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I played the FF1 portion of this hack twice using the following party: Ranger, Paladin, Master, and Archmage. The first playthrough (Run A) included the Soul of Chaos dungeons, while the second one (Run B) didn't. As such, this review will detail the difference in experience the two runs had at each point of the journey.

Early-game, the hack does what it intends to do by making enemy encounters feel more engaging. Statuses can be inflicted by some of their attacks, some of which linger after battle, requiring careful management of healing items and gil. My own status spells came in useful to subdue tougher enemy formations, mainly due to the power boost physical attacks now get from striking the afflicted. Buying new equipment and spells had more of an impact because of the limited funding available at the time, and MP had to be spent wisely since Ethers aren't as cheap as before. Mid-battle equipment switching, a feature that I ignored in the base game, was used often to get the most out of my party members. Every trip to a new location had a sense of danger and excitement to it, and I hoped the rest of the hack would continue to be this way.

After Lich, this stops being the case in Run A. The SoC bosses have been altered to be beatable as soon as they're unlocked, and they drop better rewards than they originally did. The problem is that said rewards are lategame weapons and armor. Anything that can't be equipped is sold for large sums of gil, and when combined with the copious amounts of funds obtained from chests, the affordability of Ethers in shops, and the EXP gained from the SoC dungeons' enemies, the midgame loses any semblance of difficulty. On the other hand, Run B retained some of the challenge the early-game had by avoiding all this. Bahamut's class change event is replaced with a paltry +50 max HP bonus, which doesn't feel like much in the long run. The Citadel of Trials quest thus was only worth it for the extra EXP and items.

Run A's endgame went by smoothly, as I cleared all four SoC dungeons and amassed a large amount of equipment, most of which can be used to cast magic for free when used. Money and MP management were a non-issue, as was common mob encounters. Party A was level 57 when they killed Chaos, who was noticeably stronger than anything that came before it. Nul-spell and Giant Tonic stacking was necessary to survive his onslaught. Run B on the other hand was a struggle upon reaching the Fiend rematches, and abuse of Stun, Destroy, and Qi Strike were necessary to get past them. The first is due to the low chance enemies have to recover from paralysis, making a successful stun an auto-win (this issue is not caused by this hack, but is more noticeable here). The second is due to it dealing a flat 1000 damage to anything, and its high MP cost is negated by the many Ethers that can be bought at that point. The last spell is simply a bad idea to begin with, as an instant-death attack that ignores Death resistance means even superbosses like Shinryu can be trivialized if luck allows it (like what happened in Run A). Party B never killed Chaos, as they were only level 35 upon meeting him, and they were wiped out within two turns.

To summarize, doing the SoC dungeons can make you too strong, while not doing them will make you too weak. While one could choose to not use the rewards for the former choice and grind levels for the latter, these are far from ideal ways of playing. If the hack were truly balanced, as the title suggests, both styles of play wouldn't severely hinder the overall experience. But, as unbalanced as it is, this hack still has some good things to offer. Namely, the start of the game is less of a drag, since some classes start with different weapons, and the inn/church offer their services for less gil. Up until Chaos, progression through the game is smooth, as there were no points where I felt I had to grind just to proceed. The more detailed status screen is a small, but appreciated feature that other hacks for this game lack. And finally, redundant and/or useless spells were replaced with new ones that give casters more tools to work with.

While some changes made to FF1 may have not been for the best, I have nothing but praise to give to the FF2 side of this hack. The adjustments made to the leveling mechanics, magic availability, and equipment all serve to make a more cohesive and challenging game. Thus, I'll conclude this review by saying that even if you don't end up liking the FF1 side of things, the FF2 portion may just make up for it.

(Addendum: You CAN kill Chaos without doing the SoC dungeons, but your party needs to be around Lv.44, with the best equipment and spells possible, and copious use of Nul-spells, Vanish, and Giant Tonics. More gimmicky party setups would likely need to level up more.)

NOTE: This review is solely for the FF1 portion of the game

As much as I would like to, I simply cannot recommend this hack. It ends up doing the opposite of what it intends, albeit in subtle ways that aren't completely obvious from the outset. Namely, just how spammy the combat gets, and how the negative changes to overall game balance made in Dawn of Souls are still present.

I'll start with job balance, since that is a major selling point of this hack. Despite the initial feeling that you're given more choice in how you want to build your party, it hardly-if ever-affects your overall strategy. Jobs good with weapons are going to be spamming attack, unless they have access to AoE magic, in which case they'll spam that until very late game. Jobs with healing magic are going to be relegated to healbots in tough fights, especially considering the still-absurd variance in unmitigable damage from special attacks. Jobs with access to buffs and debuffs are going to be buffing the physical hitters once at the beginning of the fight, and then doing something else for the rest of the fight. Most mitigation-based buffs are completely pointless. Very few random encounters last long enough for them to take effect, and bosses have such low HP and such a variety of moves that it's incredibly rare for them to be more useful than just healing the damage afterwards. Debuffs and status ailments are completely pointless past early-game, since they'll miss all the time. Elemental weakness scaling from magic is still extremely weak, meaning black mages are free to ignore elements and spam whatever their highest level spell is.

Late-game, you get access to spells that make combat even more spammy. Destroy does 1500 flat damage to any single target. That's almost as much damage as a buffed physical attacker. Healaga is more than enough healing for a single turn in basically any fight. Rarely does any enemy do enough single-target damage to warrant a single-target heal, but in those cases, your highest level Cure does the job. For some reason, this mod adds a completely superfluous 5th level of single-target heal.

Resource management retains its botched nature from vanilla DoS. Ethers are plentiful and cheap, and you can still save anywhere. Conservation of MP is irrelevant because you can just restore your mage to full MP after every fight throughout an entire dungeon.

Enemy groups vary wildly in power. Most are pure trash fights, doing nothing but weak physical attacks and rarely a status ailment attached to that attack. The harder enemies do AoE damage, but those are still a pushover unless you're dealing with a very large group of them. Even then, the over-saturated MP economy means these fights are a non-issue and end the same way as everything else: spamming your biggest nukes.

Bosses die in 3 or so turns if you're utilizing buffs properly (Haste+Temper/Enchant+Zeal). They're honestly easier than every other fight up to them. The only fight I would say breaks this is the final boss, but he's so much harder than anything else in the game up to that point. I would say he downright requires either grinding or doing the bonus dungeons first.

Overall, I feel like this hack's additions created more imbalances than it fixed.

My favorite class to play in the original has always been the Red Mage and it always bummed me out that at least until the class upgrade all of the other classes in FF1 feel very much one note.

With the new classes in the mod you can really get some interesting variety going on in your party, and it still feels like it maintains a good level of balance. You won't see a ton of challenge though unless you self-impose limitations like rushing through or choosing a weaker party setup.

I've been playing with Paladin, Ranger, Battlemage, and Sage.

The Paladin is similar to the Knight but you have mana and access to white magic early on in the game. Compared to the fighter (which has no magic through the whole game in the hack) he sacrifices a bit of offensive power for the ability to use some white magic and eventually they get the best armor set.

The Ranger is the closest to the original Red Mage. They hit faster than a fighter/paladin but slower than a ninja/thief and will do decent physical damage while being able to use most weapons and armor. And they also get both black and white magic at a middling rate but they don't have enough int to do a lot of damage with magic so you'll mostly want to give them support spells.

The Battlemage is similar to the ranger in martial prowess although a bit slower. But on the magic side of things they get black magic almost as fast as a dedicated mage does and have enough int to still do decent damage with magic as well.

The Sage is the epitome of the squishy wizard. They get the highest level white and black magic but compared to the other mage classes they have the least durability and a will do slightly less damage. Their mana pool is pretty large too so you don't have to spend a lot of turns with them being dead wait to conserve for the harder fights.

(As of the time of this review, version 3.5 is the latest for this hack/mod, so that is the version I've played and am reviewing here.)

Man, this is great! I've just begun playing this mod (I just won the ship from the pirates), but it's been a breath of fresh air so far; it has really rekindled my enjoyment of FF I for the GBA. I recommend this mod to any RPG enthusiast, especially FF lovers.

(FYI, I'm playing as a party consisting of a Fighter, a Monk, a Ninja, and a Sage. All are interesting classes: The Fighter gets less hits but does more damage with each hit and can penetrate defenses better, while the Ninja gets more hits with less power but can hit enemies with high evade easier than the Fighter, the Sage is interesting with high intellect and access to all/most spells but virtually no physical fighting power, while the Monk is cool but seems overpowered: He's a good combination of both the Fighter and the Ninja when unarmed, but he's also almost as good a caster as the Sage and can dodge almost as well as the Ninja [while unarmored]. I can't wait to try the other classes....)

Update (10/3/2019): I completed (and mastered) the game. Best. Hack. Ever. Tripled my enjoyment of Final Fantasy I compared to the vanilla (measured by the hours I joyfully sunk into it) and bettered my experience of FF 2. Definitely recommend!

(Note: since v3.0 and up is almost an entirely different game, I'm going to stick to v2.2. I'm also only focusing on the FF1 half)

I searched high and low for what the best version of Final Fantasy is to play, but with each version you make some sacrifices. You could play the NES version with the "Restored" hack, but you miss out on the upgrades made to the Origins remake and beyond. You could play Origins, but it doesn't have the best script and is missing the extra content from DoS. You could play the GBA/PSP versions, but the difficulty is ruined.

And then there's this hack. This hack claimed to bring back the original difficulty of the NES version. That's what it said on the tin, and that's what I played it for. You wouldn't think it'd be that hard: just add a Vancian magic system and tweak the stats to be how they were in Origins. Because some of us aren't looking to "fix" problems that were never there in the first place. Some of us just want to play these games as the designers intended, just with new graphics and content.

Well, while the hack might be closer to the NES version in terms of challenge, too much of it was changed. Boss strategies are different, spell weaknesses are different, equipment is different, and class balance is different. And that last part is probably the only reason I can't recommend this hack to someone wanting to play FFI for the first time. Part of the fun in FFI is choosing your jobs at the start, and if you wanted to, you could go through the game with crazy combinations like 4 knights, 3 knights and a red mage, 4 white mages, and so on. But with this hack, you NEED a balanced party. Parties now have checks and balances now, to where if you don't have a proper setup balancing magic, speed and physical power, you're pretty much boned. In the old days, using 4 white mages was an epic challenge, but here, anything outside the norm is nearly impossible to beat Chaos with.

I want to say this hack is perfectly fun on its merits, but I don't care about that. I'm mainly concerned with the claim that this brings back the original game I know and love, which it didn't.

Bear in mind, this is coming from a reviewer who's only played the FF2 half of this.

Alright, so Final Fantasy II for the NES isn't the most comfortable romp on the system. Too many things required grinding, and even with the cancel glitch leveling up weapon and magic proficiency took WAY longer than it had any right to. Played straight, no cancel glitch, FF2 for NES (and by extension, the PSX and WonderSwan versions) could potentially eat up an upwards of 50-hrs. of your life.

With this patch, FF2 took me a little more than 20 hours to beat. Granted, I had finished the NES version shortly before, and I used online maps to navigate some of the later dungeons, but stat-leveling comes at a MUCH more natural pace than before. No longer are you required to beat your party half to death for them to gain HP; the requirements for Vitality gains are lenient enough to where just being targeted by an enemy gives a character the chance of increasing their max HP. Additionally, spell level-ups are a lot quicker this time around, with the first level-up for a spell requiring about five casts. Really, it never felt like I needed to cast a spell 100 times just to level it up. Weapon leveling, while not as fast, still acclimate to where very little grinding is required, so long as you dedicate your characters to learning a specific weapon; given the nature of the game's leveling system, it's still highly impractical to have characters major in more than one weapon.

Along with beefier (but reasonably so) boss fights, I'd say this is the definitive way to play FF2, at least with its eccentric experience system intact. If nothing else, it's one way to play it with your sanity and time intact.

{This review only applies to the FF1 half, since I did not play the other game}

The main reason I wanted to try this is the revamped class system for the FF1 portion, and this hack does deliver. The new classes all feel unique and have their own strengths. But I don't feel Mod of Balance lives up to the author's claims of restoring FF1's difficulty. Part of this is due to the changes made by the GBA port itself, but in this hack I rarely took more than two turns to beat any fight - boss or mook - and it was even more rare to get a game over. This is absolutely not true of my experience with the NES version; I always struggled just enough to feel like the game is challenging me, encouraging me to regroup and rethink my approach, without resorting to cheap shots.

Here, my "Master" consistently overwhelmed bosses, and my "Sage" took out large groups with magic. My "Enchanter" was pretty good for healing and buffs, so no complaints there. The "Ranger" was unable to keep up in damage, healing, or support, and just took up space. However, the final boss presented a huge and unfair spike in difficulty, which was not matched by even the combined healing efforts of the Ranger and Enchanter, plus item buffs. At that point I wasn't terribly interested in the game anymore, so after about 10 deaths I had lost interest and wasn't keen on whatever grinding I would have had to do (my party was in the late 40s at that point). While I was able to revise my strategy with each death, nothing was changing the fact that I simply could not survive certain combinations of attacks if my own party members' turns were randomly executed in certain permutations, and the fight devolved into "pray that the computer doesn't implement a string of magic spells and place the boss' attacks at the end of one turn and the beginning of the next."

This hack has been updated past the version linked here, and according to the author's site's changelog, it seems to address a lot of what I didn't like (check the author's site to see both the new patch and the changelog). The graphical updates look nice too. I can at least suggest you check out the newest revision. But skip this one.