An in-depth description of the individual components that make up The Reunion:
Beacause
by DLPB, Luksy, and Charlie Beer
Beacause is a Final Fantasy VII relocalization. It is a complete retranslation and relocalization from the ground up, using the original Japanese script. The aim is to have an end product that is accurate and professional. Official sources have been used to minimize errors in context and spelling. The project's name "Beacause" comes from a misspelling (in the original localization) of the only line spoken by Jenova.
Key Features - The entire game has been translated and localized from the ground up.
- All of the text has been updated.
- Includes an option to keep the original character names and series canon.
- Includes an option for American English (as opposed to British English).
- Some of the unused dialogue has been reinstated.
- Two scenes that were accidentally missing in the original game have been reinstated (Gongaga, Corel Bridge). - External text loading, which means the entire script can be edited with the respective file in notepad or your favorite word processor.
Menu Enhancement
by DLPB and Kranmer
Menu Enhancement updates all menus to look neater.
Key Features
- Thousands of menu alignment fixes have been implemented.
- The battle menu has been moved to the bottom of the screen.
- Many dialogue box and font spacing improvements have been implemented.
- The Playstation button icons have been reinstated.
- The game timer upper-limit is 999 hr 59 min 59 sec.
- There are more items in menus.
60 FPS battles
by DLPB, NFITC1, and Obesebear
This mod allows in-game battles to run at 60 fps, so that you regain the experience of the original Playstation game.
The Playstation game runs at 60fps across the board, duplicating frames where necessary. The PC game cannot work in that fashion and must use frame-rate limiters. The PC porting team limited everything in battle to 15 fps, creating the following problems (among others):
- The menu is 4x less smooth and, therefore, 4x less accurate.
This is most noticeable with the slots of Cait Sith, Tifa, and of the
Battle Arena.
- The camera is 2x less smooth.
- The summon animations are 2x less smooth.
This mod will fix these issues and works by hijacking the pause function to duplicate the battle elements in much the same way as the Playstation version. However, it is using a method in which the game was not designed, therefore, there may be certain issues in-game. These issues are being remedied in time.
Model Overhaul
by SquallFF8, Kaldarasha, PRP, and Grimmy.
The Model Overhaul is an extensive replacement for the game's models. The models have been chosen to provide what I believe is an improvement to the original game, while staying true to it. The models are mostly from Kaldarasha's unshaded updates. The battle models are largely the same, owing to the fact that they already fit in stylistically with the original game.
This revision is a collection of models, primarily from Squallff8, Kaldarasha and PRP. The main problem with this release is that certain models will have bad animation. This is something that the modelling community are working to improve.
Key Features
- All of the field models have been updated.
- The world map characters and Weapon monsters have been updated.
The original game models were already dated somewhat after the arrival of Final Fantasy VIII. Today, they look more dated than ever. The original models are of low quality, and often resemble lego more than they do humans. That is not to say that they should be seen as bad or useless. It can be appreciated that some people will like their look because it suits the overall original game style, but personally believe that Final Fantasy VII is made better by more realistic looking graphics. The developers also seem to agree because they improved on VII's models in later game releases.
Audio Replacement
by DLPB
The Audio Replacement mod is a complete replacement for the original Final Fantasy VII sound module.
Key Features
- Virtually all of the known bugs with the original sound module have been resolved.
- All of the sound effects have been re-recorded from the PSX game using Mednafen and, where applicable, perfectly looped.
- Up to 65535 sound effects can be added. The first 1000 can be optionally loaded into memory. The original game only has around 700 sound effects. This also means voice over projects will heavily benefit from this addition. Effects are now located by default in The_Reunion\BASE\SFX folder - Vorbis OGG format.
- All of the music tracks are handled by The Reunion - Vorbis OGG format.
- Midi.lgp, awe.lgp, audio.dat, audio.fmt, music.idx, and the .wav sound effects have been abolished. The .wav sound effects are now located by default in The_Reunion\BASE\Music folder - Vorbis OGG format.
- FMV audio obeys the game's config volume setting and no longer cuts out on loss of window focus.
The following options can be set:
Mute = n
Music_Vol =100
SFX_Vol =100
Mono_Output = n
Centre_Battle_SFX = n
Field_SFX_In_Battle = y
Music_Balance_Functions = n
Load_SFX_To_Memory = y
Audio_Log_Level = 5
Mute can be toggled in-game using ctrl-alt-M.
Weapon
by DLPB
Status:
This is a massive project that requires editing virtually every main file in the game. So far, only the Gold Saucer mini-games have been completed. There is much work to do in every other department.
Weapon is a difficulty mod. Its aim is to provide a balanced, professional, and fair update to the game's difficulty. Weapon is currently at an early stage in development.
Key Features
- Gold Saucer has had extensive editing. Scripts have been amended or added for G-Bike, Wonder Catcher, Submarine, Coaster, Snowboard, 3-D Battler, and Wrestling.
- The coaster mini-game has had a complete change in points allocation. Some hitable objects have been removed, while others added. Hitable object energy has been amended (for example, the mother ship is much harder to destroy). The propeller bug and boat rotor bug have been removed. The aimer speed has been fixed (originally it was 2x too fast).
- The submarine mini-game has been reprogrammed. The new controls are similar to the Europe/US/International release of the game, and 5 unique difficulties have been added. Other minor changes have been made.
Most difficulty mods have got the balance completely wrong. They've ended up making the game a chore, rather than a fun experience. This mod attempts to address the imbalance, and make the player think more about their actions in-game. For example, rather than pressing attack continually in battle, a player will be encouraged to think about which attacks will hurt a particular enemy. A mechanical enemy will succumb much more easily to lightning attacks than anything else. Weapon tries not to inflate difficulty artificially through high HP amounts or cheap gimmicks.
Weapon will also address the gameplay outside of battle. For example, script changes have been made, the price of goods will be altered, and various mini-games have been modified.
Soldier Quest
by DLPB
99 1:35 Soldiers will be hidden throughout the world as collectables.
Status:
This mod has not yet been implemented.
Additional Modding Framework
by Aali, luksy, and DLPB
The Reunion takes full advantage of Aali's graphics driver (source) to provide a framework to allow additional mods to be installed, such as AI-upscaled graphical mods (and much, much more!)
