ReCast FF3: War of the Magitek

Feeling particularly low, I decided to skulk around various internet places in an effort to reverse my mood.  Needless to say, seeking external validation is a terrible idea, especially on the World Wide Web.

Regardless of how, I've become aware of some rumors about this hack I would like to dispel.


Rumor: ReCast uses the Complete Roster hack and has 16 playable Characters.

Reality: No, ReCast does not have and has never had 16 playable characters.  This rumor came about because of shop OAM data I researched and tested for the Complete Roster hack.  This was work I did in the hopes of assisting Power Panda, an effort to repay him for the tremendous impact his work and his help had on me.  As far as I'm aware, the shop OAM data was never implemented into the Complete Roster hack and remains an errant reply in one of the middle pages.  It was never nor will it ever be applied to ReCast.
This rumor may have also surfaced because I mused about adding Iris Havengard to the hack.  I never did so with any real intent; the thought was simply that the best place to place her in the plot was as Number 024 in the Magitek Factory (and Level 100 Magic in the Fanatics' Tower).  I've made no effort in pursuing that thought, however.


Rumor: I am making a prequel hack that tells the story of the War of the Magi.

Reality: This is completely false.  I never intended or even suggested a War of the Magi hack.  This rumor sprang up because I made a joke that Final Fantasy Tactics WAS the prequel to FF6.  It may also have been confabulated as a reaction to my vocalizing intents for future projects, or my rambling about changes to core stat mechanics.


Rumor: I roped in help for and then abandoned an FF4 hack, leaving the team hanging in the wind

Reality: I played with an idea of doing three other hacks in the same style as War of the Magitek.  These hacks would have been reimaginings of FF1, FF4, and FF7 respectively.  I made the mistake of sharing this idea publicly, whereupon I was immediately and fervently harassed by a user who wanted to "get in on the ground floor".  Despite the fact I wasn't even ready to start these projects, I was mercilessly brow-beaten by this user (whom I believe was employing a push-pull strategy to yoke me into servitude as his code-monkey for a project of HIS design).  Despite my repeated warnings that I was not ready to start the project or even sure I wanted to pursue it (and my explanation that he shouldn't waste time on assets accordingly), the user would not relent and I was forced to block him simply to get some peace.  The entire situation was rasping and I haven't done any significant hack work since.


Rumor: I don't care about aesthetic quality and I simply slap graphics together.

Reality: I spent countless hours editing monster sprites and adjusting their palettes.  Nothing in a hack is done without intent.  Graphics using elements from other graphics is not cheating: it is studying what works and reapplying it.  There's a reason artists practice by copying great masters.  You can hate my artwork: that's just fine.  But accusing me of being lazy and careless is simply untrue.


Rumor: I used Brave New World as a baseline.

Reality: The only things I took from Brave New World were Bropedio's Informative Miss, which was a standalone patch, and Gray Shadows' combined gear menu.  The latter was not publicly available at the time and I reverse-engineered it by comparing changed addresses in BNW against what the vanilla code was doing.  It was a grueling ordeal to apply the patch this way, and I did several things incorrectly (which is why the code does not enforce equipment restrictions on re-equipping, among other things).  Honestly, I would not be able to do it again, despite demand by the Beyond Chaos community for a bypass to the auto-optimize portion of that hack.  Most of ReCast's combat design actually comes from complications of (A) changing the spell list and (B) applying various bugfixes and script simplifications (Hatzen08's patches were a real paradigm shift).  I never intended for the combat engine to be explicitly different, as the hack's goal was narrative in nature.  The changes for theme brought with them a significant amount of programmer's debt, though... an insurmountable amount if I'm being honest.


Rumor: Cyan being female was a reference to Aurora from Return of the Dark Sorcerer.

Reality: False.  I was brought to FF6hacking by Divergent Paths (or rather its earlier iteration which is now 'The Three Scenarios'), and as I was looking to make changes to that hack for my preferences I encountered the sprite "Barbarella" by Zozma in the graphics resource pack.  I was unaware of RotDS and its protagonist; I simply liked the sprite and thought it would make a nice female character replacement.  I have since tried to distinguish my version of Barbarella by altering her clothes and her stance in certain poses, to better differentiate from Gi Nattak's magnum opus.  Which brings us to the next rumor...


Rumor: I changed characters 'just because I could'.

Reality: Again, hacking is a tremendously tedious and difficult process.  There is nothing done that is not deliberate, because it would not be worth the effort.  Looking at the cast from a writer's perspective, I was bored.  A bunch of men swooning over two women (and a child, which frankly was disgusting from the get-go) simply would not do when I had a dialogue editor at my fingertips.  Also, having an early important character that is thoroughly established as a womanizer doesn't work if there are no women to kick him and say "knock it off".  I wanted a better ratio of men to women, one that would make the dialogue more interesting.  I didn't simply plaster a new sprite over two random characters.  I also didn't simply gender swap the whole cast, as that would have had the same problem.


Rumor: Banon will game you over if he dies in Terra's Scenario.

Reality: This rumor's floating around both my hack and its source material Divergent Paths, but it's not true in either of them.  The Banon VIP component is removed in both.  This rumor actually comes from the Beyond Chaos Community Edition randomizer, where Banon retains his game-over status in Terra's scenario when the special flag "TheScenarioNotTaken" is active.  The randomizer leaves that mechanic in play because it increases the challenge of the run, a necessity especially in seeds with random commands as Gau is automatically placed in the party after going over the falls.  BCCE's "TheScenarioNotTaken" is based entirely on Power Panda's patch "The Three Scenarios", and has none of the (few, fleeting) changes I made to those scenarios in ReCast.


Rumor: I shrank the monsters 'just because' and can reverse the change easily.

Reality: I made it clear from the get-go in as many places as I could that I wanted to address the inconsistency of scale between the stick-figure player party on the right and the romance-style painting monsters on the left.  This was a deliberate design decision... it was time-consuming and I did not undertake the task lightly.  It also became a necessity once I needed a mechanism to display enemy status ailments: as I lack the skills to code those animations as reactions in the background of the game process (and believe me, I tried), I was forced to add a hidden helper monster to manage those displays with its script.  This addition came with no end of compromises, the biggest of which being the fact that I had to rework the monster moulds of EVERY formation to keep the thing from drawing garbage on the screen.  And I do mean EVERY formation.  Monster positions, the moulds that draw their tiles, and even which monsters are in which fights were all changed to make room for the status tracking monster.  This is not a process that can be reversed; there's literally no room to put bigger monsters now.  The change was not without benefits, though; smaller monsters take up fewer tiles which allowed for more graphic variety... so much so that I ran out of ideas and was forced to get... ahem, 'creative' with some of the World of Ruin enemies.  Who fights a fissure in the ground?  Celes, apparently.
Yes.  Kefka is tiny.  Yes, he's tiny as a final boss.  He's a man.  He wouldn't suddenly triple in size.  Kefka's tier climb was supposed to have little copies of him mocking the party on the way up.  I was forced to make them invisible because of how the game handles background tiles in the tier transitions.  The choice was invisible enemies or garbage on screen during the scrolling; I chose the former.  If you'd like to see them, bring Relm and sketch!  Better yet, open the formations in FF3USME and have a peek there.  I'm actually rather sad I couldn't keep those sprites visible, and if I were working on a new version I'd split the battle up into four separate static background fights, or remove the scrolling and have the background simply swap like a dance.  I'm not working on a new version, though, and it's not likely I will.


Rumor: Gestahl is playable in ReCast; he replaced Gogo.

Reality: No.  Gogo got replaced by Strago so that Banon could have Strago's actor slot.  This is because the vanilla game only has twelve learn sets for spells, and characters beyond actor $0B (Gau) instead have no magic or use party magic.  Since party magic was a bad fit for Banon, I needed to clear a low-index spot to make room for him.  Strago seemed a good pick for somebody who casts spells like those around him, since he is 'studied in the way of monsters'.  The whole thing became a moot point, though, because I found a patch by Gray Shadows that relocated RAM values to let actor 0x0C (Gogo) have a learning list, so Strago got his magic back anyway.  Still, it wasn't all for not, since it put Strago into the ending scene with the switches which fits him perfectly.  This rumor sprang up as confusion of ReCast with another hack that does replace Gogo with Gestahl, though I don't know which hack it was.


Rumor: Wedge is a permanent playable party member in ReCast.

Reality: No, he's not.  Biggs survives the encounter with Maduin; Wedge does not.  He ponders this on the airship in the World of Balance if you speak to him.


Rumor: You can revive Leo with 1000 Brachosaur bones.

Reality: Okay, this isn't a rumor about ReCast.  If it were, it'd be Vargas wins.  But it's not true.



I know this post is a little snarky.  Like I said, I was feeling down and I went looking for validation.  I didn't find it... I never do on the internet.  You'd think I'd learn by now, but such is my nature.