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Lockirby2

Any comments I have for 2.0

12 posts in this topic

So far this is mostly just going to be a possible bug report for the Sasquatch fight.  On the first fight I had with him, he never used Primal Rage at all.  I restarted because I wanted to use fewer items, and on the second fight, he used Primal Rage every single turn (after the first couple of turns).  The only thing I remember doing differently was using some physical attacks on him to mug him.  Does that increment a variable that isn't set back to zero or something?

I haven't fully played through this game in while.  It's amusing that it ends up being more nostalgic than a vanilla playthrough for me. :P

If there are any specific aspects of the hack that you want feedback on, feel free to ask.

Edited by Lockirby2

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Thanks brother, I'll look into that AI quirk.
I see here in his AI:

FC 0D 03 03    ; If variable VAR003 is greater than or equal to 3
F1 44          ; Targeting: random ally
AE             ; PrimalRoar
FC 09 36 00    ; If target self is not affected by status Dark
F4 16 16 16    ; Rand. cmd.: Jump or Jump or Jump
F8 03 00       ; Set VAR003 to 0
FE             ; End If and reset targeting
FC 0D 02 03    ; If variable VAR002 is greater than or equal to 3
F1 44          ; Targeting: random ally
AE             ; PrimalRoar
FC 09 36 00    ; If target self is not affected by status Dark
F4 16 16 16    ; Rand. cmd.: Jump or Jump or Jump
F8 02 00       ; Set VAR002 to 0
FE             ; End If and reset targeting

It looks like maybe if Dark status is set on him, he'll do that? Like skip Jump and the clearing of the VAR, keep casting PrimalRoar... Did Avalon maybe use Havoc on him and set Dark status?

Again I'll check it out firsthand here in a bit, just waking up! :D

EDIT: Yeah that seems to be it, he has a rather quick buildup for VAR002 and VAR003, then if he has dark status applied will not Jump and reset the VAR... Could use a little work!

Edited by Gi Nattak

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I was spamming Psycho Blade, which is definitely what blinded him.  He must have been blinded the first time as well, but since I never attacked him the variable never incremented to begin with.

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@Zig Yup! :)  I love the portrait that James made for my Moogle!

Two more things that I saw:

On the floating continent, during the cutscene with Zuriel, when the party regroups at the end, everybody walked the wrong direction.  Instead of walking onto the same spot and having everybody disappear, they all walked into different places and then the characters disappear.  It's a minor issue.

When I go to an item shop and hover my cursor over the Holy Water, Otis starts cheering as if he could equip it.  I'm in the WoR and I haven't recruited him yet, so I can't check if there's anything else to it, but I'm assuming this is a bug.

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When I dropped the weight off the rafters in the Opera house before killing the dragon, the cutscene worked as intended.  After killing the dragon, when I pushed the weight it turned into an antlion briefly as it was falling.

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I made it to the end of the game!  I see that the fancy text in the credits that references the names of the original characters is unchanged.  I know that C-Dude managed to change those names in his hack, so maybe you could ask him how to do it.

The endgame was a much smoother experience than it used to be.  In the older versions of ROTDS that I played, it felt like all attacks that were defense-piercing and non-elemental just wiped the party instantly and the other enemy attacks did nothing meaningful.  It was mostly a game of figuring out how to use a combination of ReRaise and Flammie to avoid dying to those moves.  Now that you end up at a higher level (and the bosses were nerfed, even on Insane mode), every attack is survivable at the appropriate level as long as you use HP-boosting equipment.  Also, because Evade/M.Evade were rebalanced, other attacks can actually connect.  So the game plays more like it was intended to.

I also love all the new content that was added (I was a fan of that in older versions, but it's been turned up to 11 in this one).  There's a cool secret around every corner if you bother to look for it, whether it's a hidden item, an extra cutscene, or simply turning an obscure part of vanilla FF6 into something that is more meaningful to the gameplay.  The new sprites, portraits, and other graphical work are also top-notch.

One change that I was disappointed in is Eiko's Summons.  She's unable to use almost every Esper that actually provides an interesting effect.  Instead, Summon just gives her more options to be a magical beatstick, which she could already do regardless.  And there's no need to encourage this strategy in general since it's the most natural option for nearly every character to begin with.  I can understand disallowing Fenrir and Soul Calibur, but I would have found her more fun to play if she could summon Vysage, Carbuncle, Search Ghost, and Ark.  None of those options are broken, but they allow her to do some cool things that nobody else can do multiple times.  As it is, Sylph, Yu Yevon, and Unicorn are generally the only effects worth using unless you haven't learned a good attacking spell yet (Sylph being the most exciting of the three IMO).

Also, while the design of each random enemy makes sense in a vacuum, I feel the enemies and formations aren't designed with the player's capabilities in mind.  Some examples:

  • Serin can instantly shut down nearly every encounter he fights in the WoB with either a single Psycho Blade or Cosmic Fang, while I found basically zero useful targets for Nightsever and few for Catastrophe (it doesn't outdamage Psycho Blade on average unless an enemy is weak to instant death, even if that enemy is alone).  I think that WoB encounters should have more Berserk resistance on average, and slightly more Confuse resistance too.
  • Tifa has to deal with everything and the kitchen sink during her solo section in the WoR, despite only having two Relic slots.  She also can't deal enough damage to fight encounters in the Collapsing House (unless you break rods) now that you can't learn Quake with her.  I know that you encouraged running away from these enemies, but I think it would be better if they were more appropriate for her and gave far less EXP to compensate.  It's not like you'll be fighting them with any other parties anyways!
  • The enemies in the Phantom Forest are able to use lots of dangerous spells like Acid Rain, but you don't have enough healing to keep up.  Holy Waters are too expensive to spam at that point in the game, and the enemies are too bulky to kill quickly.  That was a pretty huge difficulty spike; good thing that dungeon is short, at least.
  • Most encounters in the bulk of the WoR can't deal more than scratch damage to you once you start picking up decent armour, even on Insane mode.

I wish that the statues gave 100 Magic Points instead of 10.  As it is, you don't have a chance to learn Meteo unless you grind for it.  This would make a lot of thematic sense too.

In the early to midgame, I think that they heavy armour should have slightly more defense than it does now.  It would still be worse than robes and light armour since those have more useful effects (and this is fine because the dedicated heavy armour users are already quite good at this part of the game), but at least the heavy armour would technically be better at the thing it's supposed to do.

Overall though, it's been a blast to play through this again after so long.  Thanks for putting in the work to add another layer of polish onto the game!

Edited by Lockirby2

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Either that script posted earlier is missing an FE or Gi is using a nested conditional - those should be avoided.

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Hey Lockirby, I'm sorry for not seeing your last post here somehow until now, but thanks! I'll take it all into consideration for the next version and look into those bugs. And very glad to hear you enjoyed the latest playthrough!  

That bad party merging issue on the Floating Continent used to be an issue many versions ago I'd always encounter, but I re-coded/fixed it sometime back and haven't had it happen since, nor seen it in any streams, so that sucks there to hear it is still somehow happening >_< I'm not sure at all what causes it to happen on a fluke, because I'm sure the event code is sound. But I'll take another look into it, I'd like to be able to see it happen again firsthand though, I doubt party members matter but do you somehow remember still what 2 selected party members (besides fusoya & oboro) you had taken there? If it's not that, I suppose some previous event code thing could stick and cause it to do that, but I'd have no idea at all what. But damn, thought I had it fixed 100%.

As for Eiko's Summons, I agree it's a huge hit to her previous self, but those four Espers you listed I still feel are pretty darn abusable, perhaps not game-breaking, but being able to have the party so easily Clear or Golem status basically all the time I can't see how it wouldn't be imbalanced. Reflect is also something I've always felt really crushes much of 'the challenge', even the Reflect Ring I've thought about removing in the past. Being able to have the whole party Reflected at all times by way of Summon again falls into the realm of imbalance imo. Ark I suppose would be the least of the imo imbalanced Espers of those four, but still it is one that comes close to being cheesable I'd imagine on bosses... perhaps not though. I'd love to have my mind changed about those ones, but I doubt it would happen. I did in the latest version give her access to a new Relic, the Call Beads, which changes her Summon skill to Call, which functions just like the Magicite item in Vanilla where it calls a random Esper minus a couple such as Odin. It's obviously not as fool proof as being able to call the intended Esper over and over, but with Call she has once again access to those Espers to summon, so pending luck you can technically call them more than once that way lol.

I seem to recall there was a bug with putting a monsters' Magic Point drop to 100, I'm sure I've done that in the past and remember there was some issue of it rolling back over or something, but I'll take another look into it.

 

Edited by Gi Nattak

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