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First off, if you liked the graphics changes in Grond's FF++ hack, then you will love playing this game (as I did), because the creativity and inventiveness are taken to a completely different level here. To ensure a relatively fair review I tried playing this expansion under three conditions:

• a cold start (no previous save)
• a previous save with Fighter/Moogle/White Wiz/Black Wiz
• one with a maxed level party, Sages in tow

In general - this game is amazing, the town"s" (such that they are) are *gorgeous* and elaborate, and the dungeons are crazy imaginative. If you enjoyed the previous work I think you owe it to yourself to give this one a try at least.

Feedback below:

First - I'd love for the "cold start" (no existing save file) to be a little smoother than it is at current. I may not *want* to play through the entirety of FF1 in order to play the expansion! I mean look at how beautiful the screenshots are! As it stands playing the expansion cold is *super* difficult. ​You start near a town (great) and you start with a lot of gold (awesome) and every single enemy in your vicinity will literally kill you without a contest in under 10s (not good at all). Likewise, said town has no magic shop, so if you're starting from scratch and you choose magic users, they are completely useless to you until you can find the one location in the game that sells them. You also start nowhere near the airship and a distance away from your "ship ship" such that you can easily get killed just walking there, and then killed on the way to power levelling spot. ​ Likewise the one location that does have a magic shop has no inn(!) so in order to restore your magic pool in this case, you need to travel back and forth.

Grond does try to resolve this a bit in his README by telling the player to execute a large set of instructions to start levelling but even following those instructions required me to abuse save states, etc. etc.

I think an easier solution in this scenario is to:

• start the user at "Magic Town" (which they do if they port a save from Corneria)

• have the area *around* Magic Town be the power levelling spot

• add an Inn to Magic Town

• have a couple more NPCs in said town that tell you where the weapons can be found

I'm also not sure how to resolve the fact that the Time Mage is pretty much useless here until getting upgraded to a Sage, and this goes back to my earlier issue with the base FF++. Because of how tough the enemies are in this version of the game, Exit/Teleport and Warp are almost essential in the dungeons - however the only class that has access to this is the Time Mage, and in a "clean" game, that class doesn't get any access to either white or black magic spells until class change. So you can't really afford to waste a spot on a character that can't cast anything of notable damage unless you want to play "power level" for 50 hours. =)

Now playing in the way this was "intended" to be played (with an endgame save from FF1):

• Dungeons are beautiful
• Towns are beautiful
• Fights are beautiful + amazing - I'm in awe of how much is packed in here
• I wish there was more "life" to it
• If you don't bring a Sage don't bother with this =)

What I mean by the last two is that:

a) there's really only two "towns" in this game (understandable to some degree, since most users will have the entire magic spell list and subsequent weapons/armor are earned from dungeons)

b) the NPCs in the one town with interactivity provide *very* limited direction (and in fact don't respond any differently once you complete that "quest"). In contrast to FF1, where each destination at least gave you an idea of what to do next (even if you chose to sequence break), this game stops telling you anything after the first town and just leave it to you to explore. There's nothing wrong with that direction as a gameplay choice, but it made the "world" feel more artificial to me.

As for the Sage thing, this just goes back to my complaint re: the gating of quality of life spells like Teleport/Warp to be exclusive to the Time Mage/Sage. This is even more important in this game, where the enemies are of a power level that unless your levels are near maxed, them getting one bad drop on you is a game over. You can imagine what a frustrating experience it is to have a Fighter/Moogle/Black Wiz/White Wiz barely scrape by a boss fight and then realize you have to somehow survive getting all the way back. =) In this game especially, ideally the user could have access to items of this nature.

All of this being said, artificial or not the world at play is jaw-dropping and I think everyone should definitely give it a try. That being said, you *definitely* should power level yourself up in the original game and *then* port yourself over. And bring a Sage. But clearly I loved the heck out of this game (and the previous hack by Grond) or I wouldn't have spent this much time writing about them! =)

Recently finished Grond's ++ and WoC, so, thought I'd leave a review.

I imported my end-game ++ save, following the 'unsafe' equipment guidelines in the readme.

Everything in World of Chaos is great. There isn't much to nitpick. Seems like the author did a great job in all areas. A lot of work went into World of Chaos and it shows.

One thing that was nice and an improvement over ++ were the sizes of enemies. You can now fight more than one dragon at a time, for example.

I'll list a few things I wasn't a fan of, but it's more out of personal preference than anything else:

• Wish the window colours in battle were black like original; I'm just used to it.
• Fallen party members still get experience is interesting, but, I like the original way better.
• The Save Crystals are also interesting, but it makes things a bit too easy.

Also, the fact that this is more of an expansion pack to ++ is an epic idea. But, it felt kind of strange because I was simply wandering around looking for dungeons with no clear goals or progression in mind (since you have all the quest items). This isn't a bad thing, of course, but I've never experienced an expansion pack for an author's previous hack, so that's why it seemed a little awkward.

Lastly, I thought I would have been able to end the game without a class change, but I ended up doing so. Perhaps I could have, but let's just say it was an easier battle afterwards!

Okay, in the end.. great hack, it was really fun. I know it's not a HardType but it was still fairly easy, especially ++. Bonus points for having no spelling/grammar errors and a funny ending to WoC.

If you're looking for a completely revamped FF1 experience, look no further. Remember to import your save though!

Thanks for the fun quest.

I have been on a romhacking kick of recent and found this hack for FF1 sort of by accident. I hadn't played the first game in the series (FF1+) but I read the description on this one and it sounded like a lot of fun. I also disregarded what the description had mentioned about the difficulty level.

Basically this game plays much like FF1 in the fact that you choose your party members and names. It starts at the point in which the party members are walking into the past to fight Chaos but I sent into a world of FF madness. Essentially tying in all the games for the NES and SNES into one massive world. For instant, you start out right next to Marsh from FF6. Pretty nifty, I thought. That is until I decided to battle enemies and got my rear-end handed to me. I mean viciously... Your characters start out on level 1 as where all the monsters have their stats maxed out. It makes it impossible to gain levels or really play the game.

One of the things I noticed about the game that annoyed me was that when you died and decided to press continue on the menu screen, you'd be warped to (what looks like) the dessert from FF1 where you get the airship. But it is just an island with no escape and only one party member is alive in your crew leaving you defenseless to the enemies surrounding.

I would say play this one only for hardcore FF gamers. At least just to have some fun with it. Otherwise steer clear. You'll only get frustrated with its difficulty.