Topic: FF4A (E) Hacking Notes and Mod

[Grimoire LD]

Alright, let's get back to it then! It's been a while and I will probably be a bit rusty.

Whoa, whoa, what? Augments Ice Magic when equipped?! I had no idea you added in FFV style rods! That's been a desire of mine to do for FFIV for a long time, good thinking!

I'm glad to see the Healing Staff casts Cura now instead of less than 20 Heal.

I cannot get over some of the GBA script; "You are that boy from before!" What...? Cecil is a man of 19-20. Also some of the things the mages say seem odd. Just a commentary on the quality of the translation in that regard.

Also the instrumentation in Mysidia is the first iteration of the "kooky" (With the odd bird sounds and unfitting instruments in certain spots) style instead of the mysterious style which I had felt was what they were going for in the original.

Palom's portrait looks pretty good... but Porom's is about as bad as Rosa's.

"Baron shall burn in the fieiriest pits"
 One: I'm pretty sure that's spelled wrong.
Two: The original text says nothing about it. The "Never forgive nor forget..." sign from the original makes a lot more sense. That one is just too over the top. Considering that sign never changes.

Gaia Gear raises Strength by 5 now, eh? I'm curious to know what the Kenpo Gi does now then.

Hmm, Healing Staff has no Spirit boost, hah.

Well, time to make my way to Mt. Ordeals.

(Flips through Bestiary...) Venom Dagger? That looks like a new item that wasn't in an earlier version.

Seems that Zu's are still susceptible to the Deathbringer. It seems its Exp. was greatly decreased as a result though.

I don't feel comfortable ascending Mt. Ordeals until the Twins are at Level 15 at least so let's do some grinding.

Hmm, the Healing Staff says it casts Cura but it's still the useless 20 HP Heal from the original.

Hmm... were there always Zombies in normal fights outside of Mt. Ordeals?

Bloodbones are definitely a tougher customer with seeming resistance to Ice and Lightning and normal damage from Fire (or just high Magic Defense) and their Absorb attack can be tricky. A Decent-ish chance to drop the Venom Dagger though.

Alright, onwards to Mt. Ordeals!

...The Souls know Summon? Oh that will make this quite a bit more annoying, thankfully they can be Silenced, that doesn't stop them from using Summon however.

The enemies here are rather brutal. I may want to head back to Mysidia to buy a Crossbow and Holy Arrows for Porom. The Hand Axe can at least deal some physical damage but the Souls have high Physical Evasion so it seems almost a necessity to use a Level-2 spell to take them out.

Alright, went back to Mysidia and got Porom equipped with the Crossbow and 50 Holy Arrows with decent precision (thank you for making that viable option by the way)  so maybe now it won't be so resource costly to defeat Bloodbones and Souls.

Well, that would figure... when I go back to Mysidia to better prepare myself I get to the Tellah event without any battles at all, heh.

I can't say how useful Tellah will be with his Level 1 Spells, but his high level White Magic like Cura, Blink, and Life will definitely come in handy!

Seems like Porom can really pack a punch with those Holy Arrows and Crossbow, you've really managed to make the Twins the stars of the show here, even Tellah is support.

Need to go back to Mysidia again to properly equip Tellah.

Oh hey! Random battle Cockatrice Summon, great!

Interesting, the Souls have a really good chance to drop the Spectral Robe, hmm...

Bio is now quite expensive. Good. It needed balanced.

Some Mythril Gloves from a Ghoul/Revenant encounter, good to see!

Oh... Bio deals 1 damage to Undead... reasonable enough.

Lilith can be turned into a Pig? I used it with only 2 MP remaining, yeah I'm in pretty dire straits up here.

I was more than halfway there so I made a break for the Summit. Still need to go back down to get a chest though.

Instant Game Over Quake from Scarmiglione... hah.

  Alright, found a bit more time to play this and I managed to beat Scarmiglione, I feel kind of stupid for not realizing it before that Bluff is key otherwise time will elapse and he will insta-kill the party.

Hmm, sort of surprised that Scarmiglione 2's Cursed Elegy doesn't really do anything but Slow still.

Few, fully Bluffed Palom (4 turns of his) and two Fira's finished the job. Overall I found the second phase easier than the first. But that may be because I wised up to the proper strategy.

I do sort of feel I wasted 8000 GP on the Knight's Armor though. The Gaia Gear's Strength of +5 seems much more preferable in most respects than the plus extra 5 defense that the Knight's Armor provides.

But this seems like a proper stopping point! I'll end it here for today.

[Kea]

The GBA script is definitely odd in places, to say the least. I've been thinking about making changes to it actually, but that seems to fall outside the scope of this hack. Maybe it'll be a separate patch.

Alright, let's get back to it then! It's been a while and I will probably be a bit rusty.

Whoa, whoa, what? Augments Ice Magic when equipped?! I had no idea you added in FFV style rods! That's been a desire of mine to do for FFIV for a long time, good thinking!

Hah, coding this was much easier than I'd feared. Specifically, element-boosting equipment increases the base power of the appropriate element by 33% when castin. Attaching elemental boosts to the fire/ice/bolt rods makes them worth buying, since casting basic magic for free loses its lustre pretty quickly.

Hmm, Healing Staff has no Spirit boost, hah.
Hmm, the Healing Staff says it casts Cura but it's still the useless 20 HP Heal from the original.

It's a little confusing, but the Healing Staff functions like its FF5 incarnation; it casts Cura after attacking. IIRC the extended description mentions this, but the second line never shows up on the Equipment menu.

Hmm... were there always Zombies in normal fights outside of Mt. Ordeals?

Bloodbones are definitely a tougher customer with seeming resistance to Ice and Lightning and normal damage from Fire (or just high Magic Defense) and their Absorb attack can be tricky. A Decent-ish chance to drop the Venom Dagger though.

Alright, onwards to Mt. Ordeals!

...The Souls know Summon? Oh that will make this quite a bit more annoying, thankfully they can be Silenced, that doesn't stop them from using Summon however.

The enemies here are rather brutal. I may want to head back to Mysidia to buy a Crossbow and Holy Arrows for Porom. The Hand Axe can at least deal some physical damage but the Souls have high Physical Evasion so it seems almost a necessity to use a Level-2 spell to take them out.

The Zombies outside Ordeals are new, the idea is that the whole area has undead running about.

The Souls only use Summon when all other enemy types are defeated (there's a new-ish encounter that takes advantage of this, he he), so you can stop them from doing that by just killing them first. They're also vulnerable to Tellah's Stop.

Alright, went back to Mysidia and got Porom equipped with the Crossbow and 50 Holy Arrows with decent precision (thank you for making that viable option by the way)  so maybe now it won't be so resource costly to defeat Bloodbones and Souls.

I can't say how useful Tellah will be with his Level 1 Spells, but his high level White Magic like Cura, Blink, and Life will definitely come in handy!

Seems like Porom can really pack a punch with those Holy Arrows and Crossbow, you've really managed to make the Twins the stars of the show here, even Tellah is support.

Bio is now quite expensive. Good. It needed balanced.

Oh... Bio deals 1 damage to Undead... reasonable enough.

Bio is now a Dark elemental spell and the undead monsters here are immune to that element, so it's not as useful as it normally is. All of the undead monsters here except for Souls are highly resistant to magic, but they're also doubly weak to Holy so Porom with Holy Arrows can sometimes OHKO Revenants. Alternatively, Palom casting Fira with the Fira Rod has enough power to punch through their magic defence, since the zombies here are also doubly weak to fire.

Instant Game Over Quake from Scarmiglione... hah.

  Alright, found a bit more time to play this and I managed to beat Scarmiglione, I feel kind of stupid for not realizing it before that Bluff is key otherwise time will elapse and he will insta-kill the party.

I don't know if you never encountered this or if it's bugged somehow, but if you kill all of the Skullnants, Scarmiglione will switch to a different pattern without Quake; that spell's there to discourage leaving just one Skullnant alive while you beat on the boss.

Hmm, sort of surprised that Scarmiglione 2's Cursed Elegy doesn't really do anything but Slow still.

Few, fully Bluffed Palom (4 turns of his) and two Fira's finished the job. Overall I found the second phase easier than the first. But that may be because I wised up to the proper strategy.

I do sort of feel I wasted 8000 GP on the Knight's Armor though. The Gaia Gear's Strength of +5 seems much more preferable in most respects than the plus extra 5 defense that the Knight's Armor provides.

But this seems like a proper stopping point! I'll end it here for today.

Cursed Elegy slowing the whole party is a pretty serious debuff, it makes it harder to keep up with his offence, especially his Lightning -> Earthquake sequence...or at least that's the idea. Maybe I should make it turn your party Undead. Now that would be debilitating!

As for Gaia Gear vs. Knight's Armor, I just forgot that Cecil can equip the former. Don't forget that the Knight's Armor gives +3 Spirit - with all of his Paladin equipment Cecil has a little more Spirit than even Porom (sans a Ghouls Ring) has.

[Grimoire LD]

It's a little confusing, but the Healing Staff functions like its FF5 incarnation; it casts Cura after attacking. IIRC the extended description mentions this, but the second line never shows up on the Equipment menu.

Yes, I read tha,t and everytime I tried to attack it would miss, especially since Porom is in the backrow. You may want to adjust the weapon's accuracy.

I don't know if you never encountered this or if it's bugged somehow, but if you kill all of the Skullnants, Scarmiglione will switch to a different pattern without Quake; that spell's there to discourage leaving just one Skullnant alive while you beat on the boss.

Oh no, I saw that. It seemed to lead to an impossible scenario so I avoided it at all costs. I killed two of the Skulnants and went from there Bluffing with Palom several times before attacking Scarmiglione since he's the only one who can put a dent in Scarmiglione's HP without a rather nasty counter. (Osmose isn't too bad to deal with)

Cursed Elegy slowing the whole party is a pretty serious debuff, it makes it harder to keep up with his offence, especially his Lightning -> Earthquake sequence...or at least that's the idea. Maybe I should make it turn your party Undead. Now that would be debilitating!

Maybe... but by then the battle was a foregone conclusion. I had Bluffed Palom appropriately and since he countered with that only after he was hit with a 3000 Fira, he couldn't really stand against another 3000+ Fira.

As for Gaia Gear vs. Knight's Armor, I just forgot that Cecil can equip the former. Don't forget that the Knight's Armor gives +3 Spirit - with all of his Paladin equipment Cecil has a little more Spirit than even Porom (sans a Ghouls Ring) has.

Indeed, but that tradeoff... is not worth it, it really never is. Cecil is primarily a physical attacker so the objective is to increase his Strength as high as it can go in a quick manner. There are some hacks which discourage this (Unprecedented Crisis has Cecil as largely support). I think if the Knight's Armor did something else special it would have more use, but the slightly more defense and the Spirit just doesn't seem like a good tradeoff. This isn't a knock against your mod in anyway, the original game also has this issue when the Kenpo Gi becomes available in Baron.

[Kea]

Hmm, the Healing Staff has 80 accuracy already. It can't hurt to put it at 99.

Seems like stacking Bluff with Palom is even more effective than I had supposed. Short of making the bosses straight-up immune to magic (which I definitely don't want to do) or having them all be races against time there's not much you can do to stop that. Maybe I can recode Bluff to only work once per battle...

It's difficult figuring out the right balance between equipment, especially for Cecil who has such a diverse selection. It's definitely true that reaching an additional attack multiplier is worth more than a few points of defence, especially early on when an extra multiplier is much more significant. I was leery of giving the Knight's Armor too much defence since I worried it would make Cecil practically immune to physical attacks that would take huge chunks out of the squishier characters, but maybe it's worth giving it a go anyway.

Could always give it status protections. Blind or Curse immunity would come in handy later...

e: Thank you for the criticism by the way. I try to look at my changes from several different angles, but inevitably you end up missing something.

[Grimoire LD]

Hmm, the Healing Staff has 80 accuracy already. It can't hurt to put it at 99.

I think the issue more lies on backrow accuracy. Is is possible in the GBA version to make a weapon have full accuracy in the front and backrow? Because I recall several oversights associated with that in the original FF4A.

Seems like stacking Bluff with Palom is even more effective than I had supposed. Short of making the bosses straight-up immune to magic (which I definitely don't want to do) or having them all be races against time there's not much you can do to stop that. Maybe I can recode Bluff to only work once per battle...

Recoding Bluff is not a bad idea. Somewhere in the RAM is the initial modified stats of the characters in the SNES version if you add +16 from that value instead of his main stats you should be able to stack it just once... but are you sure that wasn't the intended method? There's nothing else that can really hurt Scarmiglione to any great extent and it's not as if Bluffing makes it a cake-walk. Without Bluff it becomes an extremely costly affair all around as I can make out as Palom deals maybe 500 with each Fira with no one else being able to contribute any damage due to non-existent damage capability (Tellah) or Scarmiglione's high Defense (Porom). With such limited Phoenix Downs you need to choose every single move carefully and the path of least resistance without any unlucky Thundara's wiping out the healers through use of Physical Attacks seems the right way to go.

It's difficult figuring out the right balance between equipment, especially for Cecil who has such a diverse selection. It's definitely true that reaching an additional attack multiplier is worth more than a few points of defence, especially early on when an extra multiplier is much more significant. I was leery of giving the Knight's Armor too much defence since I worried it would make Cecil practically immune to physical attacks that would take huge chunks out of the squishier characters, but maybe it's worth giving it a go anyway.

Could always give it status protections. Blind or Curse immunity would come in handy later...

In FFIII Knights had the "Guard" command which made all damage done to them to 1 Damage. Is it possible to create some custom ASM to make Defend do that for the Knight's Armor? It would be a neat reference is nothing else, since the price tag of 8000 GP is rather steep for this point in the game.

e: Thank you for the criticism by the way. I try to look at my changes from several different angles, but inevitably you end up missing something.

No problem. I know how difficult it is to balance FFIV and make it engaging, but at the same time make it a challenge.

[Kea]

Currently, back row compatibility is determined by item type/icon. I've fixed the out and out bugs with that system, but it would be nice to have a more robust way to determine back row compatibility. Or I could rework how attacking from the back row works in the first place. Make it halve your Attack Multiplier instead of your Precision. Basically become even closer to FF5. 

I don't remember what I was thinking giving undead Scarmiglione 15 defence; that's going to get reduced. He is double-weak to Holy, so Porom with the Holy Arrows gets quadruple attack against him. Still, no reason to make attacking with her any less effective. I still think I might make Bluff a one-time buff, but increase the bonus from 16 to 20 Intellect and allow it to go beyond 99 Int. That would be pretty easy to code, just have to expand the Bluff routine. Party stats for all characters are stored in a separate place from their in-battle stats like in the SNES version, although all characters have their stats stored permanently unlike what I hear the SNES version does with its 'shadow party'.

Making the Knight's Armor turn Defend into Guard would be possible in some ways: I can simply edit the physical damage routine to additionally check for Knight's Armor equipped when the target is defending, and reduce damage to 1 or quadruple effective defence in that case. Making it change the command's text to Guard would probably be possible too. That's already done by the Lunar Ruins equipment, after all. Might be a little OP, but it's worth a shot.

[Grimoire LD]

Currently, back row compatibility is determined by item type/icon. I've fixed the out and out bugs with that system, but it would be nice to have a more robust way to determine back row compatibility. Or I could rework how attacking from the back row works in the first place. Make it halve your Attack Multiplier instead of your Precision. Basically become even closer to FF5. 

That's what I did for Combat Boost, I got rid of the accuracy hit for being in the backrow and instead just halved damage. This makes the myriad of Spell Weapons more useful all around.

I don't remember what I was thinking giving undead Scarmiglione 15 defence; that's going to get reduced. He is double-weak to Holy, so Porom with the Holy Arrows gets quadruple attack against him. Still, no reason to make attacking with her any less effective. I still think I might make Bluff a one-time buff, but increase the bonus from 16 to 20 Intellect and allow it to go beyond 99 Int. That would be pretty easy to code, just have to expand the Bluff routine. Party stats for all characters are stored in a separate place from their in-battle stats like in the SNES version, although all characters have their stats stored permanently unlike what I hear the SNES version does with its 'shadow party'.

Wow. Go beyond 99 Int? That would be pretty neat and would make Palom very unique to stand up against Rydia's unmitigated Summon superiority over Black Magic. Great thinking!

Making the Knight's Armor turn Defend into Guard would be possible in some ways: I can simply edit the physical damage routine to additionally check for Knight's Armor equipped when the target is defending, and reduce damage to 1 or quadruple effective defence in that case. Making it change the command's text to Guard would probably be possible too. That's already done by the Lunar Ruins equipment, after all. Might be a little OP, but it's worth a shot.

I think increasing Defense rather than 1 damage and done is probably the better option, yes. Having it x3 defense or something similar could work well. 1 damage would be quite overpowered, especially when combined with Cover.

Alright, let's get back to it! Before I leave Mt. Ordeals I do want Cecil to be at 20 though.

Hey, a Silver Apple from a fight with two Lilith, quite nice!

Oh, I forgot to ask. Did you do anything to make Cry useful? I don't know if this was changed in the GBA version, but in the SNES version Cry decreased a stat, that is all but unused for most matters by a minuscule amount. Judging by nothing really happening here, it doesn't look to have changed.

Fantastic a Ghoul Ring! My luck is really up there tonight.

Ah, "Intellect" is spelled wrong in that description. Also the description claims that Intellect and Spirit both go up by 5, but they increase by 8.

Was the formula for Rod damage changed or something? From the backrow Palom equipped with the Ghoul Ring just hit a crit for 600+ damage, with 3 Strength.

Wonderful! A Spectral Robe!

Hmm, Clothes raise Agility by 3? Nothing mentions this, neat though.

A Mythril Knife from some Skeletons, nice.

Hmm, is there any given reason Tellah can't equip the Spectral Robe? It seems sort of odd.

...I think I found that encounter where you used Summon to quite a different effect. 5 BloodBones, hmm...

Oh, Cecil learns Protect, quite nice.

Well, Cecil is now Level 20 and I walked out of there with a Spectral Robe, Ghoul Ring, Mythril Gloves, and Mythril Knife, unfortunately did not pick up the Venom Dagger, Cursed Ring, and Power Armlet.

Need to head out for now but it was a fun bit of grinding.

[Kea]

I think increasing Defense rather than 1 damage and done is probably the better option, yes. Having it x3 defense or something similar could work well. 1 damage would be quite overpowered, especially when combined with Cover.

Tripling defence sounds good; that will make Cecil in full armor immune to most physicals in the Baron revisit, including Baigan's attacks, while Defending. Turns out the coding for that and the revised Bluff didn't require any special stuff, so they're ready now to be put in the next version.

Alright, let's get back to it! Before I leave Mt. Ordeals I do want Cecil to be at 20 though.

Hah, it's a little surprising to me how much grinding you do. Personally I avoid it as much as possible; making random encounters more rewarding is partly why I'm adding more rare drops and making rare drops themselves a little less rare.

I haven't touched Cry yet, no. All it does in the GBA version is make it easier to run, which isn't all that useful. I might make it cut monster evade and magic evade, now that they use those stats, to provide an option for cutting through dodgy monsters.

Fantastic a Ghoul Ring! My luck is really up there tonight.

Ah, "Intellect" is spelled wrong in that description. Also the description claims that Intellect and Spirit both go up by 5, but they increase by 8.

My bad, those mistakes will be fixed.

Was the formula for Rod damage changed or something? From the backrow Palom equipped with the Ghoul Ring just hit a crit for 600+ damage, with 3 Strength.

By chance, was Palom attacking a Zombie/Ghoul/Revenant with a Fire Rod? Those monsters are doubly weak to Fire, so Palom's attack would become (Attack + WeaponAttack/2)*4, so you may have just gotten very lucky with all your hits landing, but I'll take a look at the damage formulas again. I haven't messed with the physical damage calcs themselves, but you never know...

Hmm, is there any given reason Tellah can't equip the Spectral Robe? It seems sort of odd.

None I can think of, it's probably just an oversight. I'll fix that.

Oh, Cecil learns Protect, quite nice.

Well, Cecil is now Level 20 and I walked out of there with a Spectral Robe, Ghoul Ring, Mythril Gloves, and Mythril Knife, unfortunately did not pick up the Venom Dagger, Cursed Ring, and Power Armlet.

Need to head out for now but it was a fun bit of grinding.

Cecil's spell list will be getting expanded a bit compared to vanilla. He'll still be hindered by low MP and middling Spirit without equipment, but he can keep up as a secondary healer/supporter.

If you want, you can redownload the patch with the updates I've applied; it includes the changes to Bluff, the new Knight's Armor Guard (sans command text for now), and fixes the typos and Spectral Robe mistake you mentioned.

[Kea]

I think I might have discovered why you were having such trouble with Scarmiglione's first form: for some reason, empty hands were set to make you weak to Thunder. So Palom, Porom and Tellah would take major damage from his Thundaras for no discernible reason. I've fixed that little mistake and updated the patch, if you want to redownloads.

The next patch will cover everything up to your first visit to the underground and the fight with Golbez, which means that I'll have to get on with expanding the monster data tables. That will be a lot of work, although hopefully it won't take two months like this last update did...

[Grimoire LD]

That would be the reason it would seem, yes. I'll redownload this then and continue from there (I don't think I have a savefile close to Scarmiglione to try him again though)

[Kea]

W/E, that's all right. I didn't make any other changes aside from reducing the second form's defence.

Progress-wise, I managed to insert my first new monster! 

It turned out to be pretty easy, mostly just repointing data tables, but I did have to do some surgery to the Bestiary's monster GFX loading routine to make it play nice. The new monsters don't yet appear in the Bestiary, but adding them in by hand will be tedious so I'll see about trying to automate the process.

With new monsters being a possibility, there will be some secret monsters appearing in little-traveled areas of the world. Think of FF5's Prototype island, or the Peninsula of Power in FF1. Not going to say where exactly, but exploration will be rewarded with more than the usual groups of Golbins and Treants.

[Grimoire LD]

Excellent! I'm glad to see you figured out how to make custom monsters in FF4A. I'm looking forward to seeing what you can do with that.

[Kea]

I have a few ideas...you might even see some of them in the next few dungeons! Well maybe not the Tower of Zot, that place has almost too many enemies - 12 introduced in there, and only two or three of them appear anywhere else.

I've finished working on everything in the Magnetic Cave but the Dark Elf. Right now, I'm taking a break from that to try something else: making Protect and Shell fully fledged status effects that reduce damage taken, instead of incremental stat buffs. I know I can free up one status effect bit by removing the status bit for Reflect; that status writes a separate byte to unit RAM data to track its duration, so it's possible to make everything related to Reflect check only that byte. I'm still looking for a second status effect to replace in this way (Stop is another candidate), although there's always the option of writing to a completely unused byte if I can find one.

[chillyfeez]

It'd take some doing, but what about death status? At least in the SNES version, there are a ton of things that ref the bit,  but it's definitely redundant, since you can technically just ref HP instead. Likewise for "critical," now that I think about it... And probably easier as it's not referenced in nearly as many places.

Here's another thought... I don't know what the GBA RAM looks like, but SNES ffiv has a HUGE block of completely unused RAM in the late 7E's. In the NSES version, the critical bit could very easily be relocated to that block, as it's only referenced in battle, which would leave the normal bit available for protect or shell. Of course if GBA uses less RAM, or actually uses more of the RAM it uses, then that's a moot point.

[Kea]

The 'critical HP' bit makes sense, yeah. I should have thought of that from the start. It's only referenced in three places (once to apply it and twice to check for it and Magnetic Paralysis), so with a little bit of code expansion I can free that up too.