My patched ISO still plays like vanilla FFT. Why?

[reyhan37]

I apologize in advance if there is already an answer to this somewhere on the forum. I tried searching the forums and found nothing exactly like what I'm asking.

I've made a few edits, like Ramza's chapter 2 & 3 base job renamed to Vigilante, and following Jon's Character Creation Tutorial to the letter adding my own unique to the Gariland battle.

When I open my patched ISO in FFTactext, all my edits are there. When I open my patched ISO in FFTPATCHER all my edits are there. When I run the ISO, it still plays like the vanilla FFT. Ramza is still a "Squire" in that first battle outside Orbonne, the one archer is still named "Dish" instead of a random name, my unique character is no where in the Gariland battle. I tried playing through the whole battle to see if I would be prompted for him to join at the end. Nope. I checked the formation screen after. He's not there either.

Why isn't my patch working even though FFTACTEXT and FFTPATCHER both tell me my ISO has been patched?

[Nyzer]

Are you loading it up like a normal game or are you loading emulator savestates?

Are you definitely, 100% for sure booting up from the right path - you have no copies of the ISO whatsoever that you might be booting up instead?

[3lric]

Are you definitely, 100% for sure booting up from the right path - you have no copies of the ISO whatsoever that you might be booting up instead?

99% + 200% of the time, this is the exact issue. Everyone thinks they are loading the right ISO, but in the end, it's always one of these 2 things for this issue.

[Nyzer]

I should also point out that having a character join after Orbonne, then appear during the Gariland battle... might break the chronology of the plot just a teensy bit.

[Kaijyuu]

Generally when people add new overpowered units to their roster, game lore purity isn't high on their list of priorities.

[reyhan37]

Are you loading it up like a normal game or are you loading emulator savestates?

Are you definitely, 100% for sure booting up from the right path - you have no copies of the ISO whatsoever that you might be booting up instead?

Thanks! This solved the issue. I had to clear out my isos folder, patch a fresh ISO and start a new game.

Weird thing is, even though I trashed the old .bin when I go to open a ISO on epsx, I can still see my old ISO. It's like a ghost that won't go away. I had to rename the new one to distinguish from the ghost.

[reyhan37]

Generally when people add new overpowered units to their roster, game lore purity isn't high on their list of priorities.

LoL. Sad, but true. I would love to insert him naturally into the story, but I'm still very raw, very n00b to this mod'ing business.

The initial reason I wanted to mod FFT was because ever since I bought the PS1 game back in 1998 (still have my copy) I wanted to make my own character. Now that I've spent some time browsing these forums, I've got so many other ideas.... but that is best left for another thread.

[Nyzer]

I would love to insert him naturally into the story, but I'm still very raw, very n00b to this mod'ing business.

Event 188 should be the one in which Ramza's first party members - fellow Academy squires - join. Changing one of the Squires is the quickest way to do this.

Take note that you'll almost certainly need to slice open the fftpack and swap out some of the stuff if you want a custom sprite to appear properly in the Formation Screen - for some reason the Formation Screen doesn't take the sprite/portrait directly from the actual sprite. 

[Angel]

It's both annoying that the formation screen doesn't cull from the sprite sheet, and cool that it doesn't. It lets us use custom poses there, which is undeniably awesome.

[3lric]

Take note that you'll almost certainly need to slice open the fftpack and swap out some of the stuff if you want a custom sprite to appear properly in the Formation Screen - for some reason the Formation Screen doesn't take the sprite/portrait directly from the actual sprite. 

Untrue, he never mentioned modding the WotL version. The PSX version isn't nearly as complicated. You still have to edit the UNIT & WLDFACE.BIN, but there isn't nearly as many steps.

[Nyzer]

The PSX version isn't nearly as complicated.

Oh, neat. Didn't know that.