With the recent "update" on the Tactics remake, it reminded me of this playthrough, so I just wanted to drop back in and leave a simple and clear "thank you so much!" compared to my earlier wall of critique. Your hard work gave me a memorable experience as an adult who doesn't finish a lot of games these days.
June 25, 2025, 03:30:38 pm
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Completed Mods / Re: FFT: WOTL - Valeria 2.4 "Ivalice Remastered"
November 23, 2023, 12:03:50 pm
So, gonna begin this post with some critique and considerations (which will probably result in you just calling me bad lol), but end on more positive notes!
I've only gotten to Chapter 4 in my play-through, and I didn't fully understand all of the changes that would affect my game-plan until after I'd already made progress, so that will colour my experience. That said, I feel like I want to restart my play-through because of level-scaling and the counter-intuitively high JP costs of abilities. Again, I could just be bad, but my conclusion from my experience is that, if I have specific advanced job combos i want to try, I have to meticulously decide on my entire party composition before I even start in order to acquire the abilities I need for my game-plan. I don't know FFT inside and out like some, so while I did do planning and theory-crafting to the best of my understanding, it wasn't perfect. Thus, I needed to correct for mistakes during my play-through, make some job changes as I learned more, and do a little bit of grinding to make those corrections. Unfortunately, it feels like the balance of certain encounters becomes much more difficult due to the level-scaling, resulting in my first play-through experience being a slog at times.
Again, part of this is likely because it took me a while to really understand all the changes, so part of my critique might be pointed towards how the design and balance information is formatted and presented, as I've even found some information missing from the OP. And again, I know mods like these are generally meant for people very familiar with the game. That said, I think a bit of room to make corrections in a play-through would be a nice QoL change, as having to use Orator's Weaken to help balance things is a pretty unsatisfying "fix" for the issue. [See edit at end of post; I understand this might be beyond you.]
From my experience it seems like the encounter scaling is based on your highest-level party member. Is that correct? I personally like the idea of level-scaling, and I'm assuming you don't have the ability to make particularly nuanced changes to how it works, so probably best to leave it as it is. Instead, reducing some JP costs would provide some room to adjust your game-plan as you go. On that note, is there some sort of technical reason why JP Boost has to be kept in the game? Wouldn't it be better, design-wise, to remove JP Boost and simply spend time determining proper balanced JP costs? It would allow the player to experiment more with Support skills, if you'd be willing to re-design and re-add some of the ones you removed. Allowing more options in the Support slot instead of being forced to use JP Boost I think is a great secondary argument to JP cost changes. Of course, that would take more effort on your end, and at the end of the day that's your call.
All that out of the way, I want to also be very clear that I love what you've done with the mod! I've had a lot of fun overall, and even after feeling like I want to restart my play-through...Well, I mean, I want to restart my play-through--I still want to play this mod! it's super cool and such a fresh take on the game. Kudos!
Okay, thanks for reading this wall of text! I might wait 'til 2.5, but one way or another I am definitely doing a second run of this mod. Great stuff!
EDIT: on my second play-through I had a similar experience in different ways and at different times, but I'm starting to think if you're modding for WotL that a lot of these hang-ups are unavoidable since you can only alter so much, and nothing as fundamental as enemy AI. I beat the game, and the difficulty peaks and valleys for certain battles were still there and still jarring. You can still run-over a lot of story battles by one-round nuking the single named unit who is the sole victory condition. Not as bad as Cid walking-up and one-tapping people, but still a bit anti-climactic.
On the note of Cid, it'd have been nice to not have to grind to unlock spells for him and Valmafra at that point if we want to use them, which works against one of the main points of the mod. Generally, with this in mind as well as my earlier points, I think I stand by the JP Boost/cost critiques. I don't mind a bit of grinding being needed at hard-to-balance points later in the game to help preserve some challenge instead of the walk-over a lot of Chapter 4 is in the vanilla game, but it feels very arbitrary and avoidable in a case like this.
On the flip side, again, some missions feel like they absolutely require the "solution" being just having to do that. Argath 2.0 is such a case, where the fight design as a whole is a giant difficulty spike unless you bee-line to Argath and one-round kill him before he can heal everything back. Otherwise it feels impossible. I tried many things with a "proper" well-rounded comp, but in the end had to actually grind a bit to achieve a one-dimensional team that could take him out in the first round. It's pretty disappointing that Tactics has some really cool battle scenarios that are largely undermined by rushed or short-sighted scenario balancing. This feels like a design failing on a more fundamental level, and from what I've learned of WotL modding versus PSX modding I don't know if you can do anything, so I understand your frustrations addressing critiques in this thread.
At the end of the day, though, it was still a refreshing experience that, "good" or "bad," threw me for a loop at certain points and made me think where I never had to. In the original game most of Chapter 4 was a breeze (outside of the Barich fight,) so it was nice to actually have a few more hang-ups this time around. Thank you for all the effort!
I've only gotten to Chapter 4 in my play-through, and I didn't fully understand all of the changes that would affect my game-plan until after I'd already made progress, so that will colour my experience. That said, I feel like I want to restart my play-through because of level-scaling and the counter-intuitively high JP costs of abilities. Again, I could just be bad, but my conclusion from my experience is that, if I have specific advanced job combos i want to try, I have to meticulously decide on my entire party composition before I even start in order to acquire the abilities I need for my game-plan. I don't know FFT inside and out like some, so while I did do planning and theory-crafting to the best of my understanding, it wasn't perfect. Thus, I needed to correct for mistakes during my play-through, make some job changes as I learned more, and do a little bit of grinding to make those corrections. Unfortunately, it feels like the balance of certain encounters becomes much more difficult due to the level-scaling, resulting in my first play-through experience being a slog at times.
Again, part of this is likely because it took me a while to really understand all the changes, so part of my critique might be pointed towards how the design and balance information is formatted and presented, as I've even found some information missing from the OP. And again, I know mods like these are generally meant for people very familiar with the game. That said, I think a bit of room to make corrections in a play-through would be a nice QoL change, as having to use Orator's Weaken to help balance things is a pretty unsatisfying "fix" for the issue. [See edit at end of post; I understand this might be beyond you.]
From my experience it seems like the encounter scaling is based on your highest-level party member. Is that correct? I personally like the idea of level-scaling, and I'm assuming you don't have the ability to make particularly nuanced changes to how it works, so probably best to leave it as it is. Instead, reducing some JP costs would provide some room to adjust your game-plan as you go. On that note, is there some sort of technical reason why JP Boost has to be kept in the game? Wouldn't it be better, design-wise, to remove JP Boost and simply spend time determining proper balanced JP costs? It would allow the player to experiment more with Support skills, if you'd be willing to re-design and re-add some of the ones you removed. Allowing more options in the Support slot instead of being forced to use JP Boost I think is a great secondary argument to JP cost changes. Of course, that would take more effort on your end, and at the end of the day that's your call.
All that out of the way, I want to also be very clear that I love what you've done with the mod! I've had a lot of fun overall, and even after feeling like I want to restart my play-through...Well, I mean, I want to restart my play-through--I still want to play this mod! it's super cool and such a fresh take on the game. Kudos!
Okay, thanks for reading this wall of text! I might wait 'til 2.5, but one way or another I am definitely doing a second run of this mod. Great stuff!
EDIT: on my second play-through I had a similar experience in different ways and at different times, but I'm starting to think if you're modding for WotL that a lot of these hang-ups are unavoidable since you can only alter so much, and nothing as fundamental as enemy AI. I beat the game, and the difficulty peaks and valleys for certain battles were still there and still jarring. You can still run-over a lot of story battles by one-round nuking the single named unit who is the sole victory condition. Not as bad as Cid walking-up and one-tapping people, but still a bit anti-climactic.
On the note of Cid, it'd have been nice to not have to grind to unlock spells for him and Valmafra at that point if we want to use them, which works against one of the main points of the mod. Generally, with this in mind as well as my earlier points, I think I stand by the JP Boost/cost critiques. I don't mind a bit of grinding being needed at hard-to-balance points later in the game to help preserve some challenge instead of the walk-over a lot of Chapter 4 is in the vanilla game, but it feels very arbitrary and avoidable in a case like this.
On the flip side, again, some missions feel like they absolutely require the "solution" being just having to do that. Argath 2.0 is such a case, where the fight design as a whole is a giant difficulty spike unless you bee-line to Argath and one-round kill him before he can heal everything back. Otherwise it feels impossible. I tried many things with a "proper" well-rounded comp, but in the end had to actually grind a bit to achieve a one-dimensional team that could take him out in the first round. It's pretty disappointing that Tactics has some really cool battle scenarios that are largely undermined by rushed or short-sighted scenario balancing. This feels like a design failing on a more fundamental level, and from what I've learned of WotL modding versus PSX modding I don't know if you can do anything, so I understand your frustrations addressing critiques in this thread.
At the end of the day, though, it was still a refreshing experience that, "good" or "bad," threw me for a loop at certain points and made me think where I never had to. In the original game most of Chapter 4 was a breeze (outside of the Barich fight,) so it was nice to actually have a few more hang-ups this time around. Thank you for all the effort!
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