The title of the hack is to be determined, but frankly that's not important to me... some preliminary hack titles that I came up with are the following:
It's Palom's Fault
One Twin Too Many
Clone Wars (yea yea, it's a spoof of Star Wars)
There are some goals in this hack... I'm serious.
1) Exploit the battle engine features - Despite having a more modern GBA port (which has its own sets of disasterous bugs), the game has a lot of potential to exploit different aspects such as elemental attacks and whatnot. By exploiting more of what is known now, you could say this game could be more advanced than its SNES counterparts (well, maybe).
2) Redo unused stuff - I believe JCE's FF3US hack had the right idea. Revamping a number of equipment and spells that are underused will get the treatment it deserves.
3) Fun - I shouldn't have to explain this.
Some things to expect.. despite the changes:
1) No new treasure/map/dungeons - I'm not putting any effort into that. In fact, I'm not wasting any time on it. All the good stuff will be found through grinding and stealing.
2) Better random encounters - No, I'm not going to reduce/change the monster encounter rates. There will be a number of different monsters, but those happen to be "clones". These guys will always drop something much more useful than what you can buy in the stores. However, these battles will be harder than normal encounters and you do have the option to be a great big chicken and run away. Most of the monsters will remain the same, but their battle scripts will be revamped to something a bit more complex than "just fight". Monsters in general will have a more useful drop list. Besides, bosses will be obviously harder.
3) Wall/Reflect is learned at level 99. Since I'm fully aware that Reflect breaks counter scripts in this game, that is the first to go. Subsequently, there will be spell list changes. There will be no access to the items that cast Reflect/Wall (I may consider changing those items altogether).
4) Text/graphics changes are not a priority. I would love help in that area, but regardless of where the effort will go into making this a more fun game, the focus of this game is the gameplay.. not the text. I will give credit as appropriate, and anyone interested is welcome to make those changes in a separate patch.. but I have absolutely zero interest in modifying that myself. Discussions on what random/intended scripts are welcome... it would amuse me if anything.. but of relative importance are the in-battle messages that will certainly need testing (it has to be written with the battle scripts, so it does matter to an extent).
Story Background: Somewhere in some old library in Mysidia, Palom goofs off as usual and finds some magically sealed book that he's not supposed to open. Well, he manages to open the book anyways, and now Zeromus has the ability to make clones of every character that joins you in the game. Now, Cecil's additional challenge is to keep the peace and kick their asses in addition to whatever he has to do.
Important note: This is not a "hardtype" hack IMO. After writing a document about the game, I personally don't think it would be hard if people used their brains. Above all else, I do not give a damn to idiots who think the original game is hard. For those that understand the game mechanics well enough, this hack will not need massive grinding.. it requires a brain and its ability to "connect the dots". Of course grinding will make things easier, but on the other hand.. I have some creative ideas to make boss battles more interesting and make grinding less important.
Other random things I haven't considered or thought about, please let me know. I will allow beta testing by anyone for feedback (primarily bugs), but a release will only occur as I reach Zeromus... if I get that far into this. I suspect this will take a year, give or take sanity time. However, that's not an ETA or a completion % that is definitive. Asking me when the damned thing is done is not tolerated.
