Things I liked: The ramping and pacing was nearly perfect for most of the game.
The "New Threats" were all nice to see and fun, cant comment on their balance though since with the exception of yuffies tifas and clouds I used w-summon KOTR (more on that in the dislike section)
Early game felt harder in general with a few random enemies taking me by suprise and causing me to have a game over.
Cloud Tifa Barret Cid and Yuffies inate abilities are well suited for their characters and play styles.
Sources from mr. happy to build your characters was a nice addition and most characters I was happy with the selections available.
Low materia slots on weapons and the stats given from them really made me think harder about what loadout I wanted to run
I ended up speccing low on the physical damage scale (tifa focused dex and luck and cloud was vit/spr and dex) but was happy to see that basic magic and eskill felt balanced throughout the game and not just spikes when aquiring an E-Skill.
4x cut and Dblow+added cut didnt feel like the o.p. must have loadout for mid-late game.
New vareity in materia and skills gave me a new path to play though with which is something alone that will bring me to play through ff7 again.
Things Im on the fence about: Ultimate weapon crafting, With the ability to do all of the New Threats before actually descending into the crater I would have liked for those fights to have had one of the weapons required the crafting as a steal reward so that they could be crafted without having to try to farm from enemies in the crater. I was already max level before the crater with all the ap I needed for my materia so i felt like i was just wasting time trying to get an Iron giant to drop a weapon for it. But i understand It being the way it is to add more playtime and to encourage people to explore after reaching the bottom.
Trading a guide book for a gold chocobo, Again on the fence here because I see the reasons to give it earlier since the caves are hard and it saves time on chocobo racing, but I enjoy the chocobo breeding grind and did it anyways so this is just a nit picky point.
Crystal weapons seem a bit too powerful to me, Once i had those I prettty much always used them except for the characters special varients or ultimate weapons. I also valued defence speed and materia slots this run so thats part of it, but I feel that they are either over tuned or the later weapons are either too situational or just not worth using.
The platnium match in the battle arena. I tried this fight about 15 times before I beat it, and while for the first 6-7 times I adjusted my load out, party and strategy I only won because of pure luck because he didnt use his AOE status attack on the first turn and the person he attacked survived the hit so i was able to spam KOTR for the win.
The dark cave was a nice new addition to the story, but it ends so abruptly that i thought it was bugged at first since none on the NPCS had new dialogue like I had been in the cave, especially DIO who i assumed would have a reward or atleast a new line of text after i completed it, It was only when someone told me that the cave always ended liek that that i knew it wasnt bugged.
Things that I disliked. The new bottom swell fight felt harder than the rest of the disc 1 fights. Jenova felt laughably easy after that. But I feel like those other fights were balanced and that bottom swell was the outlier fight. I managed to pull together a 1st time win vs him and if i had lost the strategy to beat him would have been pretty apparent but the point I am making is that his difficulty feels out of place for that area, I would personally tone him down just a tiny bit, or make the mythril cave turks and Jenova fights just a tiny bit harder to keep the flow of the balance.
Demons gate felt way to weak, admittingly i was pretty overleveled by this point but he still felt more like a "just chip away at him forever with no danger of dying" boss rather than "Lord Demon's gate the 3rd, destroyer of runs and smasher of controllers"
Theifs glove come a little too late IMO. Yes its a great item to have and I like how expensive it is to aquire but by the time I got it (right after getting cloud back) i didnt see the need to use it and only put it on tifa because I had renew+magic counter and wanted the +30 dex from it.
Renew is obtained too early for the effects that It has and is a bit too easy to master.
Bomb king..... I hated this fight. After the first attempt i knew the strategy i needed to beat him, but i felt like the right was just 25% prep and 75% RNG. One of the fights he used chain explosion, sucker punched the character that was going to heal the bombs, then chain explosion again. I beat him because i got a good pattern and he only used chain explosin on turns 1 and like 10 or something. And the bombs chose to spam eruption instead of their basic attack so my characters werent in any actual danger.
OMEGA weapon is affected by stop, making that fight the easiest of all the materia cave bosses, and for KOTR It should feel like the hardest.
My only "real" complaint though is Master summon + w-summon. These were easy to obtain and as soon as I had that combo the game became basically free as mastersummon+MP absorb+w-summon followed by mime was the way I won every fight. I know that that combo also exist in vanilla and that i could have just NOT used it ( next time i play im doing a no KOTR run) but it was obtained so easily imo that there was no reason to not use it ( i didnt w-item glitch anything so atleast i got that going for me ^_^)
The way I would balance that would be to either remove master summon entirely or put one of the summon materia at the bottom of the crater or make all the master materia have a much harder boss fight than the KOTR boss was.
Overall id rate this mod 8/10 and I would say that I enjoyed it just as much as the Hardcore mod, albeit for different reasons.
Well done.
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