Insane Difficulty: Final Fantasy 9 REMIX (total overhaul mod) - Insane Difficulty

~FINAL FANTASY IX REMIX
(NOW PATH OF SOULS EDITION)~

Hello!!

I am creating an extensive Final Fantasy IX mod that will change most of (if not all) gameplay mechanics!!

Im using the in-development application Hades Workshop (by Tirlititi) to add to, remove from, tweak, fix and refine EVERYTHING in the game. Some changes are minor, but most are major. This mod is not an attempt to simply make the game harder, rebalance, fix a few bugs, or add a few new attacks to the game.... This is going to be a complete overhaul of all the mechanics that make the game what it is. Here are examples of some changes I've made so far.... (all are subject to change as development progresses)

Zidane has Detect as a command in place of his Skills. In trance, Steal changes to Thievery (damage based on items stolen). His base Speed and Spirit stats are higher.

Vivi has Flash Sense as a command in place of Focus. Flash acts like the Whats That!? skill from vanilla at a 35% success rate. His Speed stat is reduced, and Spirit is very high. Strength is also slightly increased. Black Magic has been totally revamped, as Vivi now has 30 spells instead of 18! The spell list is as follows:

• FIRE
  
• FIRE2
  
• FIRE3
  
• FIRE4
  
• ICE
  
• ICE2
  
• ICE3
  
• ICE4
  
• BOLT
  
• BOLT2
  
• BOLT3
  
• BOLT4
  
• SLEEP
  
• SLEEP2
  
• BIO
  
• BIO2
  
• WATER
  
• WATER2
  
• AERO
  
• AERO2
  
• QUAKE
  
• QUAKE2
  
• OSMOSE JEWEL
  
• DRAIN
  
• CURSE HEX
  
• DARK
  
• DARK2
  
• DEATH
  
• FLARE
  
• ULTIMA

Garnet has MANY White Magic spells now. Her magic stat is increased and strength decreased. MP Costs for her spells is generally lower, while summons are higher yet more effective. Her White Magic spell list is as follows:

• CURE
  
• CURE2
  
• CURE3
  
• CURE4 FULL CURE
  
• RAISE
  
• RAISE2
  
• PANACEA ESUNA
  
• STONA ESUNA2
  
• ESUNA MIND
  
• BLIND
  
• SILENCE
  
• MINI
  
• PROTECT
  
• SHELL
  
• MIGHT
  
• CONFUSE
  
• BERSERK
  
• DISPEL
  
• ZOMBIE
  
• HOLY

Freya is now a Red Mage/Dragon Knight! She retains her Jump command, but Dragon is replaced by Red Magic. Red Magic gives her access to a selection of low to mid-level White and Black Magic spells. Her base Strength stat is reduced, and Magic only slightly increased:

• CURE
  
• CURE2
  
• RAISE
  
• PANACEA
  
• STONA
  
• PROTECT
  
• BLIND
  
• DISPEL
  
• FIRE
  
• FIRE2
  
• ICE
  
• ICE2
  
• BOLT
  
• BOLT2
  
• SLEEP
  
• BIO
  
• WATER
  
• AERO
  
• QUAKE
  
• DARK

(NOW RETAINS DRAGON COMMAND WITH ADDED ABILITIES)


Eiko is now a Time Mage/Summoner! Her base Strength is very low, but her Speed stat is one of the highest. And of course in Trance state, Time Magic becomes Double Time! Her spell list is as follows:

• SCAN STONA
  
• SLOW
  
• SLOW2
  
• HASTE
  
• HASTE2
  
• STOP
  
• DEMI GRAVITY
  
• DEMI2 DEMI
  
• REGEN
  
• REGEN2
  
• REFLECT
  
• FLOAT
  
• VANISH
  
• VANISH2
  
• RERAISE
  
• WARP
  
• BREAK
  
• COUNTDOWN DOOM
  
• MELTDOWN
  
• PAIN
  
• COMET
  
• METEOR

Steiner, Quina, and Amarant are still early in development, although I can say some things about them...

Steiner has high HP and a moveset Cloud would envy.......

Quina has a huge list of Blue Magic with spells taken from FFV, FFVI, FFVII, FFVIII and FFX.

Amarant is the only character with counter eye for eye, gets lots of critical hits, and has Chakra as a command that affects the whole party under Trance.

Characters have more HP (Zidane has almost 200 HP at LV1) but enemies deal a lot more damage. (LV1 Goblin hits with Knife for 40-50 Damage)

All healing items restore more HP to reflect the higher character HP values (Zidane has almost 200 HP at LV1) and to remain relevant throughout the game. The costs have also been greatly reduced to better balance the stronger healing items later in-game and reflect the much lower Gil gain from enemies (Potion=30 Gil, X-Potion=500 Gil.)

Ethers are now purchasable from shops for 80 Gil (50 Gil), and all characters now have lower MP. Low-level spells generally cost less MP than vanilla, while high-level spells cost more.

All Auto Equip Abilities (Auto-Reflect, Auto-Haste, etc.) are removed. All abilities use much less Magic Stones to equip, but characters only start with 2-4 (6-10) magic stones at LV1.

Removed Antidote, Eye Drops, Echo Screen and Soft. Remedy now costs 50 Gil. Added Mega-Potion, X-Potion, X-Ether, and Megalixer in their place.

Vaccine now cures Virus Venom and Mini. Magic Tag cures Zombie, Stop, and Freeze. Annointment (now Ointment) cures Trouble, Heat, and Confuse. Gysahl Greens cure Slow, Sleep, and Berserk.

All enemies have lower Defense, but much higher HP. They deal more damage, crit and evade more often, inflict more status effects, and have different items to steal and drop. Gil and XP from battles is decreased severely. Boss monsters give loads of XP now to compensate slightly. Stealing overall is more balanced and rewarding and loot drops can very rarely be a piece of equipment, even from random encounters.

Equipment is being completely overhauled. Zidane's weapons all have lower Attack, but daggers boost your Speed stat and Thief Swords give a slight boost to Spirit and Strength. Thief swords no longer have the thief/knight sword property, which factors Spirit into the damage formula but ignores the Add Status ability. They now act like standard weapons, to compensate for Zidane's lack of the Soul Blade skill, which helps retain Add Status usefulness. Steiner's and Amarant's weapons will be the strongest, with Freya's ending up closer to Zidane.

...There are too many changes to list more but after that book I just wrote I think you get the idea.
Looking forward to thoughts/suggestions from the community and I will add further status updates in the future!!

(EDIT 9/7/2014 - MANY CHANGES SINCE THIS FIRST POST. PLEASE CHECK LATER POSTS FOR MORE ACCURATE CHANGES!)

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T'is foolishness! If all were so easy, why, none would suffer in this world!

This post has been edited by chronoslither: 07 September 2014 - 07:14 AM

I'm a big fan of FFIX, and am always interested in (well thought) rebalance and content mods. So I'll be following this and eventually trying it out.

About the change list you provided, can't really argue much without actually testing in-battle. Only thing that make me doubt will be even used / wroth using is Flash from Vivi.

I'm also a big fan, but a lot of the stuff here is a huge turn off for me.

Hart-Hunt, on 23 July 2014 - 11:51 AM, said:

i kinda agree with you there, but playing thru ff9 i find that i never use focus. whats the point of wasting a turn to barely boost your magic stat when you can simply cast a spell two turns in a row? originally flash had a 70% success rate, but in playtests this was too cheap because you could keep hitting enemies in the back too often. this is mostly a placeholder command for now. thanks for your input!

Advent, on 23 July 2014 - 12:05 PM, said:

whats a turn off? i wish youd be more specific, im posting on here to get suggestions that will influence the development of my mod. details are very beneficial to me, if youd be so kind. keep in mind, this mod is very very early still, i mean its only finished up until the boss in evil forest lol. and every single thing is subject to change as time goes on. thanks

another model i had considered going with is making zidane, amarant, steiner and freya have two command lists, one called "skills" containing abilities like cheer, treatment, silence attack, power break etc. that they all share, and a second command "special" that has character specific abilities like steal and detect for zidane, and jump and lancer etc for freya. this is not possible in the current version of hades workshop, however, for various reasons. like trances changing commands and steiner requiring vivi in the party to access his second command list. this is how the game was made, and hopefully these restrictions will be lifted in future updates. (no pressure on tirltiti, who is doing a damn fine job btw!)

Actually, in the FFIX hosted here, FFIX Unleashed, Focus plays a big role in the disc 1 and 2 battles. The one thing about Focus is that it persists through K.O. status, so playing defensive until you can get a few (5-6) focus, then pull out the powered spells is a nice strat.

You have that opinion about Focus because you were never forced to try every command, because the difficulty wasn't challenging enough. I'd suggest at least watching LP of IX mods, to get a whole new perspective of how "useful" an ability can be, and therefore its potential for your mod.

Hart-Hunt, on 23 July 2014 - 12:54 PM, said:

thanks, i will check that out!

chronoslither, on 23 July 2014 - 12:35 PM, said:

Zidane, Vivi, Freya, and Garnet.

Having Detect take the place of his normal skills makes him lose some of his depth, and is a rather large turn off for me on its own. I for one used them quite a bit, especially stuff like Soul Blade. I've always felt like Zidane is the best more fun Thief I've ever gotten a chance to play as battle-wise in any FF game, and this change is to his detriment.

Hart pretty much covered my distaste with the Vivi change.

Freya's on its own is enough for me to say I wouldn't play this if everything were to stay as is in the OP. She's one of my favorite characters in the entire franchise, and taking away her Dragon abilities is more of detriment to her than Zidane's changes by a mile to me.

Garnet has probably the least of my grievances, as I never liked the Garnet/Eiko White Magic split, but it's still just as evident here as it was in Vanilla. Why does Eiko have Regen and not Garnet? Why does Eiko have Reraise and not Garnet? Reraise I guess I can kind of see (though it still doesn't make sense to me) but not Regen.

Looks to be a great idea! Kinda agree with others how some of the ideas for change may not work so well.

For Freya, instead of making her a Red Mage just add elemental dragon skills for her "black magic" part and maybe a dragon skill for heal like "dragon spirit." Taking Zidane's skills out for one command seems silly. You can easily just add it to his repertoire and change some things around with his skills. (In vanilla, I only used 2 or 3 of his through the game - Flee, Thievery, and rarely detect)

I like the idea of what you're doing, but agree with above posters. To get rid of Freya's Dragon Abilities is just foolish, and much to the detriment of her character. She had skills you couldn't see anywhere else in the series. I would rather see her Dragon abilities expanded as you've done with the other characters. Like having Eiko has a support/time mage.

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I'm not a fan of this mindset. Not to be a total downer, but change for the sake of change isn't necessarily an improvement. Which is to say I haven't found a "remix" mod that I'm actually a fan of, for any game. Sorry This sort of mindset is also very prone to scope creep so if you want this mod to be a reality you'll want to work very incrementally and with restraint.

The one thing I do like about your list is the split between Eiko and Garner. In vanilla Eiko was a white mage/summoner and Garner was a summoner/white mage. They were mostly interchangable, and having both in your party was less than optimal. By splitting their spellbooks, they're each more unique (worthwhile?) now as well.

Auto-XXX away is another welcome change. Especially late game, where auto regen/haste/potion negated the need for Eiko/Garnet in the first place. See also -- Steiner having a standalone moveset (not Vivi dependent)

and things in a similar vein. I'm more a fan of mods that identify issues with the base version of the game and then fixes/improves them. Which is also to say that Freya's moveset was awesome (yet no more OP than anyone else's) and removing it seems silly -- unless you're doing this to free up space somewhere else.

I don't know whether I should try Vanilla first or wait until this is ready and then try FFIX out. I have the thing ready to go and I want to try playing it very much but something is kind of telling me to wait. Lol

This in its current form wouldn't be FFIX. Not to be a downer, but I in all honesty couldn't call something with those kinds of changes the same game. FFIX is a pretty great game, so I'd say to play Vanilla.

Besides, I get the feeling this won't be done for a while yet.

That may be for the best. Get a feel for it first before going for a rebalance. Super Mario RPG for example, I played the Vanilla hundreds of times and was used to it. When I tried Version 6 (and discovered the hack/this forum), I was getting my ass handed to me left and right. Lol. So I'm sure I will go Hulk the minute I get my ass beaten by an enemy or boss in the IX Remix.

genobeam3, on 24 July 2014 - 02:14 PM, said:

Not quite what I meant. This isn't as much a rebalance as it is changing stuff just for its own sake it looks like. It's a complete and utter overhaul rather than a rebalance.

A second insane difficulty mod to a point.

genobeam3, on 24 July 2014 - 02:18 PM, said:

To a point, yeah.

This is good that you came here with your suggestions, chronoslither. Accepting creative criticism is a great human quality. The rest of us will be glad to input any suggestions for your mod.

philsov, on 24 July 2014 - 05:40 AM, said:

I completely agree. Especially for a game like FF9 where the developers actually put quite a lot of thought into it about Gameplay and Story Integration.

I don't want to say that you shouldn't change anything, but in order to make a good remix, someone has to be in tune with the corresponding game as close as possible. This includes knowing as much of the story (in a story-driven game) and the gameplay especially the meta-game as possible.

I'm no expert at FF9, but my suggestion is to play Unleashed at first in order to learn more about the meta-game in more challenging and demanding situations.