Final Fantasy Hacktics

Figured I'd make mention of these in a topic here so that people are more likely to notice. The Lion War ReMixed has a few nifty features that are easy to miss, but can add a fair bit of quality of life to your playthrough.

Smrt Encounters

Not to be confused with "Smart Encounters", this one isn't always on. Under normal circumstances, the game will continue to generate random battles randomly. However, if you are holding the X or O buttons as you pass over a green dot, you will never get a random encounter. If you are holding the O button as you land on a green dot that you chose as your destination, you will always get a random encounter. If you are holding the X button as you land on a green dot, you will never get an a random encounter. It's called "Smrt Encounters" because it's dumber than the regular Smart Encounters, and because I appreciate the dual Simpsons and Final Fantasy V reference.

Swap Ability Preview Targets

When you are preparing to use an ability that can hit targets other than the one target in the dead center of the attack (if there even is a target there), you can now press the □ button to switch between valid targets that will be targeted by the ability.


Zodiac Compatibility Highlighting

When your cursor is hovering over a unit on the battlefield, you can hold Square to engage "Zodiac Compatibility Highlighting". Units with Best Compat will be flash blue, Good Compat will flash green, Bad Compat will flash yellow, and Worst Compat will flash red.

Cross Skip and Scene Skip

During events, holding the X button will speed through the dialogue at a fast pace. The Start button will do the same, but during non-battle events, if Start is held at the point when the event first starts, shortly after a dialogue box closes, or after the camera finishes moving, the entire event will actually be skipped. This was done slightly crudely via event instructions inserted at specific points in the events instead of an ASM hack so that I could prevent it from breaking event-based minigames (before I knew how to ASM hack, which would have allowed me to have an enable/disable trigger on an existing hack that does this), so, on occasion, it can take a bit of time to trigger.

Extended Warranty

Any equipment of yours that is broken (including katanas with Draw Out) gets sent to the Fur Shop, where it is repaired and available for you to buy back. Any equipment of yours that is stolen will be regained after the battle ends.

Improved Level Scaling

Enabled by default, this option can be disabled in the Extra Options menu. Battles with level scaling will recalculate the levels of the units on the field after you deploy your units, using the highest level only of your deployed units instead of checking the entire Roster.

Improved Enemy Job Level Progression

Enabled by default, this option can be modified or outright disabled in the Extra Options menu. Enemies will initially calculate their unlocked jobs and available abilities as normal, but every time Ramza's sprite changes, they will check an extra source. They start out only calculating according their preset "Job Level", which can be set in the Encounter Table Data to any possible job from levels 1-8. After you become Chapter 2 Ramza, they will also do the same for their current Job, if it is different from their specified Job. Not every enemy will be in a different Job than their specified Job, but some are. Finally, after you become Chapter 4 Ramza, they will also do the same for the Job that their secondary skillset belongs to.

This means that as you progress through the game, enemies start tending to have more abilities available to them. The most obvious example of this (before I modified the functionality of his base skillset) was with Aliste: this mechanic grants him level 8 Draw Out, and he is extremely happy to Teleport 2 into the middle of your units and blast out whatever it is he's learned from the Samurai job.

Wariness

Enabled by default, this option can be disabled in the Extra Options menu. Units with 50 Brave or more will take normal damage, but with less than 50 Brave will take less damage the lower their Brave gets. Of course, units vulnerable to Chicken will have to be careful around Oracles and Mediators...

There is also a specific ability that can be equipped to cause the reaction chance to start going up once a unit gets below 50 Brave. Make sure you read those ability descriptions!

Enhanced Knockback

Enabled by default, the option to allow "Immortal" units and Ramza to be knocked back can be disabled in the Extra Options menu. Additionally, units that can enter or remain above water can now be knocked back onto a water tile. Units that don't have "???" stats can even be knocked onto a lava tile, which will instantly kill them and dump their corpse on the nearest walkable tile.

There are also specific action abilities with guaranteed chances to knock units back. Make sure you read those ability descriptions!

Banditry

Enabled by default, this functionality of the ability "Banditry" can be disabled in the Extra Options menu. A new Support ability, Banditry can not only be learned from the Thief job, it is innately equipped to them. Among other things, this will cause Thieves to automatically crit whenever they attack from behind, dealing fixed damage boosts depending on the weapon type. Daggers will deal double damage. Fists, bows, and crossbows will deal 1.5x damage. All other weapons will deal 1.25x damage. This means that you likely will want to bring ranged weapons when going up against Thieves - or to make sure that you turn your back to prevent them from getting at it!

Extra Options

I've mentioned them a few times here, but there are plenty of options you can use in this menu to tweak your experience to be more in line with the way you like to play games. Make sure you take a look through to see what else is available!

Interesting. I figured out some time ago that there was a bug with the event commands not checking every single instance of Ramza's ID, giving a chance for one of the cats to become merged with him. Banana, though... depending on when I timed the check for occupied tiles, it may have counted her as "removed" and not considered her tile to be occupied, even though, yeah, one of the cats always spawns on her tile.

Both have the exact same gameplay (and title screen), just with different sprites given to Algus. So that's up to you.

The current beta version also seems fairly stable. I haven't gotten any new bug reports after releasing 1.2.39. 1.2.34 was also a very stable version. So those are options as well.

Duckstation's Widescreen Hack. It doesn't work.

Yeah, I forgot to change the title screen back when I made that version. At the time, I had plans to keep releasing some smaller updates here and there for the next few months, so a version 1.1.12 was going to come out a couple weeks later.

Unfortunately, that assumption was based off the idea that April-September are typically the lighter months at my job. I was anticipating a lot of free time to work on the mod. What happened was the exact opposite - work ramped up at that point and didn't really stop. I had also just started diving into big ASM hacks like Improved Level Scaling and Doublecast that really ate up the limited free time I had to work on the game.

I think I was a month and a half out from 1.1.11.401 when I realized that I wouldn't be able to work on the mod like I had been back in 2023 and even early 2024 anymore. I took that version and quickly undid all the .401 extras I could think of, then released 1.1.11 to replace the Algus Fools mod instead of 1.1.12 as I'd intended.

... no? The game has a tiny four byte data table with four track IDs. When a random battle is run, the code that sets up stuff like the chosen ENTD and weather also runs an RNG check and gets a result of 0-3, then chooses the matching ID slot to be the track for the random battle.

The random battle EVENT does very little, and has nothing to do with the music. In theory, if you wanted, you could set all of the random music tracks to 0x00 (again, via ASM hacking), apply the Event Instruction Upgrade Hack (through ASM), and then modify the random battle event to run a Random event command to pick which one of however many music tracks you wanted to have playing, using the custom PlayTrack command.

There are only four music track IDs available for random battles. An ASM hack could theoretically change them to any other four tracks in the game you might want to use.

In-game music swaps to more than the four tracks? Not without something like the Preparation Menu featured in Call of Power and ReMixed.

ChatGPT isn't going to be able to tell you anything useful about a mod for an old PSX game.

Those ability slots - and a few others, given to some of the generic jobs - can only be unlocked after beating the game. They're additions that were made in The Lion War, and as this mod is based off that, they carry through here.

No to both. The ability needs to actually change something about your character to allow you to learn it. And you can't simply add abilities to skillsets that don't have [Default] Action Menus.

QuoteI was wondering if there would be any way to streamline this, so I can check who is who in the spell charge screen instead of having to go to the AT list?

Probably not, but even if there is, I wouldn't be messing around with it. Menus are a real bitch to work with in this game, and I won't touch them if I can avoid it. Just way too many moving parts there.

One specific problem that I'd imagine here is that there would be threads and earmarked graphical data from being so deep in the Act menu that likely don't play nice with viewing an enemy's stat preview. At best, doing this would require closing and clearing all of that in order to do so, and I don't even know if I could manage that much.

New bugfix patch is out. Sorry that I have to keep releasing these, but the last few months really have been quite a mess for me.

I didn't think this mod HAD single player Rendezvous. At least not yet. Where did you hear that it did?

And now there's a 1.2.38 because Return to World Map after a Game Over was only working for Random Battles.

1.2.37 is out, fixing multiple bugs with 1.2.35.

Quote from: MRTayag on June 10, 2025, 09:18:55 amcan you tell me what is the option to disable level scaling of enemies? i tried "Never" but enemy level still scales. thank you

There isn't one. There is a setting to enable scaling if you outlevel non-scaling units, but not the reverse.

Most of them are set to level scale instead of to a fixed level, but I'm pretty sure some endgame ones can be set to Lv99.

Level scaling in ReMixed works by checking the units you deploy instead of just checking the entire roster. Though that is something that can be disabled in the Extra Options.

Patches are always meant to be applied to clean vanilla copies of the game.

1.2.35 is out now. I did a rebuild of the ISO as well as a fair few bugfixes. Unfortunately, the behind-the-scenes on this one has been a real mess. I believe everything is fine, but we'll see if anything slipped through the cracks.

This has been known ever since the mod first released. The Bard and Dancer were not combined into one job slot for a few reasons, namely because all of the documentation for the vanilla game has them as separate jobs. For the ease of modding, as TLW's second main purpose is as a base mod for others to use, this was kept the same way, meaning that they continue not to get spillover from each other (it's shared with each of the DK jobs instead).

Quote from: YuberZuri on June 08, 2025, 02:21:18 pmHello. I have a question. Should I patch the game with this file before doing anything with the resources folder in this other thread?

From the other topic:

As The Lion War was designed to be a patch as a starting point for future patches, I will be releasing the resources created to build it here.

The PPF is for playing the mod. The Resources are for making major edits to it.

This mod doesn't have multiplayer items. And id you really want to use cheat codes for this mod, you should be looking for PSX cheat codes, not PSP.