Many opportunities for amending the original, vanilla Final Fantasy 5 exist. Here are notes of promising areas of content revision, plans for some ideas, and some thoughts about good places in the game to add bonus content (plus notes on some Post Exdeath endgame possibilities).
All maps viewed with ff6tools.
It’s possible to turn on a Screen template, so you can view how much of the maps are displayed when the game is running. Map 175 is a great example of how the devs only used enough tiles to account for the player walking to the edge of the fence. The excess horizon is interesting, as it can never be seen in game; when tiles are repeating like this, they are encoded with an “RLE” notation in order to save space (like, “print 35 of this tile in a row”) so it’s not possible to easily repurpose these maps when they look like wallpaper. When there are legitimately unused “jumbles” of tiles, those are very compelling.
Like in this map!
Map 220 (Ronka Ruins Crystal Chamber) has a LOT of jank tiles in the upper left that are never used in game. It looks like it offers enough room for 1 or maybe even 2 more Crystal rooms if these tiles are reshuffled into a sensible pattern! This is powerful because it won’t violate existing RLE (map compression) and won’t force an expansion to the ROM as a result.
(The tiles that ARE seen in game are also labeled as map 254, for a related event.)
Maps 93, 94, 95 are all the exact same tilemap. Entrance tiles are all that changes, as this is the small Tower atop Walse Castle. It stands to reason that at least 1 of these could be repurposed IF a clone of the central room was drawn in 94 or 95.
This same phenomenon is seen in a more dramatically excessive fashion with the Phoenix Tower maps, however those use the “9 rooms per tilemap” layout that maximizes space so it’s perhaps not the same situation as here.
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Whenever the game reuses tilemaps, the Map ID number does change, so perhaps there’s nothing to be done here after all, and separate map listings are required. It’s unclear at this time.
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Map 246 is the Interdimensional Warp sequence using this tilemap, but also appears as the hill after Big Bridge (top center), the Fire Crystal shards after Karnak Castle explodes (also top center), and the hill after the worlds merge, near Tycoon Castle (center)! The other 2 hills are almost certainly used in other events… This is a prime example of a reused tilemap getting renumbered for multiple events.
Maps 238 & 239 are simply the unveiled version of the basement of Exdeath Castle from the Galuf Rescue chapter. If these rooms are blocked off after the unveiling, they could be repurposed as extra side rooms in the Castle.
Map 372 is simply named “?” in ff6tools and appears unused. Because of the strong repeating patterns in the tilemap, it does not offer much space to improvise. Perhaps it was meant as an extension to Phoenix Tower, if doors and platforms were added? It matches the style seen in map 463.
Maybe it’s seen in the sequence when Hiryuu becomes Phoenix??