FFT: Amelioration (Please Contribute Ideas)

[drdimension]

Hello all! Great forum!

I've been in and out of rom hacking for a few years and have been kicking around an idea for a couple. I'd like to gather the fewest number of changes required to balance out FFT's challenge curve. What follows is the motivation:

I love the challenge of FFT at the start of the game (except for the Windmill battle - it's a bit much). I sat down one day to hack up the game to fix the little things I didn't like. I quickly realized there were so many things that I wanted to change that such an endeavor would go on forever. So I concentrated on what I think FFT's biggest issue is - broken challenge.

The problem is there are just too many exploits and unbalanced moves in the game. Essentially I want to remove or nerf them a bit. I'm hoping I can gather a list of all the brokenness and spend a couple weeks preparing a patch with all of them altered / removed. I'm hoping to keep the game's challenge high and consistent throughout instead of having it become uber-characters using uber moves with little strategy.

Ideally, I'd like to collect a few dozen simple changes that could make this happen. Please feel free to contribute your ideas. Remember though that the goals are only two - preserve the games challenge throughout, and make as few changes as absolutely possible, so a single change that can fix multiple issues is preferred. And if an issue is just a nuisance rather than truly broken, it will have to go untouched.

[drdimension]

To get started, I suppose the first thing I'd do is cap the horizontal jumping range of the dragoon down to 2 or 3 max. Positioning is such an important strategy of FFT, 8 length jumping just throws it away.

[MysticKnightFF5]

First, I'd like to say
WELCOME TO FFH, WHERE ALL YOUR DREAMS WILL* COME TRUE

*Will come true if they happen to come true by coincidence.

Also, most of your work will be in the reactions, seeing as that's how you break FFT.

[drdimension]

Thank you Dunkel!

I think I would also have to remove the JP Up as it hastens the ability to get to the broken stuff.

I would also have to remove anything that can permanently increase brave / faith.

I'm going to have to do another play-through to find all the crazy things that need changed.

[theultrawolf]

What you're talking about with the Br/Fa altering seems a little like 1.3, but are you intending to remove it completely?
Also, a suggestion: why not lower the exponential element of movement altering? Like Fly and Teleport, etc. could be enemy only? And make it harder to obtain the certain movement increasers, such as Move, Jump+1, Ignore Height, and so on.