Final Fantasy Hacktics

Turns out I fucked up a whole bunch of things while trying to make my maps, including using the wrong map as the base (note to future self: avoid multi-state maps!), so I'm going through them all now to fix what's wrong with them.



At least I was able to actually test one via emulation, and it still looks pretty nifty even if I had to take a bunch of quads out of it to keep it within the map limit.

New map: From Trials of Mana, the holy Temple of Wendel, except with the side lobbies removed because of GNS restrictions and also it ended up looking very ugly.
Will be putting the download in my thread in the forum.

MAP016.zip

Also finagled the CT map a little because I ended up not being 100% happy with how it looked.

MAP004.zip

Now that Ganesha has so much more tools to play with, I've been messing about with it and for some of the maps I've reached a state where I'm willing to share the results.



First, from Chrono Trigger, a compressed version of one of the rooms in the Black Omen (I was going to include the entire chamber including the throne, but Ganesha lacks the tools to do that throne justice to my satisfaction and the whole thing wouldn't fit into the way I have things scaled. The beams of light are animated, and I added palette animations to the floor tiles to have it imitate running track lights.

MAP004.zip



Second, from Pokemon: Fire Red/Leaf Green, Professor Oak's lab. I added a palette animation on the weird tube thing, as well as animations on tube's control panel as well as the computer servers; It's not exact because I ended up finding the back wall a little bit too busy, so now the poor Prof is down one of his certifications.

MAP052.zip

My opinion is: fix the blatant typos/bad translations (Dycedarg's Elder Brother, Bracelet, Wiznaibus, whatever the hell Rafa really meant when we fought in Yuguo Woods, etc.), leave everything else alone.

Part of it is nostalgia, but I definitely prefer the casual Modern English of the original.  It has more immediacy to me than the faux Shakespearean whatever that is the WoTL, which sounds more like a bunch of Ren Faire enthusiasts doing a reenactment (that fits the framing story, sure, but it still feels hokey).

Quote from: Bonesy on January 02, 2018, 09:21:14 pm
inb4 it's probably a damn gasha-heavy mobage

Indeed it is, plus all of the plot cutscenes are just visual novel style talking portraits and the writing is terrible.

I got sucked into it for a while just because I was so starved for a Tactics-like game that I gave it a shot, but eventually the grind got to me.

Suggestions for Bard and Dancer (can be implemented individually or in any combination):

• Remove gender restrictions.  Fabulous male dancers based on FFV Bartz FTW.


• Slow down Sing/Dance, either by basing it on class speed or simply lengthening the number of CTs it takes for Song/Dance to go off.


• Make Wiznaibus and Witch Hunt evadable.


• Lower the healing power of Angel Song and Life Song.


• Taking damage cancels Sing/Dance.

My first impression is that you have over-buffed Monsters and have made their multipliers too large (when what they really needed was better growths and, if possible, the ability to equip gear).  Not only do they have way too much HP and hit too hard (especially compared to human units),but some of them can inflict status ailments as early as Sweegy Woods, before most players have a White Mage with Esuna or the money to buy curatives.

In my opinion, the level of challenge in Vanilla FFT is fine up until Chapter Three or so (especially if you don't overlevel), as every battle can still be beaten with pure brute force, which makes it a good balance of "easy to learn--hard to master".  In your version, I can't damage race anything to make a low-level run feasible, nor can I grind my way past a challenge where I'm hitting a tactical wall.

If you don't want to muck about with saves, you can also add the following cheat code:

50001302 0000
8005800A 270F
50001D02 0000
80057F9E FFFF

This sets Ramza to have mastered all Jobs.

Quote from: Elric on September 03, 2017, 12:56:56 am
(how is Seiken Densetsu 3 a isometric turn based RPG?)

Whoops! It isn't, but it could be reimagined into one.

Since I already recommended that FFV be remade in the FFT engine, here's some more isometric turn-based RPGs that would make for interesting remakes:

• Chocobo Mystery Dungeon


• Farland Saga/Farland Odyssey


• Final Fantasy III


• Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth (and its "sequel" Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity)


• Phantom Brave (really, any Nippon Ichi SRPG would be fascinating to see remade, but PB is the only game that already uses action economy as part of its gameplay mechanics)


• Pokemon Mystery Dungeon


• Seiken Densetsu 3

...those are the ones that I have at least a passing knowledge of, if not played.  I'm sure there are plenty more that could be done.

Ok, here's my personal, non-political opinion of 1.3 from the point of view of a casual(-ish) longtime player of FFTactics:

1.3 is not a well designed hack.  Sure, it does interesting things, but every one good idea is outweighed by any number of bad ones, to wit...

• All battles needing one or more "scouting" sessions to suss out exactly what combination of Jobs, Abilities, and equipment are necessary to overcome the challenge - This turns the game from a flexible mix and match of different loadouts as well as a combination of anticipation, planning, and clever improvisation into a puzzle game whose solution can only be arrived at by reading the modder's mind.  And when every battle takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes to simply try different things, this makes for an unfun experience.


• One or more enemies in all story battles having Item as a secondary skill - Putting infinite sandbagging in the hands of the AI in every freaking battle was never a good idea to begin with.  A computer has the "patience" to put up with such shenanigans from a human player, but in reverse it is extraordinarily frustrating to deal with and just drags things out pointlessly.  Even worse, the AI gets exclusive elixers that they throw around without impunity as early as Chapter Three, and that's way too early for enemy AI to be carrying around that kind of stuff.


• Scaling enemy equipment - In theory, this is supposed to be a hedge against a player simply brute forcing their way past the problem, but in practice, it makes it possible to accidentally end up in an unwinnable state in combination with the aforementioned sandbagging.  In a game where equipment gives more HP/MP than levels (on top of whatever other bonus goodies they have), giving the enemy gear that can be better than what is sold in store that, very often, can't be broken or stolen means that all players are forced into low-level runs, but with every battle dragging out much, much longer than they need to and experience being earned per action rather than per battle means that even the most efficient party can gain more levels than intended.


• All Zodiac bosses are now HP sponges with Reaction abilities that are difficult, if not impossible, to mitigate or avoid - Queklain should NOT have 4-digit HP or "Critical: Quick" as a reaction ability (especially not in a game where permanent Brave/Faith manipulation is no longer possible), and each Zodiac boss only gets worse from there.

...and this isn't even getting to the modder's ego issues that make me even less inclined to support their work.

FFT, being obviously inspired by Tactics Ogre, seems to take an overall Law->Neutral->Chaos progression, where Ramza starts out following along with society's rules, meanders around for a bit after he realizes that said society is unjust, and eventually upsets the status quo so bad that he murders God (or at least a sufficiently god-like being) by the end and buggers off for better pastures.

It would be a buttload of work, but it'd be awesome to implement branching story paths where Ramza could fully commit to Law or Chaos as early as Chapter One (or switch into Neutral at some other key juncture), with different battles and recruit-able special characters in each path.

Deeper Dungeon: 100(?) floors of randomness - you can get encounter battles (with monsters getting tougher as the floors increase), story battles, or shops.  Jobs can be unlocked classically or (possibly, IDK how hard this would be to code) as rewards after certain floors, and special characters can join as well.

Every 10th floor is a Zodiac monster (with level-appropriate stats) and Elidibs is on the 100th floor.

Ah, ok, I was downloading the wrong version.  Thanks a lot!

For Shishi, what menu option do I use? (Sorry for the stupid questions, the wiki doesn't give instructions about that.)

Awesome! How would I go about doing so?

What it says on the tin - the cutscene events sometimes have custom sprites (for example, after Sand Rat Cellar, Algus tortures a Death Corps minion, and I'm pretty sure most of the sprites in there are not on the default sprite sheets for anybody).

I remember finding said sprite sheet in the iso, but not being able to attach the right palette(s) to see what they look like, but this was years ago, back when I was still actively sprite editing.

Is such a thing possible now with the tools that have developed since then?

Ramza's face needs to be a bit older and square-looking if you're going to give him a beard, otherwise he looks like he's wearing an obviously fake disguise.

I was thinking about recreating Final Fantasy V, FFT's spiritual successor predecessor, in the FFT game engine; the Job Classes map fairly easily (I think), but I nerd sniped myself trying to figure out how the boss fights would work. 

*ETA*: Dang it, used the wrong prefix!

The tutorial for the opening text crawl ("My name is Alazlam" etc.) is not correct; as far as I can tell, unless you do heavy ASM editing you can simply use the default text height and width as the guideline, and it reads each line of text in order from top to bottom.