FFVI: Divergent Paths

Hello!

I just wanted to say that I was so intrigued by this hack I downloaded it last week- I'm up to meeting Strago and Relm and so far I'm loving the storyline changes. In particular, having Edgar at the Imperial Camp with Sabin made so much more sense and gave them a much better repartee, and the changes you made to Tools, Rage, and Bushido make those characters so much more interesting to play. All of the plot changes seem very natural and I really like your philosophy of imagining what the developers would have done with a couple more months of polish. 

Saying all of that, there are three places I've noticed so far where it feels like you could have made a change and didn't. Here are my suggestions:

1) Stamina still does almost nothing in your hack, which feels really bad given that some of the initial Espers give it as a level up bonus. This especially feels incongruous as you fixed the evade bug so that evade does something, but you haven't changed anything to fix what is more or less another bug. Brave New World was practically built around making Stamina useful, and there's no reason to go that far, but I feel like you should either change stamina to do something useful, or you should remove the Esper bonuses that give Stamina to your party. 

2) At the imperial banquet, the grand prize for doing everything was...the Moogle Lure, a relic you gave at the very beginning of the game. Likewise, while fighting the espers, two of them give Moogle Charms, which are equally lame because we got them at the beginning of the game. Do you think you could change either of these to be something more interesting? 

3) Also, another small thing: The espers we fought with Celes and Leo seemed to have a little too much HP. A cool battle and a cool moment, but the fights dragged out a little too long, making them less impactful. Also if you're going to tease a Lich magicite, I feel really strongly that I should be able to get it later in the game. 

4) Finally, it felt like an oversight that you didn't rework the cutscene at the Gate to the Espers, at least a little. That whole cutscene has always felt to me like it was messed up and the developers never had a chance to do with it what they had planned: the game tells you "distract Kefka while Terra opens the door!" but one hit on Kefka and Terra immediately opens the door. There's no sense of actually distracting him. Brave New World adds a little battle here with a countdown, and given that your goal is to smooth out the storyline, having something like that feels really natural here too. Maybe just an unwinnable battle with a timer or something while Terra unlocks the door?

Anyway, other than these small things I'm having a great time. I just figured since I made an account here to download the hack, I might as well use it to provide feedback. I hope any of those ideas help!