The 3 Scenarios

Just posting a hack idea here to see if anyone has tried it before. One of the things that's always bugged me about FFVI is the 3 scenario branch. Locke takes about 20 minutes. Banon, Edgar, and Terra take about the same. Then along comes Sabin, whose scenario is nearly as long as the rest of the game up to that point. He goes to Doma, then to the Phantom Forest, then to the Veldt, and through the Serpent Trench. But he still shows up in Narshe the same time as everyone else, 3-4 levels ahead of them.

My thought today was of a hack that re-arranged the events to balance out the load a bit.

LOCKE'S SCENARIO
* Characters met: Shadow and Celes
* Shadow is in the South Figaro Pub, and agrees to work with you to get out of town, since he "doesn't like the atmosphere" of military occupation.
* You both rescue Celes as normal, and make your way to South Figaro Cave.
* However, after fighting the Tunnel Armor, you have to continue on. Shadow leaves when you exit the cave, and Locke/Celes must make their way north to Narshe, going through mines to get to the old man's house.

TERRA'S SCENARIO
* Characters met: Cyan
* When word comes to the Returner's hideout that South Narshe has been invaded, Banon suggests that they take a "slight detour" to Doma to warn their allies of the Empire's movement and enlist their help. This is the reason the party goes down the River. They land just north of the Military Base Camp.
* The Doma events play out as normal, with Cyan recruited. The only difference is that it is Banon and Terra, not Sabin and Shadow.
* Then Banon suggests that they travel on foot to Nikeah. The Phantom Forest is re-located to be in the place where the Old Man's house currently is. The events play out as normal.
* After the Phantom Forest, the team travels to Nikeah and boards the ship.

SABIN'S SCENARIO
* Characters met: Gau
* When Sabin jumps in after Ultros, Edgar jumps in to save him, and gets washed away with him. 
* The two wake up on the edge of the Veldt, next to the relocated Old Man's house (never understood why this was so far away from the Veldt in the original game).
* The Veldt/Serpent Trench events play out as normal, but with Edgar in Cyan's place. The story is edited to be the journey of two brothers who have been apart for years.
* Barren Falls is accessed through Crescent Cave, and serves as the entry to the Serpent Trench.
* The Serpent Trench still spits out the characters in Nikeah, where they board the same boat as Terra, Banon, and Cyan.
* NOTE: for getting the Water Rondo later on, the current location of Barren Falls will be a land bridge connecting to the Veldt.

So what are your thoughts? Probably way more trouble than it's worth, but it's fun to dream.

I like the idea of this. The three scenarios are way off in length in vanilla, and this is weird both from a story and gameplay perspective. From the notes above, Sabin's scenario is the short one now, although it's closer for sure. The Veldt, Barren Falls and the Serpent Trench don't have a lot of meat to them unless you do some Rage grinding.

I think all of this can be done with event editing and map editing. The only thing that I think needs some rethinking is the land bridge connecting to the Veldt. Due to the way the Veldt works, this will cause some issues with the music, and maybe other things as well. You also have to be careful not to let Banon's team reach the Veldt. You also can't just make the Lete River dump the team off on the Veldt every time because it would be possible to get stuck if you leave the airship at Doma later. My suggestion is that when you retravel on the Lete River after the scenarios, you could have a dialogue box in place of the Ultros fight. This dialogue box could give you the choice of going left (to Doma) or right (to the Veldt). That way the two areas can be completely separate, and both can be accessed by looping around via the Lete River.

As for balancing, you may want to lower GhostTrain's magical defenses a bit, so that Terra's Fire can actually do something against him, in case the player doesn't know the Revive Kills Zombie trick. That being said, having Banon for that fight gives you a nice counter to his multi-target attacks, which previously had to be healed off by every character throwing a Potion. I also recommend giving Rhizopas a bit more HP, as a three person party will tear him apart. Gau might be able to kill him in one hit with the Hazer Rage.

Also make sure that the Imperial Camp guys don't hurt Terra too much with counterattacks if she drops a multi-target Fire spell on them. It's a natural thing to do, and this might be too punishing in comparison to most of the game around that point, even with Banon around.

Good points; all of them.

Would Banon still have his special condition of "Game Over if KO" or would you just EA that branch out so he can die normally?

This is all doable. I like your ideas. One thing you could push a bit farther is having a dialogue between Locke and Celes about the resistance after the cave and have shadow offering to join up to Narshe (implying Narshe battle too) for an extra of money. You could (or not) disable shadow's leave probability after a random encounter. Having an optional character in Narshe Battle could maybe cause problems, maybe not. I have not looked at the technical details.

Turbotastic, great question. I think I'd take away the Banon lose condition. Madsiur, that's an interesting option, but I think just for simplicity's sake I'd have Shadow leave.

For the Veldt... if I'm using the Barren Falls map to load the Serpent Trench, then I wonder about using the Entrance to the Serpent Trench in its place to load the second section of the Lete River... the part after Sabin splits off. So you go through the cave, do a small river section, and end up on the shore of the Veldt. That should fix all the issues, right?

Okay, after chewing over this idea for a week or so, I think I'm going to add it into my hack. (Man, my hack keeps growing by the day.)

A couple of key changes to make it work:
1. Sabin/Edgar will be taking the Doma/Ghost Train path. After chewing through how to do the 2 brothers' story, I realized putting the two of them in the military camp together seemed to give them the most opportunity for development. The scenario starts with a black screen dialogue about how they're about to go over a waterfall (Think the Pacha/Kuzco waterfall scene from The Emperor's New Groove), immediately transitioning to the Barren Falls battle. It spits them out near the base camp. When they get in, Sabin wants to rush in, but Edgar chides him for using "Every muscle in his body except the one between his ears," and has him watch and listen. In the place of the line of "So that's General Leo...", Edgar will talk about how he walked the line between the Empire and Returners because of men like Leo. He wanted to see if the Soul of the Empire would sway towards Leo or Kefka. When they overhear Kefka's poisoning plan, Edgar tells Sabin, "Okay, time to do things your way," and they fight. 

Edgar, of course, recognizes Cyan from his dealings with Doma. I'm hoping to add in a short scene, maybe after the Ghost Train on the platform, about how Edgar had always thought if he had a retainer like Cyan by his side, he could take the Empire head on. He hints that he has one in Sabin, to which Sabin laughs, stating that he doesn't want to be a retainer, since all the bowing would make his knees hurt. They finish by heading to the ferry in Kohlingen.

2. Banon and Terra get knocked off course by the Ultros fight, and end up floating all of the way to the Veldt. This fixes the character motivation problem. If I just had Sabin go to the Veldt, there was no rush to get him back to Narshe. With Banon and Terra, there is urgency, since both are desperately needed in Narshe. Note: I'm NOT looking forward to hacking the Gau recruitment scene.  

3. Locke/Celes/Shadow remains mostly the same, with Shadow optionally joining in South Figaro and staying until after Tunnel Armor. (This is great, because in my hack, Celes has Jump, not Runic, making that fight a little more intense.) The only difference is that Locke and Celes are turned away at the gates instead of Terra because Celes is recognized.

(Man, my hack keeps growing by the day.)

Welcome to the rabbit hole, we have carrots.

So, my first thought on looking at this code: Holy Cow! So. Much. Wasted. Memory. Just by removing the event on the cliff overlooking Barren Falls where Shadow leaves, I could practically write a fourth scenario!   I've started in on event mapping, trying to figure out where I need to add and remove characters. I'm also trying to add in an option when you go back to Mog's selection screen to unequip party members. All in all, this hack seems pretty easy to pull off, but there are so many memory addresses I need to keep in mind that it's making my head spin.

Anyway, thought I'd share here my world map edit, with a basic map of where each character in the 3 scenarios goes. The Blue portion is Locke/Celes/Shadow, with dark blue being off-screen travel. Red is Sabin/Edgar/Cyan, and Green is Terra/Banon/Gau. Yellow is where Terra's and Sabin's scenarios intersect, with the dark yellow being off-screen travel. Each scenario includes 1 small dungeon and 1 large dungeon.

Have you thought about putting encounters in the Crescent Mountain cave? It would discourage exploration (which wouldn't be great), but it would also add a little more meat to Sabin's tale. I don't recommend putting Serpent Trench enemies in there though, as making the Aspik/Anguiform Rages more accessible would give Gau some powerful stuff a little too early. Sure, you can take a trip around to the Veldt right after the Battle @ Narshe, but a lot of players won't unless they're doing a challenge run.

Also, judging by the map, it looks like Terra's group will go right after the Ultros fight. Do you plan on making that event change?