FFVI: Divergent Paths

I've been watching your stream to see the changes, I'm up to the wounded soldier side quests. I want to tell you about what I think is good and bad. There's a lot of brilliance here and you're not afraid to borrow good ideas. There's also a lot of bad.

Divergent Paths: The raft ride rearrangemet works very well. It makes sense enough that Edgar would jump in after Sabin and having Edgar on the Phantom Train works well and serves Cyan well.

You missed an opportunity in Mobliz though. Terra should have had some kind of scene there considering her position there in the World of Ruin.

I loved the scene with Celes and Leo in Vector.

General Leo: Your general Leo worship goes over the top. However, it's not all bad. Adapting the wounded soldier side quest and the world of ruin extension of that quest works incredibly well and as I said before, is downright brilliant.

I never liked the idea of Banon dying in Thamasa but it almost works. You do develop him enough that his sacrifice isn't without meaning. However, you didn't rewrite the scene where Kefka disguises himself as Ghestal.

In that scene Kafka uses Leo's blind allegiance to the Empire against him to defeat him and that shouldn't work on Banon. Without expanding the ROM I can't see how you can make this work without digging deeper into fan fiction territory by explaining Banon and Ghestal are brothers or something.

Also, your divergent paths concept from the Lethe River wraps itself up completely. From a narrative standpoint, It feels like something specific should happen between the raft ride and the battle at Narche that affects the scene at Thamasa and that just doesn't happen.

I can't tell if I love or hate the scene with Yura at Thamasa. It's a neat idea but it feels really tropey and it feels like it's there to serve the Leo worship thing you have going on.

I do however like the idea of the Emperor appointing Banon as an ambassador and this scene gives his character some much needed closure.

Taking Celes' big scene on the floating continent undermines her emotional complexity.

Other random things:

Why did you use pummel as the desperation attack? Wouldn't it make more sense for each character to just attack with whatever their basic weapon is and add a critical hit flash? I love that you moved tiger break to Sabin's skills. I didn't sacrifice pummel for it but I absolutely did this in one of my own mods.

Your camaraderie between Shadow and Locke is a neat idea but it doesn't go far enough to make them friends. It's a cool scene. I also don't feel like Locke should be using Shadow's ninja weapons. Feels wrong.

Celes being a Valkyrie is both a great idea and really fan servicey. It works well and you've executed it masterfully but it really feels like you just did it so that you could make Leo cooler. I'm guessing you're going to give him a relic that changes runic into shock at some point.

Renaming the genji glove because of symmetry was a bad call.

The joker line is clever but people don't really talk like that. It fits with the mostly unchanged Woolsey script but it comes off as very cheesy in this serious scene.


Sorry that all of the criticism is poorly written and disorganized. I'm supposed to be working right now. Ultimately, I like what you've done here but I think it needs a lot of revision. I'm hoping it's not too late and that maybe you'll take some of this criticism to heart.