GuestLog in

This is a fantastic hack of Final Fantasy 1 that inspired me to create my own; the work here is top notch. The classes are well balanced and fun to play, the enemies are genuinely difficult even if you know what you're doing, and the bugs and imbalances that made the original game so linear have been removed, so there's a lot of replay value here. This really feels like what Final Fantasy would have been like with the intervening 36 years of design expertise and more time to polish and develop it. Five stars, strong recommend.

Really recommend this hack to FF1 fans. The new classes are a blast. The equipment has been simplified. Maps redone, new dungeons to explore, and a lot of options re: where to go and what to do next as the game goes on.

The magic has been redone and it works great. All spells are useful and magic users all get spells specific to their intended combat role. I like that there are no level restrictions. For example, my ninja ended up able to use level 7 direct black magic and would have eventually gotten level 8 charges if I kept leveling. This made the ninja a viable hybrid throughout the entire game with no drop-off in usefulness. I love it. Same with Paladin - he was a viable healer for the entire game. Hybrids are not completely overpowered though, as they get spell charges a lot more slowly than full time casters.

The difficulty felt good to me, though by the end game I felt overpowered. That is fine though. I don't need every hack to be a difficulty mod :) ToFR felt like a victory lap and that's OK. The real fun of FF Ultra CE is the class system and the many choices for building your party. I went with a balanced party (Paladin/Viking/Ninja/Sage) that probably made the game feel easier than with some other parties.

If you're looking for a fresh take on FF1 with some fun new unit choices - you've found it. Great work to everyone who contributed to this hack.

The first thing I want to say is this hack is a trip. It's fun, adds a lot, and I really want to like it, and for the most part I do. The different jobs are varied and a lot of fun, takes a while to get used to, and you can make a lot of different teams that will work well together to get through. A lot of time and trial and error was obviously done, and the end product feels great.

The new spells and items and enemy scripts are all very neat and handled really well. I really enjoyed my play through, and anyone who enjoys final fantasy should give it a shot for sure.

Now, with any game though, regardless of how good it is, there's always some things I wish were different. The following are my personal opinion and constructive criticism as someone who loves challenging RPGs and a game that actually makes me try to think to get through it. The gripes I have in no way make this a bad hack, just, my personal view on things and notes that I think could lead to an even better experience.

The map is... wtf. This is the biggest thing. Everything is moved around, and it really became a huge pain in the ass to find where certain towns and dungeons are. Some seems super random, and I had to make a map myself because I couldn't keep track of anything at all in the world for the first several hours.

The stairs in dungeons. I get what you were going for in having multiple stairs in different paths in dungeons leading to an exit. But what the hell man? This was so damn annoying trying to go through caves and get treasure to head to a new staircase and randomly end up outside again. I hate this, and it made no sense at all. Teleports to leave dungeons are fine. You can tell what they look like, and know they are gonna put you outside. Random staircases that lead to places they shouldn't are not. This was mostly in the first few areas.. but this was confusing in an already very confusing dungeon layout. Marsh cave has 4 staircases that lead outside. Why?

The new spells are fun. But insanely OP. Blasting through fights with bolt early on makes the early game a cake walk with even only 1 person casting it, and you will usually have more than that available. There was very few times I felt stressed on magic uses and felt any threat at all until boss fights. Just maybe some tweaking to make the early game not just a total breeze. Up to the earth crystal there was never even a remote sense of danger of someone dying on me.

Some bosses take forever to kill but still are total wusses. This seemed to get better as the game went on, but especially the dark elf king and Lich were just annoying. They went hard, never killed anyone, but the fight took forever because they have so much health. I like long boss fights, but not when they are barely scratching me and I'm just smacking them for 20 mins. Make bosses a bit tougher or have less HP, maybe it was just me, but it felt off when I'm getting hit for 20 damage from a boss when I have 300 HP and my attacks are doing hundreds of damage each, while the boss has 170,000 hit points. (an exaggeration but that's what it felt like)

Other than these gripes of mine. I loved the hack, and will recommend it to anyone wanting a new FF to play.

This hack changes the mechanics of the game in ways that are generally quite good. It feels like a mostly solid and cohesive experience. It would work okay as somebody's first FF1 experience, but I think it'd be better to just play the original and treat this as a "second quest" for advanced players only. I consider that a flaw in this hack.

The new classes are good, and the reworked spell library is even better. I didn't use absolutely every spell in the game during my run, but I came close. And yet, off the top of my head at least, I can't recall even one that wasn't useful. Some were better than others, but few were completely irrelevant. This is a LARGE change from the original FF1, in which you only really need direct-damage spells, healing spells, EXIT or WARP, a few defensive spells, and FAST. Here, BANE seems to have been replaced with the far more interesting (and very useful!) BIO, enemies are dangerous enough for MUTE or STOP to sometimes be all but required, certain enemies can dodge well enough for BIND to actually be needed or can attack well enough for SLOW to be needed, and TMPR works (and is of course awesome)! It's great. I liked relying on so many different spells!

I'm not so confident that the classes work well; I only tried four after all (ranger, warlock, priest, sage) and merely read about the rest. You can see that my party was especially skilled with magic... I felt as if I had a white mage, a black mage, and two super-duper-red-mages! I think the ranger can actually learn EVERY spell, in addition to being pretty strong physically?? I don't understand that. I don't think there's enough difference between ranger and sage. Looking at descriptions of other classes, I see that it's quite normal to be able to learn enormous numbers of spells. It'd be more interesting if there were a bit more limitation, and a bit more character to the magical aspects of the classes. Being able to learn, say, "both indirect black spells" at every magic level is HUGELY powerful, given how useful the spells are in this game. It makes almost everybody look like a black mage, white mage, or sage, with (in some cases) some physical abilities thrown in too. But I dunno, maybe it's more limiting than I realize. I have doubts though.

There is a similar sort of universal sameyness in the equipment system, and in the dungeons as well. Everybody gets the same few simple varieties of equipment; the fun of finding a "were sword" or "vorpal" or whatever is just gone. That sucks! Everything's all systematic and orderly, until you're almost at the end of the game, at which point the unique treasures suddenly start pouring forth - though most of them won't be usable by the classes you chose! As for dungeons, well there are lots of new ones! And that is cool. But they come up in too orderly a way. Everything is organized in fours; every major dungeon follows the same pattern as the others of its class of four. It smells like something a nerd would make, with everything being so orderly... I know because I've done that kind of thing myself! Real worlds and stories should be more organic and surprising; they should rise and fall in natural rhythms that don't follow obvious, simple patterns. If you're playing through all the optional content in this hack in an effort to see it all, then you're liable to get tired of it before it's over, once you start recognizing the patterns!

That said, here I'm only criticizing the placement of dungeons in the world, the function of them in your overall quest, and their relationships to one another. I am NOT talking about their actual interior maps or enemy sets or other internal details. All that stuff is good! The new dungeons use a few interesting gimmicks, even. And their layouts don't feel samey. They have distinct designs. I think they work well.

This hack does tend to want to turn everything into a dungeon, though. That's kinda cool, but it also eats up too much of the non-dungeon content in the game's original plot. I don't love the original fetch quests involving Matoya or the bottled fairy, but I think it's valuable to have that kind of variety, as with the contrast between a quest to just talk to some weird witch (without any fighting) and a quest to battle your way into a dark elf's castle. In this hack, those two steps would just both be dungeons. It makes the game feel less like a story and more like a test arena for game mechanics. It's not an obviously bad thing, but... I dunno, it bothers me some.

This also tends to break up the original plot progression in ways that leave NPCs talking nonsense, I think. Somebody talks about the robot and the waterfall, but that waterfall has been removed! There's talk about the price of oxyale, referring to the payment you had to make at the caravan in the original game, but now you just find oxyale as a quest reward, without having to buy anything. The circle of sages has been reworked into a tutorial system, which is useful, but this stops them from acting as characters in the game, and you'll no longer be tempted to talk to them in search of advice on how to actually advance the plot. Accordingly, you may get through the whole game without ever learning how to receive the canoe! (I know because it happened to me!)

On a similar note, the gender changes in the Conerian royalty are fine and all, but the text that's displayed at the end of the game still refers to Princess Sara, not Prince Sander. It also mentions some dragons that I think no longer exist. Sloppy work! I got the impression that this hack wasn't really designed to convey the original plot properly to a new player... but also, that it simply wasn't quite finished. The Sander/Sara error has nothing to do with mechanics; that gender change thing was just thrown in arbitrarily, and if it weren't going to be implemented consistently then it could be left out altogether without any harm to the real meat of the hack.

There's also a bit of the sort of "funny" in-joke content that tends to crop up in works altered by fans. A few NPCs say silly things, and when an enemy casts a meteor spell, a "funny" word appears. It's immersion-breaking as always, but there's only a little bit of this stuff.

Well I can say a lot about what I didn't like - but overall this was a good, solid game, and in many ways it was far superior to the original FF1. If you want to try some cool new classes and spells, you should play it! It can be a really good time, especially if you DON'T try to consume all the content in one run and instead focus on only doing things that you really need to do for your current party. Becoming overleveled can ruin the fun. It may be unavoidable for any variant on FF1 to become a bit of a slog in the endgame... This one certainly did for me. The hack helped in that regard by removing most of the overpowered spell-casting items from the original game (though too many remain - that whole game mechanic is way too strong), and by reducing the need to buy 99 cure potions every once in a while (I hardly ever bought any). It also really tried to make boss fights remain difficult even near the end. But that doesn't entirely work out.

Ordinary enemy battles are often really cool in this hack; enemies can do lots of interesting things, and many of them have quite a lot of personality as a result, relative to the simplicity of the game engine. But boss fights are terribly limited by the fact that a boss always fights alone and can only do one thing per turn. Moreover, in my run, the optional bosses mostly felt weak to me, great though their stats and ability sets were, because the ones I had trouble with were all vulnerable to STOP! That was pretty much the end of them. Too bad. I think bosses are better in this than in the original FF1, but the real stars are the ordinary enemy groups.

Okay I think I've covered most of what I had to say. Basically, I want the storytelling/worldbuilding aspect and the player instruction aspect of this hack to be rather more polished than they are, and I want there to be some kind of time limit or scoring/achievement system or SOMETHING to drive a person to actually need to avoid becoming overleveled. Given all that, this could be pretty great! As it is, it's just good. It's worth playing, anyway!

I grew up playing the original Final Fantasy, and I don't think I'd go back to playing the vanilla version after playing this hack.

Having 12 classes to choose from right from the start really makes the game more interesting, and the author has done a good job balancing the classes. My first playthrough I used a Rogue, Warlock, Monk, and Sage, which was a nice, balanced party. But in the late game, I found myself wishing I had a Wizard instead of a Warlock, so I played again with Rogue, Monk, Wizard, and Sage. Status and buff magic is actually useful in this version of the game, and makes the Wizard an extremely useful character. In the mid-to-late game, his Galaxy spell is an MVP.

Some reviewers have criticized that most of the magic users are locked in to only having 3 spells available to them per spell level, removing an element of choice and customization from the player. While this is true for some classes, I would recommend a party take one of the Ranger, Monk, or Sage, so that you will still have the element of picking and choosing which spells to take.

The additional dungeons throughout the game and the 4 bonus dungeons at the end really make the game more interesting, and the areas that have been removed to accommodate them are scarcely missed.

I actually made the mistake of overleveling at the end game, removing most of the challenge from the final dungeon. I was curious watching my stats grow, and before I realized, I was at level 40+. It would be nice if there was a way (maybe a hard mode) which required the player to be at 40+ to finish the game, and would still be challenging at level 50.

Fantastic work, and thank you for this wonderful hack!

This hack was very interesting and a lot of fun. There are a ton of improvements and changes made that create a brand new experience out of a timeless classic. That said, it's not without its drawbacks.

First, I greatly enjoyed the removal of the class change in favor of additional starting classes. This added a nice variety to the standard 6 choices and ultimately made the play-through more interesting. The downside to this is that, due to the limitations of the original game, there are only so many 'roles' that can be created and oftentimes, the classes overlap-this can be somewhat beneficial if you are a heavy spell user, since 9 spell charges don't carry you very far if that is all that character has. Also, due to the same limitations, there are only two palettes of three colors available for all of these classes, leading to a lack of variety and, especially due to the darker colors chosen for one palette and an almost two-tone palette for the other, the colors end up somewhat bland looking. The last major change to the characters is the 5-letter names, which offers much better flexibility during creation, but, once again, because of the game's limitations, it causes the menu to appear glitchy when choosing a target for a healing spell or potion (only from the main menu).

Second, the world map, dungeons, and game flow has been dramatically altered, with many dungeons being completely remade and several places ceasing to exist, with new locations created in place of them, most to acquire key items. I loved the experience of a new adventure in the somewhat-familiar world a lot. The new dungeons are fairly short, so it's not tedious or difficult unless you hit a rather nasty group of enemies. It's very common to run into a group of enemies where at least half of them stun or put you to sleep with their attacks, leaving half of your party defenseless. With the addition of making running away more difficult, this leads to some rather irritating encounters and wasting of healing resources.

Third, there are four bonus dungeons with ultimate equipment in them. This is a nice addition, but the equipment is extremely overpowered in most cases (I had a Viking and a Ninja who, when equipped with their ultimate weapons, almost tripled their damage output from the highest level shop equipment). These weapons are unique to a class and while there are several nods to fantasy-genre and mythological references, without any further hint as to what class can equip each weapon, it was sort of a trial-and-error process of moving equipment and trying to equip it on everyone to see who it was for-a weapon type symbol would greatly assist there. Actually, even the special weapons found in the later story dungeons lacked symbols to show what type of weapon it was and, therefore, which classes could equip it.

Finally, I am very pleased with the changes made to the spells, especially as far as healing is concerned. Healing spells (and potions, thankfully) are more potent, making them more useful and practical in battle. The only recommendation I have here is to add the "Buy 10" option in the item shop to make stocking up on Cure and Clns potions less annoying and time-consuming.

TL;DR

Despite my complaining, I feel that overall, this was a very fun take on the classic RPG that started the Final Fantasy franchise. It is highly recommended for anyone that has played the original to death and is looking for a new way to enjoy it.

Having found and played many hacks through this site and forum(well done team), this particular mod is the first that drove me to create an account here. Despite countless views, and participation of many other mods, I write now because of this one.

Other modded game favorites of mine include super metroid, mega man anything, countless other games on here, and of course all of the final fantasies. I have been playing and dabbled in mods for a long time.

This original game, on the NES, was Final Fantasy 1. For anyone that's as into FF as I am and have been, that played 1, the vanilla unu on console with RL save; this should be especially entertaining for them.

To review the mod specifically, I simply have to start by saying that is all around excellent thus far.

I have just completed defeating Lich and lighting the Earth Orb, and man has it been a wild ride so far.

The list of chooseable characters from the start alone will probably leave you wanting to replay.

The openness of the ship (which has its own brand new dungeon to acquire) that can land anywhere opening the game up from the early onset.

So many things feel well balanced. You are pressed, tried, pushed, but as long as you know your strengths, spend a little time gathering money (so precious, is the money), make sure you have most of the spells you think you will need, and success isn't far off.

There is great support in the readme.

Can't rave about this game enough and I feel like I'm just finally getting into the real meat of the game, based on the team I have picked.

My most sincere and respectful props to this mod's creator: Absolutely Well Done.

Play this game now, if you ever loved the original FF1.

• Web