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I am reading mixed reviews on this game and have finally played through enough of the game to throw in my 2 cents. Like many people who search for JRPG challenge hacks, I have always really enjoyed the JRPG format but have always found games to be far too easy. Final Fantasy 6 in particular has such a beautiful game engine which has always felt wasted due to game bugs and overall lack of challenge. This game pushes the final fantasy game engine to its absolute limit. all the game mechanics are reworked, items are reworked, encounters are reworked, relics are reworked. The style of the game is well balanced and challenging throughout. you have to constantly think your way through encounters, boss fights, different areas. for most of the game your resources are extremely limited and precious, your money is low and you are forced to think carefully about what to spend it on to help you get through the next section.

I have found that against certain bosses and certain areas I am constantly shuffling around my set ups to get through it, trying different combinations of espers and relics until something clicks. So far there has always been a solution, I have never had to grind for experience to get through a stage. My natural experience progression has been pretty steady as I try to make an effort not to run from too many encounters when pushing through an area, as in my opinion that diminishes the experience when playing a challenge hack. Almost all of the spells that you could previously ignore in the game have become useful, as well as espers, and you have to use everything from silence to sleep in order to clear through many dangerous areas. The aesthetic designs are really refreshing as well, with new spell animations and sounds, and the fact that the over world map music doesn't end when you get into an encounter. It's is a tiny little creative element that makes a big difference. I think it's best not to abuse save states too much, but occasionally you might want to use them before certain boss fights because many of them take several attempts to figure out.

The overall feel of the game is really different from any JPRG I've ever played. This hack really shows the depth of a game that can be made in the JRPG engine, and if you are a JRPG enthusiast and wish to try a challenging game then I would definitely recommend this one. I suppose a person could just grind for levels to get through a difficult stage, but the game is balanced in such a way that it isn't necessary. There is always a solution, though it isn't always obvious what it is. Currently I am just starting into the WOR, I hope that the game keeps the same feel from here until the end, but from what I've seen so far I expect that will be the case.

I am very surprised that a team of people would put so much effort into a game that will probably be enjoyed by a fairly small niche audience. But I'm glad that they did, I for one am a very appreciative player. For the right people this game is definitely a 5/5.

This is a great difficulty hack for those who wish to test the limits of their problem solving ability. However, I would not recommend it to those who don't have patience (fast forward command is recommended also).

There is no area in this hack which requires grinding to defeat. You can fight virtually any random encounter and any boss without gaining EXP beforehand to do so (and without save state abusing), but that doesn't mean it is easy. This is a testament to the strategic nature of this hack, as pure strategy is enough to get you through. I was far under the levels recommended in the readme for the majority of the World of Ruin, simply because of my stubborn refusal to grind.

However, one downside to this hack is that it can be broken easily by somebody who doesn't want to follow the rules. I'd advise sticking to the readme if you want to continue enjoying the hack in the WoR. Resist the temptation to grab chests early and don't run into later dungeons to grab the loads of ultimate items in there.

Another issue that I have with this hack is that some things just take too long. Atma (in Kefka's tower) in particular had too much HP, especially because it was a bit of a snoozefest thanks to Slow. You could just apply Life 3, and it would be impossible for him to hit you fast enough to kill you before you reapply it. However, he took around an hour to actually kill. Some of the random encounters, such as the ones in the Cave to the Espers, were also somewhat tedious, and weren't difficult compared to much of the game.

In addition, Master Pug, I felt, went down a little too quickly. He only got one attack, and it missed.

Most of the game, though, was well balanced. I found myself switching often between magic and regular physicals as the most effective strategy. Generally special attacks were not the way to go, at least for raw damage, but they had their uses. Throw, however, was nerfed so bad as to make it entirely useless, at least as I saw it.

Much of the stats were rebalanced to make use of the game more thoroughly. You might actually find yourself checking a character's speed stats, and even stamina was incredibly important at times.

As for statuses, they are often necessary to defeat random encounters, and occasionally useful during boss fights, too. Don't shy away from experimenting. Haste also goes from the status you apply when you've got nothing better to do, to the god status of the game. If one of your characters is slowed, and another is hasted, you will get more turns by having the slower open the menu during the other's animations than by having them take a turn.

As for the lack of money, I actually enjoyed it because I felt like I was always scraping by by the skin of my teeth, and being forced to make smart financial decisions instead of just buying whatever crud I feel like. This lack of money is felt most acutely at the start, but you'll be always feeling it until late WoR. Stealing items and selling it, or keeping it, or both is quite effective. I regret not selling the Elixers from the clocks, though, as I never used them.

In conclusion, this hack put a new spin on the characters' abilities, rebalanced usefulness of status effects and natural stats, and was full of interesting battles with real difficulty. If you feel you've mastered the game and some of its mechanics, then this hack is for you.

There is a fine line between modest adjustment of difficulty to make a game slightly harder - more enjoyable for hardcore players, and amping up the difficulty to levels of headache inducing excess.

This hack is EXCESSIVELY difficult, and I did not enjoy playing it.

Been playing this hack and I really love it so far, and it is definitely hard. I died in the very beginning a few times and had to keep starting new games just to beat Whelk, because I walked into this thinking "yeah I'm sure this is gonna be soooo tough" and there's no way to revive a hero in the intro. I've been playing it a lot while I have some time off, but I have only made it to the beginning of the world of ruin (after like 40 hours of recorded play in the world of balance) so this review covers only that much of the hack.

One of the first things I noticed was you get literally no gold (with some few important exceptions) and I thought "How the hell am I going to get by like this?" But really it just made it feel like your characters were actually out there surviving as traveling adventurers, trying to scrape together what they can to fight the empire. It forces you to really think about equipment purchases, because you simply can't get enough cash to get full gear on everyone you want (on purpose I assume) and it makes what little items you can find or afford extremely precious. I have never been so happy in my life to find a green cherry in a barrel, seriously. Elixirs aren't useful so far (because it's % based so not a big deal compared to other items so far in the first half) but they sell for a lot, so finding all the clock elixirs and selling them was a good strategy (and actually made me care about finding them). The only ways I've found to get money from fighting are beating humanoids or stealing from them (mainly zozo, but also some repeat encounters on the veldt were good).

As far as item changes go, everything is different and I really like how it's set up. Heavy armor and shields actually reduce evade to compensate for their higher defense, so you have to choose do I want to get hit more or be hit for less? I haven't really found a lot of items that weren't useful in some way or another, and the unique items are really well done. One of my favorites is a sword that gives you the offering style multiattacks and a counterattack, but it has 1 battle power so you have to lose out on shield defense (which is really important in this difficult version) to basically increase your total attack damage from your main hand by 50 or 100%, since the sword's damage is negligible. I had to win it from a monster in the box in the Floating Continent who just freakin raped the everliving hell out of me, but I had to figure out a way to make him unable to use most of his skills (and he still was extremely hard). There is one type of armor that is only real good vs magic though and I have found it to not be too useful so far, perhaps should be balanced more to make it worth purchasing compared to the other light armors.

The monsters and battles are the real heart of this hack and that is what I have liked so much. You have to really think about what you're doing when you are fighting, even in many of the most basic overworld map random encounters. I have been annihilated countless times by thinking I could get away with attacking one more time instead of healing that character who is at half hp. Sometimes I can get away with it. Sometimes that character gets murdered by a regular bolt spell which leads to a downward spiral of futile attempts at revival and game over. The monsters are so hard that I had to put every party member in the back row, with few exceptions for farming gold or learning spells against lower monsters, and if I ever got struck by a pincer attack it's almost a guaranteed game over.

Some monsters have really advanced tactics, like those grasshopper guys by vector will berserk your party and cast vanish on themselves. There's been plenty of times where the monsters seemed at least somewhat impossible, but I've pretty much always found ways to beat them. Like poison and pummel do really good damage that really adds up to high hp and high defense enemies. That's the only way I could find to beat this pair of guys who would cast pearl wind on each other for ridiculous amounts (beakors I think?). I had to survive until the poison would do enough to kill one off in a few rounds of no healing. Honestly I can't tell whether the creator intended there to be these specific ways to defeat the enemy, or if the guy just made most of the fights extremely hard and wanted us to figure out whatever way possible, but it's definitely been tough to break some of these monsters at certain points and really fun and rewarding to do so. You can tell he did make many important fights purposely immune to some strategies, like you can't just revive undead monsters to kill them, I haven't found a single boss that could be petrified, and some bossess seem to be purposefully immune to some of your best available elemental attacks.

A few parts were just too hard for me to fight through. In Locke's scenario when you get Celes and are on the run from the empire, the guards and their dogs just owned me so hard I had to run. The readme though says there are parts like this, so that is intentional I'm guessing. Another part was Zozo, which had enemies that just seemed way above my level when I got there, so I had to run my way to ramuh. I could make good cash from fighting the guys here later though, so that's probably why. The other part I had to run through was the Magitek Facility. The guys in there weren't unbeatable, but they were so hard that if I spent time fighting them I couldn't have possibly been in a position to defeat the megahard boss fights. The wallchange guy was super crazy (like 20-30 minute fight when I actually won), but I got through him. The cart ride out of the facility vs the magroader guys and the boss fight at the end was the only part so difficult that I've had to use rewind to get through it. The Floating Continent started out extremely rough, where I could only successfully fight the ninjas and had to run from everything else until I could get back down to the airship, but it got a lot better with some levels. I still haven't defeated the Dragon, that creature is really tough, and I just completed my way through the world of balance without ever being strong enough to slay it.

Really, there are still ways to lame your way through this hack. Like I said previously, you can run from a lot of the encounters, and so could run your way through most of the game if you wanted. Maybe make a lot of the encounters unrunnable, if possible? That might really screw you unecessarily though at some parts, so I don't know. Also you can use the rewind to go back to when you aren't totally losing a fight or to force the monster to make a different choice and get favorable outcomes. That's pretty lame stuff though, and I think that really defeats the whole purpose of playing a difficulty hack.

There are a lot of changes to the magic and characters too. A lot of the monster spells were changed and some look really cool. There's this one dance spell called sunflare that looks freakin awesome. A lot of Mog's dances seem different (I can never remember all of his original moves) and alot have really good healing. Setzer becomes really valuable with his jump ability replacing slot, which lets him do really good physical damage from the back row as well as preventing him from taking damage. I never really liked slot anyway since the best way to use it was to abuse the game mechanics (which is pretty lame). Shadow has really high evade and his interceptor friend, so he's a total ninja when it comes to taking hits. His throw is pretty nerfed but probably necessarily so. Cyan's sword techniques are actually really useful for once, that was a really welcome change. The espers don't teach exactly the same stuff, and I haven't gotten more than the first level magic spells so far. I really think magic is kind of underpowered in this first half that I've played through, because unless you are by a free healing location, it's unaffordably expensive (gold is very hard to get) to refill mp enough to just use it when you want in most fights and doesn't do enough sometimes to warrant its use. Magic does still have its place (mostly bossfights or special encounters, had to transform terra and cast ramuh to instakill a mtek guy in the imperial banquet in order to get through it fast enough, for example) but I feel like it's just not up to par with most of the physical or free-magic-damage-skills like blitzes or swordtechs. Could use a boost, in my opinion.

The only other reviewer so far said it was so hard as to be pointless, and I really don't know what to say, I mean it was hard but not grinding hard like the guy said. The guy probably thought he could run his way through the game and not buy armor or just didn't want to buy potions or something (I had to use a truckload of potions, like over 40, during some hard parts). The only times I had to purposely fight for exp to get levels were before the phantom train (the phantom forest monsters seemed hard enough, so I got cyan and sabin up until they got quadraslam and firedance before I got trapped on the train), for the floating continent, and I think it was right when I first got to the southern continent I had a really hard time fighting the monsters and had to really get like 4 levels on some heroes. But yeah I never had to gain more than 4 levels that one time. I did have to get life and cure learned on heroes but you had to do that in the normal version so I don't think that counts? I always really tried a lot of strategies and eventually found something that really worked, and that's what got me through the game so far, but I guess you have to really be smart about playing the game instead of just leveling your way to success. That's what has really made the play most rewarding to me though, beating the enemies because of something I did with my mind, instead of burning hours getting exp.

I must say knowledge of the game mechanics has helped out a lot, like take jump for example. Spears do 2x damage using jump, even from the back row, and if the enemy is weak to the element of the weapon you are using, it will do even more damage, and so that's the kind of thing I had to consider to really do enough damage to the monsters. Mantra, sabin's healing blitz, is based off his hp, and you can get things which raise his max hp and allow him to heal really well (especially if Setzer is jumped, since it divides by remaining party members). I never really used rewind except for that one crazy cart ride part, but I would always use scan on a hard monster (and a quick rewind to preserve mana; the mithril staff was also useful for this before I could learn scan) to see if it had any weaknesses to exploit. It's definitely taken some experimentation and a lot of thinking to find what works against some really tough monsters. But if you're not up for a challenge, why play a difficulty hack? The difficulty has been the fun part for me, hopefully it is for you guys out there.

Overall, if you're like me and have just loved this game to death since you first found it, but have always been bored by how stupid easy the fights were, this hack is for you.

Complete crap. I'm not belittling the amout of WORK that has been put into this, but the result is dreadful.

This hack turns an amazing game into a tedious grindfest.

When regular monsters deal damage equal to four times the amount of HP of your best character, you can always say 'well, I can flee the battle'. But what about bosses dealing up to ten times this amount, then? And by these, I mean the first bosses of the World of Balance.

This ROM hack does not increase difficulty; having to grind up to ten levels does not increase the difficulty of the game, it just kills any point of playing it.

As much as the people behind this ROM hack have completely overhauled the game system, they also completely forgot to make it fun to play.