Final Fantasy Hacktics

FFTA Long Night is after a long time ready to be played! Although the endgame will be developed at a later patch, the current 0.6 allows access to all the new jobs, abilities and 70% of the game's (all new) encounters!

Here is a general changelog so you know what to expect going in:

• Reworked jobs: Every job has been changed to keep it as an actual option both for player and AI. The list at the bottom has the detailed changes.

• Heavily reworked skills: Thunder/fire/ice may be a staple but there were too many skills that did almost nothing other than dealing damage of X flavor. Not everything needs to be a special snowflake and skills aren't changed willy-nilly, but all of them have been looked at and the majority have been modified.

• Reworked stats: Each race has a shared starting point regardless of job, allowing to swap starting characters to different roles without massive losses in usability. Stats have been scaled down to allow a higher ceiling of endgame fights, without having a real effect on most general encounters. Speed and EV are completely gear driven.

• No APs: Units master skills upon wielding the item that grants them, although some in particular will never be mastered at all- this allows for broken concepts like double weapon to still be used without enabling ridiculous scenarios. This also allows for more creative formation design that doesn't punish the player by having him do a thousand deployment missions.
  

• No job prerequisites: A part of the formation rework demands for the player to be able to expand pronto, and following the secondary reason for the AP removal there was no need for this to remain.
  

• No laws: While a decent concept, laws worked against the variety this hack aims to provide and have been removed.

• Redone gear: Body armor has core values such as EV and speed that make for the bulk of those stats on a character- this of course varies between the three main types, that provide very different levels of defense themselves. Weapon have also been greatly changed, however these are self-explanatory in-game.

All enemies scale up to your highest level dude. A basic change that was very much needed.[/li]

• There are four types of combos that have perfect accuracy and cover different ranges, relevant to which class uses them. Combos can never be mastered, and mythril weapons, while weak overall, offer otherwise very rare modifiers to movement and improve positioning in general as to facilitate the combos themselves. The idea is that solving a battle through combos is a conscious commitment that is actually viable, as opposed to an option to randomly deal 999 damage to something because two units happened to be in range and you remembered you had some JPs.

• MP management: Most skills cost MP and it does not regenerate during fights. There's plenty of skills to help with this, but there's also a bunch that attack enemy MP, as MP damage can now be relevant.

• Formations redone to a much higher standard of threat. There's still a progression, but since the player has access to more skills and jobs, he can deal with stronger opposition earlier.

As of 0.64, all content unlocked up to story mission 15 is available. Since at that point the player gains access to all character abilities and the best shop gear, there was actually room for a bunch of endgame-ish content too.
The remaining part of the game will differ even further from vanilla, so updates from this version will probably take a while as I work on the unique classes and experiment in general.

Known bugs:

• Water Veil appears to crash in certain circumstances when using VBA 1.7.2. Using https://mgba.io/ is recommended since there are no known crashes with it.
• If you manage to get a law card somehow, there's a nonzero chance reading its description will crash the game. However these shouldn't be available anywhere except one type at Ezel's, where nothing should happen.
• Balms, potions and ambrosia do not consume the item upon usage.
• Marche starts out with a combo already equipped.

Not bugs:

• Relics cannot be obtained by players, the item type meant to be enemy only.
• No clan skill experience can be gained.
• Certain deployment missions have a combat skill requirement, this is to maintain save compatibility and keep them from completion until later versions when they are set up as battle missions.
• The "random" skills starting characters know are actually all the skills they could learn swapping starting gear.

NOTE: None of this would've been possible without the outstanding work by bcrobert, Darthatron and TFergusson. The amount of information unearthed, organized and made readily available helped greatly when getting to understand just how exactly to get things done.

NOTE2: This hack started based off the first one I played called FFTA X, the influence of X is still visible in the Shaman, Cultist and Zealot, whose core concepts are maintained and expanded as they are both simple and ingenious.

Skill list:

Enemy skill list:

Due to character limit constraints, the stat dump has been moved to the next post!

Hi, I would like to know how to access information when hex editing in a format similar to what this post http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=11036.msg208894#msg208894 displays. This seems like it would be terribly useful for making changes in the game, yet just opening the ROM on WindHex returns basically gibberish so I feel I must be missing some obvious step.