Thanks for giving me something new to FFVII.
I've been having a blast with this mod, and -- for the most part -- I think it's the perfect difficulty for me. Until disc 3, there have only been a select few times where I felt stuck, but I always seemed to pull through in the end. I never thought I had to go out of my way to level grind (gil grinding, on the other hand...). Battles depended more on preparation and strategy over raw levels. It forced me to really pay attention to stats and materia I got away with ignoring in the original. I actually made sure
not to grind too much since I thought it'd make things too easy, not to mention there's supposed to be a level cap (though not really -- my Cloud's currently around level 80). You made sure magic was relevant for the whole game. It always disappointed me in the original, because physical attacks just outperformed magic by end-game... although I think this mod has the opposite problem: magic is so important that I barely use physical attacks. Oh well. Kudos for letting me see what FFVII could be.
... Theeeeen I got to disc 3. During my lurking, I noticed a post that discussed how unbalanced disc 3 seemed to be. After playing through it for a while, I have to say... yeesh. I'm really glad 1.4 is supposed to address these issues, because I'm at my tipping point here. Disc 3 is BRUTAL. It's challenging, all right, but not necessarily in the fun way. I got a few oversoul shards and defeated about 3/4 of the extra battles in the Battle Arena, and a lot of those were perfectly satisfying victories, but good grief, the sheer amount of preparation and trial-and-error it took to defeat a single boss was way beyond anything I had to fight on discs 1 and 2. They hit hard and a lot of them have so many status ailments to defend against that I really wish I found a Ribbon somewhere. Not to mention just how many battles there are. Victories or no, it gets exhausting after a while.
I didn't really understand the complaint about the lack of HP until I started doing the New Threats and the extra battles. I think I only really started to understand what they meant until just yesterday and today, when I took a shot at Dark Cave... and eventually had to opt out by reloading a save right before I entered the cave -- I sorta anticipated this happening. Even though Cloud is around level 80, with a party full of top-tier materia from the extra battles, I'm just not hacking it. I beat the Turks + Powersoul'd Tifa, which was a nightmare that took multiple tries through trial and error -- including one more when the elite soldier battle immediately afterwards Death Sentenced my whole party, with no clue they'd have such attacks and with no time to Death Force anyone because of the big group's long attack animations ate up the counter. And did I mention there was no save spot after that Turk battle? That was halfway close to a rage quit moment for me.
But okay, I managed that, got to the slums, found Yuffie and Vincent, then tried my shot at the Armor Keeper for Red XIII, and the serpent at the Honeybee Inn. Y'know, bosses being able to use multiple, heavy-hitting attacks in one turn wouldn't be so bad... if I had the HP to survive it. Which only my Barret does. And this is with everyone in back row + Sadness + vit-raising equipment + Wall + Regen. Cait Sith has even healthier HP, except that I can't even get to him until I beat the serpent dude, which is just too much for me. I literally don't know what to do for these battles. It's the first time I've ever felt truly, legitimately stuck in this mod. If anyone wants to share some tips, that'd be great, but in the meantime I guess I can try for more of those oversoul shards. Key word there is "try." Zack is a monster. Somehow I seem to be doing even WORSE than after I grinded and got all that superpowered materia. Probably because the only materia that seems to do reasonable damage, also seems to drag Cloud's HP. Yeah. It's that HP issue again.
I can't wait for 1.4 to come out. It's frustrating because it's been such an awesome ride until now, but it seems like I've been pulling my hair out more often than not with all these near-impossible boss fights. I'm sure you've heard these complaints before, and you'll be correcting them, but I just felt like venting. Because, c'mon, after feeling like a champ for getting through all the challenges up until now, getting smacked around like this don't feel good, y'know?