Subtitle: History of Squaresoft Port Failures
If anyone has read any of my FF4 specific threads about the "back row bit" which is aka "ignore row bit", then you should know where I'm going with this.
Background:
In the FF series, the row concept has been around for many iterations.
FF1 didn't really have them, but the order of your characters dictated the frequency of damage.
FF2-FF6 has them... I'm kinda unsure of FF7, but that's beyond the scope of this.
The general point of having a character in the back row is to allow them to take approximately half the damage they would normally absorb from the front row.
Usually this tradeoff would reduce the effectiveness of your offense, and relied on generally weaker weapons that tend to ignore row to dish decent damage.
Magic has always ignored rows (I'm sure there may be some exceptions to the rule, like FF6's added weapon magic).
In FF5, bows and whips were primarily geared for this (inherited from FF4 and prior) and FF6 had a small number of weapons in that category (Locke's Throwable Objects and many of Setzer's "Gambler" type weapons fall into that category).
In FF4 (possibly in some older FF, though not the first one), monsters also have rows.
It's specifically structured in that the backmost enemy is in the back row, thus requiring you do "plow" a hole or clear the front row of monsters to dish full damage to the monster in the back.
In the classic 3 Goblin + Swordrat scenario, you would need to clear probably 2 of the Goblins to make your way into the back row.
Otherwise, you will very likely trigger its nasty counterattack (though, using Kain to Jump onto the Swordrat is usually optimal).
*Insert screenshot here*
So, it's pretty logical and simple, assuming you can envision depth of the battlefield.
Fortunately, having the monster in the back row also reduces the physical damage it dealt to you... so if it were a really strong monster, it wouldn't be as threatening until you clear out the "bodyguards".
In FF5 and FF6, monster rows were removed... so you weren't restricted too much to attack enemies in the back of a formation... which kept things simple.
Unfortunately, simple was never developed...
So... what was wrong with the SNES versions...?
In the SNES versions, there is a generally beneficial bug that pretty much any character can take advantage of.
All you had to do was equip a back row compatible weapon, and suddenly, you would NEVER be penalized from attacking from the back row.
Considering that attacking from the back row reduced your hit rate aka accuracy by 50%...
And... attacking the back row of an enemy formation would also reduce your attack rate by 50%...
You would avoid the worst case scenario of having a cumulative effect of having 1/4 of your original accuracy!
Then again, there's a bug with Edge (and probably Yang) where the back row bit doesn't get set if the back row compatible weapon (boomerang) was put on the left hand.
Go figure on the coding.
The bug is beneficial... so what? Well, some of the weapons that were back row compatible, had a nasty side effect.
For instance, the Dwarf Axe NEVER induced critical hits.... same goes for Rydia's whips.
So... was this fixed in the WSC version???
The WSC version did a lot of work on redoing a lot of internal data. Naturally, bugs would occur. However, there's a ton of detrimental stuff that came out of it.
1) Targeting was messed up - For whatever reason, selecting the front-most target was not a guarantee.
The SNES version has zero problems addressing that issue. I guess someone had to futz with this.
2) Back row bit has zero meaning. Weapons that were normally designated to attack from the back row w/o problems completely suffered offensively.
Bows and Arrows were crippled by this, so the only capable archer was Rosa (due to the algorithms, Aim escaped some punishment).
Years later, there came to be a GBA port... that would solve the WSC problems right?
No. Many issues where inherited from the WSC port... but QA clearly didn't find the bugs the first time around.
FF4A Jap 1.0/US had only one notable change - the "removal" of back row for monsters.
It's OK I guess when that make the game closer to FF5+FF6, but, that doesn't resolve problem #2 from the WSC version.
Considering problem #1, you could argue that this issue was addressed... but that's not a real fix by modern standards.
A side effect of problem #1 of the WSC port manifested itself in this version. You could not target the new Master Flan monster.
In virtually every normal battle, you were able to target ANY monster on the field. Whether you could hit the monster was a different issue...
The Master Flan was some ninja exception to this rule. In order to actually target the monster, you could have to clear its "Flan barrier".
This wasn't very difficult though... but you could only imagine WTF they were thinking over there.
Fortunately, the back row weaponry issue was somewhat addressed in FF4A Jap 1.1/Euro version.
However, it's not a good fix. It made it so that ALL attacks from the back row did the same damage as the front row!
That is NOT A FIX. What was worse was that the Bow+Arrow did not benefit from this change... probably using a different code path.
Why oh why was this not bugtested properly???
Lucky for the Master Flan, you could target it in this version.
Great... one less neutered boss from a bug fix that technically shouldn't have been used in this manner in the first place!!!
I haven't played the PSP version yet... and I'll update this thread at some point.
I'll just say this... I await to see how you managed to fuck this up.
Topic: FF4 - The Failed Evolution of Rows (Read 2133 times)