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April 18, 2024, 10:28:33 am

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I've been playing this hack recently, and I think it's pretty cool. My criticism does get somewhat harsh here, but it's only because I'd like to see the hack be better. If you disagree with my opinions and/or want me to stop, I'll stop bothering you  :)

Before I start complaining, I'd like to point out just how much I enjoy the fact that Thieves and Stealing don't exist. Having them in the game adds a lot of really weird issues, not least of which is the fact that money is utterly irrelevant to a sufficiently-opportunistic thief.
Having to manage my money was a welcome change.

The Paragon's "Un, Deux" skill does not ignore Damage>MP. The R-skill is greyed out in the combat preview, but it still activates and works.

I dunno how much you can do about the AI, but a Moogle Gunner in the mission to free Koringwood softlocked the game by using Double Attack and attempting to attack something outside his range with the second attack.

The effectiveness of healing seems to be significantly reduced by resistance. This makes it very hard for White Mages to keep themselves alive, especially early game.

The Paladin's "Prayer" skill is pretty great, but it only prevents auto-revival if you don't kill the victim with it, since apparently the buff-purging happens after the damage.
I don't know if that's intended or not, but I was certainly a little put out when I killed Babus with it and he got back up  :P

I have to say the way the level scaling works is... perhaps a little off-putting to me? Making it so the enemies are always higher level than you certainly does make the combat more interesting, but it can also feel a little cheap just how strong they are compared to you.
A good example of this is the S.O.S. mission; it's quite possible for Ritz and Shara to be dead or incapacitated before they even get to act.

Perhaps I'm just not very good at the game, but I found myself having to do some battles over multiple times, or progress a little and come back later (The ice-making wizard dude in particular sticks out to me.)
...I'm actually becoming kinda convinced Adrammalech is unbeatable without 3 Bengaa abusing Wyrmtamer and some dudes reviving people. All of the enemies are ridiculously tanky, and anything but a breath attack will just oneshot most units.
When Giza Plains was attacked, the strategy I ended up using was poisoning everything, draining the Titania's MP before it gave anyone Auto-Life, and having my Sniper use Conceal so that I would have one unit still living when the monsters died to the poison. Even with this strategy, there was a rather low probability of success and I eventually resorted to savestates because I was getting sick of replaying the mission.
It's also worth noting that the enemies always being very strong makes it much harder to catch monsters than I think is entirely reasonable, but that's quite possibly intended.
If you're balancing the difficulty with savestates in mind, I think you should reconsider; the RNG in FFTA is not predetermined at all so, so you could just savestate-abuse until literally no enemy hit you and you never missed. In which case there would be no difficulty high enough unless the enemies all got guaranteed-damage attacks.

Having all new recruits be the same as your highest level character is cool, and makes sure they're relevant, but a lot of the attachment to units that happens in the base game just kind of evaporates as a result.
If you have a character who has learned a whole bunch of abilities, generally the preferred strategy is to level them back up to usefulness, rather than just kicking him. In this hack, there's a decent chance that you'll receive a replacement who's liable to be higher level after any given mission, and all it takes to bring the new guy up to snuff is piddling around in menus for a bit.

I think the scaled enemies should just be the same level as your highest, probably a little less, with recruits joining you at the average of your clanmates' levels to give the older units a fighting chance at being kept.
The only one of my starter units I still have at this point is the human, since Duelists are awesome and therefore he's almost never not useful.

However, I've got a possibly-better solution... It seems to me that the enemies in every encounter scale to you, so the main difference as you go through the game is only two things: number of times you can use abilities, and the number/quality of abilities (and their associated gear items) you have available.
Why not just remove leveling up entirely?
The gear-based progression will be there anyway, and ability use at low levels is already a bit of a balance issue/concern.

With the removal of leveling, you could balance all classes' base stats such that they have a good amount but never too much MP to use.
The only issue I can see with this is that you lose the ability to multiclass level your units and average their stats, but the base classes have varied enough stat focuses that you can generally find your preferred balance of stats anyway.

Particularly if you went with the removal of leveling, I think I might be willing to try and help you find/adjust the stat generation code so that you control what the stat variances are.

PS: Sorry for the wall of text, and thanks for making the hack!