Toastypk 
Royal Advisor
I promised this thread weeks ago, and it’s time I talk about it.
For a long time (on and off) I’ve worked on a big project of mine- I’m hacking Final Fantasy 1 for the NES to make a pony version- Pony Fantasy 1! It works really well, because you can choose from six different classes in the game, and there are six main pony characters!
To those who are not familiar with Final Fantasy, here is the plot summary:
The four orbs/crystals of Earth, Water, Fire, Air, have lost their light, and the four light warriors have come to fix that. They discover that the Four Fiends have taken control of the elements. Their first mission is to rescue the princess from Garland, a knight who went bad. Once they get the orbs back,They head back to the temple where they found Garland, use the orbs to travel to 2000 years back, where they find that Garland is the one who sent the fiends, then the fiends send him back, creating a loop. Garland uses the four powers to become Chaos, the final boss, who gets defeated.
For the pony version, the structure is basically the same, but with specific changes. Garland, the knight who went bad, is going to be Sunset Shimmer, specifically her pre-reformed self. It makes sense, she’s the student who went bad. She will steal the Element of Magic, but this will cause the powers of four of the other Elements to be scattered, and find their way into Nightmare Moon, Chrysalis, Discord, and Sombra, who will be the Four Fiends. In the end, you travel back to the old Castle of the Two Sisters and use the restored Elements to open the path to the final dungeon, which ends in the Well of Shade from Shadow Play. Sunset Shimmer awaits with the Element of Magic, and she uses the dark aura of the place to become the pony version of her demon form, starting the final battle.
For the longest time, the thing that was hanging me up for developing the game was sprites. However in recent years, I’ve discovered I’m good at taking screenshots from the show and sprite-tracing on top of them to make the enemy sprites. Here is a sampling of the sprites I’ve done this way-
The rest of the sprites needed are character sprites, and these were where I was having trouble for years. But I found someone on a Discord server I go onto named Lyra, who was instrumental in helping develop battle sprites for the mane 6, which we bounced edits back and forth with. And here are those!
It’s not as straightforward as just editing some graphics and text, though. A number of gameplay tweaks are involved too. In the original game, there are three spellcasting classes, one for White Magic, one for Black Magic, and one for a little of both. In the pony version, only Twilight and Rarity are spellcasters, and they can use most spells, although Twilight will have a wider range of spells to use. Rarity will be a little better with physical battle stats, though.
I even used a modification that expands the text space and re-orders the windows. Spells used to be only 4 characters long, now they’re 8. Emeny names used to be 8, now they’re 14. And when you have enemies with names likes Nightmare Moon, that helps a lot. There are even other very specific coding things that I have yet to ask about on another board, but that’s for later.
But yeah, aside from the 16x16 overworld sprites, I have done enough to put out a demo of only the prologue area! Even if I started the idea gathering in 2014, I’ve only worked in bursts which could be spaced quite a lot way apart, depending on what roadblock I would come across. Though in a way, taking so long has proven to have a benefit, more creatures and monsters have gotten introduced in the show and comics that have become candidates for enemy replacements. In the future I would love some assistance with the overworld sprites, cause they’re the smallest and have the most rules to them.
Well anyway, what do you think so far? I’ll be sure to post more stuff, and on request!
