Insane Difficulty: Final Fantasy IV: The Darkness Within Alpha/Beta Development Topic - Insane Difficulty

Cid is pretty straightforward, but he's good like that. I miss his more esoteric quake hammer. He does the job that he's meant to do, though.

Glad to see Yang is Cid with options, always a fun time. Sort of wish his kick was stronger. But outside of that, his Focus lets him be the Boss killer.

Edward is master debuffer, it's great. I love the regen system you gave him. At the time he's around, it heals just enough for him to want to use it. Great job.

The twins are still awesome. Porom makes good use of Twincast early on, and Palom has all his great spells. They're just fine how they are.

Edge's time as a caster really was fun, and it was a really interesting party dynamic when I came up from the Underworld. I'm kind of hoping that you just left his throwable as the jutai/shuriken and nothing else, because outside of the first moon visit, I find Edge has plenty of tools to actually keep contributing. I did notice him starting to dip to be a little squishy during this part.

Did you tweak his jutsu? They feel just right.

Rosa feels sort of dull. I was hoping what Edge wouldn't be able to cover, she'd be able to by swapping her arrows around, but she just feels too weak. Or the arrows are too weak. They aren't as fun as Edge's gear swaps then attacking. As of this moment she just heal bots, then defends. I can't really do much different with her.

I'm going to call your mod the status effects mod, so here's a recommendation: Why don't you make Esuna cost more mp? You had a theme with status effects being something that followed me the whole time, but then Esuna finally shows up and it sort of is a catch all. I miss the before times, in a masochistic way.

Rydia has the the strongest chocobo ever. It still sort of bothers me that she has all the black magic that she does. Her eidolons sort of have enough power that I just default to them first. I keep failing at getting Bomb, Goblin, and Bird items. I'm going to give up.

I removed a lot of spellcasting items from characters where they didn't make much sense. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part they're limited to staves and rods.

Yang is basically THE elemental physical attacker. His physicals are pretty mediocre otherwise, and that's the way I wanted it. I too wanted to make Kick stronger, but it would require changing the formula in hex. Kick/Dark Wave share a formula from what I recall as well, so changing one changes the other. I got as far as finding the formula in the hex, but I couldn't find hex values for other stats to change it.

Edward is not as spoony as he was previously. He's actually a contributing member of the party now with Aria rivaling the healing that Porom can put up over time. While Sing isn't useful during boss fights, it can see quite a bit of use during randoms.

The Twins were honestly two of the characters that I changed the least. Moved some spells around, changed the Twin spells a bit and they were good to go. They accomplish what you need them to pretty well.

Edge is super-versatile. He definitely has the most options out of any other character. He does become quite squishy as the game wears on, but his damage rivals even Rydia's spells. I did tweak Edge's spells a bit, but not drastically.

Rosa's bow & arrow is intended more as a hybrid option for her rather than straight up damage-dealing. While she can't equip medium armor, she can equip the strength rings that Edge/Yang have access to for a small boost in strength. Arrows do have a pretty high power and a lot of elemental bonuses, but maybe I'll take another look at them. Admittedly, I usually use Staff Rosa because I like having powerful heals.

Rydia was a bit tough to balance. I wanted both her Black Magic and Summons to be useful, even though they share a lot of the same properties. Summons don't split damage (AKA do less damage the more targets there are), while Black Magic does, so Summons are the go-to for large groups of enemies. Summons are around Level 2.5 spells. Once you get around to Level 3 Black Magic you'll see less of the elemental Summons. I did remove Bomb, Goblin, and Cockatrice summons and I failed to note that anywhere. Sorry if I made you waste time on it.

I could perhaps look into raising the MP cost of Esuna. Status removing items are still useful though if you need a character other than Rosa to heal status, however.

By the way, which black magic spell list does Rydia use? I'm poking around the guts of your mod out of curiousity right now. Hope you don't mind.

Also, I noticed that the venom ticks are coming way too slow for it to be threatening. There any way to speed them up or have them do more damage? Poison is just one of those statuses I never really cure because of it.

Furthermore, I don't know if you want this idea, but how about moving Psych/Osmose over to the white magic tree? Palom doesn't need it at that point of the game. Tellah can access it via his double tree. Rydia gets balanced a little better that way.

Gives Rosa something to do, at least. MP damage.

Or I dunno if it's possible, but tornado/aero? White magic in some of the older FFs have it there. Give staff Rosa something to do besides throw out heals.

Rydia uses her own spell list, but spell gains have been altered.

Poison ticks are possible to change, but I think it might affect the frequency of other effects as well. It requires hex editing, so I didn't look into it too much.

Rydia will retain Psych because as a whole White Magic is far cheaper than Black/Summon. MP damage doesn't exist in FFIV as enemies have no real MP values.

Rosa can throw some decent status effects around with Hold, Mute, and Slow. If I were to add more spells I'd likely have to delete others as there are a limited number of spells in the game.

If you have already surpassed level 35 with Rydia you will not be able to learn Leviathan. I apologize for any inconvenience.

• Made some spelling corrections.
  
• Rydia was not learning Leviathan despite getting the learned message after leveling. Leviathan has been moved to level 36 (from 35) to address a bug caused by gaining multiple spells at the same time.
  
• Added note about Imp, Bomb, and Mage Summon items.
  
• Juji and Koga shuriken items were equippable. This has been corrected.

I'm assuming you removed Cockatrice/Bird too, right? Your read me file doesn't mention it.

I went back to Eblan caves, thinking there was a sidequest there after I got the Enterprise. A few new npcs showed up, which surprised me. But two of them were buggy. The guard on the right side of the far most left door (the one that goes to the nursing station sort of room) had 'as cold as the floor' desc. A little girl in red that was walking around inside the room had Cid's line 'Let's see the power of this Enterprise!'

Just giving you a fyi.

The Hummingway Elder mentioned something about a husband and wife, which I assume to be Edge's parents since I went back there earlier and the dad was gone. Did I show up too early and the trigger is during the second visit to Luna? Or did I not go back to a certain area?

The husband and wife are Yang and his wife.

Where'd Edge's dad go?

King Eblan is in the bathroom. Mechnically, King Eblan and King Baron share the same NPC, so once the game deactivates the King Baron NPC both NPCs are gone. There aren't many (possibly any) overworld NPCs remaining for me to use, so I just wrote a line in for the Queen saying he was busy.

Kain can equip the spoon. Is he going to become a miner after the adventure is over? Maybe marry the prettiest girl in Mythril?