FF6 ROTDS 1.3.1 review

Now that i finished ROTDS it's time to review the hack:

FF6 ROTDS version 1.3/1.3.1:

Pros:
- A whole swap of stunning new songs;
- A whole swap of well made sprites, both for map and battle;
- Improved difficulty, now it's challenging, yet not at the point to be annoying;
- Added new quests/events and effects, etc.
- Latest versions inproved some of the aspects above.

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Cons:
- it was intended to be a difficult hack... but some stuff have been nerfed way more than necessary in the latest releases;

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Now let's write some number, here's the subjects of score:
- Sprites (how much they have been changed and how much good they are)
- Songs (how much they have been changed and how much good they are)
- Innovation factor (new features, is it a new kind of product, all over the FF6 scenario?)
- Balancement (the game was intended to be an hard hack, unlike BNW, so it will be judged on that...)

[progress=95] 1) Sprites: 9.5/10 [/progress]
Excellent job from JamesWhite, Poco Loco, Lockirby2(world map design) and all the others involved, i saw version 1.0 and stuff completely changed since the first release, now it's definitely better;

[progress=99] 2) Songs: 9.9/10 [/progress]
After all it's Gi Nattak's speciality, isn't it? After fixing the problem about nasty sounds now no one should be able to complain, not to forget Jackimus's help which shows how much he's talented as well, i dunno if someone else helped there but thanks to them too!

[progress=80] 3) Innovation factor: 8/10 [/progress]
well, saying it's a completely new game it's quite an overrated statement, rather than new stuff i'd talk about improved stuff(on a sharp sight it's easy to notice that most of times stuff have been just edited, like formation and item drops/positions rather than implemented new ones).
I liked some plot twist and how events have been moved like the big intro before Narshe(Fraust) assault; Guests and their summon items are a nice touch.
This and many other extra stuff together definitely brings new life to FF6 game, no doubt.

[progress=70]4) Balancement: 7/10 [/progress]
back to version 1.0 i'd said 9/10 instead, while it was necessary to remove some fight in the Lava Demon event(actually i still not get why you have to fight 5 flames after the second battle against the boss: it's just a waste of time and the fact that if a Self-Destruction connects, you risk gameover after all those progresses) and maybe make SLIGHTLY less agressive Zuriel, for example removing one of the 3 deadly spells casted in a row when "the end comes... " speech is triggered: stuff like this was worth to be done.
But your error was to hear too much complaints from newbies/average players and so after 1.1 i don't know what happened but this is what i've seen: (the most relevant examples)
- Staryu & Starmie battle after the minions were dead it became a piece o' cake,
Metal Gear wasn't even a match for me, and so we discussed about that in the
forum on possible ways to make a good solution for everybody, there might be
other battles like this that i don't remember, but those 2 were the most relevant;
- Appearently statues were way more stronger before, now... well, Ark pwns
Zeromus; evade tank pwns ExDeath; Dark Cloud is just weak;
- The final fight, the infamous nerf... starting from tiers 1-3:
1) in 1.0 he can Seize with arms, Stone, Zombie, deal more significant melee
damage, earth stuff(as far you have float everything is ok)
now he can do... more or less the same stuff but damage is quite low now and
speed as well, i believe that even Seize is done much less frequently.
2) not too much different from 1.0, maybe just parameters? They ask for more
speed, anyway;
3) in 1.0 Sephiroth tosses you any Limit and Omnislash V5 is deadly, Meteor is
deadly, the special is istant kill(this one even in vanilla) Jenova mainly heals;
now? nothing... the most relevant thing he did was meteor and guess the
damage? 1100, about Sephiroth only its name is left, nothing else. even
special attack doesn't istant kill. The few limits i saw were used rarely.
The problem is that even his vanilla version is stronger than ROTDS 1.3
version, i'm not joking here, trust me.

And then Zuriel... i started playing with the memory of people complaining in
all forums about Zuriel's leggendary strenght which kicked ass to all FF6
community, and that was awesome, like urban legends and shit... checking
how he fights in 1.0 i can confirm it as well, he's quite the final boss.
Now in 1.3 he barely stands a match with last bosses, actually Atma IS
definitely stronger than him, and is a slowpoke since i was able to cure from
his most powerful spells without even have to worry about a second
action, i'm not hesitating in saying that Kefka in Brave New World(version
1.5.2) was way more dangerous, i don't have any doubt about it, there's no
comparison actually... the cases are 2:
a) all what they say about BNW with time is became a bullshit, as far as
we're talking about version 1.5.2, they keep to say that it's not hard, it's
just challenging and harder than vanilla... maybe it started in
this way(my bro complained about the lack of challenge back to that
time) but then he became really strong and even if i'm not a newbie i
had troubles with him, despite i won at the first attempt...
And so ROTDS with nerf is became less hard than BNW, which is quite
fun because in this case they swapped their position, talking about
difficulty; (and BNW claimed to not be hard)
b) BNW is still a challenging hack, but after nerf ROTDS is became easier
than BNW, that would mean that ROTDS failed to be an hard hack...

Only one of those 2 options is true, or maybe both... which one do you like most?

Anyway that doesn't apply everywhere and both in WoB and WoR there are
hard battles, even if dragons and similars can be easily beaten with melee tank
+ guard their element(i don't know if you're fine with that)
PS. the game provides the player ~10 Quicksilver that you might want to
spend right here... maybe 2 for making sure to beat AlphaOmega in the
bossrush, then with 2 other Quicksilver you can easily avoid(in version 1.0) the
risk of being defeated from Sephiroth and finally you have 6-10 Quicksilver to
use against Zuriel if you really don't want to rely only on Eiko and Ark power to
win...


[progress=85] OVERALL SCORE: 8.5/10 [/progress]

The game is not ruined, but you made the most terrible error: listen literally all what newbies/average player want, everybody will always complain about everything, no matter how much perfect is your work, so the only thing you can
do is doing what YOU want, not what the others want... it's your game and the greatest success is making the game that YOU always desired to play, almost 1 entire point was ruined from breaking the difficulty balance toward an
easier one(which is different from adjust the flaws of the original balance);
Aside that, all what you need to get closer to 10 score is improving the game, maybe when Madsiur will be able to allow rom hackers to expand the map and monsters you'll be able to add new stuff... it's quite obvious that your ideas were
tied up from game's limits... Shenron Castle almost shouted something like: "sorry guys, i'd really want to let you explore even inside the castle, but unused room inside the game are ended and so i can only allow you to go outside the
castle..."
Obviusly bugs don't impact at all on the score: you fixed them in the past and you'll do it in the future, so what's the matter?


You and all the guys who helped in this hack made a great job, congratulations! World has need of games like this, not AAA shit(perhaps in another world AAA games would mean THIS, not "that")

I don't know how difficulty have been balanced in 1.4 but i hope you'll balance better the difficulty in 1.4 or later versions, because the last battle in particular loses the "hard game" title and i just used a party formed mostly with
characters with level under 50 and the 4 guys who fought Zuriel weren't even the planned party.


In any case this game is definitely designed for all RPG gamers(or who still have to discover their beauty) which means that you, i mean right you who are reading this line in this instant, if you're reading this it can only mean that you're inside game's ideal target, so go and play it!

Personally, I feel like this review misses the mark a little.

The game is not ruined, but you made the most terrible error: listen literally all what newbies/average player want, everybody will always complain about everything, no matter how much perfect is your work, so the only thing you can
do is doing what YOU want, not what the others want...

This is not the error that Nattak made. Make no mistake: this is what *you* want; it is not what Nattak wants. Remember, Nattak would probably list himself as a relatively average player of the game, or so I'd suspect. I don't believe that he was aiming to make a fight as hard as it was. There are two mistakes that I feel were actually made here.

1) Not defining the difficulty that this hack was aiming for clearly enough from the beginning. It has flip-flopped a little I think, and I think that's a large part of your problem with the hack Tenka. You're seeing it as a difficulty hack, but at one point it wasn't really intended to be one IIRC, which is why you're getting mixed signals. I think the beta testers would have had an easier time benchmarking ROTDS if they knew what it was aiming for. To be fair to Nattak, I wouldn't have come to this conclusion earlier either, because it's not obvious, and I think hindsight is the only reason why I have this feeling.

2) I may be wrong because I don't know firsthand, but I think Nattak didn't do enough testing without some sort of advantage (maybe some sort of godmode) to make testing faster. While being able to wipe enemies more easily is an advantage in that it accelerates the testing of events, mechanics, etc. it makes it hard to gauge how the battles actually play. I remember Nattak mentioned that he agreed the fight was too hard after playing through it himself more recently, which is part of the reason why I think there wasn't enough "normal" playtesting earlier. If the premise isn't true, disregard this paragraph.

Given the above, I feel that the nerf of the endgame is part of a correction of these earlier mistakes, and not the introduction of new mistakes. Most people, Nattak included, would enjoy this version of the hack more.

I'll admit, Zuriel should have been nerfed in beta in the first place, and this was partly due to my own mistakes as well, since this was several years ago and I was 15-ish. My mentality at the time was "If it's hard but not impossible to beat without grinding, then it's definitely balanced well enough". That's not even close to correct. To boot, I was too worried about being that guy that says the game is too hard when really it's just my own mistakes, and if I were better I'd have beaten it already. But I ended up sweeping legitimate balance qualms under the rug because of that! I think things would have turned out better if I'd spoken up fully instead of just barely deciding to ask to nerf Zuriel's HP a little.

Here's the deal though: you just don't like nerfs. It doesn't matter how justified or supported the nerf is, it seems to me like you would reject any nerf ever (short of a nerf that makes the game possible at all), whether it is in ROTDS, BC or anything else. If you say otherwise, look at it this way. You were already complaining about this nerf before you had seen either 1.0 Zuriel *or* 1.4 Zuriel. That screams to me that you weren't prepared to look at it with an open mind here. This entire review almost just seems to exist to complain about nerfing. You didn't even mention any of the other parts of ROTDS that people consider questionable, which as a reviewer you should have at least made note of, whether you address the complaints or agree with them.

I'm not trying to tick you off with this post, just trying to make a level-headed point here. 0:-)

(as an aside, I'm surprised you never posted this on ID. )

1)

Definitely. since the game was released i only read: "it's hard" "an hard hack"... hard everywhere, Gi Nattak says that his hack is hard. At a certain point the only thing i can imagine is that the game is intended to be hard.
If not then his hack was intended to be an average difficulty hack and then he loses some point in the "balancement" voice for the opposite reason... because they're harder than the expected(there's easier and harder stuff) Omega Mk4 in colosseum is too much hard for an average game and even AlphaOmega is a tad overpower compared to the other boss, expecially in a bossrush made without savestates

In both the cases there are some points in which the difficulty curve is unstable and that's the actual point of my balancement rating, i try to fix that with my suggestions.

2)

I don't know either how much/how much good was the test made to that... weird that you suspected that grinding would have changed things... 9999 damage AoE unblockable only means that no matter the level he will kill you.
i actually wonder how anyone would not be able to realize that he's overpower, of course that i think the hack is intended to be difficult if they appove one guy like him!

Here's the deal though: you just don't like nerfs. It doesn't matter how justified or supported the nerf is, it seems to me like you would reject any nerf ever (short of a nerf that makes the game possible at all), whether it is in ROTDS, BC or anything else.

While you keep(for whatever reason) to believe that i want 1.0 Zuriel, it's funny the way you keep only to answer to my conplaints and ignore the comments(in general, shoutbox in particular) in which i say that to me it should be found a point of agreement with 1.0 and 1.3
If we say that in 1.0 Zuriel was 150% strong and to make it reasonable it was enough to nerf him until he reached 80-100%... the point is that in 1.3 is nerfed to the point of being 40% strong now

I'm not complaining because it was nerfed, i do it because he has been nerfed too much... is that hard to understand that he's weaker than some boss before? (not necessarily talking about optionals, someone said that he's weaker even than Dark Cloud) and the thing about being tier 4 has no sense because tiers 1-3 are harmless, no matter the level... if you miss some equip gear here, that's player's fault, in any case i doubt it's possible to be weaker than me at that point unless you made a LLG on purpose(and that would mean you should be skilled enough to not have problems)
hence i think those tiers are not a problem.
What i wanna say here is that i did an half-assed battle: it's not like i pulled efforts to win, like with other WoR bosses... no pro skill(that you use to explain why i'm unsatisfied) the only passive thing i made was to have some tank character, nothing exceptional, really.

If you say otherwise, look at it this way. You were already complaining about this nerf before you had seen either 1.0 Zuriel *or* 1.4 Zuriel. That screams to me that you weren't prepared to look at it with an open mind here. This entire review almost just seems to exist to complain about nerfing.

I did it because i predicted what it would happen today and well... it happened: nerfed more than necessary. if the nerf was balanced i can grant you that all this discussion about Zuriel wouldn't even started.(i hate entropy rather than nerfs)


Once for all i'd like to know what Gi Nattak wants from his hack, do you want an average hack and it was difficult by accident or what?


PS. actually i put a link to this review in last segment of the thread in ID, i'm not interested to discuss about that in ID rather than FF6hacking.com, which is the "home" of this hack and people who worked on this hack is mainly here, if i wanted to review something on ID i'd did that for BNW, but there was nothing in particular to comment about it...


Would you please mention the other parts of ROTDS that people consider questionable? i must say that i didn't pay a close attention to forums in order to avoid spoilers before i'd play it...

For the record, Gi Nattak never finished his own hack on a normal playthrought up to version 1.3 (or is it 1.2 ?), so he probably had a biased view on how hard the previous versions were. Killing everything with the best equipment and an "all 99" inventory can only make you think your hack is less difficult than what it is in reality.

If not then his hack was intended to be an average difficulty hack and then he loses some point in the "balancement" voice for the opposite reason... because they're harder than the expected(there's easier and harder stuff) Omega Mk4 in colosseum is too much hard for an average game and even AlphaOmega is a tad overpower compared to the other boss, expecially in a bossrush made without savestates

In both the cases there are some points in which the difficulty curve is unstable and that's the actual point of my balancement rating, i try to fix that with my suggestions.

But Omega Mk4 is optional, and so is AlphaOmega, if nothing has changed. They don't have to be part of the difficulty curve. It's fine if they're harder than Zuriel.

The balance curve is still somewhat unstable, but your suggestions would make it more unstable, not less. I do agree that Zuriel was nerfed a little too much, but not a lot too much.

I don't know either how much/how much good was the test made to that... weird that you suspected that grinding would have changed things... 9999 damage AoE unblockable only means that no matter the level he will kill you.
i actually wonder how anyone would not be able to realize that he's overpower, of course that i think the hack is intended to be difficult if they appove one guy like him!

True, but "Godmode" means more than level 99. It also means cheat codes and extra hacks potentially that make the game easier than that as well, like having 99 of all Items as Madsiur mentioned. It's reasonable to think Nattak would have missed this if he always used this mode.

While you keep(for whatever reason) to believe that i want 1.0 Zuriel, it's funny the way you keep only to answer to my conplaints and ignore the comments(in general, shoutbox in particular) in which i say that to me it should be found a point of agreement with 1.0 and 1.3
If we say that in 1.0 Zuriel was 150% strong and to make it reasonable it was enough to nerf him until he reached 80-100%... the point is that in 1.3 is nerfed to the point of being 40% strong now

Perhaps... the way you phrased that always sounded like "No nerfs is better, but 80% of the original power is okay as a compromise, I guess". Besides, if it's in the shoutbox it's not guarenteed that I'll see things, especially since you are up and about when I'm at work or asleep a lot, so it's not necessarily "ignoring" anything.

I'm not complaining because it was nerfed, i do it because he has been nerfed too much...

While I'd agree with the nerf being a tad too much, when you say things like "If this were version 1.0 game balance would be 9/10" it leads me to believe that you want 1.0 or nearly 1.0, not halfway between 1.0 and 1.3.

I did it because i predicted what it would happen today and well... it happened: nerfed more than necessary. if the nerf was balanced i can grant you that all this discussion about Zuriel wouldn't even started.(i hate entropy rather than nerfs)

That doesn't feel like the case to me, and you saying it doesn't convince me that it's true (because it's easy to be mistaken about your own tendencies). It's hard to say how things would have gone if Zuriel was nerfed less, but my instinct is that it would have worked out the same regardless, with you saying that Zuriel should have been halfway between 1.0 and 1.3.

Would you please mention the other parts of ROTDS that people consider questionable? i must say that i didn't pay a close attention to forums in order to avoid spoilers before i'd play it...

Mostly I was thinking about the large volume of references here. It seems to be a point of contention for a lot of people, so any review worth its salt should either mention it as a drawback or explain why it's not a drawback.

@Madsiur: That's what I suspected.

Personally, I feel like this review misses the mark a little.

The game is not ruined, but you made the most terrible error: listen literally all what newbies/average player want, everybody will always complain about everything, no matter how much perfect is your work, so the only thing you can
do is doing what YOU want, not what the others want...

This is not the error that Nattak made. Make no mistake: this is what *you* want; it is not what Nattak wants. Remember, Nattak would probably list himself as a relatively average player of the game, or so I'd suspect. I don't believe that he was aiming to make a fight as hard as it was. There are two mistakes that I feel were actually made here.

1) Not defining the difficulty that this hack was aiming for clearly enough from the beginning. It has flip-flopped a little I think, and I think that's a large part of your problem with the hack Tenka. You're seeing it as a difficulty hack, but at one point it wasn't really intended to be one IIRC, which is why you're getting mixed signals. I think the beta testers would have had an easier time benchmarking ROTDS if they knew what it was aiming for. To be fair to Nattak, I wouldn't have come to this conclusion earlier either, because it's not obvious, and I think hindsight is the only reason why I have this feeling.

2) I may be wrong because I don't know firsthand, but I think Nattak didn't do enough testing without some sort of advantage (maybe some sort of godmode) to make testing faster. While being able to wipe enemies more easily is an advantage in that it accelerates the testing of events, mechanics, etc. it makes it hard to gauge how the battles actually play. I remember Nattak mentioned that he agreed the fight was too hard after playing through it himself more recently, which is part of the reason why I think there wasn't enough "normal" playtesting earlier. If the premise isn't true, disregard this paragraph.

Given the above, I feel that the nerf of the endgame is part of a correction of these earlier mistakes, and not the introduction of new mistakes. Most people, Nattak included, would enjoy this version of the hack more.

I'll admit, Zuriel should have been nerfed in beta in the first place, and this was partly due to my own mistakes as well, since this was several years ago and I was 15-ish. My mentality at the time was "If it's hard but not impossible to beat without grinding, then it's definitely balanced well enough". That's not even close to correct. To boot, I was too worried about being that guy that says the game is too hard when really it's just my own mistakes, and if I were better I'd have beaten it already. But I ended up sweeping legitimate balance qualms under the rug because of that! I think things would have turned out better if I'd spoken up fully instead of just barely deciding to ask to nerf Zuriel's HP a little.

Here's the deal though: you just don't like nerfs. It doesn't matter how justified or supported the nerf is, it seems to me like you would reject any nerf ever (short of a nerf that makes the game possible at all), whether it is in ROTDS, BC or anything else. If you say otherwise, look at it this way. You were already complaining about this nerf before you had seen either 1.0 Zuriel *or* 1.4 Zuriel. That screams to me that you weren't prepared to look at it with an open mind here. This entire review almost just seems to exist to complain about nerfing. You didn't even mention any of the other parts of ROTDS that people consider questionable, which as a reviewer you should have at least made note of, whether you address the complaints or agree with them.

I'm not trying to tick you off with this post, just trying to make a level-headed point here. 0:-)

(as an aside, I'm surprised you never posted this on ID. )

Everything you said was so true and on point, it's scaring me lol.

For the record, Gi Nattak never finished his own hack on a normal playthrought up to version 1.3 (or is it 1.2 ?), so he probably had a biased view on how hard the previous versions were. Killing everything with the best equipment and an "all 99" inventory can only make you think your hack is less difficult than what it is in reality.

Definitely a questionable way to test stuff, unless you only wanna verify if bugs are triggered, rather than ponderate the balance...

The balance curve is still somewhat unstable, but your suggestions would make it more unstable, not less. I do agree that Zuriel was nerfed a little too much, but not a lot too much.

Well... when we discussed about Staryu/Starmie fight and Proton(was that the name?) i thought we were reaching a point of agreement here to not make those battles too much easy or hard... i hope that wasn't a loss of time.

I believe you're giving to "stable" the same meaning of easy and that's not the case... stable is what i call a point of agreement between the 2 versions.
You say "not a lot too much", but i think it's too much generous from you that statement... On a side note even my bro complaints about that: he's a completely different person compared to me but this time he's almost upset from the nerf
(anyway the greatest nerf of the whole hack is Sephiroth which is weaker than his vanilla counterpart, Sleep.(check a video if you're sceptic) i don't know why but despite i mentioned it at least 3 times no one still replied to that)

Perhaps... the way you phrased that always sounded like "No nerfs is better, but 80% of the original power is okay as a compromise, I guess". Besides, if it's in the shoutbox it's not guarenteed that I'll see things, especially since you are up and about when I'm at work or asleep a lot, so it's not necessarily "ignoring" anything.

I can accept a compromise, actually i'd have been among people that asked to nerf version 1.0 a bit, simply because it's just crazy to say "ok, if you don't have eiko with Flammie or Arc you can't win"
Said that i still have to remind that you find 10 Quicksilvers in the whole game and if you really have that much problems, i wonder if people have ever tried to use them, because they really make the difference... i mean, they exist to be used, right? not just as collectibles... in 1.3 version the only place in which is a good and legit idea to use them is against AlphaOmega in the bossrush.

Anyway that "you" is a 2nd person plural you: no surprise that you miss shouts in the shoutbox(which is why i'd like to discuss here those stuff rather than shoutbox)
but it was aimed to most of FF6Hacking.com community which answers only to some selected statement.

While I'd agree with the nerf being a tad too much, when you say things like "If this were version 1.0 game balance would be 9/10" it leads me to believe that you want 1.0 or nearly 1.0, not halfway between 1.0 and 1.3.

Since my review assumes that the game is intended to be hard, it's closer from being balanced "too much hard" than "too much easy" in terms of balancement from that point of view, anyway it would be 9/10 because it needs to be perfectioned, or i'd said 9.9/10 instead.

Mostly I was thinking about the large volume of references here. It seems to be a point of contention for a lot of people, so any review worth its salt should either mention it as a drawback or explain why it's not a drawback.

You mean references to other stuff(like Adventure time guys) or references to who helped with ROTDS game creation?(like Jackimus in the house that plays songs)

Something tells me that is the first type of references... well what can i say? I admit that there's some reference that fails to fit in the game: what comes in my mind here i think it's mostly Raditz, which tries to enter inside the plot, despite he really has nothing to do with it, i mean... what's his relation with Rohan(help me there because i don't even know who's Rohan) and why he should replace Vargas? even the fact that he's summoned from Zuriel... yes, i must say that Raditz is the most pointless existence in the hack.
Another very questionable point of the game is that you enter inside esper world(a peaceful location) and you go to kill Shenron, despite he represented a hope for people in Esperville... here the player does something that a villain would do! ;[

Fun fact: the references that have a questionable role inside the game come often from Dragon Ball... i wonder why.
About the other references... they really weren't a drawback of any kind, it comes to my mind a game like I Wanna Be The Guy, which is basically made only by references and i entirely appreciated it.
In short terms some problem with references is when they try have a role in the main plot or even try to replace a "vanilla" segment of the story but fail in doing that, like Raditz.

I indirectly counted even that in the review, and i guess it's inside "Innovation factor" section... after all some point is lost even there.

Definitely a questionable way to test stuff, unless you only wanna verify if bugs are triggered, rather than ponderate the balance...

It was more an "I'm tired of beating that part over and over each time I change something" I think, but I agree with you, it's an awful way to check the balance of a hack.

I haven't looked at the new Starmie or Proton fight, and my comments were not about those fights. I wouldn't be surprised if they were hit too hard with the nerfstick, because the Starmie fight wasn't too ridiculous before compared to the fights around it. I agree that getting closer to 1.0, although not quite at that difficulty would probably be about right here. And if I didn't comment on Sephiroth, it's probably because I'm not really disagreeing. He probably needs some more meat here. But like everything else, he should be edged up cautiously.

I took stable neither as "easy" nor as a compromise between the two versions. I took stable to mean part of a smooth difficulty curve compared to the rest of the game. And as it stands, it sounds like Zuriel's Tower is now somewhat below the rest of the WoR instead of *far* above it. I don't think it has nailed the sweet spot yet, but I think putting it near 1.0 would still be much too high.

I'd almost be interested in seeing how Nattak himself would play, if you gave him your save before Zuriel's Tower (presumably with everybody unequipped and everything), and he were to record/livestream (not sure if his livestreams have been working, but I have gotten e-mail notifications about him streaming from Twitch) himself attempting to beat the tower without grinding excessively or watching what you did (excluding AlphaOmega, skip him ). Obviously he doesn't have to take me up on that, it's just an idle thought.

The issue with Quicksilvers against 1.0 Zuriel is that the fight lasts maybe an hour. That's a lot of spread for maybe 6 Quicksilvers, assuming that you spent two on AlphaOmega and two elsewhere. It also doesn't help with the issue about needing Arc/Flammie. He does Nuke + Meteor back to back (spread across two turns though) at one point, and even if you are using Reraise, his Nuke hits everybody for 9999, killing them. Even the animation for the Reraise activating takes enough time for him to get another turn, meaning he will use a 9999 Meteor before you can even act, and your team is dead. Quicksilver does nothing to prevent this (admittedly, I'm not sure if that's what you were implying). I'm not sure how feasible it is to kill him before he does that, even with Quicksilvers.

Originally, Nattak billed the hack as "Harder than the original FF6, but not so hard that it makes you want to quit" (paraphrased). IIRC, *everybody* I heard from except myself and RaikouGilgamesh (who was level 99 and spent a lot of time on this) quit against 1.0 Zuriel. Having to quit against the final boss after playing through the game is painful for most players, and a huge turnoff. I think a better course of action is not to make the bosses befitting of DIFFICULTY HACK XTREME, but to turn away from that difficulty entirely and conform the hack better to the original vision listed above. The most important things (from my perspective) are that the difficulty curve is smooth from beginning to end (and the hack is closer now in 1.4, with the probable exception of the Starmie nerf), and that it's around the difficulty level appropriate for most of the dev team (Madsiur, James, Angelo and Nattak are the ones I'm thinking of most here). As you said yourself, it's about making the hack that they'd most want to play. While that does mean they shouldn't listen to every noob who comes along, as you said, it also means they shouldn't listen to every hardcore challenge seeker who wants a difficult game.

PS: I had no clue "ponderate" was an English word, but apparently it is.

IIRC, *everybody* I heard from except myself and RaikouGilgamesh (who was level 99 and spent a lot of time on this) quit against 1.0 Zuriel. Having to quit against the final boss after playing through the game is painful for most players, and a huge turnoff. I think a better course of action is not to make the bosses befitting of DIFFICULTY HACK XTREME, but to turn away from that difficulty entirely and conform the hack better to the original vision listed above. The most important things (from my perspective) are that the difficulty curve is smooth from beginning to end (and the hack is closer now in 1.4, with the probable exception of the Starmie nerf), and that it's around the difficulty level appropriate for most of the dev team (Madsiur, James, Angelo and Nattak are the ones I'm thinking of most here).

From what I can understand Zuriel 1.0 difficulty could fit an optional superboss, a bit like FFXII Yiamzat (dunno if I spell this right) or FF7 Ruby Weapon. I don't especially like difficulty hacks, but an important thing to keep in mind is that if a boss is so hard that you absolutely need a special combinaison of equipment (not saying one or two mandatory pieces but a special full set for each char) and characters (a mandatory party of 4 defined char when in fact you have the choice of 14) then there is a problem. Even a difficulty hack should allow flexibility to beat most mandatory bosses with different parties and equipment sets with no abusive grinding. If those criteria are met, I can't complain.