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So, when I had originally posted, I stopped playing the Rom Hack at the third story mission, because I also had a vanilla save at the exact same location. While I have played FFT:A2 many times over the years, I can't remember ever finishing it, usually due to getting caught up with the near infinite amount of repeatable quests that bombards you after you've done several of the Rift Summon fights.
Knowing that I basically play the game the exact same way every time (and never really finish it), I decided to continue playing the Rom Hack, so I could at least have a unique experience this time. This time I got a ways into the second continent. I might go back and finish the rest of the game through his mod at some point, but right now I'm burned out from how slow the game generally progresses, for the reasons mentioned in the last post. Anyway, I figured I would give my opinion, after another couple dozen hours invested in the mod.
Firstly, battles do get quicker, but only after you've gotten enough Quicken abilities to abuse this mod's system in your favor. I'd say it happens once you've gotten proper Jobs down for your team, somewhere near the end of the first continent. This usually result in me having my entire team rush the opposing side, and kill at least one enemy, before they have gotten a turn. At this point in the game, every fight goes like this, and the difficulty (for the most part) significantly takes a dive. The enemy team will usually swarm you afterwards, but by now, your frontline team should have enough HP to tank all the damage, and the extra turns provided by your healers is more than enough to negate all statuses and heal.
Despite this, there are a few frustrating examples where the mod's combat flow absolutely tips in the enemy's favor though, and this is especially bad, because Speed was removed from character progression, allowing a lot of enemies to take multiple actions (usually acting 3 separate times, some back to back) in a single Turn without the aid of Quicken or Time Magic. During these kinds of battles, I often found myself silently screaming "When exactly do I get to do something in this fight?", while watching my team get destroyed.
At some point you have to fight 6 of the more advanced Marlboro's (I think their called Carrie's, or something like that), in order to help some shop owner craft ribbons. This fight is a strong summary of how the mod doesn't handle combat flow well. All of them already have area healing magic that restores for roughly 120 HP, area attacks that inflict Charm with other debuffs, and a melee attack that strikes for around 120 damage (250 on a back attack). This battle was utterly insane with this mod. Thanks to their high health/damage/healing and status attacks, just 3 of the marlboro would have been enough for a party wipe, but the mod kept enabling them additional Turns, making it feel like I was fighting 18+ marlboros. Even with abusing State Saves, this mission took me around three whopping hours to complete. Every time I would get one low, half their team would collectively spam an area heal, which also gave them Regen. Every time one was near death, they would Quicken and turn the fight back into their favor.
I've gained 20 levels and a ton of abilities since that fight, but I don't think my current team would have handled it much better. Charm made the fight extremely frustrating too, because I rarely got to participate in the fight, and when I would get to, that character would be AI controlled and against me. Status effects in general are especially powerful in this mod, worse when they grant Quicken 100%. I eventually decided to abuse this, by converting my Red/White Mage into Support/White Mage, then starting out my first Turn in every fight with Proect/Shell and debuffing all enemies with Oil/Blind/etc... with a single character (Support Mages always seem to act first). Sure, now I'm down one offensive caster, but now all my characters basically do +50% more fire damage and are safer, for at least a few Turns (which is greatly needed). I don't think I need to explain how unbalanced this is.
Another bad example of lowered character Speed, is pretty much any fight against the floating eyes that have the Roulette ability. They end up using it roughly twice per Turn, which is a frustrating auto-kill, that you have to waste a turn raising your teammate (if you even can). There's a mission in the caverns on the first continent where you have to fight a couple of these floating eyes, where you I think you have to gather ore fragments, but the floating eyes are backed up by zombies. The fight overall is tough enough, but with how Turns flow, the zombies get to act often enough, that you barely have time to cleanse their graves after they die. Luckily, none of these enemies had Quicken effects, but the fight still took an unpleasant hour.
Another thing I want to mention, is the alterations to the MP System. I didn't register during my playtime with my last post, but now that I'm much further into the game, my characters have roughly 100+ MP, and so do the enemies. Early on, its interesting to be able to use your abilities so often in battle and helps move things along, but having all your MP at once, all the time, makes it obvious why vanilla didn't do this. Problems like with the aforementioned marlboro fight happen all the time, with enemies spamming status effects and buffs that give them additional Turns, etc.
Obviously, battles should be difficult, and a lot of times I lost, it was due to poor planning on my part (rushing in with one character or wasting all my MP early, etc). Vanilla could certainly be mind numbingly easy, especially if you decided to invest into Illusionists for easy wins. Although, altering the Speed mechanics to be in the favor of enemies kind of makes the game more stressful, than fun. Ideally, every character should get one action per Turn, assuming they aren't aided by Time Magic or a Reaction, but enemies in this mod frequently get way more actions than they should.
Anyway, I'm not trying to throw shade on the mod, I really like what it attempts. The reason I came back to it (and may at some point continue it) is due to how unique the Bazaar is, and how some Jobs are. Although for Mission reasons, I'm still confused about what certain Jobs function at for completion (like, I don't know what Sage or Time Mage were converted to, for unlocking abilities and completing Dispatches). However, it's really fun to steal and hunt for 5 or so missions, then hit the Bazaar and see what potentially interesting gear I might dig up. It's a bit of a gamble, but always fun, although this also does drag on some fights, as to maximize your gear, you want to steal from every monster and only finish them off with Hunting, and somewhat early on, you have to really commit to this, or your characters could go hours wasting AP without an ability to invest into. Earning advanced Magick early (roughly halfway into the first continent) was pretty fun.
One thing I will admit about the new Quicken System, is that it made certain time sensitive missions far less stressful. For example, the quests where you clean airships can be completely with relative ease, assuming your characters have lots of abilities like Precision or Protect to give them immediate extra actions. These were also especially helpful on the missions where you have to "gather X things" or disabling certain traps (walking onto a trap normally ends your turn, unless you've preloaded a Quicken triggering action). Although I still don't think it should be apart of normal gameplay, or at least, not on the grand scale that the mod presents it.
On a final note, one of my favorite things about FFT:A2, over the other Tactics games, is progression. I never really liked FFT, because of how easy (and boring it is) to just sit in one fight, mastering every ability in the game, constantly spamming the same thing over and over, and I barely remember FFT:A1. In FFT:A2, the game encourages you to advance the story and to other fights, because that's how you earn AP, and gil, which in turn provides you with gear to spend the AP on.
However, my least liked thing about the game, is the Job-based Attribute progression. I'm fine with Speed being removed/nerfed, but it needs to be balanced so fights are at least fair. The thing I always hated this system, is obviously, your going to want to switch Jobs often, to learn new abilities and unlock other Jobs, but since you level after every 2 fights, your constantly progressing in Attributes that your unaware of (without heavy research), which can ultimately ruin the fun of swapping Jobs at will, when you know your attributes will be gimped for it.
One of my favorite classes in all of Final Fantasy, will always be Red Mage, but in A2, Black Mage will always be overwhelmingly stronger, due to an increased Magick Attack AND access to High Magick. I have yet to unlock Doublecast (which was the counterbalance for making Red Mage equal to Black Mage), so I assume in this mod it got removed? Either way, I really wish someone would make a Rom Hack that adjusted character attributes to the Job they newly switch to, rather than punish someone by making character permanently set into a specific role, when the game clearly doesn't give you all the options at the beginning.
Thanks for the mod though. All complaints and criticism aside, it's been an interesting experience, both good and bad. I'm relatively new to using Rom Hacks, which outside of Randomizers, I thought were restricted to Super Metroid. I was pleased to see that I could apply mods to other Roms, too.
Knowing that I basically play the game the exact same way every time (and never really finish it), I decided to continue playing the Rom Hack, so I could at least have a unique experience this time. This time I got a ways into the second continent. I might go back and finish the rest of the game through his mod at some point, but right now I'm burned out from how slow the game generally progresses, for the reasons mentioned in the last post. Anyway, I figured I would give my opinion, after another couple dozen hours invested in the mod.
Firstly, battles do get quicker, but only after you've gotten enough Quicken abilities to abuse this mod's system in your favor. I'd say it happens once you've gotten proper Jobs down for your team, somewhere near the end of the first continent. This usually result in me having my entire team rush the opposing side, and kill at least one enemy, before they have gotten a turn. At this point in the game, every fight goes like this, and the difficulty (for the most part) significantly takes a dive. The enemy team will usually swarm you afterwards, but by now, your frontline team should have enough HP to tank all the damage, and the extra turns provided by your healers is more than enough to negate all statuses and heal.
Despite this, there are a few frustrating examples where the mod's combat flow absolutely tips in the enemy's favor though, and this is especially bad, because Speed was removed from character progression, allowing a lot of enemies to take multiple actions (usually acting 3 separate times, some back to back) in a single Turn without the aid of Quicken or Time Magic. During these kinds of battles, I often found myself silently screaming "When exactly do I get to do something in this fight?", while watching my team get destroyed.
At some point you have to fight 6 of the more advanced Marlboro's (I think their called Carrie's, or something like that), in order to help some shop owner craft ribbons. This fight is a strong summary of how the mod doesn't handle combat flow well. All of them already have area healing magic that restores for roughly 120 HP, area attacks that inflict Charm with other debuffs, and a melee attack that strikes for around 120 damage (250 on a back attack). This battle was utterly insane with this mod. Thanks to their high health/damage/healing and status attacks, just 3 of the marlboro would have been enough for a party wipe, but the mod kept enabling them additional Turns, making it feel like I was fighting 18+ marlboros. Even with abusing State Saves, this mission took me around three whopping hours to complete. Every time I would get one low, half their team would collectively spam an area heal, which also gave them Regen. Every time one was near death, they would Quicken and turn the fight back into their favor.
I've gained 20 levels and a ton of abilities since that fight, but I don't think my current team would have handled it much better. Charm made the fight extremely frustrating too, because I rarely got to participate in the fight, and when I would get to, that character would be AI controlled and against me. Status effects in general are especially powerful in this mod, worse when they grant Quicken 100%. I eventually decided to abuse this, by converting my Red/White Mage into Support/White Mage, then starting out my first Turn in every fight with Proect/Shell and debuffing all enemies with Oil/Blind/etc... with a single character (Support Mages always seem to act first). Sure, now I'm down one offensive caster, but now all my characters basically do +50% more fire damage and are safer, for at least a few Turns (which is greatly needed). I don't think I need to explain how unbalanced this is.
Another bad example of lowered character Speed, is pretty much any fight against the floating eyes that have the Roulette ability. They end up using it roughly twice per Turn, which is a frustrating auto-kill, that you have to waste a turn raising your teammate (if you even can). There's a mission in the caverns on the first continent where you have to fight a couple of these floating eyes, where you I think you have to gather ore fragments, but the floating eyes are backed up by zombies. The fight overall is tough enough, but with how Turns flow, the zombies get to act often enough, that you barely have time to cleanse their graves after they die. Luckily, none of these enemies had Quicken effects, but the fight still took an unpleasant hour.
Another thing I want to mention, is the alterations to the MP System. I didn't register during my playtime with my last post, but now that I'm much further into the game, my characters have roughly 100+ MP, and so do the enemies. Early on, its interesting to be able to use your abilities so often in battle and helps move things along, but having all your MP at once, all the time, makes it obvious why vanilla didn't do this. Problems like with the aforementioned marlboro fight happen all the time, with enemies spamming status effects and buffs that give them additional Turns, etc.
Obviously, battles should be difficult, and a lot of times I lost, it was due to poor planning on my part (rushing in with one character or wasting all my MP early, etc). Vanilla could certainly be mind numbingly easy, especially if you decided to invest into Illusionists for easy wins. Although, altering the Speed mechanics to be in the favor of enemies kind of makes the game more stressful, than fun. Ideally, every character should get one action per Turn, assuming they aren't aided by Time Magic or a Reaction, but enemies in this mod frequently get way more actions than they should.
Anyway, I'm not trying to throw shade on the mod, I really like what it attempts. The reason I came back to it (and may at some point continue it) is due to how unique the Bazaar is, and how some Jobs are. Although for Mission reasons, I'm still confused about what certain Jobs function at for completion (like, I don't know what Sage or Time Mage were converted to, for unlocking abilities and completing Dispatches). However, it's really fun to steal and hunt for 5 or so missions, then hit the Bazaar and see what potentially interesting gear I might dig up. It's a bit of a gamble, but always fun, although this also does drag on some fights, as to maximize your gear, you want to steal from every monster and only finish them off with Hunting, and somewhat early on, you have to really commit to this, or your characters could go hours wasting AP without an ability to invest into. Earning advanced Magick early (roughly halfway into the first continent) was pretty fun.
One thing I will admit about the new Quicken System, is that it made certain time sensitive missions far less stressful. For example, the quests where you clean airships can be completely with relative ease, assuming your characters have lots of abilities like Precision or Protect to give them immediate extra actions. These were also especially helpful on the missions where you have to "gather X things" or disabling certain traps (walking onto a trap normally ends your turn, unless you've preloaded a Quicken triggering action). Although I still don't think it should be apart of normal gameplay, or at least, not on the grand scale that the mod presents it.
On a final note, one of my favorite things about FFT:A2, over the other Tactics games, is progression. I never really liked FFT, because of how easy (and boring it is) to just sit in one fight, mastering every ability in the game, constantly spamming the same thing over and over, and I barely remember FFT:A1. In FFT:A2, the game encourages you to advance the story and to other fights, because that's how you earn AP, and gil, which in turn provides you with gear to spend the AP on.
However, my least liked thing about the game, is the Job-based Attribute progression. I'm fine with Speed being removed/nerfed, but it needs to be balanced so fights are at least fair. The thing I always hated this system, is obviously, your going to want to switch Jobs often, to learn new abilities and unlock other Jobs, but since you level after every 2 fights, your constantly progressing in Attributes that your unaware of (without heavy research), which can ultimately ruin the fun of swapping Jobs at will, when you know your attributes will be gimped for it.
One of my favorite classes in all of Final Fantasy, will always be Red Mage, but in A2, Black Mage will always be overwhelmingly stronger, due to an increased Magick Attack AND access to High Magick. I have yet to unlock Doublecast (which was the counterbalance for making Red Mage equal to Black Mage), so I assume in this mod it got removed? Either way, I really wish someone would make a Rom Hack that adjusted character attributes to the Job they newly switch to, rather than punish someone by making character permanently set into a specific role, when the game clearly doesn't give you all the options at the beginning.
Thanks for the mod though. All complaints and criticism aside, it's been an interesting experience, both good and bad. I'm relatively new to using Rom Hacks, which outside of Randomizers, I thought were restricted to Super Metroid. I was pleased to see that I could apply mods to other Roms, too.