Return of the Dark Sorcerer

I've been struggling for a little while, trying to figure out the best way to open this piece. It finally hit me: there is a real lack of authenticity these days. Everything has to be buried under several layers of detached irony, punctuated by a wink and a nod. The concept of genuine belief and emotion are more taboo than incest. The internet is now a nazi-run panopticon where sincerity is cringe, bro.

This also extends to the concept of fandom. As part of a project that I'm connected to in the loosest sense of the term, I stumbled across an old web site that played host to multiple shrines dedicated to RPGs that the webmaster liked. Every single one had a different layout, original artwork, dedicated fanfiction, the works. Hell, there was even a shrine for Vay, the most middle of the road Sega CD RPG. A Japanese mook once said that it contained "no positive or negative qualities," and that doesn't matter, because a dedicated fan made a whole web site to show how much they loved that fucking game.

That's the thing: fandom wasn't always called "fandom." It used to be called "liking things," and hyperactive teenagers and bored college students used to like things so much that they would teach themselves HTML and even CSS to show it. I used to spend many weekends as a shut-in teen enjoying other people sharing their interests (I did also make my own fansites, for the record, though they are long dead). I remembered enjoying the fanfiction, the fanart, and updates broken up with ^_^ faces.

The thing about sites like these, is how many of them were people having fun with their favorite things. A fanfic where the cast of Final Fantasy Tactics takes a paternity test on the Maury Povich show? Sure, why not? Amateurish fanart of Team Rocket getting drafted to the Seattle Mariners? Great! It didn't matter whether any of these things were good, or if the jokes flew over the head of anyone that wasn't in the author's fourth period English class, there was dedication, honesty, and sincerity behind it that I find myself missing more and more as time goes on. Hashtags and wikis are a poor substitute for learning a skill just so you can make a page about Gary Oak having a large penis. The most you can hope for is striking gold on Neocities, or finding a long abandoned fansite on Angelfire or Tripod.

I bring all of this up as a way to introduce Return of the Dark Sorcerer. RotDS is a ROM hack of Final Fantasy VI. A dedicated team of programmers, sprite artists, writers, and even musicians got together to take a genuine masterpiece of a game, and turned it into a story where the author's OC's hang out with various media properties. Before I go any further, I just need to take a minute to give credit to the team for actually finishing this. This is not some backhanded comment; making a game is hard! Even making a ROM hack is difficult. Hacking an RPG from beginning to end is such a monumental task, let alone hacking a game that is massive in scope like Final Fantasy VI. Not just the dialogue, but the sprites, enemies, music, characters, magic, skills, Espers, bosses, parts of the map even. That nobody killed each other during the development of this hack is a miracle.

Anyways, back to the main crux of the game. Being a ROM hack, it still follows the same story beats that FF6 does, but with more jokes, references, and Original Characters. Cloud and Tifa from FF7 are members of your party. Professor Oak, as in the guy from Pokemon, is the inventor of Magitek armor and turning Espers into Magicite. Mr. Meeseecks from Rick and Morty explains how save points work. Sans from Undertale is on board the Ghost Train. The tutorial school in Narshe has been replaced with the ROM hack team hanging out while a chiptune rendition of "Forgot About Dre" plays.

Return of the Dark Sorcerer is the logical endpoint for goofy fanfics and webcomics with Mega Man sprites. The playable equivalent of stumbling across cloud_strife38's home on the internet after a Saturday evening of scrolling through the Anime Web Turnpike. Me being the broken record that I am, I will remind you that the internet of today is a bloated, fascistic shell of its former self. The kind of fun on the web that I mentioned earlier doesn't really exist in this day and age. Publishing a two-chapter story where Rufus Shinra joins the NWO Wolfpac runs the risk of you having more YouTube videos dedicated to analyzing every aspect of your personal life than there are episodes of M.A.S.H. So to see a game like this coming out as recently as it has (in fact, its most recent update was four months ago) warms my cold heart and melts my embittered facade just a little bit.

Now, I haven't talked about the game itself much. I mean, it's Final Fantasy VI, do I really need to? All-time masterpiece. The closest we have to a "perfect" game, if such a thing even exists. That being said, this hack does fuck with the numbers a bit, which I need to complain about. Enemies, bosses especially, have more health. Status effects are a constant source of pain, and you better hope you entered a new area with at least a dozen of every curative item. Battles give you little experience, sometimes none at all, with grinding being done for money and the eventual Esper raising. Speaking as someone who had to completely start the game over because I made the mistake of playing Final Fantasy VI like it was Final Fantasy VI, let me make this clear: do NOT play this like it's Final Fantasy VI. The replacement for Terra is your front-line attacker, instead of a magic powerhouse that melts large monsters in 2-3 turns. The replacement for Edgar is a back-line support that uses his attack-all tools for minor damage. Lots of little differences in each character that will absolutely fuck you if you try to play them like the original game. Almost gave this a negative review because my first attempt at this game took me a fucking hour to defend the Narshe Esper from Kefka's forces. But then my second attempt took me minutes, so I can go back to liking this because it reminds me of the old internet.

Even with my misgivings with the battle system changes, that's still part of the amateur fan's spirit. Even if some of the jokes and references are cringy, I don't fucking care. Playing this has been something of a healing experience that I've been in dire need of these last few years. It lets me know that the spirit of fun and creativity for the sake of it is not dead. Gives me hope that more people might undertake similar projects in the future. Or at least, put together a little HTML-written page that contains a short story where Quistis Trepe and Shingo Yabuki are a Miami Vice style detective duo.