN review readers so that they know exactly what they're getting into when they play this hack.  It was less about giving a qualitative "rating" to the hack and more about describing what it is and isn't so that the reader can make an informed choice about whether the hack is up their alley.

I did try to make the story more coherent and I suppose it reveals my writing weaknesses.

To some extent, I'll admit that I'm so used to FF6's regular inconsistencies that fixing those inconsistencies and adding different inconsistencies will make me think it's more inconsistent.  I'm a bit biased.

(though I don't think Gau writing letters is silly, because he's trying to culture himself and Mobliz was right next to the Veldt)

It was less the fact that Gau could write at all and more about the details:

-Unlike Cyan, Gau doesn't really have a strong personal reason to go as far as impersonating Lola's boyfriend to console her. He maybe kinda knows the boyfriend and is generally a well-meaning person, but that rationale isn't nearly as strong.
-It doesn't feel like Gau should be as embarrassed when violating social norms by making flowers or writing poorly thought out letters
-I can buy that Gau has learned to write, but it feels implausible that he is proficient enough to impersonate Lola's boyfriend when he still speaks and writes in sentence fragments
-Sudden flawless poetry in iambic pentameter: "The world before the fall, Lovely is the light of dawn, Noble is the heart of man..."; this doesn't seem like the kind of thing somebody can write in what may as well be a second language.

I'm not sure how anybody would go about adding more challenge to the hack, but I know that I'm not going to be the one to do it.  Increasing difficulty in a JRPG means either constricting leveling opportunities or tailoring battle scripts to specific puzzle scenarios.  Since most of the monsters in ReCast don't even have scripts (and just run off their colosseum code), it's out of my league to build a puzzle battle experience.

Fair enough.  Again, this was less of a complaint and more of a note to the review reader.

That said, I don't think it's necessary to restrict leveling opportunities (or go the drastic extent of creating puzzle bosses) to build difficulty into a JRPG.  Some JRPGs, like Octopath Traveler, are successful at making smart decisions more important than grinding without turning any bosses into a puzzle with only one or two specific solutions.  In the realm of FF6 hacks, Brave New World also achieves similar results.  I think ReCast is an improvement over vanilla in this department.

Personally, I tend to see leveling in a JRPG as a sort of granular difficulty switch.  When I want to play on "Normal" difficulty, I play through without running or grinding.  If somebody wants to play on "Easy", they can grind to level 70, and if somebody wants to play on "Hard", they can fight everything at level 6.  So when I describe ReCast's difficulty, I'm specifically talking about the first scenario.  Even if a player can grind out of a situation, I still consider a game more challenging if it requires a bit of strategy and optimization to win at that "Normal" setting.

In summary, I think that if strategy impacts the game far less than level (like the original Dragon Warrior), then battles can only be a grindfest or a cakewalk.  If the tuning on the "Normal" setting is wrong, then the intended audience either won't need or won't understand how to make the right decisions to win.  Under this paradigm, I'd just conclude that I'm just not in your target audience.  But if (for some reason) you decided that somebody like me should be the target audience, I think that these would be the best methods of tuning the balance to fit me rather than restricting leveling or making battles a puzzle.