[Release] FFT Advanced Battle (Monster taming hack!)

[Leonarth]

Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced Battle is my april fools projects for this year.
I did it over the course of the last 3 days so it's a pretty rushed product but I think it offers a pretty fresh experience.


The glorious titlescreen.

In FFTAB, as the titlescreen suggests, you catch monsters and make them battle for you, which is certainly something I always wanted to do as a kid.

The changes are pretty simple, there is a new item replacing the Cureall called Capture Orb, simply use it on a weakened monster to add it to your clan!


Your monsters can go on dispatch missions, fight in battles and do whatever a spider (or whatever monster type they happen to be) can!

Check out a list of changes here:

spoiler

Main changes:

• All starting clan members have been removed, except Marche and Montblanc
• The Monster Bank has been removed
• Jail has been removed
• The job requisites for dispatch missions are ignored, any monster can go on any dispatch mission
• Cureall has been renamed to Capture Orb, which works like the Capture ability, but has a fixed range of 4
• Capture Orb is available from the start, all shops have it
• You start with 6 Capture Orbs, but start with no Antidotes or Bandages
• Capture now sends monsters to the party instead of to the Monster Bank (although it also unlocks them in the Monster Bank)
• Capture now works with all monster species (obviously not totemas and such)
• Capture rate calculation changed from [(max hp - curr hp)]%/4 to [max hp - curr hp]%
• Humanoid recruits (should be) removed
• You CAN spam the "X Wanted" missions for 20 AP I guess, but you won't get new units and it's a waste of 300 gold, I think
• All Soul weapons sell value has been set to 0

Other engine hacks:

• JP learning is included, which is the only way to teach monsters new abilities
• Judges are gone, laws do nothing
• Quick Start is in so the tutorial is skipped
• Shoes are stealable with Steal: Accessory
• Manual Sorting is in

Or simply download the patch here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/09606swwds8xgj0/FFTA_AdvancedBattle.ups?dl=0

Please be sure to always buy some Capture Orbs or you won't be able to catch monsters for your clan!
But remember to save some money so you can accept the missions or you will get stuck.

I wanted to prevent characters from joining the clan in the vanilla way, I did what I could with the time I had.
It is possible that there is still ways to obtain clan members, I didn't have much time to test characters like Eldena.
Random recruitments and special characters like Ritz should be impossible to obtain.
It's up to you if you want to add them to your clan if you get them, but I recommend you ignore them.

Monsters can talk. I'm aware. I thought about fixing it but I think it's pretty funny.
I actually changed which monsters get which dialogue, so Dragons and Lamias get Bangaa text.
Also, catching a monster that can't be caught in vanilla will result in a "- Get" message and no item being obtained, since they have no soul.
Catching a monster will now never grant a soul, and the soul taken message is skipped.

One final thing, even though you get Souls and unlock the monsters for Morphers I would recommend not using them.
If you somehow managed to get a Nu Mou and tried to morph you would notice all monsters in the Bank have 0 stats.

[dck]

Haha, really novel concept I love it, I have a friend who is really into pokemon hacks so gonna shill this to him asap .

[Leonarth]

Just fixed a bug that was making zombies lose undeath when caught.
Sadly it won't fix zombies that have already been caught.

If you want to fix your zombies manually, you can do so on an emulator with a memory viewer:
Set the zombie as your first unit using manual sorting, then go to $20000A9 and change the byte from $00 to $80.

Edit:
When fixing the zombies I actually broke everything else. It should be fixed now.
If a monster you caught is still an enemy, follow the steps above but go to $20000A8 and set that to $01 and $00 (or $80 is undead).

[Saul-G]

I missed the mechanic to capture and command monsters since the first game on PS1 and this hack takes it to the extreme as you have only Marche and Montblanc as controlable characters while taking care of an army of monsters. Angel Rings and turtles with resonate cheese out most of the encounters in this hack and you can spam abilities like blaster, voodoo and evil gaze to defeat and incapacitate most of the enemies. Your monsters are still pretty vulnerable on their own but nothing your two humanoid characters and a few faries can't do to keep them on the field.
This is a great hack alright, it gives me a good reason to play this game again.

But I found a problem: is not possible to finish mission 100, you need to go to the monster bank after capturing at least five monsters for a little cutscene, then the mission will be unlocked to take but since the place is blocked from your hack is not possible. Right now I got stuck with 299 missions  .
Wonder if there's a way to get around this problem, maybe change the flag in which the mission is unlocked? Unlock the monster bank again but disable the option to feed items to monsters?

[Saul-G]

Woops double post, sorry.

[Leonarth]

I will look into fixing this and I will make sure that the fix also applies to already existing saves.
It might take a bit but you will be able to 100% it if you hang on to your save.

Edit:
It looks like just changing the byte at $55CAC6 from 1 to 0 would do the trick.
I made a patch for you in case you don't know how to do that, just apply it to your already patched ROM.
Be sure to set this option to Ignore for this patch:


Please let me know if it worked and I will add it it to the full patch.

Also if you could let me know if you managed to get any humanoid characters to join that would be nice.

[Saul-G]

Alright, after using the patch and loading my old save right at Cyril I just noticed mission 100 on the list. Cleared that mission, got all 300 of them complete and now I get to play the corrupt judges quest.


I can say the patch works as intended, thanks for your help.
I've not used the items needed to recruit the special units, gonna do that now to give you a reply in case one of them pops up

[Chronovore]

This looks really cool. I've been a fan of both the Dragon Quest Monsters and the Final Fantasy Tactics games since they first began. I've always wanted a Dragon Quest Tactics or a Final Fantasy Monsters. This might be the closest I ever get to scratching that itch. 

I hope you'll continue to develop this hack. I need to stay focused on the FFTA2 hack I've been developing but maybe I'll play this to celebrate once I'm done.

[Leonarth]

I have no plans to develop this hack further, in my opinion it's complete.
I will fix any bugs people find but other than that this is it, although I might make more monster related hacks in the future.

[Shakko]

Really cool hack! Great job!


Btw I wanted to ask, can the monsters equip things? I have tried various items but this doesn't seems possible and I kinda wanted to equip them things, maybe not for the effects just to increase monsters stats.

[Leonarth]

Monsters can't equip any items, that's just how vanilla is and I didn't want to change anything about the monsters themselves.

That said, if an enemy monster starts a battle with an item and you capture it, it should retain the item, I think?

I don't remember if I made any code to prevent capture of monsters with items or to remove items from them. I also don't remember if there's any monster that starts battle with any item in FFTA to begin with, I know there are in FFTA2, I can't remember any from FFTA though.

[Munomana]

Flips (Lunar IPS) keeps telling me 'this patch is not intended for this rom' when I try to apply the patch. I've tried 2 separate (US) rom files, using the patch from this topic as well as the romhacking.net page.

Is flips not the intended software for this patch? I've managed to apply other FFTA hacks to my roms, so I know they're not nukes/bad roms

Sorry for the necro

Wow I just realized it's a .ups and not a .ips. I'm super sorry. If anyone else has this issue, use 'upset' and not 'flips'

[Leonarth]

The hack has been updated, including the new engine hack fixes and some difficulty balancing.

People found the first mission very difficult and I want my hack to be playable by everyone, so I made these changes:

• Added a Goblin and Thundrake to the starting team, both at level 2
• Buffed capture rate by a flat 10%
• Increased starting Orbs to 10

Previously I was able to capture all monsters on the first mission with a bit of thinking, now I'm able to do it with no effort so I hope that will be enough of a helping hand for people that haven't touched the game in a while.

The rhdn page will be updated soon, it just takes some time for changes to be accepted.

[gwitting]

Sorry for dumb question, but is there an NPC/"Rumors" entry that tells you how to unlock your monsters? I'm more than 1/2 way through the game and unable to see and control monsters other than the Thundrake and Goblin. I did the Fiend Run mission and captured various monsters, but I'm still only seeing Marche, Montblanc, Thundrake and Goblin in my party. I read the readme on RHDN and there was no relevant information. No readme file was included in the download.

[Leonarth]

Thanks a lot for reporting this, it seems like I made a big mistake when making the patch which resulted in the capture not working on the latest build... I'll go fix that right now. To clarify, just capturing a monster should add it to your clan directly.

If you download the hack from the first post of this thread, it will be the fixed version. RHDN does take a bit longer to update.

[Fallujah]

This is very well done.

Just out of curiosity, do you have a standalone hack for "Quick Start" ?

Also, I am a software engineer and would love to make tools for some of your hacks - and maybe an updated AOI editor (as I believe I have the source code still, somewhere), if that is of interest. ATM I cannot find access to darths FTP... which I believe had the source code and the AOI download.

If I find it on my desktop, I will update some download links.

Thanks!

[Leonarth]

You can find (almost) all of my stuff on github.

Rather than using a ROM editor, I use what we call a buildfile, which keeps all changes external to the ROM, which allows for version control, manages space for us and all that nice stuff.

If you do want to work on tools compatible with this, I suggest you take a look at minish maker, which is a level editor for Minish Cap that outputs buildfiles.

You might also want to check my thread: https://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=12036.0

[Fallujah]

You can find (almost) all of my stuff on github.

Rather than using a ROM editor, I use what we call a buildfile, which keeps all changes external to the ROM, which allows for version control, manages space for us and all that nice stuff.

If you do want to work on tools compatible with this, I suggest you take a look at minish maker, which is a level editor for Minish Cap that outputs buildfiles.

You might also want to check my thread: https://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=12036.0

Very useful. Thank you!

[Buff Froge]

Hey, i was wondering, do you have any plan on making a similar mod for FFTA2 as well ? it would be awesome to be able to play as monsters on this game, and it'd make the trilogy all have such mod avaliable...!

[Gokajern]

Hello. After playing this for a bit I noticed the Link option is gone. Is that intentional? I kinda suspect it has something to do with the intro skip option, given that I have another patched FFTA rom with the same problem (and that option patched in, obviously).