I wish that there were some kind of middle-ground on whether you would recommend a hack to others, as I would recommend this to specific types of people. But if you’ve been playing FF6 hacks for any measure of time, this isn’t likely to dazzle you.

If you’ve never played a hack of FF6, this would likely be an amazing introduction to the potential that romhacks have to improve what the original developers couldn’t. All of the standard bugfixes are nice, and the script adjustments to include new characters and justify their reason for being there are extremely competent and feel natural.

Initially, I was really enjoying the hack. The new battle tunes were great and I recognize some solid classics from the past, and some cool 16-bit remixes of games that are newer than FF6. Giving all enemies a unique sprite was interesting for a while, but began to become hit-or-miss as the game went on, with the art style being all over the place; some of the sprite art was high-quality and looked great, while other sprites looked messy and low-resolution. And at first, I was enjoying the changes to how Espers are handled: not everyone can use them, so this promotes a more unique identity per character. The problem is that characters eventually just become a different type of one-trick pony; in the original everyone became an Ultima-spamming factory, but in this hack, they just do the best thing that their job offers.

For instance, once you get the chainsaw for Edgar, you’ll just be using that since he won’t be able to use magic. Why attempt to confuse enemies with Noiseblaster that may miss when you can just do a ton of damage instead? Gau gets a ton of new Rages and doesn’t have Leap anymore since all he has to do is be present when an enemy dies to learn their Rage? Initially that sounds great, except you’re just going to use the most powerful Rage that’s available to you every time anyway.

And then there are the changes to magic in general, with some odd choices being made. The hack author states that they’d like it to make sense that a character would be able to use magic, so only certain characters can equip Espers. But at the time of this writing, only Terra, Celes, Relm, and Gogo can use Espers. Relm, but not Strago? I tried to reason it out by assuming that the hack author thought that it was good enough that Strago had access to blue magic with his Lore skill, and they even added some new Lores, but if you’re going to restrict characters according to a philosophy, not giving *the* mage of the cast who comes from a long line of battlemages access to Espers, but allowing his inexperienced grandchild to use them, is silly. The main story arc in the first half of the game is all about the idea that Espers can grant magical powers to those who aren’t magically-attuned, so telling the majority of the cast “too bad” and only making 4 characters well-rounded with multiple options in combat feels awful.

All of this combined with the fact that so much World of Ruin content is geared to your characters being level 70+, with most of the interesting stuff being available once you hit level 99, is silly. You could finish the game well before that point, so it turns into grinding experience just to get over the wall to see a majority of the new content, all of which is to just get unnecessary powerful equipment just for what, bragging rights?

Ultimately, it’s a decent hack that will wow people who haven’t played many, if any hacks of the game, but the design philosophies are nonsensical and the game tilts into confusion once you get to the World of Ruin and realize that you’re just going to be walking in circles getting into endless fights just to see a few new extra sprites.

Although development has ceased on Brave New World, I’d recommend that hack to anyone looking to have a substantial new experience with Final Fantasy VI.