FAQs

More questions!

1) I had downloaded the OST for quite sometime, listening to it wherever I can. Was the new cool music one of the reasons to not have battle music in dungeons and such?

2) Speaking of music, pretty much every original FFVI song has been replaced with another. Out of these "replacements", which one do you think fits the map the best? My vote is the new Phantom Train music. You'd think it'd be hard to top the original, but Dance of the Zombies does it.

3) Why FuSoYa? That was the SNES spelling. But Curaga and Arise exist instead of Cure 2 and Life 2, which suggest you were going for the updated names, so why is it not spelled as Fusoya?

4) Can you tell us a bit the process behind creating the new original characters? Serin, Avalon, Ronan, Otis etc. Did the sprite came first and later would the process of giving them a personality, or vice versa? I'd love to know!

Thanks for the questions!

1) That was definitely part of it, but if all the original songs were still in I'd still probably opt to not have battle music for dungeons. Mainly because I think the battle theme gets burned out after hearing it over and over, and this is true with all RPGs imo. I went with the idea for battle theme only for overworld battles, just so it is less used and the songs do not get interrupted every 5-10 seconds in dungeons. I'd like to think it makes battles less tedious subconsciously just because the repetition of the music is not happening over and over. Madsiur's random battle theme patch would fix my feelings about this a lot, though.

2) Wow I'm glad to hear this! I think Dance of the Zombies is fitting as well, it even has the percussion sounding like a moving train. For how short it loops it doesn't become annoying either, and I've listened to it for an ungodly amount of time when doing all the event stuff for Arc there, and etc. Jackimus was planning on doing Castlevania's Dance of Pales to replace it, upon my request:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS8ALhXLrPg

But I was going to keep Dance of the Zombies in for Cyan's dream event train, or visa-versa. BUT, I'm not sure, I like both... choosing songs is tough as shit sometimes. But hearing your feedback leads me to want to keep it in there, and Pales could go to Cyan's Dream Train instead. I'd like that.

3) I have no real answer for this, I've never thought about it that way to keep it uniform. FuSoYa looks cooler and seems like the Lunarian way to spell it, but besides that there is no reason.

4) For the most part the sprites definitely came first. Many were from my first hack Last Hope, which evolved into RotDS, but they were just ones that I took from the database oh so long ago that were available and went with it. Poco Loco colored them all in so the palettes would work, and then we went about changing the personality (some more than others as we know). Poco helped a lot with Avalon, suggesting many dialog changes to make him less Cyan. Arc was pretty much my brainchild, when I set off to rebuild him from Gau. I thought Orphanage right away, and his backstory and personality came with that somehow. Poco helped me a lot with the characters/dialog, to make them feel less like their old counterparts. Reaper was pretty much all Poco, I told him about an idea to make the ghost a more special guest character, a Grim Reaper, and he was on board enough to make the Reaper sprite, and went on to write most of the dialog you see during the train event for him, thus fleshing out his personality. He even planned out a couple events for him that I wrote, like the scene when he first appears right before the train. For Otis, he was an actual Dragoon sprite originally, then he got his legit pirate sprite, but for him I already had his dialog written up before that to be a pirate. I like pirates, and pirate talk. Poco wanted him to be less stereotypical but I wasn't having none of that lol.

So to sum this up, some sprites were created first and then the work on changing their character, again some more than others, and with a few it was the other way around. Lots of assistance from Poco Loco writing out dialog for Reaper and Avalon, and helping with others as well. He's better at making the characters seem less like their original and if it was his hack to edit the hell out of I'm sure they'd be less like their originals even more lol.