ReCast FF3: War of the Magitek

I'm looking into making Terra a spell-blade instead of a walking MTek suit, the biggest variances being that her status applications will work like Stunner (in that, much of the time they don't try to apply at all) and her absorption is limited by the enemy's max HP (so no full-healing off a 15 HP enemy).

I think the spellblade concept works better with ReCast's damage formulas (since physical attacks are actually useful), so I think this would be fun.

I'm also going to try to address some of the problems I'm seeing in your comments, such as making enemies occasionally cast Purify or Soothe on their party during the fight (or the new lore Esuna, which removes all statuses + or - from the field, both sides), or making Vargas dispel the player party after his heal script so that Haste is out of the picture.

For boss fights, I almost think it would be cool to have a second version of the status monster that can cast something like "Healed" (instead of "Asleep" or "Stunned") on bosses to remove the strongest ailments.  This wouldn't prevent the player from simply casting it again, so bosses like final Kefka could easily be stunlocked regardless.  Having bosses cast status healing on *themselves* is only so helpful because the worst status effects would prevent them from doing that.  This would discourage using more moderate status effects without preventing any big cheese.

You might encounter some problems with this particular style of run with the new patch, though, because I'm changing Cyan to set Retort after her first action in battle...

This actually doesn't matter much.  The only bosses that might trigger a Retort from Cyan in this run are the train and Larry, and they are both conveniently immune to sleep.  That said, if you remove sleep, this is arguably a downgrade because it means that Cyan will use Retort instead of counter-attacking with her weapon, and Retort isn't very strong (it doesn't even beat the Ashura, let alone the Render).

With bosses, it may be necessary to make them explicitly pick on Celes (especially the Magitek Facility fights) to kill her and drop that runic absorb.

The statues and the Atmas are probably the biggest candidate for this IMO.  Though I suppose that Celes would only shut down one of the statues in a regular playthrough since you'd only bring her in one party.  Be careful that you don't accidentally set up some cheese where the boss can just get into a loop trying to kill Celes with an attack that will always fail.  That cure would be worse than the disease.

I might also start giving some enemies the runic status like Bit has, so that certain fights can't be solved by magic spam... or have them use Terra's new spellblade attacks to bypass the runic protection.

Unlike vanilla, I didn't find magic spam to be the best option for most of the game.  It's only once you have Mog, Celes, Terra, and Relm's unique Relics that magic really takes off, and by that point you're already pretty much in the final dungeon where you can't use them all at once.  I feel like the auto-Runic would be cool for Spectre and Girl since it's thematically appropriate for both and the latter needs a buff, but I'm not sure that it's necessary for earlier fights.

I like that you're picking up on some of the subtleties I introduced to the engine, like the non-permanence of relic status effects.  I might consider nerfing EXP in version 2 to make this more apparent to players, either by lowering it across the board or removing/flooring it from human enemies (so that they're the gil sources, and monsters are the strength sources).

Sounds cool.  Maybe this will help with bosses getting overpowered easily too.

Your challenge does kind of break some of the boss battle strategies, particularly the two you thought were hardest.  You're supposed to Slash at the stooges with Cyan to cut their health in half, and you're supposed to poison the tentacles by having Sabin use his newly learned ShadowBox (though at low levels, maybe he doesn't know that one yet...)

Hehe, he doesn't even know *Suplex* yet (Slash is also unavailable).

Pearl inflicting regen is a mistake; I will look into that.  Probably a flag that didn't get flipped when I reordered the spells.

Good to know.  I thought it might be a misguided attempt to make Pearl better at slaying undead, but it was clearly a drawback, especially since the best use case for that (Dullahan) is immune to Regen.

The video hasn't loaded yet, but I look forward to watching it.  Based on your comments, it looks like you've put a lot of thought and effort into this, and I'm moved by your enthusiasm.

Thanks a lot. I like doing these challenge runs, and this hack has a lot of potential like the vanilla game does because they are around the same difficulty and there are plenty of routes to victory.