FFVI Hardtype 1.2 (Updated February 3, 2012)

[paminen]

I'm sorry to say I have not been able to get the patch working. I have tried patching it using the latest LunarIPS with several different copies of the FF3 US rom, both 1.0 and 1.1 and headered and unheadered. ZSNES always says "bad rom" and only shows a black screen. I also tried patching with SNESromutil, the game then occasionally ran but with major glitches. Does anyone have any advice?

edit- perhaps the new fix may work better

[Eternal]

Sent you a PM, Parimen, please check it.

[Kalas]

If not, then snes9x works wonders.

[Eternal]

This update features some bugfixes and altered Natural Magic for Celes/Terra.

Terra:

Lv. 1
Cure

Lv. 1
Fire

Lv. 5
Chrono

Lv. 10
Drain

Lv. 15
Demi

Lv. 20
Fire2

Lv. 25
Warp

Lv. 30
Poison

Lv. 35
Dispel

Lv. 40
Stop

Lv. 45
Break

Lv. 50
Quake

Lv. 55
Demi2

Lv. 60
Fire3

Lv. 65
Melt

Lv. 70
Ultima


Celes:

Lv. 1
Ice

Lv. 1
Cure

Lv. 5
Protect

Lv. 10
Shell

Lv. 15
Raise

Lv. 20
Float

Lv. 25
Haste

Lv. 30
Cure2

Lv. 35
Ice2

Lv. 40
Regen

Lv. 45
Whirl

Lv. 50
Dispel

Lv. 55
Ice3

Lv. 60
Holy

Lv. 65
Esuna

Lv. 70
Meteor

[paminen]

I am pleased to say that I have been enjoying this hack for the last few days. I've been taking notes after each big fight to sort of chronicle my progress, I hope this is useful to you as feedback. I've just made up to Terra becoming an esper, and felt this was a good point in the game to post my feedback and maybe ask a few questions. For everyone else, I do discuss some fight strategies which you might consider a sort of spoiler so be careful. Without further ado my crappy notes:

WHELK: This battle was surprisingly tense. Added soldiers made the beginning a little hectic, and early into the fight I managed to mistime a shot and hit his shell. Biggs and Wedge were instantly killed by his counterattack, but I had used Barrier with Terra and she was able to whittle down the rest of his health by herself.
MAGITEKS: Does this count as a boss? It was certainly hard enough! I actually had to go grind a couple levels with Terra to get through this as her health was just so low the first couple times I tried it. Granted I usually grind a bit with Terra here anyway. Their laser is devastating and this fight was a careful balancing act between hitting one enemy with all I've got to even the playing field as fast as possible, and keeping everyone's health high to avoid getting oneshot.
VARGAS: Nothing special as far as I could tell. He didn't really seem too interesting. This boss was actually a little easier than some of the random encounters coming up the mountain, which were a pain with all their status effects until I just went back and bought everyone some relics.
ULTROS: Lots of wacky status effects, but this was still not too bad thanks to Banon. I got lucky and had a white cape on Terra and blazed through this fight in one shot.
TUNNEL ARMOR: First time I had to really pay attention to a boss. This fight was hard. I don't remember if it was as unforgiving in vanilla FF6 but you really have to be on the ball with Celes to get through this, if you mess up once it's game over. I had a hasted Celes standing by ready to Runic every spell while Locke chipped away at his HP. The one-two punches of back to back spells were pretty brutal. You really had to be quick with Runic to survive.
GHOST TRAIN: This was a lot more hectic than in vanilla. Constant instant death attacks made for a very defensive battle fought at very low health where I got to put to use all those Phoenix Downs that drop from the enemies in the area. I really like how different all the bosses have been from each other and this is no exception, you turned a really boring and easy boss into something really exciting and challenging. Really had to change up my tactics for this. Also, Sabin suplexing the train will never get old.
PIRANHAS: I wasn't expecting a real boss here! The boss piranha was actually pretty tough, but luckily Cyan's Tiger (half hp) worked on him and he quickly went down. It would have taken forever without that.
KEKFA: Whooo finally. That was a good fight. Seemed almost impossible the first time, but became easy once I figured out the trick. The trick being Runic - Celes and a party of physical attackers were able to beat him down quite handily, it was almost pathetic. I'm gonna start using Celes more, Runic seems like it could be a very useful defensive tool in this hack.

Some random thoughts:

In general I like the way everyone feels, though I'm not far enough yet to really know. I really like the FF9 style equipment-magic system, even at this low level I find each character more distinct than in the base game. Character-specific relics and spells give the characters that have them a useful niche, eg I like how Locke learns Haste. Edgar's Tools revamp were a surprise and made him much more strategic to use instead of his usual role as the most overpowered character in the early game. NoiseBlaster being all-targets makes for quite the chaotic battle, that sometimes is even tactically sound on the right enemies. BioBlaster is decent as always, but a lot better now in comparison to the flaky Autocrossbow, which I find misses too much to use reliably. Blitz still rocks and Swdtech still kinda sucks, though Cyan can be pretty good at just fighting with his genji gloves.
Random battles are much better now, they actually take a little bit of effort and some configurations can be quite challenging. Each enemy simply being tougher means you have to consider your moves a bit more carefully. I also like the potent new moves I've noticed on some enemies as well. I especially liked the evil new Leafers and quickly learned to kill them in one hit. Though I fear some are perhaps too potent. I suppose that is what the run away button is for, I have definitely been using that a lot more

I have a couple of questions too. Some may be kind of stupid or obvious so bear with me.

1. The first post in this thread requests you alphabetize Gau's rages, which you said you would do on page 4. Upon getting Gau I noticed his rages were in the default order. I then downloaded the linked Gau alphabetized rage patch and applied to the game with LunarIPS. Started up the game again, saw the rages were mostly alphabetized, fought a few battles, didn't notice any bugs. My question is this: I'm kind of worried somethings going to glitch out somewhere down the line, so, did you not apply the patch because it conflicted with your edits, or was there some other reason? I am not trying to blame you for not including it, just wondering if there is an important reason not to use it, such as that it might conflict with or overwrite the changes you have made to the game. I know almost nothing about the technicalities of SNES ROM modding or hacking. If it helps, the Gau patch's readme says it changes ROM addresses 25A41 - 25A63, 2FCD0 - 2FDCE, 2FDD0 - 2FDD3, 355C7 - 355ED, 35633 - 35634.
I dont mind restoring my save from before I applied the patch if it is indeed incompatible with yours.

2. Also on page 4 you have some neato screenshots of the characters having jobs listed in the menu. Did this not make it into the final version?  Just wanna make sure I applied the patch right. Actually, since there were other cool sounding features you've discussed in this thread, do you have a more recent changelog since this old readme? http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/617/ Or are the changes since then relatively minor enough that one is unnecessary.

All in all I have been having a very good, challenging time with this hack and hope the quality persists to the endgame! Thanks for making it

[Eternal]

Thanks for the incredible battle logs. I hope you continue to post these! As I've mentioned above, though I say this is the final version, if there's anything you guys feel need to be fixed/changed, I'm more than willing to update for those.

To answer your questions, I heard that the ASM messes up if you switch enemy names from their defaults, which I do a lot- particularly in the WoR. I'm not sure if that's particularly true or not... but given how many times I've had to restart this patch because of dumb ASM stuff, I didn't want to take any risks that wouldn't really have decent rewards.

As for job names, you're getting your wish very soon, I'm hoping.

[Eternal]

Just uploaded a slightly fixed version that includes job names and some fixes to items, such as Poison Knife, which didn't properly inflict Poison. Enjoy, and send thanks to Celdia and Lenophis for the Job Name ASM!

[paminen]

Here's some more notes. The number in parentheses is roughly my party's level.

DADALUMA (17): Wow this guy is a beast and took me many tries. I first tried with Locke, Sabin, Edgar, and Celes and got nowhere since Sabin and Locke couldn't do anything without being countered by Dadaluma. Eventually went all the way back to Narshe to drop off Locke and hire Shadow. I figured Sabin could help out by using items and casting his piddly Fire spell but he was dead more than alive, Locke's Haste would have been better. I also equipped everyone with confusion-protecting gear (the Headband is finally useful) so I could use Noiseblaster on the iron fists to avoid their damage. Shadow ended up making a major difference with his skeans and shurikens and then... what! he healed to full!! Long, painful fight but I eventually won. I noticed an oddity in that he seemed to want to counter physical attacks and Mug, but Throw and physical Tools were fine yet even the magical Blitzes were countered. Maybe he's just programmed to hate on Sabin because they use the same moves Grueling but fun fight that takes a lot of preparation.
ULTROS (19): Not too hard, basically the same as the original. Sabin's Fire 2 from the fire knuckle really came in handy. Everyone's level being 19 I was thankfully able to avoid all his L? spells. Also, I noticed that Ultros' Drain was not doing any damage or healing until about halfway through the fight - intended?
#024 (21): Not too hard. His attacks seemed more damaging than normal so Runic was very handy. Blocking confuse also made it much easier. The magitek factory leading up to him was a little intense at times, and I wish that the new item Rubber Boots was available on this continent.
#128 (21): Quite a troublesome foe, though the fight mechanics were mostly unchanged I quickly realized his higher stats and annoying statuses meant if I didn't take him out fast I'd lose to attrition. My first try failed miserably but then I equipped Carbuncle and Phantom and they made a huge difference, allowing everyone to get in a few free hits without having to worry about healing the massive damage going out. Runic would have been great here, I miss it already.
CRANES (21): Very easy. Used Carbuncle and killed them quickly. Nice little breather fight after that annoying gauntlet.
FLAME EATER (25): Surprisingly tough, though the mechanics hadn't changed much each characters limitations made the battle difficult to survive. Nearly any attack from any enemy in the fight would one shot a character, especially the self destruct and flare. After some trial and error, my strategy was to immediately break an ice rod to clear the bombs and do quite a bit of damage to the boss. I summoned Carbuncle right after that to protect Locke and Strago for a couple rounds. Once a new group of bombs showed up I used Siren to completely neuter them for the remainder of the battle. Morphed Terra and started pounding the boss with Ice until it died. She had a reflect ring to stay mostly immune to the boss's attacks and Kirin to heal whatever got past it. The beginning of this fight and dealing with the bombs was the hardest part and required some quick timing, and Siren was extremely useful so I could just silence the bombs instead of having to kill them over and over. I like how this hack makes me think about my esper attacks - the base game was easy enough I didn't really bother summoning them too much. I could have made this easier for myself by buying some extra ice rods I guess, but I figured it was doable without.
ULTROS (26): Seems unchanged, which is ok because its basically a cutscene.

Stuff:
I have noticed two bugs. Nothing major. The first is in the last save room of the phantom train and what appears to be the top half of a ghost is next to the save point. If you walk on it you are unable to walk off. Good thing I used the save point first.



The second is on the status screen. The "ag" popped up sometime recently, if I had to guess exactly when I'd say when Relm joins your party after Ultros.



Still enjoying myself and looking forward to the reportedly even more different WOR. Each character's magical limitations renders their skills, equipment, and espers a much more tactical and interesting choice. I was somewhat disappointed to see esper level bonuses are still in, but its not too bad since there are only a few spells to learn and I guess those stats have to come from somewhere. But those job names look great. Before I head off to the flying continent, though, are there any of Strago's lores you've made only available in the WOB? I'd hate if I missed a good one.

[Eternal]

That ghost was originally going to be a merchant for the fight before the Phantom Train. I've removed every instance of that event a very long time ago, but for whatever reason, it's still there. =\

The -ag is probably a result of the Job Name ASM.

Also... I think the WoR needs buffed. I'm going to need your feedback on that when you get to it. You don't need to worry about Lores since you'll face a new enemy in the Cultist's Tower that uses every Lore in the game.

Thanks, and I'm glad you're enjoying it!

[dity]

This is good fun, but I've hit a brick wall at atma/Ultima weapon on the floating continent.  I was able to grind requisite spells out and get to him at clvls 23-26, but I didn't have nearly the output to even think about taking him down as cyan/locke/celes/shadow.  I came back with setzer instead of locke for his zephyr cape and runic friendly aoe healing, and while I'm pretty good at sustaining the fight indefinitely, I still can't out damage his uber regen.  Everything else I've been able to finesse pretty well.  I wonder if there's a changed item/piece of gear/ability that's relevant to my situation that I'm missing.

His regen starts at 200/tick, and gradually gets larger until it's ticking for 2000, like a sort of a reverse poison.  Hitting for 1200-1300 a turn isn't close to being good enough if I have to recover from his cyclone/whirl while blocking flares.  It's too bad none of my sap/poison skills seem to affect him. 

Genji glove's damage reduction applies to skills, making the item only relevant to a tiny niche of fights for cyan, and worthless for shadow so far for the WoB.  I like the changes to cyan's sky/second bushido, unless it's just being buggy -- it goes off when an enemy gives anyone on your team a debuff from what I could tell, in addition to its old functionality.  I have at least twice seen it act like FFT's Hamedo (though without canceling the incoming attack), in the fight against #128;  it appeared that cyan stepped forward and used the skill -- and while cyan was still standing forward the boss followed with his poison attack on someone else. 

Besides Ultima so far, only Dadaluma really gave me issues, though in my party only cyan could damage him without getting his face mage smashed or bum rushed. 

[Eternal]

Hmm, if it turns out Paminen is also having this issue, I wouldn't be against removing Auto: Regen, particularly since he uses some fairly vicious spells. Have you tried using Cyan's 4-hit attack? That may be enough to do some decent damage each turn.

Not sure what's up with Sky, since you're the first person to have reported it, and I haven't touched it at all. By debuff, do you mean debuff magic like Slow/Confuse?

Thanks for the feedback, hope you all are enjoying it!

[dity]

I haven't tested sky on everything, but I've used it most frequently against dadaluma and #128 -- sky would counter rapier or any of their physical skills that cause sap or poison, even if it targeted anyone in the party, and even if a party member was immune to the effect.  Additionally, Cyan would not necessarily counter the enemy that committed the attack, seeming to favor a random target instead when Cyan wasn't hit.  

Unfortunately, Ultima's armor is such that cyan's fang/first skill does 20-30% more damage to it than cyan's flurry/fourth skill.  

Edit:  I hadn't really used shadow outside when you're forced to (he's awesome I know, it's just a preference thing) but it appears that sky/cyan's second goes off whenever shadow uses throw.  That's pretty awesome.  Hmm.

re-edit: Can't recreate the previous edit.  Further testing req'd.

[dity]

YES




Finally took him down.  It took Terra/Relm/Celes/Shadow with three reflect rings being overly aggressive.  Would be impossible with "Active" time selected; I cut down his regen by waiting in menus instead of letting it tick after every single flare.  It was my second attempt at getting to his second phase.  Had he used comet once I would've been done for, but I got lucky.  

ed: no one in the party is over 27

[paminen]

I'm afraid to say I am having quite a lot of trouble with Ultima's 2000-per-tick Regen too. Been working on him for quite a while with several different parties, including the all-girls reflect ring group posted above, as well as parties that have even more potential for damage. I can sometimes make it to the second stage but my luck always runs out before I can finish. It'd be a hard fight on its own but wouldn't be nearly so bad if I didn't have to either play so riskily to outpace the Regen or take a few turns to take care of the party and quickly fall behind. Also if I didn't have to run through the entire FC to change parties =P I'll keep working on it - my next idea is trying a party with Edgar for Debilitator, hopefully he's affected - but as it stands I do think the high Regen should be toned down or removed as its high healing rate makes the fight uncharacteristically long and luck-dependent for what I think has been a pretty well balanced though difficult hack so far. The Air Force battle had a similar "dps check" with the doom but was handled a bit less annoyingly.

Up to you though. I also wanted to let you know about a couple more bugs I've noticed, one obnoxious and one just weird. The first bug is that using the "remove all equipment" function from the guy on the airship will also remove the permanent sprint shoes effect on those characters it affects. Choosing "unequip everyone" will definitely remove the effect from everyone, while choosing "only unequip people not in my party" seems to only sometimes remove the effect, I'm not sure. I dunno if you can do anything about this or if its just the way the game is programmed, but its something to keep an eye on. If anyone else becomes afflicted by this, I was able to restore the sprint shoes effect for myself by using the zsnes cheat code file from http://zsnes.zophar.net/cht/

The second bug is just kinda funny. There are two listings for Gale Hairpin, each with slightly different stats and description.

As far as I can tell they both increase preemptive attacks, its just that one has +2 more speed than the other. I wish I could tell you where I got them but I wasn't really paying attention at the time.

[Eternal]

The first bug mentioned is because at the time, I was unaware there was an ASM for auto-sprint, so I have each piece of gear auto-sprint. Therefore, when you removed it, you could no longer sprint. Second bug is being fixed as we speak.

Regarding Ultima, I've toned down his Regen for an update I'll release today. I just tested the battle myself and I agree with your findings.

Thanks!

[Eternal]

Okay, I've uploaded a fixed version which fixes Gale Hairpin, Quake, Whirl, and Ultima Weapon (boss). Sorry about the inconvenience!

[Odal]

omgonmgomg I just noticed this update.  DLING RITE NAO!

[Odal]

Well, got up to Mt. Koltz or however it's spelled.  Some of the random battles are needlessly long z_z  I'm sure I spent at least five in-game minutes fighting two battles against brawlers.  Thank goodness for fast forward.

I forgot to record the Whelk fight, but it was pretty easy, even with Biggs and Wedge pre-poisoned and no way to take care of it.

Marshal wasn't too bad.  I used the moogle team with the cure brush or w/e the name of it is.

The Magitek armor guys were a bit annoying with their 1-shotting Terra, but I got past it.

I better get some sleep... I'm already gonna be wishing for death tomorrow ._.

Thank you, Eternal!  yAAAAyyyy!!11!

[dity]

Since I got past the ultima weapon, I played quite a bit over the weekend.  Stuff's pretty addictive.  I'm pretty scatterbrained from some of these encounters because I've probably done too much in a weekend.  All these notes are from before the most recent patch:

1- The rest of the floating continent rush-off was fine.  The "miniboss" that you have to fight was a little problematic for my purely magic team of terra/relm/celes, but I made up time because terra could oneshot all the normal mobs.  Also, morphed Terra is the only reason why I was able to drop pre-patch ultima.

2- Celes' solo sections seemed pretty easy, though Celes was one of my powered up characters in the WoB.  I'm used to this section of the original sucking because I never used her much in previous iterations of the game.  Finding Sabin wasn't so bad, with the only issue being that if you grab all the chests in the timed building collapse event you'll run out of time fighting the monsters-in-a-box for no gain because they have so much hp. 

3- Terra's boss was pretty easy, but bolt3's slow suucks to get hit by, even with rubber shoes.  I'm really glad Celes knows haste naturally by now, as I've used to to counter slow with almost every one of bolt3's showings.

4-  Edgar's tentacle monster boss was easier than I recall it being without the patch -- but again this is because I'm actually trying to use mechanics available to me in game instead of killing everything with fight.  Poison from bio blaster pretty much ends this boss.  I recall some of the trash being pretty dangerous, but nothing overwhelming.  Since I'm not utilizing Sabin or Edgar for MP-heavy roles, I find little use for the mp-stealing soul saber as of yet.

5-  Darryl's boss took me a while to finish, but I only remember the multitarget imp song and the morningstar counter.  Fuck being imp'd and then countered.  I think I just managed to slog through it with a bunch of healing and protect.  Oh, and some of the trash here isn't worth fighting at all.  Fortunately you can just run away from it.  The monster-in-a-box whelk upgrade was fairly trivial.

6- This is where the game opens up, and I've tried a bunch of things.  I'm pretty sure I picked Cyan up first.  Mt. Zozo wasn't problematic, and in fact I think it's the only place in the WoR where the trash monsters didn't wreck me constantly.  It was fun peeking at the first WoR dragon here and getting subsequently one-shot for 3-4 times my party's health. 

7- This is when I typically try to pick up Shadow.  The toecutter trash mobs in the Veldt cave are overwhelmingly powerful for my characters at this moment, but at least I can run away with no drawbacks.  I get killed in pincer attacks if they happen.  Trying to do the monster-in-a-box is hilarious and I decide to wait on that one until I can pack some party members with memento rings.  I get to SrBehemoth/King Behemoth and ho boy I thought the Ultima weapon was a problem.  This dude is extraordinarily difficult.  The first phase is trivial until he uses comet if you use the phantom esper and spam runic, and comet is recoverable.  The problem is the second phase -- You've got this bastard that has max 65k health, has regen like the ultima weapon, counters everything with cyclone (the one that reduces your health to a few percent) or single target meteor (appears to be umavoidable by runic), and uses cyclone/comet/multi-target meteor/death on his turn for his first set of moves.  At the level I first tried him, the comet or meteor killed two of my party members at full health.  I'll just leave and come back to this one.

8- I cleared out Narshe without Locke next.  Umaro was not overly difficult.  I'll note that the encounters in the normal streets of Narshe are EXTRAORDINARILY difficult and are more dangerous than many of the bosses I've taken out at this point. 

9- I got Terra back.  There was nothing buggy with Phunbaba, but those counters from the last version of him were pretty harsh.  I remember drain being the mvp of this fight.

10- I'm pretty sure I tried to clear out Doma at this point, after gaining the elemental-2 spells from Narshe's Tritoch on one or two characters.  I found out the three stooges no longer have their elemental weaknesses, instead taking at most 0 damage from elemental abilities.  Oh, and they counter everything with an elemental-3 (one uses ice 2 sometimes).  This makes the bolt3-slow, ice3-mute, and fire3-sap extremely problematic.  I planned on coming back later, as I had no one that could really effectively deal targeted damage at the rate I needed to drop them between the elemental-3 onslaught.

11- I actually went through the ancient castle below figaro next.  The trash mobs in the cave portion are interestingly difficult, but it doesn't feel like they're going to kill my entire party if I try to fight them.  I gain quite a few levels down here from abusing phantom on the mostly physical packs in the caves.  Once you reach the castle grounds, the mobs other than the (I think they're called hellspawn?) mostly physical damage packs are overwhelmingly difficult.  I'm able to grab the offering, and I really don't think it's worth it in its current form.  Now, I don't know if Sabin gets an armor-ignoring weapon, and I like the idea that only someone like Sabin can equip it, but permanent slow and mute is pretty harsh.  Well, really just the slow.  I think the drawbacks are too much for Sabin, who would have to be put in the front row at great risk to make use of randomly targeted melee attacks, something he has mostly through back-row-friendly blitz already.  I'm sure it'll be a good option if I can power him up to hit the damage cap, but that's not going to happen any time soon unless there's some new claws I don't know about.

12- I did Locke's cave next.  Really all you need is two groups that can handle the 1k needle spam mobs as everything else you can just run away from.  Caitsith could basically solo this place, and Sabin can render them useless with berserk.  Picking up Locke is vital for some of the bosses I've seen, as with the valiant knife I now have a melee powerhouse that can choose targets.  Setzer's pretty good, but not having a powerful armor-ignoring weapon at this point slows him down a bit.  The other physical options either have elemental weapons (that are worthless on some bosses, like Sabin's vs the stooges) or can't wear hermes shoes (and ignore bolt 3's slow) or both.

13- With Locke I re-attempted Doma's event.  This has probably been my favorite part so far, or maybe it's just because it's one of the last things I did and it feels like a hell of an accomplishment.  I'm able to drop the stooges with Locke's melee, shrugging off the elemental spells with reflected Celes and rubber-boots-chakra-spamming-Sabin.  Perhaps their hp, regen, or cure spells are too much, but this fight took a long time.  I get through to Wrexsoul and oh man I'm glad I had 70 phoenix downs.  We're talking a super high phys/magic defense boss that has 40k health that can only be targeted once before countering everything with possession, forcing you to kill a random living party member each time you attack him.  Also, supporting monsters that cast elemental-3 spells, silencing and slowing your party.  God this fight took a long time.  Might want to make him only sometimes counter with possession.  Granted, it was pretty hilarious when he countered his allies' cure spam with it, making me kill another party member. 

I've since picked up Ragnarok and learned flare/fire 3 on Terra, and I hope I don't regret skipping out on the +speed ragnarok esper.  I'll pick up illumina as soon as I get someone strong enough to handle the arena.  I'll probably pick up Relm and Strago next. 

[Eternal]

Thanks for the logs! Hopefully you're enjoying it, since that's what matters most!