Final Fantasy Hacktics

7:04 The original translation made no sense here. Delita says "Are your brothers still ruling your life?" Ramza responds with "Who knows? They don't tell me anything!" When it's pretty clear now that he had nothing to do with his family after he joined Gafgarion's group, even if Gafgarion was working for Dycedarg secretly.

11:56 That's some pretty interesting insight into Ramza's character. My favorite character moments of the game are Gafgarion and Ramza. I love how Gafgarion continues to try and make Ramza look at the world with a more critical (and cynical) eye. It seems clear that the two bonded over the course of their time together and Gafgarion, in his own way, cares about Ramza. The relationship doesn't seem reciprocal though. Ramza never tries to really understand Gafgarion and doesn't look past Gafgarion's actions at Zirekile.

Honestly, while I love Zirekile this is one of the few spots that the plot skips a beat. Why is Gafgarion planning on "killing" the Princess here, but is later given instructions to take her back to Igros? Especially since Agrias does later (At Golgorand, if you bring her) ask "What are you planning to do with the Princess?" And Gafgarion responds "My mission is to take her back to Igros, after that I cannot say." And the tone presented seems to be a certain lack of surety on Gafgarion's part.

I love the cutscenes in War of the Lions and I really wish there were a few more (at least 3 per chapter. Chapter 2 gets three after all. Well, technically). That piano theme of Delita's Theme fits so much better than "Zalbag's Theme" which is more or less meant to show comradarie throughout the game. After playing the game though it's so obvious how Delita is playing them all like a fiddle. Delita specifically mentions not to take her to Goltana because "He will offer up their heads in hopes of keeping his own." When that is Delita's end goal. I would love to know what would have happened had Ramza been a little more politically savvy and called him on that.

That was a weird video. A lot of odd choices from the AI and the player, it's a bit difficult to lose when you have Agrias and Gaffgarion in your party though. Zirekile could be interesting if you don't strip Gafgarion.

This concept is beyond amazing! Like the others I would vote for job unlocks by Story Progression! It does seem like adding monsters to the mix is going to be quite a hurdle though.

Yet another gripping video. The odds of success swing so quickly in late Chapter 1 if you don't have any revival capability since it becomes a massive race against time and even then, things can get dicey as Zeakden showed.

Unfortunately you did miss getting your permanents Brave boost from Zeakden because Ramza went down so quickly. If you let the battle carry on long enough and you choose "Save Argath" at Mandalia then you get a +2 Brave Boost. If you had chosen to "Defeat All Enemies" at Mandalia and you let this battle carry on you lose that +2 Brave Boost from Mandalia.

You handled that all well! I'm sort of split between "Soft-hearted friend" and "spoiled rotten boy" personally. I think soft-hearted better displays that he views Ramza as being too kind. While spoiled rotten is a nastier sentiment but it's meaning is vague and at best general. Is he referring to Ramza as spoiled because... he always expects to get his way? Because his coddled world doesn't show the world for what it is? It's a good line and is more demeaning, but its meaning isn't clear.

I fully agree with you with "Will endeavor grant me an army?!" As being a poignant line and the use of the chapter's name of "The Meager" in "Tis my meager lot in this life..." which lends itself to Delita's next actions after his life in turn collapses. I had always wondered if Delita was approached in the same manner as Wiegraf by Rofel/Loffrey.

I don't see any problem with leaving in the party management. It's not all that long and it's good to know what the person is going in with and lends an air of credibility to it. I say go for it! Looks like the rest of Chapter 1 will probably be pretty easy now with only Assassination Missions left. Then again with your party reaching that point may be difficult.

Well having played through this demo I was thoroughly impressed! Your sense of dynamic events present scenes filled with excitement, in that respect you go above and beyond expectations. I'll break down my thoughts into Characters, Plot, and Battle System.

Characters:

Main Character: I like that the player has the choice of how they develop the main character through a fantastic use of branching options that have immediate effects. I look forward to seeing this in further display down the line.

Adria: Through her AI/Skillset/Personality you can tell she is one saucy gal, ordinarily choosing to rush in with her Staff instead of using restraint. This is shown in her more unrestrained attitude. I'm rather fond of how you've made that character and reflected both aspects on and off the battlefield.

Main Character's Grandfather: Despite his short screen time you gave him a memorable speech tick and immediate likability. I hope that he appears later on in the story.

Hartell: All we know about him is that he's gathering the Holy Stones and hoped to usurp the ?Diocese? at Lionel.

Plot: This plot has started out with a lot of potential. I love the idea of the Holy Stones being a relic keeping monsters at bay and that the church having rounds of Surveyors to check on them periodically to assure that they are safe. It is also neat to see the divide between the Common class and the Nobles is as pronounced as ever and your scenes... I don't want to get into any spoilers, but you really caught me off guard there!

Battle System: The Battle System on hand is clearly in a state of transition. Some parts are rough such as the lack of Armor, making the Fencer class a little unusable at all in the demo and some of the skills having odd AI or lack of use. (Not the Freelancer's set though, that thing is mighty impressive!) The battles themselves are challenging, but fair. I feel that maybe the third battle has a little too much sandbagging, but that's difficult to avoid when there's not much else to fight at the time. The fight at Lionel was great, it was interesting to swoop into that side of the gate to close the enemy in and finally the boss fight was tense, as you had mentioned likely owing to the lack of armor, that fight is rather difficult. It took a couple of tries but I finally got it.

All in all this mod is extremely promising and I will keep tabs on its progress! Keep up the great work!

Shopping! I knew those HP Values seemed a bit low! All in all that was a pretty good battle, Rafa's stars all aligned for half of the kills though. I'm surprised Balthier didn't get enough for Phoenix down, but then again it is Level 1 Chemist, JP takes a while to accumulate. What surprised me the most was using Ramza purely for Tailwind (and a well placed Chant, good thinking on that) instead of using his fairly decent damage to weed out some of the stragglers.

Hmm, it is admittedly an interesting idea. Matsuno games seem to steer clear of this for the most part. FFXII was pretty surprising that there were three all but established couples (Fran/Balthier, Vaan/Penelo, Basch/Ashe by end game) that made up the party and as mentioned Tactics Ogre has some shades of it with the crazy relationship that is Catiua and Denam.

Through WotL it seems to be clear that Ramza doesn't have any romantic attraction to Agrias due to trying to help Mustadio establish a relationship with her (where he fails, but still). It just seems throughout the game he doesn't have time to think about these matters (which is sort of refreshing for a game about a teenager realizing how twisted the world truly is and rises above the corruption).

If I had to make some assumption his chosen mate would be either Meliadoul or Rafa. The entire second half of Chapter 3 nearly revolves around Rafa and Malak. The only point for Meliadoul is her Unit Quote line. Other than that Ramza and her don't really show much chemistry where Rafa and Ramza sort of open up to one another (also for some reason if I recall in the event at Yardow the game skips forward 3 months so take that as you will, maybe just to show that the journey to Riovanes may have taken longer than anticipated?)

I'm always bothered that a character stops developing after they join the party (Well, nearly. Meliadoul and Agrias have one optional speech in battle) Thankfully WotL added some extra stuff for Beowulf (you know, like finishing his story!), Agrias, and Mustadio always had a fleshed out personality due to him being the catalyst for all optional events. They could have done a little better in that respect.

That is an astute observation. I would also argue it's the first time that an enemy will have a fair amount of HP AND this guy has Item.

It is sort of strange they didn't stagger it out as you mentioned. I think Dorter could have worked as an intro to AoE damage and the strong Knight archetype where the Sand Rat's Cellar/Sietch could have introduced the high ground advantage (starting the player in the ruins and giving the Archers the hills).

Eh, I also wanted the Common Item to be a possibility and wanted to throw in some FFXII functionality (sort of, not really. The concept is the same anyhow)

I thought I had an instruction slot free at first, but I seem to be missing some specific component on how the game actually loads the Move-Find Item item (that's not an awkward phrase or anything).

Aside from that important element it looks to be working right thanks to Raijinili.

EDIT: It is done! Just need to test it outside of a savestate and it will be good to go.

What this hack does explicitly is allow the modder to choose one Accessory to guarantee getting the rare item from a Move-Find Item Panel. In addition it removes the Brave dependence and has a static percentage that is also planned to be set by the player.

By default the values are E0 for Diamond Armlet and 19 (25%) for getting the rare item from a Move-Find Item Panel.

NOTE: This is my first FFT ASM (mostly due to Raijinili's direction) so my syntax or some such may be off, however it patched cleanly for me into the game.

That did the trick!...

For the most part. It seems that somehow the reason I was getting an Escutcheon was because it was reading it as the default common treasure and the rare treasure happened to be a Hidden Knife... This was not the actual items from those spots as you may have guessed.

I don't know where those items are put into... ?register 17? for quick access in the original formula.

00180264: 00408821 addu r17,r2,r0

Might this be the key to that?

I tried to put that at the start of the routine and leave the original common item portion alone, but still the same scenario played out. I didn't change anything but those aforementioned lines so now I am rather confused since all the registers used were those used in the original routine.

EDIT: Do the effects of your changes not actually show until a breakpoint has occurred? Because with the changed data, but without the save state it's acting as nothing has been changed, but only when it breaks and carries on through the custom routine do the effects of the routine show.

...And making the Diamond Armlet, if equipped, always supply the Rare Item. This is the code I have for it...

00180258: 34050064 ori r5,r0,0x0064             Load 100 into r5   
0018025c: 34040064 ori r4,r0,0x0064            Load 100 into r4
00180260: 9203001C lbu r3,0x001C(r16)         load Accessory
00180264: 10620004 beq r3,r2,0x00180278
00180268: 340200E0 ori r2,r0,0x00E0         branch if Accessory is Diamond Armlet (this doesn't seem to work for me for some reason)
0018026C: 0c017833 jal 0x0005e0cc         check if Random is greater/equal to Chance
00180270: 14400004 bne r2,r0,0x00180284         branch if Value is less than 75.
00180274: 3404004B ori r4,r0,0x004B
-------------------------------------------------------------
00180278: 92220002 lbu r2,0x0002(r17)         load rare item
0018027c: 080600a2 j 0x00180288
00180280: 00000000 nop

Here is the default routine...

http://ffhacktics.com/wiki/Rare/common_item_determination

Is there something I removed I shouldn't have or am I misunderstanding some basic of MIPS?

It was meant to be a simple change, I didn't expect to have this much trouble with it.

Things escalated quickly, but it is Dorter, the first battle in FFT where one has to think carefully about their every action and likely have a couple levels under their belt. It will be interesting to see how luck carries on in the next attempt.

Hmm, Blind really is the most worthless status in FFT. What does it do? Decrease the afflicted's chance to hit by 50% of the character they're attempting to hit's Evasion (Concentration also ignores it all together) as I recall? That doesn't scream "Blind" to me. That says to me, "slightly blurry".

As you've mentioned I find the story of FFT to be a masterfully crafted tale. It feels mature and has a volume of political machinations that no other strategy game has really matched (aside from Tactics Ogre, but... same man at the helm). The way I think of FFT is "Da Vinci Code, before the Da Vinci Code".

In terms of names, I do have to agree that War of the Lions went too much in translating s/th as th... at every turn. They missed some clear references in names that even the addled original translation included such as Algus and Golagros.

Algus in Latin means "Cold" or "Chilliness" which fits the character to a T. As you can imagine Argath itself looks to be a corruption of the greek name Argus which may have been intended his name, but I still feel Algus fits the character best due to the aforementioned meaning.

Balbanes is another case. Barbaneth sounds too... well barbaric. Balbanes (if pronounced as I always have Bal-bane-es) sounds like a high and noble name (mainly due to the "es" at the end, it lends itself well to majesty.)

I do like that the translator must have been given a list of names Not to Touch! And this would include Ramza, Delita, Wiegraf, Meliadoul. Wiegraf, while an Awesome name is no doubt a mistranslation of Wiglaf since he and Beowulf share a similar sprite.

Dorter at Level 1 should be interesting with this team. Those mages can wreak some early havoc. I imagine Sweegy (Siedge) won't be any trouble for you though.

Then I do have to say that sounds like a proper challenge. Beowulf not having access to Spellblade skills is going to be quite interesting on its own. I like the idea of discussing why certain characters were chosen over other (non Swordskillers) characters.

Looking forward to the future of this series then!

This is an interesting question, but we know that Gafgarion belonged to the Order of the Eastern Sky. Does this imply that he was actually in Lionel (which I doubt would have an Order due to being under Church control) or maybe Fovoham? Barinten is referred to as the Grand Duke and he controls Fovoham, it would make sense for him to have an Order under his command, but everything points to him being mainly a weapons manufacturer with Khamja being a secret assassination squad.

So then where could the Order of the Eastern Sky have called its base?

I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would. I even learned a little something about Medieval knights so that's always fun (only Gafgarion's armor is Brown, not Black, but same case I suppose). Your idea for a challenge doesn't really seem like a Tough-As-Nails challenge, but it is definitely a different idea, your commentary was entertaining and your reasoning was sound. I find it difficult to find anyone that will actually discuss the story of FFT in LP's.

I am a little confused though on how the secondary jobs are going to work. I see that you've unlocked up until the point of having those jobs but both jobs are being kept as default. Does that mean that you will be switching between their Main Job and Secondary Job as the playthrough goes on, gathering JP for both? Or does it mean that you will be using the Main Job only and the Secondary Job will be used only for its Skillset?

Overall I am impressed.

You know... that's not actually a bad idea to create a font in that manner. The Capital's could be lacking in the end though. I imagine with how big FFT is that Somewhere on the internet there should be an appropriate font to use. Did the Heroes of Ivalice forums ever have something akin to that?

Well there is the bugs with FFTactext that we haven't managed to fix.

http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=7163.msg212754#msg212754

More information can be found in that topic. I'm not sure of the exact details.