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One big problem I see with this hack is that especially in the beginning you lack options to deal with the challenges you are facing. When you die you don't think "Maybe I'll try it that way next time, maybe that will work better", instead you think "What am I supposed to do? What could I have done differently?"

Making enemies very strong is fine, there is nothing wrong with hard modes. But if enemies are that beefed up you need to have the tools to deal with it. There is not much you can do besides attacking, defending and healing up, especially early in the game. I wish you would find some useful things earlier in the game than in the original. After all, this hack is for experienced players, experienced players want some complexity. The original game lacks options because it slowly introduces you to the RPG mechanics. A hard mode hack designed for RPG veterans doesn't need an introduction, it needs ways for the player to find strategic choices. But instead of giving you such tools, some spells take even longer to find than in the original game. And some things you find - like bombs - are even useless. When you find them you get your hopes up thinking "finally a new element to the game I can consider", but bombs are simply so bad, that it doesn't even matter. Their damage is lower than the damage of normal weapons, despite being a limited resource. How am I supposed to make a difference in battle when I am not provided enough options?

Well , since it is hard to make a difference in battle by selecting the right weapon, spell etc. you rely on other strategies. Like only engaging in fights you need to do to progress, or fleeing if there are too many enemies and fish for a better encounter. But those are not fun decisions to do. Also, you need to guess whether it is worth it to engage in a certain fight or not, as you don't know what's in the chests. Is there a cure potion or seeds in the chests? Does the battle field give me GP which I can't make use of yet, or will it give me a spell that might help me deal with enemies?

That said, in a second playthrough attempt when you know what are in battle fields and chests and can pick the right ones, you actually can get through the Bone Dungeon (and the rest of the game) without any grinding. With grinding I mean clearing areas more than once, you just need to pick the right battles. You also don't need to come back to Foresta for free sleeping after you left chapter 1 as others have stated. While gold is limited, it is enough to deal with the game.

In chapter 2 things get better. You start to get spells and a companion with spells, so you gain more options in battle, making them easier and especially more interesting on a strategic level. From chapter 3 onwards you have enough tools in your pocket to make it a much better experience. Sure, you still get stun locked in some situations and die in a battle where you didn't even get to do a single move, but such situations become more rare as you progress.

Battle Fields are unnecessarily long, one has 99 fights. So if you want to complete everything, you now are forced to go for this one "hard locked grind". Each battle field only has 3 variations. After 10 battles you learned what to do and after that you can only do minor tweaks to your strategy, making the other 90 battles an unnecessary and repetitive task.

The game was challenging but fair. I actually had to grind this time! I did enoy the choices of music and thought they were good choices. If I had to pick one problem it would be an audio issue I had. I'm not sure if it was just my game, but the audio wouldn't stop crackling the entire playthrough. When I last played ff6 on this same computer, I had no issues at all

After not touching this game since my childhood, I was super interested in revisiting it with this difficulty mod in hopes it would actually keep me engaged. In that regard, it did great! The new difficulty, enemy stats/attacks, equipment stats, and such made it exciting to see all these new things and come up with actual strategies for a change. The new music was also a nice change, though I agree with another reviewer in saying that it would've been great to touch up the script a little bit too to potentially make the story a little more interesting (though to be fair, even clever writing may not help in that department).

Is the game grindy? Yes, but so long as you clear out the battle areas, you should be well-equipped for each new area as you arrive to it. That being said, the mid to late game battle areas are obnoxiously long. Like waaaaaay too long. I had to listen to audio books while grinding through those to even bother. Even more annoying, the last one with a whopping 99 battles has a reward that is basically required to beat the game without grinding to an obscenely high level. These are some of the biggest negatives in the game design department.

The battle engine for the game is still very basic, so even with the new weapon stats/statuses, spell orders, etc... most battles will have a simple optimal strategy (and some more resource preserving worse strategies). Balancing these throughout a dungeon can be a little tedious, but it at least is interesting each time you enter a new area to figure these out. For the levels I was at, most battles were hard throughout, and enemies with strong status counters or spells could end you anytime you got bad RNG. Thankfully, the game's existing "easy mode" continues make dying pretty trivial (you an even intentionally die if you waste resources in a battle). By the end of the game, your abundance of strong spells will carry you pretty well until you get to the Dark King. He was an exercise in frustration at my level, and reaching any higher would've taken hours of grinding based on the experience I was getting from enemies. I had basically no chance to survive several late phase attacks, so I had to pre-revive my 2 members until I could barely survive something and chip in a little damage at a time. When I did finally win, it was definitely just some dumb luck of hoping he didn't use a certain attack

In short, if you like hard-mode mods, don't mind grinding, and most importantly just want to re-experience this game in a way that actually holds your interest, I definitely recommend the mod. Otherwise, may be best to stray clear

A definite challenge. Too much so. The new changes are definitely welcome. I enjoyed myself for a bit, with some difficulty, at times a bit too much. I got up to the Ice Pyramid before giving up. As many have already noted, enemies are MUCH tougher than the bosses. It becomes so much so, that you will frequently use most of your MP just in one battle later on. A lot of backtracking to Forestia for free inn visits are a must. Bombs are useless, not that they really retained usefulness previously. A lot of the game is dumb luck. You will spend at least 90% of the time poisoned. Confusion is a constant death causing status effect, as well as overpowered enemies. Unless you power level yourself, there is no way to really survive, just by playing through normally. JCE is known for his difficulty hacks, and this is absolutely no exception. I was hoping for an in between of FFMQ's easy difficulty and this. Becomes too hard to be enjoyable. The music additions are mostly good, although I would've preferred just minorly changed music, like the synth added into the existing battle music. All and all, a decent hack, that requires A LOT of work to be enjoyable to anyone who doesn't want to grind for hours just to survive.

Honestly, there's not much to say that hasn't already been said, so I'll keep this short and simple.

The difficulty level is certainly over the top, where the vast majority of battles can only be won through savestates and dumb luck through a good portion of this game. Confusion/Paralysis being a part of so many enemy counters is legitimately frustrating. Clearly, with the absense of GP and the aquisition rate of spells/ethers, the intent was to force the player to use physical attacks. This effectively turns the entire game into nothing but RNG and dice rolls, with only a few small windows for actual decision making or strategy. Instead, I decided to farm Bone Dungeon for Ethers in order to fight with spells, and return to Foresta to rest from all corners of the world.

Considering that any and all Items can be farmed from replenishing chests in various dungeons, making it to where enemies do not drop GP is utterly pointless and achieves nothing but forcing the player to backtrack and revisit the same areas over and over, assuming that the player wants to use something other than Savestates/retries to stumble dumbly through battles.

With a handful of changes, this hack could easily retain a high and much more legitimate difficulty level, effectively making it the best version of Mystic Quest. Obviously, the music implimentation/changes to existing tracks are fantastic.

Suggestions :

• Enemies need to drop GP to avoid more backtracking than FF2. This could not possibly be more necessary.

• Either dial back on the enemies who counter with Confuse/Poison, amd/or make Ethers more accessible.

• Spread status effects out more evenly between weapons, potentially creating a situation where the player decides between debilitating an enemy or hitting for increased damage.

• More frequent ammo chests in dungeons where party members have an ammo count. This is where a majority of Ether farming became necessary, due to Bare-Handed attacks causing counters, and forcing the player to make Phoebe/Tristam's attacks constantly consist of offensive spells to compensate for high enemy HP.

Patience, and definitely save states made me survive. You'll receive everything besides the Exit magic, I couldn't find it anywhere. The Dark King is very difficult, not because you can't use cure against it, but you should save Wizard magic until he expands in his 2nd form. In the main boss dungeon (i.e. Volcano), if you have to go back and sleep to bring back all your magic and items, then do it. I did this because I first used all my magic to explore and acquire new magic and eliminate dead ends. Eventually, I knew exactly where to go to find the boss fight, plus I had accumulated experience points. Complete every battlefield in the game, even if it has 99 monster sets to clear. Try to fight a battle of 2 monsters, instead of 3 (run away if you must). This is very repetitive. My time from beginning a new quest to defeating the Dark King was over 24 hours (spread over days of course)!

This ROM hack, Mystic Quest Reborn v2.0 is easily one of the most frustrating things I've ever played. I can understand some degree of difficulty and I certainly would enjoy a harder version of this game. However, there are multiple things I'd like to point out before you consider playing for yourself. Unfortunately, 90% of these things are negative.

• Enemies take WAY too long to kill for how dangerous they are. The game pretty much forces to grind to insane levels to basically live in the next dungeon. Eventually, normal battles will become luck-based struggles of you hoping for more criticals and less misses.
• Enemies are harder than the bosses on all accounts. This is very disappointing, where the enemies are doing more damage and almost taking longer than the bosses to defeat.
• Every enemy counterattacks in this ROM hack, even the Behemoth at the beginning of the game. I would have been fine with plain counterattacks. But then I get poison-touched by the Slime every attack I do on it. Then I get confu-touched by the Basilisk. You know how annoying it is to be confused half of the fight just because you attacked one enemy? VERY!
• Bombs are worthless in this hack, and any status effect not on Claws, Ninja Stars, and Bows of Grace are pointless too. I feel that the makers of the hack did not test to see how things worked out, otherwise I'd be glad to have bombs blind all the enemies if it worked.
• Enemies do not give ANY amount of GP, only battlefields and bosses. This is frustrating to a huge degree when you're trying to grind down battlefields to 0 when you have to walk all the way back to Foresta just to sleep for free. That's not fun.
• Benjamin, the hero, is not how he is advertised. For the first half of the game, Benjamin is a piece of crap, unless he is level-grinded to death, which I'm sure the creators have this intent. However, initially and for quite a while, Benjamin reminds of a sturdy one from the original. Can't hit with squat (if he doesn't miss, 66% accuracy is not fun) and his magic isn't exactly better for quite some time.

These are things I disliked greatly about this hack. The things I did like are the fact that Benjamin's armor is a lot cooler-looking and some of the themes that were inserted from FFV and SoM show great effort in implementing. While some of the songs don't fit perfectly well, they were remembered quickly and appreciated.

My suggestions for the creators on future versions:

• + BALANCE YOUR BATTLES! If it takes two criticals to kill an enemy, it has too much HP! If it takes a spell weakness and two attacks to kill an enemy, it has too much HP! I'd expect to see more of the difficulty for the bosses, not every enemy battle.
• + Please consider testing out your hack before releasing a new version, it puts in the player's shoes for starters and it allows you to find any issues that can be addressed. I definitely was not happy to see how worthless some of the potentially helpful status effects were on the weapons.
• + Please give SOME GP with enemy battles. It doesn't have to be a lot, but any is better than none, because having to go back to Foresta to get healed fully was one of the most repetitive things I've done in my life.

I know I've said a ton on this, but I had THIS much beef with it and I don't want to go against the hard work that these guys put into it.

Most of us that grew up in the SNES era and loved the RPGs that came out from Eniq and Square will probably remember Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. Yes, the RPG that was suppose to be (1. A beginners game for newbies to the RPG genre and (2. The game that was hopefully going to make JRPGs in North America profitable. But alas, Mystic Quest was good at neither. The game sported aged graphics, even for the time. The game play was clunky, easy, and repetitive. Totally linear (minus a couple of dungeons). And the storyline suffered from a horrendous script that could have been written by my ten year old nephew. The only positive was it had a remarkable score, for the most part. This hack makes some drastic changes to the game that address quite a few of the issues listed above.

The first thing I noticed about MQ was the music. The music was changed to make it feel more like a Final Fantasy game than a spin-off. But at the same time retained a lot of the classic music from the game itself that was truly worth keeping (battle music for one). The main change that was the most welcome was the drastic change in difficulty. No more plowing through the game in seven hours. You not only have to defeat every enemy on the screen but leave the level and defeat them again if you want to have any chance of even beating a boss. As well, treasure chests aren't just lying about all over the place making the experience easier. Another thing to note is when you gain your side characters they are not so much more powerful then you are. Unlike in the original where they would be like Goliath's making your main character more of a supporting character. This is just a few changes to take note.

I only had a couple of things I would have liked to have seen changed as well. But this could be for another project I suppose. I would like to see either a completely new script for the game as I really hate the original. Yes, the storyline is very typical "Save the Crystals, you save the world from darkness" mumbo jumbo, but a good script could take even the most simplistic storyline and make it worth a gamers time. Either a completely new script or a completely new game based on the MQ engine. That is something I know I would check out.

For fans of the original game, whether you liked it or not, you should definitely check this hack out. If you liked the original and would like to play through it on a more difficult note, you will welcome this. If you didn't like the game because you felt it was too easy or childish, check this out. I think you might be surprised.