Coding a 2D JRPG?

My advice for you is to still work on it part time and enroll at a community college (NOT A UNIVERSITY) that has a lot of CS and CIS classes available. Look up the Chemeketa CC CS/CIS course catalogs for good examples. Lane CC and Portland CC are also good examples.

You should be able to get Pell Grants to pay for all the fees without getting loans, as long as you don't get student housing. If they say you must, tell them you won't,  to deal with it, and to stfu. They push it because it's how they actually make money.

Never go into debt.

All you need is 1 or 2 years of someone forcing you to bust your butt and learn to really grasp programming. After that you can teach yourself.

Go for a technical degree, an associates of applied science or a 1 year certificate of completion.

Take these core classes:
CS 160, 161, 162 (intro to cs 1, 2, 3)
Data Structures 1, 2
SQL Relational Databases
HTML and CSS aka Web Dev 1
JavaScript aka Web Dev 2

After that take as many classes in one language as you can. C, C++, C#, and Java are good candidates for mastery.

After this get a job as a software developer and work on your side projects in your free time. You will get very fast and smart after about 1 year of continuous programming after school. Things that took you months or years will take weeks, what took weeks will be a weekend.

You could probably finish this project in a summer after you master programming.

My real goals are to master C, implement compression schemes, and implement various media formats and scripting systems in an extensible way. This project is how I intend to do it.

Thanks for the well crafted advice. I'm past that point in my life though. Currently holding a job and learning to code on my own as a past time. I had tried C# before and XNA but things took off when I started with GM. Seeing things done fast was very motivating. Once I'm done with this thing I'm thinking of doing something of my own. Small, simple, release it, see how it goes. Then maybe start branching out into C#+Unity or Python for non-game purposes.

Anyway, if you ever want to exchange design ideas on how to mix up all FF games into one hit me up. The other half of the fun in this project has been playing armchair designer.