FFVI: The Power Within — Part I

Part I  ·  May 16, 2026

"It's that day of the year I hate the internet"

Who else hates April Fools' Day? How many times have you fallen for something you desperately wanted to be true, only to find out somebody was messing with you? Back when I did social media over a decade ago, I remember posting a status on April 1st: "It's that day of the year. I hate the internet."

April Fools' hoaxes in the early internet era hit differently in the gaming community. There was no social media to instantly debunk things, no ratio of skeptical replies, no fact-check articles published within the hour. If a trusted fansite posted something, you believed it. A good example of this was a 1999 piece by thegia.com announcing a sequel to FFVIII featuring Seifer as the main character alongside Fuujin and Raijin, complete with screenshots and even an MPEG of a battle scene. The Final Fantasy community briefly lost their minds. "It broke the sequel cycle!" "How can Seifer be a main character?" The reveal the next day stung, but it was hard not to admire the craftsmanship. Faking that kind of thing took real skill in 1999.

That one didn't get me, though. FFVIII hadn't even released in the States yet, so I had no real connection to it. My April Fools reckoning was still coming.

The one that did — and sent me through every emotion — came a year later in 2000, and it was called FFVI: The Shadow of Light on ffonline.com.

I was a Final Fantasy VI kid. Shadow was one of my favorite characters. So when this article dropped on April 1st, 2000, claiming a secret SNES-quality sequel had been discovered at the Tokyo Game Show, with Shadow as the main character, and screenshots to prove it!

I can't remember exactly how long I believed it, but the excitement was instant. A sequel to one of the greatest games of the SNES era. The first true continuation of a mainline Final Fantasy story. What could happen after magic disappeared, after you defeated Kefka and all the Espers were gone? The world had been shattered and was being rebuilt. The excitement was real and the disappointment, followed by anger, was real too. How could I fall for that? But man, what a "what if."

This was apparently a common reaction. A reader named Timothy Collett wrote in to RPGamer's Q&A column about the same hoax, recalling that he'd stumbled across it the day after April Fools with no warning, believed every word, and was "rather steamed the next day." Someone had done a fantastic job with Photoshop making those screenshots look real.

According to an Italian Usenet discussion from the time, even fans who didn't fully believe it were rattling off the details to each other within days. A Chinese fan site translated and preserved the full article, and the details they recorded paint a picture of just how elaborate this hoax really was:

• The game was supposedly discovered at a small, inconspicuous booth right next to the SQUARE booth at the Tokyo Game Show, where a lone person was quietly playing it
• It was presented as an SNES-quality sequel that had been secretly cancelled when Square moved from Nintendo to Sony, unknown to the outside world for years
• The story picked up several years after the defeat of Kefka, with Shadow as the central character — and confirmed the long-held fan theory that Shadow is Relm's father
• Shadow reveals his true identity to Relm and fights to avenge his deceased wife
• Locke and Celes are married in this timeline
• A new character named Brenn, a Chef connected to Locke, had a unique battle system combining ingredients and cooking techniques as attacks — with moves like "Chop," "Pan-fry," and the suspiciously named "Wang Chung"
• Cyan's SwdTech was replaced by a new skill called LoneStar
• Dialogue boxes were redesigned to be semi-transparent with character portraits in the corners
• The game had been ported to PlayStation with item transfer connectivity to the PS1 remake of FF6
• It supported both English and Japanese — though the "Japanese" text was later noted as an obvious tell by those who looked closely
• The article ends with the author breaking the fourth wall: "Haha, this is just a belated April Fool's joke :)"

Turns out I wasn't the only one moved by it. A group of people saw the same article, were active on those forums, and thought: why not? Let's actually build it. They started out hosted on The New Final Fantasy before the team — now going by Dream Horizon Software — grabbed their own domain at dreamhorizonsoftware.com. I'd been following them the whole time.*

*The Dream Horizons FAQ dates the original Darkhourse article to 1999, but the evidence suggests this is misremembered. A Chinese fan site reposted the article on April 3rd, 2000, and an Italian Usenet thread discussing it is also dated April 2000. The article was almost certainly published April 1st, 2000 — as this archive listing confirms.