Antinomia: FF6

Hi. Longtime lurker here. Mostly because hacking ROMs isn't my wheelhouse, but storytelling and art is! Which is what I came out of the woodworks to ask about.

I'm also a longtime fan of Leo, he's my favorite FF guy as well owing to a history of roleplaying him. So when I read through this thread and saw all the screenshots and demo videos I became very excited (doubly excited when I realized this wasn't an old thread but something still being actively worked on). You've expanded the lore and characterization surrounding his character in ways I've always imagined of him so I'm very impatient to play a finished version of this hack.

Awh, thank you.  Yep, still actively working on this and have no intention of dropping it barring some major catastrophe.  I've still got the World of Ruin content to make, and since most of that is entirely original it's going to take a while.  I've been a Leo fan for a long time, too, and thought that his character was underutilized in the original game.  But I didn't want to just stick him back in the game because I liked him or because "Woo, now I have Leo in my party!", I wanted him to serve a further role to the overall story without his presence really altering or detracting from it in any way.

That being said, I've combed through everything story-related and I had a few questions.

1. One of the screenshots seems to be a flashback, depicting pre-infusion Kefka and Gestahl holding a baby (I assume it's Terra, and that this scene takes place following the raid on the Esper realm). You referenced Kefka as being 17, which is accurate since according to Ultimania he's 35 when the game takes place. Leo's there too as a soldier and I wanted to know if you were deviating from the information on him from Ultimania. He's 30 when the game takes place, which means he would've been 12 when Kefka was 17.

Correct, in the line leading up to this scene (which is a flashback), Leo mentions he was 12 years old when the Espers were brought to Vector, and within the scene itself Kefka scoffs at him for being a "kid", but his commander calls him a prodigy and that he graduated the academy while still so young.  This is sort of an explanation I've given as to how Leo can be a top-ranked general at only 30 (though Celes is a general at 18...).  I've used the Ultimania and original game as a guide (including making Leo's music hobby a plot point) and have tried to expand on the information given while trying to make reasonable inferences from it without asserting anything out of place (Leo: "I'm actually half-Esper too!")

2. Since Leo doesn't die at Thamasa what is the reason or lore behind the grave? It showed up in the screenshots. Unless that's spoilers, which I get.

It's for the characters who still died at Thamasa who everyone seems to keep forgetting about: Yura and the other Espers.  Leo has a memorial erected for them.

3. Mostly just curious about this one, but since Leo is receiving story scenes that parallel the main party's journey in the WoB that we jump back to, in a storytelling sense he'll definitely come off as being framed as character rivaling Terra or Celes in importance. So, I was wondering what your reasoning is for keeping his equipment locked until he becomes a permanent party member? Is it just to keep those scenarios simpler?

This is for story purposes.  Though he's controllable several times in the WoB, Leo never officially "joins" the party at any of those times, they're just working for mutual benefit.  Therefore, story-wise it wouldn't make sense for the cast to be able to customize him.  More importantly, it's to lock him out of the Magic command until later.

The way the character stat sets work is that you can set their skills and base equipment, then flag whether it's locked or not.  But you cannot modify the skills for that stat set; you have to give them another one.  You can only swap equipment between the recruitable members, so if I wanted to give him a modifiable stat set that included the Magic command and one without, I would need to sacrifice another character slot to do so, whereas there's dozens of Guest slots that I can use.  An issue that came up with this, though, is that the rename function applies to the stat slot.  So if you rename him, it only applies to the stat set that he had equipped at the time he was named.  Therefore, I had to remove the rename screen from his original introduction and he's going to be forced into his default name of "Leo" until he's formally recruitable.  So he ends up more like Magus from Chrono Trigger who went by his default name for the whole game until you could recruit him and at that point you could rename him.

4. Last question, but I was curious to know if you had any plans for Shock mechanically speaking. I know some people nerf Shock slightly because it's a pretty powerful attack, but I was more curious about it from a gameplay perspective. Most of the main party's special abilities are designed to have an element of gameplay involved (like strategically using Morph and balancing the time it's up, inputting the right commands to use the desired Blitz, or Gau's "collect them all" Rages). Leo's ability I think, or I feel, was designed to just showcase how strong he was for his original big scene from the game, and it's a very simple, very easy "press button, do damage" ability.

I have not modified Leo's base stats in any way.  He is ridiculously overpowered in the battles you can use him in, and that's the point.  You can have him fight the soldiers in South Figaro, and the point there is to show how much more powerful he is than them since he can just one-shot Magitek Armor that would kill Locke normally.  In the Esper battle he's your main DPS since Celes is going to be busy tanking the magic attacks and the two soldiers are there for supplemental smaller damage and item heals, and I've tried to tune the stats of those boss fights to be stronger than a typical boss at that point in the game to compensate for Leo's strength.  At the Floating Continent he's mandatory to pick up instead of optional like Shadow was, and Celes and Terra are also made mandatory party members because they're all needed for the scene at the summit and I didn't want to have potentially three versions of Celes's "I was following you randomly and now I'm here!" if you didn't take her.

Other than that, I want to offer praise for how you connect threads using Leo. Having Leo be the impetus behind why Shadow repeatedly shows up in the main party's path was an amazing idea, and I just. Loved that the razing of Vector was included as a scene, it was very creatively done.

Good luck in your hacking! And if you want to talk storybeats please hit me up, I could spend all night talking story and characters. ;w;

No, I didn't create an account just to make a reply to this thread, what are you talking about, ahahahahah ahem.

Haha, thank you very much.

(by the way, do you also go by Bozeia?  I have a review from someone by that name on my FF.net Leo fic who said they RPed Leo in the past and your name is similar.  Any similarities this hack has to that fic are purely intentional and totally not plagiarism because they're both written by me.  XD  They're still two mostly separate entities exploring the same "What if Leo didn't die" concept with Leo being characterized basically the same in both, though this hack still does lift a couple of points directly from that story wholesale)