Final Fantasy VI Randomizer

Hey Dessyrekt.

Jackimus and I have been racing your randomizer (generally to Kefka) a lot and while it is awesome and a lot of fun we have come across some rather... game-ending flaws that we thought we would pass on in the hopes that you might fix them.

First and foremost is our perennial race-ending issue: Vargas. Half of the time when you get to Vargas Sabin is LITERALLY unable to kill him. If Sabin is Umaro, guess what? the race is over, you just wasted 30 minutes. If Sabin is Relm, Gogo, Mog, most versions of Celes or Terra, Strago or Gau (if you get a bad selection of lores/rages) then guess what? the race is over, start again. In the non-Umaro case you might luck out and be able to equip them with a poison rod and luck out with procs and lack of gale-cuts, but at the same time you might not have found a single healing item for sale by that point and be completely unable to keep up with the damage.
Now I am aware that we COULD grind for some levels and win that way, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of a race, right? I haven't been keeping track of what level we generally get there at, so for now let's just say that said level is LOW. We run away from most fights all the way there (unless we luck out and get a bunch of insta-kill crowd control options like tools or slots) and so every time we get to Vargas it is kind of a coin toss whether the race ends at that point or not.

So our basic suggestion to fix this problem of having an awesome race cut off prematurely is easy: reduce Vargas' hit-points further. If we only have a fight command and starting gear (a common scenario) we MIGHT be able to get 500 damage off before we die. It would honestly be best if Vargas died in one hit, but if you want to retain some amount of challenge then 500 HP would be doable.


Our next biggest problem is the Flame Eater. The one time we raced to the World of Ruin Jack spent a full hour running through the game from the inn to the Flame Eater only to get killed over and over. He counters everything with Fire 2 and you're kind of expected to have breakable rods and Aqua Lore to deal with him. We had throw with no water skeans, one character with steal and a terrible magic stat, and something else I don't remember. Basically our only way to kill it was to equip a wall ring we had randomly found and throw things at it with one character over and over.
There are two ways to fix this. The main problem is really just that if you die to the Flame Eater you've lost 8 minutes. A save point in the room before it would go a long way towards reducing the buildup of rage from constantly being thrown back before the inn.
Second method would be to reduce its health, or let us break ice rods at that point, or some such. Because without that random wall ring we probably would have both given up at that fight.

Shiva and Ifrit can also be a problem when racing. You don't fight many fights so your knowledge of magic is slim by that point and if they happen to be RNG dicks and keep tossing level 2 spells at you it can be a ridiculously hard fight. This is another place we only really got through based on luck or that same wall ring. The annoyance is mitigated to a large degree by the save point right before them, but a reduction of their HP to some degree would help out a lot.

Jack has issues with your not allowing rods to be broken, but I understand your point of view and it would kind of break the game to be able to randomly buy poison rods in Figaro and then just kill everything with them. Maybe you could allow rod-breaking once you get to Strago's town? By then you know spells of that level anyway, and it would go a long way towards killing the Flame Eater.


The only other issue I can think of at the moment is just how often we have to press A to advance text. We spend about 1/3 of the race just mashing A for no reason. If you could find a way to auto-scroll the text, that would be amazing. Similarly if you could take the Opera scenes and Maduin scenes out like you did with the intro and such that would be excellent. They both take up a lot of time and involve no skill in terms of a race.


If we come up with any other things I'll let you know. These are the main ones, and honestly it is mostly just Vargas that is perpetually catastrophic to the runs.

Let me know what you think.

We stream our races sometimes on Jack's twitch channel. If you want to watch one sometime I believe his twitch thingy is twitch.tv/jackimuswedge. He is also the best in the world at blind-folded punch-out.