Retronauts - 537: Final Fantasy ROM Hacks

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Nadia Oxford talks with special guests Andrew Vestal and Steve Tramer about Final Fantasy fan games. Some are built from the ground-up, some alter the original adventure via ROM patches, and some add hours of new content to gems like Final Fantasy VI. Edits by Greg Leahy; cover illustration by Leeann Hamilton.

This week's episode is brought to you by Notion Projects and Double Fine. This week on Retronuts, I just thought the Warrior of Light needed a bigger dong. Welcome to a particularly retro episode of Retronauts. I am your host for the week, Nadia Oxford. I am joined by two very well-aged friends of mine, Andrew Vestal and Steve Tramer. Steve, I have been told your alternative last name is But Stallion. Can you confirm or deny? I can not confirm that.

I will deny that. That is not my actual last name. Andrew, how could you lie to me? Andrew can very easily lie to everyone. And he's got butt stallion on the brain lately. I do. Well, it's actually appropriate that you do because we are going to be talking about ROM hacks. And, yeah, we, well, a lot of those are kind of filthy, but a lot are actually very, very useful.

But before we get into that, let's introduce ourselves a little bit. Steve, I think he's your first time with me in particular. Why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, hey, I'm Steve. You may have heard me on some other podcasts like X the Blood God or on very old episodes of Retronauts. I am a amateur game historian and academic, I guess I would say. I've worked in games for a little bit. I've spent most of my life as a designer or developer in some form or another with software.

I've been a writer or whatever. I just like video games, and I play a lot of them, and I'm very analytical, and I break them down all the time. And I also love old, old, old-ass games, which is why I'm here. and I've done a little bit of like rom hacking and older emulation myself. So I'm like really interested in the technical aspects of this stuff. And I think that's actually part of what makes what we're going to talk about today. Super cool.

Oh, man. Are you ever on the wrong show? We don't talk about any of that crap here. Just, uh, I know. It's game history. Yeah, I know, right? Like, I'm a huge nerd. I'm definitely on the wrong podcast.

We're all that rage shadow legend here, baby. Andrew, you've made trouble here before. Why don't you say hi? Hi, Andrew Vestel. nice to meet you all. I've been working in games for a while, done a lot of games writing in the past, been working in game translation

for almost 20 years at this point. Big fan of Japanese RPGs and Final Fantasy. I tend to replay the Final Fantasy games every few years, and when I started taking a look at replaying them this time, around the time of the pixel remasters, I found there were a lot of unusual options that were not available the last time I looked to pick them up. And that kind of sent myself and Steve down this rabbit hole of all the new, cool and unusual things that are happening in the ROM hacking scene to breathe new life into these older titles.

Actually, let's just start there for a second. You mentioned that the Pixar remasters inspired you to do all this. Yes, the pixel remasters just recently came out four consoles at the time of this recording. What did you notice that was like really interesting about them or bad or good? I really like the pixel remasters, especially given some of the tariff. Rebel mobile course that we've had in the past. Like, I really love the read-on artwork that's kind of unified

across all six games that the original pixel artist went back and worked on. I actually feel it's very true to the spirit of the original games. The redone music is fantastic too. Where I think they fall a little bit short is the fonts. The fonts are so bad. The fonts are bad.

I cannot read. I cannot play those games because I cannot read those games. It's so gross. Even the new font bothers you? The new font is like takes it from like I literally cannot play these games to like I'm just unhappy playing these games I'll play but I'll be mad

the whole time exactly and the other thing is you know the console versions added a few kind of XP boosts and speed boosts which which are great especially on the older NES ones but they really don't have a lot of quality of life

features they are missing a lot of the re-release content from the GBA version which I personally, you can take it or leave it, but I do think that they are cool in some ways. And I do think the idea of having extra stuff to do at the end of the game to keep kind of living in this world and playing with these characters

is something that's really attractive to a lot of people. One thing I found very unusual about that is that they took it out. Like for me, most of it, I can take a leave. I find Final Fantasy 6's additional stuff was eh. But I think Final Fantasy 4's stuff was kind of important story-wise because it connected into the after years and God help me like that. And I really like the Donna Soul stuff for one and two.

I really like the final. Exactly. Because Final Fantasy One is such a mechanical game and it's such a tightly designed game that it really has a lot of great opportunity to add new content on top of it because it's such a, I mean, we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves here.

For sure. Final Fantasy One is just like a really great canvas to play with. And I think that even Square themselves had a lot of fun when they went back to it on the GBA. and added more stuff. Yeah, for sure. And also with four, for some reason they had story stuff

connecting to that extra Final Fantasy 4 stuff in Final Fantasy 14 story. They didn't include it in the pixel remaster. And that just doesn't make any sense to me. I don't understand. But who understands Square? That's part of the reason we hear today. It's just kind of like talk about their works

and how they were, I guess, improved upon. Who owns Square's Final Fantasy, old Final Fantasy games? Who is responsible for preserving their memory? Again, the pixel remasters, I think, are great step forward compared to time. where they've been languishing for the 10 to 15 years previous. But they're not the original games.

And what the original games are is not necessarily what your memory of them is either. Yeah, and I think that this is actually a really important point, which is that a lot of the rum hacks that we're going to talk about today are quality of life and modernization, like in large part. Some of them go so far as to leave the main story content of the game like just completely and absolutely untouched. And it's a really interesting way to look at.

Pixel Remaster is graphical, audio, like fidelity updates, and ROM hacks are mechanical quality of life player-oriented updates. And so, like, if we really want to talk about who is the steward of Final Fantasy going forward, well, like, Square, obviously, Square Unix owns it, and they're going to keep re-releasing it until the heat death of the universe, but realistically, if you're going to be a person who is playing any of these games, like trying to play the original content, but in a way that feels good, it's probably not going to be any of their releases. It's probably going to be one of these things that we'll recommend, or one that we won't recommend that you'll find on

your own. Yeah, for sure. That actually brings me to a question. I was curious about both of you. What got you into ROM hacks in the first place? Because I think we can both, all of us can agree that even when we were like younger and into these ROMs when they first came out and these first ROM hacks first came out, first came out. Like, our favorite 16-bit RPGs were not perfect. We noticed that they had problems

with, like, translation was a big one. Like, everyone was out there to retranslate Funnel Fantasy 6 for better for worse. But what kind of got you into them? Like, what made you interested in ROM hacks to begin with? Can I say a bad word? Yes, you can. Okay. So when I was in college, this thing called Nesticle came out. Yeah, Nesticle. Yeah. Rhynd's a testicle. And Nesticle, you know, one of the first emulators for Nintendo games. And one of the really cool things about Nesticle is you could load up the sprite sheet and edit the sprite sheet directly in Nesticle and save it and share it with other people.

And so it was really easy to make low, effort, high crudity, rom-hats. And the Mario Brothers. Or whatever. But it was also the first time really seeing that it's like. like, oh, like, you can play and remix this stuff. And, and, you know, there's a, I'd say what got me into it more recently, though, was a Final Fantasy 4 remix because, like you said, like the pixel remaster of Final Fantasy 4 is missing a lot of stuff

that's been in previous versions. And I was like, well, what's the best way to replay this? And so I discovered this community that's been kind of working on this for a while. And one thing, Steve, won't you answer, go ahead and answer to you? Well, I mean, so my answer is actually going to be part of the show because I started back playing ROM hacks, mostly because of translation patches. It's how I played Final Fantasy Five, a game that I remember seeing in Nintendo Power in like 1994 being branded as Final Fantasy Extreme. And I really wanted to play that goddamn thing. People who are younger than us do not necessarily understand the frustration of knowing that there are three or four Final Fantasy games that you.

you cannot play, but exist right now. That was really what got me into the ROM hacking thing. It's like, oh, people are translating these games and I can play them. Yeah. And then, like, what really got me into them as more than just overhauls, translation patches, whatever visual overhauls or translation patches is, we're going to talk about Final Fantasy Five Ancient Cave later. So.

Yeah. But yeah, Nadia, something I think is really, worth talking about where you say that we were playing our old games and we knew that they weren't all that they could be. I think it's really worth emphasizing that a lot of those games were made it by teams of 12 people in eight months

and then translated in 10 weeks by one person who was given no context and maybe not even a debug ROM in order to play the game just a list of strings that they had to do. What we're talking about these ROM hacks here are sometimes things that have been made by fans of the games

who have played through the game you know, 10 times who have 20 years of experience with the game, who've had so much time to think about the balance of the characters and the balance of each individual battle and where the game lags and where the game accelerates. And so, yes, it's a labor of love, but also just a question of resources, you know, that these people can take three to five years

to polish their ROM hack with feedback from the community, almost like an open access thing, to get it where they want to be. You know, it's not just a one and done. It's basically like, hey, I'm going to start working on this project to try to make this game closer to what I think would be the best possible version of this game. And then as people play it and provide feedback to the creator, it continues to iterate.

And these things just get polished and polished in a way that's not possible in closed-loop ROM-based game development in 1992, like full-share. And I was going to say, you say, three to five, some of the ROM hacks that we're going to look at, like, their first published date is like 2013, 2015. These are projects that have been running for a very, very, very long time, whether they've been worked on in public or they've been worked on in, in like, stages in private by teams that kind of float together and like fall apart. Like, I don't follow the rum hacking scene too closely, but it's like the emulation scene. Like, people have beef and it's like people fight and it gets weird sometimes.

and bad. But like, games do come out. And even if they're only, you know, at some what they're calling a pre-release or a 1.0 or whatever in the patch, it's probably good enough to play. Even one of the ones that I'm going to highly recommend has like a couple of really, really bad game crashing or soft lock bugs. But it's still really good. And the fact that a group of maybe five people made this enormous thing over the course of 10 years and it works 100% except for like three issues is shocking. It's fascinating. And they're just doing it from a cart. Yeah. It's actually worth saying that one major reason that we were even able to do ROM hacks and to improve on these games is because cartridge constraints were over. So something as simple

as, hey, this translation is not as full and meaty as it could be. That was an issue of space. Like Ted Woolsey has been on that very tons of times. So we have this space now to take these characters, put as many characters as we want in the game, like instead of being constrained. by tiny ROM size. But again, Nadia, you know, I think it's worth emphasizing. It's not just like changing the size of the ROM. Like, you have to go in and re-point all the- Oh, yeah, of course.

Yeah, it's-cables, the other areas. And it's gone, Steve. Yeah, ROM expansion is actually an extremely difficult thing to do. I don't understand all of the details of it, but the simplest way to do it is effectively you slot another, you know, 64 kilobits of memory in there or whatever as though it were a separate board. because carts do this thing called bank switching, where there's a hard limit on the amount of size on one board.

Your cart is bigger than that one board, so you tell the cart to switch between the boards to let it know where to load the data from. Effectively, what you're doing if you're adding memory to a cart, is you are rewriting the electric, like the hardware of the cart header to tell it how many banks it has and what is in them. You are rewriting all of the code to direct things, into the new bank you're creating where it needs to go,

and then you're creating the entire new bank. So you are doing some form of hardware engineering in recreating a header. You are doing a bunch of reverse engineering and rewriting of the original ROM, and you are doing the expansion pack. That level of work is very difficult to, it's difficult to describe how monumentally brain-burning,

that kind of thing is, especially for the Super Nintendo, which is not an easy system to do development for. Yeah. And so, Steve, my analogy would be like, it's like taking your house from two stories to three stories by sticking an extra floor in between them. Yeah, that is literally what it is.

That is an excellent way to describe it. I actually remember something that Mato said when he was localizing Mother 3, he said that just going through the way everything was laid out, this game was not meant to be localized. And he had to basically work around all of that in addition to doing that translation, which was excellent, one of the best versions of it, translation for sure. Yeah, and we'll get to talk about Medo a little bit later in this episode, too,

because he's done some genuinely incredible work in the rom hacking scene. But, yeah, like, you want to talk about why Mother 3 is never going to get an official translation. It is because it is not worth the money or time for Nintendo to figure out how to bother to do that. What makes it so unique, like, in a nutshell, I don't remember exactly. For Mother 3? Yeah. I'm not sure. I'm going to trust your recollection of her to made it I said because I'm going to trust that guy 1,000 billion percent if he says that Mother 3 was never designed to be translated. Yeah, absolutely. So we can get into that and we can get into a little bit about the games themselves. Like we've gone over a little bit of the,

I guess it's worth mentioning too that I kind of left out here was Kyzo. I don't pay a lot of attention to Kaiser. But is there a Kaiser Final Fantasy or is it just Kylo? Let's think of Mario when I think of Kaiser. There are challenge hacks for like Final Fantasy for Final Fantasy for Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy 1, which is guessing kind of the spirit and, like, ideology of Kaizzo, but I can't think of, like, anything that's specifically branded as a Kaiser Final Fantasy. That stuff seems to be pretty explicitly relegated to platformers. Yeah.

I mean, it's easy to hurt yourself in Final Fence if you want to go with the four white mage party, see what happens. But I think it's what's talking, Nadia, before we get into the specific discussion of hacks, but what makes this so interesting is I feel like. Like, you know, for the longest time, a lot of hacking was about, like, proving how hardcore you were. Because if you were getting pointers around, you were going to crank all the numbers up to 255 and just show everybody you are. And go crazy with it. And what's been really interesting about this is there's kind of a new philosophy as people approach these games, which is, well, what instead of making them harder, we made them better?

You know, like maybe as great as these games are and as beloved as they are that the game design decisions of 1986, they're not completely sacrosanced and that our thing we can do to make them more approachable. And I think that there's another element to this too, which is we've talked a little bit about like who is the steward of Final Fantasy? Like, what does it mean to continue to play these games? What is quality of life? Like, part of what I think is doing this is younger people are getting involved in ROM hacking. Like people our age really did start with the nesical thing making stuff like mega crap.

If you are familiar with that one. Good old mega crap. I remember that one. Mega crap. It's really bad. Please do not look at images. Do not Google that if you are a listener. Oh, boy. It's all about crap. But yeah, like how we graduated from that and like extensive difficulty rom hacks, which are designed for people who have played these games, 5, 10, 20, 15 times, you know, 50 times, whatever. It's becoming accessible for players who are new to it or adding something that you thought should have been there rather than just, I want to keep playing it, but I want to keep playing it.

want it to be harder for me. And I think some of the people who are looking at these ROM hacks weren't necessarily around and eight years old when these games came out originally and playing them. I think they may be in their 20s or 30s and kind of coming to these eight and 16 big games with a fresh pair of eyes, which is great. So, yeah, like, and yeah, like you were talking about the quality of life stuff. Like, there's all sorts of accessibility things which people are doing in terms of like increasing fonts or adding dyslexic-friendly fonts or removing flashes from older game.

There's colorization hacks for like Mega Man and Kirby games on the Game Boy. There's recolorization hacks for Game Boy Advance because, as you probably know, but those games had the brightness turned all the way up because the backlight. And so people have gone through and redone the palette to be something which looks better when you play it on the analog pocket or your Mr. or a modern TV screen that can actually display colors correctly. That's actually a good hack right there because I can't stand the way Game Boy advanced games look when they're that bright. Yeah, I think it's worth mentioning that another thing driving this is improved, more cycle-accurate emulation, FPGA's stuff like the analog pocket, which has the programmable FPGA in it.

These, like, effectively consumer-grade accessible emulation that you can plug into your TV or carry to bed with you is another real reason why this stuff I think is, Like, for sure. Not just kind of like gaining steam and prominence a little bit right now, like just in how people are kind of talking about and starting to notice it. But also it's like it's a fantastic platform. Like I love my pocket. Like the steam deck emulation is one of the favorite things. I was going to say, yeah, the steam deck. Yeah, there we go.

Hey, I made a joke and I didn't even know it. And Nadia, I don't know how much you're aware, but there's this whole burgeoning Chinese retro gaming scene of devices kind of. anywhere from like $25 to $200. Oh, yeah. You know, and a lot of them are pretty good because they've been doing it for several years at this point. They've been iterating. They've actually started sourcing 4-3 iPS screens.

It's 640 by 480, so everything is pixel accurate. Like, it's really the amount of time and care that these companies have put into making great ways to play these old games so they don't look stretched or blurry or bad the way that emulation has. Yeah, for sure. The handheld market, there's no shortage of choice. There's obviously huge. The Switch has proved that, like, everyone wants to play games on handheld.

They mentioned the Steam Deck, which I think a lot of emulator, people interested in emulation, especially, you know, younger people are going to be exposed to these games and these patches. So it's, even though it's never been more ways to play these games. Exactly. Hey, everybody, it's Hey everybody, it's Bob here with quite possibly the most relevant ad read I've ever done for Retronauts. Now, why is that? Because it's for something I'd be telling you about, even if I wasn't being paid to. If you're listening to Retronauts, you probably have an interest in how video games are made.

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one. You mentioned that's a very in-depth topic. And that is probably the Final Fantasy game that needs the most in the way of tuning up. Yeah. I mean, Steve, you want to talk a little bit about the programming of Final Fantasy. Yeah, I can, I'll go ahead and I'll give a little bit of background on the Final Fantasy thing. So Final Fantasy is one of those games that is like legitimately held together by tape and string. People who are Retronauts listeners probably know it's called Final Fantasy because Square was worried it would be their final game. Like it was the make or break game for them. It had to sell or they would go under. And they really did have a truly incredible creative team there.

But most importantly, they had a gentleman from, is he Iranian? I think he's Iranian. Nassir Kabili is an Iranian programmer who is like known as the god of the 65-02, the Nintendo chip. He is just like one of the most genius programmer. He's a guy that John Carmack thinks is the best programmer of all time. shit yeah that's a yes that's how talented this guy is he's basically the one person who wrote final fantasy and that game works and it's fun and it's really good but it has a

bajillion bugs in it like none of the elemental weapons work i love that like there are so many spells that don't work like temper doesn't work there are spells that are bugged there's black belts are not supposed to be as powerful they are as they are yes that's right the black belt scaling is super weird. And some of that is design stuff, like maybe, I think the Black Belt thing is partially a bug and partially no one was really thinking about what that curve looks like when you put it on paper. And this is where the ROM hacks start to come in, right?

Because one of the easiest things you can do is go in and fix the bugs. And one of the things that, so here's another thing that I think I should mention that is really important for Final Fantasy ROM hacking is there is a full disassembly of Final Fantasy. one available, which means someone has taken the cart and taken all the bits off of it and written it in assembly for a 6502 assembler, including all the sprite sheets, all the data and everything. So you can go in and look at what is effectively the source code of Final Fantasy right now. And you can use that to figure out, well, where in the cart is this stuff located, or

I'm just going to take this disassembly, change things, and rebuild it. have Final Fantasy, but with my changes in it. And Steve, I think is worth kind of interjecting here is a lot of the ROM hacks we're going to talk about, even if they are attributed to one person, they're bringing in these bugfix hacks. They're bringing in these assembly repairs. The community is very good at sharing things. And so, you know, there's like fixing the spells that don't work is one thing.

Like adding lowercase letters is another thing. Giving you the ability to buy potions 10 at a time instead of one at a time when you go to the store is something that is discreetly able to be applied. And so people take these individual pieces. They make sure that they're not stepping on each other's toes inside of the great rom hack shuffle. And they bundle them together to get all these quality of life fixes and all these bug fixes which persist from version to version, which is great. Yeah. Because once one person has done the research of how to fix the bugs and get things set up, like it's set. No one else needs it anymore. It's the ROM. The ROM is the ROM.

It'll never change versions. It'll never be updated. It's a binary. You can check summit to make sure that it's got all the right data and isn't corrupted in any way. And then you can apply your patch. So if we want to talk about some of the specific ROM hacks, by the way, most of these you can get at a site called ROMhacking.net. They're patches, IPS patch or Delta patch. You need a copy of the ROM.

You need the patch. You need a patcher to apply the patch to the ROM. What the patcher does is it changes the bytes of the ROM from the old version, which is the retail version of the ROM, to the new version, which is the hacked version of the ROM. It's pretty straightforward. I'm sure there's some guy on YouTube who will... It's extremely easy to patch. I use Lunar RP, and it's very quick and you're done.

On ROMHacking.net, you can look in the utilities section, and you will find as many patching tools as you can imagine for download. But Lunar IPS is probably the one you want to go for. yeah um so what we'll talk a lot about final fantasy one we talked about the bugs and stuff too yeah i mentioned this earlier but one of the reasons i think final fantasy one is so fun to hack is because it's such a structured game there's there's four heroes there's four orbs there's four elements there's four big bosses and like you can take these things and shuffle them around the map and shuffle the order that you you experience them and you know it's very easy to

look at it like Lego bricks almost and to kind of, you know, when you're when you're hacking a game like Final Fantasy 6, like, who boy, like you can do anything. And with Final Fantasy 1, because of the simplicity of it, you're like, you know, it's like changing a early D&D campaign or something. Like you read the campaign and you're like, well, I have some great ideas about how I want to switch this up. Yeah. It is useful to think of Final Fantasy 1 as literally a D&D campaign because it's kind of what it is. Yeah. And it's and think of Final Fantasy 1 Romack. as like I want to expand rules for my table session of this day and D game or I want to like adjust the quest from the storybook for this like it really is just I want to be the dungeon

master of final fantasy one yeah which that's essentially what you are for better for worse but most of these final fantasy one hacks are pretty great yeah the the one that I played first was one called Gran's final fantasy um which I would say is we're going to use this phrase a lot but like a director's cut of Final Fantasy. But, you know, it like expands the spell list and the item names so that they're really large. It fixes the elemental bugs. It makes it so you can use almost any spell as an AOE. It updates the graphics and the color palettes.

It makes it so you gain experience when you die. It makes it so that harm spells attack more evil enemies, not just the undead. that you can run. This is something that a lot of hacks add is press B to run. Oh, that's a good one because running is a real ordeal in the original Final Fantasy. I can never do it. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I was actually talking about running on the overworld.

Oh, I thought I meant running away from battle. Push me to. Push B to make character move faster. That's a good. That's always still a really great hack. That's the first thing I find people add. And it's a good thing to add. Yeah.

It is such a good thing to add that Final Fantasy 6 has an item you can equip that gives it to you. Yes. But a lot of people also make it so you can automatically escape from battles or you can turn on or off as you're exploring the map. But yeah, but this particular version is just like, it just feels like the Final Fantasy one of your dreams. Like it's not changed. The text is mostly the same, though the order that you do everything and is exactly. the same, but it's just like, oh, the items have 12 letter names with lowercase letters. Yeah, or instead of having a spell called amut. What the hell is an ammit? It doesn't work

anyway. It doesn't matter. Exactly. Yeah, no, exactly. But yeah, just fixing it and just playing it again is, it's beautiful. And it has some, as many of these games do as well, some extra stuff at the end that you can experience. And this is something that I think a lot of them have done. Again, in many ways, kind of following the example that Square themselves set with the GBA games. But the idea for a lot of these is minimal touch, light touch on kind of the main game to make it the best version that it can be. And then when you get to the end game, add an extra dungeon or two, add some super bosses, add some crazy weapon style stuff, which, which again, is something that was not the style of the time. It was really kind of about with PlayStation and Final Fantasy 7 with their capital double weapons. that these super bosses, optional bosses at the endgame

became such a big thing. And so a lot of these hacks go in and at that sort of thing. You know, just as an aside, I was thinking about you said Final Fantasy 7 on the PlayStation. They did re-release a lot of the Final Fantasy games on the PlayStation, but they were not very good ports, especially Final Fantasy 5, the localization. I think most of us played the ROM hat of the good localization before we saw, like, Y Byrne and all the other stuff. if they gave us on the PlayStation. Yeah, and that's not even mentioning how bad the PlayStation load times are. That's terrible.

It is the worst possible way to experience any of those games. There really is. I was shocked at the low times. Like, they were terrible on Chrome Trigger. I did play that version of Final Fantasy 4, which gave us a very strange translation to this day. But, yeah, Final Fantasy 1, definitely a lot of fertile ground for adding ROM hacks, especially. Did you mention an ATB hack for Final Fantasy? Yeah, there's one called Manal's Final Fantasy, M-A-M-A-L, which kind of allows you to enter the inputs as they go and really changes the battle system to be more of an ATB thing.

And then there's one called Ultra Champion Edition. I love that. Do you throw fireballs in the air? If only. But that one is very much like a remix. Like I would strongly recommend that one if you're like, I want to play Final Fantasy one like I'm eight again and don't know the map and don't know where things are or what order. things. No, thanks. I'm good. Well, you know, yeah. But, you know, it's definitely like, again, one of the, one of the quality of life changes that people very often make the Final Fantasy One hacks is getting rid of ports so you can actually dock your ship anywhere on the world now. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that also allows

them to be a little bit more open world in some ways in terms of allowing you to explore more dynamically, which I think brings us to kind of our first randomizer. You want to chat about that, Steve. Yeah, the Final Fantasy One randomizer. So like we were talking about, it's a very structured game, four bosses, four orbs, and the randomizer is just, okay, I do not want to say it is just a randomizer, because that really downplays some of the stuff that's in there, like the quality of life fixes, pushman run, remove flashing and the poison damage tile sound effect kind of stuff. that. Yes. This is actually one of the most important things to mention. If you are photosensitive and have never been able to play a Final Fantasy game because of the flashing effects when you

step on a damage tile, these ROM hacks let you turn those damage flashing effects off. Nice. They are photosensitive friendly, which I think is... That's important. Yeah, it's important. It's the kind of thing that you don't really think about unless you're someone who it might affect or you know someone who it might affect. And if you're a ROM hacker, you're more likely to know that person And then if you work at Square Annex. But so the randomizer does things like, all right, the most basic version is I'm just going to shuffle around the locations of the key items that unlock the different dungeons. I still go and defeat the four fiends and then I go still and defeat chaos at the end. But there are other interesting variations like, we're not going to give you the airship.

You do not get the airship. We've added a couple of extra docks to the world map and we've added a land bridge somewhere. that you can cross without the ship if you can't find it early enough, but no airship for you. Or you get the airship at the beginning, and there are no docks, and you don't care about that. You go wherever. You can shuffle spells and spell levels. You can shuffle spells between the black and white spell pool, I think, now. Like, there's some, if it can potentially be randomized, it can be flipped around in that

randomizer. And because of some of the balance problems, like say, specifically, With the black belt, there's balance curve fixes as well that you can adjust in here. Or you can explicitly turn them off because you're playing a randomizer and you want to have four black belts that you get up to level 30, like level 30 really fast. And then you just crush absolutely everything. Like it's a really, really great thing. It's worth mentioning that the randomizer is not available on rumhacking.net. And it's not a traditional patch because it is intended to generate.

a new ROM that surprises you every time. If you apply to patch, you'd know what you were getting. And people do play randomizers competitively. Watching randomizer streams is actually pretty fun if you're a person who enjoys doing video game observation. But yeah, you go to the website, you plug your Final Fantasy ROM into the uploader, you toggle the little boxes to tell it what you want it to do

for the map for the game that you get out of it and generates you a new ROM to download. And you can go play your Final Fantasy 1 Rando. Is there an option where you can make, like, Warmec the only enemy that you see on the map? Okay. So there, you cannot do that. However, I believe that there is a guaranteed Warmec flag, which requires you to fight Warmec before Tiamat. It, like, adds Warmec as a required boss. I believe there is also a no Warmec patch, which prevents you from encountering Warmec on the bridge of destiny. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, it's, and again, that, that's a very extreme case, but I feel. like that flexibility is something that really appeals to to people who play these games over

and over. So, and I just saw this, because I have not looked at the Final Fantasy randomizer since like version 3. Apparently, the latest version, version 4.6, adds procedurally generated overworld, explore a completely new, randomly generated overworld. Oh, my God. So you could just literally play Final Fantasy forever now if that was your thing. Well, that's Final Fantasy 14. Well, yeah, that is Final Fantasy 14.

But no, that actually sounds really cool. A little less accessible than Final Fantasy 14, but yeah, I was very bad at the first Final Fantasy game. So something like at least a balancing ROM or the Grom's Final Fantasy, something like that would probably appeal to me. Although I've played several remakes never really got into Final Fantasy. I think another one that is, it's a very simple hack that's worth kind of mentioning. It's called the Vancey and Magic Patch for. final fantasy one does not work with MP because it was designed around D&D style spell memorization and having its charges i maximum charges uh the most maximum spells you know if you add

mp and ether is in the ability to scum your way um it's easier but it's so easier that it trivializes a lot of what's going on so this is just a patch that brings the original memorization charge style magic system back into the game boy advanced game which if you want to play the extra content, I would actually strongly recommend applying that patch because I think it makes it a unique and cool version of the game. And then the last one I would mention is actually not a ROM hack at all. And it's called Final Fantasy Renaissance. And if you Google it, you should be able to find it. And that's kind of a rebuild of Final Fantasy, where they have recreated the game in Unity. Oh, interesting. And you can play in traditional mode or you can play in

Renaissance mode. And Renaissance mode adds new classes, new bosses, and things like blue mages, dancers, like traditional Final Fantasy classes. And it also adds a like variability on the overall world according to who your party leader is. People will say different things to you and you can find different paths and get different results from talking to people depending on who's out there. And so again, it's not quite a randomizer, but it's like, you know, if you've done four black belts if you've done four white mages and you're like i just want to keep playing and replaying final fantasy but with a geomancer from you know because because again almost all the new classes they've added are from later final fantasy games because there's so much fertile ground

to till there um this game final fantasy renaissance is a way to just kind of play it over and over again and get a unique but still traditional feeling experience each time that you go through yeah absolutely man people have put a lot of work and like Renaissance sounds like it's probably been under like work for a very long time like people just keep adding to it and adding to it yeah and again like Steve said a lot of these are still in active development um yeah it's been in development for five plus years they have uh they have really active communities whether those are message boards or discords or whatnot you know like people are excited when new patches come out providing feedback and direct communication and that that sense of involvement is is great

you know it's just like oh people who want to replay final fantasy one as much as me um like i would say that um final fantasy two and final fantasy three didn't quite have the same fan support as final fantasy one no no no quite as full of it um yeah the the funny thing is there really aren't any final fantasy two rom hacks to speak of that are of any interest the there's a final fantasy four rom hack that turns final fantasy four into final fantasy two Final Fantasy 2 is so bad that you should just play Final Fantasy 4 and pretend it's Final Fantasy 2

That is the recommended It's actually a good, same with like, I find Final Fantasy 3 instead of just going to play Final Fantasy 5 and pretend it's Final Fantasy 3 Yeah, so what's funny is It's called Final Fantasy C2 And it was actually translated by Mato Our Good Mother 3 friend

He worked on that ROM hack there And it's It is a Final Fantasy 4 ROM hack But it adds the plot and the characters of Final Fantasy 2. So you can have a normal ATB system and a normal leveling system and a normal spell learning system

and get the experience of playing through Final Fantasy 2 without ever actually having to play Final Fantasy 2, which is really ideal. That is actually a pretty good idea. Yeah, Final Fantasy 2 is really unfortunate in that I don't think that it's a fixable game. Like not even by a ROM hacking community

with a dozen or a couple dozen people working on it over 10 or 15 years. I would love to be proven wrong, but I don't think that that game can be saved. I think that if you want to play Final Fantasy 2, you're going to be playing the C2 hack or like go pick up Saga 3 or something. Go pick up.

That's actually good recommendation right there. What is it about Final Fantasy 2? Is it because of the experience system, the way it's all kind of weird? It's so that you can't change the curve because it's just a car crash going off the road. Right.

How would I feel? fix Final Fantasy 2, the game where I have to get hit for my HP to go up, but I have to get hit not so hard that I die. So it's not really worth it either. How would you fix that? The fundamental premise of it is so bad. Yeah. It seemed like a good idea on paper, I guess.

It does seem like a good idea on paper. And I think one of the Final Fantasy 2 ROM hacks that we did find, Andrew, is legitimately always gives HP on certain level ups no matter what. so that you can actually finish the game. You can make Final Fantasy 2, playable and finishable. You cannot make it good. Okay, that's fair enough. But, you know, the best to do is still better than vanilla, let me tell you.

Yeah, it is better than the treatment that I got in the Renaissance package, in the remaster package, for sure. Yeah, so the best thing you do is make us that you don't get smacked in the face every single time you need to level up. It's just, not as much. For Final Fantasy 3, I actually really would strongly recommend people just play the Pixel Remaster. I think that's by far the best English language version that we've gotten. There is a patch by a guy named Mazom, M-A-E-S-O-N, who has gone in and rebalanced it to make it a little bit more approachable for modern audiences.

He's actually done a lot of really cool rebalances. We'll talk about them maybe briefly at the end, kind of some non-Fimal Fantasy hacks. But his thing is all the games you're talking about, Nadia, that are like, 80% of the way there, but didn't quite get across the finish line. And they're great and they're great and beloved games. They're just not good gameplay or not as good as it could be with the benefit of hindsight. And so he kind of goes in and rebalances them to, so you can take advantage of all the skills that your characters have instead of just spanning the one skill over and over that

was shipped overbalanced in the original. I have a very distinct memory of actually one of the first things I downloaded was a translation of Final Fantasy 3. not very good. I don't think it was halfway done. So I'd abandon that very quickly. Final Fantasy 3, I think, was one of the first ROMs that had to, it needed ROM expansion in order to fit the English text because it was so full on the Japanese side. And ROM expansion wasn't there when people started it. So a lot of people, I think like two or three different teams got like halfway through. And they were like, well, I can't finish this until people

started figuring out how to shuffle the pointers around. That would probably make a lot of sense. You know, I'm going to know, I'm going to know, You know, I'm going to be.

Hi friends, it's your favorite Retronauts co-host, Jeremy. Contemplating a question, people ask me a lot. How do you keep so many different games media projects going at once? I don't really know the answer to that. And if we're being completely honest, they can tell you that good organizational skills haven't factored into it at all. Between coordinating Retronauts, publishing weekly videos, before turning that material into books,

and having a full-time gig where I juggle half a dozen other people's books at once. It's tricky, and I've made it even. harder on myself by taking an absolutely chaotic approach to everything. So when I heard about Notion, a collaborative shared project management system, I wanted to give it a try. I've dabbled in all sorts of different software services, from the plain text doc where I keep track of my video projects to the scalable database boards we use at work. And the truth is, they've all been pretty deficient. Today I'm excited to share that they just launched Notion Projects, which includes new, powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features, too.

Notion Projects combines project management with your docs, knowledge base, and AI, so you can stop jumping between tools and stop paying too much for them, too. Projects gives you a huge variety of different features ranging from shared task tracking to wiki-based info and collaboration, all in a single workspace. It's massively customizable, allowing you to quickly and easily create spaces for you to work solo or coordinate a massive team, handing out assignments and allowing contributors to be involved directly. And it incorporates AI the way it's actually supposed to be used, not too. to generate a bunch of boring mountains behind Mona Lisa or create soulless movie scripts, but to save you time by simplifying wrote tasks and automatically handling the repetitive, boring parts of project management so that you can spend more time creating.

I've already migrated my entire video planning system to Norton, replacing a chaotic little text doc with a full database that allows me to keep track of where I am at every step of the process, from script writing to capturing footage to producing the actual episode. My next step is moving retronauts creaking, overloaded episode planning, spreadsheet into Notion, so that our half a dozen hosts and even more cover illustrators can take an active hand in Retronauts planning without fear of accidentally breaking our aging planning doc. In other words, Retronauts is powered by Notion, and you can be too. Do your most

efficient work with Notion projects. You can try it for free today at notion.com slash retro. That's all lowercase letters. N-O-T-I-O-N-com slash R-E-T-R-O. When you use our link, you're supporting our show. So go right now to notion.com slash retro. But now we get to Final Fantasy 4. Yes, now that has a lot going for. Not as much as one, but a lot. Yeah. And there's one here called a Final Fantasy Ultima, Final Fantasy 4 Ultima,

which is a beautiful, wonderful ROM hack. I would describe it as the, not the director's cut, but the criterion collection re-release of Final Fantasy 4. It has not just your kind of standard quality of life issues, but it has like a full bestiary with all the drops that everybody has. It has information about spells and items, what their elements are, which characters can equip them. Like they didn't just do QOL stuff on the balancing.

Like they hacked in whole new menu systems in order to really like make the game playable and approachable. And then it has the standard endgame stuff where you get there, you can go to the Lunar Whale and you can switch between 11 different party members. Right. You can switch Cecil back and forth between Paladin and Dark Knight, which is pretty... Oh, that's cool. Yeah, they actually, again, kind of added an in-game lore reason that he can return to his Dark Knight powers right there at the very end. There's a few new boss encounters added throughout the game, but very sparingly, like the first time you get to a Chocobo forest, you have to fight off a zoo to save the Chocobos or something.

So just minor things to kind of keep you on your toes. But this particular version, again, is also highly rebalanced to make, like, you can use edge in your party if you like him now. He is not the worst character of all time. I don't know about that one. So, yeah, I mean, he's still a terrible character, but his fighting ability. But you can replace him with Yang anyway, so you're good. Yeah, exactly. And you should.

But again, there's also a ton of extra bosses, a ton of extra dungeons. a lot of really super hardcore, almost like puzzle bosses. And that's something we're going to talk a lot about in Final Fantasy 6, but these bosses where it's not just big number win. Yeah. You know, but it's like, all right, so you think you're cool at Final Fantasy.

And there's some of these in the traditional series, maybe like, like, Asura and Final Fantasy 4 where you have to use Wall in order to counteract. I also think Final Fantasy DS was a game like that. Like, oh, you think you go to Final Fantasy 4? No. Yeah, but you're bad at that game for different reasons. That's true.

Yeah. But yeah, the ultimate version of Final Fantasy 4 is, it's replaced the PSB version for me as kind of like my go-to. Oh, really? Because that's my favorite to date. Even a pixel remaster doesn't match it. Yeah, I might have to get that to try. And the other thing, Nadia, I'm sure you know, but you go back to replay Final Fantasy 4, and especially with the quality of life, the dashing, the ability to turn on or off encounters

is when you don't want to. It's a 12-hour game. Like, you can... Two seconds flat. Yeah. No, my pixel remaster play-through was that. And there's a new game plus mode in it as well, which is really cool. And when you get to new game plus, it actually ups the level limit and the HP limit above, like, level 99 and 999 HP.

So you can kind of like limit burst your way on the new game to even greater heights, which can help you kind of overpower some of the, those super bosses, if you couldn't get them on the original play-through, you're like, well, now, now big number does win. Yeah. So, then there's also, there's a, there's a version called naming way edition. I was wondering about that, yeah. Which I think is super cool, because there's, there's one of these for Final Fantasy

6 as well, called the Ted Woolsey uncensored edition, which is funny, because when I heard the name, I thought they were saying, like, we're uncensoreding Ted Woolsey. What they meant was, it's uncensored. And we love Ted Woolsey. Yes. But these games have been, they've been translated by square two or three times. They've been fan translated. Meadow on his website, Legends of Localization, has gone through and done comparisons of all the different kinds of.

I've seen that. It's really good. The original Japanese. So what people have done and what the naming way edition is, is they're like, what's the definitive? It's like people who are going over the Bible. Like, like, what are the four different translations of this? which of these is the closest to the original meaning and intent. All right, let's bring that one in.

But it's great to see because for the longest time, and I mentioned at the start, I do work in game translation, so I have strong opinions about this. But for the longest time, the people who were making the translation patches were very often the people who are like literal translations only. Like the more machine translated, the better. The more the grammar sounds like Japanese grammar, the better. that's how you know

it's a quality translation because the subject verb order is inverted that's how you know genuine no yeah and but the there's again I think it's kind of this younger audience that's coming into this thing is like

of course they want it to be accurate to the intent and meaning of the original Japanese but that doesn't mean literal to them and so this means taking a look at the different translations the way that different translators have approached the same issues and over at different times and then selecting what they believe to be the best or most definitive version of that

and putting it all together in a single patch. So you can get the best of the Super Nintendo translation and the Game Boy Translation. Like, again, the Game Boy translation in general is much better than the Super Nintendo translation, with the exception of the Lunar Whale poem, which is terrible. And I actually should. It is. Why does the Lunar Whale poem get worse, the better translated this game gets? The weirdest thing.

The one on DS is incomprehensible. It's one of those things where it's like the Woosley Magic, right? Like, he reads the original text, and he does what a great localizer does, which is figure out a way to present that text to an English reader that captures the intent and vibe of the original work. Like, especially for something that's meant to have, like, emotional and story impact, like the Lunar Whales poem. I don't think he did two, though, with Final Fantasy. Oh, he didn't do, he didn't do four. No, no. I actually did an interview with him on that.

It's really interesting. They brought him in because four was such a mess. That's right. I think we need a translator. this who now i really wonder who originally did that poem because whoever did it did a great job they did yeah yeah i mean final fantasy four has issues but it's issues are not the issues you might expect going back to it nowadays like it's pretty okay for the time i think it's certainly better than like you were getting with like breath of fire one or something yeah especially too yeah um so so yeah so yeah

so yeah so like the again the naming way edition here is like a a script cleanup you know kind of to to make it as ideal as possible. Shout out to the, one of the reasons I got drama hacking, like I said earlier was for translations and shout out to the quote-unquote genuine translations that just had the F word because that's what actually said in Japan.

What does Kuso mean? What does Kuso mean everything apparently? Yeah, it's like how if you were, you were translating into French and like you just have a character saying, Zittalos! I'm in Canada, so it'd be Tabernak. Oh, that's true. Cecil saying Tavernack up and down.

And then there's a great randomizer that has some of the best runs in a fantastic community for Final Fantasy 4. I should get into the randomization because I'm really way into Final Fantasy 4 and I feed it like several times over. Time for me to randomize. Time for me to woman up. Yeah, Free Enterprise is the Final Fantasy 4 randomizer. It is actually the first Final Fantasy randomizer encounter. They've been doing this for a really long time. It's really good.

One of the things that I think about it. And I know that we haven't really talked about this too much, but the community around Free Enterprise is fairly young, like incredibly queer and diverse, like very accepting. Their Discord is actually like super great, and they do regular speed run races of different generated ROMs for the Rando. All the things you'd expect. I think that's worth mentioning when people do these runs,

you can get the same seed. So everyone's running this random version of the game. Exactly. That's why it's generated from a website. It's that multiple people can get the same ROM and no one knows what's in it. Free Enterprise has like some really good, good rando stuff. I don't think that it's as wild as the Final Fantasy One randomizer. But you can do things like you steal J items and use the Japanese item drop table instead of the American one.

You scale bosses stronger rather than weaker. You have the ability to turn on and off encounters or you can either swap it on the fly or you can just say no encounters for anybody. You can enable or disable as many glitches as you want. There's there are, I think, I think that there are still hiding in there somewhere. The April Fool's flags, which includes a push B to jump. where if you jump, you can jump over tiles. And that is actually a really, really fascinating way to play this game, too. It's totally stupid.

Nobody would ever play Final Fantasy 4 that way. But it turns out it's really fun to do it once. And I think one of the hilarious things, too, I think, is that they have managed to take a lot of the weird community memes and actually inject them into the ROMs themselves so that when you are doing a playthrough, you will be surprised. Yes. That's the other thing that I think is really interesting about free enterprise is that it's not just a like a programmer and developer-centric. They have a lot of artists and musicians. So the Zeromas Sprite at the end of a run is randowed out of a pool of, I think, over 700 sprites. And the twin harp music, I think, is randowed out of a pool of over 300 songs. Oh, my God. That'd be great. So, yeah, you know, you'll get the twin harp and it'll start playing no diggedy. And you're like, oh, yeah. I don't know if they have no diggedy, but maybe they should.

Yeah, 301, make it happen. Or, like, zero mess will be like Charles Barkley from Berkeley shut up and jam. They do have it, yeah, they have Barclay from Barclay shop and Jam. Yeah. So, but it's, but it's always great too, especially in a, uh, in a, in a speed run competition because whoever gets to zero most first is the person who gets to reveal to the stream, like what the particular seed for this ROM is. So everyone is out, it's shack and it's the, it's the same thing with Twin Harp.

Like, if you are watching a stream and there's people doing commentating, they're always going to be, like, if Twin Harp is a required objective, whether it's to complete the cave or to just get the item and then, or to play the song, like, whatever the objective ends up being. Like, people get really excited for that when that shows up in a required objective on stream. Like, it's, it is fascinating the way that the community around that is actually more important than the content of the Romack itself. Although the ROM hack itself is really great. And it's also super simple. I think it's out of all of randomizer ROM hacks everywhere in the world. If you wanted to try just one, I would say that it would be Final Fantasy for Free Enterprise. If you have played through Final Fantasy for maybe twice and you know where all the items and bosses are as a result of that, you can absolutely complete it.

Like roll yourself a beginner set of flags and go through, try it out. You'll probably finish it in like 90 minutes to two hours. like I did, and maybe you'll have a great time and want to play more of it, or maybe you'll be done. And that's what's really nice about, you mentioned the beginner flags. I think that's something that's really nice is you can kind of tune the difficulty as well as kind of like, how well have you memorized Final Fantasy Four? Like, would you say that, like, because, you know, there's like, oh, I played Final Fantasy

four multiple times and I know all the layout of all the dungeons. I'm so smart. And then there's like, I know every item in every treasure chest. I know the monster table of every tile, you know, like that level of manipulation required to kind of get to the end. Yeah, for sure. But mostly it's just fun and funny. And I, you know, I talk about the community around Final Fantasy 4 Ultima, around the Final Fantasy One Renaissance. Like there's all these great communities around these hacks, which I think is because these, you know, these games are a lot of people's favorite games or one of their favorite games.

And so finding people who love these games as much as you, even if you don't talk about the games, you feel like you found your tribe. You feel like you can hang out with these people and goof with them. They speak internet is what I usually say. Oh, thank God. Yeah. They speak ROM hack. So Final Fantasy 5... Yeah, what about five?

Despite being so early in the English translation patch story, there's not a lot of gameplay hacks for it, which is really surprising to me. My theory is that Final Fantasy 5 is the perfectly balanced game, as we know from four-job fiesta. Any possible combination of characters can enjoy and complete the title. And therefore, there's no reason to make any balanced patches. And everyone just moved on to them. Everyone, so this is perfect. I do find it even with the Pixar Remaster, leveling up your jobs can be very slow.

And no one's really done anything about that. That's, I think, where it's not really rebalances, but there are things like increase the amount of AP that you get from battles, turn on always sprint, so you don't have to equip sprint, turn on always learning, so you don't have to equip learning to learn a blue magic spell. Oh, yeah, that'd be nice. Yeah. Yeah, you know, so there's definitely quality of life features, for sure. Like, trust me, file fantasy five can use them.

But there's not a, there's not a ton of rebounds. The classes themselves are mostly just kind of left alone. But, yeah, Steve, you mentioned at the start of this, your love of ancient cave. So what about the history of Ancient Cave 2 before we get to? Yeah. So Ancient Cave is, let's actually start with a little bit of even further background here, which is that Lufia 2 for the Super Nintendo, a perfectly mid-game with some really great puzzles and boss battles in it,

has a 99-floor semi-procedurally generated dungeon called the Ancient Cave. And in Japan, like, Ancient Cave is a huge deal. People love that stuff. They love Shear and the Wanderer. They love Mystery Dungeon. So one of the first, like, real rom hacks to come out of Japan that, like, remixed a game into something new is what was called Final Fantasy 5 Ancient Cave, which is, what if we took Final Fantasy 5 and put it in the framework of Lufia II ancient cave? So every floor is randomized. You all start at level one.

Everything is in chess, spells, classes. equipment, and then like every five floors or whatever, you've got to fight a boss and the objective is to just go as long as you can. One of the biggest innovations, I think, that ancient cave put on top of it is there's a 15-minute timer. Every time you finish a floor, you get a little bit of extra time. So it also has the feeling of one of my favorite game modes of all time, which is Max Payne's New York minute mode, where you have to constantly kill stuff to keep your timer up. And then that combined with, sorry? That's just crazy taxi. That is just crazy taxi. You are correct. Crazy taxi is also a great example of this. But like, yeah, Ancient Cave is kind of the grandfather in many ways of this. And a friend of the show, Jeremy Parrish. Yeah. Hey, that dude. The reason why there's an English translation of this and I know about it is somebody on his forum in the early 2010s discovered this Japanese rom hack and was like, whoa, this is really cool. And then a bunch of us started playing it, and we were like, well, we can kind of do this, but we don't know Japanese.

So it'd be really great if this was in English. And the fellow who showed up to do the translation, SkyRender, who I think I'd done some retranslation. Yeah. Yeah, some retranslation patches in the past. I was like, all right, I'll just put together a quick English patch for this in like a couple of days and y'all can beta test it. And so for about two months, I was legitimately playing nothing but ancient cave. And it is the kind of game that you can do that with. Again, 15-minute timer.

It's actually a legit roguelight coffee break kind of game. I don't know. I'm going to be able to We're going to be able to be. ...andahs, ...toe... ...their... ...with...

...and... ...the... ...the... ...and... ...and... ...and... ...and... ...and...

And that brings us to the granddaddy of all Final Fantasy games and the granddaddy of all Final Fantasy Hacks, which is Final Fantasy Six. Yes. T edition. T edition. T edition F-F-F-6-T-E What's the T-Sand-for? Sui, the author. Is that how you pronounce it, Andrew?

Tsui, I think. So this is another tomato special. Tomato is the fellow who did the translation, and he actually did a bunch of streaming sessions where he developed and used tools to kind of like live translate and demonstrate how he works. I remember that. That was really interesting. Yes. Those are all archived. Everyone could go watch them. T-Edition itself is, I don't know if I want to call it Director's Cut or Criterion Edition, but it's definitely the biggest and wildest of all of these. It is so big, it is actually two cards.

Wow. T-addition and T-addition E-X. T-E-X is like a huge amount of challenge dungeons and bosses, and I will never in a million years play it, because I'm not even done with T-edition, and my clock. is at 90 hours. Wow. I still have three of the new dungeons to go, and it is, like, truly amazing. So T-addition is really a collection of balances and a few minor story adjustments, along with, like, total equipment rebalancing, total ESPR rebalancing, total spell

rebalancing. Everything about Final Fantasy 6 has been reconsidered, right down to the enemy pool. enemies are not just the Final Fantasy 6 enemies anymore. You get enemies from like Final Fantasy 11 and 8 and 3 and 5. So it is really like a, it is sort of a what if Final Fantasy 6 was just the last 2D final fantasy and it was the culmination of 2D Final Fantasy. What if it was a full like kind of retrospective on everything that made those 2D games kind of good and fun and interesting.

Steve, what it is is it's shoving Final Fantasy 14 into a Final Fantasy 6-sized cart. Yeah, that sounds great. It kind of is. Yeah, that is a great way to think about it. There's so much more equipment. The number of spells in Esper's has actually been substantially reduced. Like a lot of Final Fantasy 6 patches,

they got rid of the Esper on level up bonuses because that is actually one of the primary sources of imbalance in Final Fantasy 6. It breaks the game a little bit. It breaks the game, and that's part of what's fun about Final Fantasy 6 Vanilla is that you do break the game. But T-Editions approach to it is, all right, you've broken the game, you've maybe played this a couple of times. Congratulations. You know absolutely nothing. Within, like, by the end of the Welk fight in Narsh, you have really keyed into the fact that this is not Final Fantasy Six vanilla.

The Welk will one-shot you. The Welk will one-shot you. bosses tend to be puzzle bosses or like require a lot of thought and diligence into planning. Like there are some extremely late game bosses where my strategy was cast vanish on everyone before going into the fight and then beat it because it only uses physical. And that's how you're supposed to do it because otherwise it's impossible. Right. It's it has a lot of those puzzle bosses like the Final Fantasy MMOs.

Like Rexol actually is changed in this version. Rexol is different and easier and more interesting. Oh, then I hated that, AFR. Yeah, instead of having to kill off everyone except one, with Rexol, like you kind of get like a visual indicator of which party member you need to kill based on the animation that you get. It's actually very subtle and interesting. So there's extra dungeons in this and everything. There's, you know, rebalancing.

Like, gau, gow. Let's talk about gow. Gow. We are gow pilled. So, Final Fantasy 6, vanilla. Gow is actually secretly the best character. You got to do a couple. Put the work into him. Yeah. Yeah, you got to do a couple, put the work into him, and you've got to do a couple of glitches to really get it. In T edition, what you need is like a handful of maybe a couple dozen rages and the offering, and you can, like, just crush almost anything. The biggest improvement, and a lot of Final Fantasy 6 ROM hacks do this, is why does Gow need to leap on the belt? Why can't Gow just beat up a monster and then know how to be that monster? And that's how T-Edition works.

So as you just take Gow naturally through as a character, he gets better. And for example, in the underground castle where Odin is in World of Ruin, there are some really, really, really awful random encounters. in there. The kind that will wipe you if you're not paying close attention, no matter how good you are. Yeah. And the moment that you get one of the rages from one of the most physical heavy hitters, and then you put offering on Gao and that it's a 50% prok rate, I think, for the special ability versus fight in rage. It's either 50 or a third. You got the offering on their physical attacks that are a special monster ability are counted as a weapon strike. So you get four of them. And suddenly, Gow is doing 6,000 damage per hit, four hits, while the rest of your characters are barely scraping over a thousand.

Gow pulled me through, like, a third of T edition. And then also there's lots of other really interesting things in there. Like, first of all, sketch works. And sketch turns out to be really, really good. Like, there was a period where Realm was my main damage dealer because sketch, I was getting more of sketch than anything else on the floating island. She's my magic user or she sits on the airship. Right, exactly.

Or like Strago, you get the right spells on Strago and maybe you get the gem box on him. You, you pump him with the right magic equipment. He's the best spellcaster in the game. He's better than Terra or Cel is if you, like, outfit him right. And he goes from being a worthless lump to being something that's totally indispensable. Sion, you, the rate that his little bar fills up is speeded up by like four times. so you can actually use him.

Yeah. Turns out that he's still pretty bad, but that's okay. Of course, I am. Yeah. And, like, the rest of the characters are read with Edgar, because Edgar's tools are just, you know, you can use auto-crossbow for, like, the first 50% of the game.

Yeah. We're going to make each of them. That's pretty awesome. I mean, I'm actually doing machinist in Final Fantasy 14. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, and the tools in Final Fantasy T edition, like, stay useful for the whole game. You're going to be using noise blaster all the time.

you're going to be some bioblaster. The air anchor has actually changed quite a bit. It's changed from being a guaranteed move and you die to a random move and you die. So it actually works more like the chainsaw. Except that unlike the chainsaw, you can kill undead with it. Oh, shit. So they don't come back. Yeah, because if it procks moving you're dead, then undead are not immune to that.

It doesn't count as instant death. Oh. Yeah. And which leads to some other weird problems. Like there are instant death attacks that aren't classified as. instant death so you can't use the memento against them. And the only reason that it's worth even going into that level of thoughtful detail is by the end of this game, if you're doing the side dungeons, you need to know all this stuff.

You really need to know your relics, your equipment, what gives you absorb, what you're weak against because they also... Steve, he didn't even mention the costumes. Costumes are in 2.9, which I haven't played. Costumes don't show up in 3.0. but there is an earlier version I'm talking about 3.0 which is the most edition of this ROM hack

there is an earlier edition that you can still get 2.96 I think where you get different outfits for your characters which like pallet swaps you and maybe put you in a little outfit too. It also completely changes the base stats of that character to reclass them effectively.

Wow. So each character has like six to eight different costumes that they can put on with full spright sheets and they're all based like you can dress-ups like Seleis like Beatrix from Final Fantasy. Oh, that's great. I love that. Yeah, it's cool. It's really cool. I wish the picture remasters has something like that.

Yeah. And so that's just the mechanical stuff. Yeah. The story stuff, I think, is actually way more interesting because it's so unobtrusive. Story stuff tends to be just all side content in this game, except for, with a couple of notable exceptions. One of them is you cannot lose shadow on the floating island anymore. Shadow always escapes. Because most of the added content in World of Ruin is about Shadow. Ah. Because Shadow is a character that is not developed at all.

And also, like, he's fucking hanging around with his kid and the grandpa who knows that he's the dad of the kid and doesn't seem to care that he's a fucking murderer for hire. And T edition addresses this. I was going to ask if they get ahead of that because there was, looking at like old supplementary stuff, Squarespace off was going to, to have a reveal. They were going to have an instance with Strago asked Shadow, are you who I think you are? And that is in T edition. That exact scene is in T edition. They go to, like, late at night, you're in Straggo's house. They're having a drink. Straggo's like, you don't have to tell me if you're a realm's dad, but I want to see your face. Yeah. And like, that's what you get. It's so good. That's cool. It also addresses one of the things that I thought was the weirdest about the game when

I first played it and I was like 13 or 14, which is world of ruin. You have Sabin and your party. you run into Jared and he doesn't say a fucking thing about the fact that his twin brother is being this idiot in T edition they solved this problem by adding one line where he says I don't know what he's

doing he must like he's got to have some reason to be doing this to have a plan he's got to be up to something I have no idea what it is but yeah what's great about the extra content in T edition is it's woven into the game really like to be

It's additive, and it all feels like Final Fantasy 6. The thing that I'm most impressed with, actually, with some of the added cutscenes I've seen, because there's also an added one that goes into, like, Realms' relationship with her mom and her dad from when she was a baby. And that cutscene is, I don't think that was ever in the original materials, that cutscene is staged and written exactly at the level of every other cutscene in Final Fantasy 6, which that may not sound in. impressive, but replaying Final Fantasy 6, especially as part of T-Edition, I'm really keying into this is the game where they were trying to push the cinema aspect of Final Fantasy as hard as they could. And that makes Final Fantasy 6 the midpoint between, like, Final Fantasy 4 and Final Fantasy 7. So another way to think about T-edition is, what if, instead of looking forward to Final

Fantasy 7, they were also looking back through all of Final Fantasy history. I like that, yeah. And also somehow looking forward through Final Fantasy 8 through 15. Yeah, that too. By the way, I should mention that the one thing that I think is bad about it is they added a ton of music, some of which is not great. But the man with a machine gun version for the Super Nintendo sound chip fucking rips. That song is good no matter what. All right, so I'm going to move on from T-Edition, like, Like, legit, if you play any single one of these, whether or not you've played Final Fantasy

six before, T-addition is going to be good for you. You don't need to do the extra content. The end of the game is very hard. I don't really want to say how, but T-addition also resolves the grade school dispute of Is General Leo alive and can you get him in your party? Oh, nice. The answers, respectively, are yes and no. You do get shock, though.

You can get the shock ability. Gow can get shock, but it's pretty hard in the vanilla game, a substitute. You mentioned that, Steve, about General Leo, like, there's Final Fantasy 6, General Leo edition, which basically rewrites the game to be General Leo into his house. He's alive. He's back. He's shocking fools. Well, that's one of the biggest trolls I've ever experienced in an RPG where Leo is betrayed. He's ready to put his life down for the emperor, but he's just like everything I believe in is gone. now. I'm going to fight Kefka because

he's out of his mind. And I'm thinking, oh, cool, look at this strong dude. He's going to join my party. I'm going to have a great time. Nope. All right. I'm going to do the spoiler. I'm going to reveal to you how Final Fantasy 6T edition flips the script on this because it'll happen like very late in Kefka's tower. General

Leo is brought back as a zombie and you fight him. Oh, God. That's terrible. It's like super fucked up. It's an incredibly hard boss fight. And at the end of it, you get his gauntlet that gives only terror at the ability to use shock. Oh, only Tara.

That's so sad. It's like actually, and it's a really good fight. It is introduced with like the most minimal amount of dialogue possible. But even still at that moment, I was like, this is really fucked up.

I hate this. What a great end for a great warrior. Yeah. I mean, I think like you said, T edition is the one to play and it's the one that's so well known. But there are a few other hacks

that are pretty large out there. There's one called Brave New World, Final Fantasy Six, Brave New World, which is primarily a mechanical readjustment, which in addition to rebalancing all the characters and their abilities, significantly changes the Esper system so that only certain characters can equip certain Esper's.

And so you are really limited in your party builds because of what Esper is they're able to get in a way that's dynamic and interesting. You know, because we all love Final Fantasy but there is a point at the end of the game and the vanilla thing where you basically have a bunch of people who are dual casting Ultima each and every round because why wouldn't you? And that's something else that a lot of these hacks do is they give you the sword, Raggeron,

Rock, they give you the sword and the Esper. You know, they don't have you make a dichotomy or they, they, they, again, these are, these are for people who, you know, saying you get the sword or the Esper. Like that doesn't mean anything to people, if you play Final Fantasy 6 and you remember, you can only get the most powerful sword in the game or the, the most powerful magic. I took the sword. You can't get both.

I always took the Esper because you can win the sword at the Coliseum. Oh, shit. That's right. I didn't know that for years, though. Yeah. Well, I took the sword because you can uncurse the curse shield to get the palmy shield to learn Ultima from that. That's right.

That's true. And I did that too. There's, yeah. And again, this is the sort of minutiae, which these people have just been going over and over. And yeah, and there is a randomizer, too, for Final Fantasy 6, which I don't think is as fleshed out as Final Fantasy 1 or Final Fantasy 4? I think it's the youngest of them. It's also the one that I've played the least,

because I think that it's, I actually think it's the least interesting in terms of how it provides you with checks and check opportunities because it is, characters and Espers are the checks. And it's not specific ones, it's a total number of, which gives you a lot more freedom to move around,

especially because the whole concept of it is you have access to world, the ruin world at balance at the start of it, you switch between them and the rest of it works like a regular rando. I actually think that Final Fantasy 6 is too big to have a good rando like this. It's why I think Final Fantasy 4 is really the sweet spot. Final Fantasy 4 is such a neatly packed RPG. I even say to people, if you want to play a JRP and you're just starting out, Final Fantasy 4 is a good one because it's such a straightforward game like Andrew and I were just saying it's finished it in 12 hours if you know what you're doing. So

It makes sense that Final Fantasy 4 would be a good first RPG and a good first randomizer, although I am pretty interested in T-E edition now, and I really want to go along on that. Make sure anyone who's going to play T-A edition, make sure you read the Read Me so that you know where the soft locks and the bugs are. I swear that I've got another couple months before I start a new job. I might actually do a little ROM hacking myself to see if I could fix these because they're pretty bad bugs. And one of them should be eminently resolvable. But I don't think that the team currently working on it because Tomato stepped away as soon as he did the initial release.

And he just put out all the tools so other people can maintain it. I don't think that any of the people doing it right now are really ROM hackers. It looks like a lot of the stuff they're doing is adding on functionality with Lua scripts for emulators. So I want to, I don't know. I've got six weeks and I'm bored. Yeah, you should do a community service. Maybe I will. So I think that kind of brings us to the end of our whirlwind tour of what people are up to in the bringing old Final Fantasy games, breathing new life into them, bringing them up to modern standards, remixing them, renovating them.

It's a wonderful place to kind of play around, especially if you love these games, just because this is going to sound like a weird analogy maybe, But, like, I like reading different translations of books and poems, just so you can kind of see how different translators approach the same fundamental concepts and communicate the same ideas to you. And even though it's not translation, playing this remix of Final Fantasy 4 or replaying Final Fantasy 1 with different classes, it feels like a different translation of the ideas of what was in these games originally. And it gives a three-dimensionality to maybe these old somewhat 2D gameplay systems of 8 and 16-bit games. You kind of look at it from a different angle. And you understand the way these games were built and put together in a way that you didn't when you just played through the base game. For sure. Yeah.

And I think that points to something, which is for Final Fantasy games, we've kind of always known it's either really solid in story or really solid mechanically and rarely do the two meet. Final Fantasy 8, big fan right there at the epicenter of both. But to the ROM hacking scene, like, this is kind of what you see. Final Fantasy 6 is a story game, so they balanced out all the mechanics, so you enjoy the story. Final Fantasy 1 is a mechanics game. So what if we just made the mechanics more interesting or did wild stuff with them? And I actually think that might be part of why we see fewer Final Fantasy 3 and Final Fantasy 5 hacks is just those games are so mechanically wild to begin with.

What would you do to them besides, like, trying to figure out how to adjust the curves and the balance? And adjusting curves and balance all on its own is, frankly, very boring. Yeah, just a little bit, I guess. You're looking at charts and graphs, and some people are real sickos for Excel, and most people aren't. No, I'm not. I'm sorry. Like, I use it when I localize games. I'm just like, oh, God, this shows a program, isn't it?

That are Google Docs. But, yeah, also just a brief shout-out, I suppose, because there are a lot of RPGs and games, especially RPG. that have had some great wrong hacks. We talked earlier about Breath of Fire. Excellent RPG series. I love it, but God damn, that second game, that translation does, it's a war crime. Yeah, there's been re-translations of one and two

that bring the grammar up to modern standards. And also do a little bit of, and also do some quality of life stuff. They also do some coordination with like Breath of Fire 3 plus, to make sure that the character names and the glossary names for the things that are consistent across all the games are actually reflected correctly in those titles, too. And, you know, it's not revolutionary, but it just makes the game feel like a real game, as opposed to a hot mess. As opposed to a hot mess. I love, I love Breath of Fire.

Me too. But I love it in spite of itself, especially the first two, because they're messy, messy games. I don't remember the translation being that bad in the first one, but two was a... It's very dry. The first one is one of those hyper-literal translations that's, like, you can read it and you can understand what's happening. And if you played it as a teenager in the 90s, I'm sure it felt fine. But, like, it's not good. Right.

I think that, well, I think Ted Woolsey did work on that one. He did, didn't he? I think so. But, yeah, that turned out, you're right. Because I remember being kind of dry. Not bad. Not like, at least two is exciting. At least the translation was interesting, even if it was not right.

Like, there was a line of rent says, like, something like, uh, uh, you're right. your god is dumb and i just thought you know what that's a good well what a line to deliver in a breath of fire game your god is don't care about your dumb god and then the the the priest is like saint eva is not a dumb god back and forth like this is why your god's a dumb god no your god's a dumb god pushing each other in the farm yard oh man good times but then then we mentioned the guy mazom who did the final fantasy three hack um he's done some really good ones for Shining Force 2 and Skies of Arcadia

Legends. The Arcadia Legends one is really recent and I've been playing. That's the GameCube re-release of Skies of Arcadia. Oh, cool. Yeah. It's really good. I love Skies of Arcadia. You can read my 5 out of 5 review on the GIA.com. But it's, you know, you do kind of just spam Lambda burst a lot.

And you also get really annoyed at the encounter rate in the ship barrels. And, you know, like there's even, even without the retrospective of rosy retrospection at the time is like okay like this is not as balanced as it as it could be and so so replaying uh skies of arcadia with like a reduced encounter rate and more challenging and engaging encounters and more the spells are useful and fishing is useful and interesting which is and uh there's uh the the ship battles are a lot faster i don't know if

you remember some of the shit battles would have like yeah they were a it's it's it's great i love i love that game and it's and it's really great to play it again because if i were to play it exactly as it was in 2001 i would not love it as much as i did in 2001 quality of life uh i think is one of the best things we could bring to modern re-releases of RPGs like if i had not been playing the switch version of funnel fantasy nine or i could speed up the battles i would not have finished that game yeah it's just a bit much we we are older and we need our entertainment delivered to us a little bit more quickly. And also, again, a lot of this was to pad it out for the gamers who were only buying one game a month in Japan at the time,

where it's like, well, it has to be 50 hours long. And if 30 of those are spent in idle animations in the battle, they're not going to sell it back to the used game shop for four weeks. So, and something I think that's really cool in the ROM hacking scene that I've, we have started seeing recently is people doing like voiceovers right and video editing like actually getting bandcasts together to re-record these games and they sound about as good as any other sort of video game localization but a lot of the titles they're doing are kind of mid to late 90s anime style games for like the saturn playstation or turbo duo yeah do you think of like

the heyday of working designs type of aesthetic uh type thing lunar silver star story and whatnot um so you know uh on the turbo cd there's there's two games called galaxy fraulein una and private idol like uh detective idol about an idol who goes to a haunted mansion to film a music video and then there's a murder it's like a combination RPG overworld with a murder mystery um but the the people have taken these games and they've really um they're great they're fun and and you know like again Like, I love 90s anime. I feel like, you know, I don't like the 2010s as much as I like the 90s.

That's just my era. And so with these games, with these character designs, I'm like, yes, this is what people should look like in a video game. That popful male, big years. Oh, God. And, yeah, and then the big elephant in the room, Steve, which will have to come back for a second episode because it's about three hours of discussion. Yeah, Pokemon.

That is a whole other. ball of wax, because it is just ginormous community with some crazy, crazy, some now banned rom hacks out there. I have nothing but nice things to say about the Pokemon fan community. Please don't

hurt me. But they can be really obsessive about their EVs and their IVs. A little. A little. A little. Their eggs. Their eggs. Yeah. That is the thing I think is worth mentioning about Pokemon

wrong hacking in particular is that Pokemon rom hacking is for Pokemon people. Like, you are into Pokemon if you're playing those. Those are not to make those games more accessible because they're already very accessible. Those are to make those games more Pokemon. Yeah. Quite literally sometimes.

You know, there's a game called Pokemon Unbound, which is a fire red hack that has every Pokemon from Gen 1 through gen 8 in a single game. And it's just beyond, man. I mean, don't hurt me, Pokemon community, but by God, I have to say the arrow when I was covering

Sword and Shield for U.S. Gamer, that was the most miserable time I've ever had as a games writer. And I've been at this since 2004. Dear Lord, what a, what a terrible time. No one, no one hates Pokemon more than Pokemon fans. They despise Pokemon. And like the guy Joe, who's out there doing Sarahby.net since, like, I was in high school,

they just sit there and, like, throw tomatoes out. I'm like, your God, what is wrong with you people? It's Pikachu, for Christ's sake. You didn't die for this. You died? No, I was just thinking of him on a cross. Thank God. Thank God. Yeah, it's Choochoo.

Choochoo is the one on the cross. We all know that. Chuchu's on the cross. He died for our sins. Speaking of sins, before we wrap up here, I did promise you to dedicate a little bit of time to tears of the kingdom. No spoilers, but I just want to hear your thoughts on the game because I'm having a great time. I'm actually thinking about it right now. No offense.

so I want to go play it. I want to go play it too. My girlfriend has had the copy for the last like two or three days while I've been preparing for this. Do you want to go first, Andrew? Yeah, I just wanted to talk about, all right, don't hurt me Zelda fans

or fight the Pokemon fans. I did not like Breath of the Wild very much at all. I'm a big, like, what's Zelda about? Zelda is about dungeons. Zelda is about puzzles. Zelda is about upgrading your sword. I mean, not really,

But, like, Breath of the Wild felt too far for me. And even though Tears of the Kingdom is, like, 90% the same as Breath of the Wild by weight, the small tweaks they made, I'm really enjoying it. And I think for me, the big change is the emphasis on constructing objects as opposed to just interacting with the world. So the way I described it to Steve was that, like, Breath of the Wild felt like juggling and everything felt like it was outside of my control. tears of the kingdom to me feels like setting up a magic trick and then pushing start and watching the magic trick happen and feeling so clever with myself. Yeah.

Yeah, like I breath of the wild, like it just reminds me like TikTok clock. Just I'm like got to shoot this vector here and then in midair surf on the sword shield. And like I didn't feel like I was in control of link or of the situation. But tears of the kingdom gives me enough tools and enough ways to interact with it. And even just the recall ability

that's pretty cool and it makes it less frustrating to experiment because you can reset things to a set point and move forward again from there

and so the fact that Link is embodied in the physical world has just made it really enjoyable for me to run around and explore as opposed to because I feel like

I'm always doing something whereas with Breath of the Wild I felt like I always was somewhere but I wasn't doing something. And that physicality in tears of the kingdom has just really made me get what's so exciting about this new open world Zelda for people.

Yeah, I think that that points towards something that I think is really interesting about this game, which is I loved Breath of the Wild, but I'm going to freely admit that a huge part of what I enjoyed about that game is kind of blissing out while you're on the horse, going from A to B, kind of scan the horizon, maybe there's something there, maybe not. If there is, do you go to it

or mark it, whatever? Like, it really does encourage, like, kind of this more passivity in just the A to B moments, unless you're, like, really engaged with the Zelda stuff. Tears of the Kingdom is set up to actively interrupt that kind of passive play in every single possible way I can imagine. There's rocks falling from the sky all the time. there's going to be the Korox everywhere. Maybe you run across a well or like you look up towards the sky and you see a waterfall or like you do write up one of those cubes and you pull out your scope and suddenly off in the distance in the sky you see like a giant fucking Borg cube.

Like this game is really wild. It is always presenting you with something that could interrupt what you're presently doing if you choose to go and do that thing. This is like a real game academic, like psychology academic kind of thing. But I think that Tears of the Kingdom may be the strongest argument against flow state in games maybe ever. Hmm. Interesting. I personally love the game. I love Breath of the Wild for the reasons you said, Steve. And I actually love Choose the Kingdom for the same reason because I've been on the, I've done the bliss thing out on the horse saying, I adore it. I'm glad that it's in Breath of the Wild. It says in Tears the Kingdom as well. But since Breath of the Wild, I have played some really.

excellent open world games. My favorite probably to date being Eldon Ring outside of Tears of the Kingdom. And that was just such an exciting, that was a perfect to me mix of fighting, exploring, and blissing out, even though the, you know, you're not going to bliss out in, what was the name of the terrible swamp

place, Caleb, like, mostly screaming, but some places you can bless out. So I'm glad that Tears of the Kingdom is like, okay, as I understand, 90% Breath of Wild by weight, but also, hey, here's this, you can crucify a coroc. And send it on a rocket sled across a it's like Eric Van Allen from a co-hosts of Axe of the Blood God said basically Nintendo knew what they were doing when they said hey here's the Korox they're all living crash test dummies now go have fun yeah like that that is I think a big part of it is that the Korox are crash test dummies now like you could do a lot of stuff with the Korox I have real mixed feelings about the build me a Ford F150 kind of stuff but like I think it's good it's another interesting thing

to do. The other thing I think is interesting about Breath of the Wild is that I don't know how ultimately I will feel about this. I need to actually finish the game, but there appear to be Ubisoft levels of like stuff that you that's just on your map naturally. But it doesn't feel

bad or overwhelming to me in the way it feels in an Ubisoft game right now. I don't think it is. Like if, I mean Ubisoft Phoenix, what was the name of that? Phoenix and Rising or whatever it was. Ubisoft's Phoenix, right? I don't want to play that.

Objection. It's just if you want a game that misses the entire point of the game that inspired it, you go play Phoenix Rising because you go on that title screen and there's already a million advertisements for Ubisoft's bullshit, sign up for this, do that. And then you go into the game and you're trying to explore, but these stupid characters are quipping at you the whole time. Like, shut the hell up. You missed the point.

I'm playing, Amazing Go Black and play Breath of the Wild. Why wouldn't I? So something that both Eldon Ring. and Tears of the Kingdom do, which I think is really mature and really hard, is they're okay with you missing content. Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

Maybe you never find this big dungeon that they spent 30 people spent three years on or whatever. And you know what? You still had 90 great hours in the game, and that's fine. And like, Ubisoft is very afraid that you will not experience every penny that they put on screen. And so every system that they have is designed to make, to. scream at you. Don't miss this. Don't miss that. Go over here. Go over there. And it takes a lot

of maturity to accept that you may work on something that the player doesn't experience. Yeah. And I should also say it probably had like a six or seven year dev cycle all told for Tears of the Kingdom. That's a really long time to be able to just say we're going to figure out how to overhaul a base world map and then create some additional map for you to go through and then like really deeply reconsider what worked and what didn't about Breath of the Wild because mechanically it's almost the same game like there are some very slight combat adjustments one thing that I think is very funny about Tears of the Kingdom is that when I booted it up and started my game within 30 seconds I was immediately like they've been playing a lot of

from soft games yes and then about five hours in. I was like, oh, they made a FromSoft game. Yes. And they packaged it with Tears of the kingdom. It's pretty awesome. It is a really incredible game. I'm very excited for it. Congratulations to like literally everyone who worked on it. This is a real mastercraft. Like this is a pinnacle of this type of design. It's so, it feels so weird to say this, but I'm like, I don't know if I'll ever want or need to play another open world game after Tears of the Kingdom. I genuinely hope they don't make a third Zelda like this. They probably will, but that's okay.

I don't think they will, and it's going to be really good that they don't. They could probably use a break. They'll make another open world one, but they're not going to build it on this map. I think that this. No, they'll probably make another open world one, but I think it'll be different enough. Like, the thing about how Zelda has always iterated is it's kind of like what worked and what didn't about the last one. Right. Tears of the Kingdom feels in many ways like, what did and didn't work about all of Zelda ever? Like, I feel like there's bits of Wind Waker in here. And there's definitely bits of Skyward Sword in here. And there's like all these other little chunks that we see from just how Zelda has always functioned, like reconsidered and recontextualized as part of the Breath of the Wild thing.

yeah for sure I'm having a great time in fact I think I'll let you go play that a little bit now as I was saying it earlier I think probably you guys will let you go play as well but I would like to thank you so very much for coming on the show you're both excellent guests and I hope you had a good time because I had a good time and I had a great time anyone listening to this cares about this stuff as much as me as Steve did so yeah please please go play some of these ROM hacks like there are some really really great ones out there T edition absolutely I'm going to go boot up some Final Fantasy 4 Ultima or FF1 Gron, like, right after this, unless I go play Tevers of the Kingdom, because if my girlfriend stopped playing, finally. Grab it, grab it. I'm not going to just grab it out of her hands. So rude. Like, yeah, go out there, play some of these. Go to romhacking.net.

Type in your favorite RPG or whatever, see if there are any interesting-looking hacks. Like, what's the worst that can happen? You spend somewhere between 15 and 45 minutes on a ROM hack that kind of doesn't work for you? Like, go out there and try this. stuff. Have fun with it. For sure, for sure. And Steve, again, why don't you tell us where we can find you? These days, you can find me only on co-host.org, the weirdest social media site on the internet right now. I got to sign up and vowed to start blogging again. I got to do that.

You need chosting? You're going to start chosting again? Yeah, well, you do not chost. You post. I'm a capital P poster. It says post on that website. You click that button. You're a poster. You're there because you post. Anyway, co-hosts. org user spiraling void i think i might already follow you but andrew how about you uh i am also on co-host but i i'm posting anonymously so i i live a quiet life on my farm tending the crops of old RPGs these days but i like to share the bounty with people where i can you know my days my days of being internet famous or thankfully behind me never again yeah never not even once not internet fame, not even once.

As for us, we are retronauts. You can support us at multiple tiers over at patreon.com for slash retronauts. And you can choose from a whole bunch of stuff. You can get ad-free episodes, get Patreon exclusive content and podcasts. I'm not the only one out there who's making this kind of like cool, hit content. So go ahead and give them a visit. Please support us.

I think you'd like us. But if you like my verbal diarrhea specifically, you can find me as the co-host of the Axel of the Blog podcast, cover RPG's old, new Eastern, and Western. You can support us. at patreon.com for slash blood god pod. But until then, I have to give a shout out to Z-Snestis Transparency Layer because holy crap,

you could not emulate Final Fantasy 4 and get through the Mist Cave until I became a thing. Thank you. You know, I'm going to be the Nadia, that reminds me of a very famous forum post that I saw back in like the late 90s, which was subject, help, body, I got to the mist cave and it's full of mist.