OT6 v0.8 — the economy bites

OT6 v0.8 — the economy bites

OT6 is a ROM hack of Final Fantasy VI (released in North America as
Final Fantasy III). It is distributed as a BPS patch containing only the
differences from the original game.

This release changes numbers in territory you have already played —
deliberately. Ability costs across every kit were an order of magnitude
too cheap; fixing that touches Sabin from Mt. Kolts onward and Cyan from
the Phantom Train onward.

Promoted from rc2 after the owner's playtest. Two rounds of candidate:
rc1's break effect turned out to fire only rarely, which rc2 fixed.

The playable frontier is unchanged from v0.6 and v0.7.

How to play

Apply ot6-v0.8.bps to a Final Fantasy III (USA) 1.0 ROM with SHA-1
4f37e4274ac3b2ea1bedb08aa149d8fc5bb676e7 using a BPS patcher such as
Flips or beat. The patcher will reject any other ROM.

Play from the beginning through the Raid on Vector, the same supported
stop point as v0.7.

What's changed since v0.7

Breaking an enemy is finally an event. The broken monster flashes
white and a heavy sound lands with it, on the exact frame the damage
does. Previously the only sign was a digit turning into a 'B'.

Abilities cost what they're worth. Every kit price was recalibrated
against what vanilla's own spells cost at the level you learn them — 8 to
20 percent of your pool. The old numbers were an order of magnitude
under: Cyan's techniques ran 1–3 MP against a 96 MP pool, and Cleave, his
capstone, cost one percent of the pool it arrives with. MP is now a
budget rather than a rounding error.

Every kit tops out at 99. Bum Rush and Cleave are 99 MP — the same
ceiling vanilla's own dearest spell (Quick) sits at, so the top of a kit
now reads the way Final Fantasy numbers are supposed to read. The rungs
beneath were re-derived from that ceiling rather than scaled.

Steal costs 4, at parity with Pummel, Dispatch and AutoCrossbow — the
cheapest rung of every kit. (Its price still isn't displayed anywhere;
that's an honest gap, noted below.)

Gau can fight. His menu is Fight / Rage / Magic / Item, and on the
Veldt that first row becomes Leap — the thing you were going to do there
anyway. Leap is free now (it was quietly charging 2 MP with no number
shown anywhere). And his Rage list offers a chosen eight rather than a
wall of two hundred, configured under Skills → Rage.

Sabin's Blitz page shows abilities instead of button combos. It had
been teaching the input system OT6 retired in v0.4 — names, MP costs and
break-class icons now.

Both loadout pages tell you what they're doing — L/R SWAPS where it
was previously undiscoverable, AUTO or MANUAL with Y=AUTO to
revert, and - EMPTY - where a Rage slot is genuinely unset.

Costs render correctly. The loadout page's cost field could only draw
one digit, so the rescale made six of eight techniques display
punctuation instead of a number. Caught by a test written the same
afternoon.

Breaking an enemy is audible even when it dies. A breaking hit usually
kills — it takes vanilla's elemental ×2 and then the broken ×2, so 4×
base, and almost nothing early survives its own break. rc1 refused the
whole effect on that path, which is why it seemed absent. Now:

• broken and still standing — white flash and sound
• broken by the killing blow — sound only, because the death animation
  legitimately owns that palette slot

Magicite are gear. Equipping an esper grants a package of stat changes
rather than one small nudge, in the exact two-byte format FF6 uses for
every stat-bearing weapon, helmet and relic in the game. Measured against
that ruler: the best stat armour purchasable in the World of Balance is
+11 across its stats, and a boss stone now sits about there. Three tiers
that differ by shape, not just size — found stones +6 across two stats
with no downside, story stones +8 across three with a −2, boss stones +10
across three with a −3. Ifrit is +6 vigor / +4 stamina / −3 magic —
body, not book; Shiva is his mirror; Maduin carries +7 magic, vanilla's
own per-stat ceiling, and pays −3 vigor for it. Swapping magicite is a
choice now, not a strict upgrade.

Known gaps, on purpose

• Steal's 4 MP is charged but never displayed. The battle command
  window has no numeric field at all, so a flat verb has nowhere to show
  a price. Locke's kit gains a submenu in a future release; that's where
  the number will live.
• Element icons don't appear on ability pages — only break-class
  ones. The element tiles are only uploaded for battle, so AuraBolt shows
  no pearl cue yet.
• Multi-hit is not yet a designed dial. Pummel hitting twice, Quadra
  Slam hitting four times, and what that means for break rate is the next
  big balance pass, not this one.
• Locke still has only Steal. Five of his eight designed skills are
  already past in the story and none are built. He's next.
• Gau needs a fresh recruitment to gain Fight. Command slots are
  copied into your save at the moment a character joins, so a Gau
  recruited on v0.7 or earlier keeps the old Rage / Leap / Magic / Item
  menu permanently. Everything else in this build carries into an existing
  save normally. Not supported before 1.0 — start a new game to see it.

What we'd like to know

• Did anything get worse than v0.7? Specifically: Sabin from Mt.
  Kolts, Cyan from the Phantom Train. The rescale makes their abilities
  4× and 2× dearer, and that lands in fights you have already played.
• Does sound-only read as enough when a break also kills? That is the
  common case on trash, so it is the one you will hear most.
• Do esper packages feel like finding better gear? Is a −3 an interesting
  cost or an annoyance?
• Does MP now feel like a budget you spend deliberately, or like
  rationing that stops you playing your character?
• Is Fight ever the right move now? That was the whole point — vanilla
  never gave Cyan or Sabin a reason not to use an ability.
• Does the break flash land right? Too subtle, too loud, wrong sound?
• Gau's eight: enough? Interesting to pick, or a chore?