Q: Is a No Battle/Encounter Hack possible?

Dear everyone!
Wow, thank you all for your eloquent answers! I thought I was 'subscribing' to this if new posts came, and as I hadn't recieved any emails I thought nothing had happened. Again, thank you, it's amazing to get this response.

I am going through your ideas now, and it has put a lot of good questions into my head.
A cool thing is that this project almost seems like a perfect ROM-hacking "tutorial", which is admittedly another reason of doing a project like this.

I'm definitely contemplating having some, if nerfed, encounters, but not nearly as many as normally. I think, for example, places the Ghost Train the Cultists Tower get a lot of their tension from the fact that everything is creepy and you might die.
And of course, the Gau and Gogo situation needs to be fixed - right now I'm thinking maybe these areas should just remain intact - at least in tandem with whichever battle tweaks/rules I end up using: What I mean is that maybe the Veldt and the Cave can be sort of like Battle Arenas - sort of "if you would like to in fact fight and explore that part of the games mechanics, go to these places". I think this has to be tried out.

I also clearly get the thing cantone said about Dead Rising 2 - the sensation of overpoweredness might just make people not care.

Is the story in FF games an "excuse" for doing a lot of battle encounters, or is it the other way around? Is it even possible to suggest this binary? Do the battles and the story serve as two halves of a whole?
I am very interested in death in videogames - again, as cantone points out, are we connected to the characters because we fear for their lives in combat?
I think it is this tension I want to explore, even if the answer is obvious from the get-go. I mean, what am I toying around with here - the most central game mechanic, right? At least that seems to be the immediate assumption, but it is an issue I find fun to challenge, not only intellectually but also actually practically - putting actions to words, so to speak.

As for making incentive to walk around in the dungeon, while I agree with a necessity of a solution, though a scoring system might be too.. gamey, I guess? This problem is also one that has to be experimented through play. You know how Miyamoto has said that walking in caves and woods as a child inspired Zelda? For us, who have played the game WITH battles on, something might seem lacking without the battles, but for someone with no pre-requisite, how will the cave look? Will more focus be given to the sense of exploration, the music and the area? Will they die out of boredom?

Is the fact of indeed walking/travelling from place to place - the journey - itself enough to be interesting?

So, step 1 for me will be to play through FFVI with cheats on - eliminating random encounters and nerfing scripted battles - and seeing how it feels. By the way, please help me remember - which scripted battles is it that have to be lost?And are there any other things besides what cantone has addressed that I such think about starting the run?

Again, my thanks, byrjun