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Final Fantasy 6 Return of the Dark Sorceror Mod Review

FF6 ROTDS is an incredibly in-depth and expansive FF6 mod that is over a decade in the making and is an absolute must play for any fan of FF6. For those concerned about the game being too different from the original, the story of ROTDS remains very true to the original but with a list of 14 new characters, some of whom you may recognize from other FF titles, some unique to this journey, that join you on your quest to defeat Zuriel the Dark Sorcerer. There is so much to talk about with regards to this mod it is easier to break it down into sections to discuss.

Events / Cutscenes: The event work accomplished in this mod is beyond anything I have ever seen in any mod I have ever played ever...period. You will be treated right at the start of the game with a skippable opening cinematic that will introduce the iconic Kefka and several characters you will meet on your journey and set the tone of this maniacal mod right from the get-go. It's a truly awe-inspiring work and it will give you just a taste of the amazing event work this game offers.

Events will show off much more backstory for the main character Aurora (Terra's analog in this game) that delve much deeper and give more history to her control under General Gesthahl then you'll get in the original, as well as her relationship with General Leo which was only hinted at in the original FF6. Once you get to "Sabin's Sidequest" part of the journey, you know with the Phanton Train? Yes...get ready, this section of the game is filled with so much more lore, backstory and beauty than I could describe in words, and I don't wish to spoil it for you. You will be in absolute awe at the work done for this section, sit back and enjoy it and dont skip a thing!

Music You will notice an assortment of rearranged songs many classic games and other rpgs springled through this mod and you can also listen to them through an NPC later if you like. The song selection is astounding.

Characters, Spells and Abilities: As I may have hinted at earlier, most of the new characters are closely linked to their FF6 counterpart, but several of the new ones (especially those introduced in "Sabin's sidequest" ) have unique backstories, and Oboro, the stand in for Shadow is a deeper and more complex narrative to the original. As for new spells and skills, Cloud's Limit skill remains very faithful to Cyan's original Bushido, but much improved with different and more powerful abilities and remaining equally faithful to Cloud's limits in Final Fantasy 6. Avalon, a brand-new character to this mod employs a unique skilled called Havoc which is one of the more creative, well balanced and fun to use skills added to a FF6 I have seen yet. Mr. Grimm actually a 15th secret character who can join your team, he is most colorful new addition to this mod and is bursting with personality and has some really interesting abilities.

Spells are awesome in this game, with new animations and spell times and now there is evena spell that RIVALs Ultima!

Secrets, Unlockables and new content: There are many fun and exciting easter eggs and cool secrets in this game, some are easy to figure out, others can be a little cryptic. To make sure you don't miss anything I can recommend at least loosely following the strategy guide here https://www.rotds.com/guide.html The Colloiseum is now available in the WOB, and there are entirely new dungeons in the WOR and even new towns that were not present in the original with new equipment, relics, weapons and upgrades to enjoy. Spritework Characters have all custom portraits and sprite work, and everything in battle looks smooth and seemless with the new monster and character sprites. Most new enemy sprites look rather excellent, and the new Boss sprites are absolutely gorgeous Miscellaneous: Explore every nook and granny of town for hidden items and surprise characters from other lore and media. Even Angry Video Game Nerd makes an appearance in this Mod! Also, included with this mod are a TON of additional and optional patches you can apply. I'd recommend the Experience / Gold mod which will double experience and gold and half encounter rate to make for less grindy and for most, a more enjoyable experience as well the Automatic Run and hold A to advance dialogue. You can even remove the ESPER RESTRICTION on characters if you want your characters to learn all spells and espers, though I find that the restriction helps make characters unique. You can even Unrig Tifa's slots if you'd like to try to use her SLot abilities with more consistency.

The game comes in 4 difficulty levels and a New Game Plus+. I played the game on the Easiest difficulty, which was Harder than Vanilla, but completely fair and doable for a FF6 fan, it wasn't frustrating especially once your equipment is fully decked out by the end game. On New Game +, You will retain all your Spells, abilities and items, but Levels will be reset. I highly recommend doing the Hardest Difficulty (Insane) on New Game Plus to retain a fun challenge on a second playthrough and experimenting with other cosmetic mods to see alternate sprites on your characters!

Overall, ROTDS is an astounding mod with an incredible amount of new content, filled with love not just for FF6 but video games in general, and is fun and wild adventure and a novel way to enjoy FF6 another time. You do not want to pass up playing this glorious achievement

Since I played this right after I completed an NG+ run of FF6 T-Edition, I feel like this hack is quite underwhelming, although it is in fact, completed and fine, along with some nerfs that is a big letdown, such as limited access to soul shrine(dream stone is usable once per game), Offering(Divine Gift) is nerfed to 2-4 successive hits instead of just 4 and only certain characters are able to equip it and Genji glove becomes too rare.

However, there are a lot of things that are great and unique, even for T-Edition. First, natural stat leveling is back from FF1. To top that, 50% to raise 1 point seems to be somewhat funny because it reminds me of Fire Emblem stat growth. Lots of pop culture and internet meme references make this hack worth exploring, I like how some contributors even put AVGN and joked about the esper restriction, which is ironically hilarious.

The second best part is how NG+ in this game works. Not only can you bring the whole inventory to the next game but also the attributes(Gi Nattak himself confirmed this on Discord even before my NG+ pilgrimage). Theoretically, you don't even have to use Tabs to max out every stat but Tabs are still a novelty to overachievers and grinders like me.

The best part? Mr. Grimm. He is the selling point in this game[SPOILER ALERT].

Overall, this is a great alternative to T-Edition if you like memes and pop culture references. I would rate this 10 out of 10 but the hack only allows at most 4 stars at the option, damn it. Anyone, please add a dialogue option to allow me to give 10 stars.

This is definitely one of my favorite FF6 hacks so far. Everyone who worked on this did an amazing job, especially love the sprite work.

This romhack completely surprised me with how good it was. I tried it out just out of boredom expecting a bad fanfic, instead I got an incredibly well designed take on ff6.

The writing is *very* good and does not at all come across as amateurish or fanfic-y despite all the jokes and references. The plot follows the original, but with its own reimagination of it, giving it a fresh new feel. There's a fair amount of references, and some silliness, but in a good way. I actually really enjoyed the humor and the references, many in which I didn't expect at all, and I never felt like they distracted from the overall experience. The game also knows when to take itself seriously, and I never felt like the writing was anything but excellent.

The characters are interesting, fun to use and well designed. There's a few brand new storylines to match new characters, and they are very well done. The skills are mostly the original skills but remixed in different ways, and I felt they were very well implemented. There are also a lot more temporary party characters, which is something I think the original game could have had more of.

The difficulty seemed just right - higher than vanilla, but not by too much. There's a lot more items hidden in boxes, crates, shelves, trees, etc. which I never felt the original had enough of. It incentivises exploration, and I really enjoyed being rewarded for clicking on everything I could see. I also loved the changed music. We all know the original Ff6 music is great, but it was nice to hear something new, a lot of which I recognized and was excited about, and the music fit the areas pretty well. There's also an entire second soundtrack in the optional patches which you can use for other playthroughs.

There's a lot of attention to detail, which makes the game feel smooth and immersive to play. The sprite and artwork is very good, and the new enemies are varied, creative and interesting. The game has its own unique charm quite apart from the original ff6. You can tell a lot of people put a lot of time and love into this and it really shows.

As far as JRPGs go, I've had more fun playing through this than I have in a very long time. If you're a fan of Ff6, you really should give this a shot, and if you can lighten up and enjoy a bit of silliness from time to time, I think you will really enjoy yourself.

I have played FFVI to death and this was a great hack to switch some things up. I disagree with a prior reviewer about the difficulty. I found it to be only a little harder than vanilla. There is a strategy guide included that can help you if you get stuck or need some tips on the tougher bosses. I mostly enjoyed the changes with the different characters, items, spells, and so on. There is a fair amount of brand new content, mostly in the late game, to test out your skills and get some awesome equipment. I do agree with other reviewers about the music. The FFVI music was fantastic and I wish it didn't change! Maybe this could be an option to switch back in a future update. But overall, I loved it!

This mod is pretty impressive with the new sprites and the various soundtracks remixed for this game, and the new monster sprites are very well done! Many things within feel like a love letter to the various series the dev(s) pulled from for this mod!

However, there are very clear balancing issues to be had in this mod. Immediately upon leaving Narshe (er, Fraust) I nearly got a Game Over because the group of Goblins I encounters inflicted Stop on both Aurora and Cloud, leaving me unable to do anything as the Goblins whittled down their HP. Meanwhile most random encounters since then have been an absolute breeze with a minor annoyance here and there, and bosses ranging from a pushover to "This is balanced for a party you're not given for this point."

I'm stuck on Ultros at the Opera segment (mod dev(s) please make the entire Opera segment completely auto pilot so we can use the speed up to skip it should we have to refight Ultros) and this fight is so poorly balanced you essentially need Cura on at least two characters, however Cura isn't available yet (heck, unless you bring Arc and/or Avalon, you CAN'T have Cure in your party for this fight at all), and if Arc's Runic can't absorb Ultros' magic, I'm essentially stuck at this fight unless I do an excessive amount of grinding. (I'm on Normal Mode for reference)

The story is essentially the same, beat for beat, for the World of Balance segment, and characters are also rather stale and uninteresting (made even moreso by everyone not named Tifa or Cloud replacing their counterpart and joining at the same point in the story).

Spoilers ahead!!!

Aurora: Aurora's sprites and portrait are very good (though her sprite not being symmetrical has some awkward effect on some animations, like shaking her head causing her lopsided dress to flip sides). Her combat usefulness is incredible, as to be expected of a character with a naturally learned spell list (and Terra's replacement). However, her Esper Sprite leaves MUCH to be desired (Seriously? A succubus costume instead of something otherworldly like Terra's Esper Sprite? Come on, you can do far better than that), and her character doesn't deviate enough from Terra to really distinguish the two from each other (a problem that happens a lot for characters that aren't characters from other games)

Cloud: Cloud is very strong, as to be expected from basically anyone who mods in Cloud into anything he's not naturally from. Though with the steep level gap between learning new limits gets incredibly larger with each new limit learned (he learns Finishing Touch at Lv.50 but his Final Limit is learned at Lv.70...), he may fall out of the party for all but the most dedicated Cloud fans. He also has some... awkward writing moments, such as offering Tifa as a decoy for the opera (Cloud would offer himself before putting Tifa in any danger like that. Though, Tifa would volunteer to be the bait), and him taking Locke's arc of trying to revive his dead ex-girlfriend (Aerith taking Rachel's place) just leaves a sour taste in the mouth, especially with the combat cutscenes of Aerith decimating the soldiers chasing after her. If the next version replaces Cloud and others with Original Characters, I strongly recommend either removing Locke's arc, or have the guy in the relationship take Rachel's place.

Serin: hoooo boy... This is where the mod loses it's magic of shiny new game. Serin is almost 1:1 the same as Edgar, personality, unique command, and everything. His portrait and color scheme also leave much to be desired (Black and red don't go that well together, nor does being overdressed in dark colors like that while living in a desert kingdom). Again, if there's another version in the works, I strongly encourage to rewrite Serin entirely (and move the Tools command to someone else so it doesn't feel like you're just getting Edgar with less appealing colors) because the "hot lady's man" trope is very tiring and boring.

Ronan: speaking of copy/paste characters... here's another one. Ronan suffers the same issue Serin does, in that, he's still Sabin but less interesting as the characters he meets during his route split are... well, boring. He also has the same issue Cloud has with some of his Blitzes taking FAR too long to learn (there's a staggering 28 level gap between his last two Blitzes). Unless the Vargas (or Raditz in this mod... for some reason...) battle is hardcoded to end when a specified Blitz Command is used, I recommend replacing Ronan with someone else (much like with Serin) and moving Monk somewhere else in the game.

Tifa: Tifa feels weird here, in that she's written to be Celes but also Not Celes at the same time, especially as she keeps asking Cloud of all people why he's helping her. Meanwhile her combat usefulness is much like Setzer's Slots of Vanilla FF6: "random." I appreciate the sentiment of using Setzer's slots to mimic Tifa's Reels from FF7, however without removing the "random" factor from them, they become an incredible liability to Tifa's overall usefulness. In future version, removing the randomness from the Slots is an absolute must so players can have some control over what Reel Limit Tifa (or whoever replaces her should the cameo characters be replaced with new characters) uses.

Avalon: This guy's writing is Cyan's but less interesting (and without all the "thous"). the "twist" revealed during the Phantom Forest lacks any weight at all, since we barely know this guy by the time it's dropped on us and it has little to no effect on the gameplay. Speaking of, he's both really overpowered, and incredibly underpowered at the same time. Havoc can do incredible amounts of damage as it scales with his Current HP, however it does pitiful amounts of damage against multiple enemies, and the Status it inflicts is random. Keeping his HP topped off also requires you have Arc in the team to block Runic-able spells from hitting Avalon. If you're not using Havoc as much as possible, his damage output falls behind quite a lot, which is a problem early on when spamming Havoc isn't feasible since it's so easy for him to get hurt or have to spend his turns healing as he's one of the three characters with some naturally learned spells you get before Espers show up.

Oboro: Just when you thought Not-Edgar or Not-Sabin were boring enough, we now have Oboro, easily the most boring character of the cast. His story with Arc is so dull and generic it's almost laughable, and his combat performance is even more of a joke. He did get buffed to have both Throw and Steal without losing his Magic commands, however he's still incredibly lackluster. Shurikens barely do enough damage to at least be comparable to other characters using their basic attacks, Scrolls are too pricey to buy for how inconsistent his presence in the party is, and even with the Thief Gloves, he still struggles with Stealing. I wound up giving him the Speed Boots to make the most of his speed and had him be my Potion/Phoenix Down (er... Recharge, as they're called in the mod) tosser during the segments when I had him. Once Espers hit the scene, his use as a speedy Item Tosser quickly loses value as more characters learn Cure spells (along with the fact that he leaves the party until the Not-Thamasa segment, I assume)

Arc: man, the writer really doesn't know how to write kids, huh. (and the portrait artist really needs to rework the portrait so Arc actually looks like the child he is). He barely feels like a child character at all, with how serious he is, the swearing, and giving some graphic descriptions of how he'll get revenge on Oboro for his mother's death. Arc's story is so hastily done and over with all on the Phantom Train, and his intro story is weakened greatly by having such a tame and mundane backstory (that takes way too long to get to its point, mind you) described as "the saddest thing this nun's ever heard", and being so closely tied with Oboro, who is the blandest character by far. The Phantom (er, Skull) Train segment needs a lot of reworking, especially to not tie off Arc's arc so hastily. As for Arc's in-combat usage, he has a very noticeable lack of any naturally learned spells when it feels like the Legendary Onion Knight should at least have SOME spells learned (even if Arc *is* an Onion Knight in Training). Arc is also made incredibly invaluable as a tank of sorts thanks to Runic not being Awful any more, and more enemies using spells that would warrant using Runic at all (stopping a boss from casting Regen on themselves with Arc's Runic? yes please!)

Reaper: This is a guest character for the Phantom Train segment, and he's getting a segment too because it just feels wrong and bad to make Gau's Rage gimmick exclusive to a Guest Character, especially with the tweaks made to remove the "Berserk" from using a Rage. If a future version replaces the cameo characters with new characters, please return the Rage command to a permanent party member.

Another balancing(?) issue within this mod is that while you get far more Gil from random battles, shop prices have increased by what feels like five times the amount they should be (you can buy a Thief Knife from Neko at the start of the game for over 5k Gil, and you REALLY want to get it ASAP, even if it is one of the weakest weapons in the game). With the increased prices, enemies that can steal Gil from you now steal a tremendous amount of gil from your wallets, instantly decimating any time spent grinding for gil, and it really hurts on the progression.

Esper Summons are also incredibly lackluster and pathetic for Single Use casts, to the point where it's even less worthwhile to summon any of them (including Kirin, or Spikey Tiger for this mod with the Regen on the party). for being Single Use and very MP Costly, these should be far more powerful than doing basically anything else.

TL;DR I'm impressed with what the devs behind this mod have achieved, and can greatly appreciate them showing off how much editing can be done with as much as the FF6 Modding Community has learned, however there's a great deal of polish and rebalancing that needs to be done here, primarily in the gameplay aspect (after all, we came here for a fun mod, not some mind blowing story, yeah?). If I manage to get past Ultros at the Opera, my thoughts on this mod may change, especially as other reviews mention the World of Ruin being really good, and I'll update this review to reflect that. But for now, I give this mod a 4.5/10. Impressive what's been done, but there's so much more that needs to be done to clean up the script and rebalance bosses and random encounters.

UPDATE: I eventually beat Ultros at the Opera after a bit of grinding to learn more spells and such (along with changing my party to Cloud/Avalon/Arc), I barely managed to scrape by Ultros by luck. Boy, was it not worth it in the slightest.

So, as I expected, the story for the remainder of the World of Balance and as far as I've gotten in World of Ruin is, beat for beat, the same as FF6, which means this mod fails to deliver a "radically changed story." There are about three new scenes added during the Thamasa segment, however two of them (both involving General Leo) feel very awkward and mildly creepy with both ultimately being meaningless as Leo still dies and Aurora's World of Ruin story is copy/pasted directly from FF6 with Terra and the village of orphans. The third, with FuSoYa, feels greatly out of place considering how nothing else in the story has changed in the slightest up to this point.

The Floating Continent has a new scene for the confrontation with Ghestal and Kefka, but this scene greatly weakens the plot, as it undermines the whole point of Kefka being horribly messed up and dangerous as a character to introduce the author's "new" villain, Not-Kefka, which, as you might guess, feels fairly pointless in the grand scheme of things. (not to mention a laughable scene of Oboro thinking he's actually useful)

But who cares about the plot if the game isn't fun, right? How are the bosses after Opera Ultros? Put simply: they're all also very unbalanced. half of them were jokes, while a couple were unfairly tough, and a couple were specifically designed just to waste your time. Arc is borderline mandatory for these bosses to Runic-Tank their dangerously powerful spells.

The World of Ruin bosses I managed to fight before I gave up trying to finish this mod ranged from questionably easy to unbearably unfair. I gave up trying to finish the mod when it took me nearly an entire hour just to beat a Monster-in-a-Box boss in Not-Daryll's Grave.

Okay, well how are the characters between where I first stopped and now? Short answer? They're all still bland and boring.

Long answer? Otis: Otis feels more like an excuse to justify having an SNES "demake" of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme in this mod, honestly. Less personality and character than Setzer with an even more lazily thought out Unique Command (Jump???? really?????? I know he has an alternate command via a Relic, but c'mon... Spears don't even give their Jump damage multiplier in this mod).

FuSoYa: When FuSoYa shows up, things that are actually NEW plot-wise actually show up... and falls flat almost immediately as you go right back to Standard FF6 story immediately after. FuSoYa basically reprises his role from FF4 where he just infodumps important plot info and puts Tellah to shame. FuSoYa joins the party with nearly every single spell in the game pre-learned, and you get White Wind shortly after he joins, and Mighty Guard is right there on the Not-Veldt for the taking from the Commander enemy. FuSoYa is hilariously overpowered that it's basically an instant-win just to have him (and Arc) in your party at all times when he's available (he's forced in your party for the Floating Continent anyway).

Eiko: Why is she even in this mod? She's even less relevant than Relm is in Standard FF6, with a unique command that's useless if she's holding a Damage Dealing Esper, or apparently very powerful if she has a Support-Type Esper. Despite the concept of Summoners being introduced early on and made to seem as an incredibly powerful force that will be very plot relevant later on, Eiko is even less than an after thought (and whaddya know! Oboro takes more character writing from Shadow, and is Eiko's father!)

Golbez: Golbez is here... for about 2 seconds and is FuSoYa but with a bad Unique Command (it's Control). He shows up for the end of the Floating Continent then vanishes for presumably the remainder of the game).

Shop prices also got drastically worse, as you can maybe buy 2 or 3 pieces of equipment before running out of Gil, and it continues to get worse as you progress further in the plot.

Something good about this mod? Easily the new sprites and portraits. I may have ragged on a couple of the portraits in the original part of my review, but honestly it's incredibly impressive that each character has their own unique character portrait, including Guest Characters! Each Moogle during the 3 Party Battle tutorial has a unique portrait, and when you get two guest characters using the same sprite, they both have different portraits! The enemy sprites are also incredibly impressive, each one carefully crafted to fit in the FF6 World while also staying recognizable to their original source (even the meme enemies fit right in this world!)

The amount of work and effort put into the art of this mod is unfortunately let down by the nearly unchanged story and writing, and the horrible enemy balancing. The writing's biggest failure is copy/pasting nearly everything directly from FF6 (as stated earlier) instead of going all in on being original. The story may not have been *good* had the author chosen to go for full original ideas for this mod, however it certainly would've delivered on the promised "radically changed story" of this mod.

I unfortunately have to lower my rating score to a 1/10. As the incredible effort put into the spritework is, looks don't make a game fun, and this mod certainly did its best to not be fun.

Return of the dark sorcerer. I gave it a go and here is a review :

This comes off like a epic story and game giving a face lift to Final fantasy 6 to revamp game play, characters and story. We have a few original characters, others are from different titles as well. The story is fine but nothing ground breaking. Dialog works sometimes.

The difference is, there are moments of great, excellent drama upon some character development that will make you care of the background and the character. Then others are okay but nothing compelling.

The game play does shine with higher difficulty but the big deal is stats grow without espers unlike the original that you want to get them asap to have better stats.

The fall is the references to other games or TV shows that unless you are older like me, you might not understand all of them and they come off as silly killing the drama. Seems the creators had fun for sure doing this, but the content kinda falls short. Some may enjoy that, but didn't flow well with me. I would like a more organic experience, but to each their own.

Gotta give props for the work put in though. I do recommend and give this a 6.8 out of 10.

First of all, thanks to everyone for creating such a great hack! I may be critical in my comments below, but rest assured I very much like and appreciate the work you've done!

Rating: 9.2/10 Overall: The overall course of the story remains the same, however, enough has been changed that I feel like it's brand new all over again. The best part for me is the music. FF VI vanilla drills the battle music and victory tunes into your head. RotDS has a MYRIAD of different music sets, many of which don't change from battle to walking around - GREAT! I do wish you could make the music keep playing when you select it from the menu though :( (the music switches to normal game music when you leave the menu).

The entire world map has been reworked. But sadly, there are very few additional locations, they have just been moved, or changed.

In the WoR, many characters have been moved or swapped - nice touch.And the characters themselves have been greatly altered

THE REFERENCES, FRANSCINE, OMG! THE REFERENCES, OMG! Another superb addition to the hack is the plethora of references. I haven't kept track, but just to name a few: Zelda, RE 4, Futurama, Samus (low HP sprite is ball form, HAHA GREAT!), LotR, Wheel of time, mario, Pirates of the carribean, secret of mana, FF tactics, chrono trigger, SO MANY! They are quite well spread out through the game as well. This had me laughin several times an hour as i came across them! I sense kindred spirits in the developers, we are of the same breed!

The Coliseum shows you the item you stand to win BEFORE you select it! YEA! I spent hours as a kid mapping out what each item stood to win.

Gilgamesh just disappeared??

There just a tiny bit of religious input. I'm fairly anti religion and this little bit didn't bother me at all. A little refreshing honestly, specifically the corruption of the church at the auction!.

Sprites: All the sprites have been given an overhaul. I'm a huge fan of the character sprites. I love purple hair! The enemy sprites are so-so to great. I know sprite creation can take a lot of time, talent, and thought so I'm not complaining.

Characters: All of the characters have been tweaked in one way or another. I feel the characters are much more evenly balanced. Special abilities have been swapped around on many characters. This definitely adds to the feeling of a different game.

Espers: Certain characters can equip certain espers (there is a patch to revert this feature). I however left it in place. The characters can seem interchangeable at times and this extra distinction makes each character stand out in a different light.

Stealing: Placing the steal command on the shadow character, and only as an ADD ON at that, was a poor choice. Essentially every boss fight is a crap shoot attacking with thief knives waiting for a random steal attempt, since shadow is absent 90% of the time until half way through WoR.

Status effects: I ran into over half a dozen status effects in the first 1 hour of play time, making the beginning of the game seem overly difficult. Purchasing many of every type of cure item was a must to get through the beginning. And towards the middle and end, there were fewer status effects to be seen casted at you by enemies. They still exist, but a somewhat linear ramp up from game start to game end would've been much better.

I also find status effects (on enemies) to be 90% pointless. Either normal enemies, that are susceptible, aren't worth the effort (they are easily beaten otherwise), or the bosses are immune. There are, of course, a few exceptions, like some bosses can be stopped, etc., but with the increased difficulty, and the fact that i play on SD2SNES, not emulator, I cannot afford to cast every status effect to see what happens and expect to survive.

Magic: I've never seen an implementation of FF VI (including the original) where magic seemed balanced against attack. RotDS is no different. Magic just doesn't pack the wallop i would expect from the major disadvantages of magic. The foremost being the MP consumption. Sure, ethers are cheaper here, you can cast from the back row, but the benefit has just never been worth it, especially compared to just holding 'A'. There are many fights where you cannot do this in RotDS, which is nice though.

Pressing Y in the magic menu lets you see the cost of every spell - very nice. I wish this were also in the esper menu.

Battles: battle length is just slightly exenteded due to damage done and enemy HP or defense. Well balanced. Of course being OP towards the end changes this.

Bosses: Boss difficulty is definitely increased. Which i like. The boss fights last a lot longer and you get to take advantage of a lot of different status effects, equipment decisions, etc. There are bosses that cast discord, which is a major flaw in my opinion. If this is cast, I basically reset on the spot. There's no way to recover once it's cast. Normal enemies, sure, but not bosses. The sheer quantity of different attacks is also nice.

Sabin: Once again, Sabin is carrying my party. He always seems to be over powered, and with the default two weapons in each hand, and a weapon for each elemental type, he's a beast. This makes the game a little lop-sided and best played in a particular fashion.

Bugs: Overall, very few bugs. And the team seems to be constantly working to create solutions. I encountered only one major game freezing glitch. I examined the stump just below Leo's grave (intended for WoR, not WoB i guess) and the character froze.

Suggestions: I have played FF VI T-Edition (in japanese, and I struggled through with the help of the google translate app...) and there are several features in there that are superb. You can apply the vanish attribute from the menu You control your fighters in the coliseum a second tower exists in the WoR that uses the floating island map for an extra end of game challenge (filled with esper battles).

I really would like some story and game flow modifications, but I can see that as being too much of an undertaking :(. perhaps i will contribute at some point?.?

Where to begin...?

Let's start with my credentials regarding this game..

I've put for sure over 200 hours into this version.

I've played through the game two times.

All characters max level.

All spells learned for all characters.

All bonus content completed.

With that being said...

I would play through this game a THIRD time if there was a reason to!

Here's why I loved this mod:

First - there are multiple difficulty modes

I played through normal mode, then selected the new game + offered at the end, and played through the hardest difficulty mode - Insane mode.

The new game + is AMAZING! The only downside to this was you had to grind your levels back to 99 with all your characters again.. which is really time consuming.

The story line was much better (in my opinion) and made more sense, and was easier to follow than the original.

The espers were all nerfed for balance reasons (which is a negative in my opinion) and for that reason I used them less than 10 times between both play throughs.

Another downside was the character balance. Some characters were obviously overpowered and made the other characters feel obsolete. I realize this is almost always inevitable but some of the inherant skills in the characters were just a little TOO broken.

The difficulty curve was very high even for normal mode - not allowing for a casual playthrough. But, I actually loved this because it enticed the player to create more strategy in the battles.

Insane mode was definitely hard but because you got to carry pretty much everything over from your first file - this made things simple.

ON TO THE CHARACTERS:

Clouds level 7 limit break was completely OP taking almost all of the fun out of insane mode. Otherwise he was an amazing character.

Tifa was just an amazing and fun character during the first playthrough, but useless on insane mode because her reels ability is garbage once you get good gear.

Otis should have had the Steal Command, but he was a very balanced and fun character to use - his jump command was very useful and balanced.

Shadow (who, in this game replaced Gogo) was a very good unit who I think should have had Gau's rage kit (not reaper). This character could have been much better.

MOG was underwhelming, but was still MOG from the original - I'm glad he's still the same.

FuSoYa - completely overpowered from beginning to end. His mighty guard lore and his huge list of prelearned magic spells (when you first get him) are way too powerful for that stage of the game.

Golbez - YES AND YES. Amazing character, however his torment is pretty useless.

Eiko - she can summon the equipped esper using her summon ability, but because the espers suck, this is pretty much useless (on a side note, my eiko was bugged and is my favorite character now haha)

Serin (Edgar) has aethers instead of tools which are very balanced but he has one that gives any enemy weakness's that they wouldn't normally have (This is OP)

Ronin (Sabin) is generic and his attack power is pitiful... Which sucks because he was my favorite character from the original game. This character could use some love..

Arc is pretty cool actually and would have been my favorite if he received the proper love an onion knight deserves. There should have been special onion knight gear and sword that changed his appearance in battle, he also should be able to equip more gear than he does as well as dual wield naturally.

Oboro (Shadow from the original) was weak.. pretty much never a point to use him because every character can steal using thief knives with dual wield and oboro has to replace his magic slot with an accessory that grants steal... yuck. At least replace his fight command with Mug..

Avalon - completely broken character, especially in your first playthrough. His havoc ability deals damage equal to his life. So he's dealing thousands of damage a turn where your other units are dealing a couple hundred... You will never take him out your party..

Last but not least, a brief rundown on

ITEMS:

I did NOT like the name of the consumables..

Sour diesel? Etc...

I could NEVER remember which was which in battle and it didn't display during battle! The digestol was remedy but why not just leave it remedy? The original names have been burned into every FF players mind, and just switching it is a bad move.. or at least allow us to highlight an item in battle and show text of what it does..

The weapons curve is bad as well.. the hardest items to actually get in the game are pretty much useless. The zodiac Sword is better than Eternity, Destiny, lightsaber (Leo's sword), Gamma.. and it's given to you for free.

The essence shields shouldn't be in the game.. at all. Especially the gold and red! They absorb 100% elemental damage

The Divine gift is completely useless. Please fix this.

Elixers are impossible to farm or find, but Omni elixers you can buy for cheap... What?

The coliseum was very well done, but Buu is completely impossible to beat.

I could go on an on about development and adjustments, but this is just a review.

OverAll, I give the game a 8.5 out of 10.

The original I would give an 8 out of 10.

I absolutely LOVED this game and it was an amazing experience BOTH playthroughs.

I was thinking about doing an advanced guide for this game as there isn't one yet. Hmm?

Maybe when 2.0 comes out!

Gosh this game has a lot of neat updates !!

New allies, new enemies, and new battle animations/events ^_^"

If you have played the original FF6, but wanted a bit more out of the game...this is the perfect hack to try out.

With version 1.6.0, you can now select the difficulty of the game...so now you can have a fun time with new game +

Again, if you have a lazy weekend and want to get absorbed in a RPG...do give this rom hack a try.

I started beta testing this a while back. I can say this, the whole team put a lot of hard work into this project. So much is added from custom sprites and events to monsters and heroes and so much more. You owe it to yourselves to give it a try. It has a little flavor left from the original game but they have added a lot of their humor and hard work to make a super satisfying hack of FF6. With new characters, music, maps, events, story, and a nice new game+ system you would be a fool not to give it a go.

Oh yeah best part, they are all still working on it all the time!

Return of the Dark Sorcerer is a fantastic hack of FF6 with something for anyone that grew up in the 16 bit era, particularly the SNES era. Essentially, the hack improves the easy difficulty from the original game (it's a hack of the easy FF3 version that was released in the states), as well, numerous other parts of the game are changed. Characters, music, maps, enemies, etc. Most everything was changed to create a mostly fresh experience. As well, there are surprises left and right. Music is almost all replaced with music from numerous SNES games such as Mystic Quest, Drakhen, FF4, and many many others. Enemies as well are from numerous games. The real surprises I will not spoil here, but once you get nearly half way through the game, you will probably be happily surprised with all of the sudden twists and turns the hack throws at the player.

Aside from my praise of the hack, there are a few parts of the original game I wish had been changed as well. Although both world maps have been drastically altered, most of the dungeons and towns remain mostly the same. There are some minor changes, but not enough to give it the completely fresh feel I would have liked. It isn't discouraging at all as the minor changes did make for some nifty surprises.

Also, the change in difficulty, although quite welcome since the original game is way too easy in my opinion, is now a notch too difficult at times. Some of the bosses can be a bit unfair and it just can get sort of frustrating when leveling up doesn't seem to help a whole lot... I believe if the difficulty were changed to still be harder than the original game, but not as hard as the hack is in its present state (v1.2), it would be much more assessable to everyone. Nothing is more frustrating than getting wrapped up in a storyline and not being able to go forward because a certain boss is way out of line tough.

Regardless of the criticism, this is a really awesome hack and a lot of time clearly has gone into the creation. I would highly suggest fans of FF6 check this one out. It is really worth the time.

My early impressions of this game so far are that it is slow paced and the writing could have done without some of the more juvenile touches (Professor Oak?)

But really this is a very extensive project and deserves praise. I am excited to continue playing it and will probably continue through to the end. There's so much going on in this game and it is pretty impressive. That "brand new game" feeling is definitely present here.