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I've played 3 hacks recently of FFVI - Return of the Dark Sorceror, Brave New World, and this one - The Eternal Crystals. The Eternal Crystals changes up the story a little bit, but nothing crazy, and then mixes up a lot of World of Ruin stuff. I liked the changes a lot, EXCEPT that only certain characters can use magic. I don't have a problem with that, but the other characters that don't use magic are gimped. Sabin sucks. Which can be a refreshing change since he dominates most of the game in vanilla. But it makes 5-6 characters able to handle anything the game throws at you. I would have liked to see the non-magic characters get some power increases to their abilities. Also, since they can't use Espers, they don't get the level up bonuses of the magic users. So, by the end of the game, there are huge stat differences. Overall, though, there aren't as many changes to the mechanics of the game and combat as compared to Brave New World. So, if you've played the vanilla game to death, you can rely on most of the same strategies to succeed. Which is a lot of fun.

Overall, I liked Brave New World a little better, then The Eternal Crystals, then Return of the Dark Sorceror. That said, The Eternal Crystals is a great hack in its own right.

This hack adds on more features, skill sets and changes the way you battle.

The difficulty can go into overdrive if you're not careful enough.

This would be perfect for mini consoles such as Super Nintendo Classic.

There are a lot of things to like about this hack: it adds new sprites, enemies, storylines, etc. I also enjoy the fact that it's a bit harder, and that espers can only be equipped by some characters and not all. There are also new/changed skills for characters.

There are plenty of downsides, however. While playing this, I encountered multiple graphical glitches; usually during battles involving the custom sprites, or just changed battle sequences. Most glitches involve character models glitching out at the bottom of the screen; however during the battle on the airship against Chupon/Typhon, the battle menu glitched out and your cursor, as well as some battle commands, go invisible.

Most of these glitches are forgivable, but there's one thing that completely ruins this hack for me: it's not balanced. I will say that for a large part, the enemies, while harder, are balanced; however once you get to ZoZo and magic starts getting involved, all balance goes out the window. Enemies in a group of four will start casting thundara at your entire party for 500-600 damage a piece, wiping out your entire party if 2 of them use the spells before you've recovered. At that point in time, your only cure spell is still just cure, which will heal around 100-200 hp if you're lucky.

You might think that once you get espers, that problem will be solved: however, now not all characters can equip espers. In fact, very few can. Even if they can, the spell costs have increased. Cura (formerly Cure2) now costs 45MP to cast. It doesn't even have increased effectiveness to compensate.

For a few more examples: the ultros fight in the opera house has increased difficulty as Ultros now has what I estimate to be in the range of 30,000 HP, and increased damage output. He also can turn you into a frog. The worst offender I've found so far is a monster-in-a-box called a Hell Gigas found on the Floating Continent. I grinded to increase my HP and defenses due to more enemies using overpowered magic spells, and am around level 32-33 on the Floating Continent. This monster kills my party in about 3-4 attacks. Every time he goes, he attacks 3 times; with each attack doing around 600 damage. Unless he decides to use Firaga as one of his 3 attacks, which will do about 1400 damage. He also seems to counterattack every time he's attacked. Every time he counters, he does 3 attacks again.

I appreciate difficulty in games. A good challenge gives you a sense of accomplishment. I've played through the Dark Souls series several times, for example. What I don't appreciate is unbalanced difficulty where the only way to get around it is to grind for experience. Grinding isn't difficult; it's just a time sink; an artificial way to extend your play time, and to give you a false sense of accomplishment. The graphical glitches aren't a big deal; and are pretty much to be expected, as a lot of these character models aren't meant to be in the game. The overpowered magic of enemies and the highly expensive MP cost of magic spells is what ruins the game for me. If those were fixed, I'd definitely recommend this hack to anyone wanting a new experience with FFVI.

Pros:

• This hack is really freakin' awesome!
• Its a lot harder than the original but its not over the top
• I love the new enemies from FF4/FF5 mixed in
• A great new storyline involving the light & dark crystals. It really fit in well with the FFVI universe
• New dialogue that fits in very well
• Big changes for Edgar, he's a dragoon, uses Kain's sprites, and no more tools. He uses dragon powers now.
• Big changes for Cyan, he's a dark knight now, he uses Cecil's sprites and you can even change him from dark knight to paladin. Also, his abilities are changed.
• Gau has a selectable attack now instead of just rage
• Only magic users can use espers, I always thought I wouldn't like this but after playing it, I love it!
• Love how the WoR was overhauled, it's way different. I loved exploring and seeing what was around.
• new dungeons
• Locke can throw things now
• a couple extra playable characters
• Siegfried was replaced with Gilgamesh, not sure why I like this so much but I do. He's just not a b**** like Siegfried was
• certain characters can equip two weapons automatically. Shadow and Sabin I think
• Shadow can gil toss now
• equipment usage is rearranged to be more appropriate

Cons:

• There's such a limited number of enemies. I mean, lots of enemies are new, but you'll fight the same selection of 3 enemies 8 times in a row. Need more variation in enemies per dungeon. What the heck happened to all the enemies?

• Cyan's dream sequence in the WoR ruined was too hard and there's no going back once you get there. One piece of advice, make sure you've got plenty of tents or sleeping bags before you go so you can level up if needed.

• One way that FF6 was perfect was the music, so I'm not sure why they decided to use music from FF4. I mean, don't get me wrong, FF4 was great and had great music but replacing the battle music with FF4's battle music was a bad call. Its just not as good as FF6's battle music. There's other places where they replaced the music, as well, like the Phantom Forest and cave dungeons. Not good.

• I hate how Sabin's new name is Mash, although you can change all their names just like normal

• Terra is blonde now, hate it

In summary, this hack is just freakin' awesome! Its by far the best FFVI hack I've played. I highly recommend it. It's fun, more difficult, and a total nostalgia trip! The pros FAR outweigh the cons. I actually had to nitpick when it came to the cons. I rate it a 10/10

Well, this "complete" hack is not as perfect as I would like it to be, but it is certainly worth the time.

The first half of the game (World of Balance) isn't that special as there isn't a ton that has been changed from the original game. There are sprite changes with some of the characters (Edgar is now a Dragoon like Kain, Strago looks like a Black Mage, etc) as well as some music changes and variations. Also, many enemies have changed, incorporating many other enemies from other FF games. That much was fairly interesting but not enough was changed from the original game. Scenarios are almost identical to the original game (minus a lot of re-written dialog). As a result, the first half of the game was just ok.

The World of Ruin was the best part of this hack. There is still some of the same scenarios that you can accomplish but there are a ton of new secrets to discover. Once when you get Daryl's airship and you get enough of your characters to an appropriate level you will have a lot of fun just exploring all the new places and enemies. I won't give anything away but I certainly was surprised by all that was added and changed.

Some things of note; not every character can use magic. Matter of fact, there is quite a few that can't. As a result it raises the difficulty quite a bit. This is ok because other characters strengths are leveled out to make them worth while to use. But one of the negative things to note is that some of the new places to explore in the second half of the game are still not totally perfect or should I say properly finished. If you play through you will notice certain new areas that look like they have more to explore but they don't. It was a little frustrating but I was able to get past that and still enjoy everything.

Not totally perfect but I think you'd be sorry for not checking this one out.

I have played through FF6 Eternal Crystals v.X all the way through, and not only did I enjoy almost every minute of it, I would most likely not hesitate to do so all over again! I, myself, am an avid hardcore FF6 Player/Hacker/Fan for a long time now, with a hack of my own, and I was not disappointed with this re-crafting of the game, which is Version X. And while I felt that certain parts could use a little more balancing, and testing, I was pretty much satisfied in terms of difficulty. Trust me, if you enjoy a challenge, you will not be disappointed either!

Since this is an honest review, I will say that I was slightly upset with Cyan the Dark Knight, and thus found myself not using him at all. The same goes for Sabin's Kick skill, which I found rather useless. A few bugs were still present, and some cheap boss exploits that I discovered. But those are all minor issues in the long run of the experience I had. There is a whole new story that is actually pretty damned interesting, and well thought out. I was basically doing a speed run of the game, or rather trying to play through it with an excellent time, and instead found myself taking much time to read the text and absorb the story. So that should say a lot.

Since I will not spoil the story, I will just say that what was the World of Ruin, has been changed dramatically, in a way that makes you feel as though you are experiencing something new and awesome for the first time. And it is good... There are many unique surprises and new dungeons, as well as some crazy strong character specific Relics and armor. There is also many new song injections from other games, which has to be my favorite part of the whole hack, because as we all know... that is not an easy thing to do! An incredible amount of time, patience, and effort went into this hack, and it shows. And if anyone would know that, it is me. So please, do not be afraid to give FFVI Eternal Crystals a shot. Great job MetroidQuest!

Final Score 9/10

First of all, I'd like to say that I've been Let's Playing this game over on YouTube, both an older version, and a new version.

I don't know exactly what the problems some of the other reviewers have had, but I didn't have them.

Of course, 9.08 came out after I started the LP, but I've seen some videos the creator made where he shows the 'buggy' events in the game, and they just don't exist.

I like this hack. Its a complete going over on the game. We get new character sprites, new portraits in the menu, new story, new attacks, new weapons and some new armor.

One of the first big changes (other then the big change in the story) is the fact that Edgar is now a dragoon and has Kain's sprite from FF2/4. Cyan got the same treatment, as did Strago and Relm.

All of these characters are also given new abilities save the very few that can still learn magic. Yup, not everyone can learn magic in this hack, so you've gotta play it a bit differently.

The difficulty has been ramped up a tad, so its going to be a bit of a challenge for some players, I ran into trouble a couple times myself.

All that said, and I've been going on too long already, is that this is perhaps one of the best FF6 hacks I've come across. It looks good, its different enough to be really interesting but its similar enough to be familiar. The new plot, new abilities and new restrictions (like the majority of the party not getting to use magic) make it a fun experience.

You can see that Let's Play I mentioned at my youtube page. Its the same name I've got here, jasonsgroovemachine, if you want to take a look at it.

Thanks for the use of your head, and I'd say definatly download this and give it a try.

I've played a few versions of this hack about 3/4 of the way through and have found it fairly enjoyable, but the latest(9.08) is extremely buggy. MakouEyes has fixed the garbled battle text when fighting Vargas/Gilgamesh, but that's not one of the big, show-stopping bugs. There's another problem in that very battle that makes it un-winnable. It can be fixed with the FF6 editor by LordJ, but it shouldn't exist in the first place. After fixing that bug myself, I moved on to the Returner Headquarters. There, you run into a bug that creates an infinite loop. When Terra tries to walk outside to talk to Banon/Galuf, the soldier guarding the door will not stop talking. He will continually repeat the same few dialog boxes of text over and over again in an infinite loop. That's where I gave up on the newest version. These bugs don't exist in the older versions, so it was quite a surprise to run into game-breaking bugs so early.

This could be kind of a neat thing to play, but it should've been played through once by the author to look for bugs before he released it.

I will revise these comments as appropriate when I've finished the hack, but after playing this hack for a while, I've come to the conclusion that this hack is mediocre at best.

Here's a quick list of stuff done right:

• The sprite changes to insert Cecil and Kain from FF4 are good for the most part and they look pretty good in FF6. I do find Kain's movement kind of strange though.
• Monsters inserted from other games look alright and don't look too bad here
• The revised storyline is fairly good and is worth a different look/take for kicks

However, this hack suffers a lot from inexperience or not seeing other well developed hacks.. in fact it's hard to tell what the actual goal is from the hack with the lack of a readme.

Here's a longer list of issues with this hack:

• It was very apparent that not enough bug testing was done on this hack. There were many minor issues such as description problems/errors to major issues like visual bugs in scripted battle text. There is nothing more annoying than hacks that don't appear to have been tested.
• Monster sprite changes were welcomed, but minimal changes to the AI were made. In some cases, there are strict sprite changes with absolutely no AI changes, which completely ruins the overall impact. This doesn't even factor in the lack of changes in the item drops.
• The command changes were fine and limiting the number of magic users to a select few were fine. What was not OK was allowing only those users to benefit from stat growth and not nerfing those stats since they are the only ones to benefit.
• Major known FF3/6 bugs were not addressed in this hack, so I found myself playing this more like the original game. That's not why I am playing an FF3/6 hack.

In some, this hack does not deserve much credit of being radically different. In fact, there is a lot more of the same, which ruins the overall impact of the hack itself.

If you want something "slightly" different (with the emphasis on slightly), then this is for you. Otherwise, this hack truly suffers from lack of bugtesting and perhaps not enough feedback.