Hey everyone, my first post here. I'm glad I found this community, you guys seem really into the series, more so than other places people gather online to discuss FF.
Anyway, for a while now I've been working on recreating the main characters of each FF game, as faithfully as I can, on a FFVI-styled engine. This is not a ROM hack, it's all been programmed from scratch.
Here's another video, this one showing off a fight against Safer Sephiroth. Super Nova took forever to recreate
This is one of my favorite videos, showing off Noctis. He also took forever to recreate, so many friggin features. I'm still not done with him, there's more stuff to add.
You can play those two battles already and check out more videos (such as a double Kefka/Safer Sephiroth battle) on my youtube channel.
Currently I'm working on recreating the menus, the materia system is a ton of work:
You can get updates on my twitter account
The project's goal:
Faithful recreations of the main characters and dungeons from each game in the main-series.
That means a FFI Black Mage gets that tiered MP system. Cloud gets a fully functional materia system. Noctis gets his ascension grid, warping, phasing, calling up his buddies for help. Of course, adaptations need to be made. Noctis wont walk around the battlefield freely, FFI characters won't stick to their original turn system. The meeting point for every character is FFVI.
There also needs to be rebalances and content cuts. The final boss in XIII has 3+ million HP, the final boss in FFI has 20k, because in XIII you'd do much more damage per battle than I. So Lightning's nerfed and a Warrior of Light is buffed. Another issue is with repetition. In I, III and V you could get the black mage job. A FFV Black Mage is not only more useful than one from FFI but also more interesting to play with. Adding every job from V would ruin the jobs from III, which would ruin the jobs from I. So what's the way out?
For each character, I privilege keeping what's a series-first, what's unique, what avoids redundancy and what's fun to play. So for FFV jobs are Blue Mage, Time Mage, Samurai, Chemist, Mime, Berserker, Beastmaster, which made their debuts in V and which I personally enjoyed playing. No Warrior, no Black Mage for Bartz.
Lastly, there are changes I plan to introduce that actually deviate from the original games. They're not just cuts or rebalances. But they're for the good, aimed specifically at things that kinda sucked originally. For an instance, the customization system from FFII, that's going to change a lot. I also make character growth more flexible, so it's easier to manage your party. For an instance, AP acquired by Cloud doesn't go straight into the materia he has equipped, instead it goes to Cloud's AP bank, where the player chooses on which materia to invest their AP.
If I can ever finish every main character, I want to finish every final boss and every final dungeon. By this point it's already a pipe dream, but if I could squeeze in two or three dungeons from each game that'd be perfect. (But really, actually perfect would be recreating the final bosses as playable characters, both in a more human form and in their true forms)
Here are the characters I want to add:
- FFI (Monk, Warrior, Black Mage, White Mage)
- Firion
- FFIII (Onion Knight, Bard, Ninja, Dragoon, Viking, Evoker, Geomancer)
- Cecil (both Dark Knight and Paladin forms for the player to pick)
- Bartz (Freelancer, Blue Mage, Time Mage, Samurai, Chemist, Mime, Berserker, Beastmaster)
- Terra
- Cloud
- Squall
- Zidane
- Yuna (Possible jobs: Summoner, Gunner, Lady Luck, Songstress, Psychic, Trainer - with Angelo, Interceptor and Kogoro as pets)
- Balthier/Basch or Ashe, still haven't decided which and I still haven't picked jobs
- Lightning
- Noctis
You might've noticed I skipped XI and XIV. They're not in my schedule for now.
What I'm working on right now:
Fully implementing the menus and recreating the Bombing Mission from FF7.
I might take 1-2 months on that.Fully implementing the menus and recreating the Bombing Mission from FF7.
What's been done so far:
- Most core combat features are complete.
- Major content for Terra, FF1 White Mage, Noctis and Cloud
- Kefka and Safer Sephiroth boss fights
- Item Menu
- Basic equipment menu used for most characters.
What really needs to be done:
Tons and tons of testing, for which I need help. People to playtest this bad boy, find and report glitches. Because man there are SO many subsystems and edge cases going on with all the different characters I'm adding. Just think about it, between Squall, Noctis, Warrior of Light and Lightning there'll be 4 unique MP systems at play simultaneously. Even something as simple as using Ether needs to take all of those things into account.
So that's it for this post, hope you guys check it out, give me some feedback. Make sure to check my twitter account and youtube channel for occasional news. Also tell your friends about it. If you got any questions, ask away.
