Final Fantasy III: FFVI Hardcube

Have you ever wanted a more difficult yet enjoyable experience playing FFVI? Well that's what is aimed for with this patch. The difficulty is in each battle and boss fight with each win providing enough experience and gold to be worth your time. You won't find yourself grinding for hours upon hours just to get past a boss. As long as you fight what comes your way, you'll be sufficiently leveled to take on a boss.

What you'll need to actually concern yourself is with your strategy and tactics upon entering a boss battle. Are you well equipped? Are you using the right spells or abilities?

Also, you will not find yourself trying to get used to different mechanics or any huge game-changing differences. If you are familiar with the original game, picking this up and getting into it should be easy.

1.21

Intro

Welcome to FFVI Hardcube. I'm glad you've decided to try this out. I've worked on this patch since about 2010 and honestly never even heard about Romhacking.net, so I'm glad to have found them.
Anyways, let's get into some of the things this patch has to offer.

When I started working on this patch my goal was just to simply create a more difficult version of the vanilla version of the game. Primarily I just wanted a more difficult version of the game I loved to come
back to whenever I felt like playing FFVI again. This lengthy process started with blanket changes like increasing damage and health of enemies and weakening strong item combinations. While this did make things
more difficult, there are still glaring problems with the patch. Leveling was still slow, most monsters still basically sucked - they just hit harder and countered more often. That's when I realized there was no
lazy way to go about it. I eventually had to completely redo the leveling ramp of characters and monsters and bosses all while creating a smarter AI and trying to stick to what the monsters/bosses did thematically
in the original game. I believe I've accomplished that successfully and have created a sufficiently difficult version of the game. And though it was never my goal make the greatest thing since suplexed trains to
share it with the world, I hope someone does find it an enjoyable experience.

Some of the biggest things to highlight and I'll try to keep it to the point:



-Levels-
Levels are gained much quicker. Don't be alarmed if you're about level 50 around the floating continent. Don't worry - you didn't over-level, the enemies are leveled appropriately as well. Each area has a kind
of level cap.

To get more technical about it: The enemies will check the levels of a random character and if they're above the cap, you'll get no exp for that battle. On its own this did pose problems - this also locks you out
of gaining gold from those monsters as well as learning spells and things like dances. So any given level cap only persists for 20 levels. So if an area's level cap is 40 and you fight those monsters at 60+, you'll
be able to gain exp and magic points once again from them. Just know that the experience gains from those monsters will be pretty negligable at that point. The cap overall ends at level 93, by which point you will be
able to gain experience and magic points from each battle you fight.

Last important note about levels: Because of the way level averaging works, it's possible for Celes to be low leveled at the beginning of the world of ruin. Before you jump on that raft, you should fight the enemies
on the island until Celes is level 51 (until she stops gaining exp). They're basically a free way for Celes to get her levels up quickly. Enemies on the mainland are also scripted to be weaker until level 54, which
should give plenty of time for Celes to get Sabin.



-Espers-
There are no level up bonuses with espers. Insead there is much more emphasis on gear chosen to define a character's role.



-Grinding Levels-
This is severely reduced and is almost non-existant. I pondered how I could get rid of the grind altogether, however there is no way for me to stop the player from completely neglecting their characters at the world
of ruin. So the most neglected characters would probably be around level 70 by the end of the game.

Points on grinding:
- If you bring a level 70 with 3 level 90-95 or so level characters to Kefka's Tower, for example, they'll gain up to several levels per battle which will slow down a bit as they get closer to the appropriate level.
- This exp gain can be doubly sped up with Exp. Eggs which drop from the Harpys from the island Thamasa's on.
- Learning spells is also much quicker in the patch, but you may have also neglected learning spells for these characters, so the Desert near Maranda may prove to be most useful as you'll learn three times as fast
as most fights.
- Possibly the best place to grind levels and magic will be the dinosaur forest, as long as you can handle the difficult monsters there. You can learn spells up to 10x as quickly there and it's an area with max exp gains.



-World of Ruin Progression-
It's nearly impossible to not guide progression throughout the world of ruin, despite its open-endedness. The original game had a slight gatekeeper effect where, for example, if you were unprepared Phoenix cave
could be difficult to do for an inexperienced player because of the monsters there being stronger than elsewhere in the world of ruin. The game was pretty easy overall though and most people could work past it at
any point if they wanted. Well, in this patch, that effect may be stronger and more noticeable. So here's the order I recommend, however you are still free to go anywhere you want. It just may prove to be difficult,
or coming back to areas you missed may prove to make that part very easy.

Do anything in a given tier whichever order you want:
1st Tier - Recruit Cyan, Gau, Shadow, Terra.
2nd Tier - Recruit Relm, Strago, Mog, Umaro.
3rd Tier - Recruit Locke, Gogo.
4th Tier - Sunken Castle, Cyan's Dream, Ebot's Rock
4.5th T - Cultist tower (same level as Tier 4, but I think magic restriction makes it tougher)
Finally is Kefka's tower. All characters entering should be above level 90-93 and will probably get to 99 while in there.



-Bosses-
These should be roughly similar thematically to what they were in vanilla. It may take a few tries to understand what the boss does and the kind of damage they deal and whatnot, but there should not be some back
breaking learning curve to get past most bosses. If you just cannot get past a boss, your may need to really think about which item and esper choices you're using. And of course, if you've ran against every enemy
and are underleveled that could possibly explain why you're having problems. You should not have to grind out levels, but if you think it can make it easier, then go ahead. A few levels can make the difference.



-Encounter rate-
Not much to say here except all items give the Charm Bangle's "Reduces the rate of random encounters by half" effect. While this seems like you're cutting random encounters in half (because it says "half"), the
algorithm works out to it actually reducing the encounter rate by a quarter of the amount. But still... it's reduced slightly. As a result, each battle is worth more. Oh, also the Charm Bangle is now a different
item entirely, since the effects don't stack.



-Monsters-
After the Kefka's battle at Narshe, monster AIs start to take on smarter attack patterns. A few examples are:

- A monster which puts you to sleep will try not to continuously put the same character to sleep. Additionally monsters in the formation will try to not attack a sleeping target to wake them up. This is not guaranteed
though, so don't think "Oh, I'll just put this character to sleep," just to make them essentially immune.

- Some monsters will intentionally target lower health targets.

- Some monsters, usually the bigger, more tanky ones, will start off rather tame and as they take damage or as time goes on, they'll deal more damage. These are best focused down one at a time instead of hitting multiples
of them at a time and they all retaliate strongly.

- Monsters will like to focus on characters with stop, poison, or seizure or other status effects.



-Dragons-
If you've played the GBA version or know about the Dragon's Den dragons, then you will know what kind of thing to expect from the 8 dragons. Stats-wise these are tuned differently than the GBA version of course, but
script-wise and thematically they're very similar. These are not meant to be fought at the first chance available but rather you should come back when level 90+ to fight them.



-Czar Dragon-
You have to do some searching for him as he's a rare fight in the world of ruin. He's basically an exact copy from his GBA counterpart. I think I only changed his level to increase his damage to be on par with the 8
dragons - even in the GBA version, he was not tuned towards you having level 99 characters. As for finding him, look for a spot which is kind of tucked out of the way and where the random battles are other smaller dragons.



-Atma-
Probably the biggest challenge this patch has to offer. Just some boss with effectively a million health and 16 different phases. No big deal.



-Ragnarok-
A completely optional thing to do: Choose the Esper. You'll be able to get the sword back through morphing as well as other items. This is only for those with a lot of time. Each rare equipment has effectively about a 1%-2%
chance to be obtained.

Use morph on enemies above level 90.

Things you can get:

- Enemies less than L.90:
- Antidote, Green Cherry, Eyedrop, Soft.

- Enemies above L. 90 and do not drop what is on the list under this one:
- X-Potion, X-Ether, Elixir, Megalixir

- Enemies above L. 90 which drop a rare equipment all have Ether, Magicite, and Rename Card as well as one of the following:
- ValiantKnife
- Excalibur
- Illumina
- Ragnarok
- Pearl Lance
- Aura Lance
- Stunner
- Sky Render
- Heal Rod
- Magus Rod
- Rainbow Brsh
- Wing Edge
- Doom Darts
- Lucky Dice
- Tiger Fangs
- Aegis Shield
- Genji Shield
- Cursed Shield
- Force Shield
- Red Cap
- Genji Helmet
- Thornlet
- Force Armor
- Genji Armor
- Minerva
- Wraithguard
- Merit Award
- Safety Bit
- Offering
- Gem Box



-Gau Rages-
See Gau's rage guide included to see which new abilities are available to him.



-Changelog-
1.21: ***DOES NOT REQUIRE GAME RESTART***
- Changed a few Gau rages which used Roulette to use something else instead. This spell did not work as intended when raged and acted the same as Gau casting Doom. Rage Guide is also updated.
- Lowered Leader health and damage slightly.


CRC32 326CF6A2
MD5 581340FAC027D19795F417D797BF5EA7
SHA-1 E8A51418B02758C8BD4A59F4FB102BE5E86C38A2
SHA-256 7796786BC6DD2AF20872DE9D6A115F6D8C89FC249F5EBBD55EC6B0EAE9FDCAAB

Final Fantasy III (U) (V1.1) [!] Headered