ROM Hacks News
October, 2022: After a long year of fruitful ROM hacking, Mentil decided to take a break by making another attempt at replaying Final Fantasy 1 for the NES with an all-Black-Mage party. He’d recently found out the game had a built-in map screen (darn cryptic brooms!) and decided for this attempt to try an interesting-sounding hack called Final Fantasy Restored.
Aah, a much better experience… wait, why is the game still so tedious and slow-paced?! Well, someone would have to do something to fix that! And so Final Fantasy Hasted was born.
Nearly four months later, after two playthroughs testing the hack, fixing multiple bugs found by doing so, the fruits of his labor have been released.
While being compatible with many other hacks such as the aforementioned Final Fantasy Restored, it contains many new features to make the game faster and more streamlined to play, such as:
- Substantially faster transitions and combat animations.
- It’s now shown in shops who can equip which items. In weapon shops, it’s also shown if that weapon has higher or lower attack power than what’s currently equipped.
- Actions in combat now automatically switch to the next enemy or ally instead of giving an ‘Ineffective’ error (although this can be disabled if desired.)
- Pressing Start + Select in combat sets the whole party to Run. Pressing Left or Right when selecting an enemy now lets you change columns.
- The map screen now renders faster, is more readable, and is more accurate with regards to water.
In addition, this hack’s archive also includes a completely-optional antigrind patch, which increases enemy rewards 2-3x, and rebalances spell costs.
