Final Fantasy Hacktics

Quotei personally found in jot5, that the start is extremely hard, but if you endure the "many" game over at the start XD then you get very strong skills, and it's not that hard anymore, more like enjoyable.

IMO, it's kind of meant to serve as a slap to the face that breaks you of some bad habits in regular FFT where your actual Tactics involve recklessly zerg rushing your enemies with little regard for positioning or keeping near your support units, because only a very small percentage of battles actually feature enemies who bring something more threatening than autoattack to the table.

Specifically: Ramza starts out just as strong of a melee fighter as the rest, but he's also the only one who starts out with a support ability. After that, almost every ability he can learn is a support ability.

Link's in a similar situation. He's a bit more attack-oriented, but he still has ranged and support options that are worth cultivating. That's why he only has a single sword ability, but three ranged ones and three songs, as well as the option to switch his equipment on the fly. (In the rerelease, switching his weaponry won't even consume your turn.)

Dante, too, has some very good versatility with his weaponry. Unlike Link, he can't switch Styles in combat, but his base job can easily adapt to whatever battles you have coming your way.
- As a Swordmaster (his default), he's a strong DPS character. You can keep him there, but you don't have to, and I would strongly encourage you not to if you're looking to pick up more utility on your team.
- Using a dagger to switch him to the Trickster and picking up those abilities suddenly gives him a ton of utility. He's got two ranged attack skills, one self-Quick skill, and a Regen/Defending skill that not only makes him tanky as hell, but also replenishes his MP, allowing him more freedom to use special abilities. You don't have to switch him to a utility character, but the option is there.
- Using a crossbow to switch him to the Gunslinger makes him a strong DPS character, similar to the Swordmaster, but with the added benefit from attacking at range, which protects him from some harm.
- Using a hammer to switch him to a Royalguard turns him into a very tanky unit and adds the ability to buff the party. 

Snake is designed completely around the idea of being a utility character. He's meant for surprise attacks, gambler strikes, chasing down and finishing off weakened targets, or simply distracting foes and being protected from the consequences of it thanks to his high Move, invisibility, and/or self-healing potential.

In fact, the only character designed to be a pure DPS character is Cloud. And considering the utility of Cross-Slash, even that's not 100% accurate.

The idea of backing away from pure zerg DPS is also why jobs like Knight and Ranger have major utility (Knight gaining heavy support, Ranger gaining heavy debuffing) while their equivalent Jobs didn't in FFT. It's why Wizard comes with the potential to inflict status on most of their spells.

It's also why the Chemist job suddenly becomes much more useful, instead of just having single-target heals and a billion different single-target cleanses. Sapling is powerful as hell, for example.

Basically, support and utility actually become important parts of FFT in Journey of the Five. The opening battles are hard because they're supposed to teach you early on to go get those types of abilities, instead of spending all your JP on pure DPS stuff. When you leave Lionel Castle thinking "aw man, that would have been so much easier if I'd had more MP," you put a higher priority on, say, Saria's Song or Encourage. (Fun fact: the three of the Five who use MP in their base jobs all have at least one way of restoring their own MP in said jobs.)

So an easy first playthrough with an automatically harder second one? I don't quite agree with that. That's more like artificially bloating the content of the game by making you do the same stuff twice over, just tuned higher.

If the difficulty is really giving you that much grief, I'd suggest using save state abuse as a crutch while you get used to the transition from the vanilla FFT playstyle, though it's not ideal... you're supposed to learn how to roll with the punches earlier on, and get used to the playstyle differences between vanilla FFT and Jot5. Jot5 puts a lot more emphasis on status effects and playing defensively than FFT "low level Archers and Knights in Ch. 4 storyline battles" ever did.

For example, Immobilize is ridiculously beneficial, especially given how many major Jot5 enemies are melee fighters. Focus Bangles block the Crystal status, meaning you don't have to rush to rez fallen units. Knights have easy access to Reraise. Regen is mad useful. These are all things you don't really see in vanilla FFT, because they aren't worth it there - but I promise you, they are here, and they're effects that can easily turn the tide of battle.

RNG is a part of the game, but it's not always just down to luck. There's a mod out there for FFT that sets up the AI for heavy sandbagging, and some LPers are experienced with it, so they come into Jot5 already used to having a harder time with the AI than the FFT "let's have you fight low level Archers and Knights deep into Chapter 4!" style. Those LPers know what to take advantage of without having to think about it as much as someone who's just played vanilla FFT.

That said, you do have a magic bullet at your disposal for countering bad RNG or forcing good RNG instead - save states. Use them every several turns as a precaution, and you can easily recover from something horrendous like accidentally screwing up the range on an ability. Or you can attempt to force Link's Ice Arrow to cause slow if you're in a corner and need to get some healing done.

That isn't how you should be playing, mind you, but if you're still in that post-FFT adjustment period where you're not used to being unable to brute force most encounters yet, it's an option that can make things significantly easier.

I know I've posted a lot of useful tips for Jot5 here and there in the proper topic myself, but the biggest general tip is that this simply isn't like normal FFT where the jobs are horribly imbalanced - so make sure you get good use out of the early jobs; don't just try to rush to Ninja or whatever. You can send a couple characters to climb all the way up the trees, sure, but this isn't a game where the majority of your enemies bring nothing more threatening than Attack and Fire 1 to the table, so you'd better be sure you're not doing that either.

The PSP exclusive items were crudely tacked on in a completely separate item databank that was never made available to anything the Patcher can affect. All you can do with them is change their stats, names, and descriptions.

Saying that WotL is mod-unfriendly compared to the PSX version is, frankly, putting it lightly.

Even now, there are still people coming in to ask about 1.3, even though it was removed from the site quite some time ago at the request of the guy behind ID. I mean, there's a forum for 1.3 at its own website, but people still come here to ask about it, which is... odd. And yeah, it can get annoying. If people went to the PSX FFT board to ask questions about FFT Advance - repeatedly - over several years, you'd probably see an annoyed rule about posting those questions to the right place too.

QuoteThese things seriously get old, and it's very annoying to repeat ourselves over and over again.

There's been user overlap between the two sites, of course, but this simply isn't the place to come ask questions about 1.3 if you want accurate answers. If you want to know about 1.3, you should be asking on the 1.3 forums. Which do exist.

Dark and Onion Knight as GENERIC Jobs, expanded party roster, the (crudely) increased number of items for all the multiplayer stuff.

Whether that plus the rest is important enough to make up for not being able to mod the PSP version as deeply is up to you.

But yeah, 1.3 isn't available or supported here - we can't really tell you what differences may or may not be there between their PSX & PSP versions. We aren't the ones who'd know.

The CT on Jump is kind of supposed to be the "cost" of the move, which is why it doesn't have an MP cost, can go up to eight panels away, AND deals bonus lance damage... all while leaving your character invulnerable during the Jump.
As a rule of thumb, never use it on an enemy whose CT is higher than 50 unless you're sure that your Jumper is that much faster than them.

Evade With Motion has nothing to do with tracking the enemy after they move. That feature comes in a different checkbox, which isn't available for Jump skills.

You can see palettes if you open the file in GraphicsGale. The first palette - the first sixteen colors - are what's available for the sprite by default, and there's no way to increase the color limit beyond sixteen.

That does tend to mean that colors will overlap. Browns from Delita's hair or skin tone might be used on his armor or cloak, as an example - so you may very well need to modify the colors of the body to make the sprite work with Zack's head, or vice versa.

You can import colors from other images in GG, so I'd suggest opening the Delita sprite, importing Zack's palette as the second palette, then pasting the Zack head sprites in a new layer, and changing colors as necessary until you get down to a total of 16 being used (there's a menu option to check for that). Then you remove the unused colors (again, there's a menu option).

IMO, change the cloak to use colors from Zack's sprite. If you used his hair colors to make a grey/black cloak, it'd probably still look fairly good, and might take care of all your color worries.

I played WotL both before and after using the slowdown patch, and the sound there seems to be the same. But I did notice that the sounds for the PSX version can be different, too - I just thought that might have been due to the emulators I'd used. Like Xif says, it's most likely something that was hardcoded for some unknown reason.

It's been a bit jarring for me, but it's usually something I get used to pretty quick.

I don't often look in here but the idea of this topic intrigued me a bit.         

I would've suggested Sap for the MP drain. Nice to see it's already been mentioned!

As for the regen... Refresh sounds like the right name for the status, while Mist sounds like the name of the spell that would cause it. Mist as a status sounds weird to me.

Quotewhat the Immortal flag grants immunity to in the Status tab

Status Effects -> Traitor. There's a checkbox for "Immortal Cancels". Most story-specific units have a checkbox called "Immortal" flagged in the ENTD tab for their encounters, which, among other things, grants the unit immunity to any Status Effect that has "Immortal Cancels" flagged.

Quote from: nyzer on July 21, 2016, 02:43:46 pm
Marks should be all taken care of now, I'm afraid.

Also, I know the 9-sprite limit has been mentioned before - you only leave three slots free for part 2 there, and one for part 3. And I think a 7v7 battle with 13 AI units would make me throw my hands up, set the one controllable party member to Healer, and reload the save until the fight won itself, 'cause it'd be a hell of a lot less annoying than actually trying to play it. >_>

Good! Now, for a formula choice, take a look at what other skills use for formulas. IIRC, Speechcraft skills normally use a MA based formula but with no Fa involved - I'd recommend looking at Choco Esuna, perhaps. You could also try the monks' Purification formula if you'd prefer a PA formula, or Arm/Leg Shot if you want a Speed formula.

Erm, have you taken a look in the Patcher yet? Because I'm pretty sure my last post covered just about everything you'd need to know without outright being a screenshot of every single step from start to finish. The impression I'm getting is that you haven't looked at Entice in the Abilities tab, nor your enemy's Job in the Jobs tab yet, and that's kind of vital. If you've got a specific question about it from there, we can work with that. But this is fairly basic stuff.

If you'd looked in the Abilities tab, you would have seen several mage skills to start, and as you'd scrolled down, you would have seen that it just keeps listing all the abilities from generic jobs - including the Orator's Entice. If you'd looked in the Job's tab, you would have seen a lot of familiar ones there, too - and the first thing each Job shows is its skillset, all of which have their character name attached in the WotL Patcher. Scrolling down within any specific Job would have shown the "Status Immunity" box.

Modifying Entice itself isn't entirely straightforward, because of the way Speechcraft skills don't work on all enemies and the fact that there are two different ways to make units immune to the Traitor status that Entice inflicts, but it confuses me that you went to the fftpack instead of the Abilities tab to begin with, as well as that you weren't able to find most of what you needed after my last post. All I can conclude is that you haven't been looking through the Patcher, and you NEED to do that. If you have a more specific question after done that, we can work from there. But there's a lot that'll become obvious after you look through what many of those Patcher tabs have to offer.

Did you download the Version .457 suite for Tactext? The download page tells you to make sure to use that one for it. Later versions lost a lot of functionality, particularly when WotL is involved.

It's all just Patcher stuff. No, you don't have to extract anything. You can change the formula of abilities using a dropdown menu in the Abilities tab (you can't make a new one that way, but you can use any existing formula); what Jobs have for innate immunities in the Jobs tab; what the Immortal flag grants immunity to in the Status tab; or which units have the Immortal flag in the ENTD tab. Just look around the Patcher. A lot. There are tutorials and help topics all over the place, too. The reason I say "change the formula" of Entice is because Entice uses a formula that only affects humans without the help of the Beast Tongue support, so even if you disabled the Traitor immunity for the "gargoyles" (demons?) it likely still wouldn't work.

Change the formula of Entice and disable immunities to Traitor status. Probably have to edit the status itself.

Some characters use a custom second skillset that I don't think would be present on joining, let alone after switching Jobs. Some enemy Jobs don't have costs set up. Most enemy Jobs don't have a Formation sprite. Plot.

Hey, FFTA did have some good ideas, no one's denying that.

It's just that it suffered from the devs failing to use a far larger amount of good ideas from the previous game in the series, and FFTA2 did the same thing but made it even worse.

So to people like Elric, who started with FFT, bringing up anything FFTA/2 did isn't a good way of convincing him of anything. For all the things they did get right compared to FFT, there are just far too many that they failed at.

It'd be like trying to bring up anything from Warlords of Draenor to convince me of a superior change it brought to World of Warcraft. There's just too much it failed at that previous expansions were easily able to manage - I associate that expansion with a complete and utter failure of development, with broken hopes that no one even tried to fix. Not that it didn't introduce some good features. Just that the bad far outweighs the good.

Besides, as I said, I already made sure to address your idea when we were adding in the new Dragoon skills anyway

Well, making it into a Mark would require a bill in a pub that would direct the party to Goug at that time; for that reason alone it already can't play out the way you've envisioned. A one-day affair would also be exceptionally annoying to nail down as a player.

As for the Gundam thing... you're right, he didn't build one to rescue his father. He built one on his own. For no reason other than because he could. He's also not just some ordinary Joe who was swept up in the events of FFT. He didn't despair when it seemed like the whole world was against him - he stood and fought alone, he made a fake Stone, and he sought out allies, but was careful enough to only tell them what they needed to know - which kept the Stone safe when the Cardinal was asking about it at Lionel. It doesn't make sense for him to be so affected by the fact that the group doesn't remember his birthday - first off, he knows how busy everyone is and is smart enough not to be insulted by them forgetting such a trivial thing in comparison. Second, he'd probably say something to Agrias at the very least - like "oh, it's my birthday today - I was hoping you'd join me for dinner if we have the time". Mustadio doesn't lament. He acts.

But even ignoring all of that, he was already busy excavating stuff from below Goug in FFT. By Jot5, things have only gotten busier there. Mustadio's got too much to do to spend his birthday having a pity party for himself in the bar, even if it wasn't against his incredibly assertive and active personality already. He probably wouldn't even notice himself, and just run off to his dad's house or his workshop (he's got to have his own somewhere) to build the aforementioned rocket car upgrade.