WARNING: This blog is SHAMELESS with its spoilers for the original Final Fantasy VI. Changes present in the T-Edition romhack are shown off and only the strategies for overcoming challenges have spoiler tags.

Forward

Okay, so this is where the game gets hard. More hard than ever before.

The most audacious element is the enemy encounters. It seems like now more than ever before, enemies are just killer. There have been a lot of battles where one or more party members are on the floor at the end of it, missing out on EXP and AP. Enemies hit harder, are far more likely to use instant-KO attacks, and are likely to counter attacks with devastating blows. It’s downright annoying, if I’m being honest.

Usually the enemies have a susceptibility to an ailment that tones down a lot of their bite, like Gorgimera being weak to Stop so as its HP gets low it doesn’t start spamming triptych weather attacks, or Coeurl being weak to stop so it doesn’t spam instant-KO attacks or counter with them.

It comes down to keeping track to what enemies are susceptible to what and what not to attack them with. You might even want to write down specifics about various enemies because your first trek through a dungeon will likely not be your last.

It’s frustrating but there is a delightful intensity in dungeon-crawling when random encounter can scorch your hiney like that. I might complain but this something I signed up for.

World

North of Narshe is a small cabin not present in vanilla FF6. Inside is Mr Clio, a helper person who keeps track of how many times various characters have used their unique class ability, like how many times Locke has used Steal and how many times Relm has used Sketch– to keep track of how close you are ‘til you get the achievement to show up in Narshe’s Achievement Hall.

I stopped by the Colosseum to see if I could take on any fight worth fighting and the answer was a hard No. Most fights creamed me but the twist with T-Edition is you can control the character you send in to fight. Can’t wait to actually win some battles! This is where you get Shadow again so I wagered the Nigiritsune and beat him in a fight to recruit him.

While I was there I talked to Ultros who is in debt and who I immediately offered to pay for. That was all my gil out the window. Don’t know if it was just a troll or something that’ll pay off.

Getting Companions

Owzer’s Mansion was next. I have always liked this strange interior dungeon. It’s cozy. I’d live in it. Anyway, the monster encounters weren’t too bad. There’s a Lamia enemy and I erroneously assumed the trick with that one is after you deplete its HP, you have to cure it to death, but truthfully you have to use curative abilities from the start. The boss Chadarnook had a lot of HP (and is not always open to attack), but it wasn’t too hard even, although it using Disease on my party members means I beat the thing just as my MP was running low. The cutscene afterwards warps you right back outside, though– you don’t even get an Esper.

Relm was back in my party so I went to go get Strago at Fanatics’ Tower. No T-Edition tricks with that one but I’ll have to come back to the Tower later. Next up was Gogo, and you get to them the same way you always have– getting wolfed down by a Zone Eater. The enemies in Zone Eater’s Cave are wild cards in that they might just whip weapons at you for massive damage but they were like that in vanilla FF6. Luck could mean you get through battles effortlessly or enemies could demolish your party with 3000 damage attacks.

T-Edition added a new room near the entrance of the Cave– one with a fight against the Adamantoise. I gave it a try but it creamed me so I guess I’ll save that one for later. Towards the back of the dungeon there’s another Monster-in-a-box optional fight with the Death Rider. Too hard. Too deathy. Save for later.

Narshe

After claiming Gogo I went to Narshe and that place has changed a lot. No longer do you fight enemies walking around the streets. If you go into the westernmost house, you find Banon and Arvis– alive and relatively well! T-Edition doesn’t vanish them from the story in World of Ruin. They tell you about various legends and magics across the world– in other words they hint at all the optional sidequests you can do to fight more bosses and get more loot.

At this point you can travel across the world to find refugees from Narshe and ask them to come home to repopulate the town and reopen their shops. There’s about seven around the entire world once you’ve done that, the Elder of Narshe gives you the Ragnarok Magicite. Does it teach Ultima like in the original game? No, just Teleport and Libra. It still has the summon ability that turns enemies into items and we’ll see if I can turn some enemies into awesome items.

Apparently the T-Edition readme that I got with the romhack had an error in that it said that if you miss getting the Carbuncle and Catoblepas magicite in World of Balance, you can get it later in World of Ruin. That is wrong, and since that error in the readme has been fixed. If you don’t talk to Arvis and Banon in WoB, you have to talk to some old men walking around Narshe. And if you don’t talk to them then, you miss out on the two Espers forever.

Unless you happen to cheat. So various emulators can use Lua scripting to provide extrajudicial code for rom files. One Lua script I found allows players to fight Carbuncle and Catoblepas as world map encounters and obtain their Magicites after. Being that they were bonus bosses meant for WoB, they weren’t hard and I beat them with fairly regular attacks. They don’t teach any super special skills but I do like to be a completionist.

Inside the Narshe Cave, where you find the frozen Esper at the beginning of the game, lay a Magicite. It is for the Esper Titan, who you have to fight to claim. It was a hard fight, but doable on more or less my first go. I took Terra up to the snowfields after and faced the frozen Esper at the cliff. Beating it’s first form is hard enough especially with how much it likes to use Rasp on my party, but it had a second form where its attacks get more aggressive and I couldn’t step to that. Maybe this fight is for later.

Phoenix Cave

So it was time for the what is arguably the biggest excursion yet in Final Fantasy VI: The Phoenix Cave. A little refresher: it’s a dungeon where you send in two parties to navigate through it, having one party step on one switch to open the way for the other, and then vice versa– until you have chained your way to the end of the cave and finish the dungeon. It’s decently tough in vanilla and the complexity of the dungeon makes the experience moreso intense.

The enemies are real monsters here. There’s a bomb enemy called the Pineapple which loves to counter any attack with a Self Destruct ability that will 100% KO a party member with the large amount of damage it does. At least I learned that they are open to Berserk and it nullifies their counterattacks.

The cave is long and while in vanilla FF6 there’s no boss battle, but there’s a boss battle in T-Edition, though! It’s pretty interesting– there are two stages to the boss fight. The first is against Triceras. Hits hard but isn’t terribly complicated of a fight. But then it’s revived by the Phoenix’s magic and becomes BurnTyrant. It has some nasty ailments and is completely healed in intervals by, again, Phoenix’s magic. The trick is to continually use Ice magic to freeze Phoenix’s power and pause the healing so you can whittle down the boss’ HP. It took me a little bit to realize that trick, though.

Finished Phoenix Cave, got Locke and the Phoenix Magicite, and it’s at this time I realize that the hack is very apprehensive in giving me armour and relics that have elemental damage resistances anything more than cutting effectiveness in half. While more relic have those kinds of properties compared to vanilla, equipment in general seldom have Immunity to elements and I’ve yet to see an Absorption. Early on vanilla FF6, you grab the GaiaGear and absorb Earth damage. That Absorption has been downgrade to Half Damage in T-Edition.

Will I ever obtain armour that allows me absorb elements like Ice and Fire? I sure hope so, but we’ll have to see in the future as I continue this wild journey across the World of Ruin. Stay tuned!