Final Fantasy VI Classic Jobs Part I
Apr. 29th, 2023 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingI had been messing around for concepts for extending the "Classic Party" jobs beyond just the more obvious job-based Final Fantasy games, which I considered to be Final Fantasies I, III, V, and Tactics. I've often considered Final Fantasy VI to be my favourite in the series and the hacking tools available are quite intuitive, so I did a little bit of analysis to determine how to make a hacked ROM that would allow me to play this game with always a Knight, a Thief, a White Mage, and a Black Mage.
Analysis, eh? Yeah.
The Knight is easy. Give them swords and make swords exclusive to them, and attach the True Knight relic's 'cover' feature to swords. They have no command abilities, just Fight and Item. Knights get swords, shields, helmets and heavy armor. They cannot equip espers.
The Thief is pretty easy, too! Give them daggers and throwing weapons, just like Locke has by default, but no swords. Their other equips are like Locke's too. They have the Steal command as well as a new 'Flee' command that was created by changing what ability the 'Shock' command normally points to, and making it the Exit spell's escape effect. There is a minor class of "light" shields, like the Buckler, but they can't use most shields. They cannot equip espers.
The White Mage gets a tad more complicated. They have access to staves and flails only. For the sake of them having access to magic, a few white mage-exclusive equips teach white magic spells. The only shield they can ever use is the Force Shield, and they have mage-y armor. They get a prayer command, which is a modified version of Banon's health command that instead calls an ability with about half of the power of Cure. They can only use white magic espers.
The Black Mage, maybe predictably, only has access to staves and daggers and the Force Shield and mage-like armor. Some black mage-exclusive equips can teach black magic spells. They also all get Terra's morph command which is meant to act like the Focus command black mages have in some other games... although I bet that'd be weird for people who aren't Terra. I don't think I actually used Focus at all. Black mages can only use black magic espers.
I also had to assign each character a class. I investigated all forced character parties through the whole game and realized that if you did the following combination, you would more-or-less always be able to avoid having more than one of any character class at a time:
Knights: Edgar, Cyan, Relm (and Biggs)
Thieves: Locke, Shadow, Gau (and Banon and ghost)
White Mages: Sabin, Celes, Strago (and Wedge)
Black Mages: Terra, Mog, Setzer (and ghost)
I think the only issue ends up being the Cranes.
All characters' stats were all modified to reflect their new roles, the same across the board for each class.
Now espers need their own treatment. First of all, we remove level-up bonuses (or just use MP + 10%, cuz mages). Then, we analyze each spell and compare it to the other Final Fantasy games that bother to categorize spells by, uh, lightness? Which looks like this for FF6's white magic:
It looks like this for the first, more obvious part, of FF6's black magic:
And, the maybe-more-interesting part, this is how the "gray" magic breaks down:
Next, we segregated the game's espers into teaching exclusively black magic or white magic. In most cases, this was pretty easy; most of them work by default. Shiva lost Cure. Siren lost Mute (which is kinda weird) and gained Imp to be a black magic esper, whereas Stray/Cait Sith lost Imp and gained Mute to be a white magic esper. And so on. I tried to take very little artistic liberty with this while still making it work.
Note that there was no "rule" applied to prevent characters from preventing incompatible espers, as has famously been done in FF6: Brave New World; I just adhered to the rule myself.
There are three other elements of interest to this hack:
This first session was just about an hour, and I was kind of trying it out and orienting myself to this weird hack and rule variant. Most of what I was saying throughout was explaining the situation.
The first part of the game, entering Narshe in Magitek armor, doesn't really feel very different, frankly. All of the characters feel pretty much the same. I did notice quickly that I didn't have a Cure spell, though. I let Wedge die and tried to get Terra to level 5 anticipating some barriers to survivability (plus it would benefit level averaging), and even fought Whelk with Wedge dead!
Whelk (or Ymir?) only took two Tek Missiles. Tek Missiles are always pretty darn strong, but Terra is starting out even more magically-capable than usual in this hack, so it was pretty painless. Terra's short solo trip into the mines wasn't too scary.
Locke's introduction was kind of funny, because he is quite indisputably a thief!
I kind of organized the moogle parties when they showed up. This is what the equipment setup looked like, for one group, anyway:
From this, you can see the TWUE-hacked moogle names. Mog is a black mage, Molulu is a white mage, Moghan is a knight, and Moguel is a thief. The other groups are treated similarly. This battle was a bit interesting, because you usually see Vomammoths/Megalodoths using an attack called Blizzard against you. That attack is actually AI-flagged to only be used against a party with a certain minimum level, and I happen to have come in below that level.
The battle with the Marshal / Guard Lead went well. I wasn't sure it would, but the knight is pretty strong on the attack and it was helpful to have a white mage moogle using Pray. I explained that Cure has a spell power of 10 and the spell that Pray calls has a power of 6 and forced spread-targetting, so it's a bit weaker. Still useful!
I actually grinded outside of Narshe for a bit - maybe a long bit - because I was scared to cross the desert without Cure, scared to get Edgar at a low level and a bit worried about proceeding without the Tools command. The Tools command sure does make a few areas waaay easier.
After levelling Terra a bit, Edgar joined at just level 4 because of whatever I did to the join levels. With terrible levels and no tools, this could've been rough! But Terra happened to have Thunder on her list of level-up spells, which helped.
So we finished this battle with everyone alive! And besides a tiny bit of trial battling with Edgar - whose damage really didn't impress yet - this also ended our progress for the day.
Analysis, eh? Yeah.
The Knight is easy. Give them swords and make swords exclusive to them, and attach the True Knight relic's 'cover' feature to swords. They have no command abilities, just Fight and Item. Knights get swords, shields, helmets and heavy armor. They cannot equip espers.
The Thief is pretty easy, too! Give them daggers and throwing weapons, just like Locke has by default, but no swords. Their other equips are like Locke's too. They have the Steal command as well as a new 'Flee' command that was created by changing what ability the 'Shock' command normally points to, and making it the Exit spell's escape effect. There is a minor class of "light" shields, like the Buckler, but they can't use most shields. They cannot equip espers.
The White Mage gets a tad more complicated. They have access to staves and flails only. For the sake of them having access to magic, a few white mage-exclusive equips teach white magic spells. The only shield they can ever use is the Force Shield, and they have mage-y armor. They get a prayer command, which is a modified version of Banon's health command that instead calls an ability with about half of the power of Cure. They can only use white magic espers.
The Black Mage, maybe predictably, only has access to staves and daggers and the Force Shield and mage-like armor. Some black mage-exclusive equips can teach black magic spells. They also all get Terra's morph command which is meant to act like the Focus command black mages have in some other games... although I bet that'd be weird for people who aren't Terra. I don't think I actually used Focus at all. Black mages can only use black magic espers.
I also had to assign each character a class. I investigated all forced character parties through the whole game and realized that if you did the following combination, you would more-or-less always be able to avoid having more than one of any character class at a time:
Knights: Edgar, Cyan, Relm (and Biggs)
Thieves: Locke, Shadow, Gau (and Banon and ghost)
White Mages: Sabin, Celes, Strago (and Wedge)
Black Mages: Terra, Mog, Setzer (and ghost)
I think the only issue ends up being the Cranes.
All characters' stats were all modified to reflect their new roles, the same across the board for each class.
Now espers need their own treatment. First of all, we remove level-up bonuses (or just use MP + 10%, cuz mages). Then, we analyze each spell and compare it to the other Final Fantasy games that bother to categorize spells by, uh, lightness? Which looks like this for FF6's white magic:
It looks like this for the first, more obvious part, of FF6's black magic:
And, the maybe-more-interesting part, this is how the "gray" magic breaks down:
Next, we segregated the game's espers into teaching exclusively black magic or white magic. In most cases, this was pretty easy; most of them work by default. Shiva lost Cure. Siren lost Mute (which is kinda weird) and gained Imp to be a black magic esper, whereas Stray/Cait Sith lost Imp and gained Mute to be a white magic esper. And so on. I tried to take very little artistic liberty with this while still making it work.
Note that there was no "rule" applied to prevent characters from preventing incompatible espers, as has famously been done in FF6: Brave New World; I just adhered to the rule myself.
There are three other elements of interest to this hack:
- Some minor, semi-arbitrary item replacement. Given the class restrictions and the quantity of items that would be unused, I changed some endgame-tier weapons into ones that were available in the GBA versions: the Aura Lance to the Zwill Crossblade, the Sky Render to the Save the Queen, the Stunner to the Apocalypse, and the Death Tarot to the Stardust Rod. Relm's brushes were also changed into rod-class weapons since they matter for the mages, and it was an easy way to ensure the mages had access to their properly-coloured spells. Although balance is out the window, I tried to do this in a balanced way.
- I used the Ted Woolsey Uncensored Edition as a base hack! People had been speaking fondly of using this translation and I wanted to try it. This did end up introducing an issue about halfway through that I had to work around.
- I added a one-byte hex edit (and some minor text cleanup) to allow Mog to be recruited earlier, which I detailed in this GameFAQs topic. This is mainly done because, otherwise, there's a large part of the game where you would normally have a black mage where you wouldn't. Not that it would be hard to play part of the game with three characters, I just didn't want to. So now Mog is recruitable as soon as you fight Kefka at Narshe. It works nicely.
This first session was just about an hour, and I was kind of trying it out and orienting myself to this weird hack and rule variant. Most of what I was saying throughout was explaining the situation.
The first part of the game, entering Narshe in Magitek armor, doesn't really feel very different, frankly. All of the characters feel pretty much the same. I did notice quickly that I didn't have a Cure spell, though. I let Wedge die and tried to get Terra to level 5 anticipating some barriers to survivability (plus it would benefit level averaging), and even fought Whelk with Wedge dead!
Whelk (or Ymir?) only took two Tek Missiles. Tek Missiles are always pretty darn strong, but Terra is starting out even more magically-capable than usual in this hack, so it was pretty painless. Terra's short solo trip into the mines wasn't too scary.
Locke's introduction was kind of funny, because he is quite indisputably a thief!
I kind of organized the moogle parties when they showed up. This is what the equipment setup looked like, for one group, anyway:
From this, you can see the TWUE-hacked moogle names. Mog is a black mage, Molulu is a white mage, Moghan is a knight, and Moguel is a thief. The other groups are treated similarly. This battle was a bit interesting, because you usually see Vomammoths/Megalodoths using an attack called Blizzard against you. That attack is actually AI-flagged to only be used against a party with a certain minimum level, and I happen to have come in below that level.
The battle with the Marshal / Guard Lead went well. I wasn't sure it would, but the knight is pretty strong on the attack and it was helpful to have a white mage moogle using Pray. I explained that Cure has a spell power of 10 and the spell that Pray calls has a power of 6 and forced spread-targetting, so it's a bit weaker. Still useful!
I actually grinded outside of Narshe for a bit - maybe a long bit - because I was scared to cross the desert without Cure, scared to get Edgar at a low level and a bit worried about proceeding without the Tools command. The Tools command sure does make a few areas waaay easier.
After levelling Terra a bit, Edgar joined at just level 4 because of whatever I did to the join levels. With terrible levels and no tools, this could've been rough! But Terra happened to have Thunder on her list of level-up spells, which helped.
So we finished this battle with everyone alive! And besides a tiny bit of trial battling with Edgar - whose damage really didn't impress yet - this also ended our progress for the day.
