Insane Difficulty: Playable Beatrix - Insane Difficulty

I played this mod to the end of disc 1 before I got slogged down with work again, and it was a refreshing blast from the past. I hadn't played FF9 in years, though I passed it more than a few times. The difficulty spikes and the additives over the vanilla game was a welcome change of pace, and I found it very fun. I don't know if you're still working on this or not, but I was wondering if it would be possible to add Beatrix as a fully functional playable character? The sequence between her and Steiner in Alexandria would be a good time to implement her recruitment to the party. Just wondering if it could be done. Thanks for the hard work though! I'm definitely going to finish this.

There will almost certainly never be a playable beatrix in this mod. The modder doesn't change too many things around from what I've seen. His mods are basically hard versions of vanilla, without much if any "additional content."

Second, I'm pretty sure adding Beatrix would take a lot of work for basically no reason.

Third, if Beatrix was able to be a permanent character, you wouldn't use her. She is pretty weak in this mod. During the sequences where you get to use her, she spends a huge majority of the time dead. The beatrix parts are 2 of the 3 hardest parts in the entire mod, in large part to how shitty she is. Making her a permanent character as she is would change nothing, as she would spend the entire game on your bench.

The reason I stumbled on this patch was through my search for a fully playable Beatrix without using codes or the like. I haven't played it far enough into this to know how she fares with the increased difficulty when she is temporarily playable, but the implications of being fully playable means she would have access to the same things as the other playable characters. That alone would help her survivability -- magic stones would infer status immunity, passive bonuses, etc. I love this as it is, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to sound ungrateful. Beatrix would simply be icing on the cake in my opinion.

Well, in any case it's almost certain to never happen in this mod.

I don't think LandonRay is even around anymore, right?

He comes and goes.

I've only been on the scene for a month or two. So I'm afraid I wouldn't know.

Kjata, on 25 November 2015 - 08:49 AM, said:

To be fair, I remember in some of his earlier posts he did juggle around with the idea which is partially WHY she's so awful, because she's balanced around the notion of being a "party member," but is never implemented. Plus, IIRC she's actually naked on that part which is some of the reason she's so wretched on the parts your thinking of.

Augestein, on 25 November 2015 - 03:47 PM, said:

Nah, it's because she just sorta dies, does miserable damage without using her swordskills, and has barely enough mp to climhazzard once.

And unless that was the plan from the beginning, I don't think she's bad because she was meant to be a party member. She has been bad for a long time. She's just bad because it makes the game hard. Like, back in the beginning Vivi was utterly worthless between lindblum up until you got an -ara spell. He would die to everything, have enough mp for like 5 casts of fire, and fire did poor damage compared to Zidane/Freya melees and comparable damage to quina's average fork roll. He was so bad he was a liability, cuz he would require constant phoenix downs which drained pretty hard on your limited money, and required constant ethers to do anything besides throw potions at people. Stuff is just bad, because it makes the game harder.

From what I've experienced with Vivi, sleep comes in pretty handy early-game. Use him for crowd control and he does all right. He dies, sure, but he's squishy even in the vanilla game. The early access to sleep here is pretty nice. Beatrix I imagine would be something similar: she has utility, with access to blind, silence and reflect. The Seiken skill-set is simply a bonus. It's just something I feel would make an awesome patch even better. Though I haven't played far enough yet to even get Beatrix, so I'll admit I've no experience with how she plays in this patch.

Garet980, on 25 November 2015 - 04:18 PM, said:

For vivi, I'm talking about 3 years ago when Fire costed 14mp and Fira costed 29. He was trash tier. He was even worse back then than Beatrix is now.

Kjata, on 25 November 2015 - 05:50 PM, said:

Yeah, I remember that, and Bio was like 40 something for MP cost. So that's changed since then?

And yeah, I remember reading that in the beginning before the game was even playable on the account that it was one of the things that I actually looked forward to. And yeah, Vivi was garbage tier at that point, and Focus abuse on bosses was like the only saving grace because during bosses everyone was getting OHKO left and right outside of Freya and Steiner, and possibly Garnet if you did Hot and Cold.

Augestein, on 25 November 2015 - 06:25 PM, said:

Yeah, he has a bit more hp now, and the mp on spells was reduced to 8/24/40 I think.