Final Fantasy Hacktics

K, almost done ch. 1. I may need some spriting help later, but I won't ask until I've finished the rest of the patch and it'll be extremely minor. I want to give a character glasses and I can't figure out how to do it with the available pixels :/

Ooh. Where? I could use something like that.

Yeah, unfortunately that scene doesn't really offer a lot of opportunity to make fun of that particular detail. I'm also several thousand words away from it and still don't know how I'm going to characterize Vormav. =/

Good stuff. I just rewrote Balbanes' death with a new thought for Zalbag. I'm gonna have to edit his sprite now, which (having no experience) is probably going to be a ton of work, but it reads much funnier now.

That kind of stuff is perfect. I basically just have a big Word document of idle thoughts like that and as I get around to different scenes I kind of scan through it to see if there's anything that I (or in this case, someone else) thought of earlier that would work.

I guess if it needs any further clarification, here goes.

What this topic is for: if you ever played through Tactics and thought "hey, this part's kind of funny" or "wouldn't it be funny if..." but don't want to incorporate it into your own hack, I'd really appreciate it if you take a few seconds and post it.

What this topic isn't for: Recruiting; actually writing dialogue that wasn't already in the game; getting you guys to put work into this for me.

So basically if you always thought that Gafgarion looks like a walrus or something, I'd love to hear about it. I won't necessarily use it, but I don't use the majority of ideas I come up with either and there's probably a ton of funny stuff that you guys have thought of that I wouldn't ever think up.

As for the monster farm and the dancer/bard, I really want to make fun of those but I think the only place to do it is in description text, since there's not (as far as I remember) any point in the story where you're forced to use them. If I finish the main story (a mammoth task in itself) I would like to mess with some of the descriptions and abilities as well, but that's a long way off. Let me know if you think of any plausible scenes to incorporate it into though.

Uh, I've been working with the original script and only referencing the WotL script when it suits me. Some of the lines are bad enough that they have to be included, but for the most part I've kept it in the vernacular. As for the second point, I was actually really close to not asking at all, I just wanted to see if anyone has something that gives me a spark. I've written a few plays now for class and it occurred to me that what tends to get me rolling is a big conversation with a bunch of other students, so I wanted to see if something like that might happen. If I gave you the impression that I was just going to wait around while this happened it wasn't my intent; I actually wrote a scene in between my first post and this one.

Hey all,

School's ended and I've got a ton of free time on my hands so I thought I'd take a run at a parody script for the game. I know that this isn't, strictly speaking, an original idea, but it seems as if the previous attempts have been abandoned and neither of them looked like they got much past the preliminary draft (though admittedly some of philsov's dialogue was quite witty). Anyway, I've written about half of chapter 1 as of this moment, though I'll likely go back and revise it as continuity demands. I haven't made my mind up on some of the characters yet, and I typically like to jump around when writing in other mediums and try to fit it all together at the end (which doesn't seem applicable here) so I imagine I'll go through a number of drafts on certain scenes if it comes to that. I'd also like to do some minor sprite changes (probably only portrait right now) and mess around with some equipment and stuff, but I likely won't go much further than that in terms of complexity. My main goal is to make something funny and satisfying for vets to read through on subsequent plays of the game when they're doing an SSC or something.

More to the point, is there anything you guys would especially like to see? I realize this is lazy writing, but I've been brainstorming ideas for several weeks now and I'm still not completely set as to where I'm headed. Concepts for say, a funny character trait for Zalbag, would be really appreciated, but I'll definitely consider anything. Basically anything you think is funny/could be funny about FFT goes here and I'll credit you if I use it.

P.S. I should probably mention that it's not my intent to go blue on this stuff unless the joke demands it. I don't find swearing reprehensible or anything, I just think it's generally a weaker alternative to, you know, writing something funny. So the plot where Ovelia is a crack-whore and Delita's her pimp, while doubtlessly hilarious, is probably not gonna happen here.

I realize now that a lot of this stuff is off topic, but I spent a while typing it so I'm going to post it anyway:

- The AT system is really good but as has been said before speed needs a nerf in terms of its importance in combat. Within the system this could be accomplished by lowering speed growths and massively limiting speed boosting equipment. In a new system it would probably be better to start with a number higher than 100 for max CT and then fiddle with the speed increments until it's relatively balanced. This would also open up new options for spell charge times and potential speed lowering equipment with large benefits elsewhere.

- Short Charge needs to go. Every enemy that wants to cast a spell in 1.3 has short charge. EVERY SINGLE ONE. This support ability adds another disadvantage to the already fairly-weak-at-high-party-level magic commands and makes magic in general MUCH harder to balance. Either do away with it entirely and make magic some combination of faster/more powerful in general or have it innate on all spell casting classes to prevent whatever perceived abuse there might be from a samurai launching a short charge meteor. More interesting, perhaps, would be to give it to a single class with a poor magic modifier - able to cast spells really fast but without the power to back it up. Or, conversely, give it innate to all caster classes but one, and have that one have a much higher magic modifier. In a new system maybe having individual cast speeds per job or even a cast speed/damage/hit rate modifier based on the combination of job and skillset (wizards getting extra damage on wizard spells, etc.) would provide more incentive to use certain classes.

- Magic, as has been mentioned, needs to be more powerful at high levels in general. Probably the best way to do this within the system is to lessen the impact of faith on spell effects in general (I haven't done a lot of fiddling with the system, but if you can mess around with the general equations used for faith-based spells, you could probably mitigate its importance until it worked. This would require a lot of playtesting, I imagine.) Also, maybe have a number of high level caster only equips that give a solid boost to MA without making your hp suck. It seems weird to have wizard robe be at its prime early in the game when a +2 MA has such a giant effect in battle and then be relatively limited in MA boosting armor later on.

- Innates are good. Powerful innates on otherwise weaker classes give the user tactical variety and incentive to use those classes with poorer modifiers outside of just the skillset. One of my favorite things about 1.3 is that Thieves got concentrate. It makes them way more usable.

- Invis should probably work like it does in other final fantasy games. Phys attacks always miss, magic attacks always hit. Disabled upon being hit or using a physical attack. Obviously this would require some balancing, but it's a way more interesting play mechanic than 'gets to have concentrate for one attack'.

As for your concept of ZoC, I think it's important to have something that can get around it. Rogues in D&D, for example, would generally have high tumble to be able to easily obtain a flanking position (where they're much, MUCH stronger). This would create an interesting strategic dynamic in how you advance your front line as not to allow your wizards and archers to be picked off by an assassin.