Topic: Power Command

[Deathlike2]

Just sub in FuSoYa for Cid... easy!

It was never really worthwhile to have FuSoYa on the team.. since you already had better options available with more MP to work with. Then there's also having hammers designed explicitly to do the Cid-Hulk's bidding.

Besides, Edge takes WAY too much damage despite having the Thunder Claw at his disposal. I haven't quite figured out if giving him all Genji/Samurai armor would help (I don't think it does IMO).

Cid would be absolutely perfect in the role anyways... he has HP high and is simply the perfect damage soaker of the team, particularly since he has virtually has no evasion to speak of and his agility growth is atrocious. If this were FF4A-ish, I'd prefer Cid over Edge easily (though Edge would be still be great for the Elementals battle).

[Grimoire LD]

As for why Cid would replace FuSoYa... it's noteworthy that you see Cid before going into the Giant and FuSoYa and him have a bit of back and forth banter before Cid flies you in. All they had to say was that FuSoYa was "following behind" just as he and Golbez are right ahead of you as you go through the Lunar Subterrane. Also doesn't one of those unknown bytes on the Hammer make Machine type enemies target the wielder or something to that effect? If so it would make sense that Cid was intended to be there.

[Dragonsbrethren]

That would make the FuSoYa character entirely pointless, though. If anything, ditch Rosa or Rydia there, you don't need three mages. Then again, you don't really need Cid there, either. Losing characters in the original was so annoying; I hated that they took Kain away for FuSoYa, only to give him back after one dungeon, and reset his equipment. That bastard ran off with my Avenger one time when I forgot to take it off! Expanding on that even more, by taking FuSoYa away mere minutes after getting him would be really dumb.

Obviously ROM hacks can do whatever they please, but the more practical thing to do in the original game, without having to force another party change or removing FuSoYa as a playable character, would be to throw some mechs into the Tower of Zot.

[Pinkpuff]

This is all speculation of course, but FuSoYa really feels like a hacked-in-at-the-last-minute character... in fact that whole first trip to the moon seems a little like that. The monsters seem to take a significant jump up in difficulty going from the underground to the moon's surface, and seem to me to be more difficult than the encounters in the Giant.

I suspect that at one point, the plan may have gone something like this:

• Lose Kain
• Go to surface
• Golbez uses tower to transport to moon (that was supposedly the main effect of powering it up with the crystals after all)
• Giant appears
• Cid rejoins; fight giant
• Kain rejoins / lose Cid
• Whale appears
• Go to moon
• FuSoYa (NPC) gives revelations / wakes Golbez up somehow? Who knows
• Fight final dungeon as normal

[Deathlike2]

To bring some sanity to explaining FuSoYa... his equipment set is virtually the same as Tellah, except he can also equip bows+arrows. I've tried using that combo on FuSoYa (Elven Bow+Lightning Arrows) and that produced pretty mediocre results (the Samurai/Yoichi Bow probably would help a little).

It would make sense to move out Edge in this instance, if FuSoYa was meant to stick around. He's the only character that never leaves you when he joins...

If FuSoYa was never meant to stick around, can you imagine a kickass group of Cecil, Cid, Edge, Rosa, and Rydia? That would be genuinely storming that Giant.

I'm trying to recall if the CPU battle considers the CPU as a back row target when one of the front row targets go... because that would make Kain invaluable if he was meant to be involved in that...

[Grimoire LD]

Very good point PinkPuff. We know they programmed in Golbez with the most basic of things to make him work in a single battle and FuSoYa couldn't have been too difficult because he is a completely static character. Which reminds me, does FuSoYa even have a level up table that comprises of all +0's or does he just not have a table at all?

If he has nothing it may go to show that he was added quite late, to when they used up all of their space but they changed the storyline to make it have more impact. Very possibly at one point, there was no Zeromus and Cecil and the gang chased Golbez to the moon. This would go with what PinkPuff said about going back to the surface and immediately fighting the Giant and would fully explain why Cid's hammers are very effective against enemies he never fights. Likely because at one point he was intended to go to the Giant of Babil since FuSoYa didn't exist yet and was going to leave the party when Kain came back.

[Deathlike2]

FuSoYa is still relatively "complete". He closely mirrors Tellah in the sense that his MP never grows until level 70 (which Tellah still never gains enough MP for Meteor). Consider that is starting MP is 190 vs Tellah's 90... it could be coincidence but ultimately FuSoYa is a the #2 meh character in the game...

I considered Edward to be far more useful than Tellah and FuSoYa by comparison...

[Grimoire LD]

Ancient Bump, but I wanted to address what is written in the Algorithm guide in regards to Focus/BuildUp/Power,

This command doubles the attack power of the character that uses it. The
character is put under a "Charging" status where the character proceeds to
not be able to avoid magic. The duration of this status is dependant on
the Agility of the character.

Attack Power = Attack Power * 2

Magic Defense Multiplier = 0

This command does factor in the current row of the character.

Weapon inflicted statuses can be dealt if the target does not die from the
attack and/or is not resistant to the status.


I've seen proof in the game that Magic Defense Multiplier does not drop to 0 (With Yang I can understand how one might think it dropped to 0), however it does get cut in half with, surprisingly of all things, Physical Defense. I thought there had to be some kind of mistake, but I just tested it and indeed, it does cut physical defense in half.

$03/C740   AD 05 27   LDA $2705  [$7E:2705]   A:0000   X:0000   Y:0000   P:envMxdiZC - Load Status Byte 3 from Target's Data.
$03/C743   29 08   AND #$08   A:0010   X:0000   Y:0000   P:envMxdizc - Is the Target Charging?
$03/C745   F0 06   BEQ $06    [$C74D]   A:0000   X:0000   Y:0000   P:envMxdiZc - If not branch to 03C74D
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$03/C747   4E 05 39   LSR $3905  [$7E:3905]   A:0008   X:0000   Y:0000   P:envMxdizC - Divide Physical Defense by 2 (This is surprising if true...)
$03/C74A   6E 04 39   ROR $3904  [$7E:3904]   A:0008   X:0000   Y:0000   P:envMxdiZc - Divide 3904 by 2. (Possibly Magic Defense)

Come on Square! Why did you hate Yang so much to give him a skill like that? Well its easy enough to fix in any case. Just change the conditional in the AND to something else.

[Deathlike2]

I've seen proof in the game that Magic Defense Multiplier does not drop to 0 (With Yang I can understand how one might think it dropped to 0), however it does get cut in half with, surprisingly of all things, Physical Defense. I thought there had to be some kind of mistake, but I just tested it and indeed, it does cut physical defense in half.

$03/C740   AD 05 27   LDA $2705  [$7E:2705]   A:0000   X:0000   Y:0000   P:envMxdiZC - Load Status Byte 3 from Target's Data.
$03/C743   29 08   AND #$08   A:0010   X:0000   Y:0000   P:envMxdizc - Is the Target Charging?
$03/C745   F0 06   BEQ $06    [$C74D]   A:0000   X:0000   Y:0000   P:envMxdiZc - If not branch to 03C74D
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$03/C747   4E 05 39   LSR $3905  [$7E:3905]   A:0008   X:0000   Y:0000   P:envMxdizC - Divide Physical Defense by 2 (This is surprising if true...)
$03/C74A   6E 04 39   ROR $3904  [$7E:3904]   A:0008   X:0000   Y:0000   P:envMxdiZc - Divide 3904 by 2. (Possibly Magic Defense)

Come on Square! Why did you hate Yang so much to give him a skill like that? Well its easy enough to fix in any case. Just change the conditional in the AND to something else.

The Physical Defense thing is actually real, since it seems to be far more noticeable in TAY. I don't use his Charging command at all in regular FF4 since his Agility tends to be awful early on, so the time to attack is bad. I used it a lot during Yang's Tale and make Yang be the tank over Ursula (she's a better character overall, plus free healing, despite being HP+Spirit based).

Yang's Magic Defense on its own doesn't really grow to 2, w/o actual help (stat grinding), and can go to 3 with a pair of CatClaws with optimized stats (FF4's Hero Shield can puts it over the top to 4 or 5).

I think though that there are some calculation oddities with the "Defense reduction". It's not really quite working in FF4A.

[Grimoire LD]

I have to wonder how similar the coding is in FFIVA. A straight port is not going to be perfect after all. It seems they somehow misplaced the Front/Back row calculations along with a host of other things. I also would not be surprised if they took out Charge reducing Defense because it is a really stupid idea. Yang is a frontline fighter with less than optimal defense to begin with. Kain on the other hand is a frontline or backline fighter with defense second to only Cecil (maybe third to Cid) that can use Jump which is infinitely better than Focus/BuildUp and not have to deal with being hit at all.

Though I have to wonder then why they would reinclude it in FFIV:TAY. Was the defense reduction in Complete Collection? I never really took notice of it before now.

[Deathlike2]

I have to wonder how similar the coding is in FFIVA. A straight port is not going to be perfect after all. It seems they somehow misplaced the Front/Back row calculations along with a host of other things. I also would not be surprised if they took out Charge reducing Defense because it is a really stupid idea. Yang is a frontline fighter with less than optimal defense to begin with. Kain on the other hand is a frontline or backline fighter with defense second to only Cecil (maybe third to Cid) that can use Jump which is infinitely better than Focus/BuildUp and not have to deal with being hit at all.

Though I have to wonder then why they would reinclude it in FFIV:TAY. Was the defense reduction in Complete Collection? I never really took notice of it before now.

Actually, I think I have an idea why to a degree. Using characters to attack Yang under the status doesn't seem to work... although I usually build my characters to maximize high multipliers with high evasion+magic evasion.

It's hard to notice this for Yang in FF4A, when you use a Hero Shield, Ribbon, and his other ultimate armors to boost it.

In some limited testing with Game Genie codes that "hack in" the command to FF2 v1.0 SNES, your defense reduction and magic evasion multiplier reduction seems to be in order.

Just remember that Yang in most of the original has really poor armor in addition to a weak defense multiplier. So the damage intake increase is there, but not really "out of the ordinary" for Yang.

[Grimoire LD]

...That's true. All he really has is his very high HP to support him but he does get hit pretty hard from basically everything because of his lack of high defense armor to choose from, therefore the effect on Charging may not be so noticeable for that reason. Good thinking there DeathLike2.

[Deathlike2]

I just wanted to add that Cid is a bigger damage sponge than Yang, due to his poor defense multiplier and lack of evasion due to not equipping a shield.

I added the Power command to Kain through the Game Genie codes (he does have the command slots to test with) and eventually "dumbed down" his armor to crap levels. It seemed to show the proper result.

As for the "earlier discussion" about Cid and the whole Giant and FuSoYa thing... the FuSoYa thing reminds me a lot of the time you meet Tellah for the first time. You only briefly meet him, to use him in a more difficult circumstance later (Tower of Zot) where he shines... so the FuSoYa character most resembles that (plus he's still affected by the XP growth until the scripted Zemus battle screens).

Cid replacing FuSoYa would allow Edge to stay in the backrow with a Fullmoon and Thunder Claw to own everything in bliss. Even giving Cid like the entire Silver/Mythril weapon and armor set would be more than enough (Genji/Diamond would be better though - harvested from Kain's betrayal). The armor wouldn't dramatically make Cid that different really...

[Grimoire LD]

It's a very easy change to make, really. FuSoYa may rush ahead of the group citing "There's no time! I cannot tarry!" or something to that accord and rush ahead of the party. Fight through the Giant as normal with Cid instead of FuSoYa but when you reach the Elemental Fiends have Cid get wounded by one of them and forced to take his leave from the party, then have FuSoYa join with the party for the CPU Battle then proceed as normally. It wouldn't be too difficult to make work correctly.

In other news I have found all of the means I need to nerf Jump, making it take back row into effect (which shouldn't be too big of a deal considering that Jump and Focus both get bonus to accuracy it appears) and taking away all of the ill effects of using Charge. (Move it to... Berserk I guess? That's a status in need of some nerfing).

[Deathlike2]

It's a very easy change to make, really. FuSoYa may rush ahead of the group citing "There's no time! I cannot tarry!" or something to that accord and rush ahead of the party. Fight through the Giant as normal with Cid instead of FuSoYa but when you reach the Elemental Fiends have Cid get wounded by one of them and forced to take his leave from the party, then have FuSoYa join with the party for the CPU Battle then proceed as normally. It wouldn't be too difficult to make work correctly.

The match is already wicked easy with FuSoYa... doubling up on what Rydia does. The elemental battle already matches up with how Edge's Ninjutsu is aligned in spell damage strength. Cid's "best weapon" would actually be the Ogrekiller, as the Gaea's Hammer is Fire elemental and you get the added bonus of a shield during the match (Mythril Hammer is a meh weapon really).

In other news I have found all of the means I need to nerf Jump, making it take back row into effect (which shouldn't be too big of a deal considering that Jump and Focus both get bonus to accuracy it appears) and taking away all of the ill effects of using Charge. (Move it to... Berserk I guess? That's a status in need of some nerfing).

Is the accuracy bonus simply doubling of the level bonus? I had actually caught onto this while using the Blood Lance in testing... where the damage was far higher than anticipated. It initially made no sense to me as to why the Blood Sword was worse than the Blood Lance in testing... but it took a while to figure that out.