First of all, thanks to everyone for creating such a great hack! I may be critical in my comments below, but rest assured I very much like and appreciate the work you’ve done!

Rating: 9.2/10 Overall: The overall course of the story remains the same, however, enough has been changed that I feel like it’s brand new all over again. The best part for me is the music. FF VI vanilla drills the battle music and victory tunes into your head. RotDS has a MYRIAD of different music sets, many of which don’t change from battle to walking around - GREAT! I do wish you could make the music keep playing when you select it from the menu though :( (the music switches to normal game music when you leave the menu).

The entire world map has been reworked. But sadly, there are very few additional locations, they have just been moved, or changed.

In the WoR, many characters have been moved or swapped - nice touch.And the characters themselves have been greatly altered

THE REFERENCES, FRANSCINE, OMG! THE REFERENCES, OMG! Another superb addition to the hack is the plethora of references. I haven’t kept track, but just to name a few: Zelda, RE 4, Futurama, Samus (low HP sprite is ball form, HAHA GREAT!), LotR, Wheel of time, mario, Pirates of the carribean, secret of mana, FF tactics, chrono trigger, SO MANY! They are quite well spread out through the game as well. This had me laughin several times an hour as i came across them! I sense kindred spirits in the developers, we are of the same breed!

The Coliseum shows you the item you stand to win BEFORE you select it! YEA! I spent hours as a kid mapping out what each item stood to win.

Gilgamesh just disappeared??

There just a tiny bit of religious input. I’m fairly anti religion and this little bit didn’t bother me at all. A little refreshing honestly, specifically the corruption of the church at the auction!.

Sprites: All the sprites have been given an overhaul. I’m a huge fan of the character sprites. I love purple hair! The enemy sprites are so-so to great. I know sprite creation can take a lot of time, talent, and thought so I’m not complaining.

Characters: All of the characters have been tweaked in one way or another. I feel the characters are much more evenly balanced. Special abilities have been swapped around on many characters. This definitely adds to the feeling of a different game.

Espers: Certain characters can equip certain espers (there is a patch to revert this feature). I however left it in place. The characters can seem interchangeable at times and this extra distinction makes each character stand out in a different light.

Stealing: Placing the steal command on the shadow character, and only as an ADD ON at that, was a poor choice. Essentially every boss fight is a crap shoot attacking with thief knives waiting for a random steal attempt, since shadow is absent 90% of the time until half way through WoR.

Status effects: I ran into over half a dozen status effects in the first 1 hour of play time, making the beginning of the game seem overly difficult. Purchasing many of every type of cure item was a must to get through the beginning. And towards the middle and end, there were fewer status effects to be seen casted at you by enemies. They still exist, but a somewhat linear ramp up from game start to game end would’ve been much better.

I also find status effects (on enemies) to be 90% pointless. Either normal enemies, that are susceptible, aren’t worth the effort (they are easily beaten otherwise), or the bosses are immune. There are, of course, a few exceptions, like some bosses can be stopped, etc., but with the increased difficulty, and the fact that i play on SD2SNES, not emulator, I cannot afford to cast every status effect to see what happens and expect to survive.

Magic: I’ve never seen an implementation of FF VI (including the original) where magic seemed balanced against attack. RotDS is no different. Magic just doesn’t pack the wallop i would expect from the major disadvantages of magic. The foremost being the MP consumption. Sure, ethers are cheaper here, you can cast from the back row, but the benefit has just never been worth it, especially compared to just holding ‘A’. There are many fights where you cannot do this in RotDS, which is nice though.

Pressing Y in the magic menu lets you see the cost of every spell - very nice. I wish this were also in the esper menu.

Battles: battle length is just slightly exenteded due to damage done and enemy HP or defense. Well balanced. Of course being OP towards the end changes this.

Bosses: Boss difficulty is definitely increased. Which i like. The boss fights last a lot longer and you get to take advantage of a lot of different status effects, equipment decisions, etc. There are bosses that cast discord, which is a major flaw in my opinion. If this is cast, I basically reset on the spot. There’s no way to recover once it’s cast. Normal enemies, sure, but not bosses. The sheer quantity of different attacks is also nice.

Sabin: Once again, Sabin is carrying my party. He always seems to be over powered, and with the default two weapons in each hand, and a weapon for each elemental type, he’s a beast. This makes the game a little lop-sided and best played in a particular fashion.

Bugs: Overall, very few bugs. And the team seems to be constantly working to create solutions. I encountered only one major game freezing glitch. I examined the stump just below Leo’s grave (intended for WoR, not WoB i guess) and the character froze.

Suggestions: I have played FF VI T-Edition (in japanese, and I struggled through with the help of the google translate app…) and there are several features in there that are superb. You can apply the vanish attribute from the menu You control your fighters in the coliseum a second tower exists in the WoR that uses the floating island map for an extra end of game challenge (filled with esper battles).

I really would like some story and game flow modifications, but I can see that as being too much of an undertaking :(. perhaps i will contribute at some point?.?