RotDS Review Thread

Alright, I got past through the World of Balance, and since this thing is way harder than I can phantom and may not possibly end the hack because a roadblock is likely, but also because I'm in the mood, I want to review this thing. I'm no expert reviewer or anything, so this will be more like a "honest thoughts". I'm going to divide my review in different sections. By the way, *SPOILERS* like, no duh, you're in a review thread.

Graphics:
With the great work of jameswhite89 and several other great spriters it's no wonder this hack excels in the graphic department. The background changes were also pretty neat, like the squared table and the new grandfather clocks here and there, the new treasure chests etc. The Reel's new icons were also pretty great.

As far as new 'graphics' for the spells, there are only about one or two spells which I think could be improved. Volcano comes to mind. Seems excessively long, specially compared with fellow Blizzard and specially Nova. The transition from the fireballs to the flare wave is somewhat sloppy as well. Also, I think the bolt scroll animation is reused a slight bit too much. Nova, Ultima, Havoc, Bolt Scroll itself... it is a good animation so I can understand, but...yeah xD

Everything is superb on the sprite department, so I think I'm gonna go to the things I didn't like to fasten it up:
Professor Oak's sprite. There's...something about it that it gets my eye. I think it's the squared shoulder in the view side. Or maybe the straight lines in the jacket. Or maybe the hair. It's not bad by any means but I think it could be improved. The redrawn original sprites (Guard, Soldier etc), now those aren't even slightly bad, but since the originals exist and those where made by professionals (getting paid to boot), the new sprites feel uh... strange.
That's about it, which goes to show how great this hack is in the graphics department. We spriters just are amazing.

Sound:
I'm amazed that this could be achieved in a SNES game. The whole new soundtrack is bliss to my ears and it gets even more awesome when I recognize a theme (Proto Man's whistle anyone?) I think I say everything when I stood three minutes with my jaw open, listening to an awesome rendition of Future Fuckballs 2010. Great job.

Story/Character changes:
Hoo boy. I accidentally went back to that godawful gbatemp website once more. Don't f**k**g listen to these hobos, the changes here are great.
Now if you remember my QnA post where I was being overwhelmingly heartless...I still KIND of stand on my word. A few of the characters do indeed still seem like and sometimes utter the same exact lines a previous character says. Aurora was saved later with the Leo romance, (though she seemed rather...inactive when Leo dies), Ronan, well, "you'd think just a minor thing like the Apocalypse was gonna kill me off?". Cloud is still talkative somewhat, but I think the worst offender is Serin. The others are passable but I think Serin is basically a reskinned Edgar. Uses the equivalent of tools as well as a similar equip repertoire. He is a king, he is a ladies' man, how he wins over the Glow City maid? EXACT same like Edgar.
FuSoYa and Golbez are great. They behave like you'd expect from FFIV (except that one "You know how to use Meteor right?" joke) and definitely don't feel like Strago or Gogo at all. Eiko too, though the small shades of Relm leftover are circumvented due to the obvious resemblance between Relm and Eiko on their respective games.

About NPC characters and bosses, Oak is...really out of place. I know you have addressed this, but it's so strange. For starters, he's working with the bad guys. Seriously? Oak a bad guy? He doesn't even act like a bad guy. And I know Cid isn't a bad guy either, but...he's not, um, happily announcing his experiments to obviously evil Kefka and stuff, you know what I mean?
Raditz was okay, but he also felt weird, mostly because everything else (well, there's the Dragon Ball item, also Galick Gun) is devoid of Dragon Ball. Majin Buu is also there. Surprisingly, he looked less of a threat than SSJ Raditz an hour later. Dunno, I guess it isn't really that bad, but...yeh.

As far as the story goes, it is pretty much FFVI. You are made aware of a Dark Sorcerer...in the intro. You get more backstory regarding Biggs and Wedge, Aurora and etc. but only when you get to FuSoYa does the game START feeling like there's something different going on. Then the wham line "Kefka is Zuriel reincarnate!" and I'm already feeling it. So pumped to play through the WoR. However, the gap between the intro and FuSoYa is big. Quite big. I must have questioned myself "where the hell is this Dark Sorcerer guy anyway?" many times during my playthrough.
The whole ordeal before the end of the world is confusing, to me at least. How does Zemus appear if the Zeromus' statue is behind him, making both existing in the same plane of existence? Zeromus is the "spirit and hatred of Zemus, reborn after his death.". Is this a paradox? (And I know we talked it over Discord, but I wanted others to know :P). 
A simple stab was all it took for Zuriel to overcome Kefka's body? There isn't...even a transition. What I mean is that he falls down, gets back up and Kefka is long gone and it's all about Zuriel. Somewhat abrupt, to me at least Even with just a few <D> on his first dialogue box could have made the scene a bit more potent, I think. What about the Emperor? He gets killed easily as well in the home game, but there was a buildup for that. The new Emperor kinda insults Zuriel to no end for no reason, and I thought that would trigger the battle event, but instead Golbez comes out of nowhere and slays him. In one hit btw. He is still there laying down but he never gets up. The main villain for 1/3 of the game is gone like a breeze. I found it a bit out of place too.

Overall however, I 100% approve of these kind of changes made in the hack and, as my hack is called Crossover Crisis I'm glad they work well. Probably means my hack won't be a letdown.

Gameplay changes:
Alright, time for the cream of the crop!
First of all, my very first impression after having a taste of the first boss was...the early game enemies have a FOUNTAIN of HP. In vanilla, most small enemies could be taken out in one hit. Easy, yes, but here they almost take 3 to 4 hits. Usually two or more Blitz/SwdTech were required to slay even the tiniest of the bad guys. The early bosses went on forever! Later it's not as bad because you have raise, cura, more variety of attacks and elements so it doesn't get boring, but doing twenty or thirty times Ice Beam Ice Beam Revitalizer Ice Beam Ice Beam ad infinitum got old really quick. Nevertheless, I pushed on.

Inverse and Miracle were really great. It was just fun to look at these even if they didn't turn out that powerful. Cloud's Limits were really faithful to FFVII and the animations were amazing too, so was Tifa's Reels. I kept calling Ronan's Galick Gun "Garlick Gun" so it got me laughing for the early game. Now, Havoc is awesome. It forced me a new style of gameplay of timing Avalon's healing and using it, causing devastating damage. The early game gets covered by the status effects and later the ability to pierce an enemy's defenses. (Fack u Kefka battle at the sealed bridge!!). Nice animation and satisfying sound effect to boot. Summon is faithful, but I noticed that if you select it, there's no second cursor that appears whose enemies is it going to hit, or if you want to cancel it. I found that to be a little annoying but nothing big enough. You did a great job at giving the player new toys to play with. I salute you!

I have played many Final Fantasy games. I (strongest Chronodia defeated), II (Deumion defeated...it was really easy anyway), III, IV (Zeromus EG, Branchoraidos), IV After Years (Omega and Shinryu defeated. Not Giant of Babil thing because I didn't have the patience to train three teams of five), V (Enuo, Neo Shinryu and company defeated), VI (Kaiser and Omega Weapon), X, XII.
I think I can consider myself GOOD at Final Fantasy...yet RotDS kicked my ass. A lot. The first few bosses were endurance battles. Ultros (Opera) and Ifrit/Shiva were a nightmare (I had to overlevel to stand a chance). The random encounters, specially at Mt. Kolts, the Phantom Train and the Floating Continent were way too strong and inflicted too many status effects. The latter bosses were either a great experience, annoying (Lava Demon cough), or they'd suddenly do anything to kill you and make you waste your time (Omega Wep used Quake! Omega Wep used Revenge! Omega Wep used Revenge!).
Now, I'm not saying they're badly designed, at all. I think they just have too much health which gives them ample opportunity to be annoying and throw their attacks at you before you're given a chance to kill them first.
Unlike a platformer, which ramping up the difficulty is understandable as it's basically up to the player's skills, making a hard RPG (specially without being advertised as a "DUDE REALLY HARD HACK ONLY FOR PROS!") can be off putting to people who is looking for a new experience with FFVI. Well, let me not generalize. It was almost off putting for me.

This hack gets a 9/10 from me. About 70% of that 1 point less is the hard difficulty. The other 30%? Outside of a few sprites I didn't like, characters looking too much like the originals but being advertised as different and other minor things, I will have to say the overabundance of "Cutscene Battles."
They somehow don't feel right to me. You can't control anything that happens, so there doesn't seem too much of a point on those. However, once in a while isn't bad, but then you get Aeris battling a group of grunts THREE times (I think, my memory is a bit rusty though), Zuriel battling the THREE statues with no breaks in-between (Zeromus in my battle killed Zuriel five times, making it even longer, enduring the Auto-Life animation and all), The intro fight against Kefka and his cohorts (wasn't auto, but I don't think the outcome would have changed anything)... why so many? What's the point of them? Couldn't it just be done in overworld cutscenes?
And then there are the battles that SHOULD be cutscene battles and are real. Like the pitifully easy Golbez + FuSoYa vs Zuriel part 1, or the one in the FuSoYa flashback.
Again, it's nothing TERRIBLE or off-putting, but I felt like it could do without and make the action faster and more fluent.
EDIT: Something else I wanted to point out of the game that I didn't like. There seems to be a small dissonance between how powerful enemies look like and how powerful they actually are. My best example is the Tiamat near Jericho in the WoB. What does she look like? A big frickin' multi-headed dragon. She's called Tiamat, let's talk about her. Tiamat on almost every game is the queen of dragons, the most powerful of the four fiends and almost always a late-game boss. Yet she is...a random encounter in the first half of the game where Roundworms and Devilkins possess way more of a threat as she does. I'll also mention she's the fiend of wind, but she's weak to her own element apparently. Another one I adressed and was corrected was Morphed Gilgamesh as a surprise encounter in the first FIFTH of the game! Damn! He at least is now in regular form, which is much more reasonable for early game. Not many more examples come to mind which suggest it is not a continous problem, but I'd probably try to do something about it.

DAMN I talked a lot didn't I? 11000+ words! Jesus, I'm gonna go get a good night's sleep. Thanks for reading, have a good f**k**g night.
Feel free to call me an as*h**e for missing every point of the game :D